Grudge, Match

On "matchbook hauls" and social media aesthetics

On the 6 train I think of my first New York apartment and Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad (which dropped the summer I first moved to the city in 2007) plays in my memory. When I pass Regal Cinemas in Union Square I think about the first boy in New York that I kissed in the rain after seeing Ocean’s Thirteen. One of New York’s greatest pleasures is the memories that the city holds for us, like landmarks, waiting for us to pass and impart the memory’s importance like a walking tour guide. One tangible way to hold onto those memories has been the matchbook. In a world of fleeting physical media, there’s something about a bowl of matchbooks in a New York apartment that acts like the memory pool in Minority Report, a bowl of your past romances, fights, breakups, birthdays, all sitting in one bowl in your apartment. On any given day, it’s merely a piece of decoration. But on a night when you need to light a candle or stress drives you to smoke a cigarette on your fire escape, you can fish out a matchbook and be flooded with memories of an entire evening you’d long forgotten about.

A magenta box from The Nines reminds me of a night dancing to 2000s hip-hop with my friend Blair and his visiting sister. A traditional black matchbook from The Lambs Club reminds me of my first solo dinner with my friend Nicholas, where we decided to get to know one another outside of our larger group of friends. (The latter was before Nicholas and Blair began dating and co-habitating and it’s beautiful to have my separate memories of them co-mingling beside one another.) Several glossy silver Holiday Bar matchbooks remind me of a series of Thursday night gatherings at our regular booth with a rotating roster of friends. A bright yellow Chino Grande matchbook has more recent memories of a karaoke night where I did enough tequila shots to leap into a rendition of Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass.”

One thing social media does is present routine tasks as adventures. It’s why “Get Ready With Me” (shortened to the hashtag #GRWM) videos are so popular. The rather boring task of getting ready for your day has now become an opportunity to show off your fashion sense (or lack of fashion sense and surprisingly myopic and pseudo racist views on New York, in the cast of some) or more importantly, your fashion hauls. Haul being the term for collecting anything of interest to you. A well-intentioned Canadian friend (aren’t they all) sent me a TikTok by a woman who showed everyone her Chelsea and West Village “matchbook hauls,” which involved popping into restaurants and hotels and asking for matchbooks, because they’re cute and decorative. Though the user Tiffany Elizabeth claims in her caption that she only visits places she’s been before, replacing the act of grabbing a matchbook on your way out of a restaurant or snagging one to light up a cigarette outside, with a “matchbook haul” feels like a cold, contrived, and artificial way of collecting New York memories. And this being Tik Tok, what can otherwise be referred to as a gateway to gentrification, I’m sure the thousands of viewers of the Tik Tok won’t bother dining at any of the restaurants mentioned: rather they’ll just pop in, ask for matches and be on their way. I’m sure that’s why one of the restaurants, Dante, charges $6 for matches even if you dine there. And no one should dine at Dante in the first place, because it’s mid at best and usually besieged by the white straight bros and their girlfriends who have slowly turned the West Village into a post-Sex and the City hellscape of heterosexuality when it used to be a queer utopia and the inspiration for books like James Baldwin’s Another Country.

A matchbook haul TikTok isn’t the end of the world, but there is something to be said about how social media inspires people to take meaningful moments of human interaction and memory building and translate them into cold, lifeless algorithm pleasing aesthetics. It’s the antithesis of New York, in actuality. Not to sound like a millennial accosting Gen Z kids for not knowing any songs by the artist on their shirt, but if you’re ain’t sitting with Anna, then you’re not really sitting with Anna. If you have a Pastis matchbook in your apartment, then it should be because you stopped in for your 8pm dinner reservation and the host apologized to you because your table isn’t ready yet (it never is) and so you had to crowd at the bar and sip your vodka martini (straight up with a twist, olives are out!!!!!) next to group of loud, obnoxious finance bros who compliment your nail polish in a vaguely homophobic way.