The Old Vibe Is New Again

Welcome to another issue of The Jiffy, “The Newsletter Version of the James Cave Instagram Feed.” We have a lot of fun new things this month, such as a new Deep Dive, a new cow you should know, and the debut of our new style magazine: “J: The Style Magazine of the James Cave Instagram Feed.”

I also want to remind you that I’ve included a recording of the Talking Head reading this email on your behalf, in case you don’t want to read it yourself. It’s at the top of this issue. I’ve had a lot of requests for this feature lately, and I live to serve the audience who hates reading!

Let’s get into it:

• What is This Old Vibe?

• Who is James C'Avedon?

• Who is the cow we should know?

It’s been the busy time here at The Feed. A goal of mine is to send out The Jiffy newsletter once a month recapturing the exciting things that take place on the James Instagram Feed, but April was so full of things that I feel like this month’s issue will come to you in installments. This is Part 1! It’s just that there’s so much to explain, such as:

As you might remember from my deep dive into making the World’s Most Ultimate Cheese Board, I sometimes over-research topics and find myself swept into long-running, educational adventures about life in upstate New York that are also conveniently first-to-market brand-safe multi-channel evergreen series that can stretch across platforms and calendar tentpoles while targeting hyper specific niche audience segments and making millions of impressions, that brands can sponsor.

At the same time, I have a corner in my house that is sad. It’s desolate, a vibe desert. I think this is where a TV is supposed to go. But I think we can do better. This corner deserves a vibe that’s beautiful and aspirational, yet attainable and, more importantly, shoppable. Do you think we can get this corner sponsored? I’m happy to include some choice items from [luxury home furnishings company here], or accents from [famous celebrity’s] new line of [drop ship lifestyle brand].

I need to do something about this sad corner, which is why I was so excited to ride along with Warren Battle, of the antique store Battle Brown and the Instagram feed @WarrenOnWarren, to learn about how to look at old houses and really appreciate them.

And I met with Sean Scherer, author of the new book, “Sean Scherer’s Vignettes,” who showed me a lot about how to take the endless potential latent in a blank vibe and turn it into a stunning vignette. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going go turn my sad corner into a proper vignette. But not just any Instagram-worthy vignette. This vignette needs to feel like a part of the Hudson Valley. Like it was here before my house was built in 2006. Like it’s been here for hundreds of years.

So in this series, I’m driving around the Hudson Valley, talking to people — historians, antiques dealers, interior designers, authors, homeowners, restorers, etc. — to try and understand “what makes a Hudson Valley home a ‘Hudson Valley home’.”

It’s a potentially unanswerable question. But I’ve received some helpful advice so far:

• @WarrenOnWarren On Houses

• @WarrenOnWarren On Houses: Part 2: The Photos

• Sean Scherer’s Vignette Secrets

Here’s an interesting question:

James C’Avedon is driven by mysterious motivations. It’s not just his raw talent. It’s not his success as a world-famous photographer — as you’ll read below, success seems to turn him off from his own goals. Whatever drives C’Avedon, it’s somehow steered him into my very own orbit, specifically into the pages of my debut issue of “J: The Style Magazine of the James Cave Instagram Feed.” It was maybe a wrong turn for him, but the best turn of events for us.

When C’Avedon came to me asking for something new, something completely never been done before, I sent him out to Pleasant Valley, New York, to celebrate the return of spring and the high styles of the Lilymoore llamas and alpacas. Of course, he took it and made art. You can see the photos here.

C’Avedon says he was overwhelmed with visions. But who is C’Avedon, and what did that mean? He doesn’t have Instagram. He doesn’t have a website. He doesn’t have a phone. He doesn’t have paper or pens or envelopes. He doesn’t “correspond.” He says he doesn’t need to. “I just leave the house and magazine assignments find me.”

C’Avedon was one of the most in-demand fashion photographers in late 2016. But he publicly quit the industry at the height of his fame to start a business that he says “felt sufficiently humble and anti-successful at the time”: baking bread in a small town in rural New York.

Despite the pandemic, he was immediately successful again, and so he realized that maybe even success didn’t interest him anymore, that maybe he should shut down his bakery without much warning and return to the glossy allure of magazines. So that’s what he did, and he gave us this visual symphony we have in our Spring Fashion Issue: “The Latest in Llamas and Lima at Lilymoore.”

The answers to all your questions — what is a Lilymoore llama? Who is Lima? What is the latest? — are here.

And finally, here’s a cow you should know: Happy, at Churchtown Dairy in Hudson, New York. You can watch my video of Happy learning how to eat grass for the first time right here.

That’s it for this month’s first installment — you can upgrade to The Jiffy’s J’Fay Supreme level at the link below. You will get exclusive bonus content, like maps, recipes, extra vibes, and Hikes To Sleep To: