The Mostly Eleven, Vol. 1: Beyoncé, Huaraches, Sailing With Phoenix
The Mostly Eleven is a weekly sift through the cultural debris. 11 cool releases, left-field collabs, weird gems, and underrated greatness. Published every Thursday by BroBible's Brandon Wenerd.
Note from Brandon Wenerd:
I’m starting something new, mostly because I need new creative routines and haven’t found a newsletter that throws enough weird cultural ingredients in the pot.
I also want some new avenues to write about my life and work that isn’t limited to Instagram or LinkedIn, because sometimes when I pull up those platforms, I get hit with a wave of squandered opportunity and start to unravel a little bit.
The Mostly Eleven is a weekly list of 11 things I’ve found that feel worth your time. It’s a way of sifting through the cultural debris: Movies, music, collabs, Internet phenomenon, oddball randomness. It’ll also compile some of my creative projects from my main job and corners of the internet, plus lived stuff like concerts, good food, travel, and life around Los Angeles.
Some of it you’ve seen. Most of it you haven’t. My email is brandon@brobible.com if anyone wants to drop me a line.
Look for it every Thursday.
Sailing With Phoenix
Like a lot of the Internet this week, I’ve been digging the adventures of Sailing With Phoenix while he shares videos of his solo sail from Oregon to Hawaii. He’s uploading videos from the middle of the Pacific to his socials via Starlink.
Oliver Widger just kind of went for it and had the balls to do the sort of thing that most people talk about but never do. He quit his job at Discount Tires after 11 years, cashed out his 401K, bought a sailboat, and set off from Oregon to Hawaii, despite never having sailed a day in his life. His co-captain is his rescued dumpster cat, Phoenix.
His energy is so pure, and he has a whole heck of a lot of people rooting hard for him on this badass adventure.
IMO, he’s the best thing to happen on social media in a long, long time. The platforms love to amplify mind-numbingly dumb bullshit that somehow becomes cultural canon. Yet Oliver is a great example of social media making the right person famous. It’s inspiring!!!! We need more of this!!!!!
Oliver is battling a serious spine condition that he says will leave him paralyzed later in life. While he can, he’s just going for it. That’s so beautiful, man. He’s only about a week in, but so far he seems like a pretty good sailor, though, naturally, all kinds of stuff has already come up in the middle of the ocean.
If you're not already following him on Instagram, now’s the time. He’s in the middle of the ocean right now, and somehow, it’s become must-see content.
Pink Floyd At Pompeii – MCMLXXII
I love when Pink Floyd remasters one of their iconic live sets. The 2023 remaster of their 1973 Dark Side of the Moon show at Wembley is bliss. But my all-time recent favorite is Live at Knebworth 1990, remastered in 2001. On good speakers or noise-canceling headphones, it hits like crawling into bed with freshly-cleaned high-thread-count sheets, just brittle enough to have a certain crispness.
I freakin’ love late-era Floyd. Give me Sorrow and the overproduced bombast of it all. It rules.
Now it’s time for a proper remaster of Live at Pompeii, the 1972 concert film directed by Adrian Maben, with the band playing to no audience in an ancient Roman amphitheater like psychedelic druids. A city blown to smithereens once upon a time, where Romans were barbequed in lava and volcanic dust.
This was Floyd in their Echoes era, featuring spooky, macabre sounds and long, trippy jams, all before the lasers and inflatable pigs. I’ve always loved the lore that Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and the gang set up shop in a place buried by a volcano. It gives the whole thing a desolate, haunted vibe you just don’t get in other live albums of that era.
They just reissued it. They also just did a screening of the remastered film in IMAX theaters back in April. I’m bummed I couldn’t make it, but all the screenings co-incideded with Phish at the Hollywood Bowl and, well, that gets the priority in my book.
If you’ve never seen it or haven’t revisited it in a while, now’s the time. Preferably with good headphones, a nice cup of tea, and no interruptions.
Green Day's Kerplunk Kandy Grape 7-Eleven Slurpee
On Friday night, I went up to Hollywood to hit up a launch party for Green Day’s new collab with 7-Eleven via the band’s Punk Bunny coffee brand. This was the day after they got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I snagged a pic with drummer Tré Cool. Green Day entered the party with a megaphone to announce the Splurpee, which is named after the 1992 album Kerplunk and tastes like those sweet, giant cotton candy grapes that cost an arm and a leg at the grocery store.
It was a fun night! Passed snacks included mini lobster rolls and hot dogs all dressed up with ketchup, mustard, and relish like you’d get off the rollers at a 7-Eleven. I thought it was especially cool that Tré Cool and Mike Dimt stuck around to hang out for a while, slurping on espresso martinis from the open bar. Rockstars, after all, deserve a Friday night off too, and it’s always nice to see talent enjoy they’re own parties instead of showing up and ducking out into an SUV the first chance they get.
I posted a video of Green Day in front of the giant Slurpee machine on the BroBible Instagram. There were only about 40 or so people there, so middle school me was sorta freaking out.
Adult Best Friends on MAX
I really enjoyed watching the indie comedy Adult Best Friends, the directorial debut of Delany Buffett, Jimmy Buffett’s daughter. It’s now streaming on MAX. I wrote a long-winded thing here on Substack about how it’s a coming-of-age story for your 30s, and what it gets right about millennial friendships.
The Beyoncé Cowboy Carter Tour
For my day job over at BroBible.com, I wrote a meaty 3700-word essay about going to the third show of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour at SoFi Stadium on Sunday night. It took two days to write, so I’d be very stoked if you read it!
Specifically, I focused on how the Cowboy Carter live experience compared to Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, from the perspective of a middle-aged jam band fan who loves live music and an old-fashioned spectacle. Both blew my mind in very different ways!
Because I can’t resist a great concert tee, I even bought a t-shirt at the show, featuring Beyoncé holding a banjo.
Kendrick Lamar’s Grand National Tour
I’ll be honest, life has been a bit of a whirlwind since early April. I drove to Flagstaff to meet up with some family and hit the Grand Canyon with them, then caught a nasty virus that sidelined me for a couple of weeks. Then, there were three back-to-back weekends of Phish shows in Seattle and Los Angeles, followed by Beyoncé. I haven’t kept abreast of what other tours are going on right now at all, but was delighted to get this message from my buddy Mark in Philly about the Kendrick Lamar tour. Definitely need to see it.
Bullet Train Explosion on Netflix
I’m making a BroBible video for an energy drink company right now, so I went to get a haircut and beard trim the other day. I love talking to my barber about movies and WWE wrestling, both two of his biggest passions besides cutting hair. He told me I need to see Sinners pronto (I know, I know) but also to keep my eye out for this Japanese action movie about a ticking bomb on a bullet train. It’s now out on Netflix.
I probably watched Speed 25 times as a kid in the ‘90s, so I’m very in. Apparently, this is a reimagining of a 1975 Japanese movie of the same name that actually inspired Speed, so… I’m very in.
Tecovas Mateo
OK, fellas, so… Let’s talk summer footwear. I wrote about these over on BroBible, and full disclosure, we have a partnership with Tecovas. Like a true Southern Californian, I’ve spent my last couple of summers wearing Vans or SeaVees slip-ons, mixed in with Birkenstocks and HeyDudes. I’m thinking about buying either these new Tecovas huaraches this year or some Turkish slip-ons. I’m not really all that into boat shoes these days, but something about staring age 40 straight in the face later this year makes me want to upscale my sockless summer footwear game.
Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer #2
We finally have a second trailer and release date for Grand Theft Auto VI, which will be released next year on May 26, 2026. There’s no question it will make billions of dollars and certainly be the biggest video game release in years. I’m sure it will be nothing short of incredible, though, admittedly, I haven’t gone down a video game rabbit hole in many years. I waited in line to buy GTA V on the night it was released and played it for months on end. It completely blew my mind (…and, not going to lie, kinda made me want to move to Los Angeles, and now here I am).
Anyway, I’m hyped. Now we wait.
Blind Barber x Mountain Dew Baja Blast shower set
I don’t usually associate Mountain Dew with grooming routines, unless you count showering after a regrettable 2 a.m. Taco Bell run, but here we are.
Blind Barber, the barbershop-slash-speakeasy cocktail lounge with locations in LA, New York, Chicago, Philly, and Nashville, just dropped a new collab with the Dew. Do The Dew teamed up with Blind Barber to craft some show products that smell like Baja Blast. There’s a Baja Blast-inspired shampoo bar, body bar, and body lotion with that signature tropical lime scent. There are also two Baja Blast-inspired body sprays in the drop: Baja Blast with tropical lime scent and Mountain Dew Baja Cabo Citrus with mandarin notes.
Life’s a beach, even when showering after a day at the beach.
So many Grateful Dead collabs.
So many roads, so many collabs. Apparently it's the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary, and if you didn’t know, don’t worry—literally every brand in America is here to remind you.
Vineyard Vines is making tie-dye polos so your dad can look crunchy and country club. It’s… very frat star. There are polos and whales and dancing bears where the whales usually are. Go check it out…
Verve Coffee dropped a single-origin Ethiopian roast inspired by the band’s legendary 1983 Santa Cruz show and featuring packaging inspired by the original concert poster, designed by an artist named Michael Seal Riley from the Santa Cruz surf town of Capitola. They made a cool video about the poster design on Instagram.
Retrospec dropped a collection retro-inspired Dead-branded paddleboards and ebikes. Personally, I think the Grateful Dead Koa Rev+ 2 Fat Tire Electric Bike look sick. Wish I had a place to stash them in my current living situation, because I’d love to make them my daily beach cruisers
And finally, there’s @BluesForSallah—aka Sallah—a Los Angeles-based small-batch printer turning out some of the best Grateful Dead tees in the game. His hand-printed Comfort Colors shirts are loud in the right ways: puff-ink neon bears, surf-and-skate-culture throwbacks, and designs that look like they stumbled out of a Lisa Frank binder after a long, strange trip. It’s very SoCal. I’ve met him a few times at Dead nights around town (he helps run the one at Old Town Pub in Pasadena), and the guy’s got the vibe dialed.
All of it is officially licensed.
Outro: King Kyote - “The Desert”
I’ve been eager for some new dusty desert Americana tunes, and I like the upbeat soulfulness of this record from King Kyote.