Essay | Smash Yourself Clean

I looked up and saw a guy dive into me as if I was a swimming pool. I caught the full of his back with my head and forearm, as did the people around me. We crouched under the weight, trying to push him back up, both with enthusiasm and utter hatred for the guy. But any emotion is quick and fleeting. You get over offenses quickly, because you know it's not personal, because this is a concert and you came here to get hurt. It hurts good.

The Pit at a concert, at least an upbeat, wild one that is heavy on the rock-out, is a fascinating place. It is the section directly in front of the stage for those who are not afraid to get an elbow in the rib or a knee in the head. Concert goers ascend the stage, despite the best attempts by security, and fly for half a second into the maelstrom of bodies. Sometimes they will be caught. Other times people will run out of the way and let them fall. This is The Pit. If you want the privilege of being so close to the stage, there is a price to pay, and that is your physical well being.

I wasn't always so enthusiastic at the thought of being physically hurt to live music. It used to be this strange, intimidating obstacle when you just want to fold your arms and stare at the bassist for an hour. I remember a Manu Chao concert and the disappointment my friend expressed that I had not gone in to get tackled by strangers in a concentric circle. I had not even hopped in place like a bunny. I had spent (wasted) that concert simply listening to the music. It made sense to me. What was live music for if not for listening intently and respectfully?

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Why This Stupid Last Airbender Shit Matters

Let me give you some background information so we're all on the same page: Avatar: The Last Airbender was a hugely successful, wildly popular, animated Nickelodeon martial arts fantasy. The show took place in a mythical land, however, much of the architecture, writing, and character designs were based on many cultures, with emphasis on ancient China and Inuit cultures. There's a little Hinduism, a little Buddhism, a little Japan. Hollywood decided to make a live action film about it, and M. Night Shyamalan of The Happening fame was tapped to run the show.

And then they cast all the main characters as white kids.

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Take Me Home

I write about music because it is easy. At a time when writing is hard, painful and exactly like bleeding, it is easy to write about music. It's a main road into your emotional center, and that is where you find the words in bulk. They may not be sharp, or accurate, or in any way indicative of expertise, but it's easy. This blog is, after all, not a place for shining and insightful music journalism, but a place for me to type.

Let me tell you a little about "All I Want" by LCD Soundsystem and what it does for me.

First, let me explain that James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem is an amazingly talented lyricist when he wants to be. He can write some powerful, moving songs when he wants to. His last album, "Sound of Silver," produced two stellar songs about friendship and loss in the form of "All My Friends" and "Someone Great." But generally, LCD Soundsystem is a dance-punk project with weird, catchy beats and funny, almost non-sequiter lines. They are apparently just improvised lines, repeated ad nauseum, becoming part of the beat itself. So there isn't generally a lot of story telling, except in a rare few songs like this one.

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Essay | The Profane and the Indecent

crap

I was recently told that a co-worker of mine doesn't curse.  I didn't believe it at first.I could have sworn I had heard him use a variety of obscenities, everything from S to F. As I thought about it a little more, searching my mental rolodex for specific memories, I found that I had nothing. Just vague assumptions that he cursed, when, apparently, they were always modified to less offensive, non-sequitur substitutes like the ever popular stuff and fudge.

I use expletives a lot, casually, as often as I use napkins. I also have this handy subconscious mechanism that omits curse words when in the presence of authority, whether it be parents or bosses. I didn't used to dole out the profanities with such reckless abandon. It used to be a bigger deal to me, a top tier sin.

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Bleeding Ink

hyperbole

When I departed my last undergraduate creative writing class, I wrote, with purposeful hyperbole: BOATWITHOUTASAILBOATWITHOUTASAIL!!

Look, I get it. I will have more classes in my (hopeful) graduate career, people don't ever really stop learning anyway, and the last of any class is rarely a milestone. But there was something about the finality of not just the class, but my writing education, that pulled me towards a feeling of exaggerated panic. It was something like losing the training wheels and going off on your own. These days, when I'm not mocking an all-caps panic, I'm learning a lot about the kind of discipline it takes to direct yourself towards a writing career and what it is you need to do.

See, I'm at an age where artists began to be great. Michael Chabon published a book right out of UC Irvine not much older than I am right now. Joyce Carol Oates was 25 with her first book. Conan O'Brien moved to Los Angeles at this age to write for an HBO comedy. I'm already here, a place where people uproot to build their portfolio. Why am I withering into the grooves of my retail job from my parent's home?

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A Crash

It was just a few minutes past 10:00 PM on Tuesday, March 2, 2010. I was driving down the 91 west, back from a boring day at work. I was listening to the radio show, "This American Life," episode #81 entitled, "Guns." In it, a man was describing his near-death experience of being shot, several times, at point-blank range.

An ambient music interlude had just taken over the vocals and then, out of the darkness, a red car appeared, completely still and unmoving. I brake hard, but not hard enough, not fast enough, and I crush its trunk with a terrible clang of metal and glass. The glove compartment explodes outward at me as the airbag seems to form from nothing.

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Essay | Things That Were Cool

Oh, man, after you read this, you aren't going to be my friend anymore.

First, I think I need to explain a little bit about professional wrestling.

Back in the early 1990s, my cousins got me into watching WWF pro-wrestling. We had toys, we watched tapes, we talked, and, yes, threw each other around the room. As with most kids our age, pro-wrestling was one of the things. It was WWF and Power Rangers and Ninja Turtles and it was all a sparkling, shimmering spectacle to young eyes.

Now, those other things I listed still have a modicum of respect among fans as they get older. At some point, there's this weird retrospective part of the brain that starts to mythologize what we liked in our childhood. Transformers and GI Joe are prime examples - we liked them as children and then we liked them as adults. Nostalgia makes things that were uncool, cool again.

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Essay | Chrissmash

You wouldn't know it from my pretentious attempts at being a curmudgeon, but Christmas is actually one of my favorite times of the year. The grain & I go the same way when it comes to this. Fans of the holiday season are often predictable, sheep-like, and fans of kitschy sweaters. But the season has a universal appeal to it, and that's a basic truth.

The first virtue of Christmas is the mood. Despite the rampant consumerism and materialism, there lies at its heart the inclination to do nice things just because. People let you into traffic with a smile, lend you some coins to complete your change or hold the door for you just cause they believe in this one baby born a long time ago.

"But Justin!" you say. "These are basic acts of kindness that should fill our lives regardless of the mandated birth date of a special baby!"

And to that, I would agree. But it's not the way things are. The human mind is an ugly, greedy thing of darkness and we have to take what we can get. While it would be great if the Christmas spirit was the default, having a couple weeks of positive inclinations is good 'nuff for the creatures that invented the Chia pet shaped like Barack Obama's head.

"Good point!" you then say. "How could I have let my cynicism dismiss this season of selflessness?"

Well, don't worry about it. It happens to the best of us.

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Essay | On Journalism and Majors

Without fail:

"What are you studying?" they ask with sincerity.
"Creative writing," I answer.
"Oh," they say, with a piqued interest. "So are you thinking of doing journalism?"

Not really, no. Maybe back in those primitive, mesozoic freshman days. But in these modern times, I have moved to the less reliable and riskier field of straight-up fiction. And not profitable young adult fiction about teens-morphing-into-animals or thinly veiled projections of vampire romances. Since 11th grade AP English, I've been indoctrinated in the traditions of literary fiction. I've been pointed in the direction of the big theme, and when I'm lucky I even graze them.

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Essay | Godbloggin'

Everyone with a blog has, at one point, written about god, right? How did I go 4 years of blogging without dropping into this tangled web? I find myself today with writer's blog and an urge to type. With these two conflicting feelings, it seems now may be a good a time as any to try and figure out how I feel and have felt about faith.

To start from the beginning: Born Roman Catholic. Still Catholic, I suppose, culturally if not spiritually. It's complicated and perhaps even vague by design. I was as god-fearing as the church tells you to be all the way until the 8th grade, fear being the operative word. Around that time, after a few readings on the internet and a few sleepless nights, I was an athiest, or perhaps in reality, I was just a lonely and scared child.

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Essay | Every Sound at Once

Ever since I learned of its existence, the goal was to attend the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.

For a long time, I didn't even attend concerts. While I have always loved music, it didn't occur to me that I could see all this lovely music live, and in person, instead of imagining music videos in my head as I walked home. Then once in 2005, I decided to see Bright Eyes and The Faint at the Grand Olympic Auditorium. The seats were awkward, distant, and obstructed by the underside of the mezzanine above, but I've been all about concert hunting ever since.

I've come to believe that any music is made better live, even the ones that don't line up with my taste. It's something to do with the power of loud, the bass resonating with your ribs, and the groupthink adoration of the fans around you. Concerts are brief windows into an upper reality. The best ones have that moving moment where you forget you're in an audience and for a tiny moment a song is an experience.

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Essay | Wander

College has, through its friendships and connections, given me the good fortune to once again take up travel. Travelling used to be a big part of my childhood. It was a point of pride. When the Mrs. Marquez would make each kid stand up and say something about themselves, my interesting fact would always be the amount of the world I had seen.

By elementary and middle school standards, it's an impressive resume: Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the Philippines, London, New York, Vancouver and more. I wasn't old enough to appreciate the sights much, or fully grasp the new worlds I was entering, but I still had a bigger sense of the planet and its diversity. More so than the other 7-year olds sitting cross-legged on a multicolored carpet.

By 22 year-old standards, that resume is not as impressive. The world turned and travel became less and less of a characteristic of my life. My youth was extraordinarily jet set, but my adolescence was spent staying still. The occasional drive to Las Vegas was the closest I would get to road trips, though it's more of a long-distance wander. I wouldn't get to feel that horrible/wonderful rumble of a plane taking off for years.

Years, until college, which gave it back to me in some small part. We weren't going to Europe or even Texas, but we were travelling again. It was always good, even if it was short-lived or not the life-affirming, answer-finding game changer we always expect from the road. But sometimes the little bites are enough to nourish you. Sometimes the little bites feel like a main course.

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Review | Beyond That Is Anybody's Guess

M. Ward is a remarkably talented musician. I became a fan when I stumbled upon "Hi-Fi," a smooth and lightly breezy tune from his 2005 album, Transistor Radio. I was surprised to find that raspy deep voice belonged to a frazzy-haired opie-faced dude named Matt. I delved deeper into his back catalog and found a well of soulful blues & folk rock, all of it well-written, moving and sincere.

Then I saw him perform a special solo concert. Normally, he has a band backing him up, but on this night, it was just M. Ward, a guitar, and a loop pedal. On that night he had six fingers on each hand, because the shit he was playing was stunning. His finger picking speed and the ease of which he pulled off the complicated layering was astonishing. I often enjoy concerts, but I rarely leave an even bigger fan.

Ever since, I've never been hesitant to put M. Ward's music somewhere in my top ten, even five. His most recent album, "Post-War," solidified it with his best songs yet in "Chinese Translation," "To Go Home," and the heart-bursting "Poison Cup." He had reached a mountaintop in his last album. How do you keep the momentum going in Hold Time? This album was also the first since his success with Zoey Deschanel as the other side of the ampersand in She & Him. But he doesn't get to sing in that band. So for that wondrous bluesy croon, we go to Hold Time.

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Essay | We Had Courts

It's hard to tell now, but basketball used to be a defining part of my life. When I was a child, it was more than just a hobby and sport of choice, but my goal in life. Back when Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls defined the league, when Dennis Rodman was more than just obscure pop culture trivia, when Nick Van Exel was the coolest guy on the Lakers. Today, it's a faint lingering taste. It's a source of brief nostalgia.

Charles Barkley, Dennis Scott, Shawn Kemp, Grant Hill, Tony Kukoc, David Robinson: these guys were my NBA. They was my cast of characters that I had grown to know from stats on the back of Upper Deck trading cards and blurbs in SLAM magazine. Now, these guys are either all retired as color commentators or analysts. A few are still playing, but as backups to backups, veterans with limited minutes in free agent limbo whose sole purpose is provide mentorship or act as maturing influences on the locker room.

The prime example of this fall was Penny Hardaway, who could be described as my basketball idol. I had the shoes, jersey, even sent him a letter (all I got back was an application for his fan club.) It's not uncommon: Penny Hardaway's work with Nike & Chris Rock on the Li'l Penny shoe commercials made him a household name and a piece of 90's pop culture. It endeared him as the cool new star that young kids could latch onto, many of which still latch onto today. It's a rare quality for sports stars: not just a following, but a cult following.

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Essay | Wretched

As a child, when I found out that the Philippines was a former colony of the United States, my first thought was, "Cool." They don't teach you what colony means or what colonialism is in school. Your frame of reference is the American Revolution - you think it means a distant governorship, maybe some taxes charged, but otherwise, everything remains unmolested. Colonialism doesn't mean violence, it doesn't mean the manipulation and systematic molding of people. In school, "colony" is just an empty term meaning, "part of."

So it was "cool." Cool, because it meant I wasn't really an Other anymore. It meant that I didn't have to represent this strange, foreign outside image and that I fit in to the mainstream like everyone else. That I should be accepted as one of them. I was glad. I felt normal.

This was the outcome of a one hundred year plan. The stage is set like this: There was a random smattering of islands in Southeast Asia. Seven thousand, give or take, populated with different peoples, different ethnic groups, different languages and tribes and religions. Spanish explorer Magellan tries to sail across the world, but crashes into one of the islands and gets a dagger the liver for his trouble. Trade goes through with the Chinese, with Muslims, with their neighbors, and various parts of the island show the influence.

Fast forward. A guy (well, a king) named Philip sees thousands of islands and over 70 different languages and decides to draw a border around all of them and call them his own. With no regard for their own ethnic borders and unique culture, the Spanish forced the creation of a single nation out of many. King Philip decides to name the nation, and thus the people, after himself. Their message was Catholicism. The fever caught on everywhere except in the very north and the very south.

Fast forward, again, this time roughly 500 years. The people have taken the name Pilipino, or Filipino, derived from Philip, or Felipe. They finally fight off the colonizers. A revolutionary and polymath named Jose Rizal uses the term Pilipino as a personal identity, to much controversy. In some ways, it's an inspiring call to unity, a call for one people with the singular purpose of fighting off their oppressors. In other ways, it's an acceptance of the colonialist structure forced upon them.

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Essay | Requiescat

There were some amazing artists on this planet. There's the common saying that artists suffer for their art, because that's one of the most common routes for passion and ideas. But some suffer more than others. Some suffer for their art until they just stop suffering. And making art. And breathing.

Is that an enticing enough introduction yet? I'm here to write about three awesome artists in three different fields that all up and died unexpectedly.

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Essay | Something I Heard About Changing The World

When I went to the Student of Color Conference in Santa Cruz last year, a gathering of young activists mobilizing around issues that affect minority and low-income communities, one of their great speakers told us, "be prepared to never enjoy the fruits of your labor."

It was like someone told us a secret we weren't supposed to know. It was something that was painfully true, yet familiar, something we must have known on some level but never acknowledged. I thought about the causes I had a hand in, and even more, the causes that I didn't have a hand in. I thought about the petitions I signed and didn't sign, the people holding them, the people knocking on doors and holding rallies and making movements. There's so much of it out there in the community and yet there's that universal element of it. All of us who care about something more than we are expected to, will likely never get to see the fruits of our labor.

Activism is hard. Activism is draining, tiresome, frustrating, and consuming. It is also the only way we are ever going to get out of this mess.

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Essay | Place and Patriots

I'm going to attempt to do something that I hope is not taken the wrong way. But with the question of patriotism bouncing around the conversation of our current event, it's hard for me to not try and express it. This is an attempt to explain the function and place of patriotism for the rest of us -- that is, those of us for whom it's not an automatic given. It's not a criticism, a rebuke, or even denial. Just a description and a hope to convey how people like me have come to grapple with the idea since we were little kids.

My early childhood was marked by trips abroad: Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Canada, London and more. My dad worked for an airline and so we were a band of jet-setting travelers. Early on, I understood that the world was big, varied and unpredictable. I knew that much more extended beyond the playground.

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Personal Tastes

"What kind of music do you like?" is a question that I've always felt a little bit uncomfortable answering. I have an answer - several of them. But it has always struck me as a question that is awkward for me to answer. It is at once revealing, personal, difficult and over-analyzed.

Back in high school, I used to simply say, "Shitty." That is, shitty music. I like shitty music. That's not what I believed, of course, but it was an easy joke answer that would deflect the question. I have a friend who didn't like that answer. He asked me once, "How does that go over when you answer like that?" I had never thought about it in those terms, so I haven't really used it since.

In time, I began to begrudgingly answer, "indie" and sometimes I bolster it with "folk." Well, truthfully, I say it more like: "Indie...?" and let the word die off hoping they won't notice.

It's not about shame or embarrassment. Part of it is disliking labels and revealing a lot about myself in such a small answer. But most of it is about knowing the almost inevitable follow up question: "Like what, exactly?" That's the real question I don't like to answer. That's the one I try to avoid. To explain what I think "indie" means would take far too many sentences and generally be a staggering display of arrogance. But it's the label that best describes the sounds I like.

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Essay | Superconnected

I think at how history will look back on us a lot, and the only thing I'm sure of is that my generation is the internet generation, and somehow that feels more world-changing and significant than the roaring 20's, or the hippie 60's. It's not just a new way to spend time, or a place where you can look at videos of dogs riding skateboards (although it is that too and we should never forget the contribution of animals doing human things on YouTube.) It's the expansion of the mind in a greater context. A dissenting opinion is a few clicks away. But it also so much bigger with the realization, like the top of your skull opening, that the world is so goddamn full of so many people. It is the first glimpse at the vastness and variety of the human experience, and we are growing up with that with every kilobyte.

That's what the internet is to me. It's the access into the greater world, into the subcultures that were once kept in secret club houses, and into the subsubcultures that divide them. It is the spread of ideas - the good, enlightening ones and the awful, horrific ones that make you lose hope in the human spirit. But it's human all the same, we just take a shot of the terrible and chase it with the good.

I know it's been a defining part of my life. I feel pretty privileged to be able to be part of the generation that can be the first to say that. I came upon the internet at the unusually young age of 9 -- 1996, just as the internet blew that dot com bubble out of a soapy plastic hoop.

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