When Chang writes that the film is so eager to bare its soul, I agree. In fact, it’s part of the appeal. It’s the same kind of appeal that drew me to emo music: a desire to state, simply and bluntly, how bad it feels without the self-conscious desire to dress it up as something poetic and literary. Sometimes a singer yelling “I’m not okay” to loud power chords is the most thrilling musical moment of a generation.
Read MoreMy (20) Favorite Songs of 2021
The top 20 songs from the year 2021 that did the most for me. Featuring Rostam, TORRES, Kings of Convenience, CHVRCHES, Tyler the Creator, Deafheaven and more.
Read MoreMy (20) Favorite Songs of 2020
The top 20 songs from the year 2019 that stuck with me all the way to the end. Featuring Remi Wolf, Car Seat Headrest, Bright Eyes, Lauren Auder, Empress Of and more.
Read MoreNo Antidote
I can intellectually understand that the Presidency of the United States is not the most impactful seat of power. It cannot unilaterally patch the holes in our social safety net, it cannot singlehandedly curb carbon emissions and will never be able to abstain from exporting violence overseas. Yet, it holds tremendous psychological power — there is no single political office that tints the way I see the future more than the Presidency.
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The Brain Chemistry of Dog Owners
One early morning I happened to see a dog named Snoop on Petfinder. I went to his shelter’s Instagram, and saw that they were holding their first in-person adoption event on the same morning. On a whim, half awake, we decided to amble out to the car and drive to Rowland Heights to see this dog in person. A couple of hours later we came home with a dog.
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Made It Home
My journey through living in Los Angeles proper has always been marked by inconvenient situations growing incrementally more convenient over time.
Read MoreRiding a Bike
I never learned how to ride a bike as a child. I’ve always carried this like a minor dark secret: a basic rite of passage for children across the world had eluded me. In my mind, I was a person that learned to crawl, walk, run, and then skipped straight to driving a car.
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The Wire in the Age of Black Lives Matter
One of my quarantine projects is to rewatch The Wire with my partner, who has never seen more than a handful of episodes. It’s my second time going through the series, and while its still a high quality and riveting television show, my understanding of its politics have deepened. While I don’t have a disdain for the show or what it’s trying to say, the last five years have made the show’s politics seem lacking. Nothing makes me roll my eyes or feels particularly dated — but the parts about the politics of policing that have interested me the most seem barely elaborated on in five seasons of The Wire.
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Your Dad's Stephen Colbert
When I heard he was taking over Letterman’s chair and starting up The Late Show with Stephen Colbert , I was cautiously optimistic. He was clearly a top tier comedic talent that deserved to have a big stage, bigger than bringing up the rear after The Daily Show. But I wasn’t sure how his comedy would translate to, for the first time, just really being himself.
Read MoreYou Don't Have to Cut Throats
And, look, Jordan wasn’t wrong; it would be impossible to argue against his methods considering all the championships he has to show for it. But the mythologies of Michael Jordan (and Kobe Bryant’s trademark Mamba Mentality) are enforcing the false narrative that being a cut throat hard-ass is the only way to win — in sports, in business, in life.
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I Grew With You, and Now I've Changed
The lack of romance is apparent throughout the album. The Idler Wheel’s emotional core was the anguish and stakes of relationships: of finding them, burning them and burying them. In its absence, she refocuses her passion on other avenues: trauma, nostalgia, anecdotes, and complicated letters to other women.
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Photo Credit: Matt Oswalt
The World in Flux
The coronavirus pandemic has made the unmooring of natural disasters available to all of us. The dread that I felt in mid-March was mostly informed by the realization that everything will be different now, but we can’t see what that means. We could only slowly live through it, second by second, until one day we look back and realize that something hasn’t returned.
Read MoreWhat Are Asian American Politics?
The average joe on the street can’t name issues that are important to the Asian American community, and it might be because we haven’t the consensus to center around much. It’s not that the community doesn’t protest or doesn’t care — it’s just been unable to coalesce around much, and so the people drift where they may.
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Kobe
LA sports fans have the unique experience of wanting something badly, and then getting it over and over. A lot of that rested on the shoulders of Kobe Bryant.
Read MoreMy (20) Favorite Songs of 2019
The top 20 songs from the year 2019 that stuck with me all the way to the end. Featuring Broken Social Scene, Clairo, Sharon Van Etten, Better Oblivion Community Center, Earl Sweatshirt, Jai Paul and more.
Read MoreI Don't Like Many Old Things
I have a bias against a lot of old music that I can’t really explain. For a self-proclaimed music geek, expressing that I don’t really like classic rock is disqualifying. But that’s why the death of canon-thinking has been thrilling: it allows people to be their true selves and have their purest taste.
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In PARASITE, the wealthy don't need to be villainous
The lesson is about what the wealth gap does to people and their humanity.
Read MoreThere Are No Sell Outs Anymore
Over the last 10 years or so, the new dynamic has opened up all sorts of opportunities. Artists perform at ad agencies to curry favor with decision makers. Major blockbusters, no matter how uncool, can book the coolest artists for their soundtrack. You can even make songs explicitly for branded content!
That last paragraph may sound derisive, but I want to be clear that it’s all fair game in 2019. We’ve blown up the music industry, especially in terms of what money goes directly to artists. But it seems that in our zeal to get rid of the problematic “sell out” stigma, we never replaced it with anything better.
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Rust and Time
I hadn’t thought about songs like “Driving Home” and “At The End of a Gun” in literal years, and there they were, right in front of me, exactly as I remembered them. I spent teenage afternoons studying the bass tabs of the song “Free Radio Gainesville” and convinced myself it wasn’t possible with human hands, and there was Jason Black, just fucking doing it. It hit me hard, in a mixture of glee and longing.
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Today I went walking while things explode
Some sad independence
Better Oblivion
Rivers are an unfamiliar concept to those of us in the California metropolis. We have the ocean, but its cultural meaning is entirely different. Our beaches are places of relaxation, or vacation, or beauty. The Rio Grande is more somber than that. When I saw the occasional person on a park bench watching the river, they did not seem to be the type that was “taking in the rays.” The act of watching a river is inherently an act of sadness. If you were watching the river, something weighed on you that an ocean would not relieve.
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