Many things are the worst. This is my attempt to find the things that are the best.
Aaliyah’s “Are you that Somebody?” is the best middle-school song of my generation that no one really knew what do with.
First of all, this song is an amazing pop song. An awesome beat by a young and hungry Timbaland. An awesome performance by a young and hungry Aaliyah. The perfect song that bridged the post-grunge confusion of the mid-90s and the dawn of the super-pop era of the late 90s.
But what I remember most about is that it was played at every junior high dance we ever had. And no one really knew what to do with it. The song is both slow and fast and both and neither.
So some people slow danced. And some people fast danced. And most people stood on the wall. A nice little metaphor for our sexual development.
…and I deal with it. When I see Asians on TV or Movies, here’s what I think to myself. It’s very much a Margaret Cho paraphrase but essentially its this: “I’m kinda glad that people who look like me are up there.”
So to celebrate this, I’ve put together my top 5 Pop Culture Asians. This is of course, the JOHN CHO memorial list because John Cho is the man and he is so awesome that this list cannot contain him. Sulu forever! MARGARET CHO is also excluded because she’s the OG Dr. Dre of this list. She essentially gave birth to the list so she can’t possibly be on it.
Muchmusic VJ/New Music Host. Quirky and indie yet unpretentious vibe (at least of what I remember her, I haven’t been home in a while). Good old Canasian girl. Went to my high school!
Front-woman for Asobi Seksu, who happen to be one of my favorite bands. Amazingly ethereal voice. Gazes so hard into her shoes I’m surprised she can stand up straight.
Is she twee because she dates Michael Cera? Or does Michael Cera date her because she’s so twee? The chicken-and-egg problem of indie couples? In indie-world, the Yin to Zooey Deschanel’s Yang.
Because, like Harvey Dent, he’s the hero we need but don’t deserve. And because it take guts to do what he did and to fight what he fights for. The very fact that the face of the fight against “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is Asian makes me proud to be who I am.
Many things are the worst. This is my attempt to find the things that are the best.
Miss me? Apologies for being a bit AWOL. I’m both very busy at work and working on something very long.
This is the best song that reminds me of the 5th grade.
So this song is the ultimate mid-90s Lilith Fair blerg pseudo-feminist crappy ugh lite rock. It is a terrible genre with terrible songs and I don’t care what my hippie science teacher and his hippie wife and their Sheryl Crow-filled CD collection says. I will NOT help you plant trees in the fucking park, I will not going a “STEP” (Students Toward Environmental Protection) meeting, because all you do there is sit in a classroom and talk about all the recycling you did today, and I don’t care if its Earth Day, just leave me alone and oh, btdubs, did I mention this is all a big fat ugh?
But it was everywhere in the 5th grade. And the 5th grade was my best year. I probably wrote the greatest piece of writing in my life that year. I think the girl that I liked actually liked me back (of course, I learned of this many years later). I had a good amount of friends and my birthday party was well-attended.
So this song gets a million negative points for being a total ugh. It gets several thousand back for a catchy chorus. It gets several million back because the 5th grade rocked and like Jack from Lost, I want to go back!
Many things are the worst. This is my attempt to find the things that are the best.
The Last of the English Roses by Pete Doherty is the best song I’ve heard in the past month written by a boozy-druggy fuck up that reminds us of the unerring fact that the best songs are always written by boozy-druggy fuck ups.
Chris Martin of Coldplay, he’s the kind of guy that has his shit together. Well-spoken. Seemingly fairly down to earth. Wears nicely-cut shirts. Has sufficiently evocative causes that he dedicates himself to. Has a porcelain vase of a wife. He also makes boring boring music.
People who have their lives in order, who have it together, they are very busy. All that order, all the good taste, well, it’s a lot of hard work. Keeping it together means keeping your emotions in check. I don’t mean that emotion is simply not expressed. Rather, well-ordered people do express lots of emotions, just the right ones and in the right tone. Which is awesome and great and i’m not being at all sarcastic in saying I envy and strive for that.
But this control of emotion suppresses the deep place that great music comes from. A place where it is either perpetually 3 am, and cigarette smoke hangs in the air and the silence is so overwhelming that it muffles the sound of your heart breaking, or a place where it is so bright that colors blur and everything positively glows. Places about the release of emotion, even if that release involves the sadness resulting from the suppression of it.
Which is to say, great music is about Bob Dylan on amphetamines, Tom Waits on whisky, Kurt Cobain and melancholy and heroin. And it’s Pete Doherty, a hall of fame fuck up if there ever was one, evoking the gloomy heart of a dismal, cloudy English morning, singing about a universal sense of fading glory.
For your pleasure:
p.s. watch out the for the ending of this music video, random no?
“ He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage - cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.
Bob Dylan (on Obama)
Many things are the worst. This is my attempt to find the things that are the best.
aka I need to stop obsessing over this woman.
The scene below is the best scene of some chick smoking sadly in a film.
Things you do in life are only beautiful for a short period of time. To lie on your bed listening to Ryan Adams’ Heartbreaker, staring at the ceiling, taking a moment to breathe before another wave of heartbreak comes back at you again, well that’s perfect when you’re 16 and not so much when you’re 35.
At the same time, sitting outside your suburban porch at noon on a weekend afternoon watching the children frolic and play in the sun is wonderful when you’re 40, but somehow depressing when you’re 25.
So I know that smoking will kill you and that’s a nasty, terrible habit. But when you’re young and beautiful and in your early 20s with lost eyes that try to cover up the sadness with cynicism - like Shu Qi is here - there’s nothing more beautiful than having a cigarette in the dim light of the evening, watching the smoke billow in the air.
Many things are the worst. This is my attempt to find the things that are the best.
This scene in the film ‘Three Times’ contains the best response to a piece of writing in any film I’ve ever seen.
I guess all I have to say is that I write because I hope I could possibly make someone smile like Shu Qi smiles here (starting at 1:40 in the clip below).
“Do you remember me?…Time Flies…We have non-stop spring rain. In our base they keep playing that song ‘Rain and Tears’…Hope to see you soon. Stay beautiful.” (It actually sounds even better in Chinese).
She’s the most beautiful person in the world here isn’t she?
