Going into higher gear. The Low Mays’ 人生贏家2: 明星生活 (Life Winners 2: Popstar Life) – I once wrote about the band here and their track about Flat Earth. I’ve since watched an interview and am convinced these five (six?) Hong Kong men are just taking the piss and they do it well. The autotune on […]
Chinese rap, bubbles, and political everything
“Asian” Hip-hop I watched VICE’s first episode of their second season of Minority Reports. Titled ‘Hip Hop’s Reckoning with Asian Rappers,’ the half-hour show in my opinion tackled the easy, or at least obvious, questions. Easy in the sense that cultural appropriation (which VICE angled as appreciation through their choice of footage), Rich Brian’s first […]
Star Wars Physics, Chicago Jazz, & Warzones
Chuck Palahniuk on the Joe Rogan Experience #1158 Rogan bores into Palahniuk’s work process and ethic, raises questions about the limits of darkness in literature, and Palahniuk’s financial problems due to embezzlement. At one point, Rogan asks Palahniuk how he feels about not being able to recuperate the money that an accountant had run away […]
A Russian Opus, A Granta Best Young American Novelist, and The Future of Music
Ludmila Ulitskaya’s The Big Green Tent (trans. from Russian by Polly Gannon) In the world of books, we reserve the word ‘opus’ for works that are generally long. Hefty hardbacks that weigh heavier than bricks, things that make you go ‘ooph’ when you pick them off the bookshelves or get them in the post, daunting in the […]
Reading With Company
There’s an invisible man in my room watching me. I assume he’s leaning against the wall in the corner, next to the unplugged dehumidifier. Of course, he could be standing right over me, his breath infinitesimally dampening the pages of my library book, The Visible Man. Speaking of which, the invisible man, according to the […]
Joel Mak 