Brb & a zine! 🌳
Brb & a zine! 🌳
In the meantime, here’s what we’re watching, reading, and listening to
Hello from PST!
We’re off this week, focusing on our “real” “jobs” and recovering from the excitement of the U.S. Open. We’ll have a new episode for you soon, but in the meantime, Jay and Tammy share what they’ve been thinking about and consuming.
Jay:
I have been listening to the new Olivia Rodrigo album, “Guts,” mostly because I was annoyed at a tweet that unfavorably compared her to Avril Lavigne, and I gotta say that I am really enjoying it. I also have been catching up on a lot of the backlash and I want to highlight a tweet here.
I agree with the tweeter – there is something very subtly racialized about the way in which Olivia Rodrigo keeps getting called out for “stealing” in ways that white artists who shamelessly steal from the 90s don’t. The vast majority of young people don’t actually care about this and they all like Rodrigo. and I imagine most adults do too. But the backlash against her, which seems to be mostly made up of sad 30 year old Taylor Swift stans, does feel like its rooted in a lot of bullshit in which Asian people aren’t ever given the credit for creating anything, and in which any reference to anything gets read as theft rather than as reverential or creative. It’s bullshit.
Tammy:
For the record, I stand by “Sk8er Boi” as a top noraebang pick!
A special offer for TTSG: I made a low-tech, cut-and-paste, doodle-filled oral history zine to commemorate the retirement of Bruce Cumings, a game-changing historian of modern Korea.
🗞️ If you want a copy, Venmo $4 to @etk0000, and let us know your mailing address!
I’m still reporting in the PNW, and though my East Coast years now outnumber those spent here, I’m zipping down I-5 in a Prius like I never left. (PNW Guy—beard, flannel, mountain gear, tattoos, occasional man bun–truly has never left.) On a recent nature break in Oregon, I came across some weird hard-cased globules the color of Asian pear hanging off a bunch of oak trees. They’re called galls, I learned, and are produced when wasps commandeer tree buds to create spherical homes for their larvae. It’s so creepy and incredible! Also, fifteenth-century calligraphers used to crush up galls for ink. These are the kinds of facts you acquire when you escape your six(?) hundred square foot apartment in Brooklyn.
Some things I’ve dug lately:
📖 So Many Olympic Exertions, by Anelise Chen (if you like Eugene Lim and Lisa Hsiao Chen)
📖 The Past, by Tessa Hadley (middle-age bourgeois suspense)
📺 The K-drama “Twenty Five Twenty One” (tho our K-drama Discord channel is mixed on its Material Analysis)
🎥 Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” (way better than “Ladybird;” haven’t seen “Barbie” yet)
Go to the climate marches all over the world this week! And become a paid subscriber via Patreon or Substack to join our Discord community, whose members never take a week off and are organizing meet-ups as we speak.