second time around

getting into the swing of things

i like how none of us can tell if twitter is going to die or not. it seems like everyone’s got a different take on it. me personally, i think there’s gonna be at least a little bit of downtime. something will happen where we all just suddenly can’t scroll up anymore. it will probably be back and we’ll find out it’s because elon fired a guy whose job was to push a button every 108 minutes to stop a critical system failure, or something. but who knows? anyways, let’s get into it. if you haven’t subscribed, here’s your chance:

Two Multilingual Songs Stuck In My Head:

Unfortunately, I’m not enjoying Nigerian singer Wizkid’s latest album much—certainly not as much as I did his fourth album Made in Lagos, which I listened to so much that it made it into my Apple Music Replay in both 2020 and 2021. But I can’t stop playing the lead single Bad To Me, a breezy, earworm-y love song that has one of the catchiest hooks in recent memory. I love Wizkid’s music because it can make it feel like the sun is out even when snow is on the ground and temperatures are in the negatives. In the next few weeks, when the weather’s cold and I’m yearning for the seasons to change, this’ll be the first song I throw on.

I’ll admit, my attention span for music has gone way down over the years. You can only listen to so many 1-minute rap songs on SoundCloud before even regular music starts sounding too long. So it’s a wonder, then, that non-binary Japanese singer Hikaru Utada’s 12-minute-long synth-epic can hold my attention the whole time and for every listen after. The highest compliment I can pay it is that it sounds like a haunted version of the Mr. Krabs bee-boo-boo-bop song, but in a good way. To all local DJ’s, please work this into your dance floor playlist somehow. To all my LGBT+ brethren who spent the whole year posting about this album, I’m sorry I didn’t pay attention sooner!

Two Multilingual TV Shows I’m Not Yet Sure Are Great:

I’m not yet sure how to feel about Netflix’s new sci-fi historical mystery series 1899. I’ve usually got better things to do than even bother wasting time on a Netflix original, but when I heard this was from the creators of Dark—if you haven’t seen it, that German-language time-travel drama is not just the best Netflix original by a country mile, but probably one of the best science fiction shows, period—my ears perked up. And, so far, three episodes in, it’s… kinda just a redux of Lost? It is certainly novel to have a cast of diverse characters who mostly can’t communicate because they all speak different languages, and the team behind the camera is clearly enjoying the bigger budget. I’m just not sure yet if this matches Dark, which is superbly written from the pilot to the finale and even manages to solve one of time travel’s supposed theoretical problems on the way there. I probably shouldn’t be judging this series too hard after three episodes, but what else is this blog for if not for my raw thoughts? Anyways, if you’re a fan of mystery box dramas that are high on character development and low on answered questions, give 1899 a shot, maybe? (But really, you should just watch Dark. This is your PSA to watch Dark.)

Should the White Lotus have gotten a season two? Halfway through, I really can’t say yet. The first season was one of the pandemic’s great pleasures, a short “rich people suck” miniseries set in a luxe Hawaii resort that was made and shot in a week while we were all locked down at home. The second season—and presumably all future seasons—takes an anthology approach, with a new cast, new locale, and new story. I feel like I shouldn’t be complaining since it’s just season 1, but bigger and better; it traded in season 1’s cast for big names like F. Murray Abraham, Michael Imperioli, and Aubrey Plaza, it’s a hell of a lot funnier, and makes great use of being shot on location in Italy (and not being limited by the early pandemic) to produce some truly breathtaking scenes. The main thing holding me back from calling it better is that Season 2’s focus on sex and sex workers is not as interesting or incisive of social commentary as Season 1’s focus on colonialism and cultural appropriation. But hey, I remember the first one not really clicking for me until the back half either, so maybe this is another wait-and-see. And if we get to the finale and it ends up being just a redux of season 1, I won’t be mad, either. Whatever happens, I still feel like it’s worth checking in—it’s just not yet the five-star experience of the original.

Two Pictures Of Leo:

Maybe meows count as multilingual? (I really didn’t intend for this whole post to be multilingual media when I sat down to write it. It just kind of happened.)

In Closing

I fuckin’ hate Thanksgiving, man. Not only is it a wack ass colonizer holiday but I also never get to go to the Thanksgiving on the side of my family that isn’t just 100% white, so almost all the food I have ever eaten on Thanksgiving has been mid at best. For decades, I thought I didn’t like turkey because I never had a good one! (One year I had to suffer through something called ‘turducken.’)

Having said all that, any excuse to get together with the people you love to eat food and get drunk is always fine by me. I don’t think I’ll be going to any Thanksgivings this year, though, so if you read this far, DM me and let me know what your Thanksgiving plans are so I can live vicariously through you. Hopefully you enjoy some good food.

Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you next week.