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.
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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.
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.
Read MoreA Corrective to Human History
If the specter of people getting hurt in this new vision is a deterrent, I would say that the old system they’re trying to protect has been hurting people since time immemorial. Under the guise of “innocent until proven guilty,” the guilty remained out of reach of any consequences, and their victims were made to suffer in silence.
Read MoreHow Much of Right Wing YouTube is Just School Clique Grievance?
It's human nature to feel uncomfortable about radical political stances (that's why they're radical) but how we deal with them reveals much about the true north of our political compass.
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Ted Leo at The Echo
June 21, 2018
Sin Eaters
On its 15 year anniversary, Ted Leo is touring Hearts of Oak on a bit of a nostalgia tour. I went on Thursday night at The Echo. It was an all-time great concert, a marvel of singing and song construction, but very much a weird echo of the Bush era and the things we worried about back then.
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