“If you’re Asian, you’re less than human and people can treat you like trash.”

Heartbreaking story from The Guardian about a Dyne Suh, who was turned away from an AirBNB for being Asian:

An Airbnb host who canceled a woman’s reservation using a racist remark has been ordered to pay $5,000 in damages for racial discrimination and take a course in Asian American studies.

Dyne Suh, a 26-year-old law clerk, had booked Tami Barker’s mountain cabin in Big Bear, California, for a skiing weekend with friends in February, but Barker canceled the reservation by text message minutes before they arrived,stating: “I wouldn’t rent it to u if u were the last person on earth” and “One word says it all. Asian” […]

When Suh said she’d complain to Airbnb about the racist remark, Barker replied, “It’s why we have Trump … and I will not allow this country to be told what to do by foreigners.”

Another instance of how Trump’s careless rhetoric continues to embolden those who wish to use race to denigrate, discriminate, and separate.

The ‘Awaken’ trailer will melt your eyes with its beauty

Watch this 4K trailer for Tom Lowe’s Awaken on the largest screen you can:

This is the first time in my life where I’ve started crying from watching a trailer. The trailer itself is a beautiful work.

There are some insane, timelapse shots from the sky — shots that have never been attempted before. According to Engadget, this was done using “gimbal technology that allowed [Lowe] to shoot astrophotography scenes from a moving helicopter.” Incredible.

From the film’s website:

Shot over a 5-year period in more than 30 countries, the film pioneers new time-lapse, time-dilation, underwater, and aerial cinematography techniques to give audiences new eyes with which to see our world. Executive produced by Terrence Malick and Godfrey Reggio, AWAKEN is a celebration of the spirit of life, an exploration of the Earth, and an ode to the Cosmos.

This looks like a gorgeous exploration of technology and humanity in the vein of Samsara. I can’t wait to see it.

The Ghosts of Westeros Panel at Con of Thrones

I recently experienced one of the greatest joys of my life as a pop culture commentator: moderating the “Ghosts of Westeros” panel at Con of Thrones with my Cast of Kings co-host Joanna Robinson. It was a blast to spend time with these amazing actors, who been invaluable to building a show that has become such a huge success over the past 7 years.

As the event was about to begin and we walking onto the stage, looking upon thousands of fans in the audience, I acutely felt what an immense honor it has been to be part of people’s lives during the course of this show.

You can listen to the panel below. Subscribe to A Cast of Kings on Apple Podcasts here.

Here are a few write-ups of the Con worth checking out:

What it’s like to win a medal, eight years later

The New York Times has the story of Chaunté Lowe, who won a bronze model eight years after she competed in the Olympic high jump:

She read a news report: Three Olympians — two Russians and a Ukrainian — who had finished in front of her in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing failed retroactive doping tests. She had moved from sixth to third place.

She had become an Olympic bronze medalist. It was her first medal. She felt herself beginning to dance.

“I screamed like someone was in my house trying to take away my cookies,” she said. “I was excited and relieved at the same time. ‘Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, you are not a failure’!”

This podcast took me on an emotional journey

Recently, while browsing for new podcasts to listen to, I found a show called Pregnant Pause, in which journalist Zak Rosen and his wife Shira Heisler discuss whether or not they want to have children. I decided to subscribe because I was personally interested in exploring the same question.

The show is well produced and tackles a variety of aspects of child-bearing with thoughtfulness, honesty, and sensitivity. While I found the standard podcast bumpers to be a bit jarring when applied to this situation (e.g. “Stay tuned next week to hear what happened with my wife’s hospital visit!”), overall I’d highly recommend this show. Without spoiling anything, I can tell you that “Pregnant Pause” took me on an emotional roller coaster ride that I won’t soon forget. I’m grateful to Rosen and Heisler for their willingness to share themselves with the world in this way.

Listen to all 8 episodes here. They’re only about 30 minutes long each.

Listen to the Pierre Henry song that inspired Futurama’s theme song

The New York Times has published a short piece on musician Pierre Henry, whose song “Psyché Rock” inspired Futurama’s theme song:

The French composer Pierre Henry, who died on Thursday, was a pioneer of musique concrète, which records existing sounds and turns them into musical collages. His mechanical techniques were an analog precursor to the digital sampling that is widely used in music today […]

Mr. Henry’s “Psyché Rock” coupled rock with electronic tones, whirs, beeps and distortion to create a psychedelic sound. “Psyché Rock,” which has been remixed by Fatboy Slim and William Orbit, inspired the theme song for the animated television series “Futurama.”

The melody and sound effects that would become forever associated with Futurama are definitely audible in the original music. The Futurama theme song (which I believe was remixed by series composer Christopher Tyng) takes those elements and gives them a cohesion and robustness that would become associated with the show’s bold aesthetic and style of humor.

Here’s the Futurama theme, which is one of my favorite themes of all time:

What makes ‘Better Call Saul’ a successful prequel

Travis Lee Ratcliff has a nice video essay exploring what makes a prequel successful. In short: characters and events in the prequel need to have meaning beyond their original context. Many prequels forget this (including Better Call Saul, at times) but I think Saul has really cleared the bar for creating something new and satisfying out of an existing world.

[Thanks to Søren from the Slackfilmcast for bringing this essay to my attention]

 

On the desire to see yourself represented onscreen

Well, speaking of films being used as political lightning rods…

Aditi Natasha Kini has written a piece for Jezebel entitled “I’m Tired of Watching Brown Men Fall in Love With White Women Onscreen.” In it, she not only conveys her personal dismay at watching recent shows and films like The Big Sick and Master of None, she also explains how race (and specifically, whiteness) has been operationalized in popular culture:

The Big Sick has been roundly lauded in the press lately, including here at Jezebel, and not without good reason: it’s a funny, heartwarming love story based on the true-life experiences of cowriters/married couple Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon. But as much as I liked it—and I did—I also found myself exhausted, yet again, by the onscreen depiction of a brown man wanting to date a white woman, while brown women are portrayed alternately as caricatures, stereotypes, inconsequential, and/or the butts of a joke.

I know, I know: isn’t it progress to see Asian men get the girl for once, instead of stand-in as a prop, token or joke? Sure, it’s great that Hollywood is putting its money behind narratives with brown men at the helm, as in The Big Sick and Master of None. But both also center white women as the love interest—a concept which, in the complex hierarchy of power and race in America, pays lip-service to the one notion that has shaped the history of South Asian and American culture alike: Whiteness as the ultimate desire, the highest goal in defining oneself as an American. Both of these works are part of a larger trend that’s common in films in media portraying the desi community, that the pursuit of white love is a mode of acceptance into American culture, and a way of “transcending” the confines of immigrant culture—the notion that white love is a gateway drug to the American dream.

There have been a lot of writers online attacking this piece, and I myself am quite torn on it.

On the one hand, Kini’s point is undercut by the fact that The Big Sick is largely autobiographical. The movie is a passion project by Nanjiani and his wife, Emily Gordon, and it’s difficult to understand the counterfactual that Kini is advocating for in this case. Should they have altered the film details (and thus, the details of their life) to conform to Kini’s concept of a film that’s more ethnically diverse and representative?

[I should also point out that the fact that The Big Sick exists at all and is receiving a major theatrical release is a bit of a miracle. I think the film will do a lot to expand people’s idea of what the American immigrant experience is.]

On the other hand, as an Asian-American immigrant, I can totally sympathize with where Kini is coming from. Americans who aren’t white spend decades of their lives watching films/TV shows in which white people are the romantic objects of affection, OR films/TV shows where white people get the romantic objects of affection by the end (often, the latter are of a different race).

Consider this: When was the last time you watched a film that had a Pakistani woman as the love interest? When was the last time you watched a film that had a white woman as the love interest? Imagine what it feels like to acutely perceive that imbalance every single day of your life.

The Big Sick is a great film. Kini’s concept of a similar film from the perspective of a Pakistani woman would also be something I’d want to see. I’m sad that we can’t watch both this year, but maybe they will coexist one day.