Maelstrom

The album is an attempt, conscious or unconscious, to recalibrate the way black women and art have been pejoratively interlaced.

The resulting candor is a measure of how layered and arresting women’s experiences can be for those songwriters brave enough to remain unflinching.

Letting things go is synonymous with grace and release. But there’s another form of release, raw and liberating, that can be found in anger.

“Geniuses” rely on a voracious public ready to forgive the previous offense, as long as the coming one even is more deliciously shocking.

These songs remind me what troubled times make easy to forget: that womanhood is a language that is often thankless, but always, always worth it.

As Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino has come along, the question isn’t how we got here, but rather: how didn’t we get here sooner?

I worked through Haines’ songs, as she patched together instances of her life with her father, and I also found myself, inexorably, doing the same.

Napster is the catalyst which was needed to spearhead the movement. But sadly, it is also the ship that had to sink so that others learned how not to approach these critical issues.

How do you look at your own suffering and healing, when the artists who have told you to hope and hold on end their own lives?

Evidently, an artist has to make ends meet, and that sometimes means more practical decision-making. But this should never distract from the idea that art should not be corporatized. Rosy-colored, right? Hear me out.

If thrillers are to be believed, falling in love is as dangerous as leaving your front door unlocked, or walking down a dim, dark street at night.

Being able to escape the world, or else pacify it at all cost, two of the most fundamental things Brave New World condemns, had become too tempting to ignore.

When does consideration for the stories and personal lives of others become censorship of our writing?

Characters who are maddening and complicated tend to stay with us long after we’ve finished reading about them. They make better protagonists than those seemingly perfect ones, for whom everything comes easily

The Baron in the Tree is less about a boy’s hilarious, lifelong “stunt” than it is about the universal struggle of those who know that life has so much more to offer them.

The parallel analyses of magical realism is one of the most freeing elements — from the perspective of a reader as well as a writer — because it allows for looser writing, narratives and characterization

Perhaps I took it too literally, but I was under the impression that if something had not happened directly to me, I had no right to write about it.

I envy those who got the opportunity to discover the series as children ... it would have given me a taste for truly singular, out-of-the-box narration and storytelling—perhaps it would even have influenced the way I write today.

As it stands, on the cusp of the approaching new decade, Netflix and the like are no different from the very structural constraints it sought to liberate us from.

Is this one long metaphor for madness, or is The Haunting of Hill House just a very nuanced ghost story?

It’s easy to think that Black Mirror operates on technophobia, but it has always been about people, and about how we misuse what we create.

Too few shows illustrate that mental illness is not something that friendship erases, that love diminishes, that success eradicates. 

Martha’s role doomed her from the start: she was the rebound, for the Doctor and for the fans — and rebounds, obviously, never look good.

A show supposedly dedicated to female empowerment is considerably depreciated when the relationship at its crux, lauded by fans for years, is the very example of what empowerment is not.

Television shows have an invaluable opportunity, namely that of shaping the way children view the world, pushing them to question that which adults expect them not to.

In many ways, Skins was the teenager it was trying to portray: arrogant, defiant, so hell-bent on the shock factor that we were often left with a show where wild things happened, impressing no one. 

I didn’t want the black Barbie; I prayed that my dark eyes would magically turn green or grey overnight. ... I remember asking my Dad why I wasn’t white, as if it were the most natural question in the world.

Why should I want to draw myself ... when my eye is a weapon turned on my body with the precision of a knife, dissecting its every surface?

Coming-of-age is hindsight, in truth. By the time you realize it’s happening, you’ve already been irrevocably changed.

It took me nearly two decades to unlearn the lie we women have been told: that our propriety is the only thing that matters.

Composure is what is leant upon when one understands that the world has no place for someone who is falling apart, quietly or in all manners of slovenliness.

These tragedies are dragged out, rehashed like a piece of meat that remains juicy and delicious, no matter how long we’ve been chewing it.

I found more solace and understanding in the pages of these books than I did looking up at people who didn’t always get me, or want to deal with me — understandably. 

I have finally understood that I don’t need to justify myself to people: I am simply finding different ways of saying ‘yes’ to myself, by saying ‘no’ to others. 

It’s not his fault he is so evil: I’m the one who named him Voldemort. And he wears it so well.

Discovering a country is like standing on the cusp of a new relationship, with everything it entails: it could be the best thing that has ever happened to you, or it could be the thing that ruins your life.

Comparing both films brings to light thought-provoking conclusions about the varying levels of oppression, and the varying degrees of love.

The films oscillate between the dual poles of Love and Death: they aren’t perfect films — if we only observe them through this limited scope.

Whether or not it was conceived with disdain for feminism, Death Proof illustrates the downfall of a powerful asshole who didn’t see it coming.

Bad films are more than background noise or forgettable insomnia buffers. I’ve come to genuinely cherish these films, as much as I enjoy my arthouse indies and my cinematic masterpieces.

Pop culture is drawn to the seething, simmering man on the edge, whose underlying violence could turn outward, at any given moment.

Rogue One operates on the logic that there are no winners, just casualties and unfair twists of fate: it is a true war film.

Can films dealing with sexual assault afford to be nuanced and open to interpretation, when there are so many people looking for excuses and copouts?

How come, despite the fact that they are supposed to be the focal point of his criticism, the men of Wes Anderson’s movies are somehow more sympathetic than the women who surround them?

The inherent message [is] heard loud and clear: high art and high fashion can be made from the most harrowing, most heartbreaking moments ... with no one pausing to consider the baffling disrespect of it all.

If Chicago is supposedly progressive, why is it that ultimately, it’s the rich white man, a crooked lawyer, who “wins”?