Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Things I'm Reading & Watching: BRDGS | Lefsetz | AB5 | The Laundromat | Any One of Us and more

"If your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t fight so hard to block it" -SPLC

BRDGS is an artist from Toronto, but he wrote a song called "San Diego," and I kinda love it.


So another couple weeks have passed and I've made more notes on things I read in my daily perusal of the interwebs and daily influx of countless emails. These are things that I find interesting, infuriating, entertaining, or educational. Full clips/list/links are after the jump.




And just like the album killed the single in the sixties, the all at once dump has killed the weekly drip paradigm. That’s how we want it, all at once so we can dig down deep. The oldsters still think they’re the gatekeepers, they’re concerned about water cooler moments. But the truth is when you binge a show you become passionate about it, tell everybody about it, you become an evangelist, you feel like you’re the only person watching this show, you want to spread the word!
...
And we all want to spread the word about non-hip-hop/pop acts...
Now the only people aiding this process are agents and promoters. They’re interested in what sells tickets, they’ll glom on to anything. They broke Maggie Rogers, so many other acts…Rogers is playing Radio City Music Hall! But that’s about as big as these non-“hit” acts get. They play theatres.
But they’re gonna get bigger.
It’s gonna be one act at first. And it’s probably not gonna be brand new, and it’s probably not going to be made up of people under twenty, it will have paid its dues, have its sound and vision honed. And then word will spread slowly and then burst into a supernova.

This sickening hate crime happened right here in San Diego:
Beating of teenage Syrian refugee being investigated as a hate crime
and some statistics to wrap your head around:
CAIR-CA Report: 40% of Muslim Students in California Experience Bullying, Discrimination

'Not good enough' is an easy place to hide - Seth Godin
The people who are paying attention are the ones who are trying. And shaming people who are trying because they’re not perfect is a terrific way to discourage them from trying. On the other hand, the core of every system is filled with the status quo, a status quo that isn’t even paying attention.
Focusing the group’s energy on shutting down stripped-mine coal is going to make far more impact than scolding the few who are trying.

I read a ton of political news from legit news outlets as well as plenty of pundits/opinions, but some people worth a follow (and I'm sure I've mentioned these before) are Rebecca Solnit, Brooke Binkowski, and Heather Cox Richardson are my current favorites. And Bob Lefsetz is cranky and mostly sticks to music, but sometimes his political rants are encouraging.

Today's Trump - Lefsetz
Trump is toast. Over. Done. It’s just a matter of when.
It’s going to happen very quickly. He’s stuck in quicksand, and the only way you can get out is with help.
No one wants to help him.
Not enough to keep him in office.
They want to watch him sink and then say how they never supported him to begin with, that he was a liar who pulled the wool over their eyes.

And everyone is talking about AB5...after it was signed into law. So here were a couple articles I noted after following all the Twitter rage.
Freelance journalists are mad about a new California law. Here’s what’s missing from the debate.
The alternative to AB 5 would be worse. -VOX
But I loved Sara Libby's perspective from VOSD:
Typically a good time to weigh the merits of a piece of legislation is literally any time up until the moment it’s signed....this sudden rush of input at a time in which it’s not likely to have much impact exemplifies how much of the East Coast media establishment treats news: It’s not worth caring about until they say so.
I didn't think I had much in the way of a watchlist because I was out a lot the past couple weeks, but I guess I watch a lot more TV than I care to admit. As a family, there are some must-see sitcoms that are back or new this fall, including The Neighborhood (Mondays/CBS), Single Parents (Wednesdays/ABC), Bless This Mess (Tuesdays/ABC) and Perfect Harmony (Thursdays/NBC). Also, I'll say we tried to watch Sunnyside (NBC), but I cannot stand fake "foreign" accents, which is why I never watched Two Broke Girls. It's 2019, and it's not cute or funny. I haven't binged anything new, but I did catch The Laundromat on Netflix, a film about the Panama Papers, and I got to introduce Nova to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty which is currently on Amazon Prime. As I write this, I'm watching Any One of Us on HBO and I'm just a few minutes in and have to keep pausing because the anxiety of impending tragedy is a little too much, but I'll get through, and hopefully have more to report in my next wrapup. 


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