Category: Uncategorized

Book Review: How to Be Good by Nick Hornby

July 29, 2019

Categories: books

As a philosophy major in college, I wish I had read this book a lot sooner. It approaches the question of good vs. bad in a rather hilarious way. Of course, I didn’t laugh the entire time that I read it, as some parts are quite dark and make you sit and think for a minute. This is the third book I have read by Nick Hornby, besides his novels About a Boy and Slam, and How to Be Good never fails to satisfy me. It’s about this couple named Katie and David who are struggling to maintain a happy life with their two kids, Tom and Molly. They are a middle-class couple who both have stable jobs: Katie is a doctor and Davis is an angry news columnist. But there is one problem: Katie has an affair with a man named Stephen, and now David has to deal with not just his stressful job but his wife cheating on him, too. However, David goes through this spiritual change through the encouragement of his spiritual doctor DJ GoodNews. David then quits his job and decides he is going to have everyone on his block, including him and his family, bring in someone on the streets to live with them. At first, everyone on the block is skeptical, but then Monkey, the homeless kid who the family takes in, turns out to be a good guy and even gets back the possessions of one couple on the block whose adopted homeless person stole from them. While Tom and Katie think David and GoodNews are being ludicrous, Molly sides with David and becomes self-righteous. Katie begins to question whether her work as a doctor is as morally sound as the work David and GoodNews are doing with the homeless, but finds out that their plan to do good backfires and they lose hope in humanity.

This novel wrestles with the question of what does it truly mean to be a “good person.” Katie becomes a doctor because she wants to help people, but every day that she works with patients they are not happy. However, when GoodNews intervenes, people start taking his work seriously even though he lacks the qualifications to be a doctor and tries to “treat” people’s medical problems by giving them head massages instead of medicine. Katie eventually realizes that she cannot please everyone and that just because one isn’t doing what David does does not necessarily mean one cannot do good in life. In fact, I believe that if you truly want to do good in life, you should start with your family and friends. In Buddhism, we have a term called “human revolution,” which means that each of us can change the world and foster world peace by changing our attitude and striving to be the best at our workplaces, in our schools, at home. Naturally when we do this we become happy, and we naturally encourage others around us to share in that happiness. There are also the terms “relative happiness” and “absolute happiness.” Relative happiness is defined by material things: great grades, great college, wonderful spouse, your dream job, the nice car, anything that brings you joy in that moment. However, relative happiness is fleeting, because if that thing or person leaves you, breaks or gets destroyed in some way, you feel bad you no longer have it and you sink back into despair. Or even if those things still exist in your life, over time you may find yourself wishing for a better job, a better car, better food, etc., and so you attach your happiness to those things. Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t want nice things; we’re human, we go through stuff, we deserve to have hot water, a nice meal, access to Netflix. However, when we define our lives only by the stuff we have and stop valuing others in our life, we feel empty inside. Absolute happiness, however, is a happiness that you feel while you go through struggles in life. Katie doesn’t have the perfect life, but she comes to terms with its imperfections. Life is messy and many times you will cry until your eyes hurt. But I have personally found that the times I remember the most are the times when I challenged myself to my limits and conquered something so seemingly impossible, and over time I laugh when I look back at those times, and I even cry tears of appreciation that I went through that time so that I could learn what I was capable of.

The novel also makes a great point about loving the ones you are with. One night David and GoodNews call people they wronged in the past to apologize and ask forgiveness so that they don’t have to feel guilty and burdened by the past. For David, the person he called was a kid he bullied years ago, and for GoodNews it was his sister Cantata for reasons I am still not clear about (something to do with a poster of Duran Duran frontman Simon LeBon.) GoodNews, unlike David, ends up cussing out his sister when she refuses to forgive him and hangs up. Even when Katie tries to console GoodNews he still says that he feels like a failure for what he did to her. Katie realizes that no matter how much she tries to convince him he isn’t a failure, he did in fact mess up. She wonders “who are these people, that they want to save the world and yet they are incapable of forming proper relationships with anybody? As GoodNews so eloquently puts it, it’s love this and love that, but of course it’s so easy to love someone you don’t know, whether it’s George Clooney or Monkey. Staying civil to someone with whom you’ve ever shared Christmas turkey–now, there’s a miracle.” (How to Be Good, Hornby, 275)

I have found from personal experience that even as someone who passionate about social justice, I need to be a human being and look out for my friends and family, too. There are lots and lots of problems in the world: suicide bombings, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, white nationalism, global warming, the list goes on (why do you think there’s a Good News section in your Microsoft Newsfeed? Life is tough, and we could all use some acts of compassion once in a while.) However, as I am not God, I cannot solve all of the world’s problems. But what I can control is my outlook on life. I can choose to value my current friendships, my family ties, and having such ties grounds my approach to social justice. Sure, working at a coffee shop after college wasn’t the equivalent to being the CEO of the International Monetary Fund, or being the star onstage playing the Edouard Lalo Cello Concerto for a climate change festival (although I would actually love to do this someday, to be honest), or being principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic. But if anything, it was this: a way to bring home money and pay my bills so I can in fact afford to pursue my music activities and charitable pursuits. In order to take care of others, I had to take care of myself, which means taking care of my finances, saving money for myself, getting rid of any debt, and spending time with family and friends. When I was in college, I invested a lot of my rage in theses about the factories polluting the predominantly Black low-income Altgeld Gardens in Chicago. I threw myself into my papers on the Harlem Renaissance, police brutality and the ethics of freegans.

Yet I had quit my job at the local daycare because I felt this work was more important, when the reality is that other kids had to work while studying so they could send home money to an ailing parent or provide for their kid. I wasn’t focused on the preschoolers I needed to show up for every day as part of my work study, I wasn’t focused on taking care of my finances, I was solely concerned with my grades. And while I don’t regret my college experience and appreciate even just going to college, I will say that I took a lot of things for granted, like thinking I could survive each waking day after staying up studying until 2 am to polish the perfect two-page essay for that medieval philosophers class, or the times I left my phone off and didn’t call my family to check in on them. Like Katie said, it is easier to value someone outside of our immediate environment, and if we can’t treasure the people closest to us while we are out saving the world, we may end up regretting that we didn’t spend more time with them. I know I cannot speak for everyone, but this has just been my experience, so even if I go to graduate school because I want to study some noble thing and go on to make big contributions to society (because, to be honest, I want to do this), I still need to value my loved ones so that when they pass away (as I will, too, someday, like everyone and everything on this planet) I will look back on the time I spent with them with a sense of gratitude rather than wishing I could have spent more time with them.

Reading How to Be Good taught me that taking care of yourself isn’t selfish, and it doesn’t mean you did something bad for society. And doing acts of kindness is a good thing; I would never want to say it was something people should stop doing. I myself remember doing an acts of kindness project for a class I took in high school, and it was so much fun because I had to do it anonymously. However, it’s important to have a healthy relationship with yourself and your boundaries so that you can carry that healthy self-esteem in your relationships and in broader terms your work for world peace. This novel was a New York Times bestseller when it came out almost two years ago, and I can see why. I finished it in just a couple of days, it was that good.

How to Be Good. Nick Hornby. 2001. 305 pp.

Book Review: I’ve Got Your Number

July 26, 2019

Categories: books

Dang it, Sophie Kinsella! You’ve got me again with another incredibly hilarious and also very well-written novel! Haha, just kidding, I love you Sophie, but seriously this book was so much fun to read. I’ve Got Your Number is about this young woman named Poppy Wyatt who is engaged to this academic named Magnus, and frankly, Magnus’s family doesn’t like Poppy much just because she’s not an academic like they are. However, things change when Poppy cannot find her ring and has the staff at the hotel she is at look everywhere for the ring. Even worse, a random guy steals her phone while she’s on the street figuring out how to best tell her friends and fiancée that the ring is gone, but lucky for Poppy, the personal assistant of a consulting company threw her phone in the trash bin. Finders keepers. So Poppy takes the phone and uses it to contact her friends and fiancée, but before she knows it, she is getting email after email from a random guy named Sam. Turns out that this is the consulting company’s phone, and all of Sam’s business emails go into that phone. At first, Sam doesn’t of course want Poppy to keep the phone because it’s the company’s phone, but after she does him a favor (by stalling this Japanese businessman who Sam is supposed to meet with a hilarious rendition of “Single Ladies”) he reluctantly lets her keep the phone. Poppy gains access to all his business email threads, and when she sees that he doesn’t respond to most of the emails his colleagues send him, she writes everyone these super nice emails and signs them under Sam’s name. This lands Sam in a lot of trouble because he goes to the business meeting unprepared for people at work thanking him for doing things he never actually did for them. Poppy’s assumptions about Sam land her in even bigger trouble when she reads the emails from Willow, who she thinks is his girlfriend (spoiler: she’s his ex.) But when Sam’s friend is caught up in a business scandal and Sam inadvertently becomes involved in it, it’s up to Poppy to help get him out of this sticky mess. In the process, the two learn more about each other than they thought they’d need to know, and Poppy learns that she’s more capable of being assertive than she thinks she is. Sam encourages her to go after what she wants, and Poppy realizes that she and Magnus really aren’t all that compatible with one another and their marriage would be very difficult. She also realizes that she cannot please everyone in his family and that she wouldn’t be happy being married to a man who is, in reality, a commitment-phobe in just about everything (jobs, relationships) and is just marrying Poppy so he can prove to his parents that he can stay committed to something, while he has so many women lined up to be his wife.

Of course, this wouldn’t be wise in reality. Honestly, with all the surveillance and debate around privacy rights, this book, while a comedy, had a slightly disturbing undertone to it. It’s why you need to erase any personal data on your computer’s hard drive before giving it away or recycling it, because if someone accesses your data, it’s not so fun when someone is stalking you because they know your information from your computer (8/30/21: how much I can follow this in my own life, I don’t know.) But of course, if the situation was desperate, I’m sure I would have done what Poppy did (of course, it wouldn’t be the right thing, but it would have saved my friends a ton of stress.) I remember one time I was texting and walking down the stairs, and because I wasn’t paying attention and was in a rush, I fell down the stairs and my phone went crashing with me. It hit the hardwood floor of the office where I was supposed to turn in my key (for the dorm I stayed in during a summer program) and I found myself without a phone. I cried all through the flight because I couldn’t contact my closest friends to let them know I was alive and was on the flight back home. I also couldn’t check the time when my flight boarded, so much to the dismay of the woman checking everyone’s boarding pass before they boarded, I was so caught up in my sadness about dropping my phone, and so busy calling myself every demeaning term in the book for dropping it, that I didn’t realize everyone had boarded until the lady was telling me, rightfully upset, that the flight was going to leave without me. Of course, I could have averted the situation completely by not texting until I had gotten down the stairs, but you live and learn, right? I also learned to back up my phone in case I did something like that again (which probably won’t happen, after I remember to this day the pain and agony on my friends’ faces when I told them I couldn’t answer their calls and texts because I dropped my phone and broke it.)

Overall, excellent novel; Poppy and Sam make an incredible duo; I seriously hope they make a movie out of the book! 🙂

I’ve Got Your Number: A Novel. Sophie Kinsella. 435 pp.

Book Review: My Not So Perfect Life

June 6, 2019

Categories: books

I was browsing the shelves of the library last week, searching for Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, the sequel to Sophie Kinsella’s bestselling novel, Confessions of a Shopaholic. My face fell when I saw it was not on the shelves, but then I wasn’t going to lose hope, and instead spotted a green book with a young woman and the words “My (Not-So) Perfect Life” written diagonally. I wondered if it was part of a series, and then found it stood on its own, so I wouldn’t have to read anything before it, so I checked it out. After watching so many dramas and reading dramas, I needed to take a break and read some funny stuff.

I devoured the book in less than two days. Sophie Kinsella continues to amaze me with her plot twists, her witty characters and her sheer talent for writing. This may sound weird, but it kind of reminded me of a novel version of The Financial Diet. The Financial Diet is a blog where people share about their personal financial experiences, such as how they lived in a big city on a budget, paid offtheir student debt, changed careers, or found great deals on flights and travel. The blog also has a lot of stories about comparing ourselves to others and the use of social media and its effects on our happiness. However, there are also posts about a healthy use of social media, such as Chelsea Fagan’s post on using Instagram positively.

My (Not-So) Perfect Life is about a young woman named Katie Brenner who is trying to start her career at a marketing agency in London. She expects her life to be better than in her hometown in the countryside of England, and even changes her name to Cat so people will treat her like a serious city person, but she gets a reality check. Her roommates are terrible, her job pays little and is quite boring, she doesn’t have a boyfriend. Some of her colleagues also make fun of her accent and her countryside roots. In short, Katie’s life is less than perfect.

Her boss, Demeter, on the other hand, seems cool as a cucumber (I kept imagining Demeter as Amy’s boss Dianna, played by Tilda Swinton, in the film Trainwreck.) Demeter seems to have the perfect life: a husband, two children, a nice home, a nice life and a top position at her job. However, at work she is controlling, berating her employees and putting so many demands on them that her entire staff loses respect for her. One day, without warning, she lets Katie go and Katie moves back to her family’s farm in Somerset. Even though she doesn’t want to be at home, she helps her dad and his girlfriend, Biddy, with their glamping business. Soon after the glamping business takes off, and Dad, Kate and Biddy get new customers. However, when Demeter ends up visiting Somerset to glamp with her family, Katie must keep her cover so she doesn’t let her dad and Biddy know that Demeter fired her. Katie plots a revenge plan to get back at Demeter for firing her, but eventually sees that Demeter is less perfect than she thought.

This book taught me a lot of things. First and foremost, it taught me the importance of being my own person and not comparing myself to others. Katie spends most of her time in London looking at other people’s lives and assuming that she is the only person who doesn’t have it all together. Instead of deciding to be herself, she thinks that she only has to post good stuff on her Instagram in order to not let her friends know that she isn’t having a great time in London. Her friends post their positive moments, but rarely, if ever, post whether they’ve had a bad day. However, later in the book we find out that most of these people in Katie’s peer group, despite moving to these luxurious places, still have problems like every other human being on the planet. While it’s important sometimes to “fake it ’til you make it” in order to do your best work, social media and the Internet in general have made it easier for us to compare ourselves to each other and seek happiness outside of ourselves in things that, in the end, don’t last long. Social media can be great for a lot of things, but I have noticed after celebrating my 1-year anniversary of not having a Facebook account, I don’t miss it at all and have come to embrace myself without trying to keep in contact with everyone. Instead of deleting her Instagram, Katie starts a hashtag where people can post imperfect photos of their lives, such as a crowded subway platform, soaked hair, and other things that people deem failures.

This book also taught me to never forget your roots. Wherever I move, I cannot forget who I am and where I came from. As a musician, even if I do make it to Carnegie Hall and other prestigious places, I want to stay grounded and not let my ego get in the way of letting me be myself. Katie tries to leave behind her identity as a young woman growing up in Somerset with her father, but when she moves back home she gets in touch with her roots. There’s this idea that to be an adult, you need to enjoy things that we typically consider to be for adults, such as going to the bar every evening, dining out, having the dream job. But trying to be someone besides herself ends up draining Katie, and she comes back acting like Demeter towards Dad and Biddy until she realizes how much she has let Demeter’s controlling demeanor influence how she acts towards others.

Although I must say, like Confessions of a Shopaholic, this book felt like a movie. I awwwed at the sad scenes and whenever Katie spoke up for herself and even won back Alex, her coworker she was crushing on who Katie thought was having an affair with Demeter, I snapped my fingers and kept saying, “You go, girl!”, “Amen!” or “Yasssss, slay queen!” In one scene, Katie overhears Demeter trying to engage her two spoiled children in conversation while they are glued to their phones. She observes that Demeter feels lonely and broken inside even though it looks like she has the perfect family, and her kids don’t respect her or show any appreciation towards her. So Katie, when Demeter is gone, calls the two kids out, in the calmest way, for not appreciating everything their mom has done for them, telling them that her (Katie’s) mom died when she was young, so she wasn’t able to spend time with her mom, unlike Demeter’s kids. When the kids hear this, it seems as if they ignore her, but then later Coco, Demeter’s daughter, briefly looks up from her phone and thanks Demeter for taking them on the glamping trip. This scene taught me that if we want to make it anywhere in life, we need to have a deep sense of gratitude.

This novel also taught me that everyone has their own definitions of perfect. This blog post isn’t going to be perfect. None of my blog posts are perfect. My music playing isn’t always perfect. But to someone else they may be the thing they need to get through the day. I do think it’s important to work on improving yourself every day, but I try not to be a perfectionist anymore because I don’t have time to keep worrying about whether people will like me or not. Life is messy sometimes, and to get through life and your day to day means embracing the messiness. This book was awesome and so relevant to this day and age. Thank you once again, Sophie Kinsella.

My (Not-So) Perfect Life: A Novel. Sophie Kinsella. 438 pp. 2017.

Book Review: Knit Two: A Friday Night Knitting Club Novel by Kate Jacobs (spoilers from the 1st book)

May 24, 2019

Categories: books

Ten summers ago, I was bored out of my mind. School had let out and all I had planned was summer reading and vegging out in front of the TV while knitting. And then I came across it, a magical treasure, one of eight incredible summer reads I delved into that sticky season: The Friday Night Knitting Club, a beautiful touching novel by Kate Jacobs. I vaguely remember not finishing it, but then I rediscovered it one day at the library nearly a decade later, and thought, “I need to finish this book.” So I read it, and I’m pretty sure I shed more than a tear or two. Set in modern-day New York City, it narrates the lives of a group of women who all meet on a Friday evening in Georgia Walker’s yarn shop called Walker and Daughter. In the first book, Dakota, Georgia’s daughter, is thrilled to be around so many incredible women and learn from their lives as they knit afghans, scarves, hats and other things.

While I can’t remember much in detail about the characters’ backgrounds, I remember enough to know how they develop in the sequel. At the end of the first novel, Georgia dies of ovarian cancer, and in the second, Peri, one of the members of the knitting club, takes over the shop and renovates it. She wants Dakota to take more responsibility for the shop, but Dakota is now eighteen and has other interests, namely attending college at New York University and getting a cute guy at school to notice her. Anita, an elderly woman, is trying to find love after the death of her husband; Catherine is not sure she’ll ever find a man who loves her truly for her after her divorce; Lucie is searching for the father of her newborn daughter, Ginger, not only raising her but also taking care of her mother. Not to mention Darwin is now a new mom with twins and KC is struggling with her career. Like the first book, each character has their own struggles they deal with, but nevertheless, they stick it out and support each other, especially because they want to honor the incredible life that Georgia left them through the shop.

At first, I started the novel but then thought I would need to read the first again just to get into the beginning. I read the book rather a long time ago, so it took me a while to catch up to the characters, but once I remembered the plot line from the first novel, I once again devoured it like the most delicious piece of (vegan) chocolate cake ever in the entire world. This book almost got me a little choked up because these young women support each other even through the rough times. I love to knit but have only been knitting by myself for the longest time, and reading The Friday Night Knitting Club helped me understand how I really need to find other people to knit with. I like knitting alone, it’s just that it’s fun to do with friends, too. Once again, I can’t thank Kate Jacobs enough for another excellent read. This book reminds us knitters that the things we make carry our personal stories with them, and that our projects as knitters can help us connect to one another even at the times we feel alone.

Back in 2006 or 2007, around that time, they said Julia Roberts was going to star in a movie adaptation of The Friday Night Knitting Club. Fast forward ten years later, and I’m still crossing my fingers hoping they live up to their promise. And maybe it’s for the best; sometimes when people make movies from books, they have to leave a lot out, not just for time constraints but also probably for copyright policy. And I have no doubt that Julia Roberts is working on other great projects right now, but even if she didn’t play in the movie, they could have another actress play in the film. I am still (more than a little) sad that no movie has come out yet, but oh well. Maybe someday. I guess I’ll just keep crossing my fingers and praying for a movie adaptation.

Knit Two: A Friday Night Knitting Club Novel. Kate Jacobs. 326 pp. 2008.

Book Review: Queen of Babble in the Big City

April 19, 2019

categories: books

Lizzie Nichols is at it again in the sequel to Meg Cabot’s hilarious novel Queen of Babble, and this time she is in the Big Apple. A quick recap: Queen of Babble is about this young woman named Lizzie Nichols who loves to talk, but often gets in trouble for gossiping. She lives in England with her boyfriend Andrew, who is working as a waiter to pay his bills through grad school but then files for unemployment benefits after he gambles and loses all his money. Lizzie shouts aloud that Andrew is taking money away from people who, unlike him, have no job at all, and this gets him in trouble, so he asks her for money instead. Then Lizzie leaves him and goes on a train to France to spend time with her friend Shari and Shari’s boyfriend, Chaz. On the train she meets this handsome guy named Luke, who is on his way to France, too, and it turns out Shari and Chaz are staying at Luke’s estate so they can get ready for the wedding of Luke’s cousin, Vicky. At first, Lizzie thinks Luke is in love with her, but then at the wedding she runs into his girlfriend, Dominique, and then gets her dreams crushed. Dominique ends up being very condescending toward Lizzie and even challenging her to fix Vickie’s wedding dress the night before her wedding. Lizzie takes up Dominique’s challenge and ends up making the dress perfect after staying up all night fixing it, and Vickie is happy with it. Luke ends up dumping Dominique and falling in love with Lizzie, and the two of them move to New York and live together in the apartment Luke’s mom bought him (oh, did I already mention Luke-and Chaz-both have hefty trust funds?)

Lizzie thinks it’s going to be a walk in the park. Who says a girl from Ann Arbor, Michigan, can’t brave the blistery winters, congested traffic and hustle of New York City? However, when she gets there, she realizes that although Luke’s rent is covered, Lizzie still needs to find a job so she doesn’t have to depend on Luke’s financial blessings to survive in the city. Also, she wants to find a job related to her college degree in fashion design, and Luke was immensely supportive of her dream, so he moved to New York so that she could pursue her passion. However, she keeps getting rejected by several opportunities, and finally goes to a French couple who rejects her portfolio at first until she tells them she is willing to work for free. Because they cannot afford to lose out to the competition with Maurice, another wedding dress designer in the city, they have her work for them with no benefits, no paid time off, no pay whatsoever. The couple lets her work for them, but then Lizzie has to find an actual paying job so that she can do the free work for Monsieur and Madame Henri on the side. Chaz hooks her up with his dad’s law firm, and so she finds work as a receptionist there, making fast friends with Tiffany, who, like Lizzie, loves to gossip. While working at Monsieur and Madame Henri’s shop, Lizzie meets a young woman who is unhappy with the service Maurice gave her for her wedding dress (he said to store it in some kind of container, but then that material of the container ended up ruining her wedding dress.) Lizzie uses her gregariousness and her empathetic nature to her advantage and tells the young woman how the dress can be fixed. The Henris still look down on her, but Lizzie is determined to show them what she’s worth so they can finally swallow their pride and pay her for her work.

Meanwhile, Lizzie is struggling with maintaining her friendship with Shari. Shari works for a nonprofit and is very busy nowadays, and when Lizzie tries to call her about why her (Shari) and Chaz aren’t on good terms anymore, Shari tells her she has to go and hangs up. Later, Lizzie finds out that Shari and Chaz broke up because Shari fell in love with one of her female coworkers, her boss Pat, and now lives with her. Shari is worried that her parents will disown her for being gay, but Lizzie continues to support her along the way, and Shari’s mother ends up being very supportive even though Shari’s dad doesn’t react very well to his daughter’s coming out.

However, Lizzie realizes that she is on thin ice at her paying job at the law firm when she meets Jill Higgins, a young woman married to a very rich bachelor in New York named John MacDowell whose family owns quite a lot of real estate in the city. Jill works at a job John’s family doesn’t see as attractive: working with seals in a zoo, and his family thinks that Jill is marrying John for his money, so they are having her sign a prenuptial agreement so that Jill won’t get any of John’s cash until they have kids together. Jill meets with the law firm so that she can have her rights protected when married to John. The press often pokes fun at Jill and calls her names deriding her weight, but Lizzie has a soft spot for Jill, and so one day she goes into the bathroom to hear Jill crying. She gives Jill several treats from the break room in the office, and listens to Jill talk about how John’s mother-in-law hates Jill and thinks that she is just out for her son’s wealth. Lizzie tells Jill that she works with brides and that even though she is not a certified wedding specialist, she can restore any vintage or antique wedding gown and make something new of it. Jill soon develops trust in Lizzie and has her work on her wedding gown, but then Roberta, Lizzie’s boss, finds out that a photo of Lizzie taking Jill to her car makes it in the paper and nearly fires Lizzie because she had to keep any matter with Jill’s wedding confidential, and since Lizzie is a receptionist she wasn’t, according to the rules, supposed to be talking to Jill at all. But honestly, if she hadn’t met Jill, Jill wouldn’t have had anyone to really call a friend because everyone just wanted something from her.

In the meantime, Lizzie must decide if she wants to keep living with Luke or leave him, because Shari tells her that she hasn’t been herself ever since living with Luke and that she should think twice before wanting to marry him. All Lizzie dreams about is marrying Luke even though they have literally only known each other for six months, but Luke doesn’t like commitment, so he’s not too keen on marrying her yet, even though he wants to still live with Lizzie.

This book really does talk about a lot of topics that are still relevant today: working for free, marriage, commitment, friendship. This book has it all, and honestly, like the first, I kept thinking about Elle Woods from Legally Blonde. Elle Woods is this very kind-hearted optimistic young woman who doesn’t fit in when she attends Harvard Law School to see her boyfriend. But she also doesn’t give up on herself and studies hard even when her professor tells her that she isn’t going to get anywhere in law school simply because she dresses in pin and wears makeup. Elle also is very good at keeping friends because she knows how to keep a secret, even when Brooke, a lady who is on trial for allegedly murdering her husband, tells Elle that she only got her physically fit body not from exercise, but from getting liposuction. Like Elle, Lizzie doesn’t give up even when people tell her she won’t get far in anything, and I appreciate that about her character. Now of course, as an introvert who likes talking sometimes but who hasn’t been to many weddings, I couldn’t totally relate to Lizzie, but I love that she never gives up even when New York City becomes a day in day out struggle.

She also taught me the importance of knowing your self-worth. She lets the Henris take advantage of her hard work by saying she will work for free, thinking they will pay her one day. But when time passes and they don’t pay her anything (they are a family-owned business but are struggling financially themselves and having a hard time affording to pay their rent), she finally gets fed up and then when the Henris reveal to the press that Lizzie helped Jill with her wedding plans, getting Jill into further trouble and costing Lizzie her job at the firm, Lizzie finally marches in and demands they pay her a fair salary and benefits (she says “I want thirty thousand a year plus commissions. I want two weeks’ paid vacation, full medical and dental. I want at least one sick day per month plus two personal days per year. And I want the upstairs apartment, rent free, all utilities paid for by the shop,” Cabot p. 287.) When she said all this, of course I was snapping my fingers and practically shouting, “Get. it. GIRL!” But seriously, I understood that I, too, as a young woman in a creative field, need to know my worth. I need to work hard but also bot feel like I have to always work for free, especially in a private place like New York City (or really anywhere, since in a lot of places in the U.S. things are getting more and more expensive, namely housing.)

It also taught me that weddings involve a lot of planning. Throughout the book, Lizzie includes several excellent guides for finding the perfect wedding gown for your body type, what to do after the wedding (i.e. writing thank-you notes to your guests, etc.), alternatives to throwing rice when the bride and groom leave in their “Just Married” car, and other really helpful things I had very little prior knowledge of. I hope when I get married (which I have no idea when) I can keep these guides in mind.

Once again, Meg Cabot continues to work magic with her excellent writing. The end (I won’t spoil it) had me seriously snapping my fingers and reeling back in shock, not from horror but from sheer fangirldom. Now I’m going to devour the third installment in the series! 🙂

Queen of Babble in the Big City. 2007 by Meg Cabot. 307 pp.

Confessions of a Shopaholic: A Fictional Personal Finance Book

April 17, 2019

Categories: books

I devoured this book. At first I went to the library this weekend to get some novels, but then I thought I needed to get another book on personal finance, even though I had already read Get Money by Kristen Wong and absorbed The Financial Diet like osmosis.

And to be honest, Confessions of a Shopaholic really is one of the most important personal finance books out there, even if it’s a novel that came out eighteen years ago. I don’t care if people think it’s mere “chick lit” or a silly story about a woman who can’t control her shopping habit. But after listening to so many financial literacy podcasts, reading articles in the Money section of MSN and preaching to the Holy Temple of Suze Orman (I’m pretty sure I’ve perfected the way she says “Roth IRA” at this point), reading this book made me really think about our consumer culture, clutter, and our society’s lingering reluctance to talk about money, especially how society has conditioned women to talk about money.

I saw the movie a while ago, and can’t really remember it other than the gorgeous Isla Fisher starring as Rebecca, the main character. However, I do remember that, unlike the book, the film takes place in New York City. The novel takes place in London. Rebecca (“Becky”) Bloomwood thinks she is living the high life, with her upscale apartment in an affluent area, but she has a whole host of other issues to deal with, namely her credit card debt. She writes as a financial journalist and yet doesn’t get paid much or even practice Successful Savings habits even when she works in finance. She feels extremely out of place among the super-powerful financial gurus in the city, and her friend Suze tells her that her problem is not necessarily that she spends too much money, but that she doesn’t make enough money. So Becky applies for a job at a clothing store, but gets fired on her very first day for trying to steal a precious item of clothing from a customer that she (Becky) really wants. Becky tries to practice frugality, and yet after a few days she goes back to spending on things she doesn’t need, like eating out and buying books. She takes on a side hustle which involves her putting together frames for pictures and selling them for a profit, but doesn’t get far with it. Becky also has to deal with Luke Brandon, an arrogant financial advisor who looks down on Becky and doesn’t really take her seriously. However, Becky is determined to make her life work for her by actually confronting her financial issues instead of running away from them.

This book reminded me that while it’s okay to have nice things, having too much can run you ragged and actually make you feel unfulfilled in the long run. Don’t get me wrong, I love spending $11 at the movies just as much as the next person. However, movies are much cheaper when you get them on the Red Box or even at the library, so I never really feel anymore like I just have to go to the movies every week because it does add up. When I do go to the movies or eat out on those rare occasions, I can appreciate it more than if I did it every day. Becky’s struggle also made me think of how Suze Orman would react to this book; I honestly don’t know if Suze would have made it through because Becky’s spending habits are over-the-top ridiculous. However, in a way, it does imply that women are traditionally stereotyped to be bad with money and don’t have enough saved up for their own needs. I mean, there are men who are bad spenders, too, and there are also several women who manage their finances just fine. There are also women like Becky who spend and never save for themselves. The book also made me understand why it’s important to have an emergency fund, because Becky is underpaid at her job and doesn’t like it very much, but instead of saving money so she can leave for a better opportunity (or work on her own projects), she spends money so that she can push the stress she feels at work under the table. However, she continues to get multiple letters from her bank about her overdraft fees and that she needs to meet with them to discuss her financial situation. This novel also taught me that we really need to talk about money. Even though most people talk about it, it still brings up uncomfortable feelings, and that’s okay because our financial situations are unique to each of us. It made me think of the money personalities Kristen Wong talks about. Becky avoids talking about money because socially speaking, she has been conditioned to believe talking about her own financial situation was bad. But when she finally confronts the issue of money head-on, she feels less ashamed to talk about it or encourage anyone in her same boat. It reminded me of Paulette Perhach’s essay “A Story of a Fuck Off Fund,” in which she talks about how she inflated her lifestyle to fit in with everyone else, but that she was dealing with a toxic boss at work and really wanted to leave her job, so she saved up an emergency fund and took on extra work and just lived below her means so that she could leave any kind of messy situation knowing she had the means to do so.

Overall, I really loved this book, and cannot wait to read its sequel! 🙂

Confessions of a Shopaholic: A Novel by Sophie Kinsella. 312 pp. 2001.

Book Review: On the Come Up

April 27, 2019

Categories: books

I just finished On the Come Up by Angie Thomas and think there needs to be a sequel to the book. It is that good. I read her novel The Hate U Give about a year ago and devoured it within a few days. For those who haven’t yet read the book, The Hate U Give is about a young Black woman named Starr who loses her childhood friend when a police officer kills him. Starr, over the course of the novel, learns to transform her grief into a call for everyone to protest racial profiling. This novel earned Angie Thomas a spot on The New York Times bestseller list and a movie starring Amandla Stenberg as Starr.

On the Come Up is also incredibly good. It is about a young Black woman named Brianna (nicknamed “Bri”) Jackson who lives with her mom and her brother after the murder of her father, who was a prominent rapper. Bri, like her family, is struggling to make ends meet while aspiring to be a famous rapper, but then her Aunt Pooh encourages her to enter a rapping battle to get a record deal with Supreme, a prominent rapper who was in competition with Bri’s dad. Bri enters the battle even though her mom and teachers want her to focus on studying for the ACT so she can get into college, and she ends up roasting her rival, Supreme’s son Milez. Her song goes viral and everyone at school now knows who she is, but the further immersed she gets in her career as a rapper, the deeper in trouble Bri gets with her family and friends. Jayda (nicknamed Jay), Bri’s mom, was able to recover from her substance abuse and get a job at the local church, but when she gets laid off, she struggles to provide for herself, Bri and her son, Trey. Bri’s fame becomes the talk of the community, and not in a good way. One day, two police officers profile Bri and accuse her of having drugs in her backpack when she actually has candy she is selling to make money. Everyone at the school sings Bri’s hit, but a lot of people criticize her because the lyrics seem to the public to glorify drug use, gun violence and money. Supreme tries to sell Bri out, but Bri eventually realizes how, in the end, the money and fame doesn’t matter if it jeopardizes your safety and the safety of your friends and family. She realizes that one can still be a rapper and not have to play into people’s mainstream ideas of who rappers are. In fact, rap can be used as a means of fostering community and addressing social injustice. This book really spoke to me, especially with Trey’s character. Trey went to college, got straight A’s in high school, and got a degree in psychology. However, he couldn’t find jobs in his field, so he got a job working at a pizza restaurant to support the family while looking for a better job and applying to graduate school. His grandfather pities him for having a college degree and working in food service, but Trey’s situation is a real reality that speaks to a lot of us millennials who get these college degrees but don’t have many opportunities after college to use these degrees in the real world. However, even though Trey doesn’t directly use his psychology degree in a job-market sense, he still uses it to his advantage when helping out Bri. In one scene, Bri cries because she is overwhelmed with the unwanted attention she is getting at school for getting her music out there, with her family’s financial situation, and with the death of her father. She gets on a radio show and calls out Hype, the interviewer, when he belittles her music and makes her out to be this violent person when she’s really just trying to survive, and she gets backlash from it. It is overwhelming, and she thinks she is weak from crying in front of Trey, but he tells her that crying doesn’t make you weak and that “admitting that you’re weak is one of the strongest things you can do.” (Thomas p. 362)

This made me think of the film Moonlight, which is about Chiron, a young Black gay man growing up at a time where no one other than a few people would accept him for who he is. In one scene, Chiron cries in the principal’s office because Kevin, the guy he fell in love with, beats him up after a homophobic school bully pressures him to do so. The principal tries to convince him that he should have told someone that he was being bullied, but Chiron tells her that she doesn’t know how hard it is for him to do that. In another scene, we see Juan, a drug dealer who supports Chiron when his mom doesn’t, break down and cry at the dinner table because Chiron is living this painful reality where kids at school are calling him slurs and his mom also neglects him at home, and he just doesn’t know what to tell this little kid when Juan himself is just trying to survive. This movie shows that crying is human, but that Hollywood hasn’t always been good about just letting Black individuals, especially Black men, have space to just release their pain through tears. I totally agree with Trey that crying doesn’t make you weak, even though our society has historically stigmatized the shedding of tears. Crying shows that you are willing to admit that something is wrong, and it is a powerful way to communicate. Of course, crying too much is not always a good thing (I’m an empath, trust me, I know.) So even though it seems Trey’s degree is useless, it actually helps him read people and know what they are going through. This is how I feel with philosophy and Africana Studies. As much as people love to bash philosophy majors, our degree really isn’t useless because regardless of whether you pursue economics, STEM, or the arts and humanities, you need a solid philosophy on which to base your studies, otherwise you’re just doing all this research with no purpose. Even when working all these different jobs not related to my major, I learned how to think and act like a philosopher. As a philosophy major I learned how to question everything: What is the purpose of being a creative? What is my purpose in life? Are there perks to being a perfectionist? I have applied philosophy to everything: when I listen to music, when I write, when I watch movies, when I go to my job every day, when I interact with my fellow human beings, when I perform music. I live philosophy every day even though I don’t get to sit in my dorm room and reread Descartes’ Meditations ten times like I did in college.

The Mask Stereotype

Even though my second degree, Africana Studies, didn’t get me a job working at the Smithsonian (I still need to just get a ticket and go visit the National Museum of African-American History), I have used my training as a philosophy major to think more deeply about the deep roots of Black pain in our country’s history and how we can continue to address these roots through music, writing and other mediums of expression. When Bri’s song becomes a hit, Supreme goads her to do more music with lyrics about gun violence, but after understanding the risk that producing this music has on her loved ones, Bri realizes that Supreme is using her as a pawn to beef up his already successful career. When she goes into the studio expecting to rap her own lyrics, Supreme says Dee-Nice, another rapper, already wrote the song for her. She reads the lyrics and finds that it’s the same subject matter she rapped about in her hit: possessing guns and killing other people in the community if they criticize her. James, an older white man who is friends with Supreme at the record label, only has this single perception of the Black community: problems. Everywhere problems. Drugs, gangs, violence, prison, unemployment. He doesn’t know rap’s potential to address the institutional inequality that caused these problems in the first place. But because James only cares about making a profit from Bri, he thinks that all she wants to rap about is “sassy black-girl shit” (Thomas 381) and that pigeonholing her will make the record label richer. However, as an outsider, Bri can see through their nonsense even though she has gained access to this rich powerful boys club of music producers, so she speaks to Supreme in private and tells him she’s got her own music and won’t rap what Dee-Nice wrote. Supreme tells her that she can’t worry about all that because she is in the music business and “this is about making money” because James has the money they don’t have to succeed in the business. In reality, if Bri were to keep making songs that didn’t personally speak to her, she would just keep getting paid less than a profit while James and Supreme enjoyed most of the money without really doing any of the hard work themselves (aka writing the music from their hearts.)

Bri says the moment when Supreme is threatening to end her career reminds her of when she went to the zoo, and these little kids were making faces at the animals in the exhibit and trying to get them to come up to the glass or make sounds, solely for the sake of entertainment. Even though these animals obviously didn’t pay attention to these kids, Bri remembers feeling bad for the animals, and after giving in to Supreme and rapping the song Dee-Nice wrote, she feels like she’s “in an exhibit, and there’s room full of people waiting for me to entertain them. I have to say what they want me to say. Be what they want me to hear.” (Thomas 384) There is a concept I learned about in one of my Africana Studies classes, and that was “putting on the mask,” or what happens when Black individuals feel like they are always performing for the public eye. Black individuals have diverse identities and experiences: straight, gay, trans, Democrat, Libertarian, Republican, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, biracial, multiracial, rich, poor, middle class, the list of identities goes on. However, race is about perceptio, and how people were brought up to view Blackness can condition how one wants to see Black people behave, and often these perceptions of Blackness are not very well-founded. James operates from a position where he feels it’s okay to belittle Bri, her dad and other Black citizens, because he promises her money and fame if she lets him say all these bigoted things about Black individuals. Instead of feeling like she can be free with her music, Bri feels trapped in the industry and is trying to hold onto her sense of self, but when her mom finds out what happened, she asks Bri who she really is and Bri can’t answer on the spot because she has other people telling her who she is. She realizes that she can still kill it as a female rapper without catering to macho bigwigs who couldn’t care less about her humanity.

This book reminded me so much of the film Dope. In the film Malcolm, Diggy and Jib are three high school “geeks” living in Inglewood who love ’90s hip-hop, want to go to college, and play in a punk band called Awreeoh. The school bullies pick on them for loving these things, and when a drug dealer named Dom invites Malcolm, Diggy and Jib to a party , Dom and the other partygoers at first make fun of them, but then when Malcolm finds out that Dom put a gun and cocaine in his backpack and Malcolm and his friends sell the cocaine on the black market, they suddenly become popular very fast. But when they get further enmeshed into the pickle of selling the cocaine, Malcolm’s ego gets in the way and I worried his friends were going to desert him. But Jib and Diggy stick with him through the whole thing even if it nearly costs them their future dreams. The friendship between Jib, Diggy and Malcolm reminded me of the friendship between Bri and her friends Sonny and Malik. They give each other the Wakanda handshake from the film Black Panther:

and they also love quoting Yoda from Star Wars. Their friendship is tight, and even when Bri’s hit goes viral and gets her backlash, they stick through with her all the way. I also liked how Bri and Malik never make Sonny feel different from them just because he is gay. Similarly, Jib and Malcolm love Diggy for who she is even when other people make fun of her for being a lesbian. As a queer POC, I was really happy that the rare gay characters were well-represented in Dope and On the Come Up.

While reading this book, I couldn’t help but plead in my mind: pleease let there be a movie for this. And sure enough, I Googled “on the come up movie” and Variety had just published a piece a couple of months ago about Fox purchasing the rights to produce the upcoming film based on the novel. I cannot begin to emphasize how important it is that we teach The Hate U Give and On the Come Up in our high school English classes (then again, I am lightyears removed from high school so I don’t know how the curriculum is nowadays.) We need to give kids of all races, especially young Black and Latinx kids, an opportunity to read books where they feel well-represented. I remember we read the occasional Gwendolyn Brooks poem for English class and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, but for the most part the books we read had few to no POC characters with rich backstories and character development, and a lot of the authors, frankly speaking, were dead white men. After taking Africana Studies and reading literature by writers such as Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Nell Larsen, I at first got angry because I never got to read these writers in school, but then came to appreciate in the end my college education and understand how much of a privilege it was to have access to even just knowing these writers exist and that they published these deeply personal works for us to read. Not everyone knows these works exist, and English teachers who just have their students read The Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn and Julius Caesar (8/10/21: not hating on these books, I enjoyed them as much as the next person) aren’t giving their students a chance to know that these narratives like those of Starr and Brianna exist. On the Come Up is especially powerful because it encourages kids who might want to be rappers or other musicians that, while it’s okay to make money from your art to pay your bills and put bread on the table, music should also speak to social inequalities and musicians not be afraid of speaking up when something is wrong or people are taking advantage of their well-being. Brianna later uses her music to address the sexism she has encountered as a female rapper and people’s expectations for her to be someone she isn’t. As a musician who doesn’t say much, Bri’s story was inspiring for me because as an introvert she uses music to express her anger. At this point, after watching so much news, it’s hard for me to express how overwhelming it is. I could just shut off and not think about it, but I feel inspired after reading On the Come Up to use my music to address racial injustice, climate change, sexism, domestic violence and other forms of injustice. I recently came across this powerful performance of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings by Cremaine Booker, and in the video description he dedicates the performance to the late Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two unarmed Black men who died at the hands of police in 2016. After seeing this performance I gained the confidence to use my music to address things that make me angry but that I didn’t have the words to express my anger about. I have seen orchestras on YouTube perform this beautiful solemn piece, but Cremaine’s was the first version I have seen that was directly dedicated to addressing social injustice.

Overall, excellent novel. I wouldn’t mind reading it again. Truly a blessing to read another work by Angie Thomas! 🙂

On the Come Up. Angie Thomas. 452 pp. 2019.

Movie Review: Zola (CW: brief description of nudity)

August 1, 2021

Omg I have been dying to see this movie since the trailer came out! So I finally saw it. At first I didn’t want to see it because they said there was full-frontal male nudity and I was kind of squeamish about viewing it. So the first time I watched it, to be honest, I missed a lot of important scenes throughout the film because I couldn’t find any parent previews for it (which I usually read before watching PG-13 or R-rated features because I’m not into bloody stuff or jump scenes.) But also I didn’t get super surprised during the film because I had read up a lot about the film before seeing it, and watched a couple of interviews with the actors in Zola who talked about their characters, so I knew what was going to happen. And I read the Wikipedia page on it. So I finally watched it a second time without closing my eyes (except during the penis montage, although A24 does have an interesting article on their blog about how they chose the penises for that montage.)

So basically Zola is about this young Black woman named A’ziah “Zola” King, who works as an exotic dancer at night and has a waitressing job during the day. Janizca Bravo directed the film and wrote the screenplay, and the real life A’ziah “Zola” King produced the film. The film is based off of a real-life Twitter story that King told on October 27, 2015 in 148 tweets about how she met a young white woman at the diner she worked at, and how this young white woman, whose real name is Jessica but whose name in the film is Stefani, finds common ground with King because they work as exotic dancers. After they hit it off the first night (they follow each other on social media) Stefani texts her and tells her about this cute spot in Florida where they can make good money dancing. When Zola asks for more information, Stefani refuses to tell her any more details other than her boyfriend and a friend are coming along, too. We see how Stefani’s friendship is already taking up a huge chunk of Zola’s time because Zola’s fiancé, Sean, constantly has to deal with Zola texting Stefani all the time instead of spending time in the present moment with him. When Zola meets up with Stefani, she already has a sense that something is off, and the minute they hit the road it slowly becomes clear that Zola does not want to be there. I think one scene in particular shows this very clearly. Even after X, Derrek (Stefani’s boyfriend), Stefani and Zola have a good time singing “Hannah Montana” by Migos, soon after the scene cuts to Stefani loudly talking about this Black woman she met in a derogatory way, and Derrek, not knowing what to do, chimes in, while Zola looks uncomfortable and silently stares out the window.

In a couple of interviews I watched, Riley Keough, the actress who plays Stefani, was aware of Stefani’s racism and cultural appropriation and how her exploitation of Black culture, namely through her “blaccent,” was offensive. But Bravo encouraged her to go full out for Stefani in order to tell the story like it is. A character like Stefani honestly wasn’t new to me; I knew many white people who spoke in AAVE whenever I was around, and even one time I was in the car with some folks who weren’t Black and “Holy Grail” came on, and a couple of the folks decided to repeat the N word that comes up every time Jay-Z raps his verse in the song. And like Zola, all I could do was just turn away and look out the window. Even when the folks asked if I was doing okay, I couldn’t tell them because I didn’t want to seem like I was coming off as an angry, oversensitive person. The main theme I kept thinking about as I watched Zola was boundaries, because the issue of boundaries is prevalent throughout the film. Zola tells X she came with a specific purpose: to dance, but he tells her she is not there for that. Stefani keeps telling her male clients that she doesn’t set the price for her services, but this does her a disservice, mainly because she and Zola get in trouble when Zola sets her up a new page and has Stefani negotiate her pay. X accuses Zola of trying to outdo him, to do his job better than him, and persuades Stefani that she doesn’t deserve any of the $8,000 she made from her clients, and somehow makes it seem that her body is just a tool for men and that she shouldn’t get paid for the services she provides.

But if Zola taught me anything, it’s this: know your worth. It’s easier said than done, but Zola knows who she is and is a really good bullshit detector. She knows that Stefani, Derrek and X don’t have her best interest at heart, and that they are out to exploit her. Which is why Stefani’s side of the story had me busting up in laughter, because we know that Zola’s story is the only true point of view we should be trusting. In the @Stefani portion of the film, where Stefani recounts everything that went down on reddit, she portrays herself as this upright Christian woman who was just randomly approached by this Black woman who coerced Stefani into going to Florida. While she explains the story wearing a white suit, she shows Zola with twigs in her hair while waitressing and wearing black trash bags when going into the car to head to Florida. I just guffawed because Stefani’s side of the story is clearly problematic. I read on the Wikipedia page of this film that the movie is listed as a black comedy. For those who don’t know, black comedy is a genre which pokes fun at subjects that are hard to talk about, such as death, crime, suicide, discrimination and other serious topics. Even though Zola went through severe trauma on the trip to Florida, the way Stefani spins it is so ridiculous that it’s hard not to laugh at her side of the story because all she tries to do is portray Zola as this obnoxious Black woman, when Zola is the only level-headed one on the trip.

Because she is level-headed, X (Stefani’s pimp, played by Colman Domingo. Honestly, I love Coleman Domingo’s acting. He played Tish’s dad in If Beale Street Could Talk, the complete opposite of his evil character X in Zola.) often makes Zola the mom, the one to babysit Stefani and Derrek. It’s interesting that X, like Zola, is Black because it makes me think of the term misogynoir, which is misogyny against Black women. Even when Zola is trying to help Stefani by helping to negotiate her worth, X doesn’t want to give Zola credit, and even when he gives Zola some of the money, he doesn’t let her go home and instead orders her to make Stefani do what she did the previous night and exhaust herself by having sex with various clients. He refuses to let her take a much-needed break relaxing in the sun. Whenever she questions his authority and makes it clear that she’s not going to stoop to his level, he threatens her with physical violence and that Nigerian accent he pulls off when he’s really pissed off.

Derrek was also an interesting character. He ends up telling about the group’s whereabouts to someone who doesn’t have his best interests at heart. He also keeps trying to make Zola laugh by showing her funny videos, but she doesn’t fall for any of it. He is fed up with his girlfriend Stefani partaking in prostitution, and is sick of her manipulating other young women into what is essentially human trafficking. Whenever he brings this up, she goes to him and points to his chest, and asks “Whose is this?” and he tells her “yours.” and when she points to her heart and asks “Whose is this?” and he tells her “mine.” Even though he is scared he still goes along with whatever Stefani does because he feels he has no other choice because he really does love her and just wants to go back home with her.

Honestly, I’m glad I watched it twice because I missed a lot of key details of the film by closing my eyes throughout it. Like, Mica Levi’s score lines up with each scene in a different way, so it was hard to see how the score had a different meaning for each scene just because I was scared of some random scene with a lot of dicks in it. Also, Zola doesn’t say much, but she communicates a lot without having to say much during the film. Her eyes, her facial expressions, show how she is observant, how she is processing her trauma minute by minute because she doesn’t have time to rest and recuperate and heal. She is constantly babysitting Stefani and Derrek when they get in shenanigans, and it is emotionally exhausting work. By the time she gets in the car with Derrek she is emotionally tried in her patience and Derrek tries to get her mind off of it, but as a young Black woman dealing with a young white woman who has little to no respect for her, she is clearly fed up having to put up with shenanigans.

I honestly wouldn’t mind watching this again. There’s just something so attractive to me about A24 films. When I was watching Zola, it reminded me of when I watched The Florida Project. The actors in both of these films portray real life situations and bring so much magic to the everyday realities of life. I wish I had a more comprehensive review of the film, but I guess I’m still processing it.

Zola. 2021. Rated R for strong sexual content and language throughout, graphic nudity and violence including a sexual assault.

Movie Review: Begin Again

April 25, 2019

Categories: movies, music

After watching A Star is Born, I felt quite depressed and hopeless. What was the point of being a musician if it meant letting fame and fortune get to one’s head, causing the artist to lose touch with themselves in the process? I’m not saying the music industry is in any way to blame for substance abuse, but the stress of touring and parties can really stress some musicians out, especially if they are already dealing with substance abuse. I cried, thinking that was all the music industry had in store for me (even though a lot of classical musicians don’t get famous enough to lead those kinds of fame-filled lives.)

With Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping, it made fun of the fame associated with being a pop musician, and believe me, I laughed (but of course, anything with Andy Samberg is going to tickle my funny bone.) But then I asked myself, Is being a musician really just one big joke? I know not everyone ends up like that, but it got me thinking, once again: is there a way to be a successful musician if no one has discovered your musical talent until much later in life? Conner4Real (Andy Samberg’s character) has had people telling him he would be a star since he was very young, and so he grew up thinking he would just be successful for the rest of his life, even if his songs got terrible reviews and he struggled with his ego.

But with Begin Again, I can honestly say that I feel refreshed. When it first came out in 2013, I thought about seeing it because it looked interesting, but never got around to seeing it. But then I finally decided I wanted to give it a shot, and I’m glad I waited to see it because had I seen it earlier, it probably wouldn’t have resonated with me as much. But now that I have been out of the league of constant performances and auditions for orchestras and have been deciding from scratch whether to go to music school, to teach music lessons, to move to a big city and find my dreams there, or whatever else I was dreaming about with regards to music, watching Begin Again gave me a new perspective on what it means to be a musician and still lead a happy fulfilling life.

Gretta is an introverted young woman who is also a gifted singer and songwriter, and she moves to New York City with her boyfriend and fellow musician, Dave. Dave gets signed to a major record label and leads her into this totally different life, one that she is not interested in. They move from their tiny apartment in the city to a fancy studio where Dave produces all his hits. Shortly after they move into the studio, Dave tries to convince Gretta to go on tour and produce the songs with him for their album, but she is more interested in just making music and not so much the glamour that comes with all of that. Dave heads to Los Angeles to work with some producers for his album, leaving Gretta to hang out with her friend, Steve, who also happens to be a struggling musician like Gretta. Dave comes back from Los Angeles and has Gretta listen to one of his tracks, but Gretta intuitively finds out Dave cheated on her for a girl on the record producing team in L.A. and leaves him. One night Steve, Gretta’s friend, encourages her to perform at a bar, and so Gretta reluctantly sings what turns out to be a beautiful song.

Dan, a record label executive with drinking problems, a bad relationship with his wife and daughter and a reluctance to change, can’t understand why the indie record label he manages with his college buddy, Saul, is allowing too many pop-sounding musicians to record for them. When Saul tells him he needs to just go with the changes in people’s tastes instead of close himself off from them, Dan gets upset and Saul fires him. With no money and no job, Dan goes to a bar, drunk and contemplating suicide. Then he hears Gretta perform and he suddenly envisions her performance as if she was in a real recording studio, with strings, keyboard, drums and a guitar to back her up. He offers her a record deal, but she refuses. She tells him that she makes music for herself, not to get famous, and he tries to convince her that the point of music is to share with other people, not just to play it for oneself. Dan gets an epiphany and realizes that unlike Dave, who is living the high-life and going on tour but not really feeling fulfilled in his music career, Gretta doesn’t have to live that life and can make wonderful music even before she gets signed to Dan’s record label. So he gathers a bunch of musicians who are willing to play music without pay and has them, him, Steve and Gretta perform for the NYC public in parks, subways, in alleys, and on rooftops. When Dave asks Gretta to meet up with him, he realizes that she has moved on with her life and is no longer lonely without him, even when he tries to beg her to come back to him. She thankfully realizes that he’s not worth returning to not just because he cheated with another girl behind her back (and also panders to a crowd of other girls who swoon when they see him), but because she has charted her own music path with Dan and many other musicians who haven’t lived through the fame and getting signed to a label.

One interesting conversation happens toward the end of the film, and that is about how record sales work. At a meeting in the record label conference room, Saul listens to Gretta’s album and says he will hook up some producers in Los Angeles to listen to it so they can put it in some TV shows and films. Dan says he’s not interested and that he wants to get Gretta signed onto the label. Gretta then asks how distribution of music works, and one of the folks at the meeting tells her that if a CD sells for 10 units, then the musician gets a dollar (“like selling a book for a buck.”) Gretta rightfully asks why the musician gets only a dollar while the record label gets the other nine dollars. Saul chuckles and tells her that if she were to sign onto the label, the label would hire a producer to remix a couple of her tracks, then she would sell a hit record and then she would live the long and fulfilling music career of her dreams, but that because it was her album, it was her choice in the end whether or not she wanted to sign with the label. I was literally watching this interview that Rob Markman did for digital media company Genius on a study that showed musicians only make 12% of revenue from the music industry, and how musicians have tried to navigate this, and where all the other money went to if not to the artist (the full interview is below:)

This interview forced me to wake up to the reality that there is much more involved than just playing music when an artist is signed onto a record label, and it made me think of how in Begin Again, Dave’s number one dream was to record with a major record label. However, after he got his dream, he came back to Gretta and, when she asked him how his tour was, said it was incredibly grueling because he had to travel so much by himself. In the past he and Gretta just made music in their apartment, and they had that intimate space to just make beautiful songs, but when Dave got signed to the label, it totally changed him and Gretta’s relationship because he wasn’t around to be with her, and it especially changes the relationship they have with music. For Gretta, music is about honesty, but for Dave, music is a way to get famous. When they meet up in the park, he plays a recording he did in the studio of “Lost Stars,” which Gretta wrote for him when they were together. Gretta tells him that the song has lost its authenticity ever since he became famous and cheated on her with another woman. This reminds me of A Star is Born, when Ally doesn’t want to lose her identity when she becomes famous, and Jackson accuses her of becoming someone she’s not when Interscope Records signs her. It also reminds me of Big Eyes because Margaret Keane was this woman who just wanted to paint as a means of catharsis, but her husband, Walter, wanted to sell out. Margaret tells him that she wants to be honest instead of focused on fame when she paints, but Walter tells her that no one really cares about honesty.

Begin Again helped me better understand that musicians don’t have to sign to a major record deal to be successful, and that musicians can find their own path even when they aren’t famous. Dan had a long successful music career, helping sign several artists and winning Grammy Awards left and right, but in the end, he was human and had his own battles to deal with. Dave got famous, and yet he was incredibly lonely on tour and got sad when he listened to Gretta’s voicemail. Gretta, although not well-known, found her own happiness and Dan also came to understand himself that what’s really important are the friendships you make along the way, not so much the money or the status. And this movie also taught me to be open to change; I had these wild dreams at one point that I was going to either get signed on to work for a major record label in LA or NYC. But then I did some more self-reflection and after watching movies like A Star is Born, Popstar and Begin Again, I think I can figure out an alternative career path for my music, one that doesn’t necessarily fit the stereotype of how musicians should be. I would of course love to do a lot more with my music, but I also don’t want to lose my love for it, and I sometimes worry that having a career in music would make me stop loving it. I know this is silly thinking, but after seeing Begin Again, I feel a lot better about where my love of music is going to take me. Seeing Gretta and Dan bounce back from their struggles and chart their own music path has inspired me to keep an open mind about my music career, instead of doing what I have done for the past two years and keeping a one-track-mindset of “I need to be this kind of musician by blah-blah-date.” Of course, having a plan for your career helps, but Gretta and Dan inspired me to think outside the box and experiment with other styles of music.

I honestly wouldn’t mind seeing this film again so I can remind myself to be patient and not feel any less of a musician just because I haven’t yet signed onto a major record label (or any record label.) Really excellent and inspiring film. Also, seeing the violinist and cellist in Gretta’s band made my day! 🙂 I am definitely open to playing more than just classical, so maybe playing in a band of some sorts while holding down a day job would be an option. Also I just really enjoyed the cast; I love all the actors and musicians who starred in this film, especially Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo! 🙂

Here’s the trailer for Begin Again:

Begin Again. 2013. Rated R for language.

Historic Profile: Gladys Bentley (1907-1960)

April 10, 2019

Categories: LGBTQ+

This past February The New York Times published an issue of obituaries dedicated to influential African-American figures who never got an obituary when they died. One of these figures is Gladys Bentley, a queer entertainer who defied gender standards at the time.

Bentley was born in 1907 and raised in Philadelphia, and it was a very unpleasant childhood because her parents were homophobic and couldn’t accept their daughter’s sexuality. To escape this painful reality she played piano and wrote songs, and moved to New York City at the age of 16 to perform in illict bars. One of these bars was the Clam House, Harlem’s hub for LGBTQ+ people. Even though Gladys used she/her pronouns in public, she was the first prominent performer at the time to identify as trans. During the Prohibition Era, there was less stringency on what was allowed in the entertainment industry, so people were more relaxed about Gladys expressing herself. But as time went on and the Great Depression hit America, the public lost favor with Gladys and the police even cracked down on one of her performances, so she left NYC and moved to Los Angeles, where she once again gained her status as the leading queer entertainer there. She performed mainly at Mona’s 440 Club, the first lesbian bar in San Francisco. In the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy instilled anti-Communist ideologies in the public mind, and so any individual thought to be working against the government faced serious punishment. McCarthy mainly attacked artists and LGBTQ+ people, and so under this threat, Gladys changed her image to appeal to a straight audience and underwent hormone treatments to try and make herself straight. In 1960, she died from flu while studying to be a Christian minister.

I remember taking a course in The Harlem Renaissance, and I vaguely remember learning about Gladys Bentley in he course. The Harlem Renaissance was a crucial time in which Black queer people such as James Baldwin, academic Alain Locke, and Bentley flourished. Reading Bentley’s obituary taught me the importance of recognizing those people who are often forgotten in history. The pain she suffered as a queer person of color is so real, even for today in an age where more queer POCs have mediums through which they can make their stories heard and help shift the public’s consciousness. I often take it for granted that we have public figures such as RuPaul and Todrick Hall, but the fact that it isn’t until centuries after her death that Bentley got recognized in The New York Times once again taught me to always educate myself on the people who don’t make it into the history textbooks, who don’t get a huge social media following. I also take it for granted now that LGBTQ+ artists such as myself can express themselves without the government always punishing them or censoring them for their work, but back then Gladys Bentley had to try and change her sexuality because she was literally fighting for her safety against the government. It reminded me of Alan Turing in The Imitation Game and how deep-seated homophobia was in Britain during the 19th and 20th century (Turing was forced to undergo painful hormonal therapy to try and make him not gay anymore. All it did was cause him misery, to be honest.) Reading Bentley’s obituary taught me that I must make my own voice heard so that I can inspire other young queer artists (especially queer artists of color) who somehow think their voice doesn’t matter. Because trust me, these narratives matter and it’s how we can gradually bring about more open dialogue about LGBTQ+ people of color in history.

So I thank you Gladys from the bottom of my heart, for being a pioneer for queer POC artists everywhere.