pop culture and politics | no-fat, heavy flavor
Evelyn McDonnell, acclaimed music journalist, joins us to talk about her recent LA Weekly cover story on Sandy West and the Runaways. Before that though, Junichi and I touch on the future of the Catholic Church in the wake of the sex abuse scandals and alleged cover-ups.
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In this week’s podcast, we welcome guest Toni Broaddus, executive director of the Equality Federation. In the second half of the podcast, Toni and us discuss current legal/political/cultural battles around civil rights for the LGBT community in the workplace and marriage. In the first half, Junichi and Oliver discuss contemporary television, including what shows we like (such as Modern Family, above) and which we don’t.
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Download and listen later.Seriously, not only should this essay but a “must read” for anyone who gives a f— about the state of arts criticism but I really hope it establishes a new baseline in the conversation from here on outwards. I think it’s right to mourn the contraction of print journalism as a medium, I think it’s fine to express concern over the lack of standards and quality with internet-based criticism but I think the days of hand-wringing need to end if we’re going to start focusing on “ok, so what happens now?” especially in terms of establishing new models and infrastructures for supporting the kind of quality arts coverage and criticism everyone says they want.
Apparently, Complex is hiring Asian American majors with a top line Netflix account since someone was able to turn out a mind-blowing 51 pop culture examples of Asian men with non-Asian women. I have a few small quibbles (too much Jackie Chan and Jet Li examples, not knowing that Chi Muoi Lo and Sanaa Lathan actually were a couple) but otherwise, this is scarily comprehensive.
In our second podcast, we welcome guest Ann Powers, pop music critic for the Los Angeles Times. The three of us debated the present and future of the music industry, whether music downloading is bankrupting musicians, whether getting your songs onto a Twilight soundtrack is selling out, what American Idol mean for pop criticism and what states boast the biggest wangs (and we don’t mean O-Dub).
JS and OW debate Year 1 of Obama and the Dems in control (and flailing!) plus the politics of Avatar. (In case you’re wondering, there is no Podcast #1.1 or 2.1, etc. #3.1 = first podcast of March. I guess technically, I should have done 3.1.10 but I’ll save that for 3.2.10).
Welcome to the revamped Poplicks.com.
Blogger.com’s decision to stop supporting FTP-hosted blogs meant that we had to switch over to WordPress and we decided to use that as an excuse to revamp and relaunch Poplicks.
As you’ve likely noticed…our posting has declined, severely, in the last year. The main culprits are 1) family life (since JS became a dad a year ago) and 2) work, but rather than just atrophy to death, we thought a happy compromise would be to find a way to still create content but hopefully, in a more time-efficient manner.
Hence, the Poplicks Podcasts. This had been an experiment in the past but we never really took them on seriously but it seems that podcasting might be a way to generate content that would invigorate the two of us and hopefully, edutain ya’ll. We’ll still be doing normal posts too but we hope to make the podcast a weekly feature. iTunes users: you can subscribe here.
In the meantime, the “old” Poplicks still exists, back here, as a repository of the last 5 years. Hope you guys enjoy this and let the folks know: Poplicks is back!
