My name is Crystal. I'm a physics and international studies major at Northwestern University. I run Something for the Ladies and write for The Singles Jukebox.
Theme by nostrich.
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On Oklahoma and the tornadoes:
I was born in Norman, Oklahoma. My parents came to America to go to grad school at the University of Oklahoma. We drove to Oklahoma City every other weekend to buy groceries at the Asian supermarket.
Since then Oklahoma City has grown a ton. It’s building a massive skyscraper downtown, and it even has its own professional sports team. I moved to Texas, and I spent a lot of time in my teens defending the place where I was from. I call myself a Texan girl now, but I definitely fought off all the Texan haters throughout middle and high school, especially during football season.
Spring is always rough in the Tornado Alley. My mother worked for the National Weather Service while she was a grad student in meteorology, so I was always very aware of the weather news. I remember huddling in my living room as a young child, gathered as a family staring at the TV on updates on the now prolific May 3rd tornadoes of 1999 until the power went out. We ran a lot of drills in school as kids, but we were so young and it felt a lot like a break from class.
I am heartbroken. This is not about me at all, but I am missing my hometown a lot right now. This tornado came and left like many of the others: in a moment’s notice, leaving nothing but destruction when it’s gone.
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Anonymous asked: How could you not see how problematic Xosha's character is? A stereotypical ghetto black nurse is "a commitment by the show to have a truly diverse cast?" One other minority (a relation to the lead character, no less) who guest stars does not a rainbow cast make. How can you laud Mindy's humanizing of Indian Americans in her show, and not see all the repeated failed opportunities to do the same with other groups and not only that but staunchly reinforce them at every turn. I love Mindy but wow..
I wasn’t necessarily going to address this, but it’s been brought up both on the Racialicious comments and again here.
I totally see your point. I’ve actually had a difficult time thus far with Tamara, but this moment, Rishi’s arc, the bumping of Xosha up to a series regular, and actually, Morgan’s arc has given me faith that The Mindy Project will give Xosha something very interesting to do.
To explain that last point about Morgan’s arc: I feel like Morgan started off as a ridiculous character mostly there to be comic relief. Morgan still serves that role, but this arc with the Deslaurier brothers has shown that he’s got a lot of heart, too, and he’s hurt when loyalty doesn’t go both ways. Morgan, even with all his weirdness, is a good dude that believes that work friendships can be actual friendships, too, and I’ve really enjoyed his evolution in season 1. Gotta give it up to Ike Barinholtz, who refused to let his character be a caricature 100% of the time.
I will say that Mindy’s gotta step it up. I wish that she would have more non-white bffs as well as non-white love interests. If her Twitter is any indication, Mindy Kaling would love to romance Idris Elba, which I would 100% support.
These criticisms can be applied to any TV show though, soooooo…
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The Mindy Project‘s Rishi And The Call For More PoCs In Charge | Racialicious →
Speaking of The Mindy Project, I wrote this piece for Racialicious, and I’m super happy about the way that it turned out. The Mindy Project has quickly become one of my favorite shows, and I really hope that the show finds an even bigger audience in season 2 (in the same way that New Girl found some legs).
Mindy Kaling is the voice of my generation. This has been sitting on my desktop as “crystal luvs mindy.docx”.
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This moment in The Mindy Project’s season finale made me laugh so hard. Mindy and her boyfriend Casey have a very public fight about moving to Haiti together. Tamara, Mindy’s black nurse, comments, “White people problems.”
After MIndy points out that she’s not white, Mindy’s ex-boyfriend in all his white, straight, male glory chimes in with “For the record, a person of color can have white people problems”. Another one of Mindy’s ex-boyfriends asks about Jewish people, and the first ex-boyfriend says “oh definitely” with smug, confident authority.
Wikipedia tells me that Mindy Kaling wrote this episode. When are people going to start talking about Mindy Kaling being the voice of my generation? This ten seconds or so was one of the season’s finest moments; it’s a pretty perfect distillation of reality.
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I’ve seen Los Campesinos! three times.
Dallas, TX - Granada Theater - August 15, 2009
My friend Brandon dragged me to the show because no one else really wanted to go with him. I had no idea who the band was, but I had listened to a couple of tracks on some website and thought that it might be a good time.
Two bands called Smith Westerns and Girls opened. Both bands were boring and seemed immensely bored. At that point, it was pretty easy to impress me and keep me entertained at a concert, so I was worried that Los Campesinos! were going to be similarly boring. (I was shocked to find out months later that both openers ended up getting huge, arguably bigger and more critically beloved than the band they opened for. Also, the bassist for Smith Westerns was a dick to me when I tried to say hi later.)
They weren’t. They were lovely and charming and shouty and high energy and Gareth jumped down into the crowd during “You! Me! Dancing!” to get down. Plus, their drummer Ollie was really cute and I appreciated that.
After the show, we hung out with the band in the back area as they smoked. They were all terribly nice. It was Aleks’ last tour and she was really just trying to soak it all in. Neil and Tom geeked out over Brandon’s Dirty Projectors t-shirt and to this day, I always imagine “Dirty Projectors” said in a British accent. Neil left a very long-lasting impact on me about how much he hates leaks. We stayed there until 2 in the morning, much to my mother’s dismay.
Chicago, IL - Metro - April 30, 2010
This was the supporting tour for Romance Is Boring, which remains, to this day, one of the most important albums in my life.
Gareth asked some girl to prom for some guy. My friend Dan happened to be standing right by that couple and apparently they spent the rest of the concert making out on him. It was very cramped and sweaty and I feel really bad for Dan.
I was in a really horrible relationship during that winter, and I spent a lot of time sitting by the lake listening to “The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future” and crying about the past. I spent the majority of the show dancing crazy in the crowd, but during that song, I moved to the back and spent most of it crying again, singing quietly with loud shouting only during “You could never kiss a Tory boy without wanting to cut off yr tongue again”.
Ollie was still on drums on this tour and at some point threw his towel into the crowd. A cute boy I met weeks later at a Voxtrot show who went to DePaul apparently caught it. (Nothing came of that.)
Chicago, IL - Metro - January 27, 2012
Parenthetical Girls opened for them, and I watched Zac Pennington swallow an entire microphone.
Hello Sadness is probably my least favorite of the LC! records, but it’s killer live. The band sounds fuller now than it ever has, and “By Yr Hand”, “Songs About Yr Girlfriend”, and “Hello Sadness” are absolute hits, a great 1-2-3 bunch to open up an album with.
By this time, their reputation as a band that really took the time to meet all of their fans at merch was very well known. The Metro staff was really not very happy about this as they wanted to go home, but LC! was determined. I chatted with Kim about her cute lil puppy and got to meet Rob, who is the best looking out of the current bunch of very good looking bunch of people. I hope he wasn’t creeped out.
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For all my longtime followers and the people checking out my blog because of Britt’s very kind shoutout, here is a picture of me and my mother. We are standing in line somewhere in Harry Potter world. Either my brother or my dad took this picture, and neither my mother or I were prompted to make ugly faces; we just did it anyway. She is hilarious and wonderful and beautiful (even if this picture is more ridiculous) and is a major inspiration in my life.
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On the Carly Rae Jepsen show from last night:
Some of this ended up on Twitter last night but…
- It is shocking that CRJ opened for Olly Murs. According to Wiki, he’s had 4 #1s in the UK, but nothing charting above 29 in the US. CRJ’s only had “Call Me Maybe” make it to #1, but “Good Time” went all the way to #8. Additionally, “Call Me Maybe” was the song of 2012, right? I mean, Justin Bieber and Olympic athletes were doing lip dubs to the song! I wonder if KISS FM is trying to make Olly Murs happen here in the same way they tried to make Jessie J happen here. Speaking of…
- KISS FM is horrible. At a show full of eight year old girls, you really should not 1) stagedive into the crowd 2) have a bunch of barely clad cheerleader type dancers do an extended sexy dance and 3) play “Niggas in Paris” as pump up music.
- The crowd was a very confusing mix of people. On one hand, there were plenty of eight year olds and on the other, there were women dressed like they were GOING OUT. At some point, Vanessa and I were standing in the bathroom and we saw a girl’s bare buttcheeks and an eight year old scamper by underneath them. It was a very confusing visual. I helped a group of early 30-something women take a picture in the bathroom. There were a few twenty somethings in the back during CRJ’s set who looked like they had stumbled out of a frat party and were drunk and clutching onto each other for balance. I saw a bunch of white chicks tryna twerk to “Yr Heart is a Muscle”. Mostly everyone was white though.
- CRJ’s voice is very good live, but it definitely sounds very different from the studio recording. Her voice sounds more fragile, more shaky. This was lovely during tracks like “Your Heart is a Muscle”, even if whoever was mixing had her voice cutting in and out. Do they not have enough faith in the strength of her voice to let her do a slow song?
- Michelle’s description of the Owl City guy (“why does the guy from Owl City sing like a black stand-up comic’s impression of a corny white person”) meant that the guy filling in for the guy from Owl City sounded like an impression of that. It was a lot of layers of confusing.
- CRJ is really just giddy, joyful, gleeful fun. She spends a lot of time twirling on stage. Vanessa and I spent some time trying to figure out what’s she’s trying to project. On one hand, her lyrics code older than teenager (“a dinner date and a glass of wine”, “hold me down tonight”, etc.), but it’s true that she definitely sounds more sugary and bubblegum than Robyn, for example. She sounds a lot like early 20s to me, but there are plenty of older internet music folk who were actually the ones who turned me onto CRJ. Any thoughts here?
- I really could do an entire one of these “It’s the Small Things” posts dedicated to my favorite moments in Kiss.
Link reblogged from This Is How We Do It
A THING ON DISCLOSURE →
I think what I like most about Disclosure is that they marry Burial’s deft drum looping with an emotional warmth that is sometimes lacking in the UK Dance scene littered with synth shards and growling basslines. Even “White Noise,” which is not exactly overflowing with fuzzy sentiment, has a certain emotional urgency to it. This is probably due, in part, to Alunageorge. In fact, Alunageorge is an example of a Disclosure technique I really like which is that they use singers for the track itself instead of pulling vocal samples from other tracks and distorting them (“Wut” and “Archangel” are two (great) examples of the latter). I like both Burial and Disclosure but if I had to choose one over the other I would stan for Disclosure.
David pretty much hits this on the head.
A couple of things:
- They’ve definitely gotten into more “emotional” vocals lately. Sometimes, The Face EP sounds straight up icy and distorted even if the lyrics seem to suggest emotions. “Latch”, “White Noise”, and “You & Me” are all overflowing with that emotional urgency that David describes. Credit to Disclosure for the production, but I’ve got to give it up for the vocalists, too. Just listen to way that Aluna snaps on “Let’s play rough”!
- Even if they’re remixing material, Disclosure seem to pick fairly emotionally hefty songs. Their remix of Jessie Ware’s “Running” is bumping that house beat and even adds a little bit of wobble in the chorus but also manages to not lose a single bit of impact in the way that Jessie sings “Ohh, would you pull me close so nobody knows we’re there?”
- Britt brings up a point that the vocalists are “relatively unknown”. I don’t know how true this is in the UK. Miles and I got into a discussion about what’s popular in the UK, and it’s true that tastes are a little different. For example, he definitely had a (negative) gut reaction to the “feat. Eliza Doolittle” at first because she’s sort of been around in the UK and has been doing not great music. (He came around after hearing that groovin’ garage beat and some nice vocals after all.)
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Best “it’s the small things” in music so far 2013 (that I can remember right now):
One per artist.
- Nicki’s laugh on “Freaks”
- Big Sean’s “Fall Out…BOIIIIII” on “The Mighty Fall”
- Justin Timberlake saying “Pop!” in the same way as the NSYNC song on the outro to “Strawberry Bubblegum”
- Beyoncé’s “Texas Trilllll” on “Bow Down”
- Dreezy’s “Fuuuuhhhhkkk” ad-lib on “Knock a Hoe”
- Patty’s little giggle after “We will teach you how to make boys next door out of assholes” on “Young Volcanoes”
- The-Dream’s “AWOOP”s on “Slow It Down”
- Ciara and Future cooing together right after “I’m having so much fun with you” on “Body Party”
Video reblogged from The Singles Jukebox
SELENA GOMEZ - COME & GET IT
Crystal Xia: I’m conflicted about this. On one hand, this beat really hits, and Selena’s is back to her old (and great) “na-na-na”-ing ways. On the other, there’s some straight up cultural appropriation going on with the male sample in the background as well as the tabla drums. Using interesting samples and experimenting with instrumentation is one thing, but it has to be respectful. The choice of wardrobe in both promotional performances as well as the single’s cover art is both inaccurate and straight up offensive. Honestly, I don’t think that Miley Cyrus would get as much of a pass from me, and growing up in the Disney Channel family and in America, Selena can’t get away with it entirely even as a Latina lady. It’s definitely disconcerting that someone thought it was appropriate to promote this single this way.
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I’m surprised that Jonathan and I were the only one who talked about the sample here!
I did ask a couple of my Indian and Indian American friends what they thought about what they thought of both this track as well as her choice in wardrobe. They had no problem with the track itself. I asked my Indian (like grew up in New Dehli) friend about the bindi and the cultural implications of it. She said that it had a religious meaning at some point, but it wasn’t really a big deal to her, at least, because it’s become such a huge thing in fashion that it’s lost a lot of those original religious meanings. She’s not thrilled by it, but she also thinks it’s more odd than offensive. The article above definitely links to people who are very, very upset.
I guess this is also interesting to me because it’s a reflection of where we grew up. I am wary of people appropriating for the sake of fashion because I grew up in America where there are always white girls wearing dollar store Native American headdresses. On the other hand, my mother doesn’t really care if Nicole Kidman wears a qipao; she laughs it off as a sign that Westerners have kind of boring cultural clothing. However, she was super mad about that thing with Lucy Liu and Martin Freeman because she grew up in China where people are very sensitive about the language that the British use to talk about the Chinese due to a long, very recent history of colonialism (Hong Kong was still a British colony until 1997).
I really do truly believe that it’s important as an artist to be responsible for the choices that you make when it comes to appropriation. You can control what you put out into the world, but you can’t necessarily control how that’s received by an audience. In this case, it seems as though Selena meant well but still managed to offend some people on a deeply religious and spiritual level.
Finally, I guess I feel super conflicted because I think it’s great that there’s a young Latina artist out there and getting it, but does she really need to borrow from an Asian culture? I feel similarly conflicted about Nicki Minaj’s use of samurai imagery. Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku girls DEFINITELY don’t get a pass, so why am I more okay with a black woman doing a similar thing? Is it because there is some very real racism going on towards blacks in Asian American communities?
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