PicoBlog

Editor’s note: In this issue, we are happy to publish an excerpt from Amanda dela Cruz’s award-winning MFA thesis. The thesis is a collection of five nonfiction essays, each one weaving together her life experiences and her reflections on the work of five Filipino women artists. The excerpt itself begins by addressing the artist Julie Lluch’s 1988 terracota sculpture entitled Thinking Nude, on display at the Singapore Art Museum, which in turn is a feminist riposte to Auguste Rodin’s famous bronze sculpture, The Thinker.

If you enjoy this look back at ‘Sister Sweetly,’ why not share or subscribe to Check This Out? You’ll receive fresh tunes, reviews, playlists, and more in your inbox three times a week while supporting this entirely independent e-rag. Rad! When I was growing up in northern Colorado, it wasn’t expected to come across much homegrown talent on the radio or have anyone break through to the national stage. Sure, there was an embarrassment of riches on the jam scene with groups like String Cheese Incident, Leftover Salmon, and Yonder Mountain String Band, but the pop and alternative charts were out of the question.

A very special Christmas for me “Nostalgia is memory with the pain removed,” wrote beloved San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. Christmas pop songs are often so bound up in holiday tropes that they don’t sound contemporary so much as nostalgic even for 10 minutes ago. This candy-striped sugar rush of holiday cheer, however, misses that many of the classic Christmas songs are actually bittersweet: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” most famously, with its “Next year all our troubles will be out of sight,” but also “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.

Partway through Cowboy Carter, her eagerly-anticipated country album, Beyoncé laughs at the very notion of musical classification, playing a snippet of a speech that claims "genres are funny little concepts." Artists may not subscribe to the notion of genre but the music business does, particularly the country music business which has a rigorous gate-keeping system to allow certain musicians onto the airwaves and exclude others—a game Beyoncé bested prior to the release of Cowboy Carter, ensuring that its lead single "

Nick Lachey wins again (or perhaps for the first time). I feel like I’m in a cult, because Love Is Blind has infiltrated my feed once again, and I have had the misfortune of learning who Jeramy is. And what I’ve learned about Jeramy, is something that hasn’t even been released on Love Is Blind yet, it’s all thanks to investigatory journalism, baby. ncG1vNJzZmillZqwqa3MppyroaearrW0xKtlrK2SqMGir8pnmqilX6V8q7HRmqSyZZykw6Z5yKxkm6SZo7Fuv8ScqZ6snK56prrGmp6enA%3D%3D

I have switched my phone to Irish. I would like to take myself seriously. Anyway. Depression, for me, is a choice. :) Depression is the most comfortable feeling in the world. The more therapy I intake, the more aware I become. For example: I avoid ambition as soon as it get dark out. What’s that about? Depression has made me very modern. For seven days I pretended I didn’t have any student debt.

by Tom Blunt I come here not to praise Wonder Woman 1984 nor to bury it, but to address you as an semi-professional Wonder Womanologist, pushing my fashionably gigantic Lynda Carter frames up to an even snobbier position on my nose as I inquire: “Do you happen to remember how the beloved WW TV series ended?” Well, do you? Reader, I do not ask idly! Along with their rollout of this new film escapade, HBO has also acquired and released every single episode of the 1975-79 Wonder Woman television program, which can now be streamed in alarmingly high definition.

If, after surviving many years of intense upheaval, you no longer feel good and bright and optimistic—well, that makes complete sense. If you WERE a ball of pure, joyous light and relentlessly positive energy, you’d be either in deep denial or on drugs that most insurance won’t cover. The erosion of our emotional standing has been ongoing and painful. People died by the hundreds of thousands. Economies, families, educational systems, and supply chains were tested and all found to lack the flexibility they never knew they were supposed to have.

An edited extract from the introduction to my new book, Sexual Revolution, which comes out this week. Sexual freedom doesn’t exist. Not yet. In most democracies,  most of us are legally free to love who we want, live how we like  and pursue pleasure however we choose – but only in the same  way that most of us are free to buy a Maserati,or a mansion, or an election. In practice, most people cannot afford sexual  freedom.