For today, a poem about puppets.

manufactured goodbye, handmade 
marionettes await commands, 
dance about conditionally.

You can read the rest here.

Thanks to everyone who bought my stuff on bandcamp friday! I hope you get as much out of listening as I got out of making it all.

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Misc. Stuff I’m Into:

Movies:

Not sure what’s in the water but lately I have been yappin’ pretty heavy over on lboxd. Here’s what I’ve watched over the past few weeks:

• No Country for Old Men [2007, dir. Joel & Ethan Coen] (loved)

• Punch-Drunk Love [2002, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson] (didn’t like)

• Hamnet [2025, dir. Chloe Zhao] (wasn’t crazy about)

• There Will Be Blood [2007, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson] (liked)

• Dune: Part 2 [2024, dir. Denis Villeneuve] (rewatch, still love)

• Hard Eight [1996, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson] (loved)

• Lost In Translation [2003, Sofia Coppola] (rewatch, still love)

I also watched Hereditary, Pride & Prejudice [2005], and Send Help over the past few weeks, all really good!

Music:

Some new and some new to me:

• Dawn of Midi’s Dysnomia;

• Quadeca’s Vanisher, Horizon Scraper Disc 2;

• Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Insen;

• Ratboys’ Singin’ to an Empty Chair;

• Ninajirachi’s “Delete (horsegiirL remix)”;

• Xiu Xiu’s cover compilation Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1;

• I made a record.club account and you can follow me there if you so choose!

• I have successfully made an mp3 player out of a PSP, and it rocks. Last listen on it was this Boqeh EP, which feels made to be listened to on a PSP.

Books:

• Just about wrapping up Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century, a book I bought a decade ago and started reading about five years ago. It’s like eating raw vegetables, extremely dry, mostly boring, but very enriching and good for me.

• On the opposite end of the spectrum, Rax King’s Sloppy was an extremely fun, sometimes gut-punching, mostly rollicking read.

• One Piece is crazy good this week.

Root Beer Round-Up:

^{Trying out a soda review segment, bear with me.}

This week, I tried the Maine Root Root Beer (and the Maine Root Sarsaparilla). Both have a delightful bitterness to their flavor profile and are best enjoyed poured into a glass. I had previously bounced off of Maine Root sodas because they tend to arrive flat for some reason, nullifying the quality and sting of their “Mexicane Cola” that I used to guzzle by the four-pack in college. While I’ve pivoted away from cola as my soda of choice, I gave Maine Root another shot and found that the act of pouring their sodas into a glass helps reintroduce some fizz and lays a wonderful head of foam atop the sweet treat. Maybe a hot take, but root beer has enough character in its flavor that it doesn’t need to be carried by the crackle of carbonation like cola typically does. Plus, drinking a Sarsaparilla makes me feel like the courier from Fallout: New Vegas, which is the kind of dub I am in desperate need of lately.

Maine Root Root Beer: 7.5/10

Maine Root Sarsaparilla: 8/10

Before I write my own thoughts on Benito’s Super Bowl Halftime show, here are some writers I admire on the show and Bad Bunny in general:

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd for Hearing Things: Benito Bowl Wasn’t About Them—It Was About Us; and for Hell Gate: Williamsburg Changes, But Toñita Still Reigns

Joshua Rivera for Slate: The Deeper Meaning of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime performance

Andrea Gonzalez-Ramirez for The Cut: The Triumph of Bad Bunny’s Unapologetically Boricua Halftime Show

Suzy Exposito for i-D: At Home with Bad Bunny

Reanna Cruz for Switched On Pop: Bad Bunny’s love letter to Puerto Rico (podcast)

also, me for me: DtMF and four stories about being Puerto Rican

I haven’t had access to cable in over a decade, so every year (that there’s an interesting one) I have to wait to watch the Super Bowl Halftime Show until the next day, on YouTube, already a day late to the discourse, the shitposts, the collective online hype. Last year’s wait to hear Kendrick call Drake a pedophile to an audience of millions was bad, but this year, that wait stung like hell. When it comes to feeling Puerto Rican (something I’ve written about plenty at this point), I subsist off of crumbs, half-understood Spanish, aimless meandering about San Juan, Washington Heights, and Bushwick, asking my dad what it was like to live on the island. Missing out on the big party was heartbreaking, a Tantalus pool of screencaps and celebration that I could not yet drink from. Or, it was, until the next morning came, and I realized everyone was still perreando, itching to talk, and breathing the words ‘seguimos aquí’ by the time I opened my crusty eyes at 7 AM and played the performance on YouTube.

To be as up front as possible, I have wept almost every time I have watched this performance, which is several times now. It was funny, it was witty, it was amazingly choreographed, it was heartbreaking, it was life-affirming. The single shot of Benito making his way through a sugar cane field of Puerto Rican history (colonial and cultural) to the fuckboy anthem Tití Me Preguntó was amazing. I was reminded during that I’m actually related to the boricua boxer Juan LaPorte, another moment of Bad Bunny jabbing me in the arm with my own heritage. Hearing the broadcast try and fail to censor an entire audience screaming ‘si tu novio no te mama el culo’ during Safaera was hilarious.

Despite her presence most likely acting as an appeasement and undeserved reprieve to white, English-speaking audiences, I was surprised at how much the salsa remix of Die With A Smile affected me. Gaga’s importance to my baby queer development met a childhood of salsa remixes of English language songs at parties, all wrapped up in a real wedding with the global sensation that is BAILE INoLVIDABLE as the bow. Benito diving off the stage into a celebration of my ancestral homeland of NUEVAYoL (in front of a national audience of seething Patriots fans, no less) had my third eye open. I remembered getting my hair cut on Castle Hill Avenue, seeing offshoots of the Puerto Rican Day Parade at Orchard Beach, eating empanaditas in the backseat of my dad’s tiny Honda Civic.

Bad Bunny always has me remembering, reflecting, and feeling seen in my identity as a boricua. Despite what living in the diaspora has tried to take from me, it’s still mine. I say ‘seguimos aquí’ as I listen to CAFé CON Apagón, an inspired a mashup of CAFé CON RON and El Apagón that folded the real rage of Ricky Martin’s rendition of LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii into a cathartic rager (and y’all know my latinx ass is gonna age like fine wine, just like he did). I say ‘seguimos aquí’ when I watch him carry the red white and light-blue flag de un PR libre out of the sugar cane, once legally banned from public display, and see him use the Super Bowl stage to spit in the face of the unabated capital it typically represents. I say ‘seguimos aquí’ as he blesses as many countries in the Americas as he can name, highlighting the uselessness of borders but simultaneously uplifts the magic of latine and our wonderful identity. I say ‘seguimos aquí’ when he does, in his final shoutout, before leading the stadium in a triumphant chant of DtMF. “And my motherland, mi barrio, Puerto Rico. Seguimos aquí.” Qué rico es ser Latino.

PR libre.

Seguimos aquí.

Seguimos aquí.

Seguimos aquí.

- Will