Some back story ... My formal "media career" ended the winter of 2017, when I was laid off from my contract gig as the night editor at Cosmo.com. I'd inherited the post from Gina, who'd been my editor at my very first "media job," which I'd quit in part because I thought the higher ups in that company were treating her very badly and because I wanted to freelance (lol).

Before taking the Cosmo gig, I'd spent about half a year working at a poké and boba restaurant in Little Tokyo. I once served poké to Poppy (like, that Poppy), whom I later learned had jacked creation direction from a tentative collab with my friend April. Anyway, the best perk of the Little Tokyo job was that my boss would give me bags of salmon trimmings to take home, which I carried, unrefrigerated, on the hour or so bus and train rides back to my apartment in Los Feliz. I was lucky that I never got food poisoning, ha ha!

All of this is to say: the Cosmo gig was my last ditch gasp at media legitimacy. I got a Hearst email and had my stories syndicated across Elle, Marie Claire, Seventeen (lol). I reported on nonsense most of the time but I was also the person on duty when the Ariana Grande concert bombing happened, and the Route 91 Harvest festival mass shooting, and the release of TSwift's Reputation (which, long story short, caused me to miss the last train from New York Penn Station to Newark Airport). I often wrote my requisite blog posts with a glass(es) of wine in hand; typos happened often, and I occasionally got angry emails demanding if I'd ever gone to school, if I even knew how to write, if the garbage I called writing made me ashamed to be alive, etc.

So when I got the news about the layoff, I was resigned to my fate. All those years spent following and unfollowing and following people on Twitter to get their attention, cold pitching editors objectively insane stories, written on the edge of what was probably mania, hoping that someone, somewhere, would bite, hadn't done shit for me. When the same editor who'd let me know about my firing later emailed me half a year later to offer me back that gig, I was relieved to be able to say, actually, I've moved on to something else. Otherwise, I knew there was a part of me that would've sat like a dog and happily eaten those scraps, then begged for more, as I'd always had when it came to the media industry, a meat grinder that largely only rewards writers who are no longer surprised by the taste of shit.

Yesterday, early evening, the sun low but brilliant in the sky, I picked up Banana Yoshimoto's novella Kitchen and began to read it on the westbound, city-bound train, snaking below and then above the Town while taking in language that I'd last encountered over a decade ago. I think, though I might be wrong (my memory is...let's say "tricky"), that I first encountered Kitchen in a friend's book stack. Either Lisa or Diane, leaning Lisa, which means it was probably Diane but my heart (not my memory) says Lisa.

All I recall about that initial reading was that I liked the design of the standard English translation cover, and was struck by the name Banana. I still like the cover and am struck by her name—but now that I'm reading as a Real Adult, someone who (unlike the me from a decade ago) seriously works with language, it hits different. I didn't remember anything about the plot, which is tenderly compassionate about something that a lot of modern, more "progressive" writers still can't pull off, and on a sentence level, the English translation by Megan Backus makes me feel like a star-shaped leaf (perhaps even the tree star from The Land Before Time) swaying with a sighing motion as gravity rocks it, gently all the way, to a ground collaged with its fallen, decaying compatriots.

No playlist this week, because I'm tweaking the format of the newsletter. Instead of weekly mini mixes, I'm "moving toward" making megamixes like TOUCH GRASS, 1) because they're more fun to make, 2) you need time to let a playlist marinate / tweak the transitions, and 3) I can literally do whatever I want.

SO: a megamix a month, with other missives interspersed. I've already titled and queued the one for September: ⚔️ SWORD HILT HITS THE HEART. The theme is, loosely, emotional annihilation. (The Horn of Plenty version of "Shift" is on there.) I'm trying not to repeat songs across playlists but sometimes...you need that one specific bridge...

Lio Min

The previous RADIOLIO playlists have been consolidated into their own mini megamixes, for perusal here ("Intro" serves as an interlude...like changing the CD in the player or whatever simile you prefer):

via @fwbcollection

The most surprising thing about FWB Fest was that it felt like the kind of music festival that justifies the continued existence of music festivals. Thrown by the "DAO" ("decentralized autonomous organization") known as "FWB" ("Friends With Benefits," unaffiliated with either the movie(s) or the TV show(s) [???]) in the Southern California enclave of Idyllwild Arts Academy, FWB Fest superficially avoided all the things that make the modern festival-going experience a nightmare. The grounds were secluded but not remote; the canopy coverage of Idyllwild's thick groves shielded the crowds from the 90-100F day temps; aesthetic touches presumably provided by FORM, the production team that used to run the experimental art-music festival Arcosanti (on hold since 2020), transformed the forest into—

Let me be blunt: I spent the past weekend at "crypto's Woodstock," where a smattering of modern music’s avant-garde performed under the gently fluttering mushroom gill coverings in the sage-burned forests of inland southern California.

Here's the thing — I watched Sky Ferreira debut "Guardian" in 2014, but it didn't leave much of an impression and when I heard her sing it almost a decade later, I had a similar moment again of, "Okay."

It was just...a song, which over the years has since been folded into her overall mythology: the stage-fraught wunderkind who couldn't escape the ravenous riptides of fame and fortune that kept trying to draw her closer to the spotlight, even as she built dams and diverted tributaries and tried to build a legacy outside of the cultural moment that made her initially famous.

Hi! Over the past decade I've "had" a lot of "jobs" — mailroom clerk, boba barista, call center operator, the night editor of Cosmopolitan dot com (dark lol!), summer camp teacher, young adult fiction author (this is the part where I very politely ask you to buy my book BEATING HEART BABY from a local bookseller or to borrow it from your local library), flower hauler, and "more." But all of those jobs are/were second or third jobs on top of thee thing that got me into writing: music! journalism!

Many of you have bore witness to my downward spirals about particular songs, albums, and artists (don't talk to me about Utada Hikaru unless you've got Time), in feverish IRL rants or equally feverish URL missives. Like many of you, I use music as currency, as love letter, as mantra. I've devoted my life to enriching its altar, or something like that. Because my artistic practice in total, which has become the mutant backbone-foundation of my life, grew from the seed of music.