A film review for Shang-Chi & The Legend of the Ten Rings & its wonderful skill in weaving the rich tapestry of Asian artistry with Marvel’s newest hero.
Part of art is travel; it is rewriting the physics of our known universe and providing transit to foreign lands with the scribble of a pen, the flick of a brush, or the rolling of a camera. In your visits, you may often find yourself somewhere unfamiliar. Relative to you, but camouflaged in shrouds of culture or language unbeknownst to you. Art allows us to see those living behind their works, to see the worlds they create and the one that provides water for their seeds. …
An essay about no one close to me wanting to read what I write, or even trying to.
One of the reasons I firmly believe that I struggle with chronic depression, rather than a mild or moderate condition or SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), is how my brain spotlights triggers. I never notice or descry an emotional response and simply catechize it before categorizing it for my records. I baste in it, obsess over the rudiments of how it came to be, and bake in the sorrow spawned. I live within it rather than stare into its reflection and take with…
A milepost for the stories that have articulated the love I have for both stories and storytelling. One that will most certainly change and evolve but will forever remain a landmark for the storyteller who once lived here.
Stories are creatures, living things that breathe, age, and occasionally reproduce. They may dwell in the thinnest of shells, or the widest of frames. They may graze between the walls of a rainy afternoon. They may brush past those unassuming, only to induce their curiosity into a frenzy of immersion. Stories are not singular, nor does that imply they must be plural, but they are beings without herds and without simplification for their population’s arrangement. They live, and some even die, only to awake in the tomb of discovery.
For the purpose of confinement, stories, by my definition, will be…
An essay about the most recent sample of fandom uproar towards an artist’s vision and examining what it means to critique another’s work.
Stan Lee once wrote, “it seems to me that a story without a message, however subliminal, is like a man without a soul.” He did this in response to the ongoing criticism Marvel comics received for its continued expansion of representation (not all of which was good, mind you) and the moralizing of its stories. Now I’ve arrived at a similar point, not as an author or creator but as an audience member. …
*SPOILERS*
In an interview with Variety last May, screenwriter, genre pioneer, and mad scientist Damon Lindelof detailed the steps he takes when writing television. For whatever your tastes are, and I’m sure they vary from my own, we can still appreciate the volume of success that Lindelof has had with various endeavors. From Lost to The Leftovers to his latest success Watchmen, Lindelof has proven both capable, and for my mileage, potent in the ways he chooses to tell stories via the medium of television.
One of the steps in the long process that takes the greatest deal of effort is…
An essay about how Marvel Studios’ current run on television should be seen as historic for both abusing its clout with an audience, but also rewarding audiences with unique, high-budget experiences that only rhyme with cinematic filmmaking.(Published Before Loki Season Finale)
Marvel Studios is quite obviously a pop-culture phenomenon, quoted as revolutionizing franchising filmmaking — especially franchise comic book filmmaking — by making the obvious connection of matching universal-sized comic book storytelling with its predecessor’s worldbuilding methodology. The architectural rendering of stories then becomes laced with significance. It informs the next chapter or the next character or simply nods to…
An essay about Neil Gaiman and the lessons I’ve learned from his fiction and his masterclass.
It was in the spring of 2018 when I began the wreckless endeavor of writing my first novel, diving headfirst into the abandonment of normalcy in the way becoming a writer almost certainly implies you are not normal. It was a terrible novel, a bumbling, thrown-together work of compilation, disengagement, and second-guessing. Three years later, I am writing another one. This time, however, it feels different. Even though I’m typing on the same keyboard, the same cozy blanket is nestled around my waist, and…
A review about Atwood’s sequel and its inability to match the tension of her original work.
For all the bleakness and feministic torture imbued within Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, the charm of reading her ecumenical dystopian narrative is found in the underlining tension. How Atwood donates swathes of value to memory by manifesting this anxiety to forgetting, she weaponizes these mirages of yesterday as defenses against a society attempting to break you. As Offred discovers in the closet of her commander’s house, in the previous Handmaid’s writing, “Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum” (don’t let the bastards grind you down.) …
A poem that challenges the duality of being true to myself.
Who am I? Who am I
not? Where do I fit
in this grand plot?
Take away a piece
of my mask. Is there anything
underneath? Was there?
Is there a sun where I can bask?
Should I bury myself?
Would that answer their prayer?
“Hope it’s a phase,”
a momentary error.
Straighten my tie, straighten my posture,
straighten.
Hide myself,
cloaked in a haze,
misshapen.
Ignore his glance, ignore
his charm. Obscure myself,
concealed to conform,
maintain their trance.
Where do I begin? Where
do I end? Do…
