Sink Swim Chicago
Marketing a fish restaurant would be so fun! There’s so much you could do with it. Sink Swim’s take reels me in. Sophisticated but cheeky. Love it — and that little sailor hat logo. The chef is a Kent State grad, too, which means we used to swim in the same school? Eh?
Alaskan Tapes
This Ontario band has been my jam lately when I need to not jam. Ambient and chill as a creek in a long-forgotten woods, Alaskan Tapes’s music has been perfect lately when I need to calm down and focus… or calm down and zone out. DON’T TELL ME TO CALM DOWN.
I found this song, through Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, which updates, you guessed it, once a week. Spotify curates the list well. It’s on point for delivering deep cuts for genre surfers like me. It’s like someone picking the best of every city’s local scene and putting it on a playlist for you. Every week. I can dig it.
“OJ: Made in America”
Oh my gawd. Have you been watching this? Get to it. Stat.
“OJ: Made in America” is a five-part series on ESPN about OJ Simpson’s career and absolutely unprecedented historic crash and burn.
It is incredible just in terms of the way the documentary delivers his pre-trial and juxtaposes his denial of his race at a time and in a place where racism was literally making things explode. This is outstanding storytelling.
OJ’s life hits on everything that is still relevant today.
Systemic and soul crushing racism.
Domestic violence that turns into murder.
Class privilege.
Self denial.
Phony celebrity.
Athletic entitlement and hero worship.
It’s disheartening how similar many of these cases of racism and power privilege are to ones we’ve seen in recent years.
This series asks viewers to consider transcending your Otherness and how best to do that or if it’s even possible. Do you fight for the cause, for your people, for yourself? Or do you ignore it in an attempt to have everyone else, including those who are oppressing your and your people, ignore your Otherness too?
It’s important to fully understand what was happening around this case. I still have to finish the series, but I’ve been most surprised at how big of a star, renowned by the media for his “character,” OJ was (as a ‘90s kid, he has always been that OJ) AND how little I actually know about the specifics of the racial horrors happening at the time and the murder victims of this case.
I also hope this documentary sheds a little light on why women stay in domestic violence situations, what it can lead to, how abusers so often dupe outsiders, and how other women perpetuate the problem (his first wife, who is probably righteously angry at Nicole, brushes his violence off in an interview snidely, that it’s something she’d never let happen to her…).
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