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『 青峰 、部活やめるってよ 』

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Totally not getting emotional or anything, I say as I bawl my eyes out 🥺😭😭😭

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New trailer dropped for The Goldfinger, starring Andy Lau and Tony Leung! They're finally sharing a screen again after 20 years (fun fact: the last time before that was also a 20-year gap -- TVB drama The Duke of Mount Deer).

#im sick #LOVE THEM

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memorial park structure at night.

#photography

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#talking about my generation

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the young boys of summer

Even if there are four seasons in this world, one season stands alone as the ultimate vibe in kpop, and that's the summer bop. This could be, and usually is, a song released late into spring or in the doldrums of the season itself, but timing of the release is not determinative. If you are lucky, the song will advertise itself as such (GFriend's "Sunny Summer," ITZY’s “IT’z Summer,” f(x)'s "Hot Summer"). But like most vibes, you know it when you hear it, like the first time you are graced with Sistar's legendary, iconic, never-to-be-duplicated "Touch my body.” When you hear these songs, you instantly recognize the canonical kpop summer accent, big bold brasses and sounds that seem slapped joyfully out of their instruments and maybe a Spanish guitar. They demand to be played during cookouts, on outdoor patios, through a portable poolside speaker, with a silly little nonsense chorus that only makes sense because the sun has baked off a few of your braincells (ATEEZ’s “Wave”, I’m looking at you). You play these songs around other people, because sharing things makes them hotter, and thus you cooler.

If the "Red Flavors" and "Alcohol-frees" of this world are the accent of summer, then there are the kpop songs that are intended as [Erik Singer voice] evocations, meant to suggest summer and, in some cases, its eventual passing. It's my personal opinion that the slightly jazzy, very r&b, midtempo jam is the sound of autumn, but even if you don't agree, you can hear how Heize in "And July" uses Dean's khiphop vocal stylings to hint at the eventual cooling down of summer and the relationship. A touch of synthwave (IKON's "But You"), EDM (AKMU's "Dinosaur"), or sultry poledancing (After School's "First Love") are all quick shortcuts to this kind of song, one that never quite mentions summer by name but could only be played on a hot summer night. And you couldn’t ask for a better example than Winner's discography, which is littered with summer hits of both kinds. "Island" is a dictionary-definition perfect rendition of the canonical mid-summer accent, while "Everyday" despite its beachy, swimsuit-packed MV and April release date is an end of summer evocation, and “Really Really” somewhere in between. 

My favorite summer kpop evocation is the emotional rock anthem. Seventeen are such masters of every variety of the summertime bop ("Healing", "Swimming Fool," "Very Nice") that at some point you just have to lovingly roll your eyes at them releasing a thirst trap song in the middle of summer and naming it "Hot" because, of course. "Rock with you" was released smack dab in the fall months of October, but when I heard it I knew what it was: a "goodbye summer" song, too melancholy for summer vacation and too exuberant for going back to school but just perfect for convincing you that you have one last chance to tell your summer crush that you like them. Others in this vein: a little bit of BTS' "Run," a little bit of Stray Kids' "Time Out," and a whole lot of TXT's "0x1=LOVESONG."

And so too with NINE.i's "Young Boy." Released in November of last year, it too is a summer evocation, rock anthem subspecies, opening with a combo of synths and rhythmic strumming that drives you recklessly forward through the song like a car barreling down a mostly empty highway covered in the bruised purples and pinks of sunset. It is stuffed full of all the typical (post?) 4th gen markers: video cameras, stickers, spray paint, a tightly focused shot of someone boxing in a dimly lit warehouse, sparklers, the vague sense that you are intruding on a Lost Boys paradise. No kpop MV has captured the turbulent and contradictory angst of being a teenager better than the 0:32 mark, when Vari laughingly looks back on footage he's filmed of his groupmates while lipsyncing the line "When I get sick of it and say, 'Hate this.'"

It's no secret that kpop centers youth: in its performers, its intended audience, its aesthetics, in many of its lyrics. When BTS closed out their adolescent period, they released a two-part mini album whose English title is usually rendered as "The Most Beautiful Moment in Life." For BTS, there is no ambiguity as to when that moment happens: it is when you are young, which Suga underscores in the intro track that shares the album's name. Perhaps at the time BTS meant the title a little ironically, more question mark (the most beautiful?) than exclamation mark. (This is, after all, the group that wrote a song called "War of Hormone" that includes a lyric about squeezing pimples every day.) But when it came time to join the mini-albums into one full-length album, they doubled down, giving the compilation the subtitle "Young Forever" and releasing a song with the same name which declares over and over again "forever / we are young."

"Young" is, of course, not a number. BTS was not declaring the members' intention to remain physically immortal, kpop vampires who never age past their 20s. To be "forever young" is "endlessly run towards my dream," to push forward despite being lost in a maze, to "fall and hurt myself" but still get back up and keep pushing. "Forever we are young" is also an acknowledgement that BTS may always be remembered by some of their fans for this era, caught in glorious high definition high concept music videos that celebrate a carefree "live fast die young" aesthetic. In the MV for "Epilogue: Young Forever," these images, distorted as if on VHS tape, trap the members in a cage of fences. When they escape, it is to an empty runway while a plane flies overhead as if towards heaven. Is this freedom, or death? The only way to remain young forever may be to die young; or put another way, to remain young forever is to die.

Don Henley knew this when he wrote "The Boys of Summer," the summer evocation to end all summer evocations. It is, as everyone knows, not an ode actually to the boys of summer but rather to what remains after they are gone. Its best lines ("Out on the road today / I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac") are about the contradictions of growing up, realizing that you may have to betray the idealism of your youth. It is, in other words, not Maverick and Iceman playing beach volleyball in Top Gun but rather a much older Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick finally having to sit down on the sidelines to watch his students carry on playing beach football without him. The "you" of the song is a girl that Henley's singer still longs for, perhaps one he met when he himself was a boy of summer. But for a very long time, I thought Henley's singer was addressing himself as a younger man. (Can you blame me, when he sings about hair "slicked" back, wearing Wayfarers like one of Top Gun's flyboys?) Through the course of the song, Henley makes peace with the death of youth as best as he can. "Those days are gone forever," he says. He has had to grow up. But in his heart, he still sees his lost love—and maybe himself—forever young.

Perhaps that is what NINE.i is summoning in "Young Boy," when they sing "I can even die." For a moment you may think they are singing "I can't even die," and in a way, both are right. To stop being young is to die, spiritually, but growing old does not mean you stop being young. You can always return to that state. NINE.i's young boy is one of Henley's boys of summer, always shining in the sun, smiling at everyone. He is gone only if you, like Henley's speaker, let him go, turn your back on him and turn him into a sticker on the back of your Cadillac. The young boy of summer is immortal, not because he can't be hurt, but because he is mythological. Youth is not an interlude in one's life. It is a state of possession, like an ancient god that descends upon your body. It is a bit unfamiliar but, NINE.i assures you, as long as you can dream him, he is "forever."

#kpop #if spring is the season of youth then summer is when youth goes to die.

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PSA:

1. If you are not silly, it is vital you become silly

2. If you are silly, you must stay silly

2. If you used to be silly but have stopped, you must make all efforts to return to silliness

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Longing, of course, become its own object, the way that desire can make anything into a god.

Mark Doty, "The Death of Antinoüs" from Bethlehem in Broad Daylight.

#poetry: others #excerpts for the commonplace book

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All I do is eat, sleep, drink and be negligent.

John of Dalyatha, 8th century monk

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the legend of harajuku: goro's vol 2 by Goro Takahashi

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by 𝐕𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐒𝐈𝐀 𝐎𝐁𝐒𝐂𝐔𝐑𝐀

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Source

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björk ft. shygirl : ovule (sega bodega remix)

i can already tell this will be in my "23 for 2023", just a totally perfect merge of three entities into one

#music #Youtube

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lewis hamilton and nico rosberg — the silver war

nervouswreckcollective’s ig post / boymiffy’s tumblr post / intuitions, albert camus / nervouswreckcollective’s ig post / sappho, from anne carson’s translation if not, winter / extract from the dogs i have kissed, trista mateer / i lost a friend, finneas o’connell / nervouswreckcollective’s ig post / reassessing nico rosberg - and how he beat hamilton, the-race (x) / daily mail’s article and heikki kovalainen statement / extract from wuthering heights, emily brönte / parth

#f1 #f-fuck-you