#marginal diary entry

[marginalias]

i got a cd player recently (a discman! from a family friend!) and i realized that not only can i play the cds i wanted to play (my indie jpop beloveds, linkin park, the anime op/ed album i asked my mom to buy for me in 8th grade) i can ALSO listen to all of my kpop cds

apocalypse sounds SO good i might actually start trying to collect the rest of the deukae discography... can’t wait to listen to my knk cds too!!

[marginalias]

i understand that faye wong and tony leung are iconic(tm) in chungking express but also let’s talk about brigitte lin and takeshi kaneshiro, the other certified hotties?? like “sad loser not over his breakup gets tipsy and unknowingly falls for a literal villain who vanishes after one night of platonic intimacy” is ripe for the picking. jaden jeong i am in your walls (ALSO IT WOULD BE SO EASY TO LINK IN AN IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE PLOT!!! not that i want all the mvs to be in the same universe or carry the same plotline because i’m 99% certain they won’t but it would be a victory for Me)

in other news, dreamcatcher nyc RULED and i almost cried a little seeing them perform scream with handong. i am soooo tired and apparently the only normal dami stan in the world

[marginalias]

1) dreamcatcher full album in april i might fully lose my mind. i will be getting the physical yes.

2) it consistently strikes me that even though ooo are clearly media trained and extremely competent at being idols, their company clearly gives only the minimal amount of shit about constructing their personas. either that or they’re truly intended to be “just some guy” (and yes i’m thinking about sungho going off about types of shrimp on bubble for like an hour, but mostly junji having near-zero social media presence and an awe-inspiring iron wall between his private and public life, like hell yeah dude)

3) i can’t finish this suit dance edit until the sd stages + orions are over, but i... i don’t want them to be over...

[marginalias]

current thoughts: skinz choreo woke up my long-dormant art history nerd and i’ve been compelled to put together some edits?? we’ll see if that happens!

working hard and yet hardly working at all... been listening to a lot of t+pazolite and rvde again, but maybe it’s time to pull out the mushishi soundtrack...?

think i’ll go take a walk on the beach/marsh tomorrow to clear my head.

anyone else bursting into tears while writing a birthday letter to jisung? just me? @_@ i didn’t think i would be this sort of person before aug 2 but ooo really got me... at this point i’ve been following the group for almost a year, and 2/3rds of that time have been without him - it’s surreal. i remember watching a few minutes of his last youtube live with mill and nine, and thinking it was so late, i’d just watch the vod in the morning... and then it got deleted - and that was the last time we saw him... ugh.

at least it gives me a chance to practice my awful korean. i’ve spent an ungodly amount of time on the naver dictionary looking at vlive subs...

[marginalias]

thoughts after populating the queue for the first time -

it was fun going on a nostalgia trip back to the late 2000s & early 2010s! those were some really good times for media & formatively shaped my taste, for better or worse i’m not sure. felt a little old, even though i’m not old at all, but these are the rare times when i miss being a teenager. so many of my interests back then came from crowding around a computer during study hall and watching some dumb or novel youtube video. i think i’ll keep this mainly media-focused with some personal asides - but maybe that will change, who knows?

some kpop thoughts below, because i suddenly have a lot of them, for various reasons now. ouch.

so i decided to get back into kpop this year after a long, long time - like, 11 or 12 years! i grew up during the 2nd generation (the years of se7en, rain, dbsk, boa, snsd, and suju) but i was more into jpop/cpop at the time. i remember hearing about a lot of things peripherally, and friends being really into the dances, so i knew the biggest hits and groups, but never really heard anything that hooked me. a friend got me into dreamcatcher a few years ago & we watched a few oneus comebacks together, which i really enjoyed, but i wanted to do some of my own exploring, and i finally found that hook in knk’s s/s collection. i think it’s a really solid album and nassun really killed it with the production on sunset - it’s very trance/house and not the sort of sound that wins award shows, but the choreography was captivating (heejun is hanging by his arm!!) and i’ve always appreciated the theatricality of kpop. i think if i’d chosen to do this earlier, i would have gotten into vixx...

unfortunately i got into knk a few months after their 2020 comeback and 2021 has been a steady stream of bare minimum promotion! i’ve literally gone through all of their content except for the massive backlog of vlives, and i’m not sure i can stomach watching any more of them knowing what people know now about youjin & how ynb treated him - his voice is a highlight of their pre-hiatus albums and it’s genuinely one of the best voices i’ve heard, period - and it’s so, so sad to see the massive drop in team energy between 2018 and 2019. part of it is probably just a natural product of aging and maturing, as well as a fundamental change in the team dynamic, but mostly it seems like they’ve become tired and much more cautious. ynb + 220 enormously mismanaged them, which is a real shame. i want to live in the timeline where we still get spine-tingling covers like this. (the youjin-inseong vocal line is through the roof!)

to weather the media drought, i looked around for another boy group to get into, considered ateez, considered stray kids, considered going through the vixx backlog - and onlyoneof caught my eye because of the libido comeback, obviously, like the absolute galaxy brained bl/call me by your name concept and the slick choreo and junji’s gd hair are all irresistible, but then i went through their backlog and found what i’d really wanted out of the genre all this time - art hoe rnb with choreographies that are a really beautiful mix of “feminine” shapes and gestures with ones that are more associated with boy groups (boss could literally just be a girl group dance, i’ve got a lot of things to say about boss and dora maar), girl group dance covers that aren’t jokey or overly masculinized, a relatively chill demeanor... knk scratched that updated 2nd-gen itch for me, but ooo really hooked me with libido’s backing instrumental of all things - like the driving synth is literally an industrial electronica sound, and it even has noise elements! the use of dissonance, the mix, the performances, ugh. it’s not what I expected from kpop and i loved it for that!

i hope love’s departure isn’t a youjin 2.0, and i hope he gets to say goodbye somehow, if he wants to. i was really looking forward to hearing him hone his craft, especially because he seems like he’s a classically-trained singer (idk, something about his hand gestures in the recording booth reminds me of the opera singers i know). and as the vocal backbone of the group, it seems unlikely to me that he’d be let go without his express wishes - but then again, we never really know what goes on behind the scenes. i’d like to hear his voice again if he decides to get back into music, if the problem he’s having can be resolved to allow that.

i really don’t have any great love for the majority of this industry, and i think what little loyalty i have to it is a combination of nostalgia and stubbornness (asian media was there for us diaspora kids when western media refused to show us in tv/movies) - but it has contributed positively to my self-image, i’ve heard some good music, i’ve seen some really stunning dance choreography, and i’ve had something to distract myself with when i was extremely stressed out both at work and in my social circles. and i think it’ll keep performing that function for a while! just hope that nothing else falls apart the instant i touch it. :P (dbsk literally had their big divorce a year or two after i started listening to their music!!)

was going to say some more about dbsk but i’m a little tired and more than a little sad, and will save it for another day.