I usually do a write up of the events I’ve organized or hosted and my most-read articles at the end of the year. This was an unusual year (obviously, there is no need to go into it here) so I didn’t bother doing my yearly round-up. I want to highlight one project of mine that I am particularly proud of though — it’s my new podcast show, Unverified Accounts, that I cohost along with Chris Jesu Lee and Filip Guo.
In the past I’ve been involved in two podcast shows -- Escape from Plan A (EFPA) and The Aesthetic Distance Podcast. This year, one of my frequent collaborators, Chris Jesu Lee, approached me and another one of EFPA’s founders, Filip Guo, about starting a new show -- one that would be more arts-focused than EFPA and The Aesthetic Distance Podcast, though still politically aware. The main questions we wanted to ask was how to make good movies, shows, and books in the midst of moralizing censors from both liberals and conservatives. We want exciting and challenging art, not easy pandering shit that’s all about massaging our self-esteem. We launched Unverified Accounts in August of 2020 while in lockdown and to date we are on our 25th episode. It’s one of the projects I’m most excited and proud to be a part of.
UNVERIFIED ACCOUNTS
If you're a big movie/TV/book buff, have leftist sympathies, but can't stand 'wokeness' dumbing down our culture, then we're the podcast for you. So far in our 25 episodes, we’ve covered a range of contentious topics.
Our intro song is “Chairman Mao” by Bambu. Special thanks to him for letting us use his music!
Mulan Rouge: The New Red Scare. After we released one of our earliest episodes on the new Disney live-action adaptation of Mulan, which narratively is no different from the original 1996 animated classic, we were interviewed by the national Struggle la Lucha newspaper, a left-leaning socialist publication. The movie was a victim of the latest Cold War between the US and China, as various Asian American celebrities and journalists called to boycott the film which they claimed was Chinese propaganda.
In The HR-ification of Art, we hosted our guest and friend Trevor Beaulieu from the Champagne Sharks podcast to discuss how ridiculous art and entertainment can get when there’s a heavy-handed ideological (woke) agenda behind it.
For our pre-election episode, Recovering Neoliberal Shitheads, we discussed just how much our political views had changed since 2016. We analyzed the 1999 movie, Election, and the Tracy Flick/Hilary Clinton mindset that so aptly encapsulates modern Democrats. We also talked about the movies that got us into politics.
For our Bullshit Jobs episode, we took a deep dive into the late David Graeber’s book of the same name, which argues that the explosion of pointless mundane jobs is more about the upper classes maintaining a feudal system of control rather than some ruthless application of capitalism.
Unverified Accounts is streaming on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Play, Stitcher, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts. Make sure you subscribe and leave a review. New episodes are released every Monday.
You can also listen to all of our episodes below.
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I usually do a write up of the events I’ve organized or hosted and my most-read articles at the end of the year. This was an unusual year (obviously, there is no need to go into it here) so I didn’t bother. Instead I want to highlight a project of mine that I am particularly proud of — it’s my new podcast show, Unverified Accounts, that I cohost with my frequent collaborators, Chris Jesu Lee and Filip Guo. If you're a big movie/TV/book buff, have leftist sympathies, but can't stand 'wokeness' dumbing down our culture, then we're the podcast for you. So far in our 25 episodes, we’ve covered a range of contentious topics.