9-14-2025 MY FAVES: do you belieb in love?

 books of the week

i finished reading last week's new yorker issue, as well as various npr articles. i follow their app as my news source, so when i'm having breakfast or doing notes at work, i can even listen to the articles. here's another article from the new yorker that caught my attention: are critics too nice? perhaps we do need to be harsher with pop music of today. do we hear this bizarre shit circulating the internet? i'm talking nursery rhyme bullshit (abcdefu), and mediocre cash grabs (tortured poets dept - try and dox me). shall i start from myself - when i share music i'm listening to weekly? i could monetize my inner hater into a career of professional critic...

i also read a quirky chick lit romance called julie and romeo about two sixty year olds floral shop rivals - turned lovers, at the demise of their grown children. it's cute, quirky, and refreshing. with the obvious shakespearean sentiments. we're forced to look away from growing old, terrified of laugh lines and turning 30. here, we read a cute love story about people my parents' age. growing older was reality in my household, having parents who are much older than those of my peers. how my mother - especially - gracefully aged, while still having fun, reassures me and reminds me that my suspicious back pain, and being closer to 30 than 20 is still fun and not the end of the world.

going back to magazines to read some cleveland art magazines i've been getting from the museum. 

music of the week

i discovered the band cibo matto - japanese-born duo that totally defines the gen x soft club aesthetic. their music is simple but sultry, fun and a bit pretentious, but still original, not boring. collaborations with yoko ono, renditions of serge gainsbourg, and quirky bossa nova beats is what you can discover when listening to cibo matto's hits. their name means crazy food in italian. i think that's one of the best names for a band i've heard so far.

here are two songs i enjoyed the most:

working for vacation

je t'aime (moi on plus)

i listened to justin bieber's swag ii. swag (number 1) did not impress me at all. but i gave the second album a chance. firstly, the font is incredibly similar to the the pc company nec (don't ask - a client taught me the history of this brand recently, and was particularly obsessed with the logo).

the resurrection of justin's swag could be to save his douchebag reputation? or recovery of potential teen trauma? i'm just speculating, but he definitely needed a therapist and regular psych appointments at the age of 17. 

i was a belieber growing up, but with my frontal lobe fully developed, i see this public image of this fake nuclear family of himself and the useless wife of his, he is still a bigger villain that hailey and selena together would ever be.

still, a couple songs caught my ear, perhaps because they were very nostalgic. one, speed demon, bringing back the old white boy r'n'b vibes. the other, eye candy, has that early 2000s beat. justin bieber collaborates with mk.gee a lot, which we can hear in the guitar beats (remember my playlist umami guitar?).

let's hope biebs get his swag fully back. i was not fully convinced with this second attempt, but potential is there. btw, hailey - you can leave, you know? you can protect you peace. you're still a style icon, for some.

movies of the week

boyfriend and i watched some old episodes of teen wolf on friday. we're prepping for the halloween movie marathons.

sib and i almost finished the film the constitution (ustav republike hrvatske). a controversial contemporary croatian film about a nationalistic gay professor that is a drag queen at night, who has to teach a serbian cop about the croatian constitution. it might be an exaggeration of polar opposites, but the view on the lgbtqa+ community, continuous tensions lingering from the war in the 90s, and just the cool cynicism and nihilism that croatians exude make this film painfully relatable. it's a slap in the face to us the people - this is who we are, this is our ugly truth and almost 10 years after the film came out (2016), this movie feels even more controversial. 

tame impala is right, it does feel like we're going backwards.