Rec Center #6: January 2025
David Lynch's music, classic anime, mixed-race trauma, and more
Welcome to the first Rec Center of 2025! You can find recommendations from previous months in the Rec Center archives.
Crazy Clown Time (2011) by David Lynch
The legendary director David Lynch died on January 15, and the internet is full of nice remembrances and testimonies about how his films and TV changed people’s lives and influenced other artists. The same is true for me—Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks in particular were formative for my sense of what cinema could be when I encountered them as a teen. I loved Twin Peaks so much I even tattooed an Owl Cave rune on my wrist (using a sewing needle and india ink) at age 21. His work is surreal but sentimental. It’s not afraid to feel earnestly. It’s genuinely weird but it has a strong spiritual core and uncynical moral logic.
Anyway, that’s not what I’m recommending this month. I’m recommending his musical album from 2011, Crazy Clown Time. Even the most committed David Lynch fans I’ve talked to generally respond with: “David Lynch recorded an album?!” The only reason I know about it is because I joined the UChicago radio station (88.5fm WHPK) in 2011, and I found the CD in the New bin when I was trying to figure out what to play at 4am to freak out anyone who may have been awake and listening to the radio at that hour. David Lynch album fit the bill.
My favorite track is These Are My Friends, and I replayed this song on the radio periodically for years. It’s the song that jumped out to me when I first listened to the album almost 14 years ago. Something about the short declarative verses lends it a pure pathos that appeals to me for reasons I can’t fully articulate. I like how Lynch’s distinctive, plaintive voice shines through the distortion. It’s on the weirder end of the spectrum, but I still find it genuinely enjoyable, not in an ironic way.
The opening track, Pinky’s Dream, is also good, with vocals from hapa Korean American icon Karen O.
The Night Bell With Lightning is an instrumental jam with a heavy groove that feels very cinematic. I picture a long driving sequence at night, a lone motorcycle on a dark, winding highway.
Upon re-listening to the album this week, I really like Stone’s Gone Up–a laid back, melancholy rocker with an insistent driving beat.
I also like Speed Roadster, with an angry, menacing, pathetic narrator. A YouTube comment calls this song “Neil Young on bad acid,” which I think is an excellent descriptor. (Even though Neil Young is Neil Young on bad acid, at least in his Human Highway era.)
I’m not a fan of the title track. It certainly fits the trademark David Lynch deranged/menacing vibe, but I find it unlistenable as a piece of music.
Ultraviolence (2014) by Lana Del Rey
I’ve never considered myself a Lana Del Rey fan, although I’ve liked a few of her early songs (Born to Die, Video Games). I admire her aesthetic presentation, and her covers of Blue Velvet (used in the world’s greatest H&M commercial) and Chelsea Hotel #2 display artistic influences that are very much up my alley. (I’m a huge fan of both David Lynch [see above] and Leonard Cohen, my all-time #1 song daddy.) But I find some of her other big hits (Summertime Sadness, Young and Beautiful) decidedly mediocre and generic. On top of that, I found her fandom—legions of sadgirls smoking American Spirits and romanticizing addiction and codependency on Tumblr—on the cringe side. Besides, she came out in 2012, when I was thoroughly enmeshed in a toxically hip college radio station culture that would absolutely crucify anyone who admitted to enjoying an artist as mainstream as Lana Del Fricking Rey.
I like to think that I’ve outgrown caring about hipster rightthink, so this month I indulged in some belated curiosity and listened to Lana Del Rey’s 2014 album Ultraviolence in its entirety for the first time. I want to apologize to Lana and her fans, because it’s exquisite. I like all the tracks, but the one I find myself playing on repeat is “Shades of Cool.” I would normally call the album ‘overproduced,’ since I’m partial to a more raw, stripped-down sound, but in this case I think it works as a kind of Wall-of-Sound sound that goes with her soaring vocals with just a touch of Billie Holiday quaver.
It’s really a shame that I was too cool for Lana Del Rey a decade ago, since that’s exactly when I was approaching the apex (or at least a local maximum) of my drug-addled, emotionally abused, clinically depressed, eating-disordered sadgirl era in 2015. Every morning of my senior year of college, I listened to I Saw The Light by Hank Williams to gather the will to get out of bed. Lana would’ve been an effective conduit to channel my pain—and maybe I would’ve seen some of myself in the title track, Ultraviolence, written from the perspective of a woman in deep denial of her abusive relationship.
These days, I’m pleased to report that I’m no longer a sadgirl and that I go through life with what seems to be the normal amount of emotional pain. I’m dependent on no substance, not even caffeine. As Tao Lin once recommended, I frontloaded my suffering into the first 25 years of my life, learned how to weather adversity, and now spend very little time questioning the value or purpose of my life or wishing I were dead. I’m married to a loving and supportive partner who builds me up at every opportunity.
However, I remain absolutely addicted to sad music. Not just any kind of sad, though. I need sad bastard music. I’m talking music made by and/or about total fucking losers who know ‘rock bottom’ intimately. I will develop my sad bastard philosophy of music further at a later date.
Nobody Wants This (2024, Netflix)
Hear me out. I’m not a rom com person. I like my art to wound me. But even I could not resist the pull of a Jewish rom com involving a hot rabbi (Adam Brody) and a messy shiksa (Kristen Bell).
What was more surprising was that I was able to convince my husband to watch with me, with only a little cajoling. Apparently, he has long harbored a strong attachment to both Seth Cohen of The O.C. (2003) and Veronica Mars (2004), so he was on board with this 20-years-later crossover series. (I never watched The O.C. as a youth because I confused the scripted teen soap opera with the reality show The Hills [2006], which my older sister watched and I therefore regarded with disdain as a ‘preppy’ show.)
Many of the jokes in the first episode of Nobody Wants This fall flat, but keep watching–it gets better. Adam Brody is delightful, the chemistry between him and Kristen Bell is strong, and it’s fun to watch a light-hearted take on Jewish LA culture on the screen. I don’t have any connections to Jewish communities in LA (except maybe one second cousin who moved to Hollywood to be a screenwriter?) but the characters mostly ring true to me, for what it’s worth. Hot Rabbi’s brother, Sasha, is played by Timothy Simons (Jonah from Veep), whose delivery and comedic timing steal every scene.
Luckily, Season 2 is confirmed.
Ghost in the Shell (1995)
I spent my middle and high school years absolutely allergic to anime. In those days, anime was the domain of greasy white dudes with whom I’d have this delightful exchange:
Greasy White Dude: What are you?
Me: Are you asking me about my ethnicity?
GWD: Yeah.
Me: I’m three-eighths Korean, one-eighth Chinese, and half French-German Jewish.
GWD (leering): Oh, cool. I love Japanese culture. Do you like anime?
It’s a boring cliche for Asian Americans at this point, just like a stinky lunchbox story, but this is a real conversation I had multiple times, with multiple different weird white dudes (and at least one black one). Cool, you ‘love Japanese culture?’ Well, the Japanese oppressed and murdered my people for generations. Given the ascendency of Korean culture over the last 5-10 years, it can be hard to believe that when I was a child in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a common schoolyard conversation would go like this:
Non-Asian Kid: What are you?
Me: I’m half Asian.
NAK: What kind of Asian? Chinese or Japanese?
Me: Korean.
NAK: What’s that? [or, alternately: North or South? Do you know Kim Jong-Il?]
That ‘North or South’ question was always something between a taunt and a boast that they were sophisticated enough to know that piece of geography. How did I know it was not an innocent question of genuine interest? Because their eyes glazed over when I explained that, while originally my grandmother’s family lived in the northern part of the peninsula, they had resettled to the south during the war and my mother and grandmother had emigrated from Seoul to California in the 60s. They weren’t interested in the answer. Plus, occasionally they’d do the slanty eye-pull thing.
Phew, excavating some mixed-race childhood trauma. Anyway, back to Ghost in the Shell.
For a lot of reasons, I avoided anime like the plague until my (half Chinese) high school boyfriend showed me My Neighbor Totoro and I started to realize that anime could be good, actually, and that non-Japanese Asian people could enjoy it along with the greasy white dudes. Still, aside from some light Studio Ghibli enjoyment, I largely stayed away from anime until recently, in my mid-late 20s.
This is why, in the year 2025, a known cyberpunk-enjoyer like me watched Ghost in the Shell (1995) for the first time. Previously, I was only familiar with the movie because of media coverage and popular outrage surrounding the 2017 live action remake controversially starring very Caucasian Scarlett Johansson. I regret to inform you all that Ghost in the Shell is extremely fucking cool and all those greasy white dudes were onto something.
To all anime-skeptics who love cyberpunk, give it a shot. And anyone who loves Firefly needs to watch Cowboy Bebop (1998). Trust me: as a Korean, it pains me to make these recommendations. But it’s worth it.
Only Yesterday (1991)
Speaking of Studio Ghibli, my husband and I have been making our way through their back catalogue in more or less chronological order. Only Yesterday is the first Ghibli movie I watched that was not directed by Hayao Miyazaki, but instead by his co-founder Isao Takahata. I was expecting some version of the animal spirit fantasy for kids that is Ghibli’s trademark, and was instead blown away to find a tender, quiet story about Taeko, an unusual girl, growing up in Tokyo in the 1960s and coming to terms with adulthood in the Japanese countryside in the 1980s. The animation is utterly gorgeous. Without the business of fantastical creatures to distract, the animators focus on rendering the awkwardness of childhood and the lush beauty of rural life in exquisite detail.
The story is captivating, subtle, poignant, and heart-warming. I recommend it strongly to anyone who might be put off by the fantasy elements of other Studio Ghibli movies. We watched the English dub version voiced by Daisy Ridley and Dev Patel and it was great (even though, as a snob, I usually prefer subtitles).
That’s all for this month’s Rec Center. See you next week with another book review. I love you for reading!