Author: Alexander De Koning

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Film

Top 20 Films of the Decade

I’ve only been doing this blog thing for a couple years now. Yet, it’s been much longer than that since I’ve dived into filmmaking. 2010 was the year I started getting serious about the craft from watching flicks on my laptop in a Berklee College of Music dorm room. Back then I was studying jazz and still trying to pursue music as a career (somehow I thought film was a smarter choice instead.) Nonetheless, one passion culminated into the other. I know these lists have all been subjective, and that’s the point – these lists were never supposed to be the best thing, they were supposed to be my thing. But I still strive to find the greatest common denominators. The 2010s for film probably won’t be as iconic or memorable as films from the 70s, or even the 90s, but leading into this new decade where we’re inundated with new streaming services and content more than ever before, it’s the best time to be a young writer with fresh, new ideas. Here are the top 20 films of the decade.

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Film

Meet Hayk Matevosyan: Artist in Motion

Deep in the east side of downtown L.A., Slamdance’s DIG Showcase took place at Wisdome LA’s immersive art park. Filled with interactive art installations by emerging visual artists and indie game developers, it took up a whole square block with giant domes, taking us a second to find our subject for the evening – Hayk Matevosyan, director of his film Art in Motion, which is playing on display here as a featured exhibit.

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Music

WTF is 100 Gecs?

 

Last month, a topic began trending on Twitter that seemed just a little out of the ordinary. It wasn’t a celebrity’s name, or the name of a place, or a natural disaster, or “Happy National Whatever-the-fuck” day. No one was sure exactly what it was, the specifics being so vague and the tweets just as confusing. It wasn’t until Phoebe Bridgers tweeted “five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred gecs” when I discovered the phrase for the first time.

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Music

Meet Emillo: ‘Livin’ On The Rise

Living in the local L.A. music scene, it’s easy to notice the inundation of new, local hip-hop talent coming out of the woodwork almost every day. It gets to a point where the kitchen becomes so cluttered, you can’t tell who is who or who’s making what anymore. The aim for the window to become groundbreaking and noticeable just feels like it’s ever-shrinking, also due to the fact that all these artists and producers have the same tool sets. They’re all using the same equipment and software, but it’s their approach that will ultimately determine if they’re filtered out among the significant ones.

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Music

Meet Auragraph: L.A.’s Best Kept Electronic Secret

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Nestled deep inside a garden in Echo Park, an almost half-greenhouse, half-house cottage sits comfortably among what looks like an oasis. On a hot July Sunday afternoon, Carlos Ramirez, known as synth-wave artist Auragraph, takes us into what legit could be a hidden room of secrets: his studio.

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Film

What is ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’ REALLY About?

The film starts with an interview of Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Pitt) on the set of the NBC show Bounty Law. The image of the two actors in the same frame alone is already worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The exuberance jumps off the screen, which is precisely what separates Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood from today’s blockbusters – its extravagant vision is one that is not necessarily done anymore (save maybe for franchises), but one that truly feels out of its time, and also feels like it’s of the time the film depicts. That’s what, essentially, is at the soul of this film: a time that has long died off where personality and name were enough for movies to make a buck.

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Music

What Happened Last Weekend with Boards of Canada’s ‘Societas X Tape’?

Upon the announcement of their NTS Radio take over this past weekend, Warp Records scheduled certain hours of exclusive remixes, live performances, and unreleased material from just about every artist on their roster. Some artists curated mixes, others played exclusively new material. However, one name on that schedule did catch the attention of every Warp Records enthusiast.

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Categories
TV

The Inoculating Effects of HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’

There’s a line somewhere early on in HBO’s Chernobyl, in which Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) explains to Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) about how to put out the fire from the exploded nuclear reactor, in which Legasov states “You’re dealing with something that has never been seen before on this planet.” This line, essentially, is what encapsulates what’s so special about the HBO mini-series – the capability of human self-destruction, and the many layers of how the show can be analyzed.

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Music

Inside The Flying Lotus “Flamagra” Listening Party

The term listening party has always thrown me off. It’s almost a tease in the name itself – sometimes they’re cool experiences, other times they’re not as cool as they’re made out to be, maybe due to the host wanting a large turnout just so they can guarantee they’ll have a line that stretches around the block.

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Categories
Film TV

How the WGA-ATA Conflict is Reshaping How Hollywood Works

For the non-writers outside of the Hollywood sphere, there’s been a change happening lately that’ll likely impact how your favorite shows are made. Last month, the ATA (Association of Talent Agents) failed to update its policies in accordance with their contract with the WGA (Writer’s Guild of America), which expired on April 7th. As a result, the WGA asked its members to fire their agents if they did not comply with the WGA’s demands of a change of contract, which has to deal with how agents are paid via staffing and payments of their clients.

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