The most non-skater Skater boyfriend ever! + 6 other chill escapes
stress relief brought to you by live music, and yeah, Gu too.
a continuous mix of articles, shows, books + more worth raving about
this week: these are reminders for you to take breaks from the news! We got K-drama! BSB! SNL! skaters! 🛹
Scroll to b2b for a b3b: why BBC Radio is the best, Reggie Watts live, and a live set from DJ Fart in the Club! Yup!
A K-drama with a skater boyfriend?
Not technically but in My Liberation Notes (trailer) the main love interest, Gu, has skateboarder tendencies. He lives next door to our lead woman, Mi-Jeong, and works on sinks with her dad in a rural area. He eats with the family or Mi-Jeong walks his food over to his house.
One day Mi-Jeong, a quiet, depressed person, tells him to “worship”1 her cuz winter is coming (cuffin seasonnn!). Together they’re basically goth girl-skater couple.
They can be different by the spring if they date, she claims. After some false starts they start dating.
Here are Gu’s most skater qualities, based on my intensive, first-hand research:
he drinks every night and stares longingly at the moon, like a skater with a broken bone, imagining his next nollie heel flip.
he wears the same outfit every day while he works on sinks
the first text he sends to Mi-Jeong is: “I got some money. What do you want to eat? It’s me, Gu.” this scene took me out!! 🤣 the accuracy!
physical feats to impress her: Her hat blows over a train-track wide gap and Gu (with a hurt foot from a blackout drunk mishap) casually turns away and walks up the hill - to get a running start. He launches over the gap like New York skaters ollie over subway tracks. Even Mi-Jeong’s mom is like, zamn baby boy!
he’s got a weird past no one knows about and is sometimes out doing weird shit no one knows about... 🚨 Skater boiiiiii 🚨
his facial expressions tow the line between sorta bothered / hungover af
On a real tip, Mi-Jeong is so depressed about her monotonous life that she has some heavy hitting lines. Realer than most dramas. Her and Gu’s relationship is mostly sitting silently eating a meal and occasionally they voice cutting truths to each other.
Backstreet Boys at SNL Homecoming Concert
The 3-hour, live SNL concert surprised me for how good it was. All the performers were high energy and the star-studded crowd was lit, the energy exchange was obvious. You can feel how much everyone needed what only live music can provide.
This is obvious when Backstreet Boys take the stage. A few audience members belted it out like they were at karaoke, some barely contained their enthusiasm: Adam Sandler, Maya Rudolph, Paul Rudd, Aidy Bryant (my reaction exactly), Heidi Gardner. Too bad Seinfeld sounded better than Brian BSB who now suffers from a vocal condition :’(
All the SNL 50th stuff was pretty good and so was this Vulture article about Lorne Michaels, especially where he tells Taylor Swift she’s a terrorist lmao.
What’s new on Rednote?
Skaters: I can try to escape them but they loom heavy ツ Old head skaters have made it into my feed.
“You know when your nervous system is like: ‘This is actually what you should be doing’?”
At the end of 2024, Korean-born DJ Sooyeon talked to mixmag about dropping her previous moniker Oh Annie Oh. It reminded her of assimilating as a 1st grader in Canada and although she feels a connection to both of her names, she couldn’t deny the need to honor herself by using her Korean name.
back 2 back music bumps for the soul
b3b this week cuz I’ve been on the live radio apps and archived mixes: Rinse.fm, BBC Sounds, and as always The Lot.
Pete Tong’s Essential History of Dance: 20 episodes thus far, each 120 mins long. The dubstep tracklist is a time warp to the hey-days of hype machine. Safe to assume all the eps are A1 primers for anyone who wishes they could better id dance genres. PSA: BBC Sounds has everything - podcasts, news, a million radio shows. All free.
Reggie Watts at The Lot Radio (2/20/25): I caught this set live and it’s fun to watch him experiment and make tunes off rip. Reggie slips into his affected British radio dj voice just enough, a delight. It’s great to be dropped into someone else’s mind/world so fully to take a break from your own.
DJ Fart in the Club at Horst Festival (June 2024)
Other than having a hilarious name, I hadn’t ever seen the DJ herself. Turns out she’s a Korean-born DJ based in Berlin. An eclectic mix you can’t not move to.
Worship is the Netflix translation. Others say: cherish, adore, revere. A reddit user said telling someone they worship them (저를 숭배하세요) is the new “I love you.”