Photo Collage of the best three pieces of entertainment for this great week by Arts and Entertainment Editor Olivia Cusick.

  Hello! As the 2022 – 2023 Expressions Arts and Entertainment editor, I wanted to use the wonderful reporting team to reflect the media that students at San Luis Obispo High School enjoy.  In the modern age of technology, new media is constantly being created. The Expressions team is excited to give reviews on a few of these every week. Music, film, television, books, and any art form that students and staff want to discuss, are given a free space to do so.    You too can join the team for the Sunday Showcase! If you are passionate and want to talk about art, email me at [email protected].   I thoroughly hope you enjoy this edition of the Sunday Showcase!

“Payday’s Best Songs Are More of an Endorphin Hit Than an Actual Payday” by reporter Lauren Weyel

 The 18 year old rapper/songwriter Payday has been making music since they were twelve and posting it online since 2019. Payday’s music is still relatively underground, but their nuanced lyrics and fun beats deserve more attention. Their new EP “Trips to Venus” released on November 5, and in honor of the release, we’re going to take a deep dive into some of their best songs.

  “Hollywood Hyena” is the second track off of Payday’s first full length album, “It’s Just Music.” A sample from “Still Not a Player” by Big Pun plays underneath the entire song. Payday’s lyrics are the teenage spin on typical rap, with allusions to pop culture icons like Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Regina George from “Mean Girls”: “These b****** witches like Sabrina / I’m so mean like I’m Regina.” The song hits like a Sour Patch Kid — sour lyrics, sweet vocals, then gone in two minutes and ten seconds. It’s guaranteed to put listeners in a better mood, or at least make them feel cooler than they were at the start of the song.

  “I’m Dead Now” is from “Rap In A Can”, Payday’s most recent album. It follows the pattern of a basic beat underneath unpredictable and offbeat lyrics, and focuses on traditional rap themes of fame and money with added pop culture references: “I want the mansion from Clueless / I want my coupe to be roofless / I want them all to sing my song / When the instrumental loops”. The song is in a minor key, making the tone of the song darker and more serious than many of Payday’s other songs. If “Hollywood Hyena” is the sugary end of the Payday spectrum, “I’m Dead Now” is its evil twin, displaying the full range of Payday’s emotion.

  “Cry” was originally on “P.U.K.E. Tapes, Vol. 3” but is now on Payday’s “House of P.U.K.E.”  album, a compilation of all the P.U.K.E. (Payday’s Unbelievably Killer EP) Tapes. The lyrics focus on how men often feel the need to act tough and hold back their tears in an unhealthy way. The topic is ironic because rap often perpetuates the “tough guy” stereotype instead of encouraging men to release their emotions in a healthy way. Payday raps “you need tissues for your issues” and “It’s ok I’ll dry your eyes / It’s ok when tough guys cry”, perhaps the first time that the sentiment has been communicated in a rap song. Besides having a good message, it also has a groovy beat underneath the entire song so that listeners can jam out while also being served an important message.

  If you’re looking for a new rapper to support, go ahead and try Payday. Stream the new EP “Trips to Venus” on all music platforms as of November 5.

Source: allmusic.com

“Transylmania IS worth it!” by reporter Kennedy Beltram

  Every year San Luis Obispo High School students await the month of October, anxious for the spooky season to start. From carving pumpkins to costumes, horror movies, and candy, the entire experience is filled with fun. One of the most common ways to get into the halloween spirit is with haunted houses. 

  The Atascadero Vampyres Transylmania Haunted House is the closest SLO has to this experience. Although the line is a bit of a wait, it’s totally worth it. Each room has a unique eerie ambiance that always keeps you guessing. 

  As you walk through, you never know what will jump out. The combination of decorations, lighting, props, and extremely convincing actors, keep you on your toes. Although it’s already an amazing experience, a lot of fun comes from interacting with the actors. The more you scream and make comments, the more they say to you. 

  The Atascadero Vampyres Transylmania Haunted House is truly a wonderful time and provides great scares. Any SLOHS student looking for a scary evening, next halloween, should definitely try it out.

“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh – review by Editor-in-Chief Izzy Nino de Rivera-Krieger

Genre: Literary fiction

Izzy’s Rating: ☆☆☆ ½ 

Price (Retail): $17.00

Price (Barnes and Noble): $15.30
Price (Amazon): $13.02

Length: 289 pages

Any warnings?: Abortion, addiction, cancer, death, depression, drug use, eating disorder, emotional abuse, racism, sexual assault, sexual content, and suicide.

  If you read books to relate to the characters or “be friends” with the characters, steer clear of this book.

  One sentence can be used to describe this book: It’s basically about a white woman white womaning.

  This uncomfortable, crude, dissociative, and nihilistic escape of reality has no close substitute for it. I don’t know where to really begin.

  The story follows our unnamed narrator, a blonde, thin, beautiful white woman who just graduated from Columbia and is living off of her parents’ inheritance. She is in pursuit of her “year of rest and relaxation”, given the title of the book, and accomplishes this by taking a profuse amount of drugs prescribed by a quack of a psychiatrist (who oddly resembles a drug dealer, and is one in the quite literal, legal sense). She only finds catharsis through sleep – it’s one of the only times she remembers ever bonding with her mother, by napping with her. This is her “transformation” into a new person, to come out as refreshed as ever. 

  About ninety percent of the book is about our narrator sleeping. However, Moshfegh is able to make this cyclical drug haze interesting and in a strange way, both readable and unreadable. She makes you feel like you’re the one in this drug-induced drowsiness

  Moshfegh has this distinct characteristic in her books about having unlikeable characters in them – and it makes her books all the more interesting to read. 

  Our narrator knows she’s privileged in almost every way. She doesn’t care. In fact, she takes advantage of that privilege for her own benefit, and is cruel to people because her privilege and denial or brushing off to accept she has trauma. She’s shallow and can disregard what’s happening in the real world while in pursuit of paradise through sleep.

  That made it uncomfortable to read. Not necessarily unreadable, but I couldn’t do it in one sitting. I felt disgust to the core.

  And I didn’t feel pity for the narrator either – but you aren’t supposed to. They’re supposed to be repulsive, as Moshfegh confirmed in an interview with the New Yorker.

  However, as unlikeable as the narrator was, she was realistic in the sense that because she was so privileged. She had a unique air about her and had this very specific kind of cruelty and projection to everyone around her that only the privileged could ever experience. This is a common theme I seem to read in people who are conscious about their privilege in many aspects.

  Because of this privilege and very narrow mindset and priorities, she has this unbearable habit of projecting herself onto everyone around her; more specifically, she does this with her bulimic best friend Reva, who deserved better. The main feeling this evoked for me was pity for Reva for not having a better friend and because she was going through so much, this made her the target of a lot of the narrator’s anger.

  I’m repeating myself, but again, disgust. 

  “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” also hits on aspects of depression, grief, and trauma that make it all the more realistic. The narrator refuses to accept, it seems, that the indifference her parents treated her with is considered trauma, and instead brushes it off. She never got a chance to grieve her father, and much less her mother. Her depression renders her motivation-less, causing her to want to sleep all the time – She even gets fired from her job at a New York art gallery by drugging herself up and falling asleep in the janitor’s closet. Repeatedly.

  What I can appreciate about this book is the fact it doesn’t romanticize depression and portrays it in an extreme, but realistic light of how much of a blow it can be to someone’s perception of reality and of the world around them.

  I’ve suffered from depression since I was 7 and I make no surprise of it. I openly talk about my mental health struggles and trauma often. This wanting an escape from how awful reality is, through sardonic humor and monotonous actions, really struck a chord with me. I will say, readers have to be in the right headspace to read this book. I wasn’t really in said headspace when I picked this book up, but in retrospect, that probably gave me more perspective on the book’s meaning, as well as a morbid, unique fascination with this book.

  Apart from the narrator, which is the main focus of the book, I have three other problems with “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” that are more minor, but prominent details in the book.

  I feel like it’s most likely meant to be a satire on medical professionals, specifically psychiatrists, in the early 2000’s. I can use context clues to imply that, even if I wasn’t alive. However, the fact it was released in 2018 and used this one caricature of a medication-slinging psychiatrist as the face of mental health professionalism in the book really pissed me off to no end.

  Secondly, the racism in this book, although not laced throughout the whole book, has sudden appearances that also did not fail to make me livid. I’ll leave it at that, because I don’t even feel like upsetting myself all over again by describing the comment that really made me appalled.

  Last but not least, sorry, but what the f–k was that ending? It didn’t sit right with me what happened, as well as it feeling very tacked-on and rushed. I felt that without the last page, the narrator was somewhat reconcilable. It’s what knocked my review from four stars to three and a half stars.

  I liked this book but I didn’t at the same time. It’s going to take me a little while longer to clarify my feelings on the narrator and the book, and I’m always up for a discussion.

  I’m available at [email protected] and through Instagram at @starryybella. Feel free to email me or message me about books, or to maybe recommend some books for me to talk about in this column. I’d also love to hear about your reactions to this book if you read it. Just please, send your name and your grade level (or if you’re a staff member) in the email. 

  (Another P.S.A! I found this new platform for tracking your reading and your to-read list called StoryGraph. It’s a user-friendly platform for posting reviews, finding new recommendations, and tracking your reading progress through the year. You can access all my reviews there and look at my to-read list, as well as what I’m currently reading/what I’ve been procrastinating on reading. I’m @starryybella on StoryGraph.)

Source: TheStoryGraph.com, booktriggerwarnings.com