Author Archives: Jake Ayres

For those keeping score at home on your rap sheets, the current tally seems to be 50 Cent: 3, Rick Ross: 1.

I’ve almost driven off the 405 twice. Once was because I blinked for a really long time. The other time was because of a song on the radio. It was a hip-hop song driven by a sample. The sample was “Baby Come Back,” by Player.

UCLA is known best as a research university, meaning that the faculty get their hands dirty with their own projects. While this conjures up images of chemistry professors in the lab, this trend extends all the way up to North Campus, where it’s about creative output as well as research.

Following in the illustrious footsteps of Three 6 Mafia, M.I.A. (real name Maya Arulpragasam) has now become legitimized to the mainstream through an Oscar nomination for best song for her work with composer A. R. Rahman on the song “O…Saya.” from the Oscar nominated film “Slumdog Millionaire.” That is, if “Paper Planes”’ appearance in “Pineapple Express” and its near incessant radio airplay a year and a half after its release didn’t already make M.I.A. a (at least a semi-) household name.

Despite its title, this French film isn’t really a Christmas movie.

UCLA student Ana Lily Amirpour is in Park City at a film festival and just saw Paul Giamatti.
“At the screening we went to, he was just hanging out in the lobby,” Amirpour said. “He’s really cool.” However, she’s not at the Sundance Film Festival, but the Slamdance Film Festival, the other festival in town that originated as a reaction to the perceived commercialization of Sundance, and she’s having a great time. “It’s got a really warm, down-to-earth vibe. Sundance … is a totally different ballpark.”

Goodbye, detached monochrome. Farewell, greater length and slim cuts. Auf wiedersehen, underground associations.
Excuse the melodrama, but what I’m trying to say is that American Apparel is in the process of being absorbed by the mainstream, and I know exactly who to credit/blame.