作者： chenchen

China Canteen, off Hungerford Drive in Rockville, Maryland, is known to its Chinese customers as 老四川: Old Sichuan. The restaurant has planted itself on the border of a nondescript strip mall for eighteen years — old indeed for an area where restaurants surface and sink in droves.

Between the inked horse paintings and specials handwritten in sloping green Expo, the restaurant wears its age plainly. Chinese parents and kids are seated in cracked maroon booths, deftly breaking apart bamboo chopsticks and pouring steaming cups of tea. Even our broad-shouldered Hispanic server has waited tables here for over a decade. He takes our party’s orders in Mandarin.

We first try a traditional dish, 夫妻肺片, which translates literally to husband-wife-lung-slices. It’s not really lung, the menu coaches us, but the marriage of thinly sliced beef tendon and chili oil, constellated with peanuts, is nevertheless a breathless one.

The Sichuan fish is electric. Filleted tilapia simmers under a blistery rain of peppers. Its spice-bombed fragrance, lightened by bean sprouts, infuses the room; our neighbors turn to ask us what we ordered.

To the chef’s credit, milder dishes don’t erode against the numbing ones. I find myself reaching again for the pi pa tofu: silken tofu beaten with shrimp then gently fried. The size of a toddler’s fist, each ball is soaked in a delicate broth of shiitake mushrooms and bok choy. For $17.99, we share a platter of tea-smoked duck, which arrives wreathed by sprigs of green onion and airy buns painted with sweet bean paste.

As with many Chinese joints, however, the bowls of white rice have become something of a chef’s shrug. And skip the scallion pancakes: the cumbersome dough all but smothers the pale ringlets of scallion. Lunch specials will set customers back $7.99, but they sport none of the traditional plates that charge the rest of the menu.

The restaurant is run by two brothers and their father, all from the Sichuan Province. Mr. Yu, the younger brother, who greets regulars and recommends dishes to new diners with a Buddha-like warmth, says they have no plans for renovations. Every three years, they’ve renewed their license; if business is decent, they see no reason to change.

Of course, it might not be so simple: Along Rockville Pike alone, China Canteen must train its steady firepower against nearly-translucent soup dumplings, A&J’s dense, chewy noodles, and sunny, Instagram-happy newcomers like the pan-Asian food hall, The Spot.

But the Yu brothers brush those thoughts aside. For now, they’re most comfortable in the kitchen, braising fish, cubing duck blood, dicing chicken, slicking the wok with red oil and peppercorns.

And I, for one, am not looking for anything else.

After the undeniable success of “1989,” Taylor Swift’s fifth studio album, it was difficult to imagine the artist producing another album of its caliber, especially following a two-year hiatus from music-making. Yet with the release of “Reputation,” a darker, moodier version of “1989” that draws on the electronica tracks currently ruling the airwaves, Ms. Swift managed to create an album that, while showing more vulnerability than her previous work, still captures the essence of what makes her music stand out — catchy hooks, powerful melodies and rich lyrics.

In the album’s lead single, “Look What You Made Me Do,” Ms. Swift declares her old self dead, and she is right: “Reputation” pushes past the standards that she set for pop music with her previous album by mixing themes from other genres. This is evident from the album’s first track, “ … Ready For It?”, a provocative synthesizer-heavy piece in which Ms. Swift plays around with new lyrical topics and a strident bass. This pattern of trying new sounds is mirrored in tracks like “I Did Something Bad” and “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” two tracks full of stabs at Ms. Swift’s foes. In these cases a common occurrence, though, is that you either love the new sounds or hate it.

It is evident, however, that there are elements of the old Ms. Swift in “Reputation.” The musical style of past albums can be noticed in tracks such as “Gorgeous” and “Getaway Car”; both feature sounds and melodies that fans of Ms. Swift’s prior work will appreciate. Both songs’ lyrics reflect a recurring theme in the album — the implications of a romance in the public eye. This motif can also be seen in “Don’t Blame Me,” a gospel-inspired track with a thundering chorus reminiscent of “Wonderland” from “1989.” There are also tender moments — “Delicate” and the ballad “New Year’s Day,” a personal favorite, showcase a more mature Ms. Swift, replacing the lively singer of years past with a woman who acknowledges the criticism thrown her way. These themes are uncharted territory for Ms. Swift, but she charges through with heavy bass and soft-spoken melodies, leading to songs worthy of being played on repeat.

“Reputation” was a risk for Ms. Swift; passive-aggressiveness and fragility are not elements of her previous music, but she ably succeeds in analyzing the impact of superstardom and reputation on a personal basis, her stated intent. The album has a duality that some of Ms. Swift’s past work lacks — it’s bold but subdued, brash but beautiful, deliciously fierce but equally vulnerable. Despite the album’s occasionally questionable choices, it was certainly enjoyable and I believe it is a worthy addition to Ms. Swift’s discography. Look what you made her do, indeed.

I’m not scared of clowns or ghosts or sharks, but author Amelia Gray utterly terrifies me. Her 2015 short story collection “Gutshot” is provocative and unsettling. This hauntingly original collection pushes the boundaries of what a story can be, leaving readers unnerved along the way.

“Gutshot” is an apt name for the collection. It contains 38 densely packed short stories, each one stranger than the last. The stories gently coax the reader, only to pummel their mind with unnerving concepts and scenarios, and spit them back out, frazzled and tumbling into the next one. Thematically, they bring to mind Flannery O’Connor’s characteristic gothic stories.

Dissimilar to O’Connor’s, they truly are short stories. Some of the stories span only one or two pages and there’s an enthralling power to these shorter stories. Gray serves a strange scenario, lets the reader take a nibble, then pulls back the plate abruptly. There’s “Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover” which embodies Gray’s flair for the macabre juxtaposed with the sentimental. One line reads, “When he takes you to meet his parents, smother him with a pillow and eat his middle finger.” Gray doesn’t apologize for violent sentences like these. Neither do her characters for their strange behaviors, and neither do her concepts. They simply exist. Gray challenges us to read her stories without recoiling.

However, at times the especially short stories left me unsatisfied. Their images were compelling, but they lacked the deeper exploration I craved. The concepts felt half-baked or abandoned. Most often, I enjoyed the longer stories where Gray’s strange concepts are given space to breathe and develop. In “House Heart,” a couple keeps a girl locked in the claustrophobic vents of their house. In “The Lives of Ghosts” a woman is haunted by the ghost of her dead mother who has taken residence in a pimple on her face. The lengths of these stories allow for more development of the narrator’s voice while still experimenting with other untraditional elements. Sometimes the stories talk to each other. In “Precious Katherine,” a sparrow speaks using lines from a previous story, giving both stories additional dimensions.

“Gutshot” is an intense collection of fearless tales. Each one containing a small festering chunk of this thing we call life. In reading “Gutshot,” one enters the peculiar mind of Amelia Gray and reflects on what can disturb, what can provoke, and what that says about ourselves. The collection gives us an excuse to explore the grotesque and dare to call it beautiful. To read one of Gray’s stories, you must have a tough stomach. Because you will be gutshot. Multiple times over.

The bluesy riffs and screeching vocals of Greta Van Fleet, a young four-piece from Michigan, were compared to that of Led Zeppelin after their 2017 double EP topped rock charts. However, the group’s debut album, “Anthem of the Peaceful Army,” shows that while lead singer Josh Kiazka’s best howl may land in the realm of Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant’s, the likeness stops there. The seeds of a potential rock revival are chewed up and spit out in an overproduced bastardization of rock that romanticizes the hippie era without any of its relevance or defiance.

Packaged in vagueness, themes about love or peace simply lack resonance for a modern audience. Climate change is touched upon in “Watching Over” when Kiazka sings, “And it’s our demise/With the water rising,” but the overtness found here is the exception rather than the rule. A more typical lyric borders on the ridiculous, like, “March to the anthem of the heart,” found on the album’s opener, “Age of Man.” Or try, “And every glow in the twilight knows/That the world is only what the world is made of,” the fluff of the acoustic tune “Anthem,” a song that might have been their “Dust in the Wind” or “Tangerine” but instead, devoid of nuance, falls flat. The track titles alone make Greta Van Fleet’s Achilles’ heel painfully clear: They are too unqualified to address these themes comprehensively yet not self-aware enough to realize it.

Occasionally, songs like “Brave New World” will border on well-realized emotion, but then Kiazka screeches, “Kill fear, the power of lies,” and we remember that the band doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Even looser romps like “The Cold Wind” feature riffs too safe to be exciting, padded with store brand hippie lyrics about this flower child or that Tolkienesque landscape.

Despite the lack of innovation, the band is at its best tackling lighter fare. “Mountain of the Sun,” a textured reprieve from cloying talk of apocalypse, builds the energy expected from a few twenty-somethings. Where much of the album is weighed down by too many instrumental tracks and postulations on the meaning of love and pain, this song soars in its simplicity. For a while, the Michigan boys don’t bite off more than they can chew, and artist and listener alike can finally enjoy themselves.

Greta Van Fleet has one foot in each time period, an imitation of flower power twisted in a how-many-Spotify-playlists-can-we-slide-into kind of way. Their sound is manufactured to be clickable. And when moments like “Mountain of the Sun” show that they don’t lack talent, just authenticity, we can only hope that the group will eventually find their own stairway to heaven.

Sixty keys. No number pad, no arrows, no function row. The spots where the control keys should be are blocked off. Instead, control takes caps lock’s place. Backspace is where backslash was. Right shift is cut short; its rightmost part becoming an “Fn” key. This was Professor Eiiti Wada’s peculiar new design for a computer keyboard. Later, Fujitsu would market it as the “Happy Hacking Keyboard” or HHKB, which would pick up steam in mechanical keyboard circles, hobbyist communities of writers and programmers. Within, the HHKB is nothing short of a controversial icon, both vilified and lauded by typists. It’s noted for underwhelming construction: creaky plastic and flimsy flip-out feet. So, what could possibly justify a $200 price-tag on a keyboard?

Consider this: When was the last time you needed to hit Pause/Break? This and many other keys are rarely touched by most users. Wada then asks: Why have unused keys occupy desk space? The HHKB eliminates them. A smaller keyboard means your mouse and keyboard are closer together, leading to less arm strain. Similarly, the nearby placements of control and backspace are godsends in reducing awkward finger placement.

Like how holding shift enables uppercase, pressing the Fn key in combination with others enables a second “layer” of functionality: Fn + various keys accesses arrows, function keys, etc. There’s no longer a need to take your hands off the home row because full functionality is within pinkie’s reach. I’ll admit; it’s intimidating at first, but the learning curve is gentle. Rather than slow me down, these layout tweaks have increased my speed from word processing to webpage navigation, all while minimizing repetitive muscle strain for long computer sessions.

Fujitsu went with Topre key switches, lightly tactile rubber domes making each key a cushion. Typing is like pleasing pitter-patter, a sound fondly dubbed the Topre “thick-thock.” I’d say it feels like punching a pillow, soft but quick — perfect to add some oomph to your typing speed and stamina.

Topre switches can withstand 30 million keystrokes — virtually a lifetime. Add this on top of the lightly-textured keycaps which won’t fade, yellow or wear, and you have what enthusiasts call the sought-after “endgame” keyboard. For me, the HHKB’s lightweight longevity has made it my go-to, to-go laptop accompaniment.

For some, the HHKB is a canvas. There are forums dedicated to colorful keycaps, case painting and stickering, Bluetooth adaptation — you name it — all for the little keyboard I’m typing on right now. Wada’s thoughtful design is so popular because it’s ergonomic; it’s aesthetically pleasing; it’s customizable yet streamlined and minimalist. It turns a mundane input device into a personal piece of expression most comfortable and enjoyable by you, the user. In Wada’s own words, HHKBs are not keyboards, but “important interfaces” of “functional beauty.”

I have a notoriously short attention span. See: the fact that I never watched the cult-popular “Stranger Things” — the first minute bored me. But sitcom “The Good Place” somehow immediately piqued my interest — with its unnaturally cheery lighting and intriguing premise, it practically screams a promise of a good time. To devout Christians and Buddhists and atheists alike, it sums up the afterlife into the Good Place … and the ominous, self-explanatory Bad Place.

It seems simple. After death, humans go to either place based on the balance between good and bad actions during their time on Earth. Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) wakes up in the Good Place, but soon realizes that she most certainly does not belong in this land of philanthropic frozen-yogurt enthusiasts. Throughout the characters’ hilarious antics, you may begin to think “The Good Place” will get predictable … spoiler alert: It never does!

With startling self-awareness, the twists of this utopia-turned-dystopia are riddled with wittily delivered jabs at the tendencies of human nature, as seen when Michael (Ted Danson) declares, “Now we’re going to do the most human thing of all: attempt something futile with a ton of unearned confidence and fail spectacularly!” While Eleanor endeavors to improve from her corrupt life of telemarketing drugs to the elderly, viewers become enthralled in this exploration of what it really means to be a good person. Is it holding the door open for others? Is it ignoring the selfish urge to steal all the cocktail shrimps? Is it reading all of Immanuel Kant’s philosophical theories?

Through existential crises and unexpected revelations, viewers are increasingly shown that nothing is black-and-white — this world even features a literal Middle Place. The plot may be unpredictable, but its overarching theme of ethics becomes consistently more important and insightful in this age. As our current nation confirms a man onto the Supreme Court because he sexually assaulted a woman while only being “a boy in college” and school shootings continue due to contentious beliefs around our “right to bear arms,” the ethical battle between the overall good versus personal values rages on.

“The Good Place,” an unexpectedly profound sitcom, does a remarkable job of not only compellingly discussing morality, but also the persistence of human nature; all of this is accomplished while remaining both tasteful and immensely entertaining, leaving viewers wanting more. Take it from Eleanor: Striving to become a better person is what matters most — preferably before death. To quote Eleanor’s ethics teacher, Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper): “I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.”

There’s a new major force in hip-hop: mumble rap, a subgenre of rap that is characterized by songs with intense bases and little lyricism, performed by rappers with rowdy personalities. And if mumble rap were a feudal kingdom, Gazzy Garcia, more commonly known as the rapper Lil Pump, would be one of its most important lords. Pump released his first commercial album, the cleverly titled “Lil Pump,” in October of 2017. Now, much like most mumble rap, two things are true about “Lil Pump”: it is exceedingly stupid and yet, at the same time, worth listening to.

Lil Pump once tweeted, “I REALLY DID DROP OUT OF HARVARD TO SAVE THE RAP GAME.” Unfortunately, none of the genius that earned him Harvard acceptance shines through in his lyrics. If you’re the type of person who wants music that gives complex commentary on race, love or other intellectual topics, “Lil Pump” isn’t for you. If you instead happen to love songs with uncreative and repetitive verses about Pump’s wealth and fame, this is the perfect album for you. Perhaps no track exemplifies this more than the infamous “Gucci Gang,” where Pump repeats the phrase “Gucci gang” fifty-three times while bragging about his wealth.

That said, while the nutrition label on a jar of mayonnaise may be more clever than this album, it’s still an enjoyable listen. And therein lies the true genius of Lil Pump and other rappers of his ilk; their lyricism may not be amazing, but their tracks are downright fun. On “Lil Pump,” that shines through in the energy of the beats and delivery of every track. The song “Youngest Flexer” is a perfect example of this. Every line features Pump bragging about his ability to afford expensive brands, but the partnership of Pump’s passionate delivery and an energetic beat featuring laser noises and xylophones will make you incapable of getting the phrase “I’m the Youngest Flexer” out of your head. This trend continues on every track, with the repetition, catchy beats and Pump’s intense delivery combining to make songs that you will inevitably end up guiltily enjoying.

Ultimately, the jury for the Pulitzer for Music probably shouldn’t be putting “Lil Pump” on their shortlist anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean the album is inherently bad; it’s just the musical equivalent of a stupid action movie. Sometimes, it’s okay to set aside complex dramas and watch a brainless but enjoyable movie where the Rock jumps out of a helicopter as his muscles bulge. Similarly, sometimes you need to ignore the more artistic side of the music industry and listen to a teenager who claims he went to Harvard say “Gucci gang” fifty-three times.