Writing Portfolio

Hello! My name is Marvin Lin.

I am an editor, content creator, and communications expert,

specializing in digital media, project management and community development.

Here is my Writing Portfolio.

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Critical Essay

"Expiring Aesthetics"

The Walker Art Museum

"Technology has embedded humans in the instantaneity of an exclusive present, where the emphasis is not on distance or mobilization, but on speed, acceleration. Here, we act less like subjects in a geographical, spatially-contingent space and more like nodes in a complex network of information, facilitating the movement of data."

Music Review

Album: Mount Eerie, A Crow Looked At Me

"Rather than wailing existential poetry about the universe and anthropomorphizing the elements through his typically keen, self-aware wisdom, Phil Elverum has adopted a no-nonsense, matter-of-fact lyrical approach whose trailing musings and minimalistic narratives resemble those of a diary."

Feature

"21 Rappers Under 21 Shaping Hip-Hop"

"In a time when over-the-top melodrama (Drake) and conceptual narratives (Kendrick Lamar) dominate the airwaves, where even recent pioneers like Young Thug have smoothed out any rough edges, perhaps it's no surprise that the new vanguard of rappers have once again upped the ante, offering new sounds, new flows, new moods, new everything."

Interview

"Don't Pigeonhole Nmesh as Vaporwave"

"Koenig is 33, which means his formative years were shaped not by the Internet, but by mass culture expressed through the likes of Ferris Bueller, The Noid (Domino's Pizza), and drug PSAs."

Essay

2010-2019: Favorite 100 Music Releases of the Decade

"If the correlate of a past that’s endlessly reproduced is a future that never manifests, perhaps imagined futures simply lost their critical role and had become junk themselves. Perhaps they were simply cultural artifacts rendered meaningless through a technological materialism that offered both sensory replenishment and heightened temporal awareness."

Book Excerpt

Radiohead’s Kid A [33 1/3]

Continuum [excerpt via Salon]

"Kid A could be seen as Radiohead’s opportunity to construct a new identity, to pacify a desire for change because stasis would’ve meant tailspinning into the same predictable cycles; it would’ve meant going through the motions; it would’ve meant accepting the mythology. "

Blurb

Song: Klein, “Arrange”

"While much of Only reveled in disconnected interludes and ambiguous mood pieces, 'Arrange' most clearly exposed Klein’s spiritual upbringing, leveraging a sort of noisy, psychedelic, alleyway gospel. "

Book Essay

CHAPTER 34: Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1

Bloomsbury Publishing

"Eccojams shows how malleable, how contingent, meaning can be while still fulfilling our appetite for deeper emotional connections to what we might otherwise disregard as cultural trash. It’s a corollary to our mediated lives, nestled somewhere between spectacle and subversion, between communication breakdown and memory failure."

TV Review

TV Show: Twin Peaks [#1 pick]

"Watching that haunting finale was perhaps the most harrowing, crushing experience I’ve ever had with any single work of art. I could barely breathe. Suddenly, my individual taste felt irrelevant, my working theories obsolete, my attachments to its characters nullified. Everything felt undone."