Ann-Derrick Gaillot
I'm a freelance writer/reporter.
I write about communities of color, music, visual art, activism, pop culture, sports and anything else I find interesting.
PROJECTS
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My day on an e-scooter turned me into an e-hole
I was leaving my favorite food cart in downtown Portland, Oregon when out of the corner of my eye I saw what looked like part of a bicycle frame lying flat in the middle of the sidewalk. “Wow, someone’s definitely going to trip over that,” I thought, stuffing a taco in my mouth. Suddenly, a man walking with his face deep in his smartphone approached the object, set it upright, and, after a couple taps to his phone screen, rode off on it down the sidewalk.
I was mystified. The object I had see...
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Revisiting the Monica Lewinsky-hosted dating show that was too weird to work
Mr. Personality, which aired on Fox for a scant five weeks in 2003, was a show about a single woman choosing between 20 men to find the love of her life. That was the standard part, accompanied by two stranger details: All the men had to wear masks (okay, kinky, but not so weird), and it was hosted by a post-Clinton scandal Monica Lewinsky (excuse me, what?).
Produced during the height of what some described as reality televsion’s “golden era,” Mr. Personality’s premise was simple, if gimmick...
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Mitski wants you to be your own cowboy
When I spoke to her on the phone, Mitski Miyawaki was in New York on a brief reprieve from her seemingly unending tour schedule. She sounded calm and centered, even though the anxiety that comes with releasing a highly-anticipated album was hitting her full force. (“sorry to everyone i haven't texted / emailed / messaged back. in related news, my record comes out august 17 !,” she tweeted a few days earlier.) Despite being on the road for much of the pas...
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Finding new music in the algorithm age
Personalized recommendations, sponsored playlists, and the dominance of streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music have changed the experience of music discovery for all of us. Whereas magazines, zines, radio, and something called MTV once offered diverse avenues of exploration for music fans, followed by the heyday of music blogs and music piracy websites like Napster, the algorithm now looms over everyone. There is considerable reason to worry about what that means for up-and-coming a...
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The television canon is based on what we bothered to preserve
The television canon is based on what we bothered to preserve
In 1977, a radical show called All That Glitters aired on American television. Following a set of recurring characters working at a corporation called Globatron, the show poked fun at then-contemporary soap operas. The comedy imagined a world where women and men swapped positions in society — the women went to work and earned money; the men were sexually harassed, and expected to take charge of household duties and parenting. One o...
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When medication is essential to mental health
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 44.7 million adults in the U.S. currently live with mental illness, 19.2 million of whom are receiving treatment in the form of counseling and prescription medication. Still, in casual conversation, the mentally ill are often derided. Phrases like “what are you, off your meds?” and “stop acting crazy” serve as reminders that mentally ill people are considered lesser beings. Such attitudes manifest in wider harms. About one in every five pe...
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Edie Fake’s ‘Little Stranger’ is the most delightfully weird, touching comic you’ll read this year
In the opening comic of the book Little Stranger, a fanged balloon-like creature with a tail made of the alphabet zips through a maze of bold lines until it reaches a forest of tree-like bodies, enters one, dances, and zips off to a dollar store on what looks to be a flying watermelon. The book only gets weirder, and more inventive, from there. Through his stories and zines of beings in search of identity and form (though the subject of some of the pieces included can’t be nailed down so simp...
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The Bhad Bhabie show was an unbhelievable experience
After five minutes at the Bhad Bhabie concert, we realized nobody in the 21+ area was dancing. A man in a goatee and long plaid shorts sat stone-faced, arms crossed in front of his chest. Two women sipped their drinks, not talking to one another. In front of me, a man texted and scrolled through the entirety of opener Asian Doll’s set, his head slumped on his hand. It wasn’t until a top-knotted boy no older than 13 ran up to his bored mother at the barrier, asking for her to pass over her own...
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The story behind #MuteRKelly
Yesterday, women of color from the Time’s Up movement, voiced their support for #MuteRKelly, an online campaign that has been working to shut down the singer’s concerts and radio play all over the world since last summer. It’s hard to find someone unaware of the many accusations of sexual and psychological abuse against the R&B singer, his previous indictments for child pornography, his marriage to Aaliyah when he was 27 and she was 15; but despite years of reporting on and testimony from bla...
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Your favorite pin may be a giant fake
In the world of enamel pins, there is one design that’s commonly seen for sale online. It’s a two-piece set based on the classic broken-heart friendship charm design, but with a modern stoner girl twist, featuring a glamorous hand on both halves. One ignites a lighter while the other offers a thick joint. The words “best” and “buds” appear in white clouds on at the tips, each flanked by a green marijuana leaf.
It’s cute. It’s catchy. It’s the perfect gift for the Ilana to your Abby (or vice v...
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Looking back at the hug shared around the world
In 2014, a photo of a crying black boy hugging a white police officer was offered as a salve for a festering national wound. Freelance photographer Johnny Nguyen snapped a photo of then 12-year-old Devonte Hart sobbing while hugging Portland police Sgt. Bret Barnum. The event that brought them together was a demonstration in Portland, OR, protesting the decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown. Brown was only six years older than Hart at the time. Devont...
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Where does a Vine star go after Vine?
In 2013, Christiana Gilles was hanging out with her friend, Darius Benson, when he suggested she check out a new app where users created and shared short, funny videos. It was called Vine, and Benson had quickly gained attention on the young platform for his videos where he reacted to explicit Radio Disney songs, and parodied an infamous scene from the show Dexter in which a character says, “Surprise, motherfucker.” (Explanation does not capture even a tenth of the clip’s appeal.) Gilles, who...
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10 jobs, 1 year
December, in addition to being choked by holidays, deadlines, and travel, is a month set aside for retrospection and making promises for the future. Looks back are often characterized in superlatives as annual year-end roundups of “bests” and “worsts” serve as encouragements and admonishments for the coming year and guides to get us through American capitalism’s most wonderful time of the year.
Each article announcing the best cultural and commercial products of 2017 are invitations for us to...
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Did Moogfest mess up?
“Gender is over” is more of a hopeful declaration than a statement of fact — the lack of power held by women, trans, and gender nonconforming people still provides we’ve got a lot of work to do. In music, conversations about male dominance flare up around music festival season, as organizers have struggled to keep up with the times. An April analysis by Pitchfork titled “Are Music Festival Lineups Getting Worse?” revealed that in 2017, only 14 percent of surveyed acts did not include men.
The...
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What Netflix doesn’t want you to know about how its synopses are written
There are plenty of Netflix users who don’t care about the content descriptions, because they're preoccupied with literally anything else going on in our pre-apocalyptic world. But you would be surprised how many people have forceful opinions about those summaries, good and bad, at least according to Twitter. A typically positive experience comes from @IndiaAlmighty (“The people who write the synopses for Netflix are so concise. I love it.”) and @heydom (“Sometimes, reading through @netflix m...