In support of mediocrity

SALES

KEY ACCOUNTS

Chris Rudd chris@triad-city-beat.com

AD MANAGER

Noah Kirby noah@triad-city-beat.com

CONTRIBUTORS

Carolyn de Berry, John Cole, Owens Daniels, James Douglas, Michelle Everette, Luis H. Garay, Destiniee Jaram, Kaitlynn

Havens, Jordan Howse, Matt Jones, Autumn Karen, Michaela Ratliff, Jen Sorensen, Todd Turner

WEBMASTER

Sam LeBlanc

ART ART DIRECTOR Aiden Siobhan aiden@triad-city-beat.com

COVER: hen I first saw the trailer for Joy Ride a few months ago, I was so excited. A raunchy comedy with an all-female, Asian-American cast? Hell yeah. It’s what I have been waiting for.

Wforcibly tied into neatish knots. As a whole, the film felt unfinished. I felt let down. The movie was, in its full definition, mid.

But then, turning to Sam to analyze the movie on the way home, we came to the same conclusion.

by Sayaka Matsuoka

Part Bridesmaids meets The Hangover with a unique adoptee backstory, the film promised to be the kind of hilarious summer movie experience not unlike the Apatow-laden funnies that made up the mid-to-late 2000s, but with faces that I could relate to. But when I came out of the theater an hour and a half later, I was wrought with disappointment. The acting was fine; the jokes felt forced. And the story… well, it was all over the place. Threads were started and left limply hanging or

It’s okay!

Why can’t we (the collective, nonwhite we) have things that are mid? Mediocre? Kind of a waste of time?

Why can’t we have things that are mid?

Not all of the art that we put out has to be an Everything Everywhere

All At Once or Parasite or Beef-level work. In fact, only striving to create accolade-worthy art kind of feeds into the model minority myth, doesn’t it? We are allowed to exist and create things that aren’t that good. I mean, white people have been doing it since the dawn of time.

Did you know that they’re making another Expendables movie?

So yeah, Joy Ride isn’t perfect. But that’s perfectly okay, because neither are we.

To suggest story ideas or send tips to TCB, email sayaka@triad-city-beat.com

Astandard apartment at Crystal Towers consists of a small bathroom, a bedroom, a living area and kitchenette. The tiled floors evoke the setting of a hospital room, made for quick cleanups. The peeling paint — five decades of it — obscure the age of the walls. The wooden cabinets in the kitchen splinter due to years of use.

The 11-story low-income housing facility is the result of the city of Winston-Salem’s effort in the mid 1960s to create a place where elderly people on fixed incomes — but still independent — could reside. The notion of a community of people with similar needs housed in a cost-effective downtown highrise appealed to those who did not have traditional care options, so on July 31, 1972, the first residents moved into the building’s 201 units, according to reporting by the Winston-Salem Journal

But much has changed since 1972.

Now, 50 years later, the original idealistic dream of Crystal Towers is unrecognizable to its 196 residents. The world is different now: Poverty among the elderly is on the rise. The state of Crystal Towers’ facilities and its surrounding resources struggle to match the needs of the aging building’s population.

And it’s a complicated issue. Resident advocates point to the city’s housing authority, which owns the property, as failing to meet residents’ needs. The housing authority, on the other hand, focuses blame on the fact that their hands are tied when it comes to funding derived from the federal government.

In the end, the residents are the ones often left in the lurch. Ongoing issues such as broken elevators, bedbug infestations, flooded