Shabbat
Reading List

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): Boots Riley makes agitprop that actually agitates. His new film, I Love Boosters, looks and sounds like a washing machine filled with Brecht scripts and magic markers, then set to spin cycle. When I stood up at the movie’s end, I had no idea what to think, but I could not mistake the bounce in my legs. Two weeks later, I still find myself absentmindedly chanting the breathy, staccato monosyllables of its theme-song, “Hi Ho.”

The boosters of the title are a gang of clothing thieves in the East Bay, who steal and sell at discount the wildly overpriced wares of a San Francisco billionaire’s chain. Riley’s previous film, Sorry to Bother You, was the finest of several movies from the 2010s chronicling the Bay Area’s surreally rapid gentrification. If much of I Love Boosters feels comparatively placeless, that is sadly accurate to the no-there-there that tech has wrought. Thus the stores the protagonists rip off are named, generically, “Metro Designers.” When the billionaire villain rants, on Instagram, of the “urban bitches” robbing her, the racial euphemism captures how Oakland itself is being evacuated of both Blackness and cultural specificity. “Metro designers” and “urban bitches”: this is a city abstracted into class contradiction.

The abstraction also results from Riley reaching beyond the local, exposing the boosters to potential comrades in the Chinese sweatshop where Metro Designers’ clothes are manufactured. Conveniently, one of them has stolen top secret technology from the state and the bosses: a “situational accelerator” that allows teleportation, the hastening of ongoing historical processes, or the decomposition of objects into the social contradictions that produced them. In other words, the device, which resembles a life preserver, does the work of Marxist theory—and it is objectively thrilling to hear the words “dialectical materialism” enunciated onscreen by a union organizer. The ring also represents Riley’s art itself, which mixes analytic critique and gross, telling exaggeration: a corporate flunky, racing to bring his superior coffee, finds himself bearing his boss on his back in a covered canopy; retail employees must set up racing blocks to fit lunch into their truncated breaks; the billionaire’s San Francisco apartment floor is on a slant, on which she walks comfortably, while workers around her futilely climb and slide. Ironically, what the “situational accelerator” does—reveal process, change, and struggle lurking beneath apparently discrete commodities and persons—is contradicted by what it is: a static, magical object drawn not from radical theory but from Lord of the Rings.

The film does not seem fully in command of that irony, and its pivot from biting satire to revolution is not altogether convincing. Over time, the hilarious jokes thin out, replaced by more and more pointing and shooting of the One Ring. (As my wife pointed out, it’s not good when the labor organizer asserts that new workers will join her planned strike based not on one-on-ones, but on general principles; the logic of the film is that capitalist immiseration plus Marxist theory equals general strike, and never mind the messy work of organizing.) But then I remember all the smug critics who complained about the ending of Sorry to Bother You, which involved workers transformed into centaurs (“equisapiens”), a tech founder’s deranged cult, and such—misshapen gargoyles that turned out somehow, to furnish a historically precise account of how neoliberalism morphed into techno-fascism. And whatever my intellectual quibbles, I was moved to tears by I Love Boosters, which builds toward an unabashedly optimistic dream of international solidarity. One can only hope that this movie’s ending proves as prophetic as its predecessor’s.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón’s latest film, Romería, is in many ways a follow-up to her 2017 film Summer 1993. Both are nakedly autobiographical works, the experiences of the main character—the child Frida in the earlier film, the teenage Marina in the new film—tracking almost precisely, to the last detail, the filmmaker’s troubled life.

Simón’s parents were drug addicts, both of whom died of AIDS when she was a little girl. As Romería begins, Frida, the beautiful young stand-in for Simón, is played with cool charm and determination by Llucia Garcia. She has turned 18 and is seeking a government scholarship so she can attend film school. But her official documents don’t show her father’s identity, and the only way to have that lacuna filled is for her grandparents to officially correct the certificate. Frida sets off on a voyage into a world that by rights was hers, that of her father’s wealthy family, from which she was cut off.

She revisits a past she was too young to remember, or in some cases that occurred before she was born, using her mother’s diary as her guide. Frida attempts to recreate scenes from her parents’ life, imagining the past and then finally reliving it, inserting herself into it as either a witness or a participant. She’s told that she looks like her mother, so we see her making love to her father, who is transfigured in her imagination into a cousin she’d never previously known.

The slipperiness of the past is everywhere in Romería. Frida questions uncles, aunts, and cousins about her parents, and is unable to obtain a sure answer to the question of where they lived in the coastal city of Vigo. The diary, written in the flowery hand of the good bourgeois her mother was, is updated for her: Simón divides the film into diary-like chapters, the story advancing day by day as Frida attempts to get to the truth of her parents’ lives. Is it true her father was hidden in an upstairs room in the family mansion when he was diagnosed with AIDS? Who will know the truth, and will the truth be her parents’ version of it or the objective truth? Frida’s wealthy grandfather attempts to buy her off and put an end to her search by paying for her schooling, allowing him to avoid revisiting his fallen son’s life and death. But Frida and Simón refuse to hide from the truth in this brutally honest film.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): In the summer of 1971, Judith Malina, the co-founder and co-director of the Living Theatre, sat in a dark Brazilian jail cell reading Tess of the d’Ubervilles by resting the book on the windowsill so it could catch some light from the courtyard. Malina describes this incident in the last of four volumes of her diaries, just published by Northwestern University Press, edited and with contextualizing introductions by the theater scholar Kate Bredeson. The series offers a compelling and intimate portrait not just of a visionary artist, but of an artistic community and a fervent era. (Full disclosure: Though we met long after the period covered in the diaries, 1947 to 1971, I knew and loved Malina, who died in 2015 at 88.)

Like numerous layered scenes in the diaries, the one in the cell conveys much about Malina in a condensed, dramatic way. Along with other members of the Living, she is imprisoned by Brazil’s military dictatorship—ostensibly on trumped-up marijuana charges, but really for conducting lefty performance workshops in favelas. She reaches for Hardy because she must keep her mind occupied and it’s one of only a couple of books on hand. (She can “hardly bear to read,” one of the other two, Actors on Acting, and Martin Buber’s I and Thou “fills me with a religious emotion that’s almost unbearable in this environment.”) Reading Tess, she writes, “I identified with all of it.” And while she doesn’t spell out in this passage why, we know by this late point in the chronology of the four volumes that she despised hypocrisy, the second-class treatment of women, and the sexual double standard.

Malina doesn’t remark on the novel’s subtitle, either—“A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented”—but that could serve as the diaries’ subtitle, too. Not that Malina was “pure” in any pedantic or moralistically sexist sense, but you don’t have to read far into the diaries’ 1,600 pages to recognize her unwavering commitment, over some 70 years, to pacifist anarchism and to the search for theatrical forms that would hasten the arrival of a revolutionary future.

As for “faithfully presented,” well, one can never know for sure about diaries, but she doesn’t just record moments of artistic triumph and personal delight (a category into which I’d put her sharing a 30-day jail sentence in New York with Dorothy Day for civil disobedience.) With wit, insight, and unremitting self-scrutiny, Malina also bares faults and missteps in her work and turbulent love-life as she and her company—co-led by her husband, Julian Beck—endeavor to live their communal, anti-capitalist, free-love, fully vegetarian, non-violent, anti-nuke, anarchist ideals. Seeing her grapple with all the inherent conflicts and contradictions of that effort is one of the gifts of these volumes. We watch her raise two children while directing, writing, acting, reading, thinking, and touring. In one of many parenting-in-stride accounts, she tells of a border stop in France, where she reads her toddler daughter a story about a tiger while customs officials inspect every piece of paper in their car. She describes the experience of her mother’s early death and burial and shiva with spare, heart-wrenching clarity. Her father, a rabbi, had died years before, and now, an only child, she “felt no comfort” after the shiva; “it was like bursting into an implacable reality. I was alone. Earth was hard, unremitting.”

At the same time, like other great artist diaries, Malina’s brings us behind the scenes to reveal the creative impulses and impasses at the heart of The Living’s process. The second volume (1958-1968)—comprising previously unpublished material (like the fourth volume)—chronicles one of the most fruitful and influential periods in the Living’s long history, during which the company worked on plays by poets and European modernists and started experimenting with entirely new forms.

In Jack Gelber’s hyperrealist The Connection (1961), a group of jazz musicians comes together to jam and await their heroin fix. During one rehearsal, a cast member showed up late and high on the stuff. “Within five minutes everyone could see it,” Malina writes. “Even those who had never seen it before saw it. It was almost too painful. He faltered. He rose and fell. He perspired. His eyes quivered, dilated, closed. How does he feel while this is happening? I shall never know.” A few days later, she is focused on technicalities: “I do not like the tempo of the second act. I want to portray the horror, but I have only a terrible nervous activity.” For Kenneth Brown’s The Brig (1963), Malina tightly choreographed a troupe of Marines brutalized by fellow servicemen to create a parable of brute authority. (The Living Theatre has kept experimenting with new forms for more than half a century beyond the end of these diaries, and remains active today.)

In 1964, evading tax harassment, members of the Living exiled themselves to Europe and toured all over. In residence at Avignon in 1968, they worked on three pieces, including their most iconic—and explosive—(though not best) production, Paradise Now. An image from the show has, unfairly, come to serve as a shorthand for artistic excesses of the ‘60s: naked bodies groping each other and writhing around the floor. The company made an easy leap into the May 1968 student rebellion. They returned to the US and found it changed. “When we left America,” Malina writes, “everyone thought it a kind of humorous exaggeration when we said in answer to questions about our theatre’s aims: ‘To bring about the revolution.’ Now this word is on everyone’s tongue. The luncheonettes are full of people talking about the revolution.” But they soon found that the left had become more militant, even violent, in their absence, and felt ever more out of place. “And if the purpose of the revolution isn’t to feed all the people and stop all the violence it isn’t revolution,” she muses. “It’s just a reaction formation, a psychological spiritual assault on oppression, which is not enough, and belittles the effort and the glory of many.”

Malina never stopped ardently believing that a “nonviolent beautiful anarchist revolution” was possible and that theater could help make it happen; reading her diaries can just about make you believe it too.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): A quarter of a century since its initial release in 2000, the great Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros is still capable of shocking even repeat viewers with its sheer genius. The recently restored version is now showing in theaters around the country and will soon stream on Mubi. The film opens in the middle of a chase, with all the requisite thrills and chills, as a car driven madly by Gael Garcia Bernal weaves through congested city streets, a pickup truck in hot pursuit, the passenger in the latter firing wildly at Garcia’s vehicle. In the back seat, Garcia’s passenger is trying to staunch the blood flowing freely from a suffering canine. Suddenly, the car seems to explode in a brutal collision at an intersection. We’re only minutes into the film, and we’re already exhausted.

We’ve been treated to a skillful action film opening, but here Iñarritu leaves that vile and pointless genre behind. The high-impact collision is both trigger and metaphor for what the rest of the film provides: a tale of social, romantic, familial, class, and cultural collisions in Mexico. The car crash is the organizing principle of Amores Perros, as we are shown the lives of people affected by it, those in it, and those nearby. Iñárritu and his screenwriter Guillermo Arriagia don’t make the accident the endpoint of the story. Rather, it is part of a continuum, interrupting lives in midstream and sending out shockwaves that ripple far beyond it.

The film is told in three chapters, each focusing on a pair of characters. Octavio and Susana are star-crossed lovers at the lower end of the social scale. Octavio is a young man with no aim in life until he discovers his family’s pet dog is murderous in high-stakes dog fights. The driver of one of the other cars in the accident is the beautiful supermodel Susana, whose married lover has left his family for her, and who is obsessed with her own pet dog. Witnessing the accident—and profiting by it, as he steals the money Octavio has with him at the time—is Martín, a rundown wreck of a man who lives with his beloved dogs. He, we will learn, is a former professor who left his profession and family to engage in armed struggle against the Mexican state.

There are, then, two obvious connecting threads in Amores Perros, the accident and dogs. But there are so many others teased out over the length of the film: love and its disasters; family strife; the quest for gain in honest and dishonest, clean and dirty forms.

All their paths cross at the intersection, all their lives will take a turn because of the accident, and yet the characters will never be aware of each other. They are all residents of the same city, but of different worlds within it. Amores Perros is a fairly long film, clocking in at two and a half hours. Though it makes no references to the great Mexican muralists, it is in essence an homage to them—an enormous, brilliant, imposing fresco of Mexican life and society.

A. Gopalan (senior editor): Several years ago, I had the opportunity to interview a famed scholar in my field. I started the Zoom call with jitters, notebook in hand and focus sharp. But as soon as I turned on the recording software, I experienced a numbing hit of something like serenity: The technology, I realized, was preserving her answers for posterity, so I didn’t have to focus on the conversation—or at least, not as intensely. I could instead half-listen while fretting about my next question, compulsively click around on my computer, resist the pull of my phone, and try to arrange my features into a sufficiently intelligent expression. Halfway through the interview, however, a scary pop-up emerged: “Connection unstable.” The bright-red recording button started blinking in and out and the audio waves began flatlining. But my respondent was deep into an answer about the origins of capitalism, and it was beyond my grad student social skills to interrupt her. Heart in hand, I led us through another half-hour of pre-scripted discussion, and only then, with a thousand prayers, did I log into the interview folder. The worst had happened: There were no files saved, no record of the conversation.

In the months to come, I went through the mortifying ordeal of emailing the professor to let her know of my fuckup, appealing to her for a second interview, and eventually securing it. But I could not shake the feeling that our second conversation—which I recorded on three different devices, and with handwritten notes—was stilted, not as rich as the first. I took what I could get, of course, but the whole encounter jarred me. It turned out technology could not be relied upon after all. My anxieties could not all be dulled by the promise of a permanent record, a “later” when I could revisit a present I could rarely tolerate as it unfolded.

This extended prologue is meant to say: I devoured Ben Lerner’s Transcription in one sitting. The book’s “plot,” if you can call it that, is an intensified version of the experience I have recounted above. The book’s unnamed narrator is scheduled to interview his longtime mentor Thomas, a world-famous scholar of something-or-other, but right before the session, our hero drops his phone into the sink. Tech support thus squandered, he is left with no choice but to fake his way through the interview, first trying to defer the “real” conversation, then—after failing to pause Thomas’s elliptical retelling of his life—simply pretending to record on his dead phone. Unlike in my case, this narrator is not afforded a do-over: Thomas dies shortly after the interview, and the conversation is preserved only in the narrator’s recollection.

The book’s themes—the unstable nature of memory, the singular and fleeting arc of time—are familiar, but in Lerner’s masterful hands, they become something electric. Transcription reads like a mystery novel, only the reader is the detective. What really happened in the conversation between Thomas and the narrator? What was the actual substance and significance of Thomas’s life? What was the full truth of Thomas’s relationship to the narrator, and to his son, who emerges as a protagonist in the final third of the book? We can never really be sure, but throughout the book’s three acts, there are scattered clues—lines and phrases that repeat, motifs that recur, stories that mirror one another—and despite myself, I found myself gathering them in yellow and pink highlights, bookmarks, notes. I could not shake the feeling that this spare story was the result of Lerner smashing a pane of glass against the book’s spine, and I was wandering among the shards, picking them up, trying to fit them together into some sort of coherence.

But the quest was doomed. The glass is there not to reconstitute, but to reflect. Ultimately, this is the gift of Transcription: starkly drawn, intensely relatable moments of close observation. When Lerner’s narrator writes of his “withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication” at being severed from his phone; his need to hold a device so as to “not only, not fully, be where I was”; his “glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level,” I felt seen. When, later, Thomas’s son speaks of how the device “takes you out of the real world, shields you from all the pressures and information, but then administers this series of subtle sensory inputs and muffled shocks, these mild effects, as compensation for the unmanageable reality it’s made disappear”—I felt understood. What was this, if not a description of my experience of turning over to a device the task of listening to a scholar I so admired, with whom I had for months dreamed of intellectual exchange? What, in fact, are any of the moments of failed connection in Transcription if not reflections of the times when we fail to make contact with our mentors, fathers, and children, because we are moving toward them with instruments of mediation in hand, brandished like shields?

Mari Cohen (senior editor): Once upon a time, I read all my favorite books more than once, because I sped through my stacks of plot-heavy middle-grade fiction from the library faster than I could replenish them. Of course, as I grew up, my free time shrank while the quantity and complexity of books I wanted to read—and the share of my attention devoted to screens—ballooned; getting through something one time now feels like enough of a feat. But with Ben Lerner’s Transcription, the stars aligned for a double-dip. It’s a petite, propulsive book, just 144 pages, and it came out during my four-month sabbatical, the most time I’ve ever had for reading in my adult life (thank you, Jewish Currents Union!). The first time I read it, last December, I stayed up till 3 am at my parents’ house finishing my galley ebook. I raced through the last few pages marveling at how Lerner had managed to collect the book’s varied narrative and conceptual threads into a single, shimmering final image. I remember falling asleep in a haze of awe, smug in the knowledge that I was having a full-body “profound experience of art” that Lerner famously found so elusive in his debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station. By March, when the book’s publication date arrived and the rave reviews were rolling in, I already struggled to remember the texture of the book and what had led me to deem it such a perfect novel. So I took a few hours to read it again. I was happy to be re-immersed in Lerner’s smooth prose and sly humor, but at the end I no longer could locate the exact moment that had produced such aesthetic ecstasy the first time around. Was the effect just diminished upon repeat, the magic of first recognition impossible to recapture? Or had I overzealously willed myself into it the first time, seeing something that wasn’t exactly there?

In a way, this dilemma was a fitting accompaniment to the new Lerner novel, which itself takes up questions of memory, repetition, technology, and cultural transmission. The narrator—as usual a rough stand-in for Lerner—visits his alma mater in Providence to record an interview with Thomas, his intimidating, aging academic mentor. When his phone breaks, he’s too embarrassed to tell Thomas and ends up having a lengthy conversation with the nonagenarian that he pretends to record and must, presumably, reconstruct from memory later. As readers, of course, we are left wondering if the scene we are reading is the narrator’s experience in media res or its own fudged reconstruction, though, of course, what would it mean for us to access the “real” scene, if it what we are talking about, at the end of the day, is a piece of fiction? (Lerner is not subtle in guiding us here: “I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on . .eventually, I’d call this ‘fiction.’”) Later, this “Ben” confronts the anger of Thomas’s family and colleagues when they discover that he has indeed presented a scene out of memory as a veritable interview transcript. By the end of the novel, without giving away too much, we’ve witnessed the inverse of the scene, in which another character admits to having once actually recorded a conversation with Thomas without telling him. The secretly unrecorded and secretly recorded conversations become most legible when considered as a porous pair, with language and memories weaving between them.

Transcription joins a long list of novelistic attempts to make visible the small penciled decisions that create what we call fiction, and thereby induce a sort of destabilizing vertigo as to the nature of reality. (See Atonement by Ian McEwan, Trust Exercise by Susan Choi, Audition by Katie Kitamura, and many more.) By foregrounding the trappings of the digital age, Lerner heightens this sense of instability, since the virtual world is at once only virtual and yet inescapably bound up in the material world. As one character says of the nurse whose cell phone he called to say goodbye to his gravely ill father, “It’s silly, but I felt connected to her because I’d said those things on her personal phone . . . So strange to think I’d said what I’d said on a device that she’d take home, that she would touch with her hands and face, that she would charge behind her bed.”

As always, Lerner manages to distinguish his take on this trope through his singular command at the line level. Before he was a novelist, he was a poet, and in his work I’ve always been drawn most to his attunement to the rhythm of a sentence. Here, the patterns often echo Lerner’s most recent poetry collection, The Lights, in which he frequently plays with iteration and repetition (from the prose poem “The Voice”:“My father was a / poet: He made a world for me, a toy folk tradition  Or my / father was a fraud: How else had he deceived me?  Or my / father was a comedian: He knew I’d figure it out in the end / and find it funny”) and often lines up disparate subjects next to one another, using parallel forms to describe contrasting content, and then eventually blends these separate ingredients together. Transcription takes this intra-poem trick and expands it to the scale of the novel. It presents consciousness as a collage of push notifications on an iPhone: the absurd, mundane, weighty, and trivial; the father and the mentor; the present and the past; all atop one another, inside one another, inside every moment.

Hannah Gold (assistant editor): I just finished out the school year at Pratt, where I teach literature classes in the architecture school. This semester, the best novel we read was Passing by Nella Larsen. The Harlem Renaissance classic from 1929 follows the reunion of two light-skinned Black women who grew up together and have since chosen drastically different life paths. Irene, the protagonist, is an active member of the Black community in Harlem, though she occasionally passes as white to access segregated spaces of comfort. Clare spends her daily life passing, and is even married to a racist man who believes her to be white. The more Clare insists on spending time with Irene, the more doomed she is to be caught.

I hadn’t read the book since my own high-school days, and it’s easy to see why it has fueled nearly a century of conversations. Larsen doesn’t moralize either woman, but portrays complex decisions around race and survival. Judith Butler is one of many who has read Irene’s obsession with Clare as repressed queer desire. And the tragic ending—no spoilers—is dramatic and ambiguous enough that a student emailed me after 10 pm to weigh in. If you don’t have a classroom of undergrads to think with, I still recommend you get someone to read it with you—at a tight 200 pages, it’s not a big ask. The 2021 film adaptation, starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, offers another way to engage, though the movie certainly has a more unequivocal interpretation of the final scene—I think they’ve tipped the scales too far, but feel free to email me after 10 pm if you have a strong feeling about who’s to blame.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It’s film festival time in New York, and Alicia Scherson’s disquieting film of Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Third Reich will be premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival and doubtless soon elsewhere around the country. Set in a seaside town in Chile, the film follows American board-game journalist Udo Berger as he returns, accompanied by his girlfriend, to a hotel he regularly stayed at during his childhood. He is seeking signs of his own past, most specifically in the person of the hotel owner, Mrs. Else—the object of a childhood crush from which he’s still not recovered. Officially, though, he is there to play and review a strategy board game called The Third Reich. While replaying, and seeking to rewrite, history through the game, Udo also tries to replay and fulfill his own past dreams. Past and present blend, and obsessions take him over as he lives through the final days of the Pinochet dictatorship, the gloom and menace of which still hangs in the air. Not even the iron logic of the rules of the game can set things in order. The Third Reich was not Bolaño’s best novel, but Scherson creates a disturbingly moody piece out of it. 

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): In an era of mealy-mouthed, PR-firm-produced public statements calibrated to offend as few people as possible, there’s something wonderful––almost magical––about hearing “Fuck Keir Starmer / Netanyahu’s bitch and genocide armer / Better off as compost for farmers” in a major album release. Thus runs “Liars Tale,” the lead single off Irish rap trio Kneecap’s high-octane sophomore album, Fenian.

Kneecap has never been shy about controversy, most notably in the wake of performer Mo Chara’s terrorism charge last year for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag thrown onto the stage during a performance. “Carnival” consists of the most direct reply on the album––set in a courtroom, its verses are withering speeches from the defense––but the whole album is shot through with the righteous anger of the wrongly accused. “Calling me sceimhleitheoir [“terrorist” in Gaelic], / Never heard that said before,” Mo Chara raps in “Smugglers and Scholars.”

What emerges throughout is an effortless connection not just between the Irish and Palestinian liberation movements, but between these movements and gangster rap as a form. As with the classics of N.W.A.-era rap, there’s an self-conscious effort to be outrageous (“Soon as you’re outraged, we’ve won,” Mo Chara tells us on “Big Bad Mo”)––yet the ultimate aim here is not to be subversive for its own sake, but to make the experience and rage of the oppressed as obtrusive and unignorable as they should be.

To overlook Fenian’s political content would be to misunderstand it as a project, but to reduce it to agitprop would be to miss an aesthetic achievement. Producer Dan Carey has done an exceptional job in creating the thrumming trap beats that characterize the album (most prominent on “Palestine”), and is at his best when he brings in his rock expertise for the infectious dancey guitar riffs of “An Ra” and the scintillating chord hits of “Cocaine Hill.” Perhaps most unique is the album’s atmospheric opening of “Éire go Deo,” which manages to integrate an ethereal treble pulse and soaring vocal sample with industrial-sounding breakbeats, all washing over speeches about Irish independence.

None of this is even to mention the group’s frequent blend of English and Gaelic––lines in one language will often veer off into turns of phrases in the other. Combined with the spat-out delivery of Mo Chara and co-performer Móglaí Bap, the effect alternates between a sensory assault and a delightful flow as rhymes switch between languages.

Fenian stands out to me as one of this decade’s best rap albums so far. Even if that doesn’t sell you on it, you should at least give it a listen to learn your cúpla focal.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The series DTF St. Louis, now streaming on HBO and Hulu, came and went, getting some merited attention in The New Yorker and The New York Times. It wasn’t one of those series that was given a roundtable discussion the morning after each episode in the aforementioned Times, as were Succession or Game of Thrones. But it was a far more insightful, perspicacious, and—dare I say—relatable show than so many others. DTF St. Louis disguised itself as a murder mystery and a portrait of suburban emptiness and depravity. It had generous doses of sexual shenanigans, affairs, voyeurism, and experimental homosexuality. These trappings cleverly served as misdirection, obscuring its true subject—loneliness.

Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour), a big bear of a man who is a sign language interpreter, becomes friends with a TV weatherman, Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman). In the first episode, Floyd is found dead in the locker room of the local ballfield, next to a magazine open to a picture of a naked man with his face scratched out. The two police officers assigned to the apparent murder are a grizzled white former Chicago cop and a young Black woman from the local special crimes unit, each bringing very different styles and assumptions. At several points, the solution seems to be clear, but as the story unfolds—told in flashbacks out of chronological order—the obvious solutions are cast aside. Clark, unhappy in his marriage, is having an affair with Floyd’s beautiful but dissatisfied wife, played icily by a stunning Linda Cardellini. That’s a clear trail—too clear. The two friends, both experiencing romantic solitude, are on the hookup app “DTF [Down to Fuck] St. Louis.” This provides suspects and leads, all red herrings. There’s an insurance policy taken out for Floyd, his death thus being a source of profit for his wife, but this is another red herring. Floyd’s wife acts suspiciously, for a reason we hope will be explained, but which never is; under interrogation, she constantly asks the police investigators to speak louder. Yet another red herring.

Instead, DTF St Louis takes us to what is at the heart of so many lives: crushing loneliness, a loneliness for which marriage and supposed friendships are no cure. Floyd and Clark are, for a moment, suspected of having been lovers, and even make a move in that direction. In fact, what they have found in each other is what everyone seeks: someone to whom they can say anything and everything, however intimate and ugly. They join the app together and it is only with each other they can discuss it. Their fears—romantic, sexual, and professional—are their subjects. More than in their sexual hunt, more than in the acting out of fantasies that Clark and Floyd’s wife indulge in, and which Clark allows the cuckolded husband to watch while hidden in a closet, it is their time together, their sharing with each other of the self they don’t dare show the world, that makes their relationship essential to them both.

In DTF St. Louis we see a truth seldom discussed in film, TV, or literature: the love two men can feel for each other that is a result of and the producer of openness and that has nothing to do with homoeroticism. It is, instead, a feeling as profound as any two people can feel for one another. It’s the love described by Montaigne in his essay “On Friendship”—“because it was he, because it was me.” As DTF St. Louis shows us, it can be every bit as pure, selfless, and tragic as any romantic love.