Aug

9

2024

Diana Varenik (director of circulation): Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! had been on my reading list for months. But between the ongoing genocide in Gaza and a recent personal loss, I felt I didn’t have it in me to read a book about death. Last week I finally did, and I’m here to tell you what others already have: it’s high-octane, achingly rich, funny and devastating—and more relevant than ever in the face of mounting existential dread and sadness.

The novel follows Cyrus Shams, a twenty-something orphan, poet, and recovering alcoholic who is obsessed with martyrs–a fixation which, ironically, is the only thing keeping him alive. This obsession with martyrs stems from his own tenuous attachment to life, but also represents an attempt to make sense of the death that circumscribes his family’s story: his mother, Roya, killed when her commercial Iran Air flight is shot down by a US Navy Warship; his father, Ali, who stays alive just long enough to see Cyrus out of the house; Uncle Arash, whose service in the Gulf War saw him riding through battlefields nightly outfitted as the “angel of death,” visiting dying soldiers to entice them away from suicide; and Orkideh, an artist whose final installation is to die, publicly, at the Brooklyn Museum.

The pervasiveness of death elicits many different reactions among the characters: it numbs his late father, unravels his uncle’s sanity, and prompts bitter resignation in Orkideh, who reflects that “it seems very American to expect grief to change something…Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.” For Cyrus, the loss manifests as various afflictions–chronic insomnia, bedwetting, and addiction. One of his many coping mechanisms is a game he plays to help himself fall asleep, visualizing scenes between the dead and fictional characters or celebrities. We see his late father sharing a blunt with the poet Rumi, his mother having tea with Lisa Simpson, Orkideh and Donald Trump shopping for original works of classic art at a suburban mall. Indeed, part of the novel’s finesse comes from its unrelenting humor, which is a welcome complement to the crushing storyline.

In the midst of this mass death–casual, senseless, numeric–Martyr! grapples with how we grieve for the casualties of empire, whether they are our own, or whether they are not. Cyrus tries desperately to construct a definition of martyrdom that gives meaning to his mother’s death–the difference between 289 and 290 people killed on Iran Air flight 655, which he understands is “meaningless at the level of empire.” In an interview with AnOther Magazine, Akbar draws the obvious parallel: “When you read that 11,500 children have been murdered in Gaza, that is a pulverisingly large number. But if it was 11,501 or 11,499, I can’t qualitatively or emotionally comprehend that difference in value. Whereas narrative can return that granularity.” To Cyrus, that difference is a whole world, and it might be this insistence on radical specificity that makes Martyr! so forceful.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Jacques Rozier, the subject of a retrospective starting next week at Lincoln Center, was the great cineaste maudit of the French New Wave. Of the same generation of directors as Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette and Chabrol, all quite prolific, he only made five feature films over the course of a 40-year career. Plagued by a variety of problems—from organizational problems to difficulties with financing his films and holding casts together—Rozier produced a movie a decade starting with Adieu Philippine in 1962 and ending with Fifi Martingale in 2001, leaving 22 fallow years until his death. This modest output helped keep him from widespread recognition. But now that his films, which have seldom been shown in the US, have been restored and are being distributed by Janus Films, we can count on them soon showing not just in New York, but at art houses and museums across the country, and eventually through the Criterion Collection.

Rozier’s favored theme was vacation: the instincts it unleashes, its pleasures and longueurs. On holiday, he understood, relationships are made and fall apart, friendships are tested, and good and bad tendencies are exposed as people are freed from the constraints of work life. In his films, young men are constantly trying to pick up young women, and the women know just how to fend off unwelcome advances. (In this regard, Rozier’s oeuvre is very French.) His is a cinema of sunshine and movement; the characters are always on the go, whether in cars or on trains, boats, or motor scooters. Like all the New Wave filmmakers, Rozier claimed the influence of great American films—in his case, screwball comedies, particularly of the Marx Brothers. He was not always successful in these homages, but when he was, as in Adieu Philippine and Maine-Ocean Express (1985), he approached genius.

Adieu Philippine in particular is not to be missed. It’s a joy from its first minute to its last—a movie so bright you almost need sunglasses to watch it, in which the non-professional cast brilliantly plays exactly what they are: beautiful young people looking to enjoy themselves. The film takes place at the height of the Algerian War, and the protagonist’s imminent call-up to the army hangs over him, but ultimately nothing can dim the sun in this magnificent film. While this is his best, all of the features are worth seeing, with the exception of Fifi Martingale, which was never released; Rozier said this was because the distributor went bust, yet one wonders if it wasn’t because the film is unwatchable. The less said about it the better. In addition to the main attractions, I also recommend the short film program, which includes Blue Jeans (1958)—made before Adieu Philippine and sharing much of the same spirit—and two excellent brief documentaries ’60 about the shooting of his friend Godard’s Contempt (1963), focusing on the phenomenon of Brigitte Bardot.

Rozier was the last of the great New Wave directors to die, surviving Godard by a year. If Godard made too many films, Rozier didn’t make enough. The loss was his, but also ours.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I keep imagining the moment when the idea occurred to the creators of the Jellicle Ball, a show at Manhattan’s Perelman Arts Center recreating queer ballroom culture a la Paris Is Burning, performed to the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats: Wait . . . the Jellicle BALL . . . where they walk the . . . CAT-walk? We are going to make SO. MUCH. MONEY! Honestly, fair enough. Clever puns and double entendres abound in the show—just extended for the third time—which really rewards those familiar with both 1980s underground ball culture and the blockbuster Broadway musical from the same era. (Embarrassingly, my childhood love of musicals means I’m way more acquainted with the latter than the former, but whatever I forgot from Paris Is Burning, I’ve picked up in pop form from RuPaul’s Drag Race.)

Lloyd Webber famously resisted any deeper meaning for his show (“It’s about cats, Hal,” he famously said to a partner asking about the subtext), and that’s all well and good, but Jellicle Ball really benefits from the layers. You can tell that the all-Black and -Latinx cast is a mix of musical theater kids and people from the ball scene, and they’ve also made special effort to bring in some ball elders like Junior LaBeija, playing Gus the Theatre Cat, and DJ Capital Kaos, who unfortunately doesn’t do much; he remixed all the music and then Lloyd Webber said no—they had to do it faithfully or no dice.

It really shouldn’t work with the music being what it is—can you really duckwalk to “Magical Mister Mistoffelees”? Turns out you . . . can?! What makes it work is the recharacterization of the beloved Cats characters: McCavity is a fabulous couture thief, the Rum Tum Tugger serves Pretty Boy Realness, Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer are outer borough brats, Grizabella the Glamor Cat is an old Face Queen and house Mother fallen on hard times, and the Magical Mister Mistoffelees is a show-stopping supermodel ball queen. Does it feel sort of weird pretending to be at a ball—that is, mustering a big response to catwalk interactions that have been meticulously planned in advance amid an audience half composed of old Midwestern white people? Yes. And I admittedly wasn’t in the mood walking into the theater to hoot and stand and clap on cue. All that said, I’m glad I saw it. I actually felt sort of moved when the cast recites the “The Naming of Cats” (recall that all of the lyrics are T.S. Eliot poems)—about each cat’s secret, extravagant name, known to themself if not to their human companions—in this queer context. Perhaps Eliot really was a queen.

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Weekly Parshah Commentary

Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.

As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.

Parshat Devarim

Devarim, the first parshah of the final book of the Torah, begins with Moses recounting the Israelites’ itinerary on their journey from Egypt to the Promised Land: “Through the wilderness, in the Arabah near Suph, between Paran and Tophel, Laban, Hazeroth, and Di-zahav, it is eleven days from Horeb to Kadesh-barnea by the Mount Seir route.” While this line may seem to be an innocuous travelogue, the medieval commentator Rashi sees it as a reproachful reminder of each location where the Israelites had sinned. In this reading, every name Moses mentions is both a place and an allusion to a particular transgression committed there. For example, Rashi interprets “Di-zahav” to mean “too much gold”—a fusion of the Hebrew words “dai” (“sufficient”) and “zahav” (“gold”)—and takes it as a reference to the sin of the Golden Calf, which, he suggests, the Israelites built out of the surplus gold they carried with them on their flight from Egypt.

While Rashi was not the first to interpret “Di-zahav” as an allusion to the Golden Calf, some of his predecessors understood Moses’s intentions quite differently. In a daring midrash, a group of Talmudic sages imagines him blaming not the people who crafted and worshiped the Golden Calf, but rather God: “Moses said the following before the Holy One: ‘Master of the Universe, it was the gold and silver that you lavished upon Israel until they said ʻenoughʼ [‘dai’] that caused Israel to make the Golden Calf.’” In this rabbinic retelling, it was not the Israelites’ sinfulness that caused them to make the idol, but rather the gold and silver that they had amassed, the overabundance of material wealth with which God had inundated them. In a society overwhelmed by excessive affluence, the rabbis suggest, people will inevitably worship the false god of their own treasure; the fault for this lies not with the idol worshippers, who in different conditions could have been pious, but with whoever provided that treasure to them. Ultimately, the implication of the rabbis’ reading is that the economic context in which a person lives shapes their choices profoundly. The guilt for their crimes is thus, at least in part, the responsibility of the system itself and of those who uphold it.

Perhaps surprisingly, in the rabbis’ telling, God, rather than becoming defensive or insisting on the Israelites’ guilt, recognizes the truth of Moses’s condemnation. The Talmud cites a passage in Hosea, “I lavished silver on her and gold—which they used for Baal,” as God’s admission of culpability for the Golden Calf. In this, the Talmud upends the fatalism that its economic determinism might seem to imply. If Moses’s outspoken moral clarity can convince God to accept responsibility, perhaps the kind of courageous dissent he models can help chart a way out of this entire system, however impossible it may seem.

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.