Mar

7

2025

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): For those of us who live under a rock, awards season is the one time a year when new music and movies make their way to us, often via insistent recommendations by family and friends. This year, I’m grateful to this form of compulsory cultural education for bringing me the music of Chappell Roan. All I previously knew of Roan was that she had refused to endorse Kamala Harris over Palestine, and had responded to a Biden White House invitation to perform for Pride month with a memorably artistic “fuck you.” Turns out she’s got more than just good politics: This girl has got pipes. Roan’s now-soulful, now-fluttering vocals are the heart of her album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, which I devoured in one sitting last weekend.

The album is a spectrum from bop (“Femininomenon,” “HOT TO GO!” “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl”) and ballad (“Coffee,” “California,” “Kaleidescope”), but the best stuff lies somewhere in the middle. This includes the irresistible “Pink Pony Club,” a queer anthem that starts with a Tennessee-to-Santa Monica bildungsroman and ends with “I…’m gonna keep on dancing at the Pink Pony Club” playing in a loop in your head for days to come. Other mid-spectrum gems include “Red Wine Supernova,” a glittering dance number about early love with a pre-chorus so catchy that a lesser singer would have stopped right there; “Picture You,” a song whose soft, almost-growled verses slide up to a soaring refrain that shows off the storytelling power of Roan’s vocal creaks; and “Casual,” a low-fi, Avril Lavigne-esque production that, together with Roan’s relatively-restrained vocals, allows her absurdly diaristic lyrics to take center stage.

And what lyrics they are. These are not your mom’s ballads, nor the bops from gym class. “Red Wine Supernova” opens mid-scene with “her canine teeth in the side of my neck”; “Picture You” masquerades as a slow-dance track but is actually the most aching song ever written about masturbation; and “Casual” features a chorus so R-rated that parents are substituting the lyric “green beans on the passenger seat and you’re freaking me out” to be able to listen to it with their kids. I get it; you do what you need to do to listen to great music, and Midwest Princess is certainly that—emotionally hefty, vocally beguiling, gay as all hell, and designed to make you feel both young, and how much younger you could still be.

Nathan Goldman (senior editor): It wasn’t until I was reading an article about British composer Daniel Blumberg’s Oscar win for his soundtrack for The Brutalist that I realized I know his work in a totally different genre. Before he turned his attention to the more orchestral, avant-garde music for which he’s now famous, Blumberg spent a few years as the guitarist and singer for an indie rock band called Yuck. The news of his victory sent me back to their self-titled 2011 album—the only one featuring Blumberg, who departed in 2013—which I loved then but hadn’t touched in at least a decade. As critics noted at the time of its release, there’s nothing sonically groundbreaking or even particularly adventurous about Yuck, which wears its influences (namely, the fuzzy and melodic alt rock of the ‘80s and ‘90s) on its sleeve. I wasn’t sure how well its aesthetic would age, especially with another 14 years of artists working in that tradition, wearing out its tricks.

As it turns out, Yuck sounds nearly as fresh and vital today as the original progenitors of that style, while putting most other inheritors to shame. This is not to say that it’s not nakedly derivative; the emulation is just particularly exquisite. Barn-burning opener “Get Away” summons a squall as sublime as Dinosaur Jr.’s; “Operation” rides a riff as rousingly chaotic and irresistibly propulsive as Sonic Youth’s; “Stutter,” “Suck,” and “Shook Down” achieve the laconic loveliness of Pavement’s last record. Where other followers of those artists often feel like rote imitators, Yuck deploys these familiar moves like an old language in which they’re entirely immersed, somehow making it their own even as they decline to innovate. I’ve had the record on loop all week; if your tastes are anything like mine, you’ll find its raucous beauty and nostalgic glow the perfect companion to the first glimmers of spring.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In literature and film, baseball has long been associated with sentimentality, trading on its leisurely pace, its bucolic playing field, the mythology of its rural roots. (Never mind that, as Kevin Baker’s book The New York Game demonstrated, it was the city of all cities, New York, that was the real cradle of the national pastime.) Carson Lund’s delightful new film, Eephus—named after a difficult-to-hit pitch in which the ball is lobbed in a high arc to confuse the batter’s timing—at first leads us to expect a rerun of the pinnacle of baseball romanticization, Field of Dreams. The entire film takes place on a playing field in a quiet Massachusetts town: On a pleasant October day, two teams of local amateurs are facing off in Soldiers Field, a rundown stadium that’s about to be torn down to allow for the construction of a school. The film opens with a local old codger, opening his folding chair, setting up a folding table and taking out his scorebook. It’s all a perfect setup for schlock sentimentality.

But Lund isn’t interested in the familiar hooey about baseball representing a purer, bucolic America—or rather, he is to the extent that he uses it to betray our expectations. He does so with humor, affection, and enormous insight into the place the sport—and more broadly, competition and failure—play in our lives. The film is suffused with a charming bemusement at its characters. Indeed, the players are a slovenly lot. They’re out of shape, dressed in mismatched uniforms, and spend the game drinking; one smokes a cigarette, which he’s acquired by sending a child spectator to go out and get him “some smokes.” They’re hardly serious sportsmen. The players on the opposing teams converse while they’re on base, and an older teammate even offers a younger one a job in the middle of the game. Yet Eephus is also a tribute to the characters’ profound dedication to what they come to realize is an absurd endeavor: playing ball.

This commitment comes through clearly after the game is cut short by the ump, who decides to shut it down due to darkness when the score is still tied. But there are no ties in baseball, and a game can hypothetically carry on forever. (Appropriately, the pitcher who throws the titular eephus describes it as a move that freezes time, as the lobbed ball seems to hover in the air.) And so, the players press on without an ump, calling balls, strikes, and outs by the honor system, backed by the lone fan in the stands. The game drags on meaninglessly, as even the players admit, into the dark of night, the ball invisible to all. After all, this is the last game at Soldiers Field, and they must press on. But why? The word “pointless” comes up over and over. And when the game is finally decided, the players simply walk away, ignoring the celebratory fireworks, having realized they’ve pursued a goal to its end—that is, to no end.

In this week’s parshah, Tetzaveh, God instructs Moses in the Tabernacle’s priestly rituals, including intricate descriptions of the priests’ clothing and detailed explanations of various forms of animal sacrifice. After the Israelites completed their 40 years of wandering and entered the Land of Israel, the laws prescribed in Tetzaveh continued to be observed in the Temple in Jerusalem. But following the destruction of both the First and Second Temples, in 586 BCE by the Babylonians and 70 CE by the Romans, the laws and rites set out in this parshah ceased to be operable—with one exception. The parshah opens with the commandment to establish a “ner tamid,” or “eternal light,” which “Aaron and his sons shall set up in the Tent of Meeting, to burn from evening to morning before the Lord.” God explicitly states that the obligation to keep this light burning is not only in effect in the Tabernacle but “shall be a due from the Israelites for all time, throughout the ages.” In keeping with this injunction, synagogues the world over still keep a ner tamid perpetually lit above the ark.

Why is the eternal light different from every other ritual in this parshah, such that it alone should be binding “for all time”? Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, the 19th-century mystical commentator known as the Sefat Emet, answers this question by way of metaphor, reinterpreting the eternal light in order to offer a comprehensive understanding of Jewish observance. The Sefat Emet cites a classical midrash about the ner tamid, which plays off of two separate verses from Proverbs: “The human soul is a candle of God” and “a commandment is a candle.” The midrash places these two verses alongside each other, using a kind of spiritual transitive property to equate the human soul with commandments, because both are likened to divine flames. Following this logic, the midrash states that “anyone who fulfills a mitzvah, it is as though they kindle a lamp before God, and thereby sustain their soul.” The eternal light that we are commanded to maintain is, according to the Sefat Emet’s extension of this interpretation, our own spiritual life. We must ensure that this inner vitality is never extinguished, an objective that can be guaranteed through the regular performance of mitzvot, which keeps the flame of our soul burning.

But mitzvot, for the Sefat Emet, are not merely laws or rituals we are obligated to observe. He reinterprets the Hebrew name of this parshah, Tetzaveh—literally “you shall command”—as “you shall become commandments.” Through this reading, the Sefat Emet urges us not just to practice mitzvot but to transform our lives into them. In this, the Sefat Emet invokes a broader understanding of mitzvot than the standard definition of “commandments.” Drawing on a rich tradition, including the 16th-century kabbalist Moshe Chaim Luzzatto’s understanding of mitzvot as voluntary expressions of love and the early Hasidic view of mitzvot as means of connection with God, the Sefat Emet sees mitzvot not as particular activities or obligations, but as expressions of a comprehensive relational attitude toward the world and toward divinity. In a life shaped by this attitude, every action becomes a possible site for embodying the compassionate divine presence. Each intentionally caring act, however seemingly mundane, thus takes on the sacred status of a mitzvah.

The Torah’s description of the ner tamid, then, does not just materially obligate us to maintain a light in our places of worship. It also obligates us, in the Sefat Emet’s understanding, to perpetually strive to fashion ourselves into sacred vessels of divinity. Rather than understanding mitzvot from a legalistic perspective—as discrete, compulsory behaviors prescribed by the Torah—the Sefat Emet takes a notably expansive view, extending the category of mitzvot to include all those actions that nourish us spiritually and radiate the divine presence outward. This, he explains, is the significance of the Hebrew word ”tamid,” or “eternal”: The ner tamid, and the theology of Jewish commandedness it represents, is eternal not just because it is incumbent on us for all time, but because it encompasses every moment and every action of our lives.

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