Licorice Pizza (2021)

The director, who is nominated for an Academy Award for this film, returns to the San Fernando Valley of his youth. The film is set in the 1970's and begins on an upbeat note, with a traveling shot following Alana down a line of high school students waiting to have their yearbook photographs taken, offering a mirror for last-minute primping. She catches the eye of 15-year-old Gary, played by Cooper Hoffman, who approaches her with an unnerving mix of puppyish adoration and glib confidence. The fact that she’s 25 has zero bearing on his resolve: He invites her to join him that evening at his regular place, the famous Valley watering hole Tail o’ the Cock. He is preternaturally mature, and she, in contrast, is stuck in a dead end job with no future and no idea of what she wants to do and who she wants to be. In a way, she is younger than him in all aspects except age. She also does not have a creepy predatory bent to her, and so there is none of that in their relationship, which is at heart romantic, but not terribly sexual. There are a lot of screwball comedy moments and Alana is accompanied on screen by her realife sisters and parents, all of which pays off beautifully in a hilarious, Friday-night shabbat dinner scene. The cherry on top is the cameo roles that an unrecognizable Bradley Cooper, and the quite familiar Sean Penn play that adds texture to this surprisingly sweet story.

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

The only other book I have read by this author is A Gentleman in Moscow. It is a book that revolves around similar themes as his last--right and wrong, good and bad, and how to decide which is which. While the former is a claustrophobic book set in post Russian Revolution Moscow with an aristocrat under lockdown in a luxury hotel and might be seen to channel Tolstoy, this one has shades of Steinbeck with a road trip across America on the newly christened Lincoln Highway. The highway stretches from Time Square in New York City all the way to San Francisco and opened up the minds of Americans to adventure. My grandparents drove their brand new Cadillac on this route about the same time as this. It is 1954, and 18-year-old Emmett Watson has just finished a spell at the Kansas work farm where he was sent after accidentally killing a bully. His father has died and left a mass of debt, and his little brother, Billy, is keen for the two of them to head to California in search of their mother, who walked out eight years ago. But there’s a problem-- Emmett’s car has been boosted by a couple of boys, Duchess and Woolly, on the run from the law. As you might imagine, incarceration wasn't good for any of them. They are driving the car to New York City to raid Woolly’s trust fund and settle a few scores. Duchess, though not unlikable, is untrustworthy. He leads everyone astray and they struggle in their own ways to keep up and not get burned.

Ascension (2021)

This film is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary in a field that has a lot of great movies--which is typical, of course. It is set in modern China, and is an unsettling look at their facotry-based economy. it was originally envisioned as three short documentaries, one for production, one for consumption, and the last one for the waste, but has been melded into one movie with all three components, without much in the way of narration, so the viewer is left to figure it out by watching. There is a Koyaanisquatsi-esque experience that in the end is both overwhelming and mesmerizing. The take home message for me is that China is a nation of strivers, with hearts set on achieving what might be called the new Chinese Dream: wealth and success, in the world’s second largest economy. The rest of us need to take notice.

The End of Bias: A Beginning by Jessica Nordell

The subtitle is The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias. The author has a bit of an uphill battle here and I think she does a successful job. Bias is often things we can more easily identify in others than in ourselves, and her mission here is to get us to see it in ourselves, and then offers ways to identify it and to combat it. I found myself cruising through the first third of the book feeling like what she was presenting was information that I was familiar with, but by the second third she had my attention, that there were things that I could be doing better, and by the end I found myself taking the lessons learned here and applying them to the interactions I was part of or witnessed at work, and already, just one week after finishing the book, I pointed expressed bias out to a co-worker. The thing I took away here was two-fold, one is the seeing of the bias, which is for me an easier step, and the second is to make it transparent to others in a way that doesn't hurt or harm others, and that piece will take more work--but it is work worth doing.

tick, tick, Boom (2021)

This is part musical and part docudrama about making a musical. It is based on an autobiographical one-man show of the same name by Jonathan Larson, the astonishingly talented writer/composer of the fabulously successful Broadway show “Rent”. He is played by Andrew Garfield, an amazingly versatile actor in his own right. It is also a tribute, and an expression of gratitude, for the almost baton-like passage of support from those who Larson describes as a vanishing species, the creators of musical theater. Larson’s thanks include the foremost musical theater artist of the 20th century, Stephen Sondheim, an early mentor. One review that I read stated that Sondheim was passing along the help he received from another Broadway titan, Oscar Hammerstein. The movie is also a thanks to Larson from director Lin-Manuel Miranda, who might be seen as his successor. Miranda, who starred as Larson in a theatrical performance of this play, directs the film with a deep understanding of the passion, struggle, and ebullience of an artist committed to an art form that requires a lot of money and a lot of other people to be brought to life. This film is explicitly theatrical, going back and forth between Larson’s story and his one-man show telling the story, which tragically ended with his preventable death right before his Broadway debut.

Red Comet by Heather Clark

Wow. The subtitle is The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath did not live an unexamined life, but the author of this so-heavy-you-can-barely-lift-it biography had access to materials from both the Plath and the Hughes family, and meticulously goes over every square inch of the poet's life. She was a gifted poet and a talented editor who was hampered by the time she lived in and the man that she married. The tipping point for her seems to have been her husband becoming publicly involved with another woman, and so he bore the brunt of the outcry when she killed herself--nothing in this tome lifts the blame off his shoulders. Plath had either major depression or possibly bipolar disorder, and tragically, had she lived another decade she would have had treatment options that were far more advanced than what was available in the 1950's and 60's, so it is all just a terrible shame. Her life and her work highlight the misogyny of her time, the limitations that placed on her in terms of options, and just how far psychiatry and the treatment of mental illness has come. No longer can you be locked up for not wanting to be a wife and a mother.

Lunana: A Yak In The Classroom (2021)

There is so much to love about this movie from Bhutan, nominated in the Best International Film caategory for the Oscars this year. It is filmed in Lunana, which really is the eight day journey on foot that is depicted in the movie and spectacularly beautiful. The actors are largely cast by the fact that they live there than by their having trained as actors. One review I read said that the kids who are in it had never seen a camera before the filming. The story goes like this. Ugyen is a selfish and not impressively talented singer young man who is 4 years into a 5 year government teaching obligation. He is phoning it in, making no effort to disguise his lack of engagement, so his supervisor decides to punish him, to send him to the most remote school in Bhutan for his final year. Upon his arrival he is desperate to go home, but the longer he stays, the more he fits in and the villagers actually get him. He gives to them and they give back. There are a few twists but it is largely a coming of age story with a heaping dollop of cultural context. Spctacularly good.

The Book of Form & Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

Benny Oh is still a boy when his father Kenji, a Korean-American jazz musician at the time a little the worse for wear from drink, is run over by a chicken truck in an alley behind their house on the edge of Chinatown. Benny and his mother Anabelle both break down in very different ways. Benny ends up spinnning quite publicly out of control, gets hospitalized, hears voices, and seeks refuge within himself. Anabelle’s crisis is more of a private one. SHe too is paralyzed by grief for her dead husband and fear of losing her job, Benny, and her home. Her hoarding things holds a lot of meanings, and while the novel maybe tries to put too many together at once, with too many outside voices, there is a lot of truth about the craziness that gief induces to be learned from it.

Ice Cream Sandwiches

My husband made these with our grandchildren in mind. It is on the Seriuous Wats website, but is also in Stella Park's cookbook of iconic American desserts, Bravetart. These are intense! 4 ounces unsalted butter, room temperature 5 ounces sugar 2 ounces brown sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 1/8 teaspoon baking soda 1 1/2 teaspoons instant espresso powder 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 4 egg yolks 5 1/4 ounces all purpose flour, sifted (use rice flour for gluten free) 4 ounces cocoa powder, sifted 6 ounces hot coffee 2 quarts vanilla ice cream, store bought or homemade Optional: a few tablespoons of neutral oil like safflower or coconut Directions Make the chocolate wafers: Preheat oven to 350° and line 2 sheet pans with parchment paper. With a hand or stand mixer, cream together butter, sugars, salt, baking soda, powder, espresso, and vanilla on medium speed. Mix for about two minutes, just until combined. Then (with the machine still running) add in the yolks, one at a time. During this process, shut off the mixer and scrape the bowl down with a rubber spatula once or twice. Reduce mixing speed to low and dump in the flour and cocoa all at once. Mix until the dry ingredients have fully incorporated. With the mixer still running on low, drizzle in the hot coffee a little at a time. About halfway through, stop the mixer and scrape the bowl down. Continue drizzling in the coffee to transform the dough into a paste. In the end, it should have a smooth cake-batter like consistency. If you notice any lumps, crank up the mixer speed to medium and beat until the lumps have disappeared. If a few remain, don't worry; they'll bake out. Divide the batter evenly between the two sheet pans (roughly 15 ounces each). Use an offset spatula or the back of a spoon to spread the batter into a thin layer; you don't need the batter to reach to the very corners, it only needs to cover a 10" by 14" area. Rap the sheet pans against the counter to help level the batter. Bake for about 7-10 minutes, or until the cookie-sheets have puffed up and become firm to the touch. Cool thoroughly. For greatest ease of handling, refrigerate or freeze the wafers before proceeding. If you're quite careful, it's not necessary, but it does make the process easier. Prepare the wafers: Line a 9" x 13" brownie pan with parchment paper. The paper should overhang the long sides by 4 inches or so. Use a knife to cut the two cooled chocolate wafers into 9 x 13" rectangles. Set aside the excess scraps. Fit one of these giant wafers, shiny side down, into the bottom of the parchment lined brownie pan. Once you've fitted it in, peel off the parchment paper stuck to the bottom. If the wafer cracks or breaks in any place, use some of the trimmings to patch up the hole. The wafers will meld together nicely just by pressing two pieces together firmly. Store the pan and remaining chocolate wafer in the freezer until needed. Fill the ice cream sandwich: If you're opting for homemade ice cream, you will want to use it immediately after it's finished churning in your ice cream maker. If you're using store bought, store it in the refrigerator for 30 minutes or until it has become soft and spreadable. In either case, spread the ice cream into the brownie pan, atop the first chocolate layer. Use a spoon or offset spatula to push the ice cream up into the corners of the pan, and to distribute it evenly. Invert the remaining frozen chocolate wafer onto a cutting board. Peel of the parchment paper and then place it shiny side up on top of the ice cream. Cover the wafer with a piece of parchment or plastic wrap, then use your hands to gently press the top wafer down and seal it against the ice cream. If you notice there are any thin or uneven places, gently push on the chocolate wafer to redistribute the ice cream below. Return the pan to the freezer and allow it to freeze for at least 12 hours before proceeding. Make your own waxed foil: Of course, you don't have to make wrappers. But it's fun and easy. Simply take a sheet of tin foil, shiny side up, and use a pastry brush or paper towel to coat it lightly with oil. Then press a sheet of parchment paper against the oiled surface of the foil. Use your fingers to smooth the parchment down, pressing out any air bubbles. If you have a bench scraper, that's also a good tool for removing air bubbles. Cut the newly formed wax/foil into 7" squares with scissors or an xacto knife. Repeat until you have 12 squares altogether. Set aside until needed. Cut the ice cream sandwiches: Pull the brownie pan from the freezer. Run a knife around the edges to loosen, then take hold of the overhanging parchment and lift the whole thing out. It may take a bit of tugging on one side, then the other. Transfer this giant ice cream sandwich to a cutting board. Use a large chef's knife to cut it into 12 pieces. It's easiest to first cut it into quarters, then to cut each quarter into three pieces. Wipe your knife clean with a hot, wet towel between slices for the cleanest cut. Store the sandwiches in an airtight container or, to make the most out of your ice cream sandwich nostalgia, wrap each in the prepared foil. Wrap the ice cream sandwiches: Remove half of the ice cream sandwiches from the freezer. Place each on the center of the foil or parchment square. Wrap much like you would a Christmas present: fold the long sides to the middle. Then at each edge, fold the short sides to the middle. Then fold the long sides. The foil will crease and stay in place without tape. Return to the freezer, and repeat with the other half.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

This book had a lot of critical acclaim, including being on the Booker International book shortlist and amongst the New York Times best books of 2021, but it is an oddity, somewhere between a journal review article and a musing on the the state of the universe. I think the title refers to the uncertainty that Einstein brought to the table in the early 20th century and then Heisenberg cemented with the uncertainty principle, which Einstein at first refused to believe was possibly correct and then came to at least agree he couldn't find evidence that it wasn't correct. Why? Well, while god may not play dice with the world, as Albert Einstein famously declared, the author might retort: perhaps not – but the devil does. In fact, Einstein himself had a lifelong niggle of doubt about mathematics, the discipline that we suppose keeps the Lord away from the gaming tables. How is it, he wondered, that an intellectual tool invented by humans can comprehend, account for and even manipulate so much of objective reality? That the physical world should be amenable to something we made up seemed to him suspect. THe book fairly clearly and very patiently takes the reader through the amazing physical science of the last 100 plus years, and then leaves us to contemplate where in fact that leaves us. It is an unsettling and yet enjoyable read.

House of Gucci (2021)

OMG, so many unlikable people. Then again, this is Ridley Scott, not a man to shy away from unpleasant people and it is a docudrama, so one needs to adhere, more or less, to what is known about the events of the day. The end result is a sweeping yet wildly imbalanced rendering of the celebrated Gucci fashion empire’s scandalous history, full of backstabbing, betrayal, greed, and even murder. While the movie is not the sum of its parts, there is a lot to celebrate here. The story itself is a spicy enough foundation that comes with sufficient amounts of flamboyance, one that sees Lady Gaga's charactger convert herself into an ambitiously avaricious character who consumes all those around her and spits them out. It also features an unrecognizable Jared Leto dialing yet another transformative role up to eleven, and contains plenty of solid performances portraying the troubled business that stems from what has become a troubled family. The Italian accents are insufferable (we were accidentally watching the dubbed Italian voice track and it was definitely an improvement) but all else is mostly well played acting of unlikable people.

Leave The World Behind by Rumaan Alam

This is a kinder gentler disaster story than The Road, but while less bleak and creepy, the story is no less sobering. Amanda and Clay take their two teenage children away to a remote Long Island holiday house where they are able to play at ownership of a house that they cannot afford in real life. It is the allure that Airbnb allows us all to play at for a weekend or so at a time. They are comfortable, in love, delighted by their children and enjoying themselves until one night, when there’s a knock on the door. A black couple – GH (George) Washington and his wife, Ruth, ask to come in. They are the owners of the house, even though Amanda thinks to herself that it didn’t seem “like the sort of house where black people lived”. There are strong echoes of Jordan Peele’s Get Out as the reader is asked to join Amanda and Clay in ascertaining how threatening this couple are. So while we contemplate what the end-of-the-world event has just occurred, we are also grappling with their, and also our, preconceived ideas about race, class, and how to form alliances.

The Worst Person In The World (2021)

I have to say that I am not 100% sure that I even vaguely get this movie, which I would characterize as a messy but likely more accurate than most depiction of a coming of age movie. The thing that I think is both of key importance, and also the thing that I get the least is that it is about millenials. They were born into a world that doesn't demand much of them early on, but somehow that lack of pressure feels like part of the problem. In days gone by, one had to get the job, the spouse, the kids, and get on with it. Young people now are caught in this strange purgatory between child and adult. Enter Julie, a fickle Norwegian who has never stayed committed to one thing in her entire life. A teenaged overachiever, she dabbled in medicine before she discovered that she was more interested in matters of the soul than the body. So, she cuts and dyes her hair, dumps her med school lover and pivots to psychology pursuits before burning that all down too, shifting once again—this time to photography. But unsurprisingly, photography manages to bore Julie as well, and soon enough she’s off to the next new thing, next new hairstyle, next new guy iand never quite settling in to who and what she wants to be. Two events, back to back, rock her world enough that she is jolted into moving forward. It is a puzzling and yet enjoyable movie with a couple of Oscar nominations to its credit.

In Every Mirror She's Black by Lola Akinmade Akerstrom

This is a fairly intense book about three Black women in search of a better life end up in Sweden. Linking all three is a wealthy, enigmatic, and damaged man, Jonny. Kemi Adeyemi, 34, a Nigerian American successful professional, is headhunted by Jonny’s Stockholm PR firm. Muna Saheed, a 20-year-old janitor at Jonny’s firm, fled from Somalia two years earlier, leaving behind her family and the man she was in love with. And lastly there is Brittany, a black American flight attendant that falls hard for her and woos her to be his wife. So all three of them are exposed to racial prejudice and profiling, but they are all three immigrants to Sweden, none of them adjusting and not one of them accepted. The other thing that they share is that they are objectified sexually and not a one of them escapes. They are various levels of undone by the cascading experiences that they face. It is a many layered and rich portrayal of making it when you have black skin in a predominantly white country.

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

This author is a wonder. First of all, she has produced two amazing yet very different novels in two years. Next, both of them feature her in some way within them. Best of all, this is set within real time in Minnesota, so it has both the pandemic and George Floyd. Finally, we should strive to suport independent bookstores, because they are labors of love for those who work in them and at them. This is a ghost story set within a greater story. The narrator, Tookie, is a convicted body snatcher with a hard-won appreciation for the words used to build stories. She opens the novel by announcing, “While in prison, I received a dictionary.” She immediately looked up the word “sentence” because, she notes, “I had received an impossible sentence of sixty years from the lips of a judge who believed in an afterlife.” This very subtle but real reminder that brown and black people do not get a fair shake from the law. Tookie gets a break, after reading every book in the prison library, an is released from prison decades earlier than she’d feared. Because she’d spent so long dreaming of a wider selection than the prison’s limited book collection, she decides to look for a job in a bookstore. Only one employer responds to her résumé: “a modest little place” that specializes in Native American literature and is owned by a novelist named Louise. We see the world through Tookie's eyes and in the very end, there is an extensive reading list for the rest of us to work on, courtesy of Tookie.

In The Same Breath (2021)

The filmmaker, Nanfu Wang, is also the narrator of this film, which has been shortlisted for the Oscars for Best Documentary. This is her second appearance on this list, with her last documentary, One Child, making a similar appearance. This fim explores =f how political narratives and public health collided in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in both China and in the United States, and and that these are still happening in both countries in different ways. The film opens with the denial of the seriousness of the novel virus in China, even arresting those who raised the alarm early on, then with incredible access within China, she shows security footage of the sick and ailing coming in to a private clinic near the wet market where it is beleived that it all started going back as fat as November, 2019, and then how the whole thing played out in Wuhan. The contrast between a totalitarian dictatorship versus a democracy doesn't leave one feeling that either served its people well, and marveling at the filmaker's access to material from China in order to tell that half of the story is even handed. Her juxtaposition of censorship afflicting Chinese citizens from speaking out—from telling the truth to the rest of the world—against the ways freedom of speech in America slowed the proper response to the virus, is just as balanced.

The Other Black Girl by Zakyia Dalila Harris

This has both the expected and the unexpected wrapped into it. In the beginning Nella is the sole black woman at her prestigious publishing house. She is unsurprisingly not just on the diversity committee, but also the shaker and mover on that committee, the acknowledged expert based almost solely on her race. When Hazel McCall, another Black girl, shows up to work at the publisher, the drama is set into motion. Nella is thrilled and eager for the friendship and comradery, however it soon becomes clear that Hazel is not focused on new friendships. Instead, she strives for dominance in the workplace and seems to be edging Nella out and alienating her from her boss and her colleagues, and what plays out is somewhere between fantasy and thriller. The story starts out as a simple, charming story about a young Black woman working at a prestigious publishing house and turns into something altogether different and unexpected.

Procession (2021)

This is an incredibly powerful documentary around the subject of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. Even if you feel like you know what there is to know about that, the window into the long term effects on the children who were abused is very compellingly demonstrated in a way that we can all identify with and understand, and all the more damning of the church for covering it up and allowing it to continue. The filmmaker decided to make this film after witnessing a televised 2018 press conference in which three middle-aged Kansas City-area survivors of sexual abuse by priests stated their intention to name 230 priests in the area who had participated in an organized child sex trafficking ring operating within the Catholic Church, which had a long record (not just in Kansas City) of enabling, ignoring, or barely disciplining abusers on their payroll. He contacted the men's lawyer, Rebecca Randles, and hooked them up with Monica Phinne, a "drama therapist" who teaches trauma survivors how to use theater to transform feelings of victimization into empowerment. The movie is a record of the process each went through to confront their traumas, and film re-enactments of them.

Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney

Oh dear, this was massively underwhelming, a meandering and unfiltered look at several inter-related characters who seem to have little to offer, either to each other or to the reader. Maybe I just didn't get it. If this is the new 'un-novel', then I am going to take a pass on reading them. I have loved this author's work in the past, so this is particularly disappointing. Also not unique, in that I have read several books in the past year that have the potential to be self-referential, but in a way that, for me, detracts from the novel. I found this not just neutral, but actually annoying. I couldn't decide whether to power through it or put it aside and come back later, and the advice I got from those who I knew who had read it before me was that letting it simmer wouldn't improve it for me.

King Richard (2021)

OMG Will Smith. He really does seem to take on the mantle of Richard Williams and never once sluffs it off the whole length of this docudrama. It is about is half sports movie, half biopic and almost always a bit edgy. As such, it hits the sweet spots and sour notes of both genres. Depending on your perspective, this is either an invitation or a warning to parents of talented youngster who lack means and money. The story of how the preternaturally talented tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams came to be at the top of the game in tennis. They grew up in Compton, a town synonymous with poverty and rap, but not athletic prowess. The title itself on exactly how complicated the characterization of its subject will be, which is not altogether likable. Richard Williams does some infuriating things here, but the movie never once indicates he was ever wrong. This film repeatedly comes at you from unexpectedly skewed angles and is ultimately worth watching.

Castles in the Perigord

Happy New Year! It is the Spring Festival, the Year of the Tiger, and there is a lot to celebrate! Today is my anniversary and I am reflecting not just on this last trip I took with my spouse, but also the past and future trips we have made and have yet to make. I am hoping that I will have a trip in 2022 that rivals the trip I had to the Perigord in 2021. In order to fascilitate that wish, I did manage to get my passport renewed and given that it is a ten year one, am hoping to fill it up with stamps and visas.

I am not sure why there are so many castles in the Perigord--there are at least hundreds and maybe more, but it is easy for me to understand that if in fact I were to build a castle why I might want it there. The towns are managable sized, the food is exceptional, the surroundings are beautiful, and like much of the country, good wine can be grown there as well. Perfect!

May we all be able to travel this year, to enjoy what other countries and cultures have to offer, and while I am sure that masks, proof of vaccination, and possible more shots will remain a reality, none of that impaired my enjoyment of this trip, and while I have realized that this is all here to stay it doesn't mean we can't enjoy the things we used to when we travel.

Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry (2021)

This is kind of a refreshingly niave and yet ultimately knowing documentary, short listed for the Oscars this year. It’s almost impossible to predict when and where a new star will burst onto a scene. There are so many hopefuls vying for a spotlight, so much talent goes unnoticed. But documentarian R.J. Cutler lucked out when his cameras caught the astronomical ascent of electropop star Billie Eilish. He enters the picture just as Eilish is still creating music with her older brother in his room. Men from their record label stop by to hear what’s in the works, and they smile politely, unaware how big that small moment in the O’Connell’s home will become. We’re seeing a then-17-year-old Eilish change her style, come into her own and then to command control of her image, right down to directing her own music videos. We’re watching the birth of a star, an exhilarating and not infrequently excruciating experience.

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen

This is a really interesting memoir by a woman who could turn a phrase. She says, and I quote, “Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin,” and you can’t get out of it on your own.” In some way this one sentence sums up the story that starts with an unloved child who lives in crushing poverty and without much in the way of supports, one whose ambition and talent lift her up, and then her addiction brings her down so far that she really doesn't completely get over it. She is physically and sexually abused, she values money and career advancement over love, which given her background, she may not fully comprehend, and she dies young. She marries four times. She becomes one of Denmark’s most celebrated poets. Her work is now required reading in Danish schools, and she is recognized as one of the originators of the autofiction genre of the memoir-novel hybrid, with a direct line between Ditlevsen and the power house that is Karl Ove Knausgård.

Attica (2021)

Prison is still a bad place in the 21st century, but in the 20th century it was even worse. This documentary, short listed for the Academy Awards, is a harrowing, infuriating look at racism and the abuse of power in a prison where the incarcerated were largely black and brown and the administration and the guards were 100% white. The prison itself is located in a rural white town in upstate New York, and as depicted here at least, the prisoners were seen as less than human, much like a master/slave relationship. The subject is the riot that began at Attica Correctional Facility on September 9, 1971. Over 30 prison staff members were taken hostage in the largest prison uprising in American history. Once they temporarily gained the upper hand, the prisoners at Attica—mostly Black and Latino but also White—tried to negotiate for better conditions. They brought in a slew of outside personalities including senators, lawyers, journalists, and even Russell Oswald, the NY Commissioner of Corrections, and survivors and offspring of those who did not survive are interviewed, interspersed with footage from the time. Instead of reaching a peaceful conclusion, however, the standoff ended five days later in a hail of bullets that took out hostages and inmates alike. There was a short lived attempt to cover up the fact that law enforcement shot at everyone and everything indiscriminantly, but the ugly truth came out.

The Magician by Colm Tóibín

I have a deep admiration for Tóibín--in addition to the richly drawn works of absolute or at least obscure fiction (maybe his books are based on real people, but they are largely little known real people), this is his second work of fiction that is woven around the life of a real author, in this case the exiled, troubled, German Nobel prize winner Thomas Mann. I first read Mann when I was travelling with my then boyfriend now husband in Bolivia for a month, and we carried with us a suitcase of books in English, including several by Mann. He had me at Buddenbrooks and held on tight to me until I had read them all, or at least most of them. So consider the source, I love both the author and the subject, but this is well worth readingas well as thinking about. Underneath the actual story of Mann's life there are a lot of unanswered questions. Was Mann safe, sorry, or indifferent about his avoidance of politics, and on the eve of Hitler and WWII, what was going on in his mind? Did he regret anything? He ultimately had no choice, he was targeted by the Nazis and had to flee. He was not the child his parents backed as a writer, and what lessons does that have for parents? He had children, lots of them, to shield himself from those who might try to expose his homosexualty, but failed his offspring in that respect. There is a lot here, and it is well worth reading.

Don't Look Up (2021)

In retrospect, this movie is more memorable than it is good. It is a clever, unapologetically brash satire about a future America so consumed with celebrity worship, brain-numbing infotainment, social media popularity, and political gamesmanship that it refuses to take the impending destruction of planet Earth seriously. We’re not talking climate change here, though the parallel is obvious. Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) has irrefutable evidence that an unprecedentedly gigantic comet will wipe out Earth in precisely six months, 14 days. The chances of “planet extinction” are set at 99.78%. “Call it 70% and let’s just move on,” says President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep), who’s more bothered by the upcoming midterms and the unearthing of nude pics of her sexy boyfriend, a Supreme Court nominee (also unapologetically skewering the anti-intellectualism of the GOP). And so it goes, the endless attempts to alert people to the dangers that fall on deaf ears, and then how that inevitably plays out.

Read Until You Understand by Farah Jasmine Griffin

This is a mixture of literary dissection and personal memoir. The author lost her father to a cerebral aneurism, and while his prognosis at the time of his cerebral event might not have been very good, the seared memory for the author is how law enforcement treated him. Let's just say they were not there to help, and it left an enduring mark on her young self that propelled her in life going forward. In addition to her father, who gave her her first exposure to black literature and all the richness it contains, her second biggest influence was Toni Morrison, whose reflections on mercy, justice, rage, death and beauty helped her to understand both herself and her history. There are other authors that are covered, from Phyllis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass to authors who are writing today, but the resounding message from this university professor of literature is something that her father taught her, which is to read and question and think until you understand what is there in all it's pain and beauty.

Respect (2021)

The most important thing to know first off is that Jennifer Hudson does an outstanding job of inhabiting Aretha Franklin and belting out the songs that we know and love. This biopic does follow the path of others that have preceeded it. Starting with her childhood growing up with a controlling preacherman father in 1950s Detroit, through the personal turmoils and civil rights struggles that came to a head in the 60s (she was a friend and supporter of Dr King and sang at his memorial service), to the triumphant recording of a bestselling gospel album in the early 70's, there is a lot that we know or could guess about the queen of soul's life story. The controling men in her life--starting with her father, who's iron clad lock on her song repertoir was holding her back, but she escaped into the arms of a man who mistreated her in every way but torpedoing his career, are also perhaps par for the course. The acting throughout is good and the music is better. The thing that is skated over almost completely is Franklin's being a survivor of child abuse. Her mother left her father because of his incessant infidelity, but he did little to protect his child from predatory men. I did not realize this, but she was likely abused by a relative as a young girl, and had children as a 13 and a 14 year old, almost certainly products of sexual abuse. There is no way to come back from that unharmed without help. There is no hint that it was acknowledged, much less addressed, and some of what follows might have had an altered path if she had been protected or aided in her recovery.

The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed

This book was short listed for the Booker prize last year and is a retelling of a real life injustice. It is in 1952 in the multiracial Tiger Bay of Cardiff, Wales. It recounts the wrongful imprisonment and execution of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali seaman and father of three young boys, who was the last man to be hanged in Cardiff prison. Fabricated evidence, false witness testimonies and institutionally racist policing led to him being found guilty of the murder of a shopkeeper. The most tragic part is that Mattan is sure that the famous British justice system will exonerate him, and so he at first does nothing to tone down his shape-shifting character, variously positioned as a rakish antihero, plucky picaro, petty thief, charismatic dreamer, prideful gambler, doting father, anti-colonial firebrand and speaker of truth to power. The most searing element of Mattan’s incarceration is his spiritual contemplation when behind bars, interspersed with evocative flashbacks to his childhood in fractious British Somaliland and recollections of his risky life in the merchant navy. Mattan’s tender aspirations and vulnerabilities are brought to the fore, balancing out a man often dismissed by those around him as reckless and troublesome. The wrong done to him was eventually reversed decades later, but not before ruining the lives of his wife and children.