Velvet Was The Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I really enjoyed this book, which is both on Obama's reading list as well as being a New York Times Notable book from 2021. This is an adrenalized, darkly romantic noir novel set during Mexico’s Dirty War. The novel opens with the Corpus Christi Massacre or El Halconazo — “The Hawk Strike” — of June 10, 1971. On that day, thousands of student demonstrators took to the streets in Mexico City for a peaceful march, only to be attacked by los Halcones — the Hawks — a paramilitary group organized and trained by the CIA as part of the U.S. effort to suppress leftists and communists in Central America. Almost 120 demonstrators were killed. Against this back drop, the story unfolds from various different people's perspectives, all the while giving a flavor of an unsettling time in Mexico's recent history. There are unusual alliances and strange bedfellows. I liked it so much I got another book out by the author and started reading it.

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

The title kind of sums it up. The movie starts off in the most mundane of ways and then it takes a hard right into something completely different. It is Wu Shu meets Inception. Evelyn Wang is a weary owner of a laundromat that is under IRS audit. We first meet her enjoying a happy moment with her husband Waymond and their daughter Joy (who is not aptly named). We see their smiling faces reflected in a mirror on their living room wall. As the camera literally zooms through the mirror, Evelyn’s smile fades, and she is now seated at a table awash with business receipts. She’s preparing for a meeting with an auditor while simultaneously trying to cook food for a Chinese New Year party that will live up to the high standards of her visiting father. Just as Evelyn begins to feel overwhelmed by everything happening in her life she’s visited by another version of Waymond from what he calls the Alpha verse. Here humans have learned to “verse jump” and are threatened by an omniverse agent of chaos known as Jobu Tupaki. Soon, Evelyn is thrust into a universe-hopping adventure that has her questioning everything she thought she knew about her life, her failures, and her love for her family. It is hard to make sense of, buyt that is the point. It is an emotional, philosophical, and deeply weird trip through the looking glass into the multiverse and discovers metaphysical wisdom along the way. I loved it and was puzzled by it, and it is defintiely worht seeing and experiencing.

Yerba Buena by Nina Lacour

I got this from a list of "beach reads" featured in The Week, and uncharacteristically three of the four featured actually sounded good to me. Light, but good. This one definitely started out on the slow side, but grew on me and as the story wound down I was sorry to see it end. The narrative follows two women — Sara Foster and Emilie DuBois — from their teens to late twenties as they navigate major life transitions, choices, and changes. Sara is from a grittier background and has to scramble to make ends meet, whereas Emilie meanders. The novel’s themes of drug and sexual abuse, death, abandonment, and purposelessness have a role in the pair’s eventual romance, and these are explored in a way that felt good and different from other books that grapple with similar plot lines. The women find meaning outside of educational accomplishments--which is a message for today as well. leaves plenty of room for hope amidst a variety of otherwise bleak circumstances. Sara establishes herself as a well-respected figure in the field that brings her true joy: bartending and Emilie finds that she has a gift for flipping houses. And together, the women’s relationship becomes a source of comfort and purpose.

Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain

The Fundació Antoni Tàpies is a cultural center and museum, located in Carrer d'Aragó, in Barcelona, Catalonia. It is dedicated mainly to the life and works of the painter Antoni Tàpies. The Fundació was created in 1984 by the artist Antoni Tàpies to promote the study and knowledge of modern and contemporary art. To that end, the Fundació opened its doors in June 1990 in the building of the former Editorial Montaner i Simon publishing house, the work of the Modernist architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner, restored and refurbished by the architects Roser Amadó and Lluís Domènech Girbau. Constructed between 1880 and 1881, at an early stage of the evolution of Catalan Modernism, the building was the first in the Eixample district to integrate industrial typology and technology, combining exposed brick and iron, into the fabric of the city center.

Antoni Tàpies’ first artistic attempts began during a long convalescence following a serious illness, after which his increasing dedication to painting and drawing led him to abandon his university education. By the 1940s, he was already exhibiting work that distinguished him among the artistic scene of the moment. Co-founder of the magazine Dau al Setin 1948, and influenced by Miró and Klee, he became increasingly interested in iconographic and magical subjects. He gradually began to incorporate geometrical elements and colour studies leading to an interest in matter through the use of heavily textured canvases of great expressive and communicative possibilities.

So the building is beautiful and the art is evocative. One of my friends made the comment that perhaps the reason that the artist was so deeply affected by atrocities that happened at the end of the 20th century was that Catalunya has a very troubled past, most recently under Franco, and therefore they understand better than most how a culture and a people can be violently repressed.

Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology) by Deirdre Cooper Owens

This whole book can be summed up by saying it is way worse than you think. This medical historiography grapples with troubling histories of medical exploitation, cultural memory, and meaning-making in very different but equally generative ways. The women in the cases presented are known only by their first names, Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy (plus up to nine anonymous others) were rotated in and out of un-anesthetized vaginal surgeries by Sims. Using non-voluntary, uninformed subjects, Sims invented the duckbill speculum, perfected protocols for the successful suturing of vesico-vaginal fistulas, and then published the results in both US and international medical journals. There is not only scant archival traces of these women in history but also in their cultural legacies as depicted in 21st-century art, health activism, and cultural representation. This is an examination of the widespread medical exploitation black enslaved women and (in comparison) Irish immigrant women experienced, within the development of modern US gynecology. The book provides important socio-cultural context for readers, in addition to important framing of the women beyond their roles as patients or medical subjects alone. In so doing, the author illustrates their significance as enslaved women who have no choice in their impregnation, as well as being a research subject. Importantly, a number of these women were also skilled nurses who—being trained by Sims after other white male doctors abandoned him—were some of the most knowledgeable individuals in the world on modern gynecology, within its earliest stages of development. It is pretty well known that 19th-century white male surgeons—lionized as pioneers of the field—performed extensive gynecological experimentation on these groups of women. The list of acclaimed doctors includes Sims, along with John Peter Mettauer and Nathan Bozeman. The procedures these doctors perfected on black and Irish women’s bodies include ovariectomies, cesarean sections, and obstetric fistula repair.

Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story (2022)

This documentary is an infectiously exuberant overview of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the Big Easy’s unique and enormous celebration of its music, cuisine and multiculturalism, by combining their own footage of performances and interviews at the 50th iteration of the star-studded annual event — the last before COVID-19 forced cancelation of the 2020 and 2021 editions — and archival footage dating back to the festival’s earliest days. It is a love letter, a testimonial, a history lesson, and a musical revue. The one thing that I learned, through an interview with Jazz Fexst co-founder George Wein during an interview conducted before his 2021 passing, is that if he had accepted a 1962 invitation by locals to establish the New Orleans equivalent of his Newport Jazz Festival. But he just couldn’t see how a Jazz Festival could be conducted in New Orleans during a period of Jim Crow laws, segregation, and racial discrimination. It took nearly a decade before Wein was ready to partner with Allan Jaffe of the Crescent City’s Preservation Hall and get the party started. After chronicling the bad old days, almost everything that follows is footage that emphasizes at every opportunity the inclusiveness of New Orleans in general and the festival in particular. Aptly described by one interviewee as “the world’s greatest backyard barbecue” where just about everyone is invited, the event evolved by 2019 into a sprawling social gathering at the city’s Fair Grounds with 7,000 musicians performing on 14 stages over eight days. Peak attendance: an estimated 100,000 people on a single day, a number that would make it the sixth largest city in Louisiana. If you haven't experienced it, this will give you a taste of whether or not it is for you.

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

This book follows four young women navigating life in the brutally competitive, consumerist city of Seoul. I did not know this, but South Korea is believed to have the highest plastic surgery rates in the world, with a third of women thought to have gone under the knife by 30. Eyelid surgery and jaw slimming are among the most popular procedures, and improving physical appearance isn’t just vanity – it’s an openly recognized way to get ahead in a cut-throat job market. So it is a deeply patriarchal society that makes for tough living if you are female. The four women, who live near each other, are likely chosen to reflect this unsavory situation. Kyuri is a room salon girl: a kind of geisha that is a seemingly well-paid opportunity that is only open to the “prettiest 10%”. In reality, she is tied in by debt, and feels her primped body breaking down thanks to the heavy nightly drinking required of her role. She shares an apartment with Miho, an artist who, after winning a scholarship to the US, became embroiled with a hyper-wealthy crowd; it’s no shock that such grotesque riches don’t result in kind behavior. Across the hallway is Ara, a mute hairdresser who tries to escape her daily grind – along with the trauma of an assault– by obsessing over a K-pop star and living more in a world of her own than in the present. Downstairs, pregnant Wonna, who chose her husband almost entirely based on his mother being dead, panics about losing her baby and her job. It is a high wire life for each of them, and one without much in the way of pleasure or support. This a very well written, but not very happy, story.

Alapar, Barcelona, Spain

One of the very best meals that I have had in an adulthood that could be characterized by having above average food on a regular basis, was at a restaurant called Pakta in Barcelona in 2013. I was so disappointed when I learned, through a search for places to eat on my recent return trip, that is had closed during COVID. Then, at a meal we had at another restaurant, our sommelier recommended this, and noted it is in the same place as Pakta and with the same chef. Instead of Peruvian-Japanese fusion food it is Mediteranean-Japanese fusion food. Let me just say it was spectacular.

Maybe we were influenced by a week of eating tasting menus and making almost no choices, but we elected to allow the chef to choose our meal entirely. We put in the caveat that while we were not pescatarians and we would definitely eat dishes that had meat in them that we wanted to avoid dishes that were solely meat based. The courses that we had, about 9 in all, were uniformly delicious, beautifully plated, and the seafood was fresh and delicious.

I am not a fan of raw fish in general and this meal is the exception to that tendancy of mine. We had not one but two dishes that were raw mackeral, so not just uncooked but also a fish that I am generally not fond of--not to worry, they were both amazing, and so enjoyable that it would change what I would risk eating in the future. If you can only eat one place in Barcelona this should be the place.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Rebecca Dunbar Ortiz

This book, which is a reworking of the book by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, is part of the ReVisioning History for Young People series, which offers fresh perspectives on familiar narratives told from the viewpoint of marginalized communities with middle-grade and young adults in mind. Consisting of accessibly written history books written by notable scholars and adapted by education experts, the series reconstructs and reinterprets America’s past from pre–1492 to the present for a new generation of readers. This is exactly the history that the 1619 project is advocating that we add to the educational curriculum of K-12 and what white supremacists are fighting so hard to exclude. Spanning more than 400 years, this classic bottom-up history examines the legacy of Indigenous peoples’ resistance, resilience, and steadfast fight against imperialism. It challenges the narrative that America is a country that was “discovered” but rather one that was already inhabited and was invaded by Europeans. The Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity. The original academic text has been fully adapted for middle-grade and young adult readers to include discussion topics, archival images, original maps, recommendations for further reading, and other materials to encourage students, teachers, and general readers to think critically about their own place in history.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Oh my gosh, so much testosterone! It has been over 30 years since the original Top Gun, but Tom Cruise is still able to deliver a believable best fighter pilot still flying role. This is witty adrenaline booster that allows its leading producer, Cruise himself, to be a star—while upping the emotional and dramatic stakes of its predecessor with a healthy (but not overdone) dose of nostalgia. After a title card that explains what “Top Gun” is—the identical one that introduced us to the world of crème-de-la-crème Navy pilots in 1986—we find Maverick in a role on the fringes of the US Navy, working as an undaunted test pilot. No one is surprised that soon enough, he gets called on a one-last-job type of mission as a teacher to a group of recent Top Gun graduates. Their assignment is just as obscure as it was in the first movie. There is an unnamed enemy—let’s called it Russia because it’s probably Russia—some targets that need to be destroyed, a flight plan that sounds nuts, and a scheme that will require all successful Top Gun recruits to fly at dangerously low altitudes. In comparison to the original, there is some gender integration (one in 12 as opposed to none what-so-ever) and racial and cultural diversity—but it is extremely limited.