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There is one swear word in the movie review portion of this letter.
SELF-TRAPPING*
Patient comes from home.
Patient comes from home in a black and gray, three-stripe Adidas track suit, maroon Converse and a large scarf.
Patient presents swelling of the face and neck, tooth pain, fever, a cold sore on her lower lip.
Patient has had a root canal that uncovered an infection, she was sent home with antibiotics and a follow-up appointment. Patient has taken the antibiotics, carries the orange CVS vial in her backpack. While she is being examined, they spill and get in-between the pages of an annotated version of Chapter 2 of her doctoral dissertation.
Patient says, “My mother-in-law said I better go to the ER if my fever doesn’t go down.” It’s a Sunday night. It just snowed. The admitting doctor has perfectly blown-out black and purple hair. She agrees.
Patient is admitted and goes into surgery. She loses two teeth; her neck gets cut into. A doctor explains her smile might never be the same; it’s hard to not cut nerves when you work on a neck. She cancels travel plans on her phone, sends a quick email to a collaborator. “That sounds awful, we’ll meet in your absence”, a faculty member writes back. Days later she’ll check a shared draft of a publication and see that they likely did not.
Patient gets some fresh clothes from a friend and she is relieved. It’s been a tough year and it looks like it’ll end on a tough note, so at least she can take solace in the small dignity of having pants. They’re green and slightly too large but soft and clean. Another friend brings comic books from the public library, but she is asleep and doesn’t notice. One is about cows.
Patient takes a turn for the worse. She faints in the shower because the water is too warm. She swells up more and more, until she can’t really talk and can’t really swallow. Every time she leaves the bed; a nurse puts a thick yellow belt around her waist and holds onto it so that she would not fall again. Patient’s fever spikes again and she can feel her head floating despite whatever drips through her IV. It’s night and she can’t sleep because she’s scared of drowning in her own spit, her mouth suddenly the extreme opposite of dry and her throat impossible to control. A surgeon comes by, then an anesthesiologist, then a nurse and then another. They say words like ‘intubate’ and ‘tracheotomy’ and she nods through the fever haze and the fear. Talking is really hard anyway, all gurgles and whispers. She texts her husband: “I’m really scared”. On the other side of the country, her mother-in-law is getting a 4am phone call no-one really wants to get.
Patient goes into surgery again.
***
I was extubated the day before Christmas Eve, in an intensive care unit, with my husband and mother in law by my side. Together with the small tube that was allowing me to breathe, out came more phlegm and slime than you’d think can even fit in a person. And a whole lot of tears.
You know how babies have to cry to take their first breaths, the movie-famous scene you see whenever there is a celluloid-captured birth? It wasn’t like that. I was just crying because I couldn’t stop myself.
***
Before I went to the ER, I spent two days feverishly reading Alan Moore’s Watchmen. When I was released from the hospital, one day after Christmas, my husband and I took three days to binge-watch Damon Lindelof’s show claiming the same universe and the same name. (We would have binged it faster but that first night not even Hooded Justice and Sister Knight could keep me awake past midnight.) With regards to both, we got stuck on Dr. Manhattan. Debating the constraints of omnipotence and omniscience as related to the iconic blue character reminded me of college philosophy classes and having to learn about various proofs and arguments for the existence of god. College instructors will point out logical flaws but never straightforwardly say that one should not believe. A little room is always left for fatalism. This is the infuriating thing about Dr. Manhattan as well – he will not do anything that he does not already know he has done or will have done. By virtue of experiencing all of time simultaneously, he is the ultimate fatalist, unwilling to go off-script simply because he knows the script is there and thinks he has read it. To hide things from Dr. Manhattan, canonically, you need some tachyons, a likely unreal particle that moves faster than the speed of light. My one semester’s worth of exposure to string theory makes me think this is a whole lot of work to convince him to try out some free will.
As the decade came to a close, and I rung in another year, finally closing the unsavory twenty-seven, I wonder how much of a fatalist I have become. Not on any macroscopic scale – fatalists don’t change the world and I fully believe that we can and will do so – but microscopically, within the sample of one that is me. Partly, this is hubris leftover from having had been deemed a gifted child, someone special and set to go places and do things. In my case, I literally got plucked from one place and put into another, moving to the United States by myself as a teenager exactly because I was gifted, so this notion that my path has been at least somewhat set is at times hard to shake. Partly, however, the fatalism is just fear. If there is no path already laid out for me, then I am free to make every mistake in the book. As I was being admitted into the hospital and surgeons and their interns were briefing me on what can happen to the mess of muscles and nerves that is a face once the neck that supports it has been cut into, my mind was simultaneously overheating due to a fever and due to me frantically searching for mistakes I may have made that led me there. Was this always going to happen to me or was I being punished? In a sense, this is the lose-lose attitude I have been trying to keep at bay all year.
***
When I was a young teenager, my father had a tumor on the back of one of his calves. I remember seeing it, a fleshy round mass the size of one of my fists. As it was growing, we all dismissed it as just an innocent lump of fat, the kind my late grandfather would sometimes get and loved to tell gruesome stories about having removed. My dad’s lump was different though, slowing down his attempts at occasional pick-up soccer with family friends or runs with me, my mom and brother that were a staple of one of those years when both of my parents decided their bodies weren’t good enough. Early tests showed this mass was malicious and he soon underwent surgery to have it fully removed. Together with the tumor, his surgeon took a large piece of the calf muscle. Once the tumor was fully analyzed, we got a number for my father’s life expectancy that scared us all. I remember him coming home from the hospital and the couch in our living room becoming an impromptu hospital bed. I don’t remember much of his actual recovery, how long it took him to walk again or when he was first strong enough to get up and go to the bathroom or grab a glass of water (always the carbonated kind) from the kitchen. I know no-one really expected him to heal enough to go back to playing bocce ball on weekends or standing through ninety-plus minute soccer games in the rain. Years beyond his predicted life expectancy, he is still doing all of those things. Around Halloween he sent me photos of a long hike he’d just completed, and I commented on the landscape and the weather and never once thought about his bad leg.
I had not thought about my father’s surgery in a very long time, not until he mentioned it when I was released from hospital and somewhat bewildered by how weak the ten day stay in bed left me. Lovingly, he countered my ‘Two weeks ago I was running 15 miles a week and now I get winded trying to take a shower’ with a simple ‘At one time I thought I’d never walk again’. It all just came rushing back. In past retellings of the story, I would often focus on the minor religious revival our household had once it was clear my father would recover well. I had always been dismissive and haughty about the need to credit a higher power for successful healing. As a rebellious teenager who just really never wanted to go to church again (after so many years of being the zealot amongst my family), who had learned the word agnostic and really wanted to cling to it, I just didn’t get it. Now, I am taken aback by how little fear I had for my father’s well-being, how clear it seemed to me that he would be just fine, how it never really occurred to me that he must have been scared too.
There is a church in the city that my parents are from, a cathedral really, dedicated to the Virgin Mary with many related legends and folk tales full of miracles attached. In the small monastery that hangs on to the cathedral, there is a back room where all of the tokens of gratitude locals had gifted to the Virgin are collected. Many are old and reflect the town’s history as a busy commercial port and a ship-building city. There are needle-points and oil paintings of ships braving storms, very straight-forward thank you’s for the lives of sailors that had been spared the sea’s rage, thank you’s for all the first, second and third sons of local families who made it home safe. My favorite gratitude story, however, has always been of a 16th century Croatian pirate who fought a true Turkish giant in a duel. He promised to bring a candle as heavy as his opponent to the Virgin if he were to win. After a long, violent one-on-one fight, he cut off the Ottoman’s head and fulfilled his wow. The flesh the pirate had taken was compensated for by hot wax in a quiet, pious church chapel.
While I was in intensive care, with a tube down my throat preventing me from even trying to speak and a constant drip of pain medicine numbing the bacterial battlefield that was body and blurring the knife-sharp edges of fear dominating my mind, I remembered the story and hurriedly texted my husband, imploring him to call my parents in Croatia and tell them that we will need to bring the Virgin a very large candle as well.
***
The surgeon responsible for the large gashes just beneath my jaw, the one that operated on me three times though I only remember going under twice, cleared me to fly the day before New Year’s Eve. I did not remember them at all, but they knew not only my whole story but asked after my mother in law and husband as well. A resident removed one last set of stitches on the side of my neck, leaving me looking at least a little like an actually grizzled pirate, and told me I had been a very good patient. I joked about having a Christmas in July party and we inevitable chatted about my upcoming thesis defense as well. I was touched by all the kindness, then immediately anxious to get out of there, to get out of Illinois, to pretend that our winter holidays can still be normal. By the time night fell on the very last evening of the decade we were in Brooklyn and I was tired but happy to have a walnut roll baking in the oven and an open invitation to a party at my brother in law’s house. On the way there, on a bus ride so long that I almost forgot I had ever spent time anywhere other than with my ass firmly planted in the uncomfortable blue plastic seat, a child stared at the layers and layer of bandages my husband had covered me in before leaving the house. (There are germs at parties, even when you are with family.) I didn’t know what to do other than stare back, as if we were in a bad episode of Seinfeld.
So, I entered 2020 in recovery. Not with grand resolutions, not with a six-page essay full of overwrought metaphors brewing in my mind, not with a detailed plan for finding a job and organizing my life in the next eight months, but with a can of seltzer in my hand (endless antibiotics don’t mix well with gin, scotch or cheap beer), struggling to chew a pita chip, grateful for my eyes being open past midnight. Wearing the same tracksuit I had worn to the ER and just a smear of greasy gold dust here and there instead of real make-up, I made the rounds among acquaintances and almost let out a sigh of relief when I got to one that was more shocked to hear about our more-than-three-months-ago wedding than my health odyssey. We almost didn’t notice the countdown to midnight, but when I kissed my husband he tasted like liquor and sweetness. Later, someone put on Iron Maiden’s second record and handed me a box of Oreos. I was grateful and I was humbled and the fact that this night was the closing of a decade in which I had done so much and had wanted to do so much more almost did not even occur to me.
Towards the end of the night, someone asked me what the moral of my whole story was, whether something should have been done differently by me and many medical professionals that got involved. “Is this all just a reminder to actually brush your teeth twice a day?”, they joked. Despite having spent the past decade over-thinking everything and most certainly talking too much at all times, I had absolutely nothing to say. A few days earlier a doctor told me that everyone always thinks they have Ludwig’s angina, but no-one ever actually does, except that I did. Like in some old episode of Dr. House or Grey’s Anatomy, I was the freak case to be taken care off in between personal drama and whatever other spice is used to keep these shows going on seemingly forever. How do you even begin to make sense of that? It is a tired trope to say that sometime real life is more odd and more intense than anything on TV, and it would ring equally hollow for me to go on about how being sick had humbled me, how it shocked me to learn how fragile my body is, how my number-trained mind shuts down with any attempt to absorb the weight of me just having been unlucky enough to develop a statistically unlikely condition. Joking about it at parties is the quicker way out, and maybe being able to laugh because I am so much better now is superior to dwelling on the large dose of uncertainty I was administered just as the year, and the decade, was about to turn.
When I turned twenty-seven, I wrote about wanting to become more malleable and more soft, more resilient to change through adaption rather than breaking and falling apart in any instance where plans take a sharp, unexpected turn. I wanted to be less stiff, less constrained by where I think my edges are, less limited by what I think my muscles – physical and emotional – can handle. Throughout the following year I tried to carry out this practice of always being a little stretchy, a little bouncy like well risen dough or a freshly washed sweater. Often, I did this poorly. I filled up my schedule with even more non-negotiables, forced my body into even more strain when it was under-slept and tired, told myself I wasn’t tough enough whenever a to-do list defeated me. For a lot of 2019 I was scared of being a bad physicist, a bad organizer, an emotionally exhausting friend, a selfish and unattractive partner, an unwelcome guest in gyms and studios. I feared my projects never being completed, my job applications being denied, my debts never getting paid off. I worried that I would get fat, that my eyebrows are too thick, that my stomach sticks out too much when I eat bread or avocados. In the end, none of that mattered because what I really should have been afraid off was one bad tooth and I could not have possibly known that.
For about a week after the last surgery my jaw was so stiff that I could not brush my teeth properly but now I’m almost back to normal. I’ve joked about getting a new toothbrush, maybe the one that is advertised on all of those podcasts and becoming a tooth-health fanatic. Certainly, though, that is not the only self-care habit I should be carrying on into 2020.
*In some ultracold (close to absolute zero) atomic systems, interactions between the atoms can lead to localization of states that would otherwise be expected to extend throughout the whole system. To visualize this effect, consider the atoms being held in a lattice i.e. some evenly spaced “wells” and “hills”. If the atoms form an extended state, some can be found on top of every hill and the whole thing looks like a wave. A localized state, on the other hand, means that all, or most, ultracold atoms in the system are trapped at the bottom of one well. Typically, a lattice system (equivalent of a physical crystal) has to be disordered or “dirty” to have localized states, but interactions can change that. Localization of states due to the atoms “talking to each other” is often referred to as self-trapping in the ultracold atomic literature.
ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: Before I went to the hospital, I was working on my dissertation and applying to postdoctoral positions at any university that put the words ‘condensed matter physics’ in their ads. After I recovered enough, dissertation work became an overwhelming routine and I have spent most of my non-sleeping and non-eating (and I am doing lots of both) time staring at the very long draft document and fleshing it out section by section. Clocking in at a little under 200 pages and having seen the inside of my office, my kitchen, my in-law’s house, my husband’s office and bed, and plenty of trains, planes and buses, it is very close to being complete. With my defense date set for the last Friday of February (two months after my birthday and almost two months since my release from the hospital and a day off from five months since my wedding day – funny how dates always converge like that), I am now likely looking at a month’s worth of editing, proof-reading and double, triple and quadruple checking every line of calculation, code and over-written discussion. This is not exciting work. In fact, it is more anxiety-provoking than anything else and waiting for my advisor (currently on sabbatical) to sign off on each chapter while in a different state and unable to take meetings most of the time is without a doubt not making the experience more pleasant. However, it is good to see all of my work in one place and it is good to know that I am so close to having actually completed something (and almost six years worth of something at that). I am sure that as the date approaches, I will cycle through many more positive and negative emotions and that the weight of it all will start to feel more visceral. For now, though, I am treating it like a long run on a very tiresome day and just trying to reach the end.
As for my job hunt, I have reached the waiting stage of playing the academia game and have largely been trying to not think about it too hard. I received one formal rejection so far and hope that it is not a sign of all other responses to come. Writing my dissertation has included a few very extensive literature searches and reviews of years of work that came before my very small contribution so I cannot claim that I did not learn any new physics in this process, but I am definitely also learning, or maybe re-learning, how to be patient and grind my teeth through a whole lot of uncertainty. I have spent all of 2020 so far with my husband on the East Coast, but I will be returning to Illinois soon and getting back to teaching, my mentoring and organizing work, and hopefully my running and yoga practices. Likely there will be lots or re-learning to be done here as well, but as this will be my last semester of graduate school maybe I will find it in myself to take extra comfort in my routines and learn some gratitude for all the good things my time in the Midwest has afforded me.
LISTENING: Between time spent in hospital and relentless dissertation writing, I have not been taking in as much podcast content or music as usually might. I’ve really just stuck to my basics, getting the news from a few NPR shows (Up First and NPR Politics), taking in bits of more or less serious media criticism from On the Media and The Press Box, keeping up with Supercontext (though I would not recommend trying to listen to any mildly edgy discussions of Stephen King’s work as nurses come in and out of your hospital room unannounced), and here and there checking out a segment or two of The Big Picture because it’s movie award season and the reasons why certain films are celebrated and others aren’t perpetually eludes me. And just because it is that time of the year when my itch to register for some obnoxiously long race starts acting up, I want to shout-out this episode of Planet Money about the economics of getting a spot in the New York City Marathon – a race I would like to complete someday.
(If you were wondering about what Spotify had to say about my year or my decade in music, I can assure you it was all extremely predictable. In the past ten years I was obsessively listening to Iron Maiden, Cult of Luna or Janelle Monae. In 2019 I was either running to Lizzo or working with some black or post metal rumbling in my ears. I have gotten somewhat more adventurous with non-metal genres in the past year, but the backbone of my music consumption seems to be quite consistent.)
READING: I meant to read more than before in 2019 and probably succeeded to do so albeit not too dramatically. The last few weeks however were not all that great for that particular habit so I did not do much reading other than that one Watchmen binge, a chapter or so of Pleasure Activism and half an issue of Heavy Metal magazine (my partner gifted me a subscription a few Christmases ago and this is still one of my favorite presents ever, but I tend to fall behind then binge-read instead of actually keeping up month to month).
I am reluctant to write much about Watchmen because it is such a staple in the comic book world and so much has been discussed about it, and influenced by it, already. Certainly, I was taken by Alan Moore’s mechanisms for world-building that includes stories within stories and background details that cannot be ignored as much as the main storyline populated by people the reader is supposed to think of as protagonists. I was surprised by the fact that Watchmen seems to have aged pretty well, not setting off any discomfort I would usually steel myself for when it comes to media from the same era (case in point, old issues of Heavy Metal are full of sexism and other very disheartening types of prejudice). The story Moore may have been trying to tell felt rather universal as I was reading and the fear of war it is laced with unfortunately felt quite timely. This is a work that probably requires re-reads, in part because it is so dense with details and in part because it strikes me as something that I could read different meanings into at different times. I very much enjoyed it so this will not be a chore.
WATCHING: Whenever I got sick as a kid, my parents would have the exact same discussion about whether watching lots of TV while home from school would make me get better more slowly. Now that I am an adult, I have no idea if there is science behind the idea that TV will make your colds and stomach bugs more lengthy, but I also have the freedom to not care. In other words, watching movies and shows with my husband has been a staple of my recovery.
Since I was still in hospital on Christmas, we watched It’s a Wonderful Life on demand in my room. I have to admit that when my pain medication kicked in, I dozed off despite Jimmy Stewart’s existential dilemma. The first half of the movie, the half I actually managed to pay attention to, did strike me as both outdated and charming and I was entertained by it in that way that Christmas movies are singularly entertaining, especially when you know a part that will make you tear-up in near-catharsis is eventually coming. We had a minor disagreement on the meaning of it all afterwards – is it trying to say that you should be grateful for the life you have even if it’s not the one you wanted or is the moral about realizing how many people your life can touch and how many may want to reciprocate that kindness? I re-focused just in time to see the townspeople spread their change over Stewart’s kitchen table moments before his seemingly inevitable arrest and my partner seemed quite touched by this (and he was awake for the whole thing) so I’m opting to go with the latter.
The other movie we saw in the hospital, probably against our better judgement, was Pokémon Detective Pikachu. Having stayed pretty conscious for this one, I am still not quite sure who it was made for, or why this particular story was chosen as a vehicle for an overwhelming amount of Pokémon-heavy set-pieces. There is a fair amount of weirdness crammed into a story that is not particularly creative or new but still packs some mildly predictable twists (but twists nonetheless). At times this movie looks like a mash-up of some Blade Runner sequel no one asked for and an overly ambitious AR version of old Pokémon games. At other times, it spends way too much time on scenes that do not really advance the plot but do heavily remind the viewer that this is a film about Pokémon and a film with lots and lots of special effects and digital editing. It gets boring after a while. The grand finale with Pikachu flying and fighting and electrifying everything annoyed me more than anything else, even though Ryan Reynolds-voiced, coffee-addicted, mostly inappropriate and incoherent Pikachu is sort of entertaining throughout the film. I remember watching the animated Pokémon feature in 1998 and being sort of enthralled by it because I had been consuming an awful lot of the anime and traded an awful lot of cards. This movie nods to some of its plot points just enough to trigger the tiniest bit of nostalgia. But I also can’t imagine anyone becoming a Pokémon fanatic after watching Pokémon Detective Pikachu nor do I believe real 90s kids found it all that satisfying so the mystery of why it got made, and why in this way, stuck with me more than anything we actually saw on the screen.
Since my husband is a psychologist and occasionally rubs shoulders with folks who have invested a lot of time in advocating for fellow psychologists to stay out of pro-war government work, it was probably an inevitability that we’d watch The Report at some point. I am not quite sure I’ve ever seen a movie with this particular approach to storytelling nor do I necessarily understand how it could have been made with such a high-powered cast and such an odd take on plot, character development and whether these things are even needed in a film. In other words, The Report is primarily two things: horrifying and didactic. Having lived in the United States long enough to hear lots of reporting on war and war crimes, I thought I knew at least a little about how terrible enhanced interrogation tactics used after 9/11 were, but the depictions in this movie definitely shocked me. All it flaws aside, I would argue that it is worth watching just for those stomach-turning moments, as a reminder of how inhumane things can get when those in power want them to. And the flaws are not exactly flaws in the sense of the film being bad, but rather a very confused observation that all there is to it is just one long exposition, almost an extended dramatic reenactment like from a History channel special but with supreme performances and production value. There is very little in The Report to get emotionally invested in when the viewer is not outraged by the subject matter. Annette Benning and Adam Driver are good, and the cinematography is crisp, and it all seems very real, but there is little drama in the most literal sense of the word. Although Driver’s character is clearly the work-obsessed trope it is hard to feel anything for him, not even relief when his work is finally over at the end. It is really a testament to the power of streaming that something like this could be financed and pretty heavily advertised. I am partly in favor of that: if companies like Netflix and Amazon are going to throw themselves into making movies, we might as well hope for some experiments and non-traditional takes to come out of that attempt to avoid more traditional gatekeepers. However, I hesitate to say this is a film worth seeing for much other than the educational and hopefully preventative value of its subject matter.
We watched Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River mostly because it was on top of our Netflix cue and we were trying to avoid the perils of endlessly scrolling through movies and shows until it’s too late in the night to commit to anything. (Ironically, there was a power outage midway through the film, so it did end up taking us very long to finish it.) This is a film about how trauma reverberates through time and generations of people. It is also a film about how a small coincidence, a random happening that could have gone in so many other directions, can ruin lives and leave people haunted by a bad thing that happened to them for seemingly no reason. This is some tough yet compelling subject matter, but Mystic River just doesn’t live up to it for about half of its run. It is a combination of really haunting moments and really devastating dialogue and acting performances from the very high-powered cast, and mostly disconnected bits of world-building and throwaway plot-points that either lead nowhere or don’t resonate as emotionally strongly as they were probably supposed to. There is an atmosphere of discomfort and ickiness that permeates the whole thing, but Eastwood never quite ties it up, never really puts a bow on his punchline. I thought back on Mystic River a few times after we watched and couldn’t help to be unsatisfied by the fact that the story wasn’t pushed deeper into the absurd or the surreal or deeper into the gritty and brutal.
My father saw Hell or High Water before I did which probably confirms my husband’s conjecture that there is something very dad-ly about this film. However, I have always been weak for Western-adjacent stories and the mix of beautifully shot yet remarkably desolate West Texas landscapes, smart yet unpolished crime operations, and the connection between the two brothers at the center of the story was just right to glue me to the screen. In a lot of ways, Hell or High Water is pretty minimal and it does not over-explain anything about its plot or its broader commentary on banks, loans and the state of industry in places like West Texas. There are shoot-outs and car chases in it but they’re not so outrageous as to make the whole thing deserve the ‘action-packed’ moniker. There are also many off-color jokes but they are delivered and contextualized in such a way that it is pretty hard to be more than a tiny bit offended, and there are very few women in this film which likely speaks to the rules of the kind of story it is trying to tell more than anything else. Hell or High Water is an update on a collection of tropes that are a staple of Westerns and heist movies that are executed very well and with just the right amount of subtlety and finesse to seem new and compelling. It probably is mostly for dads, but I didn’t at all regret spending time with it either.
We watched The Parallax View because it was shouted-out on a podcast we both love, and because we tend to like running endless commentary on the kind of haircuts, shirts and cars people sported at any time in the near past (the 70s in this case). As a psychologist and a person that spends way too much time online, we are also fairly susceptible to anything involving mind-control conspiracies and I’ll take a pretty shot of a convention center over an explosion or a long, highbrow monologue of some sort any day. The Parallax View delivers in all these categories, and heavily so. It is a fairly rapid succession of somewhat thinly fleshed out plot-points and ideas that one still can’t turn away from, and its last twenty minutes are nothing short of masterful. I’m not saying this film makes sense at all times, nor does it try all that hard to explain exactly what is happening, but it is a great watch, gets the tense atmosphere just right, fully lives up to being part of a political paranoia trilogy, and is visually quite superb.
Since the art theater in my small town in Illinois closed in the fall of 2019, it’s been a while since I have seen a movie on a proper big screen. Seeing a late night showing of Uncut Gems in a middle-of-nowhere-deep-Brooklyn IMAX was definitely an intense way to break this fast. And as every single other viewer has noted, the word intense is essential to this movie. My partner and I have been on-and-off talking about it for days after we saw it and the best summary I have is to say that when I was trying to explain the word ‘clusterfuck’ to my mom (as a language teacher she’s very fond of learning jargon and colloquialisms, even if they’re dirty), I wish I could have just shown her Uncut Gems. This is a great gambling movie and a great basketball movie and a great New York movie and a great Adam Sandler movie. It is also so filled with dread, anxiety and people yelling over each other in nearly every scene that watching it feels like waiting to jump off a cliff when you know you’ll hit the water underneath at a painful angle no matter how much you try. It is amazing that this movie is making such a splash because it is nothing short of wild – I’m not sure I’ve ever before seen a film that I immediately thought of as actually pushing the envelope. I don’t like Sandler in anything, but he excels in this movie and the rest of the cast, many of whom were more or less randomly discovered and have no real acting training and experience, is also stunning. Kevin Garnett is great as well, and the soundtrack blew me away ever since it kicked in at the unexpectedly surreal then unexpectedly visceral opening of the film. Go see Uncut Gems because it is just truly so good but do be ready for getting really familiar with your fight-or-flight instinct for the whole two hours and fifteen minutes of its run.
As it turns out, being affiliated with a university means (limited) access to services like Kanopy, and an opportunity to stream some classic, foundational films like Fritz Lang’s M. We watched it on a bit of an impulse after a round of tacos, margaritas and vegan Ben and Jerry’s without much research into its historical significance and really appreciated all of its surprises. This is Lang’s first sound film and a film that is widely regarded as one of the first takes on serial killer stories. It is not violent or gruesome like many modern treatments of the subject are (and true crime stories are seemingly everywhere now) but it is tense and appropriately creepy. Peter Lorre is perfectly cast as the de facto main character, and the procession of caricature-like figures representing the police and a crime syndicate that are all after his child-murder are both entertaining and give the whole thing a varnish of the slightly absurd and slightly surreal. As a 2019 viewer, I was also taken by the use of sound as there are not that many of modern films I can think of that feature long scenes completely devoid of any noise. There’s a lot going on in M but I could see that a lot of crime stories from even the past few years have it as a long-ago ancestor (Mindhunter came to mind once or twice). Maybe we should use our chance to watch more of these kinds of movies while we still can.
As far as TV shows go, in addition to slow-bingeing Watchmen we also finished catching up on The Expanse and completed its fourth season. It’s hard to talk about Watchmen without offering spoilers, but overall, I enjoyed it and thought it did deserve to share the world with Alan Moore’s original. The political commentary it offers is not subtle and in many ways it is central to the story, but showrunner Damon Lindeloff does not pander to a particular side (though one would be pretty justified in arguing that there shouldn’t really be sides when it comes to most issue addressed in this series) which makes it feel appropriate for our time, and a worthwhile effort to not be oblivious rather than something overly didactic or condescending. Lindeloff’s story is about masks, crime and justice, paranoia and what it means to be a hero driven by anger and trauma as much as Moore’s is. However, he also highlights the complexity of one’s identity beneath the mask a little more and with a little more of a 2019/2020 parlance. I appreciated the balance of the mix. Unfortunately, I also couldn’t help to notice that a note of sexism or two still managed to creep in. Jean Smart, for instance, is truly magnificent in this show and the first episode in which she is introduced, the brick throwing joke and all, is a masterclass in storytelling, yet her character at times felt subtly shamed and humiliated in ways reserved only for women. Luckily, Regina King’s protagonist (another really strong performance) is mostly spared of this even with motherhood being an important undercurrent to the plot overall and touching her at times (also: so many eggs). I would also be amiss if I didn’t mention the almost parallel show that Ozymandias inhabits for most of the run of Watchmen, and Jeremy Irons’ near-Shakespearean performance that serves it very well. The way his storyline is presented convinced me that Lindeloff might actually be a real fan of the comic since it featured an overly dramatic and savage story-within-a-story through the eyes of a comic book reader. As for my gripes, I have mentioned before that I feel like Dr. Manhattan was handled oddly at times and that some of his motivations strike me as in conflict with where Moore had left him. A similar argument may apply to Silk Spectre who was left partnered and seemingly more content than some other vigilantes at the end of the comic. (I’m happy to litigate this so hit the reply button if you disagree.) I think I could also be convinced to argue that the last few minutes of the show’s finale are unnecessarily predictable, trope-ish and mildly hokey. At the same time, I loved the resolution of all the converging storylines (so old, so low-tech, so boring, so perfectly reminding us that things repeat even when we construct insanely complicated, high-tech plans to try and best our predecessors), and that one last exchange between Sister Knight and her grandfather, that I almost don’t care about what happened afterwards. Having said that, I hope Lindeloff does not decide to do season 2, this is not a story that can be kept going from one year to the next and, in my opinion, it is really the time lag between the comic and this new take that allowed the latter to not be a disaster.
As for The Expanse, this show is just solidly good throughout. It was a really solid space colonization politics story in its early seasons and it is now a really solid first-contact story. The political and economic development on Mars and in the Asteroid Belt are still very interesting, and I have so far never really been mad when a new Martian or a Belter was introduced. Earth politics have been handled more clunkily in this latest season, and the UNN Secretary Avasarala became more of a two-dimensional villain with a dirty mouth (and a Mary Sue husband) than it was probably necessary. I do, however, still find the thought experiment of a politically unified Earth with all sorts of bureaucratic and defense problems (what do you do you’re your foreign policy is space policy?) compelling. In season four we also get a bit more character development time for the crew of the Rocinante who have spent a lot of the previous seasons in constant crisis mode. I dislike how Naomi’s dark past has been handled, trying to give her guilt and a need for reforming but also painting her as a victim (the two ideas seem to conflict), but I was delighted by how consistent but also much more human Amos was in this part of the story. I am more and more reluctant to commit to long shows and there is much about overly ateur-ish prestige TV that I find sort of exhausting, but I’m happy to come back to the Expanse if it returns.
EATING: As many folks make resolutions to change their diet in January and for more and more people this includes more environmental awareness and fewer animal products, I have been posting lots and lots of vegan cooking and eating tips and no-recipe recipes across my social media. I’ve gotten some nice feedback on this ‘Veganuary’ effort and hope that it has actually been helpful to friends and acquaintances who are considering cooking more plants and plant products. While I have been personally cooking a fair amount with my husband and for family dinners with my in-laws, I have mostly been improvising salads, curries and roasted vegetables and can’t quite guarantee I could exactly repeat most. I did give another go to these spicy potatoes from the Healthy Nibbles and Bits blog and these breaded tofu nuggets from Food 52 and both were as great as I remembered so I would fully recommend them. My husband made this almond flour cake from Holy Cow Vegan one evening as well, and since I had three slices (piled with raspberries, a jam-based glaze, chopped almonds and a touch of almond liqueur), I should probably also endorse it. Below, I am not sharing a recipe but rather repeating one of the posts I’ve written for my Veganuary social media project. It gives a loose how-to and some ideas on how to eat kale, a vegan staple and a vegetable that even fast-food-adjacent business seem to have embraced for their healthy-ish options. Let me know if you have other favorite ways to eat it!
Three ways to eat kale
1. MASSAGED: In my opinion, this is the best way to eat kale raw and it makes for a really good base for salads. It also keeps well in the fridge which means that you can make it up to a day in advance and it’s pretty refreshing when it’s hot out. It is certainly more chewy than cooked kale but also has less harsh taste.
How-to: simply cut up or tear your kale into bite-sized pieces (removing any tough ribs depending on the variety of kale you have) then add a bit of olive oil, some salt and a lot of lemon juice (preferably fresh, you can just squeeze a lemon directly over the bowl and remove any seeds if needed). Now, put your hands in the bowl and rub and squish the kale with your hands until it gets a bit darker, softer and wilted. If you taste it, it should have a more fruity or floral note and the volume of kale in your bowl should look smaller with some liquid collecting at the bottom. If it tastes bitter keep massaging and add a bit more acid or salt if you want. At this point you can put the whole thing in the fridge and let it keep wilting (due to the acid in the lemon juice and the salt that draws out water) or just add some dressing you like or pile things on top of it for a salad or nourish bowl.
On dressings: you can use other citrus or a bit of dressing or vinaigrette instead of lemon juice if they are heavy on something acidic. You may try an orange-based vinaigrette in the winter or a lemon-tahini dressing whenever. Some vinegary dressings can be used to but I have generally found that citrus works best.
Salad ideas:
a) massaged kale + roasted chickpeas + roasted sweet potato or butternut squash cubes + toasted walnuts or pecans + dried cranberries + orange vinaigrette
b) massaged kale + white beans + tomato slices + red onions + balsamic vinaigrette + sourdough croutons
c) massaged kale + cucumber slices + avocado cubes + baked tofu + quinoa + lemon tahini dressing (mix lemon juice, tahini, salt and water to thin, add a bit of Dijon mustard or garlic powder for a more complex and strong taste)
d) massaged kale + black lentils + roasted or pickled beets + whole-wheat penne or rotini + herby cashew cream dressing (blend soaked raw cashews with a bit of water, lemon juice, basil or other herbs you like, nutritional yeast and salt, adjust to taste)
Other ways to eat massaged kale: in sandwiches, on top of toast with avocado or hummus, with a stuffed (sweet) potato, in a taco bowl or as a chili topping (consider using lime instead of lemon juice in this case), in a nourish bowl (with a grain, a protein, an extra vegetable and a fatty dressing), as a side to any meal that calls for a salad
2. SAUTEED: Prep the kale as above. Heat a tablespoon or two of olive oil in a large, heavy pot then add as much kale as you can fit (it will shrink) and stir it around until some bits get a bit charred. Lower the heat, add a generous sprinkle of salt and garlic powder (optional), stir again, then add some lemon juice (enough to make most of the kale wet but not so much that there is obvious liquid in the pot) and stir a few more time. I like to add some red pepper flakes and nutritional yeast (use parmesan if you are not vegan and eat dairy) but those are optional as well. At this point you should see the kale shrinking and once it is as soft as you’d like, call it done. If you’re particularly worried about chewiness, you can up the liquid a bit then cover the pot and let it all simmer for a minute or two.
How to eat sautéed kale: This is a pretty basic side and will be a great addition to most meals that are lacking something leafy and chewy and green. Serve it with some rice and a stew or a curry, eat it with roasted potatoes and some sort of protein, wrap it into burritos with some black beans and salsa.
3. ROASTED: Kale chips are sort of a thing and this take on adding kale to meals is inspired by that idea. This is a good option when you are roasting vegetables already and have your baking sheets lined and your oven turned on. Tear the kale into bite-sized pieces with your hands, toss it with some salt and olive oil and add to whatever is already roasting for the last ten minutes or so, at 400F. Use a large baking sheet so that your vegetables are not too crowded and leave the kale in for longer if you want it extra crispy.
Sheet-pan meal ideas:
a) roast sweet potatoes and bell peppers (cut into stripes) seasoned with chili powder and cumin then add chickpeas for the last twenty minutes (seasoned the same way) and kale for the last ten minutes of baking, serve over rice or quinoa and top some of the following: avocado slices, chopped cilantro, salsa, pepitas, chopped scallions, pico de gallo, wedges of lime for squeezing.
b) roast baby potatoes, red onion and zucchini or yellow squash (tossed with salt and olive oil) then add kale for the last ten minutes of baking, serve with hummus or simply drizzle with a balsamic vinaigrette and add some (baked) tofu, tempeh or beans.
c) roast cubed eggplant (salt the cubes first and let sit until you see beads of water collect on them, dry the cubes thoroughly before tossing with salt, olive oil and spices), cauliflower and carrots seasoned with paprika and cumin then add tofu, chickpeas or white beans (for tofu make sure to press it first and then toss it with some cornstarch, for beans just toss them with olive oil and salt) for the last twenty minutes and kale for the last ten minutes of baking, serve with a lemon tahini dressing, topped with chopped parsley and black olives.