À la carte (February 23, 2025)

Two documentaries, a book, and a Substack that gives me a modicum of hope

Two documentaries

I started to ask myself whether I was allowed to recommend a documentary that I haven’t finished yet, but then I remembered that this is my Substack and I make the rules! Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is two and a half hours, which is not the ideal runtime for parents who fall asleep on the couch by 9:05. But I’ve decided to treat this Oscar-nominated documentary by Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez as a docuseries, and we’re chipping away at it this week. The film’s illumination of this historical deep cut is riveting, the fact that I’ve fallen asleep on the couch every night notwithstanding. Unless you are a scholar of Cold War politics in the third world and the U.S. government’s use of Black musicians as “jazz ambassadors” in the twentieth century (as my husband is), much of this story of the U.S.’s role in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first post-independence prime minister of the [Democratic Republic of the, as it is now known] Congo will be new to you. For as long as I’ve been alive, “the Congo”—an appellation that suggests a dark and wild jungle at the heart of Africa, rather than a country—has been portrayed as a shitshow, known for untamed violence. But in the mid-century moment of postcolonial independence movements and pan-Africanism, there was a pathway to a different future. Unsurprisingly and depressingly, the U.S., with its rapacious appetite for uranium to fund its new nuclear program, and the rest of its Cold War agenda, would have its way, and would put Louis Armstrong in the middle of it! The true story is horrifying, if not shocking.

Formally, the film is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s jazz, in documentary form. It bops around, splicing imagery and archival footage with quotations from primary sources, all set to jazz. It feels improvisational, discordant, and overstimulating to the untrained senses. But I’ve gotten into its rhythm. I’m hooked and disgusted and fascinated by a forgotten moment in which the United Nations wielded real power, where Kruschev appears like the voice of morality, and where “Africa” held a different place in the world’s imagination.

Available to rent on major platforms, but also available to stream for free via the Kanopy app—which you can likely access through your local library card and download to your device of choice.

If a 2.5 hour experimental political documentary is not your speed, fear not, I have another documentary that is exactly its opposite. The Only Girl in the Orchestra is a 35 minute documentary about Orin O’Brien, the double bassist who was the first female member of the New York Philharmonic. Now in her late 80s and recently retired from the Phil, O’Brien and her double basses are a delight to spend a half hour with. In the words of my husband, “there’s no plot,” but I don’t mind this sort of snapshot profile. This is the film equivalent of a “Talk of the Town” snippet in The New Yorker. It’s a joy to watch someone who discovered their passion early and was able to spend her life pursuing it.

The Only Girl in the Orchestra is available to stream on Netflix.

A book

I came across In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Spaces on LitHub’s list of Most Anticipated Books of 2025 on my flight home from Jamaica. The timing of this discovery was fortuitous—I was grappling with the legacy of slavery and colonialism in Jamaica, its ugly history and complicated present that I found impossible to ignore during my time there. I was staying at a plantation-turned-retreat center (something about which I have Very Complicated Feelings and will write about more) thinking a lot about what the preserved “Great House” represented, who it honored, and who it did not; I was thinking about how race was so determinative of my experience there, how a yoga retreat at a former plantation would be the stuff of horrified parody on Black TikTok. The knot I’m picking at feels much more complicated than what can be expressed in a TikTok—what does it mean to enjoy the undeniable beauty of a place that was once the site of so much human pain and deprivation, but is nevertheless undeniably colored by my white lens—and so I was grateful to pick up Irvin Weathersby Jr.’s new reflection on the ways in which white supremacy is embedded in public spaces, both formally and informally. In Open Contempt is more personal than I expected—we are with Weathersby as he gets arrested, driving home through Brooklyn after an evening out with his wife, for the crime of being a Black man. We witness the legacy of racism souring a trip to Paris with his wife. I am all for the tearing down of monuments to Confederate leaders and the re-naming of streets. And I was moved by Weathersby’s retelling of his visit to Monticello. But I am left craving more collective reckoning with what we do with spaces like Monticello and the Good Hope plantation in Jamaica. I don’t think we should be destroying them simply because they were built by enslaved people, but I do think there is more reckoning to be done around how we tell the stories of beautiful historic buildings (either literally built by enslaved people, or with the proceeds of their unpaid labor) and to whom. This is especially true outside of the U.S., but I do fear the steps backward the U.S. might take in this current political moment, in which the White Men in charge, minority though they may be, seek to re-valorize and romanticize our gruesome history.

A Substack

This week, paid subscribers read about my dread of ChatGPT and what humanity stands to lose in a world taken over by generative AI—perhaps a nice reprieve from Trump/Musk-fueled angst!

Therefore, any and all hope that I am feeling this week I owe to

Garrett Bucks

, author of

The White Pages

newsletter on Substack. I’ve been reading Bucks on and off since I encountered him on

The Mother of it All

’s Mamma Mia Movie Club episode. Any friend of

Sarah Wheeler

and Miranda Rake is a friend of mine, even if he is a man! Bucks seems like a really lovely human, and has dedicated his Substack to “what it might take for all of us to become true partners in building a more caring world, including those of us who’ve been traditionally been propped up by the current system (you know, like men, white people, straight people, people who benefit economically from our current economy, etc.)” (his words).

This week, Bucks wrote about the spark of resistance to Trump that is emerging.

Soon, there will be a spark

I’ve been feeling it too, a tidal shift from exhaustion to a slowly mounting, forceful rebuke. We may not see its full effect until the midterms, but I am hoping we are on the verge of large-scale civil disobedience and protest. Between Governor Pritzker’s speech this week, and Governor Mills’ spitting in Trump’s face, to the scores of Americans who have been laid off from the federal government, people are getting PISSED OFF. And I feel hope for the first time in what feels like one of the longest months of my life.

This is my favorite recent essay from The White Pages.

If the despots can engage in magical thinking, then so can we

I’ll leave you with these parting words from Bucks:

If you are a weary, frightened bleeding heart, the only thing I care about about right now is helping you believe in a near future that likely seems fantastical. I want you to believe that past need not be prologue. I want you to believe that— even if we are not in the streets in the numbers we will need— we will be soon. I want you to believe that though whatever fears and doubts you have are real, there are friends and strangers who will stand with you in the moments when it matters most. I want you to believe that you are a part of a life-giving, historically powerful peoples’ movement, even though that movement has not yet coalesced.

First we tell the stories, then we make them true.

---