À la carte (May 5, 2024)
A foreign film, a memoir, some Kendrick Lamar, and a porridge
A film
One of the few longstanding tensions in my marriage is that I rarely want to watch a movie. My husband loves movies. I am working on articulating why I do not. Given the choice between starting a movie at 8 pm and starting a book, I will choose the book every time; given the choice between going out to the movies and going out to dinner, I will almost always choose dinner, as I did this week for our weekly Thursday date night—time with Ben feels too precious to be spent merely sitting next to each other, even in the dazzling and sensual world of a Luca Guadagnino film. This was one of the first magical weeks of spring, and I wanted to be in the dazzling world, drinking a Campari spritz, not trapped in a darkened theatre trying to stay awake. I felt free to pass on Challengers this week in part because I had already done my marital duty the night before: I watched—and stayed awake through— an entire movie after dinner!
The movie we picked, a 2023 German film called The Teachers’ Lounge, met all of my pretentious criteria for a streaming movie — a critic’s pick, preferably a foreign film or documentary. I do like quiet movies—subtle movies that feel more like a play or a novel. The Teachers’ Lounge falls into the former category, taking place within the confined world of a progressive and multicultural German school. Tensions rise within the school community when an idealistic young teacher, who previously defended her students from such allegations, accuses a staff member of stealing from her wallet. A sort of a parable for a multicultural society, I was on edge by the end, even though the only Chekhovian gun to appear earlier in the film was a Rubik’s cube. Violence seemed the only way to cut through the oppressive pressure system stirred up by the incident—that same electric current that flows through a theatre towards the end of a Tennessee Williams play. Is this an American sensibility—to expect violence in schools as the natural next step of parental anger and student frustration? Though The Teachers’ Lounge doesn’t give you as much to think about afterwards as it thinks it does, I don’t regret spending an evening watching it. I’ve had a soft spot for the “idealistic young teacher” genre ever since Matilda.
A book
Yet another week went by without having a chance to dive into Like Love by Maggie Nelson, but I did plow through Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s The Man Who Could Move Clouds, which had been on my library hold list for a long time. I am not the first person to love this book—it was a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist. Contreras deserves all the hype for her memoir tracing her lineage from a line of curanderos—magical healers—through Colombian history. She is a stunningly beautiful writer, impressive for her stylistic dexterity and weaving of genres, in a second language no less. I love cultures where magic and ghosts and prophetic dreams are ubiquitous, which one could argue is attributable to a culture that teaches and permits greater powers of perception than does my Anglo-Saxon culture. (“White people in the United States held on to a hard line between fact and fiction, between what was possible and was not,” observed Contreras in her first years in the United States as a college student.) Celtic mythology, for example, has a concept of the “thin places,” the places where the distance between our world and the next shrink away. (Jordan Kisner’s essay collection by the same name explores this concept further!) Contreras’s family lives in the thin place, and so does this book. I found I didn’t have to suspend my disbelief to accept Contreras’s family stories as fact, or at least a kind of fact. The beating heart of the novel is the complicated relationship between Contreras and her mother, a rare female curandero. I’m now a loyal fan of Contreras and am inspired to reread some Garcia Marquez through a lens that questions whether magical realism is actually just realism.
A song
A regular treat of living less than two miles from the UC Berkeley campus is getting to see Alvin Ailey (American Dance Theater!) during its annual residency at Zellerbach Hall. This year we purchased tickets for a night where the program did not include the Ailey classic, Revelations, and that was instead comprised of newer pieces. I was disappointed until I realized that this meant we would get to see Kyle Abraham’s Are You In Your Feelings? for the second year in a row.
I loved it even more the second time. Described as a “celebration of Black culture, Black music, and the youthful spirit that perseveres in us all,” Are You In Your Feelings? is also a series of romantic vignettes set to a contemporary R&B mixtape…that I can’t stop listening to. My favorite is Kendrick Lamar’s Love featuring Zacari. As the mother of an almost nine-month-old, I’m not doing very much (read: any) lap dancing, but I recently blasted this in our living room and attempted some body and booty rolling for my daughter. She chewed on a block in response.
A non-recipe recipe
After months of not being sure what I wanted to eat in the morning, I’m on a porridge kick. My latest favorite is a multi-grain hot cereal, cooked on the stove in almond milk and hot water, with a little cardamom and cinnamon. I then IMMERSION BLEND it with a teaspoon of vanilla and a tablespoon of maple syrup! I then top it with a little bit of crumbled homemade granola and maybe some caramelized apples or a quick DIY raspberry jam. It’s a little bit of a production (especially using two pots and an immersion blender for breakfast), but making a breakfast that demands to be eaten sitting down is a nice way to start my day (three hours after I wake up lol).
