at America magazine: There are 13 directors whose films are recommended by the Vatican for their depiction of religion, but not all led lives notable for their sanctity. And one went on to direct the most notorious art film of all time. It is unlikely that the Vatican will ever praise “Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom,” the last movie Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed before his murder. Yet that film’s anthropology—its account of what it means to be human—is... Read more
Relatively short reviews of three new(ish) albums by indie musicians who are various stripes of Christian. Three very different approaches, even within the extremely narrow subgenre of “guy with crackly kinda difficult voice and a million emotions tries not to despair, while playing the guitar.” In, iirc, order of album release. The Mountain Goats, “In League with Dragons.“ I love the Mountain Goats. Somebody got me to listen to this thing (trigger warning: No Children) and I was instantly hooked.... Read more
I was in London recently for a family vacation. Lots of new discoveries, including Sue Symons, whose beautiful, emotional depictions of scenes from the Hebrew Bible were on display at Bath Abbey. She’s also done a New Testament series, and I’d really recommend them for your delight and meditation. I also saw “Six,” a pop musical about the women mostly known to us as items in a list: “Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived.” This is a pop confection, tarted... Read more
In the summer before I went to college, a comic collection came out: Chester Square by Jaime Hernandez, the thirteenth volume in the greatest comics series of all time. Love and Rockets was started in 1981 by three brothers: Jaime, Gilbert, and the elusive Mario. Gilbert mostly made comics about the fictional Latin American village of Palomar, where the slugs are tasty, the children are spooky, and the men are confused ’cause the women make you growl. The art is... Read more
The Last Black Man in San Francisco: I thought this would be a story of gentrification; it’s sort of that, but mostly something stranger and more haunting. Jimmie Fails (played by an actor of the same name, who also co-wrote with his childhood friend Joe Talbot) is obsessed with the house he grew up in, which has passed into the hands of a white couple. With his best friend Mont (Jonathan Majors) he visits the house and engages in guerrilla... Read more
I recently revisited the immensely pleasurable 2002 comedy Barbershop, set in pretty much the year it was made in a struggling Chicago neighborhood; and read Eric Charles May’s Bedrock Faith, a 2014 novel looking back on a slightly wealthier slice of black Chicago society in the bad old days of 1993. Pairing them is somewhat artificial, I know, but for what it’s worth, they are both concerned with coming home after prison and the possibility of a second chance–this is... Read more
Dorothy West, The Living Is Easy: The reductive way to describe this soapy tale of a woman whose contradictory desires destroy her family is, “What if Scarlett O’Hara were a black woman living in Boston on the eve of the first World War?” West, who was one of the youngest figures of the Harlem Renaissance, makes Cleo Jericho Judson into a fabulous woman-monster out of legend. Cleo trains her daughter in Boston respectability while longing for “the amoral South,” the... Read more
I review Thomas Williams’s flamboyantly helpful new edition, for the University Bookman: Thomas Williams spends a decent chunk of the introduction to his new translation of St. Augustine’s Confessions justifying its existence. What can yet another translation hope to provide? Did Augustine steal more pears since the last one? Last year I read Sarah Ruden’s 2017 translation, and re-read the limpid F. J. Sheed translation that first introduced me to Augustine. Of these three the Williams is the one I’d hand... Read more
Hey, remember that novel I was shopping around? This one: It’s a comedy about a woman returning to DC after federal prison, trying to reenter her old social circle of local sadomasochists and get used to her new circle of halfway-house residents; when she learns that someone she knows is being abused, she needs to decide how much of her new life she’s willing to risk. Comedy gold! I have news. First off, I’ve found a publisher: Clickworks, the Baltimore... Read more
I’m at America magazine, venturing beyond America: Everybody knows the Catholic Church dominates the world of religious horror films. The sumptuous vestments, the Latin chants, the millennia-old practices—not to mention the extremely literal belief in a living Devil, who, as Pope Francis frequently notes, still works in the world today—all seem custom-made for a genre that evokes rapture and fear. Catholic faith and practices offer a striking visual and auditory language through which horror films can explore the limits of... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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