the friday five | 02 14 25
Every Friday, a new Montage will recommend five things that I am currently enjoying. “Things” is an ugly word, but it’s the best word here I think.
This is the Friday Five for Friday, February 14, 2025. Thank you!
1. Masala cashews
Let’s get as local as we can, I guess. There’s a spice shop in my neighborhood called Alive Herbals, which everyone who I know in Bed Stuy loves and everyone who doesn’t live in Bed Stuy (99.99% of the global population) has no reason to have ever heard of. But Alive Herbals, which I just learned is called that—most people just call it “that spice store on the corner down there”—rocks. Like most places like this in Brooklyn, it’s four different kinds of shops in one, with floor to ceiling racks of spices and bottling equipment, fresh produce in crates outside, frozen pizzas and samosas in the back, and a whole aisle of Dr. Bronner’s and cocoa butter. There’s also rows of in-house packaged nuts and dried fruit, and mixed in there is my discovery of the week: masala cashews. This is what you think it is: a big bag of cashews covered in masala spice mix, packed with flavor but not overwhelming. Cashews, a famously soft and dripless nut, respond beautifully to masala, like a hairless cat in a leather jacket. Go to Alive Herbals; get these.
2. No Other Land
The line on No Other Land seems to be that it’s a powerful document but a bad movie. I roundly reject this not only on the basis that especially in the confines of its genre (“document-ary”), a powerful document often makes for a good movie—where else do you think its power is coming from—but because I don’t think “movie” is its ultimate goal. No Other Land, a joint production from Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers, chronicles four years in the efforts of Basel Adra to protect his community, Masafer Yatta, in the West Bank, from destructive and illegal occupation from militant settler forces. Adra films much of the footage himself, along with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who swings through town to interview Basel and his family and neighbors; many conversations between the two young men over the years circle around the inherent tension in documenting violence without living inside of it (to say nothing of Yuval’s Israeli citizenship, of which much is said). There is so much footage of the ongoing Palestinian genocide out there that maybe it can feel “whatever” to some people to see even more of it, and in this case from before October 7, but I found No Other Land to be essential in its microcostic focus—at the end of the day, this is one story about one young person running against wall after wall in a Sisyphean effort toward the inevitable. Its value as a “movie” is clearly secondary, in my mind, compared to its value as an addition to historical documentation; Adra runs towards armed Israeli soldiers shouting “I’m filming you” throughout, reminding us again and again that the declaration, the taped evidence, is the point. No Other Land is still without a national distributor; it’s currently showing at Film Forum thanks to individual booking made directly via Michael Tuckman Media. I can’t imagine Hollywood Zionists will allow it an Oscar win, but it’s what I’m rooting for the hardest.
3. Portishead - Roseland NYC Live
Roseland NYC Live was the first Portishead album I ever heard. I took the CD home one day after working a record store shift in 10th grade, likely on the recommendation of my stoner manager Rich, and I can remember my first listen so distinctly. Beth Gibbons’s vocals are the star of any Portishead album, of course, as steady and hypnotic as they are, and I have such a distinct memory of Roseland moving from the richly cinematic preamble that kicks off “Humming” (Portishead’s founder Geoff Barrow would go on to score all of Alex Garland’s films, most notably crafting Annihilation’s hellish soundscape) into a voice that rendered me dumb; I immediately sat down on my bed and stared at my feet to listen closer. There’s nothing showy about it, no grand crescendos or vocal gymnastics I could even specifically point to—like any Portishead fan will tell you, the way Gibbons sings tickles something personally emotional, some hidden sadness in my brain just waiting to be prodded awake.
Roseland NYC Live is a live album, as you’ve likely guessed, recorded in July 1997 with a 35-piece orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom—the album’s audio is better than its VHS (eventually DVD) accompaniment, clearly zhuzhed to help with any little cracks as most live albums are, but watching the songs performed as they were, in the round, is electric. New York City, summer of ‘97. Look at all these trip hop fans politely seated like they’re at church, zoning out during the best night of their lives. Look at the conductor’s little headphones; watch Adrian Utley chew the same tired piece of gum for an hour while playing some of the most iconic songs of the decade. When I eventually went back and listened to Portishead’s studio albums—only two, at the time—I was disappointed not to hear the same breathy liveliness that I loved so much on Roseland; I did it backwards, which I guess is wrong, but to me it towers over their discography. For twenty years now it’s been one of my favorite live albums.
4. “My television appearance”
My favorite thing I read this week was August Lamm’s blog post about going on an NBC news program to discuss her crusade against smartphones. “My television appearance” is the exact kind of thing I think blogging is good for—telling an interesting story with a strong voice. I’d typically much rather read a hundred pieces about a day in someone’s life than one piece about culture or The State of Things or whatever, since most people know how to write about themselves better than they know how to write about the world at large (because that’s harder; I am one of those most people). Lamm is just the right amount of self-effacing, and I love the minutiae she gets into around the processes involved in going on television (stage makeup, changing in a bathroom stall, lugging shit around) but also the feelings going on television evokes (pretending to work at Rockefeller Center, disassociation). The turn at the end of this little essay is also just beautiful, as she goes from being on TV straight to a date with a rando. August Lamm’s You Don’t Need a Smartphone has had a major effect on my life over the past few months; “My television appearance” is just great writing. Here’s a part I liked:
Finally, I entered the main studio to find the host typing away on a wireless keyboard. There was no monitor on the desk; maybe it was across the room, or embedded in his retinas. “Hi August,” he said, before turning to a producer. “Can we confirm that all the drivers in that segment were Latino?”
I went and sat stiffly on my leather stool. “Do I look alright?” I asked one of the men.
“We can switch on your camera,” he replied. This wasn’t encouraging. A screen lit up and I saw my face.
“Wow,” I said.
My microphone had to be shifted further down my neckline to escape my hair. The audio engineer seemed nervous. “Sorry,” he said, his fingers on my collarbone. I almost wished we could be alone. The last man I’d touched was my physical therapist.
5. wig-wag vol. 36
I decided to fully delete all tweets and get off Twitter forever last weekend because the website has become a total wasteland of AI content and ads for “Grok” (???), but also because Elon Musk’s ascendancy to the Oval Office is troubling and should scare everyone away from anything to do with him. Not that he hasn’t always been a nightmare bag of dirt, but we all have our lines I guess. This was great timing, he says dryly, since a new issue of my online film lit journal wig-wag dropped on Monday. wig-wag 36 is really stellar, headlined by one of my favorite essays we’ve ever published, on Sleepless in Seattle, but also showcasing reams of powerful work on All We Imagine as Light, The Age of Innocence, Terminator 2, and the great and underappreciated Lady Vengeance. Starting with this issue, I’ve decided to move away from the essay-a-day model and drop the full issue all at once, sending it out via email listserv and letting the wind take it gloriously from there. (I’m going all in on email these days. Social media’s for the birds; I don’t need everyone to see everything I got going on all the time, you know?) If you’d like to sign up to receive wig-wag when it drops every other month, you can plug your email into the new email listserv here.
❣️ Have a great weekend everybody!
Thank you for the mention, this is exceedingly kind. And big congratulations on getting off twitter! Enjoy the ensuing peace.