the friday five | 02 21 25

Every Friday, Montage recommends 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 21, 2025. Thank you!

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1. Kit-Cat Clock

look at all the colors it comes in

We were back at MoMA last weekend, where I saw the 11:30-12:30 hour of The Clock for a second time and experienced a true and everlasting joy once more. Before throwing ourselves back out into the rain, we swung through the basement museum store, which is more MoMA Design™️-centric than the shirts and mugs upstairs. After wandering around tracing my fingers across knick-knacks and glass bowls like I was in a Terrence Malick movie, my eyes alighted upon the rhythmic swaying tail of a classic black and white Kit-Cat Clock, advertised proudly on the box as one of the 100 most popular gifts of the last 100 years (citation needed…?). I’ve seen these clocks before, most famously in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse or probably, like, Big—basically anywhere with kidcentric production design. It’s a big cat head with moving eyes and a deco clock for the torso and a tail that swishes like a pendulum beneath; she spoke to me in the MoMA basement and I brought her home in the rain, grinning all the way. Now that I have my own Kit-Cat Clock, I know how the eyes and tail move and it’s not the batteries—the batteries only keep the clock running. The animatronics are all gravity. You simply have to find just the right angle when you hang it on the wall so that the eyes and tail start roving, and they’ll never stop. I would never have guessed! I guess this is why they say the Kit-Cat Clock is one of the 100 most popular gifts of the last 100 years.

2. Pierogis

Miya and I journeyed out to the lower east side on Wednesday night this week to catch Streets of Fire at the Anthology Film Archives, part of their ongoing Willem Dafoe series. I didn’t love the movie, though I know many people who do, but Dafoe is magnetic in it of course. To me, it had real “Brian Setzer’s favorite movie” vibes, a 1980s obsession with the 1950s that I’ve never really locked into. It was my first time at AFA, too, which feels like what if a student center was a movie theater. Nobody in the lobby was doing their homework while we waited to be seated, but maybe they should have been—it was a school night after all! Anyway, afterward we skipped down 2nd Ave to the venerated Ukrainian mainstay Veselka, which was miraculously line-less (Wednesday), and got some pierogis. Here’s what I have to say about pierogis: they are the fucking best. I grew up on Russian food thanks to my stepmother, who always supplemented my family’s regular grocery shopping with a weekly trip to the Russian grocer, where she loaded up on ingredients and pastries and frozen foods from the motherland. What she made (still makes) most often were pelmeni (divine), kotleti (stupendous), pirozhki (humina humina), and pierogis. At Veselka you can get them stuffed with potato, cheese, beef, arugula and goat cheese, or my personal favorite mushroom and sauerkraut—I prefer mine fried, but boiled does the job all the same. Pierogis are essentially dumplings that migrated from China to eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, appearing as what they are now for the first time in a Polish cookbook in 1682. In Ukraine, where they’re most popular, they’re known as varenyky. All of this is interesting but none of it matters! Dough and a filling and some sour cream!

3. Shortbus

For years I confused John Cameron Mitchell’s movie Shortbus with Tom McCarthy’s movie The Station Agent, I think literally just because on the poster for The Station Agent there is a short bus (it’s actually a food truck). Now that I’ve seen Shortbus, and even though I’ve still never seen The Station Agent, the confusion makes me laugh and laugh. Mitchell’s post-Hedwig sophomore effort is like a movie from another planet, gleefully freeing in its guileless depiction of unsimulated sex and the queer underground. Shortbus captures a short window into the lives of several New Yorkers—most prominently a lonely dominatrix, a suicidal gay video artist, and a sex therapist who’s never had an orgasm—crashing them together and watching as their kinks and anxieties and curiosities explode. The movie, as you might imagine, features almost exclusively nonprofessional actors, and involved a rigorous audition and rehearsal process in which everyone got to flesh out their own characters and was encouraged to explore each other in deeply personal, physical ways. What comes out of all of this is one of the more sweetly sincere movies I’ve ever seen, and in my estimation one of the most seminal post-9/11 New York texts—even when it drags in its back half, it’s still alive with the exciting feeling that you’re watching something you’ve never seen before in a commercially released feature film. The cherry on top is 2023 MacArthur Genius Justin Vivian Grant’s bravura performance as host and emcee of the film’s central artist’s salon-slash-sex club Shortbus—they are luminous and slithering all at once, and bring the film to its perfect climax (har) right when it needs it most. Shortbus is streaming on Mubi.

4. “Pimps (Freestylin’ at the Fortune 500 Club)” by The Coup

One of the many wonderful side effects of spending so much time over the past few months revisiting and in many cases visiting for the first time so much of the Lonely Island’s oeuvre is that it’s sending me back into a little Bay Area hip-hop time warp. E-40 famously appears on Incredibad, unspooling an amazing non-impression of Carlos Santana that he apparently spat out in one take, but it’s the subtle but undeniable influence of the Coup across the board that really tickles me. Boots Riley’s seismic Oakland crew—which eventually whittled itself down to just Boots and the dearly departed Pam the Funkstress, who was later hired as Prince’s touring DJ just months before he died—made some of the most exciting and original music I’d ever heard when I first discovered them in high school, and the sheen has never worn off. I’m partial to Steal This Album, which feels like the Coup defining their own musical language apart from the old school flavor they worked in throughout the ‘90s, but this week I’ve become enamored with “Pimps,” from their second album Genocide & Juice (crazy title /pos). “Pimps” is a playful and biting track—the two modes in which the Coup has always worked best—where Boots and E Roc play David Rockefeller and J.P. Getty showing off their new party trick: rapping. The braggadocio of hip-hop stars playacting as the billionaire class is a brilliant trick, sandwiched throughout with ironic white dialogue and backed by a truly sinister beat. The bridge, in which Donald Trump embarrasses himself by butting into the conversation and showboating as a crass reggae singer (he calls it “reggie”), is especially thrilling, not only because it’s fun to remember how much Trump has always been a total loser, but that certainly doesn’t hurt.

5. Lena’s upcoming readings & events

Lena’s debut poetry collection, True Mistakes (ADD TO CART), comes out next month (though preorders have already shipped!!!), so there are a flurry of events on the horizon both explicitly book-related and not. You all are invited and it would be a true joy to see you there!

Saturday, February 22 at 6 pm - Brooklyn Poets (NYC)

Lena will be reading poems as one of the opening acts for the launch of Sarah Lyn Rogers’s debut collection Cosmic Tantrum.

Wednesday, March 19 at 6 pm - Rizzoli Bookstore (NYC)

Lena will be in conversation with poet and novelist Lisa Russ Spaar for the paperback release of Spaar’s latest book Paradise Close.

Thursday, April 10 at 7 pm - Green Apple Books 9th Ave (San Francisco)

SF/Bay book launch for True Mistakes! Lena will be reading, followed by a Q&A with poet Leigh Lucas.

Thursday, April 17 at 7 pm - Womb House Books (Oakland)

Lena will be reading from True Mistakes and poet Rachel Richardson will be reading from Smother, followed by a Q&A.

*New York True Mistakes book launch details to come! Much love to you and yours.