the friday five | 03 07 25

Mar 07, 2025

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, March 7, 2025. Thank you!

1. Woman Running in the Mountains by Yūko Tsushima

The worst part about reading a capital-G Great book is when you finish it and need to transition to a different book while every detail you loved from the last one is still lingering in your brain like a lifting fog. Over the past few months, I’ve moved from one Neapolitan novel to the next and then straight on to Steinbeck’s East of Eden, feeling spoiled by the wealth of beautiful language in the world. So when I wrapped up Eden and moved on to Yūko Tsushima’s 1980 Japanese feminist classic Woman Running in the Mountains, there was no way to avoid feeling underwhelmed by its seemingly small story and single, straightforward point of view. Woman Running in the Mountains is about a 21-year-old woman raising her new baby against the odds: she lives with her parents, who first want her to abort, then give up the child for adoption; her father is a stormy and abusive alcoholic; she has little money and has to manage finding daycare and keeping a job; and the child’s father is an older married man no longer in the picture. The novel opens on her delivery and recovery in the hospital, and moves swiftly through a year, by the end of which I was completely convinced of its quietly classic status. Tsushima’s writing is plain until it’s not, moving beautifully into rich description and deeply emotional longing whenever our young and overwhelmed protagonist fantasizes about escape—from her crying child, her overbearing mother, her own feelings of inadequacy. The novel shifts into a new gear in its final act, when she find a job she loves and starts balancing her own joy with that of her growing son’s. By the end of Woman Running in the Mountains, just like an epic, I didn’t want to leave her alone.

2. Working Girls

I rewatched Anora this week in the wake of its heroic Oscars night (heroic in the sense that The Brutalist only won awards that didn’t make me angry), and I think it’s lovely that a true-blue comedy won Best Picture for the first time in the 21st century (I haven’t seen The Artist obviously, but I can’t imagine it’s funny). Coincidentally, I also recently watched Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls for the first time, which Anora—and every modern depiction of sex work on screen—lives in the shadow of. For a long time I conflated Working Girls (1986) with Working Girl (1988), a movie I’m just now for the first time learning is about “an ambitious secretary from Staten Island working in mergers and acquisitions,” which sounds just as boring as the work in Working Girls so maybe there’s a parallel there after all. The pitch on Working Girls plural is straightforward: one long tedious day at a swanky ‘80s Manhattan brothel. The film focuses on Molly, a Yale grad in her twenties who’s new to the work but good at it, and the way she moves through the day like anybody else with a job they basically tolerate. She chats with coworkers, helps out the new employee, bites her tongue when the boss is around, and takes on a longer shift at the promise of overtime. I love how pedestrian Working Girls is, of course, since that’s kind of the whole point—the sex scenes are minimal and workmanlike, and the only times that the score and camerawork take on a striking emotional undercurrent. My favorite scenes involve Lucy, the brothel’s madam, who comes in halfway through the movie and starts annoying everyone with fake niceties like any boss who’s ever bossed. The clients, of course, are all men, mostly middle-aged sweat stains, making Molly’s final bike ride home downtown to her unknowing girlfriend all the more potent.

3. Trader Joe’s garlic naan

I don’t live close enough to a Trader Joe’s to regularly grocery shop there the way I used to, but because there’s one down the street from my job I’ve taken to popping in once a week in order to stock the work freezer with lunches. The vegan tikka masala has been a Brad Classic for the past 10 years, and if they ever discontinue it my whole world will crumble. But I also like the fried rice with bulgogi, the little pork buns, and the new pad see ewe they just started stocking, as well as a host of others that come and go at Joe’s whim. A new trick I’ve also started employing is buying a pack of the frozen garlic naan, which heats quickly in the toaster oven and goes with basically everything, including all by itself if you want it that way. TJ’s packs this ditty with garlic so the flavor is outstanding, and it’s just the right size for a little side, no matter the main. The trick with frozen Joes (froJo) meals is to remind yourself that they are not typically attempting a recreation of a dish you already know—their Garlic Naan does not actually move or taste like naan—but rather a new and at best similar dish entirely. Ultimately you must accept the flow of the universe, and of the Trader, for lunchtime nirvana.

4. Operation Mincemeat

Operation Mincemeat' to open on Broadway this spring | New York Theatre Guide — The cast of Operation Mincemeat

My good friend and thrice college roommate Joe has been wanting to “welcome” us to New York with the very generous gift of a Broadway show ever since we moved here nine months ago, and this week we were actually able to make it happen. Joe took us to see Operation Mincemeat at the John Golden, where Stereophonic just wrapped up its Tony-dominating run, and surprised us with really great front-row mezz seats. All I knew about Operation Mincemeat before we saw the show was that it was a smash sensation last year on the West End, where it capped its run with a victory lap through the Oliviers, including multiple acting wins and Best Musical. I knew, too, that it was a comedy set during WWII, which sounded to me like one of the most British things imaginable. Well, Operation Mincemeat, which is in previews through March 19th (quick q: what does this mean? “Previews”? Anyone can still buy tickets for it like a normal show…), is incredibly British—it’s a West End comedy musical sensation about MI-5 agents during World War II, after all. It’s also very funny and it has a lot of wonderful songs, but most importantly: how winsome!! The cast consists of five actors (three of whom wrote the show, with a fourth who doesn’t star) who play a core set of characters but also several supporting characters throughout, oftentimes quick-changing their way through a musical number or between scenes to delighted squeals from the audience—something like this needs to be timed perfectly or the whole facade would fall apart, and it’s a testament to Operation Mincemeat’s tight direction that it doesn’t. I won’t say much more because much of the fun of the show is watching it play out, as always, but guess what I will do? I will recommend!

5. The Sensual World - Kate Bush

Years and years ago, I pitched a 33 1/3 book on Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, longtime all-time favorite album of mine. My Hounds of Love would have focused on Kate’s obsessive dream imagery on the album and throughout her career, bringing in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Breton’s Surrealism Manifesto and theories on performance and reality. Obviously, as you can tell from the past tense, 33 1/3 wanted nothing to do with this—instead they did the much smarter thing and hired Leah Kardos to write a straightforward accounting of Hounds of Love’s writing, recording, and legacy. I forgot Kardos’s volume came out last year, though I was so thrilled when it was originally announced, and scooped it up immediately when I came across it at Greenlight last week. It’s kind of exactly what you expect and want from one of these books: passionate, informative, and personal, a delightful record of insight into a great work of art bolstered by the memories of someone who holds it close. The best part of Kardos’s book, though, is that it sent me back into a K-hole (Kate hole), compounded with my recent purchase of the lush Fish People vinyl reissue of The Sensual World, the follow-up to Hounds of Love. The Sensual World has long been a quiet love of mine, packed as it is with gorgeously cinematic songs like “The Fog” and “Deeper Understanding” and “This Woman’s Work” (literally written for a film), and its opening title track, inspired by Molly Bloom’s ecstatic soliloquy in Ulysses, gives me goosebumps every single time I listen to it, without fail. The album is also less potently experimental than Hounds of Love—it’s a regular collection of regular songs, for one—which, though not as all-encompassing, is exactly the right move after releasing something so ambitious. Mostly The Sensual World is, well, beautiful, suffused with emotional catharsis and memories and the folkloric storytelling that Bush uses so well. I’m always glad when I let it back into my life.