the friday five | 03 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, March 14, 2025. Thank you!
1. al Badawi
Lena and I have been meaning to try Brooklyn’s Palestinian hot spot al Badawi for awhile now, and we finally stumbled into it last week by deciding more or less on a whim to go to the Met (more below) and looking around for a place to grab dinner nearby afterward. We ended up, obviously, at al Badawi’s new-ish Upper East Side location, which packs tables in like a domino case but is brimming with delightful energy and incredible smells. Every meal at al Badawi starts with warm taboon and fresh olive oil the color of spring, and we each ordered an espresso to counteract the bluster of our windy walk across town. We then split the fattat jaj, a mound of “roasted chicken, rice, chickpeas, mint yogurt, crispy pita, garlic sauce, and slivered almonds” — the menu says this dish serves 3, but we barely ate half of it between the two of us (I added rotisserie chicken to the leftovers the next night for a second phenomenal dinner). I had a feeling I was going to love al Badawi, but it exceeded my high expectations—I know I’ve had a great meal when I want to go back as soon as possible and order five different things just to try them. al Badawi’s flagship location is in Brooklyn Heights, but if you live around here you probably already know that. In that case: see you there!
2. The early films of Frederick Wiseman
When Film at Lincoln Center announced their massive Frederick Wiseman retrospective at the start of this year, my immediate thought was “well, guess I live in the Walter Reade Theater now.” But I don’t live in the Walter Reader Theater—I don’t even live in Manhattan. So you can imagine how disproportionately my desire to be at Lincoln Center watching movies every day matches my actual ability to do so. Between other obligations (by this I mean “other movies” I guess) and various mishaps, I only actually ended up making it to a single movie in the whole FLC Wiseman run: his 1967 debut, Titicut Follies, a spinning foray into the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Titicut is one of very few (very very very few) Wiseman movies that is titled anything other than a direct reference to its institutional subject (Welfare [1975] is about welfare, Ballet [1995] is about the New York City Ballet, Deaf [1986] is about services for the deaf, At Berkeley [2013] is about um…being at Berkeley, etc.), and it’s a bracing, fascinating, tough watch. I found myself so moved by its point of view that I decided to go all in on Early Wiseman, markedly different from Middle Wiseman and Later Wiseman mostly because the films are 80-100 minutes long rather than the more famously Wiseman-esque 180-300. Kanopy, of course—my beloved Kanopy, oh Kanopy my sweet daffodil—has the entire (massive) Frederick Wiseman filmography available to stream for free, so I’m doing it: I’m going chronological. His second feature, High School (1968), about a Philadelphia high school, is my favorite of this early batch so far, but that can’t be surprising, knowing what I do every day. Hospital (1970), his fourth, about New York City’s Metropolitan Hospital, is a very close second, though, packed with fuller “scenes” than Wiseman typically stays with, including a rapturous ten-minute sequence of a college kid tripping on bad mescaline. Law and Order (1969), his third, about the Kansas City PD, is just as arresting (ha), and with all of these movies there are at least 5-7 moments where I’m left slack-jawed at what Wiseman was able to capture, and how he chose to frame it. Eventually these movies get longer, I know (before this early batch I’d only seen Ex Libris, a 197-minute monolith about the New York Public Library), but now I feel primed. I’m ready for it. He’s captured the whole history of modern America, it seems, and if his lens stays this steady, this probing and empathetic, how could I falter?
3. Luminescent Creatures - Ichiko Aoba
The one and only thing I miss about not going on Instagram anymore other than to promote Lena’s book and upcoming readings is that it had become the only consistent way I found out about new music. I’m not saying Pitchfork is a bastion of taste, or that it shouldn’t maybe have been fully dismantled once it sold itself out to Condé Nast, or that I even ever used to visit it with any regularity (once a Stylus head always a Stylus head (I can’t believe the 2007 time capsule that dead website is now…))—BUT what I can say is that as you get older, taking the energy to stay actively abreast of new music is challenging. So I would follow Pitchfork on Instagram and any time an album sounded good in its little IG caption, or had interesting cover art, or got Best New Music, I would save it to my Tidal (this sentence is only getting more obnoxious I’m sorry) (but also stop using Spotify, they’re in bed with MAGA crypto scammers) (sorry) and eventually get around to seeing if I actually liked it. So basically now I never know what music’s coming out that’s supposed to be good anymore. But one thing has slipped through the cracks, I don’t remember how but probably when I ~randomly~ went to pitchfork dot com out of boredom one day and saw its BNM designation: Ichiko Aoba’s Luminescent Creatures, a gentle and gorgeously cinematic album that I’ve been putting on at work and exploring even more deeply with my noise cancelling cans. Aoba has been releasing music prolifically since 2010, and is a Big Deal in Japan, but Luminescent Creatures is only her third or fourth “major” (see also: international crossover) release, including the playful score to Yusuke Morii’s 2022 film Amiko. Its songs form a suite both literally and stylistically inspired by deep sea adventures Aoba took over a period of time without scuba gear off the Ryukyu archipelago, searching for mysterious aquatic life and making spiritual connections between what she found down there and the cosmos at large. If you think you have an idea of what the music sounds like based only on this description, you’re probably right: it’s thrumming, and delicate, and transcendent. As the weather gradually warms up and the light gradually returns to us, Luminescent Creatures soundtracks my days beautifully—music for spring, strangely, or the weeks leading up to it.
4. Caspar David Friedrich at the Met
Last weekend we had nothing going on so I thought “Why not go to the Met?” I had never been to the Met so my only associations with it were Meg Ryan breaking character in When Harry Met Sally and Jason Derulo falling down the stairs—I’ll be honest and admit right away that I had no idea it’s like…a full city block long and then some. I’m such a MoMA stan that I just assumed it was another art museum (don’t laugh at me, I’m being vulnerable) with, like, some sarcophaguses in there. No, it’s fully a museum museum—like I think you’d need 18 hours with a licensed docent to get even close to the full experience. So an idea that started as “we can check out the new Friedrich exhibit and then poke around here and there before dinner” quickly became “we are here exclusively for the Friedrich exhibit.” And I kind of prefer that! If you’re unfamiliar, you likely know Caspar David Friedrich best for his painting “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (1818), which with all its grandeur has been used and abused to impart a feeling of (typically male) capital-I Importance, like this gentle German Romantic landscape painter would have invested in doge coin if only he’d had the chance or something. The Friedrich exhibit is really lovely, though, and really sweeping in its scope, moving chronologically through the artist’s shifting interests and style, from his early graphite drawings to his minimalist sepia work produced by necessity and in obscurity late in life after suffering a series of strokes. I love when an exhibit tells a story and guides you cleanly through it, and I found the way the Met handled Friedrich’s career to be quite moving all in all. His ability to capture natural light and the tiniest bristles of dewy trees still boggles my mind, and of course in the middle of it all, like a mid-life apex, was the wanderer looking proudly over the sea of fog. Maybe one day I’ll hire a professional and see what else that museum’s got going on.
5. True Mistakes (again)
Lena’s debut poetry collection True Mistakes comes out today, the culmination of a lot of work and re-work that I feel immensely honored to have witnessed. Lena and I have been together for 15 years now, and it’s very energizing to grow older with a focused artist, to watch their voice evolve and then straighten out into what they've been trying to get it to say for so long, and so clearly. I remember when Lena got her first poem published in our college lit journal, and though we make fun of it now the way poets will do after long enough, at the time I very distinctly thought, “Oh no…whatever it is I think I’m doing, it isn’t even close to this…” And now here is True Mistakes, a sublime and at times overwhelming collection of 41 poems about uncertainty, art, identity, time, giving in, letting go, the future, and the past—but most of all, to me, they are about Lena, not literally (though there’s that), but in their essence. I cannot and would never try to speak to someone else’s experience of having their first book published, but to watch it happen for the person you love most in this world is very overwhelming. When I read True Mistakes, front to back or picking through the poems like a clothing rack, I often get choked up. I think you’ll like it too. Here are two of my favorite poems from the book, published earlier in North American Review and The Yale Review: “Methods of Distraction” and “Awe.”
Hope you all have a good week :)
K you need to take us to that restaurant when we do a NY trip!
I rly do love the Met... it's nice to just bring a book there and hang out.