the friday five | 08 16 24

Every Friday, a new Montage will recommend you five things that I, Brad, am currently enjoying. “Things” is an ugly word, but it’s the best word here I think.

This is the Friday Five for Friday, August 16, 2024. Thank you!

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1. Willem Dafoe talking about making movies

I would never be able to explain to you how I came across this video (because I don’t remember…probably just “video was fed to me”) but boy did it make my whole week. I find these canned Variety marketing videos generally enjoyable because I’m old enough to find famos engaging for some sickening reason, but no one is more of a movie star to me than Willem Dafoe. What you might expect to be a generally charming overview of Dafoe’s career proves to be much more than that (or just enough more than that), though, because listening to Willem Dafoe talk about making movies is, it turns out, deeply soothing. At one point he reads one of his lines from The Last Temptation of Christ and has to hold back tears—just from reading the line! Off of cardstock! I love him. One time in an avant-garde theater class in college we watched grainy clips of the Wooster Group’s Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St. Antony, starring a very young and naked Willem Dafoe going ape. Sometimes college good.

2. Kyary Pamyu Pamyu - Candy Racer

Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is a Japanese icon, but it’s hard to tell from my Western POV what youths/demi-youths in Japan actually make of her. She’s a tarento, which doesn’t have a 1:1 equivalent in America but the closest thing I can think to call it is a “public persona,” someone who pops up everywhere in the media to perform, host things, and generally be fashionable (the UK breeds people like this too, who kind of hop from TV show to TV show without any “skill” necessarily other than, like, “being good on TV”). On top of this, KPP, who started modeling professionally at 12 years old, has built a reputation as one of the most daring kawaii figures, stepping out on the town in cartoonish outfits and wigs that have come to define her style. Most pertinent to me though is her acutely deranged music, which translates the extreme, almost sickening cuteness of kawaii into migraine-inducing beeps and boops, a fully impressive freneticism. Her 2021 album Candy Racer came to me right when I was returning to “real life” post-vaccine and listening to it now still gives me that same brainless euphoria. To be clear: I love it.

3. The subway

More to come on this, I think, but the longer I live in New York City the more I learn that the stereotype of the brusk, cynical New Yorker holds more water than I was expecting. I’m not originally from California but I did just live there for seven years and I think because of that, meeting and working with New Yorkers for the past two months has made me feel consistently slightly insane—I laugh too much, ask too many questions, wonder too loudly about peoples’ feelings, use too many exclamation points in emails, and generally speaking “come on a little strong.” But you know what? If someone grimaces at me one more time because I’ve told them my favorite thing about living here so far is the subway, I’m going to scream. The subway fucking rules. I’m sorry if you take it for granted, but live anywhere else for more than a week and I guarantee you’ll miss the train. It goes everywhere, it’s pretty reliable (I understand this is contentious…but I promise you compared to other city trains it is mostly reliable. We can’t all be the fucking Tube, OK), it’s spacious enough and quiet enough…and did I mention it goes everywhere? Getting rid of my car has exponentially improved my life, and the New York City subway system is my new best friend. Will I harden over time, become a little darker, a little quicker to judge, a little more battle-worn? I’m sure (sad 😔). But I really hope I never learn to hate taking the train.

4. “The Legacy of ‘American Bitch’”

Clare’s Famous and Beloved Newsletter is my newest email discovery, thanks to the Substack timeline feature which I literally never look at so maybe this is proof that I should…? Her essay on the infamous Girls episode “American Bitch” (the one that ends with that kid playing “Desperado” on her flute, something I am constantly thinking about) is so astute, and really finely tuned into what made that show such a lightning rod for a lot of miserable discourse throughout basically its entire run. This is my favorite part:

Girls, I think, is being critically and popularly revived by a generation for whom “Grab ‘em by the pussy” seems a cultural relic from a time other than their own…. These new Girls fans are not necessarily more nuanced or materialist, but they don’t care that Lena Dunham endorsed Hillary Clinton. 8 years into Donald Trump saying stuff like “I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear” amidst a genocide we are inundated with details about but are powerless to stop, the memory of litigating the political significance of “woman in White House” is nothing but ridiculous.

Makes me want to pick our long-gestating Girls rewatch back up. Like…why did we stop! (Well honestly because “The Panic in Central Park” really bummed us out 😔) (Editor’s note: after writing this, we watched the Kitty Genovese ep where everything Fran says is darkly evil…what a show.)

5. Little Sesame hummus

I worry this is one of those things that everyone else has been into for years, but I made my own day by ~randomly~ buying a tub of Little Sesame’s “jammy tomato” hummus last week at my bodega and after trying out a different flavor this week (“pumpkin chili crisp”) I feel confident enough now to recommend everyone go out and eat this stuff immediately. I guess if you don’t like hummus very much, Little Sesame might strike you as whatever, but the flavors, to me, are outstanding, just sharp enough to surprise you without going so overboard that you tire of it in three bites. It’s creamy…it’s cool…apparently the tomatoes in the tomato one come from some famous pizza chef in California? Now that’s ~random~!