READ WATCH PLAY FEAST: MY FAVORITES OF 2024, PART 1

A YEAR OF BEING ASTONISHED, DELIGHTED, INSPIRED, AND KEPT UP AT NIGHT

A Louise Bourgeois piece from part 2 of our round-up

In many respects 2024 sucked. No two ways around it — what with the election, Gaza, Ukraine, and all the other calamities that befell us, this was a year many of us would probably prefer to forget — but even on the edge of what often felt like the Apocalypse there were also victories and joys and much that was, and is, worth fighting for. The human filigrees, which make these hard lives worth living and celebrating. During these holidays, I’ve been trying to focus on that side, on my friends and family and on helping where I can. We’ll see where I land in January, but for now that’s where I’m at.

On a personal level I didn’t write a lot of fiction this past year. As a consequence I’ve been trying some new things to pull me out of my hole, and we’ll see how that plays out. I keep hoping one day I’ll open my eyes and the words will be back the way they used to be. One’s got to have hope.

Perhaps, unsurprisingly, 2024 — so torturous in nearly every other way — was a knockout year for art and popular culture. Throughout these twelve months, I’ve tried to document here what nourished my spirit, what kept me astonished, delighted, inspired and up at night, and for this closing round-up I’m including the work I failed to mention and recall a few that I did mention but I still ain’t been able to shake.

As always a huge blast of super-sayajin gratitude to all of you who have made this space possible.

Here’s our 2024 Round-Up —

READ

In January I reviewed Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel MARTYR! and it’s a knock-out. If you’re searching for something to bring your human heart into sharp relief, look no further.

“In Cyrus, Akbar has created an indelible protagonist, haunted, searching, utterly magnetic. But it speaks to Akbar’s storytelling gifts that “Martyr!” is both a riveting character study and piercing family saga. He traces the Shams family back to Iran, to the people they were before Flight 665. We meet Arash as a boy, unnerved by his sister Roya’s fearlessness, and later as a “zero soldier” in the war with Iraq — “zero education, zero special skills, zero responsibilities outside of my country” — and therefore utterly expendable, a martyr-in-the-making. We meet Ali in the days before chickens, before Cyrus, before heartbreak. Best of all are the chapters that home in on Roya. Dissatisfied with marriage, with motherhood, she stumbles into a friendship that opens her up to other horizons, to emkanat — possibilities.2”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/books/review/martyr-kaveh-akbar.html

Tania James is one of my favorite authors and I recommend all her books, but this one is James at her absolute peak. A superb historical, and a magical historical adventure all in one…

“Abbas is just seventeen years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Tipu Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace in order to build a giant tiger automaton for Tipu’s sons, a gift to commemorate their return from British captivity. His fate—and the fate of the wooden tiger he helps create—will mirror the vicissitudes of nations and dynasties ravaged by war across India and Europe.

Working alongside the legendary French clockmaker Lucien du Leze, Abbas hones his craft, learns French, and meets Jehanne, the daughter of a French expatriate. When Du Leze is finally permitted to return home to Rouen, he invites Abbas to come along as his apprentice. But by the time Abbas travels to Europe, Tipu’s palace has been looted by British forces, and the tiger automaton has disappeared. To prove himself, Abbas must retrieve the tiger from an estate in the English countryside, where it is displayed in a collection of plundered art.”

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/715724/loot-by-tania-james/

For readers who love their Hollywood and their comics meta-woke, this narrative razor is for you.

“Maximus Wyld had his heyday in 1940s-50s Hollywood. Of mixed race Black, Chinese and Native American descent, he was "the actor with a thousand faces”, essentially interpreting ethnic roles: Indian chief, Mexican revolutionary, oriental dandy...

A veritable reinterpretation of the myth of American cinema through the prism of minorities, Erased reveals the political and social dimension of Hollywood productions.

Maximus Ohanzee Wildhorse, renamed “Maximus Wyld” by Hollywood, was a talented, prized, admired comedian. His filmography is an anthology of cinema: Vertigo, the Maltese Falcon, Sunset Boulevard, the Prisoner of the Desert, Rebecca...

Copper-faced and with unprecedented beauty and animal presence, he paved the way for colored stars in an segregationist climate. After him, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Yul Brynner were able to reach the rank of stars. His charisma ignited white cinema and shamelessly swayed its racial hegemony. Maximus Wyld was a pioneer. However, no credits mention his name. On celluloid there is no imprint of his face. Maximus the precursor rests in the graveyard of Hollywood amnesia. What event pushed him into limbo? What occult and superior force stored his career in a cinematic Bermuda Triangle?”

https://nbmpub.com/products/erased?_pos=1&_sid=ee90d8530&_ss=r

WATCH

BRIEF TENDER LIGHT documents the incredible journey of four African students at MIT. Re-watched it last night and it truly is one of the finest films I’ve seen in years in any genre. And for those of us who had to travel intergalactic distances to attend universities, this film is a deeply moving mirror in which we are given the opportunity to see ourselves at last. Produced and directed by Arthur Musah (one of my former students — not that he ever needed my help).

From PBS: “In Brief Tender Light, Musah captures students as they embark on their MIT education with individual ambitions: Sante to engineer infrastructure in Tanzania; Philip to secure a better life for family in Nigeria; Billy to contribute to post-genocide reconstruction in Rwanda; and Fidelis to advance the wellbeing of his community in Zimbabwe. Their missions are distinct, but fueled by a common goal: to become agents of positive change back home.

While their dreams are anchored in the societies they have left, their daily realities are defined by America — by the immediate challenges in their MIT classrooms, and by the larger social issues confronting the world beyond those classrooms. Their new environment demands they adapt if they want to succeed. Over an intimate, nearly decade-long journey spanning two continents, students and filmmaker alike are forced to decide how much of America to absorb, how much of Africa to hold on to, and how to reconcile teenage ideals with the truths they discover about the world and themselves.

“At its core, Brief Tender Light is about whether youthful idealism can survive the process of growing up,” said Director Arthur Musah. “At the onset, I considered following African youths at different stages of college for a single year. As I developed the idea, it became clear that it would be more adequate that the project become a longitudinal documentary filmed over nearly a decade, in order to answer the questions that intrigued me. How does time, and iterations of trying and failing on projects gradually transform one into an engineer? How does a new world become home? How does a Black African become aware of racism in America? How does one’s identity shift, and how do different people weigh living for their community’s expectations versus their own desires? As a gay man, I also drew on my experience of turning away from Ghana and towards America in search of freedom to inform the film.”

https://www.pbs.org/pov/films/brieftenderlight/

Some have described SUPACELL as a Black Britain’s answer to MISFITS and THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY, but this Netflix series is more than its genre-peers with knock-out performances and the kind of writing we need more of.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80987077

EL GRAN HOTEL is three seasons of novela madness that helped me get over a particularly rough patch. I was raised in a novela-watching family so this kind of fare speaks to me at a molecular level. Combine period piece pressures and frothy plots + dynamite chemistry between our leads and you got your binge-fest for the holidays.

https://www.primevideo.com/detail/Grand-Hotel/0Q4ANNOPFLVSDCWDLATEV1Y09R

HOUSE OF DRAGONS and RINGS OF POWER and all the other GAME OF THRONES contenders wish they had as much brains and wit and heart and sheer talent as ARCANE. Despite the rushed second season ARCANE is still one of the best shows on TV, excluding of course …

INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE — which is the best and if you ain’t seen it, you haven’t fed your immortal heart right.

https://www.amc.com/shows/interview-with-the-vampire--1053259

PLAY

Caught Shabaka Hutchings in Tokyo and he did it all. How could I have not known about this stunningly brilliant brother?

https://www.shabakahutchings.com/#/

My goddaughter hipped me to CORTEX but given how many hiphop producers are all over their joints I’m wayyyyy late to the party. I’m always grateful for the music recs because while I might be OK with books and screens my music levels are nowhere near where they should be.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/cortex-troupeau-bleu-tyler-creator-madlib-1234584701/

FEAST

Jane Jin Kaisen’s Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) is simply and singularly soul-changing. If you’re coming to Seoul in the next three months you cannot miss Ieodo. If you ain’t coming to Seoul in the next three months and you got the means, I suggest you consider a quick trip to the National Museum of Contemporary Art. The whole exhibit is Big Fire but if I was ever going to activate a superpower or latent magic ability, it would have happened at this exhibit.

https://koreaartistprize.org/en/project/2024/

If you can’t make it to Seoul then jump over to Boston, where god-energies are being unleashed. You have three weeks to catch Tau Lewis at the ICA and after that the Gate to the Ancestral Plane closes.

“A self-taught artist, Lewis’s practice is directed at healing personal, collective, and historical traumas through the repetitive forms of creative labor she employs. She forages for materials and artifacts charged with meaning—previously worn clothing, fabrics, leather, and photographs, as well as drift wood, sand dollars, and seashells—that she often collects from her surroundings in Toronto, New York, or outside of her family’s home in Negril, Jamaica. The evocative objects Lewis gathers and transmutes constitute a relationship in her work to the social, cultural, and physical landscapes she moves through, collects from, and inhabits. Lewis’s upcycling relates to forms of material inventiveness practiced by diasporic communities, wherein working with things close at hand is a reparative act aimed at reclaiming agency. Throughout, Lewis’s interest is in honoring and advancing these diasporic traditions, and exploring, as she has said, “the transference of energy and emotion that occurs when an object is made by hand.””

https://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/tau-lewis/

Mimi’s Chūka Diner. One of my favorite pop-ups in the Boston area finally has its own joint inside of Aeronaut Brewing. Big congrats to Ted Woo and Jon Awerman, and thank you for the best gyoza in all of Mass.

https://www.instagram.com/mimischukadiner/

Part II incoming!