Author: bapu
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And Then? And Then? What Else?, Handler (2024)
Writing, even at its best, is not an act of ethereal genius. It’s nature, which includes teenagers on school buses, snowy forests, and heartbreak, that contains genius. Sometimes our minds get out of the way and let our senses reveal how funny and strange it all is. Handler’s gentle advice can be summarized as: write…
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Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams (1998)
Home is an idea, a mythical place of unconditional love and unquestioned belonging. It’s also a real place filled with what’s most familiar to us—that is, the things we find most beautiful and most appalling in this wide world. The brilliance of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is that Williams doesn’t offer resolution. She…
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One Battle After Another (2025)
At first glance, Bob Ferguson and Daniel Plainview, the protagonists of PTA’s One Battle After Another and There Will Be Blood, respectively, seem to be opposites. Bob is bumbling, overwhelmed by loss, trying to hold on to a fragment of love; Plainview is domineering, megalomaniacal, visionary. But it’s a question of angle. What we actually…
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On political violence
Conservative political organizer Charlie Kirk was killed last week. The internet is afire with fury and blame, and there’s a real risk that tensions could spiral out of control into more bloodshed. Regardless of one’s politics, it’s undeniable that the functioning of democracy depends on free speech and the rule of law. I won’t mince…
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Martyr!, Akbar (2024)
Every fifty pages or so, I asked myself if I wanted to keep going. For most of its length, Martyr! is perched, maddeningly, just between intriguing and clumsy. The prose is sometimes elegant, sometimes stilted; the plot sometimes clever, sometimes contrived. Only in the final few chapters of the book does Akbar’s central question—what good…
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A Fortunate Man, Berger & Mohr (1967)
A Fortunate Man is a striking book, made more so by the fact that the country doctor John Eskell (“Sassall” in the text) killed himself fifteen years late after its publication. His depression is dealt with frankly in the book, although the conditions is not medicalized; it seems more the depression of a hero who…
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The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio (1999)
One difficulty in reviewing popular science is separating the power of the ideas from the communicative skill of the work. Antonio Damasio is among the most influential of this generation’s consciousness researchers. His notion that consciousness is the “feeling of what happens”—a body assessing its internal state, interacting with the environment, utilizing emotion as a…
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Bluets, Nelson (2009)
Bluets, a collection of prose poems ostensibly about being in love with the color blue, is very, very brave. The deepest bravery has to do with vulnerability. I don’t know the extent to which Bluets is autobiographical, but it doesn’t matter. Everything is plausible. Most of us have been in similar places of heartbreak and…
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The Outrun (2024)
Rabeh’s take: Granite cliffs demarcate land and sea. We are told this is a border. Where life as we know it ends, and another, foreign and hidden, begins. But our bodies are made of water. The Outrun reminds us there is no difference between what happens within the vessel of our bodies and all that…
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Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco (2002)
Every listener has their biases. I’ve just never really quite grasped 21st-century indie rock, whatever that label means. I’ve been trying and mostly failing to appreciate Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear (or is it Panda Bear?), Vampire Weekend, etc. for two decades—these bands move many, many people, and so there must be something there, but my…
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Rising Down, The Roots (2008)
There are no label-friendly singles on this album, no Do You Want More?-style heady jazz, none of the late 90s neo-soul vibe. The mood of Roots albums had been growing steadily darker over the years, and Rising Down is the apotheosis of grime. That’s a good thing. It’s not easy to grab listeners with an…
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Amassakoul, Tinariwen (2004)
These dudes are the real deal. The members of Tinariwen met and learned to play music in refugee camps. Lead vocalist Ibrahim Ag Alhabib’s first guitar was made of a gas can, a stick, and a bicycle brake line. The band reportedly has seventeen bullet wounds between them. Tinariwen’s astonishing music is rooted in the…
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Against the Grain, Bad Religion (1990)
Each of Bad Religion’s albums conveys a different shade of world-weary righteousness. Disgust is probably the dominating emotion of Against the Grain—disgust at growing ecological disaster, our numbing addiction to consumption, the rise of retrograde evangelism. It’s as if the band simply can’t believe that natural selection produced such an idiotic organism. And yet Against…
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All We Imagine as Light (2024)
If films were representative of human experience, we’d get a few thousand movies every year about the people of Mumbai, Lilongwe, Salvador, Managua, Memphis, etc. trying to keep their heads above the bullshit. I refer to representation not in regard to the quantity of human lives, but rather to their quality, their emotional depth, their…
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No Other Land (2023)
The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Thucydides wrote this 2500 years ago. It’s still true. Heads of state like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu cling stubbornly to this creed and act accordingly, but if we’re being honest, they are symptoms, not causes. An insufficient faith in alternatives plagues…
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Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, Musser (2023)
The measurement problem in quantum mechanics, the hard problem of consciousness, and the challenge of developing general AI are not separate issues. Absorbing that message—understanding its potentially enormous leverage for a revolution in human understanding—is enough to justify picking up George Musser’s Putting Ourselves Back Into the Equation. The book is readable, which is no…
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The Creative Act, Rubin (2023)
I’m admittedly a grouch when it comes to self-help books. Most feel like schemes to make money off our self-loathing, to peddle detours around the actual hard work of living. The Creative Act is an exception. The difference starts with Rick Rubin’s credibility. The dude has produced some bangers over the decades, and the artists…
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Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars, and Sitars, Kalyanji-Anandji & Dan the Automator (1998)
The brothers Kalyanji and Anandji Shah composed hundreds of Bollywood soundtracks over their career, mostly for masala action flicks. Bombay the Hard Way is a collection of their 1970s funk-heavy work, curated, produced, and remixed by San Francisco legend Dan the Automator. It’s not an earth-shaking album, but good enough to generate curious smiles and…
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Pachinko, Lee (2017)
In a general sense, the events of Pachinko might have happened to any of a billion immigrant families. Lee’s carefully painted details of Korean life in twentieth-century Japan matter, of course; emotional power derives from such meticulousness. But precarious livelihoods, ill-advised affairs, lucky meetings with rich patrons, the slow building of wealth, the ever-present risk…
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The Doors of Perception, Huxley (1954)
Writing coherently about a psychedelic experience is not easy. Believe me, I’ve tried. The result is usually a mix of bad poetry and worse speechifying. (Evaluated under conditions of conventional perception, of course; if the doors of perception were cleansed, even claptrap appears as it truly is, infinitely adorable.) Huxley far surpasses coherence in Doors…
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Grizzly Man (2005)
Over thirteen summers, Timothy Treadwell spent tens of thousands of hours living among brown grizzly bears in remote Alaska. That fact is far more remarkable than the circumstances of his death. Organisms need to eat, and sometimes you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. The psychological forces that brought Treadwell to Katmai National…
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Dimanche à Bamako, Amadou & Mariam (2005)
Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia met at Mali’s Institute for the Young Blind in the late 1970s, and for the next couple decades made music in relative obscurity. Near the turn of the century, they began overlaying Malian traditional music with blues and rock styles, utilizing a dizzying array of instruments—balafon, calebasse, djembe, trumpet, harmonica, tabla,…
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When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut (2021)
I respect Benjamin Labatut’s effort. A hard border between fiction and non-fiction is unhelpful. The recent surge in “auto-fiction”—which, in truth, has always been with us: people write about what they know—is dissolving the boundary a bit, but many creative paths are still unexplored, including that of conveying scientific truths with literary skill. Science, after…
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Gilead, Robinson (2004)
It’s hard to believe that some works of art were created by just one person. Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, for example, or di Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. Their content is so perceptive, so varied, that multiple lifetimes of experience seem necessary. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is like this. Her mouthpiece is John Ames, a pastor of…
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Visions from the Country
Robbie Basho’s guitar is astonishing. Basho immersed himself deeply in various musical traditions—Indian, Persian, Native American, among others—but cultural syncretism only works when it results in something truly original. Basho’s sound is. The songs contain shadows of ragas, scales born far from the Wyoming high plateau, chants in a Native cadence; but in the end…
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Rambunctious Garden, Marris (2013)
Rambunctious Garden contains a truth about history and a quietly revolutionary argument about the future. The truth is that humans have intensively managed ecosystems wherever we’ve lived. The notion of a “pristine” nature is a 19th century Romantic ideal that led 20th century ecological practice (and theory) astray. The argument is that the concepts of…
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Spotlight (2015)
Each of us would like to believe that we would rise to the occasion. We would like to believe that if the suffering of the other were horrific enough, we would dedicate ourselves to the cause of love, regardless of the cost to ourselves. That’s nearly exactly the opposite of how most of us actually…
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Children of Men (2006)
The idea at the heart of Children of Men is unclear. “Hope” is an easy answer, but too easy. Cuarón realizes his vision well; we the viewers feel like we’re living within the gray capitalist endgame, our hope of rebirth both metaphorically and literally almost gone. Sometimes, as in the car-in-reverse scene, the feeling is…
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Hale County, This Morning, This Evening (2018)
At first approximation—from the eye of God, say, or extraterrestrials—each detail of human life is dramatically equivalent. The terrible enormous wars, a forgettable melody, walking to the corner store, falling in love. That’s not to say that it’s all trivial; just the opposite. It’s all utterly astonishing, a collision of physical and biological fortune that…
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Michael Clayton (2007)
Corporation destroys lives and hides its crimes; a hero employee can no longer deny their conscience and takes on the beast. We’ve been here before, at least in cinema. (The heroism part is less common in the real world). That Michael Clayton is nevertheless riveting is a credit to the tight scripting, unobtrusive direction, and…
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The BQE, Sufjan Stevens (2007)
The ambition of Sufjan Stevens! How many composers would attempt a symphony about an expressway? Much less pull it off—BQE is musically varied, hilarious, sometimes stirring, and ultimately joyous. I admit that if I didn’t know the concept and intention of the project, the music wouldn’t hit as deeply as it does. But the cover…
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A Brief History of Time, Hawking (1988)
A Brief History of Time is clear, precise, and (indeed) short. Other books about cosmology are perhaps clearer (From Eternity to Here) or more precise (Black Holes & Time Warps) or even shorter (The First Few Minutes), but to date none have quite pulled off the combination like Hawking did decades ago. The book could…
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PlayTime (1967)
Jacques Tati’s PlayTime was, famously, a flop. Tati built an enormous stage on the outskirts of Paris, at great cost. Audiences didn’t come and critics were divided. Over time, however, the film has come to be regarded as a masterpiece, simultaneously a statement on the confusing hollowness of modernity and a depiction of human resistance.…
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Elena Knows, Pineiro (2007)
Claudia Piñeiro is one of Argentina’s most successful authors. She’s also a pro-choice activist, having lent her voice to the successful effort to legalize abortion in Argentina. Elena Knows is Piñeiro’s effort to portray, in uncompromising terms, what the responsibility of caregiving entails. The debate around abortion typically revolves around political and religious values—what is…
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Being Upright, Anderson (2001)
The Bodhisattva precepts are not commandments. They are descriptions of the world as it is. That we humans don’t see that, or don’t quite believe it, is why books like Being Upright need to be written. Reb Anderson, senior dharma teacher of San Francisco Zen Center, one of North America’s most venerable Buddhist institutions, does…
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Troubadour, K’naan (2009)
K’naan hasn’t released an album in thirteen years, and that’s only if we’re counting 2012’s mediocre Country, God or the Girl. But the Somalian-Canadian MC’s first two albums, The Dusty Foot Philosopher and Troubadour, had the potential to take mainstream hip-hop into thrilling, borderless territory. K’naan’s art has an emotional center: his experience of fleeing…
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Apocalypse Now (1979)
I have an acquaintance—once a good friend, now an acquaintance; these things happen—who survived an act of political violence. Nearly one hundred people around her died. She was very close to the bomb but, as far as I know from our infrequent meetings, suffered neither serious injury nor persistent psychological trauma. Apocalypse Now is about…
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The 40 Year-Old Virgin (2005)
Well. The crudeness of 40 Year-Old Virgin—and be prepared for some extreme crudeness, some of which, two decades later, would for good reason no longer be tolerable—has a purpose. The film explores male fragility, especially with respect to sex, by amplifying it. And, truth be told, as offensive as some of these jokes are, they…
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The Practice of the Wild, Snyder (1990)
The ideas contained within Practice of the Wild may be the only ideas powerful enough to stave off the looming ecological and political apocalypses of the twenty-first century. I acknowledge the grandiosity of this statement. My only defense is that the ideas in this book are not the work of one man. They are the…
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Outline, Cusk (2014)
Cusk’s method is creative and straightforward: define the narrator through negative space. Outline is a record of ten conversations in Athens. In each, the narrator Faye is almost silent; even her thoughts are outward-facing, rarely self-reflective. She listens to stories about heartbreak and identity, how relationships gradually create and erase and smudge our selves. She…