ROUND-UP January 24-February 15, 2018

Sorry for the delay, dear readers! Getting published comes in ebbs and flows--sometimes you work for months on a piece and sometimes it's published within a week of being submitted, leading to some gaps in output. This round, I wrote for the Humble Arts Foundation blog, BUST, PopMatters, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, of which I am inordinately proud and honored. I interned there in 2013, and if you'd told me they'd be publishing something I wrote I might have done several spit takes. Enjoy!

• "Photography Exhibition Shows an Unexpected Relationship Between Landscapes, Sculptures, Air Jordans, and Pinball." Humble Arts Foundation blog, January 24, 2018.

"Christine Elfman’s Even Amaranth, an eerie selection of nature scenes and images of Classical sculpture, plays off Mark Jayson Quines’ companion exhibition NOBODY, which comprises snapshots of people and objects in everyday settings, interwoven with actual examples of these valuable artifacts of daily life: smartphones and Air Jordans sneakers. Despite the vastly different nature, style, and subject matter of Elfman’s and Quines’ practices, Even Amaranth and NOBODY cannily come together to form the two halves of the answer to the question: "what lasts?" What is eternal? What will outlive us after we are gone?"

• "Paul Goldberg's 'The Château' Is a Farcical Familial Fable for the Trump Era." PopMatters, February 2, 2018. 

"If Trump hadn't been elected, I suspect that Goldberg would have been able to write The Château as a sort of what-if?-so-glad-we-avoided-that parable; indeed, he told Kirkus Reviews in early 2016 that he was writing a book that clearly became The Château somewhere along the way. The proceedings of The Château are so vivid on their own that the liberal application of Trump Victorious feels topical rather than completely intertwined into the narrative. Trump merely provides a more recognizable lens through which we can view Goldberg's creation, turning the proceedings from the "Florida Man" punchline/dismissal into something much more understandable for those of us not familiar with the unique ecosystem of the wealthy retirees of South Florida."

• "Giant Mezuzahs: The Yiddishkeit of 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel'." Los Angeles Review of Books, February 14, 2018

"Jewishness as identity is central to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and yet, incredibly, the show isn’t a crash course in “American Judaism 101.” What The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel does is cater to a Jewish viewer, and allows for the possibility that gentile viewers might not get it all right away. There’s no explanation of what a Bar or Bat Mitzvah ceremony is, or why Yom Kippur tickets at the synagogue could represent a major point of contention between Abe Weissman and Moishe Maisel. The gentile viewer is simply expected either to know and understand, or to do their level best to keep up. It’s essentially how pretty much all popular media treats nondescript white Protestantism — it’s assumed that everyone watching a Christmas episode knows what Christmas is about and what it’s supposed to look like."

• "'My Happy Family' Celebrates Women Living For Themselves." BUST Magazine, February 15, 2018.

"There’s no clichéd moment of catharsis in My Happy Family in which we see Manana instantly make the decision to leave her family, no shouted declaration of “I’ve had enough!” Rather, we get a portrait of a woman worn away by degrees, like waves carving into a cliffside. After fulfilling society’s expectations of her as a wife and mother and daughter, the sounds of her family’s needs and pleas and wants have accumulated in the creases of her forehead over the years; now, all she wants is silence."