The Rider, the Ride, the Rich Man's Wife

 
The Rider, the Ride, the Rich Man's Wife

by Premee Mohamed

PS Publishing

2024

 

 
The Rider, the Ride, the Rich Man's Wife is a novella that blends science fiction and horror to tell a new version of a classic tale about human sacrifice meant to bring good weather. But unlike in "The Lottery", for example, there is a true supernatural threat here, not solely the indifference and cruelty of one's mortal neighbors.

 

In the post-apocalyptic future, twin brothers Lucas and Kit live in a farming village that ekes a living from the parched landscape. Once every seven years, the town gets absolutely deluged with rain, which heralds the arrival of a pair of hungry ghosts, the Rider and the Wife. Each time the heavy rains come, the ghosts appear and place a mark on their prey. The next morning the hunt begins. If the prey can survive until sunset, supposedly they'll be free, but if not they'll become the next Rider. No one is allowed to help; anyone who interferes will be killed immediately.

 

When Kit is chosen though, Lucas isn't willing to let his brother die without trying to help. They make a plan. Instead of running toward the river as people usually do, Kit will run to the distant city, abandoned when civilization fell. And Lucas will meet him there.Together, perhaps the can out-run, out-hide, out-think, and maybe even out-fight the Rider and the Wife. Of course it's not really that easy, and what they find in the city is much stranger and much older than they possibly could've prepared for. Almost the whole book is devoted to the chase, with only a little scene setting before it starts, and a glimpse of the aftermath after it ends at sunset.

 

Author Premee Mohamed maintains a frantic pace as the brothers try to keep ahead of undead hunters on horseback and their horrible, monstrous hounds. Just as she did in The Butcher of the Forest, she describes the otherworldly in language that's visceral and immediate, making her ghostly creatures feel disturbingly lively. If I have one complaint, it's that the worldbuilding is so expansive that the tale seems dwarfed by the world it's set in. There might even be a connection to the otherworld of The Butcher. That's much better than the author having too little imagination though, and the unexpected sprawl of the scenery never detracts from the urgency of the pursuit. 

A Fantastic Woman (2017)

  

A Fantastic Woman

directed by Sebastian Lelio
written by Sebastian Lelio, Gonazlo Maza, and Eliseo Altunaga
Sony Pictures Classics
2017
 

 
In the early 2000s, I read a law review article where my takeaway was that the main reason trans rights varied so much from state to state in the US didn't have much to do with local politics. Instead, it was because trans rights were decided by court cases brought by the other surviving relatives of a dead person, trying to stop the transgender spouse (nearly always a trans woman) from inheriting anything.

 
In one state, the first case like this might be a about a trans woman who was married to another woman, perhaps someone she married before her transition. In that state, trans women will be legally considered women, and because both spouses are women, their marriage will be nullified. In another state, the spouse who died might be a man who married a trans woman after she transitioned. In that state, trans women will legally be counted as men, the marriage will again be classified as being between two people of the same sex, and again, it won't count. The article's claim seemed to be that what decides the rights of trans people in each US state is which family got to the courts first, and set a precedent that affects everyone who comes after, in order to leave their particular widow with nothing.

 

The US legal landscape is completely different by now, partly because of the Supreme Court case legalizing same-sex marriage, and partly because state legislatures have deliberated and passed laws instead of leaving it to probate courts to set policy. But I thought of that article while watching A Fantastic Woman because, while there are no courts involved, it's all about a rich Chilean family trying to box out dead Orlando's new girlfriend Marina, taking back, within days, the car she drove, the apartment she lived in, her dog, all the while never giving her a chance to grieve, and telling her that she's a monster for interfering with their grief.

 

(I recognize that this can happen to cisgender women too, whenever a young woman befriends or cares for an older man, whenever she doesn't have the protection of a legal marriage and a new will, as in Knives Out. But Marina has no Benoit Blanc, nor anyone else to advocate for her. And there's a larger critique of transphobia and homophobia at work here.)

 

A Fantastic Woman is a film of cruel ironies. When Orlando has an aneurysm in the night, Marina drives him to the hospital, but the police treat her first as a suspect, then as a potential victim who might've killed in self defense (though even this seems more like a pretext for the detective to force Marina through a physical examination to look for nonexistent injuries). They can't imagine her as an equal partner in her relationship, rather than as someone hired just for sex. Orlando's family takes everything from Marina, while accusing her of being a thief. She's assaulted by Orlando's son and his friends while they call her gay slurs. When she tries to sneak into the funeral, she's thrown out, and told she's ruining the others' ability to grieve for their loved one.

 

The only thing Marina has left from Orlando is the key to his locker in local sauna. To find his last, accidental gift, she makes a visual descent into hell, entering on the women's side, sneaking through the staff areas, then passing through the men's baths to their lockers. What do you think she finds inside? There's nothing that could make up for everything she suffers leading up to this moment, and the film doesn't pretend there is.

 

Although the story is realistic, the visuals are tinged with expressionism. There are maybe more mirrors and reflective surfaces in this film than in any other I've seen, and they're always used to emotional effect. The lighting is moody. And Orlando reappears many times after his death, like a ghost accompanying Marina, until he finally leads her to privately watch his cremation after the funeral.
 
 

Originally watched February 2023. 

The Best American Comics 2019

 
 
The Best American Comics 2019

edited by Jillian Tamaki

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2019

 

  

The Best American Comics 2019 ended up being the last one in the series. I sort of assume it was cancelled for reasons nebulously related to the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic turmoil, but that's really only a guess on my part. The series editor announced the publisher's decision in late 2020, but he didn't give any reason. He might not know it, or might not be allowed to say.

 

Jilian Tamaki picked 2019's comics. I think she chose fewer short comics than in the past. There are only a couple 1-2 pagers. Her excerpts from longer works feel particularly well-chosen to tell a complete sub-part of the larger story, which is something I've been critical of other editors about. I haven't been systematically counting, but I think Tamaki may have chosen a few more women artists than in the past, and I think the majority of her picks are nonfiction, mostly memoir.

 

Among the graphic nonfiction, we get Joe Sacco reporting on the petroleum industry at the oil sands in Alberta, Canada (the same region Kate Beaton wrote about in Ducks). Sophia Foster-Dimino has a harrowing account of her accidental pregnancy and abortion when she was in college and in an abusive relationship. There's an excerpt from Vera Brogsol's memoir Be Prepared about attending a Russian culture summer camp in America when she was a kid. And one of my favorite pieces in the book, Angie Wang writes about trying to find her favorite Chinese food in American restaurants, prepared the way she remembers it. Wang's piece was drawn for the cellphone, intended to be viewed by scrolling down and downward.

 

There were fewer fictional pieces. We get an excerpt from Nick Drsano's Sabrina about two strangers who are drawn together after both witnessing a murder, while omnipresent right-wing radio casts doubt on what happened in the background. I especially liked Unihabitable by Jed McGowan, a complete comic told from the perspective of a swarm of billions of nano robots attempting to terraform an alien world, then making peace with their failure. Like Angie Wang, McGowan (digitally?) painted his comic, making it look very different from the many black-and-white pen drawings that were the most common style earlier in the series.

 

I'll miss the BAC books. I've found a number of artists I like by reading them. There are a couple other comics anthologies I want to read, although they actually precede the Best American series.

The Story of My Teeth

 
 
The Story of My Teeth

by Valeria Luiselli
translated by Christina MacSweeney

Coffee House Press

2013, reprinted 2015
 

  

The Story of My Teeth is a kind of rollicking first-person narrative telling the life story of Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez. Gustavo has a larger-than-life personality. He's a former security guard, an auctioneer, a collector of knickknacks, a raconteur, a teller of tall tales, a man about town, a storyteller but also a bullshitter. As a character and the book's narrator, he's fun to read. The book was originally written in Spanish, and it's set in a suburb of Mexico City.

 

The Story of My Teeth is divided into a handful of chapters, and moves across the unpredictably. In the first chapter, Gustavo tells most of his life story. He grew up poor, got a job as a security guard at a juice factory, eventually got a promotion to crisis manager. He met a rich woman and lived as her kept husband, learned auctioneering, got divorced. As an auctioneer, he made his own money, bought a house and a collection of curios, including a supposed set of Marylin Monroe's teeth, which he paid to have implanted in place of his own.

 

The next chapter shows a single auction, where Gustavo sells off ten of his own teeth while claiming they each belonged to a different famous historical figure, from Plato to Virginia Woolfe. We get to read a vignette for each one. At the end of the chapter, Gustavo meets his long-estranged son, now an adult who works at the art gallery adjoining the juice factory.

 

In the third chapter, Gustavo wakes up drugged and disoriented in an art gallery. His son has removed all his teeth and stolen all the collected tchotchkes out of his house. Gustavo meets an aspiring young writer and makes him his apprentice; we learn that the first chapter was written by the apprentice taking dictation.

 

Chapter four has another auction! Gustavo and his apprentice break back into the gallery to steal back his teeth and some other things to resell. Gustavo makes up entirely fictional stories about the origin of each object to tell at auction, and we get those vignettes too.

 

The fifth chapter is a posthumous retelling of Gustavo's life by his apprentice. Seen from the outside, and without Gustavo's grandiosity, it all looks a bit smaller and sadder. This one is illustrated with photos of the real neighborhood where the book takes place. The sixth and final chapter was written by the translator, not the author. It's a timeline that covers Gustavo's life, key events in Mexican history that overlap with it, and anniversaries of events in the lives of the famous people Gustavo references in his tale telling.

 

Gustavo is an enjoyable narrator, and via his fictional auction catalogs, we get a collection of very short stories within the larger narrative. A running theme is the question of how much the value of objects depends on the objects themselves and how much depends on the stories we tell about them - and relatedly, how much depends on the truth of those stories. Gustavo freely quotes and tells anecdotes about real philosophers and other thinkers, often claiming them as his uncles or cousins. Jean Paul Sartre becomes cousin Juan Pablo Sanchez Sartre, for example, a whiny brat who yells at the other relatives that spending time with them is hell. There's also a fair number of quotes and anecdotes specifically about teeth.

 

The story of how The Story of My Teeth was written, explained by author Valeria Luiselli in the afterward, is nearly as interesting as the book itself. Jumex is a juice factory in Ecatepec, Mexico. Ecatepec neighbors Mexico City, and the way it's spoken about in the text makes me think it's a bit like the Jersey City to Mexico City's NYC. Some of the profits of the factory have been spent to amass a contemporary art collection in a private gallery next door. Luiselli got a commission from the gallery, and wanted to write something about the connection between the factory workers and the collected art. After she wrote each chapter, a book club made up of factory workers met to read and discuss it. She incorporated their ideas and feedback into her revisions and used them as her basis to write each new chapter, making them true collaborators. Some even took the photos that appear in the book.

Aperitif

 

Aperitif

Cocktail Hour the French Way

by Rebekah Peppler
photos by Joann Pai
Clarkson Potter
2018
 

  

Aperitif is an invitation to enjoy a French style happy hour, an apero, with friends. For author Rebekah Peppler, an American who lived in Paris for awhile in her 20s and 30s, this means drinks made with sherry, vermouth, and other fortified wines, and savory snacks to accompany them before dinner. 

 

Peppler starts of with an introduction to vermouth (plus its cousin quinquina), sherry, and a few recommended liqueurs like Suze, St Germain, and creme de cassis. Most of the ingredients she uses are bittersweet, which definitely gives the drinks she builds from them a consistent palate. 

 

Vermouth is made from wine that's fortified with a spirit like brandy, then infused with herbs, including wormwood, from which it draws its name. Quinquina is very similar, except the bittering agent is quinine instead of wormwood. Sherry starts similarly but gets its flavor from aging in oak barrels rather than infusing herbs. Peppler picks a few brands to mention by name - Byrrh, Dubonnet, and Lillet - but largely treats the various vermouths and quinquinas as interchangeable aside from grouping them as rouge, blanc, and rose, which is honestly what I do at home too.

 

Next there are four sections of drink recipes, grouped by the weather at the time you're drinking them - warm, hot, cool, and cold. Peppler says this is partly seasonal, partly based on time of day, and whether it's been rainy or sunny. The drinks are all relatively low alcohol, what Dinah Sanders calls 'shims'. Because of Peppler's limited ingredient list, and because many of her ingredients are categories with several options for how to fill it, a lot of the recipes seem like flexible templates. Others are oddly specific. There's a Kir drink in each season, for example, always with the exact same ratio, just changing the mixer, always blackcurrant liqueur (cassis), just with sparkling wine, lager, cider, or red wine.

 

There's also a section with recipes for snacks, various puff pastries, crackers, and seasoned popcorns you can make yourself, along with spreads to smear on them, tapenades and pates. There's a bit of advice for doctoring olives or preparing cheese to share, but the emphasis is on things you prepare more than things you might purchase directly.

 

I have a suspicion that Peppler's vision of l'apero has as much to do with the nature of her friend group in Paris (and her nostalgia for those friends, after she moved back) as it does with what's customary in France, but I think that's inevitable. Imagine what a French woman who lived in New York as a young adult might write about American happy hour, for example! But I do feel inspired to try out a few more vermouth drinks this year.

One Week in January

 
  
One Week in January

New Paintings for an Old Diary
by Carson Ellis

Chronicle Books

2024

 

  

I think it's just a thing that happens, in your 40s, to find old diaries and letters and things. I found a bunch the last time I moved. Over the past few years, I've heard from several old friends from college, because they found something like that and thought of me. Artist Carson Ellis made a discovery of her own, a diary she kept for a week in 2001, at the beginning of the new year, starting on the first day she moved into her new apartment in Portland. 
 
One Week in January is that diary, with the addition of illustrations showing the people and sights from that time in Ellis's life. If you don't otherwise know her (she's the author and illustrator of several children's books, for example), Carson Ellis is married to Colin Meloy, the lead singer and songwriter for the Decemberists. 

 

In January 2001, Ellis and Meloy were best friends and neighbors living in tiny studio apartments on a converted warehouse. The Decemberists had self-released their first EP, were starting to play their first live shows, and Meloy was writing 'Grace Cathedral Hill', a song that would go on their first full album, Castaways & Cutouts. 

 

Ellis had a crush on Meloy, while he was going on casual dates with several other girls in their social circle. She was trying to support herself as an artist, working on a couple big paintings, and getting smaller gigs making posters and flyers and the like. Already, she was making all the promotional art the Decemberists needed.

 

In January 2001, I was halfway through my first, very lonely year of college. I didn't get the courage to tell anyone I was trans until the start of my sophomore year, that fall. Later, in my senior year, I lived in a studio apartment about the same size as the one Ellis describes, although my building had private bathrooms and only the kitchen was shared. I went to a Decemberists' concert while I was in college, so only a couple years after Ellis wrote her diary, when they were still a small enough name to play at a bar instead of a larger concert venue, (though large enough that I'd heard of them).

 

image by Carson Ellis

 

Ellis's diary is surprisingly detailed and specific, and (in her own judgment, stated in the introduction) kind of boring. He diary captures her sharing meals with friends, trying to get work as an artist, checking her email to find nothing new, dealing with the hassle of getting her phone line set up, and on the last few days of the week, going out on the town and trying to have a good time with her friends, despite everyone's lack of spending money.

 

One Week in January is the kind book I think you can probably only make and have an audience for if you're already famous. The paintings Ellis made for the book do a lot to elevate a concept that would otherwise probably only merit a zine. I say this, but I am in fact glad I read it. It reminds me of a similar time in my own life, especially my last year of college and first year couple years of grad school, a time that was emotionally fraught and painful, but also full of nights out and fumbling attempts to create an adult identity. Ellis's paintings show the kind of scenes I used to take photos of, friends I was hanging out with, views of the city I encountered during the day and wanted to hold onto. It's a good book for starting a new year.

Everything I Watched in 2025

January

Spider-Man: The Animated Series, season 1

The Hobbit (1977)

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)

Is it Cake?, season 3

Green Porno, series

The Big O, season 1

Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi, season 1

All That Breathes (2022)

Lockwood & Co, season 1

The Owl House, season 1

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015)

The Peripheral, season 1

Star vs The Forces of Evil, season 1

Gandahar (1987)

 

February

Last Exile, series

Severence, season 1

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

The Big O, season 2

Dopesick, miniseries

100 Vaginas (2019)

Chip n Dale Rescue Rangers, series (1989)

Drawers Off, series 1

Silo, season 2

March

The Queen's Gambit, miniseries

Pantheon, season 1

Legion, season 1

Pantheon, season 2

Mad Cowgirl (2006)

Invincible, season 2

Conan O'Brien Must Go, season 1

Tove (2020)

Flow (2024)

 

April

Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, series

Star Wars: Visions, season 2

Sisters with Transistors (2020)

Daredevil: Born Again, season 1

Tales from the Loop, miniseries

Spider-Man: The Animated Series, season 2

North of North, season 1

Abbott Elementary, season 4

Manifesto (2015)

Landscape Artist of the Year, series 6 (2017)

Yu Yu Hakusho, season 1, Spirit Detective arc

 

May

WeWork: or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn (2021)

Sinners (2025)

Adventure Time, season 1

Andor, season 1

Batman: The Animated Series, season 2, The Adventures of Batman and Robin

Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 5

The Substance (2024)

Shogun, miniseries (2024)

 

June

Dune: Part Two (2024)

Andor, season 2

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, season 1

Slow Horses, season 1

Money for Nothing, series 1

The Sword in the Stone (1963)

Muppet Treasure Island (1996)

 

July

Reacher, season 1

Blackstar, series

Gazer (2024)

Ironheart, season 1

Lazarus, series (2025)

Murderbot, season 1

Tom and Jerry Spotlight Collection, volume 3

Superman (2025)

Slow Horses, season 2

Succession, season 2

Slow Horses, season 3

Portrait Artist of the Year, series 16 (2022)

Solaris (1972)

 

August

Common Side Effects, season 1

Cuckoo (2024)

Jentry Chau vs the Underworld, season 1

Slow Horses, season 4

Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi, season 2

KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

Legion, season 2

Girls' Last Tour, series 

Donald in Mathmagic Land (1959)

Alias Grace, miniseries

Brainstorm (1983)

The Gilded Age, season 1

 

September

God Help the Girl (2014)

Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi, Holiday Edition

The Black Cauldron (1985)

The Gilded Age, season 2

Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuux, series

The Gilded Age, season 3

The Assessment (2024)

Alien: Earth, season 1

The Green Knight (2021)

 

October

Dan Da Dan, season 2

Molli and Max in the Future (2023)

The Secret Cities of Mark Kistler (2023)

Poupelle of Chimney Town (2020)

No Country for Old Men (2007)

The World's End (2013)

Money for Nothing, series 2

The Power, season 1

 

November

Patlabor: The Movie (1989)

The Night Manager, miniseries (2016)

Slow Horses, season 5

The Summer Hikaru Died, season 1

The Danish Girl (2015)

Landscape Artist of the Year, series 8 (2018)

Tenet (2020)

M (1931)

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, season 2

Mr Robot, season 1

The Deer King (2021)

December

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973)

There Will be Blood (2007)

The Twilight Zone, season 1 (1959)

Portrait Artist of the Year, series 18 (2023)

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

Ranma 1/2, season 2 (2025)

Dispatches from Elsewhere, season 1

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)

Adventure Time, season 2

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)

Bodies, miniseries (2023)

Love Me (2024)