I interviewed Filmfront’s Malia Haines-Stewart and Alan Garcia, along with Ashley Cooper, who has been running a series of classic Hollywood movies at that micro-cinema she calls “American Ego.” My article about them will be in this week’s Chicago Reader but you can listen to our talks here. This Saturday Cooper will be introducing a screening of Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd. I’m hardly the first to draw comparisons between that movie and our current political shitshow. It’s almost too on-the-nose but that doesn’t make it any less apt. 

A far more hopeful, yet no less harrowing story is the one J. Nicole Brooks tells in HeLa. It’s the best new play I’ve seen in many a moon. 

I also recommended Anton Vidokle’s baffling yet somehow touching Immortality for All! trilogy—based on the cockamamie pre-Soviet utopian theory of Cosmism—in this week’s CineFILE. If you find some place that’s showing it in your town, write me and tell me what you make of it. 

But what I’ve been involved with more of than anything else this week is a duel to the death with InDesign for the layout of my new book. It’ll be out in the spring. Light a candle for me in the meantime.