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Ishtar (1987) is a film that, rather famously, fails on almost every level.

Though its script is funny and its stars legendary, Ishtar’s promising first act is revealed to be a honeypot the second our heroes, lounge lizard losers Chuck and Lyle (Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty), leave Manhattan for Marrakesh to take the only gig willing to book them. Excruciatingly racist, ploddingly plotted, and such a claustrophobic eyesore that I thought it had to have been shot on a set and, like, the Imperial Valley (it wasn’t, also famously), Ishtar and its 107-minute runtime make you feel like you’re being scapegoated for every misogynist thing that Hoffman has ever done1. When Chuck and Lyle get are left to die in the North African desert, you somehow relate both to their suffering and to their torturers’ sadistic amusement.

But the thing is, I liked aspects of this clunker quite a lot. Between director/writer Elaine May’s comic genius, the touching chemistry between its leads, Charles Grodin doing his inimitable thing as a CIA agent drily manipulating Chuck and Lyle into heating up the Cold War2, and Beatty playing adorably against type as utterly bitchless, there’s enough to love and laugh at in Ishtar to endear it to you, if not redeem it completely.

I bring it up because—and I say this without an ounce of glibness, because I know how bad it is out there right now—this is what life feels like at the moment.

It’s ugly out there. If you could use some encouragement, motivation, or grounding, I recommend:

Charlotte Shane’s “Someone’s Gotta Write It,” on making art DIY-style when everything feels pointless. “As I am fond of reminding myself, there is no human circumstance so degraded that people give up on art.”

Ben Parker’s “AI=B+”, a bracing demystification of the marketing/fantasy of AI use among undergraduates. “Students have frequently suspected they could get away with a certain amount of ‘bullshit’ in their English papers because interpretations do not always receive the same scrutiny as hard facts. Now they have a machine for it.”

Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself, which is in my opinion indispensable for anyone who feels threatened by the following statement: “The only person you can now or ever change is yourself. The only person that it is your business to control is yourself.”3

M. K. Thekkumkattil’s forthcoming, The Sexuality of Care: On Nursing, Kink, and a Future Without Hospitals, a series of meditations on the erotics, histories, and compromises of the nursing profession in America. “To do no harm as a human in a body is impossible, but it is especially impossible as a nurse.”

I allow myself to listen to audiobooks for two reasons: to scratch the occasional true crime itch (unnecessary evil) and to absorb educational nonfiction when reading a proper book isn’t an option (necessary evil).

This month, I heeded my better angels and listened to my first Michael Parenti (RIP), Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, then chased it with Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. The Parenti is short, lucid, and highly accessible if you’re still finding your way around ideas like communism, fascism, and imperialism. The Bevins is longer and less accessible, if only because it details the hideous lengths that the USA and its imperialist ilk have gone in the past century to crush international people’s movements, with a special focus on Indonesia and the elimination of PKI, its communist party. Jakarta caught my eye because I spent some time in Indonesia years ago, and am still in touch with a friend there, a Balinese woman who (not to be dramatic) saved my life during a very scary situation. She’s about my age and living a precarious existence of exploitation due to the violent resortification of one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, a process that Gaza will undergo if Israel, Trump, and the oligarchs aren’t stopped.

There’s that famous Anthony Bourdain quote—“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands”—which, while memorable, isn’t precisely true. One need never have been to Cambodia, or indeed anywhere, to be stricken with homicidal rage over the violence that Kissinger, the US government, and the other imperialists have done to the Third World (a term Bevins thoughtfully unpacks). “First they came for the Communists…” as the poem goes.4

I recommend listening to or reading Blackshirts and Jakarta back to back, as I did. As a companion piece, I’d further recommend David Szalay’s Booker-winning Flesh, a Second-World narrative of white male masculinity in the ruins of the Cold War. When you’re done with that, close the loop with with Death Panel’s recent episode with Ayesha Siddiqi on “anti-aging” trends and longevity influencers as symptoms of imperial decline. Rise and fall, dust to dust.

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Come to find out the cinematography was done by Vittorio Storaro, who I was just glazing the other week for his work on The Conformist (1970).

He’s like the non-darksided Bill Murray, but with more range.

I know I already wrote about this book but it bears repeating.

What the poem doesn’t say is that, when they want you out of the way, you’re a communist whether you like it or not.