Hello! This week, an old article about an art scandal, a film about a Muslim American teenager, a Japanese novel, memes in Thai anti-regime protests and Swedish chamberpop from the mid-2000s.

Article: The Invention of the Salvator Mundi by Matthew Shaer, published by Vulture in April 2019
All of the articles I’ve read lately have been about politics, sports, or both, so I’m recommending this golden oldie instead. As the subtitle indicates, this longread chronicles “How to Turn a $1,000 Art-Auction Pickup Into a $450 Million Masterpiece”: the Salvator Mundi by (allegedly!!) Leonardo da Vinci, which was rediscovered, restored, exhibited at the National Gallery in London and elsewhere, and then sold at Christie’s for an unimaginable sum of money for a painting that kind of sucks! Oh and then it disappeared. This story is wild from beginning to end; I also recommend reading the wikipedia article for details about the restoration (during which the painting broke into seven pieces ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). If you have an obscene amount of money and would like to give me a renaissance portrait, I would like a Moroni or Bassano please, thank you.

Film: Hala, directed by Minhal Baig (2019)
I had never heard of this film before encountering it on a streaming service. I decided to watch it because the film still featured a teen girl on a skateboard, and to be honest that’s all it takes for me to want to watch something. Oh to be a teen skating down a tree-lined suburban street! Anyway, Hala is a 17-year-old Pakistani-American girl living a regular suburban teen life in what I think is Chicago: school, parents, hobbies, friends, crush, mediocre poetry. As the blurb for the film puts it, she “struggles to balance desire with her familial, cultural and religious obligations.” Written and directed by Minhal Baig and based on some of her own experiences, it is beautifully shot, and very attuned to the shift in relationship dynamic between Hala and her parents in particular. Not every aspect of the plot worked for me -- about two thirds through, the story takes a really baffling turn -- and as I was watching it I was wondering how the representation of being a young Muslim woman was received by others (this isn’t a particularly big spoiler, but the film ends with Hala going to college and taking her headscarf off…). When I read up on the film afterwards, I found this piece in the New York Times (a personal reflection on the film by Fahima Haque that includes an interview with Minhal Baig) very helpful for context. Even if you don’t watch the film, I’d recommend reading the article for her thoughts on personal experience vs representation.

Book: There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, translated by Polly Barton
Sometimes a book catches you at the perfect time in your life. This wry novel about someone recovering from burnout arrived in the mail just as I was edging close to some form of burnout myself. If this sounds like a dire premise for a book, then let me assure you that it is anything but. On the contrary, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job is funny, insightful, and, incredibly, it kept me glued to the page for all of its 400 pages -- which I experience rarely these days with literary fiction.
A woman in her mid-30s takes on a series of jobs, all of them, at least in theory, not taxing on the brain or the body. She works in surveillance, watching hours of video of a writer doing nothing much; writes bus adverts and ricer cracker copy; hangs up posters and dips her toes into map-making. As she drifts from job to job, we realise that she encounters the same issues: her own over-investment in doing things right, which ultimately keeps her from treating these casual jobs as casual. Everywhere she goes, she encounters people who have been signed off work for mental health issues, a situation that is never remarked upon. Kikuko Tsumura handles this background with a lightness of touch that I found incredibly appealing. Her characters are hilarious, sometimes slightly bizarre, and more often than not sympathetic. Nobody here is negligent, mean or incompetent; and yet, the protagonist encounters situations where the inconsiderate or, more often, unthinking behaviour of others complicates her relationship to her work. Polly Barton’s translation, so attuned to humour, is a marvel. Read it!
Note: This book publishes in the UK on 26 November 2020. I promise not to include books before publication date in the future (which should be easy as I don’t usually have them before publication date!). You can pre-order it here.

Learning: The anti-monarchist professor who became a living meme by Peter Guest, published on Rest of World
This article examines the role of Pavin Chachavalpongpun, an anti-monarchist Thai professor, as well as the use of memes and internet culture in the ongoing protests against the Thai regime. I love learning about internet culture!!

Other: Jens Lekman’s early music (2004-2007)
In my late teens/early 20s, I was a Jens Lekman completist. Lekman is a Swedish singer/songwriter of the chamberpop-and-quirky-lyrics variety that I grew out of over time; nowadays I find a lot of the male indiepop singers that I listened to back in the day vaguely misogynistic or at least veering dangerously near Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory. But upon revisiting Lekman’s first three albums I have concluded that they mostly hold up if I ignore some of the lyrics. I must have listened to his debut hundreds of times, and it was fun/weird to listen again after a few years. My favourite songs are Pocketful of Money, A Higher Power and (sorry, nerd alert) the original acoustic version of Your Arms Around Me.

That's it! I'm in urgent need of enjoyable stuff (as are we all), so do hit reply and tell me what you liked in the past few weeks. Bye!