The Brooklyn Museum honors queer artists with its free Pride Month First Saturday program, “Star-Makers,” inspired by Oscar yi Hou’s The Arm Wrestle of Chip & Spike; aka: Star-Makers. The evening features live performances by the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, Tasha, Boston Chery, and Undocubougie; a Drag History Hour performance lecture by Bertha Vanayshun, with Dev Doee, I’m Baby, Emi Grate, Harriet Tugsmen, and Aimee Amour; a pop-up Brooklyn market featuring Depop; a voter registration drive; a Hands-On workshop in which participants will make Pride pins; the Teen Talk “Queering the Collection”; Queer Figure Drawing with the Brooklyn Loft; and a screening of Seán Devlin’s 2023 film, Asog.
In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch,” “Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls,” “Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit,” “The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago,” “Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200,” and more.
The glittering “Solid Gold” exhibit, which comprises more than five hundred gold objects, closes July 6. Divided into such sections as “Origins of Gold,” “Design Strategies,” and “Crowned,” the exhibition includes contemporary and ancient jewelry, fashion, film clips, ceramics, paintings, illuminated manuscripts, photographs, coins, and video installations. Among the highlights are a 1930s radio, Christian Louboutin footwear, a tribute to Elizabeth Taylor and the 1963 film Cleopatra, Zadik Zadikian’s 2024 Path to Nine sculpture, Egyptian gold flakes from 1938–1759 BCE, Rembrandt’s Jan Uytenbogaert, Receiver — General (The Gold — Weigher), John Singer Sargent’s Egyptian Woman (Coin Necklace), an excerpt from King Vidor’s Cover Girl with Rita Hayworth, artifacts from James Lee Byars’s 1994 Santa Fe performance, photos by Charles “Teenie” Harris, a necklace by Alexander Calder, a nineteenth-century reclining Buddha, and dresses by the Blonds, John Galliano, Mary McFadden, Paco Rabanne, Halston, and Yves Saint Laurent. Be sure to address appropriately.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Documentary subject Eshete hunkers down in his makeshift Brooklyn home with his beloved cats
THE CAT MAN ESHETE (Laura Checkoway, 2025)
Brooklyn Film Festival
Windmill Studios
300 Kingsland Ave.
Wednesday, June 4, $18, 6:00
Festival runs May 30 – June 8 www.brooklynfilmfestival.org
“I admire myself for surviving all this,” Eshete says as he rides his bike over the Brooklyn Bridge at the end of Oscar winner Laura Checkoway’s sweet-natured, gently moving documentary The Cat Man Eshete, making its Brooklyn premiere June 4 at the Brooklyn Film Festival.
Eshete, which means harvest, was born and raised in Gondar, Ethiopia, in August 1960, part of a large and happy family. Following the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, he became a member of the underground Ethiopian Revolutionary Party but had to flee after being tortured. He spent five years in a refugee camp in Sudan before arriving in America. Trying to build a life for himself, he suffered a construction accident that put him on disability for twenty years, until his structured settlement ran out. He’s been living outside ever since, in a small spot on the side of a street, in front of a chainlink fence; behind the fence is an industrial area on the East River, with views of Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.
“Homeless bum, that’s how they see me,” he says. “They don’t know what I’ve been through.”
But Eshete is not looking for sympathy or handouts; he seems to be okay existing how he does, surrounded by his beloved cats, which he has been taking care of for more than a dozen years.
His grizzled face and childlike eyes are nearly hidden by his overgrown, unkempt gray, white, and black beard and mustache. He sits and sleeps on a ratty red armchair with cardboard on which he has scrawled a manifesto about “racist madness.” His friends Robert and Diane, who live in the apartment building Eshete was evicted from, have been feeding him for two decades. People from the neighborhood stop by and say hello, wishing him well.
But all that matters to him are his kitties.
“I have tremendous love for them. So deep, you know?” he explains. “My cats are everything.”
His created family consists of Horizon, Gorgeous, George Washington, Doodles, Junior, Frank Sinatra, Jesse Jackson, Winston Churchill, Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Princess Diana, Albert Einstein, Oprah, Squirt, Nubia, Sheba, Piggy, Animation, Dragon Lady, Ms. Ethiopia the Rocket Girl, Damascus, and Rico. He has a fraught relationship with Jeneane, a married woman who likes to feed the cats and talk to them, but Eshete thinks she is only bothering them; it might be jealousy, as the cats are more than just stray animals to Eshete.
As the twenty-six-minute documentary continues, Eshete delves into grief and loss, mentions the plans he had for himself and his relatives. But those dreams turned into nightmares, as memories of home flood his mind.
“It look like heaven, like a fairy-tale land,” he remembers as shots of Gondar, taken by director of photography Greg Harriott, appear onscreen.
The story also resonates as the current administration seeks to deport legal and illegal immigrants and cuts the budgets for homeless services.
But none of that concerns Eshete, who admits, “I am a traumatized person. I don’t like medication, though. My grief — I listen to music, I love nature. You know, the cats . . . Cats are great. Out of darkness give you light.”
The Cat Man Eshete is screening at Windmill Studios on June 4 at 6:00 in the “Protecting the Family” section of the festival, along with Chris Peters’s It’s Expensive to Be Poor, Nicholas Stachurski’s Land of Lost Toys, and Jesse Samos Leaman and Maite Martin Samos’s Mother of Chooks.
In addition, it will begin streaming June 16 on the Al Jazeera English series Witness in conjunction with World Refugee Day, June 20.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Charlotte Zwerin is being celebrated with three-film series at Metrograph (photo courtesy Warner Bros. / Everett)
CHARLOTTE ZWERIN — VÉRITÉ PIONEER: SALESMAN (Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin, 1969)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday, May 31, 5:10, and Thursday, June 5, 4:40 metrograph.com
Fifty-six years ago, brothers Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin made the highly influential black-and-white documentary Salesman, an intimate portrait of four traveling door-to-door Bible salesmen: Jamie Baker, Raymond Martos, Charles McDevitt, and particularly Boston’s Paul Brennan. “Go out there and get ’em,” their boss, who doesn’t exactly follow the teachings of Jesus, declares as they prepare to spread the word of the Lord, although more to earn a living than as a religious calling. The shots of Brennan singing “If I Were a Rich Man” in the snow are priceless, but the end will haunt you. Without Salesman, there probably never would have been a Glengarry Glen Ross and so many other films. All these years later, this fascinating piece of Americana, which was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1992, still feels fresh and relevant in these hard times.
The Maysles brothers and Zwerin went on to make other documentaries that redefined the nonfiction genre, including Gimme Shelter, and Zwerin scored a major solo success with the unforgettable Thelonius Monk: Straight, No Chaser. Presented by ACE (the American Cinema Editors), Salesman is screening May 31 and June 5 in the Metrograph series “Charlotte Zwerin: Vérité Pioneer,” honoring the Direct Cinema leader, who died in 2004 at the age of seventy-two; the tribute also features Gimme Shelter and Thelonius Monk: Straight, No Chaser. The May 31 showing of Salesman will be followed by a panel discussion with editor-directors Mirra Bank, Deborah Dickson, Susan Froemke, and Muffie Meyer, moderated by Michael Schulman.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Martin Scorsese will introduce Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds at New York Polish Film Festival
NEW YORK POLISH FILM FESTIVAL
Scandinavia House
58 Park Ave. at 38th St.
Directors Guild Theater
110 West 57th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
May 27-31, all access pass $150 nypff.com
“I accept this great honor not as a personal tribute but as a tribute to all of Polish cinema,” Polish auteur Andrzej Wajda said upon accepting his honorary lifetime achievement Oscar from Jane Fonda in 2000. “The subject of many of our films was the war, the atrocities of Nazism, and the tragedies brought by communism. This is why today I thank the American friends of Poland and my compatriots for helping my country rejoin the family of democratic nations, rejoin the Western civilizations, its institutions and security structures. My fervent hope is that the only flames people will encounter will be the great passions of the heart — love, gratitude, and solidarity.”
That passion will be on view at the twentieth edition of the New York Polish Film Festival, which celebrates the life and career of the Suwałki-born director and resistance fighter who died in 2016 at the age of ninety — not many honorary Academy Award winners go on to live another sixteen years and make eight more films. Running May 27–31 at the Directors Guild Theater and Scandinavia House — no need to check your map; Scandinavia still consists only of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden — the festival will be screening eleven works, six by Wajda and five by contemporary filmmakers that reveal Wajda’s legacy.
NYPFF20 includes Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds,Kanał,The Promised Land,Everything for Sale, and the Oscar-nominated Man of Iron and Katyń. The fest kicks off with 1957’s Kanał, which will be preceded by a reception and followed by a panel discussion. Polish cinema fan Martin Scorsese will introduce Ashes and Diamonds at the May 28 gala; “It announced the arrival of a master filmmaker,” has said of the war movie, which completed a trilogy begun with A Generation and Kanał. The extraordinary Katyń examines a brutal WWII massacre; the film stars Maja Ostaszewska, Artur Zmijewski, and Pawel Malaszynski, with a score by the great Krzysztof Penderecki.
Among the 2024 Polish selections are Xawery Żuławski’s Kulej: All That Glitters Isn’t Gold, about boxer Jerzy Kulej; Julie Rubio’s documentary The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & the Art of Survival; and Magnus Von Horn’s crime drama The Girl with the Needle
Below is the full schedule.
Tuesday, May 27 Kanał (Canal) (Andrzej Wajda, 1957), preceded by a reception and followed by a panel discussion with professors Annette Insdorf and Rafal Syska, Scandinavia House, $30, 5:00
Under the Volcano (Pod wulkanem) (Damian Kocur, 2024), Scandinavia House, $25, 8:30
Wednesday, May 28
Opening night gala: Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament) (Andrzej Wajda, 1958), introduced by Martin Scorsese, Directors Guild Theatre, $50, 7:15
Thursday, May 29 Everything for Sale (Wszystko na sprzedaż) (Andrzej Wajda, 1969), with special guest Małgorzata Potocka, Scandinavia House, $25, 5:30
The Promised Land (Ziemia obiecana) (Andrzej Wajda, 1975), introduced by Annette Insdorf, Scandinavia House, $25, 8:15
Mojo Lorwin finishes his father’s film, Moi-même, after more than half a century
MOI-MÊME (Mojo Lorwin & Lee Breuer, 1968/2024)
Segal Center Film Festival on Theater and Performance
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, May 17, $10– $14, 3:00
Festival runs May 15– 28 www.thesegalcenter.org www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
In 1968, experimental theater director, playwright, and poet Lee Breuer began making a black-and-white improvised film during the May 1968 Paris riots, where he was living at the time. He and cinematographer John Rounds shot the footage but never added sound, edited it, or wrote a script. In 1970, Breuer cofounded the seminal New York City company Mabou Mines with Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, David Warrilow, and Frederick Neumann, winning numerous Obies among other accolades over the next half century, but he never finished the movie, which itself is about making a movie.
Breuer died in January 2021 at the age of eighty-three; one of his children, Mojo Lorwin, decided to complete the project, hiring voice actors and musicians and serving as writer, director, editor, and producer. The result is the hilarious Nouvelle Vague satire Moi-même (“Myself”), a sixty-five-minute foray into the world of François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Pierre Melville, Agnès Varda, William Klein, and Jean-Luc Godard, who makes a cameo, walking backward as Kevin shares a series of statements ending with “Everything is a movie.”
Kevin Mathewson stars as Kevin (voiced in 2024 by Declan Kenneally), an adolescent who is making a film with his alter ego (Patrick Martin). As he proceeds around town, he meets up with a strange driver (executive producer Russ Moro / 2024 composer Olivier Conan), a movie producer (Frederick Neumann / David Neumann, Frederick’s son), a starlet (Ginger Hall / Clove Galilee, Breuer and Maleczech’s daughter), the son of a baron (Warrilow / David Neumann), an Italian heiress (Renata / Tessie Herrasti), a revolutionary actress (Anna Backer / Tiera Lopper), her replacement (Judy Mathewson, Kevin’s younger sister / Ruma Breuer, Lee’s granddaughter), a sleazy agent (Mark Smith / Alon Andrews), a couple of goons (Pippo and Mike Trane / Frier McCollister), and the owner of a film shop (Lee Pampf / Thomas Cabus). He is often accompanied by his conscience (Maleczech / Alexandra Zelman-Doring) as he faces financial and creative crises.
Lorwin has fun with cinematic and societal tropes while maintaining the underground, DIY feel; for example, he doesn’t match the dialogue exactly to the movement of the characters’ mouths as they make such proclamations as “The movies aren’t fair,” “The movies are a game and everyone who plays is a cheater,” and “All I want is to be seen and heard.” The soundtrack consists of unexpected sound effects and songs and music by Frank LoCastro, Alex Klimovitsky, Eliot Krimsky, Conan, and others.
There’s lots of drinking and smoking, violent shootings, political ranting, discussions of art and love, vapid gatherings, a heist, a touch of psychedelia, and superfluous nudity, nearly everything you could possibly want in a French film.
“Film costs money, more than you’ve got,” the driver barks at Kevin. “Producers are perverts,” Kevin tells the actress while preparing a baby bottle of milk. Unable to afford film reels, Kevin says, “Film is more expensive than love and revolution.”
Describing the film to the agent, Kevin explains, “Here it is: It’s me, but it’s not me. You dig? I mean, it’s the film adaptation of me. I just need a little bread to turn boring old me into moi-même. Feels like doors are finally opening for me.” He delivers the last line as a door opens in front of him.
Perhaps the most important line of dialogue is given to Kevin from a man on the street, who tells him, “There are no rules.” I would add, “Viva la revolución!”
Moi-même is being shown May 17 at 3:00 at Anthology Film Archives as part of the Segal Center Film Festival on Theater and Performance, followed by a Q&A with Lorwin (Summer in the City, 2020 Brooklyn Film Festival) and Kevin Mathewson, moderated by Segal Center executive director Frank Hentschker. The festival runs May 15– 28 at Anthology and the CUNY Graduate Center and includes such other presentations as the North American premiere of Aniela Gabryel’s Radical Move, the US premiere of Sophie Fiennes’s Acting, Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane’s Grand Theft Hamlet, and a Richard Foreman retrospective.
Meanwhile, Mabou Mines (The Lost Ones,The Gospel at Colonus,Dollhouse) is still going strong; their latest piece, This Like a Dream Keeps Other Time, is playing May 15– 18 at their East Village home, @122CC.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
A Jewish family in Buenos Aires faces death and desperation in Most People Die on Sundays
MOST PEOPLE DIE ON SUNDAYS (LOS DOMINGOS MUEREN MÁS PERSONAS) (Iair Said, 2024)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, May 2 quadcinema.com
In his 2019 debut feature-length documentary, Flora’s Life Is No Picnic, Buenos Aires–born filmmaker Iair Said looked at his concern about his great-aunt Flora’s apartment; he was hoping that she would leave it to him in her will, but instead she planned to donate it to the Weizmann Institute of Science.
In his 2024 debut feature-length narrative film, Most People Die on Sundays, writer-director Said stars as David, a thirtysomething man-child who who can’t find his place in a world he doesn’t know how to navigate. Inspired by the death of Said’s father, the story follows David as he returns home to Buenos Aires for the funeral of his uncle. David has been in Italy for a year studying, of all things, communication; he could not be more awkward speaking with others, be it his beloved mother, Dora (Rita Cortese), his sister, Silvia (Juliana Gattas), his cousin, Elisa (Antonia Zegers), or anybody else, from his driving instructor to his mother’s next-door neighbor to a flight attendant — to his own father, who lies in a coma at a clinic.
Queer, Jewish, and schlubby, David moves slowly, talks slowly, and thinks slowly, his face almost always in a deadpan stare, resembling Jimmy Kimmel mixed with Fatty Arbuckle. David keeps finding ways to avoid visiting his father even as the family discusses euthanasia — as well as ways to afford his uncle’s funeral and burial.
David is far from oblivious to what is happening; he just seems unable to take reasonable action, wandering through life in a kind of haze, relying on others to take care of him.
“I think I am a little sad,” he narrates as he goes through a battery of health tests. “To be back home, to have to live with my mom. . . . The house is somehow in bad shape. I feel bad for her. She is so alone. My dad’s condition is not going to change. He is practically dead. Him dying means all of us are going to die too, that everything has an ending. I can’t imagine living my life without him. If Dad remains like that for many years, my mom will not get to know anyone else, she won’t stop looking after him . . . That is a lot for her. I chose to be alone. She hasn’t.”
David might say that he chooses to be alone, but as Said shows particularly in the first and last scenes, that is actually the last thing David wants.
Most People Die on Sundays moves at the pace of David’s mind, slowly yet earnestly, with a subtle, carnivalesque score by Ascari that mimics David’s stunted emotional understanding and often pathetic, sad-sack choices. He is terrified of death, be it that of others or his own, and it haunts his thoughts. He is so desperate to be loved that he comes close to stalking several men he is attracted to. Just about the only time the family has any fun is during a Passover seder, where the wine is spoiled and David complains that the fish smells, well, like fish.
Earlier, Dora gives a doctor at the clinic some matzah, telling him, “It’s an unleavened, unsalted flatbread, but it’s tasty. If you want to be a Jew, you must know how to suffer.” The doctor asks her what happened and she answers with a dejected, downtrodden look, “My son’s back.”
David and Most People Die on Sundays are like a whole box of matzah.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
On August 12, 1978, the New England Patriots were playing a preseason game against the Oakland Raiders at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. Late in the second quarter, the Pats have a third and eight at the Raiders twenty-four-yard line. QB Steve Grogan calls the 94 Slant, and wide receiver Darryl Stingley heads downfield. At the ten-yard line, Stingley reaches for the overthrown pass and is crushed in midair by two-time Raiders All-Pro safety Jack Tatum, known as the Assassin for his punishing style of play. Stingley immediately crumples to the ground. Four Oakland defenders look down at Stingley and walk away; Patriots wide receiver Russ Francis stands over his fallen teammate, knowing something is wrong. The twenty-six-year-old Stingley is wheeled off the field on a stretcher, a quadriplegic for the rest of his life; he died in 2007 at the age of fifty-five. Tatum wasn’t penalized on the play and never apologized to Stingley, claiming it was a legal hit and that he had done nothing wrong. Tatum, who died in 2010 at the age of sixty-one, was also involved in the Immaculate Reception on December 23, 1972, in a playoff game against the Steelers; with twenty-two seconds left and Pittsburgh down by one, future Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw was facing a fourth and ten from his own forty. He ran to his right and threw a pass down the middle. Tatum smashed into Steelers running back Frenchy Fuqua, the ball popped up into the air, and future Hall of Famer Franco Harris picked it up by his shoestrings and ran forty yards into the end zone for the winning score.
Filmmaker and installation artist Matthew Barney was eleven years old when Tatum pummeled Stingley. Seeing the collision over and over again on replay did not prevent Barney from becoming a star quarterback in high school in Idaho. But at Yale, he switched from sports to art, beginning his “Drawing Restraint” series in 1987 and making his Jim Otto Suite in 1991–92, about orifices, bodily fluids, energy, Harry Houdini, and Raiders Hall of Fame center Jim Otto, who wore the number double zero, mimicking the letters at the beginning and end of his palindromic last name.
In 2023, Barney said farewell to his longtime Long Island City studio with Secondary, a five-channel video installation that used the Tatum-Stingley play to explore violence in athletic competition. Barney transformed the studio, which was right on the East River, into a football stadium, with a long, artificial turf surface divided into geometric patterns of different colors, centered by his “Field Emblem,” his Cremaster logo, an ellipse with a line going through it, evoking –0-. There were monitors in all four corners of the field, along with a three-sided mini-jumbotron hanging from the ceiling. Visitors could sit on the field or a bench; there was also a painting on the wall, an owners booth filled with football paraphernalia, and a ditch with broken piping and mud dug into the concrete. Outside, on the facade facing the water, there was a digital countdown clock next to graffiti that said, “Saboroso,” which means “delicious.”
Written and directed by Barney, photographed by Soren Nielsen, and edited by Kate Williams, the film — which lasts sixty minutes, the length of a football game — has now been reimagined on a single screen, where it will be shown at Metrograph on May 3 at 5:00, in conjunction with the publication of a two-volume companion book (Rizzoli, April 2025, $115), featuring contributions from Eric Banks, Jonathan Bepler, Raven Chacon, Mark Godfrey, Juliette Lecorne, Helen Marten, Maggie Nelson, and David Thomson; Barney will be at Metrograph for a postscreening discussion with book editor Louise Neri and Banks, followed by a reception with signed books available for purchase.
The multichannel version kicks off with indigenous rights activist Jacquelyn Deshchidn, a Two-Spirit Chiricahua Apache and Isleta Pueblo soprano, composer, poet, and public speaker, performing an alternate national anthem, a none-too-subtle jab at a league that still has teams using offensive Native American names and imagery. The cast, primarily consisting of dancers and choreographers, features movement director David Thomson as Stingley; Raphael Xavier as Tatum; Shamar Watt as Raiders safety Lester “the Molester” Hayes; Wally Cardona as Grogan; Ted Johnson as Francis; Isabel Crespo Pardo, Kyoko Kitamura, and Jeffrey Gavett as the line judges and referees; Barney as Raiders Hall of Fame QB Ken “the Snake” Stabler, who died of colon cancer but was discovered to have had high Stage 3 chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the disease that affects so many football players, brought on by getting hit so much in the head; and Thomas Kopache as Raiders owner Al Davis, whose motto was “Just win, baby,” no matter the cost. (Football fans will also notice cameos by actors portraying such Raiders favorites as wide receiver Fred Biletnikoff and defensive end John “the Tooz” Matuszak, who became an actor and died in 1989 at the age of thirty-eight from an opioid overdose.) The actors are generally much older than the people they represent, several of whom never made it to the age the performers are today.
The experimental film does not have a traditional chronological narrative; instead, Barney focuses on Tatum, Hayes, and Stingley training in slow motion in equipment rooms as if preparing for a ballet, Grogan making a football out of a gooey substance and then practicing with it, members of Raiders Nation shouting and cheering in fierce black-and-silver Halloween-like costumes, and players venturing into the muddy ditch, the broken pipe echoing Stingley’s shattered body. The music, by sound designer Jonathan Bepler, envelops the audience in a parade of noises, from hums and breathing to clangs and screams. Shots of the Manhattan skyline and the East River beckon to another life outside. The screens sometimes display the same footage, while other times they are different; it is like the viewer is at a football game, with the choice whether to watch the quarterback, the defensive alignment, or other fans in the stands. There is no actual pigskin in the film.
Matthew Barney turned his LIC studio into a multimedia installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The game of football has always been lionized for its violence. Even as the league changes rules to try to protect the quarterback, kick returners, and receivers, the sports networks repeatedly show brutal hits like the one on Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa against the Cincinnati Bengals that resulted in severe head and neck injuries. When we think of Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann, the first thing we remember is the career-ending injury he suffered on Monday Night Football in 1985 at the hands of New York Giants linebackers Lawrence Taylor and Harry Carson, brutally shattering his leg, and not his 1982–83 MVP season when he led his team to a Super Bowl victory over the Dolphins.
But Barney (River of Fundament,“Subliming Vessel”) is not merely commenting on football. Secondary is about America itself, its rituals and celebrations, its embracing of violence on and off the field. It’s about our lack of respect for the human body and one another, about a country torn apart into blue and red states like opposing teams, ready to do whatever is necessary to just win, baby.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
