Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Persian Lessons’ Review: An Improbable Holocaust Drama

    A Jewish Frenchman posing as a Persian eludes death by teaching a fictional form of the Persian language to a Nazi commandant in this improbable Holocaust drama.In the outlandish Holocaust drama “Persian Lessons,” the director Vadim Perelman (“House of Sand and Fog”) performs a wobbly balancing act of horror, humor, romance and self-glorifying sentimentality against a grim backdrop of forced labor and human squalor.At the beginning of the film, Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), a Jewish Frenchman captured by the Nazis, trades his sandwich with a fellow prisoner for an antique tome written in Persian. Condemned to death by firing squad, Gilles manages to dodge the bullets, pleading mercy as he desperately waves the book in his captors’ faces. “I’m Persian!” he screams.Miraculously, Klaus Koch (Lars Eidinger), a commandant, needs just that — a Persian. The Nazi dreams of opening a restaurant in Tehran after the war, and recruits Gilles — who pretends to be Reza — to teach him the language. Gilles improvises; not knowing a lick of Persian, he invents words, eventually using the names of prisoners kept in a logbook as mnemonic devices to develop his fictional tongue. It’s a wild conceit, and one can’t help but laugh, albeit nervously, as Koch takes in the mumbo-jumbo with studious severity.Eidinger, an expert prima donna, brings out the tragic absurdity of men who blindly follow orders. His performance anchors the film’s otherwise clumsy tonal shifts.High tensions are built into Ilya Zofin’s script as Gilles struggles to keep up the act — a fumbled word could mean his head, and a brown-nosing section leader, Max (Jonas Nay), has his eyes peeled. Pointless, lackluster detours into petty sexual dramas between the Nazis are sprinkled throughout, and, more effectively, suspicions of an erotic liaison between Gilles and Koch tease out their bond’s derangement.Less kooky and gratingly precious than “Jojo Rabbit” or “Life Is Beautiful,” the film nevertheless also taps history with a movie-magic wand. When Perelman’s saccharine sensibilities take over, the film, as if by obligation, becomes a story about the power of human resilience and compassion — or some similar platitude.Persian LessonsNot rated. In German, French, Italian, English and Persian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster’ Review: Death Transforms Her

    A teenage girl handles her grief in an enterprising way in this horror film from Bomani J. Story.At the helm of Bomani J. Story’s feature directing debut, somewhat deceptively titled “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster,” is the young Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes), a sharp-witted teenager mired in grief. Routine gun violence has snatched the lives of her mother and Chris, her older brother (Edem Atsu-Swanzy), while her father, Donald (Chad Coleman) — woeful collateral — recovers from drug addiction in the wake of their deaths.Vicaria’s genius inspires the neighborhood kids to christen her “mad scientist” and later, “body snatcher,” for she labors under the conviction that “death is a disease.” In the dim light of a cluttered storage unit, she stoops over her brother’s lifeless body — sewing bloody flesh together — determined to coax him back from the dead.Fitting that Story should make his first feature a rendition of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel “Frankenstein,” a famously fluid text that refuses classical genre divisions: It has all at once been deemed science fiction, gothic horror and women’s fiction. But Shelley’s monster always possessed a racial dimension that only a smattering of scholars have dared to confront. Consider the hardly clandestine, popular imagery of the Black Other lurking in the monster’s description: his staggering frame, destructive strength, and the ever-present threat of sexual deviance. Predictably perhaps; the novel arrived in the throes of the antislavery debate, after the nominal end of the international slave trade and amid ongoing revolts in the United States and the Caribbean.The struggle, then, of cinema that concerns itself in any material way with the social conditions of Black life, is that it must account, too, for mass death. But fixing horror in the Black body is a tricky business, and “The Angry Black Girl” stumbles in the same way its ancestor, “Candyman” (1992), did. Fundamentally, Vicaria and her neighbors are terrorized by a freakish Black man: what glimpses we catch of his bloated fingers and disfigured face transform him into a fearsome predator. It is difficult to challenge the character’s monstrousness when we know so little about Chris, the man.The film invokes Emmett Till, clumsily at that, in a tale that principally concerns itself with community violence (a phenomenon hardly exclusive to Black people). When Mamie Till displayed her son’s mangled body for the public, it was because she wanted to reflect the monstrosity of the people (and the nation that widely sanctioned it) who could do such violence to a child. “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster” struggles to manage the same complexity, despite compelling performances from Hayes and Coleman.The Angry Black Girl and Her MonsterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘A Woman Escapes’ Review: Screen Sharing

    In this moody epistolary film, a woman in Paris works through a close friend’s death with the help of video correspondences.The title of “A Woman Escapes” references Robert Bresson’s 1956 classic “A Man Escaped” about a French Resistance fighter in a Nazi prison in Lyon. This intimate yet sometimes reserved epistolary film centers on a more contemporary moment in Paris as a woman named Audrey processes the death of a close friend. During what feels like a pandemic, she takes up correspondences that become lifelines out of the grief and creative block she’s feeling.Her video and audio exchanges were made by the film’s co-directors, a supergroup of experimental filmmakers: Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Cevik and Blake Williams. The medium is partly the message here too, as the visual textures vary according to the directors’ predilections — 16-millimeter film, high-definition video, even 3-D.The result joins a long lineage of personal-correspondence films, this one tinged with the “stuck” feeling of the isolating, screen-heavy stretches of the pandemic. Audrey (Deragh Campbell) putters about the apartment and pecks at work on her laptop, but the video letters can fling us outside — into the environs of Istanbul, for example, through Cevik’s missives — and include Williams’s exploration of Audrey’s neighborhood on Google Maps.Campbell, unforgettable in the Canadian indie “Anne at 13,000 Ft.,” gives a more interior performance that evokes the thoughtful focus she brings to her collaborations with Bohdanowicz (“MS Slavic 7”), but tempered here by a stay-in-bed mood of withdrawal. Her Audrey does nothing less than enact a kind of communion through voice and image.A Woman EscapesNot rated. In English and Turkish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Barry Newman, Star of the Cult Film ‘Vanishing Point,’ Dies at 92

    Panned when it was released in 1971, the movie gained acclaim decades later. Mr. Newman also starred on TV in the legal drama “Petrocelli.”Barry Newman, whose terse integrity and understated rebelliousness made the 1971 movie “Vanishing Point” an enduring hit in the annals of American cinema about the open road, died on May 11 in Manhattan. He was 92.The death, in a hospital, which was not widely reported until this week, was confirmed by his wife, Angela Newman. While seeking treatment for back pain, she said, he came down with a lung infection that spread to his spine and heart.Mr. Newman was briefly a leading man in movies and television in the 1970s. He starred as a Harvard-educated defense attorney who moved to a small Southwestern town to work criminal cases in the 1970 feature film “The Lawyer,” and he reprised the character, Tony Petrocelli, in an NBC legal drama, “Petrocelli,” which ran from 1974 to 1976.Two decades later, he returned to prominence as a character actor, with small roles in memorable movies like Steven Soderbergh’s “The Limey” (1999); “Bowfinger,” also in 1999, alongside Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy; and “40 Days and 40 Nights” (2002), a romantic comedy starring Josh Hartnett.But Mr. Newman’s most notable performance was undoubtedly in “Vanishing Point.”In that film, he played Kowalski, a one-named car-delivery driver who makes a bet with his drug dealer while buying Benzedrine: If he can make it from where they are in Denver to San Francisco in about 15 hours, then Kowalski gets the amphetamines for free.“Vanishing Point” then becomes one long psychedelic car chase. Kowalski skillfully evades highway cops, nonchalantly accepts his deification by a rhapsodic radio D.J. named Super Soul (played by Cleavon Little), and befriends a succession of slender hippie-ish blondes. From conversations among police officers and Kowalski’s own flashbacks, we learn about his past as a decorated Vietnam War veteran, frustrated police officer and demolition derby racer.The bulk of the movie replaces dialogue with the sounds of a revving car engine, a police siren and a shredding electric guitar. The camera is often trained on Mr. Newman’s face — its shaggy hair, stubble, righteous sideburns, sharp jawline and watery blue eyes — as he stares ahead resolutely but wearily at desert highways that never seem to end.The other star of the movie is Kowalski’s car, a souped-up white 1970 Dodge Challenger that can go up to 160 miles per hour. It remains fairly pristine even as it kicks up enough dust to confound the highway patrols of several Western states.With characters making druggy proclamations about “the last American hero to whom speed means freedom of the soul,” the movie did not initially attract critical praise. Roger Greenspun, reviewing it for The New York Times, called it “a dumb movie that is nothing but an automobile chase,” and added, “I suspect that Barry Newman really can act, though in ‘Vanishing Point’ all he needs is a driver’s license.”Yet it is now regularly featured on lists of the best American road movies, car movies and action movies. Bruce Springsteen and Steven Spielberg have both ranked “Vanishing Point” among their favorite films.“It became a cult film without me even realizing it,” Mr. Newman told the movie journalist Paul Rowlands in 2019. “To this day, I’m always being asked to talk about it somewhere.”Barry Foster Newman was born on Nov. 7, 1930, in Boston, where he grew up. His father, Carl, managed the Latin Quarter nightclub. Barry visited on Sundays and saw performances by Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Milton Berle and others. His mother, Sarah (Ostrovsky) Newman, worked a variety of jobs, including saleswoman at Filene’s Basement and ticket seller at a movie theater.Mr. Newman earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Brandeis University in 1952. He then served in the Army until 1954, playing saxophone and clarinet in a military band.Several years later, while studying for a master’s degree in anthropology at Columbia University, Mr. Newman tagged along with a friend to an acting class being taught by Lee Strasberg. He was “mesmerized,” he told Mr. Rowlands, and soon began pursuing a career as an actor.He married Angela Spilker in 1994. They divorced in 2007 but got back together and remarried in 2018. She is his only immediate survivor.Mr. Newman lived in the same apartment in Midtown Manhattan from 1962 until his death.In portraying both the quick-witted lawyer Petrocelli and the stoic hot-rodder Kowalski, Mr. Newman became known for characters with opposing types of masculinity. That paradox, he told Mr. Rowlands, inspired him to take on the part of Kowalski in the first place.“I had just done ‘The Lawyer,’ where I was speaking nonstop for 90-odd minutes, and I got the script for ‘Vanishing Point,’” he said. “I wasn’t even thinking of the idea of the film or the existentialism of the character — I just thought it would be interesting to do a part where I am playing the antithesis of the character I had just played.” More

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    ‘Users’ Review: Brave New World

    In this documentary, the artist Natalia Almada explores both the terrors and wonders of technological progress.“Users,” a new essayistic feature documentary from the artist Natalia Almada, deals in a kind of paradox. While the voice-over narration considers how technological progress has inured us from beauty and intimacy, the film demonstrates marvels of film technology — underwater photography, helicopter shots, breathtakingly crisp close-ups, sinuous slow motion — that affirm the opposite.“Could the Wright brothers have imagined that flying would be so commonplace that we’d be disinterested in the miraculous bird’s-eye view of the earth below?” Almada asks — even as she shows us drone shots of oceans and highways that provoke undeniable awe.This negotiation between techno-pessimism and techno-fetishism is at the heart of “Users,” though Almada’s scattered movie struggles to keep them in balance; her broad, rhetorical voice-over is a poor match for the complexity of the film’s images. Almada was inspired to make the film after giving birth to her son and newly confronting technology’s decisive effects on our relationships. Her view of the present anticipates her child’s future: In interludes throughout the film, she describes familiar realities — childbirth, grocery shopping, 24-hour days — in the past tense, as if they were part of a bygone history. It’s a nifty dystopian conceit, but it reinforces the air of presumption that sands down the pleasures of “Users.”The film is at its best when it allows its images and sounds to let us feel things without naming them. At a waste disposal factory, crushed electronics clatter like a symphony, which flows into the rumble of a freight train. Deep inside a grimy ocean, industrial divers float around pipes holding fiber-optic cables, the veins of our information era. Mingling beauty and terror, trash and wonder, these scenes evoke the elusive temporality of technology, which moves us backward and forwards at the same time.UsersNot rated. In English and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour and 21 minutes. More

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    ‘Brooklyn 45’ Review: A Little Something to Lift Their Spirits

    A group of World War II veterans unwisely perform a séance in this ambitious yet airless supernatural thriller.“Brooklyn 45,” a claustrophobic mystery with horror-movie flourishes, plays out on a December night in 1945 in a Brooklyn brownstone crammed with military memorabilia. The home belongs to Clive (Larry Fessenden), whose wife died some weeks earlier and who has invited a few of his closest World War II comrades for what they believe will be a cheering-up session. But when the well-oiled Clive insists on performing a séance to contact his late wife, the group grasps this isn’t the sort of spirit-raising it had in mind.Less whodunit than who-done-what, the plot (by the director, Ted Geoghegan) unfurls in morality-play monologues that expose the characters’ biases and bigotries. Everyone has a story, and a transformative arc: Marla (Anne Ramsay), a bombing survivor with fearsome interrogation skills; her partner, Bob (Ron E. Rains), a deceptively meek Pentagon clerk; Archie (Jeremy Holm), a closeted war hero and possibly a criminal; and the bloodthirsty Paul (Ezra Buzzington), a uniformed xenophobe still running on battlefield fumes.As the séance progresses, Geoghegan uses the paranormal puffery (self-lighting candles, gooey ectoplasm, and worse) to drag the invisible wounds of war into the light. Imprisoned by a locked room and the deceased’s paranoid demands — expressed through her increasingly deranged former husband — the alarmed friends spiral into confessions and accusations. The demons within them are more destructive than any the séance might have unleashed.An ambitious period piece given an appropriately vintage look by the cinematographer Robert Patrick Stern, “Brooklyn 45” is overlong, repetitive and at times wearyingly stagy. The actors, though, can’t be faulted, convincingly turning unappetizing characters into broken people trying to move on from a war that keeps pulling them back in.Brooklyn 45Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More

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    It’s the End of an Era at the Metropolitan Opera

    As the 2022-23 season ends, the country’s largest performing arts institution looks ahead to a future of fewer titles.The Metropolitan Opera’s 2022-23 season may well have been the end of an era.Since September, the Met, which closes for the summer on Saturday, has put on 22 titles — 23 if you count both stagings of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” one complete in German and one an English-language holiday abridgment. As a repertory house and the country’s largest performing arts organization, it juggles multiple works at a time. On some weekends, it’s been possible to see four different operas in 48 hours.But is there enough of an audience to fill so many performances in a 4,000-seat theater?Ticket sales have been robust for some new productions, even of contemporary works. But revivals, less obviously newsworthy and less widely promoted, are no longer sure things — especially slightly off-the-beaten-path stuff like Mozart’s “Idomeneo” or Verdi’s “Don Carlo.”In an attempt to make ends meet, the Met has raided its endowment and plans to put on 10 percent fewer performances next season, which will feature just 18 staged operas (six of them written in the past 30 years). The days of being America’s grand repertory company, of 20-plus titles a year, could be slowly entering the rearview mirror.So it was fitting that, last month, the Met said farewell to one of the shows that typified the era that’s ending: its “Aida” from the 1980s. The production was typical Met: hardly cheap but sturdy and flexible, into which you could toss singers with relatively little rehearsal. The company’s model has depended on a core of stagings of the standards like this — ones which could be mounted, and sell well, year after year.If there’s less of a year-after-year opera audience, though, the only solution may be to do less.It’s melancholy to look back on the past season and realize that my two favorite performances were the kind of thing that might go by the wayside in the Met to come. They were revivals of works by no means obscure, but not nearly as famous as, say, “Carmen”: Donizetti’s gentle romantic comedy “L’Elisir d’Amore” and Shostakovich’s ferocious satire-tragedy “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”From front left, Javier Camarena, Golda Schultz and Davide Luciano in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore.”Marty Sohl/Metropolitan OperaThis has been the glory of the Met: the love, care, craft and experience that go into works as different as these two — starkly contrasting titles, both presented at the highest level. In “Elisir,” the tenor Javier Camarena and the soprano Golda Schultz were all tenderness, but were lit, as if from within, with a lively spirit by the conductor Michele Gamba, making his company debut.The conductor of “Lady Macbeth,” Keri-Lynn Wilson, was also making her debut, and showed mastery of Shostakovich’s score, which is in a savage, if often eerily beautiful, mode that would have stunned Donizetti.Neither run was nearly a sellout, but the season would been immeasurably more barren without them.The new vision that the company will be pursuing next season has a silver lining in its doubling down on contemporary opera. Sales for recent works have been pretty robust, though it’s unclear whether they’ve done well because people like them or because they’ve tended to be among the splashy, expensively publicized new productions rather than the perennial chestnuts.But even if successful at the box office, the contemporary pieces this season have not been highlights. This spring, “Champion,” a boxing melodrama by Terence Blanchard — who also composed “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Met’s 2021-22 season — was musically stilted and dramatically stodgy. Last fall, Kevin Puts’s score for “The Hours,” based on the novel and film, was relentlessly, exhaustingly tear-jerking.While Puts’s work was a vehicle for a trio of divas, including Renée Fleming and Kelli O’Hara, the real star was the third: the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as a brooding but dryly witty Virginia Woolf, her voice mellow yet penetrating.Joyce DiDonato as Virginia Woolf in “The Hours.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHers was one of the performances of the year. Another was the mezzo Samantha Hankey’s alert, youthful Octavian in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.” Hankey was joined by the Marschallin of the radiant soprano Lise Davidsen, who kept her immense voice carefully restrained for much of this long, talky opera before unleashing its full force in the final minutes.In a clunky new production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” by the director François Girard, the tenor Piotr Beczala seemed almost to float — utterly assured and elegant in the otherworldly, treacherously exposed title role. This is a singer nearing 60 and doing his best work.But the coup of the year may have been the Met debut of the conductor Nathalie Stutzmann. Leading one new production of a Mozart opera is hard enough, especially as an introduction to the company — but two, simultaneously? And Stutzmann’s work in both Ivo van Hove’s austere “Don Giovanni” and Simon McBurney’s antic “Magic Flute” was superb: lithe but rich, propulsive without being rushed or stinting these scores’ lyricism.How was she repaid? Before “Flute” opened, Stutzmann was quoted in The New York Times remarking that McBurney’s production, which raises the pit almost to stage level, lets the musicians see what’s going on rather than keeping them, as usual, in the “back of a cave” where there’s “nothing more boring.” Jokey and innocuous. But for some reason, the musicians flew to social media and condemned her for accusing them of playing bored.Even worse, the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, rather than standing up for his colleague or trying to resolve the conflict behind the scenes, publicly cheered this unseemly pile-on, adding seven clapping emojis to an Instagram post by the orchestra. He and the musicians should be ashamed of themselves; Stutzmann should be celebrated.Next season, while curtailed, is hardly free of ambition, offering a profusion of recent works and some intriguing repertory pieces, like Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” (not seen at the Met since 2006), Puccini’s “La Rondine” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser.”This new approach to programming is an experiment. Revivals of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours” will test whether contemporary operas have legs beyond their premiere runs, and we’ll see if the trims to the season increase sales for what remains.Hopefully, it all keeps the Met alive and vibrant. But whatever the coming years bring will likely be quite different. It was oddly, sadly appropriate that the veteran soprano Angela Gheorghiu, absent from the company for eight years and set to return for two performances of “Tosca” in April, came down with Covid-19 and had to cancel.This is a new phase, fate seemed to say, and the old divas — at least the ones not named Renée — need not apply. More

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    Aja Monet’s Debut Album Blends Jazz and Poetry From a Place of Love

    On her debut album, “When the Poems Do What They Do,” the writer and community organizer offers up a fluid mix of jazz and poetry that evokes the spirit of 1990s spoken-word scenes.A crowd that included musicians and actors filled the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue earlier this spring to hear the poet and community organizer Aja Monet speak about the subtleties of Black love, joy and uncertainty.But for Monet, there was only one celebrity in the room: Bonnie Phillips, her former college adviser, who sat rapt in the front row.“I remember her suggesting what schools to go to and it wasn’t Harvard, you know what I mean?” Monet said in a recent video interview from her home in California. Recalling her high school years in New York, Monet said she asked a lot of questions in class but didn’t have the best grades: “I think I was way more just opinionated and outspoken.”She remains both on her debut album, “When the Poems Do What They Do,” a fluid mix of jazz and poetry out Friday that evokes the spirit of 1990s spoken-word scenes. Featuring a who’s who of instrumentalists she’s known over the years — Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah on trumpet, Samora Pinderhughes on piano, Elena Pinderhughes on flute, Weedie Braimah on djembe and Marcus Gilmore on drums — the LP is a nuanced exploration of Blackness.“Joy is a song anywhere,” Monet declares on “Black Joy,” a sprightly, soulful track. “Joy is a six-block wheelie through traffic, with no handlebars, in the rain.”The poet Saul Williams, who has known Monet since she was 14, praised his longtime collaborator in an email. “Aja stands out because she stood up for poetry, for magic in language, for spell-casting and patriarchy-bashing,” he wrote. “She’s still standing.”Chatting from Los Angeles, where Monet, 35, has lived for almost three years, she roamed from room to room, showing off a few album covers (at least, the ones that could be seen through the still water and dhow ship that served as her artificial backdrop). “That’s my Zanzibar life,” she said, smiling. “It was a beautiful experience. It was the first trip I ever did fully by myself, not knowing anyone anywhere.”Monet grew up in East New York in Brooklyn and started writing poetry when she was 8 because she was “fascinated by typewriters and people who would sit at typewriters,” she said. “The first thing I ever asked my mother for Christmas was a typewriter,” she added, recalling an early interest in “stories and storytelling, and the ways that people tell stories.”An English teacher at Baruch College Campus High School in Manhattan was an early inspiration. “She would read and recite one foot from one desk to the next, and give us encouragement to really see what was happening in the language and what was going on in the stories,” Monet said.At home, she listened to a different kind of poetry: the R&B singers Sade, Whitney Houston and Mary J. Blige, and the rapper Tupac Shakur. She knew they were each saying something profound, even if she couldn’t fully process what it was yet. When she won the school talent show with a poem, “I just remember all my teachers in tears in the front.”Monet didn’t find much community for burgeoning poets like herself, though, so she created her own club: SABA, or Students Acknowledging Black Achievements, a space where others at her high school “with the weird obsession of poetry and art” could convene. After a classmate encouraged her to check out Urban Word NYC, a program that teaches creative writing to minority students, she attended her first poetry slam there and was hooked.“To this day it’s probably one of the most pivotal memories in my life,” Monet said. “Because it was the beginning of me being introduced to a whole world, legacy and tradition that I now found myself called to. It deeply felt like a home that I had been waiting to return to.”“Ultimately, everything I do is rooted in a deep place of love, an overwhelming obsession with love.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe poet Mahogany L. Browne remembered a 15-year-old Monet at Urban Word. “From that moment, I could see the power of her purpose,” Browne said in a telephone interview. She invited Monet to a poetry workshop at a group home for pregnant teens in Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood, which opened the young writer’s eyes to what poetry and community activism could accomplish. Later, as a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., Monet organized a poetry potluck to aid those affected by Hurricane Katrina.“I just remember feeling so powerless, away from the community of poets that I knew understood what that meant and what it felt like,” Monet recalled of her response to the storm. “It was just jarring to see Black people being killed literally by neglect of this country.”Those themes and concerns stayed with her, and inform “When the Poems Do What They Do.” The album blends poetry Monet has written over the years with vigorous live instrumentation. “The Devil You Know” pairs dark, psychedelic jazz with searing observations about America, and “Yemaya” centers upbeat, polyrhythmic percussion with words about the cleansing power of water.Monet uses a similar approach on an earlier stand-alone track titled “Give My Regards to Brooklyn.” Throughout the sprawling nine-minute cut about coming up in the borough, a mix of collaborators discuss their impressions of Monet. “Ever since I’ve known Aja,” a male voice says, “she’s been just this bold force reflecting back beauty in the world.”Monet is quick to pay homage to voices that came before her: Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka and the Last Poets, among many others. “She’s speaking with the guidance of her elders,” Browne said. “She’s never separating herself from the legacy of the work.”Making art as part of an ecosystem of music, writing and grass-roots activism remains central to Monet’s project. “I know that I’m a part of a collective of many people who are working every day in their own way to create a world that is more equitable and just for all,” she said. “So, ultimately, everything I do is rooted in a deep place of love, an overwhelming obsession with love.” More