Little is said about the current state of politics and culture in Georgia (the country, not the state). As a work of pointed satire, Tato Kotetishvili's Holy Electricity spotlights a Georgia (the country) held together by impoverished communities ground down from decades of arbitrary struggles among socioeconomic superpowers. Its economy is in shambles. Paltry mass transit options leave the already struggling citizenry dependent on cars, often sleeping in them, ultimately limiting the underclasses' mobility within Georgia’s urban corridors (again, not…

A fascinating document of how the French mind tries and fails to comprehend the existence of Florida. Dreamlike pastiches visualize a land of sturdy but neglected white teens swimming in calcified pools, supporting themselves by selling useless glass trinkets to sun-stroked tourists. They bicycle into eternal sunsets on empty roadways, and dance rhythmlessly with other American teenagers in remote party houses to morose shoegaze in the year 2024. They are only sometimes on their phones.

In this Florida, a scruffy…

On a slow afternoon in 2005, I was working alone in a record store when the phone rang. The voice on the other end had a familiar musical lilt.

“Hello, this is Gene Wilder. I believe you have a CD I ordered.”

I quickly fished through our special order bin, and I’ll be damned if there wasn’t a CD of classical music with “Gene Wilder” scrawled on the affixed post-it note. “Yes sir, I have it in my hands.”

“Ok,…

The rest of you rubes and theater kids might be fooled by quirky metanarratives and earnest showtune medleys. But not me. I can see the long, the short, the middle, and what’s in between.

There was never a band called Pavement. It was a trauma manifestation conjured in corporeal form from the collective hopes and dreams of the children who watched the Challenger explosion. Its dissonant song structures and inscrutable lyrics were shielded in dense layers of irony to protect…