Leviathan’s best quality is its realism. But its plot is not exactly realistic. It’s quite the opposite. The film is about those unspoken forces in life—fear, desire, power, greed, love—that motivate us to make decisions. It is often impossible to describe why we choose or what we have chosen. It is a fait accompli, meaning simply there. Reason can give its explanations later. Leviathan grounds this cerebral problem in a story of passions in a rugged domain: the Murmansk Oblast of northeastern Russia.

Leviathan’s characters are by the book. The movie hosts an ensemble cast led by Kolya Sergeyev (Aleksei Serebryakov). Kolya owns a house. He repairs cars. He drinks vodka. Nothing to note, especially in Murmansk. But when the corrupt mayor of Kolya’s rural-ish town seizes Kolya’s home, the plot unwinds. For Kolya, losing his land means losing his family, his history, and his identity. The importance of land and home in Leviathan reminded me of Gone with the Wind. In an iconic moment, Gerald O’Hara says to his daughter Scarlett: “Why, land is the only thing in the world worth workin’ for, worth fightin’ for, worth dyin’ for, because it’s the only thing that lasts.” Like Scarlett, Kolya fights against leviathan forces for his land.

Leviathan’s title could claim two origins. The first, quoted in the movie by an orthodox priest, is from the Bible. In Chapter 40 of the Book of Job, Job, who has suffered the loss of his wealth and his children, demands an explanation from God. God replies by invoking the images of the Behemoth and the Leviathan, creatures of immense power. He asks Job: “Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?” Only God has the power to create the Leviathan, so Job should not doubt that power. What He says, goes.

But more relevant to the plot is Thomas Hobbes’ book Leviathan. Hobbes borrowed from these verses in Job, but he personified the leviathan as the modern state. This Leviathan is absolute. As long as you are a citizen of a state, you are bound to its sovereign’s will. Here; we see the relevant to Kolya’s world. His leviathan is the Russian state. Their sovereign will is to repossess his home. Even when his long-time friend Dmitry (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) visits from Moscow to use the powers of influence and law to rectify his fate, the state responds with violence. Kolya is left powerless.

Dmitry, a lawyer from Moscow, repeats throughout the movie: “I believe in facts.” Facts uncover the tarnished past of the corrupt mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov). Facts establish legal principles. Dmitry believes that his manipulation of facts and relationships can place him above all others. His stylish dress, his good looks, his infidelity to Kolya—all imply that he wants to be the God of his own world. In all his efforts, however, he is met with the sheer reality of violence. The state captures him and leaves him destitute as he tries to win Kolya’s house back.  Kolya’s wife and son are also drawn into the maelstrom that Kolya’s conflict with the state unleashes. His attempt to use the power of law through Dmitry ultimately destroys and dissolves his own family. His wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) typifies stupefaction in face of reality—something that Leviathan wants to capture. Lilya makes choices without knowing why; and she is powerless to react to their consequences.

Everywhere, the rule of naked power is cloaked as the rule of law. The film is a look into a world that most Americans cannot imagine In an interview with Variety, Leviathan’s producer Alexander Rodnyansky said the following: “[Leviathan] deals with some of the most important social issues of contemporary Russia while never becoming an artist’s sermon or a public statement.”

The film ends with an apparent victory for the two Leviathans of Leviathan: the aggressive, noisy state and the quiet yet influential Orthodox Church. Kolya has been taken to prison. Dmitry has abandoned their friendship and fled to Moscow. Kolya’s son is effectively orphaned and taken in by his father’s friends. At church, the mayor stands next to a high church official, whom we learn to be the recipient of Kolya’s seized property. The morning sermon extols the renaissance of the Russian people and their renewed rise to power. The church father criticizes those values that lead men away from God, and he recalled those very verses from the Book of Job. God holds all truth and all power. We must follow his word lest we perish.

With this note of resignation, Leviathan ends. The corrupt mayor has won, because he holds power. The family who takes in Kolya’s son does express love for him, but his fate is ultimately tragic. Perhaps this is Russia in the 21st century: full of power and full of hopelessness. The beauty of the film’s setting can give a degree of hope; but as always, it is silent. Power is all that is palpable, but it is blatantly vacuous and shallow. It lacks the personality that characterized Kolya and Dmitry’s fraternity, and the love of kin shown to Kolya’s son. The conclusion of this movie serves its larger purpose: As Job says, “Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return: the Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” What will be will be.

619 Days until the next Presidential election

12 Number of candidates expected to run for the Republican Nomination

84 Articles on Politico covering the Republican Presidential Nomination during the month of February

21 Percentage of Republican voters who would choose Mitt Romney, who has publicly announced his intention not to run, as the the next president, representing the most popular of all Republican candidates

100 million Amount, in dollars, set to be raised by Jeb Bush, the current frontrunner, in the first three months of 2015

0 Things we learned from today’s New York Times cover story about the Republican nomination.

Sources: 1) days.to/election-day-in-us/2016, 2) http://www. nytimes.com/interactive/2015/us/politics/2016-presidential-candidates.html, 3, 4) politico.com, 5) washingtonpost. com, 6) nytimes.com

Avi Buffalo smells like high school. Just one song catapults me into the back seat of Sam Nash’s Toyota, where we made fun of our French teacher and listened to mysteriously good music. “Truth Sets In” by Avi Buffalo was one of those songs. At the time, it changed my life. Four years later, I’m meeting Avi Buffalo again on At Best Cuckold. He still smells like teen spirit. His persona is the exact same: a mixture of chill surf-rock bro and teenage boy who masturbates five times daily. He nails that perfect combination of completely weird lyrics (“my boner pressed up to your chest,” he sings on “Memories of You”), genuine sincerity, and mesmerizing sound.

But his sound seems to have grown up. Mature isn’t a word normally associated with Avi Buffalo, but it could be applied here. Pieces of Real Estate’s Days and Mac DeMarco’s Salad Days influenced Avi Buffalo’s new record. After all, Avi Zahner-Isenberg, the man behind Avi Buffalo, was 19 when his self-titled album was released. There’s (hopefully) a big difference between 19 and 23. No question, however: the vibe on At Best Cuckold is perfectly adolescent. Avi Buffalo’s new album teems with sexual energy, curiosity, and profound over- confidence, as the gorgeous song “Overwhelmed With Pride” would suggest. If you want to be adolescent, however, you can’t avoid being shallow. Songs like “She is Seventeen” and “Two Cherished Understandings” sound and feel just like Season 2 of The OC. Deeply moving, sensually overwhelming, but just a bit too sappy.

At this point, so what? I’ve heard so much electronic music in the past six months that it’s nice to think of walks on the beach and the perfect first kiss again. Before we know it, Avi Buffalo will remind us of life twenty years ago, and not just five. Drop the irony and skepticism, and try on the age of sixteen again. It feels good.

A great TV series requires a great ensemble. Our most popular TV series may boast an outstanding lead character, whether it’s Mad Men’s Don Draper or The Soprano’s Tony Soprano, but they’d amount to little without a Roger Sterling or Carmela Soprano to add fuel to the fire. I’d wager, in fact, that we derive far more from characters’ interrelations and disputes than we do from the story arc of one individual.

And when it comes to romantic comedy and drama series, groups of friends on TV shows make for an even more intricate story. Take Sex and the City: Carrie’s misguided flings may have been entertaining enough on their own, but would they have been the same without Samantha’s insatiable sex drive or Charlotte’s anal-retentive approaches to love? Of course not. The interplay of all four characters made Sex and the City an entertaining watch, where Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda were broadly-drawn stereotypes in a perceived spectrum of women’s sexual and romantic lives (circa 1999, of course). Girls was arguably drawn along the same lines, though it’s a tad less chic and far more depressing.

Here’s where Looking comes into the picture. HBO’s newest series, which chronicles the complicated and intermeshed lives of three gay men in the Bay Area, is clearly a follow-up to the (relative) success of Girls. The cinematography feels similar, the spirit of the show pays homage to the interior angst of late 20-somethings, and the setting is one of those “isn’t everyone moving there?” locales. But most importantly, it plays to the ensemble genre. Three gay men star in Looking, and it may enticing to see them as encompassing at least some, or perhaps all, of the spaces in which gay men in a progressive urban setting live today.

So what are the gays of 2014 up to? Well, there’s Patrick (Jonathan Groff), who we’d be most likely to recognize on Yale’s campus. He’s a not so recent Cal graduate hailing from Colorado, off to San Francisco to work as a video-game designer and find the husband of his dreams. He’s innocent, and awkwardly so. His poor attempts at flirting are equal parts groan-worthy and “haven’t I done the exact same before?” Looking has created a well-balanced sense of empathy for Patrick, but with a hint that all is not as rosy as it may appear for him. Next in line is Agustín (Frankie J. Álvarez), Patrick’s best friend and ex-roommate. In terms of maturity, he’s a few years ahead of Patrick, with a long-term boyfriend in tow and the realities of hitting thirty years of age ahead of him.

And then there’s Dom (Murray Bartlett). Poor, poor Dom. Dom’s the guy who can’t seem to get off of Grindr even as he approaches 40, who’s been having sex at least four times a week for the past twenty years. But he’s far past his prime, and he knows it. Here Looking really seems to flex its muscles: this isn’t just a show about disaffected, alienated young adults, though that’s likely the audience it wants to draw in. It’s a cross-section of the lives of gay men, considering each character’s context of age, ethnicity, class, and upbringing. Where Patrick is meeting guys at clubs and bars, Dom is still heading to the San Francisco bathhouses, where he’s told, “you’re sort of an institution around here.”

In the end, however, I think it’s unfair to see the characters of Looking as definitive representations of what it means to be a gay man. There really is no one, singular story about the lives gay men lead today, and Looking knows that. So while it certainly tells stories we can identify with, and while we might occasionally call ourselves a “total Samantha,” “a mix of Jessa and Hannah,” and in the future even “a little bit Patrick,” it’d be wrong to assume that this show attempts to broadly stereotype “characters” in the gay community. The series ultimately yearns for something deeper. It’s about the expansion of the gay lifestyle into a freer space, where sexuality adds color to the narrative, but never overwhelms it.

But enough intellectualizing: when it comes down to it, Looking is a heartfelt and honest show about three men. The series’ strongest moments surface when friends are smoking weed together, when it’s willing to focus on moments of non-sexualized intimacy and markedly personal struggles through life. Does being gay ever play into this picture? Yes, of course! They live in San Francisco, for God’s sake. Looking’s approach to sexuality adds dynamism to the story, taking familiar scenarios like a bad OKCupid date or the engagement of an ex, and framing these within a gay man’s world. It opts for quotidian anxieties over the exoticism of an “alternative” lifestyle, because it’s not just a show about the legacy of the AIDS crisis or the sex-driven party culture of San Francisco. It’s 2014, and the gay community has come so far in becoming a respected and self-sufficient social group in many parts of the US. Looking is the show it needs. Like its spiritual predecessors, it’s a show about friends, uncomfortably but resolvedly riding together through the shitstorm of life.

Is there a better cocktail than girls and guitars? Rock-and-roll, with its determined, aggressive sound and heart-throb rock stars, has always reveled in its particularly masculine aura. But women have left their mark on the genre; bands like Blondie, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Le Tigre immediately come to mind. And within the past five years, one of the best all-female rock and roll groups has been on the rise: Dum Dum Girls.

Two albums and two EPs into their careers, Dum Dum Girls are admittedly at risk of losing themselves in the fringes of the Pitchfork-dominated indie scene. But Dee Dee Penny, Dum Dum Girls’ front woman, is far too savvy to let the success of her bedroom project wither into obscurity; cue Too True, Dum Dum Girls’ newest studio album. It’s a great reflection on the band’s previous sound that brings in new style and nuance, keeping Dum Dum Girls (DDG) well at the forefront of indie rock.

That said, such a departure from their earlier work will alienate more than a few. DDG’s sophomore album from 2011, Only in Dreams, brought together Best Coast-y surf rock with hints of punk to create an effortlessly cool piece of music. Too True feels much more calculated. “Evil Blooms” is an incredibly sleek piece of songwriting, cool and ruthless to its core. Too True’s best track, “Lost Boys and Girls Club,” is likely one of Dum Dum Girls’ best ever: it’s the perfect mix of shoegaze and lyrical badassery, of Dee Dee’s vocal prowess and DDG’s sonic walls of screeching guitars.

But something authentic seems missing on Too True. Where Penny once bellowed her lungs out, she now seems to passively let the songs on Too True pass her by. Penny knew that she needed to reconfigure the group’s sound to stay relevant—not necessarily a crime, but some of the real spirit she used to put in her music is undoubtedly missing. Too True’s calculation comes at a price: the deep-rooted passion needed to make a great rock-and-roll record.

Where do you find yourself when watching Blue Jasmine? Somewhere in between your past and your present—and believe me, Woody Allen’s newest bleak rom-com wouldn’t want it any other way. Starring Cate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins, and Alec Baldwin, Blue Jasmine tells a story of reconciling with the past, and how fundamentally exhausting it can be to banish the demons of the past away from the present.

Cate Blanchett’s character, Jasmine French, recalls some of America’s most famous (and dubious) literary characters: Daisy Buchanan, Blanche Dubois, and Lady Brett Ashley immediately come to mind. As a character, Jasmine is a traditional, 20th century woman of means—tasteful, reserved, and elegant at first glance, but deeply troubled by the fragmentary life that surrounds her. The only constant in Jasmine’s life is her addictive personality, which craves glamour, wealth, and vodka in equal parceling.

Jasmine’s counterpart is her sister, Ginger. Where Jasmine is deeply crippled by the complexities of her own mind, Ginger is plain, simple, and realistic. And though the movie is officially entitled Blue Jasmine, the story depicts both Jasmine and Ginger’s lives. After Jasmine’s husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin), is sent to jail for his fraudulent investing schemes, she abandons her past as a Manhattan socialite and flies to San Francisco to move in with her lower middle-class sister (Streetcar, anyone? Allen’s tribute feels even more apparent when Ginger’s boyfriend/fiancé Chili enters the picture, bringing to mind the character of Stanley). Blue Jasmine’s funniest moments spring from this inversion of the classic rags-to-riches story. Jasmine’s stint as a receptionist at a dentist’s office is one of the movie’s best sequences, and gives the movie some much needed breathing room from its darker side.

But make no mistake—this is no dreamy stroll with Owen Wilson along the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Blue Jasmine is much more Manhattan than it is Annie Hall, with tendencies to make note of the vapid and insecure sides of the human psyche. Blue Jasmine’s saddest moments are barbed, bitter, and caustic. Yet it is precisely this burdensome melancholy that endows the story with its deepest, most thought-provoking moments. You follow Cate Blanchett on a 98-minute trip through time, motored on by a steady stream of Xanax, Stoli martinis (with a twist of lemon), and general malaise. But at the same time, it’s remarkably simple, and is in essence an exposé of life and people. Everyone knows a Jasmine or a Ginger, and most importantly we’ve been where they are. Past and present seam into and through one another, and your own choices, good or bad, seem to follow you through the film just as they follow Jasmine.

The word “mosquito” immediately conjures some gruesome images in my mind when I reflect on it. But even if my personal experiences with the Culicidae family aren’t too fond, I can at least add a new positive association to our humidophilic companions: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have released Mosquito, the band’s thrilling fourth studio album.

Surprisingly enough, the title suits the tone of the album quite well—lead singer Karen O’s voice is strikingly incisive, and her high-pitch screeches (to be interpreted in the best of ways) are simultaneously painful and sublime. But what is really so striking about Mosquito is not its connections to nasty bugs, but rather how radically different it is from the rest of the band’s work.

Of course, this claim alone is difficult to qualify, as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs never really emphasized a coherent sound: even the band’s best tracks, like “Maps,” “Gold Lion,” or “Zero” sound nothing alike. But Mosquito’s prominent, electronic-heavy instrumentation pushes Mosquito far away from the group’s traditional rock orientation, and much of the songwriting tunnels Karen O and company deeper into the rabbit hole of experimentation. Opening track “Sacrilege” begins with Karen O soloing a punk anthem but ends with the shouts of an overwhelming gospel chorus, and its effect is risky but powerful.

This kind of exploration is not always successful. There are moments where Mosquito’s songs wander, and some of the album feels like Karen O endlessly repeating a harmony over an indiscriminate wall of sound. But when the stars align for Mosquito, like on “These Paths,” title track “Mosquito,” and “Despair,” the result crafts an edgy yet anthemic atmosphere that truly capitalizes on the best that the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s have to offer.

Are you fond of the loud drone of a slow-moving City of New Haven emergency vehicle? Then I think you’ll find Dirty Beaches’ new album Drifters / Love is The Devil suits your tastes quite well. This album functions as a banal musical explanation of the Doppler effect, as high-pitched tones swivel into a disastrous disharmony over the course of 16 long, long tracks.

Drifters’ first track, “Night Walk,” is perhaps the most promising on the album, as it easily recalls back to elements from Dirty Beaches’ first album, Badlands. The groove moves at a steady pace, and it emphasizes the excellent producing that Alex Hungtai, the Taiwanese singer and producer of Dirty Beaches, had so excelled at in his 2011 debut. Hungtai’s sophomore album, on the other hand, emphasizes the minutiae of protracted sounds, and at times it is strikingly beautiful. Title track “Love is The Devil” is a puzzling journey through a harmonious yet eerie synth track, and following song “Alone At The Danube River” is a sincere mourning of a high-toned bass guitar over the course of seven incredibly emotive minutes.

Yet Drifters also creates an incredibly dark and heavy tone for most of its songs, and those songs heavily detract from the exemplary moments that Hungtai offers on this album. His experimentation with disharmonious electronics is simply unpleasant to listen to. I’m all for experimentation—but Dirty Beaches does so in a way that makes Drifters to be a puzzling and uncomfortable listen.

To be succinct, Drifters / Love is The Devil has some great moments that are worth a listen, and if you’re willing to invest time into the album, it’ll grow on you. But if you’re looking for a relaxing, simple, enjoy the sun album, then search elsewhere.

Spring is here, and the Los Angeles duo Rhye (Mike Milosh and Robin Hannibal) is calling back the sun to its proper height with their stellar new album Woman.

Until the record’s release, Rhye shunned as much media and publicity as possible. As Hannibal and Milosh expressed on NPR, “We made a conscious decision to stay out of things. We just don’t want to be in the imagery of our music, because we don’t want to interfere with the individual experience of our songs.”  What remains, then, makes up one of the best albums of the year so far—because while Rhye has decided not include themselves on Woman, they include just about everything else.

Rhye crafts elegant and endearing music; its presence entirely surrounds its listeners. The album is a mix of smooth jazz, ephemeral dream-pop, and sleek production. Rhye has invited many apt comparisons to minimalist indie pop bands like the xx, Beach House, and Chromatics, but Woman isn’t nearly so held back or restrained as its predecessors. “The Fall,” Rhye’s debut single from October 2012, expresses Woman’s sound more exquisitely than any track on the album, but Woman experiments in all the right ways. “3 Days” quite casually flirts with disco, and is accompanied by a mixture of low-tone synth lines and a symphonic mix of violins, flutes, and clarinets. “One of Those Summer Days,” by contrast, is a slow and dreamy track that lingers through a labyrinth of reverbs, mournful guitars, and hushed voices.

Despite this variety, nothing on Woman feels missing or out of place. After finally parsing through the incredibly satisfying layering of sound and emotion in Woman’s ten tracks, it’s quite clear: everything that Rhye includes in Woman simply belongs there. Rhye never ‘interferes with the individual experience’ of the music on Woman: they make that experience a complete one.

Indie legends of the 20th century like The Smiths, Fleetwood Mac, and Oasis seem to blossom for a moment and then fade away into oblivion. For a moment, they represent everything that defines their time—but that’s never an eternal guarantee of fame and success. Whenever these artists attempt to reenter the foray, they try to assert themselves as contemporary artists whose work still belongs. But the public never really wants them—NME will continue to give Noel Gallagher and Robert Smith their annual “Godlike Genius” award for having made genre-defining music, but ultimately cease to care about what they continue to make.

New Order is surely one of those bands. Though the group’s contemporary work goes largely unappreciated, today’s hipsters idolize the ‘80s new-wave tour de force. And a look into the recent “tell-all” memoir of their bassist (and bassist for the band that preceded them, Joy Division), Peter Hook, might explain why this is true—and perhaps why it should not be. Though Peter Hook won’t be winning any awards for “Biographer of the Decade” for Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, the book is a wonderful way to get a firmer hold on the origins of the “indie” music scene.

Bassist for both Joy Division and New Order, Hook has always been one of New Order’s most outspoken members. After a prolific career in the 1980s, including five studio albums and over sixteen charted singles, the group began to lose steam and took a break in 1993. While New Order reconvened in 2001 to make their guitar-driven Get Ready and again in 2005 for Waiting for the Sirens’ Call, their music continued to get worse and worse. In lieu of their traditional club-electronic tracks like “Fine Time” or “Blue Monday” from the 1980s, New Order offered over-synthesized tracks with saccharine vocals in singles like “Krafty” and “Crystal.” By 2007, Hook left the group (again) while Sumner and original NO members Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert continued to make music.

This month, Hook published an autobiographical account titled Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, which details the group’s origins in Manchester in the mid 1970s. In 1976, Hook and long-time pal Sumner went to a Sex Pistols concert in Manchester and immediately knew they had to start a band. After a number of fights, run-ins with the police, and lines of cocaine, Hook and Sumner met Ian Curtis, future Joy Division frontman, at a Manchester punk venue. By 1977, Joy Division was formed and playing small gigs throughout the post-industrial scene in Northern England.

Most of Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division is made up of scattered conversations and playful (although often quite bitter) banter between Hook, Curtis, and Sumner. Chapter titles include “It was like The X Factor for punks,” “Stop fucking moaning Hooky,” and “He’s possessed by the devil, that twat.” Hook’s writing style matches his public persona—crass, upfront, and bold.

Even through Joy Division’s relative ascendancy to fame in 1978 and 1979, Hook reminds the reader of the band’s personal side. Even when describing the recording of JD’s most famous singles and albums, Hook treats them as individual projects that came together at the spur of a moment. In “I Remember Nothing,” the haunting closer on Unknown Pleasures, Sumner actually plays the wrong chord on his new Transcendent 2000 synthesizer for the whole recording—but the disharmony it gave to the song was too good to pass up.

Hook’s work demystifies Joy Division in ways that have never been done before. Biopic films like Control and 24 Hour Party People depict Curtis as a dark and brooding genius, but Hook makes him out to be a “pretty regular bloke.” If anything, Hook takes his time to remind us that music is not simply conceptual—it’s a man-made product. In a whirlwind journey through the gritty punk scene of late 1970s England, Joy Division ceases to be the inevitable beginning of post-punk and New Wave, but is a group of teenagers who got together to make music. Hook didn’t know from a young age that he was destined to play the bass—he stole one at age 16 from a music store in Salford and never learned how to play it right.

We can list Closer and Unknown Pleasures  as two of the definitive albums of the late 20th century, and deem Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, and Stephen Morris to be “Godlike Geniuses,” but we still won’t know anything about who Joy Division was. As Hook’s narrative tells us, the music world in the 1970s was a very different place than it is now. But the story of a band looking to score girls, snort coke, and get famous will always remain the same—no more glorious than today.