In today’s newsletter, a dreamy new LP from aja monet. Plus:

• How romantasy seduces its readers
• Rostam Batmanglij likes to push our idea of what a pop song can be
• The hollow trickery of “The Wizard of the Kremlin”

Sheldon Pearce
A writer who has covered music for Goings On since 2020

Since the seventies, the famed Nuyorican Poets Café has blossomed on the Lower East Side as an essential hothouse for arts movements of many stripes, perhaps most crucially as a launching pad for an emergent literati straddling the realms of soul and hip-hop. The venue’s performances and readings—from artists including Paul Beatty and Reg E. Gaines, the artist formerly known as Mos Def and Erykah Badu—became a means to tap into the slam continuum. The same scene nurtured the evolution of the Brooklyn-born poet and activist aja monet, who became the café’s youngest-ever Grand Slam champion in 2007, and who has spent her career navigating the many creative forms of a blues people—collaborating on Saul Williams’s book “Chorus: A Literary Mixtape,” performing as a part of the Smoke Signals collective, and releasing the poetry collection “My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter.”

After years of dazzling spoken-word circuits with her intense and poignant wordplay, monet has seamlessly transitioned into the role of bandleader and music artist. The spirits of blues and rap have always haunted her work, but her début album, “when the poems do what they do,” from 2023, made the relationship palpable, introducing her poetry to a jazzy new context when performed alongside such artists as Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, Samora Pinderhughes, and Marcus Gilmore. Monet, who has referred to herself as a surrealist blues poet, has a new LP, “the color of rain,” out May 22, which truly commands the distinction with its dreamlike tangle of genre-blurring ideas. Performing with the keyboardist Brian Hargrove, the bassist Micah Collier, and the drummer Myles Martin, monet commemorates the album’s release at Carnegie Hall on May 20.

Broadway

Noël Coward’s “Fallen Angels” is a retro gem that gives froth a good name. The plot is pure Fluffernutter: two pretty, rich wives spend a day freaking out, primping, and getting royally hammered after they learn that the French snack they hooked up with as single gals abroad has turned up in London. The play was naughty stuff in 1925, when the show, starring Tallulah Bankhead, got banned. You can still see why it shocked people: Coward’s cynical farce is devoutly unjudgmental about these shrewd bubbleheads, dipsomaniacs determined to find wiggle room in their vows. In 2026, the play is primarily an opportunity to see Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara lounge all over the gorgeous set like bejewelled Slinkies, chugging champagne and slaloming off sofas. A sweet profiterole.—Emily Nussbaum (Haimes; through June 7.)

Dance

Not long ago, the New York City Tap Festival appeared to be on its deathbed. When the 2024 edition of the annual event, also known as Tap City, didn’t attract enough funding and was cancelled, it looked like the end. But the Joyce Theatre came to the rescue, and now Tap City is back, celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary with a week of shows there. The lineup displays some rebounding strength, with such returning favorites as Caleb Teicher, Jason Samuels Smith, Soles of Duende, and Michelle Dorrance, who will perform a vintage solo by the festival’s matriarch, Brenda Bufalino.—Brian Seibert (Joyce Theatre; May 19-24.)

Art

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Joan Semmel revolutionized the female nude. For centuries, naked women were depicted in art by men as mythic beings and/or sex objects, but in the nineteen-seventies some feminists began reclaiming their eroticism, including Semmel. She first painted couples having sex, and then images of her own body, which became her longtime focus. Semmel’s paintings are simultaneously tender and unflinching, especially those that portray her point of view, looking down at smooth, detailed skin or folded, expressionistic flesh. The Jewish Museum’s thrilling mini-survey highlights her formal experimentation, while an accompanying gallery show features new work—including a remarkable, front-facing, nude self-portrait by the nonagenarian titled “Here I Am” (2025).—Jillian Steinhauer (Jewish Museum, through May 31; Alexander Gray Associates, through May 30.)

Electronic

The English singer, producer, and d.j. Nia Archives stands at the forefront of the modern U.K. rave scene, working primarily in jungle and drum and bass. A rare star in a behind-the-decks profession, she is both bellwether and ambassador for one of the more niche music communities. Her 2024 début album, “Silence Is Loud,” sought to blend jungle with the Britpop of bands such as Blur and Oasis, and its more reined-in sound allowed for the kind of clearheaded introspection that most hit the dance floor to avoid. In 2025, she launched her label Up Ya Archives for “everything new gen junglism,” and, later this year, she’s releasing “Emotional Junglist,” which promises to continue her long-running subversion of raver norms.—Sheldon Pearce (Bowery Ballroom; May 21.)

Movies

Kara Young and Mallori Johnson in “Is God Is.” Photograph by Patti Perret / Amazon MGM Studios

For her first feature, Aleshea Harris adapted and directed her 2018 play “Is God Is.” The movie is a furious revenge thriller, in which two young women, fraternal twins, Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), who have grievous burn scars from early childhood, are summoned to the bedside of their mother (Vivica A. Fox), whom they call God, and who is similarly scarred. God reveals that the perpetrator is their long-absent father—and she orders them to find him and kill him. The sisters’ mission involves a dangerous and violent road trip; the fierce Racine outdoes the sensitive Anaia in her bloodlust, and the drama, reminiscent of classical tragedy, resounds with mythopoetic overtones. If the results are longer on action than on substance, they’re nonetheless harrowing and haunting.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)

Movies

The sardonic comedy “Clockwatchers,” from 1997, observes office life from the perspective of four secretarial temps whose daily tribulations reveal bureaucratic absurdities and cruelties in action. Iris (Toni Collette), a new temp at a credit company, quickly bonds with her colleagues: Margaret (Parker Posey), whose derision is matched by ambition; Paula (Lisa Kudrow), an aspiring actress whose optimism masks despair; and Jane (Alanna Ubach), whose dreams center on her impending marriage. The women are blithely dismissive of their tedious work, but their relationships fray under new stresses—including intrusive surveillance. The director, Jill Sprecher, films these antics like a live-action cartoon, with giddy images and spritzy performances that are nonetheless poignant.—R.B. (Metrograph, May 17, introduced by John Early, and streaming on the Criterion Channel.)

Liza Minnelli in 1969. Photograph by Burt Glinn / Magnum

1. The singer, actor, and dancer Liza Minnelli has had a legendarily stormy life. Several marriages, her addiction struggles, not to mention having Judy Garland, herself legendarily stormy, as a mother: it’s been a lot, and it’s all laid out in her new memoir, “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!” What could have easily made for an overwrought and even tragic read, however, is presented with a surprisingly light touch. Minnelli writes, “When you’re down and out, just shake off the dust and get back up.” A good note to self!

2. “The Real Housewives of Rhode Island,” the newest offering from Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchise, is only in its first season, but it is already, in my eyes, a slam dunk. Once you get over the initial confusion of telling the ladies apart from each other (deep tans and long brunette extensions seem to be de rigueur in the Ocean State), you’ll love their straight-shooting, ballsy approach to life. Cheating husbands, money woes: it’s all discussed directly and openly, God bless them.

3. Now that Madonna is in an album-promotion cycle again, this time for the July release of “Confessions II,” it’s fun to reminisce on an earlier period in her career by watching the 1991 documentary “Truth or Dare.” Directed by Alek Keshishian, the movie follows the singer’s Blond Ambition tour, and, on top of lots of great live-concert footage, it includes a ton of behind-the-scenes deliciousness, including skirmishes with her then boyfriend Warren Beatty and sassy girl talk with her bestie at the time, Sandra Bernhard.

Illustration by Clay Hickson

I was raised in New Mexico, which means that I know my way around a craft fair. Growing up, I spent my summers bouncing between various folk-art festivals and artisan markets, where my parents would placate me with sugar-dusted funnel cake or a green-chile cheeseburger while they spent hours swanning around looking at rugs and pottery and hand-woven textiles. My aunt and uncle, who live in Santa Fe—home to the International Folk Art Market, one of the largest such festivals in the world (the next one is July 9-12)—are devoted flea-market pickers and collectors of antique oddities. (My aunt is the type of woman who gets genuinely excited to excavate a rusty turn-of-the-century weathervane from a random pile of jetsam.) This is all to say that I come by my obsession with bazaars honestly. Swap meets, church-basement sales, antiques expos: give me a chance to rummage through beautiful and strange things while engaging in chipper small talk with passionate venders and I’m in my element. My other true love is vintage clothing, and so summer is a dangerous time for me—it’s the high season for pop-up secondhand markets, where some of the best vintage dealers from around the country gather to sell their wares. Earlier this month, I dropped into the Pickwick Vintage Show at Grand Central Terminal—a thoughtfully curated annual fair that moves to L.A. on May 16, to San Francisco on May 17, and to Chicago on June 21—and scored some truly fantastic pieces. From Jessica Barr, the owner of