This post is short, walk on girl

A brief note.

“Sun Cycle Taken Dec 21-17. Looking South from Gov. Hill, 1917”, H.G. Kaiser

Hello!¹ I don’t have much for you this week, unfortunately, because I’ve been writing something short for a magazine². Forgive me: I forgor how much effort writing on a schedule is. I’ve always thought writing feels like water in a reservoir — there’s only so much there you can draw out before it needs refilling. And different kinds of writing draw different amounts of energy³.

Anyway, I figured I’d use this week’s newsletter to write about two things that have been on my mind lately. I don’t think they’re related, but you can draw your own conclusions.

First: this weekend I meant to go to a screening of the 2017 film The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl, but it turned out I’d underestimated demand — it was sold out. But I wanted to see something new anyway. So I picked a film at a different theater more or less at random. I ended up at Return to Seoul, a gorgeous film that was released last year.

It follows Freddie, a Korean adoptee who grew up in France, and her changing relationship with Korea. We see her at different ages, figuring out how to define what country and family mean to her. Also, at one point, she becomes an arms dealer⁴. There’s a lot in there, thematically speaking: alcoholism, the toxic love of a toxic father, and the essential awkwardness of forging a connection across a language barrier, to name a few.

If you can see it, I’d recommend it. It’s a coming of age film that does a very good job of showing how unpleasant you can be when you’re young and “free-spirited.”⁵

Second: I’ve been spending more time on Twitter lately, and I don’t like it. Elon has seemingly figured out how to step back from being the site’s main character, lately, but the algorithmic changes he’s presided over feel like they’ve sent the site into overdrive. Every day there’s some awful discourse about tipping or AI, and every day the awful machine shows me things that make me angry. Which it’s meant to do, as anger is engagement, and engagement means growth, and growth means continued revenue, or something. It all just feels so… thoughtless?

And I dislike that feeling more and more. I dunno. At least before it felt like people were still producing high-quality shitposts. There’s a lot to say about making things for the internet / how that work has changed and deepened and professionalized in the last decade or so, but that’s a subject for another post.

In the meantime, go find a piece of art that took someone a long time to make and take your time engaging with it — on its own terms, not yours or the discourse’s.

More soon,

Bijan

1. And welcome new subscribers. This newsletter isn’t always takes on the piece everyone’s talking about on Twitter.

2. Hopefully it’ll be out soon.

3. This may not make any sense to anyone but me. But it’s my internal state!

4. Fascinating narrative choice, that. But it’s based on someone’s life; who knows what’s true?

5. This is 40% a mea culpa.