Andrew Wyeth, Night Sleeper, 1979.

In 2025 I wrote very little and worked very hard, threw out most of my wardrobe and compulsively clubbed. We brought Gangsterism to theatres. I accepted I’m more of a Charlotte than a Miranda, but I think the most good to society is offered by its Samanthas.

The best films I saw in theatres were Mike Leigh’s Another Year, Lav Diaz’s Batang West Side, Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels (seen during a snowstorm with Mia and three other people), Leilah Weinraub’s Shakedown, Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, Joyce Wieland’s The Far Shore, Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus, David Cronenberg’s Crash, David Cronenberg’s Spider, and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, but Isiah Medina’s Gangsterism was the best movie of the year. The best films I saw at home (not an often occurrence anymore) were Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky and James Ivory’s Maurice, though the line that kept coming to mind was not from anything I saw recently but from Good Will Hunting: “It’s not your fault.” The worst films I saw in theatres were Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy and Luc Moullet’s Anatomy of a Relationship.

The best not-film I saw at home was that six-week run of Heated Rivalry. I developed a parasocial attachment to Cloud, Aerith, Tifa, Barret, Cait Sith, Red XXIII, and Yuffie. I developed a parasocial attachment to mo-capped Norman Reedus. I sunk deeper into River Phoenix fanaticism.

I went to the opera twice. The two shows I enjoyed this year were both at the MoCA: Margaux Williamson, Jeff Wall. Back to clubbing, the best night was Khadija Al Hanafi, Kush Jones was silly fun and though I kind of loathed pretty much everything else about the event, seeing GRRL in the basement of the abandoned HMV was mesmerizing. There was also a forest rave where Iman and I kept telling each other “wowww tonight is like a movie,” then we watched the sunrise next to a group of teenagers discussing their relationship troubles and did some morning stretches, and on the sweltering walk home I listened to “Entombed” by Deftones and felt so incredibly cool and also old. I decided then I deserve to call a car. I feel like every year I have to fight at least one to three men at a club. This year there were two, and I forgive them both.

After much trial-and-error I decided the best Korean restaurants in downtown Toronto are Joumak (for the soondae, bossam, and large variety of kimchi) and Gyodong (for the jjajangmyeon), the best locally made kimchi is by Gohyangjipbap. The best meals I had were always at The Wood Owl. The restaurant dish I probably ate the most was the vegan crunchwrap supreme at The Wren, I’m embarrassed typing that out for some reason but I’m sorry, it carried me. I got really into Andrew Wyeth and now the inside of my brain is all blue, beige, brown, and green, like the film Maurice actually.

Since the completion of Gangsterism Isiah and I like to joke about the various -isms that plague our world today. In 2025 I encountered more chaserism and scenesterism than the year before, I can only assume this year will see an even greater increase.

My eyes kept giving me trouble but I am okay with where I’m headed (glaucoma is what the optometrist has suspected for a few years now, though hopefully not soon). Theologically this is an incorrect application, but I’m always reminded of “Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel was beautiful.” The best books I read (in order of how much I cried most to least and not by quality) were A Room with a View by E.M. Forster, Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, Horse Crazy by Gary Indiana, and Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert. Sometimes I like to skim a PDF of All the King’s Horses by Michèle Bernstein on my phone, in 2025 I did that twice.

Now 2026:

There’s an upcoming series of 35mm prints from the Harvard Film Archive throughout January and February; I’ve written on the Bertolucci selections. Gangsterism has its UK premiere at the ICA in London on February 20, Isiah and I will be there. I also edited some special FX for the brilliant Fanta Sylla’s short L’aura. And I am introducing two films by Mikio Naruse this month at TIFF: Lightning on January 3 (tomorrow), Sudden Rain on January 11.

I got top surgery in June. To the dismay of many I lived and I endure as an ideological object you’ll hear about more than you’ll actually see, but more importantly, as the same person with the same hang-ups and fantasies. In those 4-7 weeks of recovery I watched a movie or two a week with Connie over Discord. It took me back to being 15, 16, 17, 18, 19... in their living room watching movies on the floor, or at Oakridge Mall watching movies with huge cups of bubble tea and backpacks filled with jalapeño cheddar pretzel dogs.

Once, and I didn’t have permission to do this, we agreed to meet so I walked into their empty backyard and swam around a bit before they got home. Eventually they did, which I realized when I noticed Connie and Connie's mom watching me float on my back, laughing so hard in utter confusion. Connie likes to retell this story often. I was often in my own little world. Over the years I joked with Connie’s mom a few times about if we can have Panda Express for dinner. But they fed me much better food than that. For my 18th birthday, I bravely lied to my parents about my whereabouts and Connie took me downtown. I had poutine for the first time that day. And I loved it.

Friendship is an integral filter through which I measure cinema history and it becomes specifically mine. Cinema history is nervously asking my mom for a ride to go watch a movie at my friend's house, and maybe I could even sleep over? (she said yes maybe once), to eventually driving my friend in a little Jetta to the same sticky mall multiplex of our childhood as we talk about our analogous English degree programs, and then reuniting again between years apart in different countries, and this time I have a living room and a television of my own.

The thing about watching movies with Connie is that usually the movies are not great, but with a friend this good the memories live on as proof of the fact that I can be this person one year and maybe someone else another year but I'll always have someone to watch Shrek 2 with. So if my friend liked me then and my friend still somehow likes me now, then I can deduce I’m still me and I must be doing okay for myself, because they’re certainly not in this for the movies.

I think the first movie we watched together was the 2000 Uzumaki adaptation (bad). Connie was there when I watched The Matrix (good) for the first time and decided I'm an anarchist, and I never saw Titanic (bad) until Connie put it on during a pool party as "Young, Wild, & Free" boomed on the speakers. Even though I think Connie and pretty much everyone else saw The Matrix before, finishing it for my sake was the reason why we were so late to the event our high school put on for graduating seniors. But we were too cool for it all anyway and we had other priorities: Drake just put out “2 On / Thotful” (good) on Soundcloud.

Sometimes I like to take a risk by intentionally choosing a movie that’s really terrible, and then like clockwork Connie will sigh and tell me that I'm not allowed to choose the next one. I'm still sorry about the time we watched The Neon Demon (look, it stars Keanu Reeves, I said), but I'm also not sorry because I had a nice time (I remember Cinemark Century Oakridge being empty most of the time, which always made me feel special and it also meant that we could heckle the screen).

The bad ones, in this case, were Babe: Pig in the City (I know it's beloved, but I don't like seeing a three-legged dog launched so hard into the air that it briefly dies and goes to heaven as it’s being pursued by the secret police) and Madame Web (Pepsi ad). We loved Heat, of course, because it's gay, and Hoodwinked was so smart I have little clips from it saved on my phone now for a quick laugh, and Ratatouille was reliably touching.

There are plenty of others who accompanied me to a screening or who sat on the floor with me or on a bed watching a better movie. But they’re mostly gone now, and few people are as nice as Connie. And honestly, years of cinephilia have taught me that the quality of the movie is never enough to make up for that of the company. I once watched Blue Velvet on a beautiful girl’s bed, but really I was watching her text another friend about finding the right time to kick me out so the two of them could hang out instead. I stopped feeling grateful for her time and I left before the end, and I love Blue Velvet (it was my pick).

So as I continue to outgrow the conditions of my past, I am very lucky that I know and am known by others who value growing alongside me even as the movies in this terrible world hardly ever improve in quality. (They probably never will, so we make better ones ourselves.) Ah, I already wished you a happy birthday on Monday and I didn't think I would have so much to say about all this actually. But happy birthday again Connie.

Cityscape #1, Richard Diebenkorn, 1963.

Reminds me of the creek by your house that runs parallel to the sidewalk.

…

• Gangsterism, directed by Isiah Medina and produced by me, had its world premiere at the Paradise Theatre in Toronto at the end of last month (Q&A with Winnie Wang here, and thank you to Saffron Maeve / CONTOURS for co-presenting the film). It was a historic event, if you were there you know this and thank you for coming. But things are just getting started.

• I provided the introductory essay and many program notes (in very good company) for the Harvard Film Archive’s huge Naruse celebration, the most extensive retrospective out of the several hosted across North America.

Mitosis, Isamu Noguchi, 1962.

(1) From Hoyoung’s Never Mind, translation my own:

“But why do you take hormones? There’s plenty of people who live without.” Because I want to be more ambiguous. Because I don’t want to be smoothly sectioned off.

“Why do you intentionally make your life so difficult?” Because that’s how I become more precise.

Which reminds me, as the weather warms, of Wallace Stevens’s description of a summer night: "an argentine abstraction approaching form and suddenly denying itself away. [...] an insolid billowing of the solid."

For reasons particular to myself, I find gender transition morbid in that everyday I am grieving, as well as preparing for and cataloguing the death of body parts and bodily functions, relationships, ideas, and memories. But the grief has given way to a liberating sense of disappointment that I am finally able to accept. I used to think people who quote that one line from Tokyo Story sounded trite but now I think it to myself often. Like realizing that you've been watching a terrible movie or a decent movie projected terribly, you're alerted to the fact that life "wasn't the movie of our dreams. It wasn't that total film we carried inside ourselves. That film we would have liked to make, or more secretly, the film we wanted to live." Eventually you get better at the art of walking out.

(2) I saw a 35mm print of Crash, then a few weeks later I watched The Shrouds:

Signifiers of humanity's proximity to death form the nucleus of sexual desire. To derive pleasure from signifiers requires a longing for meaning and an imagination. One has to be able to locate the rhyme between a dent and a thrust. One has to be perceptive enough to even want to see the rhyme and be at peace with the way its meaning settles. In this sense, Crash is about the evolution of an audience of voyeurs into attentive critics and burgeoning artists who start off as eager copycats, then lose the training wheels of their influences as their own tastes become more defined beyond a craving for countercultural rebellion.

The small group viewing of taped collisions recalls Cronenberg’s stories about the avant-garde screenings he attended as a university student, where he encountered films by Kenneth Anger and Ed Emshwiller. I am also thinking about Delany's writing on New York City porn theatres: the sexual tension that emerges among the gay audience because of the very absence of gay sex onscreen, the interclass contact that occurs in the face of class warfare through a shared pursuit of pleasure, the importance of this contact whether the sex is fulfilling or the relationships lasting—because life is short and people die. In both cases, the image surpasses the screen and corrupts the viewer's taste, jolts awake a sense of mortality.

The characters in Crash are startled by the pleasure that rushes in when the videotape breaks and begins to loop. The glitches form an erotic patchwork. This arousing rupture of time inspires a series of life-threatening turns against narrative, most bracingly depicted by cars speeding between rather than within the lanes and in the opposite direction. Recurring remarks among old men about viagra, scattered throughout Ozu's final films, leave behind the unspoken punchline that a few extra hours of sex brings you closer to the grave. There is wisdom, Ozu suggests, in knowing the worth of the risk.

*

I cried a lot watching The Shrouds but I accidentally deleted what I’d written about it. I thought, wow, this is the best thing I've written in awhile…but the next day I laughed about it because that’s actually not true. But it’s good to feel protective over your thoughts because they’re yours. Anyway, very briefly, it was something like this:

Love is the ultimate passage through which the body is fundamentally transformed.

[…] In love’s absence you superimpose the same scars on other torsos. You imagine every other “normative” body to be as malleable and transient.

[…] And you are left inconsolably lonely because love is real but ghosts are not.

(3)

There are times, I told Robert, swirling the ice in my glass, when a look or a shred of conversation from twenty years ago comes back to me with intensely concentrated ferocity, when a gesture or a sudden noise throws open a doorway at the end of a long narrow corridor of the faraway past, and then you can make out shapes and faces, forms, colors in the distance, at the threshold of recognition. What you really remember isn't what happened at a particular moment, I told Robert, but what you thought about yourself and the world you were living in back then, what you expected or dreamed that the future might be, how you interpreted reality at the time. What happened last week or last month, I said, sometimes settles into such remoteness you can't reclaim the smallest fraction of it, because it's still consistent with your picture of how things are. But once the picture changes, I said, the past stands out differently.

Gary Indiana, Gone Tomorrow

…

Updates: I’ll be reading an excerpt of my writing on Ozu on June 12 as part of Crit Salon, hosted by Saffron Maeve, at Tranzac. ^.^

Winter Kept Us Warm, David Secter, 1965.

(1) I promised myself I would produce another newsletter within a two-month window and we almost made it, I’m off by a few weeks. I was asked if I would ever consider branding or marketing this newsletter more proactively or if I would turn on paid subscriptions. But anything more than that seems like pulling teeth so everything will stay as is: lowkey and low-stakes and free. I wrote more here, about criticism and the role of the critic and making soup and what a busy year it’s been, etc etc etc… But something about saying less as I turn the corner seemed just as sensible, like looking out the window to conclude a conversation.

(2)

Winter Kept Us Warm (David Secter, 1965): Recently restored in 4K, Winter Kept Us Warm is one of the earliest Canadian queer films. Two students, upperclassman Doug (John Labow) and freshman Peter (Henry Tarvainen), cross paths at the University of Toronto. Their increasing time spent together, listening to records with knees touching and frolicking in the snow, suggests some future revelation too agonizing to confront in the present. Like the Cambridge of Maurice, the university is held together by strictly surveilled rituals and rules that only intensify the closeness between the young men. The truth is limited to cautious gestures: a delicate touch, a quick glance, a heartfelt gift presented as a spontaneous afterthought. Doug and Peter’s ambiguous relationship is so contained within subtle cues that even the cast and crew (mostly Secter’s university friends) admitted to not knowing what the film was really about. But even this touches upon how fear renders love a secret most effortfully kept from oneself.

When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989): Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) spend over a decade agonizing over whether men and women can ever be “just friends” as the romantic and sexual tension between them escalates. The clarity required of a close friendship is muddled by the science-fictional element of sexual difference. Gender becomes a cheap shorthand for all misunderstandings, but this escape hatch only leads to more dead ends. Sexual difference fails to fully explain why some “men” hate cuddling after sex and others don’t mind staying, and it fails to clarify why marriage would resolve any such uncertainties. The best romantic comedy about this subject is actually My Best Friend’s Wedding, because at least there is a gay person present to look on at this madness with a raised eyebrow.

Notting Hill (Roger Mitchell, 1999): What I especially love about Notting Hill is its depiction of the very real role that gossip plays in shaping the memory of romance and the decisions made based on pure speculations about that shape. Gossip places the lovers (Hugh Grant’s bookish bookshop owner and Julia Roberts’s A-list actress) in the same position as the audience, spinning the details of every encounter around and around before tomorrow comes too soon. In both the honest and dishonest retelling of the tale the true feelings reveal themselves.

Anything Else (Woody Allen, 2003): On one hand, I can concede that this film starring Jason Biggs and Cristina Ricci is a decent romantic comedy about how much easier it is to fall in love with someone who appears to be a better version of you than to actually become that person yourself. Within the narrow parameters of Woody Allen’s world, this means chasing after someone who appears to have acerbic wit, sophisticated taste in movies and music, an insatiable libido, and an assured confidence in their artistic career. Once the heat of infidelity has faded, neither person possesses any of those qualities and very little art has been made. The protracted crash-and-burn does yield some of the best gallows humour of this period in Allen’s oeuvre. But the fact that Jason Biggs’s foul-mouthed best friend (and the human embodiment of his id) is played by Woody Allen never settles. And as is typical of the films directed by Allen during the 2000s, Anything Else is a blatantly vindictive film about entering new beginnings after dark times with clean hands. I was half-jokingly offered money to share even more thoughts on this film but I will not do that.

A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024): Mangold’s Bob Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet, whose sugar glider stare miraculously registers as ingenuity) is a mumbling master of seduction effortlessly ahead of his time. He can do no wrong, whether he leaves a civil rights protest early or shows up at an ex-girlfriend’s house one year after the break-up, because another great hit is waiting around the corner. Because breaking with tradition is small potatoes to “BD”, a large portion of this film is actually dedicated to his overlapping situationships with Suze Rotolo (here named Sylvie Russo) and Joan Baez. I do not reside anywhere in the Venn diagram of Bob Dylan, James Mangold, and Timothée Chalamet fans. But I admit I was charmed by how this hagiographic film revealed itself to be a romantic comedy about the mystery of an artist’s time management. A successful, talented, and extremely busy artist chooses to expend energy on hot-cold entanglements because everything else seems so easy. But the unfortunate truth is that artistic achievements do not transfer over as credit in the realm of romance.

The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024): Corbet places the myth of the tortured genius against a larger backdrop of hostility against art, an all-American prejudice compounded by capital. Nazis, collectors, banks, private investors, governments, and religious institutions create defensive, sensitive, angry, and traumatized artists who’d rather tinker quietly and not answer any personal questions. Ironically, Corbet’s dependence on repetitious, conventional coverage (and his obvious indebtedness to Paul Thomas Anderson and Jonny Greenwood) make The Brutalist more contemporary (derogatory) than modern. Like a cleverly designed but narrow loft with tastefully arranged mid-century modern furniture, the novelty of its scale (in relation to its actual size) eventually wears off and your mind starts to wander...

My Brother’s Wedding, Charles Burnett, 1983.

(3) Things I enjoyed in 2024, not all, some old some new:

• Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946)

• Sirius Remembered (Stan Brakhage, 1959)

• Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)

• Near Orouët (Jacques Rozier, 1971)

• Gloria (John Cassavetes, 1980)

• My Brother’s Wedding (Charles Burnett, 1983)

• Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet, 1988)

• The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999)

• Les Trois Désastres (Jean-Luc Godard, 2013)

• Wajib (Annemarie Jacir, 2017)

*

• Brandy, Full Moon

• Utada Hikaru, Science Fiction

• The Radio Dept., Pet Grief

• Pet Shop Boys, Behaviour

• Elliott Smith, XO

• Playboi Carti, Whole Lotta Red

• Ryuichi Sakamoto’s soundtrack for The Adventures of Milo & Otis

• Deftones, White Pony

*

• Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

• Gary Indiana, Do Everything in the Dark

• Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms

• Willow Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner, Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema

• Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

• William S. Burroughs, Queer

*

In May we were in Ottawa celebrating our anniversary and walking in circles around Parliament Hill and drowning in true love when Kendrick Lamar dropped “6:16 in LA,” then Drake dropped “Family Matters,” then Kendrick dropped “Meet the Grahams.” And I think right then and there the wind stopped blowing through the flags lining the streets, and every OVO shopping bag gained about 10 pounds. The next day we were at the hotel eating cake and continuing our conversation about the future and us. Then Kendrick dropped “Not Like Us” and we had to pretend this didn’t overshadow the cake but really it was the best thing ever. I’d never laughed so hard in a single weekend. And of course Drake dropped “The Heart Part 6” the next day. So I was on the Via Rail listening to a balloon deflate for 5 minutes, and I thought about how Drake’s childhood dream was to move to Los Angeles and live in a house that looks like the Playboy Mansion (which was his desktop background) but now he’s back in Toronto in a mansion that looks like Yorkdale Mall, and how I’ve been in Canada for over 6 years now but sometimes I stop in the middle of the street and I still feel uprooted, like 10cm off the ground. This, however, is exactly how California felt all the time. All of these disparate details compressed together by the interstitial train ride became flattened into something comfortingly simple and really, really funny. And that was one of the best moments of my year.

From Adrienne Rich’s “Images for Godard”:

[…]

the mind of the poet is the only poem
the poet is at the movies

dreaming the film-maker’s dream but differently
free in the dark as if asleep

free in the dusty beam of the projector
the mind of the poet is changing

the moment of change is the only poem

(1) Picking up immediately where I left off:

In late June I celebrated six years of living in Toronto. I finally got off multiple medical waitlists, which concluded a protracted breakdown caused by the waiting—this is not a complaint but a fact about the nature of gender-affirming healthcare in Ontario. I made my way back into my body by August. It is fall, I am happy and having equally silly and serious ideas, which means my mind is operational again. 

Between August and October Isiah and I were in Los Angeles, then Paris, to make a movie. I'd never spent much time in Los Angeles, and I'd never been to Paris. In each city I asked those we met to tell me about their favourite local cinemas, from childhood to the present. With this information in mind we tried to punctuate our days with as many movies as possible. 

(2) In Los Angeles:

Isiah, Charlotte, and I stayed in Cypress Park. Much like in Jacques Rozier’s Near Orouët (1971), we spent the week cackling and drinking and running and rolling around. At the New Beverly Cinema I attended a double feature of Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981) and Snake Eyes (1998). My estimation of Quentin Tarantino—who I really only respect as a serious admirer of minor De Palma films like Obsession (1976) and Raising Cain (1992), and as the owner of this cinema—was significantly raised by the quality of the New Beverly’s popcorn.

Blow Out and Snake Eyes are two crystalline depictions of a nation turned against its own people. Between the two one senses a sharpening of the knife, a leap from identifying categories to naming names. Blow Out is about two innocent working-class Americans trying to escape, through nothing but a pure belief in truth, the destiny of a forgettable death covered up by the government. Snake Eyes dares to be even more specific in its depiction of political corruption, presenting the American government as a brutish corporation willing to do whatever it takes to protect its lucrative alliance with Israel. It is an impressive exactitude, considering US-Israel relations serve as mere exposition at the very beginning of The Fury (1976). I use the word impressive to contain the accomplishments of this film within a very particular rubric. I had a good time.

(3) A brief break in Toronto:

Scénarios, and Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” (Jean-Luc Godard, 2024): Together these two posthumous films by Jean-Luc Godard (who appears to be shockingly quick-witted and alert, and who I only then realized I miss very much) serve as an ode to the joys of preproduction. The pleasures of the scrapbook and the note cards, the giddy excitement of excavating memories—of specific frames and cuts, turns of phrase, brush strokes—and locating in them deep wells of inspiration. The rhyme between Godard’s declaration of a seemingly incomplete work to be complete and the decision to die via assisted suicide concludes his oeuvre on a wonderfully vicious assertion of autonomy. To the very bitter end, he refused to be told what to do.

Georges Méliès (left) at his Star-Film studio in Montreuil, circa 1900.

(4) A few museums in Paris: 

The two of us stayed in Bercy near the Cinémathèque Française, which of course houses the Musée Méliès. These two floors (which consist of notes, letters, posters, early cinematographic machinery, and so on) are a touching emblem of the great work Henri Langlois dedicated to the active preservation and stewardship of Méliès’s legacy, as well as—and this is especially crucial—his livelihood.

At the Musée Picasso I took many photos of hands, feet, breasts, and genitals (triangles, squares, squiggles, circles). One of my favourite Picasso pieces, which I was so pleased to encounter in person, is a sculpture from 1909 called "Apple." It’s an unimposing little plaster orb with rectangular ridges, reminiscent of prehistoric sculpture and the steep spiral staircase of a mountain village where the artist once lived. The works of Picasso that inspire me most are the seemingly embryonic ones: the vases and plates constrained by formal and material limitations, the studies scrawled before the ideas are stretched to fit a bigger frame, and the etchings.

A matter of personal preference. I prefer things that are shabby, shaggy, and extremely stark, with no boundary between finished and unfinished. I decided that maybe I find Picasso too finished, ironic given his being against the use of varnish. Lightness of touch only reemerges in the leaking and lumpy final paintings, which are bereft of self-consciousness and bursting with the lust of a late Antonioni film. There are some especially ugly frames at the Louvre, where bright ceiling lights refract off of very finished and perversely large French nativity scenes. I never fully understood humankind's desperate need for the historical intervention of impressionism until I walked through these halls. 

I asked Isiah, if you were Thomas Crown in The Thomas Crown Affair (the 1999 remake, of course), which painting would you steal from the Louvre? Without hesitation, Isiah said either Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's The Turkish Bath or his Grande Odalisque. The Ingres paintings were hardly acknowledged by the museum visitors. Isiah and I joked that no one would notice if they disappeared, which is a shame. There is a complete disregard for the supposed logic of human anatomy that makes Ingres's portraits prone to surprising appearances of genderfluidity—Adam’s apples, deflated breasts, elongated limbs, etc.

(5) A few cinemas in Paris: 

In Paris there are as many cinemas as there are bedazzled McDonalds and pristine Burger Kings. Notably many of the films playing across the city were American films that I’d never had the opportunity to see on a big screen: My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Poltergeist (1982) at Écoles, Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Gloria (1980) at Christine. A great time—too great, in fact. I was bloated with revelations. I did also see Je tu il elle (1974) at MK2 Beaubourg and Masculin Féminin (1966) at La Filmothèque du Quartier Latin, but watching French films as someone who does not understand French is just me indulging a sick desire to be an unwelcome spectator jolted about by the image. Looking over a list of autumn produce on the flight I realized that I was ready to go home, buy some kale, and grow out my hair like River Phoenix.

Pablo Picasso, Sculptor and Model Looking at Herself in a Mirror Propped on a Sculpted Self Portrait, 1933.

Updates:

• He Thought He Died is now available to watch online.