The View from Abroad
And why I don't write about the news (but sometimes do anyway). Plus some quick notes from recent moviegoing.
Well after my whole spiel about how I’m heading into 2025 with a paid subscriber option and something resembling a content plan, I went AWOL on this newsletter for a full month. Classic TStrauss maneuver.
I would make excuses, but whatever. Life happened, and my body was giving me some trouble on-and-off as well. Work has also FINALLY begun to pick up again, so please cross your fingers for me that it holds.
It’s tempting to do a whole song-and-dance about how the problem was partly the onslaught of überfucked news - I know it’s been making it hard for other people to focus, but that’s not entirely true for me. I’ve been a little too caught up to fully take it in, and I’m not sure it even is fully take-in-able, beyond just kind of adding to the broader brainstew.
I started this post several days ago, and in the interim the news has gotten both dramatically worse and monumentally stupider. Yesterday I woke up to the big headlines that Trump has plans to “own” Gaza and turn it into the Riviera. Yup, that sounds like a thing, I sighed as I buried my phone under the duvet and dragged myself out of bed to get on with my morning. I genuinely think my brain just can’t do it. Which is, in fact, likely the intention since the actual thing that is actually happening is Elon Musk hijacking the apparatus of the federal government and trying to… end civil rights, basically? Plus a good chunk of social services and aid. For reasons. Shock and awe indeed.
At least the Treasury isn’t hoarding a cent of my money these days! Or it is, I’m realizing, because I hold Treasury Bills. Shit. But I haven’t paid taxes in the US in several years, and I don’t have loans or receive benefits of any kind.
Which brings us to the real thing that is confounding my response to all of this, which is that I do not live in America right now. So it’s all far away - literally, and in the way I experience it, in the abstract and through a screen. So while I read all of this and am like oh shit, that is very very bad! a lot of it feels like it’s happening on some… other plane. Or not really happening at all.
I’m not so naive as to believe all of this won’t ripple out internationally in some very consequential ways, and Germany has its own clusterfuck of real problems. But it also has a very different political system and social contract - and also, as a white American who is self-employed largely through clients in the United States, I exist at a weird remove from a lot of the problems here as well.
I’ve commented to a lot of people in the last couple of years that I’m at this inflection point where I don’t feel like I belong fully to either America or Europe. I live and receive benefits in a place where I can’t participate in the political process, and have limited legal rights. I can’t really participate in the political process in America either, beyond voting for president.
Basically, I feel like I exist in a sort of political netherworld, floating above and between a lot of this very worrisome shit within a rather odd nexus of privileges. And I feel sort of guilty about that fact while also knowing how totally useless that guilt is. I have always been a very political person who likes to participate, so it’s hard for me to know what to make of this… weird liminal space. The locational one, but also the psychic one.
Sometimes someone will suggest that I write more about current events, since I read quite a lot and pretty much always have Very Strong Opinions. But I’ve never had any interest in doing this. There are a lot of people whose work is built around sharing information and ideas of real value, and I think you should read them instead. A lot of other people are just making performative noise and/or venting, and venting is very much their right, but I don’t find it helpful to vent about how shitty things are (about my hormones and head colds, on the other hand…). Maybe I only like venting when I can milk it for humor, because #Jewish. And I don’t find any of this funny.
That said, here I am writing about politics and current events, in an admittedly vent-y and navel-gazing sort of way. Maybe I’m trying to work this out in my head and come to some sort of conclusion about the netherworld thing, but I have honestly failed. I am confounded, and in being so, I have fallen into the trap where the only subject I can find in this mess is myself. But maybe realizing that is the point.
Honestly, I just want to try to do what I intended to do this year, which is focus anew on my work - not just doing it, but trying to figure out what the “it” is. So unless I have something to say that feels genuinely specific to my own particular lens on the world - like that post-election piece about 9/11 and dance music that people seemed to like (thanks guys!) - I don’t want to write about any of it here. Anyone who’s ever had an actual conversation with me knows what I believe in, and that’s enough for me.
That said (again), I genuinely do hold to the idea that art is implicitly political even if it’s not topically so, and the act of creativity is too, particularly in our übercapitalistic stew of polarizing, dehumanizing, attention-mining tech. None of that shit is allowed to colonize my mind right now, or degrade what I know my own values are, or rob me of the things that connect me to my humanity and the humanity of others.
I just generally want to be a person, and to affirm the personhood of others. That’s part of the “it,” I guess.
This month’s culture notes
This is a little less than I’d hoped because with all the brain-scrambling, my reading in particular took a hit. Tania’s attention span! Wo bist du hin? But here are some odds and ends I feel like mentioning. (Trailers linked.)
In The Mood For Love - Is this the most romantic movie of all time? Quite possibly. Certainly one of the most visually beautiful, the most ineffably evocative. I finally fulfilled my longtime dream of seeing it im kino. Ten stars. Infinite swoon. Emotional hangover for the rest of my life.
Lust, Caution - Tony Leung fest! I’d seen this one before too, and it stuck in my mind even though I didn’t remember too much about it. It wasn’t unanimously praised but I think it’s quite a movie - sprawling and complicated, illusive but with so much feeling, and with such a welcome refusal to explain or excuse its characters. And yeah, it's super hot, but actually not because of how infamously graphic the sex is. Ang Lee really had a run in the aughts.
2001: A Space Odyssey - I recently learned there’s a (very nice!) repertory cinema inside the Berlin planetarium, which is a five minute walk from my house. It was awesome to see this im kino, as a film-literate adult rather than a high school student, as I was the only other time I saw it. All the wordless, immaculately designed space-ballet sequences I couldn’t wrap my head around as a teenager are my favorite part of it now. It’s also way funnier than I clocked back then. But while it’s an undeniable masterpiece, the truth is I don’t love it. Maybe because it inspires admiration more than any actual emotion? I like other Kubricks more.
A final bit of housekeeping
As I mentioned in my last letter, I’ve enabled paid subscriptions as promised for 2025. Thank you so much to everyone who actually committed to a subscription; your faith in me is both heartening and slightly perplexing.
On that note, since my current content strategy is more “write random essays when I feel thus inspired” than “run a one-woman newsletter empire,” I decide to set up a “tip jar” at Buy Me A Coffee and will add a button for that going forward. This also makes sense to me because for now, I’m leaning towards the idea of publishing longer posts slightly less often.
Also, it has the benefit of being hosted outside of Substack, in case I do in fact decide to migrate. If you already paid for a subscription through Substack or want to because that makes sense for you, THANK YOU AGAIN SO MUCH and if I ever do migrate I will figure it out.
Look at you! You read all the way to the end! You must have really been enjoying yourself.
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