A Chemical sack

Miniature Rooms Inside Television Sets

Chinese artist Zhang Xiangxi creates these incredible miniature replicas of rooms inside the shells of discarded vintage TV sets. His attention to detail, when recreating a train car or a luxury apartment, might fool you into thinking you are waiting for a TV show to start, but in reality you are looking at his intricate set designs that aim to capture reality inside a TV.

I don’t often turn my hand to music journalism on here, but I wanted to share some thoughts on a record that’s given me pause for thought. It’s been one week since Kanye West released his “problematic opus”, a phrase that I’ve placed in quote marks because I don’t understand what it means. By now, I’ve listened to it enough that I’ve started to form some thoughts about it that are a little more nuanced than “wow”, “neato” or “jeez” — or “buhbuhbuhbuh”, for that matter — the thoughts that initially typified my emotional response to The Life Of Pablo.

As, like an infant baby confronted by a small Lebanese cucumber, I’ve slowly and weakly clenched my mind-fingers around the album, which follows Kanye’s 2011 debut “Yeezus”, one question keeps coming to mind: what if Kanye was actually Tevye, from Fiddler On The Roof?

Hear me out. What if, instead of being a famous rap singer from Chicago, Kanye was, in fact, the humble Tevye, father to six troublesome daughters and protagonist of the award-winning musical Fiddler On The Roof?

Let me finish: what if instead of working with collaborators like Jay Z, Rihanna and Kendrick Lamar, Kanye’s songs were, in actuality, written for him by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick?

First, consider how easy it would be for these two men to be swapped, in a modern Prince and the Pauper-esque confection: both men’s given names end in “-ye”, pronounced like “yay”. Administratively a moment’s work. Furthermore, Kanye has two troublesome daughters: North and Saint (editor’s note: Kanye is yet to go on record on the matter of daughterly troublesomeness, but let’s assume.) While it’s a far cry from Tevye’s whopping brood of Tzeitel, Hodel, Chava, Shprintze, Bielke, and Teibel, one thing is beyond dispute: both men have an amount of troublesome daughters that is greater than one. (Will North or Saint ever be even half as troublesome as Shprintze? Entirely another matter.)

Next, let’s ask what stands in our way. What impedes a swap between Kanye and Tevye? Institutional inertia can be a challenging mistress. For many, it’s simply easier to let Kanye remain Kanye and Tevye, Tevye. It’s also undeniable that Kanye is a real person who is also a millionaire, while Tevye is a dirt poor fictional Russian Jewish dairyman who was concocted in a series of stories by Sholem Aleichem between 1894 and 1914. In this instance, as in life, money talks — and you can bet that money will be saying “Don’t give me to Tevye! I’ll only be used for a dowry. Please! Please!”