a comet on its way

Whatever you do, don't limit yourself to your medium. If you're a writer, let yourself be inspired by fashion designers, painters, musicians, dancers, filmmakers... This goes for any type of art you're making. The world is big, and beautiful, and there's valuable artistic inspiration in everything.

people get so mad when you tell them that their lowbrow entertainment they enjoy is actually lowbrow

everyone wants their self-indulgent romantasy to be considered high literature and whatever new mainstream pop boy/girl to be treated as the next beethoven and their gay fluff show on streaming apps to be revolutionary art changing the world and like, they're not. and that's okay. i'm literally watching the stupidest show right now and it's fine. it doesn't have to be more.

there's also the argument of how pop culture used to be the trickle down from high culture for the longest time but now it's an ouroboros eating itself as access and willingness to engage with high culture have been systematically destroyed and diminished through the last decades so your popcorn flick moviemaker now only gets inspiration from other popcorn flicks when their foreparents used to actually read literature and see art of all kinds and your pop musicians used to listen to all sorts of new and old music rather than just their contemporaries/competition and maybe this absence of any sort of culture outside of our easy algorithms is why everyone's so defensive of what they passively consume and so attached to it as a part of their identity but that's a discussion for another day

who else is up permanently feeling like they did something Wrong

Brian Eno and David Byrne, 1981

this is admittedly a shakespeare 101 adjacent take and i think you could make this argument for a variety of shakespeare plays but hamlet to me really is one of the strongest examples of a text that is so imbued with the love that characters have for one another—a love that is ultimately entirely ineffective in doing anything to save anybody from the inevitable tragedy that unfolds. all of the types of love we see are different and complicated and often messy and hold an immense amount of weight but without sounding incredibly corny i do not think the play works without deep and explicit exploration of those dynamics. king hamlet and gertrude's love. polonius's love for his children. laertes and ophelia's love. king hamlet and hamlet's love. gertrude and hamlet's love. hamlet and ophelia's love. hamlet and horatio's love. what i find so striking about the play is how desperate everyone—yes, everyone—is to hold fast to the things they think will save them (from madness, from death, from invasion, what have you) and how even the one aspect they all share isn't enough to save anybody

I think if I heard I Gotta Feeling by The Black Eyed Peas in the correct circumstances it could move me to tears. It's like the promise of a brighter future that never came to pass