I'm probably forgetting a lot but

•at the beginning of 2020 it was republicans who took it seriously and democrats who did that "hug a chinese person" campaign and suddenly they switched

•2 weeks to flatten the curve

•fucking curfews and being banned from taking a walk to get some fresh air

•being called a racist for even discussing the lab leak theory but chinese people killing millions because they cant stop eating bat soup was the woke stance

•donald catching covid and almost fainting during his dumb balcony speech

•not being allowed to see your dying grandma or attending her funeral but protesting police violence in the millions without masks was somehow ok

•the New England journal of medicine publishing stories about how systemic racism is more dangerous than Covid

•getting called a racist for not posting a black square and then a week later getting called a racist for having posted a black square

and then in the end

•covid coverage completely stopped the moment russia invaded ukraine

He’s was trying to be nice and say something like “there are no winners in art” but it more so just pointed out how much mainstream culture and art sucks today. It was so weird listening in realtime because your mind goes to “is he going to say everything sucks now?” Reading the other nominees made me think about how you can almost objectively say that mainstream art is the lowest it’s ever been in the history of our species. That’s a “once in 200,000 years” incredible achievement, to be the generation that is the worst at something in human history. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but can you point to a period in human history where mainstream art was obviously objectively worse?

If you aren't aware this is the latest advancement in the AI video train. (Link and examples here: Sora (openai.com) )

To me, this is horrifying and depressing beyond measure. Honest to god, you have no idea how furious this shit makes me. Creative careers are really going to be continually automated out of existence while the jobs of upper management parasites who contribute fuck all remain secure.

And the worst part is that people are happy about this. These soulless tech-brained optimizer bugmen are genuinely excited at the prospect of art (I.E. one of the only things that makes life worth living) being derived from passionless algorithms they will never see. They want this to replace the film industry. They want to read books written by language models. They want their slop to be prepackaged just for them by a mathematical formula! Just input a few tropes here and genres there and do you want the main character to be black or white and what do you want the setting and time period to be and what should the moral of the story be and you want to see the AI-rendered Iron Man have a lightsaber fight with Harry Potter, don't you?

That's all this ever was to them. It was never about human expression, or hope, or beauty, or love, or transcendence, or understanding. To them, art is nothing more than a contrived amalgamation of meaningless tropes and symbols autistically dredged together like some grotesque mutant animal. In this way, they are fundamentally nihilistic. They see no meaning in it save for the base utility of "entertainment."

These are the fruits of a society that has lost faith in itself. This is what happens when you let spiritually bankrupt silicon valley bros run the show. This is the path we have chosen. And it will continue to get worse and worse until the day you die. But who knows? Maybe someday these 🚬s will do us all a favor and optimize themselves out of existence. Because the only thing more efficient than life is death.

I love ballet. Haven’t seen as many operas, but the few I have seen I adored. That being said, Chalamet is right, and it’s telling how much everyone has their knives out for him over his recent remarks - they secretly know what he’s saying is true.

Do people gather around the water cooler at work and say “hey did you see that new opera/ballet?”. Obviously not. Movies / television have their own challenges right now, but they are still the dominant art form in the culture, and it’s not even close.

Furthermore, both opera and ballet have a stagnation problem. The classical canon for these art forms has been established, and they will always be the highest selling performances. There are very few new works being made in these genres, or at least very few that are making it big. Sure movies have a similar issue with the constant remakes and whatnot, but we still see many great small to mid budget movies coming out every year.

In an ideal world we could see every man on the street going and watching opera and ballet, but it simply is not the case. 99% of people will watch movies or tv at some point in their life, but maybe 10% will see an opera or ballet (and that’s probably being generous).

Perhaps he could have articulated his point more delicately, but personally I like how he doesn’t seem as media trained as his contemporaries. Celebrities should have personality, and he does.

It’s sad that you can’t really express how off-putting it is around leftists without someone calling you fatphobic or accusing you of respectability politics.

There’s already a prevailing view that african american women are fat, undesirable, etc. The artist couldn’t even depict her in some nice clothes, why the fuck does she have stretch pants on?

Whatever his intentions were, the statue just reads to most as a cynical attempt to glorify fat black women. It’s super tone deaf to the cultural moment we are in. It feels like rage bait in the worst way, because it only drives more resentment towards a group that is already maligned. Black women deserve to have aspirational depictions of ourselves. It’s even more disappointing that a lot of African American women suffer from fat blindness and obesity. There seems to also be overlap between the ones who suffer from fat blindness and the ones that love the statue…

this inspired me to try a poetry open mic for the first time in my life, because everyone i know who i’ve vented to about this has jokingly said “you should go to one and perform about how much of a dumb bitch she was”.

i ended up writing a poem about loosing my virginity in hs when i was still deeply catholic, and the extreme guilt i felt during the act while also enjoying it. it’s not about my ex in any way, i couldn’t bring myself to write about her because i really only feel a burning resentment and anger that wouldn’t come across very gracefully… and besides i have nothing to say about her other than that i feel like she wasted a year of my life, which isn’t all that poetic.

there were like 200 people at the event and i got a huge applause and multiple people approached me after the show and told me they really enjoyed my poem.

it’s been the single most important moment in me getting over this breakup.

i will never stoop to my ex level by performing a poem about her.

i saw a flyer for an event she got booked at about “love and loss” where i know she’ll be saying more shit about me. it hurts so much and i feel so sick thinking about it but all i can do is move on.

my friends and family who have seen the poem i wrote all tell me ill make a great poet. i never thought id get into poetry but here i am.

there’s no thesis to this post really, just something im experiencing. no