Purposeful Assumptions

To age is to see magical barriers disintegrate before your very eyes. The unending genius and mystery of the world's artists become revealed, surprisingly finding limits and becoming flat.

The mystery I'm not so sure about.

I'M EMBARRASSED

What's the difference between a creator and a critic?

Maybe it's just me, and wouldn't that be embarrassing, but I wonder if every creator isn't just someone who pulls things out of their ass, criticizes it, and publishes the stuff that (by happy coincidence) could be mistaken for meaningful art.

Or meaningful whatever-it-is, since not everything created is art. And before I start walking down the severely abused highway of ambiguity, I'm going to change the subject to pointlessness, which frankly I just don't talk about enough.

AS PROMISED: POINTLESSNESS

I'm pretty sure I spent this entire morning reading the vaunted tome of everything that's good in comic books, and all it said was "Life sucks, life sucks, life sucks!" I'm being unfair; Watchmen is everything it was cracked up to be, but I can't shake the notion that Alan Moore is just abusing nihilism as a cheap trick to be "deep." I mean, he pretty much admits it. One of the characters in Watchmen recalls this advice about writing: "Start off with the saddest thing you can think of and get the audience's sympathies on your side. After that, believe me, it's a walk."

BACK ON TRACK

So I guess some people are philosophically opposed to covers. I'm not so sure they've got it right. Nothing opens your eyes like a cover - even outside of music, penning quoted words forces you to "write" with a different rhythm and diction and all of that. It's not the same as seeing the world through someone else's eyes (which might be impossible, depending on how you spin it), but it's close enough to be artistically valuable. The act of stepping into someone else's artistic shoes doesn't have to be anti-creative, detrimental to culture, or unoriginal.

Yes, new music is good, but covers really are new music. If we can't find value in anything that's old, we're seriously up shit's creek. Life's too short, but it's also too long to be rushing around desperately trying to find new experiences - or, to highlight the oxymoron in this thinking, trying to find the same new experience that you enjoyed before. The euphoria of the fresh sound just isn't going to be around 24/7, no matter what you do.

STUPID WORDS

I don't get it when people complain about academic writing being too hifalutin, long-winded, or involving too many big words. Big words allow the writer to be more precise, which takes up less space, not more. I genuinely think this just the same as other anti-intellectual sentiment: a transparent rationalization by people who think they're somehow going to be lesser human beings if they say so much as "I don't get it." Not that I'm innocent of that kind of thing, mind you. Sometimes we're all like the boys from Southpark, pretending to know what "queef" means for the cool kids from New York.