A Spectator

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I have spent much of my life in front of screens: we all do now. Art has nearly consumed life, reimagined life nearly as it was, and I think art has grown tired. I thoroughly enjoyed watching cartoons when I was younger. Thinking back, the way in which the arts have consolidated themselves is interesting. Those animations combined the forms of storytelling, visual art, and music; modern music combines storytelling and/or lyrical verse with melody, percussion, and all of music's inherent qualities; and film consolidated photography/videography, storytelling, music, and acting into one entity. In animation, there was an odd balance between the real and clearly fictional: the real embodied by fiction. Of course, at the time, none of this had crossed my mind, and none of it would have felt important. There is something inherently pleasant about mindlessness, dissolving into fiction, that became readily apparent to me then, and feels as relevant now as it did then. The world felt beautiful in abstraction, especially when reality started feeling less available. 

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Growing up we had a tube TV for a while, until my father could afford a flat-screen in the early 2000s. Looking back now, it is kind of funny to remember the faint glow of pride we both had on our faces when he purchased that TV; my father was always subtle in expression, which I copied, or adopted, and has become essential to my personality, but there were certain moments in our shared past where he was incredibly transparent, and for some reason this was one of them.