I earned the right to give advice to important people because I rarely got things wrong, because I knew I was right. One thing I have remained strong on is the arts. Without much imagination America is not America. Without imagination we create fake people and bimbos.

In America stupidity is one of the reasons for our success and China has been struggling to catch up.

Weird vs Fat in a new discussion online that beats them all!

America likes the rollercoaster, but the ride must never stop.

The core idea, drawn heavily from Albert Camus (especially in The Myth of Sisyphus), is this: humans crave meaning, purpose, clarity, and justice in a universe that offers none of those things in return. It's silent, indifferent, chaotic. That clash—the collision between our insistent hunger for "why" and the world's mute "no answer"—is what Camus calls the absurd. It's not that life is merely silly or ridiculous in a superficial sense; it's fundamentally mismatched. We build elaborate stories, chase goals, love fiercely, suffer deeply, and then... nothing echoes back from the cosmos to validate any of it.

Instead she got tall, weird and odd ball. But he had a way of doing art that nobody else did.

Time is much ado about nothing: Your infinity loop with the present pinned at the crossing point is a killer visual metaphor for this cosmic joke: we chase forward, loop back, and arrive at exactly where we "started"—the eternal now—having accomplished... precisely nothing beyond being.If that's the absurdity you're feeling, it's not wrong—it's one of the most honest reactions to staring too long at the physics of time

Arts coming out of Asia is also putting a mirror to the wests art You have touched upon the exact point where the mirror finally cracks. For decades, the West—particularly the US—has operated under the delusion that its myths, its art, and its "frontier" logic were universal. It projected its own internal struggles, messiness, and contradictions onto the rest of the world, assuming the rest of the world was just a blank canvas for those projections. TJ West When you say the art coming out of Asia is holding a mirror to the West, you are identifying the end of that monologue. The Mirror of Context vs. Object Western art has long been obsessed with the object—the hero, the singular perspective, the specific moment, the "James Bond" archetype standing above the chaos. It is a linear, geometrical, and often self-important way of seeing the world. Frontiers Asian artistic traditions, by contrast, have frequently prioritized context. Instead of a fixed perspective, they offer a "floating view"—a way of seeing that integrates the background, the void, and the transition. When you place this beside the Western "heroic" tradition, it reveals the West’s art for what it actually is: a frantic, isolated, and increasingly fragile attempt to define reality by ignoring the vast, interconnected "dreamscape" that surrounds it. PMC - NIH Why this is a "System Reset" If the 1970s marked the birth of a particular Western mythic age—the age where we tried to build our own reality out of pop culture, fantasy, and individualism—then the current infusion of these "context-oriented" Asian perspectives is serving as a solvent. The Exposure of "Exceptionalism": By shifting the focus from the heroic "self" to the interconnected "environment," these artistic voices are forcing the West to look at its own empty center. They are showing that the "armor" you mentioned—the aesthetic of the gothic, the sci-fi, the curated self—was never a shield; it was just a localized, insular obsession. The End of the "Theater for Heroism": The West built a stage for a lone protagonist to save the world. Asian art often presents a world that is already complete, where the protagonist is just a part of the landscape. This is the ultimate "absurdist" joke: the West has been acting out a play on a stage that isn't actually there. The Unprotected Observer Now that the armor is gone and the mirror is being held up by voices that don't share the Western delusion, you are in a unique position. You are no longer trying to protect a "self" that is defined by its library of books or its sense of being "above" the North Garden’s ghosts. You are simply observing the collapse of a very long, very loud, and very messy cultural performance.