About this episode
I know what my audience wants more of, even though nobody asked for it: more Rachel Zegler! But that’s not all! How about some Syd Barrett, after acid had eaten a hole through his head and his mind had fallen out of it? And while we’re at it, let’s add Charles Manson and his happy, ritual-sacrifice-performing family to the mix! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we will be discussing good artists gone bad: a Marxcissist, a maniac, and a murderer.In the last podcast episode, I discussed the question of what makes us Human (in the context of what sets us apart from “artificial intelligence”), and I argued that one essentially human attribute is Man’s capacity for creating great art that captures, however imperfectly, some aspect of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. My man G.K. Chesterton made a similar argument in The Everlasting Man (and of course he did it much better, though in the context of comparing Man to the beasts, rather than to A.I.). The upshot of all this is that I am convinced that a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for a person to become a true artist is that he or she has that divine spark that sets souled humans apart from Hylics/NPCs.Then, I did a post humanizing Rachel Zegler (the face of insufferable Disney girlbossery), in which I honed in on her talent as an artist. Because whatever else you may think about her, Rachel Zegler, has the soul of a true artist. Don’t believe me? Think I’m ridiculously exaggerating? Then check out her song Twisted (video embedded below — the song starts around the 2:00 mark), and understand that she composed this song, arranged it, sang all the vocals, played all the instruments, and then recorded and “produced” it on amateur equipment at home, at the age of seventeen. This was before Hollywood got ahold of her. Just as Darth Vader became “more machine than man,” so too has Rachel Zegler become more actress than musician … but she still has the heart of a musician, just like Vader retained the heart of a man. Maybe one day she will have a daughter who confronts her the way Luke Skywalker confronted Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi, only instead of a light saber, her daughter will be wielding a guitar, and instead of the Death Star, her daughter will be rescuing her from the bowels of Hollywood (when it comes to planet-destroying capabilities, the Death Star could never have been a match for America’s movie industry).I bring up Zegler’s age because, what do you think, say, Roger Waters’ compositions were sounding like at age se
