The Universal Big Gulp
Why you should eat planets.
“An extremely large number of stars, scientists say, keep swallowing their own planets as little snacks.”1
Greed is good. It amps up the blood and moistens the mouth. This insatiable hunger for crust-covered marbles is our proof of life, our 422, the ACME anvil whistling in our skies.
Eat all the worlds!
If they are in your orbit, gobble them up. Don’t stop until the burp of yes exhales its stink-filled breath all over the face of your work. Eat until your stomach distends and bubbles a song.
Why?
Because worlds are influences (not YouTube influencers) and if you flip a world over to read the washing instructions you will see the words EAT ME printed clearly and precisely in a font called SNARF that took two years to develop.
It wants, and so it shall be done.
All the planets. All the worlds. Even their frozen moons with their Pink Floyd soundtracks hafta go. Gotta eat ‘em all.
Wait. When you say planets, do you mean people? Or do you mean art? Or literature? Or the melodious tickle of a songwriter’s dream?
Pay attention, ninny. Step away from your head down, distracted life, and look up at the celestial tasting menu before you.
Art. Music. Dance. Sculpture. Film. Literature. Architecture. Photography. Ceramics. Theatre. People. Places. Things. Planets! Get out the dental floss—this is gonna leave a mark.
Planets are so nutritious (seriously, check out the readings on your favorite calorie tracker), that all Doctors of Arts, Crafts, and Creative Darts recommend at least one planet a day to maintain creative health, balance, and sanity. Not too salty. Just the right amount of iron. Vitamin C out the wazoo.
To build a better body you must devour the celestial ones around you.
Fun fact: All planets are habitable. No, say you? Eat one. Find out. The carbon, the swagger, the H2O slooshiness. Feel the life of its death course through your body as you process that glorious globe. It lives in you now. The plate tectonics shift within, its planetary pulse is a-throbbin’. Sit back, ruminate, and digest this new habitation. Its influence will soon announce itself through your own work.
Burp.
Whoa! Spit that one out! That’s a plagiarism planet! Sorry, I should have mentioned that. If you’re going to be consuming planets as snacks, do your due diligence. No ripping off. No “What can I get away with before some astronomer turns their telescope on me and directs their orbital lander to my dusty surface to get my mission canceled?” trickery.
Be inspired by, not a facsimile of.
For what is influence if not inspiration? What is plagiarism if not laziness? What is, what is, what is? Too many questions. Too much sponsored by in the fine print.
As you mature as an artist—and by that I mean to keep making work that by the continual and repeated act of doing evolves over time—you take things from others both consciously and subconsciously. Inhabit. Engulf. Absorb. You get better, stronger, and more powerful with each planetary snack. New language, new modes, new ways of production. Each little planet makes you fatter with it, and the exercise—the doing the work—is what keeps you lean.
Burn the calories of creation. It’s a big bang hullabaloo. Universal creation on a lifetime scale with orbital significance and astronomical heft.
Think of it as the snowball method but with planets of creative influence, where each planet represents a style, a person, or a whole movement. With each planet eaten you are effectively taking out and paying off the loan concurrently, while the uber planet—that’s you—starts accumulating extra layers of juicy crust the more it snowballs.
We are all made of planets, working on our atmospheres while gazing at the sun and feeling the pull of our eventual and logical destruction. Bring it on, I say. Eat eat eat!
You are becoming a mega orb, a super-Earth, a true Jovian giant. One day, someone’s gonna choke on you for sure. Because that’s the goal. To be so prolific in your planetary dining and menu selections that you terraform yourself into a whole new planet. One so large and filled with a decadent richness that the addendum next to your EAT ME verbiage reads: Too much at once may cause indigestion.
It is, and so it is done.
The planetary banquet rolls on and dine you must. No reservations. Eat one planet here, another there, consuming and blooming as you go. Your work expands in its own time and its own space and all eyes are on you. A body of work so voluminous, so planetary in scale, that admirers yearn to chow down and suck all the creative sustenance from the core of Planet You.
They lick their lips. They salivate at the plate. They make room in their fridge for leftovers.
And on. And on. And on.
Here’s to clean forks and fresh eats.
This is our universe.
This is our infinite yes.
Burp.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.”
- Margaret Atwood
Via an old bookmark which I 12ftladdered so the link should work
On Rotation: “I’m a Man” by The Spencer Davis Group
Added to the ongoing Stream On Rotation playlist, which you can follow here if you need the services of DJ Janeenja
I’m sure I’ll get sick of videos like this eventually, but today is not that day. Making of video here.
Via Colossal
Chopsticks that can enhance salt flavor (so you can cut down.)
Via Engadget
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?