taylor swift turned out to be just as divisive at the art institute of chicago as she is on instagram, where you have to choose up sides between taytay and katy. so here's a great video for an excellent song. one thing is that it kind of elaborately updates and complexifies the fairy-tale romeo-juliet situations she used to write about in high school. like i say, i think the project all along has been autobiographical, and in its own way i read this as both a mythologization of herself and a sincere and pretty self-reflective and self-critical memoir. it's also a cultural commentary, about the blank space of american privilege and its aesthetics and what love can possibly mean in that context, about the diva figure and what it's like to live in a britney/lindsaylohan bubble, and so on. just introducing cell phones to the fairy-tale wasp mansion works well in this regard, and the man is just, as it were, a blank space filler. his face is great, his personality meaningless; he could be any dude that sort of looks like a kennedy. is she becoming a blank space too? she is asking herself, and the only way she avoids just mutating into a mannequin, the only way she holds onto something human, is by going mad. her memoir and the cultural commentary can coincide perfectly, because right at this moment she is the culture.
