King Kong Takes A Smoke Break

A declaration of artistic intent in a time of war

Some recent testimonials from clients who’ve benefited from my transformation coaching. If you’re interested, contact me at zeitvillemedia@protonmail.com or go to Work With Me.

“Since working with Paul I’ve started my own business, tripled my income, clarified my purpose, found a great relationship, and most importantly: reconnected with a long-ignored passion. His guidance through all those has been essential, and I would strongly recommend him to any ambitious person looking to grow faster and better understand their calling.”—AJ Pitts, writer at Greco Gum & Pirate Wires, @AJ_Odyssey

“Paul’s guidance has legitimately helped me make more money, align my business with my soul and really help accelerate my inner work. The amount of aha moments I still get every session is insane. Stop thinking and just start working with him.”

—Tiger Joseph, founder & filmmaker, @tigerjvideo

You can also check out my three books here: The Patchwork Manifesto, The Astro Cheat Sheet and Energy Is A Story

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It's somewhat mad to imagine King Kong taking a smoke break, isn't it?

Here's this creature whose sole mission seems to be terrorizing the populace of NYC and climbing the Empire State Building with a screaming dame in hand. It’s a story about civilization taming the wild wonder within us—King Kong feels affection for his prey, a svelte woman named Ann Darrow. After being shot by men in airplanes, he plunges to his death, but not before saying goodbye to his love. A police officer looks at the corpse. “It wasn’t the planes that got him. It was Beauty that killed the Beast.”

Talk about a bad day.

But consider an alternative: in the middle of King Kong’s rampage, let's say he takes a smoke break. Just leans against the Empire State Building and lights up a Lucky Strike. I mean, really, who's going to stop him? The only person who could stop such an act of audacity would be King Kong himself. He prevents his own death, but he still looms large over the landscape, proving his power to change history.

This image is precisely where we're at in late April. If you follow me on X—and you should, for immediate daily hits on cosmic weather—you know that I've been describing our ascent out of winter doldrums.

We've been mired in delays, but now we’re in an arc of action. In recent newsletters I've detailed how this is giving rise to new imagery in fictional media, social media and news headlines. We are beginning to prioritize bold assertive moves, extreme athleticism or militaristic memes, as we surge out of a prolonged period of passivity.

You'd think the last thing on the collective's mind would be a break. "Go go go—move forward" is what the overall vibe seems to say.

And yet, undoubtedly, many of you—if not most of you—have probably encountered some kind of snag or annoying obstacle in the run up to this newsletter. It's like you're being confronted with the ferocity of your desire to move forward—but you can make the bold choice to step ASIDE, to let your higher self come in and run some analysis on the situation.

Freud had this concept called "the id." All that nasty stuff broiling in the unconscious, just below the surface of glamour. David Lynch liked to represent this often, especially in "Blue Velvet," like when he showed the protagonist’s father fall unconscious in his suburban lawn—zooming in to the man's face, then into the grass, then into the dirt which was being torn to shreds by ants, beetles, bugs.

King Kong has been unleashed on the world, that's for sure. Tariff wars, or even hotter conflicts like that between India and Pakistan, threaten to destabilize daily affairs.

But here lies the issue: if each of us at the micro level is dealing with bottled up aggression, what will it take for us to get some perspective or distance on it, so that we don’t unleash a nuke? How can we take a smoke break instead of burning it all down in a fit of righteous glory? Haven't we all been caged up like this poor gorilla? "It's only justice that I correct the record," you may say.

To be clear, this isn't some call for pacificism or some argument that all aggression is evil. This is more about strategy. We're being practical here, not moralistic. If you have urges to tackle some project, seal some deal or level up some relationship, surely you are grinding your teeth at any perceived delays. You want to perhaps swing harder, knock down even more skyscrapers. You've waited so long to strut your stuff that every perceived slight or delay feels like an injustice against the universe itself, not just against you.

Follow this thread to the source. These are times of great experimental power. It truly is important for many of us to get to that place where we say "enough is enough." Change rarely comes about when one is lacking passion.

But there’s a moment here to get grounded, inhale, smell the roses.

It's not that King Kong becomes weaker after a spiritual smoke break. But perhaps he is more refined in his aggression. Maybe he'll snap off the spire of the Empire State Building and remove a bit of food from his teeth. Elegant and crude, all at once.

A moment of poetry, really, born from war.

So let's dive into this topic of giving yourself a strategy for the weeks ahead, by bringing a bit of artfulness to your rampage.

Modeling Mayhem

People think that AI is just going to take over the arts and humanities, but really it's that people's tastes have been artificially suppressed by a constant supply of slop. You're going to see a huge resurgence in the demand for authenticity, as a result of this emerging mayhem.

A bit of controlled chaos, if you will.

For years people have been laboring under fabricated recreational fads, like "Paint and Sip" nights or bars where you can throw axes. King Kong in chains. Beauty killing the beast.

Sure, these things can be fun—but the cultivation of a creative life is the antidote to the apathetic 2020s, and cultivation doesn't happen exclusively inside formal bounds. It needs to rampage, run through the streets and experiment.

Nothing about creativity is “safe”—and yet our culture has demanded it be so.

But where does creativity go when it breaks outside the limits of prescribed culture, trendy categories and socially acceptable spontaneity?

Without a proper vessel or container, creativity turns schizo, to the point that senseless expression becomes the norm.

Turns out, we do need a civilizational model—just not one that’s so suffocating.

It’s vital to answer this question of beauty’s role in civilizational cohesion. We highly underestimate the ripple effects when you starve people of beauty.

Just look at the world right now: people are desperate to find value, wherever it could possibly exist. Well, the act of creativity is the act of assigning value to things. "This lake, this cityscape, in this color, with these people in the frame." World creation and world building is what helps us move on from the world destruction that occurred in 2020.

How do you world build without a model though? How do you inspire action without stuffing a political message into it like some dull anti-drug lesson shown in school? Every day I see a post on X talking about the rise of angry dispossessed [fill in the blank tribe]. Sometimes the angry tribe is women, sometimes it is men.

It’s not that I’m entirely unsympathetic to these messages. But in my opinion, the best thing we can do in situations like this is take a hammer to our own preconceptions. Do something audacious beyond spinning up a tired old meme for a post on X, like "this is what they took from us." All that promised bottled-up violence does no one any good, especially those who continue to seethe on the sidelines while saying "one day you'll regret this."

Dare to taste a bit of controlled chaos that'll shock even yourself. Be like King Kong taking a smoke break. Model a new kind of mayhem.

Beauty needs you to be a beast—acting boldly, even swiftly and totally—but a beast needs also to behold the beauty in the palm of his hand. The creative act is subtle, elegant, grounded, not an infomercial.

Let's keep diving in.

Ars Poetica

Have you ever heard of the concept of an ars poetica? It's like a declaration of artistic intent, a creative mission statement. It doesn't necessarily have to be penned or spoken by one person. It can be a group effort. You can imagine the ars poetica of all those Paris expatriates like Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound being summed up with the phrase: "New is true! Make it all new!"

Of course, after this battle cry of modernity in the wake of World War I came the battle cry of postmodernity: "If new is true, then truth is just a copy of a copy of a copy..."

Postmodernity mocked newness and said you were already unoriginal—impregnated with ancient concepts who were living through you. To paraphrase Jean Baudrillard—whose book appears in “The Matrix”—all truth is just a lie, but the lie is true. You can rely on superficial images being the one constant in postmodernity, in other words.

This leaves us in a precarious place in the 2020s. Many people do not feel there is anything worth fighting for, but the more they believe everything is just self-referential slop, then the more they feel the necessity for sincerity, salvation and passion—lest they sink into the swamp of postmodernity, never to be heard from again.

Meta-modernity is available to us. We can live again with an earnestness that isn't cringe, because we know it's worth trying something different. At the same time, we're self-aware enough to know that our experiments rely on a rather nostalgic view of the past. We have plenty of raw materials at our disposal—images, songs, books, movies—yet at the same time we know these aren't "true" remnants of the past. They're projections of how we remember the past.

But these are useful raw materials nonetheless and I absolutely believe we can build great scientific, artistic and humanistic achievements with them. I'm not postmodern enough to think that these will only amount to some collage of vibes. We can aim higher than those TikToks that show people rollerblading in 90s clothes, believing this is the closest we'll get to tasting the greatness of the past again.

We might not have purity in our age but we do have potential—and that's worth fighting for. We might not have a single “thing” we can attribute to the 2020s but we have the feeling of an unwritten future.

So many social media posters will take nostalgia as an end in itself, telling us that we have to "return" to some Ralph Lauren ad of the past if we're going to ever believe in a political future again.

This is an extreme misunderstanding of the ars poetica, and shows just how many people have equated aesthetics with ideology. It's not that art can't be political, but good art is always already political in a way that doesn't have to beat you over the head with some "message."

Art is political precisely because it aims to portray the highs and lows of the human spirit, and if civilizations don’t prioritize those stories, then it’s only a matter of time before decay takes hold.

Dream bigger. Use your imagination and let it rip. The act of controlled chaos is what will move the needle now. Take a drag of smoke as you lean against the Empire State Building. You have all the power in the world, but what good is it if you can't rule over your own heart?

We don't need another hot take, we need you to take your ideas directly into the hot pulse of life.

Let's wrap up with some final thoughts.

“We Used To Be A Proper Country”

Jump onto social media or a news feed and you can see how the collective discourse is trending towards phrases like "everything is falling apart!"

But is it falling apart so it can be put back together?

Right now there are threads of isolationism and nationalism running through various conversations, as fears and rumors rise about tariffs.

No matter where they fall in the debate, many people want to imagine something new, a fresh start, a clean slate. "What would it be if we just had this?"

But there are sacrifices to make when you want a clean slate.

We have to ask ourselves what we really want to build with our heart and hands.

So in the spirit of that, I offer up my own initial sketch of an ars poetica.

A renaissance where people connect in spontaneous ways again.

Hitting the cafe midday or the park after work. Following that rabbit hole on a thread online, discovering a new profile.

Beyond passivity, into the realm of action.

Everything comes to you once you move on from zero.

The body as artform versus machineform.

Prioritizing transcendence, awe, bliss—and finding the sacred in everyday events. Nature is your muse, but so is nightfall over a huddle of high rises.

Nostalgia in the perfect dose.

Synthesizing lifestyles. Defying categories, labels and boxes. Finding the fringes, frontiers and nomadic in-between spaces.

The end of Lindy Walks because it's implied that all walks are meditative jaunts through countryside or city street.

Valuing refinement in speech and writing—communication is about connection not escapism into tribal slogans.

Twisting up threads of ideas until they take off at light speed. Ditching utilitarian hot takes and wandering the borders of consciousness to discover where original thought can occur again.

This is just the beginning, a mere taste. And it's available to anyone who tries in The Patchwork Age, the magical and mundane 2020s.

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Some recent testimonials from clients who’ve benefited from my transformation coaching. If you’re interested, contact me at zeitvillemedia@protonmail.com or go to Work With Me.

“Since working with Paul I’ve started my own business, tripled my income, clarified my purpose, found a great relationship, and most importantly: reconnected with a long-ignored passion. His guidance through all those has been essential, and I would strongly recommend him to any ambitious person looking to grow faster and better understand their calling.”—AJ Pitts, writer at Greco Gum & Pirate Wires, @AJ_Odyssey

“Paul’s guidance has legitimately helped me make more money, align my business with my soul and really help accelerate my inner work. The amount of aha moments I still get every session is insane. Stop thinking and just start working with him.”

—Tiger Joseph, founder & filmmaker, @tigerjvideo

You can also check out my three books here: The Patchwork Manifesto, The Astro Cheat Sheet and Energy Is A Story