Blog Post #3

Everybody's Free (To wear Sunscreen)

This is one of my favorite videos, the kind of thing I listen to when I'm feeling down or what have you. It's a video made for the song "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)" by Baz Luhrmann. Luhrmann (and his associates) mixed it from Rozalla's song "Everybody's Free (To Feel Good)" , featured on the sound track for William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (directed by Luhrmann), and a track of Austraillian voice actor Lee Perry. Perry is reading aloud the entirety of an essay written as a column in the June 1st 1997 edition of the Chicago Tribune. The essay was written by Mary Schmich (though it was falsely rumored to be Kurt Vonnegut's commencement speech to the MIT class of '97). The essay is entitled "Advice, like Youth, Probably Just Wasted on the Young".
That whole long first introductiona paragraph should give you a feel for just how hard it is to accurately define. It's a video of a song of an essay. As such, it needs to be judged (or perhaps more accurately interperated) on three different levels. First, it's worth as a video. The visual images don't convey any plot in themselves, but they aren't purely there to diagram the song either. Pretty scenes, happy faces, and snippets of daily life which are enhanced by the words and music as much as the the words and music are enhanced by the video. After that layer comes the audio, that is, the spoken words and the music. The music, not orginally inteded to support a spoken word essay has, much like the images, it's own life. That life however has (as Luhrman saw) the same emotional goals as the words, they work in concert. The spoken words are low and easy going this is not a command, this is not a warning, this is merely a collection of advice. After that we have the heart of the piece. The written word, written as a mock commencement speach, was originally meant only as part of your morning newspaper reading reutine. A collection of words written by some one moved enough to write.

I like this piece, and think it's important and powerful, because or it's creative synergy. It's at least three seperate voices working together for the same goal, adding without compromising. It hits three distinctive parts of our soul, and more literally, we simultaneusly intake and interperet it with three different parts of our brain.

If that's not cool, I don't know what is.

Blog Post #2

Blog Post #1

"As Near as I can figure an essay can be...a query, a reminiscence, a persuasive tract, an exploration; it can look inward or outward; it can crack a lot of jokes. What it need not be is objective. An essay can certainly present facts and advocate a position, but that seems quite different from objectivity, whereby a writer just delivers information, adding nothing in the process. Instead, essays take their tone and momentum from the explicit presence of the writer in them and the distinctiveness of each writer's perspective. That makes essays definitely subjective-- not in the skewed, unfair sense of subjectivity, but in the sense that essays are voncersations, and they should have all the nuances and attitude that any conversation has. I'm Sure that's why newspapers so rarely generate great essays: even in the essay-allowed zone of a newspaper, the heavy breath of Objective Newspaper Reporting is always blowing down the writer's neck. And certainly there is no prescribed tone that is "correct" for essays. Sometimes it seems that they have a sameness of manner, a kind of earnest, hand writing solemnity. Is this neccesary? I don't think so. Many of the essays that intrigued me this year were funny, or unusually structured, or tonally adventurous -- in otherwords, not typical in sound or shape. wht mattered was they conveyed the writere's journy, and did it intelligently, gracefully, honestly, and with whatever voice or shape fit best."

--Susan Orlean

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