The Ethos of Biden

Sen. Biden tries to establish his Ethos as most of his campaign has gone, be examining the ethos of Sen. McCain. Both candidates fail to answer the question for more than a few seconds. The question asked was about their own campaign promises, specifically ones they can't keep. Biden addresses this in 0:16-0:24 only (being 8 seconds longer than Gov. Palin's initial response spent on the question). The rest of his response talks about what his opponents are going to do, as if to establish that he, by not doing any of this, has the nations best interest in mind.

Presidential Debate--TO YOUR FACE

WP#1 Hey Mr. Driver Man, Don't Be Slow

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon at the bus stop. The kind of afternoon that made you regrets getting on a bus. The green grass and blue sky had all the vivid color of a six year old's rendition of a landscape using a Crayola eight pack. As I sat there listening to all the cars roll by on the surprisingly busy street I noticed a common theme. Everyone was in Red. It was game day in Lincoln, Nebraska. Most people just had red accents to their clothes, some had full blown costumes as they sat at a stoplight with their red clown wigs and face paint, others strolled down the street with their red beads shinning and their Cornhusker t-shirts identical to the one tightly stuffed onto their dog. When the bus finally arrived it was not the packed crowd I thought it would be. There were a couple of young looking guys wearing husker apparel sitting close to the driver, a woman who looked like she was well into her sixties wearing a red blouse sitting opposite of the guys, and an older Hispanic woman with her daughter who was no more than eight.

These people seem to be the only ones aware of the terrible traffic and complete lack of parking spaces that would befall any who chose to drive downtown to watch the football game whether at a bar, restaurant, or the Stadium itself. “Don’t go downtown on Saturdays. Just don’t do it” had been uttered to me hundreds of times it seemed since my arrival in Lincoln a little more than a year ago. Not only that, but I’d been told by teachers in classes, not to drive down to the game, “take a bus, it’ll save you money, it’ll save you time finding a parking spot, and it’ll save the environment!” This seemed like sound advice to me. And as such I expected there to be a crowd huddling together in the aisles waiting until they got as close as they could to their final football watching destination.

But the bus was all but empty. The plastic seats covered in upholstery that seemed to be taken from the carpeting from a great many elevators were largely unoccupied. I looked from the back of the bus where I was sitting at the graffiti the decorated the bus windows. Little more than scratches hardly visible unless you were sitting at the window seats initials were carved into the plastic covering of the windows. Some symbols which only a college-oriented eye would immediately recognize as Greek letters for what was probably a frat (though, it could have been a sorority, it is the twenty first century). A couple of the etchings were grammatically incorrect declarations of how much “ass” the cornhuskers “stomp”. They reminded me of the universality of public transit vandalism. Back home in Milwaukee I never had a car, and if I couldn’t bike or bum a ride, the Milwaukee County Transit System was a frequent hangout of mine. They were littered with marks from keys, razor blades, and permanent markers proclaiming things largely unintelligible, making the back windows all but opaque. When I moved to Chicago this summer The Elevated Trains (More concisely referred to as Ls) were covered in graffiti, stickers, posters illegally taped, and all manner of other lasting impressions left by those who had commuted. The bus I was riding on today, while it did have some of the aforementioned familiarities, seemed like it would be in the “Gently Used” sections in the metaphorical Bus System Bazaar.

The people on the bus seemed familiar as well. The guys, talking quietly about college football and people they knew having varying relations with each other, seemed well practiced at taking the bus to the game. The slight slur in their speech patterns told me they had already engaged in a pregame ritual of downing large amounts of cheap alcohol before having to buy beer at the stadium or bar where they’d watch the seemingly all consuming game. The old woman on the other hand hadn’t the faintest hint of the Husker fanaticism that permeated the streets save the crimson blouse covered by a white knit shawl. She sat hardly moving straight ahead out the front window. There was a cold focus on the slightly inebriated boys sitting next to her was vaguely apparent to me sitting as far back as I was. She made no more than two glances at them which were short and out of the corner of her eye, barely moving her head. The Hispanic woman was sitting similarly to the old lady, but instead of watching the boys, when not looking out the front, she directed her attention at her daughter. Young, wild haired, and wearing a pink Dora the Explorer shirt with a little brown stain on the sleeve, the girl stared out the window to her side watching intently as the world flew by her. Speaking in Spanish, a language in which I claim no fluency, the girl seemed to ask her mother all sorts of questions. Her mother responded with short answers that only briefly satisfied the girl until she could think of something else to say. All the while the mother affectionately stroked the girls back, who was frequently standing on the seat with her face pressed to the largely unscratched plastic windows. They too seemed utterly unaware of the husker game that was the majority of the culture on Saturday afternoons.

I watched as the people, one by one got off as we approached downtown, all with that look of direction. Some more stressed with the crowd they were stepping into, others reveling in it. Living on campus means that I don’t have to leave often. If I want food, there’s the rot, if I want coffee, there’s a coffee shop right across the street, all my friends in town live close enough that a ten-minute walk will bring me to their door. It was nice to see a different world, a different culture that reminded me so much of the way my life was pre-college, and, hopefully, would be where ever I go.

Have you seen Children of Eden?

In the beginning (of the bible) there is a book called Genesis.

Some people think it's litterel truth, this is called Young Earth Creationism. This philosophy says that the world is only thousands of years old and created in seven days exactly as the book of Genesis.

Some people believe, however, that it's an allegory. It's a story to convey a bigger point. That it isn't historical but delves deeper into what it means to be human. In this sense it isn't too far from Plato's writings about Socrates' dialogues. Stephen Schwartz is apparently one of those people.

Children of Eden is the story of the first book of Moses, commonly referred to as Genesis. It musically portrays the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their exile, and the story of thier family in the wasteland. It then jumps to Noah near the completeion of the Arc and ends in The Family seeing land.

It isn't a word for word recount of the biblical story, but a reinvigouration of a story that helps us look back and examine ourselves. It depicts, oddly enough, God as the main antagonist. God wants to keep his children safe and happy. However safe and happy means no choice. It subtly asks what the definition of Good is if there is no bad? The garden, to Schwartz, is a world where Lao Tzu wouldn't have made any sense. But a post apple Adam and Eve are exiled to a wasteland but able to recognize the beauty of what little they have. Cain, the first son of humankind, grapples with a question that haunts us even today: Should I live for myself or for God. Adam is steadfast that his family needs redemption from God. Abel believes he should follow his father, and Cain beleives that a God that doesn't tell you what to do shouldn't be obeyed and decides to strive for truth and fight anything in his way.

As Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel fight with the basic and universal questions about thier relationship with God, the second act dealing with Noah and his family deal with issues of a life without God. God has condemend the world, and a group of people (the decandants of Cain) who have done nothing wrong, and all the animals who can't find a mate (namely the unicorn). Noah wants to be a good son and follow his father as Abel and Adam before him. He also is confronted by his own responsibility as a father. That as God is responsible for him, Noah is responsible for his sons. Noah realizes that the hardest part of loving is letting go. This is a universal theme not realized by ANY of the characters especially the all knowing Father (God) until his frail and mortal son decides to live for himself and his own. This is a universality of the Musical that makes it as important if not more important to a non-religiocentric audience. If you're looking for a feel good sunday school pagent, look elsewhere. But if you're looking for an emotional, universal story of family, from the beginning of families, this is your cup of tea.

Content and Form, Music and Video

The form of the video, in my mind, begins as an admittance of it's being. That is a wordy way of saying it knows it's a music video, nothing more spectacular than that. As it begins it's about the music (as most good music videos should be [unless it's a radiohead video, because those are almost always great and don't make any sense at all, much less as a vehicle for the music])