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Growing up, I hated the basement. My mother would often send me to the pantry and, unwilling to admit I was scared, I would creep slowly down the stairs, flick on the lights, and close the door on myself as I rummaged through the pantry. Once I had found the requested item I would peek my head out of the door and bolt as fast as I could back up the stairs, back to the kitchen, back to my mom and back to safety. This process was almost immediately repeated as my mother knowingly would ask “Did you turn off the light?”

As we grow older childhood fears fade away as logic and reason replace mystery and uncertainty. Yet as we outgrow childhood fears new ones take their place. The boggie man is not a dark shapeless creature hiding in your closet, but ISIS will behead or burn you alive if somehow you end up their hostage. The boy wearing a Halloween mask is not a monster like you thought, but he may be contagious with measles. And while the mere sight of a spider used to make you cry, the termites which could infect your house eat away the largest investment you will ever make.

These adult fears cannot be easily reasoned away. Speaking practically, there is very little that one 21 year old can do about ISIS or the measles outbreak. Here is where I think the appeal of reality Tv comes from.

Tv, in general, is a mindless indulgence which helps us relax after a busy day of work or classes. The news is a sharp reminder of reality, exploiting our fears by sensationalizing the news and prodding our sense of responsibility. Dramas often explore the subjects of our fears making the possibility of being kidnapped by supposed terrorists (Scandal) or murdered by a crazy neighbor for a coincidence beyond your control (choose any crime show, NCIS, Castle, Law and Order etc.) seem more and more likely. Yet, when we turn to comedies the humor is based upon coincidence and situations which seem beyond our acceptable threshold of possible within the context of an “average” day.

Here is where reality Tv steps in. Real enough to seem like an average day in their lives, the problems which the actors(?)/contestants/people face are trivial in comparison to the real world problems which affect our daily lives. From stolen boyfriends to wearing the same dress to a party, these conflicts provide the viewer with enough drama to entertain without being substantial enough provoke thought or self reflection.

While our fears may never be as simple as they were in our childhood, reality Tv provides us with a temporary respite from the world where the conflicts are sometimes irrational but always understandable and the consequences aren’t dire.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said,

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

Dancing is one of the most universal forms of self expression and artistry – native to cultures old and new across the globe and across the ages.

Some cultures hold dance as a highly elite and sacred art form. For example, Premodern Indian cultures have used dance as a religious spiritual observance, in which the body performs a series of motions representative of the abstract divinity of the elements which make up the universe.

Modern Indian dancing is a fusion of classical, folk, and modern dance steps, which are often combined on-screen for Bollywood film song-and-dance sequences.

In a similar vein, yet completely different style, the Whirling Dervishes of Istanbul practice devotional Sufi tradition of the Mevlevi order, and a source of inspiration for many famous poets, musicians, and other devotional artsts.

Ballet is a dance which has maintained a reputation in contemporary society, but in fact dates back all the way to the Italian Renaissance, and has managed to maintain popularity over centuries by adapting to and absorbing elements of more contemporary dance forms.

Ballet is still part of popular culture today, the subject of Oscar-nominated film Black Swan

Despite the increasingly insular nature of contemporary, technologically wired society, one of the recent musical phenomenons, EDM, is music designated for dancing to. Rave culture is a big deal for teens and young adults. (doandroidsdance.com)

What is it about dance that is so universal to human culture? Beyond the obvious benefits of physical activity, psychological studies posit correlations between dance-like movements and elevation of mood. Moreover, dancing is a way of training coordination, memory, and self-expression.

I believe the explanation is simple: dancing is universal because it is the most accessible art form – requiring only a will to move rhythmically with affect. More than any film, article, or documentary about dance that I have seen, a moment from the movie Wall-E drives this point home most for me.

In the linked scene, a human captain of a spaceship who has never visited Earth asks his computer’s database to explain dancing to him. The computer replies:

A series of movements involving two partners, where speed and rhythm match harmoniously with music.

The definition voices over robots Wall-E and EVE playfully flying through the starry void of space with a synergy that feels more human than mechanical. Within the context of the film, this is a strategy to help promote audience identification with an inorganic protagonist and robot love story – but read more broadly, is a statement on how essentially human the act of dancing is.

 

This month, comedy duo Jake and Amir will leave their internet presence for good. After eight years of producing the longest running webseries  for comedy site Collegehumor, the pair will now take the time to pursue other artistic ventures. They will continue their weekly advice podcast If I Were You and are still working to get their pilot TV series picked up by TBS. However, I thought this would be a great time to highlight some of my favorite episodes over the years.

 

My favorite part of this video is how abjectly amateur it is. Clearly they were filming the video themselves, in their first office, while other people around them were in the middle of working. Weapons is one of their first ever videos, and the difference in production and humor between this episode and their latest videos is enormous.

This is the first Jake and Amir episode I ever watched. From that point on, I was hooked. Over the years they both developed their characters: Jake, the normal guy trying to get through work; Amir, the neurotic and crazy co-worker whose antics drive Jake insane. What I like about this episode is that they haven’t nearly attached themselves to those roles yet, and so the dynamic is so different than what J&A fans have come to expect.

Fast-forwarding a bit: Jake and Amir frequently drew inspiration from whatever big events were happening at the time. From holidays to sporting events to elections, they always created relevant skits in which, inevitably, Amir would have the completely wrong idea of the celebration. In this episode, he thinks he’s traveling to the Olympics in London. Here, they demonstrate their ability for quickly-paced dialogue that keeps the humor alive which each line.

One of the best parts about this webseries is the recurring guest stars they had on the show. From Alison Williams to Rick Fox to Thomas Middleditch, they’ve had big names that consistently help improve the series. This is one of my favorites, featuring Ben Schwartz of Parks and Rec and House of Lies fame. Ben has been the most frequently recurring guest on the series, and every single one of his videos is outstanding.

While I am sure there is lots more to come, the internet will certainly miss its weekly dose of Jake and Amir.

As an avid reader of words, I constantly find myself marking up and dog-earing pages of whatever six or seven books I happen to be perusing at any given time. I justify the destruction unleashed upon the unsuspecting tome by saying I’ll come back to it later and want to know where the “good parts” are, as if I’m creating an outline or my own version of Sparknotes to save the painfully immense (a gross exaggeration) amount of time and effort it takes to flip through the pages one by one. When it does come time to revisit a particular volume of Ginsberg’s poetry or Kerouac’s rolling narrative prose, however, I tend to use these underlinings and annotations as starting points rather than gravity fragments that would stand in for the general skeleton of the book as a whole. Glazing over the in-betweens separating each nugget I deemed worthy of noting on my first time around leaves me with the feeling of talking on the phone with someone through a poor connection, with whole sentences and pages of the conversation lost to static and empty space on the receiver. I rob myself of the reinterpretation that happens when you read through an idea in its entirety, which often changes drastically from the particular way I synthesized it the first time. As a result, I end up reading the whole thing over again.

So why do I keep writing and folding all over the pages of every new crispy book I get? There’s the obvious advantage of thinking about the text in a critical way that wouldn’t be possible without stopping when a particular word or line gets me right there. But I think there’s something else to this habit of documenting thoughts I’m worried I’ll forget without recognizing their importance – the potential of sharing these ideas with other people. One of my favorite things to do is read out loud; popcorn was my favorite game in high school english class, and there’s just something satisfying about discovering the way a particular word rolls off the tongue, how it rolls differently off of my tongue and your tongue, and how a simple change in the inflection of a syllable can have a drastic effect on its meaning and context. Reading out loud to each other brings the act of internalizing somebody else’s thoughts into the public realm, where the words are allowed to hover around the room and do whatever it is they please, rather than simply traversing the distance from page to headspace and calling it a day and (usually) fading into the milk of the mind where it all blurs into wordsoup. Reading out loud transforms a solitary activity into a collective interaction and I think that’s important. Not that we should always read out loud, or that spending a quiet night in bed with a cup of tea and a good book is any less satisfying or useful than sharing the experience, but one without the other seems to me to take away from the beauty of someone’s mind captured in the form of a book. Don’t believe me? Read this post out loud ! To a friend! a stranger! yourself! anyone! everyone!