Category: Uncategorized

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!

The human mind likes to put things into categories. It makes life much easier when we can separate and compare. It allows for very complex systems to be simplified into manageable pieces. We turn the gradience of the universe to be transformed into parts we can comprehend. It’s a beautiful system, but it is inherently flawed and nothing is more flawed or beautiful than the concept of the dichotomy.

Dichotomy and true opposition essentially doesn’t exist in our world. The only time we can see the idea working is the dichotomy between existence and nonexistence, everything else is much too complex to be described by two opposites. Even with this general truth, we still force ourselves to see the world through opposing lenses. This could just be an extension of our categorization, but why is two our magic number? A lot of nature functions in twos and a lot of aesthetic functions the same. Equal and opposing, but as described before, dichotomy doesn’t really exist as we define it. The world couldn’t work through opposites, it works through gradients. Colors flow into one another, numbers are infinite and indiscreet, and languages are variations of a universal grammar, but we force our perception into seeing these in distinct categories. This happens with almost all of humans’ discoveries. We must make categories, we must make opposites, we want our world to be dichotomic or classified and this can be helpful or harmful.

Let’s look towards politics. In America, politics is the one of most polarizing subjects we have and we are too often forced as a society in to the two directions, left or right. The issue arises that political topics are extremely complex and there is almost never two distinct answers to the problem. Unfortunately we force ourselves into these molds and that seeks to simplify discussion and pacify our need for debate. There is no gray area in politics, you are either liberal or conservative and we judge those labels harshly, but the truth is that if we truly looked at every single area of debate and look into ourselves for our answers, most of us would fall much more closely to the middle. A large portion of society already does that, but scorn them and refuse their participation. Instead, we like the fight. We like have an opposite and fighting against them. There may not be only two answers, but we will choose only two and position ourselves along the line and throw insults to the other side. You don’t hate the other side, you hate the chance of your position being proved wrong and the dichotomy falling apart. You need your rival, otherwise it becomes too much to handle. In our political system today, our government thrives off of this. This is how we win elections and stay in power, by being on your population’s side and fighting for the dichotomy to still exist.

Now we can look at the other side of dichotomy. There’s the saying about “too many cooks in the kitchen” and dichotomy lessens those cooks to just two. We need this in our everyday lives. To lessen our decisions to just two options, we can make the right choice for ourselves. This is another situation where there are often a lot of more options than we choose to realize, but if we were to debate every single one, we would remain comatose. Sometimes we need the dichotomy in order to advance. More often than not, our questions are complex with many answers and we need to lighten that weight for us. “What class should I take?” gets boiled down from the entire course guide to “Linguistics 111 or Anthro 101?” We need opposition and categorization in our everyday life because it would be impossible to live in the gradient, seeing infinite possibilities and debating amongst them all.

Categorization is necessary, but harmful. It is too powerful a tool to use and too powerful a tool to not use. We should keep the dichotomy in our everyday lives, but expand to the gradient when get to the general public. Our society should not be forced to choose between only two options and the individual should not be forced to debate an infinite number of options. We need this concept, but we use it far too often for our own good.

Imagination is a beautiful thing. It’s the same thing that has allowed people to come up with the most advanced technology and art. Had Steve Jobs told people from the 90s about what future cell phones could look like, they probably would have thought he was insane, but his imagination and innovation led him to do amazing things for our generation. I firmly believe that this form of imagination is no more valid that that which allows young minds to escape into the fantastical worlds of television, though these worlds don’t abide by the same rules as our world. So, in honor of this (and because I know my last few posts have been pretty text heavy) I have decided to dedicate this post to the top five things from my favorite childhood TV shows that I wish were real.

1) Socko Socks from iCarly

Okay, I admit I was probably too old to be watching this show, but Spencer’s socks from his mysterious pal Socko always had the coolest patterns. A lot of times, they even lit up. I’m sure this type of technology is not beyond us, so someone please tell me where I can get a pair of these.

2) The Out of the Box Clubhouse

If you’ve never seen this pile of boxes transform into the coolest clubhouse ever, it’s imperative that you click this link right now! Did you watch it? Okay, good, then we’re on the same page. When I was a kid I wanted nothing more than to turn boxes into magic like this, but my endeavors never turned out like this.

3) The “Let’s Watch a Disney Channel Movie” Filmstrip Roller Coaster

This blurry picture leaves much to be desired, but it captures the essence of how amazingly cool this was. Again, if you’ve never seen it or don’t recall the glory of this, please watch this video. Personally, I thought this was the coolest part of whatever movie they were about to play. The filmstrip roller coaster is awesome for two reasons. One, it would be the coolest most thrilling ride ever at any theme park. And two, can you imagine doing back flips and other gymnastic feats in the middle of space, sometimes jumping through a gooey neon strip of film? No. You can’t, because it hasn’t been invented yet.

4) Krabby Patties from Spongebob

Let’s be honest, if real burgers looked like this, I probably wouldn’t be a vegetarian.

5) The Blues Clues Jump of Wonderment

Imagine with me for a moment that a little wiggle of the hips and a jingle could transport you into your favorite Renoir or Picasso. Then, once you’re there, you could actually speak with the people and objects in the painting and they’ll not only speak back, but give you direction on your quests. Magic. This day must come or I will lose all faith in humanity. I don’t need an iPhone 8S, I need to be able to jump into pictures.