I've seen two of this band's videos and each is more amazing than the other. The first shows them in street clothes dancing on aerobics machines with a choreography and litheness that would make Olivia Newton John and Britney Spears weep with lust or envy or something. It's not the sort of art that inspires novices to create more art, though, so I'm kind of going to give it short shrift in my review, because my primary interest in writing has always been as a writing teacher. OK Go's next video, though, gives a lot more to write and talk about; they filled a warehouse with a contraption the size of an old IBM mainframe built out of odds and ends and functional parts of preexistent machines that is meant to deliver golf balls short distances in time to the song the video is meant to promote. My brother Greg, who showed me the video, says this kind of "better mousetrap" type machine is called a Rube Goldberg device after a mathematician who theorized about these things that had been in the culture of comic strips and dormitories and so on before him.
OK Go has done an amazing job of varying the kinds of motion and materials in the operation of the machine and always times the motion of the golf balls subjectively with the pace of the music. Moreover, the machine is not without continuous surprising elements that come into play specifically at transitions and surprises in the music. This is an amazing video. Unfortuneately, it made it completely impossible to think about or remember the song. But the whole day after I saw this video I was riding the bus from Berkeley back home to Watsonville and thinking how much the history of the world's civilizations is really a history of the world's cities and how like a Rube Goldberg device it all is! I thought of how I've found myself in the course of my life riding desperately on some flying piece of flotsam through space and trying to come up with some kind of cover story to make sense of it all if the wrong person asks me why I'm living a certain way or doing a certain thing or how it is the castle I'm living in stays in the air. How like the famous Hieronymous Bosch tryptych it all is(!), particularly like his vision of Hell. Do you know(?), last night I heard a soul band named Velvet Wraith on the radio and it made me feel terrified and happy at the same time, because it is nice to know someone else has seen them, even if my memory of seeing them the first time was one of the most unhappy times in my life. I have a little more stuff to say about the video still, so let me say as an aside that although the counsel of my more Christian family members is a great solace to me, I disagree with them on the vital point of a person having what seems to be visions of Hell while alive being always a bad thing and still that doesn't make me a Satan worshipper. I believe these experiences do a fine job of advertising their opposite, and aren't given to people who aren't very kind and good people already, but that experiences of Hell are themselves also better than no contact with God at all. If you don't know what I was talking about, forget it, it can ruin your life. Just basically a lot of alchemy and religion and stuff.
Wow! Suffice it to say, OK Go's second video does a much better job of inspiring me to create on my own! On a much less demented note, it is my professional opinion, as it is with other writers and teachers of writing, that it can be a good sign if you want to be a writer and don't know if you have "The Right Stuff," if you start off writing the letters of the Roman alphabet, but by the middle you're writing in Gaelic and Hebrew. One might almost call it "Frankenstein Syndrome." In fact, I think that's its name. You think of a plot, make an outline, start telling your story, but then you start hearing your characters telling you, "I wouldn't do that,,I'd do this." By the end of your story, it resembles a Rube Goldberg machine unless you can clean it up and pretend you wanted it to be that way, but some people leave the original shape of the branches in the wood, like me. It's a school of writing, I guess, or more than one.
OK Go has done an amazing job of varying the kinds of motion and materials in the operation of the machine and always times the motion of the golf balls subjectively with the pace of the music. Moreover, the machine is not without continuous surprising elements that come into play specifically at transitions and surprises in the music. This is an amazing video. Unfortuneately, it made it completely impossible to think about or remember the song. But the whole day after I saw this video I was riding the bus from Berkeley back home to Watsonville and thinking how much the history of the world's civilizations is really a history of the world's cities and how like a Rube Goldberg device it all is! I thought of how I've found myself in the course of my life riding desperately on some flying piece of flotsam through space and trying to come up with some kind of cover story to make sense of it all if the wrong person asks me why I'm living a certain way or doing a certain thing or how it is the castle I'm living in stays in the air. How like the famous Hieronymous Bosch tryptych it all is(!), particularly like his vision of Hell. Do you know(?), last night I heard a soul band named Velvet Wraith on the radio and it made me feel terrified and happy at the same time, because it is nice to know someone else has seen them, even if my memory of seeing them the first time was one of the most unhappy times in my life. I have a little more stuff to say about the video still, so let me say as an aside that although the counsel of my more Christian family members is a great solace to me, I disagree with them on the vital point of a person having what seems to be visions of Hell while alive being always a bad thing and still that doesn't make me a Satan worshipper. I believe these experiences do a fine job of advertising their opposite, and aren't given to people who aren't very kind and good people already, but that experiences of Hell are themselves also better than no contact with God at all. If you don't know what I was talking about, forget it, it can ruin your life. Just basically a lot of alchemy and religion and stuff.
Wow! Suffice it to say, OK Go's second video does a much better job of inspiring me to create on my own! On a much less demented note, it is my professional opinion, as it is with other writers and teachers of writing, that it can be a good sign if you want to be a writer and don't know if you have "The Right Stuff," if you start off writing the letters of the Roman alphabet, but by the middle you're writing in Gaelic and Hebrew. One might almost call it "Frankenstein Syndrome." In fact, I think that's its name. You think of a plot, make an outline, start telling your story, but then you start hearing your characters telling you, "I wouldn't do that,,I'd do this." By the end of your story, it resembles a Rube Goldberg machine unless you can clean it up and pretend you wanted it to be that way, but some people leave the original shape of the branches in the wood, like me. It's a school of writing, I guess, or more than one.
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