6B — Thursday, January 19, 2017
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
To be honest, it’s impos-
sible to choose just one out
of the many amazing Vines
that exist out
there. But if I
had to pick, it
would be this
wonderful clip
of a man skip-
ping
to
the
beat of Carly
Rae
Jepsen’s
effervescent
‘80s
reminis-
cent “Run Away
With Me.” This was one of
several Vines that used Jep-
sen’s song, but this one is by
far the most hilarious and
creative. Whoever recorded
this was extremely lucky,
especially since the man’s
dancing in the Vine is scar-
ily
in
sync
with the “Run
Away
With
Me,”
making
for a perfect,
smooth
loop.
It
reaffirms
the
undeni-
able fact that
Vine will truly
be
missed.
God bless this
video, God bless Carly Rae
Jepsen, God bless Vine.
— Sam Rosenberg
Trash. Blue Ribbon Select,
USDA Grade A, organic, cage
free millennial trash. Vine oper-
ated on the exploitations of the
absurdist shit our shameless
generation never ceases to
produce, and for good rea-
son — it’s great #content. An
ambassador of these antics
to the greater generational
fringes of our world, Asspizza,
a teenage anti-wunderkind
whose various sar-
torial exploits and
Sharpie-scribbled
tees have lent
the adolescent
a bizarre public
stage, unknow-
ingly cemented his
reputation as the
caricatured cultural obelisk
our generation did not deserve
— this Vine being the
best and foremost
example. Vine has
come and gone in, all
things considered,
an instant, but we
will still remain
the maligned, mal-
feasant gaggle of
degenerates that American
society has had the displea-
sure of welcoming. Thank you
Asspizza. Thank you for your
candid self-portraiture, thank
you for your cultural contribu-
tions and thank you for your
wonderfully haphazardly
slapped together triple box
logo Supreme hoodie. A bud-
ding star among aging nebulas.
— Anay Katyal
Daily Arts
Presents:
Best of
Vine
2013-16
THREE BOX LOGOS
EXPOSE HIM
RUN AWAY WITH ME
I HOPE YOU FEEL BETTER
A
beautifully
simple
Vine to honor a beauti-
fully simple app. There
are funnier ones, sure, but
as
I
tried
to
narrow
my
candi-
dates down
to a single
one, I real-
ized
there
was no Vine
that I had
watched
more
than
this one. The app became
a cultural phenomenon, a
vehicle for concentrated
bursts of creativity and
genuine expression, but
for no community was this
more true than for Black
teenagers.
There’s
not
much to describe here out-
side of a guy
crossing
up
a dog like AI
breaking Jor-
dan’s ankles,
and
then
the
world’s
greatest
human, pre-
sumably our
videogra-
pher, screaming “EXPOSE
HIM!” in the background.
That’s enough for me.
— Nabeel Chollampatty
NOT THE REAL VINE
BUT STILL FUNNY
Gavin got us. After his
uncle put a lizard on his
head, the kid sky-
rocketed
to
Vine
stardom,
quickly
becoming the face
of a generation much
older than himself.
Gavin reacted the
world the way we
did, so everything
he did was instantly
deemed worthy of #relatable-
post status. Yes, Simone Biles,
there is a Gavin meme for
everything. Because Gavin
was one of us. He was a child
with the soul of a millennial,
at once fascinated and horri-
fied by the world around him.
He was the heart
of the Internet.
This vine is Gavin
at his best. It’s the
ultimate clapback
Vine, aptly subti-
tled “tag your ugly
friend
#cute.”
And tag our ugly
friends we did.
— Madeleine Gaudin
In 2013, we were blessed. Two days
ago, we were cursed. Vine’s all-too-
brief life span was, of course, longer
than six seconds, but it’s impossible to
feel like our collective time with the
app was cut heartbreakingly short.
Vine was essential to the culture at
large, an outlet for people from any
corner of the world to express their
creative passion, yet it died at the
hands of of cut-and-dry, joyless, Sili-
con Valley business dealings. For Twit-
ter, specifically, its relationship to Vine
was almost symbiotic; one fed into the
other, artistic expression crossing the
blurred lines of vaguely related social
media. Here, we’ve compiled a list of
our favorite Vines. Enjoy.
— Daily Arts Staff
VINE
VINE
VINE
VINE
My favorite Vine of all
time is one that I have
never been able to find
after the first time I saw
it (such is the tragedy of
trying to Google
one of these mas-
terpieces). The
basic premise is a
gym full of boys
running at high
speed, one large
rope in hand.
Mariah Carey, The Elusive
Chanteuse, sings in her
upbeat vibrato, working
towards that impossible
high note. As soon as she
hits it, we discover what it
is the boys have been pull-
ing the entire time (esti-
mated 3.5 seconds): a final
boy appears, catapulted
from the rope attached to
his hips, and smash-
es into the ceiling
above. Post-climax,
a large part of the
ceiling drops and
crumbles to dust on
the gym floor. End
scene. (If you see or
know anything about the
whereabouts of this Vine,
please email it to arts@
michigandaily.com.)
— Kathleen Davis
VINE
BACK AT IT AGAIN AT
KRISPY KREME
This is my favorite Vine for so many
reasons. First, the guy starts off by saying
“Back at it again at Krispy Kreme,”
implying that back handsprings
in fast-food donut shops is a
normal Friday night activity.
Then, can we stop for a second
to talk about the athleticism
involved? I mean, this is the type
of stuff that people — myself
included — can only dream
about pulling off, and this man seems
to be on his way to landing it without a
hitch, until the last split-second of the
vine, where he kicks the neon
sign at full force, which is where
the Vine ends. Did he stick the
landing? What happened to
the sign? Did he get in trouble?
All of these questions are left
unanswered, and that’s what
makes this Vine so amazing.
VINE
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
College: The best four years of
your life.
Have you heard this before?
I have, plenty. We are set up to
believe that these four years
are the best of the best. Leaving
school and entering a world
more “real” than the one within
university borders will lead us on
an inevitable spiral downward.
This isn’t hopeful thinking, nor is
it at all realistic.
In
a
video
on
Stanford
University’s YouTube channel
titled
“Stanford
Open
Office
Hours,” two professors, Dave
Evans of the Design Program
and Bill Burnett of the Design
Program, discuss this false idea
that college is the best and life
following only gets worse. They
suggest that if we are to believe
this, that will mean that at fifty or
sixty years old, we will be wishing
we were our twenty-year-old
selves. We don’t want our young
minds to make the ultimate
decisions about our futures. Life is
a process and it will take us years
to really know what we want.
We have to work gradually
to tailor our skills and reach
our desired future. It can’t just
happen in one neat construction
of a four year academic plan. That
sets us up to believe all we have to
look forward to is a world of the
mundane, set in a dull workplace,
far worse than the lives we once
had as undergraduates.
Evans and Burnett go on to talk
about how some of the negativity
attached to life post-grad comes
from confusion with what we think
has to happen while on campus.
We fall into a trap while declaring
majors and minors, finding our
directed field and starting to
discard any of our passions that
don’t “align” with a given major.
If someone has many different
interests (let’s say music, physics
and literature), they often choose
one and assume the others cannot
be
pursued.
There
isn’t quite a clear
thread between those
three
passions,
so
many just choose one
and forget about the
rest.
These
misconstrued
ideas that circulate
in
academic
environments
are
something:
careers
and
passions
have
to be distinctly identified in
college or after years and years
in one profession, the prospect of
eventually switching directions
is impossible. This causes us to
fix our gaze on just one thing. We
limit ourselves, which may lead us
to keep jobs that maybe we once
loved and then eventually lose
interest in. In the future, if you find
yourself in a career that isn’t fully
suiting your interests,
especially because those
interests are constantly
evolving, both professors
suggest you have to do
something in order to
fix the problem. Evans
and Burnett warn us:
“You really can’t solve
a problem you’re not
willing to have.” If you
identify
that
you’ve
let something go that
really
wasn’t
worth
abandoning, identify that as a
problem and move forward to fix it.
We’ve confused the idea that a
lack of narrowing in on one interest
is a lack of progression. We want
to specialize, but in doing so, we
often abandon other passions that
aren’t relevant or helpful. Love for
music, physics and literature might
not seem to mesh. The neat, clear
picture of choosing one often seems
easier to adopt.
What do Evans and Burnett say
to the notion of forward motion?
“Don’t try to decide your way
forward, just do something.”
I’ve lived so little life to try to
decide my way toward the exact
place I want to end up. Or try to
predict the person I’ll be when I get
there. Or even worse, put myself
in a place now to assume life after
college will only get worse.
This past Monday, I had the
pleasure of hearing filmmaker Issa
Rae (“Insecure,” “Awkward Black
Girl”) speak at the Symposium
keynote memorial lecture in Hill
Auditorium, and I found that what
she shared paralleled some of the
ideas from the Stanford video.
When asked about her immense
success, she credited her career to
the idea of just going out and doing
something that mattered to her. In
order to pursue her love for the arts,
she began asking her friends and
family to participate in her films,
and she quickly gained a following.
It wasn’t a matter of having a
perfect plan or abandoning certain
interests to fit the mold of what
could be successful to the public.
She just created art about real
people and real things.
Someone said to me once that
each day you’re doing one of two
things — you’re either getting better
or you’re getting worse. As for me,
I’d take future advancement at
the expense of a coherent, neat
life plan that revolves around
one interest. If chaos and random
interests are what carry me
forward, I’m happy to say I can
only get better.
There is more to life than college
COMMUNITY CULTURE COLUMN
BAILEY
KADIAN
Maltese artist Joe Sacco to talk social justice
Activist,
cartoonist
and
journalist Joe Sacco will be
sharing his work today at the
Michigan
Theater.
Sacco’s
presentation is affiliated with
the
International
Institute’s
Conflict and Peace Initiative and
the Penny Stamps Distinguished
Lecture Series, and receives
additional
support
from
25
campus co-sponsors.
A world traveler, Sacco has used
his journeys to inspire his writing
and drawings in order to create
multiple award-winning novels,
including “Days of Destruction,”
“Days of Revolt,” “Footnotes in
Gaza” and “Safe Area Goražde.”
Additionally, Sacco took his real
accounts in Europe and produced
them into his critically acclaimed
comic “Yahoo.” Although much
of his work is rooted in Middle
Eastern
tensions
and global justice
issues in general,
he did not begin in
that field.
“I
started
drawing
when
I was about six-
years-old,”
the
Malta-born
and
American-raised
Sacco said in an
interview
with
the Daily. “I really
enjoyed
drawing
funny stuff, mainly
for humor, because I was in it for
the laugh.”
However, as Sacco got older,
he
became
more
interested
in connecting his humorous
drawings with real world events
— thus, his satirical lens led
to more “pointed journalistic
works.”
When asked to describe his
work in one sentence, Sacco said:
“The
reality
I see.” As an
artist, he can
neither
make
claims for every
artistic
viewer
nor
for
the
overall
world.
“I
can
only
recreate
what
I have seen …
it’s
completely
subjective,”
he
continued.
“I
cannot be the
monopoly on the
concept of truth.”
The
question
about
the
controversial and radical time of
Trump’s America came into the
interview and how Sacco would
go about this in his work. He
answered simply: “Comics is a
flow form of work.”
When creating his graphics,
he must think about how the
drawing
will
represent
“a
long term scene,” or in other
words, long term issues and not
necessarily bound to this specific
time in our nation’s history.
Finally,
Sacco
was
asked
what he believed to be the most
important
thing
for
people
to know when reading and
observing his work. Even as a
popular journalist, an artist and
an activist, Sacco answered:
“Journalism is imperfect.”
But journalism, in all its
various mediums — whether
broadcast, print or radio — has
the ability to alter the world.
Perhaps more now than ever
before, today’s social climate
demands that inquisitive and self-
aware journalists, like Joe Sacco,
remain critical in the work that
they do in order to preserve the
integrity of the media and defend
the notion of truth.
Joe Sacco:
Galvanizing Social
Justice Through
Comics
Thursday, January
19th @ 5 P.M.
Michigan Theater
ERIKA SHEVCHEK
Daily Community Culture Editor
DAYTON HARE
Senior Arts Editor
COMMUNITY CULTURE PREVIEW