Thursday 3 July 2008

When Youtube is about more than watching the comedy crimes of our era

Think of Shakespeare in his day, competing with bear baiting, theatre people considered the lowest of the low in society (how much has that changed) and yet, theatre was gaining speed - it was breaking boundaries - when the drunken crowd in the pit looked up from pick-pocketing and phelandering they saw Hamlet. Several years after the invention of film and countless shots of a man slipping on a banana peel the surrealists cottoned on that celluloid was as valid a canvas as any. It's late at night as I try to make this comparison - but there's something happening and it's happening on youtube. What started as a way to spend fifteen seconds to three minutes laughing at some kid in Romania getting a pen cap stuck to his eyelid (to the best of my knowledge this video does not already exist) has slowly but surely begun to expand. Videos crop up and say "Free Video content does not need to mean mindless video content. This can make more of your experience of life rather than make you feel as though you are wasting it" Fragile beauty like this are all the more startling among the videos of romanian pen caps and remixed movie trailers. So before I keep going, Watch this.

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