Video Project: My Family Portrait

Late last year I was surfing the best video site around, if you love HD and are an artsy-fartsy videographer type, when I stumbled upon this brilliant, heartwarming little video project called My Family Portrait. The first one I watched was by Clan McCloud, and I was inspired to follow suit instantly, but the idea was birthed by Jared Foster. The concept is simple. Pretend your video camera is a still photography camera and take a "moving portrait" of each member of your family.

Doesn't sound all that phenomenal on the surface, I know, but take a look at this.

Click here for larger, high-def version.

People HATE having their pictures taken, right? But a few snappity-snap-snaps and it's over. Kind of like a shot. The sharp burst of pain up front is worth it for the long term pay-off.

Not always the same with video.

Your subject knows that thing is rolling and capturing every moment. It's excruciating for them. You know it. They know it. It's written on their faces and therefore, written on the video.

However.

After the first few painful moments, something enchanting happens. Not all of them, but most of them, transition from powerless and uncomfortable, to deliberately silly. It's almost as if our human nature brings us to this place where we realize we have two options. We can either look unintentionally ridiculous or intentionally ridiculous. And when we find ourselves at that intersection, there's really only one direction in which to travel.

My Family Portrait for the year 2008 was filmed during the November and December holidays. As you can see my in-laws are terrific. We alternate families each year, so this edition was my wife's side of the family. They had so much fun and tolerated me with more class and dignity than I deserved. I hope that years from now we will all look back and say that this little bit of medicine, that we each (myself included) stood still and took with more than a fair share of reluctance, was well worth the gift of letting our children and grandchildren see a younger version of ourselves smile directly into a camera and act like complete dorks.

Feeling Betrayed By Your Feed Reader?

My apologies. I accidentally published a draft. I have 18 of them at the moment and if I continue on my current path, each draft stands about a 50% chance of becoming an actual post. I'm not a power blogger like Human3rror of Church Crunch or Loswhit. I blog mostly for my girls and partly for myself. I do it here, openly and online, because I place significant value on the review, encouragement and admonition of my ideals. One day I may actually write a post on why I don't think Jesus was an effeminate  hippy wussbag, and why I don't think he wants me to be one either. But not today.

Great. Now I even have an flippin awesome title.  Jesus Was Not An Effeminate Hippy Wussbag. Survival probability just increased by 25% easy. For now, however, the concept is resting comfortably in the section of my WordPress admin panel lovingly referred to as... drafts.

Inauguration Day, Expletives, and Racial Slurs

My formative middle and junior high school years were woven together against the backdrop of several USAF communities in the United Kingdom. Quite simply, I loved it there. I missed it after we left, but it wasn't all moon pies and snickerdoodles.

Occasionally the British youth would pass the time by shouting insults out of cars as they passed. Or spray painting "YANKS GO HOME!" on the sides of our houses. Or throwing pebbles at our windows at night and then calling us wankers as they ran off into the dark. I remember loving it there, but it was not my home. It was impossible not to notice a cultural us-versus-them undercurrent. I was young, but I still remember missing my country, my America.

She and I were reunited again in 1990, at the start of my sophomore year of high school. My Dad received his relocations orders and our new home would be in South Georgia. I didn't realize it at the time but I was about to move from one foreign country to another. I had constructed an America in my mind that the real America had no inclination of honoring. This new America, this real America, was going to be unsophisticated, Christian, and racist.

My new town had two public schools. The inner city crowd went to one. The country folk went to the other. The school I attended was approximately 80% black. In this environment white kids did not verbally or physically assault black kids. It was the other way around. For the most part I stayed out of trouble, but it did give me a front row seat to some of America's more pronounced blemishes.

Our school had a giant white dome over the gymnasium which was prevalent regardless of where you stood outside. One morning, as I approached the school, I realized that someone had vandalized this dome the preceding night. Someone with very poor orthography and/or a severe falling out with Nigerians. In large black letters I read, "F*CK ALL NIGERS."

I remember stopping, staring, and then thinking, "This is not my America."

The real America, it would seem, had its own us-versus-them undercurrent. My wife, who went to the country school, has told me similar stories. She recalls one incident where a white girl was harassed in the hallway by a couple of black guys. The next day her father was arrested for patrolling the same halls, during the same time, with his shotgun. Spewing and shouting that he was going to "Kill him some niggers." She also recalls, as if perfectly scripted from a movie, a high school football game where a cross, which had been secretly positioned outside the stadium in a field past one of the goal posts, was set ablaze to the surprise of the students, faculty, and spectators.

I think most of us can agree that today's presidential inauguration shouldn't be a big deal. Our new president went to Columbia and Harvard. He was an attorney, a constitutional law professor and a U.S. senator. It shouldn't be a big deal that this man was elected president.

But it is.

It is because he is black. Because of the sorts of things I know to have happened in the early 1990s, when President-elect Obama was 29 years old and graduating from Harvard. It doesn't seem that far away to me, really. The teenagers who grew up with me in these environments are, naturally, my age, in their early thirties. These are voters. And maybe it is because of, or in spite of, these environments that today we swear in the first black president of our country.

I didn't vote for President-elect Obama and neither did I vote against him. I fully intend on holding him accountable for the content of his character over the color of his skin, like I have with President's past. But as I think back now on the day of the inauguration, I can not help but appreciate my lady, America, for the woman she is becoming right before my eyes.

UPDATE 2/1/2010: I chose to censor my own post and remove the expletives.