🏷️ Label: music

The closest personal connection I have to the epidemic of gun violence in the United States is not through a statistic, or a headline, or a political argument.

It is through a teacher.

His name was Steve Wolf, and from 2010 to 2011, he was my AP Environmental Science teacher at Millbrook High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. At the time, I knew him as a young, energetic, slightly eccentric teacher who made science feel connected to real life. He was serious about the subject, but not in a way that drained the room. His class had a pulse.

He was also a runner.

That mattered to me. I was a runner too, and I remember being impressed that he would go for runs during his lunch break. There was something quietly heroic about that to me as a teenager: an adult with a job, a classroom, responsibilities, and still, in the middle of the day, he made time to go outside and run. It made running seem less like a school sport and more like a lifelong form of freedom.

He also introduced me, indirectly, to Dean Karnazes.

Mr. Wolf had read Ultramarathon Man, and he told us stories from the book: Dean Karnazes turning thirty and transforming his life through running, pushing himself through absurd distances, ordering a pizza during a long run and folding it into a kind of burrito while still moving down the road. Those stories lodged somewhere in me. They had that teenage magic of being ridiculous and inspiring at the same time. They suggested that the human body was not just a machine for getting through the day, but a strange instrument capable of endurance, comedy, pain, and joy.

In 2013, an evening spent watching "Quasi at the Quackadero" and "The Big Snit" on the big screen at an animation event with my dad, alongside revisiting Kanye West's music videos, marked a pivotal moment in my creative journey. This experience wasn't just memorable; it served as a profound lesson in the symbiotic relationship between animation, music, and personal creativity. Each work, with its unique narrative approach and visual style, illustrated the vast potential of storytelling through animation, reshaping my perception of creative expression.

The Impact of "Quasi at the Quackadero"

Sally Cruikshank's 1975 film, "Quasi at the Quackadero," is a masterclass in the freedom of animated storytelling. Its vibrant landscapes and eccentric characters, unbound by reality's constraints, showcased animation's capacity to bring the furthest reaches of imagination to life. This realization—that animation could so vividly articulate the abstract—inspired me to view creativity as a boundless field, where the only limits are those we impose on ourselves.

The Emotional Resonance of "The Big Snit"

Richard Condie's "The Big Snit," juxtaposing the mundanity of domestic life with the specter of global apocalypse, struck a deep chord. Its ability to weave humor, love, and existential dread into a coherent narrative highlighted the power of animation to explore complex emotional landscapes. This film, with its poignant ending and whimsical artistry, emphasized the importance of finding beauty and meaning in the ordinary, a lesson that profoundly affected my outlook on storytelling.