"Viking Quest"

-- By WilliamCoombs - 19 Feb 2016

Danny

My friend Danny’s shoe rack at his house in New Orleans has, among many, Margiela boots, Ronny Fieg’s collaborations with Asics, and Flavio Girolami and Prathan Poopat’s ‘Common Projects.’ I personally do not care or know anything about fashion, but I always walk a safe distance away from Danny to ensure I never scuff him. In an effort to better understand why he does care about fashion, I asked what his favorite pair of shoes were. “My ‘De La Soul’s.’” I know his Nike Dunk High Premium ‘De La Soul’s’ are far from his most expensive. I ask why. “Because they are a head nod to New York hip-hop.” Now, if there are two things that Danny, who grew up on the Upper West Side, loves more than fashion, they are music and New York. To him, these shoes symbolize all three.

The shoes were an intersection of three very different manifestations of creativity. And Danny loved each of them. He liked living in New York, he liked listening to hip hop, and he liked wearing clothes that made him look good. At the time, I had never been to New York, listened pretty much to EDM, and wore the same tattered Poolesville High School wrestling sweatshirt that I still wear now. Even if the ‘De La Soul’s’ represented creativity, what did creativity give him that was so worthwhile?

Me

When I thought about the kinds of creativity I love, television came to mind. True Detective sparked new ideas a for me, The Office made me laugh when I most needed to laugh, and Entourage made me think I want to be a movie star for a little while. I loved watching these TV shows, and simply because of the enjoyment the offered me, they added value to my life.

Suppose that there is no afterlife. If the only time we have is our time as living human beings, then anything in life that creates enjoyment in people is worthwhile. Creativity, in the many forms it can come, can brighten lives. When a designer adds a colored suede to a sneaker in a surprising way, it can make people that wear it and people that look at it feel good. Teenage kids are going to listen to Kanye’s new album, and in it they might find a support system. They might view his model of the peak of confidence as inspiration to be be confident themselves, and they might find value in that. Girls Season 5 is going to make people laugh and its going to be relatable on a fundamental level.

I love television. I do not want to be Vincent Chase, or an actor, or a writer, but I do want to be a part of the industry that spreads creativity to the public via television. So I came to law school. I thought maybe getting involved in entertainment law was the best way for me to fit into that industry.

Now that I am in law school, I am not so sure. I wish I had more time to watch TV.

I haven't previously run into such an interesting example of contemporary middle-brow Epicureanism. I can't tell whether it's a faux-naive effect or a genuine absence, this re-expression of ancient Italian outlook in the aesthetic of American vernacular. For a reader who has never in his life owned a television, and who would rather be limited to one pen and one sheet of blank paper a day forever than watch this crap, the replacement of the shady garden with the vast wasteland is surprising and disconcerting enough. But when one considers that the medium of "television" is itself now obsolete, replaced by even more invasively surveilling and pervasively disempowering modes of killing time, perhaps this affection for a bygone way of wasting one's life takes on the same elegiac quality one finds buried beneath the ashes of Herculaneum.

In any event, I think the next draft would benefit from the removal of the guy and his shoes; they are truly extraneous, and their departure would allow a further development of your central theme. It might also be helpful in the next version either to let us in on the joke, or actually encounter Lucretius.

Muhammad Ali

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.” – Muhammad Ali

You need to conclude your own essay, not use someone else's words. If this is an epigraph that you feel you need, float it to the top. But consider how history dealt with these words in the person of the man who took the punches.

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