This is Gio, and he is a character. He’s a character you sort of already know. Jennifer Crandall started this series of brief videos called onBeing for the Washington Post. Her job, her profession, her money-making proposition, is to go out into the world with an idea of who she wants to talk to (a seven-year-old, a nun, someone who is very … particular), chat with them, and edit a two hour conversation into a few minutes of video. It’s a great concept, and clearly Crandall is very talented - she edits the interviews in her head while they’re happening.
Gio: “Really, I like Metalhead music… they’re like, the bomb. Like the bomb like, rock ‘n roll inside of it, and then you throw the bomb, and it explodes, and rock ‘n roll comes out—it’s like that type of bomb.”
Crandall’s work seems to materialize a dream I’ve always quietly held: engaging people in a conversation that is somehow so immediately intimate, it manifests the most interesting possible version of a conversation heard on the street. I have a hope, grown from a fiction-soaked youth, that narrative can be culled from our lives. That it is somewhere there, inherent.
(Postscript: I am Second is another site that features confessional videos. But, interestingly, the site utilizes the authentic, genuine qualities of this video style to direct people toward religion.)
