Weekly Blogpost 6

The visual aspects of a piece of art, photograph or video can often times be the first thing we as the audience will notice when appreciating such works. Due to this reason, every choice an artist or director takes, whether it's the skyline of a city's horizon or the hues of various shades of forest green in a watercolor, must be made with great care and consider in how they will impact others. The appeals to logos may be blatantly obvious in a text but may require some deeper consideration in visual works. Again, let us analyze Regina Spektor's "Laughing With" video and consider her creative choices made in order to appeal to the logos of her audience.

The structural aspects of the video all center around the artist, herself as she travels through various scenes, as one is believed to assume, is God. Visually, Regina is in the center of nearly every shot within the video and is seen nearly emotionless as she goes through the chores and joys (such as playing the piano in a vast desert) as the all knowing creator. This sort of visual display really forces us to look at the universe and our experiences from the perspective of its creator. Regina's argument that we as humans cannot possibly understand God's Will because we can only conceptualize it in human terms resounds in her lyrics and her video aims to force viewers to see what life may be like for God. Spektor includes various symbols in the video that enhance this argument. One of various symbols included is at the very onset of the video itself with the optometry equipment that Regina looks through and witnesses the world form before her very eyes. Such a presentation is direct in its intent and aims to have the viewers consider literally looking at the world through God's eyes.

There's another aspect to the video, not previously visited that greatly influences the viewers, this being the simplicity of it. Throughout most of the video the scenery is depicted in black and white with Spektor being the only thing in color for at least the first half of the video. This selection of colors focuses viewers to key on only certain elements of the video (i.e. Regina, the sky, the piano, the birds) and narrow our outlook in onto the aforementioned symbols. "Laughing With" is a powerful song and is accented beautifully with the video that creates scenes that affirm everything Spektor's song sings to be true.

Weekly Blogpost 5

Within the video "Laughing With" by Regina Spektor, the artist and director aim to create varying contexts for the audience to experience by utilizing the concepts of logos and pathos and a multitude of literary devices including parallelism, irony, and imagery. By analyzing Regina's lyrics we become acutely aware of the parallelism and structure she employs in order to appeal to the logos of her audience. The repetition of the phrase "No one laughs at God" creates a sort of comparison between real life events that invoke emotions and a crossover between logos and pathos. These references to experiences we as human deal with throughout our lives take the audience on a journey on which the outset invokes a variety of feelings and leaves the audience with both fulfillment and inadequacy.

Spektor's lyrics aim to call her audience to be wary of passing judgement on their omnipotent overseer, God, and imply that we place ourselves in his shoes every now and then. The first half of the chorus, "But God can be funny / At a cocktail party while listening to a good God-themed joke / Or when the crazies say he hates us / And they get so red in the head you think they're about to choke" exudes a certain irony with the concept that God himself laughs at jokes at his own expense. Such irony appeals to Spektor's audience's pathos in the sense of a darker humor that no doubt we all would need to acknowledge in order to make sense of the actions of our overlord.

Regina choses rather intense and vivid imagery for her audience to conceptualize as apart of her first verse in which she references an airplane full of passengers that experiences engine failure. She provides brief expositions that get gradually more mournful. These references pull at our heart strings as listeners and allow us to place ourselves within the context of the song and thus appeal to pathos. Emotions such as sorrow and despair are powerful devices used in Regina's work.