Video Interview

I mentioned before I might be heading back to Japan for one more year because of the girl. Actually the past couple months I've been keeping busy filling out job applications and even going to one interview down in Chicago. I haven't been posting a lot about this because of the obvious reason that it's always a bad idea to blog about a pending job.

But I'm going to bend this slightly here. One company, in lieu of an interview, wanted a "video introduction" sent by e-mail. I didn't have the equiptment to do this, so I went over to Brett's place to use his digital camera and editing equiptment.

The directions from the company were rather vague. Simply: "send video introduction". But what did that mean? How long was it supposed to be? They had all my pertinent information from my resume, application, essay and other materials I had already sent. Did I just repeat all that on the video? Or do I just say hi and wave and have it be 30 seconds long?

Anyway, Brett did some taping of me basically just repeating stuff that was on my resume. Then we decided that this video needed a little something extra. Especially since I was applying for a teaching job that requires a fair amount of extraversion, and so far we felt I was coming off as pretty reserved, we decided to add a little Karaoke segment to it. I know I don't have the greatest singing voice, but the idea was just to show I can do all the silly things that are involved with teaching kids classes, etc.

This is either a really brilliant idea for a job application, or the worst idea ever. We'll find out. In the mean time, Brett thought this video was funny enough that we should post it on-line, and I'm inclined to agree. Maybe this is just our bias towards our own creation, but Brett said he couldn't help laugh when he pictured a room full of Japanese business men watching this video and trying to be serious as they watched it. And then afterwards asking each other, "so, do you think he has what it takes to teach at this school or not?"
Anyways, enjoy.



Useless Wikipedia Fact
Dylan reportedly premiered "Hard Rain" at the Gaslight Cafe, where Village performer Peter Blankfield was in attendance. "He put out these pieces of loose-leaf paper ripped out of a spiral notebook. And he starts singing ['Hard Rain']...He finished singing it, and no one could say anything. The length of it, the episodic sense of it. Every line kept building and bursting." Dylan performed "Hard Rain" days later at Carnegie Hall as part of a concert organized by Pete Seeger. Seeger was so impressed by "Hard Rain," he covered it himself in his own set

Link of the Day
Another treat for the history buffs:
Here is the original news footage of the 1968 demonstrations against U.S. Aircraft Carrier Enterprise by the Japanese All Student Federation.

This was of course during the height of the Vietnam War, so U.S. military ships docking in Japan were unpopular to become with. To add insult to injury, this was nuclear powered, which was another touchy issue in Japan following the atomic bombs.

This protest, although it did not stop the Enterprise from docking, is significant for a number of reasons. For one thing, as you can see in the footage, the police went a little overboard with the clubbing, and the TV cameras were there to capture it all. This resulted in a lot of negative plublicity for the Police, and meant that for the next couple years public and media sympathy would be largely for the students. (When the Japanese student movement got increasingly violent in the 70s, sympathy would eventually go the other way).