California

This week's "Show and Tell" is about finding a visual and a verbal definition or explanation. One of the first things I thought of was a video for the 1990's by Wax directed by Spike Jones. The first time I saw the video I was 10 years old and living in Los Angeles, California. It was right after the Northridge earthquake. I was just a kid and already so disaffected, but I remember the music video taking my breath away.
The video starts with a close up of shoes on fire and then slowly zooms out to a shot of a man running in slow motion. The man continues to run down the street until he turns a corner and is blocked from view by a bus. The camera them pans to reveal a girl in the back of a car watching the entire scene with an expression of numbness on her face.
I chose this as an example of visual explanation because it is a one-shot video which shows that violence is so common that even when something spectacularly horrible happens in front of us, we just turn away.