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Videos
This series of
videos is in a continuous process of
development. Some are instructional like
The
Creative
Adventure. Others are
documentaries like
Poems at an Exhibition
and Cabo. Some are installations like
Show in Chicago and Winter Garden.
Others are art, poetry, music videos or
some combination of new media. The
most recent video is
Word
Salad: Creativity and Madness with Foxes,
Deer, Ducks and Chickens which has
elements of much of the above.
I
develop these videos in different ways. Some
begin with the image and poetry and music follows. In others the image or the poetry
comes last. Many are quite experimental,
some just fun. Enjoy.
There are currently over 100 videos on
www.YouTube.com/jgyoungmd I have
put some on my blog at
http://jgyoungmd.blogspot.com/ The
most current are on YouTube.com. However, some are too long
for YouTube (limit 10 min.) like The
Creative Adventure, Poems at an Exhibition
and Concerto with Foxes, Deer and
Other Wild Ones, so you need to click their
hyperlinks below:
To get higher resolution DVDs of the videos,
email
John G. Young, M.D. See below for a list of possible
volumes:
  
Word Salads
come in many forms: In psychiatry it refers
to a thought disorder found in various forms
of psychosis; in the creative field a break
from purely logical thinking to arrive at
new meanings; in poetry it suggests playing
with language such as the famous
Jabberwocky poem of Lewis Carroll. Some
word salads are complete non-sense and in
others you have to dig for the meaning. In
this video, it is a mix of all these senses.
This
semi-divine comedy takes an out-of-the-box
“mockumentary”
approach to
the creator-producer's state of mind and
tells his tale through his alter-ego,
Rembrandt and some of his friends. It
presents a new look at creativity and a new
look at madness. It begins like an
educational piece on creativity but soon
evolves into a mad morality/mortality play.
In it he mocks contemporary art,
immigration policy, museum installations,
architects, rap, himself--even God.
This video,
Word Salad, begins with a series of
sketches, using widely differing multi-media
approaches from word-play games, graphic
manipulations, documentary, fantasy
installations, music/poetry videos, to
posters and rap. It makes suggestions about
the creative process and creative expression
that carry through the video and looks at
their relationship to madness.
Like the
elements of a salad, the sketches are
individually prepared before they get mixed
together. Issues of bowing to the past vs.
starting fresh, boundaries and intimacy,
choosing and being chosen, standing out and
fitting in, shallowness and depth, and duck,
duck, goose get all mixed up.
Psychiatrically poems move from ignoring
issues [Sublime Suite and
Strangers to Themselves] to the
struggle to face one’s demons [Plaza de
Toros], to manic excesses [Hamilton
and Chicken Salad.]
The video
poem gradually moves into madness. It
progresses from the psychological madness of
schizoid distance and manic excesses to the
physiological madness of multiple sclerosis,
its multiple ramifications, and anger about
its indignities to existential madness of
being tossed into existence with the
prescriptions for living “left in a bottle
too wet to read,” only to then in the end
having to face loss.
In the
concluding neo-dada play Dr. Young tossed
the entire work into an incredible chicken
salad. It extends the focus from sense and
non-sense to meaning and meaninglessness in
the style of the “Theatre of the Absurd.”
The dialogue is full of chicken clichés,
wordplay, looseness of association and other
nonsense. Humor replaces the sad edginess
and over-the-top emotionality of some
contemporary art films focusing on madness,
but it is not just funny, the video has a
serious side too. It suggests we all have to
hang together and face our demons,
individually and collectively. He closes the
psychodrama with a nod to Lewis Carroll’s
Jabberwocky poem—it sounds nice but
makes no sense.
Some of the
video sketches were taken using a $600 Sony
camera that did both still and video and had
a 12x zoom. Many sketches were revised over
100 times so there is some pixilation. For
the video poet “A poem is never completed,
only abandoned.” The distortion becomes a
video metaphor for the distressed state of
multiple sclerosis and the aging process
dealt with in later sections.
John G.
Young, M.D., a retired psychiatrist and
multi-media artist, created this unique
experimental video. He blends Jungian,
Freudian, and existential approaches into
this complex psychodrama. Dr. Young did the
paintings, graphics, poems/script,
photographs, music/sound-scapes,
performance, animations, videos, and
voice-overs along with his wife, Diane. The
music was freely improvised, sometimes on
two keyboards simultaneously. The only
composed piece was Fuwa’s Barriers,
the second movement of Concerto with
…which is in three parts, in 5/4 and 7/4
times like the line beats of the four haiku
of that section. The music varies from a
simple piano improvisation to more complex
orchestral and sound-scape pieces. The poems
fluctuate from serious poetry and light
verse to doggerel and rap. The art, in style
and subject matter, vary from simple
drawings, subtle graphics, large format
contemporary florals to various kinds of
abstraction. Videos range from animations,
documentaries, and mockumentaries to
abstract pieces. There are no actors. Videos
within videos, plays within plays, also
shape this multi-layered multi-media piece.
The piece was subtitled so my hearing
impaired daughter and you would not
misunderstand the computer voices; it
re-emphasizes that this is truly a “word
salad.”
A much
earlier version of Word Salad was
juried into the Core Art Gallery Word
Play show as a video installation. Other
videos by John G. Young, M.D. such as The
Creative Adventure and Poems at an
Exhibition have received the
International CINDY Competition award, The
Telly Award and the Communicator Award.
The
Creative
Adventure
In
The Creative Adventure, a
two-part, two hour video, Dr. John G. Young,
develops the original conception
that love is essential to emotionally
healthy creative functioning. He shows you
how to develop maximum effectiveness using
creative and innovative approaches. The
Creative
Adventure
won the
International
CINDY
award,
the
Telly
Award
and the
Communicator
Award.

Part One: Love and Conception
answers
the
questions,
"What is
creativity?"
"Why is
creativity
important?"
and "How
can you
become
more
creative?"
It takes
the
attitude
that
everyone
has
creative
abilities,
but we
can all
improve
our
creative
approaches.
The Creative Adventure, Part One, Love and
Conception
[1 hour
wmv]
The
script
to Part
One plus
hyperlinks.
=================================================================
The Creative Adventure, Part Two: Birth and
Re-Birth extends the
investigation into creative approaches, but
shifts the focus to the being side of
creativity. We move from the creative
process to the creative person. We look more
at the "Krainen" aspect of fulfillment, and
explore attitudes necessary to creative
living, learning and loving. At this level
living with purpose is as important as
accomplishing a goal; the process becomes as
important as the product.
The Creative Adventure, Part Two: Birth and
Re-Birth
[1 hour
wmv]
The
script
to Part
Two plus
hyperlinks.
-
Poems at
an Exhibition [50 min]

“I begin with an
idea and then it becomes something else,”
Picasso.
What started as a documentary of a
one-man art show becomes a video poem on
disability. In this work Dr. Young blends
his art, poetry, animation, and music into a
creative autobiographic documentary of his
family’s attempts to cope with disability.
His wife has multiple sclerosis, his
daughter is hearing impaired, even the dog
is mostly blind. This multi-media
presentation shows how they overcome the
challenges of loss, pain, rejection, and
despair with laughter, courage and love.
With interviews, by and of each family
member, emotions emerge as spontaneously as
the improvisational background music.
In the end, this video points beyond one
man’s family to the needs of all families
who struggle with disability.
To get your
DVD of Poems at an Exhibition
plus
Collected
Shorts contact
John G. Young, M.D. at
jgyoungmdaic@hotmail.com
Concerto
with Foxes, Deer and Other Wild Ones
[11
min]
This home movie evolved from a group of
video clips of the wild life I took
around our home. The sense of
home, one’s territory and boundary
issues becomes the focus of this set of
five video poems.
I came up
with a title, "Concerto with. . .". It just
appeared out of my Unconscious from the
images I was working with. Never
having writing any orchestral music, for the
first time I began to learn how to
orchestrate beyond the solo piano sound. The
music was improvised as the images passed
by.
The
Program Notes
may help understand the many paths I was
experimenting with in this video.
Higher
Resolution
DVDs
If you would like a higher resolution DVD of
these videos, you can order one of the
collections in the volumes below by emailing
me at
jgyoungmdaic@hotmail.com
Volume One: The
Creative Adventure Part One: Love and
Conception
Volume Two:
The Creative Adventure Part Two: Birth and
Re-Birth
Volume Three: Poems
at an Exhibition plus Collected Shorts:
Introduction to The Creative Adventure,
Invitation, Ballad of Joe and Mary and
Concerto with Foxes, Deer, and Other Wild
Ones.
Volume Four:
Collected Shorts Part Two: Show in Chicago,
Installation at Boulder Creek, Colorblind,
Plaza de Toros, Slice One, Slice Two,
Slice Three, Slice Four
Volume Five: Winter
Suite: Cabo, Snow Garden, Manifold, P.I.P,
Sublime Suite, Slice Five
Volume Six: 070220, Cage Color One,
Cage Color Two, Cage Color Three, Begin, Begin Again.
Volume Seven: Rapt,
Hamilton, Just Looking, Crime Scene,
Homage to Brakhage, Life is Short.
Volume Eight: Bedroom Flowers, Glances #
1 - # 4, P.I.P. Squared, S.F. April 5, 2007,
Tea, Notes on Nothingness, Homage to
Brakhage # 2
Volume Nine: S.F.Fog, Wind and Color;
S.F. Kites, Circle Dance #1, Circle Dance #
2, Color Blobs, Timid Tiger, Timid Wolf,
Diamond Hopd, Flow # 1, Vivace
Volume Ten: Excerpts, Alphabet,
0706143, Ghosts, Fast Fridays, Father's Day,
Rothko, Tangles, Not so Still, Rectangulated,
Jet Stream, Flitter, Sisyphus Dysjunct
Volume Eleven: Doggerel, Strangers,
Strangers to Themselves, Less, Mendocino
Volume Twelve: The Z-axis, Weave, Whirlpool,
Earthworks Art, Breath of Peonies
Volume
Thirteen:
Walking,
Talking
and,
Arabesque,
Rapt,
The
Wandering
Eye,
Autumn
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