Kseniya Simonova

Most of the things I stumble across on the Internet are unintelligent, useless, or don't impact my life very much. Sometimes they are teach me something, sometimes they are entertaining. Occasionally I find something that sticks with me, either because of its cleverness, its funniness, or it's ability to move me. When I happened upon this video in a blog today, I wasn't expecting something so striking. Kseniya Simonova truly has a gift for storytelling, and it's rare that I encounter something I react to like this.

After I watched it, I realized she was a performer on the TV show "Ukraine's Got Talent." I've only seen previews and an extremely limited few partial episodes of "America's Got Talent," but after watching this video, I was saddened by how gimmicky the American version of the show is. The acts that do well seem to rely on flashy costumes or a dramatic personal story behind the artist rather than letting the art speak for itself. It's a sad state of the world. Most "successful" artists are sensationalistic in the sense of having an action-packed routine or being sexually provocative. I'm as fond of break dancers, gymnasts, and magicians as the next person, but I can't think of a time where I had an emotional reaction to any of those groups of people. Let's take a lesson from the Ukraine and have the next person to win "America's Got Talent" be someone who creates something special. After all, that's supposed to be the premise of the show, right?

She makes me want to create. Luckily, there seems to be a paint-day in the works for sometime before I go back to school. And I've got ink-blots waiting to be turned into monsters and a cardboard sculpture waiting for me to have the patience to build it.