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How do I love this dancing bear-girl? Let me count all 17 ways

How do I love this dancing bear-girl? Let me count all 17 ways

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Via Bobby Finger (Twitter) | Source alexia (Twitter)

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There's nothing better in this life than a really good goofy dance video set to a song you already love. Except true love, the invention of the Fast Pass, and finding $10 in your winter coat. But you know what I mean. Anyway, I already love the song "Closer" by the Chainsmokers, despite the fact that it's the number one song in America and we're all therefore required to consider it uncool.

Recently, The New Yorker's Jia Tolentino wrote a really interesting piece about this great song's bizarre writing credits and received a link to this video in response:

I love it for 17 reasons.

  1. As previously mentioned, THE SONG. It's a song you can dance or cry to, and a song sung in part by a boy who didn't really like to sing before. It's a song with at least four different hooks and each one is irresistible.
  2. The bear costume. But specifically the moment when the dancer turns around and it's revealed that the bear costume has a gaping open back like a hospital gown. Great plot twist.
  3. bear
  4. The aesthetic. Love beige.
  5. The sister. Based on responses to the original tweet, I've deduced that this video was made by a pair of sisters. The sister who is recording is completely unable to contain herself and nearly ruins the joke by laughing through most of it. I don't care! I miss my siblings, who do not live near me.
  6. bear
  7. The dream. The makers of this video are already tweeting aggressively at official accounts for The Ellen Show and the Chainsmokers, hoping to get a little bit famous. One of their friends requests that if they do make it to the show, they discuss an upcoming science fair.
  8. bear
  9. The room for improvisation. Near the beginning of this video, bear-girl hits her mark every time. Clearly, she has thought about how she plans to dance to the first 20 seconds of this song. After that, she spirals into a series of unplanned Casper Slide moves and frenetic waving, which ends with her falling over. Spontaneity is so rare on the web! More please!
  10. It's 68 seconds long. Almost "nice," and exactly the amount of content you can consume at work before you're technically guilty of time theft. That doesn't really account for the number of times I've watched it so far, which is nine.
  11. The suburbs. You don't make this video if you live in a city. You just don't have the free time, the space, the carpeting, the sincerity, the sister, the messed-up doll stroller, the banister, the as-seen-on-TV bear costume, or the privacy.
  12. bear
  13. It led me to read this very good essay by Paul Ford about "The American Room," a cookie-cutter suburban space that appears in most of your favorite videos:
    14. "The people dancing and talking and singing in beige rooms with 8' ceilings are surrounded by standards, physically and online. Technological standards like HTML5 also allow us to view web pages and look at video over the Internet. All of their frolic is bounded by a set of conventions that are essentially invisible yet define our national physical and technological architecture. Their dancing, talking bodies are the only non-standardized things in the videos."
  14. I needed it.
  15. I sent it to my mom.
  16. I sent it to my sisters, whom I miss.
  17. Again with the science fair!

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