Barack Obama Narrates Avant-Garde Prose Poem
President Obama has a wonderful, versatile voice, and it's a shame that it's wasted on things like convincing Democrats to cut Social Security. Luckily, musician and Something Awful forum poster Dan Warren has spent four years making sure that Obama's voice doesn't go to waste—cutting and editing snippets from the audio recording of his book Dreams From My Father into a... well, we're not sure. Performance piece? Spoken word recording?
"Broadly speaking," Warren writes, "it tells the story of an ugly dog-faced demigod who recreates the world after it is destroyed." Ah. It's called Son of Strelka, Son of God, and this is the first chapter (with animation in progress by Ainsley Seago). Here's Warren's summary:
Our hero's name is Stanley, but he doesn't really show up until Chapter 3. Stanley's father is the first proto-man, who fell as a fruit from the first tree. He found the world an empty and desolate place, so he climbed to the top of the tree and began creating animals and plants and whatnot just by speaking their names. He gets really excited about the process, and accidentally creates a monkey in thin air, which promptly plummets to his death. He realizes that he needs to be a little more thoughtful about this process, and finishes by creating many of the beautiful things in the world. Then he disappears.
The next chapter is also partially animated and up on YouTube. There are nine chapters in total, all of which are available for listening on Warren's blog.