The Fall Semester

Classes are in full swing now, and I'm going to have to start stepping my game up if I expect to make it through the semester. As a sloth, I could be perfectly content to hang in a tree all day, but as a human it's somewhat unrealistic; we just don't have the elongated claws that make this pastime so simple for sloths. We are also obligated to worry about all kinds of things, primarily satisfying our needs in an exaggerated matter. Oh the rat race.

Anyway, I like all of my classes. Here's the breakdown:

Fiction Writing Workshop: This class is exposing me to all kinds of great literature while at the same time forcing me to write a lot. There's a lot of subjective bullshit when it comes to fiction writing, but hey, I signed up for it. It almost makes me want to become a lit studies major, but Columbia doesn't have that one, so I would have to transfer. Ho hum. We've been studying excerpts from one novel that is particularly fixating, called Pimp: The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim. The subject matter is as captivating as Iceberg's writing style. Check it out if you get a chance.



Photo I & Darkroom Workshop (co requisites): I like my photography classes the best of anything this semester. Photography seems a lot more concrete than writing and I like that. Photo I is exposing me to some great photography, as well as some standards that everyone's a little tired of (i.e. Ansel Adams). Last week we watched a documentary on Naked States, which chronicles photographer Spencer Tunick's journey across the nation to capture a nude (or ideally as many nudes as possible) in every state. If you haven't heard of this before, it's very interesting; find more here. Darkroom Workshop is basically an intro to developing and printing, which is good because I had never developed film before this. Of course the first roll got a little screwed up, but it's a fulfilling process, and I must admit that I do think film prints look better than digital prints. The atmosphere of a darkroom is very cool as well.



Poetry Workshop: Okay, I've got some mixed feelings about this one, but at least I get to write poetry and receive credit for it. The professor is Michael Robbins, and he's a bit pretentious... Direct quote: "...in one of my poems I rhyme 'velociraptor' with 'chiropractor', which I think is rather clever and so did the New Yorker." My reaction was "Okay hang on a second, read the poem first before you make judgments about this." Turns out, reading the poem didn't change my perspective one bit; it's still a hella pretentious comment. This is not to say I don't like Robbins (although I'm not sure about that poem), but you certainly have to take things in stride. On the other hand, how many classes have you taken wherein Notorious B.I.G. and Robert Frost are referenced in the same half-hour?

I think what I'm looking forward to most about these classes is getting a good look at the work of my peers.

FDA bans flavored cigarettes; Tobacco Industry incensed

Say goodbye to these...



Yes that's right; the fuckin' FDA has made flavored cigarettes illegal. I'm not sure when this ban officially goes into effect, but if you wanna enjoy a black, do it now. Apparently cloves and other such products are a "gateway cigarette" for minors. They just keep on finding excuses for teens acting out, don't they? They're teenagers, idiot. They're going to pick whichever path seems most obstinate and self-destructive. I guess this was to be expected though; every day we seem to be living in less and less of a smoker's world. Hell, I don't even smoke cloves. They're expensive. But the fact that the government can make them unavailable to me really pisses me off. In fact, this whole issue highlights two things that make life less enjoyable for me; minors and the government. I can't have any fun around either of them. They should both go extinct, quickly and quietly.

Okay, maybe it's not that big of a deal. It's just the principle really.

The complete bullshit is here.

I'm Your Native Son

A Curmudgeon for Monday:

Today I went to my first fiction writing workshop with Nami Mun, and it's definitely the highlight of my semester. Sure it was just the beginning, but we worked for the full four hours instead of hanging out for fifteen minutes to look over the syllabus (i.e. every other first class ever). So my first semester at Columbia is off to a solid start... Now I just need to buy some film.

I also recently finished American Skin, a novel by Don De Grazia (another Professor at Columbia) which chronicles the life of a seventeen year-old runaway turned skinhead in Chicago. American Skin is gritty and blunt; boiling over with race tensions and the rage of a young man dealing with the savage twists of his own life. I highly recommend this book, although if you haven't read Miles From Nowhere do that first. Every time I mention American Skin to someone they tell me to see the movie This Is England, and it's on my list.



Buy it here











WBEZ is Chicago's public radio station, and it's pretty fantastic. Sunday nights especially draw me in with a killer lineup of world jazz, news parody, and spoken word. Harry Shearer is definitely one of my new personal heroes, with his ultra-deadpan news show entitled simply Le Show, which you can listen to here. If you've never heard of Harry Shearer, he plays about a hundred voices on The Simpsons as well as the bassist with the excellent mustache in This Is Spinal Tap.



There Will Be Blood is one of my all-time favorite movies, but I've never seen anything else with Daniel Day-Lewis. Tonight I watched The Boxer, a movie that begins with former IRA member Danny Flynn getting released from prison after fourteen years and returning to his home in Belfast. The Boxer is an average film with fantastic accents, an interesting perspective on the religious controversy in Ireland, and as always an amazing performance by Day-Lewis. However, if you're watching it simply for the fight scenes, don't even bother.

I Came As A Rat

My apologies for the hiatus; school has just started, and sometimes a sloth just gets sloth.

Communists can go fuck themselves. Seriously. I'm not saying Capitalism is the solution, I don't even think there is a solution, but Communism sucks. There were some Revolution cats lobbying around the student convocation at Columbia and it was the most hypocritical, propagandist demonstration I have ever seen.



Happy Anniversary! We've been at war for eight years now and comparisons between this fiasco and the Soviet effort in Afghanistan are becoming more and more apparent.



It's really interesting how our economy is fucking everyone over, except for the "cream of the crop". Most U.S. citizens are taking on far more responsibility than they should, and the select few that should face consequences are reaping benefits. Hell man, I'm in no place to govern a country, I can barely buy a pair of shoes at a thrift store without seriously questioning my judgment. But this entire system has become too convoluted, and it's not working. America is, contrary to what you've been told, ultimately too big to succeed, too complicated. Our present reality simply confirms the feeling I've always had somewhere inside of me, that our society has raised the standard of personal achievement so high that it becomes nearly impossible. Think about it; a bachelor's degree is the same thing that a high school degree was thirty years ago, while at the same time minimum wage has not raised at the same rate. We are basically making life progressively more impossible to live. This only inspires in me an intense desire to circumvent the system.
Did you know that our little corner of history here in 2009 is now being referred to as The Great Recession? I've always wondered where the human yearning for the open road comes from, and surely it must have been influenced heavily by the Great Depression. "When you got nothing..." I romanticize a life on the road for many reasons, and every time I see the pavement stretching out below me for an inexplicable distance, I feel very satisfied. Getting there is half the fun, but then you gotta turn right around and get somewhere else. I wonder if there are more people picking up and taking off with the way things are now...



Life is a collection of Red Herrings.