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.
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