Midterms

** Editor’s note: **
The last few weeks have been crazy, mostly crazy good, but still crazy. There’s been a lot going on, a lot I have to recount here. So tonight is going to be the lightening round; instead of doing longer entries as I usually do, I’m going to do shorter ones, but more of them. There’s going to be a LOT of new content tonight, so consider yourselves warned …
** End note **
Hurrah, midterms are over! Had three of them over the last few days, and while I really can’t complain since most of my classmates had more, it’s still good to know they’re in the past. On top of that, we have next Mon & Tues off school (I think due to Election Day) so I have that to look forward to as well.
I was fortunate in that I didn’t have any of my midterms on the same day as another one. My first was in Lit Hum, which went fine, but I mixed up two of the authors, stupid Greek names. I’m sure I did fine on it, and I got an ‘A’ on the first paper for the class, so I doubt I have much to worry about but I feel stupid for what I missed. My oral Chinese exam went poorly, but I have no one to blame for that besides myself. I should have practiced it more, but it’s not a very big part of the overall course grade and I had other priorities.
I just took my last one in Money & Banking this afternoon, and am pretty confident that I aced it (maybe less a couple points here & there if the professor is feeling nit picky). That makes me very happy, as I’d really like to have an ‘A’ in that class. It’s been a good class, and I feel I’ve learned a lot.
The REALLY crazy thing is to consider that there’s only 6 weeks left in the semester, and then it’s over. And then we’re into my final semester here at Columbia, and then I will be done! I think May 16 is going to come rushing up on me faster than I anticipate …

Comedy

I’ve said many times before to people that I don’t like most comedy. Most of what other people find funny, I don’t, for various reasons. Most comedy I feel is either in poor taste, or is making fun of things that shouldn’t be made fun of, and is closer to being tragic than funny. The next obvious question is, well then what do you like? And I feel that I’ve never had a good answer to that, until now.
Here then, is my definitive answer. Conceptually, I like comedy that is ridiculous. I find the connection of things that are not really connected at all, or connecting outlandish things in an absurd way, funny. I like humor that’s intellectual, and gentle to a degree. Some satire is funny, but really the heart of comedy to me is absurdity.
As examples of my favorites, I would hold up the following: Monty Python, Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, and the Onion. Monty Python is pure brilliance, and I’ve loved the wasteful boys from Oxford (& Cambridge) for awhile. MP occasionally lapses into the crude, particularly with sexual humor (I didn’t like Meaning of Life at all), but overall everything with them has a very silly, lighthearted touch, which I like.
Seinfeld … well, he’s Seinfeld. I trust I need say no more. I will say though that I heard that he once said that comedy that needed to go for the crude or vulgar was stooping and demeaned the art form. I respect and admire him BOTH because he proved that clean comedy can work brilliantly, and also because he’s funny.
Jon Stewart, I also probably don’t need to say much. What I like about him most is his style of presentation. He holds up certain things in our current political climate, then makes these faces with long pauses as if to say, “Does anyone else find this as absurd as I do?” It’s a great shtick.
The Onion is something I’ve known about for awhile, but only really discovered recently. I can pick it up near my campus, and I’ve taken to reading it during my short lunch breaks. I am impressed with how consistently it can make me actually laugh out loud. I don’t know where they get their writing staff, but I think they deserve a Pulitzer or something. I also like the fact their tone feels very neutral; they’re into equal opportunity skewering.
( Like I mentioned in my earlier post, this pic is from the Onion, copyright by the Onion, all rights reserved & stuff like that, which means please don’t sue me, I’m a broke-ass college student who enjoys reading your paper and I’m not doing this for money )
One person who gets special mention is Bill Cosby. I remember watching Cosby Show as a kid and thinking he was funny, but he hasn’t done stand up in a long time, which I would really like to see, I hear it’s great. Also in this category would probably go Richard Pryor, I should go and hunt down some of his early material, though I know he was a bit more edgy and I’ve found that comedians in the tradition of Lenny Bruce (like Sarah Silverman) I don’t care for as much.

Sunday @ Trinity Church

Had a chance to go to a beautiful liturgical service at the historic Trinity Church down in the heart of Wall Street. (The location of the church has some very interesting metaphoric meanings to me, but more on that another time). The service is Episcopalian, and I found the entire service very different from any of the Pentecostal venues I’m familiar with, but also very beautiful. There’s a lot of mystery & symbolism wrapped up in the service, not all of which I understood, but it was neat; I particularly liked the censer and the reading of Matthew from a silver plated Bible held out by the vicar in the middle of the pews surrounded by people holding candles on long staves.
I went down there at the invitation of a school buddy; we went primarily to hear Dr. Miroslav Wolf speak, who is the Professor of Theology at the Yale Divinity School. Dr. Wolf delivered the sermon (which was very short compared to sermons I usually hear) and gave a talk over brunch afterwards (the brunch was excellent).
A man I knew whose learning I respect once talked about writing a book on the history of schisms within the church, and how to the denominations might be brought back together. I hope he writes it.
I’ll say this too, there’s a lot of stuff from the high church traditions that the church here in America misses out on. Those things, while not perfect, are a part of our heritage too, and we should be mindful of that.
I wish I’d had my camera, there was a fresco inside the church that was absolutely staggering, I had to settle for this picture instead. If I go back there again, I’ll be sure to take a better picture.

Halloween

So, I went looking for this hat see? And I couldn’t find the right one but my buddy Vinnie down in Brooklyn, he calls and tells me he has these hats that fell off the back of a truck, says maybe I want to come take a look. I say hey, why not right?
Went out on Saturday night to three different parties, and decided that while I didn’t want to “dress up”, I did need a hat. The hat I had in mind I couldn’t find, but this one was perfect since it exactly matched the shirt I already had. The idea in my mind was Prohibition-era gangster, but I got a lot of Indiana Jones all night. I suppose the leather jacket was throwing people off.
I’m going to ignore the bit of self-aggrandizement here, I thought I would have appeared in a random photo from the parties taken by my friends but I guess not. It’s all good though, some of this is just expanding on the theme of not taking myself … So … Damn … SERIOUSLY!!!!

:)

( This is actually a theme that has been coming up a lot with me lately; you try and pay attention to what the winds are telling you … )

The UN

On Friday, I had the opportunity to go and do something really fun and completely unique to NYC: I went and took a tour of the UN headquarters.
Found out about the trip through someone I’d had a class with, and although I didn’t really know anybody in the group, it was a great time. One thing that stood out to me as being very apparent is that in order to understand the UN, you have to understand it grew up out of the ashes of WWII, and that it was built by the victors of that war. The UN won’t make sense if one doesn’t understand that as a reference point. I learned so much more than I have time to put down here, but I will include a few fun facts.

- Because the UN represents all the nations, the UN itself does not belong to any nation. So technically, when you’re on the grounds of the UN, you’re in international territory. That means cops from NYC need special permission to enter the grounds.
- The UN has been responsible for setting some interesting de facto standards. For example, the official language of all air traffic controllers is English. You’ll never hear another language being used in any air traffic control tower anywhere in the world.
- The UN is very clever about handling diplomatic courtesies. For example, the countries in the general assembly hall are seated alphabetically, but each year the speaker chooses the name of a country out of a hat, and that country is seated first, in the front left of the chamber, with the rest alphabetically behind that one (and the order wraps around again when they hit ‘Z’). That means that Afghanistan isn’t always in the front and Venezuela always in the back. The flags flown in front of the UN are also in alphabetical order, and flown at the same height.
One other thing I’ll say about the UN, I got the impression just in the short time I was there that these people take their work very seriously. They really believe that they are working each day to make the world a better place, and that is something to applaud. Much of my exposure to the UN has come from my studies in economics, where we’re often looking at how UN development projects have been flawed or ill-conceived; this visit provided a good point of balance.
I got some great pictures, I have shots of myself in both the general assembly and also inside the chamber where the Security Council meets. I’ll post a link up to an online photo book once I get around to posting all the photos up (if I’m not too lazy about it …)

Nightlife

This is kind of a general note, in this my senior year, I’m trying to make a priority of going out more and spending less time in front of my books. And because of this shift, I’ve had some really good times lately.
When I first got here, I felt I had to focus on my studies, given that this place is so demanding. And I don’t think that was bad, but I also missed out on a lot. It’s fair to say that getting adjusted here was harder than I thought it would be, and I only now feel like I’m finally starting to get more comfortable with it. It would be tricky to try and recount all the neat things I’ve had a chance to do lately, and all the good people I’ve met, because it’s less about any one specific event and more about atmosphere overall, about a certain feeling that is closer to me now than before. I like this picture because it’s definitely but blurry around the edges, and is a good representation of a mood or a certain shade of feeling. It’s from a really cool sushi place down near Chelsea; I was there for a friend’s 30th birthday party. The food we had was amazing, and it was just a good time overall.

The Jewish Museum

NYC has a lot of famous museums, not all of which are of interest to me, but this one definitely was. And I was not disappointed at all.
I was planning to go anyways because I was curious about it, but I found out that they were having an exhibit of early comic book art by Jewish authors, which immediately drew me in because I have been (and really still am) a huge fan of comic books & graphic novels. Even though many of them can be pretty pulpy, I very much believe that the medium itself represents a serious and important art form, in the hands of a good author & storyboard artist.
Come to find out that a ton of the significant comic artists were Jewish. The creators of Superman, Bob Kane who created Batman, and a bunch of others whose names are escaping me, they had exhibits from all these guys, I’d never realized what a profound influence on the art form the Jewish community had. I feel like practically the only guy who wasn’t Jewish was Stan Lee, the creator of the X-men. Also found out that many of the early comics had storylines that pitted them against the Nazis; they had some great covers showing Captain America and the Human Torch fighting German stormtroopers. I hadn’t realized the extent that these books incorporated nationalistic tones.
Superman himself is interesting, as his Kryptonian name Kal-el literally means ‘all that is from God’. The exhibit described him as the ultimate triumph of the immigrant Jewish boy, which is an angle I’d never thought of before but completely makes sense knowing now the background of his creators.
Of course, comics wasn’t all the Jewish Museum had, and I thoroughly enjoyed the floors with the exhibits of artifacts from Jewish culture & history, which are far too rich & numerous to go into here. All that to say, I enjoyed my visit immensely, and may very well go back again.

The Guggenheim

So you have to figure, if you see enough museums, you’re bound to hit one that isn’t so great. This is the first one of those for me.
The Guggenheim is a bit tough to describe, but I think it’s accurate to say it’s like a museum of modern art & architecture. So, in fairness, part of the reason I didn’t enjoy it so much is that this sort of thing … isn’t my thing. I really enjoy more classical art, like what you’d find at the Louvre or the Met, but with this stuff I felt like I didn’t really ‘get’ it. I wish I’d had someone there to help explain the significance of what I was seeing. As it was, I felt very lost; it’s all somewhat deconstructionist. This shot is from the ground floor looking ‘up’; the museum isn’t very big, and it’s built in kind of a spiral.
I went with a couple of school friends, and when we got there we’d been told that Columbia students could get in for free, but the lady at the desk said we had to have the sticker for the current semester on our IDs, otherwise we’d have to pay the regular student rate of $15. I thought this was nonsense, so I waited until that lady left, went up to the counter and asked politely if there was anything else that could be done. After a bit of back & forth, the new girl decided to just refund us our money, which I very much appreciated.
So, if any of my classmates are reading, be sure you have the current sticker on your ID before you go!

GDP

OK, given that North Korea is a topic that is close to me, I figure I should say something about the recent developments there. And to be honest, I think this bit from the Onion sums it up best.
( It is fair to say that this criticism about how much GDP a nuclear weapon consumes could be fairly leveled at any country that has nukes, but most of those countries don’t have people starving by the millions; at least the nukes are within their budgets. )
To be honest, I was surprised by this act, for two reasons: firstly, because it seemed to be within their incentive to keep everyone guessing about the state of their weapons technology. International condemnation was swift, and all they seem to have done is put more people on the side of the US.
But the bigger & more immediate blunder seems to be the way it has rallied China and Japan. These two countries, for those who may not be familiar, have barely been on speaking terms diplomatically, mostly due to the fact that the previous prime minister of Japan Junichiro Koizumi (who only just stepped down) had been making annual visits to a shrine in Japan where some war criminals from WWII are buried, which infuriated China. The new prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, had just take the platform and there was some uncertainty about what his policies would be, though he seemed to want to mend fences with China. Then NK tests their bomb, and the Chinese and the Japanese instantly are able to build repoire around that issue, as both have vested interests in keeping the peninsula nuke free. The Chinese government saw the test as a huge snub, and responded with the harshest diplomatic language it has used towards the North yet. Given that China is NK’s only real friend, this seems to be a very bad miscalculation on Kim Jong Il’s part. Conversely, it also encourages US military buildup in Japan and in South Korea; the missile technology NK has isn’t really a threat to the mainland US, but Japan is certainly within range. Even though Japan has reaffirmed that it won’t seek it’s own nukes, the US has begun shipping Patriot anti-missile systems to them, and other weapons & technologies will probably follow.
So, it seems that NK had everything to gain from not testing and far more to lose by doing so, and it seems to have opted for the less strategically sound choice. It’s going to be very interesting to see how this all plays out. I think that a war is out of the question, but I hope that things can get resolved somehow so that the civilian population of NK won’t have to continue to suffer such brutal conditions.
( This picture is of course from the Onion, copyrighted by the Onion, made amazing by the Onion, nothing commercial is being bought or sold on this blog so please don't sue me by the Onion, am a broke-ass college student who likes the Onion, etc etc ... )

GDP, part 2

This is another bit from the Onion that I just find hysterical and expresses well (in my opinion) the madness of the current situation.

Fearless

Going to see a wide-release movie in a theater (as opposed to some small indie film) isn’t usually something I consider blog-worthy, but for this film I’m going to make an exception. I went to see Fearless about a week ago, and was really very impressed with it; I felt the movie said a number of important things in a clever and subtle sort of way.
** Note ** This entire post is going to contain potential spoilers from this point on, so if you’re planning to see the movie and don’t want to know anything about it, don’t read any more until you’ve seen it. If you’ve already seen it, you’re set. If you’re not planning to see it … you should change your mind. *s*
I’ve been a Jet Li fan for quite some time, and watch most of the movies he brings out. Interestingly, I tend to like his earlier films done in China far better than the US release ones. The big exception to this is Hero, but that one was a lot more like Crouching Tiger so it had the feel of a Hong Kong/foreign cinema film. As a tangent, Jet Li was actually offered the role of Li Mu Bai (the swordsman) in Crouching Tiger, but he’d made a promise to his wife that he wouldn’t do a film while she was pregnant, and so he honored that promise and the role went to Chow Yun Fat instead. This was all for the best for two reasons: it gave me an enormous amount of respect for Jet Li, and Crouching Tiger was better because Chow Yun Fat was better for that role, mostly because he was taller. Jet Li would have been about the same height as Zhang Ziyi, which would have made the dynamic between them much different. So it all worked out for the better.
Anyways, so this movie is about the heavily-fictionalized life of a real Chinese hero named Huo Yanjia, who lived during the earlier part of the 20th century. He was a martial arts master who defended China’s national honor during a time when China was seen to be weakening in the eyes of foreign national powers, and thus went down in the annals of Chinese history with great fame and renown.
Several things about this movie were very cleverly done, and made it far more than just a martial arts film, but the most notable one was the way they set up the tension between the Chinese and the Japanese. There is an ancient historical rivalry between these two countries, and prior to the N. Korean missile test, current relations between the countries were not fantastic; there had been some ugly outbreaks of nationalistic violence in China a few months ago. So, it’s very easy in film for either side to use the other as a convenient “bad guy”. This film didn’t really do that. There are two main Japanese characters, a fighter named Tanaka who is the final challenger for Huo, and a politician who sort of “hatches the plot” to humiliate the Chinese by defeating their fighter. All along though, the two fighters have only the highest respect for each other, and there are some neat interactions between them. When it becomes apparent that Huo might very well win, the Japanese politician has Huo’s tea poisoned during his match with Tanaka. It becomes quickly apparent that Huo is in bad shape, and Tanaka offers to let them resume the match later, but Huo chooses to press on. In the end, Huo gets in a blow that could have been potentially lethal, but chooses to pull his punch at the last minute before succumbing to the poison. Tanaka realizes this and declares Huo the winner. On the way out of the arena, Tanaka is confronted by the Japanese politician, who is freaking out because the Chinese have won and undone his plan. But Tanaka, realizing it was he who poisoned Huo’s tea, slams him up against a wall and tells him that he is a disgrace to Japan.
So the movie didn’t choose the Japanese people or the Japanese nation as “the bad guy”, it chose a Japanese person. And it set him in counterpoint to another Japanese person who was upright and honorable to the end. found this an extremely clever way of putting the plot together.
I also liked it because the movie was really about Huo’s evolution & journey as a man, from being a reckless hothead to being able to see a bigger picture beyond himself. There was a particularly touching scene where he goes to his parent’s grave and expresses something very much like repentance. He says to his father, “I understand now why you held back the final blow. You are the true champion of Tianjan (the province Huo lived in)” It was really neat.
Also this was a great film for Jet Li to be able to do as his final “martial arts” film, in giving this nod towards a great Chinese national hero and being able to make the film about more than just fighting. And he really was perfect for it since Jet Li has himself been a Chinese national wushu champion many times over in the past; since he is an expert practitioner of the form, it lends a realism that boots the film considerably.
The only small complaint is that they did play quite loose with the historical details, most notably that in the film Huo’s only daughter dies, meaning he would have no descendants, but in real life he had a few sons & daughters and has grandchildren who are alive today. I felt this was a bit silly, but given all the things I liked about the film, I’m willing to overlook it.
It’s a great piece, especially if you like a good story and good action. I recommend it highly.