Life, Loss, Touch, and Laugh

Neither commanding nor blatant, Pushing Daisies is a slightly off-beat sort of funny. The latest project from Bryan Fuller, the man behind Dead Like Me, it is without doubt witty and well-written; the aesthetic is reminiscent of that of a Tim Burton film (one of said reviewer’s top directors), and the music accompaniment, created by Jim Dooley (who’s composed for everything from Harry Potter and Spiderman 3 movie trailers to entire film soundtracks for The Da Vinci Code and Madagascar) is melodic and instrumental, which, combined with the Lemony Snicket-esque narration by Jim Dale, plays well into the "forensic fairy-tale" nature of the show.

The premise for the show involves a young boy’s realization that he has the ability to return life to the dead.

At age nine, through a rather unfortunate encounter involving the death of his dog, Digby, Ned discovers that with a single touch, he can bring the deceased back to life. However, he shortly thereafter learns that this remarkable gift comes with some very explicit exceptions. While he can restore life, he can only do so for a minute without imposing death on another like-being in the area, unless he touches the being again, at which point they are dead forever. Both of these lessons are learned rather tragically, though the deaths of his own mother, and the father of his romantic interest, the girl next door, Charlotte, who he endearingly calls Chuck.

As his mother was baking a pie when she died, Ned, nineteen years later, owns and works in a pie shop, called The Pie Hole. He is aptly often referred to as "The Pie Maker" in the narration.

Through a chance encounter, Ned’s gift is revealed to Private Investigator, Emerson Cod, and the two become business partners: they join forces to solve murders and split the reward money. All is well until the deceased is none other than his childhood love, Chuck. After questioning her, Ned cannot bring himself to put her back to death and consequently re-falls in love with her. They accordingly must endure their love without physical affection, an interesting twist of nature.

The show approaches the reality of life, death, and human contact without being overbearing: while other shows (even by this very creator) handling the subjects have been relatively quick to be taken off air, Pushing Daisies’ approach is slightly more optimistic, and its wit, humor, and romance allow it to broach the topics without excessive morbidity.

While it isn’t difficult to grow weary of (or annoyed by) Chuck’s at times overly played eagerness and naivete, the consistency of Ned’s charm more than makes up for it. The characters are well-thought, well-developed, and well-played and it is easy to find oneself growing attachments and returning weekly.

A Vision of What We Don't Appreciate

In my Political Philosophy class, the boy I sit behind brings his laptop everyday. And everyday I watch him start off taking notes on lecture and slowly slide into checking WebCT to checking his e-mail to lurking around Myspace. I, myself, literally only bring my laptop to class when I distinctly know that I will not be paying attention to lecture and will instead be working on something else.

"A Vision of Students Today" addresses the ironies of technology and the advancements and setbacks it produces, and alludes to the ever-prevalent decline of the American education system. Overpriced, irrelevant textbooks, impersonal learning settings, and lack of engaging circumstance riddle universities throughout the country and promote not a pursual of higher education and informed masses, but a system in which people work harder to get out of work than that which it would require if they would just give in to the work allocated.

Inequity is quite possibly the root of the greatest problems plaguing us. In the US, kids go to university to party, not to learn, while almost everywhere else in the world education is seen as the greatest privilege and is prioritized in accordance. The part of the video clip I was most compelled by was the statements "over 1 billion people make less than $1 a day" and "this laptop costs more than some people in the world make in a year." In this country we put ourselves in thousands and thousands of dollars of debt for an over glorified four year party while around the world people are living on almost nothing and still working harder than us. We have more opportunity than anyone, yet we are the least likely to appreciate it, and to take advantage of it.

Then there’s the nearly equally absurd fact that education has become a profit industry: what is a basic human right is now priced to force the majority into debt, necessitating loans to cover tuition, texts, and housing. New editions of textbooks are put out faster than anything even remotely necessary and student fees are increasing semesterly at universities around the country. Administrators are getting raises while professors barely make enough to get by in this economic climate. The discrepancies are vast and unjust and little contained.

Technology allows us access to so much and yet we, the masses, use it only to distract ourselves. Meanwhile, people without the privilege that we, here, have work endlessly to ensure that they can take full advantage of the opportunities they receive. While advancements in technology further our downward spiral of non-effort, it is not the technology that needs to be curbed, rather our culture of ingratitude and fear of effort.

A Million Huge Pieces

Bringing in fresh ingredients on the daily, Pieces Pizza by the Slice on 21st and Capital is all-around the best pizza place I’ve found in Sacramento. Huge, cheap slices, (great) beer on tap, funny staff, and amazingly convenient hours make Pieces the place to go for a good time or an after-bar slice.

Open from 11am-11pm Tuesday through Thursday, 11am-2:30pm Fridays, and 12pm-2:30am on Saturdays, this cash only hole-in-the-wall (that somehow everyone in Midtown seems to know about) offers New York style slices as big as the paper plates they’re served on for under $5. Their pesto is amazing, and if you’re not in the mood for the sun-dried tomato and feta cheese variation they offer, ask them to put some pineapple on top before throwing it in the oven. It is superb. Or if you desire a non-pesto slice, I’m willing to bet almost anything that you won’t regret the pesto sticks, which are massive and fantastic. And if you’re craving something sweet, they also serve fresh baked cake and pie.

Fat Tire and Arrogant Bastard, quite possibly my two favorite beers, as well as a few others are offered on tap, and a $13 pitcher frequently becomes an $8 pitcher if you or a member of your party know the person working, or just make a good joke.

As enticing as the food, ambiance is huge at Pieces. The person serving you is more likely to have dreadlocks than a tucked in shirt, and there’s a high likelihood that she will not be wearing a bra, but I’ve yet to encounter any staff who’s even moderately unpleasant. Show up in the afternoon in the middle of the week and you could be the only people eating in. Come back on a Friday or Saturday night at 2am and you’ll have trouble finding seating to accommodate your group. Generally, though, it’s easy to start chatting with the various other patrons (the place being highly popular among the college and alternative crowds) and to make friends or share tables even.

The walls are muraled and covered in flyers for everything from slam poetry events to concerts and shows to house parties on Second Saturday. In fact, when a certain Director of Membership for the College Democrats did not get the okay to post some..slightly controversial flyers promoting the club on campus, she took them over to Pieces, among other student-frequented places, and was promptly permitted to put them up.

While the college may not appreciate satiric and bitter slogans like "Because a bunch of rich old white men don’t know shit about my uterus;" and posted with a large picture of a marijuana leaf, "Because being a Democrat these days is basically like having a club card;" proceeded by "Just kidding. How inappropriate! Join the party with a sense of humor;" both the staff and those who frequent the by-the-slice pizzeria most certainly do.

If you’re in the mood for personality with your pizza, buzzed or sober, make it a point to stop by Pieces at least once in the course of your Midtown adventures. Second Saturday is always a great chance to head over, and there’s little better in life than art, free wine, great pizza, and great company. Don’t forget to stop at an ATM beforehand, and especially don’t forget to say YES! to the fresh garlic added to your slice.

You YouTube Too.

YouTube really is engaging; like when a student is trying to research a column and ends up getting sucked in for an hour and a half watching the “don’t tase me, bro!” video (again) and a bunch of footage of Brand New’s recent tours (Jesse Lacey and Kevin Devine together is like Jesus handing you a huge, delightful cake frosted with glorious music and silly banter).

The site, whose tag line is “Broadcast Yourself,” is a video-sharing page where people can upload, view, and share different clips. Everything from commercials to tv and movie clips to documentaries to video-blogs to dubbed versions of the movie 300 with voice-over describing why “Steve” can’t come to the party (something the aforementioned student’s roommate made her watch).

The site does have time and content restrictions on what can be posted: potentially offensive materials, like pornography, are not allowed. However, there is the similar, tactfully named PornoTube. References to this before class will make you lots of friends and ensure you will always have someone to sit with. Allegedly.

Wikipedia offers a motherload of information about the site. Everything from basic background info (formed by three former PayPal employees, originally based out of a garage) to stats on users (20 million visitors a month- 44% female, 56% male; most commonly 12-17 age range) to how much it was acquired for by Google in November of last year ($1.65 billion in Google stock) to the copyright struggles endured (which were vastly prevalent and inspired the time limits).

Also, there is discussion of YouTube’s role in the worlds of both music and politics: its goal of offering every music video ever made while still remaining free (in 18 months from announcement in August 06), as well as the vast role it has in band promotion, as experienced by OK Go, who got an MTV Movie Awards performance out of their radio hit, “Here it Goes Again” (you’ve seen it, it’s the one with the treadmills).

As for politics, it’s really remarkable; the internet has such an incredible capacity to reach people, which aids to inform and involve them in matters of consequence. The power of the internet is really being taken advantage of in the political arena. Because it offers immediate accessibility to information and the ever-changing political forum, it is being used to do everything from give widespread access to campaign videos put out by both politicians and supporters, to engaging people, especially the youth, who are the least prevalent voters, by involving them in the political process. On July 23, CNN aired a debate among the Democratic candidates for president in which the questions fielded were picked from a pool submitted through YouTube. "Because of the use of technology to aggregate questions from a wide range of constituents, the forum has been referred to as the 'the most democratic Presidential Debate ever.'"

YouTube is one of the greatest things about the internet (Wikipedia, Facebook, and Moveon.org also falling in the category). It not only provides an outlet for social expression, but it is working to mobilize and inform the masses. It is taking advantage of the vast power of the interweb and, at its best, using it to bring about positive, tangible action and change. Or at least keeping us in the know with lonelygirl15.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube

The Ones We Aspire to Be Like: Profile of a Columnist

Mary “Mhaire” Fraser is, undoubtedly, a badass. Eloquent, sharp, and outrageously educated, she not only has her own blog/ zine, Debutante Gone Wrong (http://www.debutantegonewrong.com) and writes a regular column for Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies (http://womenst.library.wisc.edu/fcmain.htm), but she is a professor of psychology and women’s studies at DeAnza, a community college in Cupertino (a suburb of San Jose), and Stanford University. Her research examines social identity and gender issues, and focuses on leadership issues and spirituality, adolescent women, and attitudes about dating, with Third Wave feminist identity and pop culture as special interests. She is a columnist, a feminist, an activist, and a truly excellent thinker of our time.

Having grown up in North Carolina, Mhaire attended the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she received her first undergraduate degree; she moved back home upon graduation and realized that she wanted to know more (of both academics and the world) and so she decided upon coming to California for grad school at the University of Southern California (USC), from which she received two masters and her PhD. She also has another undergraduate degree, as well as other masters from CSU Sonoma. All the while in her course of study, and well after, she up kept her interest and activity in the zine world, helping to put together everything from art shows to poetry slams, and music venues, and organized a number of feminist gatherings in which a "Zine Trade" was a key event. Clearly glorious and utterly cool, but even more extraordinary (in my own opinion), she teaches a class called the Fundamentals of Social Activism (how effing cool!!!).

I was directed to Mhaire’s faculty web page by my best friend, who is majoring in psychology and has taken a few of her courses, one of which he is currently enrolled in (he adores her). He had told me of her inclusions of everything from activism to zines in her social psych curriculum, a class he took last quarter, and upon looking at her page, I saw that she was a regular columnist. I was more than interested. I looked into the publication she writes for, Feminist Collections, which is put out four times a year (thus, a quarterly) by the University of Wisconsin-Madison; from the above link, I learned that the publication offers “news of the latest print and audiovisual resources for research and teaching in women's studies,” everything from book and film reviews to hard-to-find materials like pamphlets and reports. It contains “thoughtful articles by experts explor[ing] women's publishing, Internet resources, library organization, archives, and other tools for feminist scholarship.”

The site also linked several of Mhaire’s articles, a series of well-written, insightful zine reviews, ranging everywhere from "Zine and Heard: Fringe Feminism and the Zines of the Third Wave," a three part series in which she reviewed not only better funded, consistent zines, but many of the cut and paste, do-it-yourself ones that people had sent her and that she’d acquired over time, to "Rebel Song: Feminist Zines from the (Southern) Third Wave," in which she exemplifies some of the ideal zines from her own rooted region, to "Queens of the Zine Scene: Best Lines," in which she picked some of the best lines from various zines that she has been reading; everything from a journal entry to a physically present but mentally father, reading "bye. I love you. Call me. I'll write;" to "If I am made in God's image, then God has a fat ass;" to "Why, if I am so young, do I feel as if my life has passed me by?"

I, myself, having dabbled with interest in the zine and underground writing and music scenes, had actively sought out great reads both in print and online over the past six or seven years, and have come across a fair few that I truly adore and keep up with. So you can imagine my overwhelming and mind-blowing surprise when I found Mhaire’s name attached to a site that I’ve been reading for far longer than I’ve known that she’s my best friend’s professor (!!!). The aforementioned Debutante Gone Wrong is a witty, charming, smart blog that I’ve long loved, and come to find that it is, in fact, actually a product of a paper zine that Mhaire started long ago in North Carolina, which she developed online. I have long, unknowingly, been a fan, and have genuinely respected and enjoyed her musings and writings. Small world doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Mhaire Fraser is exactly the kind of writer that you want your daughter, sister, mother, friends, and self to read. She is self and otherwise utterly aware, and engaging in her writing. In speaking of herself, she wrote, “I discovered that when all is said and done, ideas are my addiction. The new ones and the ones to which there will never be solid answers even after endless nights of wine and Blues.” Mhaire is (presumably) in her early to mid-thirties, and still very much alive and operative with the glory of ideas, good writing, the spread of knowledge, and impactual activism.

Security's Fight Against Liberty

Forty-eight catholic high school girls accompanied by six chaperones on a trip to Europe and who is the sole person to be "randomly" searched at the airport? How shocking, the only middle-eastern person on the trip, yours truly. Yes, my hair is dark, my facial features clearly ethnic, and my last name ten letters long with more consonants in a row than most of anything found in the Americas, but does that mean that suddenly it’s ok for utter hassle and inconvenience? September 11 was a day of inexplicable horror and atrocity. There is no doubt of this. But the security actions that have been implemented since then compromise the liberties of the people who are supposedly being protected. Sorry, but I don’t make it a habit to carry around box-cutters or bombs, at the airport, or anywhere else. And no, I don’t plan on flying an airplane into anything, or sprinkling anthrax on those who irritate me. I’m the avid smoker who doesn’t even bring matches in her carry-on for fear of giving even the slightest justification for being excessively searched. Yet for some reason, of the nineteen flights that I have been on in the past six years, I was "randomly" searched twelve times. How random.

The Christmas of 2001, my family went to Florida. The two and a half hour security check that we had to endure that almost made us miss our flight, not so merry. Finding slips of paper from Homeland Security notifying me that my checked baggage was searched on my way to the East Coast this summer? Boy do I feel like they’re really fighting the terrorists. My best friend and I nearly missing our flight the next morning because I forgot that there was a metal clip holding the flower in my hair which therefore, of course, warranted a forty-five minute search of everything in both of our carry-ons, plus a full body scan in some sort of creepy box of detection. Ohh our tax dollars being put to good use. But I suppose it makes sense. I mean, Jesus, I’m a twenty-year old college student, I’m really threatening the national security by flying across the country to visit old friends and see the first night of the singer of my favorite band’s solo tour. Look out! The most threatening thing about me is my liberal ideology, and the fact that I still remember the notions of liberty and personal freedoms upon which this country was founded. Guess what, you’re not gonna find that tucked away in my carry-on.

I love airports. I love traveling and flying and visiting new places. But try throwing out a $120 bottle of perfume because it was .2 ounces over the allotted amount of liquid you can bring in your carry-on (for a forty-five minute flight for which you didn’t check any luggage). They’re only now letting us bring travel size toiletries again; before, it didn’t matter if you were on a fourteen hour flight, no deodorant meant no deodorant, gel or solid, so you inevitably became that guy who smells like b.o. Or worse, you sat next to the guy who smells like b.o. and there’s no escape. I am waiting for the day that some asshole tries to make a bomb out of an iPod and then they ban those too.

The fact of the matter is that many of the precautions being taken in the name of security do great to appear as though our government is protecting us, when in actuality, they are little more than vast inconveniences for the general public. Random searches are more than deliberate and security measures are being based on stereotypes. Is this the kind of protection we want? For myself, the answer is most certainly not.