Meet Kat Lukes, Blogger
Kat Lukes is a junior-year transfer student from Chicago studying Art History and French. She is a museum enthusiast, part-time doodler, and 6-time Lollapalooza attendee. Tim Curry is her spirit guide and she can probably kick your butt at Cards Against Humanity.
Film Review: 2014 Oscar Nominated Shorts, Live Action
Starting off with a sob and an uncomfortable laugh, Denmark’s "Helium" and the U.K.’s "The Voorman Problem" are the first two films in the theatrical release collection of the Oscar nominated live action shorts of 2014. They are reviewed by Nolan Miller.
"Helium" introduces us to the little blonde Danish boy named Alfred who is bedridden with a crippling and life-threatening disease. Enzo, a new janitor in the hospital, becomes friends with poor Alfred who reminds him of his own brother he lost as a young boy. With each successive visit to Alfred’s room we learn piece by piece of Helium, the collection of houses suspended by balloons where sick children go when they die to “get their strength back.” As Enzo gets close to the end of his fantastic tale complete with brief scenes of Alfred’s imaginings of Helium depicted on screen, Alfred's condition suddenly takes a turn for the worst. The short ends with Alfred, supposedly close to death, finally leaving for Helium by way of the gigantic, gold and red zeppelin called the “Helium Express.” An overly sentimental piece complete with a soundtrack oscillating back and forth between melancholy and hopeful tracks to shove its point home, "Helium" is designed to tug, no, yank violently at the heart strings of the audience.
"Helium" introduces us to the little blonde Danish boy named Alfred who is bedridden with a crippling and life-threatening disease. Enzo, a new janitor in the hospital, becomes friends with poor Alfred who reminds him of his own brother he lost as a young boy. With each successive visit to Alfred’s room we learn piece by piece of Helium, the collection of houses suspended by balloons where sick children go when they die to “get their strength back.” As Enzo gets close to the end of his fantastic tale complete with brief scenes of Alfred’s imaginings of Helium depicted on screen, Alfred's condition suddenly takes a turn for the worst. The short ends with Alfred, supposedly close to death, finally leaving for Helium by way of the gigantic, gold and red zeppelin called the “Helium Express.” An overly sentimental piece complete with a soundtrack oscillating back and forth between melancholy and hopeful tracks to shove its point home, "Helium" is designed to tug, no, yank violently at the heart strings of the audience.
Graphic Novel Review: Asterios Polyp
By Denis Sgouros
Asterios Polyp is a man haunted by the searing embers of his past; just ask the narrator, Ignazio, his still-born twin. Introduced looking broken and disheveled, Asterios lies alone on his king sized bed meant for two. He fidgets with his zippo, sounds of feminine ecstasy emanating from a television set its picture just out of frame, when a clap of thunder sparks the plot. It also sparks a fire in his apartment building. So it goes that on his 50th birthday, Asterios watches from out in the rain as all the mementos of his past go up in flames and he flees. He takes a wad of soggy $10 bills out of his wallet and purchases a greyhound ticket asking “how far would this take me?” The answer is Apogee.
Art Exhibit Review: “American Cool” at the National Portrait Gallery
By Sarah Shelton
After all the snow, class cancellations and the heart filled holiday, I took it upon myself to run way off campus to a much cooler place. I escaped to Chinatown where the National Portrait Gallery is putting famous photographs of famous people on display in the “American Cool” exhibit.Within the “American Cool” exhibit are original photographs of individuals from America’s past and present that fit into the nation’s idea of “cool.” To be cool is to something new and unattainable. Including everyone from celebrity rock stars, such as Jimmy Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, to timeless prose writers like Earnest Hemingway, the photographs offer an interpretation of what the term “cool” really means and how it is applied to a wide variety of people.
Meet Sarah Shelton, Blogger
Sarah Shelton is a junior transfer student pursuing a degree in Print Journalism and a minor in Creative Writing. She is an aspiring fashion journalist and hopes to one-day work for VOGUE UK. Sarah’s love is shared equally between cooking, stalking all things British, coffee drinking, and last but not least, play dates with her pug, Minnie.
Location Review: Busboys and Poets
By Kate Broadwell
I’ve recently made an effort to get off campus more to explore DC and discover some nice study spots that will motivate me to get things done. This past drizzly Wednesday I hopped on the Redline to head anywhere but AU to find a place where I could sit down and crank out my well-postponed philosophy paper. Enter Busboys and Poets, a renowned restaurant/coffee shop/bookstore that’s a ten-minute walk from the Gallery Place/Chinatown metro stop. Busboys and Poets boasts a low-key vibe and is most recognized for the variety of art related events hosted daily at its four separate locations, particularly poetry readings. Located on 5th and K, the building can’t be missed with its bright orange sign, colorfully painted crate flowerboxes, and metal yellow sculpture out front.Meet Kate Broadwell, Blogger
Kate Broadwell is a Freshman pursuing a major in International Relations. Her ideal future would be to live in a luxurious Paris flat, with a large dog, and furniture from Anthropology. Other than mummifying herself with soft blankets and binging on chocolate, she also enjoys taking photos and hiking.
Album Review: Xiu Xiu’s Angel Guts: Red Classroom
By Evan Mills
Xiu Xiu (the demon-baby of San Jose native Jamie Stewart) recently released their latest album Angel Guts: Red Classroom. It is a comically dark and suspenseful journey into a dank basement of Frankenstein-inspired electronic doom. The slow and simple midi rhythms drip lifelessly like water droplets and splatter into a puddle of cold, stagnant and a-tonal clambering. What Xiu Xiu does well is create a dark and enveloping mood that sounds like something very old and very cutting edge simultaneously. Their music does not follow specific and traditional song structures or have hooks or even distinguishable melodies, but rather generates an ominous vibe. They use repetition effectively and lure their victims/listeners into a cryptic trance. They then assault the unsuspecting listener with ludicrously offensive and vile lyrics that are worked in between the spaces of their electronic pings and drum kit smashes. The vocals give the otherwise soulless music a somewhat human element, so it is not accurate to describe Xiu Xiu as purely electronic. There are elements of traditional songwriting beneath the layers of synthesizer machinery. This album succeeds in being dark and creepy but is also sometimes hard to take seriously. I dig it for its dark, trance-like vibe. But I often grew tired of the over the top ghoul-like ranting.
Meet Evan Mills, Blogger
Evan Mills is a sophomore studying Film and Media Arts at AU. He is originally from Kensington, Maryland. Evan likes music and film and has a North Carolina license plate, a Maryland driver’s license, a Virginia address and a bed in DC. His insurance company hates him. Evan wants to work in visual media one day.
Art Exhibit Review: “Our America: the Latino Presence in American Art” at the American Art Museum
By Ruthie Zeltzer
A refreshing and eye-opening exhibit, “Our America: the Latino Presence in American Art”, celebrates the stories and experiences of American artists with Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican cultural roots. All text in the exhibit is written in both Spanish and English. Many of the actual pieces feature both languages and combine Latin and American cultural paradigms. The harmonious blending of cultures exemplifies the notion of shared identity claimed by both the artist and viewer.
Through numerous mediums, the exhibit explores themes such as the journey, heritage, tradition, family, and community. Using a variety of approaches, the viewer catches a glimpse of the cross-section of cultures that influence the artists’ own experiences as Americans. Sometimes painful, sometimes beautiful, and often both–the works evoke strong and sincere emotions.
Graphic Novel Review: Thor: God of Thunder, Vol. 1: The God Butcher
By Nolan Miller
Marvel is commonly considered as lighter, more fantastical, and at times even sillier than the only other comic book publisher that rivals its titanic size, namely DC. However, the company’s relatively new (2012) NOW! imprint (Superior Spider-Man, All New X-Men, Hawkeye) possesses both a darker tone and an exceptionally sophisticated writing style unheard of for Marvel since the beginning of the “adults only” MAX imprint back in 2001. The blonde-mained, Norse god of thunder Thor of recent movie fame was one of the first characters to get his Marvel NOW! reboot with the start of Thor: God of Thunder on November 14, 2012. The New York Times best-selling series is now on its twenty-first issue, published this past Wednesday. This review, however, will focus only on the first five issues, which were collected in the paperback graphic novel released earlier this month titled Thor: God of Thunder, Vol. 1: The God Butcher.
Meet Ruthie Zeltzer, Blogger
Ruthie Zeltzer is a sophomore perusing a double major in Law & Society and Latin American Studies & Spanish, which sounds like four things, but is only two. When she grows up, Ruthie hopes to be a Spanish-speaking lawyer. Some of her favorite hobbies include Harry Potter enthusiasm, working in her community garden back home in Massachusetts, and eating. Most importantly, Ruthie is both a dog and cat person.
Film Flashback: La Notte
By Jeoffrey Pucci
With the opening scene of La Notte (“The Night”) (1961), Michelangelo Antonioni (director) challenges how the modern subject is seen. Beginning within an empty reflection of an elevator, gliding down the side of a Modern skyscraper without emitting sound of its own, one must become aware to the metaphor of modernity: Alienated romance. Following the dark and restless L’Avvenutra (1960), La Notte is a troubled, sterile, and suffocating experience of an emotionally deadened marriage and its agonizing exploits throughout the intellectual circles of Milan. At the center of the film is the story of Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) and his wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau), an intellectually affluent couple, whose marriage appears predicated upon the empty promise of romantic love. Whereas the rural countryside of L’Avventura openly admits to its isolationism and restlessness, the urban landscape of La Notte assures the modern subject that there are abundant friendships and commonalities to be found within the Modern City. As the rural countryside of L’Avventura fades into the repetitive and gray cityscape of Milan, the immensity of Modernity’s industrialization returns as the central theme of Antonioni’s en-framing of Modernity. Unlike the docile and describable characters of L’Avventura, never giving birth to any sense of self-awareness or self-worth, the characters of La Notte bear the distinct marks of human beings. The film’s two main characters, Lidia and Giovanni, reluctantly attend a book signing for Giovanni’s latest book, when he and Lidia have the opportunity to involve and experience themselves with other affluent members of the intelligentsia, they are forced to confront their utter lack of interest in each other. However, as members of the educated elite, are they not bound to each-other by personal choice? How could there be a desire not to want to spend time together if they chose to be together?Film Flashback: Red Desert
By Jeoffrey Pucci
What we encounter in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) is the most paradoxical reading of modernity offered yet, which presents us with a final conclusion to his previous trilogy of films (L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse) . Antonioni assures our most basic relationships with an industrialized and modern conception of Western Civilization; we are swept across the rise of heavy industry, observe an increase in existential alienation in social relations, and experience the development of ecological problems. We know this. The uncanny and yet even distinctly modernized form of social society is what we are now. This is familiar to what we experience when we imagine ourselves traveling from the rural country into the urban center: the slow reduction of natural forms, the injection of more and more geometrically consigned shapes, the uncannily feeling of parking our car on a ubiquitous street, and the sense of anxiety we feel for being “away” from our “world” for too long, perhaps missing key or essential developments there while we were away. This momentary injection back into modernity’s preconditioned modeling is experienced in only its purest emotional form: despair. However, this is how we experience modernity; for all of its developments, it is the landscape we call home. And thus, we are brought to Antonioni’s most mature theme, which we only were able to catch glimpses of in his previous trilogy: one should not simply observe modernity, nor should one try to apply old traditions or ideas to modernity, but rather, one must adapt to modernity.
Film Flashback: They Live
By Jeoffrey Pucci
Film and cinema provide modes of explanation in the most varied domains, because they are often for us the site of profound change and reflection, crucial for self-development and experiencing what we call “the self.” Perhaps a film occurs in a manner similar to that of an “event.” For each of us it is easy enough to show that the concept of who we are and the question of how we became "ourselves” is as old as the history of the Western tradition itself. Nevertheless, the experience of molding the self is often shared — up to this point, I have sought to stake out it, marking and drawing us together into a certain nexus of experience. The function of this shared or lived experience is not to disorient us, but rather, to orient us together, balancing and organizing our horizons of meaning toward a common meridian. If each film we watch may be explained as a certain puncturing or rupturing of our distinct horizons, let us endeavor to conceive of this “event” as a profound return or remembrance of our commonality.Magazine Spotlight: Malaka Gharib and Runcible Spoon
By Tiffany Wong
Revered by The New York Times and The Washington Post, D.C.’s own humble food magazine has been making the rounds around the country and rapidly increasing in popularity. The collage-crazy Runcible Spoon is completely handmade, with letters cut out to make headlines, news columns individually pasted in, and pages layered with scrap photos that have been harvest over time. To give you an idea, in its latest issue called The Cheap Issue a haphazardly cut photo of a surprised Nicki Minaj is displayed on the same page as a satirical article, “Always Thank the Chef,” and a vintage stock photo of a boy in a lobster costume.I recently met up with Malaka Gharib, the ‘zine’s creator and driving force, to talk about her beloved Runcible Spoon.
What made you want to make a food ‘zine rather than any other ‘zine?
When I was growing up, I thought that music was cool, fashion was cool, but when I became an adult, I was no longer interested in that stuff. I was interested in food.
Our Fall 2013 Issue is online!
We're at the beginning of a new semester and getting ready to bring you another issue of AmLit. While you wait, take a minute to browse through our issue from last semester. It's a good one!
