intertribal | Entries tagged with class

the most overrated "crisis" ever.

"Students complain about lack of sleep, stomach pain and headaches, but doctors and educators also worry that stress tied to academic achievement can lead to depression, eating disorders and other mental health problems." Good. Who the fuck cares about, you know, arsenic in the freaking drinking water? Here's the real health crisis of our times.

Either go on medication (what I did) and/or suck it up, or don't apply to Harvard. Having taken most of my classes at Columbia this semester I have become increasingly sure that there is pretty much no difference between the kid that gets into the Ivy League school and the kid that doesn't.

I have some hella dumb classmates, and I was rejected from their school. Prestige is all B.S. Even at Barnard, prestige is B.S. I was at the Torchbearers reception sitting at a table with a filthy-rich alumna (and by filthy-rich I mean, filthy-rich off her husband and parents) who was talking about how great her sons' prep academy is - Dalton School, part of the Ivy Preparatory League, also known as the Children's University School, whose alumni include such "notable" people as Chevy Chase, Anderson Cooper, Claire Danes, Christian Slater, and Sean Lennon (shameful really. Horace Mann's got Ira Levin and Elliot Spitzer, Trinity's got the McEnroes, and Fieldston's got Sofia Coppola, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Stephen Sondheim. Dalton's the black sheep by comparison!). Why, the teachers there are so wonderful, all the kids pool together money when they graduate (and by pool together money I mean, their parents drop off limo-loads at the front doors) and give a gift to the school, which is not by any stretch of the imagination lacking in funds. But you know, said this Barnard alumna, quality should be rewarded with monies.

And as soon as she said the name of the school, Dalton, I immediately thought of this biographical story I read in a book called 33 Things Every Girl Should Know. Cliched title for a book, sounds like it came from the American Girl Company, but those stories, told by adult women, seriously are 33 Things Every Girl Should Know. I got that book when I was about 11 - it came from my uncle (!) - and I think it really influenced how I grew up and the beliefs I adopted. That and People, by Peter Spier, which is hands down the best book I have ever read.

The story in question was called... well, I don't remember. Follow Your Passion, I think. It's not important. But it was about this girl whose mother really wanted her to go to Dalton School, because it was such a good school, and they're at the interview, and the girl is thinking about the girls she's seen in the classes, the perfect pretty girls with jelly shoes, and when the interviewer asks her why she wants to go to Dalton she snaps her chewing gum and says, "Lady, I don't. I wanna go to public school with my friends." Her mother is horrified and clearly she doesn't get into Dalton. Fast-forward twenty years and she's gotten herself to a prestigious college of some sort (Yale? I think...) and is constantly having to tell the people she meets that she went to some prep school she made up so she isn't socially ostracized, when really all she wants to say is, "Lady! I was a Dalton reject!"

What Classic Movie Are You?
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My adviser is on hunger strike. Orange juice and water. He's sixty-nine and I'm always afraid when I knock on his office door and he doesn't reply, he has died. He's joining the other students - four, now, I believe - who are on strike at Columbia, demanding various things in response to the Manhattanville expansion, various hatecrimes that seem to feed off each other, and a Core dominated by Western philosophy. It's impossible to tell what the students are thinking because the comments are so divided. A bunch of them seem angry with the strikers for being snotty, spoiled liberal brats who are ungrateful for their Ivy League education - "if you don't like the Core, then leave", and that goes along with the people who readily say they do not want to learn about non-Western concepts and resent being forced to learn it (which is what the Columbia Spectator surprisingly advocates in an editorial). And in response to my adviser's joining the strike, there's the people who think it's a disgrace that a professor would sink to that level (and he is thus obviously not an "educator"), and there's the people who hate that he's a Barnard professor and think it just proves that the strikers don't speak for Columbia - "go back to your side of the street". Comments like that alienate me, suffice it to say. I sometimes feel like, fine, maybe I don't care what Columbia does, if we're not part of them and they're not part of us, let them deal with their own mess. If only anyone who sees my future diploma won't associate me with Columbia. They actually sort of prove one of the things the strikers say about the climate of Columbia: marginalization. Does this surprise me? No.

I'm not an activist and I know that. But I agree with the people on strike. But I don't think their fasting will change anything, partly because the bulk of Columbia, it does seem, is against them, because apparently no one cares and they don't want the Core to change. One reasonable editorial argue that striking creates an all-or-nothing climate that forbids reasoned dialogue - and I see that point, but the author also based it off writing by Edmund Burke, who is a *expletive* elitist on the side of the French government during the French revolution, and my least favorite political theorist. I highly doubt that the commenters who criticize the strikers come from working class families themselves.

I would have learned nothing at all if I didn't think students could affect change. They can, especially in third world countries under authoritarian governments. They will usually have to pay for it dearly, in deaths and disappearances, but they can sometimes be the tipping point. That's what got Suharto out of office - the riots that began after the police shot several student protesters dead in Jakarta (before then they were disappeared on the down-low, or just clubbed or given tear gas). Part of the reason I really love Akira is its depiction of various layers of political involvement of youth in New Tokyo. But the thing is, New York City is not a third world country, and Columbia has money. That and nobody cares - by which I mean, nobody is emotionally invested. They're vastly different circumstances. The system here is democratic-bureaucratic, with all our nerve endings burned off. The system there was authoritarian-chaotic, with all their nerve endings exposed.

In other news, biological entities have tendencies to swarm, leading scientists to try to program swarming into robots: "If you knock out some individual, the algorithm still works. The group still moves normally."

Current Music: "Small Time Short Away" - Massive Attack

At the dawn of the millennium, the nation collapsed. At 15% unemployment, 10 million were out of work. 800,000 students boycotted the school. The adults lost confidence, and fearing the youth, eventually passed the ''Millennium Educational Reform Act'' AKA: The BR Act...
- Battle Royale

Paul Richards, the principal of Needham High School, wants his kids to be less stressed out. As part of the S.O.S. - Stressed Out Students nationwide campaign, he has them do yoga. He stopped publishing the honor roll in the newspaper. He's instituted homework-free weekends. He wants the kids to have better coping skills. Better social skills. "So they don't fall apart if they get a B-minus." President of the PTA Connie Barr says constant stress makes it difficult to learn - but on the other hand, parents will likely stop supporting Principal Richards if the suburban affluent high school's high-achievers stop being so high-achieving. Richards himself admits he'd be run out of town without "the results". But this seems to run somewhat counter to the logic of a Needham High English teacher, David Smokler, who tells his students, "When you graduate from college, no one is going to care where you went [to college]... If they do care, you don't want to work for that boss."

I can see why Paul Richards gets hate mail. He's clearly one of the dumbest principals in the country. It's complete b.s. that your employer won't care where you went to college. And if you don't want to work for an employer that does care, then cross out the best law firms, medical residencies, Fortune 500 companies, think tanks, fast-track government jobs. Sure, you'll get a mediocre law firm, in your hometown. If that's all you want, then fine. Feel free to take it. But let's put it this way. Don't complain when India and China not only steal the low-wage low-skill jobs, but the high-wage high-skill ones (here, it's already begun: Hello, India? I Need Help With My Math). Hope you're happy with becoming technologically dependent on Japan and South Korea. And good luck with Russia - they're building nuclear capacity. It's alright. Go to your job around the corner. Help your neighbors through their divorce. Here's a hint (I know economics is too stressful for your slender, tender sensibilities): when the dollar plummets in value, things get more expensive for you, not cheaper. You don't get a raise - you get fired.

I was talking to Dipa the other week about America's "culture of complacency". We are the anti-Asia in that sense. Americans don't want to be hard on their kids academically. They don't want to push. High achievement and monetary or bureaucratic success is demonized in pulp fiction (the small-town girl who makes it big in New York always gets corrupted by the city and has to go home and marry a carpenter to heal herself and repent for her sins). And complacency - contentment with what you have - correlates directly with ignorance. If you're content, why should you care about anyone else? If you're satisfied, then go to sleep "to the rhythm of the war drums".

Do I think the U.S. should go the Japan route, then, and become a Battle Royale that really does encourage suicide due to school stress? (the S.O.S. administrators cite high suicide rates in their rich little neighborhoods... then say that those suicides had nothing to do with stress - no kidding?) No, obviously not. In fact, I say, let Paul Richards run his experiment. Let all suburban affluent high schools partake in it. Let their kids become fitter, happier, and more productive pigs in cages. The rest of us - the "subaltern" teenagers, the poor teenagers, the minority teenagers - we're going to keep doing homework. And we're going to take over, not just the U.S., but the world. We already know that nothing comes out of being with normal people - Toonami taught us that. For us, academic achievement is all we have. We don't have the resources and connections the Needham High kids do. Our parents aren't even on the P.T.A. Bringing home straight As is life because we don't have athletics or student government or popularity. And yeah, we do hate it when kids who have had it all handed to them with private tutors and accelerated programs compete with us for colleges, for internships, for jobs, for life.

So, if all the "hegemonic" kids take themselves out of the competition, awesome. More room at the top.

Current Music: "Taxi (Ave Maria) Jacknife Lee Remix" - 28 Days Later OST

I saw a fruit bat last night. It was in the tree I was sitting under by the Yarra River. Good-sized, one of those cute ones with the fox faces. It was crawling amid the branches, looking for fruit, presumably, not minding the party boat-barges filled with teenagers that had just come back from a day at the races of the Melbourne Cup with their silly hats and puffy cocktail dresses. The bat fit better with the slowly spinning ferris wheel behind it, an older and cheaper pleasure. Supposedly Coney Island is going out of business and its rickety amusement park may have to close - too bad, in my opinion.

I also went into a casino for the first time in my life. I only stayed ten minutes. ID was not demanded from me - "not you, ma'am, you're okay" - and although at first I felt out of place, in jeans, it became apparent that all the rich socialites weren't actually gambling. They went to private rooms and restaurants and chocolate stores. The slot machines and card tables were populated with people from my socioeconomic class, or maybe even lower. Unhappy, desperate people continuously pressing buttons to make little fruit shapes swirl on a screen. It's like a nirvana of capitalism - monetary amounts are posted all over, 5 c, $30, and everything glows and blinks - cheap and superficial. It's fascinating, probably because I'm so detached from it. Even if I go to Vegas after graduation, I swear to God, I won't gamble. I was born in the year of the Rabbit, after all, and Rabbits don't gamble. Occasionally there's the sound of coins in a downpour as somebody wins something, but it's rare. The house always wins. The bouncers are black or Latin, the casino workers and waiters Asian. Behind me was a man on a cellphone: "I'm somewhere in the casino, I don't know where I am."

From "An Adventure in Paris" by Guy De Maupassant. Abbreviated.

The woman whose adventure I am about to relate was a little person from the provinces, who had been insipidly respectable till the moment when my story begins. Her life, which was on the surface so calm, was spent at home, with a busy husband and two children, whom she brought up in the fashion of an irreproachable mother. But her heart beat with unsatisfied curiosity and with longing for the unknown. She was continually thinking of Paris, and read the fashionable papers eagerly. The accounts of parties, of dresses, and various entertainments, excited her longing; but, above all, she was strangely agitated by those paragraphs which were full of double meaning, by those veils half raised by clever phrases which gave her a glimpse of culpable and ravishing delights. From her home in the provinces she saw in Paris an apotheosis of magnificent and corrupt luxury.

[she goes to Paris]

And then she set out on a voyage of discovery. She went up and down the boulevards, without seeing anything except roving and licensed vice. She looked into the large cafes, and read the Agony Column of the Figaro, which every morning seemed to her like a tocsin, a summons to love. But nothing put her on the track of those orgies of actors and actresses; nothing revealed to her those temples of debauchery which opened, she imagined, at some magic word, like the cave of Ali Baba or the catacombs of Rome, where the mysteries of a persecuted religion were secretly celebrated.

[she sees a famous author in a store, Jean Varin, who is contemplating buying a figurine for a thousand francs]

"No, it is too expensive," he said.

And thereupon, she, seized by a kind of mad audacity, came forward and said, "What will you charge me for the figure?"

The shopkeeper, in surprise, replied, "Fifteen hundred francs, Madame."

"I will take it."

The writer, who had not even noticed her till that moment, turned round suddenly. He looked her over from head to foot, with half-closed eyes, observantly, taking in the details like a connoisseur. She was charming, suddenly animated by the flame which had hitherto been dormant in her. And then, a woman who gives fifteen hundred francs for a knickknack is not to be met with every day.

And she, filled with emotion, continued, "Well, if either today, or at any other time, you change your mind, you may have this Japanese figure. I bought it only because you seemed to like it."

[they spend the day together]

He was obliged to tell her the names of all the well-known women they crossed, pure or impure, with every detail about them - their mode of life, their habits, their homes, and their vices.

They went into a large cafe on the boulevard which he frequented, and where he met some of his colleagues, whom he introduced to her. She was half beside herself with pleasure, and kept saying to herself, "At last! At last!"

They went to the Vaudeville with a pass, thanks to him, and, to her great pride, the whole house saw her sitting by his side in the stalls.

As soon as they were in the flat, she undressed quickly and retired without saying a word. Then she waited for him, cowering against the wall. But she was as simple as it was possible for a provincial lawyer's wife to be, and he was more exacting than a pasha with thirty wives, so that they did not really get on at all.

At last, however, he went to sleep. The night passed, its silence disturbed only by the tic-toc of the clock, while she, lying motionless, thought of her conjugal nights. By the light of a Chinese lantern, she lay nearly heartbroken and stared a the little fat man lying on his back, his round stomach puffing out the bedclothes like a balloon filled with gas. He snored with the noise of a wheezy organ pipe, with prolonged snorts and comic chokings. His few hairs profited by his sleep to stand up in a very strange way, as if they were tired of having been glued for so long to that pate whose bareness they were trying to cover. And a thin stream of saliva trickled from the corner of his half-opened mouth.

And she ran out of the room and down the stairs into the street.

The street-cleaners were already at work, sweeping the road, sending their brushes along the gutters, bringing together the rubbish in neat little heaps. With movements as regular as the motion of mowers in a meadow, they swept the refuse before them in broad semi-circular strokes. She met them in every street, like dancing puppets, walking automatically with a swaying motion, and it seemed to her as if something had been swept out of her; as if her over-excited dreams had been brushed into the gutter, or down into the sewers. So she went home, out of breath and very cold, and all that she could remember was the sensation of the motion of those brooms sweeping the streets of Paris in the early morning.

When she got to her room, she threw herself onto her bed and cried.

My top 5 characters of the patriotic-anti-alien-special-effects fest movie Independence Day, which I watched tonight with Lucia, Kim, kettle corn and vanilla yogurt. Yeah, I know it's a bad movie. I really don't care - I enjoy it anyway. And high-brow snots can just kiss my ass when it comes to this one.

1. Will Smith (Steve): easily the most awesome person in the whole movie. He really goes well with aliens. From the rejection from NASA ("you're never gonna fly a space shuttle if you marry a stripper", as his friend says), to the Star Wars-inspired chase scene through the desert culminating in him punching the alien ("Welcome to Earth!" - the most famous line of the movie), from dragging it through the desert and leading all the trailer people to Area 51, to the final Earth-saving flight when he finally gets to see the stars, he is amazing, a hotshot in every sense of the word. So wonderfully urbane and working-class ("I'm a little anxious to get up there and whup E.T.'s ass"), has practically adopted his girlfriend's kid, funny, down-to-earth, honest ("you think you can do all that bullshit you just said?" he asks Jeff Goldblum when the latter doubts if he can fly the alien craft), and superstitious about his cigars, he is mos def the scene stealer.

2. Jeff Goldblum (David): easily the second most awesome person. Jeff Goldblum plays himself - i.e., it's Ian Malcolm, this time fighting aliens instead of dinosaurs and once again never being taken seriously because he's a math nerd in the midst of all the gun-toting military dudes ("and that's when you can, you know, uh, take them, uh, take them down. Take them out. Do your... do your stuff", as he awkwardly tells the military honchos). Formerly having punched the president, he accompanies Will Smith to the alien mothership and uploads the virus. Ok, basically he saves the entire planet. His drunken tirade is the best part, though ("maybe if we screw this planet up enough they won't want it anymore," he says of global warming).

3. Randy Quaid (Russel Casse): the former alien abductee, now drunken crop-duster, he saves everyone in Area 51 and the rest of Earth by sacrificing himself and flying into the chute in the center of the big alien ship hanging out over Area 51 and exploding it on contact. Everyone thinks he's crazy, and maybe he is, but he sure is awesome in a completely insane way, and you know - he dies happy: "Hello, boys! I'm baaack!"

4. Vivica A. Fox (Jasmine): the most competent female character in the movie - and actually pretty damn competent in comparison to the men, too - and Steve's girlfriend/wife. A single mom and a stripper (the most hilarious conversation is the dying First Lady asking her what she does for a living. "I'm a dancer," she says. "Oh, ballet," says the First Lady. She says, "No, exotic.") she survives the first blast by kicking down a maintenance door in a tunnel, then drives around LA in a city truck searching for suvivors.

5. Boomer, the Dog: the most memorable, ridiculous, and heart-warming part of the movie that I guarantee you everyone remembers is when Jasmine and her kid get into the maintenance room in the tunnel as the alien explosion blast is rippling through it, and she yells, "Boomer!" and her faithful golden retriever happily leaps over the broken cars and gets into the maintenance room just as the blast passes by, surviving and wagging its tail all the way. It also accompanies them into the top secret rooms of Area 51, and out into the desert when Steve and David return to Earth.

I couldn't find a picture of Boomer, so I just included this shot of the alien ship coming out of the sky like Jesus.

Man, I love this movie. I love Mars Attacks!, but I also love Independence Day. A lot of people say it's gotten worse with time - they've since discovered, that is, how bad it is. But it honestly has not rotted for me. In fact, this last time I watched it, I actually liked it more for all the hidden class dynamics I never noticed before. Except for the President, who is not one of my favorite characters except for his speech about not going quietly into the night (because I'm an idealist poli sci dork), all the heroes are working class or lower and seem to be uneducated, except for David, who's uber-educated and yet a complete failure at life: "You go to MIT for 8 years to become a cable technician" as his father says. Casse, the crazy alien abductee, is clearly a Southwestern hick with a bunch of mulatto kids. Jasmine is a stripper, for Chrissake. The seemingly more successful, WASPy types don't actually do much and are unmemorable characters - there's the President and his pathetic family - the President basically just flails his hands and says, "People are dying!" and "Get them out of there!" once even the five-year-olds in the audience can see that the situation is dire - and it's no wonder he's not doing very good in the polls. As Jasmine says, "I voted for the other guy". There's Constance, who is clearly the President's ho (she doesn't do anything useful, at all), is described as "spunky", and is way too good to be Jeff Goldblum's ex-wife. There's the barrage of military personnel who are all complete swaggering idiots. I think there's something very interesting about that depiction. In fact, one survivor of the LA blast says that this was the only day he took the subway - the dirty, foul, public transportation - and that's what saved him. When the First Lady says, "Oh, I'm sorry," to the news that Jasmine was a stripper, she says, "Don't be. I'm not. It's good money. And my baby's worth it." In other words, fuck conventions and political correctness - if it pays, it pays.

Some people dismiss this movie for the characters (dismissing it for the dialogue is understandable... it's pretty bad), saying they're stereotypes, but interestingly, the stereotypes that are usually pointless comic relief (the black guy, the nerd, the ghetto princess, the hick, the Jewish father) turn out to be the most engaging, important, and heroic characters, whereas the ones who are usually given heroic roles - the all-American whitebread folks - don't contribute to barely anything. Even though the President is the first to fire at the alien ship and hit it (showing that he doesn't give up, I guess), Russel Casse is the one to actually cripple the ship and bring it down. I just love watching Jeff Goldblum's father walk around Area 51 going, "what the fucking fuck is all this?" essentially, and when the military assholes tell Jeff Goldblum to shut up because they want to use nuclear weapons on the aliens and he doesn't, he says, "Don't you tell him to shut up! None of us would be here if it weren't for my David!" which is true. It's actually very empowering to watch, because the heroes, in my opinion at least, are all people with limited voice and limited opportunity to change much in the real world. Yet in this disaster scenario, they are the ones who step it up. Which really does confirm the President's message about this being not only America's Independence Day, but the whole world's Independence Day.

Then again, maybe I just tend to love movies that feature aliens and apocalypse scenarios. And, I just like popcorn flicks, except if they feature Ancient Greece or Rome. But that's for a different day.

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: "Dead Souls" - Nine Inch Nails

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I realize I didn’t found a company or discover a new insect.
the howling wind, the howling wind.
I just didn't want to be a loser anymore.
glitters in the night
a description of many people you will meet at barnard
no one's gonna take me alive!

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Page generated Aug. 1st, 2025 04:51 am

a sense of joy and then a panic

a sense of joy and then a panic

Entries tagged with class

I realize I didn’t found a company or discover a new insect.

the howling wind, the howling wind.

I just didn't want to be a loser anymore.

glitters in the night

a description of many people you will meet at barnard

no one's gonna take me alive!