Aug
19
Join The Voice Staff
August 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Interested in writing or taking photos for the school newspaper?
Interested in writing or taking photos for the student newspaper, The Voice?
Come to the first staff meeting:
11 a.m., Monday, Aug. 24 in Rm 14 of Howell Library on Main Campus.
May
11
Flight Theory by Isaac Hicks
May 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Only after death do we experience eternal liberation.
This is what Kyle, let’s call him, tells me just before he Supermans off the hotel roof and lands head-first on a fire hydrant. Me, I inch to the edge of the roof and look fourteen stories down at Kyle, his feet sticking up in the air, the top of the fire hydrant buried into his expanded skull and holding him up.
Bullseye.
I look at this, and my first thought is “whoa.”
My second thought is “what if Newton fell out of a tree and landed on an apple?” This gravitational pull thing that turned Kyle into a throwing dart, it could have gone undiscovered, undefined by humans. We could throw a paper ball off the Sears Tower and say that’s what objects are supposed to do. They’re just supposed to fall when they’re not on a stable surface. A mysterious force of nature without a name.
9.8 meters per second squared, what are you talking about?
Gravity, Kyle tells me before his thing with the fire hydrant, is only a force of nature that has been defined by humans with their superiority complexes and obscure senses of self-righteousness.
My third thought is “what if Marylin Manson painted the Mona Lisa, and Leonardo DaVinci invented the GPS tracking system for cell phones? Donald Trump was the first person to navigate the globe. Hitler made generous donations to some center for breast cancer research. Millions of atheists were killed in the Holocaust by blue-and-green talking flamingo-monkeys who worshiped the god they called Dr. Pepper. The French won a major war.”
If any of these things had happened, we would accept them as historical facts and laugh at any alterations. Sure, like DaVinci painted the Mona Lisa.
In death, we experience eternal liberation. We abandon worldly possessions and die, liberated from materialism and consumerism and the troubles forced upon us by a demanding society. We have to have a college degree. A nice car. A beautiful house. The latest clothes from some overrated fashion line. The newest cell phone that’s also an iPod, an electric shaver, and a condom dispenser.
Death is the tollbooth on the highway of eternity, Kyle tells me, his heels on the edge of the roof. Kyle tells me this, then he says, “Only after death do we experience eternal liberation,” and it’s like he’s diving into a pool. A pool with concrete and parked cars and pedestrians. And a fire hydrant.
Gravity. The opposition to Kyle’s flight theory.
Ten seconds ago he was my best friend, my philosophical anti-socialite of a best friend with disdain for humanity, and now he’s a statistic. The reason why pedestrians are screaming in the cold night and cars are coming to a halt. The fire hydrant, an extension of his body.
One person commits suicide every thirty seconds.
People say they hate violence, but they’ll stop and watch the cops handle a traffic accident, hoping to see the paramedics throw a dead, mutilated body onto a stretcher. They’ll watch stock car racing just for the twenty car pile-ups. They’ll spend millions of dollars every summer to see the latest blockbuster that’s wall-to-wall gunfire, explosions, natural disasters, mayhem, and epic-scale termination of life.
Kyle, he and I grew up together. We met in preschool, went to the same grade school, and cruised for chicks in high school, and before gravity got the best of him, we were both pursuing degrees in business. He always wondered why I never introduced him to any of my other friends.
Kyle, he always had crazy theories about human behavior, or just profound ideas in general. When we were kids, he took my building blocks and made a blue, yellow, red, and green staircase to my dad’s armchair and called it The Staircase of Patriarchy. The dad sits in the armchair. The dad, the head of the household in the traditional sense of the family. The staircase, the symbol of transitioning from boys to men to husbands to fathers.
When the sirens start getting louder, I’m down the stairwell and in an elevator. A few floors into the ride, my head starts to ache from the injury I got after slipping and falling on the stairs last week. As I grind my teeth on a couple of painkillers, the old couple behind me start to freak when the stitches open up on the back of my head.
I hear blood hitting the floor like a leaky faucet. The old lady gasps and tells Harold to look. Harold puts a hand on my shoulder and offers a ride to the emergency room.
That’s about when the doors slide open and I drag myself through the lobby and out the automatic doors, a trail of blood drip, drip, dripping behind me. People everywhere, watching this guy with a gaping hole in the back of his head.
In the street, there are no cops. No paramedics. There’s no Kyle the Human Dart with his head and neck buried in a fire hydrant and blood tossed all over the place. There’s only me, my breath showing in the cold. Then I see myself as a kid sitting in my old living room with red, blue, yellow, and green building blocks, and I’m stacking them up against dad’s armchair and talking to Kyle.
This is where mom comes in from the kitchen and smiles and sits down next to me. Rubbing the booboo on the back of my head she says, “Looks like Kyle’s back again isn’t he?”
There’s no one here with me except her, but I nod my head yes, Kyle’s here.
Mom smiles and says that’s fine, as long as we don’t play near the stairs. We don’t want another booboo from falling down the stairs like we did the other day, do we?
No, no we don’t.
When mom leaves me alone to my blocks, Kyle leans over and smiles at me. This booger-picker, this little juice-drinker, this snot-nosed little munchkin, he has the face of a grown man on a little kid’s body. There’s a bleeding, gaping whole in the top of his head.
“I don’t know what’s with that chick,” Kyle says. “She never notices me.”
When I ask what’s wrong with his head, he winks at me and says I’ll find out later.
I forget his name, but some psychologist guy developed the different stages of human maturity. Carry on one of the traits from the childhood stage into adulthood, and the rumor is you’re screwed in the head for a while. People in their thirties still living with their parents and playing video games all day are called “kidults.”
Kyle’s dead, but there won’t be an autopsy or a funeral. I could have reached out and saved him at the last second, but I had to let him succumb to the gravitational pull of the Earth.
I realize this as I study the street that has no paramedics or cops.
I realize that in life, I am liberated from the deception of reality.
May
11
It seems that Hollywood is going to pull out the big guns again this summer,
because there are so many highly waited films fans are dying to see. If anything,
Hollywood it trying to play conservative with its summer offerings — most are either sequels, prequels, remakes, or returning characters.
Here is my list of my list of the 10 most-waited films that will make audiences excited beyond their wildest dreams:
10 Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian
The original film in 2006 was a box-office surprise when it grossed more than
$250 million in the U.S. alone. Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson return in the sequel, which adds a new location and cast member, Academy Award-nominated Amy Adams (Doubt).
09 Inglourious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is the director’s take on Nazi-occupied France
during the height of the World War II. With stars like Brad Pitt and Mike Myers, and the return of Tarantino in the director’s chair, this is a must-see and could be one of the best films of 2009.
08 Star Trek
Although I have never been a big fan of the “Star Trek” series, I am curious to see how
TV’s “Lost” director J.J. Abrams transforms such an iconic show from yesteryear to a
modern-day big-screen adaptation. If the film is praised and makes a lot of money, which I expect, there will probably be more to come.
07 Angels and Demons
Tom Hanks returns as Robert Langdon as he solves another murder mystery in this prequel to Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code (2006). Although the public saw the 2006 film as somewhat of a disappointment, that won’t stop audiences from this controversial movie. Besides, what’s better than going to the movies with Hanks in the leading role?
06 Public Enemies and Terminator Salvation
Public Enemies stars Christian Bale and Johnny Depp and will probably be a throw-back to 1930’s gangster films like The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932). While it looks promising, Bale’s Terminator Salvation seems questionable, but it has been talked-about because of Bale’s infamous rant on its set last year. There are rumors that Arnold Schwarzenegger has a cameo, which is something to look forward to.
05 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Although not a fan of the first Transformers (2007), I did like the incredible special effects and visuals. The sequel could be a major improvement as producer Michael Bay describes it as a combination of Hollywood epics like Ben-Hur (1959) and Apocalypse Now (1979).
04 Bruno
After Sacha Baron Cohen’s surprise hit Borat (2006), let’s hope this will be as hilarious and brilliant. Based on Cohen’s flamboyantly gay Australian newscaster and his adventures throughout the U.S., audiences may flock to this film for Cohen’s unpredictability and his outrageous character.
03 X-Men Origins: Wolverine
A good amount of buzz is coming about this latest X-Men, especially as it centers on the popular character Wolverine (Hugh Jackson). Let’s hope that this movie is what Batman Begins (2005) was to the Batman film — a new breath of life into a franchise that desperately needs retooling.
02 Up
Pixar has never hit a bad note. Even last year’s WALL-E (2008) was my pick for the best film of 2008. Up opened the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. It’s the first Pixar film to be featured in 3D format.
01 Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Harry Potter returns to the big screen in the sixth of the franchise, and to nobody’s surprise, will probably be the most profitable and popular film this summer. As the second-to-last film of the Potter films, expect it to make a ton of money.