65.1

ISSUE 65.1 Editor-in-Chief

RACHEL RUFRANO Managing Editor

CLAY COOPER

Managing Editor

joeb.union@gmail.com

clay.union@gmail.com simone.union@gmail.com

KEVIN O’BRIEN

kevinob.union@gmail.com

News Director

ANDY KNEIS Sports Editor

CAITLIN CUTT

Literature Editor & PR

JAMES KISLINGBURY

Entertainment Editor & PR

RACHEL RUFRANO Music Editor & PR

CHRIS FABELA

Creative Arts Editor

rachel.union@gmail.com cfab.union@gmail.com

kathym.union@gmail.com

SOPHISTICATED BEAR

bear.grun@gmail.com

CLAY COOPER

Graphic Designer

CLAY COOPER Cover

MIKE PALLOTTA

On-Campus Distribution

RACHEL RUFRANO Copy-Editor Wrangler

CAITLIN CUTT

Advertising Executive

JOE BRYANT

jamesk.union@gmail.com

KATHY MIRANDA Grunion Editor

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

caitlincutt.union@gmail.com

victorpc.union@gmail.com

Culture Editor

JOE VERSUS SCHOLASTIC OPTIMISM

andyk.union@gmail.com

VICTOR CAMBA Comics Editor

-Snake Plissken, Escape from LA

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SIMONE HARRISON Opinions Editor

“The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.”

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Contributors: MIKE PALLOTTA, MATT DUPREE, SEAN BOULGER, ALAN PASSMAN, ALEXANDRA SCIARRA, MICHAEL MERMELSTEIN, JASON OPPLIGER, JESSE BLAKE, DOMINIC McDONALD, HILLARY CANTU, RUSSELL CONROY, ANDREW LEE, KEN CHO, CHELSEA ROSENTHAL, JOE HAUSER, TESSA NEVAREZ, JOHN YANG, TRAVIS OTT-CONN, JOE HAMMOND, MONA KOZLOWSKI, STEVE WORDEN, KATRINA GUEVARA, ANDY PEKEMA, KELVIN HO, ELISE McCUTCHEN, NADIA VANEK

Disclaimer and Publication Information The Union Weekly is published using ad money and partial funding provided by the Associated Students, Inc. All Editorials are the opinions of the writer, and are not necessarily the opinions of the Union Weekly, ASI, or of CSULB. All students are welcome and encouraged to be a part of the Union Weekly staff.

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A

s a newly-minted super senior, I consider myself an authority on collegial rigmarole. So, as a person of self-import, I have the following to say to freshmen: just don’t. Don’t come here with all of your expectations and hopes and dreams and rainbows and laffy taffy.

I get it. It’s college. Woo, right?

Nope. Whatever preconceived notions you had about coming to Cal State Long Beach should be left at your parents’ place along with your pogs and Pokémon cards and yo-yos and whatever else you youngsters use to placate yourselves (Salvia?). You may think you want to live in Animal House (and believe me, you can if you try), but it’s not a good idea. How ‘bout you just settle for the Belushi dorm poster and read about how to not be completely miserable your first year of college.

Writer James Kislingbury is a chronically dissatisfied person—he’s all about

hindsight. Listen to the guy’s advice.

Turn to page 11.

Starting my fifth year of college isn’t nearly as strange as I thought it would be. Since graduating from high school in 2005, I’ve attended three institutions: this one, Golden West Community College, and a midwestern private college with a student body of less than 540 people. If anything it feels weird that I’ve only been at a nice, big University since Spring 2008 and I’m already graduating. Those other places weren’t colleges I liked. The first one I was miserable at (see!) and when I was at Golden West I was just killing time before coming here. It certainly doesn’t feel like four years. I’m genuinely excited for the school year.

But I’m not excited for the first week of school. You know why? Everyone’s just so happy all of the time! Perky and full of life, you’ll hear a good friend say, “Y’know what? This year I’m going to stay organized! No more loose papers in my bag.

No siree! Not this guy. THIS guy’s got a plan and he’s sticking to it!” Lies. I don’t know what it is, but everyone is so optimistic at the beginning of the year, and, slowly but surely, that optimism will melt away to reveal our dirty habits. Procrastination. Belligerent disregard for syllabi.

Watching five seasons of a TV show in the span of two weeks. Checking Digg

an unhealthy number of times per hour.

Xbox. Lots and lots of Xbox.

This year I figure that I’ll just cut the bullshit and be a mediocre student right off the bat. I’m only taking nine units, so I’ll have more time to strategically pick which assignments will count for less than 10 percent of my grade and write them off completely, using my newfound free time for hanging out with my lady and pals, watching Twin Peaks and dusting off the Super Nintendo (Ooh, ooh!

New goal: replay all of the Donkey Kong Country games—before October). I guarantee you I’ll still get all As and Bs too.

Cat’s out of the bag: I have been coasting throughout the bulk of my college career. And it’s worked too. I’m not on my fifth year because of my lack of work ethic, but rather a bureaucratic SNAFU involving the transfer of quarter-hours to units. I’m a good student and I’ve learned a lot during college in classes I actually care about (good news for my professors: all my classes seem promising this semester). Hence why at Golden West I took Math for Elementary School Teachers after bombing Stats. Twice.

Ask Away!

Who better to get advice from/complain to than some guy you don’t know? Send all emails to: joeb.union@gmail.com

DOODLING THE NIGHT AWAY YUP, WE WERE THIS BORED DURING SUMMER

RACHEL RUFRANO JAMES KISLINGBURY

JOE BRYANT

JAMES KISLINGBURY UNION WEEKLY

JOE BRYANT 31 AUGUST 2009

OPINIONS Shirting The Issues Workin' For A Livin' ANDY KNEIS

A

lright listen I am writing this from the past. I’m not sure how you think periodicals work but this is what I’m doing. I am writing from summertime where the sun shines, the sprinklers go ch-ch-ch-ch-pshhhhhh, and college students do internships. Since I am a hollow shell of a man without an original thought in my entire body, I too am at an internship. I am at it right now. This is my first introduction really into the working world where people drink tea and shit. I guess it’s okay, but here’s a gripe anyway because the printer is broken and I can’t do any real work right now. Perhaps it is in the stars that the printer is broken and this article is able to come to fruition? You decide. Go to hell.

Anyway, everybody knows they make you dress sort of nice when you work at a real life office. This is my segue. Deal with it. What I’m getting at is I dislike tucking in my shirt. If I were on Facebook and somebody had a status that said “tucking in your shirt” I would click the “like”

button and then immediately click “unlike” because I don’t like it. A terrible college joke. Anyway the shirt gets all bulgy and it gets partially untucked in some parts of your pants but not others and all that. It stinks, especially for a really cool laid-back guy like me. In my many hours of office solitude I have come up with a solution that will solve my tucking problem and also make me a ton of cash. I’m working on opening a place called “The Untuck Hut.” It will be a cool place for business guys to go on their breaks when they feel like untucking and washing away all the stresses of the working world! At the Untuck Hut you will not be judged for having your shirt untucked. We even provide robes to cover up your unsightly shirt flaps if you wish, but our patrons are encouraged to let it all hang out! Let it all hang out at The Untuck Hut coming soon!

I am willing to accept huge bucks from all potential investors. Also maybe there will be some sort of tiki hut theme because it’s called The Untuck Hut. I don’t know. Just

Illustration go inside and untuck your dang shirt alright, it’s pretty easy, I’ve done it before.

The Untuck Hut will catch on, I just know it. Now anyone can feel comfortable in a safe environment when they are at their most vulnerable: when their work shirts are all untucked from their pants.

Actually maybe our slogan can be “give

CHRIS FABELA us some bucks to untuck!” Maybe that’s a little too demanding for a place of relaxation. Whatever I’m just going to sit by my mailbox and wait for the cash to start arriving. I can’t wait. Thanks for reading, sorry I was rude earlier.

GRATING EXPECTATIONS

WHy You Date losers: It's Not all your Fault CAITLIN CUTT While women have spent decades ranting and raving about men having “unrealistic expectations” because of what the media has portrayed women to be like in movies, TV, and those villainous rap videos, I would say that women have been operating under an equally delusional set of assumptions.

You just don’t hear about them because it works more to the advantage of men, and it’s not as easy to pick them out. The reason your beautiful best friend is dating a Social Security-collecting pothead, is the same reason you bought her a Cosmopolitan for her 21st birthday: we participate and completely believe in a dating world that only works on-screen. We date real-world men, thinking they’re like movie-world men.

On TV, fat, stupid, useless guys who work for the post office or sell shoes for a living, marry beautiful career women. So, UNION WEEKLY

31 AUGUST 2009

your talented marketing major friend finds a guy at Belmont Station who dropped out of LBCC to hop on the management track at AutoZone. “He’s street smart.”

All you “indie” girls out there, the ones who’d never be caught dead in Belmont Station, or without your copy of Ulysses, you think you’re above all this? No. I know you bitches because I’m one of you. We fall the hardest and deal with mind fuck’s that drive us to take one creative writing course after another. Let me put this out there: Having sex with a guy just because he can quote Bukowski is the same thing as screwing a guy with a nice car. Oh, and that “frat guy” that hasn’t watched Six Feet Under 80 times in a row weeping quietly to himself, or who doesn’t give a crap about Frank Zappa, that one who you’ve decided will never understand you…really. Well that guy’s gonna

have a job eventually, and the real reason you think he’ll never understand you is because you’ve seen a shit-ton of movies written by an army of weenies who never got dates in high school and who are to this day, I promise you, no good in bed.

A grumpy, broke guy who owns a record store is not gonna be like John Cusack.

The real-world version of that guy has two kids he never sees, drives a Firebird, and will never have the money to take you to Springsteen’s final tour. As much as this pains me, there is no Michael Clayton, and the guy who gets high and plays air-hockey with his friends everyday is not Seth Rogen.

He will not get a job if you get “knocked up.”

Just ask the girl with the deepest-running daddy issues that you can find, and she’ll back me up on this one.

Look, I’m not saying that good guys

aren’t out there. They are. I know a ton.

But while men have gotten caught up in the confusing, impossible images of how women are “supposed to look,” we’ve bought into the equally-impossible dream of how the story is “supposed to go.” We see potential in these sad sacks because we’ve “seen” guys like this pull it together before. But really, you haven’t. I’m not saying that they won’t, but I am saying that they probably won’t. There are great guys out there that don’t need you to fix them, who are just as funny and pithy as the really fucked-up ones. Those guys will take you out and your friends will actually like them. If he walks like a douche, and talks like a douche, he’s a douche right now… and you’re dating him.

OPINIONS POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMESICK BLUES MATT DUPREE The first piece of the CSULB campus that I saw on my first visit here was the pyramid. In the morning sky it was barely distinguishable; it took my cousin pointing it out before I noticed it. But once I did, it came to represent everything that college was to me at that time. It was enormous in a way that I couldn’t fully understand, confusing but not altogether complicated. And it held the promise of bigger and better things than I’d experienced in my days at public high school. But more than anything it was daunting, a monument to the vastness of college and the relative insignificance of me.

Since this first formative meeting between man and ‘myd, the blue monster has played many roles to me, and yet its comparison to college has remained apt. It has been my safe haven, a place to work out and shower before a stressful day or at the end of a boring one. It’s been an annoying obstacle, standing between my neighborhood parking spot and my classes, forcing a hasty circumvention around its wide base. And slowly but surely the unfamiliarity and fear gave way to a well-worn ease. This year, the campus feels like an old baseball glove, albeit a baseball glove that’s 323 acres in size. Even the great azure pyramid seems as humble as the endless suburbs that stretch across its northern boundary. Would that my college career had started now, instead of those awkward freshman semesters.

I’m sure at least a few of you reading this are in those awkward phases, and if I had any advice for you it would be to get over yourself. Everyone can see how awkward and froshy you are, so don’t fool yourself into thinking that a hip outfit and an aloof demeanor are going to impress anyone. Of all the people I’ve met, the ones who had the best time in college were the ones least concerned with what other people thought of them. And the reason is simple; there’s 35,000+ people here. No matter how cool you are, 95% of everyone on campus will never know your name. So just relax, figure out what you want to do in your college career, and then get that shit done. If you want to graduate with honors, get studying. If you want to throw the best parties, start building that beer bong. But whatever you do, don’t spend a fucking second worrying about what anyone in your classes thinks of you, because you aren’t going to see most of them once the semester’s through (this is doubly true for freshmen, since most GE classes are full of a mish-mash of every major). Beyond that, I just hope that you (at whatever point in your college career you may be) don’t get complacent. It’s an easy path, that’s for sure, but it doesn’t lead to anywhere worth going (not that Target isn’t fun to shop at, but being an assistant manager there probably won’t be as entertaining). So work hard, but take as many happy memories of CSULB with you as you can, because you’re going to be working for the rest of your life.

Year TWo:

Into The Womb

ALAN PASSMAN

I

t is with mixed emotions and a half-empty/half full heart that I write this, because I wrote a year ago that I was excited to be back at CSULB. You see, this is my last year of grad school already and I’m afraid of what is out there. Something tells me that I have it in me for a Ph.D program, but my brain doesn’t want to even negotiate that as of yet. The truth is that it is a horridly frightening time to be entering (or reentering in my case) the workforce, especially in the field of education. In actuality, I don’t think it is a good time to be an educator ever.

When you do anything in the liberal arts, it seems like you’re doomed to some quality of life that involves buying clothes on sale at GAP, Banana Republic, or Express for Men so that you can look presentable standing in front of people barely ten years your junior to gently berate them about comma splices when you yourself have to look up grammar rules as a means to justify your points. So come this spring, I’ll have a Master’s in Fine Arts with an emphasis in poetry. I’ll have written a manuscript’s worth of poems and a methodology that explains my aesthetic for writing my work. It shouldn’t discuss my ritual or routine, it has to probe deeper apparently. I should’ve been writing it over the summer. I didn’t, but I gave it more thought than I’m sure some of my classmates did

theirs. Disillusionment is just one of the largest parts of getting a degree in what other’s have toiled away in post offices, gulags and other dead end jobs to do. Being an academic probably makes for less cred in some circles and moreso in others like the ones where they will pay you to teach others what the fuck a quatrain is. When it comes down to it, I hate form in every sense of the word. Constriction only works if you are 8 feet long and prey on small jungle mammals. There is no way to be sure what any of us should do in a world that is so stifling. A place where you feel a throttling coming on every time you start to veer off the straight and narrow. Choking and suffocating the life out of you, just because you wanted to do what you wanted to do, instead of what you should be doing.

Illustration

The norm used to be that people with money were educated and the commoners were uneducated. It seems like the opposite has come to pass. We need to go back to how it was when artists had rich benefactors.

These patrons would pay for everything and this is how we got some are best works from Molière and others.

Seattle is paying bands to move there to help to revitalize and maintain the city’s rep as one of the centers for music in the US. That is a move in the right direction. We waste money on war’s we shouldn’t be in and yet art is frivolous, because it doesn’t easily yield or turn a profit. Congrats to us and our pursuit of frivolity, I guess.

CHRIS FABELA

Endless practice makes far from perfect SIMONE HARRISON German, Italian, French. Scales, arpeggios, recitative. Endless practice makes far from perfect. Trying to pursue a career in Opera is the hardest thing I have ever done and probably will ever do. I remember the moment I fell in love with opera. I was seven years old and I saw Hansel and Gretel at LA Opera. I knew then and there what I wanted to do with my life. I was so wrong. I was like all the boys at school who wanted to be pilots or president. Try pouring your

sweat, tears and vocal cords into five measures of music only to receive the response, “No one will ever pay to hear you sing.” All faith that you ever had in yourself is ripped from you by an ungracefully aging, overweight bitch who didn’t make it in her prime so she takes it out on aspiring singers.

Then there’s the possibility that after working all day every day your whole life will amount to nothing because of how competitive the world of Opera is. You could be the best in the state, hell the best on the West Coast and that won’t be enough to sing at

the Met. You literally have to be the best goddamn singer in the fucking world to get a job. Did I mention that you can’t even get hired unless you’re 35-years-old? That seems ridiculous, but really your voice doesn’t fully mature until then. So, after all this work you wait until your almost 40 and then your career lasts for five years. While the world has no doubt benefited from the insanity that is becoming a premier opera singer, I am not the woman for the job and I never will be.

UNION WEEKLY

31 AUGUST 2009

NEWS PUTTING THE FUN BACK IN FUNDS CSULB Fundraising Divides and Conquers ALEXANDRA SCIARRA

T

hrough anonymous, corporate, and individual contributions, California State University, Long Beach has generated close to $32 million in fundraising support during the 2008-09 academic school year. In relation to the previous year’s record sum of virtually $34 million, the current projected total, which will not be final until next month, already ranks as the second highest fundraising achievement in the history of the University.

This feat has been made, observes campus President F. King Alexander, “despite the challenges of our national and statewide economy,” which have placed, in the last twelve months, the entirety of CSULB under countless budgetary constraints. In the face of these limitations, university officials have been forced to increase student fees and cap student enrollment. “We are extremely grateful,” continues Alexander, “to see that our alumni and friends have [persisted] to support this great university and [its] wonderful students.”

Accounting for roughly one third of the 2008-09 year are two anonymous $5 million contributions. One of which has

been designated to establish a scholarship fund for business students.

CSULB’s Vice President for University Relations and Development, Andrea Taylor has found that for the most part, “economic struggles have had a serious effect on non-profit fundraising.” Nevertheless, she attributes most of the university’s fundraising success to “the trust and belief that donors have in the campus’ academic programs and commitment to student success.”

A majority of the charity seen by the university in the past year reflects the variety of specific interests held by contributors. Patrons have selected academic programs and initiatives in which they would like to see maintained by their contributions.

Corporate donors and organizations have continued to demonstrate their unwavering support for the university.

The Bernard Osher Foundation has gifted $1 million in scholarship money through its Osher Reentry Scholarship Program to aid students who after a break in their studies, wish to receive their first baccalaureate degree.

The Institute of International Edu-

cation gifted the campus with a $1.2 million grant to put towards the University’s Strategic Learning Initiative, a rigorous program that incorporates the learning of foreign languages with academic university majors for increased employment opportunities.

63.5 percent of last year’s nearly $32 million total has been received by individual gifts. Barbara and Ray Alpert, who donated $1 million to the Jewish Studies Program at Cal State Long Beach, were in turn named an “endowed chair in perpetuity” by the Program.

The contributions made to Cal State Long Beach during the last two fundraising years have made for the two highest annual sums in campus fundraising history. Transcending what the economy may have otherwise predicted, “We are certainly grateful,” adds Taylor, “for the continued, generous support of these individuals and organizations.” “Their contributions,” she concludes, “go a long way toward enhancing academic programs and assisting students in need… [assuring] a brighter future for Cal State Long Beach and the students we serve.”

STATE OF THE BEACH YOUR WEEKLY CAMPUS NEWS IN BRIEF JOHN YANG It’s that time of year again: crazy tuition fees, innocent freshmen and noontime concerts at the Southwest Terrace. In lieu of actual musicians, expect local radio stations all week.

Starting on Monday: Latino 96.3, AMP Radio 97.1, Jack FM 93.1 and it wraps up nicely on Friday with KROQ 106.7.

Chris Chavez is our new ASI President. Feel free to add him on Facebook and bug him.

Brian Eno INVADES CSULB! Tickets are on sale now for his exclusive lecture at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, Sunday, Sept. 20, at 7pm. CSULB students get in for $25.

Also feel free to go to the private UAM fundraiser. It’s only $175 per person.

Quizno’s is back. Thank goodness, I was worried that something healthy, UNION WEEKLY

31 AUGUST 2009

cheap, and tasty was going to go there.

Also a new frozen yogurt place has opened up by Sbarro’s. It’s called Fro Go. Or Fro Yo. Or Yo Go Fro. Or is it Gro Fro? I don’t have to tell you—Tuition fees went up by almost one-third this year, yet due to more financial aid from the government, the neediest students wouldn’t even know (or care) because they have automatically accepted bigger financial aid reward packages. Pays to be poor?

On a plus note, the Residential Learning College is ready for pimply, misguided, socially awkward kids, or freshmen—the buildings, formerly known as Brooks College, felt more or less like a mental institution.

For returning students, notice something different at Brotman Hall?

The “Water Molecule” Fountain was rebuilt, and it looks damn nice. That’s one new fountain and one fountain renovation in one year.

USU Program Council appropriately starts their movie series this Thursday, Sept. 3 with the Suspense/Horror flick, Sorority Row. The screening is Thursday, Sept. 3 at 7pm (come early) and is free and for CSULB students only. As always with advance screenings, pick up tickets at the Program Council office the week of to guarantee your seat.

Like using the campus resources that you (at the subsidized price) already paid for, i.e. Horn Center, Library, Brotman Hall, Health Services?

Well, I hope you won’t need them on Sept. 8, Oct. 9, Nov. 2, March 26, April 21 and May 6. because they won’t be open (due to furloughs).

FROM ONE IRISH TO ANOTHER: REMEMBERING TED KENNEDY KEVIN O’BRIEN Although former generations may take it for granted, and latter generations may remain ignorant, the Kennedy family was, and is as close to American royalty as there has ever been. On August 25th, 2009 the patriarch of that family, Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy passed away after a prolonged battle with brain cancer.

The youngest brother to slain politicians President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Ted Kennedy too was a public servant as well as a public icon.

Upon the election of his brother John to the presidency in 1961, Ted was elected to his brother John’s vacant Massachusetts senate seat.

He was only 30 at the time, the minimum age required to serve on the senate, and he continued to serve for over forty years—gaining the moniker “Lion of the Senate.” It was a name not lightly given during Ted’s lengthy career in the senate. He championed issues that directly affected the lower rungs of society with fiery disposition tempered by a bipartisan approach.

Ted co-sponsored legislations such as the Voting Rights Act. Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, it effectively ended discriminatory practices at polling places, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, designed to stymie potential minority voters.

During his time as the chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee he fostered the Americans With Disabilities Act. Signed into law by President George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990, the act’s broad scope protected workers from discrimination based on an individual’s physical disability, race, religion or sex.

In 1997, he reached across the isle to work with Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, in the development of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program or SCHIP. The legislation provided healthcare for millions of children who had gone without, their parents unable to afford adequate healthcare and yet still unable to receive Medicaid.

His fight for healthcare only continued after the passing of SCHIP. He had recently been working closely with President Obama on the matter of a universal healthcare system, through a public alternative to private healthcare companies. This was the focus of his work in his last months of life.

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the civil rights movement was the issue of the moment, the country was in turmoil. However, in the wake of John’s death the country came together and upon reflection and in memoriam passed the Civil Rights Act. The struggle for universal healthcare continues, debate rages in the house and senate and across the nation. Perhaps in the wake of another influential member of the Kennedy clan’s passing, the country will take a moment to reflect upon Ted Kennedy’s lifetime of dedication to those who had less, and come together in a renewed attempt at securing healthcare for all, and a legacy for one.

NEWS

DON’t throw rocks at a glass pyramid a sit down with f.king alexander MATT DUPREE

“W

ell it’s great to live in a state that prioritizes prisons above higher education,” President Alexander is more grim than sarcastic.

“Maybe if we incarcerated a few of our students on campus we’d get more money.” In a year that’s seen protests brought on by CSU tuition hikes brought on by state budget cuts in education, the President has been forced to play defense.

“I can’t make any more Kentucky jokes. They’ve knocked our per-student funding below Kentucky, Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama and New Mexico. They’ve taken back 42 million dollars, essentially saying 7,000 students on your campus aren’t worth funding, aren’t worth a dime of state money. It’s devastating. Especially when they cut you after you’ve already budgeted for the year.” He sounds suspiciously like the protesters for this part. “Last summer, we spent a lot of time getting the Maintenance of Effort act added for higher education in Washington. That MoE stopped them from cutting us even more, because if they had they would’ve risked losing their federal grant funding. The only real, good hope that we’ve seen is what’s coming out in stimulus from Washington. We’ve almost doubled the amount of student aid that’s in the system for students, and through tuition tax credits for parents and families too. So we just want to make sure that students are taking full advantage of those opportunities and the amount of new money that’s in there and not letting that go unclaimed, because they’re entitled to a lot of it.”

New this semester are the furlough days, a cost-cutting measure enacted in lieu of layoffs. “We’ve got 24 closure

Photo days, state closure days. We’ve already done two, we’ve got one coming on the eighth. We’re doing two a month. This is first-time stuff, we’ve never had to do this before. If we didn’t do the furloughs we would have had to lay off 350 lecturers and cancel 2,200 classes. That’s what students don’t know. The

It was a tough summer.

Normally we spend it planning for what’s new, but this summer it was all defense. alternative was to lay off hundreds, get rid of their retirement benefits and health benefits, just lay them off in this economy where they won’t get another job. I was in favor of this from day one because it’s the best thing we can all do for each other.” But for students, the furloughs amount to little more than vacation time. “Somebody said instead of ‘Go Beach’ days, we’ll have ‘Go To The Beach’ days. Which sounds like a good thing, but it’s caused by all the wrong reasons.”

Alexander knows he’s become an easy target for the anger resulting from the tuition hikes. “I have no friends,” He

KATHY MIRANDA

laughs. “People are going to want to throw rocks, and they’re not going to know where to throw them. So they’ll throw them at me, and that’s alright. It comes with the territory. But don’t let the Governor and the legislators off the hook. They did this, and now we’re trying to figure out a way to respond to it in the most humane way possible. It was a tough summer.

Normally we spend it planning for what’s new, but this summer it was all defense. Just putting the calendar together [for the furlough days], we went through 28 calendars.”

President Alexander sees a brighter future, but with a keen eye to the failings of the past. “I think we’ll come out of this, I think funding will start coming back. I think we’ll have to be smarter. We’re gonna be leaner, we’ll be a smaller university. Next year we’ll be at 33,000 students. It won’t be business as usual. We’ll have to change habits, we’ll have to find ways to save more energy. There’ll be some good things that ultimately come out of this, but it’s going to take us a while to recover. What we’re trying to do is protect student opportunities unlike we did in the ’90s where we cut the heck out of everything and created very few opportunities for students to get through the system. There’s an assumption that if we return to 1998 enrollment we should return to 1998 budgets, but what that doesn’t account for is that in 1998 we had a 24% graduation rate with about 3,000 graduates. We’d cut so many services that students couldn’t find the help they needed. Students left here in droves. We graduated 9,000 students this year with a 54% graduation rate.

“That’s what we’re here to do.”

UNION WEEKLY

31 AUGUST 2009

MUSIC THRASH METAL MATT DUPREE

I

chose to write the first installment of this section about Thrash Metal expressly because it isn’t hip right now; it’s not even very popular. But while what is hip will nine times out of ten be used up and thrown away in a year’s time (anyone remember The Bravery?), the relentless passion of Thrash Metal will live on.

For the uninitiated, Thrash is a fusion of the speed and raw energy of hardcore punk with the heavy guitar sounds of metal. The combination of the two produces a chugging, freight train-like sound that is as aggressive as it is cathartic. Thrash Metal brought in many elements from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, taking notes from big names like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and umlaut-enthusiasts Motörhead. The genre got its official start in the early ‘80s with the rise of its “Big Four,” the four bands that would define and popularize it, including Megadeth, Metallica, Anthrax and Slayer.

Metallica is obviously the most prominent of the four, as they’ve spent the most time on the billboard charts during their career. While perhaps be-

ing the closest of any of the Big Four to traditional metal simply in terms of speed, Metallica has more than made up for that with their ability to produce epic songs (a cursory listen to “Master of Puppets” or “One” will more than prove that). Megadeth, the brainchild of fired Metallica guitarist Dave Mustaine, formed out of Dave’s desire to crush his former bandmates in terms of musical intensity, “After getting fired from Metallica, all I remember is that I wanted blood. Theirs.” Far less popular in a mainstream sense but more interesting than both of these is Slayer, a band whose album Reign In Blood is so mindsplittingly fast and violent that it may have singlehandedly created Death Metal. Slayer had the unique ability of creating slow atmospheric worlds for their songs, which were then struck down with guitar work that was unfathomably fast. We’re talking, like, gratuitously fast. The album Reign In Blood also ran into issues with their record label which refused to release the album due to its album art and lyrics (“Angel Of Death” refers to Mengele’s massacre and torture of Jews during

the Holocaust). Still the album proved to be a hit, garnering Slayer their first certified gold record and setting a new standard for rock intensity. Elsewhere on the thrash spectrum lies the more humorous and lighthearted Big Four band, Anthrax. Anthrax focused themselves lyrically on a humorous and referential style after growing tired of the traditional serious image and black wardrobe of their metal brethren. They were known for sporting surfer shorts and Public Enemy T-shirts at shows and writing songs about their favorite comic books. Their 1991 crossover track “Bring The Noise” with Public Enemy served as sign of things to come as one of the first rap metal tracks.

Obviously, the heyday of Thrash Metal is over, but its influence still looms large over modern rock music. Radio rock hits these days can be quite succinctly split into those that borrow from the Big Four and those that should’ve. But as a new generation discovers Thrash, a resurgence has already begun. And, as metal’s history shows quite clearly, it’ll be a very long time until it goes away.

ADAM GOLDBERG

is always doing the meta thing SIMONE HARRISON Eros Ando Miss Ions is LANDy’s debut album fronted by actor, sometimes director and always hunk o’ burning love, Adam Goldberg. With the help of collaborator Steven Drozd of the Flaming Lips and Aaron Espinoza of Earlimart, the crossover for Goldberg has been met with favorable reviews. While Steven Drozd definitely leaves his mark on many of the songs, his help does not redeem the album of UNION WEEKLY

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its whiny vocals or seemingly endless stream of filler noise. With its obvious psychedelia influences, LANDy fails to live up to its predecessors, i.e. Air, Primal Scream, and Radiohead. Most of the songs run together as there is little distinction between them. “BFF” is the only slightly catchy song on the album or at least it’s the only song that can keep my attention for more than thirty seconds. Eros Ando Miss Ions

took Goldberg six years to complete and there is little to show for this. The album has little to offer that hasn’t already been heard before. The length of the songs border on masturbatory and the lyrics often verge on being cliche.

You’d think that an album six years in the making would be a masterpiece to be remembered forever and always. In LANDy’s case this is not so.

Something happens when I talk about U2. The conversation turns abruptly and suddenly I find we’re not talking about U2. But I want to talk about U2. I don’t want to talk about what they look like on stage, I don’t want to talk about humanitarian work, I don’t want to talk about Christian undertones, and I sure as hell don’t want to talk about Bono’s sunglasses. The general mass youth hatred towards U2, I’m assuming, has less to do with their music and more to do with their success.

This is understandable—ask any expert on marketing to the youth and they’ll tell you that anything mainstream is old news; anything our parents can understand is even older news.

The only hope left for the mainstream is to wait around long enough until they’re so bad they’re good again. Frankly, I don’t have the patience or the amount of shame to like something due to its degree on the swinging pendulum. I also can’t bring myself to dislike anything just because it’s accessible to anyone middle-aged and older. I mean, look at The Rolling Stones—they’re covered in cobwebs, but none of us could ever honestly say they’re no good. Or should we wait until it’s too late? How many of us actually knew Johnny Cash even ever existed before he died?

Some of us are lucky—some of us grew up with parents who truly understood the musical Renaissance they grew up in and they gave that to us. For the rest of us, we are prone to the musical authority in the hands of the powers that be: Billboard charts, Clear Channel, MTV, and Pitchfork.com.

And that’s what really kills me. As soon as some rock critic deems something “ironic” or “seminal” or some DJ breathes “number one” into the mic, the impressionable youth (and I mean all of us) fall in line. But if we all listened to the music we really liked, if we all decided for ourselves, I suppose no one would be making any money. We’ve been conditioned to love the new releases and ditch them as soon as they hit it big (Remember The Shins? Don’t blame Garden State.)

So this is my plea, as a born and raised music nerd, to anyone who’s passionate about music: Keep your mind open (or your ears, for that matter), because you’ll never enjoy music if you hate something just because it’s easy to hate or because all your friends hate it. John Lennon’s rep as an “asshole” doesn’t make “Mother” any less profound; Pick up a Bruce Springsteen album (or just look at him, for God’s sake, he’s an Adonis of a man). Take “anything but rap or country” off your God damn music interests. Decide what you love for yourself, because I guarantee your answer wont be “everything.”

Because, you know what, I like U2. I like the way every song begins like a landing helicopter. I love the passion with which Bono sings, like he may pass out like he’s in the crowd at a Pentecostal church. I like how you can’t tell if he’s singing about God or a woman. I like how I can never follow the snare on “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” I even like “Vertigo.” And that’s of no one’s influence but my own.

MUSIC

THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED WHILE you were doing something useful with your summer

A

SEAN BOULGER

ll right, everybody, back to school. Put away the Internet and turn off your record players, because you don’t really have free time anymore. Granted, many of us are responsible adults who opt to take advantage of a free summer schedule and work full-time. There are also, however, people who do not choose such a path. Instead, some of us elect to spend the majority of our time trolling the vast and infinite corridors of the Internet, soaking up every bit of miscellaneous trivia possible. So for those of you that spent your summer being responsible, here’s a condensed recap of the miscellaneous musical hip-happenings that went down over the summer.

As with any time of the year, a great deal of CDs were released over the summer. Some were highly anticipated, and some seemed to come out of left field, giving us a few surprise sensations. One of the most interesting trends of the last few months was the well-established indie band making its debut. More than just a couple of bands that had made the underground rounds were finally granted some more-or-less mainstream exposure with heavily lauded summer releases.

Grizzly Bear put out its third full-length Vekatimest, making somewhat surprising appearances on a couple of the more well-known late night talk shows, and French pop-rockers

Phoenix dropped more than just a couple of jaws with Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Late summer brought some pretty interesting releases as well, giving us some new tunes from previously unknown entities: Bibio’s newest album Ambivalence Avenue combines warbling guitars and kinetic beats reminiscent of Boards of Canada, and the mysterious Swedish outfit jj found a decent amount of critical recognition with their debut album jj n˚ 2, released just last month.

Not all the summer action happened in the studio or record store, however. There was plenty of action to be observed around the globe, as bands continued to provide us with behavior that was sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad, and many times both. Easily the most famous musical event this summer was the death of Michael Jackson, an event that caused a media uproar the likes of which haven’t really been seen lately. In what seems to be an aborted attempt at mimicking the amount of fame Jackson received, the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch got cancer, but then quickly had it removed in surgery. Bo-ring.

This summer, just like every one before it, also boasted an impressive amount of music festivals, which boasted even more impressive line-ups, typically. Coachella was a

bit of a disappointment, and lots of people on drugs got really, really upset when Los Angeles rave Hard Summer wound up getting shut down before people like Steve Aoki and the Bloody Beetroots even got a chance to play. Also, newcomers to the indie music scene Waaves had a fairly well-publicized meltdown onstage at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound Festival, apparently the result of frontman Nathan Williams mixing ecstasy, Xanax, and Valium. Sounds like a fucking party to me. Chalking his audience abuse and bandmate bickering to the aforementioned cocktail coupled with an unexpectedly quick rise to fame (pfft), Williams posted an apology on the Internet and canceled some tour dates.

All in all, this summer wasn’t a bad one for music. Certainly faring better than the movie industry, the last few months of music industry activity saw some very decent record releases and some even more decent festivals and tours. We got some great new albums that will be there to help us all return to the process of pounding square pegs into circular holes in between being herded about an overcrowded campus like cattle to the slaughter. Have a great year, everyone.

MIXTAPE : F. King Alexander When I asked our president, F. King Alexander, for a playlist of his favorite songs, he said he only listened to what his kids let him listen to: Hannah Montana, Spongebob, Etc. This, I surmised, was completely unacceptable. Someone like the King needs a soundtrack, and that’s exactly what the Unionites have set out to supply him with.

“Living for the City” - Stevie Wonder In light of the budget cuts, this song is just the trick for taking the stress out of being broke—CSULB is nothing like a boy growing up in hard-time Mississippi. That’s kind of comforting, right?

“I’m A Man” - Muddy Waters This song was probably, most likely, definitely written about F. King.

“I Don’t Like Mondays” - The Boomtown Rats This is definitely the worst song to put on a playlist for someone who works in education.

“Dream Weaver” - Gary Wright There may or may not be women in the Union office who hear this song every time F. King walks by.

“Woke Up This Morning” - Alabama 3 There may or may not be men in the Union office who hear this song every time F. King walks by. Because the King is kind of like a mob boss, in that, he’s awesome.

“This Will Be Our Year” - The Zombies King, this will be your year.

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College is

Miserable and

So Are

You

I

JAMES KISLINGBURY

’ve got some bad news for you: You’re screwed. You decided to go to college and it’s going to be awful. I’m not alone in this belief, either. There’s plenty of people I know who had dismal experiences in their first year of college and after a brief perusal of the internet, I’ve found that about 30% of students drop out in their first two semesters. This should be enough proof that the first year of college is probably going to be the worst one. You’ll also learn quickly that all the terrible things you tried to leave behind you will haunt you like that kid you accidentally killed on that camping trip.

Obviously certain choices are simply out of your hands (especially if you’re on the parental dole or on a scholarship or something), but being happy, or at least avoiding misery, is something that is entirely up to you. So if things start going south, you have no one to blame but yourself. Now you’re legally an adult you can’t blame others for the mess you’re in. Unless you’re some kind of a criminal genius. You’re going to Long Beach, though, so I kind of doubt it.

I do have some good news for you: Right now you can start avoiding the traps that have snared so many others.

Welcome to the Beach.

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Save the Beer Bong for Grad School Nobody wants to see a photo of you doing a beer bong. That’s a major amateur move. While drinking, smoking, and making questionable decisions with your genitalia is all a part of the college experience, there’re plenty of things in college life that don’t involve puking in the bushes outside of your dorm. Stuff like actually going to college.

All of the people I know who flunked out in their first year (I know about six) they did so because they couldn’t moderate, they couldn’t see beyond their beer keg. I knew one guy, let’s call him “Manuel.” Manuel was an idiot. Besides some reprehensible personal decisions that I need not detail here, he was a kid who indulged too much, too fast, and never learned the importance of the phrase “No, thanks.” When he didn’t go to bed drunk at five in the morning the day before a test, he would get wasted before class. As you can imag-

ine, this didn’t do him any favors. He flunked out.

Last I checked, he now lives in Bakersfield nursing a drug problem and has the mustache of a teenage refugee. Do you want that to be the future you wake up to in ten months? Do you!? I thought not. Learn what your limits are soon and realize that nobody is impressed with your ability to empty vodka bottles or hold bong rips. To paraphrase Dean Vernon Wormer, “Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life.”

Get Rid of Those Pesky GEs As I said, you should probably worry about the college part of your college experience before all of the other junk. It is why you’re here in the first place.

The advisory people at SOAR probably already told you that you shouldn’t overdo it your first semester by taking too many classes. As somebody who has been there and lived it, let me tell you this: That’s BS. You can handle it. On the off chance that you can’t, you’ve

got three weeks to drop any class without penalty.

No person who put a modicum of effort into it has ever been overwhelmed by a Communications class or introductory Psychology. It simply doesn’t happen to thinking, breathing human beings. If you’ve made it this far, you’re obviously smart enough to go the rest of the way. Take the 15 units, get those ugly GEs out of your way so you can start taking classes about things that you actually care about. Even a monkey could complete 15 units of GEs and you aren’t dumber than a monkey, are you?

Another reason that you should knock out your GE’s as soon as humanly possible is that it’ll free you up for things later on, like adding a minor or studying abroad.

It’ll kind of suck for a bit, but eventually you’ll get used to the work load and when you’re in your third year taking classes for your major, you’ll be happy that you don’t have to worry about going to San Pedro to graph barnacles.

Be Gregarious, Damnit!

One of the main reasons I was miserable at Long Beach for so long is because I couldn’t meet anyone that was worth a damn. Your classes are full of people just as scared and alone as you are and they’re looking for friends too, so meet them. There’s no better position you could be put in to make friends, references, and people you can someday borrow money from. Sure a lot of them will be pricks and deadbeats, but there’s 35,000 of them, the odds are good that you can find some decent people to share some memories with and eventually live with.

Meeting worthwhile people in your first year is also the primary way you’re going to keep your second year from sucking, because the people you meet now are more than likely go-

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ing to be your roommates a year later—if you’re lucky, that is. Personally, it took me three years and four apartments to actually get a roommate I liked and trusted. Before that there was my tenure at Park Avenue apartments, which I thought was a bad situation until I moved to Baycrest Apartments for my second year of higher education.

A Crack Den for 600 a Month is Still a Crack Den Now, I realize that the place has changed for the better in the past two years, but in the time I lived there, in no uncertain terms, it was a dank, urine-soaked hellhole. For the nine months I endured Baycrest there were three shootings (that I knew of), several robberies, and, my personal favorite development, the management chained two complex’s gates shut, leaving several hundred residents with only one doorway to enter and exit through. Luckily a quick call to the Fire Marshal sorted that out. To say the least, it wasn’t a fantastic situation.

Don’t move into a place like Baycrest and don’t get put into a situation where you have to move into a Baycrest. Shop around. Pay attention to where you’re moving by looking for reviews online or recommendations from your friends. Don’t move into the first place you see just because it isn’t a complete dump (unless it has two parking spots, in which case, grab that place with both hands). Also, make sure the landlord abides by the fire code, being a severe burn victim isn’t as glamorous as you might think.

Don’t Move in with People You Don’t Know the Names Of The misery of my second year doesn’t really compare to my third year. I moved in with two North African twins that I couldn’t tell the difference between for the entire nine months I lived with them. They also had Borat-level English, which did little to smooth away their rougher edges (like how they called women “bitches” and their recreational use of the n-word). I put up with

most of this for about six months before I somehow got conned into getting another apartment with them and two other ESL students. I don’t think I was drunk, but I can’t entirely rule out mesmerism.

At the second apartment, I ended up paying more rent for less room and more roommates. At some point they also bought kittens without asking me and one of their brothers lived with them for about two months, rent free (also without asking me). The worst thing about that whole year is that I have no one to blame but myself. I didn’t get my ducks in a row when I had the chance. I just moved in with the first people available and because of that I spent a year living in a very expensive hostel in a country I would never choose to visit (though I did end up with more than a few stories about them, so maybe it’s a trade-off).

At this point, you’ve probably already cast your die, but you might as well start thinking about your plans for next year. Start scouting for reliable people to move in with now. Don’t go into the next school year with no idea where you’re going, that’s how you end up in living arrangements like that one I had—or living with your goddamn parents.

Find Something Worthwhile Though all of this is practical and it’s rather boring advice, it also only covers a small spectrum of the human misery that college brings out. In fact, there’s a minute chance you might even have fun your first year here (I’ve got thirty bucks riding that you won’t). If I’ve learned one thing in my four years here (God, where did that time go?), it’s that your entire experience is up to you. The only thing that’s kept me here through all of the bad times was finding something I liked and sticking with it (it’s writing, if you’re wondering).

That’s the only advice I can give you without a snarky aside: Find what you want to do and do that.

Don’t wait for your classes, your parents, or your frat bros, or anything else to tell you what makes you happy. Do it now. If you want to be an artist,

study psychology, or become a despicable reprobate there will never be a better opportunity than right now. You don’t even need college to do what you want to do, because as important an institution as this is, it isn’t for everyone.

Put the effort into the things you do here, they matter. There’s a chance that someday you’ll look back on all the things you’ve done with your time here and you’ll realize that the past isn’t what you used to be, but that the past is what determines who you are. So since you’re not going anywhere for a while you might as well make it count. Find something you love to do and do that, beyond that, it’s all just set dressing.

Hey, Before You Call No controlled substances were used during this photo shoot.

Promise.

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ENTERTAINMENT KELVIN HO

MAD MEN BEYOND DRAPERDOME WELCOME TO THE 1960s, WHEN WOMEN WERE BROADS AND MEN CHAIN-SMOKED THEIR WAY INTO AN EARLY GRAVE KELVIN HO

I

hate television. I love television. If there is anything I detest most about network programming, it is its constant effort to dumb down their viewers and shorten their attention spans. Television, unlike cinema, never depended strictly on visuals or requested the viewer’s unmitigated attention. However, sometimes there is that one gem that makes television exceed film. It not only entertains you, but leaves you with something to contemplate. It not only entices you with its images, but it brings you into its world. That gem is the AMC television series, Mad Men. The glitz and glamour of American capitalism is materialized in Mad Men, a series devoted to the “Golden Age” of advertising. Part of its allure is that it centers on the promiscuity of the men in the gray flannel suits, the objectification and condescension of women in the workplace, sexual orientation, and the power of white corporate influence through the media. The other fascination is its social historical critique. All of this is decorated with an assortment of eye-candy: the chic 1960s fashion style, classic American automobiles, smoking scenes that look like they came out of a Wong Kar Wai film, GQ men with their oily, slick hair, and women who are hybrids of Jacqueline Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.

American decadence is full-fledged in this 1960s setting. Since it is set during one of the most crucial decades in American history, it’s the series’ retrospection that ultimately makes it both comically disturbing and socially significant.

One of the show’s many bold subjects is in its depiction of the American lifestyle, where ignorance and backwardness are presented as innocence and naiveté. A little girl playing spaceman by wearing a dry-cleaning plastic bag over her head, a mother throwing garbage in a park after a family picnic or reprimanding her 12-year-old daughter for smoking only because she could have burned down the house these are moments where we UNION WEEKLY

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laugh and gasp at how primitive people seem.

However, this study of American capitalism reveals even greater the dissipation of virtue.

In the pilot episode “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” Donald Draper (Jon Hamm), the hero of Mad Men and the creative genius behind the advertising agency Sterling Cooper, helps Lucky Strike dodge cigarette health warnings with a simple but specious slogan. He summarizes his profession and the American way of life in a nutshell, “Advertising is based on one thing: happiness.” Being an inventor of want, Don is an example of the moral and ethical confusion in corporate America.

Mad Men is also admirable in its efforts to portray the condition of the country’s social and racial beliefs. Beginning with the feminist movement, the series focuses befittingly on its female characters as some juggle between the dutiful housewife stereotype and the working single woman. It is not surprising that they have more female writers and female-directed episodes than any other show. The only regret regarding Mad Men is its underrepresentation of racial minorities. Considering the Civil Rights Movement helped define the ’60s, it seems almost insulting to see AfricanAmericans relegated to only being elevator operators. It is not enough that sex is examined. As feminist theorist bell hooks believes, our awareness of sex, race, and class must all be expanded for they are “interlocking systems of domination.”

Having already included many significant historical events, Mad Men seems to be just getting started. With its third season under way, John F. Kennedy is still president and history will dictate more turbulent times for the world of Mad Men. With the assassination of the president looming on the horizon, the madness of the ’60s will come to a head.

The country’s vulnerability is at its highest and any remaining innocence they have will be gravely challenged. What a mad mad mad mad world they live in.

ENTERTAINMENT

CINECULT

THIS WEEK: MILLER'S CROSSING (1990)

T

JAMES KISLINGBURY

he Coen brothers have been around for almost twenty-five years in the movie business, something that even as a fan I can’t quite get my mind around. Twenty-five years. That’s practically an institution. They’ve written, directed, produced, and edited some great films in that span of time, from the award winning No Country For Old Men to the cult comedy Raising Arizona. Over the years though, some of their movies have been overlooked. Just about everyone (at least everyone reading this paper) has seen The Big Lebowski and they they’ve at least heard of Fargo, but because they’ve been around for so long and produced such note-worthy films, occasionally some of their movies will fall between the cracks. Miller’s Crossing is one of those movies.

The Coen brothers’ films have always been about pining for the past. If it isn’t in the actual plot (like No Country For Old Men, which revolves around the sentiment that things aren’t what they used to be), then it’s in the style of the film (like with The Hudsucker Proxy, which is a throwback to the screwball comedies of the 1950’s). Miller’s Crossing is no exception. It’s a 1920’s gangster picture in

the tradition of Howard Hawkes’ Scarface. If you don’t know or care who Hawkes is, I can assure you that the Coen’s flick is chock full of punch throwing, double-crosses, and quaint accents of the quality that our modern, law-abiding society lacks.

It’s also got some of the sharpest written dialogue that the two brothers have put to screen. It also doesn’t hurt that Miller’s Crossing has one of the best scenes of submachine-gunning of all time.

The actors are worthy of the script, as well. From Gabriel Byrne (End of Days, In Treatment) as Tom, the wise-cracking advisor of the Irish mob to Albert Finney (Big Fish, The Bourne Ultimatum) as the distinguished, if impetuous Irish mob boss, the cast is dead-on perfect for their roles.

Even John Turturro (O Brother, Where Art Thou), who is at his most rat-like as a grifter, is still a guy you want to get out of this movie in one piece (almost). Admittedly, you wouldn’t want to hang out with

any of these characters, but they’re exciting to watch.

Miller’s Crossing, despite being a movie about masculinity and crime, is also one of their most emotional movies. The last shot of the film feels like you’ve been hit with a Mack truck three or four times. It’s devastating. Where characters like Scarface don’t have to live with their terrible decisions, Tom and his friends do. Even though, in the end, everyone gets what they want or what they deserve, nobody is any better off for it. You want all of the characters to be do make the right choices because they’re

interesting, intelligent people, but they can’t ever be anything but miserable because then they’d stop being the person you fell in love with for ninety minutes.

The Coens’ future is looking just as bright as their past does. They’ve got a lowkey comedy coming out called A Serious Man and, even better, a new adaptation of the brutal western, True Grit, which I am preemptively declaring as my new favorite Coen brothers film. The past shows that they’ve always been top-notch filmmakers and Miller’s Crossing stands up as one of their best. Not bad for a third feature.

THE COLUMN FOR MOVIE NEWS IS BACK AND ALMOST AS GOOD AS IT USED TO BE MIKE PALLOTTA

The entertainment news (or Nooze) just keeps coming, no matter how hard the recession hits. We’re finally coming out of the after-effects of the writers’ strike from a year and a half ago, and we can all look forward to movies that don’t have rough, unrevised scripts (i.e. Transformers 2). Unfortunately, the recession holds its own set of problems. There’s a lesser chance that bad scripts will get made, but it’s more likely that we’ll see movies being produced that can be easily marketed and

that will have a guaranteed audience—like the upcoming World of Warcraft movie

by Sam Raimi (Spider-Man, Drag Me to Hell). However, movies that can’t be marketed well enough are more likely to get snubbed. That seems to be the rumor as to why a movie like Scorsese’s Shutter Island (based on the novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane) is now being pushed back until February 19, 2010. Yes, it’s only another six months of waiting but this is a goddamned shame. For one, February is a well-known dumping ground for films.

Nothing good comes out in February, that’s why an average movie like Taken made $145 million. And it’s all (again, still a rumor) because Paramount doesn’t have the financing to market a possible Oscarwinning film (which would cost them up-

wards of $50 million). Let’s just hope that this delay doesn’t let Shutter Island get completely overlooked.

I’ve got some good news though, Mila Kunis (That ‘70s Show, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and Natalie Portman (Garden State, the shitty Star Wars movies) have a scissory-lesbo love scene in their new movie Black Swan, which will apparently have another hour and a half of them doing other things. Finally, those guys who were watching Léon: The Professional, and saying to themselves, “God I wish she were naked!” are all going to get grossed out cause she’s 28 now. Black Swan is written/directed by Darren Aronofsky, the guy who brought us Jennifer Connelly fucking a doubled-ended dildo and having money shoved in her mouth in Requiem for a Dream

and Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler.

In other good news: Anchorman 2 is getting made. On the downside, Adam McKay is quoted saying, “Sadly, the second part after I say, ‘We’ll do it,’ is that it could be two or three years away.”

In very quick news: there’s going to be a Soul Train movie.

Facebook is getting its own movie. Based on the book The Accidental Billionaire: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal, the movie (titled The Social Network) is being directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) and already has a script penned by Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, Sports Night).

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SPORTS REFERENDUM AND REFERENDUMBER HOW ATHLETICS IS COPING SINCE WE SCREWED THEM OVER KEVIN O’BRIEN

L

Illustration

ast March, we the students, in a stunning display of our lack of school pride, shot down the Beach Legacy Referendum. Had it passed, the Beach Legacy Referendum, commonly known as the BLR, would have raised student fees fifty two dollars and allocated them to the athletics department.

However, with an air of indifference or ignorance we causally rejected the BLR. It is disheartening when one has to hope that the majority of the student body was ignorant of the BLR instead of indifferent.

CSULB Athletic Director Vic Cegles cuts to the quick of the issue: “When it comes to increasing any kind of fee, [a majority of students] are going to say no without even trying to […] understand and appreciate what [it] might do for them.”

The BLR would have gone to directly aid the average student, just as much as it would have gone to help the star athlete. Director Cegles explains the situation. “The priority was to put JAMES KISLINGBURY in three lighted, synthetic turf fields for

recreation [and] intramurals for people to use in [the] community, we were also going to give one point six million dollars back, 800 thousand to ASI and 800 thousand to IRA fees […] it was an obligation for us to enhance what I call student development on campus.” These benefits, collected from the students would go directly to the students and the community that surrounds them. Fields used more for intramural activities than CSULB sports will go un-built and ASI and IRA will go, again, underfunded.

It is also a clear reality that the values of universities today are weighed to a great extent by the strength of their athletic teams. A majority of institutions renowned for their scholastic endeavors are equally renowned for their athletics; along with that notoriety, rivalry and pride are produced. USC and UCLA, Duke and North Carolina, Notre Dame and Michigan, each of these universities is known for its high scholastic standards and its rich legacy, but it is not these merits that are screamed at the top of the lungs of thousands of USC and UCLA students and alumni, that kind of pride,

passion, and unity is only found on game day around the hardwood.

A strong athletics program presents our University to the public. Director Cegles continues, “I have always believed that it provides a window to this University, and whether people like it or not, people really see a university based on the success of their athletics department.” Voting against the BLR was an attempt to save money in the short run, but in the end we only devalued our institution, our educations, and eventually our diplomas in the long run.

Now the athletic department is left to deal with a variety of problems caused by the lack of funds. Undeterred, the athletic department picked themselves back up after the initial blow of the BLR’s failure and are eager to begin to strengthen the department.

Director Cegles outlines the old attitude necessitated for this new challenge: “We’re going to keep working hard, we’re going to go out and fundraise […] we’re not going to back down, we’re just going to work as hard as we need to work.”

SPORTS FOR INDIES

NON-INDIES MAY READ THE ARTICLE AS WELL ANDY KNEIS volley shit, and in cricket…??? Frankly, if cricket is what I think it is I think you should really steer clear, I hope this helps.

Baseball is a fun sport that many people enjoy and also it is encouraged to wear sunglasses so that you can catch the baseballs easier. You can relate to this. Sunglasses are cool to wear and you can get big ones that cover up most of your face so you are mysterious and no one can see the intense sadness in your eyes.

Not only are these sports fun to watch, play, and have me explain them to you, but also people who go to the same school you do are going to be playing them this semester. Bonus: on top of that me or someone else around here will write about them and put them on this page right here if our crippling depression doesn’t get in the way. Wow! You love sports now! I did a great job.

VICTOR CAMBA

fixed-gear bikes, except their one gear is hay.

In water polo, instead of using horses people just swim. Very simple. Then there are two teams and they try to throw the ball into each other’s net. Oh did I mention the ball was yellow? That’s what that sport is all about. Is it bad that I’m almost halfway through this article and don’t know who exactly I’m writing this to? You! Enjoy.

What about volleyball? The ball is a lot like the water polo ball except it’s white. Women and sometimes men (but at a different time of the year) try to keep it in the air and there’s a big net. It’s like tennis except bigger? Do hipsters like tennis? Is anything real? Anyway, our school takes this very fun sport and puts it inside of a big blue pyramid. It’s true go check it out. Actually, if you think about it, most sports tell you what they’re about just in the titles. Baseball (more on this later) has bases in there somehow. In volleyball people

Illustration

Thank you for reading the sports page, I realize that some of those who enjoy this particular newspaper are also those who may not be big into sports and other sportsrelated things. Yeah, I’m an editor and that was a very bad sentence, what are you going to do about it? As the sports editor, it is sort of my job to get you super pumped about sports and also things related to sports! Do it! Get pumped! Anyway here’s some ways all you indie types can get into sports and read my dang page!!!

Pun Idea! Something about an indie-pendant. In sports you can win a pennant… an indi-pendant. I don’t know, use your imagination, yeesh. A cool sport you could enjoy is waterpolo. This is a sport that comes from regular old polo which is like soccer on horses. Oops, this probably just made you confused, I’m not doing so well with this. Let’s start with the basics. Horses are like nature’s

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31 AUGUST 2009

LITERATURE

ESCAPING THE SYLLABUS

THE WORKS OF MICHAEL CHABON

I

f you are part of the sadly-dwindling literate population of America, you understand the buzz you get from introducing another reader to an author you think is a good match for them. It’s like a low-stakes blind date—if it works out, great! If not, no one gets hurt. But in the Union Weekly’s opinion, introducing a reader to Michael Chabon is like setting a girl up with a millionaire who spends his free time de-worming African kids, playing rugby, and rescuing kittens from burning barns. Oh, and he’s nice… but not too nice. Our entire staff has had a love affair with him for quite a while, but we’re willing to make it an open relationship.

Here are three great ways to get to know Mr. Chabon a little better.

THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH (1988)

MIKE PALLOTTA

Rarely do writers hit a home run on their first novel; but Chabon, while attending the University of Pittsburgh, took the keen advice to write what we know and did exactly that.

Eventually becoming his masters thesis at UCI, Mysteries of Pittsburgh incorporates a setting Chabon knew much about (Pittsburgh in the early ’80s), a character who’s Jewish (he was raised Jewish) that attends his school, along with themes of bisexuality (which Chabon was struggling with at the time).

Mysteries isn’t without its flaws, but Chabon’s adept ability to draw from his own life and translate reality into fiction results in some of the most tangible moments in literature, proving his skills

WONDER BOYS (1995)

VICTOR CAMBA

Like most creative writing majors, I have a strange fascination with my professors. There’s a secret world behind their untamed hair and hornrimmed glasses. Wonder Boys is that secret world and it’s exactly the way we’ve imagined it.

Grady Tripp is a college professor and awardwinning author. He’s working on an epic 2,611 page novel, seven years in the making, most of which he’s written completely stoned, but he’s nowhere near finished and his editor is coming into town to take a look at his work. Although proving himself to not be a failure with his new novel is a major priority, he has other things to worry about—his third wife has walked out on him, his mistress (the chancellor of the college) is pregnant with his baby, and his most talented and somewhat disturbed student James Leer has gotten him into some very peculiar legal trouble.

Chabon seems to be aware of the archetypal

as a writer. The furthest Chabon asks his readers to stretch their imagination is in believing that the main character, Art Bechstein, is the son of a mafia man. However, Chabon knows when to pour on the fantastic and when to reel it back into more realistic territory. This “toeing of the line” is more prevalent in later novels—in fact, many of his techniques employed in Mysteries were used and perfected in subsequent works (i.e. themes of bisexuality, Judaism, and coming of age as a young man). By the time he wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, he had mastered these techniques, culminating in his best work yet. Yes, Kavalier & Clay is better than this book.

RACHEL RUFRANO characters he’s created: A struggling, aging writer, his troubled, genius apprentice, the elusive party boy editor, and the strong and intelligent mistress.

Tripp spends his time trying to write something “true” and then his life becomes the stuff of bad fiction. At first glance, one might think Chabon’s story verges on cliché, but that’s precisely the idea he’s toying with. On top of which, Chabon’s work reads with such fluidity and ease that it’s difficult not to enjoy what seems to be a group of recycled characters, seen in literature since the beginning of time, but Chabon takes these trite archetypes and makes them “true” again.

It’s an adventure story in which writers write about writers writing about writers, and that’s where the real trouble is: At what point does our reality cross over into fiction and our fiction cross over into reality, or was there ever a difference to begin with?

Illustration

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER CAITLIN CUTT & CLAY (2000) In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Josef Kavalier and Sammy Klayman are cousins who come of age together in an America that wakes from fever dreams of war and genocide, to a brilliant “Superman-blue” sky that fills more and more each day with beaming high-rises that inhale money and exhale popculture deliverance in the form of inky panels of fantastical escape. Amidst the real events of America’s Golden Age of comic books that occurred in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, Chabon’s characters, Josef, a refugee fleeing occupied Europe, and Sammy, a scrappy New York kid with a knack for storytelling, come together to create their own comic book hero: the Escapist.

As The Escapist takes off, the young men (who are themselves in fact an amalgamation of real-life comic book godfathers such as Will EisUNION WEEKLY

31 AUGUST 2009

ner, Jerry Siegel, and Joe Shuster), bump into key figures of American popculture like Orson Welles and Salvador Dali, and grapple with the very same financial injustices that actual creators of famous comic book characters endured at the time.

I have to say, I’m not sure if there really is such a thing at the great American Novel anymore, but if there is, Kavalier & Clay is one, or maybe it’s the last one. I read Chabon’s masterpiece for the first time about a month ago. When I finished it, I read it again. For the avid reader, the novel’s structure and composition is enough to keep you glued to your favorite chair all night. As a writer, each page is filled with that kind of “Holy-God! I wish I wrote that!” ache, that truly hurts so fucking good. Finally, as a popculture junkie, the novel perfectly and tenderly articulates the intimate history between America and the entertainment industry—two threads that, as Chabon proves, are impossible to separate.

LITERATURE

STRUGGLING

WITH THE DENIAL OF DEATH Ernest Becker’s novel costs $10.55 on Amazon.com. Woo.

I

IT WON A PULITZER, WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?

n nearly any college class today, the concept of psychoanalysis, and especially the name Freud, is met with open rejection, off-topic conversations, and nervous giggling. It is easy to make Freud a perverse cartoon, however he opened an insight into the human condition that fueled twentieth century discourse. Enter Ernest Becker, a Professor interested in Humanities’ “hero projects” and “character armor,” two tools man has used throughout the ages in order to deal with his own neurosis. In his final and most fully realized book, Becker repackages Freud and offers an insight into psychoanalysis rooted in the human fear of death instead of the limited, controversial and wrongheaded notion of sexual primal instinct. Needless to say the book was tre-

MICHAEL MERMELSTEIN mendously popular with Woody Allen, coloring his most famous films and making a special guest appearance in Annie Hall.

The book begins by exploring the organismic reality of man, and the symbolic awareness that separates us from the animals. These opening chapters are purposeful, immediate and genuinely timeless. So why did I have such a hard time getting through this masterpiece? In Becker’s discussion of Kierkegaard, Becker explains that man’s only out to the anxiety caused by human life is faith. Which after an in depth discussion of character armor rings very hollow for me. How does Becker rationalize human civilization as being a “vital lie” but not religion? Frustratingly he does not address the issue in more depth. I was off-

put by the damnation Becker used on Freud for his agnosticism, which also comes off as rushed and unsupported. However, by the end of the work I felt like Becker had reached a perfect balance between the two thinkers’ world views saying, “If Freud can be said to have erred on the visible, then Kierkegaard can surely be said to have equally erred on the invisible.” Above all Becker asks us to strive towards a life project that is most “healthy,” and moderation is the key factor in a healthy life.

Admittedly my rejection of the material was biased and unfair to the book that up to that point I had considered one of the most important books I have ever read. But to me it was like watching The Godfather and then in the second act, somebody switched the

reel over to White Chicks. I carried on with the book, and began to loosen up and enjoy Becker’s keen insight on the problems of mental illness and the nature of modernity.

One of the things Becker does so well is speak in universalities. Becker makes clear that he is not setting out to write a specialized piece on a small slice of psychotherapy, or even a history of post-Freudian thinking. Instead, Becker makes a sweeping novel that provides the reader with an understanding of mental illness, religion, fetishism, and existentialism, all with an authoritative and instructive tone. The Denial of Death is by no means a light read but for those looking to understand the shortcomings of mortality and neuroticism then this book is essential readings.

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CULTURE

Day Trip: The Museum of Jurassic Technology WORDS AND PHOTOS

W

arning: You are about to be mindfucked. Second warning: the Museum of Jurassic Technology is not a museum dedicated to dinosaurs, unfortunately. Or technology.

Actually, this museum is not really a museum at all—it’s more like the seizing of your mind. Just be aware that the fate of your existence rests on the experience you will encounter in this museum, and from the second you turn the knob to enter, you will have officially transported into a dimension of reality that does not actually exist, except

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31 AUGUST 2009

KATHY MIRANDA in your mind, which in this realm does not exist either—you are now transparent, completely weightless. You are no longer in control of your senses. Every part of your body is now being controlled by one force and once force only—curiosity.

Standing inconspicuously on the corner of Venice and Bagley, this museum of oddities is said to provide the intellectual with the artifacts of the “Lower Jurassic.”

It should also serve as a kind of hands-on experience of life in the “Lower Jurassic,” with special exhibitions dedicated to the people, the ideas, and things that were conceived during this time. But even the museum’s mission statement is a dialect that does not entirely make sense. After all, what real technology existed in the Jurassic times, anyway?

What makes the museum interesting is that this confusion is a part of the experience. To even call the experience confusing doesn’t seem fitting. It was more like a violation of sensory perception by some ghostly being, which proceeds to follow you throughout the entire building—but it wasn’t just following you, it was a ghost embodying you, ridding you of your own weight and making you feel light.

The eerieness of the situation is apparent from

“ The

learner must be lead always from

familiar objects toward the unfamiliar...

guided along as I were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life. ”

the beginning. The door to the museum is closed—you must press a button to get in.

You will be greeted by the attendant, someone soft spoken and polite, who then directs you into the room. It will be dark, of course, and sometimes it will be quiet, other times you will be pressing buttons and picking up phones, yes, phones. You will be looking through different “seeing apparatuses”, as they call them, and witnessing images of people and places that were never real, but have materialized by some unknown force, right now, in your mind.

And what happens with the phones is so fascinating: you find yourself at a glass exhibit, looking into a telescope or very old broken glasses, mirrors reflected upon other mirrors and a red phone urging you to pick it up (it is not ringing, mind you). And when you hear the voice at the end of the line, it does not sound like a recording but like a real conversation, so real you are inclined to speak, to seek some kind of mutual connection with the voice on the other line. I remember the woman’s voice so vividly, her breathy sighs and the very slight drone she had in her voice as if she just came home from a long day at work. Am I sounding crazy yet?

There are several rooms on the first floor, all connected by darkened corridors and ominous sounds transpiring just around the corner. A loud set of seductive chimes lead me into the darkest room, and I felt an intense rush of fear, even while I was aware of where I was. When these chimes stopped, my

heartbeat quickened, and once they would start again, I was compelled to keep moving.

Aside from all this sensory mystification and bizarro theories being explicated by comforting voices, you’ll find yourself amongst peculiar collections of objects like disappearing dice, needles with tiny images imprinted on them, a geometric structures of water, and little replicas of old trailer park homes, including artifacts collected from inside of them.

There is not much else I can tell you.

Everything that I have said may or may not be what actually exists in that building. I’m not even sure if anything I saw in there was real or imagined. All I know is they give you tea, and you just drink it, no questions asked. It was like an episode of the Twilight Zone, except real—but not real, at the same time.

Our curiosities act as a catalyst in uncovering something unfamiliar despite however bizarre the new information may be. This is what the museum offers its visitors: a true unmatched experience of intellectual discourse, a kind of sudden electrocution of brain cells, but in a good way. We are inspired to think here, and massage our minds by confusing the senses.

And we leave dumbfounded, alone and hungry. Good thing there is an In-N-Out down the street.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is located on 9341 Venice Boulevard in Culver City. The museum open Thursday, 2-8pm and Fri-Sun, 12-6pm.

CULTURE

Scuda the Divin’ hunt for long beach’s best vintage SIMONE HARRISON

T

he newest addition to Fourth Street’s “Retro Row” has a lot more to offer than meets the eye. At first glance, Scuda is just another vintage store that is detestably overpriced, tragically hip and frightening to walk into without checking your reflection in the outside window. Scuda volunteers an atmosphere that doesn’t suggest you look like a fouryear-old who’s divorcée father tried to dress her for the first day of school, instead you feel as if it’s just another day hunting for a one of a kind outfit that makes all of the mustached Portfolio boys turn their heads. This is a welcomed change from most of the bullimia-inducing vintage stores in the Southern California area.

Scuda offers a reasonably priced selection of true blue vintage clothing. Whether you’re looking for an authentic Patti Smith outfit circa 1979 or a ball gown straight out of Ingrid Bergman’s closet, Scuda has all of the pieces for the look. Not only do they have the authenticity that would shut the fucking Eugenics Formulators up, but they also have the best selection in vintage town. The employees have obviously done their share of sorting because you would be hard-pressed to find something even slightly unattractive in the entire store.

Shipments arrive every two weeks so there is something

PHOTO BY CHELSEA ROSENTHAL

new to see almost every time you walk through Scuda’s doors. Most of the stock is found by employees scouring consignment stores or estate sales.

Typically when you stroll into a vintage store, shining in the corner like Jesus’ second coming are the greatest pair of shoes you’ve ever seen. They make you feel like Christmas morning or the first time you saw Adrien Brody and then it all comes crashing down when you realize the shoes are a size four. Scuda offers a wide array of shoes that weren’t designed for people with proportional dwarfism. With Fall around the corner, boots are essential and the cutest galoshes around that won’t cut into your cigarettes and coffee budget are available here. Their accessories section is impressively large with hard-to-find 1920s hats reminiscent of Clara Bow or Lillian Gish.

The real charm that Scuda holds is the rotating art gallery that supports Long Beach’s local artists. An entire wall is devoted to the works of these artists which makes for an interesting center piece in the vintage store setting. With the appeal of non-digital photography and avant-garde paintings, at times, Scuda feels like a good day at MOCA. A stage that usually displays furniture and artwork from local estate sales is also set up for monthly concerts that take place instore. This Saturday will feature the indie rock stylings

of San Francisco’s 100 Swans.

Basically, Scuda runs the gamet for the artistically inclined. One stop to Scuda affords the customer with fashion, art, and music. Unlike many of its kind, Scuda is a breath of fresh air for Long Beach locals and should not be passed by on the walk down hipster purgatory more commonly known as Retro Row.

Emphasis on Et Cetera

Exploring the Menu at Eggs, Etc.

by kathy miranda There are enough Long Beach breakfast spots to make anyone despise eggs and bacon for the rest of their life, which is why Eggs, Etc. offers you a bigger menu, with a variety of options for both breakfast and lunch.

A family-owned business since 1975, Eggs, Etc has the same inviting atmosphere of having breakfast at a friend’s apartment.

Unlike most chain diners, Eggs, Etc. gives you the option of eating your meal on a nice sun-lit patio or inside where the smell of breakfast is thick and mouth-watering.

You are often greeted by an energetic waitress, who welcomes you with a smile and a reassuring, “Sit anywhere you’d like.”

Now for the best part, the food.

Breakfast at Eggs, Etc. is anything but run-of-the-mill. The portions are big and all of the food is fresh. More importantly, along with your classic omelets and

egg/bacon/sausage combinations, this popular breakfast spot also offers a great hamburger! The hamburgers are always cooked to order, and the patties are never frozen. With a background in countrystyle cooking, the owners of Eggs, Etc. sure know how to grill a patty just how you like it!

With eggs, steak, burgers, sandwiches, salad, fresh OJ, country-fried everything and plenty of coffee, you are slated for a full stomach the second you sit down on the shiny patio.

Clip out the coupon on this page (to the left!) and invite your friends to have a nice breakfast, two for the price of one!

That means free, people, free eggs and homemade jam!

Eggs, Etc. is located on 550 Redondo Avenue.

They are open everyday, 7am-2pm UNION WEEKLY

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COMICS You’re STUCK Here by Victor! Perfecto

yourestuckhere@gmail.com

SUDOKU

20th Anniversary Year!

Drunken Penguin Comics by James Kislingbury

10% OFF ANY PURCHASE WITH THIS AD

penguin.incarnate@gmail.com

Expires 09-15-09. Not valid with other offers. Limit 1 per customer.

*We’ll match any competitor’s prices!*

5555 Stearns St, Long Beach 562.493.4427

Koo Koo and Luke by Jesse Blake

Comics Graphic Novels Statues Action Figures Comic T-Shirts Magic: The Gathering

www.funatronics.com/kookoo

Oh hey, we’re back.

E-mail editor Victor Camba: victorpc.union@gmail.com Or drop off comments at the Union office Student Union Office 239

ANSWERS

The Kids Are Alright by Ken C.

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31 AUGUST 2009

Art and Photos

NADIA VANEK

CREATIVE ARTS

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Disclaimer:

This page is satire. We are not ASI, nor do we represent the CSULB campus. Kelp douche. Send rags to bear.grun@gmail.com

“A baby could blow you.”

Volume 65 Issue 1

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Budget Cuts Raise Tuition to Level of Legitimate University

This bargraph was lifted from a recent issue of the Daily 49er and colorized for your viewing pleasure. It’s fairly clear what it’s trying to point out and it doesn’t need further explanation.

BY BOSSY BOOTS LONG BEACH, CA — Ted Evans, 35, a CSULB senior, stands in line for books with his fellow CSULB students and complains. On the heels of a second tuition increase, Evans fumes, “That tuition increase is a bitch!” Evans states, “Fuck, man. I mean, if I wanted to spend this much money I would’ve just taken the SATs and gone to a real school.”

This “real school” complaint is one that has spread fast and loose throughout the student body, but it was not a surprise to CSULB brass. Linda Lloyd, head of CSULB’s new 4RL committee,

stated in a press conference held Sunday morning at a local Holé Molé, “We knew that, as tuition increased, the students would notice the financial gap between CSULB and more prestigious universities closing, while the gap in the quality of education CSULB provides as opposed to say, UCLA, will remain the same. That’s why we developed the 4LR committee before the increase announcement.”

The 4RL (For Real) strategy was originally developed on the East Coast, as the Ivy league campuses were built. The goal being to emulate the European college “look.”

“America has learned time and time again that, if people think something is real, they will believe it is.” Lloyd stated, “What 4RL aims to do is make the students at CSULB feel like this is an actual institution of higher learning.”

The strategy is simple according to Lloyd, who wrote the committee’s two-page plan. “Much like our Engineering Department capitalizes on our proximity to certain industries, our committee is taking advantage of our proximity to Hollywood. With the new Health Center opening next year, we were able to piggyback on a significant increase of legitimacy.

But with a little movie magic, we can create more legitimacy.”

The plan includes installation of cobblestone walkways, a snow machine, and a team of writers to create better first-day speeches for the professors. “You think all of this is silliness, but it’s not. Our studies indicate that the change of seasons has a strong correlation to real-school feelings. We’ve scheduled two truckloads of imported foliage from the East Coast to arrive on September 15th. Also, we commissioned the installation of 100 plaques that read ‘This building was built in 1894’ to help the students feel like their school is older. The concept of ‘old’ has a strong mental link to ‘important.’”

LBUNION.COM

I Can’t Wait to Die OP-ED BY JEFF BRIDGES, ACTOR I don’t know who is aware of this, but being alive seriously stinks. I’m stinky. Just think of all the terrible things in life: babies, white babies, babies wearing suits that have pants connected to the socks and all that is connected to a shirt? I could go on, but you can see how bad those things are and you can also add that article to this list. It’s bad.

Because of this I decided that I’m going to die. I hope I get to die soon. I hope there are no babies in the afterlife. I sincerely hope this.

I know this sort of seems like a suicide note to dumb people, but committing suicide might be one of the stupidest parts of life. Instead, I have decided to just spend every waking hour praying for death. Wish me luck! Thank you.

Shut up.

I have compiled a list of my preferred ways to die and I will outline them here. I would like to throw a pass with a football that has such a perfect spiral that everyone dies somehow and then I die later of boredom because there is no one left to make any more quality television programming. Or maybe I would like to have such a fun time at the Gilroy Garlic Festival (a lot of fun) that someone murders me out of kindness so I can die at my happiest moment.

Perhaps I would like to travel

Yep.

to Australia and push a kangaroo’s head into its own pouch causing it to collapse in on itself creating a rip in the space-time continuum causing the entirety of the planet to be sucked into the rip thereby ending life as we know it, yet beginning our spiritual journey as a commune of star children in search of terra firma. This life is but a journey, a journey to the bottom of a mystical marsupial pouch containing all the mysteries and horrors of the universe and I will be this Earth’s ambassador.

Kangaroo pouch got goop in it.

Actually writing this out makes me realize how badly I do not want to do any of those things, maybe I should plan these things better. Or maybe not since life doesn’t even exist it is simply a dream of a perception. Time to die.

INSIDE

Area Boyfriend Didn’t Mention It Was a Horror Movie

Rihanna Attacker Chris Brown Mysteriously Still Alive

Local Drug Dealer Lures in Customers with New Sound System

Area boyfriend, Mark Young, took his then-girlfriend, Jenna Straub, to the movie theater this past weekend with the intention of seeing the newest horror movie, The Final Destination. Young claims that at dinner he merely “forgot to mention” that they were going to see a 3D movie packed with exploding body parts and digital blood. His actions, on the other hand, lead Straub to believe otherwise, “[Mark] made me go get coffee while he bought tickets, and then he grabbed me and kissed me the entire time it took us to walk into the theater and find our seats. I thought it was really romantic until the movie started…fucking asshole.”

PAGE 3D

Last Tuesday, singer Chris Brown was given a slap on the wrist and ordered to not go near his ex-girlfriend Rihanna after slapping the shit out of her face. What’s even more astounding is the fact that Chris Brown has managed to keep his life for six months since using his fists to shut a woman up. There have been reports that Brown was even seen getting coffee in LA without having a mob of people tackle him to the ground and ripping his face off with their bare hands. When reached for comment, Rihanna simply said, “I just want Chris [Brown] to live his life, oh, ay, ay, ay…”

PAGE RNB

Local Drug Dealer, L. Mondo “El Mondo” Lucas recently purchased a Westlake Hi-Fi sound system for the sole purpose of getting his customers to come over and hopefully stay longer than normal. Mondo recently broke up with his girlfriend and is finding that his customers are all he has left. Now a self-proclaimed workaholic, and state-declared alcoholic, “El Mondo” is hoping the clarity of his high-definition stereo will drown out the sorrow of his empty life. It’s too bad he’s a boring piece of shit and it doesn’t matter if he’s got Dark Side of the Moon on Dolby 7.1 audio.

PAGE LCD