Highs and Lows: Weeds Wraps Up

On Sunday, July 1^st Weeds returned to Showtime for its eighth and final season, revealing the target of the sniper’s bullet from last season’s cliffhanger ending.  I will include absolutely NO SPOILERS in this article, but I will say the season is off to a strong start.  I hope the show’s producers, writers, and creator Jenji Kohan can continue to build together a resolution for The Widow Botwin and her brood.  I’m sad to see the show go but like most Weeds fans still watching I’m a bit relieved as well.  This moment probably should have happened four or even five years ago when the show spectacularly jumped the shark.

Just a few moths ago I wrote an article on the value of networks allowing creative series with promise survive to a reasonable, six seasons and a movie number of episodes without the constant threat of ratings.  (There’s also the added monetary incentive of syndication, which I neglected to consider.) But Weeds has me thinking about the flipside.  When a series

Regina Spektor Struggles To Regain Old Spark

When I was in high school, I was head-over-heels in love with Regina Spektor. My copy of Begin to Hope (2006) was constantly spinning in my CD player; a few years later, I managed to download practically every recording Regina had ever made, including unreleased demos and live performances. I loved Spektor for her deceptive simplicity: Even though many of her songs, on first listen, seemed like straightforward, charming ditties, there often existed in her songs a hidden complexity — a darker edge tucked away in the lyrics, perhaps, or a complex piano line accompanying her sweet vocals.

With her 2009 album Far, though, Spektor seemed to abandon understated complexity in favor of overproduced quirky cute. Instead of lyrics about an inmate on death row, Far featured Spektor making dolphin noises and delivering heavy-handed stories about how people don’t laugh at God. Sure, the music is pleasant enough, but it lacks the intellect or lyrical creativity of her previous music.

Rediscover Movie: Ghost

I decided to watch this movie not knowing what to expect. I was in the mood for something supernatural, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Ghost is a great film.

The movie stars Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, and Whoopi Goldberg, who steals the show as a con-artist named Oda Mae Brown who pretends to talk to ghosts to make money. But Oda Mae can hear the voice of ghost Sam Wheat, played by Swazye. Sam, with the help of Oda Mae, tries to solve the mystery of his own murder, as well as protect his girlfriend Molly (played by Moore). It all works out to be a really fun and interesting movie that has a new take on the suspense-mystery genre.

While I think the movie is well done, there definitely is an argument that the film has its corny moments. The lights from above and the shadows from below that take ghosts to a heaven-like or hell-like place (respectively) were really fake. But I don’t mean to be too picky–tech has gotten much better since 1990.

Haiku The News: Elaborate Proposals, Vampires, And Abraham Lincoln

Next time, just go for

the classic fancy dinner

and one-knee thing, dude.

from Asterisky staff writer Katie Holliday

Come On And Dance: My Reactions to the Spectacle of Eurovision

My first apartment.  My first legal drink.  My first time watching the Eurovision Song Contest.  Few things in the past few years have matched the pure excitement and joy of these momentous occasions.  I finally experienced Eurovision this past Saturday, May 26^th in a stifling and overcrowded bar in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC.  In short, Eurovision is American Idol on speed. It’s shorter than Idol, weirder than Idol, and a hell of a lot more fun.  Especially in public spaces like an American bar where each country inevitably has its own cheering section of travelers, ex-pats, and descendents.  Most Americans are completely unfamiliar with the popular contest first started in 1958, even though it did launch the careers of ABBA and Celine Dion back in the day.  But perhaps that’s starting to change with the Internet infamy of Jedward and their fellow catchy Eurotrash acts. While I doubt Eurovision will ever catch on here in the same way it has abroad, it may become a more significant indicator of buzzworthy pop acts in years to come.

Making A Good Treaty With Iran: The P5+1 And Islamic Republic Talk Nukes In Baghdad

We may be about to see diplomacy work, and dodge another military crisis in the Middle East. Almost. Maybe. Hopefully.

As many, if not most, of our readers will have at least heard about, the international realm has been a bit on edge of late as a result of the developing Iranian nuclear program–a program many policymakers (especially Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak) believe to be well on its way to creating and providing the Islamic Republic with nuclear weaponry. In November of last year, an International Atomic Energy Agency report suggested that the Iranian program was capable of imminent weaponization, if such a policy was chosen by Iran’s government.

Now, there is, and this cannot be stressed enough, no current hard evidence that Iran has done any such thing or acquired any such program. It has declared that

What I’m Reading: Xenocide

I must be on an easy-to-read science fiction kick this summer–I just finished Xenocide, which is the third book in the Ender’s Game series. Though the book was nominated for the Hugo Award, it did not win like the two previous books in the series Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead.

I was assigned Ender’s Game over the summer in high school, and it was impossible to put down. The book follows the precocious Ender Wiggin, who at a young age goes to battle school so he can train to become the leader in the war against an alien race called the Buggers. While training in outerspace, his siblings, Peter and Valentine, become famous on earth. Peter becomes the leader of the world (called the hegemon) and Valentine becomes a famous philosopher under the name Demosthenes. At the end of the book Ender’s training is so successful that he unwittingly destroys the Buggers. He realizes the horror of the act he committed, especially after gaining the ability to communicate to a hive queen. Leaving Peter to run the world, Ender and Valentine decide to travel to what will become the human colonies in outer space now that the war is over so that Ender can find a world that is suitable for the Buggers to live.

The Cabin in the Woods and the Return of Meta-Horror

As a child of the 90s the recent recycling of everything from that not so far-off decade, from Titanic to Soundgarden, does not necessarily bug me like it seems to for some other reviewers.  As the protagonists of the 90s-slasher gem Scream put it, “the killer always comes back for one final scare,” and the same idea holds true for most pop culture phenomena.  Simply put, it’s the thrill of nostalgia, and very few things can tap into that factor like a good scare.  The fact that we can know the killer is going to return, and yet still jump when they do, speaks to that power.

Speaking of unwelcome returns, the Tupac hologram provides the ultimate example of 90s nostalgia gone bad.  And the whole (very forced) “controversy” around it has played out like a self-fulfilling prophecy.  A bunch of people take to the internet to sarcastically ponder, what’s next, a hologram tour??? and here we find ourselves.  The issue I take with the Tupac hologram, and despite my opening statements, believe me, I do take issue, is that Pac is much more deceased than any other 90s act currently on the reunion circuit.  Taking a hologram of the man on tour represents a deeper looting of the man’s legacy than any careless rap samples or cheesy Cirque de Soleil tributes could (because we all know MJ is under consideration for the hologram treatment as well).

Haiku The News: Dick Clark, Missile Tests, And The First Black Bachelor (Maybe)

Next New Years won’t be

as rockin’.  Thanks for all the

midnights together.

from Asterisky staff writer Katie Holliday

What I’m Reading: Star Wars: Heir To The Empire

While some might think a pulp-like book is lame reading material, I often find that it helps me learn to love reading again. Don’t get me wrong, I love reading and my mother (a children’s reading specialist) would probably have a heart attack if I didn’t. But after reading for class, sometimes the last thing you would want to do is pick up a book and read for fun. Why put yourself through the eye strain when you could do some other mindless activity?

This probably won’t help with the eye strain, but an easy-to-read book can be really helpful here. Not only does it remind you how much you love reading, but after reading a hundred pages (or more) in the time it took you to read an essay for one of your classes, you start to regain some confidence as a reader.

This is why I picked up Heir to the Empire, the first book in a Star Wars expanded universe series called the Thrawn Trilogy. A friend of mine, who is a huge fan of the expanded universe and specifically the author of this book, Timothy Zahn, recommended it to me. From what I’ve learned, there is no clear way to begin reading the Expanded Universe.