Jordan... is that in Utah?

I first moved to the US about 4+ years ago. I went straight from Amman, Jordan; a city of about 3 million people, to Cadillac, Michigan, a town in the middle of nowhere in northern Michigan with a population of about 10,000 people. People, for the most part, had no idea there was a country by the name of Jordan, let alone where in earth it is. It was a bit of a culture shock moving from a huge city where things are always happening and there’s almost always something to do, to a tiny little town who’s main attraction is a Super Wal-Mart on the other side of town, a movie theater with 4 theaters, and the lake (but only during the brief summers). People asked me some of the craziest questions like:
“What do they speak in Jordan? Jordanese?”
“Where’s Jordan? You mean East Jordan, MI?”
“Jordan… Is that in Utah?”
“Do you have TVs in Jordan?”
“Do you live in tents like in Laurence of Arabia?”
“Do you ride camels to get around?”
I was in 8th grade at the time and, despite growing up in a foreign country, knew a fair amount about American history as well as the names, locations, and capitals of all 50 states. I was pretty surprised that no one knew where Jordan was, or at least that it was a part of the Middle East, the area of greatest turmoil for the past what? At least 50 years of recent history, but realistically, the turmoil dates back thousands and thousands of years. They were almost all Christian, except for the Schappas, the single non-Christian family in town; they were Jewish. I thought “Don’t they know that Jesus was baptized in the JORDAN river, and that it was near Jerusalem which is in Palestine (Israel, Palestine, whatever you choose to call it, it’s all one big mess in reality), which is on the west side of the JORDAN river bank, opposite (oh my gosh!) Jordan the COUNTRY.
So my point being, junior high, in a town like that, for a person like me, was two long years of hell. Point two being, US public schools REALLY need better geography classes.

BitterSweetLoveAffair

Missing my sweet sweet lover
But he's right there
Sitting in my pocket
Nestled
Warmly snuggled with his spark

He's right there
Right within my reach
I want him
But I don't
I love him
And I hate him
I crave
Yet despise him

Within me he ignites a small temporary light
At the expense of the eternal flame in my soul
He weighs heavily on my chest
Grounded deep in my heart

He constricts me
Holding me back
Chaining me down
I am his prisoner

Comfortably
He resides in my core for all eternity.

He's always there for me
My shoulder to cry on
My angry release
He loves me for me
No strings attached
No matter what

My longing
My craving
My yearning
My desire

Its all for him
Only him
I am loyal to him
I am exclusive
I obey him religiously
I answer his every call
And I meet his every need

I could never betray him for another
But no other could ever live up to him anyway

He goes perfectly with anything
Every time is his time

Every place is his place

He lifts me up
He brings me down
He masks my soul
And distorts my being

He tortures me
He comforts me

I am a victim of his manipulation

I squirm
I struggle
I itch to evade him
Beneath my skin
I can feel it

I need him

I need him

From the first touch
I am relieved
I fall
All over again
Every time
Descending,
Deeper
And deeper
Into a state of dependence

That last touch comes along
It is dreaded.
That wretched last touch
Damn it
Its so inevitable

A dark feeling sets over me
Submerging me in a tenebrous sea
I am full of regret
Disappointment
Disgust
At myself
And my submission.

I hate myself for loving him
I hate myself for needing him
I hate myself for falling so
Madly
Deeply
Truly

Head
-
over
-
Heels

From the first taste
The moment I first brought my lips to his
That instant they interlocked
He had me
But I feel he always has

He is my life partner
My loyal lover
…
My silent slayer

Damn him.

Poetry Reading at the Dikeou Collection

On Thursday, April 12th 2007, Copper Nickel hosted Jake Adam York, a professor of English at University of Colorado at Denver, reading poetry at the Dikeou Collection downtown along with two of his former students Mary McHugh and Roxanne Banks. Roxanne Banks is currently an English teacher at Littleton High School in Littleton, CO, a suburb south of Denver, and Mary McHugh is currently a student at University of Colorado at Denver.
Mary McHugh was the first to read, she walked up to the podium timidly after Jake Adam York introduced her. She giggled nervously saying, “Wow, I have a lot to live up to with that introduction. She read several poems including a poem about the poet Andy Goldsworthy, a poem called Octopus; inspired by Marianne Moore, a poem called Pompeii and a poem called Radioactive Water. Jake Adam York compared her poetry to that of Marianne Moore, scientific and logical in manner. She was wearing a black cardigan, knee length skirt and knee high socks with clunky Mary Jane shoes. She seemed a bit nervous; slightly rushed, voice unstable and wavering.
Roxanne Banks on the other hand, a teacher at my high school, was far more eloquent and confident speaking in front of people. She stepped up to the podium and almost immediately cracked a joke. She mentioned an electronic sign outside of a Walgreen’s pharmacy, it read, “Vienna Sausage Armor… $6.75” and talked about how wonderful it would be to have armor made out of Vienna sausage. Her most recent works have been eulogies, mostly to fictional characters. The first poem she read, An Eulogy for a Prairie Dog, she said was a poem she probably should have written about years ago when she first witnessed the events in it. She had very steady rhythm, as well as great structure and imagery. Her second poem, called And Now, was about a beetle, the main character of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Her third, I Tried to Kill Her But… a “fractured fairytale”. Her fourth, Your Educational Rights, about a high school student with an unhealthy obsession with his teacher. And finally a poem about Meursault, the estranged character of Albert Camus’s book, The Stranger (L’Étranger).

I was able to stay long enough to hear two of Jake Adam York’s poems, they were both about unfairly solved murders that happens several decades ago. I noticed he had a great stance and confidence. He used his voice very well, he had great projection and made great use of accents in reading his poetry. It was definitely interesting to hear each of the three poets read their own work because it makes a big difference as to the way they read them and the understanding extracted from them. Had I been reading the poetry they wrote it probably would have been very different, having breaks and stops at different points, making a huge difference in the meaning behind the words.

Watch Before You Eat

So I visited the Downtown Denver Aquarium with one of my friends last week. I felt like such a kid, it was great! I loved it, I had so much fun that I felt a bit ridiculous. I got all excited when I saw just about every single fish in there. I’m really pretty surprised my friend didn’t punch me in the face at all; I was like an extremely over-grown three year-old. “OH MY GOD LOOK AT THE JELLY FISH!” and once we saw the clown fish, “Look! They found Nemo!” and “OH MY GOD! What if the shark eats the little fishies? They need protection!!”
So it was pretty much awesome, an escape much needed from my insane week.
What I found most interesting about my Downtown Denver Aquarium experience was the restaurant located at the end of the tour of the Downtown Denver Aquarium. It seemed a bit odd to me to spend an hour admiring hundreds of beautiful kinds of fish then walking into a restaurant to eat some fish. Not to mention the fact that the restaurant was lined with a huge aquarium covering the entire left wall. I think I made a wise decision, I ordered a salad. I did not want any angry little fishies breaking through that aquarium going for my throat.
I mean I’m still struggling with being ok with eating meat, let alone eating a fish, in front of a fish. Sure sure, fish have puny little brains and don’t know the difference anyway, but it seems a bit odd, and made me extremely uncomfortable. I’m really wondering if I’m the first person to notice anything odd about watching them before you eat them. I sure hope not.

Daniel Alarcon

I walked into the recital hall of the King Center not knowing quite what to expect. I had never been to a book reading, or any other type of reading at that. There were a couple of people from the English department that spoke, introducing Daniel Alarcon before he actually came on stage to read from his newest book; Lost City Radio. They pointed out how great of a writer he was, how his book was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, that he received the award for being one of the British journal Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and the fact that he received the Whiting award in 2004. In Addition he is the Associate Editor for an award-winning monthly magazine, Etiqueta Negra, based in Lima, Peru.
Once they were done with their thanks and introductions, the audience applauded and he got up and walked up to the stage. I was relatively surprised, his hair was pretty big, almost a fro actually, looking as if he had been electrocuted, or maybe had just rolled out of bed, I couldn’t do anything but stare at it for a few minutes. He looked very casual, but not really the laid-back kind of casual, more like a half-assed casual attempt at looking more formal. He was wearing slightly worn-out black Chuck Taylors, and his jeans were tearing a little where they rub against the ground. He was wearing a bright red T-shirt with a hint of obnoxiously bright yellow text peeking out from underneath the orange shirt he was wearing on top. He pulled it all together with a navy blue blazer and a silver band on his pinky. Although it was hard, I did snap myself out of my hypnosis in time to hear him introduce his novel, giving a short background summary and explaining the first portion he was planning to read.
He started reading, a bit awkward and monotonous, but the words he was reading were great. The story of a female radio host and her husband, trying to make it through a city going to shambles, sleep in a bar because it’s unsafe to go home captured me. It was interesting and grasping, and his words were sewn together so gracefully it was amazing.
The second portion that he read was further on in the book as well as in the future. At that point, the radio host, Norma, has lost her husband in the jungle. He studied plants and had gone there to study the natural medicines that people used in the jungle’s villages and had never returned. There were rumors that he had joined the Illegitimate Legion, the rebel group that had by then been defeated. On her radio show, Norma often read off lists of names of people gone missing, lost to the nameless south American city, in an attempt to reunite them with their families. A boy came to the station with a list of names of missing people from his village, and her husband’s name was on the list. Here begins Norma’s search for her husband where the war is over and people are trying to pick up the pieces. It is the first clue to solving the mystery.
The story sounded so great that I bought the book and am actually almost finished with it. Daniel Alarcon is indeed one of the great young American novelists, he combines his Peruvian background with his American one in an attempt to bridge the gaps and open people’s eyes to the differences and wonderful things that Peruvian culture has to offer the world. I think he is an amazing asset to both this country and the world as a whole.

WHAT?!

CK's Beautiful Fantasy

This advertisement, which is a relatively obvious parody of Calvin Klein’s perfume and cologne lines, poses a hysterically great mockery of what scent sales are all about. Technically, it seems like there’s nothing much that a picture can do to promote a perfume or cologne besides give it a persona that will appeal to the largest number of potential buyers. Calvin Klein tends to take the approach of portraying beautiful, thin, sculpted, and pretty much perfectly elegant and classy models as the face of their cologne-promotion campaigns. In the Adbusters version of it, there is a relatively overweight man, hairy chest, no visible muscles, your average joe so to speak. It portrays the complete opposite of everything that Calvin Klein ever advertises, everything that is- as mentioned in the heading- REALITY. The reality of the matter is, men are not all sculpted to perfection, hairless, silky smooth with an all year round gorgeously sun-kissed looking tan. The people that are that way are either extremely blessed, or work their tails off to get there (meaning no life, and never eating). People are real, people have flaws, normal people are not perfect. This is something that I believe advertisers try to hide from people, like it’s one big secret, while still oddly enough managing to shove it in everyone’s face at the same time. I personally hate the advertising business because I think it’s one of the most manipulative, evil, conniving professions out there, it’s all one big trick to manipulate people into thinking they want a certain product, whilst trying to jedi mind trick them into believing this all new standard for beauty and normalcy. This advertisement does a great job of hitting that right at the core and shattering the perfect picture that has been upheld for so long, only to unveil what we all need to see, and that is, the REALITY.

Sex sells, no matter what it is you're selling

So above you can see the Calvin Klein advertisement that I found the most surprising; it's supposed to be a jeans advertisement despite the fact that it portrays little to no jeans. For the past ten years or so, more and more clothiers have started to adopt the same advertising and marketing techniques as Calvin Klein (for example Abercrombie & Fitch, Express Jeans, Victoria’s Secret and numerous others.) The bottom line is, sex really does sell, no matter what we’d like to think, and sellers will take advantage of that whenever they possibly can.
In this ad, an ad for Calvin Klein Jeans, you can see a headless, sculpted male body, standing under a shower head, wearing nothing and shielding his “junk” so to speak with a pair of jeans that he holds in his hand. To me this is the epitome of using sex appeal; this isn’t even a person, his face is cut out of the picture, it’s only his body. He’s wearing absolutely nothing; instead he’s holding a pair of jeans covering his area up. The funny thing about this to me is that the photo in no way promotes the jeans, but rather the idea of taking them off perhaps? What is it about these jeans that makes them sexy? Are they trying to advertise that the jeans are in some way or another easy-access, easy-off?
An even more odd concept is that of Abercrombie & Fitch’s advertising techniques, most of the models on their huge billboards don’t have any clothes on at all. The first time I went into an Abercrombie & Fitch Store and saw their billboards I was pretty curious as to how exactly you can advertise clothes with models that aren’t wearing any. The thing is, they’re not advertising clothes, they’re advertising sex appeal, they’re trying to tell their customers that if they buy their clothes at Calvin Klein or at Abercrombie & Fitch, that they too will be sexy. It’s not about the product per se, it’s about attracting customers to the risqué and adventurous side that they are always looking for.