The Wake

This break has launched newly created struggles into my lungs.
Your appetite for curiosity forms scabs on my knees, sore and
Shaken from plummeting to them for support in a sobbing convulsion.
Words suffocate to death in my throat when you force down pearly
Gates with your reason of irrationality, preventing the escape,
Escape of these bleeding shouts.
They bleed for you, an aqua hue that you’ll recognize in your backstroke
Away from me through an ocean of forgetfulness. I feel like dying
Whenever we talk on the phone. More like, you talk, I just listen. …

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I check my mail: storied blues, jazz & pop singer Maria Muldaur Tonight. And I Picture
her face and I wish today was Friday, not Monday. Monday is when rock
and roll swallowed my mother’s
guarantee—quoting lyrics to a scrabble
board of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Blues he remembers,
began with not Guthrie and not Johnson, but his Devil—dancing on his pedestal fiddling as I burn, plucking strings crafted from my gut
at the crossroads.
I remember it, the deal
I made in the sepia south, what his
pigmented pale hand …

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Over 250 people filled the Cowles Auditorium in the Hubert H. Humphrey Center. A buzz generated by students, journalists, academics, and lawyers filled the room. They all anticipated Floyd Abrams, the legal representation for New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who was held in contempt of court and sent to jail for refusing to reveal her sources in the Valerie Plame investigation. Since the lecture, the Plame investigation has resulted in the resignation of I. Scooter Libby, special aide to Vice President Chaney. Abrams had come to the University for the 20th annual Silha Center Lecture, which is devoted to …

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After sunset every Monday through Thursday, until Nov. 2, Grace University Lutheran Church on the University’s East Bank is filled with the sounds of worship. The call to prayer can be heard as people file in, greet their friends, leave their shoes in the hall and take their places on rows of rugs. But the sound that emanates from the church these evenings is not that of Christian sermons and hymns. Instead, the room is filled with the gentle rhythm of Arabic spoken in unison and the steady recitation of the Quran. Facing toward Mecca in Saudi Arabia, the worshippers …

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Many students make it through morning lecture by chugging down cans of Coke. This is partly because of the caffeine, and partly because there is no other soft drink available on campus. What the numerous Coke machines will not advertise to U students is that Coca-Cola has been tied with murders and torture in its bottling plants in Colombia. One Scottish university has taken a stand against the actions of Coke. The Department of Geography and Sociology at Strathclyde University in Glasgow decided to boycott Coca-Cola and Nestle this year. The head of department, …

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Last October, this campus was overrun by insistent-voter-registration drives, rallying politicians, visiting celebrities, eager political science majors, and campaign buttons by the thousands. The university community was active, involved, aware and ready to vote. In short, we had election fever. But somehow this civic spirit has disappeared, as if we all awoke last fall from a dream, our frenzied activity evaporating away to be replaced with political apathy. Are we simply tired from our efforts and ready to wait out the next four years until we gear up again? There seems to be a profound lack of interest in this …

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Rule Changes In an effort to make professional hockey more entertaining, the NHL has altered the rules to make the game more focused on offense. This season there are a plethora of new rules that make the game faster-paced and higher-scoring. The rink dimensions have changed to make the offensive zones bigger, the blue lines have moved closer to center ice, and the goals have moved farther back. Icing is still enforced, but the team committing an icing infraction will no longer be able to make a line change for the ensuing face-off. Goaltenders will now be limited to a …

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The lights come up on the players as they skate around in circles. The pep band launches into the rouser. Not the regular pep band, but the women’s athletics pep band. Their version is equally awe-inspiring.I look up at the roof of Ridder Arena and banners fall like beacons of dominance: back-to-back national championships, 2004-2005. WCHA Champions, both regular season and tournament. Champions of the world, really. I hear a guy behind me brag about how five former and current members of the team were selected to represent the U.S. in the 2006 Winter Olympics.“M-I-N-N-E-S-O-T-A,” the crowd chants in unison. …

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“Drinking parties busted”; “Drinking citations increase in the past week”; “Student Dead after reportedly drinking heavily at a fraternity.” Any of these sound familiar to you? They should, they are all media headlines from the past two weeks. Cracking down on underage drinking has become a high priority for law enforcement agencies around the country. Does this mean that underage drinking has increased? Absolutely not. The difference is that now people are beginning to realize the extent of the problem. Drinking for college students is considered a right of passage, much like the right to drive …

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“I have lived within the monster and know its insides; and my sling is the sling of David,” said José Martí, a Cuban poet, journalist and activist, near the end of the 19th century in reference to the United States’ government. Martí feared that if Cuba successfully broke away from Spanish rule, then the U.S. would annex his home country. Martí ultimately died in this fight for Cuban independence and racial equality in May of 1895. Three years after Martí’s death, the Spanish sunk the USS Maine in February of 1898. This act officially began the Spanish-American war and …

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The University of Minnesota’s Police Department website still shows photos from the night of April 12, 2003. Street signs pulled down, dumpsters on fire and a car being turned over are shown in color prints. Still don’t remember this night? It was the evening of the hockey riots. For various reasons after the hockey (and alcohol) induced madness, a policy forbidding rioting was put into the University of Minnesota’s Student Conduct Code. The policy prohibits the incitation or participation of riots “on campus, in areas proximate to campus, or…in response to a University-sponsored event.” While …

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Broken Social Scene is an amalgam of some of Canada’s finest musical stock. The collective, which is made up of members from bands including (but not limited to) Stars, Apostle of Hustle, and Feist, released a self-titled record on Oct. 4.The music on Broken Social Scene is constantly in motion, searching for new sounds and ideas while maintaining a high degree of cohesion. Voices come and go while string arrangements, samples, and backward tape loops create the musical backdrop. Because their 2003 release, You Forgot it in People, has become such a cult favorite, there were high expectations for the …

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Bryan Adams got his first real six-string in the summer of ‘69 but more importantly the most infamous music festival of all time, Woodstock, was born. Oh yeah, and two men in big-expensive spacesuits landed on the moon. History is something that sticks with us in varying degrees. For instance, the song “Summer of ‘69” will always be that song I yell in unison with my girlfriends out of car windows, so it lives on for me in that way. Woodstock is rekindled for me every time my living room fills with smoke and I can feel music rippling up …

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A History of Violence really should be a great film. As a treatise on violence, I understand what it’s trying to do, and hopefully others will too. But having an incredible idea and really doing something with it are two very different things.Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) has a gorgeous wife (Maria Bello), a teenage son and a young daughter. He lives one of those idyllic small-town lives you typically see in movies. One night at the diner Tom owns, two men come in to rob the place and presumably murder everyone inside. Tom, in a quite un-idyllic manner, brutally and …

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It’s a Monday evening in autumn and the familiar buzz of fall semester returns with a swarm of people commonly known as the student body. New texts, new faces, and if you’re lucky, new classrooms are enough to avoid thinking about the inevitable upcoming midterm week. To break the tension of amassing assignments, as well as to find a comfortable way to get them done, you have to find the right surroundings. The coffee shops and libraries that are scattered across campus are suitable for a cram-session. But for a new ambiance, one with personality to break the monotony, I …

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