The Wake

Two Sundays ago, I went to Columbia College in downtown Chicago to see a holy relic of the Beat generation: the mythic scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s seminal American novel On the Road. Written in 1951, On the Road is Kerouac’s breakthrough tale of the freewheelin’ Sal Paradise and his outrageous friend Dean Moriarty rambling across the country. It’s a Beatnik bible, hailing the revered gods of sex, drugs, jazz, non-conformity and spontaneous creativity. It’s Kerouac’s push to reach the limits of free expression, a push that has inspired ten thousand road trips and just as many acid trips. Time Magazine places it on a list of All-Time 100 Novels. Translated into multiple languages, read by millions, imitated but never replicated, On the Road is regarded as an incredibly important piece of American literature….

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Welcome to The Wake’s first graphic novel. Being our first attempt at something like this technical difficulties may occur. Enjoy:

The story has two titles because there are two separate but related stories occurring at the same time. The main story takes place within the dreams of the main character as he falls in love with a girl named Stella. Slowly, fear begins to creep into his mind (the scribble monsters) and his dreams slowly turn into nightmares overrun by monsters. This gives way to the second story happening simultaneously as Pride (the circle) and Love (the square) fight to keep the forces of Fear out of his mind and help the main character realize that he truly does love Stella …

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In today’s technology-driven society, innovations are abounding. The presidential election is just around the corner and people have gotten so swept up in the intoxication of it all that they didn’t stop to think about what “presidentia strategies” really imply. Naturally, technology has become a
significant portal for politicians to use in marketing themselves. Many of you probably know what it means to get an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). These scans “visualize a structure and body” so that physicians can determine differentdetriments or assets to our vitality. Neuroscience has
especially been focusing on research centered around MRIs more recently; but now they use a different scan for the brain called an “fMRI.” An fMRI measures blood flow and determines when
brain cells release; resulting in the need for more oxygen to those parts of …

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Any hack creative writing instructor will tell you that an effective storytelling technique is to start at the end of a story and work backwards. So I’ll tell you this: In 1932, Jonathan Selwyn became the mayor of Deadwood, South Dakota. He was a great man; an honest broker who refused to back down.
He stood up to criminals of all stripes and refused to take injustice sitting down. More than anything, he wasn’t afraid to ask why things were the way they were.

As the election draws near, it’s becoming increasingly rare to hear any questions being asked, not to mention incisive, constructive queries. The country has entered into a locked groove: statements are made, statements are parroted, increasingly adversarial debate ensues, nothing changes, statements
are made, etc. We’re fed news and opinions every minute via RSS …

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As I walked down Washington Avenue, congealed globs of blood streaked the pavement. Any other day
I would have run screaming for the police. But as a man with a terrible gash on his neck approached, he moaned “brains” and I knew everything was all right.

Zombie Pub Crawl IV was by far the highlight of this month. Forget the Halloween celebrations — this was it. Who would have thought so many people would enjoy having “blood” smeared all over their bodies?

The evening started out at Grumpy’s near downtown Minneapolis. Human flesh, brains, and fried potatoes seemed to be the specials for the night. As the zombies staggered into the bar the atmosphere became gruesome. Wounds of all shapes and sizes were thrust into my face and I was delighted to …

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“We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past.” — Ken Kesey Only three weeks after the chaotic RNC in St. Paul, the Hollywood production “Battle in Seattle,” narrating the 1999 WTO protests, came blockbusting into Minneapolis at the Uptown. In the aftermath of severe police intervention in the anti-war activities in St. Paul, the film’s dramatic representation of similar events drew on our own memory to make a powerful statement on oppositional politics and globalization. While filmmaker Stuart Townsend concludes the film by proclaiming the WTO protests a “success” story, it would be hard to consider our St. Paul anti-war/RNC activities a success: we were crushed by police force, our mainstream media stifled debate, the convention went off without a hitch, and the …

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In a local scene as diverse and talented as that of the Twin Cities, Marvelle somehow manages to stand out among the rest. The rock band “with indie and classical sprinkled on top” consists of John Holm on violin, Derek Winter on bass, Brian Herb on drums, and Linnea Maas doing live painting. The band configuration itself sets Marvelle apart from other local musicians. While they sound heavy, with thundering bass lines bellowing beneath haunting violin riffs, they retain the composure of classical music, and produce a full sound despite stripped-down instrumentation. Holm and Winter alternate singing on songs, each providing a differing vocal style that compliments the other. Winter comes
off as a conductor live, waving his hands and making eye contact with the other members. As the musicians perform, Maas paints a canvas that …

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I won’t trouble you with reductive binaries (good, bad, rich, poor) regarding the contentious nature of our current economic situation. As far as I can tell, with my head buried in books and hands juggling student loan, scholarship and study abroad applications, the so-called crisis is turning out to be whatever we make it.

In the course of the last two weeks, I have been interviewing concerned students and professors and reading through our quintessentially American disparate literature on the subject, only to realize that a metaphor from quantum physics is the best I could come up with to characterize the matter. Quantum mechanics asserts that matter propagates like a wave and interacts like a particle. This creates the Heisenberg “uncertainty” principle, which amounts to the fact that scientists can tell you where a …

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He stands five feet, five inches tall. He weighs just over 100 pounds. His blonde hair is slowly growing back, covering his once-bald head. Clothes that used to fit him now loosely hang on his frame. His eyes become livelier, less sunken with each passing day. He can’t bench press 300 pounds, but he’s one of the toughest guys in Minnesota. He’s thrown down with Death and knocked it out. He’s beaten cancer before. He’s trying to make cancer tap out again. This is 15-year-old Andrew Kippley. He’s tougher than cancer.

Andrew was first diagnosed with neuroblastoma when he was 2 years old. Neuroblastoma is a type of cancerous tumor that grows out of the body’s nerve tissues, usually from the adrenal glands. There are around 650 new cases reported in the U.S. alone each year, …

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The Wake: First off Liam, I would just like to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with us today.
Liam Finn: It’s my pleasure.

W: “I’ll Be Lightning” is the name of your record. “I’ll Be Touring” is the name of your tour. Has the tour
proved as successful as the record?
F: “It’s been really great for us, we’re having an absolute ball and the shows have been really well attended, so yeah, I guess our goal was just to make sure we had a good time. We’ve been doing a lot of van touring this year and all of the really long drives get to be difficult. Finally, on this tour we’re sharing a bus with The Veils and …

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With the current economic slowdown, and the exchange rate at about 1.5 dollars per euro, the closest most University of Minnesota students will come to something French this fall can be found
on the dollar menu alongside le rodeo cheeseburger.

Paris remains the greatest recipient of tourism worldwide; however, an increasing number of students are opting out of the classic study abroad in Europe experience in favor of countries with a lower exchange rate, the National Student Exchange program, or just remaining at home. Paris, the city of love and light, is looking a little less lovely under the shadow of student loans and debt.

It’s 8:15 a.m. and the only thing that makes waking up worth it at this hour is that one guy or girl who sits next to you in class. As you talk to him, his face is pointed towards you, but his body is facing away. Or, as you casually joke about how nerdy the professor looks today, she stares down at her notes rather than you and leans back in her chair as far as she can. What does this all mean??

As a new school year begins, students will meet new people, create new relationships, and drunkenly fornicate with random strangers after doing six keg stands. Last year, there were 28,703 undergrads attending our fine institution, according to University statistics. With …

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Photos by Matt Miranda and Scottie Tuska

D-day. Convention week. September 1st-4th. Republican Christmas. Call it what you will, the atmosphere in St. Paul that week was truly bizarre. Amongst the commotion surrounding the MSNBC Free Speech Stage® a Tucson cop buys himself a hocked McCain-Palin T-shirt. A man in a suit claims to be McCain’s second choice for VP. A group of antiwar feminists decry the nomination of Sarah Palin and a group of radical Christians chant passages from the Letters to Corinthians. If we’re all doomed to hell, then what was that place?

Why cuffs?

When I asked why I was being arrested, the police told me I shouldn’t have been in St. Paul.
We were at the foot of the capitol when a man …

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Many, if not all, of us here at the University of Minnesota have experienced the loud, claustrophobia-inducing walk from the East Bank to the West Bank as a result of the fencing put up on the pedestrian bridge spanning the Mississippi River. Not unbearable, but certainly not enjoyable. Thus, the fact that the restrictions placed on the bridge are finite gives us something to look forward to with the coming of spring. And with the reopening of the Interstate 35W bridge peeking around the corner, things are looking up for traffic conditions at the U of M.

Bridge to somewhere

According to Hennepin County Engineer Jim Grube, the concern about the safety of the pedestrian bridge began when the Hennepin County Public …

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As protesters filled the lawn at Capitol Hill to the seams, cameras landed in swarms, delegates
and party bigwigs paraded their candidates’ causes, and blank-faced onlookers with a delicate
half-interest lined the streets, the eyes of the nation and—daresay I—the world shifted to rest
upon our Twin Cities. And while the mass media, the lens that brought our cities into focus, have
the attention span of a young child, city leaders have salivated over the events of the Republican
National Convention for years. They placed much faith in the convention’s ability to launch this
unique area into the upper echelon of citydom. Whether their hopeful visions unfold in the manner
they expect remains to be seen.