So apparently last night downtown Portland turned into a little bit of a war zone. I was riding the MAX home last night after the Blazers dispatched the hogwarts house team, otherwise known as the Washington Wizards, and 3rd Ave. near Ash was swarming with Police. A couple of club bound girls were informed by a trio of club bound fellas that there had been a shooting. Shootings in general are not unheard of in Portland, in the six and a half years I have lived here there have probably been twenty, but it had been a long time since there had been one downtown. I woke up this morning, and found this article on OregonLive. Apparently there was some craziness popping off last night. Something I miss both a downtown bus and the MAX after games and end up walking home across the steel bridge. I usually stop by Dante's on Burnside for a moment to say hello to a guy I know that works the door there. Last nights shooting took place just around the corner from there. I had to wait about two minutes for the train last night, and I didn't want to walk because it was snowing, but if I had walked I would have been front and center to some serious action. A few years ago, the first summer I was living in Portland, I used to walk around downtown near the clubs at night. Right near where I used to walk there were like four shootings in one week. Needless to say that I stopped walking around there at night, and those clubs got shut down. I say that to say this: I will miss downtown a lot when I move.
I just got home from the film The Reader, and I think that it is safe to say that I have now seen all the movies that may be in the consideration for the upcoming Academy Awards. Because the nominations have not been released yet, I will not speculate as to which I think are going to win, but I will briefly recap which movies I have seen recently and say what I thought of them.
Not a lot of new news. First off, I have officially requested to be changed over to the new MFA program starting next fall at PSU. One of the women that I talked to on campus said that as long as I turn in the form it should all be ok. They, the English department, are going to meet up later this term and decide what the standards and such are to be for students in the new program. I was told that the department wants to let all the students know that the new degree is not the old degree plus two classes, which I have to admit I was hoping it was going to be. And once this new standards thing is all ironed out, those people like myself who have chosen to shoulder the extra burden of the Fine Arts will be given a chance to second-think their decisions. I'm pretty sure that I will stick with the program. I've been basically cruising thus far through grad school. I got better grades as an undergrad than I did in high school, and I've gotten better grades in grad school than I did as an undergrad. Hopefully I'll get straight A's in the new MFA program, and write a publishable thesis. Really only one of those two things is likely to happen.
So I haven't posted in a while, and since it is monday, which notably is the first day of the winter term and I am sans class, I thought I would write a little something. These last few weeks have been pretty busy. Olivia went to Alaska for the holiday, and I spent almost all of the ten days she was gone watching The Wire on Chinese YouTube. The problem with the Chinese YouTube is that in the hours of the day when the Chinese are asleep, most of the time that Americans are not asleep, it runs beautifully, but as soon as the Chinese wake up its curtains for me. With a conservative estimate being that half a billion Chinese people are all trying to watch The Wire at the same time, its difficult for me, all the way on the other side of the world, to keep from getting lots of download lag. Those internet tubes are good, but they're not that good. I got about half way through the second season in ten days, which is pretty good. I also watched a few episodes from the third season and a few from the fourth. Martin turned me on to this other sweet show that I have now watched all of. It is Australian and is called Summer Heights High. In fact the eight HBO episodes are the exact same as the eight that were originally shown on Australian TV. All HBO did was buy the thing and rebroadcast it. Pretty excellent deal for the Home Box Office network. The show is set in an Australian high school and is similar in style to The Office. The main characters are Jonah, an Islander in year 8, Ja'Mie King, a private school girl on exchange to the public summer heights high, and Mr. G, the over the top drama teacher. The best part about the show, and obviously the major selling point, is that all three main characters are played by the same guy. Its a pretty excellent set up. While my parents were in town, I talked to my dad a little about how international comedy is better than American comedy because they have mastered the art of subtlety. In America people have to be hit over the head with a joke. It seems the international community of comedians understand that sometimes jokes are better if they are much much smaller. In fact there are times in Summer Heights High where its hard to tell where the jokes really are. They aren't pointed out.
