Posts by Zack Mezera

I have no context for this inscrutable yet engrossing video of Dean Bergeron reciting a text by Ranier Maria Rilke. My personal favorite part begins at 8:25…

http://home.comcast.net/~dslkjlsdfidk/josstuff.htm

The semester is dying down, and due to a few too many Blue Room bread puddings (ok, way too many), we’re once again forced to delve into the nitty-gritty of the uncrackable Brown University Meal Plan.

But don’t give up hope! One BUDS cashier (who wishes to remain anonymous) with apparently wayyy too much time on her hands has done all the heavy lifting for us–at least at Jo’s. Just enter the minimum and maximum bounds of what you want to spend (probably close to $6.15 or $12.30; or between 0 and any low amount of money), and the program will spit out every possible permutation of items, complete with a random color changer!

There are also useful, easier-to-read PDFs of more common searches. Perhaps most refreshing is the simple list of item prices: after all these years, we can finally know how much that cookie really costs.

Erin McKeown '01 of the Erin McKeown Trio

Good news everyone: there’s still time to catch the Third Annual Brown Folk Festival!

Some may have been buzzed about the Festival’s having to move off Lincoln Field on account of the rain, but Sayles has acoustics to die for (unlike Meehan…). The day has already witnessed brilliant performances from Erin McKeown ’01, a ghostly Tom Thumb, current student Josh Garcia, the bluesy Mark Greenbaum and more. Still on the docket:

The inflatable mattresses have been packed up to make room for dancing, so come quickly!

Colombia's President Santos wants to make sure you give a damn about Latin America ©semana.com

Today at 6:30, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos will be speaking to a packed Salomon Center. The evocative topic? “Why People Should Give More than a Damn About Latin America.” Unfortunately, tickets are sold out, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still give a damn about these important issues. [Read more →]

Showing this week at the Avon

Biutiful is a ringing endorsement of this, our best of all possible worlds. It finds Uxbal (Javier Bardem) in the grim “underbelly” of modern Barcelona, which teems with undocumented immigrants and their exploitative supervisors, corrupt cops, and a general haze of cigarette smoke and desperation. Things aren’t going too well for old Uxbal: There’s only enough money to feed his two children cereal and fish. His bipolar ex-wife sleeps around, including with Uxbal’s brother. He believes himself to be a benevolent force in a number of complex immigrant money-making schemes, but those are unraveling before his eyes. And to top it all off, Uxbal is dying. In short, things couldn’t be better. [Read more →]

© Iwan Baan (thanks Iwan Baan)

Good news, folks! We’ve Built Brown!

Okay, okay, so the new “Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts” may only be one building, but trust me, if you haven’t taken a look, you should. I dropped by on Wednesday night for the first time to give it a once-over, and to share my impressions of this new addition to the Brown landscape:

First off, I want to thank Ben – a chill security staffer with impossibly hip glasses – who was kind enough to take me on a tour of the building after hours. After I went down to the basement, took a hidden elevator, and wound up in a dead end trash room, I needed all the help I could get. So Trust Ben! [Read more →]

Good news for all you romantics out there! The New York Times is hosting its second Modern Love college essay contest, which means it wants to give you $1000 big ones for your take on what the four-letter-word means to our generation. The editor of the column had this to say about the last contest, in 2008:

When the contest deadline passed seven weeks later, more than 1,200 essays had arrived, from 365 schools in 46 states and Puerto Rico. In perhaps typical collegiate fashion, nearly 700 poured in on the last day, 400 over the final hour. [Read more →]

Now playing in 3D at Providence Place

I must admit, I’d originally all-but-written this review even before I saw Never Say Never. From the crack about never having asked the BDH for a film refund until now, to the effusively praising and transparently sarcastic tone, to even the requisite Tiger Beat photo; it was all planned out. But at some point in my sitting alone in a theater full of exuberant girls and their exasperated parents (and some 35 year old woman who seems to have come of her own volition..), a more intriguing question began to plague me: Why read this review?

We all already know it’s shit – [Read more →]

Blue Valentine is currently playing at Providence Place Cinema and is coming soon to the Avon.

First, the facts: Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are the two halves of a dying relationship. The latter is nominated for Best Actress. The film vacillates between love’s adorable beginning and its alienating end, which might remind some of (500) Days of Summer. Yes, you may have heard about the sex (it was previously rated NC-17), but it’s the passionless, robotic kind that makes you want to question the idea of sex in the first place. It has a run-time of one hour and fifty-four minutes. Blue Valentine is not a happy movie. [Read more →]

Classy.

Hold onto your lanyards – Brown seems to be stepping up its internal security with a few new measures. First, J. Walter Wilson now requires swipe cards on weekends; no longer can we shimmy over to J Dubs in our pajamas to innocently and obsessively check our mail in the mornings. Similarly, I’m sure you’ve seen the new space-age apparatus set up in the Rock. The glass pane emblazoned with the Brown logo keeps the public out – in style. I feel like we have to stop and ask ourselves: what is the point of all these checkpoints? The way I see it, doors exist for two reasons, to keep people out, and to keep people in… [Read more →]