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Yesterday, my girlfriend Debbie and I caught Sin City at the ginormous AMC theatres at Times Square.

We loved it. Go see it.

But she and I had lots of question in the end (mainly her), including:

1. What was with the constant castration?
2. Also, what was with the constant rhetorical treatment of impotence (”Look at you old man, you can’t even lift that cannon you’re holding”)?
3. What commentary did the movie seek to add to the feasibility of self-sustained all-female communities (Old Town)? Was it a critique (note Gail’s dependence on the male-figure)?
4. Why are Asian women always depicted as femme-fatale types in film noir?
5. Who will come along first: a successful white female emcee, or a successful Asian female emcee?
6. Will the first line to make it big from a Asian female emcee be: “Looks lovely, I’m yellow and I spit pretty/Straight fire, I open my legs, Hello Kitty!”? (Asian female readers, do not kill me!)
7. What significance, if any, is given to the use of color?
8. Which scenes did Tarantino direct?
9. Is it always necessary to make the Catholic Church the root of all evil?
10. If Jessica Alba can fall in love with Bruce Willis, does that mean I have a chance?

Any thoughts?

Claudio

Hey Everyone,

So finally my summer is set: I will be spending three months in lovely Budapest, Hungary working on public diplomacy towards the Eastern European area.

I’m hype! My girlfriend will be studying across the continent at Cambridge University, one good friend of mine will be studying French in France (of all places), and another close friend will be visiting family in Budapest while I am there. All in all, this is looking to be a wonderful experience - I’ve never beyond the Atlantic and I’ll have plenty of good friends (kinda) close by to help me cope.

Hopefully, I’ll still be able to blog - New Europe is fairly developed so Internet access should be pretty easy to find. I’ll eat plenty of cake, catch the opera, and try to learn some Hungarian while I’m out there. I’ll also be trying to keep a journal (if I can’t blog) on European politics and Euro-American relations. Should be challenging, but it promises to keep me busy.

Until then, I’m going to be kind of busy the next couple of weeks. The student government elections continue into next week. Following that, I’ll be in North Carolina visiting family. Then, the final crunch comes at school (I’ll be writing on subjects as varied as political rhetoric, psychoanalysis and narcotics, Habermas, black conservatism as a political ideology, and British conservatism as it compares to its counterpart over here, JOY!).

Then I’m off to Missouri for the Truman orientation, and back just in time to catch a flight to Budapest. Oh, Claudio, aged traveller.

Claudio