Zachary CrimeFighter Clark

irresolutefate @ 2007-03-31T13:20:00

2007-03-31T17:31:53Z

National Geographic made me hate sushi.

Counter Coulter

2007-03-09T17:45:01Z

Media Matters has a list of newspapers (and the email addresses of their editors) still syndicating Ann Coulter's column after her slur-happy tirades at CPAC. If you are as interested as I am in making this woman understand that actions have consequences send an email to the list urging them to drop the column.

Here's my letter:
To Whom It May Concern:

I’m saddened to hear that you have not dropped Ann Coulter’s column from your paper yet, in light of her use of anti-gay slurs and continued defense of using such slurs. Coulter spoke recently for Sean Hannity, defending her use of the word and all its variations, claiming that it is completely acceptable, “a school-yard taunt.” As a gay adult, I can assure Ms. Coulter and your paper that the word faggot has a violent history in this country (and in my life) which is much more destructive than just school-yard taunts. I urge you to reconsider removing her column. While Coulter’s opinions and her venomous tone may periodically spike readership, there is something very sobering and sad in being a minority reader hearing slurs against you become commonplace, acceptable. Media outlets continue to allow even the most purposefully offensive words and ideas (often under the dubious anti-P.C. craze) splatter their pages and screens for the sake of keeping hype up as long as possible. While you may not be someone who has had to deal with constant, infectious anti-gay rhetoric and its insidious effects, please think on any gay or lesbians friends and family you may have—friends and family of any minority group—who may have felt their country quaking with hate for them, seeking them where they stand. The topography of homophobia in this country is a shifting, unstable one for gays and lesbians. Finding it in our homes, a secret shaking where we should feel safe, is terrible discovery. It opens the ground beneath our feet.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.
I hope you will seriously consider my request.
Zachary Clark

Get writin'!

Blood Puns, Parentheticals, And the Lingering Feeling that a Professor Thinks I'm Anti-Semitic

2007-02-17T19:54:29Z

Last night Amanda Jones and I went to the first of the readings the Creative Writing department is hosting for the Writers' Festival. The poet, Kay Ryan, was lovely and witty. I've added her to the list of lesbians I want to grow up to be.

After the reading, though, Amanda and I ran into Cara and Professor Todd Hasak-Lowy. We asked what they were up to and Todd, who I felt strangely pressured to impress, mentioned he was going to an event about "Jews and Blood". I, of course, heard this as "choosing blood".

Amanda (who heard it right) seemed confused and no one bothered clarifying*. I, having heard it wrong, was really confused. Todd finally explained to me what he'd actually said. I offered lamely, "Oh, I was thinking, like, 'which bank is right for you?'"

"What?" Cara asked a little severely. I lost my awkward smile. "That doesn't make any sense, Zack. What are you talking about?"

I tried to explain the not-so-great-anyway joke ("You know, blood banks?"), but my breakdown just ended up sounding anemic(get it?). I gave up and apologized for ruining what seemed like a perfectly adequate conversation.

And now I don't know where I'm going with this.

Let me again apologize for ruining what seemed like a perfectly adequate post.

* We found out later they were referring to a discussion of Jewish literary dealings with blood-drinking legends about Jews. Pre-Modern Christians believed that Jews, once a year or so, would have to drink the blood of Christian babies to stay alive, and paired this with a general suspiciousness regarding the blood-letting that was/is involved in Jewish food-preparation.

Macadamia

2007-01-25T02:04:39Z

Has this happened to anyone else? After about 12 hours of reading and listening to lectures and taking notes and a few cigarette breaks in between I was reading The History of Sexuality tonight and the words started shifting and conglomerating. I saw a lion and then an old lady in their soup and I couldn't seem to get through a sentence anymore.

Although, Foucault's sentences aren't exactly clean little nuggets of meaning, even when you've read it before.

I can't think of anything else to type in here. I need to go touch something hot and painful for a few minutes.

irresolutefate @ 2006-12-07T20:14:00

2006-12-07T20:14:51Z

Lindsay Lohan can't make a sentence.

Savage Zack

2006-10-19T15:00:00Z

Dan Savage published an email I sent to him!

It's kind of lame, actually. It's one of many letters he got in response to advice he gave to a woman with a slob of a boyfriend. It it he dismisses gendered work and tells her to just clean up after him if his mess bothers her. All the letters are pretty similar, and there isn't anything glowing about mine that separates it from the herd (except that it's the second one in the list of them--I always stop reading response letters after the third).

But here it is--run on sentences and all. I'm "A Not So Angry Feminist".

ANSAF? I should have thought of a better acronym.

Harder, better, faster, stronger

2006-10-15T18:30:01Z

This is what Mo and I do on Sundays at Goerings.

Crybaby

2006-10-08T18:56:38Z

Crybaby (Erica's new kitten) and I spent the afternoon on this:

It gets at our complicated and nuanced relationship. See how much you can figure out without any captions.

Anthropalooza

2006-10-02T14:23:40Z

So I went through my store opening rituals this morning, as usual.

I sat down at the computer when I finished and prepared to take a ten question online quiz for my Anthro class, as usual.

Surprise! I'm an idiot and forgot that I was supposed to take a fifty-question online TEST over the weekend and it closes at 10:00am whether or not I'm done--giving me forty-five minutes to finish it in between customers.

Don't worry, friends. I blazed through that hot mess like a comet and came out with a B+. Not bad for the circumstances. What bothers me is that I could have gotten an A if not for my instructor's idiotic question about her idiotic boyfriend's faggy Jeep Wrangler, and where her ramblings about it during class settled on the issue of why it was masculine or feminine. This woman is so starved for friends that she makes exam questions our of her idle banter.

Fuck you, Rhodes.

So far:
Four funny-animal internet videos shown in class.
Her cell phone has gone off 6 times.
She has described to us (200 students) in detail about: her boyfriend, a nudist wedding she went to, how much she enjoys swearing ("Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck it."), not asking her questions before or after class because she has "too much going on in (her) life right now," how much she hates cell phones going off during her lectures.

irresolutefate @ 2006-09-25T09:53:00

2006-09-25T13:55:55Z

A man just called Goerings this morning and asked for my boss, Fred.

I told him Fred wasn't in but maybe I could help him with something.

He asked me if I was Fred's wife.

Me: No bye.

irresolutefate @ 2006-09-20T13:58:00

2006-09-20T17:59:24Z

Can anyone else smell/feel Autumn today?

Puts a spring in my step.

Not-so-great Things

2006-08-09T14:43:10Z

1. Lieberman lost his senatorial primary and I'm pretty okay with that.

I'm not okay that he's going to run Independent now, ensuring a Republican wins his seat.

2. Kenneth Turan gives a scathing review of World Trade Center and confirms what I'd decided from the previews; it's a movie about New York's attacks made for Texans, not New Yorkers.

3. It bugs me when people say things like, "Don't become a statistic," to keep others from smoking/drunk driving/getting involved in dangerous drugs. If you are on the census you are a statistic. If you are not on the census, you are on statistics of people not on the census. If you are gay/straight/black/Hispanic/white/Christian/Buddhist/Non-religious/stillborn you are a statistic. A better way of communicating the importance of staying safe is to tell people to be safe.

Man-child

2006-07-22T16:13:40Z

I don't think there is a better example of the phrase "man-child" than the new family-owned government of Poland.

irresolutefate @ 2006-07-11T02:22:00

2006-07-11T06:23:01Z

Tonight I had both my hair and outfit insulted within five minutes of one another.

Boo.

irresolutefate @ 2006-07-06T16:19:00

2006-07-06T20:29:06Z

Sorry about the double post, but I just found out Shannen Doherty is replacing Star Jones on the View July 31st and August 1st.

With the appearance of so many amazing people and crazy-ass freak outs on the show, I am feeling more and more like I should start watching.

Thinking and Speaking

2006-07-06T18:59:04Z

In Women's Studies today we read a little bit of the Declaration of Sentiments by Liz Cady Stanton. It's more or less a copy-and-paste job of the Declaration of Independence, except it describes the cruelties women suffer at the hands of men--marking the irony in the DoI's claims at equality.

Anyways, this post isn't about that because halfway through our reading of the piece a bro raised his hand and started talking about Git-Mo as if that's what we were discussing, and about how people "say the prisoners deserve...whatever" (basic human rights?) when they aren't citizens and how stupid that is--with him presuming they are all guilty, with no knowledge of the law or circumstances of these peoples' arrests, and with no apparent knowledge of the Supreme Court case that was just decided.

This, of course, started a shouting match in the room in which, of course, I was a major shouter. The instructor was all "This is a very interesting conversation we should be having" when she finally managed to open her mouth five minutes later and get the class back on track. She's one of those everyone's-opinions-count-equally people. The type of teacher that smiles while people spew uninformed garbage out from their pie-holes as if what they are saying is not a logical fallacy, blatantly inaccurate, or ideologically cruel.

I miss English, where the points people make have to be based in text.

irresolutefate @ 2006-06-21T16:13:00

2006-06-21T20:14:58Z

Who will cry for Mary Cheney?

I found this AMAZING video via Queerty.

irresolutefate @ 2006-06-13T02:34:00

2006-06-13T06:35:33Z

Jesus, I know I've said this before, but I want Mission Hill to be my life after graduating. AMAZING.

Alaska: Part 2

2006-06-04T21:26:42Z

Today is our last day in Alaska. We fly out at around 8:30 tonight, all night, and get back early Monday morning--Florida time. When writing my last post I thought my adventuring was intense. I mean, hell, I’d been directly responsible for the deaths of five large Alaskan fish. Not an hour after posting, though, my parents, brother and I were in a plane listening to the clunking noise of skis falling in our plane so we could make a landing on a melting glacier. The glacier walk was nice and Dad seemed to really enjoy flying between the relatively narrow valley of two cliffs near Mt. McKinley.

The next day we rode ATVs to a cabin in the middle of the woods that we were staying in for a night. All-terrain vehicles are, let me say, a surprisingly amazing way to spend an afternoon. I thought they were only for bros and rednecks, and maybe they are, but it felt more to me like Mariokart, even when Matt refused to support the illusion by throwing things at Mom and Dad from the back.

The cabin was nice and quiet. We had a great view from the cliff top nearby. There wasn’t any running water, so the only bathroom was an outhouse a couple dozen yards from the cabin. This wouldn’t have been a problem if not for the continuous, multiple, gruesome stories I’d been hearing all week about people being crushed, smashed, splattered, eaten, and generally killed by bears. Matt and I had to sleep in the cabin’s shower, a separate structure from the actual cabin, because there wasn’t enough room in the main building. It was cold, hard, and I slept maybe three hours, filled to an uncomfortable almost-breach-point with my own waste, but completely unable to will myself to the outhouse.

For now, I’m in Anchorage, a town with running water and young people. My horniness has settled down the past few days, allowing me to curb the libidinous gay monster I was turning into. I managed to separate from my parents and get to a small coffee shop with internet in the downtown area. During the drive here, Dad, still somehow moving with an energy that annoyed Mom, Matt, and I, pointed out all the places he knew, as if we weren’t capable of reading and were actually interested.

“Oh this is _________ and ___________. I think ________ lives here. Down that way is _________ where there’s a really nice restaurant, __________. We should have gone there, darn.”

I’m not ungrateful for the time and money Mom and Dad have put into bringing Matt and I here. It’s been an amazing week. I think I’m just cranky because of exhaustion.

I’m looking forward to: night time, summer, stories about things other than bear maulings, talking to Lisa about Everything is Illuminated, which I picked up before going to the cabin and have been enjoying a lot, and finally, drinking in public with people who aren’t my parents.

With love,
Zack

irresolutefate @ 2006-06-01T21:35:00

2006-06-02T01:57:34Z

Hello from Sunny Alaska.

I'm in a small town right now called Talkeetna that is basically just a large hotel and a few scattered restaurants and gift shops. There isn't a lot to do here, but they have some very limited cable and a small bar. Alaska is full of old people; it's the state where vacationers go to die. My summer libido is in full swing right now, too, so whenever someone reasonably young and attractive somehow passes my gaze (which isn't often) I fall completely and irreversibly in love with them. Our waiter today at the cafe we ate at was beautiful. Young, small, and polite--he actually reminded me a lot of Nick. I almost proposed.

As far as adventures go, I've done a lot, but I always find these stories the most boring part of someone recapping their vacation. I'll go fast. We have: seen whales (humpback and orca), fished (caught 10 sea bass), touched a glacier, seen caribou, elk, an eagle, bears, puffins, muskox and other things I can't remember, rode for two hours on horseback, and fought bitterly with one another. We could leave tonight and call it a success.

It is so bright here all the time. It bothers me less than I thought it would, though. It's actually kind of comfortable to see a nice dull twilight at midnight.

I miss everyone a lot. As much as I love my family, I am beginning to get lonely for my friends. We fly out on Sunday night and will arrive in Jacksonville Monday morning. I'll try and drive down to Gainesville at some point that day if anyone is interested in going out. I am going to be yearning for some contact with young people.

With love,
Zack

Dibs

2006-05-19T07:31:11Z

I call Jorma.

Art School Confidential: An Angry, Probably Incoherant Review

2006-05-15T17:40:18Z

So Tony and I decided to go and see Art School Confidential last night, which may have been the biggest mistake I’ve made all summer.

“Oh, Zack,” you say. “Quit with your exaggerating. You hate every movie and get offended way too easily.”

Not so! I reply to you, slightly offended.

But, really--
Even Anchorman and Forty Year Virgin with their jokes so repetitious it becomes infuriating, fat and unattractive comedians desperately begging for me to suspend my disbelief long enough to accept that they are dating these genuinely pretty women, and constant onslaught of cheap, uncreative, and sometimes mean gay jokes--even these had redeeming moments, endearing jokes, focused stories…characters…

ASC (I’m not italicizing or writing out the name of this shit-storm any more) has one character, the main character, who comes out strong with some funny and sad scenes showing him getting beat up as a kid. He also, we see from the scenes of his childhood, has an obsession with Picasso. Picasso’s lame art career, misogyny, and blatant racism aside--our waify protagonist’s main reason for liking the man is because he could sleep with any woman he wanted (also historically inaccurate, P-man mostly frequented with syphilitic prostitutes). So some 7 year old whose balls hasn’t dropped is worried about sex. Whatever, the kid’s cute which must mean our protagonist will also be somewhat--ooOOH GOD GET HIS EYEBROWS OFF THE SCREEN. Max Minghella jumps in, hairy mug a-blazin’, ready to take us to art school.

The next hour and a half of this film is spent shifting uncomfortably from one space to the next. Minghole goes to his room where he meets his roommates, a film student of little consequence who won’t shut up and for some reason keeps showing up in the film and Nick Swardson doing, yes, again, his impersonation of a femme gay man as sexually confused fashion student, Matthew. For about half an hour or so we are introduced to the other students--if you could call them that. The film takes a turn for the mean here. One after another, it attacks and berates every kind of art school person it can, and where it doesn’t have time to fully mock someone it settles on mean labels provided in the dialogue by in-story label maker, Bardo. The most common focus of the film’s attacks? Surprise! Gay people. Whether they be the so-labeled “angry lesbian” who never speaks and spends most of her shots looking placid and calm (but hey, her name in the credits is angry lesbian--we’ll have to go with it), John Malkovich as an art professor who hits on male students, or an up-and-coming artist who kisses characters uninvited, queers, we are told, are predatory, angry, confused. And art, it is explained by a deranged flop asshole in one of many tiring diatribes, is about whether or not you are a good “cocksucker.”

I want to do a bit of role-play here for the last part of the film:
So we have finished up our thirty minutes introducing these armies of weak, goofy, meanly drawn characters and we’ve come to a dilemma. We’re tired. We’re out of breath from throwing out way too many stereotypes into way too short a span of time. And now we have to, oh shit, tell a story with them! But how do we tell a story with only flat characters?

Let’s opt for a murder mystery! A strangler is introduced. A blond, boring love interest with no personality is introduced. We get fleeting, stupid updates on the strangler story from the…oo! Loud roommate! Good! That way, when the strangler, who has played no bearing on the first hour of the story becomes, suddenly, the focus of the film, people won’t be TOO surprised. Sure, the story will be weak, predictable, I Love Lucy-esque in its comic misunderstandings. But you know, we’re tired. It takes a lot to write a hateful piece of shit. We’ll throw some cops in at the end to mock the art students with favorite cop eff-words like freak, fruitcake, and fag before driving away. They can be the film’s moral compass, setting us back nicely in the real world after an hour and a half with the art weirdos.

Wiping our hands, we look down at our work and smile. This film is going to be very important! It will change the way people look at…uh…

It is a dynamic story with…er…

It has original humor and strong comic tim…ugh…

Hey, look at those art freaks! Aren’t they weird?!

Check this out!!! New Game!!!!

2006-04-30T01:22:52Z

a HAGS post

2006-04-21T19:31:42Z

I threw some anti-perspirant in my car today because I generally need to re-apply at some point during the day or risk smelling awful.

After Art History I walked back to the car, opened the cap, and ran it under my arm. What I didn't do was check the quality of my Old Spice before applying. Sitting in the heat of my car, the semi-solid stick had melted in a non-Newtonian liquid and proceeded to explode into my arm pit, my shirt, my side, my pants, the drink I was holding, and my back a little.

I do these kinds of things constantly and never learn my lesson.

*Edit: I forgot to mention--I was driving while this happened. I had to pull over, step out of the car, and wipe tons of white shit out of my arm pit in front of like three people.

The Best Show Ever

2006-04-17T05:30:29Z

Does someone want to get me the Mission Hill complete series DVD?

I wish I had been old enough to appreciate it while it was on and not just on Adult Swim on Sunday nights. It's pretty much exactly the life I expect to have after graduating.