University of Southern California

Got up at 11:30am, we literally had no other choice but to go to USC to kill the rest of the day. However, it turned out to be such a fun day in USC. I've been dreaming to visit this school for a long time, part of the reason is this is the school he wants to go to, of course, other than that, this is a school I personally like a lot, too. (Cross the finger, hopefully they will accept me...) 

The international students portion of USC is amazingly big, almost half of the students are from outside of the U.S. I saw that by myself--it was the commencement day of the 2010 class students. Coincidentally, we ran into all the graduates today. They had some light dinner, without any doubt, Fiona and I mooched some...It was so awkward since half of the students had Asian faces. Many from Taiwan, others from China or Korea. I thought there must be much pressure for students, like me, to study there, now that there were so many ABCs, no one would treat you with the tolerance for foreigners. 

I like the buildings in USC. They all have the same style and relevant colors. Even though LA has no style at all, USC as an old school has its own "schoolnality"--well, it's hard to conclude now, but it definitely does, at least from in terms of architectures. I love the quiet small gardens spattered here and there in the school. Good place for lovers. I can almost imagine the way they talk to each other. Who would get angry in such a place?

The building for communication school is the worst building in the whole school. But what can I say? This is me, always the unluckiest one. I may never had the chance to study in an old and beautiful hall. But the thing is if Gorge Lucas was graduated there, what does it matter the building is not good-looking?

The only thing is, several blocks away from USC, it's another world, which is packed with Mexicans and dirty gum on the ground. The world never loses its hierarchy.

Another LA

After six hours unconscious sleep on the plane, we finally arrived at LA, Mike's dream place, where all the beautiful romances happen. The weather was out of our expectation, for like one out of millions chance, it was cooler than Boston during the day. Fiona's friend picked us up and drove all the way to our hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. Frank Sinatra sings:" LA is my lady..." Now I"m wondering where he got that idea? LA is absolutely not a "lady", not even close. As a relatively new city, LA should be clean and modern in my mind, but on the contrary, LA is kinda dirty compared with Boston. The whole city is covered with thick gray mist. There are no green trees: almost all the trees are light colored. The buildings have no certain style, with the light colors that are similar to Miami, but the gray mist and the gray trees make LA dimmer than Miami. 

It is amazing that everyone says the same thing about LA: you can go nowhere without a car, downtown is the most dangerous place in LA, and there are a lot of Chinese people. We proved all of them in only one afternoon. It took us nearly one and a half hours to get to the hotel from LAX, and then another one and half hours to get to the restaurant from the hotel. I tried to find a Chinese restaurant on Hollywood Bl, failed. How can people order Chinese? Then I realized most people on the this avenue were visitors. But still, it's really inconvenient without even one Chinese restaurant nearby. The good part of this story is that, even though we had to drive more than a hour to get to the place, the restaurant was really good. It is ran by a Tianjin woman, and the food there was fantastic. For the first time in almost a year, I had roasted lamp and Baozi. There was even "Ge Da Soup". Oh I love this place for the good food. Checking out the menu, we thought it was nice that they didn't directly translate the meaning of the soup, or no one would want a bowl of "goose bump soup."

There are all kinds of people in downtown, making it dangerous. But we stayed in Hollywood district after dinner. It was really weird that there were so many sex toys stores on Hollywood Bl. With all the stars on the ground, this avenue should be the most fabulous place, but how come there are so many little sex toys shops, tattoo stores and palm reading rooms? I have no clue at all. The night came quickly, before I realized, we had to head back to the hotel.

Anyways, LA disappointed me a little bit today. It's like another LA from my mind. I hope it can get better tomorrow.

Kane’s plays always feature professionals (soldiers, journalists, doctors). How does work affect the people she writes about?

        Sarah Kane has always been regarded as an elusive writer, so have her works. Even though her plays are often unrealistically violent and brutal, the characters in the plays usually have rather normal identities, like soldiers, journalists, and doctors.  However, what astonishes readers the most is, it is just these ordinary professionals who commit the extremely unexpected behaviors in Kane’s plays. Journalist stays indoors, soldier leaves the war, and doctor complains about his life to a patient. Almost everyone reverses the stereotype of his career. Is it simply because these people are strange and crazy? Sarah Kane depicts a big picture in her plays, through which she explains that it’s not only these people, but all human beings tend to have counteractions when they reach an extreme point in life.

    
        The first professional we encounter is Ian in Blasted, a forty-five years old journalist living in Leeds much of his life. Ian first leaves us the impression that he is a homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic person and has a very passive life attitude. As he comments on families at one point in the play: “Who would have children. You have kids, they grow up, they hate you and you die” (Kane, 21). To him, life is full of disgusts. Even in the innocent kids he can only see the somewhat doomed future aspect.  He is such a solitary person that he hates most people in the world. The only people who he does not discriminate against are people like him, pure native white men. This is not a very suitable kind of character to be a journalist. Journalists are destined to go outside and get in touch with as many people as possible to get the latest information and the newest stories. The only news story we hear from him in the play is about “a serial killer slaughtered British tourist Samantha Scrace in a sick murder ritual” (Kane, 12). The horrible story seems to prove some of Ian’s discriminations are actually reasonable. Women are stupid because they go to the isolated foreign forest regardless of common sense and get killed. Foreigners are cruel and uncivilized so they kill people for a certain ceremony. Apparently, this is not true, because incidents like that are too rare to be counted as solid evidence to define a group of people. However, it is fair to assume that as a journalist, Ian probably hears or reports this kind of story a lot. Ian talks about his job in the play: “I do other stuff. Shootings and rapes and kids getting fiddled by queer priests and schoolteachers.” (Kane, 48). It’s like his opinions are being proved over and over again. Just as the psychiatric indication will make people believe fake truth, Ian is convinced that the world is the way he imagines.

        The more convinced he is, the less he wants to be anywhere near the people he hates, in other words, most people in the world, which goes against the feature of his profession as a journalist. He even refuses the story that comes to him, as he refuses the soldier’s request to tell his story, “This isn’t a story anyone wants to hear…It’s not my job…No joy in a story about blacks who gives a shit? Why bring you to light?” (Kane, 48). Instead of running for stories, Ian seems to be more interested in those who are innocent and ignorant. Ian is seducing Cate during the night: “You don’t know anything about it…Don’t know nothing. That’s why I love you, want to make love to you.” (Kane, 23). When Cate refuses to have sex with him, Ian rapes her.

At this point, Ian has already become this person who creates the story that a journalist like himself will do a piece of news about. He rapes the young girl like a “foreigner” in his own opinion, he keeps smoking even if he knows that is so dangerous that can take away his life, just like the woman without common sense, he becomes everything he hates.
 

       Similarly to Ian, the doctor in 4.48 Psychosis also goes to an opposite way when his job reaches a certain point where he finds it too much to bear. The doctor asks the patient in a therapy: “What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive? What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive?” (Kane, 236). Facing a patient who suffers from serious depression, the doctor asks this question without any context. It is confusing. If the first time he asks is gentle and guiding, the second time he asks the same question is more like a request. Why does a doctor want answers from a patient who he knows well that will not give him an answer? The only possible explanation is that the doctor does not expect for an answer: he just needs to speak it out. As the play goes on, the doctor becomes the one who pours out all the hidden angst, “Most of my clients want to kill me. When I walk out of here at the end of the day I need to go home to my lover and relax. I need to be with my friends and relax. I need my friends to be really together…I fucking hate this job and I need my friends to be sane…I’m sorry.” (Kane, 237). The job is somewhat driving the doctor crazy, and the only way out for him is to stay together with his sane friends. However, friends are not shadows. There are definitely some time when they cannot be there for the doctor. Under this circumstance, he has no one to turn to help, and he has to be the one who helps during the day. His life is in an extremely unbalanced state. Finally, when the misery of the doctor’s life accumulates to a certain point, it explodes like a volcano. The doctor behaves like a patient in front of the real depressed patient, complaining his life and talking to himself as if he is out of his mind.

       Going the opposite way seems to be a way out for people whose lives are extremely unbalanced and polarized. This is also the same situation that the soldier in Blasted is going through. In the early scenes where the soldier comes into the room just for food, he is still the soldier who’s taking absolute charge by the arms, as he tells Ian the reason why Ian should listen to him: “’Cause I’ve got a gun and you haven’t.” (Kane, 40). Soldiers are long-time considered to be as cruel and cold as the arms during the war, no exception for this one. However, as the conversation between the soldier and Ian goes on, the soldier makes some very weird remarks, like at one point they are talking about Cate, the soldier says: “Don’t [kill her], I’ll have to shoot you. Then I’d be lonely.” (Kane, 44). The soldier seems to have an unknown dependence on Ian, and this becomes even clearer when he fails to persuade Ian to write out his story, he almost pleads Ian, “…At home I’m clean. Like it never happened.” (Kane, 48). The soldier is literally trying to prove him to be an innocent person, or even a victim after telling Ian the horrible things he did to the girls. The feminine side of the soldier takes control of him at the moment. The loneliness and the desire for sexual action drive him to rape Ian, and after that he “smells Ian’s hair” and “is crying his heart out” just as what Cate does earlier in the play. The stereotypically cruel and cold-blooded soldier unexpectedly shows his feminine aspect.

         Kane doesn’t explain what happened to the soldier that makes him suddenly so sensitive, but the background information about his girlfriend helps us understand this character. The soldier shouts at Ian at one point in the play, “You don’t know fuck all about me. I went to school. I made love with Col. Bastards [soldiers] killed her, now I’m here. Now I’m here.” (Kane, 48). The soldier used to be a school person, but what happened to his girlfriend made him choose to be a soldier. He hates the soldiers for killing his girlfriend and eating her eyes, driving him to be soldier and do the exact same things. The horrible accidents changes him to a person who is totally different from he used to be. After sucking out Ian’s eyes, the soldier explains: “He [the soldier who rapes his girlfriend] ate her eyes. Poor bastard. Poor love. Poor fucking bastard.” (Kane, 50). The soldier is lamenting his girlfriend, as well as himself. He’s become the bastard he used to hate. He hates what other soldiers did to his girlfriend, and he also hates what he did to the poor girls. From one extreme to another, the soldier is tired of the brutality of military. He wants to be the clean person he used to be, so he cries and pleads, but there is no way back, he chooses to end his life.

        The endless terrifying stories make the journalist become one of the stories; the timeless listening changes the doctor to a talking patient; the long-time brutality esposes the soldier’s sensitive personality. Just as Lao Zi, the founder of Taoism, reveals, things will develop in the opposite direction when they become extreme. The world needs balance, so as long as these professionals reach a certain extremity in their professions, they turn to the opposite way. Kane’s plays are filled with the idea that the world is balanced. In Blasted, the three characters take absolute control one by one in the hotel room, while in 4.48 Psychosis the doctor and the patient both have problems and both don’t have solutions. It is not just the professionals, but all the people will have counteractions when they get to the point of extremity.

Work Cited:

Kane, Sarah. Sarah Kane Complete Plays. London: Methuen Publishing Ltd, 2001. Print.

Gritzner, Karoline. "(Post)Modern Subjectivity and the New Expressionism: Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment." Contemporary Theatre Review 18(3.328 (2008). MLA International Biliography . Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

Iball, Helen. "Room Service: En Suite on the Blasted Frontline." Contemporary Theatre Review: An International Journal 15.3 (2005): 320-329. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 23 Apr. 2010

Solga, Kim. "Blasted's Hysteria: Rape, Realism, and the Thresholds of the Visible." Modern Drama 50.3 (2007): 346-374. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

"Taoism." Religious Tolerance. N.p., 2009. Web. 23 Apr. 2010. .
Urban, Ken. "An Ethics of Catastrophe: The Theatre of Sarah Kane." PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 23.3 [69] (2001): 36-46. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

May we always be like this

We've been school pals for like nine years, but not until we both went to college did we really become friends. All the memories about you were the guy that spoke really beautiful english, the guy that got a highest score on an english exam, the guy that was in the class next to ours. And now it's the guy who supports me always, the guy who hangs out with me, the guy who i miss and misses me. Who will you become? It's a terrifying question.

It's weird that whenever I'm blue, so are you. They "dumped" us. We got new BF/GF. We are alone again. Why does the world work this way? Sometimes I'd think that it as the God's sign, telling us to be together. But whenever I think it that way, the horrible scare from the uncertainty of relationship forces me to chicken out. Like now, I can't even text you back. We're friends. How wonderful is that.

And I know we can be friends forever, as long as we don't step forward. Couples separate. Friends stay. You are too precious to lose. It hurts, both you and me. I don't know how I can put it, but please, don't go away, you are my best friend.