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Slam!

It may seem odd to rank poets like sports teams, but slam isn’t just art, it’s a competition. In an official poetry slam, a poet must present an original composition, no longer than three minutes and without using any props, music, or costumes. Five audience members are chosen at random to serve as judges and they rate each poem on a scale of one to ten. Unlike purely written poetry, just as much emphasis is placed on bodily movement and intonation as on the poem’s content.

Voices

Track 03–The Scientist

Snow means real life is paralyzed; the only way to spend a day pent up inside your house, because you can’t open your front door, is doing nothing at all. I watched Empire Records, and it was phenomenal. I’d forgotten how much I love AC/DC and Coyote Shivers, the flannel shirts and long greasy hair.

Voices

Finding myself, between the sheets

Back in one of my high school English classes we read the great American novel, The Great Gatsby. Gatsby isn’t just any book to Manhasset, the town I grew up in. The novel takes place on our shore and surrounding locations. Seventy-eight years after its publication, the social mores of the novel survive.

Leisure

Quixotic quest ends in failure, fun

Video killed the radio star, curiosity killed the cat and bad luck and a lack of funds killed The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the latest would-be joint from offbeat director Terry Gilliam. The only thing that remains of the director’s vision for a film version of Cervantes’ Don Quixote is Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s documentary Lost in La Mancha—a detailed account of the dissolution of one director’s dream.

Voices

They will like us when we win

Recently I have found myself arguing with my parents about the situation in Iraq. They believe that the Bush Administration is being too aggressive, and that France, Germany and Russia are taking the right approach. As a result, I find myself leaning toward supporting war solely out of spite.

Leisure

Cowboys and pudding

Listen up, you pasty, drug-addicted prostitute of a student: I know how you feel. It’s February, perhaps the worst month of the year. Spring Break seems far away. It’s cold and snowy, and there is nothing to do in this city unless you’re going to see Liza Minelli on Friday night at the MCI Center.

Leisure

Recording like the pros

Listening to the professional sheen of Spacecamp’s new Grog’d EP, you’d swear these guys were major-label pros, rolling in a big advance reveling in heavy MTV rotation and airplay on modern-rock radio stations nationwide.

You’d be wrong. Spacecamp, composed of five Georgetown students, is a lot like many other garage bands—unsigned, little-noticed and hungry for success.

Voices

Playing though the pain

I rotate writing this personal column with a senior in the college, Peter Hamby. He is my closest friend at Georgetown. Last spring, his brother Patrick died in a car accident. Peter’s never written a column about what happened. That’s because what he has to say is too overwhelming to fit into half a page.

Editorials

We’ve got better Facilities

Last Monday morning, in the wake of D.C.’s 18-inch snowfall, a lone member of Georgetown University Facilities Management’s townhouse crew stood at the corner of 37th and O Streets in front of the Village B apartment complexes, shoveling. He didn’t stop until he reached N Street, clearing the entire walkway by himself.

Leisure

DC Improv the only game in town for stand-up

Looking for a good time that doesn’t involve smirking ironically at rapping kangaroos or enjoying a mean-spirited laugh as the Capitol Steps fumble obvious political humor? You won’t find it on the Hilltop—but you might find it down a narrow set of steps in a tucked-away nightclub called the D.

Editorials

Empty promises, not empty beds

In anticipation of the 780 beds to be provided next fall by the newly-completed Southwest Quadrangle, Director of Student Housing Services Shirley Menendez told students in an Oct. 31 e-mail that the University would “have enough space to accommodate all students who want to live on campus.

Leisure

Cabaret brings noise, occasional funk

This isn’t your grandmother’s cover band concert. Assuming your grandmother has a cover band. And she’s not dead. It’s Cabaret, Georgetown’s long-running, annual variety show featuring performances by campus singers and musicians.

Editorials

GUSA: Clean up your act

Georgetown University Student Association elections are never a flawless process, and there has already been one especially ugly election this year: The returns from the election for first-year GUSA representatives were not certified by the assembly until almost a month after the election was over.

Features

Georgetown’s New Cookbook

Trying to fill the gap between home cooking and a steady diet of Hot Pockets, two new cooking groups and a television show have been created at Georgetown over the last few semesters, . Food aside, the new groups all have something else in common—they are centered on socializing. The students behind these organizations found that good food wasn’t the only thing missing from their time at Georgetown, but that a sense of community was lacking as well.

Sports

The Sports Sermon

Our younger brother Michael told us on IM the other night that after reading Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, the children of L.A. scare him. Why, we asked him. “They’re bisexual cokeheads with lots of money and whatnot,” he explained. Well, there are other children in L.

Sports

Couch potato

As the snow fell from the sky like cocaine in the promised land, I cursed the sporting gods as athletics stood at a standstill for the weekend. Between the mullet overload that was the Daytona 500 and the soap opera that was Tiger and Phil, there was little else to do but peruse the wide world of cable.

Sports

It’s a winter wonderland of sports

Ah, snow days at Georgetown—a rare and beautiful thing. And what better way to spend them than outside participating in winter sports? Here is a how-to guide for my three favorite Georgetown snow activities. Hilltop skiing—This is an activity that I first witnessed on campus Sunday night, and it was love at first sight.

Sports

Lohser finds balance with tennis, academics

With his neatly styled hair and GQ attire, senior Marc Lohser (MSB ‘03) looks more like a young professional than a college athlete. Yet every morning at 8:40 a.m., Lohser can be found on the tennis courts practicing with Georgetown’s men’s tennis team, just as he has since he was a first year.

Sports

Hoyas in the Pitts, suffer second loss to Panthers

Not much separated the Georgetown Hoyas men’s basketball team (11-11 overall, 3-8 Big East) from the No. 9 Pittsburgh Panthers (18-4 overall, 8-3 Big East) Tuesday night in the Hoyas 82-67 loss. Simply put, the Panthers came through in the clutch; the Hoyas didn’t.

Leisure

‘100th Window’ gives view of band’s decline

Pioneering British electronic act Massive Attack has finally released the follow-up to 1998’s critically acclaimed Mezzanine. The new album, 100th Window, is a disappointing record that tries in vain to recreate Mezzanine’s sound.

That sound was a sensual mix of slowed-down hip-hop beats, throbbing, insistent bass lines and the occasional foray into churning storms of guitar.

Leisure

Mr. Lif gets political

Independent emcee Mr. Lif is an emerging underground rapper who is making a name for himself by incorporating political awareness with his purist hip-hop formula of rapid-fire, innovative lyrics and hard-hitting beats. His latest LP, I Phantom on Definitive Jux records, has received critical acclaim and is his best-selling to date.

Leisure

’80s bands, again

Bands from the ‘80s are pissed. Wouldn’t you be if a bunch of ex-hardcore and emo kids hijacked your sound and called it their own? Maybe that’s why such groups as Wire, Television and Mission of Burma are reuniting. It can’t be for the cash, right? In any case, this Friday all the kids under 30 who never got to see Mission of Burma in the band’s heyday can drag their young butts down to the 9:30 Club and watch the aging legends roll out some classic tunes.

Leisure

Kickin’ it with Cody ChesnuTT

Donray Von, the cousin-turned-manager of rocker Cody ChesnuTT, sat silently backstage at a table eating buffalo wings an hour before ChesnuTT was to perform at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Va. earlier this month. The Birchmere’s promoter sat down on a couch next to the table and talked with Von for a few minutes.

Leisure

Bourke-White exhibition shows the unexpected

You’ve seen her photos before. The picture of Gandhi sitting by his spinning wheel, those snapshots of DC-4s traveling high above Manhattan or the one of a female photographer kneeling on a skyscraper gargoyle. That last one’s actually not a picture she took, but a picture of her.

Leisure

‘One Acts’ offer quick, dirty theater

“Because television sucks” is the slogan for Mask & Bauble’s Donn B. Murphy One Acts Festival this year. But even if you don’t want to watch television that sucks, decent actors trying to pull off plays that suck may not be enough to draw you off the couch.