Trend Story: What's Hot, What's Not

For this week's arts highlight, having felt we've done the cutting thing to death, we were looking for something different. When the unofficial film society had a recent showing of Funny Face, it was as if half the campus was erputing in she's-got-Audrey-Hepburn fever.

Never one to refuse to whore ourselves out to a fad (even a questionable one with no scientific backing -- hey we're just like real journalists!), we hung around campus looking for someone who could best act as cruise director. While the ten gals dressing the part of Audrey these days spoke merely of the simplicity of the look, we found many males dressing the part of beatnick. (Yes, Virginia, some still want to go on the road with Kerouak.) Seventh year grad student William squeaked by Che. Though both had the goat-boy-look down pat with their mini-facial hair eruptions, William's downy moss actually had food crumbs. A true intellectual if ever we saw one.

After spending thirty minutes ensuring that he was indeed a bonafide, we were either convinced he was the real deal or just happy to have had the cat nap he lulled us into with his oral dissertation on ontology's subtexual cosmic debt to epistemology. So sue us if we graded on a curve.

Quick to make our deadline, we immediately began probing him to compile the sort of "hot list" Entertainment Weekly's Jim Mullen's must only wet dream about. Follow it, live it, breathe it because what's a publication without a trend story!

1) Hot Comeback: Herman Hesse. "Events in Iraq, specifically Fallujah, add a new layer of contextual analysis to Steppenwolf and present an opportunity for a renewed critical appraisal."

2) So 80s: Swan Lake. "It's become the It's a Wonderful Life of the dance world. Over performed and over sentimentalized."

3) The New Jay-Z: Mozart! "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik K. 525 is nearly impossible to degrade tonally. Simplicity at it's most utilitarian with none of the vulgarity of Ravel's Bolero."

4) Hot blogger: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Our notes are spotty, at best, during this five minute discourse, but watch out Wonkette, this dude is way wack! Recommended: The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy.

5) Hot Drink: "Black coffee is the new latte."

6) Tricked Out Ride sure to tell the ladies a new stud's in town: "The Vespa Scooter."

7) Forget The Diary of Bridget Jones, here's the hot chick-lit fellows need to read to seal the deal: George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. "How a Hen Takes to Stratagem has many remarkable passages." Here's one William quoted from memory:

Mrs. Tulliver hid these reasonings in her own bosom; for when she had thrown out a hint to Mr. Deane and Mr. Glegg that she wouldn’t mind going to speak to Wakem herself, they had said, “No, no, no,” and “Pooh, pooh,” and “Let Wakem alone,” in the tone of men who were not likely to give a candid attention to a more definite exposition of her project; still less dared she mention the plan to Tom and Maggie, for “the children were always so against everything their mother said”; and Tom, she observed, was almost as much set against Wakem as his father was.

Score!

8) Hot backhanded compliment to a former lover: Speaking of his last relationship, William offered that, "Etta truly was the Charlotte Bronte of emo with all that entails."

9) Forget Hot Pockets, the new hot munchie: "Walker's Shortbread Rounds is a staple. For the truly decadent, I'd suggest Walker's Stem Ginger Shortbread."

10) DVD for entertaining friends: "The Sorrow & the Pity explores what The Pianist only indicated. Haunting and obsessive."