So (American) Cool!

If you’re reading this and you’re roughly around my age, you remember playing Pokémon, right? Turning on the Game Boy (or Nintendo DS later on) and going on an adventure, playing for hours straight without stopping, the endurance test of training your team until they were strong enough, and making huge progress in one sitting. And inevitably, you would drop it and shake the cartridge loose or run out of battery, turn it off without saving or maybe the game would just crash and you’d have to start over again. It was the most demoralising feeling, if you were about to beat the Elite Four and become the champion, then your game would cut out and you’d go back to before Victory Road, with no Moltres to speak of and no motivation to push all those boulders around again.

I’m bringing up Pokémon for two reasons- one, when I got back in January I knew I’d have a lot of long Megabus journeys ahead of me so I dug out my old Advance SP and Pokémon Yellow and brought them along. To be fair, it did help get through a 14 hour bus ride to Toronto (For the record, aced the Elite Four with my Hypno/Articuno combo). Second, it’s the best analogy I can think of for when your laptop decides to just seriously crash while your mid-essay, and no amount of saves can protect your work. My epic assignment-writing weekend was basically three days indoors churning out 16 pages of work, and rewriting a chunk was not the ideal way to get through it. But after some very long nights I got through it and all my assignments are done! Next Monday and Tuesday bring my three exams, and then my studies at George Mason will be complete.

My dissertation research will carry on through the summer, and I’ve made a good start thanks to Mason and D.C.’s resources. Our studying took us to the Library of Congress, which along with the British Library is the biggest library in the world. I’d been here before with my brother but this time I was here for research, so with Georgia we navigated the underground tunnels, many protocols and got our library cards. We went into the iconic main reading room, looked up the available resources and I realised that actually, it wouldn’t be of much help to me. Georgia found some great primary sources but my dissertation is looking at debates around art, culture and society in America, so the American Art Archive was of much more use to me. It was worth going to explore the library though, and a card for the Library of Congress is a pretty good souvenir.

Afterwards we explored a little of the surrounding area which was a big surprise to me. I’d never been east of the Capitol, but past the government and tourist areas were really nice suburban areas and Eastern Market, which felt like it belonged in a completely different city. Even 9 months after arriving, D.C. can still surprise me.

 I went back to the American Art and National Portrait Gallery with Terry, which I’d seen a little of back in November but this time I discovered so much more fantastic artwork. The best pieces were ‘Electronic Superhighway’ by Nam June Paik, which is a neon map of the U.S filled with large and small televisions showing something relevant to the State- so Alabama shows civil rights footage, and the film ‘Oklahoma’ can be seen in- well, you can guess. I also saw some of my favourite ever paintings, Thomas Moran’s watercolours of Yellowstone. These huge pieces were crucial to the government establishing it as a national park and you can see why. The ‘American Cool’ exhibition was great too, a photographic history of the coolest figures since the term was coined the late 40s. Predictable people like Hendrix and Dylan made it in, along with some surprises like Susan Sontag. It got us wondering, in the face of these legendary figures, who from our current times would make it into a list of the 100 American Cool? I struggle to think of many who can live up to these guys.

Let’s talk burgers. The weather in North Virginia might change but the search for the best burger is constant. The Hard Rock Café, Shake Shack and Burger King were completely outclassed by the joy of Five Guys, the go-to place for a squashed roll of too much meat in a greasy brown paper bag and a mountain of Cajun fries… there’s one in London, for British people who need to experience this. I thought it couldn’t be topped, even by Ross’ home-cooked efforts… but then we found Freddie’s. More choice, onion rings, frozen custard, cheaper price, and the burger is amazing. It might just be the best one I’ve had yet- so if Jeremy or Samir read this, apologies. You’ll have to come back to the U.S and check this out!

With the weather finally back to form, we’ve had a farewell barbeque (thanks Josh!), a bit of volleyball (don’t get in Alexandre’s way, he’s deadly) and some more badminton showdowns. To which I have to concede, forget any British/French rivalry, Pauline beats us all easily. It’s probably not my sport if we’re honest! And I think the long study days leave us a bit odd by the late nights- our game of Time's Up was weird, the charades afterward more so. Yusuke acting out alligator wrestling is something special!

 The RA in charge

 Beach Volleyball got pretty serious

 I have no idea what Sukes is doing

Badminton showdown!

A long blog post, but I wanted to try and fit it all in. This time next week I’ll either be on a plane to or have landed in San Francisco, so there’s only one more post from George Mason to go!

A