I’ve never seen all of Scarface. If I’d had some Cuban friends growing up I’m sure I would’ve seen it, but there were no Cubans in my hometown (too far inland, I guess), and now it’s too late.  I’ve tried to watch it before, but it’s so dated I can’t get into it. It’s not the synthy music or the fact that Michelle Pfeiffer was still hot. It’s the cocaine. How am I supposed to relate to a movie about a drug empire built on coke when nowadays even Stephanie from Full House is doing crystal meth? You think she’d give a shit if she walked in on Tony Montana snorting mountains of coke?  She’d probably mumble “Pussy” through her dissolving teeth before proceeding to fire up another hit of crank and fantasize about a three-way with the Olsen twins.

Rocky, on the other hand, has aged pretty well.  It’s 33 years old, but audiences still connect with it because it doesn’t rely heavily on any 70s trends.  Rocky doesn’t have a roller-derby disco dance-off with Apollo Creed: they beat the hell out of each other.  That’s a time-honoured tradition.  How does Rocky train for the fight?  He runs up stairs – a practice that’s been with us at least since Anne Frank’s time – and punches large slabs of cow.  That shit is timeless.  Maybe there are some vegetarians out there who think that shows excessive cruelty to animals, but with any luck the rest of us will have eaten you fucks before Rocky’s 35^th anniversary.  Then we’ll commemorate the occasion with a big veal dinner courtesy of the descendents of the same cow carcass that Rocky tenderized.  But I digress.  My point is, the date would’ve been stamped on that movie if Rocky had trained on the 70s equivalent of a Bowflex.

There’s one thing that’ll make a movie seem dated faster than time itself: fads.  They come and go so fast, within a year people can’t watch a fad-infused movie without cringing.  It took producers a while to learn to be selective about which fads to put in a movie.  They must’ve learned a hard lesson with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, a film that featured a climactic battle in which the Turtles defeated the bad guys using a combination of martial arts and break-dancing in the middle of a Vanilla Ice concert.  Luckily, some fads were so short-lived that Hollywood didn’t have time to put them in a movie.  I bet they had ideas, though.  The odds are pretty good that at least one producer, after polishing off a kilo or so of cocaine, started off his pitch with, “Imagine Searching for Bobby Fischer… with Pogs.”

~ Greg Osadec

Silly me. I’d been away so long I’d forgotten that life at McGill doesn’t change.

The past few weeks have turned out to be a bit of a trip down memory lane. Walking around, I hear a lot of phrases that take me back to the golden days of yesteryear. On the streets I still hear, “Do you have any change?” On campus it’s, “…I was soooo drunk last night….” At the bookstore they tell me, “The line starts on the roof,” and in any administrative office they still say, “We can’t help you here. For that you’ll have to go to [whatever other administrative office I just came from].”

It turns out that I’m the one who’s changed. Sometimes I stop in my tracks when I realize that I’m standing in the exact spot where, six years ago, I threw up a massive puddle of beer and pizza (can you call it a puddle even if it’s not quite liquid?). Yep, those were the good old days, when 99-cent pizza was only $1.49. But thanks to the profound wisdom I’ve gained over the years, I no longer feel the urge to drink beer, wine, vodka and tequila all in the same night, even it is free.

Time and experience have changed my perspective on a lot of things. Just the other day I walked into one of the men’s washrooms on campus and saw the same cock ring dispenser I had first laid eyes on as a naive first-year student. I never thought I’d reach a point in my life where a cock ring dispenser could make me nostalgic, but I guess Montreal has that affect on people.

The first time I saw it, it seemed to be tangible evidence that I was officially going to a very liberal university. A friend at a university in western Ontario – which I won’t name here — once called my cell to complain that they weren’t allowed to have glass bottles in rez, and that they’d get kicked out if they were caught smoking weed. Unfortunately, our conversation was cut short. My roommates and I were in the middle of hot-boxing our bathroom at Solin, and the smoke got so thick I lost reception.

Sadly, any fond memories that I may or may not have of those glow-in-the-dark rubber rings with soft spikes are now tainted by a new sexual-pseudo-political analogy. At a time when students have to fight harder than ever for their place on campus, it seems ironic that one of McGill’s long-standing monuments (pun fully intended) is a cock ring dispenser – an enduring symbol for the eternal ass-fucking the administration gives the student body here at McGill.

                                                                                                                                                                                                            ~ Greg Osadec