6 A THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NEWS
WEDNESDAY,MAY 10,2006
ACTIVISM
Student activists attract media, enact change
BY DAVID LINHART
editor@kansan.com
KANSAN CORRESPONDENT
Student activism today is a world away from the angry protests of the 1960s and 1970s, said Karl Brooks, assistant professor of history and environmental studies.
Brooks protested U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict during high school. By the time he reached college, he had turned to more conventional forms of politics.
Noticing how the media were gatekeepers even in local debates. Brooks saw that activism needed to evolve.
Brooks said he saw student
activism today, especially KU student activists, as far more media-savvy than that of the past. More students angrily protested on college campuses in past years, but now professors know how to grab TV and newspaper coverage.
"More students know what's going on in the world, though fewer of them may understand the political process itself," Brooks said.
KU Info returned last month, thanks to student activists like Justin la Mort, Cherrywale senior and a columnist for The University Daily Kansan, who trumpeted KU Info's importance to students during its absence.
La Mort and other student activists helped restore the famous piece of the University's student services so students who wonder how many trees are on KU's Lawrence Campus can go to the new KU Info office in the Kansas Union.
La Mort attributes his success to knowing how to handle the press.
"Using the media and controlling the terms of the argument are essential," he said. "Mobilization is fundamental to give incentive to legislators if they want to keep their jobs while at the same time providing them political capital as cover from the lobbyists."
La Mort is president of the
KU chapter of ACLU. He fought, unsuccessfully, in April for the Lawrence City Commission to alter a noise ordinance that local privacy activists found intrusive and unfair. La Mort joined with the Delta Force coalition from Student Senate and marched on City Hall.
Despite the commission's refusal to make changes to the law, La Mort said he saw a chance for student activists to push for a change again in about six months.
"It depends on what you count as success," La Mort said.
His efforts earned him a spot on the front page two days in a row in The University Daily
Kansan and the Lawrence Journal-World, along with some press in The Washington Post and The Drudge Report. La Mort said that was a surprise.
Other student activists, led by Ethan Nuss, Salina senior, helped organize the PowerShift energy security conference at the Kansas Union on April 29. The conference was sponsored by 20/20 Vision, a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing oil dependency.
Nuss urged a Woodruff Auditorium audience of more than 240 to sway from addiction to foreign oil.
"The beautiful thing — the
advantage we have as students — is that we don't have the money," Nuss said. "The biggest resources we have are passion and people. If we can organize around that passion, then we can mobilize for change."
Nuss wants to continue his work with 20/20 Vision next year by taking the fight to reduce oil consumption to Toneka.
La Mort said, "As with most things, realizing there is a problem is the first step to fixing it. The change I've seen is that people are talking and repeating the points we've been hammering."
Edited by Kathryn Anderson
ENTERTAINMENT
African filmmaker debuts with autobiography
BY JILL LAWLESS
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
LONDON — Richard E. Grant wears a watch on each wrist. One tells the time in London; the other is set to the time in Swaziland, the country of his birth.
The latter was a gift from Grant's late father, an official in the southern African country's last British colonial government. It closely resembles the timepiece received by Ralph, the hero of Grant's directorial debut, "Wah-Wah," from his similarly employed dad.
The scene is based on truth, Grant says — as is nearly everything in the film, a warm but unsentimental coming-of-age story set during the last days of the British Empire.
It has been described as a semi-autobiographical film, but Grant goes further: "It's entirely autobiographical."
"You have to put in the
`semi' to cover yourself legally, and obviously there's dramatic license taken," said Grant, who gained fame as the title character — a deliriously drunken failed actor — in the 1987 slacker classic "Withnail and I."
"But everything that happens, happened."
The film does not give a romanticized view of Grant's family or their neighbors, a tiny colonial elite seeing the sun set on their empire in the days before Swaziland's 1968 independence.
In the course of the film, Ralph watches from the back seat of a car while his mother and her lover romp in the front, endures his parents' divorce and the icy disapproval of their neighbors, and sees his father sink into bouts of alcoholic despair that culminate in taking a shot at the boy with a pistol. All true, Grant says, and all events he has wanted to write about for a long time.
"It's been hovering in my head for years," said Grant, 49, over a lunch of pasta at a centuries-old London pub.
"I started keeping a diary when I witnessed my mother's adultery in this car when I was 10, simply because it was such a poisonous secret and I couldn't tell anybody about it. I suppose writing about it was a way of being listened to — a record of this actually going on, because I couldn't tell my friends and I certainly couldn't tell my father."
"Wah-Wah" — the title refers to the drone of upperclass chitchat that drives one American character to distraction — is emotionally wrenching, but far from bleak. It has humor and absurdity as Ralph and the other expats stage an amateur production of "Camelot" to mark the arrival of Swazi independence.
"It would be very easy to mock them," Grant said of the characters, who are frequently
snobbish, narrow-minded and racist. But he set out to give a fuller picture.
Grant said he hoped to convey the panic felt by people who saw "empire running out on them, and their livelihoods and the ridiculous social pecking order that we lived under. The sands of time were running out on them fast."
Grant, whose acting CV runs from the sublime — Robert Altman's "Gosford Park" — to the Spice Girls (he played the band's manager in the girl-power feature "Spice World"), retains a strong sense of his younger self. The film sticks resolutely to Ralph's point of view, as he is angered and often mystified by the behavior of the adults around him. The role is played by Nicholas Hoult ("About a Boy", "The Weather Man"), whose gangly frame and otherworldly expression are reminiscent of the tall, turquoise-eyed Grant.
Alastair Grant/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Actor and first time movie director Richard E. Grant has directed a semi-autobiographical film, "Wah Wah," based on his childhood experiences in Swaziland in Southern Africa.