Randall K. Cohn

Randall K. Cohn is completing his PhD in Cultural Studies at George Mason University, where his major fields are Political Theory and Art History. His formal education also includes a BFA in Theater from New York University and an MA in International Relations from San Francisco State University. He was the founder and producing artistic director of Kansas City based EMS Theater from 2001-2004, and has written, directed, designed, or performed with NaCl Theater (New York), foolsFury (San Francisco), and We Players (San Francisco), among others. Currently living in Minneapolis, MN, he cobbles together a living from a combination of teaching and assorted odd jobs, and is in the early stages of a new career as a photovoltaic solar-electric system installer. He is a member of the Marxist Literary Group (MLG) and the Committee for Revolutionizing the Acadamy (ComRAd). It would behoove him to have a website where his formal work is available, but for now you will have to be satisfied with waiting for his peer-review debut in the forthcoming Renewing Cultural Studies, edited by Paul Smith (Temple University Press, 2009).

Test Regime

by Randall K. Cohn

What I am proposing to do here, I realize, is going to be difficult. First of all, I am going to try to convince you that Kim Jong-Il — the bouffant-wearing, Elizabeth Taylor loving, female-reporter-kidnapping supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – is not batshit crazy. Then, just in case I have failed to alienate any of my potential readers by suggesting that we reconsider our attitudes towards the leader of a totalitarian state that is openly building a nuclear weapons program in defiance of pretty much the entire world, I will follow up by talking smack about Israel.

I’m just letting you know up front so that there is no chance that you will feel blindsided by these arguments, and compelled to write an angry response denouncing me for my insidious self-hatred as either an

Essay

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Second Thoughts on 2nd Helpings

by Randall K. Cohn

My former housemate’s baked chicken was notoriously bad. I still suspect, though I have now moved and it is unlikely I will ever get confirmation, that I was not the only resident of the house who had spent measurable time resenting the chicken’s dryness, its lack of seasoning, its tendency to stick to the baking pan.

He certainly was not the only one of us who, on occasion, might have phoned in his or her responsibility to cook for the house. I once made fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It wasn’t even particularly irksome that the stuff he cooked was always bad. Other housemates, in a large and dynamic house that boasted something like 15 different residents during the

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