Arts & Culture

TEST SPINS | Queen: ‘A Day at the Races’

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Editor’s Note: This is a special guest edition of Sydney Levinton’s column Test Spins. I cannot possibly refrain from geeking out about Queen. For you to understand just how much this ’70s rock band means to me, allow me to briefly describe the state of my bedroom back at home. Lining one wall are my Great Uncle Alan’s Queen albums, proudly in pristine condition. Covering the door to my closet are posters documenting each phase of Queen’s career.

Arts & Culture

“Una Velita”: Bad Bunny, Bureaucracy and Las Boricuas

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Bad Bunny, the pioneer reggaetón artist and Puerto Rican icon, is beloved not just for his upbeat Latin tunes, but also for his unflinching political advocacy. The song “El Apagón” from his breakout album Un Verano Sin Ti was his most blunt commentary on the state of Puerto Rico and its government until the Sept. 20th release of “Una Velita,” which translates to “a little candle.” While the song is a callback to the devastating hurricane that ravaged the island years ago, remembering this event says more about the present than it does about the past. 

Arts & Culture

Resurgence of The Rave

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Picture a tunnel covered in graffiti, packed wall to wall with sticky half-dressed bodies writhing around, the bass thumping the floor so hard that the walls shake enough to mimic an earthquake. Now let’s turn the clock forward 45 years, and instead of a graffiti-covered tunnel, it’s open land designated for 170,000 people anxiously awaiting their turn to see the day’s hottest 30 DJs. Still an experience packed with even stickier and extravagantly adorned bodies, but with an increasingly growing community that can’t be tamped down. Rave culture has blossomed into a living, breathing experience where everyone shares one love: music. 

Techno was created by a group of young Black artists in Detroit during the 1980s as a way to investigate new soundscapes, encourage style experimentation and welcome queerness with open arms. This genre was a way to escape from the heavy political issues weighing down on all of society. Techno grew and blossomed into an evolving community that brought in people of all different cultures, sexualities, ethnicities and experiences.

Arts & Culture

On Walden

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Last February, I picked up Walden on a Saturday morning and hoped to get through the first chapter. But by evening, I had not started any work, had not eaten and had torn halfway through the book. On my walk back from the library, I felt that I was holding something sacred in my bag.

Arts & Culture

A Deep Dive Into The Sax Sensation: Moon Hooch

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It is sometime in the early 2010’s, you live in New York City and you are on your way back home from work. Normally, you take a familiar route, but on this day, you find yourself in a different part of the subway. Echoing deep from within the subway, you hear a throttling commotion of brass and drum. Out of curiosity, you creep closer to get a better view of what’s happening. A golden sheen draws your eyes to the bodies of two saxophones, instrumented by none other than Michael Wilbur and Wenzl McGowen.

Arts & Culture

Falling for Plath: Embracing the Season with Poetry, Reflection and Change

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As the season shifts from summer to fall, we see other elements around us shifting. Our peers’ clothes shift as more skin is covered to protect from the cool breeze entering campus. Tanned skin from the summer fades away as we spend more time in the confines of the library, completing and utterly dedicated to the task due at 11:59 p.m. 

We are no different from the poets, writers, and brilliant academics who came well before us. We are always in a constant state of revising, editing, shifting, and evolving. Slyvia Plath is a perfect person to reference and learn more about in the upcoming fall weather. 

Poetry in the fall, especially when Cornell’s campus is filled with fall foliage, is a great and enriching pastime.

Arts & Culture

A ‘Dead Poets Society’ Fall: An Ode to Change

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Let’s set the stage: it’s early September. The year is 2023. I’m entering my senior year of high school in a week and I have a plan: I am going to start my college apps early (I did not), I am going to decorate my room (again, unsuccessful), and I am going to figure out what I want to do for the rest of my life (unfortunately, another failure — this one, however, led to some important self realizations). In a way, I could not have chosen a better time to watch Dead Poets Society: it was fall, a transitional period into my last year at boarding school and the first time I’d ever have to meaningfully grapple with the question of what comes next. It’s now 2024 and fall started a week and a half ago.