The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/culture/page/3/)
Music, dance, laughter and the smell of blended spices permeated through Barton Hall as Culture Fest commenced for its second annual event, featuring performances, music, food and presentations Sunday afternoon.
In hopes of eradicating the stereotypes against their home country, two Cornell alumni from Pakistan started organizing trips to bring students to their home country starting last year. This past spring break, 24 Cornell students travelled to Pakistan, where they got to learn about the culture and meet notable figures such as the President and the Chief of the Military.
As the year of the pig approaches, several organizations and student centers will be hosting cultural events to celebrate and educate the Cornell community on one of the biggest Chinese holidays of the year.
Netflix has advertised their new food documentary, Salt Fat Acid Heat, for several weeks now, billing it as a delightful tour of the globe to teach their viewers about the vital elements of good food. With vibrant cinematography, a cheery soundtrack and compelling direction by Samin Nosrat, it delivers a unique take on the food documentary a la the late Anthony Bourdain. Part observational and part educational, this four-part series is an enjoyable watch with production value rivaling Chef’s Table. Samin begins her tour (albeit out of order) on the intricacies of fat, traveling to northern Italy to discover the secrets of such delicacies as red cow parmesan and traditional focaccia. This episode first captures the process of olive oil production straight from the source, complete with funny-looking harvesters and an industrial-size press.
In a dimly lit Duffield Hall on Saturday evening, students lined up for a “night market” to sample cuisine from Ghana, Ethiopia and Nigeria and enjoy the diverse culinary culture of Africa. “The purpose of the Africa Night Market is to expose the Cornell community to different African cultures because there is misconception that we’re all kind of the same,” said Maame Ohemeng ’20, organizer of the event and president of Ghanaians at Cornell. “We have different foods, different music, different people and it’s a way to bring us together and expose us to that.”
Dishes offered included — among many others — jollof rice from Ghana and Nigeria; waakye, a Ghanaian dish of rice and beans; and tibs, a type of grilled beef from Ethiopia. Ohemeng said the food was cooked by members of the community. The home-made quality of the buffet presented a logistical problem for the organizers, as they experienced difficulty trying to get the student volunteers “out of their comfort zones” to cook for the Cornell community.
At the recent New York Fashion Week, staff at Pyer Moss’ Spring-Summer 2019 show wore t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase, “If you didn’t know about Pyer Moss before, we forgive you.” This statement, rooted in bravado, was also prophetic, as the five year-old fashion house went on to put on what was arguably the most important show of the season. Founder and designer Kerby Jean-Raymond brought NYFW crowds to Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, the previous site of one of the first African-American communities in the United States where a 40-person gospel choir sang in models who strode past 19th-century wooden framed houses, creating what Vogue reporter Chioma Nnadi called a “tableau [that] was like something out of a Kerry James Marshall painting”. In an interview with Vogue, Jean-Raymond said that he wanted to use the show to “explore what Black American leisure” looked like in the face of structural racism, where simple existence is systemically deemed threat. The result was a collection that featured beautifully structured suits, silks printed with images from visual artist Derrick Adams and vibrantly patterned athleisure from the Pyer Moss x Reeboks collaboration. Kerby Jean-Raymond is no stranger to the fashion show as medium and embraces experimentation with social commentary and art, having featured a short film on police brutality and a Raphael Saadiq-directed gospel choir in previous Pyer Moss shows.
In January of 2017 Donald Glover, better known as Childish Gambino, gave a shout out to three of music’s hottest on-the-rise M.C.s: Quavo, Offset and Takeoff. Together they formed the group Migos. A few days after Glover’s mention of the trio, Migos dropped the album Culture, which quickly reached critical acclaim. From there, Migos saw a successful summer, playing on a massive tour with Future and making several festival appearances. In the midst of their busy summer, Offset dropped a major bomb: the announcement of Culture II.
I only recently turned around and noticed the contrast between myself and the Iran I was thrown against. Somehow, when I was younger my legs were longer, or the middle space between the two circles of the venn diagram was smaller, and I managed to barely stretch across the pervasive gap. Now, I struggle to engage intellectually and socially with Iran — the actual one, not my own construction — because I’m left grasping at language and culture from which I’ve fallen behind.
When Donald Glover, better known as Childish Gambino, was called on stage to receive his Golden Globe on behalf of the show Atlanta for best TV series, people did not expect what he would say next. Donald did not take the conventional route of thanking his parents or making a political statement for unity and inclusion. Instead Donald said, “I really want to thank the Migos, not for being in the show, but for making ‘Bad and Boujee.’ Like that’s the best song…ever.” He would later go on to call the Migos “the Beatles of this generation,” high praise for the Atlanta rap trio who have been pioneering the new wave of trap music. To say that the Migos have been “hot”’ lately would be an understatement. In a matter of four months their chart-topping single “Bad and Boujee” has reached platinum status and the group has amassed a cult-like following that stretches from places like Atlanta, Georgia to Lagos, Nigeria.
No one other than James Baldwin could have ever hoped to deliver a proper eulogy to James Baldwin, but I find it incredibly ironic that my namesake ended up accepting the mantle. Amiri Baraka was an embattled and deeply flawed artist, and in reading his work, I have often found myself rapidly vacillating between vehement disapproval and mesmerized admiration. What he had to say about the man I aspire to be like, though, elicited neither of these responses. “Jimmy Baldwin created [contemporary American speech] so we could speak to each other at unimaginable intensities of feeling, so we could make sense to each other at higher and higher tempos,” wrote Baraka. For most anyone else, words like these would serve as poetic and profound excerpts from a worthy homage.