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Un(official) Musings in the Urban Jungle

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It seems that I have always been a sucker for trends. When I was younger, I used to go to sleep in my school uniform so that I could be more efficient and have more time to eat breakfast and watch cartoons in the morning. Every night as I buttoned my plaid pinafore and folded my collar, I felt a peculiar pleasure from cheating the system. Not only did I get to watch 15 more minutes of Captain Planet than my brothers, but I also got the best pick of breakfast food. “It’s just a phase — a silly trend she’s started in her head,” my mother said behind closed doors to my father, as he stood perplexed over how to react when I was fully clothed and ready to go to school at 8:30 p.m. the night before.

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Open The Gates: NYC’s Memory of Color

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“We live in a terrible century of banalization and trivialization, of repetitious things; all our world is surrounded by…bombastic things. And we the humans like to experience something unique, once in a lifetime, if never again. All our works have this quality that if you miss them, you will never see them.”

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A Summer Made of Music

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As the semester rolls to a close with bands booking their last shows at The Nines, a capella groups begging you to come to their spring performances and Slope Day just a week away from filling the East Hill with one final musical celebration, I’ve already started to switch the gears on my music agenda to focus on summer.

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Guest Lecturer Gives ILR Students New Perspective

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About 60 ILR students saw their course work come to life yesterday when Patricia Kakalec, deputy bureau chief from the New York Attorney General’s Labor Bureau, lectured to two ILR classes taught by Prof. Kati Griffith, labor and employment law. Kakalec regaled students with real-life anecdotes of subpoenas, labor lawsuits and depositions.
While the focus of Griffith’s courses are the study of law, she explained that, “We study … what the law actually is, but students often don’t have exposure to real practice, real cases, what’s going on out there. So I brought [Kakalec] as somebody who actually enforces the law from the government’s point of view … I think students should get a sense of how things work in the real world.”

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NYC's P.S.1 Offers The Good and The Ugly

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Over break I visited friends in New York City, where I had previously lived for five years. During that time I rarely schlepped out to Queens from my Brooklyn apartment — with one big exception: the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Museum summer parties. This time, I decided to take in the museum sans hipster-packed, alcohol-sopped outdoor rave. This trip made me wonder, though, whether beer-goggles were needed to appreciate the often vapid beauty — or more often, politicized disparagement of beauty — that crowds the contemporary art scene.

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Documenting the Brooklyn Blues

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Students take pregnancy tests, hand over drugs and run from cops all in the hours before they trudge into class on the first day of school. These are not the typical scenarios that we see on television teen dramas nowadays. On Monday afternoon, Cornell alum and writer/director Trac Minh Vu ’97 presented a screening of his TV pilot Red Hook High, where students are as far away from the luxuries of the good life as they can get.

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Ithaca Ballet: Dancing in the Face of Death

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Tragedy strove to reverse itself in Byron Suber’s dance piece, Bach Solo Cello Suite No. 1, Circa 1986. Dancers in black fell to the ground one by one, like birds shot in midair — only to rise again, flinging their skirts with a death-defying joy.
Suber’s dance piece was performed at the State Theatre last Saturday for The Ithaca Ballet’s Winter Repertory Performance alongside with pieces by other choreographers. Bach Solo Cello Suite No. 1, Circa 1986 was an exercise in contrasts.
Dancers whirled together simultaneously with a frightening vigor — producing a dizzying juxtaposition of chaos and order. Neo-classical balletic movements jostled with modern dance techniques for a place in a piece where life and death are intimately intertwined.

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Election Supervisor Says Voting Process is Flawed

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Since the United States democracy operates in such a way that every citizen of 18 years and older has the right to cast a vote, one would imagine that every citizen’s vote would have the right be counted. According to Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections for Leon County, Fla., however, this is not at all true.
This past Saturday, New Yorkers for Verified Voting invited Sancho to speak to the public concerning issues of the flawed voting processes that occur in the country.