According to State Representative Carlo Leone, a Democrat of Stamford, movie productions provided a total of $1 million to the Connecticut economy before 2006. Now, after the passing of a July 2006 law that gives film production companies a 30 percent tax credit, that number has risen to $480 million, and the likes of Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, and Uma Thurman and have flocked to Connecticut, or as some would now have it, “Hollywood East.”
In 1989, an outpatient from Connecticut Valley Hospital (CVH), a mental institution located just over a mile east of the University, stabbed a nine-year-old girl on Main Street. Eighteen years later, residents of Middletown remain somewhat uneasy with the hospital’s presence.
This year’s winter elections for the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) and the Student Budget Committee (SBC), a subcommittee of the WSA, featured several key changes to last year. For the first time, frosh candidates ran for three available positions, while 11 students ran for five at-large positions.
As you’re all keenly aware, a semester can’t be filed away until the grades have been posted. We’ve reached the last Argus of the year, so here are our grades for some topics to which we’ve devoted a lot of ink this semester.
Mytheos Holt: Your column “Tear Down this Wallerstein!” (witty, I’ll give you that) is just as ideologically driven, and therefore flawed, as the “radical leftist” theorists you criticize. Let me try to squeeze your argument down: socialism and communism are bad because they are systems of social repression that enslave (see Stalin, Mao, Che and Chavez), whereas capitalism is unbelievably great because it looks past social repression in the name of higher profits.
Born under fundamentalist religious law in Somalia in 1969, Ayaan Hirsi Ali lived under continuous sexism, sometimes racism and constant oppression during the first half of her life. Since a young age, Ali witnessed the terrible condition and subjugation of women in her society, such as wife beatings, forced marriages and genital mutilations, the last of which she was subjected to at the age of five.
I wanted to write a Wespeak regarding my thoughts on the final weeks of the semester. How appropriately collegiate I feel when I walk through Olin and I see so many laptops with research paper writers attached to them. Everyone reading J-STOR articles, and groups of friends sharing studying snacks; it’s an amusing sight to behold.
As a senior English major, the complaint that the department does not offer enough creative writing courses, and that these courses are often nearly a familiar refrain for me. I could not agree more: it took me nearly two years to enroll in one myself. At the same time, I think it falls upon us as student writers to create the community that we have perennially clamored after, to “create the taste by which our work is to be enjoyed,” as Wordsworth put it.
On Feb. 5, a.k.a. Super Duper Tuesday, Connecticut will have its presidential primaries. This means that if you want to register to vote in the Connecticut primary, you must do so before winter break. This is because the deadline for registration is 14 days before the election, or during break.
In response to Scott Ugras’ Wespeak “With three wars in Iraq, which war are you talking about?” printed on Nov. 30: for your consideration, here are three points in counter-argument.
I believe empathy is the heart of morality. In this busy ending season bleeding into the holiday cheer and smear, give a hug, give a smile, anything that is contagious enough to spread some fucking love in this place. XOXOXOXO.
WESU’s Holiday Pledge Drive entered its second week this past Tuesday, giving listeners the chance to support the non-commercial radio station’s operations. The station has currently raised between $22,000 and $23,000, and hopes to achieve its stated goal of $35,000 before the end of the drive.
Concerned that the standard tour from the Office of Admission neglects certain essential aspects of the Wesleyan experience, Claire Kaplan ’09 has publicly announced a controversial new initiative: a student-run alternative tour.
President Michael Roth announced today that Peter Patton, vice president and secretary of the University and professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, will return to teaching full-time next semester. Patton has taught at the University since 1976. He joined the administrative staff in 1995, serving on former President Doug Bennet’s senior staff as senior advisor for Information Technology.
When Emily Sheehan ’10 first joined Wesleyan Christian Fellowship (WesCF) in her freshman year, she was uncomfortable revealing her Catholic denomination. “Then, I didn’t know if they would see it well,” Sheehan said, explaining that WesCF is mostly Protestant. Now, however, Sheehan is an active member in WesCF as well as the Catholic Student Organization (CSO).
The preliminary exterior designs of the Molecular & Life Science Building have been released. The facility, which is currently estimated to cost $160 million, will be located behind and around the existing Exley Science Tower and Science Library. The Hall-Atwater Labs and Shanklin will be demolished.
She may have been your Residential Advisor (RA), you may have seen her dance in Kalalu, or she may have yelled at you at Senior Ball (as captain of Event Staff, of course), but do you know the real LaShawn Springer? Do you know about her marriage on Foss Hill? Her days as a ballerina? Her psychic abilities? Read on to find out all about this and more, plus why some people may just be calling her the next Lorraine Elmhurst.
The men’s squash team dominated Vassar College on Wednesday night, sweeping each individual match to post a 9-0 victory. Wesleyan won 27 games total in the best-of-five matches, to only five losses combined. The match was the team’s fourth in the past week and marked the Cardinals’ final action before winter break.
The women’s ice hockey team closed out its first-semester action on Wednesday night with a tough 3-2 loss to the Holy Cross College Crusaders. The loss concludes a disappointing first part of the season for the Cardinals, who finish the stretch at 1-6. “The game against Holy Cross was really disapointing,” said Adrienne Shea ’08.
The Bears of the United States Coast Guard Academy were simply too much for the women’s basketball team Tuesday night, shooting the lights out at Silloway Gymnasium for a 70-56 victory. The Bears shot nearly 50 percent from the field over the course of the game and nearly 80 percent from the free-throw line. The strong shooting night ended a five-year winning streak that Wesleyan had over Coast Guard.
“Samsara,” the 16th annual South Asian cultural show, filled Crowell Concert Hall last Saturday with poetry, dance, and music. This year’s show featured several compelling spoken word pieces, and dance pieces that exploded with infectious energy. The show began with ten performers singing the Bangladeshi, Indian, Nepali, Pakistani and Sri Lankan national anthems, representing the South Asian communities at the University.
As Pastor Marichal Monts led the Ebony Singers this past Monday, he filled Crowell Concert Hall not only with the sound of music, but with clapping and dancing, as well. One of the more popular concerts on campus, the Ebony Singers traditionally sells out over a month in advance of the show. Songs included this year were “Free One Day,” “More Abundantly,” “The Light,” “Be Blessed” and crowd favorite “Jesus.”
In its last event of the semester, Wesleyan World Wednesdays sponsored “Dancing Across Continents,” a dance performance and discussion with alumnae Pei-chun Wang ’99 and Abigail Levine ’99 about their new collaborative work.
It’s freezing outside. Our exams are looming over us. Some of us, maybe, are looking for an escape. Pablo Neruda’s poetry can be a lot more than distraction, but its sunny climes and passionate emotion inevitably move us beyond ourselves. The 1993 reissuing of the 1976 Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition of “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” makes it easy to love these 21 poems.
It is a tired axiom that a film adaptation will never be as good as the novel it is based on. The trend of poor adaptations, however, doesn’t stop studios from continuing to crank out disappointments. The latest great novel to be butchered in this fashion on the big screen is Philip Pullman’s “The Golden Compass.”
Since this column (at its worst) amounts to a glorified blog, brace yourself for an uncomfortably intimate confession: I have never seen “The Godfather.” I realize it’s a vibrant adaptation, a meticulously crafted period piece and the nucleus of New Hollywood.
That face: mouth slightly agape; skin pale; eyes at once vacant and burning with mysterious torment. Though complicated and distressing issues of marital disunity, personal isolation and the role of the imagination percolated throughout last weekend’s production of Peter Nichols’ “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg,” its greatest strength lay in its foregrounding of the title character’s haunting visage: an ever-present reminder of the play’s sorrowful, questioning, broken heart.
Cormac McCarthy is the new Herman Melville. The Coen Brothers are the new Howard Hawks. “No Country for Old Men” is the new… it’s unclear. “No Country for Old Men” follows the story of three men. The first is Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a down and out country boy who, while hunting one day, comes across a suitcase holding 2 million dollars at the grisly site of a massive drug deal at the border gone horribly wrong.
Chair of the Film Studies Department Jeanine Basinger’s “The Star Machine,” examines the insular, heavily-commercial process that made and broke the careers of movie stars from the 1930s to the 1950s. The book illustrates the studio system’s effect through “the human factor”"including case studies of movie stars who were built up and knocked down by the earliest titans of pre-color Hollywood.
“We have no other choice—socialism, or SMASH!” This call to revolution was not made during a campus rally, but rather is a line from “SMASH!”, a play read on Monday night by the all-student Playwrights Repertory Company at the ’92 Theatre. The reading was held in honor of playwright and screenwriter Jeff Hatcher, who was in residence at the University Dec. 3 and 4.
Like many rock musicians, David Longstreth has always dabbled in quieter, gentler genres. His love of classical, primarily the voices of a well-tuned and professionally-trained chamber choir, has put him in august company—as the natural heir to Wolf Parade and Modest Mouse, among others. Thus, he can rest assured that what once would have made him eccentric is now a familiar technique.
This summer, from June 2 to 27, the University will join fellow NESCAC school Middlebury College in hosting a Summer Language Institute on campus. The University’s Institute is open to non-Wesleyan college students as well as professionals seeking instruction in Arabic, French, Spanish, or Russian.