Members of the University community filled the Memorial Chapel on Thursday, May 14, to celebrate the life of Johanna Justin-Jinich ’10, who was shot to death on May 6 while working in the Red & Black Café
Speaking before a packed Memorial Chapel last Friday evening, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author shared his thoughts on everything from national politics to his personal creative process with a mixture of ruminative ambivalence, unapologetic humor and guarded optimism characteristic of his acclaimed style.
Last Friday’s sold-out benefit performance of “In the Heights,” the Tony-Award winning Broadway musical created by and starring Lin-Manuel Miranda ’02, raised $1.5 million for University financial aid. Thirty-eight scholarships will be supported by these funds, which represent a combination of ticket purchases by alumni, parents and friends of the University, and alumni donations.
An estimated 500 people, including many within the Wesleyan community, came together last month to celebrate the life of David Lynn Harris, Jr. ’08, who died in a hiking accident in Oregon last July.
In his commencement address, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) directly challenged the class of 2008 to commit themselves to community involvement and global engagement. Obama filled in for Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), whose recent diagnosis with a malignant brain tumor prevented him from speaking at the event.
In his commencement address, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) directly challenged the class of 2008 to commit themselves to community involvement and global engagement. Obama filled in for Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), whose recent diagnosis with a malignant brain tumor prevented him from speaking at the event.
If you think the movie star life in Hollywood’s golden age was all autographs and red carpet photo ops, Chair of the Film Studies Department Jeanine Basinger has some news for you. Discussing actress Betty Grable, one of the many film actors and actresses examined in her book, “The Star Machine,” Basinger laid out but a few of the job skills required of Grable to maintain her high status within Hollywood.
Family, friends, and members of the University community gathered last Thursday at the Memorial Chapel to celebrate the life of Chase Anna Parr ’10, who died in an automobile accident on Dec. 22 while travelling with her parents and sister in Wyoming. Her parents, John Parr, 59, and Sandra Widener, 53, also died in the accident. Her sister, Katy, 17, survived and has been staying with her aunt and uncle in Boise, Idaho while recovering from her injuries.
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.
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.
Recent criticisms of certain University classes within the national media have been met with surprise and skepticism by professors on campus. In fact, many faculty members usually seemed surprised that their classes would garner national attention at all.
An article published in last Friday’s issue, entitled “Prohibition comes to Wes? All-campus ban of hard liquor considered,” stated that Assistant Dean of Student Services Scott Backer proposed changes in campus alcohol policy before the Drug Enforcement Policy Subcommittee, which he chairs.
Members of prominent on-campus environmental groups have expressed approval and excitement over President Michael Roth’s decision to sign the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment. By agreeing to sign the document, President Roth commits the University to establishing a comprehensive plan that both assesses the University’s greenhouse gas emissions and puts forth a detailed strategy to reduce them.
Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics Gary Yohe is among the members of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize last Friday. The IPCC shared the award with former Vice President Al Gore.
Dramatically lit freshmen draped in $1,200 cashmere scarves were not the only contribution that Wesleyan students made to this past Sunday’s “college issue” of The New York Times Magazine.
"We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." Written 45 years ago, the anxious urgency expressed in the opening line of the Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) retained an elemental allure for a small group of students who met last Wednesday on the front steps of Olin.
The Middletown Police Department (MPD) identified several suspects yesterday in connection with last weekend’s on-campus assaults, wrote Director of Public Safety David Meyer in an all-campus e-mail on Thursday. One or two of the suspects apprehended yesterday were directly involved in the assault of a University student that occurred early Saturday morning on Church St., Meyer said. The other suspects were present but did not take direct part in the assault.
One year ago, Silver ’08 was forced to resign from the University after failing two academic courses. The circumstances surrounding Silver’s departure, including his family’s financial situation and his active involvement in the University, led to a wide range of student protests. Now, one year later, Silver has returned to campus.
Weshop’s $200,000 renovation has received a mixed reaction from the Wesleyan campus, as students and Weshop employees absorb the changes in the store’s layout and selection of goods. Some have praise store’s transformation, while others point to longer lines and poor product placement.
Campus reaction to a recent poll by the blog Gawker naming Wesleyan “America’s Most Annoying Liberal Arts College” can best be characterized by the words of President Michael Roth. “I don’t know that I have much to say about this,” Roth said in an e-mail. “Gawker is trying to be annoying enough to get noticed (to make some money), but why even pay attention?”
Here’s a look back at the notable events and issues that dominated the 2006-2007 academic year at Wesleyan.
By the end of the 2006-2007 academic year, half of the University chaplaincy positions will be vacant. Protestant Chaplain Dr. Gary Comstock’s recently announced retirement after 17 years of service, along with the absence of a Catholic chaplain since the departure of Father Louis Manzo last year, have left two of the four University chaplain posts empty.
A gentle reminder was all it took to enliven the audience gathered last Wednesday night at the World Music Hall. The first of three performances making up "Sounds of the Fields," the Wesleyan Korean Drumming Ensemble concert, had just come to a close, the drums still reverberating throughout the now-silent performance space.
Tragedy at the circus. Putting the ideas of “tragedy” and “circus” together somehow makes the mind recoil in confusion and sadness. Why does the circus exist if not to allow an escape from the everyday world, if not to reflect our own broken world back at us and make it seem, if not whole, then at least a little less cracked?
The work of award-winning playwright Catherine Filloux runs the gamut of emotion and experience, from the abject horrors of the Cambodian massacres to the delicate complexities of personal identity. Filloux teaches the Playwright’s Workshop this semester. I recently sat down with her to discuss both the history of her own highly political work and her experiences working with a new generation of aspiring playwrights.
The presidency of Doug Bennet will be commemorated with song and dance this fall at the CFA Theatre. The Theatre Department recently announced the upcoming production of their original musical, "I’m With Midge!," which promises to be a frothy, fun-filled romp through a bitterly divisive presidential tenure.
Who says Ibsen is all about bourgeois anguish in tastefully arranged sitting parlors? Directed with seemingly boundless energy and invention by Assistant Professor of Theater Yuriy Kordonskiy, "Peer Gynt," written by the revered playwright before his classic forays into psychological realism such as "A Doll’s House" and "Hedda Gabler," burst with a giddy, infectious life that proved Ibsen to be as fantastically imaginative as he is emotionally perceptive. Kordonskiy’s production lifted the audience up on a wave of theatrical ingenuity as wonderfully entertaining as it was thematically germane.
For local bookstore owner Stu Hecht, the choice between his store and nearby book-selling chain stores Barnes & Noble and Borders literally comes down to a matter of taste. “Here [in Connecticut], we are the meat between two pieces of white bread,” Hecht said.
Asked by an audience member to describe his creative process, playwright Charles Mee gave the audience an open-ended and disarmingly simple answer that very well summarized the spirit of his lecture last Thursday evening.
For the first time in a long time, there appears to be some genuine suspense at the Academy Awards. "Little Miss Sunshine," a dysfunctional family road-trip comedy, "The Departed," a Boston-based crime drama, and "Babel," a sprawling meditation on international communication breakdown, all seem poised to potentially take the big prize this Sunday at the 79th annual Academy Awards ceremony.
Harpsichordist Sera Son spanned centuries of music last Sunday. Playing before a standing-room-only audience at Russell House, Son masterfully performed a collection of harpsichord pieces whose composers ranged from 18th-century composer Johann Sebastian Bach to the University’s own Neely Bruce.
According to his website, James Longley ’94 has been a film projectionist, an English teacher, a newspaper copy editor, and a web designer. However, anyone who attended the screening of his sobering, Oscar-nominated documentary "Iraq in Fragments" last week will probably tell you, it is his role as documentarian that has justifiably sparked the most discussion and earned him the most praise.
"Mary and Myra," Catherine Filloux’s two-person dramatization of the fight by lawyer Myra Bradwell to release Mary Todd Lincoln from an insane asylum following President Lincoln’s assassination, received an impassioned reading last Saturday at the Patricelli ’92 Theater.
Dear Emily, Mark, and the whole Wesleyan theater loving community: Fall at the Arts section has been incredibly busy, but that does not excuse the fact that, due to unforeseeable circumstances, we were unable to print a review of As You Like It in last week’s Argus.
It’s a familiar Wesleyan weekend dilemma: you and your friends want to sojourn into Manhattan for the weekend, but how to get there? Inevitably, those acquaintances who promised they’d be able to give you a ride to the New Haven train station will react with befuddlement when you show up, ready to go, on Saturday morning.
Late in "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," our hero finds himself in a dire straits. Broke and abandoned, Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) desperately stumbles into a service of a Texas revivalist church.
It’s been a very topical week for film, both on and off campus. Over the course of four days, Michael Winterbottom’s "The Road to Guantanamo," Robert Greenwald’s "Iraq for Sale," and Paul Greenglass’s "United 93" screened on campus. All the films explicitly address the causes, methods, and consequences of current American foreign policy. Down at Destinta, meanwhile, the casual viewer can see Clint Eastwood’s "Flags of Our Fathers."
A shadowy figure climbs into the backseat of a taxicab. As the driver speeds through the neon-stained boulevards and seamy back alleys of 1960s Chicago, the silhouetted passenger unveils an unsettling alternate history of American political and cultural life.
Wesleyan’s own Halley Feiffer ’07 can currently be seen off-Broadway in the Second Stage Theatre’s revival of "subUrbia," Eric Bogosian’s chronicle of aimless adolescents searching for life’s meaning while loitering in front of the local 7-11. I sat down with Halley after a recent matinee to discuss the off-Broadway experience; the ups and downs of playing Bee-Bee, a self-destructive music-lover; and why Middletown cuisine beats New York City’s any day.
Tonight at 8 p.m., the Film Series will screen Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” before what one hopes will be a packed house. If there was ever a modern-day movie to screen before a gaggle of college students, it’s Tarantino’s bloody, profound, screamingly funny and time-twisting triumph.
To enjoy "Hell Meets Henry Halfway" is to accept the show as little more than a gleeful plunge into unremitting pessimism. Performed by the Pig Iron Theater Company last Thursday and Friday at the CFA Theater, its vision of human existence as a treadmill of boredom, disappointment, and suppressed fury is hardly a revelation, theatrically or philosophically speaking.
Three professional thespians discussed the strengths and shortcomings of the modern-day theater company in “Stories from the Field: How to Start and Sustain an Ensemble Theater Company,” held Wednesday at the CFA Cinema. The panelists engaged an audience of 25 students, faculty, and community members in a conversation on both their unique collaborative processes and the complications of making group theater in contemporary America.
A distinction often occurs between "Actors" and "Movie Stars." The former sinks into his or her given role with quicksilver grace and chameleon-like skill. The latter imbues every on-screen moment with the intangible glow of personality, physicality, and that elusive quality known simply as star-power.
When planning a recent trip to the movies, two options presented themselves. One, inevitably, was "Snakes on a Plane," the much-discussed Samuel L. Jackson thriller. The other was "Little Miss Sunshine," the small dramedy about a dysfunctional Albuquerque family traveling cross-country so the youngest of the clan can compete in the titular beauty pagaent.
The 2005-2006 academic year gave the student body a wide variety of art and cultural events to choose from, with lectures, screenings, exhibits, and performances to satisfy almost any interest. Here are but a handful of the highlights from last year:
Film
The real question surrounding the release of "United 93" is not "too soon?" The question is "does it?" Does it denigrate the memory of 9/11 and its victims by turning their stories into fodder for the Hollywood grist mill? Does it have anything new or illuminating to say about the causes or effects of that horrible and defining moment in America?
Make the trip to Destinta and see "Friends with Money." A witty and wise study of friendship and class in elite Los Angeles, this bittersweet new comedy starring Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener, and Frances McDormand is simply terrific. As the artery-clogging onslaught of greasy summer blockbusters grows closer by the day, this perfectly tossed salad of a movie, light yet surprisingly filling, provides a refreshing antithesis.
Ask Alexander Payne what drew him to the novel from which emerged he and Jim Taylor’s scalpel-sharp satire Election, and he’ll tell you about how impressed he was that novelist Tom Perrotta wrote a character that had a stinky-watch band problem. He admits having no desire at the time to do a high school movie, and essentially read the novel, given to him by producer Albert Berger, "just to get him [Berger] out of my hair."
Based on its kinetic, no-nonsense advertising campaign and tick-tock bank heist plot, who would guess that "Inside Man" is (to use the technical term) a Spike Lee joint? Spike Lee, that polarizing explorer of race and social tensions in modern-day America, directing a bank heist movie?
If 2005 saw rivulets of the country’s divisive political and social atmosphere begin to seep into the upper tier of the film world (Oscar baiters like "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Munich"), 2006 might be remembered as the year when the rushing stream of current events burst through the heretofore Hollywood-imposed dam and began to saturate all levels of the movie world.
The summer movie season is just around the corner, and Hollywood power players are jockeying for the rapt attentions and open wallets of that most coveted age group: the 18-24 crowd. With this in mind, I turn my print space this week over to Hollywood development executive extraordinaire, Max Profite, who will bring the Wesleyan student body up to date on his latest batch of sure-fire successes coming soon to a theater near you.
Any pretensions the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had at achieving some degree of social relevance was spectacularly shot to hell last Sunday night, when presenter Jack Nicholson announced to a visibly surprised audience the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture: Crash.
n discussing this year’s Oscars, it’s become increasingly in vogue to characterize the nominees with such adjectives as "small" and "serious intent." These very phrases, in fact, were lifted directly from The New York Times Arts section the day after the Academy’s morning announcement.
It was midnight on a Saturday, and I was about to be deflowered. Standing on the threshold of the makeshift screening room in Alpha Delta Phi, I cautiously tip-toed my way through a sea of fish-net stockings, bustiers, and eye-liner seemingly stolen from RuPaul’s medicine cabinet, finally locating a seat besides a would-be leather daddy.
When it comes to art, Assistant Professor of History Magda Teter is a woman not easily deterred. While on sabbatical in Israel a few years ago, Teter was intrigued by a glowing review of an art exhibition by Hagit Molgan at the Kibbutz Be’eri. Since public transportation would be closed on a Saturday in Israel she decided to bike the fifty miles to the gallery.
The Russell House had to say two farewells last Sunday afternoon. When Nancy Albert, the organizing force behind this and countless other Russell House events, introduced the final concert of innovative instrumental trio the New American Wing, she too bid her last goodbye. Two Wesleyan alums are members of the band, and Albert will leave Wesleyan at the end of the semester.
The hypnotic hum of Neba Solo’s balafon reverberated through the World Music Hall, when the renowned Malian musician performed last Sunday evening. The thirty attendees were treated to the singular sound of the instrument, a type of West African xylophone, played by one of the greatest and most innovative balafon players in the world.
The politically charged hip-hop group The Coup ignited Crowell Concert Hall last Thursday night with its electrifying brand of pulsating topicality. Accompanied by fellow socially conscious artists Lifesavas, the Oakland-based group galvanized the 150 students, faculty, and Middletown residents with its rhythmic and rough-hewn musical portraits of political revolt and personal struggle.
In many respects, Capote, Bennett Miller’s thoughtful account of the pivotal six years leading to the release of author Truman Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, is a film about observation. More specifically, it forces us to consider the relationship between artist and subject.
Modern women breathed life into an ancient art form last Wednesday evening, when the World Music Hall hosted the Scroll Painters of Bengal. Imbuing rich Indian tradition with contemporary urgency, they defied audience expectations and offered a gateway into a foreign world through their storytelling and singing.