PHOTO FEATURE
LITERARY
A look at the goods on display at flea markets around New York. PAGES 28-29
Read the winning entries from the 2012 Creative Writing Prizes. PAGES 11-26
PRIZE WINNERS
FLEA MARKETS
THE OBSERVER www.fordhamobserver.com
APRIL 19, 2012 VOLUME XXXI, ISSUE 6
Professor Criticized for Iran Trip By BROOKE CANTWELL Staff Writer
Earlier this year, Fordham assistant professor of sociology and anthropology Heather Gautney traveled to Iran to speak about the Occupy Wall Street movement. On April 4, the Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) chapter of Amnesty International hosted the event #Occupy in Iran. The event centered around Gautney’s account of her recent trip and the criticism she recieved from media outlets upon her return. The event was set up by FCLC’s Amnesty International president Sogand Afkari, FCLC ’12, and secretary Charlie Martin, FCLC ’14, who is currently taking a course in social movements with Professor Gautney. “She mentioned [her trip] and it caught my attention because Amnesty already had an event about Occupy Wall Street. I asked if she could come in so we could have this presentation and learn from the experiences she had as an academic,” Martin said. Gautney said she was nervous to speak in Iran and suspicious of her invitation and the circumstances under which she received it. “It was an alarming time to be going to the country,” Gautney said. She wondered why she had been asked to travel to Iran, and if Tehran University, the university sponsoring her trip, was supporting Occupy Wall Street because they thought it was anti-American. Gautney soon found out two professors from the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, where she received her graduate degree, had also been invited to speak in Tehran, Iran. Together they set up
AYER CHAN/THE OBSERVER
The construction of the new law school will bring new space for the Gabelli School of Business to expand to the Lincoln Center campus. In addition, it will allow for opportunities to reassess the current curriculum at Fordham College at Lincoln Center.
Provost Discusses Business School Expansion By HARRY HUGGINS News Co-Editor
the idea up first of bringing GSB to Lincoln Center?
The recent announcement that the Gabelli School of Business (GSB) would be allocated space in the new law school building currently under construction left many with a lot of questions. The Observer spoke with Fordham University Provost Stephen Freedman to learn more about curricular changes coming to Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) in the next few years.
STEPHEN FREEDMAN: The pos-
THE OBSERVER: Who brought
sibility for a GSB or business school presence on this campus has been in conversation for many years. There have been off and on conversations about a business major or a business program and how it might be constructed at Lincoln Center. In my role as chief academic officer, I am often involved with deans in conversation in changing the curriculum and how one might go about both graduate and undergraduate
see IRAN pg. 3
programs. So I’m often very interested in program and curricular changes, depending on student interest and faculty perspective. OBSERVER: What, at this point, is faculty at FCLC input being used for in the planning process? S.F.: I’ve asked them to look
through the curriculum and how they may be involved with our faculty across schools in looking at the kind of programs that would appeal to a broader range of students. I was with some students over the weekend and they met in
a Mandarin class. Neither of them are from China and they both took Mandarin for different reasons. Neither of them are in the business school, both of them are in FCRH, but they thought the course would really have a tremendous impact in their thought process in terms of their profession. I’m very enthusiastic about that. I really see students sometimes enroll in courses they see as peripheral to their interests, but it changes see PROVOST pg.2
FEATURES
Inside OPINIONS
GIRLS
An inaccurate portrait of NYC living. u PAGE 6
FEATURES
BOWERY POETRY
A cool place for poets to check out. u PAGE 31
SPORTS
BASKETBALL
The Fordham 3-on-3 Tourney. u PAGE 36
Kathryn Berry: Manhattan, Meet Your Queen By IAN MCKENNA Asst. Online Editor
Dancer-turned-pageant star Kathryn Berry, Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) ’11, was recently crowned Miss Manhattan 2012 in March, amidst a crowd of dazzled fans and supportive family. She said it all started with a dance class. “My mom first put me in dance class when I was six. There was a little ‘dolly dinkle’ studio five minutes from my house, and I took to it like a duck to water. I loved it. I wanted to dance as much as I could,” Berry said. “I’ve been dancing my whole life, since I could walk, and for me it was an opportunity to showcase a solo I had been working on or a special piece,” Berry said of participating in pageants. Berry’s love of performance and dance and her desire to share her creativity with
others is what drew her to pageants, but she soon found something more in the competitions. “I really liked the people I met and the things I got to do and the different community service projects that I was exposed to that I would normally or probably not have been exposed to had it not been for pageants,” Berry said. “I definitely think there is a stigma surrounding pageants—that they are a beauty competition,” Berry responded when asked about the mainstream media depiction of pageants. Shows like Toddlers & Tiaras and movies like Miss Congeniality seem to give pageants a bad rap as beauty-centric and body-focused competitions. Berry said it is important for the public to know that “its more about scholarship than beauty.” Berry explained how the Miss America Organization is the largest provider of scholarships to young women nationwide, distributing $45
THE STUDENT VOICE OF FORDHAM COLLEGE AT LINCOLN CENTER
million annually. “I mean, that is amazing when you think about it!” Berry said. Berry thinks that pageants even transcend scholarship in certain ways. “I think educating people to the fact that these girls that participate are involved in the communities and outreach programs,” explained Berry. “We each have to have a platform, which is a cause that you would advocate if chosen for whatever the title is that you are aspiring to be. The things that these girls are doing are amazing and so much more than beauty. It is deeper than that.” Berry’s personal platform is titled “Unmasking the Stigma of HIV/AIDS”, a cause that Berry associated herself early on in her pageant career, at age 15. “I think especially our generation has this idea of AIDS and this idea of being infallible, of ‘Oh, that will never see MISS MANHATTAN pg. 32
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News
April 19, 2012 THE OBSERVER
Calendar THUR., APRIL 19
Ecology Seminar
11:30 a.m - 12:30 p.m. LL 612
MSA: Peace Picnic 12:30 p.m. - 2 p.m. Central Park
CSA & RHA’S Commuter/ Resident Mixer 12:30 p.m. - 2 p.m. Student Lounge
TJ Leyden: Turning Away From Hate 12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. 12th Floor Lounge
Racism at Fordham 1 p.m. - 2 p.m. LL 1013
RISE Documentary Screening: One Piece at a Time 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. Student Lounge
RHA Theater Thursdays Presents: Peter and the Starcatcher 6 p.m. - 10 p.m. Brooks Atkinson Theater, 256 W. 47th St.
The Titanic 3D Movie Outing 6:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. AMC Theaters on 68th and Broadway FRI., APRIL 20
Fashion Law Symposium Meet Up 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. LL 608
Paintball’s April Indoor Event 4 p.m. - 6 p.m. 47-11 Van Damm St., Queens, NY
Amnesty International & RISE Present: Kony 2012: A Town Hall 4 p.m. - 6 p.m. MM 109
SOL’s Latin Café 5:30 p.m. - 7:45 p.m. Student Lounge
SAT., APRIL 21
Relay For Life noon - 10 p.m. Outdoor Plaza
MON., APRIL 23
Commuter Brunch 10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. Student Lounge
Spring Fling Treasure Hunt All Day LL & Outdoor Plaza TUE., APRIL 24
FUEL Graduation Dinner 5 p.m. - 9 p.m. Atrium
RISE Documentary Screening: Oceans 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. Student Lounge Compiled by Richard Ramsundar and Rex Sakamoto
www.fordhamobserver.com
Students Weigh In on the Importance of Graduating On Time By RICHARD RAMSUNDAR Asst. News Co-Editor
According to an article released by U.S. News and World Reports, Fordham did not make the top 10 list of colleges with the highest 4-year graduation rate. Instead, Washington and Lee University topped the list with a 91.7 percent graduation rate while Bucknell University came last with a graduation rate of 89.4 percent. However, Fordham still maintained a high graduation rate of 76 percent. According to Donald Gillespie, associate vice president for institutional research, the federal government provides detailed guidelines for calculating graduation rates so that the rates institutions report are based on the same methodology. The most commonly used statistic, according to Gillespie, is the six-year graduation rate, which is also called the “Student-Rightto-Know” graduation rate. “The most recent class for which we can calculate that sixyear graduation rate is the class of full time freshmen that entered in fall 2005. The rate for that class was 78 percent,” Gillespie said. “As well as that, the average for the classes of full-time freshmen who entered in the fall terms from 2002 through 2005 was 79 percent.” Because of the high graduation rates between this time period, Gillespie expects the rate to generally increase. “Graduation rates at Fordham have f luctuated around a gradually increasing trend line. Generally, I would expect them to continue to do so. However, we do not forecast graduation rates,” Gillespie said. Bernie Stratford, director of Experiential Education at Career Services, discussed the importance of graduating versus getting a career. “It really depends on the job. If a theatre student were to obtain a high paying job on Broadway, it’s enough reason to not graduate.” While Stratford also views a high-paying job as a reason not to graduate, he also supports getting an education. “I do think that the Fordham community offers a great education, some students even stay longer than four years for the it,” Stratford said. Stratford said that there are things that prolong graduation, however he does not see a lack a motivation as a problem. “I would
COURTESY OF CHRISCOBAR/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Fordham’s 76 percent graduation rate may reflect students who prioritize graduating on time.
say there are practical reasons for a student not to graduate like financials reasons, but the commitment they have shouldn’t be differed,” Stratford said. Andy Hsu, Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) ’15, said, “I think it’s important to graduate after four years because you can always get a job, but it’s better to focus on your classes now and get a job later.” Other students at FCLC seem to agree. Yzabelle Onate, FCLC ’15, said, “Graduating after four years is more important than just getting a job with good pay because college allows you to get an insight to what career you want while getting an education. If you get fired from a job and didn’t go to college, it’ll be difficult to get another job so you want to have an education to back it up.” Other students like Nazia Kamruzzaman, FCLC ’13, feel a bit differently about the matter. “I
think it’s more important to have a well-paid job because having a bachelors degree doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to have a steady job,” Kamruzzaman said. “If obtaining a well-paid job means not having to graduate then so be it because if you think about it, we’re all in college because we all hope to get a well-paid job.” According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are a myriad of jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree. For example, air traffic controllers earn an estimated annual income of $108,000 and require an associates degree. Other jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree include transportation and storage management, non-retail sales management, transportation management, dental hygienist, police detective and commercial piloting. With the high-paying earnings from jobs like these, it does make sense thatstudents would be more inclined to question the im-
portance of graduating versus getting a degree. Michael Macalintal, FCLC ’15, said, “I think it depends on what the job is; I mean there’s a difference between getting paid to head an architectural project at 18 and getting a full time job as a delivery boy for the local paper.” Other students also view finance as a reason not to graduate. “Tuition has skyrocketed in their costs in the past decade and for what? It’s bad enough we live in an extremely rocky economy; if higher education is so highly regarded in this country, then why make it so difficult for kids to receive it,” Macalintal said. George Hlynsky, FCLC ’15, said, “It’s accepted to go to college for four years but there are factors like tuition and financial aid. There are things going on with the economy that people have to consider so I can see why people to don’t graduate.”
Provost Discusses New Academic Programs PROVOST FROM PAGE 1
their lives in terms of how they see themselves in the world and their relationships culturally and socially. I think that’s what I’ve asked the faculty at FCLC to do is reflect on those kind of multidisciplinary experiences and how we might together as faculty view curricular change. OBSERVER: Do you think this
new program and new body of students going into core classes here will in any way affect the new core at FCLC? S.F.: My sense is the core should
continuously be reviewed and modified. That may not be a position that faculty would necessarily hold to. As we implement the core, we should look for ways to enhance it. In the sciences, for example, I would like to infuse in the broader curriculum elements of disciplines that are examined in a different kind of way. So if you’re studying sociology, having a biological basis to understand that would be very interesting. I’m only speaking as a person,
“ What we have is an
opportunity to think about the curriculum in the context of the future of the institution.”
— STEPHEN FREEDMAN,
Fordham Provost
but I would like to see curriculum continuously reviewed and reinterpreted. That’s not necessarily what should happen—the faculty needs to make those determinations, but in my leadership, those are the kinds of issues that I like to stress. OBSERVER: Is there a deadline
for the decisions to be made, before the building opens? S.F.: We have to plan as most
universities do. We have to market programs, we have to prepare marketing materials and brochures. For example, I have given
faculty at GSB and faculty at FCLC the next year or so to think about the conversations you and I have had about the curriculum. There is no point in making a decision hastily about academic programs, they do require a good deal of thought and careful reflection in terms of faculty lines, the courses at each level of the four years, the numbers of students involved and the depth and breadth of courses involved. I could spend hours on what would have to be discussed in order to make good decisions. We have a huge opportunity in the new residence hall being built and new space being available. We have no idea really how successful we will be in the market place until we do the market research in more depth and until we see the numbers of applications and the kinds of students that apply to these programs. We also know that the world of higher education is changing pretty significantly, and we need to be adept at reacting to changes. OBSERVER: You bring up ap-
plications. With the two percent decrease in applications to FCLC this year and the 20 percent increase in GSB applications, what sort of improvements do you see this having on the Lincoln Center campus? S.F.: I’m actually very excited
and enthusiastic about the future of Lincoln Center. When I think about this campus and I think about the future, I see huge opportunities for students studying on this campus in 2016, 2017 and 2018, not to say that the experience now isn’t wonderful. What we have is an opportunity to think about the curriculum in the context of the future of the institution, and for FCLC, there are lots of possible curriculum innovation in the arts and sciences that can be put forward. I think of ways we can engage our faculty and engage our students in how we can create a new vibrant community of learners at FCLC to take advantage of the new residence hall, a new community dynamic.
www.fordhamobserver.com
News
THE OBSERVER April 19, 2012
3
Calendar WED., APRIL 25
Spring Fling Presents:Gourmet Popcorn Bar Noon - 3 p.m. Indoor Plaza
“Papers” Screening 3 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. Student Lounge
“MSA Presents: Zamin, the Band” 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. Student Lounge
Evita: CAB Broadway Outing 6:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m. Marquis Theatre THUR., APRIL 26
Open Studio for Performing and Telling Your Life COURTESY OF Q THE SPOTLIGHT!/YOUTUBE.COM
Diana Muniz, FCLC ’12, performs at the “Q the Spotlight” event as part of Rainbow Alliance’s ‘Queer’ awareness campaign.
Rainbow Alliance Brings ‘Queer’ Awareness By BROOKE CANTWELL Staff Writer
Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC)’s Rainbow Alliance, a club for anyone identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) allies, has been striving to educate students and staff at Fordham about a word that is central to their organization, “queer.” As of now, Rainbow Alliance is prohibited from using the word on any fliers that are hung around the school. To promote awareness, on March 28, FCLC’s Rainbow Alliance held an academic panel to discuss the word, which has become the subject of controversy. Also, on April 3, Rainbow Alliance held “Q the Spotlight,” a night of musical performances. Rainbow Alliance’s vice president, Dan Drolet, FCLC ’12, who worked with other members of the club’s executive board, said, “I feel that ‘queer’ is such a powerful word for so many reasons: as a personal identifier, and for its political and academic uses.” Rainbow Alliance decided to hold this academic panel, led by sociology and anthropology teaching fellow Ron Nerio, English Professor Anne Hoffman, women’s studies Associate Professor Fawzia Mustafa, theology Associate Professor Ben Dunning and
“ I feel that ‘queer’ is such a powerful word for so many reasons: as a personal identifier, and for it’s political and academic uses.” –
DAN DROLET,
Vice President of Rainbow Alliance, FCLC ’12
modern language and literatures Professor Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé. Their goal was to, as Drolet said, “connect Rainbow Alliance to those deep academic roots, and build relations between students and faculty.” The faculty panelists shared their opinion on the word and its use, specifically in the classroom. Nerio said, “Sometimes class is the first time people have discussed sexual orientation,” and that sometimes the word receives bad reactions. Dunning said, “The problem isn’t that the term ‘queer’ is offensive, it’s that it’s scary… It makes a lot of people nervous.” Rainbow Alliance has been working to educate others on the term “queer” as a self-identifier. As Rainbow Alliance’s secretary, Thomas Welch, FCLC ’15, said, “Not enough people are educated on the word.” He feels that many people write off the term as not applicable to them: “They think the
push is a just a gay thing, but people don’t realize the word is meant to encompass many different identities.” For many in Rainbow Alliance, educating others on the power of the word “queer” is very important. Jackie Mosteller, FCLC ’14, said, “I think it’s important to have campaigns like these that educate the general public…” She also says it’s important to have this discussion now, even though some people may find it offensive. She said, “Using the argument that it is offensive is invalid, because if we kept waiting until people aren’t scared, nothing would ever get done.” While Rainbow Alliance is pushing to allow use of the word “queer” in FCLC student activities, the club has experienced resistance. The club has tried to speak to Student Affairs about using the word, and Rainbow Alliance members say they will work to, as Mosteller said, lessen “the fear with the word
‘queer.’” Rainbow Alliance has many goals that came out of the academic panel. Drolet said in the future he would like to see a Queer Theory, Gender and Sexuality or Queer Studies course, the continued challenge of “heteronormativity” in the classroom, and to have student affairs become involved with faculty in the discussion of “queer” on campus. As part of the club’s efforts to foster awareness of the word on April 3, Rainbow Alliance held their third “Q the Spotlight,” which consisted of musical performances by Fordham students Lauren Giangrasso, FCLC ’15, Claire Lorenzová, FCRH ’13, and Megan Lang, FCLC ’13. Lorenzová said, “I look forward to coming down to Lincoln Center for Tuesday night Rainbow meetings every week. The club fosters a welcoming, safe and supportive environment to talk about LGBT issues... but really we can talk about whatever is on our minds.” She said she was honored to play at “Q the Spotlight,” and said, “Events like ‘Q the Spotlight’ are crucial to this community bond we have because they’re fantastic opportunities to bring everyone closer together, and of course to showcase how talented our club members are!”
Professor Recounts Experiences in Iran IRAN FROM PAGE 1
ground-rules: They decided not to engage in media interviews, she said, “We didn’t want to be put in the middle of whatever was going on.” Everything Gautney had heard about Iran before her trip was negative. She said that it was, as George Bush famously said, “the axis of evil.” She was told the people were anti-feminist, anti-Semitic, and was told to delete all information on her phone and to leave behind her computer to prevent having her information stolen. She said, “I was told, ‘You really can’t say just anything.’” Along with these concerns, tales of detained journalists created a fear of making it out of the country. However, when Gautney arrived, she saw Iran was much different than she had been told. “We’d never been treated so well in our lives,” she said. “The conference was really interesting because you had people who were really focusing quite heavily on the United States as an imperialist country going back to Christopher
Columbus and really hammering in a powerful rhetorical way that America is a predator,” Gautney said. Others compared Occupy Wall Street to the Islamic Revolution. “Occupy Wall Street was pretty different, it’s trying to stay away from mainstream politics and not couch itself as a political movement,” Gautney said. “We had a discussion about what was really going on and how wide spread Occupy Wall Street really was.” For Gautney, it was difficult to see how America’s opinion on Iran affected the students there, “There’s a lot of propaganda which goes on on both side here,” she said. “All wars rely on propaganda, obviously. It was very troubling to see a young man distraught at being labeled a killer because of his faith.” During her time in Iran, Gautney also visited the house of late Iranian revolutionary leader, Ruhollah Khomeini. “When I was growing up he was the face of evil,” she said. “It was very interesting to go to a place where people loved him. I didn’t know his real history of organizing people and
I found that to be very interesting.” Gautney also had a chance to speak to his daughter, who was involved in bringing his writings into Iran during the revolution. When Gautney returned from Iran, her welcome in America was not as warm. Shortly after returning, Gautney said, “I got a phone call from somebody at Fox News who wanted to know if I had said while in Iran that Occupy Wall Street signifies the downfall of the American government.” Surprised by the question, Gautney looked at a Press TV account of the conference, and saw the quote had somehow ended up in a headline on the website. Gautney spoke to Fox News to clear up the situation and was surprised by the response of the Fox readers. “I got 80 comments and emails saying I was un-American, I should have acid thrown in my face, be stoned to death, that I wore a hijab when I was there and that I should being strangled with my hijab, and calling me weird slang names, things I don’t want to repeat. What they
were saying wasn’t related to the interview, but to the fact that I went to Iran, and that I shouldn’t go there,” Gautney said. “It did confirm some of my worst fears about going,” Gautney said. “There’s a strong element in our culture that can’t see beyond the comment about the axis of evil, and are very against Islam.” Gautney was also mistranslated by a paper in Iran and accused of saying terrible things about the professors at the University of Tehran. She began to feel that she was being used to incite anger on both the American and Iranian sides. “I fell right into the trap that I was trying to avoid,” she said. Gautney, with help from professors at the University of Tehran, worked on fixing her reputation, which was damaged by the media both in America and Iran. She said her overall experience was very positive, and she and her husband would both enjoy going back to Iran. “There’s so much more to see,” she said.
3:30 p.m. - 5 p.m. McMahon 109
MESA Dinner Outing to Afghan Kabab House 5:15 p.m. - 6:15 p.m. LL 406 FRI., APRIL 27
CSA Goes to Central Park Zoo 2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. Central Park
APAC’s Sushi DIY 5 p.m. - 6 p.m. Student Lounge
Jazz at Lincoln CenterLynda Carter 7 p.m. - 8 p.m. Jazz at Lincoln Center MON., APRIL 30
Senior Leadership Awards 5 p.m. - 8 p.m. 12th Floor Lounge
TUES., MAY 1
FACE AIDS: Build-a-Bear Workshop Trip 4 p.m. - 5 p.m. 565 Fifth Avenue
NBC Studio Tour 4:30 p.m. - 7 p.m. 30 Rockefeller Plaza Compiled by Rex Sakamoto
Crime FRI., APR. 13 On Friday, April 13, at 3:55 A.M, a Fordham student had her purse stolen by male with a firearm near 2477 Arthur Avenue.The case is under investigation by the 48th Precinct detectives. Compiled by: Richard Ramsundar
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News
April 19, 2012 THE OBSERVER
www.fordhamobserver.com
CHARLIE PUENTE/THE OBSERVER
Fordham’s Information Technology team in SL 19A is working on upgrading the University website, which hasn’t been updated since 2006.
Website Upgrade to Address Outdated Portal By REX SAKAMOTO Asst. News Co-Editor
Fordham has not upgraded its website software since 2006, but is currently in the process of assessing the website for possible changes, according to James Kempster, senior director of marketing and communications at Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC). “University websites need to be reviewed and upgraded every five years and this one is long overdue,” Kempster said. Last year, when Kempster was hired, the university’s senior administration asked him to start working on a plan for a new website. The initiative is being called “next. fordham” and over the next two
years the university will be working on overhauling its website, making it more applicable to the 21st century. Kempster, said that the changes made in 2006, were “superficial fixes” such as updating the website’s layout. While the face of the website was revamped a few years ago, the understructure (the software that the website uses) is more than 10 years old and is crippled. He said that a replacement of the understructure is necessary in order to keep up with the University’s needs. Paul Sieradzki, student web coordinator and FCLC ’14, said, “My main argument is navigation; the current website is a maze. There are some pages that aren’t linked and
some you can’t find your way back from.” Kempster recognizes that navigation is an issue, and he hopes to make it more intuitive. In addition, improvements including support for video capabilities, integration of newsfeeds, and a solid calendar will be implemented into the new website. While these tasks may seem daunting, Kempster said that he saw these as “happy challenges,” Kempster said, “We want to bring all these features in cleanly and seamlessly. The challenge is to integrate all of them into the website. Fortunately, we have the tools to do it now.” Sieradzki said, “Most of the time
I just Google what I want and tack on ‘Fordham’ at the end and then click on the first link that pops up.” This is a common problem students run into on any large website, according to Kempster. “We have to serve everyone from a prospective student, to faculty, from current students to donors and alumni,” Kempster said. In order to complete this project the university is conducting research about user’s habits as well as talking to a wide variety of users affiliated with Fordham. The university is using mStoner, a website evaluation service, to help gather data about what kind of website Fordham needs. “This is a university-wide proj-
ect and initiative and representatives from around the school are involved,” Kempster said. Once the results come back from the assessment, the university will be able to determine the cost as well as contract an outside organization to help design the website, according to Kempster. Kempster hopes that this new platform will give the university a durable website that will last for years to come. There will be a focus group in late April where students can provide suggestions and ideas in order to further improve the website. If any student would like to be a part of this group, contact James Kempster at jkempster@fordham.edu.
Want to expand your clips and work on your writing skills? Interested in knowing exactly how Fordham works? Need a few extra Comm credits? Register for the Observer’s Journalism Workshop course. COMM 2211, CRN 10616
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THE OBSERVER April 19, 2012
News
5
Fordham Student Charged with Mother’s Murder “ I think [Wachtel]
genuinely had a lapse in his consciousness. He could not have ever done that and still be the same smiling enthusiastic man.” DENNIS GOLIN, FCLC ’13, acquaintance of Henry Wachtel
By LAURA CHANG AND HARRY HUGGINS News Co-Editors
Henry Wachtel, a freshman at Fordham School of Professional and Continuing Studies (FPCS), was charged April 10 with the murder of his mother Karyn Kay in their Midtown apartment, according to the New York Daily News. Wachtel’s father, Edward Wachtel, is an associate professor of communication and media studies at Fordham College at Rose Hill (FCRH). Kay had called 911 earlier Tuesday before her death to tell police Wachtel was having a seizure and beating her, police sources told the Daily News. In the New York Daily News article updated on April 12, Wachtel said that he was completely unconscious and did not remember hitting his mother during the event. “I didn’t kill her, I lost her. We loved each other,” Wachtel said. Kay was found unconscious with severe trauma in her apartment on W. 55th Street and Columbus Avenue when cops arrived before 9:30 a.m and pronounced her dead at 1:52 p.m. She was a teacher at La Guardia High School, located at 65th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Wachtel, age 19, has suffered from seizures and health problems in the past, the Daily News said. Wachtel’s lawyer Lloyd Epstein is claiming Wachtel’s epilepsy medication caused the fatal outburst.
AYER CHAN/THE OBSERVER
Police found Fordham student Henry Wachtel’s mother unconscious at their apartment at 300 W. 55th St. She was later pronounced dead.
Wachtel took several classes at the Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) campus during the daytime. Dennis Golin, FCLC ’13, who knew Wachtel for a year said that Wachtel seemed pretty normal. “He was really warm, really friendly,” Golin said. “He would usually light up with a genuine smile when he saw me.” Golin said, “I think he genuinely had a lapse in his consciousness. He could not have ever done that and still be the same smiling
enthusiastic man.” Samantha Rekas, FCLC ’15, said that she took an Eloquentia Perfecta (EP) class with Wachtel. She said, “The teacher was absolutely in love with him. My teacher would always speak so highly of him and thought he was great contributor to the class.” Rekas said that Wachtel always had a lot to say. “His comments were always valuable. At the same time, he had a laid-back attitude.” Sevin H. Yaraman, Ph.D., professor of art history and music at
FCLC, taught Wachtel and said that she knew him “rather well.” “I did not see a sign of aggression whatsoever,” Yaraman said. “He was always very smiley and respectful. All I can say is he was trying so hard to be on time to the class, participate in discussions and meet with the deadlines,” she said. Fordham President Rev. Joseph M. McShane, S.J., addressed the incident with a university-wide email sent April 11. “It is my sad duty to inform you that a member
of the student body, and the son of a Fordham faculty member, was charged last night with killing his mother, an instructor at another institution,” McShane said. “This is, of course, an unimaginable tragedy for the family, and for the University community. I ask that you afford the affected individuals as much privacy and compassion as you possibly can while they struggle with this heartbreaking burden. I know that you join with me in keeping the family in your prayers during these dark hours.”
President’s Letter, Reactions Follow Ram Article By LAURA CHANG AND HARRY HUGGINS News Co-Editors
Jewish students and Fordham President Rev. Joseph M. McShane, S.J., have reacted strongly to an April Fools’ article published in The Ram, Fordham College at Rose Hill (FCRH)’s student newspaper. Others, including The Ram’s editors, have said they believe this to be overreaction. Although McShane asked for a printed apology on the front page of the following issue, The Ram’s editors instead decided to publish the apology and a letter from McShane on page eight of their April 12 issue. Connie Kim, editor-in-chief of The Ram and FCRH ’14, said that it was the editorial board’s decision to not publish the letter on the front page. “It is our policy to put all the letters that come in into the opinions sections,” Kim said. “Page 8 is where the masthead is located.” The controversial article, titled “Jesuits Gone Jewish, Fordham Abandons Catholicism” was written under the pseudonym of Herschel Q. Goldberg, “Staff Investment Banker.” On April 12, The Ram published an apology to all those the article offended, as well as three letters to the editor defending the paper’s decision to run the article. On April 2, McShane sent a university-wide email condemning the article and expressing his
disappointment in The Ram’s decision to publish an article that he said “is directly insulting to Jews, and offensive to every member of the University community.” “I want to apologize to each and every one of you, and most especially our Jewish sisters and brothers, for this egregious lapse of civility,” McShane said in the email. “In the best of times, such an article would rightly be condemned as ill-advised, hateful and offensive. In the highly-charged atmosphere created by the bias incidents of the past month, however, it must be seen and condemned as both wildly insensitive and willfully inf lammatory.” The article itself played off the concept of the Catholic Fordham switching roles with the Jewish Yeshiva University and included fake interviews with students. One graduating senior complained that he missed a chance to get a minority scholarship as a Catholic. It also joked that a protest had to be canceled because of scheduling conf lict with Shabbat and Passover. The Huffington Post featured the article in an April 12 slideshow titled “College Student Newspapers Publish ‘Jokes’ That Are Offensive” along with articles from other student newspapers. Jewish Student Organization (JSO) Vice President Emilie AmarZifkin, Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) ’13, welcomed McShane’s response and said she, too, was shocked by the article, es-
pecially the fake byline playing off the stereotype of banking as a Jewish profession. “It’s so tired, so inappropriate,” Amar-Zifkin said. “I am surprised [that they used that stereotype], because that was once extremely dangerous.” Amar-Zifkin said she was shocked that they would use a stereotype once prominently seen in Nazi propaganda posters depicting the untrustworthy Jewish banker as the fault for Germany’s economic problems. “It represents a culture of extreme ignorance and extreme insensitivity,” Amar-Zifkin said. “I don’t want to be the reactionary Jew or anything, but I am worried because this is more than just an isolated incident. It’s multiple people on the staff of a newspaper being okay with publishing this. And it just wasn’t funny.” Rebecca Etzine, FCLC ’12, said that she felt the article was not an attack on just the Jewish minority, but on all the minorities at Fordham. “After the rash of racist and homophobic incidents, I do not think Father McShane reacted appropriately. A demand for an apology in a strongly worded email was not enough,” she said. “This article is an escalation from anonymous hate on stairwells and doors. Someone sat down and thought about this article and passed it on to an editor who in turn approved it.” There are no absolute first amendment rights at private col-
leges, however administrators at universities have not been the practice of exercising censorship or controlling information campus newspapers. The Ram responded to McShane’s letter and complaints like those from Amar-Zifkin with an Editor’s Note on page eight. “It was never The Ram’s intention to offend, and we sincerely apologize if anyone, particularly any Jewish members of our community, found this article in any way offensive,” the note said. “The article was simply meant to satirize existing Jewish stereotypes and poke fun at universities with strong identities.” The note went on to defend The Ram against McShane’s remarks. “Mistakes do not equal hatred, and we think it was incorrect to describe The Ram as a purposeful purveyor of bias,” the note said. Also included in the April 12 issue were multiple letters to the editor, including one from Chaim Dienstag, Fordham Law School (FLS) ’12, an Orthodox Jew who said that he “did not find this article offensive at all.” In addition was a letter from the editors of The Cardozo Jurist, the independent, studentrun newspaper of Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law. The letter described the article as “HILARIOUS!” A letter from former editors of The Ram defended the current editors from McShane’s letter. “While the name Goldberg is a stereotypi-
cal name and Jews are oft stereotyped as bankers and lawyers, neither of these ‘offenses’ is a slur of any kind and by no means the worst,” the letter said. “A public reaction of this sort seems patently ridiculous and uncalled for, similar to a mean school teacher reprimanding a single student over the building’s P.A. system.” Beth Knobel, the faculty advisor for The Ram, said that she disagreed with The Ram’s decision to print some letters to the editor addressing the April Fools’ issue without including a name. “This is not in keeping with journalistic norms, because without names, readers lack information that they need to assess the credibility of such letters,” she said. In addition, Knobel said that she disagreed with the ways the editors of The Ram chose to respond to the complaints about the April Fools’ issues. “My own feeling is that when Father McShane emailed the whole university about the April Fools’ Issue, the matter moved from being an editorial issue into being news, and it should have been addressed in the news section. The editors disagreed, as is their prerogative,” she said. Knobel said, “However, I am convinced that The Ram staff had no intention of offending anyone with the April Fools’ issue, and I found their letter of apology to the community to be sincere and heartfelt.”
Opinions
April 19, 2012 THE OBSERVER
STAFF EDITORIAL
‘QUEER’ SHOULD BE ACCEPTED, NOT FEARED
“Q
ueer.” It’s short. Crisp. Easy to say. But it lingers in the mind, conjuring up ideas of the unusual or perplexing in its most traditional definition. We’ve all grown up with the term, and for many, the word queer has had a negative connotation, suggesting that the subject it describes is some sort of outcast. But Rainbow Alliance is fighting against that negative connotation, arguing that “queer” can be used as an accurate, even positive way for those in the LGBT community to identify themselves in an academic setting. Rainbow has turned “queer” from being an expression into a campaign, advocating for the use of the word through tabling and events—one being “Q the Spotlight,” (featuring musical performances by LGBT Lincoln Center students) most recently held on April 3 and an academic panel held on March 28 to discuss the controversy of the word. Despite Rainbow’s support from students and faculty, as well as the impressive turnout at their events, not all are comfortable with using the word
“ Student Affairs should allow
student clubs to use the word queer in their advertising. Not doing so is denying students the right to publicly embrace the word as a valid, affirming identity.”
“queer.” Some are hesitant to say it. They believe the term is outright offensive and solely applies to gays in the LGBT community, as opposed to gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered. Student Affairs has even prohibited using it in club advertising, according to Brooke Cantwell’s article “Rainbow Alliance Brings “Queer” Awarenewss” on pg. 3, preventing Rainbow from using the word “queer” on fliers around campus. The fact that Student Affairs won’t allow the word queer to be used in Rainbow Alliance fliers is especially concerning. If members of the LGBT community are in support of the word, why is printing and publicizing the word forbidden for campus
clubs? Fordham encourages openness, diversity and freedom of expression. We’ve seen them reach out to listen to our problems and address concerns, especially in light of the recent bias incidences. Therefore, in keeping with those efforts to embrace the diversity in Fordham’s community, Student Affairs should allow student clubs to use the word “queer” in their advertising. Not doing so is denying students the right to publicly embrace the word as a valid, affirming identity. Those who identify as queer should not be marginalized or made to feel like the sexual groups they represent are ostracized because of the limitations faced by the Rainbow Alliance. We commend those at Fordham who are openly and objectively addressing what is for some an uncomfortable topic and we believe the negativity that often circles the word “queer” should continue to be addressed openly. We hope that Fordham will embrace the word, allow it to be used in Rainbow Alliance fliers and realize that it is one that should be met with openness and understanding, not fear.
HBO’s “Girls” Supposedly Accurate, but Mostly Disconcerting COLLEEN THORNHILL Opinions Editor
On April 15, HBO premiered the new show “Girls.” The series claims to accurately portray life as a 20-something female in New York City. It focuses on Hannah, a writer who is the self-proclaimed voice of her generation, but Carrie Bradshaw she isn’t. An emotional eater reliant on her parents and insecure when it comes to men, Hannah doesn’t know the first thing about adulthood. If she is supposed to be the voice of my generation, I’m a little concerned. Maybe Hannah is supposed to be the anti-hero, but to me she’s simply annoying. She’s selfcentered and self-loathing, and when her parents tell her they’re finally cutting her off, she gets high on opium and demands $1,100 a month for the next two years rather than take command of the situation. When her parents vent their frustration, Hannah replied, “I am busy trying to become who I am.” Maybe Hannah should exert her efforts on trying to become an adult, because she seems to be failing miserably. In the New York Magazine piece “It’s Different for Girls,” author Emily Nussbaum claims “Girls” is “a show about life lived as a rough draft.” If that’s the case, then Hannah’s life could use some heavy editing. It could also use a new title. “Girls” is presented as the typical life of a New York City girl, but it’s more like “White Girl Problems 101.” Hannah’s biggest concern is her weight, her best friend is dating a wonderful guy she can no longer stand and her other friend is a glamorous world traveler. They’re all white, privileged and a little too pretty, except Hannah, who repeatedly reminds us of how awful she looks. If I can give this show any
JOJO WHILDEN/HBO
The main character of “Girls,” Hannah (Lena Dunham, center), is hardly a role model and is more annoying than fun to watch. If this is the average New York City 20-something female, the future of this town is in unsteady, self-absorbed hands.
credit, it’s at least in its ability to dash the idea that living in New York City is a cake walk. This town is more like a multi-faceted obstacle course, a la “Legends of the Hidden Temple,” where we may or may not get grabbed by a local and lose our way before we manage to get out alive. Shows like “Girls” are trying to portray this struggle, which is admittedly refreshing since shows like “Sex and the City” and “Gossip Girl” often present New York as a glossy, glamorous place. However, anyone who lives here knows that’s not the case. The subway is hardly a joy to ride, getting a taxi driver to smile is like trying to break the Queen’s
Royal Guard and going to the grocery store is the equivalent of “Supermarket Sweep.” The entertainment world is finally catching on to this reality, and I give props to “Girls” for at least trying to give us a show about females who don’t live it up the “Sex and the City” way and whose closets are more likely to be filled with Forever 21 bargain wear than vintage Armani ensembles. I know post-grad life will be a challenge, and “Girls” doesn’t deny that. After four years of college, I’m more aware of how to write 20-page research papers than write cover letters or file tax returns. I’ve had a couple of great internships that have prepared me for a “real
job” and then a couple where all I did was manage twitter accounts. At one of my internships, I was surrounded by graduated seniors who hoped to get a job at the company eventually. Of course, by the end of the summer, all of them were still jobless and while they added to their resumes, they hadn’t added to their bank accounts. “Girls” succeeds in representing that sad reality. Hannah faces a similar problem in her work life. She has had the same internship for a year without pay, and when she asks for a salary, her boss laments that he’ll have to let her go, even though he’d wanted her to start controlling their Twitter account. Apparently, Hannah’s
degree in English will only get her so far. With my degree in history and communications, I imagine I’ll be facing a somewhat similar fate, but I hope to handle it with more grace than Hannah. Like Hannah, I’m probably what many would consider a privileged white girl, but I don’t plan on drowning my sorrows in opium as Hannah does anytime soon. Most girls I know are hard-working and eager to prove themselves to their parents, but this show suggests otherwise. Maybe “Girls” will grow over time and so will Hannah, and I hope it does, because right now, I’m a little concerned about the message it’s conveying about my generation.
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THE OBSERVER April 19, 2012
Opinions
7
The Lost Art of Empathy: New Book Reveals Us to Be Accepting Yet Insensitive Generation PIYALI SYAM Staff Writer
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It’s been a little over one and a half years since Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi committed suicide after his roommate, Dharun Ravi, filmed his personal life. The incident shocked the nation. People wondered, what could have been going on in Ravi’s head? Did his Twitter posts and webcam taping have something to do with the fact that Clementi was gay? No. Despite his actions, Ravi professed that he was not homophobic. And gay or not, did he have no conception of how his roommate would feel at this intrusion of his privacy? A recent article titled “Generation Me” by Jean M. Twenge published in “The Chronicle of Higher Education” asks what’s behind three disturbing, yet contradictory trends in teenagers according to various psychological studies. Twenge even wrote a book on the subject, and apparently, our age group has increasingly less empathy and is less likely to take responsibility for our own actions, yet we are also more tolerant toward minority groups and more likely to believe in equality more than ever. How is it possible for us to be both tolerant and unempathetic? Is it even possible to have these ideals while crucially lacking what seems to be the essential character component behind them? Ravi, while ‘tolerant’ of Clementi’s orientation, still failed to consider something as basic as his roommate’s feelings as a consequence of his own actions. A trend of low empathy is increasingly evident in our culture. The popularity of reality TV demonstrates that we find enjoyment in voyeuristically watching intimate details of other people’s trainwreck lives in all their lurid glory. There’s a reason “The Hunger Games” is so popular: its picture of a dystopian world where prime entertainment consists of children battling each other to the death is incredibly timely. Few people would dare openly attack someone for a reason like being a different orientation or race. Even the recent bias incidents on both cam-
COURTESY OF JEAN M. TWENGE
The novel “Generation Me” highlights the problem that young adults are becoming increasingly oblivious to the effects of their behavior.
puses were committed in more discreet, surreptitious ways. We live in a time where these labels are socially unacceptable. But the motivations underlying them are not. As a result, we find new and increasingly creative ways to find differences between people now: the way they behave, the way they act, the things they like, the people they hang out with, etc. We are a generation of contradictions. I’ve seen people committed to making the world a better place, to fighting for social justice, human rights, all the lofty ideals which, as liberal, educated young adults, we
take pride in having. Yet in their private lives, these same people make cruel comments and make fun of their peers without blinking an eye. And it’s not as clear-cut that only ‘bad’ people are unkind to others. ‘Normal people,’ like you and me, engage in this type of behavior all the time. In fact, it’s become part of our daily lives. We hear a racist or homophobic joke, say “that’s awful” but still laugh at it. We don’t hesitate to use derogatory terms like “bitch” not just to people we dislike, but even people we don’t know and often even to our
friends as terms of “endearment.” It’s common to say something mean about someone but preface or follow it with “I feel bad.” If we feel bad, then why do we do it? We’re clearly aware of what we’re doing. Our generation has some strange sort of paradoxical selfawareness that allows us to be aware of our own moral failings but still not do anything to change them. We excuse and justify ourselves, saying some people deserve it, or make ourselves feel better because we’re not as mean by comparison to others. Maybe we’re too self-involved, encouraged by our worlds of Facebook, Twitter and social image, to notice or care. Maybe we’re just exposed to so much information and stress on a daily basis that we’ve become desensitized. Perhaps we feel we just don’t have enough time, or truly believe that the things we do and say don’t have much of an impact. It’s possible that all these things mean nothing or that I’m just being too sensitive. But I think there’s something deeper and more troubling about the flippancy with which we handle other people. We’ve found a way to distance ourselves from each other’s pain. There’s a difference between real empathy, the genuine ability and effort to understand and feel yourself what someone else is feeling, and simply believing in tolerance and equality in name and at face value. Bullying, name-calling, and general unkindness aren’t necessarily new things. But their scope, avenues, and degrees of intensity are definitely facilitated with the Internet, Facebook and other forms of technology. While we may not intend to be malicious, it’s not that large a step from smaller, everyday moments of unkindness to what Ravi did. Ravi probably had his own justifications for his behavior toward Clementi, and yes, Clementi’s choice was ultimately his own, but we must realize that there is still a line between what is and isn’t acceptable. Some things do have potential to create serious lasting damage, and that thinking twice about our actions and their possible consequences is worth it in the long run.
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Opinions
April 19, 2012 THE OBSERVER
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How I Learned to Stop Judging and Embrace the Flannel It’s Not So Wrong for “Hipsters” to Help the Environment, Buy Organic Food and Support Local Businesses NICK MILANES Staff Writer
Alright, guys, there are “hipster” memes based on everything from Disney characters to Hitler. Hipsterism has peaked. It’s hit the mainstream. So I’ve officially decided that hipster jokes aren’t funny anymore. Yes, what I’m saying is that joking about people who supposedly don’t like popular things on principle has become too popular, therefore, it is no longer funny or cool. Is that hipster enough for you? The application of the word “hipster” has become so ubiquitous and vague that just about anything has become acceptable criteria for the epithet. “I’m seeing a band in Williamsburg this weekend.” “Hipster!” “I bought this shirt at American Apparel because I learned about sweatshop labor today and it was the only store I could find that doesn’t use it.” “Hipster!” “I’m going to this local coffee place instead of Starbucks because the president said it’s important to support local business.” “Hipster!” No matter how far removed from “cool” or “hipsterism” the motivations may be, the action itself makes you a hipster. A caricature. A non-individual bereft of personal opinions. I find these arbitrary standards troublesome. We’ve now reached the point where almost no one is willing to see eye to eye with the human behind those RayBans. It’s true that some hipsters can be exclusive snobs who do what they do to be trendy. But shouldn’t people buy organic, or support fair trade, local businesses and independent artists? Is there something wrong with caring about the environment? Is it snobby to buy products from distributors who make sure that their workers don’t perish in
poverty? Is it uncool to support smalltime musicians who don’t have multi-billion dollar media corporations ensuring their charttopping success? Throughout the past century, with every social movement or trend there came a push and pull. Some people define themselves by the trend, some merely dabble in it and some dismiss it altogether. Consider the past decades: In the ’50s, we had the beatniks. They could be exclusive and pretentious; but, they gave us Ginsberg, Kerouac, Kesey—cornerstones of modern literature. In the ’60s there were hippies, who, yes, could often be unwashed and lazy. But weren’t the issues they were protesting—racial segregation, gender inequality, the Vietnam War—issues worth fighting against, whether or not you wear hemp and stick flowers in your hair? In the three following decades, there were punks, including Generation X-ers. Elitist to a fault. But punk was a backlash over very real issues: a failing job market; an increasingly conformist and indifferent attitude towards politics, gender norms and rampant consumerism. (Any of that sound familiar?) In the early 00’s, we had emo, which...uh....well, I’ll get back to you on that one. So we come to hipsterism. Let’s look at it objectively. The negatives: some snobby art school kids with a sense of entitlement thicker than the rims of their glasses, some fashion trends that will more than likely lead to an epidemic of male infertility somewhere down the line (read: skinny jeans) and a slew of tired memes. The positives: The organic industry has grown exponentially over the past decade, which is a good thing if you give a crap about the environment, which you should. More people care about fair trade, and in my opinion there is no downside to increased ac-
tion against exploitative working conditions. Independent artists—musicians, filmmakers, and so on— have a greater share of the market than ever before; less money for the labels, more for the artist who actually does most of the work. On a local scale, independent businesses are the lifeblood of the downtown area; look at every single quirky restaurant and specialty store in the Lower East side. What our economy needs most right now is for small, independent business ventures to be successful. I see nothing negative in the fact that people are trying to support honest folks who are trying to make their own living. Not everyone who upholds “hipster” standards is doing it for the sake of trendiness. When did labels become acceptable again? It’s idiotic that people our age are still stuck in this high school mentality of abstaining from anything that might get them branded a hipster. College is a time to exchange ideas with people who differ from you, not a time to dismiss them because their fashion sense incites a preconceived notion of disingenuousness. People who take a true interest in indie music or organics don’t like the word “hipster” any more than homosexuals enjoy hearing the word “faggot”—or any more than a football fan likes to be called a “bro.” All are dehumanizing words that reduce complex people to a rigid set of diminutive stereotypes. Next time you see that NYU kid looking at organic tomatoes in Union Square, why not ask him about his reasoning instead of sneering at him? Or maybe talk to that cute girl in the cardigan, peering into an art-deco book at the Strand? Why not try on a flannel shirt? They’re comfy as hell. (Can’t say the same for skinny jeans, though.)
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN JASINSKI/ THE OBSERVER
People are deemed “hipsters” if they like anything out of the ordinary. If that’s the case, then soon everyone will be considered a hipster.
Ram Apologizes About April Fools’ Article But University’s Jewish Students Still Go Unheard Article Creates Stir Between Father McShane and the Ram While Subject of Piece Remains Quiet SARA AZOULAY Photo Editor & Asst. Opinions Editor
For the April Fools’ issue of the Rose Hill newspaper the Ram, the editors decided to run a story called “Jesuits Gone Jewish,” which jokingly claimed that Fordham would forgo its Jesuit roots and become a Jewish institution. There were a few jokes thrown in at Jewish people’s expense, and in response, Rev. Joseph M. McShane, S.J. wrote an email to the whole school admonishing the editors. I, among others, was alarmed by his response, which was quite vehement in its disgust. In its next issue, the Ram printed two letters to the editors and an editor’s note. One letter was one from McShane himself, expressing his disappointment in the piece, while another was from the editors of “The Cardozo Jurist,” the newspaper at Yeshiva University, who stated that they found the article to be hilarious. The Ram also printed another letter, from former Ram editors, expressing how they felt that Mc-
“ There’s something missing from this discussion...there should be someone who steps forward and expresses how the Fordham Jewish community feels since the Ram failed to do so. ” Shane had overreacted. They also accused him of making biases that were as bad as the Ram’s mistake in the April Fool’s issue. Finally, in the editor’s note, the Ram apologized for their mistake but thought that Father McShane’s method of communicating with the paper wasn’t proper. Since I read Father McShane’s email before reading the April Fool’s article myself, I expected it to be filled with complete and total hatred towards Judaism and the Jewish community. To quote McShane, I had expected the article to be a “particularly crude article that trafficked in the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes and that seemed to have been written for the sole purpose of offending the
Jewish members of our community.” There’s something missing from this discussion, though. So far we have responses to the April Fools’ article from Yeshiva students, the Ram editors and McShane. I have yet to hear the voices of the people that McShane thought were hurt the most. We haven’t heard from the Jewish community at Fordham, so I’m writing this article as a Jewish student that attends this university. My opinions clearly don’t ref lect every Jewish student in the university, but I’d like to think that I have some voice in the situation. After all, there should be someone who steps forward and expresses how the Fordham
Jewish community feels since the Ram failed to do so. The most insulting bit of information I could find was the byline given to the author. His last name was a common Jewish name and he was described as a banker. In Nazi propaganda posters, the Jews were depicted as fat bankers who were villains ultimately trying to damage and change the “German” lifestyle. There is a history of hatred behind that stereotype, a history I don’t think the Ram editors wanted to highlight, but a history that hurts nonetheless. The actual article and the idea behind the article were meant to be satirical and funny. I ultimately agree with the Ram when they said that McShane didn’t communicate his frustration with the article correctly. He could have noted that the byline was something specifically offensive. His email was instead very general, as if he didn’t truly understand what Jews would be offended about in the article. Also, treading on freedom of speech is not a good way to push good morals across. I don’t think that everyone is attacking Jews, but I do think that the Ram editors and those who
responded to McShane’s email should have been a bit more sensitive in dealing with the article. As a Jew, I have experienced certain biased judgments against me. We are, in fact, a minority and people aren’t completely educated on our religion. In lieu of the recent biased incidents that have happened on both campuses, McShane believed that behavior isn’t tolerated, even if the Ram was just poking fun, and I don’t blame him. The real problem I see in this is how the Ram ultimately decided to respond to his email and the article. They apologized but failed to print an article that let the Jewish students at Fordham voice their opinions. They could have pushed for a news article asking Jewish students (and nonJewish students) whether or not they found the piece insulting. Instead, they printed two letters to the editors that made McShane look bad. The whole situation was ultimately a shouting game between McShane and the Ram, with the Jewish community in the middle of it. So, are the Jews really offended? I don’t know. Ask them—the Ram certainly didn’t.
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THE OBSERVER April 19, 2012
Opinions
9
Why Graduating with a Liberal Arts Degree Is Worthwhile BIANCA JEAN-PIERRE Staff Writer
College offers a world of possibilities. You can live in a new city, make lifelong friends and most importantly, map out the essential steps to establishing your future career. Whether you want to be a journalist, an accountant or a musician, Fordham has a multitude of majors for you to choose from with great professors that will get you on the right path to turning your dreams into a reality. As promising and optimistic as this sounds, quite similar to the brochures being mailed to you relentlessly during senior year of high school, once you receive that coveted degree, the job market will not be very welcoming. In fact, it’s pretty merciless when your degree is in the liberal arts. Despite the incentive of more career possibilities as a college graduate compared to a high school graduate, those with college degrees are still being sucked into menial jobs like retail and food service. Many question whether pursuing higher education is worth the time, money and effort. According to an article in the New York Times by Catherine Rampell titled “Many with New College Degrees Find the Job Market Humbling,” only a depressing half of the jobs acquired by new college graduates even require a degree. In fact you probably know alumni from other universities in addition to Fordham who majored in communications, English or psychology and are now stacking boxes at Duane Reade or folding T-shirts at the Gap. Degrees in the liberal arts are as worthy as you make them. You have to work beyond the classroom and set career goals before graduation. As-
SCHMID/MCT
Graduating from a liberal arts university means that you’ll use your brain well after graduation.
sessing your talents, networking and working hard at your craft can guarantee you a spot in your most desired field. No one wants to be the former French major and current Starbucks barista preparing a frappuccino for the former communications major turned columnist for Time magazine who made all of the right moves and built the essential personal connections. I have a friend who worked relentlessly through internships at GQ and Fader magazine for consecutive sum-
mers while attending SUNY Albany as a communications major. His hard work paid off once he was offered a job at GQ a little less than a year after graduating. A fellow Fordham student also experienced success with her liberal arts degree before even receiving it. An English major, she was offered a job at Macmillan Publishers after interning at Penguin, Simon & Schuster and a literary agency. Of course there are not enough jobs for everyone, but with the right attitude and enough determination a liberal
arts degree can be more of a solid guarantee of employment than most people assume. In all honesty, the available jobs in liberal arts can be few and far between. This is why it is important to not only assess your talent and skills to make sure they are adequate but also networking. Networking is a must when pursuing such low demand but rewarding careers. My dream job is to become an editor of a fashion magazine and I never would have realized the specific skills and
demands of such an industry if I didn’t land my internship at a Condé Nast publication this semester. Building the right connections and immersing myself in that specific career environment can turn my potential post-graduation job at my local movie theater to a position at the company of my dreams, including the fancy office with the even fancier name plaque. Realistically, it will probably be a cubicle, but a girl can dream. We are all warned about the dangers of pursuing a liberal arts degree and suggested, by parents and caring friends, to focus on a career where jobs are in demand like those in the health field. But where’s the fun in that? Unfortunately, the burgeoning artist, writer, musician, architect within many of us cannot be silenced. As the economy is stifled by mass unemployment and a rising cost of living, with rent in New York City being the most appalling, a secure and comfortable job seems like the right way to go. How can you decide to be a nurse or a paramedic because it is a “safe” choice when you know your passion lies in editing a magazine or designing public works projects for urban areas? By no means am I belittling the health field or making it seem like a shortcut. I am only warning against falling for the potentially easy way out financially which can lead to much disappointment and frustration in the long run when the unhappiness you face at work becomes a heavy downpour on your life. If that philosophy degree does turn out to be a dead end after all, you can always use that sharp, wellrounded liberal arts wit and cura personalis to strike up stimulating conversation with guests while waiting tables at Le Bernardin.
Think Summer, Think Fordham Summer Session 2012 Session I: 29 May–28 June Session II: 3 July–7 August • The Comic Voice (ENGL 3086) • Environmental Ethics (PHIL 3109) • Modern France: 1900-Present (HIST 3503) • Sustainable NY (VART 2085) • Or choose from 200 courses available this summer at Fordham University
Learn more at
fordham.edu/summer or call (888) 411-GRAD
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Arts & Culture
April 19, 2012 THE OBSERVER
Fordham Mainstage Tackles Immigration in the U.S. By MALCOLM MORANO Contributing Writer
While Fordham’s recent mainstage play, “Swoony Planet” has a heightened poeticism in its tone, its story is rooted firmly in the ground. The play tells a thoughtprovoking story of immigrants in search of their place in America, couched in soaring language which is beautifully delivered by its talented cast. I had my problems here and there, but I walked out of what is the last production of the season for the Mainstage, feeling impressed, intrigued and at peace. “Swoony Planet” was written by Han Ong, an American immigrant writer from the Philippines. Ong is a lauded playwright and novelist, and one of the youngest recipients of the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant. His background as a gay immigrant is well explored in his work, “Swoony Planet,” where the feeling of being an outsider is central to tying the story’s many threads together. I found the language interesting, lying in the gray area between realism and poetry. Occasionally, the characters will break from their scenes and engage in poetic soliloquies. Even in the scenes, however, this heightened language occasionally makes an entrance, blurring the lines between the realistic and the heightened worlds. Overall it makes for a wonderfully written play, if not the slightest bit ostentatious. The cast does a good job at making the language work. Micha Green, Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) ’13, has a theatrical exuberance that is difficult to top. Her presence fills whatever scene she is in, which makes her possibly the best at delivering the heightened language. However, this theatricality ends up being her biggest weakness. She tends not to listen to her scene partners, making her less believable. It’s as if she is waiting for each line to be delivered. Her monologues are fantas-
JACKSON GALAN/THE OBSERVER
Fordham’s mainstage play, “Swoony Planet” addresses current issues like immigration and homosexuality.
tic, but she isn’t receptive enough to make her scenes feel as alive as she is. Precious Sipin’s, FCLC ’12, performance has the exact opposite virtues. She responds to her cast mates and she keeps her focus on other people, but I found myself occasionally losing interest in her struggles. She tends to use the same tactics too much, making the pursuit of her objective less interesting. Daniel Velasco, FCLC ’14, strikes a nice balance between
the two. His pensive performance leads to many touching moments, but has less of a journey than the other characters’ do. He was reserved, which was usually perfect for his role, but sometimes made him seem detached from his character’s deep internal conflict. His scene with William Yuekun Wu, FCLC ’12, was the highlight of the show, where his character finally meets his long lost father. Wu has a fantastic balance of humorous character acting and introspective
emotional struggle. His character could have easily fallen into a comedic trap, but he brilliantly keeps his performance believable and relatable. In fact, this is something the supporting cast pulls off very well. Harry Dreyfuss, FCLC ’14, plays two extremely entertaining roles, and his gravitas is perfect for both. But he never veers into the absurd, and he keeps his characters well rooted into the ground by committing fully to his scenes. Taylor
Armstrong Purdee, FCLC ’14, also has a strong theatrical presence, but counters it with his full commitment and concern for his scene partners. And Paul Thode, FCLC ’15, gives a generous performance. He listens and reacts well, delivering his lines with surprising sensitivity and ease. The play was directed well by guest director Mia Katigbak, the artistic producing director and co-founder of the National Asian American Theatre Company. The staging is fantastic, with a great use of the space. Certain moments, like the father and son dressing in sync or the magician’s center-stage act, add a great deal to the style of the play. The transitions between scenes are smooth, but need to be sped up. A long transition can kill a play’s momentum. Katigbak lacks cohesion in how she directs her actors. It seems that she brought out the best in each of them, without being concerned with how they contribute to the play as a whole. It ended up feeling disjunctive, with some performances being very subtle (such as Velasco and Sipin), and others being very large (such as Green and Dreyfuss). The play could have benefitted from a more overarching direction of the actors. However, the set, lighting and sound were all beautifully done. The row of bars in the back of the set, followed by a mostly empty stage, gives a good representation of the characters’ struggle to find a place in their country. The lighting is stark and dramatic without drawing too much attention away from the actors. And the sound is fitting, ranging from the eerie noises of something like a Bartok string quartet to calming folk music. “Swoony Planet” strikes a resonant chord in the viewer. It has a unique style which, while occasionally being upset, manages to contribute positively to the play’s fantastic script.
Brooklyn Zinefest Welcomes All Things Weird
By JACKSON GALAN Staff Writer
The weirdos must be heard. The New Yorker wouldn’t publish them. Rolling Stone wouldn’t publish them. I certainly wouldn’t publish them. And so they publish themselves, and bare it all for all the world at the Brooklyn Zinefest. For those unfamiliar, a “zine” is, according the Urban Dictionary entry, “a cheaply-made, cheaplypriced publication, often in black and white, which is mass-produced via photocopier and bound with staples.” Yet the zine’s strippeddown production method is simply a by-product of its essential nature, namely, that it is weird. In fact, some of the more popular zines have graduated from the photocopy format and, with support from fans, collaborators and advertisers, produce glossy magazines, publish books and run slick websites. One such example is FOUND, an operation that posts found items (letters, homework, ticket stubs, doodles, etc.) on their website, publishes them in a yearly zine and occa-
sionally produces a book. FOUND’s success is partly due to the fact that its content can be placed in an established artistic tradition; the Dadaists took “ready-made” artifacts (like a urinal) and artistically recontextualized them. FOUND’s context of anonymity makes us look at love letters and parking tickets as a story rather than our story, and in doing so we react differently, and because we think of these objects as real, we value them differently as well. Most of the publications at the Brooklyn Zinefest—and this is true of zines in general—are artistically oriented. With no editor but the self, self-publication is the playground of poetry, short fiction, photography and drawing. This can result in uninhibited, experimental, fascinating work. It can also result in the kind of work that no one else would publish: bad work. The boatload of available crap, however, cannot be a criticism of the zine format. One subscribes to the New Yorker because one trusts its editors to provide a certain kind
of content. One subscribes to the National Enquirer for the same reason. The only difference between a crappy zine and a crappy magazine is that fewer people read the former. Included among the 60 plus zines at the Brooklyn Zinefest were such titles as “Discomfort” (“abrasive counter-culture materials… memoirs, poetry, harsh imagery, vegan recipes ...”), “I Love Bad Movies” (“essays and illustrations about great-bad films”), and “Deafula” (“a humorous, straightforward and informative resource for hearing folks on how to be a better ally for deaf people.”) Many magazines would publish an article on these kinds of subjects, but it is the zine’s perpetual commitment to the weird that makes it a special and invaluable resource. Perhaps one can find a humorous essay about interaction with deaf people in Harper’s Bazaar. Perhaps one can look up a vegan recipe online. But zines offer a sustained passion for esoterica, and one cannot find that anywhere else.
COURTESY OF BROOKLYN ZINEFEST
The Brooklyn Zinefest plays host to the more unconventional underground magazines.
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12
ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS PRIZES
Lover, Heal Thyself By CRISTINA J. BAPTISTA Prize Co-Winner
I. I am putting away the dinner plate for one, reaching into the too-high cabinet from the 1920s (this building is older than my grandmother, but she’s dead—both grandmothers are—so the comparison may make little or no difference, but there it is), and leaning while on tip-toes, over the chipped tiled countertop, straining; and my back is aching as if it had been mistaken for an archer’s bow and someone had tried to use it. And my toe-bones are cracking and somewhere someone is throwing fire-crackers to celebrate a Super-Bowl victory, and suddenly, while standing there like a ballerina balancing plates, the kind of plates you cannot eat on but are called “plates” just the same, with a dog spinning in a circle as her sideshow act, although I have no dog, I come to think: why does “revolver” have “love” hidden in there, backwards, cowering—poor weak child!—and crawling, tail-tucked, away, hoping to be unseen, to avoid the shooting? Or maybe it is a knowing of greatness, the swollen heart, swollen with testimony in a foreign language, where it is “doctor” in one city, and “physician” in another; where the phantoms of long-ago people are still ruminating in their eye-sockets and loose-limbed bones the meaning of such words as “Physician, heal thyself.” The Band-Aids are too out of reach. I’m too old for mecuricome. What a ridiculous word, like a child’s self-revelation, a selfrevolution of independence: “me cure I,” I cure myself. Come. That last part is rather lovely, though. When we are injured, all we ever want is for someone to come. II. Or is it “rev, lover”? Rev, like an engine, a motorbike, a wild-hog, orange flames licking the backseat (that sounds dirty) and partially obscured by the spindle flank of your acidwash jeans, broken at the knee. Not torn—yes, broken— where the kneecap sticks out like a bald newborn all scuffed and unready. Rev me, rev out loud, rev until the neighbors are complaining and the cops are on their way and the cops are in pursuit, and now, it’s the state troopers in their champagne-colored cars with the awkward Brush Script words that no one can read, so maybe it’s not a real car and they’re not real state troopers and this pursuit, this chase is not real. Rev until you’re drowned out by the sirens and my own screams to let me down, let me off, let me sink into the rust-colored night, dried-clay red as mecuricome tucked beneath old bandages. You peel it up and find out that it’s darkened in time. It’s darkened, in the dark. Let me go, into the unreal. III. I get less action than Oscar Wilde’s tomb, which is a shabby way of looking at things, but an honest one nonetheless. There must be something wrong with me, seriously wrong, more wrong than that time I asked my mother “what are you reading?” and she stuffed the papers—loose, tissue-like, black-and-red inked like beaten limbs tripping all over themselves, hands fluttering, blocking “don’t read me!”—into the file cabinet, and then somehow lost the key. Seventeen years later, and she’s still lost the key. It’s the only logical explanation as to why I’m juggling a plate for one with as much poise as a Degas model whose humanity has long since been touched, fondled, tainted, painted away into some musty backdrop of men in bowler hats that are called something else in French and of snootily clawing cigar smoke that draws the breaths of young girls so desperate to feel fed. My father used to take the tip of the small wand, the brush connected to the bottle lid, and daintily stroke a smiley-face in that acrid mecuricome over the cut, the scrape, the sliver, the slice; over the bang, blow. The “boo-boo.” A menina, he’d say in Portuguese, to his little girl,” staring at her fixedly, as if he could make her, as she was, permanent. “Poor child,” he’d coo. He’d wipe the knee, elbow, finger, toe, ankle, etc. clean, give it a kiss as if nothing disgusted him— a man who grew up in a house without water, electricity, and toothpaste— and draw that silly thing, as if one picture’s worth a thousand ways how not to feel the sting.
ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS PRIZES
13
The Sweetest Fig SARA AZOULAYTHE OBSERVER
By CRISTINA J. BAPTISTA Prize Co-Winner
“‘The worst of sins is not to fall in love,’ said God, with the soft voice of a tango-singer.” José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons In Portugal, they call this season a figment of the imagination. It treads subtly, the dance of a hair falling down your back where only I can see and watch it make its way to your left thigh before the breeze comes. Then, it turns into a bird’s nest or a garden patch somewhere; that thick shrubbery of Eden, unreserved. I imagine it stretched, like telegraph wire or the clotheslines of some rustic Moitas vineyard in the country, where hares with skinny ears trample the patches of wild poppies and scatter their droppings, without knowing how much good they do. Casting filaments. Or—across the sea— the Milton backstreet long ago, worn and wiry, a preservation of communication and labor. It could never break; or, if it did, would be re-fused or refastened by a clever person (a woman) refusing the waste. I’ll never know for sure. I have already accepted this. I really never leave— only parts of me get anywhere. The other parts must be content to wander through eyes that prefer that what-isn’t-there to the what’s-there. But I won’t say it like it’s a bad thing or a good thing; it is a thing that I can live with. In late spring, we eat it from our garden turnip kale carrot beet— the sweetest fig— and marvel at just how miraculous is a body that moves, if even just a little bit.
One From the Diner By JOHN HAROLD Prize Co-Winner
The diner is only open when it rains. You need holes in your jacket and at least a three day beard to be seated at the counter. You sit down next to a man with glitter in his hat and no laces on his shoes and he tells you he owns the place. The air conditioner is blasting way too high, so you leave your coat on but take off your gloves and your flea market hat. Over clanking silverware and low rumbling conversation you hear the jukebox playing something by the Ramones. “Danny says we gotta go, gotta go to Idaho but we can’t go surfing cause it’s twenty below… The waiter comes by and you ask for a menu, so he turns around and lifts up his shirt and he’s got it all tattooed across his back. The specials are written on with a magic marker and he’s just a kid. You ask for a cup of coffee but all they have left if decaf, so you get a glass of water. There’s a lipstick stain on the glass that was probably left there by a young girl pretending to be an orphan yesterday and the Ramones song plays again. …sound checks at 5:02, record stores and interviews oh, but I can’t wait to be with you tomorrow… You order the hamburger and it’s dry. Your tongue accidently touches the orphan’s lipstick on the glass but you’d never have to meet her parents, at least. The man with no laces stands up on his stool and yells out that there’s a price to pay for dreaming, god dammit! He walks out without paying and the Ramones song plays again. …hangin’ out in L.A .and there’s nowhere to go, it ain’t Christmas if there ain’t no snow listening to Sheena on the radio, oh-ho oh-ho… So you finish your meal and it’s finally stopped raining. They’re closing so you don’t linger. You pay at the counter and step out onto the street, into the steam. And you forgot your hat. For a second you think about the orphan and you wonder if you should join the circus and you finger one of the holes in your jacket. …oho-ho-ho, we got nowhere to go and it may sound funny, but it’s true…” And you’re whistling all the way home.
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ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS PRIZES
SARA AZOULAY/THE OBSERVER
American Nightmare By JOHN HAROLD Prize Co-Winner
I got highway dreams Stuck in Catholic traffic Streams of sun scream To a merciful dusk Warm ribbons of iron Tie a beautiful knot Which road do we take? I’m asking the dust Muscle and bone And leather and steel In the name of the father Lies the grave of the son Run, little Mary Away from this place I got only four wheels To prove myself on The sky’s three shades of black And three shades of blue I won’t send you flowers Or a blood diamond ring I’m a bone-thug cobra I was born in the rain Had an American Dream I woke up, trembling
ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS PRIZES
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Coexist: A Holy Sonnet By SARA JANSSON Prize Runner-Up
I only considered myself blessed By you, unchaste. I stopped believing in God the day you fucked a born-again Christian. (Haven’t they deemed that the ultimate sin?) For every looping fish that says “Jesus” on the bumper of a car, All I see are You two tangled in the backseat, Her crying out for God, now I am incomplete How could you invest so much in your religious rites To turn around and do what you condemn? If she asks, she’ll be absolved, this she believes. How anyone could sleep peacefully at night —So long as God will forgive them— Is beyond me.
Love By SARA JANSSON Prize Runner-Up
In order to fall in love, you must tear yourself open And let everything fall to the ground, And allow another to sift through it. And you sigh and say, “This. This is me.” They will either delight in being elbow-deep in your life— Your problems, your fears, All of the baggage you carry now unzipped and free for the taking —Or, they will run.
SALMA ELMEHDAWI/THE OBSERVER
MARGARET LAMB/WRITING TO THE RIGHT-HAND MARGIN PRIZES (NONFICTION)
Sour Like Lime By CHRISTY POTTROFF Prize Co-Winner
Late one night, dressed in an oversized T-shirt and cotton underwear, I tiptoed down the stairs of my parents’ Kansas farmhouse. My sixteen-year-old legs had not yet decided on flesh, muscle, and bone, but they deftly moved me across the cool wood floors into the kitchen. I found myself facing the white refrigerator door, straining my ears for the sounds of my family. My tongue, cooked by years of lime juice, was ready to recite a quick excuse if my parents barked, “who’s up?!” I heard my breath, my heart, the light whirr of the refrigerator. Satisfied that I was passing unknown in the night, I opened the door and searched inside. I reached between tubs of casserole, ears of corn, and jugs of liquid to pull out the last lime. I made it back to my room undetected. Alone, under the covers of my bed, I brought the fruit to my face. Some of its cold had escaped into my body between the kitchen and my bed. Lying on my back, I rolled the lime over my lips, feeling the pressure of the porous skin against my teeth. To begin, I dug my fingernails into the rind--if I had trimmed them too much, I knew this part would hurt. Bound tighter than an orange, the rind could be sharp to touch, to taste, to smell. The skin could hold too tightly to its flesh. Ideally, I would take away the dark green rind in one zig-zagging piece. This time, however, the unwrappings unfolded for a few inches until the inevitable break. I set the pieces of rind on my chest, took in the deceptively sweet aroma, and rolled the whitegreen sphere between my hands, savoring the anticipation. I gently separated one section from the others. This one: I would pinch between forefingers and thumbs, moving from the outside to the middle, tracing the shape of a plump lip. When all the pulp had broken, I bit in. First sucking the juice, then chewing the pulp and veins. I was accustomed to the sour of lime and took pleasure in its familiar strength. I separated another section. This one: I bit in the middle, crushing each half between my tongue and my mouth’s roof. The juice moved between my teeth, under my tongue. The next section: I plopped it on the back of my tongue like an oyster, letting it slide down my throat, imagining the union of citric and stomach acids. Piece by piece, I consumed the wedges. Chewing, sucking, not bound by propriety. I worked my way around the sections, seeking a center. One by one, they became part of my body. Finally, I was left alone with the rind, sticky fingers, and the smell of sour. I slept with lime shells on my chest. I wanted the fruit to melt into me. To cling tightly around my flesh. The aroma led to dreams of tropical things. My heart hurt for a space of warmth and sour, but when I woke, I was still surrounded by broken green shells in a cold flat room. I ran my tongue across my teeth while I groggily dressed. After preparing myself for another day of school, I tenderly collected the pieces of rind scattered across my pillow. I rubbed each of the whites into my hands. Across the palms. Over the fingertips. I could feel my taste buds tighten and the saliva collect under my tongue. Thinking that others do not have these secret acts of consumption, I moved to my bedroom window and cast the peel over the roof, into the prairie wind. On the refrigerator door, my mother kept the list of groceries for the week. Bread. Milk. Steak. Ketchup. Each item jotted hastily, without care, to be consumed in the same fashion. Chewing without taste, eating without love. I stood facing the shopping list with a dulled pencil from my school bag. Slowly, gently, I added in very faint writing: Limes. With a quick turn, I left the kitchen. Left the house. During my walk to school and throughout the day, I would find moments to bring my hands up to my face and inhale the scent of sour like lime.
SARA AZOULAY/THE OBSERVER
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MARGARET LAMB/WRITING TO THE RIGHT-HAND MARGIN PRIZES (NONFICTION)
The Coat By LAURA SMITH TERRY Prize Runner-Up
1. You won’t let me take my puffy winter coat to the thrift store. What once was white is now dingy and speckled, with the gray condensing to form a black ring around the cuffs of the sleeves. A soiled line runs over both shoulders, darker on the right side. If only I had a car. People with cars probably don’t have the telltale worn and discolored shoulders and hips of coats from days weeks months of carrying and lugging. Only a transplant buys a white coat in this city of ubiquitous dirt. Like a flashing marquee -I’M NEW HERE. Feel free to splash me with that puddle as I stand too close to the curb. And I did get splashed, and I did get hit by that bike messenger who rode through a red light because I assumed he would stop, and I did get handed back change for a ten when I gave the guy a twenty as he drove away because why would I count it. The still newly white coat announced my arrival- Welcome to New York, dipshit! The coat wrapped snuggly around me through each transaction. Each deflowering that darkened my green. Each ruler-rapped lesson leaving my knuckles raw and stinging. 2. Six winters later a friend tells me it’s time to say goodbye. You look homeless, she tells me. Really, it’s gross. And buy a black one this time. From the crevice next to the refrigerator, I pull out a vibrant purple shopping bag from a store I can’t afford. When students at the school bring in their school supplies, their spiral notebooks never arrive in their original plastic drugstore bags, but have been oh-so-casually placed into a bag from one of the finest of the high-end department stores in the city. I fold the coat in two, and I scrunch and I press, but it slowly fills with air, oozing up out of the top, defying its fate and bloating the paper bag. I tie the handles tightly together to keep it inside and set it next to the front door. And there inside the store’s bag, my dingy, worn, no longer white coat sits defiantly, arms wrapped around bent knees, chin tucked to chest as it awaits its fate. 3. October wanes. The brown corduroy jacket is no longer effective against the dropping mercury and rising winds. I hang it back in the closet until next fall and pull my brand new friend from its sack. Black, warm, fur-lined hood this time, tapered at the waist to give the hint of a woman’s shape under the quilting. The white coat peeks out over the top of the shopping bag that still sits in the same spot by the door. I avert my eyes as I slip on the new one. This one will hide the dirt. It will not show its age. It will tell people I am gainfully employed, and it will allow me to sit on public benches without the fear of a stained backside. 4. We squat below the windows in my living room and peer out over the top of the radiator. Through the falling flakes we see him again- the naked man is cooking at his stove in his apartment across the alley. We discuss the many risks of such an activity. Food contamination, splattering grease, the precarious proximity of genitals to flame! We ponder possible motivation and laugh as we settle back into the couch to watch TV. 5. More items have been added to the bag. They don’t fit inside, so instead they get piled on top of on top of on top of the white coat. It can’t see anything and it can’t breath very well. A trip to the thrift store is imperative. The coat must be put out of its misery. 6. Comings and goings, comings and goings. My great-grandmother, Bema, would say this from her wheelchair in the nursing home as she watched the world scurry by from her stationary perch. I’m often reminded of her musings as I walk in this city. Coming and going from buildings, in and out of cabs, up and down stairways, to and from offices, homes, bars, delis. Comings and goings and usually in coats for at least seven months out of the year. Anonymous forms in hoods. Coats with legs. An exoskeleton we shed once we get to where we’re going, but then we’re never where we’re going, so we enclose ourselves in our ever-present winter companions again and step back out into the cold. 7. I should really take that bag today. It’s gathering dust, I say. You ask me what’s in it and I rattle off some items. When I get to the coat, you furrow your brow. Which coat? I snip the handles and pull it out from the bag to show you. You frown. But what if you need it? you ask. You know I have a new one, the black one. When would I need a dirty old white one? You think. Well, what if we go sledding? You wouldn’t want to get the new coat dirty, so then you could wear your old one instead, you say. I laugh. Sledding? We have never gone sledding, and in the rare case we do, the new coat will survive. But you’ve had it for so long, you say. I know, but it’s filthy! You could dye it, you say. Dye it? I don’t think that would work. And it’s just so big and takes up too much space in the closet. You think again. You touch the soiled sleeve and rub the cuff between your fingers. But. Well. When we met you were wearing this coat, you say. I sigh and smile as I put it back in the bag and drop it by the door. We can take it next weekend.
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MARGARET LAMB/WRITING TO THE RIGHT-HAND MARGIN PRIZES (NONFICTION)
ALEKSANDRA GEORGE
Home By GINA CILIBERTO Prize Co-Winner
My home is small and rectangular. It comprises a kitchen, living room, dining room, three bedrooms, and two bathrooms above a basement and a garage, all wrapped in beige siding and maroon shutters, and a roof that keeps out the water. There is a green yard, and, in the middle of our side yard, there is a large rock on which I used to play when I was little. There is no white picket fence. Anyone is welcome here. I have led boyfriends, school friends, honor-society members, learning communities, Emmaus retreat parties, and one Peruvian family to this house without apprehension. When I left for college, my dad approached me the first time that I returned home and asked, “Do you like coming home? Do you feel comfortable coming home?” Home is quaint. Home is filled with Italian smells and often someone yelling. When I wake up at home in the middle of the night, I’m never scared shitless as I am when I wake up almost anyplace else. And, no matter how awake I am, I always know where the bathroom is. In that way, home is convenient. But living away for four years changes things. When a stomachache emerged one week during my senior year of college, it didn’t matter that I wasn’t home. I did what any sensible adult would do, I dealt with it, eating accordingly and scurrying off to my personal bathroom, the location of which I am well aware. When lower-abdominal cramps began to worry me, I went downstairs onto the comfortable-enough couch of my friend Sam, so that I didn’t have to lay in bed alone. Sam will hug me and listen to me and, if he’s feeling particularly fond of me, give me chips. That’s the thing about home: you can find hugging arms and a stable bathroom other places, too. In some ways, home is transportable. When I woke up the next morning to even more nausea and more pronounced abdominal cramps, I needed more than Sam. I went and found Caitie, an EMT in the building, who listened as I recited my symptoms and offered me a Snackwell cookie. “You can either go to Barnabus or wait it out,” she offered. I was terrified of St. Barnabus Hospital, having heard only horror stories, and I wasn’t especially keen on the idea of going alone. But isn’t that the essence of adulthood, going to the hospital on your own? Unsure of where to turn, I called my mother. “Come home,” she implored me over the phone. “You might have appendicitis.” In the Danbury Hospital Emergency Room, after my vitals were taken and a cursory exam was performed, I sat behind a curtain of green with flecks of gold and rectangles of gray-brown. The design looked as if an artist once had a vision that was marred by exhaustion and a few too many glasses of straight scotch, and the destroyed afterthought was then transferred onto a sheet. My makeshift gown was decorated with a snowflake pattern print even though October had just started. As I’d imagined, the emergency room was bland and chilly and beeping, and it exhausted me. My IV dripped. Nurses rushed around. It was a pretty standard emergency-room experience. “How’s the pain now?” “I’m not in pain,” I tried to tell the nurse, her tight eyebrows wincing back at me. It’s not pain in my side, it’s discomfort, and it was making me nauseous --swaying, swaying—so that I wanted to eat but couldn’t and instead ended up doubled over, heaving, only coughing up clear strings of mucus. As she stared back at me, I realized that there was no credibility on my end, because I didn’t have life-threatening symptoms. “But I’m really nauseous,” I told her again. “I know it’s not a stomach bug and I haven’t been able to eat since Tuesday.” They gave me two super-sized, Tang-flavored drinks, while they injected antinausea medication into my IV. They laid me down, put on breast shields, and slid me through a CT scan machine, the robot voice from the gastrointestinal machine telling me when to hold my breath and when to exhale. “Breathe now.” The smiley face above my head lit up green. “Hold your breath.” A different smiley illuminated in orange. “How’s the pain now?” Danbury Hospital is enormous: it is contained by four walls, but it prides itself on having “more than a million square feet of healthcare” and 371 overnight beds. It delivers 2,500 babies every year, which is just a few hundred heads shy of the population of Danbury High school. I was tucked away into a corner of the emergency room for two hours, the green curtain substituting for two walls. My mother was sitting across from me, the abstract colors behind her like the backdrop from a bad portrait studio, and she was probably thinking about cleaning the house. She had picked me up from the train, driven me here, held my clothes. I felt bad that she was here. I was sorry for having ruined her plans for the day, but I was also grateful that I didn’t have to go through the hospital’s admission process alone. As I was considering suggesting that she leave, even just to get a meal or a coffee, she perked her head up and looked at me. “You could do this on your own,” she said. “You’re twenty-one now; you don’t need me to go to the hospital with you.” Tears came to her eyes as my hospital gown slid further down my shoulder. I could have done this alone, but I didn’t. I wanted to come home. I am home, again. After last night at the E.R., I woke up this morning to the smell of eggplant frying and sauce simmering, the precursor to a house filled with Bronx Italian-English and laughter. As I lay in bed with my warm, neon linens enveloping me, my mind drifts to the sheet that hung in front of me in the emergency room. Maybe the artist who sketched the senseless pattern knew his work was doomed, only to hang limply and then be stared at by eyes that don’t really see anything, 371 people in 371 beds, all with their trains of thought lingering above them. Maybe the artist stared at his canvas and thought, this doesn’t matter, and flung wads of paint of green and gold onto a sheet of speckled oblivion. Maybe he felt the moments of his career collide into a vat of senselessness as he pushed the brush against the canvas in small strokes, redeeming his dignity with rectangles of gold. In the realm of the emergency room, with half-dead and mangled bodies whizzing past me, I realized that I was not that important. I was the least urgent of the many bodies in the space where there is always blood to take, x-rays to read, body parts to re-assemble. Each day, the doctors with straight faces tell patients what is —or isn’t—wrong with them. The green-and-gold-flecked curtain hangs motionless even now, sheltering new bodies each hour, as the world spins on around it. When I wake up at home, though, I matter. My mother asks how I feel and insists that I eat something to settle my stomach, otherwise I’ll never get better. She orders me to stay home for the night so that I can go to another doctor on Monday, as I reach for ceramic dishes, arranging them on the dark-wood table in septuplicate. I am welcome here, as is the family that will come later, and it feels as if everyone is concerned about one another’s well-being, concern of the genuine sort, rather than the billable-by-the-hour kind. This, I think to myself, is why I wanted to come home. This is what home is. A place steeped in tradition and sameness: the same tickle-me-pink paint covering my bedroom walls since my dad took me to Home Depot, I was still an only child then, and told me to pick a hue to for my big-girl room. The motto of “keep doing what we’ve always done” that fails our country’s government ceaselessly is granted great success within these walls, where we can’t imagine life any other way. Home is not a place for revolution or lofty ideals. Home is not pulsing with boundless energy, as is the college campus that houses me temporarily. Home is not a friend’s couch or any cold bed, blockaded by a green, abstract sheet. But home, regardless of where it is located geographically, is filled with the same pink walls and concern and food and routine that still works, just as it always has. And when dusk returns, we will return tonight to our own beds, each tucked away in our respective three rooms (not 371 like Danbury Hospital, or 344 like my dorm) each sheltered by four plaster walls, with no hanging curtains of green and gold.
MARGARET LAMB/WRITING TO THE RIGHT-HAND MARGIN PRIZES (FICTION)
By LAURA CHILDS Prize Runner-Up
A flashlight sends a beam of yellow through the blanket strung across the backs of two tall chairs, casting a spider web across the otherwise dark ceiling. The hand-made blanket with loops of thread and soft yarn is pitched like a tent above the two children, with long sides pooling onto the floor at their sides. The fort is narrow, but to Aaron and Annis, it extends into a boundless world removed from the party downstairs, away from the relatives and stories they tell that mean nothing to the young pair. They have covered the small stretch of wooden floorboards beneath them with pillows and sit cross-legged, face to face upon them. The flashlight is held between Aaron’s ankles, pressed together in front of him, but his hands hold the plastic grip as if prepared to grab it and go at any moment. It is the only light in the room, but it brightens their small, secret space enough for Annis to see her cards and prepare her tricks. Aaron’s eyes leave her pale hands to look from left to right; he’s too aware that outside of their hiding place sits a still, dark room. Their shadows can be seen hunched over and whispering from the other side of the fort, but Aaron realizes that, from within, he may as well be trying to stare through a solid wall. He feels safer focusing on her movements and her face, framed like a portrait by straight black hair that hangs just below her boney shoulders. Her eyes follow the cards that she shuffles in and out and spreads across the floor in one swift motion, more agile than anyone of their young age that Aaron has ever witnessed. The smooth playing cards follow her fingertips as if attached to them by unseen strings. As if she knows that Aaron is taken by this skill, a crocodile smile spreads across Annis’ face and she laughs quietly in her throat. “What?” He asks, suddenly self-conscious. “Nothing. It’s just fun, you know.” She doesn’t raise her eyes to him as she speaks. “What exactly are you doing?” Annis gives no answer. She simply gathers the cards into a deck, fans them out, and commands, “Pick a card. Any card.” “Pick a card,” he begins with a furrowed brow, “that’s it? Everyone does that.” “Really? So you’ve done it before?” “Well, no, but you see it on TV all the time.” “That’s television, this is real. Just take a card,” she says with a flash of her small, pointed teeth. He pulls a card out and shields it from her view; it is the seven of clubs, a boring card with no king or queen staring back at him. The flashlight shines through the back of the card, causing the red design on the opposite side to bleed through to the white face. “Okay, now remember that, and put it back in the deck. Oh, sorry, I forgot you were an expert, Houdini.” “I never said that,” he replies while sliding the seven of clubs into a new position in her crimson fan. Annis sticks her tongue out at him from between puckered pink lips. He feels a slight squirm in his stomach from looking at the mushy shape created by her mouth. He takes the twisting inside as nervousness, and his brown eyes shift around the space again he assures himself that they are alone. She puts on a neutral face and shuffles the cards expertly, but after a few seconds, her eyes close and her hands freeze around the deck. Her elbows rest upon her knees, peeking out from beneath a violet dress, and she leans her body forward in concentration. Aaron thinks she’s putting on a show, but can’t help but wonder what thoughts might be floating in her mind. He doesn’t understand how a family member can possibly be so foreign to him. Aaron opens his mouth to speak, but before he can conjure his voice, Annis opens her hands. The deck is split in half, revealing the seven of clubs clutched within her fingers. He’s surprised to see the right card, but he’s hardly impressed. It must be rigged, he thinks – but only for a moment. With her eyes still shut Annis declares, “This is your card: the seven of clubs.” Aaron’s doubts are quickly silenced as he looks from his cousin’s smirking face to the upturned card in her right hand. He stops his arm from reaching out and snatching the deck from her, expecting to find every card decorated with seven black clubs, all part of a little scheme to fool him. But in the shadowy fort with mere inches separating them, he can’t help but feel that something so strange is possible; and if it is, he doesn’t want it to end by chasing her away with bold anger. “How did you do that? How did you know if your eyes were closed? It’s a trick deck, isn’t it?” He tries to keep his voice steady, scared of how Annis would think of him if she knew that his nerves were electrifying his body. She drops the cards on the floor between them, allowing many of them to scatter face up. Aaron sees enough to know that the deck is not fixed. “That’s just kid stuff,” she says with a shrug. “Then what’s serious?” “I could show you something I’ve been working on. But I haven’t really tried it yet.” “Show me. Please.” Annis leans forward again and wraps her hands around the standing flashlight. Aaron quickly pulls his own hands away from it but keeps it pressed between his feet. She closes her eyes tightly, seeming to have more trouble with this than she did with the cards. Slowly, her hands slide up and over the bulb, making the fort dark but illuminating her hands as if they were glowing from the bone. When she lifts her hands, the flashlight is no longer warm and bright. The bulb is dark though the switch is still pressed down, but Annis’ hands remain lit as she cups them in the air between their bodies. The light did not go out -- it came out. She holds the gleaming orb close to her chest, looking down at it with wide eyes; she is almost as impressed with herself as Aaron is. They look at each other with two pairs of dark eyes now circled with rings of gold. He holds his hands out, his palms facing the light, and feels the heat emanating from the sphere. “Tell me how you did it,” he whispers. “It’s magic. I can’t reveal my secrets,” she teases. “You can’t just say that it’s magic and leave it at that.” “Sure I can. Lots of people do.” She gestures for him to take the orb in his own hands. They handle it like fragile glass, and for all they know, it could break or disappear at any moment. He transfers it with care to his hands, but once she pulls away, the fort is consumed by darkness. Aaron’s hands grasp empty air and his cousin’s face is painted black.
ALEKSANDRA GEORGE
Some Have It
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20
MARGARET LAMB/WRITING TO THE RIGHT-HAND MARGIN PRIZES (FICTION)
Almost By WILLIAM BRENNAN Prize Co-Winner
The car lurched onward, a ruby beetle seeking refuge from an impending seasonal shift, and the exhaust which trailed it seemed a desperate smoke signal. Guiding the bug on its doomed path was Anthony, and to his right, his seven-year-old daughter, wailing as she cradled a now-four-fingered hand. Despite having made, by a recognized grace, only one trip to the emergency room in the past seven years, Anthony realized blurrily that he was driving there as if the course were rote: Surmount the San Franciscan hill that was Abrams Ave, crest the top, cross the train tracks at the bottom, and pass under the glare of one traffic light (hopefully green) at the four-way intersection on the other side to pull up to the front doors of the E.R. It was a simple path he now cursed because he’d yet to make it up the hill, as his car sputtered and flitted, pushing forward only in short bursts. All that mattered was getting this hunk of shit down the other side of the hill and through the intersection so that his daughter’s severed digit—a good two-thirds of a pinky finger contained by an iced Ziploc bag in the cupholder—could be reattached. He was trying to focus solely on ending her pain, but he couldn’t keep back the thought that, in a sense, they had been lucky: he’d have cut off her thumb if she’d placed her hand on the other side of the cutting board, as he cried over the onions and the gut-pounding severance of losing his father. Dad, be with her now, he thought as the car approached the hilltop with trepidation. He didn’t know if he believed in the import behind his invocation, but then the car crested the hill, instantly stalled—and began rolling down the other side. Now just the tracks and the intersection lay ahead. He said nothing to soothe her because he did not want her to hear his voice quiver or to give an impression of his weakness. If she observed this on her own in later years, so be it; but he would not be the one to let her know. The towel wrapping her hand looked wine-soaked from the blood; he’d used tape to keep it tightly in place because he didn’t believe in her tiny right hand’s ability to maintain pressure. What a sickening story to tell, he thought. “Well, I was crying—over the onions I was cutting!—and I didn’t see her come up through the tears . . .” He could imagine the questions that long lost aunts and uncles would ask him at the funeral. His father’s funeral, not Kelly’s. There would be no funeral for Kelly—there would NEVER be a funeral for Kelly—because now his car was swiftly descending the hill (it seemed twice as steep going down as it had on the way up) and he was giving no thought to the brake because there were no cars ahead on the road or stopped at the intersection. Hell, if traffic was clear, he’d blow the light. From deep within him, a bellowing laugh rose—it began with a rattle in his diaphragm, slithered up his esophagus, struck the vocal chords, and, before he could retain it, lunged from him and coiled itself around his daughter’s screams. How strange was it that he was laughing? The thought of his dad’s sneezing had come from nowhere to his mind, and this seemed to be what had brought on the fit. He envisioned the man as he remembered him most clearly: standing in the bleachers of his son’s high school baseball game, wearing the team’s viridian in support and saying, Come on, Ant, hang in there, you got this, as Anthony rounded third base for home. His dad’s sneezing and coughing on those nights after games, exacerbated by the dust from the diamond and by his own weak lungs, never failed to scare the hell out of someone in a nearby room, and Anthony’s mother had made it a tradition to yell in response, “Here comes the—” Train. At the bottom of the hill, a red-and-white striped arm was falling across the road, coming down to keep cars—to keep him and his daughter—out of its path, but he realized through a sickening self-view that if he hit the brakes they would stop either just in time or in the underbelly of the locomotive. On both sides of the arm signals flared and died over and over, like a warning light being shone through amber, and a bell with a steady beat clanged. Clenching the steering wheel, he moved his foot from over the brake and pressed the gas to its end with such force that his shaking ankle nearly failed him. His daughter screamed, “Dad! Stop! Train!” and he broke his silence to tell her to hold on, seeing from the corner of his eye her misinterpretation of the command, as her right hand gripped the bloody towel tighter, so that the knuckles went pure as the fist reddened. Here comes the train . . . It ran three measly cars long, and he realized that they would clear its front end and make it safe across if the car would keep its same speed. It bellowed at him—he thought distantly of how little it sounded like his father—and then they cracked the striped arm in two, careened over the tracks, and were kissed by the blunt power of the train’s passage through the black plume behind. He found himself trembling, pulling breath in deep drags, crying—but he feared his daughter would turn to see his blood-rushed and contorted face, his pitiful display of masculinity, and be sliced by him again. Yet she was crying, too—he heard her sobbing, Daddy . . . Daddy . . .—and he thought maybe, if she cried a little harder and he a little less, she’d see nothing through the tears but a blood red towel and he a green light.
AYER CHAN/THE OBSERVER
MARGARET LAMB/WRITING TO THE RIGHT-HAND MARGIN PRIZES (FICTION)
Halsey Street, An Excerpt From A Novel By NAIMA COSTER Prize Co-Winner
Mirella could not rest. It was too quiet in the residence, too far from the road. She heard only the humming of the generator downstairs, the crickets tuning up their legs. Her lover breathed hard beside her, his hands on the back of his head as he slept, facedown. He slept this way every night, and every night Mirella thought he looked ridiculous. Was he under arrest? Was he blocking out the sound of nothing? Of their seclusion here in the residence, where there was no one but other expats, Mirella, and the watching-man at the gate? They had been to the beach that day, running through the surf as if they were half their age. They drank limoncello then stretched out on their stomachs to eat pasta. Mirella picked the oregano from her garden that morning in short shorts and her bathing suit top, while Marcello complained in her kitchen that Dominican beef was too tough for ragù. He was badly sunburned now, his skin bright red and peeling. Tomorrow Mirella would cut a spear of aloe from the yard to rub over his back. For nearly a year this had been their routine: trips to the beach, quiet dinners with cold wine, sex, sunburns, and sleeping in Mirella’s bed. She refused to sleep in his house after having paid so much for her own house, her own bed: a four-post caoba frame sent from the capital. She still had family in Santiago, a few distant cousins and great aunts, but she had moved far enough that none of them would visit her. She stayed in their apartments when she first left her husband Ralph in New York and had nowhere to live in the Dominican Republic. When she finally found a house, she rented a truck, packed it with her belongings, and drove across the island. She left her cousins a small bundle of U.S. dollars tied up in a handkerchief. It was her good-bye. Mirella slipped out of bed, and Marcello didn’t stir. She walked down the stairs to the kitchen and sat at the counter. All of her appliances—copper pots, the bamboo cutting board, and Mr. Coffee Machine—were wedding gifts from Ralph’s friends. It was as if they expected her to spend her married life cooking in a stuffy Brooklyn kitchen. When she found herself back in DR, forty-five, and cooking for just one, she wasn’t sure what she liked to make for herself. Most nights she wanted only a glass of wine and dark chocolate from the German bakery down the road. She laughed to herself during these dinners and thought that if her mother, Ramona, weren’t dead, she would be horrified at how she was eating— a little piece of chocolate, like a beggar, and a glass of liquor, like a puta. Marcello didn’t know that Mirella’s mother had lived in the mountains in the south of the country, in a village where the red earth stuck to your legs and your hair. He assumed she was from Santiago like her cousins. He didn’t question why she had chosen to live in the residence full of European ex-pats: a few Germans, an Englishman, and another Italian like himself. They had all come to DR for the same reason. Here, they could live like the people they had envied in their own countries. They had pools and Jeeps, servants, time. Mirella was the only resident without a staff. She worked all day in the garden, checked the fuses in the generator, and climbed onto the roof if one of the skylights was leaking. “Why don’t you hire someone to clean for you?” Marcello was always asking. “Your house is enormous.” Mirella hadn’t told him she spent years cleaning much larger houses in New York: brick townhouses with cream-colored carpets, lofts with what seemed like miles of windows. The Dominican woman who cleaned for Marcello was a slender Santiaguera named Ariane. Mirella often invited her for coffee, but she never accepted. They spoke over the gate around Mirella’s house, and Mirella cherished their short conversations, the relief of Ariane’s husky, melodic voice, from Marcello’s flippant Italianate Spanish. Ariane must have been at least twenty years younger than Mirella; she was Penelope’s age. Mirella and Penelope had spoken English for so many years in the house on Halsey Street that Mirella couldn’t remember the sound of Spanish in her daughter’s mouth. As a child, Penelope had been fluent, until Ralph ordered her to speak English at home so he could understand what they were always chattering about. Soon, the only times Mirella heard from her daughter in Spanish was in cards for her birthday and Mother’s Day. When Penelope was a teenager, they fought in English, and Mirella always said the wrong thing. In English, Penelope had the upper hand, so Mirella yelled and threw things to keep up. Maybe that had been their problem. English was for Ralph and Brooklyn and the rich ladies whose houses she cleaned; it was never meant for her daughter. Mirella reached into one of the cabinets underneath the counter. She felt the rim of an old, chipped cup, and set it on the counter. Inside the cup was a folded-up card. She unfolded the postcard and saw the smudges from all the erasing she had done, her handwriting in the faint gray of pencil lead. Hija, she had written, then a few lines, and her signature. When she first arrived in DR, Mirella had thought, briefly, that maybe her daughter would visit her. Maybe things would be better in this big house in the north of the island than they ever were in Brooklyn or in the mountains where they spent summers when Ramona was still alive, and Ralph was too consumed with the store to miss them. Mirella had never mailed the postcard because she didn’t know Penelope’s address in Pittsburgh, and she didn’t want to mail it to Ralph to forward. They hadn’t spoken since she had left him, after the closing of the store and his accident. She had been threatening to leave for weeks, while she washed his back with a sponge, or pushed him down the street in his wheelchair to pick up a prescription. He cried every day, whether over his spine or the store, Mirella was never sure. He had never cried over her or the years they had spent silently maneuvering around each other, as if they were both simply features of the house, a wobbly table or a fragile vase that should be avoided. When he cried and wanted her to take care of him, Mirella felt herself suddenly able to speak aloud the thoughts that had been circling her mind for decades: This is not why I got married, and This is not why I came here. When she started shipping the boxes to DR, Ralph asked her if she would really go and abandon their life together. She stayed for two weeks after the boxes were gone, just long enough for them to arrive in DR. While Ralph was asleep one night, Mirella put on a scarf and gloves, not bothering to take her wool coat, and slipped out of the house on Halsey with her suitcase. She hated to leave her plants behind, but there wasn’t any way to ship them. She walked to Bedford Avenue and hailed a cab to the airport. She had thought of Penelope as she drove away from the neighborhood she had moved to when she was a girl, eighteen and fresh from the red-earth campo, looking for life. How will my daughter find me? she had thought as the taxi plunged farther into Brooklyn, and then she remembered that Penelope hadn’t been looking. Mirella put the clip, the porcelain pieces, and the folded-up postcard back inside the cup and in the cabinet. She walked back to the living room, unlatched the gate and opened one of the sliding doors onto the patio. It was warm in the garden, the air damp and clean. Mirella felt as if someone had thrown a shawl over her in the dark. She stepped off the breezeway, and the earth gave under her feet. The crickets were louder outside. Mirella loved her days here in the garden, tending to the banana trees and vegetable patch, picking the avocado and papaya and lemons that fell in the breeze, uprooting weeds and killing snakes that had slipped through the barbed wire around the perimeter of her land. She loved her birds of paradise: the magenta beak of the buds, the yellow and blue petals like a crown of feathers, the slender green stalks. She could have never grown flowers that bright and intricate in Brooklyn. You would like it here, hija, she thought. Penélope.
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ULLY HIRSCH/ROBERT F. NETTLETON POETRY PRIZES
In Salamanca, we rested By MATT PETRONZIO Prize Co-Winner
ALEKSANDRA GEORGE
In Salamanca, we rested below our mosquito net sky, two nude islands caught within the tide of tusk-white linen. We housed each other in blushed positions, trapped wind between our lips, between unsteady heathen tongues. We are all just our mouths— everything else is nondescript. Let us speak through our nondescripts.
In Salamanca, we danced to drumsticks on cobblestones, reached out through open windows, palms to the moon, nipples hard from the sweet honey of poetry. We bore witness to the sound of sound, the taste of taste.
We ripped the sinews of habit— bathed in delectable wrong. Let us mourn for those who can’t be us.
In Salamanca, we converted to a religion wrapped in threadbare bedsheets. We were Spanish gods escaped from Kingdom, and we lived by the pulse of animal blood beneath our divine skin.
Seasoning By MATT PETRONZIO Prize Co-Winner
You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. – Matthew 5:13 Mother, virgin, prostitute: these are the social roles imposed upon women. – Luce Irigaray, Women on the Market I. Taste The word igualdad tastes like brine. I lick the sound from the corner of my lips each morning before it can be taken away. The shadows of salt curve like a smile across my mouth and cheekbones. A plural hand has rouged those spots. I am expected to look like a feather, but my breasts only weigh me down. God carved igualdad at the baseboard so that when I am kicked to the floor, I am reminded that I am not worth the salt of the earth. II. Savor But am I not made salty again? Am I not igualdad incarnate? I was the Judge, the well-keeper, the disciple. I am the lesson, the medicine, the poetry. I am salt with salt no longer, risen from the floor, that taste left in your mouth.
ULLY HIRSCH/ROBERT F. NETTLETON POETRY PRIZES AYER CHAN/THE OBSERVER
23
Three Days of a Slowed Heart in Words Thus I Spoke, Thus I Chose
By KRIS ULER Prize Co-Winner
I almost had it all. I do not mean you, I mean me. I had almost reached my potential, had almost learned to open my eyes in the mornings without a hint of regret. I almost learned to arrive at expected times and to leave before dusk. I ate heads of lettuce and dyed my skin red with handfuls of carrots. I had to teach myself once more to breath air instead of thick white fumes rising from piles of tin foil. Cleaned the walls of my shrunken insides with glasses of milk and teaspoons of honey. Learned to keep this all down, to allow the tiny red lines on the backs of my hands to heal. I tried wearing ribbons in my hair, thought it would mask the garishness still left within the hollows of my face. Tried keeping still on trains to remain seated until the stops that led to school, to work, to family. I tried to not jolt free from my seat in this metal car at stops that I knew much better. Stops that led me up and down filthy stairs to filthier rooms where the only clean object was a shiny scale reflecting my eagerness, my naiveté. I tried pleasantness but the lines imbedded within my skin and the depth of my pupils all conferred a much different aura. I am intricacy and enigma and I am going. I am going to continue on this tour of indulgence and venom, of oral copper and demystification. I have drained my body of sweet liquid and white milk; I am airtight and still able to speak.
Abrasions I need to write, to rid my bones of bitter marrow. I’d like to scrape each particle of browned tissue and release myself of fatigue and displacement. With each letter that forms each word my hands shake less, my mind stops scattering. I can focus on each element of my spiral; analyze each detail of my forever contradicting apathy. I bathe the heart with these excessively emotive sentences. I wash it of ache and pressure, of the hands grasping onto it in their absurdly desperate search in fulfilling themselves. It is strange that the only hands that grasp us are the ones whose skin reeks of self-indulgence and despair at their realization that they are not whole. They need these vestibules to complete their model of self, to feel like they are a part of something other than their own heads. The hands that tighten, the hands that bleed ever drop of your hard earned blood are never hands that wish to caress your flaws, your inconsistencies. They are never the hands of those sweet, poor folk who only want to peak at other’s hearts, to simply be content at hearing them beating. Those who are stirred by such simplicities will always be heard of but never seen, will never come to fruition in front of you. We’ll never be given that opportunity to be held by devotion and honesty and every other adjective that we always write about but never experience, all the words that warm us with catharsis during writing but never beat against our eardrums during speech. These words will never dull nor ever reach a grandiose closure. They will always hang above our heads, emitting their glow, blind us with their glare of impossibility. They will never be spoken, will never rip themselves off this page to enter someone’s mouth so that I can, for a moment, hear how they sound out loud, hear how they sound with meaning.
A Lost Minute of Thought I hope she answers. Sometimes, hearing her voice makes time stand still in the most cliché of ways and I’m left wondering what it is. She’s filled with pretty things, smelling like sweet nectar that would be too thick to swallow. It would stand still in your throat slowing the pace of your body the way her intensity slows down your breath. Being in the midst of such openness makes one rework their definition of how a human should be. She of course finds fault in this; she can’t comprehend how to everyone she is too much and how for me she is just right. She weighs her words, drenched in beauty and wine, against those of mine, becoming disappointed to find I am not as pure, as easily eager to word my heart out. She doesn’t yet realize that I am all marrow and ligaments, tied into a pretty knot of thick hair and cold eyes. All marrow and ligaments within which somewhere, possibly, lay some pieces of heart and veins still filled with blood. These things, however, have long been foreign to my body, have long been pushed into the deepest caves of the undersides of my ribs. The hands that once so eagerly pushed this heart into those sweat-filled crevices no longer belong to any living entity; they simply reduced me to this person, if I can be so kind, and left. And I am now wondering in bewilderment at this girl. This sweet, sweet lover that has reminded me to speed up instead of slowing down, to sit in grass and touch beetles, to hear music to listen for her words to me. I could love her, I say to myself. I could try to rework the ways of my heart and slow the iron bars descending in a haste to lock me out from what I want. I try to persevere against my reflexes and reach across miles and miles of waters and land, to say hello, I miss you, are you still mine...am I still present there? …should I still be present there?
24
ULLY HIRSCH/ROBERT F. NETTLETON POETRY PRIZES
This Poem is for my Grandfather By SARAH J. ROGERS Prize Runner-Up
When I take the train to Pennsylvania it winds in at night, through those hills, past those porches Your dreams lit the fires of steel mills that now seem mere scenery, stubborn and decorative It tastes like slate and I still have nightmares. I lit my dreams on fire to propel myself away
from the city you died in, fast as I could to return only at dusk –
I still remember your scent, and I’m sorry.
On the closing of the last hospital in Braddock, PA By SARAH J. ROGERS Prize Runner-Up
The dead in Braddock are piled on streets; the smell sticks to your clothes. In pleasant places the dying are ripened grapes – dried and put in boxes. Limbs bent from work are the new barked branches; Do they trim the ones that block the telephone wires? We don’t make outward calls, anymore. We know it’s useless.
BERNICE KILDUFF WHITE & JOHN J. WHITE CREATIVE WRITING PRIZE (FICTION)
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Ash Wednesday By KRISTEN SHARP Prize Winner
On the morning of Ash Wednesday Maggie let the scalding water of the shower wash between her breasts in a river that divided around the delta of her pale belly, soft but stretched taut like a hard-boiled egg. The last few months had made her round and fleshy around the hips, and her swollen feet loomed up at her like red banana slugs through the humid steam. She leaned back against the icy ceramic tiles and delighted in the contrast between temperatures. When she got out of the shower she vacantly dried her body with a towel, and after a while she stopped and let the towel fall over a puddle on the bathroom floor. She turned back and forth, and watching herself in the mirror rested her palms flat against her abdomen and tried to suck the new weight back in. The mirror fogged up and she squinted at herself as she applied black eyeliner and mascara to make her eyes look larger, and then carefully dabbed a ruby red stain over her lips and powdered her cheeks with rouge. She went into the bedroom and after some deliberation put on a gray suit dress over a white turtleneck and nude pantyhose: bland, dull colors for a chronically dull-colored girl. She was running late; lunch was in an hour. Rummaging through the cardboard boxes Maggie pulled out and rejected several worn-down pairs of shoes before selecting a pair of low, sensible black heels that her mother would approve of. As she was closing the closet door she noticed the white post-coital shirt out of the corner of her eye, still dangling expectantly on a wire hanger pushed off to the side. It was a beautifully sheer garment, oversized, refreshing and yet tantalizingly masculine, and she called it the post-coital shirt because it gave her the appearance of having just finished copulating. Maggie had been running a diligent but mostly fruitless campaign to increase her sex appeal since her years at Sarah Lawrence. Her mother would cry if she saw the post-coital shirt. Lucy was supposed to be the slut of the family. After a moment of reticence she shut the door firmly on the post-coital shirt and left her apartment without eating breakfast. Out on the street she bought a large black coffee from one of the carts and stopped to light a cigarette. Smoking was another habit picked up in college; it was fashionable among the young ladies, and eventually Maggie admitted to herself that she’d grown to like smoking for its own sake. The cigarettes were something all her own, apart from the family, apart from the house in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with the saggy twin bed and worn out quilt that showed 1,504 quadrilateral glimpses of Poland. She would have to quit, she thought as she finished the cigarette on the corner of McCarren Park, next to the flower stand that exploded with multi-colored blossoms even in the dead of winter. Happy hour with her coworkers was still a possibility, but she would have to abstain from alcohol and she didn’t like being around drunks when she was sober. All around the flower stand sober sandy-haired women and men in mourning, bearing the solemn crosses of ashes and incense upon their foreheads, moved back and forth like pious ghosts going about their daily errands. All Polish people believe in ghosts; it’s an Eastern thing, a thing that comes from the cold, the dark and vodka-induced hallucinations. Maggie sucked into her lungs what little sunlight was present in the February afternoon and distanced herself from the Ash Wednesday specters. She continued down the street. It was only a fifteen-minute walk to her family’s home, the place where she had grown up. Max would already be there—he was still at Brooklyn College and lived at home. It was unlikely that Lucy would show up at all. Her mother would have been cooking pierogi all morning. Sasha of course would be there. Her father would not be there. Maggie crossed the street and lit another cigarette, fed the filter into her mouth; best to finish them now and then this would be her last pack. Her lips were full and large. The cigarette curled and dried up like a caterpillar, orange-red in the crisp light of the February morning. She inhaled nostalgically and watched herself turn back and forth in the front window of the flower stand, evaluating her stomach and the new chubbiness of her cheeks and chin once more. A Chinese man pushed a bouquet of bright yellow geraniums into her face and she bought them to appease the man, herself, and, with any luck, her mother. She looked at herself again. It was unfair that her first time should have produced such a result. Lucy was the slut of the family, but her arms and legs and stomach were still thin and beautiful as reeds. Her mother would cry. You have to tell her, Max said. Crowded around the lunch table with Max, her aunt Mary, her mother, and her baby sister Sasha, her mother congratulated her on the weight gain. You’re finally starting to look like a woman, instead of like one of those twiggy anorexic twelve-year-olds that are running around all over Manhattan. But you haven’t been to mass. No. Sasha spit up formula onto the front of her bib. Her mother would cry if she knew, about the cigarettes, about Maggie’s belly under hot, hot clear water, about O’Brien, about the post-coital shirt hanging up in the closet with the top buttons undone. Her mother was again smiling sidelong at the roundness of her daughter’s new shape, prompting Max to leave the table without clearing his dishes away. The creature growing inside of her was the product of a love affair, if you could call it that: a brief and clamorous encounter with a stranger, Nick O’Brien, who was in real estate and enjoyed wheat beer and greyhounds. It was unfair that her first time should have produced such a result. Lucy was the slut of the family. Her mother would cry. You haven’t touched the soup; you should eat now, remembering you won’t be able to later because we are fasting. Maggie tried very hard to relax her jaw and forearms. She was not a teenager anymore. She was twenty-five years old. What better time for a child? People did that these days. Why should she live in fear of her mother? There was no reason for it. This was not Poland. Are you sure you’re not hungry? Now her aunt Mary had begun serving tea. If she was going to tell the time was now, before the tea was gone and her mother began washing the dishes by hand. After that her mother would be tired and would take Sasha to lie down with her in the empty marriage bed. Now was the time to tell. You have to tell, Max said. You can’t ignore it any longer. ALEKSANDRA GEORGE
Several hours later it was dark and it had begun to snow a little bit. Any warmth afforded by the sun had been absorbed away like a sponge soaking up hot, dirty water from the edges of the kitchen sink. Maggie lit her last cigarette and listened to the rumbling of the subway coming up through the grates below her feet and she thought of the electrifying third rail, and falling in, and yellow geraniums in a blue vase, and O’Brien, and Polish ghosts, and one hundred other things, as she inhaled smoke like it was the last thing on earth that mattered. She leaned against a lamppost and felt the snow melting on the top of her head, the cold seeping through her thick hair until it finally brushed against her scalp. She looked up, searched through the frosty air for a spot of brightness, but the sickle-shaped moon was obscured by aubergine and slate-gray clouds of ash.
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www.fordhamobserver.com
THE OBSERVER April 19, 2012
Arts & Culture
27
COURTESY OF UNSOUND FESTIVAL
Distal (left) and Sepalcure (right) featured at Saturday’s Bass Mutation during New York’s Unsound Festival.
Unsound Festival Returns to New York City For a Third Year By BRIAN BRUEGGE Asst. Arts & Culture Co-Editor
The city will be diving into some experimental waters from Wednesday to Sunday as the Unsound Festival returns to New York for its third year. Rated as April’s number one music festival by Resident Advisor (residentadvisor.net), the festival brings musicians to the city who push the boundaries of genre and sound to display an eclectic mix of noises. Several venues across Manhattan and Brooklyn will be hosting a range of shows ranging from minimalist electronic music to a solo cello performance, as well as events such as artist discussions and related film screen-
ings. The festival will be next door to Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) on April 19 at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium. At 8:30 p.m., the dub-influenced duo Peaking Lights will be performing lo-fi electronic music incorporating elements of krautrock, dance and pop music. To kick off the night, LXMP will offer a percussive interpretation of the classic Herbie Hancock album “Future Shock.” The show begins at 7:30 p.m., but be sure to get there early; the free events tend to fill up. Nihal Ramchandani, FCLC ’13, has attended Unsound since its first year in 2010. He described the festival as an exciting place to hear music that
doesn’t usually get represented in a city like New York. “It’s generally all forward thinking, experimental and fresh,” Ramchandani said. “You’ll have string quartets and things like that in the evening, and then you’ll also have club nights that have DJs playing, but it’s all interesting music. A lot of artists also have their North American debuts at the festival who wouldn’t otherwise come.” If you’re willing to hop on the subway, there’s no shortage of events scheduled a bit farther afield. On Friday night, the festival-commissioned piece “TRINITY” will be given its world-premier by Norwegian ambient artist Biosphere and LA artist Lustmord. The inspiration for the piece
came when the pair visited the early atomic weapons test sites around New Mexico and they incorporated the experience into their work. “Lustmord is very dark, and Biosphere is the opposite of that,” Ramchandani said. “They’re doing a collaboration for the first time which is really exciting.” Another highlight will be Saturday night’s Bass Mutations show, which has been billed to feature a smattering of trailblazing artists in bass music from both sides of the Atlantic. The show will also feature a live A/V show and DJ set from established New York City based artists Praveen and Dave Q. Though relatively new to New York, the Unsound Festival has been
around since 2003 in Poland where it began, and continues to grow in popularity. Originally an underground event, the festival has become a big name that has curated events across Europe. From these beginnings, Unsound Festival New York began in 2010 and has already become an established annual festival. To get a feel of the music to look forward to this year, tune into the official festival playlist provided by the music blog Hype Machine (hypem. com). The full event lineup and a venue map for this year’s festival can be found online at unsound.pl.en. Tickets will be distributed by the individual venues hosting the events, and can be purchased directly from them.
FCLC Student Takes His Passion from the Classroom to the Stage can’t really teach songwriting. I enjoy working at it, but I didn’t really enjoy studying it. It just takes the fun out of it for me.
By OLIVIA PERDOCH Asst. Arts & Culture Co-Editor
When the Observer caught up with David Pollack, Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) ’13, he couldn’t wait to grab his guitar and sing us a song. Pollack, a communications and media studies major at FCLC and lead singer and guitarist of Brooklyn-based indie-pop band, Bridges, exhibits an unmistakable passion for music. With commitments extending far beyond being Bridges’ front man (he also writes all of the band’s original songs, and has other writing projects on the side), he exudes an inspiring energy and excitement about all aspects of the industry both on and offstage. Pollack aspires to become a producer for other artists. Judging by the catchy melodies and relatable lyrics on his bands’ most recent EP, “Groundwork,” he’s got a good idea of what people want to hear. We sat down with Pollack to talk training, band mates, college crowds and, of course, to hear him play. OBSERVER: How did Bridges
start?
DAVID POLLACK: I went to the
University of Vermont (UVM) for a couple of years in Burlington but I decided to move back to New York and my friend’s little brother, Steele, was just getting out of a band so we decided to form Bridges together. It was pretty serious from the beginning; we were really into it. We started playing gigs almost right away because I already had songs written. We’ve had a lot of different members come in and out of the band but it’s always been Steele and I since the beginning. Our other guitarist, Tim, and our bassist, Abe, are relatively new. They’re great.
OBSERVER: How did you get into
writing songs?
D. P.: When I first started picking
up the guitar, I wrote my first song and my guitar teacher helped me put it together. From then on, I started writing a lot. OBSERVER: What do you write
about?
D. P.: All different things. Social
commentary. A lot of songs about love. OBSERVER: Which artists would
you consider your greatest musical influences? D. P.: Weezer. I love Weezer, those
guys are probably my favorites. Simon and Garfunkel are really great. Joni Mitchell, those kinds of artists. OLIVIA PERDOCH/THE OBSERVER
David Pollack, FCLC ’13, and his indie-pop band, Bridges, playing a show at Sullivan Hall.
most of high school and we played a lot of shows around New York City. When I was living in Burlington, I was in a band there and I was doing a lot of songwriting and working with other artists as well. OBSERVER: Where is your favor-
ite place to perform with Bridges?
D. P.: Colleges. Definitely colleges.
The shows are free so people just come. Students get really into it. We’ve played at Bard, Yale, the University of Vermont, Rutgers and Swarthmore. We played here at Fordham for Relay for Life. House parties are really fun to play, too. Usually when we play at a college, we try to play at a party near campus afterwards.
OBSERVER: Had you been in a
OBSERVER: Where else have you
D. P.: Yeah. I was in a band for
D. P.: Sullivan Hall, many times.
band before?
played in New York City?
Knitting Factory, Cake Shop, Spike Hill. We haven’t played at the new Knitting Factory yet; I really want to play there. OBSERVER: How did you first get
into music?
D. P.: I was always kind of con-
nected to music since I was really little. My parents said when I was younger I always hummed along with songs, even before I could talk. I had a little Sony play recorder and I made up this thing called, “David’s Greatest Hits” where I would just sing along with songs on the radio. It was really silly. OBSERVER: Do you have any
formal training?
D. P.: I got a guitar when I was 12
or 13 and started taking some lessons. I took lessons for about five or six years with a couple of differ-
ent teachers. I also took piano and voice lessons for a couple of years. When I was in my early teens I went to this creative arts camp and that was when I really blossomed and really began to take music seriously. Those were probably the best summers ever. I got lessons there and I was writing a lot and playing a lot and getting feedback and just gaining a lot of experience. OBSERVER: Why didn’t you
choose to major in music in college? D. P.: I did for a little bit, actually.
I went to Berklee College of Music in Boston for a summer program but realized I didn’t want to go to a conservatory. Then I was studying music at UVM, which was fine, but I decided I didn’t want to continue doing that because I realized you
OBSERVER: Do you want a career
in music?
D. P.: Definitely. I want to be a
songwriter and producer. I like to work with artists. I’m working with a few artists right now, writing and producing. OBSERVER: What goes into pro-
ducing exactly?
D. P.: Hearing a song and then cre-
ating an arrangement for it. Giving little ideas to make the song better. OBSERVER: What’s in store for
the future of Bridges?
D. P.: I don’t know. I’m not sure
where this band is going to go but I’d like to play more festivals and colleges for now. I think that’s the most lucrative market right now. Check out fordhamobserver. com for video footage of a recent Bridges show at Sullivan Hall, as well as a private solo performance on the FCLC plaza.
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Arts & Culture
April 19, 2012 THE OBSERVER
www.fordhamobserver.com
PHOTO FEATURE A trip to a flea market in the city is like a trip into another world. Observer Photographers discover the beauty in the vintage items, cluttered tents and interesting folks at flea markets around the city.
KATHERINE FOTINOS/THE OBSERVER
The welcoming sign at the Malcolm Shabazz Harlem Market at 116th and 5th.
HARRY HUGGINS/THE OBSERVER
A child watches his mother sell necklaces at the Hell’s Kitchen Market.
NATASHA MAHADEO/THE OBSERVER
A rack of dresses rope off a playground at GreenFlea markert.
SARA AZOULAY/THE OBSERVER
Flea markets are a great place to find decorative pieces for apartments.
SARA AZOULAY/THE OBSERVER KATHERINE FOTINOS/THE OBSERVER
Two sellers watch over their wares at the GreenFlea market on 76th St.
Items at Malcolm Shabazz Harlem Market at 116th and 5th.
JACKSON GALAN/THE OBSERVER
Handmade rings made from seeds on display at the GreenFlea market.
NATASHA MAHEDEO/THE OBSERVER
Handcarved crafts clutter a table in the GreenFlea Market.
www.fordhamobserver.com
THE OBSERVER April 19, 2012
Arts & Culture
29
PHOTO FEATURE
KATHERINE FOTINOS/THE OBSERVER JACKSON GALAN/THE OBSERVER
Vintage dolls, books, records and vases are some of the many things at flea markets.
Jewelry on sale shines at Malcolm Shabazz Harlem Market.
SARA AZOULAY/THE OBSERVER
Conversing with sellers can be a whole different experience at flea markets.
KATHERINE FOTINOS/THE OBSERVER
A crowded display at Malcolm Shabazz Harlem Market on 116th St.
SARA AZOULAY/THE OBSERVER
Trinkets and other items are at plentiful supply at all flea markets.
JACKSON GALAN /THE OBSERVER
Furniture pieces on display at the GreenFlea Market on the West Side.
HARRY HUGGINS/THE OBSERVER
An exhausted shopper takes a break in one of the chairs on display at the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market.
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Arts & Culture
April 19, 2012 THE OBSERVER
www.fordhamobserver.com
COURTESY OF MOMA
Famous photographer Cindy Sherman’s work will be displayed at the MoMA until June 11.
Cindy Sherman: Queen of the ‘Selfies’ Returns to MoMA By KATHERINE FABIAN Staff Writer
Photographer Cindy Sherman claims she spent most of her childhood glued to the television, watching old movies. It was these Old Hollywood films from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s that are what Sherman claims to be her inspiration for her first series of black-and-white photographs made in the late 1970s to early ’80s. In the series, Sherman uses makeup, wigs and vintage clothing to create different characters, a similar process for most fashion photography. However, the subjects of Sherman’s photographs are not highprofile fashion models; rather it is always the artist herself. In fact, Sherman almost never includes anyone in her photographs but herself. “Cindy Sherman has exhibited about 130 photographs of herself as
art—not as ‘art photography’ but as art, period,” writes Peter Schjeldahl in a 1984 essay on Sherman’s work. All of Sherman’s art is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in a retrospective of the photographer’s work including her original untitled film stills, as well as many other series that she has made up to the present day, including her 2010 wall mural. In this mural, making its debut in the U.S., Sherman uses Photoshop to digitally alter her face so that she is physically portrayed as a different person. “I have been working on this exhibit for about two years and Cindy has always been an important and influential artist here at MoMA,” Eva Respini, curator of the exhibit, said. “We’ve always had a history with her.” However, it was when Respini saw Sherman’s society portraits from 2008 that she decided to do a complete ret-
rospective of Sherman’s work. “I just thought they were excellent and that they showed how much of a contemporary artist she is for our time,” Respini said. “These works were made right around the time of the financial collapse. I also realized that a complete retrospective of her work had not been done before in the U.S. since 1997.” Sherman uses post-modernism in order to take on many subjects within the art world, from fashion to film and even to pornography. Her original films stills were intended to recreate the look of movie scenes in an ambiguous way. She never intended to look like an actual person or character, she just wanted to emulate the look of film stars like Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield. Included in the retrospective is her centerfold series, commission by “ArtForum” magazine, a more erotic color series of photograph following the orig-
inal film stills from 1981. These images are also more dramatic in the way that Sherman attempts to engage with the viewer in a sexy and anxiety-provoking way. Sherman’s satirical fashion portraits from 1983 to 2008, can also be seen as a departure from her original film stills in which she dresses up as dramatically grotesque characters posing as if she were a sexy editorial model. A couple of series that appear as more of a departure from her other works are the sex pictures from late ’80s and early ’90s, and her history portraits. The sex portraits are the only pictures in which Sherman does not present herself, but instead uses doll parts to make a statement about the male gaze. The history portraits are the only pictures in which Sherman sets out to portray specific characters, namely the Mona Lisa and Caravaggio’s “Sick Bachus.”
MoMA also enlisted its curators, as well as other contemporary artists like Marina Abramovic, Marilyn Minter and Robert Longo to comment on their on favorite Cindy Sherman photo. The sound clips can be found on the exhibit’s online gallery on moma.org where the exhibit can be viewed in its entirety, but nothing compares to seeing the detail of the photos in person. “The way Cindy uses herself in her work has proven to be very influential in the world of contemporary art,” Respini said. “She makes these creative worlds and narratives that show a fluidity of identity. And in this world of Facebook and reality shows, it seems as though our society is all about the anxiety around the status of the self.” The Cindy Sherman exhibit at the MoMA runs through June 11. For more information about the exhibit and its corresponding events visit Museum of Modern Art at www.moma.org.
Think Summer, Think Fordham Summer Session 2012 Session I: 29 May–28 June Session II: 3 July–7 August
• Evolution of Human Nature (ANTH 2000) • Afro-American, Afro-Britain, 1900-1960 (ENGL 3667) • Acting I for Non-Majors (THEA 2010) • Introduction to Film (COMM 2471) • Or choose from 200 courses available this summer at Fordham University
Learn more at fordham.edu/summer or call (888) 411-GRAD
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Features
April 19, 2012 THE OBSERVER
Celebrate the Rhythm of the City For National Poetry Month
SOFIA ALVAREZ/THE OBSERVER
The swanky Bowery Poetry Club & Café is one of New York’s hidden treasures. Patrons can see live music and poetry readings on the club’s stage and enjoy coffee and drinks. By MARIO WEDDELL Features Co-Editor and Asst. Photo Editor
The word “poet” often evokes an image of a half-mad, romantic recluse—an absinthe-guzzling scribe in a candlelit room penning intimate lyrics to a lost Lenore. But even Edgar Allan Poe did not choose to make his poetry an entirely private affair. What purpose does an excellent poem serve if no one gets to appreciate it? During the month of April, readers and writers have the opportunity to make their love for poetry a public affair. Here is a guide to celebrate National Poetry Month, featuring the Bowery Poetry Club, and some additional ways to wax poetic in New York City.
Bowery Poetry Club & Café
Behind an unassuming green façade, the Bowery Poetry Club provides a space for those who love poetry, those who are poets and those who are either of the first two, but just don’t know it. One step through the front door reveals a cozy café with wood floors and posters of poetic heroes spread across the dark brick walls. Off to the side, a staircase bears words from a Pablo Neruda poem painted on each step. The ceilings are high and the air smells like ground coffee. Jazz from a Charles Mingus
album bounces around the room. A few more steps to the end of the café, through some black curtains, the café becomes a bar. More poetry memorabilia adorns the walls, like Ginsberg’s translation of a Japanese haiku painted on the wall, and old portraits of writers. Further along, past the bar, is an open space full of chairs, finally coming to a stop at a raised stage with the words “Bowery Poetry Club” hanging on a banner. This is a multi-purpose stage. Every Tuesday night, the club hosts a workshop for aspiring poets, a performance by an established poet and then a competitive poetry slam. “Urbana [Poetry Slam] on Tuesday nights is probably the best for students to check out,” café manager Grace Kalambay said. “They have a ‘Wordshop’ before the slam, and the featured poet that night runs it and gives them tips on how they work.” These featured poets are often big names in contemporary poetry or have published works. Students pay a five dollar cover charge to get in, discounted from the usual eight dollars, and have an opportunity to be a part of the competition. Ryan Ramirez, manager and sound DJ, explained that audience members determine the outcome of the Urbana Poetry Slam.
“If [students] come to the slam, they can be judges,” Ramirez said. “We pick five people from the audience—objective and fresh faces—to hold up scorecards and rate the performers to determine who advances to the next round.” On Monday nights the stage belongs to actor, writer and poetry legend Taylor Mead. The 87-year-old Beat poet has made a name for himself after a long (and still) thriving career in New York City. “He’s legit, he’s been around,” Ramirez said. “He was hanging out with Warhol and Ginsberg and those guys back in the day. He’s one of the last of that crowd.” Mead, it seems, is also the reason for the music selection on the speakers. “He’ll get up on stage with his stereo, play some Mingus and then do some talking,” Ramirez said. “He’ll read poetry; some of it is pretty sexual. He’s wild.” After “The Taylor Mead Show”, it’s time for Monday Night Bingo. This is not the typical bingo night for grandmothers (unless they happen to be as edgy as Mead). Instead, it’s a game hosted by “Mr. Murray Hill and drag queen Linda Simpson,” during happy hour with “cheap booze, sex jokes, drag queens, and fart machines,” according to the event pamphlet. A bingo card is two dollars for the entire night and players can win prizes,
including a real cash jackpot. Once players have downed some spirits to raise their spirits, the “NYC Talent” open mic night begins. Crowd members can sign up before the show to perform and showcase their talents amongst featured performers, including known comedians, writers and other artists. The Bowery Poetry Club is built for artists and poets, and it’s built for sharing. Step in, order a coffee. Sip it, pen a poem. Then walk to the bar. Take a couple shots. Muster the courage to get on stage, and embrace National Poetry Month.
BOWERY POETRY CLUB & CAFE
Located: 308 Bowery St., between Bleecker and Houston. A few blocks from the B/D train stop at Broadway-Lafayette. Don’t Miss: Monday nights- $5 cover charge for students, all ages 6:30 p.m.-7 p.m., The Taylor Mead Show 7 p.m.-9:30 p.m., Bingo! ($2 to play) 10 p.m.-2 a.m., NYC Talent Tuesday nights- $5 cover charge for students, 6:30 p.m.--7:00 p.m., Wordshop 7:00 p.m.-9:30 p.m., Urbana Poetry Slam.
NUYORICAN POETS CAFÉ
Located: 236 East 3rd St., between Avenue B and Avenue C. Nuyorican hosts various slam poetry events and hip-hop and jazz performances. A few blocks from the F train stop at 2 Ave. Don’t Miss: Friday nights - $10, all ages 10:00 p.m., The Nuyorican Friday Night Poetry Slam.
KGB BAR
Located: 85 East 4th St., between Bowery and 2 Ave. This Ukrainian-socialist-themed bar is a popular literary hub for those who like to get wordy. A few blocks from the N/R train stop at 8 St. NYU. Don’t Miss:
Monday nights –Free admission, 21+ 7 p.m.-9 p.m., Monday Night Poetry readings
TELL ME MORE POETRY
“Tell Me More,” a program on National Public Radio, asks writers to Tweet their poetry (no more than 140 characters), with the hash tag “#TMMPoetry.” The program will select poems to play on air during National Poetry Month. More info at www.npr.org.
Want to read more? Check out www.fordhamobserver.com
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Features
April 19, 2012 THE OBSERVER
www.fordhamobserver.com
From Dancer to Miss Manhattan: Kathryn Berry Tells All MISS MANHATTAN FROM PAGE 1
happen to me’. And because of that, we have become complacent, and we don’t think of the decisions we make or the consequences and ramifications that they have,” Berry explained. Some of Berry’s involvement with HIV/AIDS charities and activist groups even stands at FCLC; Berry was the brain behind the MasquerAIDS Ball “a masquerade ball where everyone wore masks to help unmask the stigma surrounding AIDS,” Berry explained. In addition to creating a fun event, the MasquerAIDS Ball was also used to generate funds and educate people on the transmission of AIDs and testing. The MasquerAIDS Ball has even continued on even after Berry’s graduation, taking place at FCLC earlier this year. “It was the most amazing thing to see it continue past my graduation How exciting is that that it continues! I hope it still continues and grows!” Berry was initially attracted to FCLC because of the alliance with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. “I chose Fordham because of their dance program. I knew that I wanted to dance, as I said, I had been dancing my whole life and they have a phenomenal alliance program with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater,“ Berry explained. Berry was taught early on by her parents that education was just as important as her artistic creativity, something Fordham,
Berry’s love of performance and dance and her want to share her creativity with others is what drew her to pageants.
KATHERINE FOTINOS/THE OBSERVER
Kathryn Berry, FCLC ’11, won the 2012 Miss Manhattan competition and continues to compete in pageants.
in conjunction with the Ailey BFA program, seemed to understand.
Having double majored in Dance and Communications and Me-
dia Studies, Berry now works as in marketing and advertising for
Swiss watch company Vacheron Constantine. But work isn’t the only thing on her mind; the Miss New York competition is approaching fast for Berry. The pageant, which is slated for June 14-16, will consist of three basic phases, an interview portion, lifestyle and fitness portion, and the talent portion. And while Berry is no stranger to pageants, she admits that “There are always those initial nerves.” She describes it as a bundle of anxiety and excitement. “It’s good to have that nervous energy because it means this is still fresh. It means I get excited every time I am about to walk out there,” Berry explained. “It isn’t ‘Oh, I’m doing another pageant.’” “Whatever will happen, this journey has been amazing and it has been great to represent Manhattan. I mean, I love this city, so how amazing is that?” You can find out more about Miss Manhattan 2012 at missmanhattan2012.wordpress.com.
Study Reveals an Increase in Births Outside of Marriage By FREDERIC ADOR Contributing Writer
The term “nuclear family” is relatively new, but the concept has existed for thousands of years. Usually, a nuclear family is composed by two married parents with one, two or more children, and it is a relatively important part of the American tradition. However, there is a slow but steadily increasing trend of outsideof-marriage births. A 2011 study from NGO Child Trends points out that not only has there been an increase in births outside of marriage, but also that it affects women under 30 more than any other group. For women under 30, more than half of the total births come from a nonmarital relationship, according to the study. The fact that marriage is losing ground among the so-called “Y Generation” does not surprise. Kerry McCabe, Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) ’15. She said she thinks “it makes sense... as people are living a more modern lifestyle, especially women.” More than half of the 15 stu-
dents questioned knew someone their age with children, and most of these parents were not married. “I went to [high] school with several girls who gave birth... but marriage was always out of the equation,” said Andrew Ortaz, FCLC ’15. What seems to be more of an issue is the age of women when they have a child. The term “teenage mother” has become a common term in politics and in culture, thanks to MTV’s “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom.” McCabe said, “I went to high school with girls who were having babies, and they were 17 or 18 years old, and I definitely think that it is not okay because they [were] so young and not ready.” In 2009, 87 percent of the teenage pregnancies were outsideof-marriage according to the Child Trends study. The way marriage is seen is certainly changing. A couple of decades ago it was seen as a necessity to ensure a normal life. “[That] is not put on a pedestal anymore,” McCabe said. Ortaz added, “My father’s boss has kids with someone and they are not married, but their relationship is doing very well.”
It seems like people are breaking from the traditional marriage as an institution for raising kids, but they are still able to live satisfactory lives. Only one demographic group appears to be going against this trend: college graduates. Alex Bivona, FCLC ’14, said, “Maybe college graduates come from more traditional families where marriage comes before having children.” Faith Brancale, FCLC ’15, added, “Some people meet and begin dating in college but have no time to think about kids.” As a result, for many in an academic or professional setting, marrying one’s significant other can be a way to take a relationship to the next step without adding the responsibilities of having a child. This traditional background and the trade-off between having a child and being able to pursue a professional career could very well explain the opposite trend among college graduates. There is however a broader concern linked to marriage losing ground among the less educated: marriage could very well become a new factor of social divide.
CHRIS WARE/LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER/MCT
College students still tend to marry before having children.
New Date Ideas to Help You Find Love in the Fresh Air Don’t Forget to Hold the Door Open to These Exciting Outdoor Dates By DIANA KOKOSZKA Staff Writer
Chelsea Piers Driving Range 23rd St. & Hudson River Park New York, NY 10011 Smack some balls around against the romantic backdrop of New Jersey and a murky Hudson River. Golf is just athletic enough for you to show off your skills without messing up your hair. YouTube a few golf swing tutorials so you can confidently reach around and ahem, give your date some hands-on lessons. Go easy on the Tiger Woods references and pray that your date ends a little bit better than his marriage.
Rocks Off Concert Cruises
Habana Outpost
Bohemian Hall Beer Garden
Mets Game at Citi Field
West 41st St. and Hudson River New York, NY 10036 Show your date that you can navigate the rough waters of love and partake in a concert cruise around Manhattan. Shows usually last three hours, so your date won’t get a chance to fake an emergency call and bail prematurely. Upcoming concerts include punk band The Bronx, a Springsteen tribute band, and Jamaican ska group The Skatalites. If you’re worried that you won’t have any chemistry, rest assured that seasickness has a way of bringing people together.
757 Fulton St. Brooklyn, NY 11217 Invite your date out for a bite and reduce your carbon footprint at the same time. This eco-friendly outdoor restaurant is filled with recycled furniture and serves up smoothies out of a bike-powered blender. Habana’s menu includes Cuban sandwiches, fish tacos, and plenty of vegetarian options. If their rainwater toilets don’t impress your date, their fried chicken and waffle on a stick certainly will.
29-19 24th Ave. New York, NY 11102 If you’re craving cold beers on a warm night, head over to the Bohemian Hall Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens. Large communal tables guarantee that any awkward silences will be filled with general chatter. Their menu boasts an impressive beer list and a sexy selection of Eastern European fare like Bratwurst and Head Cheese. Queens is the land of airports, so even if you can’t make out any stars through the urban smog, you can still make a wish on a Boeing 757.
12001 Roosevelt Ave. Corona, NY 11368 A baseball game is the perfect date spot, mainly because it’s a great excuse to day-drink. No one expects the Mets to win, so even an embarrassing loss won’t put too much of a damper on your date. It’s also slightly cheaper than say, a Yankees game. The Shake Shack at Citi Field offers a perfect mid-game bite if you’re aiming for something a bit classier than a ballpark frank. Creative heckling is sure to score extra points with your date.
www.fordhamobserver.com
THE OBSERVER April 19, 2012
Features
33
N.Y. CHALLENGED
A Heartbreaker and A Home Broker By MARIO WEDDELL Features Co-Editor and Asst. Photo Editor
It’s tough to dump someone. I’ve handed out my share of unhappy endings—I am a masseuse of misery. I’ve had tearful, sobbing breakups and screaming, hour-long ragers. I’ve done the measured-tones, apologetic breakup, and the silent, unofficial, time-has-passed-us-by breakup. I even had that embarrassing text message breakup years ago, when I received a message that read, “Are you going to dump me?” after she kissed someone else, and I learned that being honest and direct was the only way to make things final. I texted her back, “Well, yeah.” Things weren’t going well anyway. With years of experience on my résumé, I’ve realized breakups follow a pattern. My split this weekend was no different. Still, I was unprepared, because this time, I had to dump an apartment broker. And it wasn’t easy. Somehow, I figured a realtor would be better at coming to terms with reality, but the only thing real was his desperation to save our relationship: namely, his desire to have me (and my roommates) rent his apartment. Our appointment was at noon, in Brooklyn. The roommates and I (who I will now just refer to as “I,” for clarity) stood outside the building for several minutes, waiting for the realtor (who I’ll now dub “Weepy”) to show us the four-bedroom apartment. But no one was there. I called Weepy. No response—the first inklings of a shady lover, no longer gung-ho about maintaining constant communication. Okay. I would wait. More minutes passed. I called twice more, and still he did not answer. I paced a bit, mentally. Had I been stood up? Maybe it was time to give up and leave. It echoed those first weeks of doubt in a dying relationship. I knew I should
ILLUSTRATION MARIO WEDDELL/THE OBSERVER; PAUL SCHMID/SEATTLE TIMES/MCT
end it, but the hope that things would get better kept me frozen. Finally, the harsh reality presented itself, in the form of a mustachioed tenant taking out the trash. “Hey,” Mustachio said to us. “Are you looking at the upstairs apartment? Just so you know, the landlady is a crazy bitch. The worst landlady I’ve ever had. That’s why I’m leaving, and that’s why the first-floor tenant is leaving.” That settled it. I had spent enough time waiting for Weepy to show me he cared, he was a bad communicator and my mother-in-law was going to make our marriage awful if we ever got to that point, anyway. I walked away. Five minutes later, Weepy called me. He begged me to come back. I told him I had waited 20 minutes, and I had other appointments; there were bigger
fish in the sea, I could do better. Sorry, thanks for your time, Weepy, and have a nice weekend. He understood, and wished me well. A clean break. You finally catch your breath after you drop the bomb and think it’s over. But after the split, there are still the passive-aggressive arguments and the active-aggressive comments that keep it going—the radiation after the bomb. Five minutes later, a text message from Weepy was buzzing on my phone. “Mario Thanks for wasting my time I came all the way from queens to meet u and I was here at noon exactly there was no one outside so I went 2blocks away and u couldn’t wait??????!!!” There it was—the desperation, the
anger and the spiteful disbelief that I could be so cruel. How could I throw away everything we had together? Did our email thread mean nothing? And, in typical heartbreaker fashion, I tried to keep things rational and mature. I had to keep emotions out of it, and I had to resist the urge to point out his hypocrisy (he expected me to wait 20 minutes, but couldn’t wait until 12:02 before wandering off). So I texted him back, to keep things cordial. “Our intention wasn’t to waste your time. Sorry. I called 3 times to no response, and you could have called me. You got my number via email.” So there it was. And I believed that would be the end. As one always believes, in naïve foolishness. But Weepy replied minutes later.
“I didn’t have it with me but I was talking with the tenant when you called U could leave me a message let me know that you’re leaving I was there at noon and u probably came few min after I was few blocks down Bedford,” explained Weepy. It was the “you-led-me-on” response. I should have given him an indication that things were not working out. I should have told him how I felt at the beginning, so this would not feel so abrupt. How could he have known if there were no signs? But of course there were signs. I had tried reaching out to him. When I tried to broach the topic, he was distant. He was unresponsive. So now, after trying too hard for too long, my decision was final. I had to be blunt with Weepy. “Your lack of an apology affirms our decision to not do business with you. I don’t know what else to tell you other than this response was not appropriate. We felt we wasted our time too, and I already apologized to you. Why would you want tenants like us, anyway?” It was a classic response, to tell Weepy that it never would have worked out, anyway. If he couldn’t handle a five-second breakup, how could he ever handle a lease-long commitment? And if I was such a terrible person, he should be glad we weren’t together. Almost an hour later, Weepy pulled himself together long enough to send a short and sweet message. “Well let me km now if u still want to see it It’s ok,” he replied. He was forgiving me. He was in denial. Maybe we could give it another shot, once I realized I needed him. So, following the pattern of breakups, I didn’t respond. Maybe one day, time would heal our wounds, but not now; we were damaged goods. He had to move on, and I wasn’t helping by constantly responding. I cut him out. And then, a day later, I met someone else. He has an apartment in Harlem I’d like to rent.
JEWEL GET TO KNOW ME
Sometimes, Almost Famous is Enough By JEWEL GALBRAITH Staff Writer
The great thing about Manhattan is that when you walk down any given street, your chances of seeing someone in a standard-issue lunatic outfit raving at you about the apocalypse are just about balanced out by your chances of seeing a celebrity. One girl I met at Fordham told me she sees Alec Baldwin “all the time,” the same way I might say that I see my history professor “all the time” or that I singlehandedly eat entire containers of hummus “all the time.” Somehow, though, I haven’t run into a single celebrity since living at Lincoln Center. Well, there was one notable exception. But I don’t think that anyone other than he himself would have described him using the word “celebrity.” He approached me in a FedEx Office store. I was standing at the monstrous do-it-yourself printing machine trying to make copies of headshots I needed for an audition that weekend. The console itself looked like it was designed more to present the possibility of printing photos than to actually physically print them, and no matter how hard I tried to center my photos on the screen, they came out lopsided. The employee behind the store counter had helped me out by suggesting the time-tested method of trying to print them again, which was what I was doing when a man walked in the door. Maybe it was the fact that he had called at least two people “fabulous” within 20 seconds of entering
JEWEL GALBRAITH/THE OBSERVER
Jewel met a larger-than-life personality at the FedEx Office store.
the store, but somehow I just knew that this guy was peculiar. Things got weirder. Just a few feet behind me, he accosted a stranger and, upon finding
out that the man was a lawyer, started in on a long story about how he had been hit in the head by a falling object
in Bryant Park and was now looking to sue. The store was closing in 20 minutes, my audition was the following day, and I needed those photos printed. There was no time to get sucked into a conversation with a talkative stranger. Avoid eye contact, I told myself. I tried to seem unapproachable while I continued on to the next phase of the printing process, which involved looking back and forth between my photos and the printer console and frowning. It was too late. I heard his voice from over my shoulder. “Oh, girl,” he said, “Those photos are fabulous.” Could I still avoid a conversation? I smiled and thanked him with my gaze focused on the touch screen in front of me. I couldn’t. “What are they for?” he wanted to know. I explained that I was auditioning for a tap dance program, and to my surprise, he said he was a tap dancer as well. He had studied under Gregory Hines, one of the late greats. That initial factoid was just the upward climb to the top of the bizzare rollercoaster hill that was the rest of our conversation. For the next five minutes, he talked at me while I stared back. This is what I learned: In addition to being a tap dancer, he was a headshot photographer. He could have taken my headshots for $50 (something he decided to mention after I told him I had paid $100). He also could have, and probably should have, done my makeup. In fact, he
traveled from California every year to work as a makeup artist for Fashion Week shows. That was why he was in New York that day. It was also where he had met his husband, who he had married in New York on “the first day of gay marriage” (I wondered if that was a technical term). Between his work as a tap dancer, photographer and makeup artist he had managed to sustain a head injury in Bryant Park and receive a PhD in clinical psychology from Columbia. His husband, naturally, was a supermodel whose name I didn’t recognize but whose photo was apparently featured on a giant billboard in Times Square. Now he was quiet, waiting for my response. I said something to the effect of “Oh.” And as suddenly as it had started, our interaction ended. He told me one more time that I was fabulous and left the store. It took a couple more minutes of frustrated combat with the printing machine for me to process what had just happened in that FedEx Office. I wanted to know who the man was, but by that point he was probably halfway to John Hamm’s house to squeeze in a quick photo shoot and psychological consultation before his next Fashion Week shift. All I knew now was that our conversation had been interesting and weird on an unexpectedly personal level. But that was worth something. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the man was fabulous, but was one of the more interesting people I’ve encountered this year. Which, until I actually meet him, is more than I can say for Alec Baldwin.
Sports
April 19, 2012 THE OBSERVER
Resurgent Knicks Look to Make Playoff Run By MIKE MCMAHON Staff Writer
With the season winding down, the 2012 Knicks are an ambiguous team. Sure, they are still holding on to a playoff seed in the Eastern Conference, but merely entering the playoffs seems like a weak and quiet finale for a team that once thrived on “Linsanity.” To those who somehow managed to avoid the media firestorm that was the ascent of Knicks guard Jeremy Lin, let us recap: The Harvard grad came off the bench in early February and helped the Knicks go on a tear, winning eight of his first nine starts and lighting up the Lakers for 38 points, all while superstar Carmelo Anthony sat out with injury. Lin’s play had reignited a fan base, and he looked to be the dominant, ball-distributing point guard then-Coach Mike D’Antoni so badly needed, forcing many comparisons between him and perennial AllStar point guard Steve Nash, without whom D’Antoni has had a .385 win percentage, according to ESPN. In the time since, however, the Knicks have struggled to maintain any type of consistent, long-term success. D’Antoni resigned because he and the organization had “conflicting views of the Knicks future,” according to ESPN. As of April 15, the team is two games above .500, just as they were at the end of that eight-of-nine run back on Feb. 19, and just as they were before acquiring Anthony last season. The Knicks will be without Lin and forward Amar’e Stoudemire at least until the playoffs start. In fact, it appears doubtful that Lin will even be available for the first round of the tournament, wherein the bottom-
JIM MCISAAC/NEWSDAY/MCT
Anthony has led the Knicks by shooting 51 percent from the field and averaging 30.2 points per game in April.
seeded Knicks are likely to face either the league-leading Chicago Bulls or the big-three led Miami Heat. In spite of winning eight of 12 games leading up to their division showdown with the Boston Celtics, the Knicks still remain a fair amount behind in the division standings. Optimists may point to the fact that
there is still a possibility of catching the Celtics, thereby changing their first round opponent to one somewhat less daunting than Chicago or Miami. While this is certainly true, and it would not be the first time in the past year that a Boston sports team saw such a late-season collapse, the Knicks should be just as
concerned (if not more so) with holding off the Milwaukee Bucks, who sit close behind New York in the standings, though the Knicks defeat of the Bucks on April 11 certainly helps. Once, it seemed that the most troubling fact about the likely playoffbound Knicks was their continued struggle to perform better with An-
thony on the team. Since acquiring Anthony, the Knicks had fared better without him on the court; however, recently, the team has thrived in tandem with Anthony’s strong shooting. At times, during Anthony’s tenure in New York, it seemed like he was in an unshakeable shooting slump, but lately, he has broken out with 51 percent shooting and 30.2 points per game, according to ESPN. Greater question marks for the Knicks of late have come elsewhere. In Lin’s absence, help from the point guard position has been few and far between. The strongest effort has come from veteran point guard Baron Davis, who has played well below expectations, averaging under six points and five assists per game. Rookie Iman Shumpert continues to contribute with strong defensive performances, but has also been a key part of an offensively-anemic supporting cast. As it stands, these Knicks have plenty of talent, but are having difficulty supporting their top players, some of whom continue to sit out. While Stoudemire’s absence is an issue of caution on the team’s part (as he has been healing and looks to be ready for the playoffs), Lin’s recent knee surgery leaves the team without two of its players for the time being. Moreover, Boston’s decently strong hold on the division lead leaves the Knicks staring down the seemingly unstoppable Bulls. Anything can happen, of course, and the Carmelo Anthony-led Knicks might storm their way to a championship, but with the Miami Heat and Chicago Bulls looming and a bottom-end playoff seed likely, it looks like the Knicks might be headed home sooner rather than later.
Mets Exceed Early Expectations, Eye Strong Season By JOE SPARACIO Asst. Sports Co-Editor
Sports Illustrated predicted the New York Mets to win merely 75 games and come in last in the National League East, behind even the young Washington Nationals. Yet, as the season has begun, fans have seen a shimmer of hope. With expectations at a seemingly all-time low, the Mets have already been written off by most as losers. There are many reasons for these low expectations. Mets fans were disappointed last season, as the Mets finished with a dismal 77 wins and a .475 winning percentage, landing them the fourth spot in their division. There were a few bright spots from last season, including the emergence of bright young rookies like Ike Davis, Lucas Duda and the maturation of younger players like Daniel Murphy and Jonathan Niese. Also, Jose Reyes, the five-tool Met shortstop, won the batting title last season, sporting an impressive .337 batting average. Yet, this positivity came to a crashing end during this off-season. Mets fans have been dreading a payroll cut since the 2010 season. In December 2010, team owner Fred Wilpon found that he was named in a lawsuit filed on behalf of the victims of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. As a result ownership began to scramble for more money to offset pending losses. These austerity measures have finally hit home; the Mets payroll has fallen from $134,422,942 in the 2010 season to $93,357,465 by the 2012 season. While this may still seem like a lot of money, in actuality it is a large loss, and fans realized that their team would not be able to sign any highpriced free agents over the next few offseasons. This was a tough pill to swallow, and critics began projecting high losses for the Mets’ 2012 season.
DAVID POKRESS/NEWSDAY/MCT
The Mets are 7-3 on the young season and are just a half game out of the division lead.
Offseason woes continued as the Mets all but broke their fans’ hearts. The Mets’ two best players from 2011, homegrown speed-demon Reyes and high-powered slugger Carlos Beltran, were in walk years of their respective contracts. The Mets traded Beltran in exchange for future draft picks and let Reyes test free agency over the winter. The Mets couldn’t afford to pay Beltran and fans had already come to grips with this fact, but there was a great outcry to resign the beloved Reyes. At times, Jose, as he was affectionately referred to by fans, was the sole reason that fans showed up to the stadium. Die-hards had cheered for years as Jose legged out booming
triples and swiped bags with a seemingly arrogant confidence. Sadly, ownership had convinced themselves that they could not afford to resign Reyes either. Hearts broke as Reyes signed with the division-rival Marlins, simply because they could not afford to pay him a $106 million, sixyear contract. Put bluntly, spring training did not get fans excited for the season to start. Finishing 10-19-2, the Mets showed signs of inexperience, sloppiness and a lack of stellar pitching. In a division with the star-studded Phillies, tenacious but aging Braves, up-and-coming Nationals and flashy Marlins, it was hard to imagine that
the Mets have a fighting chance at making the playoffs. Yet, when the regular season opened, they gave the fans something to root for. Johan Santana was back on a major league mound for the first time in years, opening the season for the Mets. This alone gave the fan-base hope; Santana is a true ace, a former Cy Young winner and a team leader, so the team was happy to have him back on the mound. After a better than expected first outing that lasted five innings, prompting Met Manager Terry Collins to say, “It’s one game but it’s very, very important for us. [If] we pitch, we can compete.’’ That mantra stood true for the rest
of the series, and fans watched as they continued to receive great pitching performances from all their starters. Not only was the starting pitching effective but the bullpen looked fantastic as well. John Rauch and Frank Francisco, the two relievers that were meant to sure up the eighth and ninth innings for the Mets pitched much better than they did in the spring and seemed worth their contracts. Francisco quelled the nerves of management by posting a 0.00 ERA and collecting three saves, as opposed to the 5.54 ERA that he accrued during spring training. The Mets then went on to win the next three games, opening the season at 4-0. This great start was not only due to great pitching but also to timely clutch hitting. David Wright, the face of the franchise, is off to a really hot start, batting .583 over the first four games. He was aided by some of the younger rising Mets players. Outfielder Duda finally has begun to flex the muscle that the organization has been hyping, hitting two homeruns during the second game of the season. Another highlytouted homegrown Met, Davis, has been hitless to start the season, yet he is projected to be an above average first baseman with great power as well. While this start seemed nothing short of “Amazin,” the Mets have already begun to show their faults. Fans have had to cringe as Wright injured his hand, hitting became stagnant and the bullpen had begun to falter. However, to this point the Mets are a respectable 7-3, and are just a half game out of first. If the start to this season is any indication, Mets fans are in for a bumpy ride this year, with many ups and downs, but their team may surprise many critics as the season progresses. Only time can tell if the Mets can remain relevant.
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THE OBSERVER April 19, 2012
Sports
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Protein Bars: Nutritious Treat or Unhealthy Snack? By JASPER CHANG Asst. Sports Co-Editor
Protein bars are potentially a student’s best choice for food during any time of the day, and in the final push of the spring semester of 2012, these bars may be the only thing a student will eat. Protein bars are small enough to fit nearly any pocket or purse, they are not inexpensive as their prices range from 99 cents to five dollars and they come in a host of different flavors, such as coconut chocolate, marshmallow crisp, and peanut butter cookie. With such appealing qualities, these bars can be hard to resist. However, what sounds so appealing must definitely have some drawbacks. In order to discern the pros and cons of protein bars, The Observer spoke with nutritionist Andrea Chernus. Chernus is a registered dietitian, a certified diabetes educator and a Board certified specialist in sports nutrition. Her office is located on 133 W. 72nd St., suite 703 and she can be contacted via email at ARC@chernusnutrition.com. “I wouldn’t say protein bars are either beneficial or hazardous, but they are meant to be a supplement,” Chernus said. “One should not be living off of them. One should realize that they are a processed food, and the big push in nutrition these days is to work towards eating more whole foods in their original form. One can certainly get sufficient protein eating a varied diet.” Protein bars are a supplement to one’s dietary needs, so having a bar as a snack is perfectly fine. It becomes problematic when protein bars replace one of the three daily meals. Breakfast, lunch and dinner should be from wholesome food, not a packaged rectangular bar.
AYER CHAN/THE OBSERVER
While protein bars have their benefits, they are a product that must be eaten in moderation.
There are many brands of protein bars out there, which makes it difficult to decide which would be best because their packaging emphasizes only their good points. “I don’t have specific brands that I recommend because I don’t think there is a difference for men or women. That’s more in the marketing of the brands!” Chernus said. “The body can’t use more than about thirtyfive grams of protein per meal or snack, so it is wasteful to eat bars that contain more protein than that. Most ‘protein’ bars actually have more carbohydrates than protein,
however.” Although protein bars are meant to be a supplement, it seems that there are better options one could choose over a protein bar, such as Greek yogurt or mixed nuts. If the body can only use thirty-five grams of protein and most protein bars have more carbohydrates than protein, it may be a waste of money to buy protein bars. “There is a limit to the amount of protein that is safe, and there is an amount the body can actually use,” Chernus said. “The safe range is 1035 percent of one’s daily calories.
Another way to look at this is by body weight. We need to consume about one half gram per pound of body weight as a minimum, but at the high end, the body can only effectively use about one gram per pound of body weight in protein – so that would be 100 grams for a 100-pound person. Consuming more than that will cause the body to either burn the protein for energy or store it as body fat. Additionally, high protein intakes dehydrate us because the body excretes water when metabolizing protein.” Protein bars can have anywhere
from ten to thirty grams of protein. Although the protein count does not exceed thirty-five grams, one should keep in mind that the protein count will add up at the end of the day. Since high-protein intakes cause dehydration, protein bars may not be for those with a low body weight. Some protein bars contain soyprotein or soy-based ingredients. “Soy is a food that stirs much controversy,” Chernus said. “In reasonable amounts, one or two servings a day, there is no harm from soy. It is always beneficial to obtain protein from a variety of sources. If one is a vegetarian or vegan, other plant sources of protein include legumes, nuts, seeds— even grains and vegetables have small amounts of protein. If one is an omnivore, consuming a variety of protein-containing foods such as meat, fish, poultry, eggs, milk and yogurt all provide excellent sources of protein. There is no limit to soy-protein consumption. As I stated before, to supply our bodies with all the necessary nutrients for good health, it is wise to include a wide variety of food because there is no one food that provides all the nutrients that we need for good health.” Multiple sources of protein are most beneficial for good health. One protein bar a day is a reasonable consumption, but it is important to eat wholesome foods. Although protein bars are convenient, it is imperative to remember that they are a supplement to one’s dietary needs. Protein bars should not be the sole source for anyone’s nutrition. One should consider their body weight before eating a protein bar and think about how beneficial that bar really is.
Soccer Club Aiming for Division Crown By RANDY NARINE Sports Editor
In what will be their biggest match of the year, the Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) soccer club will play on Sunday against Dinamo in the Metro Soccer League, with a chance to move into first place on the line. Fordham currently sits in third place in the league with a 4-0-2 record and 12 points. The soccer club trails the league leader, Dynamo, by a mere two points, and second place Brooklyn FC 2 by just 1 point. Team Co-captain Diana Kokoszka, FCLC ’12, thinks that the team is in a good spot this year. “I think we’re doing really well this year,” Kokoszka said. “There’s been a greater commitment to attendance for games and there has been more communication when people aren’t going to come. It’s been working really well on the field because we have enough time to make sure we have substitutes.” Kokozka’s co-captain, David
Wall, FCLC ’12, felt the reason the team is so close to the top is because of their chemistry. “We have some really excellent and talented players,” Wall said. “Everyone is a team player and no one is selfish. They won’t just take on multiple defenders by themselves.” Of the players on the team, Kokoszka feels that the younger members can give a big boost to the team.. “Graham Smith (FCLC ’14) and Russell Parker (FCLC ’14) are two great young players,” Kokoszka said. “They are both aggressive and strong on offense. Graham is versatile and can play anywhere; he adapts to the role of wherever he is on the field. Russell is a great playmaker who can make things happen.” Despite these advantages, Wall feels that there are difficulties facing this team. “I think one of the biggest problems is the budget,” Wall said. “We have the same budget as every other club, but most clubs use their money on events. Our events are our games which
“ We have some really excellent and talented
players. Everyone is a team player and no one is selfish. They won’t just take on multiple defenders by themselves.” –
we have every week. We need more money for things like equipment and training. I think that the organization just needs to be more sensitive to the fact that a sports club needs more than just events to be operational.” In regards to the training, Wall feels that the club just needs better facilities to train at. “Obviously at Lincoln Center we just have a basketball court and we need a regular field to play at,” Wall said. “It’s hard when you go to a field to practice and there are random people on the pitch. We can’t kick people
DAVID WALL, FCLC ‘12
Team Co-Captain
off because we don’t have the field reserved and that costs money that we don’t have.” The team is currently selftrained by the captains. It is a role that Wall relishes. “I love helping people play,” Wall said. “Diana and I aren’t at the top of the game. We know there are players who are more experienced or talented. When our teammates make suggestions, we listen to their input. It’s nice because everyone learns to play and has fun.” Kokoszka found that it was a harder role to adapt to as captain.
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“It’s tough because I wasn’t a starting player last year. Sometimes I wonder if people question my credibility and I struggle to maintain team leadership. But we’ve been winning lately and morale has been high.” Now all of the focus will be on this week’s matchup with the top team. A win would put Fordham right where they want to be, but a loss would cripple the club’s hopes for a championship. “This is big game this week,” Kokoszka said. “They’re an established football club in Brooklyn with a large rotation. It’ll be interesting and I hope everyone shows up and brings their A game.” Wall added that if the team wanted to win a championship they must win all of their remaining games. “I think we can win a championship; we just need the first place team to slip up,” Wall said. “If we beat them this week that’s the slip up we need. We just need to put all our concentration on that.”
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Sports
April 19, 2012 THE OBSERVER
www.fordhamobserver.com
Fordham Freshmen Win 3 on 3 Basketball Tournament By RANDY NARINE Sports Editor
The Fordham 3 on 3 Basketball Tourney kicked off as a fierce competition on April 15 with 7 teams vying for the title as Lincoln Center’s best squad. When the dust had settled it was Josh Tarpav, Forham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) ’15, Tristan Paguio, FCLC ’15 and Yuta Kobayashi, FCLC ’15, who came away as tournament champions.
“ We’ve been
playing with each other so long, we know what each of us is good at; we’ve developed a great chemistry on the court. ” TRISTAN PAGUIO, FCLC ’15
The three ballers have had a lot of time to mesh their games since they first met seven months ago. “Basically I posted in the freshmen Facebook group at the beginning of the year,” Paguio said. “I asked everyone if they wanted to play and Josh responded. After that Yuta came and we’ve been playing together ever since September.” Paguio felt that the length of time that the three have played together played a pivotal role in helping them claim the championship. “We’ve been playing with each other so long, we know what each of us is good at; we’ve developed a great chemistry on the court,” Paguio said.
COURTESY OF OJALA NAEEM
Freshmen Josh Tarpav, Yuta Kobayashi and Tristan Paguio gutted out a strong performance to win Fordham’s 3 on 3 Basketball Tournament.
The team of Tarpav, Paguio and Kobayashi won three games en route to their matchup in the finals. The three champions got off to a slow start and fell behind 9-3 in the final round. “We went down and Yuta made a couple of jumpshots,” Paguio said. “After that we just fed the hot hand and tied it up 10-10.” The rest of the game was a close battle, but the 7-1 run really helped the champions snatch momentum. They fed off of the run to win the final game 21-18. “We just went out and played,” Tarpav said. “Competition-wise
there were a lot of people we had seen around. It was more about winning against them than just we’re freshmen and that’s why we wanted to win.” Paguio added, “I was really hyped after we won.” One positive aspect is this tournament had a bigger outcome than the last 3 on 3 tournament that was held earlier in the school year. However, for a campus with about 1800 students, 21 students is a very low turnout. “I would have liked to see a lot more teams play,” Paguio said. “Seven teams is too low and it
Think we’re dropping the ball on something?
would be nice if some girls played. However I would rather people play who are passionate. I would rather people who care about basketball than a lot of people who casually know about it because I like competition.” Tarpav added, “There was some good teams. At Lincoln Center you don’t expect a lot of basketball players but a lot of people came out. Everyone was ready to play and it was a lot of fun.” When asked about the size of the competition, Tarpav felt that it could be even bigger. “The message
needs to go out further,” Tarpav said. “A lot of people didn’t know until two to three days before. Maybe if we had some more posters around Lincoln Center. Also we have a heavy commuter population and if we can get the message out to the them, we can have a bigger tournament.” The champions were excited about their win and would be happy to do it all over again. “We are definitely going to keep the squad in tact and come back next year to defend our title,” Tarpav said.
Proudly Welcomes
NOVELIST
Alice McDermott 2012 D’Angelo Endowed Chair in the Humanities
Write for us.
T
he two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and National Book Award winner joins the English faculty of St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences this spring semester. Professor McDermott’s visit engages and inspires students through on-campus events including a fiction-writing workshop, individual meetings and public lectures. Established in 2007, the Peter P. and Margaret A. D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities promotes excellence in teaching and scholarly exchange.
Visit:
www.stjohns.edu/mcdermott
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