MAY 2014

BARD FREE PRESS

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY

MAY 2014

VOLUME XV ISSUE 8

bard free press EDITOR IN CHIEF naomi lachance

PHOTO EDITOR olivia crumm

CULTURE EDITOR duncan barile

ONLINE EDITOR max wortman

MANAGING EDITOR leela khanna

ARTS EDITOR sam williams

EDITOR AT LARGE levi shaw-faber

CREATIVE DIRECTOR abby zieve

OPINION EDITOR anne rowley

SPORTS EDITOR avery mencher

NEWS EDITOR akshita bhanjdeo

BARDIVERSE EDITOR connor gadek

COPY EDITOR madi garvin

EDITORS EMERITUS will anderson j.p. lawrence rebecca swanberg

cover by kathryn palmieri

NEWS. 04 CULTURE. 10 COMMENCEMENT. 16 BARDIVERSE. 20 SPORTS. 24 OPINION. 26

photo by kathryn palmieri

[ TERMS ] the free press reserves the right to edit all submissions for spelling, grammar,

and coherence. we protect our student journalists’ first amendment rights and accept the responsibilities that accompany that freedom. content decisions are

made by the editorial board, and the free press will not print anything libelous or discriminatory in nature. anonymous submissions can only be printed if the writers consult with the editorial board first.

all articles in the features and opinion sections reflect the opinions of the authors, not those of the free press editorial board or staff. responses to opinions are totally welcome and can be sent to bardfreepress@gmail.com, as can letters to the editors.

all letters submitted to the free press will be considered for publication unless the writer requests otherwise. they will be edited for space, content and grammar.

Madeline’s sassy honesty embodies the Free Press ethos. She joined because she “just wanted to learn InDesign” but left the Free Press as the unfiltered voice of the paper. Her advice has helped countless Bard students. Bard was so lost this spring that we had to tap into her wisdom one last time.

Will’s actual, honest-to-god Tinder photo was taken in the Free Press office. That probably tells you something about Will.

He’d sit down at the computer with his headphones on, and hours later he’d magically made all the articles look good on the page. We wish he’d share his secrets with us. Also, he once bought an e-cigarette so he could work all night and never take a break.

Over the past 4 years, if you were looking for Rebecca you would find her riding ponies. And if not that, she was writing about ponies. And if not that, she was bringing peace to the Free Press. And if she wasn’t doing that, she was covered in glitter singing in a meadow. We’ll miss her role as voice of reason most of all.

BYE BYE SENIORS

Lucas, 22

Emily is the most creative person we’ve ever met. She knows exactly where to place a scanned condom and is probably the reason why a lot of people look through the Free Press without actually reading it. She once spent over 12 straight hours on an infographic. It was a pretty chill infographic. She is also a really good dancer, especially sitting on her knees in a rolling chair.

One of the worst Lucas stories has to do with the Sunday morning when Lucas showed up to the office with the worst hangover in the history of alcohol. It was rough. But after hours of nursing Gatorade he managed to write a perfect article.

Lucas is like that. He also wrote two sprojs and one was on Kierkegaard, so we know he’s smart.

w. love from editor emeritus kurt schmidlein ‘13:

Lawrence makes lists of all the punctuation he uses in all of his writing. He also likes to write sports plays on our chalk board.

We’re not really sure how this correlates with the writing itself, but he must be doing something right because he writes really well. He is going to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism next year, which is kind of cool.

“These senior FPers, they’re the best. They taught me so much about writing and journalism and design, and they did so in the funniest of ways.

They brought grace to the difficult stories, humor to the weird, decency to the tragic, and quality to them all. The FP is better for their work, and so is Bard. “

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GET A JOB OR GO HOME INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS RACE AGAINST THE VISA CLOCK

BY LEELA KHANNA “I don’t know what you’ve been hearing out there, but there’s a lot of anxiety among the international students right now,” says Manishka Kalupahana, the international students advisor at Bard. I’m sitting across from her in her office in Sottery Hall on a Friday afternoon, staring at a pile of files and paperwork stacked high on a corner of her desk. Things are pretty busy this time of year, and it’s hard to get to everything, she comments, after noticing me eye all the paperwork.

International students studying at any accredited four-year institute are granted student visas, which permit them to stay in the United States as full-time students.

Although each student visa is granted on a case-by-case basis, international students generally have at most three months, or 90 days, to find full-time employment after the time they graduate. For many, three months is not enough time to get settled, let alone find employment.

“Unless your parents are willing to support you financially, you can’t afford to live here without a job for three to four months,” says Kalupahana.

For Anam Nasim ‘13, going back to her home country after graduation was not part of her career plan. Born and raised in Pakistan, Nasim majored in math at Bard and graduated last May with the hopes of finding a job in New York City. She began the process of searching for jobs early in the fall of her senior year, well aware that as an

international student she was at a disadvantage in an already competitive job market.

“Compared to an American citizen it is harder to get jobs because two things have to match: your qualifications and the legal issues,” Nasim said. “The main issue after graduating from Bard for international students is to find a company that sponsors work visas. The job market is already tough, and the hard part is not only to find a job, but to convince the company that I am the best in comparison to other American citizens.”

International students planning on finding a job after graduation must file for Optional Practical Training (OPT), which allows them to stay in the United States for at most one year on their student visas to gain practical training to complement their field of studies.

After a year, students will need to be sponsored for a work visa by their employer. But dealing with the legal issues involved with sponsoring a non-resident is something many companies, especially start-up firms, don’t want to deal with.

“You cannot start out as an assistant role, you need to have a certain expertise that the employer wants,” said Nasim. “Employers, such as a sales firm, will not sponsor a work visa for an entry-level sales position because they can hire anyone for that role.”

Nasim’s early planning and determination to find a job paid off. She works for an expert network firm called Coleman Research, and she is part of their client analysis team.

While Nasim’s math and finance background has provided her with expertise in data analysis, jobs for international students studying more typically liberal arts fields are tougher to find. According to Kalupahana, students with a computer science background are generally the ones to find jobs the easiest because that is what the market is currently looking for.

“When international students have spent four years at Bard there are anxieties on multiple levels,” Kalupahana said. “One thing they consider is whether they can go back home and fit into the home environment, because most of them, if they go back home, will have to live with their immediate families, and the dynamics may not work well. It’s not just about finding a job here.”

The other option for students, which Kalupahana says is easier in terms of visa formalities, is graduate school.

“Some are pretty set on going to graduate school and that’s all they want to do, and most of the international students who apply for graduate school know that that is their first choice,” says Kalupahana. “Especially if you are a science student, the opportunities you get in the U.S. are much larger than what you can get back home, and this mismatch is a driving force to go to grad school, so they can look at long-term opportunities.”

This holds true for Rachit Neupane ’13, an international student from Nepal, who came to Bard with the intention of staying for

graduate studies as well.

“I had planned to go to grad school directly so I wouldn’t have to deal with all complications associated with visa status process,” said Neupane, who is now getting his Masters in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “There aren’t many research institutions or companies in Nepal, so [if I had gone back], I’d have applied for whatever I could find and started applying to grad schools abroad right away.”

For students who don’t want to stay in the United States, but are not quite sure of their options abroad, the situation is a bit more complicated.

“There are no options, really,” says senior Louis Bonhoure, an anthropology and human rights joint major. I’m sitting with him and another Bard senior Vitor Carvalho outside the campus center after Bonhoure has just completed the Bike Co-op’s Tour de Franzia. When I ask them whether they have better job opportunities back home, they both laugh and agree that their options anywhere are bad.

Carvalho, a film major doesn’t plan on staying in the United States after commencement. He hopes to go to India and learn documentary filmmaking. “To get a job in film here I would start off as an intern, so I would rather just go somewhere else where I feel that I can do something that will teach me more, rather than stay here and go through the whole ‘I got to go up in the ladder.’”

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“When international students have spent four years at Bard there are anxieties on multiple levels...It’s not just about finding a job here.”

“There’s either OPT or go get fucked at home where the economy is terrible,” says Bonhoure.

“Of course, I would like to go back to my home country where my granny can make me good food, but otherwise…”

Bonhoure holds a British passport but spent much of his life traveling around the world with his parents, both of whom are humanitarian workers, and went to high school at the Woodstock School in India. As far as he’s concerned, Bard doesn’t prepare undergraduates for the job market, and he has no intention of staying in the United States.

Back in Kalupahana’s office, her cell phone rings and she begins talking to a senior on the other line wondering about some form submission deadline. “Did you read my email that went out a couple days after senior projects were due?” Kalupahana asks the student. There’s a hint of weariness in her voice as she assures the caller that there is still time till the form submission deadline. With the number of people always trying to reach her, especially frantic seniors, Kalupahana has given up trying to make appointments with students. She comments that making appointments goes against the Bard ethos, even though that would allow her to get more work done. But even so, she keeps her office door open, almost always accepting drop-ins.

Nearly 12 to 13 percent of Bard’s student body consists of international students, and Kalupahana says that the number of international students has been steadily increasing for the past four years. Kalupahana is the sole coordinator

for all activities related to undergraduate and graduate international students affairs at Bard.

She takes care of all formalities — from student visas, to taxes, to post-graduate employment authorization forms. When asked why there is only one coordinator to deal with all undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate international students, Kalupahana says that she has requested for at least more part-time help, but it may take a while for the college to notice.

As Kalupahana sees it, the best thing that international students can do in order to figure out their plans is to begin networking early on in their Bard career. Last semester, she organized meetings between Bard alumni to meet with current international students to help share knowledge and network basis for student’s interested in staying and finding employment.

She recommends that students get internships through programs like the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program so that employers can begin to notice them.

For some, like Nasim, who decided to stay in New York despite the odds against her, the hard work paid off. After doing an internship at a software company for over half a year, Nasim secured her current job in finance, something she was striving for.

“I wanted to try to make it here and fight,” said Nasim. “I wanted to exhaust all of my options, exhaust all of my energy in finding something I really enjoyed, and in my heart when I knew that I had done it all — I tried it all, talked to many people, interned places, I would be happy to go back.”

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STUDENT LABOR DIALOGUE LOBBIES FOR HORTICULTURIST

BY JOHANNA COSTIGAN Bridget Maple works at Bard. Both her parents are currently employed or have been employed by Bard, in addition to other family members who currently work here.

She is also a Bard graduate.

However, since being underpaid and unfairly treated by the administration during her time working at Bard, she no longer feels the same pride in the school that she once used to.

Bridget was hired in January of 2012 as a part-time horticulture intern while she completed her Horticulture Certificate classes at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens. Her contract was to end on June 30, 2012, coinciding with her graduation from the aforementioned program as well as the start of the College’s new fiscal year on July 1, at which time she was told that she’d be offered a full-time horticulturist position.

The promise of a permanent full-time position with benefits is what initially motivated Bridget to take the internship, despite the significant pay decrease compared to what she was making in the private landscaping industry. But instead, the contract she was given categorized her as a “temporary full-time horticulturist” effective April 16, 2012 through June 30, 2012.

According to Steve Pinchbeck, a union representative for Buildings and Grounds, this was not an appropriate situation in which to hire a temporary worker. He said that temporary workers are supposed to be hired only when an employee is leaving for a fixed amount of time and is going to return to work.

“The nature of Bridget’s position was permanent,” he said. “It was never filling a temporary gap.”

Despite this, she accepted the temporary job, hoping that she would soon be hired for a full-time position. She worked 35 hours a week, at the same rate of pay as when she was an intern, $15 an hour, without benefits.

Over the next year, she received three additional written job appointments extending her position as a temporary full-time employee.

Throughout this time period, she did the same labor as her four male co-workers, including the same responsibilities expected of a level II horticulturist at Bard. In the early spring of 2012, Bridget became a CNLP (Certified Nursery and Landscape Professional), a degree that three of her colleagues had, for which they were compensated an extra $0.45 per hour, and she was not.

“I have to stress that throughout this time period, and with each new extension, I was still holding onto the hope that a full-time with benefits position was actually being created for me,” Bridget said.

But she was frustrated with her financial situation. She was frustrated by the fact that she was paying her health insurance out of pocket, and she was frustrated that she wasn’t being treated the same way as her male counterparts.

In March 2013, Bridget was offered another extension to the same position, and finally spoke honestly with her co-workers and a few of the B&G Union stewards. She learned that, historically, Bard temporary full-time employees were paid the same rate as their peers and offered benefits.

“I was so disheartened. I felt like I had been toyed with over the past 12 months without regard for my needs as a laborer or as a person. I finally went on the offensive,” she said.

“With the primary goal of finally being hired to the full-time horticulturist position the administration had been dangling in front of me like a carrot,” Bridget continued, “I actively advocated for myself and ultimately reached out to the student body (via the students of the Student Labor Dialogue) to pressure the administration into doing the right thing.”

The SLD stressed the fact that she had been underpaid, which the administration was quick to correct by increasing her salary to the appropriate hourly wage paid to a level II horticulture employee with a license.

By May 1, 2013, after completing the threemonth probationary period, she finally being paid the same wage as her colleagues.

After being freed from the confines of probation, Bridget felt comfortable bringing up the issue of her backpay with the administration. But the administration refuses to compensate her for the work she did, as a totally qualified and competent worker, during the time in which she was unjustifiably considered a “temporary worker.”

The college denies that she was ever considered a “temporary full-time employee,” even though she has multiple letters of appointment referring to her as exactly that, signed by Fiona Smarrito of the Human Resources Department. The administration attributes this mislabeling to a clerical error.

According to them, Bridget was an intern up until her official full-time hiring a year ago.

“To me, it is infinitely clear that I have been significantly wronged,” she said. “For almost a year, I was underpaid by at least $6 an hour while doing the same work and possessing the same certification as my coworkers in horticulture.”

Had she been paid the same salary as her colleagues during this amount of time, she would have made an additional $10,000, not including benefits and insurance.

“The only reason that I have a full-time job right now is because the students spoke up on my behalf. I am positive beyond even a single doubt that if it were not for the student movement, I would no longer be employed at Bard.”

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NEW VILLAGE DORMS WILL REPLACE TRAILERS CONSTRUCTION STARTS THIS SUMMER

BY NAOMI LACHANCE As soon as next week, ground will be broken for two new dormitories. Named after Sarah McCausland and Evelina Brown in memory of the first-years who were killed in a car accident earlier this year, the dorms will be the final buildings in the Village neighborhood.

Vice President for Administration Jim Brudvig estimates they will take eight or nine months to finish, at which point the college plans to return temporary trailers Hudson and Catskill, which are rented on an annual basis.

“It’s good for us. It’s a good deal,” said Brudvig of the new village dormitories. He added that construction will be funded “in connection with board-supported internal funding.”

The budget for the project is $5.5 to 6 million.

There are several benefits to building village-style dormitories. The college already owns the plans, so they do not have to pay an architect to design a new building. They are heated and cooled with a geothermal heat exchange system, a sustainable practice.

The style of the building is relatively cost effective: the cost of a village dorm comes to about $60,000 a head, while in a Robbins dorm, for example, the cost is about $85,000 a head.

The two dorms will house 95 to 100 students in total. They will be located on the very northern end of the village, near Villages J, K, and L. One of the two will include a fully furnished basement.

The dorms, according to Brudvig, will be an improved version of the current villages. They will have improved insulation and the siding will be made of fiber cement siding Hardie Plank rather than the current villages’ pine siding.

“We believe students like living in the village style,” Brudvig said, adding that construction will begin as soon as possible.

photo by olivia crumm

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BARD IN TOP 10 FOR CONSERVATION COMPETITION

BY NAOMI LACHANCE

Bard EcoReps hold events throughout the year to teach sustainable practices. They have posters, programming, and tabeling. For a few weeks in April, though, the events were part of a national competition among colleges to reduce electricity usage. And it paid off: Bard finished in the top ten in the Nationwide Electricity Conservation Competition Campus Conservation Nationals (CCN).

Bard as an institution reduced their energy usage by 24 percent during this period. Other schools in the top 10 reduced their energy usage by between 11 percent and 28 percent. This included unplugging vampire electronics, reducing thermostats when not in the room, changing incandescent light bulbs to compact-fluorescent bulbs, and reducing daily water consumption.

The competition looked at 109 schools and 1330 buildings. More than 265,000 students from more than 100 colleges and universities competed. Collectively, 2.2 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and 476,00 gallons of water were conserved between February 3 and April 25.

First-year Carl Amritt is south campus EcoReps coordinator. He saw the CCN as the perfect way to educate students about how to conserve energy. Events like stargazing and movie screenings got students to unplug. He hopes to help teach his peers how to conserve.

Of course, the results have a margin of error. It wasn’t possible for the Bard students who monitored the electrical output to have an exact gauge of how much energy each individual uses. Still, they tracked kilowatt hours every Monday and Friday.

Bard has several other initiatives that show a dedication to going green. President Botstein signed a pledge through the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) that the campus would be carbon neutral by 2035. The Bard Office of Sustainability recently received a grant to pave the Olin parking lot in an ecologically friendly way. Green Mountain Electric Company has given a $35,000 grant to Bard to build a solar through their Sun Club initiative to put solar thermal in South Hall.

“We anticipated being a green campus. No one anticipated top 10,” Amritt said.

The CCN is organized by Lucid, the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), the National Wildlife Federation and the Alliance to Save Energy.

INTRODUCING THE MIX

BY LUCAS OPGENORTH The newest addition to Bard’s collection of student-run publications is meant for listening, not reading.

This semester, junior Doug Friedman and sophomore Elizabeth Chiappini led the curation of a compilation CD, intended to reflect the music that Bard bands wrote and recorded in the 2013-2014 academic year. Out of the 28 submissions they received, Friedman, Chiappini and The Mix’s other two staff members selected nine songs to appear on the CD. The Mix aims to be as eclectic as possible, with the genres represented in the inaugural edition ranging from electronic to rock to folk to “sample-based spoken word.”

“I like the idea that it’s a physical archive that’s a taste of Bard music right now,” Chiappini said, adding that she hopes that several years from now people will return to editions of The Mix to see what kind of music Bard was producing during any given year.

Moving forward, the two hope to produce a CD every semester, expand their budget, and include more genres — Friedman mentioned that he would like to see some classical music make it on the disc.

For its first run, 300 copies of The Mis were produced, many of which were distributed at Kline on May 11 and at that evening’s Punk Rock Prom.

“I think there’s a lot going on right now in terms of the music scene at Bard getting more organized, but still on a DIY level,” Friedman said. “We’re just trying to add to that.”

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THE ABDUCTED NIGERIAN SCHOOLGIRLS AND PRESENCE OF BOKO HARAM

BY AVERY LAMB At the break of dawn on April 15, over 250 schoolgirls, between the ages of 16 and 18, were kidnapped by an extremist terrorist group from a boarding school in Northeastern Nigeria.

They presently remain missing. They are in enormous danger, and face the prospect of being sold as sexual slaves and into involuntary marriages. This incident is one in a number of attacks by the group, known as Boko Haram, which has devastated areas of Northeastern Nigeria in recent years, especially targeting educational institutions and their students.

I spoke with Chiamaka Oham, who lives in the capital of Nigeria, Abuja, and is currently studying at a boarding school in Connecticut. A day before the young women were abducted, Boko Haram set off two bombs at a crowded bus station in her city, killing 88 people and injuring at least 200.

We spoke about girls’ abduction from Chibok, and the Nigerian government’s response. Although she explained that government schools in parts of Nigeria prone to attacks have been closed for security reasons, generally the government doesn’t take measures to protect the right to education. “The only thing holding Nigeria back is corruption,” she said.

In response to heartwrenching pleas for the girls’ return, the Nigerian government claimed they were unequipped to perform rescue operations. “The government is only unequipped because they choose to be that way,” Chiamaka told me. “Nigeria doesn’t lack money, and we certainly do not lack resources.”

Knowledge of government corruption is widespread: she explained that the average Nigerian politician is extremely wealthy, “and it’s not money that they can legally account for.”

Instead of increasing military defense, or providing basic amenities to the general population, members of the government often launder the money or store it in foreign banks. “Or they use the money to take care of their families and send their children to expensive schools in foreign countries,” Chiamaka said, “where they do not have to worry about Boko Haram attacking them in the middle of their final exams.”

When she went to the American International School of Abuja, Chiamaka told me that special protections were provided by the American embassy and the president, because his children attended the school. “The security around that school in particular is very tight,” she explained.

“They receive a lot of threats.”

The outstanding surge violence exhibited by Boko Haram in the eastern region of Nigeria, on the border of Cameroon and Chad, is made possible in part due to dark recesses in the formidable Sambisa Forest that naturally camouflage the insurgents. The Forest, which had previously been designated by the English colonial government as a game reserve, is known for sizable thorns and is impenetrable in many areas without a cutlass or tool to cut foliage.

It is safe to make the assumption that the environment into which these girls have been forced

poses significant health risks. Two girls have reportedly died from snake bites. They are currently in dense forests, thick with malaria-infested mosquitoes, eating inconsistently, and forced to hydrate on dirty water that will inevitably make them ill. Needless to say, they are the recipients of extreme psychological trauma, and very likely sexual assault.

Since the young women were abducted, outraged protesters have mobilized in urban centers around the world. Their indignant call to action has grown louder, breaking the silence that has till this point shrouded Nigeria and it’s mounting internal political crisis from mainstream and social media attention. Former victims of religious or ideological persecution are campaigning beside victims of gender-based discrimination and violence for the girls’ return — including 16-yearold Malala Yousafzai, who survived a shooting by Taliban insurgents in Pakistan and continues to campaign for the right to education.

Significant problems have arisen, however, within the platform of international public and media response to the event. For example, the women featured in photos disseminated by the popular #BringBackOurGirls campaign have absolutely no relationship to the kidnappings, yet their faces have featured almost infinitely online to elicit sympathy for the Nigerian women.

Amy Vitale, who captured the photographs in 2000 and 2011, explained to the New York Times that the subjects were from Guinea-Bissau, more than 1,000 miles from Nigeria. The young women featured in the photos were not victims, Vitale explained, so using the images and portraying them as victims was not truthful. “I realized the way Africa is generally portrayed in mainstream media is either wars, famine or stories like this terrible abduction,” Vitale continued. “So it’s ironic the story I was telling was that there is a beautiful world that lies between these two truths.”

A similar problem has arisen with the twitter campaign #RealMenDontBuyGirls, featuring images of celebrities like Sean Penn and Justin Timberlake holding signs reading the phrase. The photos have been tweeted thousands of times in connection with the abduction; however, most of the celebrity images were taken as far back as three years ago. After news emerged that the militant group were threatening the sell the girls, however, the old photos were widely re-posted and shared on social media sites.

These misinformed social media campaigns endorse the public opinion that celebrities must adorn a charitable cause in order to legitimate themselves, and that the general population can involve themselves superficially with a cause without truly knowing if their cause strikes at the core of the problem.

The extended period of time it has taken news

of the Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria to reach international attention, and the continuous propagation of misinformation surrounding the conflict demonstrates the inevitable disconnect of media and the status of local conditions in crisis zones and emphasizes the entanglement of the young women in an inaccessible, violent environment.

Public outcries implicate the Nigerian government, and force them to reexamine how they protect the right to education. It is questionable, however, if international outrage shakes the individual agents of Boko Haram. The U.N. has publically warned members that following the orders of Abubakar Shekau would implicate them for war crimes. It seems that this international resentment, though, would only fuel the merciless sentiments of a group whose title can be translated to “Western education is forbidden.”

How does human rights rhetoric affect individual actors, and independent terrorist networks, which exist far outside of the jurisdiction of international or national law? Does the enormous surge of international support for the girls, when witnessed and interpreted by the captors, jeopardize their safety?

Chiamaka, for her part, has faith in the resilience of the young women. “I would think that these girls are generally very street smart,” she said, “they’ve developed a ‘tough skin’” as a result of heightened risk of attacks on their village.

“Just like me, all they wanted was an education,” she said. “The only thing separating me from them are the circumstances.”

Since the young women were abducted, outraged protesters have mobilized in urban centers around the world. Their indignant call to action has grown louder, breaking the silence that has till this point shrouded Nigeria and it’s mounting internal political crisis from mainstream and social media attention.

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GOLDEN WOK: GIGI CHENG’S AUTHENTIC CHINESE MENU

BY JP LAWRENCE

photos by levi shaw-faber

All immigrants have some sort of story they tell themselves, some way to rationalize uprooting their family for a future in who knows where.

Listen to enough of these stories and you’ll encounter, over and over again, a peculiar hunger belonging to immigrants and their kids.

It’s the need to talk about food from back home.

Food often plays an outsized role in the stories immigrants tell. I know it does in mine. It definitely does for Gigi Cheng.

Gigi is the woman who runs Golden Wok, the Chinese restaurant in Red Hook. Gigi is the harried, stressed out, gregarious person who just walked outside the restaurant to give a handicapped man his meal. She takes the money and goes inside to do what seems like five thousand other things. It’s Mothers’ Day, which means it’s going to be a very busy day for Gigi, the mother of two boys.

I sit at a table underneath a massive picture of the Hong Kong skyline. Hong Kong is where Gigi was born. Her parents owned a restaurant there, a big 300-seat sit-down joint. She started

working there when she was 14 and left for cooking school four years later. They were strict at school, but when you’re born into a restaurant family, you already have the basics, Gigi says.

She learned all the ways to cook a chicken in school. She met her husband there, too. After graduating, they opened up a restaurant in Hong Kong together. After a while, her husband said he wanted to come to America. And Gigi said yes.

A local cop walks in to pick up his order and buy a bottle of Snapple. “What are you doing working on Mothers’ Day?” He asks.

“Oh look at me,” Gigi says. “Working on Mothers’ Day. I guess I forgot.” She laughs, gives the cop his order.

Gigi was always sociable, but when she came to America, everything and everyone was so strange. She remembers she came to New York City in the summertime, thinking to herself, “Woo! My god. Everyone here is so big.” She knew some English, but it was the pronunciation that got her. She learned English through grit and mistakes and a few classes here and there.

Mostly, she focused on work. She and her husband left the city for Hyde Park, N.Y. At the suggestion of Fred Feldman, for a long time Bard College’s tennis coach, they moved to Red Hook. There, she and her husband and their two sons and various cooks kept the restaurant open almost every day of the year. She said they used to close for Christmas, but that didn’t last long.

A student walks in and orders Generals Tso’s chicken. She pronounces it “General Toes.” There actually was a General Tso, but he never ate the dish named after him. It was invented in America, like most food found in Chinese restaurants.

Most dishes are wildly different from those found on the Chinese mainland and are the product of decades of evolution to fit the American palate.

Think blander, thicker, sweeter.

Some Chinese restaurants have secret menus filled with food from back home. I ask Gigi about hers. “It’s no secret,” she says. She had placed new items on the wall behind her. Bok choy and pork belly. Hot black bean twice-cooked pork.

Dan Mei Fun soup. Ma po tofu. Eggplant in garlic sauce. This is Gigi’s authentic menu. The spicy stuff. I order a dish off it, and I want it as hot as possible.

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Gigi doesn’t understand why some people are scared of the food on her authentic menu. She cooked chicken feet once, and customer came in and gawked. It was the same when Gigi cooked a fish with its head. People don’t like to be reminded their food once wiggled.

But where Gigi’s from, food is served whole. The skin and feet and parts people throw away — that’s part of the flavor of the food. “When I cook, when I’m making home cooking, I use that natural flavor,” Gigi said. “I don’t use salt. I don’t use pepper or soy sauce. You just cook it for four hours in its own flavors. It just tastes really good. I tell you the truth.”

A human thrust in a new environment has to translate so much about themselves. Their words and their jokes and their dreams. But food is different.

Food can be a vessel through which the old world can still be tasted. A bite of the right home-cooked dish and the homesick travel across time and space to where home was, where the food was real and the food was good. Nostalgia is like MSG for memories, intensifying everything. For Gigi, her authentic menu was a tie to home, something that didn’t need translation.

Gigi sits at the corner table. She had been eating, but now, she is still. She is facing the blank white wall in front of her. But then the phone rings with a sound and jarring reverberation that can only be described as evil, and Gigi peels herself away from her chair to answer another call. “Fifteen minutes,” she says and she puts down the phone and falls back into her chair and exhales. But it’s a short breath, before the phone rings again.

“Happy Mothers’ Day!” A customer says as he walks in.

“Hello hello!” Gigi, still on the phone, says.

“Looks like they got you working. Never a break.”

Gigi smiles stiffly, as people do when they’re waiting on someone. Her two sons are the reasons she does all of this.

I pick at my food and watch Gigi take another call.

When I was growing up, my mom would make me Filipino food. When I was three she took me from the Philippines to Minnesota, the land of tater tot hot dish. Pork adobo and lumpia were a rare treat, because my mom had to work so much. But I never really appreciated it. I was growing up and in the process of translating myself.

When I left after high school, I began searching for food that reminded me of the Philippines. But I realized, as Larissa Pham, a Vietnamese writer, once wrote, “It feels like cheating, to write about culture by writing about food.” Home is never just having the right peppers or sauces. People try to connect to their heritage with food, but it’s the people connected to the food that count. The food from back home mattered because my mother made it for me, because it mattered to her, and because when she worked and worked, she did it for me.

I ask Gigi to pack up my food, and I drive home, and I call my mom.

Nostalgia is like MSG for memories, intensifying everything. For Gigi, her authentic menu was a tie to home, something that didn’t need translation.

culture

12

#BASED

BY OLIVIA FORMAN “By the graces of the Based God, we will finally have a Spring Fling act that will be compatible with the karaoke machines we use as speakers,” says senior Jessica Merliss in reaction to the announcement that, at 11 p.m. on Saturday, May 3, Lil B, or the Based God, would headline Bard College’s annual weekend concert.

For as long as I have seen Spring Fling at Bard, both the booking of talent and the quality of the sound system have been under heavy fire from legions of students. The Spring Fling Committee’s selection of Lil B is a choice that threatens to enrage Bardians unfamiliar with him as an artist, because, not only must you be a fan of hip-hop to know and love Lil B, you must also be an attentive participant of the Internet culture that has been instrumental in Lil B’s success.

If you are like senior Lucas Baumgart, who when asked about Lil B said “I wish I could say I know who that is, but I have no idea,” your first Google inquiries would lead you to his most popular music video, “Wonton Soup”.

Hip-hop fan or not, Lil B’s painful monotone delivery, awkward sound production, and absurd lyrics are bound to drop jaws and raise eyebrows: “Then I park my car (WO!), then I fuck your bitch (WO!), Eat that wonton soup (WO!), wet like Wonton Soup (SWAG!)”.

Even Spring Fling Committee member sophomore Alec Petty admits that Lil B “may be a ‘bad’ rapper,” but insists that the Based God has birthed a movement standing for much more than his music.

The philosophy behind Lil B deserves to be explained to Bard, even if the insight won’t appease those who won’t get past the facevalue aesthetics.

When I asked for comments from those on the committee, the response was like the worship of indoctrinated followers: “Lil B is a cult rap legend who will bless the student body with his positive and loving music and energy,” says committee member and sophomore Sam Williams.

Petty says “Lil B is a positive force in rap music; he may be a ‘bad’ rapper but Lil B is always fighting against the odds and doing things by his own standards.”

Why such devotion?

A master of our Digital Age, Lil B has created his own world, slang, and philosophy. He brands himself in his Twitter bio as “Mogul, First Rapper Ever To Write And Publish A Book at 19, Film Score, Composer, Producer, Director/ Photo/Branding/Marketing/Historical Online Figure”.

Lil B has over 75 mixtapes, two several hundred-song compilations, a Myspace

anthology of 700 tracks and 855 “Based” Freestyles. He’s singularly prolific and uniquely vulnerable for it, making him perhaps the rawest example of a rapper in the Age of the Internet.

Key to our understanding of why his presence at Bard is notable is the meaning of “Based.” The Based God himself defined the expression for Complex Magazine: “Based means being yourself. Not being scared of what people think about you. Not being afraid to do what you wanna do. Being positive. When I was younger, based was a negative term that meant like dopehead, or basehead. People used to make fun of me.

They’d use it as a negative. And what I did was turn that negative into a positive. I started embracing it like, ‘Yeah, I’m based,’ I made it mine.”

Petty says, “I like to think of it as the YouTube generation’s Tao or Zen. Based is a complete and totaling effort to be at peace with everything and give it all back to the people: He’s building a school in the Bay Area!”

If Kanye and Jay-Z represent the opulence of hip-hop, Lil B sits like the Buddha on the opposite end of the spectrum. While Jay-Z buys his 2-year-old a $75K purebred Arabian horse and a $3 million private island, Lil B leads a movement for the sake of his fans and follows almost all of his 870K Twitter followers right back.

It may be ironic that his music isn’t exactly what we can call ‘good,’ but Lil B’s performance at Bard had the makings to be a phenomenal experience. However, other than saying I thoroughly enjoyed myself, I don’t see value in my “reviewing” Lil B’s performance, because I understood my presence there as a witness to music rooted in a youth culture not my own: the rowdy hip-hop heads of the Bay Area. It would be good to see Bard embrace the sincerity of Lil B in place of our usual love of irony that served us so well when Kevin Lyttle launched into his third encore of “Turn Me On” in 2012.

The Village Voice, in their Complete Guide to Understanding Lil B, makes an important distinction: “If you think any of this is meant as ironic, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Lil B fans understand there’s a difference between being funny and being ironic, and they wouldn’t follow a 23 year-old from Berkeley with such fervor if they were trying to prove how detached or cool they were.”

That night, Lil B brought his bright energy to our strange stage and had us chasing him into the parking lot until the moment his van door slid shut, a last “I love you!” gracing our ears.

photos by sam williams

13 culture

SPRING FLING SPRING FLING SPRING FLING SPRING FLING

culture

14

For some reason, the name on the door of Bennett Sims’ office is not his own. It’s unclear who this name belongs to, presumably a former occupant whose ghostly presence continues to haunt the bottom floor of Shafer House through the mysterious, makeshift plaque.

When I interviewed Sims, the only things in this office — aside from the raincoat, water bottle, and bike helmet that he brought — were a telephone, a pad of notepaper, and a magazine (most likely “Harper’s”) folded at its spine. That’s it. The walls and shelves were completely bare.

In addition to this perplexing temporary office, this past semester Bard provided Sims with housing, a $30,000 prize, and six months of unstructured time to work on whatever projects he brought with him; Sims is this year’s recipient of the Bard Fiction Prize, an award the college bestows to an emerging American writer under the age of 40.

It’s a pretty sweet deal.

“The Bard Fiction Prize is a uniquely generous residency in terms of how it’s structured and what the institution seems to want,” Sims said. “I guess the obverse side of that generosity is my own guilt as its recipient — this deeply internalized Catholicschoolboy guilt that, because I’ve been given this time, I have to use it in a really productive manner.”

began as a thesis from Sims’ senior year at Pomona. The project was, in Sims’ words, “an anatomy or phenomenology of the undead,” with each chapter devoted to a different body part, sensory modality, or behavior of the zombie.

“I was an English major; it was a weird English thesis,” he said.

Sims analyzed and juxtaposed representations of zombies in film, as metaphors in psychoanalysis, as thought experiments in mind-body philosophy, and as subjects in anthropological studies of Haitian folklore, in which the undead feature prominently.

“Even though these discourses aren’t in in any conversation with each other, I found there was a remarkable consistency in what the zombie is being invoked as a figure of,” he said.

The thesis served as a theoretical foundation for the novel, in which the narrator draws many of the thesis’ conclusions and has a similar critical lens to Sims’. The narrator at times thinks like a philosopher, a literary theorist, and a pop culture critic, providing a compelling perspective that relates zombies to our own experiences with memory, ethics, and personal relationships.

Sims attributes the birth of many of his philosophical interests to reading the fiction of David Foster Wallace, the late giant of contemporary fiction with whom Sims studied while at Pomona.

“He had a huge impact on my reading, just because he was such an inspiring figure of bottomless intellectual curiosity and

WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE UNDEAD? BARD FICTION PRIZE RECIPIENT BENNETT SIMS

BY LUCAS OPGENORTH

Besides write all day, read at night, and head to the gym every once in a while to “stay sane,” Sims has given readings—one at Bard and another in Rhinebeck—and held office hours and a film club for students.

The prize comes on the heels of Sims’ debut novel “A Questionable Shape,” which was published last year by the indie press Two Dollar Radio. It’s an account of a zombie outbreak in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, from the perspective of a well-educated, hyper-attentive, and intellectually curious narrator.” “A Questionable Shape” eschews the blood and gore of the common zombie tale and replaces them with musings on the subjective experiences of the undead and one’s ethical obligations to them. “[The novel] tries to triangulate three different perspectives on undeath,” Sims explained.

“Three different, almost ideological positions, concerning what zombies are and what their conscious experience might be.”

One character posits that the undead are subhuman, automaton beasts; another that they are mentally and physically compromised humans, deserving of the same rights and treatments of those who have managed to avoid the infection.

The narrator navigates a middle area between these views, and becomes obsessed by the exotic otherness of their form of consciousness, rather than a complete lack thereof. Sims shares this interest in consciousness.

“It seems that most of what literature is about is preserving conscious experience in language. So it was natural for me to write about the consciousness of a character interested in consciousness: an attentive person who watches other people and tries to reason his way into their thought processes.”

Bard seniors — who have a propensity towards moaning that they just spend a full year on a project that maybe only three people will read — will be interested to learn that the novel

omnivorousness,” Sims said.

He recounts exercises Wallace would lead in his writing workshops, in which he took messy or confusing sentences from the students’ manuscripts, distributed them to the class on strips of paper, and led discussions that aimed to parse out the grammar, syntax, or usage errors that plagued the writing.

“Rather than treating this as a rote, pedantic exercise in grammatical exactitude, the way he usually pitched this to us was as an exercise in empathy — he wanted you to always be mindful of the fact that the reader who was going to be seeing your sentence was another human being, and that clarity was a form of compassion,” Sims said.

Sims’ fondness for footnotes and the breadth of his characters’ cultural allusions have drawn comparisons to Wallace. Video games also work their way into the book, alongside ruminations on Agamben and Wordsworth. For Sims, games share literature’s effect of immersing yourself in another consciousness.

“You’re being given a rule-bound world, where you have to learn how to see and perceive your environment, and it’s different from the way you would see your everyday world,” he said. “And there’s this afterimage effect: once you leave the game, you find yourself still looking at the world that way, just in your apartment, evaluating the surfaces of walls or ledges in terms of their puzzle-solving applicability.”

Sims is vague on the projects he’s been working on while at Bard, saying that he’s been “spinning his wheels” on a few stories and “wading out into” a longer work, which may or may not eventually see the light of day.

To check out his published work, look for “A Questionable Shape” in the campus bookstore or pick up the Fall 2013 issue of “Conjunctions.”

15

: CASSIDY

TURNER

BY OLIVIA CRUMM Free Press: Where are you from?

Cassidy Turner: Los Angeles.

FP: Tell me about your project.

CT: My project is a little different from others, because it’s not really about a specific subject; it’s about conjuring an emotion and expressing a mood through a group of photos. It kind of evolved as the year went on, and would change every time I edited the pictures. It came out of my attempt to express a certain sentiment through each image.

FP: How did the result differ from your intentions?

CT: I started with some really specific guidelines. I wanted to photograph my family

and my family’s photo books and artifacts, then I realized I don’t really work that way and I have to let myself have the freedom to kind of just go with it.

FP: Where did the title “Dark Praises” come from?

CT: The project was dedicated to my grandpa who passed away so I wanted something that was like an elegy. It just had a ring to it, I kind of couldn’t get it out of my head once I thought of it. Titling isn’t my favorite thing to do; I like the viewer to figure it out.

FP: How has your art evolved at Bard?

CT: When I came to Bard I had never studied photo history; I took photo classes in high school but that was to learn the chemistry.

When I got here, I was looking at a ton of work and reading about it. That changed everything for me. I had no idea what I was doing when I first got here. It’s kind of funny to look back at my freshmen work. I think I kind of figured out a way to work that challenges me.

FP: What artists do you look to for inspiration?

CT: I looked at a lot of photographers that were using black and white and making light a subject. I was looking at Sally Mann who photographs her family, Judith Joy Ross, Emmet Gowin, Francesca Woodman, people that channel this sort of energy through their photos.

FP: What’s the most difficult part of taking photos?

CT: I think just feeling like I’m doing something that other people understand and appreciate. It’s easy to take a pretty picture, but it’s harder to make the viewer feel something while they’re looking at it.

FP: What’s the first photo you ever took?

CT: I built a pinhole camera out of scraps of wood in my first photo class when I was 14. I think I did a really cheesy self portrait of my feet.

FP: What do you order at DTR? CT: Since I live off campus I’ve been kind of missing DTR. I get a vegan burger wrap with avocado, chipotle, pickles.

culture

FEATURED ARTIST ARTIST FEATURED

photo by edan ward

bardiverse

18

I am not an activist. Yet if you asked me if I cared about the world, I would, without hesitation, answer ‘Yes.’ Albert Camus saw revolt as an innate part of our existence and that connecting to the struggles of others was something that occurred almost instantaneously upon revolt. As much as I want to believe this, that the mechanism for change in the world is within us all just waiting to be tapped, it doesn’t address why the connection to a worldwide struggle of issues beyond ourselves are often forgotten.

And then in those moments that we are able to form a sense of solidarity, there is still this question to answer: Is there anything we can possibly do?

Jesse Myerson ‘08, Occupy Wall Street ‘leader’ and author of “Onward: An Occupier’s Guide to Understanding the Current Crisis,” says there is.

Free Press: When we are all living our own lives, and some of us are just doing what we have to do to survive — how do you get people involved? How do you convince people that this is your fight too?”

Jesse Myerson: Yes, that is the question isn’t it?

Well I can’t rightly say that I know the answer to that question. Part of the thing with places like Montreal, and Chile, and other places that have had really successful student movements is that they have really established infrastructures and ways of organizing.

At Occupy we were starting from scratch and I think the way to do it, I mean, look: there are, especially among young people, a huge number of very bright, unemployed, alienated young people who make up sort of a natural organizing base. I think a disaffected petite bourgeoisie, especially of young people, especially of a generation that is much larger than the previous generation, and that is much more technologically savvy, is a really dangerous thing for a ruling class. And I am hoping the way to do it is to articulate a utopian ideology.

[The Occupy] movement was a really righteous but inarticulate ‘No.’ And I think that now, three years on, there is a real energy for proposals to extricate ourselves from the ‘No’ situation — especially a universal basic income.

FP: There are some states that use universal basic income, right?

JM: You know, food stamps are basically one.

All welfare programs are basically like some version of a minimum income. The idea is that we have enough that we could just subsidize everybody’s survival and allow everyone to just subsist just by straight money transfers is so simple.

It is also very inspiring, not just for passion but also for imagination. What would you do if you didn’t have to work all the time? This really appeals to a lot of people who are bright, have projects that they want to do and know that the production of community and culture is valuable but can’t figure out a way to survive off of it.

FP: That is the exact dilemma I am having now.

I feel like most things I am interested in doing will never make me any money, ever.

Myerson himself is a testament to a shift to the far-left in search of other work for policy that works. Despite being the son of two card-carrying Communists, he was a Democrat during the Bush years.

He would later participate in NYC Uncut, an activism group with a modest impact, whose members later went on to Occupy Wall Street.

To Myerson, Occupy was not only a catalyst for inspiring change, but a movement whose value he hopes will only truly be understood years down the line. That is, the formation of social movements years down the line will all credit there roots, in some way, to the Occupy movement. Now in a Post-Occupy world, activists look towards the next step.

I met with Myerson, in a Manhattan coffee shop in February to discuss what exactly this next step is.

A CONVERSATION WITH JESSE MEYERSON

BY RAJASRI NARASIMHAN

JM: We have to get out of a mode of thinking them to live without working in production. It that says that the only things that are valuable is a crisis no government is ready to respond are the things that could be made profitable. to, and they are just going to have to get ready.

FP: My head immediately goes there because As the crisis becomes more and more evident, that is the society we grow up in. That is the I think the articulation of an alternative like the way that they tell us we have to survive — we one we are trying to develop at the moment have to make money. will become increasingly needed. I hate this JM: They are closing down hospitals in Brooklyn sort of line of thinking, because it’s hoping for because they are in the red perpetually, and crisis, which almost always disadvantages poor the reason they are in the red perpetually is people, but ... because they are in this horribly underserved FP: But people don’t respond until crisis occurs communities that don’t have money to give to either. the hospitals. So we either have to admit that JM: The parties and the social movements the hospitals are valuable independent of their that are doing the best, most exciting activism ability to make a profit or the other choice. now, are operating on real heart language of The choice that we appear to be making in this coming together. And there seems to be an society, is to further deprive deprived people. appetite for a politics of real joy and hope, as FP: And it is the same with the education opposed to just “No.” Like you can have a “No, system. And it is the same with a lot of things this is wrong,” but to have a “Yes” with that is with this country. But when you say those something really seductive. things, you are a dirty commie and we don’t want to listen to you.

JM: Which is fine. A report came out the other day that two or three million people are going to leave work because of Obamacare. That is the best thing I have heard about Obamacare. Several million people are not going to have to work because they don’t need their jobs just FP: I think everything you just said goes towards to get healthcare anymore. With three million forming solidarity. people abandoning their jobs, that opens up JM: Absolutely. Viewing other peoples three million jobs for people who need jobs. struggles as yours. That is the crucial thing.

Not making more jobs, but reducing the Chris Hayes has written about his father, who number of people who need jobs to survive. was a Jesuit community organizer. He had a We can’t actually justify in their minds, in our gradient that starts at first collecting pity and minds, working sick and old people harder just then goes through sympathy and empathy and to keep them employed. That doesn’t make eventually winds up at solidarity. This is where much sense. someone else’s struggle and suffering compels FP: I feel like I don’t have very many choices. I action in you. know so many people who work all the time to And we have to, and I actually want to … full make money, some of it to survive and others commie that I am, go even one step further to just make money. They all seem so unhappy. beyond solidarity to love. That actually it is It isn’t something to look forward to, that’s for about loving and caring for one another. If we sure. There has to be a better ways out of this. can’t figure out a way for everyone to love and JM: There is going to have to be. There was a care about one another, we are really fucked. report that I was just reading today that over So be very good to one another and love each the next 20 years over half of the world’s jobs other. are going to be replaced with robots. We are going to have to fire over half of the people To read an extended version of this conversation that touches on debt working in production, or we have to enable and race, go to bardfreepress.com

Look — there are, especially among young people, a huge number of very bright, unemployed, alienated young people who make up sort of a natural organizing base. I think that is a really dangerous thing for a ruling class.

19

BY DILYA MAMADSHOEVA I’m immensely tired of the concept of ‘help’ when we, more or less privileged people, talk about those who aren’t that privileged. Especially when this ‘help’ is coming from any international organization.

These success stories when some guys from the “developed” countries come to “indigenous people” of the developing ones in order to “help” or “make a change” makes me really upset, nervous and indignant.

But wait… what’s wrong about that?

Several months ago, some people from an international organization were trying to run their own project aimed to “help” children living in orphanages in Kyrgyzstan. What they did was find local organizations that are doing charity here, and then they went to some selected orphanages, played with the children, gave them toys and left with a feeling that they were the best guys in the whole universe (apparently they don’t know about the Doctor). Ah, forgot, every step that they took was all the time captured on camera, so that next day all the pictures were on Facebook, and at the end, organizers, as usual, were taking honours for the wonderful job they had done.

Well, it’s saddening to admit that nowadays there is a basic need of toys in our orphanages in Kyrgyzstan. However, ‘help’ that was brought from this organization is absolutely not sustainable. These toys will be temporary useful and important for the children, but when they grow older, it’s education that is supposed to contribute to social mobility, not toys. It seems like we all understand this but what makes me really frustrated is that this kind of a project isn’t a rare case in my friends’ and my own experience. Moreover, usually such projects are ostensibly considered to “bring changes;” however, people never clarify which kind of changes. Seems like we all have the same a priori understandings of things and know that whatever humanity does is for the better future. No need to mention that lots of resources (I’m talking only about economic ones) are given to realization of such projects.

Details on that project aren’t that important, because what I have written here isn’t just the problem of one project. It’s getting even more ridiculous when the projects of some ‘respected’ organizations are aimed to tackle some complex issues like promotion of ‘gender equality’ or initiatives on ‘female empowerment.’ So, e.g., a typical project on female empowerment in Kyrgyzstan might be a project that supports females-entrepreneurs in sewing/backing and all other spheres that are considered to be ‘for females’ in this cultural context. Thence, the project itself is reproducing a system of strict ‘traditional’ roles existent in Kyrgyzstan, and doesn’t try to focus on other types of projects like supporting females in such spheres as e.g. computer repair.

However,even if the essence of the project is supposed to bring positive changes to the current situation, one can never be sure that it would be implemented as flawlessly as it’s supposed to.

Here’s an outline of such project implementation stages: several international experts who aren’t that familiar with the context of the country (but who cares, right?) where they came to ‘help,’ are supposed to lead the stage of project

implementation. Actually, I think it’s quite positive that people from different countries work in a project in a totally different place, so there’s an international dialogue that can lead to better results, given that locals who are working in the project know how everything is working in the location. But then comes another issue: do the locals really know the problems and generally every day practices of people whom they are ‘helping’? Or are they themselves representatives of the ‘target-group’ of that particular project?

Usually, the answer is… no. Why? One of the reasons is recruitment limitations that are already set by an organization that implements the project. Every time this organization is looking for staff, there is a huge list of requirements that these workers should qualify with, such as English language proficiency and, of course people who have privilege to comply with them, will have more chances to be selected as full-time workers (and yes, for Kyrgyzstan, a small not globalized country with a Soviet past, proficiency in English is a privilege indeed). Unfortunately, these locals, due to various reasons (no realization of their ‘privileged’ position might be among them), neither know the real problems of people, nor want to compensate this lack of knowledge. So they will just automatically do their job, get the salary and tell everyone about their huge help to different ‘minorities.’

Here a very important section comes. Of course everything you read above is expressed quite roughly, some important things (that are all the time within the discourse due to complexity of the issue of projects’ essence and implementation) are omitted and not elaborated. This negative impression that I got while observing activity of some NGOs is constituted not just by all international organizations, but local ones as well.

The only reason I was highlighting international actors here is because their knowledge of social context on average is less than the one of locals, but again homogeneity of local population shouldn’t be assumed. Additionally, it is fair to mention that I know a couple of projects where goals are clearly defined and people are really wholly committed to the initiative that they are leading.

Having complained to you quite a lot, you might ask me: what is the alternative way I want to see the the process of projects’ implementation? I think it all starts with people’s perception about the things they do. If, from the very beginning, people involved in the project think: Oh, poor ‘others’ I’m helping too! — that will never work! But if these people go to the communities they want to represent, get to know about their lives, be accepted there and build solidarity with them, getting rid of the “we” and “they” dichotomy, then this project will not be “a job they get paid for.”

I really believe these results will be much better.

bardiverse

HELP? SOLIDARITY!

bardiverse

20

MEANINGFULLY MUNDANE: DECONSTRUCTING THE RUSSIAN NARRATIVE

BY BEN POWERS I stepped off the plane at the St. Petersburg airport and the grating smell of newly set steel settled against my nostrils. The terminal that I and the other Bard College students arrived in had only recently been completed after having been planned during the Soviet era. Walking off the plane sleep deprived, in rumpled clothes, and nearly delirious, I had no idea what to expect. Outside the glass wall of the terminal I saw a barbed wire fence and my heart beat faster from a mixture of excitement and fear, even though the fence just ended up being part of a construction site. Russia had recently annexed Crimea and with escalating tensions along the eastern border of Ukraine as well as the deterioration of US-Russia relations I thought that there would be a tangible tension

After arriving at the hotel we were treated to a traditional Russian dinner, where I ordered something I can’t pronounce, with the idea it would be authentic. Turning to the Smolny College student next to me I ask about the situation with Ukraine. “Well,” they said, “you see the thing is nobody here seems to care too much. The government does not speak for us.

We are the Russian people. Because of this, it is not as if we are angry at the United States over Ukraine.” While not speaking for all Russians, the student in one sentence began to chip away at an education about Russia that largely centered on U.S. propaganda, per the Cold War era. Maybe it was because I don’t believe there is as stark a divide between the people and the government in the US or because I had

range. Unfortunately though, I did not speak Russian, and was therefore unable to attend the vast majority of the panels that included many different papers under sections such as politics and art criticism. I have and continue to believe that conferences such as this give students a rare chance to articulate their work in a competitive academic setting – moderators question you about your paper after and award a limited number of “stellar presenter” awards at each panel.

That being said, what I walked away from St. Petersburg with was a subversive education that stood in opposition to what I traditionally thought about the country, even though I knew the narratives that I previously associated with Russia had been shaped by my American

in the air, something amiss that I would be able to feel. Yet I was surprised at the ambivalence I found, in spite of the images and articles about Russian support for President Putin’s actions as well as the large political protests that took place in Russia months ago.

Driving from the St. Petersburg airport towards the city center we were told that this part of the city is where the Soviet government was supposed to move years ago, just inside of the industrial belt that encircles the city, but it never did for a variety of reasons. The result is wide streets, grand parks, and glowering yet grandiose Soviet-style buildings, but with no government to occupy them. As we get closer to the center of the city we start to pass over the channels and by the monuments that have made St. Petersburg a famous tourist destination — one of the most visited cities in Europe. The Winter Palace, former palace of the czars, Kazan Cathedral, and St.Isaac’s Cathedral — comprised mostly of red marble.

Everywhere there were people walking, going about life, the same as people would elsewhere, and it was momentously mundane compared to

seen previous reports on Russian support of the Crimean annexation, but this observation took me by surprise. The dish I had ordered came out from the kitchen. It looked and tasted very much like fried chicken.

The conference started the next day, Friday, and continued into Saturday. Though I didn’t present until the second day, I went to a number of presentations. There was only one room with English language panels that ran throughout the day. There were over 100 Russian and English language papers presented at Smolny College’s Third Annual International Student Conference, which was titled “New Approaches in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” I listened to presentations that argued against a human rights regime, how there was not substantive evidence to convict Milosevic of war crimes during the Balkan wars, and about how the age of big data has resulted in the loss of essential parts of our humanity.

The lectures, as I’ve come to find with many undergraduate conferences, ranged from boring and inarticulate to engaging and well thoughtout. Like many things, these presentations exist

upbringing. Along the Neva River, which runs through St. Petersburg, there are number of beautiful buildings that harken back to imperial Russia. Their elegant facades are well kept, maintained so that their beauty can be appreciated from the river and the streets that border it. But these buildings are abandoned.

If one could walk into the inner courtyard of the blocks of buildings, one would see that the backs of them are falling apart, in a perpetual state of disrepair. Though the government and history books might want to educate us about a Russia that is unforgiving and autocratic, it is worth the time and energy to separate the government from the people. This is not to say that Russia does not face many issues, most noticeably economic issues and human rights abuses, but like the buildings along the Neva, my beliefs of a government and people who are working to destabilize Ukraine and contribute to an ominous narrative, are beginning to crumble.

what my primed brain had expected.

on a spectrum, and Smolny gave me the full

21 bardiverse

I had never thought that I would be leaving the country so soon. I had always planned on buying a passport, but never really got around to it. Then, over winter break, I got an email from Erin Canaan saying that I had a chance to present a paper I wrote for the Hannah Arendt conference at Smolny College in St. Petersburg. After a bit of paperwork I got my passport, and on April 16 we were on our way. I was accompanied by a group of 7 Bardians.

I, along with some other Bardians and Assistant Dean of Students Mary Ann Krisa, stayed next to the yellow asylum that Dostoevsky talked about in “Crime and Punishment.”

It definitely had a very ominous feeling, especially at night.

For a city of 6 million people, the city, except for Nevsky Prospect, goes quiet. It was actually quite uncomfortable at times. The pristine condition of the buildings and streets didn’t help either. It was almost too clean; it felt like a hospital in some areas, but in others I felt like I was witness to St. Petersburg’s great past and seemingly booming present.

The place that I frequented the most was Nevsky Prospect. Any city dweller could appreciate the wonderful eateries, funky shops and overpriced clothing stores. And while the shops themselves were a sight to witness, the people were the most interesting. Fashion is no light thing in St. Petersburg; everyone, even the children, are dressed well! Americans look like bums compared to some of the city dwellers that I saw. Maybe New York City and Los Angeles (some parts) could match Russian style.

The interesting thing, at least this is what was told to me, is that Russians apparently dress so well because they think Americans dress the same way. I don’t know if that’s completely true, but it’s an interesting, if not funny, thought.

The architecture, like I said before, is amazing. The Hermitage is especially awe-inspiring; Pyotr the Great had an eye for grandeur and beauty. The Hermitage, also known as the Winter Palace, is home to some of the most impressive and rare art collections in the world. The art spans from ancient Greek, to realism and to more modern works of surrealism. Even without the art, the palace itself would be enough to marvel at. I also had the chance to go and see the Church of the Savior on Blood and St. Isaac’s Cathedral; both were amazing and had been through quite a bit throughout Russian history.

The food, at least to me, is very Southernesque. What I mean by that is the foundation for any meal is meat, bread and potatoes, to put it simply. Granted, there are some vegetables present. Breakfast in the hotel we stayed in included a meat option, usually pork, rice or some other carb, vegetables, yogurt and bread. No eggs unfortunately. But I loved it! The Russians, it seems, much like Southerners, have their own sweet ambrosia called Mors. Mors is basically a berry juice cocktail; it’s good, but I don’t think it could stand up to sweet tea. There were

also some commercial “American” restaurants as well.

As our number one geopolitical enemy, Russia is very accommodating.

The only thing that was a bit disconcerting was the very apparent apprehension towards difference, especially race. After speaking with a friend, it turned out that I had been almost not let into a bar due to the color of my skin.

And the stares were constant — and when I say stare, I mean they stared. But I can’t attribute all of this to racism.

Part of the problem is that St. Petersburg lacks people of color or at least a significant amount. I did see some odes to Pushkin which was nice.

Now, Smolny was a beauty in its own right. A palace turned into liberal arts college, wow. The infrastructure such as the library and student center could use some work, but Bard is helping with that process. The conference itself was very Bardish: it started late, was a bit disorganized and went an hour overtime. Nevertheless, we had fun. Some of the presentations were truly impressive and some were somewhat funny. The truly impressive ones made me think that Bardians, at least a good handful of us, need to step up our A-game. The theme was “New Ways to Approach the Social Sciences,” and I think the conference achieved offering such viewpoints. No viewpoint was ever completely the same, even those who used Hannah Arendt. Granted, we agreed on just about everything. There was some healthy debate, and students, from both Smolny and other schools, were incredibly friendly.In the end, St. Petersburg and Smolny were both very wonderful and offered a nice juxtaposition between American and Russian life.

BARD FREE RUSSIA: AN AMERICAN IN ST. PETERSBURG

BY DURANTE BARRINGER

bardiverse

22

MY EXPERIENCE AT BARD HIGH SCHOOL EARLY COLLEGE

BY MOJIQUE TYLER Bard High School Early College (BHSEC): a unique environment, a school, a lifestyle. BHSEC was a different world. For someone used to a slow and relatively stagnant academic environment at school, the fast pace caught me very much by surprise, but, for the first time in years I felt at home at school. Of course, as it is for so many academically minded freshmen, I was far more interested in what the upper grades were doing than my own. I endeavored to (in my copious free time) make acquaintances with those in upper grades. Partly as a result of this, I was somewhat alienated from my own year, but I was content; I was being exposed to ideas that I had never come into contact with before, and in a volume that I had never come close to previously.

Of course, people subsequently graduated and that had the interesting effect that I actually had to get to know the people around me, and for a while I was brought jarringly back into the reality of the high school: rote memorization.

That isn’t to say there was no room for creativity, merely that ninth and 10th grade are far more regimented than other years. For a while, Bard became a regular high school, full of other people like me, interested in learning, but nothing special. The curriculum ran faster and the work was more demanding, but the ideas being circulated out of classrooms, while different to what I had encountered before, weren’t on another level of complexity.

It wasn’t until Year 1 (the year I am currently in) that I truly comprehended again how special BHSEC is. The realization first came about when I saw the course catalogs in June of ninth grade, and realized that, not only was I able to choose some of my classes, but that I was choosing between classes with names like “Fiction of the 1960s”, “Novels of Dostoevsky” and “The History of American Foreign Relations” rather than English, Honors English, History, et cetera. Of course, I knew from prior Year 1s and Year 2s that this would be the environment I would be in, but how rare it was never really dawned on me until I was actually able to choose. The specificity of the classes and the high level of work that we are able to do are just two of the advantages of one of the best aspects of BHSEC: the belief that students in 11th and 12th grade can learn college-level material in a college setting.

Take ‘The History of American Foreign Relations,’ for instance. You are enrolled in a class usually with a professor with a Ph.D., and consequently with a teacher who is really invested in the class, and often studied the specific field. Having college-level professors also means that, for

students who are motivated, there are a host of opportunities that one wouldn’t have normally. I am able to talk about extensions of what we learn in class and even the basics of quantum physics with my physics teacher and I am currently doing mathematical research with one of my prior teachers. College professors also allow for independent studies, which are very unusual for high schools, and these allow for truly personalized educational opportunities, giving students the chance to experience an environment where they learn because of interest as opposed to grades.

However, there are a few issues that the school doesn’t adjust for that detracts from all of these benefits. Firstly, although the college environment is amazing, teachers don’t take into account the fact that students have far busier class schedules than college students because of the fact that there are Department of Education requirements as to how many hours you have to be in school. Even with free periods, many students will have an average of five (or even six) classes in a day as opposed to two or three for college students. However, teachers assign college or near-college levels of homework. This has a few problems. Firstly, it creates a lack of sleep. Students often average of four or five hours a night at an extremely important formative period for the brain. Lack of sleep at young ages has been shown to have serious effects both short term and long term. In the short term, it means that parts of student’s brains are actually asleep during classes, detracting from their educational experience.

In fact, studies show that an extra 30 minutes of sleep a night can raise a students grade level by a third of a letter grade. Students are often forced to choose between good grades, a social life and sleep, not to mention extracurricular activities. The catch is that if you choose good grades over sleep, like many students do, your grades go down anyway, and so does your comprehension and retention (sleep is essential to information retention). I have often experienced classes where peers simply can’t understand things I know them to be capable of comprehending and had them tell me afterwards that they were too tired to think. The threat of sleeplessness leads to students using class time to do homework. If they don’t take a class seriously, they will try to do homework the day of in the class, disrupting class and taking away from their understanding. In addition to these compromises, it also diminishes student’s ability to participate in extracurricular activities, which in my view, are essential to learning. Furthermore, it stresses students out, once again decreasing their functionality. And finally, it

leads to a utilitarian view of education. You prioritize that which will get you a grade over that which you are interested in.

Another problem I have with BHSEC is that many of the classes don’t quite function as I believe they should. Some of the college classes are still focused in mindsets that one associates with high school. There is a massive amount of drilling in STEM classes in which, I believe, students need to have the opportunity to figure things out for themselves. Math classes are also typified by the idea that if you make the arithmetic hard then you are engaging students. As a math-and-scienceoriented student, this is extremely frustrating because, instead of being challenged by material, I am being forced to do irritating arithmetic without a calculator. In the real world that simply isn’t what math is about, it is about proofs and logic, which, at BHSEC are almost completely absent.

Seminar, modeled on Bard College’s seminar courses, is also flawed (at least in Year 1). It becomes a significantly lecture-based class rather than a discursive one. This is great in some ways because we learn more from our professors, but that’s what we have English classes for. Seminar implies that students create ideas. Instead, ideas are fed to us, much like they would be in a regular high school class.

All of this being said, BHSEC is still an amazing place, and I feel very privileged not only to be able to work with my teachers, but also to be able to work with them in an intimate way that is often hard to get at an average high school or college. The student-run clubs function brilliantly and allow great access to a depth and breadth of academic understanding rarely found in high schools. And, of course, there are the added benefits of two free years of college credits and brilliant experience for college. I am, in the end, very glad that I chose BHSEC over the host of large schools that claim brilliant academics. It caught my eye from the first sit-in class and I wouldn’t trade it for anywhere else. The individualized environment has been wonderful, and has allowed me freedom to do things that I wouldn’t be able to do anywhere else. BHSEC isn’t just a school, it is a lifestyle, and I am proud to live it, if only for four years.

23 bardiverse

PHOTOS BY KARMEL KHALED

P I E C E S O F R E A L I T Y

The photos hung like flags on a string behind Stone Row. They were the work of Karmel Khaled, a junior at Bard Al-Quds, who had printed photos for a small showing.

Khaled studied at Bard for the spring semester as a Program in International Education (PIE) student.

At Al-Quds, Khaled is a media studies major and has worked with Philip Hopper, who runs a digital media lab course at Bard Al-Quds.

The camera, to Khaled, is a way of

BY JP LAWRENCE

understanding the story behind the scenes of everyday life in Palestine.

“The camera that is real and solid but the photographs can be dynamic and ethereal,” Khaled said. “A photographer is not just a person who stands behind his camera but a pocket of feelings that at the end gives the audience a special piece of reality.”

“I am missing in each picture but I hope to give happiness to everybody who I see through my lens.”

sports

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ON ATHLETICS: A CONVERSATION WITH PRESIDENT BOTSTEIN

BY AVERY MENCHER “There’s a joke about a president of a Big Ten university,” President Leon Botstein tells me with a bemused smile. “He was reputed to have told the legislature, in a plea for funding for the university, ‘Don’t you want a university which the football team can be proud of?’”

On a warm, sunny day, Botstein welcomed me into his home, greeting me in his customary long black suit jacket, black shirt, black pants, and black shoes — a true Bardian. Sitting in a room surrounded by violins, a piano, undoubtedly priceless artwork, and various philosophical tomes, I talked to the man who’s been president of Bard for more than half of his life to finally set the record straight on his feelings about athletics, both at Bard and in general.

According to Botstein, Bard actually possesses a more storied history in athletics than people realize. In the 1920s, there was a successful football team on campus, and the school recruited and awarded scholarships to athletes. Bard being Bard, this policy eventually became the subject of student protests. In 1928, Bard combined with Columbia University, after which athletics diminished greatly. By the time Botstein arrived here in 1975, athletics were nowhere to be found. “Our culture at the time was anti-athletic. To be an artist or an intellectual meant that you were unfit, unwell, and there was a kind of contempt for athletics.” This apathetic culture persisted into the 1980s,

until a paradigm shift began to occur on a national level. Adults were quickly realizing that, in order to live longer, they should be exercising and eating well.

At the same time, Bard was interested in building a new library. Charles Stevenson, an avid amateur athlete and a new board member at the time, made what Botstein calls “an unusual offer.” “He said, ‘You can probably find other people to build a library, but you won’t find anyone else interested in building a gymnasium.’” In this spirit, the current Stevenson Athletic Center was constructed.

Botstein credits this shift in health perspectives with the change in attitudes at Bard. Today, it is common to see students running, skateboarding, and biking. According to Botstein’s narrative, this would be rarer 30 years ago. With this shift, adult employees of the college began to demand improvements to the athletic center. Along with this expansion, Bard sports teams began to grow. Finally, Mary Backlund, Jim Brudvig, and Kris Hall, all high-ranking faculty members, proposed that the school be absorbed into the prestigious Liberty League. Botstein is cognizant of the fact that he’s the only president of a Liberty League college that has never been to a Liberty League meeting. “I’m not sure they appreciate that,” he remarks with a smirk.

Unlike the other Liberty League schools, Bard, Botstein said, did not begin intention-

ally recruiting student-athletes. “We were recruiting students — not recruiting with scholarships or anything, but spontaneously — who didn’t want to be in a high-pressure sports environment … but they wanted to be in a place where sports were well-played.”

As Botstein said, one thing led to another, and now a fifth of our first-year class is comprised of recruited athletes.

“There is no long alumni history. There are no donors waving dollars at us and telling us that we should have this kind of facility or team...[Building expensive athletic facilities] is a route that’s not in our institutional DNA.” When asked about a rehashing of antiathletic attitude, Botstein characterized this attitude as “largely misguided and misplaced.”

“The lessons that are learned here in sports are the right lessons: how to play with dignity and elegance, how to cooperate, how to create a sense of solidarity, and how to lose, the most important lesson that sports have.” He does feel that this antiathletic attitude is a “good corrective” to the “slippery slope” of college athletics. As an unendowed, small liberal arts school, it would be easy to point to the example of financially-successful schools such as Williams College or Amherst College and accuse Bard of employing the same method of athletics as a route to achieve this success.

Botstein points to the lack of athletic tradition as a deterrent to seeing a change like

this occur. In a phrase, “It [the anti-athletic attitude] keeps us honest.”

Botstein does believe that there is a positive, constructive place for athletics within Bard’s existing framework. He compares sports to science, both activities based strongly in collaboration and teamwork.

He enthusiastically defends the potential for Bard athletics, while condemning the “outsized monster” of Division I college sports. This distinction is important for Bard student-athletes, who must come to terms with the fact that their athletic experiences here at Bard will likely never compare to their counterparts at similar D-III schools.

For most of these students, that’s totally fine — that’s the reason they’re here. Still, many would like to see more obvious support from the administration. Regardless, they cannot deny that Bard is changing.

Who knows, perhaps the opening of Honey Baseball Field will see Botstein on the mound, throwing out the ceremonial first pitch. Stranger things have happened.

25

sports

FALL SPORTS PREVIEW

BY JOHN HENRY GLASCOCK

Competitiveness, a trait elusive to the Bard athletic community for most of its existence, is developing rapidly for all Bard teams. Kristen Hall, the athletic director at Bard, is excited by the prospects that the next academic year will bring. Athletics at Bard is expanding at an astonishing rate.

Under Hall’s leadership, the coaches of Bard’s promising teams have worked tirelessly to make the upcoming year of athletics an impressive one.

With an unprecedented volume of athletes, Hall stresses that a combination of both quality and quantity is essential for the athletic teams to grow into respectable competitors. Large numbers of athletes typically lead to the necessary competitive attitude among team members, which in turn translates to increased performance on both the individual and team level. Bard Athletics is finally a stable operation, and there is only optimism about the improvement within the department.

Stability was not always a given for athletics at Bard. This is the first budget cycle in six years where Bard is not adding a new athletic team.

The department was bounced among the local athletic conferences in unusual fashion until three years ago, when the Liberty League reached out to Bard. There were always aspirations to join the Liberty League, but these aspirations could not be made a reality until it was evident that sports at Bard were up to par. All of the conferences that Bard previously belonged to were drawn to the school because of its impressive academic reputation. Bard was always the school that gave an athletic conference substantial academic merit.

In accordance with the Division III tradition of emphasizing “priority on the overall quality of the educational experience” (from the NCAA DIII Philosophy Statement), the athletic department takes extensive measures to ensure that students who represent Bard in game situations also succeed in the classroom. The coaches work closely with Bill Kelly, the director of recruiting, to be certain that students coming in to play a sport will be able to survive the taxing academic environment.

Balancing the rigor of a Bard education and the athletic status of the Liberty League is difficult, but Hall and the rest of the athletic department is committed to helping student-athletes meet the demand placed on quality academic performance.

Next year will bring new types of faces to Bard, faces that may have never come near the campus just a decade ago. Something that will never change, however, is the Bard athletic department’s commitment to the ethical recruiting of student athletes, says Hall. First and foremost will

always be academics, athletic recruits included.

The draw of Liberty League prestige will, without question, lure new student-athletes to the Bard community while the coaches and existing members help to assimilate them accordingly. Hall asserts that students will never be promised a spot just to be cut a few practices into the season, as some of Bard’s competitors are known to do. Students will also never be misled to believe that, as an athlete, special treatment will be awarded. All student-athletes are subject to the demanding academic schedule that has always been a cornerstone of the college. In order to make sure that first-year student-athletes can make the academic transition, the athletic department will be expanding the little known Athletic and Co-Curricular Excellence (ACE) program. In conjunction with the Learning Commons, ACE helps students with academic troubles and works to see successes in the classroom as well as on the field.

As far as fields and facility upgrades go, the long-awaited baseball field will be ready for use next year, and many other projects are in the works. The locker rooms at Bard were designed and built when there were 900 students enrolled.

Bard has since doubled in size, placed more emphasis on its athletic program, and has done more outreach to expand the gym availability to community members. Among improving the locker rooms, increased use of the fields and the basketball court has spurred discussion of artificial turf fields and another indoor playing space. One of the biggest considerations for such a dramatic increase in the athletic facilities is the intramural sports that currently have to be marginalized due to the incredible demand from varsity teams. Hall wants to make the athletic center more open to the whole Bard community, and it is difficult to do that with the available facilities.

The biggest noticeable difference next year will be the increased size of athletic rosters. By the numbers, recruited students will eclipse any mark previously set by any previous class of athletes in Bard history. Bardians will also notice a radical improvement of athletic performance. While this improvement may not initially translate directly into wins right off the bat — pun intended — the new brand of competitive edge that Bard will offer will impress any observer. There is no lack of support in the Liberty League community, as Hall notes, with all of her fellow athletic directors offering nothing but positivity.

Bard may not have the nicest facilities in the Liberty League, as a visit to any other conference school will demonstrate, but it possesses an ath-

letic department that prides itself on its determination and commitment to growth. Catalyzed by the unmatched recruiting efforts of its coaches, next year will be the year that Bard situates itself as a permanent fixture in the Liberty League. The strides taken this year towards a more solidified athletic program will be matched and hopefully surpassed with a new class of student-athletes and an impressive group of existing ones eager to prove their abilities. The ambition is to develop a prominent athletic program that will complement the longstanding academic foundations of Bard. All the tools are in place, and they are in the hands of unparalleled workers; now it is time to build.

opinion

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CONFRONTING TODAY’S RACISTS

BY OLA OLA-BUSARI Junior Christiane Koffi is the club head of AfroPulse and the organizer of Bard’s first ever Race Monologues. She and the 12 other Bard students involved in the Race Monologues think that race is an issue that is not talked about enough on Bard’s campus. It is their hope that the production of Race Monologues on May 11 “served to inspire the student body to be more comfortable about race.”

The timing of Bard’s first Race Monologues was apt given recent media coverage on Cliven Bundy, Donald Sterling, and Tal Fortgang also made the topic especially relevant.

In a society that is rushing to become post-racial without critically engaging with race, and in which people of color risk sounding whiny for speaking their truths, these three men are a much-needed reminder of the lengths we still have to go in countering racism.

Cliven Bundy’s racism is loud, overt, and complete with allusion to slavery times. In this last respect, especially, it goes too far; it is too recognizable. Sterling’s racism on the other hand is more subtle. His sentiments typify the increasingly covert nature of racism today.

It is a racism that names itself opinion. It recognizes itself as distasteful but hides behind the banner of freedom of speech and proclaims itself unworthy of reprimand. It is the racism of innuendo, of things never said but always suggested.

As a person of color, you encounter this

kind of racism when people are surprised by your intelligence, or when they treat you better than others of the same race as you because of said intelligence, or because you have straighter hair, or lighter skin.

You encounter it when others want to consume your music, your dress sense, and your culture, but don’t want to engage with the lived experiences out of which those elements emerged.

Owing to its indirect nature, this kind of racism is harder to call out. It is so subtle sometimes that it is unrecognizable to even those who exhibit it. When someone is called out on such behaviour, it is not unlikely to hear the quick proclamation: “I am not racist.” As if saying this alone will make such actions less problematic, as if a rose by any other name would cease to be a rose.

True, this kind of racism is not always deliberate, but what such actions highlight is a certain unwillingness to challenge assumptions and stereotypes inherited from an imperfect society. Such actions say, “I follow the thinking of a society that functions on the premise that people of colour are inherently inferior to me…but I’m not racist.”

And so, I am grateful for Donald Sterling.

Grateful because we all seem to agree that he did indeed express racist sentiment, despite the fact that he is a philanthropist, despite the fact that he is Jewish, and despite the fact that he has a half-black, half-Latina personal assistant/girlfriend.

I am grateful for Donald Sterling because he proves none of those character-

istics make you immune from racist behaviour. Instead, he exemplifies how racism is a product of unquestioned assumptions about others, endorsed consciously and unconsciously by those around us. We are all guilty of feeding into stereotypes, and so we must all be responsible for changing our conduct.

If you are white, racism is not just the problem of people of color because they are the group it affects, it is your problem too because often the perpetrators come from your ranks. If you are a person of color, racism cannot only be talked about amongst yourselves because then how will the perpetrators learn to do better?

We cannot stop racism if we continue only to talk about it with people who look like us. We cannot stop racism by refusing to talk about it outside of the confines of well-structured classroom discussions. If we are to stop racism, what we need, instead, is open and honest dialogue between races.

When we avoid such dialogue, and cling stubbornly to our presumptions, we end up with more Tal Fortgangs when what we need is more Briana Paytons. And so, I hope that when the second Race Monologues rolls around, there will be more Bard students who will choose action over complacency, and who will be willing to risk discomfort for the reward of enlightenment.

27 opinion

cunt: reclaiming the word and the power

BY JODY WISSNER

I came home one day during spring break to find my sister waxing her own bikini line. I thought that was pretty cringe-worthy. If not only for pain sake, but also ‘cause, like, hello — is feminism dead?* Maybe it was just Central Jersey.

When I returned to warmer spring weather in the Bardlands, I was comforted by many hairy legs in yoga class.

I also got to speak with the women of The Vagina Monologues (VM), produced by Students for Women’s Equality and Rights (SWEAR).

Here’s to reclaiming our cunts.

When I sat down with first-year Clark Hamel, VM co-director and feminist powerhouse, one of the first things she declared was, “We are expected to look like a fucking Barbie down there.

When you’re wearing a bikini or underwear, you are not allowed to have any hair showing. No hair.”

An aside: Can some feminist please invent a Chia Pet/Malibu Barbie hybrid? I’d love to be able to give it to my future tween.

“You’ve got to love hair in order to love the vagina. You don’t get to pick the parts you want,” reads a line from the monologue “Hair” performed by first-year Isabelle Bennett.

On the terrible, horrible, shameful and completely fun to read mobile applica-

tion Lulu, girls can “rate” men they’ve hooked up with. Lulu was dubbed by Buzzfeed as “Yelp for Men.” In a letter to the resident dude of Lulu who answers ladies’ questions, one woman wrote: “Is it OK to stop hooking up with a guy because his peewee is wearing a turtleneck?” Maybe this isn’t a gendered issue.

The monologues cover an astoundingly broad landscape of topics, transcending the physicality of the female and dealing with feminine experience.

My experience in watching the monologues went from laughing to crying to nodding to kind of wishing I wasn’t sitting next to someone’s dad.

Performer sophomore Alana Bortoluzzi managed to perfectly sculpt her monologue, “Reclaiming Cunt” into a sex-like arc. With the denouement being, “Tell me, tell me ‘Cunt cunt,’ say it, tell me ‘Cunt.’ Cunt.”

“I was screaming cunt on stage. My dad was supposed to be away on business, but when I went to meet my mom at DTR, my dad was hiding and he had come anyway. He sat in the front. But he’s a really big supporter of the monologues […] so it was fine,” Bortoluzzi said.

Another highly compelling monologue of the night came from senior

Rosemary Ferreira. Her monologue, entitled “My Vagina Was My Village” focuses on women from refugee camps who were victims of rape as a tactic of war. Theater experience or not, I could tell there was a reason for the power behind her words.

Last summer she worked as part of a retreat in Newark, NJ, where many young women opened up to Ferreira about their experiences of rape and sexual assault. “I was just bawling when these young women were sharing their stories. It felt like going into a really dark hole. It touched me so much that these brilliant, funny, just lively young women also had to deal with such serious issues at a young age. […] It forced me think about myself and my own body so that I could talk to these women about their own bodies. Since it’s something I didn’t grow up talking about,” Ferreira said.

I found that every single woman I interviewed was so empowered about her body, her vagina, her femininity. It’s interesting how we must come from a place of power to be able to share the stories of those who do not. Some women had that power before the Monologues, and some found it during their experience.

Senior Amanda Gan had a really interesting perspective as a performer,

coming from a not-so-typically-Bardliberal background. “You have no clue”, she told me. “A lot of people in my country would be disgusted. Like, you don’t talk about those things. [They would say] ‘It’s bad, you’re a bad girl!’

But then some part of me was like, ‘Why is this bad exactly?’”

Why? Because it’s okay for men to sexualize women, but a woman shouldn’t reveal that she has a sexual body or even a natural body. This has been reinforced by a long history of objectification by men. If you’re confused, Google “Playboy Magazine” or “Robin Thicke”.

“Camel toe? What the hell is that?

Oh, are vaginas not supposed to be different shapes and sizes? They expect it just be this flat place down there. But it’s not. We can’t show that we have a vagina, but you see a bulge in a man’s pants and it’s like ‘Oh yeah, he has a penis. Cool. He’s a man,’” observes Hamel.

One of the women told me she had a male friend who felt “guy guilt” after seeing the show. We agreed: thank you, but now try to turn that guilt into something that’s productive. *I shave my legs and do not intend to shame anyone for any choice they make to their own bodies.

opinion

28

BRING GREEK LIFE TO BARD! (JUST KIDDING)

BY JOHANNA COSTIGAN Tulane first-year Cathy Sellier was waiting in line for her dinner. A bleach-blonde girl in short-shorts and a tank top proudly sporting a magically superioritygranting combination of two Greek letters cut her in line, wordlessly smug. When Sellier asked her why she had taken her place, the girl answered her question with a question.

“Which sorority are you in?”

Sellier attempted to explain to the pledge that which sorority she belonged to was irrelevant. While she is in a sorority that is more respected, if also more clothed, than the majority of sisters in this girl’s sorority, that doesn’t enable her or the blonde to cut the dinner line.

Bard students frequently complain about our lacking social scene. First-year Shane McDonald spoke about the hardships Bard kids face every weekend. “Nightlife at Bard sometimes gets repetitive; you’re either in a dorm room or Smog or a bar or a house in Tivoli. Those are the four options,” he said.

Junior Ryan Alcazar, who transferred to Bard from UC Davis, often hears criticism about the Bard social scene that is similar to what McDonald described. But coming from a university with a highly socially influential Greek life, Alcazar appreciates Bard’s inclusivity and social diversity. “There are problems with the Bard social life, but I would take it over Greek life any day.”

Like a beer-bong-accessorized aristocracy, Greek life has the potential to create large social gaps amongst the student body, and can also lead to alienation or physical danger.

Maybe Bard doesn’t constantly have wild parties.

Maybe the majority of Bard kids will graduate without mastering the keg stand. Maybe we don’t start our weekends on Wednesday and never fully commit to weekdays.

But there is social equality amongst all students. We shouldn’t take that for granted.

McDonald visited his friend at University of Pennsylvania during their spring fling, and it was not a positive experience.

“It was just like a lot of tank tops and vodka. Greek life was hugely prevalent. Every male I saw was wearing some sort of frat-related apparel. I prefer small, closeknit gatherings. Despite a few boring Saturday nights here and there, Bard is worth it.”

Alcazar addressed another concerning aspect of Greek life. “When you’re at a school with really strong Greek life, there’s a lot of emphasis on knowing girls and being able to bring them to parties,” Alcazar said.

He would often be asked how many girls he had with him before being granted admittance to a party.

“Girls are really objectified, they’re just viewed as tickets into a frat party,” he said.

As a result, even if a girl isn’t in a sorority, if her school has a social scene that is largely dominated

by Greek life, she is likely to encounter the kind of blatant misogyny that the survival of Greek domination depends on.

Syracuse University first-year Grace Harrington spoke about the way girls at her school are classified, depending on whether they’re in sororities.

“The sorority girls like the idea of being in a group where everyone else is an outsider, so they feel superior,” she said. There are 20,000 students at Syracuse, only 20 percent of whom are in sororities or fraternities.

“Two of the higher-tier, well-respected sororities have very specific reputations. Tri Delta girls are considered bitches and Kappa Kappa Gamma girls are considered sluts,” Harrington said.

So if you want to be in one of the “well-respected” sororities, you have two options: act like a “slut” or act like a “bitch.” At least you’re given the choice. The fact that students at Harrington’s school can so offhandedly pigeonhole entire groups of individual women into these arbitrary yet demeaning categories of “bitch” or “slut” is not just offensive, it’s frightening. The worst part is that she wasn’t inventing these terms herself, she was clearly repeating the sexist echoes of her peers, unphased.

Fraternities also have their own reputations. At Syracuse, Sigma Alpha Mu, or SAM, is known for having stereotypically “guido” members. “You know, gym, tan, laundry,” Harrington said. The Boston University chapter of SAM was suspended last month after a first-year member died due to excessive drinking, according to Boston University Today. She also mentioned Sigma Alpha Epsilon. “They’re attractive, but they’re assholes.”

Again, this kind of generalization is impossible and should not be encouraged, especially not in the official capacity of membership in a nationally-recognized fraternity. What if an unattractive asshole somehow snuck in? Or an attractive nice guy? Or, god forbid, an unattractive and decent guy?

SAE’s men aren’t just hot and mean, they’re also in danger. According to Time Magazine, at least 10 members of SAE have died in accidents related to fraternity partying since 2006, the largest number out of any fraternity in the country.

Sellier, over 1,300 miles away, says SAE has a wellestablished partying reputation at Tulane.

“SAE is the coolest fraternity; they’re supposed to throw the best parties,” she said.

At Tulane, membership in a fraternity distinguishes a guy. Frat brothers are supposed to be the social, cool guys. With that association comes the implication that male students who are not in fraternities are somehow socially inadequate, or at least unfit to attend Greek life events.

First-year Paul Schochet is a Kappa Sigma at the University of Delaware. He said that Greek life is regaining popularity at his school. While it was not a very prominent aspect of the university in the past, it is now. “If you’re a guy, you need to be in a frat,” he said.

While female students don’t need to worry about gaining admission to frat parties, guys do.

“They’re always gonna let girls in, but not random guys.” Schochet’s observation was mentioned by Harrington and Sellier as well; the concept of “the ratio” is

clearly an essential component to any good frat party.

If the number of guys is higher, or equal to, the number of girls, something has gone amiss.

For example, Sellier talked about an Easter weekend vacation plan that some Tulane fraternity brother pledges made. Fifteen of the brothers invited 40 of the “hottest girls” in the grade to go to a beach house with them and spend a weekend drinking and partying.

The only exception to the ratio rule is sorority-hosted “formals.” The guy asks a girl to be his date. They spend some time chatting and drinking at the formal, and then finish off the night, or from one perspective, actually start it, by retiring to a dorm or, oftentimes, a hotel room, where they consummate the obligation they made to each other. Even Harrington, someone who doesn’t participate in Greek life, knows that if you go to the formal with someone, you’re sleeping with them.

While encouraging young adults to attend black-tie events is a classy gesture, the way the term “formal” is morphed within the context of Greek life makes the concept of formality utterly foreign to the actual function. Instead, once again, the focus of the night is to get laid.

“Any frat guy can get a date,” Sellier said, presumably because of the shame a sorority girl would face if she wasn’t asked. In fact, if she isn’t asked, she isn’t going.

In some cases, however, she is probably better off staying home than going anywhere with the type of guy who she’d have the misfortune of being paired up with.

For example, Sellier’s friend was asked by a frat guy to go to the formal with him. She said yes. She knew she was going to be on her period during the weekend of the formal, and she told the guy who asked her. He very casually told her “not to worry about it.” He was confident he’d be able to find someone else.

There are many reasons students at a large university would feel inclined to pledge. They could be interested in the sisterhood or brotherhood, the bonding, togetherness, and inevitably, cliqueness, as well as forming professional connections. But on a day-to-day, Saturday-to-Saturday, formal-to-formal basis, they’re not simply going about their business forming all the bonds they want. Instead, by dominating their school’s social scene and purporting sexist exclusivity, they’re creating a standard for their university, their gender, and their future.

Alcazar talked about how Greek life influenced his decision to transfer. “It wasn’t the only thing that made me want to leave, but it was the biggest thing. The people involved in Greek life were athletic, Type A kind of people. They were intimidating because they were really attractive and I didn’t feel like I could connect with them. They seemed like robots.”

Sellier was standing in line at her date party, or formal, and she heard a group of guys talking. One of them said, “Our goal for the night is for every senior in our frat to bring home a drunk freshman.” Sellier said it is common and accepted for guys to have competitions about who can hook up with the most girls. They use sexual acts for bragging rights, brotherly bonding, and hazing.

“There’s a midget in my grade and SAE had one of their pledges hook up with her, as a joke.”

Thank God for Bard.

BY KATY SCHNEIDER

29 opinion

CASINOS IN BORSCHT BELT, NY

In early fall we will know where New York State’s four new casinos will be built. Eighteen hopeful developers will walk away disappointed. Eighteen towns will lose potential economic gain. And several old sites may remain untouched.

I’m talking about the old, decrepit, and very deserving Borscht Belt hotels.

With a decision looming, the roads along Ellenville (a small town in the heart of the Catskills) are flanked with picketed signs and peeling red billboards. Many say: “Bring Back the Nevele.” The Nevele was among the most famous of the Borscht Belt hotels. It closed its doors (after 10 years of struggling) in 2009.

The town’s enthusiasm stems from New York State’s late fall approval of a constitutional amendment to expand casino gambling. This excitement was heightened when it was announced four new casinos would be permitted to open in New York State.

Their enthusiasm also stems from a hunger for a lost glory. The decline of the Borscht Belt began swiftly in the mid 1980s. From the early 1900s until nearly the turn of the century, hundreds of hotels and bungalow colonies littered the landscape, providing respite for isolated New York City Jews.

They were lavish, and lively, and beloved.

And their guests were loyal — the hotels were, in a way, their homes. But then, at the end of the century, the popularity of the Borscht Belt dropped. The loss of interest is mostly blamed on the rise of cheap air travel; vacationers simply headed elsewhere.

But also: because of the social upheavals in the 60s, traditional, family-style resort vacations lost their appeal. Plus, Jews integrated — they didn’t need such intensely Jewish places anymore.

What remained were the husks of the hotels.

Some burned, a number were converted to be used by ultra-Orthodox Jews as schools and camps. But most just disintegrated into the landscape. And with the hotels’ disintegration, came the towns.

Based on the signs and billboards, one can assume that Ellenville and the Catskill region in general, is in favor of the resort’s potential reincarnation as a casino. Perhaps they think that a casino would restore the town’s former glory; that a casino would solve all of the town’s financial and social struggles.

This may not be true. There is research that claims that introducing gambling to suffering towns can only worsen social and financial conditions. The research says that a casino is a band-aid — a shoddy solution that rarely works and that often brings crime and unrest to small and distressed towns.

Several weeks ago, I drove to visit the remains of The Nevele. The building, which I had last visited in the fall, was unchanged. The same propped whiteboard at the entrance with the same hand written message: ‘Picture Taken” — hardly faded despite the months and months of heavy snow. The only differences were seasonal: bare trees, slicks of ice.

It looked dead.

The New York Times reports that the debate over the locations of the casino will intensify as the board comes closer to its decision. They claim that: “Applications are to be evaluated on a number of weighted factors, including economic activity (70 percent), local impact (20 percent) and “work force enhancement (10 percent).”

I’m certain that all of the 22 proposed locations are deserving on all of those fronts. All I can offer is this: The Nevele was once filled with life. Ellenville, the other towns threaded along the Borscht Belt — these were once vibrant vacation destinations. They were once the epitomes of The American Dream. Maybe a casino is not the answer. But maybe it would bring people back upstate, back to the hotels.

I can’t think of any location more deserving.

opinion

30

N U C L E A R P O W E R

BY JACK HANLY

Japan has a nuclear problem, but it’s not what you’d think. On a recent trip to France, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced the partnering of AREVA, France’s state controlled nuclear group, and ATOX, the leading force in maintenance services for nuclear facilities in Japan.

The respective French and Japanese companies will participate in a joint venture to decommission Japan’s nuclear power plants.

While countries such as Germany have pledged to abandon nuclear power since the Fukushima disaster, the alarms over climate change have only grown louder.

Yet nuclear power remains our most viable energy source and can be clean, safe, and incredibly efficient if done right.

Oscar-nominated documentarian Robert Stone has created a great deal of controversy with his movie Pandora’s Promise, which is in favor of nuclear energy. “Nuclear power disasters have killed probably under 100,000 people since we invented this technology. But if you look at coal, which is most likely the alternative, there are over 3 million deaths a year attributed to air pollution,” he recently argued. “We need to examine the costs and benefits of different energy sources, and nuclear solves many of our most pressing issues.”

Rather than helping other countries decommission nuclear power plants through their significant expertise, France should be encouraging the world to follow their lead.

France leads the world in nuclear power production, with other 75 percent of their electricity coming from this source. According to their website, Paris AREVA hopes to build one third of the world’s nuclear power reactors.

If that’s so, why are they helping one of the world’s largest economies replace clean nuclear energy with dirty coal?

The answer owes itself in large part to the stigma attached to the entire “nuclear” debate. It’s not surprising that many still have reservations about the prospect of huge amounts of nuclear waste with the lingering paranoia of the Cold War and post-9/11 eras.

But there needs to be a distinction between the threat of nuclear fallout due to the proliferation of weapons-grade plutonium, and the safe and regulated handling of nu-

clear waste. In fact, 10 percent of all electricity produced in the U.S. in the past twenty years has come from decommissioned Russian nuclear warheads, showing that the development of nuclear energy could mean the destruction of all atomic weapons.

Fears over nuclear power stem from the energy source’s unprecedented environmental persistence, but many of the claims over its health effects are overblown. The World Health Organization estimates that there will be no global health effects as a result of the Fukushima disaster, and only slightly elevated risks of cancer for those living closest to the fallout.

At the same time, cancers attributed to air pollution far outstrip those directly attributed to radiation. Not to mention the myriad other health problems caused by burning enormous amounts of coal.

Obviously the Fukushima disaster demonstrated the need for increased safety precautions and proper siting of facilities. But the consequences of even that extraordinary meltdown pale in comparison to the everyday effects of continued fossil fuel use.

Rather than focus on shutting down what nuclear reactors we do have, we should be building reactors the way we produce other goods: focusing on standardization and scalability.

Nuclear power is a near zero-carbon energy source that has the capacity to replace all fossil fuels at this very moment. Renewables such as wind and solar, on the other hand, still have a long way to go before they could serve our current energy needs. Like so many other debates of our time, nuclear energy has been unnecessarily politicized (by the left, I might add), leaving honest debate to the wayside.

If we are going to solve the ever-growing urgency of climate change, let’s acknowledge the risks this technology poses and work towards developing smart, safe, and clean solutions.

31 opinion

JUNK MAIL IN WHICH MADELINE GIVES ADVICE

BY MADELINE PORSELLA

I’m graduating, so now what?

- Hopeless in Hudson

Our email address gets its fair share of junk mail. But we kind of like it. It’s nice to think that you’ve got friends out there in the interwebs.

Asma Abdul-Qahhar: “Can i trust you please let me know” ********** Jose Lopez: Hello, I just arrived in Istanbul (Turkey), I need your help, I’m in a fix. Can I get a loan of ($ 2,500 USD)? You’ll have it as soon as I get back home. I lost my bank card, I’ll appreciate what you can give if not all. It’s really urgent, please get back to me asap, I’ll advise on how to send it.

Looking forward to hear from you soon.

Thanks ********** National Consumer Finance Website Valuepenguin.com issued a Study after researching the best credit card rewards for students. We thought you’d consider highlighting the findings in your publication.

Best Student Rewards Credit Cards Kind thanks Andrea Martone ********** The Fault in our Stars Press Conference in New York Sunday, May 4th at 1:30pm at the Crosby Street Hotel.

Screening will take place the evening of May 3rd. Details to follow.Participants: Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Nat Wolff, Laura Dern, Sam Trammell, director Josh Boone, and author, John Green Please let me know if you will be able to join us or have any requests for 1:1’s. ********** You are a Beneficiary to Mrs Evelyn I. Curry’s donation Merve Nur Karaoğul ********** Hello, This Project is about the exportation of 100,000 barrels of Light Crude Oil daily out from Iraq to Turkey through my client?s company in Iraq at the rate of $92.00 a barrel. This amount to $9,200,000 daily. I ask for your support as a foreigner to handle this business project with my client and you are not expected to invest in Iraq.

If yes, let me know and we will discuss this project proper.

Attorney Kim. Barrister Kim ********** I am yet to receive your response concerning our project.

Regards Chin

My dad has always joked that I will probably end up marching into Starbucks with my bachelors degree and a half-hearted smile to beg for a barista job that I am disappointingly under qualified for. In all jokes there is a note of truth and I’m pretty sure the Starbucks inside of the Target in Kingston is hiring.

I had a spring fling during spring fling and I think I really liked the girl and I think she was really hot and smart and funny ... But I don’t know because the only thing I remember from that night is the lingering smell of blueberry stoli and the color of her underwear next to the Keith Richards autobiography (which I’ve been meaning to read btw) on my bedroom floor. Help?

-Blackout Biddy Even with all the factors going against you, this sounds like it has great romantic potential. I say you ask around... If your hook up was anywhere near as sloppy as it sounds I’m sure you were seen any number of places (the campus center stairwell, the tent, the Obreshkove common room). Once you’ve found out who your mystery girl is check her social media presence to make sure that she’s not a) a dog b) a psycho or c) a narcissist. Coast clear? Now leave a bottle of blueberry stoli and a note outside of her door (she’ll appreciate the sentiment if she isn’t still hungover). The rest is up to you.

I have my project board on Wednesday and idk if I should bring something or not. Is it sweet or desperate?

- Sweet and Desperate Bring something low key if your project is bad so that no one feels guilty about failing you (think box o’ joe and donut holes).

If your project is good, seduce your board. Sell them on the person behind the project. Light candles. Pop bottles. Strawberries and whipped cream are never a bad idea.

I am deeply deeply in love with Gerard but I only see him when I’m wasted and trying to pull lithe young freshmen. What do I do?

- Traghaven Tramp Go to the bar sober on a Tuesday night. Get drunk slowly. By the end of the night you’ll be wasted enough to exude confidence and there won’t be any freshman around to distract you so you can focus all your attention on Gerard. I’m sure you’re a charming drunk.

I recently pulled a threepeat. I thought I would feel proud and satisfied but I feel kind if gross. Is this normal?

- So Laid No yeah. That’s gross.

The erratic weather of late has taken a huge toll on my appearance. My hair is both greasy and frizzy, my skin oily and dry, my shoulders tan and my legs pale. Any advice?

- Combination Complication Coconut oil. Put it everywhere. You won’t be sorry.

RE: BARD TWEETS @BranchezBeats Headed to my alma mater Bard College to play their Spring Fling tonight. I’m pumped because it should be a rowdy dance party/I don’t have HW

@barthameatrice Every school I’ve ever attended ages 0-21 has been considered the ‘hippie’ school of its equivalents so what does that make me

@_siira_ “What ya up to tonight” “Dunno, probably get drunk, go off campus, get drunker, hit on a hot freshman, go home, cry, masterbate, sleep. Hbu”

@riovn Alone In Tellos: A Memoir

@Andrea_SzM I only truly believe the semester is ending when I get an all-caps email about birth control from Health Services.

@likesomebardian Hey.. we met (and made out..) for like a second in the spring fling tent, you were shorter than me…

@dnldlng announcement: i fucking know what blithewood looks like on 4/20 stop sending me snapchats

@weirddeals somebody alert bard college i was looking at the new arrivals on netflix and there was a movie about hannah arendt and another about zizek

@jpcorner Just watched someone walk up the front doors of the library, stare at them for a solid ten seconds, sigh, and then walk away.