March 2013

BARD FREE PRESS

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY

MARCH 2012

VOLUME XIV ISSUE 6

bard free press EDITORS IN CHIEF will “big willy” anderson kurt “got an iphone” schmidlein rebecca “has access to kids” swanberg NEWS EDITOR anna “madeline’s master” daniszweski CULTURE EDITOR lucas “loves eating eggs so weird” opgenorth

OPINION EDITOR arthur “srsly wut is ur accent” holland-michel

ART DIRECTOR emily “bard papers sux” wissemann

BARDIVERSE EDITOR leela “llama” khanna

LAYOUT STAFF will anderson madeline porsella emily wissemann

SPORTS EDITOR tom “lachance” mcqueeny

COPY EDITOR emily “coffee lover” berkowitz

ONLINE EDITOR naomi “mcqueeny” lachance

NEWS [04]

CULTURE [20]

front by sam rosenblatt

COPY STAFF nora deligter margaux robles PHOTOGRAPHY will anderson anna daniszewski jon doelp kalena fujii anna low-beer ben powers leah rabinowitz emily wissemann

WRITERS jeremy gardner david goldberg stasha moreno alec petty gaby philo ben powers elizabeth pyle jonian rafti nolan reece levi shaw-faber tessa von walderdorff helen wicks k.r. yeshi

BARDIVERSE [16]

OPINION [24]

SPORTS [26]

photo by valentina von klencke

[ 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.

back by emily wissemann

[ CORRECTIONS ] 1. In the article titled “2013 Budget Forum” RJD2 and Araabmuzik should not have been confirmed as performers at Spring Fling. Rather, they received the highest number of votes in the Spring Fling survey released last semester. No artists have been confirmed.

CAMPUS MOURNS KAROLINA MROZ 1991 - 2013

BY REBECCA SWANBERG

Students, faculty and staff at Bard have joined together to mourn junior Karolina Mroz, who passed away on Thursday, March 7. Mroz was from Westtown, NY and was an accomplished and talented painter.

According to Mroz’s academic advisor, Lisa Sanditz, the mourning process began as soon as President Leon Botstein sent an email to the Bard community and students on Friday morning.

“I was at Fisher [the studio arts building] by 12:30 that day, and already her studiomate Jean Wong had posted a statement on their studio door, opening their studio for people to visit and offering her thoughts for Karolina,” Sanditz said.

Mroz was a Studio Arts major and an integral source of inspiration for the department. As a sophomore, she received a scholarship to do a summer intensive program at the New York Studio School. This year, she was one of two who were facultynominated to apply to Norfolk, the Yale Summer Arts Program. In honor of Mroz’s commitment and love for the arts, students, faculty, and staff have been visiting her shared studio as a sort of makeshift memorial site, Sanditz says.“People have left notes, flowers, gifts, and even some of Karolina’s artwork that people have found,” Sanditz said. “I think it

has been a quiet and intimate place for people to go and leave things and collect their thoughts. Jean Wong has been extremely generous in sharing their space this way.”

On the Monday after Mroz passed away, there was a service held in Florida, NY. Upwards of 35-40 Bard students were there, according to one of Mroz’s close friends, senior Helen Wicks. The memorial was over an hour away and included a wake, visitation and funeral mass. Afterwards, they went to the cemetery.

“Most kids got lost on our way,” Wicks said. “[We] had our own celebration time of honoring because we missed the official one, and then a huge Polish feast for friends and family.”

On March 13, a meeting was held in Fisher Studio Arts Building, initiated by the arts program, but open to all. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the mourning process, to share memories of Mroz and take part in collective grief, according to Sanditz. At the meeting, Dean of Students Bethany Nohlgren spoke along with Jen White, Assistant Director of Counseling Services. The group began work on planning a memorial on campus. According to Wicks, they are considering holding a memorial celebration on March 22, Mroz’s 22nd birthday. The Feitler Co-op hosted a

party on Friday, March 15, in honor of Mroz, with a lineup of bands.

Students in Mroz’s Painting III class came together and created a mural for Mroz, using a wall-size canvas that they hung in her studio space in the Universal Builders Supply warehouse (UBS), in Red Hook. In addition, they used some of her paints and canvases to include in the tribute.

“The paintings are gorgeous. They capture the spirit of Karolina in prismatic color and wild and free expression,” Sanditz said. “I stopped by at the end of class and the students were listening to the Beatles and painting, drawing and even laughing at moments. It was profoundly moving to see this small community transform grief into beauty.”

Both BRAVE and Bard Counseling Services have opened their doors to help students who need help processing their grief. Bard Counseling Services is open to all walk-ins and counselor Tamara Telberg encourages students to seek support from the Bard community. Telberg urges the community to make space for the grieving process on campus and with each other.

BRAVE counselors set up walk-in office hours last Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to be available to students post-tragedy, according to BRAVE Director Rebecca Stacy. They also

implemented a backup counselor who would be on-call. Students can call a BRAVE student counselor anonymously and confidentially, or they can meet with a BRAVE counselor in person 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“Grief processing can look different for everyone, and I would invite the Bard community to have respect for everyone’s individual process and not to have expectations around their peers’ grieving process,” Stacy said.

Stacy reminds students that there is no need to feel isolated in your grief if being with others is helpful for you.

But in addition, she says sometimes you have to give yourself space from the grieving process.

“I would also invite students to take a break from this process,” Stacy said. “They are human and need to step away from these intense feelings for a bit. Go do something uplifting and then come back to processing these feelings.”

Wicks also wants students to be prepared for a huge celebration of Smigus Dyngus, a Polish holiday on the Monday after Easter, where participants dump buckets of water on passersby. It was one of Mroz’s favorite holidays, second to Halloween.

“Karolina was loved by many,” Sanditz said. “And we miss her.”

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[LETTERS]

NOTES FROM ALUMNI/AE UNDERGROUND Greetings from your future, beyond Bard. Here, tucked away across the road in the ‘Two Boots building’ (technically, they are in our building) is Alumni/ae Affairs. We deal with all affairs alumni/ae have (and there are a few).

It’s our job to collate, contact, laud, invite, assist, follow, reunite, solicit, and connect with those who went before.

Have you ever noticed that when you meet someone who went to Bard they can’t help but tell you how cool it was when they were here? Or complain that they never had what you had? Or tell you a crazy story? I’m wondering if you guys care what happened before you got here.

I know I could have cared less when I was a student (‘85’89). All I cared about was my apartment in the schoolhouse in Tivoli, my friends, my band (all-girl cover band of songs from 1973), my green Karman Ghia, and my super nerdy senior project on lives of female Irish mill workers in Columbia County 1830-60 with Myra Armstead.

Well, truth is, it really wasn’t any more or less cool—it’s just everyone in college likes to believe they were the end of an era. That said, there are some good stories if you want to hear them.

Last month, I drove up to northern Vermont to visit the last living St. Stephen’s (what Bard was called pre-1938) alumnus from the class of 1934. He was sharp, remembered everything about his experience at Bard —what books they read, what professors served a good drink (it was prohibition), what kind of cars they drove (Desoto Sedan), and what happened when the Vassar girls visited.

My job is to care about all Bardians: the average, the above average, bad, and the.... unusual. There’s a guy who went to school with me who has made a career out of encouraging people to eat bugs to save the planet—he was even on Colbert. My roommate at Bard became a

professor of 15th Century Carthusian Monastic Miscellany, and one of my bandmates just came back from directing a documentary on Antarctica for the National Science Foundation. Bard has all sorts out there, believe me. If you want to know more about alumni/ae and what to look forward to, then watch this space. And I am here across the road most days with my colleagues, Joanna Tanger ‘07 and Anne Canzonetti ‘84, and we are happy to have you visit us here in the Alumni/ae Center.

Be seeing you,

- JANE ANDROMACHE BRIEN ‘89, DIRECTOR OF ALUMNI/AE AFFAIRS

IN RESPONSE TO “ON THE NEED FOR ENGAGEMENT” IN THE FEBRUARY ISSUE OF THE FREE PRESS “A culture of indifference … fundamentally undermines our ability to have a robust, engaged community,” wrote Gardner last month, in a biting critique of Bard’s “disengaged community.” Generalizations, such as Gardner’s, promote the myth that our community is apathetic. This stereotype too often distorts the reality of engagement at Bard. When taken at face value, the stereotype hampers our ability to solve the engagement dilemma.

The myth of our collective apathy has roots in freshman year, a crucial time when our habits are cultivated and cemented. The first year is a juggle; it’s a balancing act of academics and socializing.

Many first-years engulf themselves in their education while maintaining substanceoriented weekends. These desires let en-

gagement fall through the cracks of our Bardian lives. However, for one freshmen, a chance encounter shifted her views on the freshmen juggle of academics, socialization, and community engagement.

A First-year’s Perspective: ‘The romanticized view of Bard that I had before I arrived is not what I experienced when I got there. Although I loved L&T, a time filled with eager minds and intellectually stimulating conversations, I also found that nobody knew what to do besides go to class and search for friends. As the semester progressed, it was easy to feel overwhelmed with coursework. It was difficult to think of anything besides solidifying friendships and establishing my work ethic. Like many of my peers, I was still adjusting to college life. I felt I could wait until spring semester to become involved in the

community—it would somehow happen, I would worry about it later. But I found that turning my desire for engagement into a reality took more effort than that.

‘I got lucky. A month into the fall semester, I became friends with a highly engaged upperclassman. Our passions and goals were similar; the difference being that she was engaged in all of the ways that I desired to be. She became both my friend and my mentor. She constantly connected me with volunteer opportunities within the Center for Civic Engagement. But at the same time, she showed me that that if I felt stressed about a paper, the best remedy was a long Sunday in the library. Friendship and work aren’t mutually exclusive.

She showed me that engagement isn’t just another obligation, taking up more time and energy: it is a new group of support-

ive, motivated people, who, by the rewarding work they do, give their lives at Bard greater meaning.’

Getting involved is not as easy as stepping outside of your dorm room. It is based on two things: motivation and a supportive social network. We don’t lead student clubs and volunteer for TLS projects solely for the flourish on a résumé. Over 160 active student organizations exist to build a socially aware and sympathetic local, as well as global, community. Before we can care for sustainability, education, artistic expression and so on, we must care for each other. We harm our faith in the community by labeling each other as apathetic. Isn’t it time to debunk the myth of apathy at Bard?”

- GABBY PHILO & JONIAN RAFTI

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MISSING DRUMS PUZZLE DEPARTMENT

“Mysteriously disappeared” is the official term for what happened to $6000 worth of Bard Conservatory drum sets. In October, Amy Garapic, a percussion teaching fellow at the Conservatory, discovered that the drums were missing.

“When I went into the [Achebe House] basement, I noticed that the crates were naked and the drums were completely gone,” she said. The missing drums consisted of five Pearl Reference drum sets with a silver sparkle finish.

Until January 2012, the Conservatory percussion department shared the Achebe House with the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI).

After the 2011-2012 winter holiday, the percussion department moved into a few small rooms in the basement of the Edith C. Blum Institute. Conservatory Dean of Students Eileen Brickner explained that BPI told them that they had to “get out of [Achebe] because we can’t do our work.”

The percussion department’s new home in Blum did not have enough room for all of the drums, so the BPI agreed to let them keep five drum kits stored in the Achebe House basement.

Throughout the spring semester of 2012, Garapic practiced in the Achebe basement and in May she noticed that some of the drums and drum cases had been moved out of a small room and into the main room of the basement. The smaller room had been converted into a union office for Bard employees. “They had kindly moved all of those (drum cases) and even put the drums up on a couple of packing crates in case there were any leaks in the basement floor,” Garapic said.

Garapic left Bard for the summer, and in October she went down to the Achebe House basement to practice and noticed that the drums were gone. “The cases were still there, as well as some [sheet] music that was left, but there was no sign of the drums,” she said.

Garapic then contacted Brickner who went directly to the Assistant Director of Physical Plant Randy Clum. Clum said that

Brickner “asked if I knew where they had gone from a house on campus here, and I told her, ‘No.’” He continued, “I went up to take a look … and when I went there the only thing that was left were the cases, so I picked them up to see if the drums were still in them, and they were empty.”

Brickner reported the loss to Security.

According to Brickner, Head of Security Ken Cooper “came back to [her] and said ‘well what do you want to do?’” Brickner said that it did not seem like Security had a clear policy for dealing with this.

Cooper said that he had trouble starting an investigation because nobody had any idea when the drums were lost. Garapic discovered the loss in October, but they could have been taken out of the Achebe House basement any time between May and October. “It makes it very difficult when you have a timeframe of weeks or months,” Cooper said.

Cooper, like Brickner, also believed that the drums were borrowed and not stolen.

There were no signs of forced entry on the Achebe House basement.

“When things go missing at Bard, most of the time they are borrowed, and that’s what we thought happened to the drum sets,” Cooper said.

When Brickner began to feel that there was little chance of the drums being returned, she contacted Director of Institutional Research Joe Ahern, who deals with the college’s insurance matters. Ahern said that, because there were no signs of forced entry, the insurance company would not cover the loss of the drums. The insurance company officially deemed the matter a “mysterious disappearance.”

Ken Cooper believes that the missing drums could be the biggest loss of Bard property in recent memory.

“I don’t recall other losses with values as much as these drums,” he said.

The Bard Conservatory welcomes any information regarding the location of the missing drums.

graphic by will anderson

BY LEVI SHAW-FABER

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The Bard Farm is expecting their produce to double or even triple from the last—an achievement that they soon anticipate to reach.

“One thing I can guarantee is that Chartwells is thrilled about the 15 to 20 thousand pounds of food, which will bring a great financial net,” John-Paul Sliva, the Farm Coordinator, said. “Last year, we grew over 60 thousand pounds of food, but with it being a full season this year, I am hopeful for what is to come.”

Eager to discuss what was new this season, Sliva began by explaining the aesthetic additions. Posts have been put up on either side of the farm with a wire running from post to post in order to allow hops vines to increase from eight ft. to about 12 ft. tall. Hops are the flowers that are used as flavoring and stability agents in beer brewing.

As for the produce itself, Sliva is anticipating for another successful year, particularly with their cranberry bog, which is the largest in the

boxes. Among these stirring innovations, Gordon seemed most upbeat about the current production of maple syrup.

“We recently have been tapping maple trees on campus for maple sap, which we have just made into syrup,” Gordon said.

A first-year who recently joined the farming community, Natalie Cuomo, said that there is a possibility that the farm will become certified organic.

“The Bard Farm has always been organic, even without the actual certification,” she said. “We don’t use synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or insecticides. Instead we weed the rows by hand and cover young plants as they mature.”

Sliva added that though they are organic, by receiving a federal stamp, it will give more value and appreciation for the produce grown and provide a clear product difference.

“It is a wonderful thing for institutions and consumers who want

food systems and of the stronger support of local farmers from the government. “As a nutrition advocate, I tend to absorb the reality that’s going on,” he said. He went on to describe a myriad of problems, which included the constant struggle of the one-billion to find a meal, the issue of obesity and diabetes, soil digression, water quality, air quality, and climate change.

“The reality of the world food system goes all the way into some pretty dark areas that has huge global impacts,” Sliva said. “People are finally becoming aware of the seriousness and are beginning to take action. We are in the process of creating a new culture, or the culture that was once there.”

It is simple to become a member of the farming community. Anyone can join, according to Sliva.

“I was always eating cheeseburgers during my childhood. I was right along the lines of the contemporary pop culture of food,” Sliva laughed.

Working on the farm has given him

FARM PREPS FOR NEW SEASON

BY TESSA VON WALDERDORFF Hudson Valley. Last year they managed to produce these cranberries in pots, up to 40 pounds.

“It will be a little bit of an experiment this year as we work off a new technique,” Sliva said.

These cranberries may experience some minor struggles as they slowly adapt to growing straight from earth. In order to make this change as smooth as possible, the farmers used row covers to protect the plants during the winter and keep the moisture from evaporating as fast.

“I don’t know if that technique will work as well as other techniques because it may freeze some of the buds, which won’t let them make it through winter,” Sliva said.

Junior Ben Gordon, a student that works on the farm, expressed his delight for the wine cap mushrooms being grown in the back of the farm.

“They are the only mushrooms we can inoculate in the spring and expect to get something in the fall,” he said.

Additionally, the farm is expecting to produce an abundance of looseleaf lettuce and, at the end of this season, to harvest honey from bee

to buy products,” he said. “Certification is a legitimate thing saying we are being responsible for what we’re doing.”

Yet another novelty that will aid in further developing the farm is the creation of a new website, designed mainly to give Chartwells access to buying online. Unlike last year, where all business was handled via phone, this year will allow for a more efficient and steady process.

It will also permit students to go online and see what will be available on the menu in both Kline and Manor.

“Last year, Chartwells was hesitant in buying food from us,” Sliva said. “Now they are much more committed. Personally, I think it’s a no-brainer. The food is not only better and super fresh, but there is plenty of goodwill to it as well.”

He made it clear that they are mainly focusing on distributing to Chartwells based on the sole belief that it is wiser to change the institutional food here as opposed to some local restaurant that has more money. “It’s an activist piece,” Sliva said.

Sliva is aware of a new energy in photo by leah rabinowitz

a true appreciation of nature’s supremacy and has radically altered his diet.

Cuomo also expressed how much her involvement on the farm has changed her values of food.

“I think more about where my food comes from and what was put in it. Tasting the difference between fresh organic produce and commercial produce grown in bulk is really incredible,” Cuomo said.

Gordon believes that his participation as a farmer has provided him with academic growth. “I have learned so much more about how much consumption affects the agricultural economy of the world and the environment.”

For Gordon, his hard work feels worth it when he sees Bard Farm produce in Kline. He takes a picture on his phone and sends it to friends and family to show them what his work has accomplished.

“There is nothing more fun than being really sore in the morning, crawling out of bed, making a nice breakfast for myself, and then going back out there and doing it again,” Sliva said.

Sophomore Ezra Broach, who identifies as transgender, has made the decision to undergo a double mastectomy, commonly referred to as “top surgery,” a surgical procedure that involves the removal of one’s breasts. Without the financial support of their parents and the coverage of their healthcare provider, it seemed as if Broach would not be able to raise the funds to cover the $7500 operation. Luckily, with the help of their friends, including sophomore Jasper Katz, Broach was able to organize an online campaign on the fundraising website Indiegogo. On Saturday, March 9, Bard students gathered in the Bertelsmann Campus Center for a phone bank, during which callers contacted their own friends and family, many of whom had never met Broach. The Bard Free Press sat down with Broach and Katz and discussed the journey through the campaign and their hopes for the future.

FREE PRESS: EZRA BROACH:

JASPER KATZ:

INTERVIEW BY ANNA DANISZEWSKI

EB:

FP: EB:

FP: JK:

EB: photos by anna daniszewski

How did you get the idea to do the phone bank?

It was really Jasper’s idea. Basically, right after I talked to my parents and said that this was what I was looking for—top surgery—they said, well, we don’t really want to support you in this, and so I had a very small break down. … You can’t really discount the breakdown for sheer force compelling me to do something about it. I was at the end of my rope. … As a college student, what are you supposed to do? You can’t really hold down a full-time job that pays enough for you to save up $7000 in four years. That’s just really implausible. At the same time, I knew I wasn’t going to be making enough money through my job here that pays minimum wage … I was sitting with Jasper in the campus center … and [they] said you could do a phone bank. Of course I said, ‘No, I can’t. We can’t do that,’ just because it seemed ridiculous for someone to have a phone bank just for themselves. I felt really uncomfortable asking people for money and for help.

I have a lot of experience with asking people for money, because I worked on the marriage equality campaign in Maine over the summer and into the fall. I would ask people for money, and, in July, there was what was called a Friends and Family Phone Bank.

All those who worked on the campaign got together … and we called our friends and family for a couple of hours. Just through our calling … we raised $18,000.

Then one of my supervisors in Maine had told me this story where … one of her friends [was] looking to get top surgery, so she and her friend called through some people for a little while and got some folks to donate money. So, I had known it was something that had been done before. Ezra needed money, and I was like, I know how to get money. … I have a slight obsession with running phone banks. It was a meeting of the minds.

It really was a meeting of the minds, inasmuch as Jasper kind of pushed my mind against the idea. In the end, I was very grateful for it. I couldn’t have done it without Jasper. I wouldn’t have done it without Jasper.

What was your experience during the phone bank?

I was really nervous … I’m okay on stage [but] when it comes to real people, when I have to be myself, it’s incredibly awkward. … But people started flooding in, and [we] had to get started. It was really inspiring to see everybody calling.

My problem … during the phone bank [was that] I had a lot of issues, because a lot of the people I was calling, or I would’ve called, were already there and had already donated in some respect, or were giving their time … So, I was calling a lot of family members who I basically had to come out to, and that was really scary. Thankfully, it went pretty well. They didn’t really know what the hell I was talking about but they said, well, we love you and we accept you, and we might not donate right now, or ever. But they’re acceptance was really … what I really need from them more than money. … I [also] talked to my friends from back home who really didn’t know anything about being trans, … and had a lot of offensive stuff said to me, unintentionally, and then some very intentionally. But the fact that I had so many friends there at the phone bank who were so kind and supportive and gave a shit and understood kind of counter-balanced all of it.

Your campaign existed on and was largely publicized through the internet. What do you think the role of the internet is in projects like this?

It’s definitely a common practice. I think if you go on Tumblr you can see all sorts of these things. … [We’re definitely not the first ones] fundraising via the Internet for top surgery.

The internet can be an equalizer, and it’s something that most people on the western hemisphere have ac-

JK:

FP: EB:

JK:

EB:

JK:

cess to, which is a really fantastic thing. But I also think it’s something I had a lot of trouble with. Going into the phone bank was reconciling myself to the fact that I have a lot of privilege in being able to call people and ask for money. … I had to take a step back and say whoa, just think about how lucky you are … that you know enough people who are willing to donate.

The internet really enables that.

One of the really weird things was I have substantially more followers on Tumblr now … because people were reblogging the link and saying, hey, spread the word, this person really wants to get top surgery.

I think I had quite a few donations from that. That was really … great, but really strange for me, because it really did show that there’s an expansive queer and trans community on the internet.

But it also sends a larger message. … What does it say about the society that we live in that hundreds of young adults are forced to turn to the internet to raise money so that they don’t feel like shit about themselves? That’s a pretty sucky message to be sending, that … your only option is to turn to strangers. … Insurance companies don’t cover it, because they think it’s a choice. Why they think it’s a choice to have your boobs cut off is beyond me. You just wake up one morning and you’re like, you know what would be fun?

We have this idea that if you need something, it is up to you to produce it on your own with no help whatsoever from anyone. … In reality, lots of people want to help you, lots of people need to help you, lots of people are sitting around waiting for you to ask them to help you. … You see these campaigns that are able to raise almost $700 in a few hours, and that’s clearly not the case.

What happens if you don’t raise all the money?

I don’t think I’m going to raise the entire amount. I think that’s really implausible. … I have a couple weeks in which to raise basically a little bit [under] $6000. …

But I think we’ve got a couple strategies in hand. …

I’m hoping to expand the campaign a little bit but after that, hopefully this summer I’ll be holding down a couple of jobs and saving my money from this job [on campus].

I also just want to point out that [if] 1,000 people on campus … [donate] $5, Ezra’s done …. Or if you can’t donate, this campaign is about so much more than raising money. … This is a really amazing opportunity for people to stand up and say that, look, these people deserve the proper health care …. I think that’s what this is more about, creating a community of people that support each other.

I think no matter what, Jasper is right. I kind of hope that by doing this, trans issues will at least be a little bit more out in the open …. I know it’s going to take me a long time to get top surgery, but if you get at least one person talking about why top surgery matters, or why trans people are actually, like, okay and not fucked up in the head, that’s an achievement all on its own. … I think it’s easy to think of trans rights really conceptually, … and just live life without realizing that we exist, trans people exist. … I suppose to that extent, it would be really great to have more awareness as far as language goes. In an ideal world, people wouldn’t just be automatically gendered. … It would be great to have gender neutral bathrooms, because that’s something I really freak out about on a pretty regular basis, [as well as] the locker rooms at the gym.

I think Bard right now is faced with this really amazing opportunity to say, yes, there are parts of the world that suck, and that are probably always going to suck, but Bard doesn’t have to be one of them.

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STUDENTS RALLY FOR EZRA

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CLEARING THE AIR

BY REBECCA SWANBERG

what it is, and, inevitably, make Bard look good while she’s at it.

But often, Kucera finds herself leading groups past big clusters of students smoking or pavement littered in cigarette butts.

She explains that this happens in college, brushes it off, and moves on.

According to Director of Student Health Services Marsha Davis visitors notice, and the groups of smokers outside the library make an impression. In her 25 years at Bard, the prevalence of smoking here has been an issue that haunts her and one that she’s put considerable effort into turning around.

“The smoking culture at Bard is really shocking to people from other parts of the US,” Marsha Davis said. “Somehow, there is an established culture here, which has been the hardest thing to break.”

Marsha Davis said that, as a mother, it was one of the things she paid attention to during college tours. Her daughter attends Wesleyan, where Marsha Davis says cigarette smoking seems much less ubiquitous.

The pervasiveness of tobacco at Bard makes it a more comfortable place to propose going out for a smoke, Kucera says. She’s less apt to suggest it at other schools when she’s visiting a friend. Instead, she’ll wait for someone else to bring it up.

“You never really know when you enter another social situation how they regard smoking, because it is looked at in a very specific way depending on what social environment you’re in,” Kucera said. “And here, it just happens to be something that is very normal. I’m never hesitant at Bard to ask if anyone wants to have a cigarette.”

Marsha Davis thinks it has something to do with the ‘Paris Café syndrome’—students start smoking for an affectation and then become addicted. She also thinks it has a lot to do with smoking being a social norm at Bard. Those theories, alongside Kucera and Smillie’s agreement that there is a factor of aesthetic value and social anxiety, could be reasons for the high population of student smokers.

But junior Sophie Davis thinks that using smoking as an excuse for social interaction isn’t legitimate.

“I feel like I would be just as awkward if I was standing outside in a circle with people smoking as if I was inside, sitting in Kline with the same group of people,” Sophie Davis said.

“I don’t think the cigarette is really what ties you together.

That doesn’t give you a topic of conversation.”

Sophie Davis has never smoked before. For her, there are no personal benefits. None of Sophie Davis’ friends smoke, so it’s not a part of her social life. She acknowledges that smoking could act as an icebreaker but doesn’t see it going much deeper than that.

“Maybe it just makes it easier to start a conversation,” she said. “Probably a lot easier than going up to a table of strangers at Kline and asking to sit with them.”

It’s not as if Sophie Davis didn’t grow up in a place with a cigarette culture—she was raised in Brooklyn. But for many students, the idea of home—a place where you grew up, with parents that generally helped to ingrain an anti-smoking philosophy in your life—prevents smoking there. Sophie Davis says that one of the main reasons that she doesn’t

LOOKING AT BARD’S SMOKING CULTURE “I can’t really recall if I was 12 or 13 when I started smoking, but it was around then,” sophomore Michael Kulukundis said. “I didn’t really understand what inhaling was. No one taught me.”

Kulukundis, originally from LA, grew up in a family of smokers. They’re in the film business, he says, where smoking seems to be the norm. He’d always wanted to try.

And when he did, he got hooked. At 14 years old, he and a friend, who is now a Bard alum, started smoking four or five packs a day. They spent the summer chain smoking while Kulukundis’ dad was in New York.

“My dad came back from New York and was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing? You’re sucking it into your soul, and you’re smoking 100 cigarettes a day,’” he said. “He made me cut down.”

But even after cutting down, Kulukundis was still smoking about two or three packs a day, he says. And when he got to Bard, it only became more accessible. During Language & Thinking (L&T), everyone seemed to smoke. Living in Tewksbury, he said that students were constantly smoking, indoors and out, and he felt that nobody had a very good reason for why they started. They were nervous and in a new space. Students that had never touched a cigarette before were taking drags outside the library. Students that only smoked at parties were suddenly casual two-packs-a-day-

smokers. Sophomore Megan Smillie experienced the same shift when she came to Bard. Smoking acts as a method to ease the tension of a new environment, she said. “[Cigarettes] are a really good tool for social interaction or abandoning social interaction—walking into a party and feeling awkward, you bring one person and smoke outside.

It’s the story of my every weekend,” Smillie said.

Smillie, who had an occasional cigarette in high school, didn’t start buying her own packs until she got to college.

She transferred to Bard from Lehigh after her freshman year. At Lehigh, she said, students that smoked on their way to class stood out—smoking in daylight was foreign. Her habits of taking library breaks for a cigarette or going out for a cigarette break after a meal all developed at Bard. But for both Kulukundis and Smillie, the seed was planted before coming to Annandale.

“I wanted to smoke in high school because it looks cool.

Who is anyone kidding? It’s cool. It’s a cool thing, and that is important at this school or seems like it is,” Smillie said.

Senior Maggy Kucera had her first cigarette when she was in high school, like Smillie, and for similar reasons. Being cool, looking cool, fitting in, and, most importantly, meeting new people. If you have the choice betweem sitting in the library alone while everyone you’re with is having a cigarette break or going with them, Kucera thinks the choice is clear.

But though smoking started as a way for them to breach social barriers, both Smillie and Kucera have recognized a growing desire to smoke for stress relief and out of habit.

“I don’t consider myself a smoker, even though I do smoke,” Kucera said. “And it has definitely increased my senior year with stress. Now I definitely smoke more than I ever have in my life.”

— A couple times a week, Kucera leads groups of prospective students and their parents on tours through Bard’s campus.

As a tour guide, it’s Kucera’s job to represent the school for

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who are already addicted to cigarettes.

Behavior modification, nicotine gum, even short-term antidepressants that have shown success in helping smokers cut back. There have been some success stories. But Marsha Davis agreed with Kulukundis when he said that the problem is stopping the start.

On that front, Health Services is open to working with PCs at the beginning of students’ first year on preventative measures.

Since Marsha Davis began working at Bard 25 years ago, they’ve managed to discontinue the sale of cigarettes on campus, and smoking is no longer allowed in buildings.

Aside from their responsibility to help smokers who want to quit, the administration and Health Services employees are focused on protecting the rights of nonsmokers. Smokers cluster outside of Olin, the library, and dorms, areas that are shared by smokers and nonsmokers.

“Smoking is legal. One is allowed to smoke,” Dean of Students Bethany Nohlgren said. “I’m more concerned about the way the smoking culture on campus impacts nonsmokers and people feeling like — they can’t breathe easily in the doorways of buildings.”

A couple years ago, Bard Health Services Kucera said that those clusters bugged hosted a smoking cessation group in Kline her when she was a freshman, but now that for students and opened it to faculty and she smokes, she doesn’t notice. Kulukundis staff as well. No students showed. Since thinks that’s a common mindset. then, attempts to gather groups have fallen “From being a smoker for so long, I don’t apart, though Barbara-Jean Briskey FNP, know if I recognized the other people,” KuluAssociate Director of Health Services, has kundis said. “I’m not thinking about it, it’s for completed two smoking cessation training me—I’m smoking because I want to.” workshops for clinicians to help their paOne method that Kulukundis recently

every day. In class, he inhaled. The ecigarette vaporizes a liquid solution that includes nicotine, simulating the experience of smoking and satisfying nicotine cravings. But research on the e-cigarette is very limited, and it is not FDA approved.

“After two or three weeks, I was like, ‘what am I doing?’” Kulukundis said. “It’s not FDA approved, no one knows if it’s really good for you. It’s disgusting; it’s revolting; it’s stupid, but it helped me quit.”

Kulukundis tried the Ego-Tobacco e-cigarette, which had a higher concentration of nicotine and tasted better than a cigarette, and said that going back to conventional cigarettes made him realize that he found them “disgusting.”

“You’re still getting the nicotine, but you’re not getting all the tars and additives and chemicals in the smoke,” Marsha Davis said. “So it’s an improvement.”

—

If you look inside the student handbook, you’ll find that smoking is prohibited within 15 feet of a doorway or window. The rule directly contradicts those clusters of students outside Olin or under the overhang at the library—but Nohlgren said that Bard doesn’t have the disposable manpower to enforce these rules. They invite individuals to stand up for their own rights and encourage PCs to remind students of this rule. There have been discussions about making designated smoking areas, and even making Bard a smoke-free campus after the trend among other colleges. But restrictions like that are unrealistic, LeGendre says. Because it’s hard for students and staff to get off campus, mandating a smoke-free campus would be bound for failure, and a violation of individuals’ rights.

“If we’re going to continue to treat people as adults, putting restrictions on things that are legal for adults to do seems antithetical to the way we function as an institution,” Nohlgren said.

Kulukundis thinks that there is nothing Bard can really do to stop students from smoking but that there is already a widespread decline, and that it’s only a matter of time before that downward trend hits Bard.

The effort that Bard is making is enough, he says. But in the meantime, because the Bard community has a “reverence for personal liberties” as LeGendre puts it, students should attempt to feel more comforttients quit smoking. adopted, that acts as both a cessation able standing up for themselves.

“It’s hard to get students to do time with aid and preventative measure for second“If you’re really ballsy, you can come up to a group,” Marsha Davis said. “That’s why hand smoke, is the electronic cigarette (e- us [smoking outside of Olin], and ask us to we’re offering primary care visits. Make an cigarette). He says its aim is to make you please stop, but no one does. You should appointment, and we’ll work with you indi- hate smoking by catering to your need for try. Tell the other nonsmokers to try, stand vidually.” nicotine with a device that has an improved up,” Kulukundis said. “We’re weaker than The staff at Health Services is trying every taste, no chemical additives, no smoke. you anyway; we’re killing ourselves, one method they can think of to help students Kulukundis used his e-cigarette all day, cigarette at a time.”

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it’s about quitting. It’s about stopping the start—which I can’t do,” Kulukundis said.

“I’m away, and then I pick up a cigar, get nicotine, and want to smoke again.”

Kulukundis has seen cigarettes’ grip on his family in LA and has decided to quit. He says that it’s for health that he’s stopping—because he wants to be able to breathe. His grandmother smokes about 100 cigarettes a day, “chewing on it to get the nicotine.” He recalls seeing his aunt’s ashtray on her bed right next to her pillows.

And watching someone in your family suffer with addiction is sometimes the most straightforward deterrent, LeGendre says.

As someone with what she describes as an addictive personality, LeGendre watches addicted students with a lot of compassion.

“My father was a two or three pack a day smoker,” LeGendre said. “He died of lung cancer, which was inevitable, it was no surprise, but it was still devastating to watch a parent suffocate.”

She tried smoking once, but growing up watching her father’s dependence on smoking, she felt a lot of guilt. She said she tried a lot of methods to attempt to support her father. And that’s the real struggle—supporting someone you love when their desires are ultimately hurting them. It’s something the Bard administration and Health Services have been trying to reconcile for a long time.

photos by leah rabinowitz

smoke is her mom. She says she doesn’t think her mom would ever look at her the same way if she smoked.

When students at Bard who casually smoke find themselves home for break, they often notice that they cut back on cigarettes. Smillie and Kucera notice this when they’re home. Smillie’s parents don’t know that she smokes, and when she feels the urge to have a cigarette at home, she makes sure to keep her distance from areas where someone might see her. Health Educator Amii LeGendre, who plans to tackle the issue of smoking prevalence on campus with some vivacity when she returns from maternity leave, thinks this divide between home and Bard is a good opportunity. The buffer time between being at home with less exposure to smoking, and sinking back into the Bard routine is where students need to capitalize on their ability to quit, she says.

But the issue is in accepting that there is even something to quit—acknowledging the addictive property of nicotine, and actively wanting to stop smoking. Neither Kucera nor Smillie consider themselves addicted.

They consider it a temporary habit, like weekend drinking—something that comes and goes with college.

“It’s all in the college bubble,” Kucera said. “I’ve never really thought about smoking after Bard. I definitely don’t want to be a real adult in the real world who smokes, because even as someone who smokes cigarettes, when I’m home, I look down on those people. I find myself being embarrassed for them.”

It’s an assumption that a lot of students make, LeGendre says. Students expect that leaving college will make the cravings go away. For some students, she says, they’ll be able to quit relatively easily with the environmental change. For others, they’re starting a lifelong addiction. Sophie Davis agrees that though students find it easy to smoke on campus, that doesn’t mean they’ll find it easy to quit when they’re off.

“If you are a person who feels like you have to leave the library [to smoke] in order to continue working, then you’re probably addicted,” Sophie Davis said. “And that’s not just gunna stop when you don’t have a library to go to anymore. It’s not dependant on the library. It’s an addiction in your body.”

The reason why Kucera doesn’t imagine herself smoking as much after Bard is mostly because she doesn’t consider herself to be addicted. “I don’t crave them,” she says.

Then she shrugs. “But I don’t actually know if that’s true or not.”

Smillie feels the same way. But the other day, when she found herself without a pack, she was craving a cigarette so badly that she asked three people if she could bum one. For her, that feeling came with a certain burden of guilt. She found herself wondering if this meant she had a problem.

For students who have smoked as long as Kulukundis has, that realization has come and gone, leaving a certainty that the addiction is there and that the next step is accepting it, or finding a way to stop for good.

“I quit for seven months, but I don’t think

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GEN. MCCHRYSTAL SPEAKS AT BARD EVENT

BY ARTHUR HOLLAND MICHEL

Sometimes you get to meet a man who has shaped history. On March 10, Roger Berkowitz, Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights and Academic Director of Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, and Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities, stood by the stage in an auditorium at the New-York Historical Society, watching as a crowd filed in through the doors. The two men were chatting casually when a third man—tall, with short hair, large ears, and a nice grey sports jacket—joined them. They shook his hand and brought him into their conversation. This was retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, former Commander of the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, and arguably the most im-

“Leadership is about responsibility,” said McChrystal, early in the talk.

“It is the acceptance of responsibility.”

He spoke at length about Lord Nelson, whom he admires as one of the greatest military leaders of all time and who inspired his leadership style in Iraq and Afghanistan. When pushed by Berkowitz on whether his Nelson-inspired leadership style had worked, McChrystal was evasive. “I never decided what target they hit, which they didn’t,” he said, in reference to individual units’ decisions of who to engage. He added, “War is really hard. It requires people to get deeper into their ethics, though it doesn’t seem like it from afar.”

McChrystal’s answers were clear and rehearsed while still being casual enough to keep the audience engaged.

“Most of what he said in the interview came from his book,” Berkowitz said.

McChrystal into a detailed and grim analysis of the situation in the Middle East and Central Asia. “People ask whether or not Pakistan is our ally,” said McChrystal. “Pakistan is Pakistan’s ally.” Speaking of Afghanistan, he reminded the audience that the country had not asked for the US occupation, and that at this point in time, their highest priority was to engage with American business.

Responding to the inevitable question about Iran, McChrystal was unequivocal. “I personally hope they don’t get a nuclear weapon,” he said. “However, we have to assume that a confrontation with Iran is inevitable.”

One of McChrystal’s more controversial points was that the Middle East is on the cusp of profound and unprecedented change. “The Middle East will change more in the next 20 years than

portant man in America’s military history over the past decade. The three men took their seats under the pinkish glow of the stage lights (McChrystal in the middle, Mead and Berkowitz on either side) as the audience of about 250 people, dotted with Bard students, listened intently. The event, part of the New-York Historical Society’s Bernard and Irene Schwartz Distinguished Speakers Series, took the form of an interview; the two Bard professors asked McChrystal a series of questions touching on leadership, Middle East policy, and drone technology.

According to Berkowitz, he had been approached by the Historical Society to organize an event, and, originally, he had suggested a discussion on blogging as part of the series “Blogging and the Public Intellectual.” Though the Society was enthusiastic about the concept, it turned out to be impossible to schedule with the speakers they had selected, and so Mead suggested an interview with Stanley McChrystal, who had just released his book, “My Share of the Task: A Memoir.” Mead is currently writing a review of the book for “Foreign Policy.”

There were, however, moments of candor. Moments when the audience was given a chance to peek past the general’s clean, steely facade.

“It’s really hard to stay black and white in a war,” the retired general said. “You don’t execute prisoners, but sometimes that happens.” A little later, speaking of President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai, he said, “I like Karzai, but he doesn’t do press well.”

The most spontaneous moment of the talk came when McChrystal responded to a question from the audience and began to talk about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the militant Islamist who he pursued for many years during the Iraq War, and subsequently wrote about extensively in “My Share of the Task: A Memoir.” “I could call him a psychopathic murderer and killer, and I’d be right,” McChrystal said.

“That surprised me,” said Berkowitz, who explained that, “over and over in the book [McChrystal] praises Zarqani as one of the most interesting leaders with natural leadership ability of anyone in the whole war.”

Walter Russell Mead’s questions focused more on hard policy and led

it has in the past 60 years.” Outside the auditorium after the talk, several Bard students grumbled that this part of the retired general’s analysis lacked the subtlety and clearheadedness of the rest of what he said during the talk.

They argued that even though the Middle East is clearly in a period of transition, entertaining the idea that a the coming period will somehow see “more change” than the last felt academic for a practical man like McChrystal. On the whole, however, students were enthusiastic about the event.

“I thought [the talk] went well,” said Berkowitz, “though I wish it could have been longer. The Historical Society put an absolute one hour time limit for the talk, with five minutes for introductions and 10 to 15 minutes for questions, and I was painfully aware that Walter, the General, and I were down to 45 minutes for the interview.” During the talk, it was clear that both Bard professors had to resist the temptation to push McChrystal on certain points. “There were times when I thought we were just getting somewhere interesting,” said Berkowitz. “But given the time constraints, I think we covered a good amount.”

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* and who works for Gretchen Perry

BY ALEC PETTY to Sustainability Manager Laurie Husted.

“Our paper will be turned into cellulose insulation for homes,” Husted said. “Our food scraps become soil.

Our containers become any number of consumer products.”

Bard is stepping up to the plate by taking part in While these figures may seem significant at first, the nationwide sustainability contest, Recyclemania. there is still a lot of work to be done. According to Recyclemania is a yearly eight week competition be- the official Recyclemania website, Bard’s ranking in tween colleges and universities to promote waste re- the contest is a low 181 out of the 263 participating duction. Each week, they tally each college and rank schools. Bard’s reduction rate in pounds per capita them according to the percentage of pounds recycled. for the first week was a mere 20 percent. However, Within the first week of Recyclemania alone, Bard’s because this number does not take the college’s comwaste has been reduced by 50 percent. Bard compos- posting into account, it does not represent the full exted 11,200 pounds of food scraps alone and recycled tent of our sustainability efforts.

5,200 pounds of paper, cardboard, and containers Still, our recycling rate has only increased to a 23.47 within the week. percent since the start of the competition. This figure is Participation in Recyclemania will make a difference put into perspective when compared to the impressive not just for Bard but also for far-reaching communities. 87 percent reduction rate of the leaders of the contest, Everything we will recycle will be put to use according University of Missouri in Kansas City.

While it is admirable that the school has been able to recycle and compost, we must continually examine and improve upon our behavior with regard to sustainability. Food scraps may be a necessary way to recycle, but the amount that we compost also demonstrates just how much food the community wastes each day. Additionally, the figures shed light on Bard’s status as a school attempting to become increasingly more environmentally friendly. In order to change the way Bard engages with recycling, composting and beyond, students need to take a new approach to environmental activities.

This cannot be done without the help of students like you. In order to continue this discussion, students should email reduce@bard.edu to be entered into the weekly Caught Green Handed Raffle.

photo by anna low-beer

THE SWAN SONG

BAR CLOSES FOR GOOD

BY NAOMI LACHANCE The F-250 Ford pickup truck was filled with cases of alcohol, and the old bar space still wasn’t empty.

Mike Nickerson, owner of the Black Swan, was evicted from 66 Broadway in Tivoli after a downhill spiral: a police raid, a slew of legal fees, and a campaign to raise the money that almost made it.

“He has a lot of alcohol that he doesn’t know what to do with,” said Jeremy Gardner, a Bard sophomore who lives next door to the former Black Swan. Now, it’s been distributed among family and friends, a reminder of the bastion of Bardian revelry that is no more.

“Losing the Black Swan is like losing a friend,” said Tim Voell, owner of the Suminski Innski in Tivoli. The inn threw a “wake” on St. Patrick’s Day in honor of the former bar, paying tribute to its huge presence in the village.

“You could always go there. There was always someone to talk to, someone to make you feel welcome,” Voell said.

The Swan was appreciated, Gardner said, by students who were looking for a nightlife scene that was not SMOG or a house party.

On the college review website College Prowler, Courtney Scott ‘10 wrote, “The bar scene around Bard is pretty limited. For the most part, Bardians flock to the Black Swan, a local Tivoli tavern known

for its smoky atmosphere and cheap drinks.”

Gerard Hurley opened a bar at 66 Broadway in 2001 and ran it himself until 2004, when he leased the space to Nickerson.

“I decided to open a little Irish pub,” Hurley said, who emigrated from Ireland in 1984 at age 17. “I basically just wanted to sit in there and read books and play chess.”

In 2004, he returned to his original career, writing and producing films. He was working in Ireland at the time of the Dec. 7 police raid and promptly came back to the States.

Nickerson scrambled to raise the money to meet the subsequent fines given by the New York State Liquor Authority (SLA) on Dec. 12. He created a campaign on the fundraising site Indiegogo, where 447 funders raised $24,635—just shy of the $30,000 goal.

In the end, though, he realized he needed nearer to $50,000 to reopen the bar.

“Just as we were on track to be reopened by St. Patricks Day, the landlord, despite my paying the rent in December and January, filed an eviction notice and notified the SLA,” Nickerson said.

“I watched it become sad,” said Gardner, who grew close with the Swan’s employees and regulars living as its neighbor.

Nickerson said he was happy to return money to donors but that he still had to cover a variety of fees— the fine, lawyers’ salaries, and rent, for instance, and so he still needs the money he raised.

Hurley evicted Nickerson when it became unclear whether the bar would soon reopen and, according to Hurley, Nickerson neglected to pay his rent for two months.

Hurley said that when he opened the bar, he wanted a place about the people, “not just a mosh pit where you go to get fucked up. I put my heart and soul into it when I first opened it,” he said.

“There will be a serious gap in Bard’s social life,” Gardner said, who estimated that he had met more Bard students at the Black Swan than he had in any of his classes.

“It’s kind of like watching your ex-girlfriend fool around with somebody else,” Hurley said. “I’m working to get the place open again.” He said he wants to run the bar as it was when he first opened it.

As for Nickerson, who has worked at the Rhinecliff Hotel, Upstate Films, and as an actor, he is preparing for another business venture.

“Maybe it’s just time for a new chapter,” Nickerson said.

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A MESSAGE FROM A DUDE WHO LOVES RECYCLYING*

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FEITLER IS CLOSING NEVERMIND IT’S NOT

BY NAOMI LACHANCE The Feitler Co-op residents were having trouble agreeing on a type of milk to buy. It was their weekly Sunday meeting, and the 10 Bard students all wanted to make sure they bought the best choice.

Finally, they decided on Hudson Valley Fresh—though sometimes they get Ronneybrook from their Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA), a share-based method for consumers to obtain local produce. They buy their own food through a budget allotted by the school; that’s the deal when you live in Feitler. This is the kind of argument you have when you live in Feitler.

“We care about getting good food,” sophomore Sam Rosenblatt said.

The house was in jeopardy when, on Feb. 20, Vice President for Administration Jim Brudvig had a meeting with the residents and told them that the house would be taken off-line for the 2013-14 school year, and then possibly turned it into office or student space.

“I did not expect him to say we can’t live

BY BEN POWERS

there,” junior Abby Kaplan said. “A lot of people started crying.”

The residents sent a petition to the administration proposing that they live in the house for at least one more year. It was approved; five current residents will live there next year, and five new residents will be chosen through a peer-reviewed application process to join them, as has always been the procedure for choosing new residents.

“The people that choose to live there want to have community,” Kaplan said.

“It’s like living in a cabin at summer camp.”

The current plan is that Feitler is to be renovated during the summers so that students can continue living there during the academic year.

“The reservation is that I don’t know how much work actually needs to be done,” Brudvig said. “My remark was made on the basis of a casual inspection, but I hope that summer work will accomplish the needed repairs.”

“In the scheme of things, a house that houses 10 students may or may not take priority,” Director of Housing Nancy Smith said, who spoke of other recent projects—such as renovating Tewksbury and making a generator to supply power to the area of campus between Village G and the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts—that would have a more widespread effect.

The co-op has existed since 1998, when Brudvig worked as administrative liaison for a group of students who wanted to do their own cooking and cleaning.

“It’s been a really good thing,” Brudvig said. “In some years it’s been difficult to manage,” he added, referencing residents who were messy, partied too much, or even residents who couldn’t respect the dorm’s vegetarian policy.

“It just has a reputation of being run down, but we keep it really tidy,” Kaplan said.

Rosenblatt said the residents share all the chores, including the chore of having

to make something. “I made a shelf this week,” he said. “People will make cookies, or cake.”

Each night, two people cook dinner.

Anyone in the Bard community is welcome for dinner on Thursday evenings— just give them a heads-up.

“It’s important to have places like Feitler,” said Rosenblatt, who hopes it retains its charm through renovations.

“The last thing I want is for it to look like a dorm,” he said.

Feitler’s future remains uncertain. “Every year they’ll have to justify continuing,” Brudvig said, referring to their applying each year for neighborhood status. “They shouldn’t take anything for granted.”

The Co-op’s survival depends on student investment as much as administrative support. “The school definitely wants a co-op if the students want it,” Smith said.

REGISTER BRINGS DEBATE TO PRISONS UNEXPECTED RESULTS ENSUE

Arguing is not usually encouraged in prison, but David Register is bringing a new approach through his public speaking class with the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI). “I went into the Bard Prison Initiative with a number of assumptions, assumptions that were quickly dispelled,” Register said. “I had never worked in a prison; I had never set foot in a prison before this class, so I didn’t know what the people were going to be like. If you base it on a show like ‘Lockup,’ you’re in for a surprise.”

Teaching his first public speaking class at BPI in the fall of 2012, Register started with a diagnostic paper. “I said, here is Barack Obama’s first inaugural address, and I want you to within a week write no more than four pages that explain any argument about this speech and why it might be effective.”

Register was impressed. “The level that the students were thinking about and probing the text was beyond what I had imagined.” He went on to speak about one student who said that the reasons the speech was effective was because of the constraints of being black in America and how Obama had been criticized

from every possible angle. He tied his arguments to the text of the speech and brought in Dubois’ “The Souls of Black Folk.” Another student mentioned that after Obama’s election, his granddaughter had come to see him and told him that “when she was president, she would get him out of prison. The fact that a black woman could now say that showed how much effect Obama’s inauguration had on the US.” This was just the beginning. One of the things Register was later struck by was the position prisoners took on a number of controversial topics.

“We had a debate on the Stop and Frisk policy in NYC, and the crux of the debate was whether or not the policy should end,” he said. He went on to say that at least half of his class was vehemently for the program.

“I look out at the people in the class, and they pretty well fit the statistics; largely minority and most were from NYC. The statistics fit. Their opinions did not,” he said. This was shocking, because all the criticisms of the program were about how it targets minorities, it targets certain neighborhoods, and its unwarranted

search and seizure.

Register then asked some of the students why they were for Stop and Frisk and they said, “Well, we have kids, and, frankly, there are some bad people in those neighborhoods, and we encourage the city of New York to keep guns away from our kids. If that means racial profiling, if that means harassment of minority youth, then so be it. Because on the one hand you have it targeting minorities, and, on the other hand, these neighborhoods are highly dangerous.” Even after Register handed out information arguing for and against the program, very few of his students changed their minds. Students said that they accepted all the criticisms but that their neighborhoods were safer because of this program.

Their concerns extended not only to their children, but as Register would discover later, the whole of society as well.

A few weeks after their debate on Stop and Frisk there was another debate, this time on the death penalty. Register was surprised when, again, almost half of the class was in favor of the death penalty.

When asked why, many responded that they felt that there are, “some really bad

photo by emily wissemann

people behind the walls of these prisons, they don’t need to be in here.” In this conversation, the students admitted that “most of the guys behind these walls… did something stupid. They understand why they are here and accept the punishment for what they did. But there are some people in there that are downright scary, no good for society, and this is one of the reasons that we should have the death penalty.”

Register talked about how the course was a remarkable look at how people internalize punishment; how they understood that they had done something detrimental to the community and therefore should not be allowed to take part in the civic activities of that community until they have paid their price.

“In terms of what that means going forwards,” reflected Register, “I think that it means debate in prison is a great place for debates to happen, because you have a bunch of guys who really think through these things and are not all of one mind, which is an assumption a lot of people might make about the guys that are behind bars.”

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BY WILL ANDERSON

Either guys at Bard are incredibly endowed, or incredibly vain; either way, the dime store is running out of money. According to an internal email circulated in early March, an increased number of Magnum condom requests has forced Peer Health to request additional funds.

In addition, a new series of Stall Seat Journals

while normal Trojans cost $260. Trojan Magnums are currently the most requested brand of condoms through the Dime Store.

“I refuse to cap how many magnums we deliver to people’s mailboxes, because it’s not our place to tell people what condoms to use, or to say I don’t believe you really need a larg-

length, and 2.13 inches in width. This means that they are a mere .32 inches longer and .5 inches wider at the head. Both regular and Magnum Trojans are 2 inches wide at the base.

The SSJs feature two pictures of unwrapped condoms, seemingly similar in size, and asks

(SSJ) will debut in the coming weeks that aim to educate men on the importance of choosing condoms that fit appropriately.

While the Dime Store requested a $3,000 budget for the spring semester, they were only allocated $978 by the Budget Committee.

A case of 1,000 Trojan Magnums cost $360,

er condom,” Peer Health member and Dime Store head Zoe Malecki wrote. “So as a compromise I’ve created some Stall Seat Journals that inform people that Magnums are not significantly larger than a typical Trojan condom.”

Trojan Magnums, which are marketed as “large sized condoms,” are 8.07 inches in

the viewer to identify the Magnum condom versus the regular condom. It is framed by a question in all caps: “IS YOUR PENIS REALLY THAT BIG OR ARE YOU JUST COMPENSATING FOR SOMETHING?” Probably the latter.

BY JEREMY GARDNER

SMOG IS IN DANGER SEND HELP NOW

photo by emily wissemann

A Bard establishment rivaled only by Tewksbury in notoriety, SMOG has been a cradle of controversy and legend since any student can remember (i.e. circa 2007). Therefore, it was a surprise when Cara Black, Student Government Association President, sent an email on behalf of SMOG in mid-February even though nothing had been broken, no one had been hurt, no “psychoactive” “date rape drug” had been ingested, nor had any wealthy baseball aficionado threatened the future of the establishment—issues that have plagued SMOG in the past. Yet once again, Bard’s storied student-run performance space is in jeopardy, the consequence of a random inspection by a state fire marshal on Feb. 7.

According to the official citation by the New York State Office of Fire Prevention and Control, the marshal’s visit led SMOG to be cited on two counts. The first count was due to the defacement of the “No Smoking” sign required in the structure. Dean of Student Activities Julie Silverstein explained that tampering of any kind with the sign, including drawings, such as the ever-amusing smiley-face, will lead to a viola-

tion. The second citation was for “Evidence of smoking in a prohibited area,” referring to the cigarette butts that often litter the floor of the structure. Consequently, SMOG’s fate is once again in limbo.

Venue club head Preston Ossman pointed out the massive reduction in late-night incidents at SMOG this year. While the administration appreciates the efforts to minimize debauchery and stomach pumpings, “Bard students still have ‘enemies’ waiting in the wings,” said Ossman, a sophomore. “The Fun Police are on the prowl.” The plea made by SMOG club heads is for the same respect that Bardians pay to the Root Cellar or Manor, Director of Student Activities Julie Silverstein says. They ask students not to not smoke inside, leave butts on the ground, and, for the event hosts, to clean up.

The school was given until March 9 to correct the violations. From that point on, the fire marshal may return at any point, unannounced.

Smiley faces or not, if the “No Smoking” sign is found defaced in any way, or if cigarette butts are found anywhere under the roof (including on the patio with the skate ramp), Bard faces a $50 fine for every day that has passed since March 9. This means that if the marshal returns May 9, the charge would be around $3,000. SMOG has always had to pay these fines in the past, wasting precious club money that could be allocated elsewhere, “but now, if either of these infractions occur again, we will be forced to close SMOG for good,” Ossman said. According to Silverstein, “for good” may mean this semester, or the next. However, a semester is a long time at Bard and such a closure would have ramifications felt by a large proportion of the study body.

“So, if you like having SMOG, just be respectful and use discretion,” Ossman said. “And we can all get along, right?”

news

DIME STORE BROKE DUE TO LARGE DICKS

by karolina mroz

The way Karolina lived life was legendary. She was so committed to her experience. She was led by her senses. The stories of her time in this realm are hysterical and unruly. Before she died, when I tried to describe what kind of character she was to friends who didn’t know her, I often could not get through the story because I would find myself laughing too hard.

Facts about Karolina: -She was proud to be the first one in our class to use EMS, when she sprained her ankle on day one of L&T on the “run in the woods” activity.

-She did not tell us that she had never had sushi before, until she asked, “That green stuff is not avocado is it..?” She spit it in the sink, but was unphased, barely even flushed in the face.

-She took Halloween more seriously than anyone.

-After procrastinating too much, looking at animal videos (primarily bulldogs, screameleons, tapirs), she put off a presentation in a religion class, first by not going to class, and then again. This second time she went to Kline, put ham and peanut butter, balsamic vinegar some sesame seeds, perhaps some ice cream, into a cup. She stirred it together, dabbed it on her mouth and shirt and went to her teacher claiming she had just thrown up and could not do the presentation today...! She was proud of this one.

-Karolina’s favorite holiday besides Halloween is a Polish holiday called Smigus Dyngus, which involves dumping pails of water on people the Monday after Easter. She explained it as Polish April Fools. She would sit at a window in Honey facing the quad and get passersby. We want to have a big celebration of this holiday... the Monday after Easter, be prepared.

-She’s also a Polish princess. She had to leave the second weekend of L&T to be on a float in a parade in NYC.

-Her imaginary friend is named “Black Girl.” She is dressed in all black, including black gloves, and would run beside the car window.

-I called her the day before Valentine’s Day and woke her up. She said “Happy Valentine’s Day,” and I said “Happy Valentine’s Day to you, too, but it’s not time yet. It’s tomorrow, girl.” She said, “Well Happy Valentine’s Day.” She continued to meet me 20 minutes later in full Valentine’s Day attire. Together, we went around main campus spreading the merriment of the day. <3 xoxo. — -She did not measure time. She could not keep a beat to save her life but she loves the song we wrote, “Mama Took a Big Shit.”

-We were working on our freestyle rapping... one of us would say “the size of my thighs is ridiculous” on repeat and the other would freestyle. Got a bit better with practice.

A caretaker, a lover, a pleasure fiend, a best friend, a baby, a mama, a bird, a squirrel, a sexy powerful lady, a voyager, a legend, a shining star.

I’m living inside these stories. All of them make me smile. She does not want us to have sadness.

She would scare me when I found her sleeping in my bed and cackle at my terror. She loves gingko leaves and would bring gingko leaves as presents often. She loved sunglasses. Temporary tattoos.

Her flame baseball hat. Her grandmother Ramalda.

Her care for others, her generosity, and her attention to detail is tender and thorough. She is joy.

She is not magical, she is magic. Feeling her everywhere. She is everywhere. Toast to her. Enjoy some borscht. Enjoy your procrastinations. Take pleasure in your own amusements. She would want you to.

Please excuse my lack of ability to maintain past tense.

- Helen Wicks, ‘13

BARDIVERSE

BARD OFFERS BOTANICAL OUTREACH PROGRAMS

BY LEELA KHANNA

Bard’s scenic landscape is recognized not only for its natural beauty but also for the successful preservation of its numerous plant species on campus.

The Bard community’s desire to maintain a healthy ecosystem for plants and trees led to the establishment of the Bard Arboretum Program in 2007. An arboretum is a botanical garden that focuses on the preservation of a collection of ‘woody plants’ partly for the purpose of scientific study. Amy Parrella, Director of the Landscape and Arboretum Program and Supervisor of Horticulture for Buildings and Grounds, has handled the program since its inception.

“The program was motivated by current staff and a trustee, Elizabeth Ely, who is also an alum, who had an interest in promoting the trees and the landscape at Bard and thought an arboretum would be a good idea,” Parrella said. “The whole campus was dedicated for the efforts of the Arboretum.”

The mission of the Bard Arboretum Program is to promote plant conservation and preservation while also offering education and outreach programs, and conducting botanical research. Bard’s arboretum has been recognized as one of the New York Botanical Garden’s (NYBG) satellite gardens. Through the NYBG, people interested in learning about horticulture can take classes at Bard. The horticulture topics currently being taught is about fruit tree pruning and training.

“The education component we focus most on is our connection with the NYBG and the classes that we offer to the community—the public education classes on horticulture,” Parrella said.

The program is responsible for maintaining the collection of plants and trees as well as making a recorded collection of all plant specimens on Bard’s 550-acre campus. Bard does not currently support the program financially; all funding comes from donations from faculty, staff, and trustees as well as grants.

“I think [the arboretum] is important,” Marika Sitz, recent Bard graduate and temporary curator for the arboretum, said. “I’ve been at Bard four years, and I didn’t know that the little plaques on the trees were the tree names, and I think it’s important to know what’s going on [with our landscape] in general.”

In order to promote the program more, Parrella has introduced Bard Arboretum Walks with the Director. Every third Thursday of the month, Parrella will take any students interested in horticulture on a casual stroll all around Bard to explore some of the trees that make up the Annandale campus.

“Currently you do have to pay for the classes offered through NYBG, so I think it’s an appropriate thing to be able to offer some sort of educational component to the masses free of charge,” Parrella said.

photo by emily wissemann

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BY LEELA KHANNA When Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) Director Erin Cannan first approached sophomore Gaby Philo with a project to initiate an educational program between high school and college students, Philo immediately felt compelled to say yes. Philo, an intern at CCE, has been involved in civic engagement efforts since the beginning of her freshmen year and believed that bringing together high school and college students could be an advantageous experience for both parties.

Now, three months later, Philo and sophomore Jasper Katz at CCE have introduced Bard Splash!, a studentrun educational program that brings in high school students from New York City and the Hudson Valley to Bard campus for a day to explore an assortment of courses taught and designed by Bard undergraduates.

“Sometimes, throughout the process of a traditional classroom in high school, you lose the motivation to learn,” Philo, now the student director of Bard Splash!, said. “Bard Splash! is about learning for yourself, and learning what you love.”

Splash! is an educational initiative founded by the non-profit organization Learning Unlimited, which advocates college students acting as mentors,

teachers, and leaders for high school students. The program is designed to have high school students spend a whole day at Bard taking different creative courses taught by Bard students. Courses range from Bollywood dancing, a circus workshop, and meditation, to an EMS course and spoken word poetry course.

“I went to a camp that was founded on this idea that when you get college students teaching classes that they are passionate about, it gets high school students excited about learning,” Jasper Katz, sophomore and Volunteer Manager of the program, said. “I thought this was a really great program for Bard to get involved in because it combines all of the academic things Bard students are really passionate about with the civic engagement piece.”

The program is geared towards high school students living in communities of low socioeconomic status who cannot afford to attend extracurricular academic programs.

Bard Splash! will operate as a freeof-cost program for students attending International Community High School (ICHS) in the South Bronx.

The majority of the students that attend ICHS are immigrants to the United States and face language barriers.

The school is struggling to improve its performance with only 5 percent of the student population reading at grade level, a graduation rate of 66.2 percent, a college readiness rate of 4.4 percent, and a college enrollment rate of 41.3 percent.

“ICHS already has a few Bard graduates working as teachers, so we have a strong connection with the high school,” Philo said. “My number one priority for Splash! in general is to make sure we don’t charge [the students for attending the program],” Philo said. “Seventy-five percent of the students at ICHS are on partial or free school lunch; that means that their families are at an income bracket that makes this program a luxury. We don’t want to put any additional financial strain on them.”

Philo and Katz are also working to expand the program to students in the Hudson Valley, though they will be charged for the program. The program’s top goal is to raise $3,000 for the program by April 13.

“I see it as being a sort of a mentoring program and also a way to inspire students to consider a path in education,” Philo said. “This is a way to inspire high school students to consider college and higher education in general.”

BARD CLOSES DOORS ON NATIONAL PROGRAMS

BY LEELA KHANNA

Though Bard’s overseas endeavors are seeing success, two national programs have recently seen setbacks. On March 12, Bard pulled out of its four-year partnership with a charter school in Delano, Calif., Paramount Academy, which was formerly known as Paramount Bard Academy.

Bard entered a collaborated effort in 2009 with the Resnick Foundation, the Delano community, and Paramount Agricultural Companies.

Bard’s role in the charter school was to provide graduate students with the opportunity to teach the students at the academy while earning a master’s degree and a teaching credential.

The Kern County Board of Education revised the school’s charter to reflect Bard’s departure from the partnership.

According to the Superintendent Christine Lizardi Frazier, Bard has not played a large role in developing the academy’s teachers, and Para-

mount Academy intends to find an alternative source for providing professional development.

The closure of youth and community education programs at the Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge was announced on March 6. The school was founded in 1915 and serves about 224 undergraduate and graduate conservatory students while also offering community programs to students and adults who want to learn music nonprofessionally. The decision to close the community programs came as a surprise to the nearly 1,000 students and adults who can no longer take part in Longy’s programs.

Though the merger between Longy and Bard, which occurred last year, was meant to be positive for both institutes, Longy does not have the means to support both Bard’s involvement and the community prep programs. In the letter sent out to the participants of the classes and faculty

of the program by Longy President Karen Zorn, the move was justified as an action necessary to “support the continuing growth of our conservatory and address our critical need for practice and teaching space.” Zorn’s letter also recognized that “music lessons are a regular part of you and your family’s extracurricular life,” and added, “To that end, we plan to work closely with you over the next six months to identify additional resources in Cambridge and greater Boston for music instruction. Within the next week, we will circulate a list of community music schools and other institutions that offer private lessons, classes and ensemble opportunities for students of all ages.”

While Bard is no longer a part of the Delano charter school partnership, the Longy’s community programs will continue till the end of this summer, and will officially close August 2013.

bardiverse

PROGRAM GIVES HIGH SCHOOLERS MENTORING OPPORTUNITIES

bardiverse

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REALIZING UBUNTU IN THE RAINBOW NATION IDENTITY IN SOUTH AFRICA

BY BEN POWERS

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bardiverse

Outside of Johannesburg, an informal settlement squats next to a highway where citrus-sellers clad in the jackets of their favorite soccer teams flag passing cars. Next to a shack with a corrugated tin roof is a BMW. Where does the owner fall among South Africa’s three major ethnic groups, 11 national languages, and eight distinct tribes?

The word “ubuntu” is a southern African philosophical concept that attests to interconnectedness as the essence of being human: I am what I am because of who we all are. Focusing on the lack of isolation among humans and their actions, it emphasizes the fact that we are all part of a human tribe, regardless of superficial differences.

But is Ubuntu realized in the country of its origin, South Africa, the self-proclaimed Rainbow Nation?

This utopian idea of complete unity in the the face of extreme diversity operates at the level of a dream.

Dreams have their place, but in the waking world, they delay people’s responsibility to take action now. If there was a dream, one that lasted through the tumultuous times before and after the presidency of Nelson Mandela, it turned to nightmare during the xenophobic attacks in May 2008. The many confusing, dividing, and uniting layers of identity in South Africa have come to a deadly head.

In 2008, xenophobic attacks swept across South Africa killing more than 60 people, injuring hundreds more, and displacing over 100,000 more. They were committed by local South Africans, everything from home invasions to murder to looting. Attackers set upon people that were different, however they wished to define the term, and in most instances the victims knew their attackers. In fact, almost a third of individuals killed were native South Africans. While not le-

gal, violence is a socially accepted method of dealing with issues in South Africa. This can be seen in the instances of necklacing, when a gasoline-soaked tire is pulled over an individual and set on fire. People who collaborated with the apartheid government are often the victims, and, more recently, members of communities that subject criminals in their midst to mob justice are the perpetrators. There is a vernacular of the protest culture that still exists as the best way of garnering public attention to the cause.

Politicians preach tolerance. Tolerance: the word in itself invokes the idea that you accept something or someone that you would not normally. You are not embracing; you are tolerating.

Apartheid suggested that everybody had a place—a race, a culture, a nationality and she/he should stay in it. Unfortunately, that idea seems to have lived on after the death of the system that birthed it. People have an innate tendency to lay blame elsewhere, never thinking that ‘the problem starts with me.’ A South African proverb says, if you want to go fast, walk alone; if you want to go far, walk together. The Rainbow Nation would do well to heed its own words.

A girl is singing in Zulu on the corner, the strains of her melody lost in engines and taxi horns. She launches into a refrain in English: “They’ll kill him there. They’ll burn him there. They’ll hurt him there.

But he has a home. He was born in Africa. He has power, but you have power too, and don’t forget that you are brothers.”

Ben Powers is a junior Political Studies and Human Rights major.

He studied abroad in South Africa for the International Human Rights Exchange undergraduate program, Fall 2012.

photos by ben powers

CULTURE YOU ARE WHAT YOU DRINK

nies are “isolating the only good water reservoirs we have left.”

When asked if he was thirsty and only had the options of drinking water treated in his plant or bottled water, Rice said that he “would probably go with the Bard water.” “I don’t trust big companies when they start selling a resource that everyone needs,” he said.

BY LEVI SHAW-FABER The use of chlorine in the country’s drinking water has been commonplace since the early 20th century. The United States Environmental ProtecMark Rice, the operator of the Bard water treattion Agency explains on their website, “To protect ment plant, does not drink the water he treats. drinking water from disease-causing organisms, or Rather, Rice, a large scruffy man who wears a pathogens, water suppliers often add a disinfectant, worn Guinness hat with sunglasses perched on such as chlorine, to drinking water.” Rice admits the bill, is so passionate about the quality of wathat there is very limited research showing the detriter that he brings water to work from his home. ments of chlorine. Further, chlorine has led to a vast At his home, Rice has a personal well that draws decrease in cholera and other waterborne diseaswater from the aquifer. He filters his water, but he es and has helped millions access pathogen-free does not chlorinate it. Rice says that Bard’s wadrinking water. Without chlorine and other disinfecter is safe to drink—he follows all New York state tion and filtration processes, a waterborne pathodrinking water standards, though he has personal gen could easily flow down the Fall Kill creek, past qualms with the use of chlorine to disinfect the the waterfall, and into the college’s water supply. water.

“The worst thing that I ever would want to find out Bard sources its drinking water from a single that was coming in would be cryptosporidium … a pipe in the Fall Kill Creek located just past the wabug, a parasite that could kill you,” Rice said. The terfall. The water is then pumped to a red barnprotozoan parasite, cryptosporidium, is every walike building, rushing through a maze of white and ter treatment plant operator’s worst nightmare bebeige pipes and filters that lead to a huge white cause of its ability to become resistant to chlorine. It cylinder that bubbles and smells of chemicals. In causes cryptosporidiosis, an illness with symptoms this cylinder, the water is combined with chlorine including acute diarrhea, stomach pains, nausea, and left to disinfect. Then, the water is piped to an vomiting, malabsorption, and dehydration. These even larger cylinder, directly outside the treatment symptoms can be lethal for immunocompromised plant. This is where all of the College’s drinking people. Rice confirmed that if cryptosporidium were water is stored. to travel down the Fall Kill creek, the water treatAll of the water is treated according to the New ment plant’s membrane filter would stop it from York state drinking water standards, which are passing into the College’s water supply. outlined in “two big, thick books.” The regulations Two years ago, the water treatment plant switched are so complicated and strict that it took Rice from a sand filtration system to a membrane-based nearly a year to learn and understand them. Addisystem, which Rice learned from his continutionally, he worked under a water treatment plant ing education classes. The sand filter treated the operator’s wing for about five years, getting the creek’s water by passing it through sand covered required experience to pass the Department of in a biofilm. The new system has microfilters that Health’s exam and earn his license. Rice, whose physically block particles from passing through. He ringtone is the sound of a flowing stream, is serisaid that the over the years, some parasites have ous about the water he consumes and treats. become adapted to the chlorine, growing an outer Although the New York State Department of shell that strips away when it encounters chlorine Health strictly regulates the drinking water that but saves the organism.

Rice treats, he still fears the negative effects of Rice needed to be able to treat water that has chlorine. Rice strictly will not drink water that has pathogens that have become resistant to chlorine, been disinfected with chlorine. Rice said, “The but he said that he did not want to add more chemiway I look at is, your body is 70 percent water, cals because he believes that adding too many so if you are altering your water with chlorine or chemicals makes it “not water anymore.” According any kind of chemical and you drink, ain’t you kinda to Rice, the sand filtration that the treatment plant altering your body and your molecules, and your used before the membrane or microfiltration was genes?” Rice said. “The less chemical, the better. much more “finicky, it would only treat water that The less treatment, the better.” came in at certain point of dirtiness.” This means Rice also will not drink bottled water. According that if a storm system caused a lot of rain and runto Rice, bottled water companies are, “big busioff into the Fall Kill creek, the Bard water treatment ness taking over an industry. They can actually plant would have to shut down and the College pull [water] out of Massachusetts and sell it in would switch to Red Hook water.

New York with no regulations. It could have conSurface water like the Fall Kill creek is inherently taminates all over the place. They could say it’s dirtier than groundwater, but Rice says the water spring water, and it could be out of a reservoir. ” According to Rice, large bottled water compa-

in the creek is actually “really good” compared to much of the water in the area.

“You’re always going to have fish crapping in your water. You’re always going to have deer crapping in the field where the rain grabs it and brings it down to the water,” he said. Although groundwater is much cleaner than surface water, it would be a big and expensive project to dig wells instead of using relatively clean creek water.

If the college wanted to switch to ground water, he would not be able to dig just one well like he has in his home. He would have to dig multiple wells around campus and pipe them all to the treatment facility then back out to the campus.

Rice believes there is a safe way for the treatment plant to reduce the amount of chlorine in Bard’s drinking water. The system is called ultraviolet germicidal irradiation and is becoming more common in water treatment plants. It is an expensive process that kills pathogens using ultraviolet rays that do not stay present in the drinking water like chlorine does. Red Hook and Tivoli do not use ultraviolet disinfection but, earlier this year, NYC opened its $1.6 billion ultraviolet drinking water disinfection plant, which is the largest ultraviolet plant in the world.

Rice says that, for an initial investment of $75,000, the College could switch to ultraviolet disinfection, which could decrease the amount of chlorine in the water. The only chlorine that would need to be added to the water would be to kill any pathogens that it encounters in the pipes as it is distributed throughout campus. According to Rice, the ultraviolet disinfection system, after the savings in chlorine costs, would pay for itself within 10-15 years. But he says the current financial situation makes the initial investment too high for the administration to pay, especially with no concrete evidence that the chlorine level in the water is detrimental.

There is no data showing that Bard’s drinking water is in any way unsafe. The water is treated to some of the strictest standards in the country, and Rice monitors it regularly to make sure that not only is the water coming out of the water treatment plant safe, but he also tests the chlorination and quality of the water coming out of sinks and water fountains all over campus. Rice personally will not drink chlorinated water but the New York state drinking water standards require that drinking water is disinfected, and chlorination is the most cost effective and tried method. When asked if he would drink the Bard water if it were treated with ultraviolet rays and not chlorine, Rice said that he would. But when asked if he would still drink the water after it has been slightly chlorinated and distributed throughout the college’s pipes he said, “Well, maybe before it’s chlorinated.” photo by emily wissemann

HOLOGRAMS AND HOLOGRAPHIC MOVIES

BY ELIZABETH PYLE

Hart Perry, the curator and creator of the recent installation in the Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center, “Holograms and Holographic Movies,” engaged the spectators of the instillation with complex descriptions of the science that was used to create his holograms. People nodded their heads, listened to the intricate explanations as they saw images of B-52’s, Alice Cooper, and Salvador Dalí floating in space. As Perry talked to one spectator who was in awe of his craft, Perry said, “every boy needs a hobby.” Using the word hobby to describe the holograms, Perry creates seems like an understatement.

One hologram in the installation showed collusion of psychedelia and surrealism: a circle of plexiglass spins slowly above a lightbulb to show Dalí painting a portrait of his wife, Gala, surrounded by various props including a framed picture of Mao in the foreground. Dalí is not still, however. As the holographic movie spins around, Dalí’s hand moves slowly upwards, poised to paint the image of his wife. The holograms are composed of a rainbow of colors: greens, blues, violets, yellows, and reds.

The movement of the subject within all of Perry’s images is the novelty of the

sions. The movement in the film footage provides the movement in the hologram.”

The types of holographic movies Perry was creating at the time had never been made before; he had to invent most of the technology and processes that rendered the holograms and holographic movies.

Perry ended up making thousands of holograms in the ‘70s and ‘80s. “The holographic movies are like making a sculpture of your film, so it exists as an object, not as a projection,” Perry said, reflecting on the form of his work. Although each holographic movie only contains a couple seconds of real time, the result is sensu-

usually it’s static sculpture. This stuff is amazing because it’s actually a movie, so the resolution isn’t as high as a regular hologram. But the fact that it’s moving adds another layer of reality to it.”

Along with Peter Hutton, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor of the Arts, and scientist Bill Molteni, Perry is currently making a proposal to set up a holographic film lab in the basement of the Ottoway Film Center.

“Hart mentioned his holographs to me last summer when his friend Bill Molteni was visiting. I suggested a show to see if it might stimulate interest with the stu-

Perry, primarily a cinematographer and filmmaker, started making holograms in his late 20s, and his holographic career was built upon a series of fortuitous events. In the early ‘70s, while he was filming a music video for Alice Cooper, Cooper’s manager heard that Salvador Dalí was staying at the St. Regis Hotel in NYC. Alice Cooper’s manager, Joe Greenberg, called Dalí hoping that they could work together. Dalí then proposed that their working together would include the creation of a hologram, a medium with which Dalí had, at the time, recently experimented. Perry ended up filming the project with Selwin Lissak, an entrepreneur and advocate of art of holograms.

holographic movie, as opposed to a still hologram. All of Perry’s holographs were filmed on the finest grain film, originally produced for use in astral physics. On a piece of paper hanging near a holograph of Alice Cooper, a small description by Perry explains the process of creating this unique movement: “We filmed Alice rotating on a turntable with a 16mm camera at 24 frames per second. Each film frame was one-third of a degree of the 360 degree rotation by Alice. Each frame was reprinted as an anamorphically squeezed rainbow hologram with a laser as as a light source. The viewer sees around 40 frames at once in the hologram, giving the illusion of three dimen-

ous and interactive. In the way that some of the holographic movies were presented, the spectator had to move their body right to left and up and down in order to get the full effect of holograph. Within the installation itself, this movement created a type of dance, as people shuffled around, tilted their heads, and eventually would bump into one another, obeying the printed sign above the images, “Stay eight to 10 feet from Hologram for optimum viewing.”

“They are uncanny. That’s really the only word you can use to describe them,” Ben Coonley, Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts, said, reflecting on the images. “When you see a hologram,

dents. That’s where we are right now,” Hutton said. “I sent their proposal to the Physics Department, so we will see what happens. The idea could manifest in several different ways.”

Perry said that the intersection of art and science is incredibly important. He said that his proposal to create this holographic lab at Bard would stimulate these connections between art and science. He wants art and film students to be able to learn about physics, chemistry, and optics through understanding the mechanics of holograms. illustration by hart perry

culture

GREEN IS THE BRIGHTEST VIEWING COLOR:

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culture

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SAY HELLO TO BRIAN

photo by will anderson

THE LATEST WRITER TO BE TRANSPLANTED TO ANNANDALE

BY WILL ANDERSON

This is what Brian Conn did the day before: woke up, ate oatmeal, and talked to Human Resources about his health insurance. He checked his mailbox, explored a nearby hiking trail, and responded to some emails. And before eating some dinner and heading to bed, Brian sat down to write. He wrote for three hours.

In late October, it was announced that Brian Conn had won the 2013 Bard Fiction Prize. The prize came with certain accolades, such as $30,000 and press for his work, but it also came with some parameters. Winners of the fiction prize move to Bard for a semester where they write and live amongst the faculty and students of the college. There is little structure to the way Brian must spend his time. He has office hours and gave a reading earlier this month. But other than that, he is left alone.

And now he finds himself here, transplanted from Oakland, Calif., in a house that Leon Botstein’s mother once lived in, with a flickering kitchen light, a backyard shared with Olin, and a 1993 IBM laptop, which has no internet connection, 1 MB of ram, and only a simple word processor. It is here that Brian Conn will work for the next six weeks.

Bard established the Fiction Prize in 2001 in an effort to recognize and promote young, contemporary writers. Contestants must be under 39 years old and have already been published. A winner is announced each October, determined by a panel of Bard faculty (Mary Caponegro, Robert Kelly, Brad Morrow). In the past, winners have included Karen Russell, Edie Meidav, and Paul La Farge.

Conn submitted to the prize on a whim, an approach that has worked seemingly

well in the past. In 2004, he thought to apply to the Clarion West workshop in Seattle—an intensive six week program where participants write a story a week, workshop for hours a day, and live in close quarters with one another. After completing the workshop, he decided to try and find an MFA program. He landed at Brown University, a feat he described as a “miracle.”

And then he decided to move to Hawaii for a summer, live in an empty apartment, isolated and alone, where he ended up writing roughly half of his first novel, “Fixed Stars.”

The work went on to be published in Spring 2010 by Fiction Collective 2, an author-run, not-for-profit publisher that specializes in experimental and avant-garde fiction.

But let’s back up a bit. Conn grew up in the mountains above Santa Cruz, Calif., in a community he only describes as “odd.”

He went through high school fascinated by science and math and planned to continue studying these subjects when he arrived at Yale in 1994. But then his interests veered off course. He decided to study Archeology.

“If you majored in science, then that could get you a job. If you major in economics, then that could get you a job. Any other degree, they’re pretty much all the same,” Conn said. “So I thought that what I should do is go into the course catalogue, and pick out the courses I want to take, and then figure out which major would allow me to take most of these courses.”

Interestingly enough, Conn kind of looks like an archeologist. He has fair skin, light, blonde hair, and academic facial hair. He is tall, skinny, and soft-spoken. He talks like someone who is intensely fascinated by what’s around him; he loves taking walks and loves being in new places.

Anyway, after completing his undergraduate, with his archeology degree in hand, Conn drifted around from place to place, employed as everything from a bartender in New Orleans to a used bookstore employee in Boston. At one point, he bought an old typewriter at a pawn shop.

Conn wrote during this entire period.

His work is generally considered under the genre of science fiction, or fantasy. He plays with time and perception in his stories, and his writing is often described as “dream-like.”

During his time in Boston, Conn had a couple of stories published, and his writing accelerated when he entered the Clarion workshop. Which led to Brown, which led to Hawaii, which led to “Fixed Stars,” which led to the Bard Fiction Prize.

When Conn received the news, he was in Oakland, Calif. He had been living there for the past year or so, working at a well-paid job and still writing on the side. “I was quite shocked [when I found out about winning],” Conn said. “I really didn’t expect to get this.”

“I remember the last week, packing up the apartment, and … these are some of the favorite times in my life. You’ll have this when you graduate; it’s something to look forward to. It happens when you’ve been doing something for a long time, and it’s about to come to an end, and you just have no idea what you’re going into.

My things were packed up; I put them in storage. I was in this totally

empty apartment, sleeping on the floor, wandering around Oakland, being unsure of what was going to happen to me the next day.

I’m going to this crazy place,” Conn said.

And here he is. Some of Conn’s expectations have shifted. He expected the area towns to be wealthier, the students are smarter than he thought they would be, and he is surprised by how much everyone seems to think about music.

Conn’s short-term plans are now solidified. He is working on a novella, something he describes as taking much longer than expected. He is living in Botstein’s mother’s house until the end of the semester. He is continuing to ease into Bard, becoming familiar with its customs, and establishing some routines. But beyond that, it’s less clear. After Bard, he may go to Mexico, or Alaska, or Southern California. He may go into teaching, or not. Or he may just let it figure itself out, as he has done in the past, hoping all goes well, and new opportunities arise.

Write on, Brian. Write on.

BARD SOPHOMORES FOUND #FFF MENSWEAR

BY LUCAS OPGENORTH In the hexadecimal language that HTML coders use to bring color to websites, pure white is notated with the sequence ‘#ffffff,’ or ‘#fff’ for short. This is the inspiration behind the name of #FFF Menswear, a new clothing company co-founded by Bard sophomores Robbie Brannigan and Trevor LaMountain. The brand’s name is more of a visual symbol, intended for the fashion aficionados of the Internet generation, whose intake of fashion media often comes through a computer screen.

“You look at all these designers with these crazy European names, and you can go for years liking them, and you’ll never once say [the label’s name] out loud,” Brannigan said. “It’s more about how [‘#FFF’] looks.”

While #FFF’s clothes are made with the male body in mind, Brannigan and LaMountain would like to eventually design non-gender-specific clothing.

The company’s expansion will depend on their sales, which are planned to be exclusively through fffmenswear.com. Their online store opened on March 17, but LaMountain and Brannigan are already planning their fall/winter line.

“Our vision of the company was still being developed when we were working on the clothes for the first season, and I think we’re starting to refine what we want to do with it,” LaMountain said, indicating that the next season’s line will stray further away from the familiar.

“These clothes are more accessible to the common folk, and I don’t want that anymore,” Brannigan clarified. “I’d like to be more conceptual.”

photos via robbie brannigan

The idea behind the brand arose in the summer of 2012 from a combination of Brannigan’s boredom over break and his growing interest in fashion. LaMountain already had experience sewing clothes for himself, and the two developed a vision of a company based on principles of quality and affordability.

Like many other sartorially inclined college students, the Internet has provided much of Brannigan and LaMountain’s exposure to fashion. The various sects of the web’s fashion landscape appeal to a wide range of interests. There are bloggers who are infatuated with pocket squares, tie enthusiasts with 1,000 different ways to make a stylish knot, and photographers who devote websites to the well-dressed pedestrians of New York, Paris, and Milan. But not much of this interests #FFF’s co-founders.

“Sartorialist is just—there’s some lame stuff going on over there,” Brannigan said of the popular street-fashion blog. “There’s just a whole bunch of people who want to look like their grandfathers, and it’s weird.”

Instead, the company takes its inspira-

tion from the European scene of high-concept, high-priced “high fashion.” Brannigan cites Raf Simons, Takahiro Miyashita, and Undercover as contemporary designers and brands which he finds particularly important.

“They’ve all worked with themes of counterculture, invisibility, decay, rebellion, etc. which I think translates well into clothing,” he said.

But although the Internet can expose broke 20-year-olds to these more innovative approaches to fashion, the brands’ financial inaccessibility prevent any engagement with the scene that extends beyond Tumblr reblogs. #FFF’s goal is to design and sell clothing that is thoughtfully designed yet priced in a range that is typically dominated by mass-produced clothing and “streetwear” brands.

“H&M … is an awful place in most every way. They give you what you pay for, basically. If you pay $15 for a brand new shirt, it’ll likely be falling apart sometime soon,” Brannigan said. “[And] the whole world of streetwear … tends to make me sick in general because of how ruthlessly brands will exploit trends to make some money.” #FFF has each piece domestically manufactured and produced in limited quantity by a seamstress in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, who Brannigan found via Google.

The two-man operation begins a piece by creating a pattern of its design and form. Next, LaMountain will sew a sample for himself in order to gauge how well the design fits, feels, and looks. Once patterns are made for the piece’s various sizes, Brannigan and LaMountain will send the pattern to their seamstress, who then sends back a sample for approval. If no further changes are required, she cranks out a full run of the piece and sends it back up the Hudson Valley for the two to distribute.

“It’s possible [for us] to make a shirt under $100 because we don’t have huge runway budgets and advertising campaigns and the mystique of luxury,” Brannigan said. #FFF’s inaugural line is composed of button up shirts, shorts, t-shirts, and swim trunks. The company’s website features images of headless models whose bodies bear a striking resemblance to those of the company’s founders, displaying their selection for spring/summer 2013.

The shorts, which expose a solid amount of the wearer’s leg, are patterned with vibrant images of river rocks and multi-colored slushies. The t-shirts feature prints of darkly colored paintings and the #FFF logo, and there are both patterned and solid colored button-downs. One of the more visually striking pieces is a t-shirt with a patterned left breast pocket as well as coloring on the sleeve hems and collar.

culture

JUST TWO DUDES MAKING SOME CLOTHES

23

photo by dylan gilbert

SPORTS photo by valentina von klencke

RE : CYCLE CLUB

BY TOM MCQUEENY Spectators said they couldn’t decide who it was, but one person definitely flew.

It was the Cycling Club’s first race of the season at Grant’s Tomb in NYC and Logan Hollarsmith’s first cycling race ever.

Officials had specifically told racers not to look down at the racing clips on their pedals if their feet fell out.

The race started, and Hollarsmith sprinted out.

New to the racing clips and barely from the starting line, Hollarsmith did what felt right and looked down.

In the moments that followed, he hit the tire of the racer in front of him and immediately went down.

“Then I fell, and Arthur Holland, my teammate, ran over my head and he went over his handlebars,” Hollarsmith said.

Covered in dirt and blood, they jumped up and frantically tried to untangle their bikes as they watched the pack disappear.

About half an hour later, Hollarsmith and Holland finished the race 11th and 12th with grins and grit.

When club head and team captain Eames Bennett revived the team last semester, he hadn’t expected its first race to go exactly like that. However, it was the kind of team he expected to race.

“The difference between the older cycling teams and this one is that the previous teams were built for those who already know what they’re doing,” said Bennett.

Bennett’s hope is to build a team that offers the resources to help anyone race to whatever capacity they would like. The team has slower rides on Sundays, open to cyclists of any ability. Every other day it rides 25 miles at varying speeds.

Already the team has Ken Cooper as a driving force and Martin Bruhn, a semiprofessional who has raced in Europe, as coach, but Bennett feels that that alone is not enough.

Cost is a serious obstacle for competitive cycling, even at the collegiate level and the club needs money to facilitate entry into the expensive sport. On the first

Sunday of spring break, Bard College will be hosting an East Coast Collegiate Conference race in the hope of increasing funding to the group. If the club can show what kind of cultural contribution it can make, the thinking is that it could apply for much more funding. Events like this and potential fundraisers are intended to subsidize club members in buying practical racing bikes or modifying their current bikes.

When Bennett started up the team, he met with a lot of people who said they would want to do it but that they didn’t have the proper bike. It was a problem that he thought precluded people from entry into the sport.

“It’s hard to have a cycling team when no one has bikes,” Bennett said.

After all, cycling isn’t cheap by anyone’s standards.

With the purchase of a proper road bike, it’s easy to blow anywhere between $500 and $1000.

The team, its subsidies, and its activities are intended to be a gateway for people to get into the world of cycling and to get them ready.

In a college culture that prizes bikes, Bennett hopes there might be

some people who would want to take it to the next step and that is what the team is there to do.

That’s one of the appeals for Hollarsmith, anyways.

As the head of the Bike Co-op, he commutes to school from Tivoli on a bike and has gone across the country on a bike, but competitive cycling offers a whole new experience.

“It’s the final layer of cycling,” said Hollarsmith.

Hollarsmith got a taste of the appeal to competitive cycling when he and Bike Coop went to Brooklyn to take part in a tall bike jousting competition. Clad in white jumpsuits with shoulder pads, Hollarsmith

came to one conclusion.

“I was like, biking is the perfect thing to form a competition around,” said Hollarsmith.

He remembered this as he mashed the pedals towards the finish line at Grant’s Tomb.

As he came closer to the line, he could think of little else.

He was there, so entirely involved in what was going on at every moment as he passed them by.

Though Hollarsmith described the feeling as “something else,” Bennett had a different description.

“There’s a purity in the sport in that it’s you and the bike, and the only limitation is yourself,” said Bennett.

On the first Sunday of spring break, members of the Bard Cycling Club will go head to head with students from Hampshire, Columbia, and NYU around the small circle in front of Robbins.

A pace car or motorcycle will pace the race, marking the front of the pack.

Scattered across the race, Bard Cycling Team members will push up and down hills and among those members, an excited and cautious Logan Hollarsmith will remember to keep his head up.

photo by kalena fujii

@ BARD AND BEYOND

BY STASHA MORENO

photo courtesy of jon doelp

BomBardment was at Saratoga Springs for the Uprising Tournament. It began to snow. The field became icy and mud was everywhere. The disc was passed to Nathan Steinauer, who runs and jumps high above his defender to catch the disc and score. Some say that Ultimate Frisbee isn’t a demanding sport, or even isn’t a sport at all, but after watching a game it becomes clear how athletic Frisbee players truly are.

In its current manifestation, BomBardment has been active for about eight years. Meg Gatza, a former physics and religion major at Bard, started the current team.

Ultimate Frisbee is a club sport that offers Bard students a way to get involved athletically at Bard without the same demands as a varsity sport. BomBardment provides a niche for the portion of the student body that does not have the time or ability to practice sports for several hours everyday.

On this subject, senior Will Cordes, a co-captain of the men’s ultimate team said, “I think that the ultimate team offers an inclusive situation where people can enjoy being part of a team, take part in that camaraderie, and still enjoy competing.”

According to Cordes, the ideal member of the ultimate team shows up and stays committed.

But if you don’t show up to practice, he says, nobody is going to yell at you.

“Part of this experience of being at Bard is being self-sufficient, and people make their own decisions about whether they want to be at practice or not,” Cordes said.

Ultimate Frisbee for many reasons is a different type of sport than what people are generally used to. In Ultimate Frisbee there are no referees, instead everyone on the field is a referee, and players call their own fouls. This makes Frisbee an open sport that prides itself on sportsmanship and the ability to talk fouls through with other teams.

“I think, because we don’t have referees, Ultimate Frisbee draws a certain kind of player to the sport,” senior Allegra Rosenbaum said. “We are all fun-loving and good sports, for the most part, and that’s what makes it such a great game. When I am on the field and I am able to make my own call, that gives me a certain freedom and liberty that other sports don’t get.”

Ultimate Frisbee is a sport that is known to foster community and Bard’s team is very tight-knit.

The team is a way for students to make friends who they may not have met otherwise, and who generally have similar mindsets.

Cordes, who says he is a relatively introverted person by nature, finds comfort in the feeling of a team. “I think that the 40 familiar faces and people I know is a big thing for me. It makes walking around campus a lot better of a thing, I feel I run into my friends constantly,” Cordes said. During his freshman year, Cordes didn’t think that he would become as close to his teammates as he is now. “Now I love each one of them, I would kiss them on the cheek and tuck them in every night if I had to, because they’re just so great,” Cordes admits.

About the Frisbee community, senior Jasper Weinrich-Burd added, “there is no way to overstate how instrumental the Frisbee team has been in my four years at Bard, or in the lives of

25

sports

ULTIMATE (WITH A FRISBEE)

the other Frisbee seniors at Bard. There is no way to overstate it.”

In recent years, the Ultimate Frisbee team at Bard has been making huge strides in turning itself into more of a disciplined sports team. Responding to the wants of many players on the team, BomBardment has been taking itself more seriously and working harder to become a higher-ranking team. Right now Bard is ranked 202nd in the country for the college league, which is a great achievement for Bard. “[At Bard] we have changed the culture of ultimate, now our team is not just like a bunch of barefooted weirdos, running around mindlessly.

It takes a certain amount of effort to establish that we are going to run drills at practice, that we are going to run some conditioning exercises,” Cordes said.

Many of the changes that have been taking place in the sport of ultimate are not what people have come to expect from Frisbee. Outsiders see Frisbee as a laid-back sport, but for many that image is changing to encompass great athletes.

Even just four years ago, Bard’s ultimate team had a very different vibe. It used to be difficult to get players to bring cleats with them to practice; anyone who actually plays ultimate, even if they just play pick-up games, wears cleats. The culture of ultimate at Bard is changing.

“At this point, we have developed a different culture that perpetuates itself, because it takes itself more seriously, and even if our best five players graduate, which will happen at the end of this season, the team will continue to exist, and that’s not really a doubt in our minds,” Weinrich-Burd said. “That’s a big thing for me—that we are leaving behind something that can sustain itself as a program. Besides being a Frisbee team, there’s an Ultimate Frisbee program at Bard now.”

Cordes credits several team members with helping to change the culture of ultimate at Bard, by legitimizing and intensifying the team. He said that seven or eight players have stuck with the team for all four years, which helped to push the team into a new level of commitment. Their consistency, effort and dedication has held the team together.

The ultimate team has progressed even further this year by choosing to create two teams, both a men’s and a women’s team. Before this year, they hadn’t had enough committed members to split.

Dani Dobkin, girl’s co-captain added, “I think in creating this women’s team we’ve opened up a lot of opportunities for people who have always wanted to join the team but were timid in doing so.”

At the teams’ recent tournament at Skidmore, the men’s team won all of their games 4-0. It was also the first time that the women’s team competed as an official team.

Both teams will be attending High Tide, a large ultimate tournament in Georgia this spring break.

This is the third year Bard has gone to the tournament. The team couldn’t go last year because of a different spring break schedule, but this year they are able to attend again. Twenty-six Bard students will be attending. “[High Tide is] a four-day long tournament, and that’s going to be a lot of play time for us to develop a lot of strategy, and plays, and build chemistry, but it’s also a week-long retreat, or ‘hang out,’” Weinrich-Burd said. “And I’m really happy about that—it’s great for developing the team dynamic.”

According to Cordes, one of the men’s team’s top goals is to advance to regionals—something the team has never done.

“That would sort of be the capstone for me of four years of good work with the guys,” Cordes said.

[opinion]

THIS IS THE FUTURE AND THIS IS HOW I FEEL ABOUT SAID FUTURE

machines or if this is where that line is finally blurred beyond recognition. But the concept of Google Glass also disturbs me for a multitude of other reasons that are less abstract. CEO Sergey Brin is just one person, and so he is only a figurehead for a group mentality that is much larger than one single man. However, he is a legitimate force of a man. His personal wealth is over $20 billion. Here is what that number looks like next to the average American salary: 20,000,000,000 | 45,000

Sergey Brin’s wealth is nearly 450,000 times that of the average American’s. For a thought

From beneath the residual late evening squalor left in the Kline dining area, I recently came upon a new product on the cover of the Business section known as “Google Glass.”

Google CEO Sergey Brin says that, “People can make use of Google Glass to get around futzing with a smartphone.” The product is pretty much a pair of sunglasses with a tiny device attached to the frame that allows you to surf the Web using your voice while projecting an image of what you’re Googling across the lenses. To see what it’s like to wear Google Glass, just search up the video “How It Feels.”

You’ll enter the point of view of various people utilizing their Google Glass, viewing the world, as humans traditionally do, except with a small rectangle of Internet between their eyes and their environment.

There are many things one can say about how this device may compromise the integrity of ‘personhood,’ about how the mass consumption of Google Glass will redefine common notions of what it is to be a human, and whether we will continue to be distinct from

experiment, imagine that it costs one dollar to travel one mile. Say that I, an average American, and Sergey Brin wanted to spend the same percentage of our wealth on a travel outing. I’m willing to spend a dollar and change, and I go one mile and a little bit extra. Sergey Brin has gone to the moon and back for the same percentage of his wealth.

There is an unearthly discrepancy between the social standing of a man like this and the hundreds of millions of people he affects.

This man now presents a new product so you “don’t have to futz around with your SmartPhone.” ‘Futz’ around with a smartphone? The equivalent to “futzing around with your SmartPhone” is sliding your finger to the right six inches in order to access the ability to contact anyone, out of billions of humans, anywhere on the Earth, via speaking, text, networking.

Likewise, you can surf the internet and search an unimaginable, unbelievable, incomprehensible amount of information, like a bus schedule in any part of the world (including Somalia), or the directions to, say, a hospital. You can also use the internet for superfluous ends: to

BY NOLAN REECE

find out what a crocodile looks like, who won the Knicks game, or some public info about a girl on Facebook.

You can have all this in a matter of 20 seconds and a few taps of the finger. And Sergey Brin is leading a project to make it… easier.

It seems banal to express the opinion that commercialism has taken over America, that it is trampling over the free thought of the common citizen, that the intrinsic nature of technology is ‘evil’ because the corporations promoting these products are ‘evil’ as well.

We have the right to wave off remarks of this nature and indulge in our smartphones. We are free to crane our necks over the dinner table in the midst of company to peer into the depths of our smartphones. We may stifle all awkward pauses in conversation to keep up with any number of current text message exchanges. These things are considered acceptable behaviors.

Yet the consequences of such behavior are profound despite all the inaction surrounding it. We are more distracted and unobservant with respect to our environment than we have ever been.

What we gain in communication digitally, we lose in communication personally. The advent of Google Glass now presents a further step in this direction by creating a social environment where we are no longer distracted by a device but rather by our own outward sight.

Sergey Brin couldn’t possibly reflect on the impact of his actions on the people of the world. If he did, he’d give at least $19.9 billion away and feel greedy with $100 million.

He wouldn’t devote his work to something that is outrageously unnecessary. It is important to consider that he is just a businessman who wants his company to be more successful than Apple by using the common customer as a means to that end.

27

opinion

BARD POLITICKING TIBET

BY K.R. YESHI

Five years ago, on March 10, a Tibetan girl who was the head of the Bard Chapter of Students For a Free Tibet staged a tabling session outside Kline to raise awareness of the history of the birth of the Tibetan protest movement. A Chinese student approached and verbally assaulted the Tibetan girl, resulting in a temporary tension within the Tibetan-Chinese students’ relationship.

The annual March 10 Tibetan protest is the largest organized mass campaign for Tibet. It started in Lhasa, when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army coerced Tibetans into submission after a failed Tibetan revolt against Chinese occupation, resulting in the flight of the Dalai Lama to India. Since then, each year, Tibetans all over the world commemorate this anniversary as Tibetan Uprising Day, organizing protests or campaigns to draw attention to the situation in Tibet.

Today, there are a few more Tibetans at Bard, and all of them appear to get along well with the fellow Chinese students on campus. But there remains a dark issue that no one is willing to tread upon—a candid conversation on political difference. I asked students from both sides—Chinese and Tibetans—if the difference in their political background mattered in their friendship, and the answers were unequivocally forthcoming. Both firmly stood by their own people’s political standing but are willing to remain on good terms as long as there is no disagreeable political talk.

The important question to ask is whether this status

quo in student diplomacy will remain as it is today.

Is there no other avenue that potentially can lift the political muteness that seems to have bedeviled both these groups for so long?

Bard is a place with a penchant for gentile politicking. I remember a Facebook friend who wrote on her wall on March 10, when a group of Students for a Free Tibet supporters marched around campus: “Working at the library on a Sunday evening when a group of student protesters walk in politely whispering, ‘All we want is free Tibet.’ Oh Bard, how I missed you.”

Such an environment at Bard can serve well to develop amicable interaction between groups like the Chinese and Tibetans. It all starts with the right motivation and intention. I will share two stories to emphasize the importance of diplomacy. Twenty-eight years ago, a relatively low-profiled Xi Jinping (China’s current president) made an enduring friendship with the American people through his host family, while on a short business trip in Muscatine, Iowa. Now, as president, we’ve witnessed how at an individual level, personal interaction between Xi Jinping and the Iowa family left a positive impression on the political atmosphere between two of the most powerful nations on earth.

Another story I remember vividly was an article from the newspaper “Chronicle of Higher Education.” It explains how a group of international students were invited by former Vice President Dick Cheney to the US. After the educational exchange, all the students went back to their countries, and they were asked to

LIKESOMEBARDIAN?

write what was most memorable about their trip. One student neither mentioned how great the excursions were, nor how wonderful the cities were but, instead, singled out the kindness of an American stranger.

The lesson from these two stories is that interpersonal relations are a determining factor for the identity of a population; whether someone leaves a good impression depends on the nature of the interaction between the two people.

The relationship between the Chinese and the Tibetan students is imperative for prospective future diplomatic ties. People may describe the Bardian way to mean having specific political views, but a more realistic description is that Bardians do care about politics. We do politics well, adding humor while still sending a message. The Students for a Free Tibet members who raised awareness of a political situation by gentle politicking most aptly capture a grassroots, non-violent, peaceful mode of self-expression.

This political stigma between the Tibetans and the Chinese students can be dispelled through direct communication. It is only if we have every intention of bridging this unpleasant schism that the tension between the two groups will come to an end.

A decade from now, Bard’s Chinese and Tibetan students can and will carry on the skills of diplomacy that they pick up at this school. I hope we can embrace compassion, tolerance, understanding and care, and spread it to our people. This will be the wind of change that spreads the seeds of world peace to all hearts.

GO TALK TO THEM (IN PERSON)

BY DAVID GOLDBERG

Granted, there are an infinite number of social and psychological barriers that may make the non-confrontational approach the most preferable for declaring one’s love.

Likesomebardian (LSB) may be a valuable resource for connecting timid lovers, but something sublime and edifying is lost when the act of declaring love or even meeting your crush does not involve at least some modicum of face-to-face interaction.

Admittedly, I am no guru of face-to-face romantic confrontation. My own random, heart-puking crush at Bard consisted of teeth-gritting radio silence punctuated with bumbling, clumsy bursts of my crash and burn M.O. However, I can testify to the exhilaration I felt every time I worked up the guts to talk to that girl. It was like standing on the top of a big existential high dive thinking, I can’t do this, I can’t believe I’m doing this, there’s no way I can do this, oh......noooo!It is healthy. It is edifying. It humbles you, and

it makes you feel wise and alive.

Fear in the face of this thrill is not unfounded. When you have a crush, all rational faculties to downplay your emotion are wasted. All traditional methods for blowing off steam reveal that, unlike steam, a crush is not merely a byproduct of internal combustion within you. It is something organic and intractable that you don’t know what to do with; you feel you must do somethingwith it, and yet it feels too big to act upon.

However, fear of acting or fear of rejection are poor reasons for wasting a right of passage—especially one that very well may lead to your dream or whimsy coming true.

You are lucky to have a crush. (At least, it does no good to think about it any other way). Even if revealing yourself to your secret beloved is an awful, awkward experience, it cultivates wisdom and strength, and it will make your crush feel flattered (even if they kind of want the interaction to end).

You may think that there is no need to put your ego on the line when you can simply indicate your crush anonymously via LSB, but there is something oddly conditional about the way LSB allows you to wait for your love to be reciprocated before decisively taking responsibility for it. I understand that that is precisely the point, but conditionality diminishes the electricity of the crush experience, and the preference for it reflects an emotional cowardice in our community that leaves a surprising number of perfectly awesome people—piner and pinee—feeling dissatisfied, unloved, and bored.

You may think there is no space for oldschool courtly love in a place where people hook up before they date and where courtship consists of persistent, ambiguous exchanges of eye-contact, but take a look at LSB (which can be done by glancing at most laptops in the library), and you will see

that people pine more than they let on.

Let LSB be evidence. The secret is out: romance is fucking sexy. There are social conditions that make people ashamed of and repulsed by the very sound of the word “love.” They are the same conditions that make LSB undermine itself with a selfdeprecating “sappy” in the header, but that doesn’t mean silver-tongued scenes of seduction are not rampant within our secret imaginations.

I hope that, rather than being a crutch used to circumvent the uncharted and fearsome emotions natural to crushes, LSB inspires within us the emotional courage to take responsibility for what we cannot help but feel we must act upon. I’m not sure what is to be gained through this slightly masochistic form of courage, but I think something vital is lost without it.

RE: BARD TWEETS Martha Beatrice ‫@‏‬barthameatricea I consider the annotations i make in my rental books to be a public service.

Nigel Uno ‫@‏‬cheese_grits Moderation got me shook, can’t front.

J.P. Corner ‫@‏‬jpcorner The biggest gap in my education is probably that I never know how to respond when people say “what’s good?” || siira || @siiraSIIRAsiira watching old people youtube videos instead of the usual baby ones . is this is what people meant when they said you’d experiment in college

Naomi LaChance ‫@‏‬gnomeschomsky Made eye contact with a girl looking at likesomebardian. She guiltily shut her laptop, pulled out a book. It’s okay, stranger, I understand.

Jenny Ghetti ‫@‏‬weeghetti Yesterday my senior project adviser gave me a high five and today I spent a lot of time watching sad youtube videos.

Madeline Porsella ‫@‏‬inePor Is it weird if I sit in my car in the Olin lot for the next two hours? Jk I don’t care if you think it’s weird. I’m doing it.

Marty Abbe-Schneider ‫@‏‬shitmartythinks If you see me walking out of the dining hall with five biscuits and a lidded coffee cup don’t be fooled.

The coffee cup has a biscuit in it.

www.bardfreepress.com