The Georgetown Voice, December 2, 2010

VOICE the georgetown

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, D.C. s Dance Hall RevivaL

BUDGET CUTS AFFECT REIMBURSABLE COP PROGRAMS PAGE 4

HARDCORE PARKOUR AT GEORGETOWN PAGE 6

BLACK SWAN IS NO UGLY DUCKLING PAGE 10

Georgetown University’s Weekly Newsmagazine Since 1969 w December 2, 2010 w Volume 43, Issue 15 w georgetownvoice.com

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december 2, 2010

Vox Po*pu*li |vahks POP’-yoo-lee| -noun (1) ORIGIN mid-16th century from the Latin,

hot off the blog

!

X VO

“voice of the people” (2) can be used metaphorically for commonly understood, the popular person or idea, what

“Public Safety Alert: Your laptop will never be safe again” “Thanksgiving--the beginning of breakup season”

everyone knows or accepts, the latest trend (3) the title of Chapter 1, Book 3 of V for

Vendetta (4) the opinions or beliefs of the majority

“Twuesday Tweetacular: Something we likealittle more than Lau” “Darnall dorm room burgled while student naps”

(5) the blog of the Georgetown Voice, see ridiculously awesome

“Georgetown previews new website” “Georgetown gets $90 million to complete Science Center, renovate facilities” “Campus Plan update: No need to worry, the neighbors still don’t like us”

Vox Populi

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Voice Crossword “Titans of Ska” by Scott Fligor

ACROSS 1. Raises 4. Super-soldier exoskeleton 10. Halt!

14. Loosen, as in laces

15. End ___ 16. Ripped 17. Israeli city 18. Half of Mork’s goodbye 19. Growl 20. Found in a little pond?

blog.georgetownvoice.com

answers at georgetownvoice.com 23. Day-___ 24. Stud’s place 25. With certainty 27. Author of Emile and The Social Contract 32. Diminutive (suffix) 33. Bristle, on a plant 34. Chimney visitor 36. Campaign aim 39. Nothing 41. Attire 43. German article 44. Location of a famous council 46. Verdi aria 48. Finish 49. Irish terrorist org.

51. Partial 53. Dry ice does it 56. Dutch river 57. Honest ___ 58. You put it on a hot dog?

64. An FSU player, in short 66. Soda measurement 67. Raccoon relative 68. Golfer John 69. Waters, formally 70. It’s found in the black 71. Eye problem 72. Old waste allowance 73. Georgetown’s science building

DOWN 1. German river 2. Spanish business school 3. Play to ___ (draw) 4. Used in biathlons 5. “Chilean” catch 6. Displayed on a wall 7. Military letters 8. Founder of the USSR 9. Famous castaway 10. British currency 11. At a loss for words 12. Toothpaste brand 13. EDS founder and presidential contender 21. “___ the news today...”

(Beatles lyric) 22. Comes in 720p and 1080p 26. Plains tribe 27. Tirade 28. Man ___’___ 29. The vulnerable side

30. Japanese version of EPA and DOE 31. Nirvana’s “In ___” 35. “To tell a lie is ___” 37. Fem. suffix 38. Comic Foxx 40. Indigo plant 42. Determine the course 45. Cut closely 47. Sold in lots 50. Talisman 52. Levy 53. They’re found in deserts 54. German WWII sub 55. To be, en Español 59. Not false 60. Helper; abbr.

61. Air Force language prgm.

62. Salt Lake City athletes 63. Moves quickly 65. Used to see

ARE YOU A LOGOPHILE? Share your love of words and help us write crosswords.

E-mail crossword@georgetownvoice.com.

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VOICE the georgetown

Volume 43.15 December 2, 2010 Editor-in-Chief: Juliana Brint Managing Editor: Molly Redden Editor-at-Large: Tim Shine Blog Editor: Chris Heller News Editor: Cole Stangler Sports Editor: Nick Berti Feature Editor: Sean Quigley Cover Editor: Holly Ormseth Leisure Editor: Brendan Baumgardner Voices Editor: Keaton Hoffman Photo Editor: Jackson Perry Design Editors: Megan Berard, Ishita Kohli Literary Editor: James McGrory Crossword Editor: Mary Cass Assistant Blog Editors: Geoffrey Bible, Julie Patterson Assistant News Editors: Emma Forster, Holly Tao Assistant Cover Editor: Marc Fichera Assistant Leisure Editors: Nico Dodd, Leigh Finnegan Assistant Photo Editors: Max Blodgett, Matthew Funk

Associate Editor: Iris Kim Staff Writers:

Thaddeus Bell, Akshay Bhatia, Mary Borowiec, Tom Bosco, Kara Brandeisky, Rachel Calvert, Matthew Collins, Matthew Decker, John Flanagan, Satinder Kaur, Daniel Kellner, Matt Kerwin, Julie Patterson, Sadaf Qureshi, John Sapunor, Rob Sapunor, Abby Sherburne, Melissa Sullivan, Keenan Timko, Imani Tate, Mark Waterman, J. Galen Weber

Staff Photographers:

Helen Burton, Julianne Deno, Lexie Herman, Hilary Nakasone, Seun Oyewole, Audrey Wilson

Staff Designers:

Richa Goyal, Catherine Johnson, Lauren MacGuidwin, Michelle Pliskin, Nitya Ramlogan, Amber Ren

Copy Chief: Matt Kerwin

Copy Editors: Emily Hessler, Tori Jovanovski, Claire McDaniel, Kim Tay

Editorial Board Chair: Hunter Kaplan Editorial Board:

Gavin Bade, Kara Brandeisky, Ethan Chess, Jackson Perry, Eric Pilch, Molly Redden, J. Galen Weber

Head of Business: Eric Pilch The Georgetown Voice

The Georgetown Voice is published every Thursday. If you would like to subscribe, make a check or money order payable to the Georgetown Voice and send it to the mailing address listed below. Subscription rates are as follows:

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Newsroom: (202) 687-6780 Fax: (202) 687-6763 E-Mail: editor@georgetownvoice.com Advertising: business@georgetownvoice.com Web Site: georgetownvoice.com The opinions expressed in the Georgetown Voice do not necessarily represent the views of the administration, faculty or students of Georgetown University, unless specifically stated.

Unsigned editorials represent the views of the Editorial Board. Columns, advertisements, cartoons and opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or the General Board of the Georgetown Voice. The University subscribes to the principle of responsible freedom of expression of its student editors. The Georgetown Voice is produced in the Georgetown Voice office and composed on Macintosh computers using the Adobe InDesign publishing system and is printed by Silver Communications. All materials copyright the Georgetown Voice. All rights reserved.

On this week’s cover ... Dance Revival Cover Graphic: Holly Ormseth

the georgetown voice 3

GOOOD MORNING VILLAGE A!

Crimes of opportunity knocking on our doors

In the last month alone, a string of six robberies in Georgetown’s Village A apartments, an attempted abduction, and at least 12 reports of laptop theft have left students questioning their safety and security. The actions taken by Associate Director of Public Safety Joseph Smith and DPS in response to these crimes are steps in the right direction, but Georgetown students and administrators still have a great deal of work to do to get campus security up to par.

Recently, DPS has set up spotlights around Village A apartments for better lighting, positioned security officers and a squad car along the Canal Road during night hours, and hired extra security details to help patrol the area. Over Thanksgiving break, two sheds were installed so that officers will be able to patrol during winter months. It’s too early to judge their effectiveness yet, but

it is an encouraging sign that the wave of crime afflicting that part of campus subsided shortly after these increased security measures were initiated.

It is important for students to help prevent crimes on and around campus.

Many of the recent robberies could have been prevented had students remembered to lock their doors. The sheer number of crimes in which the perpetrator simply walked in through an unlocked door shows that this cannot be emphasized enough. Students should also report any suspicious activity to DPS and avoid leaving laptops unattended.

The most important next step for public safety officials is the installation of security cameras in crime hotspots around campus. When installed in proper locations, such as outside Village A, security cameras can serve to deter crime without infringing on the privacy

of students. The University has said that cameras will be added as it works to establish wireless throughout campus by the end of spring semester. In light of recent crimes, it should shorten the timeline for this project and begin to immediately install cameras in public spaces around campus.

At the same time, DPS should be sure not to infringe on students’ rights in its effort to maintain security. They must avoid past mistakes like randomly checking if students’ doors are locked and confiscating laptops left unattended in Lauinger Library, which only created confusion and resentment. With the spotlights, security sheds, and warning posters, Village A is beginning to look like a military base, but it is important that Georgetown doesn’t become a police state. We can have security without compromising the student experience.

MIND THE GAP

A surplus of city services in D.C.’s budget cuts Even before he takes office in January, D.C. Council Chair and Mayor-elect Vincent Gray (D) will be a part of the strenuous process of dealing with D.C’s budget problems. Over the next two years, his administration will have to slash 583 million dollars from the District’s ballooning deficit by either raising taxes or cutting popular programs and services. While neither option is likely to win him friends, Gray must take a hard look at next year’s budget to bring services in line with the economic realities of a city still struggling to exit the recession.

Current Mayor Adrian Fenty’s (D) budget proposal to close this year’s $188 million gap includes no new taxes, instead relying on deep program cuts in D.C.’s operating budget. Hardest hit by these cuts are the city’s social services, youth programs, and police and emergency departments. While certain pro-

grams, like the perennially mismanaged Summer Youth Employment Program, deserve tighter scrutiny, wholesale cuts of welfare and Child and Family Services budgets place an unfair burden on residents who are most dependent on the District for assistance.

Cuts to the Healthy Schools Act in particular deserve reconsideration by Gray and the D.C. Council as they review Fenty’s proposal over the next two weeks.

The hard-fought bill bought local produce for the city’s school lunches and was widely applauded as a model program for the nation when it was introduced in August. Delaying the program will only save $4.6 million for this year’s budget, but may have larger consequences for D.C.’s youth, a staggering 35.4 percent of whom are obese.

Instead of axing worthy programs that provide needed services to D.C. residents,

councilmembers should put aside their pet projects and pipe dream capital spending plans to find a solution that fairly distributes the future deficit burden. Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), for example, has made the ludicrous proposal to cut the salaries of D.C. government employees who do not live in the District while continuing to support the $2-3 billion required to renovate FedEx Field.

With the city’s debt ratio pushing the legal limit, now is not the time to dream up creative solutions that do not adequately address D.C.’s budgetary woes. Re-evaluating plans for a $50 million streetcar system or a $3 billion stadium would do more to reduce the city’s debt obligations than cutting dozens of smaller, more necessary programs. Gray and the D.C. Council must draw a line between the services that District residents want and the programs that they need.

IN LOKO PARENTIS

The national drinking age is too damn high!

Packing as much alcohol as five light beers and the same amount of caffeine as two cups of coffee, in recent weeks Four Loko has been attributed to several highly publicized cases of alcohol poisoning, binge drinking, and suicide. According to the FDA, the mixture of caffeine and alcohol in drinks like Four Loko, Joose, and Moonshot leads to more dangerous drinking behaviors, especially in teens and college students. After many states had already banned alcoholic energy drinks, the FDA ruled on Nov. 17 that the added caffeine is an “unsafe food additive,” effectively forcing drink makers to remove the caffeine from their products.

This decision is both shortsighted and impractical. Banning Four Loko will do nothing to curb binge drinking and consumers can easily recreate the effects of these beverages with mixed drinks containing similar amounts of alcohol

and caffeine. The FDA is confusing a symptom of the problem of dangerous underage drinking with its cause. Underage students drank to excess long before Four Loko appeared on the market, and will continue to drink as long as there is a disparity between the culture of drinking on college campuses and the country’s national drinking age.

University presidents across the country have long seen the wisdom in lowering the drinking age. The presidents of Syracuse University, Pomona College and Ohio State University, and almost 100 other colleges, have all encouraged lowering the drinking age from 21. They say it contributes to a culture of clandestine binge drinking that occurs mainly behind closed doors. A study published by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism says that the highest rates of consump-

tion are found in university-owned dormitories and housing. Fear of police and campus safety officers drives students to consume more alcohol at quicker rates than they might otherwise. The rates of assault, sexual assault, and injury as a result of alcohol consumption are alarmingly higher when binge drinking is involved.

The FDA’s recent ban on the sale of Four Loko has brought the issue of alcohol consumption on college campuses back into the national spotlight.

But that spotlight has shined on a very specific product instead of the underlying issue driving dangerous drinking behaviors. If government agencies or college administrators are serious about addressing the problem of underage binge drinking, they should advocate for reopening the debate on lowering the national drinking age.

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december 2, 2010

Fenty budget cuts hit reimbursable cop program

by Rachel Calvert The Metropolitan Police Department’s reimbursable detail program, which regularly provides patrols for Georgetown’s businesses and residential areas around campus, faces significant budget cuts under the 2011 fiscal year budget proposed by outgoing-Mayor Adrian Fenty.

The program allows private entities to hire off-duty MPD officers to patrol a given area. The private party pays half of each reimbursable detail officer’s hourly wage, and the Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration matches these funds.

Fenty’s budget cuts have the agency reducing spending on the program by $500,000.

In a June Advisory Neighborhood Commission meeting, Second District Lieutenant John Hedgecock said that the businesses and associations in Georgetown hire more reimbursable details than any neigh-

borhood in the District, and they contributed to relatively low crime rates in the area. At the Nov. 29 ANC meeting, he said that the details are present five a days a week in the business district, and seven days a week around campus.

Hedgecock said the program has been used extensively in the surrounding area at the University’s request to address safety issues and the concerns of local residents regarding students living off-campus. The Department of Public Safety hired an additional detail in response to the string of Village A burglaries in early November, according to Vice President of University Safety Rocco Delmonaco.

Associate Director of DPS Joseph Smith declined to comment on any cuts to the program.

“We have no definitive information about exactly what or how or when this could impact our current efforts,” Julie Green-Bataille, Associate Vice

President for Communications, wrote in an email.

Luca Pivato, the Vice President of the Citizens Association of Georgetown and co-chair of the CAG Public Safety Committee, wrote in an e-mail that CAG hired reimbursable details in response to an increase in burglaries and robberies in residential areas. CAG noticed a decrease in crime since the hiring of the reimbursable details, he said.

“As far as our detail program is concerned, we are satisfied with MPD’s responsiveness and work,” Pivato wrote.

Pivato added that CAG was unaware of the proposed cuts.

The Burleith community does not fund any reimbursable details, according to ANC Commissioner Ed Solomon, Burleith’s ANC representative.

Fenty’s budget also proposes a reduction of less than 10 percent in the budgets of ANCs across the city. Solomon, who is the Georgetown ANC’s

treasurer, said this would not have a significant impact on the community.

“We have enough funds to provide for expenses,” Solomon said.

The reduction in the ANC budget, funds that are allocated based on proposals submitted by members of the community,

will result in fewer funds available for community projects such as parks and playgrounds, he said.

After a marathon 14 hourplus budget hearing that ended early Wednesday morning, the new budget is pending approval from the D.C. City Council.

HELEN BURTON

Proposed budget cuts slash $500,000 of ABRA’s funding of reimbursable offices.

On the record with DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson On Nov. 26, the Voice’s Gavin Bade sat down with Kaya Henderson (SFS ‘92), interim chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools, to talk education reform in D.C. The policies of your predecessor, Michelle Rhee, were relatively controversial nationwide. Do you intend to change any of them?

I’ve been Michelle [Rhee’s] deputy for the past three-anda-half years, so they are not her policies. They are our policies. I ran our human capital shop and everything that had to do with people, including hiring, firing, professionally developing, retaining, evaluating, compensating.

The [Washington Teachers Union] contract that we negotiated, I was the lead negotiator on. … I don’t see us turning around anything.

How do you answer critics of your merit pay system who say too many teachers are being fired?

What people really need to understand is our theory of action … to ensure that every single classroom has the most highly effective teacher possible. … It means we have to reward and retain our highest performers, to support

and develop our middle performers, and it means we have to move out our lowest performers. ... Part of the issue was whether or not we even knew who our highest and lowest performers were, and we didn’t when we got here. So, we created a teacher evaluation tool [called IMPACT].

Instead of relying on a single observation by a principal or assistant principal on a laundry list of random competencies, which is how a lot of evaluation systems work, [IMPACT] allows for five observations against a teaching and learning framework which capture the practices of great teachers. … We believe very strongly that you can’t say that someone is a highly effective teacher unless their student achievement results support that. … That means test scores, that means end of term exams. That means all kinds of measures of growth.

How do you answer critics who say that measuring a student’s test scores doesn’t always accurately reflect a teacher’s impact in the classroom?

We don’t believe in basing a teacher’s pay only on test scores, but we do believe it is an impor-

tant component when we measure a teacher’s effectiveness. …

Nobody in the country has an evaluation system that is as sophisticated, that is as fair … and provides teachers multiple opportunities to show their stuff.

When you change from a very simple system to a very complex system, there’s bound to be a lot of rumblings. … Our teachers are saying that they’ve never gotten this kind of specific feedback on their classroom instruction as they have with IMPACT. The second thing is that IMPACT is allowing us to make decisions in completely different ways. … It has identified who our highest performing teachers are … it helps us spend our money differently. So, we spend millions of dollars on professional development. Previously it’s been random, with no idea as to what return on investment looks like.

Now we can be proscriptive on what kind of professional development [the teacher needs].

How do you see your relationship with the unions at this point?

I’ve been our main labor negotiator … and enjoy a really good relationship with all

of our unions. Up until I got this job, [I] was meeting with them monthly. … Union-district fights sell newspapers. What nobody wants to talk about is that at my 40th birthday party in July, my union friends were there because I spend just as much time with them as I do with my co-workers.

I think the unions are in a particularly difficult place right now.

They are trying to move from being organizations that were only concerned about wages and job protection and job security to a changing environment, where as professional organizations, they are called upon to be partners and leaders in school reform. …

I think they are trying to figure out how to go from where they were to where they need to be.

What’s the biggest current challenge to the school system?

We are engaged in a massive culture change … and culture change is like rerouting the Titanic. You can’t just turn a corner. The teacher is the lynchpin in that, but it’s [also] professional development, it’s curriculum … it’s change that has to happen in the classroom. …

So keeping the culture change going and really pushing down to the point where the unit of change is the classroom is the biggest challenge.

EMMA FORSTER

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GU ROTC largely avoids DADT debate Students survey GU’s core

by John Flanagan From the gay George Washington University student kicked out of the university’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps to Harvard’s president promising to reinstate its ROTC program if the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is repealed, the military’s policy preventing openly-gay men and women from serving has come under fire on many college campuses. These controversies could come to an end if the policy is repealed.

But Georgetown’s ROTC program has steered clear of conflicts with the University’s non-discrimination policy, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

“We’ve not seen any evidence at Georgetown of discrimination related to these issues,” Julie GreenBataille, associate vice president of communications, wrote in an email.

As an official branch of the military, the college-based officer commissioning program enforces all aspects of the Military Code of Justice, including “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Federal law prohibits universities receiving federal grants to ban ROTC from campus, but ROTC has chosen not to operate at several institutions since the Vietnam War.

In 2008, President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University said that the current “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was inconsistent with his university’s fundamental values.

At Georgetown, by contrast, the policy has quietly been in place since it was implented in 1993.

“I’ve only been briefed on [“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”] once in my entire three-and-a-half years in ROTC. It’s never come up,” Cadet Public Affairs Officer Jonathan Klay (COL ’11) said. “When I signed my contract, there was this brief section stating that the policy as its set now, that one cannot be openly homosexual in the military.”

MAX BLODGETT

Georgetown’s ROTC operates under the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

Democracy inaction?

Dec. 7 is D-Day for the Georgetown University Student Association. On Tuesday, students will vote on the GUSA Finance and Appropriation Committee’s pet project: Student Activities Fee Endowment reform, or, in Georgetown’s tradition of ridiculous acronyms, “SAFE Reform.” If the referendum passes, GUSA will slowly raise the yearly the Student Activities Fee from $100 to $150 and stop diverting half the fee to the withering endowment, which was supposed to begin subsidizing the fee by around this year.

The GUSA FinApp Committee has decided that the referendum will need a voter turnout of 2,000 students in order to be considered legitimate—a high watermark, considering that this year’s senatorial election only attracted 1,006 voters. Furthermore, expecting that students will want to end the practice of investing half the fee in the failing endowment but will likely oppose a fee increase, the senators have made the obstinate decision to

Klay said that, as a cadet, he could not give his personal opinion on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Although all ROTC courses are listed on MyAccess and count as University credit, only the first-and second-year courses are open to non-ROTC students.

ROTC instructors are considered members of the faculty, but organized under a distinct Military Science Department, and are paid by the Army.

Although the Pentagon presented a report to Congress on Tuesday recommending a repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the Senate has yet to vote on the matter.

force students to vote up or down on the package deal. This is an indication that the senators may not have as much support for the plan as they would like. But their philosophy is go big or go home.

“If you divide the referendum question in two … people will vote yes on the first part and no on the second part,” FinApp Committee member Colton Malkerson (COL ’13) said. “We did think about that as a committee … but [voting to only allocate $100] doesn’t meet the true need.”

At its heart, this referendum is not about whether or not to increase club funding. Instead, the results will tell us whether or not students really trust GUSA to manage their money, and—more importantly— whether or not a third of the student body even knows enough about GUSA to voice an opinion.

More than any senatorial or presidential election, this referendum is a test of GUSA’s legitimacy.

It’s a test the senators expect to pass. Over the next week, the

committee plans to ramp up its campaigning with door-to-door canvassing and increased flyering.

“We’re slowly building the groups who will endorse it,” FinApp Committee Chair Greg Laverriere (COL ‘12) told the other senators at Tuesday’s meeting. “It comes down to the ground game, which we will win.”

But in their fervor, the senators have launched a campaign that has at times been misleading. For example, in town halls, the senators

Saxa Politica

by Kara Brandeisky A bi-weekly column on campus news and politics

noted Georgetown’s sparse wireless service to illustrate the ways Georgetown is lagging behind. But the increased Student Activities Fee wouldn’t go towards wireless, and to suggest otherwise is deceptive.

Likewise, in their public comments and postings, the senators have failed to dispel the rumors that the SAFE has languished solely because of the economy. This is a lie. The SAFE—established in 2001

by Mark Waterman Starting this week, as part of the University’s ongoing evaluation of its core curriculum, several seniors will attend five seminar-style classes to provide feedback on their experiences in general education classes at Georgetown.

Father Christopher Steck, who is moderating the sessions with Dr. Randall Bass, executive director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, said that the class serves as a “sounding board” for students.

Steck and Bass are the leaders of a faculty-only committee that is evaluating the University’s general education requirements.

Both the class, a tutorial for which students may choose to earn one credit hour, and a CNDLS survey of juniors and seniors are part of the committee’s plan to elicit student opinions.

“There’s a big push for assessment,” said Steck. “Anybody who’s not doing this is probably behind the game … It’s very hard to measure what quality of education students are receiving …

To be able to assess something,

and expected to reach $10 million by about this year—is $8.1 million short because the University reneged on its promised $3 million contribution and the accompanying interest. Class after class of GUSA senators forgot about the administration’s promise—and the fund itself—for almost a decade.

The recession didn’t deplete the endowment. GUSA mismanaged it.

But Malkerson and Laverriere believe that despite students’ misgivings about GUSA’s past incompetence, the current senate will be able to convince students to support the higher fee and reforms. According to the committee’s report, the advisory boards, which fund clubs at Georgetown, have an estimated $800,000 need. The report also says that compared to peer institutions, Georgetown’s $100 fee is in the bottom 25 percent.

“Once you talk to kids and once you explain it to them, it becomes very clear, very quickly, this is something they should support,” Malkerson said.

To be fair, the FinApp Committee has held a number of town halls about SAFE Reform. A few

you need to know … where the goals are.”

The committee is attempting to form concrete ideas about these goals while also focusing on active learning and the integration of new technologies in education.

After the tutorial ends, student participants like Colin Brody (COL ’11) will lead their own focus groups of 10 to 15 students in discussions about the strengths and weaknesses of the general education curriculum.

Though the process is ongoing, students have so far expressed desire for more first-year seminars, more interdisciplinary courses, and more student research opportunities, among other things.

Brody said that participants in the tutorial have also been researching curricula at other universities around the country in an attempt to develop a list of potential changes to Georgetown’s curriculum. “[I] believe that there are very good parts of the general education curriculum and there are parts that can be improved,” Brody said.

senators, reporters, advisory board members, and I have been to all of them. But I suspected that outside that insular group, no one has any idea what’s going on.

I talked to a handful of other students to get a sense of what other people are thinking. They were both more aware and less informed than I expected. Some said they had seen GUSA’s posters and didn’t know what they were about.

But several were able to describe the main contentions, and a few offered viable counterarguments.

“I’m a major capitalist,” Milan Suri (COL ’11) said in the most strident opposition I heard. He argued that rather than raising the Student Activities Fee for everybody, students should contribute additional fees to their own organizations as needed.

“If you want any of those things, you should just pay for them.”

Then I asked if he planned to vote against the referendum.

“Oh, we’re voting on it?” he asked.

Want to celebrate Kara’s retirement from Saxa Politica? Email her at kbrand eisky@georgetownvoice.com

sports

6 the georgetown voice

december 2, 2010

Parkour turns Georgetown into playground

by Daniel Kellner From vaulting over brick walls to landing perfectly on a railing only a few inches wide, the practice known as parkour encourages one to challenge the limits of the human body. Over the past few years, students have witnessed groups of individuals pull off maneuvers all over campus that appear to defy the laws of physics.

Eli Shane, a former gymnast and parkour enthusiast who frequents the Georgetown area, defines parkour as “the fluid and efficient movement through your environment over any obstacle no matter what it is, using only your body to propel yourself.” There is no equipment or anti-gravity mechanism involved—only the human body and its unlimited potential.

But what possesses these so-called traceurs to attempt these unusual and even dangerous stunts?

Originally practiced in France as a means for discipline and physical training, parkour has since spread worldwide, becoming an Internet sensation and inspiring many ordinary folks to get out and test their abilities. Many athletes have been doing parkour long before the French turned it into a defined sport and discipline.

Shane found out about parkour from someone who had noticed him training outdoors.

“I started a good 12 years ago, before I knew what parkour was,” Shane said. “Somebody was like ‘You’re doing parkour?’ I checked it out and was like ‘wow, this is what I’ve been doing.’ So I looked into it more and found out what it was all about.”

What Shane discovered was much more than just an interesting fitness regimen. But even more appealing than the physical benefits are the focus and

non-competitive nature that parkour fosters.

“It’s a lot of mind over body, really overcoming your mental obstacles and barriers, as well as your physical ones,” Shane said. “I see it more as setting personal goals rather than beating someone else. It’s about bettering yourself.”

This mindset draws traceurs to the Georgetown area where the many unusual structural features of the campus and neighborhood make it one of the parkour “hotspots in the metropolitan area,” according to Aaron Jackson, another former gymnast. Jackson specifically highlighted the railings by the Exorcist Stairs in addition to the walls and varied elevation around Darnall Hall and Henle Village as ideal training sites for experienced traceurs. As a result, when the World Freerunning and Parkour Federation made a stop in Washington, D.C. on their nationwide tour this August, Georgetown was one of the places Jackson insisted on showing them.

“They enjoyed it and those are some of the biggest names in the sport right now,” Jackson said.

“They really enjoyed Georgetown for all the stuff it had to offer for parkour.”

Traceurs also view parkour as a great way to interact and connect with new people, making it a great way to socialize and exercise at the same time.

“Whenever I’m around I try to go out with people I haven’t met yet, train with new people, meet new people,” said Shane. “When you’re all in a group, you want to help out each other and encourage each other.”

However, each traceur takes their own interpretation of what parkour means to them. Jackson still spends time coaching gymnastics, claims parkour is more of a hobby that offers both exercise and amusement.

JACKSON PERRY

Eli Shane doesn’t walk around the walls of Henle, he jumps over them.

“To me it’s a challenging way to get around, a fun way of moving from one place to another,” said Jackson. “I like looking at a wall and instead of saying ‘I wish I had a ladder,’ I think ‘I’m going to run up this wall.’”

While participation in parkour remains limited among the Georgetown student body, there is no shortage of interest among students who see these traceurs as they walk to class. It is not uncommon

for the traceurs to build up a modest audience as people try to figure out what is going on. Observation is inevitably followed by questions, which the traceurs are more than happy to answer.

“I actually love it because I’ve been trying to spread the word about it,” Shane said, who teaches his own course on parkour and coordinates training with other traceurs. “I love to go and talk to them and explain what we’re doing.”

Jackson has noticed a significant rise in the awareness of parkour. He said that more and more people are recognizing their prodigious leaps and awe-inspiring vaults as parkour, rather than having to ask what it is. Given that Georgetown is such an ideal environment for practicing parkour, it may be only a matter of time before students start leaping across the wheelchair ramp outside Henle with Shane and Jackson.

the Sports Sermon “I study my ass off. I dont go out there and laugh, ... and [want to] get embarassed on Monday Night Football in front of everybody.”—Cardinals QB Derek Anderson

The Yankees are offering him more because he is worth more than his stats—he is a leader, a proven winner, and an integral part of the Yankees’ brand. Fans mention his name in the same sentence as Ruth, Mantle, Gehrig, and DiMaggio. While many think intangibles are overrated, the Yankees obviously see them as important (and Jeter sees them as insanely important). The key question becomes, how much is he actually worth?

The Yankees are the richest team in sports and have never been afraid to spend their money.

speech, in which the terminally ill ballplayer said, “Today I conFor my entire life, Derek Jeter sider myself the luckiest man on has been synonymous with the the face of the earth”; and Jerry New York Yankees. Jeter’s rookie Maguire ranting, “Show me the season was the first season I rootmoney!” Jeter and his agent took ed for the team I now call my fathe Jerry Maguire route—and vorite in any sport (sorry, Hoyas). they were wrong.

I don’t know Jeter without the He is not a bad person for tryYankees, I don’t know the Yaning to make as much money as he kees without Jeter, and in a perfect possibly can—especially when evworld it would stay like that forery athlete does it. But Jeter should ever. But unfortunately, that is not be less Jerry and more Lou. the world in which we live. Jeter Every time Jeter walked out and the Yankees will eventually of the clubhouse to the dugout separate. in the old Yankee Stadium, he Technically, Jeter is not curtouched a sign on the wall with a rently a Yankee. He famous quote from is a free agent, and Joe DiMaggio on it.

Pete Rose Central has been since the “I want to thank the Da bettin’ line World Series ended.

Good Lord for makBut no one thinks of ing me a Yankee.”

Dookies Margin Hoyas him in that way—to When the stadium (underdogs) (duh!) (favorites) New Yorkers and was destroyed, Jeter Bostonians alike, Cavs Fans LeBron The decision took the sign as a he is still a Yankee.

Pats Spygate II keepsake.

Jets However, he will Doesn’t he realAggies Polygamy Hoyas officially be part of ize how much the the team again only Yankees have given when he signs the contract Sometimes, they are even reckless him? He plays for the premier with New York. with their fortune. They threw team in baseball in the MLB’s This will happen, in time. Carl “American Idle” Pavano biggest market. He is an icon beBut Jeter and his agent Casey $40 million in about two seconds. cause of his play, but also because Close’s initial offer is in a com- They gave Javier Vasquez $11.5 of his championships, which he pletely different ballpark than million this past season after he wouldn’t have if he played for, what the Yankees want to pay failed miserably the last time say, the Pittsburgh Pirates. The the 36-year-old shortstop. It he wore the pinstripes. So how Yankees provided him the launch has been reported that the Yan- could a team so rich spend so pad to soar into the stratosphere. kees’ initial offer was $45 mil- much time negotiating with the I’m not discounting anything lion for three years, while Jeter franchise’s most important play- he has ever done in the uniand Close were looking for $150 er in the last 40 years when they form—his career has been million over six years. Jeter’s have thrown money at overrated nothing short of masterful—I last deal paid him $189 million players in the past? It’s those in- just think he needs to give the over 10 years, making him one tangibles again. There is no way Yankees more credit. of the best-paid players ever to to measure them, which is why The Yankees’ offer to The step on the diamond. Marco both parties are so far apart on the Captain isn’t disrespectScutaro, the shortstop for the ri- terms of the deal. ful, either—they are paying val Red Sox, put up very similar When thinking about Jeter above market value. It is numbers last year and he only deciding to either take the deal time for Jeter to take what earned $5.5 million, less than a or ask for more, two memorable the Yankees are giving him— quarter of Jeter’s salary—and moments flashed in my mind: he was always meant for the Jeter wants a raise?

Lou Gehrig’s famous farewell pinstripes.

by Nick Berti

sports

georgetownvoice.com

Dream run ends for Hoyas

by Abby Sherburne “Every team but one loses their last game,” Georgetown women’s soccer coach Dave Nolan said.

Unfortunately, this year, the Hoyas couldn’t be that one team.

Last Friday the Georgetown women’s soccer team’s dream season came to an end when the squad fell to No. 12 Ohio State 2-0 in Columbus, Ohio.

But while the loss brought an end to their hopes of a national championship, it still took them to the quarterfinals. Being a game away from the Final Four meant a lot to the Hoyas, who had never won a postseason game in program history before this year.

Nolan said the team was not taking their victory lightly; every year, they strive just to make the Big East tournament, without focusing at all on the NCAA

tournament. But this year, the seven-year coach gave the team a record performance of 15-7-2, blowing their previous showings out of the water. Their incredible performance this season against tough teams gave them a much better chance at the title and more wiggle room towards the end of the season, Nolan said.

“Last year we had a pretty good team—we just didn’t get a bounce of the ball along the way,” Nolan said.

The team this year was more solid as a whole, and he attributed their unprecedented success to their dedication, momentum, and the way each player fit with the team.

Junior midfielder Ingrid Wells thought that the team’s success was due in large part to good chemistry, which has improved from years past.

Now, she and her teammates

JACKSON PERRY

The Hoyas walk away from a historic season knowing there is more to come.

Age matters in the clutch New is always exciting. But sometimes seeing someone new perform can be a burden. We set lofty expectations, even elevate their performances, to mythical proportions that he or she can’t match on a consistent basis.

It happens all the time in college basketball. Ever since Carmelo Anthony led Syracuse to an NCAA title in 2003, freshmen have been revered in college basketball. Michael Beasley, Kevin Durant, and most recently, John Wall, were all considered saviors at their respective schools.

Despite their cult-like followings, though, no freshman since Anthony has led their team to a National Championship. In fact, none of those three collegiate First-

Team All-Americans led his team past the Elite Eight.

College basketball has been and will continue to be a veteran’s game.

Last year, the Duke Blue Devils beat the Butler Bulldogs in the NCAA championship game. Duke was the weakest number-one seed in the tournament and had experienced some big losses earlier in the season. But when senior center Brian Zoubek entered the starting lineup, the team’s play started to pick up. With Zoubek’s rebounding, senior Lance Thomas’s defense, and senior Jon Scheyer’s leadership at the point, the team rolled to another national title.

Duke’s victory was more of the same. The year before, Tyler Hans-

are looking toward the next season.

“I think we’re still going to be really strong next year, and after having a taste ... I know it’s something we’re going to strive to get back to,” Wells said.

Wells is part of a strong junior class that will again make up the core of the team next year, but they don’t expect the road to the championship to be easier with more experience.

“We’re going to have a big target on our back now,” Wells said.

Nolan agrees, but said the increased level of competition could be good news for the Hoyas.

“It puts you now in a different stratosphere,” Nolan said.

“We can now appeal to more [good players].”

He expects to see an increase in talented recruits with the success of the team, and a successful recruiting class can take the program to the next level. Although the team isn’t that old, they could use some young help with the loss of five seniors, including starting goalkeeper Jackie DesJardin.

With the team standing to lose four of their top five scorers the year after next, the team will need to plug a lot of holes for the 2011 season.

Although Nolan knows it will be hard for the Hoyas to repeat the success of this season, he thinks the Hoyas have what it takes to get back to the NCAA tournament again.

“It doesn’t mean we won’t try,” he said. “And more than anything I’m hoping that the kids now will get a taste for what we did this year and it will just help them push.

borough, one of the greatest players in North Carolina history, was finally able to secure a championship in his senior season. In 2008, the Kansas Jayhawks were led by juniors Mario Chalmers and Brandon Rush and seniors Russell Robinson and Darnell Jackson. The trend continued with Florida in 2007, North

Backdoor Cuts

by Tom Bosco

a rotating column on sports Carolina in 2005, Connecticut in 2004, Maryland in 2002, Duke in 2001, and Michigan State in 2000.

It seems likely that the trend will continue this season. The best freshmen in the country—North Carolina’s Harrison Barnes, Syracuse’s Fab Melo, and Kentucky’s Brandon Knight—all play for most-

the georgetown voice 7

FAST BREAK It’s never been a secret that the strength of this season’s Hoya squad lies with the backcourt, but after Tuesday night’s thrilling overtime victory against No. 8 Missouri, Georgetown’s guards may just be the best in the country.

The No. 14 Hoyas (7-0) defeated the Tigers (5-1) 111-102 in front of a hostile crowd in Kansas City as the guard trio of Austin Freeman, Chris Wright, and Jason Clark divvied up the three periods of the game to dominate.

The first half belonged to Freeman, who didn’t miss a beat following his recordtying performance against UNC-Asheville. The senior made a run at the school record of seven three-pointers in a game yet again, draining five before halftime, en route to a 31-point performance. The Hoyas rode Freeman’s hot hand to an early 18-point lead. Near the end of the half, Freeman was credited with a three that left his hand after the shot clock had expired. The call was not reviewable and would prove later on to have a great impact on the game.

Despite Freeman’s sharpshooting, the Hoyas’ lead had been whittled down to seven points at halftime. Answering Freeman was junior guard Marcus Denmon, who went five for seven from beyond the arc and finished with 27 points to lead the Tigers.

The Tigers run the self-proclaimed “Fastest 40 Minutes in Basketball,” and that frenetic pace eventually caught up with

ly inexperienced teams, which will make it difficult to win a national championship. However, other stellar freshmen, including Duke’s Kyrie Irving and Ohio State’s Jared Sullinger, have an experienced cast of characters playing around them and will have a chance to chase glory in the tournament.

Luckily, the Hoyas have the necessary experience to compete for a national title. Much has been said already about whether or not the Hoyas can account for the loss of Greg Monroe. Can the Hoyas’ experience make up for the skill Monroe took with him to the NBA? As we’ve already seen this season, seniors Austin Freeman, Chris Wright, and Julian Vaughn have answered the call and have shown the ability to play crucial roles that other schools had their seniors play over the last decade.

the Hoyas. Georgetown clung to its lead for much of the second half, but slowly watched the margin dwindle in the face of Missouri’s relentless full-court pressure. Missouri scored 29 points off 18 Georgetown turnovers, and 16 fast break points to the Hoyas’ six.

Momentum favored the Tigers for most of the second half, and the Hoyas relinquished the lead for the first time with just over eight minutes to play and they wouldn’t get it back for the rest of regulation.

Fortunately for Georgetown, Missouri could not nail its free throws to close out the game, and the Hoyas got the ball when they were down three with 14 seconds remaining. A wild Hollis Thompson three missed, but an even wilder rebound ended up with Clark, who found a wide open Wright for the tying 3-pointer with less than a second remaining. Wright recorded his second doubledouble of the season, with 21 points and 10 assists.

Overtime was Clark’s time to shine. He scored nine of his career-high 26 points in the extra period all from behind the arc, including early back-to-back threes that put the Hoyas in control for good.

If the backcourt continues to play the way they did against Missouri, the rest of the country should take notice. With three strong options to carry them, no obstacle is too large for the Hoyas to overcome.

— Tim Shine

In the game against Missouri on Tuesday, the Hoyas played extremely well against a very talented team, but found themselves down late in the game. It was the experienced backcourt that came to the rescue, though, as Wright hit a game-tying three with less than a second left on the clock. Without that experience, there was no way Georgetown would have won that game—against a top ten team in a hostile environment.

Seven games into the season, the Hoyas have been impressive.

If we can draw any conclusions about the Hoyas, it is that they have the experience to succeed.

New may be exciting, but old is more reliable.

Reminisce about your younger days with Tom at tbosco@georg townvoice.com

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8 the georgetown voice

december 2, 2010

Dancing in

the Dark

By Leigh Finnegan

Courtesy U street Music hall

Mad men: Eastman DJs for more than his Tittsworth.

Courtesy U street Music hall

A booth with a view: Looking out from U Hall’s DJ station.

Courtesy U street Music hall

DJ duo: Tittsworth and Eastman bought the U Hall property in 2009.

It’s a little after 12:30 on a Tuesday night, and the palpable energy in the U Street Music Hall shows no sign of dissipating. DJs Tensnake and Brian Billion have already hyped up the crowd, and when Jesse Rose, an internationally acclaimed DJ from London, gets into the booth and begins his set, the sweaty mass of dancers grooves on, barely noticing the change.

Unless they witnessed the performers quietly switch places behind the dark booth or detected the subtle shift in the style of mixes, there is no way the partygoers would have noticed that the hands spinning the records had changed. None of the DJs announced their entrances, said their names, or addressed the crowd in any way—that would have interrupted the music.

At U Street Music Hall, which opened in March of this year, the music is always the center of attention. From its black, minimalist interior to the gut-shaking speaker system that rattles its floor, the venue has become a haven in D.C.’s expensive, VIP-oriented nightlife scene for those who are looking just to dance.

“I feel that [the music itself is] kind of an afterthought for a lot of venues around town,” U Hall co-owner and DJ Jesse Tittsworth said. “You can tell that we’ve definitely put a bulk of our money into the sound system, there’s a no-photography policy to encourage people to kind of live in the moment, stuff like that.”

In the past six months, U Hall’s focus on quality DJing and its unpretentious, no-frills atmosphere has helped start a revival, centered mainly in

clubs along the U Street corridor, of dance-oriented parties in the District.

In the 1990s, a time widely regarded as the golden age of the D.C. dance scene, DJfocused clubs with dedicated fans were the norm. A group of clubs in the Near Southeast area, like Capitol Ballroom and Tracks, thrived on gritty, inexpensive dance parties with what Tittsworth called a “come as you are and dance all night” attitude.

“There was this corridor of dingy, no-frills dance clubs and rock venues in the Southeast area,” he said. “[They] were just focused on having really good DJs, and a good sound system, and a good time.”

But over the past decade, new property developments in Near Southeast forced many clubs to shut down. By 2006, when the remaining clubs were steamrolled into the Nationals Stadium parking lot, the scene had shifted to the U Street corridor in Northeast, where bassheavy grit and sweaty dancing were largely replaced by chintzy VIP booths and steep cover charges.

In the U Street area, originally known for its jazz and soul performers, live concert venues like the 9:30 Club and the Black Cat hosted dance parties as part of their regular rotations, but were more focused on their live music acts than on DJs. While Tittworth was organizing and promoting events in the corridor with longtime colleague and friend Will Eastman, he said they saw the need for a dance-oriented venue in the District.

“When we first started doing events at the 9:30 Club together, [the audience] was a

few hundred kids, and by the time we were done with it, it was like 700 to 800 kids,” Tittsworth said. “And it’s the 9:30 Club, there’s no sort of built-in crowd there.”

But before they established U Hall, some parties managed to keep going through the last decade, bouncing from venue to venue. Nouveau Riche, a combined effort by local DJs Gavin Holland, Andrew Nacey, and Steve Starks, started out in 2006 as a small party among friends with similar musical interests at U Street club DC9, but it has become one of the District’s most successful dance parties.

Much like Eastman and Tittsworth, the group wanted to revive the ideals of former D.C. performers who made music for the sake of music.

“Fugazi shows were famous for never costing more than five bucks no matter what,” Holland said, referring to D.C.’s famous 90’s punk group. “Even though their popularity might have demanded a higher ticket price for their shows, their primary concern was making the music accessible to anyone regardless of their economic status … Not depending on advertising, having an actual punk rock thing. That’s something that I grew up in.”

At $10 per ticket, the Nouveau Riche party is as cheap as its founders can possibly make it. Holland, Starks, and Nacey create a significant portion of the music they spin, and rely heavily on their honest reputation and word-of-mouth promotion to pack their parties.

Citing independent punk label Dischord Records as one of their influences, the trio say they value the indepen-

feature

georgetownvoice.com dent, do-it-yourself aspect of their show.

“It started out as a community of friends that came out to it every month and looked forward to it as a chance to go out and have fun,” Holland said.

“And now it’s become a bigger thing, but I like that it’s driven by the actual community of friends. The music is our own.

We’re doing it ourselves.”

While focusing on making music and the art of DJing has

Though Fatback might not aspire to match Nouveau Riche’s highbrow, artful DJing, the two parties share a good deal of common ground. Neither one puts any emphasis on partygoers’ appearances (Fatback’s motto is “No cover, no dress code, just a chance to do it right”). Both have operated mostly at clubs that usually cater to more live music events than dance parties—Fatback puts on a

the georgetown voice 9

the crowd gets a little heavyfooted—are the two fullystocked and reasonably priced bars. During the opening DJ’s set, the over-21 portion of the crowd takes advantage of the bar ’s offerings, adding an uninhibited, uncoordinated element to the pulsing and somewhat grimy crowd.

The club’s dance-oriented, straightforward atmosphere has attracted a lot of DJs, from local unknowns to interna-

“From its black, minimalist interior to the gut-shaking speaker system that rattles its floor, U Street Music Hall has become a haven in D.C.’s expensive, VIP-oriented nightlife scene for those who are looking just to dance. ” helped make Nouveau Riche a fixture of D.C. nightlife, other clubs in the District are proving that there are other ways to throw a party.

Fatback, a funk-soul dance party that has been going on since 2007, started out just like Nouveau Riche did—a few DJ friends looking for a good time that they felt didn’t exist anywhere else in the city. But though it is run by eight DJs, Fatback does not aspire to the same level of DJ purism that defines Nouveau Riche.

“It’s a different creature altogether from most of the other parties in town,” DJ KC Higgins said. “We’re putting together a party. … We’re more skilled at throwing events and having a party atmosphere, whereas other parties are more DJ-oriented.”

monthly show at Liv (part of U Street’s Bohemian Caverns) and has done special events at clubs like Black Cat, Wonderland Ballroom, and Virginia’s Discotheque, but neither party had a niche where dancing was the main focus.

But in the past six months, these two party philosophies have converged at U Hall, the first D.C. venue in years to cater expressly to the dance-first audience.

The somewhat minimalist basement space perfectly embodies the atmosphere of a club where it’s all about the dancing. Its black walls unadorned except for a few posters showcasing upcoming shows, the only things that distract from the dance floor—which has a layer of cork underneath it for when

tional hitmakers, and subsumed popular established parties like Nouveau Riche and Fatback. “[U Hall] really filled a void in the D.C. dance scene,” Holland said. “There are a lot of clubs that are sort of rock focused that have ended up doing dance parties. … The club is designed with DJs in mind, and it’s for people who want to come see DJs.” That’s exactly what Tittsworth and Eastman had in mind in 2009 when they bought the basement space that they would turn into U Hall.

With clubs like the 18th Street Lounge requiring a specific dress code and expensive cover fees, Eastman and Tittsworth said they longed for a return to the glory days of the ‘90s.

“My frustration was being

Courtesy FatBAck DC

Wait until you see the afterparty: Partiers re-enact a scene from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Courtesy Gavin Holland

Flipping out: Nouveau Riche partygoers come dressed to sweat. on tour and playing clubs, and having a good sound system, and having a good vibe, and connecting with the crowd, and then coming home and … not having that in my own city,” Tittsworth said.

Tittsworth said D.C. dance venues were too concerned with appearances and turning a profit, and the quality of the party fell by the wayside.

Strict dress codes, bottle service, and high cover charges, he said, took away from the atmosphere that he experienced elsewhere on tour.

It wasn’t just the DJs who noticed and rejected this attitude. W. Ellington Felton, the artistic manager of U Street restaurant and live soul venue Ben’s Next Door, takes pride in the way Ben’s refuses to allow money to get involved in their musical dealings.

“We don’t play Top 40 music in here … We don’t cater to a commercial-driven music audience,” Felton said of the venue, which hosts Tuesday night performances for no cover by artists ranging from the local and independent to nationally renowned. “I think most venues still base their creative process on the consumption of art, while we focus on what art really is.”

The presence of U Hall has bolstered the scene so much that its effects are even being felt at other clubs along the corridor.

“It draws in a much bigger crowd to the area in gen-

eral, so we get a lot of people who drift over from U Street Music Hall and check out what we’re doing [at Liv],” Higgins said. “A lot of the clubs in the neighborhood get spillover.”

This spillover has yet to carry over into local businesses not connected to the dance scene, though. Managers at nearby restaurants Ulah Bistro and Indulj both said that their business has not been impacted, and Felton said attendance at Ben’s Next Door hasn’t changed at all.

Even if its partygoers don’t patronize local lounges and restaurants, U Hall’s influence on the area is undeniable.

“We get a lot of comments from DJs that prior to U Hall, D.C. hadn’t been a tour stop for a really long time,” Tittsworth said. “They describe it as a breath of fresh air.”

It’s been such a positive addition, in fact, that opportunists have already approached U Hall’s owners about expanding and franchising, but Tittsworth is unsure as to whether another city has the same empty niche that D.C. did.

“It completely made sense for what I thought would be good for the neighborhood, good for the city, and about what we knew,” he said. “People have asked us whether we would consider doing this in another location, or expanding … [but] as of right now, I think U Hall is perfect.

leisure

10 the georgetown voice

december 2, 2010

Black Swan: Sex, drugs, and ballerinas

by Brendan Baumgardner I cannot think of a film which has made me as consistently, persistently uncomfortable as Black Swan. I was not alone in this. I became regrettably acquainted with the upper thigh of the man seated next to me as time and time again we both pulled ourselves into half-fetal positions and collided while trying to protect ourselves from the images on the screen.

All the accidental stranger contact and the perpetually knotted stomach would have been incredibly frustrating if it weren’t for one thing: Black Swan is really damn good.

In Black Swan, director Darren Aronofsky explores what happens when an obsession with perfection is at odds with one’s own well-being—territory he also explored in his previous film, The Wrestler. Only this time, Aronofsky leaves the grime of the ring in favor of the highsociety glamour of ballet.

The film tells the story of Nina (Natalie Portman), a frail and graceful ballerina whose

sights are set on the lead in “Swan Lake.” But while her devotion and technical precision make her perfect for the role of the White Swan, she can’t find a way to embody the other half of the role,

instructor Thomas (fantastically portrayed by French actor Vincent Cassel), Nina begins, reluctantly at first, to embrace passion and sexuality to prepare for the role. What ensues

ity and Nina’s unlikely guide to the dark world outside of the studio.

All this takes place in ultratight focus as Aronofsky channels his inner David Cronenberg and

Scary and sexy: Black Swan will probably cause both night terrors and nocturnal emissions. the bold, lustful Black Swan. Her chief competition is Lily (Mila Cunis), a wild and unsophisticated new dancer from Los Angeles.

At the insistence of her rigid, sexually domineering

is a claustrophobic fever dream of frantic practices and late night excursions that bend reality as Nina throws herself into the role. Lily becomes the drug-toting symbol of carnal-

ing night parties round out the festival’s offerings.

CIFF was founded in 2008 by Solas Nua, Washington, D.C.’s association for contemporary Irish culture.

“We are trying to give a platform to contemporary Irish culture, but we are also trying to give a platform to young emerging artists who might not otherwise have a platform here,” Festival Coordinator Emma Madigan said.

One such up-and-comer is Mark Cantan, who directed Alarms, a “mock rock doc” about a fictitious Irish rock band. Cantan will be giving a lecture about mak-

ing your first film on a shoe-string budget, as he did with Alarms.

Another film of particular interest is Maya Derrington’s film Pyjama Girls, a documentary about teenagers in Dublin’s inner city who wear pajamas as regular clothes that has received critical acclaim in Ireland.

Before Solas Nua started CIFF, it hosted other, shorter festivals that had more specific themes. Its first festival in 2008, for example, showed only films that were directed by women.

“It became clear that there was an audience out there not just for thematic films, and that’s when we adopted the name Capital Irish Film Festival.”

Some may find it unusual that the country’s largest Irish film festival is in Washington, a city whose Irish community is relatively small compared to other East Coast cities like Boston and New York.

Even though the Irish community does not define the identity of the city, there is a large number of outlets for Irish culture. Nearly every downtown neighborhood in D.C. has an Irish pub, and there is live Irish

IMDB

finds horror in the human form.

These ballerinas’ bodies are not finely tuned machines but hideous mockeries of the body, with ankles that twist and threaten to break, and flesh that is stretched

and scratched and gnawed and torn. The pace is blistering and every interpersonal relationship has the potential for savage, jealous turnabout. It culminates in a strange, graphic, Kafka-esque physical transformation that is both revolting and magnificent, and makes for an incredibly visceral experience Plus, sometimes it’s funny, too.

Mercifully, Black Swan has some of the best moments of comedic relief in recent horror history.

This sure as hell isn’t an easy film to watch, but it’s also not an easy film to forget. Portman’s performance is dynamic and fearless, and Aronofsky treats her well, playing off her vulnerability without exploiting it. The only real criticism is that Black Swan may sacrifice a bit of its intellectual integrity in exchange for every possible punch in the gut. But it works. In a film about sacrificing your health and sanity in pursuit of an ideal, making the audience suffer along may not be such a bad thing—provided they don’t mind getting uncomfortably cozy with their neighbors.

The CIFF: No, we don’t show The Boondock Saints

lez’hur ledger

by Nico Dodd

If you only associate Irish culture with green beer and leprechauns, this year’s Capitol Irish Film Festival will surprise you. The largest Irish film festival in America, CIFF opens tonight at E Street Cinema and the Goethe Institut.

This year, CIFF is featuring over 50 contemporary Irish films that range from featurelength pictures to documentaries to short films. Special events like Q&As with directors and the usual social events,like opening and clos-

Meet Ireland’s fifth most popular Cranberries cover band.

courtesy

ciff

I may not understand fashion, but this just seems lazy to me. music somewhere in the District every night of the week.

“We have a very wide-ranging audience coming from all different areas and all different backgrounds,” says Madigan. “Some of them have no Irish background at all. It’s a testament to the strength and quality of the films being shown.”

In addition to its usual programs, CIFF will also feature two special programs from the Darklight Film Festival, Ireland’s largest film festival. In “Darklight: State of the Nation,” Darklight

Courtesy Ciff

Film Festival’s artistic director, Nicky Gogan, will be showing a selection of films she believes show where Ireland is politically and socially today.

“We want to show as many films as we do to show the range out there,” Madigan said. “We have something for everyone, there are so many high quality films coming out of Ireland today.”

So if you can get away from your final week of classes, a night out at CIFF could give you more than enough Irish culture to hold you over until St. Patrick’s Day.

georgetownvoice.com

“I have other interests. I’m a magician.”—Boogie Nights

Comic nerds are Party Crashers?

by Mary Borowiec D.C. is home to many of our nation’s greatest museums: the Air and Space Museum, the Portrait Gallery, the American History Museum … the list of popular eighth grade fieldtrip destinations goes on and on. But if you’re seeking something beyond the National Mall that features an art form less traditional than your Smithsonian staples—for example, a comic entitled “The Black Shit Monster”— then Party Crashers: Comic Book Culture Invades the Art World, a new exhibit at the Arlington Arts Center and Artisphere’s Terrace Gallery, fits the bill. Unique and visually engaging, Party Crashers finds surprising ways to display of fine art comics.

Comic culture has exploded in recent decades, evolving from a medium whose artistic and literary value was largely ignored into a highly celebrated art form that is now recognized for both its literary merit and its legitimacy as contemporary art. As a result, comics have become a popular feature in art galleries around the world, although their style reflects an artistic perspective most would not associate with traditional gallery artwork.

The desire to join the discussion about the role of comics in the contemporary art gallery culture inspired Jeffry Cudlin and Cynthia Connolly, the curators of Party Crashers.

“Comics hold a unique appeal because they create a rich exchange

between different image cultures,” Cudlin explained. “[Comics] overcome limits of traditional art and conventional storytelling with truly novel solutions.”

Too expansive to be contained in one location, Cudlin and Connelly designed Party Crashers as a collaborative exhibition at two venues. Complementary collections of comics will show at the Artisphere’s Terrace Gallery from Dec. 11 to Feb. 13, and at the Arlington Arts Center, whose exhibit is currently open and will run until Jan. 16.

The diversity of comics on display at both of these locations is incredible. The Arlington Arts Center boasts a fascinating combination of autobiographical comics, with abstract, wordless comics and animated films. The exhibit also highlights “Creative Time Comics,” a current publication that collects nine-panel comics presenting grim social justice issues.

CONCERT CALENDAR THURSDAY 12/2 Fun with Steel Train, The Postelles 9:30 Club, 6:30 p.m., $15 The Blue Line with Redline Addiction, Rites of Ash Rock & Roll Hotel, 8 p.m., $10 Friday 12/3 Poor But Sexy with The Dirty Bomb Velvet Lounge, 9 p.m., $10 saturday 12/4 Warpaint with Rewards, Family Band Rock & Roll Hotel, 8:30 p.m., $14 sunday 12/5 Chief with The Dig, Paul Michael Rock & Roll Hotel, 8 p.m., $12 Stornaway with Franz Nicolay Black Cat, 9 p.m., $12 The Antlers with The Lyas Black Cat, 9 p.m., $15 Monday 12/6 The Sword with Karma to Burn 9:30 Club, 7 p.m., $20

ARLINGTON ARTS cENTER

Tuesday 12/7 Pygmy Lush with The Gift, Braveyoung Black Cat, 9 p.m., $8

The Plums Velvet Lounge, 7:30 p.m., $8 Diamond Rings with Outputmessage Red Palace, 8:30 p.m., $10 wednesday 12/8 Better than Ezra with Big Sam’s Funky Nation 9:30 Club, 7 p.m., $25 Carol Bui with Kristeen Young, Lucia Lucia Black Cat, 9 p.m., $10 Thursday 12/9 Donzientara with Dave Smalley Black Cat, 8:30 p.m., $10 Darlingside with Tom McBride, Adam Klein Red Palace, 8:30 p.m., $10 Friday 12/10 Ra Ra Riot with Imperial China, Mon Khmer 9:30 Club, 7 p.m., $25 Saturday 12/11 George Clinton and P-Funk 9:30 Club, 8 p.m., $40 Tuesday 12/14 The Capital Bones Blues Alley, 8 p.m., $25 S. Carey with White Hinterland Rock & Roll Hotel, 8 p.m., $12

Party Crashers lets you... wait for it... DRAW your own conclusions.

You may not go blind, but...

College kids tend to do a lot of dumb things—some of them pretty unsafe. But when we’re not partying hard or gorging ourselves on Leo’s food, most of us spend a good chunk of our time studying.

Doesn’t that count for something? I mean, how are you going to hurt yourself by sitting at your desk or working on your computer?

As it turns out, that’s easy.

Repetitive Strain Injury is an injury caused by continuously making the same motion, like typing, clicking, or even texting, for long stretches of time. Those continuous motions can put stress on a person’s arms, shoulders, neck

The variety shows in the layout of the exhibit. Cudlin said he contrasted groups of comics that displayed “unvarnished real life” against those that portrayed fantasy, and showed them alongside comics that bridged the two themes, like the story of the aforementioned “Black Shit Monster”—a monster who finds life in a man’s toilet.

The comics that will be featured at the Artisphere, he said, are “deeply invested in the music scene.”

Many of the works displayed began as promotional art for small bands.

The sister exhibitions are set up in a way that emphasizes the many distinct genres of contemporary comics, all of which Cudlin hopes will surpass people’s expectations.

The exhibit succeeds—everyone from the comic book enthusiast, to the average art aficionado, to the friend who was just dragged along for the Metro ride will find something to love in this fun and exceptional collection of comic art.

the georgetown voice 11

and, sometimes, back. Noticeable or persistent pain might take months or even years to show up, but every extra hour of performing that repetitive motion can lay the groundwork for eventual, chronic pain.

But the 20-page final paper isn’t really the guilty party.

Yes, with lab reports and papers that need to be typed, journal databases that need to be searched, and Blackboard documents that need to be uploaded, most students spend much of their pre-finals study days interacting with their keyboards and touch pads. But the real culprit is bad posture.

Unless all of your studying takes place at a perfectly po-

sitioned desk, the way you sit could be the biggest factor putting you at risk.

Many of us prefer to curl up in a lounge chair, recline in bed, or sit at a much too-low coffee

Rub Some Dirt On It

by Sadaf Qureshi

a bi-weekly column about health table when getting work done.

But study spots like those encourage a person to contort her body in ways that she might not realize are uncomfortable and painful until much later. Ultimately, investing in a lap desk is probably a good idea for those who want to take some pressure off of their muscles. Even a nifty new lap

desk won’t solve all posture problems on its own, though.

It is still important to sit up straight, keep your wrists level, and position your thighs and forearms parallel to the floor.

If you’ve got a lot of irregular verbs to conjugate, don’t take out your frustration out on your keyboard. Slamming down on it won’t make French grammar any more pleasant, but it will cause your hands to feel tight, sore, or tingly. Tapping lightly can make a major difference, especially in the long run.

Alternating between using a mouse and a touch-pad is also a nice way to avoid repetition of the same motion.

Touch-pads can be particularly tiresome, especially when they aren’t as sensitive or respon-

sive as one might like, and keeping a USB mouse on hand is well worth the trouble.

If your typing starts to get clumsy, and you begin to lose coordination in your hands, then you know that either your posture isn’t quite right, or that it’s simply been too long since your last break. That’s right—you now have another, great excuse to get away from your computer screen for a few minutes. Take a relaxing stroll down the hall to visit a floor-mate, or across campus to pick up some energizing snacks from Vital Vittles. Your muscles will thank you.

Spend countless hours with poor posture emailing Sadaf at squreshi@georgetownvoice.com

leisure

12 the georgetown voice

december 2, 2010

C r i t i c a l V o i ces

Tigers Jaw, Two Worlds, Run for Cover Records Born in the basements of Scranton, Pa., Tigers Jaw has bucked indie rock trends and blogosphere pressure to create a sound that is patently their own. Their blend of indie rock and pop-punk is musically complex while still being flatout fun and relatable. While this week’s release of their long-awaited second LP, Two Worlds, brought the band out of the basement to tour across the country, they haven’t lost any of their underground spirit.

Two Worlds is the natural next step for the band’s discography, evolving naturally from their self-titled LP and successful split record with Balance & Composure. It retains the same

sense of equilibrium between frontman Adam McIlwee and lead guitarist Ben Walsh, who shared most of the vocal duties, and plays up the vocal harmonies of keyboardist Brianna Collins. But while Collins’s vocals are a welcome addition, her instrumental work is what really shines through, particularly the hauntingly catchy organ break in “Test Pattern.”

The record opens with “Return,” a classic Tigers Jaw jam with Walsh’s melodic lyrics punctuated by catchy guitar leads and a surging drum line. The album lifts off from this point with a series of solid jams, leading into “I Saw the Wolf,” a great acoustic duet between Collins and McIlwee. It’s a song that shows the group’s diversity and marks the shift between the first and second halves of the album.

Two Worlds closes with the introspective “Thank You, Noah Lowry,” followed by “Static,” which swells to a swirling tempest as bassist Dennis Mishko belts out his first-ever vocal cameo amidst the confusion. “My head, it lies at the confluence of insanity here in my room and of catas-

Giving them the hook

Every pilot season, we media-consuming Americans find ourselves assailed by an endless blast of magazine ads, billboards, and outright shameless publicity stunts that beg us to watch “the next Mad Men/Friday Night Lights/ Modern Family!” But despite the excess of advertising and self-promotion—which ensure that if you flip to any station, you’ll know at least half its fall lineup—if you scan the TV listings in December, you won’t find that show whose commercials Fox bombarded you with during the World Series. Are the networks failing that miserably?

In a word, yes. This season alone, more than a dozen of the new shows the networks were oh-so-excited about have already been given the ax before even airing all the

episodes they filmed. While a small number of these can be chocked up to the television-watching population’s inability to tear itself away from Dancing with the Stars, it seems that the epidemic is too widespread to entirely blame Bristol Palin.

The main problem, I think, is that the networks are relying too much on gimmicks to try to draw in viewers. Take The Event, NBC’s political sci-fi thriller whose ads were emblazoned with the promise of Lost meets 24 with a dash of The X-Files. Sounds like a fantastic idea in theory—who wouldn’t want to watch Jack Bauer battle aliens?

Unfortunately, in reality, the show’s concept proved too convoluted: whereas Lost started out with a fairly simple, mysterious event that

trophe in letters,” he cries.

Both musically and lyrically, Two Worlds is an album about deciding who you are.

The band takes a stand for everyone who has ever dared to stray from the normal path; as McIlwee belts out in the title track,“I want to be a loser forever, man.” Tigers Jaw shows us on Two Worlds that sometimes you have to forge a new path to find your way.

Voice’s Choices: “Return,” “Test Pattern,” “Thank You, Noah Lowry” —Matthew Decker

Curren$y, Pilot Talk II, Bluroc Besides his unspeakably massive cannabis consumption, Curren$y is best known eventually spiraled into a mental clusterfuck, The Event had aliens that had been hidden by the government for decades and then released into society, which was just too damn complicated to maintain an audience. You’d think

Warming Glow

by Leigh Finnegan

a bi-weekly column about television NBC would have known better after the failure of last year ’s FlashForward, but some networks just don’t learn from their mistakes.

Star power is another way to get a show to stay on the air (Two and a Half Men comes to mind, but calling Charlie Sheen a star anymore is probably being too generous), but a show that relies too heavily on name-recognition may be signing its own death war-

for his incredible prolificacy.

Since leaving Lil’ Wayne’s Young Money label in 2008, he has released nine album-length mixtapes and four full albums, whose subject matter rarely deviated from typical independent rap trope: weed, fly kicks, and fucking.

The man knows his niche.

Pilot Talk II, his second album on Bluroc, the label run by former Jay-Z business partner and Roc-a-Fella founder Dame Dash, is filled with nothing but more weed talk and raps about limited-edition Jordans.

But as anyone from Ol’ Dirty Bastard to Waka Flocka Flame can teach us, it’s not what you say—it’s how cool you sound when you say it. No one is better at turning the banal into boasts than Curren$y— with an easy, limber flow, he writes about stuff like sitting in his rocking chair and going to Waffle House. At one point, he brags about taking a nap.

His long discography is often marred by horrible beat selection (one of the pitfalls of being perpetually blazed), but this time, he has found a comfortable musical complement in Ski Beatz, who produced rant. Running Wilde had the advantage of former Arrested Development producer/actor team Mitchell Hurwitz and Will Arnett, bolstered by Keri Russell and ads featuring a miniature pony. But when the show’s rich, quirky characters failed to become the next Bluth clan, the initial audience dropped off and the show was quickly canned.

These shows shamelessly exploited retired favorites in their marketing ploys, but at least they had the decency to wait until their betters were dead and buried. Some of this season’s premieres didn’t have a fighting chance at survival because the niche they tried to fill was still firmly occupied. What’s the difference between the audience for new courtroom drama The Whole Truth and that of Law & Order?

Can a new show really expect to compete with an institu-

most of the album and suits his brand of breezy cockiness.

The disc grooves with fat organs, crisp live drums, woozy sax lines and thick, overdriven guitars.

But as the album’s second half is dragged down with clunkers like “Silence” and “O.G.,” it’s hard not to wish he’d spend a bit more time on his releases. He records at a torrid pace—the first Pilot Talk came out barely six months ago and suffered from the same unevenness; the third installment of the series is already scheduled to drop in March.

But for someone who ostensibly spends most of his time inhaling bong rips and playing NBA Live, just getting an album recorded is a feat. The fact that these albums are consistently good is downright impressive. So while Pilot Talk II has a few tracks that come off as half-baked, the album as a whole proves that Curren$y is a force to be reckoned with.

Voice’s Choices: “Airborne Aquarium,” “Montreux,” “Famous” —Sean Quigley tion that has seen the likes of Sam Waterson and Ice-T? The Whole Truth was pulled for the entire month of November, freeing up space one night for a special called Primetime: Celebrity Plastic Surgery Gone Too Far? Ouch.

But amid the sea of disappointing or just plain crappy TV shows that this pilot season witnessed, let us take a moment to remember that those shows that floundered not for lack of quality, but lack of viewership. This year ’s saddest loss goes to Fox’s Lone Star—although the con-artist show was heralded by critics, apparently those critics were the only ones who watched it.

The show was axed after just two episodes.

Want to see more Leigh?

Let her know that you’ve been watching all along. Email her at lfinnegan@georgetownvoice.com

Make it New

fiction

georgetownvoice.com

Y

ou open the cabinet, take a mug from the shelf, fill it with tap water and set the microwave to two minutes. Another cup of tea, another late night. You’re one of those insomniacs who turn into insomniacs because you like the idea of it. You light a cigarette. You wonder how you became one of the smokers who turn into smokers because you like justifying a self-created masochism to the others who look down on you for it. A cold weather cigarette, a stressed out cigarette, a last cigarette even—none of them taste as delicious as the image you see in the mirror—choking another one down, irritating your already swollen throat.

Self-reflection is a funny thing when you first start playing that silly mind game, then become aware of its absurdity, and then keep on playing anyway. It’s like buying a vowel when there’s only one letter of the word left. But you just need to make sure.

I tell you all of this knowing that you know full well that this you is not really you, though it very well could be. But that’s beside the point, isn’t it?

Throw on your favorite record and let’s sit down and talk for a while over a cup of tea.

•••

When you’re old and grown, please come home.

When your friends are gone, please come home.

When your head is gone, please come home.

Dear mom, when your boyfriend’s gone, please come home.

•••

A lot of my friends have said that they couldn’t live without music. “Could you imagine? What if…” But it’s really just like anything else. Everything is Life, Death, Love, Loneliness. We have all these special capitalized words to signify that we’re talking about something important. A philosopher spends his whole life trying to define these meaningless words. He dies a failure. Just as much a failure as that engaged woman yesterday, the one who flipped her car and killed her fiancée as she walks away from the wreckage, bloodied delirious, not yet registering that the hand she saw dangling out the shattered window won’t ever hold hers again.

•••

He lay down on a greased towel, his feet jutting out from under the truck and started examining the truck’s steel intestines. He was always doing housework—waking up at seven on a Sunday morning, just three hours after falling asleep in his tuxedo, bowtie undone across his chest, pants unzipped, shoes to the side of the bed, wife asleep. He was in the city last night, like most weekends. He was the “help,” to use his word—to play jazz—hired to be the background of a night corporate consorting and back-patting at the NBC building, or to create a more Western elegance during the reception of some Turkish marriage at the Pierre, where the bride and groom had fallen in love for their families and not for themselves.

Muttered cursing. He kept tooling with something under there while haranguing about what he was doing, as if self-aware that he was performing the duty to fix things, to teach his son things, and in the process, to do the things grandpa had never done for him. All I could think about was if he looked me in the eyes, would the Visine save me?

I sighed. “Can I help you somehow?”

“Well, it’s a tricky thing here, I—” And that was the end of it. He began muttering to himself again, moaning with melodramatic strain, as he did whatever he was doing under the car.

The humidity of the garage made a pool of sweat across his chest. He outstretched his hand toward me. I looked at it and was completely lost as to what he could possibly want. As I turned to grab the pliers, I almost said, “Here,” when I realized he wanted me to help me him up. I took his hand like I would take a woman’s, with only our palms touching. A little bile came up in my mouth when I saw the whole thing as some mawkish attempt to say—see, I’m the not such the bad guy, I’m trying to be better.

He was a martyr who died for pity rather than God. I didn’t care that mom thinks that it could be from some nerve damage, some neurological disease caused by a parasite eating the nerve endings of his brain. The same parasite that drained his mother of all semblance of life, save for her immortal nicotine addiction. But Mom never looks at him in the eyes. She doesn’t stare at those brown balls of helplessness, neglect, and Kronite-paranoia, like I do.

Then I was immediately conscious of how I was

the georgetown voice 13

By Joseph Romano thinking like one of those artsy types—the ones who abstract their feelings from a contrived intellectualizing of emotional events—who’d rather foot their lives in languages of others, languages in which they’d would never become fluent: their favorite authors, in science, their friends. They veil this as necessary for ‘work,’ but really are just trying hide pain and regret, to fend worthy adversaries, like themselves.

•••

A guard idles at the top of a watchtower. But that’s just it. A guard, not the guard. There’s no specificity here because his place has been determined by exactly what’s behind this passive voice—an invisible entity that structures experience, that structures his role to the point where the image of his face: the pimple on the bridge of his nose, the scruff on his chin and neck, his shimmering green eyes are lost in the desert.

There’s no one out there. There’s no enemy coming looming just on the other side of the horizon. His rifle will always remain at his side. But this is real— in the desert where a kernel of reality patiently resisting illusion.

Sooner or later it will emerge stumble upon illusion and bring the foundations of the watchtower, of the office, of the school, of the home, crumbling to the ground.

From the inside out. I salute to this and to you. I bid you welcome. This is what you’ve been waiting for.

•••

This whole thing is hollow. An artifice of pretension.

An example of an apprehension in the face of a call to action. A paralysis where you can’t objectify anything.

Taking a breath is unjustified. Loving is unjustified. Who are you and what do you stand for?

•••

So? We’re all guilty. We all take for granted. We all don’t know. But we’re people and that’s what we do.

We senselessly try to make sense of everything that can’t possibly be understood. Patterns, numbers, words, signs, all don’t mean much in the end. In the end, all that matters is what we’ve done passing the time until our last breath makes a smile light up our death-pallored faces that last night we lose consciousness. We all die alone together.

Nitya Ramlogan

voices

14 the georgetown voice

december 2, 2010

Department of Public Safety, why do I feel so unsafe?

by Julie Patterson “I’m off duty in 15 minutes.

You can fuck up your lives all you want after that.”

That is not exactly what you would expect to hear from a Department of Public Safety officer on a Saturday night—yet I have.

Underage partying and subsequent DPS party-busting are regular weekend activities at Georgetown. The University has a well-publicized alcohol policy, and most underage students know the punishments they face by violating it. But less well-known is the protocol DPS officers use for busting parties. As a result, DPS’s enforcement of school policy is sometimes unnecessarily heavy-handed.

On a number of occasions when DPS busted a party I was attending, they have made me feel intimidated, threatened, and even unsafe. I do not know if this is typical of the dynamic between Georgetown students and DPS officers in this situation. The depart-

ment did not respond to requests for comment about the number of students who file complaints about DPS’s behavior each semester. But I know that there are certainly times when DPS officers abuse the power they have and create a tense atmosphere where safety is compromised.

Part of the problem is that few students know whether they have the right to deny officers entry to their residence. In fact, they do not know what rights—if any—they have. Often students who in good faith attempt to invoke a right that they unknowingly surrendered to the University are slapped with a failure to comply charge in addition to whatever other violations they are cited for.

Students who are just there for the party often do not know if they have the right to leave, refuse a search, choose not to answer the door for an officer, or refuse to pour out alcohol. If there was a clear and established protocol that required the host of the party

to answer the door, said that students must remain in the house until they are asked to leave, and made public what rights students still have while on campus, DPS officers might find students more compliant and students would feel safer in their presence.

But regardless of unclear protocol, it is obvious that the dialogue between officers and students needs to change. I have seen students reduced to tears by officers who isolate them from the rest of the crowd to shout at them. I have heard officers threaten to arrest students for not producing their GoCards.

One student, who wished to remain anonymous, recalled “[standing] in a line with five other friends in 15-degree weather for twenty minutes while six DPS officers arrived on the scene, one by one.”

When the student asked to be searched or charged, an officer responded, “Nuh-uh. This is Georgetown, not D.C. In here we can do what we want.”

After all this, the student and friends had to submit individual reports and were never contacted about the incident again.

Another student, who also wished to remain anonymous, witnessed a DPS officer walk into a party and say, “You guys have no idea how fucking fucked you are,” repeatedly. The director of Student Conduct ended up dropping all charges against them as a result of the officer’s threats.

DPS is designed to keep students safe, not to seek out groups of friends letting loose on a Saturday night as if they were dangerous criminals. This is not to say that students should not be punished for underage drinking, but there is a way to deal with underage drinking and treat students with respect at the same time. Conducting a party bust as if it were a drug raid, reducing students to tears, gratuitously threatening to arrest them, and making them feel unsafe is not the way DPS should operate.

The same student who was forced to stand outside in the cold

said of his encounter with DPS, “This event and others have demonstrated to me that DPS is not interested in maintaining even a basic degree of civility. ... It’s shocking that the University allows … such harassment, but then goes on worrying about creating a ‘community’ atmosphere.”

In the past we have seen Georgetown’s institutional failures come back to bite them in a number of incidents: Snowpocalypse, the noose scandal, and the confusion and misinformation in the wake of the DMT bust. Let’s avoid another.

This is a problem Georgetown can easily solve by establishing a standard protocol for officers responding to unregistered parties and by encouraging officers to treat students with the respect they deserve.

Julie Patterson is a junior in the College. She’s thankful that DPS doesn’t have the authority to sic their vicious dogs on us.

Kanye West remains a fan’s beautiful dark twisted fantasy

by Sean Quigley It’s been just over a week since Kanye West released his latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and the verdict is already in: it’s a classic. With 518,755 copies sold in its first week, MBDTF debuted as the number-one album in the country. It has received perfect ratings from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and countless other publications. His personal brand, too, has more than fully recovered from the public disgrace and rebuke he suffered in the aftermath of his

Hennessey-fueled Taylor Swift bashing at the 2009 VMAs. Once pop music’s biggest asshole, he seems more popular now than at any other point in his career. Everyone loves Kanye.

MBDTF is his best album yet, but it took more than music to win back the goodwill of American music consumers. It’s impossible to separate West as a person from the music he makes.

More than any other rapper, his releases are indelibly imbued with his own personality. He’s petulant and precocious, cocky but insecure, and makes up for

MARC FICHERA

He’s gonna let you finish, but when he’s on stage, Kanye always steals the show.

what he lacks in technical rapping ability with intimate honesty and witty charm.

Where you stand on Kanye’s music depends largely on whether he comes off as an egomaniacal douchebag or an earnest, charming guy. The fact that he never misses an opportunity to act like an asshole in public—showing up four hours late to his own show at Bonnaroo, posing as Jesus on a magazine cover, etc.— turned many listeners against him, trunk-rattling soul beats and infectious energy be damned.

But since his return this summer after a self-imposed, postSwiftgate exile in Italy, West has been on his best behavior, waging a massive campaign to win back the goodwill of everyone he’s ever offended. His frequent (and hilarious) Twitter updates made him seem interesting and personable, and the free music he gave away in his G.O.O.D. Friday series, with guest features from the biggest names in rap, set the blogosphere on fire every week. He apologized profusely for all of his transgressions. He smiled a lot, partially to seem friendly, but also to show off the fact that he had replaced his bottom row of teeth with actual diamonds. He was funny, egregiously over-the-top, and seemed almost—gasp—humble.

Clearly, it worked. Two years ago, salty critics would have questioned the authenticity of West’s transformation from a consciously

conflicted megastar to a cosmopolitan aesthete and art film director. Boom-bap classicists would have derided flourishes like the extended vocoder noodling at the end of “Runaway” or the minutelong string interlude that precedes “All of the Lights” as pretentiously artsy and unnecessary. MBDTF has plenty of blemishes—Nicki Minaj’s painfully affected British accent that opens the album, Chris Rock’s weirdly hilarious and vulgar but totally out-of-place skit at the end of “Blame Game,” the presence of Fergie and Swizz Beatz—but they’ve been mostly overlooked on account of his newfound niceness.

West’s situation is unique.

Most of the time, rappers are able to keep their personal identity and the character they inhabit on wax separate. 50 Cent lives in a mansion in Connecticut but still raps about drug money and bullet wounds. Rick Ross doesn’t let his past as a correctional officer in the Florida prison system get in the way of his grandiose mafioso rap fantasies, and so on. But the success—and necessity—of West’s public redemption campaign highlights the increasingly blurry line between rappers and their music.

No one embodies this new paradigm more fully than Berkeley oddball rapper Lil B, who releases hundreds of self-produced, stream-of-consciousness videos and mixtapes via his Youtube channel and blog. With

little more than a digital video camera and a Twitter account, he has built a passionate cult following for himself and a bizarre, new age-y philosophy which he calls “based.”

But by any traditional standard, B’s music is objectively horrible. At his best, his words (it’s a stretch to call them rhymes) are arrestingly funny and weird, but barely rhythmic; at his worst, he cackles and mumbles nonsense like a lunatic over ambient noise.

Yet no other rapper is able (or willing) to connect with fans like he does. He exudes intimate warmth and enthusiasm that resonates deeply with his fans, who revere him (at least semiironically, you have to hope) as a “based god.” It’s a personality cult disguised as rap fandom. It’s fandom disguised as friendship.

New technologies have made it easier for artists to connect with fans, but increased access and visibility makes digesting and contextualizing music that much harder. We’re entering a time when microblogging acumen and people skills could soon be more important than street credibility and actual rapping skill. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, but it will be exciting to witness.

Sean Quigley is a junior in the SFS. What’s his beautiful dark twisted fantasy? A big, swirly chocolate lollipop.

voices

georgetownvoice.com

the georgetown voice

15

SAFEguarding student life: Vote yes on fee reforms

by Adam Talbot and Sam Ungar “As students concerned with building a campus community … we believe that a current systematic neglect of student life issues means a neglect of the whole person. The Main Campus manifests this neglect primarily in areas of the funding of student organizations and activities.”

These words are not recent— they were written by student leaders in a report on student life at Georgetown in the spring of 1999, but unfortunately they ring just as true nearly 11 years later. Our student activities budget continues to languish, and the gap between us and our peer schools continues to grow

at a dramatic rate as a result. The student body must act together to remedy this growing problem through the passage of Student Activities Fee and Endowment Reform.

Ten years ago, largely in response to the 1999 report, students voted to establish a yearly Student Activities Fee. This was a marked departure from previous policy, as students were taking it upon themselves to administer and distribute activities funding independently for the first time. The referendum creating the fee also created a Student Activities Endowment held in shares of the University endowment. Half of the $100 Student Activities Fee went into the endowment each year, with the hope that it would grow in value

JACKSON PERRY

Posting over 95 fliers, GUSA calls for reform of Student Activities Fee Endowment.

Porterfield reconsidered Anyone who has used CHARMS, Georgetown’s online roommate matching service, knows that first impressions are sometimes incredibly wrong. One of my current roommates and I unknowingly talked for the first time through CHARMS, but we did not decide to live together freshman year. We were in the same New Student Orientation group, and only after two months of friendship did we realize we had talked on CHARMS over the summer.

We didn’t initially become roommates because I didn’t like Coldplay’s most recent album Viva La Vida as much as he did, and our musical disagreement colored his opinion of me.

Every day, when we meet people for the first time, we develop impressions that are sometimes correct, and sometimes not. When I first met Daniel Porterfield,

Georgetown’s outgoing Vice President for Strategic Development, I thought he was just another administrator with a disdainful opinion of student perspectives.

Last year I was involved in Georgetown, Divest!, a student movement that has urged Georgetown to invest its endowment in a socially responsible manner.

Last April, after we called for the University to divest from companies profiting from human rights violations in Israel, several members of the group and I met with a group of high-ranking University administrators, including Vice President for Student Affairs Jeanne Lord, Chief Investment Officer Lawrence Kochard, and Porterfield.

During the meeting, Porterfield joined the University in resisting socially responsible investments. I considered him

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to the point that its yearly interest would eliminate the need for the fee altogether in about a decade.

Today, it is clear that this vision is unrealizable. Real costs have risen dramatically for clubs as inflation has driven prices up, while the University has exacerbated the situation by increasing reservation fees on student space. This year, the Student Activities Commission was forced to make across-the-board cuts to its clubs due to unanticipated shortfalls.

The University’s failure to provide the $3 million it promised and the volatility of the stock market have hobbled the Student Activities Fee Endowment. It now holds approximately $2 million, nearly $8 million short of what its overly-optimistic creators envisioned it would be today.

Meanwhile, peer universities have continued to widen the gap in activities funding. While Georgetown has allocated approximately $350,000 per year from the fee since its inception, last year alone Stanford collected nearly $2.5 million, and Duke nearly $1.4 million. Neither school enrolls as many students as Georgetown does.

The Georgetown University Student Association, having heard the concerns of advisory board

hypocritical and grouped him in with all of the other administrators who refused to take ethics and student opinion into consideration. Earlier this semester, when the CIO’s departure was announced, I had no qualms bidding him good riddance.

I almost felt the same when I heard about Porterfield. When I heard the news of his departure from Georgetown to accept a position as the president of Franklin &

Carrying On

by Jackson Perry A rotating column by Voice senior staffers

Marshall University, my first inclination was to recall his opposition to the cause that I had worked hard for and believed in so strongly.

Then I recalled the second, and last, time I met Porterfield, when he spoke at Georgetown’s Take Back the Night rally on Nov. 12. Remembering his strong words for ending sexual violence against women made me consider that I had the wrong impression of him. As I read news articles and comments about Porterfield’s departure on Vox Populi, the Voice’s blog, my opinion of him fundamentally changed.

members and club leaders alike, has determined that student activities at Georgetown have reached a breaking point. This fall, they launched an intensive listening campaign to solicit ideas on how the Student Activities Fee could be improved, holding a series of town halls and open meetings for the Georgetown community to provide suggestions.

The result of this semester-long process is the SAFE Reform referendum, which will be voted on by the Georgetown student community on Dec. 7 through 9.

We believe that the SAFE Reform proposal is the silver bullet to solve the student activities shortfall.

It proposes that the whole Student Activities Fee go toward student activities. This would stop contributions to the SAFE, leaving that $2 million dollars to continue accruing interest within the larger University endowment. The reform also proposes that the fee increase by $25 next year and $25 the year after that, bringing it up to $150 during the 2012–13 school year.

These two provisions would bring the amount available every year to approximately $1,050,000. Finally, the reform would tie the fee to inflation beginning in 2013–14 and allow the student activities funding mechanism to allocate the inter-

I recognize now that Porterfield has worked on social justice issues for decades at Georgetown.

His efforts have helped bridge the gap between a Georgetown education and the real world, from his advocacy for the LGBTQ Center to his founding of the D.C. Schools Project. Nevertheless, it is not his views that impress me as much as his earnest dedication to improving our university and our world.

After his impending departure was announced, many of his former students posted congratulatory comments on Porterfield’s Facebook profile, attesting to the personal connection he has forged with students. It turns out he is exactly the kind of administrator I have always thought the University lacked—an individual committed to the students of Georgetown, and also cognizant of the role Georgetown and its alumni must play in our world.

Every school needs an administrator who will sacrifice personal time to deliver a short speech at a vigil against sexual violence on a Friday night. The impact Porterfield has had on the lives of many Hoyas is clear. I can only hope he returns as President of the University one day.

Throughout this semester, I have found many things about

est gained on the Fee Endowment.

These measures would finally create a sustainable system of student activities funding at Georgetown that would improve our competitiveness with peer schools.

If this referendum passes, it will mean a cultural change for student life on campus. Gone will be the culture of austerity, which has too often required advisory boards to tell clubs what not to do, rather than to help them make their goals a reality.

Suddenly on the table are chances to offset dues for club sports, to increase opportunities to give back through the Center for Social Justice, or to mitigate creative constraints placed on the performing arts by tight budgets.

As SAFE is still unlikely to reach its original goal even 20 years from now, we Hoyas must acknowledge that the system as it stands is unsustainable. In the face of this harsh reality, it’s time to take matters into our own hands once more. We encourage all students to vote yes on SAFE Reform.

Adam Talbot and Sam Ungar are juniors in the College and GUSA senators. They want to raise funding, but only by a little, like a poor tax.

Georgetown to be worthy of criticism, and it is easy to paint every administrator with the same brush. I have even used the word “administration” as a way to conjure up negative images of unresponsive college bureaucracy.

But that shortchanges administrators like Porterfield, who tirelessly work for the benefit of the Georgetown community.

It’s also possible my impression of other administrators may be wrong, but the distance between the administration and the student body makes it difficult to improve my image of them, particularly of aloof senior officials like President John DeGioia and Vice President Todd Olson.

An attachment to my personal cause célèbre blinded me to Porterfield’s work in so many other important areas of social justice and University life. Beyond feeling humbled, I am glad that I was able to rethink my impression of Porterfield. I did wrong by him, but I think he would forgive me for making this into a teaching moment.

Jackson Perry is a junior in the College. He discovered that his impressions stood on pillars of salt and pillars of sand.

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