The Georgetown Voice, March 3rd, 2017

VOICE The Georgetown

Spaced Out: Club Sports in Crisis p. 8

March 3, 2017

New NatGeo Exhibit Adresses Environmental Issues p. 10

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MARCH 3, 2017

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

staff editor-in-chief Graham Piro Managing editor Caitlyn Cobb

Volume 49 • Issue 12

news

executive editor Ryan miller Features editor Alex bOyd assistant features editor jonny amon news editor isaiah seibert assistant news editors Jake maher, margaret gach

culture

executive editor Brian Mcmahon Leisure editor caitlin mannering assistant leisure editors Gustav Honl-stuenkel, Devon O’Dwyer, ryan mazaltis Sports editor tyler pearre Assistant sports editor alex lewontin

opinion

“Practice this week in Gaston” by Aicha nzie

Editorials

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Carrying On: Reflecting on Death and My Grandmother’s Disease Rebecca Zaritsky

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contents

Fashioning a New Understanding of Gender Equality Allison Pfotzer Growing Up Godless Kaei Li

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Spaced Out: Club Sports in Crisis Graham Piro

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Earth Explorers Take D.C. Caitlin Mannering

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Orchestrating Diplomacy: GU Students Head to Cuba Isaiah Seibert

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Alternative Snacks: A Second Student Dining Option Devon O’Dwyer

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Logan Isn’t Afraid to Break New Ground Jake Sanford

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Steve Alderton Captures the Blurred Emotions of Memory Emily Jaster

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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. 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. All materials copyright The Georgeton Voice, unless otherwise indicated.

Executive editor kevin huggard voices editor emma Francois Assistant Voices editors kaei lI, rebecca zaritsky Editorial Board Chair chris dunn Editorial Board jon block, caitlyn cobb, kenneth lee, kevin Huggard, Alli Kaufman, GRAHAM PIRO, Isaiah seibert, PHillip Steuber, ryan miller

halftime

Leisure editor amy guay assistant leisure editors brynn furey, emily jaster, anne paglia Sports editor Jorge DeNeve Assistant sports editor parker houston

design

Executive editor alli kaufman Spread editor lindsay reilly Photo Editor Isabel lord assistant design editors jake glass, lizz pankova, jack townsend Staff Designers Rachel Corbally, Alexandra Falkner, Sam Lee, Aicha nzie, max tholgmas, rachel zeide

copy

copy chief Anna Gloor assistant Copy editors audrey bischoff, julia pinney editors Sienna Brancato, Jack Cashmere, Clara Cecil, Claire Goldberg, Isabel Lord, Isabel Paret, Greer Richey, Jack Townsend

online

online editor Anne Freeman podcast editor danielle hewitt assistant podcast editor nick gavio social media editor Claire Goldberg

support

associate editors Mike Bergin, Jon block, lilah burke, michael coyne, cassidy jensen

Staff writers

editor@georgetownvoice.com Leavey 424 Box 571066 Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057

MOnica Cho, Brynne Long, madelyn rice, Brice russo, Katya Schwenk, Dan Sheehan, Noah Telerski

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

READ ON GEORGETOWNVOICE.COM halftime Why Experimental Film Needs Its Own Category At The Oscars Though an admitted sucker for the Oscars despite its “glorification of corporate filmmaking”, Chad Davis argues that the challenging, strange, and camera-centric nature of experimental film deserves its own category at the Academy Awards.

MLB Season Preview With spring training underway and Opening Day approaching quickly, Claire Goldberg and Sean Berman make their very early predictions for who will make the playoffs this season and who will win the World Series.

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EDITORIALS

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Georgetown Must Support Refugees

Prioritize Club Sports’ Space

On June 20, 2016, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees announced that the number of displaced persons in the world reached a record high at 65.3 million people. Of those displaced persons, one-third—or 21.3 million people—are refugees.

In response to this humanitarian crisis, several communities nationwide, including two universities and the Holy Trinity Parish right outside our gates, have sponsored refugee families. Following this precedent, a petition began circulating in mid-February for Georgetown University to “provide housing, resources, and a support system to a refugee family in need.”

This editorial board believes that it is the moral imperative of the university to live up to its Jesuit ideals and sponsor a refugee family.

In alignment with Pope Francis’s call for “every parish, every religious community, every monastery, every shrine [to] accommodate one [refugee] family,” supporting the resettlement of a refugee family in Northwest D.C. would bring its core values of cura personalis and women and men for others into action. Standing at the intersection of academia and faith, this university has a duty to not only teach its Jesuit ideals, but to demonstrate them.

While it would be ideal for Georgetown to go beyond sponsorship, we recognize the limitations of the university as an institution to participate further in political affairs.

Therefore, the responsibility for continuing this humanitarian work falls on the student body; signing the petition is simply the beginning. Students can partner with existing organizations that help resettle refugees and focus on the latter portion of the petition, that is, to “work collaboratively with the refugees through language training, resource gathering, and cultural adjustment.”

As a community, we must live our values and be active in the world around us.

Sponsoring a refugee family is the first step towards this goal.

When the university closed the increasingly hazardous Kehoe Field last February, this editorial board approved of the move. It was right to end the use of Kehoe’s unsafe playing surface, but over the past year it has become clear that the university does not have a plan to provide other spaces to compensate for its closure. As the Voice reports in “Spaced Out: Club Sports in Crisis,” efforts to find off-campus practice space have proved largely futile, as transportation costs or poor lighting have hindered club sports teams’ ability to have full practices.

The university was negligent in allowing Kehoe to fall into such disrepair. Going forward, administrators must prioritize how they will help club sports teams find affordable and accessible practice space. Club sports is a fast-growing community that is highly valued by its members, and the university should take immediate action to mitigate this issue. This means incorporating the leaders of club sports teams into the decisionmaking process and providing assistance to teams as they look for new fields to use.

Whether this includes university transportation or reimbursement for travel expenses is up to individual team needs, but failure to support club sports will only continue to alienate a significant portion of the student body’s athletic population.

Unfortunately, no solution appears ideal or imminent, but this is no excuse to stand by and do nothing as teams look for alternate fields in Georgetown, Burleith, and beyond. Club sports teams may not generate large amounts of revenue like some varsity-level sports, but they are essential to campus life at Georgetown. The teams need immediate assistance and deserve assurance from the university that club sports will not be further neglected.

Full Disclosure: The Voice’s editorial board chair, Chris Dunn, is a member of the Men’s Ultimate Frisbee team. He was not involved in the writing or editing of this editorial.

Library Cuts Set Harmful Precedent Lau saw its 2016 fiscal year budget cut by six percent or $1 million, resulting in a 17.5 percent decrease in the library’s budget for principal collections of books, as the Hoya reported.

While this editorial board commends the university for its commitment to preserving jobs within the library by not cutting from its budget for staff spending, we believe the cuts represent a step away from Georgetown’s values, and will make it harder for members of the university community to realize their academic goals.

Georgetown, at its core, is an academic institution. The library, with all of the resources and opportunities it offers, is central to this basic institutional goal. In taking from the library nearly 20 percent of its budget for collections, the university risks endangering one of its fundamental aims.

These cuts have been made despite consecutive years of tuition increases. They are unlikely to be reversed, meaning that in future years available research tools will only be more limited. Our concern lies in the future, and what continual slashes to this budget will mean for students and professors in upcoming years. In the future, there must be greater transparency in how these cuts affect Lau. There also must be a contingency plan in place to ensure the quality of resources is not affected by consecutive years of budget cuts.

Georgetown prides itself on being a research institution that attracts minds from all over the globe. To maintain the level of scholarship and rigor Georgetown boasts and encourages, a library with expansive research opportunities is a necessity. Students and professors are expected to compete with and contribute to a nation-wide academic community based on scholarship and research. While Georgetown is following a trend seen in other national peer universities, these cuts to the library’s budget could potentially harm the university’s ability to provide premier resources to faculty, staff, and students.

Elizabeth Pankova

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

Sometimes I run to think through a problem, but this is not one of those days. I’m at Yates, running on the treadmill because my left knee is too messed up to run counterclockwise for 40 minutes. Mind blissfully blank, I’m surprised when the thought comes—I cannot die the same death as my grandmother.

I don’t know where it comes from. I wasn’t thinking about my family or neurology or psychiatry or Alzheimer’s disease. The terror comes and grips my throat. This happens often, nearly every day. It’s not pathological, just human.

My family often jokes that my grandmother holds the world record for “longest-living Alzheimer’s patient.” At just 76, she has been sick for as long as I have known her— deteriorating gradually, slowly. Now, she doesn’t make much sense when she speaks, and she needs help with the most basic things, like brushing her teeth.

It’s a cruel irony, but she’s healthy otherwise. Even though her mind fails, her body refuses to die.

When I say I cannot die like her, I mean I cannot be dead for 20 years before I die. I cannot be a body without a mind; I cannot lose myself to plaques and tangles. When I say I cannot die like my grandmother, I mean I would rather die than live like she does.

Most people are with me until I express that last sentiment—when I wish myself dead rather than alive, when I deem another person’s life to be worthless. When I say that I wish my own family member would die.

My grandmother used to be very smart. She used to love me, when I was a baby, and her disease was in the stage of setting off fire alarms and taking the wrong bus. I don’t think she loves me anymore.

Humanity can’t be defined—it is too personal, and there is nothing necessarily fundamental to personhood, but we can define what it is for ourselves. For me, it is my intelligence, my passion, my fire. What is it for you? And if we lose that thing—what would we consider makes us, us—what would we consider ourselves, then?

I don’t think euthanasia is wrong in principle. If a life is not worth living, then it is just to end that person’s suffering with their consent. But what if they cannot give consent, as my grandmother certainly cannot?

I know my grandmother would not want to live the way she currently does. She lived her whole life holding onto love—she raised my mother, she worked, she pulled her family out of the Soviet Union. She used to put my mother’s lunch under her pillow so it would stay warm. My grandmother was once a strong woman. And so, to see her now, reduced to a body sitting at a table and muttering gibberish, I think she would have wanted to be dead. She would have seen that if she lost what she valued, she would have had nothing left.

But how can I know for sure? There are always those who say that her life is worth living, worth saving, and that human instinct would not allow her to want to die.

For years, my grandmother muttered under her breath, “Mama, come and get me. Take me to you,” over and over. She still says it sometimes.

I am not fighting, here, for the right to kill my grandmother—I couldn’t, even if it were allowed, not unless I had proof that she would have wanted that before her disease began. Most certainly, I am not saying the lives of the disabled are not worth living—my grandmother has worth. The question is how much she would have been willing to lose before she thought she didn’t have anything left.

I am saying there should have been a choice for her to make, while she could have made it.

The default is—and should be—life. The default should not be killing someone once they forget the names of their children. That is eugenics, and my grandmother, a daughter of the Holocaust, would be the first to tell you that is wrong.

But there should be another way. There will always be people who want everything done for them until the bitter end—feeding tubes, IV antibiotics, and 24hour nursing care. But many, and I believe my grandmother is included here, would not want this.

I cannot know for certain. She was never given that choice. But, in a world where dementia is a leading cause of death, we have the opportunity to provide a lot of choices, and I think that’s our obligation.

SAM LEE

There should be a way to have a dignified exit, to know the information and make a choice before losing the presence of mind to do so. They shouldn’t have to forgo all of themselves first.

This is personal to me.

My grandmother developed her disease in her late 50s, unusually early for an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. This means her case is likely to be genetic—early-onset familial Alzheimer’s disease. There is no way to know for certain, since her family has a history of early death unrelated to Alzheimer’s. This means the disease cannot be reliably traced. Genetic testing is expensive, and we’re not at a point at which we want to know.

But if it is genetic, then I know one thing for certain: I have a one-in-four chance of developing her disease before my 60th birthday. My mother’s chance is one-in-two. We’ve talked about it, and both of us would honestly prefer to die. We want to have some agency, some control, some choice.

Faced with the prospect of this disease, we deserve at least that much.

Campus Resources: Counseling and Psychiatric Services (CAPS) can be reached at caps.georgetown.edu or (202)-687-6985.

By Rebecca Zaritsky She is a freshman in the College.

VOICES

Reflecting on Death and My Grandmother’s Disease

Carrying On: Voice Staffers Speak

VOICES

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MARCH 3, 2017

Fashioning a New Understanding of Gender Equality

Elizabeth Pankova

When most of us hear the words “gender equality,” our minds jump to women’s issues. We automatically conjure images of feminist rallies, calls for equal pay, and ownership of reproductive rights. Despite our tendency to conflate gender equality with women’s issues—a simple misunderstanding—we must acknowledge that, as a community, we are leaving at least 50 percent of the population out of our universal fight for equal rights. By ignoring the role of all people in the fight for gender equality, we are actively hurting both women and men.

In our stratified society, we frequently conceptualize “equality” as an attack on the status quo. Those privileged individuals within the status quo often misinterpret attempts to achieve true equality as threats, attacks on their widely accepted version of normalcy. Until I experienced discomfort in my own privilege as a white, cisgendered, straight woman, I did not understand the defensive nature of those with privilege against equal rights.

A great example of this lies in the Black Lives Matter movement, in which critics frequently asked for the movement to extend to all lives. While I agree all lives truly are the same and equally worthy of representation, what many missed (myself included) was that “black lives matter” does not mean other lives hold any less value. It is simply responding to the reality that a specific group of people have been continually ignored and, in many cases, actively hurt. The movement affirms that black lives matter within a culture that, perhaps implicitly, says they don’t.

The perception of a gendered movement that excludes men is a similar error. It’s not hard to see why many view gender equality as a women’s issue, given the many women’s human rights conventions, the many papers on the history and future of women’s movements, and the many groups exclusively lobbying for women’s rights (I should know; I study women’s human rights in the SFS). This fundamental misunderstanding assumes the solutions to that issue will only benefit women. The Lancet journal of Stanford University released a paper on gender norms in 2013, penned by Dr. Sarah Hawkes of UCL Institute for Global Health and Dr. Kent Buse of UNAIDS. The paper concluded that the idea of “exclusive-to-women gender equality” has caused male health to suffer dramatically on a global scale.

At Georgetown, this confusion about the meaning of “gender equality” takes an interesting form. One example is the commonly asked question, “Why do we have the club Georgetown University Women in Leadership (GUWIL) and not a men’s version too?” Another example of our campus’ meaning of “gender equality” is DC Reads. The club’s female majority puts together annual hiring teams with the explicit purpose of attracting male tutors in order to have a diverse staff. In both instances, the focus is on only one gender in a perceived binary, instead of on attaining equality for all individuals at any point on the gender spectrum.

While our culture and expectations reveal a clear need to invest directly in women and girls, this is an incomplete mission that hasn’t produced results commensurate with the degree of work, time, energy, and money devoted to it. The limited effects of focusing solely on women’s issues are why GUWIL and other groups, such as GU Women Who Code, are still necessary. We do need to increase women’s ability to succeed in building a career in contemporary society. In the fight to equalize—not rule—women are still trying to get a fair shot. But we must cease conflating gender equality with women’s issues. In addition to addressing women’s issues exclusively, we

must fight also for gender equality—for holistic solutions that equally benefit all individuals on the gender spectrum.

The Tahirih Justice Center, which assists immigrant girls and women fleeing violence, was founded on the principle that in order for society to progress, all genders must be made equal.

While no single organization can really be held up as successfully implementing such holistic solutions, this approach is integral to the human flourishing targeted by equality movements.

The essence of the gender equality movement signifies a much more difficult type of activism, one that highlights an issue without excluding those not “directly affected.” Its foundational premise is that all people—regardless of gender identity—are included in the global right to equal participation and treatment. As a result, solutions to gender inequity will yield universal benefits.

For it is the intersectionality of each individual’s identity—race, religion, ethics, socioeconomic status, education, language, and culture beyond their gender identity—that places them into different camps of advocacy. The gender equality fight is, therefore, one of the most unifying movements in all of history. It only excludes those who don’t believe all people are innately equal.

It is from this place that I am trying to glean the clarity needed to reach equality, by asking everyone—regardless of identity, background, or political affiliation—to break down this phrase “gender equality.” Gender equality is the equality of all genders, not just the usual binary. My hope is to come back to Georgetown as an alumna and see a “gender equality” club battling for this very understanding; the understanding that equality-oriented groups are not a threat to males, but a threat to the status quo, a status quo that also hurts men by limiting the full capacity of humankind by holding back at least 50 percent of its population.

The next wave of social movements can view gender issues as universal—not primarily lifting up one marginalized group, but doing so indirectly as part of an effort to unify all populations to attain a holistic equality for all individuals at any point on the gender spectrum. Ignorance and insecurity compose the root of this issue. Misconception surrounds the term, and fear obscures what change would bring.

To reach equality, we must all do again what we did when we came to college: we left home and learned much more than we ever expected by opening up our minds and hearts and being vulnerable. To me, gender equality isn’t a magical world of kumbaya. It is a place much closer to the actualization of full human potential, the elimination of suffering, the furthering of understanding, and the use of honest and real competition to improve all things. It will be a messier, fairer, and more beautiful world by far.

By Allison Pfotzer She is a junior in the SFS.

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

VOICES

Growing Up Godless

EMMA francois

I’m three or four years old, holding up a popsicle stick cross I made in day care for my mom to see. I had colored it using pink washable marker and draped fake ivy around the arms. She smiles and puts it in a craft supply box. Over the years, it’ll be shuffled deeper and deeper into our basement.

tells me nothing happened. Honestly, I shouldn’t be so surprised; he’d been helping at a friend’s church for years, and it really was only a matter of time. Later, my mom tells me he’s hardly the only one—apparently grandma likes to listen to Christian radio in the sanctuary of her Shanghai home. Mom’s tone then was laced with the slightest derision, but reflecting over the past three years, I can’t quite remember the last time I heard it there.

(9/11, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Hurricane Katrina) (Iran nuclear deal, Ebola, Black Lives Matter) Stepping into a church for the first time, I look around. It’s beautiful in a foreign, exotic way.

The stained glass angels stare at me, telling me with their judging eyes something I already know: I don’t belong here. But I follow my teacher down the aisle, up the three short steps, onto a wooden stage where a gorgeous grand piano beckons to me, its lid invitingly open. I sit and warm up as my teacher sets up the recording equipment. He presses the red circle and the angels fade as I start to play, my music filling the space.

It’s the first week of class and I read the syllabus to see the first reading: Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality. I’m at a Catholic university now. Sitting at lunch with some newly made friends, I’m skipped over as they discuss their understandings of faith. Days later, I’m at my computer answering that same question for Problem of God. The words come easily.

(Paris attacks, Donald Trump’s presidential election, travel ban)

(Global Recession, Barack Obama’s presidential election, BP oil spill, Bin Laden killed) We’re sitting at the dining room table. I’m sipping my water, wondering if we’re allowed to start eating, when everyone suddenly holds hands. My best friend turns to look at me, cocked eyebrow but soft expression, and I hold out my hands to complete the circle. As her father says grace, I start to panic. Do I say “Amen” with them? I’d feel like an imposter, but I don’t know if it’s impolite to abstain. I end up mumbling something incoherent and keep my head bowed for a beat longer, not wanting to see if anyone noticed. Once we start eating, though, it doesn’t take long before the entire table is talking and laughing again, and I forget about my anxiety.

I found that old popsicle stick cross over winter break. It was sitting in the same craft supply box my mother had put it in. The pink faded but the ivy is pristine, safe from the cobwebs that decorate the rest of the cupboard. I turned it over to discover my name on the backside, bookended by two small hearts. As I sit here writing this now, I think back to all the times I’d been reminded of the depth of American religiosity, and I reflect on how my journey, just like those of thousands of other children, started with a simple craft project. I may not believe in God, but I believe in people and the incredible capacity they hold.

(Occupy Wall Street, Benghazi attack, Boston Marathon bombings) “Did something happen to you?” It’s out of my mouth before I can stop it, but it’s the only thing that makes sense to me in that moment. I’m lying on my parents’ bed with the phone next to me, speakerphone on, as I listen to my brother tell me about his conversion, or, as he calls it, “acceptance of Christ.” I can’t help but imagine a sort of “Jesus take the wheel” moment, but he

By Kaei Li She is a sophomore in the SFS.

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MARCH 3, 2017

Daniel Varghese

Spaced O ut: Club Sports in Crisis

When Kehoe Field closed, it was a long time coming.

The playing space was notorious for its rough conditions, and Georgetown deemed it unsafe for practice conditions.

Although many felt the decision was necessary, the timing was unexpected.

“We just feel, as a community, as a board, individually, that the university has repeatedly made decisions that are going to be incredibly detrimental to our community and there’s no contingency plan,” said Daniel Fain (COL ’18), chair of the Advisory Board for Club Sports (ABCS), cochair of the GUSA Athletics Policy team, and president of Men’s Ultimate Frisbee.

Among the most affected teams has been Men’s and Women’s Ultimate Frisbee, two of the largest club teams on campus. After the closure was announced, it soon became apparent that the university did not have a contingency plan.

“There was no real alternative space that the university planned on having club sports and intramural (IM) athletes use,” said Jacob Marsh (COL ’18), a captain of the Men’s Ultimate Frisbee team. “Basically the consequence of Kehoe’s closure was that a lot of the athletes who do club sports, who do IMs, who do these field sports, were left with no place to practice, no place to compete.”

There are more than 30 club sports teams at Georgetown, many of which, like Men’s and Women’s Ultimate Frisbee, compete at a Division I level.

“Club sports has been disproportionately affected by this sudden lack of field space because of our position as not a varsity sport but also not an intramural sport,” Anna Pettee (NHS ’17), a captain of the Women’s Ultimate Frisbee team said. “The administration is assuming that club sports can continue to operate under these stressed

conditions, but the experience that my team has had this past fall calls this assumption into question.”

“The administration is assuming that club sports can continue to operate under these stressed conditions, but the experience that my team has had this past fall calls this assumption into question.”

According to Pettee, over the next four weeks, her team will practice once per week off campus, and it has to be from 5 p.m. to dark, which makes it difficult to have full practices. “We know that there are multiple members of our team that won’t be able to make that,” she said.

“It just puts an extra amount of stress on ourselves and our teammates who are already stretching themselves thin managing this responsibility with their other Georgetown responsibilities.”

The ABCS was planning on presenting to the Board of Regents about the conditions on the field before Kehoe’s closure last year, according to Fain. “When we did that, we were planning on pitching them that this is vital to our community and you really need to fix it,” Fain said. “Two days before that presentation, they informed us that Kehoe would be closed.”

The ABCS had been looking into alternative field space before Kehoe’s closure. Fain said that the board looked for off-campus fields as soon as Kehoe closed, and the project continued over the summer. “We went through every single field within D.C. Parks and Recreation and created a spreadsheet to figure out how far it was timewise and distance-wise to walk or drive and whether or not the field had lights,” he said.

Lighting on the fields is especially important because club sports teams have to accommodate their players’ schedules. They do not receive academic priority to miss class, so their practices must occur after classes end for the day. On Kehoe, practices could occur late at night because of its lights. Two field options remaining for intramural and club sports, Burleith Field north of campus and Georgetown Visitation’s field, don’t have lights, restricting options for practice times to daylight hours, according to Perry Cao (SFS ’17), a captain of the Men’s Ultimate Frisbee team. On short days in the fall semester when Cooper Field is used by both intramural and club sports, clubs are left with very limited practice options.

However, 5 p.m. off-campus practices are also difficult for students to attend because of class conflicts, Cao explained.

The lack of practice space has also harmed the team’s future. Cao said that the inconsistent scheduling and

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

Club sports demonstrates on Copley Lawn locations were difficult to communicate to the rest of the team, and dissuaded new players from staying. “We suffered a huge hit to recruitment,” he said.

“We had one of the smallest freshman classes coming out to the team that we’ve ever seen,” he said. “For a lot of people who wanted to join the team, they just couldn’t, because practice was happening when they had class or the timing was so inconsistent that they would make other plans because they just didn’t know when practice was going to be.”

Even without considering lighting and scheduling issues, finding any locations for practice has been difficult. Fain said that the ABCS sent out 35 requests through the department of Parks and Recreation to try to find other fields in the D.C. area and were denied on all but two. “The two that we got are spaces that are comparable to Healy lawn,” he said. Both of the fields are 20 to 30 minutes by foot from campus.

Another issue is transporting equipment for practices to off-campus sites. While traveling to other fields may be feasible for certain club sports teams, other teams, like soccer and baseball, have equipment such as goals and batting cages that need to be transported as well if the field does not already have them.

Jihye Kim, program coordinator in the CSE who works with the ABCS to find practice space off campus, wrote in an email to the Voice that the university has a working relationship with the Parks and Recreation department to use a field in Burleith and Visitation.

Aidan Delaney, the outreach chair for the ABCS, said that there is a possibility that portable lights might be purchased as a quick fix for field options like Burleith and Visitation. He estimated the cost at $20,000, money that he said would come from the administration.

“The [ABCS] is not too excited about that because we feel like if we were to go through with that plan, then they might be

dan fain

able to put off fixing Kehoe for another five to ten years,” he said. “To some extent it would be helpful because the lights would be moveable … they only go so high. I think they’re 14 feet high, so sports like softball and baseball wouldn’t be able to use them.”

There is a lot of uncertainty about the future of practice space on campus. Delaney said that any field option has cons.

“Whether it’s travel, whether it’s lights, just having teams willing to go and actually practice there, and you have to account for the safety of these fields,” he said. “A lot of them have potholes and are really poorly kept.” He continued that some of the potential fields are just as dangerous as Kehoe, if not worse.

While both short-term and long-term answers are up for consideration, the solutions presented by the university would require an extended period of time. Connor Maytnier (COL ’18), the student representative to the Board of Directors, explained that the university’s long-term plan is the development of an athletic district on campus.

“This plan would build an entirely new recreation center, a new Shaw field, and a new Kehoe field,” he wrote in an email to the Voice. “This redevelopment plan, however, is being considered on a 10-year timeline, and realistically would require even more than 10 years from approval until completion. Thus, we are looking at at least a decade with the current facilities in place.”

What makes renovating Kehoe logistically challenging is its location on top of Yates Field House. The 2017 Campus Plan states that renovation options for both Yates and Kehoe are limited and costly, and proposes demolishing Yates entirely and replacing it with a new facility. The cost and timing of repair to either Yates or Kehoe has not yet been determined, university spokesperson Rachel Pugh wrote in an email to the Voice.

Kehoe’s issues stem from its original design in the 1970s and not a lack of maintenance. “The design did not properly address controlling rainwater as the field is flat and consequently water sits on the field,” Pugh wrote in an email to Voice. “This condition over time degrades the roof and has resulted in the unsafe conditions.”

Maytnier wrote that given the inadequate temporary field arrangements and the negative effects already seen in year one, it is extremely important for the university to re-invest in Kehoe and pursue a short-term renovation. “Such a renovation would allow us to re-open the field and extend Kehoe’s lifespan by 10 years--the time needed before the university’s larger vision for the future of the ‘athletic district’ can be fully realized,” he wrote “The university is currently considering a range of options to address the long term needs of Yates and Kehoe,” Pugh wrote. “The options include repair of Kehoe Field and continued investments in Yates to the development of a new recreation center and fields.”

Club sports has made attempts to draw attention to their situation. A demonstration was held on Copley Lawn on Thursday, Feb. 16, which Fain said had 70 participants at its peak. Maytnier presented a letter to the Board of Directors that several captains of club sports teams signed to urge the university to pursue a short-term renovation of Kehoe. “The Board members echoed the concerns of the team captains, however the finances necessary to pursue the renovation still remain in question,” he wrote. “We are hopeful that the university will make these finances a top priority in the near future, but that remains uncertain as of now.”

“If something isn’t done, sooner rather than later, which for us means 10 years or longer, I don’t think the club sports community is ever going to come back to the place it was.”

Club sports has been one of the largest growing communities at Georgetown. Fain said that six years ago, there were 11 club sports teams, which have grown into more than 30 today. “If something isn’t done, sooner rather than later, which for us means 10 years or longer, I don’t think the club sports community is ever going to come back to the place it was,” Fain said. “I don’t see sustained levels of participation or any possible chance of growth under the current system.”

By Graham Piro

10

MARCH 3, 2017

permission national geographic

permission national geographic

Earth Explorers Takes D.C.: New NatGeo Exhibit Addresses Environmental Issues

By Caitlin Mannering

The National Geographic Museum’s newest exhibit, Earth Explorers, opened on a peculiarly balmy February day. The exhibition, running February through September 2017, offers visitors the opportunity to become a NatGeo explorer for the day. It takes only a little bit of imagination to propel visitors around the world—whether that be into the depths of the ocean or the canopies of the rainforest.

National Geographic Presents: Earth Explorers was created with the help of Global Experience Specialists (GES), a company that helps museums and other venues add to live experiences through audio-visual, creative, design elements. With the help of GES, the exhibition took about a year for National Geographic to create, and for the past three years the exhibition has been on display throughout the country.

The exhibit carries visitors into the world and lifestyles of NatGeo explorers. “National Geographic has given over 13,000 grants for science and exploration since 1888, and the people and explorers that we fund have really interesting and diverse backgrounds and focus on different areas of the world,” said Kathryn Keane, Vice President of Exhibitions at National Geographic Society.

The motivation behind the production of Earth Explorers was to “create an exhibition that could go out to science centers and museums

across the country to highlight what NatGeo explorers do in hopes of inspiring young people,” said Alan Parente, Creative Director, Exhibitions & Global Experiences, National Geographic Society.

Earth Explorers consists of several interactive ecosystems: Polar Regions, Oceans, Rain Forests, Mountains & Caves, and the African Savannah.

Each section is filled with educational information. Every stop on this around-the-world journey contains an interactive map detailing the different animals living in that ecosystem, a panel titled “high-tech help” that highlights the technology utilized in studying that ecosystem, and a Q&A with a prominent animal.

The importance of conservation and the effects of global warming on the environment are two recurring themes throughout the different ecosystems. Both are relevant problems in Washington, D.C. specifically, especially since the transition to the new administration.

On Tuesday Feb. 28, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at rewriting the Obama administration’s 2015 Waters of the United States rule, created by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers to regulate the pollution of tributaries in the United States.

A few blocks north of the White House, the National Geographic Museum has the unique ability, compared to other museums in D.C., of combining both art and science. D.C. is a city heavily influenced by museum culture. The National Mall alone is home to 11 of the 19 Smithsonians, and the city at large features over 70 museums in total.

Still, none of these museums focus specifically on science, exploration, and photography, Keane said.

“We have the ability to blend the best in natural history, photography, exploration, and curiosity,” Keane said.

Although National Geographic remains a prominent fixture nationwide, for Keane, the National Geographic Museum is the “bestkept secret in Washington.”

“The long history of the brand, the magazine, and the television specials makes people receptive to coming,” Parente said. “If we were a museum off the mall and not associated with a strong brand like NatGeo, it might be difficult to draw people.”

The NatGeo Museum never considered itself a competitor to the Smithsonians. It seeks to tell stories in a different, more accessible way.

“Our strength lies in the amazing amount of assets [we have]: digital [sources], photography, access to first person [sources]—people who

11

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE are on the ground around the world,” Parente said. “It is not necessarily about showing artifacts in a case—it is much more experiential, handson, and maybe a little more fun than what people would consider a traditional museum.”

In addition to two featured exhibitions, the museum hosts a wide array of live events, including speakers, photographers, film festivals, and family days. Around 2,000 people attended the free family day held on President’s Day this year. The museum also hosts NatGeo Nights on the third Thursday of every month. The event includes a happy hour with hands-on activities such as themed drink tastings, small bites, or trivia.

“

“We have the ability to blend the best in natural history, photography, exploration, and curiosity,” Keane said.

”

March is specifically Earth Explorer-themed, and will include short talks from explorers Kenny Broad, Chris A. Johns, Erika Bergman, and Gina Moseley about their efforts to discover new species, study animal behavior and learn about how technology, innovation, and ingenuity help explorers make and document their discoveries.

The National Geographic Museum also hosts Student Matinee Programs 10-12 times per year. The hour-long presentations are given by photographers, explorers, filmmakers and scientists, and include a short question and answer section afterwards. “The museum is free for students,” Keane said, “and we work very closely with the nonprofit organization called D.C. Collaborative...that raises money to support the transportation costs to the museum.”

When visitors first walk into the National Geographic Museum, they enter the exhibit @NatGeo: The Most Popular Instagram Photos. “National Geographic is best-known for its photography, and our Instagram has introduced us to a whole new generation,” Keane said. “The exhibit is aimed at a slightly older audience. Earth Explorers is less about pictures and more about people.”

After crossing into Earth Explorers, visitors are immediately initiated into the world of NatGeo explorers at “Base Camp.” Here, a Toyota Land Cruiser, like those used by explorers in the field, awaits transit, its windshield showing footage explorers have collected in the different ecosystems featured in the exhibit. Visitors are next ushered into the Oceans ecosystem where an almost eerie blue-green light undulates across the floor and a great white shark opens its massive jaws to greet them. As visitors step into a small submarine, water bubbles up around them as they sink under the surface into the depths of the ocean in the corresponding film shown in the windows of the submarine.

Visitors can next wander into the Rainforest ecosystem where a dimly lit, massive tent—replicated from those used in the field— is situated, inviting visitors to encounter the different dangers in the rainforest such as jaguars and poison dart frogs. Next, they can climb into a hot air balloon and overlook the vast expanse of the African Savannah ecosystem where multitudes of animals make their migrations.

The use of hot air balloons by NatGeo explorers allow them to get a steady, low-altitude shot of the migrations below.

The target audience for Earth Explorers is family all the way, Parente said. “This is a really fun, interactive, hands-on exhibit—lots of stuff to touch, move, operate, and pose with.”

The interactivity of the Earth Explorers exhibit “allows you to explore and dig deeper into the content if you want...it provides layers of information and it is up to you how deep you want to go,” Keane said.

National Geographic’s efforts to market towards families are apparent. Giggling children climb into and out of the land cruiser and hot air balloon and use their sleuthing skills to try to match the foot-

prints with the corresponding animal while parents closely scrutinize the information presented in the exhibit.

“If a kid is interested, and gets involved, he or she might be inspired to become a marine biologist, an environmental photographer, or a conservationist,” Keane said.

Scattered through the exhibit are multiple “Meet the Explorer” features which focus on the achievements of specific NatGeo explorers. “We fund exploration at almost every level,” Keane said. “We wanted to present a wide variety of exploration from different agegroups, genders, different ethnicities, and different places around the world.”

National Geographic Young Explorer Grantees—college-aged students who have received grants from National Geographic to conduct their own research—are also featured. After being named a grantee, Erika Bergman shared a series of real-time videos conducting manned-submersible dives in hopes of increasing ocean awareness.

Grantee Chris A. Johns uses his passion for wildlife photography, documentary videography, and graphic design to increase people’s awareness of the world’s imperiled tropical ecosystems and the people working to save them.

“It is always important to talk about exploring our world,” said Keane. “Inaccessible places are some of the most threatened today, and it is important for National Geographic to take people to these places and teach them more about these places because they will be much more relevant to people if they understand.”

“Every bit of rainforest left is at risk,” states a sign in the Rainforest Ecosystem, confronting visitors with the importance of conservation.

Crossing into the Arctic ecosystem, explorer Enric Sala travels to the Russian Arctic to discover how climate change is impacting the pristine Arctic ecosystem while explorer Steve Winter talks about surviving on top of the world in order to photograph the elusive, endangered snow leopard. Visitors learn that as the ice in the Arctic melts, more of the sun’s heat is absorbed by the resulting larger expanse of dark ocean water, which increases temperatures even more.

The Earth Explorers exhibit preaches an increasingly urgent but universal message. “No matter what the political environment is, National Geographic has stood for the same things. We are proponents of the environment, science, exploration, and curiosity,” Parente said.

“Our message is universal: explorers look for the truth, and the more they learn, the better decisions we can make collectively.”

Oceans ecosystem of the National Geographic Earth Explorers Exhibit

PERMISSION NATIONAL GEOGrAPHIC/Christopher gannon/GANNON VISUALS

Polar region of National Geographic Earth Explorers Exbihit.

PERMISSION NATIONAL GEOGrAPHIC/Christopher gannon/GANNON VISUALS

12

MARCH 3, 2017

Orchestrating Diplomacy: GU Students Head to Cuba

By Isaiah Seibert While most students will be relaxing at home over spring break, 12 members of Georgetown’s orchestra will be boarding a plane to Havana, Cuba. Only two years ago, such a trip would have sounded unfeasible as the U.S. government considered Cuba a state sponsor of terror. Now, members of the GU orchestra will spend the week with a youth orchestra, the Lyceum Mozartiano de La Habana, as a cultural exchange project between Americans and Cubans. In late April, 10 members of the Lyceum will come to Georgetown for a similar experience.

As part of this cultural exchange, the students will leave on March 5 to spend the week in group rehearsals and private instruction to prepare for a performance on March 11. They will spend much of the week learning Cuban repertoire, but they have already started rehearsing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4, which they will perform with the youth musicians at the Lyceum. The Cuban musicians at the Lyceum will then travel to the U.S. for a week in April, culminating in an April 22 performance with Georgetown’s orchestra.

Although they have only had four weeks to prepare since the university approved the trip, many of the students are eager to participate. “It feels unreal because we only found out recently that it’s been approved,” flutist Claire Abijay (COL ’19) said.

After then-President Barack Obama’s decision to thaw U.S.-Cuba relations, Angel Gil-Ordóñez, a professor in the performing arts department and music director of the Georgetown University Orchestra, said he saw an opportunity given the new atmosphere of openness toward Cuba.

The Georgetown Orchesta plays in Gaston Hall.

Angel Gil-Ordóñez conducts at Georgetown in October 2013.

For Gil-Ordóñez, music has the potential to bridge political barriers. “I’m a true believer of the music as a means for mutual understanding,” he said.

He cites the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said in 1999, as an example of this in practice. The orchestra, currently located in Seville, Spain, brings together Israeli and Palestinian musicians to promote peaceful coexistence.

“Individuals who had only interacted with each other through the prism of war found themselves living and working together as equals. As they listened to each other during rehearsals and discussions, they traversed deep political and ideological divides,” the orchestra’s website reads. “Though this experiment in coexistence was intended as a one-time event, it quickly evolved into a legendary orchestra.”

“Of course, with Cuba, we don’t have such a dramatic situation as, you know, the Israeli-Palestinian, so this is much less conflict,” Gil-Ordóñez said. “But you know, that was...the inspiration behind what I wanted to do here.”

Several students also said that they are interested in learning firsthand about a country that is often demonized in U.S. public discourse. “I’d love to get a real sense of who the people are and what they’re like rather than what we see the Cuban government as,” trombonist Patrick Mulcahey (COL ’19) said.

The U.S. and Cuba have had a tumultuous relationship since the Cuban Revolution in 1959. After the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, U.S.-Cuba relations were particularly fraught, and Ronald Reagan put the country on a list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1982.

U.S.-Cuba relations improved only recently, during the final years of Barack Obama’s second term. In May 2015, the Obama Administration removed Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terror. In July, bilateral relations were re-established when the U.S. Embassy opened in Havana and the Cuban Embassy opened in D.C. John Kerry visited the country in August 2016, becoming the first U.S. Secretary of State to do so in 70 years.

Obama loosened financial and travel regulations with Cuba before his visit in March 2016, when he became the first president to travel to the country since Calvin Coolidge in 1926. Later that year, commercial airlines began offering flights to Cuba.

Because of financial support from the University Office of the President and the Georgetown University Latin America Initiative, the Georgetown students will not have to pay for their commercial

Photos Courtesy Angel Gil-Ordóñez

flights, and the program is free for all participants. The Georgetown students will only have to pay for their meals, Gil-Ordóñez added.

Bringing the Cuban musicians to Georgetown, however, has proven to be somewhat more difficult financially. The university will provide their housing and meals, but the Georgetown students plan on fundraising to cover incidental costs after spring break.

“What we’ve been working on is there will be certain stores around the Georgetown area that will take a plot of time out of their day where about 10 percent, I think, will go towards our missions,” said Roman Kosarzycki (COL ’19), a violinist who is part of the orchestra’s three-member Cuba Committee tasked with facilitating the program.

The orchestra could only take 12 students to Cuba because of financial restrictions. Upperclassmen were given priority, but since some are unable to participate because of other commitments, sophomores are able to attend.

Gil-Ordóñez hopes that the program will be ongoing, so he chose to give priority to juniors and seniors to maximize the number of musicians who can attend over the course of their Georgetown career. Though he aims for the program to be at least bi-annual, Gil-Ordóñez hopes to make it an annual event.

An annual trip would be a big change for an orchestra that has never toured before. Gil-Ordóñez has wanted to travel with orchestra, but the busy schedules of most Georgetown students have kept them stateside.

“We have been thinking of this for a long time,” he said.

“But you know how busy you are here at Georgetown, and you are all so bright and you have so many different activities, that to put together 50 people in order to do something, to me, is a nightmare.”

He hopes that both groups of students will learn musically and culturally from this experience. According to Gil-Ordóñez, there are no music majors in Georgetown’s orchestra, so the Georgetown students have much to gain from their Cuban counterparts, who are training to become professional musicians.

“There is an extraordinary energy in every rehearsal and there is a phenomenal atmosphere so in that sense, I think that this travel will somehow enhance that a little more,” Gil-Ordóñez said. “For the Cuban students, they are going to be professional musicians so they are musically trained, so to relate to our students—and to see that, for them, music is so important even though it’s not their main activity—I think is going to be a great experience for the Cubans, too.”

13

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

Alternative Snacks: A Second Student Dining Option

By Devon O’Dwyer College dining hall food is notoriously subpar, and for many Georgetown students, Leo’s is no exception. But it is an unavoidable part of campus life, as all freshmen and sophomores living in on-campus dorms are required to purchase a meal plan.

A stranger observing Leo’s for the first time would see the steady stream of students who dutifully file in and out of its doors each day, briefly grabbing a bite to eat in between classes or gathering with friends at the end of a long day to reflect, chat, and laugh. It is clear that Leo’s is more than a place to share a meal; it is an undeniably central part of the culture of student life, particularly for underclassmen.

Nevertheless, students have frequently complained about the food quality and lack of options offered in on-campus dining.

“Last fall was my first semester owning a kitchen in an apartment, so I thought that I would be cooking up meals every day instead of going to Leo’s, which I really didn’t enjoy doing my freshman year. Frankly, Leo’s costs way too much money for pretty mediocre food and long lines,” Georg Stolt-Neilsen (COL ’19) wrote in an email to the Voice.

In January 2015, GUSA hosted a Dining Town Hall that brought students and administrators together to discuss the state of on-campus dining and listen to students’ biggest concerns.

“It was kind of no-holds-barred, everyone really said how they felt about the current state of dining. People were like, why aren’t we getting meal exchanges at Hoya Court? Why aren’t there more guest swipes? Why can’t we have to-go boxes?” said Mark Camilli (COL ’19), GUSA’s Dining and Auxiliary Services chair.

Many of those changes were made this school year, such as adding meal exchanges and Tapingo pre-ordering across various locations on campus, as well as to-go containers at Leo’s. In addition, guest meal swipes included in meal plans will increase from two to five next year.

However, for those still unimpressed with on-campus dining, there is another option in sight.

Seth Kramer and Josh Cohen, who graduated from the University of Virginia (UVA) in 2015 and 2013, respectively, said they were unhappy with their on-campus dining options as students. “We were wasting a lot of money. We wanted to come up with a much better experience for students,” Cohen said.

The result was Elevate Meal Plan: an alternative to traditional on-campus meal plans, which they piloted at UVA in December 2015 and launched at Georgetown on Feb. 1 this year.

Elevate partners with local restaurants that create abridged menus specifically for Elevate customers. Students select one of a variety of plan options and download an app with which

they can order their meal in advance and then pick it up from the restaurant when it is ready. Elevate also allows customers to use their meal exchange to dine in person.

After almost doubling the number of restaurants Elevate offered at UVA in their second semester of starting the app, Kramer and Cohen began to look for other campuses that could benefit from an alternative meal plan system.

“We thought Georgetown had a lot of similarities to UVA. It had a lot of really amazing restaurants right nearby, and also from talking to students, we learned that like UVA, students tended to be really dissatisfied with the current meal plan options–just poor quality of food and really expensive,” Cohen said.

Stolt-Neilsen, who purchased an Elevate Meal Plan, was disappointed with Leo’s, but did not have enough time to make his own food. “A lot of days I just wouldn’t eat enough, so I needed something that wasn’t that expensive, higher quality of food, and convenient. Elevate seemed to fill that gap.”

Elevate offers 45, 75, and 105 meal plans per semester, each averaging between $11-12 per meal. In addition, they offer a 15 Meal Supplement plan that is $13.74 per meal. In contrast, Leo’s 75 meal block plan calculates to $14.61 per meal. However, a comparison to Georgetown’s weekly meal plans reveals a less drastic difference. On-campus meal plans include 18, 14, and 10 meals-a-week and are comparably $11-12 per meal, calculated based on a 15-week semester.

By partnering with local restaurants, Elevate hopes to provide higher quality food compared to on-campus options.

The restaurants are each within walking distance, and can be ready for pick up in approximately 15 minutes via the app, Kramer and Cohen said.

Elevate also allows for unused meals to roll over in future semesters, “So you don’t lose hundreds of dollars at the end of the year as you would if you don’t use up all your swipes,” Kramer said. Campus meal plans do not allow unused meal swipes to roll over.

Juan Andino is the Food and Alcohol Manager at Mr Smith’s, one of Elevate’s restaurant partners. He said that Elevate initially contacted him to form a partnership. “I was actually thinking about possibly reaching out to Georgetown University to make a deal and then all of a sudden they reached out to us,” he said. According to its website, some of Elevate’s other Georgetown restaurant partners include Wingos, Via Umbria, Flavio, and Simply Bahn Mi. “We’ve been around for over 53 years, so we get a lot of business from Georgetown. But we’re also hoping that the new generation, the new people that come to Georgetown, get

Elevate Meal Plan

to know us so I think this would be a great way to introduce ourselves to the freshmen,” Andino said.

While Elevate provides one alternative, Georgetown Dining has sought to address the problem itself. Beginning next school year, the renewed Aramark contract intends to drastically change on campus dining, starting with a complete renovation of Leo’s. “It’s important to note it’s a brand new contract.

Although it’s the same provider, they’re being held to a whole new set of standards,” said Camilli, who represents students’ dining concerns in GUSA. The upper level of Leo’s will be converted into six different quick service restaurants, much like the structure of Hoya Court. Daniel Heyward, Aramark’s Marketing Manager, wrote in an e-mail to the Voice that these will include Whisk, an espresso and pastry store featuring a partnership with District Doughnuts, Bodega Market, a sandwich and salad store, and Launch Test Kitchen, which will continually include new food concepts. Each of the stations will accept meal swipes and cash, credit, and debit cards.

The lower level will be used exclusively for meal swipes as it is now, but it will also undergo major renovations. The 11 total planned stations will include many of the current stations, as well as a new BBQ station and vegan, vegetarian, and allergen free options.

As part of the renewed contract and an effort to satisfy student feedback, Cosi, Elevation Burger, Subway, and Salad Creations will be replaced by Chick-Fil-A, Crop Chop, and Royal Jacket Delicatessen in Hoya Court.

“I feel like this year has seen a lot of improvements in terms of convenience. Initiatives like the Leo’s to-go program have really changed the way that I think people view our campus’s dining system. That, along with the new meal exchange in Hoya Court and Cosi have really answered a lot of student demands and have been really helpful in incorporating diversity into my diet,” Cameron Bell (COL ’19), who is currently on the 75 block on-campus meal plan, wrote in an email to the Voice.

Although it’s unclear how the new dining contract will impact the quality of food and student life in the long term, it has potential to open up new possibilities for the culture of Leo’s. “By keeping that top level open, it allows anyone, meal plan holder or non meal plan holder, to come into that top level so professors could actually meet you there. The goal is that it will foster an even greater sense of community, and I think it’s really exciting,” Camilli said.

Off campus, Elevate will continue to seek new ways to respond to student dining needs. While Kramer acknowledged the cliché that dining hall food is not good, “I think short term our goal is really just to create the best possible dining experience for students.”

Georgetown Meal Plan

15 meals

$13.74 ea. 75 block

$14.61 ea.

45 meals

$12.40 ea. 10 weekly

$13.78 ea.

75 meals

$12.07 ea. 14 weekly

$11.17 ea.

105 meals

$11.93 ea. 18 weekly

$9.28 ea. photos courtesy Elevate & Georgetown University Dining

LEISURE

14

MARCH 3, 2017

LOGAN ISN’T AFRAID TO BREAK NEW GROUND

By Jake Sanford IMDB

Logan, the newest X-Men movie from director James Mangold, delivers the best send off to Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine that fans could have hoped for. It’s no secret that Fox’s X-Men franchise has had its ups, downs, and outright flops, but Logan, like last year’s Deadpool, offers a fresh take on a superhero genre that has been growing stale. The film wisely avoids the veritable mess that is the storyline established by other X-Men films like Apocalypse and Days of Future Past and instead chooses to set itself in the far future. Mutants are a thing of the past, and an aged Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is the caretaker of a dementia-addled Professor X (Patrick Stewart). From the onset, the movie deals with themes of loss, grief, and acceptance with an intensity seldom found in blockbusters. Watching the two actors embody their characters for the last time is bittersweet, to say the least—just as Jackman and Stewart take a final turn in dealing with their characters’ flaws and vices, so too must Wolverine and Professor X come to terms with their imminent demise.

Jackman and Stewart have dealt with their characterizations of famous superheroes, on and off, for 17 years. With their performances in Logan, both actors exhibit their thorough understanding of Wolverine and Professor X on an intensely personal level. Both performances establish and accent the tone of heavy dread and helplessness the movie creates, while their constant banter injects levity and reveals the close connection the two actors have formed over the years. The supporting cast of the movie, which features Stephen Merchant, Richard Grant, and Boyd Holbrook, adds life and is able to build a believable world for the characters to evolve and form relationships in. Dafne

Keen in particular, only 11 years old, delivers an outstanding portrayal of the enigmatic Laura, a child whose relationship to Wolverine is kept under wraps and teased out with near perfect pace and rhythm.

The quality of Logan’s writing and plot development is, bar none, the best work done in the superhero genre to date. While Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War and Guardians of the Galaxy deliver fun, fast-paced action and attempt to add depth to their characters, Logan is a harrowing two-and-a-half-hour journey into what it means to develop a family and deal with loss. The relatively smaller focus of the film—no planets are about to be destroyed, nor governments toppled—grounds the story firmly in a world that, despite its fantasy, is intensely human and understandable. The death of one character, by consequence, means more than any alien invasion or annihilation of a city in your run-of-the-mill superhero blockbuster. The writing team, headed by Scott Frank, James Mangold, and Michael Green, does a superb job of making each character unique and encouraging the audience.

Logan’s true strength lies in embracing what makes it unique.

The R-rating allows every scene—from the visceral brawls to the quietest moments—to gain an extra edge. Whereas all other films in the franchise (excluding Deadpool) constantly had to pull punches in storytelling and action sequences, Logan is free to tell the story of discrimination, brutality, and loss that its characters deserve. The writers, unfettered by concerns of appealing to the widest audience possible, were allowed to delve into what it means to accept one’s mortality and the hardships involved

in reckoning with one’s past. The fight choreography is superb, and action scenes often do just as much to characterize Wolverine and company as their dialogue. Whereas the Wolverine movies of the past always felt like one foot was held over the brake, Logan steps on the gas without a second thought.

This is not to say the movie is without its faults. Occasionally, the R-rating that frees most of the movie is a bit too liberating, in a “did we really need to see that metal claw go through all of their heads?” kind of way. Although cutting ties with the rest of the X-Men franchise was a smart move, it leaves much to be explained, and exposition is occasionally told rather than shown. The writers are able to cover it well, but certain characters seem to have been created for the express purpose of introducing new concepts and building the world around them.

However, at the end of the day, between the fluidity of the action and the meticulous attention to detail of the plot, such flaws are easily forgiven.

Most importantly, Logan is a superhero movie without superheroes. Captain America is not insisting on the righteousness of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Tony Stark doesn’t drop a clever quip every other line. The movie accepts that it isn’t made for some (those who considered X:Men Apocalypse a franchise high-point may want to consider skipping this most recent installment) but delivers a rare treat to those it is catered toward: a story that embraces its niche position in both its own cinematic universe and in our movie theatres, pandering to no one. Logan isn’t afraid to treat its characters like humans—humans who are fallible and ultimately willing to change.

15

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

By Emily Jaster

Memoryscapes - Blurry Lines III is the third and final installment of a series of increasingly abstracted landscapes—but at first glance, these paintings don’t look like landscapes at all.

Rather than displaying the appearance of a classically rendered landscape, each work captures precisely how artist Steve Alderton felt at a particular place and time.

Memories are not static aspects of the mind; in contrast, they are dynamic echoes of the past that grow and change with their owner. Likewise, Alderton’s Memoryscapes changes dramatically over the course of the three installments, dropping image details until only the core essence of the artist’s emotional memory remains. Blurry Lines I consists of Expressionist paintings of nature. Broad and visible brush strokes mold pastel blue, purple, and green acrylic paint into foggy, roughly outlined portrayals of trees, ponds, and skylines. The paintings in Blurry Lines II are still clearly landscapes, but more simplistic than the first series. The landscapes in this series are constructed of bold blocks of solid or slightly mottled color, and outlines are no longer present.

In the third installment of Blurry Lines, all visual realism has faded away, leaving emotion to shine in its full authenticity. The blocks of color that previously formed landscapes now stand abstractly on their own, allowing basic color and form to convey the emotion of memory. Alderton explained that as he paints, he recalls growing up in the midwest: a land full of farms that appear as patchwork colors when viewed from airplanes above.

Even so, the paintings lack the clear-cut edges of farmland. The rough, blurred edges of the color blocks contrast structure with messiness—mirroring the disorder that exists within the regulated city of Washington, D.C. Alderton has lived and worked in a studio on Capitol Hill for over 20 years, and surmises that the city’s ordered chaos has impacted his artwork in this way.

LEISURE

Steve Alderton Captures the Blurred Emotions of Memory “Blurry Lines III No. 5” by Steve Alderton Alderton has worked with a paintbrush for the majority of his two decade long career as an artist, but he challenged himself to paint with sponge rollers to create the textured blocks of Blurry Lines III. The rollers came in different sizes and textures, such that each applied paint in unique and often unexpected ways. “For an artist, it’s all about the surprise,” Alderton said. Once, the deep holes of a sponge roller created a variation of light and dark paint within a block of color—a beautiful, spontaneous effect that Alderton could not purposefully recreate.

Each painting is not merely a unique season, but a specific day and time. To portray a February afternoon, Alderton painted blocks of purple, white, and black, like a hazy winter sky over snow and shining asphalt. The image is blurred, but the emotion is precise. “I’ve never met a purple I didn’t like,” Alderton said with a smile.

Once Alderton begins to lay paint on canvas, the practice becomes an emotional release: a mix of memories and the present moment. For this reason, an after-the-fact decision to change a single aspect of the painting requires Alderton to completely cover the old painting with a new one, for the time and emotion have since changed. Alderton pointed to the beauty of this process with the Italian word pentimento, which means the painting below a painting. Layer upon layer of paint coat the surface of each panel, forming a thick accumulation of texture over canvases that Alderon may have built nearly 20 years ago, long before the paintings were inspired. In this way, each painting of memory is laden with memories of its own from the history that each canvas has experienced. Older versions of each piece are visible at the edges of the canvas and between color blocks, building depth and demonstrating how old memories permeate daily life.

“Blurry Lines III No. 12” by Steve Alderton

Courtesy of Tuchstone Gallery Blurry Lines III invites audiences to develop their own interpretations of each piece, embarking on a personal emotional journey. “I’ve forged my own language,” said Alderton in explaining how the paintings speak for themselves. None of the paintings have titles, enabling viewers to contemplate meaning independent from exterior direction. “When I’m working on a painting, it’s mine,” said Alderton. “When I’m done with it, it’s yours.”

For Alderton, the presentation of a series is as much an artform as the act of painting. The order of the paintings determines how audiences perceive the underlying story, one that Alderton may not discover himself until he sets out to select an order. In the Touchstone Gallery, Blurry Lines III grows steadily darker as the paintings progress, opening with a bright portrayal of spring, and transitioning to darker representations of rainy summer days. The final painting, however, is an ode to summer, a collection of bright blue and purple hues. With this organization, Alderton realized that the series might have a spiritual symbolism for life, death, and rebirth, or for enduring hope after darker times.

As a whole, the Memoryscapes - Blurry Lines collection is a mirror of life, from the experience of vivid landscapes to the emotional footprints of lifelong memories. Alderton has lived on Capitol Hill since the 1980s, but he continues to carry fond memories of his hometown in Wisconsin. Likewise, his work reflects memories in the way that Alderton felt them in the moment of painting: a unification of past and present experience. During the painting process, he enters a sort of “trance,” as Alderton called it, or complete immersion into the artistic process. The abstract paintings capture the very essence of memory and emotion, and in this way, they are even more realistic than photographs.

Photos Courtesy of Tuchstone Gallery

Alli Kaufman