Spartans, ROTC distribute food
By Anahi Herrera Villanueva STAFF WRITER
Volunteers from all over the Bay Area have come to San José State’s Provident Credit Union Event Center to volunteer and remember the 9/11 tragedy on Wednesday.
Bay Area Meal Pack for 9/11 Day is an event hosted by 9/11 family members and partners with Americorps, according to the 9/11 Meal Pack website.
More than 800 volunteers pack 250,000 meals for people facing food insecurities, according to the SJSU Events Calendar.
The day, 9/11, is when Americans remember the tragic events that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001.
In New York City a group of terrorists by the name of al-Qaeda hijacked 4 commercial planes and 2 of those planes crashed into the Twin Towers. The third plane crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia and the
plane crashed into an empty field in Pennsylvania, according to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.
David Paine and Jay Winuk established the nonprofit event in 2002 after Winuk’s younger brother died while responding to the terrorist attacks on Sep. 11, 2001, according to the 9/11 Day website.
Richard Wald, a board member of 9/11 Day, said he hopes that the organization will be in 25 cities by the 25th Anniversary. Currently, the event is in 21 cities with 30,000 volunteers, according to the same 9/11 Meal Pack website.
“This is our first year in San José (and) based on this turnout, we are going to be here for many many years,” Wald said.
For San José, all the meals packaged will be donated to Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, according to the 9/11 Day website.
“(The food is) not being shipped out, (it’s) staying here and in every city,” Wald
said. “It’s staying in their local area which I just think is so powerful.”
Selina Salvador-Lopez, a sophomore social work student, was among those students who attended this event.
“I chose to come out today
focus is to serve eastern Palo Alto and the Silicon Valley area in community events and support the community as much as possible.
AmeriCorps is a local, state and national network service program that works with Americans to meet
Frank Belcastro, captain of the University Police Department, Captain said he recounted his experience on 9/11 as a commanding officer of a Borough task force in New York.
“It was a horrendous day, I will never forget the
It was a horrendous day, I will never forget the uncommon valor of the first responders who gave their lives saving other ... I need you to remember that those sacrifices continue to this day.
because I enjoy volunteering in general,” Salvador-Lopez said. “I feel this was a great opportunity to connect with the San José community just because I am not from here.”
Christian Rodriguez, an Americorps and City Year member in the Bay Area, said these organizations’
their community needs in areas such as education, environment, public safety, health and homeland security.
AmeriCorps also collaborated with nonprofits, public agencies and community organizations, according to the AmeriCorps website.
City Year is a national service program that works to unite young adults from all sorts of backgrounds to work in community service events.
City Year strives to help young people develop skills such as problem-solving, leadership and more active citizens, according to the City Year website.
“(Volunteers) are packing up meals for a total of (around) 8 million meals nationwide so we are just helping facilitate that,” Rodriguez said. “They are ready-to-go meals that include vegetables, lentils, rice, and vitamin packets.”
uncommon valor of the first responders who gave their lives saving others,” Belcastro said. “I need you to remember that those sacrifices continue to this day.”
Mayor Matt Mahan discussed two things that came out of the tragic events of 9/11 that he has carried since the said tragedy.
“Number one, there was a beautiful period of unity that we can continue to work to recapture. We transcended party lines, we were no longer Democrats, Republicans, urban, rural, race, gender or religion…” Mahan said. “Second, and you are all a part of (this), is the number of people that were inspired to engage in service of some form.”
Members from corporations such as the Technology Credit Union and the Bridge Bank division of Western Alliance Banks were present at this event.
Fred Voss, senior
managing director from the Bridge Bank division of Western Alliance Banks talked about the company's value and its alignment to this event.
“Western Alliance Bank tries to be very involved in the community and we are very proud that it is part of our heritage so this was a natural day for us,” Voss said. With the turnout Richard Wald mentioned, Tech CU hopes the event continues each year in the Bay Area. Bay Area 9/11 Meal Pack was able to meet its goal of packaging 250,000 meal packs and contributing to the total amount of 8,600,000 meals nationwide, according to Wald.
Cathy Casa, assistant vice president from Tech CU and a volunteer at this event, talked about what this opportunity means to her team present.
“This is our first event for Technology Credit Union and 9/11 day and we are very excited. I am just hoping we can continue to participate in this event and support this organization and its initiatives,” said Casa.
SJSU President Cynthia Teniente-Matson spoke on the impact this event will have as a whole.
“Seeing all of you here today fill the event center is proof that together we can move mountains and every good deed no matter how small has the potential to change lives and leave a positive impact. Thank you for being here today,” Teniente-Matson said.
ANAHI HERRERA VILLANUEVA| SPARTAN DAILY
Members of the SJSU's Air Force ROTC aid the community in distributing substantial food to the Sacred Harvest of Silicon Valley on the anniversry of Sept. 11.
Frank Belcastro Captain of University Police Department
ANAHI HERRERA VILLANUEVA | SPARTAN DAILY
SJSU Dance Team welcomes volunteers with a performance on stage to kick off event.
fourth
SJ community honors 9/11 with service
#1: San José State Dance Team and Sammy the Spartan greet volunteers for the Bay Area Meal Pack for 9/11
#2: Volunteers from Western Alliance divvy up lentils to be sent to Second Harvest of Silicon Valley.
#3: Rows of rice and lentils are stacked at different stations ready to be packed and then distributed.
#4: Richard Wald (left), board member of the 9/11 meal pack event and AmeriCorps volunteer sealing up a box with
Spartan speakers return to SJSU
By Anfisa Pitchkhadze STAFF WRITER
San José State Student Involvement hosted the first Spartan Speaker Series event of the year on Sept. 10 at the Student Union Ballroom on campus.
The Spartan Speaker Series invites notable individuals such as authors, critics, and activists to discuss issues that have an effect on the students at SJSU, according to SJSU Student Involvement.
The event featured the author of the novel, “The Sympathizer” and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, Viet Thanh Nguyen, who spoke about his time growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in the Bay Area.
Nguyen’s talk centered around the themes of memory, identity and the lingering effects of war.
“So much of my work is actually really concerned with memory and forgetting,” Nguyen said. “Both in my own life, my family’s lives,
and the lives of the United States and Americans.”
He recounted how his parents, like many other Vietnamese refugees, opened a grocery store in a downtown area that few others wanted to invest in at the time.
“This is a time when most people did not want to come downtown, and it was Vietnamese refugees who came in because they had no choice but to open up businesses,” Nguyen said.
As he was living in San José for a while, Nguyen began to notice the discrimination his people faced in the town.
“You could walk the blocks in downtown San José, and you would never be able to avoid Vietnamese businesses,” Nguyen said.
“So that was really important for me to grow up in this kind of Vietnamese refugee community.”
He recalled a time where his family’s grocery was shot on Christmas Eve. Nguyen began to reflect back on the
moment of the challenges of being Vietnamese in the Bay Area.
Among the attendees at the event was Sheila Phong,
Vietnam War,” Phong said.
In Nguyen’s discussion, she learned about the experiences of Nguyen’s time growing up as a Vietnamese.
Furthermore, as an Asian American, Nguyen understood that to be an Asian American in American society or anywhere.
San José has been a home to me for a long time
Viet Thanh Nguyen Novelist
“My identity was shaped by (the Vietnamese) community, by the fact that I was growing up in a population of people who had just left Vietnam and were deeply traumatized by the experience,” Nguyen said.
As Nguyen spoke about his experiences, he recalled that the Vietnamese people felt a sense of loss and anger.
“People were still fighting the war in their minds. They were still finding the war in the community. I could go to any kind of community event like death,” Nguyen said.
junior business major , who found Nguyen’s insights both moving and timely.
“I came to this event because I wanted to hear from someone who not only shares my heritage but also understands the struggles my family went through after the
San José now sees a large growing number of the Vietnamese community decades later.
According to CBS News, San José has a population of 160,000 members of the community and is the largest population of any city that is not in Vietnam.
“You can’t separate it from the ways that racial formations, capitalists and colonization have impacted all these different groups,” Nguyen said.
As an award winning author, Nguyen hopes for other refugees like him to have their voices heard in telling their stories through writing.
He said refugees don’t get to speak about their story and are spoken for by other people like journalists.
“I could write stories about people who were like my parents,” Nguyen said. “I wanted to make this country, the United States, more welcoming, more inclusive of people like me.”
Nguyen said he hopes for change and sees that refugees like him can make an impact on their story for other individuals to understand or even relate to.
Phong said that learning history like this isn’t just like learning history from books.
“Hearing someone like (Nguyen) speak about his personal connection to the war and its impact on Vietnamese Americans makes it so much more real and urgent,” Phong said He ended off his talk with making a point that history may either be forgotten, or we never knew it in the first place to forget it.
For Nguyen, his return to San José was not just a professional engagement but an emotional homecoming.
“San José has been home to me for a long time,” Nguyen said.
Fred again.. raises roof on house music
By Charity Spicer STAFF WRITER
Fred again.. takes listeners “ten days” through life in the form of 20 tracks.
Under the stage name Fred again.., British producer Frederick Gibson released his fourth studio album “ten days” on September 6 full of refreshing deep house tracks on love and loss in the DJ’s life.
Fred again.. released “ten days” after completing the album trilogy “After Life”, from the previous albums released from 2020 to 2022.
As electronic music has become more mainstream over the past ten years, the scene of house music has continued to flourish among many other electronic dance music (EDM) subgenres.
House music was born in the ’70s in warehouse venues of Chicago, Detroit and New York City, according to Carnegie Hall’s website.
It primarily stemmed from the Black gay club scene and always has had a diverse audience, according to the same website.
Fred again.. is considered one of the fastest-growing DJs in the house music industry, as he was nominated for the “Best New Artist” Grammy by
The Recording Academy in November 2023. I first discovered Fred again.. in 2022 after watching his captivating Boiler Room set and listening to his album “USB.” The fact that he was collaborating with some of my favorite rappers such as Future and Baby Keem attracted me to his discography.
As I’ve dove deeper into the live EDM scene more recently, Fred again.. has remained in rotation and is one of the
multiple different artists, such as “glow”.
In comparison to his 2022 album “USB” which contains hard basslines and features rappers, this album has psychedelic melodies and a lo-fi ambiance.
“USB” is an EP released in June 2022 with hardcore electronic hits like “Turn On The Lights” and “Rumble” featuring a wide range of popular rappers and electronic producers.
The second track on the
Fred again.. isn’t afraid to break out of this tranquil sound and explore harder beats that appeal to rave audiences in tracks such as ‘ten’ and ‘places to be.’
most respected DJs in my top favorites. His undeniable musicianship combined with mind-spinning production is truly what makes him one of the best in the game, in my opinion.
Featured on the album are 20 songs with ten of them labeled by numbers and containing ambient sounds within seconds.
While the other ten tracks are longer with features from
album, “adore u,” features Obongjayar invites me into the feelings of romance and literal adoration of this love in his life.
The 14th track, “i saw you”, discusses the overwhelming feelings of love and heartbreak.
With the melancholy sonics of the instrumental, the vocals croon, “You're further away now than you used to be / But, darling, I saw you and you saw me.”
The lyrics bring an evocative pain of the growing distance between his relationship.
Fred again.. isn’t afraid to break out of this tranquil sound and explore harder beats that appeal to rave audiences in tracks such as “ten” and “places to be.”
Towards the end of “ten days,” Fred again.. explores
the meaning of the peace after tumultuous moments in “glow” featuring other DJs such as Duskus, Four Tet, Joy Anonymous and Skrillex.
The 18th track “peace u need” also features production assistance from Joy Anonymous.
The track “glow” reunites Fred with Four Tet and Skrillex who collaborated on his “USB” hit single “Baby again..” and is a complete 360 of sound from their usual style.
With a mixture of sounds in the likeness, Fred again.. listeners are invited into this atmospheric tranquil space that the DJ has created.
Typically, most fans only hear this style of music from Fred again.. in his live performances where he mixes beats in front of his audience, as seen on his
famous Boiler Room set from London in 2022.
However, with “ten days”, Fred again.. brings this experience to your earbuds on demand. Overall, I found “ten days” to be an invigorating and stimulating experience from my point of view and it doesn’t just provide the peaceful vibes of the sonics but also meaning through poetic lyrics.
Whether you’re going through the rush of falling in love or heartbreak or simply need a breath of fresh air sonically, “ten days” will be a treat for any fan of electronic music.
Memes should be in art history
Saturn Williams STAFF WRITER
When John Chadwick was rigging the model of a baby doll to the sporadic dancing animations programmed by Robert Lurye at Unreal Pictures Inc. in 1996, the concept of the ww meme was just beginning to be formally described.
Almost three decades later, the resulting “Dancing Baby” animation remains synonymous with the birth of meme culture online.
Memes have evolved a long way, developing from niche references on archived message boards to facets of culture baked into the digital media landscape.
Seeing the effects of the “brat” meme in the public zeitgeist today exemplifies how all-encompassing this form of expression has become.
Spawned from the release of Charli xcx’s sixth studio album, “brat”, the lowresolution Arial text stretched over a lime green background swept the internet.
Not only has it been shared by countless individual users across social media platforms, it has been used in numerous advertising campaigns wholly unrelated to the British pop singer.
Following Charli xcx’s post on X (formerly Twitter) proclaiming “Kamala IS brat,”
the official U.S. presidential campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris also adopted the meme on its Kamala HQ page.
Given the scope of influence, cultural impact and human creativity, it’s time that memes are recognized as the legitimate form of contemporary art they are.
Richard Dawkins first described “meme” in his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene”, as a particular iconography and behavior that is replicated, iterated on and widely spread.
Further than just being spread, the content of a meme is something that is mutated and impacted by creative input.
Memetics is the study of memes as a unit of culture, a practice that precedes the existence of media online and with applications that extend far beyond an Instagram feed, according to a journal article by Francis Heylighen and Klaas Chielens for the Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science.
Michael Godwin was one of the first to apply Dawkins’ framework to certain media shared on the internet in a 1994 Wired article.
In an increasingly fragmented, contemporary internet space fueled by passive discovery, memes are more important and necessary than ever in facilitating cultural communication across various communities.
Looking at the history of memes online, one can draw parallels between the evolution of the internet phenomena and that
of various historical art movements.
The ‘90s represented the first experimentations with the art form as internet access was becoming available to general populations in the U.S. via the creation of the World Wide Web.
In this era, memes were spread through email and across early online forums, with the forerunner “Dancing Baby” animation shared throughout CompuServe forums before escaping onto other platforms.
If this period was similar to an Ancient Classical era of digital memetics, the 2000s were the Renaissance.
Internet use continued to explode as Web 2.0 hit the scene, expanding the
possibilities of user-generated content and with it the proliferation of memes.
YouTube was created in 2005, catapulting viral videos and animations to the forefront of the conversation such as the “Numa Numa Dance” and “Chocolate Rain.”
Videos weren’t the only big players in the meme arena though as image macros, humorous images with large superimposed text, were rampant on imageboard websites such as 4chan.
Launched in 2003, 4chan hosts a variety of boards dedicated to specific topics that users can contribute to without registration.
The website is credited with the popularization of many early internet memes.
One of the most prominent of these were “lolcats”, images of cats overlaid with text often containing purposefully misused grammar.
As these new technologies and techniques emerged, they greatly iterated on the concepts laid out by Dawkins’ classical meme and did so with earnestness, representing the hopeful optimism of the fledgling internet.
However, as online spaces have been increasingly privatized and corporatized, memes have responded by becoming increasingly abstract and surrealist.
Similar to how the Dada and Pop Art movements rejected the mainstream
sensibilities of capitalism and supplanted them with avantgarde irony, the modern meme landscape seems to sit in the same place.
The community r/SurrealMemes on Reddit contains 898,000 members, ranking in the top 1% of Reddit communities by size.
After a very demure, very mindful “brat” summer, it feels pertinent to reexamine these pivotal ways memes have shaped culture the internet.
Social media does not represent reality
Jackson Lindstrom STAFF WRITER
Have you ever seen a picture of someone on social media who’s totally shredded with six-pack abs and thought to yourself, “Gee, I wish my body looked like that!”?
Comparing yourself to others – especially on social media – might lead to a deterioration in your mental health from feelings of inadequacy.
But physical fitness is just one example of this lie that social media weaves.
You might be sad because you see people posting their happiest moments online, but you don’t know if they really are happy underneath.
Social media is not always an accurate representation of a person’s life, so you shouldn’t treat it as such, because you never truly know what a person is going through.
For example, when you scroll through Instagram, and see somebody with massive arms and a chest that would make yours look sad, there’s a
very good chance that person is using steroids. Steroids are known to have extremely undesirable side effects such as off-the-charts
Social media is not always an accurate representation of a person’s life, so you shouldn’t treat it as such, because you never truly know what a person is going through.
testosterone, heart enlargement and even erectile dysfunction for males, all for the sake of bigger muscles, according to a Frontiers review article.
Instead of comparing yourself to some random person on social media who could be taking decades off their life to look good in their 20s and 30s by taking steroids, maybe try comparing yourself to the person you strive to be in the future.
Under the unlikely circumstance they are not using steroids and they still have a great physique, social
media fitness posts are part of what is likely the top 1% of the top 1% of social media users.
That’s like comparing the first time you cooked spaghetti to Gordon Ramsey’s finest dish.
Posts on social media from internet influencers are made for a reason; to get views and likes.
People wouldn’t post something if they weren’t confident in their abilities in that particular skill.
If someone is posting a video of themselves playing a difficult piano piece, they’re posting it with the goal of seeing people watch their performance because they know it’s what they’re good at, and it’s what will get them likes.
Maybe you saw someone you know post a picture of themselves on social media with their six-pack abs, and you see the likes and attention they’re getting and you decide you want the same thing.
If you think that being lean means being healthy, here’s the ugly truth you may not know. Being lean enough to have visible abs is not sustainable year-round.
This is especially true for females because they naturally carry more body fat, according to the National Library of Medicine.
This is important to know because females are much more likely to compare their facial structure and body shape to others in comparison to men, according to a Marquette University study.
Lower body fat percentages are also sometimes associated with having privilege, according to an International Journal of Obesity review.
People who store more fat may be at a disadvantage,
which means they may try to lose their weight and end up comparing themselves to something unachievable.
To be clear, being lean doesn’t make you unhealthy as it’s very healthy, but there is a certain point where you can go too far and get too lean.
A study following a drugfree female bodybuilder before and after her competition did not return to her normal menstrual cycle until 71 weeks after her bodybuilding competition, according to a study from the National Library of Medicine.
In bodybuilding shows, the goal is to lose as much fat as possible but this comes at a great cost.
So when you see someone on social media post themselves in a position you’d like to be in yourself, think about what they had to do to get there.
Ask yourself, “Would I really want to go through all of what they did just for that?”
If you don’t want to spend 10 years playing guitar so you can look good at parties, then don’t. You can choose to be happy with that decision.
When you see amazing guitar players on social media, you’re seeing the top 1% of guitar players and they get those views because they’re extremely talented.
Be mindful of what people are posting when you are using social media, and most importantly, be kind to yourself.
GRAPHIC BY KAYA HENKES-POWER
GRAPHIC BY JACKSON LINDSTROM
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