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(11/13/14 1:15pm)
Last Sunday, I walked into the editorial office a few minutes before 5 p.m., as I’ve done most Sundays for the past two years, eager to discuss whatever it was we had decided to editorialize on that week. But instead of being greeted by the rest of the editorial staff, I found an empty and dark office. Someone — not even another editor — was working in the back room. I asked if she had heard anything about a rescheduled meeting and she said she hadn’t. But she had come to the office to do work with another editor, which suggested maybe there had been a change. When my fellow editor showed up and saw me sitting confused in the office, she started laughing, realizing what had happened. The meeting had been pushed until later in the evening so that we all could go to President Liebowitz’s forum on social life. And of course, the Editor-in-Chief had made the decision over email, forgetting that for seven days I was cut off of the Internet entirely.
Constant connectivity is something we all take for granted. Professors make last minute changes to assignments by emailing the class. When an unknown concept comes up on a homework assignment, we assume the answer is only a few seconds of Googling away. Most of these conveniences are exactly that — convenient. But sometimes it seems we are too connected. We spend hours scrolling through Twitter instead of writing that next paper on Shakespeare and we stress over finding that perfect angle for the next selfie we’re going to send out to 1000 of our closest friends. This is why I decided to unplug for an entire week. No internet at all and no phone on me all day to answer the question: is it even possible to unplug in today’s hyper-connected age?
When my editors and I first came up with this idea, I have to say I was a bit worried. The Internet and technology are huge parts of my life. My first concern was social. So many plans are made spur of the moment through text message; surely if I don’t have my phone on me, I’ll never see my friends again. And beyond the initial comments of ‘wow, I don’t think I could ever leave the Internet’, some of my friends had pretty serious concerns about my project. One of my friends insisted that I carry my phone on me on mute. If something horrible were to happen, he warned, no one would be able to get a hold of me and ‘the whole world would fall apart.’
On the first day of my tech fast, I spoke with Professor of Psychology Barbara Hofer, who is currently teaching a class titled ‘Psychology and Emerging Technologies’ where she and her students examine the ways the proliferation of technology has affected our lives. She explained that this anxiety about being disconnected from the internet is common among college-age individuals.
“The first year I taught this class, in 2011, there was a group of students who said ‘we want to find out what happens when students have to stay off Facebook,’” she said. “They were going to randomly assign students conditions: there was a group that could stay on Facebook and there was a group that had to stay off Facebook from Friday through Monday … they had a prediction of such dire distress that I actually had to get Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval to do the study because you can’t predict this level of distress and not get approval.” However, the study found that, given the opportunity to disconnect from Facebook, students responded in the complete opposite way and in fact benefited from being offline.
“The people who stayed off Facebook for a few days showed less of every single one of the distress measures,” Hofer said. “In many ways they were grateful for the opportunity and excuse to avoid using it for a few days.”
Similarly, after only the first few days of being away from the Internet, I could tell my world wasn’t going to end.
Email was consistently the hardest part of the fast. I told my professors that I wouldn’t be receiving emails and had an automated message set up, informing anyone who tried to email me what I was doing and why I wouldn’t receive their message for a week. I had one professor, for whom I am a TA, print out an email exchange with the TAs’ planning help sessions and put it in my mailbox so I’d be in the loop. But still, I was tempted to check my email. Especially during the first day of my fast, I found that, whenever I opened my computer, I reflexively clicked on the Google Chrome item without a second thought.
After a week away from my email, I had 105 unread messages in my ‘primary’ inbox on Gmail (thanks, Google filters!). And of those emails, maybe 20 or 30 of them were consequential and not a single one was critically important. That was one of the more eye-opening parts of this fast for me: that most of the emails we feel so urged to read are not all that important. With email on our smartphones, it’s expected that communication is immediate and that everyone is reachable at any hour of the day. Before I disconnected, I know when I’d be lying in bed trying to go to sleep and hear my phone buzz with an email, I’d roll over and check it because it felt so urgent. But once I was forced to ignore all my emails, I realized I have control over things like that and that 10:48 p.m. email from Bernie Sanders’ email list can probably wait until the morning.
Productivity was another change. The internet has a tendency to be an enormous time sink for people. How many times have you heard someone complain about not having free time, but then in the same breath talk about the two hours they wasted on Facebook? Engagement with social media is no longer talked about as free time; it’s started to feel like an obligation for people. No longer do we sit down and focus our attention on one single assignment for a long period of time. Now it’s five minutes of reading, then respond to a text, then read another paragraph, then jump on Facebook for 45 minutes, but wait, just one more Buzzfeed list, and then…
With the Internet off, it quickly became easier to focus on my work. That isn’t to say I didn’t waste time. Procrastination isn’t new and unique to the Internet. But during my week offline, procrastination meant reading a book that wasn’t for class, or spending an extra hour over lunch with friends.
A common criticism you often hear about the so-called ‘Internet generation’ is that we don’t know how to socialize. We are so caught up in being online, that we can’t form meaningful relationships anymore without the mediation of a glowing screen. Of course, often what we are doing online is socializing, but it’s a different form of socializing. I didn’t do this fast with Luddite aspirations of ending the Internet, and I definitely reject the notion that our generation doesn’t know how to connect with other people. But I think there’s something to be said about the quality of attention we give people face to face.
(11/12/14 7:19pm)
Last year, I wrote a column urging students and the public in general to pay more attention to the news surrounding the large trove of information Edward Snowden leaked to The Guardian. The leaks detailed a vast network of domestic and international spying put in place by the US government. In the year since, more and more has been revealed about what the NSA has done and yet little has changed with our legislation to limit spying on US citizens.
And unfortunately, it doesn’t look like much will change soon. Both the Senate and the House have tossed around amendments to the USA Freedom Act that would supposedly limit the NSA’s ability to collect phone data from US citizens. However, the Senate’s amendment has received mixed support from civil liberties groups. This past September, a group of signatories including Daniel Ellsberg — the whistleblower who exposed the Pentagon Papers — released a letter condemning the amendment, warning that it will cement the NSA’s ability to abuse power, not limit it.
I still feel that the Snowden leaks and NSA spying have not received the attention they deserve. We have large amounts of evidence that the US government has committed gross violations of our civil rights and yet, discussions and warnings about these violations are often still dismissed as crazy conspiracy theories. I think a big reason we have trouble getting upset about these issues is that it’s not easy to point the finger at a single culprit or outline a way to solve the problem.
An argument I often hear brought up in discussions about the NSA and domestic spying is ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear.’ Meant not as support for the NSA as much as a reason not to get upset about what they’re doing, the argument claims that the average US citizen doesn’t need to worry about the government reading their emails and listening to their phone calls because their online presence doesn’t involve things like threats to the government and plans for making bombs. “The NSA is fighting terrorism,” people tell me. “Not checking up on what porn you watch.”
This argument scares me. First and foremost, contained in the information leaked by Snowden is plenty of evidence that the spying goes beyond ‘fighting terrorism.’ In July, The Intercept, an investigative group co-founded by Glenn Greenwald, released a list of American citizens targeted by the NSA despite no evidence that they were threats to national security. Unfortunately, the only real connection between the five individuals is that they are of Muslim heritage. And in a more bizarre example of abuse of power, last summer the Snowden documents revealed ‘LOVEINT’, a series of instances where NSA employees used their access to the group’s surveillance program to gain information on love interests.
The other problem with the ‘nothing to hide’ argument is that everyone has something to hide. I don’t mean that the average US citizen has on their computer detailed plans for their involvement in ISIS. What I mean is that everyone has a right to a private life and private correspondence — especially private from the eyes of the government. We’ve all said things online or through text message — whether it be an innocent joke or an explicit picture exchanged between two consenting adults or something else — that maybe won’t make us a government target now, but with the NSA surveillance in place, who’s to say that someone in the government who disagrees with us won’t dig these things up and use them against us if we were to run for office or rise to some other position of power.
I recognize that it’s outlandish to compare what the US government and the NSA are doing to past examples of dictatorships and other governments that have committed serious human rights violations and acts of oppression. I’m not saying that it’s become the American KGB or that we’ve lost all sense of human rights. However, the problem is that this infrastructure exists at all and that it has been used against innocent US citizens even once. Maybe you don’t have anything to hide today, but what’s to say that something you say now won’t be used against you in the future if circumstances are different.
The Internet is possibly the most powerful tool created by humankind. The instantaneous access to information and communication around the globe has forever changed the way we interact with each other and the world. However, this power also means that it has unbelievable potential for abuse. Just look at places like North Korea or China where the government has severely (or entirely) restricted public access to the internet as a tool of oppression. We cannot passively accept what the NSA is doing as an inevitable reality of the internet just because we ‘have nothing to hide.’ This issue goes beyond the United States of America, too. As citizens of the world, we have to take back the Internet as a tool for information and free speech for all.
Artwork by JENA RITCHEY
(04/16/14 8:36pm)
Regardless of your scientific background, you’ve probably heard of the Big Bang. Approximately 13.7 billion years ago, all of the energy in the Universe was concentrated at a single point and then suddenly underwent a rapid expansion, sending matter, energy and the fabric of space and time itself out in all directions. The Big Bang is a heuristic concept; we have observed that everything in the universe is expanding away from us in all directions, and by running that idea in reverse, we hypothesize that everything must have started at a single point. It has proven to have incredible predictive power — the true test of any scientific concept — but there hasn’t been any direct observational evidence of the Big Bang and inflation. Or at least there wasn’t, until a team working on the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarizations (BICEP2) instrument released their findings on Mar. 17.
The team, led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and working at the South Pole, used BICEP2 to look for subtle changes in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB).
The CMB is radiation that was released when the universe was relatively young — only a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang — and is spread uniformly across the sky. It is the hallmark of the field of cosmology and allows physicists to study the very early universe. The team found patterns in the polarization of the CMB caused by gravitational waves in the early universe that were almost certainly amplified by a rapid rate of expansion. Polarization indicates the orientation of the electromagnetic waves; all radiation has a preferred direction of vibration. This phenomenon comes into play in our everyday world any time you wear polarized sunglasses: the glasses block light that is polarized in a certain direction and reduce glare.
On April 10, Robin Stebbins, the father of a Middlebury student and a physicist at NASA’s Gravitational Astrophysics Laboratory, came to the College to give a lecture on the BICEP2 discovery and give members of the College community some insight into its importance and the nature of gravitational waves.
“[The lecture] really helped to put this discovery into context for anyone who has been following the news, regardless of their scientific background,” said Assistant Professor of Physics Eilat Glikman, who is currently teaching a course on cosmology at the College.
“This is truly science at the margins,” Stebbins said at the start of his lecture. “This is a field that has been trying to make progress for over 50 years … Gravitational waves are to gravity what light is to electromagnetism, propagating changes in the field strength.”
Part of Einstein’s theory of relativity describes time and space not as separate concepts, but rather as a larger, interconnected concept called space-time. Gravity, in Einstein’s theory, results from a bending in space-time caused by the presence of matter and energy: the more matter and energy, the more space-time is bent. Gravitational waves are created when incredibly large masses are in motion, causing ripples in space-time that propagate just like ripples on the surface of a pond.
In his lecture, Stebbins spoke briefly about the nature of gravitational waves, and then went on to explain in incredible depth the experiments in place to attempt to detect these waves.
As gravitational waves propagate through the universe, they cause slight variations in the distances between objects. In essence, the waves are squeezing and stretching space-time. In the very early universe, before the CMB was released, gravitational waves strained space-time and created variations in the distribution of energy. Then, as the universe underwent rapid inflation, these fluctuations amplified and left a pattern in the polarization of the CMB when it was released.
There are many different ways that gravitational waves could, in theory, be detected, and Stebbins clearly outlined all methods currently being used and methods that are more theoretical and may be put into place in the future. One method involves observing a binary star system, two stars bound to each other by gravity. As these stars orbit one another, they will create gravitational waves that carry away energy from the system, causing changes in their orbits.
Another involves observing variations in pulses coming from pulsars. Pulsars are incredibly dense, rotating stars that emit radiation we can detect here on Earth. These pulses come with incredible regularity, making them some of the most accurate time-keepers in the universe. As gravitational waves propagate past a pulsar, their rate of pulsing will change, revealing the presence of the passing wave.
One of the terrestrial experiments outlined by Stebbins is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) located both in Washington and Louisiana. Interferometers split beams of light and send them down perpendicular paths. The light beams are then reflected and recombined and patterns of interference in the light can reveal slight changes in the length of the two arms. LIGO uses arms 4 kilometers in length and some of the smoothest mirrors ever designed and can detect changes in length down to one-thousandth the diameter of a proton. As gravitational waves pass through Earth, LIGO should, in theory, be able to measure the fractional changes in distance.
So far, we have only found indirect evidence of gravitational waves, such as the variations in binary star orbits and pulsar rotations. It is important to note that even BICEP2 did not directly observe gravitational waves. Rather, the pattern of polarization in the CMB is just a footprint left by these waves.
The BICEP2 results are the sort of discovery that takes the scientific community by storm. For decades, scientists have depended on and used the theory of the Big Bang and now we finally have direct evidence. Though the results still need to be verified by other teams, they are incredibly robust, with a 5 sigma detection, meaning a confidence level of 99.9999 percent. It is a testament to the power of science that we are able to look back to the earliest stages of the universe and describe what happened to create the universe we live in today.
“The day that the results were announced, I couldn’t help but think ‘science won today,’” Glikman said. “This is the sort of discovery that makes me proud of humanity.
(03/19/14 3:16pm)
The stories we tell ourselves about our own past are the result of hundreds of voices — both named and otherwise — coming together to paint a picture. Each voice has its own volume and each listener comes with their own biases, so these pictures of our past are just that: only pictures. As time marches on, the quieter or disenfranchised voices fall to the side, and it falls on our shoulders to seek out these stories in order to better understand the past.
On April 9, Middlebury students will put on “Voices of the People’s History of the United States,” reading passages from historian Howard Zinn’s book filled with letters and speeches by people intimately involved in the social movement history of the United States.
The event is co-produced by Assistant Professor of Sociology Jamie McCallum and Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater Dana Yeaton and is co-sponsored by the history, sociology, political science and English departments and The Oratory Society. It will open with a lecture by Francis Fox Piven, world-renowned sociologist and political scientist of social movements and a longtime friend of Zinn.
“She was invoked by Glenn Beck a few years ago for developing a plan to try and undermine American capitalism,” McCallum said. “He did a multi-part series about it. But her “plot,” so to speak, was actually quite old by that time. She was well-known in the ’60s and ’70s and now she’s famous again, largely because of [Beck] in some weird way.”
While McCallum comes to this event from the stand point of a sociologist, Yeaton hopes to emphasize the performance aspect.
“Last spring, [McCallum] and I worked together on a reading of MLK’s ‘Letter from the Birmingham Jail,’” Yeaton said in an email. “So I was excited when he proposed a follow up project. And because of The Oratory Society, I knew we had students who could bring the speeches to life. These speeches are the definition of theatrical: each one was calibrated, not just to capture and hold attention, but to provoke its audience into action. And of course, it’s a live solo performance, which is always a high-wire act.”
Students will read different stories from the Howard Zinn piece in order to frame the history of American social activism in a way that uses the voices of those directly involved. The book was the primary source companion to Zinn’s book “The People’s History of the United States,” which was written in 1980 to tell the story of the United States through the voices of the common people, not the economic and political elites that often dominate textbooks.
“Because that book ends in the early 21st-century,” McCallum said, “we’ll find a few more things from the last ten years to fill in the gaps. We may add something from Occupy Wall Street such as a speech that was given there.” McCallum added that the program for the event has not been finalized, and that what will be added is not fully known yet.
“There was a student-ran course over J-term called the People’s History of Middlebury that culminated in a panel discussion with two ’70s radicals who were Middlebury students,” he said. “We may have something read from that as well.”
The show is not unique to Middlebury and has been performed countless times throughout the country.
“The reason this show is done so often is that these words — spoken well, with full understanding — have enormous intellectual and emotional power,” Yeaton said. “They rattle us. They remind us of our ideals and our hypocrisies. So I’m excited to be in the room and watch these words hit home.”
The hosts of the event hope, just as Zinn did, to give a voice to those who may not always be heard in a retelling of American history. While history books may focus on the romanticized stories of our Founding Fathers, they often glance over the blood and strife that went into this country’s founding and the fact that many of them were slave-owners. Stories about the struggles of labor movements and civil rights activism often become clouded by the political leanings of those telling them. This event aims to give voices to all involved. The book itself includes selections by people such as Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Malcolm X and Allen Ginsberg.
“It’s history from below,” McCallum said. “You could do a people’s sociology of the United States if you wanted to. The benefit of getting those voices is not just that they’re diverse, but people tell truths from their own perspectives and unless you’re getting all of them, you’re not getting the full story.”
The event will take place on April 9 from 7 – 10 p.m. in the Abernethy Room.
(01/23/14 3:37am)
In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., four a cappella groups, students from the J-Term course Move2Change and the newly formed student group, the Oratory Society came together this past Monday to put on the “MLK Oratorio: A Celebration in Song, Speech and Dance”. This was the sixteenth year since the show’s initial conception by the event’s founder and spiritual leader, Twilight Scholar Francois Clemmons. This year’s event was to serve as a passing of the torch, as Clemmons is now retired and the group who originally served as its driving force — the Spiritual Choir — has been disbanded.
The event opened with the song “Shed a Little Light”, performed by the Mamajamas. With the lights in Mead Chapel dimmed, the song began as the soloist, Nick Rehmus ’16, walked up the aisle carrying a single candle and singing quietly. As he reached the stage, the lights were raised on the rest of the group and the song truly began. “Shed a Little Light” proved to be a solid opening for the Oratorio, a bit quiet and reserved at moments but an image of the mood for the rest of the evening.
The strongest piece of the evening, for me, came next, titled “King in Dialogue”. This piece featured members of the Oratory Society, with Cheswayo Mphanza ’16 reading quotes from King. As Mphanza read a variety of quotes that epitomized some of the key points of King’s philosophies, the different members of the Oratory Society responded with quotes from other important figures throughout history, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X and Henry David Thoreau.
The different quotes chosen each were presented as a sort of commentary on King’s ideas, creating a back and forth between King and others who shared a similar path as King, though each with their own take and perspective. The juxtaposition of these quotes proved to be a thought provoking dialogue and really served to engage the audience in a thoughtful reflection on King and his beliefs, setting the stage for later performances.
Another relatively new student group, JusTalks, was also featured in the program. At the most recent J-Term JusTalks event, participating students were asked to respond anonymously to the question, “What does a better Middlebury look like to you?” These questions were collected and read aloud at the oratorio. Four members of the Oratory Society got on stage and first explained JusTalks and the question they had asked students. Then, students both on stage and throughout the balconies of Mead Chapel erupted in a percussive “stomp and clap” performance, alternating back and forth from the original question to the various responses received.
Many of the responses called for different forms of action on campus to further promote tolerance and equality here at the College. The students challenged complacency within the current system, urging the student body to remember that though progress has been made towards equal rights for all, institutionalized oppression is still very much so a reality. Though the initial question seemed, at surface level, unrelated to the theme of the evening, the answers read really tied it all together and proved to be a strong addition to the program.
After this, the a cappella group, the Bobolinks, performed their rendition of KT Tunstall’s “Suddenly I See”. While the performance was quite strong — I particularly enjoyed the soloist — the song itself seemed a bit misplaced among the other events of the night.
The centerpiece of the night’s program was a reading of King’s most famous speech, “I Have a Dream”. At first, two members of the Oratory Society stood on stage, reading King’s words. As the speech progressed, more and more speakers joined the group, jumping back and forth between speakers. I was impressed by the choreography of the voices — if I can call it that — as some parts stayed with a single speaker for many lines, while other parts of the speech jumped around more sporadically, the rhythm of these alternations matching the changing tone of the speech.
Two songs in the program, first one by the Paradiddles and another featuring all of the vocalists, were accompanied by dancers from the J-Term class Move2Change. These performances added an interesting and dynamic element to the night’s pieces and the student dancers did a great job of evoking the emotions of the evening through the dances, especially considering that not all of the students in the class were dance majors.
“The performance planning for the Move2Change class began with photographs from the civil rights movement,” said Aoife Duna ’16.5, a student in the class. “We then transformed these scenes of arrests, marches, and solidarity into a moving tableau set for the chapel space. The class has spent the past several weeks exploring creative activism and generating small pieces in class to speak of issues ranging from the post-racial myth to gender inequality.”
The strongest individual performance came from Debanjan Roychoudhury ’16 who read King’s speech. “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” This speech was the last speech King delivered, on April 3, 1968, the day before he was assassinated. Interestingly—or perhaps ominously—King’s speech focuses quite a bit on both threats to his life and a previous assassination attempt where he was stabbed and barely survived. Roychoudhury did a phenomenal job of capturing King’s energy in his speech and it was fitting to match the last speech of the night with King’s final speech.
As Roychoudhury spoke the final lines of “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” the vocalists — standing in the balconies — quietly began the first of two final songs. The growing sounds of their voices gave even more power to King’s words and these final two songs were the strongest songs of the night. By the end of “This Little Light of Mine,” even the audience had joined in on the clapping and singing, making for an emotional ending to an emotional night.
(01/16/14 4:54am)
On Thursday, Jan. 16 in Mead Chapel, The Sweet Remains — a folk-rock group led by Middlebury College alumni Rich Price ’99.5 and Greg Naughton ’90 — will perform in Mead Chapel. The concert in sponsored in part by both Brainerd and Wonnacott Commons, as well as the MCAB Small Concerts Initiative.
“We’ve been slowly working on bringing the band to campus since September,” said Winson Law ’16 of the Brainerd Commons Council in an email. “We’re also excited that this event is sponsored by three different campus organizations, and hope that the concert will help different people come together.”
The Middlebury Campus had a chance to chat with Naughton and to learn a little bit more about the band’s history and their plans for the upcoming Mead Chapel show.
Middlebury Campus (MC): When did you guys start playing music and how did the band first come together?
Greg Naughton (GN): Well— Rich and I are both Midd grads and although we weren’t there at same time, we became aware of each other in New York City for this reason, since we were both solo singer-songwriters at the time. I would go to his shows and he would come to mine. We became friendly then ultimately started writing, playing and touring together about ten years ago. But being fans of some of the old super groups, like CSN, we had this idea that we really wanted to hear a third harmony on the stuff we were writing. About 5 years ago, he called me from a co-bill tour he was doing with this fella, Brian Chartrand, he’d just met and said ‘I think I found the guy.’
So when their tour reached the east coast I met up with them in a hotel room in Rhode Island somewhere and we had a little jam session. I think we knew that day we had a new band...
MC: What are your biggest musical influences, both for you personally and for the band as a whole?
GN: We all bring different influences to the group, which I think gives it some dynamism it wouldn’t otherwise have if we all were coming from exactly the same place. I feed heavily on Motown and soul. Brian’s a fan of alternative bands and R&B. Rich loves some Paul Simon, James Taylor and John Mayer. But we kind of meet up on a mutual affection for the singer-songwriter super-groups of the 70s like CSN, The Eagles and such. And that’s easiest comparison to draw with our music, 3 part harmonies and singer-songwriter folk-rock.
MC: You say you and Rich were Midd students. What did you guys study here at Middlebury and did you play any music while you were students at the College?
GN: Yeah, I was very active musically at Midd in bands and the Dissipated Eight, which was great education for the harmony singing and arranging we do with the Sweet Remains. But I did a joint major in English and Theater. Rich and I were both really involved in Midd Theater (he did a joint History/Theater major). It’s a great theater department you’ve got there.
MC: What sort of music and touring experience do you and the other band members have outside of The Sweet Remains?
GN: As I said, Rich and I used to tour together promoting our solo stuff. He then got a deal with Geffen Records (for which we wrote a couple songs together) and then they put him out on the road really heavily for a couple years. Though we do solo and other projects on the side, these days Rich and I pretty much only tour with the Sweet Remains. Brian however is gigging pretty much every night of the year — if we’re not out, it’s his solo deal or other side projects.
MC: Tell me a bit about your writing process, do you pull from personal experience? Play off of music that influences you?
GN: I think all three of us have pretty different processes and different themes that we favor, though there’s definitely a common thread. For the most part the Sweet Remains is about having a good time hanging out with friends on the back porch, if you will. So there’s a good number of those types of songs. Most of the darker stuff gets saved for our solo projects. Most frequently one of us will bring something to the table once it’s mostly been written, then we’ll polish it up together and arrange harmonies and such, a process we call “RGB-ifying” it (Rich/Greg/Brian). But we also write some of the stuff together.
MC: What has been your toughest experience touring with The Sweet Remains?
GN: Geography. Brian lives in Phoenix, Rich in Vermont, and I’m in New York City, so we’re probably one of the most geographically challenged indie bands you’ll find. Every tour starts off with some hefty transportation bills that need to get paid. Otherwise the middle of the country is hard, it’s much easier to tour the Northeast and the West Coast. But in the middle the drives between cities can make it really difficult.
MC: If you could play with any musician in history, who would it be?
GN: For me it’s definitely Stevie Wonder (I got to meet him last year, and that was pretty cool for me…). Rich I’m pretty sure would say Paul Simon or maybe the Beatles. That would be awesome, I’d go to that show! And Brian, Steely Dan.
MC: Anything else you’d like to add about the upcoming show?
GN: We’re pretty psyched to be playing in Mead Chapel this time. We’ve played McCollough Social Space the last few times, which is great, but the chapel is such a unique space to hear music. Its got is own great vibe and acoustics. Also, we’ll be joined by a great backing band, including Midd grad Peter Day (of VTs own The Grift) on Bass, and Brad Wentworth on Percussion.
(10/30/13 10:49pm)
Two leather chairs and an array of lamps sat atop a faded, ornate rug on stage at the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts (MCA) Concert Hall. Concert Hall Technical Director Mark Christensen played his guitar quietly, contributing ethereal and jazzy music to start off the event. This set-up, a warm display reminiscent of a cozy, family living room, was a warm welcome for an audience that packed the seats of the Concert Hall for Cocoon, a night of story-telling hosted by the creators of MothUP and sponsored by the MCA and the Committee for the Arts.
Cocoon brought six storytellers on stage, three students, two community members and a professor, to tell stories all centered around the loose topic of metamorphosis, stories of growth and change that ranged from a humorous story about first jobs to a heartwarming story of love and loss.
“Change is one of the only true constants in life,” said Luke Greenway ’14.5, one of the three students in charge of the event and MC for the evening, during his introduction.
The first storyteller was Doug Anderson, the director of Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater. “I think we’re wrong about miracles,” he said as he walked up to the microphone.
Anderson’s story talked about his time teaching at Amherst College. With an extensive history in theater, he was brought on to teach in both the theatre and English literature departments. With a hint of bitterness in his voice, Anderson pointed out to the audience that he had never taken an English class in his life, a fact that Amherst College somehow overlooked.
The story proved to be a strong start for the evening. Anderson’s experience in theater definitely showed through and his style of storytelling quickly caught the attention of the audience.
However, though there were probably just as many non-students as students in the audience, it seemed a bit odd to lead with this story. Anderson’s story was far beyond my experience as a student and, after the show, I heard complaints about his comment that teaching at community college was the “worst thing that could happen to someone in academia.”
The second storyteller was Mariam Khan ’16. Khan spoke about her experiences during her year abroad, during which she spent time working at a hospital in Indian slums and DJ-ing at a night club in Thailand. Khan’s story spanned four countries and raised interesting questions about identity, specifically about Muslim identity in America. Her experiences were incredibly fascinating and the wide range of her story was captivating, though her delivery was quite fast, making her hard to understand at parts. Also, because there was so much going on, sometimes the separate parts felt disjointed.
“Though it may not look like it,” Khan started her story, wearing a headscarf and traditional Pakistani clothing, “I’m as American as they come.”
It was at this point in the show, after the first two stories, when I found myself starting to wish that the organizers had better utilized — or used at all — the set-up on stage. The chairs and lamps created an interesting scene and I feel that the relaxed atmosphere of the event could have taken something from having two other speakers sit in the chairs while the stories were being told.
For me, the strongest speaker of the night was the third speaker, Emily Jacke ’12.5, who was the last speaker before the intermission. Jacke told a story about her relationship with her close high school friend Jesse, who struggled — and eventually lost the battle with — leukemia. The story was, naturally, incredibly emotional and Jacke had an incredibly powerful and distinctive method of conveying her story. Her sentences had an almost sing-song tone to them, coming to quiet stops at just the right moments.
And while the story was incredibly emotional, it was also funny. Jacke seemed to know exactly when to add a joke or light detail. When she said, “Then, Jesse stopped coming to school,” my heart dropped and then — seemingly moments later — I was laughing at the image of Jacke unable to cross the bridge at prom in her 108-inch circumference skirt.
During the intermission, the hosts of the event asked audience members to fill out slips of paper answering the question “What are you becoming?” Between each of the acts after the intermission, Greenway read some of the responses, which ranged from “A freshman of life — I’m graduating,” to “A big gay rainbow butterfly” to “I’m only 65. It’s too early to tell.”
Throughout the show, Greenway contributed an array of one-liners and jokes and, in the second half of the show after Emily Bogin ’17 story about finding secret places around campus — a story, she said, that was “not a love story, but [was] a story about love” — he shared his own story about storing his possessions in an air duct over the summer. While his jokes were certainly cheesy, his persona worked well on stage facilitating the transitions between stories.
The highlight of the second half of the show was a story by Associate Professor of English & American Literatures Daniel Brayton. Brayton told the audience about his experience as a graduate student flying back home from visiting his sister outside Paris. High above the Atlantic Ocean, a Moroccan man sitting next to Brayton on the plane was attacked — first verbally, then physically — by two drunk Frenchmen. Brayton, who had some experience wrestling and boxing, got involved with the dispute happening at the back of the plane, helping his new friend.
Brayton’s story felt almost like a change in genre, from the more heart-warming stories before to one with a bit more tension. And while two French drunks and a Moroccan man getting into a fight over the Atlantic sounds a bit outlandish, his story was incredibly real, vividly told and very human.
Near the end of the show, Greenway announced that, in January, MothUP will be expanding.
The hosts of that event received an offer to become part of the official Moth with NPR. NPR and students at the College will be working to start the Vermont Story Slam which will feature stories both here in Middlebury and in Burlington.
All in all, the event was a huge success. A wonderfully curated group of stories provided for a night of strong emotions. Each storyteller brought an interesting perspective and a wide range of experiences that captivated the audience.
“We were very proud of all the storytellers,” Greenway wrote, in an email. “It’s a tribute to the strength of our storytellers that in our conversations with audience members, every single storyteller has been cited as a personal favorite.”
[CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article, as well as that in print, stated that the fourth speaker was Emily Goins '17. This was incorrect; the fourth speaker was Emily Bogin '16.]
(10/16/13 10:30pm)
“How can you possibly tell a movie-length story about Sandra Bullock floating in space?”
That was the response I most commonly heard after showing someone the trailer for “Gravity.” And the short answer to that question turned out to be, “you can’t.” The long story, however, is “it doesn’t matter.”
The thing about Gravity is it is not supposed to be a plot-driven story. The film follows Dr. Ryan Stone (Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), two astronauts servicing the Hubble Telescope as they fight to survive after space debris from a defunct Russian satellite force them to abort their mission and cut off all communication with Mission Control. Above all, “Gravity” is all about the beauty of the image on the screen, the technology behind that image and the human emotion that drives the story.
The last time director Alfonso Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki teamed up, they gave us “Children of Men,” a beautifully shot story about a future in which all women on Earth have become infertile and the resulting fall of humankind. With such a well-received and gorgeous film in their repertoire, and with a teaser trailer filled with more high-tension action than most summer blockbusters, Cuarón and Lubezki promised to deliver quite a spectacle with Gravity. These expectations were more than exceeded.
Visually, this film is in a league of its own. The film opens with a shot of three astronauts working on the Hubble Telescope. In front of the verdant and blue backdrop of the Earth miles below, Stone works diligently to repair the telescope while Kowalski jetpacks around her through space, telling stories of partying at Mardi Gras and commenting on the beauty and silence of space far above Earth’s surface. As the scene progresses, the camera spins around the crew, artfully capturing the idea that in space, there is no real sense of up or down. What is even more breathtaking about this opening scene is it is all done in a single shot. For nearly 20 minutes, the camera follows these characters without cutting away and it is not until all hell has broken loose that Cuarón finally cuts away. The final image of this first scene leaves us watching Bullock drift out into space.
Like many science-fiction films, “Gravity” is far from scientifically sound, but I did appreciate what Cuarón did with sound. In the vacuum of space, there is no air pressure to carry sound waves so everything is silent, from the sound of ships to collisions and explosions — a fact that films like Star Wars often overlook.
“Gravity,” however, embraced this fact and used sound to push the beauty of the film. Even as the satellite debris tears the ship apart, the only sounds heard are the panicked voices of Stone and Kowalski communicating through their spacesuits. At one point in the film, Stone is trapped in a torrent of water and each time the camera dips below the surface of the water, the sounds of her struggling are muffled as though the audience, too, is trapped under water.
This is not all to say that the film is without its problems. As I said at the start of this review, the story aspect of the plot does not get much deeper than “how many more terrible things going wrong can Sandra Bullock survive?” There is an interesting human element to the plot. Cuarón explores some fascinating themes about how humans respond to fear and isolation. However, if you go see “Gravity” for a well-developed story, you will be disappointed.
Also, while Bullock delivered a fantastic performance, any quality in Clooney’s performance was overshadowed by the grating personality of his character. Thankfully, the focus of the film is on Bullock.
While I do think the “Oscar-sweeping” hype around this film since its release is a little premature and quite overblown, I wholeheartedly recommend seeing it. The film is breathtakingly gorgeous — perhaps the most beautifully shot movie I’ve seen in years. My only regret is that there isn’t an IMAX screen in Vermont and I wasn’t able to see this film as large as it was intended.
(09/26/13 12:08am)
By now, I would hope that the majority of students at Middlebury College have heard of the whistleblower Edward Snowden and know why he is currently stuck in legal limbo in Russia. Most people have probably also heard of “Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management” (PRISM), though the role and significance of PRISM has most likely been overshadowed in most people’s minds by the government’s reaction to Snowden’s actions.
Since May 2013, Snowden has taken temporary asylum first in Hong Kong and then in Russia after leaking to the Guardian papers exposing the massive and secretive data mining program, PRISM, operated by the National Security Agency (NSA) since 2007. The reaction to the leaked information by the public was largely one of outrage: calling for more transparency in our government and fear of a Big Brother scenario in which the government spies on its citizens constantly. However, President Obama’s reaction – aside from a few comments assuring the average American citizen that they are safe from government spies – has been to label Snowden as a criminal and a traitor to his country.
This past summer, the trial of another major whistleblower under fire for exposing secrets of the United States government, Chelsea Manning (née Bradley Manning) came to a close. Though Manning was acquitted of the charge of aiding the enemy, she was still charged with five counts of espionage and theft. There are many parallels between the Snowden and Manning cases, but I think the differences raise some interesting questions about Obama’s handling of Snowden.
I do, in large part, support the actions of Manning. I believe that her decision to put herself at risk by leaking the Iraq War Logs to the organization WikiLeaks was incredibly brave and that she brought to light many injustices conducted by the U.S. government through the course of the war in Iraq. It is our right as U.S. citizens to be made aware of what our government does in the course of war – both good and bad. However, I do understand the government’s case in arguing that Manning’s actions put the lives of many U.S. soldiers in danger and that was important in considering her sentence.
To me, though, Snowden is different. This is information that absolutely deserves to be made public and I find it hard to believe that the lives of U.S. citizens are put in danger by this knowledge reaching any of America’s “enemies.” The U.S. government is in a scramble to cover the publicity nightmare following these leaks and suddenly the babblings of tin-foil wearing conspiracy theorists seem a bit more grounded in truth. Numerous documented cases of public officials lying, under oath, about the existence of domestic spying programs; private data is being collected from sites such as Google and Facebook, both through explicit cooperation with these companies and through the application of illicit backdoor access to data; access to this mined data is being provided to Israel, regulated only on an “honor system.” All of this and more has been revealed by these leaks and there is some indication that there may be even more information that Snowden has withheld as of yet.
The Guardian recently published an opinion piece by Bruce Schneier, in which Schneier issued a call to members of the tech and internet industries, as well as the public at large, to reject this reality of government spying and “take back the internet.” I am not saying that everyone at the College should seek out government secrets in order to expose them. However, I am saying that we as a society should promote a culture in which whistle-blowers and the journalists who support them by publishing their leaks should be applauded as champions of justice – not labeled as traitors to their government.
In some of the information revealed by Snowden’s leaks, it has been shown that Congress has the power to challenge requests by the NSA for certain information. If Congress is supposed to represent the people, then it is our job to contact our representatives in Congress and tell them that we will not stand for these attempts at tyranny. We cannot sacrifice our liberty in the name of security. This is not the first injustice conducted by an otherwise flawless government. However, it takes a whole new level of apparent maliciousness to actively spy on your own citizens – and then to blatantly deny it in court.
(09/12/13 12:45am)
Al Schnier and Vinnie Amico are Buffalo-born musicians who, for over two decades, have been playing with one of the premier American jam bands, moe. — a group that sounds a bit like the Grateful Dead if they played a few sessions with Les Claypool. When these two powerful musicians joined forces with the bluegrass talents of Jason Barady, Nick Piccininni and Zachary Fleitz, a bluegrass band with a strong, alt-rock flavor was born. And that band is Floodwood.
“We formed two years ago at Moedown,” Amico — Floodwood’s drummer — said, “when Al had a great idea to start a bluegrass band in the northeast because he felt that there wasn’t enough coming out of the region.”
Floodwood’s music is undeniably bluegrass but they’ve added a unique spin that frames them as a promising leader in the genre. Amico’s drums really bring a harder rock feel to the music and Amico and Schnier’s history playing in jam bands really shows through in the songs.
“I could name so many different groups who have influenced my playing,” Amico said. “There’s a lot of jazz behind what I do, I could name 20 or 30 bands and it wouldn’t be enough. Probably the biggest influence for all of us would be the Grateful Dead.”
While the group has been touring for just over two years (their anniversary was this past Labor Day), they will be releasing their first studio album sometime this fall. Both the album and their current tour were largely funded by a Kickstarter campaign by the band. The website Kickstarter can be a priceless resource for smaller bands looking to bring their music to the public without taking the more traditional label-sponsored route.
“It’s tough to make CDs in the traditional format when we have to be the ones putting money up for it,” Amico said. “Through Kickstarter, people are paying in advanced for the music that they want to hear.”
Amico emphasized the band’s dedication to their fans, and their website is littered with fan messages and an often updated news-stream that feels more like a shout out to friends than a white-washed news report written by the band’s publicist. The group recognizes that without fan support — both financially and emotionally — they wouldn’t be where they are today. Many of the perks offered through Floodwood’s Kickstarter reflect the connection they are hoping to garner with fans. Fans who donate to the band’s cause can win a variety of interesting perks including a guitar used by the members of the band, the chance to have a song written about you by the band and even an appearance by Floodwood at a private party — a throwback to the earlier days of Schnier and Amico’s career.
“We love the relationship with our fans and we love when fans become good friends,” Amico said. “I’ve been doing this a long time and Al and I played a lot of house parties and made a lot of friends all over the place before we graduated to playing bars and theaters.”
One of the Kickstarter perks may be of particular interest to any of the many Middlebury College student musicians. On Wed, Sept 18, Floodwood will be coming to the Burlington music venue, Higher Ground, to play a concert alongside jam band, Leftover Salmon. Anyone who donates at least 10 dollars to the band’s Kickstarter will automatically be entered into a drawing to win a chance to play on stage with Floodwood at Higher Ground. On the band’s Kickstarter, Emily Ginsberg, the band’s publicist, said, “You don’t have to be a pro to take advantage of this opportunity! Whether it’s whistling, hand clapping, shredding on the guitar, we want you to join us! So donate now for this opportunity of a lifetime.”
This intimate relationship with their fans has really worked to their advantage, as the band’s Kickstarter is going well and they’ve already raised enough money to continue their tour. In a message on their website dated Sept. 5, the band said, “Thank you for your amazing support on this campaign…We’ve got our new (old, work) van and named it ‘Van Halen’ (Eddie, for short)…Thanks to your contribution, there’ll be enough lunch money to make it through our Fall Tour.”
Floodwood will be playing at Higher Ground on Wednesday, Sept 18. Doors open at 7 p.m. and tickets are currently on sale for $20. When asked what fans, old and new alike, should expect for Floodwood’s performance, Amico promised a unique, bluegrass-inspired experience.
“You have to come loving bluegrass, but we do drive it a lot harder with some heavy rock influence. There’ll be a lot of energy brought over from our time playing in moe. so if you know that, you’ll know what to expect.” And if you’ve never seen or heard moe. or Floodwood before, you’re in for quite a treat.
(05/09/13 3:45pm)
Last Sunday, the Middlebury Film Society hosted a screening of “Syrup,” an edgy comedy set in the cut-throat world of advertising, based off of the best-selling novel of the same name by Max Barry. The film was produced in part by Middlebury alumni Aaron Becker ’10, Shane Mandes ’10 and Baird Kellogg ’10. Current student Hunter Nolan ’13 also worked on the film as an associate producer and assistant editor. After the screening, Kellogg, Mandes, Becker and Nolan all sat down for a Q&A with the audience.
With loud music blaring over the speakers of Dana Auditorium and with a veritable entourage of the college alumni who worked on the film and their friends, the premiere was quite the event. Arriving 10 minutes before the show started, I was stuck sitting in some of the front row seats as excited students had already packed the auditorium for the film.
The film stars Shiloh Fernandez as Scat, a business school graduate who thinks he has the next great marketing idea. After being betrayed by his friend ‘Sneaky Pete’ at the beginning of the film, Scat teams up with ‘6’, his new boss at the Addy drink company to work his way to the top through an industry he soon finds to be riddled with deception. At first, I thought the running gag of the characters giving themselves unique names was a bit gimmicky, but as the film progressed, it tied in well with a running theme of self-reinvention and our attempts at hiding behind a false image we create for the world.
“It’s a dramedy — a dramatic comedy,” Becker said. “[It’s] a society piece and a bit of a satire.”
The acting was solid throughout the film. Fitting with the off-and-on lack of seriousness in the film, each actor was able to pin down a different trope for his or her character. The sexy and mysterious business woman, the ‘always thinks his idea is the next big thing’ idealist, the silent but deadly archenemy — all of the characters seemed to want to be a cliché, while still managing to be interesting with a sense of depth.
My only real issue with the film was the pacing. After only the first half-hour or so of the film, two or three conflicts had been established and resolved. At one point, the story seemed to rush by at break-neck speed, only to slow down for another 20 minutes without plot development.
While there were a lot of interesting and plot-moving scenes, the transitions sometimes felt rushed and fragmented. That being said, the story as a whole did manage to hold my attention throughout and even kept me guessing at points. And, as well as being compelling, the story presented a less-than-cliché love story. In fact, love story is a bit of a misnomer in this case and I enjoyed seeing the romantic tension culminate in a way I didn’t predict.
The filming process began three summers ago. Kellogg, Mandes and Becker spent many weeks travelling the country, trying to juggle commitments from actors and producers in a difficult balance that proves that there’s a lot more involved in a movie than filming.
“A script had been circulating in Los Angeles as an earlier adaptation of the story written by the author of the book and we were able to buy the rights from him and completely readapt it,” Becker said at the Q&A.
According to the three involved, they aren’t using the term ‘readapted’ conservatively, as the film really only takes the name and basic idea from the novel. It becomes a new work in and of itself.
“It was great to have the author so heavily involved,” Mandes said. “He took the characters, ideas and themes from the book and made a whole new story.”
The enthusiasm on the part of all four involved was incredibly evident during the Q&A. The effort that went into this film was clear both from their stories and in the final product. And their effort certainly did not go to waste; the film was released on iTunes last Friday and by the end of the week it was already the second most downloaded independent film on the site.
“You get really anxious the day it is released because you don’t know how people will receive it,” Becker said, “so seeing people get so excited about the movie was my favorite part of the whole process.”
The final question of the Q&A, asked by Nolan himself, directed to the other more experienced filmmakers touched upon the goals that many students at the College have; to take something they are truly passionate about, create a product they are proud of and go somewhere with. “What are some stepping stones,” he asked, “in getting to where you are?”
“The first and most basic thing,” Mandes said, “is just doing it … if you get thrown into the fire, you’ll figure it out. If someone has an idea and there’s an opportunity, just go for it and make something.”
Looking ahead to the future, the three Middlebury alumni hope to keep up their momentum from “Syrup.” This summer they will be in Chicago shooting a political thriller about a cyber-terrorist attack on the United States.
“Syrup” is currently On Demand and available for download on iTunes and is set for a theatrical release on June 7.
(03/21/13 4:00am)
“Ladies and gentleman of Radio Land, it is six o’ clock. The sun has set. Soon darkness will be all around. Yes it is six o’clock and evening has fallen, an evening of thrills and suspense.”
For nearly eight years, every Saturday night, these words have been broadcasted from WRMC’s radio tower, the introduction to Middlebury Radio Theater of Thrills and Suspense (MRTOTS). Situated between two music shows more typical of WRMC, MRTOTS is the College’s very own live radio theater group, performing a two-hour collection of plays — some of which are student originals — each week.
Even with a group of 10 to 20 regular performers, the cast is never consistent, rotating each week to accommodate whichever actors volunteer to perform for that episode.
“Since we do multiple scripts in each episode,” David Seamans ’13, one of the group’s “co-dictators,” said, “we make a point of casting evenly each week and assuring that everyone who shows up get at least one role.”
When Seamans and the two other dictators, Brigit Carlson ’13 and Michael Davies ’15 refer to themselves as such in a casting email, I didn’t think twice about it. But sure enough, they use it as their official title.
“We like to think of ourselves as democratically elected dictators,” Davies said when I showed up to the WRMC studio last Saturday night.
Dictators only in name, the three run the club with fantastic efficiency. Each week, three to five plays are selected, the casting call goes out and actors are given their parts. Rehearsal takes place on the night of the show, in the two hours before they go on air. And by the time the clock strikes six in Radio Land, the actors are in their positions around the microphone, the director ready with an arsenal of sound effects. In my correspondence with Seamans about the club, he invited me to the studio and I was handed a role; I wouldn’t just be observing, I’d be participating.
Headphones on, just after Alpenglow had finished recording in the studio, seven actors and I sat around a single table in the small and cozy, but a-bit-too-warm WRMC studio, one microphone hanging above the center of the table. The first play, The Dark Tower, written by Alexander Woollcott was a thriller, a story about an actor and his retelling of the murder he got away with. William Starkoff ’15, who played one of the main characters, demonstrated an impressive array of voices throughout the play, transitioning seamlessly between the voice of the actor Damon and his murderous persona Max.
“Sometimes you’ll be totally surprised by a voice one of the actors pulls out of nowhere, often the actors even surprise themselves,” Davies said. “What’s great about radio is you can make it what you want it to be, you get a lot of people who really want to be there,” Seamans added.
The group performed four plays in total on Saturday, with themes ranging from mystery to comedy. While the three longer pieces had a serious tone to them, the more serious mood was made much more whimsical by a faux-commercial from MRTOTS “sponsor” the Lipo-Lax 3000, an infomercial-style skit in which I played an actor reluctant to be participating in the advertisement of a seemingly dangerous do-it-yourself liposuction/candle and soap making kit. The skit was written and directed by Ben Mansky ’15.
“We always try to put on any original scripts that get submitted, and we mean anything,” Davies said. “Often they end up being all over the place.”
About one third of the plays the group performs are original student works, the rest being vintage radio plays or adaptations of other shows for the radio. Many of the student works are one-offs, but the group has a few recurring and episodic pieces, as well. Each Christmas season, they perform scenes from a continuing holiday saga, written mostly by radio theater alums, featuring characters like Jack Frost, a CIA agent and a cast of holiday-pun names.
Seamans has also written and directed a few episodes of a still-growing mini-series, The Wild You, a story that follows a vagabond who has broken his leg, decides to settle down in a small town in New Mexico and meets an eccentric cast of characters. All of the music for the series is composed and performed live in the studio during the performances by Dustin Lowman ’15.
During winter term, the group puts on a live show in the Hepburn Zoo — this past January’s show being the third ever performance.
Last Thursday, MRTOTS also performed three student-written pieces (two of which were also performed on Saturday) in front of a live audience at Atwater suite BCG, a student-run art house for the display of student-created art on campus.
“[BCG] really feels like what the Atwater suites were intended for,” Carlson said. “It’s a wonderful place for student artwork to be showcased. There are some great people there.”
Attracting actors, writers and anyone interested in radio, MRTOTS demonstrates an undying devotion to what they do while still maintaining a relaxed atmosphere. Their sheer ability to produce an impressive array of skits each week is impressive; every show is performed live and recorded. Their website features an archive of every performance in their eight years of existence. (Their site is experiencing technical issue and while the recordings are all still there, the group is working to restore the interface. To find the recordings, go to this link.)
Sitting in and participating in their live show, I was immediately greeted by a laid-back and friendly atmosphere; a great introduction to a group I feel has not received the attention they deserve on campus.
“What I love about radio theater,” Carlson said, “is that it feels like low commitment and yet it’s incredibly productive. It’s something that I can have fun doing without stressing out too much.”
(02/28/13 5:00am)
On Feb 8, the Middlebury College Museum of Art opened their new exhibit, Linear Thinking. The exhibit features pieces by artists such as Matisse and Picasso, and its focus on starkly contrasting shapes, repeating patterns and sharp edges demonstrates a wide variety of artwork from the 20th century. The center piece of this exhibit is Wall Drawing #394, by Sol LeWitt. LeWitt created an enormous collection of wall drawings, varying in complexity, shape and color. But perhaps most uniquely, LeWitt will never see the completed piece hanging in Middlebury’s gallery.
Raising questions about the distinction between draftsman and artist, LeWitt designed these wall drawings as a set of instructions that he intended for others to execute. Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture Edward Vazquez and his class, HARC0361, Minimalism — a reading seminar on the emergence of the minimalist movement in the New York art scene in the 60s and 70s — started the project in their class on Monday. They plan to work on the drawing throughout the week, with hopes of adding the final lines on this coming Monday afternoon. The class is working alongside Museum Designer Ken Pohlman and Museum Preparator Chris Murray. This is the second LeWitt piece that the Museum of Art has had in its collection; the last drawing went up in 1994.
“We were in touch with the Sol LeWitt estate because we’ve worked with them before: we already own a few other LeWitt prints,” said Chief Curator Emmie Donadio. “We wrote to them and they sent us 15 wall drawings to choose from and we chose the one that seemed feasible and best for our space and also best suited for the exhibition in which it would be included. Most of these 15 pieces were drawings that LeWitt had done especially for students.”
“His work is the embodiment of linear thinking, in a way,” she continued. “He plans a strategy and tells people how to do it and they do it. It was a good contrast to modern art in which the style or the handwriting of the artist identifies the artist. LeWitt’s strategy for making art is totally different from that, in fact it’s almost antithetical to that, the whole idea of individual talent.”
The students worked in groups of two, with two or three groups working on the wall at one time. The instructions were very straight-forward; start with a grid of 12-inch-by-12-inch squares that covers the entirety of the wall — 228 in the Museum. Then, in each square draw one of a few lines designated by the artist.
“LeWitt said he didn’t need to necessarily be involved in the full installation of his work, and so there is a plan he put together and we are going to execute that plan,” Vazquez said. “There is a potential for variation internal to it, but when we are done, we as a collective — as a class — will have created a Sol LeWitt work as per his instructions.”
There are four orientations possible — horizontal through the center, vertical through the center and diagonal in either direction — and three different types of lines — straight and solid, dashed and freehand.
“There’s a family resemblance between different iterations of the same LeWitt piece,” Vazquez continued. “If you knew this work, you’d be able to recognize variations of it but they are not meant to be carbon copies. There is a bit of free will and agency still left up to the drawer of each piece.”
The only other direction was an emphasis on the element of randomness. LeWitt intended for the piece to take on no recognizable geometric form, and while it is up to the individual artists where to place each line, they must be careful to not give the piece the appearance of a coherent form or shape.
“When drawing a line, it is important to think about what your line will do in relation to the others on the wall,” said Pohlman as the students began working.
It was particularly powerful watching the drawing go up in the middle of the exhibit, with this new piece of art being created before our eyes while surrounded by these already-created classics of the art world. The process was slow, but each new line provided stark contrast against the black wall and the design of the piece warped and blossomed with each new addition
“There are decisions that the draftsman makes,” LeWitt said in Art Now in 1971. “Each individual, being unique, if given the same instructions would understand them differently and would carry them out differently.”
Wall Drawing #394 and the rest of the Linear Thinking exhibit will be up in the Museum of Art through April 21.
(02/21/13 5:00am)
Horror tends to be a divisive genre of film; either you’re an adrenaline junky looking for the next great movie scare, or you can’t stand the thought of being subjected to an hour and a half of blood, gore and cheap screams. I fall in the former group. Whether a beautifully crafted psychological scare like John Carpenter’s The Thing or a campy, black-and-white monster suit classic like Creature from the Black Lagoon, there’s nothing better than a movie that really chills you to your core. While Andres Muschietti’s Mama is not the scariest film I’ve ever seen, it definitely got me to jump and is a well-designed take on a fairly straight forward ghost story.
The film follows two girls, Victoria and Lilly, who were abandoned in a cabin in the woods by their father after he committed suicide, only to be found five years later. The girls are adopted by their uncle, Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his punk-band girlfriend, Annabel (Jessica Chastain). The couple, recently moved into a new house, is then tormented by a ghost that cared for the girls during their five years of solitude.
Too often, horror films — especially newer films — blur the line between “scared” and “startled,” opting to have something jump out and startle the audience every few minutes rather than building any real psychologically thrilling horror scene. Any movie can make you jump; a truly great horror film will have you on the edge of your seat, tormented by every dark room and trick of light on the screen. Mama definitely goes for the jump-out scares quite a bit, but I appreciated the ambiance built throughout the film and the story really pulled me into the couple’s struggles with the ghost making the horror deeply-rooted and psychological as well as just startling.
The two highlights of the film were the design on the ghost, Mama, and Chastain’s performance. Annabel’s character is reluctantly pulled into the position of guardian for these two girls, choosing only to stay out of her feelings towards Lucas and Chastain hits the nail on the head with her portrayal of the character. I found myself at first disliking Annabel and her frustrations over the presence of the two girls in her life, only to begin to sympathize with her as she becomes more comfortable with the role of step-mother. Juxtaposed with a cast of otherwise unknown actors, Chastain definitely stood out in the film and her character added an extra edge to the story.
I will be the first to admit that I am a sucker for monster and villain design. While a well-designed hero is important to every story, it is the antagonists and anti-heroes that I believe make or break a piece and Mama’s monster delivered in every way. For the start of the film, we saw very little of the ghost, mostly quick glimpses in the corner of the screen or —quite cleverly on the part of the filmmaker — through the weak eyes of Victoria after dropping her glasses. These attempts to hide the ghost from the audience only made the beast scarier, and added to the subplot questioning the validity of the ghost or if it was all just fabricated by the young girls.
Near the end of the film, we saw a lot more of the ghost and, unfortunately, this took away from the film for me. It was not that seeing more of the ghost highlighted flaws in the design, I just felt that the story was enhanced by a spectral monster, hidden from the audience except for the bloody aftermath of her attacks.
The design on the monster was just one part in an all-around fantastically crafted art design for the film. Each scene incorporated an immerse color scheme that held a thematic tone throughout the film and from the childish drawings scrawled on the walls of the cabin that held the young girls prisoners for five years to the otherworldly portals that oozed from the walls, signs that Mama had found her way into the house, the artistic design of the film from start to finish proved to be an extra bonus to the film as a whole.
If you’re a fan of horror films, I’d definitely recommend Mama. I’m not expecting it to find a place on the shelves next to classics like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre or George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, but it is a fun ghost story that is beautifully shot and certain to creep you out.
(02/13/13 11:31pm)
Ex-Girlfriends is a cleverly written story about the perils of tiptoeing around the subtleties of dating as a 20-something in New York City. But do not take the film at face value. Alex Poe’s ’03 first feature-length film delivers a unique spin on a perhaps overused story that is saturated with talent and sardonic wit.
Poe, who wrote and directed the movie, as well as played the lead role, proves to be a rising talent. His writing is strong and clear, and breathes life into the story. It is through the characters’ witty comments and sharp dialogue that I was able to connect with the characters and pull myself into the story. The film features a strong cast of Middlebury alums such as Poe and Kristen Connolly ’02 (The Cabin In the Woods), as well as nationally recognized faces like Jennifer Carpenter ("Dexter"). Carpenter’s character, Kate, was my favorite in the film. Kate is Poe’s character, Graham’s, ex-girlfriend-now-friend. The insightful yet brutally honest advice she gives Graham throughout the film echoes the comedic, yet thought provoking theme of the rest of the film and I often found myself hoping she would come back on screen to pick up some of the slower scenes. What is perhaps most impressive about the film is its quality, given Poe’s limited budget. Not once does by a “low-budget, indie” feel bring down the quality of the film. Every scene feels masterfully shot, and the story takes the characters through an impressive collection of locations in New York. The Campus got a chance to talk to Poe about Ex-Girlfriends and his experience shooting the film and performing in theater since graduation:
Middlebury Campus: What did you study at Middlebury and do you feel like your experience at Middlebury impacted this project and how you approach filmmaking?
Alex Poe: I studied theatre and literary studies at Middlebury and I started this theatre company called Redux Productions with a few friends, Joseph Varca ’02 and Ben Correale ’04. We would produce about a play a semester up in the Hepburn Zoo, everything from a Paul Auster neo-noir adaptation to a comedy inspired by a Tom Waits album and a re-telling of stories by my old relative Edgar Allan Poe ... We didn’t really care about the budget, we kind of made the aesthetic fit the budget so the sets were usually just chairs that would be configured in different ways or Varca would design some shadow projections — that kind of thing. So after we graduated and moved to New York we just kept working together, doing plays, short films, [and] things with no budget but some started to do well. I wrote/directed a play called “I Was Tom Cruise” which won Outstanding Play at the Fringe Festival. All of that led me to film school at Columbia University and ultimately making Ex-Girlfriends, which is my first feature.
This movie was really made in the same down and dirty way that we did the plays in the Hepburn Zoo. We didn’t have many resources but I had a solid team of collaborators including Varca, who co-produced and a bunch of other Midd alums including Connolly ... Along the way it kind of turned into something bigger, we added Jennifer Carpenter from “Dexter” to the cast and ultimately it got a theatrical release and is now on Hulu, iTunes and Amazon.
MC: I know it’s easy to write yourself, whether consciously or not, into your own characters and story. Given that you played Graham, did you put yourself at all into the character and draw from your own experiences while writing Ex-Girlfriends?
AP: There is a lot of my own experience in the film, I wanted to make a comedy that was really honest about the complications of relationships and found humor in that so a lot of that has to come from real life in order to feel authentic. I find what people actually do in life so much more interesting and complex than the predictable way they usually act in films. Something similar to the story of the film happened to me and it stuck out to me as something revelatory of the way people keep things from each other and the way we look for fulfillment in relationships. Of course things change when you start to transform them into a story but I tried to retain the emotional core of that experience. I do play the main character and there is a part of me in him but it’s also pushed in a certain direction for the sake of the story and to make it more of a comedy. I hope I am a little less naïve than the character … It’s kind of looking at a certain moment of life that everyone seems to go through at one point or another.
MC: You use a lot of voice-over throughout the film, which helped me as a viewer kind of get more into his head. Could you talk a bit about that writing decision and your writing process over all?
AP: The character is a writer who is always constructing the narrative of what his life means in a very absurdly literary way, so the voice-over sections are really him writing his life as a story. It provides some access to his thoughts but really he’s kind of a comically unreliable narrator as the film goes on. The writing process was very fast and I really wrote to locations I had access to and things I felt I could shoot on a low budget — apartments, bars, streets. Grand Central was a bit of a challenge but we just shot it guerilla style, which was an interesting experience.
MC: Could you talk a little bit more about your experiences shooting “guerilla style” in Grand Central Station?
AP: Shooting in Grand Central was interesting because you can’t actually shoot film there without a whole lot of expensive permits, but you can shoot still photographs there so we had to sneak around shooting on a 5D which looks like a regular still camera but actually shoots HD video, trying to be very low key. Of course packs of commuters would recognize Jennifer Carpenter from “Dexter” and ask for her autograph, blowing our cover. But Grand Central is a big place so we would shoot in one place, get caught by security and then go underneath the station through a tunnel into another part and start shooting again. One of the last shots of the film is a very long shot of me walking up a ramp amongst a crowd while all of this voice over is going on, it’s kind of an important turning point and in the take that is in the movie, Varca is just off camera telling the security guards that the camera is off and we’re packing up. A lot of the film was like that, getting what we needed right under the wire.
MC: I know that you and Connolly went to Middlebury together. How was it working with a fellow Middlebury alum and how did Carpenter get involved with the film?
AP: I had worked with Kristen on my first short so to have her in my first feature was great. Jennifer Carpenter actually came on board because we had an actress drop out due to a scheduling conflict a week before we were supposed to start shooting. It came right at a moment when everything seemed to be falling apart with the budget and locations and equipment all at once, it was pretty much going to shut down the whole project. But Kristen’s manager was a supporter of the film and he gave me a list of the other clients his company represented and Jennifer’s name immediately jumped out to me because I thought she was great on "Dexter." We met, talked about the script, she liked it and a week later we were shooting. It was a real boost to the film to have her involved and she was great to work with; directing her and acting with her was a lot of fun.
MC: Who have been some of your biggest influences throughout your artistic process?
AP: There’s definitely a kind of Woody Allen streak in my work, especially with this one, taking on writing and directing along with acting. I like John Cassavettes, his method of making films with friends and just constantly creating work is a big inspiration. Truffaut was someone whose films I looked at a lot in thinking about this film, his Antoine Doinel character is kind of the model for my character in this film, very romantic but somewhat immature and comic in his idealism. Also this film by Joachim Tried called Reprise was something I looked at a lot in terms of coming of age stories.
MC: I was quite impressed by the quality of the film given the low budget. What problems — or benefits — did the budget present?
AP: Despite not having a lot of money we really did everything we could to give the film a very classical look. We shot on the RED with Zeiss lenses and really paid attention to having elegant, locked down shots. There’s very little handheld camera, it’s mostly on a dolly or tripod. You have to get creative and you have to make compromises in terms of how many takes you can get, how few shots you can get away with for a scene, but it was important to make it have a certain cinematic look as opposed to the more handheld “mumblecore” aesthetic. I spent a lot of time with my cinematographer, Greg Kershaw, my producer Jennifer Gerber and Joe (who co-produced) talking about the shots for each scene and really trying to keep the aesthetic consistent.
(01/17/13 6:47am)
Quentin Tarantino has proven to be one of the more divisive directors in Hollywood. Three of his films have received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Picture, one of his films, Pulp Fiction, won him both the Palm D’Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Despite these awards, his use of sometimes over the top violence has earned him much criticism as a less-than-serious director by some critics and some members of the public. Tarantino’s 2012 film, Django Unchained, followed Django (Jamie Foxx) a recently freed slave working with the bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) to free his wife from the famous plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).
Each of Tarantino’s films acts as an homage to a specific genre, and Django was an artfully constructed tribute to some of the old spaghetti Westerns.
The name Django is a recurring character from over 20 films throughout the history of the genre and Tarantino’s film feels like a great addition to the tradition.
The acting was solid across the board. Waltz, who was brought to the public’s attention in Tarantino’s last film, Inglorious Basterds, and DiCaprio both gave solid performances — it’s no surprise Waltz was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance.
The best performance definitely came from Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson, who is a regular in Tarantino’s films, played Candie’s head servant, Stephen. Jackson has a flair for often bombastic roles but Stephen was a refreshing and surprising change from the norm, proving his ability as a top class actor.
Tarantino, whose films often feature stellar soundtracks, made some interesting decisions with the music in Django. A mixture of both time appropriate folksy tunes and more modern feeling hip-hop tracks, the soundtrack helped develop the unique feel of the film, though it did prove distracting from the movie as a whole at points.
Unfortunately, Django is Tarantino’s first film since the untimely death of his long time editor, Sally Menke and this definitely showed, as the film lacked the seamless flow of his other films.
I think it’s only fair to mention that I went into the theater for Les Misérables having never seen the stage production and being only vaguely familiar with the story.
That being said, I had high hopes for this film and unfortunately, I was largely disappointed. There is a lot to like about the film, most noticeably the performances by Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway. Jackman, a veteran of Broadway, delivered an electrifying performance and I don’t think I could find a single flaw in his performance. Hathaway, who is newer to musicals, was fantastic and I hope this isn’t the last time we get to hear her glorious singing voice.
It’s also worth pointing out the devotion both actors obviously had for the role as both nearly starved themselves to develop their image for the role, weight that Jackman then had to regain for the second half of the film. Unfortunately, the good things I have to say about the film stop there.
Russell Crowe was greatly overshadowed by his fellow lead actors and his singing voice left a lot to be desired, which is surprising given his history performing on stage with multiple bands since the 80s.
The cinematography also felt very out of control. It is a common trope in musical films that shoot large, grandeur shots that take in the entirety of the scene and Les Mis really tried to break away from that but in the end, the execution was poor. At one point, the scene would be filled with a large cast of characters and images of the admittedly fantastically executed scenery, only to zoom in on one of the characters, tracking their movements with a shaky camera. While I have no problem with a shaky camera in general and I appreciate any attempts to work outside ones genre when shooting a film, the attempts fell flat in Les Mis, only leaving me confused as to what sort of movie they were trying to make.
The end of every year seems to have at least one “sleeper hit,” that movie that doesn’t really get talked about until it is released and then suddenly blows up on stage, taking everybody by surprise.
Think The King’s Speech in 2010, which was hardly talked about until it won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
For 2012, Silver Linings Playbook was that hit. The film follows Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) who has just finished his court-ordered treatment at a mental institution and suffers from bipolar disorder.
Dealing with psychological disorders in film is always tricky and too often the disorder becomes nothing more than a plot point, trapping the character in stereotypes and clichés.
Silver Linings was a striking exception to the rule. The film talked about Pat’s illness in such an intelligent way and became a beautiful story about the disorder and the trouble both patients and their friends and families experience.
What really pulled the movie out of disorder-film clichés was Cooper’s performance.
Cooper has never really had a role that’s truly wowed me until this film, where he was able to so perfectly capture the torment of the illness while still being able to break away from being just another “bipolar character.”
For a large portion of the movie, Cooper’s character is obsessed with winning back the approval of his ex-wife, Nikki, and though we hardly see Nikki in the film, her character is so well put together by the stories told about her that I felt like I connected with her without really meeting her.
While I think the movie could have been enhanced by a well-composed original score, the soundtrack added an eclectic spin to the film, especially during the final dance scene.
Unfortunately, the film suffers from a trailer that seems to describe an entirely different film than what Silver Linings actually ends up being.
Certainly one of my choices for best movie of the year, this movie well deserves the growing, end-of-the-year attention.
(12/05/12 11:45pm)
From Nov. 29 through Dec. 1, The Vanek Trilogy, a collection of three, interconnected one-act plays, ran in the Hepburn Zoo. The performance was directed by Paula Bogutyn ’13.5, whose direction counted towards 700-level senior work.
The play was written by Vaclav Havel, an influential playwright during the time of the Soviet regime and the first president of the Czech Republic. The three one-acts each have the strength and depth to stand alone as separate pieces but are best enjoyed in the manner put on by Middlebury College’s theatre department this past weekend; consecutively, as a single, three-scene piece. One character Vanek, the play’s namesake and a playwright recently hired at a brewery (played by Adam Milano ’15) is featured in all three scenes. Noah Berman ’13 and Isabel Shill ’12.5, who both received 500-level junior work credit for the production, played the other characters in the piece, changing between scene.
Milano’s performance proved his strength as a rising actor within the College’s theatre department. While the other characters throughout the piece seemed to dance chaotically about, anxious to earn Vanek’s approval — or lure him into something sinister — Vanek remained largely silent, offering short words and strong insight. Milano did a beautiful job of highlighting his character’s paradoxical passive activism. In the final scene, as the audience put together the final pieces of the play’s backstory and after two scenes of Vanek’s apparent inactivity, he presents an already-written protest just as quickly as fellow-writer Stankova suggests it.
In all regards, the acting on stage was incredibly strong. While the second scene did, at times, feel a bit over-acted (and in a lot of ways, that may have been the point), I was impressed with both Berman and Shill’s ability to switch between such drastically different characters. In the first scene, Berman portrayed the drunken foreman of the brewery, practically begging Vanek for his approval. The audience could pity his character as well as criticize his attentions, ever attentive of his oft-repeated phrase, “Vanek, don’t be depressed.” And in the second scene, while the attempt to project his own insecurities onto Vanek remained the same, the overall demeanor of Berman’s character shifted drastically, running about the stage frantically, from couch to fireplace back to couch over to Vanek back to the fireplace.
The play’s slow process of revealing the backstories of the characters at first was a bit off-putting. In the first scene, we see Vanek speaking with the foreman of the brewery where he has been recently hired. The audience is thrown into the middle of this conversation, with references to the goings-on of the world without any real explanation. I struggled as I watched, trying to put together Vanek’s story while still paying attention to what was happeneng on stage. However, as the production continued more and more was revealed, both explicitly and implicitly.
This slow reveal of the backstory was the highlight of the play’s directing. Not only did the dialogue of the characters hint at Vanek’s story, but it also highlighted what was happening in the world and how he fit into it all. Bogutyn did a fantastic job at using subtle hints in the characters’ actions that showed us so much more of the world. As the stage-hands changed the props on stage between scenes, brief actions on the part of characters revealed more about the characters. Between the first and second scene, Shill’s character followed the stage-hands frantically, making sure everything was pristine and in the right place, a strong hint at the hectic caricature to come.
And before the third scene, anonymous men in suits placed bugs throughout the room, the first explicit hint at the tyrannical regime against which Vanek and his contemporaries were quietly fighting.
Another unique feature of the production with which I struggled was the use of repetition, especially in the first two scenes. At times, the repetition was an incredibly strong enhancement to the piece, emphasizing points and offering a common thread that ran between the first two scenes which otherwise, seemed a bit disjointed until it was all brought together in the third scene.
However, by the end of each scene, especially the second, the repetition moved from a matter of artistic design to feeling like the actors and author were simply trying to sledgehammer the message into the minds of the audience. Sometimes subtlety can be a play’s best friend.
With a minimally designed set that hinted at Vanek’s secrets while leaving a lot to the imagination, artful acting on part of the whole cast and some wonderful decisions by the director, The Vanek Trilogy proved to be a phenomenal production. Shifting wildly from humor (though I must admit, the rest of the audience seemed to find the jokes much funnier than I did) to powerful dialogue of emotion and depth, The Vanek Trilogy is theater I won’t soon forget. Depressed, it certainly was not.
(11/14/12 11:24pm)
This past weekend, the Vermont Collegiate Choral Consortium performed Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem at three locations around Vermont, including a Thursday night performance in Mead Chapel. The Consortium includes five choirs from Castleton State, Johnson State, Middlebury and Saint Michael’s Colleges and the University of Vermont (UVM). The Consortium started two years ago in the spring of 2000 with a joint performance between Middlebury College, Castleton State College and Saint Michael’s College. It was not until this year and the performance of Requiem that Johnson College and UVM joined the Consortium. For all three concerts, admission was free with a suggested $10 donation to the Consortium.
The concert began with each choir performing a single solo piece. Singing from the balcony seats of Mead Chapel, the choirs presented a wide array of songs, varying in origin, language and overall energy. Saint Michael’s College Chorale sang first, an African-American spiritual medley titled “Where the Sun Will Never Go Down.” The first parts of the piece started off slowly, featuring melodious ballads that drew in the audience to start a spectacular night of music. Paradoxically and unfortunately, the energy seemed to drop a bit as the piece picked up pace. Saint Michael’s Chorale was the only of the five choirs to feature a soloist, though at first she seemed to get lost among the energy of the rest of the choir. That is, until the finale, which featured a powerful back and forth between the soloist and the rest of the choir.
Middlebury College’s own choir sang “A Boy and a Girl,” a slower piece composed by Eric Whitacre. The haunting tones of this piece framed lyrics that told the story of, most appropriately, the growing love between a boy and a girl and follow them from their first kisses to their final moments, buried together after death. The energy and emotion behind this performance of “A Boy and a Girl” truly outlined Middlebury College Choir’s strength as a cohesive group of singers and was the highlight of the first half of the night.
After an intermission, the main event of the night began. Requiem is composed of seven separate movements and in between movements, the different directors of the choirs of the Consortium rotated the role of director for this night’s performance. A few days after the show, Director of Choral Activities Jeff Buettner spoke about the piece and he explained how Fauré’s Requiem was chosen.
“This piece was something we wanted all of our students to know when they leave college,” he said. “It is a piece that is performed frequently by symphony orchestras and choirs around the world and we wanted our students to be aware of that culture.”
The first movement started strong as the choirs enveloped the room with their voices. At times the organ seemed to come in too strongly or too abruptly. And where the voices championed the first movement, the strings stole the show during the second movement, “Offertory.” Their sounds guided the audience through both the images of Hell that haunt the lyrics of “Offertory” and the images of hope that pervade throughout the whole piece.
The performance featured two soloists. Suzanne Kantorski-Merrill, soprano, sang her solo during Pie Jesu, the fourth movement. Her solo was one of the highlights of the show, though it felt as though she was separated from the strings at points and the performance could have been enhanced by more interplay between her and the orchestra. The other soloist was David Nieween, a baritone, who sang during the piece’s sixth movement, “Libera Me.” His strong entry set the stage for a full ensemble build and one of the emotional high points of the night.
The climax of the piece came during the fifth movement, “Agnus Dei.” As the choirs sang words of redemption, the whole chamber orchestra built to an explosion of emotion and then dropped off into quiet lyrics that reflected the opening of the piece: “Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon them.”
While the shear number of singers in the room, covering both the stage and the balconies above, was almost overwhelming, perhaps the most impressive part of the experience was the coordination it took to put it all together.
“One of our many challenges is that we do not have much time to rehearse the piece together,” said Buettner. “Each choir practiced it on their own for many weeks but for the whole performance we only had one day to rehearse the entire group and that puts pressure on things. You need to be very organized and anticipate what you will need to work on the most. But that’s also part of the fun.”
“My favorite part was when I would forget my own expectations for the music and I would simply listen and look up and see all of my students and all of these other students singing and listen to the beautiful sound that they were producing,” he continued. “It was really quite remarkable and incredibly rewarding because the music meant more than even what the piece was supposed to mean and that is the beauty of these major works. They’re something you have to put together with other people.”
Going forward, Buettner is hopeful for the future of the Consortium. During the 2013-14 academic year, the Middlebury College Choir will be on tour in Austria and Germany, so it is unlikely that there will be any major Consortium shows. However, after Middlebury College Choir’s return, the Consoritum plans to hit the ground running with more shows of the caliber of Fauré’s Requiem.
(11/07/12 11:33pm)
Both the neuroscience and biology departments are looking to add faculty members to start in the fall of 2013. The two departments are working together to find a single candidate to fill positions in both departments. The biology department is looking for a candidate independently who will fill the position previously held by Philip Battell/Sarah Stewart Professor of Biology Andrea Lloyd who was recently promoted to Dean of Faculty, as well as another biology professor. The neuroscience department is also looking for a third candidate jointed with the psychology department. All three positions are tenure-track positions.
Much of the specific information on the types of candidates the departments are looking for is not available to the public yet. The joint biology and neuroscience candidate will teach classes in cell biology and animal physiology and will establish a research program with an invertebrate animal system in which students may do research. The joint neuroscience and psychology candidate will teach classes in physiological psychology and will be expected to maintain an active research program with either humans or animals.
While the biology department is seeking to fill an opening created by Lloyd’s promotion, the need for new neuroscience faculty is largely due to an increase in students entering the major.
“There has been a lot of competition for neuroscience courses, especially the physiological psych classes,” said Chris Batson ’13, a senior representative of the neuroscience Student Advisory Council (SAC). “In these courses, you have not only neuroscience students, but psych and bio students too, and the classes become very hard to get into.”
As a senior representative of the SAC, Batson attends all of the neuroscience faculty meetings and helps to review the syllabi for new courses. During the hiring process of these new faculty members, Batson and other members of the SAC will help the department review each candidate’s application. After the candidates are called in to present a mock seminar and lecture, they are taken to lunch with the SAC representatives.
“This not only allows us to get to know the candidates better, but it’s also a chance for them to get to know the type of students who attend Middlebury and see if it will be a good fit from both sides,” Batson said.
The interview process for all three positions is currently underway. The candidates will be brought in to give mock seminars and lectures open to all students in the coming weeks.
(10/31/12 4:35pm)
In response to the Dalai Lama Welcoming Committee’s (DLWC) email, in which students sent out a mock press release to hundreds of students, faculty and staff claiming the College decided to divest from arms and fossil fuels in light of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s visit, Community Council Co-Chair Barrett Smith ’13 and Student Government Association (SGA) Senator Anna Shireman-Grabowski ’15.5 presented a resolution asking the administration to invest its money in ways that reflect its mission at the Oct. 21 meeting of the SGA.
“Though we don’t have the final authority to control where our money goes,” Smith argued, “we have this opportunity to act as a megaphone for the student body in addressing the administration.”
The bill was met with mixed opinions, with many of the senators questioning the effectiveness of such a resolution.
“I don’t think the purpose of the endowment is to represent us as a body,” said Senator Rachel Liddell ’15.5, one of the senators who ultimately voted against the resolution. “I see it as a possibility for the College to generate wealth. I support this bill in spirit but I want to open the idea that [divestment] isn’t this easy.”
The writers of the resolution and its supporters pointed out that the College has very clear language in its carbon neutrality pledge that states it will seek out opportunities to invest its money in green initiatives.
A large part of the endowment is invested by the company Investure, and the details of the investment are not made available to the public. Investure delegates portions of the endowment to investment managers, who are free to invest the money in a way that they believe to be the most efficient.
A few of the senators cited the work the student group Students for Responsible Investment (SRI) has done to address this issue. They pointed out that, although the issue is more complicated than simply pulling money out of “bad companies,” the College and Investure have the ability to put up screens on parts or all of the investment to ensure that the money does not go to certain companies, or that it does go to specific companies.
In the end, the resolution passed with 14 votes for, one against and one abstention.
The Oct. 28 meeting of the SGA opened with a presentation by Peter Mattson ’14, the SGA treasurer and chair of the finance committee. Mattson outlined the current SGA budget and the plans for the finance committee in the coming year. Financial commitments for the year exceed the money generated by the student activity fee — the fund’s main source of revenue — by about $100,000, a sum that will be taken instead from the SGA reserve fund.
This has been a steep drop in the reserve fund and both Mattson and SGA President Charlie Arnowitz ’13 have been working hard to address these financial issues. Some of their proposed solutions are to talk with the administration about shouldering some expenses, such as paying for midnight breakfast, increasing the student activity fee and reforming guidelines on how student organizations can spend money.
After this, the issue of the DLWC returned to the Senate floor with another resolution from Smith and Shireman-Grabowski. This resolution, titled, “The Resolution in Support of Student Free Speech,” contained stark language citing general support for students’ free speech, as well as support for the actions of the DLWC. The authors of the resolution pointed out that the issue went beyond questions of the endowment, as the College has repeatedly received low ratings from civil rights groups on its history of handling students’ free speech.
Arnowitz offered his general support for the issue of free speech, but ultimately did not support the resolution.
“We share a common goal of making our endowment more ethical, and I feel this bill undermines the progress made by groups such as SRI through legitimate channels,” said Arnowitz. “I don’t think it is the place of the SGA to be supporting lying and fraud.”
Both authors of this resolution pointed out repeatedly that no official judicial ruling had been made about the actions and because of this, it is not appropriate to label the email as fraud. A friendly amendment to the resolution was accepted that changed the language in the bill to general support for free speech, removing any direct mention of the DLWC.
Senator Will Potter ’14.5 spoke to the compromise of the group.
“Free speech is the opportunity to speak freely, not the ability to lie and take away others’ right to speak,” said Potter.
Even after the language was removed, much of the meeting’s discussion centered around the DLWC. Some of the senators cited support for the group’s ideas but questioned their possibly illegitimate use of a widespread email.
“Soon after the email went out, posters were put up in dining halls outlining the group’s beliefs and they weren’t censored,” said Liddell. “I think we can understand the College’s decision to limit student access to all-student emails, so why don’t students express themselves through legitimate means?”
The bill eventually failed with two votes for, 12 votes against and two abstentions. Senator Nathan Arnosti ’13, who voted against the bill, explained that he was concerned with how much the bill needed to be edited.
“Many bills fail before they pass,” said Arnosti. “We seem to be trying to change this bill so much that it is becoming a new bill. Perhaps if the authors revisited their language, they could bring to the Senate floor a bill that would receive much more support.”