626 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(01/21/10 8:39pm)
Pressure to work linked to dropout rates
A recent study found that students who drop out of college do so because they feel pressure to work.
The survey, conducted by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research firm with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, determined that 71 percent of students who leave school do so at least partially because of work. Of those, half cited pressure to work as a major reason for dropping out.
Thirty-five percent of the dropouts attempted to balance work and school, but left their studies because they found the combination of the two too stressful. The survey interviewed 614 adults, aged 22 to 30 with at least some postsecondary education.
Results from the survey support the national trend in thinking, which suggests that part-time students, who account for 40 percent of undergraduates nationally, fare worse than their full-time counterparts.
— The Chronicle of Higher Education
Animal rights groups protest pig burials
Constant protests from animal rights activists forced Austrian and Italian scientists to cancel a controversial experiment that involved burying pigs alive in snow to monitor their deaths.
The study, conducted by Institute of Mountain Emergency Medicine in Bolzano, Italy, and the Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria, attempted to determine what factors would increase the odds of survival in an avalanche.
Following the administration of an anesthetic and a sedative, the pigs would be buried in the snow and the scientists would monitor deaths. A total of 29 pigs had already participated in tests.
Animal rights activists claimed the experiments served no useful purpose for humans and forced the pigs to suffer horrible deaths.
“It is absolutely unacceptable that these highly sensitive, helpless animals are killed for such an unnecessary test,” said Johanna Stadler, head of the group Four Paws.
— Associated Press
NYU mourns professor’s sudden death
Popular New York University (NYU) computer scientist Sam Roweis jumped to his death from a 16th-floor balcony, Jan. 13.
Roweis worked in NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. His wife had recently given birth to premature twins and an argument about caring for them preceded his death.
Roweis earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto and earned his doctorate from the California Institute of Technology in 1999. He did postdoctoral work at the Gatsby Unit in London. He was at the University of Toronto from 2001 to 2009, and arrived at NYU in October.
On his Web site, he described his interests as machine learning, data mining and statistical signal processing.
Roweis garnered several accolades, including the University of Ottawa’s Premier’s Research Excellence Award.
“It’s a matter of great sorrow to us to lose one of our faculty members so abruptly,” said university spokesman John Beckman. “Our hearts go out to his family.”
— New York Post
(01/21/10 8:32pm)
Library and Information Services (LIS) plans to launch the new College Web site in February. The new site will feature a redesigned home page that focuses on displaying the diversity of the College, while retaining the traditional links to admissions, academics and other popular portals.
Although there is no definite launch date, LIS, which began the project in the fall of 2008, is currently reviewing “certain technical aspects that need to be completed” and “aiming for an early February launch,” according to Dean of Library and Information Services Mike Roy.
The project is formally titled the “Middlebury Web Makeover.” Jason Pontius, lead designer at White Whale, the Oakland, Calif.-based design firm hired for the project, explained in July that the title emphasizes the dramatic nature of the redesign.
“It’s like ‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,’ where they tear down walls,” said Pontius.
According to Roy, the redesign of the site has multiple goals.
“[We aim] to improve the ability for the Middlebury community to find the
information they need on the site; to allow for the increased use of media — audio, video, animation — on the site; to make it easier to keep the information on the Web up-to-date; [and] to reflect the dynamic nature of the Middlebury community to the outside world,” wrote Roy in an e-mail.
Roy emphasized the positive impact he hopes the new site will have on the College community.
“We think the Middlebury community will benefit by being able to rely on the web to stay informed, to get their work done and to learn about the myriad opportunities for learning and growth at Middlebury,” said Roy.
Member of the Coordinating Committee Ryan Kellett ’09.5 said the Web site would continue to evolve even after the launch.
“The new site doesn’t just halt progress the day it launches,” he said. “It’s an ongoing process to make the Web site better. Middlebury is doing this project on an accelerated timeline that takes other schools several years to complete. So, I encourage the community to engage with the new site and then tell us how to make it even better.”
Although the site strives to increase the ease and practicality of use for those directly involved within the College, Web designers had to consider a wide range of potential users in order to create a design that satisfies all parties. Designers worked to develop useful features for students, faculty and staff while simultaneously creating a marketing tool for prospective students and others looking to learn more about the College.
The designers worked to provide plenty of opportunities for feedback on ideas. Although the College hired White Whale, which specializes in college and university Web design, to conduct the project, those at Middlebury presented ideas through online surveys, focus groups, information sessions and direct contact with departments to determine their specific needs. The Web Makeover blog at (http://blogs.middlebury.edu/webredo) also features a comments section where anyone can provide input on the design.
The new homepage has replaced the traditional photographs of students and Vermont landscapes with a series of colorful, vertical bars that resemble the equalizer display on a stereo.
Each bar features a story, event, or some type of highlight. Running the cursor over a bar reveals a brief headline, and clicking on the bar displays the full story, which is presented with text, a photograph or even a video.
The design of the site itself also reflects the desire for input. One of the most prominent bars on the equalizer displays invites users to submit stories.
This feature stands out from the rest of the solid colored bars with just a white dotted outline, and clicking on it opens a pop-up window that invites the user to “share your story.”
Design changes are visible in sub-sections of the site, such as the athletics, academics and arts pages, where bold, white headings overlay photographs that can be viewed by scrolling horizontally. The font size of the text has also been increased, making the new site more legible and the overall look appear more modern.
(01/21/10 7:51pm)
Nestled five miles down a dirt road in the Moosalamoo National Recreation Area, the Blueberry Hill Ski Touring Center offers visitors ultimate solitude and breathtaking mountain views.
With about 46 miles of trails of varying difficulty and terrain, Blueberry Hill is one of the most renowned cross-country skiing and snowshoeing centers in the state. The ski center is located about 30 minutes from the College in Goshen, Vt., and is accessible from Route 125.
As I approached Blueberry Hill, an amicable black dog that could only be described as “a mix of all sorts” greeted me. Griffin followed me to the front door of the beautiful 1813 farmhouse which serves as Blueberry Hill Inn — a year-round “country living” inn that has been operating for over four decades. Paige, the inn’s receptionist, was exceptionally hospitable upon my arrival, offering me cookies and tea in between answering phone calls.
Blueberry Hill’s chocolate chip cookies are notoriously delicious and are always available for guests to take from the cookie jar in the inn’s kitchen.
Tony Clark purchased the Blueberry Hill Inn in 1968 and has been the owner for four decades. The ski touring center opened up three years later in 1971 and since then has been rated one of the finest Nordic ski centers in New England.
Welsh in origin, but born in France, Clark had aspirations to travel around the United States and eventually settled down in Goshen. Clark believes that Blueberry Hill continues to be one of Vermont’s most popular ski touring centers because the trails are more extensive and scenic than most.
“People get the feeling of being out there in the wilderness,” said Clark.
The ski lodge is housed in the estate’s original barn located across the street from the inn. The ski center offers full day ($20) and half-day ($12) passes that begin after 2 p.m.
Although the center offers ski rentals, students can save a few bucks by renting cross-country skis, boots and poles from the Middlebury Mountain Club during their open gear hours.
The lodge itself is especially charming, complete with original wood floors and an old wood-burning stove. Guests can also enjoy a complimentary bowl of soup in the lodge from 12 - 2 p.m. when they buy a day pass. It’s a good excuse to avoid Proctor’s long lunch lines.
Blueberry Hill boasts a variety of trails ranging from the three mile beginner’s trail to the Romance Trail which, at an elevation of 2,900 feet, is the highest groomed cross-country trail in Vermont.
The Romance Trail is also part of the comprehensive Catamount Trail — a 300-mile winter-use trail for cross-country skiing and snowshoeing that extends down the entire length of Vermont.
Clark believes that the ski center’s location in the Moosalamoo National Recreation Area makes it unique because it ensures that the rural landscape will be preserved for future generations to enjoy.
Moosalamoo protects 15,875 acres of land in the heart of the Green Mountains and can be explored during all four seasons.
“[The ski center] was designed for those seeking picturesque Vermont without being disturbed by roads or highways,” said Clark.
The sense of escaping civilization and connecting with nature is one thing that made my time at Blueberry Hill memorable. As I diverged from the frequently used Beginner Loop onto a narrow wooded trail, I was completely enchanted by the graceful force of nature. The snow beneath me was interspersed with ski grooves and animal tracks and the only sound I heard was the babbling brook that skirted the trail. Moments like this remind me of just how beautiful Vermont’s landscape really is.
(01/21/10 7:48pm)
Oliver the camel is not native to Vermont. But then, neither is Judith Giusto, his owner, and she is getting along fine.
“I’m originally from New York City,” Giusto explained.
“I owned a business in New York. Then I adopted a boy as a single mom. I was bringing up a child in New York City, and I thought, ‘Maybe there’s a better way to do this.’”
Giusto’s solution was a farm in Ferrisburg, Vt., where Merino sheep were her animal of choice. She now runs the farm with her 19-year-old son, Montana, and a recently hired farm worker.
“I was learning more about textiles and the animals that produced them,” Giusto said of her choice to focus on fibers. “I wanted to create an artistic expression that people could use every day.”
This concept manifests itself in the scarves and sweaters that Giusto’s knitters create from the fibers harvested at her farm, Round Barn Merinos on Route 7. Like any artist, Giusto likes to draw from a varied palette.
“Sheep are what we all know,” Giusto said.
“You understand their fiber. Then your horizons start to widen, you start to realize that sheep aren’t the only animals that make fiber. You start to realize there are more exotic animals.”
Seventeen years after Giusto purchased Round Barn Merinos, it is now home to about 100 sheep, an alpaca, and a Bactrian camel.
The camel, Oliver, was born in 2002 on a camel farm in Wisconsin. Giusto compares Oliver’s breed to the llamas of Latin America. Like the llamas, Bactrian camels are often used for transportation and milk.
Unlike Dromedaries, the one-humped species, Bactrian camels are also utilized for their fiber, which can be spun and used for textiles.
“If you want a durable fiber for a coat, you shear the whole camel and take the down and the hair,” Giusto explained.
“If you want something very soft, similar to a cashmere scarf, you pluck the camel and separate the down.”
Giusto practices the latter method of fiber collection, a process that begins in early spring.
“He molts like a bird losing its feathers,” Giusto said.
“It doesn’t all come out on day one or two, it happens over the course of about a month. Every evening my son or I will walk him on his halter and one of us will follow, gathering up all his fur.”
The next step is to spin the fiber. Unlike the sheep’s wool, which is spun at Green Mountain Spinnery in Putney, Vt., Oliver’s down, classified as an exotic fiber, must be sent to Prince Edward Island in Canada. From there it is sent to the knitters.
“The knitters make it into scarves,” Giusto explained.
“That’s pretty much all I do with his down. When I first got him I was turning it into knitting yarn. He produces about five pounds of down per year. If you turn that into yarn it’s not going very far. But only about three ounces are used in every scarf.”
Oliver’s fiber, while decadent in a scarf, serves practical purposes for the camel itself.
“Bactrian camels come from central Asia,” said Giusto.
“Places like Mongolia, Afghanistan and the Russian Steppes. They have unique coats to get the animals through the winter.”
His native habitat makes Oliver well-suited to Vermont’s climate, but people’s misguided understanding of a camel as a desert species has caused concern.
“It’s interesting,” Giusto stated.
“When you live in a place that is as exposed as my farm is, your life becomes very public whether you like it or not. People complain to animal control, and I have to address those complaints. Once you’ve been reported to animal control you have to explain how you’re not abusing your animals.”
“You could get annoyed,” Giusto admitted.
“But the thing to do is to educate people. Sometimes people complain that the sheep are outside during the winter, and I say, ‘If you lived your life with a wool sweater on, you would be warm.’”
When Giusto receives complaints that Oliver’s water trough is empty in the peak of summer’s heat, she must explain that Oliver, as is appropriate for his breed, receives water once a day, and that he doesn’t take his water from a trough, but from a hose.
But despite people’s ignorance, Giusto is thankful for the visitors.
“People stop all the time,” Giusto said.
“One of the reasons I did get Oliver was to help bring recognition to the farm. Sometimes it’s inundated with people.”
Oliver responds well to the attention. Camels are social animals by nature.
“He is a very intelligent animal,” Giusto said of Oliver.
“He wants people to acknowledge him and he’ll run and play for attention.” This behavior took Giusto, who had been accustomed to sheep, by surprise.
“It was an eye-opener,” Giusto said.
“You begin to believe that animals behave like people. All the other animals on the farm know that Oliver is the largest animal and could hurt them should he choose to. The alpaca integrates with the flock differently. He instinctively takes charge of the flock, and when he thinks that it is in trouble, he will get the sheep and help move them.”
Giusto’s knowledge about animals has grown significantly since her career in New York City and her seemingly random decision to move her life to Vermont.
“People thought I was crazy,” Giusto laughed, of her decision to start a sheep farm.
“They thought it couldn’t be done.”
But Giusto, like Oliver, whose breed is known for its perseverance — they are often utilized as pack animals on Mount Everest — has risen to the challenge.
“It wasn’t like I got up one morning after 30 or 35 years of working in corporate America and decided to be a brain surgeon,” Giusto said. “I’ve never tried to do something so beyond my grasp that it couldn’t be done. But, like I did as a single mom adopting a child, I thought to myself, ‘How hard can this be?’”
(01/21/10 7:19pm)
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how other people perceive sex. Perhaps naïvely, I assumed that people with shameful or other negative feelings about physical intimacy simply avoided it, but sexual satisfaction is a need that must be met somehow, and I do know that it is all too easy to give in to desire. There are lots of people, then, who have intimate interludes and then feel really awful about it. This seems really obvious, of course, but since I formed my current understanding of sex, I have forgotten that I used to, and many people do, get intimate without it.
My understanding is that sex is natural — perhaps the most natural thing humans do next to breathing and eating and sleeping. Sure, unlike those other things, you can live without intimacy, but why would you want to?
In my early days as a sexually active young person, my ideas about kissing, oral sex, intercourse — the whole gamut, really — went through many different stages.
When I was 13, long before I was more intimate than even quick kisses, I actually believed that you couldn’t physically have sex unless both parties were in love with each other.
I was utterly in love with my first partner, my high school boyfriend junior year, but by the end of our relationship, sex had become my only indication that he still cared about me, even though there was no love in it. In the months after we broke up, I tried to reaffirm my self-worth through sex — never, ever a good idea.
We are taught simultaneously that sex is an expression of deep affection, but that it can also be a meaningless way to meet physical needs, and, though I have since discovered that sex can’t both mean everything and nothing at the same time, I employed both of those ideas in trying to rebuild my self-esteem.
I took any interest in sex with me as proof that my partner cared for me very much, and I felt a sense of control over my partner in that I had something he or she wanted, and I was “cool enough” to offer it, no strings attached. It took a loving relationship for me to realize that unless sex is in the context of other caring interactions, it’s rarely an expression of emotional attachment, and I didn’t have any more power over my partners than a hamburger does over a hungry person.
In college, especially in those non-relationships I’ve discussed before, I’ve still been guilty of taking continued intimacy as a reaffirmation of my value to a specific person, but I’m beginning to get away from that behavior. It has taken a lot of discovering what sex isn’t to help me figure out what sex is, and my definition isn’t complete yet, but I’m getting there.
So far, sex appears to be what I said it was in the beginning: a normal act of human nature. We are all programmed to get physically close to other human beings and reproduce — no denying that.
What complicates the perception of sex are the many hats we force it to wear. It’s a physical urge without a rational explanation, marking us as no better than animals — thus it wears the hat of the taboo and debauchery. We’ve tried to elevate it by turning it into an expression of love — thus it wears the hat of meeting emotional needs instead of just physical ones.
I think problems arise when we’re faced with the disparity between what sex is and what hat we’ve made it wear, and my life has become remarkably less complicated since I started reminding myself that sex by itself has no meaning but what I give it, and it’s the context that helps me make meaning. Being wary of and honest with myself and my partner about the context has made sex much more empowering and enjoyable for me, and I hope your own path to understanding sex, dear reader, is helping you achieve the same thing.
(01/14/10 4:00am)
Years from now, when Middlebury’s current population of six- and seven-year-olds looks back on its first reading triumphs, first-grade teachers and patient parents may get less credit than one furry individual who does not even read.
Meet Shoopie, the four-year-old Newfoundland therapy dog who has recently signed on with the Ilsley Public Library’s Youth Services as a once-weekly reading companion.
“We look for different ways for kids to connect with reading and to get excited about it and have positive library experiences,” said Judah Hamer, Librarian for Youth Services. “This is a program that I know has been successful other places, and if you’re a kid who just loves animals, then this is a great way to come the library and do something you really love to do and get you reading a little bit.”
The program Hamer referred to is called Library Dogs, a national organization that connects libraries with local therapy dogs, and it’s what got Shoopie’s owners, Tom and Nancy Maxwell, to bring her in and see if Hamer was interested in December.
“I had read about [Library Dogs]— it’s a fairly widespread program — and it just seemed like a wonderful thing to do,” said Tom Maxwell. “We do Helen Porter nursing home on Thursday mornings and this is a nice counterpoint to that. When you have a dog like this, you want to share the dog with people. It’s a great thing that we just enjoy doing, and she seems to enjoy doing it, too.”
The Maxwells bought Shoopie from a breeder a year ago and took her to therapy dog training with Therapy Dogs International over the summer. Newfoundlands are loving and calm dogs often trained for rescue and therapy work, Tom Maxwell explained, so getting Shoopie involved in the community was a no-brainer. The only thing limiting Shoopie’s volunteer work is her fur.
“She’s good for about an hour, and then she starts to get too hot and it’s time to put the toys away, get her outside,” said Tom Maxwell.
Shoopie is perhaps even more patient than the average Newfoundland as she lies next to peacefully reading children and affectionately greets each new reader, seemingly aware of her large size and approaching small children carefully.
Professor of Computer Science Amy Briggs brought her two children, Anna, 9, and Peter, 6, to read to the gentle giant on Tuesday, and both Briggs and the large number of children who wanted to sign up for 10-minute slots at only the program’s second weekly meeting spoke to its success.
“My kids were really excited — my daughter loves dogs,” Briggs said. “She was great, she was petting the dog with one hand and reading with the other. Anna is a struggling reader and Peter is just a beginning reader, so especially for Anna this will be really helpful. She read for 15 minutes straight today, and she doesn’t read to me for 15 minutes straight.”
Hamer was also pleased with the event’s popularity, explaining that part of the appeal in reading to a dog is that it removes much of the pressure on kids associated with reading to an adult who may want to correct or assist the child, but it is also just nice for children to interact with a friendly animal.
“Shoopie is just so easy-going,” Hamer said. “I grew up kind of skittish around dogs, so I’m thrilled to offer this nice positive experience with a dog. And there are kids who can’t have dogs for various reasons — that’s definitely part of the appeal.”
The program is also unique in that its main focus is reading.
“It’s nice that it’s a program that’s appealing to kids and has a really strong reading component to it,” said Hamer. “We do all sorts of different programs here, and each has different ways of encouraging kids to read and interact with media and opening up the world to them, but in these days of the internet and all of these other things, it’s just nice to have something that’s pretty squarely a reading program and know that it’s going to be a homerun.”
As kids left the reading room on Tuesday afternoon, many stopped to give Shoopie a hug or kiss goodbye, so it seems the kids might not be the only ones enjoying Stories with Shoopie. Join Shoopie and all of her friends every Tuesday at 3:30, but be sure to sign up for a 10-minute session beforehand through Judah Hamer at (802) 388-4097 or Judah.Hamer@ilsleypubliclibrary.org.
(01/14/10 4:00am)
Sharon MacNair realized her animal loving nature as a teenager, thanks to a fuzzy duckling friend, Daisy.
She watched Daisy hatch and quickly developed a mother-daughter relationship with her.
“She even walked me to the school bus in the morning,” MacNair said.
A pivotal moment in MacNair’s life occurred on Thanksgiving a few years after Daisy was born. Her mother pretended to dance with the turkey she was preparing for dinner. Her mother then took out the innards and MacNair noticed the blood.
For the first time, MacNair realized the connection between Daisy and the meat she had been eating.
“I screamed, ran to my room and vowed never to eat meat again,” MacNair said.
Forty-three years later, MacNair is still a vegetarian and is also an active member in the local animal-loving community. She joined the board of directors of the Green Mountain Animal Defenders (GMAD) soon after it was founded in the early 1980s and still holds the position today.
MacNair finds volunteering at GMAD the perfect outlet for her passion for the humane treatment of animals because she is able to help animals recover from both injury and crisis.
She finds it particularly rewarding when GMAD is able to change local policy to treat animals more humanely. Over the past 26 years, GMAD has helped convince several government officials to sponsor animal protection legislation.
Thanks to much help from GMAD, Ben and Jerry’s and Bruegger’s Bagels recently switched to using only cage-free eggs.
Although MacNair has several memories of saving animals’ lives across the state, she remembers one particularly moving story about a cat named Cyrus. When Cyrus was four months old, his guardian was moving out of the house from an abusive relationship, but the domestic violence shelter could not accept pets.
The owner put Cyrus on a waiting list for a local animal shelter, but she needed a quicker solution. She contacted GMAD which responded right away, according to MacNair.
“Through our volunteer work, we found a temporary home for Cyrus so the woman would know that she and her cat would be safe,” MacNair said.
MacNair points to the story of Cyrus and her owner as a representative anecdote of what GMAD was created to do.
“This is an example of what is so unique about GMAD,” MacNair said. “We are able to use our community connections to help other organizations and fill gaps in services.”
After listening to MacNair’s story, a natural question arises. What is her favorite animal?
“I value all kinds of animals for their individuality,” MacNair said, but when it comes to her favorite she still thinks back to her childhood duckling, Daisy.
If you would like to volunteer with GMAD, consider their internship program: http://gmad.info/internships.php
(12/03/09 10:00am)
Animal Collective has had quite a year. Way back in January the Brooklyn/Baltimore-based group released the monumental “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” an album that set the critical world ablaze (many critics wasted no time in deeming it the album of the year) and kicked off the electro-pop trend that so many bands have since unsuccessfully tried to emulate. They embarked on a headlining tour across the United States and Europe and even received some considerable attention from the mainstream media with an appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”
Now, as 2009 draws to a close, AC delivers its second ’09 release, the remarkable five-song EP “Fall Be Kind.” Most of its tracks were written during or shortly after the “Merriweather” sessions, but with its blend of the experimental and immediately accessible, the EP stands on its own.
“Graze,” a song about the creative process, opens up “Fall Be Kind” with shimmering, fairytale strings that slowly give way to Avery Tare’s soaring vocals and a gently played piano. The song’s slow, ambient soundscape makes for a satisfying listen, but what occurs during the second half of the track takes it to new heights. Unexpectedly, a playful, swirling flute backed by crashing cymbals and a bouncy vocal melody transforms the song into a medieval romp. This music seems like it was made for elves and hobbits, not a college-aged hipster, but it’s fresh and inventive and like nothing you’ve heard all year.
“What Would I Want? Sky,” the first song ever to feature a legal Grateful Dead sample, continues with more rewarding surprises. The song’s first half is made up of fractured and experimental textures that at first may seem boisterous and random, but upon further listen reveal intricate sonic touches and details that make for an endlessly interesting experience. The last three minutes of “What Would I Want? Sky” find Animal Collective at their most accessible. Tare’s infectious vocal melody and Panda Bear’s ethereal harmonies give the song an immediate but chilling effect.
“Bleed,” the album’s weakest track, serves as a transitional piece, separating the more melodic openers from the haunting and difficult closers. “On a Highway” considers a usual place of escape, the open road, as a prison where every sound and movement trigger thoughts of despair and darkness: “On a highway/I let the bad things taunt me/Or do they want to haunt me?/I do not know how they find me.” Throw in some eerie strings and occasional tones of dissonance, and Animal Collective has created a truly tense and evocative piece.
“I Think I Can,” with its dreamy, layered instrumentation and length of over seven minutes, stands as “Fall Be Kind’s” most epic track. For most of the song, the lyrics invoke a sense of uncertainty and doubt as to whether it’s possible to move on from a situation in the face of “too many tough times.” But as the track closes, Panda Bear, in his familiar Brian Wilson-esque croon, repeats the song’s title with such assurance that we believe that things will actually work out. The dark tone that marked the second side of “Fall Be Kind” is erased, and we, as listeners, are left wondering where these remarkable musicians will take us next.
(12/03/09 1:45am)
Despite the fact that Wes Anderson’s new film stars an assortment of furry creatures who scamper, scurry and crawl in the dirt, the characters of “Fantastic Mr. Fox” bear more similarities to the oddball humans of Anderson’s other films than to the actual animals they are supposed to be. Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman make their usual appearances and play their usual idiosyncratic characters. The customary pretension and insecurities can familiarly be seen resonating in the characters’ boasts and belligerence, even if it is out of animals that should not actually be able to articulate English words. These memorable Anderson quirks have been equally alienating and endearing to audiences in the past, and the films that have resulted generally achieve a zealous cult following rather than widespread, blockbuster success. Without question, though, “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” in melding the Wes Anderson method with the Roald Dahl children’s story, combines the best of both eccentrics to present a film that fully realizes its comic potential.
With an all-star cast headlined by George Clooney and Meryl Streep, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” recounts the attempted and failed reformation of the title character. Mr. Fox (Clooney), embodying his animal persona, begins the film with the much-maligned vocation of thief. Like all husbands with a familial commitment, however, he must soon give up the fun and perils of the high life for the boredom and security of the desk job. But as his son grows up and the tedium of his career overwhelms him, Mr. Fox begins to question the life he’s been living.
Determined to prove his worth, he undertakes the dangerous task of stealing from the three most notoriously cruel farmers around. When the farmers discover the robber in their midst, however, Mr. Fox’s surreptitious activities endanger the rest of the animal world. As the animals fight for their survival, a didactic tale emerges that ultimately moralizes on the value of being different.
Early in the film, as Mr. Fox asks his lawyer’s opinion, he says, “I understand what you’re saying, and your comments are valuable, but I’m gonna ignore your advice.” This statement, although referring to an entirely different question, embodies Anderson’s determination to stick to a style that has failed to resonate with viewers in the past because of its refusal to portray realistic characters. Instead, he has resolutely stuck to stories in which humanity is embodied by peculiarity. While “Fantastic Mr. Fox” bears the classic trademark eccentricities of an Anderson film, it is apt to appeal to a wider audience than his past offerings.
It is not the use of the creative genius of Dahl that will draw in new viewers, or the fluffy cuteness of some of the creatures inhabiting the film. Instead, Anderson’s use of animation as opposed to live-action is the integral element that makes the movie work. Audiences that would generally shy away from such unrealistically bizarre characters will be able to digest the strangeness in the form of a puppet fox, an apossum or even a psychotic rat. Ironically, these traits being displayed by animals marks an even more improbable story line than usual, but with audiences approaching the film already knowing the tale will contain a collection of animated animals, they will not be disappointed when the characters bear no signs of genuine humans.
Able to finally recognize the likeability of Wes Anderson films, audiences will likely be inclined to reassess his previous work, for, despite the strangeness threaded through his films, they do in fact find truth and sincere humanity in their emotional endings — compassion, honesty and dignity. “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is no exception. It stands out, however, in infusing its usual idiosyncrasies into characters that live beneath the ground. Ironically, that is where these most definitely inhuman characters find those most human of qualities.
(11/19/09 4:33am)
For anyone that’s stepped onto Middlebury’s campus, the bent toward environmental awareness quickly becomes apparent. Reminders to save energy grace signs above light switches, a plethora of recycling bins dot dorm rooms and offices and even the toilets in the Axinn Center save water by reneging on the routine downward push of the handle. And if students were not already breathing, thinking and sleeping “green,” the environment has even seeped its way into academics. Students are now able to make any major they’d like “green,” with environmental studies running the gamut from specialties in literature to economics.
It is no surprise, then, that the environmental spirit has now infiltrated the Film and Media Culture department. This Winter Term, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture and American Studies Jason Mittell will offer a class titled “Sustainable TV: Producing Environmental Media,” that will ask students to “produce a nonfiction television program discussing sustainability and energy issues.”
With the College’s involvement last year with Planet Forward, Mittell became inspired to create this type of course.
Frank Sesno ’77, former CNN anchor and current journalism and public affairs professor at George Washington Universtiy, began Planet Forward as a way to spread the message of environmental awareness through media methods. Designed as a Web site where people can generate a dialogue about climate issues, the project has become an example of how pivotal a role media can play in the public sphere. People give their opinions not only through mere writing, but use video content to generate a message.
“The goal is to hear from a variety of people who aren’t getting their voices heard otherwise,” Mittell said
Last December, Sesno arrived at the College to generate enthusiasm among students about creating videos for his Web site, which by then had become a successful endeavor. Five videos appeared on the Web-site in March, and can still be seen at http://www.planetforward.org.
“Two of those videos ended up getting chosen for the PBS special that aired in April,” Mittell said. “And one of them was actually the most popular video on the site.”
That video was called “Going Under,” a two-and-a-half minute animation “about Bangladesh being submerged under water.” Created by Farhan Ahmed ’09, Luisa Covaria ’09, Ioana Literat ’09 and Louis Lobel ’08.5, the short uses collage-like figures to send a warning about the havoc that will result from the melting icebergs. After the video became popular, the students received the opportunity to see the taping of the PBS special, and Ahmed even made an appearance on the show in a panel discussion with Carol Browner, the director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy.
When Mittell later saw Sesno at last year’s commencement, they hatched a plan for a class to unite the issues of environmental studies and media students had only been doing in their spare time.
“One of the impetuses of the course is to generate material for Planet Forward,” Mittell said. “Every one of the short segments that they produce can be submitted to Planet Forward. It’s up to the students whether they want to or not, obviously. The idea would be they would create things that would go into Planet Forward, that potentially, when they do their next taping, which will be in April, again we could have Middlebury participation, which would be really great — a really great opportunity for our students.”
Changing his title from “professor” to “executive producer” who will only have final say in the products generated, Mittell emphasizes that student choice will dominate how the class works. In a largely collaborative model, students will have the opportunity to create what they want, switch roles as they please and play at different ways of production.
Unfortunately for students, one freedom they will not have is the power to procure a celebrity spokesperson like Al Gore or Leonardo DiCaprio. Although Middlebury might appear to be riding the wave of the use of media to instigate environmental awareness, Mittell believes that media retains a power even when separated from the celebrity culture that has powered it recently in such films as “An Inconvenient Truth” and “11th Hour.”
“I think one of the challenges that the environmental movement has faced,” Mittell explained, “is that they’ve been branded as something for celebrities — sort of, ‘It’s chic to drive a Prius.’”
Without a celebrity behind the project, the professor still envisions the course as a powerful tool to spread environmental activism.
“I think that one of the other problems is that the issue is too global to make a difference,” he said. “So what I really want to have happen is make this a sort-of grass roots media project focused at least in part on local actions and local decisions [in order to] make it empowering for people to say, ‘Okay, watching this makes me think of here are some things I can do, here are some changes I can make in my life, here are some things I can advocate for that will make a difference.’”
If the projects are successful, Mittell intends to have a screening here on campus in the spring. In that way, the movies will continue to educate and raise awareness about what students believe are the central issues of climate action.
Although Mittell himself admits to never being centrally involved in the environmental movement, he sees media as one of the foremost forms for spreading such knowledge.
“I’m always interested in thinking about how you can use moving images and media to make social criticism or commentary,” he said.
(11/19/09 3:29am)
Correction Appended
“Ophthalmologist and writer — coffee growers?” Middlebury College Writer-in-Residence Julia Alvarez applied a tone of self-deprecating humor when she spoke about the unexpected endeavor she and her husband, Bill Eichner, undertook in 1997. Traveling to the Dominican Republic on a writing assignment, Alvarez discovered that the community of Los Marranitos and its surrounding farmland were suffering from deforestation, soil erosion, illiteracy and poverty and needed more hands-on assistance than the publicity from Alvarez’s story would receive. Unable to ignore the basic needs of the suffering Dominicans, Alvarez and Eichner established Finca Alta Gracia — which roughly translates to, “the farm of High Grace, the protector of the Dominican Republic” — an organic coffee farm that uses traditional sustainable methods and simultaneously seeks to educate and support the surrounding community.
Alvarez and Eichner’s memorable visit to the Dominican Republic that led to their purchasing Finca Alta Gracia was initially prompted by The Nature Conservancy’s construction of an anthology. “They were asking writers to visit one of their protected places, write a story about it and gift it to them so that they could put it in the anthology and raise funds for different programs,” Alvarez recalled. When The Nature Conservancy asked Alvarez to cover the Dominican Republic, she jumped at the opportunity to visit her parents’ native land and her childhood home. Her free trip home quickly turned into a lesson in farming practices.
“We were taken to this area where we connected with a lot of the local farmers who were trying to go back to the traditional way of growing coffee, which has always been under shade trees — organic by default, because who could afford pesticides?” Alvarez said, contrasting this traditional farming technique with the popular “plantation method.” Under the plantation method, much of the mountainous terrain of the area had been stripped of its shade trees in order to support a different kind of beans that grew in the sunlight.
“The habitat was completely changed,” she said. “The songbirds were gone.” These negative consequences from coffee harvesting deeply affected Alvarez.
“These farmers, not even aware because they didn’t have the means — they didn’t know how to read or write — of some global movement in that direction [of organic farming], they just wanted to go back to the way they were doing things,” Alvarez said of the movement to return to the shade-tree method of growing beans. “So they asked Bill and me if we would like to help them.”
Alvarez initially responded skeptically, saying that her story would raise awareness about the perilous effects of the coffee industry on local ecosystems and, as a result, those with the means to help them could become involved. However, the farmers and Alvarez’s husband were not satisfied with that response; Eichner bought six acres of abandoned and deforested farmland and began planting trees. This initial reforestation was recognized by the Vermont Institute of Natural Science because, as a result of Alvarez’s and Eichner’s planting, Bicknell’s Thrush, an endangered bird that migrates from Vermont to the Dominican Republic, had finally returned to the Dominican Republic. This symbolic return of animals to their natural habitat is highlighted on the Café Alta Gracia Web site with bird woodcuts by local artist Belkis Ramirez.
The small reforestation project quickly developed into much more. Eichner purchased 60 more acres and then 60 more. Finca Alta Gracia currently occupies 260 acres with room to expand. On these acres, Alvarez and Eichner have worked with the local farmers to create a coffee farm that has improved not only the surrounding environment but also the lives of the farmers. Eichner explained that a pound of Dominican coffee that is sold in the United States for 10 dollars can be bought for as little as 33 cents in the farming communities. Alvarez, Eichner and their business partner Paul Ralston, founder of the Vermont Coffee Company, who grinds Alta Gracia’s beans and sells them, worked to meet USDA organic standards in order to ensure a fairer price for their coffee beans and for the beans of neighboring farmers.
“Certification is an important imprint that says that you are following those practices, and that’s important to the marketplace,” Ralston explained. “[The farm] was certified under a program that allows the manager of the farm, which is a Dominican government organization, to extend that certification to neighboring farms. So there are a number of farmers who have met the quality standard and the organic standard who are now able to export their coffee.”
Realizing that sustainability encompassed much more than reforestation and organic growing practices, Alvarez, Eichner and Ralston sought to further improve the community by establishing a literacy program on the farm. Alvarez recalled meeting the town’s “letter-writer,” one of the few literate men in the community who was in charge of transcribing communication for community members. “And that’s when we realized that we were taking care of the land, nature, but we had to take care of human nature, too,” Alvarez said. “And without the access to reading and writing, the cycle of poverty just keeps getting repeated. So that’s where the whole school idea came in later in the process.”
Seeking to promote development and sustainability simultaneously, in 2000, Alvarez conducted a Winter Term course titled “Writing in the Wiles” in which 12 Middlebury students lived with her on Finca Alta Gracia for the month, devoting half of each day to writing workshops and the other half to community projects, including teaching, bean-picking, cooking and gardening.
Unable to repeat the class due to changes in the structure of Winter Term, Alvarez established a different ongoing connection between the College and the farm. Every year, two Middlebury graduates are hired for one-year fellowships as either volunteer teachers or “farm and community development volunteers,” during which time they live in the community and work to improve its situation.
When Julie Baroody ’03.5 arrived at Middlebury in February of 2000, one of the first things she did was attend a presentation conducted by the “Writing in the Wiles” class. Four years later, this international studies major and former inhabitant of Weybridge house was living and teaching on Finca Alta Gracia. Baroody said she worked closely with Alvarez to determine the goals of the library on the farm. “The experience gave me some insight into non-profit management,” she said.
Naomi Harper ’08, who lived and worked on the farm last year, shared a similar learning experience in management and sustainability, “Working there made me realize that in order for any project to be sustainable, the driving force behind it has to come from the bottom up,” Harper said. “By that I mean there must be a high level of engagement on a local grassroots level. The Alta Gracia dream is one in which community development, education and empowerment go hand-in-hand with environmental sustainability.”
In addition to working on the farm and conducting literacy classes, the fellows undertake community “micro-enterprise” projects. Eli Berman ’07, a current volunteer at the farm, is working to increase the production of compost that will be re-used as natural fertilizer. Berman maintained that such projects require a great deal of help and input from locals.
“One of my good friends on the farm is a nine-year-old boy, Johanni, who helps me with the composting project,” Berman said. “Although he can barely read, he is an expert on all of the plants and animals in the area. He leads me around the farm and community quizzing me on the differences between plants. Although I have had trouble learning the difference between plants, I like to think that he sees the same potential in me that I see in him.”
Dylan Wadja-Levie ’08, who worked last year as the farm’s first farm and community development volunteer, developed what became known as “the chicken project,” through which the Alta Gracia Foundation hired two Dominicans to build a chicken coop on the farm and stock it with chickens. The project’s purpose was twofold. It served not only to employ community members, but also to provide fresh eggs and meat for the surrounding town.
“My experience taught me that sustainability is not easy,” Wadja-Levie said, comparing the buzz word of “sustainability” to the realization of such projects. “For something to be sustainable it must be sustainable on many different levels,” she continued. “Something that might seem sustainable, or that is labeled as sustainable, might not always be sustainable. We need to constantly evaluate and adjust.”
Eichner said that the very presence of the volunteers in addition to their hard work, encourages change in the community. “A lot can be accomplished by people coming down and doing their thing and it being seen,” he said.
Ria Shroff ’09, who, along with Berman, currently lives and works on the farm, detailed in her Oct. 26 blog entry the power of promoting literacy by reading in public. She also encourages parents to set their own example for their children:“I told them that now, since their kids were in school, it was up to them to set a good example about the importance of education, and that the kids would imitate their behavior,” she wrote. “They teased me and started complaining in jest about how I was a taskmaster, but I could tell they were all eager. I walked out of my house 30 minutes later and found all the women on their front porch with a book. It reminded me of sitting out on the balcony in my house and reading, reading, reading.”
As evidenced by the volunteers’ stories, sustainability at Finca Alta Gracia encompasses more than organic and eco-friendly growing practices. Sustainability for the farm incorporates environmental, economic, political and social justice.
“Paul [of the Vermont Coffee Company] is 100 percent fair trade because, as he said, ‘fair trade is a philosophy,’” Alvarez said. “If you believe it, then anything else is not fair. It does trickle down to these people having a significantly better chance.”
Alvarez, Eichner and Ralston are grateful for the support of the fellows, the yearly Middlebury Alternative Leadership Trip trips to the farm and the funding provided by the College’s Alliance for Civic Enagement office. “[The volunteers] are a great gift to the community,” Eichner said.
Finca Alta Gracia plans to expand more this year, exporting 300 60-kilo bags of beans to the United States, up from 250 last year. Alvarez, Eichner and Ralston would also like to see additional College involvement and look forward to reading the applications for this year’s fellows.
For those who cannot travel to the Dominican Republic to assist directly in the ongoing 13-year sustainability project that began with a story assignment, the volunteers suggest supporting fair trade on the consumer level.
“For coffee drinkers, think about relationship coffees,” Wadja-Levie suggested. “Try to find a roaster who knows where the coffee comes from and the farmers who grow it.”
Berman added, “I encourage people to learn more about the products they consume because, although I’m only knowledgeable about coffee, I’m sure this is a trend in many other markets. The final price should only be one of many factors in deciding whether or not to buy a certain product.”
Café Alta Gracia can be purchased at a number of local Middlebury establishments or online at http://www.vermontcoffeecompany.com.
Correction: On Nov. 19, the headline on page 13 “Finca Alta Gracia: organic farm partners with the College to promote community development” misrepresented the relationship between the College and the farm. No direct partnership between the College and Finca Alta Gracia exists. Rather, two Middlebury graduates are hired each year as fellows, and the funding for the Middlebury grad volunteer fellows is provided by gifts made to the ACE office by an alum of the Class of 1987 and the Vermont Coffee Company. The Campus regrets the error.
(11/19/09 2:03am)
Let’s name the animals no longer with us,
except in language: start with the dodo,
the Haitian long-tongued bat, the dwarf emu,
the laughing owl, the eastern buffalo.
And then animals like the nukupuu,
the lorikeet, the broad-faced potoroo,
whose absences don’t sadden me as much
as I can’t put a picture to their names:
two potoroos, say, lounging in their den
with baby potoroos clambering over them.
I think of Adam watching the parade
of just-created animals, their form
still taking shape, so had he touched too hard,
the camel might have had some extra humps,
the colors might have smudged on the peacock,
which wasn’t yet a peacock, but a thing,
a brightly-colored, gorgeous, feathered thing
in need of a name--as was the camel,
the marmoset, the deer, the parakeet,
waiting to enter language and be claimed.
But now, we, Adam’s babies, find ourselves
uttering names no one comes up to claim:
no iridescent, billed, web-footed thing
quacks back when we say Leguat’s gelinote—
in fact, unless we say the name out loud
or write it down, the gelinote is gone.
And so, our language, which singles us out
from dwarf emus, nukupuus, potoroos,
becomes an elegy, as with each loss
our humanness begins to vanish, too.
from The Woman I Kept To Myself
(05/07/09 12:00am)
Author: Grady Ross Several years ago, my family decided to take a guided tour at a zoo we were visiting. Everything was going quite well: we rode the little trolley from cage to cage oohing and ahhing at the crocodiles and monkeys and giraffes. Then we got to the panther. "We call these panthers," informed our guide, "but there are really no such things. They are simply black leopards."At this point my grandfather, a Midd man from way back, whispered:"She has no idea what she's talking about. She must have gone to Dartmouth."Growing up attending football, hockey and soccer games at the College and cheering at Winter Carnival up at the Snow Bowl, I've always understood that panthers were sacred animals. And although I've been in Middlebury all my life, this knowledge has separated me from campus: I've always been a spectator, never an actual part of the Panther tradition.Prepare yourselves for that last epic scene of a sports movie,
(04/30/09 12:00am)
Author: Corinne Beaugard and Kaylen Baker We begin our lives of schooling between the ages of two and three on our first day of preschool. Sixteen years later, we go to college for four years, then possibly to graduate school. We spend the better part of our youth passing through the motions of structured education without the opportunity to direct our own paths. Of course there is summer, which has the potential to rejuvenate and restore, but many of us want to be productive year round, using summer to build resumes and work. Following this predestined course is the perfect fit for people who thrive in the structured and demanding environment of higher education, but some reject it and choose to explore the world and themselves without such constraints. Luckily for those of us who want to leave for a semester or more, Middlebury makes it extremely easy to do so. Our Feb program is great because it allows students, both Febs and non-Febs, to take a semester off while still being part of a particular class. There are a considerable number of students on campus who have taken time off, which is likely due to Middlebury's lenient policy. It is possible to defer for a semester up until the day before classes start. Cassandra Moore, a first-semester sophomore, took last semester off as well. She had been deliberating for a while and finally decided it would be for the best. "I moved from Durango, Colo., to Olympia, Wash., in late August and lived with two friends, Mesa and Automne, in the cutest little house. And that's what I did: I just lived there. I wanted to take time off school and didn't have a plan, really, of what to do - and I didn't want to plan anything." She also had crappy jobs, one at a religious coffee shop and another cleaning at a scummy motel, yet she enjoyed her time. Time works in a very different way when you're not in school. The day is not organized into class periods, athletic practices, lectures, and screenings. It is a lot more flexible and the days become distinguishable for reasons aside from hours in the library and meals in the dining hall. Upon reflection, Cassie noted how valuable this was for her. "It seems strange, but it was really nice to work jobs, for a little while, that I didn't care about. It was relieving. It wouldn't hold my attention for a very long time, but for a little while. It was nice to reserve my best energy for my life outside of work." She stayed in Oregon for the rest of her time off, working, riding her bike, and enjoying the freedom of really living. Cassie considered returning to school, not entirely convinced it would be the best decision, but she did and is not disappointed. However, she believes she may take the following semester off and possibly more in the future. Many people here are more concerned about their graduation date, but Cassie says she'd recommend taking time off to everyone, realizing how crucial it was for her personal growth and happiness."I think it is a bad decision, honestly, not to take time off. I think there is a reality beyond school's structure that so many people don't see for too long and I think that is sad. I think plowing through education like we do lends itself to the creation of a lifestyle that is equally fast-paced and just not humble."Other students decide to take time off with the intent of participating in a social or political cause. Ben Wessel, currently a sophomore, plans to take next semester off to work for 1Sky, a climate advocacy group in Washington, D.C. He has worked for the organization before and felt it was so rewarding he wants to return. At 1Sky he will participate in U.S. and international policy analysis, working with existing policies, as well as proposals, that aim to influence Congress and organize the grassroots youth movement. Ben said he decided to take time off not because he needs a break from this academic environment but because this environmental movement is so time sensitive. Waiting until graduation is not an option; too many critical decisions that will have already been made, decisions he hopes to influence. According to Wessel, taking next semester off is the best solution, for he does not want to continue investing himself half heartedly in school and this cause. By taking time off he can fully devote himself to achieving climate goals and then return to school, satisfied that he followed his calling to act. His work with policy change will culminate with an international conference in Copenhagen, COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009. During this time, Ben will work with the group of young people at the conference to influence the policy makers."We will call attention to the failings of negotiations through creative actions," Wessel said, "with focus on the media. We offer a policy stance that will safeguard all countries." Ben is excited to sit at the table with the policy makers and his fellow activists this coming December to push for his climate agenda, which he hopes will be enacted.Xian Chiang-Warren '11 went straight to college after high school like most kids do in the United States, but soon changed track. "It just became apparent to me during my first year that I wasn't getting enough out of being here academically," she explained. "I was in classes I was interested in with amazing professors, but it wasn't clicking. The timing was off."Instead of returning for sophomore year at Middlebury, she decided to take time off and travel around South America with some friends. Originally, she expected to end up working at an animal refuge in the Amazon Basin in Bolivia, but as she traveled along, her plans changed and she found herself forging a different and spontaneous trail.Chiang-Warren does not disapprove of formal education, but she staunchly believes that life must contain more than just theoretical classroom discussions and regurgitated principles. "There are other things that academia can't teach you, things that it alienates us from, which are equally important to our growth as human beings," she said. "What scared me was the idea of hitting age 21 or 22 and not being able to remember existing outside of these places."When asked whether it was difficult to return to school life after her traveling, she admitted, "Yes and no. I was always going to come back - I understand that I should probably finish college, that it opens more doors than it closes, and also there's just a lot of information out there that I want to learn. Most importantly I've found amazing friends here, without a doubt the most interesting and talented groups of people that I've ever seen in one place. I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to spend three more years with them. With all that said, it was still really hard to get on the plane back home.""Make sure you are doing something adventurous and different than you have done before," advised Nate Blumenshine '10.5 on taking time off. Instead of continuing his sophomore year, he harvested corn on a Kansas farm to learn more about the U.S. food system and lived at a Lutheran retreat center in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. Two years later, he left school again to learn Arabic in religiously enticing Bethlehem Palestine. "I felt the power of the divine when I saw the spot where Jesus was born and heard the call to prayer and church bells ringing in unison," he remembered. This past fall, he worked on the Obama campaign in Reading, Pa. - this inspiration drew largely from the broadened international perspective he has gained. "[Obama's] role in improving U.S. relations with the rest of the world just by being elected is better than another candidate could have done with four years devoted towards doing the same thing," he said. Each valuable experience taught him something - one day, while crossing the border to Jerusalem, he went through the checkpoint behind a smiling Palestinian man and his Frisbee got stuck in the x-ray machine. With instructions from the Israeli guard, he recalled, "I walked back to the other side of the machine and kind of crawled up on the conveyor belt so that I could reach into the X-ray and grab my Frisbee. Triumphantly, I freed my Frisbee from its dark radioactive fate and received smiles of congratulations from both the Palestinian man and the Israeli soldier." However, Blumenshine accepted this cordiality fully aware that his American identity was responsible. "Something was wrong here
(04/23/09 12:00am)
Author: Melissa Marshall No, faithful readers - yes, I'm addressing all five of you (hi, Mom!) - I have not gracefully stepped down from my independently-labeled soapbox. If you've seen me walking in the dining halls, you'll know that first, gracefulness is not my forte, and second, I am not able to pass up an opportunity to pontificate on the social importance of the entire campus knowing what currently plays on my iPod. In fact, you should not only care what I listen to, you should spend the time to download it as well - college is a period of broadened horizons and self-improvement. So get thee to a music blog, post-haste. Not to say that my predecessors haven't done a fantastic job. And I'm sure that most of you are pleased to read about music from artists who are not white 20-something males armed with high-pitched voices and acoustic guitars (in my defense, I did write about 20-something females). But in their attempts to break out of a certain mold of "indie-music," my male counterparts have made a grave oversight that cannot go unheeded. Hey Jason and Alex, ever hear of someone named Andrew Bird? I'm sure you have, in your enlightened upperclassman status. But we have some freshmen - excuse me, "first-years" - who missed out on the Sepomana of yore when Andrew Bird took the McCullough stage and awed an audience with a whistle and an untucked button-down. Since then, Bird has experienced if not mainstream fame, then at least a fan base extending beyond hyper-literate undergrads. In 2007 the cohesive "Armchair Apocrypha" cemented my love for the one-man band from Chicago - an adoration that started when a man behind a counter handed me a copy of "Weather Systems" five years ago. This long-term love affair hasn't blinded me to his imperfections, however. In fact, I wanted to dislike January's "Noble Beast," bitter at Mr. Bird for canceling his Higher Ground show and demolishing my hope to have my folk-pop hero as the last concert of my college career. But you can't deny greatness - and "Noble Beast" isn't just great, it's inspired.His fifth full-length release and second record with the Fat Possum label, "Noble Beast," like the album cover itself, shows a return to a simpler, cleaner, more natural sound. It's not that the electronic presence of Martin Dosh on "Armchair" detracted from Bird's feel - in fact, Dosh's collaboration gave the album its polished, catchy feel and subsequent popularity. On "Noble Beast," however, it is refreshing to hear the classically trained violinist return to his roots. He continues to manipulate the strings, crafting a genre-bending style ranging from the swing jazz of "Not a Robot, But a Ghost" to the almost Caribbean feel of "Nomenclature." Hell, "Fitz and Dizzyspells" may even have those indie-kids dancing. In addition to showcasing his versatility, "Noble Beast" offers listeners Bird's finest musicianship to date: either by picking at the strings or by forming sprawling chords, Bird's talent for the violin on such tracks as "Masterswarm" and "Anonanimal" eclipses his reputation as a peerless whistler. And no, not all of the cuts from the album are groundbreaking: "Privateers" proves downright boring and the opener "Oh No" I could take or leave. But even if every other song was like "Privateers," Bird's crowning achievement, "Tenuousness," would be enough to gain my endorsement. With a steady clapping undertone and solid violin foundation, "Tenuousness" is classic Bird: clean, catchy and flawlessly crafted. Actually, my review could have been just one word - "Tenuousness" - but I thought 499 exclamation points were a bit much. On "Anonanimal," Bird sings, "I will become this animal/Perfectly adapted to a music hall." And in response to his claim, we will answer back, "I know this song, I love this song." If Andrew Bird couldn't be my final college concert, I'm grateful that at least he could be my final column.
(04/23/09 12:00am)
Author: Johanna Interian If you think kissing farm animals and social justice have nothing in common, then perhaps a human rights club's fundraiser will change your mind.Middlebury's chapter of Amnesty International, a global organization whose mission statement is to "protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied," is hosting "Kiss the Cow" on Battell Beach on April 30.As part of the fundraiser, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz and four First- year Counselors have agreed to kiss the animal responsible for Vermont's livelihood. In light of recent controversy surrounding human rights violations in the state's agricultural labor, the cow was an appropriate choice.The club arranged to rent a cow from a local farmer and will be collecting donations at the dining halls in the coming week in order to make the event possible. In addition, Amnesty is currently raising funds to be able to sponsor more events and activities aimed at promoting human rights awareness on campus.In November, Co-Presidents of Middlebury's Chapter of Amnesty International Veronica Muoio '11 and Phoebe Shang '11 embarked on a 27-hour van ride to Fort Benning near Columbus, Ga. There, they joined members of other social justice organizations to rally for the closing of the School of the Americas, a military facility that has been associated with teaching terror techniques to its students.In November 1989, graduates from the School of the Americas murdered six Jesuit priests from El Salvador, and there is a weekend demonstration held there every year in that month as a tribute. Each year, the number of protestors rises."Last year, 20,000 people came, but [the school] has not closed yet," said Muoio.A fence was erected surrounding the institution in order to keep the demonstrators out."Every year, the nuns symbolically step over the boundary lines in protest," said Shang. "The nuns also read off the names of people killed by graduates of the school."The co-presidents would like to have the School of the Americas trip be an annual event with more student participation."Next year, we'd like to reach out to more people on campus," said Muoio. "That's part of why we're inviting new lecturers."An Amnesty-sponsored lecture on Wed., April 22 in Dana Auditorium attracted environmentally conscious students. Issues discussed dealt with sustainable agriculture in developing countries, and specifically with women farmers and environmental degradation in Darfur. The lecture was led by Fatima Ahmed, leader of the organization Zenab for Women in Development, and Vivian Stromberg of MADRE, a women's human rights organization.Amnesty also tries to raise awareness and encourage action through writing campaigns."We wrote to State Secretary of Northern Ireland Shaun Howard about Patrick Finucane, an Irish civil rights lawyer who was killed 20 years ago. His case was never very thoroughly investigated," said Shang.The club's main goal now is to increase student membership and also to gain participation from faculty and staff. To do this, the leaders plan to have more activities to encourage people to bring in their opinions on issues they care about."I think next semester, it'd be great to get faculty members more involved
(04/16/09 12:00am)
Author: Brian Fung Ever since journalism became a true profession in the early 20th century, citizens looked to the news to learn about the world around them. Today, the news is the news - and while print, TV and radio organizations still perform the same function they did a century ago, that very commitment to tradition actually deserves much of the blame for causing journalism's current plight. It's no secret the news industry is collapsing - partly because of the economic hardships facing everybody else, but mostly because the heavy hitters failed to capitalize on the Internet back when they still could. Call it a failure of imagination. Luckily, community newspapers like ours have escaped the identity crisis gripping larger media outlets. In fact, for us, the future is looking up (if it was ever looking down in the first place). Our recent April Fools' issue saw widespread success and earned effusive praise. We've taken bold steps this spring to upgrade our production software and photography equipment. And we've also brought on new editors for some added firepower. These expansions have made us more all the more competitive and should lead to an improvement in your overall Middlebury Campus experience.But these developments do little to address a fundamental imbalance in the way we operate. Today, Campus editors spend most of their time laying out a product that no more than 2,800 people will ever see. By contrast, our Web site will receive upwards of 18,000 unique hits this week alone, and over 70,000 this month. There's something wrong with this picture. Our priorities are out of sync - why do we spend countless hours slaving over our print edition when the Web is such a growth market? This is where the major leaguers failed. Until we readjust, this imbalance will make our jobs increasingly difficult.To show you how we plan to adapt, let's take a one-sentence trip down memory lane. In 2001, we launched the Web site you see today when you visit MiddleburyCampus.com. For the past eight years, it's given us basic Web functionality - the ability to post stories whenever we publish a new issue, and a handful of other features. But in today's Web 2.0 society, that's not enough. The most successful news sites today offer multimedia like streaming video, interactive animation, support for social media bookmarks and RSS feeds. What's more, page design has become just as important as the actual reporting. Just compare today's version of Facebook to its predecessors. The San Francisco-based company has proven obsessive about Facebook's layout, revising it repeatedly to drive users to certain tools and making the user experience itself more efficient.With our coming site refresh, we hope to make MiddleburyCampus.com more than a simple carbon copy of its print sibling. Accessing articles will become less of a chore with a rotating slideshow of top stories displayed on the front page. Photo essays and audio/video podcasts about the week's news will supplement our print reporting. We'll add to our roster of columnists and have them write blogs. Most importantly, the site will see updates three times a week, making our Web site trusted online resource for all things Middlebury.All these changes will cause a fundamental shift in the way this newspaper is produced. Where in the past our Web editor would craft our online edition alone and after hours, future Web editors will have a team of staff reporters underneath them just like any other section. What's more, those editors will become an integral part of the production process.This semester, we've been hard at work laying the foundation for our new site. When we make the jump in September, get ready for an entirely new online experience at The Campus.As always, thanks for your continued support.
(04/16/09 12:00am)
Author: Andrey Tolstoy Since 1985, The Darwin Awards have been conferred on "people who ensure the long-term survival of the human race by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion." In 1998, a German zookeeper named Friedrich Riesfeldt was honored for suffocating under nearly two hundred pounds of elephant feces. Riesfeldt had served the constipated beast 22 doses of animal laxative and was administering an enema when the medicine took effect. This is roughly how I visualize our Republican columnist's tirade on socialism and America last week.There are many ways to misunderstand the world, and politics is just one of them. Unfortunately, practitioners in the field are convinced that using graphs and obfuscated jargon makes them scientists - even though the predictive capacity of their discipline ranks somewhere between that of palm-reading and sorting tea leaves - which makes it all the funnier when they bicker with one another, and all the funnier when it's a curmudgeonly Young Republican introducing "forced equality [i.e. civil rights], equitable distribution of resources among the proletariat [i.e., single mothers], and the submission of the populace to the will of the government [i.e., representative democracy]" to the freedom-loving end of his boot.To make sure we're on the same page: socialism is the belief that certain groups and individuals are disadvantaged by circumstances beyond their control - disenfranchisement, social prejudice, geographic location - and that because private organizations have no material incentive to help them, the government should assume responsibility. In fairness to the elephant in the room, he isn't the first unemployed intellectual to misappropriate these otherwise reasonable ideas - Karl Marx beat him to it by suggesting they were a means to achieving communism. But deriding the failure of North Korean socialism has no more academic merit than applauding the success of North Korean neoliberal capitalism. Irrespective of what ideology Kim Jong Il purports his government to represent, he remains at the head of a totalitarian dictatorship. No more, no less.The great problem of social science is not at the level of ideas, but at the level of taking credit. None of these crackpot theories are truly predictive, but because there are so many of them out there, a small percentage can claim scientific success in any given situation. Notice how colonialism, Nazism, mercantilism and other bankrupt ideologies fell simultaneously with the regimes that espoused them, yet the United States' rich history of racism, social inequality, decimation of indigenous peoples, financing of foreign dictatorships, torture and other crimes continues to be sublimated in favor of the illusion that for the past two hundred years there has been some sort of commitment to principles. I agree, let's call a spade a spade, but let's not call every bad spade socialist, and every good spade American. U.S. hegemony is currently challenged by the rise of international actors whose ideological base will praise their success as testament to the inherent values of their culture or social/political/economic system. And when the going gets tough, whatever mammal they identify with most will start grunting and farting about national principles being forsaken. No nation's creed is failure.Fifty-some years ago, a junior senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy described his communist witch hunt as "Americanism with its sleeves rolled." The world was different then, and communism was a fairy tale the Soviets used to enlist ideologically vulnerable well-wishers into their spy network. McCarthy's activism did nothing to supplement the work of U.S. intelligence agencies, and only created a culture of exclusion, intolerance and paranoia. It was an embarrassing time when one set of beliefs was temporarily declared un-American and forced thousands into unemployment because of hearsay and rumor. Understandably, it chills my blood a little when I read the elephant say, in reference to the supposed third wave of socialism, "We are AMERICANS. We need to start acting like it." We'll start by writing a declaration of independence and keeping our slaves.
(04/16/09 12:00am)
Author: Kate Siegner "A Cleaner Tomorrow." "Baking with Solar Energy." "Algae Fuels the Future." These titles accompany three of the videos that have been uploaded to Planet Forward, the new social networking video site devoted to publicizing issues related to climate change and clean energy. Frank Sesno '77 created the Web site and is hosting a national PBS special on April 15 that will showcase the project and include clips from selected videos. Sesno is a strong advocate for expanding the dialogue on renewable energy so that larger sectors of the population will have access to information as well as a forum in which to discuss new and innovative ideas. "In this age of citizen journalism, we are inviting all Americans to join the debate, offer opinions and let their voices be heard," said Sesno in a press release on the Middlebury College Web site.In particular, Sesno has expressed interest in having students become involved with the project; he has made several trips to the College, where he has attended a meeting of the Sunday Night Group, the largest environmental group on campus, and spoken with the head of the Film and Media Culture department about encouraging Middlebury students to submit videos. Students have responded enthusiastically to Sesno's encouragement, and have already produced five videos that have appeared on Planet Forward. Two of them, "Going Under" and "Choose Earth," were selected to appear on PBS. "Choose Earth," created by Leslie Stonebraker '09, features the new biomass plant on campus. A clip from Stonebraker's film will appear in the opening of the channel's special, and she, along with the creators of "Going Under," flew to Washington D.C., to be in the audience for the show's filming. Stonebraker, a film and media culture major, had been hired by Facilities Services to document the opening of the biomass plant which launched on Feb. 19, so when she was presented with the opportunity to make a film for Planet Forward, she jumped at the chance. Stonebraker feels her film is important because the College is "on the forefront" of the green movement and yet "lots of people here are unaware." For example, when she talked to friends about her film, many did not even know there was a biomass plant on campus. "Choose Earth" is therefore about spreading awareness.Matt Vaughan '09, who co-produced the chalkboard stop-motion animation "Think Hydrogen" with Michaela O'Connor '11, also hopes to educate the public about his cause - using hydrogen gas for energy "in the most simple way possible." Vaughan is a physics major interested in applying physics to green engineering, and used his thesis as inspiration for the video. After participating in Power Shift from Feb. 28 to March 2, he realized "there's a real hunger for knowledge" and that "people want to get involved but don't know how." Vaughan sees Planet Forward as an opportunity for people to learn, and highlights the "differing views" that the Web site presents.Planet Forward has the potential to be a successful organizing force in the green movement, since it is open to such a diverse array of people and opinions. In the words of Bill McKibben, scholar-in-residence in Environmental Studies, who was interviewed in the film "A Message from Bill McKibben" by Middlebury students Alex Consalvo '09 and Evan Griswold '09, it's time to "stop worrying about light bulbs and start worrying about organizing."
(03/19/09 12:00am)
Author: Emma Stanford Saturday's closing performance of "F*ckpigs and C*ckroaches" started slowly, as would-be audience members were escorted into Hepburn Zoo to find extra crannies to occupy. For some, this was their second or third time seeing the show since its opening on Thursday; they were drawn repeatedly to its superb acting and tense depiction of the darker sides of humanity."F*ckpigs and C*ckroaches: A Meditation on Power," the senior work of Director Jeanine Buzali '09, melds together scenes from plays by Harold Pinter, Naomi Wallace and others. The scope is wide, ranging from American soldiers in the Kuwaiti desert to the interrogation rooms of an unnamed oppressive dictatorship. The constant in this stew of violence and lies is the distorting, brutalizing effect of one human being's power over another.It's perhaps a good thing that Buzali cut and pasted scenes from various plays into this collage. A full-length version of any of the scenes could have been tiresome. In the scenes from Harold Pinter's "One for the Road," a passive-aggressive megalomaniac (Christo Grabowski '12) ranted at broken-down political criminals on subjects ranging from the rush of killing to the beauty of his victim's wife to the quality of the scotch he was drinking. This was interesting for a while, as the audience got an insight into the mind of a man with absolute power over other people, but there wasn't enough range to the performance for it to remain interesting. By the time we saw him interrogate the first victim's wife, shaking a little too theatrically as she stood before him, there seemed to be nothing more to say.Fortunately, the variety of scenes kept the play moving quickly. We saw a pair of American soldiers in Kuwait, learning from a superior how to access their anger and use it against the enemy. We saw a tight-jawed official (Katie Thacher '11) rebuke another woman (Chantia Harper '12) for showing her ankles, saying of her need to dress provocatively, "You continually subvert that man's right to be a simple person! You oppress him!" In both scenes, the line between sanity and psychosis blurred: was the insane woman the one denying human sexuality or the one defined by it? The line was further blurred in a later scene, in which an American family in Rwanda, housing a Tutsi refugee, shoved him forward like a sacrificial lamb rather than have their daughter hurt by a Hutu militant. "Do we matter to you at all?" the Hutu asked, his machine gun still leveled to fire. In an unexpected and compelling twist, the villain of the show became not violence or hatred, but old-fashioned American selfishness.In the final scene, a nervous overalled artist (Michelle Alto '12) adjusted the pose of a living model (Grabowski) while her surly, cigar-wielding mentor (Ekow Edzie '10) criticized. When she timidly suggested that the model make a strong gesture, Edzie berated her for being too obvious: "Do you have to spell everything out?" I wondered the same thing about "F*ckpigs and C*ckroaches." Did they have to dress this living model in a black torture victim's hood? Did the woman under interrogation have to be so visibly trembling? Did we need so many juxtapositions of scotch-sipping psychopaths and broken-down prisoners, so many juxtapositions of "Ave Maria" with machine-gun fire? And why, after all, did the man's cigar keep going out? Was it only so he could scream "Light!" at the artist and make her scurry to offer a Zippo?Still, "F*ckpigs and C*ckroaches" bravely confronted the ugly side of human nature. The last moment, in which Grabowski as the model finally became animated and gave the audience a deadened stare before the lights went down, proved simple and powerful. And while there could have been more such moments, there were enough. The ensemble's superb acting and Buzali's directing more than made up for any heavy-handedness of the subject matter.
