BUZZSAW MAY 2016
When Home Is Hate pg. 15
NOT FOR AMATEURS
Rhetorical Repercussions pg. 26
San Fermin Concert Review pg. 32
Buzzsaw presents...
EDITORS’ COMMENT
The Dunk Issue
Basketball is our favorite sport. Dunking means more than to score some sure-fire points. It means flamboyantly, forcefully, powerfully, absolutely obliterating your opponents and breaking them into pieces as the crowd goes wild. Crowd pleasing annihilation is what we’re talking about. The game isn’t about not losing, it’s about convincing everyone that you’ve won. Join us in exploring the ways that the preformance of domiannce colors the world we live in. A 19-year employee of Ithaca College bids IC a critical adieu in a powerful piece. (Imagine… Being Really, Really Proud of Ithaca College, p. 18) Although citizens have the right to the full or partial disclosure of unreleased documents controlled by the United States government, the process to get them presents itself to be slam dunk for the government. (The Right to Know, p. 24) Everybody Wants Some!! may be more of a lay-up than a slam dunk. What’s a lay-up? Beats me. (Everybody Wants Some!! Review, p. 34 )
BUZZSAW News & Views Upfront Ministry of Cool Prose & Cons Sawdust Seesaw
Alexa Salvato Michele Hau Evan Popp Sophie Israelsohn Lexie Farabaugh Grace Rychwalski Elena Piech Julia Tricolla
Layout Marissa Booker Art Lizzie Cox Website Christian Cassidy-Amstutz Social Media John Jacobson Senior Editor-at-Large Katelyn Harrop Copy Editors Miranda Ella Sophia Hebert
Advisor Founders
Jeff Cohen Abby Bertumen Kelly Burdick Bryan Chambala Sam Costello Thom Denick Cole Louison James Sigman
Buzzsaw is published with support from Generation Progress / Center for American Progress (online at GenProgress.org). Buzzsaw is also funded by the Ithaca College Student Government Association and the Park School of Communications.
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
Divider and Table of Contents photography By Megan Banning Megan Banning is a freshman Film, Photography, and Visual Arts students with an Art History and Women & Gender Studies minor. The photos submitted are part of her series, The House on Pennsylvania Avenue. Megan prefers to create conceptual series and looks for often overlooked subjects to inspire her work.
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Vanguard Printing is our press. (Ithaca, N.Y.) Buzzsaw uses student-generated art and photography and royalty-free images. Views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editorial staff or of Ithaca College. Feedback and contributions should be sent to buzzsawmag@gmail.com. Front cover art by Megan Banning Center art by Lizzie Cox Back cover art by Claire McClusky
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Our magazine exists to inspire thoughtful debate and open up the channels through which information is shared. Your comments and feedback are all a part of this process. Reach the editors by email at: buzzsawmag@gmail.com.
Table of Contents Seesaw ..........................................................4 Print media is dead, check out multimedia on the web.
News & Views .................................................6 Current events, local news & quasi-educated opinions.
Upfront ........................................................21 Selected dis-education of the month.
Ministry of Cool ........................................30 Arts, entertainment and other things cooler than us.
Prose & Cons .............................................37 Short fiction, personal essay and other assorted lies.
Satire threatening the magazine’s credibility since 1856.
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BUZZSAW News & Views
Sawdust .......................................................45
buzzcuts
The slam dunk is basketball’s most efficient and flamboyant shot. A dunk can change the tenor of a game, giving momentum to one team and deflating the other team’s confidence. According to an article in Mental Floss, the first dunk occurred in the decade of 1910 when Jack Inglis — a player in both New York’s and Pennsylvania’s basketball league — threw one down. Mental Floss cites author Bill Gutman’s description of the dunk: Inglis “jumped up alongside the basket, grabbed the cage, and pulled himself up alongside the basket. While the defenders looked up at him helplessly, a teammate passed him the ball. Inglis caught it while hanging onto the cage with one hand and dropped it through the basket.” The first dunk in an official game was by Joe Fortenberry, a captain for the 1936 U.S. Olympic team. In 1967, the NCAA banned the slam dunk from games. The rationale was that the slam dunk was not a “skillful shot” and was an injury risk. However, the ban was widely believed to be directed at Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (who then went by Lew Alcindor), whose height allowed him to easily dunk on his opponents and may have been viewed as an unfair advantage. The ban lasted until 1976. In 1984, Georgeann Wells, a sophomore at West Virginia University, became the first woman to dunk in the history of women’s basketball on a breakaway slam in a game against the University of Charleston.
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
Today, the dunk has become a potent weapon, with slam dunk competitions leading to even more creative, flamboyant dunks, and certain iconic slams etched into many fans’ memories.
The History and Evolution of the Slam Dunk 4
Dunk: Multimedia (Photos, Videos and Interviews)
“San Fermin Interview”— Elena Piech, freshman & Sophie Israelsohn, junior “Naked Noise”— Parita Desai, freshman “Circle Jam” — Julia Tricolla, freshman
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News & Views
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WS&VIEWS. NEWS&VIEWS.NEW
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
Current events, local news & quasi-educated opinions.
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I Spent 3 Years Sweating in the Buzzcave and All I Got Was a Formative Experience Thank you and goodbye from two senior editors By Katelyn Harrop, Senior Editor-at-Large
ing and research more critically than ever before. I’ve had the incredible opportunity to report, edit and content-develop alongside other student journalists dedicated to challenging the structures and norms that hold society’s status quo, all while proving that a horizontally-run, hierarchy-free structure can not only work, but also prove to be incredibly beneficial to the functioning of a newsroom. In my humble mag-loving opinion, the importance of an independent media infrastructure on college campuses can not be overstressed. Magazines such as Buzzsaw, and the dozens of other awesome indy college mags I’ve seen at conferences, go beyond providing an avenue to develop journalistic pluck — they offer a platform for responsible experimentation and the exploration of complicated, intersectional questions without the potentially stifling weight of institutional oversight or perceived financial obligation. An ethos of independence — fiscally, intellectually and politically — is the foundation of transformative journalism and has been the catalyst for the best journalists in the world such as I.F. Stone, Glenn Greenwald and
Art by Lizzie Cox, Art Editor
other writers and reporters who continue to challenge systems of power and push for greater social responsibility. By offering up a means to explore these ethical practices alongside motivated, passionate peers, students are given the opportunity to see media through a clean lens — one that may not be explicitly examined in many journalism classrooms. In just a few weeks I’ll find myself profusely sweating in a navy blue robe next to scores of other graduating seniors. As I reflect on my last four years, serving as a member of the Buzzsaw magazine masthead stands as one of the single most important choices of my college career, and a catalyst for some of the most challenging and formative opportunities I’ve had as a journalist yet. I’m no longer bound for that big-city culture desk I had always imagined for myself, but I am prepared to ask tough questions, seek out challenging ideas and work to promote productive and challenging discussions through my capacity as a reporter — three passions I may not have ever found if it weren’t for my experience in college alternative media.
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News & Views
When I started college in 2012, I planned to spend four years working toward a form-fitting blazer at the culture desk of a major metropolitan daily. I couldn’t name three members of Congress, and I thought the two-party political system was a pretty solid way to organize a nation. I spent a summer interning at a branding agency writing product press releases. My first year of college took place at a university near New York City where I served as the arts and entertainment editor of the campus paper and was promised to have a top ranking music journalism internship by my sophomore year. I was living the dream and making incredible connections. For a myriad of reasons, I was also fucking miserable. I manifested my angst into transfer transcripts and a one-way ticket to Ithaca, New York. I heard the hiking was good and The National had just played there, so it was probably pretty cool. Someone condescendingly told me that the people would be more accepting of my Pacific Northwest-curated wardrobe. I knew I wanted to do something radically different from the college newspaper experience I had already pursued, so I shuffled my way to the Buzzsaw table at the fall student organization fair. “We have pretty rad covers and we deconstruct popular ideas,” a wise senior with a hip haircut told me from behind a folding table. I was intrigued. I went to rush night and picked up a story. Little did I know that I was being introduced to what stands as the greatest influence of my young journalist career: the power of independent media. I was hooked immediately. Within a year, I found myself on the editorial board, pitching stories alongside other Buzzsaw editors and encouraging my own writers to look at social, political and cultural issues from new and exciting perspectives while they, in turn, taught me to look at report-
Jammin’ Out
Second annual Circles Jam spreads music in the springtime By Ben Kaplan, Contributing Writer
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
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pril 16, 2016 marked the second annual Circle Jam music festival at Ithaca College. On one of the first nice days in what seemed like forever, students, parents and members of the community came together to enjoy a refreshing spread of music, food and outdoor activities. The event takes inspiration from the ever-so-popular Porchfest!, the phenomenon where musicians from all over the Ithaca area come together to perform small and informal concerts along different street blocks downtown each fall. According to Maggie Wetter, the Community Director and event coordinator for the Circle Apartments, the college’s event was proposed by an unknown resident in a living experience feedback survey. “We don’t even know who the original student was who gave us the idea,” Wetter said. The festival took place on the main quad of the apartments, but the smell of hamburgers and the sounds of jam bands could be heard all the way down by the baseball fields. “It really was the perfect spring environment,” freshman Maiah Overdorf said. “The weather, the music and the food all together created such a chill time.” A total of 10 bands performed. The groups performing reached across a wide spectrum, both in terms of their chosen genres and in their performance experiences. Many of the acts have been regarded as staples of the Ithaca music scene, while others were performing for the very first time. Some of the acts included the popular Scopes Monkey Trial, rapper Isaiah Horton and the alternative band, Semesters. The setlists catered to a diverse audience. Songs ranged from reggae to Beatles covers. One of those performers was freshman Jacob Sullivan of Jake and The Nowhere Men, a one-man
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alternative rock act. Jacob had found the event through a friend posting about it on Facebook and wanted to participate with the intention of getting his music out. “I haven’t ever done a show like this,” Sullivan said. “Before this I’ve only played open mic nights and once on ICTV.” Though he is no newbie to performing, Sullivan admits that he has limitations in what he can do. “One of the drawbacks of being a one person band is playing live,” he said. Even though he is just one man and his guitar, Sullivan does bring other things to the table. “I tend to up the humor to make up for the lack of a band.” A solid turnout came in and out throughout the day, credited to the extensive advertising done by the event coordinators. “Lots of planning goes into this,” Wetter said. “We created advertisements throughout campus and on social media.” These advertisements included Facebook and Twitter posts, posters put up throughout campus and spots on the college’s radio station, WICB. The event, though funded by the Office of Residential Life, was almost entirely student-run. Thanks to the coordinators’ extensive preparation, people were able to enjoy a wide variety of activities, including tie-dye, a s’mores pit and an obstacle course. Some people let their dogs off leash and played frisbee, while others simply brought blankets and sat on the lawn to enjoy the eclecticness in music that our community has to offer. With finals looming on the horizon, the festival was a good way for everyone to take a day out of their busy schedules to just relax. “I had a ton of fun,” Sullivan said. “Everyone was oblivious to the sunburn they were all getting. … I had fun in the bouncy house, but mostly I enjoyed the music for as long as I could.” Among the audience, consisting of young and old members of the
community, were fans coming out to support their favorite groups, as well as a number of new ones who had been won over by performances. “Yeah I had heard of a few of these groups before, like Maple Hill, but I hadn’t actually listened to their music that much,” freshman Justin Bertolero said. “I dig them, though.” Between bands there was a sense of fandom and camaraderie. “I am friends personally with all the members of the The William Shears Campbell Experience,” Sullivan said. “I even sang on a Beatles cover of theirs that has yet to be released.” Another participating band and the opener for the day was Hanging by a Thread, featuring students Pat Starke and Kyle Banks.“This was our first time [playing an outdoor event],” one band member said. “[We] thought it went pretty well. It was fun to play outside, especially as people started to show up.” That kind of friendly and relaxed attitude was exactly what Wetter wanted to be fostered throughout the event. “My favorite part of the event is seeing the community come together for their local artists,” she said. “We always strive to make the apartments a community and an event like this really highlighted that.” ____________________________________ Ben Kaplan is a freshman journalism major who loves some chill tunes on a Saturday afternoon. You can email him at bkaplan@ithaca.edu.
Local Nurses Fight for Their Rights
Cayuga Medical Center nurses attempt unionization By Sophie Johnson, Staff Writer
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those that are opposed to it, and even trying to fire employees who are a part of it, Marsland said. Robert Forrant, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and former union business agent, spoke of the benefits of unionization. “If you look at the hospitals where there are nurses’ unions, the wages and benefits are always better universally than where there are no unions,” Forrant said. A study done by the Department of Labor Statistics analyzed the difference of compensation between unionized and nonunionized workers. It said unionized workers in 2011 got paid on average $23.02 an hour whereas nonunionized workers only got paid $19.51. Nurses’ unions also provide benefits to patient safety and mortality, according to a 2004 study done by Michael Ash of UMass Amherst and Jean Ann Seago of The University of California, San Francisco. This study said patients at hospitals with unionized nurses have 5.5 percent lower heart attack mortality than those at non-unionized hospitals. However, some nurses at CMC don’t want to unionize. A per diem nurse from CMC who does not wish to be named due to worry about judgment from peers is against unionizing. She has worked at unionized hospitals in the past as support staff and is against unionizing because of her belief that unions treat people as a part of a group and not as individuals. When coming to work at CMC 12 years ago, she “was glad they weren’t unionized, in the sense that any promotional type things I got would be based on the merits of the type of work that I do myself,” this nurse said. Additionally, this nurse believes that if the hospital was unionized, there would be less flexibility with her bosses when it comes to time off. She gave an example of when her brother was sick with cancer and she decided
to spend his last few months with him, making her unable to work. Her boss understood and once she got back after two months, her job was still there for her. She believes that if the hospital were unionized she would have likely lost her job. “Generally in a unionized setting, you work the days that you’re supposed to work even if you can’t work them, and if you need to take time off you call in and take time off,” this nurse said. In the case of a family emergency, this system would not help her, she said. Additionally, Forrant said, unionized nurses have to pay dues to their union. If the hospital were unionized, all workers would be forced to be a part of the union as part of their contract. In order for CMC nurses to join the Service Employees International Union, over 70 percent of employees must be “on card,” or have signed their support of the union, before they go to an actual vote, said Marsland. Marsland said right now over 50 percent of nurses are on card for the union, but they are not yet to 70 percent. Marsland also said if they do not get up to 70 percent by May, the cards reset and have to be resigned, starting the process over again. Cayuga Medical Center failed to respond when asked for comment. ___________________________________ Sophie Johnson is a freshman journalism major who listens to a lot of Pete Seeger in her spare time. You can email her at sjohnson3@ithaca.edu.
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News & Views
group of nurses at Cayuga Medical Center are attempting to join the Service Employees International Union, the largest healthcare union in the country, due to issues with respect for nurses, patient safety and quality of care, according to complaints by nurses. Scott Marsland, an emergency nurse at Cayuga Medical Center and a family nurse practitioner, said the unionization effort at CMC partially stemmed from a lack of respect for the nurses. Marsland said that December 2014 was the first time in decades that employees at CMC did not get a bonus. That same year, the CEO of CMC got a $71,000 bonus, the CFO got a $29,000 bonus and the VP for Medical Affairs got a $42,000 bonus, Marsland said. Another issue that is causing the nurses to unionize is understaffing, Marsland said. In a survey conducted by the group attempting to unionize, which was given in March 2016 to 54 nurses who support the unionization effort, 66 percent said in the past year they had worked more than 10 times without enough staff to safely care for patients. “If a hospital wants to save money, one of the easiest things for the hospital to do is to cut back on nursing care,” Marsland said. Hospitals often push for a higher patient to nurse ratio and with fewer nurses caring for a greater amount of patients, Marsland explained, and as a result patients receive poorer care. CMC is against the nurses unionizing. According to Marsland, on May 2, there will be a federal hearing with the National Labor Relations Board for the ways nurses claim CMC has violated federal law during the unionization process. These disputed actions worked to intimidate nurses from joining the union by preferential treatment for
Geeking Out Ithaca College hosts the community’s 41st Ithacon By Elena Piech, Seesaw Editor
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ostumes, comics, videogames and more made their way to South Hill for Ithacon, Ithaca’s comic convention. The convention ran April 16 and 17 in Ithaca College’s Campus Center and brought guests and vendors from all around the Finger Lakes region. This is Ithacon’s 41st year in existence and its third year at the college. 501st Legion Although a majority of the characters may have existed a “long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” stormtroopers, R2-D2, Ewoks and other members of the Star Wars universe were present at Ithacon. Some guests might have done a double take, as the costumes were extremely detailed for a small comic book event like this one. These detailed costumes seemed to belong more at San Diego’s Comic Con rather than Ithaca’s much smaller version. But Darren Blum assured that guests oftentimes are surprised to see the details put into these costumes. Blum is the executive officer of the upstate New York
branch of 501st Legion, Garrison Excelsior. Blum described 501st Legion as a “Star Wars costuming club that was formed in 1997.” 501st Legion’s official website has a more detailed description. The 501st Legion is “the world’s definitive Imperial costuming organization.” For those who don’t know Star Wars, or understand the basics of it, the Imperial Army includes the humans, clones, machinery and aliens that support the “Dark Side” and Darth Vader, who was characterized as a villain in the original trilogy. This organization, which according to Blum has 9000 active members in over 150 countries, focuses on costumes and events from the “Dark Side.” However, these individuals support charitable causes as well. According to their mission statement, “The Legion is an allvolunteer organization formed for the express purpose of bringing together costume enthusiasts under a collective identity within which to operate. The Legion seeks to promote interest in Star Wars through the building and wearing of quality costumes, and to facilitate the use of these costumes for Star Wars-related events as well as contributions to the
local community through costumed charity and volunteer work.” In order to make contributions to the local community, Garrison Excelsior used Ithacon as a way to raise money with the Make-A-Wish Foundation, a nonprofit that grants the “wishes” of children with lifethreatening medical conditions. “We oftentimes work with different charitable organizations to raise money,” Blum said. “This month we are working with Disney’s Force for Change and they’re actually doing a dollar-for-dollar match on any money raised for Make-A-Wish.” In order to raise that money, the Excelsior chapter of 501st Legion sold Star Wars Legos, collectables and even asked event attendees for a donation if they wanted to take a photo with someone in an elaborate Star Wars character costume. “This is my first year here, but I know other members of the legion were here last year and they had a table and they were costuming,” Blum said. “We had a lot of positive reactions from the crowd. It’s always a lot of fun to see the kids interacting with the characters, especially R2.” (R2-D2 is a masculine drone in the series. In the original trilogy, he works with protagonist Luke Skywalker.) Blum said Garrison Excelsior participates in about 40 events per year. “Typically we try to raise money for different charities,” Blum said. “But with this being a smaller convention, I’m guessing [the money we raise] will be in the $2-to-300 range.”
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
3D Game Market Aside from elaborate costumes and bringing awareness for specific causes, some vendors come to Ithacon to promote current and future projects. Vince Lindow is a partner at 3D Game Market, a business that works to optimize the video game experience for players.
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Photo by Evey Lowe
Photo by Alyssa Rodriguez
just really getting into 4K gaming.” Comics In addition to promoting projects, vendors at comic cons also, surprisingly, sell comics. Comics for Collectors is a local comic shop located in downtown Ithaca. Although the owner of Comics for Collectors had a table at Ithacon, his businesses wasn’t closed during the event. Melanie Walker, who worked at the store during the weekend of Ithacon, said the convention impacts business. “Anybody that has a booth up there is hoping to draw in customers,” Walker said. “Our store owner and one of his colleagues is up there right now. The point is if you don’t have it up there, you can come to the store and try to find it.” Walker said the Ithacon works to provide cross-promotion with the comic shop. “You try to maneuver people back and forth from here and there,” Walker said. “We’ve been handing out flyers for the convention all day. There’s a lot of cross-promotion.” Walker also said the date of Ithacon worked better for the comic shop this year. “Last year Ithacon was on Free Comic Book day, which is a big deal for us,” she said. “We have artist and writers that come and sign stuff
in the book. It was bad because we forced our customers to pick. ‘Do I go to the show? Do I go to the store? Which do I go to first?’ Most people that do Free Comic Book day come here first because it’s free. This year they kind of moved it back a couple of weeks, which was good.” Next year’s Ithacon is already scheduled at the college for March 25 and 26, according to Ithaca College coordinator Katharine Kittredge. This date will be weeks before next year’s Free Comic Book Day, planned nationally for May 6, 2017. __________________________________ Elena Piech is a freshman journalism major who’s always down for a good convention. You can email her at epiech@ithaca.edu.
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News & Views
“What we do is we provide information so that you can take existing video games and play them in 3D,” Lindow said. “We can do this either with glasses-free 3D, or a 3D TV, or on regular 2D Monitors.” Lindow started the businesses with his friend with a talent for coding in August 2012. The two wanted to learn how to use the monitors to make glasses-free 3D. “It’s been almost four years now, and we’ve come quite a ways since we first started,” Lindow said. At first, Lindow said, the two were just trying to figure out how to make glasses-free 3D. Now they have learned how to do that and they also know how to change video game coding in order to enable them to be played in 3D. Currently Lindow said that the two are working on producing a glasses-free 3D monitor that can be sold at a more affordable price for consumers. “We hope by the end of the year to just have a monitor we can sell, something that could cost under $900 or $800,” Lindow said. “Right now we are just here to spread awareness.” 3D Game Market had a booth at Ithacon and at another recent event at Ithaca College, Ed Tech Day. Lindow said both events were successful in creating attention for his product. Before attending the event Lauren Wudro, a Dryden native, did not even realize glasses-free 3D existed. I spoke with Wudro as she played the glasses-free version of a Transformers video game. “Sorry if I seem spacey in my responses, I’m just really trying to focus on this game,” Wudro said. “It’s crazy that I’m playing this without the glasses. Of course the 3D isn’t anything too crazy, but this seems better than having to get a headache from wearing glasses.” Lindow said reactions like Wudro’s are pretty common when it comes to glasses-free 3D. “I just love seeing people’s reactions to the 3D gaming,” Lindow said. “This is our second year doing Ithacon and we’ve had just so much fun here. Who knows what our stand will look like next year. We’re
Drugged Out
How a student’s area of study may impact use of ADHD medication By Taylor Ford, Staff Writer
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
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ttention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder medications are now a reality in the lives of America’s college students. Since the 1990s, doctors have increasingly accepted ADHD as a medical condition — one that can be treated with drugs. As of 2011, about 11 percent of children between the ages of 4 and 17 had been diagnosed with ADHD, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And for many of them, the primary treatment was medication, according to a 2013 study led by Susanna Visser, a researcher at the CDC. The most popular form of ADHD medication is prescription stimulants, such as Adderall, Ritalin and Concerta. They’re uppers, the same as cocaine or methamphetamine. And for many people who have been diagnosed with ADHD, the treatment doesn’t stop when they transition from children to adults. As a result, college campuses are flooded with what is essentially pharmaceutical-grade speed. Of course, we should not be naïve enough to assume every college student keeps their medication to themselves. Research by David Rabiner of Duke University has shown students who are prescribed ADHD medication regularly sell it to their peers. His study, “The Misuse and Diversion of Prescribed ADHD Medications by College Students,” found that about one in four college students who were prescribed ADHD medication had given it to another student. These medications, colloquially referred to as “study drugs,” are primarily used by students to stay awake and focus more intently on academic work. Different groups of students use more than other groups. For example, a study led by Sean McCabe — research professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women & Gender — titled “Medical Use, Illicit Use And Diversion Of Prescription Stimulant Medication,” found white college students use at a higher rate than non-white college students and men use at a much higher rate than women. However, there was one factor that struck me as missing — what a student
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is studying. No work had been done to determine whether a student’s area of study predicts their illicit use of prescription ADHD medication. I decided to do a research project to examine the non-medical use of ADHD medication at Ithaca College. I carried out the project by surveying a sample of Ithaca College students during the fall 2015 semester. Five hundred students, who were selected at random out of all undergraduates at the college, received invitations to take the survey through email. A total of 89 responded. They were asked questions about themselves, their major and their use of ADHD medication. The results are as follows.
The results of the survey indicate a high degree of non-medical use of ADHD medication among students. Of the survey-takers, 16.9 percent of students reported medical use of the medication, while 22.5 percent reported that they had used these drugs non-medically at some point in their life — almost one in four students. Consistent with the results of prior research, men used at a rate almost three times that of women. But perhaps the most interesting finding was the study’s indication that a student’s area of study is tied to the likelihood they will use ADHD drugs non-medically. Within Ithaca College, the highest rate of use was found in the School of Business, with 57.1 percent of the student respondents using prescription ADHD medication non-medically, more than twice the rate of students on average. On the other side, only 6.7 percent of the respondents from the School of Health Science and Human Performance had
used ADHD medication non-medically, and none of the students from the School of Music reported use. Students in the Exploratory program had a rate of use more than twice the general population at 46.7 percent of respondents. However, it’s not immediately clear what these students have in common, as students in this program can end up in any school. Some may argue against these findings by saying the differences in rates of use is just due to chance and the small sample size of the study makes it meaningless. However, there are statistical tests that can be run to evaluate if this is the case. For this study, a chi-square test was performed. This test tells how likely it is that the relationship found by the study is real, and not just due to a problem like small sample size. In the social sciences, this test has to predict that there is a 95 percent chance that the relationship is real in order to be considered significant. This study passed that test. That means there is less than a 5 percent chance the relationship between a student’s area of study and their non-medical use of prescription ADHD medication is due to chance. So, what should we make of these results? These findings open more questions than they answer. What makes students use at such different rates? Is there something about the academic work in different areas of study that makes ADHD medication helpful for some and not others? These uncertainties demonstrate the need for a qualitative, interview-based project to examine why students behave in this way. However, one of the most important questions raised by findings like these is why so many students feel the need to take a performance enhancing drug. This drug use doesn’t occur in a vacuum and is impacted by the culture of higher education. We as a culture need to consider what we value, as well as the way that students approach their studies. ____________________________________ Taylor Ford is a junior sociology major who gets a high out of writing articles. You can email him at tford1@ithaca.edu.
Brussels Terror Attacks
Jihadist attacks in the Belgian city follow those in Paris By Emma Lewis, Contributing Writer
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which left 130 dead.” However, at the time of this assumption, it was too early to declare it as a definite correlation. Jean Pederson, professor at the University of Rochester agreed. “There seems to be a distinct possibility that the Brussels attacks were a response to the arrest of people in Brussels who were involved in the Paris terrorist attacks,” she said. “Brussels itself is a symbolic target because it’s the head of the European Union and the capital of Belgium.” The attacks themselves started around 8 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. NPR reported that at the airport, a suicide attacker set off explosions destroying the ceilings, shattering the windows and filling the hallways of the airport with smoke. Many ran out of the airport in panic, trying to maneuver their way out of the panicstricken crowds. At the train station, trains came to a halt and people ran through the smoke-filled tunnels beside the tracks of the station. Jonah Grob, a sophomore at Vassar College, was in the Brussels International Airport less than 24 hours before the attack took place. While traveling in Brussels, Grob noticed that “the city was on edge. There was soldiers everywhere, there was soldiers walking the street, in the metro stations.” While in the airport Grob also noticed that, “they had triple security.” Additionally, he stated he went “through normal security, then another round of security, and then even before [he] got on the plane everyone was patted down and thoroughly searched.” To him, it was evident they were expecting something. Brussels did make many attempts to try and avoid this ordeal from happening. The New York Times reported that a month before the attack, a team of FBI members, the State department and the Department of Homeland Security “met with their Belgian counterparts a month before the Brussels terrorist attacks to try to correct gaps in Belgium’s widely
criticized ability to track terrorist plots.” The publication discussed the lack of communication between European countries and United States, suggesting that the lack of intelligence regarding what is going on gives terrorist groups the ability to successfully plan their attacks. Additionally, as Eric Schmitt of The New York Times said, “the shortfalls plaguing Belgium and several other European countries come as no surprise to American officials, but the Islamic State’s sophisticated strikes in the heart of Europe in the past five months have alarmed administration officials.” Now these issues are on the United States’s radar, and it’s also this country’s job to work with other European nations to prevent further attacks from taking place. If the United States uses the resources it has and is able to communicate to the best of its ability with the European nations, it can aid in decreasing the amount of terrorist attacks that are happening in Europe. ___________________________________ Emma Lewis is a freshman sociology major. You can email her at elewis3@ithaca.edu
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News & Views
n March 22, 2016, terror filled the Belgian city of Brussels after the Brussels International Airport in Zaventem and Maelbeek Metro station were attacked during the morning rush hour, leaving 30 dead and 230 wounded. Three days before the attack, Salah Abdeslam, the man suspected for the Paris attacks, was arrested by police Prior to the Brussels attack, in Nov. 2015, Paris and northern suburbs of Paris were attacked by suicide bombers. Concert halls, cafés and sports games were among the places assailed, leaving 130 dead with hundreds more injured, The Telegraph reported. Brussels expected attacks after the Paris incident. They tightened security in airports and government officials were on constant watch for suspicious behaviors throughout the city. According to BBC, “Security forces had a dry run in November, the terror threat was at its second highest and soldiers were already deployed on the streets of several cities.” Also connected is that investigators captured Abdeslam, in the southwestern suburb of Brussels, SintJans-Molenbeek. According to BBC, “Belgium has struggled with Islamist groups for years and some 500 of its citizens have been lured into fighting for [ISIS] in Syria and Iraq.” More recently, Belgian terrorist populations have been increasing tremendously within the last few years. Molenbeek is also the home of the Jihadist group which claimed responsibility for this attack. Belgian jihadism expert Pieter Van Ostaeyen suggests that he “had certainly expected something else would take place, but not that it would happen on this scale.” Many thought these attacks were related to the arrest of Abdeslam earlier in the week. According to CNN, “The working assumption is that the attackers came from the network behind November’s massacres in Paris,
North Carolina: A Huge Step Backward A discussionof NC’s new discriminatory policy By Anna Lamb, Staff Writer
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
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n March 23, 2016, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory signed legislation eliminating anti-discrimination protections for LGBT individuals. This is a huge step backward for human rights and interpersonal communications in our country. Last month, legislation passed that would ban citizens from using bathrooms assigned for the gender with which they identify, but instead would force people in the tar heel state to use bathrooms based on their gender from birth. “The law is basically saying depending on your biological sex, that dictates what bathroom you will be able to go into,” Chelsea Moroski, the project coordinator at the Cortland LGBT Resource Center, said. “So for people of the LGBT community, there’s a lot of people who don’t necessarily fit into those two gender binaries.” In response, several companies have refused to do business in the state. PayPal, one of the largest online payment systems, has become the first major company to pull out of an existing project. Dow Chemical Co. and American Airlines have also joined in condemning the law. States and public figures are also making their voices heard on the subject. The list includes Ringo Starr, Michael Moore, Rob Reiner, Bryan Adams and Sharon Stone. Groups like Mumford and Sons are taking the stage as scheduled in North Carolina, but are donating to a local LGBT organization. After the legislation was signed, Bruce Springsteen canceled a concert in Greensboro. In a public statement he explained his decision. “Some things are more important than a rock show and this fight against prejudice and bigotry — which is happening as I write — is one of them,” Springsteen said. In addition to the 66-year-old singer, upwards of a dozen conventions have cut ties and pulled out of events
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in the state according to the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority. New York state Governor Andrew Cuomo banned all non-essential travel to North Carolina. The governor believes that House Bill 2, its name in the North Carolina legislature, is a direct violation of any equal rights ideology. “In New York, we believe that all people — regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation — deserve the same rights and protections under the law,” Cuomo said in a statement. “From Stonewall to marriage equality, our state has been a beacon of hope and equality for the LGBT community, and we will not stand idly by as misguided legislation replicates the discrimination of the past. As long as there is a law in North Carolina that creates the grounds for discrimination against LGBT people, I am barring non-essential state travel to that state.” Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton has followed suit. “That law blocks local governments from passing anti-discrimination rules to grant protections to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender women and men. It violates the values and the laws of our great state. In my view, it is destructive to the progress we have made to provide equal rights and protections to our LGBT community,” Dayton wrote in a letter to state employees. So much progress has been made in the last century to create equality. The first gay rights advocacy group was formed in 1924 by Henry Gerber in Chicago. They called themselves “The Society for Human Rights” and received a charter from the state of Illinois. The 1940s brought a wave of scientific analysis of human sexuality, and scientists like Alfred Kinsey and Wilhelm Reich found that a large number of people did not conform to traditional binaries. There was a retreat from progress in the 1950s, condemning deviation from heteronormativity as a mental illness. However, the 1960s and
’70s was a time of whirlwind dissatisfaction by the youth of America, and the LGBT community took full advantage of the opportunity to enact change. For years marches and protests rocked the streets, including the Stonewall riots of 1969. In 1977, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician elected to office in California, introduced legislation that would protect homosexual individuals from being fired from their jobs. Milk was assassinated the following year. Fast forward to 2011, when President Obama announces that his administration would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which had prohibited same sex couples from getting married. And again to 2015, when the act was struck down permanently and marriage for all became legal. This new law delegitimizes gender identity for many citizens in North Carolina. But the country’s response has shown that there are many Americans willing to stand up for equality and the rights of their peers. Sandra Babcock, a professor of law at Cornell University, said that she believes the law has a good chance of being repealed. “One of the things that’s been really interesting is to see the reaction of the business community, and the very very quick response by business leaders indicating that they would withdraw support for expanding their businesses in North Carolina, investing in the North Carolina economy, providing jobs to residents of the state and the reaction from the state has also been pretty swift,” Babcock said. “I think that money speaks louder than words in some cases.” Only time will tell whether or not she’s right. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------Anna Lamb is a freshman journalism major who is proud to not be a North Carolinian. You can email her at alamb@ithaca.edu.
When Home is Hate
A North Carolinian’s Reflection on HB2 By Charlotte Robertson, Staff Writer
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my hometown. It means that despite being a full-tuition scholarship recipient, a dedicated student and an avid writer, my sexuality ultimately holds more weight than my hard work and dedication. HB2 also denies trans people from using restrooms that align with their gender identities in state-related facilities, instead forcing them to use the bathroom that coincides with the sex assigned to them at birth. This part of the bill also bars trans youth from accessing appropriate facilities in schools across our state. This bill adversely affects university students as well, eliminating the non-discrimination policy established by the University of North Carolina, which has been put into practice in the university system’s seventeen campuses. HB2 also restricts cities from expanding upon laws regulating workplace discrimination and use of public facilities, delegitimizing rulings previously made in Charlotte, Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Durham. Businesses have already begun to speak out about the HB2 ruling. Companies such as Apple, American Airlines, Google, Lowe’s, PepsiCo and IBM have publicly voiced their disapproval of the discriminatory bill. Nationally, the bill has come under heavy fire. New York State and the cities of Seattle, San Francisco and New York have all placed a restriction on non-essential public employee travel to North Carolina. In one statement, the NBA suggested it may reconsider its plans to host the All-Star Game in Charlotte in 2017. The NCAA made a similar statement about reconsidering hosting its annual college basketball tournament in our state. The Obama administration is looking into whether or not HB2 makes North Carolina ineligible for billions of dollars in federal aid. However, this backlash has not stopped other conservative states, such as Georgia and Mississippi, from attempting to
follow in North Carolina’s hateful footsteps. I find it deeply embarrassing that the pushback from big business may be the only thing troubling current North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory. Time and time again, equality is overlooked in the name of conservative preservation, masking hatred with seemingly good intentions. HB2 is so obviously backwards and so clearly inequitable. However, the culture of fear that still beats through the heart of North Carolina clings onto hatred of the unknown. Except LGBT people are not unknown. We are your neighbors, your friends and your family. We are the people in line with you to get coffee in the morning and the people that are already using the same public restrooms as you are. We are people that share your love for a good biscuit and who love this beautiful state we all live in — North Carolina. We are people, and we are not going anywhere. This piece was originally posted April 8, 2016 on the Huffington Post Queer Voices blog. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------Charlotte Robertson is here, queer and sick of her home state’s bullshit. You can email her at crobertson@ ithaca.edu.
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News & Views
orth Carolina is sticky summer nights catching lightening bugs. North Carolina is fading blue mountaintops and salty ocean crests. North Carolina is the best barbeque in the South and tea so sweet it makes your teeth tingle. But North Carolina is also discrimination, proven by the passing of House Bill 2 (HB2) on March 23. I am currently studying abroad in London and, despite being over 3000 miles away, tears still streamed down my face as I read about HB2 and its damaging effects for the LGBT community. I cannot describe how it feels to have your home, the place where you were born and raised, reject you. I felt unable to breathe, as confusion, anger and sadness tormented my throat and lungs. This is not the first time I have felt like this and I am almost certain it will not be the last. I identify as queer, wandering somewhere on the spectrum of sexuality. And, though my sexual identity does not define me, it does make me who I am. It took going to college in New York for me to come out. In high school, I refused to think I could be anything other than 100 percent straight. Though I am open about my sexual identity at school, I still haven’t come out to my relatives back in my home state of North Carolina. I made this choice because it was always easier to avoid that conversation; I felt it was not necessary. The passing of HB2 made this conversation necessary. I will tell my story because I refuse to be ashamed of who I am and who I have the capacity to love. As part of HB2, North Carolina legislators refuse to include sexual orientation as an identity that should be protected from discrimination. This means that any North Carolinian (or anyone who travels to and through our state) who identifies as LGBT can be refused service and can be fired or demoted from their job. It means that I can be fired while working in
Giving and Receiving Navigating structural complexities in Christian service By Michael Tkaczevski, Staff Writer
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
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t seems simple: people in need should helped, and no matter who you are or how you help, it’s a good thing to do what you can. But good intentions may not represent the whole story. The way the giver interacts with the recipient has everything to do with differences in class, race, intention and power between the two people. For those who can afford to give their money or time to charity, these structural complexities can be a stumbling block or a chance at personal growth. Helping those in need is a popular value of U.S. society in general. A 2013 Gallup poll found 83 percent of U.S. citizens donated money to a religious organization or other charity, and 65 percent donated their time to service. It’s also a major part of Christian life and faith. Proverbs 19:17 sums it up nicely: “One who is gracious to a poor man lends to the LORD, and He will repay him for his good deed.” Likewise, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Himself tells the people listening to Him that those who gave alms and visited the poor, sick and imprisoned were doing these things to God, and would gain salvation. Those who neglected the poor, however, were abandoning God, and would not be saved (Matthew 25:35-45). Service includes spreading the Word of God for senior Ray Cheng, who is involved with his local church’s outreach program in Ithaca and his community back home in Boston. “I see myself as part of His Kingdom, and I believe everyone needs to hear the Word, and I feel it’s partially my job to spread the Word,” he said. Cheng said he and his fellow volunteers approach homeless people on the street, people in prison and people at soup kitchens, give them food or other supplies, and try to “squeeze in” a conversation about faith. Sometimes, people are surprised— and not always in a good way — that Cheng and his fellow volunteers are
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evangelizing. “The first time, it did disappoint me a little, but at the end of the day I knew I had to keep on going if I really wanted to spread the Word,” he said. It may take several interactions before a person warms up to discussing faith and long-term assistance, Cheng said. But if the person was interested, the church community would provide transportation to church and even additional financial support. Senior Imani Hall considers service and community to be a reciprocal relationship between God and people. “Even though Jesus is God, He chose to come down and serve us, and serve man,” Hall said. “We, as Christians, are called to serve in the same way that Christ served us.” This call to serve is central to Christian life, and provided the basis for Hall’s interest in service as he came to college. But service is more than just monetary, and even people who are financially secure have emotional and spiritual needs, Hall said. “I give what I can, even if it’s just an ear,” Hall said. Providing one-on-one emotional support helps bridge the gap between people, even when there are differences in class or race, Hall said. Junior Emma Grabek said she feels a sense of responsibility toward her local community. In January of this year, Grabek organized and led a mission trip in Ithaca that 20 of her fellow Ithaca College Protestant Community members, including Hall, joined. It was both Grabek and Hall’s first mission trip. Grabek titled the mission trip “Love Does Ithaca,” inspired by the book Love Does, by Bob Goff, a bestselling collection of short essays on the role Christian faith plays in charity. “The love of Christ is not just supposed to be in our hearts, it wasn’t just supposed to be talked about. It’s an action,” she said. The volunteers worked with Loaves & Fishes, a local Christian non-profit charity organization that operates a soup kitchen, and visited people in prisons, assisted living homes
and cottages for homeless people. They also visited the Jungle, a small shantytown where homeless people live in tents to pass out care packages that included food, blankets and hygiene products. At night, guest speakers spoke with the volunteers on topics concerning faithful and ethical charity, Grabek said. Previous mission trips organized by ICPC have gone to places including Chicago, San Antonio and Haiti. The decision to hold the mission trip in Ithaca, as opposed to a foreign country, was important to her and her peers when they were designing the trip. “We weren’t always seeing the long-term benefit of our work,” Grabek said. “Were we just going to go in and step out and things would still be bad, or were there long-term relationships being built?” Grabek said she felt God was telling her and her peers to “stay here,” which felt radical because mission trips that go to faraway places are glamorized in American Christian culture. “Some people really treat it like a glorified vacation,” she said. “We need to really careful about the way that we go, and the why.” After all, poverty affects people in Ithaca as well. Deuteronomy 15:711 in the Old Testament teaches that people in need who live in one’s own community should be taken care of, not looked down upon or helped begrudgingly. “Sometimes mission trips cost up to $1,500 because of the plane flight, because of food, and what if we took that money and poured it into the communities we lived?” Grabek asked. Grabek said mission trips to foreign countries are important for helping Christians around the world, but to neglect one’s local community would be unjust. In retrospect, Grabek realized she had gotten involved in service work without fully understanding the ramifications of her involvement. “I always viewed any type of service as a good thing,” Grabek said. “No one ever really challenged me to question … if the method we were
Art by Lizze Cox
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News & Views
using was really effective and really loving.” The Christian philosophy on charity goes beyond the simple act of giving and addresses the spiritually and ethically proper ways that one should understand one’s own situation and the situations of others. Jesus spoke against doing charity to gain the admiration of others when He said, “So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full” (Matthew 6:2). In other words, there is more to Christian service than feeling good about oneself or receiving congratulations from others in society. Trying to make everyone happy and feel good is not realistic or transformative, Grabek said. “You are not going to end pain,” she said. “When Christian charities have this mentality that they are going to save the world, it’s just inaccurate. … If your motive to do something is because it feels good, you’re going to burn out really quickly.” The giver and recipient may have completely different lives, and the giver must be cognizant of how even subtle differences may put up barriers between the two people, she said. “What kind of language are you using?” Grabek said. “Are you using language that says, ‘I’m better than you,’ or ‘you need me,’ or ‘I have something that you don’t have,’ or are you using language of togetherness and unity?” Even something as simple as wearing a regular pair of jeans and a t-shirt, instead of expensive coats or shoes, for example, can make it easier for both people involved in the
act of service to feel more together, she said. Cheng draws from personal experiences to try to connect with the people he meets, such as in his early teens when he struggled with depression. “It was definitely a rough patch, and it was difficult for my parents to help me,” he said. He recalls his struggle with depression to better imagine how the people he meets are feeling, but still acknowledges the differences, he said. “With these people I’m talking to, they’ve had it way worse,” Cheng said. “Even my rock bottom isn’t even close to where they’ve been.” It was through the consistent support of his Christian community combined with his personal faith that Cheng overcame his depression, he said. Hall, who spent most of his childhood in a predominantly black lower-middle class neighborhood, still makes an effort to notice his own privilege, including simply the fact that he is not homeless. With that acknowledgement of at least relative privilege, Hall said there is a sense of guilt that comes from privilege and power. “For me, it comes from the realization of … my own security,” he said. But empathy and guilt are two different things, he said. In other words, feeling bad for someone is only one step towards understanding them as a person. Cheng regularly spends time praying on his own to remind himself of why he’s serving those in need. “I need to humble myself,” he said. “This is about the community as a whole.” As a white woman, Grabek said understanding her own privilege is absolutely necessary to make sure the charity is not just to help herself get over her own guilt. That understanding often only comes when one sits down and listens to others. Sometimes, calls for forgiveness
skip over the need to respect oppressed people’s righteous anger, Grabek said. “When people are oppressed, that anger that’s in their hearts, that bitterness, that pain, is real, and we need to make sure that do not invalid it,” Grabek said. “It can be very damaging to hear someone say, ‘You should be slow to anger. Forgive them and move on.’ It’s never that simple.” Understanding race is crucial to discovering the proper application of faith and charity, Hall said. “It is important to speak the Gospel, but the history of how colonialism used Christianity to harm others needs to be recognized,” Hall said. Over the years of friendship between Grabek and Hall, both said they have shared many meaningful conversations about privilege, especially racial privilege. “There’s less anger there because we know we are sinful, and we can look at each other and say, ‘I know you’re broken, I know I’m broken, let’s have a conversation and seek healing together,” Grabek said. Grabek said she has found that conversations with fellow Christians about these topics are fundamentally different than with non-Christians. “Sometimes when I have conversations with nonbelievers, there’s an anger that feels hopeless, and that breaks my heart,” she said. “It’s anger that’s righteous, it’s anger that’s deserved, but it’s hopeless, and so it stays and it grows.” Having a community of friends and mentors dedicated to making their charitable practices more beneficial for the recipients is invaluable to Grabek. “In recent years, I’ve been really challenged just by being part of the Ithaca College Protestant Community … to look into the dynamics of mission trips and to ask does this exude the love of Christ, or does this exude power and privilege?” * The author of this piece is a Russian Orthodox Christian ------------------------------------------------------------------------------Michael is a senior journalism major who knows that personal growth is directly tied with understanding how structures work. You can email him at Mtkacze1@ithaca.edu
Imagine . . . Being Really, Really Proud of IC Reflections on 19 years at Ithaca College
By Maura Stephens, Associate Director of the Park Center for Independent Media
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
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or much of my 19 years working at Ithaca College, I’ve loved being here. I’ve grown very close to many students and count several dozen alumni as friends. I’ve made lifelong connections with faculty and staff members, and I believe that my contributions have enriched the college community. Having invested enormous amounts of time, energy, effort and love in this place, I feel it’s my right and my obligation to share some thoughts. This is my parting gift and my adieu to the campus and alumni communities. Over these nearly two decades I have seen much good happen, the output and accomplishments of many magnificent minds, creative spirits and inspirational individuals. I have also, to my dismay, witnessed the once-palpable sense of common purpose deteriorate. Ithaca College no longer feels like the community of learners, of people, striving to understand each other and work together to make a better world. Now it feels like merely a place where faculty and staff perform their jobs (very well, generally) and go home. And where students come to plunk down a whole lot of money, have fun, make friends and graduate with a diploma that will get them as high-paying a job as possible, so they can repay their student loans and afford a decent place to live. (Not necessarily to find meaningful work that excites and fulfills them.) Among faculty, with some exceptions, there’s little mutual support and less collegiality. There are few heroes. What passion there is comes primarily from students — who are short-timers here, after all — and after last semester’s intense, sustained actions led by POC at IC (People of Color at Ithaca College), the response from faculty and staff has been dishearteningly quiet, at least publicly. Many POC at IC are understandably disheartened, if not disgusted. Yet perhaps that dismissal is premature. Scholars don’t leap, they deliberate.
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Symptoms of a More Serious Disease I used to think universities and colleges were places of ongoing experimentation, innovation and excitement, where bold ideas were conceived, tested and implemented. I assumed that faculty encouraged students to think radically and practice pioneeringly, even if failure was likely. I was (perhaps naively) surprised to find that IC does not really welcome diverse approaches or implement novel programs or policies; witness the way it has responded to pressure for more inclusivity by forming committees and creating new administrative positions. Nor has it figured out how to attract employees who reflect the diversity of the student body it so actively pursues. During the years 1997 to 2010, I worked in what was then called college relations, housed in Alumni Hall alongside admission and alumni marketers. I saw how specifically they emphasized diversity of race, ethnicity, culture, geography, gender and sexuality in their recruitment and donor publications. They were committed to recruiting students of diverse backgrounds. But after moving into an academic division, I learned such efforts were not practiced as concertedly in recruitment of faculty. It is clear that retention programs for both students and faculty are woefully inadequate. People in academia tend to recruit from their own circles, so when the recruiters are primarily white and middle-to upper-middle-class, they’re most likely to network with people who look like themselves and come from similar backgrounds. The lack of diversity among faculty and the cultural bias against people of color on campus are very serious problems, but not new ones. I joined the Diversity Awareness Committee at IC in 1998 and have served on it off and on throughout the subsequent years. I was one of a small group of studentled community members who pushed to create the Center for LGBT Education, Outreach, and Services in 2001 and was part of another small group pushing to create the Center for the
Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity and the (late, lamented) Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies. I’ve both observed and participated in search committees struggling to broaden the candidate field to include people of different “races,” ethnicities, cultures, economic status, sexualities and gender identities. I think it’s fair to say that most such committees do not work hard enough to find the best candidates of color. Our challenges are much the same today as they were in the last millennium, although it did feel that we made some progress through the early part of the 2000s that subsequently slipped backward. In the Institutional Plan implemented in 2001 under then-President Peggy Ryan Williams, the college articulated the priority of “creating a campus environment that accepts, reflects, and celebrates diversity.” In 2004, Williams established a Presidential Task Force on Diversity to assess progress on that goal. A year later, in response to racist incidents on campus, she wrote in a column for ICView: “There is no room for racism, bigotry, and hatred at Ithaca College.” Also in 2005, she asked the task force for an update, which led to the creation of a permanent President’s Advisory Committee on Diversity, with representatives from across constituencies. (It still exists under President Tom Rochon.) Diversity and inclusion were front and center on our minds and in our discussions, as was another important subject: sustainability (all aspects: economic, environmental, social and encompassing). An additional critical problem has been articulated by both students and employees over and over in recent years, coming to a head last semester: Governance. The people directly affected by policies and programs are more often than not left out of the decision-making process on those very policies and programs in which they participate. As the administration hatches new ideas, the faculty, staff and students are expected to simply follow whatever missive comes out
from on high. These shortcomings are indeed severe, but they’re merely symptoms. The real problems lie at the top, not only with the upper administration and the Board of Trustees, but also, even more elementally, with the lack of vision and of clarity of mission. The college’s current mission statement is so bland as to be virtually meaningless: “Ithaca College strives to become the standard of excellence for residential comprehensive colleges, fostering intellect, creativity, and character in an active, studentcentered learning community.” Back to Basics: What Do We Want to Be? Why not something unique, visionary and aspirational? How’s this for the kind of place where you want to study and work: “Ithaca College is working hard to break down barriers and embrace humanity in all its myriad forms. We strive to offer an exciting, questioning, questing, learning, living and working environment where students, faculty, staff, administrators, alumni and even our neighbors collaborate on a wide variety of initiatives designed to excite intellects, spark creativity, challenge existing power structures, welcome and ensure the safety of all, and seek solutions to today’s most pressing problems, with the overarching goal of ensuring a sustainable future for us all.” When the cost of higher education is astronomical and becoming unreachable for average families, IC cannot continue to operate as if it will just take some minor adjustments to set things right and keep classes full. As we are reminded annually at all-College meetings, ours is an almost totally enrollment-driven institution (more than 90 percent of the annual budget comes from everrising student tuition and fees). Without a full class coming in each year, we’ll have to do serious belt-tightening [read: “employee layoffs and firings”].
it (and to which it pays no taxes) and has other campuses. It’s got an endowment worth more than $6 billion and a huge pool of wealthy alumni (176,637 individuals gave to its recently ended, decade-long capital campaign), corporations and foundations. 2. The two-year TC3, part of the SUNY system, is agile, adaptive to changing demographics and trends. It expands offerings as needs arise; e.g., it has added degrees in culinary arts, wine marketing, and sustainable farming and food systems to match demand in our area, famous for vineyards and organic farm-to-table innovation. It has almost as many students as IC, including full-time matriculating, degree-seeking students, parttime, certificate-pursuing, and online students. It’s a whole lot more affordable, and it allows commuting, an additional money-saver for students. 3. Ithaca College, despite innovative individuals across all divisions and nationally renowned programs in music, theater, physical therapy, occupational therapy, TV-radio, cinema and various other disciplines, has not distinguished itself as a leader in either programming or operations. It does not appear to even know what it wants to be. Even IC’s once-groundbreaking, publicity-generating sustainability programs have been all but abandoned, although it has three LEEDcertified buildings that were intended to be more than physical nods to energy conservation. (Just walk around
the “closed” campus some early-January Saturday and count the number of lights on and computers glowing.) Although many faculty members incorporate sustainability and climate awareness into individual courses, there is no campuswide culture of sustainability, just as there’s no active culture of understanding of equality or campus-wide commitment to inclusion and elimination of bias. There’s no easy way to say this: I do not believe that, 10 years from now, all three Tompkins County higher education institutions will still be around. One will be gone, unless it begins to envision a whole new way of being, and I don’t think it will be our red neighbor on East Hill or the resourceful community college in Dryden. The number of families that can afford to pay our tuition, rising as it will, is dwindling. A college education is not as necessary as it once was, with so many nontraditional ways to learn, such as FreeSkool, Open University and self-guided online methods. And planned international “trade deals” are likely to send even more jobs abroad. (But that would be the subject for a whole other essay.) Elephant in the Room: So how can IC become sustainable? First of all, let’s re-envision what we want it to be, perhaps using the above revised mission statement as a starting point.
Art by Elizabeth Stillwaggon
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News & Views
Consider: Tompkins County has three institutions of higher education. 1. The one on East Hill is effectively too big to fail. A vast research university, it’s got prestige. It’s as big as the city that houses
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
Second, let’s replace current leaders with people who reflect the best of what we are. There is a startling difference in the membership of the 200708 and 2015-16 Boards of Trustees. The current board is overwhelmingly male (76 percent) and corporate, with only two individuals from the nonprofit sector. The two people of color on it are a George W. Bush appointee as director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys who resigned during a scandal and is now a corporate attorney, and a college dean who stuck by her university’s powerful president when her own faculty voted No Confidence in him. Only one trustee lives in Ithaca. On the prior board, in place during Peggy Williams’s last year as president of IC, only 12 of 26 trustees were corporate. The other 14 worked in the nonprofit or education sector or were performers or small-business owners; one was an attorney and human rights activist. Three lived in Ithaca. The male-female imbalance was a little less outrageous (61 percent male.) Of course every board needs people who can donate funds or recruit donors. That’s critical to the fiscal health of the institution, especially one like IC, with a modest endowment that’s dependent on tuition. With one notable exception, the current trustees have virtually no involvement with the students, faculty, staff, programs and offerings of our campus, and are informed only by what the president and President’s Council choose to tell them. And as noted above, they are far from representative of our campus in regard to race, gender, professional field and commitment to the nonprofit and arts worlds. Our governance body should reflect the community it serves, with at least more than half of its members from the fields of study we offer. And note that the current student population is 59 percent female, and 46 percent of faculty are female.* Considering how much IC has touted that it has finally reached the magic 20 percent students of color population (but only 11 percent faculty of color), the board should have at least that percentage of people of color (and not only rightwing POC). New board members should be chosen not by current secretive methods but by an open participatory nomination and search process. Similarly, the campus community should create a system via which to audit each individual trustee’s performance yearly —
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just as staff members are put through review, and just as the campus community should undertake an annual review of the president’s performance. That’s a start, and necessary if IC is to ever achieve a democratic, open and participatory governance system, which the overwhelming majority of students, faculty and staff have indicated they want. Let’s give credit here to the trailblazing votes held here last semester, when our students became the first in the nation to hold a vote of confidence/no confidence in their president. The faculty followed suit, and the staff became one of only a handful of higher education staffs in the country to hold such a vote. In all three, the message was clear: No Confidence in Tom Rochon. President Rochon decided, with the trustees’ approval, to stay in his highly paid position for more than 18 months after those votes clarified the campus community’s wishes. That was a clear indication that the comfort and wellbeing of our campus community is not the trustees’ highest priority. That in itself should be enough evidence that an equitable, sustainable governance system at Ithaca College can develop only when there is a decisive shift in power and responsibility toward the more than 7,000 people who live, work and study here. Looking Past the Obvious The best, and the hardest, point is my last. It is impossible to discuss sustainability without stating one stark truth — one that has, for reasons unclear to me, been swept out of the many conversations swirling around this campus, yet is front-and-center among aware people everywhere. The most important crisis we face, dwarfing the already massive problems of bias, inequity, exclusion, nonparticipatory government, the Board of Trustees makeup and finding the right president, is the great equalizer: climate change. Tompkins County, IC’s home, is blessed with abundant fresh water and fertile farmlands. It’s far from the coasts where sea-level rise will be wreaking havoc. Many students and alumni are from or live in those areas; having spent time in Ithaca, it’s likely they’ll look in this direction when they decide to migrate. If, as I believe will happen, there are no longer enough paying students to keep IC viable as the “residential comprehensive college” it has self-branded, we need to be thinking
in more creative ways about what our campus can become, if no longer housing full-time students. Our acres could be cultivated to grow food crops, with our permaculturists leading the way. Our natural lands, already a source of mushrooms, maple syrup, fiddleheads, herbs and more, are rich with sustenance for human and other creatures. Our well-maintained buildings could house climate migrants. Our community of bright people with big hearts and imaginations, with experience and courage and passion, if properly prepared and equipped, could help others transition to the new environment we have not yet imagined, but for which we should be readying. Can we muster the will to guide and participate in such a transformation, whether it takes the shape I foresee or in some other way? Can we remain flexible? Can we be leaders? I hope that we don’t allow ourselves to be shoved down the chute of mediocrity and irrelevance that seems to have been laid out for us by a failed administration and unrepresentative Board of Trustees. We’ve got a lot to build on. Let’s decide together to answer the call of POC at IC, IC Onward and other campus groups and individuals who displayed such incredible leadership last semester. Let’s not fail them and their promise. It’s past time for revolutionary change here, if we are not to fade into obsolescence in the rapidly changing realm of higher education on the rapidly changing planet we inhabit, together. *(Other genders are not acknowledged in official counts.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------Journalist Maura Stephens spent many years at Newsweek and Newsweek International before fleeing corporate media to start an early e-zine and write for such independent outlets as Truthout and CommonDreams. She came to South Hill in 1997 and edited ICView until 2010, when she was named associate director of the Park Center for Independent Media. She is leaving IC this summer.
Upfront
UPFRONT. UPFRONT. UPFRON
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Collaborative Destruction
How the Argentine ant is taking over the world By Sydney O’Shaughnessy, Contributing Writer
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
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n moist areas, under trash, concrete, buildings and sidewalks, a network of nests lie hidden. The inhabitants are 1/16 of an inch long and travel in long lines that practically go unnoticed by people walking by. These brown creatures can crawl into virtually any space seeking sweets to eat. They are everywhere and they are nearly unstoppable. These tiny, seemingly harmless, creatures are Argentine ants and they are cleverly on their way to world domination. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the mega Argentine ant colony consists of hundreds of thousands of ants spanning six continents and various oceanic islands. This supercolony is the largest insect community of its kind and may be rivaling humans in scale. Soon, with the unwitting help of humans and the ants’ ability to outcompete other species, they may further expand their range and fully live up to their title as the number one household pest. Andrew Suarez, an associate professor of entomology and animal biology at the University of Illinois and an expert in Argentine ants, said these little pests originated from northern Argentina before being unintentionally introduced by humans to the southeastern United States and other countries in the late 1800s. Humans unwittingly caused the spread of the Argentine ant by allowing the species of ant to stow away in ships that were traveling between countries. Suarez said the ants became hitchhikers on ships because they were trapped in human cargo. “They were first detected in a few islands and places like New Orleans and from there they were very successful and they spread rapidly throughout parts of the Southeastern United States and hitchhiked over to California,” Suarez said. What makes these ants unique is their colony did not remain small like other ant colonies. Suarez said the Argentine ants’ ability to rapidly
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increase their population is due to high reproduction rates, and their success in expanding their range is what enabled the colony to get so large. “They basically were forming these colonies over very expansive areas and, unlike a typical ant colony, which is in one little place at a time, they formed expansive supercolonies,” Suarez said. Another reason Argentine ants have become so established is that even though ants are a highly territorial species, the Argentine ant supercolony does not fight each other, even if the ants are from vastly different places. Jan Nyrop, an entomology professor at Cornell University, said this could be because the Argentine ant supercolony has less genetic diversity. Typically, greater genetic diversity enables the invader to become successful in their new environment because they have the genetic background to adapt to and exploit their new environment. However, Nyrop said this is not the case for ants. “With ants, it turns out to be the reverse and the reason for that is because with low genetic diversity, they don’t recognize other colonies as competitors,” Nyrop said. Nyrop said supercolonies can form because the ants are not competing with other ants of the same species. In the case of the Argentine ant supercolony, the ants are not very genetically diverse and the separate Argentine ant colonies are able to come together to outcompete all other native ant species. Nyrop said different ant colonies, like fire ant colonies, do not come too close to each other because they can sense the differences between the colonies. Nyrop said these ants have the ability to recognize friend or foe due to an odor cue. However, he said this is not seen with the Argentine ant. Because they do not have much genetic diversity, they lack the odor cue that signals a new colony. “With the Argentine ant, there was
not a genetic diversity in there. So ... they all say, ‘Oh, we are all the same. We all come from the same colony,’” Nyrop said. The vastness of the Argentine ant supercolony is making the invasive ant a powerful oppressor of native life and is impacting the ecosystems they invade. According to the NCBI, Argentine ants can outcompete native ant species because of their large population and can essentially push out the native species by using native ants’ resources and fighting for territory. Invasive species are detrimental to native environments because they are able to prey on and outcompete native species for food, according to the National Wildlife Federation. Invasive ants, like the Argentine ant, are no exception. Once they establish in a foreign environment, they can replace native species. After replacing the native species, there is a reduction in biodiversity — allowing the Argentine ant to spread rapidly across their new environment. Suarez and Nyrop are both concerned with the ecological impacts the Argentine ant species is having on their non-native environment. “Native ants often serve very diverse roles in the ecosystems they live in and replacing the diverse ant community with a single introduced ant, we fear that we are not only losing diversity but also those ecosystem services,” Suarez said. However, Ana Jesovnik — a PhD candidate in entomology at the University of Maryland — said there is little hope for humans to control the invasive Argentine ant population. “We can try to lessen the impact by controlling shipping and things like that but, because ants have colonized for many years before us, we are minor players in this story,” Jesovnik said. ___________________________________ Sydney O’Shaughnessy is a junior journalism and environmental science major who wishes Argentine ants were more like the ants in the movie “A Bug’s Life.” You can email her at soshaug1@ithaca.edu.
Getting to Know Celebrities
How social media stars dominate the internet with their presence By Ana Borruto, Staff Writer
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Khaled has coined some motivational phrases like “we the best,” “bless up,” and told viewers his keys to success. In the case of Khaled, Schreiber said she thinks fame on social media can sometimes be a lucky thing. “I think people who can figure out really quick what their thing is, what their brand is, like Humans of New York or Khaled, with his sort of inspirational empowerment message,” she said. Schreiber said that on the other side of social media fame, there are young people who begin posting regularly on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram or Vine and what they do begins to grasp their audience. Schreiber wrote an article for Paper Magazine in 2014 about a group of teenage boys who rose to fame with their six-second videos on Vine that attracted young girls everywhere. They became a group called “Magcon,” which stands for “meet and greet convention,” and started making appearances at public venues where hundreds of fans would line up to see them. Schreiber points out that these boys, although not together anymore, served as pop idols who audience members around their age could relate to. This sets them apart from other pop idols who are not so easy to meet or connect with. “There is something really compelling to a lot of fans, a lot of young girls, even boys, to have someone who seems simultaneously this famous idol, but who’s also obtainable,” she said. “They’re not someone who is making millions of dollars and performing in arenas throughout the world, but it’s someone who is a high school kid, or a junior high school kid, like them who happens to be really good looking and within a certain subset of people pretty famous.” Social media has a way of creating a distraction for users, Schreiber said, and for young people, when these online stars assert their identity, they are
connecting with this audience through relatable content. Viewers can begin to obsess over these people they’ve never met, or begin to hate them. Schreiber said we are still waiting to see how social media, and these social media stars, are impacting young audiences. It is hard to tell if it has been negative or positive. “The best benefit is that it connects people, especially young people, like never before,” Schreiber said. “On the other hand, I think it definitely distracts you and takes your attention and your mind away from more important things, whether it’s school work or work. I think it also breeds a certain competitiveness because if you’re watching things on instagram or on vine, you see these people with ‘amazing lives,’ you can easily feel that you are somehow inadequate.” ___________________________________ Ana Borruto is a sophomore journalism major who prefers face-to-face interactions with people she looks up to. You can email her at aborruto@ithaca.edu.
Illustration by Adriana Del Grosso
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Upfront
he millennials need a new social media personality? We’ve already got ‘anotha one.’ Social media has completely shaped the millennial generation. One of the biggest aspects of social media that has influenced this target audience are the social media stars. Abby Schreiber, managing editor of Paper Magazine, said viewers are exposed to different types of social media stars, either through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Vine. This ranges from more traditional celebrities like Justin Timberlake to Internet famous celebrities like Kylie Jenner. “There are the stars that become more famous through the more traditional route, they’re musicians, actors or models,” Schreiber said. “They have a whole team of people working for them to build this image and this brand, so everything is pretty calculated and they’re really projecting a certain side of themselves.” DJ Khaled is one of the most influential social media identities to date. As Schreiber points out, he received his fame through more traditional means; he is a record producer who has collaborated with artists like Rick Ross, T-Pain and Lil Wayne. He first asserted his dominance online when he began using the app Snapchat to connect with his viewers. In an interview with Tech Insider, Khaled recounted how he used Snapchat during a jet ski mishap. Khaled was jetskiing through the Miami’s Intracoastal Waterway at dusk, and when he got lost, he decided to Snapchat the entire journey. The fact that his adventure made national news proves how Khaled’s social media identity has become so prevalent. Khaled said his Snapchats are meant to inspire people and see the real him. “The thing is that what you see on Snapchat, that’s DJ Khaled. That’s Khaled for real. That’s Khaled,” Khaled said in the interview with Tech Insider. “My fans are seeing me besides my records and music videos and interviews. They’re seeing a more spiritual and at the same time motivational and inspirational side of me being at home.”
The Right to Know
How FOIA creates bureaucratic barriers to the truth By Evan Popp, Upfront Editor
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
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hen investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson requested documents from the Pentagon via the Freedom of Information Act in 2003, her daughter was eight years old. By the time Attkisson received a response to her FOIA request, it was 2013 and her daughter was going off to college. “And the response they provided was heavily redacted,” Attkisson said. The FOIA, established for citizens to obtain documents from federal agencies, is seen by many as a symbol of freedom of the press in the United States. But for others, the FOIA is a fundamentally flawed system. One such critic of the law is Jason Leopold, senior investigative reporter for Vice News. Leopold said while he has had some successes using the FOIA, such as accessing documents pertaining to the Central Intelligence Agency’s torture program and forcing the State Department to release Hillary Clinton’s emails, such victories only came after prolonged battles with the government. And he said in some cases, such as when he requested documents from the Federal Communications Commission about the commission’s activities on the issue of net neutrality, the documents are so heavily redacted that they are of little use. “It’s a very frustrating process dealing with this and I’m always encountering documents that are redacted, agencies that are trying to figure out how they don’t have to give me any information or how to thwart my attempts to gain information,” Leopold said. Many critics of the FOIA — such as Leopold and Attkisson — and open government advocates say obtaining documents through the FOIA takes far too long and argue the way the FOIA has been administered doesn’t work well because government agencies look for any excuse to not disclose requested information. A long wait Under the law, government agencies must respond to FOIA requests within 20 business days unless there are “unusual circumstances.” However, as seen by Att-
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kisson’s requests that was answered 10 years later, documents asked for through the FOIA are not always disclosed in a timely manner. Attkisson said it is common in the requests she has made for government agencies to simply ignore them. Additionally, she said another problem with the FOIA law is that all requests are put in the back of a queue, even requests that could be easily granted. “They put you in a long queue that will never be answered and the material, if it is ever answered or provided, it’s so heavily and impossibly redacted that it’s beyond use and it’s been so long that it’s no longer useful for the news story you were working on,” Attkisson said. Leopold said the queue system factors into his determinations over whether or not to sue the government when they refuse to grant him a file or ignore his request. “When I sue it means that I’m simply just going to the top of the pile and then the agency is simply producing the records,” he said. However, Leopold said most of his FOIA requests are still in the government backlog. He estimated he has more than 1,000 FOIA requests that the government has yet to respond to. Judith Burns, a spokesperson for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Department of Public Affairs, wrote in an email that in the fiscal year 2015, the average response rate for “simple requests” under the FOIA was 14.9 days. For “complex requests,” Burns said the average response rate was 91.36 days. Brandon Smith, a recipient of the 2016 Izzy Award from the Park Center for Independent Media for outstanding achievement in independent journalism and the journalist who used the FOIA to force the release of the video showing a Chicago Police Officer shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald as he walked away, said the lack of ramifications for ignoring FOIA requests contributes to the delay in acquiring information. “The main reason it would seem that the federal law is without teeth is that it has no penalties as to time,” Smith said. Harry Hammitt, editor and publisher of Access Reports — a biweekly newslet-
ter on the FOIA — added that the amount of time it takes government agencies to respond to FOIA requests makes it difficult for journalists on short deadlines to obtain information they can use, limiting who can realistically use the FOIA. “FOIA is used fairly successfully by a number of journalists, but not people who need to get information quickly,” Hammitt said. Culture of non-disclosure One of the common complaints about the FOIA is the culture among government bureaucrats of withholding anything possible when information is requested under the FOIA. Hammitt said whenever it is possible, government employees attempt to invoke one of the nine exemptions they can use to withhold information. He said one of the most common exemptions used to withhold information is the privacy exception, in which government officials claim disclosing the document would constitute an invasion of someone’s privacy. Attkisson said another common exemption the government uses to withhold information requested under the FOIA is the B5 exemption, or “deliberative process privilege.” Attkisson said the vagueness of the term has allowed the government to put this exemption to use frequently. “Pages and pages, hundreds of pages sometimes, are largely or entirely blacked out with the letter and number B5 and it’s been nicknamed, because of its abuse, the ‘withhold it because you want to exemption,’” she said. Attkisson said among government officials, there is a culture of withholding documents requested via the FOIA. “When it falls up to the bureaucrats and their political bosses to interpret the law, they’re interpreting it very narrowly,” she said. “Their presumption is to withhold automatically everything. And it should be the opposite.” Attkisson believes many FOIA requests are not fulfilled by design, with the government withholding information because it can under the exemptions in the law. Leopold said government officials can violate the FOIA and usually get
away with it. He said he knows the only way he’ll get records is if he sues. Robert Freeman, executive director of the New York State Committee on Open Government, said federal courts are also complicit in enabling government agencies to withhold information requested under the FOIA. “In too many instances, federal courts have simply taken the word of the federal agency as the basis for their denial [of FOIA requests],” Freeman said. Hammitt said by using the FOIA exemptions so aggressively, the government is withholding from the people a valuable resource. “Government information is an important thing for all sorts of people,” he said. “The idea that this all should be withheld because it’s exempted, either in full or in part under one of the exemptions, I find really distasteful.”
A better FOIA With the government often stonewalling reporters seeking information through the FOIA, Attkisson said bureaucrats must be held accountable for violating the FOIA if they illegally withhold documents. “If one person went to jail for improperly withholding material, they’ve done that under state laws in FOIA … they’d have a much better response to their FOIA requests,” she said. Leopold agreed that criminal penalties for withholding information are essential for creating a better open access law. He added that a crucial reform to the FOIA is making it more efficient by creating an online portal that people can file requests through. Additionally, Leopold said there needs to be a reform to the deliberative process exemption, which he said has been abused by the government to withhold documents whenever it wants to. Finally, Leopold said setting in stone how agencies are supposed to deal with FOIA requests would improve the law. “Codifying President Obama’s 2009 memorandum into law, in which he instructed agencies to act with the presumption of openness, making that actually law would improve it,” Leopold said. Additionally, Hammitt said there needs to be a change in perspective regarding the way agencies deal with releasing documents. Instead of using the exemptions under the FOIA whenever possible, agencies should only use exemptions when it is absolutely necessary, he said. Freeman said there is an example of
a great FOIA law the U.S. could adopt if it wanted to improve the ability to access records. “When I’m giving a talk, if someone asks what state has the best Freedom of Information Law, my answer is Mexico,” Freeman said. “Mexico passed a terrific law a little over 10 years ago.” Freeman said the law in Mexico took advantage of technological advances to make the FOIA process more efficient and said the U.S. could improve its law by doing the same. FOIA isn’t useless Despite its flaws, Leopold said, as a national security reporter, the FOIA is his most important tool. He said because national security information is often classified, the FOIA is an essential tool in his repertoire. Freeman said the FOIA works best in small communities where government officials can truly be held accountable to their constituents. “There is … direct accountability between the residents of a community and the people who represent them in government,” he said. “It’s different as we go higher.” Smith, a journalist who has used the FOIA to expose police corruption, said despite the FOIA’s flaws, valuable information can come from it. “It’s not like it’s perfect and you can never guarantee that they’re searching in all the right places and they give us everything they find, but we also can’t speculate that they’re not because we have no information to that effect,” he said. “We just have to use it and use it and use it and good stuff does come from it.” _______________________________________ Evan Popp is a sophomore journalism major who get you to confess your secrets without the government’s help. You can email him at epopp@ithaca.edu.
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Upfront
The FOIA under Obama President Barack Obama has claimed his is the most transparent administration in history. But others have a different perspective on Obama’s record fulfilling FOIA requests. Attkisson said she doesn’t view the Obama administration as being transparent and honoring more FOIA requests than other administrations. “It’s gotten worse in my opinion and experience, every year with every administration,” she said. “Part of it is because I’m using [FOIA] more, but if you listen to other journalists who have done this longer, they say this is by far the worst administration of all.” Attkisson cited an Associated Press analysis from 2016 of FOIA requests made in 2015. The AP found that the Obama administration set a record with the 77 percent of the time those requesting documents under the FOIA received either censored files or no files at all. According to the AP story, in the first full year after Obama’s election, that number was 65 percent. Leopold agreed the Obama administration is highly secretive. He said in his experience, the administration of George W. Bush was actually more open than Obama’s. The secrecy of the Obama administration is even more disappointing, Leopold said, because of the lofty promises and claims of transparency Obama has made. “The Obama administration made it clear that they were going to be the most transparent,” Leopold said. “And they constantly say they are the most transparent in history. And the frustrating part
of that is that it’s simply not true.” However, Freeman said he doesn’t think there’s a huge difference between the Obama administration’s level of secrecy and other administrations in history. He said while it’s likely harder now than it was 25 years ago to obtain documents, there is a treasure trove of information available on government websites. Hammitt agreed that the Obama administration has made more information available online than many other administrations. However, he said the reality of the Obama administration’s transparency doesn’t match the soaring rhetoric the president uses regarding the issue. “The Obama administration seems to have talked the talk but not walked the walk,” he said. “They don’t seem to have recognized the sorts of things they could do to make information public. I think that lots of people have been incredibly disappointed in what could have been.”
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BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
Rhetorical Repercussions Using language as a means to compartmentalize
By Celisa Calacal, Staff Writer
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Upfront
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BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
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here are over a million words that make up the English language. Each word has its own definition that provides context to what it means. And while a word’s denotation provides this standard dictionary definition, it is the connotation that gives a word its implied meaning. In some instances, words serve as labels — a way to categorize particular groups of people into a neat box. While certain terms act as a labeling mechanism for various societal groups, their connotations stem beyond simply naming a collective group of people. The usage of certain terms over other terms is its own political statement. In some cases, these terms can perpetuate power dynamics, further strengthening feelings of superiority by the dominant group in society. Sonja Lanehart, professor and brackenridge endowed chair in literature and the humanities at the University of Texas, specializes in sociolinguistics and African American language. She said people tend to naturally categorize things because of how it helps them make sense of the world. In addition to this, she said the dynamics of the “us versus them” mentality also contribute to the issue of labels. “In ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ the us is a good category and then the them is a not necessarily good category,” Lanehart said. “And so I think there are, in addition to either categorization or identity issues, there are also issues of power dynamics that are involved.” The use of the terms “black” and “African American” is an example of this categorization technique of labeling people, as these terms are used to refer to people with dark skin or Americans of African descent. The perceptual differences between these two terms further highlights the power dynamics in play when groups fall under certain labels, a fact that is highlighted in a 2015 study, “A rose by any other name?: The consequences of subtyping ‘African-Americans’ from ‘Blacks’” conducted by Erika Hall, assistant professor of organization and management at Emory University. Researchers in the study conducted multiple experiments testing how terms like black and African
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American were perceived. In one experiment, using résumés as a basis of comparison, the research study ultimately found the term black is viewed more negatively than the term African American. Hall said she and other researchers found people who used the label black were perceived as having a lower socioeconomic status, being less competent and even having colder personalities than people referred to as African American. “So essentially we had résumés that were equal on every other dimension except that they said that this person was black or African American,” she said. “And we found that the person made significantly less when he was labeled as black as opposed to African American — people thought he was lower status and he was less likely to be in a managerial position.” Hall said one potential explanation for the disparities between how the two terms are perceived are the inherent political undertones of the words. In looking at the results of the study, Hall said certain words retain connotations to the time period they were born out of. She said terms like “Negro” and “colored” were used at a time of taut racial tension, and therefore carried those implications moving forward, making it difficult to remove them from their negative connotations. “The word, it’s just a regular word, but if it comes out of a certain movement or a certain time period, then the rhetoric around that time period kind of stays with the word,” she said. Benét Wilson, vice president of education for the National Association of Black Journalists’ Digital Journalism Task Force, said the dif-
ference in perception between black and African American may have something to do with acknowledging a person’s ethnic heritage. “I think that there might be a perception that … if you’re African American that’s acknowledging that you are of African descent that you have a history and a past, whereas black is very generic, it’s a cover, it’s an ethnicity, but it doesn’t always say exactly who you are and where you’re from,” she said. In a Salon article from March, 2015 titled “It’s the Blackness that scares everybody”: Why white people favor ‘African-Americans,’” author Brittany Cooper discusses the results of Hall’s study and what the term black means to her. She wrote using the African American label makes black people feel “safer” to white people. “Perhaps adoption of [the African American] moniker signals that we are willing to fall into step and into line with what America says about us,” Cooper wrote. “Perhaps Blackness really does conjure visions of insurrectionary dark-skinned people ready to revolt against the violent machinations of whiteness.” According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the term black has been used to refer to people of African descent since the 1600s. Then in the 1960s, according to the book, “From Negro to Black to African American: The Power of Names and Naming,” by author Ben L. Martin, associate professor emeritus of political science at the University of Missouri Kansas City, black was reclaimed during the Black Power Movement — led by the Black Panther Party for Self Defense — as well as the “Black is Beautiful” movement. Wilson sees the progression in the
“The use of the terms ‘black’ and ‘African American’ is an example of this categorization technique of labeling people, as these terms are used to refer to people with dark skin or Americans of African descent.”
Lanehart said shorthand terms like “illegal” and “alien” harbor negative connotations toward U.S. non-citizens. “We don’t have a citizenship status that’s called illegal alien, and when we think about alien, the connotations for alien have to do with space, those sort of things, and that’s not what we’re talking about,” Lanehart said. “We’re talking about people who have an undocumented status based upon laws that we have about who’s a citizen and who’s not.” One of the largest perpetrators of the term illegal immigrant is the media. In fact, according to a 2013 Pew Research Study on the shifting language regarding immigration in the media, the term illegal immigrant remained the most used phrase by news organizations when discussing immigration. Researchers compared newspapers from April 15-29, 2013 with three other two-week periods in 1996, 2002 and 2007. In each time period examined, illegal immigrant was the term most often used by newspapers when writing about immigration. In the study, the term illegal immigrant was used 49 percent of the time, whereas a less offensive term like “undocumented immigrant” was used only 14 percent of the time. News organizations have been slow in banning the use of the term illegal immigrant from the language they use, but progress is gradually being made. According to the “Illegal Index” by online media website Fusion, which shows the news organizations that continue using the term “illegal immigrant,” 12 organizations have banned the use of the term illegal immigrant, including outlets like Vox, NBC, The Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press. And while The New York Times has not explicitly banned the term illegal immigrant, it strongly urges its reporters to use alternative phrases. In contrast, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters prefer to use the term illegal immigrant in their articles. Although there is a lack of diversity in the newsroom — with just 12.37 percent of the overall newsroom population made up of minorities, according to a 2013 census by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school of journalism in Florida — Wilson said news outlets have the responsibility to look at style guides
by organizations like the National Association of Black Journalists to make sure they are being culturally conscious. “They need to take the steps to make sure they are sensitive to the audiences that they’re writing to, not just the white audiences but all audiences,” she said. There is a purpose for the language people use, Lanehart said, and the language used in news stories has implications that media outlets and journalists must be aware of. “The adjectives that you use provide a particular impression,” she said. “Your sentence construction, whether it’s a passive or an active sentence, those all have implications for meaning beyond just the syntax. There’s a semantic, a pragmatic meaning that comes across in those sorts of things and so you have to be cognizant of them.” Within the realm of politics, Lanehart said dog-whistle politics, which uses coded language to implicate a particular societal group, could explain the decision to invoke certain terms over others. She said the choice to use certain terminology influences the way people picture members of marginalized communities by attempting to put forth a certain message. “Everybody knows what you mean, but we don’t want to say it because then that’s too obvious, and we don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “Those are all of the things that are going on in terms of why in some cases, especially in political discourse, you would use certain terms over other terms.” While society does not need to necessarily jump around hurdles in choosing which terms and words to use, Hall said the subtle messages must be taken out of these labels. “We need to know that these words are kind of charged with these implicit undertones and try our best to use them in our rhetoric in a very positive way so we can change the implicit meanings that are encoded in them,” she said. ___________________________________ Celisa Calacal is a sophomore journalism major who knows 999,999 words — no, but really. You can email her at ccalacal@ithaca.edu.
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Upfront
terms of reference to describe black people in her own family’s birth certificates — her grandfather’s and her father’s birth certificates say “colored,” her own certificate reads “Negro” and her daughter’s has the term “black.” She said this evolution in what terms are deemed acceptable at the time — and the movement from “colored to “Negro” to the reclamation of “black” — was strengthened by the Civil Rights Movement. “We were fighting for respectability, we were fighting to get rid of Jim Crow laws, we were fighting to have people stop calling us ‘nigger,’ we were fighting to have the same respectability that any citizen of the United States that wasn’t black got, so I think that was the line of demarcation,” Wilson said. “And people felt stronger about asserting their black identity.” In contrast, the term African American is a relatively recent one. According to Martin’s book, it was formally introduced in December 1988 at a news conference in Chicago’s Hyatt Regency O’Hare Hotel by civil rights activist Jesse Jackson as the term preferred by members of the black community to express a sense of ethnic identity. “He essentially said, ‘What I wanna do is I want us to be on an equal playing field with white because I want us to have heritage, I want us to feel confident in ourselves and I want us to have higher socioeconomic status,’” Hall said. “He was also a person who was of higher socioeconomic status.” This may be one explanation of why whites perceive blacks as having a lower socioeconomic status compared to African Americans. Because black was a term of reference that has existed over time, for white people it may continue to carry implications of inferiority related to socioeconomic status. The introduction of African American in 1988 and the proposal for a more ethnic reference similar to Italian American or Irish American may have been regarded as more politically respectable and acceptable by White America. In addition to labels of African American and black, the debate over immigration is another example of discrepancies with terms of reference, where terms like “illegal immigrant” and “illegal alien” are becoming regarded as highly offensive phrases that should be avoided.
OL. MINISTRYofCOOL. MI BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
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Arts, entertainment and other things cooler than us.
The Fine Ethical Line Reliving tragedy through film By Sophie Johnson, Staff Writer
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starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Nightcrawler) and Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black) that will focus on a man who lost both of his legs during the bombing. While the creation of films about tragedies like the bombing theoretically have the goal of honoring lives that were lost and impacted, this intension is overshadowed by the negative forces that come with it. The media covers most films with a focus on the big name stars like Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Wahlberg. This is the case with Stronger and an article The Hollywood Reporter published about it. The article discusses Jake Gyllenhaal’s extensive workout training to portray the part of Jeff Bauman, the man who lost both of his legs, and how he “hit the gym big time” and worked with his trainer who was wearing “an official Boston Marathon jacket.” The article also commented on how thin Gyllenhaal looked, making his weight loss and muscle building heroic, while he is portraying a man who lost two of his limbs. Another issue that is raised when creating a movie out of something so tragic is the portrayal of real people who either lost their lives or were otherwise greatly impacted by the events. These people have friends and family who care for them, love them and miss them. Who is going to play the role of eight year old Martin Richard who lost his life on the day of the bombing? How about his little sister Jane who lost her leg? Their family will have to watch their
Art by Lizze Cox
lives coming apart once again. Which actors are going to portray the Tsarnaev brothers, who brought so much destruction to the city of Boston? Will they be portrayed by actors of Middle Eastern descent, like the Tsarnaevs were? All of this comes back to the question of who is benefitting from a movie being made about the marathon bombing. It could be the filmmakers, producers and actors and actresses who will likely make millions off of the films being made. It could be the victims and their families. They are being commemorated, but filmmakers have to be cautious not to glorify their suffering or heroize the actors’ portrayal instead of the victims themselves. Or it could be the public who needs a coping method for tragedy so great and hard to understand. Making a heroic movie about the Boston Bombing provides hope and entertainment out of something that has caused so much suffering. Society cannot simply accept such strong and destructive hate, so movies are created to help cope. But maybe instead of achieving this through a questionable retelling, we should be moving on and trying to create a society where this kind of suffering doesn’t happen. ______________________________________ Sophie Johnson is a freshman journalism major who knows the difference between storytelling and exploitation. You can email her at sjohnson3@ithaca.edu.
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Ministry of Cool
n April 15, 2013 two brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, set off two pressure cooker bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Boylston Street. They hid two backpacks packed with the pressure cooker bombs and other shrapnel amid the crowds of spectators who were watching the runners come in, ABC News reported. When the bombs went off, chaos errupted, killing three and injuring over 260 people, according to ABC News. Of the three dead was an eight-year-old boy named Martin Richard. According to The Telegraph, sixteen of the injured lost legs, including Richard’s sevenyear-old sister. Once the identities of these brothers were revealed with surveillance cameras, a massive manhunt began. In the Tsarnaevs’ attempt to run, they allegedly shot and killed MIT police officer Sean Collier when trying to steal his weapon, as reported by The Telegraph, adding one more to their casualties. They then took the driver of a car hostage, forcing him to drive around Boston and take money out of ATMs. The hostage escaped at a Cambridge gas station and called the police, who tracked the car the Tamerlan Tsarnaev was driving to Watertown, a Boston suburb, according to History. There in a neighborhood, a massive gun battle broke out, seriously injuring one officer and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Dzhokhar took off in the stolen car, running over his brother, who later died in the hospital, and eventually abandoned it, fleeing by foot. They found him the next day in a Watertown resident’s boat, where he wrote a note in his own blood explaining that the bombings were for the American wars in Muslim countries. These two brothers shut down the Boston area for four days, ending and drastically changing the lives of many. Boston’s own Mark Wahlberg is going to star as a Boston police officer in a movie about the bombing, titled Patriots Day. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the movie will be filmed in Boston and with the goal of its release in Los Angeles, New York City, and Boston on Dec. 21, 2016. Additionally, there are other films being made about the bombing, including one titled Stronger,
RAW SAW
Concert Review
FROM THE
San Fermin Sophie Israelsohn, Ministry of Cool
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
Editor
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On April 13, The Haunt hosted a better-thanaverage hump day with a show by San Fermin and Esmé Patterson. Going from big festivals like Lollapalooza to a small-town bar, San Fermin and The Haunt could have seemed an unlikely pair. Attention given to it or not, venue has a lot to do with the overall concert experience and The Haunt in particular is worth a praise or two. For first timers like myself (I’m surprised too), the venue was a pleasant surprise. Caddy-corner to the stage is the bar, set facing the rest of the room on a slightly raised platform. There’s only one TV for those who care about what the score is — dare I say one too many — and a respectable selection of craft brews and liquor. The L-shaped bar, roomy on its own is joined by additional seating high top style or booth on the outer edges of the bar platform. All that and there was still plenty of standing room left over. Granted, at any venue, the timing of when one were to get there might then determine how much space one has between themselves and their neighbor. But with the pack I traveled in, coming in a solid half-hour between when doors opened and the start of the show, grabbing a beer and a nice spot up front wasn’t difficult to manage, personal space uncomprimised. Promptly enough, Esmé Patterson came on in her Crayola blue overalls (that I may or may not have admired from the Instragram she posted at Niagara Falls earlier that day) with the rest of her band. But in defense of my admiration, I’ve been waiting to see Esmé Patterson live since watching her sing with Shakey Graves — who played The Haunt this time last year — on “Dearly Departed” for their Pandora Session. Patterson and company kept it casual with their style of performance, no theatrics necessary, but it was pleasantly obvious that they really wanted to be there. I so appreciate openers who don’t let their position in the lineup dictate how they treat their set. San Fermin’s baritone saxophonist Stephen Chen made an appearance during Patterson’s sizable set wherein Esmé played some new material from her forthcoming album and also a nice slew of songs
from her previous album Woman to Woman — a concept album told from the perspective of women sung about in popular songs, like Eleanor Rigby and Jolene. Not too long after, the members of San Fermin took the stage and put on a set that honestly could have lasted all night. Its energy was so ridiculous that the mind-wandering side effect of a set that overstayed its welcome was impossible to have experienced. San Fermin’s use of theatrics was also quite minimal, mostly sticking to hue changes in the lighting. Every once in a while though, lead singer Charlene Kaye would hike up her combat-booted foot onto the center monitor. Not one member of San Fermin is limited to one role; songwriter Ellis Ludwig-Leone held down stage right on the synth and keys, drummer Michael Hanf at one point delegated to Kaye — who herself shares the vocals with co-lead singer Allen Tate — swapping out for guitar. And the whole night was practically one big game of who has the egg shaker. San Fermin had a good mix, tracks from its most recent album taking set priority. Its first album was generously dispersed as well, Kaye taking the brunt of the vocals once sung by Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe (both of Lucius). But boy, was she up for it; “Crueler Kind” as a more than sufficient example. Tate’s pleasantly lethargic, Matt Berninger-esque tone was warmly charming. The partnership between he and Kaye justly brought out the personal meaning behind the tracks. Adding to the connection between audience and bandmates, trumpet player John Brandon jumped down into the audience to play a song; something not often expected at any ol’ show. San Fermin truly capitalized on the intimacy the venue provided, a quality that made both the band and the location memorable and worth going out on a weeknight.
The Lumineers
Cleopatra Album Review
The Thermals
Sophie Israelsohn, Ministry of Cool Editor
We Disappear Album Review
Alexa Salvato, News and Views Edior
out. Even with the B-sides on the deluxe version, it’s not enough to keep the energy up. In fact, there’s something clearly missing from the entire second half of the album: vocal harmonies. Of course, in the car, you can just make up your own (#carsingingisthenewshowersinging), but the harmonies this band is capable of have always added so much to the overall texture, as is clear in its first few tracks. Another thing to consider is the diversity in sound. Because of their orchestration, many songs on this album, as on the last, sound quite similar. This could be seen as signature and cohesive, or it could be seen as the one trick from the pony and a little boring. It’s so obviously Lumineers, so how could we expect anything different? Cleopatra was released in the same season of releases as Lucius’ sophomore album Good Grief and Andrew Bird’s umpteenth album Are You Serious? both of which step outside their respective freshman comfort zones. There’s comfort in familiarity, but it often isn’t without a tinge of curiosity for something new in a sophomore album. The Lumineers don’t necessarily disappoint by sticking to what they know, but from a progression standpoint, it would be interesting to see how far they’ll explore in the future.
The Thermals’ We Disappear starts out with messy, distorted electric guitar, quickly transitioning into catchy rhythm chords. Reminiscent almost of classic Breeders tune “Cannonball,” I was surprised when the lyrics were sharp and rhyming, a cool contrast to a guitar style most associated with the unintelligible and ambiguous lyrics of Nirvana, Pearl Jam or The Breeders itself. However, the album grew in a poppier vibe — whether pop-punk, alt-punk or pop rock is still to be determined — as it proceeded. We Disappear is the seventh album of this Portland band that has been producing albums since the beginning of this millennium. And if the mention of Portland rings a bell when thinking about The Thermals, that’s not a surprise; it was the opening band for Bernie Sanders’ now famous Portland rally when the bird that landed on his podium stole the show. After the first song, “Into the Code,” the two that follow are the most catchy tunes on the album, “My Heart Went Cold” and “Hey You,” which was also released separately on April 22 with “White Rabbit,” a song not featured on the album. “My Heart Went Cold” stands out with the kind of chorus I could imagine belted into a mic tipped toward the audience at a huge concert, going “But my heart went cold, this I know/ I pushed you away, a whoa oh oh/ I left
my heat untold/I couldn’t keep you warm/ My heart went cold.” The next few songs are perfectly good tunes, but I found the middle stretch of the album to be quite boring. The rhythm guitar is repetitive and the melodies are overly reminiscent of the stronger songs that both precede and follow them. However, it could also be my superficial distaste for lead singer Hutch Harris’s voice. Unlike the powerful voices of other punk vocalists, Harris sings “always in the same boyish pop-punk yelp that renders his lyrics about 40 [percent] cuter than he probably intends them to be,” as Evan Rytlewski perfectly articulated in their review for Pitchfork. And even though I’m the only high school theater geek in history who despises bands of the genre, his voice’s similarity to Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump and Brendan Urie of Panic! at the Disco certainly did not aid my opinion. Yet the album does rise from its downturn in the middle, ending with some short, romantic and endearingly genuine tunes. The antepenultimate “Thinking of You,” marked with harmony-laden vocals and sweet lyrics, stood out especially: “And when I thought about love/ I was only thinking of us/ When I thought of all the things I wanna do/ I was only thinking of you.”
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Ministry of Cool
Up until a few weeks ago, it was practically assumed The Lumineers had gone on hiatus. It isn’t too much of an overstep to say that it was just about forgotten completely aside from its single “Ho Hey” occasionally making an appearance on the airwaves. But The Lumineers most recent release, Cleopatra, affirmed that it is not a band to forget. As it is said in the single “Ophelia,” we “should have known better.” In true Lumineers fashion, the first track of the album, “Sleep On The Floor,” opens with kick drum and tambourine, slowly and surely, picking up the pace both in lyrics and rhythmic accompaniment. By the second verse, it’s as if The Lumineers never actually fell of the planet like some may have dared to think. The contour of the album isn’t super balanced. The first half is predominantly uptempo with “Cleopatra” and “Gun Song” and then progressively (or rather, regressively) leads to the slower, softer ballads like “Long Way From Home” and the closer, “Patience.” There are moments that hint toward a harmonic peak, but it’s not often achieved in the latter half of the album. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but for passive listeners it hits a lull that doesn’t do much to prevent a listener from checking
Tyler Obropta Staff Writer
Demolition
Everybody Wants Some!!
Film Review
Film Review Mitch Ward,
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
Staff Writer
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This movie has a weird fascination with butts. The only other Richard Linklater films I’ve seen have been School of Rock (2003) and Boyhood (2014) and those didn’t have nearly as much attention placed on the derrière. Everybody Wants Some!! doesn’t just occasionally have medium shots that dip a little below the waist. There are many, many shots of women’s posteriors. As many as in a Fast and Furious film, and then some. Men slap each other playfully on the butt, as do the women; the male characters are constantly talking about who has the most well-shaped butt; there’s a scene where the main character accidentally lifts his head into another character’s bare rear.... Now, it’s not creepy or anything like that. I completely understand Linklater painting his script with the raging, sex-hungry hormones of our cast of college jocks. But it’s just so excessive. Maybe it’s a thing about the era. What was it with the ‘80s and butts? The leering, arse-obsessed young men at the core of this comedy are college baseball players. Our lead is freshman pitcher Jake, played by Blake Jenner and Blake Jenner’s chin. Everybody Wants Some!! chronicles with great vivacity Jake’s final weekend before college begins, a weekend that quickly becomes filled with more alcohol than Ernest Hemingway’s writing room, more rock-and-roll than your dad’s CD collection, and more weed than
an Ithaca College dorm room on the weekend as Jake and his endearing, competitive cohorts strive to bed as many women and rock as many parties as the confines of reality will permit them. His merry band of alcoholic party-fiend teammates is delightfully eccentric. Their peculiarities work just as well to highlight the more normal characters, such as our lead, Jake, or his romantic interest, Beverly. The lovely Zoey Deutch brings a charming intelligence to Beverly, her voice cracking and bubbling on each line with a joyous, youthful fervor. She’s a marvel to watch, so much so that it’s genuinely a shame when Jake waves goodbye to Beverly and rejoins his baseball team. As Dazed and Confused (1993) focused on trying to replicate and pay homage to an era, the ties Everybody Wants Some!! has to the 80s only run skin-deep, mostly in wardrobe and music choice. Linklater doesn’t indulge in any heavy drama, he doesn’t care about giving his characters depth and he most of all doesn’t care about telling a story. It’s a blessing when a movie knows exactly what it’s trying to be and hits the mark just right: Everybody Wants Some!! is a fun and funny time about a bunch of dumb jocks and little else. It’s not trying to draw tears or win awards — unless, that is, some film society gives awards out for the Biggest Fascination with the Human Posterior. Everybody Wants Some!! would have that one in the bag.
People grieve in different ways, some of them attractive and some of them reproachful. Maybe if Demolition had been a dissection of that truth, like Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011), it would have made for an interesting film. While it might start off that way, the comedy-drama ultimately winds up becoming a hollow character study of an excruciatingly self-centered man. After becoming recently widowed when his wife dies in a car accident, Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) comes to the uncomfortable realization that he never truly loved her. While those around him mourn in an apparently healthy fashion, Davis develops an odd habit: he compulsively tears objects apart to see what’s inside. Along the way he befriends a single mom (Naomi Watts) and her fifteen-yearold son (Judah Lewis), both of whom bear nonjudgmental witness to his newfound hobby. Director Jean-Marc Vallée’s past two films, Dallas Buyers Club (2013) and Wild (2014), also deal with characters breaking down their lives to assess the damage and start over. Demolition takes this theme quite literally. From refrigerators to bathroom stalls to computers, nothing is safe from Davis as he
tries to find some reason to miss his wife. While these scenes of deconstruction start off as humorous, they quickly lose their comedic potency. Eventually, Davis starts doing things the audience is meant to find edgy, like stepping on a nail and rejoicing at the pain, putting on a bulletproof vest and asking someone to shoot him or telling a sexually confused high school student to repress his feelings until graduating. But instead of coming across as edgy, they instead feel obnoxious. Many of Demolition’s problems stem from tonal confusion. It attempts to land that balance between studio drama and quirky indie comedy that only David O. Russell has really been able to achieve. This straddling between genres makes the movie feel utterly fake, which is troublesome when making a movie about honesty. What also makes Demolition troublesome is its insistence that Davis, an apathetic, well-to-do investment banker, is the most honest person in his world. This is a shame because Gyllenhaal, one of the best actors right now, gives a fine performance here. It’s clear he saw something in this role beyond a prospective Oscar nod. To find that out might mean to demolish the movie itself, but that would end up being a fruitless endeavor.
Marguerite Film Review Tyler Obropta Staff Writer
Marguerite is the perfect example of a movie that’s 30 minutes too long. The momentum of the story and the grace of the character arcs hold steady at the 90-minute mark, and everything after that goes the way of the Hindenburg, which is to say that it all crashes and burns. Whether it’s too lengthy at the beginning, however, is anyone’s guess — anyone’s but mine, at least, because an older woman in the theater lobby asked me if I’d watch her things while she used the lavatory, resulting in the loss of the first few minutes. Marguerite, from director Xavier Giannoli, is a beautiful, energetic film that’s not quite a comedy yet not quite a drama. Though its story is that of an older, wealthy baroness aspiring to be an opera singer, it’s also not quite a musical. Giannoli’s film is less concerned with classification or tonal consistency, sacrificing both to tell an engaging, lively and ultimately tragic story while honestly representing a fascinating, loveable character. The étourdissant Catherine Frot stars as Marguerite Dumont, a woman in 1920s Paris who is in love with music, especially the opera. She sings at least four hours a day and performs for her friends and the music club she generously donates funds to, all with the ambition that she will one day be able to sing on a stage, in front of an audience who has not yet discovered her talent. The problem lies in that she has no talent, a secret her husband, servants and music club all strive to keep her from learning. They have little trouble with that, of course, as the baroness is incredibly naïve. Frot inhabits Lady Dumont with beautiful sincerity and an uplifting spirit, despite a sad, touching sense of loneliness just under her surface. Lady Dumont’s husband, played by André
Marcon, undoubtedly loves her (though he’s seeing another woman), but he can’t stand to be embarrassed by her. Thus, he fakes car troubles on the way to each one of her performances, always missing them by just a few minutes. Though her husband Georges and her singing instructor Atos Pezzini (Michel Fau) are often tempted to blurt out the truth to her, one look into Lady Dumont’s hopeful eyes stops them. Nobody can stand to tell her the truth. Frot champions the film, lifting our hearts when Marguerite succeeds and breaking them when she fails. The energy is kept up by Giannoli’s energetic, wild music choices (all sung by choirs, of course) and brief, fun sequences in the film, such as a Rocky training montage for Lady Dumont and the suspenseful, emotional opera performance from Marguerite that should have ended the film. It’s a gorgeous character study with some very impressive performances and cinematography and it’s probably for the best if you walk out of the theater after Marguerite’s aforementioned opera performance. Everything after that feels like a car on the turnpike that suddenly decides it might be more fun to drive the same direction on the other side of the road for a half an hour. And for those like me that were disappointed in the ending, there is another film with the same premise — this time based on a true story instead of just inspired by it — in Florence Foster Jenkins, due out in theaters just in time for awards season. This one stars Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant, and hopefully nobody in the lobby will ask me to watch their things before the screening. After all, the first two minutes of Marguerite could have begun with Catherine Frot fighting a velociraptor, and I’d be none the wiser.
Ministry of Cool
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Wii™ Anonymous
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
Back before the days of Fifty Shades of Grey, BDSM culture certainly still existed, even though it was only on the periphery. And while present me does not believe that having to physically or emotionally hurt your partner and then having to trauma bond (or “after care”) afterward is a healthy way to practice sex, past me thought it was just “kinky.” Something that always turned past me on was my boyfriend over me, being the one in control. I loved it when he was on top because, even if he wasn’t really dominating me, I could still fantasize as if he was and get off to it. But I wanted more. One day, after we had finished having sex, I mustered up the courage to tell my boyfriend what had been on my mind. He kind of chuckled when I told him I liked him controlling me, but then I gave him a task: “I want you to tie me up and dominate me the next time we have sex.” He was understandably nervous about it (bless his gentle soul) because he was concerned he would hurt me or that this would create an imbalance in our sexual relationship (may I say again: bless his gentle soul!). But I persisted, saying that I would be (more than) okay during it and that we could have a safeword so he’d know if I wasn’t. As I went to his house the next time, I was playing it cool. I didn’t think he would bring it up unprompted and I didn’t want to seem desperate. But immediately after we were behind the closed door of his room, he started kissing me all over. We started to undress one another and he started walking me, still kissing,
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in the direction of his bed. I wasn’t really sure what was happening so I stopped him and said, “Where are we going?” (Way to ruin the moment, past me). He looked confused for a second, but responded, “I was going to press you up against the wall, but I guess we can just lie down.” I figured, “Less foreplay, more sex!” and got down on his bed. But as I thought he was going to continue our makeout session, he went toward his TV and video game systems. He came back toward me, kneeled above me and started kissing my neck and my collarbones when I realized he was holding something. Before I could ask, he had taken my arms and pinned them above me. Oh man, this thing was really gonna happen. But when I looked up at his face, which I expected to be stoic and sexual, his forehead was wrinkled and he was biting his bottom lip in concentration. Just as I was about to ask if something was wrong, he started to bind my hands together with something cool and smooth. I had envisioned it being rope or string or even a necktie, but none of those had this same texture. Curious, I tilted my head back. When I did, I saw thick, gray wiring that must belong to one of his gaming systems. By the color, I’d guessed it went to his Nintendo Wii. He was having a hell of a time tying me up with it because its shape and texture was specifically made so that the wire wouldn’t tangle when put in storage. I tried not to react, but he must have seen something in the way I was staring at the “bondage” because he
said, “It’s the only thing I could think of!” Although present me would have laughed myself right out of bed and gone upstairs to order Thai food, past me was going to take all she could get. Once he had it tied (or at least made it look like it was tied), he tried to reclaim the mood and snapped into character. He crawled down my body, removing whatever clothes were still on me, and did his best to pleasure me while acting distinctly “bad.” However, less than 10 minutes in, I gave a pretty strong tug on the “bondage” — and had to fake being bound for the rest of it. I tried to look like I was “struggling,” hoping he wouldn’t notice the everslackening game cable around my wrists. I don’t think he noticed, though; he was too busy trying to ask me if “I liked that” — which, to be honest, I did. It wasn’t long before, after having been faced with the reality of this fantasy situation, I found myself growing bored. Sure, he was dominating me and sure, he knew his way around my body by this point in our relationship. But all I could do was just lie there and take it all in — and where’s the fun in that? I eventually asked him if he would untie me (as if I couldn’t just get out of it myself) so that I could give him the same pleasure he was giving me. He happily obliged and even seemed relieved. After that, it was sex as usual — I got him off, he got me off, no bondage needed. Although there were a few times in our future that we still played around with the act of domination, I never asked him to tie me up again — and I don’t think I ever will.
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Prose & Cons
OSE&CONS. PROSE&CONS. PR
Short fiction, personal essay and other assorted lies.
Heart
By Alexa Salvato
“Emma!” Margaret squeals from across the
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issues
7-Eleven parking lot. “Emma! Emma! Oh my god, get the fuck over here! I’ve been waiting forever!” I roll my eyes and smile despite the annoyingness of Margaret’s tinny, familiar voice. “One sec, Margaret. There was no need for you to get here so early. And besides, I have to get Heart’s shit together.” I unbuckle the cage from the back seat and cross the parking lot with it, gingerly looking both ways. When I get to Margaret’s station wagon, I place the cage on the hood. “Margaret, meet Heart.” “Oh. My. Fucking. God!” She looks from me to the bunny to me again. “We have a bunny. We, Emma and Margaret, have a goddamn bunny. It’s ours! She’s our traveling pants! She’s our traveling pants!” She looks Heart straight in the eyes, completely unbothered by the rabbit’s lack of reciprocation. “Emma, can I hug you?” she says quietly. “Of course, Mag.” She grabs me in a rib-crushing embrace. “Do I really get to keep her?” “Till Thanksgiving!” “This is the best idea I’ve — we’ve ever had,” she corrects, carefully, looking at me desperately to
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make sure she didn’t fuck up beyond repair. But we each already have too many times to count. For Mag and I, I don’t even know what that means anymore. Mag and I have been friends since we were sixteen, sophomore year, and we’d thought nothing could break it. We loved each other. We loved each other. But then we, well, thought we loved each other differently. Like, love-loved. That’s the only thing that could have destroyed us forever. I brought it up first, but Margaret let it linger for a whole year, expecting me to wait for an answer. Fuck her. No, fuck that. Not her. I look at her glistening pink lipstick, her clumsilybarretted curly brown hair as she gently extracts Heart from her home, holding her tight to her chest, right between her tiny breasts. Mag and I have always had trouble caring for each of ourselves. When we couldn’t care about each other without it hurting, we had nothing in common. It was my idea to find something we could love together, despite our three-hour driving distance. Not to mention our emotional distance. In came Heart. Mag named her. I let her.
It Was Always Water (It Was Never Wine) By Erika Walsh
I stare at myself in the mirror; press my lips into the heart of some forgotten religion. The bell tolls (and it’s still tolling). The steam curls up under my eyelids, and I’m always waiting, but I forgot what for; it never comes. There is nothing notable about the way the moon curves into your stomach. There is nothing ethereal about it (you step inside of the bell; I can’t see you anymore). I will not recognize God until it hums inside of me. Even then, how could I be sure? My body aches to be remembered, but I cannot love it until it loves me back. Right? (The bell still tolls; I don’t hear it anymore). You kiss me back into my birth. The marrow of my bone is so yellow. Sour against my skin. Sensitive, like some rotting fruit. Seedless. The inside of the bell (still tolling) is a shade of gold my bones will never be. We pray to every cloud, but they don’t look down to find shapes in the curvatures of our guilty spines. You never looked at me the way I wanted you to (Still, we toll), and sometimes, we remember.
Prose & Cons
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Slouching Lion Feed Your Young By Joseph Heiland
Can’t whistle with game in your mouth lips stained, tendons drape from your jowls song of bees like blood
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
and wanting
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Communion
C
andlelight was all we had, but you didn’t seem to mind. My eyes had grown weary from focusing. From trying to witness what lay beyond lilting wax candles, held aloft by symmetrical rows of chandeliers. You always sat on the periphery of their cast, still sitting up straight, despite faith-affirming maple of the pews. Even as a child, you had always sat up straight. While the rest of my parish slouched and snoozed, you listened intently, a pair of glowing eyes and soft breath melting into the darkness. I would raise my voice for you. I would grow from feeble whisper to booming timber. During Mass, I made a habit to commiserate with my flock. Their numbers could have been greater; their faith could have been stronger. When they imbibed the blood of Christ, I could see habit in their movements. Not reverence, not even respect. Routine. A head cocked back, a gesture towards the lips, an open mouth. An expectation. For His body, His blood. Communion was something that you never elected to participate in. A sacrament that — like most other things — you chose to watch. There were times when you professed I had helped you. That my sermons had woven in you a hope for the future. The
pain I felt in those words could not match the pain in my heart as I remembered your childhood. Your innocent smiles, your love for God … expunged in a simple, weak act. Once, in the bitterness of winter, you remained long past the end of evening mass. As I went about the nightly routine, I could feel your eyes following my every move. Yet, when I approached you, a brusque “Thanks” was all I received. And then you left. The echoes of your footsteps resounded amongst years of stone — the same stone that has heard secrets and loves and promises and lies. I cannot reconcile myself with this sin, with this grief. But your last words to me before you no longer inhabited the furthest possible pew … they will forever bolster my faith. You have known me as I have known no other. I envy you. I envy your love, and your starry-eyed visage. How you know — you truly know — what God’s love is. I professed to give it to you, but I was wrong. I am wrong. I am a bastardization of his love, a glitch in the machine that he built those thousands of years ago.
By Gavin DuBois
The sermon ended hours ago. I pressed on. “Why are you still here?” Your stare was a hand I wanted to grasp. A hand I wished would lead me home. “Your eyes,” you finally said. “What about them?” “I used to see a warmth in them,” you stood then, towering over my withered form. You were a man grown. I was silent. Not because I could not understand, but because I agreed. Used to. “I didn’t know at the time,” you said. “I couldn’t understand why,” Your hands were raised, in defense. Or perhaps, I thought within the innermost crevices of my mind, in longing. “Now… I think I can.” With that, you left, and your visage dissolved into the whispering glow of candlelight.
“Why are you here?” I had asked once, finally. Everyone else had left. Prose & Cons
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BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
Home is not where the heart is, but rather home is the place where you carved our initials into a tree as love grew out of my ears and mouth and wrapped itself around my body like ivy leaves and thorny greens. Home is not where the heart is, but rather home is where the waves gave my feet cool and salty kisses as you traced my lips with warm and soft ones. Home is not where the heart is, but rather home is where I broke his heart as you broke mine. Ugly emotions sewed my mouth shut. And the ivy leaves choked my lungs as the thorns pierced my skin burrowing themselves into my inner veins turning love into hate. Home is not where the heart is, but rather home is where my heart broke.
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That Place
By Madison Barlow
Marshmallow ceilings and muscle spasms Standing at this bar, waiting for a glance That lion typing on his screen, taking orders Dancing around ovens, slicing sweet pies Bearded men pouring growlers, savoring Still afternoons lead to slow nights Waiting around in Vermont for lion boy Still he takes orders, marks mine pink Murmurs of effervescence and sauce seep Slowly, tasting this time for some while
By Michael Petit
Lion Boy Prose & Cons
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Y I N / y a n g By Grace Rychwalski
I SEE YOU. SLENDER AND SINEWY AND REMARKABLE. THE KNOTS GNAW THROUGH MY STOMACH. SHOULD I CONCEDE TO THIS INFIDELITY?
i see you. serpentine and sufficient and part of my world. my lack of appetite gets better yet worse.
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
can i continue ignoring this correlation?
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Satire threatening the magazine’s credibility since 1856.
Sawdust
AWDUST. SAWDUST. SAWDUST
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Dunking Against the Odds
Double-dipper declared local hero By Rachel Mucha, Staff Writer
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
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his past Friday night, a college student astounded partygoers when she approached the chips and salsa. After taking a bite out of her chip, and having a significant piece left, Lisa Thomas decided to dive right back into that salsa. Everyone around her was dumbfounded; Peter Donnelly dropped his drink after witnessing this bold move. “I just couldn’t believe it,” he gushed, clearly still exhilarated from the incident. “It’s not very often you meet a girl who just doesn’t give a damn what people think. She could’ve been ripped to shreds by everyone at that party for doubledipping … but she did it anyway.” Donnelly stared off into the distance for a while before adding: “I think I’m in love.” Many of the other attendees had a similar reaction to Donnelly, commending Thomas rather than condemning her. Jackson McCarthy isn’t concerned about germs in general, let alone the few that are the result of double-dipping. “I eat food off the floor all the time — I’m a big believer in the 10 minute rule. So one girl double-dipping won’t give me any germs I haven’t gotten already.” McCarthy also shared he often missed class due to chronic stomach aches, but doesn’t believe these are related to his eating habits. Chad Manning, the host of the party, agreed with McCarthy when it comes to concern about germs. He explained that he always makes out with random girls at these gatherings, which is a much germier activity than eating compromised salsa. “I never know where these girls’ tongues have been, so why should I worry about a double-dipper,” he
said. “Not to mention we make out in the darkest corner we can find. Who knows what’s back there?” Manning paused, looking at his disgusting house in the light of day. “Maybe I should clean up a little,” he added. Thomas herself was shocked to find out all this fuss was from her brief stop at the snack table. “I only ate a few chips,” she said. “I didn’t even realize what I had done, and now everyone is making me out to be a hero or something.” Thomas shared that she always double-dips, though it was never noticed until now. “I hate sharing food, so when I go to people’s houses and there’s chips and dip, I usually take the whole thing and sneak off into a corner,” Thomas said. “But I was trying to stay in sight so my friend could find me.” Though this happened last Friday, everyone who was at the party is still talking about it. A psychology professor, Dr. Annabel Snyder, heard the story around campus and decided to weigh in.
“What makes this so fascinating is that Lisa went against the societal norm and did what all of us have the natural urge to do,” Dr. Snyder said. “Of course everyone wants to double-dip deep down, but we all fight the urge and stuff that disappointingly dry tortilla chip into our mouths because we are scared — too scared of being cast out of society like a leper, all for wanting some more salsa on our remaining chip fragment.” Dr. Snyder added that Thomas truly is an inspiration. “I guess I’ll start double-dipping at every party I go to now!” Thomas said, laughing. “Who knows, maybe next time I’ll take a bite out of a carrot and leave the other half on the tray.” _________________________________ Rachel Mucha is a junior journalism major who would never let anyone stick their chip in her dip. You can email her at rmucha1@ithaca.edu.
Image by Grace Rychwalski
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The Only True Legacy
How straight white men have given us all
By Kelsey Schmidt, Contributing Writer
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create the energy that powers our homes. Franklin discovered lightning one day when his hot chocolate grew cold. Frustrated, Franklin ran outside, and, fueled by the rage inspired by his lukewarm cocoa, climbed an elm tree in his yard that was roughly five miles high. The friction created by Franklin’s hands flying over the scarred trunk of the elm created the very first lightning bolt. Without electricity, we would not be able to see at night, and, perhaps worse, we would not be able to watch sports on the television. Incidentally, the television was created by a straight white man called Philo Farnsworth. There are some millennials who argue that women, people of color, and members of the LGBT community have invented things. While the claims are largely unfounded, there is some evidence that indicates that a woman may have invented the bra. However, straight white men are once again behind this idea. Everyone knows that prior to the invention of the bra, the bikini was invented by a straight white man. The bra is an inferior version of the bikini, because it is hidden beneath clothes, and therefore it cannot possibly accentuate the breasts of a woman. Breasts are items that should be on display for straight white men at all times of day, as was decreed by Columbus, our God. Similarly, the author of this expository piece could mention some of the alleged “accomplishments” of people of color and the LGBT community (e.g. Super Soakers and computer science), but we all know that these endeavors all lead back to straight white men, so there’s really no point in looking into it. In conclusion: All hail Columbus. All hail Columbus. All hail Columbus. ___________________________________ Kelsey Schmidt is a senior speechlanguage and pathology major who knows better than to take credit for this article, as she is neither straight nor a man. You can email her at kschmid2@ithaca.edu.
Sawdust
lbert Einstein. George Washington. Benjamin Franklin. What do these people have in common? They are all straight white men who have irrevocably shaped the history of America — the world’s greatest and most powerful country. Many history books laud the accomplishments of straight white men, and rightly so. In this short expository piece, we will explore the ways in which straight white men have bettered America, and the world. It is impossible to think about America without thinking about straight white men. In fact, our nation was created by the first ever straight white man, Christopher Columbus. Columbus was the first sentient being to walk on this planet we call Earth. We do not know who or what created Columbus, and there are some who speculate that he was a godlike figure, created by the amalgamation of space and time. After creating Earth, Columbus created America. Legend indicates that Columbus possessed a large army of eagles, which gathered hefty boulders at his command and flung them into the sea for six days. On the seventh day, Columbus rested. He dubbed the eagle-built landmass “America,” which means “this thing was built by a lot of eagles.” Despite the presence of his flock of loyal eagles, Columbus felt lonely in America. Therefore, he created five more straight white men so they could play a decent game of pickup basketball. Shortly after Columbus created America, electricity was invented. Electricity, which allows us to live comfortably in our homes, was also created single-handedly by a straight white man. Benjamin Franklin, who was both straight and white, invented what is known in modern times as “lightning.” Lightning falls to the ground when summoned by straight white men, and its power is then harnessed to
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Somewhat Similar to LeBron ‘Like Mike’ sequel hits theaters By Miranda Materazzo, Staff Writer
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
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hortly after it was announced Warner Bros. would finally produce a sequel to the 1998 hit film Space Jam, the project was dropped when Interpol began pursuing the company’s executives. They’d been charged with crimes against humanity in connection with the 2014 film Scooby-Doo! WrestleMania Mystery. Now tasked with filling the seriously profitable niche of family movies about basketball, 20th Century Fox decided to produce a sequel to their 2002 film Like Mike. Upon gaining permission from Rupert Murdoch’s sentient jowls, filming began. And after several on-set fires and months of reshoots, Somewhat Similar to LeBron was released in April 2016. Like the original film, Somewhat Similar to LeBron follows childhood friends on their quest for basketball stardom. College-aged orphans Terry Frangledorf and Griffin Wells win a meet and greet with the Cleveland Cavaliers after the Make-a-Wish foundation hears about Terry’s fatal man-bun disease. Griffin makes two successful half-court shots and gets LeBron’s personal contact information. The film cuts to Terry rummaging through the utility closet of the stadium, where he finds a Cavalier mascot suit. He puts the suit on and discovers that it’s magic, like the shoes in Like Mike. The suit doesn’t increase Terry’s basketball prowess, though; it simply gives him the physical comedy skills of a French circus performer. Overwhelmed by the new powers, Terry stumbles out of the locker room in the Cavalier mascot head and falls on top of point guard Kyrie Irving. Much to Griffin’s dismay, LeBron takes a more vested interest in Terry’s character. Fox producers
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exclusively sought out Will Poulter for the role due to his eyebrows’ performance in The Maze Runner. Their casting call for Griffin’s role was much less stringent, with the ad simply stating, “A young African-American male who can add diversity to this sour-cream colored shitstorm.” Terry wears the mascot head to a game in the hopes of getting LeBron’s contact info as well. While waving like someone trying to flag down a passing cruise ship, Terry hits a rival team member with his foam sword and causes him to miss. Griffin attempts to catch up with LeBron after the game with the hopes of introducing him to his high school coach. LeBron is so amused by Terry’s antics that he offers him a car. Griffin and his coach remain in the arena for a while only to be harassed by Mike Tyson. The film’s executives elaborated that Tyson thought they were filming the sixth season of Game of Thrones and demanded to be included in the production. The actor behind the role of Griffin said of Tyson, “He mentioned he wanted to eat Will [Poulter]. He did bite that guy’s ear off so I should probably tell somebody to take him seriously.”
The final scene of the film features a play-off game between the Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors, with both Terry and Griffin showing up at the match. Terry is once again in his mascot suit and causing chaos, including accidentally dumping Gatorade over reporter Dana Jacobson rather than the Cavaliers’ coach. Rashad Roberts commented on the film’s ending to Buzzsaw. “It’s actually pretty tight, my character finally gets to play ball like a pro. The game is tied with just a few minutes left when I come out and score the winning goal for the Warriors. I have to knock over Will to get to the other end of the court, and he knocks a bunch of cheerleaders down too.” Roberts was unable to comment further, as the stunt-double for Terry had reportedly gotten his head caught in a vent and set off the fire alarm, forcing the evacuation of the studio. __________________________________ Miranda Materazzo is a senior journalism major who once tried on a pair of magic shoes she found in the street — and ended up with magic foot fungus. You can email her at mmatera1@ithaca.edu.
“Their casting call for Griffin’s role was much less stringent, with the ad simply stating, ‘A young African-American male who can add diversity to this sour-cream colored shitstorm.’”
Deconstructing Construction Local man rejects social conventions By Claire McClusky, Staff Writer
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teven Horn was arrested on April 2 for crimes he didn’t realize he committed. He claims that because he never signed a contract, he doesn’t need to follow laws. When I met him, he seemed like a normal guy: someone with morals, someone with class, a real straight arrow. But when I dug a little deeper, his deviant nature was revealed to me. Clam Suckle: So, why are you in prison? Steven Horn: I’m not quite sure. Ever since I took my first sociology class, things stopped making sense to me, you know? Like nothing is real; we made it up. So, if laws are made up and I never agreed to anything why am I in prison for not following them? Suckle: Well, hasn’t the sovereign benefitted you? Is that not reason enough to follow it’s rules? Horn: No, I don’t think that’s reason enough. Laws are made up and I shouldn’t be in prison for disobeying made up stuff. Suckle: Okay well I’m sure our readers are wondering what you did to end up here. Care to share?
Suckle: You didn’t feel bad for store owners that you stole things from? Horn: No, because guess what? Suckle: What? Horn: Money is also construct. It’s not real.
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social
Suckle: But does simply being socially aware really make you free from social constructs of the society you’re in? Horn: It’s not real. Money isn’t what’s giving people their livelihood. It’s the stuff they buy with their money. They can just take it, they should just take it. Nothing real is keeping them from their livelihood. Suckle: And now you’re in prison. Is there anything you haven’t explained that you want the public to understand? Horn: Well, you say “crimes,” but I didn’t commit any crimes because crimes aren’t real. I never agreed not to do the things I did, so why am I being punished? I know what you want to know but I just gotta explain this again because I don’t think you get it. Laws are a social construct, meaning people just made it up. They’re made up. They’re not real. They’re just ideas. Alright?
thought, “Hey, I should drive really fast because that would feel good.” And it did. I saw the speed limit signs and I thought about all the sheep who just follow those signs without realizing how meaningless they are. And then I decided that those sheep are just reinforcing the lies so I decided to murder some of them. You know, kill them, put them out of their misery. Suckle: Don’t you see killing as immoral, though? Even without laws we still have morals. Horn: No, why would I? Just because someone told me it was wrong? Someone having an idea about it being wrong isn’t a reason for me to feel bad. Morals are also a social construct. So if I desire to hurt someone, it’s in my nature. And, therefore, I see no reason not to. Suckle: Hmm, I’m not sure I agree with that, but I’m digging your philosophy. And I really did dig his philosophy. Since this initial meeting, I have visited Horn time and time again. We have become quite close friends. There is definitely something we can all learn from Horn’s ideas. And maybe Horn had fascinating ideas and beliefs, but were his conclusions and actions reasonable and acceptable? I think not, but again, it’s up to you. Or is it? These are just words someone made up. _____________________________________ Claire McClusky is a sophomore film, photography and visual art major who has a twelve inch vertical — or so she says. You can email her at cmcclusky@ithaca.edu.
Suckle: Alright.
Sawdust
Horn: Well, a few weeks ago I started testing some stuff out. I started jaywalking regularly. Just in alleys at first to get comfortable with it, but then I started jaywalking in large intersections. People honked. They were annoyed, but I didn’t get in any trouble. Then I started to steal things. Again, that was fine. It was just gum and stuff so it was harmless. Yeah, so I just kept stepping it up — started to rip up parking tickets. Then eventually I stopped driving on the right side of the road when it was safe. Next thing
I know, I’m buying a gun in the back of a bowling alley. You know, just to buy it. Just to prove that I could do whatever I wanted. It was all just little stuff. I really felt free. It felt like I was waking up. Not that there is a law against it, but I grew out my hair. I figure social constructs other than laws might feel good to leave behind.
Horn: Okay, so I took my car and I
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Snapping at the Issues
HONY’s founder takes strong stand By Grace Rychwalski, Sawdust Editor
BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue
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ew York, New York — Humans of New York Photographer and token “good guy,” Brandon Stanton has come out with an unprecedented and truly fearless open letter to Donald Trump. “I try not to be political,” he began on the heroic March 14 Facebook post. “Because along with millions of Americans, I’ve come to realize that opposing you is no longer a political decision. It is a moral one,” he continued, clearly demonstrating this unique viewpoint which has not at all been universally shared with anyone and everyone who isn’t racist, sexist and classist for about a year already. Stanton went on to say that Donald Trump’s views against Muslims and those of Middle Eastern descent are “racist” — which, clearly, this brilliant man knows firsthand because he has spent time taking pictures of those people. Without his groundbreaking trip across nations such as Iran, Iraq and Pakistan, which has rightfully made him thousands of dollars and gotten him even more well-deserved social media fame, Stanton clearly would not have known that those living in the Middle East are also human beings who have rights. The revolutionary statement was deservedly well-received by many. These individuals are right to believe that whenever a celebrity, especially one as glorious as Stanton, makes a statement, no matter how noncommittal or watered-down, it is a triumph for humanity. “Wow!! so brave!!” Facebook commenter Angela Truscani, whose profile picture is a low quality JPEG of Miss Piggy, said. “u r inspiration to youth of 2day!!!” Truscani’s statement shows how Stanton blessing us with his opinion is possibly the best thing to happen
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to America since the invention of the Snuggie. “It’s so important for you to say these things,” Mariam Abbadi agreed. “Although making this statement in no way endangers or inconveniences you — in fact, it benefits more than anything, given your audience — it’s still so hard for you, who makes a career out of other people’s misfortunes, to take a definite political stance.” Abbadi followed her statement with many stickers, most of which were the same heart-eyes emoji. However, some commenters were unable to see the blessing that is Stanton’s open letter. “i never got to see part 3 of the one about the woman who lost her husband,” Patricia Inez wrote, clearly attempting to challenge the patriarchal notion that whenever a man says anything, no matter how baseline or average, he is heralded as profound and daring. Another commenter, Ellie Turot, was clearly outraged at Stanton making a political stance on a Facebook page which is markedly non-political. She stated, “My granddaughter has your picture book.” Neither Stanton nor Trump could be reached for comment. ____________________________________ Grace Rychwalski is a junior writing major who spends most of her time co-opting other people’s struggles for her own gain. You can email her at grychwa1@ithaca.edu.
BUZZSAW ASKS WHY…
Relationships have to have a power structure. “So who wears the pants in the relationship?” Bi, gay and straight alike, we’ve all heard this question. But why does everyone assume that relationships, romantic or not, have to have power structures? Sure, if you’re thinking of relationships in a patriarchal, heteronormative way, in which a man is controlling a woman and stripping her of any and all tangible autonomy, there are clear power structures that occur. But why is it assumed that, first, imbalance must occur in non-straight relationships and, second, it’s the only way for relationships to work? Saying that there’s always a “man” and a “woman” in a relationship, no matter the sexes of the partners, is insulting and antiquated. If two lesbians are together, the whole point of that relationship — other than the mutual affection — is that there are no men involved. In the same way, it’s utterly misogynistic to proport that the person who you deem to be “weaker” is always who you assign to be the “woman” — or the opposite of the person who “wears the pants.” Because women always have to be on the bottom, right? Going further than that, though, why must relationships work off of power structures? Two people who love one another, whether it’s platonic or romantic, should only seek to see one another thrive and self-actualize. While there are many compromises in relationships of all kinds, believing that there is an inherent, constant imbalance of power is toxic. Your dunkin’ Sawdust Editor, Grace Rychwalski
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