ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF EDITORIAL FREEDOM Wednesday, February 10, 2016
Ann Arbor, Michigan
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GOVERNMENT
Michigan bill seeks to remove book taxes SAM MOUSIGIAN/Daily
Protestors demonstrate their frustrations with Gov. Rick Snyder (R) and their demands for his recall in a march from Hutchins Hall to the Diag on Tuesday.
Crowd fills Diag in protest to recall Governor Snyder Demonstrators connect Flint water crisis to Black Lives Matter movement By RIYAH BASHA and CAITLIN REEDY Daily Staff Reporters
Nearly 100 protesters gathered outside Hutchins Hall and marched to the Diag on Tuesday
afternoon, pushing for a recall of Gov. Rick Snyder (R) in light of the Flint water crisis. The protesters marched across campus shouting multiple chants including “Flint Lives Matter” and “Black Lives Matter.” A coalition of organizations including the Ann Arbor-Flint Solidarity Network and the Ann Arbor Alliance For Black Lives initially organized the protest in response to a panel on Detroit’s bankruptcy hosted by the Uni-
versity’s Law School that was set to feature Snyder, however, The Law School indefinitely postponed the event last week, but protestors still decided to have the protest. LSA senior Cassandra Van Dam, an Ann Arbor-Flint Solidarity Network organizer, said she believes pressure from protesters motivated the Law School’s decision. “Snyder is humiliated,” she said. “It is clear that, had the
event gone on, it would have been disrupted and he would have had to answer to the human rights violations that he and his administration have committed against the people of Michigan.” “The Detroit bankruptcy event was postponed because its organizers don’t wish to distract from efforts devoted to higher priorities in the state,” the Law School’s communcaSee SNYDER, Page 3A
State representaive aims to reduce expenses for college students By CALEB CHADWELL Daily Staff Reporter
In an effort reduce the cost of college, state Rep. Robert Kosowski (D–Westland) introduced a bill to the Michigan legislature that would exempt college textbooks from the 6-percent state sales tax. The proposed legislation, House Bill 5309, would eliminate the tax from textbooks for college students who purchase them with a valid student identification card. In an interview with the Michigan Daily, Kosowski said his primary motivation for introducing this bill was to help students save money while going through school. According to estimates from
ADMINISTRATION
SUSTAINABILITY
‘U’ stops recycling glasswear in 2016
Schlissel talks mental health improvements In fireside chat, University President also discusses Greek life culture By JEN CALFAS Daily Staff Reporter
Greek life and mental health dominated the conversation at University President Mark Schlissel’s monthly fireside chat Tuesday. Held in the Michigan Union’s Willis Ward Lounge, students asked Schlissel and E. Royster Harper, vice president of student life, about specific initiatives to improve the mental health services the University offers, and the aftermath of a controversial all-chapter meeting of Greek life members in September. “I don’t think it was appropriately structured,” Schlissel said of the September meeting. “You can’t very often force people to show up and listen. I was disappointed in the fact that people didn’t listen and showed disrespect.”
In September, Schlissel required all chapters of the University’s Greek community to send at least 70 percent of their members to a meeting in Hill Auditorium, where Schlissel said Greek life culture “devalues” a University degree and voiced his disappointment in the party culture and sexual misconduct that occurs within the Greek community. LSA sophomore Clare Nienstedt, a member of the University’s Phi Beta Pi chapter, asked Schlissel if anything has improved since the meeting. She also agreed with Schlissel that the meeting wasn’t structured appropriately. Schlissel said he has since learned more about the positive attributes of Greek life, including the philanthropic work done in the community and the fact that members of the Greek community have higher GPAs then the overall average at the University. However, he said the University is still working to improve the party culture he voiced dissatisfaction with in September. “My worry is toxic behavior — See PRESIDENT, Page 3A
the College Board, students at public four-year institutions spend an average of $1,298 on textbooks and school supplies each year. The University’s Office of Financial Aid recommends University students allocate $1,048 per year for books and supplies. Kosowski said his office’s research found that the average cost of textbooks to a student is $1,300, Kosowski said. “1,300 dollars is a lot of money for a college student, if we can save them even $78 of that, it’s a positive thing,” Kosowski said. Kosowski said his office did a study in Maryland, a state that also has a 6-percent sales tax and numerous colleges, which determined the state collects about $7 million each year in textbook sales tax revenue. Kosowski said this number would be relatively similar to what could be expected in Michigan with a textbook sales tax exemption. The small decrease in tax revenue would be negligible, and See TAX, Page 3A
GREG GOSS/Daily
Change caused by decline in market, University Plant operations says
Dr. Lee Gill, associate vice president for inclusion and equity at the University of Akron, speaks about his undergraduate experience at the University at the Rackham Amphitheater on Tuesday.
Lecture highlights history of student activism on campus University of Akron diversity adminstrator delivers Black Heritage Month address By ADAM HIYAMA For the Daily
University of Michigan alum Lee A. Gill, vice president for inclusion and equity at the University of Akron, addressed a group of more than 40 students at Rackham Amphitheatre Tuesday to outline connections
between the Black Action Movement at the University during the 1970s and the #BBUM campaign launched in 2014. The hashtag and social movement surrounding its use garnered national attentionwhen thousands of people took to social media to describe their experiences being Black at the University of Michigan. Hosted by the Office of MultiEthnic Student Affairs, the event was the inaugural lecture for a slate of University Black Heritage Month events. In the lecture, Gill highlighted connections between
missions of activism during his time as a student and now. “If we had social media then, we would be saying the same things you’re saying,” Gill said, referencing the #BBUM movement. Discussing the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Bollinger v. Grutter to uphold affirmative action at the University’s Law School, Gill referenced Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion for the case in which she wrote she hoped diversity would not be an issue in 25 years. See LECTURE, Page 2A
By KEVIN LINDER For the Daily
Effective Jan. 1, the University of Michigan Plant Building and Grounds Services has suspended the collection of glass for recycling. This change comes in response to a decline of local glass recycling markets. The University’s current system is single-stream recycling, where recyclable materials such as paper and recyclable plastics are all collected in the same bin and sorted at a recycling facility. Western Washtenaw Recycling Authority has been the organization providing recycling services to the University, but due to the decline in the glass market, it has ceased its acceptance of glass materials. In an e-mail interview, Andrew Berki, who is the See GLASS, Page 3A
the statement Navigating homelessness in the Ann Arbor winter
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2A — Wednesday, February 10, 2016
MONDAY: This Week in History
WEDNESDAY: On The Daily
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ON THE DAILY
ing the water crisis in Flint, Michigan,” the statement says. The announcement comes a day after Beyonce debuted her new single Formation during the halftime show of Super Bowl 50. After Flint switched its water supply to the Flint River in April 2014, the water was contaminated with lead for multiple months due to leakages from corroded water pipes. Flint officials, Gov. Rick Snyder (R ) and President Barack Obama have since declared a state of emergency in the city. The crisis has spurred health concerns and has garnered national outrage,
with protests calling for Snyder’s resignation for allegedly mishandling the situation. According to the statement, Beyoncé will partner with United Way and the Community Foundation of Greater Flint to raise funds aimed at addressing long term impacts of the water crisis such as education, nutrition and health. The artist has joined the ranks of other celebrities that have pledged to aid residents impacted by the water crisis including P. Diddy, Mark Wahlberg and Cher. -ALYSSA BRANDON
WHAT: UHS will host a sexual health conference titled “Sexpertise” to educate students of all sexual orientations on sexual health. Today is the second day of the ongoing series WHO: University Health Service WHEN: 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. WHERE: The League, Hussey Room
Maize and Blue Cupboard WHAT: The Maize and Blue Cupboard will hold their monthly food distribution for students. WHO: Maize & Blue Cupboard WHEN: 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. WHERE: The Union, room 2105A
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SAM MOUSIGIAN/Daily LSA junior Toni Wang marches with protestors as they demonstrate their frustrations with Gov. Rick Snyder (R) and demand his resignation in a march from Hutchins Hall to the Diag on Tuesday.
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Beyoncé announces fundraiser for Flint water crisis as part of tour Amid a Super Bowl performance and the announcement of her world tour, Beyoncé has found time for the children of Flint. The singer announced today she will hold a benefit to raise funds for children in Flint as part of her Formation World Tour, according to a statement on Live Nation Entertainment’s website. “True to her life’s work of always giving back, fans will be given the opportunity to participate in Beyoncé’s #BeyGOOD initiative supporting local United Way programs and the continued work surround-
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Brown Bag recital
Philosophy lecture
Political news lecture
WHAT: The School of Music Theatre & Dance will host a recital featuring an organist and a flutist. WHO: School of Music, Theatre & Dance WHEN: 12:15 p.m. WHERE: School of Public Health Building, Comunity Room
WHAT: The Philosphy department will host guest lecturer Hilary Greaves, who will speak about “comparing existence to non-existence.” WHO: Department of Philosophy WHEN: 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. WHERE: Angell Hall, room 3222
WHAT: University professors Michael Traugott and Stuart Soroka will give a lecture titled “Bad News, Good Democracy.” WHO: LSA WHEN: 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. WHERE: Rackham Amphitheatre
Nam Center series
CREES lecture
Student roundtable
WHAT: Guest lecturer Kyung Deok Roh will speak about the Yalta Conference and the division of the Korean Peninsula. WHO: Asian Languages and Cultures WHEN: 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. WHERE: School of Social Work Building, room 1636
WHAT: Guest lecturer Neringa Klumbyte will give a lecture titled “Of Secrecy and Laughter: Aesthetics, Governance, and the Covert Sphere in Soviet Lithuania.” WHO: Center for European Studies WHEN: 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. WHERE: School of Social Work Building, room 1636
WHAT: ArtsX UMMA will host a student roundtable to discuss leadership, diversity and the arts. WHO: University oof Michigan Museum of Art WHEN: 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. WHERE: UMMA • Please report any error in the Daily to corrections@ michigandaily.com
THREE THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW TODAY
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On Tuesday, Red Lobster sales spiked 33 percent. CNN Money reported. According to CNN, the spike could stem from Beyonce’s endorsement of the restuarant in the lyrics of her new single “Formation.”
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The Statement’s lead this week examines the state of homelessness in Ann Arbor during the winter, particularly the resources and infrastructure in place. >> SEE STATEMENT on 1B
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The White House released its $4.1 trillion budget on Tuesday, Politico reported. President Barack Obama is aiming to launch a series of domestic initiatives. The plan also aims to reduce the deficit by 2.9 trillion.
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Schlissel visits CSG to discuss need for campus-wide dialogue ‘U’ president encourages difficult conversations for diversity reforms By BRIAN KUANG Daily Staff Reporter
At Tuesday’s Central Student Government meeting, University President Mark Schlissel spoke about several ways he hoped to open an inclusive campus dialogue on topics such as race and diversity at the University during his tenure. During his remarks to the assembly, Schlissel stressed the importance of not only diversity of students on campus, but also diversity of student opinions, saying students should be exposed to opinions they don’t Sudoku Syndication necessarily agree with. “A significant fraction of students make it through their
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four or five years of undergrad without really taking advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn from each other,” Schlissel said. “I’m going to make an effort in the coming years to very purposefully provoke difficult discussions and invite speakers that you’ll protest.” During a hearing later in the meeting confirming his appointment as chair of the Campus Inclusion Commission, LSA junior Kendall Poindexter drew on Schlissel’s statements in his support for differing perspectives and backgrounds on campus. “While nobody likes conflict, by hearing different viewpoints everybody is able to learn from one another, especially if they’re willing to hear it,” Poindexter said. In December, the Campus Inclusion Commission was disbanded following the sudden resignation of all 11 commission
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members after the previous chair was terminated. The current membership status of the commission is not known. Resolutions At Tuesday’s meeting, the body brought four resolutions to the floor discussing the creation of a centralized web resource for undocumented students, refurbishment of the mental health services department as part of the upcoming Union renovations and a resolution to rename the Biomedical Science Research Building after ANDREW COHEN/Daily University President Emerita University President Mark Schlissel discusses his role within the university and responds to questions from student repreMary Sue Coleman. A resolution authored by sentatives at the Central Student Government meeting at the Michigan Union on Tuesday. LSA juniors David Schafer and calling for their endorsement of have a building named after them. heard by CSG about using the Anushka Sarkar noted that the renaming of the biological The resolution further says no body’s resources to send aid though the University financial sciences building after former buildings on campus are named to the city of Flint, though it aid website has resources for University President Mary Sue after women, and that women was found unfeasible due to a undocumented students, there Coleman. are greatly underrepresented University policy policing the is no centralized online page for The resolution — authored in scientific fields. Coleman is a use of funds generated by student all other available resources for by LSA sophomore Nicholas biochemist. organizations. http://sudokusyndication.com/sudoku/generator/print/ undocumented students, and that Fadanelli, LSA senior Michael Though CSG lacks the authority “University guidelines other universities — including the Chrzan, LSA junior Stephen to actually rename the building, if prohibit University money to go University of Southern California Halperin, CSG vice president, the resolution is passed, the body into charity use,” Public Policy — have similar webpages. LSA junior Yong-Joon Kim and will officially endorse doing so sophomore Jacob Pearlman, CSG If enacted, this resolution LSA senior Reid Klootwyk, and will actively lobby members legal counsel, said. would create an “Undocumented LSA Student Government vice of the University administration In the bylines stipulating Student Resource Guide” tab president — notes Coleman’s and the University’s Board of money management by student on the CSG website with links significant contributions as an Regents on the issue. organizations through the Office to relevant legal services and academic and administrator, LSA-SG passed a similar of Campus Involvement, the student support networks. and that there is a precedent for resolution on Jan. 28. assembly is unable to donate CSG also heard a resolution former University presidents to An additional resolution was funds for resources for Flint.
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Thirteen years after O’Connor delivered her landmark opinion, Gill said issues of diversity and inclusion are still impacting students. He urged audience members to take initiative in addressing these issues. “It’s still an issue,” he said. “Guess who’s taking the battle now? It’s your battle.” When asked by an audience member about reconciling social justice efforts with academics and other educational or personal activities, Gill said he didn’t balance the two very well, noting
that he had to put his activism on hold once he went to law school. He also shared his experience as an undergraduate student at the University, describing his time on campus as one of the best decisions he has ever made, as well as several stories of individuals who have inspired him to succeed in life. Gill was appointed the University of Akron’s first associate vice president for inclusion and equity and the chief diversity officer in 2008 after its creation to facilitate diversity initiatives with recruitment on their campus. He cited former Jon Onye Lockard in particular as being influential in his life, saying he
was inspired by how Lockard got involved in initiatives of social activism. Lockard was a muralist who drew on African influences in his paintings and a faculty member at the University and Washtenaw Community College from 1970 until his death in 2015. While at the University, Lockard co-founded the Society for the Study of African Culture and Aesthetics. “He was the reason I was successful here,” Gill said, noting that Lockard was the senior art advisor for the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial. Gill said his inspiration for the title of Tuesday night’s lecture, “If We Don’t Tell Them, They Won’t
Know,” was derived from a song Lockard would play at the beginning of every lecture, the Three Mo’ Tenors’ “Let Them Hear You.” Discussing his own involvement at the University, Gill highlighted his appointment as resident director of his floor in South Quad. According to Gill, a panel of housing employees initially denied him the job because he was Black. Gill successfully sued the University and after a more selective committee was appointed to review his candidacy, he received the job. He said being a resident director at South Quad Residence HallSee LECTURE, Page 3A
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NEWS BRIEFS
Snyder addresses Flint water crisis in budget Gov. Rick Synder plans to include $195 million in the 2017 budget to address the Flint water crisis, according to the Detroit Free Press. The budget will be proposed on Wednesday. The request for Flint is broken down to support several efforts, including safe drinking, nutrition and education. The majority of the budget serves to improve the physical and social wellbeing of residents. An estimated $15 million from the budget was allocated to fund food and nutrition, such as school meal programs, food banks and restaurant inspections. Snyder also plans to test and replace deficient water fixtures in educational settings. Officials claim that the contamination began when the administration decided to switch from Detroit’s water supply to Flint River water. In October, Flint switched back to Detroit’s water supply; however, lead continues to contaminate pipes and water fixtures. The state previously provided vulnerable areas with $28 million to purchase bottled water and filters as well as to support other measures to address the water crisis.
Detroit teachers plan walk-ins Detroit Public Schools teachers planned walk-ins on Tuesday, deviating from their series of sick-outs over the past few weeks, according to the Detroit Free Press. The goal was to keep classes going while participants gathered before the school day to see the schools and engage in honest dialogue about the conditions. Cass Technical High School’s walk-in began at 7:40 a.m., and afternoon walk-ins were scheduled in a series of other schools, such as Greenfield Union Elementary-Middle School, and Cooke Elementary. The previous sick-outs served to demand attention to the devastated conditions of DPS schools. Teachers called in sick to protest the poor infrastructure and building conditions. On Jan. 15, approximately 64 Detroit schools were shut down and over 31,000 students were affected. The Free Press reported that $300,000 from the DPS budget has recently been reallocated from other departments to fund building projects. Forty-six of 97 DPS schools have been expected since the sick-outs, and Tuesday’s walk-ins were an example of the continued pressure the community is putting on local and state government officials. The district’s emergency manager, Darnell Earley, announced his decision to step down at the end of February following a lawsuit filed on Jan. 29 calling for his dismissal, according to the Detroit Free Press. -CAMY METWALLY
PRESIDENT From Page 1A
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the things that put your health at risk and make it difficult for you to make good decisions in a situation,” Schlissel said. He also pointed to a newly formed 30-member task force charged with suggesting policy reforms for the Greek community. The task force includes former Panhellenic Association President Maddy Walsh and Alex Krupiak, former Interfraternity Council president. Another area for improvement Schlissel addressed Tuesday was the staffing and organization of the University’s Counseling and Psychological Services. Both LSA sophomore Kelly Crosson and Business sophomore Sam Orley expressed concern with the stigmatization of mental health on campus and how CAPS can improve as a whole. Crosson said she had to wait seven weeks for a preliminary appointment at CAPS. “Your story is really disappointing,” Schlissel said in response. “I’m a little concerned that there are areas that there is so much need that it’s going to be hard to keep up,” Schlissel added. “There are a lot of mental health challenges that come with being a student here.” He said the University is currently expanding the CAPS staff not only to have more professionals available to help students, but also to diversify their staff to ensure more identities and backgrounds are represented to help students feel at ease. Orley, who is a member of Wolverine Wellness, a student group created to promote mental heath resources and destigmatization, said the group hopes more professors will include CAPS information on their syllabi. A discussion also took place about the inclusion of CAPS information on the back of Mcards. “I believe this can only not happen if someone comes up with a compelling reason for it not to be done,” Schlissel said in support of the Mcard proposition. Students also asked questions that are often posed at the monthly fireside chat concerning the improvement of the experience of students on North Campus, the ongoing increase of tuition and how to make the campus more diverse. Throughout the hour-long discussion, Schlissel continued to express his gratitude for the questions posed by students, and urged each student in the room to ask one — causing the event to go over its marketed timeframe. “I’ve only been here for a year and a half, and I’ve never taught my own class or had advisees, so my own learning about the student community and seeing the campus through your eyes helps me understand the job I have and make this place as good as it needs to be for you, and, more importantly, for those people who come after you,” he said.
was what ultimately allowed him, along with the newly formed Minority Council on campus, to create multicultural lounges in residence halls. “From the Minority Council, we began to push for what we called Black Housing Units,” he said. “But what the concept was, was that we were going to take a whole half side of South Quad, and we were going to have it mixed between white and Black and other ethnic groups. But the idea was to have a predominant number to be African American, so for the first time African Americans could be in the majority as opposed to being in the minority.” Originally, the idea was approved by the Housing Policy Committee, Gill said, but the Board of Regents rejected it on the grounds that the policy was akin to segregation. The alternative that they offered was the creation of the multicultural lounges. LSA junior Adelia Davis, a diversity peer education, said she
GLASS From Page 1A manager of the Office of Campus Sustainability, stressed that the decision to suspend recycling was directly caused by the change at the Western Washtenaw Recycling Authority. “The decision to suspend glass recycling is due to our recycling facility’s decision to discontinue collecting the material because the local glass recycling market has ceased,” Berki said. Berki added that glass constitutes 1 percent of the 2,400 tons of material collected annually for recycling at the University. “In terms of Sustainability, the decision has a very low impact because glass comprises such a small percentage of U-M’s overall waste stream,” he wrote. LSA junior Louisa Kane, a CSG University Sustainability Commission member, said the University is taking steps to adjust to this change. “The University is already trying to adjust accordingly by finding new replacement products in recyclable materials, as well as developing a separate glass collection system for the glass products that are still floating around campus,” she said. John Lawter, associate director of University Plant Operations, said the suspension of glass collection is not a significant blow to the recycling operations of the University. He added the change does serve as an indication of reliance of the University’s recycling operations on external factors. “The impact to our recycling rate will be minimal, however it does illustrate our need to have a flexible program that can respond to market fluctuations,” he said. The change is one of the larger adjustments to recycling policy that the University has made in recent years, according to Lawter. “This is probably the first time we have had to backtrack on a program change of this magnitude, though it is still only 1 percent, and
was intrigued by the fact that the Black Action Movement of Gill’s time was responsible for the creation of the multicultural lounges in the University’s residence halls that she and other DPEs oversee. “I found it very inspiring,” she said. “His story, the work he’s doing, and just his point of that the battle for freedom has to be won every generation. I get frustrated, because it’s a lot of the same issues that are recurring, but it totally makes sense: Each generation has to struggle for this freedom. It’s disappointing, but at the same time it just empowers us to always be aware and active in our community,” Davis said. Public Policy senior Eric Riley said he was also surprised by the extent to which BAM was responsible for the multicultural lounges. “We really are the fruits of his labor,” Riley said. Leon Howard III, a program manager in the Office of MultiEthnic Student Affairs, said while students today are fighting the same fight as those in Gill’s time, he thought progress was being made.
is somewhat of a warning on the volatility of the markets and their affects on our program,” he said. Kane said since the suspension was forced by the decline of glass recycling markets, and wasn’t by University design, students and faculty involved in sustainability and environmental advocacy on campus did not have any say in the matter. “I personally have heard buzz circulating around it in the sustainability community, but not with much urgency or backlash,” Kane said. “It’s more of a worry of a messy transition into a new system within a such a large institution rather than an outcry of sustainability injustice.” Berki wrote that Plant Operations has been listening to feedback from the University community regarding the suspension, but cannot fully address concerns since the change was ultimately out of the University’s control. “Plant Operations has fielded many inquiries from students, faculty and staff regarding this recent change however has not received any specific opposition from environmental advocacy groups or organizations,” Berki said. Lawter said he thought that the lack of opposition from the University community was due to the fact that the University had no choice in the decision. “The campus community has been very understanding and cooperative which is good given this is something that is beyond our control,” Lawter said. “We are also getting a lot of good feedback on ideas to minimize the effects of market changes to our program in the future.” Lawter said one of the biggest concerns that University Plant Operations currently holds is the worry that glass on campus will contaminate the single-stream recycling program. If too much glass is found in a given collection, he said the entire collection must be sent off to a landfill as waste. “We need to broadly educate the campus community on this
Wednesday, February 10, 2016 — 3A
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SNYDER From Page 1A
would be outweighed by the larger benefits to students, Kosowski said. “This seems like a no-brainer,” LSA sophomore Cochise Jackson said about the bill. “When I was trying to buy my chem book for like $250, it would’ve been great if that was reduced even a little bit.” LSA sophomore Jose Guzman echoed Jackson’s sentiment, saying he could definitely use extra funds and allocate them to other schoolrelated costs such as supplies. LSA freshman Bryan Pollard said when he came to the University he was nervous about the high prices of textbooks, but they actually ended up being less than what he was expecting. However, he said he still believes that having textbooks be sales tax exempt would be beneficial. “I think this legislation would be great for a lot of
tion director Shelley Rodgers wrote in an e-mail to The Michigan Daily. The Flint water crisis began in April 2014 when the city, under state emergency management, switched its water supply from Detroit city water to water treatment centers connected to the Flint River, which resulted in contamination after the more corrosive river water caused lead from the pipes to leak into the water. The water supply was not switched back until October 2015. Though Snyder issued a formal apology last month, and has declared a national state of emergency in the city, protesters have alleged that the governor knew about the issues earlier than October, and should have taken action sooner. The governor’s office has maintained he learned about the issue in October. Ann Arbor Alliance For Black Lives representative Rebecca Ahmad-Robinson, a Public Health graduate student, said Snyder should be held accountable not just for Flint, but also for deplorable conditions in the Detroit Public Schools and mass incarceration in state prisons. At multiple points during the event, attendees linked #BlackLivesMatter to Flint. “We can’t breathe under Snyder, but we also can’t drink water,” Ahmad-Robinson yelled during the march. Besides students and other citizens upset with the current state in Flint and state politics, the National Lawyers Guild from the University’s Law School sent some of its members. NLG is a national organization that aims to unite various people from the law force that seek to change the ill-structured components of the political and economic systems in the country. Law School student Reid Murdock, a member of the University’s chapter of NLG, said they attended the protest to raise awareness about human rights. “We are here to ensure that people’s civil rights are protected. Everyone here is using their freedom of speech and freedom of assembly,” Murdock said. “We are here to make sure things go smoothly and to be a resource and possibly a liaison with the police should they come.” Other groups present included the Socialist Equality Party. Lawrence Porter, assistant national secretary of the SEP, said he believes the water crisis is not only a crisis but also an attack on the working class people of Flint. “It’s a crime, without question. It is a monumental crime that is being carried out,” Porter said. “We believe that it’s not just by Snyder; it’s been carried out by both issues. It is a bipartisan attack.”
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change to minimize contamination of our single-stream program with glass,” Lawter said. “We are working with University Communications and the Office of Campus Sustainability on getting the word out in as many forms as possible.” In regard to the University of Michigan’s image as an environmentally friendly institution and campus, Kaine said he didn’t think things would change. “As long as the University holds to its statements on accommodating for this change, then hopefully we will rise to the standards we’ve set for ourselves as a University,” he said. With other campus sustainability initiatives and goals still on track, Berki wrote that he feels that the glass suspension will not hinder the University’s improvement as an environmentally friendly and sustainability conscious institution. “Despite this setback with glass recycling, we feel the overall outlook for waste reduction on campus is very positive,” Berki wrote. “The campus community is working hard to achieve our campus-wide sustainability goal of reducing waste sent to landfills by 40%”. When asked about whether or not glass would be re-listed as a collectable material, Lawter said he believes glass will “probably never” be re-added to the single stream. “Glass has been problematic at all the Material Recovery Facilities who have converted to single stream, which is most everyone in our neighborhood,” he said. Berki echoed Lawter’s sentiments, writing that he believed glass would likely not be re-added to the list of acceptable materials. “As always, we will continue to face these challenges head-on and hopefully find solutions to them.”
Opinion
4A — Wednesday, February 10, 2016
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
MADELINE NOWICKI | OP-ED Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890. 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com SHOHAM GEVA EDITOR IN CHIEF
CLAIRE BRYAN AND REGAN DETWILER EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS
LAURA SCHINAGLE MANAGING EDITOR
Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s editorial board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.
D
The Trump effect
onald Trump’s campaign for president still strikes me as some sort of cruel performance piece or, at the very least, a brilliantly orchestrated satire of the American political process — but that’s precisely the point. Trump is an entertainer, and every aspect of this quality is reflected in his path to the presidency: from his obscene remarks to his pervasive presence in the media. However, the LAUREN obvious issue with treating SCHANDEVEL a presidential election like a reality TV show is that it is decidedly not. There are real-world consequences to plucking at your audience like radicalized guitar strings. Although Trump may be portraying an exaggerated character for the sake of garnering attention, the voters he attracts are completely and terrifyingly genuine, and represent something far more sinister than political theater. From the beginning, Trump has functioned as a compelling figure in the context of the political sphere. Upon announcing his bid in June 2015, the real estate tycoon became an eccentric asterisk in a race that was initially Jeb Bush’s to win. Since then, his numbers have skyrocketed to unforeseeable heights. This influx of support is evidently not due to his policies (which are vague at their best and borderline fascist at their worst) or his political experience (which is virtually nonexistent, unless you count that time he almost ran for president in 2000), but because of the way he strategically markets himself to his target demographic. There are two noticeable personas that Trump embodies, both of which seem to work inexorably in his favor: the mogul and the populist. The former rears its head whenever the topic of debate shifts to more “establishment” issues — he can be a smoothtalking, well-connected entrepreneur with decades of experience under his belt if it suits the context. The latter persona, however, is more present at his chaotic political rallies, during which he hits the pressure points of the average blue-collar American with impressive precision — the personification of everything you have ever heard your grandfather complain about after a few beers, except completely sober, embraced by millions, and dangerously close to filling one of the most influential positions on the planet.
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Trump’s ability to alternate seamlessly between his two political personalities has proven to be his most effective campaign strategy. The media tycoon fares just fine with voters earning less than $50,000 per year, despite lacking the classic “humble beginnings” narrative that politicians commonly craft to score points with the working class. For a man worth $4 billion, Trump’s trick to wooing Middle America has been to take on the role of a brutally honest, anti-establishment mouthpiece for the economically downtrodden while effectively sweeping his empire of greed, fraud and opulence under the rug. Nevertheless, despite his surge in popularity, Donald Trump is only one (albeit unorthodox) politician, and realistically, his odds of actually becoming our 45th president are slim — but the impact he’s had on voters will linger long after his poll numbers dwindle, and that is precisely the issue. The hoards of supporters with whom his rhetoric resonated will remain frustrated and militant until some other politician comes along, using vague phrases like “take our jobs back” and “make America great again” to rouse them into action. Trump is playing a game with Americans that not even he can win in the end, because what he doesn’t realize is just how volatile his voter base really is. His carefully crafted stances on immigration, Islam and other hot-button topics may be mere talking points with which he can capture the extremely conservative vote, but they are also real opinions that his supporters hold, and pandering to them only further radicalizes this prejudiced ideology. The Trump campaign has shaken the political culture of this country to its core, drawing out all of its most abhorrent qualities in the process. Through loudness, hyperbole and spectacle, he has managed to claw his way to the top of the polls, leaving a trail of misguided anger and xenophobia in his wake. Of course, he didn’t plant these ideas in people’s heads; they were there long before he stepped onto the scene. He simply did what he does best: interpret what his market wants and cater to those desires (even the more disturbing implicit ones). At the end of the day, Trump is still an entertainer, but there is nothing entertaining about what he has created.
I’m not sure who I will cast my ballot for in November, let alone in the Michigan primary. I have a Bernie sticker on my laptop and a Hillary magnet on my fridge. I am constantly learning more about each candidate, while also balancing my pragmatic feelings from a tactical strategic perspective. This article is not about endorsing a candidate. Sanders and Clinton will both need to produce more convincing evidence to inspire my allegiance. Last week, when the results were rolling in and the caucus-goers of Iowa felt a similar split, resulting in only a 0.2 percent win for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, I felt my tentativeness was justified. Eagerly, I turned to social media to hear how everyone else had reacted to the news. What I stumbled upon was not a united liberal front excited that two candidates had proven viability, furthering the discourse of economic inequalities and women’s rights and looking to expand protections for minority groups. Instead, I found rhetoric barely deserving of that term. It was acrid and not politically engaging or smart. It was a verbal assault on the supporters of Clinton by the supporters of Sanders. “Bernie Bros,” as certain media outlets have deemed them, are the passionate, often young and often (but not always) male supporters of Sanders. These people are very active on social media, and while many supporters of Sanders have followed his lead in a mostly positive campaign focused on issues of substance, this subset digresses. There are varying degrees of comments sponsored by “Bernie Bros,” from portrayal of all Clinton supporters as robotic, to insisting that Ms. Clinton was vehemently arrogant in her claim of victory at the caucus. The Sanders campaign, which employs many people of politically underrepresented backgrounds, has asked its supporters several times to “#FeelTheBern respectfully,” but the damage has already been done. Clinton has been the brunt of overwhelming amounts of hate in her time as a public official. She has been called every name and criminalized with every action —
NOTABLE QUOTABLE
— Sen. Bernie Sanders after winning the New Hampshire Democratic primary
E-mail Michelle at shengmi@umich.edu
and some of these characterizations were valid, policy-based criticisms. But why is it that her appearance is constantly policed, while Mr. Sanders is able to show up with his unkempt white hair? Why is it that “likability” is such a huge part of journalism surrounding Ms. Clinton, but people rarely wonder if Bernie is charming enough to be electable? Then there is the gross meme that implores people to compare Sanders and Clinton on the real issues, which sounds innocuous enough. The format of the meme is such: a text box at the top populated with the issue du jour, photos of the two Democrats side by side, and text boxes below each of their photos stating their respective opinions. Some of them are passively funny, the kind of joke you smirk at out of recognition, not real humor. The thing is, we’re not voting for a president based on their comedic chops. If we were, I think Trump would’ve been ironically instituted as supreme leader already. Sadly, this meme becomes discomforting extremely quickly. Sanders is depicted as a wild, crazy, cool dude’s dude who is vaguely high at all times. He’s shown as the kind of guy you’d find on Reddit getting way too excited about Radiohead. He’s the bro who’s blowing your mind with Marxist theory freshman year, because of course you’ve never heard of it before, while you’re sitting by him on the stained, dusty carpet of the staircase at a house party. Clinton is depicted as a 67-year-old woman who has worked in government for decades and not done much other than deal with testifying before Congress and work on her campaign before watching The Good Wife at night. These portrayals aren’t equal. Sanders has been involved in government for 34 years, beginning with an eight-year mayoral term in Burlington, followed by 16 years in the House, and nearly 10 years in the Senate. He’s been in government for a long time, dealing with issues, not with Pokémon. Let’s recognize that. Let’s acknowledge that all things equal, Sanders and Clinton are both veterans in American politics. Why is she depicted as a boring old woman and he gets to be a carefree hip guy? It’s not only unfair
— it’s stupid. Clinton, and women online everywhere, have tried to portray themselves in certain ways — only to face criticisms at every turn. Sanders is better than that. I implore his supporters to be better than that, too. Sanders has tried to frame this campaign as a positive one, and has stated his interest in discussing the real problems faced by real Americans. This meme from his supporters does neither. It, along with the derogatory online interactions, drags the goals set by the Sanders campaign to a despicably low standard. I think it says something real about the power of the “Bernie Bro” culture that I am hesitant and even a little scared to write this piece. And I agree with Sanders on many issues! Publicly granting Clinton a right to dignity and equal treatment online should be a given. My ability to have enthusiasm about more than one candidate should be a great victory for the Democratic Party’s strong contenders. Instead, these social media norms make my stomach sink. I feel like if I say these things, I will be chalked up as “just another feminist” who is influenced by “big money.” That is a serious problem. Despite my amazement with Sanders’ ability to raise his campaign funds from individual contributors, his long history of supporting gay rights and the phenomenon of his jump from a 62-point trail to a dead heat with Clinton, I have a really hard time identifying with his movement. When a vocal portion of his supporters is so clearly committed to firing antagonisms into the Internet, I am being burned by “the Bern.” I cannot consciously align myself with a movement that sours my conscience, no matter how I feel about it intellectually. That may be a fault of my political identity and, as some could perceive it, sensitivity. But I’m not alone in these reservations, and the Sanders campaign will need to surmount this in order to secure my (currently wavering) vote for the primary. Madeline Nowicki can be reached at nowickim@umich.edu.
EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Caitlin Heenan, Ben Keller, Minsoo Kim, Payton Luokkala, Aarica Marsh, Anna Polumbo-Levy, Jason Rowland, Lauren Schandevel, Melissa Scholke, Rebecca Tarnopol, Ashley Tjhung, Stephanie Trierweiler, Mary Kate Winn, Derek Wolfe
Lauren Schandevel can be reached at schandla@umich.edu.
People should not be financially distressed for decades for the crime, the crime of trying to get a higher education. That’s absurd.
MICHELLE SHENG
Social media’s double standard
W
The political marathon
e’re 10 months away from electing a new president. Ten whole months with 10 candidates remaining in the race among both parties, seven more televised debates for the primaries alone, and we’re only two states into voting. I want to DAVID get off and exit HARRIS this wild ride of an election already. Yet here we are, almost a full year after Ted Cruz became the first major candidate to announce his candidacy as we embarked on this ride that has yet to even make its stop in Michigan. Canadians completed their recent election process in less then three months, and the British take a mere three and a half weeks to elect an entire government, but that’s simply not the American way, where we supersize everything, including the election process. Media stories about election primaries and Donald Trump quotes, all leading up to an event nearly a year away, take news precedence over the current refugee crisis overseas, the Zika virus, the Flint water crisis, whatever the heck our government is doing while all this politicking is going on, and even given higher front-page placement than the most American of all events: the Super Bowl. It’s a fatiguing process, in which it takes five months of voting in primaries and caucuses just to figure out who will get the final nomination at the party conventions in July. Our society has advanced to a stage where information can be retrieved and transmitted quickly and easily accessed via the Internet. Which, in theory, should allow the
process to move quicker and allow voters to make more intelligent choices without relying on months of debates and campaigning; instead, election season has become a slogging marathon race through a soaking trail of mud. It’s nothing more than an exercise in angering me, the American voter. Nobody likes the marathon, and it’s long past due to at least cut it to a mid-distance race. The process began to lengthen in the 1960s, and the trend moved away from internally nominated candidates to placing emphasis on the primaries with John F. Kennedy’s candidacy. Along with the fallout of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the shift to focusing on the results of state primaries allowed for a larger field of potential candidates to enter the fray, which certainly makes the process more democratic by invoking the opinions of the citizens. The process also gives more time for candidates to be exposed to the public, and given the changes in polls over time, it does have an effect as the citizens begin to settle on preferred candidates due to the publicity. However, along with the reasonably positive explanation for early primaries, the early start to the cycle highlights a darker side of politics: money. Campaign finance chiefs have floated out that at least $50 million to $100 million is necessary to financially compete in the primaries, a figure that holds consistent as five of the six leading candidates across both parties (excluding Donald Trump who does not comparatively fundraise) have raised more than $75 million to date. Months before official announcements, many candidates gauge donor and vote interest to test the viability of their campaign, lengthening the whole process even more. If enough money isn’t raised
early enough in the cycle, candidates will find themselves massively underprepared for the marathon of campaigning. Whatever combination of causes has led to this, the result is months of campaigning that goes on despite the majority of Americans agreeing that the season is too long, significantly over-covered by the media compared to actual news interest, and having mixed opinions on whether the campaigns are even informative. More simply put: It’s a massive waste of time and resources for something that should be carried out more efficiently. Elections take time, but the expansion of the process has only brought increasing political noise and tabloid-like coverage to the process for up to half of a presidential cycle. Far more important than any benefits of the primary process is the impedance of the discussion of important issues covered up by the never-ending election and the lost productivity that it entails. And when voter turnout is often low in these elections, such reasons are contributing factors. Solutions for the problem of the ever-expanding election calendar including eliminating donation limits and thus lightening the need to court high amounts of unique donors, reducing the influence of primaries by scheduling less, increasing the number of unpledged convention delegates, to changing the primary scheduling as the parties have already done for 2016. It’ll take a combination of many reforms to curb the advantage of early entry and require the support of the politicians themselves, always a difficult task but for a worthy cause of moving toward an efficient model that better serves the citizens whom our elections impact. David Harris can be reached at dharr@umich.edu.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, February 10, 2016 — 5A
TV REVIEW
FILM COLUMN
A beard made for Westerns
A
ABC
You know they’re on their way to Red Lobster.
‘Galavant’ wraps up with homages Amid cancellation rumors, Season 2 finale a success. By MEGAN MITCHELL For the Daily
Through all of its madness and cringe-worthy scenes, ABC’s “Galavant” might just be the only show on television that’s not Abending over backwards for Galavant the audience’s Season 2 approval. It’s Finale the “friends with benefits” ABC show that has absolutely zero strings attached because they might not make it another season. And trust me when I say that they’re well aware of this — it’s basically a “do whatever the hell you want” card, and they definitely swipe it in the season two finale. After all, this might be the end. Capital T-E “The End;” And if this is really it for the musical, then they certainly went out with one hell of a show. The first part of the finale “Battle of the Three Armies” plays off of the “Hobbit” franchise’s “Battle of the Five Armies” in both name and style. If J.R.R. Tolkien had somehow written “The Hobbit” as a Broadway musical directed by Mel Gibson, then this 20-minute episode would hit the target dead-center. First, in arguably the catchiest episode recap in history and surprising throwback to “A Knight’s Tale”, the Jester (Ben Presley, “What We Did on Our Holiday”) gives us the lowdown on what’s been going on this season, which earns
him a round of applause from the armies about to face each other to the death. Meanwhile, Princess Isabella Maria Lucia Elizabetta of Valencia (Karen David, “Castle”) faces her own challenges when the Valencian army suggests suicide as an alternative to battle, which leads to a “Braveheart”-style speech and a song. “It’s a Good Day to Die” is frustratingly catchy. It exposes the Hortensia confidence and the ultimate fear of the Valencians when the battle begins; it even reprises a duet between a young couple whose house is unfortunately located right in the center of the battlefield. But despite these humorous inserts, emotions really rule most of this episode. Especially the hesitation shown by Queen Madalena (Mallory Jansen, “Young & Hungry”) when the magician Wormwood (Robert Lindsay, “Atlantis”) requests her use of dark magic to win the battle. “Actually, I’ve been having second thoughts about the dark evil way,” she spills. Even though it’s whiny and grabs a quick laugh, it’s totally believable — I mean, it took a while for even Anakin Skywalker to turn into Darth Vader. It takes a lot of thought, and apparently a Disney-esque musical number and synchronized choreography for the Queen to give in. The first part of the season finale ends with a reunion of friends and the reprise of “It’s a Good Day to Die” that gives way to the clever “Oh please, this isn’t ‘Game of Thrones!’ ” line that will most definitely be recycled by fans. Just as the Jester ponders leaving the audience on another huge cliffhanger similar to that of season one, the screen promptly switches to black. The final part of the season finale begins with duet with
Richard (Timothy Omundson, “Supernatural”) and his younger character’s counterpart (Alfie Simmons, “The Woman in Black 2”) that’s cringeworthy, but stylistically pleasing. It highlights an important question we all might be pondering. What would our younger selves think about who we are today? So even though it’s incredibly cheesy and offkey, there’s a deeper, emotional meaning much like that we’ve seen in the more recent episodes of “Galavant”. The writers are taking all the right stylistic chances with this episode. We’re thrown back into battle and as Richard fights Wormwood, we finally see the true power that’s been previously dormant in Richard after the supposed death of the lizard/dragon Tad Cooper. The change between fighting freestyle and with a vengeance that Omundson shows is striking and quite terrifying, so I almost wish we could have witnessed it sooner. Now completely worthy of the “One True King” title that we’ve all been waiting for, Richard pursues lost love Roberta (Clare Foster, “Ripper Street”) in an attempt to save her from a life of becoming an old cat lady, earning him a ticket from the police on the way that hits us all in that secret “oh, c’mon!” spot, I’m sure. Overall, the (possibly final) season finale of “Galavant” took chances that paid off in the long run, while still playing off the “cheese” factor it’s well known for. One last joke pokes fun at the unlikeliness of a renewal for the show and the possibility of the cast being sent to “crappy cable TV” before it finally all comes to an end. Almost. Because Tad Cooper finally turns into a big fucking dragon at the end, and I’m personally proud of that.
STYLE NOTEBOOK
A case against the Canada Goose coat By HANNAH SPARKS For the Daily
It’s that time again, the time when all of the Canadian Geese start to migrate to Ann Arbor, Mich. When the temperatures drop, we see an influx of these geese by the hundreds. If you haven’t caught onto my attempt at sarcasm yet, I’m talking about Canada Goose jackets. Having just transferred to this fine University, seeing every other person wear a Canada Goose is the very first thing I noticed. For the record, I do own a Canada Goose, but in my defense it’s just a vest. How did Canada Goose manage to become so popular in these past five years? Apart from them being everywhere, some of the jackets are quite unique and come in fabulous colors: greens, blues, greys and red. Having said that, the majority of what I see is the same long, black fur hooded Canada Goose parka. Prices for these beloved jackets start at $495 and can get as high as $1,275. Can we just stop and put that into perspective for a second? That money could go toward so
many other things — paying rent, paying for insurance, a million Starbucks coffees and not to mention you get even get a plane ticket to Europe for those high prices. Also let’s not forget the last option — we could always just choose to put our money in the bank and save it, but that’s, like, a crazy concept. Canada Goose jackets are quite literally made for and worn by people who are out in the Arctic. I know Michigan can feel like living in an icebox at times, but there are other jackets out there that can make you feel just as warm as that Canada Goose. Admittedly, when I first got my hands on my Canada Goose vest I was very eager to “show it off.” Being someone who values material things (sorry not sorry), I felt very proud to finally have my very own Canada Goose product. Yet, having owned it for two years now, I realize it’s nothing more than a warm vest with a cool patch on the front. There’s really nothing else to it. If anything, I should be feeling bad for all the geese that had to die for this product. The “Kensington” parka,
priced at $775, is definitely what more than half of the girls at the University are wearing. For the guys, the “Carson” parka seems to be the popular choice. These jackets are so expensive that they’re what I would call an investment piece. I struggle to believe that this many people like the same exact style, in the same exact color (black). Let’s be real. The jackets aren’t actually flattering, they’re just formless parkas. The jacket is hot right now. For a lot of people it’s just a fashion statement that will grow old in the next couple of years. I applaud everyone who has ventured outside of these two types and has decided to go with something different. People tend to spend money on things they don’t necessarily care for, with money they don’t necessarily have, just so they can conform to the majority. To me, this is sad. Please only buy a Canada Goose if you truly want one. Although I do like my Canada Goose vest, and have to admit the jackets are good quality, I cannot deny the fact that they’re incredibly overrated.
bout four weeks ago, I decided to grow a beard. I made my decision out of necessity: I was skiing out West where, on the first day of a six day excursion, the wind and cold ripped apart JAMIE the skin BIRCOLL on my face into peeling, inflamed flakes of shedding epidermis. With my face burning red, tender to the touch, I needed some extra protection if I was to return to Ann Arbor without looking like Captain America’s nemesis, the Red Skull. After those six days, I decided to challenge myself and see how well (or poorly) I could get my barely visible bleach blonde scruff to grow. After a month, the results are satisfactory, better than I had predicted. During that month, I also watched 10 Western films, old and new. Almost every single male character in these films, with the exception of Gary Cooper in “High Noon,” sports some mighty form of bristly, manly facial hair. Kurt Russell’s potent mustache in “Tombstone,” which grew even more formidable in “The Hateful Eight,” the rugged stubble of Clint Eastwood and Franco Nero in the “Dollars” trilogy and “Django,” respectively, Jeff Bridges’s scruffy, one-eyed sheriff in “True Grit” and even Leo’s dirty, disheveled, somewhat patchy mountain man look in “The Revenant” (which, I would argue, is most certainly a Western), all of these protagonists don better facial hair than I ever could. I find my own mildly bristled visage inadequate by comparison. But of course, they’re actors; they have makeup departments to fix what they can’t grow, to make their beards and mustaches perfect. They are, in fact, perfect specimens of facial hair. And given their perfection and their pervasiveness and visibility, one realizes that facial hair has become integral to the Western hero. Because when I think about Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp without a mustache, he looks less grizzled, less haunted by his past as a soldiering peacekeeper (and it wouldn’t be historically accurate, but that’s beside the point). A clean-shaven John Wayne in “The Searchers” seems less desperate, less martial. And I have a hard enough time believing Leo
could ever survive in the wilderness like Hugh Glass — the absence of his beard would make “The Revenant” beyond incredulous. I ask myself why this is. Naturally, we can reason a couple explanations as to the characters’ beards: It’s the Wild West, so of course many men will be unkempt, since they have larger concerns at hand. And the costume and makeup departments likely want to remain historically accurate in the case of biopics, and many classic lawmen and outlaws grew some sort of facial hair. But it’s very easy to write off these decisions to historical accuracy. I imagine most people don’t know what Hugh Glass and Wyatt Earp actually looked like, and no one would complain if they lacked facial hair. After all, film has influenced much of how we think about and perceive the West, for better or worse, as much as if not more than history itself. We have mythologized the West into, well, a Hollywood version of itself through years of mythic constructions in the 1930s and ’40s, some deconstructions in the ’50s and some hyperviolent hyperboles in the ’60s and ’70s (and most recently with “Django Unchained”). All of these films attack or build or borrow from the myth of the American West in a myriad of ways, but they are all tied to their bearded heroes and villains.
My barely visible bleach blonde scruff. Most recently, I watched the 2007 remake of “3:10 to Yuma,” and the situation is no different. Christian Bale’s Dan Evans is an ex-Union soldier, who lost his leg during the war and a struggling farmer. He is tasked with escorting renowned outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to the town of Contention to catch the train to Yuma prison. Both Bale and Crowe don the same shortboxed, low-trimmed beard — these men are two sides of the same coin, a complicated mix of good and evil, success and failure, muddied by differing perceptions of justice. For Wade, justice is monetary, a give and take depending on actions dealt and received. Evans is more concrete: justice is honor and code, a duty to uphold “though the heavens fall,” as the saying goes. Over the course of the film, the two
ideologies mesh and mingle, and morality and justice shift depending on the perspective. That’s not to say that the facial hair itself dictates this idea, but that it links these two forceful characters and contrasts them with the others: the snooty, rich railroad man’s slicked moustache, the seasoned officer’s thicker mane, the out-of-his-element doctor’s modest moustache and the beardless, angry stowaway son of Evans. All of these other characters are wildly different from each other and serve mainly to highlight this central conflict between Evans and Wade, two titans of morality. It is here we find the heart of the Western. Every tale set in the American West is tragic, because, in every case, no matter what happens, the story, the characters, the laws and the values will inevitably be left behind. But even in the nameless, endless stretches of sand and mountain ranges that time and progress will soon forget, the stakes are never higher. In the myth of the American West, a fight in the small town of Contention between two men with nothing in common but their beards can create an atmosphere rich with tension, so dangerous and fateful it might as well be a fight between God and the Devil. It’s an atmosphere that only the Western has been able to achieve so perfectly and consistently. That’s why the Western will never disappear; our perceptions, historical and current, of good, evil, morality and justice, though they change and though we revise them through the years, are engrained in our consciousness, and engrained in the American Western. Even in films like “Unforgiven” (where the heroes are bearded and the villain is clean shaven) that completely reject and deconstruct the West for all of its ugliness. Though it’s a genre fixed in time, it is, in the end, timeless. And if the Western is timeless, then so too are the beards that contribute to its ethos. I like to believe that the emphasis placed on a strong beard in these films is not due to the lack of cheap Gillette razors but to the evocation of the battle for justice and a bygone way of life that the beard symbolizes. I can only hope to one day honor that ethos, and grow something that might make Kurt Russell proud. This is a story of a boy and his beard. If you’d swipe right, email jbircoll@umich.edu.
Arts
6A — Wednesday, February 10, 2016
ALBUM REVIEW
Emotive ‘EVOL’ a win for Future Artist serves another success with latest By MATT GALLATIN Daily Arts Writer
With an onslaught of Future music comes an onslaught of cheesy emojis. There was the diamond for What a Time B+ to Be Alive, the purple EVOL umbrella for Purple Reign, Future and now the rose and A1 fire emojis for EVOL (pronounced “evil”), Future’s newest album. After premiering on DJ Khaled’s new Beats 1 radio show, fans were quick to dutifully litter ex-girlfriend Ciara’s Instagram with the emoticons and shout “Fire!” throughout the Twitter-sphere. But the pettiness of these social media gimmicks does injustice to the Atlanta rapper’s rapidly expanding discography. His relentless pace of releases over the last year and a half has been nearly unparalleled, and is a refreshing contrast for fans given the recent trend of major artists holding back and cutting down on their production. EVOL, coming just three weeks after Purple Reign, is his latest solid release of smoky-room trap. “Low Life,” the first taste of the album, was released on Christmas and features a characteristically dark and murky collaboration with The Weeknd, an artist who talks about drugs almost as much as Future does. It’s predictable, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. “I just took some molly, what else?” Future states, acknowledging that we should be fully aware of the life he lives at this point. He doesn’t need to advertise — this is common
knowledge. This complete selfawareness is obvious through the track. That release set the tone for EVOL. There’s nothing here that we haven’t heard before. As expected, the album is filled with prescription drug references (“Promethazine/ codeine this shit champagne for us”) and subliminal Ciara disses (“I know you ain’t saving that pussy / You know somebody play in that pussy”). Still, EVOL manages to keep its head above the sea of strong Future releases and stake its own claim. “Xanny Family” captures the aesthetic of the album particularly well. Melodic rapping, hallucinogenic production and constant tempo push this track forward. It’s a hedonistic night of debauchery during which Future takes just enough time to look around, comment on his surroundings, and move on. The entire album is the same, hardly ever slowing. Where his last release Purple Reign put on the brakes with “Perkys Calling,” a ballad of sorts, EVOL powers through for 40 minutes without sign of letting up.
Future’s latest album is above all a victory lap. With this relentless pace, Future leaves behind the syrupy dissatisfaction that consumed DS2, his critically acclaimed album from last year. On “Kno the Meaning” from DS2, he stops rapping and simply talks over a quiet piano note, explaining the context of his mixtape 56 Nights. He follows this with the croon “there’s so much more I gotta endure.” Drug addiction and meaningless sex weighed heavily
on Future on that album, and it was a cry for help masked with trap production. EVOL removes the lament and sees Future fullheartedly embracing that foggy world. Future comes to own his rapping style here as well. His skill has always been in delivery and memorable one-liners, and EVOL doesn’t disappoint on this end. “You n****s don’t exist, we eat filet mignon” is a clear example from “Photo Copied.” What does that even mean? Regardless, it’ll stick with you afterward. Stylistically, EVOL has close ties to “March Madness,” the single from 56 Nights. “Fly Shit Only” recalls it especially, angry and pummeling headfirst, but with an added cinematic feel. Future is looking down on the world from above (“JET DOUGH”), listing off the reasons why he’s the “only one that’s ballin.” That kind of outer-worldly quality is honed throughout this album. Take the track “Photo Copied,” an ex-girlfriend diss. While lyrically it’s relatively petty, it manages to transcend with production that punctures the air like some kind of alien-space ship. Apparently no longer bridled with the intense emotional pain of DS2, Future’s latest album is above all a victory lap. “Seven Rings” establishes this album as the latest trophy in the line of his six previous. On track “Lie to Me” Future yells “I’m a motherfucking boss,” and while it’s only track eight, it feels like the final statement that this album leaves off with. There’s no “I think I went over my limit” here — Future has no limit. Adding yet another ring to his hand, Future gives his fans everything they could ask for. And while the formula will inevitably become tired, EVOL is fresh enough to keep us interested.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
TV REVIEW
VICE
Is this Sean Penn?
VICE takes on ISIS By SOPHIA KAUFMAN Daily Arts Writer
The Islamic State dominates our headlines. It’s impossible to ignore the stories that circulate every week, on the front pages B of our newspapers and pop- Vice ping up on our timelines and Special newsfeeds. Report: Despite the seemingly end- Fighting less wealth of ISIS information and current events, Sunday at it can be dif- 10 p.m. ficult to find a HBO comprehensive version of the “truth,” or a place to begin learning about the complicated subject matter. “Vice Special Report: Fighting ISIS” which aired on HBO on Jan. 31 offers a balanced, well-formulated introduction to what ISIS is, how it formed, how it’s operating today and how other groups are fighting against it. The report begins with old footage of American politicians — including an extra-long shot of former president George W. Bush — and then an interview with a captured ISIS jihadist (name withheld). VICE correspondent Ben Anderson explores the buildup and subsequent execution of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and talks to members of rebel groups in Iraq, captured ISIS
jihadists in Kurdistan and even military forces in Syria. The oneon-one interviews are intriguing but too short; there’s not enough time given after the build-up to let us fully establish a read on any single figure, including a captured Sunni Jihadist (name withheld) and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq. The balance between the emotional pull of the subject matter and the focus on mapping out an informational and accurate portrayal of the history of ISIS and its current conflicts is aided by Anderson’s journalistic style in interviewing his subjects. He is calm and professional, and presses for answers that are more complex than the ones he is initially given. Anderson pushes his interviewees on what the future looks like, looking at it especially through a global lens as the Western world doubles down on fighting terrorism transnationally. One of the tensest moments of the special is when the journalist asks, “Is the U.S. more likely to face an attack from Iraqi soil today than it was under Saddam (Hussein)?” The short answer, according to multiple sources, is yes. Though the percussive soundtrack throughout the report is usually unnecessary, as the narration is fascinating enough, it’s only mildly distracting. The audio of the interviews is clear and clean, and the voiceover is sharp, flowing smoothly over the busier
MUSIC NOTEBOOK
Preferring Panama By CATHERINE BAKER
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background noise. The emphasis isn’t on Anderson’s travels into a dangerous area — though there are a few times in which he has to move due to circumstances involving sniper gunfire — but rather on the different groups of people he interviews. “Fighting ISIS” has a rating of TV-MA, and for good reason. There’s footage of people being forced down on their faces with bags over the heads, people falling from gunshots, beheadings and children putting guns against the heads of prisoners. There are also a few minutes of interviews with women who have been victims of ISIS, giving space to show how families are torn apart by the conflicts. Luckily, these shots and interviews don’t read as manipulative — though they easily could. They’re difficult to watch because of the fact that there is often nothing between the camera and the horrific events taking place; because they’re not overdramatic or exploitative, there’s nothing to point to to release the tension of those shots. Though the report as a whole is fairly comprehensive, the end feels gimmicky. It returns to familiar rhetoric about terrorism and 9/11, news clips about the Nov. 2015 Paris attacks and an ominous warning about the future looking grim. Though “Fighting ISIS” isn’t a superbly fleshed out representation of the battle against ISIS and those who are on the front lines, it’s a fair introduction.
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I’ve been tracking Panama Wedding’s progress for about a year now. For those of you who don’t know, Panama Wedding is an electronic/alternative/ pop band based in Manhattan. Initially comprised of nowlead singer Peter Kirk and his computer, Panama Wedding has since expanded into a full ensemble with a rhythm section. Kirk began his musical career as a classically trained pianist before turning to synthbased music in his later years. After releasing their debut EP, Parallel Play, in 2014, Panama Wedding amassed nationwide attention. Now, its second and most recent EP released in November 2015, Into Focus, has launched the band into a broader public sphere. Into Focus starts off with “Halfway to Heaven,” an artificially produced track that emphasizes complicated beats and a strong vocal presence. The swelling chorus uses a heavy electric guitar and strong drumbeat to convey the storyline while the verses are faded and focused around Kirk’s voice. Kirk explains his own fears in the lyrics, “Wide awake in the middle of the desert heat / 100 miles to New Mexico / With the devil in my limousine.” “Infinite High” has a softer, quieter electronic feel and sounds evoking summer sunsets and warm night drives. Its driving force is a steady beat with organic hand claps, while the chorus creates layers of multiple vocals to produce a larger band feel without losing intimacy with the listener. “Infinite High” speaks to being unsure of your place in life when Kirk sings, “And its getting all too much / Your life is getting hard / Living month to month on a credit card.” Kirk’s most personal song on the EP, “Into Focus,” addresses
his struggles of balancing work and music and how he overcame those difficulties. Starting slow with echoing beats and a repetitive guitar riff, Kirk sings, “I’m amazed why you would believe in me,” speaking to all of those without faith in themselves. He continues, “I’ve been working all day long / I’ve been working out of my mind / Waiting for my thoughts to shape into focus.” It has a dance sound without feeling too electronic and lends a reassuring message to all those doubting their own focus. My personal favorite track, “A Brand New Life,” has an upbeat underlying force pushing the song forward. It considers leaving everything behind and setting off for a fresh start. (Does that not sound great right now?) Kirk deals with being cheated by life plans when he sings, “I didn’t know / This was the ending I was sold.” With a sound extremely similar to The 1975, “A Brand New Life” lays out dreams and hopes for the audience to share like, “I wanna live on the north shore / I wanna cut my hair.” The bridge is comprised of simple claps and a piano before the chorus returns one final time, driving home the point of leaving behind a life you’re unhappy with. The closing song, “Younger Love,” is constituted of simple electric guitar and synth. It uses fewer instruments to demonstrate stripping yourself of all worldly stereotypes and understanding that we are all the same. Kirk concludes his EP by singing, “Isn’t it a small world? / Isn’t it a strange time? / How we’re all forced to smile to each other.” With just under 7,000 Twitter followers, Panama Wedding is by no means a household name, but by steadily expanding its fan base and consistently churning out quality music, Panama Wedding can expect continued and widespread success.
Sports
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Wednesday, February 10, 2016 — 7A
Michigan healthy, stronger after productive offseason By COLE ZINGAS Daily Sports Writer
The Michigan baseball team was certainly disappointed to end last season with a loss to Louisville at the 2015 Super Regionals. But with that defeat, coming against a perennial contender and the preseason No. 2 team in the country this year, Michigan had caught the nation’s eye and was catapulted into an offseason in which it has earned more recognition than any Big Ten team is accustomed to seeing. The Wolverines, ranked 15th according to Baseball America’s preseason rankings, have taken the offseason as an opportunity to get healthy and stronger in an attempt to build on last year’s impressive ending. Senior left-hander Evan Hill was forced to miss a large chunk of last season with an anterior cruciate ligament injury, appearing in just 11 games. Hill says the offseason has helped him tremendously, and that his knee is 100 percent heading into the team’s season opener Feb. 19. Playing on a weakened ACL in 2015, Hill still managed to fan 37 batters in 38 innings of work. Junior left-handed pitcher/ first baseman Carmen Benedetti, who was named to the preseason All-American third team, has also been trying to improve himself physically in recent months. “His growth is impressive,” said Michigan coach Erik Bakich. “(Benedetti) was a slow runner his first year, kind of an average runner last year, now he’s like a speedster on the bases.” Benedetti and Hill, as well as junior pitcher Brett Adcock, were able to work on their game
while playing in the competitive Cape Cod Baseball League over the summer. All three put up impressive numbers. Hill posted a 1.80 ERA and a 5-0 record for Wareham, and Adcock helped YarmouthDennis to a league title, going 3-1 with 26 strikeouts in 37.1 innings. Benedetti was able to work on his pitching as well. He went to Cape Cod with two pitches and came back with three, adding a breaking ball to go with his changeup and mid-90s fastball. When Michigan’s players returned to campus at the end
of summer, normally the team would have a couple of months of fall ball before bringing everything indoors. But this winter has not been typical. Mild weather has allowed the Wolverines to practice outdoors at Ray Fisher Stadium about 10 to 15 times since their winter training started. That’s compared to last winter, in which they managed to scrimmage on a snowy, halffrozen field for two days in January. “We’ve been outside more in the last three weeks than maybe the last three years combined,” Bakich said. Bakich and his team are excited
“Everyone wants to get out of the cold a little.”
to have had a prolonged fall season and extra reps outside this winter, saying it has been a great benefit for the team. Still, despite some milder weather, the team is more than ready to fly down to Florida and kick off its season next weekend in the warmth. “Everyone wants to get out of the cold a little,” Hill said. “I think I can speak for all the returning guys and say that we’re pretty anxious to get out there.” There’s been a lot of talk surrounding the Wolverines so far this year. And after an already experienced lineup has taken big strides this offseason, the publicity is well deserved. Michigan has been dead set on working hard and improving, all through the summer, the fall and even into the winter. But now, nine days from the season opener, Michigan baseball is ready for spring.
Veteran outfield to lead Michigan Lawrence, Susalla, Christner all return to pack Wolverines’ prolific lineup By AVI SHOLKOFF Daily Sports Writer
SAM MOUSIGIAN/Daily
Junior Carmen Benedetti returns as one of Michigan’s top talents on the mound and at the plate.
Artz shines in Michigan’s tri-meet By LANEY BYLER Daily Sports Writer
Known for her bubbly personality and energetic floor routines, junior team captain Nicole Artz was expected to make a splash at the Michigan women’s gymnastics tri-meet. She didn’t fail to deliver. With Michigan facing Eastern Michigan and Maryland, Artz’s biggest competition came from fellow Wolverines — junior Talia Chiarelli, freshman Olivia Karas and sophomore Brianna Brown. Despite the strong competition from her teammates, Artz maintained her position as a constant threat. On the floor exercise, she took first place with a 9.925. Artz has a reputation for the consistency in her dismounts, and she reinforced this reputation in almost every event. She stuck landings throughout her entire floor routine, as well as on the bars and beam. She took a minor step back when
DELANEY RYAN/Daily
Senior outfielder Kelsey Susalla hit .380 with 14 home runs last season.
landing her vault, which put her at a tie for eighth place with Eastern Michigan’s Kimberly Ebeyer with a score of 9.800. “I just like to take it one thing at a time. You can’t get ahead of yourself,” Artz said. “If something does mess up, you can’t dwell on it, you just have to move on. So it’s just staying in the moment and focusing on what you did in practice.” Despite the lower ranking in vault, which was the first event of the day, Artz was able to make a comeback and outscore her opponents with her 9.925 on floor and a 9.900 on the uneven bars, where she tied for third. She also snagged second on the beam with a score of 9.925, a season high. These high scores led to
another all-around first-place result for Artz, who ended the meet with an overall score of 39.550. With a previous best allaround of 39.525, Artz earned another season best. It was also Artz’s 20th score above 39.000 in her career — the 12th-most in Michigan history. “She is a great leader on our team,” said Michigan coach Bev Plocki, “because she really does demonstrate that work ethic, and the desire to win, and the competitiveness and those things that make her great.” Artz’s high scores and flooring routines rarely go unnoticed — she was named Big Ten Gymnast of the Week on Tuesday, her third time gaining recognition for her dominant performances
“She is driven, but she doesn’t take herself too seriously either.”
in every event. She is also on the Big Ten Gymnasts to Watch list. “She is driven, both gymnastically and academically,” Plocki said. “In everything she does, she is driven, but she doesn’t take herself too seriously either. It’s kind of a good mix, because sometimes if you’re too much of a perfectionist, you’re too hard on yourself. “She’s a really good mix of she’s got that drive and desire to want to be perfect, which means she works really hard, but she doesn’t take herself too seriously. She knows how to enjoy a moment and sometimes even be silly.” As the gymnastics season begins to draw close to an end, Artz is a big contender heading into the NCAA Championships. Her reputation on floor and in the all-around, combined with her recent success on bars and beam, put her in a good position to dominate the podium at a national level.
ZOEY HOLMSTROM/Daily
Junior Nicole Artz helped power Michigan to a season-high score of 197.425 by winning the all-around title with a season-high score of 39.550 on Monday.
As the No. 2 Michigan softball team begins its season this weekend, its outfield will be crucial to its success. The Wolverines’ outfield will lead the team both on offense and off the field, helping to motivate younger players. All three starting outfielders return from last season’s second-place finish in the Women’s College World Series and look to improve on last season’s performance. After spending her freshman year on the bench, only getting occasional opportunities to pinchhit, junior outfielder Kelly Christner flourished in her first year as a starter. She finished second on the team in a variety of categories including home runs, supporting an offense that led the nation with 118. “My main focus my freshman year was really (on each) pitch,” Christner said. “I came in for pinch-hit at bats, so I really had to focus on every single pitch. Last year my main focus was my confidence, and that really helped me excel to the next level.” Playing alongside Christner in the outfield will be two seniors, Kelsey Susalla and Sierra Lawrence. Like Christner, Susalla also thrived in her first year with regular playing time, finishing third on the team in batting average and RBI. Susalla also garnered tremendous praise from Michigan coach Carol Hutchins about her work ethic and dedication. “(Susalla) didn’t quite get the accolades that (Christner) did, but she was critical to our success,” Hutchins said. “She came from being a walk-on who had (few) at-bats as a freshman and sophomore to our starting outfielder who was on the AllAmerican ballot and All-Big Ten.” Lawrence is one of just two four-year starters on the roster. Last season, she led the team in stolen bases and played in at least 50 games for the third year in a row. She also was perfect in the field, not making a single error. Lawrence knows the tools for a successful team, and along with her fellow seasoned outfielders, she aims to assist
the younger players, who have just begun their Wolverine softball journeys. “Me and the upperclassmen, we’ve done great job of coaching the underclassmen and the freshmen we have out there,” Lawrence said. “I think it’s a big role that we all have to step up and do, and we have some freshmen out there who need to do some learning for when I step down or if they need to come in this season.” Michigan gains two new freshmen in its outfield corps this season, Natalie Peters and Courtney Richardson, who were both named to their allconference teams in high school. Hutchins enjoys coaching freshmen because of their commitment to improving and assisting the team. “Freshmen come every day excited to be here,” Hutchins said. “This freshman class, I’ve loved from the get-go. There’s a lot of them, and they stick together as a group. They’re enthusiastic. I like that pack mentality. They take care of each other.” Christner explained that the elder players will do whatever it takes to ease the challenging transition of college softball — be it extra batting practice or a simple conversation. Perhaps because she knows from experience the importance of taking advantage of every opportunity, Christner is always eager to help a young player with extra reps. “Sometimes you can just see the look on people’s faces that they’re having a bad day and go up and talk to them,” Christner said. “I think it helps them calm their nerves just because they do have a lot on their plate, and we do know what it’s like being a freshman coming into this program.” When asked about keys to Michigan’s season, Christner believes the team must remain upbeat and enthusiastic. If she is determined to succeed, she feels it will carry over to the other players. “Whenever I wasn’t confident last year, that’s when I didn’t do well,” Christner said. “If I have energy on the field, I think I bring everyone else up, and then we all have energy.” Hutchins remains confident in the leadership of her veteran outfielders. The three will give the Wolverines the best opportunity possible to win games. If Christner and Susalla can repeat their breakout seasons and Lawrence remains consistent, Michigan will have many wins to look forward to in the coming months.
“We’ve done a great job of coaching the underclassmen.”
Sports
8A — Wednesday, February 10, 2016
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ICE HOCKEY
‘M’ tied atop Big Ten By JUSTIN MEYER Daily Sports Writer
Just over half of the Big Ten hockey season is in the books, and the conference is split into two distinct camps. Michigan, Minnesota and Penn State have separated from the pack as the only teams left in real contention for the regularseason crown and the No. 1 seed in the conference tournament. Ohio State, Michigan State and Wisconsin are lagging far behind — a discouraging result for the conference in its fourth year. The Daily breaks down each team below. The Contenders Michigan (8-2-2-1 Big Ten, 17-44 overall) LUNA ANNA ARCHEY/Daily
Senior guard Caris LeVert has missed 10 straight games with a leg injury, but did practice for an hour Monday.
Wolverines head back on the road With LeVert still on the mend, Michigan visits woeful Golden Gophers By SIMON KAUFMAN Daily Sports Editor
Michigan men’s basketball coach John Beilein keeps a ledger of how many practices his team has had and how many more it has left. Entering Tuesday, the Michigan at count read 82 Minnesota down, 18 to go. It’s not a Matchup: Michigan 17-7; countdown Minnesota to the end of 6-17 the season, When: he says, but a Wednesday way to keep 9 P.M. track of how much time the Where: Williams Wolverines Arena (7-3 Big Ten, 17-6 overall) TV/Radio: BTN have to improve. After a rough week at home in which Michigan got played out of its own arena twice — first by Indiana and then by Michigan State — Beilein probably wishes the number in the second column was greater. With the Big Ten Tournament in just four weeks, Beilein is tasked with turning around a team that’s headed in the wrong direction after getting a reality check last week. “You only seem to be as good as your last game, and that just weighs on you,” Beilein said Tuesday. “And we weren’t very good our last two games. … You just got to keep trying to refresh yourself and get better, but you have to get a win somewhere
along the line again to feel good. Any type of win at any place against anybody.” Lucky for Beilein and the Wolverines, their next opportunity for a win comes Wednesday night against Minnesota. The Golden Gophers (0-11, 6-17) still haven’t won a conference game and haven’t won a game at all since Dec. 16. However, Minnesota has played a handful of tight games over the last month despite being unable to turn any into wins. Since falling to Michigan in Ann Arbor three weeks ago, the Golden Gophers have hung in against the likes of Illinois, Purdue and Indiana. They forced a 21st-ranked Boilermakers team into a game that came down to the final seconds and nearly took down a 19th-ranked Hoosiers squad on the road a few days later before ultimately falling, 74-68. But Thursday, Minnesota still proved extremely vulnerable, getting blown out by an unimpressive Northwestern team. In its meeting earlier this year, Michigan squeezed out a 74-69 win despite lacking energy on the court and shooting just 37 percent from the field. Another lackluster effort could still potentially earn a win for the Wolverines — Minnesota shoots just 41 percent as a team — but after two sluggish showings last week, another would add to a list of problems Michigan has faced lately.
Despite the two straight losses, Beilein says team morale isn’t down. “(There’s been) really good energy in practice, and there’s nobody hanging their heads in practice,” Beilein said. “The attitude is good as far as getting the improvement. How we’re getting there is so slow, and that’s what’s so frustrating.” Also frustrating for Michigan is the extended time senior guard Caris LeVert has missed with a lower left leg injury. The All-American candidate has missed 10 games since suffering the injury on Dec. 30. Beilein hasn’t been specific about a timetable for his potential return but offered more optimistic news Tuesday, including that LeVert practiced for an hour Monday and is pain-free. Beilein also said that the decision as to when he returns is completely up to LeVert and could even come as late as during Michigan’s shootaround Wednesday. “We’ll go into practice today, and we’ll have some actions for him defensively and offensively that he’s got to learn, and then you just don’t know what it’s going to be like,” Beilein said. “It’s extremely important that he plays when he’s ready to play and that he’s not risking any further injury. So it’s a puzzle.” With just 17 practices remaining after Tuesday’s, the time to put the pieces together and assemble a finished product that qualifies for the NCAA Tournament is running out.
The sixth-ranked Wolverines tore through the last four conference series despite a miscue Friday night in Detroit. Michigan dropped an overtime heartbreaker to Michigan State in that game, but hasn’t recorded a regulation loss since Dec. 12 against Minnesota. In that stretch, the forward line of freshman Kyle Connor and juniors JT Compher and Tyler Motte has become perhaps the most elite in all of college hockey. The offensive explosion was complemented by better cohesion in the defensive zone and a marked improvement by senior netminder Steve Racine. The run has propelled the Wolverines to a tie with the Golden Gophers atop the Big Ten standings. Both teams have 27 points and will meet in Minneapolis again in late February. Minnesota (9-3-0, 14-13-0) The Golden Gophers used Big Ten play to salvage what looked to be a lost season, but they’ll need to do more for any chance to play in the NCAA Tournament.
Heading into December, and the first conference series, Minnesota was 4-7. Now above .500, the Gophers are tied for the lead in the Big Ten despite lacking a true quality win. They split four games with Penn State, but those two wins are the most impressive in a schedule that was packed with tough opponents. Minnesota’s strength of schedule is sixth in the nation, but that alone isn’t enough to combat the dismal season record. The Gophers are still in contention for the regular-season title for two reasons. The first is freshman goaltender Eric Schierhorn, who has a .915 save percentage and is ranked third in the conference. The other reason is the ridiculous rate at which the team is converting shots into goals. The team’s .125 shooting percentage in conference play is tremendous, tied with Michigan’s prolific offense. The Gophers have a chance to make up some ground in the national rankings with two home games left against Michigan, but will still likely require a firstplace finish in the conference tournament to sniff a chance at the postseason. Penn State (7-5, 17-8-3) The Nittany Lions are sitting in third place, six points back in the Big Ten regular-season race despite a No. 15 ranking in the national poll. After a blistering start to the season, Penn State squandered an opportunity to climb the Big Ten leaderboard in its series with Michigan. The Nittany Lions lost by a score of 13-7 in that weekend, putting the team’s postseason hopes in serious jeopardy. NCAA at-large teams are generally representatives from the top 10 of the RPI, and that leaves Penn State on the outside looking in. Coach Guy Gadowsky has puzzled many with his decisions in
net, though. Freshman goaltender Eamon McAdam owns a .923 save percentage this year, but continues to split time with Matt Skoff. Skoff is a senior with a significantly poorer goals-against average (3.18) and save percentage (.900). The Bottom Feeders Ohio State (3-5-2-1, 8-14-2) Sitting in fourth place, you could say the Buckeyes are exceeding expectations this season. But the team has managed just three wins in conference play — such is the state of Big Ten hockey. Ohio State is a better team than its 1-7 start to the season indicated, though. An upset win against Penn State and another against Michigan, this one by shootout, are marquee wins for a program that isn’t historically strong. Michigan State (3-9-0, 7-19-2) A win over Michigan at Joe Louis Arena on Friday night and another respectable contest against the Wolverines on Saturday may mark a turning tide for the Spartans, but it is certainly too little, too late. After finishing second in the Big Ten last year, winning the conference tournament is now Michigan State’s only chance of making the postseason —and that seems like a long shot. Wisconsin (1-7-2-1, 6-12-6) It has been a dismal two years for the Badgers’ hockey program. After winning just four games last year, Wisconsin opened this season with a six-game winless stretch and never recovered. Wisconsin’s best result of the season came early, in a 3-1 win over No. 3 North Dakota. Since then, the Badgers have shown few signs of life, and it is anyone’s guess how the program will recover from a historically awful two-year run.
“You have to get a win somewhere along the line again to feel good.”
SINDU KILARU/Daily
Sophomore guard Katelynn Flaherty is confident Michigan can still beat each of the six teams left on its schedule.
Home stretch will ease up on ‘M’ By TED JANES Daily Sports Writer
The schedule makers didn’t take it easy on the Michigan women’s basketball team. A heavily front-loaded Big Ten schedule — with the toughest games in the first half of the conference season — has put the Wolverines (5-7 Big Ten, 13-10 overall) in a hole that may not be indicative of how good they actually are. Currently in 10th place in the Big Ten, Michigan has just six games left to boost its standing ahead of the Big Ten Tournament. One of those games is against Maryland, the No. 6 team in the country, but beyond that, the Wolverines still have matchups against opponents like Northwestern, Wisconsin, Penn State and Rutgers, which are all below or even with Michigan in the conference standings. The remaining game pits the Wolverines against Purdue. The Boilermakers opened up the Big Ten season in Ann Arbor on Dec. 31, narrowly leaving Crisler Center with a win after hitting a go-ahead 3-pointer in the last six seconds. Michigan had the chance to tie it from the line, but freshman Boogie Brozoski hit only one of three free throws. Michigan’s two best players,
sophomore guard Katelynn Flaherty and freshman center Hallie Thome, both said Sunday that they were looking forward to finishing this campaign strong, touching on its importance leading up to the postseason. “I’m excited to try and play Maryland again,” Flaherty said. “Rutgers, going home is always fun. Purdue, we lost in the last second. Each game, I think we can win every single game we have left, and I think if we do, it will really be a turning point with us. “I think we really could win the Big Ten Tournament, and I think it’ll come down to if we go in there with momentum.” Maryland, of course, is the toughest opponent left on the schedule, but even in the Wolverines’ seven-point loss back on Jan. 14, they hung around until the Terrapins sealed it with free throws late in the game. On the road, there’s no question it will be a tougher matchup, but there is still no reason to believe Michigan couldn’t finish out the Big Ten with a winning record.
The Wolverines don’t have to worry about Ohio State, Nebraska or Michigan State until they potentially meet these teams again in Indianapolis the first week of March. “Our schedule, the first half, was a tough one,” said Michigan coach Kim Barnes Arico. “But we don’t want to look past any opponent. “We try not to emphasize (the schedule) too much, because we don’t want them to think that anything is easy. So this part is not easy, I mean, because just how could you lose on any given night … So the kids know, they read (the Daily), they read the paper and they read the Internet. They know who’s really good and who’s not, but I don’t emphasize that too much.” The Big Ten Tournament begins March 2, when the four lowestranked teams in the conference play each other for the chance to advance to the next day. Michigan stands ahead of that pack for now, and over the next three weeks, it will do everything it can to separate itself even further.
“I think we really could win the Big Ten Tournament.”
down and out in ann arbor
statement THE MICHIGAN DAILY FE B RUARY 10, 2016
Wednesday, February 10, 2016 // The Statement
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Copy That: A Love Letter to the Em-Dash
ON THE RECORD
MARCO RUBIO
BY ALEXIS NOWICKI
I
’ve been told that I use too many dashes. My high school AP Language and Composition teacher would often draw an X through each dash I used in my essays, suggesting that they detracted from the message I was trying to convey. In peer review — in both high school and college — my peers have frequently written in workshop letters, “Why do you use so many dashes where you could just use commas?” I’ve never listened to them, though — without a dash, my sentences wouldn’t convey the same meaning. They wouldn’t elicit the same pause in the reader’s head, and they wouldn’t set the sections of the sentence apart from each other in the same way. Plus, commas are overused. I have an aversion to the unnecessary comma — even if the sentence is grammatically correct, a comma should never be used when it doesn’t need to be. When in doubt, I go with the dash. I have a confession, though. Until I started working at the Daily, I didn’t know what an em-dash was. Sure, I had seen them, but I thought it was just a different font, or something, that some authors knew about and I didn’t. The dash I used in my high school and early college essays was the en-dash – the one that’s in-between the hyphen and the em-dash (and the one I used in this sentence). It’s easier to make — you just type a word, a space, a dash, another space, and then continue on with your sentence. It’s much more intuitive than the “option-shift-dash” that makes the em-dash. After just a couple shifts at the Daily, though, I found that I’d been converted. The em-dash came naturally to me, and it just looked better. It had the effect I’d desired but never quite got out of the en-dash: It was longer, and it gave the emphasis that I wanted to force my readers to notice. What I’m trying to say here is that I’m in love with the em-dash. This seems like the right time to switch forms — specifically, to the form of a love letter. Dear em-dash, I love you. You are my favorite type of punctuation. I’m not just saying you’re the best type of dash — that’s obvious. I’m saying you’re better than every single punctuation mark. Commas, semi-colons, periods — all of them. Periods are necessary, sure, but they lack personality. Commas are too plentiful. Everyone uses them; they’re boring now — they have no allure. And semi-colons are replaceable — I can’t think of a time when a semi-colon couldn’t be replaced by an em-dash or period to strengthen the sentence. That leaves you, em-dash. My one true love. I don’t care if my professors don’t like you or my classmates tell me to leave you for someone else. I’m going to keep using you. Don’t take that the wrong way — I need you, em-dash. I know we’ve only known each other for two years, but I’m committed to you, I promise. You’ll be a part of my life as long as the alt-shift-dash MacBook shortcut exists.
“We are taking our message to families that are struggling to raise their children in the 21st Century, because as you saw, Jeanette and I are raising our four children in the 21st Century.” — U.S Sen. MARCO RUBIO (R-Fla) on raising children today during a campaign rally in Nashua, New Hampshire. ***
“And we know how hard it’s become to instill our values in our kids instead of the values they try to ram down our throats.” —RUBIO at the same rally in Nashua, in the next sentence.
*** “In the 21st Century, it’s become harder than ever to instill in your children the values they teach in our homes and in our church, instead of the values that they try to ram down our throats in the movies, in music and in popular culture.” —RUBIO at the same rally, in the very next sentence.
D E-S T R E S S I N G
THOUGHT BUBBLE
Love always, Alexis
ZOEY HOLMSTROM/DAILY
“I take the long way to class, listen to music and just let everything soak in. It lets me take my mind off of things and helps me focus on what’s important.” – Engineering sophomore ANDRE SOFIAN
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIE FARRUGIA
Wednesday, February 10, 2016 // The Statement 3B
THE Magazine Editor:
statement
Photo Editor:
Karl Williams
Zoey Holmstrom
Deputy Editor:
Creative Director:
Nabeel Chollampat Design Editor: Shane Achenbach
Emilie Farrugia Editor in Chief: Shoham Geva
Managing Editor: Laura Schinagle Copy Editors: Emily Campbell Alexis Nowicki Jose Rosales
Snapshots of A Year-And-A-Half in Comedy B Y M I K E F LY N N
H
ello. My name is Mike Flynn, as you can probably tell by that little line of text that says “by Mike Flynn.” But I digress. (Wow. Digressing within the first three sentences? That is some lazy writing. But I digress.) I’ve been doing stand-up comedy for a year and a half, and it’s evolved into one of the all-consuming passions of my life. (Hey, it’s better than crack, right?) As I edge closer and closer to the much sought after year-and-five-months milestone, I’ve found myself in a reflective mood, thinking about some of the major moments of my comedy not-even-close-to-career. September 2014 I perform stand-up for the first time at the LOL ROFL Comedy Club mass meeting. I tell a joke that gets no laughs. I tell another joke that gets no laughs. I begin to tell a third joke, but I forget the punchline. Doesn’t matter. It likely would have gotten no laughs. Naturally, I return the following week. October 2014 I tell an AIDS joke at a Metal Frat open mic, and learn the hard way how important it is to read the room. January 2015 I write my first good joke, and pat myself on the back, confident that my days of bad joke-writing are behind me. The next day, I write a bunch of very bad jokes. It becomes clear to me that this shit is harder than it looks. I am introduced to the UnClub, where Michigan’s best comics go to tell their jokes to a lukewarm response from other comics. It becomes something of a second, very dysfunctional home to me. February 2015 After a solid set at the LOL ROFL semester show, I am convinced that my comedic chops have developed to the level at which I can now deconstruct the medium with ease. I construct endless non-jokes and puns, confident that the audience will latch onto my esoteric genius. I don’t get any laughs for about a month, save for at a benefit gig in Saline that LOL ROFL did for Festifall money. Realizing that I’m going to bomb anyway, I write a whole set of shitty new material in five minutes, delivered in a bad Seinfeld voice. Nobody laughs except the three comedians who came with me, who are in hysterics. I have a particularly bad set at the UnClub, after which a comedian whom I admire (and as of this writing, has recently been on Conan O’Brien’s show) said “good job” to comfort me. After getting shit from other comedians for coddling me, he turns to me and says, “All right, go fuck yourself.” April 2015 I go up at the Ann Arbor Comedy Showcase for the first time, and don’t suck completely. I start doing well at the UnClub, and have a killer set at the ROFL-
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY WATERS
sponsored Univeristy of Michigan versus Northwestern University show. I begin to realize that comedy is what I want to do. Summer 2015 I go to the New England Literature Program, where I can’t get people to stop laughing at everything I say. I go back home to San Francisco, where I try to get into the Bay Area comedy scene, and fail to get people to laugh at anything I say. I do my first booked showcase in Berkeley and bomb, hard. I begin reconsidering the idea of medical school. September 2015 Upon returning to Ann Arbor, I jump back into stand-up. I realize all the material I wrote over the summer was is shit and throw most of it out. October 2015 I become vice president of LOL ROFL. I begin doing well at the UnClub at a more consistent frequency than I ever have before. I make Mark Sweetman, the UnClub’s host, guffaw for the first time. I smile and nod. I have arrived. December 2015 I have a good set at the LOL ROFL Semester Show, and ease into my new position as the undisputed king of comedy. January 2016 I do my second booked showcase and bomb. I realize I still have a long way to go. I decide that for the time being, I’ll enjoy being the court jester of comedy.
COVER PHOTO BY ZOEY HOLMSTROM AND COVER DESIGN BY SHANE ACHENBACH
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Wednesday, February 10, 2016 // The Statement
Down and Out in Ann Arbor An investigation into homelessness in winter By Giancarlo Buonomo, Daily Arts Writer
John Schippers, director of operations for the Delonis Center, looks out into Ann Arbor on the women's-only floor of the Center.
Editor’s note: The names of some individuals have been changed to protect their anonymity, denoted with an asterisk. “Rain is no respecter of persons the snow doesn’t give a soft white damn Whom it touches.” - e.e. Cummings Mary*, who for soon-to-be obvious reasons asked that I not use her real name, sits crosslegged on a sheet of cardboard in between two large brick buildings in downtown Ann Arbor. Her face is sandpapery from the wind, with a burgundy smear beneath each eye. She says each breath feels like Altoids chased with ice water. She’s swaddled in many layers of coats and blankets. In one hand she holds a plastic coffee cup half-empty with bills. In the other, a sign that reads, in block letters, “PREGNANT AND HOMELESS.” “I left my home, my family and my teaching job,” she tells me. “My husband is very abusive.” Mary took a bus to Ann Arbor a few months ago from another Michigan city, she says, after a particularly brutal episode left her with broken facial bones and a broken sense of safety. She’s lived on the streets ever since. “I spent three days in the hospital. He beat the hell out of me — he’s been doing it for six and half years, but this time it was really bad. He spent one night in jail, because he’s a cop,” she says. “It’s pathetic that I’m safer out here in the middle of the Michigan winter than back with him.” Food isn’t an issue — her sign seems to inspire generosity in passersby, who bring her sandwiches and cups of soup. Most nights, she can panhandle enough to get a cheap motel room, or crash, for a small fee, with an acquaintance. But one or two nights a week, she and a few of her friends crawl into sleeping bags and huddle together behind a church. She’s on the waitlist at a battered women’s shelter, because she doesn’t
want to sleep in the same shelter as “strange” men. “I won’t have a baby on the streets, so hopefully I can figure things out,” she says. Pending some atmospheric disaster, Ann Arbor will always be cold in the winter. Some winters are so brutal that, such in 2014, the University cancels classes. Others, like the current one, are like autumns with a dusting of snow. But at night, when the thermometers plummet, when fingers begin to resemble frozen shrimp, and when the wind slaps you across the face, the cold transitions from uncomfortable to unsafe. Pending some societal miracle, Ann Arbor will always have a homeless population. The more visible individuals, the ones panhandling or selling newspapers on downtown streets, often go unnoticed as fire hydrants. Others you’ll never see. Suffice to say, being homeless is never easy. But in the winter, the struggles are intensified. There’s the struggle to stay warm, of course. But there’s also the struggle of local resources to provide for individuals in need, the struggle of individuals to balance self-sufficiency and self-preservation, and their combined struggle against social and economic forces that can feel as cold and oblivious as the air outside. If you’re going to discuss homelessness in Ann Arbor, you have to begin with the Delonis Center, a local homeless shelter. An official-looking building, it stands on the corner of Huron and South Ashley right across the street from LIVE nightclub. I met with Ellen Schulmeister, the executive director of the Delonis Center, to get a better sense of the problems of the homeless in the winter. She began by correcting my terminology. “It’s ‘being homeless in the winter,’ not ‘the problems of the homeless in the winter,’ ” she explained. “It’s an experience in your life. It’s not who you are.” The distinction between the two terms
reveals the contrasting ways in which we talk about homelessness. In his book “Making Room: The Economics of Homelessness,” economist Brendan O’Flaherty describes the evolution of American discourse on homelessness. In Britain, he notes, “homeless” has historically been a residency classification — for whatever period one is without a home, one is homeless. In the United States, on the other hand, “homeless” typically describes a certain scruffy lifestyle — panhandling, transience, reliance on charity — regardless of residency. The United States government switched to a British definition in 1984, but, as O’Flaherty notes, “most Americans feel comfortable about labeling someone homeless without having to know where they slept last night.” In 2014, the number of individuals classified as “literally homeless” — sleeping in the streets or in shelters — was estimated to be 49,895, according to Michigan’s Campaign to End Homelessness. The total number of individuals, which included “those living with friends or family due to a housing crisis and (who) are facing immediate eviction with no other resources,” was estimated at 97,642. Racial discrepancies are stark — African Americans make up 14 percent of the total population of Michigan, but are 52 percent of the homeless population. Delonis is the largest shelter in Washtenaw County, and sees the most individuals — 1,459 according to their latest annual report. It’s a shelter with services, providing medical and economic support and stable residency, as opposed to a mission-style shelter, which offers night-to-night rooms. It only services single adults — two other local shelters, Alpha House and Ozone House serve families and children respectively. Delonis has room for 75 residents, but during the winter it operates as a warming center for those without a place to sleep at night. “In the summertime, being homeless is difficult at best,” Schulmeister said. “In the
wintertime, it’s life-threatening.” To get a better idea of the dangers of winter homelessness, I spoke on the phone with Dr. James O’Connell, president of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, who’s been caring for people experiencing homelessness in Boston since 1985. To my surprise, he said it’s the comparatively mild weather that can prove the deadliest, because individuals assume that they can tough it out. “When the temperature starts dropping at night early in the winter, people are particularly vulnerable, because it’s still cold enough to get severely hypothermic and frostbitten,” he said. In fact, the worst case of hypothermia Dr. O’Connell ever saw was on an October night in Boston when the temperature was about 30 degrees. The patient was found with a core body temperature of 72 degrees, and had to be put on cardiopulmonary bypass. The threshold body temperature for hypothermia is 95 degrees. Most states have “danger to self” laws, which allow the police to take someone to the hospital if they believe that person poses an imminent threat to their safety. Michigan’s law decrees that “If a peace officer observes an individual conducting himself or herself in a manner that causes the peace officer to reasonably believe that the individual is a person requiring treatment … the peace officer may take the individual into protective custody and transport the individual … for examination … or for mental health intervention services.” These laws operate in an ethical gray area, where the police are forced to balance the civilian’s right to autonomy and the state interest in preserving life, particularly when individuals are sleeping outside in freezing weather. Dr. O’Connell had mixed feelings about these laws. “The bar is often set so high that we often err on respecting someone’s autonomy and possibly allowing them to die,” he said. The imminent threats of hypothermia and frostbite — which can be exacerbated by the
numbing effects of drugs and alcohol — are coupled with the long-term effects of exposure. Weakened immune systems are susceptible to flus and pneumonia, which are more common in the winter, and easy to catch if sleeping in a crowded shelter. According to Dr. O’Connell, the leading cause of death among those living and sleeping on the street is not hypothermia but cancer, followed by heart and lung disease, all brought on by harsh lifestyle and deadly without stable medical care. As for being pregnant while living on the street, Dr. O’Connell said it was “dangerous and to be avoided at all costs, during any season.” Clearly, medical problems are an effect of homelessness. But the causes of homelessness are, contrary to popular belief, primarily economic. To be sure, Delonis sees many clients with debilitating physical and mental illnesses, addictions and unsafe familial environments. But at the risk of sounding obvious, the main problem when experiencing homelessness is that you don’t have a home, and the main reason people don’t have a home is that they can’t afford one. Homelessness has not always been a position of economic despair. Peter H. Rossi, in his book “Down and Out in America,” explains the shifts in the economics of homelessness in America. In between the Civil War and World War II, the homeless were primarily migrant laborers who moved from city to city seeking seasonal, unskilled labor. Theses laborers were so prevalent that by the late 19th century, most major cities had a Skid Row, a specialized neighborhood that provided cheap housing and amenities for the workers. Permanent residents had little affection for the migrants — Skid Rows were also designed to keep them out of sight, and “transient workers were characterized as tramps, hoboes and bums and were often warned to leave town when there was no demand for their labor,” Rossi writes. But they were still a major labor force. By the 1940s, technological advancements in industry, agriculture and construction had eliminated the need for massive amounts of cheap, temporary labor. The homeless population became less of a workforce and more of what Karl Marx called a lumpenproletariat — an unorganized, unemployable class that exists on the fringes of society. In the absence of temporary paid labor, many individuals experiencing homelessness are stuck in a vicious cycle. Without a steady income, you can lose your residence, and with a bad line of credit it’s difficult to find a new dwelling. Without a permanent residence, it’s difficult to find and hold a job. In light of this, Delonis assigns all residents a case manager, and together they work toward three primary goals: establishing a steady income, finding housing and saving money to pay for a security deposit and a first month’s rent. They estimate that 50 percent of clients find permanent housing within the year. Ann Arbor is clearly not a place one would want to be without a home during the winter. But it’s also one of the most difficult places to find affordable housing in the state. In the latest ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) assessment by the United Ways Foundation, Washtenaw County received the lowest rating for housing affordability, and 58 percent of rentable properties in Ann Arbor cost
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more than 30 percent minimum wage a month. The Atlantic recently named Ann Arbor the 8th most segregated city in the country. This gradual bloodletting of affordability, as MLive reported in 2014, is most likely due to increases in renting by both families and young professionals. It’s the bittersweet irony of an affluent community like Ann Arbor — it simultaneously prices out low-income residents and has the resources to provide shelter and services for those experiencing homelessness. So what’s it like to be without a home in Ann Arbor during the winter? I went to the Groundcover News office in the basement of Bethlehem United Church of Christ on South Fourth Avenue to find out. Groundcover is the homeless newspaper of Ann Arbor, which functions both as a community news source and a source of employment for individuals experiencing homelessness. I sat with the publisher, Susan Beckett, and three of the vendors, who candidly spoke about their past and present travails. A home, especially during the winter, isn’t PHOTOS BY ZOEY HOLMSTROM/Daily merely a place to stay warm. It offers security and stability. It’s a place to store and cook food, Each night, blankets are handed out to everyone sleeping in the warming shelter. The blankets are washed daily access the Internet, maintain a mailing address to prevent bed bugs or other issues in the premises. and have intimate relationships. There is a use the bathroom. Even if one is near the woods, warm during the winter, especially the joints popular perception that if someone is homeless, food stamps cannot be used to purchase toilet I injured,” she said. “Sometimes the pain is so they must only have the clothes on their back and paper, not to mention tampons. horrible that I’ll just be crying.” a few coins in a Styrofoam cup. But as I learned “For most of the winter, I wore incontinence After stories like this, I was left wondering during the research for this piece, the rises and pads,” Lit explains. Unable to go to the bathroom why anyone wouldn’t head to a shelter during the falls of homelessness are less the bungee-jumps outside or at night, she would try and hold it in winter. When I brought it up with Schulmeister of the American imagination, and more a series until 5:30 in the morning, when she could go to from the Delonis Center, she sighed, as if she’d of tedious, yet traumatizing, stumbles. Take, the YMCA to use the toilet and take a shower. heard the question before. She explained that for example, the dilemma of losing one’s home But with membership prices at $50 a month, it it was ultimately up to individuals to seek help, and still having possessions that need to be was difficult to make the payments without an and some of them just don’t like the idea of protected. income. Louis can’t afford the YMCA, and he committing to any type of program. “You just can’t part with them,” Louis, a often washes himself in the church bathroom, “It’s hard, because it’s institutional, and somber-looking man, told me. “I keep my stuff using hand soap and the sink. many people don’t like that, but our goals are with me at all times, keep my bags with me at all Qualifying for food stamps is no guarantee short-term,” she said. “We are accommodating, times, even when I sleep.” though. Able-bodied adults must work or be in a but sometimes people don’t read us as Lit, a vivacious woman who is Groundcover’s work program at least 20 hours a week to receive accommodating.” most successful vendor, explained how she SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Louis, from Groundcover, won’t go to Delonis is forced to rent out a storage space for her Program) benefits, but finding that much work is out of spite — he received a trespass, or one-year possessions, including her bulky winter boots difficult for anyone without a home. Even if one ban, eight years ago for having a loud verbal and coats. But she’s missed several payments works, a single adult’s net income can’t exceed altercation with his girlfriend in the doorway, and cannot retrieve her warm clothes until $981 a month, a sum that is quickly gobbled up and said he has no interest in reapplying for she settles her debts. The management is being by the ancillary costs of storage, motel rooms, residency. The Delonis Center doesn’t comment relatively generous, she explains — with another gas and car insurance. on individual cases but noted anyone can request storage space, she lost a whole cache of family “I just wish the government would recognize to have their ban lifted. He’ll go there for meals, photos and papers when she missed payment on that there are expenses associated with being but only because those are served by an outside storage and her unit was auctioned off. homeless,” Lit said. organization. “I’ve worn the same bra for a year and a half Food is, generally speaking, less of a concern Others I met were just unaware or now. I have all these nice ones in storage with than housing and hygiene. Local shelters misinformed about Delonis. Daniel, a tall man the right cup and padding. It’s just a fact of life — often serve meals, and St. Andrew’s Episcopal with a wiry gray beard, became homeless a without the right padding, I feel like the nipple Church has a breakfast program. Lit has made year ago when he left his apartment after it was lady,” she said with an easy laugh. friends with the kitchen staff of a Main Street repeatedly broken into. But those storage problems don’t compare restaurant, who give her leftovers. Sometimes, “I’ve been finding myself lately just crawling to a night during last years crushing winter. Lit passersby will just give the vendors food. But as up someplace and going to sleep,” he told me one was sleeping in her car when the heater broke Theresa*, an elderly vendor with a honey-thick frigid afternoon in between puffs on a cigarette. and she was left with only a sleeping bag and southern accent, explained, relying on others His favorite place is a heating vent in a parking the car’s thin walls for warmth. Already ill, she for food always has unintended consequences. garage that is big enough for him to lay down on began having trouble breathing as sub-zero Driving around to different shelters and at night. Other nights, he’ll just walk around all temperatures set in. churches for meals costs precious gas money. night to stay warm. When I asked him why he “I thought I was going to die,” she told me. “I Without a fridge or cupboards, she has to eat at wouldn’t go to Delonis, he shrugged and said, thought I was going to freeze to death.” a restaurant when no free meals are available. “I’ve heard it’s crowded there.” She managed to get to the hospital, where And when people are nice enough to buy her It’s understandable why some individuals they told her it was just a bad cold and prescribed food, she’s sometimes unable to eat it because of are resistant to seeking help. Many have been medicine. After that, she began scrimping to pay dietary restrictions. betrayed by people they trusted: landlords, for a motel at night. Theresa used to work in a plastics factory, bosses, lawyers, family members. And for some, The most banal aspects of everyday health but she fell and eventually lost her job because the supposed shame of accepting help outweighs and hygiene suddenly become difficult without a of the resulting disability. She was rejected for the very real risks of the cold. home, especially in the winter. Most businesses worker’s compensation, and lost her home. require that someone be a customer in order to “My doctor tells me I’ve got to keep myself Read more online at michigandaily.com
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Wednesday, February 10, 2016 // The Statement
fear and self-loathing in santiago: an introduction by Adam DePollo By way of an introduction to this column, I’d like to say a few things about myself and my idea for the series that I hope might help you decide whether this piece is the one that finally proves you can no longer justify reading another word printed in The Michigan Daily, even for the low, low price of $Free.99.1 My name is Adam DePollo, and I’ve held several editorial and columnist positions during my time at the Daily2 while writing on a wide range of topics3 in a healthy smattering of sections. But despite all of that work, my many character tics and neuroses, the critical stances I’ve tried to take in my writing, my relationships with friends and family and the many hobbies I’ve been frantically cultivating over the years have yet to coagulate into anything I would feel comfortable calling a stable selfconcept. Or, in other words, I’m still eluded by the intangible somethingness toward which all of my efforts to date have vainly aspired: namely, Objective Knowledge of the Self and a concise answer to the Question of Questions, “What is the Meaning of Life?” Fortunately,4 however, I’ve been afforded a rare opportunity this semester to leave my home, friends and family back in the callous Michigan tundra and spend the better part of six months in Santiago, Chile, exploring life on the planet’s much-discussed other hemisphere.5 There, I will embark on one of the
perennial undergraduate quests that our University6 describes as a “study abroad program,” but which I have already subconsciously designated “The Search for Self and Brief Glimpses of Universal Truth 2k16: Santiago Edition.” This column will, I hope, serve as an amusing, inspiring and at times heart-wrenching record of the Search, and, if we’re lucky, I might even come across a few instances of what the Wikipedia article on novelist David Foster Wallace7 describes as “earnest, unselfconscious experience and communication in a media-saturated society” — the lack of which might, for all I know,8 be what’s preventing me from figuring it all out, landing my book deal and spending the rest of my life bumming around a villa somewhere as a much less confrontational version of David Duchovny’s character from “Californication.”9 Now, in feeling compelled to write this, I also assume that you (The Reader) want to read about how a guy like me goes about “finding himself,” which I think means that, like me, you haven’t got it all figured out yet, either. But, let’s not fool ourselves, that’s kind of a weird way to go about figuring yourself out, don’t you think? Why not just go out and be yourself instead of reading about how someone else does it? What are we really getting out of stories like these? Why, as a culture, do we feel compelled to subject ourselves to this sort
1. The idea being that there is (in theory) some aspect of my character which would, despite the many differences that I’m sure exist between us, allow for the development of some kind of pathos or sense of kindred spirit between myself and you [the Reader], without whom this column would be little more than a sort of frantic travelogue written by an über-self-absorbed college senior who should probably be in therapy.a 1a. In practice it will be that, but with enough of you [The Readership, that is] racking up the page count, we might dare to call this column a Small Slice of the Millennial Experience, which is, as I’m sure you’re aware, another name for First Rate Journalism. 2. All of them (3+2 unofficial spots) in our Arts section, where I was given the ontologically distressing nickname “Father Arts.” 3. Including underground music in Detroit, sexism and commodity fetishism in Drake’s hit summer jam “Hotline Bling,” Grammy-winning jazz pianist Fred Hersch,student consumer behavior and its influence on local Ann Arbor businesses, the philosophical and political character of eating dinner alone, etc. 4. Fortunately for myself, I suppose — but who knows! Maybe for the rest of humanity, too. 5. I’m hoping that the answers to my many philosophical queries have been hiding down there in a spiritually resonant alleyway of some sort, or maybe under a vase in Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s house, which I have every intention of visiting and whose restroom it is my most profound wish to experience first-hand (since the toilet is, in my mind, the only real seat of genius). 6. Since journalism is a cold mistress who won’t pay for things like this and my parents are warm mistresses who can’t, the only reason I’m able to make this voyage is, naturally, with the assistance of UM President Mark Schlissel — or, rather, the University’s illustrious Financial Aid Department (Peace Be With It), which has, throughout my undergraduate career, had much greater confidence in my ability to pay back federal loans than any other entity on this earth or floating amid the ether of the great hereafter. I’m also assisted by our Uncle Sam in the form of an incredibly generous grant through the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program, which provides funding to allow “U.S. citizen undergraduate students of limited financial means to pursue academic studies or credit-bearing, career-oriented internships abroad." Such international exchange, I’m told, “is intended to better prepare U.S. students to assume significant roles in an increasingly global economy and interdependent world.” 7. The first five chapters of whose magnum opus “Infinite Jest” I finished reading for the first time last week; and let me tell you, that is a guy who can sure write a lot of things. Wow. And
Illustration by Shane Achenbach
of syndicated navel-gazing? I can only imagine there’s a very complex and multi-faceted reason for it, but, for my part, I’ll say that my fascination with stories about self-discovery stems from a combination of the fact that I’m a big fan of avant-garde story-writing (shouts outDaniil Kharms) and that stories of the self-discovery variety are one of the few underground literary genres still widely produced, even among non-literary-inclined people. Everyone has one10 and we come up with them, more often than not, in the privacy11 of our own heads, our skulls providing a calcium-rich cushion between these stories and the creativity-squashing influence of logic and fact-checking. Because these stories are very rarely shared in any sort of public setting, strange things happen when people are asked to recount them out loud. Just ask any stranger in your nearest coffee shop how they “found themselves” (I have tried this) and the answer you’ll get12 will likely be a sprawling collection of
sporadic anecdotes that sounds something like an absurdist combination of a presidential candidate-style stump speech and an emotional J.D. monologue from “Scrubs.”13 It’s somewhat off-putting at first, but that really is, I think, a pretty close approximation of what those stories we tell ourselves sound like when they’re bumping around in our brains. The funny thing, of course, is that formally scatterbrained self-discovery stories of that sort work perfectly well to get you through the day and effectively do allow, who knows, maybe millions or even billions of people to get through their days without collapsing into a puddle of wrecked nerves. That fact alone — in my eyes, at least — pretty definitively demonstrates that: a. Any time you read a coherent “self-discovery” narrative on a news site like this, you’re dealing with a literary construction, i.e. a fiction, i.e. not objective reportage of any kind of “self” that exists in any tangible way. and
his footnotes are really something — much more enthralling than your usual, run-of-the-mill marginalia. I, too, often have more thoughts than I could fit into a single sentence, but when he does it, it feels like you’re stepping into a whole new world with a much higher screen resolution. The closest thing I can compare it to is the feeling I get when I look at the Direct Optical guy for the first time after getting my new glasses prescriptions. All of the sudden he’s not only a Direct Optical Employee, but a Direct Optical Employee with a lot of pores and an oddly-shaped little scar next to his left ear, a deformity which I’m sure has some very interesting story behind it that I don’t feel we’re quite chummy enough to be able to ask about without seeming rude. Life is full of mysteries with the right corrective lenses. 8. He won a MacArthur Genius Grant, after all, so I’m sure his Objective Knowledge of the Self speaks for my human condition, too. 9. Keep on the lookout for a TV Notebook from myself re: the various problems with “Californication,” which are too numerous to count here. The most egregious, however, might be that the show ruins the perfectly pleasant idea of watching David Duchovny live out his days as a villa-based sardonic novelist/good-hearted hyper-macho literary enfant terrible by structuring itself around a prolonged, incredibly uncomfortable off-brand Nabokovian story arc wherein the forty-something writer gets his mojo back by way of sex with a 16-year-old girl who quickly turns into one of the show’s principal antagonists. It’s hideous. 10. History and the arts are rife with examples of the types of horrific problems that pop up when we try to get around with (or just plain get around) faulty narratives about who we are and how we got to be where we’re at.a Much rarer are stories about people trying to get around with no such narrative whatsoever; can you name any off the top of your head?b There’s some sort of conceptual barrier there which I’m sure someone has written an essay about at one point or another. 10a. See: eye-gouging in “Oedipus Rex,” drunken arbitrary self-enthrallment in “The Tempest,” the Holocaust vis-a-vis German post-WWI economic/legal sovereignty/national identity crises, death aboard a glacier in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” drunken hotel room stupors in Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, drunken run-ins with nationalistic police officers in “Ulysses,” the murder of a perfectly innocent dog in “The Babadook,” etc. 10b. The closest thing I can imagine is a story that doesn’t exist. I’m thinking a remake of the movie “Memento” in which the anterograde amnesia-suffering protagonist never bothered to give himself any tattoos and simply doesn’t give a shit about the fact that he wakes up devoid of
Wednesday, February 10, 2016 // The Statement
b. Whatever literary-caliber stylistics or narrative inventiveness you might find in a person’s “self-discovery” story says absolutely nothing about their intrinsic value as a human being (which should be equal across the board) and very close to nothing about their “depth,” since what you’re trying to crawl into there is a drawing of a well and not an actual well (i.e. whatever “depth” might be there is a sort of optical illusion produced by the skillful manipulation of perspective). I should clarify, however, that none of this critique is meant to discredit the art of the “self-discovery” narrative as such. What I’m trying to get at here is that a highly wrought “self-discovery” narrative is more like a Ferrari than you’d think. Like a Ferrari, each finegrain narrative is a commodity, which requires a not-insignificant amount of mechanical skill, conscious tinkering, access to raw materials, labor hours and, yes, capital to produce. If you read Daily Editorial Page Editor writer Claire Bryan’s recent piece “Generation PS: The evolution of the personal statement,” however, you’ll see that, especially in recent years, American universities have begun to resemble “self-discovery” narrative Ferrari factories in certain important ways. Before students even get into the door at a place like U of M, for example, they’re expected to produce a polished personal statement which, demonstrates their life’s value as raw material to be molded into the finished narrative/Ferrari. That initial requirement primes them for four undergraduate years in which they’ll be expected to engage in some profound self-reflection14 with an eye toward gradually working that initial narrative into a fully functional vehicle com-
plete with doors and windows, a V-12 engine, hand-stitched leather seats and many other finely tuned, aesthetically pleasing parts. When you’re done, you get a wonderfully articulate luxury-class narrative/person that can get you into some very nice dinner clubs and attract much more positive attention from peers, potential employers, grad school admissions offices, grant disbursement committees, etc. So part of the reason why we’re so fascinated with personal statements, “self-discovery” narratives and other sorts of creative nonfiction, I think, is that they canhelp you get into very nice dinner clubs (i.e. allow you to hang with the upper crust, the 1 percent, the aristocracy or what have you). They’re the sort of thing we assume that a person picks up at university, so they suggest that the person writing/reciting them has a certain degree of learning, sophistication and respectability15 that the uneducated masses don’t. But, of course, the problem with using a narrative/Ferrari to get into a fancy dinner club is that the Ferrari doesn’t make the gotdamn dinner club more inclusive! All they do is get you in the door, and once you’re in, your friends who never made it through the personal statement draft round are stuck outside in their 2002 Toyota Camrys, leaving you with nothing but your “self-discovery” to get you through a lifetime’s worth of gilded cocktail hours. So is our obsession with “self-discovery” narratives really a productive obsession? Does it do anything to improve the world we live in? At the very least, I don’t think it’s all bad. Indeed, it might even be good in a sort of
a self-concept every day. Instead of catching his wife’s murderer he lays in bed for an hour and forty-five minutes before the screen fades to black. 11. Now, the question of precisely how private it is in our own heads is, naturally, up for debate. Certain branches of contemporary philosophya are especially concerned with this topic, the general consensus being that you never can get entirely out of the Matrix. A good introductory example of this contemporary philosophizing (featuring plenty of entertaining pop culture references) is Slovenian Marxist philosopher/top-notch storyteller Slavoj Žižek’s “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” (a film available on Netflix). 11a. Most of them descendants of or in conversation with psychoanalytic theory, which, in turn, owes quite a bit to Marxist theory — especially Marx’s comments re: commodity fetishism (!) which have already received a much more in-depth treatment in my “Hotline Bling” column. 12. You will need to keep prodding them with (sincere) smiles and (sincere) supportive exclamations, hmms and hums whenever they hit dead ends. Perhaps the occasional gentle reminder of why you wanted to hear this story in the first place (sincere yet disinterested curiosity re: your fellow man’s thoughts and feelings). This technique is often called “listening.” 13. There is a high degree of formal similarity between this sort of response and the sort of response you might hear in undergraduate English classrooms when the professor demands that an obviously clueless student give a plot synopsis of the book they haven’t read. 14. Which, if we’re being honest, is a sort of University-sanctioned self-absorption. 15. A brief alternative history of the collegiate narrative factory: We should remind ourselves, of course, that the undergraduate period (roughly around age 18 to 22) has been, since the middle of the last century, more-or-less universally designated by successive generations of undergraduates (often with the complicity of their ex-undergraduate parents and our pop culture’s borderline-fanatical obsession with 18-to 22-year-olds’ search for meaning) as the time in which American youth must “find themselves,” i.e. spend a few years out of the house, beyond the reach of their immediate family and most of the professional and behavioral expectations placed on full-fledged adults in their economic class and cultural milieu, trying on various personality hats, drinking to excess, experimenting with a palette of hallucinogenic drugs, sampling from a number of atypical sexual and romantic permutations, otherwise engaging in a prolonged, noble rail against the various aspects of the System which have always kept them down, and thanking God all the while for college, which finally shook them free from their cultural programming, dragged them kicking and screaming out of the
1776-vintage liberal sense. Cultivating selfawareness and self-reflection should, in theory, also require you to question your place in the world around you. Questioning your place in the world around you, of course, requires that you not be the same thing as the world around you, which is to say that your “self” is something distinct from the various socioeconomic systems and communities within which you are otherwise hopelessly embedded. Having “found yourself”16 in this way, you’re immediately provided with a platform — your “self,” which has its own subjective experience of communal life and likes to demand things like “personal freedom” — from which to critique the terms under which you’re expected to participate in society. This is why things like labor unions don’t exist without first having people who view themselves as “labor,” why you can’t have gay rights without first having “gay people,” why you can’t have rap music without first having a “rapper” who makes it, etc. But maybe — and this is the troubling part — there’s a point at which “self-discovery” ceases to have any kind of redemptive feature, where the “self” no longer functions as a platform from which to effect change in a society, where “self-expression” ceases to be counter-culture and instead becomes a practice that reinforces the status quo. When I watched the earlier rounds of the presidential debates this election cycle, for example, I was a little disconcerted by the amount of time even establishment candidates like Hillary Clinton and John Kasich spent talking about their life stories. Not too long ago, that sort of thing was reserved for memoirs and posthumous biographies; the
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Powers that Be were expected to be more-orless empty suits and the art of governing was less art and more science. There were obviously problems with the old cold-blooded model (see: Henry Kissinger, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Cold War-era spats/proxy wars over “spheres of influence,” the partitioning of Africa in the 19th century, etc.) but, I don’t know, somehow I’m bothered by the idea of an election going one way or another based on a candidate’s ability to craft an entertaining narrative. I also got a C- in the only PoliSci class I’ve ever taken, so maybe these are waters I shouldn’t be swimming in. In any case, my deadline is fast approaching and this introduction has gone way beyond the sort of word count that makes my editors want to quit their jobs and join the Peace Corps. The last few thousand words have been about some of the problems I see with the idea of “finding oneself” and putting that fictional process into writing, but I’ll shut up and conclude this discussion with a quote from Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own.” The quote, I think, pretty accurately (and succinctly) describes the merits of an admittedly fictional “self-discovery” narrative and I’d like to try to let it justify my decision to write a narrative of this sort. Anywho, here it is: "At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial … one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact."
sheeple herd and molded them into a species of satyric goat-person, carrying between their cloven fingers a Certificate of Completion indicating that their four years of personhood-forging/ debauchery have fully prepared them for their choice between a. drifting along the horizonless sea of global capital or b. signing on for the graduate round of university life, in which they will trade in a sizable share of their debauchery credits for access to esoteric learnings of the highest caliber. 16. “Finding oneself” being, again, a sort of exercise in creative writing. “I” don’t exist in my own head unless I take the time out of my day to writea that character into existence. 16a. Or choose from one of the many fine selections of “I” lining the shelves of the post-postmodern Wal-Mart we like to call the 21st century. Current American options include, but are not limited to, the Donald Trump Model,i the Bernie Sanders Modelii and, of course, the Undergraduate Model, which I believe I was starting to sketch somewhere back three or four levels of footnote ago.iii 16ai“I” is a natural-born millionaire (despite any appearance to the contrary) whose attainment of incomparable wealth and the state of pure individualism is constantly threatened by the combined forces of the encroaching hordes of unemployed brown-skinned barbarians and their crypto-communist “American” P.C. liberal allies. Comes complete with blonde toupee, American flag pin and one complimentary spray-tan session. 16aii “I” is a person free from the sort of jingoistic, nationalistic, individualistic and capitalistic fantasies that have caused so much harm and destruction over the centuries. “I” realizes that, at the end of the day, we’d be so much better off if we all understood that we’re in this boat together. “I” also knows that if there are bad guys, they wear suits and ties and think money’s more important than building a society where their fellow man can live a healthy, happy, sustainable life. The suits might also be lizard men and, yes, of course “I” has watched every season of “The X-Files” (except the second half of season five, which was far too campy) and can quote lengthy snatches of “Twin Peaks” dialogue from memory. David Lynch is an unparalleled genius, after all. But “I” doesn’t want to talk about “Dune.” And, yes, if we’re being completely honest “I” fell asleep in the middle of “Eraserhead” and has not seen “The Elephant Man.” Comes complete with one complimentary folk guitar lesson and a guest spot on “SNL,” which “I” will accept despite thinking “SNL” is only barely watchable even with the best host imaginable. 16aiii I think it was before the footnotes, actually. David Foster Wallace must have been a really clear-headed sort of dude.
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Wednesday, February 10, 2016 // The Statement
V I S UA L S TAT E M E N T: A VISIT TO BOSTON By EMILIE FARRUGIA I spent this past weekend exploring the snowy streets of downtown Boston after a winter storm blanketed coastal New England Thursday night.
The sun sets onto the snow covered roof of a church near Massachusetts Avenue.
Snow melts from the blossoms of a bush in the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.
A man and his dog stroll through the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.
Young families sled down fresh snow at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.
Snow covered trees frame a street off of Columbus Avenue.