No, not this Wednesday

New York City is packed with amazing culture and inspiring art, but sometimes it’s difficult to break the Morningside-bubble and experience it all first-hand. “Where Art Thou” is a weekly guide to interesting and notable lectures, events, and performances for the literary/musically/theatrically-inclined on campus.

On campus:

• This Wednesday, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Barnard’s Lida A. Orzeck ’68 Artist-in-Residence, and Mary Sibande, Johannesburg and Venice Biennale artist, will discuss the political role that artists can play in today’s society. The discussion will be moderated by Kellie Jones, Columbia Professor of Art History and MacArthur Fellow. It will take place in the Diana Event Oval, starting at 6 pm.
• Also on Wednesday at 6 pm, Eduard Gorokhovsky’s “From Siberia To Moscow” exhibit will open in the International Affairs Building. Eduard Gorokhovsky is a Russian Soviet Nonconformist who is known for using photographs to create “intentionally unresolved serial images.”
• Also on Wednesday, Writers Danielle Dutton and Jen George will be featured in a fiction reading at 7 pm in Dodge Hall. Dutton founded the independent publishing press Dorothy, a Publishing Project, which is now publishing a new book by George.
• This Thursday, from 8 to 10 pm, the Miller Theater will put on a composer portrait of Raphaël Cendo, known for “sonic and kinetic excess as an exploration of ‘saturation.'” Cendo’s music will be performed by Either/Or and Yarn/Wire.

Off campus:

• If you are a grad student in the Columbia School of the Arts and are also looking for an excuse to go downtown this Wednesday, check out the “Columbia School of the Arts/NYU Tisch Partnership Mixer.” The event promises “a brief discussion of the different programs, drinks, networking, and inevitable musical theatre discussions.” Register here.

Photo via The Film Experience

What we all feel like after a typical Saturday night

On Columbia’s underslept campus in the city that never sleeps, late-night eats are usually the highlight of the night. But late at night when your decision-making skills are depleted and your stomach is growling, it’s hard to decide where to pick up a cheap plate of steaming greasy cheese or carbs. Here, Bwog pairs parties and food like fine wine and a cheese platter. Call us the sommelier of Frat Row.

Frat Row – JJ’s:
Keep up the school spirit and camaraderie by ducking into Columbia’s finest institution. Plus, chances are the function will be shut down by 12:53 am, giving you time to sprint over to campus before 1 if you’re from Barnard.

EC – HamDel:
Close and convenient. Make sure you buy an extra sandwich to drop off for the random senior who signed you in. And maybe another for the security guard who didn’t give you the evil eye.

1020 – Koronets:
A match made in heaven. Two MoHi classics that go together like peanut butter and jelly. If you want to take it to the next level, stay at 1020 til closing at 4 and then hop over to Absolute for hot fresh bagels.

600s/Plimpton – MoWill or Appletree:
If you’re coming from a Barnard gathering, stop by Morton Williams or Appletree on your way home. Cop some mac and cheese and ramen, and maybe pick up some eggs or yogurt for tomorrow morning.

Suite, Amity, or somewhere else on Amsterdam: 
Literally just eat the leftover noodles that have been sitting in your fridge all week. Yeah, you’re hungry, but it’s time to go home.

Butler:
Please go home and eat a full meal that includes fiber and protein.

Portrait of the artist as a drunk man via Pixabay

What’s worse: herpes or the pain of spending more than $5 on a single mediocre drink at Starbucks?

You read our “Campus buildings as forms forms of contraception post” (or we hope you did). Here’s our next in the series. We hope you enjoy, and learn something too (about coffee, or sexual health). Remember: STI = sexually transmitted infection.

Blue Java Cafe = Yeast Infection. Technically not an STI, but we are including it. Not the worst, but you also don’t want it. Easily gotten rid of using over-the-counter meds.

ButCafe = Syphilis. It’ll drive you (literally) insane. Harder to cure as time goes on. Highly infectious.

Starbucks = Herpes. More people have this than you’d think. As much as you wanna pretend you’ve never had it, you’ll be stuck with the virus for life. Symptoms can improve. Frappes = genital herpes.

Hungarian Pastry Shop = Chlamydia. Sounds scary but really just takes itself too seriously. You can get rid of this, but it might come back. Interrupts your sex life. You may see profs, TAs, or Sciences Po students posting up here all day.

Oren’s = UTI. Also not technically an STI, but if it were, it would be the basic one. Everyone’s been here. Not great, but not horrible. Conveniently located near Duane Reade, so you can pick up that over-the-counter treatment kit.

Joe’s Coffee = Gonorrhea. Many have been here, but few know it. Easy to miss until you’re inside. If you have symptoms, you’ll know. Curable with antibiotics.

Maxx Café = Hepatitis A, B, or C. Fucks with your liver. Takes a while to walk here. Can be gotten rid of, but can also become chronic. Be careful.

Brownie’s = Trichomoniasis. How exactly do you get here? One of the less common STIs, but if you know, you know.

Up Coffee = Donovanosis. For real though, what is this. Rare STI.

Nous = Public Lice (Crabs). Niche. Not actually an STI, but an insect. Need a graduate student ID to get in.

Coffee via Wikimedia Commons

Does the other side of your room always look like this, too?

After a semester of living together, I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the signs of an impending apocalypse is a night where my roommate comes back to our room before me. No matter if it’s the weekend or a week day, no matter if I get back 8 pm or 3 am, she’s still out, studying in Butler or hanging out with her friends because she’s both a better student and more social than me. However, I feel like there could be an alternative explanation, and I’ve spent the last several months wondering: where could my roommate be going at night? Here are the possibilities I’ve come up with:

• The most obvious: she’s a vampire or werewolf and doesn’t want me to know.
• Less obvious: she’s a Gremlin, and is attempting to convince the JJ’s staff to feed her after midnight.
• She’s pretending to be enrolled at NYU and has to spend the night there to keep up appearances.
• There are 9 feral turtles that live in the John Jay basement, and she feeds them at night,
• She’s attempting to recreate the first splitting of the atom in the Pupin Basement.
• We’ve got a 12 Dancing Princesses situation going on, and she’s dancing the night away in the tunnels under Columbia.
• By day, she’s a Columbia student. By night, she’s working undercover with Public Safety to uncover the source of the weed smell that permeates all of Carman.
• She secretly hates me and never wants to see my face.

Empty bed via Flickr

Sen. 1: What’s Cicero talking about? Sen. 2: Not sure, he hasn’t gotten to the verb yet.

Yesterday afternoon in Hamilton 503, the Classics Department kicked off its semester of Classics Colloquia in style. If you missed this one, fear not: the next colloquium is next Friday, February 2nd, at 4:10 pm in the same place; Nicholas Rynearson will be giving a talk on Socrates in Plato’s dialogues. Bwogger, noted nerd, and potential Classics major Levi Cohen attended this one, however, and discusses it below. Even if the subject matter was, to borrow from Livy, nimia obscuras — “excessively obscure” — it was still a great time.

After a brief nap following my Friday-morning Greek class, I bravely entered Hamilton Hall one last time before the weekend to attend the first of six talks being given this semester by Classics professors from Columbia—and its peer institutions—on a variety of topics. The turnout was solid, with a nice mix of undergrads, postbaccalaureates, grad students, and professors eagerly taking notes throughout the talk.

Our speaker was Hannah Čulík-Baird, a Professor of Classics at Boston University (@opietasanimi on Twitter); the talk was entitled “Vetustas pauca non deprauat, multa tollit — loss and recovery of knowledge in the late Republic.”

For those readers without any Latin, the quotation in the title is from the author Varro, and translates to: “There is little that time does not distort, much it obliterates completely.” It was a fitting header, then, for this talk, which examined a variety of sources so as to develop a picture of how Romans engaged with the concept of their own past.

Hear A LOT about what Cicero has to say after the jump

New drinking game: Take a shot every time you find underwear in an elevator

Happening in the World: A devastating fire in a hospital specializing in care for the elderly in Miryang, South Korea has killed at least 37 people and injured about 130. The cause of the fire is currently unknown, but the owner and manager of the building the hospital is housed in were arrested for malfunctioning sprinkler systems among other safety violations. (BBC)

Happening in the US: Despite opposition from both the left and right, Republicans are beginning to express agreement with Trump’s new immigration policy proposal, with Congressmen like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas calling it “generous and humane.” (US News)

Happening in NYC: Rebekah Mercer, a board member of the American Museum of Natural History, is facing pressure to step down from her position. Hundreds of scientists have endorsed an open letter to Mercer, a long-time donor of several climate change-denying conservative groups, encouraging her to resign. (NYT)

Happening on Campus: Columbia’s MFA Sound Art Winter Exhibition is happening today from 2 to 8 pm! The works presented in the exhibition feature a unique approach to sound, including performance, video, computer programming, and sculpture. Check out the Facebook event here.

Overseen: A pair of underwear in the corner of a John Jay elevator, pictured to the right.

Elevator goodies via Bwogger