Spar was last spotted in front of Barnard Hall in the pouring rain, blasting James Blunt through a speaker and shouting “Take me back!”

Last year, Debora L. Spar resigned her position as 7^th president of Barnard College. She was on her way to bigger and better things, like the presidency of Lincoln Center (the complex which hosts the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, and many other performing arts organizations). This was a fantastic opportunity by any standards, so the Barnard community saw her off into this new chapter of her life with gratitude and respect.

This Friday, she quit.

In a New York Times article released this morning, DSpar was quoted as saying: “Moving from academia to the performing arts world pushed me to think, learn and lead in new ways. While we have achieved a lot together over the past year, I have also questioned whether the role is right for me. As I looked back on the last 12 months, I ultimately determined that the fit I’d hoped for has not materialized. It is for this reason that I have decided it is best for the organization for me to step aside.”

She is not the first Lincoln Center president to resign suddenly. Her predecessor, Jed Bernstein, was forced to step down after 27 months. Gordon J. Davis resigned in 2001 after only 9 months. Seems like a more stressful job than managing a women’s liberal arts college, though that’s hard to imagine.

DSpar’s tenure as president was marked primarily by an unsuccessful attempt to renovate the New York Philharmonic’s David Geffen Hall, due to a lack of support from wealthy donors. Lincoln Center announced in October that they were proceeding with a simplified plan to improve the hall.

After the article was posted on the Facebook page Overheard @ Barnard, DSpar received no shortage of smug comments from Barnard students. “WHOSE TREES WILL BE DESTROYED NEXT?? FIND OUT AFTER THE BREAK,” said Nina Gonzalez Silas. “When corporate feminism does you dirty in the end,” quipped Victoria Martinez.

Poor DSpar. Let’s hope she finds a new organization to be president of soon – a nice, non-stressful one with very few trees.

My bad on that one via Wikimedia Commons

I thought we said NO CAPES.

While you’re enjoying Bacchanal (or shivering your butt off), Columbia’s teams are busy taking on Ivy opponents.

Baseball: The Lions (8-18, 4-2 Ivy) head up to Hanover this weekend to take on Dartmouth (5-13, 1-1-1 Ivy) in their first conference roadtrip of the season. Columbia is currently tied with Yale for first place; the Bulldogs will take on last-place Cornell this weekend. The Lions are coming off a midweek 7-6 win against St. Johns, while the Big Green haven’t played since going 1-1-1 against Penn last weekend. Although Dartmouth swept Columbia last year, the Light Blue are in a much better position to take the series this weekend.

Men’s Tennis: Columbia travels to Penn (12-9, 1-0 Ivy) today for its first Ivy game of the season at 2 pm, then plays a home match against Princeton (15-8, 0-1 Ivy) on Sunday at 1 pm. The 11-3 Lions are ranked 15th going into the weekend and have dominated both teams in previous seasons. Penn and Princeton both opened conference play last weekend, when Penn beat Princeton 6-1.

Women’s Tennis: After a resounding victory over defending Ivy League Champion Cornell last weekend, women’s tennis (9-5, 1-0 Ivy) takes on Penn (7-9, 0-1 Ivy) today at 1 pm and travels to Princeton (13-3, 1-0 Ivy) on Sunday for another 1 pm game. Last weekend, Princeton took down Penn 5-2 in their conference openers.

Forced Incredibles reference via gocolumbialions.com

A Schapiro single.

Perhaps one of the most conveniently located dorms on campus, Schapiro has nice amenities and decently sized rooms.

Location:

• Nearby dorms: Furnald, Woodbridge, 615 West 115th (LINK), River
• Stores and restaurants: The UPS Store, the 115th halal cart, Morton Williams, Starbucks, Ferris, BookCulture, Sweetgreen, Shake Shack, Nussbaum and Wu

Cost: $9,538/year, like all upperclassmen housing

Amenities:

• Bathrooms: Communal bathrooms, one for men and one for women per floor. Also one ADA single occupancy gender neutral bathroom per floor.
• AC/Heating: Has both. Heating can get pretty hot in the winter.
• Kitchen: Large, nice kitchen in each floor lounge.
• Lounge: One on every floor, with a kitchen, TV, and comfy chairs. Also a building lounge on the ground floor, and a sky lounge on the 17th.
• Laundry: Laundry room in basement.
• Computers/Printing: Computer lab and printer on the first floor.
• Fire Escapes: None.
• Gym: None—the old Schapiro fitness room is now the Stephen Donaldson lounge.
• Bike Storage: None
• Intra-transportation: Three fast elevators.
• Hardwood/Carpet: Hardwood, but linoleum in lounge.
• Bonus: Music practice rooms in basement.

Room variety:

• 245 singles, which are pretty reasonably sized.
• 85 doubles, which are also fairly spacious but sometimes oddly shaped.

Numbers:

• Doubles: 10/2659
• Walkthrough Doubles: 10/2842
• Singles: 10/2395, although this is drastically lower than the AY 2016-17 cutoff of 20/1795. Usually only juniors get Schapiro singles.

Bwog Recommendation:

Schapiro is a solid option for rising juniors who want a single. The location can’t be beat, the rooms are reasonably sized (although not huge), and the lounges are easy to cook in. If you’re a rising sophomore, make sure that the double you’re getting is as big as you think it is. Some have a decent number of square feet, but some of that may not be usable. The laundry room gets crowded during the day. Residents also report some problems with the dryers.

Resident opinions:

• “The stovetops in my lounge smoke when turned on. Fuck that.”
• “The lounge and kitchen are really spacious and it’s nice to have so many places to do homework.”
• “The sky lounge is alright if you’re into that kinda thing. Nice view from it.”
• “The view from the higher floors is really beautiful!”
• “The showers are small and kinda gross but you can only expect so much from a dorm room.”
• From a particularly disgruntled resident: “It seems to attract people who steal shit.”
• From a less disgruntled resident: “It’s a big floor, so there isn’t a lot of community among floormates.”

Not sure why you’d go downtown this weekend, since tomorrow is Bacchanal and Sunday will be recovery-from-Bacchanal Day, but here are the planned subway service changes around MoHi this weekend. Happy travels! 

1: No planned service changes this weekend.

2: No planned service changes around MoHi this weekend.

3: No planned service changes this weekend.

A: Uptown (Inwood-bound) A trains will skip every stop from 72nd to 116th at night from 11 pm to 5 am this Friday through Monday.

B: Service will end early at 8:45 pm on Friday.

C: Uptown (168th-bound) C trains will skip every stop from 72nd to 116th on Friday evening from 9:45 pm to 11:15 pm.

D: No planned service changes around MoHi this weekend.

MTA via Bwog Archives

Note: There are far fewer actors in this production than there are people in this drawing.

This week, the Columbia University School of the Arts New Plays Festival, which features original works by members of the 2018 MFA playwriting class, kicked off at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, where the first two plays of the ten-play festival will debut. One of those two shows is River Rouge, a riveting tale about workers, bosses, love, passion, industry, and art written by Andy Boyd and directed by NJ Agwuna, both of whom are MFA candidates. Bwogger Jake Tibbetts, who couldn’t turn down an opportunity to attend a play written about his favorite Trotskyist muralist, was lucky enough to catch the Thursday night premiere

The title of MFA candidate Andy Boyd’s newest play, River Rouge, may seem fairly self-explanatory upon first glance; after all, the majority of the play takes place at and near the Ford River Rouge Complex, which Diego Rivera visited at the invitation of Edsel Ford in 1932 in order to gain knowledge of the American capitalist mode of production so that he could prepare to paint his Detroit Industry Murals. One only needs, however, to see the first few minutes of the show, which begins with most of the players coming together on stage and singing “Union Maid” by Woody Guthrie, to realize that the significant of the color “rouge” extends far beyond being part of the name of the play’s setting. This work, which focuses primarily (but far from exclusively) on the relationship between revolutionary artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and wealthy industrialists Edsel and Henry Ford, is quite open about where it stands politically, depicting factory managers as almost cartoonish villages and giving its revolutionary characters more than a few opportunities to sing songs like “Union Maid,” “Solidarity Forever,” “Bread and Roses,” and, of course, “The Internationale.” The show is red as hell, and damn proud of it, too.

What is perhaps most fascinating about what this show had to say on a political level, though, is that it refuses to oversimplify complex debates which were relevant in the early 1930s and which remain relevant today. While the tale is a framed as one in which Rivera’s (and Kahlo’s) Marxist view of the world comes into conflict with the realities of capitalist America, Henry Ford, played by Roger Lipson of the Actors’ Equity Association, rejects the label of “capitalist,” as he doesn’t feel that he is motivated by profit. (Marxists, of course, would find this argument laughable.) Edsel Ford, the president of the Ford Motor Company, is depicted as being somewhat sympathetic to Rivera’s views, even if his class interests are fundamentally opposed to the interests of the class that Rivera seeks to uplift through his work. Rivera, an avowed communist, is unable to stop himself from thinking about his desire to increase his revenue. Even when the show seeks to depict divisions that exist between communists and capitalists, those on different sides of those divisions are rarely if ever portrayed as one-dimensional ideologues.

Find out more after the jump

What we aspire all our pregames to be

Happening in the World: Scientists have recently discovered black holes manifested in the center of our galaxy, surrounding other black holes. Columbia’s very own astrophysicist Chuck Hailey published these findings, calling the presence of multiple black holes a “party.” Clearly, astrophysicists don’t need million dollar telescopes to find out bad things manifest around other bad things – just look at any group of Columbia students and a single bottle of Grey Goose. (Reuters)

Happening in the US: In news surprising no one, a party chaperone in Kentucky was arrested for the possession of drugs and alcohol in a house full of teenagers. Police officers who arrived at the scene immediately noticed the smell of weed and the discarded liquor bottles around the house. The 55-year-old chaperone, identified as Thomas Gardner, later confessed to possessing 20 grams of marijuana on top of the present alcohol and weed. Which is louder: the single man in my Barnard seminar or the amount of weed at this guy’s house? (Wear TV)

Happening in NYC: A guard from the Metropolitan Correctional Center has been accused of accepting bribes totaling $45,000 to sneak in a cellphone and alcohol to a prisoner. The jail itself is notorious for housing high profile prisoners, including El Chapo. The guard, identified as Victo Casado of the Bronx, is being charged with fraud. We say: let the prisoners party. (New York Times)

Happening on Campus: With Bacchanal in a little over 24 hours and subsequently very little time until students begin their 24 hour Bacchabenders, Bwog wants everyone to drink water (please) and pace themselves. Don’t puke at the pregame – Ty Dolla $ign would not want that for you.

Bop of the Day:

Party via Good Free Photos