Be on the lookout for the November and December issues of The Blue & White, on campus this week everywhere you look in Butler. As we always have done, Bwog will honor our heritage/amorous affair with our mother magazine by posting features from the upcoming issue. Below, Tom Humphreys asks a very important question: who chooses the movies at 1020?

Illustration by Louise McCune

A man walks into a bar in which a bad movie plays on several TV screens. Thirty minutes later, he freezes. “Wait…why are they playing Donnie Darko? Wait, wait, wait, that’s not Donnie Darko…why are they playing…the sequel to Donnie Darko?” This man is at 1020, where taste is relative and, perhaps, ultimately irrelevant.

The second favorite Morningside dive bar of the staff of The Blue & White (Tap-a-Keg takes the cake), 1020 has a tradition of favoring, shall we say, unorthodox cinema. Except for special occasions, the bar shuns traditional options such as Top Gun or baseball. Whether screening the atypically cerebral (Mulholland Drive), the disturbingly grim (Monster), the grotesquely violent (District 9), or the shockingly insignificant (Cuba Gooding Jr.’s direct-to-DVD works), patrons have come to expect, and even revere, the not-quite-irony of the screenings and their environs.

The reason turns out not to be as sinister as might be feared. Friday night bartender Thalia Dergham, CC ’12, explains, “Nobody ‘picks’ the movies at 1020. We simply pick a channel at the beginning of the night and usually leave it on unless something particularly disturbing comes on, even though usually when that happens we leave it on anyways.” She recalls Silence of the Lambs and The Lovely Bones as two—ahem—favorites. “The bartenders usually don’t know what is play- ing, because their backs are turned to the screens, so it’s a bit useless to ask them,” Dergham explains with a laugh. It appears that the randomness of 1020’s lineup is, indeed, random.

Just because the selection is governed by serendipity doesn’t mean that there is no accountability. 1020 lore has it that one Wednesday this semester, an uncensored porn movie ran for almost ten minutes. Eventually a middle-aged woman inquired at the bar. “I just wanted to see how long it would last,” the bartender replied.

Editors note: Last night Bwog was intrigued and disturbed by the insane samurai movie playing at 1020. If you have any information about this film, please email tips@bwog.com

Be on the lookout for the December issue of The Blue & White, on campus this week. In the meantime, Bwog will honor our heritage/amorous affair with our mother magazine by posting features from the upcoming issue. Such treats include a breakdown of Barnard’s budget woes, a look at Columbia’s proposal for a new engineering campus, and the politics of space in Lerner. Below, Helen Bao gets an update on Columbia’s latest real estate acquisition.

Illustration by Liz Lee

Students can be a little noisier than nuns,” admits Vice President of Campus Services Scott Wright. That’s discomforting to nearby residents of St. Hilda’s House, the convent on 113th and Riverside that Columbia is in the process of converting into a dorm.

Per Columbia tradition, neighbors were invited to a town hall meeting where some expressed concern about the possible increase in noise. Not everybody objects to the new arrangement, however. Keren Blum, Co-Director of the Chabad Resource Center at Columbia, lives close to St. Hilda’s. She explains, “[W]e were so excited that Columbia bought them because we were hoping that students would move in so we can service them more [...] If they make noise, I wouldn’t mind.”

Read more…

Illustration by Maddy Kloss, CC '12

Be on the lookout for the December issue of The Blue & White, arriving on campus this week. In the meantime, Bwog will honor our heritage/amorous affair with our mother magazine by posting features from the upcoming issue. Such treats include a breakdown of Barnard’s budget woes, a look at Columbia’s proposal for a new engineering campus, and the politics of space in Lerner. Below is our profile of campus character Dan Weinstein.

“I feel like I spend my time on all these different things, but I just can’t think of any of them,” Dan Weinstein, CC’ 12, says sheepishly as he pauses from rattling off a incomprehensible list of accomplishments, hobbies, and experiences.

Weinstein’s involvement in Columbia’s community has been so widespread that most students have probably met him in some capacity. He’s been involved in COÖP since freshman year, and has served as a leader for COBOP, its biking orientation program, since sophomore year. “I love it a lot,” he reflects. “I just think that being outdoors is the number one bonding experience you can possibly have [...] and it is cool to know a subset of the incoming freshman class each year.”

But even those who wouldn’t dare pass the city limits owe Weinstein thanks for his part in another Columbia tradition: Bacchanal. As current president and a former concert chair, Weinstein was responsible for bringing Whiz Kalifa, Ghostface Killah, and Of Montreal to campus in 2010, and Das Racist and Snoop Dogg this past year. Though the club has recently been plagued by budget issues, Weinstein remains positive, and takes great pride in having the opportunity to “choose the direction of the biggest event on campus other than graduation.” His favorite part is building relationships with all of the musicians. “They’re some of the weirdest people to work with,” he laughs.
Read more…

Illustration by Eloise Owens

Be on the lookout for the December issue of The Blue & White, which will be arriving on campus this week. In the meantime, Bwog will honor our heritage/amorous affair with our mother magazine by posting features from the upcoming issue. Such treats include a breakdown of Barnard’s budget woes, a look at Columbia’s proposal for a new engineering campus, and the politics of space in Lerner. Below, find the transcript of our interview with Todd Gitlin.

Columbia Journalism School Professor Todd Gitlin first immersed himself in protest culture when he got involved with New Left political activism in the 1960s. After a stint in the underground intellectual and writing culture, Gitlin turned to academia, becoming a prominent public intellectual and prolific author. He has recently asserted himself as a prominent and informed voice in the debates about the Occupy Wall Street movement, upon which he is currently writing a book. Gitlin recently found the time to sit down with Blue & White contributor Anna Bahr to discuss the trajectory, politics, and core values of the movement.

The Blue & White: In the last month the majority of media attention on the movement has been more focused on police brutality than what Occupy Wall Street has actually been accomplishing. Do you think the shift in focus has negatively affected the purpose of OWS? Can you comment on the vilification of the police force?

Todd Gitlin: Right after the eviction [from Zuccotti Park], I was hearing a lot of indignation and outrage about the police tactics and [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg. That was about two and a half weeks ago and it seems to have faded. In the conversations I’ve had since them with people since then, with people who had been deeply involved, there wasn’t that much about the police. They rolled up their sleeves and started to address other issues.

In terms of the outer impression, it probably looks to people who have not been paying such close attention that the big story is this collision, the confrontation. That always happens whenever there’s violence—that’s what happens.

B&W: Has the public and media attention on instances of violence detracted from the effectiveness of the movement’s other efforts?
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As reported by basically everyone, Stanford has withdrawn its bid to construct a science and engineering campus in New York as part of Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign to reinvigorate the city’s reputation as a technology hub. Proposals from Columbia, Cornell, NYU, and Carnegie Mellon are still under consideration. Originally considered a front-runner in the competition, Stanford claims to have withdrawn due to an inability for the school and city to “reach an agreement on a number of points, including whether the school could withdraw from the project without penalties” and the decision was “partly a result of the different cultures and expectations of a private university and a major city,” according to a Bloomberg source.

We reported on the announcement that Columbia had made it to the Mayor’s “short list” of proposals a few weeks back. In their December issue the Blue & White examines in-depth the impact of Columbia’s plan, which conveniently fits into the grand Manhattanville strategy. Look out for the print magazine on campus next week!

Illustration by Eduardo Santana, CC '13

From the Issue: Bloomberg Means Business, Again

“We have presidential candidates who don’t even believe in science… it’s mind-boggling!” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg exclaimed at a recent international economic forum on Columbia’s campus. Science has certainly been on Bloomberg’s mind of late (not to mention for most of his life—he did, after all, make his name as a tech entrepreneur before it was cool). After his early-morning eviction of Zuccotti Park, his most publicized crusade over the past few months aims to reinvent New York as the next Silicon Valley. The mayor has called for universities all over the world to submit proposals for new tech campuses within the city.

Bloomberg extended the invitation on July 19th, promising free city land and $100 million in funding to the winning plan. The mayor speculated enthusias- tically that the innovation (and the further innovation it sparks) could bring the city $6 billion in economic activity, and somewhere around 400 new companies with 22,000 new permanent jobs—what he called a “real game changer for this city.”

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Columbia recently updated its sexual assault policy. In the latest issue of The Blue & White, staff writer Anna Bahr weighed in on the changes. Be sure to look out for the December issue soon to hit the presses.

Zero tolerance implies an uncompromising, absolute application of law. When the phrase appears as the ironclad final word on sexual assault in university handbooks, those two words make perfect political, ideological sense: sexual assault is a crime punishable by United States law. It follows, then, that the Columbia administration states in its newly renamed and significantly revised “Gender-Based Misconduct Policy” that it “does not tolerate any kind of gender-based discrimination or harassment.”

Of course, in reality, the math is not so simple. If zero were zero, every student in violation of the policy would be expelled without a second thought. Reality does not accommodate such exacting demands. If it did, some fraction of the 39 reported sex offenses committed by students on Columbia’s campus and in residence halls between 2008 and 2010 would have resulted in expulsion.

Though Columbia is not permitted to release any information regarding its sexual assault investigations, the administration has a reputation for issuing lenient sanctions for offenders of the policy. The Columbia Daily Spectator reported that the first expulsion for sexual violence in nine years occurred just last year. As President Bollinger commented in December, “If it is true that no one has been expelled for sexual assault… My view is that that’s a problem.” He went on to add that he had no immediate intention to review the assault policy.

But someone did. Columbia’s sexual assault policy underwent major changes over the summer. The last major overhaul of the policy occurred in 2000 when the university’s response to sexual violence on campus was formally consolidated into the “Sexual Assault Policy.” The policy has sustained minor revisions over the course of the decade, but its newest incarnation demonstrates the university’s renewed commitment to serious and comprehensive treatment of assault.

Read more…

We're hoping he tried to order a sausage pizza

So as to continue this wonderful recent trend in overheard/seen pleasantries, now a gossip gem from the Harvest issue of the Blue and White:

One recent Saturday night, a drunken blond gentleman tried to order Koronet* pizza with his jeans pooled around his feet and his eerily transparent boxers on full display. When the cashier refused him entry, the young lad addressed him as, “Papi,” told him to “fuck off,” and then spun around, bent down and flashed the entirety of his ass. He then ran outside and hailed a cab, but before making his final exit, he decided to come back Koronet’s entryway and flash his balls.

*Editor’s note: we debated for a good five minutes whether it’s Koronet or Koronet’s. Verdict: technically it’s Koronet, but colloquially we’ll stick with Koronet’s.

Gratuitious meat addition via Wikimedia

Keep your eyes open for the October issue of The Blue & White, which, after a delay from the printers, has finally arrived to campus! In the meantime, Bwog will honor our heritage/amorous affair with our mother magazine by posting highlights of the upcoming issue online. Among the treats to look forward to: Knickerbocker Motorsports: a surprisingly gripping history, an examination of Columbia’s updated sexual assault policy, and the festive search for magic on campus. In Campus Characters, the Blue & White introduces you to a handful of Columbians who are up to interesting and extraordinary things and whose stories beg to be shared. In the current issue, staff writer Sam Herzog profiles the ever energetic Brandon Thompson, CC’12. 

Illustration by Maddy Kloss

Keep your eyes open for the October issue of The Blue & White, which, after a delay from the printers, has finally arrived to campus! In the meantime, Bwog will honor our heritage/amorous affair with our mother magazine by posting highlights of the upcoming issue online. Among the treats to look forward to: Knickerbocker Motorsports: a surprisingly gripping history, an examination of Columbia’s updated sexual assault policy, and the festive search for magic on campus. This month, contributor Austin Williams tells you why the Columbia housing shortage does and does not exist.

Illustration by Marie Nganele

If you take the number of deed listings in New York City’s ACRIS property database as a proxy for power, three men emerge as the synecdochic kings of New York real estate: Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, Michael Rubens Bloomberg, and Lee Carroll Bollinger. That is, the Pope, the Mayor, and the 19th President of Columbia University. Our institution, placing third behind the City of New York and the Catholic Church, owns a hell of a lot of the most coveted real estate on earth. Scores of city lots, the vast majority of them on the isle of Manhattan, are under the control of the Trustees. Yet you or someone you know was forced into Plimpton.

Maybe they had a bad lottery number. Maybe their group fell apart in suite selection. Bottom line, Columbia’s promise of four years of guaranteed housing sometimes yields a the lonely life of a Plimptonian instead of the cozy experience of Ruggles.

This is only one symptom of an unpredictable, and somewhat unsavory, last minute solution to the crisis of an undergraduate housing shortage. The signs are everywhere: your laziest friends take the 1 to class from their 89 sq ft plot in the recently-acquired Harmony Hall (because it’s cheaper than a cab); and your author, who took leave and thus forsook his four year guaranteed housing birthright, couldn’t even snag a Wien single.

The University, through Scott Wright, Vice President of Student Auxiliary and Business Services, does not deny it’s a problem. “There is a shortage of undergraduate housing—that’s not just a perception, that’s a reality—and to compensate for that shortage what we do is create what we loosely refer to as ‘temporary beds.’” These temporary beds are the rooms in places like Barnard’s Plimpton, or in University Apartment Housing (residence units in Morningside, but also in Washington Heights, Manhattan Valley, and Riverdale, usually reserved for graduate, General Studies, fellows, and faculty or staff), or in the East Campus hotel traditionally for university guests, where you will eat, sleep, study, get drunk, and make one or many kinds of love for the nine-month academic year. These beds are temporary only in the long, administrative view. To the Columbians who inhabit them, temporary beds are as good as permanent.
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Keep your eyes open for the October issue of The Blue & White, which, after a delay from the printers, has finally arrived to campus! In the meantime, Bwog will honor our heritage/amorous affair with our mother magazine by posting highlights of the upcoming issue online. Among the treats to look forward to: Knickerbocker Motorsports: a surprisingly gripping history, an examination of Columbia’s updated sexual assault policy, and the festive search for magic on campus. This month, man about town and contributor Eric Wohlstadter bares his ankles … and his soul (on the issue of cuffing your pants).

Illustration by Emily Lazerwitz

Keep your eyes open for the October issue of The Blue & White, which, after a delay from the printers, has finally arrived to campus! In the meantime, Bwog will honor our heritage/amorous affair with our mother magazine by posting highlights of the upcoming issue online. Among the treats to look forward to: Knickerbocker Motorsports: a surprisingly gripping history, an examination of Columbia’s updated sexual assault policy, and the festive search for magic on campus. In case you did not know, regarded Columbia history professor Richard Bulliet, outside of his academic career, writes fiction. Of his five novels to date, all seem to give a shocking importance to camels, or other equivalent quadrupeds. Below, staff writer Matthew Schantz and senior editor Brian Wagner approach this myster, with close readings analyses of passages from (in this order) Bulliet’s Kicked to Death by a Camel and The One-Donkey Solution: A Satire.

Kicked to Death by a Camel

“…I told [Gino] that I only studied the history of camels and had no intention of getting to know them that closely. Apparently [Gino] just walks out until he finds someone with a camel and asks them to give him a ride. Personally, I think it’s rather stupid. You get on the damn thing; some guy leads you around for an hour until you have a sore ass; and then you pay him money. Ridiculous.” (27)

Camel-researcher Roger’s complaint delineates the dichotomy between those who act and those who study. If we allow ourselves to view Gino not only as a literal fellow traveler, but a “fellow traveler” as the term is used for a communist sympathizer, Roger’s griping hints at the ramifications of never engaging in an activity that one judges. Gino, like the fellow travelers, enters the fray without subscribing to ideology—he “walks out until he finds someone with a camel,” displaying his unbridled gusto to engage with the situation, without assuming it will end well or poorly ahead of time. Likewise, fellow travelers, though they sympathized with communists, did not join the party, thus refusing to blindly swallow communist dogma.

Gino’s nationality reinforces this reading. During the time-period in which the term “fellow-traveler” was in vogue, the Italian government’s stability fluctuated wildly. Thus, the Italians do not subscribe to predetermined readings of their surroundings.

Gino provides the negative space into which Roger’s prejudices emerge, starkly contrasted. Roger, like many Americans during the Cold War, immediately assumes that the Other (the camel rider, the Communist) is bad, dangerous, unknowable, and conflates multiple social taboos. Roger’s description of Gino’s camel riding practices suggests Gino is soliciting sex: Gino pays money to an anonymous “guy” for an hour that will end with “a sore ass.” By heaping socially pre-established taboos upon each other, Roger demonstrates the extent of his blindness. Read more…

Keep your eyes open for the October issue of The Blue & White, coming soon to campus. Until then, Bwog will honor our heritage/amorous affair with our mother magazine by posting highlights of the upcoming issue online. Among the treats to look forward to: Knickerbocker Motorsports: a surprisingly gripping history, an examination of Columbia’s updated sexual assault policy, and the festive search for magic on campus. Here, senior editor Sam Schube reveals how professors decorate their snazzy offices.

Illustration by Stephen Davan

A headless kouros welcomes visitors to the Media Center at the Department of Art History and Archeology. Poking around the space reveals a large African mask, crafted mostly from straw, and an original Piranesi print. The Department is luxuriously appointed, as might be expected. But in a city of owners, the Department remains a renter—the pieces are all on loan from Avery Library’s Art Properties collection.

As it turns out, any old professor can outfit his or her digs with Columbia’s finest paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures. Interested parties contact Carole Ann Fabian, Avery’s director and presently the acting curator for Art Properties, with a request for art. Fabian then dispatches the office’s more technically-minded for a security assessment of the space in question; certain spaces are hospitable to durable sculptures (think swinging backpacks), and others are better-lit for paintings. Then, Fabian schedules an interview: a “holistic approach to assigning art to a person,” she says. They’ll talk about the professor’s field of study, interests, and artistic tastes—they really do care about finding pieces a happy, thematically appropriate home. Fabian then invites the art-seeker to Avery’s storage space, where he or she can choose from a number of preselected viable works.

After the piece is settled upon, the two parties sign an official loan contract, transferring responsibility for any damage or loss onto the professor, and the work is soon hauled onto its new wall, podium, or desk. Sometimes those swinging backpacks take a toll and an unlucky professor discovers a steep bill for a work’s conservation, repair, or replacement.

Artwork is rarely lost, though they’re occasionally “lost;” Fabian carefully mentions that crimes are prosecuted with the all the bumbling force of Public Safety—also, the NYPD. Typically, the paintings stay where they are, and “culturally enrich life at the University,” from their various offices and seminar rooms, as Fabian puts it.

She couldn’t divulge what PrezBo’s got hanging above his bed—but we imagine he gets his pick of the collection.

Keep your eyes open for the October issue of The Blue & White, coming soon to campus. Until then, Bwog will honor our heritage/amorous affair with our mother magazine by posting highlights of the upcoming issue online. Among the treats to look forward to: Knickerbocker Motorsports: a surprisingly gripping history, an examination of Columbia’s updated sexual assault policy, and the festive search for magic on campus. Here, contributors Matthew Schantz and Alex Jones debate the merits of Times New Roman.

Illustration by Sevan Gatsby

Quite frankly, I don’t understand what there is to debate. Times New Roman is the definitive standard for properly written communication, and deviating from the norm is merely a lazy exercise in subversion—not to mention how dreadfully gauche it is. One simply cannot concede to the baser elements of our society, and choosing something like Cambria (or, heaven forbid, Verdana) is just not done in polite company. Times New Roman’s ubiquity and long-reigning dominance are reason enough to enforce the strictest embargo on competing modes of typographical illustration.

The finest flourishes of ink adorn every letter, rendering each beautifully-crafted word as muscular and balanced as an ancient temple facade. One does not merely type with Times New Roman; one works with the very building blocks of communication. Yet this typeface is far from garish. The serifed font is adorned, but in a humble way—like Christmas trees for poors. Whether it is placed upon a cordial country club invitation or a sharp resumé, no letter will seem out of place. So quickly would I dismiss a cover letter printed in Tahoma—to say nothing of bourgeois Helvetica!

This begs the question: when has Comic Sans ever done the world any good? What are TAs supposed to think of a literary analysis presented like a third grade birthday invitation? Aesthetics aside, some fonts betray an unsavory symbolism—what is Arial but a hammer and sickle in disguise? Cambria is naught but an unworthy usurper to the throne of the default setting (a curse upon the house of the cult of heedless, sloppy innovation at Microsoft). We make mistakes (everyone has mistaken Papyrus for quick-track class once in their lives), but could you envision any time when Wingdings or Dingbats would be appropriate fonts? Can you even seriously say “Wingdings” or “Dingbats” aloud? Computers boast an astronomical number of font options, yet the vast majority of them are completely worthless—mere placeholders to give pull down menus an illusion of depth.

Every modern, decent society necessitates stability, and such stability stems from the ineffable wisdom of our forebears, born out by the travails of time. It was no group of lowly peasants who crafted these computers and software programs, nor flippant graduate students who envisioned the unbreakable rules of collegiate paper conventions, and it likewise was no accident that they chose Times New Roman as the gold standard. And it is quite clear, I believe, that any recent transition to so-called “alternative” default fonts is the unfortunate result of misguided attempts at “hipness”—a hopeless and uninformed play at rebellion.

Read more…

Keep your eyes open for the October issue of The Blue & White, coming soon to campus. Until then, Bwog will honor our heritage/amorous affair with our mother magazine by posting highlights of the upcoming issue online. Among the treats to look forward to: a debate on the merits of Times New Roman, an examination of Columbia’s updated sexual assault policy, and the festive search for magic on campus. Here, contributor Will Holt tells how Knickerbocker Motorsports became a Formula SAE contender.

Illustration by Liz Lee

Unless you happened to catch the Formula One-style race car sitting on College Walk during the activities fair back in September, Knickerbocker Motorsports probably means nothing to you. So, if the name Formula SAE sounds like an alternative to breast milk, here is some explanation.

Organized by the Society of Automotive Engineers and founded in 1978, Formula FSAE is an intercollegiate design competition in which students develop Formula-style race cars that are meant to serve as prototypes for a hypothetical autocross racer. The competitions are set up on the premise that a fictional manufacturing company has hired a team to design this prototype, which runs a full gamut of tests–from overall design to fuel economy–to gauge its viability as a production item.

Columbia University’s chapter of Formula SAE arose in 1997. “Then it was only five to six guys building the entire car themselves,” said Columbia FSAE’s current president, Christopher Correa-Henschke, SEAS ’12. “Their goal was to design and build a chassis.” The two inaugural engines came from a junkyard, and the team spent the majority of its time those first few months stockpiling materials for the years ahead. According to the organization’s website, alumnus Steven Wang built the team’s first chassis himself in the summer of 1998, “spending months in the back of the Wind Tunnel lab with his welder and the tubing.” After graduating, he went on to design for Ford.

“It was just so undermanned, then,” said the club’s vice president, Sakina Pasha, BC ’13. “We didn’t have our first [full] car ready for competition until 2004.”

Nowadays FSAE is currently the only student-run organization on campus to have its own home base, a garage in Mudd that no other student organization has access to. Their $30,000 yearly budget is a considerable help. Building a car from scratch is expensive business.

It’s the team’s effort rather than Columbia’s money that matters, and the evidence is manifest. The FSAE workshop in the basement of Mudd is a cluttered array of power tools, machinery and car parts. The trash bins are filled with tangled wires, takeout boxes, and empty beer bottles from all-night shop sessions. Stepping through the door, one feels as if on the set of Discovery Channel’s Monster Garage, but with someone considerably less intimidating than Jesse James at the helm.

Correa-Henschke’s leadership and that of his immediate predecessors is paying off: FSAE has been growing at an incredible rate, from 15 students in 2004 to 55 students this fall. Whereas the original incarnation of FSAE had the luxury of a small and close-knit group of dedicated gearheads, Correa-Henschke now oversees 10 separate systems operating simultaneously.

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