Bwog respects our heritage/amorous affair by posting each issue of The Blue & White. The latest issue, available this week, is a cornucopia of delights: a gripping debate on the merits of shaving, tales of Columbia’s forgotten protests, and profiles of two truly awesome students, among others. In the Conversation, the magazine locates a cool person, and sits down to talk to them for the benefit of all—simple as that. This month, we sat down with Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere fame.

Illustration by Eloise Owens

If you happened to be looking up while walking through Union Square one night in March, 2005, you might have witnessed a peculiar scene. The windows of the Whole Foods building on 14th Street were filled with people doing enthusiastic jumping jacks in perfect unison. A few of the jumpers also held poster board letters which, together, urged their audience to “Look Up More.”

Commanding the troops on the ground with hand-signals was Charlie Todd, the founder of Improv Everywhere. According to the group’s website, “Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places.” Improv Everywhere has orchestrated dozens of large-scale pranks throughout New York City, including the annual No Pants Subway Ride. Todd is also a performer at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre in Manhattan, and the author of Causing a Scene, a book about Improv Everywhere’s exploits. Blue & White senior editor Hannah Lepow sat down with Todd to learn about pranks from the master.

The Blue & White: So your last mission featured a lone, clumsy ice skater stranded and falling down on the rink at Bryant Park when the ice was cleared, only to turn out to be a professional figure skater. How did you come up with that idea?

Charlie Todd: Two of the more senior members of Improv Everywhere—Matt Adams and Katie Sokoler, my main video person and my main photographer – they happened to be in Bryant Park and they saw something similar. They saw a guy kind of struggling to leave the ice when it was time for the Zamboni clearing. And I think he fell a couple times and a lot of people were watching and kind of laughing. And they suggested the idea to me of trying to find a professional skater who could be in that situation and then all of the sudden start skating really well.

B&W: It looked like the people who were watching really got a kick out of it, but there did seem to be some mixed reactions.

CT: Yeah I’ve kind of been surprised. A lot of the YouTube comments (which you can never take too much stock in because often it’s just 14-year-olds), but a lot of people had the reaction of being angry that people watching were laughing instead of helping. But I don’t think they understood the situation. They couldn’t just run out there and help him. There was a wall all around the ice.

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Bwog respects our heritage/amorous affair by posting each issue of The Blue & White. The latest issue, available this week, is a cornucopia of delights: a gripping debate on the merits of shaving, tales of Columbia’s forgotten protests, and profiles of two truly awesome students, among others. Here, the staff of Bwog and The Blue & White presents a collection of brief personals. Valentine’s Day is long gone, but they are presented nonetheless, because even magazine writers need to find love.

Seeking Men

Illustration by Maddy Kloss

Artist wants to spread her creative juices all over your canvas. (5553)

I’ll swallow anything organic. (5233)

London native ready to influence your Strokes with her Kinks. (6317)

Always looking to recruit new staffs. (3025)

Do you want some candy? (3025)

Francophile wants more than Frenching. (4336)

Be my coxswain, and I’ll stroke your boat. (5558)

Put your rabbit into my hat, and we can make some magic together. (5608)

Hey, actually, I’m all set. Great. Tanks! (6290)

Religion major seeks someone to uncover her mystery rites. (6411)

London export interested in trade negotiations. (3270)

I prefer “law stylist.” 30 Rock enthusiast seeks one last college fling before professionalism sets in. (3223)

Don’t miss my Times announcement! (6290)

Be my Chaplin, and I’ll be your table dance. (6434)

Never schmaltzy, up for waltzing, so take her home to meet your Bubbe already. (6313)

Episodically erotic, unfailingly neurotic. (2491)

Sweater vest up! (4925)

Choli ke piche kya hai? Let me show you. (2051)

Ladyplayer seeks game, videogame. (4710)

Dinosaur lover searching for bone. (5482)

Electrical engineer wants to feel a spark with a boy who won’t charge. (4981)

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Bwog respects our heritage/amorous affair by posting each issue of The Blue & White. The latest issue, available this week, is a cornucopia of delights: an exploration of Columbia’s graffiti sub-culture, a foray into our Facebook pasts, and an introduction to Morton Williams’s ticker, among other delights. At Two Swords’ Length” is a feature presenting opposing opinions on an issue. This month, Mark Hay and Hannah L. face off on one of the biggest decisions a college student faces … to shave, or not to shave?

Affirmative

I am a heavily forested man and damn proud of it. When a boy starts pushing up foliage, that is when he knows he has become a man, all other activities of the pituitary gland be damned. No offense to those with alopecia areata, of course.

The fact that you could skin me and turn me into a carpet is how I know I am not just a man, but a strong, beautiful beast. But if Disney taught me nothing else, it is that every beast must groom away some of his coarse nature to snag his belle. (That was the point of that movie, right?)

Six months is exactly enough time to see everything you can in another human being and form a rationale for never, ever wanting to see her snaggle-toothed, over-made-up, vacant-eyed face ever again. Sure, I see flaws in my current entanglement, but Buddha knows why, I’ve come to like Hannah’s snaggleteeth. And I know she does not appreciate coming away from an encounter with thick, curly black hairs stuck in her smile.

Maybe there was an allure to my fuzz at first. Running her hands through something with the texture of a Persian rug—that is a luxurious experience you don’t get with most men. Hair, and lots of it, gives you an air of rugged virility and mystery. A grizzled mane with a healthy sheen is the choicest of aphrodisiacs.

But, if that novelty passes, what then? I can admit that hair, everywhere may have some downsides.

The natural bouquet of my skin is a potent pheromonal snare, worthy of inclusion in that Ben Whishaw movie Perfume. Yet I’ll admit hair has a habit of trapping the aroma of anything that enters, exits, or just passes by. It pushes down my musk and mingles it with the basest of odors. And in the heat of passion, all of the stewing scents by my roots boil and bubble, and as her face approaches my flesh I can only imagine that I must sometimes smell like a sewage treatment plant in the dead of summer. (more…)

You might not know the following figure—but you should. 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. If you’d like to suggest a Campus Character, send us an email at editors@theblueandwhite.org. From the current issue, Senior Editor Carolyn Ruvkun profiles Erica Weaver, CC ’12.

Illustration by Chloe Eichler

Erica Weaver, CC ’12, passionately plunges into the past. The medieval enthusiast speaks Old and Middle English, composes poetry on a typewriter, and studies ancient manuscript writing. She keeps a list of unusual and intriguing words handy: baroque, equinox, wanderer, dastardly, rutabaga, toothsome. Weaver almost always wears flouncy retro dresses. Her stockings sometimes have foxes on them.

And it isn’t an act. You could practically pluck Weaver from a sepia photograph. Though she does seem to live in another world, her friend Danica Damplo, CC ’12, clarifies her nostalgic sensibilities. “Erica prefers to focus on the world of medieval literature as if it is existing at the same time as this one,” Damplo explains. “She’s not completely in another world, but when she does delve, she lives it as if it’s existing.”

“Sometimes I romanticize the past and think I should just live in a monastery,” Weaver wistfully trails off. “But there are lots of modern conveniences,” she concedes. A self-proclaimed Southern girl, Weaver grew up in Norfolk, Virginia immersed in a culture clinging to a problematic past. She enthusiastically relays the equal sense of discovery she feels reading Faulkner and studying medieval manuscripts. “The book in the Middle Ages was such a physical artifact,” she explains, as she illustrates the painstaking process of creating and preserving a manuscript with gestures. Weaver doesn’t just recount stories—she acts them out, adopting the mannerisms of each character.

With the same infectious energy, Weaver creates goofy videos for each of her friends’ birthdays and explains the medieval punctus, a trademark of her writing. The earliest form of punctuation in manuscripts, the medieval punctus serves as an alternative to the hyphen or period by marking an “unspecified turn in the thought process” and adding “more ambiguity to the poetic line.” “But everyone in writer’s house refers to it as the Erica dot,” she jokes. (more…)

Bwog respects our heritage/amorous affair by posting each issue of The Blue & White. The latest issue, available this week, is a cornucopia of delights: a set of unimaginably raunchy personals for the staff (they’re anonymous), an account of a foray into the oft-forgotten Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, and the story of that greenhouse on top of Milbank Hall (all available soon on Bwog). Here, staff writers and Bwog daily editors Brian Wagner, Conor Skelding, Grant D’Avino, and Peter Sterne (in that order) tell the tales of forgotten Columbia protests.

Illustration by Cindy Pan

Though many Columbia students take pride in the university’s history of student activism, a strange amnesia often strikes our collective memory of the years following the 1968 protests. We cannot and will not forget the newsmaking violence of the spring of ’68, but our glorification of “1968” is more than a fascination with those incidents. 1968 stands for a time when Columbia students were politically and socially opinionated, committed, and courageous. We forget, if we were ever told, that Columbia students have taken risks to make themselves heard dozens of times since 1968. They staged sit-ins, organized protested, disrupted university operations. And yes, they even took over buildings.

In the following pages, The Blue & White profiles four notable protests since 1968 and the students who led them. They have written the histories of student activism, outrage, and speech on campus for the past four decades, but as you turn these pages, dear readers, consider that the future is for you to write.

1983—Apartheid Divestment

To force an end to South Africa’s apartheid policies, the United Nations recommended throughout the 1980s that all national governments divest (remove all ties and investments) from companies doing business in that country. Students across America urged their schools to divest as well, and soon protests were erupting on dozens of campuses. At Columbia, the issue came into the spotlight once the university trustees rejected a University Senate proposal for divestment in 1983. Students took no direct action just then, but support for divestment grew gradually until, two years later, the students rose up in a collective action that the university could not ignore.

Illustration by Stephen Davan

In late March 1985, seven students began a hunger strike to pressure the university to remove all financial ties to South Africa. The administration had already frozen its investments in all firms doing business there, but the protesters would only settle for full divestment—the withdrawal of all funds from any activity connected to South Africa or apartheid laws. Students first rallied on Low Plaza in April, 150 of them then marched to Hamilton, chained the doors, and blockaded the front entrance. The protesters allowed a handful of professors access to Hamilton through an alternate entrance, but urged the professors to support them by not holding classes. Among others, Dewitt Clinton Professor of History Eric Foner and the late history professor James Shenton publicly showed support for the student movement. The protest also gained momentum from the visits of folk singer Pete Seeger and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who praised the students’ “willingness to suffer for a principle.”

The administration, hesitant to call the police, sought to resolve the conflict through legal action. They filed a case against the Hamilton Hall protesters in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan for illegally occupying private property. (more…)

Bwog respects our heritage/amorous affair by posting each issue of The Blue and White. The latest issue, available this week, has a lot of good stuff: a debate on the relative merits of shaving or not, the history of Columbia’s forgotten post-1968 protests, and a conversation with Improv Everywhere’s Charlie Todd (all available soon on Bwog). From this issue’s cover, Mark Hay explores Columbia’s graffiti sub-culture.

Illustration by Louise McCune

Back in Berkeley, СИЛА (pronounced see-lah, now a Columbia student) was an active tagger. Her Russian nom de guerre could be found stenciled and sprayed throughout the areas she frequented, woven among a tapestry of others. СИЛА was just one member of an active tagging community, composed of supporters, artists, self-promoters, and droves of amateur hipsters toting around spray cans in their messenger bags as part of the “look.” As СИЛА says, “tagging can be used to signify or solicit membership in a particular ‘scene,’” and so should be expected of youths, especially anxious youths searching for an identity—never in short supply at a college. But one will never see a СИЛА tag in even the most remote corners of campus, and rarely find any form of graffiti at all. Columbia is immaculate.

Or at least it is becoming more so. According to Dan Held, Director of Communications for Columbia University Facilities, “In 2010 there were 12 recorded incidents of graffiti on campus.” But as we learned in 2007, at the height of a “graffiti epidemic” on campus covered by The Spectator and on Bwog, most graffiti here is isolated, obscure, and personally directed— think anti-Semitic scrawl on a bathroom door, more than systematic branding. And it all vanishes almost instantaneously. The university’s focus is on keeping the campus pristine—vandalism is handled by facilities, not public safety, and is only reported to the police if it contains a bias incident (racial slur, assault message, etc.).

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You might not know the following figure—but you should. 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. If you’d like to suggest a Campus Character, send us an email at editors@theblueandwhite.org. Staff writer Liz Jacob profiles Phillip Dupree, SEAS ’11.

For many Columbia students, December 19, 2009 marks a night to remember: the biggest campus-wide snowball fight in recent memory. The man responsible is Phillip Dupree, SEAS ’11. What began as a simple desire to ease finals stress turned into a snow battle of epic proportions—by the early evening on December 19th the Facebook event boasted nearly 600 attendees. Dupree climbed onto Alma Mater as the throngs gathered on Low Plaza. As if parting the Red Sea with his staff, he commanded his followers to vacate a central space and form two teams. To his surprise, they obeyed. And with a “3-2-1 ATTACK!!!,” the battle began. As Dupree’s friend Katie Lupica, CC ’11, describes the snowball fight, “Other than Holi (the annual Hindu festival on Ancel Plaza), it’s pretty much the only campus event I’ve been to that was so genuinely joyful and irony-free. I think that’s pretty descriptive of Phillip as well.”

Whether describing an ornithopter for an engineering project or explaining his interests in Parkour and longboarding, Dupree radiates that irony-free enthusiasm. Take a random day Dupree spent in the city during the summer of his junior year: he had originally planned to check out a music video being shot near the Queensboro Bridge, but he returned home late that night as both a music video star (the original actor never showed up) and the proud owner of a new longboard (won in a competition while waiting for a costume change). Despite the adventurousness of that day, Dupree doesn’t think intrepidity is necessary for a fun time. “You don’t have to search high and low for something crazy to do,” he says, “but you do have to put yourself out there, make tiny, interesting choices, and watch where they lead you.”

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It is our habit to respect out heritage/amorous affair by posting each issue of The Blue and White. The latest issue, available this week, has a lot of cool stuff in it. In one blast-from-the-past article, staff writer Lily Icangelo forays into our pre-college Facebook haze.

It is sometimes hard to think of Columbia students as a united tribe. We are not a college whose sense of community is wrought by a collective despair at being stranded in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees and bears and unpaved roads. But deep in the annals of Facebook there lies proof that we all do have something in common—the inelegant, gauche, social anxiety of those post-acceptance, pre-college months—when we had yet to arrive but could think of nothing else. We may not have agreed on politics or the perfect prospie profile picture, but we all shared the need for reassurance that we were not alone in our excitement and anxiety.

Facebook’s “Class of…” groups satisfied that need, providing a cool blue salve for the raw wounds of newly admitted students, wrenched from their cozy high school cliques by selective (or perhaps arbitrary) admissions letters. The administration creates these official “welcome” groups for recently admitted students every year, to help them get to know their fellow almost-freshmen and connect them with current students. Students must be invited or confirm their admission to Columbia in order to join their official class group; other students start unofficial and open groups that fill with spam after students arrive in Morningside and eventually lose interest. Though the groups of both types quickly recede into the haze of their members’ memories along with the likes of NSOP and AlcoholEDU, the conversations on the group message boards that once ruthlessly tossed you from valiant crests to deep troughs of the waves of pre-collegiate popularity remain preserved there like mosquitoes frozen in amber. (more…)

In the latest issue of The Blue & White, available this week, staff writer Sylvie Krekow discovers enlightenment while in line at Morton Williams.

Illustration by Liz Lee

Calling itself the “University Super Store,” the Morton Williams supermarket on 116th Street and Broadway has a storied, eight-year history on campus as the home of overpriced goods, under-enthusiastic employees, and walls adorned with photographic Columbia idolatry. But for all its—shall we say—character, it is one single piece of technology that gives Morton Williams the upper hand in the battle for neighborhood grocery supremacy: the ticker, a half-functioning beacon of knowledge and inspiration that hangs from the ceiling’s perimeter and scrolls quotes like “WHAT DO SNOWMEN EAT FOR BREAKFAST? SNOWFLAKES – AUTHOR UNKNOWN!” across its blinking, red LED matrix.

As with any sign, the ticker theoretically communicates messages to the store’s customers. It’s really okay, for example, that you just paid way too much for that Haagen Dazs because “AUTHOR UNKNOWN!” can cheer you up with a clever pun. But the ticker’s high, out-of-the-way placement means that customers often overlook it. Even one Morton Williams employee was surprised to learn of the ticker’s existence when we pointed it out to her during an interview.

Those who do happen upon the mythic ticker may have their shopping experience brightened by the food-related quotes from William Shakespeare. Or the wisdom that “COOKERY IS NOT CHEMISTRY. IT IS AN ART. IT REQUIRES INSTINCT AND TASTE RATHER THAN EXACT MEASUREMENTS,” a quotation from some man named Marcel Boulestin who presumably had something to do with food before he died. Or, maybe he’s still alive—your guess is as good as ours on this one. Morton Williams’s manager couldn’t offer us much help, either: “We don’t pick the quotes. They come in the machine pre-loaded,” he said.

So to that nameless signmaker out there who apparently gave up a career as a littérateur to become a mere letterer, we hope you take comfort in the fact your ticker has enlightened us. But we do urge you to reconsider your profession. Pursue your passion for literature before it’s too late, for as your own ticker says, “THE APPETITES OF THE STOMACH AND THE PALATE, FAR FROM DIMINISHING AS MEN GROW OLDER, GO ON INCREASING – CICERO.”