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Sara Fulton ’20 — “The most romantic place in Waltham is definitely the river walk on Moody Street. In the summer, the light glistens on the water just right at sunset, and when you walk with your partner, it’s almost like you’re walking into the sunset. There’s plenty of places to stop and stare and great opportunities for great photos. It’s pretty much what I feel like is a clip from a romantic film in real life.”
As Valentine’s Day comes around every February, we all look for songs to get us into a romantic mood. Often the songs are classical tunes — wordless, sometimes corny melodies replete with string sections. Very rarely, though, are Valentine’s Day songs lacking instruments. Brandeis’ all-male a cappella group VoiceMale sought to change that with its annual variety show “Lovapalooza,” which took place this past Saturday. “Lovapalooza,” however, delivered performances as diverse as the selection of discount candy after the holiday.
Parents, alumni and undergraduate students gathered in the Shapiro Campus Center theater on Sunday afternoon to see the Hooked on Tap (HOT) semester show: “HOT Off the Press!” HOT is an all-inclusive tap group that is completely student-run and all their pieces are student-directed and choreographed.
Money Magazine named the City of Waltham the best place to live in Massachusetts in an annual list of the best places to live in each of the 50 states. The list is based on affordability, economic and educational performance, safety, convenience and a “pleasant way of life.”
One message resounded clearly at the Conversations in Global Health Services Delivery forum on Thursday evening: One person really can make a big difference. The forum, part of 2018’s ’DEIS Impact social justice festival, featured four panelists who described the challenges and opportunities they encountered during their time abroad.
The Senate convened for its weekly meeting on Sunday, voting on two Senate Money Resolutions.
Kicking off the first day of ’DEIS Impact, the University’s festival of social justice, students and faculty joined together on Thursday to discuss the necessity of establishing a department at Brandeis that focuses on the origins of Asian-American activism.
Theaters these days are full of fast-paced movies with modern filmmaking techniques and complex story structures, but sometimes one needs to step on the brakes and go back almost a century to the films that introduced these practices we now take for granted. One must return to the golden age of cinema, to the Hollywood of the late 1920s to early 1960s. So, amid the oncoming onslaught of summer blockbusters which seems to come to theaters earlier and earlier every year (I’m looking at you “Black Panther,” “Tomb Raider” and “Pacific Rim: Uprising”), it seemed just to attend an on-campus screening of a Buster Keaton film.
On Jan. 28, the 60th annual Grammy Awards, held in New York City, continued the long and storied tradition of honoring the complete mediocrity that the Recording Academy strives for. Once again, the Grammys chose to elevate bland and predictable pop acts over cutting-edge hip-hop and rap artists. Bruno Mars’ milquetoast pop retread “24 Karat Magic” bested far more worthy contenders like Kendrick Lamar’s “DAMN.” and Childish Gambino’s “Awaken, My Love!” for album of the year, repeating the annual cycle of hip-hop being kept out of the top spot by any means necessary. Once again, the Grammys have marked themselves as the laughingstock of the award season, hopelessly out of touch with anything close to the cultural zeitgeist and seemingly clueless to music’s current form. Disturbingly, the Recording Academy seems to care less about artistic integrity or creativity and more about ensuring a basic standard of whiteness and complacency is maintained in its top honors. If the album of the year winner isn’t an accessible and inoffensive white pop album, it’s an oddball album from white industry veterans the Academy should have honored years ago, like Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories” or Beck’s “Morning Phase.” The last album of the year that can be charitably described as anything close to a daring pick is Outkast’s 2004 LP “Speakerboxx/The Love Below,” a legitimately forward-thinking album that only won because of the runaway success of its lone traditional stab at pop songwriting, the smash hit single “Hey Ya.” Since then, no hip-hop album has ever won album of the year, despite the wealth of fantastic works in the genre and its meteoric rise as the dominant form of popular music. No matter the pick, the logic behind it is always the same. The Grammys are only capable of looking backward, clinging dearly to musical artifacts and outdated preconceptions. Mars’ “24 Karat Magic” is a hollow replica of classic R&B albums like Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life” and Janet Jackson’s “Control”, containing all their flair but none of their punch or immediacy. Traditionalist pop and rock acts always manage to find their way into the top spot, cultural relevance or critical acclaim be damned. Any remotely daring album put out by a Black artist is to be cast aside by the Grammys, regardless of artistic merit.
Golf is about to get rowdy. Starting Jan. 29 and going through Feb. 4, the Waste Management Phoenix Open, dubbed “the greatest show on grass,” is taking place in Scottsdale, Arizona. The tournament is famous for its notorious 16th hole, a par-3 which, with the addition of stadium seating, turns into “the Coliseum.” It’s one of the reasons this tournament has one of the largest galleries of any tournament in the world. Tiger Woods was famously showered with beer by adoring fans after he aced the 16th in 1997.
I think Stephen Colbert said it best on The Late Show on Jan. 23, the night after the 90th annual Oscar nominations were announced: “There are no controversies over lack of diversity. …With no big Oscar snubs, who are we mad at?” While I don’t believe diversity is an indicator of quality, there are very few exceptions to this year’s nominees that I take issue with. It happens to be that the Oscars got most everything right this year. This growing inclusion is more a commentary on the industry than on the quality of the films released in 2017.
Anyone who has seen theater at Brandeis knows the hard work that theater students put into their performances, with several hours of rehearsal culminating in an elaborate performance. At the beginning of the spring semester, however, students perform plays that have only been rehearsed two or three times — and while they are very impressive, they have the unique element of being performed in under 10 minutes.
Psychedelics enthusiasts huddled into the Wasserman Cinematheque at the Brandeis International Business School last Thursday night. The atmosphere did not feel intimate, but rather quite distant, and the entire room smelled heavily of marijuana. The speaker for the event was journalist and filmmaker Hamilton Morris, who shared season two, episode six of his show, “Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia on Vice.” The episode was titled, “A Clandestine Chemist’s Tale.” In his show he explores the history and process of making various psychedelic drugs, from mushrooms to hallucinogenic frog venom. The show has a huge following; even a viewer not interested in partaking in such experiences can find the documentary-style episodes to be actually quite intriguing.
On the first day of 2018, popular YouTube blogger Logan Paul uploaded a video showing close-up footage of a deceased man in Aokigahara, in Japan. In a Jan. 19 interview with Seventeen Magazine, actor Dylan Minnette revealed that season two of popular Netflix series “13 Reasons Why” will delve deeper into the life of the character whose suicide is the focus of the show. The very next day, Paramount Studios dropped the red band trailer for their TV anthology remake of cult classic film “Heathers,” which features teenagers finding posthumous adoration when their murders are staged as suicides.
The Brandeis Sustainability Fund awarded funding to 10 student groups for the 2017-2018 school year, allowing them to bring their environmental initiatives to life on campus and the local Waltham community.
REVIEW — Last Saturday was the premiere of the miniseries “MockU,” a satirical look into a liberal college’s theater department and the politically correct culture enveloping it. The production was the brainchild of its creator, Caroline Kriesen ’20, alongside co-director Emma Bers ’20 and co-writers Zoe Rose ’20, Alan Omori ’20 and Maryam Chishti ’20. This admirable and ambitious student project centered on a group of students from varying backgrounds (arts, pre-law, economics) who plan on participating in an Arts Festival for Diversity and Progress to protest the “Ronald Rump” presidential administration.
REVIEW — There was a full house at Cholmondeley’s Coffee House last Wednesday night for WBRS’ Fresh Comedy Night. The host — Josh Day, a man with more hair than head — opened with a painfully unoriginal joke about not having a joke and followed it with a lowbrow pun. After several more minutes of awkward comedy and uncomfortable laughter, Day introduced Jiayong Li. Originally from Beijing, Li took up comedy five years ago to force himself to “go outside and talk to people.” Despite his apparent discomfort speaking in front of a crowd, Li’s deadpan style and impressive timing generated the first genuine laughs of the evening. His material centered on his experience acclimating to American culture as a Chinese immigrant, and the audience was surprisingly receptive. It is also possible, however, that the Brandeisian crowd was won over by Li’s harsh critique of white liberals. Regardless of the reason, Jiayong Li’s stand-up was thoroughly enjoyable and undeniably funny.
This year’s Midyear Orientation Program welcomed 105 Class of 2021 students and 23 transfer students to the University community.
After the November 2017 armed robbery incident on campus, attendees at the Dec. 7, 2017 student safety forum discussed how to maintain campus safety and improve relations between students and University Police.
On Wednesday, Sodexo’s new app, “Bite,” was launched on the Brandeis campus, according to an email sent by Andy Allen, Brandeis dining service manager. The app has been designed to allow students and users to “view daily menus in the dining halls on campus at any given time” as well as “nutritional and allergen information for each dish, rate dishes, and provide valuable feedback to [Sodexo].”