Hi there. In an article this week in the Indy’s Arts section, I talk a little bit about William Hundley’s SWEET floating fabric artwork.
Here are a few pics with quotes from an exclusive interview with The Indy.
“I typically shoot with friends and we are cracking up most the time. The funny thing is that I never officially learned the photographic process. My college career consisted of painting, drawing, and sculpture classes. I never took a photography class, but I was always taking photos. It is as though my photos were just a way for me to quickly record my ideas so that I could revisit them later in another medium. Somewhere along the way my photographs became the art as opposed to just being a step in the process.”
“I have never really liked pictures of myself, so that might explain part of the identity-less aspect of my photos. I am working with ways to steal other people’s personality and conceal my own. I think we all share unconscious thoughts, but have learned to experience our lives independently. “
“Art can communicate on so many non-verbal and personal levels. Language can be such a barrier and I feel the more we communicate these non-verbal ideas to one another visually and structurally the more we understand our own existence and where we might be going.”
At the beginning of this year, I accidentally visited www.mail.harvard.edu looking for my webmail. I was surprised to find a Harvard gmail applet there. Apparently gmail won’t work with any @fas email accounts; instead it requires the @mail.harvard.edu address. I googled it and found that, low and behold, this is a pilot program for the graduate school of design, of all people.
….what about the undergraduates, Harvard? Do we not merit any gmail goodness?
One of the more unfortunate outcomes of Sex and the City’s success (other than the obsession with rabbit vibrators–seriously, ladies, there are other kinds. Variety IS the spice of life) is TV’s scramble to find its replacement. For example, the upcoming Literary Superstars, a SATC-style take on the publishing industry. Matthew Reilly, an Australian thriller writer, wrote the pilot, which will star Jenna Elfman, the aggressively quirky star of Dharma & Greg.
Reilly, 33, described the series as a Sex And The City-style view of the literary industry. Its opening scene involves Elfman, who plays a book publicist, at a launch in her underwear. “[Publishing] is a funny world,” Reilly said.
I suppose TV is fairly saturated with police procedurals, forcing a thriller writer to strike out in a different direction. But another ditsy urban female who gets into embarrassing scraps and makes faces? Is that really necessary? Of course, before we get Literary Superstars, we’ll have to run the gauntlet of Lipstick Jungle and Cashmere Mafia–one from the writer of SATC, the other from the producer. Awkward!
Can we please just bring back Roseanne? She was funny, she was awesome, she was married to John Goodman, and she didn’t tacitly encourage the purchase of $500 dollar shoes.
I’ve never been a big fan of IvyGate (from hereon referred to as “IvyHate”), and not just because I happen to know a bubbly little sex blogger named Lena Chen who they plagiarized from a month or two ago. I don’t know who they are or where they’re from- nor do I really care- but they strike me as a gang of self-serving (what the Crimson would call “masturbatory”) Yalies out to drown their own social inhibitions in bitter stabs at their rival college. In fact, it is difficult to take the “Ivy” in their title seriously when 17 of the 30 front page posts refer to either how awesome Yale is or how terrible Harvard is.
One of the posts in particular caught my eye. It was in reference to a certain Greek pop sensation currently matriculated here, and his amazing new hit single (and hot music video). Granted, I am a bit biased, and have probably exhibited my obsession with all things Petros (aka Peter Shields ‘09) on these pages before. Before I continue on to the IvyHate analysis of this almost-masterpiece, independently made with music by the man himself, I’d like to let you all judge for yourself:
Tacky? Yes. Kind of Creepy? Yes. Awesome? Definitely. Of course, fun apolitical pop seems not to be IvyGate’s cup of tea, particularly if it involves Harvard kids and Catholicism. Jacob Savage, the supposed “writer” responsible for this unnecessarily angry post takes the opportunity to express his deep-seeded envy of free-spirited (I believe the term he uses is “shameless”) young Harvard men going where they’ve never gone before: the cheesy pop world, and taking some bootylicious Harvard girls with him (Emily Cregg, the protagonist of the video, holds more than her own writhing on that bed there). Savage treats frivolity like a crime, as if somehow it was sinful for Ivy Leaguers to spend there time on anything other than philosophical debates and anti-Bush protests (are problem sets worthy of our time, Jacob?). Half the post is a series of cheap shots against Harvard girls, and the other an attack on Petros himself for putting himself out there in such a way.
I could forgive Savage only because of the comments of several Ivy Leaguers in response to his post. Varying in wit from “the dumber the girls are, the hotter they are” to “eeww” to “GGGAAAAAAAAYYYYYY!!!”, the IvyHate comment section reads surprisingly similarly to my own home in the boxing world, Ringtalk.com, where the average comment sounds something like “Your just another intelluctuel asshole that dosn’t know what the hell your talking about.”
My heart can’t help but sink when I think that my colleagues at other Ivy Leagues could possibly even remotely resemble the drunken heteronormative construction workers that frequent Ringtalk, or, worse, that IvyHate would allow such comments on their site, one that is supposedly respectable. How could they allow such horrid comments in response to an article based completely in typical Yalie envy and haphazard Facebook sleuthing?
Speaking of Facebook sleuthing, I did find one Harvard girl IvyHate seems to find quite hot, a woman who some falsely claim to be the Ann Coulter of the class of 2009 (I like to reserve that title to myself, thank you very much). In this article on the high-brow, low-IQ Aryan princess Lucy Morrow Caldwell, you will find an extremely strange post in the comments section.
Hey-
Please watch your language on the comment boards. We love having comments and hearing your takes. While things like “self-serving” are OK, hateful personal attacks are not, and we will delete such comments if we see them.
Thanks,
IvyGate
Oh, so little miss “I love rape and racism” needs IvyHate to be a gentleman to her, but a Harvard student of legitimate talent and cultural value gets to sit by the sidelines and be personally offended? Defending the worst thing to come out of Harvard since ex-RedIvy co-editor Christopher Bruno Lacaria (who apparently insists on writing his articles in archaic Latin) is IvyHate’s way of promoting the subsequent downfall of our institution’s reputation. While Yale is still living down the undergraduate career of George W. Bush (great president, terrible frat boy), Harvard is enjoying being the alma mater of Conan O’Brien and Rivers Cuomo. Let the IvyHate people have their way, and in ten years we’ll be known as the hellhole that spawned both Caldwell and Lacaria. Nice try, IvyGate. We know what you’re up to.
I’ll admit to some skepticism at the announcement that we’d now be able to track the shuttle in real time, thanks to actual GPS equipment installed on the buses. The Boston Globe puts the start-up cost of the program at $150,000, which, memo to Dean Pilbeam, would buy a lot of PBR. But the Globe also mentions another exciting development, which is that the Harvard Square Business Association will be offering free wireless “outdoors from the Inn at Harvard to the Charles Hotel to the Cambridge Common, according to Denise Jillson, executive director of the business association.”
This is great for Harvard students, as it prevents the GPS from being a complete waste of time (let’s face it, when you’re shivering in front of Boyleston is when you want to know where the shuttle is NOW), but it’s also great for those who can’t just walk over to the Science Center and jump on the Harvard wireless network. While I wouldn’t want to see everyone in the square glued to a laptop screen, it’s nice not to have to buy a $4.00 latte to get internet access.
My seventh-grade science teacher used to (and probably still does) refer to James Watson and Frances Crick as “Watson and Prick.” Her comments were in reference to Watson and Crick’s…appropriation of Rosalind Franklin’s experimental data on DNA, which allowed them, in effect, to skip ahead several steps and piece together the double helix structure.
But my teacher was willing to be fair: Crick, she told us, actually had the reputation of being a nice guy, despite his involvement in underhanded lab maneuvering. Watson was the real jerk.
Well, it appears that her comments didn’t exactly come out of left field. Far from it, in fact. Watson has a long history of horribly offensive remarks on the subject of genetic traits (which the CNN article recounts). He seems to think that his and Crick’s discovery offers a possible explanation for gross stereotypes: Must be genetic.
This particular round of controversy stems from remarks made to London’s Sunday Times (article available here) in an interview–in Arts and Entertainment–for his latest memoir. (He also makes comments in the interview about Rosalind Franklin’s alleged horrible awkwardness and hostility, speculating that she had Asperger’s.) A sample of the most offensive comments from the interview:
He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.
What’s really sad about this remark is how much it looks like the nineteenth-century’s pseudo-scientific justifications for racial oppression and slavery. This comment is probably already prominently displayed on racist messageboards and white supremacist pamphlets.
Watson thinks that his words are merely speculations in the spirit of scientific inquiry, and the right to consider all possibilities is essential to science. But Watson isn’t working for better understanding or good science with these remarks. Their destructiveness, to science and to society, far outweighs their merit. Plenty of people are already convinced that those of African descent are inferior, and they won’t treat Watson’s comments as possibilities, but as confirmation of what they already know–the very antithesis of the scientific method.
Simply put, with remarks like these, Watson is destroying his own legacy, encouraging the proliferation of preconceptions and stereotypes. He’s spouting very old, very wrong ideas about the differences between peoples and with no evidence beyond a horrible kind of “conventional wisdom”–the enemy of the rational, skeptical inquirer.
