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OPINION
Preoccupied by Pre-Fab
| Aug 20Buster Keaton knows how to poke fun at modernity. In the filmmaker’s 1920 silent comedy “One Week,” Keaton and his wife spend seven days burdened by an unusual wedding gift: a prefabricated home. The film serves as a most suitable opening to MoMA’s new exhibition, Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, curated by Chief Curator of Architecture and Design and Columbia Architectural History Professor Barry Bergdoll.
An Ode to Los Angeles Even Woody Allen May Like
By Fran Bodomo
| Aug 19
Woody Allen’s Manhattan comes up the most when speaking of the interesting visual perspectives and black and white photography of In Search of a Midnight Kiss, Alex Holdrige’s new beautifully captured homage to Los Angeles. But given Woody’s vocal hatred of the City of Angels, the comparison can feel contradictory as we watch the sun-drenched, parking lot-filled, and apocalyptically empty Downtown LA. The city serves as a backdrop for the impromptu roamings of Wilson and Vivian, two twenty-somethings verging on thirty-somethings, who search not for sweeping romance nor for existential answers, but for all the drive and hope and change symbolized in the midnight kiss on New Year’s.
Always the Brideshead, Never Quite Right
| Aug 9There's at least one occasion on which Julian Jarrold's new film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic novel Brideshead Revisited could be indispensable. If you're assigned the novel for a class, don't want to actually read it, and need to develop a passing familiarity with its basic plot and thematic structures, look no further!
Protesting Nichiren Shoshu’s Use of Miller Theatre
By Lisa Kawai
| Mar 17
On Sunday, May 18, the fundamentalist “Nichiren Shoshu”—or The True Sect of Nichiren—Buddhist Temple will be holding a 1 p.m. meeting at Miller Theatre. As a member of Columbia’s Buddhism for Global Peace club, I am concerned about this event and will be in front of Miller Theatre in protest.
Measuring Our Emotional Quotient
| May 13No faculty can complain about such evidence of superlative student IQ. But what about our EQ—emotional quotient? Certainly there have been few attempts to measure emotional intelligence because it lacks the precision of a grade point average or SAT score.
Greatness—Out of Reach
| Aug 20I can almost feel tears welling up in my eyes at the last scene of What We Do Is Secret, the new biopic about 1970s Los Angeles punk band The Germs. The band’s visionary frontman is disintegrating on camera, dying of an intentional heroin overdose, while the incredulous guitar player watches mourning fans circling the body of a fallen rock star on television.
A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Whiskey Go Down
By Shane Ferro
| Aug 9
I got drunk on behalf of Spectator a few nights ago--at the Museum of Natural History, no less. Besides being a metaphor for my life at Columbia, the event was also a celebration of a great American cocktail, the mint julep.
[title of show] Wills Itself to Broadway
By Laura Hedli
| Aug 5
It’s like a gift within a gift that just keeps on giving, the matryoshka doll of the theater if you will. [title of show], or [tos] for short, is a musical about two average Joes writing a musical.
Reflections of a First Year
By Sean Udell
| May 13
I think it would be worthwhile to discover other ways to sustain this schoolwide unification, so that we can still be happy and unified during the parts of the year where we don’t have random elements like the sun to bring us all together. To do this, though, we need to find something that we can all coalesce around. Finding that “something” should be one of our goals for the coming academic year.
The 'Ad Hoc' Stuff of Publishing
By John Mascari
| May 5
Admittedly, I joined Spectator freshman year for the opportunity to help manage an autonomous company, rather than because of an interest in newspapers. The publisher at the time ran me through her long list of day-to-day responsibilities and concluded, “That’s what I can think of off of the top of my head, but the most exciting stuff is ad hoc.” I was impressed.
