Campus Character:
Jeffrey Hunter Northrop II
By Alexander Statman, Illustration by Maxine Keyes

Wise men have said that what is closest is also most distant. So for social and holistic learning, I sought a teacher as widely known as he is little understood. From the hallowed halls of Butler to the fertile fields of the South Lawn, there could be no greater guide along the way to self-improvement than Jeffrey Hunter Northrop II, CC '08.5.

Like most success stories, Jeffrey's began on a wayward path. And like many such paths, it began in Connecticut. As a first-year in 2003, young Jeffrey arrived in the big city and, like St. Augustine, was drawn toward debauchery and sin. "I own up to my actions of freshman year. I deserved a lot of the shit I've been given," Jeffrey recalls.

The five-year-old rumors still fly: St. A's parties and sleepless nights, Barnard girls and Barnard dorms. Everything was out of control, and Jeffrey's life became "unmanageable." So he took a one-year medical leave to put his affairs in order, and has been sober since December 2004. His only remaining chemical vice is a daily hookah habit—one that he indulges morning, noon and night.

The March issue is headed off to the printers, and you've already left for spring break. Still, please enjoy this preview feature from the next BLUE AND WHITE: A look at Brooklyn's next wave of debauchery.

24 Month-Old Party People

Rubulad, the infamous bi-monthly debauch at an apartment-building-turned-commune in the badlands of Brooklyn, is a decidedly grown-up affair. About an hour and a half away from Columbia, it's a converted warehouse that sits in the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, reachable only by switching from the 1 to the A to the G. After arriving at the Classon subway stop, the journeying partygoer must venture about half a mile past two stretches of housing projects, four gas stations and a structure behind a barbed-fence resembling a hybrid of a prison and a hospital.

What I remember of my last bender—ahem—evening spent at Rubulad are attempts to claw my way out through room after room of sweaty, writhing, half naked and less-than-half conscious bodies before my escape was almost thwarted by a man wearing noth- ing but socks. On his feet. Sort of like Resident Evil meets Fear and Loathing, or flophouse meets rave. It's been a while since I've been back.

The February issue is nigh, but a teaser is hither.

You may have seen them walking together down Low steps, just a hair's length closer than the average pair of professional colleagues. Maybe you sat next to them at Brownie's, the architecture school's classy alternative to Ferris Booth, as they nibbled on croissants and talked dryly of the Frankfurt School, or maybe, they even taught one of your classes together. Married professors: they're everywhere on Columbia campus--there's more love in Morningside Heights than you'd think.

An informal investigation yielded about a dozen married professor couples, in a broad range of departments, as well as a pair or two of lovebirds rumored to be "shacking up" together. Getting face time with these power couples proved to be very difficult. As any undergrad is well aware, it is difficult enough to pin down one professor for a meeting, so busy is the academic life. Getting two in the same room at the same time is near impossible. Philosophy professors Philip and Patricia Kitcher are on leave together in Berlin. Professor Janaki Bakhle (history) is on leave as well and her husband, Professor Nicholas Dirks (Vice President for Arts and Sciences, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of History) was in Davos, Switzerland when I requested a sit-down. Professors Andrew (English and American Studies) and Dawn Delbanco (art history) politely declined to be interviewed.

It's coming! We promise! Meanwhile, one more teaser, from our Parisian correspondent Sumaiya Ahmed.

I keep thinking about the hot pink curtains Benoite puts up for wintertime, how she changes them to white for spring. The pink matches the flowers on her balcony, the cyclamens I brought her from a marché the other day. The red, mint greens, and creams in the living room chatter with the colors in her paintings on the walls. The white sunlight falls softly on the wooden floors. On days like this, you say the sunlight is "plat" or flat, Benoite tells me and I repeat it, like everything I hear on the streets or on the metro, in whispers to myself, "plat soleil, plat...."

There is a string of glass beads on every door handle, notes tucked into the edges of a mirror, an evil eye amulet hanging over the toilet paper, a chart tracing the origins of alphabets to ancient Syrian underneath the sink. The apartment is on the fifth floor, sixth to an American, and there is no elevator. On the door outside of the apartment, Benoite has posted a note: "Vous êtes arrivé. C'est bien ici." You have arrived. It's good here.

The December issue will be here soon, hopefully before you all scatter for the holidays. For now, a little teaser while you wait.

Margot at the Wedding
Directed by Noah Baumbach
93 minutes
Now playing

It's hard to miss the academic snobbery of Noah Baumbach's characters in Margot at the Wedding. In his follow-up to The Squid and the Whale, a group of forty-something writers, whose clique centers around the talented and loathsome Margot (Nicole Kidman), drop their intellectual credentials shamelessly. To wit: Margot's husband and lover studied together at Stanford, and her husband teaches at NYU. Her flaky sister spent time at Bennington. And the neighborhood temptress is headed to Harvard, prompting Margot to muse that plenty of "stupid people" get accepted there. And where did Margot study? She issues an answer in two clipped syllables:

"Barnard."

At the screening on the Upper West Side, this line earned gratified chuckles. For the subset of moviegoers who know Columbia, the revelation that Margot went to Barnard grants a new insight into her character. For a moment, we understand Margot's blithe meanness because we—the sophisticated Manhattan intellectuals that we are—see her traits in ourselves, or at least in some of the English majors who walk among us. She is simultaneously overeducated and ill-equipped for human interaction — it makes perfect sense that she is a creature of an insular school on a small island.

The December issue is getting printed somewhere, and meanwhile, a little feature to keep your spirits up.

Emilie Rosenblatt, CC' 08, is of average height and build, unassumingly pretty with straight brown hair and fair skin. In her daily uniform of jeans, a hoodie, and a tank top, at first glance she could be in the admissions brochure of any East Coast private college. But those jeans? They're Baby Phat. And the tank top says "Latina is Beautiful" in rhinestones. When she opens her mouth, it is clearer still that she doesn't fit the mold: she uses a distinctly urban dialect—sounding more like a hip-hop artist than an Ivy League academic—readily admitting that she's not too concerned with colloquial grammar.

And then there's her resume. At one point during our interview, Rosenblatt used the word "myselves." Though it was an accident and she laughed and corrected herself, it was a fitting Freudian slip: her incredibly busy schedule requires a few extra limbs, if not personalities. As an English and African-American Studies double major, Rosenblatt balances an ambitious course load—last semester she took 24 credits. As if that weren't enough to keep her occupied, at only 21 she's already held more jobs than most retirees. As a first-year she worked full-time at Duane Reade—the four P.M. to midnight shift—to compensate for "lousy" financial aid. She's held countless internships, including stints at Grove Atlantic Press, Crotona Park in the Bronx, the Working Families Party and Sean John, and she used to copy-edit for an economics professor specializing in contract law.

The October issue--featuring drugs, 80s movies, and freshman nostalgia--is somewhere between here and New Jersey. While you wait, here's a profile from Andrew Flynn.

This is Jonathan Alonzo Rios, CC '09—though he answers simply to Alonzo, due to both Hispanic heritage and grammar school confusions with five other Jonathans. When he says "Ah-lon-zoh," most think he's English, or perhaps a poseur English major, but the accent is all his own, the anomalous result of a bilingual upbringing. The name, however, is a relative pittance: Alonzo is a man to be known by sight, to be picked out from a distance by his gait—an easy trot, often supported by a cane for an undiagnosed knee ailment—and his dress. Alonzo favors the obscure and the refined: crème-colored fedoras, gold pocket watches, suspenders. In cold weather, his stout frame is draped in black trench coat, his neck wrapped tightly in a wool scarf. When he smokes, which he quite likes to do, his Nat Sherman is frequently wedged in a cigarette holder, bobbing between his faint moustache and slight goatee, kept afloat by a tight, sly grin.

But don't let looks deceive you. To know Alonzo is to know the roles of Alonzo: gracious host, Muslim seeker, language-dabbler, painter, thinker, to-be-writer, night-walker, and, most of all, constant reader. Upon entering his 191^st Street apartment, one must take off one's shoes before padding down the oriental-carpeted hallway to Alonzo's study, a room spacious enough for a sofa, a writing desk, and almost all of the classics of Western and Islamic literature, most in their original languages. (Alonzo's bathroom reading includes Rousseau, Montaigne, and the Iliad in German—"to remind me I should be learning my German.")

The print magazine is rushing here from New Jersey--until it arrives, here's another teaser from B&W Culture Editor Paul Barndt. Art by Shaina Rubin.

The French Evolution: Race, Politics, and the 2005 Riots, works by Alexis Peskine
Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Arts
80 Hanson Place, Brooklyn
Directions: Take the downtown 2/3 to Atlantic Avenue

When I arrived at MoCADA, the Bastille Day party was going strong— consummated with free crêpes in the museum's backyard. The seminal French holiday was an occasion to celebrate not just independence, but MoCADA's current exhibit, "The French Evolution." Founded in 1999 in by Laurie Cumbo, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Arts currently occupies the ground floor of the James E. Davis Arts Building—a several-story space not far into Brooklyn and just down the block from the large Pacific-Atlantic Ave. subway stop— which the Brooklyn Academy of Music allots to various artists and arts organizations (the contemporary music collective "Bang on a Can", for example, has the seventh floor). One such artist, Alexis Peskine, the creator of "French Evolution" is the poster boy for MoCADA's mission— he has French, Russian Jewish, and Afro-Brazilian heritage. He splits his time between Paris, his childhood home, Salvador, Brazil, (where his mother's family lives), Washington, D.C., and New York; he was educated in the States.

The print issue, which we worked hard to put out by Orientation, has been snarled in red tape and will arrive later in the week. But for now, a teaser: Henry Pedersen, as profiled by Hannah Goldfield.

"It's hard to explain," says Henry Pedersen, CC'08, when I inquire as to the nature of his summer job. "Just come over whenever you can. My boss is away, so we're having a barbecue. It's gonna be awesome!"

I showed up in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood around lunchtime, expecting the headquarters of an internet start-up or some obscure grassroots organization. Instead, I found an unmarked gate on a quiet residential street. Out bounded the 6 foot-plus Henry, the picture of oh-so-ironic indie rocker in a worn blue 90s-era tank top and paint-splattered pants, hair cropped short but for a single thick forelock flopped over one eye.

But anyone who saw last year's Varsity Show could surmise that if Henry, who composed it, were going to be in a band, it would be a tribute to Earth, Wind and Fire. He plays bass, French horn, and piano; I once found him struggling to get a baby-upright into his Ruggles dorm room (he failed). And it only takes a short conversation with him to figure out that he vehemently despises anything deemed "indie"—within five minutes of our interview, he referred to his own sister as "hipster scum."

So why the tag-sale look? Pure practicality, of course. He swung the gate open to reveal his office: the courtyard of an apartment complex. Far from the Merrill-ing crowds, Henry was employed as a landlord's handyman.

As you desperately attempt to fill your brain with the Art Hum knowledge you've been neglecting all term, know that there is a light at the end of this exam-ridden tunnel - the print issue, which drops Monday. Herein, Addison Anderson performs a textual analysis of your drunken bullshit.

Great Minds Drink Alike

Abstract:

My target of analysis is the ex post facto retelling of a drunken adventure. What first comes to mind is just how many different narratives are possible for the population of an urban, pedestrian campus. No drunk driving means less dying, and Manhattan's bounty offers thousands of ways to have an awesome night. Now, a look at semantics.

Common Phrases:

1. "Soooo," "waaaasted," "druuunk," etc., as in "I was soooo druuunk last night. I stole some cop's gun and waaaasted him."

Such words are very common in drunk stories. The speaker expresses the extent of something in the story, usually his/her/his own blood alcohol content or how ho(ooo)t someone looked, using vowel lengthening to express this quantity in sound. I call this "quansonance," and I find it not only in stories about drunkenness, but also in the real-time speech of actual drunks. Thus:

Inquirer: I see you're drinking rum. How much have you had?

Drunk: Ruuuum.

Inquirer: Ah, four.

Philosophy

Philosophy is a great major if you have deep insights into the metaphysical puzzlements of human existence. The problem is not the scant few undergrads who have deep insights about the metaphysical puzzlements of human existence, but the glut who think they do. Could you tolerate that guy in CC who thought that Kant's Groundwork was "solidly argued, though ultimately, existentially unconvincing"? He's probably a philosophy major.

And the professors—the people who have made careers of claiming special insight about the nature of existence—think it is a mark of their intellectual prowess not to teach undergraduate classes. Or answer e-mails. Or show up to office hours. When your other liberal arts-majoring friends are struggling to decide which of their chummy professor-friends will write their fellowship recommendations, you'll realize you've never taken a seminar.

But at least you get to sound like hot shit at office parties, right? Think you can drop some Deleuze and Derrida and leave them all fawning? Stop it right there, buddy. That's comp lit. Any real philosopher knows that stuff is crap. And don't even get started about the meaning of life here—there's a reason Columbia has lost three renowned political philosophers in under a decade. Face the facts, dilettante-to-be: a philosophy degree won't even make you a moderately competent poseur.

Art History

Art history requires learning a little about a few disparate topics, and the sum is considerably less than its parts. In Greek Art and Architecture, one learns how to date ancient vases, while in a Gothic architecture survey, one reads arguments about which philosophies influenced the design of 13th century French cathedrals. Then you get to the 20th century, where the shit really hits Duchamp's urinal. Mostly, you learn great sound bites to impress nubile MoMA visitors: Picasso was terrified of contracting VD, and may or may not have actually done so, which may or may not be important to understanding his depictions of women; Mondrian's entire career can be understood as an attempt to produce a completely flat picture plane; Robert Rauschenberg's Monogram is a " very ejaculatory" work. Thank you, Professor Krauss.

It's like, art, dude.

Creative Writing

Everyone's a poet. Still more think they're short story writers or, worse, novelists. Far fewer claim to be playwrights or screenwriters, and thank God for that, because there's nothing quite like reading 20 pages of "fictional" dialogue about the death of someone's beloved sheep dog.

Here are five things to expect as a student in the creative writing program—now a major/concentration: (1) Bad writing. (2) Teachers who are, first and foremost, writers themselves. Some of them are decent, but "those who can't do, teach" is a good rule of thumb. They have one objective only: paying the bills. Some will write detailed comments on your work, and once in a while their feedback might even be coherent and helpful, but for the most part, the graduated grad student sitting at the head of the table does not care about you or your bad writing.

He is too busy being bitter about his first book, which went straight to remainders, and his MFA, which—surprise, surprise—is the most useless degree of them all. (3) Outraged students who don't understand why no one can see the brilliance in their bad writing. (4) "Hills Like White Elephants" by Hemingway. In every class. Every single class. It's a great story; we get it, and we never want to read it again. (5) Bad writing. Very, very bad writing.

Computer Science

You walk into Advanced Programming on the first day and you find a half-empty room. The students that did bother to show up are in it for the free wireless, already actively engaged in leveraging competing job offers from Wall Street firms and scary overseas conglomerates.You shuffle into the back row for a lecture recapping the very topic that got you expelled from high school—when you were twelve. You can't hear yourself think over cell phone chatter and the clacking of keys on E-Trade, the Merrill Lynch website, and CareerTrak.

You should have known something was wrong when you found out that the class met in Hamilton. You're a long way from the Gateway Lab. The comfort of painted cinderblock and linoleum tile are a distant memory.

At some point between long, unkempt beards and the development of the DVD burner, computer science turned its back on nerdiness and became the engineer's Investment Banking major in all but name. These slick, pocket-protector-less yuppies-in-training do not play Dungeons and Dragons; they wear Brooks Brothers suits and spend more time in job interviews than in class.

Those of us who grew up thinking of programming as the domain of an elite community of social outcasts were, in hindsight, idiots. The modern computer scientist isn't a hacker, or outsourced to India—more likely, he bought and sold you six times this morning and didn't even get out of bed to do it. His PC did it for him when the Nikkei opened at 4 a.m.

East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALAC)

At Columbia, you can major in many languages: French, German, even Yiddish. But woe betide the eager beaver who chooses a little-known world language like Chinese—these bits of esoterica fall under the auspices of EALAC. If your destiny lies here, you will soon discover it to be an ill-assembled grab-bag of disciplines vaguely pointing—you guessed it—East.

Language? Check. You must take three years of Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, which will just about get you through a language textbook, or a dinner menu. Disciplinary focus? Check. Choose from topics you didn't want to major in like religion, political science, or economics, and learn how they relate to East Asia. Thesis? Check. It's required, and due months before those of other majors. Disquisitions on the hegemonic, phallocentric discourse of post-industrial Japanese gender identities? Double-check. Get used to this stuff, because you're going cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary whether you like it or not. You might just want to major in Chinese, but for once, the Orient is actually going to give you more than you bargained for.

Music

You've declared yourself a music major, have you? I guess that means one of three things: (1) You weren't quite good enough to get into conservatory, but your musical ego wouldn't admit defeat. (2) You actually did get into conservatory but turned them down because your academic ego wouldn't admit defeat. (3) You're one of the elite(ist) Columbia-Juilliard joint-degree students who likes stroking both egos at once. In any event, welcome to the madness.

As a music major you'll be spending a lot of time in Dodge Hall, one of Columbia's most colorful, dysfunctional locales. The entrance is located in the coldest wind-tunnel on campus, but despite the harsh winter weather, there are always three or four music/film grad students in thick-rimmed glasses smoking unfiltered cigarettes outside the door. You'll have every class in the same shitty classroom on the sixth floor, but keep clear of the office at the end of the hall—sleeping monsters dwell within. The powers-that-be guard the key-codes to all the classrooms ruthlessly, so you'll have to find your own devious ways to acquire them if you want a decent space to practice or rehearse. But that's okay—there's no performance requirement. You're not here to play music. You're here to theorize about it.

In which Bwog continues in its fine tradition of shamelessness and provides you with a sneak-peek at our upcoming issue. In this installment, Addison Anderson takes on Columbia's newest Guilty Pleasure: The Gates.

Soap Dispensable

When The Blue and White discovered that CTV was launching a new soap opera, The Gates, we rued the limitations of our medium. We too want sex! Emo! Technicolor! But we can merely imagine how the script of a Columbia'd-out The OC would look.

SCENE 1

GAVIN FISTOL, innocent square-jawed quarterback, is sitting on the bed of leggy Stressbuster KELLY LANYOVICH.

GAVIN

It sure is nice of you to offer a shoulder massage.

KELLY

(smoldering) You've got a very important shoulder. (touching his shoulders)

Ooh, so much tension.

GAVIN

I know. I shouldn't worry about my classes so much.

KELLY

Let me help you unwind.

KELLY tears GAVIN's shirt off.

GAVIN

Um.

KELLY

Yeah?

GAVIN

Jeez-louise, Kelly, haven't you heard that consent is sexy?

KELLY

But is it (raises eyebrow) sexiest? Now shut up and kiss me!

Continue reading after the jump!

In which Bwog shamelessly plugs the November issue of the Blue and White, beginning with Paul Barndt's review of a video game several orders of magnitude wimpier than Grand Theft Auto, for all you Election Day shut-ins.

Bully
Rockstar Games
Playstation 2
$39.99

Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto III is the Star Wars (Episode IV) of video games. GTA has spawned numerous sequels and brazen imitators like Saints Row and the forthcoming Crackdown, creating a new genre of "sandbox" games—a name that reflects their strengths and limitations.

The sandboxes contain vast, wide-open landscapes with few constraints, where the kid (or mass murderer) in you can get lost for hours; they are also plagued by choppy graphics and sloppy gameplay. But the style and sophistication of Bully, Rockstar's latest, proves that it's possible to think, yes, outside the sandbox.

A few things that Bwog noticed on the Columbia Homepage this morning:

- Rich man (Bill Gates) gives another rich man's (Warren Buffett)
money to a third rich man (Jeff Sachs) to, eventually, help poor

- Administration puff paper takes note of Bwog idea, interviews faculty bloggers

Also, two of our favorite banners from the homepage, each picturing a campus personality featured in our October Issue, which will hit dorms and libraries imminently! See if you can spot who we're talking about.