Last month, senior music major Steve Eaton presented his thesis composition. The performance was broken into two sections. In the first, the audience sat in typical fashion, facing the musicians as they played. The last piece of the first section was two minutes long. The song consisted of one chord, played once and sustained over the duration of the piece. The movement of the song was all in the flux and change of the chord as the wavelengths gradually distended, warped, and eventually faded.
Or rather, your notion of the face in Baudelaire is evasive. Poetry’s stock has fallen; that of the novel, the short story—that of prose—has risen. The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books have run articles addressing the … Read More
In an episode of The Simpsons, Ned Flanders goes mad. Lashing out wildly at every person in the town of Springfield, Flanders’ acid tongue finally rests on Lisa Simpson, the town know-it-all. “And here is Lisa,” Flanders snaps, “Springfield’s answer … Read More
When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, the world marveled at how quickly a superpower could unravel. But for Serguei Oushakine, all it took to knock down Communist Russia was a good book.
When I stepped into the René Magritte exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I stepped into a Magritte painting. The artist in many of his paintings depicted the ultimate “common man,” pudgy and ambivalent in bowler hat, … Read More
Jess is the President of her campus’s pro-choice group, Rider University Vox. She has also been moonlighting as a saleswoman for a sex toy company since January. Pink pro-choice posters hung behind the display table last Friday night in the Terrace library, where she had arranged a mélange of dildos, vibrators, bottles, and anal beads for her sex toy demonstration.
It is not often that I feel like a cultural alien. My formative years, which afforded me the priceless opportunity to forge a fine intellect and noble character, were instead spent imbibing cable TV, movies, magazines and every significant album in the rock and rap canons. I therefore know the weight and nuance of the associations borne by words such as ʻNascarʼ and ʻCristalʼ and can deploy them to well calibrated effect. In the past year, however, I have felt myself socially crippled when faced with jokes, insights and analogies that hinged on understanding of the nature and habits of a human type known as ʻThe Hipsterʼ, a type with whom I was only vaguely acquainted.
When I meet Howard Nuer ’07, a Hassidic Jewish student, three Sundays ago in his room, I am struck most by his bookshelf—filled to the gills with advanced math books and Hebrew scripture. The math major sits relaxed at his … Read More
Last Thursday afternoon at about 4:10 I might have had one of the worst moments in my Princeton Career thus far. It was raining. It was two and a half weeks until my marathon and I couldn’t walk without limping … Read More
I am a Polonophobe by origin, tradition, and right. My ancestors on my mother’s side of the family, Swabians and Hungarians, come from the plains of the Neckar and the Danube, and probably looked at anything north of the latter … Read More
Since the advent of the internet, the intimacy that we feel with our pop songs has changed. When content is so utterly customizable, taste is automatically effected; musical taste can now be articulated in a broad spectral slate of enumerations—the … Read More
Miss Victoria Lace and Miss Cee’Mour Cox, two professional drag queens, held court at the All Ivy Drag Competition on Frist Campus Center’s South Lawn. “Let’s see what’s edible,” Victoria commented ominously to Cee’Mour near the beginning of the show as they scanned the audience in the tent for “tasty” men.