In case you didn’t notice (or were too drunk/stoned/tired to care), it’s finals week. As you might expect, the folks of Wesleying are a band of procrastinating miscreants, and thus, we are continuing Operation LOL (Liveblog Olin) for a third time. You can find the other two parts here and here.
Sit back, relax, and enjoy the memes.
All-around good guy Yohei Okada ’16 and fairly decent guy Matt Kim ’16 invite you to partake in a tale of crushed grapes, damaged genitalia, and excessive Taiko. While you may have ten papers to write, five exams to study for, three life-sized peep dioramas to make, and a partridge in a pear tree, this is quality study-break material. Enjoy.
The title of this post is not meant rhetorically. It’s a serious question: who killed Spring Fling’s vibe?
Was it the student attendees, some inebriated and inconsiderate, who jumped over the barrier when the floor of the rink was at capacity and allegedly behaved drunkenly and belligerently when asked to back up? (“Some students ought to be ashamed of themselves,” observed a witness who asked to remain anonymous.) Was it the massive security detail (Public Safety and CSC) who guarded every nook and cranny with the graveness of airport TSA agents and reportedly physically abused one student and verbally harassed another? Was it the organizers (Spring Fling Committee or otherwise) who neglected to inform students in advance that they would be turned away if they arrived late, even while other students were visibly exiting, and flipped on the lights shortly before Ab-Soul’s set, possibly to punish students for failing to obey orders that were largely unintelligible over the ice rink’s cavernous din? Or was it the fucking weather, or maybe Spurrier-Snyder Rink itself, which has never seemed like a less suitable venue for a free, unticketed performance by one of the fastest rising rappers in the world in 2013? At least it wasn’t Kendrick Lamar, who, despite subpar conditions and acoustics better suited to a high school gym, performed “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” “Money Trees,” and other highlights from Good Kid, M.A.A.D City with admirable energy and charisma, wooing throngs of adoring fans who knew precisely how to yell out “Drank!” or “Ya bish!” on cue and reportedly popping over to Warren after the show, decked out in a Wes sweatshirt.
From Kate Weiner ’15‘s book.
From Piers Gelly ’13:
Come to Espwesso at 7:00 p.m. tonight for the Stethoscope Press final reading and launch party! Our books are finally here and at this reading they’ll be free for the taking. Past experience has shown that the books go like hotcakes, so arrive on time in order to get your copies of:
- Relative Strangers, a book of poems by Josh Krugman ’14
- Oroitz, a philosophical mystery novella by Nate Dolton-Thornton ’15
- Informant, a collection of essays in China by Amy Zhang ’15
- Civics, a collection of Cold War-era short stories by Rachel Pincus ’13
- Home, a collection of short stories about homes and homelessness by Kate Weiner ’15
Refreshments will be served!
Date: Today, Wednesday, May 15
Time: 7:00 PM
Place: Espwesso
Facebook: Here
King at Bay, a collaboration between the extremely talented musicians Jess Best ’14 and Mel Hsu ’13, just released their first album Libation. With a cello holding down the bass and the keys building a bluesy core, the duo’s razor-sharp harmonies pull you into a place as sweet as it is wild. This debut EP also features Sam Friedman ’13 and Mark Bennett ’13 to fill out the sound with a dirty harmonica and soulful pocket. Contact Jess (jsbest@wes) or Mel (mhsu@wes) to purchase a physical copy of the album for $10.
From Mel:
Dear Wes,
We are so excited to share this with you!!! Thank you for listening!!
You can download their album on bandcamp here.
Incoming news from The Japanese, a 1/3 Japanese-American band composed of Adrien DeFontaine ’13, Neo Sora ’14, and Dan Moakley ’13 (and back in the day, Will Solomon ’13, who has unfortunately dropped off the face[book] of the earth):
We’re the Japanese. Some of you may know us from various shows around campus. We’ve been together since freshman year, and now that our time here is coming to an end, we wanted to release a professionally recorded EP. We’ve already started the recording process at a studio in New York, but due to monetary constraints, we are far from finishing it. We’ve explored all avenues with raising money with the school and on our own, but we need your help! Please check out our kickstarter page. We greatly appreciate any contributions and check out our rewards including “dress up Neo,” “quiche by Dan,” or “meat with Adrien.”
Hop to it, folks. A lot of these gifts are pretty time- and location-specific (there are only two Finals Week Specials left!), so you should help out for the story, even if you hate this band a whole lot or are just mad that they opened for Linus back in the day. I get along fine with ‘em myself, but hey.
Got a creative project of your own that you’d like help funding? As long as it’s Wes-relevant, feel free to let us know, especially if you don’t know us, because we would be kidding ourselves if we ignored that people who happen to know regular Wesleying contributors pretty well just happen to have a much better chance of ending up on the blog frequently, and even though there’s not really intent to do this people who do work that doesn’t get put up on Wesleying often rightly feel shorted, and so we probably should do a better job of reaching out to underrepresented artists on Wesleying, but in the meantime please don’t feel intimidated to just shoot us an email about whatever it is we’re doing that we’re fools for not knowing about and maybe we’ll stop being fools so much.
The DIY collective writes in:
Tonight at 8 pm, we’ll be gathering in the UOC fun for some DIY fun and finals stress-relief. Mr. Anne Goose McDonald’s will be leading a workshop to build a basic theremin controlled with light! And then we’ll plug them all into a mixer and try to broadcast a brief performance with our baby fm transmitter on 103.5 fm. It’s gonna be awesome.
Full schedule
7:30: Get there early! Help set up! Get a head start on your theremin
8:00: Official workshop start time
9:00: Broadcast performance! Tune in on 103.5 if you can’t make the workshop
Tooth Pun and Miss Chef
Date: Tonight, May 14
Time: 7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Place: UOC, 190 High Street
Are you about to graduate with a bullshit degree and no job? Are you horrified by how expensive rent is these days? Do you just want to leave it all behind? Have you considered life on Mars?
Seriously, though. Wanna go to Mars?
Mars One is a not-for-profit organization run by Dutch people (of all people) dedicated to colonizing Mars in 2023. They apparently will be able to do this only using technology which currently exists, because unlike other plans to send people to Mars, this does not include a return flight.
You may ask, what kind of maniac would volunteer for such a thing? The answer is this kind of maniac. Because, of course, all the application videos are available online for your viewing, rating, and commenting pleasure. In case you were in any doubt, the world is full of strange, strange people.
As you may know if you read the Argus or are just generally more well-informed than the slackers over at The Wesleyinger, the WSA recently passed a resolution advocating for an end to the chalking ban that’s been in place since 2003. Read the article itself for a quick-and-dirty history of the events that inspired the 25-2 vote a couple weeks ago. You can see the resolution itself here, courtesy of sponsor and WSA member Scott Elias ’14, until the WSA uploads it to their website, but be warned – there’s a prominent date error at the top of the document that may or may not irk you. For those of you who haven’t had a chance to see the typical format for WSA resolutions, by the way, you may find the writing here amusing, infuriating, or both. Oh well!
WSA resolutions, if you’re wondering, have no binding “legal” force on the University, but as presented to administrators often are used to further discussions or enact real policy changes in accordance with the resolution (yes, real changes do actually happen because of resolutions). So, y’know, optimism and all that. Check out some words from Elias (you may recognize the style) on why this matters to some people (continuing under the cut):
I think most students when they hear that there is a chalking ban think its insane. So our purpose was to create a consistent communications policy that won’t preemptively restrict student speech, that will be more consistent with our institutional priority of advancing social justice, and that will put an end to the exorbitant cost of enforcing a broad ban– an easy and logical way to curb costs in an era of austerity in which we terminated need-blind admissions.
It is incumbent upon the Wesleyan Student Assembly to reflect the fervent desire of many for a more inclusive campus culture and improving areas in which we, as a community, have fallen short. And our policy on chalking is one example of an area in which we can improve. So it will be interesting to see what kind of leverage this resolution will have with the administration. I’ve met with various administrators and they definitely understand where we are coming from, but they fear that past concerns will manifest again, which, as I understand it, is their main reservation. But let’s not kid ourselves. The chalking ban isn’t the last bastion of social justice the university wants us to think it is. It brushes oppressions and micro-aggressions that occur at Wesleyan under the rug and is thus inconsistent and antithetical to our university’s institutional goal of advancing social justice.
Today, we bring you a silly tumblr called “Reasons My Son Is Crying.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: a parent posts pictures of hir son crying with description as to why the kid is so upset. Many of them are quite entertaining, and will likely lead the kid to look back on this blog many years from now and curse his parents for their literally portraying him as a whiny baby on the internet.
For previous Procrastination Destinations, click here.
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