During its January meeting, the Board of Trustees approved a 6.9 percent increase in comprehensive fees for the 2004-2005 school year. The total cost for tuition, room and board and general fees next year will be $34,156, compared to this year’s total of $31,944.
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State Representative and House Minority Leader Matt Entenza ’83 encouraged students to make the most of the upcoming Minnesota caucuses at a recent on-campus caucus training session.
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Photojournalist Flip Schulke ’54, who has worked for publications such as LIFE, National Geographic and Ebony, received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree on Feb. 12.
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For the fifth year in a row, a Macalester Mock Trial team defeated 26 other teams from Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin at the regional championships.
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Plans to construct a permanent median and cobblestone crosswalk across Grand Ave. are now in their final stages.
Macalester will fund the $150,000 to $200,000 project. Director of the High Winds Funds Tom Welna said that the project will be completed this summer.
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At the St. Paul City Council meeting on Feb. 4, Councilmember Jay Benanav announced that he plans to postpone the vote on his proposed legislation requiring a certificate of occupancy for students renting single-family homes and duplexes until November.
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As you may know, one of my top priorities is planning for a new or renovated humanities and arts center and a new or renovated athletic and recreation center. The need for these projects has been discussed for several years, and we have begun to make progress on both fronts. I wanted to update you on where we are today.
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Last week, Andrew Goodman-Bacon wrote, “If Macalester students, all very powerful and smart people in the grand scheme of things, cannot step back and add constructively to the legislative process, who can?” And this is exactly the point: we’re actually the only kind of people who participate in the legislative process, and that’s the problem. Our political system makes it virtually impossible for anybody who isn’t us—you know, powerful and smart, or maybe just rich and white—to have any say in the governing of the country. Quite frankly, Macalester students (myself included) are just about the last people I want to see running this country.
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Global climate change is very real and is already starting to affect our lives in profound ways. The last 10 years have been the warmest on record and there is scientific consensus that global climate change will have dramatic effects; the only question is, how dramatic? The Washington Post ran a front page story on how the leading international scientific climate research group has said that 30 percent of all species will be extinct by 2050 at our current rate of global warming. The emission of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels is the leading cause of global warming and our dependence on them is proving ever more dangerous. The international community has pulled together to face this issue but despite unprecedented steps toward global action, this administration has pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, which is the leading international agreement for curbing emissions. The Kyoto protocol is a UN agreement, and the U.S. withdrawal was a major blow to its ability to create meaningful international agreements. The United States produces more than 36 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases and has only five percent of the world’s population. This has alienated the international community and confirmed the double standard the U.S. uses for its foreign policy.
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There is a distinct culture at Macalester, the kind that makes people ambivalently murmur “Oh…” when you tell them that you go here. We frame every other phrase with bunny ears, as we do not wish to own the words coming out of our own mouths, even if we love to listen to the sound of them. There’s probably some kid walking around campus who turned a cashmere sweater his mom sent him into an art project.
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So Macalester has changed your life. Here you’ve begun to learn what’s really important, to you. You’ve begun to reconcile what’s valuable enough to struggle for, and what’s not. And you’ve begun to think, “What’s next?” What will life after Macalester be like? How will you shape a meaningful working life based upon those things you’ve come to value so highly?
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The excitement builds in the humid, chlorine-saturated atmosphere as teams begin to take their first warm-up laps at the MIAC Conference Championship Swimming and Diving Meet. Fans steadily fill the stands to support their teams and athletes. Multi-colored bags and warm-ups litter the pool deck and individual teams cluster around the natatorium. Teammates and fans wave and cheer on their swimmers, distinguishable only by the uniquely emblazoned swim caps that bob up and down as they are propelled through the water. The fervor reaches near-hysterical levels as cheers reverberate off the water and walls and fill the whole building with noise during the final lengths of each event.
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Conference doormats St Mary’s entered the raucous Macalester Fieldhouse Saturday, Feb. 7 looking to avenge an embarrassing 8-1 loss to the Scots at last year’s conference tournament. The Scots came into the match supremely confident, having nearly upset Gustavus in last year’s tournament quarterfinals, losing a heartbreaking 9-0 decision to the Gusties, who would go on to place third at nationals.
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The women’s basketball team won its first game of the season at home on Saturday, Feb. 14 against fellow MIAC team St. Olaf. The Scots had been stuck in a 22-game losing streak, 19 of which were within the MIAC. The Oles came to campus looking for their second win of the season after beating Macalester a month ago.
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This week I’ll be reviewing Deus Ex: Invisible War, the much-anticipated sequel to the original best game ever, Deus Ex. This review has been difficult for me to write, because the original game was so very, very good and Deus Ex: Invisible War is so very, very bad. Playing the game was like watching a brilliant close friend in the throes of Alzheimer’s disease—the basic personality is the same and brief flashes of brilliance remain, but everything that makes it special and fun has been bleached out by the dementia of corporate greed.
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One of my major life events last semester was the purchase of my first pair of designer jeans. Entranced, I lifted the black garment from its mailing package, the legs unfurling like a perfectly-chanted spell, and I felt as though my life had changed in some special and unique way, like the special and unique wash of the jeans. I viewed this as my christening into the world of designer clothes, where the name Balenciaga would breeze from my lips as casually as that of a close friend’s. I also saw this as a step in the direction of my becoming a disciplined shopper, where I would discriminately buy versatile items as easily worn to a Friday night date as a Sunday brunch. This resolution came from a past littered with far too many barely-worn clothes in bags to be sent to Goodwill; my closet during high school was a model of the market flow, with goods racing in and out faster than you could say “Abercrombie.”
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Ali Akilli, proprietor of the Black Sea Restaurant (reviewed in last week’s Mac Weekly), grew up in Trabzon, Turkey on the coast of the Black Sea. He left Turkey for Germany, and then made his way to Roseville, Minnesota in 1990. His wife, Sema, joined him in Minnesota in 2001. In the following conversation, Ali discusses the story behind the Black Sea.
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Bernardo Bertolucci’s new film The Dreamers, currently playing at the Lagoon in Uptown, can safely be summed up as the director’s love letter to cinephilia. Gorgeously shot and filled with references to classic films (in the form of both discussions and directly-inserted movie clips that function like poetry citations in literature), it is unabashed in its own movie love and sensitive to the aesthetic passions of its protagonists.
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Iron and Wine is otherwise known as Sam Beam, Miami resident and cinematography professor. Many have been intrigued by Iron and Wine’s deliberate delivery of finger-picked guitar accompanied by slide guitar, a melodious banjo and hushed falsetto harmonies. Beam plays all the instruments and records all his music at his Miami home on a primitive four-track, creating a sound that is reminiscent of unplugged Smog or if Pink Moon-era Nick Drake lived in Florida. The songs, however, aren’t as macabre as Drake or as self-defeating as Smog but intimate, like Beam is playing only for himself.
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Sarah E. West, Assistant Professor of Economics “I am a child of the ’80s and I like bands whose members came of age when I did. I bet Coldplay listened to U2 when they were twelve, too. Their sound attains the triumphant beauty that U2 set the standard for. And the White Stripes must have listened to the Clash and Fugazi like I did. They rock. (Ask me sometime about the wild Fugazi concert I saw one steamy summer night in Minneapolis.) But more often I listen to Hole, Blondie and Garbage. When I become a rock star I wanna be like them. And the best band ever? Pink Floyd. No contest.”
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Men are easy to convince, and this works out for everyone’s standard of living. Women like proof, and for this we all suffer.
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Heather Lendway ’06, second from bottom, starts off the 800-meter relay for the women’s swim team. Lendway, Liz Fitzgerald ’04, Jackie DeLuca ’07 and Nancy Taff ’07 did particularly well at the meet. Full story on page 11. Photo by Brent Hecht.
The Mac Weekly is an entirely student-produced publication. The opinions expressed in this document are those of its authors and editors, not of Macalester College.
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