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Day: January 19, 2012

Leisure

Critical Voices: Cloud Nothings, Attack on Memory

On Cloud Nothings’ first two albums, Turning On and Cloud Nothings, Dylan Baldi’s band was saddled with the classifier “lo-fi pop,” a term that wasn’t really inaccurate but didn’t quite do justice to the band’s unique sound. It’s true that most of Baldi’s songs were hummable two-and-a-half minute jams coated in a reverby distortion haze or blazed-out, melodic mumblers. Even so, there was a kinetic anger behind the endless progression of catchy bridges and hooks. It was Wavves via the Pixies via No Age. “Lo-fi,” sure, but there was something deeper going on than “pop.”

By January 19, 2012

Leisure

Critical Voices: Bombay Bicycle Club, A Different Kind of Fix

Despite their young career, the members of the Bombay Bicycle Club have proven themselves worthy of recognition through a rapid-fire series of successful indie albums. Their latest release, A Different Kind of Fix, follows 2010’s Flaws and 2009’s I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose, both of which reached the top fifty on the UK Albums Chart. Thankfully, Fix lives up to the standards set by both the band’s previous successes.

By January 19, 2012

Leisure

God Mode: Tiny Tower‘s big break

The iPhone might be the most popular video game system of all time. It almost definitely is when lumped in with the iPad and iTouch—Apple had sold 250 million of its iOS devices in October of last year, a total that has surely skyrocketed after the holidays. To put that in perspective, the PlayStation 2, the best-selling traditional video game console of all time, barely surpassed 150 million units sold in its lifetime.

By January 19, 2012

Leisure

Blast that Box: 99 problems, but the rich ain’t one

“Gotta give us what we need/ Our freedom of speech is freedom or death/ We got to fight the powers that be.” When Public Enemy used these words in 1989 to command their fans to “fight the power,” they could not have guessed that their message would be embodied by a global movement more than two decades. But four months ago, the Occupy Wall Street protests burst onto the scene with a flurry of media coverage, and since then, terms like “Occupy” and “the 99 percent” have unquestionably become part of our lexicon. The Occupy movement has managed to gain universal attention, garner celebrity support, and even shape America’s political debates. Unsurprisingly, rappers have also attempted to ingratiate themselves with the movement.

By January 19, 2012

Leisure

Nomadic’s acts are Un-f**king-Believable

“I was high as heck and I just wanted to love things.” Channeling a well-intentioned hippie at the beginning of the production, it’s a shock to see Addison Williams (COL ’14) morph into a sociopathic killer in the span of a few short hours. Yet Nomadic Theatre’s Night of One-Act Plays encourages this kind of versatility. While he plays the lovable Truman in John Behlmann’s Un-f**king-Believable, Williams casts off the character to take on a darker role in Neil LaBute’s Coax. Brought together on a sparse stage, the plays in Nomadic’s Night of One-Acts don’t sync together intuitively, but they combine to provide the audience with a wonderful range of theatre.

By January 19, 2012

Features

Workers unite: GSC organizes around labor rights

In the spring of 2005, 26 members of Georgetown Solidarity Committee staged an eight-day hunger strike as part of their Living Wage Campaign, a multi-year effort to improve the working conditions of the University’s subcontracted custodial staff. At the outset of the campaign, many custodial workers were not even making minimum wage. According to Gladys Cisneros (COL ’04, MA ‘06), then a member of Solidarity and now an AFL-CIO employee, GSC’s ultimate goal was a wage floor based not on the legal minimum wage, but rather on standard of living.

By January 19, 2012

Leisure

Unbuilt Washington: A new type of rejection

People sometimes take Washington D.C. for granted, but it’s beautiful—the manicured grass lawns surrounding the mall, the minimalist Washington Monument, the simple yet dignified White House, and the famed cherry blossoms bordering the tidal basin. But what if the grassy plane of the national mall were flooded with water à la Venetian canals, and Congresspeople were carried in paddleboats to the different federal departments? Or if walking across the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial Bridge, bookended with two gothic towers straight from Medieval England, you were met with a pyramid-shaped version of the Lincoln Memorial, seemingly plucked out of Egypt?

By January 19, 2012

Leisure

A journey through grief and New York

According to the “seven stages of grief” theory, dealing with loss typically means journeying through different emotions—from shock and denial to pain and guilt—experienced before acceptance. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, though, nine-year-old Oskar Schell’s own path is anything but linear. Looking through Oskar’s eyes, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close director Stephen Daldry deftly handles this fragile material and crafts a cinematic adaptation true to Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel.

By January 19, 2012

Editorials

NDAA an inexcusable violation of civil liberties

On December 31, President Obama signed into law the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, one of the most constitutionally questionable bills in the history of the United States. The law broadens the definition of the “War on Terror” and legalizes the indefinite detention of foreign nationals and American citizens. While the President issued a signing statement promising to disregard this final provision, one ought to remain intensely skeptical of this claim—indefinite detention, while not yet officially applied to American citizens, is already regularly practiced abroad, and Obama’s rhetoric doesn’t change that it is now part of official law.

By the January 19, 2012

Editorials

GSC holds Georgetown to its Jesuit values

As the only campus organization dedicated to the needs of workers, the Georgetown Solidarity Committee plays a uniquely vital role on Georgetown’s campus. Although the University administration is nominally committed to the Jesuit value of social justice, many of the subcontracted workers on campus, including Leo’s workers and custodial staff, work long hours for meager wages, all while receiving inadequate healthcare services.

By the January 19, 2012