Walking through SCMA’s newest exhibit, I couldn’t get the chorus of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” out of my head: “Don’t cry / don’t raise your eye / it’s only teenage wasteland.” The song’s otherworldly warning seems to be woven throughout the artwork in “Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials,” an exhibit that documents the past, present and future of plastics and human existence. The 20th century got to enjoy the thrilling innovations of plastic, inadvertently creating an archive of the costly convenience of daily life. Now, the upcoming waves of youth will inherit what is left of this material’s legacy: an impending wasteland. “Entanglements” confronts the viewer with the medium’s metamorphosis, asking whether the possibilities of plastic can ever make up for the destruction it wreaks.
THE SOPHIAN
This weekend, I went to UMass Amherst and attended Hack(H)er 2019, the first hackathon exclusively for women and non-binary students in Western Massachusetts.
It’s here again. The part of the semester where things get hard. Syllabi, once sheets of paper you collected while glibly sampling classes, have turned into lists of assignments you actually have to complete.
As we enter the fourth week of classes, I can only assume that most of us are prematurely beginning to feel the mid-semester slump that inevitably affects us all at one point or another.
At the Kensington International School in Springfield, Mass., 23 Smith tutors are working with children from nine different countries.
Divest Smith hosted a panel discussion titled “Climate Justice and Migration” last Friday afternoon in the Campus Center, led by Gabriella Della Croce ’11 and Andrea Schmid ’17 from the Pioneer Valley Workers Center and Professor Rick Lopez from Amherst College. Friends greeted each other as more chairs were pulled out to seat a full audience from both the Five College and greater Northampton communities. Conversation centered on the enormous effects of climate change on marginalized groups.
The Hampshire College Board of Trustees announced Friday, Feb. 1, their decision not to admit a full freshman class for the coming 2019-2020 academic year amidst tensions on campus. The decision came after the announcement Jan. 15 of enormous economic challenges the college faced, causing concern in the Hampshire community.
Prompted by the incident July 31, the College announced new Inclusion, Diversity and Equity Initiatives Jan. 30. College Relations reports: “The college has taken action in policing policies and training, employee training and cross-campus education focused on culture change.”
Welcome back from winter break! Now that it’s the spring semester — er, rather, the semester that will see the end of winter — what are you going to do? There are surely some holiday sugary treats left over, burning a hole in your pocket (or a shelf in your room), but before you indulge, consider… not?
In a 2013 interview with Stereogum, Potty Mouth bassist Ally Einbinder ’10 expressed discomfort with having her band automatically get labeled as a riot grrrl outfit. She argued: “Slapping the riot grrrl label on us just because we happen to be women playing a type of music that happens to be reminiscent of another era in time seems like a lazy conflation,” then maintained: “Gender does not equal genre!” Fair enough. While Potty Mouth’s upcoming second album SNAFU features women playing the types of confident pop rock/punk that have been associated with male-fronted bands, the lyrics of their songs do not necessarily display the same political bent that riot grrrl bands are known for.