Watching Meredith Monk was a dream come true for me. Indeed, her concert had the rare magic of teleporting me from the Buckley Recital Hall to imaginary landscapes: when she performed parts of “Songs from the Hill” (1977), I was watching her at the top of a mountain in New Mexico under the scorching summer sun, where the music was born. And when her voice bounced with the piano keys in “Traveling,” I felt like a kid hopping along a grassy path in a vast open land, bounded only by the snowy range from afar.
Now that we’re substantially into the semester, and the sting of getting the boot from that first-choice class has subsided, it’s time to look back and rant on the confusion that is add/drop. We come to Amherst for one main reason: the academics. Our school provides the best teachers and they teach the best classes, so we agree to pay huge sums of money, time, energy and hard work. Why, then, semester after semester, are we subjected to a system that is not only inefficient, but also keeps us from taking those classes and learning from those very teachers that we chose this school for?
Currently in its sixth season, “The Big Bang Theory” is a sitcom that revolves around the lives four nerdy scientists and their friendships with Penny, an aspiring actress and waitress at The Cheesecake Factory. Roommates Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) and Leonard Hofstader (Johnny Galecki), both physicists, live in an apartment across the hall from the beautiful and blonde Penny (Kaley Cuoco).
A common question that we all ask ourselves here at Amherst College deals with the purpose of a liberal arts education. Why liberal arts? Why are we here? We come to answer this question from a variety of perspectives as time goes by. Through our daily experience, we regularly redefine what it means to us. We redefine it after a very exciting class that we would have never taken if not for Amherst, after attending a poetry society meeting in the Mead Art Museum, or after cheering for our school during a game.
In mid-July of this year, rising R&B artist Frank Ocean released his new album “Channel Orange.”
When your aesthetic appetite has exhausted the 18,000 works available in Amherst’s own Mead Art Museum or when you’re just looking to get off campus for an afternoon, hop in a car and head to Smith or Mount Holyoke, or both.
There’s a lot to be said about “Looper,” but perhaps the most important speaks less to the successes of the film than to the dreary state of the pseudo-genre “time travel” movie and the larger science fiction genre as a whole.
