Candidate Statements for Class of 2020:
William Jang
Each genre of music elicits a unique response in the body language of a listener, from head-banging, to fist-pumping, to pogo-hopping, even moshing. The term “shoegazing”, although named for its guitarists with perpetually bent necks to help them see their frequently used pedals, can be just as easily connected to the response of many audience members nodding along to the undulating music. Canadian shoegazing band, Living Hour, held such a spell over their captivated audience Friday night in the basement of Greenway A.
On Sept. 6 FX premiered the pilot of Donald Glover’s new series, “Atlanta.” Glover, who has done everything from writing for Emmy-winning TV shows like “30 Rock,” to releasing critically-acclaimed rap albums under the moniker Childish Gambino, takes on the roles of creator, executive-producer, writer and lead actor in this comedy-drama series. The show is situated in Atlanta, where Glover’s character, Earn, is homeless and in search of a steady paycheck in order to support his daughter, whom he had with his best friend and on-and-off landlord, Van.
The Rotherwas Room in the Mead Art Museum is over 400 years old. According to the Mead, the intricate wood panels that constitute the room have meandered from an English castle to a New York City gallery to Amherst over the last few centuries. The panels were commissioned to be crafted in the early 1600s by English knight Sir Roger Bodenham, were moved to a Fifth Avenue showroom three hundred years later and were eventually auctioned to Amherst alum Herbert Lee Pratt (half-brother of Charles Pratt) and subsequently gifted to the College in 1944.
Once upon a time, classical music was considered cutting edge, a place for bold and brash experimentation. This past Saturday, the Amherst Symphony Orchestra brought one of those experiments to life with massive success. In a welcome concert for the class of 2020, the Symphony performed Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony #9, “From the New World” in E minor.
Trigger warning: This content deals with accounts of misogyny, harassment and sexual violence and may be triggering to some readers.
Dormitory life is an Anglo-American peculiarity. Drawing on residential colleges at, for instance, Oxford and Cambridge, colleges like Amherst build their pedagogy on the firm belief that collegiate co-residence will produce a livelier intellectual atmosphere than would a university at which students go to class and then return to their separate homes. The idea is a familiar one: putting bodies together in houses and bedrooms will thrust the minds inhabiting those bodies into some kind of close-knit intellectual community.
