In the last couple of months I have come to appreciate the fact that IC pretty much constantly has speakers or presenters on campus. Whether they are writers, photographers, business people or artists, visitors to IC are always knowledgeable and frequently fun and/or interesting. On Tuesday night, I went to hear photographer and photo-editor Jason Fulford speak in Park. Fulford, who has had his work published in the New York Times, Harpers Magazine, National Geographic's Green Guide, and a variety of other places, turned out to be knowledgeable, fun and interesting, all in one.

Fulford is a free-lance photographer who co-runs J&L Books, a non-profit publisher of artists' books based in Atlanta & New York. He spoke about his experience both as a photographer and an editor, and wowed the crowd with a slideshow of photos. His work, which is beautiful and often whimsical, is influenced by a variety of things. To give you one anecdote, a project of his was once inspired by found photographs taken by an amateur mushroom collector. If that isn't enough to make you curious, I don't know what is.

So if you get bored during this luxurious fall break of ours, head over to Fulford's website and explore his work, or check out J&L's website and see what mysteries it holds. Speaking of which, Fall Break calls. Have a great one!

At the beginning of last week, I was a Twilight Zone virgin. I'd never seen an episode and never even been friends with anyone who was a Twilight Zone fan. I was pretty much clueless. This weekend changed that. I got the chance to watch a few episodes, but more importantly, I'm pretty sure I entered the Twilight Zone on Friday night.

I showed up at Park Auditorium expecting to hear the keynote speaker for the Rod Serling conference. Instead, I'm pretty sure I got transported to a fifth dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. George Clayton Johnson, introduced by the co-chair of the conference as a "legend in the television writing business," may be a legend, but he's also, in his own words, "not your ordinary bear."

Clayton Johnson, writer of approximately seven Twilight Zone episodes, has had an eventful life to say the least. He grew up in Wyoming, failed the 6th grade, dropped out of the 8th grade, and, with his mother's permission, ran away at 15. He joined the army at 17 and learned to be a cartographer, but ended up painting murals in mess halls for a large portion of his time there. He then got a job as an architectural draftsman, worked nine-to-five for a while, and quit in order to pursue his "fantastic love" of science fiction and become a science fiction writer. Obviously that worked out for him, but along the way I think George entered a twilight zone of his own. His speech, while informative and often interesting, wandered from his childhood, to his beginnings as a writer in 1959, to Rod Serling, to Ray Bradbury, to the state of the country in 1959, to his belief that one day there will be telepathic people, to how sick of watching TV shows about autopsies he is, and back, always, to 1959. (Ed.: He might be on to something -- I'm sick of perpetual autopsies on TV as well. And anything involving those folks who perfectly straddle the idiocy/vanity axis, which is pretty much everything not involving autopsies, I suppose.)

I learned a few things about Rod Serling, but mostly I just sat there and tried to follow Clayton Johnson's thought process. His back-and-forth speech was entertaining and out there, but I was a little disappointed not to learn more about Serling and his epic TV show. “The minute Rod bought my first story I went to a permanent search for the imaginary,” George Clayton Johnson informed his audience. I get that. I'm a fan of the imaginary. But in this case, it would have been nice to hear a little bit more about reality.

I went home a bit confused and and somewhat let down, and spent the rest of the weekend doing homework and watching Twilight Zone episodes. In case you hadn't figured it out by now, that show is trippy! It's beautifully shot, well written, and often totally weird. After a couple of episodes, I forgave Clayton Johnson for his rambling speech. Who cares whether or not the man can orate? He wrote the intensely creepy story that the Twilight Zone episode "Execution" is based on, and six other episodes. That's good enough for this newly minted fan.

***As of 3:30 p.m., this event has been canceled due to illness (the presenter, not Rod Serling or the Simpson family -- he passed away 34 years ago and they don't actually exist).***

Straight up, The Twilight Zone always creeped me the hell out.

I always found the subtly off-kilter parallel universe it illustrated far more haunting and worrisome than the more out-there slasher flicks and other ghoulish fare, possibly because it seemed considerably more likely to actually take place. When I was a kid the nightly news was rife with stories of "the disappeared" and other seemingly paranormal flights of freakishness that were in fact just products of brutal sadism masquerading as geopolitics, so Rod Serling's vision of a dark reality just around the corner from our own was tangibly terrifying.

I saw the movie version when I was 12, though I can't entirely remember why, since I had actively avoided the endless reruns of the original TV show at a time when at least four of the dozen terrestrial channels we got back then showed them seven days a week. The fact that Vic Morrow and two child actors died in a gruesome helicopter accident during production of the film further convinced me that the whole damned enterprise was simply a standing invitation for Evil itself to waltz in at any moment and thump the everloving bejeezus out of all that was good in the world. Yet there I sat at the old State Theater, enduring the madness with school chums gleeful at the notion of a gremlin ripping the wings off a flying airplane.

Never really trusted my friends after that.

Anyway, fast forward far too many years to mention here, and I confess I'm actually considering attending some events at this year's Rod Serling conference (he taught here up until his death in 1975, further unnerving your humble fraidycat reporter). There's a marathon of classic episodes Saturday night, but that's not really my thing. No, I'm not quite ready for that level of commitment. I need to find neutral ground between my brave new initiative and the timidity of my youth.

Which is why I'll be attending Diana DePasquale's "From Serling to Simpson" this afternoon at 3:30 in Emerson Suites (that's Homer, by the way, not OJ, who wouldn't be any less scary than TZ itself). I always knew The Simpsons frequently used elements from what Homer once called "that show about that twilighty zone," but apparently the connection is even stronger than I thought.

Anyway, you should be there (and at a bunch of the other events too, since so many are free and open to the public). In the meantime, check out my fave Twilight Zone homage, from one of those "Treehouse of Horror" episodes they do after Halloween every year. Submitted for your approval, natch.

Feminism is a hot topic on the Ithaca College campus these days. You've probably heard that Top Girls, the first theatre arts show of the year which opens next week, deals with feminism, among other things. There's another "feminist movement" on campus nowadays, however, and that is Dawn Hunter's Spectacle Spectacular show at the Handwerker Gallery.

The artist, who spoke at the Handwerker Wednesday evening, described herself as a "feminist artist", whose show explores the relationship between popular culture (mostly Vogue magazine) and gendered identity. I went to see her speak, and discovered that behind all those fancy-schmancy descriptions of her work, there is a fascinating story, not to mention some compelling art.

Ms. Hunter, who holds an MFA from UC Davis and now teaches at the University of South Carolina, spoke about her past career and how her family history influenced her art, but focused mainly on the evolution of the Spectacle Spectacular show. The idea evolved out of a course she took in graduate school, in which she chose to research Vogue over a space of four years, 1987 to 1991. While Ms. Hunter originally expected the magazine to remain focused on the same issues over the course time, what she discovered was that the focus of articles shifted. In 1987, Ms. Hunter told us, articles about fitness focused on health and longevity. By the time 1991 rolled around, the articles were about sculpting a certain physique. If people couldn't sculpt the right one, Vogue advertisements subtly suggested they get plastic surgery.

Ms. Hunter had been fascinated by this information in graduate school, and she returned to the topic when researching for her current series of paintings. She was most interested in the change that happened in the magazine from 1983 to 1986. She discovered that in this time period, Vogue went from portraying older, successful women as powerful icons, and advertised products that "serviced the body", to courting a much younger audience featuring products that "create the body instead of servicing it, making the body a medium of culture." Ms. Hunter said the change happened because feminism "isn't necessarily that marketable."

Ms. Hunter explored the way the magazine's fashion and advertising layouts changed and how their focus shifted from older women to younger women. She also became interested in the way Vogue's covers evolved from featuring supermodels to featuring actresses, reflecting the fact that the magazine was becoming less about fashion and more driven by the movie industry. These ideas are explored in the Spectacle Spectacular exhibition, which draws from Vogue advertisements and fashion layouts and explores the relationship women have with each other as well as with the audience and the fashion and advertising industries. "There's an ambiguity to the work because there's a sexual aspect," Ms. Hunter explained. "It's feminist [work]," she said, "but I'm not telling you what to do with it. I'm not sending a clear message. I'm not telling you what to think or what's good or bad."

No matter what your opinion of the relationship between women, fashion, and advertising, I suggest you head over to the Handwerker and take a look at Dawn Hunter's exhibition. Her paintings are fascinating at first glance, and become even more interesting when one thinks about the motivation, influences, and research that lies behind them. I know I'll be heading over at least once more to spend some time with the art and try to figure it all out. Maybe I'll run into you there.

1. The set in Emerson Suites this past Friday was nothing short of a life-changing experience. Playing a solo show consisting mainly of "ancient s**t," (his words) John Darnielle managed to lull hundreds of normally boisterous college students to a haunting silence during one of the most beautiful, raw performances I've ever seen.

2. The new songs he played were amazing! He debuted at least two songs for the first time ever for us, and they met every expectation. "Deuteronomy 2:12" and "Genesis 30:3" were the most memorable for me, with the latter being a far-and-away favorite. Something about the simplicity of the chorus line -- "I will do what you ask me to do because of how I feel about you" -- just gave me shivers. Can't wait to hear them on the upcoming album The Life Of The World To Come.

3. John was wearing a Farm Sanctuary shirt! Supporting one of the greatest organizations in the Ithaca area is always a good thing. When I met him before the show he even had a pocketful of Farm Sanctuary flyers he was passing out. Check it!

4. Dude really and truly loves his fan base. The set was the definition of a "fans' set," with John playing the best, oddest selections from the whole breadth of his recording career. Tuning his guitar once, he prefaced the song with "I wrote this back when I didn't really know how to play guitar, so even if it still sounds like that, at least it'll be in tune!" In addition to these old, rough gems, he delivered the best and most loved songs from Zopilote Machine, Sunset Tree, and Heretic Pride, pleasing the old and new fans alike. I don't think anyone was left desiring anything after firey impassioned singalongs such as "Dance Music" and "This Year."

5. He closed with "Best Ever Death Metal Band Out Of Denton," complete with the whole crowd shouting along with a frightening ecstacy to the ending lines "Hail Satan! Hail Satan, tonight!" Geez, what a way to end a show. Amazing. (Ed.: I particularly like the contrast here with the whole Bible theme of his new stuff -- JD's got both sides of the equation covered.)

Hit the gallery for some delightfully snarly pics from the whole affair!

In an informal lecture Wednesday in Park Auditorium, documentary filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin sat down with an audience of mainly Ithaca College students and staff to discuss the trials, tribulations, and triumphs that come from a career on the grittier side of movie making.

Deal and Lessin, whose projects include Bowling For Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Capitalism, a Love Story are perhaps most well known recently for co-directing the stunning film Trouble The Water, a documentary largely about those trapped in New Orleans at the time Hurricane Katrina hit. Talking about the concept of documentary film, Deal said "most movies and news networks and television shows are one way outlets; people can watch and listen but they can't really have much influence over the product. Documentary filmmaking," he said "is a form of media from the people, for the people. That's why it's often so controversial."

Having worked with Michael Moore on many films, Deal and Lessin are no strangers to controversy. "We make our films to, hoepfully, try and make some change" Lessin said, "and usually change, even when it's almost universally recognized as a change for the better, faces opposition."

Showing short clips of their selected works, the two noted that most things they do are connected by a common thread. Deal said "I think that the way I measure success for one of my films is, how many people are walking out of the theater thinking 'how can I help?'. The higher that number, the prouder I am of that film"

I have a disclaimer to make: I’m a bit of a literary geek. In elementary school, I used to get yelled at for reading during recess. The yard aids used to tell me that recess wasn’t the time for reading. Why didn’t I want to get up and go play? I thought it was obvious -- reading was playing. 

I still think like that, although I no longer have the luxury of recess in which to indulge my literary geekdom. Instead, I enjoy my literature during classes and in snatches of free time on buses, while waiting for friends, and, occasionally, at poetry readings.

Tuesday night held a particular treat for the literary geek in me. I went to the first reading of IC’s Distinguished Visiting Writers Series, where I had the opportunity to hear Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz read from his latest book Failure and his soon-to-be-published book The God of Loneliness.

When I first arrived at college, I thought I would be going to events like this all the time. But as every college student knows, what you thought you'd be doing when you got here is rarely what ends up happening. I've gone to a lot of great events in my past year at IC, but this was my first poetry reading.

As IC writing professor Jerry Mirskin said in his introduction of Schultz, “There’s a special quality of air that hangs around a poetry reading.” He’s right -- there’s something magical about the atmosphere. I found myself drawn not only to Schultz's poems, but also to the absolute quiet that occurred as he paused between poems. All I could hear was page turning and the quiet breath of the people next to me. (Remarkably, I heard very few coughs over the course of the evening. Perhaps the writing department has a secret formula for staying healthy that the rest of Ithaca College has yet to discover. Ideas, anyone?) The silence was, to quote a poem of Schultz's that he read that night, "a scintillating and perplexing music I did not expect to hear." The poems themselves were, of course, fascinating, partly because of the anecdotes that Schultz told during breaks between. My favorite story was one he told about the inspiration for the title poem for his next book, God of Loneliness. Schultz told us that the poem came from standing in line to buy his sons a Wii, back when they first came out. I was delighted to find out that if I ever become a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, I too, can participate in the popular technology crazes.

I came out of the reading feeling like I had given my parents one more good reason to keep paying for my college education. Hopefully, I'll be giving them even more reasons by attending the next two readings in the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series.

Charles Baxter
National Book Award Finalist in Fiction
Public Reading
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
7:30p.m., Clark Lounge, Egbert Hall

Jo Ann Beard
Acclaimed Essayist
Public Reading
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
7:30p.m., Klingenstein Lounge, Egbert Hall

I hope to see you all there.

"Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because with good news nothing presses; but when you have bad news, arouse me immediately, for then there is not an instant to be lost."

          -- Napoleon Bonaparte

They love the Little Corporal in New Orleans, despite the fact that he sold their wondrously unique Creole universe to the Americans in 1803 for the modern day equivalent of a six-pack of Natty Light and a used Katy Perry CD. At the corner of Rues Chartres and St. Louis in the French Quarter there is a building that, upon Napoleon's exile to St. Helena, was said to have been augmented to include living quarters for the former emperor upon his Creole-assisted escape. (It is worth nothing that New Orleanians have perennially been trying to bust people out of somewhere or other since the first French tents were pitched along the Mississippi in 1718, and would have done so again had Napoleon not been so rude as to die before they could make the effort.)

The legend may or may not be true. His death mask is kicking around town some place, that's for sure. And when the flood waters that followed the levee failures in New Orleans began to rise four years ago, his maxim about bad news was spot on. Time got pretty tricky for those left behind.

Such is the premise of the Oscar-nominated documentary Trouble the Water, a film by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal which builds on raw footage shot by Kimberly and Scott Roberts in and around their Ninth Ward home before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina made land (I'll let you decide if that's a "right place, right time" scenario). The good folks at FLEFF screened the film this past spring, but tonight Lessin and Deal themselves will be showing Trouble -- 7:30 p.m. in Emerson Suites -- and will respond to your Q's with their A's afterward.

As it happens, I just got back from New Orleans last week, and while considerable progress has been made it should be pointed out that a significant portion of a major American city still looks like a bad day in Bosnia four years after lousy weather, dodgy engineering practices, and the sort of infrastructural shortcuts bean counters adore conspired to drown it. New Orleans still needs help -- lots of help -- and Trouble the Water goes a long way toward illustrating why these problems linger.

Plenty of Ithacans have been involved with recovery efforts in southern Louisiana and the Gulf Coast in the past four years, whether spending an alternative spring break building homes with Habitat for Humanity, working in the hard-hit Seventh Ward with local samaritans Love Knows No Bounds, taking in displaced pets and college students alike, and (for the construction-hapless like myself) spending every last vacation day gorging on beignets and gumbo ya-ya in New Orleans. Trouble the Water offers a sometimes inspiring, often enraging portrait of one community's near destruction, the tireless efforts of locals and visitors from around the world to save it, and the appalling confederacy of government failure, embedded racism, and insurance company greed that actually managed to make things worse -- which is saying something when the starting point was a city 80% under water.

Check it out and let us know what you think. It's not every day the most unique city in America is threatened with extinction, and thus not every filmmaker who happens to capture that horror first-hand. Maybe you'll be inspired to visit and help the recovery process, or at least grab a muffuletta at Napoleon House Cafe, served hot...just the way Bonaparte liked 'em.

I tell ya, nothing cramps the campus life and events section of the web quite like spring break. We thought about auctioning off your stuff while you were away, but in the end that would have involved leaving the office for more than a mad frozen dash to the coffee cart, and we just weren't ready for that level of commitment.

Alas, today isn't much of an improvement. For me the jury is out on tangentially Irish endeavors on St. Patrick's Day. Wegmans certainly goes to some lengths to seasonally represent; their corned beef/cabbage/soda bread/Guinness/Bewley's Coffee/Irish Drinking Songs CD display is nothing if not widely varied in its stereotypical portrayal of Irishness. All they need is a dear old Mayo mammy in an Aran sweater beating an English soldier to a bloody pulp with a sack of potatoes and they'd be cooking with diesel.

Both local McDonald's outlets ran out of Shamrock shakes before lunch today. I just think that's a sign.

So I'm not entirely heartbroken that there isn't anything particularly plastic Paddy happening on campus. Suffice to say elsewhere in town the bon mots and beer will be flowing like the broad majestic Shannon tonight, but if you were hoping for something a bit more highbrow, dream on.

Of course, you could just pretend you're living in a Beckett play where absolutely nothing happens. That's about as Irish as it gets.

* * *

Simple fact is IC is saving up its event mojo for the "Sport, Sexuality, and Culture" conference this Wednesday to Friday. In the interest of promoting a healthy dialog about sexuality in what could well be the last great bastion of entrenched bigotry on college campuses and the workplace, this conference is free and open to everyone in the Ithaca community.

I'll take a wild guess and presume it doesn't blow your minds to find out the sporting world hasn't always been the most gay-friendly corner of American life. Invariably homoerotic with all that butt slapping and sweaty rolling around in tandem, yes. But queer positive? Survey says "noooo."

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that the first player to come out in the almost cartoonishly macho NBA was English, and thus already an anomaly in the league. Conference keynote speaker and former NBA player John Amaechi is many things, but "typical" is not among them. Despite having once turned down $17 million to play for the Lakers, Amaechi seems to be doing just fine as a media pundit, author, high profile public speaker, and advocate for LGBT youth. He'll be speaking in Emerson Suites Thursday at 7:00 p.m.

Don't miss this one; lots of good stuff comes to Ithaca year round, but this is a pretty special event even by our robust standards.

Of course John Amaechi is only part of the conference. Lots of other stuff going on, covering topics like

• legal issues involving sex and sexual orientation discrimination
• sport, media, sexuality, and culture
• gender, race, sexuality, and culture
• research trends and issues
• replacing homophobia/transphobia with humanism in sport settings

Check it out and tell us what you think. This is an adventurous and high profile event for Ithaca College, so we expect a lot of chatter.

And to warm you up, check out John Amaechi telling Ann Coulter where she can stick it:

Fellow by the name of John Carlos will be speaking tonight at Emerson Suites (7:00 p.m. for those interested; 11:30 p.m. for those who aren't).

If you're an obsessive track and field fan, you may recall seeing the name Carlos in the "1968/200 meter dash/bronze" column of your copy of the Ginormous Compendium of Track and Field Minutiae (79th edition). Not to diminish the accomplishment of placing third in one's Olympic event, but if that's all John Carlos ever did he probably wouldn't be talking to a bunch of college students 41 years after the fact (unless it was to yell at them to get off his lawn).

No, what John Carlos did was to evoke both a passion for justice and (quite frankly) reactionary hysteria among his countrymen by silently raising his fist and looking downward at the medal podium as "The Star Spangled Banner" played, a gesture born of the frustration, sadness, and anger felt by Carlos and millions of others about the blight of racism and the economic misery of people around the world. (For those of you too young to remember or unfamiliar with this episode in history, let's just say 1968 wasn't exactly a banner year for humanity.)

The image of Carlos and U.S. teammate Tommie Smith, heads bowed almost mournfully and those gloved fists aloft, is widely considered to be among the defining icons of the 20th century, as much for the violent reaction that followed as the gesture itself. Both Smith and Carlos were cast out of the U.S. team and ostracized upon returning to the States. The usual healthy debate of death threats and racial invective followed. Even Australian Peter Norman (he's the other guy on the podium) took it on the chin for his support of the two Americans; he was banned from 1972 Olympics and eventually sank into depression and booze, dying in 2006.

And if you're sitting there thinking how lucky you are that you live in an era when peaceful protest is no longer met with violence and hysteria...well, you just cling tightly to that little delusion as long as you can, friend.

Anyhoo, Carlos will probably have a lot to say on this subject and more tonight. He's led a fascinating -- if frequently tragic -- life, and we could all learn something from a man who made one of this country's most resonant statements without uttering a single word.

The idiot who edits this blog was supposed to tell you all about how Tom Wolfe was coming to speak last night at Emerson Suites. Said moron was going to enlighten you as to the oeuvre of the man many call "America's only public intellectual," since anyone who saw the film adaptation of Bonfire of the Vanities would have naturally assumed it had been written by a committee conscripted entirely from the head trauma ward.

Alas, as often happens when cold medicine and bile convene, our dimwit-in-chief forgot to actually post the story he wrote in a timely fashion. Thus, we're left with this pitiful post-game analysis. Which, as it happens, is rendered even more pathetic by the fact that none of us actually attended the event in question.

There was an incident with pumpkins -- that's all I'm going to say.

Anyhoo, we'd love to hear what people thought of the Man in the Eternally White Suit, especially since he went all Bushie these past few years. In the meantime, check out this podcast from the New York Times and listen to TW tell all about an ancient and strange time clandestinely known as "the sixties" (we Rattlers prefer "the Great American Weirdness"):

http://readingroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/the-man-in-full/