Author Archives: Pauline

Advocacy

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Laura Rodriguez de Simons shared her care and devotion for helping others at the Tompkins County Advocacy Center this last Wednesday. She spoke about how her work, how we can become more involved with advocacy and our own community, and what sort of advise she has regarding our college years. With her broad knowledge and long history in this field from spending time with commercial sex work and exploitation of children in Central America to dealing with gender-based violence in Ethiopia, she brought a lot of awareness regarding domestic violence shelters and the services they provide for however long needed to people who survive sexual violence. Her advice for us: 1. Have a strong sense for serving others 2. Don’t go down the sensible or expected path 2. Pay attention to what you are passionate.

Romanian New Wave: Aferim!

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Radu Jude’s ironic yet sobering film Aferim!, an Eastern European production by Romania/Bulgaria/Czech Republic, describes the enslavement of the Roma during 1835 Walachia through the adventures of bounty-hunter Costandin and his son Ionita as they set out on a quest to capture the runaway gypsy slave Carfin and return him lawfully (yet immorally) to his rightful landowner. Most of the film shots are conservatively tripod-still and wide-angle, stretching the horizon line and extending space in the expense of close details, so that the very first impression of Costandin and Ionita is one likened to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as they enter and exit the scene—black specks on horseback. It is in this caricature that Costandin amiably greets an old crow driving a cart of goods only to end up berating her as farewell. These jerky instances reveal anachronistic behavior challenging the uniform/authority (whether it be the landowner or God). Costandin, for example, as a respectable man should never bring himself to speak in such a manner not only to the elderly but also later to a priest. However, the priest himself lacks the tact of professionalism, openly condemning Jews, gypsies, Turks, Romanians through respective stereotypes. Despite his vulgar use of language and at times actions, Constandin remains honest to his vocation and its ethics; he refuses to free Carfin even on a guilty conscience. A strong sense of duty becomes a betrayal of his sense of morality yet the film makes one question the standard of that moral compass. The root of evil returns back to the landowner’s wife who indulges in the sensual, tempting men who cannot help themselves. The film, from the very beginning, revels in the complexities of Romanian identity, especially revealing of misogynistic patriarchy, localized control, and nationalistic attitudes many of which continue to re-surface today.

The film enjoyed international success, winning the 2016 Silver Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival and was a strong contender for the Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. It was one of the few films to address the slavery of the Roma that was abolished in the 1850s and deal with cinema of the European periphery, often marginalized but strongly advertised under the director’s fame. The treatment of the Roma then opens discussion to the second-class treatment of the Roma now, and in this frank exploration, Aferim! overcomes “fatalism through ironic distance and black humor” (Hendrykowski). In other respects, however, as much as it inscribes itself in the New Wave, it fails to address the issues in a more pressing and immediate manner, and in this way, reinforces stereotypes that are made within the film. When contrasted with the films of Emir Kusturica who builds a comprehensive, magical, immersion into gypsy communities, creating an empathetic Other in the viewer much more effectively, Aferim! is a rather poorly and crudely executed film.

Ineffectiveness of Chinese Bureaucracies

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Professor Andrew Mertha, a specialist on Chinese-Cambodian politics and a passionate raconteur, introduced us this evening to the relationship between China and Cambodia and the difficulties he encountered during his research regarding the Chinese involvement during Khmer Rouge coup, providing us with a riveting talk on history and an engaging discussion on scholarship. When the Prime Minister of Cambodia whose political views very much aligned with those of the U.S. overthrew Sihanouk, a leftist and intensely nationalist monarch treated as god-king who China adored for his neutral position, the radical underground movement of the Khmer Rouge emerged; during 1963, the U.S. dropped more bombs on Cambodia than all of World War II. Professor Mertha discovered that the Chinese used the Khmer Rouge to build an airport in Cambodia, which he uses as a point of reference to study Chinese bureaucracy and its ineffectiveness. Here is my take away: the effectiveness of Chinese foreign policy is only as good as bureaucracies that maintain those relationships.

Being an Activist

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How do we do activism? was an informative workshop exploring some challenging questions regarding our role as activists and how we go about performing those roles. We defined what it means to be an activist, how one goes about being one, what are the steps that an activist group must take to get something done (and how important it is to take the appropriate steps in order to achieve that goal), when does one group’s agenda begin expanding to become more inclusive of other agendas without losing sight of its initial goals, when does that moment when you decide or define yourself as an activist happen and how would you describe it? Esmeralda opened with a quote by Alice Walker “activism is my rent for living on this planet.” Activism is our social duty and it effects different people from around the world. And yet it is exhausting to be incessantly active. When a law passes and you win one battle, then several others are left to be addressed. It is not enough for your work to translate into law (though that is an important step in protecting people when their rights are infringed upon), it must transcend paperwork and change the mind of others. Only then do you and can you really succeed. That is why I am not as interested in working with groups as I am in helping individuals; I think some of the most powerful changes exist in the personal exchange.

Coaching Life through Tennis

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What started at first as a presentation on student athletes at Cornell (with a focus on the Tennis team) became osmotically a coaching on life lessons punctuated by small dozes of refreshing and de-stressing daily reminders on how to find balance for a healthy work ethic into one’s schedule. Oftentimes, as students at an elite university, we find ourselves pressed on time to complete projects and essays etc., easily losing ourselves in the details of polishing the current assignment on hand and neglecting our long-term goals in the end. Coach Tanasoiu energetically reminds us the very importance that a little effort everyday can build into high-end long-term performance. The moment that we lose the routine of practice, we lose the rhythm of our success. Coach Tanasoiu notes that it is a responsibility and a privilege to be part of a team that also asks its players to be “extremely intentional with their time” and to be “aware of what you can and cannot control.” I think this is sound advice that we all need to constantly tell ourselves. I remember the stigma freshman year around students who slept a proper amount of hours and an almost exclusive pride projected by those who stormed through a few all-nighters per week—like a select club of members trying to outdo the others with the least amount of sleep. But the question really lies in what do you do with your time? How do all the 5, 10, or 20 minute breaks of lounging and chatting compensate for hard work when they only create more work in the end (and not to mention kill brain cells and weaken the immune system). Ever since this talk, I have been trying everyday to remind myself to be grateful, humble, and nice to myself.

The Dream Act: Political Imagery

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GRF Esmeralda presented a compelling history of the illegal immigration policy in the United States, and explained how images and labels act as vehicles for promoting different political platforms, sometimes at the expense of demoting others. Imagery has the power to evoke and convince and forge the empathetic Other within the viewer, therefore by default is propaganda: simplistic and catering to a specific agenda. I am interested in learning and paralleling the struggle of immigrants from South and Central America and Mexico to immigrants from across the ocean. Why doesn’t the Dream Act extend to other illegal immigrants? I am also not sure whether borrowed frameworks from the Civil Rights movement legitimizes the Dream Act movement as one to adopt itself as the Civil Rights (it was also hinted but not clarified as to which civil rights movement—African American, Gay, Women’s?); it is a civil rights contention, but jarringly different from the African American Civil Rights. I caution against a bridging like this because that would be like paralleling the Syrian refugees with the Holocaust, and by doing that the hardships of one oppressed group are collapsed and condensed and therefore devalued by becoming the political platform for another group.

Dancing while Sitting to the Temptation of Salsa-Jazz

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The Spanish Harlem Orchestra, vividly rhythmic and sensationally jazzy, released last night some incredible musical vibrations ripple through the crowd of swaying bodies and tapping feet. It was a sensuous and tempting concert that few couples could withstand the dynamic and lively beats. The presentation of such a buoyant form in a concert hall (that lured one euphorically into salsa, merengue, and bolero) teased us all, so that even the elderly could not resist the natural movements of their body, standing up elbow-wide greeting the beats. Salsa-jazz connoisseurs could do little but break the confines of their cushioned seats and turn the aisles of Bailey Hall into the dance floor we all longed for. There was one striking comment that the pianist declared: this music in its historically, culturally, and rhythmically rich complexity deserves to exist in a concert hall just as this, just as any other esteemed classic hit. And it very much does, but it does even more. This music calls for more than pure spectatorship, but an engagement with its very core from the body of the instrument into the body of the viewer-dancer, so that the viewing area becomes an extension of the stage itself, and there is nothing more rewarding, generous, and beautiful than to invite the onstage experience into the experience of your listeners.

Environmentalist Humor

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Professor Aaron Sachs on Why So Serious? How Environmental Humor Became an Oxymoron provided an engaging (an problematic) discussion on comedy and its effects on environmentalism. He outlined some sharp contrasts between comedy and tragedy: comedy as a sense of unsettling, fatalistic, offensive wonder, open-endedness, and mystery that serves as a coping mechanism, while tragedy is open-and-shut, effective at grabbing our attention but not keeping it. Though his opening punchline about his grandfather’s Semitic humor was a means to invite and ease the audience into a relaxed and entertained state, I had trouble following the bridge between Jewish and environmentalist humor; it was an interesting, but slightly forced parallel.

The Space Between Notes

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Momenta String Quartet’s performance of Leos Janacek’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ recalls a beautiful cycle of artistic re-appropriation, of interpretation and representation of a piece, of what it means for work to recycle—not as the Pop artists did simply through image culture—but the transition, the loss in translation, and that loss or miss lending itself to a different sort of re-creation through which the work evolves onto a different level of its totality, into something almost otherly. It is this liminal dance between the original and the simulacrum that makes art subliminal, that allows ideas to expand in breadth beyond the limits of a singular medium, evolving unto, into, and passed themselves. And that is what Janacek’s sonata was an affirmation of. Each instrument was its own separate body that interrupted and resisted the piecing together of all of them in harmony. The music at times became planes of sound masses that crescendo and collide into what Luigi Rossolo terms “noise-sounds” before plateauing into more classical pacing and rhythm. The weakness, however, of this “organized sound” lies in this valley from which builds a mountainous chaos only to always retreat back to the same horizon line. This classical backbone—stiff and archaic—exists as a narrative voiceover that pulls us to the 1890’s of Tolstoy’s book rather than the 1920s of Janacek’s life. This underlining classical current is a nostalgia for the romantic, the pastoral, that is disrupted by the Modern man, the mechanistic, robust, disorderly human noise that pervades even the sounds of nature claiming, reclaiming, and remaking them into their own. This rising crescendo abruptly stops—and it is here about the static, the stasis, the period, the void, the space between notes that this sonata really explores. I would be curious to understand what it means to have listened to Beethoven’s sonata then read Tolstoy’s story before having listened to the Janacek’s sonata, and compare that to the inverse experience of listening to Janacek’s sonata then reading Tolstoy’s story, and lastly listening to Beethoven’s sonata—would it be a flashforward, a flashback, or simply the accumulation of experiencing the now, the timelessness of our presence?