Author Archives: Sophia He

And Bears, Oh My!

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The nature of land trusts is interesting in itself– when you are in the depths of nature here, among deciduous forests and gorges, you rarely ever associate what you’re seeing with business. Yet, as we discovered last Wednesday, nature and the land itself is indeed closely tied to business. Andy Zepp told us about the amount of work put into negotiating with land owners and maintaining the land itself in order to preserve the nature around us in Ithaca–a great deal, in fact. So next time you hike the trails and gorges here in Ithaca, don’t just appreciate the beauty of the nature, appreciate the business behind it as well.

Super interesting overall

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Last week, Professor Mertha gave an eye-opening talk about the nature of the Chinese bureaucracy by connecting it to his research in Cambodia. He also told a lovely anecdote about his issues with research being finally resolved by a helpful undergrad of his.

While I understand that the talk was last-minute, as he had not been the scheduled speaker, I wish he had gone more in depth about the flaws in the Chinese bureaucracy. During the presentation, he briefly showed a convoluted flow chart portraying the tangle that is the Chinese government, and I feel as though his argument that “the Chinese bureaucracy is a mess” could have been better supported if he had explained the chart rather than just saying, “take my word for it,” though I do understand it may have been too complicated to touch on all the key points in under an hour.

Make the most of it

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Last week’s Rose Cafe speaker, Daniel Schwarz, brought up many key points about the college journey and gave a variety of good advice relating to entering and experiencing college. However, I feel as though he was speaking to the wrong audience, or at least that some of his advice was misdirected, as a I am not able to follow the advice pertaining to first entering college, as that time period has passed and my mistakes have already been made.

That being said, I will make the most out of my remaining years here, so his tips are not completely lost on me.

Belonging

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Last week’s screening of Carol at Cornell Cinema was a moving tale about two women who find each other amidst the constant motion of life. Displaying brilliant visuals and scenery, as well as featuring a stellar soundtrack, I enjoyed seeing the perspective of someone who feels like she does not fully belong. Last year in a writing class I took, we discussed queer theory, which relates to individuals who hold a characteristic that differs from the “norm,” and how they adjust to this normalized society while still maintaining their identities. This particular section of class resonated with me greatly, as I realized that though we typically associate the term “queer” with members of the LGBTQ community, we all have “queer” aspects to ourselves. For example, my minority race has always differentiated me from the caucasian “norm,” and I have had instances where I felt like I did not belong. Many others have many different defining aspects to themselves that make them feel this way. For this reason, I saw Carol as more than an LGBTQ film. It was a film about women who find their true place in the world; it was a film about belonging.

Saturation vs. Platforming

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As someone who lives close to the area, I’ve been a regular at Cinemapolis since my high school days. So, when I saw that the Rose Scholars would be given a tour of the theater, I jumped at the chance.

Manager Brett Bossard gave a thorough tour and presentation of the cinema and its inner mechanisms. What I found most interesting was his explanation of the differences between saturated market release and “platforming.”

The saturation method of release would be the method used for movies played in theaters such as Regal Cinemas, in which large film marketing companies invest in advertisement and build up anticipation for a certain movie, an example of one of these movies being Batman vs. Superman. We would see during the week of the release a high grossing box office, but these sales would sharply plummet during the second week. This is due to the movie being designed for mass appeal and not critic appeal and the poor ratings driving customers away.

Platforming is considered to be the opposite of the saturation method, and the movies are designed for critic appeal. They are typically marketed by smaller independent film companies or branches from larger companies specifically designed to find critically-acclaimed movies, such as Fox Searchlight. A film would first be shown to critics in select theaters in larger cities such as New York and Los Angeles and, upon receiving good reviews from the critics and thus garnering buzz and anticipation from the moviegoers, would then be released to other cities, and then to smaller regions like Ithaca. The movies released would be the typical “Oscar-worthy film,” and these are the films shown in Cinemapolis.

As a movie addict, I typically get my fix from what Cinemapolis has to offer.

Boxed In

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Last Wednesday’s Rose Cafe featuring GRF Esmerelda brought light to the current issues regarding what we call DREAMers, or rather, the repercussions of the term encapsulating them. Because the DREAM act emphasized that educated undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US at a young age could not remember their immigration at such a young age, they were innocent of this act many American citizens view as criminal. However, this criminalized their parents, who were without a doubt cognizant of their immigration circumstances. This wrongful criminalization simply redirected blame towards other undocumented, uneducated immigrants rather than producing a panacea for the overall issue regarding how illegal immigrants are viewed, treated, and given legal rights.

One thing that intrigued me during the talk was how Esmerelda paralleled this racial struggle to the African American Civil Rights movement. She brought up the tale of Henry “Box” Brown, who in the 19th century had physically mailed himself from the pro-slavery South to the abolitionist North. I found this comparison remarkable because it was a parallel both systematically and symbolically. What Henry did in the 19th century was illegal, yet he was rebelling against an unjust system and trying to achieve a better life as a free man. This may be likened to the immigrants who escape to America illegally, who may be running from opressive circumstances and are trying to find a better life. However, symbolically, when these immigrants arrive in the States, they find themselves just as boxed in as Henry “Box” Brown was when he arrived in his crate. They are faced with paperwork and more paperwork, with a complicated legal system where they must fit themselves into a box where they mark their citizenship status, their race, among others, and they must reduce their entire life into a series of check marks which can never define who they really are.

Who Knows?

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Last Wednesday’s Rose Cafe featuring Professor Blalock, our resident professor, brought up an interesting perspective on the nature of humanity as a collective. He started by surveying us, college students living in America, asking us how many of us wanted to help the environment. While almost all of us raised our hands in response, when we were asked whether we owned an automobile which optimized efficiency and reduced waste, almost no one did, save for one or two people. He followed this by telling us that his research in rural Africa proved a similar case–when given an opportunity to use more efficient stoves (than the commonly used three-stone stove) which reduced the amount of smoke and the amount of damage done to the lungs of the families using the stoves, almost every family abandoned the more efficient stoves and returned to the old three-stone stove system. When we compare these two points on our globe, Africa and America, though we differ culturally and geographically, we must realize: we’re not so different, are we? This brings about the question–is it simply our nature as humans to resist change? To that, I will say yes and no. If we truly deflected all change, we would still be living in caves like our cro-magnon ancestors. We would not have the technology and adaptive means of survival and comfort that we have today. Change is inevitable. But it cannot be denied that though change is inevitable, we are quick to resist it. But the knowledge is there. In a couple of years, decades, who knows? Maybe the majority of the U.S. will be driving Priuses, and maybe the rural areas in Africa will be using more efficient stoves.

Anything is Possible

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Last week, Dr. Adam Shwartz came to talk about the Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech, based in New York City. He spoke about the importance of being able to work not only in an academic environment that promotes self study but in a multifaceted team in which each individual member holds a different skill they may contribute as well. While currently the institute is smaller in size and more collaborative, Dr. Shwartz hopes to grow the institute in the future, expanding its amount of students as well as its curriculum within the next couple of years. As for ten years ahead, his response: anything is possible. Technology will change rapidly and drastically within the next ten to fifteen years, but for certain, the Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech will adapt with it.

Melancholia

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Last week at Rose Cafe with featured guest, my GRF, Sara Schlemm, we discussed melancholy and its prolonged, pensive state alongside Hitchcock’s psychological thriller, Vertigo. We watched a couple of scenes, which I am not going to go into detail in for fear of spoiling, which expressed and invoked the feeling of melancholy in the viewer. Two contrasting scenes appealed to me: one scene in a flower garden bathed in sunlight and one scene in Muir Woods, which contained vast, shadowy redwood trees so tall that they hid the sky. What I found interesting about these almost contrasting scenes is that though the scenery and imagery was completely different, they both conveyed a sense of melancholy, felt by the characters and made cognizant to the viewers. This perhaps demonstrates that the feeling of melancholy can arise at any time, any season, in any environment, and that it is natural and beautiful in its own sense, much like the beauty of both types of nature in these scenes.625986E8-766C-4CBF-B404-BFA1E12C3BA6

Relating to melancholy, here is one of my favorite pieces from the Corning Museum of Glass, where I have worked as an Explainer in the past. It is fittingly titled Melancholia, by Narcissus Quagliata, and is made in the style of traditional “stained” glass (we call it stained glass, but it’s actually colored glass, but that’s a whole other story); however, it is made modern by its simple, minimalistic design and coloration, as opposed to traditional ornate, colorful glass. The man, masked by his sunglasses, looks out the window of an airplane, giving off an aura of slight melancholy and evoking in the viewer the feeling of leaving loved ones and loved places, something external which triggers internal ache and conflict.