Category: Arts & Life

By Michelle Joline

Arts & Life Editor

He revolutionized the world of technology, with the iPhone and Macintosh staples in today’s culture, and he inspired the creative world; the death of Steve Jobs at the age of 56 comes as sad news to people across the world. The face behind Macintosh and Apple battled pancreatic cancer and underwent a liver transplant all in the past decade, which lead to his recent resignation from Apple in August.

Jobs is famously quoted in saying that he wanted to make, “a dent in the universe,” and so it seems that is exactly what he did. The majority of students can be seen sporting a Macintosh computer on campus. The Apple products have created a link around our somewhat turbulent world, with the inventions of face time and video chat making communication attainable to all walks of life.

Often times Jobs is only recognized for his achievements in the Apple enterprise, but he was also a revolutionary in his other firm, Pixar. Some of the most beautiful contemporary images are products of Pixar’s creations, such as “Up” and “Finding Nemo.” The technology behind these animated films are the means to these extremely creative ends. Perhaps without the help of Jobs, the face of animation and the creativity behind it would not be what it is today: extraordinary.

Jobs was an enormous supporter of the arts, continuously working to make the tools necessary for the processes of creation attainable to everyone willing to experiment. With products like GarageBand, the face of the music industry has changed forever as more aspiring artists are recording their own music in the comfort of their living rooms, avoiding the expensive costs of studios. We can snap a shot of our latest inspiration on our iPhones, which produce digital quality photos. Jobs made creativity a normal piece of our lives in society, enhancing the art world through technology.

As the Apple silhouettes light up around the library during midterms and finals this year, we should take a moment to remember the man behind the emblem who revolutionized our generation.

By Heather Hennigan

Writer

No, University students didn’t meet the baby elephant with the huge ears. What they did do was even better, believe it or not. On Sept. 24, over 40 students hopped onto a bus bound for Brooklyn to visit a temporary Mecca for the arts in New York–-the 15th annual DUMBO Arts Festival. The Presidential Arts Initiative and the Griot Institute for Africana Studies sponsored this one-day event.

DUMBO featured 100 studios, 50 galleries and stages, and over 500 artists from a variety of disciplines, encompassing art from local, national and international communities. Musicians, painters, poets, performance artists and dancers filled the streets and created an atmosphere that was nothing short of spectacular.

“Everyone was involved in everything that was going on; the audience was just as engaged as the performers were,” Elyas Harris ’13 said. “I’d love to see something like this brought to the Bucknell campus.”

The Festival also featured a gallery talk and exhibit, “Invisible,” by art and art history professor and artist Tulu Bayar.

“[The festival had] cutting-edge multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary works. The whole neighborhood was turned into a creative lab. Besides the galleries in the area, various artwork was displayed in elevators of buildings, on and under the bridge, in dumpster trucks converted into display units, in the park and on the sky,” Bayar said.

“[My exhibition] received very positive feedback from hundreds of festival attendees and gave me the assurance that ‘Invisible’ was a great beginning for a new direction in my work. It was worth all the hard work, risk-taking and experimentation. I would like to thank every Bucknellian for their invaluable support. I am especially grateful to Carmen Gillespie, who organized the ‘Bucknell in Brooklyn’ bus trip. Her enthusiasm, wisdom, imagination and organizational skills are amazing. I am a proud Bucknellian,” Bayar said.

For more information on the DUMBO Arts Festival, visit dumboartsfestival.com.

Visit bucknell.edu/x71757.xml for “The Muse,” a new weekly arts overview, to stay updated on arts happenings on campus.

By Carolyn Williams

Staff Writer

Edward Albee’s “The Zoo Story” is set on a park bench in New York City’s Central Park. Peter, a mild-mannered publishing executive in his mid-forties, sits reading and enjoying a pleasant Sunday afternoon until he is interrupted by a strange young man named Jerry who wants to talk. As he interrogates Peter on the minutiae of his day-to-day life, Jerry exhibits biting sarcasm and frightening intuition but reveals his own isolation, loneliness, and desperation for some sort of human interaction. The reluctant Peter is drawn into this protracted conversation by the promise that, if he is patient, Jerry will share what happened to him at the zoo. But as the play progresses, Peter may wish he never found out.

This performance of “The Zoo Story” is directed by Diego Chiri ’12, who was inspired to mount an Albee production after the playwright’s visit to campus last semester to receive the honor of Janet Weis Fellow in Contemporary Letters.

“Peter and Jerry are more real that you could imagine. There is a Peter inside all of us who has found comfort and security in our everyday lives and suppresses the need to break out of the mundane – but the Jerry inside us.. Jerry challenges our thinking, our life, our habits. Who should you choose? Peter, who desperately resists change, or Jerry who urges us to connect with anyone or anything at any cost,” Chiri said.

Preston Perrin ’15 stars as the politely normal yet intrinsically unhappy Peter, and Nicolas Muoio ’15 as the charismatic and troubled Jerry.

“This play is one that has more than just a literal meaning. There is more to this show than what meets your eye. There are ideas and beliefs thrown around during the hour we are performing so pay attention and really open your mind to hear and see what it is Peter and Jerry are trying to get across to one another,” Perrin said.

Part of the strength of “The Zoo Story,” which has captivated audiences since it was written in 1958, is the universality of the characters’ problems. Some people are always going to labor under the misapprehension that they are happy in their own mediocrity, and others are bound to be fighting a losing war against their own loneliness. With a Spartan set (it literally consists of one park bench in a black box theatre), and two frighteningly real characters, “The Zoo Story” is a coldly realistic portrait of humanity, both then and now, and Chiri’s production executes it admirably.

The show is open to the public tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m. in Tustin’s Studio Theatre. Tickets are $5.

By Mackenzie Halfhide

Writer

As students at the University, we are fortunate enough to have professors who are invested in our education as well as our personal growth. This is atypical for most universities, where the majority of professors focus primarily on their personal academic projects. The University has the privilege to employ professors who do it all, even though their contributions to academia are not always well-publicized on campus. In order to learn more about professors’ involvement on campus and their recent academic accomplishments, I had the pleasure of interviewing Shara McCallum, associate professor of English and director of the Stadler Center for Poetry.

As director of the Stadler Center, it is McCallum’s job to provide opportunities for poets and poetry lovers on campus. The most well-known function of the director is to organize the Writers Series, which brings acclaimed writers to campus so they can read excerpts from their latest projects. McCallum is looking forward to a reading from this year’s Sojka Poet, Tony Hoagland, whose poetry is exceptionally smart and funny, and surprisingly attainable for readers of all levels. He will read in Bucknell Hall on Oct. 4 at 7 p.m. McCallum is also in the process of starting a slam poetry series that is slated to begin this year; for next year, she is organizing a “Poetry Path,” which will set up a walking trail that connects the landscape of downtown Lewisburg and campus through a series of poems. She also manages the Stadler Fellowship, which offers internships to two writers who are looking for an “opportunity to receive professional training in arts administration and literary editing.”

This last year has been particularly rewarding for McCallum as she is one of the recipients of the 2011 Fellowship for Poetry, which is a grant awarded by the National Endowment of the Arts to support her continuous work as a writer and to promote her future contributions to the poetry world.

Her hot streak of recognition began when President Bravman asked McCallum to write a poem for his inauguration in 2010, an honor that felt daunting since she had never been asked to write a poem for a specific event. She typically concentrates on personal connections to landscapes in her poems, and since central Pennsylvania does not evoke the same warm feelings as her homeland of Jamaica, McCallum began researching Lewisburg and the surrounding area, which helped inspire the poem “Susquehanna.”  She discovered she could write a history that was not hers, and in a fairly short time, though she knows poetry is not something that can be rushed.

“I’m very invested in revision,” McCallum said. “For me, that’s where the writing happens.”

It has been eight years since the publication of her second book, “Song of Thieves,“ and McCallum has been persistently writing and revising poem after poem for her third book, “This Strange Land.”  As a poet who prefers to write at night, it is difficult to find the time and energy while her attention is divided between classes and two young daughters. Luckily, her sabbatical last fall gave her the opportunity to finish editing her book of poems for the April release date.

In the midst of the book deal, Peepal Tree Press in the United Kingdom reached out to McCallum and offered her a chance to publish a collection of her poems. Scheduled to be released at the beginning of October, “The Face of Water: New & Selected Poems” includes her latest work and some of her best poems as selected by herself. McCallum will kick off the Writer Series for the fall semester with a reading of her poetry on Tues., Sept. 27 at 7 p.m. in Bucknell Hall.