Magazine

It’s about time I let you in on a little secret: putting me in the trash doesn’t make me go away. Though it’s pretty obvious once you think about it, we receipts have all of your information tattooed on our bodies.

Leading psychologists have just announced that seemingly innocuous behaviors, such as flipping through old photo albums once a day, could be early stages of Collectingum Uselesscraposis, better known as hoarding.

Last Monday at approximately 10 a.m. the New York Administration for Children and Family Services were surprised to find a furry, disoriented five-year-old digging through the trash outside a school for cookies and singing the alphabet to himself.

Love them or hate them, reality shows are becoming a tent pole of American television. The growing presence of reality programming is what inspired veteran producer, Lance Roan, to develop his revolutionary new show, That’s F***ked Up: Battle for America’s New Obsession. The show will be a competition, but instead of seeing which contestant can stuff the most cockroaches down his or her pants or which prostitute has the nicest singing voice it will be to determine which producer can create the most morally depraved reality show

We live in an era of both unprecedented government spending and a remarkable lack of accountability for what is done with the average American citizen’s tax dollars. While money is continuously shipped overseas to military operations in foreign countries — and sapped from medical and welfare programs — politicians on both sides of the party line say they are diligently working to reduce the country’s national debt.

For something that is so prevalent and dynamic in our culture, the portrayal of marriage and divorce is very generalized. Marriage has often been romanticized into an ideal of two people who are head-over-heels for each other that go to their nearest house of worship, recite their vows and ride off into the sunset in their car with aluminum cans tied to the back. In contrast, divorce is typically depicted as a violent, hateful mess initiated by adultery and ending in emotional scarring for the children who are inevitably caught in the middle.

During the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival panel discussion at Cinemapolis on Mar. 31, viewers expressed unanimous feelings of disgust after watching a graphic documentary about the colossal waste produced by one of China’s most progressive metropolitans. Wang Jiuliang’s documentary Beijing Besieged by Waste let the images speak for themselves as the filthy demon of consumerism physically manifested on the big screen.

“What if we wrote a lesbian fairytale musical? Why are there no musicals about lesbians?!” That’s how Sara Stevens remembers the initial brainstorm for The Lesbian Fairytale Musical, a new show written by juniors Will Shishmanian and Sarah Kasulke.

It is often said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but is that really true? In many ways, women and men are held to a societal standard of how they should appear. Unfortunately, this creates a society in which anyone who deviates from these standards is considered to be “letting him/herself go.”

Cinema has always been a medium that has astounded and amazed people of all generations and backgrounds. The expression “the magic of cinema” is not too far off from the truth. Sadly, it will take more than applause and pixie dust to keep it going. In a world in which a film like Twilight can break box office records, there is little hope that the “magic” will last much longer.