Shea: When did Ithaca Freeskool start?

Lily: Our earliest calendar is from 2007. Dirk Trachy and another early organizer had visited Santa Cruz California and seen their Freeskool in action. When they returned to Ithaca they started their own version here.

Shea: What is its main mission?

Lily: Freeskool is a grassroots, not for profit, all volunteer community building initiative that creates spaces where people teach and attend classes with one another without cost. Primarily, but not exclusively, geared towards adults, anyone can teach and anyone can attend. Freeskool fosters ties between people and provides access to skills and knowledge in an informal and empowering setting.

Shea: Tell me some logistics: cost of running the program, things the organization does to promote, etc.

Lily: We have three semesters a year. Each semester we need some money for printing, maybe 300 calendars at 10 cents each and the paper, maybe $20. Each semester we put up flyers, write press releases, email our mailing list and update our website and Facebook. We also just spread the word by telling people.

No one gets paid. Sometimes when we have money from grants or donations we make videos, buttons, and purchase snacks for social events.

Shea: Who are the staff members?

Lily: We don’t exactly have a “staff”, more like volunteers. They are me, Mckenzie Jones-Rounds, Dirk Trachy, Greg Rothman, Marina Gershon, Shira Golding and Ari Moore.

Shea: What are some of your favorite classes taught in the past?

Lily: Breakdancing, Capoiera, Mushroom Walk, Origami Night, Queer Erotica Writing Group, Bike Mechanics, Traditional and Experimental Animation, Improv class, DIY Movie Making.

Shea: For anyone just learning what Ithaca Freeskool is, what would you tell them?

Lily: Ithaca Freeskool is a group of people who organize free classes in and for the community. The classes are taught by anyone who has an interest in sharing their knowledge and skills. The classes are informal, held often in people’s homes, or public spaces. Anyone can attend. It’s a great way to discuss issues in a community and explore the kinds of things people are most currently interested in. And it’s an alternative to main stream education which often lacks flexibility and can be very costly. It’s a lot of fun participating in something that changes every semester, and brings in all the diverse interests of a community.

Questions about classes? Visit their website at ithacafreeskool.wordpress.com or e-mail the “staff” at ithaca_freeskool@riseup.net

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Prez D-Skortz on LSD.

Everybody knows “The Economy” sucks. Even David Skorton, our university president (case ya didn’t know), whose Stanford-schooled super-senior son can’t even find employment despite the fact that he took an extra half-year to do an extra major! Sadface. Guess he’ll have to live off the meager $700,000/year salary that daddy earns — but let’s hope he doesn’t have too many coke parties, considering the fact that his noble father hath forgone a salary increase this year. At tonight’s “Senior Presidential Reception,” dapper gentlemen and ladies crowded around our president, trying to get a good word in, or perhaps just to snap a poorly aimed cameraphone picture (see left). And, although Skorton was both drily eloquent and soberly charming when my senior self spoke with him, he didn’t seem to have much to offer in the way of practical advice for seniors who have been fucked in the ass by a shitty job market, one that’s moreover flooded with recent laid-off bitches who are considerably more “senior” than us. “You’ll land on your feet,” he told us right before we toasted the Class of ‘09 with our recently bought $5 champagne glasses. We’ll be fine. Just fine! Right. D-Skortz had earlier told me that I still ought to consider newspapers. (Yawn.) And to talk to University spokesman Tommy Bruce, who I already know. “I often speak fairly unfavorably about the University administration,” I told him. In other words: What’s a brash blogger to do in these days? Skorton said that even critics can get jobs. You know, talking to Tommy might actually be a good option. Damn you and your good sense, D-Skortz. Maybe I will land on my feet. Also: good luck, Class of ‘09. Srsly.

If you are a gay man who doesn’t know who Larry Paciotti is, that’s forgivable. But if you gay men don’t know Chi Chi LaRue, you might be fooling yourself — she (the drag/gay porn director persona of Larry) has directed hundreds (thousands? is too lazy to do research) of titles you may have used your dominant hand to “enjoy.” Watch on, trannies.

This lil FB-msg interview was conducted before tix sold out, which was announced via Facebook message by Ms. Arkin at around 10:40am today (Wed Feb 25):

Hey Evan-
I’ll try to answer these to the best I can. I’m just making clear that number 4 is my own personal opinion and should not reflect the opinions of Cornell Concert Commission or Cornell University and all entities that may be involved (always need a disclaimer).

1) how many tickets total have sold? what’s the breakdown between CU and gen pub?
>> as of 8:04pm on Tuesday, we’ve sold a little over 4700 tickets, out of 5200. Out of that, around 1/4th is general public, give or take a few extra student tickets. This tends to be the usual breakdown.

2) how did your e-board get in touch with ludacris?
>>The Ludacris concert is sponsored by the Minority Concert Fund Advisory Board (MCFAB), which is a collaboration of CCC and ALANA. Our advisor for MCFAB/CCC, Joe Scaffido, negotiates offers and contracts with agents and artists directly.

3) how did shawnna get added on?
MCFAB developed a list of possible openers, and she was on the list. An offer was submitted, and she accepted the offer.

4) do you think the hyper-sexual messages of luda and shawnna are fitting to the cornell community in general?
>>I personally believe that both artists fulfill a niche of very popular music these days. Personally, I feel that a lot of rap has “hyper-sexual messages” and does not reflect necessarily the attitudes of Cornell students, but it does reflect what popular rap content is these days.

5) will there be any surprises?
>> If there are any surprises, we are not aware of them. Maybe this is the surprise of all surprises, but I’m anticipating no.

If I understand space/time/math correctly, this means 500 tickets were sold between Tuesday night and this (Wednesday) morning… which is pretty impressive, no? I don’t know if any show has actually ever sold out Barton Hall — so kudos to the organizations who pulled Luda and ‘Nna.

But take those kudos with a grain of salt, CCC/ALANA/MCFAB,  because I want to make absolutely clear that I am NOT OKAY with your prostitution of our student body. Happy Endtimes!

–EVAN THE PROPHET

CornellWatch: How did you, Jonah, and Jess come up with the idea?

Jonah and I were gchatting during work, complaining about what a bad time it is in the book/magazine industry and various more superficial complaints (my junk-food-binge-induced achey body, his alcohol-and-salt-induced puffy face), and the idea grew really organically and almost instantly out of that.

The basic rundown was this: Jonah said “I thought Obama would end all this suffering,” I said “I thought Obama would make my body stop hurting,” he said “I thought Obama would get me laid,” I said “We should buy ithoughtobamawouldgetmelaid.com and make a website like the bicycle one listing our unreasonable complaints,” he agreed. The tough part was that neither of us knows how to code something like that. So I gchatted my sister, Jess, who has a bunch of computer geek friends, to see if she knew anyone who could do it. While she asked around about that, the three of us started a Google doc with all our ideas for the site. When Jess found out that we needed to find someone who knew PHP to code the site, I emailed my ex-boyfriend, Lee, who’s an IT guy, to see if he could do it. I also changed my gchat and Facebook status to “Anyone know PHP?” About an hour later, Jess’ husband Dan gchatted me and said “I know PHP.” He hadn’t even know at that point that this was for a project Jess was part of! So Dan got to work setting up the site, and in the end it was Lee who wrote the code, which Dan then implemented. A big ol’ group effort. And oh so webby the way it unfolded.

CW: What volume of traffic does the site drive on a daily basis? How has it varied throughout the months it’s been around?

The site launched on December 19, and was picked up by The Huffington Post and Digg and a few other places almost immediately. In the first two days alone we got 110,000 hits. Things settled down after that. By comparison, we only got about 210,000 hits for all of January.

CW: How are your unrealistic expectations of Obama different from those of BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle.Com?

We wanted to be sure we didn’t overlap with BOIYNB too much, so our general rule of thumb was that they deal with Obama being a total nice guy (remembering your birthday, making you cupcakes) and we deal with ridiculously unrealistic expectations of him (fixing the economy, curing diabetes, getting rid of your crow’s feet). We wanted to take it beyond satirizing the fact that everyone’s in love with Obama and ascribes all these wonderful traits to him, to the more recent issue: the degree to which we expect him to tackle the impossible.

CW: One Cornell-sanctioned blogger said this about an MLK rally in LA: ‘Today’s parade was like the fifteen or so I went to before it, but at the same time it was different… On hardened faces one would not consider friendly beamed signs of laughter, smiles, and hope…  While Obama might not be the complete savior we all imagined, one thing is for certain hope/faith is the evidence of things not seen, and while America might face problems you couldn’t tell that by the faces of the crowd.’ Obviously the guy doesn’t really expect Obama to be the Messiah, but he kind of hoping for it. Is this desire for a politician to be some sort of ’savior’ indicative of what you guys are trying to push against?

I wouldn’t say we’re trying to push against it, necessarily, so much as point it out and snicker. But yes, it’s that whole feeling of “Obama is a superhero! Obama can do anything!” that initially got us joking about him being able to fix the publishing industry or get Jonah laid or whatever. And I know we weren’t the only ones making those jokes; my mom said it was eerie seeing the site once it launched, because apparently my dad had been making “I thought Obama would…” jokes for weeks!

CW: I’ve noticed you guys have asked for more submissions to the site. Now that Obama’s president, where do you plan to go with it?

We don’t have any real plans, other than to let it float out there and keep getting discovered anew.

CW: How has Barack personally failed you today?

He actually did fail me today! Or, I guess it was yesterday. I felt kind of played by his whole “I screwed up” media blitz after Daschle pulled out, as I blogged about this morning on Slate’s XX Factor.

Samantha Henig ‘06 got her degree in sociology and, after a long journey through the NYC media landscape, is now the associate editor of Double X, a women’s web magazine that Slate is launching in the spring.

CornellWatch: It’s been almost a month since you’ve gotten back from Beijing. What is your favorite memory from the games?

Walking into the Bird’s Nest during the closing ceremonies; there were so many people in the stands, cheering, waving flags, it was amazing! I just kept thinking, “This must be how Michael Phelps feels where ever he goes.” It was just awesome to be there with different types of athletes from other countries and know the people in the stands are there to support you.

Speaking of Michael Phelps, did you party with any stud muffins at Olympic Village?

I actually saw Vince Vaughn and the women’s soccer team while I was out. Other than that, it was just other athletes.

Even in the company of teammates and fellow athletes, what was it like competing in China? How’d you adjust to the city?

It felt just like another regatta. There were definitely many more distractions, with all the other events going on besides rowing. The Olympic coverage in the U.S. was amazing, but I didn’t see any of that sort there. I felt kind of removed from the Olympics, even though I was competing in them. The weather was tough and it was difficult to breathe at first; it was very smoggy the first couple days, but I actually got used to it and never noticed the smog after that. I didn’t have black snot or cough up anything dirty like people warned us about!

Then the cloud seeding must have worked!

There were a lot of really nice clear blue skies the last week. I had heard about the cloud seeding, but never saw it being done, so I didn’t think they actually did it.

Besides the air quality, food was a concern for athletes. Were the Chinese government’s confident assertions of food safety comforting… or just sketch?

It was comforting, actually. I was never really worried about the food, although I was a little nervous the first couple of days because of all the built-up warnings to watch what you eat. We were staying at a hotel near the rowing venue, not in the Olympic Village, so our food was catered at the hotel. There was even a separate food inspector there just for our food.

Were you tempted to try any of the “exotic” treats, namely candied scorpions and assorted critters of that sort?

We were warned not to try food outside of our hotel or the Village during competition. I stayed away from anything out of the ordinary, even after racing was done.

So, were you cyclically overdosed on Chinese cuisine during your stay? I mean, I love Chinese food, but I can see that becoming a major ooof!

My first meal after racing was a calzone, which was amazing! I had been eating the same meals rotated every 3 days in the hotel for 3 weeks so some Italian sounded really good! They served us Chinese food, which they tried to Americanize, and they also had pasta and sauce, if you wanted that.

Let’s talk about the actual race you competed in. What was it like just being edged out by the Ukrainians for fourth place?

It was tough because we had been beating them consistently in previous races…we beat them in Lucerne at the World Cup.

Team U.S.A was awesome nonetheless. What are you up to these days in Princeton?

I’ve just been rowing, training and working for a restaurant group. I really like Princeton. The town is great: lots of cute shops, good cafes and it’s easy to walk around.

It’s been said that if the Ivy League were a country, we’d have the 8th most total medals in the world. How do you feel about that statistic? What do you envision the “Ivy Nation” would be like?

That’s a pretty impressive stat. Not all athletes are dumb jocks. I think “Ivy Nation” would be like Cape Cod, or the Hamptons, but on steroids… there would be a lot of “Tea Par-tays!”

Click through to find out how the banging goes in NYC, who this damned Cowboy is, and whether his linguistics are quite as cunning as he claims.

CornellWatch: I saw you wrote a guide to having good sex in hotels on HotelChatter. Have you been sex writing/blogging at all since you ended your run with the Daily Sun?

Jenna: Yes! But nothing public — or at least, nothing with my name attached to it yet. There may or may not be a blog floating around out there with all the snippets that never made it into the column or occurred after the column ended, but it’s written completely anonymously. I figure as long as I’m 21, I might as well record all this shit before I turn into an old bag of wrinkles and stop getting laid altogether, which could be in the next year or so judging by the amount of time I spend tanning.

Speaking of getting laid, we heard from IvyGate that you wrote in to Savage Love about how guys viewed you as a trophy conquest instead of a prospective girlfriend. Has that trend continued in New York?

NO! Thank GOD. Life on the dude-front has been largely back to the pre-column days. Leaving the campus allowed me to leave behind all the bullshit that came along with being a campus character, like the interrogations and the dudes who just wanted to sleep with the sex columnist. I have my last name and a little bit of my dignity back, which is all I can ask for.

But are you still getting some play-play?

Significantly less, but whatever. I think I get a little bit more respect when people aren’t aware of the goings-on between my legs. Also, it’s nice to be able to look back on your college days and talk about how crazy they were — but once you’re out in the real world, you have to give some thought to growing up. Did I really just say that? Jesus.

You’re talking a lot about growing up. Have you found anyone to grow up/old with?

I may be growing soft three months out of college, but let’s be real for two seconds… I havent changed much, and the dating pool has gotten larger and, if you can believe it, older, and even a bit dorkier than it was at Cornell. So, short answer? No. Long answer: nnnooooo.

Longer answer: Boooringgg.

I wish I could be like, I’m engaged, suckas!!! To the Cunnilingus Cowboy!

WHO IS HE?

I won’t name names, but he was — and still is — a very close friend of mine. And let the record reflect that I do not give shitty head.

The record currently reflects a dismal 5.75 out of 10. Where do you rank yourself?

8. I don’t know, Evan, where would you rank me?

5.75 of course… You know I don’t never change my stance once I’ve taken a position. Right back atcha: where do you rank his taco-tonguing?

I just giggled like a little girl at the phrase taco-tonguing, so clearly my points about growing up and shit hold no truth.

Imitation is the sincerest flattery?

Something like that. But anyway he gets a zero. Fail.

Epic fail, perhaps? Harsh. Let’s talk about your time as Sun sex columnist extraordinaire. Now that you were ranked in the top 6 of the UWIRE 100 and won a Sex-Positive Journalism award, there’s big shoes to fill. What are you thoughts about Liana Mancini, our new “Shocker”?

Full disclosure: I’ve worked with Liana for the last couple of years on the Vagina Monologues, so I know she won’t take any shit from anyone and will command the respect that any sex-positive woman deserves. I can see that she’s going to be taking the column in a different direction than I did, and I give her major props for making the column inclusive in ways that I never did — I know she’s frank, and I know she’s a fierce bitch… and as far as I’m concerned, the column is in good hands. As long as she doesn’t wake up one day and decide to go all Carrie Bradshaw on us (SO unlikely), I think she’s going to kick some ass.

Is there anything wrong with Carrie Bradshaw besides the fact that she could NEVER NEVER NEVER afford that apartment and that her character has those horrible “typity-type-type bad-pun-bad-pun-ban-pun, question mark?” endings?

Well, she didn’t maintain her highlights, so she always had dark roots, for one thing. And really, she never talked about sex except for that one time the politician tried to piss on her and she wrote about how weird and awkward he was for having a fetish. And she was fickle and flaky and always asked questions at the beginning of each column and never really answered them. Oh, and by the way: She wasn’t real. And if she was real, I guess I would fault her editor for letting her introduce every column with “I couldn’t help but wonder…”

So we’re agreed: Carrie’s writing style needs to die a fiery death. Enough of flawed women… Describe your ideal man. And your sexytime with him.

Oh shit. [Long pause.] I’d like a taller-than-5′8″ writerly type with an affinity for good music, good books and a fucking decent sense of humor. In bed, he’s gotta be in charge. In life, not so much.

Okay then, fill in the blanks: My ideal guy will buy me a _____ at the bar, then we’ll go home and eat _____ in a manner reminiscent of _____ and I’ll _____ his _____. Then he’ll put me in the _____ position and he’ll fuck me _____.

My ideal guy will buy me a DOUBLE VODKA SODA WITH 2 LIMES at the bar, then we’ll go home and eat CHOCO-COVERED STRAWBERRIES in a manner reminiscent of GOSSIP GIRL and I’ll TURN OFF his iPHONE.

Then???

I am not answering the second part. I’m not going to give up ALL of it.

Fair enough. Any new euphemisms for the penis? Wrinklebeast, peen, etc. slay us, but we want some new ones.

If we want to keep it seasonal, I’ve been using Summer Sausage a lot lately. Kicking it old school with weiner, also… tubesteak. I guess I’ve been on a meat kick.

Tasty. Finally, what’s up with the kissyface you make in pics, like the one from your personal blog profile (at right)? Are we sad, happy, from Staten Island? I don’t know what to feel for you.

I am very happy, actually. It sucked leaving Cornell, but things are pretty baller these days. I’m doing what I want to be doing (writing), going out all the time, and living in the big bad city. Shit’s good. There is, indeed, life after being a big slut at Cornell.

Can’t get enough of Jenna? Check out her personal Web site or stalk her Tumblelog!