CornellWatch

Hey kitschfolk (schfolk?): Today we present to you our newest feature: The Week in Kitsch. In which we volley ill-informed judgments upon Cornell-related happenings that occurred within the last 7 days!

Courtesy of Dictionary.com.

Exhibit A: Kitsch finally is a dictionary.com Word of the Day

Validation, yeah! We’ve been waiting a long time for this, except we didn’t really think “kitsch” was esoteric enough to merit Word of the Day status, but lo and behold, dictionary.com LOWERED ITS STANDARDS. And now we feel our name is terribly becoming and perhaps even inspired to start this new feature. Bad taste, check. Pretentious, moi?

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Jenna Bromberg, pondering new euphemisms in her new place of residence.

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.

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The Sun’s new pull-out magazine.

And then there’s those brave souls who have said pish posh to Radar’s snarky commentary and transcended petty adversity. Like blue-blooded** Eclipse (the supplementary section of the Sun that has been converted into a pull-out “magazine”) editor Leigha Kemmett, who embraced the magazine’s “unique and engaging content, content that [she] actually wanted to read” despite the fact that the issue she picked up was the one that slighted Cornell.

In any case, I’ll stop this crappy-trend-story-lede nonsense and cut to the chase, sort of: our feelings about Eclipse magazine. It wants to be like Radar, kind of? And the cover story, the unfortunately headlined “Rating the Rankings,” is basically a rumination upon the current status of Cornell’s rankings poo-poo (dropped from 12 to 14 in the U.S. News & World Report, the most overrated item in Radar).

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I wrote a guest column for the Daily Sun about my personal experiences and realizations  in the wake of the controversial April Fools Day post that used and abused Asian stereotypes. Check it out. (They couldn’t put it in the print edition because they were overloaded with senior goodbyes, but I will try to get it posted in the fall when they resume publication.)

If you haven’t already, go check out “My Night with Jenna B.” It’s written by this dude who totally banged Jenna B and apparently she totally pulled the downward-head-push on HIM and she totally was only a 5.75 outta 10 in the BJ department….

But we want to know: who is the author, the so-called “Cunnilingus Cowboy”? The Sun provides these little hints at the bottom of the story:

The ‘Cunnilingus Cowboy’ is a senior. The Sun granted him pseudonymity to protect his identity, but has verified, to the best of its ability, the facts of the article. The article is printed with Jenna B.’s permission.

Pseudonymity? Fuck that shit. We faithful readers want answers.

After the break: a poorly thought out theories of mine as to who this disrespec’in’ cowboy is.

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The first edition of Props & Drops seems to have caused quite a stir, especially among fans of Tina’s “Bias Cut” column, so here we are with the second edition, which gives props to heaven, the sacred, and God and drops to hell, the profane, and the Devil.

PROPS: to the Daily Sun’s heavenly columnist Katie Engelhart, who wrote a wonderful piece about meeting God in the form of an “overly embroidered old hag” sitting next to her on an airplane. The column isn’t actually about the grandma who was reading Becoming God, however, it’s about religion and spirituality in the modern age:

Kids these days just aren’t interested in stuffy sermons and pushy proselytizers anymore. Please! The Facebook generation is “spiritual, not religious.” We’re yoga-worshipping, kabala-bracelet-wearing, oriental-herb-consuming horoscope readers. We’re children of the pagan earth one day and born-again virgins the next. We dress as “Slutty Santa” for Halloween, but keep it real with orthodox Jewish rap. We’re more concerned about whether or not Jesus was black than about his purported teachings.

Granted, Engelhart is making some broad generalizations, but she buffers her anecdotal evidence with a study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life stating that one in four adults has changed their spirituality or left it altogether and that three in four young adults still have some sort of religious affiliation. In my opinion, she’s spot-on in characterizing today’s youth as affiliated with some sense of spirituality, but not in the dogmatic ways of our parents and grandparents. What I wonder is if this lack of doctrine is good or bad, for example: does it lead us to fling away capriciously every set of beliefs that contains something difficult or unappealing to us? Is picking and choosing at the salad bar of spirituality liable to give us an ultimately unfulfilling, unfocused smorgasbord of beliefs?

DROPS: to IvyGate’s devilish Jacob Savage, who made some broad generalizations too, but poorly founded ones. In his recent post “What the Fuck Happened to Decency Standards at Ivy League Dailies?” he cites dodgy evidence of “shitass Ivy Dailies” printing “fuck and shit for no good or extenuating reason.”

Item #1: A post from Daily Sun’s 2007 Halloween joke edition: “I’ve evolved to fuck, shit, and eat, but it’s odd that while I’m doing these basic things I have the ability to think.” Doesn’t a parody edition cover that “extenuating reason” idea? They even have a disclaimer in boldface at the top of the story saying that the story is “intended for entertainment and parody purposes only.” Pretty hard to fucking miss, shithead!

Item #2: An editorial in the Harvard Crimson from 1969 (“The End of Obscenity”) about how “recently ‘fuck’ has been thrown around publicly in all kinds of ways, and it has suffered accordingly.” First of all, 1969? Savage makes it seem like this is a new sensationalist trend sweeping college dailies, but apparently someone else beat him to the idea that fuck is being used for no fucking reason 40 years ago…

IvyGate is always being such a vanilla preppy little bitch, about Jenna B.’s “ickiness” and about “obscenity.” Stop being such fucking prudes!

Sorry, Daily Sun, but you really sent the wrong reporter to cover the Vag(ina) Mo(nologues) this weekend… Not only can Suzanne Baumgarten not spell “twat” (unless they really spell it “toit” in New Jersey), she made the mistake of going there (you know what I mean), and quite tactlessly, at that:

“Not only were the auditoriums packed both nights (over 1000 tickets were sold all together), they were packed with both genders. I was impressed that the male audience members accepted the various stabs at their gender nobly, not letting the show’s feminist nature interfere with their overall enjoyment.” (italics mine)

Uh oh, Suzy Q… did you just make the blanket claim that all feminists are men-hating bra-burners in a review of the Vagina Monologues? Watch out–you might have a herd of violent lesbians at your door soon, whose feminist nature might interfere with your overall enjoyment of your night.

Suzy Q also commits the gaffe of calling the performers girls instead of women: “Most of the “monologues” were actually performed by more than one girl. The inclusion of so many actresses added to the performance’s empowering, original mood.” Barring any comments I might have about the last sentence’s helpless triteness, did it not at least cross your mind that the Vag Mo is a very feminist play, and as such its acting “girls” might not appreciate being pushed into a diminutive, cutesy nomenclature?

Last time I read the Feminine Mystique, I tried to make sure that its feminist nature didn’t get in the way of my enjoyment, but somehow all those uppity girls got on my nerves.

The Daily Sun takes a heteronormative approach to internet pretending on Craigslist’s “Casual Encounters” section, posting as a 20-year old “Cornell coed looking to experiment,” and IvyGate takes them to task for their giggly schoolgirl antics.

Too bad they didn’t read Kitsch’s article on gay Craigslist entries (“Hooking Up”), which is infinitely more relevant given that m4m ads comprise up to 25 posts a day, paling in comparison to the m4w’s 5 to 6 average and w4m’s 3 to 4.

IvyGate suggests the Sun do another of their devilish underground “investigations” as a m4m pretender in order to scare Cornell’s closeted population, but is it really worth the trouble? The result will be an assemblage of questioning freshman, closeted frat brothers, and unattractive grad students—not to mention the occasional self-debasing “fat pig” who urgently “needs to be used.” (Bacon, anyone?)