V o l u m e I V, N u m b e r X I I I C e l e b r a t i n g t h e P r e C i o u s h u m a n t a P e s t r y n o v e m b e r 2 0 , 2 0 0 9

Israeli novelist Amos Oz spoke about the need for compromise between Israelis and Palestinians at Hassenfeld Conference Center Sunday night in a lecture sponsored by the Schusterman Center for Israeli Studies.

Oz, who grew up on a Kibbutz, a communal liv-ing environment based on utopian society in Israel, explained that “Israel was born out of a dream,” and said that though they may be reluctant, both Israelis and Palestinians need to put aside their differences to resolve the issues they are fighting over.

In his opinion, many Israelis and Palestinians know the eventual reso-lution of the conflict over their land will result in a two state solution.

“In my vocabulary, the word ‘compromise’ is syn-onymous with the word life,” Oz said.

Highlighting the argu-mentative nature of Israel,

Oz calls upon Israelis and Palestinians to come together

I’m sure most self-respect-ing liberal arts students do not consider Lady GaGa a gold standard for cultural consumption. For the most part, I would agree.

Lady GaGa in many ways represents all that is wrong with pop culture. Her songs, and especially her videos, are the musical equivalents of empty calo-ries. They are loaded with addicting elements—catchy tunes, dance beats, sparkly things—but provide no sub-stance beyond the superfi-cial. Listening to her music is analogous to chugging pixie sticks—briefly invigo-rating, and afterwards you feel like spastically jumping around a lot. But there’s no nutritional value, and side effects may include nausea.

After watching her lat-est video “Bad Romance” online this week, I realized something: Lady GaGa is more than a flashy, ambig-

BY SAMANTHA SHOKINEditor uously gendered music

celebrity. She is an icon—the personification of pop; the physical embodiment of everything pop-culture junkies drool over.

“Bad Romance” is essen-tially pop-culture porn. But besides the fact that it is obnoxiously, stupidly catchy and doesn’t require many IQ points to process the lyr-ics, there is a lot more to this five-minute musical perver-sion than meets the eye.

The concept for the video is basically this: GaGa is kidnapped by a gang of supermodels who take her to a futuristic “Bath Haus” and transform her into a fashion sex kitten to be used for human trafficking by the Russian Mafia. I know, I know.

The video starts out in this “Bath Haus” of sorts, with a bunch of models rising from what I assume to be tanning booths that actu-ally seem more like white plastic coffins. It’s an easy

mistake to make, since the models break into rickety dance moves reminiscent of the zombie choreography in Michael Jackson’s classic “Thriller” video.

That’s not the only bor-rowed dance move, either. If you look closely, GaGa’s choreography incorporates a couple mini-takes on famous numbers. I spotted references to the “Grease” hand-jive and Destiny’s Child’s “Single Ladies.” The costume design is also remi-niscent of past entertain-ment—the all white, skin-tight uniforms worn by the model brigade match the equally blinding walls of the Haus. Apparently a bleach-clean set design is inherent-ly futuristic—Michael and Janet Jackson used the same color scheme in their sci-fi 1993 music video “Scream.” Also, at one point GaGa sports orange hair and bare-ly-there white body wrap. Sorry Lady, it’s been done— Milla Jovovich rocked white

body tape and fluorescent orange dreads when she played Leeloo in the 1997 sci-fi action comedy, “The Fifth Element.”

Unoriginality aside, “Bad Romance” does a pretty good job summing up our present pop culture zeit-geist. The cameras glide over some pricey looking

bottles of Nemiroff vodka (GaGa gets a shot of it poured down her throat, I guess as some sort of trendy elixir). I need not bring up the myriad hip-hop songs out there that mention ‘pop-pin’ bottles’ in the lyrics. Then, in typical GaGa fash-ion, she cranks up the cloth-

Oz said the diversity of opinion within the Jewish state makes Israel a diverse nation, despite what could be perceived as religious homogeny.

See LADY GAGA, p. 11

Oz explained that although there will be debate over a two-state solution, the very essence of Israel is about disagreement.

“It’s a civilization of doubt

and argument…and it will prosper despite all of the terrible noises it’s making,” he said.

The current problems Israel faces, including the condemnation of the Israeli Defence Forces’ use of mili-tary force in the Goldstone report, are still solvable, Oz said.

Oz called on Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank, and voiced his opin-ion that the occupation was “deeply corrupting the Israeli society,” Oz said.

He added that the nature of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is “a clash between right and right and recently a clash between wrong and wrong."

Acknowledging that such cooperation will be difficult Oz spoke about the need for a “painful compromise.”

See OZ, p. 11

PHOTO BY Jurgen Bauer/Harcourt

Lady GaGa is only the bad in pop culture, not the romantic

PHOTO from Internet Source

BY JON OSTROWSKYStaff

VOICES

Brandeis student performs in community production of “Rent”

Before last week, artist Peter Maphatsoe had never travelled outside of south-ern Africa. This week he got a taste of North American culture and shared a bit of his own culture at the same time.

Maphatsoe displayed his paintings in an exhibition in Montreal, Canada last week and has spent several days at Brandeis, visiting class-es and sharing his passion for art with the Brandeis and Waltham community. How’s that for an introduc-tion to North America?

The artist has spent most of his life in his native Lesotho and started experi-menting with art at an early age. When he was 14 years old, Maphatsoe became the first Mosotho (Lesotho native) to create carvings from the aloe wood charac-teristic of his country, sell-ing his art on the street to survive.

In 2007, he founded the Children’s Art Organisation of Lesotho to provide

materials, instruction and encouragement to local children.

Maphatsoe would soon partner his organization up with the newly-found-ed Professor Jane Hale’s (FREN) Family Literacy Lesotho.

In an e-mail message to The Hoot, Hale said that Family Literacy Lesotho’s mission is to encourage the “creation of the first chil-dren’s picture books about Lesotho in the Sesotho lan-guage and put them in the homes of Basotho children.”

Maphatsoe illustrates a number of Family Literacy Lesotho’s children’s books and is the key representative of Hale’s work with fam-ily literacy in Lesotho when she’s not there.

Maphatsoe has stayed on campus with Kenny Altidor ’10, who is helping Hale with a children’s book proj-ect in Haitian Creole to go along with the project in Lesotho.

While at Brandeis, the now 25-year-old artist has taken part in several events,

visited courses in compara-tive literature, anthropology and studio art, has attended student archery practice, and has eaten on- and off- campus with Brandeis stu-dents.

Maphatsoe stopped by the Lemberg Children's Center to teach children

Artist visits to work on Family Literacy Lesotho project

BY CHRISSY CALLAHANEditor

Open Fields Community Theater will be perform-ing “Rent” at Regis College over the next two weekends, with Brandeis student Nick Maletta ’13 as Collins, a philosopher and anarchist.

Maletta, originally from Sherborn, Mass., became involved with the theatre at the end of his junior year of high school and returned to the stage for “Rent” this year.

“It’s exciting to finally be able to do this show with such a great cast, after over-coming so many obstacles,” Maletta said during a recent interview with The Hoot.

The obstacles he’s refer-ring to almost prevented the show from being per-formed at all. The original date was April 2009, but the group was unable to get the rights to perform because the “Rent” touring cast was performing in Boston.

“After that delay, we were

unable to find a place to perform. We were finally blessed by the help of Adam Kantor,” said Open Fields founder and director Keith Greenfield.

Kantor, who played Mark Cohen in the final Broadway cast of “Rent,” was intro-duced to Greenfield and later helped Open Fields get the rights to perform the show.

In addition, he helped the cast prepare for the show in various ways, includ-ing working on lines and exploring their characters and the themes of the show.

Performances will be held at The Casey Theatre at Regis College in Weston on November 22nd at 2:00 p.m., and November 27th and 28th at 2:00 and 7:30.

At the performances, col-lege students with ID will be sold tickets in the first two rows of the theater for $10 on a first-come basis. This is in honor of a long-standing tradition that started with

Jonathan Larson, the cre-ator, who felt that it was important to enable the young, artistic community about which “Rent” was written to afford to attend performances.

All other tickets are $20

for adults and $15 for stu-dents and are available at www.open-fields.org

“Rent” is a popular rock musical written by Jonathan Larson that tells the story of young bohemian artists and musicians struggling to sur-

BY LEAH FINKELMANStaff

November 20, 2009 Diverse City 9

PHOTO COURTESY OF Nick MalettaLA VIE BOHEME: The cast of Open Fields Community Theater’s production of “Rent”.

Children’s Art Organisation founder Peter Maphatsoe comes to Brandeis in partnership with professor

vive and create in New York, based on Giacomo Puccini’s opera “La Bohème.” “Rent” is also the seventh lon-gest-running musical on Broadway, where it was per-formed from 1996 to 2008.

about Lesotho and do a mural with them, visited the Rose Art Musuem with Professor Mark Auslander's "Cross Cultural Arts and Aesthetics" course and stu-dents from Waltham Family Literacy School to kick off the international language component of a cell phone

tour of the Rose. He was also the featured guest at a Chum's Coffee House and displayed his art while offer-ing hands-on activities in the Shapiro Campus Center. He will head back to Lesotho this Sunday after a send-off potluck at Hale’s home.

PHOTO BY Max Shay/The Hoot

10 Diverse City

CHORUSNovember 20, 2009

The ease with which the Dirty Projectors perform feats of pure musical acro-batics belies the fact that they might just be the hard-est working indie band around today.

Between front man Dave Longstreth’s demands for marathon rehearsals and an exhausting touring sched-ule, the group has managed to work its way to the top of critical and popular musical consciousness.

That’s not to say that talent isn’t the main driving force for the group. When they graced the stage on Tuesday night at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston, it became instantly clear that every member of the Projectors maintained uncannily deft musical chops.

Bassist Nat Baldwin’s slith-ering bass lines provided rhythmic as well as melodic counterpoints to the triple intertwining vocal onslaught of Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian and Haley Deckle, to say nothing of

Longstreth’s poised guitar virtuosity.

The band’s blend and bal-ance revealed a striking cohesion despite fractured arrangements that under-mined traditional song structures.

This is not Longstreth’s pet project as some critics have painted it. Each member is vital and brings a unique texture to the overall aes-thetic.

Not surprisingly, the group kicked off their set with a track from their much-celebrated new album, Bitte Orca, entitled “No Intention.” It begins with a boomeranging guitar riff that sounded like a clas-sical musician stumbling through a traditional Asian dance motif, and the cho-rus, including the angelic female choir, soared grace-fully.

Initially the sound of Longstreth’s guitar, or per-haps his amp, bothered me. There was a certain fuzzi-ness in the sound incon-sistent with the crisp, clean production of the band’s lat-

est album. This was a minor flaw, however, in a set that was otherwise remarkably solid.

What was truly remark-able about the show was the visual proof that the band can actually do all the things they put down in the recording.

It was exhilarating to watch the Projectors’ wide variety of aural tricks repro-

The Dirty Projectors strut their stuff

BY MAXWELL PRICEStaff

duced, from the ricochet-ing vocal antics of Coffman and Deckle to the notori-ously weird time signatures that pepper all the band’s recordings.

This display proved as exhausting for me as an audience member as I imag-ine it did for the musicians themselves. After a while I found it was better to stop trying to follow what

sounds came from where and simply appreciate those moments of sheer bliss that popped up within the songs. For example, the chorus of “Remade Horizon,” anoth-er standout from the new album, featured a shrieked refrain passed between Longstreth and his women colleagues that made my skin quiver.

AMC’s hit mini-series “The Prisoner” is worth-while television for Brandeis students. Staying true to the original series upon which it is based, "The Prisoner" tells the story of one man’s attempt to escape the uto-pian village where he (Jim Caviezel) one day wakes up and finds himself.

Before waking up in the village, the man is shown resigning from his mysteri-ous job (in the original he was a type of spy).

When speaking with the man who runs the vil-lage, Number Two (Sir Ian McKellen), Six is told that the New York he remembers never existed, and that he lives, and always has lived, in the village.

The protagonist is pre-sented with pictures of his childhood and other evi-dence planted to suggest that

his “real world” was nothing but a dream. Among these items he comes across an ID card. With this ID card is his picture and in the space for a name it says “Number Six.”

A regular phrase that Number Six is compelled to repeat as he tries to main-tain his senses of reality, self and sanity is, “I am not a number, I am a free man," a quote often referenced in pop-culture (FOX's The Simpsons reference the quotation in no less than four episodes).

According to an interview with J.J. Abrams for TV Guide, “The Prisoner” was one of the main influencing factors for recent popular shows like Lost.

Not only is the premise of the series indicative of its strength, but the cast is strong as well. Caviezel (aka Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ”) was perfectly cast

in his role as Number Six in order to fill the shoes originally played by the late

Mini-series “The Prisoner” poses deep philosophical questionsBY GORDY STILLMAN

Staff

Patrick McGoohan. He maintains a level of

intensity necessary to con-

vey the difficulty with which he strives to maintain his

See THE DIRTY PROJECTORS, p. 11

See THE PRISONER, p.11

Celebrated indie band wreaks beautiful chaos in Boston

PHOTO from Internet Source

PHOTO from Internet Source

END-NOTENovember 20, 2009 Diverse City 11

“The Palestinians should renounce their dream of a greater Palestine just as the Israelis should renounce their dream of a greater Israel,” he said.

Oz felt the key to resolving a two-state solution will be a new form of leadership.

“The patient is reluctantly ready for the surgery,” he said. “All we need now is a bold and courageous leadership” he said.

“The appropriate leader will arise sooner or later,” Oz said, “history is full of surprises.”

Predicting plans for the future, Oz expects to see a division of East and West Jerusalem.

He also hopes for future coopera-tion between all people in Israel.

“One day there will be a Palestinian embassy in Israel and an Israeli embassy in Palestine,” said Oz.

Oz said one reason he loves his country so much is because of the ability he has to speak his opinion and argue with others over what he believes is right.

“At long last, I can conduct my disagreements with the next Jew at the top of my voice, and the hell with the neighbors. That’s indepen-dence for you,” he said. “Such a jux-taposition of loving without being able to stand someone is common in the best of families.”

Israeli novelist addresses Israeli-

Palestinian conflict ing shock-factor by strutting a couple of sufficiently hideous outfits—one, perhaps as a nice salute to PETA activists, is a full-body polar bear shawl with the dead animal’s taxidermal head still in tact, trail-ing the floor behind her. She strips, of course, revealing the itty bitty thong beneath.

It gets better yet! Next, the chamber of the Russian Mafioso spontane-ously combusts, setting GaGa her bear-shawl on fire. She cries, breaks into dance, and randomly starts speaking French. (A side note: The French thing has been done too. “Lady Marmalade,” anyone?)

Sex! Fashion! Passion! Flames! Vodka! What more could the public ask for? This may seem absurd to some of you cultured folk, but you have to give Lady GaGa—or at least, the marketing and entertainment force behind Lady GaGa—some credit. They’ve basically condensed

Going goo-goo for GaGa

Likewise, “Temecula” included a 7/8 time breakdown before unfold-ing into a blossoming harmonized chorus.

There were a couple of disap-pointing instants, although they seemed like intentional choices. First, several songs were convert-ed into acoustic instrumentation, which worked beautifully for some delicate numbers but didn’t capture the full emotive force of tunes like “Gimme Gimme Gimme.” And a reworked vocal hook in “Useful Chamber” dampened the cathartic release from the album.

No one leaving the concert that evening, however, seemed dis-appointed, including Baldwin’s 78-year-old grandmother.

The Projectors’ presented their best material with considerable vivacity and superhuman precision. Just another day in the life of the hardest working indie band in the country.

Dirty Projectors do Boston

identity, while seamlessly shifting to pure joy upon discovering evidence that his beliefs are right in the form of a sketch of the statue of Liberty drawn by a fellow village member based on a dream.

McKellen (aka Gandalf and Magneto) shines as he manages to portray an eccentric and amiable Number 2, who can rapidly become a ruthless tyrant and go so far as to pull a grenade out of his pocket and threaten one of his most loyal workers.

So what’s the big deal? The thing is that this show (it is a mere six hours total minus commercials) expands your mind.

What if you woke up and every-thing around you suggested that the world you “knew” was nothing but a dream?

What would you do if you could not even remember your name? This may sound like “The Matrix” but this show presents a similar idea in a more believable setting.

I implore you to look into this rare series that has the potential to change the way you look at the world, even if only slightly.

The series has been airing this last week on AMC (Channel 59) and is also currently available on iTunes. Additionally, AMC offers the original series for free via streaming on their website AMCTV.com.

AMC miniseries explores utopian

philosophy OZ (from p. 8)

all the tantalizing elements of pop culture into five minutes of pure mind-numbing entertainment. If the video makes no sense to you, it’s because it’s not supposed to. If, however, you interrupt your inter-net browsing to watch this gem, and have to put in your earphones lest someone around you hears and accuses you of being a sell-out, and you try to deny actually liking the glitzy, gaudy thing and you have to stop yourself from humming the confounded melody later—well, Lady GaGa’s done her job.

LADY GAGA (from p. 8)

PHOTO from Internet Source

THE DIRTY PROJECTORS (from p. 10)

THE PRISONER (from p. 10)