The theater is small, painted black, ceiling to floor. The stage, really just the floor, is backlit. Trees line the back of the stage. In front of them, four large windows stand—two smaller on the left and right of the stage, two larger in the middle center. In the open space where glass would be, there is lace stretched in the frame. Each window notes a new room. Unsettling and hauntingly beautiful music plays as the audience filters in. The lights dim, the music gets louder. When the lights come up again, there are five people standing on the stage. The music continues. The play begins. Boise State’s theater department put on Albert Camus’ “The Misunderstanding” as a part of the 2013 Colloquium on Albert Camus. The show will run again April 24 to April 27 at 7:30 p.m. and April 28 at 2:00 p.m. “The Misunderstanding” tells the story of a daughter, Martha, and her mother who run a motel with the help of an old man, and make... ...
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Author Archives : Zoe Colburn
Zoe is a freshman Communications major who spends far too much time holed up in her room watching movies. She hopes to someday be an entertainment journalist.
It’s a small room with three tables in three corners, a projection screen in the other, about 15 to 20 chairs and a large notepad at the front. The Healthy Relationships Comic-Con was a workshop on what constitutes a healthy relationship, including how cultural perceptions of race, gender and sexual orientation can affect relationships. It used comic book characters as a medium to connect to the attendees. Sophomore Amanda Griffin set up and was in charge of the event. “I love comic books,” she said. “So I saw we had a comic book club, and we always co-sponsor with other clubs on campus, and I thought that would be the one thing that would really get other people to come, because I know how much comic books are popular now.” After a lengthy discussion on gender roles and how they affect individuals and their relationships, the attendees split into three small groups and went to the three tables, each group participating in a different activity. There was a framing booth... ...
Read More →Langston Hughes is one of the best-known American poets. His poetry is read and discussed by thousands of students, as well as by poetry lovers all over the world. After a performance in the Newport Jazz Festival in June 1960, Hughes wrote a 12-part poem and musical accompaniment entitled “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz.” On April 5, Ron McCurdy, Ph.D, will bring a multimedia performance of this poem suite to Boise State. This performance will be brought to campus by ASBSU, the Arts and Humanities Institute (AHI) and the Cultural and Ethnic Diversity Board (CEDB). Fifteen years ago when McCurdy, the director and spoken word artist of the production, found the jazz-poetry suite after being asked to set up a performance at University of Minnesota, he only planned to perform it once. “The response was so positive, we decided to do it again and again,” he said. In true form with Hughes’ poetry, there is a strong sense of history and social justice behind the poem, and the... ...
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Treefort ended its second-annual run on Sunday, and despite the highly disagreeable weather, the end result was a great weekend which provided an awesome kick-off to spring break. With some big-name indie artists like El Ten Eleven, Youth Lagoon and AU as well as a lot of lesser-known (and many times local) artists like NUDE POP, Shades and Hallowed Oak, not to mention the three sets Built To Spill played–it was pretty hard to go wrong, even just blindly picking artists at random from the schedule. While walking and standing and generally being on your feet four days straight can get tiring, in true festival fashion, people kind of ran on the adrenaline from going to concerts (yes, even the notoriously dance-free hip concerts which tend to populate these types of festivals). But even though most people weren’t dancing around, the music itself held them up. Maybe it’s a little cheesy (or a lot cheesy), but it’s hard to feel tired when Youth Lagoon is 15 feet away, despite the... ...
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Apr 1, 2013
Posted
Arts & Entertainment, Sub Feature
Tagged Boise State, Community Events, Student Life
Sometimes, you just gotta get off the beaten track, forge your own way through the indie jungle, forget the mainstream and travel by creek, or maybe groundwater? Luckily, Treefort is home to many an unknown band and artist. 2:20 p.m. The Red Room (21+) Pony Village Pony Village has a distinct nostalgic feel to their music. The Portland-based quintet uses that to their advantage, hacking into I-remember-when and The Good Old Days-type feelings with their magic-infused lyrics. 3:00 p.m. The Crux Hallowed Oak Psych-Folk five-piece band Hallowed Oak provides the perfect music to feel like a teenager on a road trip in a Wes Anderson movie — and I mean that in the good way. The plunk of the guitars and the whine of the violin help promote the hazy feeling of a long evening drive in August. 5:00 p.m. Linen Building Lionsweb Lionsweb’s Facebook reads “let’s shake souls together” and that’s what she does — makes her audience feel connected to her and want to dance with her. Although... ...
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With Treefort Music Festival only two weeks away, the Student Union Performance Series (SUPS) wizards joined forces with the Treefort organizers and held a preview show on Thursday, March 7. Grandma Kelsey and Sun Blood Stories, two of the bands to play at the festival, played for anyone interested. Amy Rajkovich, a first-year graduate student and the student union fine arts program assistant, helped put the show together. “This one in particular was easy,” she said. “I worked with Eric Gilbert and he puts on Treefort.” The preview show began with a performance from Grandma Kelsey, a one-woman band composed of Kelsey Swope and her guitar. Between songs, Swope bantered about her time as a student at Boise State, and how strange it felt to be back on campus. After a brief intermission at the end of Grandma Kelsey’s performance, Sun Blood Stories took the stage. Their sound is almost the complete opposite direction of Grandma Kelsey’s, one that was gritty and southern, with a lead singer whose voice was... ...
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“Thoroughly Modern Millie” began its life as a movie in 1967, but it wasn’t until 2002 when it hit the stage as a Broadway production. Now, the timeless tale of a country girl setting out in the big city will be presented by the Boise State Theater Arts Department and the Music Department. The plot’s timelessness is what drew theater director and director of the show Robert Klausch, Ph.D to the play. “I just love the fact that this show represents so many different periods of our 20th and now 21st century culture,” Klausch said. “It comes from the 1960s, it depicts an America in the 1920s when young people, young women in particular, because that’s who it focuses on, had many of the same kinds of concerns, dreams, ambitions and struggles as they were having in the 1960s. And now you translate that whole thing to the 2000s where you take a look at some of these things and you say ‘wait a minute, I don’t know if things... ...
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Mar 11, 2013
Posted
Arts & Entertainment, Culture Main Feature, Main Feature
Tagged Boise State, Student Life
The consumerist culture that surrounds much of society has been widely debated for years, and it has a nasty habit of creeping its way into every facet of life—including education. There’s always one student who thinks they know better than the professor, or that the university exists for the sole purpose of catering to their whims and making them as comfortable as possible. The consumerist mentality creates this view of the university as a business, and in some ways maybe it is, but the purpose of education isn’t to create a comfort zone, but rather to escape the comfort zones we create for ourselves. That is the belief of English professor Bruce Ballenger, Ph.D, “I think that we want to not make our customers unhappy, we want them happy with the things that they’re learning, but we also want to challenge them,” Ballenger said. “We want to disrupt, in some ways, the way they always have thought about things. We want them to be critical, including of the university itself.”... ...
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“It’s in the house,” Verne whispers, in terror, into the phone held tight in his hand. A green, web-footed monster jumps on the stage; splashing sounds come from the speakers. The arrival of the monster has been long anticipated with much of the first act of “A Nighttime Survival Guide” seemingly leading up to this point. It’s the story of a preteen boy living in Arco, Idaho and his penpal Aki, a girl in Japan learning to survive the night and how to get rid of monsters that might be real. Three performers handle the limbs and head with rods connected to the puppet’s appendages. They are dressed in black—meant to blend into the background, but too present to be ignored. Verne bows to the monster puppet—a Kappa—and it bows back. “Bow again, a little lower this time,” says Aki over the phone. He does. The monster bows again. They repeat the process once more and water, which gives him power, spills from a dip in the kappa’s head, leaving... ...
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Feb 21, 2013
Posted
Arts & Entertainment, Culture Main Feature, Main Feature
Tagged Boise State, Student Life
Gossip is a pretty big part of human existence—we tend to default to talking about the affairs of other people when we don’t know what else to say. It’s easy to fall into, “Did you hear about Karen and Lee?” and “Can you believe he would say that to me?” And with the recent rise and fall of Boise State University Confessions, the thought springs to the front of the mind: is Boise State really that gossipy? Maybe. But the confessions offered an outlet where students could say otherwise very secret things publicly in a fashion similar to Frank Warren’s Post Secret. Whether or not Confessions was a good or bad thing, it was a unique, and pretty fun thing. When large groups of humans get together, our nature is to sort of gravitate toward gossip. According to freshman Rachael Budahl, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “I feel like most of the stuff people talk about is stuff (students) shouldn’t do in the first place. It’s not so much... ...
Read More →Attendance requirements during flu season are the worst thing ever. It turns what is usually a gross time of year into a gross and challenging time of year. I’ve probably blown my nose about 57 times every day since the beginning of December; that’s an approximate number. I don’t even have any kind of sickness. However, with it being flu season, my stuffy nose can sometimes fool me into believing it’s something more sinister. The flu is all up in Boise, and I am super worried about getting sick, mostly because being sick in college is vastly different from being sick in any other type of school I have thus far experienced. You can’t just sit it out and get better. My roommate is sick (pretty massively sick) but she can’t actually miss any of her classes and get them excused because many professors with mandatory attendance policies require some sort of doctor’s note or an official excuse from the university for an absence to be excused. This can be... ...
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School is back in session, and I am nowhere near ready to enter back. It’s sort of like August all over again, but without the soul-clenching fear and excitement that accompanies leaving for college for the first time, and a little more experience in being a student. The main difference from August, however, is that rather than already being excited about leaving for a brand new school experience, I need to sort of psych myself up to get back to work. To do that, I’ve mostly been ignoring the fact that it’s coming up, but now that it’s become inevitable, I’ve taken to focusing on what has become my beacon in university studies: literature. It’s something to look forward to which I also enjoy. I never realized how much I would miss literature until it wasn’t a part of my curriculum any longer, and once it was gone I felt a hole in my heart much like the one a person might feel when they’re away from their family. So... ...
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Happy Apocalypse Week, everyone. I hope you are all prepared with guns and canned food and boarded-up windows, lest the zombies or radioactive bombs or whatever natural causes will cause the world to spontaneously explode (or implode) get you. Ironically it is happening right during finals week. Despite the common belief that the end of the world will be a horrible occurrence, the timing of this apocalypse is good news for those who have been letting their academics slide. So if you didn’t get straight As it’s not a problem. Hopefully we are not let down yet again—I can’t begin to describe the disappointment that accompanied the sun rising the day after the last supposed apocalypse. And though I was but five years old, I can still remember the bitter taste of being let down by Y2K. This time, though, science is on our side. The ancient Mayan, known for their impressively advanced civilization (after all, Europe invented social organization, right?) and for their impressively violent human sacrifices, predicted hundreds... ...
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Winter has finally decided to grace us with her presence, if the 2 millimeters of snow that gathered Sunday morning is any indication. And if the snow wasn’t convincing enough, try taking a look around campus—you can’t go anywhere without running into garlands or Christmas trees. There are windows painted with the snow we wish we had, and baubles painted in the windowsills of the Starbucks. Even the library isn’t free from the cheer boasting a quirky tree made of books and a parrot tree-topper. All these symbols of winter are enough for anyone to turn full-on Grinch. There’s nothing wrong with being a Grinch. Some people just don’t have enough cheer left over after the year is done to handle all the holiday songs and movies, especially with finals hovering just around the corner. It’s all very understandable, especially when the exceptionally high level of cheer that surrounds the holiday season. The immediate question most non-Grinches have about Grinchitude is “why so much humbug?” It is very simple: “I... ...
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In a reinvention of the university’s image, our logo was re-designed from the eerily corporate diamond to an edgier, sportier italicized “B.” Not to dis the new logo, because it certainly is very attractive and looks better, but the re-design could have easily been created by a student, allowing the school to involve the student body more fully and directly. “There’s two very opposite paradigms that I see when it comes to graphic design.” said freshman business major Austin Loomis. “There’s local paradigms, where it’s special because you can say ‘my buddy made it,’ and you’re wearing it or using (the logo) because you know the person who made it and that makes it relevant to you. And then there’s also the huge corporation paradigm, where we’re talking BSU spends a ton of money on football, where they want to connect the university to football and Nike.” It’s not inherently bad the university should want to connect itself with Nike, because our football team is gaining more and more recognition.... ...
Read More →“Oh, I’m sorry,” was the top response I got from anyone I talked to about living in Towers. I can kind of see what they mean—it’s around a 15 minute walk to the SUB and most days I just starve because 15 minutes is just too long. I have short legs, and they get tired easily. Like a corgi’s. But aside from the distance, I’m not really sure why anyone would be sorry for me. Towers is honestly a pretty good place to live. Sure, it’s all freshmen, but being a freshman myself, there’s really no room for me to complain. People can be obnoxious, but it’s not like Towers is any more obnoxious than any other freshman hall and the atmosphere of living in a small, circular group is fairly familial. And yeah, like a family, there have been days where I’ve absolutely wanted to scream my head off at my floormates for being loud at 2 a.m. or for any number of reasons, but I also feel like... ...
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Between 2008 and 2010 there were a total of 764 recorded crimes committed on campus. Now, that number will sound big and scary, but the reality is less than one percent of those were physical attacks. Specifically, .8 percent including sex offenses and aggravated assault. 4.5 percent were theft-related, .3 percent were arson and 1.3 percent were illegal weapons possession violations and arrests. The majority of crimes committed were alcohol and drug violations or arrests—they account for 87.9 percent of all offenses. Fittingly, students don’t seem to be too worried about being attacked on campus. They feel safe and unthreatened, even at night. “It’s just that I don’t feel like anyone threatening will go on campus, and there’s always someone to go places with you,” said freshman Aryssa Hutchinson. The buddy system is a tried and true method and one students will employ if they’re going out after dark. “I’m never out late, and I have a buddy with me all the time,” such as freshman Michelle Fournier. And the... ...
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Zoe Colburn is a resident freshman and Arbiter opinion writer chronicling her experiences at a new university in a new part of the country. Having to make new friends in college is the worst. No, seriously, all I can think when I think about making friends is, “I already did this once, like seven years ago when I started middle school. Now I have to do it all over again? I call shenanigans!” But since the only other option is sitting in my dorm feeling massively sorry for myself and eating cookies by the handful while watching the entire Toddler and Tiaras series, I guess I kind of do have to make some friends. Making friends totally blows, not because I hate everyone but because there’s this really super lame thing that happens when you are alone with a mutual friend or someone you haven’t spoken to on your floor: You both clam up and enter into this mutual agreement of I’m-Not-Talking-Until-You-Do. Which doesn’t work. And then you end... ...
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Traveling is hard enough in the best of times, but trying to find a decently-priced flight during any holiday season is essentially the result of someone saying, “Could traveling get any harder?” and Satan himself laughing in response. The usual strategy is to buy the tickets as far in advance as possible, but many freshmen leave home completely unprepared for the spike in prices around holidays. The drive from Boise to Coeur D’Alene is nine hours, the flight is close to one. Freshman psychology major Peyton Reader has flown from Coeur D’Alene to Boise many times and usually it ends up close to $100. When she booked her flight home for Thanksgiving, she met a nasty surprise; holiday prices. “I came down this summer and the round-trip ticket was $100 flat, so when I went to buy my ticket for Thanksgiving and it was more than double that, I was shocked,” Peyton said. Her round trip ticket ended up costing $210. For some students there is no “best price” and... ...
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Using art to get out a message is not a new tactic. Street artists and awareness campaigns have been doing it for years. It’s no secret why art is such a good tool for awareness, an art installation begets interest in people, where a pamphlet filled with statistics and paragraphs upon paragraphs would do just the opposite, no matter how interesting or high-priority the issue at hand. Particularly for students, some of whom barely have time to get a full eight hours of sleep, an art installation can provide the information quickly and easily. And with all the events happening on campus for the campaign, One Million Bones, it makes it easier for students to get involved, as well as hear the message. There’s something indisputably powerful about seeing an art installation rather than reading a pamphlet. “Art is the chosen way to raise awareness. When people see a visual petition, it’s more powerful than words,” said Jamie Lish, coordinator for the Idaho section of One Million Bones, a... ...
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