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Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012 | vol. 67 No. 24
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Freshman mariah Bianco dips her caramel apple into a bowl of toppings during Fall Fest.
ANDREW lAWRENCE Vanguard Staff
Student groups and organizations are requesting funding in new ways this year. The shift is infuriating to some and a relief to others.
After the purchase of a $100,000 budgeting software program, the Associated Students of Portland State University student fee com-mittee is overseeing the changeover from a proprietary system used for more than a decade to one that can communicate directly with the bud-geting software Portland State uses.
The move has the potential to save these groups and the universi-ty time and money. The funds come from the $216 fee that an average 12-credit student pays each term.
Alex Accetta, director of campus recreation, said that the new system, called TM1, will save its users time, since it is already formatted into language of the university’s soft-ware. He said doing this translation took four times as long as entering the budget itself.
Campus Rec’s budget is funded with nearly $2.4 million from the SFC for the 2011–12 year, out of the roughly $14 million total collected in student fees.
These student fees help fund everything from the Academic and Student Rec Center to the Elec-tro Dance Club to the Vanguard. Changes, though seemingly unsub-stantial, can affect many amenities students take for granted.
New software gets mixed reviews
sFc changes budget method
See SFC on page 3
RIZA LIU/VANGUARD STAFF
KAElA O’BRIENVanguard Staff
Dreams came true Thursday evening as students celebrated the wonder-ful season of fall by hurling pies at residence assistants’ faces.
“Fall is an exciting season filled with food and social gatherings,” said Christina Hanson, a second-year RA who helped plan this year’s Fall Fest.
Students filled the first floor of Montgomery Court to engage in fall-themed activities such as pump-kin painting, squash bowling and
students dip caramel apples, throw pies
See FAll FEST on page 2
caramel-apple making. The event was free.
Fall Fest was organized by Univer-sity Housing and Residence Life with help from the Residence Hall Asso-ciation. The Associated Students of Portland State University organized a nonperishable-food drive.
A bit before 8 p.m., as a cappella group The Green Notes finished the first of its two performances, Mont-gomery’s main room was filled with 40–50 students who cheered and chat-ted with one another.
It was the third year for the event and the most successful as far as attendance, said Matt Lewis, an area coordinator for PSU Housing and Residence Life.
With an estimated 250 students in attendance, this year’s event easily eclipsed last year’s count of about 100 students.
As food cooked on the barbecue, students took pictures together in a photo booth. There was also face painting, caramel-apple mak-ing, pumpkin painting, squash bowling, prize raffling and, of course, pie throwing.
Last year, pumpkin painting was the most successful activity, Lewis said. This year, however, students could hardly wait to smash a pie in an RA’s face, he added.
WhITNEy BEyERVanguard Staff
Not many people get an opportunity to sit down with Mayor Sam Adams and tell him about an embarrass-ing moment in their lives, but on Thursday night, 14 students got to do just that.
Adams was this month’s speaker for Dialogues After Dark, an event series that aims to connect students with civic leaders in a comfortable environment.
“Rather than facilitate a lecture or a Q-and-A, I wanted to create a dialogue,” said Brian Forrester, a senior social science major and creator of the event.
“My goal is to cultivate an environ-ment conducive to the exchange of ideas,” he said.
Forrester’s theory is that if he can bring students and civic leaders together in a space where “no grown-ups are allowed,” as he put it, everyone will feel more comfortable and willing to engage in conversation.
“Even if we got [President] Barack Obama to come, [PSU President] Wim [Wiewel] isn’t invited,” he joked. “For tonight, I’ve asked Sam to take off his politician hat.”
Forrester said the series is still a work in progress and he’s learning as he goes, but he was pleased that all seats were filled at the Contrary on Thursday evening.
The cafe, located on Southwest Fifth Avenue and Hall Street, has been allowing Forrester to host the event in its space afterhours, provid-ing free tea and coffee to attendees.
In the intimate space, surround-ed by eclectic paintings, students formed a half-circle to face the couch where Adams and Forrester sat.
Forrester introduced the event
Dialogues After Dark connects students with civic leaders
Mayor Adams loosens his tie
and himself before asking students to go around the circle and share their names, majors and an embarrassing moment, just to break the ice, he said.
Embarrassing moments out of the way, Forrester began by asking Adams a few questions of his own.
“If you could go back in time and sit across from yourself as a 21-year-old, what words of wisdom would you have?”
Adams said he’d tell himself to not be afraid of whatever it is he’s afraid of and give himself plenty of reassur-ance, which continued to be a consis-tent theme throughout the event.
“At that age, it was my own mis-givings and my own anxieties that
were holding me back—not anybody else’s,” Adams said.
Throughout the evening, Adams answered questions from students and, in some cases, asked questions of his own.
Halfway through, questions about how Adams’ sexual identity plays out in his politics came up.
As the first openly gay mayor in the U.S., Adams said he ignores hateful responses to his sexuality.
“It only gives them oxygen,” he said. “It’d be nice to blast them, but I don’t because they just want that reaction.”
Adams recalled an event that took place while he was campaigning for mayor in which he was asked what
it’s like to be gay.“I responded with, ‘It’s all right,’”
he said. “The next day, headlines read, ‘Gay candidate has normal, boring answer.’”
At the end of the event, Adams made a point to shake everyone’s hand and thank them for coming, re-calling names as he said his goodbyes.
Adams said he was happy to be a part of the event, and noted the importance of dialogue in a less- formal setting.
“Take over Portland; I’m retiring,” he told the group of students as he went out the door.
See DIAlOGUES on page 3
mayor sam aDams aNd briaN ForresTer, the social science senior who created the event, chat informally with a small group of students at Thursday’s Dialogues After Dark event.
MILES SANGUIINETTI/VANGUARD STAFF
Third annual Fall Fest celebrates autumnal activites
harshing the ‘Mellow Mood’Head shop moving to PSU’s neighborhood
2 Vanguard • Tuesday, noV. 8, 2012 • news2 Vanguard • Tuesday, noV. 8, 2012 • news
NEWS Editor: dEEda SchroEdEr [email protected] 503-725-3883
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2 Vanguard • Tuesday, noV. 8, 2012 • news2 Vanguard • Tuesday, noV. 8, 2012 • news2 Vanguard • Tuesday, noV. 8, 2012 • news2 Vanguard • Tuesday, noV. 20, 2012 • news
Freshmen hannah Sun, Marina Kabot-Sturos and Shelly Montag talk to APSU’s campaign director, Chris Dollar.
nick carter, a sophomore resident assistant, paints a pumpkin during Fall Fest on Thursday evening.
2 Vanguard • Thursday, noV. 8, 2012 • news2 Vanguard • Thursday, noV. 8, 2012 • news
NEWS Editor: dEEda SchroEdEr [email protected] 503-725-3883
2 Vanguard • Thursday, noV. 8, 2012 • news2 Vanguard • Thursday, noV. 20, 2012 • news2 Vanguard • Thursday, noV. 8, 2012 • news2 Vanguard • Thursday, noV. 8, 2012 • news2 Vanguard • Thursday, noV. 8, 2012 • news2 Vanguard • Tuesday, noV. 20, 2012 • news
PaTricia weTzel (right) attends a high tea during the delegation to Indonesia.
ANDREW MORSEVanguard Staff
For the second time this year Portland State participated in the United States Higher Education Delegation to In-donesia—an effort to build partnerships with the country ranging from economic and diplomatic to higher education.
Patricia Wetzel, director of PSU’s Institute for Asian Studies, represented PSU for the weeklong trip earlier this month. Along with represen-tatives from 10 other colleges and universities from across the United States, Wetzel trav-eled to different schools in Indonesia and met with aca-demic and government officials.
One focus of the recent delegation was to help Indo-nesia develop a community college system similar to that in the U.S.
Wetzel explained that there are many vocational schools in Indonesia, but nothing to compare to the matriculation process many U.S. students experience.
“Here you can start at MIT and transfer to PSU, then Chemeketa Community College, and your credits follow you,” she said. The concept of attending multiple schools is one that Indonesians sometimes have a hard time understanding.
In order to familiarize them with the process, Wetzel men-tioned developing what’s called a “sandwich program.” This would entail Indone-sian students beginning their
Psu connects with indonesiaPSU faculty join higher ed delegation overseas
studies at a school in their home country, coming to a U.S. community college for one year, transferring to PSU for a year and then completing their studies back home where they started.
Indonesia is one of the world’s fastest-growing econ-omies. Currently it’s 16th, but is expected to jump to seventh by 2030. It boasts the world’s fourth-largest population and the largest Muslim popula-tion of any one country. As the third-largest democracy in the world, it challenges percep-tions about Muslim society.
In 2010 President Barack Obama signed a joint declara-tion with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in an effort to strengthen bilat-eral relations between the two nations. Part of the declaration included the creation of a U.S.-Indonesia Council for Higher Education Partnership.
The United States-Indonesia Society, based in Washington, D.C., was one of the founding members of the joint coun-cil. Earlier this year the group elicited universities interested in sending representatives to Indonesia as part of the initial delegation in April.
PSU expressed interest and sent Jonathan Fink, vice president for research and strategic partnerships.
“In both my case and Dr. Wetzel’s, the goals [were] to build connections with Indo-nesian universities and high schools in order to attract more Indonesian students to PSU, establish collaborations with Indonesian researchers and potentially open doors for Oregon companies to find
economic opportunities in Indonesia,” Fink said in an email.
PSU has already made similar connections in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf.
Fink’s trip focused on top-ics such as Islamic finance and conservation biology.
Bernie Burrola, executive di-rector of the USIS and member of the joint council, summed up PSU’s experience with the two delegations this year.
“Portland State has now had the opportunity to visit 15 Indonesian universities, be-tween the two delegations, and meet with over 100 Indonesian higher education officials,” he said in an email.
This includes what is called a memorandum of under-standing with Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, In-donesia. This is a document that expresses mutual inter-est in pursuing a relationship based on common interests.
PSU now has direct con-
tact with Indonesian univer-sity presidents and greater publicity within Indonesia, Burrola added.
Burrola mentioned several challenges in forging bilateral educational ties with Indonesia.
For example, the U.S. has a decentralized educational system that allows schools to create institutionally tailored curricula and to do so quickly. Indonesia’s system is highly centralized; changes to curri-cula require Ministry of Edu-cation approval.
Another example is a simple imbalance of understanding.
“Indonesians regularly read about the U.S. in their news-papers and therefore have a stronger understanding of the U.S. Americans, on the other hand, rarely read or hear about Indonesia,” he said.
On Wetzel’s trip, the group met with representatives of the Indonesian Ministry of Peo-ple’s Welfare about bringing 15 graduate students to Oregon
universities, including PSU. There was additional dis-
cussion about undergraduate exchange programs.
Wetzel mentioned getting in touch with Indonesian schools to explain options for their students to come to PSU. There is hope that the ex-change process can be stream-lined, whether it’s for short-term or full-year programs.
Indonesia is not a place U.S. students typically go when on exchange. There are a lot of Australian and European students who go, though, and Wetzel said she would like to see Indonesia become a bigger target for American students as well.
“The United States is still what people aspire to in terms of higher education,” Wetzel said. The experience that In-donesian students would get in the U.S. and the experience U.S. students would take with them to Indonesia would be beneficial to both countries.
RIZA LIU/VANGUARD STAFF
RIZA LIU/VANGUARD STAFF
CoURTESy oF US INDoNESIA JoINT CoUNCIL oN hIGER EDUCTIoN PARTNERShIP
The staff-generated event consisted of 11 student staff members in addition to two professional staff members, he said.
“We do, however, like to partner with other offices on campus, like Campus Rec, Services for Students with Children and the Resi-dence Hall Association. Get-ting them involved helps our residents and exposes these other campus resources to the students who live with us,” Lewis added.
The event welcomed all types of students, those who live on campus as well as those who commute.
Lewis believes that when students live on campus, they get a richer experience.
“There is an added benefit of community and the ability to supplement education by living with other like-minded people that you can really only get by living on campus,” he said.
University Housing and Residence Life strives to cre-ate events that benefit this sense of community and en-able it to thrive, Lewis said.
However, the events are
FAll FEST from page 1
also meant to create a base of community for those stu-dents not living on campus, acknowledging the fact that most of the student body commutes.
Students at PSU with chil-dren also attended Thursday evening’s event.
“We have a lot of families on the west side of campus, and we love being able to give them a fun event to come to,” UHRL volunteer Kristyn Crouse said.
Lewis said events like this give student parents the “ability to be social with their peers while provid-ing a fun atmosphere for
their children.”He also said that PSU’s
more traditional students were able to “unwind and so-cialize with one another be-fore [heading] home for the Thanksgiving holiday.”
There was only one ma-jor obstacle, which nearly caused the cancellation of this year’s Fall Fest. Fresh off the heels of organiz-ing a haunted house, Lewis worried his staff might be overworked.
“At the beginning of the year, I actually gave them the option of not doing this program because of the haunted house, but because the RAs on this side of campus are so dedicated to building community and putting on really fun programs, they actually decided to continue with it,” he said.
A similar event is penciled in for next year.
“We’re really trying to create traditional programs that people come to expect and that our department is known for,” Lewis said.
“PSU’s more traditional students were able to unwind and socialize with one another before [heading] home for the Thanksgiving holiday.” Matt Lewis Area coordinator, PSU Housing and Residence Life
news • Tuesday, JaNuary 17, 2012 • vaNGuard 3 news • Tuesday, JaNuary 24, 2012 • vaNGuard 3 news • Tuesday, JaNuary 17, 2012 • vaNGuard 3 news • Tuesday, May 1, 2012 • vaNGuard 3 news • Tuesday, JaNuary 17, 2012 • vaNGuard 3 news • Tuesday, JaNuary 24, 2012 • vaNGuard 3 news • Tuesday, JaNuary 17, 2012 • vaNGuard 3 news • Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012 • vaNGuard 3
Louis Maltese, a philoso-phy major, said he was really pleased with how the event al-lowed people to actually inter-act with Adams.
“I was at a City Club meet-ing, and it was terrible,” he said. “You were just listening to people talk.”
October’s dialogue event, which featured Northwest Health Foundation’s founder, Thomas Aschenbrener, filled half of the available seats;
Forrester attributed the poor turnout to the timing of the event, which fell right around midterms.
The next Dialogues After Dark event will be in January, but the exact date is yet to be decided. Nan Waller, Mult-nomah County’s presiding judge, will be the speaker.
For more information and for reservations, visit dialoguesafterdark.com.
DIAlOGUES from page 1
Multnomah county Judge Nan waller will speak with students in January
psu stuDentsLouis Maltese, Amber Smith and James Lopez had a casual talk with Portland Mayor Sam Adams on Thursday.
hiro ito, associate professor of economics, spoke on Thursday.
SFC from page 1
New budgeting system coming to rest of campus
With the entire campus slat-ed to change over to this new system, any unresolved prob-lems have the capacity to be magnified when, for example, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences begins to use the soft-ware for its own budgeting.
“We’re the guinea pigs, figuring out the kinks,” said Aimee Shattuck, director of the Student Activities and Leadership Program.
The new software has been causing some headaches for those that have to deal with it, however.
“Everyone I’ve talked to has said it’s really confusing,” said J.T. Howard, editor-in-chief of PSU’s Rearguard.
Howard, along with oth-ers in charge of budgeting for their groups, has been attend-ing “budget school,” which he said was, “about as fun as you’d expect.”
Because of the confusion, the deadline for budget sub-missions from all fee-funded areas was pushed to Monday, Nov. 19.
After this, the SFC deliber-ates and announces what is called an initial allocation—basically, what parts of the budget it is willing to fund, and to what extent. A group can appeal this decision, however.
Another advantage of the new system is accuracy, said Nick Rowe, chairman of the SFC.
“Ideally, there’s less room for operator error,” he said.
But along with any behind-the-scenes changes, Rowe said its best students remain un-aware.
“When the [SFC] does its job, in terms of what Joe Student notices, it should be nothing.”
ERIK MUTzKEVanguard Staff
On Thursday, at an event pre-sented by the Portland State Center for Japanese Studies, associate professor of eco-nomics Hiro Ito spoke about the current clash between Ja-pan and China over a group of three small and uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.
Slides of revealing statistics captured the attention of a crowd of nearly 50 listeners. They were gathered to under-stand a difficult topic buried deep in national sentiments and entwined in a complex historical relationship.
The islands have been claimed by three different governments and are part of a long history of contention. In September 2012, the Japanese government made the deci-sion to nationalize the islands. This resulted in massive pro-tests by thousands of people in more than 100 Chinese cities.
Ito described the heated situation.
In China, protests have be-come violent. Citizens have called for a boycott of Japanese products in as many as 85 Chi-nese cities.
“There have been situations where Chinese citizens have been beaten for driving Japa-nese cars,” Ito said.
china, Japan struggle over islandsThe economics behind territorial disputes between Japan and China
While possession of the ter-ritories will grant the right to possible oil reserves and ac-cess to fisheries, the issue goes far deeper.
Japan’s decision to national-ize the islands has essentially added more fuel to a histori-cally tense relationship be-tween the two countries, Ito explained. There is a great deal of anti-Japan sentiment in China, and the feeling is mu-tual in Japan—especially since China took Japan’s second-place spot on the list of the world’s largest economies.
“For Japan to become the third-largest economy, from the second, is a big shock. It is a psychological issue of na-tional pride,” Ito said?
In his lecture, Ito sought to show the strong economic un-dercurrents surrounding the situation. The paradox is that both countries are reliant on one another.
“Both countries need each other economically,” Ito said. He suggested that interde-pendency may have been the cause of this clash.
“The United States have no territorial issues, so it’s dif-ficult to understand how this is a sensitive topic,” Ito ex-plained. “A territorial issue is simply an emotional topic.”
SIERRA ROBERTSVanguard Staff
Since 1998, Nov. 20 has been a day to honor victims of “trans-phobia” and gender-noncon-forming violence.
When activist, writer and t r a n s g e n d e r - c o m m u n i t y member Gwendolyn Ann Smith founded the Transgen-der Day of Remembrance, she could only hope that its impact would be felt around the world.
“When I first started the project, I felt like no one would take this seriously, that the community itself would never turn out for it, that it would get no attention at all,” Smith said. “But when I walked up the steps at the Castro Street BART station and into Har-vey Milk Plaza, and saw a group of people ready to par-ticipate, I saw a community that was willing to stand for something.”
In 2010, the event was ob-served in more than 185 cities in more than 20 countries.
This year, activist Janet Mock will come from New York City to spearhead PSU’s observance. Mock was named one of The Grio’s 100 most in-fluential people, GBMNews’ “15 Most Powerful LGBT Figures” and Sundance Channel’s top 10 LGBT voices. The event will be held in the Smith Memorial Student Union Ballroom from 6–7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 20.
The event is being held as a tribute to the members of the transgender community who have died because of violence related to their identity. A list of their names will be read aloud to remind us that they are gone but not forgotten, said Kirsten Keith, one of the coordinators of the event.
“The trans population is very resilient and enduring to face the amount of vio-lence and victimization out
Students mark day of remembrance
there and to still put on these events,” Keith said. Both Keith and Cooper Lee Bombardier, another advocate of the trans-gender community, agree it is easy to get caught up in the Portland “bubble” and forget about the day-to-day violence and discrimination going on in the rest of the world.
“It’s really important to come together as a commu-nity,” said Cathlene McGraw,
Event honors members of transgender community
Queer Resource Center co-ordinator. McGraw believes events like this help the stu-dent body confront the op-pression facing transgender individuals that has not been covered by the media.
“Most of PSU is unaware [of] the level of devastation against the trans community nationally and internation-ally,” she said.
gwenDolyn ann smith, top, founded the day in 1998 to honor victims.Janet mock, lower, will speak about PSU’s Trans Day of Remembrance.
MILES SANGUINETTI/VANGUARD STAFF
RIZA LIU/VANGUARD STAFF
Writers needed
Apply online at psuvanguard.com
Get paid $8.80 an hour/4–12 hours per week to write.See your work in print ev-ery week. No newspaper experience required. Must be enthusiastic about reporting, willing to cover any event and responsive to constructive criticism.
CoURTESy oF FEELFREEDoM.CoM
ACoURTESy oF TREDWELLPhoTo.CoM
news • Tuesday, JaNuary 17, 2012 • vaNGuard 3 news • Tuesday, JaNuary 24, 2012 • vaNGuard 3 news • Tuesday, JaNuary 17, 2012 • vaNGuard 3 news • Tuesday, May 1, 2012 • vaNGuard 3 news • Tuesday, JaNuary 17, 2012 • vaNGuard 3 news • Tuesday, JaNuary 24, 2012 • vaNGuard 3 news • Tuesday, JaNuary 17, 2012 • vaNGuard 3 news • Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012 • vaNGuard 54 vaNGuard • Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012 • news
PRIVACY VIOLATION: NOV. 9Park BlocksAt 3:08 p.m., officer Denae Murphy and officer Shawn McKenzie received a report from a student witness that a white male was taking pictures up a woman’s skirt as she sat in the Park Blocks. Upon being contacted, the victim said she was unaware of the occurrence.
ExCLUSION: NOV. 3Science Research and Teaching Centerofficer David Baker responded to a report of a robbery in progress in the basement of UCB at 7:06 p.m. Upon arrival, it was discovered that the robbers were actually a group of students filming a robbery scene.
DETOx TRANSPORT: NOV. 4University Center Building basementAt 6:06 a.m., officer Jared Schuurmans contacted a man sitting on the loading dock of the SRTC. The man was highly intoxicated and wanted to go to the hooper Detoxification Stabilization Center. officer Schuurmans transported the man to a detoxification center without incident.
HEROIN POSSESSION: NOV. 13Cramer Hall basementAt 9:29 p.m., officer Baker arrested Jonathan Watten, a nonstudent, for illegally possessing heroin.
TRESPASSING AND METHAMPHETAMINE POSSESSION: NOV. 14Extended Studies Building parking lotA student reported a stolen backpack to officer Gary Smeltzer at around 2:40 p.m. The student said the bag was stolen from the Smith Memorial Student Union lounge.
MARIjUANA POSSESSION: NOV. 15Broadway Housing BuildingAt 9:42 p.m., officer Michael Anderson was dispatched to the third floor of the Broadway building because of reported marijuana smoke coming from a room. Upon contacting the residents, officer Anderson seized two bags of marijuana and a glass pipe.
Crime BlotterJOSh KElETyVanguard Staff
Test your mood
AUSTIN MAGGSVanguard Staff
As fall term draws to a close and with finals just around the corner, many students are feeling stressed.
Hoping to lighten the load, the Center for Student Health and Counseling staff held a Test Your Mood event on Wednesday.
“Sometimes you don’t take the time to think about your-self—especially when you’re in a busy school environment, have a lot of work to do, have a lot of pressure, deadlines and schedules,” said Suzanne Eklund, a senior speech and hearing sciences major who attended the event.
“You don’t always take the time to look at your own self to see what your needs are,” she added.
SHAC’s Director of Counsel-ing and Psychological Services Marcy Hunt-Morse organized the event that was held in both Smith Memorial Student Union and Ondine Hall.
Hunt-Morse said the test is an anonymous mental health survey that allows the taker to score how high their anxiety level is as well as test for mood changes and whether or not painful memories affect them.
“For a lot of folks, there’s some stigma to this, so they don’t want to be identified,” Hunt-Morse said. “This just provides them with another means to get some assess-ment so they can see how they’re doing.”
After attendees took their tests, SHAC counselors sat with them and reviewed their scores. In some cases, the counselors suggested scheduling a coun-seling appointment at SHAC.
“When we sit down with them, they’re in front of us, and we can still have the conversa-tion about where they’re at and what they need in order to feel better,” Hunt-Morse said.
Around 100 students at-tended the mood screenings between the two locations. Many saw it as a useful op-portunity.
“I think a lot of students might be under a lot of pres-sure that they aren’t com-pletely aware of,” said Brittney Eagan, an undeclared fresh-man. “Filling that kind of thing out and getting another perspective, you can highlight the things that are potential is-sues and can fix it.”
Nathan Rochester, a senior sociology major, attended the event because he is interested in opportunities available at SHAC.
“My interest has become a little increased this year be-cause of the changes to the student health plan and the additional services that can be provided to students,” he said.
Rochester also has a minor in psychology and is interested in a future counseling career.
“This is a good way to get a feel for the testing that is cur-rent,” he said.
Rochester learned about the event after it was announced in his psychology class, which offered him extra credit. The class announcement was one of several promotion meth-ods that Hunt-Morse used. She also advertised the event through email and Facebook.
“We try to promote it to faculty and staff, to encour-age students who they maybe concerned about or who are just potentially interested in getting a check-up,” Hunt-Morse said. “That’s probably one of our most successful strategies, is working with staff to encourage students to come.”
Hunt-Morse feels this event was a good opportunity to promote Portland State’s counseling services and help pique students’ curiosity, as well as get out of her office and
educate students about the available resources with help from faculty and staff.
“Some of it is students’ own curiosity around it, but I also think some of it is encourag-ing faculty and staff to help their students be curious,” Hunt-Morse said. “A lot of times, students don’t even know we have a counseling center on campus and coun-seling services.”
While Hunt-Morse was in charge of the screening in SMSU, SHAC clinical social worker Carla Riedlinger host-ed the screening in Ondine Hall, where more than 40 stu-dents screened. Students and their knowledge of the event surprised her.
“A lot of people seem to know what’s going on when they walk in the door,” Riedlinger said.
Russell Jones, Ondine’s resident director, also helped with the Ondine screening. He advertised the event to enter-ing students with the phrase, “Test your mood before you eat your food.
“It’s a good opportunity for students to evaluate where they’re at,” Jones said. “If they feel like they need some extra support and resources to be academically successful, that’s what SHAC is here for and that’s what University Hous-ing Life is here for, as well.”
A raffle featuring two fit-ness-training packages and a gift card to the Portland State Bookstore was held at both screenings.
There were also several fli-ers available explaining how to handle certain situations such as loneliness, relation-ships, post-traumatic stress disorder and stress.
“How we feel impacts a lot of how we move through our days,” Hunt-Morse said. “[T]his provides folks with that opportunity to get a checkup and see how they’re managing and doing, some folks are doing great. Oth-ers are saying, ‘Wow, this has been very difficult for me.’”
marina kaBot sturos, a criminology major, fills out a mental health survey to test her mood at Wednesday’s event, held in both Smith Memorial Student Union and ondine hall. Around 100 students participated.
Students receive mental health evaluations
RIZA LIU/VANGUARD STAFF
“how do you feel about Disney rebooting the Star Wars franchise?”
Every week, the Vanguard interviews members of the Portland State community in the Park Blocks and asks them a timely question.
This week’s question:
Rich Reece, 36, a post-baccalaureate economics student, finds the rebooting inevitable. “I don’t know exactly what their plans are, and I’ve just read some headlines. I saw the price tag on it was substantial and it seemed like it would’ve been hard for [George] Lucas to turn down,” Reece said. “It’s disappointing to see, but it seems like an inevitability due to the amount of money that was thrown at them.”
Aleah Stephens, 21, a junior anthropology major, is also skeptical about the rebooting, despite not being a Star Wars fan. “I don’t really know if that’s a good idea or not. I know a lot of Star Wars fans are upset that it takes the original meaning and sells it out,” Stephens said. “I just feel it’s not going to have the same message that the first six episodes had, and that a seventh installment is a money-making plot.”
Story Heath-McKee, 18, a freshman criminology major, finds the reboot unnecessary and feels the new movies won’t add to the previous installments. “I think the ones they have now should be the only ones they have, because they fit together,” Heath-McKee said. “The old movies and the new movies they came out with just click together, and I think they shouldn’t have anything else to add to them.”
Elizabeth Nichols, 21, a graphic design freshman, strongly detests the rebooting. She’s also uncertain about Matthew Vaughn (X-Men: First Class) being considered as the direc-tor of the reboot. “I think it’s taking away from the original-ity of it. There are a lot of people who say that it’ll be better, but it’s only because they don’t want Lucas actually direct-ing—but either way, I don’t like it,” Nichols said.
Sean Mahan, 22, a computer science junior, is skeptical, but is waiting to see the movie before he makes any judgment. “I think Star Wars reached a conclusion, but I can’t really judge it until they make a new movie. It was kind of funny watching South Park make fun of it,” Mahan said.
MAyA SEAMANVanguard Staff
“You have breast cancer.” These are four of the scari-
est words a woman can hear—and in the U.S., one in eight women will hear them in her lifetime.
How the rest of that con-versation goes is largely up to the doctor. Women are often bombarded with treatment options and life-altering deci-sions within minutes of dis-covering they have cancer.
Some doctors seek to edu-cate and encourage the pa-tient; others simply state facts. Either way, that first visit can leave any woman feeling scared and a little hopeless.
“We know that in primary care and in specialist care, the more the communication is patient-centered, the bet-ter outcomes patients tend to have,” said Dr. Jeffery Robinson, a communications professor at Portland State whose interest lies in patient-centered care.
Patient-centered care is the idea that doctors can com-municate with their patients in a way that makes them feel empowered and involved in decisions regarding their illness, which research has shown can improve a pa-tient’s outcome.
In a study funded by the National Cancer Institute, Robinson examined the inter-actions between 147 women newly diagnosed with breast cancer and their surgeons during their first meeting.
From this, Robinson was able to measure how the communication between patient and doctor affected the patient’s level of hope-lessness about their disease, both before and after the pri-mary visit.
“Hopelessness happens to be one of those variables that we know from can-cer research is extremely consequential,” Robinson said. “Women that are more
Offering words of hope
Doctor’s language can empower or disempower patients
hopeless about their pros-pects for survival, the worse their outcomes are.”
In terms of both psycho-social and physical health, hopelessness can play a role in a woman’s quality of life, including the levels of depres-sion and anxiety she experi-ences during treatment.
But research also shows that hopelessness can affect reoccurrence and mortality.
“Communication tends to have the most effects on psychosocial outcomes,” Robinson said.
“Breast cancer is a highly treatable and survivable dis-ease, but it’s one of those dis-eases that women are most freaked out about, for obvi-ous reasons—it has so many implications with their look and feel and life and relation-ships.”
When a woman is diag-nosed with early-stage breast cancer, she can expect to deal with a long line of health care providers.
In Robinson’s examina-tions of these interactions, patients who asked more questions of their doctors or asserted their preferences for care were rated as less hope-less. Patients whose doctors framed information in a posi-tive manner were also rated as less hopeless.
According to Robinson, a doctor can frame informa-tion by saying to a patient, “You’ve got a stage-two can-cer. I suggest we do surgery, followed by chemotherapy, radiation, etc.”
Or the doctor can say, “You’ve got a stage-two can-cer and that’s actually really good, because it hasn’t moved to the lymph nodes yet and your tumor is only 1.8 centi-meter.”
“Virtually any fact or fig-ure that doctors give can be framed as positive news, without lying about it,” Rob-inson said.
But hopelessness isn’t di-rectly affected by facts and figures; it is affected more by the patient’s satisfaction with the surgeon.
Robinson found that when certain communication
variables were used—such as positive framing—the patient was more satisfied with the doctor. Patients who were more satisfied with the com-munication during their visit left the doctor’s office feeling less hopeless.
“It’s exciting to me that there are measurable and specific communication be-haviors that are associated with improved patient cop-ing,” said Maria Venetis, a former PSU graduate student whose dissertation served as the pilot study for Robinson’s research.
“We do this research with the hopes of helping people, and some of our findings are the first steps in trying to im-prove the patient experience.”
Because the visits were filmed, Robinson can see how patients reacted to the types of communication pre-sented by their surgeons, and use the positive and negative examples to help train doc-tors to have better communi-cation skills.
MJ Dunne, a former PSU graduate student who worked with Robinson, sees a lot of potential for behavior train-ing in the medical field.
“The research is really helping hospital staff learn how to respond appropriately and pick up on emotional and verbal cues from patients,” she said. “It can help doctors and surgeons give patients the reassurance they need.”
Robinson’s results will be published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, and he will do teach-back sessions with the nine surgeons involved in the study to show them how their communication skills can be improved.
He also hopes to add com-munication skills to the continuing-education work-shops all doctors must attend throughout their practice.
“Providers are very skilled at what they do, and I recog-nize that they may be hesi-tant to adjust their practices,” Venetis said. “However, most providers do want to provide the best care possible, and that includes communicating as well as possible.”
Portland General Electric’s corporate foundation, the PGE Foundation, recently awarded a $50,000 grant to Portland State for a power engineering teach-ing laboratory that will help pre-pare engineering students for careers in the power industry.
“The electric utility industry is embarking on significant change in how we generate and deliver power to our customers,” said Jim Piro, president and CEo of PGE.
“Building a smarter energy grid will require highly trained engineers. We strongly support educational institutions like PSU, which are developing edu-cational pathways and hands-on learning for students to become power engineers,” he added.
The PGE Foundation grant will support the development of the lab for the Electrical and Com-puter Engineering department in the Maseeh College of Engi-neering and Computer Science.
The program includes indus-try-relevant, hands-on projects
PGE Foundation awards $50,000 grant to PSU for power engineering teaching lab
as part of the curriculum, and will lead students to a bach-elor’s or a master’s degree in electrical engineering with a specialization in power engi-neering.
The lab is directed by associ-ate professor Robert Bass.
“This is a perfect example of a public/private partnership,” PSU President Wim Wiewel said. “our job is to train the future employees of Portland, oregon and beyond. PGE rec-ognizes that and is helping us do it through programs like the PGE Foundation power engi-neering lab. It’s just smart busi-ness all around.”
In 2010 Piro and Wiewel signed a memorandum of under-standing formalizing an alliance between PSU and PGE. The alli-ance emerged from a joint task force to investigate potential ef-forts that would contribute to a common vision of Portland as a leader in developing and imple-menting urban sustainability.
PSU and PGE work together on research, economic devel-opment, community projects and professional training aligned with two main themes, “Urban Mobility” and “Integra-tion of Energy and Sustainable Design.”
The goal is to leverage this work in support of a strong and vibrant regional economy.
A previous PGE Foundation grant created the PGE Foun-dation Renewable Energy Re-search Laboratory at PSU.
In 2011 PSU and PGE worked together to open Electric Av-enue on the PSU campus—the nation’s first street dedicated to showcasing electric transporta-tion technology.
PGE and the PGE Foundation have contributed more than $850,000 in financial support to PSU, in addition to donations of professional expertise over the past nearly 30 years.
Holiday Guide is coming soon!FRIDAY, NOV. 3O, 2012
CoURTESy oF UCDAVIS.EDU
—PSU University Communications
arTs & culTure • Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012 • vaNGuard 7Editor: louiE opatz [email protected] 503-725-5694ARTS & CUlTURE
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Sarah mirk and carl adamshick chart different literary coursesMIKE AllEN Vanguard Staff
Beside the fact that both earn their meals sell-ing words, Sarah Mirk and Carl Adamshick could hardly be more different. He’s from a small town in the Midwest; she’s from small town in Southern California. He writes poems; she writes news and nonfiction. Most striking, while Mirk has wanted to be a journalist since she was a little child, Adamshick didn’t read a book until he was 21.
“When I was growing up…I would write the family newspaper. I would make headlines like ‘Dad makes pancakes for dinner’ and ‘Dog gets stuck in tree,’” Mirk said.
For Adamshick’s part, he said that once he started reading, “I found that it was something I needed to fill this gap in my life that I didn’t re-ally know I was missing.” It took little time for him to try his own hand.
Both writers read to, and answered ques-tions from, a small gathering of faculty and students on Tuesday night, an event spon-sored by PSU’s master of fine arts in creative writing program. Adamshick read from his first book of poetry, Curses and Wishes (2011), published by Louisiana State University Press, and Mirk read from her Oregon History Comics (2012) from local boosters Dill Pickle Club.
Adamshick comes from Harvard, Ill., a small farming and industrial town north of Chicago, now memorialized in a crisp poem of his. He said that, though his was a family of readers, there was no library in town, so they made do with popular fiction. He moved to Portland when he was 21 and wasn’t really working, so he just spent time in the library, where he dis-covered Raymond Carver. “He got me into po-etry,” he said.
In a time when a master’s degree in fine art seems like a prerequisite for writing anything
more involved than a blog post, much is made of the fact that Adamshick is entirely self-taught. He claims that if he were to do it again he would indeed go through an academic writ-ing program, but he wonders what the differ-ence is between school and a writing group.
“I think the big question is whether it mat-ters to other people or not,” Adamshick said. “There’s a big sense that people get, like, ‘I can’t get published unless I do an MFA,’ and I’m glad I can represent that not being true. That’s the big question, whether you think you can do it without the MFA or not.”
Adamshick is fascinated not just by text, but by books themselves. That fascination is appar-ent in the practices of Tavern Books, his pub-lishing company.
Tavern publishes rare and out-of-print titles and translated poetry from around the world. Tavern’s focus is on a finely crafted product with pamphlets in hand-stitched bindings, cop-per plate printing and gorgeous covers. Tavern promises to keep their titles in print and never to publish electronically.
“It’s in our contract that we will never have an electronic book,” Adamshick said.
The bulk of Mirk’s published work, on the oth-er hand, is available for free on the Internet. As a staff writer for The Portland Mercury, Mirk cov-ers much of that paper’s “serious” journalism, with a particular focus on transportation, poli-tics, gender and sex. Mirk graduated from Iowa private liberal arts school Grinnell College and went directly to the Mercury for an internship.
“The problem with newspapers is that the only way to get a job at a small one is if somebody quits or somebody dies,” Mirk said. “I interned at the Mercury for way too long, like six months or some-thing like that, until somebody quit and I got their job, and that’s how I ended up here.”
In many ways, Mirk is doing exactly what she’s always wanted to do. Besides her early fascination with journalism she claims—with apparently perfect sincerity—that Seattle’s The Stranger (parent paper to the Mercury) was her favorite paper in the country while at Grinnell.
Mirk interned there, too, but passed on an offer of a position in order to finish school.
She fondly remembers coming to Portland as a teenager for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry’s science camp and spending a summer here after high school as a canvasser: “A terrible, terrible job, but it was really great to live here,” Mirk said.
Having set herself up right where she wants to be, Mirk has begun launching some ambi-tious side projects that encompass an ever-larg-er circle of interests.
Her Oregon History Comics is a series of 10 short pamphlets, each authored by Mirk and illustrated by a different artist and sold as a boxed set. Mirk illustrated and wrote the first one, “Faces of the Lone Fir Cemetery,” before the Dill Pickle Club approached her about do-ing a series with different illustrators.
She says she was inspired by the pace of change in a city that grows so fast that trans-plants now outnumber natives.
“I went to a talk at the library and they were talking about how different things were in the old days, like in the early ’90s, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this city changes so fast, ancient history was like 20 years ago,’” Mirk said.
She saw comics as a way to pique people’s in-terest in a subject dominated by imposing tomes penned, more often than not, by old white men.
As an example, she showed photos of the five top-selling history authors of last year. All were men, all were old and all but perhaps one were white. She also projected a photo of a history mural at a local school, depicting the history of this conti-nent beginning with the landing of Columbus.
Mirk’s current project is called Sex From Scratch: Rules for Relationships for People Who Make Their Own Rules, which she describes as “a nontraditional guide to relationships.
“Most of the traditional relationship books out there really suck, like, ‘how to snag a man and get married to him,’” Mirk said, describ-ing her book as an ethical guide for people for whom the term “relationship” carries a differ-ent import.
When unrelentingly pressed for a common thread through her various interests, Mirk points to the human factor.
“I’m always interested in talking to strang-ers,” Mirk said. “So that’s what I see as cutting across all those fields…people’s stories.”
A tale of two writers
music forward! concert raises money for pSu music opportunitiesMIKE DIAllOVanguard Staff
While the corridors of Lincoln Hall are al-ways filled with the sounds of musically in-clined Portland State students, anyone who has heard a melody drifting through the halls or walked by a dedicated music major strumming her guitar outside on a sunny day knows that these musical snippets don’t quite deliver the full experience.
Music Forward! is a chance to remedy this, with a jazzy holiday celebration showcasing the music department’s talents on Nov. 30.
“We’re opening the doors of Lincoln,” said PSU jazz professor Darrell Grant, who is also the chair of the Music Forward! committee. Grant, who will be performing with other fac-ulty and students, hopes that the event will be-come an annual tradition.
“[Music Forward!] tells the story of our mu-sic department,” Grant said.
The department is injecting festive arrange-ments and classic holiday tunes into the show, but Music Forward! isn’t your average winter
concert. It features myriad different classical and jazz performances from students, profes-sors and musicians from the community.
Music Forward! pushes the department’s boundaries by mixing in some unlikely pair-ings and arrangements. Operatic renditions of 20th-century Christmas tunes, newly formed wind octets and even the Taiko Ensemble come together to create a show that embodies the
spirit of Portland’s music scene.“We want people to appreciate the breadth of
music PSU has to offer,” Grant said.Grant and the rest of the department value
the influx of students bringing new life to Lin-coln Hall. The School of Fine and Performing Arts is the fastest-growing school at PSU, and the music department has benefitted greatly from this expansion as the number of music majors and minors has doubled.
The program is now the largest in the Or-egon University System, and has the ability to provide important opportunities to the musi-cians within it.
“We want to do more,” Grant said. While 10 percent of music students are already on scholarship, the goal of Music Forward! is to increase that number. All of the event’s profits will go toward providing more scholarships for the music program. Some of these schol-arship students will present their talents by performing solos during the event.
“It’s really cool to see what [the scholar-ships] can do for the students,” Grant said. “From someone having one job instead of three to a student finding something they love to do, like teaching.”
Investing in its future has helped PSU attract a talented and diverse population of musicians. There is no better representation of this com-munity than the blog dedicated to the event.
psu Department of music presents Music Forward! Friday, Nov. 30 at 7:30 p.m. Lincoln Performance hall $25 general admission All proceeds go toward PSU music student scholarships
Opening the doors of Lincoln HallOn Music Forward: The Journey Beyond Lin-
coln Hall (putmusicforward.wordpress.com), the department spreads the message of the upcoming event while showcasing different alumni who use various music degrees for a variety of life experiences, or, in the site’s own words, “a blog about how PSU music grads are making a difference in music and the world.”
These alumni, featured in the site’s profile segment “30 for the 30th,” are examples of the dedication the music department puts into its students and the department’s pride in the stu-dents’ accomplishments.
PSU’s musical legacy is predicated on pro-viding opportunities, and Music Forward! is a celebration of a department that is dedicated to teaching and showcasing its students—with a goal of increasing those opportunities for years to come.
“We want to show how far the reach of our music extends,” Grant said.
practice makes perFect: Portland State violinists run through their songs at a recent orchestra rehearsal.
oregon literary transplants Carl Adamshick (left) and Sarah Mirk (right) read from their respective works at a recent reading at Portland State.
RIZA LIU/VANGUARD STAFF
MILES SANGUINETTI/VANGUARD STAFF
NIChOlAS KUlAVanguard Staff
It is all too common for bands to form out of sheer boredom, and that’s exactly what Crystal Castles used to sound like. Used to.
Back in 2008, Crystal Castles came under some intense fire in Canada for repurposing free, instrumental chiptunes tracks and having vocalist Alice Glass shriek over them.
Because chiptunes is the antithesis of cool to the Crystal Castles crowd, the two paths never intersected and the band was able to skate by without much rabble. Sleuths cracked the case, however, and chiptunes artist Covox was added to Crystal Castles’ album credits.
In 2010 Crystal Castles veered into darker territory, but Glass’ vocals were just as shrieky and unhinged as ever. At the same time, pro-ducer Ethan Kath stepped up his game, and the instrumentation on the band’s second epony-mous effort canceled out Glass’ drunken kara-oke vocals. The album was mostly a wash but showed real promise.
As it stands now, Crystal Castles is teetering on the edge between poster children for 21st-century cocaine culture and absolute voltage-controlled renaissance. How do they fare on III?
Crystal Castles has been forced to walk the tightrope, with Kath’s instrumentals strug-gling to carry the band to the other side, where a safety net of rich electronics—unhindered by bandmate Glass—waits to catch him.
On previous albums, Kath recorded the in-struments, then sent the mixes ahead to Glass, who then yelped and screeched over them. On III, it sounds as if those days are over, and the two now share a vision—one where Glass doesn’t try nearly as hard—to pleasing results.
Strangely, the album begins with a track that
crystal castles: now more than just a band named after a video game
sounds like a closing track (it’s even the lengthi-est cut on the record). I don’t know if Crystal Castles planned it this way, but it certainly sounds like this track, titled “Plague,” is the closer to 2010’s record.
What follows a couple tracks later seems like a rebirth for the band, as if Kath and Glass lured the old Crystal Castles into an ice-filled bath-tub, dug its organs out and repurposed them in a much sleeker body. Gone are the bulk of Glass’ banshee calls, and in their place is more of Kath’s dense programming and Glass’ new-found talent for sonic sculpture.
After the death of Crystal Castles’ old style, the harmonic tendencies come pouring in, al-beit slowly, starting with track three, “Wrath of God.” Drawing from immediate contemporary electronic music, this song sounds like a cut of witch house not too far removed from Picture-plane, the genre’s somewhat reluctant pioneer.
Because the genre is unknown to so many, Crystal Castles come out smelling like roses, and that’s completely fine. It’s a curious musi-cal category without much mainstream expo-sure as of yet. The track is almost too sparse, but it is at the end of “Wrath of God” that the last drops of the old Crystal Castles have been squeezed out.
The band is in full metamorphosis by track four, “Affection.” Once again, his fishing net in the current-EDM (electronic dance music) pond, Kath manages to craft a string of trap tunes laced with haunting vocal effects. I know what you’re thinking—witch house? Trap? I un-derstand your confusion.
Just realize that witch house is exactly what it sounds like: spooky-sounding house mu-sic. As for trap; imagine the bastard child of
dirty-South hip-hop and dubstep. Trust me, it’s not as bad as it sounds, and Crystal Castles works hard to ensure that its sublimation is as painless as possible.
The tracks “Pale Flesh,” “Affection” and “Mercenary” all feature flashes of trap music and showcase Kath’s cutting-edge sensibilities, and the tracks back up his chops immensely. “Mercenary” is the standout track on the entire record, but is cut woefully short. It could have easily been twice as long and not lost a bit of appeal.
Of course there are flashes of Crystal Castles records past on the album. In particular, “Insu-lin” shows that the band still has as much clam-or and ruckus as they ever did, but the abuse of the reverse delay and filtering effects on the track make it sound slightly amateurish. Good news, though: The track is short enough to not play itself out, and works fine as a brief segue.
Only a handful of tracks on III don’t fall into the witch house or trap genres, and “Transgender” is one of them. It’s also as close
to a concept track as Crystal Castles will likely ever get.
The song starts with a bewildering array of bell tones and intense filtering—perhaps to simulate feelings of being trapped in a vacu-um—and confusion and dread. Eventually, the track finishes off on an upbeat note, all while using the same sonic palate as before. Things will look up if you just be yourself. Whoa.
Wedged in the middle of III is the album’s cer-tified dance-floor volcano, “Sad Eyes.” Drawing mostly from electro house with just a tinge of witch stirred in, the track is as traditionally dance-y as the band has ever been. It’s refresh-ing on a record like this—a dark swath of IDM (intelligent dance music) basted in effects.
Finally, at the end of your journey, you are treated to a real closing track that sounds noth-ing like any other Crystal Castles track ever written.
“Child I Will Hurt You” makes you proud, as a Crystal Castles fan, to see how far they’ve come since Glass’s vomiting-dalek-esque vo-cals on the band’s first demos. The final track sounds very grown up, like the closing credits to a great movie. It closes just as soft as it opens, and has enough nuance to really keep the lis-tener engaged.
Crystal Castles finally has sprouted a sapling of longevity and no longer sound like they’re on a fad’s trajectory. It’s somewhat comforting to watch a band come as far as Crystal Castles has; to see two young people bury the carcass of youthful boredom and start from scratch is inspiring, to say the least.
The band has found its stride as an innovator and tastemaker, and hopefully they will stray no longer.
crystal castles III out now Fiction Records
Third time’s the charm
BREANA hARRISVanguard Staff
What is it about films with religious overtones that makes them feel so exhausting? Last year, Terrence Malick inflicted upon the world his visually spectacular—and in every other way completely insufferable—The Tree of Life, which some people considered a masterpiece and I consider the cinematic equivalent of water-boarding.
When watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1986 film The Sacrifice—the story of a philosophical older man who lives in the country with his family and makes a deal with God to prevent the end of the world—you may be reminded of The Tree of Life more than once.
It turns out Tarkovsky is widely considered Malick’s predecessor in both style and theme. Tarkovsky cornered the market on the “lack of a linear narrative combined with some lovely visuals and a lot of pretentious pontificating about the spiritual void of man” model back in the ’80s.
The Sacrifice was the director’s final film, which he made shortly before he died. Though Tarkovsky was Russian, the film is in Swedish, starring Erland Josephson as Alexander, an ag-ing critic and one-time actor who seems to be an expert in theater, literature and philosophy.
Complaints from the countrysidefifth avenue cinema screens andrei tarkovsky’s the Sacrifice
You know this because he talks about it a lot, to his 6-year-old mute son, known as Little Man, and his Nietzsche-loving friend, Otto (Allan Edwall), who works at the post office and delivers a birthday card to Alexander at the start of the film.
The beautiful countryside home owned by Alexander and his wife, Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), is a fixture of the story. These are clearly aristocratic people, which makes Alexander’s speech to Little Man about how mankind has given up spirituality in exchange for materialism more than a little ironic, espe-cially considering Alexander is portrayed as nonreligious in the beginning of the movie.
Whether this lack of self-awareness belongs to the character or the director is something you’d have to ask somebody more well-versed in pretentious-message movies than I.
Alexander complains that all people do is talk, rather than ever taking action, which is unintentionally hilarious in a movie full of six-to-eight-minute takes with nothing but philo-sophical conversations.
The house is full of thinly drawn and inconse-quential supporting characters, like Alexander and Adelaide’s teenage daughter, Little Man’s nursemaid and a local doctor named Victor (Sven Wollter). There’s also the family’s maid, Maria (Guorun S. Gisladottir), who is suppos-edly a little weird and possibly a witch.
The inevitable call to action finally comes when the TV announces the start of World War III to the sound of jets outside. Watching these sheltered rich people deal with the idea that they might soon die in a nuclear apocalypse is the only time things really get interesting.
And what does Alexander do? He turns to God, vowing to sacrifice his material
possessions and his family if only the war can be stopped. In the English subtitles, at least, he literally uses “Thee” and “Thou” to talk to God—it’s just that kind of movie. He also takes Otto’s advice to sleep with Maria so she can use her witch powers to stop the war.
How does this make sense? It doesn’t, but there’s something great in the idea that a rich old man deludes himself into thinking sleep-ing with the maid will save the world. Unfortu-nately, I don’t think this is the plot point I want it to be.
But the next morning, it’s as if the TV reports never happened. Did Alexander dream it? Is he going insane? Who knows.
The details might be a little more concrete than in a Malick film, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to engage with the characters or care about anything that happens. That’s for films that aren’t important art, you know.
The visuals of The Sacrifice are indeed stun-ning, and it’s interesting how much of the film is done in long tracking shots, like you’re
looking at a painting, which goes well with the enormously long takes. Undoubtedly, this film has a lot of fans who believe it is a masterpiece and are enthusiastic about Tarkovsky’s work in general.
But these kinds of movies are not for me. I’m definitely not a religious person, though I wouldn’t call myself a hardcore atheist, and yet there’s something about using a film to talk about God that offends me.
Belief in God doesn’t offend me—stifling and narcissistic filmmaking does. As Samuel Goldwyn once said, “If you have a message, send a telegram.”
Fifth avenue cinema presents The Sacrifice Friday, Nov. 23, and Saturday, Nov. 24, 7 and 10 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 25, 3 p.m. 510 SW hall St. $3 general; students free
sacriFice, shmacriFice:Audrei Tarkovsky’s 1986 religious-message film, The Sacrifice, is playing on campus this week.
crystal emBrace: Fiction Records’ Crystal Castles put it together on their aptly titled third album, III.
CoURTESy oF FICTIoN RECoRDS
CoURTESy oF SVENSKA FILMINSTITUTET (SFI)
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The high cost of low pricesretail employees weigh in on working Black fridayROBIN CROWEllVanguard Staff
Walkers, biters, lurkers, herds—though this may sound like a description of AMC’s The Walking Dead, it can be more accurately as-cribed to Black Friday shoppers.
This year the retail apocalypse goes down on Friday, Nov. 23. This does not mark the end of the Mayan calendar, though it is a day that retail workers far and wide dread.
Weeks are spent in preparation, setup and advertising. Deals are waved in front of the faces of millions. Stores open earlier and earlier each Thanksgiving to accommodate the droves of shoppers. Though the deals keep consumers’ wallets everywhere a little heavier, there is a cost: the sanity of the people behind the scenes.
Katie Searls, a former employee at a popular clothing store in Clackamas Town Center and a current PSU employee, said that her favorite Black Friday experience was quitting on the day itself.
“I was hired a month before, approximately, and I knew it was for Black Friday,” Searls said. “It was so crazy—I just saw a grown woman and a teen girl fighting over a pair of jeans. So I took my pile of clothes that I had at the counter, rang myself up and left.”
Though it may seem that she left her cowork-ers high and dry, personal sanity was, in the long run, worth it.
“When my boss called me, I just told him the mall industry makes me uncomfortable and it wasn’t worth being employed by him,” Searls said.
Stacy Durland, a current retail employee at a popular clothing store in the Washington Square mall, has only worked one Black Friday thus far.
“In that 10-hour time span I was stepped on, shoved, almost punched, yelled at, cursed at and practically trampled on,” Durland said. “It’s difficult to explain what it’s like to stand in a crowd of Black Friday shoppers, but it’s al-most as if you are standing in a crowd of dead, psychotic, killer zombies who are in a frenzy for bargains rather than human flesh. They will steal, hunt, shove, push small children, topple over handicapped people in wheel-chairs and tug-of-war over any bargain they
can get their hands on. It’s quite an unpleasant sight to [witness].”
Durland also bore witness to another dis-gusting display: two grown men fighting out-side of the store prior to its opening at midnight on Thanksgiving.
“At my place of employment, on Black Friday, the first however-the-hell-many people in line were given scratch cards that valued anywhere from $10 to $300,” Durland said. “So, natural-ly, the obnoxious die-hards who would rather spend Thanksgiving camping outside mid-priced retailers than getting fat on turkey and stuffing were…waiting outside.
“Not two minutes before the gate opened, I
witnessed two men get into a fistfight over what I thought at the time was…the stupid scratch cards. Security had to remove the men from line, and I later found out that it was a domes-tic dispute between a woman and two men who were supposedly fighting over her,” Durland said. “Apparently, being first in line at a major retailer on Black Friday just isn’t good enough for some people.”
Though Durland’s experience may not be in line with everybody else’s Black Friday experi-ence, some former employees look forward to not having to work that day this year.
Amanda Rossman, formerly employed at the same establishment as Durland, is excited for Black Friday this year; she doesn’t work, and may shop instead.
“I might actually go shopping this year,” Rossman said. “I can come and go as I please and not have to deal with the shoppers like the last few years. It’s refreshing, you know? To just not have to deal with it.”
The season is rapidly approaching, and instilling a sense of foreboding in retail employees nationwide. Though this day is dreaded, Durland reflects on some “posi-tive” aspects of the biggest shopping day of the year.
“I love being able to say ‘no’ and telling peo-ple we are sold out of something…to see the sad, depressed and anguished look[s] on the faces of people as they realize their idiocy [for] shopping on Black Friday and expecting things not to be sold out after the first 10 minutes,” Durland said.
Durland also notes that it’s important to respect the people working on Black Friday. Though shoppers have a choice to be there, the employees do not.
“Every time you harass an employee of any kind [while] shopping on Black Friday, Jesus kills a baby panda,” Durland said.
FistFul oF Deals: Every year, millions of shoppers invade retail stores on Black Friday, much to the chagrin—and physical detriment—of retail employees.
MILES SANGUINETTI/VANGUARD STAFF
Thanksgiving wontons and cranberry dipBreathe life into your thanksgiving leftoversKAT AUDICKVanguard Staff
Thanksgiving leftovers make for the most boss second meals of all time. But if you tire of the same old plate-piled-with-turkey in the days following Thanksgiving, give this Asian-inspired twist a try. These wontons and cran-berry dip are easy to make, and you can mess with variations depending on what you have left over.
The cranberry dipping sauce is the star of this recipe. So sweet and tart and silky smooth, it’s a whole other world of flavor compared to the usual canned cube of jelly. For best results, cook dipping sauce in a stainless steel pot if possible. Its nonreactive surface will aid in keeping your colors vibrant.
If your wontons are lacking moistness, try adding a few ounces of softened cream cheese to the filling mixture. If you like more meaty goodness than crunchy shell, try the same fill-ing recipe in egg rolls.
INSTRUCTIONS
Mix shredded turkey, stuffing, gravy, chives, garlic, salt and pepper in a medium bowl until well combined. Add additional gravy if filling is crumbling. Heat 3 cups canola or other cooking oil in a pot over medium heat. Place a tablespoon of filling into the center of each wonton wrapper, brush one edge of wrapper with lightly salted water and fold in half, pinching edges together to close. Cook in small batches, 2 to 3 minutes on each side, un-til golden brown and crispy. Drain on a plate with paper towels, cooling for 5 minutes be-fore serving.
Combine all ingredients in a medium steel pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a mild simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until cranberries have softened and liquid has reduced by about half. Move ingredients to a blender. Open blender lid hole and cover with kitchen rag to allow re-lease of steam. Blend on puree until smooth and serve in small bowl beside wontons.
iNGredieNTs
Wontons1 1/2 cups cooked turkey, shredded1 cup prepared turkey stuffing1/3 cup turkey gravy4 tbsp fresh chives, chopped1 clove garlic, mincedSalt and pepper to taste3 cups canola oil1 14-oz package wonton wrappers
Cranberry dip1/2 lb cranberries, frozen (approximately 1/2 12-oz bag)1 cup pulp-free orange juice1 1/2 cups ginger ale1 tbsp maple syrup2 tbsp light brown sugar1/3 tsp kosher saltZest of 1 orange
give thanks for days on end by using your Thanksgiving leftovers in creative ways. This Asian dish incorporates leftover turkey, stuffing, gravy and cranberries.
KARL KUChS/VANGUARD STAFF
oPiNioN • Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012 • vaNGuard 11
OPINION Editor: mErEdith mEiEr [email protected] 503-725-5692
16 vaNGuard • Tuesday, NoveMber 10, 2011 • sPorTs10 vaNGuard • Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012 • oPiNioN
Growing up outside the U.S., I never fully ap-preciated the Thanks-
giving holiday. So, when I sat at my first traditional turkey feast only a month after I came here, I wondered how I’d man-aged to survive without this magical day. I was hooked. It became one of my favorite holidays, as much for the food as for the family and friends I knew I’d see.
In recent years, though, as the day approaches I question what I’m really celebrating, for two reasons.
First, I look at the supposed origins of the holiday, the ones still taught to children in schools today: Some happy pil-grims and some equally happy Indians came together to feast and share in the bountiful bless-ings of the land they cohabited in such peaceful fraternity.
Generally, this is represented by cutouts of figures arm-in-arm, wearing top hats and feathered headdresses or some-thing to that effect. I suppose having kindergartners cut out massacre scenes from construc-tion paper wouldn’t go down that well.
It’d be closer to the truth, but that’s not important. It’d ruin our appetites before we got to the pumpkin pie.
In general, my growing dis-gust with the day’s true history made it less and less enjoyable.
Then I read something that Sherman Alexie, Native American poet, writer and filmmaker, said in an inter-view with Sadie Magazine. When asked if he celebrated
Thanksgiving, he replied:“Yup, [we] make a turkey,
invite our lonely white friends over. We live up to the spirit of Thanksgiving ’cause we in-vite all of our most desperately lonely white [friends] to come eat with us. We always end up with the recently broken up, the recently divorced, the broken-hearted. From the very begin-ning, Indians have been taking care of brokenhearted white people…we just extend that tra-dition.”
Obviously, this is only one Native American’s opinion, and I’m aware that there are many equally important arguments against the celebration of a day that symbolizes lies, exploita-tion and genocide. Many call for a day of mourning instead. Rightly so.
What struck me about Alexie’s statement, however, was how he chose to represent the holiday. Rather than regur-gitating a patronizing, Euro-centric story, he tells one that honors a people upon whose land shiploads of immigrants arrived, and who, though never acknowledged as equals, were ready to offer their knowledge and understanding of the land. This tradition—extending com-passion, whether deserved or not, is one he chooses to relive.
The holiday would look very different if this were the Thanksgiving taught in schools and celebrated on tables across the country.
Which brings me to my sec-ond point: Black Friday.
It was recently reported that Wal-Mart stores will
open their doors for the shopping weekend earlier than ever before—8:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. Stores used to wait at least until the wee hours of the morning on Friday before allowing the masses to stampede through their doors, but no more. The retail giant has officially sunk its greedy teeth into Thanksgiving Day.
Instead of counting our blessings on Thursday, we’ll be counting the number of people ahead of us in line at Best Buy.
If ever there were a need to savor what’s truly impor-tant, it’s now. As we teeter on the brink of an economic depression, can we not have one day—one day—to focus on what we do have without the incessant reminders of those two, three, four things we don’t have (and absolutely cannot live without).
Last year, Americans spent a record $52.4 billion over Black Friday weekend, according to the National Retail Federa-tion. Despite the fact that the unemployment rate was over 9 percent and we were in a re-cession, we blew the previous year’s spending—$45 billion—out of the water. I guess that’s what plastic is for.
Seriously, though, imagine what we could do with $52.4 billion. For one thing, we could cover Oregon’s $5.7 billion pub-lic education budget for almost 10 years.
Okay, so dreaming won’t make it happen. I ask myself, though, what if Alexie is right? What if my Thanksgiving Day became about extending hos-pitality to the broken—instead of breaking the bank?
I have a sneaky suspicion I might feel really, truly thankful.
Racism, consumerism and the mashed potatoes, please
Are we really celebrating a day of ‘thanks’?
Everywhere and here
eva-Jeanette rawlins
Back in the 1940s and ’50s, while we were at war and dealing with its
repercussions, Americans were doing their civic duty to repro-duce as much as they could, to ensure that the U.S. had a high-er population of able-bodied citizens than any other country. The population of the U.S. grew exponentially, but in addition the economy, jobs and educa-tion were forever changed.
Those baby boomers are still around today. Many of them are our parents or even our grandparents. Now Port-land is facing a new kind of boom: a senior boom.
Thanks to Portlandia, Port-land has been labeled the city where young people go to re-tire. While that’s a slight exag-geration, it has validity; but those who deviate from the typical “young people” defini-tion are making their way to Bridgetown as well.
Portland’s already a grow-ing city, with more people flocking to live the PDX life-style every day. The Portland/Vancouver area population of people 65 and older is “pro-jected to more than double over the next two decades,” according to The Oregonian in an article in which Alan DeLaTorre, project manager for Portland’s Age-Friendly Cities Project, said that this age demographic will jump from 190,262 to 394,406 over the next 20 years.
The AFCP aims to create quality of life and generate a sense of community for people
of all ages. According to the project’s website, this includes combating architecture and transportation that “prevents older people accessing the plac-es they want to visit,” and a call to “dismantle these obstacles and encourage the new ideas that will help make the world a more age-friendly place in the 21st century.”
Basically, the organization wants to combat ageism in every possible way. That’s pretty cool. Even cooler is that Portland is a part of it. Since the population boom will more than likely hap-pen, citywide adjustments must be made to support the chang-ing demographic.
The AFCP’s plans are based on equality. This means that re-sources and aid will be distrib-uted evenly across the board, combating the idea that all of us young people just want to send those in the 65-plus age range to the urban-legend-esque death panels that conservative-erring folk believe in.
DeLaTorre said the Age-Friendly Advisory Council hopes to have a plan draft available in January and will ask for the city’s approval sometime in 2013.
If approved, many changes will happen throughout the city. Building codes could be modified to make housing more accessible. This would offer accommodation for a broader range of people, including the elderly and people with disabil-ities, and would help decrease the number of housing proper-ties that aren’t in compliance
with the Americans with Dis-abilities Act. It could also lead to improvements to preexist-ing properties that aren’t eas-ily accessible.
Another change: sidewalks. Sidewalks are taken for grant-ed more often than not. Even in newer suburban neighbor-hoods, houses are lined by streets rather than kid-friendly sidewalks. Updating the city’s sidewalks helps all of us, not just the elderly, the disabled or the kids. Sidewalks make get-ting around the city safer.
Working toward a common goal is Portland State’s Institute on Aging, part of the School of Community Health. The in-stitute’s website states that its goals are to provide “education and insight into our aging pop-ulation.” It offers resources for the older population, including news and community events, as well as access to many studies conducted by the program and to various publications.
It isn’t easy to accommodate something that’ll happen grad-ually over the course of 20 years, but it seems like both Portland and PSU are doing what they can to make sure we’re pre-pared. PSU already hosts more nontraditional students than any other public university in the state, with an average student age of 27. It shows that more and more older folks are heading to college.
The concept isn’t new to PSU, so things on campus probably won’t change too much.
All in all, this coming popula-tion growth shows that there’s more to Portland than just soy lattes, vintage stores and Voo-doo Doughnut. It might be the place where young people come to retire today, but who knows what it will be like tomorrow.
Senior boomBigger senior population likely in PDX’s future
one Step off
emily lakehomer
One of the biggest questions on the na-tional scale is: How
are we going to reconcile the federal budget and reduce the deficit? There’s a lot of talk about what we can do and the kinds of solutions
available, but will they work? And why?
On Monday, Nov. 5, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) cohosted a budget workshop/town hall meeting with Portland State’s political science department that asked participants to
work in small groups to look at how the U.S. can improve the federal budget and Social Security.
Using numbers from the 2011 national budget, the Concord Coalition gave each group a set of figures and available options.
My group focused solely on the federal budget and what we as a nation could do to improve it. We agreed that the budget should reflect our priorities as a political community, and we
concentrated on looking at the programs we felt could really help the most people.
The topic gets really dry, re-ally fast, so I won’t go into the minutiae; instead, I’ll highlight some things I felt were the most interesting or significant.
First: national defense. According to the Concord Coalition, defense spending accounts for approximately $708 billion, or 19 percent, of the total federal budget. This figure should go down, partly as a result of ending both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and partly from reenvisioning the way we’ll defend ourselves in the future.
The way we fight wars is changing. It’s moving away from the traditional model that dominated Cold War spending and into a new par-adigm of war, which shows that smaller unit sizes have a technological advantage over their opposition. The defense budget should reflect these changes.
Second: health care. Of the seven options provided in the workshop, only two were worthwhile: adding a public option to health care exchanges and gradually raising the age of eligibility for Medicare from 65 to 67 by 2027. Both options could help add money to the feder-al budget, though not in any substantial way.
Third: increasing revenue. Given the options provided, only one contributes to in-creasing revenue in any meaningful way: comprehen-sive tax reform. By restruc-turing the tax system to in-clude only three progressive tax brackets, the Concord Coalition estimates that $1.3 trillion would be raised over the next 10 years.
The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts should be allowed to expire, as written in current law. Al-lowing these cuts to expire would increase individual tax liability. This is not a tax increase or a new tax, it’s
simply allowing tax rates to return to previous levels.
Fourth: the oil and gas in-dustry. Subsidies need to be eliminated. I’m not a finance expert, but I think that if oil companies are posting record profits the federal government shouldn’t be giving them more money. This is a very political-ly loaded proposition that, at the very least, warrants a little investigating by our elected representatives.
While these options are by no means inclusive or exhaustive, our government could really make some serious progress if it were shown that we are willing to make some sacrifices in order to further the common good.
I encourage all of you to re-search the issues that you be-lieve are most important and then let your representatives know how you feel and what you think they should do. Having worked in a senator’s office, I assure you that it’s appreciated when you make your voice heard.
Reconcile and reduceWorkshop offers in-depth look at federal budget
and how to fix it
Art of the Possible
Joseph Kendzierski
That’s What’s the Matter
Kevin rackham
A Critical Glance
adam e. bushen
Thank you, George lucas
Disney acquiring Lucasfilm Ltd. is a good thing
I have a confession to make. I was a huge Star Wars nerd for most of my
childhood and adolescence. I didn’t just obsess over the movies; I read the books and played the video games, and the best Christmas present I ever received was the Millen-nium Falcon Lego set.
This obsession has worn off in recent years, but contrary to most, I’m excited that Disney now owns Lucasfilm Ltd. The rights to the other six films in the series still belong to 20th Century Fox, but that’s not the point. Prepare yourself: Disney’s adding three new film to the Star Wars can-on, with a sequel trilogy to episodes IV–VI.
I was too young to real-ize how bad Episode I: The Phantom Menace was when it came out, or how George Lucas made stupid changes to the original trilogy when he started making the prequels, so it wasn’t until a few years ago when I sat down and re-visited both trilogies that I ful-ly understood where all of the dramatic “George Lucas raped my childhood” talk came from (yes, that’s a real quote from people all across the Internet).
The original trilogy was—and is—a fantastic set of mov-ies, and while some people get way too worked up over what Lucas did with them, he did change some of the things that made them great films.
I’ve watched other people’s unaltered copies, and while
some of the visual updates Lucas made were great, they weren’t necessary, and things like adding Jabba and the in-famous “Han shot first!” fiasco were completely uncalled for.
Complaints made in regard to the prequel trilogy are valid. Although my 7-year-old self would disagree, Jar Jar Binks deserves all the hate he gets, and Hayden Christensen is an awful actor. The dialogue is cringe-inducing, and a lot of the plot doesn’t make sense.
That’s why I’m glad Lucas is done with Star Wars.
Lucas once made great movies. But he became self-indulgent and started paying way too much attention to merchandising. Because he’s the man who made Star Wars and owned Lucasfilm, no one could really keep him in check, because it was more or less up to him. His ego and the money he made became more important than whatever ar-tistic vision he once had.
We’ve seen the kind of mov-ies Lucas made to further the trilogy. They’re not very good.
We’ve also seen the kind of movies that get made when Disney owns a company (like Pixar or Marvel). The sta-tus quo remained the same: They made both phenom-enal and awful movies. Dis-ney let them run with almost no interference. For every Cars 2 or X-Men 3, we’ve had an Up, a Toy Story 3 or a Cap-tain America. Disney hasn’t had a noticeably positive or
negative impact on the fran-chises it owns, but it’s usually avoided running them into the ground the way Lucas did with his.
Now that Disney owns Lucasfilm, other directors can make Star Wars mov-ies. I’m not saying we need one made by Joss Whedon (like some people are al-ready hoping for), because Firefly, Buffy and The Aveng-ers are all great, but the tone Whedon uses and the tone of Star Wars don’t go together. Still, it shouldn’t be hard to find a director who can make a successful—and good— addition to the franchise.
What made the original films great were the other people who worked on them, even more so than Lucas. Ben Burtt’s sound work, John Williams’ scoring, and the mind-blowing special effects from Industrial Light & Magic were all huge parts of why the movies were so successful.
If Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill are on board for the new movie, as the rumors purport them to be, I’m confident that any one of Hollywood’s hundreds of direc-tors can make a movie I’ll like.
I’m not naively optimis-tic. I recognize there’s still a lot of room for a terrible new Star Wars movie, and the ri-diculous merchandising that surrounds the franchise is only going to get worse with Disney’s involvement. But I’m also hopeful.
Despite the prequel tril-ogy’s awfulness, the films are hilarious to watch because some parts are truly bad. At worst, we get that again. At best, we get the trilogy we’ve always wanted.
I f you haven’t already no-ticed, Mellow Mood, a “pipe and tobacco” store
(aka head shop), is opening its second Portland location, on Southwest Broadway and Clay Street. For those not hip to the lingo, head shops sell glass pipes, bongs and other smok-ing supplies and accessories.
Though the products are clearly intended for marijuana use, the fact that weed is ille-gal forces establishments like Mellow Mood to publicly state that their products are “for to-bacco use.”
While it goes without saying that Portland has a reputation for a lax approach to pot, it came as a bit of a shock to see that a head shop will be open-ing so close to the Portland State campus. Actually, given how close it is to Lincoln Hall, Mellow Mood could easily be considered “on campus.”
Having transferred to PSU from another university, I can confidently state that the shop’s proximity to campus is unconventional. At my pre-vious university, the student body would have openly and vehemently opposed such a move (in fact, it successfully lobbied to prohibit a liquor store from opening in the vi-cinity of campus on three sep-arate occasions).
No one’s foolish enough to believe that the presence of a head shop near campus will lure those who don’t already
smoke into using marijuana. Its presence alone won’t derail any student’s academic career by hooking them on pot. But it doesn’t discourage the activity either, and although the store isn’t affiliated with the univer-sity in any way, its presence suggests that PSU allows for a weed-smoking culture.
Mellow Mood will make a statement about PSU, if only because of its proximity to it.
PSU’s image is at stake here. I can imagine a prospective student taking a leisurely tour of campus with his parents. They’re trying to get a “feel” for the place, and while stroll-ing around the edge of cam-pus they come across Mellow Mood. After having been im-pressed by the gorgeous Park Blocks, the excellent rec center and so forth, the parents sud-denly become alarmed. They don’t want their kid exposed to marijuana use.
They figure Mellow Mood must’ve opened here because it’s expected to have a solid customer base, and in that moment they create a link between PSU and marijuana use. They become convinced that smoking weed must be not only common among stu-dents, but also open.
In this hypothetical sce-nario, PSU representatives can make any statement they like to these parents in order to distance the univer-sity from the head shop, but
harshing the ‘Mellow Mood’
Head shop moving to the neighborhood
the connection is already established.
The fact remains that the head shop represents mari-juana use, and its proximity to campus signifies a commu-nity in which marijuana use is prevalent, regardless of whether it actually is. Assum-ing the parents have a signifi-cant impact on the prospec-tive student’s decision about where to attend college, they may attempt to persuade him to look elsewhere.
There may not have been anything PSU could do to prevent Mellow Mood from opening so close to campus. Because of its downtown loca-tion, it’s unavoidable that the campus is surrounded by un-affiliated businesses. But what surprises me is that there has been no discussion or open opposition made by PSU.
Regardless of a potential inability to prevent Mellow Mood’s setting up shop, an open opposition would have been a great public relations move. By doing so, PSU could have acknowledged that some people might make a connec-tion between the university and the shop, and defend it-self by claiming the school did all it could to prevent the opening. At the minimum, it would have helped preserve the school’s reputation.
While recreational marijua-na use is no longer a cause for social panic (or enforcement, in the case of Colorado and Washington), it still carries negative connotations. With Mellow Mood being so near to PSU, those connotations may potentially start to apply to PSU’s campus.
CoRINNA SCoTT/VANGUARD STAFF
SURAJ NAIR/VANGUARD STAFF
12 vaNGuard • Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012 • oPiNioN eTc. • Thursday, noV. 8, 2012 • vaNGuard 13
ETC.Editor-in-chiEf: Erick BEngEl [email protected]
503-725-5691
eTc. • Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012 • vaNGuard 13
ETC.Editor-in-chiEf: Erick BEngEl [email protected]
503-725-5691 ETC.ETC.
= on Psu campusFREE = free of charge
= open to the public21+ = 21 and over
TUESDAy, NOV. 20
Transgender day of remembrance6 p.m. Smith Memorial Student Union Ballroom 1825 SW Broadway The Queer Resource Center wel-comes transgender activist and author Janet Mock for a special presentation. Janet will salute and honor women who have triumphed and dealt with tragedy within the transgender community. Tickets are $5 presale and $8 at the door. No one will be turned away, however, for lack of funds. For advanced tickets and more information contact [email protected].
an Inconvenient Tooth: world Theatrical Premiere
7:30 p.m. Mission Theater 1624 NW Glisan St.
An Inconvenient Tooth is the story of fluoride and the effects of putting it in our water, presented in a docu-mentary film by local filmmaker Guy Wagner. Admission is on a sliding scale and all proceeds benefit Clean Water Portland. 21+
“let’s Talk” drop-In counseling
2–3 p.m. Women’s Resource Center 1802 SW 10th Ave.
Come to the Women’s Resource Center for a free consultation from a Student Health and Counseling counselor about any questions you may have or stresses you may be dealing with. FREE
ivy Pull3–5 p.m. Women’s Resource Center 1802 SW 10th Ave.
Join the Environmental Club in helping to keep the landscape at the Women’s Resource Center entrance maintained. Light refreshments and tools will be provided. FREE
WEDNESDAy, NOV. 21
crafternoons
Noon–1 p.m. Women’s Resource Center 1802 SW 10th Ave.
Bring your knitting, crochet, sewing and supplies and come share your skills, ideas and thoughts. Everyone and all kinds of crafts are welcome. Yarn and needles are also available for beginners or those in need.
FREE
ThURSDAy, NOV. 22
Turkey Thursday
10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Montgomery Court 1802 SW 10th Ave.
If you will be staying on campus for the Thanksgiving holiday you are invited to come and enjoy a dinner hosted in the Montgomery Court Lounge. FREE
ProPer’s annual Free Thanksgiving day Feast-ival
Noon–4 p.m. Celebration Tabernacle 8131 N Denver Ave.
Live music and storytellers as well as free food, with vegetarian and vegan options available, are of-fered at this community-organized Thanksgiving celebration. FREE
Psu opera Program: French Baroque operaNoon–1 p.m. Lincoln Hall, room 75 1620 SW Park Ave.
Portland State presents, as part of the Performance Attendance Recital Series, a free concert featuring the French baroque opera style of per-
formance. FREE
FRIDAy, NOV. 23
The Portland Ballet: a Mid-summer Night’s dream4 p.m. Lincoln Hall, room 175 1620 SW Park Ave.
The Portland Ballet comes to PSU to present their take on the Shakespeare classic. Admission is $10 for youth and $25 general for the 4 p.m. preview. For ticket informa-tion visit theportlandballet.org, call 503-452-8448 or go to the PSU Box Office.
2012 Portland Macy’s holiday Parade
9–10 a.m. Downtown Portland
Head downtown the day after Thanksgiving for the Macy’s Holi-day Parade. The parade boasts 26 floats and more than 500 costumed characters as well as numerous local marching bands. FREE
Turkey detox4–11 p.m.
Portland Short Bus offers a day-after-Thanksgiving adventure that stops at various bars around Portland, ending in a karaoke experience. Tickets are $25. For more information and meeting location visit portlandshortbus.com. 21+
SATURDAy, NOV. 24
Thanksgiving day weekend wine Tasting
11 a.m.–7 p.m. Hip Chicks Do Wine 4510 SE 23rd Ave.
Hip Chicks Do Wine invites you to come and taste every single wine they make while enjoying live music and appetizers—and you go home with a free wine glass. Admission is $15. For more information and to purchase tickets visit hipchicksdow-ine.com. 21+
Francesco Francavilla signing
6–9 p.m. Things From Another World 2916 NE Broadway
Award-winning cover artist for com-ics Francesco Francavilla comes to Things From Another World for a signing. Come and collect his auto-graph while you enjoy free food and beer (for those over 21). All ages are welcome for the signing. FREE
SUNDAy, NOV. 25
america’s largest christmas Bazaar
10 a.m.–5 p.m. Portland Expo Center 2060 N Marine Dr.
With more than 1,000 booths full of holiday decorations, foods and gifts, America’s Largest Christmas Bazaar is the perfect event to kick off your holiday shopping season. Admis-sion is $7 for adults, $6 for seniors and $3 for children 12–17 years of age. Children under 12 gain entrance free of charge.
Free concert: Christmas from africa
7 p.m. Celebration Tabernacle 8131 N Denver Ave.
The Asante Children’s Choir, made up of children from East Africa, sings songs of hope for the holiday season. A meet-and-greet as well as free African-themed foods will be available, and all ages are encouraged to attend. FREE
MONDAy, NOV. 26
aIses dead week dinner6–10 p.m. Native American Student and Community Center 710 SW Jackson St.
PSU’s chapter of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society is hosting an informal dinner and study space for all students dur-ing “dead week.” Feel free to bring your homework, books, friends and dessert to share. FREE
recycle electronics 3–5 p.m. Women’s Resource Center 1802 SW 10th Ave.
Local organization Free Geek teams up with the Environmental Club to host an event that will teach you how to recycle your electronics while helping out the community.
FREE
TUESDAy, NOV. 27
Maquilapolis
4–6 p.m. Women’s Resource Center 1802 SW 10th Ave.
The Eco-Femmes present a film on the lives of female sweatshop workers, highlighting the nega-tive effects of globalization in a free-trade zone with Tijuana.
FREE
Faculty Favorite lecture series: dr. Kim williams
2–4 p.m. Women’s Resource Center 1802 SW 10th Ave.
Dr. Williams has been invited to speak on the topic of her latest paper, based on hundreds of in-terviews with African-American leaders and data from opinion polls. She argues that there is a mistaken narrative that African-Americans are hostile toward im-migrants due to job competition at
the low end of the wage scale. FREE
living a Multidimensional life
7–9 p.m. New Renaissance Bookstore 1338 NW 23rd Ave.
New Connexion offers a lecture on quantum and parallel realities at New Renaissance Bookstore. Admission is $10 and all ages are welcome.
Join fellow Portlanders for a true Portland tradition with the holiday tree lighting at Pioneer Courthouse Square on Friday, Nov. 23, at 5 p.m. The event will feature a sing-along atmosphere with Thomas Lauderdale and members of Pink Martini.
Portland holiday Tree
lighting
CoURTESy oF PECCI.oRG
T his is the first of a three-part series about some of our
most celebrated holidays and traditions—those that are so ingrained in society that we often don’t know (or don’t re-member) where and how they started. We’ve come to expect certain things from these pe-culiar holidays, but it’s time to look back at their origins.
Buttery warmth melts the air with the sweet aroma of baked bread, the luscious fragrance wafting around a table brimming with succu-lent turkey, savory gravy and irresistibly creamy mashed potatoes. Relatives lounge la-zily with loosened belts, nib-bling at pie they’re too full to eat but consume with relish nonetheless.
It’s Thanksgiving, and it’s wonderful.
Despite being a relatively young nation, America’s ac-quired quite a few of its own antiquated traditions—tra-ditions that often stem from obscure or bizarre origins. Thanksgiving, a time of de-lightful nationwide gluttony, is no exception.
The first American Thanks-giving is often attributed to the October of 1621. The story describes Plymouth Pilgrims celebrating their successful harvest thanks to the help of the Wampanoag American Indians.
Elementary school filled our imaginations with this momentous day in our coun-try’s history: We’d decorate funny hats or make hand-print-turkeys to celebrate the wonderful unity of Thanks-giving, but the actual his-torical details were always a bit fuzzy.
When looking back at this holiday Americans so steadfastly celebrate, what’s interesting is how such a touching tale of united cul-tures is based almost solely on a single letter written by a man named Edward Winslow. Winslow, the Plymouth colony’s leader, wrote the description of the first Thanksgiving—a short letter that was lost for nearly two centuries before being rediscovered in the 1800s.
Yes, the tradition of Thanksgiving is based on a rather diminutive letter that was lost for 200 years, during which time the holiday didn’t really exist.
It didn’t come into being until 1841, when Bostonian Alexander Young decided to publish the letter. In a mo-ment of personal flair, he dubbed the event the “First Thanksgiving.”
Strangely, the concept of “thanksgiving” in the 1800s didn’t look anything like what we have now (devour-ing a feast and watching foot-ball). It was traditionally a
time for fasting and prayer. What we do today would more aptly be described as a harvest festival, one that’s been celebrated in many cul-tures over the centuries as a way to thank deities for a successful crop.
Some of the basic beliefs surrounding Thanksgiving are also misleading. It’s un-clear whether the Pilgrims actually invited the 90 or so Wampanoags to their fes-tivities or if they were intimi-dated when the Wampanoag showed up to a 50-Pilgrim-strong party.
One of the biggest traves-ties, perhaps, is that mashed potatoes, stuffing and pie were almost definitely not present at this “first” Thanksgiving feast. At the time, sugar was a rarity and potatoes hadn’t yet become a common staple.
Deer, wild fowl and corn were the main dishes de-scribed in Winslow’s ac-count. Seafood, such as eel and shellfish, were also likely incorporated, as well as veg-etables like squash.
The modern Thanksgiving we have today was shaped throughout the 17th century. After Young’s publication, it quickly grew popular, and in 1863 President Abraham Lincoln declared it a national holiday.
President Franklin Roosevelt tried to change the day of Thanksgiving to the third Thursday in November. This was an attempt to lengthen the Christmas shopping sea-son and boost the economy. The public responded poorly,
and in 1942 Roosevelt issued a proclamation that declared Thanksgiving should be held on the fourth Thursday in November.
It’s unnerving to realize how elementary education gives very little factual evidence re-garding Thanksgiving, and yet the holiday is such a promi-nent point in our yearly cur-riculum. I’ve certainly never eaten eel for Thanksgiving, and no one ever told me that the holiday was based on such scant information.
Teachers used the coming together of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag American In-dians as an example of a peace-ful moment in time, when the Pilgrims could celebrate all they were thankful for.
As admirable as the senti-ments are, it’s rather falla-cious to teach these lessons in public classrooms using historical information that is loose at best. To present these values tainted by a conjectured history is dan-gerously close to exploitative interpretation.
The idealism of the “First Thanksgiving” is part of a pretty facade we’ve fashioned into our national self-es-teem. We’ve built a tradition around a legend that symbol-izes family unity and giving thanks for what we often take for granted.
Misleading ourselves about our past and exaggerating the glory of our history bor-ders on pitiable. All in all, though, there are worse rea-sons to get together and enjoy delicious food with the ones we love.
Peculiar holidays: part 1Break out the sweatpants, it’s Thanksgiving
Ms. Fudge’s Sweet Nothings
stephanie Fudge-Bernard
got something to say? give us your $0.02 at psuvanguard.com
I am writing to express my disappointment in the publication of a re-
cent column authored by Alyck Horton. In the Octo-ber 23 opinion piece titled “Monitor vs. Whiteboard,” Mr. Horton couches the issue of online coursework in sex-ist, judgmental, and offensive language. I believe there are more respectful—and accu-rate—ways to engage in this discussion that centralize the merits of online learning, not online learners themselves. While I agree with some of Mr. Horton’s assertions about the unsuitability of online envi-ronments for coursework that is dynamic and discussion-based, I find his sexist carica-ture of female online students particularly disgusting, and I disagree strongly with the characterization of students enrolled in online coursework as lazy and unprincipled. This portrait is both offensive and inaccurate.
Online learning increases accessibility for students, par-ticularly non-traditional de-gree seekers who may work during typical class hours, have family responsibilities, or who cannot access campus affordably. According to the Center for Academic Excel-lence, PSU currently engages more than 16,000 students in online coursework. On-line coursework can demand a high level of student effort and accountability, operating on the same premise as the
brick-and-mortar environment that Mr. Horton champions. I’d venture that both settings ultimately rely on a student’s agency and desire to partici-pate-- the rigor of any course, online or not, often functions in tandem with a student’s own application and engagement. As online options expand, the onus seems stronger than ever on all students to take account-ability for their own education and learning.
As a campus based student, I appreciate the contact I have with faculty and peers, and would hesitate to substitute this experience with an online format. However, in framing all online students in terms of derogatory generalizations, Mr. Horton effectively closes the door on this debate of on-line learning as a viable educa-tional modality. Premising the conversation disrespectfully on the demographics and mo-tivations of online learners de-rails the discussion. Let’s set aside inaccurate and dispar-aging speculation with regard to online learners, and talk instead about how online for-mats have and will continue to shift the landscape of post-secondary education, and the implications of such change for students, educators, and employers.
Respectfully, Renee HuizingaMSW/MPH student, projected grad. 2014
Sexism and classism have no place in the ‘Monitor vs. Whiteboard’ debate
letter to the Editor
* * *
KAyLA NGUyEN/VANGUARD STAFF
14 vaNGuard • Tuesday, JaNuary 10, 2012 • eTc.14 vaNGuard • Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012 • sPorTs
SPORTS Editor: marco ESpaña [email protected] 503-725-4538
eTc. • Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012 • vaNGuard 13 sPorTs • Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012 • vaNGuard 15
in his first game with the team against Pacific, finishing with 16 points in the victory.
Despite losing to the Ducks last week, PSU showed a lot of poise after falling behind by 20 points in the first half. The Vikings were able to regroup in the locker room and played well on both ends of the floor in the second half. Winston Jr. and forward Renado Parker had 15 points apiece, but a physical Ducks team out-re-bounded PSU 35-24 on their way to the win.
The University of Portland will present a strong challenge in the post. Six-foot-7-inch for-ward Ryan Nicholas has been their star, leading the Pilots in scoring and rebounding this season. Nicholas and 6-foot-11-inch center Thomas van der Mars should be tough to handle for the PSU frontcourt.
On Sunday, a formidable Oklahoma State team awaits the Vikings. The Cowboys have an imposing presence down low as well, but it is their guard play that has been most impressive so far this season. Sophomore swing-man Le’Bryan Nash, who was selected to the preseason All-Big 12 team, is sure to cause plenty of matchup prob-lems, and freshman guard Marcus Smart, a McDonald’s All-American, is also off to a strong start.
The Vikings will need to put
together a solid team defensive effort this week and will rely on the continued hot shooting of Winston Jr. Expect athletic junior college transfer Marcus Hall to see more playing time,
particularly against Oklaho-ma State. Whatever the results of the next two games, PSU should be well prepared head-ing into a busy winter break schedule in December.
Men’s basketball prepares for road trip
BRyAN zINSChlAGVanguard Staff
By crosstown bus ride or 1,900-mile flight, the Portland State men’s basketball squad will travel off campus to face two strong nonconference op-ponents this week.
On Wednesday, the Vikings will make a quick commute north for a matchup against the University of Portland, then head out to Stillwater to face Oklahoma State Univer-sity on Sunday.
PSU is 1-1 so far this season, with a 77-58 win over Pacific University and an 80-69 loss to the University of Oregon. Vi-kings guard Dre Winston Jr., a transfer from Washington State University, was impressive
DREW lAzzARAVanguard Staff
By the time this column drops, the first seven games of the NBA season will be a dis-tant memory. Once Tuesday rolls around and this paper is in your hands, most of the league will have played two whole games beyond that. We’ll have a brand new set of power rankings, and we’ll all feel pretty silly that we were ever even talking about those first seven.
But as I’ve said, I’m still on this side of that great di-vide, the horseless carriage to your flying car. I come from a simpler time, a time when an infinitesimally small sample size can be the elixir of infinite hope. A time when early season over-achievers are hard at work effusively weaving their own narratives to explain their suc-
cess in unquantifiable terms.In other words, a time of
buying in.The New York Knicks are
the poster children for the “buy in” portion of this year’s NBA season. They won their first six games of the year, including impressive victo-ries over defending cham-pions the Miami Heat and the perennially sturdy San Antonio Spurs. The Knicks accomplished this feat by do-ing things they haven’t been known for in recent years: taking care of the basketball, making extra passes, mov-ing without the ball, play-ing committed defense and shooting an excellent three-point percentage.
They also did so because two of their most talented players, Carmelo Anthony and J.R. Smith, are discovering that what they believed they could do on a basketball court is in-consequential next to what they are supposed to do and have so far managed to maximize their talent, taking the sermons of their defense-minded coach to heart and coexisting on a team with more than its fair share of outsized egos.
Now it seems that all any-one can talk about is how the
zACh BIGAlKE Vanguard Staff
In the span of an hour on Sat-urday, the Bowl Champion-ship Series race was turned on its head as number-one Kansas State University and number-two University of Or-egon both suffered their first defeats of the season.
The top level of college football will be instituting a four-team playoff two years from now to put an end to this kind of upheaval and the ambiguousness that follows, and for many it couldn’t come soon enough. Fans have been clamoring for a playoff system for years now; even before the upsets over the Wildcats and Ducks (just a week after previ-ous number-one University of Alabama lost to Texas A&M), the overhaul of a process which seeks to determine the country’s best team by way of polls and computer rankings was considered long overdue.
But does a playoff really solve this predicament? Can a one-off bracket of any size definitively determine the best team in a sport during any given season?
American fans love playoffs. And leagues both professional and collegiate understand that common yearning for a “pure” knockout tournament, where only one team is left stand-ing in the end. But there is a downside to that system as well, and we often see teams sneak past the gates on their way to a trophy—teams that,
Vikings come close in Dam Cup defeatzACh BIGAlKE Vanguard Staff
Back at Jeld-Wen Field for the season finale against Eastern Washington Uni-versity, it looked like the 26 seniors suiting up for their final game at Portland State might go out on a high note against their longtime rival. As the rain fell in Portland, the Vikings surged to a dou-ble-digit lead in the first half and then again in the second. But with a share of the Big Sky title on the line, Eastern Washington rebounded both times and snatched the vic-tory in the final two minutes to win the Dam Cup.
The Vikings didn’t make it easy for them, taking an early 13-0 lead on the strength of two touchdowns by tailback DJ Adams. Capitalizing on ex-cellent field position thanks to two Eastern Washington fum-bles and a bad punt snap, PSU racked up 120 yards of offense and controlled the time of pos-session in the opening quarter.
Eastern Washington con-tinued to sputter offensively in the second quarter until former Southern Methodist University quarterback Kyle Padron relieved freshman starter Vernon Adams. Stand-ing tall in the pocket, Padron coolly drove the Eagles down-field for two touchdowns and a one-point lead at halftime.
PSU quarterback Kieran McDonagh found senior
Early returnsFinding the right formula in the NBA
what’s in a playoff?
away games
down to the wire
on the verge: Viking running back DJ Adams evades defenders during the Dam Cup at Jeld-Wen Field. Portland State came close to an upset bid over Eastern Washington, losing by a touchdown in the final two minutes.
Viking offense downfield on a 78-yard drive that the quarterback finished on a two-yard keeper for the score. McDonagh then lofted a high pass to Monahan for the two-point conversion, tying the game at 34-34 with less than five minutes remaining.
Padron then went back to work, hitting prime targets Kaufman and Greg Herd be-fore carrying the decisive touchdown over the goal line himself. Portland State would have a final chance to send the game to overtime, but Eastern Washington linebacker Zach Johnson snatched his second interception of the day to end the Viking comeback bid.
“That’s the game some-times,” head coach Nigel Burton said after the game. “Last year [against Eastern Washington], we threw a ball over the middle that bounced off three different people, and we scored. At that moment, they probably had the same feeling I had [in this game] when the ball got kicked off somebody’s foot: ‘This isn’t going to go very well today.’ I’m sure that was their feel-ing last year, and it came back and got us this year.”
The Eagles were indeed able to turn fortune in their favor to close the season against PSU. But the Vikings can take sol-ace in the fact that they ended the year with a tremendously gutty performance against the 2012 Big Sky champions, mak-ing the Eagles work for their victory every step of the way. There can be no doubt that PSU’s seniors have gone out on a high note.
receiver Justin Monahan for a six-yard touchdown pass on the Vikings’ first drive of the third quarter, reclaiming the lead 19-14. Adams would follow that up with his third rushing touchdown of the game on the subsequent drive that put the home team ahead 26-14. The Viking defense did
everything it could to hold onto that lead.
“Our goal going into the game was to stop the run so we could only focus on defending the pass, and we successfully did that,” senior linebacker Ian Sluss said.
The Vikings held Eastern Washington to zero net yards
on 28 carries, but Padron con-tinued to hit his receivers for big gains. The Eagles would finish the game with 463 yards of offense, all through the air. Their first score of the sec-ond half was set up by a mi-raculous kick-save catch by Brandon Kaufman, who reeled in the ball just short of
the goal line to set up a short touchdown run. The second came on a 36-yard strike from Padron to Nicholas Edwards to take the lead 27-26.
After Eastern Washing-ton made it 34-26 following Padron’s second touchdown to Edwards, McDonagh responded by leading the
gut check: Portland State gears up for two difficult matchups this week.
Postseasons provide excitement without a definitive champion
by any other metric, would never be declared that season’s champion.
Look no further than that other brand of football, the one played all around the globe. Most international soc-cer leagues follow a round-robin, home-and-away format in which every team in a divi-sion faces every other team twice. Once the season has
concluded, the point totals are tabulated, and we’re left with a more concrete appraisal of the team that most success-fully navigated the crests and troughs of the year to emerge atop a crowded heap of con-tenders.
The playoff system, on the other hand, especially in a single-elimination format, is marketed as a way to avoid
assigning too much weight to regular season performance, forcing teams to back up their results during the year in games where there’s more on the line and the pressure is ratcheted up considerably. But what it’s really designed to do is increase the enter-tainment value of a product with a nine-figure bottom line, as every game increases in
significance when it could be the team’s last.
While there is no doubt that a Cinderella story can be in-spiring, rare is the minnow that could roar over an entire season against tournament-level competition. Even when it is a powerhouse program rolling to victory in college football, one win offers a trou-blingly limited if not altogether
illegitimate sample size to de-clare greatness.
Were the 9-7 New York Giants the best team in the NFL last season? Seems like an easy ques-tion to answer—the Lombardi trophy certainly offers a com-pelling argument. Still, it was a victory that hinged on a single performance to crown a final champion. Other teams were much more consistent over the course of the season, only to fall at the most unfor-tunate of times near the finish lines of their campaigns.
Baseball, basketball and hockey seek to increase the fairness (along with the rev-enue) of their playoff systems by scheduling best-of-seven series to determine who ad-vances from one round to the next. Each presents a larger sample size, but also tends to illustrate the vagaries of divi-sion strength during the year. In all of these sports that depend on a combination of division championships and wild-card eligibility to fill out the playoff schedule, they often unjustly exclude teams and advance others based on geography more than excellence.
It’s not an easy problem to remedy. If the goal is to pique interest in a sport, then a playoff certainly does that. But does a single loss de-termine the worthiness of a champion any more than the current system? Too often we have seen how playoffs man-age to reward a team that wins at just the right time, rather than acknowledging the difficulty and tremen-dous accomplishment of sus-taining a high level of play over the course of an entire season.
aFtershock: The University of oregon was knocked out of its number-two spot in the rankings after an overtime loss to Stanford last week.
Knicks are finally “buying in.” This is a dangerous ex-
planation for a team’s good fortune, however, because it is an implicit admission that you aren’t completely sure why things are going so well. That’s fine if there genuinely are no concrete reasons for your achievements. But if there are real, observable fac-tors contributing to your suc-cess during any stretch of the season, it would be nice to be able to identify them, so that when you hit a rough patch late in the year or find your-self struggling on the second night of a back-to-back, you’ll have actual solutions instead of platitudes.
If I were a Knicks fan listening to Anthony pon-tificate on what’s different about the team this season, I would pray that he bypassed all the talk about buying in and said something more along the lines of, “Well, this year, I’m actually trying on defense. And I decided to pass the ball every four pos-sessions, which I’m not used to. And J.R. stopped taking stupid shots with 20 seconds left on the shot clock. And Raymond Felton isn’t fat this year, so that’s nice.”
Recognizing exactly what it is that has led to your team’s improvement not only helps you to continue improving, it makes you accountable to those changes. As a team, you aren’t either buying in or not; you’re either playing sound basketball with maxi-mum effort, or you’re not. The rest is just noise.
NBA teams become win-ners for three reasons: tal-ent, coaching and cohesion. In a way, these are nebu-lous terms, too; each ele-ment bleeds into the others in imprecise ways, pulling and pushing with dispro-portional force and varying degree. But they are abso-lutely not matters of faith. It isn’t necessary to buy into concepts like these—they are undeniable, built upon past evidence and clearly discern-ible results. And if a team lacks them, no alternative set of factors can be bought into fervently enough to overcome their absence.
You know who never says a word about “buying in”? The Miami Heat. Remember that when they are sweep-ing the Knicks in the second round of the playoffs this spring.
place your Bets: Carmelo Anthony and the Knicks have surprised many with their strong start.
DANIEL JohNSToN/VANGUARD STAFF
KARL KUChS/VANGUARD STAFF
CoURTESy oF UNI-WATCh.CoM
CoURTESy oF UPI/JohN ANGELILLo
16 vaNGuard • Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012 • sPorTs
vs
vs
vs
vs
@
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receNT resulTs
Thursday, Nov. 15
Friday, Nov. 16
saturday, Nov. 17
Vikings 3weber state 0
Blazers 119houston 117
Vikings 3idaho state 1
eastern washington 41Vikings 34
winterhawks 5Medicine hat 2
Kamloops 6winterhawks 4
Vikings 87oregon 85
VOllEyBAll
NBA
VOllEyBAll
FOOTBAll
Whl
Whl
WOMEN’S BASKETBAll
Top performersaubrey mitchell: 13 kills, .812 hitting percentageJaklyn wheeler: 8 kills, 5 digs
Top performersnicolas Batum: 35 points, 6 reboundsdamian lillard: 27 points, 5 assists
Top performersmegan Ellis: 16 kills, 14 digscheyne corrado: 14 kills, 8 digs
Top performersdJ adams: 56 rushing yards, 3 touchdownszach walen: 7 tackles, 1 sack
Top performerstaylor leier: 2 goalsty rattie: 2 goals
Top performersBrendan leipsic: 1 goal, 2 assists
Top performerscourtney VanBrocklin: 26 points, 11 reboundskate lanz: 17 points, 10 rebounds
Portland State volleyball team claims title on senior night
ROSEMARy hANSONVanguard Staff
The Vikings volleyball team followed up their impressive sweep of Weber State Univer-sity on Thursday with an even better encore, beating Idaho State University 3-1 on Satur-day to clinch the 2012 Big Sky regular season championship. In front of the second-largest crowd at the Stott Center all season, the Vikings fought past an injury to junior out-side hitter Jaklyn Wheeler and a second-set loss to take a dramatic four-set victory on Senior Night.
“I’m so proud of our effort and what we did tonight,” head coach Michael Seemann said. “We’ve had some pretty tough losses in the past few weeks, and you can learn a lot from those losses. We learned we have to play as a team. Throughout the year, you’ve seen big numbers here and there, but we’ve always be-lieved we need a total team ef-fort. We got that on Thursday and we got it again tonight.”
The Vikings’ win over We-ber State combined with an Eastern Washington Univer-sity upset of Idaho State on Thursday to make Saturday’s showdown the deciding match for the regular season Big Sky title.
The team benefitted from fine performances by the two seniors honored that night, outside hitter Megan Ellis and setter Dominika Kristinikova. Ellis put the per-fect finishing touch on her reg-ular season career at Portland State, coming through with the winning kill in the fourth frame. She led the team with
Vikings stand alone in the Big Sky16 kills overall to go along with 14 digs as she earned her 17th double-double of the season. Kristinikova provided an anchor in the back row for the Vikings, contributing 13 digs on the night, including mul-tiple crucial saves.
“Megan was a rock tonight,” Seemann said. “She was abso-lutely solid. I felt like whenev-er we gave her the ball, it was going to be terminated…Domi came in and made some huge plays. They played like they’ve been here for four years, and they wanted it.”
The Vikings jumped out to an early 7-3 lead in the first set, but the Bengals kept the match close and eventually tied the score at 23-all after an error by Wheeler.
The error was the least of the Vikings’ concerns, howev-er, as the team’s star hitter col-lided with sophomore libero Kasimira Clark going after on a loose ball and landed wrong on her knee. Wheeler had to be helped off the court and did not return for the remainder of the match, but the Vikings were able to regroup to close out the set 25-23.
Wheeler’s injury resulted in backup outside hitter Cheyne Corrado stepping in to fill the shoes of her teammate. Corrado had not played more than two sets in a match all season, registering just five kills in Big Sky competition. But she came up big on Sat-urday, throwing in 14 kills with eight digs, responding to the challenge when the team needed her most.
According to Seeman, Corrado has been working up to this moment for a while. “Cheyne’s had possibly [the] best three weeks of practice of her career,” he said. “The hard-est thing to do is to go hard in practice when you don’t neces-sarily have a starting role. You always are preparing for the
‘what if,’ and for her to come in the way she did was amazing. She played a little tight for two points, and then she relaxed and she did a fantastic job.”
Even after her tremendous performance, Corrado was quick to give credit to her in-jured teammate.
“[Backing up Wheeler has] been my position all year long,” she said. “I knew that’s where I was. I was always ready. The past few games, I’ve gone in and given her re-lief and she’s come back in and
AlEx MOOREVanguard Staff
PSU’s women’s basketball head coach Sherri Murrell knew that, out of all of the keys to the game against a fast and aggressive University of Oregon squad, the most im-portant would be the Vikings’ ability to simply outlast their tireless opponents.
In a game that went to dou-ble overtime and came down to the very last shot, the Vi-kings did just that, beating the Ducks 87-85 on a layup at the buzzer by senior guard Courtney VanBrocklin.
“We just showed a lot of heart and will to win,” Murrell said. “We never gave up. We have so much depth on our team, and a lot of indi-viduals did their part to help us win the game.”
The Vikings showcased their resilience in the second overtime, when Oregon built an early six-point lead. Port-land State fought their way back on a three-pointer by
Vikings survive ducks
did great, and this time was the real thing. I felt ready for it and I was happy to do that for my team.”
In a back-and-forth second set, the Bengals managed to finish stronger, winning it 25-21. But the Vikings refused to allow the setback or the injury of their teammate discourage them, pulling together to take the third frame by a score of 25-20. The team came out and took control midway through the fourth set and never looked back. With 1,000-plus
fans on their feet at the Stott Center, they held match point at 24-15, but the Bengals made them earn it, forcing three straight points before Ellis’ kill sent the rest of the Viking squad running onto the court to celebrate their Big Sky victory.
“It was a team effort all the way through,” Corrado said.
The Vikings move on to Greeley, Colo. next week, where they will be the num-ber-one seed in the Big Sky Championship.
Digging Deep: After a tough couple of weeks, the PSU volleyball team returned to its winning ways with a dominant sweep of Weber State and a gritty four-set win over Idaho State.
senior Karley Lampman, and eventually tied the game at 81-all on a shot by VanBrocklin.
After the Vikings went up by three with just over two minutes remaining, Oregon made a run and managed to take the lead 85-84 on a jump-er by Jordan Loera. PSU ju-nior guard Kate Lanz tied the game again with a free throw, and the Ducks held for the last shot, but Loera missed with seven seconds still on the clock. Lanz grabbed the re-bound and raced up the floor, finding VanBrocklin, who scored as time expired to give the Vikings a hard-earned vic-tory. The win was a tremen-dous motivator for the team in the early part of the season.
“It gives them confidence and belief that hey, you can do this,” Murrell said. “Never give up.”
The Vikings play Corban University tonight at the Stott Center. Tipoff is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. PSU students get in for free.
Portland State prevails in double overtime against U of O
in the clutch: The Vikings pulled off a huge upset over the University of oregon on the road.
AUSTIN MAGGS/VANGUARD STAFF
KARL KUChS/VANGUARD STAFF
