Sunday, May 3, 2009
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Andrew Colarusso: The Editor At Large
The basement of the Broome Street residence hall resembles a children’s labyrinth; the mythical dungeon that every elementary school is thought to have. Worn, blueberry colored carpeting line the hallways where paper cut outs of musical notes and club fliers are taped to the fading yellow walls. The maze of hallways leads to meeting rooms, janitor closets and the utilities room; these are the entrails of the entire building, the no man’s land.
Tucked away in one of these rooms, Andrew E. Colarusso, 19 hums with a quiet presence. He has a short build. His cropped, chocolate brown hair forms a cap above a thin and defined nose separating his face into symmetry.
His baby face matches his soft spoken nature and both amounts to an understated exterior. His personality is slow and warm like the rhythm of a jazz solo and when Colarusso speaks his words leak out like quiet oil spills.
That wednesday night Colarusso waits for the start of his eight o’clock meeting, he hardly says more than two words before 8:10. Perhaps he’s nervous. It’s the first meeting for “Apo(phonic)”, the art anthology born largely from an idea Colarusso threw around with Solmaz Sharif, a Residential Assistant at Broome Street and a published poet. Now, what was only an idea months ago was going to become a published collection of poetry, fiction and photography submitted by students, run by students and distributed to New York University and the surrounding artists of New York City.
“I always wanted to head a literary journal collecting different people’s works and display them and send it out to different people who’s interested in reading something good.” Colarusso said said.
The basis of “Apo(phonic)” is inspired by Apophenia, the experience of seeing connections in random or meaningless data and “Phonics”, the manner of teaching literacy through sound and speech. ‘’Apo(phonic)” will be a blank slate where people can connect by sharing their subjective experiences using art as the icebreaker said Colarusso.
“So if you’re reading the same poem with your friend, you’ll think it’s one thing and your friend will think another thing. I mean essentially it’ll create discussion and dialogue between people on how the world looks to them.” said Colarusso.
Colarusso started writing when was he was young. In the 4th grade he published his first paper in a collection showcasing elementary students and education. His short stories and poems, like the one titled “Allophonic Loom Blooms” the runner up in The Poetics of Cloth Creative Writing Contest at NYU confront identity, race, and sexuality. Identity is a theme that rings hardest for Colarusso whose mother is Afro-Latino Puerto Rican and father is Italian American; his parents never married because of his paternal grandmother’s opposition to a “dark skinned woman.”
Born in Brooklyn, NY he moved to live with his grandparents in Puerto Rico when he was one year old. He moved back to Brooklyn shortly after with his grandparents to reunite with his mother. He saw his real father every other weekend but it was with his mother and his maternal grandparents who Colarusso developed a strong attachment with.
Now he has branched out to writing about the world as as he sees it, literally. He’s influenced by movies and enjoys creating visuals with words.
“I’m influenced by whatever I see and find particularly moving. It could be as small as a lady bug or as big as my obese friend” said Colarusso with a low laugh.
In a recent essay about racism in America, he penned the image of his grandfather, Elias Sanchez running away from black “Morenos” in 1950’s Harlem. He creates everything from fictional dialogues heavy with disappointment to poems the beauty and the ugliness of human affairs; he’s influenced by fifty percent allusion and fifty percent life. Colarusso sees writing as a way to escape while examining reality.
Colarusso plans to distribute Apo(phonic) by early May, but he already has problems. For one thing he’s new to the publishing jargon he needs to learn to even converse with printing companies. And there’s the other tricky thing of getting the word out about the journal, so far his scope is limited to Facebook friends. Even still he’s confident. In many ways “(Apo)phonic” is the manifestation of Andrew Colarusso. They are both subdued, patiently waiting for a bright future. It may turn out that beneath their quiet facades lies a treasure trove of talent. Colarusso is optimistic. Even before “(Apo)phonic”’s inaugural issue comes out he’s already planning his legacy; in the next two years he’s hoping to pass his position on to another Broome Street student .
Tucked away in one of these rooms, Andrew E. Colarusso, 19 hums with a quiet presence. He has a short build. His cropped, chocolate brown hair forms a cap above a thin and defined nose separating his face into symmetry.
His baby face matches his soft spoken nature and both amounts to an understated exterior. His personality is slow and warm like the rhythm of a jazz solo and when Colarusso speaks his words leak out like quiet oil spills.
That wednesday night Colarusso waits for the start of his eight o’clock meeting, he hardly says more than two words before 8:10. Perhaps he’s nervous. It’s the first meeting for “Apo(phonic)”, the art anthology born largely from an idea Colarusso threw around with Solmaz Sharif, a Residential Assistant at Broome Street and a published poet. Now, what was only an idea months ago was going to become a published collection of poetry, fiction and photography submitted by students, run by students and distributed to New York University and the surrounding artists of New York City.
“I always wanted to head a literary journal collecting different people’s works and display them and send it out to different people who’s interested in reading something good.” Colarusso said said.
The basis of “Apo(phonic)” is inspired by Apophenia, the experience of seeing connections in random or meaningless data and “Phonics”, the manner of teaching literacy through sound and speech. ‘’Apo(phonic)” will be a blank slate where people can connect by sharing their subjective experiences using art as the icebreaker said Colarusso.
“So if you’re reading the same poem with your friend, you’ll think it’s one thing and your friend will think another thing. I mean essentially it’ll create discussion and dialogue between people on how the world looks to them.” said Colarusso.
Colarusso started writing when was he was young. In the 4th grade he published his first paper in a collection showcasing elementary students and education. His short stories and poems, like the one titled “Allophonic Loom Blooms” the runner up in The Poetics of Cloth Creative Writing Contest at NYU confront identity, race, and sexuality. Identity is a theme that rings hardest for Colarusso whose mother is Afro-Latino Puerto Rican and father is Italian American; his parents never married because of his paternal grandmother’s opposition to a “dark skinned woman.”
Born in Brooklyn, NY he moved to live with his grandparents in Puerto Rico when he was one year old. He moved back to Brooklyn shortly after with his grandparents to reunite with his mother. He saw his real father every other weekend but it was with his mother and his maternal grandparents who Colarusso developed a strong attachment with.
Now he has branched out to writing about the world as as he sees it, literally. He’s influenced by movies and enjoys creating visuals with words.
“I’m influenced by whatever I see and find particularly moving. It could be as small as a lady bug or as big as my obese friend” said Colarusso with a low laugh.
In a recent essay about racism in America, he penned the image of his grandfather, Elias Sanchez running away from black “Morenos” in 1950’s Harlem. He creates everything from fictional dialogues heavy with disappointment to poems the beauty and the ugliness of human affairs; he’s influenced by fifty percent allusion and fifty percent life. Colarusso sees writing as a way to escape while examining reality.
Colarusso plans to distribute Apo(phonic) by early May, but he already has problems. For one thing he’s new to the publishing jargon he needs to learn to even converse with printing companies. And there’s the other tricky thing of getting the word out about the journal, so far his scope is limited to Facebook friends. Even still he’s confident. In many ways “(Apo)phonic” is the manifestation of Andrew Colarusso. They are both subdued, patiently waiting for a bright future. It may turn out that beneath their quiet facades lies a treasure trove of talent. Colarusso is optimistic. Even before “(Apo)phonic”’s inaugural issue comes out he’s already planning his legacy; in the next two years he’s hoping to pass his position on to another Broome Street student .
Monday, February 23, 2009
My personal inquiries
I never imagined myself in a journalism class before. I never aimed at being a professional journalist, at least not the kind
you see in the image above; that mans looks brave, timely, he looks ready to take on the world and at a moment's notice it
seems like he could follow the wind wherever it took him to his next lead. I remember watching old black and white classic
movies where journalists were pencil chewing, fast talking hardballs who didn't have the time to spare for anyone. I never, ever
wanted to end up personifying those characteristics. But here comes the sharp turn: I just finished Tilley's section in Clark's
book, yes I admit I'm still catching up on my reading and I'm not even sure if its the right edition but and after reading her
concerns about herself as a writer and as a human being I realized that they reflected my own discomforts, wishes and
personal battles in my relationship to the world. When Tilley said that she understood how exactly her articles will not revamp
the world, how it was unrealistic for society to truly change so dramatically I was finally glad that someone and a journalist no
less was honest.
After taking Foundations of Journalism it felt like we were handed the weight of the world. There was so much talk about
democracy, upholding truth and giving the nation a sphere to conduct free speech. I believe in the concept of these ideas but
in reality, riots are squashed too quickly by the same authority who ironically claim to honor free speech, billions of people live
everyday turning a blind eye to injustice, the mentally ill are left to die and the person who was shocked from the morning's
headlines about a man suffering from a hit and run accident rarely ever rile the compassion to visit the stranger in the
hospital. I am of course guilty of these things. But Tilley was right for not expecting a sea of change to occur, and I appreciated
her honesty but in reading her six piece series I realized how rumbles of change could occur. For one thing she gave us an
insight into Dix Hill that was expectedly depressing but surprisingly hopeful. I think it's lovely that reporting coupled with
writing touched with a dose of compassion can tear down mental walls between society and those deemed unsociable.
This class is really hard. I never was asked to go up to strangers and milk reactions out of them. I emailed Professor HC
few weeks ago about my shyness to go up to strangers and to "bother" them. I had always liked observing people but slipping
into a pocket of their life was foreign to me. The first assignment was frustrating because I kept interviewing people who
would make excuses to avoid talking to me. Either they didn't speak enough English or "it was their boss I should be talking
to", I would just stand there overwhelmed with having to find another person to talk to because the previous way brushed me
off. But I'm getting over being scared and I realize that with interviewing you need to be quick and catch your person when
he/she is talking about something that matters to them. Sometimes it's when someone starts using hand gestures and gets
really heated, other times a person's octaves run low and quiet and the emotion of the person is indicative of how the topic
really hit home.
My other difficulty is organization. I've done 2 or 3 stories so far and my notebook is almost 3/4 packed with chicken
scrawl. They're written down chronologically so when I go back to find an idea for an assignment I have to comb through every
word to see who said which quote, how many tables were in the room at the time, what kind of lighting was there, what the
mood of the speaker was etc. It's hard when more than one speaker is talking or you have to figure out how to section off idea
categories. This spiral pattern or turning here to find a tidbit and turning there to locate a name is driving me insane.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
actual assignment 1
In a darkened classroom, against the backdrop of an uncooperative projector and a packed group of skeptical physics students Brian Cox gestures to the screen and states simply “It goes without saying that its the most complicated machine built”. Particle physicist Brian Cox was referring to the Large Hadron Collider to which he spoke about at New York University’s SHARP Lecture last Wednesday. The LHC is the world’s most powerful and largest particle accelerator, it circles in a circumference of 27 Kilometers(16.77 miles), is embedded 50 to 175 meters underground and straddles the border of Geneva and France. The LHC accelerates protons and lead ions at 99.999999% of the speed of light and then smashes them together to reenact the environment created right after Earth’s Big Bang.
The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research in 2003 to “understand what the world is made of, what the smallest building block of physics is”. That elementary building block was the “proton soup” produced when the Big Bang occurred. Cox explains that physicists are using the LHC to identify the Earth’s creation story where “we began with a soup of gluons”. In studying the origin of the world’s most basic material -gluons, protons, leptons and quarks physicists can then understand more complex physical relationships between matter. Also the LHC may produce Higgs boson particles, notoriously dubbed “dark matter” because of its presumed presence in the universe despite our inability to have ever seen, sensed or recorded it.
As a testament to the sheer enormity of the LHC, the particle detector that Cox works on ATLAS alone weighs more than 7716 tons and has the computing power of more than 5,000 PCs. The great size of the project hindered the repair process when in September 2008 a fault occurred on the LHC’s super conducting magnets. Brian’s Cox’s lecture takes place on the eve of the LHC’s return, it will be up and running again next month in March when physicists will continue their search for unprecedented discoveries with what Cox considers “the greatest scientific development of the 21st century”.
The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research in 2003 to “understand what the world is made of, what the smallest building block of physics is”. That elementary building block was the “proton soup” produced when the Big Bang occurred. Cox explains that physicists are using the LHC to identify the Earth’s creation story where “we began with a soup of gluons”. In studying the origin of the world’s most basic material -gluons, protons, leptons and quarks physicists can then understand more complex physical relationships between matter. Also the LHC may produce Higgs boson particles, notoriously dubbed “dark matter” because of its presumed presence in the universe despite our inability to have ever seen, sensed or recorded it.
As a testament to the sheer enormity of the LHC, the particle detector that Cox works on ATLAS alone weighs more than 7716 tons and has the computing power of more than 5,000 PCs. The great size of the project hindered the repair process when in September 2008 a fault occurred on the LHC’s super conducting magnets. Brian’s Cox’s lecture takes place on the eve of the LHC’s return, it will be up and running again next month in March when physicists will continue their search for unprecedented discoveries with what Cox considers “the greatest scientific development of the 21st century”.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
I found my lecture
Too bad its at 6:45 on the Wednesday this first blog has to be written
Research:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/07/brian-cox-calls-em-like-he-sees-em/
Brian Cox, ex-keyboardist, physicist, 40 year old who looks 30...I'm stoked
Research:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/07/brian-cox-calls-em-like-he-sees-em/
Brian Cox, ex-keyboardist, physicist, 40 year old who looks 30...I'm stoked
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