This Thursday March 29th

Event Date Change

The Midnight in Paris screening will now be on Mon Feb 13th.

Bard URF Update

Hey everyone! Time for another great semester! We just had our first

meeting, and this is what is up:

1: Always check bardurf.blogspot.com for info on events, including

today's meeting minutes

2: Text "follow bardurf" to 40404 to get a text reminder every day

there is an event!

3: We have the following events (info on the calendar on the website):

[Wed Feb 1st 6pm-7pm] Bard URF Table

[Thu Feb 2nd 8pm-10pm] Wickerman Screening and Discussion

[Fri Feb 3rd 8pm-???] Cool Story Bro! - The Worlds Worst Open Mic

Night

[Thu Feb 9th 8pm-10pm] Fantasia vs. Fantasia 2000 Partial Screenings

and Discussion

[Thu Feb 14th 8pm-10pm] Midnight in Paris Screening and Discussion

[Sun Feb 26th All Day] Oscar Best Picture Nominee Screening and

Contest

Want to talk to us about what's going on? Join us on Wednesday for the

URF Table!

<3URF

Bard URF First Meeting Minutes (by Diana)

Official Boringish Meeting Minutes

Main goal (according to Jono): ensure that people who want to keep doing this & make sure ResLife will be willing to give us the whole building

Less talk & more do!

ditching corporate events (stuff we do for other groups). 

repeating Dark Dining & Kline Carnival

Someone who's not Jono needs to start being the liaison to Kline

Julia in charge of Carnival

Izzy in charge of Dark Dining (ask for $200 for food)

Sign up for the Twitter phone texts. Text "follow bardurf" to 40404

URF TABLE (Wednesdays 6-7)

Like a language table, but for URF art & nonsense

We could wear costumes (themed days)

Bring a centerpiece- a weird URFian object that we can talk about

SCREENINGS (sign-up sheet on wall/Jono will put it on our online stuff)

New format for sign-ups. If you want to have one, you pick a time

Feb. 2  8-10: Wicker Man Jono

Feb. 9 8-10: Fantasia v. Fantasia 2000 Jono

Feb.14 8-10: Midnight in Paris Sarah

VOLUNTEER DAY- Queen's Galley

J-Bucks

EVENTS

Feb.8: "Cool Story Bro" party

Feb. 26: All Day Screenings of Oscar Movies in Jono's room

Gender Bender/Gender Fluid Party?

Cosgrove's Viking Birthday Party

Labyrinth Party

Matt Hughes becomes a sober bartender (Giving us Silence tally marks)

Camping Trip w/Legit Tiago (spring break?)

Noah recommends setting a date & time for if you have an event & make it not conflict with another URF event

Make a master list of schedules

POKER NIGHTS

MAD LIB SLAM

SMOG SHOWS:

-Sobine

-Chloe & James

-No Shoes

Tiago might be able to recruit Flaming Lips to come play a concert

ARTIST NIGHTS OUT

Bringing in art professors & career artists, so art people can 

R.S.V.P. for students to meet with specific artists

And then open dinner for everyone

BUDGET:

Dark Dining ($250)

Poker Chips

Back up budget for Carnival

Rocky Horror budget- probably only two. One of them is April Fool's. & The Princess Bride

Bard URF Meeting

There will be a meeting in Village J at 3pm on Sunday. Show up and learn what we are thinking of doing this semester!

Velvet Weekend!

Hey everyone! 

As always, bardurf.blogspot.com is all of the important. All of it. 

This weekend though? 

Glitter and be gay at Village J! With three nights of fabulous movies: 

Thursday: Blue Velvet, David Lynch's suspense-romance 

Friday: Velvet Goldmine, a bi glam rock fantasy inspired by Bowie 

Saturday: Tipping the Velvet, the lavish British lesbian miniseries 

All at 8pm in Village J!!! 

<3 URF

CAGED is imminent!

Greetings!

You know the drill: bardurf.blogspot.com

This week we are all focused on CAGED, an event headed by our own Izzy Filkins at the Global vs. Local event this coming weekend!

CAGED takes individuals who volunteer to express what makes them feel trapped in the Bard community. By sitting in a cage in the campus center for a short time, they show their state along with a written statement of their predicament.

The details and protocols are loose and subject to change, but if you would like to be involved, please contact us immediately or show up at the final planning meeting on Friday at 6pm in Village J.

In other news we also are working on a fun project for Halloween: the Bard Haunted House! Get in contact with us if this interests you, as we are just in the preliminary stages of work.

<3 URF

We Need Volunteers!

Hey everyone!

As usual check out upcoming events on bardurf.blogspot.com! This includes two more bonfires, a screening, a volunteer meeting for CAGED and a recommended food-related event! Come to the fires, and also bring your friends to Club Fair so they can sign up for this mailing list or at least meet the interesting folks of URF!

More importantly: We need volunteers for CAGED! This event is quite serious and will be prominently featured in the Campus Center at Global vs. Local. If you feel that an aspect of your identity is trapped, restricted, ignored or otherwise "caged" by the Bard community or your community at home, we ask you to take a chance to express this to the community. Contact if9597@bard.edu for more information. And to the faculty on our mailing list, please feel free to volunteer or reach out on your own to locate students who can partake in this event. A general synopsis is below.

<3 URF

CAGED:

This event focuses on a visceral representation of issues in our community. Brave volunteers express their entrapment on placards that are displayed next to a cage, inside of which they sit for a period of time. Over the course of the day the people and confessions will rotate.

Other details are up to the volunteers to discuss at meetings of their own where they can have a chance to discuss their confessions and thoughts and set parameters that they feel most comfortable with.

First Update, Towers of Thought and CAGED

Dear URFies (URFites? URFians?)

Welcome to another year of Bard URF! This year we are the Union of
Ridiculous Freelancers (last year we were the Unlikely Realists'
Forum), so let's get to business!

Upcoming Events!

SURPRISE I won't list these because our calendar of events appears on
the front page of our blog now! This calendar will include our events,
as well as events and clubs we particularly like. This includes Poi
Joy, Tsuuuuupa Hoop, No Diner Cast, Mental Academy, Surrealist Circus
and others!

Of course emails will contain blurbs, but more complete information
will always be linked to: bardurf.blogspot.com

If you have suggestions for things to go on the calendar, email
bard.urf@gmail.com


More importantly, these emails will usually contain updates and
information on projects in motion, as opposed to those that are plan
and set:


Towers of Thought: Ten Years Later
Project Heads: Amii Legendre and Jono Naito

This Sunday we will be handing out notecards at the 9/11 screening and
panel. On these people will respond to the event or our questions. We
will compose these cards into long strands that are placed throughout
the Campus Center in pairs. They are offset in height slightly to
suggest the towers symbolically. We will hang these on Sunday, Monday,
Wednesday and Friday morning, then take them down the next Sunday (a
week later). These responsibilities can be distributed among several
people so we don't overwhelm one person.

We will offer people to write more responses on cards on 9/11, the
bonfires and at the info desk until Friday, occasionally hanging more
pieces.

We will also be running 9-11pm bonfires on the 11th, 13th and 15th as
"safe spaces" to discuss some poignant questions as posed by Amii.
Show up to help keep things rolling and to share your thoughts.


CAGED
Project Heads: Jono Naito, Izzy Filkins, Brian Mateo

On the weekend of the 24/25th this month there is a large scale event
called Global vs. Local, designed to look at how subjects we try to
deal with abroad (discrimination, for example) may not be as well
focused on in our own community. Ann Seaton, Brian and Amii have all
invited us to conduct the CAGED event in the Campus Center during
either or both days of this event.

To explain CAGED, it's is a performance art piece where a person
displays an honest and heavy confession abut themselves feeling
trapped in their community while they sit in the cage. Volunteers and
confessions are switched out every hour. Whether the cage is
decorated, if the volunteers can talk, etc. will be discussed at
volunteer meetings.

We need a cage. We need volunteers. We need to move fast. A meeting
slot will be selected ASAP to start the mediation between volunteers
to go in the cage. Speak to Izzy or Jono immediately to get involved
ASAP. For example, jn8828@bard.edu is a good place to start. Warning
to volunteers: You are expected to be very honest and to be brave in
making a personal statement. Do not take this lightly. If you know
anyone who would like to do this, tell them!

Contemporaneous is this weekend! Go to it. Hoop/Poi/Improv/Circus
should all be attended as well. Have fun! Get involved if you want to
help out, otherwise have a nice week.

<3 URF

TSUPA HOOP

circus skill subgroup with bard's favorite hoopers. keep an eye out for meetings. BECOME LIKE THIS GUY:

Running an URF Project

So at our first meeting you will all hear about our organizational change concerning events. Or the meeting may have happened and I told you to come here. In order to not overburden myself and to ensure everything can run without Sarah or I, when things come up as potential projects, a person will take it on as the leader. This mean a division of labor and responsibility.

By taking on a project, you are committing to doing a peice of work woth the resources and manpower of URF at your disposal, although you must motivate the process on your own. This is likely preferred to a sytem of officers who oversee different processes (aka one person always does advertising), instead letting a given individual locate the necessary people and materials to do anything.

Note that Village J remains ours through a diligence to offer things to the community. By choosing to head a project, you are being awesome and have helped Village J not only remain, but thrive.

Below is a checklist of things to consider:

-Most important of all: Set a date that works! Try not to conflict with other things, and once you have a date, stick to it and prepare as well as possible. It is hard to change things at the last second. There are/will be two slots that are identified as good times to plan things, and the schedule for these time slots will be available in the laundry room. Grab 'em quick!

Screenings/Meetings/Music Exchanges/Other events in J suites
-Advertise!
-Send the date, time and info to jn8828@bard.edu and I will post it on the SPARC calendar for all to see, as well as put it in the weekly update.
-Get permission from the hosting suite

Events elsewhere:
-Guerilla art or performance art may need training, rehearsal, preperation, etc. but may not need registering, etc.
-Advertise more!
-Stop by SPARC to reserve the space, put it on the calendar and register it! I can't do this for you, but if you stop by when I'm in the office it'll be easier. If you stop by any other time, you need to bring a second event host.
-Send me info to put in the weekly update.
-Locate people and prepare them for anything that needs to be done.
-Meet with special staff and ensure the event can be run (e.g. in Kline)
-Submit check requests and reimbursement information to access club budgets.

<3 Jono

Potential Projects

Hey everyone! I am going to take a moment to list possible things we can get involved in this semester that I know about so far:

-Amii would like some people to do an event for 9/11
-The CAGED event can be staged
-Freeze in Kline
-Organic Canvas '11
-Brian wants to do Paparazzi
-Begin screening Game of Thrones each week
-Another Beatboxing workshop by AmstarKatz
-PC's are thinking of making Manor into a haunted house this October
-Officially sponser NaNoWriMo on campus
-Retool and restart the URF book club
-Donut Ninjas!

If anything comes to mind, be sure to mention it at Homecoming!


<3 Jono

Homecoming

Join URF for food, stories, strange dancing, gender bending, new friends, old friends and probably a cake. Just in Village J starting at 7! Help us start the year off well!

<3 Jono

Hey, Summer?

So I'm chilling here trying to think up stuff to work on in URF this year, and for the sake of this blog I will definitely post the Weekly Update as well as mail it. That should help keep the information flowing.

Hope everyone is enjoying summer!

<3JN

Bard URF Returns!

URF is going to come back next year! We have been approved for three suites in Village J and things are only starting to get crazy! Our updated list of residents are below:

Adam Bowman

Jay Barett

Matthew Cosgrove

Matthew Hughes

Sarah Longstreth

Diana Crow

Rachel Finkelstein

Becky Lipnick

Victoria Konopacki

Izzy Filkins

Samantha Rosenbaum

Julia Koerwer

Tiago Moura

Myan Melendez

and me! Jono Naito!

We also look back on a year of amazing work and saying goodbye to some of our residents. Still honorary members who always have a home with us, Ben Sobine, Bart Robello and now CJ Sulze are on our list of fabulous and unforgettable alumni.

*Holds up champagne* here is to crazy art *clinks*

Spring things

No idea if anyone even reads this! But I'm rolling in anyway.

Aside from playing Pokemon White and festering in the hell on earth that is cub scout related activities, I have spent much of this break glued to TCM. The next screening I've enlisted our little community movie theater for is "Shortbus," in an effort to trample my house with the queer brigade (a little more). Good idea, Bard deviant sexual maniacs--stop by; I think it's in two weekends (update when I get back, and I'm sure I'll facebook spam it).

Anyway, after that I'm going to vote to instate a "fuck new media" feature and foist film noirs and other old stuff on these people. Just as many old lesbians in these as anything else, not to mention sex and murder.

Upcoming things! To do my job, Contemporaneous has a show on April 1st in Hudson with some Bard composers and fabulous premieres. If you're able to go, don't miss it; these guys put on a hell of a show and this is a hell of a program.

BUT MORE RELEVANTLY TO US WE HAVE OUR APRIL FOOLS' ROCKY SHOW THAT NIGHT (first Friday after break) AT MIDNIGHT IN WEIS AND IT'S GONNA BE AWESOME. Way different from our normal offering too--edited movie with various hilarities and funny costumes and Gaga galore. Be there!

In the performance art sphere, look out for our "Caged" collaboration with the social justice dorm upstairs, coming this spring to follow up our wildly successful Dark Dining meal (below; expected to return next year, as, hopefully, are we). And stop by Village J first floor any time to get active (by which we mean sit on our couch and watch stuff)!

Still not on our mailing list? Email sl4629@bard.edu and I will HOOK YOU UP.

Upcoming Events

Review: Black Swan

Normally I am not compelled to write a review, but maybe that is already a testament to this movie that I wish to comment.

I’ll start with something that one may immediately critique: the innocence of Natalie Portman’s ballerina character at the beginning will throw you off, but you will accept it soon enough, or even miss it as the roller coaster moves forward.

The cinematography is varied, nearly every shot is made special. Wrought with symbolism, subtle effects that almost seem to be inventions of the mind and both careful camera movements (for dancing) and rough changes (for real life) that keep what you are seeing lively and interesting.

The pinnacle of the performance is Portman, who plays every angle of anger, pleasure, innocence, forced cooperation and lost sensations with true merit and fervor. I can only say little of the extent of her performance that actually honors its range and depth.

Will you like this movie? I don’t know. You will either adore it or despise it. Each moment will drag you through intense moments of hilarity, madness, fear, sensuality and passion as this movie, preposterous as it may be, captures you for every moment. The mixing of unnerving sounds with the murmurs and crescendos of the music of Swan Lake itself highlight the scenes well, and regardless of your suspension of disbelief you will feel involved in all of Portman’s confusion and fear in her interactions with an excellent supporting cast. In a movie where you are not sure what is real you are only sure of what you see when Portman rehearses with the company, and that you are having some true visceral reaction to everything else.

No matter your opinion, the common person would agree that it was worth seeing, either to love or laugh at. And I feel anything worth your time is truly commendable entertainment.

Hey look: An update!

No, we're not dead. This semester has been kicking everyone's ass lately which is why you haven't seen an update here recently. However, we have some really cool stuff in the works, both for this blog and events in meatspace. So stay tuned.

And now for something completely different:

If you haven't seen this film or don't know who Banksy is, you're really missing out and you should use the power of the internet to educate yourself. Oh, wait. You're already doing that.

Who is Banksy? Well, Banksy is this guy:

He's that graffiti street/performance artist who held an art show featuring a live elephant; hung his own artwork in a number of art museums; tagged the wall in the West Bank, you know, that wall, among other things. We're big fans of Banksy here at URF, considdering his skill at subverting and disrupting normal reality. He does some cool shit. He even made a movie.

(SPOILER ALERT! WATCH THE DAMN MOVIE ALREADY!)

But the movie isn't about Banksy. It's about this guy, Thierry Guetta:

Take note, hipsters. Oh, wait, let me give you a better shot of his "ironic" facial hair configuration:
Yeah. That's right. Mutton chops. Mutton. Chops. (!) The word on the street is that these will soon be required for acceptance into Top-Notch Liberal Art Schools (tm), such as Bard College. At the very least, you'll all be looking like this in a few years, so get used to it. But what does this guy actually do? Well, when the film opens, he's "employed" ripping people off so they can think they look cool selling vintage clothing in L.A. What else? As if we're not convinced enough by the mutton chops to believe this guy is a little bit unhinged and full of himself, we're told that he has this odd habit of filming everything. Everything. So, when he just happens to be blasted into the street art scene by way of Invader and Sheppard Fairey ("What, no hyperlink?" you ask? Fine. Fine. Here's your hyperlink.), we, as well as the street artists our oh-so-hip protagonist meets, don't really question him filming everything. Even the ultra-reclusive Banksy, apparently persuaded by the mysterious power of mutton chops, allows himself to be filmed. But it's all ok because, as Thierry tells everyone, he's a filmmaker; he's making a documentary about street art.

Except of course, he's not. He has boxes upon boxes upon boxes of tapes, most of them unlabelled, all of them unwatched. It takes a nudge from Banksy for him to actually put some footage together into this epic street art documentary that Thierry had been talking about for so long. So Thierry makes a film called "Life Remote Control" and shows it to Banksy. And it's total shit. Un-watch-able. The kind of thing that makes moderation projects rejected by the film department at Bard College look like they could have a shot of winning "Best Picture" at the Oscars. Hipsters interested in being "filmmakers": This is how low they've set the bar for you. So Banksy, seeing a few snippets of actually good footage in the mess, takes the film from Thierry, explains that it'll clean up in editing, and tells him to go back to LA, maybe do some art (Thierry has been dabbling in street art while filming Banksy, et al.).

So is Thierry Guetta a filmmaker? As Banksy puts it: "Maybe Thierry wasn't actually a filmmaker; he was maybe just someone with mental problems who happened to have a camera."

Banksy decides to take the project, which is how we've come to be watching the film in the first place. Thierry, meanwhile, has fashioned himself a street artist alter-ego by the name of Mr. Brainwash, complete with production team to roll out his "art" on a commercial scale. On the subject of that "art", it's part Warhol, part Banksy, and part Sheppard Fairey, and wholly unoriginal. But, as his first show "Life is Beautiful" demonstrates, although he does virtually none of the actual creative work, and though his style is completely stolen from other artists, Thierry Guetta can sell a painting. Indeed, his work is highly commercially successful, much to the confusion and amusement of Banksy, Fairey, et al.

That's the story we're given. But consider this: Mr. Brainwash, and perhaps the entire character of Thierry Guetta as well, is a creation of Banksy's, in a move to pull an elaborate self-referential prank on the art world by creating an artist out of nothing, but who produces work that the art world cannot help but love, even though/especially because it has no meaning except the commercialisation of art. This would not be the first time that Banksy has made a statement like this, since after his work began fetching high prices at auctions, he put on the front page of his website an image of a crowd bidding on a painting that said "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit." Of course, this reading of the film only adds to its meta-weirdness.

Go see it. Go make art.