Hunger is the world’s number one health risk. It affects 49 million Americans alone. These are just a couple of the statistics that the Gleaning Club, a new organization on the College of William and Mary’s campus, relayed to potential members in its first meeting Oct. 14.

To combat the problem of hunger locally, the club said it hopes to organize trips to nearby farms to glean, which involves picking leftover produce that the farmer did not decide to harvest. The club will then deliver this food to soup kitchens and food banks so it can be distributed to the less fortunate.

“It’s very, very new, and we’re still kind of forming, but what I really hope is to provide nutritious food to someone who can’t afford it,” founder Laura Stephens ’15 said.

The idea to begin a gleaning club at the College originated with participants in Campus Kitchens Seven Generation’s trip this past summer, in which students made meals and delivered them, worked in a kitchen making the meals, and took a trip to go gleaning on a farm, Nadia Asmal ’15, another of the club’s leaders, said.

“There was a group of six of us that went on the trip for hunger in the community,” Asmal said. “We went out to food banks and gleaning was one of the first things that we did.”

While working together on the trip, Stephens, Asmal, Naziha Niazi ’14 and Derin Dacey ’15 said they used to talk about the possibility of starting their own gleaning club on campus, although they didn’t take the idea seriously at first.

“We joked about it during the trip,” Asmal said. “We used to talk about it every day after our activities.”
However, the group then began to consider starting the club after seeing the results of three hours of their work. In that time frame, 16 students picked enough corn to feed 6,000 people.

“It just made an impression on all of us, that a few hours of work can feed thousands of people,” Stephens said.

Dacey added that although the idea began as a joke, it eventually became a serious one that the group wanted to further pursue.

“We were joking about it, and then we realized it would be a good, sustainable idea,” Dacey said.
In order to start a gleaning club on campus, Stephens said she discussed logistics with the Office of Student Activities, and also talked to the Society of St. Andrew, with whom they worked during the Seven Generations trip.

“They’re the biggest gleaning organization in the country, and they’ve been helping us organize this,” Stephens said.

She added that one of her main goals in starting the club is to play a role in addressing hunger in the community.

“There are thousands and thousands of crops that go ungleaned, and it’s just wasteful,” Stephens said. “Why should a child go hungry when they can eat perfectly good food?”

The club also said one of their main goals is to provide healthy food to those who cannot always afford it. Dacey explained that soup kitchens and food banks have a turnaround time of a few days when — food that is brought in is used relatively quickly, which means patrons can eat fresh products rather than canned food.
“There’s more protein and more nutrients [in the fresh food],” Stephens explained. “A lot of people in poverty don’t have access to healthy food.”

She also emphasized the idea of a vicious cycle — that in eating unhealthy food, people get sick, which then forces them to spend money on necessities like medicine as opposed to healthy food.

“Why should people with less money be forced to eat food that’s going to kill them?” Stephens said.

In their presentation, the club stressed that it is open and looking for new members. They are in need of students who can become certified to drive a van, especially those 19 and older, who have fewer restrictions on the distance from campus they can drive. At the first meeting, the club explained that transportation is critical to ensuring that members can physically travel to various farms around the area to do the gleaning itself.

“It was really easy to start it just because the student activities office is really nice and helpful,” Asmal said. “That was good in that the school makes it incredibly easy to start your own club. But the downside is that being a freshman, it’s hard to get van certified and be able to drive people on the highway.”

The group’s first gleaning project is scheduled for Nov. 4 at College Run Farms near Gloucester, and its second is set for Nov. 5.

“It’s going to be two gleanings in a row, which is going to be a little tough, but based on weather, that will be the best option for us,” Stephens said.

After the first two events, the group said gleaning will be done depending on the weather. The club hopes that gleaning activities will pick up more heavily in the spring.

Asmal added that she is hopeful about what the club can achieve this year and in the future.

“Personally, I hope that if we can accomplish anything, that we can spread the word about gleaning just because it’s such a fantastic opportunity that not that many people know about,” she said. “Even if we don’t get to glean at every opportunity, we want to spread the word so that more people know about it and join the club even next year, so hopefully it will be even bigger and better.”

There are many great cultural crossroads on and around our beloved, verdant campus. The two mighty nations of Old Campus and New Campus do trade via the sketchy path between the woods. There is, of course, Wawa, the veritable demilitarized zone between the warring nations of Twamptia, the United Fratdom and the Socialist People’s Republic of the Police.

My point is that there exist spaces on campus where, no matter where you are in college life, you find yourself in the close company of a wide array of people from very different walks of life. Sometimes these places are the most tiring; but more often than not they are the funniest.

In Paris, where I’m currently writing this, one of these mixing spaces rises above the rest as a cultural milieu where you are guaranteed to see something interesting. A place where people of all walks of life come together that is very similar to our wooded pathways. Or, maybe I should say, one space sinks beneath the rest. For in Paris, it is the Metro.

The Paris Metro is older than time itself. Approximately. On the Seventh Day God rested, and then he thought, “How are the Parisians going to get around?” So he created the Paris Metro. And God saw that this was chill.

The Metro is the place where you will be crammed liked sardines snout-to-snout with the Louis Vuitton model with six dogs in her purse (five of them barking,) the immigrant who hasn’t yet learned the importance of bathing and the insane homeless man who’s screaming that the potato sacks on his feet know nothing of Neitzche’s views on death. Nothing.

If you’re like me and the largest “cities” you’ve ever lived in are the field where the Civil War began and the sleepy town of Wiliamsburg where once, a long time ago, there was some significance to DoG Street and the surrounding buildings0, the Metro can be the sum of all your big-city fears. It’s the epitome of urbanization. It’s a giant steel tapeworm hurtling through the man-made bowels of the old city, snapping its doors open and close at seemingly random intervals, utterly disinterested about whether your backpack, fingers or junk were in between them.

I’ve witnessed strange things on the Metro. I’ve seen violin virtuosos stand in the middle of a crowded car and play for spare change. I’ve seen drunken teenagers get into fistfights over whether some speech-slurred insult constituted some great injury to his honor (in France, it always does). I’ve seen people robbed and others arrested. All within the small metal box of a Metro car.

But if you want to observe the great comedy that is life, there’s no better place to do so than on the Metro. Riding the train every day to class, to the store, to just about everywhere you want to go, you get very good at pointedly avoiding eye contact. I now can tell you exactly where to look based on where you do not want to look. It takes some practice. I can predict exactly when a hot girl will not sit by me on the little flip-down chairs and with equal accuracy predict when the sweat-drenched fat guy will.

People talk about the cafe culture in Paris, about how you can sit outside for hours and drink coffee and watch people. It’s completely true. But so what? If the cafes are the heart of Paris, the Metro is the colon. And let me tell you something about Paris’s colon: It’s the shit.

__Jason Rogers is a Confusion Corners columnist and finds himself missing the late night Wawa crowd while braving the Parisian tunnels.__

“The Whole Love” is, honestly, just another Wilco album, but for followers of the band, this couldn’t be anything but a great thing. With “The Whole Love,” Wilco once again delivers on their legacy of lush aural textures, intelligent lyrics and occasional musical experimentation.

Most of “The Whole Love” is very similar to Wilco’s previous LPs. Gentle and acoustic guitars and piano have been the band’s instruments of choice since “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” Their lyrics are intelligent and thought-provoking, and even their melancholy tracks brighten any day. Standouts include “Open Mind,” with a breezy, yet highly melodic style comparable to tracks such as “Impossible Germany” on “Sky Blue Sky.” The eponymous track “The Whole Love” creates a call-and-answer effect between vocals and guitar; the style echoes classic tracks “Kamera” and “Jesus Etc.” on “Yankee Hotel.”

Experimentation has also always been a hallmark of Wilco’s works. Although they never shy away from their alternative folk rock roots, they consistently pay homage to their influences and the great rock artists of the past. The haunting opening guitar on “Black Moon” and its dark lyrics , like “past the gate, desert keeps forming underneath the black moon,” nearly reach the transcendent yet ironically peaceful mood of Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind.” Vocalist Tweedy’s neurotic mumbling of “goodbye,” accompanied by a spaced-out closing guitar solo on “Sunloathe” recalls some of Pink Floyd’s greatest compositions.

The largely homogenous LP is sandwiched between two incongruent, though wonderful tracks. “Art of Almost,” the opener of “The Whole Love,” is an angsty and intense piece — through its almost nonsensical lyrics and syncopated jitters we gain a sense of Tweedy’s insecurity about his own artistic reputation, and the track’s closing guitar solo could very well be some of the most frantic and heavy sounds Wilco has ever released. “One Sunday Morning”, the epic twelve-minute finale is a change from Wilco’s normally ambiguous lyrics. It tells the story of a boy who feels relief when his overtly religious father finally passes away. Lilting guitars and accompanying piano drip nostalgia and conflicting emotions.

There are always two things that must be mentioned when Wilco is discussed: the band Uncle Tupelo, of which Jeff Tweedy was a founding member, and the brilliant “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” Uncle Tupelo broke up in the mid-90s and “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” is nearing its 10-year anniversary. With “The Whole Love,” the band is consciously continuing to distance itself from both. This is the first album released on their new label, dBpm. It was completely recorded and mixed at their own studio called “The Loft.” The band has also experienced no personnel changes since 2004.

If there is one fault with “The Whole Love” (as well as with their past two or three releases) it is that it still doesn’t feel quite as bold as their earlier records, namely “Summerteeth” and their masterpiece “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” During the early 2000s, critics were hailing Wilco as America’s Radiohead, calling the band brilliant, and lauding the bands innovations and bold rejection of commercialism. Though the only radio station that would ever play Wilco is still NPR, a certain comfort-zone feeling pervades “The Whole Love.” The fact they didn’t expand on the two aforementioned tracks “Art of Almost” and “One Sunday Morning” seems like a missed opportunity. But even though the band isn’t adventurous on “The Whole Love,” and most likely will continue to use their folk rock formula, it still satisfies with many near flawless tracks, exactly what the world expects from Wilco.

The myriad pieces at this year’s DANCEVENT performance this past weekend can be described only in one way:
“They’re all really good. They’re all really unique. They’re all different,” Jessica Dolezal ’12, Orchesis president, said.

DANCEVENT is a production of faculty research in modern dance, performed by both faculty members and the students of Orchesis. Three faculty members, theatre, speech and dance Department Chairs Joan Gavaler, Leah Glenn and Denise Damon Wade, choreographed all nine pieces. These three faculty members also support Orchesis, a dance group founded in 1941 and the only school sponsored modern dance company.
“It’s faculty and student run, I think that’s something that makes [Orchesis] unique,” Dolezal said. “We have the support of the faculty, so we get a lot of input and feedback from them.”
But, what exactly is modern dance?

“It is hard to define modern dance because it is such a wide range and there are so many different types of modern,” Dolezal said. “Modern has a strong ballet technique base. A lot of the movement comes from the technique, so it is important to have a good background in [ballet].”

Like any style of art, modern dance is not for everyone. It creates a different type of performance, unappreciated by many non-dancers who do not understand the complexities of the steps. Most students in the audience were there either for class or to support friends in Orchesis.

“I went for my Modern I dance class and to support my friend, Amanda Hinckle,” Sammy Nelson ’15 said.
The student performances appeared to be the favorites of the evening. They involved larger groups on stage with engaging and active choreography.

“Overall, I enjoyed the creative works brought to the stage and their inventive interpretations,” Nelson said. “All the student performances were really good.”

The students in the Orchesis company performed in four pieces. “Going Up” was a faculty and senior student performed improvisation, or improv, featuring 12 dancers. The performance was set to a medley of cell phone ringtones and served as an entertaining opening act. As improv, the dancers were given a few loose guidelines they had to follow during the performance, including seducing the audience and striking up a conversation next to a mimed water dispenser.

“Strings (Attached),” featured five Orchesis dancers, including Dolezal, and was a favorite of the night. Glenn choreographed the piece and the individual dancers represented her best friends from high school. The performance was fun and lively, with many synchronized portions, exemplifying the “strings attached” side of the piece. The rambunctious attitudes entertained the audience, culminating in a silhouetted reverse-cha-cha exit.

“Strings (Attached) was my favorite because it had interesting groupings and good costumes,” Jordan Turner ’15 said.

“Lost (Found)” was an emotional piece featuring nine Orchesis dancers and choreographed by Wade. On the first day of rehearsal, the performers wrote down a loss they had experienced during their lives, and Wade choreographed these losses into the performance. The dancers individually seemed to “lose” and later “find” the group of dancers throughout the performance.

The last performance, “Grounded in Flight,” was choreographed by Glenn and featured a display of 12 hopping and happy Orchesis dancers in jean shorts and ribbons, seeming to prance across the stage. The piece was inspired by Glenn’s autistic son’s simple and genuine enthusiasm for life.

“The piece exudes happiness,” Orchesis member Amanda Hinckle ’15 said.

The other performances of the evening included fewer dancers and were primarily faculty research. These faculty performances included the duet “Stumble,” choreographed by Wade and performed with Melinda Trembley. The piece centered on the struggle of communication with the performers moving in and out of sync with one another.

DANCEVENT also included collaborative works among the Arts Department at the College of William and Mary. “The Fool and the World” is a prime example. The piece was inspired by reactions to 22 tarot card linocuts designed by Liz Gill Neilson and projected onto the stage during the performance. Gavaler choreographed the piece with poetry by Nancy Schoenberger and music by Sophia Serghi.

Other faculty performances included “Ode to a Cat,” a solo piece by Wade performed to the meowing music of Rossinni, in which Wade danced like her feline friends and even hissed at the audience.

“[Ode to a Cat] was extremely entertaining and original,” Olivia Flynn ’15 said.

The duet, “Peripheral Vision,” was a collaboration between Gavaler and Glenn. The film “Irma,” a collaborative effort between Wade and Irma Cardano, was shown after intermission and depicted a woman dancing with what could be her younger self in an old apartment building.

Gavaler described DANCEVENT as a collaboration within the William and Mary performing arts community, including members of the college’s English, Music and Theatre departments.