At the height of Ivy class–1965–Japanese fashion photographer Teruyoshi Hayashida set out to chart the fascinating phenomenon of the Ivy League gentleman. His book, “Take Ivy,” is a gorgeous panoply of understated prepsterdom, beautifully capturing an aesthetic that skinny jeans and muscle-Ts may soon resign to the ash heap of history. Via Bows + Arrows, here’s what we’ve lost:
Lots more after the jump:
| The Washington Post indicates that April 1 “joke issues” of school papers, laden with fake news and goofy headlines, may be a thing of the past — come tomorrow, you will have to read (or ignore) the same boilerplate. Spectator EIC Ben Cotton says a joke issue, which had run in past years,
sets up a whole slew of ethical issues — trying to toe the line between what’s funny and what’s an inappropriate comment about a person or subject we purport to cover objectively is asking a lot.
Yawn, boring! Brown’s Herald declares that it totally WOULD have a joke issue, but they’re on spring break right now. Just like a real coward would say! (April Fools — or is it?)
For fun pranks, one has to look outside the Ivy League, I guess! Boston University’s Free Press Editor-in-Chief, who is planning a prank issue, declares:
It’s a nice day off from hard news, barring giant stories (which we would put online), and is a fun chance to have the core staff all sit down together and write/layout the paper ourselves from scratch.
Yeah, that sounds fun, and a clearly-delineated enough tradition to ensure no toes would be stepped on. No fooling!
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Mother Jones‘s blog publishes a denunciation of James Franco’s recent accession into the Ivy League — a move they view as dillentantism. It’d be a lot easier to accept Franco’s interest in academics, they argue, if he hadn’t just revealed himself as a hack in his Esquire short story. Says Mother Jones:
I say this with sympathy—it is a typical MFA workshop Frankenstein, a musing on youth, friendship, and death, replete with car crashes, sexual ambiguity, and one-off similes (“the shadows make it shadow-color”; “the black gaping gap”). It’s one of those pieces that you read aloud in class, then insist to your peers at the end that “It’s not autobiographical.”
Ouch! Um, we actually agree. The story is a piece of hackwork (“I love driving down an empty dark freeway, lit up intermittently by the lights at the side of the road, and when I see the lights, I think of all the little worlds out there, all the little animals living in their habitats out there…”). But what about Franco’s desire to just improve his miiiind, man?
The YDN reports Cameron Dabaghi, Y ’11, passed away on Tuesday after jumping from the Empire State Building. Our thoughts remain with the student’s family and friends.
Personal question:
Were you, despite your best efforts, still snubbed by those most secret of societies? (And, as such, denied entrance to all those weird Kubrickian sex parties you secretly craved to attend? You sick bastard.) Well, worry not, my friend, because thanks to Ralph Lauren’s Rugby brand, secret society street cred has never been more accessible.
When Rugby’s new spring clothing line was recently unveiled, one item in particular jumped to our attention: A graphic t-shirt that appears to be emblazoned with Cornell secret society Quill and Dagger’s name and crest. No one can quite explain how or why, but whoever designed the shirt certainly appears to have had Ithaca’s most storied paragon of smug self-importance in mind: Even beyond the matter of the matching name, the symbol at the center of the shirt is a spot-on replica of the society’s emblem.
One anonymous Quill and Dagger member denied the shirt’s authenticity, insisting that the maxim wrapped around the crest (“Leadership. Character. Dedication.”) was not the organization’s actual motto. However, the words do appear — and in that same order — near the beginning of Q&D’s Wiki page. So either someone over at Rugby has some connection to Cornell’s most elite after-school club — or else someone over at Rugby is cribbing Wikipedia for design ideas.
Seriously, though, what’s going on here?
A couple of weeks ago we brought you the exclusive and twisted tale of Cornell “literary fraternity” ADPhi’s hazing travails: nudity, dogfood, ritual abuse, etc. Well, in the days that followed, some considerable crap went down: the story went viral, you feisty commenters went wild (it was Spring Break, after all), and new info and multimedia started streaming in from all sides. We’ve held off on updating, letting the story simmer, but now–with pics and fun galore–we can’t restrain ourselves any longer. Here’s what we’ve heard from our tipsters:
Oh, but there’s a lot more. Head on past the jump for more exclusive pics, including funtimes inside the frat and an unfortunate use of a second-floor window.
Columbia: Sarkozy speaks at Columbia, and OMG Carla Bruni was there.
There are two universal truths: life is long and arduous…and everyone drools over James Franco. Pull on your rain boots and expect a flash flood upon his first steps into New Haven this September. That’s right, Franco’s coming to Yale… for an English PhD. The Green Goblin’s son, after an MFA-stint at Columbia, is officially an IvyHopper! (copyrighted by IvyGate). Franco’s decided to cruise from New York to New Haven, bringing with him the wrinkled eyes of celebrity.
This begs a few questions. Is he a divine prophet sent down to radically improve Yale’s College Prowler sexy rating? Will he smoke a ‘dragon bong?‘ Will he need security from the eager Asian tour groups who will track him down for giddy pics? What about the cougar gays, looking for a real-life remake of Milk? And, wait…is he even that smart? This man–correction, this prayer-answered–has a history of…well…being attractive. In other words, does he really belong on any Ivy campus?
Then again, New Haven deserves a little eye candy for once. Sex Week isn’t all that relevant when one’s only choices are seedy Quinnipiac nymphomaniacs or prudish bulldogs. It seems Franco’s aim is not to christen himself with some throwaway Columbia English MFA or Yale English PhD, but rather, to bring some much-needed levity to academia. He’s taking the Ivy League on a night out, rounding up the freaks and geeks and introducing them to Mary Jane. I predict a lot of broken smoke alarms and billowing pillars in Yale’s future.
But let’s get dirty – what will Franco even do in a seedy little backwater town like New Haven? It’s no coke-laced New York City, but he’s got a plethora of options. Get mugged and then universally humiliated by soon-to-retire Yale Security Chief James Perrotti? Check. Shame all the undergraduate theatre majors into realizing that looks do matter? Check. Go streaking? *Girly moan…* I mean, Check. That’s about it. At least he’s not stuck in grey, prison-camp Ithaca. Or wrapped in the folds of Princeton’s popped collars. Or in the all-around fail of Harvard’s party scene. It seems he actually got lucky! In, you know, an academia-sense.
Though realistically, if he’s looking for his biggest fans, he should’ve run to Providence. A holy Brunonian cross would have been erected in his honor…and then smoked.
| An anonymous source close to the Penn 2013 class election (the one that crowned Jonathon Youshaei with over 70% of the vote) tells us that Youshaei’s numbers actually went UP on the last day of the voting period. This is surprising, given the late-breaking and lukewarm endorsements for opponent Jake Shuster from each class President, which theoretically would have tipped the final day’s vote totals away from Youshaei.
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As I shuffled out of Columbia’s Low Library this morning and saw French security agents huddled around and puffing cigarette smoke into the rain, I got to thinking about la camaraderie (as them Frenchies would say) — the kinship between Ivy League students and our melancholy, cigarette-smoking, scarf-wearing counterparts across the Atlantic.
“We are your friends,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told a crowded hall full of Ivy Leaguers this morning, myself among them. Super chouette. And to respond to someone’s greeting with this quick turn of French phrase would indeed be the expected reply of either a French person or an Ivy League student. Oui, like that French painter Claude Monet, Ivy League students are eager to impress.
And we share so much more with the French people. We don’t tend to tip waiters. We do the best we can to get by with minimal cleanliness. We think we’re the first ones to come up with an idea. We grow ironic facial hair—the French call it a goatee, translated as, “Your face looks like a goat’s face.”
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