Sarah Maurizi | Student Life

The Green Events Commission partnered with Bauhaus this year to create a more sustainable event.

In an attempt to make Bauhaus a more sustainable event, the Green Events Commission (GEC) worked in collaboration with the Architecture School Council to install these bins.

The GEC exists to help student groups put on more environmentally friendly events. This was the first year that the GEC partnered with Bauhaus, and the commission helped institute a number of changes at this year’s party.

“We partner with [Bauhaus] and focus on making their food options more sustainable and reducing the waste generated at their events,” said senior Emily Averna, co-chair of the GEC.

The GEC pushed the Architecture School Council to serve food from Chipotle at the event, instead of Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s.

“Chipotle has an emphasis on responsible food. A lot of it is naturally raised and organic,” Averna said.

A larger part of the budget was dedicated to buying utensils than in the past to assure that all napkins, plates and cups were compostable.

Unfortunately, all of the work put in to ensure that the waste could be composted did not pay off. Attendees threw the foil wrappers in the composting bins, and many compostable items were thrown in the garbage.

“It didn’t work out as well as we expected,” said Tristan Sopp, president of the Architecture School Council.

“Obviously, drunk people aren’t the best at putting trash in compost bins. Students aren’t that great when they’ve been drinking at making sure they separate things correctly,” he said.

Ultimately, the Architecture School Council was unable to compost anything because the bins contained the wrappers and other non-compostable items.

“It did cost a little more to [compost]; it was frustrating. I just don’t know if it was the right scenario to make composting work,” Sopp said.

In organizing the event, Architecture School Council found compostable wrappers, but by the time they had contacted Chipotle, the food had already been wrapped.

Averna hopes that this mistake can be avoided in the future.

“We’re still a new group, so we’re hoping to learn,” Averna said. “We always expect curveballs, so I guess at this one we have to appreciate the victory of sustainable foods.”

Bauhaus was already making efforts to be sustainable before its council met with the GEC. In previous years, the council already used paperless advertising and reused decorations, according to Averna.

Last year, the GEC worked with Dance Marathon to reduce water bottle usage by hosting a raffle in which only those who brought their own water bottles were eligible to enter. The GEC also brought in local pizzas and other locally and more sustainably packaged snacks.

The GEC has plans to work with Relay for Life, Thurtene, Celebrations Weekend, Dance Marathon and the First Year Center throughout the year.

The bands are mostly on the small-but-mighty indie side. The aspect of discovery is one of the most fun parts about the festival. Notable performers include mashup kings The Hood Internet, Atlas Sound (a Deerhunter side project), Brothers Lazaroff, Midwest Avengers, recent W.I.L.D. performer Nite Owl, Illphonics, Superfun Yeah Yeah Rocketship and Ellee Ven.

The shows kick off on Wednesday and continue Thursday through Saturday. All 10 stages are at places on the Loop, including Cicero’s, Blueberry Hill, Vintage Vinyl, Racanelli’s Cucina, Chipotle and the 560 Music Building. Each of the venues hosts several sets each night starting around 7 p.m. Check out the full schedule at http://2009.playstlfest.com/.

In addition to the shows, the festival also features a series of advice panels for making it in the music business. Topics include basic business sense for musicians, how to get exposure, social networking and the questionable necessity of booking agents. Panels start Saturday afternoon at Cicero’s.

Wash. U. students can pick up three-day wristbands for $5 (about 5 cents per performance) at the Edison Box Office. That’s a $10 savings on the normal price of a wristband, plus all the swag that comes with it: Wristband holders get a free Chipotle burrito, a free drink or shirt, and preferred admission to panel discussions.

Head out to the Loop this weekend to find yourself a new favorite indie band!

Well, I wouldn’t know. Let me tell you why.

Before it was announced who was performing at W.I.L.D., I had never heard of Kweli or David Banner or Kid Sister. Nite Owl was a superhero in Alan Moore’s “Watchmen.” You could say rap isn’t my thing. That’d be an oversimplification, but it’s true enough.
I’m going to talk about music for a little bit now. W.I.L.D. was a five-hour event, musically. Those five hours consisted entirely of rap, a genre of music, which while more approachable than Swedish heavy metal opera, is not really something you can immediately get into. Now, correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I don’t think there were any big names here either. Nite Owl doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.

But still, I decided to participate and have a good time. I mean, it’s not every day you get to see a free concert, is it? And free food is always good.

So I left with some friends at about 4:05 to go over to Brookings Quad. Bolstered by rumors of free Chipotle until 5:30 or whenever they ran out, we meandered to campus. At 4:15, I saw people from my floor leaving without any food. They told me that the free Chipotle had already run out.

This does not make sense to me. If you’re planning on serving food until 5:30, wouldn’t it make sense to have enough food to last until then? Or even enough food to last more than one-sixth of that time? Granted, I don’t really know any of these details for sure. Maybe there was no free Chipotle. Maybe the plan was for it to end before the concert started at 4:30. Maybe they didn’t really run out at 4:15…(We never checked because we were told they were out; instead, we walked in and we lay down.) And it’s not like W.I.L.D. has never been put on before; Team 31 knew about how many people would be there, when they would get there and pretty much everything they’d need to know in order to correctly gauge the amount of food they’d need. But the lack of burritos is not really all that important to the story.

So we get to W.I.L.D., and the first act comes on. All I can say about Nite Owl is that there is a reason he’s not popular enough for a Wikipedia page. We left.

A while later, we came back. I got free pizza and then went to the bathroom. When I got out, I saw a friend of mine who was having some trouble, so I helped get him back to the dorm, and then I stayed in the rest of the night. I figured I wasn’t missing anything. In talking with people who were at W.I.L.D. for the whole time, the general consensus seems to be that I figured correctly.

Now, I’m not saying Team 31 needs to bring in The Who or The Rolling Stones for the spring (although if they did, it would be the greatest W.I.L.D. ever), but can’t they get R.E.M. to come back? Or how about the Arctic Monkeys? Maybe some indie rock band no one’s ever heard of? That certainly would keep with the “no one’s ever heard of our acts” theme that was established this year.

Or even The Romantics. They came once before; what’s to say they wouldn’t again? Come to think of it, I think I’d probably be happy with any band, as long as it is actually a band. Let’s get some instruments and musicianship back on that stage.

Therein lies my critique of Tess’s column. The hypocrisy ascribed to my statements (that I would wait in line for Chipotle but not for voting) is no doubt deduced from my bombastic tone and loudly contentious attitude. I apologize to Tess for my lack of manners during the event she accurately recollects. I constantly have to remind myself that speaking loudly against the grain is neither endearing nor persuasive. However, I must defend resistance (c.f. Brian Dorne’s Oct. 3 column, “The conscious non-vote,” for a related view on this).
Though Tess rightly opposes the thoughtless non-participation I promoted during Chipotle Day, she erects a straw man argument by reducing my dissent to apathy. Therefore I must put forth an altered argument, espousing meaningful resistance rather than the indolent rebellion.

To begin with, the substance of my polemic is against the electoral system, not against the premise of voting. I am vigorously opposed to the appropriation of my vote to legitimize the election of a candidate who I will most assuredly not support. Thanks to the Electoral College’s methodology, in virtually every state one candidate walks away with each voter’s voice. This gives the victor a greater share of legitimacy (the more people who vote, the more significant is the majority of the population who voted for him). Simply put, that someone whose platform I abhor may receive even the paltry authentication of my vote is appalling. This leads me to the general conclusion that our “bipartisan” government receives undue legitimacy from inherently uncritical electoral participation.

That being said, I must agree with Tess that “political issues are not abstract—they get at you on a personal level, they affect almost every arena of your life.” However, I realize that legitimizing the system is not always the answer. Voting is not the “little taste of all those American rights and freedoms” that she’s “heard so much about,” especially if the choice is coercive, a constructed selection of one of two supposedly different candidates (c.f. Randy Brachman’s ironic Oct. 1 column, “How the cookie crumbles”). The false dialectic we are presented with operates on the supposition that by all voting in a two-party system, we can somehow promote a synthesis (read: bipartisanism) between the two poles. Our democratic process ostensibly seeks to attain a compromise that moves us toward an approach to government that is simultaneously progressive and traditionally sound. Our system tells us that we can reach a conclusion that rises above the destructive tension between Democrats and Republicans.

Yet, as Theodor Adorno states so succinctly, “Freedom of choice means the freedom to choose your ideology.” The problem lies in the fact that our system demands
unquestioning obeisance to the tenets of American dreams and ideals: The only difference between the parties is the path taken to this mutually stated utopia. This is why we cannot productively move our society beyond pure ideology and promote realistic approaches to governance, and why the bipartisan “dialectic” is detrimental to democracy. It is impossible for dynamic tension to exist in a unipolar political system.

My indignation is real and my refusal to participate is conscientiously justified. How can we so emphatically demand participation in a system that excludes minor party candidates and marginal voices? How can we blithely invest our voices in support of a system that heaped vituperation on Ralph Nader for Al Gore’s loss in 2000? Why is anyone who does not want to vote characterized as a lazy and unproductive iconoclast? Finally, why is it anathema to express discontent with the coercive, false choice that we are given?

I defend the “exuberance” with which Tess describes my defiance. I am hopeful when I violate the norms of the electoral process. By emphatically rejecting the false dilemma set forth by our bipartisan political system, I subscribe to a means of political progress through effective negation, even if it remains a subjective endeavor.

I will cast my vote, or refuse to participate, depending on where my issues lie and not where ideological pressure attempts to pigeonhole me.

He explained to his squirmy companion that her vote would surely be canceled out immediately after she cast it—said it wouldn’t even make a difference. He told her the candidates are all the same anyway.

If I were a more confrontational person, I might have said something instead of just rolling my eyes and muttering under my breath. But I can imagine asking Chipotle guy how he could wait in line for free food but not line up for the biggest opportunity to use that voice he seemed to love so much.

Sure, my vote is going to be canceled out. The same roommates who waited in that burrito line with me will probably be waiting in line with me at the polls. I’m for Obama; they’re for McCain. Canceled, just like that. It would actually make some kind of sense for me and one of them just to stay behind, paint our nails and save the time and trouble of voting. But we’re all going. We’ll all be there standing in line, even without the promise of free food.

It’s not that I think my vote is going to decide the election. I guess I’m voting for the taste of it—a little taste of all those American rights and freedoms I’ve heard so much about. Together we can perhaps avoid eight years of the wrong leader. Or maybe not. But I really do care, and saying you don’t—saying you’ll take a pass on voting day—is worse than lame; it’s just plain lazy (you heard me Chipotle guy: I think you’d rather be napping than voting—way to stand up to the man).

Political issues are not abstract—they get at you on a personal level, they affect almost every arena of your life. You can think of voting as a statement: You’re saying, yes, you’ll break your routine and even wait in long, obnoxious lines to help make your country a better place. You’d do it for a burrito, so of course you’ll line up to choose the new leader of the free world. You are free to make decisions that are bigger than yourself. A new president, or, let’s say, global warming—these are challenges so huge, they make you feel tiny. You think, “Why would I turn off my light or recycle this cup when I know that guy isn’t going to do it? What’s the point?” But you are free to choose to be greater and more powerful than you feel.

You have to ask yourself: Do you really want to stand by while more people vote for American Idols than for an American president? Like the Chipotle guy waited almost an hour for a free burrito (and spent almost that long talking about not voting)? Of course, he’s free to choose not to vote. But if you don’t vote, you have absolutely no right to complain. And c’mon, we’re college students—complaining is what we do best. See you at the polls.

One new program of Student Union, the Chipotle Challenge, aims to encourage students’ participation in campus activities. Nelson’s brainchild, the Challenge provides free burritos at sports games and major campus events.

According to Nelson, Student Union (SU) wants to focus on athletics this year, especially on the heels of the school’s three national championships earned last year.

“Lot of students love Chipotle and it’s free; I think it’s really going to drive kids towards involvement,” he said.

Many students said that free Mexican food would encourage them to attend more student events.

“I think college students jump at any opportunity for free food, especially Chipotle, so I would be there,” freshman Laura Beckman said.

Freshman Joseph Marcus said that the desire for Chipotle is widespread on campus.

“I would definitely go there if they had free Chipotle,” Marcus said. “Chipotle is a strong motivating factor for all college students, including myself.”

However, others feel that the new program will not make an impact.

“[Having free Chipotle] will probably increase attendance, but I don’t think it will increase it by a huge amount,” Doug Horn, a senior and residential advisor, said.

Nelson has been coordinating with Chipotle since April.

“[Chipotle was] very eager to work with us, get their name out there in conjunction with students’ events and to get students out there,” Nelson said.

SU’s encouragement of school spirit goes beyond free food. This year will see the return of GoCrossCampus, an Internet game in which residential colleges compete against each other to conquer various regions of Washington University’s campus in a format similar to that of the board game Risk.

In order to be further in touch with students, another new program known as “Flash Drives for Freshmen” will provide every freshman with a flash drive containing information and links to useful sites for activities, the judicial code and other practical places.