Campus News: Multimedia Belt

Bounce houses, beer and glitter make for Mayfest 2013 memories
By Jillian D'Onfro
April 28, 2013 - 2:25pm
Commentary: Syracuse University senior Jillian D'Onfro describes her last Mayfest and thinks back on past years' celebrations.

I noticed the first sign when I peered out my bedroom window and spotted a rainbow bounce house already shaking and swaying two backyards over. The second sign arrived as my roommate thrust a freshly opened beer into my hand. Next came the beats thumping from nearby speakers, the squeals and yips floating through my open windows as someone started their inaugural game of flip cup and a text from a friend asking what time we would start putting glitter on our faces.

“Happy senior year Mayfest,” my roommate grinned wickedly.

Students break out bright clothes and glitter for this year's Mayfest
By Alyssa Marie Meisner
April 27, 2013 - 2:48pm
Mayfest 2013 offered something for everyone with concerts and free food in Walnut Park, parties on Euclid and an evening Block Party featuring Trey Songz and Ke$ha.

Sunshine was rare at past Mayfest celebrations, but this year Mother Nature pulled through. The mild weather and sun on Friday brought out Syracuse University students and their bright clothing to celebrate. Taking a break from looming finals, students ate, drank and danced the day away.

Spike Lee speaks to students about chasing their goals
By Greg Cwik
April 16, 2013 - 11:26pm
Film director Spike Lee spoke to students and community members Tuesday night about his film career and advised students to follow their dreams.

In 1989, Spike Lee’s epochal Do the Right Thing, a manic meditation on race and morality on the hottest day of the year in Lee’s native Brooklyn, was heralded as a film that was wildly in sync with its times. According to Roger Ebert, one of the film’s earliest champions, Do the Right Thing was one of the most earnest reflections of modern race relations to hit theaters in years. The film felt fiercely modern.

But Tuesday night, while addressing a packed house in Goldstein auditorium, Lee referred to himself as an old man—“all fuddy duddy.”

Hate Expires at second annual LGBTQ conference
By Hani Taha
April 16, 2013 - 1:01pm
The second annual LGBT conference at SU focused on important issues like bullying, HIV and providing support to the LGBT community but what it did crucially well was demonstrate the separation of church and hate.

There were just a handful of people at the second annual Life Gets Better Together Conference this weekend at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, which is telling about the polar attitudes towards LGBT issues in the country.

Currently only 9 out of the 52 states within North America have authorized same sex marriage and the last two weeks saw the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition Eight being hotly contested in California courts.

University Lecture Series Interview: David Henry Hwang
By Gina Marie Lazara
April 8, 2013 - 10:42am
The award-winning playwright best known as the author of 'M. Butterfly,' spoke to The NewsHouse before his talk at Syracuse University.

David Henry Hwang is best known as the author of M. Butterfly, which ran for two years on Broadway, won a number of awards including a Tony, and was a finalist for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize. He is also author of the award-winning plays Golden Child and Yellow Face as well as several books for award-winning musicals.

The Black Reign Step Team to showcase Harlem Renaissance-themed performance
By Gwendolyn Craig
March 25, 2013 - 5:27pm
The campus club step team will hold its seventh annual performance, inspired by a cultural movement that changed African American identity in the United States.

Stepping and dancing are not the same.  With dance, you move your body to music.  With stepping, you are the music. 

Ashley Holland, a Child and Family Studies junior, spends her free time stepping, making her body into a musical, percussive instrument along with dozens of other students.  Together they make rhythms and beats, moving in synch to a pattern only they know and feel.  They stomp, clap, slap, click.  The rhythm is contagious.

National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson discusses light pollution
By Jingnan Li
March 19, 2013 - 10:01pm
The veteran photographer spoke in Hendricks Chapel Tuesday about potentially harmful effects related to "vanishing nights."

Jim Richardson, National Geographic photographer since 1984, spoke to a full house at Hendrick's Chapel Tuesday night, to express his concern about light pollution through his lecture, “Our Vanishing Night: Light Pollution.”

Conor Grennan speaks on changing the world through volunteering
By Heather Norris
March 6, 2013 - 3:08pm
As a part of SU's Lecture Series, Conor Grennan spoke to students and members of the community Tuesday about the impact of volunteering and storytelling.

Conor Grennan didn't even like kids when he flew to Nepal in 2004 to work for a few months in an orphanage. The idea only came to him, he said, after friends kept asking about why he wasn't planning on including some volunteer work in the year-long trip around the world he had planned.

"I didn't go to Nepal to kind of save the lost children of Nepal," said Grennan. But after bragging to a girl in a bar about his plans to volunteer, that's exactly what he ended up doing.

Roz Savage shares her experience rowing across the Atlantic Ocean
By Gwendolyn Craig
February 28, 2013 - 11:16am
The 2010 National Geographic "Adventurer of the Year" spoke in Hendricks Chapel about the 103-day journey at sea.

Life can seem pretty bleak when you’re in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and all four of your rowing oars are broken.  And you’re alone.  And you don’t have a motor. 

That happened to Roz Savage, an environmentalist and the first woman to row across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.

SU graduate Stephen Barton and a panel of experts discuss gun control in the United States
By Taylor Procopio
February 20, 2013 - 12:29am
In lieu of the recent mass shootings, a panel was held Tuesday night in Hendricks Chapel to discuss the issue of gun control.