Twin Peaks return sure to bring new mysteries, same old coffee

Armed with the familiar hashtag “#damngoodcoffee,” co-creator and director of the early 90s TV series “Twin Peaks” David Lynch announced via Twitter on Oct. 6 that the series will be returning to television for a limited run. Nine new episodes are set to air on the Showtime network in 2016. The show was cancelled by ABC in 1991, after a two-season run which lacked steady viewership and the resolution of the show’s central mystery: “Who killed Laura Palmer?”

Lynch’s tweet reads, “Dear Twitter Friends… it is happening again” and was accompanied by a minute-long video starting with a clip from the show’s final scene in which Laura Palmer, depicted as alive in one of the surreal scenes that is characteristic of the series, raises her arm and snaps, turning the screen black.

“25 years later” then appears in the signature font of the series, an unappealing brown outlined in neon green. Afterward comes a still of a sign reading “Welcome to Twin Peaks” is the backdrop for “2016,” followed by “SHOWTIME,” as the beloved theme song “Falling” begins to play.

This short video sent shivers through me, a casual fan, due in no small part to the haunting instrumental from “Falling.”

It may seem redundant to display “25 years later” and “2016” in the same short video, but the time elapsed since the last aired episode is important to the new series. Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost may have known this even in 1991.

In a move conscious of the pioneering nature of their program they embedded plot points into the final episode that the new series will pick up, 25 years in the future. The “25 years” is also in direct reference to the final scene that the announcement video uses. In another part of the scene Laura Palmer says “I’ll see you in 25 years.”

While Frost and Lynch have to please their fans who have been salivating for this moment since 1991,they also want the new episodes to be accessible to people who have never seen the original series.

Showtime will be airing the original series before the new premiere for those who want to catch up, but with both seasons already on Netflix you could probably knock it out in a weekend or two.

There will also be a book titled The Secret Lives of Twin Peaks, written by Frost, which will explain what all of our favorite characters have been doing with their small town lives for all these years. It’s set to be released in 2015 for those fans who just can’t wait.

Although only nine episodes are planned, the new series may continue on if it’s well received.

Frost and Lynch have hinted that there are greater mysteries than Laura Palmer’s death in the town of “Twin Peaks.” This new series may solve some of those mysteries which original series was only able to hint at before it was cancelled.

Sky is the limit for Lerderer exhibition

The Bertha V.B. Lederer Gallery opened on Oct. 24 with 16 of artist Susan Leshnoff’s “SkyVisons.” Each acrylic on canvas represents something more than a just a beautiful sky. Through a spacious interplay of color, depth and ambiguous horizon lines, Leshnoff creates exactly what the title suggests: visions of the sky. “It has to do with looking at the sky and becoming visionary,” Leshnoff said. “They’re meant to be spiritual in concept and content.” A skywatcher since childhood, her intimacy with the sky is clear in her ability to transform it into something personal and meditative while retaining the universality inherent in any nature scene.

The spaciousness and opportunity for the viewer to create meaning within Leshnoff’s work could be due in part to her career as a professor of art. “I look at art from a scholarly point of view as well as a self-expressive one,” Leshnoff said.

Leshnoff earned her undergraduate degree in art history, but she’s taught all grades from K-12 in her career as a teacher. Additionally, she teaches studio art at Seton Hall University, instructing art teachers and advising the theses of graduate students.

She recently left her position as chair of the department of art, music and design at Seton Hall after 17 years of teaching a wide range of courses, including watercolor and 2-dimensional design. With all the administrative work that had to be done, Leshnoff stated that there was little time left for her to paint.

We can be thankful that she opened up this time for herself. Some paintings in the gallery like “Duskdawn,” with its temporal and spatial ambiguities, were completed just this year. Her work seems to create a hypnotic, perception-stretching effect. As Leshnoff said, they create “the opportunity for people to go off into a dream world.”

Of course, these effects are due to the artist’s rigorous artistic method and her breadth of knowledge. My favorite aspect of the paintings was the way they changed with distance, becoming more amazingly detailed and textured. She attributed this to the “couple of miles a day” she walks back and forth when painting.

Starting with particularly engaging photographs of the sky, Leshnoff described her process. “There’s a basic quality in the sky that I like to hold on to, but then I go off and it’s not representative of the photograph,” she said.

The process then becomes a spiritual experience in which she layers acrylic––a water- based medium she is comfortable with after teaching watercolor for so long––until the composition is harmonious without losing the visionary feeling and the sense of sky.

It may seem curious that in an exhibit inspired so heavily by the sun, the glowing orb itself never appears. This, however, avoids any possible distraction for the audience. “[I want to] make the eye span from left to right and beyond the dimensions of the canvas,” Leshnoff said.

Just as they are spiritual experiences for her to create, Leshnoff aims to make the experience of viewing the paintings spiritual as well. “A photograph might capture the sky in a frozen moment,” Leshnoff said. “But what I hope for in my paintings is that they are something people can live with for a while.”

“SkyVisions” will remain open at Lederer Gallery until Dec. 6.

Maybe Mayonnaise spreads onto campus music scene

If the closest thing you can find to live music at Geneseo is an iHome, Maybe Mayonnaise has what you need: a sound so thick and creamy, it’s almost edible. “We play music,” vocalist sophomore Oliver Diaz said. He conceived of the project with peer band member and guitarist sophomore Josh Shabshis. “[Our sound is] beauty, nature … and mayonnaise, a lot of it,” Shabshis said.

So how do you make Maybe Mayonnaise, anyway? You start with sophomore James Cooper’s unstoppable drumming, mix in sophomore Jessica Beneway’s bass and Diaz's voice, sprinkle some of Shabshis’s funky rhythm guitar on top and then whisk it all together with sophomore Russell Brinkman’s guitar licks and you have mayonnaise.

Maybe Mayonnaise shoots for a jam-rock unpredictability, and the band’s performance style is simple and tasteful. Beneway said the aspect of the condiment that informs the identity of the band most is mayo’s status as “a totally unidentified substance.”

The members of Maybe Mayonnaise seem to be under no pressure when performing; the guitar solos flow, the lyrics roll and release tensions built by Diaz’s elastic, scratchy voice.

The first song I heard the band perform, titled “The Second,” had me dancing like a fool with its building choruses. Despite a slower rhythm, another song “Thunder Notice” managed to maintain the intensity of its predecessor.

For Cooper, the band is more than a group of people to play great music with; it is a refuge with absurd amounts of creativity.

Cooper hopes the condiment will be given an actual presence in the group’s performances and practices instead of only occupying its current position in the name. He has suggested simply placing jars of mayonnaise around the stage to avoid a mess. This interactive and artistic approach from the band is sure to surprise and draw attention, especially once the band begins to perform at on-campus events, a possibility the band foresees for its future.

Maybe Mayonnaise is just finding its footing as a group. “[Right now], it’s chaos and total confusion and an explosion of nonsense,” Beneway said.

But like a good mayonnaise, the fat content isn’t too high and all the ingredients are holding together. For now, the band still has a ways to go, but you might catch Maybe Mayonnaise playing around at local performances off campus.

Poetry professor brings culture, creativity to English department

Now that school has been in session for more than a week, you’ve probably started to notice some new faces. One of those belongs to Icelandic translator, poet and assistant professor of English and creative writing Lytton Smith.

Smith isn’t a stranger to Western New York. He lived between Rochester and New York City four years ago when his wife had a fellowship at the University of Rochester for a year. Smith has done work for the university himself; translating works of Icelandic fiction like Bragi Ólafsson's The Ambassador. Smith said that the “independent stuff going on with music, radio and breweries” has him excited to be back. He grew up in a small town in England. While, his parents got him into verse speaking competitions at a young age and exposed him to a range of poetry, Smith didn’t identify as a writer until he was in high school.

Writing became a larger part of his identity while he attended University College in London, England. There were no workshops, so he set up a literary magazine called 50 Meters Fully Clothed with some of his friends. Another major shift in Smith’s writing destiny occurred when he decided that the time he was taking to memorize lines for theater would be better spent on writing. Smith has published two books of poetry and is working on a third. One of his books, All Purpose Magical Tent was published in 2008. “It’s about being unsettled, not having a place in either in language or in the world,” Smith said. “It’s fascinated with circuses and exclusions, but in a fairly whimsical way.” Displaying a trait that isn’t uncommon in poets, Smith admits that while he’s written a book influenced by the circus, he’s only been to three in his life. Smith’s second book, While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed by It, published in 2013, switches topics and themes drastically as it tries to explore the relationship between poetry, politics and ethics.

Now, Smith is astonished that he thought of applying for MFA’s in fiction. “I’ve always been interested in form, like the line, and discovering a range of forms, getting beyond just the sonnet,” he said. Translation and poetry are complimentary activities to Smith. He describes the translation process as a "wonderfully creative jigsaw.” “You try to work out what all the pieces are and how they fit together, but then you get to rearrange it so it’s an even better image than you started with, in a sense,” he said. With Icelandic being a more obscure language, it comes with the satisfaction of introducing the literature to people who wouldn’t otherwise come to it.

Spotlight On: Sankarsh Ramachandra

Junior Sankarsh Ramachandra’s “rap noir” is a fresh and inventive aspect of Geneseo’s rap scene. It’s unusual to immediately know that someone you’re casually conversing with is an artist. This isn’t the case for Ramachandra, who has a tendency to start rapping in the presence of anyone he’s just met.

“Sometimes I’m not able to respond to casual conversation with the propensity that it’s given to me, so I just start rapping,” he said.

He doesn’t do this for his ego or for self-promotion. He does it out of the pure eagerness to share a large aspect of his personality. His love for hip-hop is all that he wants to promote.

“For as long as I’ve been at this school, I’ve been telling people I have a mixtape coming out,” Ramachandra said. “I’ve been rapping for five years, but I’ve never been satisfied completely.”

Restlessness seems to define his rapping career. It led him to rapping in the same way that it makes him rap even more and more. A verse that he liked three days ago could get consigned to the archives of his phone.

“I didn’t really have another outlet of expression, which was something I had been worrying about,” he said. “I acted in school, but what was I going to do when I got home? I’m not going to do monologues in my room.”

Before he began rapping, all Ramachandra really was interested in was playing video games and watching anime. When he discovered hip-hop, it was a breakthrough for him.

“It was life changing to say the least,” he said. “I had something to go home to.”

Although he was always a fan of the “horrible early 2000s hip-hop” that his brother would play, it wasn’t until high school that he thought of himself as a rapper.

He stumbled upon his talent during one of the quick ciphers his friends would hold in the locker room. The ciphers were laid-back and humorous, but his friends were amazed by one of his free-styled verses.  They encouraged him to work on his rapping and helped him realize his “fervor and passion for words.”

During the fledgling years of his rap career, Ramachandra was still listening to top 40’s hip-hop and found himself frustrated that these songs didn’t fully take advantage of the variety and beauty of the English language. He began to use more unconventional language into his songs.

The desire for odd beauty is apparent in lines he writes today like “bark splinters at opposition.” Ramachandra’s raps have a certain quality in each line and in their loosely defined, non-linear narratives.

While he likes working within “the boundaries of structured music,” the topics and stories he puts in his lyrics are anything but structured.

“I could shift from being a samurai in the Tokugawa era, to robbing a bank, to being haunted by ghosts in the same verse,” he said. This proved true in the couple of verses he rapped where the topics went from “sniffing large knickers” to Batman and mobsters on the Vegas strip.

Given Ramachandra’s love for free-styling, it’s no surprise that his written lyrics sound like a stream of consciousness. He describes his writing process like free-styling on a page: “I’ll do a verse one take … I won’t second guess a line.”

His lyrics are personal, dark and humorous. He calls his rapping style “rap noir,” a style that doesn’t communicate the factual personal at all but rather showcases personal emotion. “I don’t want anything that I write to be misconstrued as a direct extension of my personality,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you about my life for you to understand it.”

Juried Exhibit provides student artists with professional criticism

The Lederer Gallery hosts a student-juried exhibit judged by a local artist each spring. This year’s entries boasted a huge variety in both medium and subject matter. Submissions were open to anyone, but juror Constance Mauro, a Rochester-based artist, selected artworks for display from the larger pool. The jury process also involves selecting three winners and three honorees.

“Several things I looked at were presentation, composition and degree of skill. The portraits were the hardest to judge due to the excellent quality of the work,” Mauro said in an email interview.

Mauro added that selecting the winning pieces is a complex process – an interaction between the work and the juror. “It’s almost as if they speak to you,” she said. A fair balance of mediums must be maintained while awarding the most deserving works.

Two-dimensional art was well-represented with works like “Transcendence” and “Sunset at the Lake.” Using only charcoal to create “Transcendence,” freshman Suma Hussien captures every detail in the face of a bearded man with piercing eyes. “Sunset at the Lake” by junior Jessica Kim, which took first prize, uses vivid colors and a serene background to complement a joyous portrait of two women in the foreground.

While there were fewer sculptural submissions, the medium made a strong showing with works like “Fish in the Sea” by senior Julia Andalora, where an eel and an angler fish create the silhouettes of two humans from their tail and lure, respectively. The fish are made of steel with pig intestine stretched over it to create a skin.

Director of galleries Cynthia Hawkins announced the winners and honorees at the juried exhibit opening on April 16. Following Kim’s “Sunset at the Lake,” junior Hannah Glaser’s “Michael and Tucker,” depicting a young boy dozing with his cat, won second prize. The third prize shifted from painting to jewelry. Senior Andrea Jerabek created a simple, beautiful design entitled “Leaf Necklace.”

The exhibit also featured a video showcasing “The Omeka Launch” from Bridget Kelly ’13. Omeka is a free web publishing tool that the art department is using to catalogue Geneseo’s large and varied collection of art. Kelly worked for over a year on getting the site launched before she graduated. In the video, Kelly talked about showing the Omeka website to a Malaysian woman who asked her what art is like in America.

Hawkins introduced the People’s Choice Award to let every student become a juror. The winner will be announced May 2. The exhibit will be open through May 6.

Spotlight on: Tom Mulholland

If you picked up something that surprised you recently, something that was out of the ordinary, it might have been an issue of Ghoulies III. You can be especially sure of that if you found it in a pizza box on Geneseo Recognizing Excellence, Achievement & Talent Day. As you perused its pages, you may have been intrigued by the “murder castle” of America’s first documented serial killer or started to think about the correlations between suburbs and graveyards. You were just as likely to be asking yourself, “What is this?”

Ghoulies III is a zine created by senior Thomas Mulholland. He said he’s been sitting on the idea since he first arrived on campus, when the administration announced the discontinuation of the studio art department.

“The immediate thought was creating a space where you could see this was an artistically productive place,” Mulholland said.

Four years later, he received the final shove to start printing.

“It was extremely doable, easy and cheap and there were a lot of people who wanted this to happen,” he said.

The community gave the idea much more than lip service; people have taken to it so well that several other zines with themes like body positivity and dream cataloging are in the works – ideas that Mulholland said he wanted to see after he started his zine.

Mulholland said he feels strange being the only name attached to the project, a result of all the work in the zines being anonymous. The anonymity, along with the overall silliness of the zine, is intended to make people feel less intimidated and ready to get involved.

“Each thing on its own is really awesome, but I want the overall feel of it to be thrown together and relaxed,” Mulholland said.

Each issue has its own theme. The next issue will be “mad science,” while the broader theme is “monster stuff.” Submissions don’t have to relate to the theme, however.

The zine will be a morphing project; Ghoulies III won’t even remain the title. It was originally lifted from a cheesy horror movie titled Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College, and intended for the first issue only. Mulholland listed “Ghost Dad with Bill Cosby” or “Hail Satan” as possible titles for upcoming issues. He’s also considering different methods of formatting, binding and printing.

For the future, Mulholland wants to make the zine, “a more face and body thing … I’d like to start handing these out rather than just leaving them places and maybe meet up to work on them.”

G.R.E.A.T. Day captures final year of studio art

Editor’s Note: The name of an individual in this article has been removed until further notice due to extenuating circumstances. Please contact The Lamron at lamron@geneseo.edu if you have any questions or concerns.

Despite the studio art department closing next semester, students created varied and engaging artwork that came together for Geneseo Recognizes Excellence, Achievement & Talent Day in the Lederer and Kinetic Galleries, with each space adopting a distinct feeling. Activities Commission Arts & Exhibits Coordinator junior Chelsea Butkowski has curated the G.R.E.A.T. Day show for the past two years, describing the process of putting the galleries together as both “interesting and difficult.” This year presented its own unique challenges.

“Remarkably, both of these shows had a lot black and white, so it was hard to find where the color works were going to be placed to balance the black and white works,” Butkowski said.

One intimate corner of the Lederer Gallery held self-portraits, wire cats and chameleons, a personal look at a shirt, landscapes and a cardboard sculpture. The sculpture, constructed by seniors Mathew Rhoney, Bryan Watson and Laura Golden, demands attention but maintains the intimacy of the gallery with its humble construction.

It invites you to look closer, if you want to. You can look at the label on one box and see that it used to hold frozen broccoli florets and in others you can see diagrams of foam trays.

Other works in the Lederer Gallery gave the viewer a look into the personal. “Lily,” a galvanized steel wire cat by Golden, embodies the way cats live in their own cat world with the piece’s lithe and accentuated spine.

The Kinetic Gallery lived up to its name, displaying pieces with active titles such as “Transformation,” “Transcendence” and “Eruption.”

Pieces utilizing a pointillism technique displayed and transcended the simple movements of brush strokes. Using only small dots to create different textures and shades, they made the movement ripple and flicker on the page.

In “Brushstroke Pointillism” by freshman Josh Abrahams, a bold, flowing line moves across the paper perpendicular to the major movement of the piece.

The theme “Untitled I” by sophomore Ursula Quinn ripples with various images. One can find any number of elements in its design: algae floating in the ocean, the ocean itself, a smooth and striated canyon or a jungle canopy.

“The Late, Great Monique,” an egg tempera by one student, hints at the idea of death that appeared in other works in the gallery like “Transformation” by senior Christine Kim and “Seng Im Ung” by freshman Laurel Linde. “The Late, Great Monique” sets the viewer’s mind wandering as it depicts a pale young woman in front of flora, then announces her death in the title.

“Transformation” by Kim uses black paper cutouts pasted onto white paper to depict a flower from a tree falling apart and becoming a skull. The beauty of the piece arises from the fact that the viewer can see the transformation going in the opposite direction.

Other works in the style of “Transformation” had subject matter that ranged from nonsensical – in the case of “From Ice Cream to Giraffe” by junior Bonnie Stathis – to disturbing metamorphoses: Aahuman hand grows webbing and a tail, turning into a cobra in junior Holly Birdsall’s “Untitled.”

After seeing such a great showing from the students, it’s hard not to think about the closing of the studio art department.

“Having the art exhibits on G.R.E.A.T Day is extremely beneficial and shows the liberal arts breadth of Geneseo,” Butkowski said. “If we aren’t able to have an exhibit next year, it will be a loss for the overall aesthetic of G.R.E.A.T. Day.”

Invasion of Privacy: Peace Corp volunteer envisions geographies of portraiture, landscapes

Despite the almost absurd list of illnesses and injuries that senior Riley Burchell has encountered at home and abroad, including typhoid and malaria, she’s always busy in Geneseo and abroad. In high school she began traveling when she became interested in “an individual sense of place and sense of identity as it pertains to the physical space people occupy,” she said.

She did a photographic study in Mozambique and Botswana through portraiture and landscapes, although she said she enjoyed the interactions that came with taking the portraits more.

Portraiture originally sparked her interest in photography because of the way a person’s expression or pose can encapsulate the event occurring around them.

“It was a happenstance sort of thing,” Burchell said. “It was the first place I had gone where I was there for a long enough time to develop real relationships and real rapport with the people I came in contact with, and I walked out of that trip with a few good friends ... Also, I love deserts.”

Her attraction to photography and travel preceded her interest in geography, even though she came to Geneseo with her major undeclared.

During her second semester, she took GEOG 111: Physical Geography with associate professor of geography David Aagesen and was hooked from then on.

Burchell studied abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina, under Aagesen, through the “Latin America: Environmental Issues” program. This program allows students to study pollution in the Riachuelo, a river that runs along the southern boundary of Buenos Aires, for two and a half weeks.

Burchell said she appreciated the laid-back nature of the program; the students were allowed to explore the city on their own time. She also found the subject matter engaging.

For the first time, Burchell saw “the connection between doing something I love to do and studying something I love to study,” she said.

“Photography is interesting in the study of cultural and historical geography and human geography because it doesn’t necessarily deal with physical geography; it deals more with the propensity of certain ideas – the special component of how people associate places and ideas with one another,” she said.

Burchell returned to Africa last summer, doing medical work in a clinic in the Cape Coast region of Ghana.

“Establishing myself in a new place is something that has always been really attractive to me,” Burchell said. The work was particularly rewarding because the urgency of her work came from the need to improve quality of life rather than adhering to a deadline.

At Geneseo, Burchell is a member of Delta Phi Epsilon and is on the Student Association executive committee as the director of public relations. She was the campus photographer for two years with College Communications and she hiked the Appalachian Trail with the Geneseo Outing Club.

Burchell is far from taking it easy after graduating; this summer, she’s returning to Africa for an internship in the Volta region of Ghana, doing youth and female development, and she plans to work with the Peace Corps in Guatemala a month later.

“The first time I went there, I said, ‘This is really cool’… so it’s funny how it’s come full circle in that aspect,” she said.