Fonda Shen

Kanoa Mendenhall, CC ’19, is not the shades-wearing, tall, gaunt, man in a fedora that people usually imagine to be a jazz bassist. And yet, petite, slight, and quiet Mendenhall has been performing as one since she was a little girl. As she prepares to graduate from Columbia and begin her first international tour, she reminisces about the integral role that jazz has played in her life.

When one watches a love story unfold slowly in a musty cinema, listens to a singer’s voice build in an unearthly crescendo, or stands stunned before a mural painted with startlingly bright colors, it is possible to pause for a moment, take a deep breath, and step back from reality. It becomes possible to succumb to the incalculability of life—suddenly, one can reclaim the right to feel.

The Notorious RBG, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Law ’59, is now one of the most well-known members of the Supreme Court bench and a cultural icon. The popularity of “On the Basis of Sex,” the movie based on Justice Ginsburg’s involvement in the 1972 case Charles E. Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, perhaps embodies this phenomenon more than anything else.

People go to operas to live in another world for a while—a world of drama, tragedy, and beauty that resides solely in the jewel box that is the opera house. Likewise, people conventionally go to church to find solace, clarity, and strength from a divine power. At Rutgers Presbyterian Church last Wednesday and Thursday, however, audience members watching Heartbeat Opera’s contemporary adaptation of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” were not offered an escape, but were rather confronted with the stark injustices of the American criminal justice system and reminded of their own complicity in it.

The phrase “building blocks of music” can refer to rhythm, melody, dynamics, or any other fundamental characteristic of a musical work. Rarely, however, does that phrase mean actual blocks—Lego blocks, to be more exact.

The Center for Justice at Columbia University commemorated the work of the inaugural class of the June Jordan Fellowship at the Gavin Brown Enterprise in Harlem earlier this month.

Rachel Kastner, BC ’19, says she is someone who makes friends on the subway, remembers her cab driver’s name from last night, and, above all else, loves people. It is significant to note that three of her grandparents are survivors of a tragedy that stemmed from hatred, the Holocaust. Kastner, a passionate film actress and producer, is now trying to capture the horror of that age and the generosity of the people who stood up to its hatred in a documentary called “The Barn,” which she produced with Matthew Hiltzik and director and producer Phil Berger.

The words “opera” and “horror” are rarely used in the same sentences. Traditional operas à la Puccini, Bizet, and Verdi call to mind soaring opera house ceilings, elaborate sets, drama-filled romances, and ultimately great, heartrending, tragedy. But in Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s opera Proving Up, which premiered in New York on Wednesday at Columbia’s Miller Theatre, the set is nothing more than a sandbox representing the arid land of Nebraska, and the story begins in hopelessness only to end in a tragedy that leaves the audience horrified.

Katie Cooke, CC ’19, stands at only a little over 5 feet tall. She wears big round glasses, sports a pixie cut, and is almost always smiling. She is, in other words, the absolute antithesis of a common stereotype of a tall, stern, and unapproachable conductor. Yet, a conductor is exactly who she is.

There is something particularly ironic about watching a documentary on the 1968 Columbia protests in the sparkling new auditorium of Manhattanville’s Lenfest Center for the Arts. Sitting as a glistening reminder of Columbia’s gentrification of Morningside Heights and Harlem, Manhattanville is the modern version of the Morningside Park gymnasium plans, one of the sparks of the ’68 protests.