castles made of sand

The theatre department is putting on A Streetcar Named Desire sometime next month. The show itself is great, even though Tennessee Williams gets caught up in his own cleverness, both Streetcar and A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are really well written plays that have helped a lot of actors start their career, such as Marlon Brando.

Even though the show is prolific and a classic, I really don’t think that it can be performed well at the college level. Since this is a community college, the amount of student taking theatre classes is smaller than Universities with larger budgets. The talent you find at a community college is sparse compared to a theatre school you’d have to audition for. With that in mind, shows that have such a wealth of interpretation like Streetcar isn’t the best choice for student actors. It’s like Shakespeare. No matter how good a student is, how deep they play Hamlet or how flippant they play Puck, there are still thousands of actors that are doing the same thing, and better.

The community college theatre is more a place to explore new ideas on stage, newer plays and less known scripts to expand the horizons of both the actors and the audience. The problem with putting on shows like Streetcar, or Fiddler on the Roof, or anything Shakespeare, is that the audience is going to be much more critical, as they’ve seen the show many times before. They will have been exposed to many interpretations of those shows and will stack all those performances against the show put on by the students.

Lisa Abbott, the director of A Streetcar Named Desire, is leaving Clark after this show. I was hoping that she’d do something a bit more challenging or controversial to signal her departure. The Clark audience would have really benefited from seeing No Escape or Tartuffe, or something as grand and magnanimous as Les Miserables. Instead, we’re going to get a well-meaning, but disadvantaged version of a show almost everyone’s seen.

The end of a Quarter at Clark always inspires ‘over-the-horizon’ behavior not unlike Wizard of Oz. The people who make flyers and posters, and hand out free food often like to mark the end of a Quarter as a milestone. And while we don’t go that far, The Independent does do little things, usually only a banner though.

The most the end of a Quarter ever meant for me was a brief chance to get some actual sleep, attempt to do some things on my ‘Super Magic Fun Time World Domination’ checklist, and hope I didn’t fail any of my classes.

Seriously, I’m really looking forward to sleeping in for a few days. I think when it comes to going to bed at a decent hour, I’m a masochist. I know that I’m going to have to get up at the crack of dawn, but I always end up going to bed at 2 or 3. This strangely extended spring break we’re all getting is going to be spent walking around Portland and enjoying criminally long naps.

You know, I still haven’t heard a satisfactory reason why this Quarter was shortened so much. The Quarter started later and is ending sooner than previous Quarters. I’m not really complaining, it means less class time, but if Clark was going to make a major change in the length of their curriculum, shouldn’t have there been a memo? Still, if it means two whole weeks of Spring Break, it can’t be bad.

This Quarter saw a lot of things on campus change. For instance, the remodeling of Gaiser Hall, which I think started last winter, is finally done. The building is completed, and the poor middle management types that were banished to the T-Building will probably spend their two weeks dragging their stuff back to this side of the road. We have maps and markers on campus and in the parking lots. Personally, I think that color coordinated parking lot system is rather cloying, but I sort of approve. The signs though are a bit weird.

While walking to class today, I came across two maps. In one map, north was south, Gaiser was on the bottom and Bauer, Baird and AA5 was on the top. This makes sense because it’s facing the direction a student is walking. However, all my on the fly logic escaped me when I saw another sign next to the Science building in which North was left and South was right. Gaiser was on the left side of the map and Bauer was on the right. This makes no sense and I also begs the question, ‘Who the hell designed these things?’.

Anyway, on a more local note, next quarter will be different because we won’t have Rachel or Rylan here anymore. It’ll be weird, but as long as Joanna doesn’t abuse her new power and keeps Chris in check, things should be fine.

Like a portion of college students nowadays, I have a laptop that I use for just about everything. It’s a Dell cookie-cutter computer that I’ve modified to suit my needs, but the main thing I use it for is the internet. Within the scope of my college day, I use my laptop and the internet for a lot of classes. For Psychology, I use the eLearning BlackBoard site to get assignments, I maintain the clarknews.org web site as part of my job at the college newspaper, and I keep in touch with other students in my math class.

One of the boons of having a laptop at Clark College is the wireless internet that’s basically free to all registered students. When I started attending here last year, the only place for anyone to get wireless internet was the upper part of the campus, Gaiser Hall and Cannel Library. But at the start of this academic year, wireless routers were placed around campus, bringing the internet to students who don’t have classes ‘up north’ or simply don’t want to trek up to PUB to check their mail. But this is not all the sunshine and rainbows that it appears to be. When the internet was focused here, in the northern parts of the campus, it was extremely reliably, insofar as it could be. I could always connect and had a fast, responsive connection. When they dispersed the network across campus, that went away.

For the most part, trying to connect to the wireless internet anywhere near the Fireside Lounge, the ASCC, the Independent, or the Upper level is completely impossible. I can connect to the network, but it takes me twenty-three minutes to simply go to the Student Wireless Log-on screen. This is extremely aggravating, as most of my day is spent in this area.

I feel that the college missed the point of larger wireless. The point was to bring a fast connect to a larger area that’s easy for students, and while they have aspects one and two down, they still struggle with three. It doesn’t matter to me at all if they internet is everywhere, if I can’t use it, it doesn’t matter.

Clark has an undefined identity. It’s unique in that, at it’s core, it’s a place of higher learning for anyone and everyone who happens to stumble on campus, but there are a lot of locked doors, a lot of unanswered questions that makes it self know only by anomaly of it being a community college. The younger Clark students, those out of High School or under the age of 25 seem to attend primarily to gain an AA degree and go somewhere else. I’ve noticed that whenever asked, young students are taking only those classes that get them out of here as fast as they can. In that regard, Clark College is High School part two.

For the older student, I’ve found that a majority of them are working toward a specific program or goal in which they either will complete within their stay at Clark College or will finish somewhere else, but they separate themselves by having a goal in mind. Their a lot more focused on what they want out of an education and Clark is an easy first step.

The idea of Clark being the second stage for the High School experiences seems to be magnified by the activities, and even presence, of the Associate Students of Clark College (ASCC). The ASCC spends quite a bit of coin a quarter in order to fund free food events with entertainment thrown in. They direct our students funds and remain the only student organization that the Board of Trustees of Clark College will formally recognize. However, those two attributes are the only thing that separate the ASCC from any High School’s ASB. The real government of the school, the real decision makers is the administration, currently led by President Robert Knight. The way he came into power is still a topic my friends at the paper like to mull over. The Board of Trustees selects various candidates for the President of the College and presents them to the public in a series of conferences that span about five months. However, when the previous President left Clark College under dubious circumstances, of which I’m still in the dark, Robert Knight was selected by the Board of Trustees as the interim President. The odd thing about it though is that when it came time to do the whole democratic process that we so admire, the Board of Trustees basically shirked their responsibilities and only really endorsed Bob Knight.

However, in the interest of fairness, I will not hold this shadowy selection process against Mr. Knight nor his administration. What I will do is question the wisdom of some of the things they’ve spent Clark’s funds on. First, they parking lot identifiers. While this is a helpful tool to campus security and students by offering a quick reference regarding location, it seems that it only puts a fresh coat of paint on a collapsing house. Parking is the single biggest irk for any student that drives or carpools to school everyday. The cries for more parking lots have been heard throughout the life of Clark College and when the funds are allocated for something, we instead get Fisher Price ‘My First Parking Lot’ signs which pretty colors and numbers.

Secondly, the holes in the ground around campus that no one seemed to explain to the students, sadly including The Independent. They appeared one day, roped off with industrial strength caution tape without any indication of purpose. In between Fall Quarter and Winter, those holes were filled with brick and eventually blue signs that say ‘Campus Map’ at the top. However, in the time since, no map has been added to these boards and they remain blank blue slabs that litter the campus.

This school employs the idea of transition to potential students. ‘The Next Step’, as it were. But the school itself is undergoing a transition. With the completion of another branch on Mill Plain, increased presence in the area, and stronger ties to University’s and other institutions, this College is moving away from being a community college toward a University itself.