Thursday, January 27, 2005

Passion this...

Yet another reason I will refuse to ever see The Passion...

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/26/oscar.passion/index.html

I'll stick with my favorite version, South Park's The Passion of the Jew.

Monday, January 17, 2005

The Inaugural Rizide

President Bush will evidently have a new limo fleet to ride in to the inauguration this Thursday.

http://money.cnn.com/2005/01/17/news/newsmakers/bush_cadillac.reut/index.htm

In related news, I would like to announce that I will be driving myself to and from work in a 2002 Chevy Impala beginning around early to mid-February. This car will serve as a slight upgrade from the 1996 Accord which I have been driving. It is slightly bigger with better performance, yet lacks some of the luxurious features which made the Accord so endearing. Honda was not shocked at the customer loss and Chevy reportedly could "give two shits" about the fact that I would be driving one of their products once again. No word yet on whether or not a parade will accompany the inaugural trip up to Evanston from the Lincoln Park area. Police are rumored to be nervous about the potential length of said parade and are considering the request.

Monday, January 10, 2005

Stop That, You Freaks!

http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/01/10/dances.cancelled.ap/index.html

I don't know about you, but as an educator of sorts myself, and especially as a high school graduate who realizes how stupid all that shit was, I would hope that someone could help this school's student body president realize that she'll be a lot better off if she sets some dreams for herself which don't involve her senior prom.

In further news supplied by CNN.com this morning, enjoy this wonderful act of censorship by the libraries down near the land o' Rinaker.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/01/10/banned.book.ap/index.html

In light of that and Randy Moss' actions yesterday, when is America going to lighten up and have a sense of humor? I guess maybe I should take solace in the fact that Stewart and co.'s book has been atop the bestseller lists for 15+ weeks now, but come on - lighten up Robert Willits.

Sunday, January 09, 2005

In order to save my humorous reputation... (especially after that somewhat sersious last post)

I came across this earlier today and literally almost pissed my pants, which is ironic after you check it out:

http://magic-cone.com/animation1.htm

A Trip Down Memory Lane (Albeit a Blurry One...)

Here's yet another contribution to the blog stolen fairly and squarely from another author. This story appeared in the New York Times Magazine this morning which focused on my fraternity - and not the entire organization, either, but my specific chapter. It provided an interesting trip down memory lane and some interesting food for thought when it comes to my current academic undertakings. Enjoy - and set aside a significant period of time, its a long one.

Ban of Brothers

January 9, 2005
By BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

By modern fraternity standards, Phi Delta Theta's tailgate
party was a real rager. For one thing, there were kegs. I
couldn't see them just then, but proof of their existence
was everywhere. Packed into a backyard near the campus of
Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., were some 100
drunken college students, beer spilling from plastic cups,
industrial-size ketchup bottles overturned on the grass
near the grill and gaggles of hard-drinking sorority girls
(including one self-described Phi Delt groupie) keeping
pace with the boys.

Amid the revelry, I spotted a lanky, easygoing Phi Delt
sophomore from Texas who goes by the nickname Two-Shot,
because two shots is about all it takes to get him acting
silly. ''Two-Shot!'' I said loudly as he meandered through
the crowd in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, a beer in one
hand and a cheap plastic bottle of vodka in the other.
''Where's the keg?''

He pointed toward a far corner. ''Hey, homey,'' he said.
''The beer's over there.''

''You going to the game?'' I asked.

''Man, that's a good
question,'' he said. ''I got great intentions, you know.
But stuff happens. Sometimes I don't make it.''

I wished him luck (''Keep it real!'' he replied) and made
my way toward the keg, where I bumped into Theo Michels,
Phi Delt's likable chapter president, and Greg Bok, a big,
sarcastic, deceptively smart sophomore. (Bok looks like a
meathead but says he scored a 1,550 out of 1,600 on the
SAT.) Both Michels and Bok were marveling at the success of
the day's tailgate.

''Six kegs and no cops,'' Michels said. ''This has to be
some sort of record. Last year, we had an off-campus party
that started at 10:30, and by 11 the police came with a
paddy wagon. A paddy wagon. We're college students trying
to have a party off campus, because we can't have one in
our own fraternity house, because we're not allowed to
drink there. So we try to have one off campus, and it gets
broken up. Basically, we can't have a party anywhere.''

Peter Micali, a square-jawed Phi Delt sophomore who had
wandered within earshot, chimed in, ''Yeah, it was easier
to party in high school.''

Bok shook his head sadly. ''The good old-fashioned
fraternity experience is dead,'' he said, pausing for
dramatic effect. ''So long, 'Animal House.' ''

It's doom and gloom time for many fraternity boys at
Northwestern and at colleges across the country. University
administrators, alarmed by the extent of binge drinking on
their campuses, are cracking down on the excesses of Greek
life, saying it's high time for fraternity boys to shape up
and sober up. While all kinds of college students binge
drink, the 2001 College Alcohol Study by the Harvard School
of Public Health found that fraternity house residents are
twice as likely to do so as other students.

Eleven national and international fraternities, including
Phi Delta Theta, now require most of their chapter houses
to be alcohol-free, no matter what their university's
policy is. (Sororities have long banned drinking in their
chapter houses.) Take away the booze, the new alcohol-free
theory goes, and fraternities will be safer, on more solid
economic footing (fewer lawsuits, cheaper liability
insurance) and more conducive to the creation of real bonds
of brotherhood. Friendships will be forged out of genuine
respect, not the shared misery of hazing or the shared fog
of drink. ''We just didn't see a way to dramatically change
the fraternity culture without removing alcohol,'' said Bob
Biggs, executive vice president of Phi Delta Theta, when we
met last fall in his office at the fraternity's spotless,
museumlike international headquarters in Oxford, Ohio.

But what, exactly, would a dry fraternity look like? And
would anyone want to join? You'd have a better chance, I
thought, of getting James Carville and Bob Novak to open
''Crossfire'' with five minutes of meditation. As I
listened to the brothers in that backyard go on about life
at one of Northwestern's ''alcohol free'' fraternities, I
couldn't help feeling a little sorry for them. I was a Phi
Delt at Northwestern in the mid-90's -- not that long ago,
to be sure, but seemingly a different time entirely. While
we considered ourselves tamer than fraternities at many
state schools (where Greek affiliation can often take
precedence over just about everything), my brothers and I
still saw drunken debauchery in the chapter house as our
fraternal mandate. We threw rowdy keg parties. We got drunk
in our rooms and then broke into other fraternities,
stealing their sacred robes and toaster ovens. Some of us
smoked marijuana, which we grew and harvested in an
off-campus apartment. And many of us eagerly participated
in drunken hazing, which most of the hazers and hazed saw
as a kind of comic relief integral to fraternal bonding. To
my brothers and me, a dry fraternity would have been
inconceivable.

In less than a decade, though, the inconceivable has
happened. When I told a friend from college that his
fraternity, Theta Chi, was now dry, he was baffled.
''What's the point?'' he wanted to know. Indeed, what is
the point of a fraternity if you can't give a party -- or
drink a beer in your room with a brother and watch ''Cops''
at 3 a.m.? Wasn't alcohol what enabled fraternity boys to
be, well, fraternity boys?

When I first heard of the move to ban alcohol from
fraternity houses, I was reminded of a scene in the film
''Roger Dodger,'' when a 16-year-old boy sneaks into a bar
with his uncle, who promises to teach him the fine and
complicated art of picking up women. When the boy declines
an alcoholic beverage, the uncle becomes apoplectic. ''You
drink that drink!'' he demands. ''Alcohol has been a social
lubricant for thousands of years. What do you think, you're
going to sit here tonight and reinvent the wheel?''

A number of fraternities are brazenly trying to do just
that, arguing that the fraternity wheel is broken -- and
badly in need of a redesign. But what does this new,
redesigned American fraternity look like? I was back at
Northwestern to find out, and to try to make sense of my
own fraternity experience. Had I joined for the drunken keg
parties, or was brotherhood about more than that? And was I
really a ''frat guy,'' or an anomaly -- a guy who played
sports and wore baseball caps but who really should have
been hanging out with fraternity-mocking English majors?

Nearly a decade removed from college, I still view my
fraternity experience with a mixture of pride and
embarrassment. And I'm not alone. Two fraternity brothers
told me that while they loved being Phi Delts, I was not,
under any circumstance, to mention their names in this
article. I understood. Never mind that Frank Lloyd Wright,
Paul Newman, Walter Cronkite and Ted Koppel -- not to
mention nearly half of all U.S. presidents and 40 percent
of Supreme Court justices -- belonged to a fraternity in
college. The stereotype of the fraternity guy as
party-loving imbecile is alive and well: just listen to any
rant about President George Bush's lack of intellectual
curiosity, where a reference to him being a frat boy is
most likely used as indisputable proof.

In that backyard in Evanston, though, surrounded by
beer-guzzling fraternity boys and the girls who love them,
I didn't feel ashamed. I felt old. ''Dude, you're the
reporter dude, right?'' one brother said, grinning wildly.
''Let me introduce you to some freshman girls! You want to
meet some freshman girls? You're with Phi Delts, man. You
remember how it is! It's all about the girls!''

Word spread among the brothers that I was a Phi Delt from
way back in the 1990's, and before long several cornered
me. They wanted answers: ''How often did you have keg
parties in the house? Was the house packed with girls? Were
the girls hotter? How much cooler was it?''

They listened intently as I held court in the backyard,
recounting salacious stories of riotous fraternal living --
a little exaggerated in the retelling, of course. But the
more I went on about our ''huge keg parties,'' the more
pathetic I felt. Was I really trying to impress college
students? And were all of my favorite fraternity stories
really about getting loaded?

Since 1997, the year I graduated, Northwestern has expelled
five fraternities -- in cooperation with their national
organizations -- for alcohol and hazing violations. The
last casualty was Kappa Sigma, banished after its 2003
formal dance party at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. In a
gaffe almost too dopey to be believed, a Kappa Sigma
brother dropped a flask into the aquarium's beluga whale
tank. Already on probation for an alcohol-related incident
that sent a pledge to the hospital, the fraternity was
booted off campus by Northwestern administrators (it can
petition to return in 2007), but not before the brothers
could make going-away T-shirts. They read, ''Kappa Sigma --
a Whale of a Good Time.''

Of the 17 fraternities now at Northwestern, 13 are
alcohol-free, and any new chapter starting at the school
also must be dry. (In 1997, not a single Northwestern
fraternity was dry.) Across the country, some 30 colleges
-- including the University of Iowa, the University of
Oklahoma and the University of Oregon -- have gone even
further, banning alcohol in all their fraternity houses.
(Some have also made their residence halls alcohol-free.)
And many schools are increasingly placing fraternities on
probation, requiring that they meet specific academic and
behavioral standards. Others are moving fraternity rush
from fall to winter, heeding the words of the Arizona
Supreme Court, which in 1994 opined that ''we are
hardpressed to find a setting where the risk of an
alcohol-related injury is more likely than from under-age
drinking at a university fraternity party the first week of
the new college year.'' To try to combat the tendency of
fraternity members to simply move their parties to
off-campus apartments and houses, university officials are
also cooperating more than ever with the local police.

And then there's Alfred University in Western New York and
Santa Clara University in California, which have taken the
most drastic step of all: they decided to do away with
fraternities altogether. ''The Greek system is beyond
repair,'' Robert McComsey, chairman of Alfred's board, told
The New York Times in May 2002.

Fraternities did little to improve their image this fall,
making headlines across the country in hazing and
alcohol-related deaths. At Colorado State University,
Samantha Spady, a sophomore, was found dead in a lounge at
the Sigma Pi chapter house by a member giving his mother a
tour of the fraternity. At the University of Oklahoma,
Blake Adam Hammontree, a freshman, died at the Sigma Chi
house from alcohol poisoning. And at the University of
Colorado, Lynn Gordon Bailey Jr., a Chi Psi pledge, was
found dead after drinking during an initiation ritual.

Some fraternity leaders point out that drinking-related
deaths at fraternity houses make up fewer than a dozen of
the 1,400 alcohol-related deaths at colleges each year (car
accidents are involved in approximately 1,100 of those).
Whatever the numbers, none of those deaths occurred at dry
chapters, which would seem to bolster the argument that
alcohol-free fraternities can and do make a difference.

In 1997, Phi Delt was among the first fraternities to
announce its plan to go dry, arguing that it would save
lives, lift grade point averages, improve the condition of
chapter houses, boost slumping recruitment numbers by
attracting a new kind of college student (fraternity
membership nationwide is down 25 percent from its peak in
1990) and help its members return to the core principles on
which the fraternity was founded -- friendship, sound
learning and moral rectitude. The policy called for all
chapter houses to be dry by 2000.

In July, Phi Delta Theta will celebrate its fifth
anniversary of being alcohol-free. And while some
fraternity leaders still question how effective the policy
is in stopping binge drinking (''We're not sure that
focusing on where a person drinks will have any impact on
how much that person drinks,'' Mark Anderson, the president
of the Sigma Chi Corporation, said), Phi Delt's executive
vice president, Bob Biggs, insists the policy is bettering
the daily lives of members -- and keeping them safe. For
the first time since he can remember, Biggs said, the
fraternity isn't facing any lawsuits. ''It was common
before we instituted this to have four, five, six claims at
any one time,'' Biggs told me. To go with its newfound
sobriety, Phi Delt even has a new motto: Brotherhood -- Our
Substance of Choice.

But sobering up chapter houses isn't easy, and the backlash
has been fierce. Some chapters have refused to go dry,
choosing instead to break away from their national
organizations. And many theoretically dry chapters are
anything but -- there's plenty of alcohol, pot and harder
drugs behind closed doors. ''I don't think anyone is naive
enough to think that there's no alcohol in many dry
houses,'' one fraternity chapter president at Northwestern
told me. ''If it's done in a somewhat covert way, you're
fine.'' It's often not, and both Biggs and Dave Westol,
executive director of Theta Chi, whose chapters started
going dry in 1998, have recently closed chapters that
brazenly ignored the no-alcohol policy.

But the greatest opposition to dry fraternities often comes
from alumni. Westol has received hundreds of e-mail
messages from angry alums who, he said, ''can't imagine
that a fraternity can be fun without alcohol.'' He went on
to say that among the biggest challenges in persuading
current fraternity members to take the dry policy seriously
are alums who return to the chapter armed with countless
stories about the fraternity's drunken past -- or, worse
yet, with six-packs. When I sheepishly admitted to having
done just that (minus the six-packs), Westol went easy on
me. ''Don't beat yourself up,'' he said, ''but you see what
I'm talking about.''

Many fraternity members can't help thinking that
alcohol-free fraternity houses came about not out of
genuine concern for their well-being but because the
fraternities were worried about their pocketbooks. While
Biggs denies that fear of costly lawsuits was the primary
factor in going dry, he concedes that increases in
litigation and liability premiums played a part in Phi
Delta Theta's decision.

In the 1980's, the number of lawsuits and insurance claims
resulting from fraternity binge drinking and hazing
skyrocketed, causing the National Association of Insurance
Commissioners to rank fraternities and sororities as the
sixth-worst risk for insurance companies -- right behind
hazardous-waste-disposal companies and asbestos
contractors. Some insurance companies began refusing to
cover fraternities, forcing fraternities to take measures
to minimize their risk.

In the mid-90's, Phi Delt's executive board considered
going even further. ''We wondered, Can we conceive of a
fraternity that doesn't allow alcohol in its chapter
houses?'' Biggs said when I met with him. ''But we knew it
wouldn't be easy. When we decided to do it, someone made
the analogy to when John Kennedy said, 'Let's go to the
moon and back by the end of the decade.' So that's what we
did.'' (It's a telling analogy. Neil Armstrong brought his
Phi Delt pin with him to the moon's surface in 1969.)

At its annual convention in 1998, the fraternity broke out
fireworks to celebrate its 150-year anniversary and its
alcohol-free future. But back at Northwestern that fall,
''we thought the world was ending,'' said Nick Logan, the
chapter president at the time. ''Northwestern had actually
told us that we needed to go dry that year, so unlike other
Phi Delt chapters that had two years to prepare, we didn't.
It was absolute pandemonium. I mean, we're like 19, 20, 21,
many of us have been drinking regularly since high school,
we join a fraternity partially for the social scene and now
we're supposed to just not drink? It was like telling a
monk that he can't pray.''

Many dry chapters still have members who try to skirt their
dry rule. Chapter presidents, who are sometimes under-age,
are put in the difficult position of policing the drinking
of members who are 21. But even those fraternities that do
follow the rules insist that administrators, in their
efforts to crack down on drinking, have failed to do just
that -- and, in the process, managed to take much of the
fun out of fraternity life.

At the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house at Northwestern,
members told me of their fruitless attempt this fall to
show the classic 1978 fraternity movie ''Animal House'' at
one of their philanthropic events co-sponsored by a campus
sorority. The Sig Eps were all set to make a special
T-shirt for the event -- it would read ''Fat, Drunk and
Stupid Is No Way to Go Through Life, Son,'' a famous line
from the film -- when they say the university ''very
strongly suggested'' they not show the film.

''It was really a very ironic event, of course, because
most fraternities now are pretty far from the 'Animal
House' model,'' one Sig Ep brother told me. ''But the
administration and the Panhellenic Association, which
oversees the sororities, didn't see the humor in it. They
acted very disappointed in us, because we'd been a frat
that had worked hard to dispel the 'Animal House'
stereotype.''

Then there was the controversy surrounding Sig Ep's annual
prep-school party, at which female undergraduates
traditionally arrive in their best Catholic schoolgirl
attire. As one of the school's four ''wet'' fraternities,
Sig Ep can have parties with alcohol in their house, as
long as the beer is sold by an outside vendor and no one
under 21 drinks. But this year the party was going to be
dry. ''The university brought our attention to some clause
in the student handbook,'' said Jordan Cerf, the chapter's
vice president of recruitment, ''that says that any event
that freshmen attend during the fall quarter in a house has
to be dry.''

The Sig Eps were still expecting a huge crowd when I talked
to them in October. ''Here's what the school has done by
making this party dry,'' Nick Johnson, the chapter
president, explained. ''Before coming to the party,
everyone is going to get loaded at their dorm, or off
campus, or in their car. They're going to drink more, and
they'll drink faster, so that their buzz lasts them through
the party. That's really the disingenuous thing about this
policy. I don't see how this is keeping anyone safer. It's
just moving the binge drinking somewhere else.''

I never expected to be a hard-drinking frat boy when I
arrived at Northwestern in the fall of 1993. I considered
myself far too much of a ''free thinker'' to join a
fraternity, and I certainly wasn't going to be ''paying for
friends,'' which is what I considered the monthly dues to
be.

There was also my father's fruitless fraternity experience
to consider. In 1958 he joined Lambda Chi Alpha at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, a fraternity, he says,
''for guys other fraternities wouldn't take.'' Still, it
was a welcome social outlet for my shy dad, and he happily
went along with the heavy drinking and the endless talk of
sorority-house panty raids if it meant having friends. But
things went awry when my father wanted to attend a
racial-equality march, which didn't gel with the
fraternity's conservative views. The chapter president told
him not to go, and when my father said he was going anyway,
the president insisted that he not wear his fraternity pin.
Outraged, my father moved out of the chapter house and
started writing anti-fraternity letters to the school
newspaper. He was expelled from the fraternity soon after.

My dad's experience played right into my stereotype of
fraternities: they were for close-minded people. But as the
fall quarter of my freshman year progressed, my
anti-fraternity stance softened. I realized that a third of
Northwestern's undergraduates (including plenty of people
who seemed perfectly decent) belonged to fraternities or
sororities. I also loved fraternity parties -- my friends
and I spent many weekend nights stumbling from one
fraternity kegger to the next. And as much as I liked to
mock fraternity guys, I desperately wanted to belong to
something. I was a mostly clueless drifter in high school,
and I didn't want to be one in college too. As an only
child, I was intrigued by the idea of brotherhood -- by the
concept of guys contractually obligated to have my back.
Maybe paying for friends wasn't such a bad idea, after all.

So I didn't object when my classmate and new friend, Dave,
who struck me as even less of a fraternity guy than I was
(he was a film major prone to outbursts of
hypersensitivity), suggested we head up to Phi Delta Theta
and enjoy the free food at its Rush Week event. I didn't
know much about the chapter, but Dave apparently knew a
brother there. That evening I was introduced to many of the
members, and everyone seemed cool enough to me. Dave and I
went back the next night, and I was summoned to a room and
offered a ''bid'' -- an invitation to ''pledge'' membership
to the fraternity. I had a Groucho Marx moment -- did I
really want to join a fraternity that would have me? -- but
I got over it and accepted on the spot.

They threw a pledge T-shirt on me and we ran downstairs,
out the front door and onto to the porch, where there was a
lot of congratulatory hollering and a few ''who's that
skinny dude?'' whispers from pledges who didn't know me.
Before I knew it, I was being hurled high into the cold
night air, and everyone started singing a ditty you won't
find listed among the official songs of Phi Delta Theta.

To hell to hell with Fiji, to hell with Sigma Nu,
And if
you're not a Phi Delt, to hell to hell with you,
So listen to me lassie, so listen to my plea,
Don't ever
let a Phi Delt an inch above your knee.
He'll take you to the back shed and fill you full of rye,

And soon you'll be the mother of a bouncin' baby Phi.

Soon after pledging, I learned that I wasn't joining a
chapter with the most sterling reputation. We were told
that in the 1980's, our house was known for spawning
''obnoxious jerks.'' One night some brothers apparently got
drunk, shouted obscenities and ''threw things'' at marchers
during a Take Back the Night rally. University officials
booted the fraternity off campus, but not before the
brothers got drunk and trashed the place.

I was half-amused and half-horrified by this news, but soon
I was too busy being hazed to care much one way or another.
We had weekly ''lineups'' in the main room of the chapter
house, where active members, drinking and wielding
flashlights, would belittle our physiques and quiz us on
arcane fraternity history. We were made to do push-ups
until we couldn't anymore, and we were told to lie on our
stomachs and cover our behinds, because the Betas, who
lived in the chapter house next door, were coming after us.
The Betas didn't seem particularly gay to me (we mostly
knew them as bigger potheads than we were), but we were
made to believe that they wanted nothing more than to have
their way with us.

There was also a lot of forced drinking. We were told to
down copious amounts of liquor, and most any effort to
avoid it (an earnest explanation that alcoholism ran in the
family, for example) was usually laughed off. To haze
effectively, many of the active brothers had to get drunk,
too. After all, hazing isn't much fun when you're sober --
a fact that isn't lost on fraternity leaders who hope that
going alcohol-free will reduce hazing.

And maybe it has. The current Phi Delts at Northwestern
seem to value the humiliation of freshmen a lot less than
we did. ''When I was a pledge last year,'' Peter Micali
told me, ''we would be at some off-campus apartment and the
actives'' -- full members -''would be like, 'Here, drink
this.' But if you didn't want to, they were like, 'O.K., no
problem, that's cool.' So we don't do much hazing.'' One
night at a bar, Micali admitted that he actually would have
liked to have been hazed a little harder. ''I wanted them
to be like, 'O.K., you worthless dirtbag, walk through that
wall!' That would have been funny.''

As much as the actives tried to humiliate us a decade ago,
we stayed cocky throughout, and we did the minimum required
during our months as pledges: we fetched food, cleaned the
house, took our morning Wheaties with beer instead of milk.
Soon enough we were initiated and taught the secret
handshake and the secret sign, both of which I promptly
forgot.

We told ourselves that we were clearly the best fraternity
at Northwestern, and we could drink you under the table to
prove it. My senior year, though, was to be the beginning
of the end. Just after I graduated and stepped awkwardly
into the real world, the brothers were faced with the
daunting, incomprehensible, surreal prospect of fraternal
sobriety. They didn't react well. Brothers disagreed about
following the alcohol-free mandate. In May 1999, the
university informed the fraternity that its members needed
to find a new place to live the following fall. According
to The Chicago Sun-Times, the school's list of the
chapter's infractions included ''a sink that was pulled
from the wall and used as a urinal; a member who set off a
fire alarm by smoking marijuana; throwing garbage, urine,
paint and other debris.''

David Sykes, the chapter president at the time, told a
skeptical reporter that Phi Delt was ''no Animal House''
and that many of the charges were overblown. The brothers
sued Northwestern, but a Cook County Circuit judge
dismissed the case as ''an unnecessary drain'' on the
courts. Remarkably, the university let the brothers return
to the fraternity house the following year. Everyone was on
his best behavior. But over the last three years, the
brothers haven't always agreed on how seriously to take
their alcohol-free mandate.

In that way, they're not much different from some Phi Delts
who came 150 years before them. The Phi Delta Theta
international fraternity -- now home to 170 chapters in 44
states and six Canadian provinces -- was founded by six
serious and determined students at Miami University in Ohio
on a December night in 1848. Conceived as a secret literary
and social society for men of intellectual vigor and
upstanding character, the Miami University chapter enjoyed
a brief period of fraternal harmony before all hell broke
loose.

By 1850, the fraternity was ''chaotic with dissension
between fraternal idealists and hedonists,'' writes Hank
Nuwer in his book ''Wrongs of Passage: Fraternities,
Sororities, Hazing and Binge Drinking.'' Phi Delt's members
-- including a transfer student named Benjamin Harrison,
who would later become the 23rd president of the United
States -- disagreed about what a fraternity should be.

Was Phi Delta Theta, as its six founding fathers
envisioned, about friendship, sound learning and moral
rectitude? Or was it a place for boys to be boys, no matter
how juvenile and tasteless that might appear to the outside
world? Or could it be some ingenious combination of the
two, making space for both righteousness and debauchery?

A hard-liner, Harrison quickly got himself elected
fraternity president: Phi Delt was to be a place of honor
and respectability. He was more than a little displeased
when two fraternity members became obscenely drunk at a
reception for Pierson Sayre, the last living Revolutionary
War soldier. He gave the offending men a second chance
after they promised to shape up, but soon enough they were
back to their old ways. Harrison threw them out, upon which
several other members, who backed the banished brothers,
resigned.

The growth of Phi Delta Theta (in 1859, it became the first
Greek organization at Northwestern) and other fraternities
stalled during the Civil War. But Phi Delt rebounded
between 1870 and 1900, as fraternities expanded west. The
first reported alcohol- and hazing-related fraternity
deaths also occurred during this time, Nuwer recounts. In
1873, a Kappa Alpha Society pledge at Cornell University
died when he fell into a gorge after fraternity brothers
left him alone in the woods. Nine years later, a
blindfolded Delta Kappa Epsilon pledge at Yale pierced
himself with a sharp object on a carriage while following
orders from fraternity brothers to run down the street. He
subsequently died from the injury.

In 1897, the South Carolina State Legislature voted to ban
fraternities at the state school; in 1901, Arkansas
followed suit. The president of the University of Michigan,
James Angell, neatly summed up the feelings of many college
presidents who disliked the lack of discipline in
fraternity houses when he said, ''The great dangers to the
residents of these houses are waste of time . . . a
substitution of social life for hard study. If the
upperclassmen are not of high moral strain, the lowering of
the character of the members is inevitable.''

During the 1920's, fraternity members proved adept at
procuring liquor despite Prohibition. In 1930, a commentary
in The New York Times warned that colleges needed to be
wary of the ''gay-dog alumnus'' who visited his old
fraternity house, alcohol in tow. Hazing incidents
increased in the 30's, leading officials at 14 colleges to
join together to crack down on the practice, according to
Nuwer.

Fraternity enrollment dropped off during World War II, but
it bounced back soon after. While alcohol wasn't
technically allowed on many college campuses and in
fraternities until the mid-60's, fraternity members were
known for ignoring the rule. In 1957, Northwestern's
Interfraternity Council began conducting ''liquor checks''
in chapter houses to catch offenders.

Throughout the Vietnam-era, fraternity enrollment dropped
off significantly as the Greek system came to be seen by
many as an outdated symbol of establishment culture. But by
the mid-1970's, fraternities were again soaring in
popularity, openly celebrating mischief and mayhem, while
universities did very little to stop them. At Northwestern,
Sigma Chi held beer-chugging contests on its front lawn,
which it advertised prominently around campus: ''Chug for
Charity,'' read one Sigma Chi poster in 1976, just two
years before ''Animal House'' hit movie theaters.

''Back then,'' Patrick M. Quinn, an archivist at
Northwestern, said, ''they had kegs inside their frats so
they could drink beer all day long. You could smell the
weed all the way down to Tech'' -- referring to the
technology building midway between north and south campus.
''It was a crazy time. These days, you walk by the
fraternities, and everything is so quiet. It's eerily
quiet.''

Appearances can, of course, be deceiving. From the outside,
the brick, four-story, Ivy-covered Phi Delta Theta house at
Northwestern looks like a nice place to live -- it
certainly has more charm than the cookie-cutter dorm the
school recently built across the way. But walk inside the
chapter house and you discover an unmitigated disaster -- a
job even the team from ''Queer Eye for the Straight Guy''
would surely dismiss as hopeless. As one freshman put it,
''It's shockingly nasty.''

During most of my two weeks at Northwestern this fall, the
chapter's third-floor hallway was strewn with garbage, and
the toilets were indescribably foul. (''I won't even go to
the bathroom here,'' one brother said.) In the main room,
tossed carelessly underneath a pool table littered with
cups, flyers, magazines and Papa John's pizza menus, I
found the fraternity's '95-'96 framed group photo. It
should have been hanging prominently on the wall with the
others, but the brothers had apparently run out of space
and found the floor a suitable alternative.

Kyle Pendleton, Northwestern's director of fraternity and
sorority life, told me that one ''effective'' way to get
fraternity members to take care of their chapter house is
to ask them these questions: ''What would your fraternity's
founders think if they came back to life and walked into
your house? Would they approve? Would they want to join?''
Either those questions hadn't been asked at Phi Delt or,
more likely, the Phi Delts laughed it off. ''Most of us
don't take any of this fraternity stuff too seriously,''
Will Johnson said, strumming a guitar in his room. He
acknowledged that he and his brothers are most likely not
what the fraternity's leadership had in mind when they went
dry. ''Yeah, they were probably thinking that if we weren't
drunk all the time in the house, that we would get really
into being the best fraternity we could be or something.
But this is just a place to live and hang out with your
friends. I don't think it should be taken as much more than
that. All that fraternity ritual and stuff, it's a little
silly.''

The current brothers are a study in cocky, amused
detachment. Their laid-back attitude extends to rush, which
at Northwestern happens in the winter instead of the fall.
The extra months give Northwestern freshmen ample time to
be courted, although the current Phi Delts are too lazy to
do much of that.

''The whole rush thing is really pretty gay,'' said Matthew
Rosenthal, a goofy, curly-haired Phi Delt junior who was
nursing a hangover one weekday afternoon in his large room,
which is decorated with Frank Zappa and Grateful Dead
posters. ''Sometimes it feels like we're trying to get them
to sleep with us, you know?''

Phi Delts acknowledge their dry policy initially gives the
recruiting advantage to Chi Psi (better known as the Lodge)
and Delta Tau Delta, their two biggest competitors, both of
which are wet. ''There really is no way to positively spin
not being able to drink in your chapter house, even when
you're 21,'' said Michels, the chapter president.

When I visited in October, though, both Delta Tau Delta and
the Lodge were on probation and were temporarily dry. The
former home of David Schwimmer, one of the stars of
''Friends,'' Delt had been in trouble since last spring,
following an incident in its chapter room. A freshman girl
and a Delt pledge were apparently cavorting privately when
other fraternity members -- some under-age and drunk --
burst in and started taking pictures. The girl told her
story to The Daily Northwestern, claiming that she heard
the stunt was a Delt ''tradition,'' and before long local
television crews were parked outside the fraternity,
eagerly reporting on this salacious fraternity sex scandal.

The Lodge has had no similar public relations disasters,
but the Phi Delts find plenty of reasons to make fun of it
too. Like an aggressive politician going right at an
opponent's strength, Phi Delts like to mock the Lodge's
notorious -- and in some freshmen circles, deeply revered
-- ''floor parties,'' which are usually packed with sweaty
freshmen drunkenly hitting on each other. At mostly dry
Northwestern, the floor parties are about as close to
''Animal House'' as anyone is going to get (and it's still
pretty far). ''The parties are fun when you're a
freshman,'' admitted Matthew Rosenthal, ''but freshmen are
happy with whatever as long as they're drunk.''

Still, many Phi Delts confessed that as freshmen they
considered pledging the Lodge. ''Joining a wet house is
definitely tempting for most guys,'' Rosenthal said. But
Rosenthal eventually chose Phi Delt, mostly, he said,
because of the colorful personalities of the guys in the
house. I heard the same from other brothers. ''A lot of
fraternities have guys who look, talk and act the same,''
said Alex Wu, an engaging Phi Delt junior known for his
rapping skills. ''We have such a cast of characters, and
that meant more to me than being able to drink in the
house.''

The same was true of the fraternity a decade ago. We had
football players, swimmers, nerds, preppies, writers,
artists, liberals and right-wingers. We were an eclectic
bunch, unpredictable in our perspectives on life. The
chapter became a little more unpredictable when I came out
my junior year. After a plethora of drunken attempts to
convince myself that I liked girls ''in that way,'' I
finally accepted what part of me had known since I was 12:
I was gay. Once I accepted it, I really wasn't interested
in lying about it, and I told my family and some of my
friends. But I was living in the fraternity house that year
-- was I going to tell my brothers too? If I did, would
they disown me -- or, worse yet, keep me around as a
courtesy but mock me behind my back? My fraternity was
diverse, all right, but it wasn't that diverse. There
wasn't anyone in the chapter who was openly gay, and some
brothers were clearly homophobic. My freshman year, one
brother told me, ''Thank God we don't have any fags in this
house.''

The current Phi Delts at Northwestern don't have an openly
gay member and also like to throw the words ''gay'' and
''fag'' around a lot (they assumed I was straight), but I'm
not convinced the words actually mean much to them. I
watched in surprise as two brothers who only hours earlier
jokingly labeled Lodge members as ''a bunch of pretty-boy
fags from Long Island'' ridiculed a freshman who walked out
of a room when he saw two guys kissing on television.
''Dude, what are you, homophobic or something?'' one
brother asked him. ''Grow up, man.''

I would have loved to have heard something like that a
decade ago. Instead, I drank and drank and became very good
at changing pronouns (my boyfriend became a girlfriend,
although she was always too busy to come by the house). I
didn't like lying, and I tried desperately to build up the
courage to tell my brothers. I suspected that my closest
friends in the house would be fine with it. As for the
others, I was really hoping that brotherhood actually meant
something. Would they have my back?

When I finally told my close friends in the house, they
promptly told their girlfriends, who then told the whole
school. Most important, though, most of my brothers
surprised me by accepting me completely. For many of them,
I was the first gay guy they'd really known -- and some of
them claimed to be heartbroken when I told them that, no, I
didn't find them attractive. ''If I can't even get gay guys
into me,'' one drunken brother asked me, ''how am I
supposed to get girls?''

Kyle Pendleton, Northwestern's director of fraternity and
sorority life, kept urging me to visit Sigma Chi. It is, he
told me, ''the model fraternity in many ways.''

I could see immediately why Pendleton liked the place so
much. The house is spotless and majestic. (Frankly, it
looks and feels a lot like a sorority.) But more than that,
Sigma Chi takes its mission as a new and redesigned
fraternity very seriously, and it is, according to most
fraternity guys on campus, the driest of the dry
fraternities.

''We don't want to be a house that thinks the only way to
have fun is to be drunk, stupid and belligerent,'' Diego
Berdakin, a sophomore and Sigma Chi's president, told me
one afternoon as he gave me a tour of the house, with its
beautiful woodwork and king-size beds (both thanks to
big-spending alumni). ''We're looking to live up to the
ideals that the fraternity was founded on. At the same
time, we're trying to build our own legacy, a whole new
model of what a fraternity can be. We're not interested in
being anything like 'Animal House.'

''If you look at this chapter five or six years ago,''
Berdakin continued, ''we were considered one of the top
fraternities on campus, but I don't think the brothers back
then really respected the fraternity. You could spend two
straight days just trying to think up everything a
fraternity could do wrong, and I'm sure they did it all.''

In 2000, this chapter of Sigma Chi was shut down by its
national headquarters for being too unruly, a far cry from
what it is today. Last spring, as part of its New Chapter
Initiative, the fraternity's leadership recruited about 45
Northwestern students to start the chapter again. Some
never expected to join a fraternity but were intrigued by
the idea of starting one from scratch. Others, like
Berdakin, are engaging and likable students who wanted to
join a chapter that wasn't about partying and hazing. And
some joined because, as members of several other
fraternities told me, ''no other chapter would take them.''

While it's difficult to take issue with Sigma Chi's focus
on things that actually matter (Berdakin spoke often about
wanting to have a house ''with integrity''), something
about the place spooked me. It struck me as too clean, too
perfect. At one point, I had to use the bathroom and found
myself staring at a sign above the sink that read: ''Wash
your hands. Dirty hands spread disease.'' Was this the
redesigned American fraternity?

Pendleton also spoke highly of Sigma Phi Epsilon, saying
that while the chapter is wet, its focus isn't on drinking.
The house was hard to miss, with a moose head and strobe
light protruding from its top window.

Most Sig Ep chapters, including Northwestern's, have
adopted the Balanced Man Program, which Sig Ep's national
leadership developed in the early 90's to combat what the
fraternity's national spokesman, Scott Thompson, called ''a
fraternity culture of boozing, drugging and hazing.'' The
program doesn't restrict drinking in the chapter house, but
it does something nearly as radical and arguably more
meaningful: it has done away with the ''pledge system,''
meaning that new members who join the fraternity have
nearly all the rights and responsibilities of active
members.

''New members don't pledge for a certain period of time,
get hazed, get initiated and then show up for parties until
they graduate,'' Thompson said. ''In the Balanced Man
Program, men join, and they are developed from the time
they join until the time they graduate. Part of that
development focuses on building a sound mind and sound
body, a simple philosophy that we took from the ancient
Greeks.''

Thompson supports Sig Ep chapters that choose to go dry on
their own (a dozen have), but he says the fraternity
doesn't force the issue. ''We believe that if we recruit
smart men and put them in an environment where they respect
each other, they're going to make smart decisions,'' he
said. I heard similar reasoning from Nick Johnson and
Jordan Cerf, Sig Ep seniors who spoke fondly of the
Balanced Man philosophy and clearly valued their fraternity
experience. They pride themselves on being a well-liked
chapter where girls ''feel safe'' and know ''the door will
be held open for them.''

But Johnson and Cerf also talked a lot about having a good
time. They were visibly giddy at the news that Kappa Alpha
Theta, considered one of Northwestern's top sororities, had
chosen to do Homecoming with them. ''That would have never
happened 10 years ago,'' Cerf said.

When I asked them why, they struggled to put it delicately.
''I wouldn't want to use the word cooler, exactly, to
describe us versus the guys from back then,'' Cerf said.
''But, you know, those guys were just starting out and
weren't really known on campus.''

Johnson assured me, ''They were all-around nice guys, but
maybe, in terms of social presence, they weren't quite
there.''

Before spending time with the Sig Eps, I was skeptical of
the Balanced Man Program. Fraternities often coin new
initiatives that, in practice, mean very little. But I left
feeling thoroughly impressed. More than any fraternity boys
I visited at Northwestern, the Sig Eps seem to be, well,
balanced men. And they're proof that a wet fraternity
doesn't necessarily mean an unruly one.

They're also proof that there are other ways, besides
outlawing liquor, to redesign the American fraternity.
Going dry may be a necessary step for some chapters, but
the more I hung around Northwestern's fraternity boys, the
less I saw regulating alcohol as particularly relevant to
the health and personality of fraternities. For me, the
ideal fraternity would somehow combine the strengths of
Northwestern's Sigma Chi, Sig Ep and Phi Delt chapters. It
would stress integrity, character and leadership. But it
would also be a place where fraternity boys are allowed to
be fraternity boys, however unseemly and absurd their
choices may appear to the rest of us. Without that, the
redesigned American fraternity may be no more balanced than
the one that was scrapped in the first place.

Benoit Denizet-Lewis is a contributing writer. His cover
article on teen sex appeared last May.


Tuesday, January 04, 2005

New Year's Resolutions for the Music Industry

Greg Kot, music critic for the Chicago Tribune, proposed these reforms for the music industry in the new year. I think most of them are right on point and figured I'd share them with you guys.

The New Year that will be--hopefully
--------------------
Greg Kot, the Tribune music critic
December 31, 2004

Everybody needs resolutions to live by in the new year, and the denizens of the music world are no exception. In case anybody's stuck for ideas, I've got some recommendations.

The music industry should resolve to:

Lay off with the lawsuits already. The lawyers representing the multinational corporations that dominate the music industry have filed nearly 7,000 lawsuits since 2003 against fans for sharing music files online. Instead of paying the legal fees to smash its audience into submission, the industry should be spending its steadily shrinking pile of dough on ways to best serve its consumers. Imagine how much better off the Sonys and BMGs of the world would be if they had dedicated their money, muscle and manpower to creating a flexible, easy and inexpensive digital distribution network instead of resisting it all these years?

Stop overcharging for concert tickets. The idea of charging fans more than $50 to see a show is a ridiculous, I don't care how "golden" the seat is. Or how about $30 to sit on the soggy lawn in an amphitheater? Get real.

Roll back service fees. The price of "convenience" is now edging toward 33 percent of already inflated concert ticket prices. What's convenient about that?

Bring back artist development. Newcomers from Bruce Springsteen to Depeche Mode were given several albums to find their voice before they found an audience. Quirky artists such as Neil Young and Prince were allowed to go on tangents, and make albums that disrupted commercial expectations. The idea of investing in art is a concept that has gone the way of the 20th Century.

But if it doesn't come back soon, the major labels will soon find themselves with no artists left to promote.

Spend less money on marketing. Most of the industry's costs are swallowed up in hyping and selling music rather than creating it. Who knows? If the record companies resolved not to devote millions of dollars to pushing the latest hunk of cheese from J-Lo or Hoobastank, maybe CD prices wouldn't have to be so high.

Artists should resolve to:

Worry less about getting "signed" to a label deal and think small. Local touring, a Web site streaming new music and stocked with MP3 files, and homemade CDs are the way to build a following one listener at a time. In the arena of career-building, patience isn't just a virtue. It's a necessity.

Music radio should resolve to:

Play more independent music. This means they'll have to find the heart, guts and soul to treat music as music, rather than as a revenue stream. This means hiring programmers who love music and actually listen to it, rather than ones who play whatever they're spoon-fed from the major labels and their legion of promoters.

Fans should resolve to:

Stay away when bands and concert promoters charge too much for a show--no matter how much they love the band.

Do everything they can to support the mom-and-pop record store. Sure, in this Internet era, they're dinosaurs. But without the mom and pop, music connoisseurs would lose an essential part of their community: the quirky selection, the music-geek knowledge, the racks of fanzines and the walls filled with posters. Who wants a world where the record-buying experience is reduced to picking through a limited selection of mainstream CDs at a giant discount store? And, let's face it, ordering online may be more convenient, but it isn't nearly as much fun as the hands-on experience of looking for that elusive CD and stumbling across three other gems in the process.

Critics should resolve to:

Let the music dictate the story, not the media campaigns.

Write for the readers, not to mollify the record industry, befriend the bands or impress other critics.

Revisit these resolutions annually until they stick.

Copyright (c) 2004, Chicago Tribune

Monday, January 03, 2005

My Apologies, Loyal Readers

I had a crazy holiday season, and haven't had much time to get on here and write, but I'm back, much to the joy of all of you, I'm sure.

Had a great Christmas and even better New Year's. Mufu and Abby were in town for the weekend and let's just say that the first day of 2005 went pretty damn well for us. Mufu brought home Abby and I brought home these two chicks:

http://www.rockporttours.com/Photo%20Albums/new%20year's%20celebration2.JPG

I'd say a successful night was had by all!

More to follow later, including the reason I started this thing in the first place: so I had a place to post a year-end best of list. Not sure what it will all entail, but I'm guessing I'll work on it quite a bit during class tonight.

Until then...