Archive for August, 2008|Monthly archive page
SF State Alumnus Lucian Read’s photos on 60 Minutes
SF State alumnus Lucian Read’s photos were featured on the latest 60 Minutes special, “The Killings in Haditha.” Read, an embedded photographer in Iraq, was accompanying U.S. Marines on patrol in November 2005 when a group of Iraqis, noticing that he had a camera but no weapon, beckoned him inside a house where some of the bodies lay. None of the Marines, Read told SF State Magazine back in 2006, did anything to stop him from shooting the photos.
Read’s powerful images from his travels across the globe can be seen here: www.lucianread.com
Gators Going for Gold
This just in from Beijing: Alumna Kim Probst and her teammates on the U.S. Synchronized Swimming Team, coached by another Gator alum, Gold Medalist Tammy McGregor, will make a splash on Friday, Aug. 22 with the tech portion, while the team free routine will be performed on Saturday, Aug. 23.
Team USA hopes to push the envelope with a new free routine to the theme of “light.” The routine features innovative and groundbreaking choreography which has never been brought to the competition pool before. Before the routine is revealed on Saturday, the team will debut a brand new team tech routine on Friday to the theme of “action.”
SF State’s Anne Galjour at the Magic Theatre
SF State Lecturer Anne Galjour is presenting a preview of her latest solo performance piece, “You Can’t Get There From Here,” at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre next weekend. The work-in-progress has been described as “a tart comic tale about class, climbing the ladder, and real estate, set in the woods of rural New England.”
Two nights only at Magic Theatre: Friday, Aug. 22 and Saturday, August 23 at 8 p.m.
No reservations are required. Tickets are $10 at the door.
For more information: www.zspace.org
Amphibian watch, food- and Olympics-related news
Vance T. Vredenburg, assistant professor of biology at SF State, appeared on CNN’s Planet in Peril with some alarming news earlier this week: Amphibians are dying off at an unprecendented rate. “An ancient organism, which has survived past extinctions, is telling us that something is wrong right now,” Vredenburg has said. “We — humans — may be doing fine right now, but they are doing poorly. The question, really, is whether we’ll listen before it’s too late.”
SF State alumna Paula LeDuc is a visionary chef in the Bay Area, part of an elite group that includes Alice Waters and Thomas Keller, writes Michael Bauer in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Click here to see when you can watch SF State alumna Kim Probst and her teammates on the U.S. Synchronized Swimming Team go for the gold next week under the direction of gold medal winner and SF State alumna, Coach Tammy McGregor.
In other SF State-related Olympics news, Professor of Psychology David Matsumoto is lending his expertise to the games in more ways than one. He’s found that the victory dance done by so many Olympic athletes, is innate to all primates, including humans. And while his students call him professor, his daughter, Olympian Sayaka Matsumoto, calls him coach.
SF State alumnus nominated for two Emmy Awards
SF State alumnus Ralph Arlyck has been nominated for two awards in the 29th Annual News and Documentary Emmy® Awards for his feature-length film “Following Sean”: Best Documentary and Outstanding Individual Achievement in Writing. The awards will be presented Sept. 22 at a ceremony in Frederick P Rose Hall in New York’s Time Warner Center. The nominees were announced in July by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
After a long festival and theatrical run, the film was broadcast on the PBS series POV last summer. It’s a follow up to the original “Sean” film that Arlyck produced at SF State in 1969 when he was a graduate student in the Film Department. Back then Arlyck found himself living downstairs from a crashpad full of hippies in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury. His candid first short film about 4-year-old Sean, a precocious tot who says he smokes pot and hangs out with speedfreaks, garnered many prizes —and sounded alarms—at the time. Young Sean, a natural on camera, proves just as compelling three decades later when Arlyck finds him as an adult in “Following Sean.”
Film critic Gerald Peary, writing in the Boston Phoenix, said, “This is the finest film I’ve seen this year. As affecting as one of Chekhov’s sobering tales.” A review in The New York Times described it as, “a tender and levelheaded rumination on the legacy of the ’60s and the mysteries of everyday life.”
