4B — Thursday, April 2, 2015
the b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
By MELINA GLUSAC
Daily Arts Writer
The Kellogg Eye Center looks
a lot like Hogwarts.
At least, from where I’m
standing it does. I’m in the
heart of Riverside Park on
a very cloudy, very British
day. The grass looks mossy;
my boots are getting wet and
muddy. The Kellogg Eye Center
is peaking through the back of
the field, its impressive stature
reminding me of J.K. Rowling’s
famed school of Witchcraft
and Wizardry despite the two’s
architectural differences. But
all that doesn’t matter. There’s
a quidditch game going on.
Founded
in
2010
and
originally
a
subset
of
the
Michigan
Muggles,
the
University’s quidditch team is
on the rise. Later this month,
they’re sending a 21-person
roster to the World Cup in Rock
Hill, South Carolina, where
they’ll be among 80 other teams
from around the country — and
they’re doing all this with a
less-than-magical catch.
“Having a broom between
your legs is really hard,” said
LSA
junior
Lisa
Lavelanet,
quidditch team beater. “It’s just
very foreign for people, so it’s
hard to really gauge how good
they’re gonna be once they get
used to it.”
Though
growing
in
popularity, quidditch remains
a bit of a mystery to the typical
sports-minded public. The team
broke it down for me.
“It’s a poor man’s lacrosse,
basically,” said keeper Eric
Wasser,
a
University
alum.
“There’s no sticks, but you’re
still scoring on, you know, a
pitch — four on four with the
quaffle play, with the added
addition
of
dodgeballs
as
bludgers. And those bludgers, if
VIRGINIA LOZANO/Daily
Engineering Sophomore Daniel Tresnak prepares to toss a quaffle.
you get hit by one thrown by the
other team, you have to step out
of the play and touch your own
hoops before you can continue
playing in any way.”
LSA
junior,
quidditch
publicity
chair
and
chaser
Meaghan O’Connell notes the
roughness of the game.
“I kind of call it a mix
between rugby and handball.
The rugby part is because it is
full contact,” O’Connell said.
“We don’t do it much at practice
because we’re trying not to kill
each other, but if you go to a
tournament, you see people just
getting tackled, like full-out
taken down.”
Prior sports experience is
a must. Everyone on the team
has some athletic background,
according to Wasser. No spell
can poof you away from the
tackling, sprinting, throwing
and catching.
“If
you’ve
never
played
contact sports and you’re not
comfortable getting hit, this is
not the place for you,” Lavelanet
said, chuckling. “People figure
that out pretty quickly once
they’re actually at tryouts.”
A standard broom-riddled
year looks like this: after
advertising at Festifall and
gaining solid exposure, tryouts
happen right after Welcome
Week.
Midwestern
regional
qualifiers are in early November
— and then there’s April’s
coveted World Cup. Even when
they’re given a break from this
hectic schedule, the team still
must stay in shape.
“Especially because we have
an off-season, I’ve gotten more
disciplined. When we’re not
playing in the winter, we do
workouts on our own. A lot of
us have started lifting, which
I didn’t have to do in high
school,” O’Connell said. “It’s a
lot of like doing stuff on your
own, knowing that it’s going to
pay off in the spring.”
Wasser
recognizes
the
dedication the seemingly trivial
sport demands, as well.
“90 percent of the team who’s
going to World Cup works out
three or four days a week and
stuff. It’s just like any other
sport in that aspect, and we
get looked down upon because
it’s quidditch, but at the same
time, for most of us, we don’t
even think about Harry Potter
at all,” Wasser said.
That last statement was an
Avada Kedavra to my heart.
“Really?” I inquired.
“For me, there’s no more
Harry Potter,” Wasser said. “I
read Harry Potter as a kid, and
then, like, I don’t know. I came
out to play this because I didn’t
wanna like commit to a super
serious club sport or varsity sport
in college. This is more relaxed;
we have more control over it
because it’s all student-run, but
like when we’re actually playing,
it’s serious.”
O’Connell elaborated on the
death of The Boy Who Lived in her
teammates’ eyes.
“I was like, ‘Oh, quidditch! It’s
Harry Potter! That’s cool!’ when
I was like interested from the
beginning, but, like Eric said, after
my first week of practice I wasn’t
thinking about it,” O’Connell said.
“I feel like I’m a huge anomaly,”
Lavelanet said. “I’m a super-fan. I
love it so much. I like it probably
more than the rest of the whole
team combined.”
All three answered promptly
when asked what their favorite
books were, though. For Wasser,
it’s “The Order of the Phoenix;”
O’Connell likes “The Prisoner of
Azkaban,” and “The Chamber
of Secrets” occupies a particular
place in Lavelanet’s memory.
“I’m really attached to two
because two was like the first one
I could really, like, read on my
own at a good pace, just because
I was little when they came out,”
Lavelanet said. “So I have, like, a
special attachment to that one.”
Though small in numbers at
today’s practice due to injuries and
the like, passion is not lost among
the team. O’Connell is eager to tell
me about one of the coolest real-
life revisions quidditch has to offer.
In the Wizarding World, tiny gold
spheres are self-navigating and
airborne, but “Muggle” quidditch
is a little different.
“The third element we didn’t
play with today is the snitch. So,
that’s a person with shorts and
like a little ball,” O’Connell said,
gesturing to her backside.
After 18 minutes pass in a
game, the snitch is released,
and each team’s seeker (Harry
Potter’s position) strives to
catch it.
“And that kind of looks a lot like
wrestling, like more than you’d
expect,” Lavelanet said of the
catching maneuver. “It’s evolved
into being a wrestling match.”
O’Connell
and
Lavelanet
hunch over and start to simulate
a spirited, intense duel for
me. After, Lavelanet muses on
quidditch’s vitality.
“It’s like playing any sport.
I feel like especially since it’s
full contact, you’re much more
energized — at least, for me.
I used to play volleyball, and
I’d always feel like there was
something missing, and it was
contact,” Lavelanet said. “As
a beater, you’re out there with
one other beater, so it’s kind of
like you and your partner. So,
especially if someone is like
roughing up your partner, it’s
definitely just like a very good —
I don’t know, it gets you going.
You want to win.”
MUSIC VIDEO REVIEW
Take
a
moment.
Remi-
nisce on Queen Elsa’s com-
ing-of-age,
I’m-a-boss-
ass-bitch
moment
in
“Frozen.”
The
ridicu-
lously catchy
“Let It Go”
backs
her
up as ice —
crystalline,
Disney ice — streams seam-
lessly from her hands, creat-
ing a lovely little mansion for
her and only her. Charming,
right?
Well, Azealia Banks ain’t
Elsa. The queen of throw-
ing mad ice on Twitter just
dropped her new video for
“Ice Princess,” off the great
Broke With Expensive Taste,
and it’s mystifying but unde-
niably Banks.
She’s
a
fierce,
frozen,
Medusa-esque
dictatress
owning her throne in a uni-
verse of arctic blue. Every-
thing is surreal — from her
army of ice robots to her giant
chrome snake, which takes
her wherever she needs to go
in her gangster winter won-
derland. It’s creepy, to be sure,
but so chill (no pun intend-
ed). The groove of the song
matches the low-key colors
and overall pace of the video
— everything is going swim-
mingly, so far.
Soon, random conglomera-
tions of rainbow colors appear
in the sky as Banks is over-
looking her splendor. So she
goes off to battle them on that
weird-ass snake, eventually
freezing the volcano they’re
coming from. But her army
betrays her, picking at that ice
until the volcano erupts and
Banks is engulfed in kaleido-
scope flames. Does she die? Is
this a metaphor for the impli-
cations of totalitarian leader-
ship or her career?
We’ll never know. Banks is
a super-diva enigma. That’s
the madness and the genius of
the “Ice Princess.”
-MELINA GLUSAC
PROSPECT PARK
B+
Ice
Princess
Azealia Banks
Prospect Park
EPISODE REVIEW
“The Fosters” can be a deeply
frustrating
show
sometimes.
There
are
times
where
it, brilliantly,
tells
stories
untouched by
anything else
on television.
Yet, its need
to amp up the
drama to arti-
ficial
levels
plays
other
moments as fake. The finale
amplified both the good and the
bad of the series.
The series has mostly done
well by its two main characters,
siblings Callie (Maia Mitch-
ell, “Teen Beach Movie”) and
Jude (Hayden Byerly, “Parent-
hood”), and the finale was no
exception, bringing both of their
season-long arcs to their natu-
ral conclusions. The moment
between Callie and her father,
Robert (Kerr Smith, “Life Unex-
pected”), allowed their relation-
ship to deepen to a point where
they actually felt like father and
daughter. Over the course of the
season, the series did an excel-
lent job portraying the relation-
ship between Jude and Connor
(Gavin MacIntosh, “Parks and
Recreation”). The moment when
Jude finally calls Connor his
boyfriend is a beautiful payoff to
their love story.
However, what doesn’t work
about the finale is the cliffhang-
er ending involving Mariana,
Jesus and Anna crashing their
car. The episode takes a slow
approach, showing them driv-
ing, then Anna going into labor,
then the decision to continue
driving despite that, then the 911
call stating there was “one con-
firmed fatality.” It was a mad-
dening way of building tension,
ultimately ending in a crash that
wouldn’t have been there if it
wasn’t the finale. It felt artificial
and out-of-place from the rest of
the episode.
It’s a shame that the series
had to force a cliffhanger ending,
because the other stories involv-
ing Callie and Jude were lovely
closings to their arcs and the sea-
son as a whole.
-ALEX INTNER
ABC FAMILY
B
The
Fosters
Season 2
Finale
ABC Family
THE D’ART BOARD
Each week we take shots at the biggest
developments in the entertainment world.
Here’s what hit (and missed) this week.
Design by Gaby Vasquez
A Case of You
Joni Mitchell hospitalized, but doing OK.
Ambulance Taster
Litigious guy “injured” by
Pizza Hut croutons that were
“too hard” awarded $2,000.
Steal My Lead Singer
Zayn quits 1D and releases
new song.
Dawson’s Greek Yogurt
Katie Holmes has a secret entrance at
Whole Food.
Mr. Pibb, however,
remains untouchable
Pepsi passes Diet Coke
as second-favorite pop.
CLUB PROFILE