Alaina Stamatis Remembers Her Culture Shock, and Tells It Like It Is

The build up to last weekend’s Culture Shock was surrounded by constant controversy. Alaina Stamatis, the Major Events Coordinator, who most students now know, was in charge of lining up the bands and organizing Purchase’s biggest show of the year.

She has been criticized by students over the past few months on issues that ranged from how she chose bands and the lack of carnival rides to the way she dressed and who her friends were. But last weekend, she still managed to have a good time and has some names for her detractors.

“I actually had a lot of fun,” Stamatis said. “I was drinking a lot secretly. I was sort of like the hostess of Culture Shock because we had our sound guys and I had Christa Porter helping me out, so all I really did was greet the performers and, like, give them meal tickets.”

By the time Culture Shock started, all the hard work for Stamatis was over. While she could finally relax last weekend, she spent most of the semester contacting bands and managers and DJs, working out contracts and trying to get input from students, which some students complained she didn’t get enough of. Purchase’s Internet communities were buzzing about there dissatisfaction with the line up.

“Leading up to [Culture Shock] was really torturous and anxiety ridden,” she said. “[The controversy] didn’t really bother me until the back page of The Independent kept allowing nasty things about me to go to print. That’s when I actually had a problem with the whole situation.”

Stamatis found the anonymous notes on the Back Page of The Independent to be personally insulting, and she didn’t understand why a publication that she writes a column for would print submissions like, “Fuck Stamatis Shock.”

“I think we’re filing a complaint against [Adam Tyrell, Editor of the Independent]. I asked him not to after a few things with my name got written. I was just like, ‘Could you not run these anymore because you’re obviously validating the way people are talking about me.’ But he allowed another one to go to print, and that’s when I sort of got angry about the whole thing because it’s one thing to be at odds with rednecks, but when it seems to be coming from my side, then it makes it seem like there are so many more people against me, when really it was always the same four or five rednecks and their stupid Facebook group.”

Stamatis got a little frightened towards the end of the planning faze. One student on Live Journal left a post saying that they were mostly in favor of the line up, but that they hated her and pointed out specific events that she had attended, and what they didn’t like about the way she acted at them.

The post, which was riddled with swearing and typos, called her and her friends “Spandex by-numbers hipsters,” and that most of the bands she chose were “the same bullshit Williamsburg Showpaper immaterial self-aggrandizing name-dropping cocksuckery that Alaina is known for.”

“It just sounded really threatening and horrifying,” Stamatis said, her normally loud voice softening. “They actually hated me [and] were trying to hone in on details about me, but they were wrong. It was really creepy! After I read that and responded to it, I actually started locking my doors at night because I didn’t want to get, like, attacked.”

Stamatis let out a breathy half-laugh, and then rolled it into a louder, more characteristic chuckle. In the end, she said she had basically expected the reaction. Many students remember controversy surrounding band selection and the MEC almost every year.

“[We] worked really hard to avoid what had happened with Jessy Heffler, where it became a race issue. But with me, none of that happened with me and the cultural groups, because I was working with them and most people were fine. But [this year] it was just, like, crazy people that hated me. So then I realized that people are just insane.”

The biggest piece of pre-Culture Shock hype was the rumor that Stamatis had worked out a connection with rapper/actor Mos Def, and he was going to headline for one of the nights.

A lot of students got excited for his appearance, but as the big weekend got closer, it became clearer that Mos Def would not be on the bill. Stamatis found the whole confusion hilarious.

“That rumor, which I started, kind of made me the hero, so I could kind of cruise through without anyone bothering me,” she said. “The Mos Def thing was initially going to work, but I just totally forgot about it. It never really seemed that important to me. I don’t think he’s that special as a musical artist. He’s just really cool as a person. That didn’t really bother me that much.”

Despite all the hype, Culture Shock weekend went off relatively smoothly. There were a few small issues that Stamatis had to deal with, but she says they weren’t a big deal.

She thought it was funny when the lead singer of Fucked Up cut his head open with a beer can and jumped into the crowd to throw a police barricade in the air. She was disappointed when the cops pulled the plug on the band and told her to go up and calm down the crowd.  The crowd booed her.

One thing that upset Stamatis was dealing with the rapper Cassidy, who showed up an hour late and wouldn’t get out of his car.  He, then, only performed for 20 minutes. But the rapper and his friend, DJ L, had been giving her trouble from the start.

“It totally ruined that entire scheduling,” Stamatis said. “The whole thing is that DJ L and Jadakiss and Jim Jones… the way you book those people is like through their DJ friend who you then pay to be the DJ. It’s like some weird mafia.”

DJ L helped get Jim Jones but then Jim Jones’ manager asked for more money and said they could only play at a certain time, so DJ L helped get Jadakiss.

“I actually hate DJ L,” Alaina said flatly, “because after I switched to Jadakiss, Jim Jones, manager and DJ L started calling me and harassing me, and saying they were going to sue me. But I hadn’t actually done anything and it was all their fault. So DJ L, I think, was very annoying and not a good DJ, and not a good person. And, apparently, at the after party, he played the exact same DJ set, which is part of what I paid him to do. And that sucks.”

However, Stamatis said that most of the bands were really nice, and she really liked meeting and hanging out with them, especially on Saturday, when some of the performers were friends of hers from Brooklyn.

Some of her personal favorite performances of the weekend were Atlas Sounds and Deerhoof. She also really liked both dealing with and watching Care Bears on Fire, the three little kids who played their punky protest songs and came with their moms.

Now that her job is done, Stamatis says people have been thanking her and being really nice to her, almost too nice, she says, laughing. She has only come across one detractor so far this week.

“I was in a class, Criticism and Review, and Lenora Champagne always asks, ‘So, what did you guys see this weekend?’ And no one in my class goes to anything because they’re all idiots. And this one girl is like, ‘Urgh, Culture Shock.’ And the teacher knew that I booked it, too, which is what made this weird. And Champagne was like, ‘Oh, how was it?’ And the girl was like, ‘It sucked.’ But she had, like, really bad teeth,” Stamatis pointed to her teeth.

“And she was another person who was obviously crazy. Like all of the articles she writes have this undertone of being kind of insane and out of touch with reality. So I said, ‘Thanks,’ and everyone around me was like, ‘What the fuck? Are you totally dumb?’ And I think she is totally dumb. Maybe she’s just mad because I didn’t give her a t-shirt over the weekend because I was busy,” Stamatis rationalized.

“She didn’t deserve a t-shirt. I didn’t want a person looking like that wearing my shirt.” She laughs.

“No, I’m kidding.”