BARE | i26

issue 26

Editor-in-Chief Carlin Praytor

Operations Directors Belinda Yan Yasmeen Elkuwaiz

Creative Directors Sofia Viglucci Anissa Rashid

Art Director Sophia Swedback

Editorial Directors Charlotte Muth R.J. McIntyre Saffron Sener

Layout Director Jah’rel Moyenda

Marketing Directors Genevieve Kirsch Neha Shah

Web Director Alan Nguyen Diana Tu

Contact baremagazine.org @baremagazine

ASUC Sponsored Special Thanks To Mars Mercantile Down at Lulu’s & Sarah Kersting

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Alisha Pandya Ariana Dideban Bianca Lu Cade Johnson Camille El Ghaoui Caroline Jones Cheyenne Tex Clara Sperow Danya Karch Erika Badalyan Etheline Nguyen Ezra Alanis Francesca Hodges Gillian Robin Grace Kostal Graciella Moceri Grace Schimmel Himani Someshwar Imani Salazar-Nahle Isabel Cardenas Andrade Isabel Eagles Isaiah Acosta Isha Patel Jacqueline Ghosh Janah Alawi Jenny Somin Lee Jessica Ni Kaylie Moropoulos Kristen Lee Lauren Cohen Lucia Salazar Lukas Viskanta Maya Chen Megan Chai Megan Hansen Megan Lackey Meher George Mihai Cipleu Nancy Duong Naomi Snow Nasim Ghasemiyeh Nicole Ship Nidhi Chalgeri Noel Jones Nusheen Ghaemi Paola Haro Candelas Phoebe Hyer Rio Vargas Ruhi Pudipeddi Sarah Kersting Sasha Hassan Sasha Shahinfar Shelley Cai Simon Han Simona Zangari Sophia Dawn Sophia Sharifi Summer kailani Tovah Popilsky Vivian Kim Yasmin Gehman

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Cracked Teeth and Apple Pie: Performance in the Bay

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Sidewalk Salvage

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In the Morning

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Wasteland

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The Culture Will Save Us: Finding Hope in a World on Fire

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Worn Out

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History (and so much more) Repeats Itself

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Heirlooms

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Photographed by Innovative Design (Kevin Cao)

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Editor’s Note He was a retired carpenter with a crew cut, one out of sixteen children born to Irish Catholic parents in Queens. I called him “Ojichan” (grandpa, in Japanese) and I was his “darlin’ Carlin.”

When my parents picked up a fabulous, two-storied, wooden dollhouse for me at a neighborhood garage sale, my Ojichan took on the task of furnishing it. He made standing lamps out of shampoo bottle caps and disposable chopsticks. Used that plastic stand found in pizza boxes as a side table. Painted scaled-down bed frames, wrapped a piece of foam in a miniature fitted sheet that his wife—my Obachan—sewed out of one of his old, cotton T-shirts. My favorite item was, and is, the teensy toilet that he crafted for me out of scrap wood. The lid—no bigger than a dollar coin—flips up and down on a tiny hinge. A thin, bent nail makes-up a flushable handle.

My Ojichan was selectively fastidious but indiscriminately clumsy. Despite giving my toy toilet such sincere attention, he was also known to meander through our kitchen unaware of the blood dripping down his forehead, apparently unconcerned by whatever it was that he must have hit his head on in the first place.

If you love someone deeply, with your entire body, you might make them tiny, toy toilets. Or, something like that. When I hold this ridiculous memento in the palm of my hand, I remember how much I was cherished. I miss him deeply.

I palpably flinch while typing: “one man’s trash…” Still, there might be no better way to explain the tenderness that I feel towards the bona fide garbage that my grandfather populated my little home with.

If I ever have a child, I’ll haul that sturdy dollhouse into their bedroom. I’ll tell them about my Ojichan and assure them that, on nights when they felt small or lonely, they could curl inside that tiny house and tuck themselves into a miniature bed made out of leftover parts and the shirt off of their great-grandfather’s back.

These items—the homemade, the hand-me-down, the aged— are the ones that will always stick with me. That I long to keep in my pocket. The dress I’m wearing below, which was my mother’s; the ring she gave me when I got my first period; my dad’s piece of the Berlin Wall that somehow lives in my jewelry box; that silly, lovely, wooden toilet.

The twenty-sixth issue of BARE, the Hand-Me-Down Issue, grapples with what it means to waste and to expend, to have and to hold, to love and to lose. While reading, my familiar fear for our collective future—the integrity of our environment, our insatiable need to consume and keep consuming—is redeemed by my faith in nostalgia and love-objects. I hope you enjoy it!

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Cracked Teeth and Apple Pie: Performance in the Bay “Come closer, please,” she begged us, “we need to feel each other in here.”

The audience, about sixty people huddled into a small, exposed-brick loft in North Beach, timidly inched towards the pink shawl splayed out across the makeshift stage where the artist sat cross-legged. With the shoulders and legs of strangers now grazing each other, she closed her eyes and parted her lips, silencing the restless crowd. The woman grabbed a glass Coca Cola bottle from the edge of the shawl and considered it, looking inside it, around it, through it, until she clicked her nails across the glass.

She continued until the sharp, cold tap created a steady rhythm--that of a heartbeat or a ticking clock.

Then, sustaining this song, she tapped the edge to bottle on her right foot, moving up her leg, over every inch of her body. As she hammered gently over the curves of her body, the faint pang of the glass changed, becoming silent and relaxing over the fleshy areas and eerily hollow over the bones of the arm or jaw. When she reached her face, members of the audience held their breath, silently clenching and cringing at the steady, unwavering sound of the glass bouncing off of her brow and cheekbones.

Approaching her mouth, the artist rolled and clicked the bottle over her teeth, snapping onlookers out of their trance through a collective gasp.

She passed the glass through her teeth, replaced the bottle on the shawl, and read a poem about Coca Cola and commodity, referencing her home back in Brazil. Then, she stood up, folded the shawl, and walked out of view, leaving the audience grinding our teeth and gripping our bones for some sort of bodily reassurance.

Performance art is famously difficult to pin down. Since its emergence from the “happenings” of the 1960s—proto-performances that combined elements of dance, theatre, poetry, and visual art that blurred the stark barriers between life and art—critics, audience members, and even the artists themselves have struggled to establish the parameters of the art form.

Increasingly, performance art has evolved to become an all-consuming, all-inclusive medium. Now, critics are hailing performance art as “the medium of our time,” not despite its ambiguity, but because of it.

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Then, she stood up, folded the shawl, and walked out of view, leaving the audience grinding our teeth and gripping our bones for some sort of bodily reassurance.

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Photographs courtesy of the artist, Clara Merçon

No matter how you qualify it, one pattern reigns indisputably consistent throughout its history: it is overwhelmingly practiced by women who insert themselves and their art into the public sphere. From Adrian Piper’s Catalysts (1970) to Regina José Galindo’s ¿Quién puede borrar las huellas? (Who can erase the traces?) (2003), artists have employed performance as a means of articulating visceral representations of political existence, drawing on both explicit and unspoken emotions by creating vulnerable, often intimately shocking encounters between bodies in space.

Artists in the Bay Area have relished in particular political medium. In 1970, Tom Marioni opened his Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco, a fourteenyear-long conceptual art “performance” that served as the space and place for the San Franciscan avant-garde scene to mount shows and perform their work. In Berkeley, a group of poets, musicians, and artists began spreading outrageous rumors about themselves. They painted themselves as eccentric, over-the-top characters. One artist, Paul Cotton, even rechristened himself as “Adam ll.” All of these pieces seem to fit nicely into the late ‘60s, Age of Aquarius Bay Area visual landscape, often relying on sarcasm, excess, and camp to convey a semi-coded critique. As we know, the Bay’s current landscape is physically, circumstantially, and socially different from then. Our current interactions, our neighbors, and our systems now reflect the modern Kafkaesque political era. As a sanctuary city with a progressive reputation, the San Francisco Bay Area attracts people from all over the world, drawing in not only artists, but techies, investors, laborers, and students. Contemporary Bay Area performance art wears its political personality on its sleeve, exploring conceptions and definitions of the body in order to tap into the nature of diaspora and displacement. Just as artists come from all corners of the globe, so too are varying ideologies, experiences, and worldviews finding their way into the landscape and conversations of the Bay.

Beatriz Escobar is an artist, educator, and native of São Paulo living and working in the Bay Area. Her performance, Mexican Coke (2018), was the piece that left me and other audience members gripping our bones in the North Beach gallery last autumn. “That piece came up after thinking about the word fragility,” she explains to me a year later. “I was tapping into this constant, pervasive sense of precariousness, whether it’s the precarious status of marginalized people, the precarious nature of the systems we operate off of, or the basic precariousness of flesh and the body.” She continues, “there’s a certain fear in precariousness that pulls on certain people more, whether through capitalist structures, immigration status, or other unstable, imposed conditions.”

Through the glass Coke bottle, the artist wanted to articulate such instability, referencing the international flow of commodities and simultaneous suppression of migration. Beatriz is an active member of the Bay Area performance art movement, a community that she describes as “diasporic,” made up of folks from all over the place. This community reflects a new demographic landscape in the region and draws on their transnational experiences, creating pieces that reflect these notions of displacement, migration, and the politics of the body.

“The world looks very different than it did when I first moved here in 2013,” Escobar says. “You know, Obama was in office and there wasn’t a right-wing, fascist president in my country like there is now.” When combined with personal feelings of dislocation, aggressive, nativist immigration politics prompted a dramatic shift in the way she approaches everything from the mundane to the works she creates. As an artist interested in the activation of the body, Escobar uses performance to tap into our collective vision of the future, engaging emotion and our inherited intelligence to imagine a future we want to be a part of.

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Another member of this transnational performance community, Clara Merçon, similarly draws on the overwhelming feelings of displacement, honing in on the challenge of establishing interpersonal and productive relationships in a culture far different from her own. “My relationships here build completely differently than they do in Rio,” she explains. “At home, there’s so much touch— hugging, kissing on the cheek—immediately upon meeting someone, and I feel like this touch is so crucial for me and my relationships. It’s not like that here, and I think that’s an underlying challenge for a lot of my community, having to fit into a cultural norm that doesn’t feel as loving for you.” As an artist, Clara draws on these cultural dichotomies, creating transhistorical, identity-based pieces and performances that reflect her personal notions of outsiderness. In her performance, I Want My Apple Pie, the artist eats an entire apple pie with her hands. She shovels pieces in her mouth to the tune of the United States national anthem, as clips of Tr*mp discussing the infamous border wall, and other sound bites of North American xenophobia play in the background. Much like Mexican Coke, the artist draws on this very “American” symbol of the apple pie, articulating the pervasive pain hidden in the American dream sold to the rest of the world. “There are times when I’m performing it that I feel like gagging,” she says, “I’m so full and all-consumed by this pie, similar to the shaky, constantly anxiety-inducing state of being an immigrant in this country.” She moves through the world with this weight on her shoulders. Using her work, she aims to highlight and expose the structural ties of xenophobia and share these feelings of loneliness and cultural confusion with her audience.

Contemporary art, so I am told, is entangled in questions of spectatorship, of the authority and ethics of the viewers’ involvement in the piece.

There are certain narratives in popular discourse that inform the aura and mystery that surround art: it’s emotional, it’s moving, it’s meant to confront you with feelings of overwhelming sadness, anger or empathy. We hear tales of people collapsing upon first gaze at Picasso’s Guernica (1937) or folks leaving the Rothko Chapel in tears. Outrageous stories of abstract art forging the path towards self-discovery often exclude or confuse those who do not have bodily reactions to artwork.

In truth, I have never had such an overwhelming experience with a painting or sculpture. Minimalist sculpture still makes my eyes roll, no matter how many articles I read that communicate its significance in contemporary art. The first art piece I fell in love with was an afghan crocheted by my grandmother. I watched her hands crochet a space for me, performing an unconditional act of labor as a means of opening herself up to me.

When she finished, I wrapped myself in it and allowed my body to take up a warm space in her dark, wood-paneled house.

Contemporary Bay Area performance art wears its political personality on its sleeve, exploring conceptions and definitions of the body in order to tap into the nature of diaspora and displacement.

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In a similar way, performance art takes the notion of “creating space” and runs with it. Performance art envelops the viewer in corporeal ways through invitation into a new, temporary space. Much like eight-year-old me watching my grandmother crochet, we watch artists contort, stuff, cut, burn, and scrape themselves. We gaze upon bodies—often the most circumstantially vulnerable—perform their sorrow or their burden, and we cannot help but become implicated in the pain.

As much as we can float through our days pretending not to notice the man on BART asking for change, or the woman crying on the bus, performance artists refuse to let us relish in the anonymity of the urban landscape. Their work can snap us back into our earthly existence, forcing us to remember our communities, our kinships, and even the theatrical backbends we perform to avoid confrontations with our privilege in dayto-day life. In an era of global turmoil fueled by neoliberal strongholds and rampant xenophobia, performance has the potential to ground us in the reality of these abstract institutions. It demands a lot from the viewer despite its ephemerality. We are pulled into its sphere of orbit for just long enough to find comfort in its gravity. Both Mexican Coke and I Want My Apple Pie create extremely uncomfortable, authentically visceral atmospheres, not through expensive, immersive churchlike installations or expansive oil paintings, but through the mere meeting of bodies. Beatriz mentioned her fascination with the fragility of the human body, and perhaps that is what I find most fundamental to performance. There is a blurring of the lines between the Self and the Other until abstract realities become tangible. For one uncomfortable moment, we are all a part of this alternate and momentary existence where we are defined by our fragility and reminded of the intense forces of nature—whether literal or metaphysical—that draw us this particular landscape. ■

GILLIAN ROBIN

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sidewalk salvage

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Photographer: Lalyn Yu Production: Bianca Lu, Simona Zangari, Himani Someshwar, Kristen Lee, Caroline Jones, Isabel Eagles Amanda wears top stylists own, pants stylists own, and boots models own.

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Virgil wears button-down Mars, blazer Mars, and trousers Mars. Lea wears tank top Mars and two-piece set Mars.

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Emmett wears green button-down Mars, coat Mars and pants models own.

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Vivian wears blazer Mars, button-down Mars, trousers Mars, and shoes models own.

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In the morning A personal short story

Illustration by Lukas Viskanta

S

he lived in abundance. Or whatever having unlimited tokens at Chuck E. Cheese meant. Because she was her father’s star. His all-encompassing, shining star. And he watched as she collected those small, meaningless pieces of paper. Tickets, right? He watched her as she went up to the game machines. Each one exceeded the height of her three-foot, five-inch tall self. All ten toes of her feet flexed so she could tiptoe up and let the flashy, cartoon frog-filled screen entertain her. And he would slide past her, discreetly managing the controls of the game so that he could win every single token in that machine just so he could give them to her. To see a glimpse, for even just a second, of that look of sheer joy; that look of only the purest form of happiness on his daughter’s face.

And she would crane her neck to see him, proud and beaming, as if she hadn’t just stood there and watched the frog with the purple shirt jump past the frog with the red shirt. And she dreamed to be just like him.

To one day win half as many tokens as he could.

At night, tucked underneath her Princess Belle comforter, she waited for him. 1 AM. 2 AM. 3 AM. She thought about all the 18 • issue 26 • baremagazine.org

things they could do. Maybe he could tell her one of his military school stories from when he was a kid. Or, they could play their word game, exchanging words they would make up for hours. She jumped up at the sound of keys turning in the front door’s lock. She knew it was him. He stood in the doorway, eyes bloodshot and reeking of Jack Daniel’s, staring at her as if he had never seen her before. Was she ridiculous to ask if he recognized her? If he remembered that she used to be his star?

If he could still win those dumbass tokens for her if she wanted? But it seemed so farfetched now. An absurd request. A distant memory. He walked past her, leaving her to stand alone in the living room in her matching Belle pajamas.

There is something about mornings that makes it impossible to hide from yourself.

The light creeps in through the window and shines on the tiniest parts of your face.

Suddenly you notice the baby hairs on your forehead or the small lines in the iris or the dotted pores on your nose. All that was able to be disguised in the dark of the night becomes glaringly apparent in the light of the morning.

And it was in this light he would come crawling out, every detail of his rotting, disheveled self clear for her to see, to beg for her forgiveness. He would promise a million tokens next time. He would buy her anything she wanted, he said. Donuts every day for breakfast. Donuts every day for dinner. Anything. It was never the tokens or the donuts or whatever stupid toy he promised that drew her back in again. No, she felt like a princess again. She sat upon her throne again. Taken care of, loved, adored by the one she loved the most.

If she had a dollar for every apology, maybe she could afford a house in the Bay. Apologies for the social workers, for the nights spent at the motels, for the police interrogations, for the court cases, for the crippling drug addiction, for the financial complications, for the psych ward visits, mostly for the inconvenience. Sorry. Months of sorries. Years of sorries. She would hear keys turning in the front door’s lock and sink deeper into her covers. Maybe she was finally tired. Maybe she would reign on her own.

There is something about mornings that makes it impossible to hide from yourself.

It was a pursuit of independence. Control was the newfound retreat to comfort. Greater control because she could always do greater. Be better than he ever was. Oversee whole empires. She felt the ache in her chest and her breath stutter as she worked through entire nights. Even when the light of the morning crept in, eyes watering from the strain of pure exhaustion and stomach heaving from the pain of feeding it nothing but instant ramen, she felt the exhilaration of being on top. She carefully constructed each precious, delicate tower to proudly display in her kingdom. It would be hers and only hers. In every piece, around each corner, underneath all the minute details, you couldn’t find a hint of him if you tried. She belonged to no one.

But everything started to blur into one unanimous unit of time. She couldn’t tell the difference between day and night. People didn’t look like people.

They were misshapen, foreign objects trapped in flesh suits. She was struggling to see, only making out shadows that would disperse in a matter of seconds anyway. She was losing the balance beneath her feet, feeling the weight of each tower collapse while her surroundings turned nonsensical. And just at the very edge of surrendering in desperation,

she found it. She saw it there. A miracle. Like a hidden treasure, gloriously shining, beckoning her to take just one. “This will help,” it said. It shamed her. “Scared of a tiny pill?” it said. Round like a pretty gem, she swallowed it whole.

She felt reincarnated. She felt every electric pulse in her heart, each lens of her reality becoming heightened. Just as long as she had her chest of treasure close by, her pile of gems in sight. Remember: she was doing what her father could never do.

Remember: she had to tell herself. Remember: as she kept swallowing the gems, that she was nothing like him.

Time doesn’t stop for the royal. No amount of treasure can be used as a bribe. So the light of the morning returns inevitably. The sun forced itself through the shutters, glaring onto what had become her skeleton of a body, emphasizing every dark circle, all the dry, white around her mouth, the clumps in her hair. For the first time, she could see her reflection, what appeared to look like her but rotting. And she was alone. There was no one waiting up for her in the night. No one to share the weight of her pitfalls. Only she stood in the collapse. In secret, because only she knew of her treasure.

2016 Honda Odyssey. He parked it in the cramped space directly in front of her apartment. He had made the five-hour journey to bring her home.

She played the music, he listened happily. He loved whatever she put on. Music flooded the car as if all the luggage and people in it weren’t there.

There wasn’t much to say anyway. At the pitstop, he bought her an apple pie and wandered around the corner to smoke his cigarette. When he finished, he met up with her again. She scrunched her eyes at him as the sun glared into her face and he gave her a wide smile — yellow teeth, front gap, brown gums and all. Everything he had given her was nothing. Nothing in comparison to how much she had done for herself, how much she had always done for herself. So he beamed, proud and in disbelief.

He would do anything for her. His all-encompassing shining star. ■

ANONYMOUS

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wasteland

Photographers: Lauren Cohen, Tovah Popilsky (film) Production: Río Vargas, Noel Jones, Alisha Pandya, Lauren Cohen, Tovah Popilsky, Nasim Ghasemiyeh Models: Amanda Lee, Spencer Bundoc, Dina Ghandour, Imran Sekalala

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Spencer wears shirt model’s own, shorts Down at Lulu’s, boots model’s own. Dina wears teal two-piece set Down at Lulu’s, belt Down at Lulu’s.

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Amanda wears dress Down at Lulu’s, green mesh shawl stylists own.

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Imran wears shirt Down at Lulu’s, pants Down at Lulu’s.

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Amanda wears dress Down at Lulu’s, sheer cover stylist’s own.

Dina wears teal two-piece set Down at Lulu’s, belt Down at Lulu’s. Film shot by Tovah.

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The Culture Will Save Us: Finding Hope in a World on Fire

“L.A.’s in flames, it’s getting hot,” sings Lana Del Rey on her new record Norman Fucking Rockwell!, capturing the cultural zeitgeist in an all-consuming heat. So is the rest of California in 2019, and more than 7,000 square miles of the Amazon Rainforest has gone up in smoke. As we approach the end of the decade, the threat of climate change hangs over us like a prophecy written in smog, clouding our view of the stars. Of course, in California, there’s also the looming fear of the “big one,” and in the Pacific Northwest, the “really big one”– earthquakes that would rattle the unprepared West Coast into catastrophe. Sudden preventative power outages across the Bay Area jigsaw the region in satellite maps. It seems that, in every respect, our planet is trying to shove us back into the dark, warning against the destruction we have committed in the light.

It seems that, in every respect, our planet is trying to shove us back into the dark, warning against the destruction we have committed in the light.

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This is a decade that has been under continuous scrutiny by artists, cultural critics, political theorists, and climate scientists in a way that is unprecedented. It will continue to be studied for decades to come–so long as the gravest predictions among scientists do not come true. Never have we seen such rigid tensions between generations than in the age of the internet. The culture of now–particularly the music–is being produced with a sense of urgency and, with the advent of streaming, we consume it at an even more rapid pace. It feels as if artists are trying to grab audiences by the shoulders and shake them awake. But it’s also indicative of a deep-seated fear, and to some degree, a sense of acceptance that we as a planet have arrived at a place from which there is no going back. We may only dive deeper and deeper into consequence.

Natalie Mering, otherwise known as Weyes Blood, offers optimism in a record released in April 2019 that brings us out of the depths of rising sea levels, singing of hope. The record’s title, Titanic Rising, evokes a cinematic image both poignant and whimsically inspiring. It serves as the album’s uplifting focus: choosing optimism as we railroad towards doom. She paints images of the apocalypse with lyrics like “living in the rising sun” and “running on a million people burning.”

At the same time, Mering provides reassurance with optimistic sentiments on modern dating, like “True love is making a comeback,” and puts a friend’s fears about the death of monogamy to rest, singing, “Not too bad / Then again, you might be right, / Then again, sleep the night.” Mering believes we can find refuge from the fate of our planet in love, but she has also captured the anxieties that arise around relationships in a world where we must make a commitment to protecting ourselves, emotionally and physically.

I can’t listen to Kanye West’s JESUS IS KING without wondering if his record is a response to the looming darkness: gospel choirs chanting hallelujah in his track “Selah” sound both rapturous and apocalyptic, like the soundtrack the Earth might play as we hurl ourselves into the sun. Clearly, Kanye’s relationship with religion is complex, but one might question his motivations in light of his controversial public persona. Yet, what can we do other than turn to a higher power such as religion or astrology for answers when human systems are failing us, and scorching our planet?

Illustrations by Sophia Swedback

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With internet culture making post-ironic emotional extremism a central tenet of humor among millennials, an apocalyptic outlook becomes–if I dare say–satisfying. “Hawaii just missed a fireball, / L.A.’s in flames, it’s getting hot / Kanye West is blonde and gone, / Life on Mars ain’t just a song.”

This aesthetically apocalyptic perspective closes out Lana Del Rey’s “The Greatest.” The lyrics strike a chord not only because they shrink the last decade into a bite-size piece, but also because of their epic, catastrophic proportions.

It is difficult to imagine Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” topping the charts if it were released in 2019, and not just because of the all-consuming evolution of pop music. It feels nostalgic and regretful in a way that is almost balmy or playful, and it lacks the attractive sense of doom, the sense of a grand finale found in “The Greatest.” Lana sings of the world on fire, and it sounds like validation when we live under an administration that refuses to hear calls to action about climate change. The deeply harrowing truth, however, is that catastrophizing the future is no longer melodrama: it is a response congruent to our real-life prospects as defined by climate scientists.

Ezra Koenig, frontman of indie rock band Vampire Weekend, is on the same page as Mering. He’s not convinced that resignation to gloom-and-doom is the best response. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he likened the aesthetics of modern environmentalism to a “horror movie,” opting for the “very kind vibe” and optimism of 1990’s environmentalism in his record Father of the Bride released earlier this year. Vampire Weekend, previously characterized by its anxious, intricate melodies and increasingly dark and dense lyricism as it matured, seemed to run off its trajectory and

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experience a rebirth, offering a record that felt like a breath of fresh air, a return back to love, simplicity and universality in the wake of climate change. While the record might have been weighed down by fraught sentiments like “How long ‘til we sink to the bottom of the sea?” and “Something’s happening in the country / and the government’s to blame,” the record is remarkably buoyant and familiar, structured around a three-part love story woven throughout.

These millennial artists stand to show that even if we find ourselves in darkness, we will create our own light. Turning to the human parts of ourselves–love, memory, art, and storytelling–is how we seek refuge in times of crisis, as fear propagates in the air like a haze. Climate change is not an active, direct threat to most individuals on a daily basis, but a gradual one with certain earthly consequences. This knowledge permeates the mind, setting in like a tension headache. Nonetheless, artists will continue creating to ease the fear, and put the fear to purpose, unbothered by the idea of whether the melodies they sing will soon dissolve into the ether.

Turning to the human parts of ourselves–love, memory, art, and storytelling–is how we seek refuge in times of crisis, as fear propagates in the air like a haze.

Yet, the government ignores our calls to action: the falcon cannot hear the falconer, the center will not hold. Like Yeats, I believe that we will see a Second Coming, but not of the biblical sort. Our new messiah will be the culture; it is the art, the music produced over the next few decades that will save us, give us hope, remind us of our humanity. There is no certain trajectory for the fate of our planet, but there is still hope. Artists, politicians, and activists will keep reminding us, by god, there is still hope. No matter the outcome, we can at least find solace singing along with Lana: “the culture is lit, and if this is it, we had a ball . . .” ■

CADE JOHNSON

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Worn Out

Photographer: Kendall Halliburton Production: Isaiah Acosta, Danya Karch, Ariana Dideban, Naomi Snow, Nicole Ship Models: Natalya Crawford, Hannah Thompson, Jadyn Lee, Mihai Cipleu Natalya wears Tommy Puffy jacket team’s own, black slip dress team’s own, sneakers model’s own, and bandana model’s own.

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Hannah wears purple slip skirt team’s own, black corset top model’s own, boots team’s own, and bag Down at Lulus. Jadyn wears printed dress Mars, leather jacket Mars, leather knee-high boots Down at Lulus, sunglasses Down at Lulus, and bag Down at Lulus.

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Mihai wears Polo vest team’s own, white tank Down at Lulus, leather pants Mars, and cowboy boots team’s own.

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History (and so much more) Repeats Itself

Illustration by Chanea Smith

My entire life, my parents and grandparents have told me that I remind them of my great-grandmother. There is something about my eyes and my smile that makes them think of her, and in some abstract sense, our passions and attitudes toward life intersect. But, I wouldn’t know this if they didn’t tell me; she passed away while my mother was pregnant with me, leaving me stories and her middle name.

There’s something simultaneously heart-warming and unsettling about how much is passed down within families. We pass down last names, but sometimes we also pass down wedding rings, unmet life goals, specific ways of laughing. Recycling passions within families can be inspiring but also daunting to the children who grow up hearing stories of how history repeats itself. I chose the same university as my grandparents, and I share a major with both of my great-grandparents. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell how much my decisions stem from my unique identity and how much I am subconsciously influenced by the stories I was raised on. My mother keeps her wedding dress in a box under her bed just in case I decide to wear it one day. I wonder if I will wear it just as I currently wear my identity as an English major and a Cal student.

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Last year, I took a seminar on consciousness in the Molecular and Cell Biology department. Fifteen students sat around a table as our professor led discussions about dreams and the soul. One day, we talked about reincarnation, and I started theorizing that when we die, our spirits aren’t kept intact but are instead redistributed into those we love—into family members who haven’t been born yet. It was a fleeting thought I had at 3 PM on a Wednesday, but I like the concept. Perhaps, parts of you can continue in new forms after you’re gone. Regardless, I am fascinated by how we hand down parts of ourselves to our family members while we’re alive. In this way, we can live multiple lives through our children and grandchildren. Sometimes this can be wonderful, but it can also be a box much too small for a whole individual to fit in.

A friend of a friend lived most of her life in Germany in a family of artists. Both her father and grandfather are painters, but when Sarah Wallace was born, her father decided that he didn’t want her to know how to paint or draw. This surprised me. I’m so used to the opposite, to feeling guilty and disconnected when I don’t share the passions of my family members. Feeling pressured to pursue the same careers as one’s parents is practically a

cliché. So, her father’s deliberate choice to not pass down his craft stood out as peculiar to me.

It wasn’t that Sarah didn’t want to learn how to paint— she did. When she was young, she would ask to go to the art classes her father taught. When he allowed her to attend, she would eagerly show him her work. But instead of bringing them closer, these moments simply brought tension. Sarah could sense that her father was conflicted between simply supporting his young daughter’s efforts and giving her criticism that could shape her into an artist of the same caliber.

“I want strict advice, but I don’t think he wants that, and I’m not sure why. Maybe there is something he didn’t like in that transmission with his own dad,” Sarah told me.

Ultimately, this is what I think familial hand-medowns should be: options and opportunities, clothing we can grow into or decide won’t ever fit quite right.

Perhaps Sarah’s father grew up feeling trapped by his own father’s hand-me-down. Not only did painting shape his identity, but it also completely altered his relationship with his dad. Instead of just being a father, Sarah’s grandfather also played the role of an instructor, but not in the traditional sense. Teaching his son to paint created a professional dynamic that consumed their relationship.

In the same way, instead of just being a son, Sarah’s father also filled the role of protégé. Sarah thinks that this chain goes back further than just her grandfather, but she can’t be certain—after all, it was broken with her.

If it does go back further, perhaps painting wasn’t the only thing Sarah’s forebears handed down. Maybe along with the knowledge and skill of painting, generations of Sarah’s ancestors passed down tensions and strained relationships. When Sarah’s father decided to break the tradition, maybe he wasn’t giving his daughter less of himself—maybe he was trying to give himself to her entirely as a father.

Despite being discouraged from painting, Sarah was still drawn to the arts. Perhaps it was due to the redistributed souls of her artistic ancestors (or she just liked the sound of the instrument) but at the age of three, Sarah started playing the piano. She still plays; she’s currently a music major.

So, maybe some familial hand-me-downs don’t involve as much agency as we think. It could be that I chose Berkeley not because my grandparents’ stories subconsciously influenced me but because it’s the right fit for me, just as it was the right fit for them in their day. I was naturally drawn to studying English just as Sarah was naturally drawn to the arts, and these interests parallel those of our predecessors because, after all, we are related to them. I asked Sarah whether she’ll teach her children how to play piano, and she said that she’s been asking herself that question a lot recently.

“When I asked that to myself, I realized I understood better how my father felt about teaching me to paint. I know how to become a professional in the music field, so, if they start music, I want them to do it perfectly. I think I would be too intense,” Sarah confided.

By not passing down her trade, Sarah will continue her father’s legacy: the tradition of giving children the freedom to figure themselves out on their own.

We can’t control everything we pass down to our children. Sometimes we would do anything to not pass down parts of ourselves—the migraines I regularly get and the threat of Alzheimer’s and heart disease are familial hand-me-downs that weigh on me. So, maybe we should unapologetically celebrate what family members gave us deliberately. Maybe we should also think about all the things they gave us without knowing and celebrate those too, decide what we might want to deliberately pass down if given the chance.

I never understood my mother’s fashion sense when I was young, but recently, I’ve found myself borrowing her clothes, looking at old photos of her, and wishing she had saved dresses she wore in her twenties. Currently, one of my favorite items in my closet is one of her old skirts. I wear the skirt differently than she did, but I wear it regularly, and every time I do, I look at the navy print with delicate white flowers and think of her. Ultimately, this is what I think familial hand-me-downs should be: options and opportunities, clothing we can grow into or decide won’t ever fit quite right. In my childhood bedroom, I have a box full of miscellaneous jewelry from relatives I never got the chance to know. I’ve never felt comfortable wearing any of it, but I’ve been thinking about a specific ring that sits in a small red box on my bookshelf. The ring was my great-grandmother’s, and I think the next time I go home, I’m going to bring it back to Berkeley and start wearing it. ■

CLARA SPEROW

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Heir

Photographers: Sofia Viglucci, Graciella Moceri (mirror shot) Production: Cheyenne Tex, Mihai Cipleu, Graciella Moceri, Nusheen Ghaemi, Janah Alawi

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Looms

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Object Permanence

When my mom’s mom died, I distinctly remember walking around her house and picking things out that I wanted to keep, and I remember feeling like my brother had wound up with a better haul. I ultimately walked away with a heavy metal cross to hang on my non-Catholic walls. He walked away with a similarly heavy metal train to put on his dresser. Sometimes, I wonder which sibling will get what, if I could swing the argument that my dad’s books belong on my shelves and my mom’s favorite chairs belong in my living room. This is fundamentally selfish, and also 100% morbid, because it rests on the presumption of my parents’ deaths.

When my dad’s dad died, my grandma burned all of his photographs, effectively removing them from a tradition of handing down. When a person leaves us, it is hard not to see them in all of the stuff that remains. What do we do with it? Give it away? Burn it? Play keeper for every fork this person ever ate off of?

This begs the question: will my aged husband burn all of my photographs when I go? Will he give my things away? Recently a distant, older cousin asked me if I wanted any fine china. She was moving and had way too many of several great-grandmothers’ plates stored away. I had to say no. 1) I have no current use or space for fancy plates. 2) I am well aware that I will one day inherit other fancy plates from other grandmothers of various sorts. Sometimes, I am hit with vivid imagery of those many rejected plates stacked in the Goodwill on San Pablo.

The whole set for $4.99 calls my name into the deep, dark night. An older, more seasoned stack of plates tells them to shut up.

I occasionally acquire the very old things that other people have gotten rid of.

I buy them with the intention of rehoming them, giving them a warm bed to sleep in, spare change to hold. One day, I will ask my distant, younger cousin if she has a need for an antique candy dish that I did not inherit and she will say “No, thank you, one day I will get a different and more meaningful candy dish from my other better and more well liked cousin.”

Objects inherited necessitate the aging or death of another, often someone close to us. How do we take these things into our bodies and accept them into our lives as our own? How do they change with each iteration, becoming uniquely someone’s for one moment before being handed down to another? Layers of ownership graft independence unto the things that outlive us.

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In turning our spotlight towards these inherited objects, we acknowledge these heirlooms as standalone beings, with lives and minds completely of their own. They have lives and minds completely of their own. It is, therefore, fit to give them some space on the page and the chance to speak out, the chance to explain themselves in their own terms.

Of the self-sufficient red GAP sweater pictured sitting upright, filled out by nobody but its own, Josh says: “I liked wearing it as is, but then I get really bored and kind of dissatisfied with the way it fits, so I decided to sneak it to a friend’s house and crop it! There’s this weird value I place on the sweater because I feel like it’s still my dad’s sweater, but since I altered it, there’s a little bit of me transferred onto it as well. I guess that’s why I like it so much.”

I have always loved these cigar boxes because Don reimagined their function. These wooden walls once housed Latin American cigars, but now they hold items that we use every day from pencils to erasers to rulers. Objects don’t have one purpose, they can have many different uses.

When visitors come into my room, the boxes often catch their attention. They look old and special—almost like a treasure chest. I enjoy looking at the black script carved into the rich, warm wood. Most of all, I love being remindIf we turn to Ariana’s cigar boxes pictured filled with pome- ed of home, Don, Anita, and my family when I look at the granates and other plant matter, we see “wooden, sturdy, boxes.” vintage, warm, unique, special, repurposed, creative, and elegant” objects, used for “a place to put my paintbrush- Wearing her necklace, Paloma’s angel is positioned on a es, pencils, pens, and art supplies.” Further explanation cake stand with bunches of ornamental grapes. We learn:: reveals their lineage.

Where they come from: “Both of the objects came from “My next-door neighbors, Anita and Don, were like a sec- my mother’s side of the family. The necklace was worn by ond pair of parents. My sister and I spent countless hours my grandmother and made in Mexico. The angel my mom with them, and they taught us how to embrace our creative had when she was younger and recently gave to me for sides. They were both professors and valued writing, espe- protection in college.” cially writing utensils. Don had beautiful fountain pens, markers, and shading pencils that he would store in old What they do: “I wear the necklace often, but the pendent cigar boxes. He had converted dozens of cigar boxes into I do not regularly wear. The angel sits on my desk gazing organizational units for his supplies. When I was a sopho- at me while I sleep.” more in high school, Anita and Don moved away and as a goodbye gift, Don gave me the cigar boxes.

What will happen to them: “Give them to my children” ■

GRACE SCHIMMEL

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Red Gap Sweatshirt from Josh Bernaldo Cigar boxes from Ariana Dideban Rings from Tovah Popilsky Necklace and shirt from Xia Jimenez Necklace and angel jewelry box from Paloma Macias

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