issue iv

campo review ‘16

campo review JANUARY 2017

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campo review ‘16

THE CAMPO REVIEW JAN. 16 2

campo review ‘16

the museum issue 3

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letter from the editor Like my peers, I participate in the stressors of high school. While I’m very much a part of the spiral notebook and mechanical pencil routine, while I may buy into the various habits and techniques, superstitions and routines—among which a ridiculous caffeine consumption, a particularly embarrassing experience of attributing the location of my fall PSAT, a German classroom, as a kind of positive sign—I also make a concerted effort to buy myself space from this world.

Ernest Hemingway once said, “When you eat, eat; when you sleep, sleep,” advocating a kind of mutual-exclusivity between different actions. This satisfying mutual-exclusivity was what I had in mind when selecting the museum response theme as that to fit the issue which would cover finals week, a stressful time for both our editorial staff and contributors; so, this issue, despite its complexities of thought, its exuberance of colors, was intended, believe it or not, as a kind of break from rather than an extension of that world of academic chaos. I think it has succeeded in this role, providing me a kind of granite slab, if a demanding one, to cling to, as well as the joy of knowing campo review responsible for our having spent at least a menial sum of this month’s reserve of focus within those spaces which most content us, be they filled with graphite bits or fragments of the English language itself.

I hope the issue brings this same sense of contentment, this same sense of calm to the reader. I hope he or she can come to imagine the best of the people behind it: the Ruby Lower capturing a crab’s ‘Persistence,’ instead of the bowed-head Ruby I found beside me in class last week, rather than the application-stressed Adam Frost-Venrick, the seventeen year old who woke in a fit of insight to build a ‘Forest,’ the perceptive photographer responsible for ‘Expectation: a Series’ instead of the frazzled Sierra Warshawsky I ran into last period in the library, wearing anxiety and a Northwestern sweatshirt. I hope the reader can find our editorial staff about their element: Katie Nunn thinking of pink dresses for funerals, Tanya Zhong finding the night sky in the skin of a portrait, my head bent in writing lessons in diplomacy from Alexander Calder. I hope the Brigitte Jia ogling a coffee-table book appears, instead of the Brigitte I saw running with violin case from the rain, the Fiona Deane-Grundman with faith in science instead of with fear over a borderline grade, the Elena Koshkin newly experiencing New York instead of the Elena computing AP chemistry equations.

Alexandra Reinecke, EIC 4

campo review ‘16

from the issue “You don’t know what to make of modern China.”

“How is the bottom of the East River doing?” called Henry, across the room, “Or the sidewalks? How are the sidewalks faring? The fire escapes?”

“I’ve spent my life time walking. / But it begins and begins and begins.”

“The inside of my stomach began to fold into itself, layers of vertigo churning together.”

“My mother did not cry during the ceremony . . . She wore a beautiful pink dress, the color of sex, and sung to their hymns magnificently.”

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“Your beauty is like a sunflower / Whose petals are singed by the sun / You start your life anew each week.”

“We didn’t all look the same.

We didn’t think the same, or share the same stories.”

“There’s never been a man respected for his participation trophies.”

“At the direction of a Calder mobile, which I suppose . . . must be an expert or a half expert on diplomacy, I’m telling you why I’m shaky.”

“You are confused, appreciative, intrigued.”

“The most the individuals who were also attending the museum had in common was our love for science, which was good enough for me.”

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editorial staff EDITOR-IN-CHIEF alexandra reinecke MANAGING EDITOR elena koshkin SUBMISSIONS MANAGER brigitte jia SUBMISSIONS TEAM fiona deane-grundman (poetry) katie nunn (fiction) betsy alter (art) isabel owens (photo) WEBSITE DESIGN tanya zhong SPREAD PHOTOGRAPHER sierra warshawksky PUBLICTY MANAGER fiona deane-grundman ADVISORY COUNCIL lindsay webb-peploe sarah morgan emmanuel williams 7

campo review ‘16

contributors alexandra reinecke (’18) elena koshkin (’18) brigitte jia (’18) katie nunn (’17) isabel owens (’17) tanya zhong (’18) fiona deane-grundman (’18)

sierra warshawsky (’18) ruby lowe (’18) zoe del-rosario (’18) adam frost-venrick (’17) maya jenn (’18) emma quimby (’18)

models kate ginley (’18)

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campo review ‘16

food for thought from the campo review editorial staff

credit: art is a way of life, facebook

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contributed

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portrait by zoe del rosario

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eye by emma quimby

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redstone series by maya jenn

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redstone series by maya jenn

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campo review ‘16

some internecine conflict by alexandra reinecke It was a useless groggy afternoon in November, and two undergraduates were lounging around a diminutive though not altogether unkempt dorm on the UC Berkley campus. There were various useless items strewn about the room, some old Diet Coke cans and folded newspapers, two cot beds, one of whose mattress had been removed, in a mid-term and freshman class in Eastern philosophy-induced stint of anti-materialism, and pushed up against the space, in the room’s corner, between the push-pin tired wall and oatmeal colored carpet. Beside the mattress, its removed frame, a worn and thick dull caramel colored plywood, touching part of its old appendage, comfortably, somewhat resignedly, as an old friend might lean against one’s thigh or calve in sharing a couch square, had been utilized as a makeshift library encasement.

There was an old poster hung above the shared mahogany dresser from which a young and particularly equine-nosed young Gregory Peck was paused, as though in an individual sort of eternal torture, in the moment before kissing a tilted-jaw and turtleneck wearing Ingrid Bergman; as the two men in the room worked and dress and ate, he sympathized with their specific pains, their simultaneously sad and brave endeavors, with an austere and vaguely holy flavor of supervision.

At the campus-issued plywood desk, where sat the more attractive, and the darkerfeatured of the two roommates, a knockoff or time-worn Burberry scarf was caught in a wholly physical arrangement between the chair and the minuscule waffle-knit plane of a long-sleeved thermal shirt-clad back. Opposite this academic furniture, on the wall in which was contained the windows, the Oriental red of a cheaply-framed neighborhood takeout menu beckoned one to gummy brown sauce and lychee-flavored soda as three rows of fourteen men looked out of light eyes and black hair from a frame marked Exeter Academy, Class of ‘76, in which neither of the men were featured, to which neither of the men could claim ownership, by either acquisition or birthright, but which the more intellectual of the roommates had purchased, for no reason outside of want, to hang as a kind of broken relic above his head.

Edwin Murphy, the more intellectual of the roommates and the man in which the Exeter photo had stirred a brief warmth of blood, was polishing a row of loafers with a laundry sponge and a tin of Kiwi shoe polish opposite the open dorm window. It was cold in the room, though the air was somewhat thick with the aftereffect of rain, and the newspaper on which Edwin had lain his loafers beat up mildly against the various shades of leather, chocolate, black, pewter gray, so that little bits of polish were taken up in the fringed part of the newspaper and so little lines from the paper, like those made my twigs in snow, settled in the drying leather.

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campo review ‘16 Across the room Henry Scott, the less intellectual, less handsome roommate, who was a man saved, if not exalted, by a particular rivulted quality of blondeness and a kindness, such as rare in those of moderate to exceptional intelligence, was flattening a copy of the week’s New Yorker, the particular page was one on which a mint-green room was strewn with Scrabble Tiles, as though trying to will, in want of some meaning, or some meaning beyond that which, as was evident in his furrowed blonde brow, his fidgeting sweatpants-clad legs, had preemptively disturbed him.

“Hen,” said Edwin, across the room. Henry and Edwin were moderately intimate friends, having spent four months together as roommates, and there existed between them the kind of comfortable, traditional understanding of mutual circumstance as has existed through all years between all brothers, all classmates, all simultaneous participants of war or of any similar such harrowing experience.

Henry liked Edwin better than Edwin liked Henry, or rather, Henry liked Edwin in a fundamental and human way which was not so much not returned but which was returned with a lesser wholesomeness and with an intellectual fascination to make up the lost space. Edwin liked Henry too, or he was stunned by him, in the way one is affected by a handsome thing, a creation in one way or another triumphant, and it was long thought in the sophomore class that Edwin had liked Henry more than platonically, intellectually reverently, because of the melancholy poem he wrote on the subject of his roommate’s waved hair, on a bit of cement in the quad, outside of the library and the fountain, which had been printed, for its noteworthiness, its responsibility to the truth, in both the literary magazine and the weekly newspaper which was distributed in the metal boxes, and by way of mouth. Theirs was a strange relationship then, fragile in some places, sound as wooden beams in others, so that an afternoon spent between them was a fumbling of sorts, a charade which was not so much the austere movement of little ears tucked with great sweeps of dark brown hair behind blue grosgrain, which was a success at Yale, which was cautious and, too, was neat, but neither was the comfortable understanding in which Edwin’s brother and his girlfriend sat, in leather-sink down, with the latter’s jodhpur-clad legs lain across the others at their monstrosity of a waterfront complex in Maine; it was a compromise of sorts, a meeting of ends; there was in it the allowed brutality, the allowed harsh brunt end of the truth and also the need for buffer, for white Navajo blanket between their interactions, for shared bedside table between their respective rests.

Each loved the other, each respected the other in a way which was not similarly returned, though it was returned equally, so that there was something in their relationship not completely sound, but neither broken. It was only in personal proximity to the two that the dynamic became apparent, of course, and so it was that the homosexual rumors surrounding Edwin’s poem, such a triumphant poem, had died down, the general opinion of the college, or any of their classmate within it, that they were the men in the room McCulloch, 5B, Astor Residence, and that there was a shared satirical bent, a shared miscalculation or exceptional comprehension for life as others existed outside of which accounted for their having the takeout menu to Golden Palace hung beside the hard brilliance of the Murphy Estate mirror, so great a handsomeness, a handsomeness to attest one a handsomeness, which had come to Edwin only after having pinned the UC Berkley gold pin to his graduation robe (a breathtaking, forest satin).

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campo review ‘16 So Henry liked Edwin and Edwin liked Henry, they said. They were friends. They were content together, contented by one another’s company, and it was only the rare professor’s assistant, the variable bartender who could register unrest where the average of their classmates understood stability. They had similar sympathies, though Edwin’s more tortured, more acute; at last year’s Astor Residence holiday party they had shared a stocking which had read, in crummy glitter point, ‘EdwinHenry’ with the letters melted into one another; they had the same Patagonia fleece vest in the same shade of oatmeal wool.

“Hen,” said Edwin again, rubbing, with some difficulty, a bit of chocolate colored shoe polish into the heel of a particularly ill-balanced loafer.

“What?” said Henry, from across the room.

“Watcha reading?”

“Nothing.”

“Think you’d be reading the paper this time.”

Henry turned in his chair, gestured at the newspapers which Edwin had, in the way a butcher might a cut of cod or a steak, wrapped the mattress atop his cot.

“You told me I could take it.”

“Didn’t say you couldn’t take it.” Henry was smoothing again the magazine paper against the caramel colored plywood of his dorm-issued desk.

Edwin returned to rubbing in the polish; he took up a bit of it on the side of his hand.

Noticing this, he ran his hand along a bit of newspaper tucked into his mattress, pulling a pale brown smudge over a column which had featured an article about a new museum in Brooklyn, in some old PS-something-or-other building, because it was the New York Times and the columns gave less space for the rest of the country than they did for the boroughs.

“How is the bottom of the East River doing?” called Henry, across the room, “Or the sidewalks? How are the sidewalks faring? The fire escapes?”

Edwin laughed a short laugh, because he was tired. It was a sharp, brunt laugh, the way a Swiss Army knife is. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Henry, or didn’t like the course of the conversation, but more that he wasn’t still, was disturbed by and preoccupied with the smudges which were materializing in the leather, and that earlier that morning they hadn’t had the coffee table book he’d wanted at the library, the one he’d wanted to have that night so that when Spencer Corrigan’s parents came over he could pretend he was an architectural prodigy or an engineer, so he could fit himself to that false image of a son his parents had formed for him so completely from age 15 that he thought they hadn’t half believed his rejection letter from Michigan, they hadn’t half separated him from the image they had in the kitchen, from when they’d toured the campus, so that for them he would always be somewhat, if not wholly, that eager 17 year old in the portrait, dark-haired, ruddy-nosed, a hunter green windbreaker billowing some outside that gothic library, frigid and unaccustomed, with his California manners, to the cold; he was thinking of the maple donut they hadn’t had that past weekend, that past stint at nine or ten PM when so many pastries, so many glazed cakes, so many dough shapes had gleamed warm in the case, warm against the dingy linoleum and malfunctioning plaid of the metal racks, where it had smelled of grease and had gleamed a color like golden bourbon, and where, despite all this, he had been sad rather than happy.

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campo review ‘16 “What,” said Henry. It was not a question. He had perceived in his roommate this solemn, strange discord, this momentary unrest or frustration. He had seen it before. He had seen it the night he and Edwin had gone to a protest, a sit in, or a sleep-in, at the Cal library, where sleeping bags in various hues of navy, black, forest green, ugly sepia and pumpkin subdued oranges had been pressed up against the book cases, against the tinily-pebbled blue carpet, and someone had spelled a name wrong on a poster-board, which had seemed to him somehow sacrilegious.

“You’re not still thinking about that letter, are you?” Henry set down the magazine.

Turned momentarily to look at the dark-haired, inherently thin but then circumstantially thin form of his roommate, who looked sad and handsome polishing his loafers. The room smelled of polish and also of the swim-team bathing suit someone had left on the floor the night before wrapped in the crustacean of a navy and saffron striped towel; it was cold though it was groggy outside, and through the window, as the miniscule fringe of the newspaper, the little texture whipping up at the wind through the window as though in tiny protest, the place where the barcode of the publication was stamped in tiny little bars of varied widths. He was speaking about the letter Edwin had received the week prior, something which had come in a purple letter with the white block lettering of the ‘NYU’ logo on the front, in the corner, which had been a response to his inquiry, the nature of which had remained that week to Henry indeterminate.

Edwin was looking out the window. The little fringe on the newspaper was flapping the little barcode against the drying shoe leather with the mild wind and the top of Edwin’s hair, which had grown some long, was nudged a little too, though his face remained unmoved, focused on the oatmeal knit of the carpet or the signage of the gas station across the street.

“Edwin.”

“What.”

“Are you gonna tell me about the letter?” Henry took up the magazine from his desk and relocated to his bed, where he folded his legs up, pulling his knees outward against the mattress, and dropped the magazine in the space of his lap, as though in the basin of a wastebasket where it was to be discarded. “Are we gonna talk about it? Don’t tell me you’re gonna pull that Edwin trash and not talk about it.”

Edwin did not respond, but took up the laundry brush where he had set it down and set to rubbing the hue back into the leather.

“Don’t tell me—” “Drop it, alright? Drop it.”

“Alright.” Henry unfolded the magazine in his lap. “You’re boring you know that?

You’re the most boring motherfucker I’ve ever—” but he dropped it halfway, dropped it because there was in him, though it in no way matched Edwin’s journalistic responsibility, a certain loyalty to truth which others had identified in them common, and he had known it false, too false even for mocking. “I’ve got something for you,” he changed his course.

“You bought me a box of maple donuts from Jasper’s,” Edwin said, not turning, speaking soberly to the wall. “No,” this too, soberly. “The Julia Morgan book that’s been checked out two weeks. The exact one, Hen, with the gold lettering along the spine.”

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campo review ‘16 “An article, you jackass.” Henry let one of his legs down off the bed, caught his nose, the left side of his face momentarily in the Murphy Estate mirror in his movement. “About some internecine conflict. How a language can be lost.”

“Like those mints?” Edwin said, preoccupied with rubbing out the last of the unfinished spots in the chocolate colored of his three sets of loafers.

“What?” said Henry.

“Lost in translation,” this the small indignant spot of leather which would not conform, “like those mints you’re always talking about. Those Altoids from when you were a boy in Seattle that no one ever knows what you’re talking about when you—” “Not a mint tin, Edwin. A language.”

“Mint tin, language, same difference.” The chocolate loafer had yielded to the kiwi polish on the sponge and so Edwin, feeling mildly amused, mildly dominant in that way one feels after having, even about a small manner, conquered something, forcibly pasted down the flapping triangle end of the newspaper with a book he’d gleaned from his desk, at which point the small noise the newspaper had been making, lapping at the wind, ceased, so that the men understood the sound they had mistaken for the wind itself had been, instead, the papery and barcoded scalloped end of some outdated and time-worn spread of the Wall Street Journal.

“A dead language,” Henry said, smoothing the magazine vehemently over his thigh, “Like Latin, Edwin, but with the symbols gone, too. No one speaks Latin except for emphasis, except for Hemingway in italics, except for the parochial school children, but they can speak it.

There are words, still, symbols still to sound it out, should one feel so inclined but here there is nothing. Here every last bit of—” “Here?” said Edwin. He was wiping his hands on a towel.

“This tribe. This case. A group of people native to California. A group of people, Edwin, whose bodies might be buried right under us, right under this dorm house, right under the crappy linoleum counter of that stupid ramen place you and Spencer are always ranting and raving over all week until you can get your fish-tank noodles in their big plastic containers—” “Alright.”

“Alright what, Edwin? A whole culture of people ground into—” “Alright it’s 9AM for Chrissake, Hen. Would you lay off a minute while I take a shower?

Order my thoughts out of oblivion? You asked me the name of my scotch last night I wouldn’t know it, and here you are—” setting down the hand towel, “lecturing me as to whatever role you seem to mistakenly think I played four hundred years ago in the fate of some indigenous peoples.”

Edwin walked tiredly, but arrogantly to the bathroom, for he recognized the smell in the room, that of newspaper columns time-balanced and made fragile, that of leather and of polish, dense and sharp, which he had somehow leveraged himself victorious over. When he slipped out the door and padded down the hall to the common bathroom at the corridor’s end, in his stupid fleece sleep-socks, Henry heard the slam of the wooden door he knew to be marked ‘gentle bears’ and affixed with a crudely torn out advertisement for Smirnoff’s vodka, because someone had thought it humorous, someone had thought it an altogether welcomed and civilized comment on McNally’s pub, fourth street, to cross out, with black marker, the words in between ‘gentleman’ and ‘bears.’

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campo review ‘16 The first was a sign affixed the door, denoting the sex of the room, ‘gentlemen,’ and the second a paper poster which read ‘go bears,’ but the words in between had been crushed out with that will of Sharpie, that will of brilliant though disturbed and wasted undergraduate, so that the message had been altered to fit the oft-repeated motto of the more indecent of the male half of the sophomore class.

When Edwin returned from the shower it was naked to the waist, with dark hair combed back from the ears, and with a bottle of half-empty Tropicana orange juice clamped in his left hand. When he entered the room he pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and gray fleece sweatpants, a t-shirt, and took down a deeply faceted scotch glass from a little metal tray he and Henry kept underneath Henry’s desk. He poured the remainder of the orange juice into the cup and settled with his new cleanness and his pulp-free through lukewarm drink in a crisscrossed position on his mattress.

“Alright,” he said, when he’d settled, or pushed aside a fleece blanket to make room for his folded legs. “Hit me with it now.”

“I mean,” said Henry, still pouring over the magazine article, though now ensconced at the plywood monstrosity of his desk, “we don’t know anything about them. Not anything. We don’t know how they talked or how they raised their children, or whether they banded themselves together in groups when they went out to accomplish a thing, how we do. We—” Henry paused a minute, as though to consider. There was a draft so he got up and closed the window, a rickety old wooden window, painted thickly in white paint, which closed slowly.

“Think of them,” he said, stepping over the rock of a hardened cinnamon bun or some other indistinguishable dead pastry, Edwin’s just-used towel, still warm from his heat and the steam of the bathroom, “what do we know about them, you or me? What do you think when you hear about them? Think about that. Native Americans. What’s the first thing you—” “How my dad fed the hummingbirds,” said Edwin. “How we made those headbands out of feathers they bought in packs from the craft store when we made all sorts of things for no reason. Igloos out of sugar cubes. Butter by turning a marble around an emptied jam jar that was supposed to teach us colonial sympathies or some shit like—” “Or that distant friend from tennis camp whose brother got into Dartmouth for being onesixteenth Cherokee,” Henry rushed, “Or your fiscally conservative grandfather and how he read you the Hemingway stories about making oatcakes on hot black griddles in the woods. That Gucci add wedged in the bathroom at Stanford as a hand towel, when we went for the water polo game, that looked some like leather skinned from a hunt hanging to dry, because it was dark brown and chestnut—” “And how,” interrupted Edwin, “it all boils down to nothing, right? How that all boils down to some misconceptions, some Anglicized beliefs or lies, some warped sense of—” “Exactly,” Henry was frantic now, excited. “Exactly! A language lost altogether, Edwin, crushed into the dirt. A language crushed!” He stood from his bed, pulled on a decrepit pair of dark leather loafers—held together by some combination of a force, willed of the leather, to repay, if in half-trashed, thin, crushed-down service, what had been the latter half of a boyhood, what had been a good nine years or so of loyalty, some by cream colored thread pulled with some expertise about a certain warranty-assured manner through the tiny holes in the leather—

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campo review ‘16 and shoved an white baseball cap on his head before rushing, without pause to pick up either his cell phone or his wallet, out the door.

As Edwin watched his roommate go he recognized in his eye that old excitement, that old earnest inertia toward proximity toward life, that very quality which Edwin had pegged in him the first day they’d met, upon discovering their room assignment, and had found a hundred times as worthy, as honest as he had thought it in witnessing it that first cold Sunday. Edwin sat and drank his Tropicana orange juice out of the cut-glass scotch glass, also a possession willed of him in that single extravagant and morally-steadying unloading of artifacts and attitudes which had preoccupied him that weekend after graduation and which had included, in the lot, along with the glasses, some old wallet images to trace his roots back through class portraits, the Murphy mirror, that sense of intellectual entitlement he’d acquired whole-heartedly only then, in that assumption of objects, for before it had seemed naked, had seemed wrong, the familial code of interaction without the familial weight in cups, in soft leather, in brandy decanters and rugs and mirrors of great esteem so that they retained their names, even in that egalitarian, rameneating effort of Cal to rub them out, the Murphy mirror, how it would have felt skiing without the puffer coat, without the assurance of the bindings holding one, physically, to the boot and the ski and thus the ground which one intended to traverse.

Edwin watched out the window as he saw the English nose, then just a sliver, the white of the baseball cap he wore for tennis, the messy loafers of his strange and handsome roommate, his once-supposed lover and his always friend, stumble out upon the damp gray of the sidewalk and start maybe for the quad, maybe the student center, maybe some odd dinner as he favored to frequent, probably the library, where he found so often his desired respite.

When Henry returned later, shielding under his shirt a pile of library books, a stack of glossed coffee table stunners and less attractive hard bound volumes, a thing of floppy dog-eared paperbacks from the rain, which made a thud when he proceeded to drop them on his bed, exhausted and unfed from the library, suggesting that they pick up some hamburgers so that he could work without thinking of his stomach, it was then that Edwin understood in him a hunger for finding what had not been provided him, for comprehending that which had squatted low and deep, which had hid away, and thus had evaded, altogether, those more menial or common of investigations of his sort. *** The next week was Thanksgiving and though Edwin and Henry had been gone most of the week, they both had returned the weekend before, on some false pretense of accumulation, though they both understood, and did not speak between them, that their early return to campus was in fact prescribed for the sake of partaking, that Saturday, and as a kind of mid-semester cleansing, a notoriously cheaper, and thus more packed evening at McNally’s down on fourth street, where the owner had made it a tribute, a sort of nod to the more gifted of the country’s undergraduates, or to some sort of vague banker-lamp-lit and sink-down leather couch bedded academia, to offer two-thirds priced hard alcohol from 5PM until sunup, as denoted by the orange and yellow and hot pink and gelatin green colored printer paper signs tacked up about the telephone posts and solicitation boards and the windows of the less elitist of the campus fraternities.

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campo review ‘16 It was Friday evening, early, in room McCulloh 5B, and Edwin was rubbing into the space behind his ears the musky and surely over-priced cologne his brother had bought him and given to him when he’d been home on account of returning to Dublin for school and not wanting to pay the postage on a small bubble-wrapped brown package. Henry was sitting on the floor, struggling with straw and string in a vain attempt to copy in miniature size a Native American boat from instructions in a book; he wore a worn Cal Soccer t-shirt and a sweep of mild frustration across the mouth.

“You done already?” said Edwin, because it was 6PM and he and Henry were supposed to meet some of the other Ascot residents in the common room before heading to McNally’s.

“Hang on.” Henry was leaned over a large coffee-table book with glossy pages, the spine of which read “Rudimentary Basket-Weaving and Boat-Making, 15th anniversary edition.” He snapped a bit of paper-string with his teeth.

“Got the candies?”

“Sure.”

Henry snapped another bit of string with his teeth, affixed the end of a bundle of straw to another bundle and curved up the end. “You know,” he said, as he tied together the boat’s end, as he had similarly been saying throughout the evening, “what the Spanish said about the sea lions when they came here? Do you—” “C’mon.” Edwin picked up his wallet, shrugged a large back of caramel candies in yam or saffron colored cellophane wrappers. “We’re already late.”

“Pavement, Edwin. They said they looked like pavement there were so many of them.

Pavement all over the beaches. Have you ever heard of such abundance? Have you—” he was frantically tying the root ends of the boat.

“Yes.” Henry paused, looked up from the floor at Edwin.

“Seen Spencer Corrigan drinking Midleton.”

Henry stood indignantly with his little hand-sized straw boat. “I’m serious, Edwin.

There’s so much we don’t know, there’s so much—” pausing, momentarily. “I was talking to Ben, right? I told you that. I was talking to Ben across the couch—he was preparing a drink at the liquor cabinet behind the couch, along the back wall, you know—and you know what he did, Edwin? You know what? ‘What happens he said,’ after I’d been talking to him a while, ‘What happens, Hen, when the last speaker dies? Does the language go to the reeds? Do the sounds go to the dirt? If they tried to reclaim what they’d had would it be like that time we took the subway in for Moscow Mules at the Commodore and found the Commodore closed? Would it be like that day Spencer went to visit his brother at Choate and found his old ski henleys, his stupid cashmere scarf hung over his chair back and waited up all night, called people up through the morning just to find himself holding his brother’s scarf, kneading what little warmth was still in it, what little scent of Burberry Men’s remained and hearing him dead?’”

Edwin put his hand on Henry’s chest, unloading the cumbersome caramel suckers bag.

“You need to lighten up. You need a drink or something. A nap. One of those stupid coffee drinks you order that’s all sugar and vodka and hardly any coffee at—” “I mean, they’re just like us, Hen. Just like us and we don’t know hardly anything about them. Just like us.” Pulling on his baseball cap, shouldering a coat in a wondrous strain of frustration. “Sweat lodges like the places we all keep in Tahoe, jewelry meaning status just like that time I went to Tiffany’s with Lucy Wilmot and she was able to buy her weight in silver

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campo review ‘16 because she knew her worth, because she had on her car-keys a hand-embroidered white ‘Y’ for Yale—” “C’mon already.” Throwing open the door.

“An all-male society just exactly like Skull and Bones—” Edwin and Henry went down the corridor, down the stairs to the common room where was congregated mass of undergraduates about various seasons of dress. Some wore puffer-coats with hoods, others thermals, yet others loafers with thick white socks and bare legs; Spencer Corrigan wore a thick pale mauve or gray pullover sweater, Cal rugby shorts, a pair of particularly well-worn black flip flops and indecently clipped toenails. He had a laundrysoftened fifty dollar bill in his right pocket he was fingering, and had been fingering for twenty minutes or more, in waiting there; knit behind his left ear was a maraschino-red dyed craft-store feather which Henry, within five seconds of recognizing the shampoo smell, the extravagantly wide mouth of his old friend, understood as a kind of personal affront.

“Hey, asshole,” Edwin said to Spencer, wrapping him in a casual hug. Emerging from it he held out, with a large grin, the fifty dollars he’d extracted from his friend’s puffer-coat pocket.

“Funny,” said Spencer, grabbing back his money, taking a little tear in the bill’s pliable corner as he did, which fell the floor, a tiny triangle soon to be trod with anxious feet, a tiny triangle contrasted against the ugly maroon of the campus-issued hard carpeting.

Henry was standing, looking Spencer’s toes.

“What’s his problem?” said Spencer to Edwin.

“Thinks he’s reclaiming a culture or something. Things he can capture something everyone else neglected to; thinks the old transcripts are wrong and the old stories false. You know.” Smiling. “Usual Henry Scott bullshit.”

“Sure.” Laughing. “The usual Henry Scott.”

“The problem with that type of recording,” Henry spoke to Spencer’s unkempt, flip-flopclad toes, as though reading from a typescript or prompt, “is that the stories are not always complete due to translation differences where meaning can be easily misunderstood.”

“Chill, Hen,” said Spencer, “No one’s asking you for the historical play by play.”

“And no one’s asking you to be here,” said Henry.

“He been like this all week?”

“He just got home tonight. This afternoon,” said Edwin, considering. “I don’t know.

Guess we could call Ben and ask him.”

“And stories are stamped out that way,” said Henry, now looking at the McNally’s advertisement which someone had taped to a building support, “like the Williams Sonoma sugar cookies. The ones we made shittily that New Year’s and no one ate without scotch—” “Henry,” said Edwin, putting a large hand on his roomate’s rigid shoulder. “Hen. Calm down, alright? We’re going to calm down. Mellow night, Hen. Get you a drink.”

“Stamped out like bits of sugar cookie dough—” “Jesus, Hen.” Edwin clamped down on his shoulder, nodded at Spencer. “C’mon. Let’s go and set him down. Get a booth or something. Row of stools.”

“Sure.”

They went on over to McNally’s, a diminutive and somewhat dirty bar tucked between a bookstore and a trendy Asian fusion restaurant; it was filled with leather booths and leather club 23

campo review ‘16 chairs with brass tack-studded backs and had specials advertised in little stand up menus that sat in what looked to be cheaply or poorly laminated attempts at order; rows of green and clear and ice blue and sapphire and deep brown bottles monopolized the right side of the establishment; a half-extinguished green fluorescent shamrock sign buzzed tiredly in the left front window. The same pink and orange and green posters which had been tacked up around campus were tacked up around the front windows and the telephone posts outside, and inside was already a swath of undergraduates, dressed to varied degrees of formality, already congregated inside around a pool table of less than average appearance.

Edwin and Spencer deposited Henry at a stretch of booth bench, leaving him, as they went to order drinks, between an old Heinz ketchup container and a cup of pre-packaged metal silverware.

When the two men returned it was to the more slumped posture of their friend, channeling what was his palpable anxiety, his palpable circumstantial frustration, into a hideous attempt at weaving made with a white paper napkin. They set before him a drink, a cup of Irish coffee, to which he paid no attention.

“But they don’t hang photographs,” Henry was saying, still knitting his napkin and not any less to the other mahogany side of the booth than to either of his companions, “Maybe they’re less inclined to being recalled, the Ohlone. Maybe—” pausing, stricken, as though by a revelation of medium or large proportion, “There’s as much sacredness to submission as there is to the British language books they distributed, or to the masses sung in Spanish, the masses forced down their throats in Catalan—” 9PM found Edwin Murphy and Spencer Corrigan mildly wasted, Henry Scott mildly disturbed. Where the heat of the coffee had cooled, there was a little floating slice of what had been the heated surface; the room smelled like scotch and bourbon and of hard, cheap vodka.

One of Henry’s old professor’s, his history professor from freshman year, had spotted him across the room, across the pool table and the slow-moving, lucid mosh pit, across the beer glasses and bottles, and yet he did not so much as consider venturing across the five or six foot space to speak to him, to pull him from that stricken state in which he was submerged.

He thought Henry looked strange, though he looked handsome, worn though he was obviously clean, for he looked—less out of appearance than out of stance, out of that slumped posture of his over the table, that distant glare settled not on fluorescent Guinness sign or old vodka advertisements but somewhere more far off—reduced to one tenth the man he had been in his freshman history seminar, with a dead culture separating him from his surroundings, from the small-featured female classmate who kept tucking her hair behind her ears, looking at him, doe eyes, thin lips, rose gold dress and all the rest, and who took up instead with a dark haired and thin classmate, a tennis player, whose brown eyes had turned a kind of yellowish olive earlier, when a slash of sun had torn across his features at the bar.

An hour later, after Edwin and Spencer had carried Henry, that is mentally, and Henry had carried them about a manner, that is physically, back to the dorm house, Henry was standing in the grimy cinnamon toothpaste colored tiled stall of the Astor Residence shower, floor 5, watching the shower water matt the dark brown of his leg hair to his calves. Someone was beating on the general door to the bathroom, because he’d locked it, and this someone was yelling, too, though he couldn’t hear it. He heard only sounds through the plywood of the door, 24

campo review ‘16 through the white plastic of the shower curtain, through the years of comprehension which clouded his attention and thus distanced him from the present. He knew them words and yet he did not listen for their syllables, did not trace, as he so often had before, the Latin in their beginnings.

He was thinking of Edwin, of the wicker magazine rack in their room filled with Wall Street Journal Obituaries, how he had used to love that nature of Edwin’s, his intellectual curiosity, how he’d thought Edwin a Hemingway figure then, a kind of humble god, for having had the simultaneous wherewithal and immorality to have known where to pick life for its marrow, and to have been able to have done it—he’d highlighted them up, used them for names for his fiction, his editorials, extracted from them idiosyncratic hotel names, favorite summer spots, family artifacts, more or less noble traits and careers—how he hadn’t cared when the freshman class had brought his sexuality into question over the poem they all had admired as one admires a great thing done, because he’d respected Edwin about a simple, fraternal manner, but that was gone now, he was thinking, dead, and that he wasn’t going back to that place any sooner than it was coming back to him. He was thinking how he’d brought the miniature Ohlone boat with him, to McNally’s that night, to put out as a truce, an appeasement, with caramel suckers, for the time he’d nabbed a drink or two off the house, but how he’d forgotten, had let, about his disturbia, the boat fall from his hand somewhere along College Avenue. Outside a real estate agency or a bank. Something with columns.

He rubbed a bit of eucalyptus oil between his hands, over his forearms. As he did he was thinking how he’d bought it that past week at the Westchester Mall because it had seemed something they would have had, but that when he’d gone to the Origins store, where he had used to partake in great white mint gumballs from a case, it’d looked different from when he’d been before, because he had a real Barbour coat, because in looking at a thin woman’s legs in jeans he thought of Sloane Murphy, who he’d been with once, instead of something mundane or boyish, and that he wanted to go back, to go back forever, not only then to his boyhood but before, beyond, where he could pound the dirt and know its sound, where people didn’t discuss quantum over curry to get in favor, to get their names as interns or assistants on abstracts, but made balms from leaves and pots from clay.

He understood it had been lost, whatever it had been. He understood that even if he unearthed all the books, if he dug up all the great coffee table books out of all the great libraries of the world, if he went to all the old sites and laid his nose in the earth, it still would be lost to him. He knew that even if he found an old script, a bit of language or symbols which remained, nestled somewhere, the symbols, the words, the language would be incomprehensible, broken, smudged or watered out the way the digits on a paper napkin he had carried home from the Drake Hotel had been that night freshmen year they’d all gone in, had been in the morning, when he’d taken it off his bedside table to read them and found the numbers blurred together in a kind of cruel impressionism so that he was left only with a scrap of the hotel bar, the dark green paper napkin, the smell of leather booths and mahogany wood on his chest, the silver darting of her eyes, the cup of a masculine hand on a knee, as though the napkin itself had been a hallucination wrongly escaped a dream or mistake.

“Stamped out,” he said as he smelled the eucalyptus oil on his skin, as he watched the hair become matted to his calves, as he turned over in his mouth, as though a stick of gum, the 25

campo review ‘16 bit of redwood bark he’d pulled off a tree on the way to the bar, “like those stupid sugar cookies from Williams Sonoma.” As he stood, the shower water growing lukewarm on his back, listening to the pounding on the door, he tried to fit a different image to the pounding, to the words muddled through the plywood and the shower curtain and the beating of the water on his back and on the tile than that of the frustrated or drunken Astor House resident who surely stood, in flip flops and dark hair, too long in the front, or in an oversized sweater and tortoise shell wayfarers at night, on the other side.

He remembered how he had used to have had diversions in the dark, of the more wholesome kind, how in boyhood he had lied awake, feeling the black room around him, feeling the swirl of the cotton blanket and the sounds of his parents’ entertaining hanging from his back, making his own images to fit the sounds.

persistence by ruby lowe

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forests by adam frost-venrick I walked into the forest with the moon overhead.

When the earth was new, That thing was old as sin.

I’ve spent my life time walking.

But it begins and begins and begins.

Again.

And I stepped into the circle.

Where the snaked shed their skin.

They crawl in a circle, there.

Mouths open wide.

The more you think, the more they go.

Until they’re all inside.

And the world is not poetry.

The word if not that of God. Fire laps at your face, but the Ice is hard and dead and cold.

And I walk towards the fountain, The fountain of liquid gold.

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color hands by isabel owens

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two worst fears by tanya zhong I approached the front of the classroom as if it was the ledge of a cliff. My soft leather flats dragged on the linoleum floor, as if an unknown force was grabbing my shoulders and pushing me feet-first so that the heels of my sneakers tore up chunks of grass and dirt from the ground.

Turning around to face a room full of expectant, encouraging faces conjured images of the dark and disappointed shadows at the bottom of the cliff below. The inside of my stomach began to fold into itself, layers of vertigo churning together. The pounding of my heart echoed all the way down to my toes. I gripped the edges of the podium, the knuckles of my fingers clutching the last bit of rock on the ledge. Looking down one last time, I closed my eyes and began to speak, letting gravity carry me down the cliff-side and into the abyss.

watching by emma quimby

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expectation: a series by sierra warshawsky, model: kate ginley

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expectation: a series by sierra warshawsky, model: kate ginley

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expectation: a series by sierra warshawsky, model: kate ginley

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expectation: a series by sierra warshawsky, model: kate ginley

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image source: yelp.com

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contemporary jewish museum, san francisco, ca a trip by katie nunn

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virgin by katie nunn in response to the contemporary jewish museum A ring. A key. A photograph. Squinting, my mother appears before me. She is young, dark, intelligent. She smiles at her lover at the time, penetratingly.

I crouch out of the public storage compartment we rent, looking at my mother, thirty years, two children and a divorce later. Tired, holding a lukewarm coffee, she still looks broodingly intelligent. She gives the air of someone you just interrupted who was thinking, long and hard, about their own existentialism.

“Adara” my grandmother snaps at her from her wheelchair. “alhusul ealaa kamila lilmusaeadat fi hadha alquraf alqadim”.

I haul the box of my mother’s gifts to her in a trash can.

“Are you sure you do not want to be buried with this?” My mother responds, in smooth English. She holds up a copy of the Qu’aran, my grandmother’s first copy.

“No. I buy that is nicer”.

My grandmother is going to die. She has a week to live, at most. My mother, her dark circles under her eyes and knotted hair has been trying to take care of her, almost begrudgingly.

It is approaching 90 degrees in the Public Storage and my grandmother is dressed in a full niqab, when a covering only shows one’s eyes. Her gaze penetrates my mothers, who is dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, her hair pulled back in a slick ponytail, Ray-Bans sunglasses over her head.

My mother stares back, relentless.

I am wearing a Justice T-shirt, which I have begged my mother to get me for so long. It says: “Boys like Girls like me” with a pink English terrier wearing polka dotted sunglasses. A short skirt covers my rear, matching polka dotted pink. I am wearing a black hijab, that my grandmother gave me for Christmas. I have not worn it until today. A 90 degree June day in LA. Sweat poured down my back, my face, my ears. I felt like steamed broccoli. My grandmother looks at me disapprovingly, as if to say that I disappointed her by not acting up against my mother more. I should nag, as a 6-year-old, for her to dress me in a hijab. I shrunk against her glare.

“You are really throwing out my gifts to you?” My mother asks. Even as a young child, I can detect a pain in her voice. “I gave those to you when you were still living at home.”

By home she means Iraq. Convincing my grandmother to come to America was a long process. Even after the war started, she continued to stay, only leaving when my grandfather died, because she could not do anything once he died. She had no financial security, could not get remarried. My mother sent her things, gummy bears, laundry detergent, books that she could 38

campo review ‘16 not read, pajamas, rice, nice perfume. She sent her letters about her life in LA, what boy she was seeing, what her acting career looked like, how she prayed five times a day still. She wore the hijab. She made friends, and could spend money. Wouldn’t her mother be happy-proud?

She would not tell her mother about her abortion, or the man she married. When my mother was around 27 she fell in love with another actor, who’s only endearing quality was that he made a lot of money. My mother, a starving, Muslim women wearing a hijab, could not find much work as an actress. They feel in love quickly and married. When she found out he made money selling top-quality cocaine, she was already pregnant. Going against her faith, her beliefs, her homeland, and her mother, she aborted the fetus.

She would tell me this when I was 22, about to have an abortion of my own, when a condom failed with my long-term boyfriend at the time. She did not offer advice, simply the story. At the end, she told me that if I got this abortion, I would be free from my physical duties as a mother, but I would always carry the child with me, my uterus would become a grave for this child at times.

I did not know this at the age of six. About to throw away a cardboard box full of letters, photos and empty detergent bottles, my mother and grandmother looked at each other, like two gladiators ready to fight.

“Yes. I am surrounded by this shit all the time. I do not need some mementos from a long time ago. Kamilia, throw it out”.

I looked at my mother, wearing a stone like mask throughout this. I threw away the mementos thoughtlessly.

“Adara I will die in a week. You will no longer have an obligation to feed me, please me, take care of me. When I leave this earth, I can only hope that you serve God and you are happy serving God the way you do. I need only my Quran and my husband’s ashes with me when I go.

There is nothing left for me.”

“Not even Kamilia?”

My grandmother looks up, startled. She looks at me, and I feel again penetrated by her. I look back at her with my blue eyes, from my father, who is British.

“Kamilia will treasure what you have of home left inside of you, Adara. She is a mirror of you.”

Years later my mother would tell me how she cried when my she dropped my grandmother off from the public storage unit. It had started to rain, the heat burning the water.

She thought back to her dead child, to her name, meaning virgin. She was impure, tainted by America and their free culture.

The next day my grandmother died. My mother did not cry during the ceremony, and did not even wear the appropriate attire. She wore a beautiful pink dress, the color of sex, and sung to their hymns magnificently.

My mother discarded all traits of my grandmother’s presence from the house. She removed the pictures, and the hijabs. She decorated the house for Christmas that year.

Years later, when I was in my 40’s, I asked about her sudden shift, and she told me that in order to be herself fully, she needed to stop asking her mother for her approval. She inherited her 39

campo review ‘16 mother’s stubbornness, retaliating against her mother in death. I called my daughter Adara, not for virgin, but for her stubbornness.

image source: tripadvisor.com

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museum of the african diaspora, san francisco, ca a trip by tanya zhong 41

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of opulence and enigma by tanya zhong in response to the museum of the african diaspora She is a woman the city dwellers have only ever seen through their ears. Even the hanging displays of fabric seem to send whispers of her down the rows of tents as they sway in time with the movement of the crowd. The sun has just come up, and already, the air of the marketplace is ripe with gossip.

The standard speculation surrounding the Marchioness has long been relayed like an old coin passing from pocket to pocket. Even her title—Marchioness—is one that drips with layers of opulence and enigma. Among her many contrived histories, certain colorful reports stand out.

“Listen closely,” the townspeople say, asserting that her wealth was inherited from her late husband, a prominent European banker, had been absolutely smitten with her, even until the fateful day she smothered him with a silken pillow as he slept.

“Oh, no, no, that’s not it.” Her isolation, they say, is punishment imposed by her Nigerian aristocratic family for attempting to elope with a handsome young musician at one point in her youth.

Any old busybody knows these trite narratives of the inhabitant who lives in the pristine mansion tucked into the town’s periphery, but if one wishes to find fresh (albeit, still of questionable veracity) information regarding the Marchioness, they would seek out Amara.

“A pound of loose-leaf tea, half a dozen bottles of Parisian perfume, and a shiny, new mink fur coat today,” says Amara, the son of a merchant who does business in luxury goods. His lips stretch into a playful grin as he leans against his rusted pickup truck, relishing the way the crowd of people around him leans in to hear his every word.

“Amara!” A young woman grabs onto his arm, looking up at him sweetly. “You’re going this afternoon? Can you take me with you?” He shakes his head, patting her hand that rests on his arm.

“She doesn’t like people hanging around.”

“I want to see her! Tell me what she looks like,” she pouts, and Amara furrows his brows.

“Well... she’s very beautiful.”

“Everyone knows that. But is it true her gaze turns people to stone? That her voice cuts like a knife? And that her skin is the color of the night sky?”

Amara pauses.

“Of course not. Where did you hear such nonsense?” With that, he turns to climb inside his truck.

The dimming sky is projects a soft blush on the white pillars of the mansion by the time the roar of Amara’s truck comes into view. He cuts the engine, and at once lull of silence gives the house a quiet air of permanence.

As usual, a servant lets Amara into the foyer to drop off the packages, not wanting to leave expensive goods outside for the taking. Amara stands alone, soaking in the richness of the room, and something stirs inside of him. He drags his feet into the foreign landscape of intricate 43

campo review ‘16 textiles and porcelain vases. Satin curtains gloss from floor to ceiling, and without realizing it, Amara reaches out to touch the smooth material with a childlike wonder in his eyes. As he runs his fingers along the fine grain of the fabric, there is a thought that Amara can’t seem to shake from his mind: what does the Marchioness look like?

He steps away finally, parting from the curtains, and another object catches his attention.

He traces the elegant scroll carved into the door handle with his fingertip. Amara knows what’s behind the door but he can’t stop himself, and it swings open. A pair of eyes meet his own.

The Marchioness reclines in the center of the room with her legs crossed, as her lips purse into a callous line. The color of her skin is a striking obsidian against her all-white dress.

She peers at Amara through her horn-rimmed glasses with aloofness in her features in a way that makes Amara feel exposed. Her gaze, Amara notes, has not only turned him to stone, but paralyzed his soul.

Wordlessly, the two watch each other, until Amara bolts from his spot. His sudden burst of energy disturbs the quiet room, as the vases vibrate slightly with his heavy footsteps and the curtains swirl and sway as he skates by and out the front door. He can feel his heartbeat hammering in the soles of his feet by the time he reaches his truck, and the tires kick up dust as he speeds away, headed back to the marketplace.

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image source: dailyscandanavian.com

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museum of modern art, san francisco, ca a trip by alexandra reinecke

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skewed diplomacy from alexander calder by alexandra reinecke in response to the museum of modern art I had wanted to go to the Alexander Calder exhibit. To have derived some allencompassing and literarily significant statement about the act of balance. Moderation. I found myself, however, despite a visceral attraction to the simple baby blue, gray and primary red of the Calder room, maybe in a connection to the visceral association of those colors to the recent election, to derive of sitting there before them a different kind of balance, which was one which tended toward lopsidedness, toward unrest. Sitting on the bench in the Calder room, which was supposed to be a calm space, which was supposed to be a room appeasing in baby blue and primary red and all-lowercase letters, I instead found myself contemplating the shape of the last week, the respective arcs and mobiles of its particular constituents.

So, yes, sitting in the Calder room, where I should have derived an old memory of a blue puffer-coat at a stone barn, or the color of a firetruck beside a row of dark haired schoolchildren, I instead found, in a particular melding of two bits of his metal, the intersection of my resentment, a tiny, silver intersection of two metal rods posed in mid-air which instructed me to talk. At the direction of a Calder mobile, which I suppose, in having both mastered and pioneered that form of balance, must be an expert or a half expert on diplomacy, I’m telling you why I’m shaky. At the direction of a Calder mobile I’m filling a notebook with shapes, feeling responsible to tell you what I want, which is that: life is not defined by numbers, judgements, the difference between this grade and that.

This is what I have to say to you when you child-talk me, carrying your violin case and your presumptive smile, I am not sorry for my words, for my channeling of mind into one straw at neglect of another. This is what I have to say to you, to all who define their comprehensions in the meters of little gold men, scraps of ribbons: the world might not remember what we’ve done here, might discard my words, but there’s never been a man respected for his participation trophies, for manufactured blocks of stone carved to meter out task and name.

I am not stupid if I am slow to addition, hesitant to graph, nor am I tone-deaf if I can’t pick out the alphabet in your black box theatre pits. For every graph I know the slope of a poem, for black box music I have the sound of a tennis ball of a racket or legs through sheets or the first sputter of salmon skin against pan, which always comes out so gold. Your mother might have forced your mouth around digits, might have tucked multiplication charts in the backseat envelopes of the car, but my mother taught me more than the patterns and the way to combine numbers to make codes.

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campo review ‘16 This is what I have to say to you: my mother taught me the English language alongside dictionary images of animals in the zoo and pushed me not to record digits but to be in proximity to things that make the mind learn: the rocks under leaves by the puppet theatre in Central Park, the squeak of snow-down lobster and L.L. Bean snow boots, how to drink coffee without flinching and drain the milk out of life. This is what I have to say to you: you’re very good at being average, which is less than a lot. This is what I have to say to you: today we watched a movie in honors English in which a man draws out equations on the windows of Princeton, draws slopes and slants and boxes into fragments of glass, sits barefoot on radiators with being disrobed his socks, and I’ve a bet for you there, that you may have understood the numbers, the shapes, but you didn’t understand the words, which you never were taught.

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image source: californiabeaches.com

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deYoung museum, san francisco, ca a trip by brigitte jia

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frank stella a response to the deYoung museum by brigitte jia “There is nothing wrong with abstraction being liked outside the art world.”

—Frank Stella

In the greater portion of your young life, you have never really understood abstract art.

It’s not as meaningful as realism, and you get confused when there’s no focal point to a piece, when you’ve got nothing in your mental database to compare it to, when the colors clash or fade out into thin air or the lines simply don’t bend the way you want them to. Abstract art deals with concepts that you aren’t quite sure of, and the uncertainty of a piece alone turns you against it as a whole.

So, based on the above definition, you are against Frank Stella. The de Young proudly displays an entire wall-full of his squiggles and when you walk into the main building and see the giant mural hanging across the hall, you feel like the washed-out father character from The Man in the Ceiling. You love art, but surely this can hardly be considered art. You wonder, for a moment, if Frank Stella turned to abstraction because he couldn’t manage to turn out a proper portrait.

You’d like to make yourself believe that you’re open-minded about the different styles of art, however, and you buy a ticket to the Stella exhibit for ten dollars instead of marvelling at Central American art for the fiftieth time. When you make your way to the entrance, you notice that even the volunteer scanning your ticket looks bored. You clutch your bag and shuffle in.

east broadway, 1958 It’s black and muddy yellow, uneven stripes across a canvas that is twice your height.

The name “Broadway” inspires thoughts of light, feelings of excitement, reminiscence of song and dance---but the painting is somber and grey. Cutting into rotting mustard and bands of black is a pitch-black rectangle that seems closer to the doorway to Hell than rising red curtains. You think that perhaps the piece represents the emptiness behind the American Dream. The work’s aura of hopelessness hits you like a truck---it is the first emotion that pure abstraction has ever inspired within you! You take out your notepad and make note of the piece’s name and its date.

You keep walking.

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campo review ‘16 “There are two problems in painting,” you read, from a printed blurb of text. Apparently you are quoting Frank Stella himself. “One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting.” The statement leaves you ruminating about whether abstraction can say more about the real than realism as you tiptoe past other museum-goers who are trying to read it.

jill, 1959 You stop focusing solely on the lines of text printed on the walls, because they do not explain Jill in any way or form. De Young is forcing you to interpret Stella’s works and motives for yourself, and Jill refuses to be interpreted. The painting is layers and layers of ebony diamonds, and you simply cannot figure out why it is named Jill. You invent a sort of backstory for the work---perhaps Jill is Stella’s lover of the time period. Perhaps she is mysterious, like the painting that carries her name. Perhaps, like you, Stella could never decipher Jill. The painting is geometric, enigmatic, static, dynamic---all of those things at once. You snap a picture, intrigued.

The rest of the exhibit awaits you, but you linger for awhile in front of Jill.

copper, 1961 You’re looking at a giant picture frame.

Well, the corner of one, anyway. The edges have been cut off so that the piece resembles a large, sharply assembled ‘L’. You would probably injure yourself if you attempted to fit a picture into a frame formed as stiffly as that one.

It’s coated with metallic bronze paint. Gone are the uneven stripes of the 1950s---Stella has transitioned to perfect lines and crisp angles. You’re amazed at the change in style. You begin to pay more attention to the years noted next to each work’s title. There might be a timeline to this artist’s madness.

effingham II, 1966 You keep shuffling down the exhibit halls. There are more people here than you thought there would be. You see a little boy and his parents, the tiny human being enthusiastically jumping about amidst the strange twists and turns of abstraction. He is quite ebullient---does he understand Stella’s message? Or is he amused by the insanity of lines and lines of paint?

Anyway, there is a giant neon logo in front of you.

The mid-1960s have brought Nike to Stella---and you don’t see the Greek goddess anywhere. What is going on? Effingham II leaves you confused, but it’s a nice sort of confused.

You’re not afraid of it, just incredibly curious. The colors are so vivid, they’re almost blinding.

You make a note of the year in your notes and wonder if Stella legitimately designed logos in the sixties.

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damascus gate, 1970 kamionka strumiłowa, 1972 jarmolince III, 1973 You weave through a brief selection of nature-inspired works and a neat, threedimensional piece that incorporates different cloth textures into its aesthetic. The velvet looks so soft that you wish you could reach over the marked line and stroke it. You note that Jarmolince III forms a leaf shape in various shades of forest green, and Damascus Gate reminds you of a colossal wooden wing. It is quite nice.

You’re beginning to understand Frank Stella and his evolving artistic method. You feel at peace with yourself and with abstraction in general; the works surrounding you now are quite aesthetically pleasing and have color schemes that work very well with one another. It is still all a bit confusing, but you’ve really begun to enjoy yourself.

talladega, 1980 The next room is right around the corner and you’re excited to see how Stella will utilize lines and geometry in the eighties. More vibrant colors, perhaps some works inspired by other details of the natural world--COMPLETE AND UTTER CHAOS ENSUES. There are no cleanly-cut edges, solid colors have escaped the canvas, and discord reigns over the piece. What has happened? You are at a loss for thoughts (if you could be at a loss for words in the quiet of the de Young, you would be. If you could be yelling in complete bemusement in the quiet of the de Young, you would be) and you scramble to locate the two to three straight lines that are visible from your angle. It is as if Frank Stella has broken up with his significant other, or lost his life purpose; even the wire framing that supports the threedimensional painting is jagged and reminds you of nothing but metal teeth.

So much for your understanding of abstraction. You’re lost again. But the piece kindles interest within you, about the motive behind it---is Stella protesting an ideal? What has caused him to turn his back on razor-sharp lines and solid shapes? You shake off your initial wariness of this new method of painting and propel yourself forward, deeper into the exhibit.

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indian bird maquette, 1977 De Young has arranged the pieces so that the 1977 work follows Talladega. Perhaps they’ve done so in order to push forth Stella’s delving into the insanity that is the sculpture-like painting’s descendent, and, although it doesn’t provide you with a concrete motive for Talladega, Indian Bird Maquette is made from recycled soda cans (root beer! the cultural invasion brought to India by the U.S. and globalization! the wreckage brought by industrializing!) and waste material. It is streaked and speckled with rust. You think it might be a protest against capitalism. You think Talladega might be full-blown anarchy.

Google is a handy resource in times like these. You search for the definition of ‘maquette’ in the browser and pull up the phrase ‘preliminary sketch’. Preliminary sketch of which completed work? Is the piece nothing but a conglomeration of ideas? A coagulation of flowing creativity into paint on metal? You are, once again, thoroughly confused. You come to the conclusion that confusion is linked intrinsically with Stella’s works, and you suppose you’ll just have to come to terms with your lack of knowledge of the artist’s motives.

Journeying through the late seventies and eighties hasn’t allowed you to slow down and pull conclusions from everything you’ve seen. You realize suddenly that Stella’s works have inspired stronger emotions and reactions within you than many of the realism-based paintings you’ve seen at the Louvre and the British Museum. You are amazed by this, and also a bit irritated---you’ve been swayed by mere shapes and colors (or lack thereof, in certain cases) and you think that may expose you as a shallow individual. But perhaps that was Stella’s intention in the first place. Perhaps that’s what makes him an artist of immeasurable skill. Your footsteps are soft, as soft as your thoughts are not, and you drift in such a fashion towards the final set of exhibit rooms.

the grand armada, 1989 “I cannot, for the life of me, figure out whether he’s sculpting or painting,” you hear a viewer exclaim from across the room. You find an inscription on the whitewashed walls that gives a semi-concrete answer.

“The crisis of abstraction followed from its having become mired in the sense of its own materiality,” Stella states, “the sense that the materials of painting could and should dictate its nature. That’s not enough, and the belief that it was was killing painting.”

Hence, you find, The Grand Armada’s sculpture-like state. Thin sheets of what appears to be a sort of metal from your angle are bent into curves and smooth parabolas, coupled with rounded edges, coated with titanium white and peaceful shades of the color spectrum. Stella, you think, has made another abrupt about-face and returned to pure aesthetics; for a work titled in a way that makes one think of war and destruction, The Grand Armada is visually pleasing to a fault. The entire painting is one breaking wave, tinted with dots of crimson, patches of sun, strings of the closest thing abstraction has to kelp. You stare at the metal for a long time before someone standing behind you coughs politely and you are forced to tear your eyes away from it.

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redjang, 2009 You don’t know what to make of modern China.

Your parents are from the mainland; they arrived in Canada at the turn of the century and had you in British Columbia. When you do your history homework you are torn between identifying with Chinese-American history and admonishing yourself due to your status as the child of members of the New Wave---Dad is a software engineer and Mom used to manage entire bank branches. You are taught in World History that the new Middle Country is hideously devoid of rights, but your cousins back home are getting married and earning six figures and studying abroad at Johns Hopkins. Modern China and the implications your background has on you as an individual are as confusing as abstraction itself.

And because you have figured out neither, you can’t possibly figure out what to do with Redjang. Redjang is stiff acrylic that Stella has molded into crimson cloth ripples. Redjang is oilcloth and synthetic plastic rain poncho, torn apart by the set of jagged metal teeth that rests beneath the textiles. Redjang is modern China in abstraction, to the highest degree of reality. You are emotionally moved by your interpretation of the piece, and you wonder if you understand the piece. You wonder if Redjang is meant to inspire any emotion at all.

(You search ‘redjang’ in Google, afterwards. You pull up the phrase ‘an Indonesian people of Southern Sumatra’. There is no mention of modern China anywhere. You are an emotional wreck and thoroughly confused.)

circus of pure feeling for malevich, 2009 You’re almost to the end of the exhibit, and you’ve yet to see something quite like this.

You’ve walked by a single set of miniatures from Stella’s mid-twentieth-century painting era, and there have been no encounters with works smaller than twice your size thus far. You mistake the name card of Circus of Pure Feeling for Malevich for another work at first. After all, circuses are colossal and excited, filled with fanfare and elephants and the like. A small circus is hardly a circus at all. A dreary clown-showing, perhaps, but nothing to crow about.

You are absolutely and incredibly wrong.

The sixteen miniature sculptures are arranged across simple wood grain display tables that span the width of the exhibit room. They are dainty spools and threads of metal, bits and pieces circling around and through one another to create delicate, web-like apparatuses that are no larger than your head. On each web are a few well-placed plastic blossoms and intricacies.

You read an inscription that tells you about Stella’s utilization of the 3D printer to form these buds---technological blooms built on miniatures of steel giants. You marvel at these scaled-down models of human development, mouth hung open. You feel like a bull in a china shop. You feel like the damn china in a china shop. Once again, abstraction confuses you, and you are strangely alright with the feeling.

You, however, have only been considering you during the exhibit. Circus is observed by many others, and you strike up a conversation with another museum-goer. He does not see flowers, he sees automobile parts, bike wheels, Rube Goldberg machines---miniature cogs to a disjointed machine. You reason that the difference in ages, perhaps, or the difference in lives, accounts for the disparity of your thought paths. His method of ponderance does not come 57

campo review ‘16 intuitively to you, but you can see it all the same once he relays his view to you. You make a note of the encounter in your notepad. The exit is to your left.

frank stella: a retrospective It is a fifty-dollar, brand-new hardcover book. You are but a young thing and you do not have fifty dollars of your parents’ earnings at your disposal. You ogle the book for a good fifteen minutes, though, until the clerk behind the glass counters at the gift store begins to shoot you strange looks and you feel obliged to convince her of your lacking even the thought of stealing A Retrospective. You remember that material goods cannot be looked upon with the same sort of gaze as works of art. A cheaper memento is available in the form of a glossy postcard with Jill printed on the front.

So you end up taking home a bit of enigma, the bit of Stella’s interpretation that you will never be able to receive, because, as with man you encountered by Circus of Pure Feeling for Malevich, you will never live the same life. But you know now that there is infinite realism within the abstract, and you have gained a new respect for an artist’s ability to stir emotions within a viewer’s soul with mere shapes and colors. You come to the conclusion that Stella’s abstract art is, on the most basic level, representative of a human individual in its little complexities and its larger disparities. You are confused, appreciative, intrigued. You are abstraction.

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image source: berkeley campus energy portal

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lawrence hall of science, oakland, ca a trip by fiona deane-grundman

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in common by fiona deane-grundman in response to the lawrence hall of science While this year’s election seems to dominate the political and cultural sphere, I can't count the times I’ve been told to “get over it,” “stop talking about it,” or my personal favorite, “give him a chance.” While it remains difficult to keep my mind off the fact that my political, reproductive,and human rights are being restricted more and more every day or imagine a foreseeable end to the colossal damage Donald Trump has done to the political system and national public, I do take the opportunities I get to take my mind off both the sorry state of the nation and my own stressful and intense junior year, which has left me frazzled and frankly, not as well-rested or adjusted as I would prefer.

A few weekends ago I headed to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, a childhood favorite and center of scientific inquiry and hands-on exploration in Golden Gate Park.

I often take the opportunity to escape the “Lamorinda bubble” to instead experience the “Bay Area bubble,” which I believe is less aptly named because the lack of diversity, culture, and acceptance of social progress is so pertinent in Moraga. Here, I see a sea of different faces of men, women, and people. Gender is less dividing, and less defining. Race is less immediately noticeable, because it is not a sea of white faces. A man and his partner kiss on the muni bus. A woman’s shirt reads “no uterus, no problem.” People of vastly different socioeconomic classes mingle on public transportation.

This city has its flaws, a major one being that in one block you go from the posh and bourgeois Bloomingdale’s to a sidewalk with a disenfranchised homeless woman and her young child who need far more than the measly five dollars they request: healthcare, housing, dental, education, and stable employment. However, Lamorinda residents aren’t absolved from blame for the poverty that plagues San Francisco. They are simply removed from it. Despite it’s flaws, this city is instantly preferable to me than my clean, quiet, and wealthy hometown: it represents the diversity that enriches America and the blending of cultures that is necessary to unify and strengthen our broken country. Divided and damaged by racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and just plain fear, we attract and seek out those who look and think like we do, but in a major metropolitan like San Francisco, you are exposed to the often marginalized minority cultures that usually lead movements for social change, a la Malcom X, Shirley Chisholm, and Harvey Milk.

At the science museum, in the heart of Golden Gate Park, I watched mothers teaching their daughters about fossils and geology and witnessed a young father chasing his son in the courtyard. The most the individuals who were also attending the museum had in common was 62

campo review ‘16 our love for science, which was good enough for me. We didn’t all look the same. We didn’t think the same, or share the same stories.

On the living roof of the museum, I looked out across the beautiful city, from Potrero Hill, to the mission district, to downtown, thinking about the many individuals who call it home, bringing with them their history, heritage, and story to contribute to the beautiful cultural mosaic that is San Francisco, damaged by class and issues such as poverty and gentrification but enlivened by diversity.

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metropolitan museum of art, new york, ny a trip by elena koshkin

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sunflower by elena koshkin in response to the metropolitan museum of art Did you know that your laughter is contagious But your temper frightens Like a scorpion stepped on unwittingly?

That your beauty is like a sunflower Whose petals are singed by the sun You start your life anew each week And with a blank canvas Your joy seems to peak As you color it with light And pour your love into the untouched white But soon your ambition turns to rust And you poison your painting with rage, Tear it until it’s damaged and bleeding Destroy it till the sunflower wilts Leaving nothing but the smoke from Your extinguished flame of life, Which burned too bright for you to manage.

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