AT WILL
The At Will Team Project Manager: Mathilda Christensson Editor of Written Content: Sheridan Wilbur Layout Designer: Carina Tracy Fashion Director: Gabby Paul Creative Directors: Mika Deshmukh and Gea Bozzi Photoshoot Editor: Kayla Carlisle
Creators Mary Zhang, illustrator Jasmine Lu, illustrator Sheridan Wilbur, prose Jake McCarthy, chef Simon White, singer, songwriter Hannah Yehudah, photographer Mika Deshmukh, prose Gea Bozzi, photographer Sydney Smith, painter Alice Dai, fashion creator Jasmin Jin, poet Lola Sanchez-Carrion, prose, photographer Beryl Baldwin, painter Lydia Hendrick, photographer Rachel Lamparelli, painter Josh Neuhaus, producer Kalif Jeremiah, musician Lucas Tishler, musician Nic Wainwright, photographer Shailen Parmar, illustrator
Interviews Mary Zhang and Jasmine Lu: An Early Creative Path By Margot Hasty Simon White: Sound Sounds By Francesca Maglione Sydney Smith: Leaving a Watermark By Margot Hasty Rachel Lamparelli: On the Surface By Kat Tiscornia Josh Neuhaus: Striking a New Note By Susan Yun Shailen Parmar: Art as Meditation By Sheridan Wilbur
Mathilda Christensson
When we set out to create a second issue within our “awareness” series, we wanted to provide a platform to showcase the creative talents across Duke students, and provide them with an opportunity for ample exposure to our student body. Throughout this magazine, we encounter all types of creatives, from makeup artists to painters, to poets, to creative writers, and graphic designers. As a team, we sought not only to show off their skills, but also to highlight that these students utilize their mediums of creativity to achieve a space of relaxation, a mental getaway from their daily Duke schedules. What we learnt is that these students create for themselves, without the primary motive of fabricating for a tangible, “productive” outcome. Their activities in creative innovation are to escape, have fun, and explore an avenue for expression. As college students, we are challenged by an ever-present noise of to-dos actively demanding our attention on a dayby-day basis. With this, it becomes difficult to reach a long-lasting state of single-minded absorption. We are more inclined to skim the surface across our tasks and flit between them, consistently multi-tasking. In the time that you have read this, maybe you have had an email fly across your screen, a text pop up on your phone, or a buzz for a news alert. No longer are we really able to be solely focused in one act. This magazine tries to emphasize the value of breaking away and slowing down, and investing time in the art of passing time rather than spending it. We hope that you learn from our second awareness issue that adventuring into the realms of creativity is an opportunity to attend to yourself at your own will.
Project Manager, Mathilda Christensson
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I know perfectly well that only in happy instants am I lucky enough to lose myself in my work. The painterpoet feels that his true immutable essence comes from that invisible realm that offers him an image of eternal reality.... I feel that I do not exist in time, but that time exists in me. I can also realize that it is not given to me to solve the mystery of art in an absolute fashion. Nonetheless, I am almost brought to believe that I am about to get my hands on the divine.
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— Carlo Carra, The Quadrant of the Spirit
Mary Zhang and Jasmine Lu: An Early Creative Path Artwork Collaboration by Mary Zhang and Jasmine Lu Written by Margot Hasty Photography by Mathilda Christensson
Mary and Jasmine have a friendship that is tied by a rare thread: the love and practice of art stemming from childhood. Their artistic identity was fostered firstly by their fathers. Mary’s father, a lover of film who valued art, lovingly conned his daughter into practicing and developing her innate talent. Mary laughingly recounts how her father tricked her into practicing sketching, “when Heelys were in, my Dad told me that if I wanted a pair I’d have to buy them myself. A good drawing was $1, an O.K. one was 75 cents and a mediocre one was 50 or 25 cents. In a month and a half I had a stack of sketches. At the end of it I had $50 and bought my own Heelys.” Mary reflects on how she always spent time with her father in art museums. Art became a thread tying them together despite the passage of time. Like Mary, art is also a thread tying Jasmine to her father throughout the years: “my Dad is very floaty—that’s the way I describe him. He loves all that stuff and that’s how we have connected over the years.” Mary recounts with a soft smile how her father, an architect by training, used to try and teach her how to draw as a baby. Art has become a central thread in their lives— tying them to the people they love most.
Art has also become a personal thread of theirs tying together their personal past with their present identity. Jasmine talks about her blog, the one that she has had since she was 15, “I’ll write or re-blog things that I find interesting. It’s something that keeps me somewhat creative... It’s meaningful to me. It’s how my identity has shifted and grown. You see the flashes of who you are now.” The blog has become a beautiful meditation on the evolution of her very self. While art serves as a mirror of introspection to Jasmine, art is a kind of reflection of reality to Mary, “all you see is based on other pictures or observation. One day inspiration hit. I just realized how much I look in the mirror and my perception of myself in the mirror.” That emotion is what led her to create a piece of art.
For both Mary and Jasmine, art ties them to their own respective realities and their experience of it. However, both argue that art must be anchored in the objective life that resulted in the experience that created their art: “you have to give context to art. Otherwise it’s a floating piece of feeling with nothing to anchor it.” Art has become an inescapable and sometimes irreconcilable part of their identity. Both Mary and Jasmine feel that being artistic is a fundamental aspect of their personality but express concern at the little time they had for art while attending Duke. Jasmine discusses how the environment at Duke made identifying as an artist carry a judgment, “I feel inadequate if I identify myself as an artist.” The attitude around art and creative fields made their artistic identity secondary. “I feel like I can’t fully call myself an artist. Even though it’s a big part of our identity, it’s on the side.” They articulated that they were excited to leave Duke so as to have the freedom to explore their artistry and to re-integrate their artistic identity. Looking at the love they have for their art, there is little doubt that they will accomplish precisely that.
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All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated… When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. – Virginia Lighthouse
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War Against Time is now currency: it “ Time is not passed but spent ” Written by Sheridan Wilbur
It’s something that I don’t think about, and simultaneously do. It explicitly organizes my life through my calendar’s daily schedule and by the less glaring visual on the right hand corner of my laptop screen. I’m reminded of it every time I unlock my iPhone or glance down at my wrist, and it plagues my mind while I’m in class and hear the rhythmic hum of an analog clock. It beeps at me while I wait for my morning oatmeal from the microwave, and demands to be acknowledged at all moments of the day — all knowing, omnipresent, and ever-ticking is Time. Often, I forget about Time, but it creeps up in more subtle ways and manifests in the background as anxiety, anticipation, stress or dread. Sneaking in through the backdoor, Time infiltrates the room when I’m not looking, and forces me to think about how much homework I have to do or glance down at my to-do list when I need to sit still. Time’s three digits aren’t always visible, but I know it’s still there. Lurking in the corner, Time disperses existential fear of the future, nostalgia for the past, short term excitement for next week or ruminations on yesterday’s gossip — all in lethal doses.
My shoulder devil is loaded with ammunition, and never misses a chance to strike and steal the moment in front of me. Time replaces Presence with Tasks and Duties, and leaves me with an embedded sense of urgency that something must get done. I find myself with little room for leisure and no clear distinction between work and life under the hands of the clock. It’s a demanding system to live under 24/7, but other workers offer me Adderall, coffee and energy drinks to combat my symptoms. Yet stimulants don’t defeat Time for long, and I remain victim to being busy, distracted, and naturalized to constant work and fatigue. But it wasn’t always a war against Time. Our notion of time seems so embedded in the system, that it’s hard to think of life without it, yet temporality wasn’t always so rigid and standardized. We kept Time in intermittent doses and knew when we were off the clock. Working along the rhythm of nature, farmers dictated their days by the labor finished on the field, and fishermen estimated time by the rolls of the tide. Time used to pass, and now, Time is spent.
Color-coded calendars, alarm clocks and stopwatches. I’ve tried to grab hold of time through numerical data, photographs and dialog clocks, but the reality is time is just a fleeting idea. I’m guilty of attaching my sense of time to these external benchmarks, but Duke makes this accident easy. Our culture of busyness, competition, and ambition requires a jampacked schedule, and has become a way to connect with other students. It comes at no surprise when we’ve been trained since elementary school to continue until the bell rings, but at Duke… the bell never rings. There is always more that could be done. However, this environment creates a scarcity mindset. It leads me to think I’m running out of time, and simultaneously hyper focus on that one thing. It feels as though I never have enough time for things I want to accomplish and explore because Time’s gnawing presence is impossible to escape. I fill my day at Duke with ‘worthwhile’ activities outside of class, like sports practice, FLUNCHes, social events and guest lectures, and it’s preparing me really well for maximizing opportunities. But have I become so busy planning for the next job interview and attending networking events that in between the activities for later, there’s little room for exploration, play, wonder and spontaneity now?
Students, like myself, can use Time as the greatest excuse to miss what can’t be planned, in favor for what is already on the calendar. We’ve adopted a utilitarian attitude, embracing the culture of ‘the grind,’ dreaming big and focusing on our goals to get there. But in the meantime, we obsessively plan and chronically put off pursuing perceived meager moments today, for our greatest aspirations in a few years. We live with the hope that “the future will somehow provide a more favorable backdrop,” yet forget how we’re living to get there. What about the moments that can’t be planned, that come without any return on investment? The ones that can’t be judged for productivity and efficiency because we’re too busy participating in it? Aristotle tried to answer “the main question, with what activity one’s leisure is filled” thousands of years ago, but we’re still trying to balance work and play today. It would be easy to point fingers at Duke and blame the culture of ‘effortless perfection’ or persistent competition keeping us from living, but how to spend leisure time can’t be taught in the classroom. Our lifestyle can’t be dismissed by our abused cliché, “work hard, play hard.” Rather, a lesson on how to live is a lesson we need to teach ourselves, at will. Ben Franklin once said “time is money,” and if that’s the case, we’re bankrupt. We’ve spent so much time hung up on the future and ruminating on the past, that we’ve been deceived by Time’s value and are left feeling the effects of its short supply. Drugs, sex and money are common anarchists to suspend Time, but they can’t permanently defeat the battle for the present moment. Instead, Creativity is my first line of defense. I’m off the clock when I get to make stuff. I escape by becoming fully submerged in writing, poetry, painting or photography, and forget about where I just came from, and where I need to be. I have a place to explore, rather than rush, and expand, rather than finish.
After I get over my instinct to ‘be productive,’ I’m no longer focused on the outcome of my art, or even if it turns out well. I’m relieved with a sense of freedom to be imperfect. It doesn’t matter if my poems are saturated in teen angst or if my photos have too much exposure because it’s not to show anyone, make money or put on my resume. All that matters is that I enjoy doing it. There’s something kind of liberating in the emptiness of meaning, and allows me to make something better than I would have with the weight of judgment, the need for external validation, or with goals for the future. In the beauty and activity of creativity, I’m free from the wrath of Time, and it’s restricting instincts for productivity, efficiency and perfection. Artistic endeavors are my first solution but they aren’t the only way to end the War. “Life is long if we know how to use it” and I use Time well when I expand my awareness to the moment I’m in, rather than the moment that just left or the moment coming up. I put the stimulants down when I replace busyness with presence and can skip my afternoon Americano. Time is weakened when I let go of expectancy or nostalgia, and in return, can enjoy experiences of today. I refuse to be Time’s victim and show up to obligations… becoming absent from myself by mistaking all the doing, for being. I’m losing sight of a rigid schedule, the pursuit of an A, social recognition, or ‘doing stuff just to get it done’ and ending this war against Time. I’m left with the moment right in front of me… and that is infinitely more rewarding.
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How amazing was this ability to achieve plenty by achieving little, to go home emptyhanded yet still satisfied at the end of the day!
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– Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul
Satisfying the Appetite to Create with Jake McCarthy Giacomo, Jake, McCarthy is an aspiring Middle Eastern studies Duke junior with an intense passion for cooking. Gaining knowledge of different cuisines in a hands-on kitchen in high school, he continued to expand his love for the culinary arts over the years and he never makes a dish twice.
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You’re always going to lose it! It’s always in time! Nothing that is in time is going to pass away Lay not up your treasures Where moth and rust doth corrupt That’s the trap of time As long as you want anything in time It’s going to pass Because time passes
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- Ram Dass, Be Here Now
Simon White: Sound Sounds Written by Francesca Maglione Edited by Sheridan Wilbur Photography by Hannah Yehudah
How did you start your music journey? Were there any influences growing up that led you to be musically inclined? My family is not musically talented but growing up I played the recorder and did chorus. The recorder is just a solid party trick now. But I’ve been making my own music since high school. I started by making raps on GarageBand for my friends and put them on Soundcloud as a joke, and it sort of proliferated and got more and more serious and less of a joke. Do you ever struggle with identifying as an artist, while simultaneously being a Pre-Med student? Do you feel like those passions conflict? It’s conflicting in terms of timing and scheduling. I run into problems where I have to prioritize one over the other, like school over being creative. But in terms of who and what I want to be in my life, I have a very set ideal path that involves both. I don’t want to jinx it, but in an ideal world, I’ll be famous and still go to med school. I want to be a doctor but music is my passion and I’m going to keep doing it as long as I can. I really find the whole writing process crazy. Do you just have moments of inspiration and then start writing something down? Honestly, that’s exactly what it is. I was just sitting in my apartment and playing on my computer when I came up with my first single, “Know Your Name.” I thought of ‘da da da da da’ and just came up with the chorus from there and went to the studio the next day. It’s usually a moment of inspiration like that, but if I don’t have a sudden light bulb, I’ll sit by the piano and something might come. Do you always write your own songs? Yeah. It’s always just me for the writing process. I would write stuff and then put it into a song in high school, but now, I play the piano first. I’m not really good at piano but I can play cords. I’ll build the beat and come up with the words later. Most of my songs are pseudo-love songs, but it’s usually just about whatever I’m feeling at the moment.
Do you find that you write songs usually about people, or about emotion and experience? Both. Sometimes my music is about a person, but there’s only a certain amount of people in my life and if I wrote a song about someone I know, they would know. So I try to keep it experience based. What is the weirdest experience you’ve ever had in the studio? I guess something that’s kind of strange is we’ll have shirtless sessions in the studio. We just all go shirtless and crank up the heat to get creative juices flowing. It’s a blast. Ethan [Simon’s manager, joins the conversation]: My favorite time was when Simon and I were hanging out and started free styling right on the spot. I set my phone up to record it, and we kept going. I entered a new beat and our friend Wilson, the producer at the time, came in and grabbed one of those egg shakers and stood in front of the camera. He was clearly feeling it too. It was so cool to see everything flow together and ended perfectly casual when I turned off the camera. It was one of the coolest things and why I’m so lucky to be working with Simon. There’s so much creativity flowing out all the time, and I’m always introduced to something new and exciting.
Does the relationship to your songs change the more you sing them? Yeah, definitely. It’s interesting because I’ll make a song and have it for two to three months before anyone hears it, so by the time I release it, I’m pretty much done listening to it. It’s not that I dislike them, but I need to work on other stuff and get tired of them after the moment. I think that happens to anyone who makes music. But I still play it on silent at night to boost the play count… obviously. Do you feel that making music provides a place for relaxation and complete absorption? Absolutely. If I can say anything, it’s that my Duke experience would’ve been so different if I didn’t take the chance to do music in the way that I have. Making music is my number one stress reliever to deal with emotions. And more so, I just wanna rock, and kick back and hang out. Making music is a solid pass time for that.
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How are we to know that the mind has become concentrated? Because the idea of time will vanish. The more time passes unnoticed the more concentrated we are . . . All time will have the tendency to come and stand in the one present.
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- Swami Vivekananda, Raja Yoga
Creating as a Perfectionist Written by Mika Deshmukh Photography by Mika Deshmukh Until two years ago, I didn’t think I could “be creative.” In my head, creativity was a kind of innate ability— you either had it or you didn’t. I was convinced I didn’t have it. Art class was my “bad subject” in elementary and middle school. I always ran behind my classmates, and ended up disappointed with how my projects turned out and discouraged by the “bad grades” I got. I didn’t know that there were creative outlets besides watercolor painting, sketching, and ceramics. I didn’t realize that my writing and scrapbook collages were a creative in themselves. In case you don’t know me, I’m a serial perfectionist. At its worst, my perfectionism takes control of me, and at its best, is an irritating voice in the back of my head telling me I’ll never be good enough. As a perfectionist, it’s really hard for me to let the details of projects go, to diverge from the plan, to try new things. Growing up, I agonized over even the simplest homework assignments and pushed myself to improve, improve, improve, never content with being average. I feel like my perfectionism often gets in the way when I want to try new things or follow my gut instincts. My perfectionism is why for the longest time, I thought I couldn’t create and express myself through artistic mediums. I used my elementary school art teacher’s criticism of my inability to cut in a straight line and my lack of formal artistic experience as a basis for this.
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Creativity doesn’t have to be purposeful. Not everything we do has to be published, submitted for a competition, or even shown to others.
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If I wasn’t going to make something “good,” if I wasn’t going to be the best (or even average), why bother? It was only at Duke, when I found myself gravitating towards people that valued creativity, that I realized I wanted to try to create. Using perfection and achievement and grades and all that bullshit as benchmarks for my pursuits makes the prospect of creating something absolutely terrifying. When I took a short audio documentary course, the idea of editing together audio into a piece made me anxious. I had never worked with audio documentary before and felt like there was so much that could go wrong, namely that my work would fall flat and not be “a success.” When I set out to make a zine last semester, it took me so long to get started because I was scared that the final product wouldn’t live up to my expectations. These sorts of fears always contest my desire to create; working with new, different mediums and accepting imperfection is intimidating. I know I’m not alone in this feeling and my perfectionism. At Duke, we’re conditioned to want to be the best of the best, to achieve more, and to maximize our four years here. There’s a feeling that everything we do must be productive and directed. I think this mentality prevents most of us from exploring creative pursuits and new ways to express ourselves. Creativity doesn’t have to be purposeful. Not everything we do has to be published, submitted for a competition, or even shown to others. Above all, it’s more than okay to create knowing that your drawing, painting, music, dance, whatever it is, is most certainly not the best. It may even be far from the best—dare I say the worst—and that’s okay, too. While jumping into a creative endeavor scares me and often does not turn out how I had planned, I’ve never regretted it. Achievement and improvement be damned, every project has been a chance to explore my surroundings, to see myself in a new light, and to end up with a work that I can call my own.
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But that’s where I am, there’s no escaping it. Time’s a trap, I’m caught in it.
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Margaret Atwood, Handmaid’s Tale
The
Durham in Detail
Photography by Gea Bozzi
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Time is a fixed income and, as with any income, the real problem facing most of us is how to live successfully within our daily allotment. - Margaret B. Johnstone
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Leaving a Watermark Art by Sydney Smith Written by Margot Hasty
Sydney Smith is a [now graduated] Duke senior known for her lyrical and delicate watercolors. She picked up painting in late middle-school, the outcome of an artistic curiosity characterizing her childhood. Starting out with the acrylic paints available in her middle and high school classes, she soon discovered she loved watercolor. The medium’s movement and workability sparked her proclivity for the paints and a love for art that has left an indelible mark on her identity as an artist. Her artistic expression and identity is, in part, owed to the encouragement that her parents provided,
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I was encouraged to paint, create or express myself in any way.
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Smith’s artistic process is all-consuming, “it’s hard to stop once you start. I don’t want to do anything else.” She says that it’s a kind of meditative practice that calms her but requires mental preparation due to the intensity of focus her art requires. Part of her preparation involves finding figures and inspiration on the Internet. Her favorites include Ivan Schiele and Edgar Degas’ smaller figure sketches. The human figure—particularly the female figure, captivates Smith’s inspiration. “I’m automatically drawn to female figures, I think they are really beautiful.”
While Smith loves the practice, she finds it hard to dedicate enough time to her art. Smith found her time at Duke made her change her relationship to time. Her peers had a pre-professional mindset. Such a mindset made the prevailing attitude around time one where time should be dedicated to pursuing extracurriculars and activities that fit into one’s future profession. Taking time to pursue art, purely for the sake of the creative passion, came to feel wrong—useless even.
Smith states that the sentiment probably arose, in part, from a lack of import the arts have at Duke: “Art isn’t really Duke’s thing.” Lately, however, Smith has been seriously considering turning back to her original passion as a career.
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It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness. Yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption.
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― Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self
Soft Grapes Creative Director and Photographer: Alice Dai Assistant Creative Director and Model: Allison Wu Model: Devi Lakhlani Model: Cynthia Shyirahayo Model: Anya Dombrovskya
As a sophomore, Alice Dai created Instagram thrift shop Soft Grapes to help Duke students resell their clothes. Soft Grapes creatively directs photoshoots with student models and releases each round of clothing in drops with a central aesthetic theme. The store showcased a diverse range of student models in its first drop, which was shot in a funky “bathroom grunge” style. Soft Grapes received major feedback from students on campus and also experienced a small controversy during launch for labeling the store as a “cybercommunist thrift shop” on its Instagram bio. Soft Grapes started as a photography art project. However, the store has turned into a platform for a large student audience to engage with experimental creative direction while also supporting a project that hopes to combat clothes waste.
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The wheels of a machine to play rapidly must not fit with the utmost exactness else the attrition diminishes the Impetus.
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- John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart
Three Poems by Jasmin Jin Photography by Mathilda Christensson
The time to grieve is now
That unnameable thing settles in like dust and your body makes room for it, shifts all your organs to the side eclipsing your needs in a starless sky It tugs at the hem of your skirt, taunts you with images of shipwrecks and spaceships— look how far you’ve sunk Fear of becoming ocean silt, a pair of ragged claws, dragging the remains of a gutted past Feeding the animals The loneliest people are often the kindest. They know no other way of living. They hold their hand out for someone to take. An elderly woman sits in a rundown church courtyard throwing breadcrumbs at pigeons, prayers for company. She continues to feed them even when they have all flown away. Bread crumbs litter the ground, but she goes back to the bakery across the street for another loaf. Eventually the birds return to nest, pecking at the trail they’ve left behind.
When was the last time there was a Self so stable the shelves don’t rattle Was it before the earthquake or shortly after Now you’re pulled by the urgency of tide, in search of that mythical normalcy The jokes don’t land anymore, fall flat on their faces, refuse to get up, while silence tiptoes around the absence of mirth Do you believe in curses are you old-fashioned like that how else would you explain this madness
Evening Ritual I stand under the hot running water of my shower and let the day’s filth wash off me. The city’s grime. Social faux pas. I am fueled by vitriol, selfhatred, and pure spite. Something stirs within my chest. Almost nostalgia, but for something only imagined. The feeling is as elusive and simple as contentment. Fumbling around this chasm, I come up empty. (I look for replacements.) I go to bed alone. I kiss my own hand. I imagine this flesh as someone else’s. I do not think I can live with myself for too long. This house is not big enough for all my disparate selves. We clash together like frantic molecules under heat—expanding endlessly but headed nowhere.
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Here we are Here and now That’s all there is And if it isn’t beautiful, man There’s nothing
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- Ram Dass, Be Here Now
The Masked Blacksmith Written by Lola Sanchez-Carrion Photography by Lola Sanchez-Carrion
I began questioning words when I moved to Lima and was given a label I didn’t quite ask for.
I was raised by a Peruvian dad and CubanAmerican mom. Peruvian dad meant we always had Inca Kola in the fridge. Cuban-American mom meant we liked our tostadas tightly pressed, smothered in butter and dipped in café con leche. Our parents spoke to us in Spanish. We’d nod, register, and respond in English always. El español manifested itself in the things we did, not in the things we said. It was our culture, not our language. I began questioning words when I moved to Lima in sixth grade and became painfully aware of how fragmented my Spanish was. I didn’t roll my “r’s”. I didn’t spit out my “j”s. I could hold a decent conversation but I didn’t speak in slang. I knew of fiestas, not tonos. I knew it was my Dad’s trabajo that had sent us to Peru, not his chamba. And the bits of culture I had acquired throughout my pseudo Peruvian upbringing didn’t cut it here. I learned that I couldn’t dance for my life. I learned that everyone had watched Es Tan Raven growing up, not That’s So Raven, which meant I couldn’t sing the theme song during lunch. I learned that there were five or six Shakira songs everyone knew and I didn’t. Memorizing their lyrics felt like a rite of passage so I started reciting them in the shower. I learned, above all, that I was American, something I hadn’t ever really
felt until it was being pressed upon me. I didn’t feel it back in Miami, where everyone and their mother carried the weight of Latin America on their shoulders. Everyone’s grandparents were immigrants. Everyone spoke Spanish. But in Lima, people had more than just Peruvian grandparents. They were born and bred on the same streets as them. And their Spanish wasn’t just spoken. It was sung in a tone I wasn’t attuned to and in words I had never heard of. So I wore “American” on my forehead like a permanent stamp. “A ver, a ver! Habla en inglés porfa!” At my new friend Barbara’s beach house, I am placed under a microscope. I sit in the sand surrounded by kids, a few from school, the rest unfamiliar. They’ve been going to this beach their entire life. So have their parents. All of them and
me. They beg me to perform a few sentences in English. They beg in a Spanish so smooth, I wish I can grab it from thin air and put it in my mouth but the words spill out too quickly. They’re gone before my hands can reach them. I am reduced to Barbara’s American Friend who moved to Lima a few months ago. I can’t crack jokes because I don’t have the words for them. My humor doesn’t translate. They ask me why I’m shy and I want to scream that I’m not, that I have a tendency to speak too loud and say too much but the words to explain this are elusive. I try hiding the gringa in me but she hangs over my neck like an unwanted medal. She begs to be seen. So, the curtains unveil and I give them a few words. “My name is Lola and I’m from Miami. I just moved here.” They look at me, eyes wide open, smiling. “Ayyyy! Yo quiero hablar así!” I want to speak like that, one says. I realize it isn’t me they are looking at. They look at this medal that shines through my shirt and clings on for dear life. The weight of it anchors me deep in this foreign sand. I want to speak like you, I want to say. But I don’t. When my friends looked at me, they saw americana, but they didn’t know I spent most of my days trying to scrub that label off. I stopped ordering ketchup with my tequeños during lunch because I was scared I pronounced it too American (quechoop, I had learned, was the right pronunciation). I started after-school tutoring where I learned that it’s fácil, not facil and even though problema ends with an “a”, it will always be el problema, not la problema. I memorized and recited the Peruvian national anthem. The words bestowed upon me during those extra hours of español, words I polished and practiced when no one was looking, served well beyond the classroom.
They became swords to establish myself in this new terrain. With them, I dominated the four-square courts (“juguemos con doble bote”), poked my way through the lunch line (“me colas?”), and jabbed at boys (“no jodas”). The bits of Spanish I knew before moving to Lima quickly metastasized into a Spanish so peruano, the gringa in me, the gringa everyone saw when I first arrived, quickly faded. At Colegio Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The American School of Lima, English was the language of instruction, yet it was Spanish that pervaded its halls between third and fourth period. English was the language of instruction, yes, but it was Spanish you heard whispered in classrooms when teachers turned their backs. I wanted in on the whispers, so I said adios to el inglés and actively set my default setting to español. “Ey, ey, ey! In-glich at all times.” Authority cuts through the air, disrupting the chaos that stirs in the back of our Math class. I use authority liberally here. El profe isn’t the most assertive of teachers within el Roosevelt’s confines. He throws this phrase around two or three times a class and is met with unanimous laughter each time. “Inglich at all times”, he reminds us while solving for “x” but we sit in a whirlwind of Spanish. It gusts through the room bringing chismes and chongos along with it. It’s tenth grade. The language that dictates my life is español. I’ve learned to float among the regulars. One might say I’ve even become one of them. “Oye, profe. No entiendo nada. Me explicas?” I ask, trying to make sense of the variables scribbled on the board. “Claro, Lolita. Qué parte no entiendes?” He says while picking up his wooden meter stick. He points it at the equation and uses it like a lightsaber to weave through the numbers and letters. “Esto va aquí. Blim. De ahí pasas la “x” al otro lado. Blim.
Después resuelves. Blim. Es fácil. Entendiste?” I nod my head to each blim to acknowledge that I’m going through the motions with him. It makes sense after a few seconds. After a quick “gracias”, I turn my head back to my friends and the chismes resume. While he continues rearranging the variables, I rearrange words. A shuffling of languages that once took me several seconds is now second nature. Spanish spills out like a can of beans. From an early age, language was a currency. Speak fluent Spanish and you’ll have people to sit with at lunch. Speak fluent Spanish and it’ll be easier to order food from Yanina at the kiosk. Call it quiosco, y eres una más. Spanish plus proficiency equals un mundo de possibility. By tenth grade, that mundo felt wide open to me. I flaunted my words with confidence and felt rich in my shiny peruanita shoes. But that mundo came at the price of some selfdeprecation. I began mispronouncing English words or messing with my grammar to sound more Peruvian. An Active Attempt to Make English My Foreign Language. “Can you borrow me a pencil?” I knew this didn’t make syntactical sense but I didn’t care. I let the English mistakes rub off on me in the same way that I adopted the Peruvian lingo. If erasing americana meant adopting second-rate English, I would. And it was all de lo más bien till I walked into my ninth grade English class and realized I loved to write. “Indignant.” Mr. Topf sits at the front of the room with the
rest of the class facing him. We’re split into two teams. The opponents slam the table. Their turn. “Angry because something is unfair or unjust!” someone screams. That’s right. Damn. He tallies up the points and continues down the list of words. “Mollify.” He reads again. We hit the table first this time. “To calm down.” Point for us. He tallies up again. Every few weeks, Mr. Topf makes us memorize a list of vocabulary words at home. But when we’re back in the classroom, he weaves them into lessons and gives them life. Words become something worth fighting over. Long after we play, I find myself actively trying to remember their definitions. When something is worthy of punishment, it’s reprehensible. When something ceases to move or flow, it stagnates. I jot the words down in the side columns of my planner and force them into my essays. A few months later, we deconstruct the lyrics of Billy Joel’s Piano Man and I see how words take on new meanings when strung into song. I see that they can reveal the subtleties of the human experience, or the power of conversation, in Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom. Mr. Topf challenges me to accept the conviction that English and writing and words for the sake of words can be fun. That they’re allowed to be fun. In his class, I don’t mispronounce. I don’t phrase things wrong. I want to preserve the integrity of my inglés and become its master. The first semester of ninth grade wraps up and we shuffle into our high school gym for final exams. One of the writing prompts for our English final asks that we write a vignette about a moment that stood out during class. I write my vignette about the first time we wrote a vignette in class. I write about being in a classroom and calling upon a memory. The feel of the pencil, the tick of the clock.
The pressure of timed writing imploding, you sit in your chair and try to grab a meaningful experience from your web of scattered thoughts. An experience that demands to be written. When you find it, you try letting it unravel onto the page. Words become sentences. Sentences become paragraphs. You flesh out as much as you can till time is up. Then you drop your pencil. A vignette about a vignette. Those vocabulary words he taught me stick for years to come. Apathetic. Lacking interest or enthusiasm. The apathetic attitude I had adopted towards the English language was suddenly being turned on its head. I was being nudged to care again. Ambivalence. Mixed feelings towards someone or something. I wrestled with the newfound ambivalence that comes with loving English words, when for so long I convinced myself it was better to forget them. Eventually, I cut the crap and owned up to the fact that I liked words, that I liked to write. I didn’t sulk in the fear of saying something dumb because I knew that in the realm of the English language, I was more than just my slang. My friends saw this, too. They saw how I reveled in words and began asking for my help. Some requests would end with a reassuring “no es tan largo” but even if the essays were sólo una página, I took them on like a project. I can’t remember what they are about but I chisel at them like a blacksmith, smoothing the rough edges of sentences when they run on for too long.
I weld phrases together like metal and bend them in new directions when they reach dead ends. There was a repetition to the task. Smoothen. Weld. Bend. Repeat. I’m not one for routine but there was something cathartic to the smoothing and welding and bending of words. A process that was always preserved with words that were always different. I didn’t feel qualified to be doing this and was caught by surprise when friends asked but I didn’t complain. If taking on some extra work meant getting the chance to embellish new sentences, I was happy to be the blacksmith, to put on the rusty apron and punch at words for hours. I became more accustomed to the idea that English was no longer something that clung around my neck and weighed me down. Insead, I let the medal hang with the newfound lightness that comes with embracing something you didn’t know you were allowed to love. I checked the “Corrections” folder on my laptop the other day and all traces of my high school editing days have been washed away. A folder once packed to the rim with English essays is now filled with obscure Spanish titles. El Misterio de Caramelo. El Vínculo Roto. Una Doble Prisión. These are the things my Duke friends send me and ask that I skim over for them. Español now pervades what was once a space to rearrange sentences in a language I grew to love. For these new essays, the chiseling is tedious. I check for grammar and spelling mistakes. I change verb tenses. I add transition phrases. But I don’t give these words the craft they deserve because it isn’t the same in Spanish.At Duke, I am Peruvian. Bearing this label means I carry the weight of explaining my country to those who can’t see its many layers. But it also comes at the price of still feeling reduced to that one place. I ask myself if they know that I love English words. If they know that I write. If they know that, like Peru, I too have many layers. But I see how so many years of scraping americana off my forehead can make myself seem flat.
January is one of the rare months that we — my home friends and I — all happen to be in Lima at the same time. On my last Friday before heading back to Duke, we all go to the beach. Barbara’s beach. A place once alien to me has become a haven for my favorite childhood memories. Babi has invited me here so many times I’ve lost count. We drive into the beach’s familiar gates on this Friday and I am reminded of nights playing policias y ladrones with this friend that has become
family and this city that has become home. José, el heladero, calls me by my name and offers me an ice cream. The trampoline sits in its rightful place on the beach, next to the swings. I look at the waves and remember the time I got caught in one and broke two of my fingers. The weight of my longing to hold onto this place is what anchors me to the sand now, a sand that is no longer foreign. It hugs my feet. My friends laugh and waves crash and it is this feeling — the feeling of things once out of place now coming together — that makes me want to write. I write with the hope that the craft will provide clarity, that words will work like swords to pierce through the fog that covers mi Lima limón. But when I read the words over I end right where I start, wrestling with the ambivalence that comes with digging relentlessly, only to find another layer.
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You said it was because your art would reveal what you were like. What you were like inside... We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.
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- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Brushed with Denim Art by Beryl Baldwin Written by Margot Hasty Photography by Lydia Hendrick What prompted the start engaging with art in high school? I’ve always sort of believed that education counts and the way that you learn should include art because you can understand material and facts but you have to understand yourself too. Art is meditation even though you don’t realize it. You’re really reflecting and creating something without regurgitating information like you have to do in other classes. What’s your favorite medium? So I like to do things with my hands a lot. Which was fun; I would get into a lot of trouble because I would just flat out refuse to use paintbrushes. I also knit—I knit a lot. For the jackets— my friend Tory Andrews had a vision to create a jacket for a friend. I had never thought about that, using a jacket as a canvas, so I just gave it a shot and used brushes and, I don’t know, I think that was my first time using brushes to paint and I like it. So you did the jackets and you thought, this is my thing? Yea, I was surprised by how much I like it. At first I was really just trying to see if she’d want help and what was required in the process. I’ve always really been drawn to vintage comics—I really like comic girls, I have hundreds of collections. I had nothing else to put on a jacket and I and thought why not put a comic girl on a jacket and it looked good.
What about the comic do you like? I think it’s fun especially today—because I consider myself super feminist. I like that, in the comics, the gender roles are so defined and these men are often so focused on power and one thing. I like to take something and take a pre-existing sexist dialogue and change it into something that is fun and feminist. There’s one where it’s a girl slapping a guy across the face saying, “Make me a sandwich.” I don’t know — it’s fun. Why do you do art? I think that art is something you do whether or not you know that you do it. You make art and you are part of art and it is important to you. People consume art and you get to a point where you consume enough art and feel inspired enough that it bubbles over the surface and makes you feel compelled to put it out there. Everything you create is the combination of other people’s thoughts and other people’s ideas—which is essentially what human beings are. You are the product of so many different people’s beliefs, opinions and experiences; art is this concrete interpretive way to show it. What is your favorite thing about the creative process? I like that sometimes I don’t want to do it. I think I used to think that artists always were ready to do something and I think that something can be said for people that force art even if it doesn’t want to materialize. But I’m a really firm believer in trusting in the time of your life even on a super small scale. Whether or not you feel like painting that day or going to the movies or doing whatever, which probably isn’t the best advice because you should definitely go to class and do your homework, but I like that being creative is sort of cyclical; sometimes I get into these moods where it’s all I’ll do and I won’t stop doing it until I finish. Or I’ll either not want to do it at all and it will feel really hard to start.
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Here! What time is it? Now. Try 4:32. Three weeks from next Thursday. By God. It is. There’s no getting away from it. That’s the way it is. That’s the eternal present. You finally figure out that it’s only the clock that’s going around. It’s doing it’s thing, but you’re sitting. Here Right now Always
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- Ram Dass, Be Here Now
On the Surface Makeup by Rachel Lamparelli Written by Kat Tiscornia
When did you start doing art? My mom and grandmother both painted so they set me up for enjoying art. I first started taking art classes in high school because I needed something to do, but then it became a relaxation and a break from everything else. How did you get into makeup as an art form? I started just by watching endless youtube videos of beauty gurus doing their makeup. Also, now a lot of those ideas have transfered over to Instagram on the explore page. That inspired me because it gave me the security to know that before I did it on my own, I could watch someone else do it. What is your favorite thing about the creative process? I believe that it is very relieving, it gives you an opportunity to do whatever. If you mess up, it doesn’t really matter and it might instead turn out really cool. The feeling of seeing something you did completed and finished, even if it wasn’t in the way you originally wanted is so satisfying. What has been your favorite creative piece or makeup look that you have done? I definitely went all out for Halloween and my favorite makeup look came from that. It was the one with the blood dripping and I added gold foil to it. I found a bunch of different images from Instagram and combined them for that look. It was really fun to do, since you can’t do that style of makeup every day. It was a good opportunity to experiment more along the lines of crazy eyeshadow and other makeup they do on the runway. What sparks your creativity? I definitely like to sit down and really think about my pieces before I do them. The opportunity to sit down and think about something, usually sparks some sort of weird path and I roll with that. If you could do anything you wanted creatively without having to worry about anything like school, what would you do? I would definitely become a makeup artist. I am really inspired by people who do runway makeup because they really experiment with makeup and make it a true art. I think it is so cool. Especially because my paintings are mostly portraits because I think faces are really unique. You can never get tired of working with people’s faces.
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Some split between the inner world and outer world is common to all behaviour, and the need to bridge the gap is the source of creative behavior.
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― Anthony Storr
Striking a New Note
Musicians: Josh Neuhaus, Kalif Jeremiah, Lucas Tishler Photography by Nic Wainwright Written by Susan Yun
Music is all around us. Whether we are listening to a DJ set at Shooters, driving in the car, or playing songs from our headphones, we are constantly absorbed by sound. Many of us listen to music in passing, but for Josh Neuhaus, he cannot listen to a song without hearing the details of its composition. The joy of music lies in the process of his sound. Josh could care less about the end goal if the development of his track is poor. “I think that’s really where you can craft real sound. In terms of my process, the process is the end goal. If you perfect the process and keep working on it, the product comes.” Josh starts by spontaneously downloading music production software and playing around with it. “It wasn’t a conscious decision like ‘Oh I need something that’s going to be just mine,’ but the thing I like about [music] is that I can just go into a dark room by myself and close the door and enter into a world of sonic exploration.” Josh admits closing the door to his dark room opened a new window of production opportunities. Last summer, he worked at an advertisement company in Brooklyn but had no idea where his internship would lead him when he was off the clock. He stumbled upon a music studio and started visiting every day after work. Josh says the studio exposed him to a world of music creation that challenged his initial beliefs about what music meant to him. “In Brooklyn, I couldn’t see more than 5 meters in front of me. It wasn’t as clear to me. It was like learning to walk. I would learn one technique and just play with that. I wasn’t making songs; I was making sounds. I did that every day, over and over again, and then one day, I just realized, ‘Oh I’ve done this enough times where I can go a little further now.”
Josh realized advertising was not an industry he wanted to enter, and gained momentum with his passion and skill for music over the summer. He admits he’d listen to podcasts about songwriting while at work and became, in his own words, “completely obsessed.” Josh read about music technology on subways and taught himself how to play guitar in his spare time. He found that playing guitar allowed him to add unique and personal elements to his music, as opposed to just making electronic sounds on his computer. Josh realized music production wasn’t going to be something that ended when his internship in Brooklyn did. Now, Josh often finds himself getting lost in his projects with this ‘will to create’ and frequently pulls all nighters to finish his sounds. “Sitting there in quiet, and listening to [my sounds] for hours, there’s this weird moment where no one in the world has heard it except for me, and I just listen to it for my own enjoyment and that’s beautiful. Then I can listen back to something objectively, and hear some truth in it. I guess that’s sort of the goal… to make some truthful sounds that move me, and hopefully other people.” Josh’s music isn’t just for his own ears, and has started to manifest itself into a public atmosphere upon returning to Duke. He admits music began as a personal endeavor but quickly defined him at Duke, and has now been the DJ for Shooters and fraternity parties. These gigs started as a way to make extra cash, but Josh actually appreciates “the responsibility to control how people experience music on a night out.”
“DJing really helped [my development] because you’re still in the music in the sense that you’re putting songs together, but it’s a much more shared experience. You’re crafting a journey, not just for yourself, but for others listening. I wouldn’t say playing at Shooters or frat parties are the most artistically pioneering way to craft sonically, but there’s still a lot of responsibility.” Josh finds the art in DJing often gets overlooked by the commercial music scene and draws inspirations from DJs who take risks such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Frontman, John Frusciante, and Jimi Hendrix. “As you’re creating, you’re changing how your mind listens to music. It can’t help but change my perspective of how I’m listening to a song in a car. And when I listen to a record on vinyl, I think ‘why do I actually listen to music…’ but it means something different to everybody.” That’s the beauty of art. Josh says, “the bar is that you want to experience as close to what the musician was experiencing when they were making that.” Josh grew up with a passion for learning languages that translated into the way he understands music. He loves learning grammar and sentence structure in the classroom and then applying it in foreign countries. Likewise, he learns different sounds then finds new ways to express himself through those rules to create a song. Josh relies on his gut feeling to know when a song is complete, but the concept of finishing a new song is new to him. “There’s a moment when you’re bopping and grooving and the melodies hit you, and there’s this gap that you’re constantly trying to fill with the expectations of how the music sounds and how it actually sounds. Once you bridge that, you know and it hits you.” He says he never really feels finished, but that’s the beauty of creativity. Josh hopes to seek guidance next year while he pursues music production in LA and hopes to eventually see himself in a place where his “external reality” reflects what he wants internally. “Normal is completely subjective and I’m constantly fighting that battle where I feel crazy, and no one can relate to me, and that my passion for music is useless. But I realize that everyone deals with shit in their own way and this is my own way of finding myself in this universe.
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Divergent thinking...is characterized...as being less goal-bound. There is freedom to go off in different directions.... Rejecting the old solution and striking out in some direction is necessary, and the resourceful organism will more probably succeed. ― Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire
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Art as Meditation Artwork by Shailen Parmar Written by Sheridan Wilbur
When did you start drawing and why did you start an Instagram for your art? I started an Instagram account Junior year of high school, but I’ve always been drawing always (@Shalien_art). At first, I just had [the instagram account] as a place to put all of my art, but started telling my friends. People started enjoying it and telling their friends too, and it’s been pretty nice to have people’s instant feedback. Do you feel more pressure to post things that you know people will like once you started getting a following? Yeah, but in a really good way. Because sometimes I can be lazy with art and be focused with school and forget I really like drawing and then someone will be like, “hey when are you going to draw something?” and I’ll get started again. It’s kind of flattering that people actually notice when I’m not posting things, and it helps me stay motivated. Do you think your school work compliments your art? I’m a Neuroscience major and one thing I learned in Neuro 101, is that my love for drawing and illustrating really compliments my studies. My notebook is just a stack of blank sheets of printer paper, and I draw in all my notes. It’s fun and it helps me a lot because I’m a really visual learner.
As a Neuroscience major, have you thought about the link between creativity and mental health? Do you see a link between creativity and abnormal brain states? I actually want to look into art therapy for depression and anxiety and other disorders and figuring out how art can help people. Art, for many people, is mediative. And meditation is strongly correlated to the increase of white matter, the neurons that connect different regions of the cortex. Normally, you lose white matter as you get older. But people who meditate can regenerate it, and I think that there’s a lot that can be researched to see how art plays into mental health. Has art been beneficial to you personally? Art is a really nice outlet when I’m feeling emotionally unwell. I say that, but I should probably follow my advice more… I don’t always do that. Sometimes I just get angsty and snappy and I should really be channeling that energy into my art. Do you think art helps you find presence or is meditative for you? I hear that word “presence” all the time at my house. Both my parents are meditation instructors… and I’ve grown up with that being a part of my life. I’ve gotten used to walking into my parents room to find them just meditating, and I realize that’s not a normal experience. Earlier, when I was 10-14 years old, I had a lot of pushback and thought [meditation] was pretty weird and pseudoscience-y and not something I would ever like. But as I got more mature, I realized how valuable meditation is and how special it was that I grew up in that atmosphere that valued “being present” so much. Where do you think you get a lot of your inspiration from? I’d say I’m an emotional artist. I derive my drawings from how I’m feeling. My inspiration comes from my intense emotions. I’m not usually drawing when I feel ambivalent. I think I’ve produced my best work when I’ve been struggling or feeling intense anger or sadness or nostalgia. I don’t think I’m doing much drawing when I’m happy… Which I guess is pretty sad because most of my drawings are not particularly lighthearted. I guess that’s how I operate. I used to do a lot of drawings of celebrities, but now most of my drawings are more abstract— mostly emotionally and interpersonally inspired now. If I ever do make a social statement, it’s on a very small scale. My favorite drawings are the ones that include words too. I’d call myself still a very much developing artist, and I’m still trying to figure out what my style is and what I want it to be.
A massive thank you to all the creators and a look into production...
At Will By The Standard