Kitsch Magazine: Fall 2013

kitsch vol. 12 no. 1

UTOPIA/ DYSTOPIA

FACEBOOK TIMELINE:

OUR CURIOUS OBSESSION WITH SELF-TRACKING FROM SPACE BOOTS TO IPADS:

WHAT THE JETSONS GOT RIGHT

HAS ANYONE EVEN READ 1984?

HIGH-TECH SEX TOYS

kitsch magazine FALL 2013

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Ithaca is a pretty polarizing place. When we’re not singing along with Dynamic Inkline, praising Ithaca as “ten square miles surrounded by reality,” we’re watching the sun rise from Uris library, wondering what fresh hell that 9 a.m. prelim will bring. From the highest of highs to the lowest of lows (which is what, -20ºF?), townies and students alike tend to describe Ithaca as one of two extremes. One day it’s Arcadia, and the next, perdition. It’s natural for humans to describe our world in superlatives—and that impulse extends well beyond Trumansburg.

Faced with a rapidly changing world, this tendency grows ever stronger. In “Dystopia/Utopia,” kitsch looks at the massive technological changes our generation has experienced and predicts the future they bring. In our cover story, Kevin Burra considers the dawn of the Facebook Timeline and our need to quantify every element of our lives (p. 26). Nate Coderre foresees a dazzling state of human existence where 3D printers enable us to manufacture the perfect midnight snack in “Print Me a Pizza” (p. 7), while Kaitlyn Tiffany revels in the glory of Pretty Little Liars hashtags and the changing face of social TV (p. 39). Tia Lewis envisions a wonderland Lorded over by our new Kiwi teen queen (p. 42), and Aurora Rojer imagines a dreamworld where children are freed from the infernal clutches of Baby Einstein (p. 35).

But not everyone sees the future as a place of unbridled positivity. Arlana Shikongo questions the morality of online anonymity in “Letting Strangers Ask Us Questions” (p. 24); Katie O’Brien wonders whether the real meaning behind SlaughterhouseFive was “everything was boob jobs and nothing hurt” (p. 60). Our two Zacharies take on technology’s role in our daily lives, as Labe wonders what the hell is going on with Google (p. 31) and Zahos argues that technological advances have, in fact, harmed the film industry (p. 51).

From Cornell’s role in the rise of silent disco to the thoughtcrime of overusing the word “Orwellian,” “Dystopia/Utopia” aims to guess what novelist William Gibson once claimed was unknowable. “We have no future because our present is too volatile,” Gibson wrote.

“We have only risk management.” He may be right—but that doesn’t stop us from imagining the future. And after all, if we don’t try to foresee what comes next, how will we ever progress?

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GINA CARGAS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

DATE OF BIRTH PLACE OF ORIGIN WEAPON OF CHOICE WEAKNESS

6/26/92

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

PATRIOTISM BURRITO

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PETER ZAWISTOWICZ DESIGN EDITOR DATE OF BIRTH PLACE OF ORIGIN WEAPON OF CHOICE WEAKNESS

4/13/92 KING’S LYNN, UK ADOBE CS6 CRUMPETS

kitsch238453

ANNA BRENNER WATCH & LISTEN/FICTION EDITOR DATE OF BIRTH PLACE OF ORIGIN WEAPON OF CHOICE WEAKNESS

4/7/94 NEW YORK, NY ETERNAL YOUTH

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

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NATE CODERRE

BITE SIZE/FICTION EDITOR DATE OF BIRTH PLACE OF ORIGIN WEAPON OF CHOICE WEAKNESS

7/6/94 WORCESTER, MA VIOLET WAND BURGUNDY

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MO RAHMAN

ART EDITOR

DATE OF BIRTH 5/24/93 PLACE OF ORIGIN SAN FRANCISCO, CA WEAPON OF CHOICE GLITTERY NAIL POLISH WEAKNESS GIN

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KAITLYN TIFFANY MANAGING EDITOR

DATE OF BIRTH PLACE OF ORIGIN WEAPON OF CHOICE WEAKNESS

11/4/93 ROCHESTER, NY

TAYLOR SWIFT LYRICS

SLAM POETRY

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EVELYN FOK

LEAD COPY EDITOR

DATE OF BIRTH 10/12/92 PLACE OF ORIGIN HONG KONG WEAPON OF CHOICE KNITTING NEEDLES WEAKNESS DARK CHOCOLATE SEA SALT CARAMELS

kitsch238456

HENRY STALEY ZOOMING OUT EDITOR

DATE OF BIRTH PLACE OF ORIGIN WEAPON OF CHOICE WEAKNESS

5/12/94 PIEDMONT, CA SNOBBERY NASCAR

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KRISTI KRULCIK

SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR

ZOOMING IN EDITOR

DATE OF BIRTH 11/27/93 PLACE OF ORIGIN NEW YORK, NY WEAPON OF CHOICE TWITTER WEAKNESS SENSITIVITY TRAINING

DATE OF BIRTH 3/15/94 PLACE OF ORIGIN SARATOGA SPRINGS, WEAPON OF CHOICE PUPPIES WEAKNESS PUPPIES

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CARLOS KONG

NY

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in this issue Editors’ Trading Cards 4 On the Plaza 6 Print Me a Pizza 7 Five Things That Need to Be Invented 8 The Future’s Not So Bad 10

Silence! at the Disco 11 Ithaca and the Folk Comeback 13

Al Franken is a Senator 16 2013: A Sex Odyssey 19 From A to Z 22 Letting Strangers Ask Us Questions 24 COVER STORY: Designing the Future By Recording The Present 26 Apps You Probably Don’t Need 29 Want to Live Forever? Google It. 31 Holding Out For a Hero 33 Baby Einstein 35 Has Anyone Even Read 1984? 37 Pretty Little Liars and the New Magic Formula for Television 39 Praise The Lorde 41 Lena and Lena: Tipping Gender Scales on TV 45 When “Molly” is More Than Just a Name 48 Are We Human or Are We Blockbuster?

51 Slut-Shaming and Shrew-Taming: Modernizations of Shakespeare 54 Pass the Space Boots: What The Jetsons Got Right 57 Kurt Vonnegut and the Eternal Quest for Youth 60 Tao Lin: The Kanye of K-Mart 62 Beyond Boys Don’t Cry 66 Physics 68 The Protest 70 On Growing Up 72 Eschatology 73

5

Worst bomb ever

WHAT TECHNOLOGY DO YOU NEVER WANT TO SEE INVENTED IN YOUR LIFETIME?

ALEX ‘15

Mind control WILL ‘17

House cleaning robot ZACK ‘15

Automated cars MATT ‘17

Government-mandated implants or geotags MATT ‘17

Parents choosing children’s genetics NOAH ‘17

The Matrix

ADEFOLAKANMI ‘17

Mind reading DELPHINE ‘17

Free Wi-Fi everywhere ALEX ‘15

Individual flight ZACK ‘15

Biomedical transplant advances WILL ‘17

Altering genes with those from other species MATT ‘17

Ability to use higher percentage of brain MATT ‘17

Teleportation DELPHINE ‘17

WHAT TECHNOLOGY DO YOU WANT TO SEE INVENTED IN YOUR LIFETIME? 6

Glasses with windshield wipers JASMINE ‘17

Vacation space travel NOAH ‘17

PRINT ME A PIZZA the future of 3d printing Putting instructions into a box and pulling out a working firearm is magic. No one’s going to be able to convince me otherwise.

Science fiction inventions—time machines, teleportation devices, sonic screwdrivers—have always captured our imagination. But 3D printers seem like something out of a fantasy novel. They create something out of nothing. Sure, the box is an incredibly complicated machine that, layer by layer, uses a sophisticated computer model to make objects out of powdered plastic or metal. But it’s also really cool.

And it’s going to help usher us into the proverbial “future.”

3D printing has already started changing the landscape. According to Hod Lipson, director of Cornell’s Creative Machines Lab, “3D printing is worming its way into almost every industry, from entertainment, to food, to bio and medical applications.” Its most obvious uses are in manufacturing, but people have found uses for these printers in unexpected fields—including the humanities.

At the University of Virginia, the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education is making a push to encourage teachers to use 3D printers in their classrooms. They want kids to use them for exciting projects, like designing catapults and testing their efficiency.

The Center believes that 3D printing can gain widespread appeal within the next few years. Artists, sculptors, and all other sorts of creative types think 3D printing could be a great medium for self-expression. A Dutch architect named Janjaap Ruijssenaars is trying to print an entire house, which he thinks will be ready by 2014. One California-based artist, Cosmo Wenman, is attempting to make famous works of art more accessible by photographing them for use in printing.

So far, he’s taken photos at the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris, but is seeking funding to get the project completely off the ground. Artists such as photographer and erotic provocateur Natacha Merritt have expressed interest in printing off original work as well. Merritt—whose work was described by Rolling Stone as “literate smut”—

NATE CODERRE

art by ZANDER ABRANOWICZ has recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund her latest project: a 3D rendering of spider erections.

Future developments may never be more important than spider erections, but 3D printing should soon be making major scientific advancements. Researchers in China have already been able to print human organs from printers that use living cells instead of plastic. Within a few years, doctors will conceivably be able to use 3D printers as their primary source of materials for organ transplants. Perhaps even more significantly, NASA has begun testing 3D printing for space exploration, specifically for fabricating rocket parts.

The tests have been largely positive, and NASA officials are confident that printing will become a viable manufacturing technique. Additionally, 3D printers could be used to build permanent structures in outer space. This is certainly a lot further down the road, but given the rate at which technology progresses, it’s entirely possible that it will happen within our lifetimes. And, most importantly, NASA is developing a “3D pizza printer” that will help feed astronauts while they are on their expedition. Imagine thousands of years of stargazing finally culminating in a whole new age of pizzafilled battlestars for humanity.

Is that insane speculation? Of course it is. But technology is continuously advancing, and 3D printing will soon dramatically alter the way we live. Some printers already cost under $1000, so it’s completely conceivable that it will become a household item. These printers may not be effective (or affordable) enough yet to make financial sense for individual families, but once they do, it could change the way people consume goods. What will they be able to print? What will they need to buy? Will the government limit the printing of certain products in an attempt to protect companies’ patents? Should we even care about that?

There are countless more questions to be asked, but one thing is certain: 3D printing is going to play a huge role in determining our future. •

7

S G IN D

H E T T N E V E N V EI

FI

T A H T

B O T D

NEE

art by

KATIE

As a member of the human race, I am proud of all the technological progress we’ve made—and not just of revolutionary inventions like the Internet and credit cards.

I’m proud of things like zippers, invented in 1890 by Whitcomb L. Judson. Or Viagra, developed accidentally by a team of scientists in 1998 (they were trying to lower blood pressure, but they raised something else instead). Even the ever underappreciated development of pockets, which were invented by who-even-knows a time long, long ago.

little kids, mind you. These are juice boxes for MEN. I happen to know for a fact that certain members of the lumberjack community would very much appreciate beer juice boxes.

There’s still a lot we have to do, so I am reaching out in the hopes that someone will read this article and one day give me what I want. These aren’t big inventions.

They won’t change the world. But we need them nonetheless. Without further ado, I give you my wish list:

Most people stop eating an apple whenever they hit the core, and they’re left with that sticky, sugary apple flesh that turns brown faster than they can say, “A seedless apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Sure, you could eat right through the core if you really wanted to, but the texture and taste of an apple core is gross. Don’t get me wrong—I like eating apples. I’m just saying the world would be so much nicer if we could just eat right through the apple. They have seedless oranges. Seedless watermelons. Seedless grapes.

The apple, however, must look on in jealousy as his cousins are eaten without complaint. Does this seem fair to you?

1. beer juice boxes How does nobody sell these? They would be so helpful for all you lightweights (featherweights, really) out there while also providing the least amount of calories possible. Maybe you really don’t want to wake up with a hangover tomorrow.

Or maybe you just want a little sampler, not a whole can.

Maybe you just miss the feeling of being a little kid, finding your favorite juice box in your school lunch. These aren’t for

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E NG N E G IEN EU O’BR

When? Depends on you, America. If enough people write to Budweiser, maybe we could get these on the shelves within a few years.

2. seedless

apples

When? They have been discovered, the first one in 1906 in a mutant tree in someone’s backyard.

Maybe the apples are trying to tell us something.

3. human

wings

Humans are pretty fat. Definitely way too fat for flight, and we can’t even blame this one on junk food (#topofthefoodchainproblems). Alas, wings are not for us; we lack the hollow bones and streamlined feathers. But developments in human flight are being made! Human powered flight is all over the Internet now, and pretty soon we might not consider flying a superpower anymore. I don’t know how they’re doing it, but hey, if it works, it works. I, for one, am going to start my flying diet tomorrow, right after I finish the tub of ice cream sitting in my freezer.

When? I’d give it the next 50 years, because more and more people are getting involved. Too many chefs in the proverbial kitchen.

4. textbooks with even numbered answers Although this is not strictly an invention, I think we need more of these textbooks, don’t you? There have been so many nights when I have spent hours working on a math problem set and turned to the back of the book to check my answers, only to discover that they weren’t there! How am I supposed to know if my answers are right?

When? In America, probably never.

Maybe in Switzerland.

5. truth

serum

This would either be the best thing to ever be invented, or the worst. I can’t decide which. On one hand, I would probably use some on my girlfriend, because I suspect she might be cheating on me. On the other hand, I don’t actually have a girlfriend, and you would find that out pretty quickly if you used it on me.

When? Not in my lifetime, if I have anything to say about it. •

9

GINA CARGAS

art by KRISTINA LOVAAS

At the 2012 Singularity Summit, an annual conference begun in 2006 at Stanford University, one researcher claimed that there is an 80% probability that the technological singularity will occur between 2017 and 2112. The singularity—the notion of a point in time at which artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence—has long been of interest to scientists, science fiction writers, and enthusiastic geeks alike. And now, researchers’ predictions and evidence of accelerating technological change point to the very real possibility that it will occur in the next century. It’s natural to approach the singularity with something between trepidation and terror; between The Matrix and I, Robot, Hollywood has conditioned us to associate the singularity with a massive, violent robot uprising. But our inevitable post-human future doesn’t have to be so bad. While the film industry prefers sleek, aggressive robot overlords, science fiction literature has historically explored the possibility of harmonious humanoid-computer coexistence. Science fiction writers as diverse as Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams have written famous works with intelligent robot characters.

But the most developed and insanely sprawling version of the post-singularity universe is surely the work produced by Scottish author Iain M. Banks.

Banks, who died in June at the age of 59, is best known as the creator of the Culture, a vast interstellar civilization that has long since progressed beyond the technological singularity and into a post-human and post-scarcity utopia. Before his death, Banks published ten novels set in the Culture universe, rarely featur-

intelligence, and began a constant cycle of self-improvement and redesign. As supercomputers manufacture all possible products (including more supercomputers), the living are free to focus on what Banks calls the important stuff: history, literature, and, you know, scaling mountains. It’s hardly difficult to see the appeal in this vision of the post-human existence. Banks’ idealism values human achievement for the sake of human achievement, rather than the commodification of what it manufactures. It’s the validation of human existence as remarkable regardless of its material production, rather than because of it.

Most notable, however, is the fact this utopia is far from perfect. In the Culture series, there are no heroes and villains, no good and wicked, no righteous struggle against an ultimate evil. Instead, we find complex characters with multiple motivations, machine-driven destruction, and high-stakes anarchy. In

S ’ E R U T

ular g n i s l a c ologi n h c e t e d th banks an

it y :

U F E H D T A B SO

iain m.

T O N

i n g the same characters or time periods. Banks is often lauded as one of the last holdouts of “optimistic” science fiction— that is to say, his version of advanced society is more Shangri-La than Ingsoc. The Culture is widely praised as one of the most appealing versions of humanity’s future. (Technically, the Culture exists concurrently with Earth civilizations, with some novels of the series taking place as early as 1300 AD.) So what is it about Banks’ post-singularity utopia that makes it so attractive?

Perhaps most prominent is the fact that this computer-run universe has eliminated the need for biological species to, well, produce anything. The majority of Banks’ starships, orbitals, and planets are run by sentient supercomputers called Minds. These Minds are Banks’ most direct reference to the technological singularity; though originally built by humans (or at least humanoids), Minds evolved, surpassed their creators’

10

2008, Banks told The Independent that the Culture is “driven by the urge to do good” rather than the capitalistic “urge to exploit.” In this egalitarian society free from regulation, people die, wars rage on, and genocide is committed.

But in the midst of all this chaos, Banks repeatedly emphasizes the triumph of human persistence and good’s ability to rise above—or even out of—chaos. Banks is called an optimist not for depicting an ideal society, but for his faith in human achievement, perseverance, and, ultimately, survival.

The singularity will be the end of civilization as we know it, but it doesn’t have to be the end of civilization. If Banks is to be believed, accelerating artificial intelligence does not necessarily indicate the eradication or enslavement of the human race—just an unforeseeable change to the way we live. While the idea of our current foundations crumbling is frightening, the endless possibilities can be thrilling. And as Banks told Orbit Books in 2012, “you’d have to have the head of a cabbage not to be interested in civilizations meeting their ends.” •

SILENCE! AT THE

DISCO

jake reisch ’15 talks party headphones GINA CARGAS & KAITLYN TIFFANY Silent disco, or the practice of playing music at a party via wireless headphones rather than speakers, isn’t an entirely new concept. It originated in the nineties when environmental activists realized that the easiest way to bring people to an event was to bill it as a party, but were concerned about noise pollution being disruptive to wildlife.

Silent disco has been popular in Europe since the early 2000s: originating in the Netherlands in 2002, appearing at the Glastonbury Festival in the UK in 2005, and quickly moving into the mainstream of music festivals, parties, and other events. Silent disco can be used effectively for DJ battles, as listeners can use the controls on their headphones

to switch between two or more channels, as well as to allow people more options when they’re at a large party—including the possibility of turning the music down and having a conversation.

Silent disco’s migration to the United States has happened only recently, primarily initiated by Party Headphones, an Ithaca-based company that originated as a class project at Cornell. In the spring of 2012, Jake Reisch ’15, Eric Hoffman ’13, and Christopher Strayer ’13 outlined their intentions for the startup in NBA 3000: Entrepreneur and Private Equity Investment. According to Reisch, the idea came from his own experiences at concerts and parties.

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“My buddies and I are all musicians,” he explained.

“We want to talk about sweet guitar riffs and communicate about the music. You can’t do it—you lose your voice, you scream, it just doesn’t work out.”

Inititally, professors at the Johnson School told Reisch and his classmates that “the business plan would be a failure.” The team spent the following summer restructuring the plan and establishing a partnership with Australian manufacturer Silent Safaris to create and design the final product. Party Headphones is essentially a rental business, working with party planners and event coordinators to organize silent discos using rented headphones.

For students looking to take an entrepreneurial trajectory similar to that of the Party Headphones team, Reisch has encouraging words: “Being a student makes business life easier.”

In the early stages of the company’s development, faculty members helped guide Party Headphones along its way. This safety net of experienced supporters helped Resich and his co-founders avoid the high costs of some mistakes, he said. Furthermore, starting a company while in school often allows for more affordable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.

“The difference between office hours and consultative hours is about $300 an hour,” Reisch said. “Whether you need to get connected with legal advice or people who are specialized in a certain area, being in an academic environ-

“

BEING A STUDENT

MAKES BUSINESS

”

LIFE EASIER

ment can really help you.”

Reisch and his colleagues also draw frequently on the resources provided by PopShop, located on College Avenue in Collegetown, which offers “free office space and brainstorming sessions for students who want to get into startups.”

For Reisch, however, startup life is no longer an extracurricular—it’s a full-time job. He has committed to taking a full year off from Cornell to focus on managing the business, but intends to return next fall. While the academic environment is helpful in some ways, Reisch claims that he has learnt far more in the real world.

“The professors I’ve had have all been amazing,” he said. “But while you may get some of the strategic thinking and analysis skills, what you lack is learning some of the nitty-gritty details that you won’t get out of the class—like how to outsource designs and manage people.”

For Reisch, it is only a matter of time until silent disco becomes as popular in the United States as it has been over the last decade in Europe, and the adoption process will be

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quicker because he and his partners have already been able to watch “how it progressed over in Europe.”

With luck, silent disco’s popularity and changing usage in Europe will help keep Party Headphones’ business expanding. Already, European event promoters have used the technology of silent disco for non-rave purposes. In 2009, Wales-based theater company Feral Productions began putting on shows based on a mixture of narrative and guided exhibition tour. Their first performance, Gingerbread House, led audiences through a multi-story car park; and their second, Locked (Rapunzel’s Lament), was performed at a children’s playground. Rooftop cinemas are experimenting with the technology in London, silent battle of the bands events have become increasingly popular throughout the UK, and the London Silent Opera performed its inaugural shows this October. Already, Party Headphones is moving forward by opening the first silent disco store in the United States, an online shop where one can buy a pair of headsets for personal use or rent hundreds for a silent event.

Cornell hosted its first silent disco event, attended by hundreds of students, in Willard Straight Hall last spring with Party Headphones. Rachel Price, Class of 2015 President, told The Cornell Daily Sun that, though bizarre at first glance, the event was ultimately a success.

“The silent rave event was awesome! At first, when you see everyone dancing in silence, you have to laugh,” Price told The Sun. “But as soon as you put on your headphones you just start dancing, too.”

More notably, Party Headphones has worked with wellknown corporations such as MTV, Red Bull, Nestlé, and the Museum of Modern Art. From a planning standpoint, these partners find Party Headphones appealing because they allow the corporation to both try something new and avoid noise restrictions. This is how Party Headphones landed their first big event with MoMA.

“It was a 500-person silent disco during the unveiling of a new exhibit,” Reisch said. “There was an open bar on top and a roped-off area with two NYC DJs spinning at the same time. Everyone was dancing like mad.”

The company also worked with Red Bull to plan a silent disco at LarkFEST 2013, a music festival in Albany. The event reached maximum capacity, with 300 people dancing around two DJs in Red Bull’s electronic music tent. For Reisch, the experience was surreal.

“There’s such excitement when you get a check in the mail from the Red Bull corporate office,” he said. “This whole time we’ve been building this machine and all of a sudden it’s such an awesome experience.”

While noise restrictions are one reason event planners choose silent disco, it’s not the only motivation to forgo standard sound systems, Reisch argues.

“As soon as you put on the headphones you instantly get it. You understand what’s going on,” he said. “During high school, you had these dance parties with the people who start dancing and it’s kinda awkward. With silent disco it literally never happens because everyone feels so in tune with everyone else and closed off to the rest of the world.” •

ITHACA

AND THE

FOLK

COMEBACK RACHEL DRACHMAN art by THELONIA SAUNDERS

A staple of life in Ithaca is the collective insistence on maintaining a thriving artistic community. Film, theater, fine arts, music, literature—Ithaca has it all. This community-fostered mentality of art for art’s sake, combined with the huge population of college-aged kids, has allowed folk music to thrive; and according to Dan Smalls of Dan Smalls Presents, “Ithaca is a haven for musicians; people see life in a different way here.” Ithaca’s openness to art and to change, and especially the two together, has made for an optimal breeding ground for folk music.

Every year Trumansburg, a town just northwest of Ithaca, holds the Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance, which was founded by Trumansburg’s own Donna the Buffalo, a local band that self-proclaims it has “proven itself a consistent purveyor of Americana music.” The festival began as a concert held in the State Theater of Ithaca to raise money for local AIDS support organizations.

Thrilled by the success, Donna the Buffalo went on to make GrassRoots an annual festival. Its musicians are carrying on the tradition of sharing their music, in the spirit of folk. “[These] musicians do what they believe,” says Smalls. “We have craftsman here who build their own instruments.” The specific music genres and performing artists have changed throughout the years, but the general love of music and the desire to share its significance have remained the same here in Ithaca.

Folk music has traditionally been about passing along a story or message through song and music. Jim Farber, in his article from the New York Daily News explains, “Over the centuries [folk music] has morphed from ‘music of unknown origin’ to ‘sounds drawn from tribal cultures’ to ‘songs passed down through generations by mouth,’ to simply ‘anything old.’” The folk comeback in recent years has revealed an even more evolved art-form—one that is

more about artistry and cross-genre experimentation, and less about story. “The sound has [come back], but the message hasn’t,” Smalls remarks.

For example, Phil Phillips, one of today’s chart-topping folk musicians, sings, “Hold on, as we go. As we roll down this unfamiliar road,” in his song “Home.” These lyrics are sweet and reminiscent of the folk music troubadour, but aren’t dedicated to storytelling in the vein of Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan—artists who used music to articulate stories and narratives of Americana and political agenda. Singing about oppression, Seeger warbles, “We worked to build this country, Mister, while you enjoyed a life of ease. You’ve stolen all that we built, Mister, now our children starve and freeze,” in the song “I Don’t Want Your Millions, Mister.” Phil Phillips uses instruments that are classically folk, as well as its characteristic simplicity, but he doesn’t embrace the same message of justice that folk music was once known for.

In the forties, folk music was used as a tool for activism.

Pete Seeger sang about the need for racial equality, his support for civil and labor rights, and countless other issues. The Weavers became big in the fifties, with songs and stories of “classic Americana.” They recorded such well-known narrative songs as the “Erie Canal,” about the workers on the canal, and “House of the Rising Sun,” about a life gone wrong in New Orleans. They also recorded many songs promoting peace, such as “Kumbaya.” The sixties brought us artists like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Arlo Guthrie. Dylan was, and still is, incredibly influential in music. His songs “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” became classic anthems of the civil rights and anti-war movements.

Baez, an equally significant bilingual singer-songwriter, was an avid Vietnam protestor and activist for civil rights. Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant” became a piece of Americana protesting the Vietnam draft. These are just some of the classic artists who have shaped American folk music.

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The influences from early folk are obvious in a recently recorded song like “Thistle and Weeds” by Mumford & Sons: the cries of a violin, with the humming plucks of an acoustic guitar and the vocals that harbor a mysterious mix of beauty and sorrow. “In Mumford’s music you’ll often find instruments that commonly read as ‘rustic’ and ‘rural,’ like fiddles, banjos, mandolins, and kick-drums,” writes Jim Farber, but their experiment isn’t as surface-level as it seems— Mumford & Sons also dabbles heavily with the narrative structure of folk, notably in songs like “Dustbowl Dance” and the lovelorn “Winter Winds.” However, reviewers complain that Mumford engages in the same sort of amp-heavy overstatement as much as the rest of modern music, and that their foot-stomping energy is a cover-up for music that is nothing but a British take on Americana. As Farber ex-

14

plains, “that’s a shallow exchange compared with the righteous harmonies of The Weavers [and] the threatening intimacies of Joni Mitchell.”

Recent chart-toppers The Lumineers engage a classical narrative structure of storytelling in the song “Charlie Boy.” The lyrics tell a brief story of a soldier going to war, complete with mid-century nostalgia and a title that throws back to the classic Irish ballad. Slower tracks on their debut album such as “Dead Sea” and “Slow it Down” reveal a genuine poetry that is heavily reminiscent of folk’s mid-century heyday; in reference to the “Dead Sea” lyric, “I don’t gamble, but if I did I would bet on us,” Paste magazine writes, “In a day where new porch-stompin’ Americana acts crop up every day, any smart gamblin’ man or music lover would be sure to bet on The Lumineers as well.” The Lumineers may

be the modern folk band that gets the mix between radio play and old-school musical camaraderie right, but they’re just one glimmer amongst a dizzying light show of revived “folk music” sub-genres.

Today, our generation has everything from “folk rock” —seen particularly in narrative songs with a rock ‘n’ roll beat—to “electric folk,” typically characterized as folk-rock, largely imported from the UK with more of a punk and electronic feel. Music from The Decemberists and The Avett Brothers is typically categorized as “indie folk.” These artists do draw from folk of the fifties and sixties, but they are also influenced by genres such as country and indie rock.

In The Avett Brothers’ song “Open Ended Life,” you can clearly hear the banjo and fiddle—musical influences from folk. However you can also hear an electric guitar, and lyrics that depict a vague narrative but don’t tell us much of a story. Popular music that does draw from folk isn’t necessarily a reincarnation of folk music—instead, what we consider folk today is a mix of so many genres that some artists stray away from the classic idea of “folk” music.

In my conversation with Dan Smalls, he stated, “Two years ago was the year of the banjo.” Popular artists, in using the sounds of folk, were specifically drawn to the banjo.

Michael Machosky, in an article about the return of the banjo, says, “Now, mainstream bands like The Avett Brothers and Mumford & Sons are putting the banjo front-and-center, and even pop icon Taylor Swift has been known to pick at a banjo on occasion.” The New York Banjo Summit has played a part in influencing banjo sounds across the state.

And, as reported on its website, “Ithaca also produced The Horseflies—a band fusing old-time tunes with modern art/ alternative rock influences and world music, and blending percussion and keyboards with traditional string band in-

struments. The banjo was in the hands of Richie Stearns.

Richie took the improvisational approach one step further with the band Donna the Buffalo, forging a place for the banjo in the jam band movement.”

I can’t imagine a better place to experience this musical transformation than here in Ithaca. While trying not to blow all my money on apple-themed treats, I had to stop in front of the State Theater at Apple Fest this October. There was a band playing a folky tune with a New Orleans-inspired twang. Each performer had some sort of string instrument, about half of which I didn’t even recognize. As they played an upbeat tune, little kids were running around dancing to the music, and older people were nodding their heads in enjoyment.

“Ithaca has been a destination for folk acts past and present,” says Smalls. Joan Baez, Gordon Lightfoot, and Bobby McFerrin have all played at the State Theater, as well as acts like Fiona Apple and events like the New York Banjo Summit. The Avett Brothers started playing in Ithaca before they could even fill the entire theater. Dan Smalls explained that Ithaca has treated folk artists, and musicians in general, very well. And in return, these musicians have remained very loyal to the town that gave them such a wonderful platform.

One of the greatest things about Ithaca is the variety in its musical taste. As a college town, with a population of different backgrounds, exposures, and preferences, Ithaca is bound to produce a wide array of music. “People want to play to who will listen,” Smalls explains. “College towns are perfect for that.” Folk music definitely has a variety of sounds and an essence that can appeal to all. Ithaca is perfect for folk—“it’s filled with intelligent people who love good music.” •

15

AL FRANKEN IS A

SENATOR

JESSICA EVANS

art by SANTI SLADE

As a nation, we value freedom, independence, and most importantly, validation. Though we claim to want qualified leaders, deep down we really just want them to be cool. Sure, we could prove our superiority to other countries through strong, thoughtful policy, but it’s easier and more fun if we just shove a cool, down-to-earth guy in their faces.

This tendency may not be as bad as it seems.

Yes, we seem to have a long tradition of electing respected officials based on characteristics that shouldn’t really be that important. We elected John F. Kennedy because, on television, he looked more handsome and exciting than crotchety old Richard Nixon. We chose George W. Bush because he seemed fun to bring to a bar. I feel this qualification is important in electing someone to be on your local community basketball team, but not for being leader of the Free World. Or maybe, we elected him because, well, Kerry and Gore were snores.

Sometimes coolness-based voting ends up working; Bill Clinton, for example, played the saxophone and saved the economy. In many ways, personality foreshadows a leader’s success in office. A well-presented persona can indicate a well put-together individual capable of commanding respect. Ronald Reagan was an actor (and not even a very good one) before we elected him President. Now he is considered one of the greatest leaders of all time, evidenced by the fact that no one has been able to shut up about him for the last 30 years. California even allowed Arnold Schwarzenegger to become governor. The Terminator was in charge of the most populous state in the country. Given the Governator’s ineffective policies, gaping deficit, and secret-love-child scandal, he may not be the best example.

One of the most surprising political success stories of the past few years, however, is comedian-turned-senator Al Franken of Minnesota. A hard-core Democrat, Franken has spoken in favor of Supreme Court justices Elena Kagan and

16

Sonia Sotomayor, and staunchly supported the Affordable Care Act, even having proposed successful amendments to the bill. In his two years in office, he has earned the respect of colleagues and constituents alike. In fact, Franken has received more respect and less scrutiny than countless politicians from more traditional backgrounds.

I didn’t think much of any of this until I started reading Tom Shales’ Live From New York, a hefty hard-cover book comprised of interviews with almost everyone who has ever been involved in Saturday Night Live since its inception in 1975. Al Franken was involved with the show pretty much from the beginning, when it was merely an idea in the head of executive producer Lorne Michaels. For those of you who don’t know much about Al Franken, this may be a good read for you. I guarantee you, the more you read it, the more surprised you’ll be that this fascinating man was ever seriously elected.

According to the book, Al Franken and his writing partner, Tom Davis, were two of the original rookie writers on Saturday Night Live during its formative years. They, like the rest of the seventies cast and writers, were rebellious, living out stereotypes of the time through big hair, a stick-it-to-the-man attitude, and of course, copious amounts of cocaine.

“I only did cocaine to stay awake and to make sure nobody else did too much cocaine.” Franken joked. “That was the only reason I ever did it. Heh-heh.”

Considering the scandals the press has fabricated over politicians having smoked marijuana through the years, it is fair-

ly shocking that Franken was elected after saying things like this. Yet no one seems to care (as they shouldn’t).

Franken became famous for the “Franken and Davis Show” sketches, written with Tom Davis. These sketches were arguably the strangest and edgiest parts of each show, and were often the most conceptual and offensive segments of SNL. They would often end by saying, “Brought to you by the International Communist Party—working for you, in Africa!” One famous 1975 sketch involved gay couples announcing their secret relationships to their wives.

Considering that homosexuality was still legally considered a shameful mental disorder just two years earlier, this was cutting-edge television. Now, all of a sudden, homosexuality was viable material for discussion on a broadcast television show. That’s pretty groundbreaking considering this was before you could really even say the word “bitch” on television. Franken did not exactly play by the book, but his cleverness allowed him to contribute to changing the standards of media/television while innovating and pushing the boundaries of social issues.

Despite his brilliance, Franken was a notorious loose cannon. In his most famous bit from those first years, he appeared on a Weekend Update segment in 1979, with a piece called “Limo for a Lame-o,” about then NBC President Fred Silverman. Franken called Silverman a “total unequivocal failure” and mocked him for owning a limo

(which Franken felt he, as a comedy star, deserved more).

Unsurprisingly, this put into motion Silverman’s idea to get rid of both Franken and Lorne Michaels before the 1980 season. Whether Franken’s brazenness in the face of authority is a valuable quality in a leader, it is undoubtedly a rare quality these days.

“

BIG HAIR,

A STICK-IT-TO-THE-MAN ATTITUDE, AND OF COURSE, COPIOUS AMOUNTS

OF COCAINE

”

When Shales asked Franken about his career leading up to Saturday Night Live, Franken discussed the scarcity of comedy jobs in the seventies.

“I think Sonny and Cher was on, which was a piece of shit,” he said. Few political figures could get away with this, and we’re lucky Franken was able to emerge from this period.

By reading this book, I’ve gotten a real sense of Franken as a person. In one chapter, he and Tom Davis recall the day Franken introduced his new baby daughter (the “first SNL baby,” as he calls her) to the staff. At the baby shower organized by famous cast member Gilda Radner, Franken was supposed to carry in the baby. Instead, he bought a doll of the same size and walked in with it, immediately starting to beat the doll up and slam it on the floor, pretending to kill it. Shortly thereafter, his sister-inlaw arrived with the real baby.

“I’m telling you, Al did shit like that,” Davis said. “I love him for it.” The takeaway here is that Franken is first and foremost a comedian, and, like anyone that makes a living off humor, he will do whatever it takes for a laugh. The other takeaway is that Franken is kind of an asshole, but nonetheless entertaining and smart.

Franken returned to the show in 1985 and stayed through the mid-nineties. He was even a semi-cast member, penning and performing the famous character “Stuart Smalley,” an effeminate self-help specialist of ambiguous sexual orientation. You may recognize Stuart from the movie he inspired, Stuart Saves his Family. And if you do, you should probably tell Al Franken, because you are one of the 12 people who saw

17

that movie.

Stuart’s catchphrase was, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.” He also was famous for saying things like, “That’s just stinkin’ thinkin!” and, “You’re should-ing all over yourself.”

When you think about it, Franken has carried these values to his political career. Franken got to where he is because, doggone it, people like him! He goes against the grain and is not afraid to say what he thinks. He is not about politics as usual, and he wants to get his message out there, whatever it takes. He took down the head of NBC without batting an eye. He’s like that smart, witty, intimidating guy in college who always makes you feel dumb when you talk to him. We all hate that guy, but we admire him too. Most importantly, we listen to him. And Franken still carries his old reputation. In 2010, when Senator Mitch McConnell spoke out against Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Franken sat behind him and made mocking faces and hand gestures. McConnell retorted with, “This isn’t Saturday Night Live, Al.” Well, maybe the political scene is actually becoming kind of like Saturday Night Live. Is that really so bad? Comedy has become a pretty political field with figures like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher rising to positions of fame and national influence. As much as I like to spew about wanting supremely qualified candidates only, I’m not immune to the cool guy syndrome. If Jon Stewart ran for office, I’d have a hard time voting for anyone else.

It’s pretty absurd to think of some famous comedians going into politics. Think about someone like Louis CK, whose celebrity comes from lines like, “suck a bag of dicks.” And yet, with so many comedians now doing political humor, it’s becoming more and more feasible. And there isn’t really a way these people can be much more ridiculous than some of the trained politicians we have out there now. Fellow Minnesotan Michele Bachmann once claimed that, “there

“

FRANKEN GOT TO WHERE HE IS BECAUSE,

DOGGONE IT,

PEOPLE LIKE HIM!

”

isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas,” yet she still enjoys a seat in the House of Representatives. Apparently fact-checking isn’t necessary in politics.

What is interesting about comedians in particular is

18

their consistent intelligence. It takes a lot of cleverness and logic to craft a great joke, sketch, or script. Not just anyone can do it. Working on a show like Saturday Night Live, in

“

IT’S A RISKY GAME,

VOTING FOR

PEOPLE BECAUSE WE SECRETLY WANT

TO HANG OUT

WITH THEM

”

particular, takes a lot of discipline. A lot of the skills we want in politicians are skills required of comedians. After all, half of politics is just acting, right? Maybe that’s why Reagan was so successful.

Really, what comedians do is get at something very innate and real about the way people interact, and they expand these interactions to make us aware of them. They make us laugh because they understand the world in a way that most people don’t, or at least in a way that most people don’t recognize. They make us realize things about ourselves that we had never considered before. This requires a pretty high level of cognition and observation. If someone can do this, who’s to say they can’t do politics? Maybe the political and comedic worlds aren’t really that far apart to begin with. Comedy can be smart, and politics can be funny.

Franken may be onto something.

Franken has been a senator now for two years. People were surprised that he was elected. People were surprised he ran in the first place. But after all, enough people voted for him that he was able to get to where he is now. No one ever expected Franken to get this position. And yet here he is, two years in, getting things done.

Perhaps we shouldn’t fear valuing politicians for their entertainment value or relatability—but that’s not to say we shouldn’t be smart about it. It’s a risky game, voting for people because we secretly want to hang out with them.

Franken is clearly a difficult guy, and he may not have the background for the job. Maybe, at heart, he is too much of a comedian, prioritizing getting laughs or making scenes. But if someone is smart enough to trick us into buying him as a comedian-turned-senator, maybe we should listen to what he has to say. •

with the editors of kitsch

After many a long night lost staring deep into the eyes of Adobe Creative Suite 6, even kitsch editors need a break. That’s why this year we decided to relax with our favorite late-night pastime: testing the latest, hottest, and weird sex toys. After all, properly-wrapped text and daintily-placed oxford commas are usually the closest kitsch editors get to orgasm. And, well, we had to spend our bumped-up SAFC funding on something.

not your mama’s wake-up call

VIBRATING ALARM CLOCK BY LITTLE ROOSTER

by PLENTY

O’TOOLE

Every morning is an existential crisis. If that alarm rings and the body isn’t ready, what does one do? Sleep more or hit the daily rut: work, sleep at work, and then hate the world. Heck, the cycle never ends.

The solution isn’t to just give up on morning perseverance. If a good reason exists to wake up, and that reason is a reward, then bring in the alarm. The day has begun.

Little Rooster. Seemingly innocent and certainly cutely named, this product may be much more than one can ever anticipate from a morning pick-me-up. Little Rooster is your run of the mill, overdone concept of, you know, an alarm-clock vibrator. At a whopping $69—yes, you heard that right—Little Rooster creates an ongoing, low-impact vibration as it’s worn through the night. Set the alarm and as the time approaches, this little piece of technology will increase the intensity of the vibrations and, ultimately, you’ve got yourself a nice little morning orgasm to get energized.

Named the “raciest alarm clock in the world” by Glamour, Little Rooster has various settings for utmost comfort, ranging from the classic sensation all the way to “extra power”—the site coins this setting as a movement “from butterfly to beast.”

Worn externally, the vibrator cups around the privates for a supposedly safer experience. There’s always the issue of how strong and comfortable such a hold would be. Amazon reviews on the product suggest that the legs must be tightly wound for the product to not fall out. Alternatively, one could invest in some undersized undies for a tight clasp, only to compromise comfort. It’s not a perfect model. Additionally, the angle, though one of comfort–—it rests right on the clitoris—may create an unfortunate gap that’ll collect dust and dirt all night long.

And that doesn’t end the disappointment. Far too many reviews throughout the Internet suggest the vibrations aren’t strong enough to get to climax. The rod on the end just isn’t a nice enough texture for something that cups the nether regions for hours.

But the concept itself isn’t too shabby. If some of those little errors are worked on, this could be the alarm of the generation. While marketed primarily to single women, it’d be a travesty if something so efficiently sexual weren’t available to the masses. Get on it, Little Rooster. The snooze-hitting, three-hour-sleeping, rage-alarm-clock-banging population is counting on you.

19

when i want my man/when my woman needs me LONG-DISTANCE PLEASURE REMOTE BY VIVI

by OCTOPUSSY

I first found this VIVI Pleasure Remote when Bond and I were separated, and had to continue our pleasure long-distance. It takes a lot to please a jewel smuggler and circus owner like me, and this little toy was almost as good as the beyond fantastic Bond.

When us girls want some sex with our favorites, we get oh-so-sad when they’re far away. But VIVI presents a solution: plug in the USB, download the software, position the vibrator, and then our men are free to play with us how we like it! Not only will you feel the, feel the, feel the VIBRATIONS, but you will also experience a completely novel form of sex—virtual sex!

What’s so great about VIVI virtual sex? How about the fact that my man can set the vibrations to our special song? He can also set a pattern of vibrations that is curated to make me scream. Or, if he’s a commanding man like my Bond is, he can play with me freestyle. It’s all done through the Internet. Only the women need the vibrator, and both parties need the software.

Oh, and this delightful little thing is not just for those couples who are long-distance. It can be used without the Internet in public places when both parties are in the same room! Want to heighten the suspense in a movie theater? Give a real reason to celebrate at a restaurant? You catch my gist. And if you’re single, then you can either control your own pleasure (for the ladies), or spur wild orgasms to the women of the World Wide Web who also possess a VIVI vibrator.

If you’re one of those rare unicorns concerned about the consequences of sex, then enjoy the most mind-blowing element of it with the safest sex possible—virtual sex!

The VIVI Pleasure Remote is delivered “directly and discreetly” to the lady of your choice for $159. The downside? The VIVI can only run on Windows, so all of the innovative Mac users will just have to masturbate in the boring, usual way for now.

Shake us, men. For us women deserve to be more than just stirred.

hello, touch me like E.T.

FINGERTIP VIBRATORS BY JIMMY JANE

by MARIA

FREUDENSTEIN

“This is a hand. It does the things hands like to do, like stroke, tickle, and squeeze. And this is a hand wearing Hello Touch…”

Going by the online demonstration (which we encourage you to YouTube), Hello Touch fingertip vibrators are most commonly used for fondling purple grapes, reenacting E.T., and accessorizing your pink “fabulous” version of the American Horror Story spandex suit. Faulty advertising aside, the Kitsch staff is now prepared to give a solid thumbs-up (or, first-two-fingers up) and a heavy nod of agreement to Jimmy Jane’s proclamation, “There’s nothing to learn and everything to discover.”

There’s a tiny control panel on your wrist so that you can feel like Zenon whilst sexing. In case you were worried, 21st Century Girl, these aren’t like your standard fingertip vibrating fare. They’re aptly sized for whatever cranny they need to be in, and each of the motors is as powerful as a full-size vibrator. The vibrator pads are totally waterproof (and scrubbable…), and the get-up comes with sweet neon accents that will make any former nineties baby feel like they’ve dropped straight into a sexedup version of Lost in Space (the shitty but altogether better-costumed Matt LeBlanc version).

With twin vibrators, it’s a crime not to get creative. Zenons aren’t the only ones who can suit up for the future—futuristic-fingered fellas, you can use your dirty digits to turn yourself into Phil of the Future (that’s twenty-second century shit)*.

The only limitation on this toy is your phalangeal dexterity and your imagination.

Cheers to the new century.

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*None of this is Disney Channel-sanctioned.

grab your smartphone, keep your underwear on FUNDAWEAR BY DUREX

by VAMPIRE WILLOW We all know how it is. You wake up on a lonely Sunday morning, missing the touch of your long-distance lover and yearning for some mid-morning penetration. So what do you do? You could go for some good old-fashioned masturbation, but Durex has another solution in mind: grab your smartphone and keep your underwear on.

Fundawear, the condom company’s newest “Durexperiment,” connects vibrating underwear—or is it undawear?—to a smartphone app. While you can control your own robo-panties, the product is primarily aimed at long-distance couples hoping to move past uncomfortable dirty talk and Snapchat nudies.

Durex’s phenomenally awkward ad for Fundawear features two meticulously tanned heterosexuals preparing for a steamy Skype session. Without so much as a, “How’s it going?,” our heroine reaches out and squeals, “I want to touch you!” The idea is that with a quick swipe—or a slow, tender caress, if that’s your thing—of a finger, you can simulate the imprecise groping that led your partner to flee the country in the first place. Less “phone sex” and more “smartphone sex,” Fundawear’s greatest appeal may not be the long-distance aspect—there are plenty of remote-controlled vibrators for that—but the fact that Durex has developed a version for our penis-having brethren. The male half of the planet is often neglected when it comes to sex toys, but Durex has never been one to disregard the dong.

As Fundawear is not yet available for purchase, it remains unclear whether it will be sold in his-hers pairs or as individual products. In the meantime, you can sign up to test the beta version on Durex’s Fundawear Facebook page. Or, you know, you can spend your next free weekend trying to spice up ye olde granny panties with a couple of carefully-superglued electric toothbrushes*. *Don’t do this.

disrobe you, then imma probe you TWILIGHT VIOLET WAND BY ZEUS ELECTROSEX

by NC-17

Turns out that jabbing your partner with an electrode-loaded wand is pretty old hat. The first down and dirty discussion of this practice was on HBO’s Real Sex in 2002 and focused mainly on BDSM usages, including branding and a variety of seriously uncomfortable-sounding varietals of vagina tazing. If, however, playfully electrocuting your lovebug’s lovebug is in your bag, and permanently scarring it isn’t, Zeus Electrosex has the answer to all of your problems.

The Twilight Violet Wand is pretty, purple, and most importantly, painless. Analogies abound—it’s like sticking your junk in a slightly finicky electrical outlet, it’s like extended contact with a Tickle-Me Elmo, it’s like drunken nights at Tom Wahl’s with the order pager in your pants, it’s like driving around with your cell phone in your lap whilst you miss 30 calls from that angry chick you accidentally branded last week. Zeus also brags four different electrode plug-in options, all designed for heavy stimulation without, you know, the possibility of a crazy person burning their initials into the most tender parts of your epidermis.

Earlier violet wands could emit sparks, which is as awesome as it is dangerous-sounding. Though this tamer version isn’t going to be a stand-in for a flint at your romantic camping trip getaway, each of the Zeus electrodes provides its own ambient light show, effectively turning that tent into Epcot center. Similar models have been used in Cirque du Soleil performances!

For a mere $69 (that joke isn’t getting old yet, Amazon), you can turn your boudoir into the glowing Canadian circus ring you’ve always dreamed of. We suggest pairing this up with the aforementioned pink spandex suits provided by Jimmy Jane to make the experience complete. Also, maybe master fire-breathing.

And because the best toys come with safety warnings: don’t put this shit on your face, or near your piercings, or inside someone pregnant. And cool it if you have epilepsy. •

21

FROM A TO Z amazon.com: setting the stage for the future

KRISTI KRULCIK

art by CLARRIE SCHOLTZ In early November, the United States Postal Service announced that it would be delivering mail on Sundays— for Amazon Prime customers only. This deal is not only financially monumental for both companies, but it is also a game-changer for e-commerce and other rapidly expanding industries. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s legendary CEO, has taken his motivation from outside of pure financial benefit and is looking toward a new objective—customer satisfaction.

Mail has not been delivered on Sunday in the United States since 1912, when post offices agreed to close under pressure from religious leaders. And, more recently, the USPS has experimented with more delivery restrictions as communication shifted online. In 2012 alone, it lost nearly $16 billion and considered cancelling mail services on Saturdays to cut costs. So why did the USPS accept this arrangement, and why now? And how was Jeff Bezos able to convince one of the oldest American institutions to change a policy that’s been set in stone for over a century?

Bezos’ achievement in this area is nothing new for Amazon, but it highlights just how rapidly some of our biggest corporations continue to expand, and how powerful they have become. Beyond Amazon, we’ve seen major financial and organizational changes from tech companies across the board.

When Apple wanted Siri and fingerprint technology for its new iPhones, it bought companies that were already developing such technologies instead of spearheading its own attempts. Google expanded well beyond just a search engine and virtual services; it now aims to affect the way

22

we travel (Google Chauffeur), the way we interact (Google Glass), and the length of our lifetimes (Google Calico). Elon Musk, the innovator behind Tesla and SpaceX, has exceeded expectations of what one man can do for the transportation of people. Musk has created a space exploration company, a high-end electric car company, and has plans for electric commercial planes that launch and land vertically. He has even challenged the brightest individuals in the world to create the Hyperloop, a high-speed, solar-powered tube that will transport people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 30 minutes.

It seems that Bezos’ recent surprising and large-scale achievements fit right alongside those of his peers, but his

“

REVOLUTIONIZING

NOT ONLY WHAT NEEDS ARE MET,

BUT ALSO HOW THEY

”

ARE FULFILLED

motivation sets him apart. Convincing the USPS to deliver on Sundays, even if this service is currently limited to New York City and Los Angeles, has set a precedent for companies who wish to improve their sales and expand their

reach. Over the next year, Bezos hopes to expand this Sunday delivery service to large cities like Dallas, Phoenix, and Houston. Whether the USPS would go for it is not too hard to guess—this new deal is profitable for them too. Yet one difference with Bezos is that his motivations are largely focused on providing paramount customer service, rather than just benefitting from the increased revenue made possible by Sunday deliveries.

This drive has been with Bezos since he first founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994. When Bezos chose the name and logo for his company, he had one thing in mind: optimal customer satisfaction. Named after the voluminous Amazon River, Amazon.com offers a wide range of products that include both digital and physical items. The logo for Amazon shows a yellow arrow that goes from the “A” to the “Z” in “Amazon,” which symbolizes that Amazon has everything from A to Z available on its website. The curve of the arrow was chosen to represent customer’s smiles sparked by positive experiences with Amazon.

Bezos’ focus on customer service—providing the widest variety of products to people as quickly and cheaply as possible—explains Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos in 2009.

Zappos, an online shoe company headed by the young entrepreneurial millionaire Tony Hsieh, strives to accomplish its idealistic motto: “Deliver Happiness.” When Hsieh took over Zappos in 1999, he made the decision to put customer service above all else, and focused on shaping company policies and office culture around that idea. Since Hsieh’s leadership of Zappos began, he has not spent a cent on advertising, and relies solely on word-of-mouth and positive experiences between Zappos and the customer at each possible touchpoint.

The integration of Zappos culture with Amazon’s resources only accelerated both companies’ efforts towards providing prime customer service. Amazon’s latest deal with the USPS had the same purpose. On the morning that the Amazon-USPS deal was announced, shares of Amazon.com, Inc. jumped from $1.69 to $52. That alone shows consumers’ support for the business move, and forecasts their satisfaction with the new convenience provided by the deal.

The expanded reach of Sunday deliveries will only improve the offerings of Amazon.com. Already, Amazon capitalizes on the immediate satisfaction of digital downloads with its MP3, video, and e-book sales. With Sunday deliveries, it will advance its sales of tangible items, like the recently introduced wines and groceries.

The advancements made by Amazon are notable because they have set the stage for the future of e-commerce.

Amazon has focused on several product areas that they see as most meaningful to consumers, then differentiating their offerings. As a result, consumers can now feed themselves, entertain themselves, and even make money all without leaving their homes. With subdivisions like Amazon Studios, the conglomerate’s production company, and the entire Kindle industry, Bezos is revolutionizing not only what needs are met, but also how they are fulfilled. The availability of e-books has transformed the accessibility of literature; and the Amazon Mechanical Turk service, which allows users to post tasks they wish to be completed in turn for a minor payment, has made it possible for some to earn money while still in bed.

On his own, Bezos has surprised consumers in multiple ways. With his interest in space travel, Bezos created a spaceflight startup called Blue Origin in 2000 that he still funds with profits from Amazon stock. In early October 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post—not under the Amazon umbrella, but with his own funds. This purchase frightened some people in the publishing industry and perplexed consumers. But with Bezos in charge, could it really go wrong?

Bezos has proved himself as a successful businessman, a game-changer, and a driven leader. His passions in space travel and customer experience inspired his achievements today. And if you choose to challenge his decisions, he will challenge you. As a response to recent concerns over his leadership of The Washington Post, Bezos responded, “Bring it on.” He has proved himself in the industry, and he plans to continue impressing business leaders and inspiring consumer smiles, as Amazon’s offerings continue to grow from A to Z. •

23

LETTING STRANGERS ASK US QUESTIONS on anonymity and ask.fm ARLANA SHIKONGO

art by CARLOS KONG

“If you hate being bullied about being black, why don’t you change the color of your skin?” A mere five minutes after sharing a link to my Ask.fm account on facebook, that was the question I was staring at on my laptop’s monitor. The anonymous attacks began rolling in, one after the other. “How lame do you have to be to fail at killing yourself?” they asked. I chuckled and responded with an unenthusiastic, “Ha. Ha.” My feelings weren’t hurt­­. At 18, I was past the point in my life where the negativity of others could scathe me. However, I wondered which of my friends had been crude enough to dig at old wounds, and I questioned the type of people I associated with. Who was cruel enough to say this? I’d never know. And, that, at least for my attacker, was the very beauty of the anonymous social site. Anyone could attempt to hurt me—I would never know their identity.

It has become common to scroll past a Facebook post broadcasting just how immensely bored an individual is and encouraging their friends to “Ask me Anything.” Although Ask.fm has been around for quite a few years, it has only recently boomed among youth all over the world who are waiting, full of angst and excitement, for anonymous questions to flood in.

Ask.fm is a social networking website that allows users to ask other users questions, with the option of anonymity. The questions are sent to the user, who can decide whether or not to answer. The questions only become visible to the general public when they have been answered.

I remember a time, not too long ago, when children were discouraged from talking to strangers. As we moved into a more virtual age, social websites such as Facebook set up protective measures for younger users. Facebook states that it has designed many of its features to remind minors of exactly who they are sharing information with and to limit interactions with strangers. For example, Facebook protects sensitive information, such as minors’ contact information, school, and birthday, from appearing in public searches. While Facebook allows older uses to utilize a feature called location sharing, they automatically turned the feature off for minors. “It’s important for minors in particular to think before they share their location,” the social website explains. However, our entire society is moving away from this fear of the unknown. Social sites are reducing these measures and youth are willingly encouraging anonymous interaction.

The dangers seem nonexistent as we scroll through virtual timelines that have become central to our lives. But the dangers that have concerned parents for years on end are still a reality. Last August, a 14-year old girl took her own life after being bullied online through Ask.fm. This tragedy brought the website under scrutiny from organizations such as the Family Online Safety Institute and the Federal Trade Commission, and Ask.fm was forced to revise its protection policies. The Federal Trade Commission updated its rules on the kind of personal data websites can collect from children online. “These modified rules widen the definition of children’s personal information to include

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persistent identifiers such as cookies that track a child’s activity online, as well as geolocation information, photos, videos, and audio recordings,” it explained.

The incident has not affected the site’s user base at all, but the company has had to make changes internally to assauge the concerns that were put forward, to prevent such behavior and to curb the culture of online bullying. For example, Ask. fm has hired more staff to moderate comments on the site, and has committed to viewing all cases reported within 24 hours of receiving them. The company has also made it easier to report inappropriate behavior by making the Report button more visible and accessible. Further, it intends to limit the features non-registered users can access in order to encourage people to register. The idea behind this decision is that it is easier to track a report of abuse to a specific person when they have a registered account. By providing an email address, users allow Ask.fm to capture their IP data—which can be used for tracking. Users can also now opt out of receiving anonymous communications, allowing them to moderate the content they receive.

However, I think that the issue that needs tackling is less a matter of privacy measures or the lack thereof, but rather the existence of anonymity on a platform that already allows individuals to hide behind a façade of pretenses. It is easy to

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HOW LAME DO YOU

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HAVE TO BE TO FAIL AT

KILLING YOURSELF ?

set up any sort of account under a fake name and create a fake identity. This raises the question of why the feature was even included, if the extension of one’s anonymity was not a matter of concern.

For the most part, the argument in favor of anonymity is the individual’s right to freedom of speech. Sometimes a career path prohibits an individual from having a Facebook account, and that cripples them from effectively communicating in a world that almost completely revolves around social network sites. This is the case for many high-ranking jobs, especially in the political industry . Many political figures do not have Facebook accounts, and if they do, they operate under an alias.

However, even this is a risk as IP addresses can easily be tracked by any amateur who has read a “How To Hack” or “How To Track” article. High school students applying to college are well aware that admission officers can track their digital footprint and will more than graciously appreciate the opportunity to remain anonymous. In essence, there is no wrong in that. The problem, however, stems from the fact that there are ethical consequences

to every decision, regardless of how good the intent might be.

Although anonymity might prove beneficial to the freedom of expression, it is important to note that when an issue allows an individual to be protected, they are, more likely than not, going to feel free to express something in an offensive manner. In this way, anonymity—and the endorsement of it—enables abusive behavior. These two opposing opinions only create a vicious cycle of good intent being succeeded by bad consequences.

As an avid user of social media websites, including but not limited to Facebook, Twitter, and Ask.fm, I can testify that it is troubling to witness the direction in which protection policies are headed. Even as an 18-year old, I am still sometimes frightened by the questions I get on my Ask.fm profile, and I cannot imagine a 15-year old being put under the same scrutiny. My own experience on Ask.fm elicited questions such as, “Don’t you just hate being as black as you are?” or, “Is it true that you’re suicidal?” While I was able to shake them off, such questions are enough to throw any mildly self-loathing person off the edge they were so stoically standing on, waiting for the nudge that would push them over. However, the questions get worse.

Between the, “You know being gay means you’re not a human, right?” directed at youth who identify as homosexual, and the, “Even your parents are ashamed to have you as a child,” statements that I’ve seen posted to other users, it becomes easy for the individual reading these to lose hindsight and see only the negativity being raised. There’s just no end. As much as teenagers like to believe themselves to be more mature than they are, the stage of their mental and social development is simply not in a place that can endure being publicly ridiculed.

They are not in a position to be told, “You know everybody hates you,” or, “Have you ever met someone uglier than yourself?” because teenagers seek social acceptance. They are at a stage where a large part of who they are is dependent on what people think of them.

The arguments for the benefits and consequences of anonymity both establish important points; however, the focus should be taken off the pros and cons of premeditated anonymity.

Rather, we should focus on the existence of anonymity in a digital era that already provides a computer screen and an array of names and accounts as a veil behind which the menaces of society can hide.

Knowing the extent to which anonymity can be used to hurt another individual, we should think twice about enforcing and encouraging it so avidly. Although anonymity is beneficial in certain instances, the reality is that it has a more threatening effect on society and this needs to be addressed more cautiously. This is not to say that anonymity should be put off completely, but rather that it should not be so blatant. An alias is the best way to remain anonymous as a name can still be put to a digital face, whereas the form of anonymity that Ask.Fm employs essentially allows a ghost to be a menace. •

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DESIGNING THE

FUTURE

BY RECORDING THE PRESENT nicholas felton and the facebook timeline KEVIN BURRA

art by THELONIA SAUNDERS In 2012, Brooklyn-based graphic designer Nicholas Felton slept 2,814 hours, with an average of seven hours and 41 minutes per night. August was his most talkative month, and Saturday, on average, was his most talkative day. He wore 157 distinct items of clothing, including 29 T-shirts, 19 button-downs, 12 sweaters, and one gown. He watched three Japanese television shows, attended 12 live music performances, and swam at the Silver Lake Potholes at 4:15 p.m. on August 25. He spent 265 nights of the year sleeping alone—that is, if you don’t count the ever-present Reporter iPhone app by his side that Felton used to collect all of this data.

I was not one of the 311 people whom Nicholas Felton spoke with that year, but I know a lot about what he did— and you can too. Each year since 2005, Felton has designed a personal infographic booklet that weaves numerous measurements into a tapestry of graphs, maps, and statistics that reflect the year’s activities, and has published them to feltron.com. While this datafied narration of life was seen as an artistic curiosity when he began, the practice is becoming more ubiquitous and economically oriented. Thanks to Felton, you and your friendly marketing algorithm friends can probably pull up your annual report right now—he was one of the core designers of the Facebook timeline.

The original 2005 report was intended for Felton’s close friends and family. He wanted to give them an idea of the places he’d visited, the music he’d listened to, and some of the food he’d eaten. With his background in graphic design, he did so using the form of the infographic. To Felton’s surprise, when he put the report online, it traveled well outside those intimate circles—he reflects, “stock brokers found it amusing and design bloggers were entertained by it.”

Since then, as Felton explains in a 2010 New York Times: Bits Blog story, “The collection process has become more

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intense…I’ve been able to use technology to help track what I’m doing, and I’ve tried to collect new types of information.” Whereas the 2005 report relied on digital and tangible artifacts he had gathered throughout the year, such as his iTunes and last.fm music history and his airline ticket stubs, a recent surge in self-tracking technologies has broadened the scope of the project. In the ‘Tools’ section of the 2012 report, Felton reports using five consumer-oriented self-tracking devices—Fuelband, Basis, Up, FitBit, and Zeo—which collect data on GPS location, steps walked, heart rate, and sleeping patterns. For more subjective information, Felton used the custom-built iPhone Reporter app, which sent him a survey at random intervals throughout the day with questions such as, “Where are you? Who are you with?

What are you wearing? How productive were you today (on a scale of 1-5)?” The results of these questions were saved alongside background measurements to form the basis of the 2012 report.

A 2007 issue of Print, an American graphic design magazine, was one of the earlier (soon to be

countless) publications to feature Felton. Felton was one of “four artists known for their clever online record keeping” who were asked to graphically display a week in their life.

The feature story was titled “The Obsessives”—a description that the designer doesn’t shy away from. In a September 2013 interview published in the Financial Times, he reflects: “My girlfriend, though, thinks I am totally obsessed by data and sometimes she is right. We were at a restaurant recently and I couldn’t relax because I was looking for information to include in the next report. It might have been the type of vegetables I had on my plate or the clothes I was wearing but I had to write something down…I don’t think I’m that geeky, but gathering information has become a bit obsessive.”

Considering the growing cast of data-seeking characters in publications ranging from the New York Times, the Financial Times, and Forbes to Mashable, TechCrunch, and Wired, Felton is not alone in his obsession.

A 2011 article in the Financial Times tells us of Joe Bettes-LaCroix, a so-called “self-tracker” and bio-engineer, whose wife recalls, “I was giving birth to our son, and instead of holding my hand and supporting me and hugging me, he was sitting in the corner entering the time between my contractions into a spreadsheet.” A 2012 article in The Atlantic describes Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist-turned-computer scientist, who keeps detailed charts of the microbial contents of his feces. These extreme examples of reimagining the body as an information dispenser, while fascinating, seem so ridiculous that they are easy to dismiss as just a handful of eccentrics with too much time and research funding on their hands.

Although few people go to such extreme lengths to learn about themselves, the interest in datafying one’s personal narrative is spreading.

In 2007, Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, and Gary Wolf, who was then a writer and contributing editor of Wired, offered a banner under which the burgeoning masses of personal dataphiles could unite: “The Quantified Self Movement.” They noticed that “people were subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracki n g that

went far beyond the ordinary, familiar habits such as stepping on a scale everyday.” As Wolf explains in a lecture at the June 2010 TED@Cannes conference, “People were tracking their food via Twitter, their kids’ diapers on their iPhone. They were making detailed journals of their spending, their mood, their symptoms, their treatments.”

Furthermore, with the ballooning public interest in life-logging, personal genomics, location tracking, and biometrics,

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YESTERDAY’S CURIOUSLY

OBESSIVE

IS TODAY’S

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STATUS QUO

they saw a growing demand for technologies that “added a computational dimension to ordinary existence.”

Just as Nicholas Felton had the Reporter app custom-made to collect information for his 2012 report, the Quantified Self Meet-ups—which began in Silicon Valley, but have expanded into cities around the world—are oriented toward individuals developing personalized methods to take data collection into their own hands. Drawing on the model of the DIY Homebrew Computer Clubs of the seventies and eighties—in which individuals showed off their creations and then determined what to use them for—individuals host meet-ups where self-trackers answer questions like, “What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn?” in a casual, show-and-tell format. Following a similar trajectory as the Homebrew Computer Club’s idea of the personal computer, which helped spread computing from hobbyist to the general public, Felton and the Quantified Self members have fueled public interest in personal data collection and have helped mainstream the methods to do so. Last March, Time magazine even featured the Quantified Self Movement as one of the Top Five Tech Trends at SXSW 2013. To make the shift even more concrete, Felton, who was originally viewed as an artistic curiosity, has come to be revered as the leading expert in tracking and making sense of quotidian routines, and his ongoing Annual Feltron Reports have become a “glowing example of how seemingly mundane information can tell a beautiful story with just a little artistic treatment.” It isn’t only the press who have taken notice of Felton’s cultural foresight, either. His annual reports caught Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s attention in 2010, and it wasn’t long before Felton was invited to join Facebook and help develop Timeline as the third-generation redesign of the social network’s profile page.

The redesign, which technology journalist Ted Greenwald describes as “a computer-assisted autobiography—a searchable multimedia diary of our lives that hovers in the cloud,” is a logical extension of Felton’s annual reports. Recall that Felton tracked location, number of photos taken,

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interactions with people, food eaten, distance traveled, shows and films watched, books read, and music listened to for his 2012 report. In the promotional tutorial that Facebook released, called “Introducing the Timeline,” all of these “data points” are featured, with Facebook positioned as the hub of a slew of applications with self-tracking capabilities. It’s easier than ever for anyone to become a proto-Nicholas Felton. Yesterday’s curiously obsessive is today’s status quo.

Of course, Facebook is a business, and its motivation to develop Timeline was tied to commercial interests. As Greenwald explains, advertising accounts for more than 85% of Facebook’s revenue, and “successful targeting is a numbers game…Timeline’s new features are bound to boost [personal data] dramatically, potentially providing Facebook with more personal data than any other ad seller online can access.” The sometimes hilarious, sometimes terrifying advertisements that line that right-hand bar on your Facebook navigation page are proof of the value that this growing trove of data provides to marketers.

This raises questions about the role of the Timeline, compared to Felton’s Personal Annual Reports. In his 2012 report, Felton found that his most social day of the week during the year was Monday, and his least social was Sunday. On a personal level, that might be self-evident, and simply an interesting story to add to the year’s narration.

Now imagine that this information was available to marketers in real time: Monday morning might become a valuable time for a nearby restaurant to place an ad on the side of Felton’s page, featuring its happy hour special. Sunday would be the

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target of individually-oriented products, such as Netflix, to push a new show to Felton based on what he had previously watched.

All this isn’t to criticize the Timeline, or targeted marketing in general, per se—the fact that one’s curated, datafied life is available to marketers on Facebook can lead to some desirable outcomes. If record labels want to look at the history of bands I have “liked” to recommend similar artists, who am I to complain? During a late night studying session, is it really so bad that The Connection knows that I am a college student who might want pizza? The Facebook ad features a coupon, after all. Still, if Felton’s work offers any example of trends in this area, as he heretofore has, new technologies will make it easier and easier to log as many data points as possible, and services such as Facebook will arise to turn this information into an increasingly precise, profitable, and “personal” report of the ideal consumer.

Early in his career, Nicholas Felton said, “I’m a list maker, and tend to keep records of things naturally. This is mirrored by an economy that is constantly tracking and accumulating statistics on us.” As personal list-making increasingly takes place through profit-driven services, and anyone can become a Felton-esque dataphile, the begrudged acceptance of our increasingly deep digital footprints will take an enthusiastic, obsessive turn. Tensions will abound between privacy and convenience, memory and curation, living for the moment and living for the chart. If you’re feeling anxious about any of this, then consider yourself lucky.

You’re algorithmically due for a deal on chamomile tea and slow-breathing yoga classes…and how can you not “Like” that? •

AM I

DRINKING

ENOUGH WATER? apps you probably don’t need

You know that moment when you’re just so happy with your phone that you give it a little peck? Well, now there’s an app for that. It’s called “Kissing Test” and it can magically judge how well you kiss…on a screen. If this is the weirdest thing you’ve heard all day, 1) I am excited I have the bragging rights for the day, and 2) good, because just like any other form of media, mobile applications are a telling sign of the times.

In the ever-expanding world of mobile apps, you have your useless entertainment apps (anyone up for some Britney Spears Photo Booth?), your games (from Candy Crush to Robot Unicorn Attack…2!), and your thoroughly-scientifically-examined, stalker-free-pass, social apps. But there’s also a huge part of the industry that is focused on “lifestyle.”

These apps are designed to judge your performance, like how many calories you burned in a day, or to teach you how to do something. Some of these can actually be helpful.

However, like the kissing app, many of these are more concerning than helpful.

First, the water tracking apps. Typically, one decides to drink more water when there is thirst to be had. Pretty standard, right? According to the creators of “Waterlogged,” apparently not. This app measures your water intake and tells you when you need to hydrate. I tried “Waterlogged” for about a day, and it was pretty easy. You take pictures of your water bottles and maybe the glasses you typically drink out of and record the ounces. Then, whenever you’ve consumed one of them, you channel Barney Stinson and give yourself a self-five because, good job, you’re doing something necessary for your general health! You can analyze your hydration process and show your friends lovely graphs that depict all the H2O you’ve chugged. You can even creep on your friend’s process, because water con-

KIRSTEN WISE art by AURORA ROJER

sumption is hype competition, of course.

Water’s lame, but what about how much alcohol you drink? “R-U-Buzzed?” might be the one for you. This program allows you to plug in your weight, number of alcoholic beverages consumed (separated into beer, wine, and liquor, and length of time you have been drinking. From there the app will measure your level of intoxication. It sounds scientific and eye-opening, but hold on a minute…are you really going to trust a phone (even if it is “smart”) to tell you if you can drive or not? I don’t know about you, but I think knowing if you’re a lightweight or not is a valuable life skill that should be exercised regardless of your current Internet connection. You don’t even need to actually use the app; one way to tell if you’re long gone is if you can’t find the app on your homescreen. Or not trip consistently. But hey, times are changing.

Or maybe it’s the Monday after a crazy weekend and you’re trying to text that chick who gave you her digits. How do you go about saying hello? Behold, the “Text Her This” app. This beauty gives you numerous options of what to send to that special girl you’ve had your eye on and helps to “keep your flirty text simple and in a non-sexual nature.”

Good to know how to not be a creep? I guess some people need that. Many responses are creative, but sadly, this app assumes someone cannot even come up with a message as simple as, “We had a great time tonight.” My personal favorite is the eloquent, “You just popped into my head so I wanted to say hi!” The Textual Romeo Dictionary fortunately saves you work and leaves out little details like, “You popped into my head so I had to consult my texting for dummies app to know exactly what would be a simple, fun, and CASUAL way to say hello.” The sad part is that people actually use this. Take Kevin, who in the ratings and reviews

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section of the iTunes App Store replied: “WASTE of money.

So corny this would never work with females. Better idea to just pick the girl’s number you want to text, close your eyes, and hit letters! The one star rating is generous!!!!! Now where’s my 99 cents?” Sorry, Kevin, for your lost dollar. But wasn’t discovering the “My back hurts! I hope you’re good at giving massages!” pick-up line worth it?

Man, with all these apps you must be busy. Like all day. Going places, ya know? So when you walk into your apartment or dorm and your roommate asks, “Yo, where ya been?” you no longer need to bother thinking about it.

Just check out your super-necessary “Where Did You Go” app. On the Google Play page it explains that the program “helps you easily remember your favorite places (parking, home, friend, point of view,...).” Finally, right? Like I don’t know where my favorite restaurant that’s on that main street is, or where my neighbor lives, or hell, where I live! This app is so useful and it doesn’t impede my brain development at all. Even better, “Where Did You Go” reminds me where I was so I can make Facebook statuses talking about my wonderful, unique trip to Wegman’s that’s on some road I drive to but somehow don’t know the location of.

Oddly enough, “great concept” is a repeated phrase in the comment feed.

Whether you find the programs useful or not, you have to wonder about the reasoning behind the decision to download them. Of course, there are the addicting ones everyone talks about, but reaching the 300 level of Candy Crush is not a great sign of how you spent your summer. And who hasn’t had that one friend on Instagram who couldn’t seem to stop posting photos for a week? Good or bad, it’s a movement. But what about those random apps you’ve stumbled upon? Do you think you would download an app that judges the quality of your life—be it for kissing technique or how much water to drink—and actually kind of care about how you measure up? The Internet has taught us to be curious and scroll and click really fast to read all sorts of random information that talks about things we might not necessarily need to know. And yet it has got us thinking—do we drink enough water?

Are our texts engaging? Do we fol-

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low the right sleeping pattern?—and start to measure ourselves.

Of course, this most likely only lasts for a couple of days.

In fact, a 2012 study from The Wall Street Journal reported that only 15% of smartphone users open any given lifestyle app 11 times or more. Look at your own apps. Don’t tell me you can’t name at least three apps that you downloaded and haven’t used in a month. And they’re there, being carried around in your pocket all day long, and, though not weighing anything, wasting your battery. •

WANT TO LIVE

FOREVER?

GOOGLE IT. ZACHARY LABE art by KATIE O’BRIEN

Google CEO Larry Page believes that we can defeat death.

Well, at least that’s what Calico, the latest beneficiary of Google’s investment, aims to do. In an official press release this September, Page expressed tentative hope regarding the project, explaining, “With some longer term, moonshot thinking around healthcare and biotechnology, I believe we can improve millions of lives.”

This idea of beating death once and for all sounds like something out of a SyFy Channel movie. But it’s not all that surprising that Google—the company that developed the autonomous car and created the original “Google” search that pretty much runs our lives—has decided to undertake the endeavor. And this is not the company’s only outrageous upcoming project: under the leadership of the infamous Page, Google has recently undertaken initiatives to design brain chip implants, create a mad scientist island, and provide Internet access via atmospheric balloons. These audacious ideas address age-old human questions, challenge morals, and could breach the ethical limits of technological intervention. Fearless in the face of countless privacy, copyright, and censorship suits, Google is certainly not afraid to approach such barriers.

Co-founded in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google began like many other Silicon Valley startups: in a standard suburban garage. 15 years later, Google announced it had surpassed one billion unique visits on its popular search engine homepage. And, in January 2013, Google’s annual revenue surpassed $50 billion. This quick success is certainly attributed to the company’s original ambitious goal: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google has now expanded well beyond its origins as a search engine; research in self-driving cars and

giant balloons in space have become priority projects for one of the world’s most successful companies.

Initially, these projects seem to focus on necessary technological reformations and improvements to everyday life.

Take concepts such as Project Loon, for example. Project Loon is an ongoing research project that places large balloons in the stratosphere to provide Internet access to remote areas of the world. Yes. Large balloons circulating the globe may soon be a reality. Google hopes this network will increase Internet access for people in rural areas and developing countries. Concepts such as universal web access may be well intentioned, but are actually not focused on more pressing issues, such as solving world hunger or curing diseases. Critics like Bill Gates have been quick to respond: “When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek in August.

Globally, access to technology is a leading cause of wealth disparity. However, as Bill Gates surmised, with the amount of available resources Google has in all markets, it seems a bit precocious for them to focus on improving only their own network instead of other larger societal problems.

Furthermore, think of the political boundaries that would be breached by this balloon flying across international air space.

Google sees itself as an unstoppable entity and appears unconcerned with the feasibility of their initiatives. In fact, it often disregards any expert with a conflicting opinion. Famous aeronautical engineer and innovator Per Lindstrand claimed that the project is hopeless in a September interview with TechRadar.

“I talked to them about it,” he said. “I told them it was a waste of time, but they didn’t listen.”

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According to Lindstrand, atmospheric conditions make it nearly impossible for this type of system to last for more than a few days. It is frightening to see Google’s denial of competition and outside expertise when developing its ideas.

In addition, the latest rumor to hit the tech blogs surrounds the future intentions of Google Glass and Google’s apparent scheme to implant chips in the human brain. In the book In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, Steve Levy quotes Larry Page as saying, “When you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information… eventually you’ll have an implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.” Glass—Google’s computer eyewear— can already grasp what its users are thinking pretty well. The Glass website invites you to “say ‘take a picture’ to take a picture, answer without having to ask, translate your voice, and ask whatever’s on your mind.” Glass is the first advance in this automated technology initiative. To further personalize the technological experience, Google sees these brain implants as a possibility to revolutionize day-to-day life.

But perhaps their most ambitious project yet is Calico, or The California Life Company. The premise behind the plan is simple: to take a radical approach to the medical field by promoting a focus on the aging process. In the September 30 issue of Time, Page claimed, “for too many of our friends and

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YES, LARGE BALLOONS

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CIRCULATING THE GLOBE MAY SOON BE A REALITY.

family, life has been cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking.” Page says the healthcare industry is currently focusing on the wrong thing.

“We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that’ll totally change the world,” he said. “But when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it’s very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it’s not as big an advance as you might think.”

Calico will be a separate entity under Google, utilizing separate employees and resources to focus on extending life as we know it. Page believes he can improve the lives of millions. Billions. While it sounds like a rewarding result, there are associated costs and concerns that go along with aging.

It is important to live not only longer, but also better—to live at an equal, or greater, state of wellbeing later in life. It is expected that Calico will focus on crunching big data for the medical field and not limit its scope to only one disease. But, with such a broad spectrum of ailments and diseases, Calico may not be able to adequately solve individual problems.

Already, efforts into DNA replication, cloning, and cryonics have been explored—but such a prospective concept may, frankly, be missing the mark. Instead, a focus on the current state of healthcare in rural and developing countries is a

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much-needed area of reform.

Google wants to be different. Google wants to be creative. Google wants a revolution.

Larry Page is an idealist who wants to improve a product to a standard that is ten times better than the competition.

The March issue of Wired highlighted this new approach: “The way Page sees it, a 10% improvement means that you’re doing the same thing as everybody else,” Levy wrote in the magazine’s cover story. “You probably won’t fail spectacularly, but you are guaranteed not to succeed wildly.”

The madness behind brain microchips is just one of these “power of 10” projects that Google calls “Moonshots.”

Larry Page sees the technological field as a 99% virgin realm—and he’s right.

If anyone has the resources, intelligence, manpower, and money, it is probably Google. According to Page,the technology industry is definitely doing one thing wrong, and that is its inability to work collaboratively. Page’s answer? Build a mad scientist island for engineers to work in ethereal harmony.

The unifying theme of these moonshot projects is technological personification, the idea that the user experience will become so life-like that these mechanisms seem natural. Computers and other machinery will be able to determine options for us based on our thoughts, likes, hates, and feelings. References and questions will be answered without even logging into a computer; this is our Smart House. Automation will dominate. Search engines will search before your search. Your car will drive before you drive.

These ideas sound bizarre, but it is all about enhancing the user experience—to simplify and improve. Although Larry Page’s legacy as a CEO is not without its faults, he seeks to grow the company by ten times. It will be interesting to watch Google grow over the next few years. Google is far above and beyond a search engine—it is a company that encompasses much of what we do each and every day. The ambition behind such moonshot projects can be alarming, and without the novel minds at Google, the world would be a lot different. But is this for better or worse?

Technology has certainly improved certain aspects of society: people are living longer, globalization continues to rapidly expand communication, and day-to-day life is essentially simpler. But we will reach a tipping point where technology attempts to cross boundaries that should not be crossed. The concept of living forever is frightening. I do not want to live forever or have a microchip placed in my brain.

Of course, the inevitability in technology and innovation is that we must always dream bigger and bigger. There will be problems and conflict along the way, but if anyone is to solve them…maybe it is Google? But hell, if anyone tries to stick a microchip in my brain, I will quickly be making a mad dash into the woods to become one with nature. •

HOLDING OUT FOR

A HERO real superheroes of the modern age

ALEJANDRA ALVAREZ

art by MICHELLE SAVRAN

To many people, superpowers seem like unattainable (yes, fantastical) our species is fulfills the criteria. fantasies, accessories to comic book storylines we read as We often hear stories of warfare overseas—stories children. Back then, the act of saving lives seemed reserved whose protagonists I would categorize as superheroes. for those with physical capabilities that transcended those They too don uniforms to fulfill the protective expectations of average human beings. People who possessed super- placed upon them by their positions. Having undergone powers lived in secret amongst the rest of the population, training to increase muscle size and emotional endurance, donning costumes and masks when duty called, chasing vil- men and women that enlist in the armed forces assume the lains down city streets, and vanquishing extraterrestrial evil responsibility of protecting the wellbeing of their nation. Ofwith a bat of their capes or a tentimes, the threats they face swing of their fists. prove to be more elusive than, However, as of late, my say, an asteroid bearing down perception of superpowers has upon earth’s atmosphere or a shifted. I no longer attribute reptilian antagonist stomping unfathomable feats to superhuaround New York City with the NOT HAVE A MISSION AKIN TO man strength, or logic-defying goal of converting everybody flight to devilishly handsome into an amphibian. The bomb good looks. One does not have that ticks and chips away at the to disappear from, see through, safety of a people resonates or fly above the rest of us in orfrom within our planet’s core, der to be revered or to make not from without. This is why headline news. the duty of a soldier is weightier than that of, say, Spider By extension, my definition of “superhero” has shifted man or the Avengers. While these characters battle alien as well. To me, a superhero can be someone as simple as a invaders from another world, soldiers fight their own kind: protector or defender whose ability and resolve is unusual. human villains with human flaws. It takes a particular brand The proof is in the pudding: to be a superhero implies of bravery to recognize the indecency and imperfection of neither the coiffed hair nor the X-ray vision, neither the un- humanity without the gimmick or pretense of a transformadercover identity nor the brooding personality, but the ca- tive monster or alien invasion to cover it up. To fight against pability to salvage those parts of our humanity that have members of your own species—people who, like you, mainbecome eclipsed by confusion or shrouded in misinterpre- tain familial, friendly, and, above all, important relationships tation. It lies in defeating the self-refuting mentalities that in their own lives—one must have a special, sort of indebring out the worst in us and hinder our progress towards scribable maturity. To recognize warfare for the horror that it discovery in the name of enlightenment. Any one of us who is and still lace up the boots, shoulder the gun, and bite the nurtures, guards, or complements these often overlooked bullet on a daily basis for the sake of anonymous defense is qualities is a hero in my eyes; any person who reminds the a superhuman task. No individual of average mental capacrest of his or her contemporaries about how truly fantastical ity or emotional depth can saddle this burden. I still

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TELL ME YOU DO

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SUPERMAN’S

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get star struck whenever I see a camouflage-clad soldier at an airport, strolling away from the metaphoric battlefield on temporary, or permanent, release from the war. I begin to fill in the blanks of his or her personal story—the details that newspapers do not provide. I begin to illustrate his or her reunion with their families and friends, spouses and pets, children and neighbors. I fantasize about the type of home they will be returning to, the sort of hobbies they will pick up again to pass the time now that target practice or bench pressing are no longer parts of their daily schedule. I slip into the role of a comic book writer and artist, penciling in these individuals’ heroic details.

I unabashedly begin to replay in my mind those videos they would show us in my high school on Veteran’s Day— the ones that depicted soldiers returning home and surprising their loved ones with their unannounced arrivals. I have no qualms about admitting the fact that I, to this day, cry like a baby whenever I see one of these clips. These videos manage to humanize an enterprise I would otherwise not identify with—war—in a way similar to how comic book heroes are humanized via their interactions with their own loved ones: Superman with Lois Lane, Peter Parker with his aunt or girlfriend.

I have a similar perception of doctors.

As a young child, when I could not identify what my body was concocting beneath my skin and these men and women clothed in white could, I would chalk it up to magic. I would chalk it up to an understanding of bodily processes I would never be able to acquire, an insight I would never have into the mechanics of this intricate machine I subconsciously operate. The liquids they prescribed me were healing serums, while their thermometers were inexplicable weaponry used to fight the pathogens creeping through my bloodstream.

Even as I have aged, their stethoscopes have remained badges of heroism, as has their incredible ability to heal.

Therapeutic powers, as well as powers of ingenuity: these are doctors’ tools to treat patients, to protect us from future illness.

As technology continues to evolve, breakthroughs are being made in how our bodies can potentially fuse with computer appendages to increase life expectancy and stamina, to fight with more efficiency, and cure with greater finality. Ironman was certainly onto something when he constructed his armor, and I suppose technicians of the modern era are modeling their own creations off of a similar premise: that physical fortitude will ensure the preservation of our mental and emotional states. Nowadays, soldiers who have their legs blown off in battle need not resign themselves to lives of stagnation and regret—mentalities that reap negative effects on attitude and vivacity—because neurologically controlled prosthetics can allow them to regain the ability to walk. The growth of limbs and organs within laboratories, the facilitation of communication between stunted cells

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and their corresponding tendons, and the breathing of life back into a fractured skeleton, defy conventions regarding humanity—that we cannot simply be “fixed good as new”— and call into question our supposedly inevitable mortality.

Thus, it endows us with heroic qualities.

Are we invincible, given the infinitely possible processes of our minds? Not really, but it is fascinating to think about.

While there is so much we have discovered, so much waiting to be discovered, nothing will ever really be known in totality. People who are able to recognize this fundamental aspect of our existence in the universe are those that truly deserve to be called heroes. It is a superpower in its own right to possess humility in a world that is constantly trying to inflate ego in light of all we can accomplish diplomatically and scientifically.

When the gun is removed from our fists and the prescription medicines from our researching hands, what are we left with that still enables heroism? How else does mankind save itself from self-destruction when battles are not naïvely selected as the solution, nor colorful serums as the elixirs?

All of us, in one way or another, are heroes.

From the gentle woman working the kitchens at Appel Commons, to the parents that so graciously put up with their young adult children’s ridiculous behavior—they are all around us.

And then there is you, reading this very article. You are the Hulk, in all his shining, green, terrifying glory. With his rough exterior and jagged, muscular physique, one can say life has not treated him kindly, and his body has had a physical response to such treatment; it has steeled him against future pain, prepared him to endure forthcoming assaults. However, there is another side to this beast within us all—a side that explains the fury, the monster-like qualities we tend to display whenever our tempers flare up or our judgments become obscured by anger. It is a side that encapsulates our fundamental desire to be understood, to be treated with credibility and sensitivity.

Such is the desire of anyone confined to the parameters of this universe and our existence in it. We can fly to the ends of the Milky Way, disappear into oblivion, or box with our foes until our knuckles bleed; but, at the end of the day, superhero and human alike return to the same physical body, the same mental constitution.

Take a look at the pen in your hand, the goals you have in mind, the loved ones you care for and the obstacles you wish to overcome, and tell me you do not have a mission akin to a Superman’s.

Tell me your cape is not hiding beneath your backpack.•

BABY

EINSTEIN the show, the myth, the legend

AURORA ROJER art by SANTI SLADE

A monkey leaps from tree to tree. Cut to a puppet dancing. Cue a rushing waterfall. All to the soundtrack of classical music played on what sounds like a toy piano.

What is this, a YouTube video made for someone on acid? Close! It’s Baby Einstein. I first came into contact with these troubling DVDs while babysitting. There’s nothing quite so disheartening as walking into a gig and seeing the child already plopped down in front of the TV. Sure, it makes the job easier for me, but come on now—the kid can’t even talk! Luckily, what he’s watching doesn’t have much dialogue. Or a plot. It’s basically a stream of ten-second clips interlaced with flashes of bright colors and a killer soundtrack—if you’re into “classically-inspired” music and animal noises.

If your baby is to be the next Einstein, or Ivy League bound at the very least, he or she needs an extra leg up.

Created by Julie Aigner-Clark in 1996, Baby Einstein promises to give your child this boost. Aigner-Clark filmed the first video in her basement and edited it at home. The video was released in 1997 and in 1999, books and the patented “Discovery Cards” (glorified flash cards) were added to the enterprise. Bought by Disney in 2001, the Baby Einstein product line was then extended to include toys, baby products, party supplies, bibs, and soft bath items (whatever that means).

“What makes Baby Einstein products unlike any other is that they are created from a baby’s point of view,” one ad proclaims. Babies can neither talk nor process full stories, so short segments with bright colors and silly noises make up the only sort of program that can really lock babies’ wandering eyes on the screen and ensure they stay there, glazing over. Many parents may argue that a child too young to follow a plot line is too young to be watching TV. But this is no ordinary television! As the Baby Einstein website

proclaims, this series “incorporate[s] a unique combination of real world objects, music, art, animals, and nature—providing you with a fun way to introduce your baby to the big, beautiful new world around him.” Because everyone knows that the best way to be introduced to something is not to engage in it, but to watch it on a screen. Why play with toys and other real-world objects when BE allows you to watch others do it for you? Why actually go outside to see nature when the DVD shows, like, 50 ten-second clips of scenery?

With the BE activities, any parent can “immerse [their] little one in a world of discovery” and “capture the baby’s attention with products that surround him with mirrors, lights, melodies, and textures.” It’s like a rave, but for babies!

But believe it or not, Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a doctor and researcher at University of Washington, claims that babies may not benefit as much from the show as its PR team believes. Christakis told Time in a 2007 story that by watching Baby Einstein, “[babies’] minds come to expect a high level of stimulation, and view that as normal. By comparison, reality is boring.’” So rather than engaging babies in the world around them, these videos lower their attention span so that when kids grow older, they are unable to engage in anything at all.

BE sells books, too, but they freely admit that “books are enjoyed more when used with our DVDs, toys, and other products. Inspire a love of reading and turn the page to a new chapter of discovery.” A love of reading—but only if it involves DVDs and toys, because, you know, reading is boring and lame otherwise. Not even Einstein read without some other entertainment as well, right? Wrong. According to Scholastic, “children learn an average of 4,000 to 12,000 new words each year as a result of book reading.”

Meanwhile, Christakis and his research team told Time that “with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs

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and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos.” So every parent who thought that by depositing their little one in front of a BE video, they could achieve the benefits of reading to their kids without actually doing so, was severely mistaken. Instead, their kids were slowly digressing.

All of the BE products, including the video line, are “designed as interactive tools for parents to use with their babies.” These products “were developed with the idea of creating a ‘digital board book,’ allowing a parent to have two free hands while enjoying and experiencing the video with their little one—leaving them free to clap, point to objects, and interact with their baby,” or so says their marketing.

But Rachel Barr and Harlene Hayne, in a study for the Society for Research in Child Development, conducted an experiment in which they showed infants a televised clip of an action as well as a live demonstration, seeing which the babies were able to better replicate. They found that the infants’ ability to imitate the live demonstration was far superior to their ability to imitate the same actions shown on television. Thus if parents truly want their child to learn from interactions, rather than using their hands to clap and point at a TV, they should use them to hold, play, and engage with their child without a screen for distraction.

From the brand name and the copy promising to engage and inspire, it seems logical to conclude that Baby Einstein is a baby-brain-enhancer. However research has proved that this is not the case. When these allegations first came out, Baby Einstein was forced to respond. The company decided to refund $15.99 for up to four Baby Einstein DVDs per household, bought between June 5, 2004 and September 5, 2009. This gesture led many to believe that they were agreeing that their product was falsely advertised and perhaps harmful. The company quickly refuted this claim.

“Baby Einstein products are not designed to make babies smarter,” Susan McLain, the General Manager of the Baby Einstein Company said. “Rather, Baby Einstein products are specifically designed to engage babies and provide parents with tools to help expose their little ones to the world around them in playful and engaging ways—inspiring a baby’s natural curiosity.”

In other words: “Gosh guys, where did you ever get the idea that we, Baby EINSTEIN, are trying to make babies

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smarter? We just want to engage them and expose them to the world around them while inspiring their natural curiosity.

Duh!”

Of course, it was silly to believe that these videos could do such a thing in the first place. For babies to learn to talk, they need to be spoken to. For babies to learn about the outside world, they need to leave the house. For babies to have fun, they need to play. DVDs do not facilitate human i n t e r a c t i o n , and it is for that reason over all others that they can be harmful to babies. Any time spent watching a screen is time that could have been spent engaging in the real world, with real people. This seems like common sense. So why does Baby Einstein have so many parents fooled?

Because what we want—all of us, all the time— is a shortcut: microwaves, calculators, pre-washed jeans, escalators, packaged sandwiches with the crust already cut off. This is progress: the ability to do the same function in less time, with less effort. This is the secret lure of Baby Einstein. Parents want to better their kids. They really do. They will do whatever it takes to make sure their little tyke has access to the best of the best. But they also have jobs and lives and frankly, raising a little one is tiring.

Baby Einstein is to reading out-loud as Pillsbury Ready To Bake!® is to homemade.

Parents pop in a DVD and voilà! 23 minutes and 53 seconds later, their child is smarter and more immersed in the world around him or her. Except that is not really true.These DVDs are a way for parents to avoid feeling guilty for taking a much-needed break from child-rearing. It allows parents to pretend they are helping their children without expending any additional effort. But if we actually want to raise a generation of literate, engaged, and capable young people rather than just an army of short-attention-spanned zombies, we have to turn off the TV and put in some actual time and toil. There is no shortcut to early childhood education, and anyone who says differently is selling something.

So next time I’m baby-sitting and I come face to face with one of these displeasing videos, I’ll turn it off and play with the kid or read him a book instead. Because he, and every other tot out there, is worth the effort. •

FREEDOM IS NOT SLAVERY

AND THIS ISN’T 1984

so please stop calling everything “orwellian” YANA LYSENKO art by AURORA ROJER Lately, intellectuals (or, rather, pseudo-intellectuals) seem to and surveillance of Big Brother and his Party. One person said, have made “Orwellian” their new word of choice. Outrageously “I immediately think of ‘Big Brother is watching you’ and all exaggerated headlines like “Orwellian Bill Will Be a Disaster that stuff with doublethink and cruelty to humanity and truth in for Our Forests” and “NSA Surveillance Goes Beyond Orwell’s contradiction.” Another said, “It describes an action/institution Imagination” are now an easy opportunity for political criticism, as totalitarian. It includes reducing privacy, liberties, availability, and these days anything that is unsatisfactory about the and existing accurate knowledge/information.” Those who had government is described as “Orwellian.” There’s nothing wrong not read the novel usually understood that “Orwellian” related with criticizing the government, of course, but “Orwellian” is not to Orwell and 1984, but knew less about the concept because the catch-all term for every stupid thing the government does they weren’t familiar with the novel. One person described it as to its citizens. It’s becoming one of those words that make it too “something resembling a concept from one of Orwell’s books.” easy to sound intelligent and well-read. The consensus seems to Another said, “it probably means some dystopia, big brother be that you can drop it as a buzzword, with no further elucidation style.” Looking at these responses, it seems people have some of your opinion and an assumption that everyone knows what knowledge of “Orwellian” as a term related to Orwell’s dystopia.

“Orwellian” implies. In short—it is overused to the point that we But the problem here is that people pretend to understand what are forced to question why we ever made it a word. it means, when they really don’t.

So what exactly does We have sufficient reason to “Orwellian” mean? The word believe Orwell himself would not have comes from the government approved of “Orwellian” as a word— Orwell created in his famed novel, during his life, he criticized ambiguous 1984. The work contains elements political terminology that became WO U L D N O T H AV E APPROVED OF of totalitarianism, oppression, and cliché due to excessive, nonspecific dystopia, and Orwell combines application. In his 1944 essay “What all of these tyrannical elements is Fascism?” Orwell expresses in his own way to form the states disdain for the word “fascism” for of Oceania and Ingsoc. Popular specifically that reason. He argues usage hints at a totalitarian state, that it is almost entirely meaningless, exploiting the word for its shock and and notes that, “in conversation, of hyperbole and ignoring the specific aspects that define Orwell’s course, it is used even more wildly than in print.” Conservatives, Ingsoc. It is common practice to name certain sets of ideas after socialists, communists, Trotskyists, Catholics, pacifists, supporters authors—Kafkaesque, Shakespearean, Joycean­— but none have of war, and nationalists are all groups considered by others to be been mutated to such an extent as “Orwellian.” Its vagueness has fascist, he writes, which makes it impossible to figure out who is come from its diverse application to irrelevant situations, so that actually fascist. Orwell argues that the more we relate “fascism” “Orwellian” no longer has to mean anything pertaining to Orwell to non-fascistic American life, the more we lose track of what with any kind of specificity. Suddenly, things like paying your taxes fascism meant in the first place—a pretty dangerous loss of and convenience store surveillance cameras are “Orwellian.” understanding. It’s difficult to summarize a political ideology as Before writing this article, I asked 30 Cornell students extensive as fascism, but its major characteristics include extreme whether they had read 1984 and how they defined “Orwellian.” nationalism and racism, anti-Leftism, violence as a method of I noticed that many of those who had read the book were more political enforcement, and the servitude of a glorified, all-powerful specific in their explanation of the word. They frequently related leader. Compared to the examples that Orwell listed in his essay it to elements within 1984, such as the oppressive totalitarianism of what people deem fascist, the word has come a long way

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ORWELL HIMSELF

“ORWELLIAN”

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from its original extremist right-wing roots. The irony with which “Orwellian” is following fascism’s increasingly superfluous misuse is obvious.

Such a phenomenon is not new, however. The first recorded use of “Orwellian” took place in 1950, when writer Mary McCarthy included it in an essay. The line “a leap into the Orwellian future” was all the attention she devoted to the word, a usage which is just as vague as anyone’s application of it today, and the word in no way contributes to her criticism of Cold War-era communism.

Such usage only confirms that people see “Orwellian” as a way to make a political statement, without needing to provide any other arguments that support their opinions. Today, political criticism websites like The New American and Real Clear Politics feature headlines like “Orwellian Nightmare: Data-mining Your Kids” and “Obama’s Orwellian Legacy” to promote their not-sosubtle right-wing agenda. Such headlines serve as excellent click bait—the Internet loves hyperbole as a way of getting people to click and generate web traffic—but they make essentially no progress toward a logical argument. These distorted headlines can also be dangerous in political discourse, because buzzwords like “Orwellian” and “socialist” undoubtedly radicalize political opinions. They also silence real debate—if I’m reading an article from an opposite perspective and they use one of these sensationalist words, I’m going to think they’re irrational and won’t read the rest of their argument. Neither of these exaggerated articles mentions televisions watching me in my home, and I haven’t seen any federally published posters with the words “Big Brother is Watching You,” so I’m going to assume that we’re not living in Ingsoc.

One of the most recent examples of the word’s abuse is in conversations surrounding the NSA government surveillance scandal. The newfound knowledge of the National Security Administration’s telephone and Internet surveillance has notably exacerbated public distrust of the American government. Many of the students I asked about the word “Orwellian” linked it to the NSA and Snowden.

Surveillance is an obvious key to Orwell’s Ingsoc, and tenuous connections to the principles of the NSA scandal certainly exist.

Still, the degrees of surveillance are different—no one is watching your every movement, and particularly not to such

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an extreme case that you’re forced to hide in your own home to avoid it (as Winston Smith does at some points in 1984). Of course, government surveillance is unnerving, and I’m not trying to lessen its seriousness in our nation, but calling it an “Orwellian” nightmare would be an obvious exaggeration that does not at all apply to a country like the United States. Newsweek summed it up pretty well in its June article, “Sorry, We’re Not Living in Orwell’s 1984”: “If you are invoking 1984 in a country in which 1984 is available for purchase and can be freely deployed as a rhetorical device, you likely don’t understand the point of 1984.”

The obsession with potential American tyranny stems in part from the prevalence of popular dystopian literature like 1984, but if we can access books that criticize political authoritarianism, then we haven’t yet reached it in our government. It’s fairly insensitive to insist in earnest that we suffer from what has been a very real type of oppression sporadically across human history, but that most of us have no experience with.

“Orwellian” may be a questionable term, but that doesn’t mean we should disregard 1984 as irrelevant to contemporary American and global society. The main purpose of dystopian fiction like 1984 is to point out human flaws that could potentially lead to disaster. By creating the corrupt and oppressive Oceania in 1984, Orwell calls on us to recognize the defects in our own government and society, and how these defects may escalate into serious issues if given the chance. For example, the NSA surveillance scandal brought widespread public outrage. We’re uncomfortable with how much the government is watching us because it infringes upon people’s privacy in an undemocratic way. It seems to encourage the possibility that our democratic country could someday become something like Oceania. Orwell wants us to look critically at our government and to distrust aspects that impose upon our rights. The fear that America will someday exemplify the government of 1984 is something that dystopian fiction like Orwell’s work encourages, so that we can change unfavorable aspects (like surveillance) to prevent future oppression and tyranny.

Nonetheless, it’s 2013, and we’re not yet living under conditions even close to Orwell’s dystopia. Oceania still doesn’t exist, and neither does Big Brother.

So after all of this, if you’re still thinking about using the word “Orwellian” in reference to the NSA, or the traffic light with the camera, or the new Xbox with a built-in camera that can’t be turned off (wait, what?), then please, stop.

Then again, if you’re still really dying to use it, then no one’s stopping you.

It’s a free country…maybe? •

PRETTY LITTLE LIARS AND THE NEW MAGIC FORMULA

FOR TELEVISION the power of transmedia storytelling

KAITLYN TIFFANY

art by THELONIA SAUNDERS ABC Family’s teen drama Pretty Little Liars is confusing the shit out of everyone. The show centers on four estranged friends uniting in an effort to combat a mysterious tormenter, “A,” who they initially suspect of having murdered their nightmarish blonde ringleader. It’s a plotline that reveals new complexities, twists, and character duplicity at a rate to be envied by Scorsese himself, but this isn’t the source of confusion—and neither is the fact that its central romantic relationship is a clear-cut case of statutory rape (but why aren’t we confused by this?). It’s the fact that we all thought watching television in real time was as dead as the limp-handed, lip-glossed corpse in the show’s opening credits.

However, creator Marlene King is keen on the bait-andswitch, so, for Season Four, it turns out that tuning in, skipping soccer practice, and suffering the commercials is back.

Pretty Little Liars, though it was initially viewed as a watered-down version of Desperate Housewives for pre-teens, has proved to be one of the most social media savvy and masterfully constructed pieces of entertainment in recent memory.

With its summer finale garnering four million viewers, the show holds the highest ratings in the 12-to-34-year-old demographic and is the top-rated program on cable. To put that into context: the much-anticipated and buzzed-about Breaking Bad series finale had 10.3 million viewers and a 6.5% share the night it premiered, but it was only its final season that topped the Liars in the ratings; Walt and Jesse averaged only 2.6 million viewers in 2012 and 1.9 in 2011.

Even while a long way away from its impossible-to-imagine denouement, Pretty Little Liars is averaging 3.7 million viewers across all four seasons and, most importantly, the middle-of-the-season show looks about the same, rating-wise, as a hyped-up finale.

Yet neither PLL nor its competing “ratings giants” can hold a spot in the hall of fame for conventional television ratings, because TV is not the same game it used to be.

Most producers understand the game isn’t just about “ratings” anymore, but the producers and publicists of Pretty Little Liars take it a step further. They know what the new name is:

“Buzz.” Social media buzz, to be specific.

#buzz

The 2013 summer finale of PLL boasted 1.9 million Twitter mentions—a number that shattered the previous record of 1.4 million held by the Season 12 finale of American Idol this May. Mashable presented a breakdown of the episode, which reveals the true power of the program’s implementation of live-tweeting—these mentions are happening in real time. At 8:00 p.m. on the East Coast, when the episode began, the show was mentioned in 18,000 tweets simultaneously. At 8:28 p.m. when fan favorites Ezra and Aria shared a spontaneous kiss after their long and oh-my-god-so-tragic separation, there were 17,000 PLL hashtag mentions—primarily the network-generated tags #Ezria and #EzriaTogeth

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er. At 8:59 p.m., the reveal that Ezra was a member and/or the orchestrator of the notorious “A Team” solicited 70,000 #EzrA and #PLLReaction tweets in one minute.

The explanation for the Liars’ success is multi-faceted and reveals an impressively constructed long-term scheme on the part of its creators. Not only does the show appeal heavily to younger demographics­—already the most likely people to use social media—it also manipulates its genre in a way that makes participation in real-time viewing, viewer interaction, and transmedia storytelling absolutely vital for enjoyment.

The show’s use of social media actively ups the rewards for real-time viewing by offering the possibility of interacting with the show’s actors during the episode’s airing.

Before the Season Three winter premiere, the Pretty Little Liars Twitter account and Facebook page both encouraged fans to interact with an account set up for one of the show’s villains, Mona Vanderwaal, who tweeted clues throughout the episode that would lead viewers to a hidden piece of unaired video. The account accumulated 54,000 followers in four days. Keegan Allen, who plays the often-shirtless supporting character, Toby, live-tweeted the premiere and received 40,000 mentions. Three of the female leads, Shay Mitchell (Emily Fields), Ashley Benson (Hanna Marin), and Lucy Hale (Aria Montgomery), all boast upwards of two mil-

“ ” SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVELY UPS THE REWARDS

FOR REAL-TIME VIEWING

lion followers apiece, more than the show’s own handle, and often log on to answer fan questions during episodes.

transmedia horror

Another huge draw of Pretty Little Liars is the way that it understands and exploits its genre. The Atlantic has credited Pretty Little Liars with the reinvention of the slasher. As an episodic and PG-13 adaptation of the classic horror film, Pretty Little Liars turns the horror movie model of attractive young people stumbling sexily towards a redemptive gore-fueled finale on end. Deaths are few, far-between, and completely tied to the ever more complex plot. At the center of the story looms the question of who murdered (or maybe just scared into hiding) the girls’ sadistic and manipulative friend, Allison. But each uncovered secret only leads the four “liars” down another winding detour, deeper into the mysterious A’s game of mental and emotional warfare. The characters are complicated, and even the core four are hard to trust as they finagle their way out of a web of lies and betrayal, which is largely of their own design. Bad acting aside, it asks the same questions about redeemability and reflexive/eventually-devastating loyalty to the main characters as Walter White does. The Atlantic proclaims that

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this “deep tension turns every episode into a trembling trip to the multiplex;” and largely attributes the show’s success to the way that each episode reveals at least one vital piece of the enormous central puzzle, “making the spoiler-rich series a rare island of appointment television in the streamingand-DVR ocean.” Sure, a huge reason it draws fangirls is the gossip magazine-type focus on steamy relationships and ever-evolving nail polish trends, but the mastery with which the show handles suspense and terror makes it a piece of television that is equally enjoyable to many outside its key demographic. And the complex and therefore intellectually demanding nature of the plot encourages the viewers’ active cognitive participation, making it perfectly suited to reawaken socially participatory and attendance-mandatory television, driven by social media.

As an extended horror film, it is more than easy for the show creators to encourage fan theories and continue discussion throughout breaks in air. During the 2012 gap, an eight-part web series called Pretty Dirty Secrets was released, building anticipation for the October Halloween special by introducing a new character to the series. Pretty Dirty Secrets attracted a whopping three million views, representing about three-fourths of the show’s total average viewership. Melanie Brozek of Salve Regina University explains the implications of these efforts, calling them a prime example of “transmedia storytelling,” meaning “a process where the elements of fiction are dispersed over multiple media platforms for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.” The aim is to create a more engaged audience that feels obligated to reach out to each new channel of information in order to understand the narrative as intimately as possible.

the backchannel

This effort only amplifies social media participation as it generates more fuel for discussion, creating what Mike Proulx and Stacey Shepatin call a “backchannel” in their book on social TV. A backchannel is made up of “real-time organic social expressions that act as a participatory companion to our favorite TV broadcasts,” and the authors assert that it is superior even to the discussion and shared-viewing generated by old network hits—as they contend, “before Twitter existed, conversations about live television shows or events were contained to the household or left for discussion with friends after the event occurred.”

Now, they argue, real-time viewership and unprecedented amounts of participation and discussion are created by the compulsion to connect with a social community and share the immediate experience of the show. Katie Walsh, of the USC Annenberg School for Communication, describes this particular form of motivation for viewer interaction as having a potential for the viewing to become only a small part of a larger “game” of understanding the narrative. “Game culture and the rise of a play aesthetic emerged as an organizing experience in media culture,” she explains, and “viewer interaction is now an integral part of television viewing, as a result of an industry-wide effort to sustain attention in a marketplace where attention is largely

fragmented.” ABC’s Facebook page for the series has tabs for “Suspect Tracking” and offers mobile alerts to inform viewers of chances for extracurricular sleuthing. As much as this is “just TV,” it is also a serious mystery in need of solving—and if the page’s “Like” count is any indication, there are 11 million people who feel up to the challenge.

the new magic formula This isn’t to say that PLL is truly on the verge of dismantling the house that DVRs, online streaming, and audience segmentation has built. DVRs are present in 60% of television-owning households, and 64% of all viewers—including 83% of viewers under the age of 25—say that they watch their television online at least part of the time. Most importantly, since the heavy adaptation of cable began in the late eighties, the increasing diversity of viewing options has been constructing an ever-more-splintered audience for television. In 1983, during the heyday of networks, 125.6 million people tuned in for the series finale of M*A*S*H—a number that represented a 77% share of the real-time television viewership for that hour. After transitioning from a world of four main channels to hundreds of options, these are unreasonable goals for PLL (even with the highest 18-to29-year-old viewership on cable). The truth is, people don’t watch television on shared sets, and no single show dominates popular consumption. Episodes of Saturday Night Live are distilled to HuffPost lists of the highlights and a handful of short clips per week that are shared across social media networks, with maybe one or two per season reaching public consciousness. Even popular shows like Mad Men and Girls, which manage to elicit the standard next-day “water cooler” conversation and the new trend of a zillion Internet think-pieces per episode, don’t demand viewing in real time. And even Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead, cable hits that have seen success on social media, can’t prove that a significant majority of their buzz comes from real-time viewers.

Where there were once gaggles of pre-teens congregating in the homes with the most lenient parents to watch Steve Martin’s first appearance alongside the Blues Brothers and hordes of demographic line-blurring family members and friends circled up to find out who shot JR, it is now possible that every family member sits in a different room watching a different program. There is no fight over the remote, no dad accidentally getting into Grey’s Anatomy because he lost a coin toss. And with TV available on a myriad of devices, we aren’t even likely to overhear someone else’s selection—making us even more isolated in our consumption. While no current television program seems poised to break the 50% share threshold of the big network shows of yore, the Season Three winter premiere of Pretty Little Liars accounted for 52% of all Twitter activity on January 8, 2013—indicating that the people of ABC Family have un-

derstood something important about the future of television, which their competitors have yet to grasp.

If there’s one thing that Pretty Little Liars does better than just about any other show on television, it is that it sustains attention. Social media functions to drag viewers to the television for real-time viewing and to hold them there in a fully attentive and interactive state for the duration of the show, as evidenced by Mashable’s tracking of PLL’s summer finale tweets. The plot of the show, constructed as a horror film and murder mystery on a grand scale, mandates attention to detail and encourages personal and collaborative speculation. The participatory state created by both of these factors is elevated by ABC Family’s innovative use of multiple media in telling the story of America’s favorite pretty little liars.

While Pretty Little Liars isn’t set to win any Emmys, especially not for its acting, there is undeniably some sort of genius behind the fact that there are 11 million people in America spending a generous amount of time focusing their collective brainpower on one question—“Who is A?” •

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PRAISE

TIA LEWIS

THE

LORDE you can call her “queen bee”

With clear, layered vocals set over snapping fingers and the echo of a bass drum, “Royals” propelled Lorde to music industry fame the second it hit up Soundcloud last November. The song slams modern music’s obsession with riches and fame, making humorous references to unrelatable luxuries that aren’t always available, desired, or even necessary in today’s world. Although Lorde, or Ella Yelich-O’Connor, may be a new musician, this top single has certainly proved that she is not ignorant of the industry’s inclination toward glamour or how to write a Billboard number one song.

Lorde is not another L.A. princess with a rock star father and a shitload of Hollywood connections, but a 17-year-old girl from New Zealand. She was signed to Universal Music Group at the age of 13 when a scout stumbled upon a video of her singing at a school talent show. How many 13-year olds can say that they not only write their own songs, but are also signed to UMG? When I was 13, I’m pretty sure I was watching Doctor Who and struggling with geometry.

Lorde, however, was out conquering the world, and at a mere, youthful 16, “Royals” had already hit number one in New Zealand, Canada, and the United States.

Of course, “Royals” isn’t Lorde’s only impressive single.

All of her songs, from the seven on her EP The Love Club to the ten on her debut album Pure Heroine, adhere to a similar aesthetic. Centered on the theme of youthful wisdom, these tracks ride on a hip-hop inspired beat mixed with a chorus of indie pop vocals. Despite the consistent formula, Lorde’s songs are not by any means an example of lazy copy-and-paste. Beyond the varied melodies and instrumentals is the real meat of Lorde’s music: the lyrics.

As much as Lorde rocks her songs with the confidence of a fresh, young pop star, her words reveal vulnerabilities, opinions, and wisdom beyond her years. Lorde’s music is about themes like getting older and appreciating your hometown—things that everyone experiences. She doesn’t rely on the glamorous filter of “jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash” to dilute her lyrics like so many other popular artists do, but mocks them instead . She embraces her writ-

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ing roots—her mother is a poet—and jumps into ambitious internal rhymes like, “It’s a switch flipped, it’s a pill tipped back, it’s a moon eclipsed.” To many, she may be just a kid; but when it comes to writing, it’s clear that this International Baccalaureate student knows what she’s doing. In an interview with The Fader, Lorde spoke of her writing experience:

“I’ve always written short fiction and read short fiction,” she explained. “Short fiction is like the most difficult thing to do, because everything’s got to be short and clear and potent because you’ve got like 15 pages to create this amazing thing that people will remember. So I guess that stuck with me in writing songs.”

Beyond Lorde’s songwriting abilities, she’s gained notoriety for her upfront honesty about her inspirations and opinions about others in the industry. Lorde has had her fair share of slip-ups, but has managed to maintain an aura of elegant professionalism. In a recent interview with Metro, for instance, she trashed Taylor Swift’s influence on young fans:“Taylor Swift is so flawless, and so unattainable, and I don’t think it’s breeding anything good in young girls,” she said. “‘I’m never going to be like Taylor Swift, why can’t I be as pretty as Lorde?’ That’s fucking bullshit.”

Naturally, a storm of articles followed, painting Lorde as a Taylor Swift hater. She responded to the claims on her Tumblr: “There’s a lot of importance placed on physical perfection in this industry, and I wish my favorite stars didn’t look perfect because I think fans (me included) have these feel-

ings of worthlessness, like they’ll never be as pretty/talented/whatever,” she wrote. “Basically, this is an apology for not thinking too hard before I speak.”

In another interview, this time with MTV, she claimed that “there’s a funny culture in music that’s only happened over the last 15 years, that if you have an opinion about something in music that isn’t 100% good, you’re a ‘hater’— even if you have perfectly reasonable grounds for that critique.”

Lorde may be young and opinionated, but she does not throw her opinions around carelessly— they’re only interpreted carelessly. Consumers have become so used to the politics of fame that they forget actors and singers are real people with varying opinions and points to make. Even worse, they forget that many of these people are artists seeking to express themselves—not simply keep the masses entertained (although that’s usually an appreciated side product). Lorde must balance her roles: an artist with societal critique to offer, and a celebrity who has to walk around on tip-toes to keep a career going. Because she’s so new to this balancing act, she is bound to bounce off the walls for a while before finding her footing. Lorde is far from the first female artist to assert this right to speak her mind. Madonna had no reservations spreading anti-war, anti-Puritanism sentiments, and, surprisingly, pro-gun messaging; while artists like M.I.A. and Bjork regularly promote clear political ideals. The most prominent and perhaps the most aggressive is Azealia Banks, who first signed with XL in her teens and has proven to be remarkably blunt and outspoken with the press. Most recently, Banks has publicly condemned President Obama for considering intervention in Syria, attacked celebrity blogger Perez Hilton on Twitter, and criticized Miley Cyrus for her “embarrassing” cultural appropriation. Fresher to the music industry is the young Lorde, who seems to be following a similar fuck-it-all, trash-talkyour-peers model. The music industry can always use more female artists who embrace a Kanye-like attitude of “this is how I see it and I have a right to say so,” especially ones who are very young, who appeal to a wide demographic of the youth population, and whose music sits in a popular, “mainstream” position. Stripping women like Lorde and Banks down to fit into the same little pop star box may keep everyone clean and nice, but it ultimately prevents anyone from being able to truly embrace their craft and show their individuality.

These artists also know what it’s like to be on the other end as a listener or fan. Lorde understands that many people eat up Hollywood and other media deceptions as common truths—that young kids accept fictional exaggerations as reality because no one’s telling them that it’s not all true.

In an industry where a fear of change stems from a fear of losing power, Lorde is trying to stay true to herself and keep her commentary honest.

Being constantly compared to Lana Del Rey due to their similar style of music, Lorde has often been asked for her opinion on the 27-year-old singer’s work. In a conversation with Interview Magazine, she said that Del Rey’s work was unrelatable: “Around the middle of last year I started listening to a lot of rap, like Nicki Minaj and Drake, as well as pop singers like

“

LORDE IS NOT

”

AFRAID TO SCRAPE OFF THE

SUGAR-COATING

Lana Del Rey,” she said. “They all sing about such opulence, stuff that just didn’t relate to me—or anyone that I knew.”

Del Rey’s songs harp on things like, “Wining and dining, drinking and driving,/Excessive buying, overdose and dyin’,” painting a dramatic portrait of wealth. But ultimately the rest of the world cannot connect to these images except in fantasy—and disturbed fantasy, to say the least. One could argue that her music is an ironic representation of the problems in a money-obsessed society. Unfortunately teenage listeners probably don’t see Del Rey’s songs as portraits of a destructive lifestyle, but rather as passionate and worth pursuing. Lorde, on the other hand, writes about the everyday things, singing, “You’re the only friend I need/Sharing beds like little kids/And laughing ‘til our ribs get tired/But that will never be enough.” Like Del Rey, her lyrics target apathetic youth; but instead of offering dangerous dreams, she gives them something worth appreciating in the reality they already live in. In The Fader, Lorde elaborated on Del Rey: “She’s great, but I listened to that Lana Del Rey record and the whole time I was just thinking it’s so unhealthy for young girls to be listening to, you know: ‘I’m nothing without you…This sort of shirt-tugging, desperate, don’t leave me stuff. That’s not a good thing for young girls, even young people, to hear.”

It’s impressive to see a teenager so new to fame with such a strong understanding of the effects of media on consumers. In fact, Lorde is not afraid to scrape off the sugarcoating that many public figures rely on to skirt real issues. She confronts topics such as feminism head on with an honest and educated opinion. When songs like “Blurred Lines” are popular, stripping women of their humanity and painting men as their powerful saviors, the last thing young girls and boys need to hear is music by women representing themselves as desperate, man-needing animals who lack any outside ambitions. “Because I’m crazy, baby I need you to come here and save me”—a line from Del Rey’s “Off to the Races”—is not the type of lyric young girls should idealize. If you’ve been in love, maybe you understand the feeling of devoting yourself to someone; but, for teenage girls still trying to identify their own gender roles and find their place in the world, this kind of guidance can do more harm than good. In a New York Post article in September, Lorde directly addressed her relationship with feminism: “A lot of women in the music industry in general say things like, ‘I’m not a feminist—I love men,’” she said. “It’s such an 18th-century perspective. Feminism doesn’t have to be all about burning your bras and not shaving under your arms.”

On the other end of the spectrum, celebrities like Katy Perry and Lady Gaga reject feminism. “I am not a feminist, but I do believe in the strength of women,” Perry said in

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her acceptance speech for Billboard’s “Woman of the Year” award. In an interview with Norwegian music channel Lydverket, Lady Gaga went a similar course, claiming that she’s not a feminist: “I hail men, I love men, I celebrate American male culture—beer, bars, and muscle cars,”

What? Clearly there’s a discrepancy between actual feminists and straw feminists here, and, of the three celebrities, only Lorde seems to be aware of that line. There’s something incredibly refreshing about an artist who’s conscious of prominent social issues and doesn’t fear a conversation about them. Of course, she isn’t alone on this stage. Celebrities like Amy Poehler, John Legend, Lena Dunham, Kerry Washington, Keira Knightley, and Ellen Page have all openly called themselves feminists. And yet, so many people in the spotlight still confuse the meaning of feminism, confuse its goals, and fear that potential fans will confuse the meaning as well—that identifying as a feminist will make men distrust you and some women afraid that you’re rocking a boat that ought to remain steady. What they don’t realize is feminism’s “bad name” is, in part, what justifies it. Why is it that a movement seeking to achieve gender equality is written off as one full of complaining, ugly, mad women? Something is wrong with the system; something is wrong with the patriarchy. The real craziness is the fact that it’s the 21st century and people would rather pretend everyone is equal than face the fact that we’re not. The next generation needs role models, like Lorde, who aren’t afraid to stand up and say, “This isn’t right, this is unfair, and here’s how we change it.”

Lorde never forces agenda in her music, but these little comments that she drops into an interview or blog post on her Tumblr give her stage name special meaning. This honest way in which she expresses her view of the world is not only reflected in her music, but also her image. Whether she realizes it or not, Lorde is branding herself as an educated young person who’s still figuring things out, but isn’t afraid to pick out the right from the wrong with certainty.

Where other musicians create their persona and label meticulously and with noticeable thought, Lorde seems to be constructing her brand in a way that’s so organic, it could just be the result of her status of still exploring her “newfound fame,” and being “not in the swing of things/But what I really mean is/ not in the swing of things yet.” However, the fact that she’s been signed since 13 can’t be discounted. Perhaps the brand she’s created is one that has been worked on for years, just as carefully as the rest—there’s no real way to be sure. She’s young and unpredictable right now, but that’s what keeps her interesting. Everything else about her image construction is speculation. Still, her interviews continue to give the outside world a curious look in on who Lorde appears to be.

“I have pretty strong morals and opinions being in pop music, and I

art by DANIELA PIMENTEL and THELONIA SAUNDERS

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can’t help but express those, which I think people appreciate,” she said in an October interview with MTV. “I mean, I don’t think I say anything that isn’t backed up. Most of the time I will stand by things that I’ve said.” Lorde shows attention to representation and major issues, but also an understanding of the complexities of the industry from the inside.

Being from New Zealand does seem to have a way of keeping her grounded, as Lorde pointed out in an interview with The Guardian.

“I’ve had two of the biggest songs in the country and I can do exactly what I’ve always done,” she said. “I can walk around, go to parties with my friends, it’s still relatively casual.”

While some, like Miley Cyrus, seem to embrace the Hollywood madness, Lorde has found her footing in New Zealand and clearly plans to keep it. The little things like these, which give us insight into her character, breathe of an honest image that one can only hope Lorde will cling to further into her career.

For now, Lorde will tour the world and keep us entertained with Pure Heroine, dissing the idea of “White Teeth Teens” and reminding us that we don’t have to be in the 1% to live life to the fullest. She may just be a young New Zealander with a clear head and a shitload of opinions, but that may be all she needs to continue writing killer music. She’s got quite the path ahead of her and it’s one I think she’ll walk, and walk well, for a long time to come. •

LENA AND LENA tipping gender scales on TV YANA MAKUWA

art by CLARRIE SCHOLTZ

I once overheard a professor say that with a little margin for error you can find out all you need to know about a time period from what was popular on television. But taking even a cursory glance at television today will show you that some experiences just aren’t represented on TV, and that gives our society a kind of tunnel vision that we’re not inclined to get rid of. When was the last time you watched a comedy set in a country other than the USA? And how much more likely are you to see an all-male cast than an all-female cast?

There is a great bias in acclaimed television today and it leans far away from women, and even more so women of color. However, just because they don’t regularly win awards doesn’t mean that there aren’t talented women out there looking to balance out this skew. One TV show that breaks this Caucasian male mold is Lena Dunham’s Girls, but she is not the only Lena looking to make a dent in this big hulking issue. Lena Waithe is a young African-American writer and producer of a new television series looking to be picked up by a network. Her show, Twenties, has gotten a lot of attention from blogs and magazines like Jezebel as a project that flies in the face of inequality in our broadcast entertainment.

The HBO series Girls—about a group of 20-somethings living in Manhattan—aired in April last year and was widely talked about because of the new image it gave to women on television. It gives audiences a look at the gritty and unpolished side of a class and age group that had previously been portrayed as socialite Barbie dolls within one-dimensional plot twists. People applauded the young Lena Dunham for her hyper-involved creative process (she writes, produces, and stars in her show) and the intense but always comedic realness of the girls. The show is unique and original; when it came out, many viewed it as the answer to the previously insufficient and inaccurate television depictions of women as combinations of the sexy bimbo, the damsel

in distress, the type-A bitch, and the unfulfilled housewife.

In her article for New York magazine “It’s Different for Girls,” Emily Nussbaum writes, “Dunham’s sly, brazen, graphic comedy, with its stress on female friendships, its pleasure in the sick punch line, its compassion for the necessity of making mistakes, felt like a retort to a culture that pathologizes feminine adventure.”

However, with great praise comes great criticism; and, for Girls, this came in the form of underrepresented minorities. The four main characters in the show are exclusively white females, which is problematic; this is more unrealistic when we take into account that these girls are living in New York City, where, as of 2012, 56% of the population was non-white, according to the United States Census Bureau. Even though Girls is a show with relatable characters, sharp humor, and strong female direction, there is obviously something to be desired from a television show that claims to truly depict life in NYC but leaves out more than half of the city’s populace.

The issue of diversity in television is particularly topical for shows like Girls that have such paradigm-altering potential. Over the last 30 years, there has been an average of 0.92 female writers and directors nominated for an Emmy each year–yes, not even a whole person to represent a group that makes up at least half (and in 2011 more than half) of the population, while men have 6.3 acclaimed male writers and directors each year. According to a report released in October by the Directors Guild of America, minority women directed only 2% of all primetime episodes in the 2012-2013 season, but 10% of the people in the country are minority women. This figure is, in fact, a decrease from the previous season, when they directed 4% of all network and cable episodes. White women, on the other hand, directed 12% of primetime episodes. No woman of color has ever won an

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Emmy for lead actress in a drama. And although a show like Girls made it onto the DGA’s “Best Of” list for shows that hired women or minority directors for at least 30% of the episodes, there is still an uncomfortable disparity in these numbers that is completely separate from the inequality between men and women. The way that women are marginalized should (and often does) bring them together and make them a force to be reckoned with, but there is a tension that arises from the fact that six times more white women than minority women have directed TV episodes. Female leaders in television are forced to fight for a limited space to get their voices heard, and it is unfortunate that minorities have this added barrier that they must face.

This skewed representation of American ethnic diversity on television is disturbing, but, on the plus side, it is inspiring a lot of minority artists to address the issue in their own work. One such innovator is the aforementioned Lena Waithe, whose work Twenties is about a young woman without a real job desperately seeking an Internet fanbase. She and her two friends live in New York City, and the show fol-

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lows the experiences and struggles that come with making a life as a young adult in a big metropolis. After watching the pilot presentation, which you can find on YouTube in four parts, I had the great opportunity to speak with Waithe about her vision for Twenties and her thoughts about the role women of color play in the entertainment industry and in her own work. When I asked her about her vision for the show she was emphatic. “This is NOT a web series,” she assured me. The goal is for the show to get picked up by a major network. Waithe identifies herself as a television writer, and she has written Twenties specifically for that medium. She created the video series to give people interested in the project a better idea of what her vision for the show is, and to prove that there is an audience for it (something that networks have been unsure of).

I was curious to see how Waithe would respond to my question about Twenties being likened to Girls, and being compared to Lena Dunham. She responded by saying, “it’s a compliment to be compared to Lena Dunham,” and it is “an easy comparison to make,” but “Twenties is not a

black version of Girls.” Waithe likes Girls as a show, and says that it gives a good perspective and “shows our ugliness, beauty, and complexity,” but it is still a specific experience.

Both shows have that specificity in common, because each woman wrote according to her own experience, and Waithe hopes that when Twenties gets to TV people will see that “both of our voices are valid and deserve to be heard.”

As an African-American female television writer, Lena Waithe has been working in the thick of the gender and race issues in the entertainment industry. “When I was in the Writers Guild I was one of two black women,” she said. The solution? Television needs more women of color in executive positions, since “African American showrunners (head writers who make major decisions about the direction of the show) are more likely to employ other people of color.”

Waithe continued that the misrepresentation of racial diversity in television is directly related to the diversity-deficient executive broadcasting companies—which makes sense, considering that people are more likely to understand a project’s nuances or its underlying intent if they have similar experiences and perspectives to the writers or creators.

She mentions Shonda Rhimes, the woman responsible for the hit dramas Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, as the type of minority woman in power that needs to be emulated. And to young people looking to get involved in the industry, she says, “Go for it!” Even if you’re not the greatest of writers, there’s still a great need for executives with good taste and good sense.

Staying on the topic of minorities, I asked Waithe about her main character, Hattie, who is not only black, but also gay, and whether she thought that the difficulties being part of an ethnic minority differ from those that come with being a sexual minority. Her response: “The biggest difference

between being black and gay is you can hide being gay.”

She voiced concerns with having token minority characters and misrepresenting those experiences, but also noted that, when it’s authentic, these characters can help television strike a deeper chord with people. Waithe describes Hattie as a unique or particular, but still universal, character.

She isn’t a stereotype, but rather “confusing and mixed-up” and “charming.” In Waithe’s vision for the show, Hattie is not what you’d expect from a black lesbian, and that not only makes her more interesting for the audience, but forces them to reevaluate their expectations of both the show and the stereotypical black lesbian. Hattie and her two friends, Marie and Mia, make up the heart of the show, which is “about a friendship and a bond,” in Waithe’s words.

Lena Waithe is looking forward to the future, glittering with the premiere of a film directed by Justin Simien that she produced called Dear White People, and dreams of Emmys for Twenties on the horizon. We should all be on the lookout for people like Lena Waithe and Lena Dunham, who have it in their power to create something that can affect change in what we see on our screens. The problem of racial diversity in television is elusive, because it’s hard to know what we’re missing when we have no point of reference.

There are very few truly fair and diverse representations of women on television, so we have no idea what to expect from entertainment that tries to give it to us. Waithe and Dunham are looking to tap into a need that we all have: to personally relate to the people who entertain us on screen.

Diversifying TV, whether it’s by writing more minority roles, hiring more female directors, or having more minority executives, will give a wider range of people more material to relate to, and characters to defend at CTB over coffee. •

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WHEN “MOLLY” IS MORE THAN JUST A NAME the modern drug-infused EDM culture

ALYSSA BERDIE

art by AURORA ROJER Of the two notorious fatalities at New York City’s 2013 Electric Zoo festival (E-Zoo), one was caused by a fatal dose of “molly,” the pure form of the drug MDMA; and the other by a mixture of molly and methylone, a similar stimulant that is usually cut with MDMA and sold as molly. Known as the “love drug” for the elated and often amorous feelings it elicits, MDMA causes neurotransmitters to flood the brain with dopamine and serotonin, producing a sought-after euphoric state. However, large quantities of the drug can also cause body cells to freak out and organs to shut down.

Overdosing and mixing drugs, due to a lack of education or general carelessness, usually causes the fatal effects of molly—or any drug, for that matter. The current drug sweeping the Electronic Dance Music (EDM) scene, molly is frequently found and used by concertgoers at festivals and small music venues alike.

I have been to a few musical festivals, none of which were exclusively EDM, but Chicago’s Lollapalooza was one of the greatest weekends of my life so far. I spent three days enjoying music and exploring a new city with my best friends; however, I also experienced some strange incidents at my first huge musical festival experience.

When I walked into Grant Park on the first day of Lollapalooza, the very first thing I witnessed was a 20-something-year-old being wheeled out by emergency medical technicians while a friend held a bag underneath this chin.

This was at about 3 p.m. As the three days passed I witnessed a lot of drug use, drug sales, noticeably intoxicated people, and a lot of what seemed like drug users losing their sense of self, place, and reality. The headliner Bassnectar—an EDM artist known for bass-heavy dubstep and drum & bass music—didn’t go on stage until 9 p.m., after festivalgoers had been dancing, drinking, and partying for the last ten hours. I was standing with my friend, pretty far from the

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stage but still within a large crowd, when we saw two girls dancing together. This didn’t strike us as strange until we saw both drinking from an unmarked reusable water bottle held by a man who was waving them over. One girl—who looked like she was in her early twenties—appeared unsure of her actions and lost within reality, while the other woman, older and dressed in a more “rave-esque” outfit, seemed more confident in her actions but very intoxicated. These two women clearly didn’t come to this festival together, and the less experienced raver seemed desperate to escape the situation; however, she also seemed uncertain of what was even going on. Eventually a brave group of women began to dance around her in order to isolate her from the situation. Scared, my friend and I moved away, but felt nervous, hoping these two women found who they came to their festival with and left safely.

My negative experiences haven’t dissuaded me from attending a music festival in the future. There is nothing like the festival experience, but it has made me very aware of the widespread drug abuse and ignorance in regards to keeping safe. After Lollapalooza, I can’t imagine what it is like at an exclusively EDM festival, especially since many of my strange observations happened at the EDM stage.

Many people believe that the fantastical hyper-reality of EDM environments mimic the idea that technology is taking over. As a frequenter of music festivals, I understand this point of view; it is definitely amusing to see a huge crowd of people moving to one guy with a laptop on a huge stage that is filled with mostly screens, graphics, and lights. However, I don’t think it’s the one guy with the laptop that mimics the idea that technology is taking over, but the fact that Millennials are the first generation to come of age with social media. We have grown up with the popular idea of documenting and sharing everything that happens to us.

It’s this unconscious desire to be loved, accepted, and validated by our peers. You got to eat at a cool restaurant, so you absolutely must commemorate your decadent dessert on Instagram; you go to a huge music festival, so you want to upload a picture to Facebook. It’s second nature to us to document what we are currently experiencing, to show our peers facets of our personality through snippets of our experiences. This ties in with the typical experience of adolescents longing for acceptance by our peers: we want to be considered cool and interesting rather than boring and inexperienced. This need for approval is only intensified through social media, where we can give physical evidence of our interesting lives through pictures and blog posts. The typical adolescent experience, combined with social media, creates a plethora of negative activities—some of which we know and recognize, like cyber bullying and “nudes” being shared without permission; but others are not as familiar, one of which is the added pressure to be doing the coolest thing and sharing it with peers. This creates such a negative avenue for events where there is heavy drug and alcohol use, like going to bars, parties, and music festivals, where partygoers choose to do and take things that they aren’t necessarily educated about—in order to say they did it and show (or prove) so through social media.

You can’t expect that drug education comes with age; usually it comes from experience, or active attempts to educate oneself through mediums such as online courses, drug education courses, or medical advice. But drug education tends to focus purely on abstinence, never addressing safe usage; education that isn’t just “say no” isn’t easy to find, and isn’t being provided to our youth through regular education.

So now we take the typical adolescent experience, with the need for validation via social media and general lack of drug education, and combine it all with a huge musical festival with an attendance of anywhere from thousands to hundreds of thousands of people. This can be a very dangerous—and as we’ve learned, fatal—combination. That girl from your high school who never spoke a word might look to taking drugs at a big music festival, without prior knowledge or understanding of how to take it responsibly, just so she can prove to herself and to her peers that she is in fact an interesting and unpredictable person. Or maybe it’s that guy you met in college who does every drug under the sun, casually taking some at a festival without understanding the physical toll a music festival can have on a person’s body, especially under the additional influence of alcohol.

The fact that there are EDM artists out there promoting drug use—not only in their music lyrics, but also in their actions, statements at shows, and social media presence—

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only exacerbates the situation of misinformation. There is an added sense of danger within EDM music that isolates it from the rest of the music industry, and this difference lies in the environment. Under bright lights, huge screens with crazy graphics, and bass-heavy music, drugs seem like just the next ingredient to the mix—a way to enhance an already hyperstimulating environment. Then there are artists like Diplo, an American EDM producer who, in his song “Biggie Bounce,” includes the lyric, “put a molly on the table then she licks it up.” And there is Cedric Gervais, a French house music DJ, whose 57-word song “Molly” asks repeatedly where molly can be found, explaining that molly makes life happier and more exciting. These artists are promoting the use of the drug as well as literally referencing the reasons why someone would experiment with these drugs. This isn’t anything new, it has been going on since the days of disco and cocaine—but our social media presence works to enhance its effects. For example, if someone saw a picture of a cool girl at a big cool music festival with huge pupils and an ecstasy pill on her tongue, they may take this image and try to emulate it. Or if someone hears the lyrics of either songs I mentioned, or one of the many others that exists, they may wish to participate due to their idolization of these artists or their misconception about the EDM community. There is definitely a misconception of the EDM world that all artists are making music for you to get high to and dance around. For many artists like Bassnectar and dead-

“

THE FANTASTICAL HYPER-REALITY OF EDM

ENVIRONMENTS MIMIC THE IDEA THAT

TECHNOLOGY IS

”

TAKING OVER

mau5, the drug use by their fans is insulting and concerning. Deadmau5, or Joel Zimmerman, is openly a non-drug user who has spoken out against drug use in EDM, calling it an insult to his art. Last summer, Zimmerman bashed Madonna in Rolling Stone magazine over her reference to “molly” at the Ultra Music Festival in Miami. And Bassnectar recommended to his 1.2 million Facebook followers on the eve of a summer concert last year that there is “no need to overdo it or get sloppy with your nervous system.”

There are many more EDM artists who are creating this music because they love it and, of course, they want you to dance and let loose—but through their music, not through mood-enhancing substances. James Murphy, the creative mastermind behind LCD Soundsystem, has recently created a new sound system for Despacio, a three-night club event that is part of the Manchester International Festival.

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Murphy has commented less on drug use at EDM shows, and more about the artist-to-fan relationship and attachment to social media. He is trying to create electronic music

“

THE ARTISTS AND FESTIVALS NEED TO COME TOGETHER AND

”

TAKE A STAND

that gives his audience an experience on its own, rather than heavy bass and silly lyrics that beg the listener to add something more to enhance the experience—drug use. He wants his live music to provide an experience in itself, one that encompasses all of the listeners’ senses on its own, and to have the listeners not feel the need to share the experience on social media. A tactful sign at Despacio’s says, “Maybe don’t take pictures. Maybe don’t shoot videos. Maybe just be here. Just for tonight.”

The future of EDM music and EDM festivals lies with the artists and the events themselves. Artists who are currently not thinking of the well-being of their fans by having drug-promoting lyrics need to either come out and discourage the use of drugs, or, at a minimum, stop promoting it via their lyrics and social media presence. The music festivals themselves need to take more action on protecting their festivalgoers; simply putting, “don’t bring in drugs, don’t take drugs, stay hydrated,” on official webpages is not enough. The artists and the festivals need to come together and take a stand against the reckless and misinformed use of drugs, especially molly, ecstasy, and other “club drugs,” and work to inform their fans of the dangers, risks, and even fatal combinations of drugs, alcohol, and physically-demanding music festival events. •

ARE WE

HUMAN BLOCKBUSTER?

OR

ARE WE

ZACHARY ZAHOS

art by CLARRIE SCHOLTZ

“Immersion” is a hot word these days. That 13-minute tracking shot at the beginning of Gravity really immersed me in space with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock’s characters. That battle scene in Game of Thrones’ “Blackwater” episode back in Season 2 was so detailed, huge, immersive. Those graphics in Grand Theft Auto V really immerse me in the world of Los Santos. This new, cursory way we think of immersion (and there is another, which I will address) requires high-tech computer effects, camerawork, sound design, and a million other variables in order to make an unbelievable sci-fi, fantasy, superhero world believable. You forget yourself and become one with the action. Entertainment is more immersive than ever, but that doesn’t mean it’s any better.

What do I mean by “better?” It’s an ambiguous word, I’ll admit. While the aforementioned Gravity may just be the most egregious exception to the following statement, narrative films with high immersive value—specifically the synthetic kind obtained through cutting-edge CGI and other technical craftsmanship—most often fail as art and, most crucially, as drama and entertainment. A cynic would say that a lot of films, regardless of budget, fall short on all these factors, as predicated by a bell curve; however, my argument is more along the lines that almost any of these expensive summer movies sacrifice basic tenants of storytelling to satisfy their studio-sanctioned quota for overwhelming visual effects. There are notable exceptions, like Gravity, Life of Pi, and Hugo, but these have gained the reputation as representing the rare, if not lone, technologically masterful and artistically meritorious films from their respective years.

To put this simply, almost all these synthetically immersive entertainments are trifles with a short shelf life. The Hollywood summer movie mentality has prioritized the creation of detailed cities from the future (along with their inevitable, highly combustible destruction) over a good script. This is old news, maybe, but I would like you to consider how much entertainment—forget artistic insight, forget narrative ambition, forget all that—the last crop of summer films actually supplied. Star Trek Into Darkness would be a live-action reenactment of nice concept art without the presence of Scottie (Simon Pegg), and I challenge you to remember one of his lines. Man of Steel blew up Metropolis a billion times over along with your brain cells, while Elysium attempted thematic depth with a ham-fisted health care analogy devoid of any of the nuance the special effects team must have put into their pretty

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spaceship. These movies all share a poor, or nonexistent, sense of humor, instead banking on visual set pieces that will likely look dated in ten years, if not sooner. The few actually fun action extravaganzas we get—like Fast and Furious 6—are wise enough to be in on the joke, encouraging us to laugh at the ridiculous expense of their cheesy stunts.

Immersion breaks, for the sake of an honest and enjoyable, though sort of soulless, mode of camp.

The type of immersion which I have been criticizing differs from the kind of immersion all films strive to achieve, and plenty do. Pretty much every narrative film from the past 100 years that history has (unironically) remembered immerses you into its story, themes, aesthetics, and character. Movies depend on machines for obvious, fundamental reasons, but a good filmmaker knows that bells and whistles can only get him or her so far. It’s a matter of vision, you know? Stories have been told since time immemorial, by blind Greek poets and concentration camp prisoners. Technology takes a backseat to the spirit of the artist, to the potency of the tale—it’s a means to an end.

There’s a general reluctance among those my age, including those looking to dedicate their lives to filmmaking, to watch any movie prior to 1970. Hell, that’s too old for some; try 1994, the year of Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, and The Shawshank Redemption, which might as well constitute ancient history. The prospect of no computer effects, color, or—God almighty!—sound in a motion picture turns so

“

regardless of their knowledge of movies, than anything released this year or the last. While it features no spoken words, no color, and certainly not a pixel from a computer, it broke new ground in filmmaking with its moving, “unchained” camera. But that’s not the reason we still celebrate it today. It became timeless because it captured love so exquisitely, so honestly—it bottled an aspect of the human experience in a way that couldn’t be duplicated. In Late Spring or Tokyo Story, Japanese auteur Yasujiro Ozu did nothing to advance the technology of his craft, yet we tout these films as masterpieces because of how astutely he touched our anxieties on death, family, work, and loneliness.

Ozu moved the camera only once in Tokyo Story: What he included inside the static frame—nothing more than veteran Japanese actors and modest sets—was so fluid and identifiable to the layman that modifying the image further would be tantamount to consecration.

Ozu used what he had and left us with perfect art.

Filmmakers of all ages can learn from him today. One can say that computer effects of the highest caliber are part of the modern cinematic arsenal, yet I would counter that they are at the center of a new kind of arms race. Instead of signing on diverse minds and insightful stories, your Hollywood studio would rather hire the filmmaker willing to shut up as green screens litter his set—and you know he’s out of work mere months later when the next wave of explosion rendering software hits and he finally screams,

I ACCUSE THE STUDIOS, DISTRIBUTORS, AND MALL THEATER CHAINS OF UNDERESTIMATING, IF NOT THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE MASSES, THEIR

”

THIRST FOR GOOD,

HONEST STORYTELLING

many off before they even try. I am comfortable arguing that any film recommended by, say, the Sight & Sound Poll (determined by respected critics, directors, and historians) should connect with you as powerfully as any movie involving cell phones, Facebook, and government surveillance, if not more so. Technology rules our lives, yes, but let us try, oh, try to remember the world of flesh, wind, rock, and shore that we have shared for thousands of years with those hapless billions afflicted with the human condition.

The simple truth is that a great film requires this exploration of our shared experience. I believe Gravity, wherein two astronauts struggle to survive space catastrophe, does this. Director Alfonso Cuarón and Sandra Bullock drill to the heart of endurance and the will to live, and erect an essential cinematic monument in the process—despite the awe-inspiring visuals that will look outdated someday in the near future (à la Star Wars).

I also believe a movie like F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, released in 1927, has more to say to the average person,

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“Enough! Get this crap off my set!” Meanwhile, stories like Fruitvale Station and The Spectacular Now resign to independent funding—because not as many people will see them, because no one goes to the movies to see life as we know it, because most people go to the movies to distract themselves.

In 2011, the late Roger Ebert observed, in response to declining box office revenue, the Netflix streaming dominance of Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (as antiTransformers as you can get) over blockbusters and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Critics love to classify the “art cinema” from the “genre fare” or “low-brow trash,” yet we forget that any great film—be it Bicycle Thieves or Spider-Man 2—speaks to the same audience. A housewife from Louisiana and curator in San Francisco will both find themselves in tears by the end of David Lynch’s The Straight Story or Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. The dichotomous void between arthouse and multiplex films is not as large as you might think.

We need both, Fast and Furious 6 as much as Amour, yet the average moviegoer recoils at the thought of the latter. This is not the fault of the people as much as the result of conditioning. It’s easy to think of movies as fleeting products that, when done right, supply us with 45 minutes of fight scenes, 30 minutes of romantic tension, and the steamy three-minute payoff where the movie stars do it, for our pleasure much more than theirs. There’s also a story in there somewhere, which must end on as feel-good an ending as possible, regardless of how many people died preceding it. There is a predictable formula behind this kind of moviemaking—like, actually. That would be Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, a screenwriting guide whose popularity has led to a woefully derivative blockbuster landscape. The director and below-the-line crew comes in and resets the drapes, furniture, and wallpaper, but we’re still standing in the same goddamn room. We’ve been duped into thinking this is the best it gets.

I accuse the studios, distributors, and mall theater chains of underestimating, if not the intelligence of the masses, their thirst for good, honest storytelling. They leave the theater of Pacific Rim satisfied with what they saw on

the screen: skyscraper-tall robots smashing the shit out of massive aliens, all of which looked convincing enough. They leave the theater of Prisoners, on the other hand, shocked, saddened, and confused at what they saw in themselves: how a realization of our deepest fears can awaken the beast in any of us. The spell of Denis Villeneuve’s direction, Aaron Guzikowski’s narrative structure, Roger Dearkin’s cinematography, and the actors’ embodied brilliance immersed them in a bleak, startling reality, one hardly removed from their own.

Let us regard the films tethered to our own existence.

The movie with that three-minute tracking shot sweeping through a battlefield barraged by lasers, mushroom clouds, and giant mechs will scratch that itch we have for mindless, violent fun, but what will you take from it? Shouldn’t a good film exist not entirely in its moment, watched and then forgotten, but in your mind, for days, weeks, or years after you saw it? Why anchor your movie down to the fad of the moment? Why distract yourselves with empty worlds when you barely look at your own? Why ignore what’s over there, or here, already pre-rendered and just waiting to be touched? Why get behind a camera in the first place? •

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SLUT-SHAMING AND

SHREW-TAMING

This summer, with Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing, I finally succeeded in making my mother watch her first Shakespearean play—and, for the first time in history, I witnessed a woman who couldn’t get through the first chapter of The Great Gatsby turn to me after viewing a Shakespeare performance and declare, “I really liked that.

It was great.”

After jumping around for several minutes or so, I took a moment to ask her what made it so different. It took only a short period of immersion, she said, before her confusions with language that had always deterred her from Shakespeare gave way to the brilliance of the story. Though the “convoluted” language was still present, the strength of the characters and the vivid transition to the modern-day made the language clearer, the jokes funnier, and the plots more accessible. The Shakespeare of the 17th century was no longer the incoherent Bard, but a storyteller with a message for the people of our day.

Modernization and rebooting of Shakespearean plays has been a phenomenon for hundreds of years. In fact, in 1611, during Shakespeare’s own lifetime, the playwright John Fletcher wrote a sequel to The Taming of the Shrew.

No other playwright could successfully have one version of a play set in ancient Greece, another in 19th century England, and yet another at a 21st century lovers resort; and yet I have seen versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in all of these settings. This possibility for transplantation arises from the fact that Shakespeare wasn’t writing to an elite group of scholars, intending to have his works picked apart by men smoking pipes in libraries. Shakespeare wrote for the crowd—he wrote plays where men threw things at the actors and laughed loudly at bawdy sex jokes. His work is not kept alive by an elite few, but by the masses. These works lend themselves to modernizations because their humor and thematic resonance open them to the public and keep them alive in all eras.

much ado about feminism When it was announced that Joss Whedon, the man who gave us Firefly and The Avengers, would try his hand at Shakespeare, it was a disconcerting idea to many. The Internet film critic community was abuzz with concern and bemusement—a Vulture writer expressed shock that Whe-

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shakespeare in the 21st century MARISSA TRANQUILLI art by DANIELA PIMENTEL

don had time for anything aside from his Marvel “meal-ticket” and noted that he had to “sneak the shooting…into the slim production break he was given after The Avengers wrapped filming.” The black and white film, shot in only 12 days at Whedon’s mansion, pleased and surprised viewers and critics alike. Released only in select theaters, it attracted

nearly disproportionate critical attention, garnering positive reviews in every major daily.The New York Times’ A.O. Scott dubbed it “perhaps the liveliest and most purely delightful movie I have seen so far this year.”

Incorporating the language, timeline, and setting of the original play into the 21st century, the film was seamlessly crafted and flowed without the often forced feel of archaic language spoken by present-day actors. The cinematography represented a gorgeous throwback to seventies black and white experimentation, while the contemporary setting allowed a more head-on approach to some of Shakespeare’s originally buried double entendre, as well as a sounder confrontation of the gender dynamics at play. In particular, feminist voices took note of Whedon’s handling of the female protagonist, Hero (Jillian Morgese). Feministing published an intricate analysis of the way that Whedon brought the issue of slut-shaming to the foreground of his exploration of the Bard’s work, saying, “There’s a knowingness that colors the conclusion of the movie, an understanding of expectations placed on women and the dangerous ignorance we can face from men…Much Ado is first and foremost a giggly, sexy good time. But it’s also set up to inspire conversations about the disturbing reality of slut shaming.”

Past modernized versions of Much Ado have often felt forced—the Shakespearean rhetoric muddied understanding of the plot rather than allowing for an organic experience of the Bard’s storytelling. Whedon’s work succeeds where others have failed, however, because his stylistic approach is to isolate a beautiful corner of the world in which the poetry of Shakespeare can keep its hold. The somewhat archaic nature of an immediate wedding between strangers was made possible by the exquisite surroundings and the nod to Hollywood golden-era cinematography, while the overtly sexual jokes of the Shakespearean play allow the characters to slip easily into our modern world. While a onenight stand between Benedict and Beatrice is only hinted at in the play, it becomes a reality in the film, serving to make their passion for each other evident from the beginning. The Chicago Sun Times remarked, “If the two were as indifferent towards one another as they declared, then why do they keep talking incessantly about each other?”—an observation that could crop up just as easily when discussing any number of modern sitcoms, rom-coms, or the schematics of a real-life romantic relationship.

let’s see how far we’ve come

Arguably one of the most underappreciated film interpretations of a Shakespearean play, Coriolanus (2011), boasts big name stars—actor and director Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler—but received almost no popular attention, opening in only three cities. Positive critical reception was , however, unanimous; the adaptation was praised in The Vancouver Sun, where Katherine Monk wrote, “Coriolanus not only finds all the contemporary parallels, it reiterates the tragedy of the endlessly exploited patriot who hopes to earn love at the end of a barrel.” Rather than simply echoing the Roman wars from the days of myth, modernizing the story calls attention to real life in war zones to-

“

A MISOGYNISTIC

SHIT-SHOW

”

[IS REVAMPED] INTO A FEMINIST STATEMENT

day and illustrates how economic collapse destroys those without wealth. Coriolanus, unlike Macbeth, Othello, or Hamlet, is not your Prom Night blood bath with a single character standing above the carnage; rather, it depicts the selfishness and cruelty of human nature, and it is the death of only one man that echoes as the screen turns to black.

The same dissatisfaction with the government and distrust of ruling bodies shown in the play still exists today, as illustrated by the Occupy movement and the October closing of the American government, allowing Coriolanus to resonate with the contemporary public just as it did 400 years ago. Smooth-talking manipulative senators, a citizenry that wants to hear only flattery, and the masses who change their opinions at the drop of a hat are horrifying issues that have plagued society for hundreds of years—showing us truly how far we haven’t come.

star-crossed heartthrobs Though these language-faithful adaptations are commendable, not every Shakespeare modernization needs to keep the original poetry in order to maintain poignancy and achieve applicability to the world today. In fact, some modernized Shakespeare is almost completely unrecognizable. One of the greatest pieces of entirely revamped Shakespeare is the nineties gem Ten Things I Hate About You. The break-out film of actors such as Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles, and Joseph-Gordon Levitt revamps The Taming of the Shrew, a play that could be interpreted as a misogynistic shit-show, into a feminist statement—with classic romcom jokes along the way, of course. Katerina, the “shrew,” is a somewhat tempestuous character in any interpretation, but Stiles’ “Kat” is hostile in her attempt to broadcast her feminism in an unreceptive setting. While in the play her sister Bianca is a selfish backstabbing bitch, the Bianca of the movie manages to choose the proper man and kick the ass of the awful runner-up. Though I suspect there is a population out there who will slap me for saying so, Shakespeare’s plays were almost meant for romantic comedy conversion.

They were created for the masses, for the greatest number of people to enjoy ridiculous plots and sexual puns. The modern version of this is obviously the sitcom: feel-good films that everyone loves, even while they recognize their absurdity. Ten Things I Hate About You is an amazing recreation of a hysterical play—it holds Shakespeare’s humor and wit while “taming” Kat in a manner that is not a torturous remodeling of personality, but a natural response to wanting to depend on someone else in life.

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One beautiful rom-com-bastardization of Shakespeare that comes most readily to mind is Andy Fickman’s She’s the Man (2006), a comedy propelled to popular success by its teen heartthrobs of the moment, Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum. On occasion, I’ve explained to friends that She’s the Man is actually a Shakespeare play, and received reactions similar to when I’ve exposed the fact that Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” is about giving a blow job: denial, horror, and the utter conviction that they will never be able to look at it the same way again. However, by neglecting to

“ ” SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS

WERE ALMOST MEANT FOR

ROM-COM CONVERSION

examine the film’s origins, the majority of audiences miss so much of why the movie was such a success.

She’s the Man doesn’t merely adopt some names and the conceit of cross-dressing from Twelfth Night. Instead the movie modernizes Shakespeare’s challenge of gender roles, effectively showing how our society still subscribes to often-exclusive gender stereotypes. The Viola of Twelfth Night just wants to be left alone, and finding a job in Lady Olivia’s house seems to be her best bet. To do so, however, she must circumvent Lady Olivia’s edict to meet no strangers while she is in mourning for her dead brother. Viola must therefore find employment in the house of the Duke Orsino, as the Duke often sends messengers to the house of Lady Olivia and Viola foresees she may gain the trust of Olivia this way. But, to be a respected and trusted servant to Duke Orsino, a cisgendered female role would not suffice, and so she must disguise herself as a man. While Viola in She’s the Man has different inducements, obviously—namely, to kick her ex’s ass on the soccer field and prove that women can play soccer as well as men—the desire to prove themselves worthy, either in court or on the soccer field, as well as the use of disguise to overcome the stereotype of “weak” women, resonates through both Violas.

Both She’s the Man and Twelfth Night deal with the epitome of the modern rom-com: the embarrassment and miscommunication that follows the act of falling in love (or lust, depending on your interpretation of Shakespeare’s work). As the obscene amounts of money that romantic comedies rake in at the box office will attest, these concepts are as powerful now as they were four centuries ago.

Shakespeare was the master of these follies—and though it lacks the sexual puns and double entendre of the Bard’s language, She’s the Man, in its modern context, manages to convey Shakespeare’s masterful humor. The funniest parts of the movie—Olivia falling in love with Viola in disguise, Viola declaring her love for the Duke while in the guise of a man, Sebastian’s utter cluelessness when he arrives at Illyria and finds a life established for him—are bastardized Shakespearean wit, not the brain child of a writer pumping out ten rom-coms a year, and they are the funnier for his sleight

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of hand. And though Shakespeare never had his heroine shove a tampon up the nose of the Duke, his overtly sexual and physical sense of humor would not make this scene farfetched.

I sometimes think I have seen too much Shakespeare.

But after watching Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing again, I realize why I cling to the plays so tightly. Sure, the language is what makes Shakespeare the maleficent twinkle in every high school teacher’s eye, but it is the shaping of the stories, the powerful, resonating themes, and the truthful characters that keep Shakespeare alive. The plays were never about sitting by a musty old book holding a magnifying glass trying to wring every drop of meaning from each individual word—they have always been about performance. The texts themselves were never about fidelity to timely issues, which becomes one of the reasons why they can be adapted and readapted as such. This is why Shakespeare resonates, why his work can be modernized, why it was a perfect fit 400 years ago and still fits today, and why lovers of drama will be performing his works 400 years hence. This brilliance is why the endless machine that continues to produce the plays of William Shakespeare generation after generation echoes throughout our world, and why this machine can never, never stop. •

PASS THE

SPACE BOOTS how the jetsons did (and didn’t) predict modern technology ANNA BRENNER

art by ZANDER ABRANOWICZ On September 23, 1962, The Jetsons premiered in a primetime slot on ABC. Set 100 years into the future (in 2062), the show—which aired three years after the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 mission landed on the moon—presented millions of children across the nation with a vision of an All-American Space-Age future: a future that promised flying cars, holograms, and elaborate robots, not to mention an overabundance of Googie-style architecture.

Flash forward 51 years. It is now 2013, which means that, hypothetically, we should be halfway to Rosie the Maid and Orbit City. So, where exactly are those flying cars? And how accurate is Hanna-Barbera’s “future” shaping up to be?

things we totally have The “TeleViewer” George gets all of his news from the TeleViewer, an interactive screen that presents information in a newsprint-y fashion, but includes moving images and audio.

OUR ANSWER: Pretty much anything with a screen and the ability to connect to the Internet, but especially iPads and other tablets. The new iPad Air, which Apple boasts weighs only one pound and is a mere 7.5 millimeters thin, threatens to outdo even the TeleViewer, as tablet technology is becoming much less screen-like and much more like paper. Also, did the TeleViewer have apps for finding the nearest public bathroom or simulating the sound of a whoopee cushion? Didn’t think so.

ESTIMATED TIME OF ARRIVAL (ETA): Now. And although you can still get your news the

old-fashioned, printed way, it’s looking very likely that society will be paperless by 2062—and probably before then.

Videoconferencing Telephones don’t exist on The Jetsons; instead, people communicate through TV-like devices on which you can both see and hear the person on the other line.

OUR ANSWER: While the basic concept of videophony was first popularized in the late 1870s in the US and Europe, and AT&T created the first videophone—literally a telephone with a video display monitor attached—in the late twenties, videoconferencing didn’t become widespread until the improvement and popularity of the Internet in the late nineties and early two thousands.

ETA: Now. Dog-walking treadmills

Instead of taking Astro out for a walk around the block, George Jetson opts for the dog-walking treadmill, a necessity in the essentially ground-less Orbit City.

OUR ANSWER: Treadmills have existed in some form for thousands of years—in antiquity, they were animal- or even human-powered and used to lift buckets of water; in 1913, the first US patent of a treadmill “training machine” was issued.

But personal, commercially available treadmills were not developed until 1968, only five years after The Jetsons aired.

As far as treadmills for the canine persuasion go, they do actually exist today; the PetZen ‘DogTread’ Dog Treadmill is currently listed on Amazon for $545.95 and promises to be a “dog-specific treadmill designed for the way a dog learns, thinks, and

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moves.” This makes it a great alternative to traditional walking for pet owners, especially those with health issues, who can’t provide their dogs with sufficient exercise. Still, most people prefer to take Fido out on their own, or let him run around by himself in the backyard.

ETA: Now, but they’re not commonplace.

things we kind of have now Moving walkways Rather than walking on their own two feet, characters are shuttled around on moving walkways from their desks to their elevators, and even to their bathrooms and beds.

OUR ANSWER: The moving walkway actually debuted long before The Jetsons first aired, at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago; it consisted of both seated and standing divisions, and riders were looped down a lakefront pier to a casino. That said, moving walkways were not commercially available until 1954, when Goodyear built the “Speedwalk” inside the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad Erie Station in Jersey City, NJ. Nowadays, moving walkways can be readily found in public spaces such as airports, museums, zoos, and theme parks, but have yet to appear in private homes.

ETA: In public spaces, right now. But in your own home?

Unless treadmills count, probably not any time in the near future.

REALLY automatic toothbrushes After being shot out of bed—by the bed itself—onto a moving walkway that transports him to the bathroom, George Jetson’s toothbrush pops out of the mirror and proceeds to brush his teeth for him.

OUR ANSWER: In early October, the Huffington Post ran a story about a 3D-printed toothbrush, the Blizzident, which is based on a mold of your teeth. While it bears little resemblance to George’s mechanical toothbrush, the Blizzident pretty much does all the brushing for you, and in only six seconds; all you need to do is “put a drop of toothpaste onto your tongue and move it over your upper teeth,” then bite down on the Blizzident and chew.

ETA: While the Blizzident is available now, it costs $299 and, thus, probably won’t be found in everyday households until 3D printing technology becomes cheaper. That said, that could easily occur within the next ten to fifteen years.

Food machines Tired of waking up early to make yourself (or go procure) breakfast? If you lived on The Jetsons, you wouldn’t have to: you can have your breakfast (and lunch, and dinner, and midnight snack…) literally at the push of a button.

It’ll pop out of the bottom of a machine in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

OUR ANSWER: The first vending machine-like device was created by the engineer and mathematician Hero of Alexandria in the first century; the machine would accept a coin, which would fall upon a pan attached to a lever, and the lever, in turn, would open a valve that allowed holy water to flow out. However, vending machines didn’t become

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commonplace until the industrial revolution, when the first modern, coin-operated vending machines were introduced in London in 1888 (they dispensed postcards).

Nowadays, electronic vending machines around the world sell anything and everything from chips to cupcakes, apples, and even marijuana—medical marijuana in the US, that is. Of course, these medical marijuana vending machines are operated by trusted employees in secure rooms after they obtain a fingerprint scan of the prospective patient. For now…

ETA: Sure, we have vending machines, but until we have one that’ll dispense almost anything you’d want to eat or drink—from Kool-Aid to glazed ham—we’ve not quite caught up with The Jetsons.

Flying cars When George Jetson leaves his sky-home, he gets on his moving walkway, is deposited into his elevator/transportation tube, and is shot directly into his flying car, which he uses to drive the kids to school, Jane to the mall, and himself to work. He doesn’t even have to stop to let anybody out; with the push of a button, each passenger is transferred from the car into a smaller flying pod, which propels them across the short distance left to their destination. And forget about parking—once George reaches work, the full family-sized car folds up into a briefcase. Yes, really: a briefcase.

OUR ANSWER: In 1940, American automobile mogul Henry Ford announced that a “combination airplane and motorcar” was in the works. Nine years later, Moulton Taylor successfully designed (and flew!) the Aerocar, a vehicle that looks like a Volkswagen Beetle with airplane wings and a tail; but, while six models were built, it never entered production. Other flying car models have since been tried and tested, but safety authorities were unwilling to give their approval of mass production.

Until now.

On October 30, 2013, the BBC reported that the Aeromobil 2.5, designed chiefly by Slovakian engineer Stefan Klein, made its debut flight in Montreal this past September, and might just be the prototype of flying cars to come. It’s streamlined, with hinged wings, can hit a top air speed of more than 124 miles-per-hour, and features a flight range of 430 miles. Aeromobil hopes to have its 3.0 prototype out in 2014, and intends to target US market, as it would likely be easier to gain certification and regulatory acceptance here than in Europe. Of course, Aeromobil is not the only company in the race to perfect and mass market a flying car. Terrafugia, a Boston-based company, received an experimental airworthiness certificate from the US Federal Aviation Authority for its Transition “roadable aircraft” model, and hopes to achieve full certification as soon as possible. That said, the

Terrafugia is definitely more of an aircraft than a car—and looks like one, too—and will always have to be flow out of and landed into an airport, rather than on the road.

ETA: Certified flying cars (or “roadable aircrafts”) of some kind will likely be made available to the public within the next five to ten years. But as for ones that will replace cars altogether? Probably not for quite some time. And don’t push your luck on something that’ll transform into a suitcase.

Rosie and R.U.D.I. When Jane Jetson wants to get the house cleaned, she calls in Rosie, an old demonstrator robot maid model with a humanoid personality and definitely as much sass as a real person. R.U.D.I. (an acronym for Referential Universal Digital Indexer), on the other hand, is not only George’s work computer, but is also his best friend. Like George, he is a member of the Society Preventing Cruelty to Humans, and like Rosie, he also has a human personality.

OUR ANSWER: We currently do have robots that can clean our houses (see: the Roomba) and even our hospitals.

As of late this October, the Xenex room disinfection system, which uses UV rays to disinfect an entire hospital room in a matter of minutes, made its debut at Wesley Hospital in Wichita, Kansas.

As far as computers that talk back go, we have Siri, although her personality comes already pre-programmed by Apple and she does much of her magic via Google/the Internet. There’s also Watson, IBM’s artificially intelligent computer system that’s capable of answering questions posed in natural language and beating real humans on Jeopardy!

ETA: Difficult to say. Sure, we can pre-program machines to act or talk like the real deal, but until we actually find a way to give devices genuine personalities, we’re really only halfway there, at most. Will it happen? It’s possible. Do we really want it to? Some might call the concept Orwellian.

Accessible space travel

Anyone on The Jetsons can travel to Moonhattan more easily than us Ithacans can get to Manhattan.

OUR ANSWER: As of September 2012, a few companies are selling orbital or suborbital space flights. While commercial orbital flights (ones that remain in space for at least one orbit of the Earth) have already occurred via the Russian Space Agency, only seven tourists have participated and for upwards of $20 million. And while suborbital flights promise to be cheaper, (the spacecraft reaches space, but does not complete one orbital revolution due to an intersection with the atmosphere; passengers experience three to six minutes of weightlessness and a pretty view of the Earth’s curvature) suborbital space tourism has yet to occur.

ETA: The Russian Space Agency put commercial orbital

flights on hold for the past few years, as they had to use available seats for expedition crews traveling to the International Space Station, but expect to resume sometime this year.

Companies such as Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace have begun selling seats and expect to start actually flying customers within the next few years.

That said, neither of these types of space flights involve actually traveling to another planet and we do not have anything even remotely approximate to Moonhattan (besides, well, its Earthly counterpart). Plus, even suborbital trips are booking for about $200,000, which is no small fee. So for truly accessible space travel, let’s see how far we get in the next 20 years.

things we totally don’t have (yet) Space boots

Sure, you may have heard of Moon Boots, those clunky, pillowed boots made popular in the seventies and eighties, but the Jetsons have space boots: shoes that actually allow you to break ALL of the gravity rules and walk on the walls and even the ceiling, à la Fred Astaire in the classic 1951 MGM film Royal Wedding—except for real.

OUR ANSWER: In a spaceship that’s actually in outer space or in a zero-gravity chamber, wall/ceiling walking is totally possible. Back down here, under normal Earth conditions? Not happening. Although video editing software could definitely make it look as though you were.

ETA: Don’t expect it any time soon.

So will 2062 actually be like the future presented in The Jetsons? We’ll certainly have a lot of their technology, thanks to advancements in robotics, computer science, and the Internet—although we probably won’t have some of their other inventions (space boots, anyone?).

But while the technology shown on The Jetsons may have been before its time, its actual story—of an average white American family, complete with the working father and breadwinner, the angsty teenage daughter, the enthusiastic younger son, and the shopaholic stay-at-home mother—is hardly visionary. In fact, considering all the laws that have passed since 1962—laws that allowed for the legalization of, say, same-sex and interracial marriage—The Jetsonian future by today’s standards can look pretty downright passé.

Give me a pair of space boots and a new season featuring Mr. & Mr. George and James Jetson, and then we’ll talk. •

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THE MEAT IS

THE WHOLE DEAL plastic surgery and the eternal quest for youth KATIE O’BRIEN

art by KATIE O’BRIEN

In Terry Bisson’s short story “They’re Made Out of Meat,” aliens are shocked when they discover that Earth’s sentient life is composed of nothing more than meat. One of them is skeptical. “That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine?” he asks. “Yes, thinking meat!” the other alien tries to convince him. “Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal!” The aliens conclude that they do not wish to talk to meat, and mark the sector as uninhabited. Indeed, viewing the world through the lens of materialism, humans are nothing more than meat: we are born meat, and we die meat. Once we die, our mind, the concept of the self, dies with us. This is one of the most difficult notions for any person to accept.

In his novel Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut claims, “Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.” There is not much that distinguishes animals from machines: machines give certain outputs based on input and programming, and animals have certain reactions based on their environment and instinct. Both are formulaic and predictable, and neither is sentient. However, we are animals with extraordinary brainpower that manifests itself in the form of a consciousness, which makes us sentient beings. Just like any other animal, we have the brute instinct to survive at all costs—what makes us different is our acute awareness of mortality that drives us to combat death and aging. We do this by innovating technologies that keep us young by “preserving our meat”—a coin with two sides. One side is the natural aversion to death, but the other side is a longing to remain perpetually young and beautiful.

Throughout Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut often

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introduces men by their penis measurements and woman by their bust, waist, and hip measurements to satirize the artificial and arbitrary importance that society places on these traits. Plastic surgery culture represents an extreme expression of the human desire to conform to constructed beauty ideals. These ideals are rooted in our animal instincts, but perpetuated by pop culture and the media. Humans do not want to die, and therefore young is the ideal, and young is beautiful. Desire to preserve one’s youthful appearance drives people to procedures such as Botox and facelifts to smooth wrinkles, mostly undergone by people as they age.

There are evolutionary advantages to looking young, such as attracting a mate and being perceived as stronger and sharper by potential adversaries. However, the media also propagates certain beauty ideals, and there are societal benefits to conformity, such as acceptance by others. Vonnegut says that “in the interests of survival, [humans] trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that too.” Humans are imitation machines.

We see images of celebrities in magazines and try to replicate the ideals that we believe they represent; and the media perpetuates these ideals over and over, leading people to plastic surgeries specifically to “improve” their appearance, such as nose jobs or breast implants. TV shows like The Swan, in which the self-proclaimed “ugly duckling” makes a transformation to a beautiful Swan through a series of extreme plastic surgery procedures, illustrate the culture of striving to retain youthfulness and imitate the airbrushed look of celebrities in magazines. According to Reality TV World, this is an opportunity that will “allow these women to come back better

than ever.” Plastic surgery offers them the chance to alter their meat in the most drastic way possible to appear more beautiful.

According to Radar Online’s list of Perfect 10 Bikini Bodies, “Megan Fox has one of the hottest bodies on the beach—does it get any more perfect than Megan’s body?” (Don’t you want to be like her?) Ever notice how these people never seem to age? Sometimes it’s plastic surgery, sometimes it’s Photoshop, and sometimes it’s just a talented makeup artist. They represent everlasting youth

“

OUR SPECIES CONSISTS

”

OF NOTHING MORE THAN BONES IN A BAG OF FLESH

and beauty, and people strive toward this ideal by imitating anything from their clothes to their nose. And then, when someone notices that they do have flaws and are not forever young and beautiful, it makes the headlines of every tabloid, as if they have revealed their true repulsiveness. Just the other day, Daily Mail Online reported that “Angelina Jolie display[ed] shockingly veiny arms while taking twins Vivienne and Knox shopping in Australia […] joining Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Meg Ryan on the growing list of A-list stars with unsightly blood vessels protruding from their skinny arms.” It seems the writers of the article consulted “health and fitness experts,” who informed them that “prominent veins are usually a sign of physical over-exertion, and they become more evident as the body ages.”

Shocking indeed! Procedures done specifically to look younger are especially common among celebrities, which is not surprising considering how the tabloids call them out in the headlines for showing their natural age. Of course, plastic surgery can only help you on the outside, because despite looking younger, albeit more plasticky, your body will internally continue to age grotesquely, ticking away the time until your inevitable death.

Life extension scientists hope to achieve near-immortality within the next 20 years. Biologists and geneticists gathered at the Maximum Life Foundation to discuss their research as to how humans could achieve a significantly longer lifespan. Discussions of the different techniques for prolonging life were reported by io9, including “organ cryopreservation; tissue replication via stem-cell therapy; chemical supplements to encourage telomere lengthening; and tinkering with cell structures to situate our mitochondria more favorably.” Another idea discussed was the harnessing of artificial intelligence (once it exists): “Imagine hundreds of thousands of Ph.D.-level machines chipping away at the aging problem.” Scientist Ray Kurzweil claims, “We are very close to the tipping point in human longevity…we are about 15 years away from adding more than one year of longevity per year to remaining life expec-

tancy.” This seems like an overly bold assertion marked with desperation, considering those technologies have yet to be developed. There has been some progress: scientists have found “longevity genes” in living organisms such as fruit flies and one type of worm; they were able to double the average life span of both by altering just one of these genes.

Medicinenet reports that humans also have this gene, but that “it is unlikely that changing genes will be tried in humans in the near future as a way to help them live longer.”

Plastic surgery culture and life extension science both reflect the human instinct to preserve youth and combat death. Plastic surgery culture reflects a more shallow side rooted in robotic imitation of beauty ideals made popular by the media, while technologies to reverse aging and prolong life show our aware side, the use of our superior brainpower toward fighting against and/or denying the onset of that which we fear the most. Following the group and survival are some of the basest instincts in all animals, and these instincts both make humans act like machines, and elevate us above them through our innovation. The cult movie Repo!

The Genetic Opera anticipates a future in which any organ can be manufactured and replaced, which improves life at first but leads to people trying to achieve genetic perfection and becoming addicted to surgery. When they cannot pay their debts for their surgery, the company that produces the organs, GeneCo, repossesses the organ by ripping it from their body. The movie is both a satire of plastic surgery culture and a story of a dystopian future, and it embodies the extreme lengths people will take to perfect their bodies as well as the desperation that accompanies the desire to prolong youth and life.

Even Kilgore Trout, a character in Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions who writes science fiction parodies of the stupidity of humanity, ultimately submits to the enticing idea of eternal youth and the brute instinct to survive. When he meets his creator near the end of his life, Trout finds out that he is just a character in a book, and that his creator controls all of his actions and thoughts simply by writing them down on a page. His creator offers him free will, but Trout instead cries out, “Make me young, make me young, make me young!” Trout’s realization that he does not control his own actions mirrors the human fear that there is no ghost in the machine; that our species consists of nothing more than bones in a bag of flesh, going through life with thoughts and actions mechanically generated by our bodies. This may be just as difficult for us to wrap our minds around as it is for the aliens that encounter humans in Bisson’s story—we are conscious meat, and our sense of self derives entirely from our physicality. We do our best to pretend otherwise, and even if all we have are our bodies, we will always cling to them while we’re alive. •

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THE KANYE OF K-MART tao lin, celebrity/author/enigma KAITLYN TIFFANY art by THELONIA SAUNDERS

Celebrity-author-wunderkid Tao Lin, known best for being the poster child for Twitter-induced malaise, founding the independent publisher Muumuu House, and dedicating pages of his recent novel Taipei to unadulterated praise for Rilo Kiley, is one of the greatest riddles of contemporary literary culture.

Almost all of his interaction with the public is aggressively weird—usually either extremely obtuse or confrontationally honest. For a Vulture profile he provided the interviewer with the disclaimer: “While writing Taipei, I got into this habit of taking Adderall and staying up all day and night…I think you will be able to tell when I am peaking and coming down on Xanax or whatever.” During his stint writing fodder for Thought Catalog, the pseudointellectual version of Buzzfeed, he provided an eclectic collection of “35 Tweets I Have Favorited.” He also curated a reading exclusively of tweets at St. Mark’s in New York, opening up the night by reading some of his own, such as, “Energy drink called ‘liquid Jesus’” and, “Novel with the word ‘autism’ in every sentence.” Deliberately controversial and incendiary (read: a professional douche), Lin knows his behavior makes him a figure of some disdain, but a figure nonetheless.

It’s not a stretch to say that Tao Lin’s literary presence is akin to Kanye West’s presence in the music industry. Lin is provocative and widely scorned, but he uses this attention to promote his own ideals about American culture. In an age in which most celebrities are trying very, very hard to be real people—replying to fans on Twitter, giving personal emails to Miranda July’s “We Think Alone” project, freaking Nicki Minaj talking about her baby-making goals in Marie Claire—West and Lin appear to be some of the last celebrities left who are staying “celebrities.” They remain

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products, separating their true personhood from their public display in a way that isn’t easy to delineate.

As a self-appointed champion of American culture, Lin makes conscious efforts to defy categorization, to eradicate the expectation that our celebrities are also our friends, baring their honest-to-God souls, and to remind us of the original purpose of art made for mass consumption.

k-mart realism Lin’s music world counterpart has repeatedly criticized the Grammys, pointing out that while he has won more Grammys than anyone else his age, he has never won against a white person; he has also decried the practice of awarding “Best Rap Album” to black artists year after year as a consolation prize for withholding the “Album of the Year.” The Grammys are supposedly America’s democratic selection of its absolute best musical artistry and craftsmanship, but it’s impossible not to notice how the lumping of historically ethnic genres into secondarily evaluated categories is an act of diminishment. The Grammys aren’t just about a moment in the spotlight—they’re indicative of future career success and are major propellants into the top tiers of the music industry. And as West points out time and again, rap and hip-hop are being criminally categorized as niche genres; while rock, and even pseudo-country and pop-hybrid gender-role-solidification-campaign bullshit like Taylor Swift’s Red are put forward as the cultural torchbearers.

Like West, Tao Lin has a professed distaste for niche labeling, though with obviously different motivations. His work has often been dubbed a Millennial form of “K-Mart

Realism.” When pressed, he defines this term sarcastically, stating, “K-Mart Realism is a term a New York Times journalist or I think probably Tom Wolfe made up to group a lot of writers together in a shit-talking way...It has also been called “minimalism,” “dirty realism,” and something with Diet Coke in the term, I cannot remember.”

More objectively, K-Mart Realism is a term referring to a minimalist style of writing characterized by sparse, terse descriptions of generally bleak settings and struggling, straddling-the-poverty-line characters. Prominent themes are generally those of isolation in the modern setting, human relationships complicated by the antisocial expectations of capitalism, and altogether a more grounded and gritty sense of malaise than was present in the inexplicably unhappy narrators of Modernism.

Despite Lin’s obvious disdain for the term, it has been applied to his novel Taipei by major book reviewers, bloggers, and critics from all over the literary map. Taipei tells the semi-autobiographical story of a young author named Paul, who lives in a Xanax and Adderall-fueled haze. He drifts lazily between personal interactions and interactions with his MacBook as if they are one and the same. In fact, Lin has stated that Taipei could just as easily have been titled MacBook Pro, and the LA Review of Books insists that it could also have been called simply Drugs. While the characters are not working class or near poverty, Taipei certainly establishes the distinctly Millennial situation of the voluntarily impoverished (via purposeful underemployment and irresponsible financial decisions), and the setting is as bleak as can be.

Set mostly in New York City, the disconnected characters are reminiscent of those in a Modernist masterpiece. Their disengagement and debilitating social anxiety make romantic, familial, and friendly relationships impossibly fraudulent, while the prevalence of self-medication and disguised psychological illness drop even more curtains between these individuals. Names are listed in the novel with the person’s age directly following, à la reality TV, providing a distinct air of detached categorization of people by their vital statistics. The entire thing reads like an assault on people who read books. Lin deliberately forces an immense, painful boredom upon us in the vein of Eugene O’Neill, and the horrendous central romantic relationship is as acutely torturous as anything Hemingway could concoct. No person without a frame of reference in Don DeLillo could have created such a haunting hellscape—all the more powerful because it is only ever so slightly a hyperrealistic portrait of American society. Lin has also cited Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver, K-mart co-patriots, as major influences. In early rounds of publicity for the novel, Taipei was lauded as a novel to encapsulate the Millennial generation and its artistic aesthetic. That description was popularly reneged after The New York Times took heavy issue with it, saying that Lin expressed more Modernist tendencies than he did anything characteristic of his cohorts or of the subversive reputation he had built for

himself.

Largely, these contemporaries are people who seem to be working earnestly towards growing into what David Foster Wallace predicted for them in 1993, saying, “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching…who treat plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reference and conviction.” This “New Sincerity” was set up as a salve for the irony and cynicism of Postmodernism.

And while there are examples of beautifully executed “sincere” writing (Colum McCann, Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, etc.), there are also elements of the Millennial form of sincerity that are deeply problematic—i.e. a cultural fascination with that which is “precious,” an emphasis on simplicity which forgives lack of talent, and most importantly, the creation of an altogether false dichotomy between what counts as ironic and what counts as sincere. While The Times seeks to distance Lin from the Millennials on the basis of how jarringly his cynical portraiture clashes with their dreamy optimism, and while they are correct in asserting that he doesn’t match up with his cohorts in message or conduit or tangible empathy, what’s neglected here is that the New Sincerity is no longer solely a reaction to Postmodernism. The New Sincerity is an extremely formal aesthetic, with much of the focus dedicated to language, language about language, and the meaning of medium. The writing’s artificiality is in the foreground even when its emotional reporting is in earnest, and this is exactly what Tao Lin has been doing dating back to his could-be-a-Miranda-July-title debut in 2006, you are a little bit happier than i am.

As academics, we are wont to label stretches of literary history under a uniting banner, e.g. Romanticism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, The New Sincerity, the Dawn of Fan Fiction About Vampire Vaginas, etc. In a lecture during his guest professorial stint at Sarah Lawrence College, Lin remarked that his primary gripe with K-mart Realism wasn’t actually anything specifically to do with the term or the writers it summed, but rather, “I don’t feel that any two writers, however similar in whatever manner, are ever the same…Even if they’re exact clones or photocopies, they have different contexts. Any discussion outside that level of accuracy seems in part to me ‘sarcastic,’ or ‘just screwing around.” He also remarks that “K-mart Realism” is a particularly irresponsible term in that it talks about writers that have “little concretely in common”—they didn’t write at the same time, they didn’t have the same friends or share a mentor, they didn’t go to the same schools or have the same publishers. They were merely intrigued by something similar in American society.

The problem with shuffling them off into a category is the same problem that exists when we equate a Lena Dunham script with an Eggers short story—sincerity isn’t the same in all contexts, and minimalist realism isn’t either; neither are

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going to be evaluated to the fullest extent of their individual merit when these conflations occur.

the anti-celebrity “Honesty” has recently become the rallying cry of contemporary literature, while it has served as the foundation for what we consider “good” in modern music for several decades. What Lin, similar to West, seems to recognize better than anyone else is what a total crock of shit it is when any artist proclaims that they are being entirely “honest” with their audience on a personal level. Gimmicks are gimmicks and if you’re going to have one, fucking cop to it.

Whatever other seemingly insane shenanigans he gets into, Kanye West never claims to be anything short of completely manufactured and an entity apart from his audience. “I don’t have some type of romantic relationship with the public. I’m like, the anti-celebrity, and my music comes from a place of being anti.” If he’s trying to deify himself (“I am a God”), he’s closer than most, because he’s not a person, he’s an icon—there’s a difference between hoping your art can connect with people and hoping that they’re going to want you as a person, and he knows it.

So does Lin. There’s nothing especially relatable about Adderall binge after Adderall binge after guacamole binge, and part of what Lin describes is how endlessly boring it can be to be forced to share another person’s experience. Most of Taipei is not a rewarding experience. The climax, however, is a particularly intense trip in which the narrator hallucinates that he has forgotten a life-long heroine addiction and is now in the moments before death. And then he just walks out of the bathroom and hugs his wife a little bit, mostly by accident, and says that he is “glad to be alive.” The rest of Taipei is so weighty. So full of adverbs and bizarre metaphysical hullabaloo and phrases that are completely made up and mentions of GoodReads and Facebook and Urban Outfitters. And then the ending is fucking spotless. It’s a

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three-paragraph reward for forcing ourselves through all the brilliantly written bullshit. Part of the relief comes from the end of the assault, the recognition that we’re being let out of the protagonist’s horrible nightmare of a life and into a chance for redemption.The 0LA Review of Books proclaims, “The paradox is that Taipei’s failure of imagination is so closely tied to its success in portraying the experience of contemporary culture. Such is the altered state of our dystopia.”

In this way, Lin’s works fit into the same framework as West’s when talking about how it reflects American culture.

If American culture is represented by a “failure of imagination,” its artwork is totally justified in throwing that failure back at us—be it through giving us exactly what we expect from a “Millennial voice” or be it giving us exactly what we expect from a “rap-star douchebag.” Albums like West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Watch the Throne are overtly ornate, riddled with big-name features, over-thetop, potentially self-aggrandizing—and somehow excruciatingly, beautifully so. It is nearly hostile how thoroughly West gives us what we want. There is a way to play flaw as strength when the flaws are those plucked directly from the American palate.

great american organism

Another part of Lin’s assault on American culture comes from his obvious qualms with the state of the literary industry. A recent return of the literary celebrity can be seen in the desperate attempt by the people who write about books to assign the term “the Great American Novelist,” a task which seemed as if it had been abandoned in the fifties— ending with Harper Lee, J. D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Bellow, a n d

not gaining significant traction again until Toni Morrison and David Foster Wallace. And, you know, Franzen. It’s a way of making the literary culture simpler, cleaner, easier to sell at Target and easier to turn into a blockbuster a few years down the line.

This type of commodification results in a bastardization of the art form that Kanye West is also no stranger to. In West’s New York Times interview, the interviewer remarks, “No rapper has embodied hip-hop’s often contradictory impulses of narcissism and social good quite as [Kanye West] has, and no producer has celebrated the lush and the ornate quite as he has.” It’s common knowledge that hiphop has been appropriated into the white fascination with what they think is the point—excess and glamor and “cool” and showing people up (without realizing that they were the people that comeuppance was originally intended for).

Kanye West may happily take white people’s money, but he certainly doesn’t let them run away with defining his genre, or the music industry, or American culture.

In the same vein, Lin has blatant disdain for the publishing industry’s trend of creating the commoditized author dating back to his grad school days—he is known to have written a fake blog as Jonathan Safran Foer (you know, the man who used to write fiction but now just signs movie deals and edits things for his imitators). For the cover story of The Stranger in September 2010, Tao Lin wrote a feature about himself as “The Great American Novelist.” The article refers consistently and bemusingly to a “pile of hamsters” metaphor and insists that Tao Lin humbly does not view himself “as a ‘novelist’ or a ‘serious novelist,’ or a ‘great American novelist,’ but as a ‘human’—or, in his stricter moments, ‘organism,’ or ‘thing.’” There are big moments of mocking Jonathan Franzen (e.g. when Lin is said to have briefly considered titling his second novel Freedom in Capital Letters with Nineteen Exclamation Points After It) but there isn’t a single sentence in the entire piece that isn’t openly mocking the whole process of interviewing authors and creating literary celebrity: “It’s hard to say exactly what makes Lin so uncomfortable. It could be me. It could be the much-fretted-over standing of hamsters in America’s cultural-entertainment complex, or it could be the temporarily unsettling nature of The Human Centipede, a movie that made Lin feel scared for around two days, including today.” It’s silly to argue that Lin doesn’t enjoy being famous—there’s no way of knowing and he does enough self-promotion to make me think he probably does. But there is every reason, based on his writing in The Stranger and elsewhere, to believe that he detests how the lit set turns literary celebrity into something as false as tabloid celebrity—reading books should not become another form of gossip. We’re not reading novels to understand their writers or to glean something from an author’s personal life. It’s not their job to package their personal experience into something therapeutic or cathartic, and they aren’t a receptacle for the insecurities of society in the vein of a reality television show. You won’t get life advice from Tao Lin other than “do drugs, draw hamsters.”

Tao Lin truly seems bent on inflicting pain on his readers, rather than alleviating it. In her review of Taipei for The Millions, Lydia Kiesling wondered, “Why does he inflict upon me his ‘framework-y somethingness,’ his ‘soil-y area,’ ‘the

salad-y remains of his burrito?’ Why does he take away my joy?” In Taipei, he’s insisting that modern life is about filming MDMA-fueled documentaries in a Taiwanese McDonald’s, that it’s about sitting on Tumblr while surrounded by living, breathing humans, that it’s about live-tweeting The Avengers alone in the theater, that it’s about Whole Foods being the only remaining joy derived from nature. Lin had an extensive book tour following the release of Shoplifting from American Apparel, a novella in which he recounted his experiences of, surprisingly, shoplifting at American Apparel, and he blatantly confirmed the autobiographical suspicions of the audience. At many of his readings, including one I attended in Austin’s BookPeople, he answers questions with an, “I don’t know” or an incredibly long pause before, “I forgot the question”—effectively curb-stomping the publishing industry norm of glorifying personal interaction with authors. He told Vice that he wrote Taipei simply because he wasn’t making enough money. (Apparently, during the writing, he spent a huge chunk of his advance check on Klonopin.) Maybe it’s a bit of a responsibility-shirk to turn away from a Toni Morrison-esque answer about writing the novels that we want to read, writing about something important and undocumented, but it reads to me much more like an admission of the reality of today’s publishing industry, pessimistic as that may be.

As full of himself as West often sounds, and as obnoxious as Tao Lin seems for bashing author profiles, literary labels, and the literary celebrity’s delusions of grandeur, both of them profess over and over a dedication to liberate their respective artistic realms from dishonesty and scheming. And they’re both businessmen who are savvy as all hell.

I won’t demand personal respect for the actions of either Kanye West or Tao Lin. A lot of what they represent about our culture is superficial at best, despicable at worst—but as a minimum, it’s out in the open and mercilessly admitted to.

Both are incredibly aware of the fact that they exist as a personified version of their art. Knowing their true autobiography, that which exists outside of it, shouldn’t be relevant to the understanding of it at all.

In 1923, D. H. Lawrence famously warned that readers should “Never trust the artist,” and that, rather, they should “Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist that created it.” Sylvia Plath is not her suicide, Hemingway is not his alcoholism, T. S. Eliot is not just his anti-Semitism—and we should stop mining literature, and art in general, for what it can tell us about its creator.

Tao Lin’s work is professedly autobiographical, but that’s not what makes it great. What makes it great is its ability to speak to a distinctly modern state of being that extends beyond whatever drugged and douchey persona he has created for himself and beyond whatever industry labels it might afford. In a time when celebrity, literary or otherwise, has become about personal histories and gossipy revelations, Lin insists that each piece of literature should exist as an independent entity. He takes on the enormous challenge of being his work, rather than letting us probe his mind for some kind of hidden answer to it.

If we did, he implies, the answer would just be “hamsters.” •

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BEYOND

BOYS

DON’T

CRY

trans* characters on television

In a memorable flashback scene from Orange Is The New Black, the Netflix-binge-show of the summer, we watch a burly firefighter examine his reflection in a mirror, pulling up the skin around his eyes. Staring back out of the mirror is a far more feminine face, and the firefighter, then known as Marcus, looks longingly into his reflection’s eyes.

The man is a pre-transition Sophia Burset, a trans woman trapped in the same prison as the show’s protagonist, Piper, a pretty middle-class white woman who is imprisoned for crimes she committed a full decade prior. Over the course of the first season, the show reveals details of Piper’s past in small increments—but far more interesting is what we learn about the other inmates. Arguably the most sympathetic character in the series, Sophia is serving time for credit card theft, an act she’s committed out of desperation in the face of expensive sex reassignment surgery.

A few episodes into the season, the show increasingly fell victim to uncomfortable stereotypes surrounding race and gender. Black women were depicted fantasizing about fried chicken before cheering on a prison fight, to the shock and revulsion of white inmates, of course. Meanwhile, every Latina on the show was portrayed as sexually promiscuous, crazy, or both. It’s not that these characters couldn’t possibly exist, but their entire purpose seems to be to jolt Piper out of her comfortable, artisan-soaps-and-NPR lifestyle. Call it the Glee syndrome or call it lazy writing, but in its attempt to depict life within a systemically racist institution, Orange Is The New Black ended up perpetuating that very racism.

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GINA CARGAS art by CARLOS KONG

Yet somehow Sophia, played by trans actress of color Laverne Cox, managed to survive the cliché shit-storm.

Episode after episode, Sophia remained one of the show’s most sympathetic characters as we watched her navigate the multiplying challenges that came with her life as an imprisoned transgender woman with a family waiting for her outside. When budget cuts hit the prison, Sophia is temporarily barred from receiving her full dose of hormones, while her wife struggles with her marriage and sexual desires.

For many viewers, Sophia was the first trans character they had encountered on television, and her struggles with her identity, access to hormones, and family relationships were completely unfamiliar—and yet they are common challenges faced by the real-world trans community. The new model of TV production spearheaded by Netflix has certainly contributed to its willingness to take such risks; without the pressure of advertisers, weekly ratings, and broadcast restrictions, online distributors have far more creative freedom than their network counterparts. And the inclusion of a three-dimensional trans character like Sophia— paired with her overwhelmingly positive response—signals the beginning of a new wave of inclusive representation.

It’s not that trans characters have never been depicted or referenced before on screen; rather, trans identities have historically been used as punchlines first, lived experiences second.

Interestingly, trans representation in film predates television by a number of decades. Perhaps the first film to even touch on the topic is 1953’s horrifyingly-bad Glen or Glenda, Ed Wood’s semi-autobiographical depiction of cross-dressing and transsexuality. Though widely panned in the fifties, and still perceived as, well, awful, Wood was surely one of the first to demand tolerance for nontraditional gender identity. Throughout the sixties and seventies, the king of the creepy moustache—that would be John Waters— featured transvestite actor Divine in a number of male and female roles. More often than not, Divine’s characters still fall into the male-female binary, and Waters’ motivations were likely about subversion rather than representation; but the inclusion of Divine in lead roles paved the way for future films to explore virgin territory. More recently, movies like Boys Don’t Cry have sought to bring attention to the violence that trans people experience. This sort of representation is certainly of great importance—after all, the murder of a trans person is reported once every three days—but, as is often the case with stories of oppressed minorities, media representations tend to focus largely on unhappy endings. What’s been sorely lacking in film, with a

couple of minor exceptions, is a sympathetic trans character whose existence serves as more than just a Public Service Announcement.

And that’s why Sophia Burset is so affecting. Sure, Sophia’s life is not the picture of perfection—the entire show does take place in prison—but she’s a character with a past, a family, and, most importantly, with a future. It’s rare in film, and rarer in television, where even shows lauded for their progressive social commentary have transformed trans lives into punching bags.

Take, for example, 30 Rock. Yes, 30 Rock is hilarious.

Yes, 30 Rock is unabashedly liberal and devotes hours of screen time to exploring issues surrounding race and feminism. Yet the show has, at least once each season, targeted trans people as punchlines, either through use of offensive slurs or the repeated mockery of a character’s cross-dressing—a character who is, predictably, played by a heterosexual, cisgender man. This is not an attempt to pinpoint 30 Rock as a stronghold of transphobia, or to imply that Tina Fey and her team actively aim to privilege normative ideals of gender identity and representation.

The very innocuousness of these jokes on 30 Rock is what signals a larger trend—transphobic punchlines have essentially become the status quo. From Arrested Development to Saturday Night Live to Conan, these sorts of popular, ostensibly progressive shows have shown no qualms about using this offensive, and offensively lazy joke. It’s the kind of joke that rests on the assumption that a man dressed as a woman, or a woman dressed as a man, is inherently funny, rather than part of an actual human identity. Even worse is media that attempts to include trans characters, but only in the most reductive of ways—as cardboard figures whose only purpose is to lure our heroes into near-sexual encounters with (gasp!) someone with genitialia we didn’t necessary expect. The whole premise is based on a ridiculous notion that an individual’s worth is inextricable from their gender, sex, and any discrepancy between the two.

Orange Is The New Black is one of the more visible signs of pop culture’s shifting attitude toward trans characters, but the movement has been gaining strength over the past few years. GLAAD, the ever-powerful gatekeeper of acceptable queer representation in Hollywood, lambasted SNL for its use of transphobic slurs, and Conan O’Brien publicly apologized following backlash for a slur he used on his talk show.

More encouraging than apologetic comedians, however, is the upswing in actual trans characters featured prominently in mainstream shows.

In 2008, America’s Next Top Model featured Isis King, a transgender woman, on a reality competition that had historically a c c e p t e d cisgender

contestants that fit the mold of what it means to be female.

In the world of sitcoms and dramas, we’ve seen Adam Torres on Degrassi, Unique on Glee, and Alexis Meade on Ugly Betty. Alexis’s gender seems to be included more for soap-opera shock value than anything else—she returns “from the dead” post-gender reassignment surgery, makes a power play to seize control of her brother’s magazine, and subsequently attempts murder. And as we’ve seen time and time again on both Degrassi and Glee, these two shows’ attempts to provide insight into the politics of teen identity have floundered, falling quickly into tired stereotypes and tokenism.

Meanwhile, the CW has announced that it’s working on ZE, a new hour-long drama about a transgender teen in Texas—the first mainstream show whose lead character is trans. While the show is still in the works, the fact that the network is calling it ZE—a pronoun often used by gender-neutral, genderqueer, and trans people—suggests an actual awareness of trans issues that could result in the kind of show and character that television currently lacks.

Furthermore, we have to hope that that the CW casts a trans actor in the lead role; while this may be difficult if they are seeking to tell a teenager’s coming out story, the CW hasn’t historically proven averse to casting actors years older than the characters they play. (I’m looking at you, Gossip Girl.)

Between the positive reception to Sophia Burset and the very fact that ZE got the network go-ahead, the future’s certainly looking bright. Will cringe-worthy dude-lookslike-a-lady style jokes disappear for good? Perhaps not immediately. But if television continues to prefer cheap laughs over actually-clever writing and character breadth and depth, then I’m sure Sophia Burset would tell us the same thing she tells Piper in episode two: “You have some fucked up priorities.” •

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PHYSICS

MAYA DURHAM

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What do I do?

I thought to myself.

After however many odd years, there you were standing across the room as distant as a stranger.

It felt like summer because every “fuck you” had evaporated and every “fuck me” particle by dense particle lifted into the air and the two hung there like moisture.

You’re damn right, it’s humid; we live in Maryland, right by the bay, not in land locked Nevada where the air is as dry as my sense of humor.

Like a five year old who believes in Forever I told you I’d always be there, and like a bitter teen who suffered her first heartbreak long before her first kiss, you told me you’d never believe me.

But I believed me, so wasn’t that enough?

That’s all I really wanted—to believe in myself.

To believe in my own lies spun like cotton candy served to grinning children at the Howard County fair.

We are all liars in our own respects, because even when we die they keep on spinning like the dreidels at Joshua Leebow-Feeser’s bar mitzvah that I wasn’t invited to; like my head after a sip too many of my father’s drink; like the earth, in constant motion motion motion that none of us can feel until we remember that gravity is the only thing keeping us grounded,

keeping us from lifting into the air, off the ground passing the atmosphere.

We would die from lack of oxygen but keep on rising rising rising

Forever.

And once you were gone I had to cover my face with my hands so I could fool myself into thinking that I couldn’t see you because my eyes were closed, not because you weren’t there.

And after all these years, I don’t know how I still believe a word I say.

But like a five year old who believes in Forever I went “peekawboo, can’t see you!” and didn’t cry when I woke up in the middle of the night.

The blonde flecks in your girlfriend’s red hair remind me that every flame dies and only I can prevent forest fires even if I’m miles away when the cigarette butt hits the tree.

So will it be my fault?

When brush fire strikes on the West coast and I’m on the East coast too far away to reach you with my water gun.

If your house burns down and we never meet again will it be my fault?

If the last time we spoke is the last time we speak, am I the one to blame?

Because I’m so far from you and you’re so close to me, yet I keep inching further and further away so that I don’t catch a whiff of the sweat you worked up trying to chase me.

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world. And right now I knew she was in her own world.

“They’re anti-war protesters,” I told her. “I saw it mentioned in the news.” I would have liked to play the intellectual and say I had read it in the Times, but the truth was that I had only seen it in a Tweet and had accepted the information, just like that.

“Well, isn’t everyone?” She said, pushing back her bangs with perfectly manicured fingers. “Except for those rednecks down south, of course. And by red, I mean republican.” She winked.

If Allison could be described in a single phrase, it would be “one-sided.” I didn’t disagree with her though, just her way of putting out her ideas. She was often so brash that people didn’t know whether to laugh or take her seriously.

“Yeah, but they’re like extreme pacifists,” I said, struggling to remember the details of the tweet.

I had scrolled through so many this morning and none seemed to stand out more than the others.

“Like, they want to end war forever.”

Allison guffawed, as expected, then had a good The two of us had been walking for a long time laugh. “Oh, that’s all? Ha! Come on, that’s when we finally reached downtown and got to completely stupid. It’s the nature of man to be brutal witness an unexpected display. and unyielding. The human race is never going to “Oh, what are they protesting now?” Allison reach a real level of peace, and to think that we grumbled, hand on her hip. She was one of those could someday is just nonsense.” Allison loved to people who could pull off the “hand on hip” pose and preach her own opinion, especially the most brutal not look like a ridiculous doll, bent into position. It one she had. And I let her. “Why can’t people just was natural for her, like her red pout and heavy accept that we’re going to be bent on murdering mascara were natural for her. She could pull off each other for the rest of time, and let the wars end never making eye contact with a person, too, themselves? Even if those red-handed politicians because she seemed to be that level of important, stop this conflict, there will always be another one even though she was only a young assistant in knocking at the door.” the industry. She had the face of someone who I frowned. In general, negativity gets me a little would get somewhere—a star of the business wound up, but Allison is a full-blown romantic pessimist and nothing will ever stop her. So I don’t say anything and move on. I’ve learned that being quiet has served me best in every situation.

Dressed in heels and short skirts like proper Barbies and feeling completely out of place, we started to maneuver our way through the crowd of half-naked hippies in an attempt to reach our office building on the other side. They were loud, ringing our ears with their chants and shouts that muddled so 70

much together that they became meaningless. The stench of sweat, smoke, and gasoline overwhelmed the flowers in their hair—which I noticed were made of cloth and plastic anyway. A couple of them bumped into us, but we had been walking in fiveinch heels long enough to survive some minor jostling. I could imagine Allison huffing and puffing with annoyance as she led me by the hand, but the shouting and sirens were so loud that I couldn’t be certain whether she was making any noise at all. Above the heads of frizzy-haired protesters, I caught sight of a couple policemen watching from the sidelines, murmuring to one another and checking their watches.

They looked uninterested and unattached—much like how I felt.

Allison was right, these protesters weren’t going to win their fight.

Their only success was annoying a good chunk of Manhattan by making them late for work.

I stumbled past a couple of particularly loud bearded men who ignored me completely, trying to keep up with Allison’s iron grip on my hand. We were almost to the other side—I could see the revolving doors of our building up ahead, just past a couple more rows of poster-toting screamers. It was when I was nearly out of the mess that one of the signs being toted proudly scratched my arm with a sharp, unexpected sting. I glanced down in surprise and although I saw that it was bleeding, I didn’t say anything to the protester responsible because I knew it was an accident. By the time we got to the front steps, my grumbling friend noticed the blood.

“Damn, Lu! Did one of those pacifists attack you?”

I gave her a weak smile in response to the irony, as I’m not capable of much else, and said, “One of the signs got me, I think. No big deal.”

“Well, the blood is going to get on your white skirt, pretty girl, and then you’re going to have to do some hardcore bleaching.” She began to wipe the long red line away with a tissue, but a bit of it splashed onto my black top. “Shit! Sorry, Lu.” She gave the shirt a look over and then said with a shrug, “Eh, no one can tell. Probably don’t even have to clean that part up.” She finished wiping down my arm and began to dig around in her huge bag for a Band-Aid. I turned back to where the protesters were getting quieter as they moved away from us, traveling further down the street as the bored policemen finally got to shooing them along.

“You know,” I said. “They’re just trying to make the world a better place. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”

Allison didn’t hear me, or if she did, she didn’t care to respond. Her Band-Aid search had been halted as her phone distracted her with a tinny chime, and now she was texting someone furiously, forgetting about me completely. The blood had begun to drip again, without my noticing. This time it flowed from my shirt down to my skirt like a terrible scar.

I let it flow. In an hour, it would make for a good story in the office.

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ON GROWING UP TIA LEWIS

They say your face still changes Until you’re twenty-five.

Bones shifting, Reconstructing your image,

Does that mean I still have a couple years left?

I don’t want to be stagnant; I’ve got to keep going, Keep pushing Onward, somewhere, anywhere.

Like a shark, I’ll die if I don’t keep moving forward.

When does the train finally halt?

When do I get off?

Can’t I stay Just until another stop?

And another And another and another?

Even when the bones come to rest I’ll keep on changing, But it’ll be inside Where no one can see.

For some reason That idea really frightens me.

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Eschatology Maddie Jones

My last relationship ended because the guy went to Alaska and never called me again.

He moved there without telling you?

No, he told me about the trip. It was supposed to be for a couple weeks—a vacation, to hike and dog sled and stuff, but there wouldn’t be any phone service. I waited for him to come back. Then I found out from a mutual friend that he had come back, just not to me.

That’s bizarre. That is straight up fuckin’ weird, I don’t even know what to call it. Jesus. I’m sorry.

I didn’t really mind. I just wonder.

Why? Well of course. He never said anything?

Ever?

No. Eventually I left a voicemail just bluntly saying yeah so I guess we are not doing this anymore?

I am going to consider myself single? I think I said something about how maybe he had hooked up with an Eskimo and didn’t have the balls to tell me. And that being cold is not an excuse to fuck in an igloo while your girlfriend is at home being celibate as her pathetic neighbor down the hall who hasn’t left her apartment but for work and the occasional Laundromat stop since maybe April. But that was dumb and pointlessly vengeful for me to do. It probably sounded astoundingly childish on his answering machine.

You know, it’s all kind of hilarious, sorry, I know it’s not supposed to be, but, he just disappeared to Alaska—ALASKA, Christ—and that was it. I shouldn’t laugh. It must have really fucked with your head; it’s just so bizarre. Even my shitheadhigh-school-self wouldn’t have pulled something like that. I don’t know what I would do if my girlfriend just jetted off on vacation and then came back and started over without me.

I think he’s gay. But an explanation still would have been nice.

Oh, really? Did he seem gay when you were dating?

Yes. I didn’t think about it then, but he did. I hope my next conquest doesn’t emigrate to the Czech Republic or something.

Why would he do that?

I don’t know. Just a thought. What happened to your last girl?

We fell out of love.

Oh. That is much sadder.

Than one of us disappearing without warning?

Yes. Much, much sadder.

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kitsch

would like to thank STUDENT ASSEMBLY FINANCE COMISSION

our Cornell advisor, MICHAEL KOCH JOE SHELTON AND CAYUGA PRESS THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF INEQUALITY

THE BARTELS FAMILY and the OFFICE OF THE DEAN OF STUDENTS

MANN LIBRARY (we had some great nights, but let’s see other people)

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