Kitsch Magazine: Fall 2017

meet the editors

Elise Cording Jessica Brofsky

Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson Co-editor-in-chief

Co-editor-in-chief

Abigail Mengesha Zooming out editor

Chris Skawski

Anna Lee

Assistant zooming in editor

Watch & listen editor

Andrew Peiser Copy editor

Madeleine Galvin Nadya Mikhaylovskaya Assistant design editor

Zooming in editor

Design editor Assistant art editor

Sarah Chekfa

Bite size editor Assistant copy editor

Annika Bjerke Art editor

letter from the editors When does enough become too much? Who gets to say? When is too much not enough? In this issue of kitsch, we explore these many senses of extra. As Stephanie Carmody notes, extra is a perniciously gendered term, part of a long history of language used to describe and censor the behavior of women and girls. For Veronica Dickson La Rotta, this censure is clear in her candid look at Hermione’s extraness--which can be found both at Hogwarts and in group projects at Cornell, enforcing an unwritten and strict code of normalcy.

As Kathie Jiang traces in late night infomercials and as Zé Fernández Guerrero identifies in those ubiquitous videos popping up on your facebook newsfeeds, the aesthetics of superfluity--or extraness--seem to work: they sell kitschy goods, and they generate millions of shares, using flashy techniques to somehow stop you from asking why you are clicking and calling and buying and filling your house with avocado slicers and five facial cleansers!

However, extra is also a well of possibility, and maybe something of a farce. Take, for example, Anna Godek’s “Embracing the Best of the Bad”-where she explores the special joy in films which have never really been good--and shouldn’t be. Or look at Abigail Mengesha’s “The Extraness of Minimalism,” which shows how even minimalism, a philosophy in opposition to extravagance, demands that anything inessential (a tricky calculation to be sure) is rendered extra and discarded; how then, can we say that we know what extra really is anyway?

But extra has truly only been the starting point for this magazine: Abby Eskinder Hailu looks at the complex subjectivity of extraness across cultures, and Nathan Chazan at the curse of canonization on one of his favorite films.

Jeremiah Kim follows Orientalist tropes as they develop through and shape sci-fi film canon.

Finally, thank you to everyone who worked on this mag-- your efforts drip from every page. To Joe Shelton at QMC Group; to our advisor, Michael Koch; to the department of Inequality studies; to our lovely eds and contributors: our many blessings and thanks. Whether it’s in aliens or food waste, in music that subverts globalized exchanges of knowledge, in literally diving into the dumpster for treasure, in Facebook groups devoted solely to birds, or in the text which which covers our campus, this issue has gone whole hog! Can you handle it?

jessie and nathaniel

Jessie & Nathaniel

kitsch vol

editors-in-chief

copy editor assistant copy editor design editor assistant design editor art editor assistant art editor zooming out editor zooming in editor assistant zooming in editor watch and listen editor bite size editor cover art artists

advisor funded by

16 no 1 || fall 2017

jessica brofsky

+ nathaniel lacelle-peterson

andrew peiser sarah chekfa nadya mikhaylovskaya madeleine galvin annika bjerke nadya mikhaylovskaya abigail mengesha elise cording chris skawski anna lee sarah chekfa

writers

lorenzo benitez olivia bono clarence boyce jessica brofsky stephanie carmody nathan chazan sarah chefka gabriela dickson la rotta veronica dickson la rotta abby eskinder hailu madeleine galvin

annika bjerke olivia bono julia greenberg manon elise gros kaamiya hargis helen hu kathie jiang yabework abebe kifetew angaelica lapasta anna lee leo levy isabel ling fauna mahootian sophie may nadya mikhaylovskaya chloe rippe hassan saleem angelina shi emily sullivan chloe wanaselja taylor watts michael koch student activities funding commission

viri garcia anna godek zĂŠ fernĂĄndez guerrero mikaela hamilton kathie jiang sesha kammula yabework abebe kifetew jeremiah kim angaelica lapasta cesca lapasta erin lynch fauna mahootian abigail mengesha emma moore andrew peiser darby tarlow lela robinson

In This Issue...

Your Question is Pork Name a Less Iconic Duo Was Thoreau “Extra?”

You Should Ditch Your Pads and Tampons and Use a Menstrual Cup Circle Quad Skincare Unnecesary Tools Running Thoughts Modern Desire, Extra Pulp

6 7 8 9 10 12 13 14 15

36 Facebook Groups and Counting The Art of the Rom-Com A World of Violence When Politics Engulfs Criticism Embracing the Best of the Bad Laughing at the Movies Extra Ex Machina

16 18 20 22 24 26 28

You’re Not “Uncultured” Hermione Granger Syndrome Muralizing and Moralizing Extroversion On Campus Diving for Treasure Lilac Hair & Septum Rings The Writing on the Wall Stop Telling Me to Eat Less

31 32 34 36 38 40 42 44

Extra: a Gendered Term?

Hi vs. Tenaystilign Shackles of Society Aesthetics and Rhetorics of Late Night Infomercials

Why Do I want to Believe?

Mashrou’ Leila, Third Culture Kids, and the Building of Global Citizens Extra But Not Enough The Extraness of Minimalism

48 50 52 54 56 58 60 62

Your Question is Pork Andrew takes the hog for a spin through Google Translate

by Andrew Peiser Original

But your question is what is a hog. Stop asking me. Just get in. A four-wheeled vehicle that’ll transport you from here to heaven. Wear a harness. My hog is a-purrin. What? Your head hurts like a hundred hogs.

That’s tough. My hog gleams covered in tree rot. Can you handle it—hog don’t bite, but turn ye leafmeal need be.

English to Arabic to Icelandic to English

But the question is what the pig is. Stop asking me. Just keep going. Four-wheel drive that will bring you to heaven. Wear a belt My pig is Perrin. What? Your head hurts like hundreds of pigs. It’s hard. My Guillem pig is covered with rotting trees. You can see it—pig does not wait, but turn You to the bell you need.

English to Scots-Gaelic to Luxembourgish to Chinese (Traditional) to English But your question is like a banner. Stop

me from getting it A wagon can come to heaven from here. use tools. My beans are clean. what? The head sounds like a hundred nails. This is hard. A wheelchair hangs on my rib Can you succeed? It does not change, but you have to do the page.

English to Danish to Japanese to Esperanto to Zulu to Hindi to English

“My beans are clean.”

But your question is pork. Please ask me, come on. A four-wheel car that takes you from here to the sky.

Please use the window. What is my pig parin? Your head is painful as 100 pigs. It is difficult. I have trees in high light. Can you handle it? Not included in pigs, but please answer this book. w

bite size • 6

Name A Less Iconic Duo art and article by Sarah Chekfa 1. Cornell University and your mental health 2. Your emotional labor and the emotionally unavailable people to whom you devote it 3. Fraternity culture and toxic masculinity 4. The Student Assembly & its disappointing thoughts on Cornell Cinema 5. An open table at Zeus and the time you willfully waste attempting to find one—time you will never get back, no matter how hard you may try 6. Books you want to read for fun and the anxiety that comes with the knowledge that you are not reading them 7. Online shopping as a coping mechanism and the emptiness you feel when your purchase is delivered and you try on the Zara camisole dress and you somehow… still… aren’t…happy 8. Getting a plant and the guilt you experience when you inadvertently, but inevitably, kill it—it’s dead and it’s your fault, everything is your fault— 9. Libe Slope and the relatively tiny amount of oxygen your lungs are capable of retaining as you ascend aforementioned slope 10. Okenshields & the embarrassing Hot 100 club bops from 2010 garishly, carelessly played in its halls 11. The Cornell Store and the exorbitant price of a 1-subject notebook 12. Science requirements and the fact that you are not really all that interested in science and you are still required to complete them 13. AEM finance bros & their overbearing sense of conceited entitlement 14. The desire for social media validation and the knowledge that it will never be enough 15. Falsely thinking you have the self-control necessary to take a 20-minute nap and your inevitable failure to do so as the cursory nap transforms into a 3-hour-long siesta 16. White people and colonialism 17. Softboys & the way they think they’re soooo misunderstood just because they read Bukowski and smoke weed and are fundamentally incapable of communicating their emotions to you in a healthy, adult manner 18. The bottled water industry and the ever-exacerbating reality that is climate change 19. Capitalism and the political, social, and economic needs of the proletariat 20. The jarring juxtaposition between who you are and who your 8-year-old self thought you would be at this point in your life w

7 • bite size

Was Thoreau “Extra?” or is that even the right question to ask?

by Sesha Kammula art by Fauna Mahootian I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

-Henry David Thoreau

Extra is associated with excess. To have extra is to have more than strictly necessary, to have too much, to have miscalculated. To be told “guac is extra” is to be told that guacamole is a luxury item, worth more money, inaccessible to those without the means. To be extra is to be more than the standard. On the surface, the word extra in its colloquial sense seems to fit in with this definition. Calling someone extra is to heap these same associations onto them. A person who is extra tries too hard, does too much, takes up too much space. They have qualities in excess.

However, in practice, being extra is a little more nuanced. Such a general term is almost irresponsibly broad. Using it to describe someone without parsing out the meaning seems, in itself, a bit extra.

First we encounter the question of whether extra is an inherent trait or a performative one. How can we make a distinction between being extra and performing extra? In a perfect world, there would be no difference between performance and being, but in reality, most actions we see are performative. For example, giving a hug sends a message. It is a physical expression of affection. It is showing rather than telling. Where there is room for misunderstanding with words, actions convey the message on a baser level. They represent what we want others to know and what we want to express. Hugs, like all actions, can be disingenuous, but because there is less room for interpretation, performing actions is often much more convincing than expressing things with language. On the topic of extra, we generally associate actions with “being extra,” and so it follows that extra is essentially a performative trait.

Language has managed to slip a rope around all our minds and hold us hostage

to the ideas we try to express. Language evolves from itself, but at its core there is no one true sound to express a meaning. Despite this, a dog in any language is still a dog, we can point to it and mime it and draw it. The difficulty we generally associate with higher language arises with abstract thoughts. For example, before schizophrenia was classified as a diagnosable illness, no one had schizophrenia. They may have had symptoms that fit the current classification of the illness, but no one was diagnosed with schizophrenia itself.

This dependence on words is why so many things cannot be exactly translated. Context matters, word choice matters, tone matters. Though people around the globe may fit the English definition of “extra,” it would be incorrect to translate the word extra into the language of the region and use it to describe them. Similarly, though people in the past may have fit the current definition of extra, they were not extra. Language is tenuous and anchored in the context of the present. A word is only as meaningful as the ones that surround it, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Just as every action exists in the context of the actions around it, so does every word.

Which brings us back to overly dramatic individuals, those with an inflated sense of self-importance. Perhaps someone who was arrogant and obnoxious, claiming that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Henry David Thoreau happens to fit all of these characteristics. He placed himself above other writers of his day, but received only modest initial attention for Walden. He spurned society to live in the woods, but often returned to his mother’s to do laundry.

In an individual today, these facts would earn them the label “extra,” but Thoreau was decidedly not. He is not a Kardashian, celebrating himself on TV, nor is he a teenager at his high school prom, spending hours matching his pocket square color to his date’s eyes. Thoreau is not a serial monogamist, creating drama surrounding his lovers and then replacing them every few months, nor is he a young adult trying to eat only green foods. Rather, he is misunderstood; he is trying to find himself in his world. While “finding oneself” has been fetishized in the years following Thoreau’s death, during his lifetime he was unique, albeit the kind of unique you might laugh about from behind closed doors. His placement in history demands that language be used accurately to describe him, his actions, and the context of his actions.

His timeline evokes a different era where, though he was histrionic and arrogant, he was still somewhat visionary. While today he would be, technically speaking, an “extra ho,” respect for his time calls for a different adjective. w

bite size • 8

Reasons You Should Ditch Your Pads and Tampons and Use a Menstrual Cup

by Fauna Mahootian 1. They’re environment and wallet-friendly

Menstrual cups are efficient in terms of both cost and material. Menstrual cups cost around $20-40 and last for around 10 years. According to Mooncup, an average user of menstrual products disposes of around 300 pounds of pad/tampon waste during their lifetime. And the price totals at around $2500 spent on menstrual products, as estimated by the office of Congresswoman Meng. Extending menstrual cup consumption to a lifetime results in a cost of around $250, a whole degree of magnitude lower than our conventional options!

2. They’re convenient

Menstrual cups can usually provide 12-hour coverage, depending on your flow. It can be convenient to change it only in the morning and at night. They’re relatively low maintenance, requiring rinsing with light soap and water during your cycle, and boiling for five minutes after your cycle. They are extremely convenient when travelling—you only need to pack one item to cover your cycle as opposed to 15.

3. Health benefits: Less cramps! Less TSS risk!

Menstrual cups can decrease cramps by strengthening your pelvic floor muscles. I can personally attest that this works—and works wonders. Another amazing benefit is that a cup is much less likely to give you toxic shock syndrome than a tampon. Tampons make you vulnerable to infection

by TSS-causing bacteria. The cotton fibers in tampons can cause microscopic cuts in your vaginal wall, which allow the bacteria to enter your bloodstream. Menstrual cups are made out of silicon, which can’t cut you, so the risk of contracting TSS is much lower. Another concern for many people is the fact that most tampons and pads contain dioxins, chemical agents used to bleach the cotton, which are carcinogenic. Menstrual cups do not contain dioxins since they don’t need to be bleached, so you can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that this, at least, won’t give you cancer. In fact, menstrual cups are made with high-grade silicon, which doesn’t break down in the body. This means no chemicals leaching into your bloodstream, unlike with pads and tampons.

4. They’re Trendy™ More and more people are using menstrual cups. By using one you become part of the community. It feels a little exciting and exclusive because cups are not very widespread right now, but they’re catching on. Being eco-conscious, health-conscious, and cost-conscious are all currently popular outlooks, and they are consistent

9 • bite size

art by Chloe Wanaselja

with the benefits of menstrual cups as I’ve described above. Another t r e n d y mindset, getting in touch with y o u r s e l f and your body, is also consistent with the menstrual cup experience.

5. Get to know your body better Using a menstrual cup means having a practical learning experience with the inner workings of your reproductive system. It helps you determine the details of your cycle. For example, how much you bleed. Some cups are labeled with measurement lines, allowing you to track the volume of blood leaving your body each time you change your cup. As you become more familiar with your cycle, you will get the hang of knowing how many times to change the cup for each day of its use. Inserting and removing the cup also teaches you a lot about the physical layout of the inside of your vagina.

Using a menstrual cup can be messy and a little uncomfortable at first, but for all the reasons above, getting over this gentle learning curve is worth it. Reminder: pantiliners are your friend. They’re a good safeguard against leakages as you learn about how often you need to change the cup over the course of your cycle. Some people find changing the cup in a public restroom to be a concern, but a simple rinse with water from your water bottle or wiping it off with toilet paper will do the trick. In my experience, it took about one to two cycles to get used to a comfortable method of inserting and removing the cup and handling the blood. I would 100% recommend making the switch.

On top of the health, cost, environmental, and feel-good benefits I’ve outlined above, once you get used to wearing the cup, you can basically forget that you’re on your period!

It’s fantastic, fun, and freeing. w

“...quote.”

section • 10

1 • section

Skincare

a millenial’s obsession

by Viri Garcia art by Annika Bjerke

I’ll just say it now: I’m a millennial and I’m obsessed with skincare. There are countless articles about our generation’s growing obsession with self-care in general. From manicures to gold sheet masks, it is true that we have not only brought selfcare to life, but also suffocated it. However, when it comes to self-care, I think that it’s not only important to cover the basics, such as drinking water and sleeping in at least once every week, but that it’s just as crucial to adopt a routine that’s the perfect level of extra.

Recent generations are often accredited with becoming more emotionally intelligent and more self-aware, which has led to the self-care obsession. The internet is something that facilitates our search for more inventive, ridiculous ways to achieve self-care. Everyone has those Pinterest boards that are dedicated to recipes that will never be cooked, workouts that will never be worked, and DIY weddings that will never be DIYed. The internet is meant to be browsed alone, and with so many ideas being presented, it is natural to think of oneself when a new idea is discovered.

For example, I don’t browse Pinterest for outfits and recipes for my best friend. I have Pinterest boards for myself: for the laidback, me time Saturdays that will never happen and for aesthetics I will never care enough about. The internet has become much like its own universe in that each person creates their own space on it through social media.

Additionally, we get to choose what parts of that private yet public space we get to share and with whom. However, when it comes to self-care and ideas of the like, we’re selfish and it’s a cycle that repeats itself over and over again.

One of my guiltiest, most extra self-care pleasures is skincare. I have a routine that I religiously follow, and I’ve never met anyone that doesn’t think it’s tacky and overdone.

Funny thing is that I’m always the one with smooth skin while they think I’m extra. I will swear by using two different cleansers in the morning and before bed, as well as a mud

mask on Friday nights and an exfoliator on Sunday nights. My routine is specific and there is no need for anyone to ever own two different face cleansers and three different toners, but here I am with my thriving skin. Whenever I see my dresser full of skincare products, I often wonder whether it is all necessary, and it probably isn’t.

However, I know that if it weren’t for my skincare obsession, I would neglect myself, which would most likely have a negative effect on my mood and mental health. I think it’s important for everyone to choose one or a few specific self-care ideas and become a little obsessed with them. There is a certain type of satisfaction to be felt as well as a sense of accomplishment. We live in a high stress, fast-paced environment in which it becomes extremely difficult to keep ourselves in mind outside of our pinned internet ideas. Whether I get home at 8pm or 7am, I always make sure to clean my face at night. I carry a small cosmetics bag with travel size versions of my skincare products and often have to perform my nightly skincare rituals in the Klarman Hall bathroom.

Whether it be skincare, manicures, owning at least ten plants, eating a balanced, homemade breakfast every morning, or drinking 60 ounces of water a day, self-care should be a part of our lives, and it yields the best results when it’s done in a slightly overthe-top way. Become obsessed with that cooking Pinterest board. Paint the things in your camera roll you always wanted to paint. Drink water. Do the New York Times crossword puzzle in its entirety every time. Be extra with self-care because it’s important to be selfish now more than ever. w

bite size • 12

Unnecessary Tools a contradiction

by Sesha Kammula art by Annika Bjerke

Tool (noun): 1. a handheld device that aids in accomplishing a task.

2. something (such as an instrument or apparatus) used in performing an operation necessary in the practice of a vocation or profession.

There’s a kitchen implement that is only used to slice avocados. It is named, aptly enough, an avocado slicer, and you can buy one for $5.99 on Amazon. It’s one of the latest in a string of supposedly useless tools. If you can cut an avocado open with a knife, why do you need a specific tool? It adds to clutter, it’s a waste of money, and it might not even work that well. With the minimalist trend nipping at our heels, who can justify buying a product whose singular purpose is to enable millennials never to buy houses?

On the other hand, who is to say that anyone has the power to pass judgement on this device? Who has the status and social capital to name themselves the decider? After all, every generation is defined by the tools they use.

The definition of tool does not include qualifiers or disclaimers. As long as it meets the above criteria, then a tool is a tool is a tool. Most would say the invention of new tools is innovative. Perhaps progressive. Maybe even revolutionary.

So why is it that when tools emerge with only one purpose, they are ridiculed as “extra”? Who is to say that ultra-specific iterations of the knife are less useful than a multipurpose razor?

If an avocado slicer makes life easier, if it facilitates a common task, then it is no more extra to own than a set of ten different knives. Technology develops to make complex tasks more accessible to the general public and to save time (e.g. lawnmowers, dishwashers, and cell phones). Who’s to say that having a large machine that washes dishes in large batches rather than just washing them all by hand isn’t extra?

Picture yourself cutting into a ripe avocado. You pierce the slightly leathery skin and slice through the buttery fruit.

The smooth pit stops your knife and you proceed to cut around it. You try to scoop the pit cleanly out of the fruit, but you end up losing some avocado along with the seed. You have ninety percent of a smushed avocado when your hand slips and you’re suddenly dripping blood on the counter and

13 • bite size

the floor. Someone drives you to the emergency room where you receive stitches and the recommendation that you be more careful next time.

Picture this same scene with an avocado slicer. It may not be faster, and it may only be marginally easier, but you eliminate the risk of needing to be rushed to the hospital. If you give in to the pressure of pop marketing, you can cleanly pit and slice your avocado, saving mental energy that could be better spent not buying diamonds or freeloading. Of course, most people aren’t rushed to the ER in the middle of slicing avocados, but that shouldn’t be the only reason to reject utensil evolution. Just because some people can get by without them doesn’t mean society as a whole needs to reject them. Entire populations are erased with the assumption that the only reason to use an avocado slicer is because someone is lazy and has money to burn. People who have trouble using knives for physical or mental reasons deserve access to the same goods as others, and hiding behind flimsy excuses is a terrible way to deny condescension and implicit ableism.

There is no question that an avocado slicer is a millennial tool. It may be used across every generation, but at its core the concept of an avocado slicer defines a generation of people trying to find a way to make the world work for them.

Rather than accept life as it comes to them, millennials are constantly looking for ways to make their lives easier. Some call this lazy, but I call this progress. w

Running Thoughts

by Lela Robinson art by Fauna Mahootian

Thoughts have a tendency to run away with themselves taking a variety of routes, some leading us to creative, critical, or brilliant ideas, others taking us to no destination in particular, only to dull contemplation.

There are certain courses, however, dragging us on uphill marathons, stealing the last agonizing breath from the lungs, and replacing it with an utter exhaustion completely enveloping every fiber within the body. Imbued in negative energy, these thoughts incessantly nag and berate us as they traverse our brains. It is when these streams of consciousness distract us from the positive or contemplative thoughts that they become “extra.” Often uncontrollable, they seek to harm and draw attention away from our more valued contemplations. Extra thoughts are personal, and ingrain themselves within the existing patterns of thinking we tether ourselves to as perpetual and recurring doubts.

Some extra thoughts take up small chunks of our day, infrequent and sporadic lapses. Others flow steadily through our brains, doling out consistent torment, infesting our neural pathways, creating a fabricated state of disturbance.

These thoughts interrupt one’s presence of mind, steal away selfesteem, and form a customized state of demeaning and humiliating abuse.

Extra thoughts commandeer a considerable amount of power and influence over our lives, but is it inevitable, and must we always succumb to these pressures? How can anyone find appreciation for anything, including themselves, when chained to an iron ball of self-doubt dragging capability and self-assuredness beneath the surface?

It is possible to distract ourselves from extra thoughts, which may help us to shift our focus onto caring for others when our own thoughts inhibit us from doing it for ourselves. Holding the door, looking someone in the eye, even feigning a smile—these small acts of kindness may

in turn increase our own sense of security and temporarily wash away harbored negativities. This may alleviate the chronic effect of extra thoughts, lessening the amount of mental energy expended on them and derailing them so that we can focus instead on those around us.

Remember when that unreasonably practical and unrelatable adult in your life justified enduring hardships with the tiresome platitude that suffering builds character?

Try and find it in yourself to see reason in this, as the cliché lends itself to an ability to build empathy and humility. When extra thoughts cause pain, they simultaneously lessen critical judgments we may hold against others. Not unlike a language or any other skill, it is with increased exposure and tangible and related experiences that we improve both our fluency and our ability to engage more meaningfully in troubling occurrences.

Enduring self-doubt, even as it knocks us down, is a form of experiential learning providing the necessary skills to build compassion for others, to u n d e r s t a n d unhappiness on a deeper level, and to somehow work with rather than around the obstacles extra thoughts present.

Is it annoyingly optimistic to think we can avoid these extra thoughts? Maybe—but maybe there’s a way we can acknowledge the extra thoughts that will never completely go away while using them as tools instead of letting them rule our consciousness. It may take somewhat of a rebellious attitude, but viewing these thoughts as challenges to overcome could make us more resilient. Easier said than done, but maybe we can trick ourselves into thinking these thoughts are supplementary as opposed to extra. w

bite size • 14

15 • bite size

36 Facebook Groups and Counting a tour of the weirdest corners of the web

by Viri Garcia art by Annika Bjerke

One of my closest friends once said I’m “wellversed on the internet,” and he’s not wrong. Being active on several social media platforms ensures my exposure to plenty of content. I have been from the socially conscious and aesthetic pages of Tumblr to the icky, questionable corners of 4Chan and Reddit and back. I have seen things I wish I hadn’t, and others that I wish I could go back and see but are now too deep in the internet for me to return to. Regardless of my vast internet travels, the only place on the internet that still makes me feel strange is Facebook—and it is all my fault.

I think most people have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, the space where family members, close friends and long-lost friends randomly intertwine on your screen. Naturally, it’s going to be at least a little unnerving to see someone I went to high school with share pictures from a page called “Hood Memes” while my relatives post pictures of my cousins.

However, I have found a way to make Facebook an even more bizarre experience: Facebook groups. Facebook groups are what they sound like. Not everyone is part of one, some require approval of admins to join while some are open.

Members post content that may or may not require admin’s approval and revolves around the group’s theme. Sometimes,

“...the only place on the internet that still makes me feel strange is Facebook— and it is all my fault.”

I enjoy scrolling through the varying content that gets posted in the groups, and other times, I find myself turning my brightness down when in public and looking around to make sure nobody saw the self-incriminating video of Shrek that popped up on my newsfeed.

As of right now, I am in 36 Facebook groups, not including those for buying and selling and finding housing and textbooks on campus.

These groups’ titles and focuses range from “Birb memes,” “Things that are not aesthetic,” “Vaporwave,” “Rick and Morty,” “Recipes for disaster,” quality drawings of objectionable things, to elderly people trying to use social media, and pictures of traffic cones people encounter. At this point, I have become cautious when I open Facebook in public because I don’t know whether I will scroll past a cute bird video or some extremely questionable Minions fan art of a minion sliding a ring onto Gru’s finger while they both blush.

So, maybe I am being extra with all these Facebook groups.

However, I think that being a part of them adds something to the Facebook experience that can’t be attained through the simple friends and family network.

I have come across several articles about Facebook groups, or as they are commonly referred to: Weird Facebook.

I agree in that my feed has gotten much weirder since I joined the 32 groups I am currently in. However, the groups that are more on the “mainstream” side, such as “Please show to Jim ! !

HA ! ! HA ! !” (101,431 members) and “Vaporwave Sadposting” (145,044 members) are not what I would call “weird.” Of course, they’re weird in the sense that they are closed groups and none of your friends can see what you post or comment on those groups unless they are members, but they’re not weird as far as content goes: usually content revolves around the group’s theme and can be generic, such as the rooster with sneakers pictures on the bird memes group. However, in some rare and extreme cases content can also be screenshots from some grimy Reddit on the group for things that are not aesthetic. From this angle, Facebook groups become more of an “alternative” Facebook, but considering content and

watch & listen • 16

network, a better term for it is “extra” Facebook: almost like a Finsta, which only your close friends follow. On Instagam, it has become increasingly popular to have two accounts: one in which you upload the more aesthetic parts of your life, or a Rinsta, and another (usually private) in which you reveal what your life is really like beyond the sugar-coated parts, or a Finsta. Facebook groups appear to parallel Instagram’s Finsta concept without the need of a different account. However, on extra Facebook, you can choose to interact with other group members and make new friends or you can just observe from afar. I’ve noticed that after being in multiple groups for a while, you start seeing some people overlap, people who consistently post to certain groups, or people who argue with everyone in the comments sections of several groups. You begin to observe that controversial posts get the most comments and what kinds of people pick sides.

In addition to providing an alternate virtual social space, Facebook groups provide specific content that the user joins the group for. For instance, I think that older people trying to use the internet is funny and wholesome, which is why I joined the group “Please show to Jim ! ! HA ! ! HA ! !” in which members post screenshots or texts of “Jims” (people who try to use social media, but it becomes obvious they don’t know how to), such as a screenshot of your dad’s autocorrected texts saying “big chocolate fudge cake with euthanasia.” Facebook pages may or may not always provide themed, quality content, but groups do, mainly because posts are not made by a single group of admins, but rather group members. I have seen posts get weirder over time, but only in certain groups: mainly “Things that Are Not Aesthetic,” “Important Posting,” and “Despite My Moral and Ethical Objections I Must Admit this is Drawn Well,” which given their names alone seem that they could get weirder and more obscure over time: one of the latest unaesthetic posts is a bowl of ramen with milk, while one of the latest important posts is a picture of a newspaper with the headline “China may be using sea to hide its submarines.”

As someone who’s used to weird things on the internet, the weirder the content, the funnier it is to me. If anyone sees me around campus, nine times out of ten I’m trying my best not to laugh at something I remembered from a Facebook group. However, there is a point that can be reached in which too many groups equates to too many members and people posting things you see as you scroll, creating a saturated space that can either be entertaining or slightly unnerving.

I don’t think being a member of 30+ Facebook groups creates a negative experience, even though it has its setbacks.

Facebook is unique in that it is so popular compared to other social media platforms that an alternate but simultaneously equal space can be required, which is what Facebook groups provide. The more groups I’m a member of, the more entertaining and “social” my experience becomes. There is a certain place in the internet that can only be reached by joining 36 Facebook groups. Different groups will expose you to different weird spaces and people, but it’s definitely something worth exploring and experimenting with, especially once you get extra with it. w

17 • watch & listen

The Art of the Rom-Com love in the time of banality

by Gabriela Dickson La Rotta art by Kaamiya Hargis When did the world fall in love with the romantic comedy? Was it the moment in City Lights (1931) when the Flower Girl saw the Tramp for the first time? Perhaps when in Some Like It Hot (1959) Jack Lemmon finally tears off his wig and reveals that he is not Daphne to the indifference of his alarmingly persistent suitor? Or did it strike us as we watched Wesley pine for Buttercup in The Princess Bride (1987), yet limit himself to a simple: “As you wish.” What these films share is what makes the romantic comedy such a deeply human endeavor: they have managed to capture the absurd, ineffable quality of love.

Some, however, have declared the rom-com dead.

Headlines like Vox’s “7 reasons Hollywood doesn’t make

“At the heart of every good rom-com is the understanding that human nature is nuanced, flawed, and full of passion.” romantic comedies anymore” and LA Weekly’s “Who Killed the Romantic Comedy?” are splashed across webpages with twisted glee. Whereas icons like Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn once dominated our screens, we are now forced to endure the endless parade of Jennifers, man-children, and contrived meet-cutes. Nobody wants to waste their money on a formulaic two-hour long bag of randomly selected clichés. Or so they claim.

Admittedly, the past 15 or so years have endured their fair share of bad movies, and particularly bad romantic comedies—think The Ugly Truth (2009) or Employee of the Month (2006). Nonetheless, there exists an entire class of films that continue to innovate and pay homage to an underrated genre that is more relevant now than it has ever been.

Although the true origins of the rom-com can be traced far back—think Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Austen’s Emma—the genre came into its own when it transitioned to film. Without the innovation of “talkies”

or the loose social norms of the early 20th century, the tongue-in-cheek nature of rom-coms would have never existed. Critics are right to hold up movies such as His Girl Friday (1940) and The Philadelphia Story (1940) as paragons of good storytelling. By turns heartfelt and hysterical, these films pioneered the screwball comedy and marked a shift in female characterization, allowing women to match the men quip for quip. Beyond that, films such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and The Apartment (1960) walked the line between sorrow and elation, and echoed the hollow ache of loneliness.

Whatever joy we derive from today’s love and laughter we owe to the vision of directors George Cukor and Billy Wilder.

I would argue that recent rom-coms have not shirked that legacy, but honored it. Who can deny that Nora Ephron’s rapid-fire dialogue in When Harry Met Sally (1989) immediately calls to mind the chemistry of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn? Or that Joel’s desperation in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) is every bit as wrenching as watching Holly Golightly push away the only man who ever truly loved her? And do not even try to tell me Emma Stone’s character Olive in Easy A (2010) is not a direct through-line to the wonder that was Carole Lombard.

These are just examples, but they serve as references for the genre as a whole. Modern technology may have changed the way we interact with one another, but not the way we love each other. Time passes and social norms change, but the core of the romantic comedy stays the same: love is senseless, and people even more so.

Nowadays modern rom-coms are free to push the boundaries of what a romantic comedy can be. Three that come to mind are My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), The Big Sick (2017), and Spanglish (2004), vastly different films exploring themes of self-worth, religion, and class conflict.

They seamlessly tie the complexities of the immigrant experience to the endless confusion of falling in love.

And not only do these entries imbue the genre with some admittedly much-needed diversity, but they expertly juggle the quirks associated with each nationality without ever straying into reductionist stereotyping. We enter the movie theater expecting a funny family comedy and exit having realized that the nuances of being a foreigner in such a large country aren’t as inaccessible as we thought. After all, who among us does not know what it feels like to be a little lost?

watch & listen • 18

While we are discussing modern rom-coms, I would be remiss to exclude But I’m a Cheerleader (1999), a worthy contribution to the new romantic comedy and its somewhat new views on sex.

While Cheerleader represents only one of many LGBTQ+ rom-coms that have popped up in recent years, it is an exceptionally well-crafted one that reminds us that whether you are 15 or 55, sexuality is fluid and always a learning experience. And for those that are straight, there is also an abundance of romcoms to choose from that tell authentically funny and wacky stories of sex and desire. For a Good Time, Call… (2012) does so by deconstructing the Madonna-Whore complex and letting its two female protagonists explore everything they desire. I won’t spoil it, but the last scene in particular is unlike anything you will ever see. Sleeping With Other People (2015) takes a different route, but its refreshing honesty in the bedroom and fearlessness in the face of sometimes terrible and often horny main characters is all the more rewarding.

A separate category exists for those romantic comedies that play with the very definition of the name, choosing instead to explore non-romantic love. In the eyes of their creators, what matters is not the magical first date, or the mad dash through the airport, or the proposal—even if the movie is 2009’s The Proposal–what matters is the people that fill those scenes. The extras, if you will. Notting Hill (1999), for example, only works as well as it does because William Thacker’s loved ones fill in the spaces of his heart, making him so much kinder and more thoughtful, and by extension proving him worthy of the incandescent Anna Scott.

And on the topic of non-romantic romance, we must pay special attention to that most wonderfully weird category of rom-coms that spotlights that most wonderfully weird tradition: female friendship. Unlike bromantic comedies that deviate from the tropes of the genre, female friendship-centered films take the most tired aspects of rom-com tropes and recontextualize them within the frame of ladies who love other ladies. Ultimately many, if not most, of the protagonists end up with “the guy,” but that almost feels like an afterthought. It is the women who are the linchpins of these films.

Bridesmaids (2011) famously combines raunchy, self-effacing humor with a deeply felt understanding of how our closest friends complete us. Clueless (1995), as Austenian as it may be, charts the journey of its main character, Cher, not through her romantic pursuits, but through her female friendships in life, which force her

19 • watch & listen

to reckon with her mistakes and genuinely empathize with others. Miss Congeniality (2000) takes the inherently misogynistic concept of beauty pageants and peels back the layers of makeup and butt hairspray to reveal that there is just as much honor in being a badass woman as there is in twirling batons. What these films seek to show is a truth that feminists across the world champion: women should be allowed to live their lives. They should have the freedom to lie and fail and, in the process, find out who they are meant to be. They should be given the space to be human.

And yet, in spite of the trove of evidence that proves that romantic comedies are as profitable as they are worth watching, filmmakers remain reluctant to approach the genre. Painful as it may be to admit, Hollywood is filled with Harvey Weinsteins that view the needs, thoughts, and desires of women as irrelevant. And compared to heavy dramas or bombastic action thrillers, romantic comedies reek of femininity and lightheartedness. However, I would argue that the opposite is true. Love is one of the most deeply felt emotions. It is anything but weightless and it is nearly impossible to depict. If film is art, then romantic comedies are the work of Pablo Neruda, Gustav Klimt, and Jane Austen. They reflect what we so often see in ourselves and each other. At the heart of every good rom-com is the understanding that human nature is nuanced, flawed, and full of passion. Romantic comedies are merely the vehicles through which that understanding is expressed, and they fill our lives with joy and pain in equal measure.

Perhaps no one said it better than Nicholas Cage in Moonstruck (1987). In what remains one of the most beautiful monologues ever written, he professes his love to Cher and reveals an enduring truth, “We are not here to make things perfect. We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and to die.” w

A World of Violence the Yakuza films of Kinji Fukasaku

by Clarence Boyce art by Annika Bjerke Director Kinji Fukasaku, well-known for Battle Royale, did for the Yakuza genre what Francis Ford Coppola did for the gangster genre.

From 1972 to 1976, Fukasaku directed several Yakuza films that showed a postwar Japan in a state of non-stop violence and brutality. Long gone were t h e days of honor, these new times called for unrepentant killing and unabashed displays of cruelty. For some reason, the Fukasaku Yakuza films have taken a long time to reach the US and the UK. As of December 2015, Arrow Video has been releasing these classics on Blu-Ray and DVD. I caught on to them around last summer and hope that they’ll show up on Netflix or Hulu eventually. I believe these films more than deserve to be held up with the films of other great Japanese directors such as Akira Kurosawa, Masaki Kobayashi, and Yasujiro Ozu. The magnum opus of Fukasaku’s Yakuza period is undoubtedly The Battles Without Honor and Humanity series. The five-part series follows Shozo Hirono, played by Bunta Sugawara in a masterful role, as he tries to navigate the blood-soaked world of the Yakuza. The world that the characters of this epic inhabit is one of extreme and everpresent violence. Yet, this world doesn’t seem so alien from our own: sometimes violence is such a part of our reality that it barely can grab our attention. In that series, we see how a world this violent is birthed from resentment, anger, and fear. Each film presents our main characters as unabashedly bad people, but stuck in a world of malicious people they can seem almost good. Through the Honor and Humanity series, Fukasaku never preaches a message of nonviolence, but rather he shows that the reality these characters inhabit makes violence unavoidable. Either you kill or you are killed, and no matter which one you choose, violence will eventually fully consume you as it has done to everyone else.

These films were shot over a two-year period, yet the plot spans decades. The most astonishing aspect of these films is just how easily Fukasaku juggles a large rotating cast of characters, multiple POVs, jumps in the timeline, and brutal cringeworthy scenes of violence. Even though violence is almost a central character of its own in the films, it never comes off as excessive. Yes, a dude is cut up in a way that is reminiscent of a certain scene from Ichi The Killer (not a film for the faint of heart, by the way), but it seems perfectly normal in this insane world. The violence really reaches its peak by the third film, Proxy War; at this point in the series,

Fukasaku shows violence infecting every institution in this world. His endgame was to show several examples of how violence is not inherently good or bad but rather a part of the human condition that no one can escape. This is exemplified through the character of Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara), an ex-soldier that gets drawn into the Yakuza’s violent world due to a scuffle with a gang member.

“Either you kill or you are killed...”

The original series uses Sugawara’s character to show how desperation and difficult times lead people to commit atrocities. The beginning of the first film in the original series shows the delicate and tumultuous state of postWorld War II Japan. Living in this period caused Sugawara to give into anger and land in prison. This aspect of the film is more than applicable to the real world: during many tough times violence and crime increases due to the thick sense of ennui that seems to permeate the air. Another character that exemplifies this is Shoji Yamanaka (Kinya Kitaoji), a shorttempered man with a penchant for cheating at card games and messing with women he shouldn’t. In the second film of the series, Hiroshima Death Match, Shoji gets so angered over a card game that he ends up stabbing several men.

To him this response is more than appropriate: he can’t afford to be perceived as an easy target during this period.

Acts of violence such as this are so common that he only serves two years in jail. One jailer even remarks that Shoji shouldn’t even be there. Fukasaku shows us that some eras are completely defined by violence and as such it becomes practically invisible. But, just as each character in the series adapts to survive this world, Fukasaku shows that violence itself rapidly evolves as well.

The fourth film, Police Tactics, is where Fukasaku shows how violence begins to evolve. The film shows the Yakuza at their most brutal: running a legitimate corporation and abusing all the power that it entails. The companies that these

watch & listen • 20

men run provide services ranging from entertainment like Pachinko parlors to the realm of politics with the formation of a political party. The best part about this addition to the plot of the series is how natural it feels: smart dudes run these crime families, and the best way to commit crime is to do it in a white collar setting where you’re essentially above the law. This bloodstained white-collar crime world moves the spotlight to more subtle elements of violence.

Originally, it may seem that the Yakuza are going corporate to avoid killing–even they believe so at first. Yet, they simply use their new positions of power to commit a new form of violence. This form is not just physical, but it is financial and societal annihilation. In the final film of the series, Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Final Episode, we see the realm of politics infested with so many Yakuza that an average fundraising meeting can end in bloodshed. The brutality becomes almost comical, practically every politician in Japan was either Yakuza or was owned by them. Society can no longer call them thugs and brutes: They’re productive members that just happen to kill people to get things done. The violence they always carried with them had fully integrated into society. However, the end of the first series of Battles Without Honor and Humanity leaves one question: how would this full integration of violence shift the reality of this world?

Toei Studio had Fukasaku craft a sequel series called New Battles Without Honor and Humanity. This series is composed of three standalone parts that reuse several actors and expand on the themes of violence, love, hate, and revenge that the first series showcased. The first film shows how the addition of dope addicted gangsters led to botched hits, and complicated relationships with prostitutes led the Yakuza to make deeply comic errors. The second film, The Boss’s Head, gets a bit more serious as a bunch of upstarts plot to kill a Yakuza boss and replace him with one of their own. Last Days of The Boss, the final film, blends the tones of both previous entries quite well by showcasing a gang war filled with brutality and failures so bad you’ll wonder how these men got into the Yakuza in the first place. This film takes a standard tale of vengeance and morphs it into a journey of violence that leads to the destruction of almost every character (think Oldboy but set in the 70s). I found this series to be great, but it lacked the gut-punch of the original series. However, after a few re-watches I believe that this was the point Fukasaku was trying to push: violence in the second series is so present that it doesn’t fully capture your attention. Just like the people that inherit that world, the audience is no longer taken aback by the good old Yakuza brutality. The reality of this new series is one of rampant violence, so no matter how many times a character may get murdered, it’s just another day for the others. When Owada (Ko Nishimura), a long-standing Yakuza boss is killed in the second film, immediately the other characters begin to choose a successor. At his funeral there is no mourning, just planning and plotting. An interesting addition to the series was the use of dope, as drugs gives the violence a more beastly yet comical edge. The Yakuza are bored of violence, so they now seek their thrills in the realm of drugs. Fukasaku manages to

21 • watch & listen

inject a fairly decent amount of irony in this new paradigm as well. For instance, an older woman is more afraid of a kid using drugs than a bloody Yakuza member running down the street with a gun. The second series is short but sweet, using three separate tales to show the natural evolution of a world made of violence leading to a world where violence is just like breathing.

One of the most interesting aspects of the second series is how it’s firmly placed in the 70s, and how Fukasaku uses this era to give the prevalent violence a comedic edge.

Fukasaku manages to use the 70s setting to maximum potency, showing how even the toughest of Yakuza still love to disco. Hell, to them going to the disco is more important than completing a hit. Through normalized violence, drug use, and disco, each film paints the 70s as a time of stagnation for the Yakuza. They employ new tricks and tactics to insure their survival, but they’re handled with the same brutish touch. The opening of the first film has a character botch an assassination so badly that you can’t help but laugh. People aren’t even surprised by the attempted assassination; one elderly lady just slowly moves out of the way when a gun is drawn, like she sees one all the time. Fukasaku starts the film this way to show how decades of violence has integrated into the fabric of everyday life. All the old shock tactics that the Yakuza formerly used are passé; they are literally seen every day.

In the second series, Fukasaku shows the struggle of a group of violent people that can no longer use violence as their main tool. Unlike in the first series where the Yakuza knew this and began to operate in boardrooms instead of Pachinko joints, the Yakuza groups of the second series refuse to change in the slightest. The shadow of the first series covers the second and though its attempts to inject parody and new elements such as dope are good, they fall short of reaching the heights of its predecessor. Yet, Fukasaku still gets his message across and manages to do so without telling a continuous story. Together, both series are Fukasaku’s treatise on violence as an everyday reality in a world not too different from our own. While Battles Without Honor and Humanity was a stark portrayal of violence infecting every aspect of reality, New Battles Without Honor and Humanity takes a different approach that shows it as just another aspect of life that goes unnoticed thus making it even more potent and terrifying. Fukasaku’s Yakuza world is one where violence flows through the veins of reality and can be found in every part of existence.

With both series, Fukasaku’s contributions to the Yakuza genre are groundbreaking. The final film, ends not with a triumphant anti-hero brooding over what he has done but rather with his bloody hands cuffed and a look of confusion on his face as if he’s wondering how, even with all his mistakes, he ended up losing everything. The series itself leaves the viewer with a sense of confusion as well, especially compared to the first’s decisive ending. The original series begins and ends in Hiroshima, a place that has seen the most brutal, violent act in the history of humanity. I believe Fukasaku chose this location for one specific reason: violence and cruelty are highly infectious diseases; once they enter an organism they’re next to impossible to cure. w

When Politics Engulfs Criticism do we over-account for political messaging in cinema?

by Lorenzo Benitez art by Angelina Shi Among my favorite arts critics is Armond White, currently a writer for the National Review and Out, whose compelling, albeit controversial, voice is uniquely situated amidst contemporary film criticism. Most infamous for writing the first negative review of Toy Story 3 to appear on Rotten Tomatoes, White has, over the years, accumulated his own fair share of critics. For instance, White was temporarily banned from the popular reviews aggregator, allegedly because of populist furor over his stubborn contrarianism—note, for example, that he also ecstatically appraised Adam Sandler’s 2011 comedy Jack and Jill, an undeniable box office flop, as a work “rooted in Jewish comics’ proverbial self-deprecation.”

White has been publicly named and criticized by directors such as Darren Aronofsky, who he has rightly labelled a filmmaker “specializ[ing] in specious deep thoughts.”

More recently, White has attracted controversy for the conservatism of his writing: this year, in his review of Battle of the Sexes, he described in no uncertain terms how the film “epitomizes Hollywood’s Left-warped, identitypolitics reduction of what is human,” because its singular feminist agenda “neglects to offer a humanely balanced portrait of the players.” While this kind of social conservatism is unsurprising from a writer for the National Review, what ultimately is surprising is the identity of Armond White: a black, gay, conservative Christian living in the city attacked

by Ted Cruz for its “New York values.” Indeed, White’s identity doesn’t conform to the neat, political assumption currently being drawn between social liberalism and people of color, the coastal states, and LGBTQ community. As an outspoken critic who, despite his political conservatism, has no qualms leveraging his identity to critique the implications of identity politics, White should be credited for his brave resistance to a regrettable, accelerating trend in conversations about art.

As of late, I’ve noticed an increasing tendency among art critics to evaluate the significance and achievement of a work based on its artistic character rather than its artistic merit. Nowhere is this as pronounced as in criticism directed toward the moving image: the most ubiquitous, capitalized, and consumed of contemporary entertainment. Take 2016’s The Birth of a Nation, which was met with significant acclaim at its Sundance premiere that year, earning not only the festival’s Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award for the U.S. Drama category, but also a $17.5 million acquisition, the festival’s highest to-date. At its premiere, the film was rapturously applauded and given a standing ovation before

it even screened, presumably on the merits of its noble political messaging, and was promptly lauded by most outlets afterwards.

However, it wasn’t long before the positive conversations about the film swiftly dissipated after it resurfaced that its director, Nate Parker, was alleged to have committed sexual assault. Parker was accused of raping a fellow college student in 1999, and soon afterwards, the sycophantic acclaim for the film’s message retreated as quickly as it materialized. While one cannot discount the seriousness of this allegation–it is certainly not grounds to continue supporting the film–the swiftness of public condemnation reveals how little else supported Birth besides its director’s identity. Unlike other films directed by men such as Woody Allen or Roman Polanski, whose alleged sexual predation complicate receptions of their admittedly-good films, little else appears to justify the merit of The Birth of a Nation besides its director’s favorable politics. And once that identity was jeopardized, so too was the film in its entirety.

As you might expect, critics who refused to be swept up in the praise include Armond White. Lamenting its “Hollywood-style and Obama-era egotism,” White’s review described how Birth, as an “angry, naïve epic ... Lack[s] both radical form and revolutionary content.” While I don’t agree with many of White’s final artistic assessments, I can’t help but feel an inkling of agreement with his bold categorization of Birth as a “mediocre race film.” Initially touted as a potential Oscar contender, the film was forgotten by the cultural zeitgeist because of its director’s morally-dubious history and perhaps because of the deserved acclaim re-directed toward that same year’s Moonlight, a film whose artistic merit matches, if not surpasses, its political contribution to our understanding of the intersection of race and sexuality.

Identity politics as it intersects with criticism of the arts has been a troublesome topic as of late. When it came to my attention that gay Quebecois filmmaker Xavier Dolan, whose films feature many characters who struggle with the social conditioning against their sexuality, doesn’t like his films being labelled as “gay films,” I couldn’t help but be enthused by the extent to which fellow, minority-identifying creatives would rather the artistic bar not be condescendingly lowered especially for them. Indeed, Dolan’s statement appears to stem from a desire to have his works assessed foremost according to their strengths as pieces of cinema, and secondarily, if ever, for their socially-liberal politics. It’s

watch & listen • 22

an attitude worth supporting for its ability to attend to the difficult intricacies of those films whose reception conflates agreeable artistic motivations with commendable artistic execution. As a socially-liberal filmmaker, having good intentions is perhaps the “easiest part.” Representing these same views with the rich, affecting nuance of the moving image is far more difficult. This affective nuance is the ultimate comparative advantage a creative medium holds over the sterile intellectualization of academic theory, even as many directors seek to inform their creativity with the latest in academia.

As a filmmaker myself, I’ve recently assumed the

“Having good intentions is perhaps the ‘easiest part.’ Representing these same views with the rich, affecting nuance of the moving image is far more difficult.” belief that what ought to be embraced about the distinct mediums are their unique abilities to conjure universal reactions from the particulars of their content. Following from this line of thought, that which differentiates the artistic mediums in aggregate from other forms of communication is their ability to imbue abstract, intellectual theories with the emotional significance necessary to actualize tangible change.

Remember, for example, the significant pathos Moonlight charged our intrapersonal and collective understandings of being a black, gay man. However, the increasing critical tendency to elevate the political implications of a work

23 • watch & listen

as a more relevant consideration than creative merit risks ignoring that which truly ensures a work’s lasting potency.

Instead, many appear to now favor those sinecure films capitalizing on favorable timing within the current political climate. If we consume art foremost for its agreeable political messaging, why not just read an academic article advancing a similar line of thought: not only will you find a more robust, rigorous account, but so too will you find a work whose political directedness leaves less ambiguity to the subjective interpretation inherent to art. Say what you will about The Avengers director Joss Whedon, but, in reference to political didacticism in art, he valuably remarked that “art isn’t your pet–it’s your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.” Indeed, the tight equivalency being drawn between art and artist is something we ought to be cautioned against.

Admittedly, all human creation, especially art, is situated amidst a context of constantly-shifting social relations, and therefore can never be drained of its political implications. After all, anything that critiques its own relation to society is, according to many cultural theorists, political.

The artistic mediation of certain content variably affects its messaging, correspondingly affecting its political immediacy.

However, while the extent to which we should account for political messaging in art remains subject to further debate, as of right now it appears our tendency to account for it has become overextended. After all, if everything is political, then so too is how a message is communicated, in addition to what that message is. While the increasing fetishization of political liberalism in contemporary American cinema more than acknowledges the latter, we thankfully have figures like White who’re eager to defend the predominant significance of the former. w

Embracing the Best of the Bad The Room and why we love bad movies art by Angelina Shi

by Anna Godek

It was close to midnight on a late August night as I made my way to my seat in the movie theater, box of plastic spoons in hand. I was there to see a movie, and I was hoping it would be bad. Really bad. I wasn’t disappointed—it was terrible.

I was there to see The Room, a movie so hilariously awful it’s known as “The Citizen Kane of bad movies.” The plot supposedly follows the love triangle between the

protagonist, Johnny (Tommy Wiseau); his fiancé, Lisa (Juliette Danielle); and Johnny’s best friend, Mark (Greg Sestero), but to say the film has a distinguishable plot would be generous. As The Room unfolded before me, I laughed and cheered. Along with the rest of the audience, I threw spoons and heckled the characters on screen. I chanted at the Golden Gate Bridge. When I left the theater, my sides ached from laughing.

watch & listen • 24

I couldn’t wait to see it again.

Yes, people don’t see The Room because it’s good, they go to laugh at how mind-bogglingly bad it is. They go to mock it with other moviegoers. The Room is the brainchild of writerdirector-star Tommy Wiseau. Financed with his own money ($6 million, supposedly made selling knock-off jeans), the movie was released in 2003. Wiseau can’t act, write, or direct with any competency, and it shows. Much of the dialogue is absurd, and the production value is so low that the art department bought framed pictures of spoons to help furnish Johnny’s apartment, where most of the action takes place.

This oddity led to the audience’s ritual of yelling “Spoons!” and throwing plastic cutlery at the screen whenever they’re shown. While The Room is probably the most famous of the so-bad-it’s-good movies, it’s certainly not the only one; there

the best (or worst?). It’s simply the most absurd, bizarre, and terrible thing out there. All rules of logic and reality seem suspended when you watch The Room. In one scene, the male characters are all wearing tuxedos as they toss around a football, and it’s never explained why. It seems that there was some subplot that would necessitate tuxedo wearing that didn’t make it into the final cut. Additionally, the movie’s intended emotional climax is best described as “that scene where Tommy Wiseau humps a dress.” The absolute sincerity with which Tommy Wiseau made The Room adds another layer of comedy; he truly thought that he was making something great and that normal people actually act the way they do in his movie.

The Room also fascinates people because of the story surrounding its filming and its enigmatic auteur, Tommy

“...there’s a special combination of painfully low production value, absurdly poor writing, and acting so bad that you’ve seen better in middle school plays. In other words, comedic gold.” are plenty of famously funny-bad films out there, so much so that they constitute their own genre.

The appeal of these movies lies in their ability to make us laugh. Much of comedy is based around people acting illogically, refusing to follow social norms, or subverting our expectations in some way. This is why, for example, we laugh when a stupid-looking monster leaps out at the screen in a B-horror movie—it isn’t actually scary. Unlike bad movies that are just mediocre or boring, bad-good movies are bad in more unpredictable ways. For instance, in Troll 2, a movie that rivals The Room for worst movie of all time, the child protagonist has to stop his family from eating goblininfected food. He does this by urinating all over the dinner table. Surely there are other ways to stop people from eating food, but not in the strange and wonderful world of badgood movies.

In the notorious Plan 9 From Outer Space, the line “future events such as these will affect you in the future” is actually spoken as a serious piece of dialogue. On some level, we’re just laughing at the total incompetency of the filmmaking.

For movies that usually make the top of the so-bad-it’sgood list, like Troll 2, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Birdemic, and The Room, there’s a special combination of painfully low production value, absurdly poor writing, and acting so bad that you’ve seen better in middle school plays. In other words, comedic gold. The appeal of these movies also lies in the communal way they’re often consumed: screenings of Troll 2 and The Room generally involve major audience participation, like the spoon throwing mentioned earlier. The interactive nature of the showings further sets the bad-good classics apart as a unique experience.

While there are many contenders for the top title in the so-bad-it’s-good genre, The Room inevitably wins out as

25 • watch & listen

Wiseau. First of all, no one knows for sure how old Wiseau is or where he was born–his unplaceable accent might hint at Eastern Europe, but Mars is also a possibility. In 2013, Greg Sestero released a memoir called The Disaster Artist about The Room’s troubled (to put it mildly) filming and his relationship with Wiseau. It reveals such wonderful details as the fact that the first thing Tommy orders in a restaurant is always hot water, that he drives twenty miles per hour below the speed limit, and that he wanted a subplot in The Room where Johnny was revealed to be a vampire. Sestero also relates how it took a whopping three hours to film Wiseau’s infamous “I did not hit her” dialogue, which is only seven seconds long. The more you dig into the life of Tommy Wiseau, the more questions you have, such as, “Did he really make millions of dollars selling knock-off streetwear jeans?” As you look closely at the narrative that emerges from The Disaster Artist, there is a twisted inspirational underdog story and a strange immigrant success story. Tommy Wiseau apparently built himself up from nothing (by selling shady streetwear denim) after coming to America, and, despite all odds, fulfilled his dream of making a movie. He is, in some ways, a distortion of the self-made man ideal. The Room makes you question that definition of success. After all, it has brought its creator enduring fame, and people from all around the world love it and pay to see it. But, of course, it’s famous for being spectacularly awful.

What conclusions to draw from this, I leave up to you. But, with a film adaptation of The Disaster Artist coming out and Wiseau and Sestero reuniting for a (non-Tommy directed) movie called Best F(r)iends, The Room is only becoming more culturally relevant, and, by extension, so are all so-bad-it’sgood movies. So, if you haven’t already, it’s time to embrace the genre. Don’t forget your spoons! w

Laughing at the Movies Mulholland Drive and the consequences of making a masterpiece

by Nathan Chazan art by Leo Levy I went to a screening of Mulholland Drive the other day. It’s a good movie by most people’s reckoning although it’s had the misfortune of being deemed canonically great. When a film becomes great, people start to watch it less, even if they go to see it. When we go to a canonical film, our experience of the work is predetermined to a certain extent by its critical packaging. Even if we avoid spoilers, there’s no escaping Certified Freshness and all its implications. We turn off that curious part of ourselves and seal our emotions in a crate pasted up with quotes and trivia. In the case of a “surreal” movie like those that David Lynch makes, we walk out and tell our friends how weird it was.

A film’s reputation becomes a barrier much in the way we create barriers to our unconscious. Sublime expression will always provoke a little tingle in our hearts, some sort of cosmic stirring, and perhaps it’s better (for some) that we never make sense of where that little kick is supposed to push us. After all, it’s nothing new. We’ve been led astray from art by its institutional codification at least since Aristotle decided he knew damn well how tragic theater ought to work.

And Mulholland Drive is nothing if not an unsolvable mystery, the sort that begs for some banal context to be imposed upon it. It’s a conspiracy film about crimes and abuses in the Hollywood studio system, a tragedy revolving around powerful men victimizing aspiring starlets. We begin with many strange and disturbing sights from which a story eventually snaps into place with the arrival of Betty (Naomi Watts), a dame with stars in her eyes landing in Hollywood for the first time, a mythical figure who seems absurd in the new mythical LA of criminal corruption and Reaganomical hucksterism, a fantastic vision of a broken world (i.e. the world as seen in independent films and prestige television).

But Betty is a sign representing a pop culture unversed in Hollywood Babylon and thus cannot interpret the signals that the environment she’s flown into is a much creepier, shittier place.

That shittier place is personified by Rita (Laura Harring), an amnesiac who Betty first encounters stumbling naked in her apartment. Rita’s bruised body and broken mind is that of a displaced and disempowered femme fatale whose

presence ruptures idyllic normality—some might call this Lynchian. Rita tries to make sense of her past while Betty falls deeper into the muck of her career; thus, they represent two archetypical cinematic images of femininity becoming cognizant of their exploitation. The trauma that Mulholland Drive dramatizes is obviously pertinent in a post-Weinstein film world although the ghastly maleness that certainly haunts the film’s gaze is worthy of critique. The satire of Hollywood Lynch crafts in this movie is bitter and poignant, an articulate and heartfelt rage against the objectification of women. At the same time, Lynch is clearly captivated by this very dream of Hollywood starlets the film attempts to wake us from, a tension which gives the film its energy. It’s an allegory that stares you in the face, clubs you over the head even, as you watch the movie, yet it’s still possible to miss. With the voice of canon buzzing in our heads, we can simply wander through the marshes counting the ways in which this movie is a David Lynch movie, and the things it does that are Great Movie things. There’s a history to the puffing up of Lynch’s films, especially this one, and as with many works we’re told are classic, we sometimes forget to ask ourselves why.

The very designation of Mulholland Drive as a film is itself a creature of marketing since Lynch had originally filmed the first hour as a TV pilot, which was rejected. The second hour of the film was created to reformat the pilot as a feature for the international festival market. This sort of practice of playing the film and TV markets at once isn’t unusual; there’s a feature

watch & listen • 26

length version of the Twin Peaks pilot out there originally created for theatrical distribution in Europe (I hear Bob dies in that one), and God knows the deceased direct-to-video market is strewn with countless refitted pilots, beginnings with new endings. Mulholland Drive in fact draws attention to its retrofitted nature in the narrative’s bifurcation. This hiccup in narrative and production is in fact signalled on scene with a pandora’s box literally being opened; what follows could either be considered a flashback or an inversion of the first half of the film with Naomi Watts taking on the role of Diane, a woman who died before the start of the film, while the preamnesiac “Rita” becomes a much more sinister figure.

The reversals and ambiguities created by the second act are certainly part of what make the film great, but at the same time this structure, signalled to the audience with the all the pomp of a CG tornado in a summer blockbuster, is a “special effect” which communicates the importance of the work to the critics and festival judges, the ones who create lists for the BBC and bestow numbering in the Criterion Collection (Mulholland Drive received spine #779 just last year). Moreover, the movie dramatizes the glamorous woes of behind-the-scenes Hollywood, a schtick that film intelligentsia have been falling over from A Star is Born to Birdman and beyond, though the specifics may be a little sharper than or at least distinct from other examples. And having achieved prestige, a popular auteur such as Lynch also reaches the TV crowd that turned onto his brand name from Twin Peaks, readied by labels of austerity to treat this surreal mystery as a very serious matter, either one for intricate theorizing or sacred reverence (depending on the viewer’s disposition). David Lynch came out of the fine art world, and aside from picking up surrealist and avant-garde methods from the scene, he also shares an adeptness for creating works that navigate audiences of wealthy donors and the so-called general public. Marketing is a part of Lynch’s storytelling.

But great filmmaking doesn’t have to be just the art of the deal. There’s plenty going on in Mulholland Drive that doesn’t fit into a glowing Letterboxd summary, namely the humor carried through charged, deadpan delivery of bizarre declarations; the things people say in this movie ought to be laughed at. The film creates a space where the Hollywood fantasy world and the “real” world—mystical and mundane modes of perception—coexist and interact with one another in a way that is palpably absurd. That push to laugh you feel when that guy with the big ears and the weird eyebrows (you know the one) starts describing his dream in that shite looking diner is a confrontation of your experience of the world. To laugh, to respond to this scene as a provocation of humor might well be a nudge in the direction of a spiritual epiphany, or at least a reflection of an epiphany Lynch has had. Laughter is a breaking thing, a moment of bodily response that takes us out of the story and into ourselves, with the possibility open for us to bring a bit of the story in with us. But the audience I sat with did not laugh at this scene. Nor did they laugh at many of the other funny bits beyond the involuntary titters quickly stifled out of shame.

However, I did hear more than a few turn to their friends to comment “this is weird!” Above these comments, the dread specter of the Lynchean whispers, “what you see is peculiar,

27 • watch & listen

surrealist, painterly, pure noir,” persuading us so seductively to think that what we see means nothing while reassuring us that the big nothing we digest is significant. In our mumbling silence, art becomes a product. Who was it who said Caesar’s just a salad on the shelf?

And yet there was one scene that received uproarious laughter. It’s about halfway through the movie when Betty

“As I might say in a casual context, when the two finally fuck” and Rita make love (or, as I might say in a casual context, when the two finally fuck). In the beginning, people were stone silent, perhaps afraid to laugh at a lesbian scene in 2017, perhaps silencing some other feeling this display of passion before them might have drawn out. But then Betty says three words that had the audience hooting: “I love you.”

She says it again. Another wave of laughter. I think I may have giggled a bit myself. It’s an odd reaction if we step back and think about it for a moment—why is it that we treat a moment that clearly deviates from irony in favor of something more tender and raw with such sarcasm?

It’s not that Mulholland Drive is beyond reproach. For one thing, the power of that aforementioned love scene is perhaps undercut by the leering gazeyness of Lynch’s framing.

And yet I find it miserable to see waves of laughter seemingly prompted by the very notion of a person saying that they love someone. In a film awash in irony, we as an audience avoided laughter for fear of confronting cynicism. And yet when we were presented with a clear enough reflection of our most tender and beautiful feelings, heightened as melodrama but recognizable and meaningful, we began to hoot. Laughter can be a way to embrace and come to terms with our demons.

But here laughter might be a rejection. Could it be that we laugh because we are watching a weird movie? If someone says “I love you” and it doesn’t seem strange, that must be the joke.

I’m not offering a prescription on laughter–laughter’s great, and to be honest I don’t understand it. I’d rather you didn’t talk about dinner plans while an art film’s playing, but generally speaking it just isn’t up to me how you engage with and respond to the big picture before you. Rather, we ought to be concerned with emotion, how we interact with art, how we understand ourselves. Film can be a door that lets our feelings roam free from ourselves from time to time, feelings like “I love you.” Yet much of the time we are encouraged or encourage ourselves to keep that door shut. I think this alienates us from a very true pleasure, a knowledge both intellectual and internal that produces a sort of warmth in us.

Our encounters with movies can teach us new ways to feel, but this can only happen if we take the time to learn how to recognize and accept those feelings when they come. w

Extra Ex Machina Asian Bodies as Disposable, Alien(ated) Labor in American Sci-Fi

by Jeremiah Kim art by Helen Hu

INT[ERIOR] HOUSE/CALEB’S BEDROOM – MORNING CALEB is woken by light flooding onto his face. The door to his room has been opened. Outside is the bright glass corridor CALEB sits up to see a GIRL entering his room.

She looks Japanese. She’s stunningly pretty. And she doesn’t say anything. Just walks in, carrying a tray with a cafetiere, which she puts on CALEB’S bedside table.

CALEB: … Hi. The JAPANESE GIRL doesn’t answer. Just turns, and leaves.

EXT. GARDEN/GYM AREA – DAY NATHAN: Hey. Sorry to send Kyoko to wake you, man. I just didn’t want too much of the day to slip by.

CALEB: No. It was a good thing. Thank you.

NATHAN: She’s some alarm clock, huh? Gets you right up in the morning.

CALEB smiles.

— Ex Machina, dir. Alex Garland, scenes 30-31 It is a well-known fact in America that Asians cannot speak. Actually, that’s not exactly true: we might whirr, or chime, or hum, or stutter out cluttered clusters of computerized code. Think of Arvind Mahankali, blinking wordlessly amid streams of confetti after winning the Scripps National Spelling Bee in memes-immemorial.

You know the gif I’m talking about. Look at his face; you chuckle, no emotions. A total fucking machine. His parents must not have programmed him to smile, poor kid. Asians might have gained the ability to render complex diction, but sadly, we have not yet learned how to convert these strings of data into normal, human, American expressions.

I’m getting to the sci-fi part now. The excerpt at the beginning of this article is from a screenplay of Ex Machina that I found on the Internet. I’m going to use it as a

jumping-off point for a quick dip into the racist, sexist, colonialist logic of Orientalism that forms the hegemonic substrate upon which the image of the Asian body has been constructed in the wondrously perturbable imagination of the American viewing public. It’s the same logic that makes you see a robot short-circuiting when you watch that gif of Arvind, over and over again.

First of all, no, this is not another Asian American think-piece about whitewashing in Hollywood. The Scarlett Johanssens of the world may breathe a sigh of relief; you’re off the hook for now. Instead, I want to talk about three movies—Ex Machina, The Matrix, and Blade Runner—that do put the Asian body on display in order to pronounce a particular strain of American anxiety about the racialized, gendered Other. These films, all of which occupy variably secure positions in the nascent canon of American sci-fi, are chiefly concerned with the question of what it means to be human in imagined future societies that have been infiltrated by artificially intelligent beings.

In doing so, they each continue a historical discourse of disposability and alienation that has been inscribed onto the Asian body since the mid-1800s (roughly), when Chinese migrant workers were imported en masse by white American industrialists to both eschew and discipline an insubordinate labor pool of emancipated black former slaves. Critically, the Oriental was never meant to be allowed to stay in America: he (it was predominantly “he” in the beginning) was expected to serve his purpose and be discarded. This transience was read as an abhorrent alienation from labor by working-class whites, who were whipped into a bloody frenzy against the encroaching Oriental horde by a coalition of nativist politicians and union leaders during the Los Angeles Chinatown massacre of October 1871. I’ll let you draw your own connections to 2017.

In brief, white America has always relied on the de facto enslavement of black people to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. Yet systems of racialized labor are constantly mutating under the pressures of capitalist development, and new waves of an alien workforce must be brought ashore because—supply and demand, right? It follows that the

watch & listen • 28

Orientalized Asian body is at once a near-perfect model of neoliberal accumulation and an inhuman appendage to be excised when the specter of globalization creeps too close to the American heartland.

Now listen up, this is the important part:

infamously eerie geisha ad that grins at Deckard every goddamn 30 seconds from the digitized sides of buildings and blimps...like, we get it already. Motifs of creepy East Asian women are dang-handy anxiety-inducing world-building devices!

Blade Runner Up first, we have one of the granddaddies of American sci-fi: Ridley Scott’s startling vision of a dark and not-so-distant dystopia has deeply influenced the two other films in this article, to say nothing of its cult status as the progenitor of the entire genre of cyberpunk. Rephrasing the movie’s nominal plot around ex-cop Rick Deckard’s mission to terminate four rogue Replicants, Blade Runner is a fantasy of American individualism, encountering and subduing non-Western machines that threaten to upend the U.S.’s axiomatic supremacy over an uncertain, globalized future. In that sense, the pivotal character in Blade Runner is not Harrison Ford’s Deckard nor the Replicant Roy Batty,but the city of Los Angeles in 2019. It’s the city that first emerges from blackness in plumes of fire rising from a thousand pinpricks of light; the city whose horizon is dominated by kanjiesque corporate megastructures upabove and whose streets are spilling over with Japanese babble spoken by the swarms of human refuse down-below; the city whose secrets Deckard must pry open in order to locate the elusive Replicants, to the extent that the city itself becomes his target, his informant, his augur, and his opponent all-in-one.

The city of the future, in Blade Runner’s time, is Scott’s searing critique of late global capitalism from a decade when the threat of an East Asian technological/economic behemoth loomed large over the developed Western world.

How can we tell? All the clean white people are gone; in their place, the technologically advanced yet culturally primitive Oriental masses have overrun America. It is no longer a world worth saving, but one worth repressing all the same.

Consequently, the collection of symbols by which the city embodies a collision of high-tech and low-life cultures in Scott’s dystopian future are located most evocatively in the Oriental body: the glinting neon dragon sign hovering over the noodle bar where we first find Deckard spea-kingEng-lish-ve-ry-clear-ly to an Asian cook who refuses to understand him; the ziggurat-like headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation; the night market teeming with eagles (?) and ostriches (??), where Deckard consults a wizened, microscopewielding Chinese woman about a fleck of synthetic snake scale; the sputtering eye-guy Hannibal Chew (James Hong) who engineers Replicant eyes in sweatshop-like conditions for Tyrell Corp; and last, but not least, the

The Matrix The Wachowski siblings’ 1999 smash-hit gave a serious reboot to the cyberpunk genre, both in terms of its mindbending computer effects and its recalibration of Orientalist tropes for a new millennium. The advent of the Internet and other network technologies meant that the Asian body could be encoded into visual culture to an extent previously unimaginable by older productions like Blade Runner. That America’s social and economic systems were becoming increasingly virtual meant that they were also becoming more foreign, less human. Ripe terrain for the Oriental menace to take on new forms, new visages, new devices for infiltrating the private and professional lives of everyday Americans.

Think about it. The Matrix takes place in the scorched ruins of a world wracked by totalizing war between humans and machines. The majority of humanity in 2199 is imprisoned on par with other dystopian visions of the future—captive bodies are harvested for energy while enslaved minds are submerged in a deep computer simulation known as the Matrix. Designed to synthesize an illusion of modern life in 1999, the Matrix renders a cookie-cutter complex of monochrome cubicles and starched suits. It is the latter world that the film first presents to the audience, and the one in which the most stirring action takes place. It’s this virtualized reality, manufactured and monitored by a host of artificial intelligences, that the hero must master on his journey towards enlightenment.

The Wachowski siblings strategically divest the ethos of American individualism from Blade Runner’s disgruntled ex-cop, a figure of corporal punishment and failed Western governmentality, and divert it into Keanu Reeves’ Neo, an ethnically ambiguous computer hacker whose “power” (before he gets his actual powers) is his singular ability to navigate the frontier of cyberspace. As such, Neo’s primary antagonist lies not in the cephalopodic figure of the mechanical Sentinels that scour the “real world” but in the ubiquitous form of Agent Smith, a malignant computer program bent on superseding all human life with its own uncanny simulacrum of biological proliferation. Hugo Weaving may be white, but

29 • watch & listen

the character he plays is coded (literally) as an Oriental villain for Y2K’s burgeoning dot-com bubble. And how, pray tell, does Neo learn to defeat Agent Smith? He simply has a martial arts program uploaded via the aux-cord plug-in at the back of his head, precipitating one of the best/worst lines in movie history: “I know kung-fu.” Thank god for that.

Ex Machina Arriving at the most recent installment to the American sci-fi canon, Ex Machina resolves certain tensions inherited from its predecessors that might have been paradigmatic at one moment of history but would be deemed anachronistic today. The main divergence, as far as I can tell, is in the movie’s subversion of the ideal, enlightened human subject.

Alex Garland, Ex Machina’s screenwriter and director, thus performs a sort of meta-narrational bait and switch: we’ve been conditioned by movies like The Matrix and Blade Runner to assign the role of protagonist to a tech-savvy white male like Domnhall Gleeson’s Caleb, but the real focal point around which the plot revolves is the realization of Ava’s (Alicia Vikander) consciousness. Ava’s exceptional intelligence is simply a continuation of previous models, yet it is only Ava who escapes the compound where the majority of the film takes place and enters human society unnoticed. Only Ava, with all her wit, will, and whiteness, can transcend her alien forebears and gain emancipation from the male gaze with all its outmoded capacities.

That Ava’s techno-feminist (look it up!) liberation comes at a deadly cost not only to her creator Nathan and human

“It is a well-known fact in America that Asians cannot speak. ” guinea pig Caleb, but to her silent precursor Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) is key. The movie script’s unspoken characterization of Kyoko as a “girl” who “looks Japanese,” is “stunningly pretty,” and “doesn’t say anything” gets explicitly affirmed by Nathan’s conflation of the Oriental android with a sexual household appliance—and yes, Kyoko’s body does get used by its master for that exact purpose. In a later scene, Nathan gives an offthe-cuff explanation to Caleb regarding Kyoko’s inability to speak English: he’s deliberately chosen (programmed) her to be a “firewall against leaks” so that he “can talk trade secrets over dinner...and know it will go no further.” As the two men sit watching Kyoko wipe up spilled wine on her knees, Nathan adds that her lack of proper speech “also means [he] can’t tell her [he’s] pissed when she’s so fucking clumsy that she pours wine over [his] house guest.”

It’s evident that Garland is playing off racialized, gendered tropes of East Asian women as infantilized domestic/sex workers while also invoking World War II/Cold War anxieties about Asians as foreign agents of technocratic

espionage; what’s less clear is whether the eventual revelation of Kyoko as a speechless, underdeveloped (in relation to Ava) android changes anything about how we perceive her along these lines. The most “advanced” level of agency that Kyoko attains arguably occurs at the moment she slips a knife into Nathan’s back. Upon a critical delineation, however, this act of rebellion merely arises in sacrificial service to—and is quickly subsumed by—Ava’s establishment of her own individuality. In this sense, Kyoko’s commodified, hypersexualized Asian female body preconditions her inability for speech and, more broadly, for metacognition.

The labor Kyoko performs, whether in service to Nathan or Ava, is alienated by her encoded capacity to simply receive and respond to external stimuli. Her inner motives are first rendered inscrutable by Nathan’s self-gratifying programming, and consequently made incidental to Ava’s brutal, only-one-can-survive scheme for self-actualized independence. Kyoko always was and forever will be not-quite human.

By way of conclusion, I want to make sure that my discursive assemblage of Spelling Bee kid memes, alien L.A. architectures, Keanus downloading kung fu, and silent sex machines hasn’t gone misunderstood. If your main takeaway from this article is a reductionist aphorism along the lines of, “All American scifi films are filled with racist Asian stereotypes!” then that’s probably a fault of ill-planned rhetorical structure in my own writing. If you’re reading my skewed analysis of Orientalist tropes in Blade Runner, The Matrix, and Ex Machina as an argument for more diverse casting in mainstream movies— let’s replace all the white heroes with Asian ones!—another fault on my end. I apologize.; I apologize so profusely for my mistake! Please forgive it.

But anyway: authenticity is a pipe dream, and mainstream heroization will neither solve racism nor topple heterosexist patriarchy. Furthermore, my critique of these movies for inscribing the ills of capitalist accumulation onto the Asian body doesn’t mean I think that Asian/Asian American people should be absented from larger criticisms of racial capitalism. A lot of us do subscribe to notions of individualism and whiteness, because that’s how the system works. That’s how hegemony works. And believe it or not, I think Spelling Bees are a good-ish example of that.

If, on the other hand, you’re starting to question the entire Western construction of the individual subject—if you’re beginning to suspect that a racialized, gendered Other must always be written in opposition to the human hero’s knowledge/mastery of self—well maybe I do have something going for me with this whole writing thing. Then again, none of these are really my ideas. I’m just rephrasing and re-applying what other people have said. And maybe that’s the point. America wants to make me a copy? Sure, I’ll be a copy. I’ll code my speech; become inscrutable; mouth words that you can’t hear. But I won’t be an accessory—I’ll just be with the others. Which others, you ask?

Which others, you a—

watch & listen • 30

You’re Not “Uncultured” the case against the homogenization of speech at Cornell

by Mikaela Hamilton art by Isabel Ling

Fairly soon after my arrival at Cornell two years ago, I began to feel that I was missing something— something that most of my peers seemed to have and that I’d never known myself to lack. Several days later, while talking on the phone with one of my friends from home, I found the word for those feelings: I simply felt “uncultured.”

My peers seemed to know the names of directors and academics I’d never heard of, made jokes about books I’d never read, and talked about places I’d never been. Even the simple act of going to the dining hall seemed to be a way of outing myself as uncultured—I’m sorry, b u t what’s a falafel? It was easy to feel inadequate and easy to lack a sense of real belonging, but I didn’t want this to weigh heavily on me. I acknowledged that this was the difference between an inadequate public high school education and that of an elite private school, the difference between very different parents, upbringings, and life experiences. I had to remind myself that ignorance is not indicative of intelligence.

I could read more books, watch more movies, and try more foods. I could “catch up.” Still, there was an inescapable daily reminder of our differences: my speech.

My peers would comment on words I used that they perceived as unusual or “mispronounced.” Sometimes it was friendly teasing, and sometimes it was intended to be encouraging—they liked the novelty of my dialect—but it always felt like a call-out and resulted in me becoming increasingly self-conscious. I’ve always believed that there is no right way or wrong way to speak a language, and that dialects associated with lower socioeconomic status are by no means actually lesser. And yet, my speech has significantly changed in these past few years. I have become painfully aware of the extent to which my speech affects how I am

31 • zooming in

perceived by others.

Cornell has taught me that assimilating is the best way to come across as educated.

I’ve entirely stopped saying the adverbial “wicked,” although it used to modify every one of my most enthusiastic adjectives. I try not to say the words “hot” (it sounds something like “hut”) and “water” (something like “wather”), because I have not been able to change the pronunciation to anyone’s satisfaction (“wicked hot” is right out). I always hesitate before saying “museum” (I naturally say “muse-zam”), and I still worry that I haven’t gotten the new, modified pronunciation quite right.

I’ll say “I’m going to get ready for bed” instead of mentioning my pajamas (“puh-jam-uhs”). I try to reduce profanity and colloquialisms. I’ll “make a U-turn” not “bang a uey,” and I’ll say “look at this” instead of “lookit.” There are seemingly endless adjustments I’ve made in order to “fix” the way I speak, and I know that there are others at Cornell who have experienced this to a far more significant degree.

Of course, this is all situated in a larger dialogue about what is considered “proper” or “professional” language, a classification system rooted in racism and classism. There is no easy way to fix this problem, but I suppose I can at the very least end with a call to action. Please, don’t point out someone’s speech if it’s different from your own. Even if you do it in a well-meaning way (e.g., “I love the way you say that!”), it can create a rather uncomfortable situation for the person on the receiving end. Remember not to judge intellect based on dialect. And to anyone reading this who has been made to feel this way, know that you are not “uncultured.” The way in which you express yourself is by no means inadequate, and it is reflective of nothing more than your unique background and life experiences. w

Hermione Granger Syndrome work, wands, and insensitive warts

by Veronica Dickson La Rotta art by Olivia Bono

Hermione Granger syndrome (noun): wanting to throw yourself unabashedly and romantically into your academic passions while understanding it comes with inevitable peersanctioned disdain; being too extra in class.

I’m not the first to have stared at my Harry Potter collection, wishing deeply I could conjure up Hermione and ask to sit next to her for a bit—just two girls who are a little tired of being shut down. “Are you incapable of restraining yourself, or do you take pride in being an insufferable knowit-all?” said Snape, while the class tittered. Hermione: I’m so sorry.

It was in middle school that I began to notice things get out of hand. He wouldn’t do the readings for our English project. My hands would grip the corners of the desk until my knuckles shone white. I growled at him under my breath saying that his behavior was both intolerable and unacceptable, that he’d better get his shit together real fast. In my history class, another guy wouldn’t let me pay attention to the lecture, so I would turn around and scream.

The following week as I headed down a school hallway I heard him spit out “bitch” to his friend, just loud enough for me to hear.

Then, in the ninth grade, I committed my pièce de résistance. It was a science project, and we were all assigned pieces to complete of a paper on the scientific method. We were given weeks, but the night before the due date I still hadn’t received so much as an email from any of the boys that made up the rest of the group. I slid my copy of Prisoner of Azkaban off the shelf and opened to page 293, chapter 15: “Harry and Ron both made furious moves toward Malfoy, but Hermione got there first SMACK! She had slapped Malfoy across the face with all the strength she could muster. Malfoy staggered. Harry, Ron, Crabbe, and Goyle stood flabbergasted as Hermione raised her hand again.” Nice. I closed up the book and walked to my computer. I typed up my research notes and conclusions and reached for a clean sheet of A4 paper. Twenty minutes later, I stapled a savage, yet illustrious piece to my homework explaining why it was only 20% complete. You see, I was not in the business of subsidizing free riders, so if the teacher could kindly fail them and grade me based on my merit, I would be most grateful.

I’m not particularly proud of these memories. They roil deep in my stomach, as I kick myself wondering why I didn’t just chill out. Was I really reduced to a writhing ball of petty rage when confronted with difficult team dynamics or was

there something else at play? Everyone else had understood at that point that it just wasn’t cool to devote yourself to doing work you could really be proud of.

Frankly, interest in the subject matter is irrelevant. Just relax, don’t make waves, and please do not be that girl again.

By the time college came around, I was salivating at the prospect of surrounding myself with the most brilliant and devoted progeny the world had to offer. I had never felt that I’d quite mastered the complex social dance that is “group work.” Yes, we are all homo economicus, the rational man who seeks to gain the greatest reward with the least amount of effort.

But what about doing a good job merely because you’re interested in getting smarter? I never knew how to navigate asking more from my peers than they were willing to give. I could never manage my expectations for those that surrounded me. It was implausible for me to think that the same characters who had sneered at me in middle school would ever be allowed to cross the threshold of these Ivy gates.

But the thing about dynamics ingrained in you as a kid isn’t just that they stay with you into adulthood; the patterns we fall into become the social norms we draw upon and rely on every day. We use them as an explanation for others’ behaviors and as justifiers for our own. They’re not immutable, but re-socializing ourselves is not something we’re all committed to doing. There have been times at this school that I’ve been disappointed and wanted more from

zooming in • 32

my peers, more frank engagement with the material. It goes beyond grade grubbing and office hours. I never hear people encouraging each other to bring in a personal experience with the topic, or congratulating someone for using just the right word. I want to know people in my classes have feelings that extend beyond “I’m so stressed, let me finish this as soon as possible.”

It’s been three years since that ball dropped, and I’ve been learning to adjust and find ways to feel satisfied without feeling scrutinized in class. And I’d say a little selfadjustment isn’t the worst thing in the world. I’ve learned to be a bit more quiet, and with that I also learned how to listen, a skill I had not yet fully developed. When I took the time to listen, it became much easier to perceive undertones in the relationships classmates form, the dynamics that we all know exist but often fail to recognize, critically reflect on, and challenge publicly. This piece has a narrative thread I’ve been pivoting around, and it’s that women are generally the ones who feel this guilt and pressure not to be so present all the time.

Paradoxically, we are the hallowed caregivers in all relationships and are often tasked with the busywork necessary to complete the assignment at all. We make the G o o g l e docs, we text in the Groupme, we go see the teachers.

A friend relayed to m e that her professor even suggested she get started on planning her reading group ahead of time. There’s no way her male peers would do it, so the task would have to land on her.

I’ve also recognized my own hypocrisy in all of this.

In all corners of my heart I feel joy when women take what’s theirs in this icky world. But in class I automatically begin to form groups in my head, mentally assessing the skill level of each participant and inevitably creating strata based on gender. I love to participate and that rush you get when all members of the conversation take the time to applaud your contribution to the discourse. And competition is not an inherent evil, but damn if I don’t admire the smartest most eloquent men in the classroom and resent the brilliant girl who challenges my spot in the hierarchy of Smartest and Best Female student. Internalized misogyny runs deep, and I believe only very few ever shake off its dead weight. The

33 • zooming in

girl who speaks up and brings the conversation to a deeper and more robust place doesn’t create bonds of kinship with me, but rather is presented as a threat to my status. The guy who brings in an outside source and impresses us all with his deep knowledge on the subject is a person of intrigue, adding to my understanding without challenging it. Turns out even the Hermione Grangers out there perpetuate the very systems that they seek to dismantle.

It’s been a long time since I last lost it during a group project. I’ve learned how to be assertive without being alienating (I think!) and have grown more confident at letting my inner nerd out. I know the manic pixie dream girl thing is

“Turns out even the Hermione Grangers out there perpetuate the very systems that they seek to dismantle.” problematic, but I have to hand it to Zoe Deschanel for bringing female quirk and passion into the zeitgeist. All Hermione wanted was to find a kindred spirit to share questions that piqued an interest in her or who could recommend a good book. (Aside: Total cop out that she married Ron. Her immortal words ring in my ear: “Just because you’ve got the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn’t mean we all have.” She deserved better and we all know it.)

I am not the same voracious freshman that resented those who skipped class or skimmed material. I’ve learned that the onus is largely on us to invite our classmates into the conversation, and show interest in their niche and varied interests. Luck favors the bold after all (Felix Felicis anyone??), and even if you haven’t found them yet, your dork crew will find you.

As graduation hastens, I see myself falling back into old patterns. I’m salivating at the prospect of joining the workforce, finally surrounding myself by truly like-minded individuals, individuals who won’t fall prey to petty childhood standards of coolness. I recognize in the back of my brain that this is unrealistic and that I’m setting myself up for disaster, but I come prepared now! It’s clear to me that the divisions drawn between men and women and inequities experienced in college are only a drop in the bucket compared to the realities of the workplace. I’ll say it again, internalized misogyny runs deep. We hold galas and benefits uplifting women and encouraging them to adjust to society and take up space like the men do, just to turn around and ask to turn the volume down. In the books, Rowling gave Hermione a happy ending, granting her a cushy government job in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, but I think that shit is harder to come by than a fantasy novel would have you believe. In the end, my only solace is that I (and others) are always evolving, role models for me keep popping up, and Rowling came out on Twitter and admitted that Hermione should have ended up with Harry Potter. I KNOW. w

Muralizing & Moralizing Ithaca’s street art

by Darby Tarlow

Walking around downtown Ithaca on a bright day, it’s hard to miss the plethora of murals on each street corner and electrical box. Images of blooming flowers, Harriet Tubman, snarling dinosaurs, and many other curiosities splatter across walls and lend a backdrop to the day-to-day lives of bustling Ithacans. While these beautiful artworks permeate our spaces and our lives, their stories and ramifications yearn for exploration. Public murals have a colorful history of being intimately entwined with cultural politics and Ithaca’s murals are no exception to this tradition of transforming public spaces into public forums for cultural and political ideas.

Inspired by curiosity about the stories of the murals, I decided to investigate. On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, I met with Caleb R. Thomas, one of a team of organizers at Ithaca Murals, near the Ithaca Commons in front of the iconic “Blackeyed Susan” mural, an ode to the beautiful native blossom by artist Kellie Cox. Battling the cacophony of buses and cars speeding past, Thomas carefully articulated what it means for social activism to be expressed through public art. He quoted famous artist and social activist Favianna Rodriguez: “When culture shifts, policy changes.” This breed of social activism aims to inspire cultural shifts as the catalyst for institutional reformation.

Many of the murals we encountered on the guided tour encoded a morality exalting multiculturalism, diversity, and nature: Honoring local Indigenous Peoples of the region (Brandon Lazore, 400 year Anniversary Mural, 2013) Honoring African-American history (Jonathon Matas, On the Master’s Horse, 2010)

Honoring native plants (Kellie Cox, Native Plants of NY, 2012) Honoring Muslim culture (Lachlan Chambliss, Portals to Peace).

Thomas pointed out that in a downtown space built primarily by and for dead white men, the public artworks serve to showcase voices that otherwise would get lost within the dominant cultural narrative. The murals give visibility and legitimacy to an anthology of other voices that construct Ithaca’s identity.

A Mural Story The birth of a mural begins with a concept. An artist submits a concept to City Hall with a wall in mind. Ithaca’s City Hall assesses the art submissions based on a number of criteria (found in the Public Art Plan for the City of Ithaca, 2003): “(1) Artistic merit and quality of work; (2) Safety and durability of work; (3) Unrestricted public viewing of work; (4) Administration of work (shipping, installation, maintenance); and (5) Balanced inventory in the permanent collection.”

After a particular artwork gains approval, then the process of negotiating terms with the artist begins and a contract is formed. There are preapproved city spaces by the Board of Public Works, or alternatively, an artist can petition to paint a non-preapproved space.

The contract between the artist and the city negotiates the details of what the artwork will be, where it will be, liability in case of an accident, responsibility for supplies, reimbursement, maintenance of the artwork, and credit for the work, as well as giving the city the right to remove or paint over the artwork at any time for any reason. While the

zooming in • 34

city gives its blessing to paint on city spaces and helps with the legality of the process, the onus largely falls on the artists to find outside resources to help them bring each artwork to fruition.

Funding is primarily raised through external nonprofits, donations from private businesses, crowd-sourcing, or volunteered time and supplies from the artist. On occasion, the city has the motive and means to commission a mural, but this is rare and tied to a specific location. For example, the city commissioned seven murals in the Collegetown Garage and two murals on the top floor of the Seneca Street Garage. Money was found for these in the city budget as graffiti deterrence, which fell within the budget for graffiti removal.

Large murals are work-intensive and often require many hands to complete. Artists employ different individualized strategies to carry out each of their works, ranging from an artist ambitiously completing a work within a few days, completely solo (such as Amir Roti’s mural facing City Hall), to recruiting a couple of friends to help, to projects that span months and involve the community (such as Lachlan Chambliss’s mural honoring Muslim culture in the Downtown Green Street parking garage, which has had over 250 pairs of hands help gradually paint it over fourteen months).

While the murals are beloved by many Ithaca community members, they also experience their share of controversy.

The city has in place policies that allow for dissent before a mural is painted and after it is completed. Before a piece is installed, there is an outreach procedure whereby proposals are sent to neighborhood listservs and postcards are distributed to anyone residing within 200 feet to hear comments the immediate community has. This gives a forum for the public to dissent the installation of a piece that either an individual or the community at large disagrees with.

Ultimately, an artist does not have to navigate all these complex threads alone to create their mural. A crucial component of the organization Ithaca Murals is to assist in the coordination and execution of this process to bring art to the Ithaca community. They are responsible, in part, for the proliferation of public murals within the Ithaca community in recent years.

Our Collective Murals While each mural carries a rich individual history, the murals as a whole create a body of work with cultural, class, and political implications within the broader Ithaca community.

A key aspect of public murals is surviving the test of time. Each mural reflects the politics and culture of the specific moment in history in which it was dreamt and brought to fruition. The completion of each mural involves an extensive network of people to sponsor it in the form of logistical support from City Hall and from the community to bring a mural to life in the first place. But, to outlive the historical moment of its conception, the mural must capture the ongoing support and imagination of its surrounding community. This is especially true when artists themselves are responsible for maintaining their own artworks. For various reasons, an artist may eventually become unable to maintain their work, in which case the burden shifts to the

35 • zooming in

community either to maintain it or allow the work to perish.

As murals vie for the community’s limited time and resources, those that people ultimately feel are most reflective of the community’s self-conception triumph, while those that are no longer culturally relevant get cycled out. Through the passage of time, murals reflect a dynamic shared identity. John Pitnam Weber writes in Politics and Practice of Community Public Art: Whose Murals Gets Saved?, “All of the community murals, like any other public art, whether abstract or figurative, assert moral claims to public space, claims concerning the history, identity, and possible future of the surrounding area.”

For a mural to come to life in the first place, community engagement is required and leads to a discourse about what the community’s identity means to them. Additionally, as many of the contemporary works become dated, Ithaca will

“...in a downtown space built primarily by and for dead white men, the public artworks serve to showcase voices that otherwise would get lost within the dominant cultural narrative.” need to reassess its identity once the artworks can no longer be maintained by the artist duty-free. Will the city assume the responsibility of maintenance? Will the community? Will the artworks be painted over by new ones? If so, is a piece of Ithaca’s history lost? These questions will become relevant to Ithaca’s identity within the next 20 years. But even at the expense of losing history, turnover in Ithaca’s street art creates space for new murals, reflecting the dynamic nature of Ithaca’s identity and its present historical moment.

A Broader Mural Framework Murals may be misconstrued as “extraneous” to public spaces, as they have no material functionality other than simply being seen, and they require elaborate planning and costly, time-intensive maintenance. However, murals have important moral and ethical implications for constructing collective identity. From their content to their audience to their influence on negotiating cultural and political ideas, murals are both a reflection and source of public discourse.

They transform everyday spaces into public forums. Murals tie together collectively-experienced physical spaces and abstract concepts like beauty or violence, cultural concord or discord. In muralizing a space, we actively moralize it, rupturing or perpetuating prior politics, and amplifying the voices of traditionally marginalized identity groups. w Thanks to Joann Cornish, City Hall Director of Planning and Development for her interview and very special thanks to Caleb R Thomas, who took me on a mural walking tour of the city/interview and assisted with developing the content of the piece.

Extroversion on Campus a story of branching out

by Emma Moore art by Chloe Rippe

If you were to ask anyone who knows me on this campus to describe my personality, one term would come to their mind: extrovert. It’s a word that encompasses a wide range of descriptors, most of which are associated with loud, “extra” individuals.

The labels of extrovert and introvert divide Cornell into two main categories of people. Even beyond Cornell’s campus, these perceived stereotypes infiltrate day-to-day life for many individuals; these trends at Cornell are simply part of a much larger phenomenon. Introverts are often written off for their quietness, while extroverts are judged for being “too much.” Realistically, however, nobody can be truly confined to one small box or a simple binary of introvert or extrovert in which their identity can fit, and there is always more to an individual than a label or any one thing. Introversion and extroversion exist on a scale for each person, and the scale moves up and down for everyone, depending on factors such as setting and mood.

But not every selective admissions process or student organization at Cornell sees it this way. Instead of considering their complexities, individuals are categorized and judged based on their surfaces. Coming to college in and of itself is a challenge, with the new environment, strangers, and difficult coursework. There’s pressure to make new friends, something that isn’t easy for many people. With all of this in mind, it becomes quite clear that the college transition tends to favor the extroverted—those who aren’t as afraid to put themselves out there and to jump into the college experience headfirst. Here at Cornell, extroverts are given an advantage in certain areas of college life, which is something I have experienced firsthand.

For me, being an extrovert has become central to my identity, but it wasn’t always this way. In high school, I was selfconscious, stressed out, and anxious in any social interaction I had. I felt like everyone at my school was judging me, so I refused to be myself for fear of being taunted or bullied.

I self-identified as an introvert or borderline ambivert—a 50/50 split of introversion and extroversion—and wasn’t about to break out of my shell into full-fledged extroversion.

I figured if I kept to myself, high school would go by faster and I could escape the confines of my small private school.

But the summer before I came to college, I discovered my suppressed extroversion while working as a camp counselor. I didn’t care about being judged by the six, seven, or eight year olds I was surrounding myself with, and found that tucked away within me was a girl who was funny, confident, and bold.

I had discovered more of a balance between the person I had been in high school, and the person I wanted to be in college.

Extroversion became an aspect of my identity that I decided to embrace.

Once on campus, I was ready to leave behind my San Diegan roots and fully immerse myself in the East Coast college experience. I went to practically every orientation program, actually talked to the quarter-carders on Ho Plaza, and embraced my newfound extroversion. I thrived during Orientation week, where every single freshman is put into an orientation group that requires them not only to meet and engage with other students, but to participate in icebreakers, games that are designed to coax students “out of their shell” and make them more comfortable. While my personality flourished with these activities, I could also see how they were causing discomfort for some of the more introverted students,

“...extroverts are given an advantage in cerain areas of college life, which is something I have witnessed firsthand” zooming in • 36

forcing them to be the extroverts our campus seems to want them to be. However, it encouraged me to seek out other extroverts on campus because I connected with them on a certain level, and I even applied for the most outgoing, social, and perhaps loudest group on campus: Visitor Relations, better known as the Tour Guides. My acceptance to this job was perhaps one of the first moments I realized I had an advantage in some ways on Cornell’s campus compared to some of my more demure classmates. In order even to consider applying for the job, I had to know that I loved talking and interacting with people, and to be hired I had to actually be good at it.

There are also countless other jobs across campus that recruit from a more outgoing crowd— reference or help desks, athletic centers, tutoring jobs, and the Cornell Annual Funds calling program all require you to participate in upbeat social interactions on a daily basis. Cornell is unequally geared toward students who are more comfortable putting themselves into more social settings, interacting with others, and taking initiative socially to gain academic or careeroriented success—whether it be joining an on-campus organization or asking a professor for help. With 14,000 undergraduate students and 6,000 graduate students, our large university makes it even easier for less outgoing students to feel lost in the crowd. In order to find your home on campus, more often than not, you have to take matters into your own hands which requires at least a little confidence and extroversion at the start.

With a campus as seemingly extrovert-centric as Cornell, the benefits of being an introvert are often hidden in the shadows. But those who self-identify as introverts are just as valuable on our campus as extroverts, and they have their own unique advantages. Someone with more introverted tendencies may spend more time listening and absorbing content and information in classes and their environment, which could not only enrich their academic experiences but their friendships as well. Since introverts don’t always need to be the loudest voice in the crowd, they can take a step back and take notice of smaller details and analyze situations that may assist them later on. There are many

37 • zooming in

introverted individuals who put themselves out there, attend parties, and join organizations, just as there are extroverts who would rather stay in some nights than socialize. When it comes down to it, there is almost always an overlap within oneself of extroversion and introversion.

As someone who has identified as both an introvert and extrovert, I can understand how both types of students might feel on Cornell’s campus. My social outlook has been greatly transformed by this dual-perspective and has shaped how I view my role as someone who identifies as more extroverted at Cornell. My high school experience was clouded by overbearing, loud students who I felt ignored my presence and wanted to exclude me from their groups because of my different, then demure, p e r s o n a l i t y.

Having been the quieter student, I don’t want my own newfound extroversion ever to cause another student to feel less-than or unworthy, as if their voice matters less in a conversation simply because it is quieter.

I think it’s important for our campus to emphasize that Cornell is a community where all individuals can be who they want, regardless of how outgoing they may be. The stereotypes of the introvert and extrovert perpetuated by our society do not have to box us in and define our individualities—they do not define our passions, our friendships, our aspirations, our happiness, our success. Be whoever the hell you want to be, whether it be the loud, boisterous tour guide marching through campus, or the person who spends their free time binge-watching Netflix and avoiding social interactions at all costs, or both—it’s all okay. Cornell is a campus where students should feel empowered to be themselves and not feel shut down by a student body and administration that preference those with louder voices. And if we can generate this kind of community on our own campus, it may also be possible on a larger scale. w

Diving for Treasure dumpster diving at Cornell

by Cesca LaPasta art by Nadya Mikhaylovskaya

On my mantle sits an old-fashioned radio that is constantly set to 91.7, Ithaca’s premiere eclectic radio station, “The Station for Innovation.” I rarely ever turn it off, and its sound brings together the room in the same way the radio does aesthetically. It also came from a dumpster.

The radio was sitting right on top of a pile of paper and wood in the dumpster, a slightly atypical diving experience.

Typically, to investigate the possible treasures, one needs to get down into the trash and explore the dark taboo that is the inside of a dumpster. At Cornell, the hauls are usually pretty full of great items that are thrown away separately or in see-through bags, so proper digging isn’t even required.

Discarded printers, posters, and even working laptops can be found without much effort. Although it’s occasionally necessary to come in contact with gross food waste and unsanitary used items (like used sex toys, which have been known to come up occasionally), usually in the dumpsters on campus, the good objects are there for the taking without much hassle. Generally, Cornell is a diver’s paradise, full of useful things that have been thrown away simply to be replaced with the newest model, or because someone can’t be bothered to take their belongings with them to their next destination.

At first, I thought the radio just looked nice, but when I plugged it in and found it worked, it felt like a little miracle.

There’s a spark of ecstasy in finding something really special that’s just been thrown away, like the feeling of having a delightful secret. These days, whenever someone comes over to my apartment and compliments the radio, I immediately reply, “I got it from the trash!”

And I’m not the only one who’s found incredible things

zooming in • 38

“...Cornell is a diver’s paradise, full of useful things that have been thrown away simply to be replaced with the newest model, or because someone can’t be bothered to take their belongings with them to their next destination.” in the trash at Cornell University. Here are some anecdotes from people who have also found treasure not just in the physical gain of dumpster diving, but also in the practice and beauty of the process itself. Quotes have been edited to maintain the anonymity of the people and locations of the stories: “I think dumpster diving is enticing in the same way that social media is designed to keep us checking it—both offer intermittent reinforcement (unpredictable random rewards). Unlike your Facebook notifications, however, if you put in a couple hours [of diving] at move-out time, you’re almost guaranteed to find something good. I also enjoy wondering about the untold stories of some of the more unusual items I’ve found.”

Unusual items found in Cornell dumpsters include: -Working iPhones -Six square feet of individually packaged dried corn kernels -Hundreds of apples (though it later turned out they were used in experiments and not safe to eat) -A deodorant bottle full of quarters -The supplies to build an entire bookshelf “I returned home with a nice 12”x30”x5” wooden trunk that I filled at the dumpster with high quality art supplies, a backpack full of photo paper (and other expensive printing papers), and $26 in stamps. I even left half of the art supplies and papers behind, because I simply couldn’t carry the weight nor volume of it all. The dumpsters were emptied the next morning.”

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, on average each person in the US produces 2.89 pounds of trash per day. In a year that adds up to 254 million tons of trash.

“Most of the useful items I find I don’t keep because I simply don’t need them. I do have a yearning to stop everything I find from going into a landfill, though, and I’ll usually leave stuff people might want beside the dumpster, [or] move it to one of the Dump and Run collection bins. But it’s a little humbling and sad, because I know literal tons of the kinds of items people need and spend money to purchase still get thrown out here every year.”

According to the 2016 Census, the US poverty rate is 12.7%. For some of us dumpster diving is a fun activity, but for others it’s a necessary act of survival.

39 • zooming in

“Two pieces of sorority art [found in a dumpster] grace my walls. A formerly-discarded rug is on my floor. The things people throw out without thinking about them are not as broken as those people want to think they are. And with the right mindset, they are not as useless as everyone tries to see them.”

We can all learn lessons from dumpster diving, even if we don’t want to climb in ourselves. Reusing is important in order to limit the amount of waste taking hundreds of years to break down in landfills and to slow down the incredible rates of production contributing to the degradation of the environment. In the current state of climate change, with 80 degree October days in Ithaca and terrible natural disasters being aggravated by rising temperatures, thinking about how our actions affect the environment is more important than ever. Dumpster diving can also help us reconsider what we throw away by viewing the items as things that other people could still benefit from and use, especially since so much of our waste is because of our constant unnecessary “need” to buy and consume. If you want to change the way you throw things away, consider donating used items to Goodwill or Cornell Thrift, participating in Ithaca’s fantastic composting program, or buying items in reusable containers at your local co-op!

Or of course, you could just keep throwing things away and we’ll keep diving to find the treasures. w

Lilac Hair & Septum Rings

the promises and pitfalls of the “alternative look”

by Madeleine Galvin art by Annika Bjerke

Lately I’ve been feeling the urge to dye my hair lilac and pierce my septum with a gold hoop. The piercing has been a long time coming; it was inspired by a girl I saw last summer who wore it so well at this crowded Die Antwood concert where I was high off my ass, jumping when the crowd was still, and rocking back and forth as the ground rolled under my feet. I found the girl on Instagram afterwards* where she proudly posted images of her high-end nostril decor.

The lilac hair came from a house party filled with a ton of people, most of whom I knew, few of whom I liked. Another girl, less entrancing than the first, just a mere distraction rather than a fascination in this case, passed by me as I sat awkwardly with a group of people who probably seemed like my close friends. The lilac haired girl had her purple tresses tied into a knot on the top of her head that formed a salutation to the ceiling. In this moment, I wondered what it might be like to be the girl with purple hair whenever I walked into a room of these in-between people who are not exactly friends, yet not strangers. Maybe they would notice me more, forced to acknowledge my presence simply due to my unconventional hair color.

That very night, a kind stranger took a picture of the people I was with, the ones who outwardly appeared to be my friends. I was in this picture. On the outskirts, yes, but still an active, participating member of the photograph. Days later I saw it on Instagram, a beautiful relic of these girls with whom I had spent my time that night. I was not in the picture. At first, I assumed it was taken before or after I had *We have become meticulous in our documentation of events; the information we provide to the world is now so detailed and exacting. No longer is it appropriate to tag a photo with “Upper West Side;” it has to be the Starbucks on West 96th and Broadway, just in case someone was really, really curious. (This is just example of the “extraness” of today’s society, but not necessarily the topic of this article.)

entered the scene–how ridiculous would it be to crop out an equally youthful and unobtrusive member of the group?

Yet upon closer inspection, I realized that in the back of the photograph, which was so perfectly filtered with tints probably called ‘Austin’ or ‘Judith,’ was a flash of my mother’s pearl ring, the exact ring at which I am looking as I type these words. My hand was left as the shadow of my presence; the rest of my appearance had been deemed too damaging on the real friend group to fully enter the scene. It seems that I wasn’t cut out because my appearance stood out from the others, but rather because it didn’t. This leaves me to wonder, would I have been so mercilessly cropped out of the picture had I been lilac-haired and interestingly pierced? Or would my appearance have been considered a worthy contribution to the group, distinct enough to merit my presence in the final edit?

There are intrinsic flaws with passing judgments on the basis of one’s physical appearance, but this behavior seems to be allowed when it comes to making invitations into a friend group. It is as if having a distinguishing label (and consequently, a distinguishing physical appearance) is a prerequisite for membership in some groups. This may be because people are often attracted to characteristics in others that they feel are missing in themselves, and it makes me wonder if dying my hair purple is actually a necessary step to be included in a friend group, or how others would interpret me differently if my appearance was slightly outside of the accepted norm. In this case, is it worth putting effort into differentiating my appearance if it is just going to lead to friendships based on superficial qualifications? Some may claim that they wear pink lipstick because pink lipstick makes them feel free/beautiful/untouchable, but I think that even if I were totally confident in my looks, I still would have had my head removed from the friends’ picture as quickly as the Red Queen from Wonderland beheaded those around her.

That is not to say that one cannot wear pink lipstick to feel confident, even if it does also make them more attractive

zooming in • 40

“When friendships become based on unsubstantial criteria such as one’s Instagram aesthetic—which really portrays only a fraction of a person, and a rather edited fraction at that—they disregard their interiority and tend to move in the direction of superficiality.” on a superficial level. I don’t think that being excluded in this case was due to not having enough confidence, or any interior quality really; it seems that social acceptance was merited on the basis of differentiation, on assuming the character of something alternative, which thereby would make someone an enticing addition to a friend group. Issues with this arise when the superficial performance of an alternative stereotype is the reason why others feel more inclined to associate themselves.

People tend to prefer this type of association instead of making decisions about friendship on the basis of one’s personality or a genuine interest to get to know someone.

In my experience, people often want to form transient links between themselves and whatever alternative label the so-called “different” person is associated with. It is as if physically distinguishing oneself is a characteristic that can rub off on others; therefore, having a friend with a different look within one friend group can allow for individual members to expand their own network. They can then make introductions upon encountering another admirably different person by saying, “Nice septum ring, my friend has one too,” and the whipping out a photo of the friend group and the friend with the piercing. In this we have a real problem, as many people work hard to overcome stereotypes that they don’t choose to be associated with, and here we have others (myself included) who crave the label of an alternative stereotype just because it can be of use in some uncomfortable social situations. Crazy, huh.

In this way, some friend groups end up being held together by the weak connection of wanting to be considered stylistically diverse and look to outsiders to form these connections. When friendships become based on unsubstantial criteria such as one’s Instagram aesthetic— which really portrays only a fraction of a person, and a rather edited fraction at that—they disregard their interiority and tend to move in the direction of superficiality. Take into consideration that this does not have to extend to all friend groups, and there are many that are based off of genuine compatibility. I simply speak of a growing trend that seems to be amplified by social media usage.

This is more than the issue of college struggles with friends and those who do not quite make the cut; the need for changing one’s physical appearance can also come

41 • zooming in

from a deep desire to differentiate oneself from those who might also classify their interests as non-mainstream. There is definitely a competitive aspect to this; take, for example, writing, which is considered an alternative passion, especially for those who wish to make it a long-term career option.

In this case, one’s physical appearance can play a role and serve as a marker of dedication to this passion.

But then what happens when everyone who has chosen this career path decides to differentiate themselves via their physical appearance?

Then we just have a situation where to not be alternative becomes the alternative, and all because people are trying to say, “Fuck you, I’m dedicated,” which they do by changing their physical appearance with facial modifications and other signifiers of eccentricity. Maybe the reasons for doing this are pure, but it seems to me that striving to look a particular way because it is “required” by a field of study or a career track is actually just another way of falling prey to stereotypes that feed on an inherent desire for social acceptance. But let me be clear—everyone is looking for social acceptance in some way; I just would like people to reconsider the methods used to reach this feeling.

I am not sure if purple hair is going to bring me further away or closer to demonstrating my diverse interests or increasing my social acceptability in a productive manner, especially since the looks that I have identified as alternative are things that I have seen on other people and therefore would not make me very different. Sure, purple hair and septum rings are cool, but they are definitely representa tive of a particular type of look that has already existed. Therefore those who seek to associate with this look— either through their friends or through their own physical appearance—may actually be more interested in the implications of these stylistic choices. This is perfectly acceptable, as we have been copying the style of others for two millennia at this point, and inspiration has to come from somewhere. (Don’t we have that saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?) The reason that I strongly encourage people to reconsider making initial judgments based on physical appearance (of which I am also culpable) is due to the fact that there is probably a lot more original content to be found within the person, as opposed to that which is openly displayed on their exterior. w

The Writing on the Wall text inscribed on campus article and photos by Angaelica LaPasta art by Emily Sullivan

As I see it, there are three ways in which words are literally inscribed on Cornell’s Campus.

1. Chalking. Chalk is everywhere. It is ephermal: here today, gone tomorrow. It is swept up by the feet of its audience, and the little, bright specks of chalk are borne all over campus from the remotest peak of the vet school to the lowest reaches of west campus. These words are momentary and express the daily needs of a campus full of humans clamoring for attention. Sometimes in the pursuit of convincing one to attend the Cordial’s auditions and sometimes to remind one that one is human.

2. Cornell’s administration would never want to be left out of the fun of writing all over random parts of campus.

Their methods are more lasting: carved stone, metal letters,

zooming in • 42

unreachable paint. These words are full of wisdom, corruption, death, and sometimes poetry. A few of these words seem to have been sold to the highest bidder, placing their name in unreachable places for as long as their money remains good. Many recount young lives lost, bringing death into our community of young people who so rarely experience it. My favorite is a bench outside of Goldwin Smith donated by the man himself with the words: ABOVE ALL NATIONS IS HUMANITY. It helps me think of not just the unity of the world, but also the unity of our campus; despite our many interests, we are all connected by humanity and our passions.

Lastly, this bench is a reminder of corruption at Cornell because Goldwin Smith was an antisemite. Despite his wise words about the importance of looking beyond borders to find humanity, he failed to see the humanity in his fellowman. The bench is more complex in its message than a quick glance could ever know.

3. The last is a hybrid between the two previous: the chalk that is written over again and again. The light in the darkness that–despite its ephemeral, precarious, and easily blown away construction–persists.

“Dear God, be good to me;

43 • zooming in

“I am not religious, but it touches me deeply every time I see it.”

The sea is so wide, And my boat is so small.”

This quote has been traced again and again over the last year on a bench in bright orange chalk. I am not religious, but it touches me deeply every time I see it. The ritual of its rewriting reflects the lostness and smallness that everyone at Cornell experiences at some point. This shared experience of being desperate and overwhelmed, looking for help, connects me to my fellow students though they may be unknown to me. Outside of my window Freshman year at Cornell, someone spray painted the words “I love you so much” on a bus stop building. The administration painted over it. The words were rewritten again and again. This was one of the most beautifully romantic things I have ever witnessed. It lit up the darkness that often falls on students at this institution. w

Stop Telling Me to Eat Less language, obsession, and eating disorders

by Jessica Brofsky art by Manon Elise Gros

The NS1150: Introduction to Nutrition professor has a song he records and plays for the 575-person survey course.

The chorus to what one might loosely call his “rap” repeats the line: “if you don’t need it, don’t eat it.” Long after I handed in my final exam and had forgotten the functions of the epiglottis and the specific benefits of soluble versus insoluble fiber, this line has haunted me. It echoes in my ear, begging to be used and misused, to justify whatever type of eating I want it to.

I have been overwhelmed by the number of people

“Long after I handed in my final exam, this line has haunted me.

It echoes in my ear, begging to be used and misused, to justify whatever type of eating I want it to.”

I know on this campus that have confided in me about struggling with eating disorders—most of whom are female and many of whom are in the nutrition department or have taken NS1150. I have been struck by their use of language regarding food. It is mathematical, formulaic, reduced to numeric values, calories in and out, a chart filled and full— an approach anything but moderated or holistic. It points to food as the enemy, the central axis and source from which all other problems extend. Eating disorders, which are rooted in problematic thinking and brain function, have psychological underpinnings that manifest themselves through food. In this way, food can be used to both manage and produce anxiety and depression when it becomes a source of control or loss of control, as in the case of binging. As psychological phenomena, eating disorders can be genetically predisposed.

And the addition of social pressures tied to the Western ideal of beauty as equated with thinness, especially on top of the stressful academic environment, can make people vulnerable and generate the circumstances for a perfect storm.

Recently, a friend told me she was anorexic for three years and kept it up because she hated herself that much.

It disgusts me to write this, but my initial reaction was to feel something competitive churn in me, something that made me want to say I hate myself more. It appears that being optimistic is out of style and dark, cynical self-hatred is in. We privilege thin bodies and self-torture and the kind of people who we deem “strong” enough to sustain the pain that accompanies inorganically working towards becoming underweight. In much the same spirit as the social contest of keeping busiest, we deprive ourselves of sleep and food.

We supply the addictive attention, noticing jutting bones and slim legs, likening them to models and movie stars.

Managing food—what’s on our plates—becomes another way of competing with the smart, attractive, frequently privileged people around us. It’s a classist competition, too: what grocery store do you go to? What kind of kombucha do you drink? Where did you get your poke bowl? And in our highly visual society, weightism, discrimination against larger people, is alive and actively operating. Of course, if someone is heavier, it does not mean they are less disciplined. If someone is skinnier, it does not mean they are strong-willed and have admirable selfcontrol. But we still blend these false notions into warning signs and ways to constantly compare ourselves to others.

These nutrition-specific social pressures are not just phenomena at Cornell or on college campuses or in undergraduate nutrition departments, but according to the research paper “Orthorexia Nervosa and Eating Disorder Symptoms in Registered Dieticians Nutritionists in the United States” by Tremelling et. al, they are also prevalent among registered dietician nutritionists (RDNs). There’s a huge number of RDNs—49.5%, to be exact—at high risk of having orthorexia nervosa (ON). These are the food-obsessed, and I mean can’t-order-food-at-a-restaurant-without-knowingevery-ingredient food-obsessed. ON can also manifest in such behaviors as creating unnecessary restrictions such as being gluten free without having an allergy or celiac disease.

It makes sense that people who are already concerned with weight and food would naturally gravitate toward this subject; and spending a lot of time focusing on food and thinking about food choices—mirroring people with ON and eating disorders—can produce the obsession and turn into a

zooming in • 44

45 • zooming in

serious condition. According to Jan Hangen, a dietician and Cornell alum, the RDNs feel pressure to eat a certain way and to look a certain way. They’re often the targets of food shaming—especially among themselves—and perpetuate this standard of what the article calls “a fixation with righteous eating.” While the exact relation of ON to eating disorders is unknown, they are frequently associated in their restrictions and risks (although, of course, eating disorders pose a much greater immediate threat, as anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness).

The overdrawn concern with healthy eating looks similar to eating disorders as people with ON spiral into dysfunctional compulsion, holding themselves and others to the same

much like a therapist, should be individualized, set in the context of a one-on-one personal interaction. That space should be private and sacred, adjusted to a specific set of needs, body image, and relationship to food. If I didn’t see a nutritionist, then I may not be aware that I should take this advice with a grain of salt. It may be a valid way to maintain a stable weight, but it overlooks individualized needs and often does so at the expense of preserving a healthy relationship with food.

In a nutrition survey course there will most likely be students more concerned with being thin than being healthy.

Seeking this information entails a sort of selective hearing, a special attention to methods of weight loss, and a disregard

“In much the same spirit as the social contest of keeping busiest, we deprive ourselves of sleep and food. We supply the addictive attention, noticing jutting bones and slim legs, likening them to models and movie stars.” strict, intolerant standards and hindering their abilities to be healthy and engage in certain activities.

In nutrition courses saturated with students obsessed with food, when you say, “if you don’t need it, don’t eat it,” what you need becomes open for interpretation. It isn’t universal and it changes depending on activities, gender, weight, metabolism, nutrients already consumed in a day, the time, lifestyle, etc. But in the cutthroat arena of the cafeteria, the small amount of food on her plate is the amount I want on mine. Beauty standards condition us to consider normal weight as surplus. I grew up knowing that my mom had anorexia in college. I also knew she modeled and had seen her pictures from when she was dangerously thin and wanted desperately to look like her, to have her frame. It wasn’t rational and I knew that she was sick, but it still colored my expectations for myself. The amount of food I “needed” then was reduced, cut back.

Hangen says, “A good eater can tolerate a lot of ambiguity.

They feel comfortable with their feelings and know when they are tired, full, or hungry.” But a bad eater, without this natural intuition, needs to be told or relies on external factors. There are responsible eaters, sure, but we can hardly assume everyone is one or that everyone practices listening to their bodies and paying attention to signals of pain. As psychiatrist Dr. David Herzog says, education and information should theoretically be a good thing but that this isn’t always the case. Labeling calories on foods in cafeterias or cafés and offering nutrition courses should allow us to make informed decisions concerning our health. However, this can also cause fixation and obsession, moving us away from moderation.

When you say things to a class, predominantly freshmen, scared of gaining the freshman 15, about maintaining or losing weight, they hold onto it like gospel. Telling students, who are most likely taking this course with a predisposed obsession with calories and food, to weigh themselves every morning can be dangerous. It’s dangerous for me. I get obsessive with numbers. A higher weight in the morning informs my whole day, makes me prone to restrict, restrict, restrict—to cycle into some internal logic that doesn’t align with the rest of the world. A relationship with a nutritionist,

for the bigger picture. Paradoxically, this attitude ignores the science of nutrition, what is actually healthy, and the technical contents of the course. People love to simplify nutrition, but our bodies are so complex that we don’t even really know what they need. Supplying these students with a catch phrase or a slogan that supports and encourages an approach to food that negates its value is not only unhelpful but potentially harmful, capable of causing lasting damage. It can negatively drive the way we feel about ourselves.

Our instructors should be cognizant of the miscellaneous groups of students in front of them. They should address this problematic obsession with food and promote an appreciation for it as something that energizes us and gives us pleasure. We need to be more sensitive and aware of the fragile dynamic between information and obsession. Eating disorders are so complicated—far more than I can allude to and capture in this space or even understand. But what shocks me is how little they were mentioned in my introductory nutrition course, how the professor glossed over them like a footnote at the end of a lesson. He didn’t discuss the intersection or relation of orthorexia nervosa to eating disorders, or trends in eating behaviors of which we should be wary. Instead, on the first day of class before outlining the breakdown of grades and announcing the TAs’ office hours, he projected a lecture slide with the question: “How little should I eat?” On the last day of class he seemed to answer this—a commonly asked question turned around to imply that we eat too much—by spelling out in capital letters “EAT LESS.” He claimed that these two words summarized the 2015 dietary principles on health. gov, but those encouraged healthy eating habits, and he did not. Healthy eating is not striving to eat less than some arbitrary amount, especially one left open for interpretation.

It is relative, contextual, a complex formula of circumstance.

And for those struggling with an eating disorder or at risk of developing one, this kind of language does not help. It can echo in your ear like the chorus of a song stuck on repeat. It can make you take that food that’s on your plate—the food that’s good for you, that brings you joy, that is just beyond the bare minimum to survive—and throw it away. w

zooming in • 46

Extra: a Gendered Term?

by Stephanie Carmody art by Helen Hu

Looking at Urban Dictionary’s definition of “extra,” I’m reminded of an older, but equally popular phrase: “drama queen.” Growing up, my mom (lovingly) called me a drama queen for what she deemed excessive or over the top behavior. I remember one time in particular when I was in desperate need of a pink flip phone as all the cool kids at school had them. Waving a gray Android flip phone in hand, I begged my mom to see the light. My pretty please with cherries on top received only soft chuckles followed by the phrase, “you are such a drama queen.” Yet, my mom never used this phrase for my male cousins or friends when they had “tantrums.” Whenever they overreacted, my mom tried to get at the heart of the problem, or she soothed them by saying that everything would be okay. I asked my mom about this recently because it was never something I really noticed as a kid. In response to my question about whether she would call a guy a drama queen, she looked at me rather entertained, tilted her head, and said matter-of-factly, “What guy would I call a drama queen?”

“ ‘What guy would I call a drama queen?’ ”

I had no answer for her; it seemed rather silly, the idea of my barely 5-foot-tall mom going up to a masculine guy and calling him a “drama queen” for overreacting. Yet, the humor of the situation draws upon an interesting societal belief regarding gender and behavior. Women are more often called phrases like “extra” or “drama queen” compared to their male counterparts. So often language is taken as fact, but it may hide some deeper, problematic implications. An examination of the phrase “drama queen” further demonstrates this, as together the words literally mean “play; act; perform” and “woman.” There is a direct correlation with over-the-top behavior and its expression regarding the female gender.

The term “drama queen” has faded from American slang (though my mom will sometimes fondly bring the word back into circulation), just like its predecessor “prima donna,” which was used for nearly the exact same reasoning and stands for “first lady.” However, the appearance of the new

phrase “extra” seems to pay homage to its previous genderincriminating ancestors–the same ancestors that suggest exaggerated behavior is a feminine trait.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I know some fine ladies who own the characteristic of being “extra” and are proud of it— the kinds of girls who can rock high heels with t-shirts and blast their boyfriend’s infidelities on social media. While you can see this kind of girl strut into a room and declare to her best friends that she’s “so extra,” a guy would never do this.

A guy strays from the phrase unless it’s used to describe him. Sure, he can be called “extra” for writing a novel for an assignment or going out of his way to get a girl’s number, but these are all singular examples; the word isn’t used to define

zooming out • 48

him in totality. While girls seem to embrace extraness as a biological character trait, for boys it’s more in the moment.

The deeper implication is that extraness plays into the role of being female, which is just not true.

Unlike its predecessors, “extra” can be used to define both males and females. It’s the more politically correct term for anything over-the-top and thus the gender implications become slightly blurred. Despite being an umbrella term, “extra” is used more often in chastising female behavior.

When the phrase is used to describe males, it is because there are often blatant parallels to what is considered feminine (ex. salt bae who defined “extra” is seen in a tight-fitting shirt and ponytail flamboyantly sprinkling his prime steak).

“Drama queen” was used in much the same regard, becoming popular in queer communities. Feminine men were referred

to as ‘queens’ for their flamboyant and effeminate behavior, but heterosexual men hardly ever merited this title. Instead of being called “extra” or “drama queen,” heterosexual men are often called “bold” and are praised for their exuberant behavior. Words often are used to draw distinctions, but this becomes a problem when clear derogatory connotations exist in one and not the other.

On August 27, 2017 (the day the U.S. went into a frenzy), Taylor Swift dropped her latest album Reputation. That day I was bombarded with articles that had titles reading along the lines of “Taylor Swift’s ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ Video Is Here & It’s So Extra.” For those of you who have not seen ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ (you should do that right now),

49 • zooming out

the song is about the infamous Kanye-Swift feud. The song represents Swift’s transition into a “smarter,” “harder” version of herself after her reputation had been tarnished. The video is laden with scenes of Swift exhibiting scandalous behavior from robbing a bank to leading a motorcycle gang.

“Look What You Made Me Do” radiates a kind of crazed femininity. Scenes flicker from Swift draped in a plunging red gown, gracefully poised on a golden throne to her digging a grave. The whole recording was a response to Kanye’s lyrics: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made that b---- famous.” While Kanye walks away unscathed and his video is deemed “brilliantly batshit,” Taylor’s music video is chided for being “extra” and “vengeful;” I’m not defending “Look What You Made Me Do” as good music (you’d have to find another writer for that), but here “extra” is again seen describing a woman that takes a problematic situation and further escalates the issue in ways described as “irrational.”

I have no idea whether Swift was sincere in how deeply angered she was or if the act was all for publicity, but for society instantly to dismiss her video as “extra” in a negative sense, when for the majority of Swift’s career this has not been her kind of music, is just another instance of this fallacy: the one that believes women are capable of being melodramatic and over-the-top regardless of the situation.

The physiological impact of this fallacy is one that I think many girls feel; even Beyoncé is not safe from this paranoia.

Before Taylor Swift dropped her earth-shattering album, the world was shook by Beyoncé’s album Lemonade. This album, like Swift’s, was written as a kind of exposé–specifically to bring her husband’s infidelities to light. One of the most iconic scenes appears in the song “Hold Up.” Beyoncé dons a gorgeous, flowing yellow dress that highlights her feminine beauty, but at the same time she violently swings a bat at unsuspecting car windows. The theme of “crazed femininity” recurs and it is further prompted by the repeating lines: “what’s worse, lookin’ jealous or crazy? Jealous or crazy?”

Beyoncé knows that any response will look anything but rational. After discovering something as deeply wounding as a loved one cheating, she still has to stop and think about a “correct” response. This fear that causes girls to pause and to question their behavior is due to the psychological impact of constantly being labeled as dramatic. Previously she sings that she “kept it sexy, you know I kept it fun.” That’s the side society likes to see from females: the playful, teasing, lighthearted female with a little mystery; to be otherwise—to be opinionated, loud, and angry is simply seen as unattractive; it’s dismissible and “extra.”

While “extra” can be used in mock appreciation—I will admit it’s funny at times—it is dangerous when used in describing behavior. It touches on the fear many females have of being dismissed for overreacting, for being simply “melodramatic.” The idea that “extra” denotes intrinsic overthe-top behavior is ridiculous and should neither be used as a dismissible explanation nor implicate one gender over the other. In the wise words of Albert Ellis: “There’s no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.” So, to all the girls who have to ask themselves whether it’s better to look “jealous or crazy?” to a situation that could be mocked by others as “extra,” I say be the queen you are. w

“Hi” vs. “Tenaystilign” the subjectivity of extra

by Abby Eskinder Hailu art by Yabework Abebe Kifetew One day, I was at lunch back home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at my grandfather’s place. My father and I walked into the dining room and proceeded to greet everyone with a handshake and kiss on each cheek—the traditional way.

I said hello to one of my grandfather’s friends in Amharic.

“Wow,” he said in Amharic, “you said tenaystilign instead of ‘hi’ like most kids your age do!” He was genuinely shocked that I (an Ethiopian) was speaking to him (also an Ethiopian) in Amharic (in Ethiopia). To me, it seemed obvious that we would be speaking in Amharic both being Ethiopians, and I was only ever exposed to cultural exchange in the relatively positive environment of my international high school where multiculturalism was always celebrated. However, toning down one’s culture comes part and parcel with being a citizen of the modern Americanized world. But after paying close attention, even to the most pedestrian aspects of culture, it’s not hard to see the extraness. Sometimes, culture can be overwhelming.

There are layers to the extraness of a language or culture.

For example, any given language can hold deeply embedded extravagance that is often most clearly revealed when

swear to God, but rather to all of the Saints, including the Virgin Mary. Even when wishing someone well or saying “thank you,” you always indicate God, regardless of your religion.

Conversely, the English language has its own features which are extravagant both in English and in its translation. Every language has its own identity and respective markers of extraness, which are apparent from both within and without.

Language and culture are not necessarily inherently extra but rather they contain extra elements which the culture itself defines. But often these self-identifications can become invalidated by an outside perspective and compel people to downplay things they wouldn’t normally be overwhelmed by.

Cultural practices and phrases can suddenly be misinterpreted as extra, which can be very impactful on a personal level because of the influence that language and culture have over identity. More often than not, the self-identified drama is inextricable from deeply personal and influential life values which materialize just in time for important milestones or when you need to answer “the big questions” in life.

People’s cultural backgrounds manifest most clearly when faced with big life decisions or events. For example, weddings

“Toning down one’s culture comes part and parcel with being a citizen of the modern Americanized world.” translated and placed in relation to another language— something commonplace in the modern globalized world.

For bilingual people, there are some phrases and expressions that may seem normal in everyday usage but they simply just do not make sense in English. For example, there is a phrase in Amharic used to express someone’s anger towards a person which translated means “she was about to devour me.” Another such phrase to express happiness in everyday situations can be translated to “I wouldn’t be able to handle the joy.” And one of my least favorites is a more proactive rendition of swearing on someone’s life but can be literally translated to “let so-and-so die” (usually used with a parent’s name). Another aspect of the embedded melodrama is the inescapable religious element. In Ethiopia, you don’t just

are a very important thing to most people, regardless of their cultures. Multicultural people face a particularly difficult decision of planning a wedding that is either very traditional or modern. My uncle left Ethiopia at the age of 13 and spent most of his adult life in Maryland and the entire family would regularly tease him for being Americanized—but then it came time for his wedding. Traditional Ethiopian weddings can vary by ethnicity and mine, Tigre, has its own customs. One such practice is that the bride, for a week before her wedding gets insosila (the Tigre equivalent of henna) and on the eve of her wedding goes into a butter and herbal sauna as a beauty treatment. Also, the mother of the bride prepares homemade honey mead for a month prior to the actual wedding and then pulls an all-nighter to prepare food on the day of the

zooming out • 50

wedding. This food is originally a gift from family friends and is in the form of cattle, usually oxen, to be slaughtered. This reflects the importance of community and family in Tigre culture where there are entire cities and regions named after families and their drama. The guestlist is also largely dictated by the mothers of the bride and groom so the entire event is almost more for the parents than the couple. It’s not uncommon for a parent to be in charge of key aspects of their child’s life well into adulthood including college degrees, career options and choosing a spouse. Essentially, preparing for a traditional Tigre wedding is a month-long affair and on the actual day, if the party is particularly exciting, it is commonplace for a proud uncle or cousin to fire a shot from a pistol on the dance floor. This tradition can be traced to the heritage of Tigres as being the warriors of Ethiopia, defending the nation from northern invaders including the Italians during the scramble for Africa in the 1800s (yes, this is a humble brag). Each of these traditions reflect some of the most vital principles, like community, valuing your parents’ opinions and defending what you love, which are essential to Tigre culture; this is how we can trace 500+ cousins without genealogy.com and provide support to one another in an almost mobbish way.

Each of these wedding customs has a beautiful and distinct backstory that has contributed to framing countless happy Tigre couples’ most joyful moments throughout history. Frankly, the logistics of having this type of wedding in a rented manor 30 minutes outside of D.C. is out of the question. My uncle’s 20s in the U.S. have been characterized by an anglicized surname, not cooking traditional Ethiopian food in a cramped apartment complex because of the pungency of the spices, and a masterful erasure of foreignness in the workspace. But how would he reconcile this cultural erasure with his wedding? Ultimately, we ended up having an in-between wedding where we compromised by serving the incredibly aromatic food but left the pistols and herbal saunas for another time. But what other compromises will my uncle have to make in life and will they be as easy as reshuffling wedding plans? What about the next generation of multi-cultural people who are going through a vastly different experience where native cultures are perceived differently?

How will this generation deal with cultural mitigation?

Arguably, we have more resources than our predecessors to stay connected to our cultural roots in increasingly creative

51 • zooming out

ways, such as social media, iTunes playlists, gentrified yet adequate versions of your favorite food at the local Wegmans and even entire college courses dedicated to your native language. Globalization can mean that any given person that you meet can actually know something about your culture and even impress you with a “tenaystilign.” Increasing diversity and visibility seems to pacify the homesick on a superficial level but still leaves the matter of which values to adopt wholly unsolved—which is essentially the crux of the problem. Perhaps one day, someone in my family can have a traditional Tigre wedding (cattle and all), in a rented manor thirty minutes outside of D.C., but what about after the wedding? Some aspects of cultural values are logistically not conducive to life in the U.S., like frequently visiting even the most distant members of your family and providing the same magnitude of support that you would back home. Although a change in setting alone cannot erase one’s culture, it can curb its expression necessitating a sort of battle to maintain its existence. Principles and practices don’t necessarily need to coalesce in the same precarious way that identity and actions sometimes don’t. The internalization of cultural elements is deeply subjective and complex for everyone, especially those living in between cultures.

Most people from multicultural backgrounds experience what experts call “identity management.” This entails adapting one’s values and sense of identity to conform to the surrounding environment; therefore, being highly alert to cultural subjectivity and balancing these differences is part of everyday life for people with multicultural backgrounds.

The dilemma facing multicultural people cuts deep because identity and culture are inextricably linked. In an Americanized world, it almost seems necessary to forgo the most extra bits and frills of one’s native culture. Understandably, this trimming process is welcomed by some, particularly those who don’t entirely relate to their native cultures. Conversely, it is spitefully resented by others, like my grandfather’s friend, in the name of cultural preservation. Although it comes with its share of difficulties, juggling multiple cultural identities can even be an asset. Maneuvering between cultural value systems allows you to reexamine the cultures you come in contact with using a more critical perspective and you can deem for yourself what is extra. Ultimately, it is a matter of personal choice and experience whether you say “hi” or “Tenaystilign.” Thus cultural extraness will perpetually exist in many shapes, flavors, scents and gunshot sounds. w

Shackles of Society

the revival of transcendentalist ideals

by Erin Lynch art by Angaelica LaPasta

As the world becomes increasingly extra, the doctrines of simplicity and individuality that guided the great thinkers of the mid-19th century have all but disappeared.

Transcendentalist ideologies are at odds with many modern societal changes that have been widely accepted as progress.

The motif of adventure that has been threaded into the history of the human race has nearly disappeared as the human race succumbed to materialistic and technocratic tendencies. The societal expectations of today’s world are bringing about the downfall of great philosophy, and ultimately the demise of the human condition. Now more than ever, it is important that the ideas of Emerson and Thoreau are preserved in the face of a changing climate, flawed institutional leadership, and a loss of meaningful human passion.

The human population at its most fundamental level has become extra. Population growth has skyrocketed in the past century, and the United Nations projects that the human population will surpass the 11 billion mark by the year 2100. A large number of people inevitably necessitate a large amount of resources. Further, developed countries have established a self-destructive precedent of overconsumption, resulting in an unequal distribution of earth’s finite resources. In a startling statistic released by BBC, humanity would require an estimated five earths in order to provide the resources necessary for every person on earth to sustain a lifestyle similar to that of the average American.

In response to overconsumption, the earth’s climate and feedback systems have adopted their own extra, and decidedly dangerous, positive-feedback loops; greenhouse gases and chlorofluorocarbons in our atmosphere have reached a level that even the most innovative carbon sequestration methods will not be able to resolve for over a century.

Additionally, modern society is centered around a consumer culture in which production pushes the limits of earth’s carrying capacity and possessions are equated to happiness.

The great transcendentalist thinker Henry David Thoreau once advised his followers, “We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.” Although material goods drive forward the economy, they do not sustain the human spirit. Simplicity, a founding tenet of the transcendentalist movement, must be integrated into societal norms in order to slow the progression of climate change and revive the planet that has provided us with the resources necessary for life.

Currently, man is the corrupting agent whose carelessness

is infringing on the innate sanctity of the natural world. Jack Kerouac, a leader of the Beat generation, a group of vagabonds and poets who adopted some transcendentalist ideals, envisioned a radical societal shift: “All of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad.” A movement like this would require a massive upheaval of current convention and a commitment by all members of the human race to rid themselves of their ties to earthly goods and venture into the possibilities of a life lived unattached. A simplistic lifestyle is simultaneously uncomfortable and liberating, allowing the soul to rid itself of burdens as it breaks free from the shackles of society to discover the dangers and rewards of a life untethered.

Without the distractions of material belongings, humanity is able to foster deeper connections with the natural world and develop well-founded empathy for others. Humanity must humble itself in the presence of rushing rivers and towering mountains rather than debasing itself at the mercy of institutionalized consumerism. A commitment to largescale sustainable living would allow for a healthier earth, as well as a healthier individual.

“Rediscovering emotion is essential in igniting the revolution that will bring us closer to an equal world.”

Transcendentalists have strived to make education and political activism accessible for people from every walk of life in an attempt to guarantee that all humans are given the opportunity to reach their fullest potential. In recent years, however, the progress toward this goal seems to have reached a plateau. New policies have established a cycle of lawmaking that favors trickle-down economics over the contributions of the individual, many of whom are working to reach success from the ground up. The lower-class experiences systematic discrimination due to lawmaker’s inability (or unwillingness)

zooming out • 52

to implement policy that will break the cycle of poverty and facilitate the ability to achieve the education necessary to reverse these trends. A radical change must be made on this front to ensure that humanity as a whole is maximizing its assets and thriving off of the contributions of a diverse set of minds. In “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau calls on fellow transcendentalists to fight to end the injustice integrated into the structure of the current system: “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”

Oftentimes, social influence is not earned, but rather results from wealth obtained at the cost of those living in poverty due to systematic discrimination. According to transcendentalist theory, it is the duty of those born into privilege to utilize their influence in the fight for universal equality for all of humanity. In his essay “Politics,” Ralph Waldo Emerson offered hope for a changing society: “The old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centers; but any particle may suddenly become the center of the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round it.” These relatively isolated calls for deep-seated societal change two hundred years ago have festered into a desperate plea for justice resounding from every country.

We should be outraged at the binds of poverty that remain on a majority of the human race, especially in a time when humanity has developed the means to correct the problem.

And, more than outrage, we should feel obligation. There must be implementation of new priorities that favor the uplift of lower classes oppressed by a corrupt system through a radical reframing of the ductile tenants that ground modern politics. Before these tangible changes can be made, however, we must relearn empathy, an emotion that is all but extinct in the age of big business and technology.

An acute dependence on technology has infiltrated society and replaced the meaningful human connections that are vital to the preservation of the human spirit.

Technology has undeniably benefitted humanity, providing us with everything from medical advancements to longdistance communication. But with these advantages come drawbacks. Texting has replaced face-to-face conversation, and emojis serve the purpose of conveying complex emotions. With this decline in human interaction comes a lack of understanding for the challenges endured by people living in different circumstances than our own. There is a popular saying that, “it is hard to hate someone once you understand them.” Rediscovering emotion is essential in igniting the revolution that will bring us closer to an equal world.

The human soul thrives on passion, and passion is not attained through a keyboard, but rather through the wholehearted embrace of adventure and the essence of life itself.

53 • zooming out

Further, in the modern world we have access to a vast library of information available at the touch of a button, easing the process of learning and providing answers to complex chemistry problems with nothing more than a $15 Chegg subscription. However, this accessibility goes hand in hand with a lack of motivation to retain information and the illusion of contentment that accompanies naiveté.

The transcendentalist movement stressed the pursuit of knowledge through exploration and firsthand experience with the real world rather than through a Wikipedia article.

The modern transcendentalist Christopher McCandless, subject of the critically acclaimed book Into the Wild, once said, “I read somewhere… how important it is in life to measure yourself at least once. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” Societal normalcy does not allow for deviation from a life lived in front of a computer screen driven by the necessity of acquiring money, which encourages a suffocating conformity that suppresses the freedom of the individual. Opportunities to test the perseverance of the human soul are few and far between, requiring an active decision to escape the monotonous drone of an existence void of meaning. Danger is an integral part of the human experience, and fear can be manipulated into motivation in the search for meaning. The world was meant to be explored, and the endless mysteries waiting around each corner yield greater fruits than any information that can be found in an online textbook. A man has not truly lived until he has thrown himself at closed gates only to find the powerful truth waiting behind the boundaries of the impossible. The world is engaged in an intricate dance of constantly changing cycles that reach far beyond the bounds of the human mind. Technology is urging humanity to seek a life of comfort in which little work is required to “suck the marrow out of life.” But an individual’s self-fulfillment is directly correlated to their willingness to delve into the unknown. Exploration is necessary to progress society in a way that will simultaneously benefit both the earth and humanity, and thus must be promoted as a means of reaching one’s full potential.

The preservation of the human race as we know it depends on redefining innovation so that the intrinsic value of transcendental principles is translated into practice. A shift in ideology is vital in the reversal of current destructive societal norms, as human beings have an innate call to live more deeply than the superficial tendencies allowed by the modern world. The tapestry of history is unwinding as the fabric of adventure disintegrates in a society based on routine and conformity.

There is a necessity to devolve towards old tendencies for humanity to evolve.

By merging the doctrines of the past with modern intellect, there is a chance of reviving the world we call home and detaching society’s inherent extra-ness from the driving forces of progress. w

Aesthetics of Late Night Infomercials

art and article by Kathie Jiang

ORDER NOW

Portmanteau of information and commercial, infomercials are half-hour long advertisements with the appearance of a news program and the intention of providing in-depth information about a product. Many Plus S & H infomercials air between 1am and 5am to cut costs of airtime. Infomercials sensationalize their products—which can be too novel or difficult to sell—in exaggerated and tacky ways: narration from energetic salespeople, rapid-fire demonstrations, scientific data, on-the-street customer testimonials, B-list celebrity appearances, etc.

Infomercials are a living embodiment of 30-day money back guarantee / Allow 2-6 weeks for delivery commodity fetishism, a concept explaining the relationships between goods, labor, and value that Karl Marx observed as he witnessed the domination of capitalism in Europe during CALL IN THE NEXT 15 MINUTES! the mid-19th century. Before the rise of the market economy, PHONE OPERATORS STANDING BY! Just 4 easy payments of what determined the value of a good was the time and effort the laborer took to produce it. With Creating a false sense of urgency is our attempt to industrialization, the increased Plus S & H break down your rational judgement and circulation of products and wage labor—the mechanism by 30-day Money Back Guarantee Allow 2-6 Weeks for Delivery which a good (now a commodity) acquired value—rested entirely on the market price of the product, or relationship to other goods, aside from sitting in front of your TV set in the middle of 3 AM programming in the eyes of the consumer. A key component of commodity fetishism is imbuing the product with a mystical, sublime aura when it is presented to the consumer through marketing. This is done so that the consumer forgets, or better yet disregards entirely, the plight of the laborers, the impact of harvesting the raw materials, the transportation of the Just 4 easy payments of products from manufacturing site to the market, If we flash our prices fast enough and insist in an and the many steps of the production of the absurdly enthusiastic manner good. that the consumer is getting the deal of a lifetime…

Fast forward a century, and the American infomercial and the powerful mass media and economic apparatuses that created it have taken this notion far beyond the proportions Marx could have ever imagined: it cut out the middleman of the market itself and brought the presentation of products squarely into the homes of the consumers through the mass medium of Plus $4.99 S & H television. No matter how peculiar the product or how such a commodity came into material

Have we mentioned we want you to…

Just 4 easy payments of

$13.99

Call 1-800-000-0000

ORDER NOW

WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

$13.99

BUT

Call 1-800-000-0000

ORDER NOW

$ 19.99

$16.99

$13.99 !

Call 1-800-000-0000

30-day money back guarantee Allow 2-6 weeks for delivery

zooming out • 54

THE

Cal

The American infomercial industry has an estimated value of over $250 billion dollars as of 2015.

ORDER NOW

It only costs a company an average of $150,000 Just 4 easy payments of existence, one filmed direct-response commercial to run a half hour paid programming segment on for the product can now reach the entire nation network local television in the “Graveyard on the same screen on which consumers watch Slot” from 1am to 6am. This is in comparison to their local news, favorite drama series, or national the costs of a program of the same length during primetime network television: $15 to $30 million.

Plus S & H sports games from the comfort of their sofas. How could a consumer in a direct order business even Products sold in infomercials are often come to question how and where their commodity marked up by as much as 400% from was produced, let alone whose hands and bodies the original materials and labor. on the opposite side of the supply chain helped assemble and deliver the good? If a consumer becomes accustomed to initiating this method of exchange in their very home rather than in the market, how can a consumer even fathom their 30-day money back guarantee / Allow 2-6 weeks for delivery position as the final cog in a larger machine of capitalist production and circulation in which a more common product are a regular trope in infomercials, profits are maximized and costs minimized down to an exact featuring the infomercial product performing the same science? purpose but visibly quicker or with less effort on the part of What the consumer does see and comprehend is the the user than its conventional counterpart. Infomercials often infomercial product’s divine, salvational power. This is also tout their prices as lower than any other conventional directly in line with Marx’s observations, created from a product that executes the identical function to suggest that specialized formula of gaudy, zippy aesthetics and rhetoric for audiences are getting “an incredible deal.” In reality, research which infomercials have become known and even parodied. firms for the infomercial industry recommend corporations set prices for infomercial products at 400% the costs of their materials. In addition, infomercials will often bundle additional items to accompany the main good advertised, such as cookbooks to complement an offbeat kitchen appliance.

Just 4 easy payments of These add-on products make the main good advertised, which can at first appear too novel and unnecessary, seem more functional and useable. This increases the perceived utility of the good, justifying the value of the good by a sheer Plus S & H material juxtaposition. These methods of augmenting the value through the product’s presentation with other goods is another way in which commodity fetishism operates.

Imagine, for a second, if this intricate web of highly optimized marketing tactics around infomercials suddenly dissipated and all that was left were these novelty products.

With no context, need, urgency, or comparisons, there remains little reason even to consider purchasing a Foreman Grill, a 30-day money back guarantee / Allow 2-6 weeks for delivery Shamwow, or a Snuggie. Yet through increasingly exaggerated marketing, these products suddenly appear as panaceas with The tropes that make up this particular aesthetic and mystical capabilities of fulfilling a desperately neglected rhetoric are an amalgam of cheap but intentional marketing need in your home, all a phone call away from appearing ploys. In a typical infomercial, tacky artificial sets of kitchens, at your doorstep—while the processes of producing and gyms, gardens, and other settings of contemporary daily transporting such commodities remain shrouded in the life become the backdrop for an energetic salesperson dark. w rapidly demonstrating their product for as many purposes imaginable, trumpeting its benefits as “making [insert daily A TIDBIT OF INFOMERCIAL HISTORY chore] easy!” and completing the task “faster than any other Infomercials existed as early as television airwaves itself, and inserted product!” The lightning pace of the visual and auditory between entertainment programs of the 40s and 50s. Fueled by the postwar boom and the thriving American middle class, advertisers quickly stimuli shot out in an infomercial leaves the viewer in a caught onto the ubiquity of television in every household and pumped their products into the consumerist imagination. dazed state of simply trying to keep up from shot to shot, The real boom in infomercials happened with the pitch to pitch. In infomercials, theater, cinema, music, and deregulation of television programs during the late 80s and throughout the 90s, and with companies and television visual aesthetics are employed in their cheapest form less controlled, infomercial advertising on TV flourished. to convey the glowing, inscrutable “amazingness” of the The divisions between mass media, consumerism, technology, if they hadn’t begun to buckle product. before, were knocked down during this era of advertising and brought the department Infomercials present the value of their commodity store aisles right to our living rooms television screens. The cash register? Your telephone. as greater than all other similar products on the market, further enabling the fetishization of the material product and eliminating consideration of its actual value or utility.

Side-by-side demonstrations of the infomercial product and

$13.99

Call 1-800-000-0000

WAIT!

ERE’S MORE

ORDER NOW

$ 13.99

ll 1-800-000-0000

55 • zooming out

Why Do I Want to Believe? the truth was inside us all along art and article by Olivia Bono

“Why do you insist the Earth is flat? For what reason?”

I was truly struck by this question, posted by Jer9999 on the Flat Earth Society’s online forums. I stumbled upon this comment after spending an embarrassingly long amount of time scrolling through a thread titled, “Does Flying Around the World in 1 Direction Prove the Earth is Round?” that I had found through Twitter. Jer9999 had just undergone a very long argument with a flat-earther (who sported an animated GIF signature straight out of 2005, despite the interaction taking place in 2014) about whether the government has hacked airplane pilots’ GPS monitors to hide the fact that

“If you believe everything you read, then Avril Lavigne died years ago and was replaced by a lookalike...”

NASA has been lying to us about the shape of our planet for centuries. This really got me thinking: why do conspiracy theorists insist on “facts” that can be so easily disproven? Not the political conspiracy theories, driven by a need to defend one viewpoint or another by accusing an opposition, but the truly separate ones. The theories that delve into the realm of science fiction and fantasy. Are they just trolling, or do they truly believe these things in earnest? Could it be simply for the thrill of resisting the public consensus?

“Look at a globe and try to put 2 and 2 together,” wrote the conspiracy theorist, who went by the name ‘jroa’, from behind their flashy skull avatar. “You are really embarrassing yourself here.”

The internet has done wonders for the spread of conspiracy theories. If you’ve been on social media at all in recent years, you’ve probably seen a lot of “evidence,” curated in masterposts and definitive threads. If you believe everything you read, then Avril Lavigne died years ago and was replaced by a lookalike; there’s a secret plotline in Star Wars in which there are actually two Luke Skywalkers, one slightly taller than the other (aptly dubbed “Bigger Luke” and “Luke Prime”); and beloved actors Keanu Reeves and Nicolas Cage are immortal vampires.

Even late-night host John Oliver has been trying to gain traction for his own theory, that Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen are one person moving faster than the human eye is able to perceive.

Spreading these kinds of conspiracies, getting invested in carefully-researched fantasies, is incredibly addictive. Hell, after gaining a reputation in high school as a serious journalist, I myself published an article in the school newspaper claiming a ghost haunted our halls. (I’m still not convinced that the time our school burned down on Thanksgiving in the 60s didn’t have ghostly consequences, considering the high density of false fire alarms we got during my time there.) But everyone knows these are all tongue-incheek, right? People just believe these for fun: No one really

zooming out • 56

thinks that mountains are just the corpses of very big, very dead trees, right? Shaq was kidding when he claimed the Earth is flat, so the rest of them must be, too, right?

I’m not really sure.

Believing in hoaxes, conspiracies, and hidden truths isn’t a new phenomenon invented by bored internet teens– these concepts are so alluring that they’ve persisted for centuries.

Generations of bored teens have been questioning the government since way before the Internet was a thing.

The theory that Paul McCartney had been secretly dead for three years was started by a handful of college kids in 1969.

Recorded sightings of Bigfoot-like creatures date back to the 1400s, and alien sightings can be traced back to as early as Ancient Egypt.

We know about these supposed UFO sightings because the people who spotted them were important enough to have written them down. The pharaoh Thutmose II was the first to have his scribes report the “fiery disks” he saw in the sky. Since then, sightings were recorded by Greek generals, Roman historians, 9th century archbishops, and untold hundreds of newspapers. The year 1947, which spawned the terms “flying saucers” and “men in black” (the latter a staple of government-centric conspiracy theories), began an era of frequent 20th-century alien sightings. Claiming someone saw a flying saucer became the hottest trend; publications loved the sensationalism, but it’s unclear whether people really believed them. In ancient history, many powerful figures recorded UFO sightings and we remember them for it; in the last century, ordinary folk in places like Washington and New Mexico have followed suit.

With society’s increasing appreciation for science, modern theorists aren’t as respected as the pharaohs and bishops of old, although they are remembered all the same.

It’s clear a lot of older beliefs in the supernatural were cultural—a civilization that believed an immortal crocodile devours the hearts of the wicked surely had no problem assigning otherworldly qualities to lights in the sky. But things get interesting when these beliefs aren’t cultural. There has to be something that drives the modern man to believe in reptilian cover-ups when an increasingly jaded society labels you as a lunatic. What convinces someone to go against all known laws of science and accuse entire governments of hiding secrets about the very nature of our planet?

For one thing, it’s just plain exciting. See, in order to

57 • zooming out

believe in the extraordinary or some outrageous belief that someone knows is wildly regarded as false, someone has to believe in one of two things: either the believer is the only one who knows it, and others would surely believe too if only they knew the real facts, or everyone else does know and is lying about knowing it. The latter is often attributed to governments or corporations or secret organizations. If a conspiracy theorist believes in one of these two situations, then they become privy to hidden knowledge, a hidden world away from the mundane. Let’s say for the sake of argument that maybe, somewhere out there, there is some kind of magic— maybe the Loch Ness Monster is real, maybe we have already made first contact with alien life, maybe the government is hiding the fact that gravity is a lie—how exciting would that be? Wouldn’t that make the people who believe in this stuff not weirdos, but rebels? Heroes?

There’s also a sort of camaraderie that comes from feeling like one of a group of “rebels.” The term alone invokes a connection to Star Wars, so think about how the rebels in the films interact—they’re all one big team, working together to outsmart the oppressive Empire. What little kid hasn’t wanted to be a rebel? The Rebel Alliance is undeniably cool, and everyone has a role, from pilot to strategist to spy. They even have multiple Lukes! When conspiracy theorists come together, comparing notes and validating each other’s “crazy” beliefs or assigning leadership roles on a dedicated forum, they feel like the Rebel Alliance. They feel like the unlikely heroes opposing a greater evil.

TBS shrewdly caught wind of this phenomena when they created their comedy series People of Earth, which finished its second season earlier this year. In the show, a support group of alien abductees find comfort in each other as they realize they all went through the same experience, despite being called crazy by the rest of their town. At the start of the show, we learn that one character in the group hasn’t been abducted, and his desire to join his friends in their beliefs and experiences fuels his interest in alien lore. He has nothing but his friends’ words and vague accounts of historic abductions to tell him that the alien conspiracy is real, but he believes anyway. Real-life conspiracy theorists are a lot like this character: they are willing to believe so-called crazy things to feel like part of a select group.

Even if most of this stuff is baloney in real life (I’m still waiting on confirmation of the existence of the arsonist ghost from my hometown—I’m telling you, there are some spooky happenings going on in that school), that doesn’t matter to the people who believe in them. They don’t let the public’s definitions of what “trees” and “mountains” and “international pop stars” should be hold them back—defying these definitions gives them a unique sense of both belonging and individuality. They feel like they belong to a close-knit group of rebels, fighting against “The Man,” but at the same time, they feel that they are part of a select group of only the shrewdest individuals who see past a conspiracy.

Think about it—if you thought you were one of the only people in the world who knew the truth about something big, wouldn’t it make you feel important? Special?

And with all the craziness, hurt, and heartbreak in the world right now, don’t we all want to feel a little bit special? w

Mashrou’ Leila third culture kids and the building of global citizens

by Yabework Abebe Kifetew art by Julia Greenberg

The first time I heard Mashrou’ Leila, I was sitting with friends on a balcony overlooking Cascadilla gorge. My friend showed me the song “Lil Watan” with much enthusiasm. I don’t recall much from that first encounter, but I remember sitting outside on a high wooden stool looking at all the green of the canopy and thinking: it’s an indie band but in Arabic–okay, cool. I really got into Mashrou’ Leila this summer though when I met someone from Lebanon who said that they were one of his favorite bands. I don’t know what was different this time, but instead of hearing them as just another indie band, I heard this depth and cultural plurality that drew me to them, and I have been an avid fan since. The lead singer’s voice is emotive, rich, and passionate in a way I had never heard before. Even more than his throaty, vibrant, dark voice and the violin melodies that draw me to their music, Mashrou’ Leila represents something that is larger than myself but that I am also a part of as a third culture individual–an amalgamation of cultural influences brought about by globalization and a shared language of “other”-ness.

Growing up, I had this interesting mix of both feeling connected and isolated from the outside world. Having parents that immigrated from Ethiopia to Kenya before I was born, I was exposed to multiculturalism by nature of living in a different culture than that of my family. I was, however, never fully part of either as I felt like I had a foot in both worlds at any given time. I lived in Nairobi my whole life, but being an Ethiopian not living in the country, I never felt fully assimilated into the culture even though I feel closer to my Ethiopian identity; and being obviously not Kenyan by virtue of my appearance and not knowing Swahili, I never fully assimilated with Kenyans either.

In general, the pop culture I engaged with during my teenage years was Western, and there was almost an aspiration towards this ideal, an attempt to shy away from my cultural roots in a sense. I don’t know how much of liking this sort of music was simply because of my personal taste or because I didn’t feel fully welcome in either of the cultures I grew up around. I listened to bands such as Bon Iver, The Beatles, The Strokes–I even went through a Nirvana phase, something commonplace here but not so much back home–and had this very singular idea of what kind of music I wanted to listen to, what was “cool” and what wasn’t.

When I came to America, I started feeling a desire to

reconnect with who I was and what made me different here–and that was that undeniable influence that these two countries and my experience as a third culture kid had on me. Rather than trying to emulate Western culture–now that I was surrounded by it–I started to realize that my own position of juxtaposition back home was a larger part of my cultural influence. I wanted to explore that as well as how I could find similar narratives around me. This came out in little things I did. I began wearing more Ethiopian scarves, seeking out people to speak Amharic to; after my first summer back home, I brought back a lot of Kenyan garments and Ethiopian classical music from my parents.

As a third culture individual, there is a strange tension between wanting to be part of a bigger whole and wanting to stand out in how I interact with the things I consume. At each stage, I find myself both trying to find my own image and self and simultaneously searching for peoples and cultures that fit into that image. My closest friends here are similar to me in that they grew up in cultures different from their parents’,

“Mashrou’ Leila represents something that is larger than myself but that I am also a part of as a third culture individual–an amalgamation of cultural influences brought about by globalization and a shared language of ‘other’-ness.”

zooming out • 58

and we have bonded over this shared experience.

Of course, the Western influence is still prevalent, primarily in my taste in music because I do like alternative and indie music in general. I’ve realized though that I usually like international indie music instantly–such as the Korean band Hyukoh and Mashrou’ Leila. Music is, as well as other forms of art, something that easily transcends the barrier of language, which for me was the greatest element to how much belongingness I felt to the societies around me. With Mashrou’ Leila, for example, I don’t feel like I need to know the language to be a part of their world, which is a world of sounds and meanings and not a political one like Ethiopia and Kenya where I needed the language to engage fully within them.

The band members’ backgrounds are also characteristic of most third culture kids. Born into well-to-do families, they all met at the American University of Beirut where they had the opportunity to engage with crosscultural knowledge and culture but with an obvious Western influence. They are well aware of the dangers of having an openly gay lead singer, advocating for queer rights, singing about nightlife in Beirut, and criticizing Lebanese politics i n their music. However, they have the a b i l i t y to rise above their co u n t r y ’s constraints on their liberties primarily b e c a u s e of their socioeconomic status, which enables them to challenge their country’s norms. In doing so, they show their values as being influenced by a larger stream of thought and the remnants of colonization, as Western ideals still dominate the exchange of knowledge today.

I identify with Mashrou’ Leila because their music reflects this multicultural influence and because of how they engage with the knowledge and world around them. They try to be different by joining multiple aspects of different cultures, which tends to cater to a very specific audience globally. This audience is of a growing importance in a time of increasing migration and as we are more aware of the societies around us. I think that constant reassessing of what is the norm creates something really interesting and cool–like Mashrou’ Leila! What’s interesting to mention is that a lot of my friends from Middle Eastern countries aren’t that keen on them, saying that the band caters more to Lebanese people who live in America. In fact, I think this is why it is so appealing to me because I am a third culture individual, part of a growing subculture of the world.

59 • zooming out

Is this growing cross-cultural population the future?

What are our shortcomings, how do we engage locally, where do we belong? We are a globalized youth that have somehow risen above the geopolitical process of oppression–thanks to education or higher economic status–but are still a cultural product of it and are often hyper-aware of that fact. How,

“Is this growing cross-cultural population the future? What are our shortcomings, how do we engage locally, where do we belong?” then, can we use this to make a change in the world, and is our impact significant?

Mashrou’ Leila’s music is an example of how our world cultural exchange is changing as more individuals form the global South engage in it. This could be seen as a shift in power, perhaps not at a national level but at an interpersonal l e v e l .

Countries of the global South are developing, but perhaps artists such as Mashrou’ Leila stand as a representation– a l b e i t not an adequate one due to their own Western influence–of their respective cultures. This allows for the interaction of knowledge to open up to a more even playing field where their voices may be heard, even if their nations may not be on such ground politically. As the socioeconomic well-being of these individuals improves globally, I hope there is more engagement of the world’s unique cultures that questions the authorities that are at play today.

The band’s music is a product of an intercultural conversation influenced by existing world power as well as a reclaiming of that power through the reconnecting of cultures. Instead of striving for this Western ideal of aesthetic in its entirety, Mashrou’ Leila brings their Lebanese identity into this conversation. The discovery of Mashrou’ Leila came to me at a time when I was coming deeper and deeper into myself and what it is that makes me who I am, a third culture individual claiming space and validity in a global exchange that is, I hope, decreasingly dominated by Europe and North America. w

Extra but Not Enough snippets of social media activism

by Zé Fernández Guerrero art by Anna Lee and Elise Cording

How often do you scroll through your Facebook feed and find trendy news on 30-second to 2-minute videos? If you’re part of liberal circles, these kinds of videos are commonly produced by BuzzFeed News, NowThis, AJ+ and even the Dodo. Except for the environmentalist and animal rights oriented vids that the Dodo puts forth, the others usually talk about social and political issues. Popular topics for this past semester’s videos have been the California Representative Maxine Waters’s “Reclaiming My Time,” government responses to natural disasters, and Trump’s responses to basically everything. (Turns out Puerto Rico is an island. Surrounded by water. Big water. Ocean water.) These small videos have become one of the most informative bits of news that we are exposed to. The question is: NowWhat?

For some, these videos provide a summarized argument to share with more conservative or distant relatives and friends. For others, sharing these videos is how they believe they are showing ‘solidarity’ for a specific cause or group. But at best those with a tangible and monetary impact are the videos’ producers. That’s it. The subjects of these videos do not feel the impact of our Facebook share button. Thus, I argue, these videos are simply not enough. How many of us have seen an AJ+ video while we were distracted in class?

Probably all of us. But how many of us have been inspired to search for more information, to take action, to vote, or to donate?

Admittedly, we are busy people with limited budgets, so we cannot do and donate everything. Nonetheless, I see a trend among fellow social media users whose performative activism plays a rather passive role in addressing the issues.

We do not touch the subject again, unless there is a followup video. Logistically, these videos have a limited time frame to get the most viewers while presenting reductive information. This pragmatic decision on behalf of producers is not an excuse for us to stay uninformed. If we have social media, we have Google (or Bing or Yahoo). It is within our capacity to find more information and engage in action for a purpose that truly moves us. I encourage myself and others to take action rather than satiate our desire to make a “post

a day” and not get further informed.

I do not blame our Internet generation for the trendiness of these videos. Their aesthetic even matches our latest minimalist fashion trends. It incorporates bold, white font wherein important words are in alternate colors, like yellow or blue. Subtitles in Arial or the like are common (which I appreciate because they’re inclusive of people who are

“But what are we as consumers doing?

Just sharing.” hard of hearing or those who struggle with some varieties of English). The videos often follow a soundtrack. They are omnipresent on Facebook. You can even start finding these videos on different social media platforms, such as Snapchat and Instagram. But if you look up their mottos, you see another trend. NowThis’s slogan is “stories that move.” AJ+ starts its website with “Experience. Empower. Engage.” So, do these news sites operate alone, or do they want us to move on and engage toward something? Do WE want to move on and engage in the issues they highlight?

Given the civil rights orientation of some of these videos, their most logical intentions would be to galvanize us. But what are we as consumers doing? Just sharing. We share these videos to spread the knowledge of the event within a specific political and social stance, creating a constellation of informative videos, leisure photographs, and birthday wishes on our Facebook feeds. Certainly, this constellation is as extra

zooming out • 60

as we are. Our experiences, backgrounds, and interests are diverse and reflected in these feeds. But now, what happens after we press that share or like button? (Or any of the new react buttons with their concomitant emoticons?)

I reiterate: we cannot be experts in every possible issue in the world today. For that, I applaud Vox’s extended videos because they do seem to be experts sometimes of the most random things. But with these smaller videos on social media, we cannot continue pretending like our job is done when we share them. Who is benefitted? The answer is even more contentious. Let’s take for example the first scenario. When we share these videos to inform our conservative relatives and friends (if they decide to watch), the most positive of possibilities is that they change their minds, because these videos compelled them to. In reality, it probably takes more than one video and a lot of interpersonal communication to make them care. In any case, the person who was most benefited here was the person who became “enlightened” in regards to the issue in the video. But they are not the people whom the video is about, even if they are the target

with Puerto Rico when he congratulated locals on having less deaths than the mainland U.S. had after Katrina. Or when he threw paper rolls into a crowd. We cringed and wished he was not in charge, but that was it!

Soon, Facebook friends would joke in the comments of pictures with a “reclaiming my time” or have a rant-like status about Trump. I give them the benefit of the doubt: they are now vocal and critical of the current political climate, but it makes me wonder if that was all that the videos accomplished when they were shared. The voices of the marginalized in these videos—who were finally given a revolutionary, modern platform to be listened to—have not been heard. They have not benefited. Needless to say, those who needed to be brought to justice were not. Steven Mnuchin is still incumbent. The shared videos like “Reclaiming My Time” are now a post of the past.

So, I wrote this piece to put our actions into perspective, whether they take place on social media or not. Do we share these videos to create a social activist persona? Does that persona make it outside of that platform? Who is the focus

audience. In other words, we fail to advocate for the groups discussed in these videos since the benefit is not circular. It stops with our conservative friend changing their mind.

Who is usually featured in these videos? It is either marginalized groups who need help or abusive people in positions of power we need to confront. Going back to the example of Representative Maxine Waters, she is one of twelve women in the U.S. Congress where there are 535 voting members. The video that famously featured her “reclaiming my time” phrase against the Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin* put her on the radar for many of us millennials as a symbol of criticism towards the current administration. But this video—and its catchphrase—became a sensation. Its sensational quality, rather, did not highlight issues of government corruption, sexism or racism. Its theme was reinterpreted as being fed up. Take Trump’s interactions

of these videos? Are we benefitting them or essentializing them? I am not against sharing these videos because at the end of the day they are informative. However, actions that involve political and social issues must not be done routinely and blindly. Go have those conversations with acquaintances who have different points of view. Express your frustration with an issue. But if you make social media your political platform, I expect your praxis to not be limited to the click of a button and a react emoticon. w

61 • zooming out

*Curious fact: Steven Mnuchin is an executive producer of various blockbuster films, such as Wonder Woman, Mad Max: Fury Road, American Sniper and Suicide Squad. I too wish I had known that sooner.

The Extraness of Minimalism

by Abigail Mengesha art by Nadya Mikhaylovskaya

Let’s not lie to each other. Minimalism is the most extra thing right now. Normally, the two terms are complete adversaries: denotatively, minimalism is the practice of using the least means necessary to achieve a desired effect, while extra, in its newly founded modern context, means doing the absolute most for generally no (or an unnecessary) reason. At first glance, it might be hard to recognize that these terms can intersect, but the principle and application of minimalism, specifically the way it is applied in the arts and its effects on people’s lives, have assimilated it into the realm of extraness.

One matter that masks this integration is the fallacy that extraness is closely associated with abundance and quantitative enormity, while in reality, it is purely a concomitant of magnitude and extremity. It does not depend on the amount of something, but on the concentration of its essence and the intensity of its substance. Whenever you label an object, person, or idea as extra, you are not commenting on how much of it is in existence, but on the strength of its actuality. This understanding indicates a correlation between extraness and minimalism, since the latter is a tool to get rid of the excess in favor of concentrating on the significant so that people can find happiness, fulfillment, and freedom. Here, the excess is not given a bounded space or a constraint; contrary to popular belief, minimalism is not a set of restrictions or an instruction manual. You do not need to get rid of your car. You do not need to abandon your smart phone and move into a shack in the middle of nowhere. You do not need to check things off a list, particularly when that list does not exist in the first place. So, if this excess does not have a measurable representation, people’s preventive and/ or curative actions against it also become immeasurable.

Their reactions surpass the enumerative make-up of limits,

and attain a state of dynamic abstraction similar to that of extraness. It simply requires people to discard as much as they don’t need. As a result, it comes to light that both terms are concerned with a position relative to the superlative, not its quantitative representation.

Nowadays, art can highlight this interrelation. Modern art museums are full of minimalistic forms of art, which are the epitome of extra. Take, for example, Robert Ryman’s

“You do not need to get rid of your car. You do not need to abandon your smart phone and move into a shack in the middle of nowhere.”

Twin, which is a blank canvas. Initially, this work might be dismissed since it appears to require nominal effort and time.

How can something so simple be regarded as extra? And the answer lies in the previously verified definition: it is extra not in terms of the amount of effort the artist put into it but in its degree of simplicity. Like other minimalist works of art, it is extremely simple—literally just a canvas—since it resists the ideological requirement to imitate something and accepts that art should have its own reality. This results in a critical focus on the medium and form of the work, which entails an acute process of conceptualization that is void of individualized influence—a blank canvas is pretty silent about the artist—and consequently develops a severe intensity of impersonality. This final, grave sense of neutrality is attained by not physically doing the most—after all, mounting a canvas is not extra in the least sense—but by abstracting the art as much as possible.

Therefore, minimalist art becomes extra because of its glaring presentation and lack of components. It shies away from sophistication and embraces a sense of crudeness that is materially empty but immaterially pregnant with rich

zooming out • 62

thinghood. The work sets out to expose the essence of art by eliminating all unessential elements. As a result, it has no moderation because it settles on the ultimate ends of the spectrum: the expression of enormously abstract terms like spirits, emotions, and ideas via extremely reduced visual representations. Visually, this kind of art may be subtle, but in its subtlety it aims at achieving the absolute most of what art can do.

Similarly, literary minimalism mirrors this sense of extraness. According to John Barth, literary minimalism arises from the notion that “less is more,” and that can be interpreted in various ways. There are minimalisms of unit, state, and proportion: short words, terse sentences and paragraphs, awfully brief stories, very thin novels. There are minimalisms of style: a reduced vocabulary; a reduced syntax that avoids periodic sentences, successive predicates and intricate subordinates; a reduced rhetorical devices that may avoid figurative elements altogether; a reduced, impassive tone. And there are minimalisms of material: nominal characters, nominal exposition, nominal action, nominal plot. Unlike minimalist art’s approach of “what you see is what you get,” literary minimalism condones, “there is more to what meets the eye” because meaning is entrusted and pressured upon a limited vocabulary, a restricted communication of details and an objective point of view. As a result, the works of authors who partake in this movement—namely, Ernest Hemmingway, Tobias Woolf, and the like—forge content from context and require the active participation of readers to achieve the complete experience of their pieces. For instance, Hemingway’s short story “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” is composed of only six words, the very same ones that constituent the title. This is by far his tersest work, which desperately requires the reader to participate in the construction of a greater narrative. Hemingway jams the plot, theme, and setting of a whole story into half a dozen words. After all, like all minimal works of literature, it integrates allusion and inference via exclusion to add depth and make up for its restricted exposition. And this factor pushes literary minimalism towards the extreme.

Literary minimalism’s extraness arises from its need for a severe sense of removal, reduction, and concision. In a way, it requires intense concentration and intellectual investment to ground its practicality since it is saturated with oblique hints that arise from its linguistic limitations.

If the authors are effective in their narration, there is no reason why readers wouldn’t be able to grasp the message without ornamental additions. And in its aim to remove the unnecessary, it boils down to a rigid and abrupt form of efficiency, which denotatively achieves the absolute maximum from the absolute minimum; and this explanation

63 • zooming out

fits perfectly into the millennial interpretation of “extra.”

Correspondingly, the concept of minimalist architecture is to strip everything down to its essential quality and achieve simplicity. In Kanagawa, Japan, Shinichi Ogawa & Associates designed the Cube House, an epitome of this movement. From the front, the house is a solid gray cube with a single, narrow, white door. Thanks to its plainness and elementary features, each room is connected through this void in the living room. Seamlessly, the house blends in with other similar constructions, since minimalist architecture— the concept it’s based off—is characterized by plans where spaces are predictable and uncomplicated. Admittedly, the idea is not completely void of embellishment, but all parts and features are considered as relegates to a stage where no one can remove anything further to improve the design.

Similar to literary minimalism, it uses the fewest and barest elements to achieve the desired functionality.

As a result, the designs create a refuge from excess and grandiose additions because minimalist architects use space as a design in and of itself.

The incorporation of basic geometric forms and the repetitions of structures compliment this dogma and depict the extent designers and architects are willing to go to achieve this heightened degree of simplicity. And in doing so, their works welcome extraness with open arms.

Achieving this level of simplicity requires a monastic orderliness and a sense of perfectionism. The straight lines, the clean-cut geometric furniture and the light filled open spaces have an element of exactness that surpasses any sense of moderation. This level of “perfect” is deeper than that of a monochromatic or a high contrast color scheme since it removes sofas, radiators, doors, and other elements of design that the inhabitant can do without. For this exact reason, the path to achieving smooth, simple designs gets tainted with extraness, one that will try to remove as much as it can because clutter is the farthest thing from perfect, from order, from cleanliness.

So, looking at these three forms of minimalism, an intersection reveals itself.

All of them are extremely reductive and ambitious, regardless of their corresponding methods of achieving simplicity. They are inherently too much; too much in their disregard of the unnecessary; too much in their obsession with the necessary; and too much in their acts of separating the unnecessary from the necessary.

And this extremity makes them extra because they are as close to the utmost as possible. This relationship—of the necessary, the unnecessary, and their distinction—reveals the irony behind the term “minimalism.” Even though, it strives for the minimum, the simplest, and the essential, it still takes the most supreme, the most complex, and the most intense actions to achieve the desired result. Just like extraness, minimalism is inseparable from its fixation on a position relative to the extreme and a concern with limitless magnitude. w

if you like...

writing diting

e

@kitschm

ag

design

gnomes

blogging

photograp

hy

s

ast c d o

p

art layout

copyediting

then join

kitsch!

email kitschmag.eds@gmail.com