Parlor Tricks I Spring 2015

PARLOR TRICKS

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PARLOR TRICKS Editor-in-Chief Story Ponvert Managing Editor Claudia Reyes Creative Director Krista Gelev Designer Alexandra Scarangella Arts Editor Brianna Rettig Literature Editors Jasper Burget Kristina Hwang Rachel Oren Nonfiction Editors Jordan Jace Lylia Li Eric Muscosky Sophie Wunderlich Editors Trevin Corsiglia Devin Helle Maia Sacca-Schaeffer Malena Steelberg Editor’s Note Most of what you need to know is inside. I can, however, explain a little about how this came to be and where it’s going.

Parlor Tricks started as a practical response to what a group of students found lacking at Williams. For all the writing that happens here, it seemed that outside of news there was a serious lack of published work intended to engage students and faculty. Art was given even less exposure, as was creative output that too often slips under the radar, like recipes or translations. Our solution was to try to provide a platform where work of any sort would be considered, edited, and designed carefully. We decided the best way, perhaps the only way, to do justice to all the talents and tastes of the college, was to welcome a variety of content and take it all seriously, working closely with contributors and designers to emerge with the best product we can come up with.

This issue is a part of that product, but it is not its entirety. In the fall, we’ll launch a website, and next spring we’ll publish our second issue, which will be bigger and benefit from everything we learned creating this one. So, while right now, Parlor Tricks is what you hold in your hand, expect to see more of us in the future. I hope you find something in these pages that excites you for what’s to come, and thanks for reading.

-Story Ponvert

White Castle Luke Warren

HAVE you heard of a movie called Harold and Kumar

Go to White Castle? Of course you have. Not a great movie, but a perfectly good movie—nothing wrong with that. A “stoner, grossout comedy,” according to Stephen Holden of the Times. Does some interesting stuff with stereotypes, plus it’s just funny. But you knew that. How did you first see it? At a family party, upstairs—or perhaps in the basement, if it was finished—with your parents’ friends’ older children? Accidentally, when you were watching TV late one night? As the result of your undying devotion to Neil Patrick Harris? Did your mother know?

It was August, right before they were all to head off to college, and they realized that none of them had ever gone to White Castle. Their mothers had certainly never taken them. An idea, at first little more than a joke, gradually gathered steam.

Everything fell into place: yes, they were starving; yes, there was no more beer; yes, no one had anywhere to be; yes, Phil wasn’t drinking that night; yes, they all knew, White Castles were open all night long.

“Hey Siri, where’s the nearest White Castle?” Phil asked.

“Okay, I found this on the web for ‘spite vassal.’”

“Goddamn it, Siri. You fucking idiot.”

“I don’t talk to you that way, Phillip,” Siri responded.

“We could just order pizza,” Adam suggested.

The nearest White Castle was at least half an hour away 4 Luke Warren “White Castle”

in Spring Valley—across the Hudson on the Tappan Zee, up the Thruway, and onto Route 59. Maybe more like 40 minutes, especially considering that this was when they were still doing that construction on 59 by the Palisades Mall. Adam’s mother had mentioned a Vietnamese restaurant in Spring Valley before. Really authentic, apparently.

Before they knew it, the six of them were piled into Phil’s mother’s Volvo station wagon.

“This is gonna be so awesome,” Claire said. “Just like Harold and Kumar.”

It took a few blocks for Henry to pack a bowl and take a hit.

“Dude, blow out the window. This is my mom’s fucking car.”

At the next stoplight, Henry leaned over from the passenger seat, held the bowl to Phil’s mouth, and lit it for him.

It wound its way across the backseat—Walker, Sophie, Claire— back to Henry for more weed, and finally to Adam, crammed in the back. Adam made an attempt to exhale in the direction of a window. Luckily, Phil didn’t notice. Adam recalled that in Driver’s Ed they had learned never to drink and drive, and to try not to smoke and drive—or at least that’s how it had seemed. Every once in a while wasn’t so bad, he reasoned. Animal Collective played in the background. Phil would often discover a band a few years later than everyone else and play them incessantly.

A few days later, Phil’s mother found a cigarette butt and a dime bag on the floor of the backseat, and Phil wasn’t allowed to use the car for the rest of the summer. She was South American and very strict. Everyone felt really bad, but they all knew it was probably Henry who didn’t know how to throw away a cigarette butt.

The bowl was followed in its rounds by a bag of Haribo Fizzy Cola, Claire’s favorite candy. Kids and grown-ups love it so.

“Where are these from, anyway?”

“Japan, I’m pretty sure.”

“No, they’re definitely European.”

“Yeah, they’re from Spain.”

“I thought they were Dutch.”

“Haribo? Sounds fucking Japanese.”

“Jesus Christ, they’re not Japanese.”

“You’re all wrong. I just looked it up, and they’re German.”

“Stop looking shit up. Put your fucking phone away.”

“Hey Claire, can you pass me the Haribo?” Adam asked.

Soon they were crossing the bridge in the far right lane.

A motorcycle passed them and swerved right in front of them, followed by another, then another, then another. All of a sudden the interior of the car was bathed in pink neon light, like a Nicolas Winding Refn movie. These weren’t Harleys or anything; they weren’t choppers at all. These were sleek and all black—Yamahas or something. The riders were dressed in black from head to toe— glossy black helmet, reflective black helmet visor, black leather jacket, black leather pants, black leather boots. Phil was already swerving a little out of the lane, and this didn’t help. Anyone would be a little scared. But no one mentioned the mysterious riders. Adam began to question whether it had really happened. It was like the cheetah in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.

It was around two when they arrived and the restaurant was completely empty. Behind the counter were two employees: an older woman about their mothers’ age, and a younger man about their age. “That little Yorkie’s ‘bout to make me start drinkin’ again,” they heard the woman say to the man. Now that you mention it, she was probably at least a decade younger than the youngest of their mothers, even if she didn’t look it.

She glanced at them and could tell they needed more time.

“Just turned one. Had a little party, but we couldn’t keep a hat on him,” she continued, while they puzzled over the menu.

It was like a foreign language: Chicken Rings, Fish Nibblers, Hash Brown Nibblers ™, Buy ‘Em By The Sack®, Castle Pack 8, Crave Crate®, Cheesecake on a Stick. Chicken Rings, they giggled to one another. Adam had made little headway when he noticed a sign behind the counter: Consider this your starter Craving kit. Four Original Sliders, small fries, and a small soft drink. Calories: 910.

Nutritional information based on a small Diet Coke®. Perfect, he thought.

Feeling brave, he was the first one to approach the register.

The woman turned to face him and set her phone down on the counter. The phone’s wallpaper was a poorly framed screenshot of a poorly formatted online Bible. Colossians 3:23-24, he managed to make out. He tried to read the rest, but the screen went dark. He thought he already knew all about the strange things that happened when older women were combined with phones. He had once received a postcard from his grandmother with the word ‘phone.

He liked to imagine her internal dilemma: As a rule, I disapprove of slang, but I would like to save space.

If he wasn’t quite so high, or if he was better at reading upside down, or if the screen had given him just a little more time,

or if his mother hadn’t traded in Christianity for yoga, he might have known what came next: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward.

It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” Something about work, he gathered.

“Uh, can I have the Original Sliders Combo, please?”

“Anything else?”

“Uh, no, that’s all. Thank you.”

“Six eighty-four.”

He fumbled with his wallet, and it took him what seemed like a full minute before he succeeded in handing over his credit card.

“Uh, sorry.” Does she know I’m fucked-up, he wondered. At the time, it didn’t occur to him that she had a lot of experience with fucked-up kids. Charity, her nametag read.

Walker also had the Original Sliders Combo. Claire and Sophie split a French fries and an onion rings. Phil just had a chocolate shake. Henry ordered ten sliders for himself. No one tipped. Henry ate hunched over his sliders, wordless. He quickly developed a system: remove little paper box from big paper bag, remove little hamburger from little paper box, lift little hamburger to mouth, bite twice, chew, repeat. He finished before everyone was served and began to complain loudly.

“That was probably the single grossest meal I’ve ever had,” he announced.

None of them enjoyed the food. The 2” by 2”, 100% beef patties were gray. The steamed buns were stale. The pickles were indistinguishable from the onions. The French fries were room temperature. They weren’t like Adam’s mother’s hand-ground beef chuck burgers, to say the least. But the rest of them would never have said anything about it. Charity pretended that she could not hear them, but Adam noticed her peeking in their direction.

He moved to a table across the aisle to eat by himself.

He wanted to both disassociate himself from Henry and attract attention to himself. Claire and Sophie laughed to each other. Adam decided that this had to be a promising sign, and smiled to himself even as he tried to swallow another bite of slider.

“Just fucking disgusting,” Henry continued. “Like, seriously.

Have you ever had a worse burger?”

The poor people that made this, Adam thought. Claire pulled out her phone and took a photo of him. He secretly hoped it would end up on Facebook the next day. It didn’t.

He had also hoped that Claire would have sex with him before they left for school, but Phil dropped everyone off individually that night. And that was that—the next week, she was off to Minnesota and he was off to Maine. Harold gets the girl at the end.

So yeah, it wasn’t all that much like Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. At a certain point you just have to give up and stop trying to draw connections. You can add some stuff here and remove some stuff there, but it will never be the same. Still a good movie, though.

Anyway, I thought about shooting Claire a text the other day, but decided against it. I still see her when everyone’s home for Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and all, but, fuck, it didn’t end up the way it was supposed to. Like always. Does this kind of shit happen to you?

Luke Warren “White Castle” 5

Finding What is There Jordan Jace I wrote a poem about my two brothers The first time I was in New England in Autumn.

I live here now.

About this time of year I collect the fallen Leaves with a crappy rake.

I can only think when I’m raking.

Every time I realize the same thing, That art is just showing what’s there, Beneath it all.

My mind is as bad as my rake.

I wrote the damn poem as a companion of sorts.

I’d fallen in love with this girl, also a poet, Whose best writing was about her brother’s Death, about the lengths people will go To bring back their loved ones.

I cried when I read it, I felt weak, I went outside To let the wind batter me And scatter my thoughts.

I hate her poem, It makes me think about my brothers, I live here alone You know.

The girl never answered any of my letters, Like the leaves, loving me is the last thing On her mind.

I’m as good as dead to her now, And my brothers too, for that matter.

All I know is the maintenance of my small home, The collection of the earth, Sitting at my desk at dawn Every morning, Hoping to learn from the sunrise, And the grating scrape of my rake.

6 Jordan Jace “Finding What is There” • Madison Weist Martyrdom I

Brianna Rettig Desert Trash no. 19 • Desert Trash no. 17 7

8 Christa Rousseva

Christa Rousseva

is a self-taught photographer in her first year at Williams. Both of her parents are from Bulgaria, and she has been visiting her family in the country all her life. This collection was assembled from photographs taken in the village where her grandmother lives. Its subjects are people and places familiar to her from her many trips, but only intermittently available to her for shooting.

“I think photos can lie a little bit,” Christa says, and acknowledges that the rustic, nostalgic quality she achieves is as much the result of her film development as it is a reflection of her locales. Her subjects are deeply personal, yet they feel familiar and open, made available to us by Christa’s eye. “If I see something beautiful I take a picture,” she explains, and her photographs invite us to imagine what she finds beautiful in each image, given the personal history each one represents.

Christa Rousseva 9

OR, An Elegy for gears and limbs sealed silent still in the petrified sicksweet Syrup of bloody sugarcane and Crude on the Occasion of Brooklyn’s ongoing 33⅓ rpm SelfAnnhilation I. PROLOGUE Fool child, you’re never gonna make it.

New York City just wants to see you naked (And they will).

Though they’d never say so.

Wise, old, black and dead in the snow: My southern sister…

—Destroyer, “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker,” 2011

10 Gabriel Samach “Suicide Demo for Williamsburg”

On October 24th, 2007, a private reception for media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is held in the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s ancient Egyptian collection. The event, thrown in celebration of the launch of Fox Business Network one week prior, turns the cavernous concrete void of the museum’s north wing into a veritable who’s-who of the entertainment and media circuit. Guests drink and dine on small tables arranged along the banks of the pavilion’s placid reflecting pool, mood lighting echoed back off the water’s penny-lined depths.

The Counting Crows conclude their set with a solemn rendition of “Long December” as a Gawker paparazzo scurries about and catches a ghostly photograph of Vanessa Trump and Lauren Bush, the neck of the president’s niece fashionably wound in the black and white gauze of a chic Palestinian keffiyah. Outside, beyond the expansive glass and steel curtain wall of the wing’s north facade, Central Park lies hidden in black.

Towards the back end of the wing, a collection of large sandstone blocks have been awkwardly arranged, the ancient stones resting upon their concrete pedestal in incongruous metonymy. The guests have all flocked to mingle contiguously with this alien structure, yet none of them seem to pay it much mind. It simply sits there, its weathered facade awash in red and blue light, like a gaudy yet forgotten conversation piece. Inside the small temple, past the crumbled colonnade and glass museum partition, a slender-wristed limestone woman peers out from eyes long since lost to time’s erosion. Her severed torso lingers in the dark, a delicate leg poised forward in proto-contrapposto. A white-gloved waiter passes by the Temple of Dendur in silence bearing a golden tray of chocolate bars with FOX BUSINESS embossed in congealed confection.

Seven years later, on the opposite bank of the East River, a sphinx is erected in an abandoned sugar factory.

II. IN THE SHADE OF THE SUGAR PLANT Here are three landscapes, landscapes “complete” and broken from one another as a paragraph is. And at the edge of town, the camp of the gypsies.

— Susan Stewart, On Longing, 1993

On May 10th, 2014, the first sculpture installation by artist Kara Walker was unveiled on the corner of Kent Avenue and South 1st Street in the New York City neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Commissioned by the public arts organization Creative Time and housed within the decaying, gothic nave of the abandoned Domino Sugar Factory, the sculpture bears the following unabridged title: At the behest of Creative Time Kara E. Walker has confected: A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant

Measuring 75 feet long and molded out of 160,000 pounds of refined cane sugar mounted on a polystyrene core, Walker’s sculpture depicts the massive nude caricature of a black woman poised in the evocative feline repose of an Egyptian sphinx. Head bound in a kerchief and buttocks exploding almost pneumatically behind her, Walker’s sphinx speaks at once in two parallel languages of black female identity. On the one hand, there is the figure of the “mammy:” the 19th and early 20th century trope of the matronly black caretaker tasked with raising the children and minding the homes of her affluent white employers. On the other, there is the play to the haunting and ongoing objectification of black women as little more than sexual objects. It is no coincidence that Walker chose to compose her sphinx’s breasts and thighs so that they billow out like eroticized zeppelins, sugar-coated nipples and vulva orchestrated provocatively at eye-level with the viewer, as if daring us to take a fatal taste.

This tantalizing, nauseating sweetness is as much Walker’s medium as it is her message. From the moment one enters the Domino Sugar Factory, it is immediately clear that the sculpture and its setting are deeply and irrevocably intertwined. Rebuilt in 1882 on the foundations of the original 1856 factory, the 90,000 square-foot complex of the Domino Sugar Factory was, for a time, the single largest sugar refinery in the world. Situated squarely at one vertex of the old triangle trade route—the network through which slaves, sugar, and liquid capital were once circulated from Africa to the Indies and back to the Northeast United States—the Brooklyn plant was by 1870 producing upwards of three million pounds of sugar a day, at that time more than half of the sugar consumed in the entire United States. Over a century later, visitors to Walker’s installation are still assailed by the acrid fumes of burnt sugar and insecticide, trails of petrified molasses clinging like amber fossils to the rusted walls.

By placing sculpture and setting in direct dialogue with one another, Walker has crafted her Sugar Baby as a shrine to our

collective consumption in all its twisted facets. The sculpture’s exaggerated and eroticized curves lay bare our lust for the carnal consumption of bodies; its visual association with a system of racialized domesticity, our impetuous consumption of service and labor; its sugar-coated body, our insatiable and infantile consumption of processed commodity and raw material. As Nato Thompson, Chief Curator of the installation, writes in his Curatorial Statement on the project, “[the Sugar Baby] speaks of power, race, bodies, women, sexuality, slavery, sugar refining, sugar consumption, wealth inequity, and industrial might that uses the human body to get what it needs no matter the cost to life and limb.”

And yet, while so much of the press and commentary surrounding Walker’s exhibit has focused on the sculpture’s provocative deployment of the iconography of black labor and racial caricature, critics seem to have missed what’s right in front of them. Why a sphinx? That is to say, how can we understand the Sugar Baby’s Black-ness in the puzzling context of its equally apparent Egyptian-ness? How might we see Walker’s invocation of the sphinx as a statement not simply on the racial violence of antebellum America and Jim Crow, but on a broader system of violence leading all the way back to the very foundations of the Western aesthetic tradition? However, to pursue this line of thinking and draw out the subtle threads Walker seems to be weaving, we must turn our attention back across the East River to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to the cavernous concrete pavilion of its Sackler Wing.

III. AFTER THE DELUGE I own somewhat similar things to this, and I have always liked them. This is a rather more sophisticated version than the ones that I’ve seen, and I thought it was quite beautiful … the total composition has a very contemporary, very Western look to it. It’s the kind of thing, I think that goes very well with … contemporary Western things. It would look very good in a modern apartment or house.

— David Rockefeller, in the catalog for “Perspectives: Angles on African Art,” 1987

Around the year 15 B.C.E. Emperor Augustus commissioned the construction of a small temple honoring him along the west bank of the Nile in the southern region of Egypt, then known as Nubia. Two millennia later, in 1965, threatened by rising floodwaters in the wake of the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the Temple of Dendur was removed from its resting place 50 miles south of Aswan and shipped block by block across the Atlantic to New York City. In 1978, the temple debuted in the newly completed Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Designed by the then fashionable architectural firm of Kevin Roche, John Dinkerloo & Associates, the 400-foot-long postmodern pavilion engulfs the temple like the unscalable sandpit in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 film adaptation of Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes—the sandstone structure pathetically imprisoned within its yawning cavity. The effect was not lost on critics. As Paul Goldberger phrased it in his 1979 critique of the installation for the New York Times, “The finished Sackler Wing has turned out to be an uncomfortable, vast space, much too big for the temple it houses … The ancient Egyptian building cowers in the huge modern

Gabriel Samach “Suicide Demo for Williamsburg” 11

space, looking as awkward as a person dining alone in an enormous banquet hall.”

But the Temple of Dendur has seldom had to worry about dining alone. Indeed, what might have initially seemed a gross excess of space has since proved a great utilitarian benefit. For those who can afford it, the Sackler Wing can be seamlessly converted into an entertainment venue, the otherwise vacuous space easily adapted to accommodate dinner and dancing for as many as 800 guests. And so, whatever its original purpose may have been, the Sackler Wing has come to find itself the unlikely host of some of Manhattan’s most lavish social events, the Temple of Dendur conveniently serving as an exotic, impossibly rare adornment.

What the story of Dendur ultimately lays bare is the powerful entanglement of preservation, ornamentation, and canonization undergirding the Western approach to a certain strain of African art. Just as the imperial nations of the 19th century made a hobby of erecting stolen Egyptian obelisks in the grand capitals of Europe, the “preservation” of Dendur marks a more modern chapter in the Western colonization of Egyptian culture through its very assimilation into the Western canon. By placing Egyptian artifacts within the meticulously curated enclosure of a museum— shielding them from the corrosive effects of the African sun and the dangerously unpredictable Nile—the West has not simply removed Egypt from Africa, it has removed Africa from Egypt in an unspoken ritual of purification, cleansing these objects of their African origin and refining them into something collectible, something Western, something safe, something white.

So it is with sandstone, and so it is with sugarcane. “Sugar crystallizes something in our American Soul,” Walker notes in her interview with Blake Gopnik of The New York Times. “It is emblematic of all Industrial Processes. And of the idea of becoming white. White Being equated with pure and ‘true’ it takes a lot of energy to turn brown things into white things. A lot of pressure.” Just as the Sackler Wing provides a space for the purification of artifact into high art, the Domino Sugar Factory provided a site to enact

the same cleansing process on the byproducts of luxury agriculture and slave labor. If raw sugarcane can be said to still bear traces of its harvester’s sweat and blood, the refinement process washes it all away, polishing the pulp to a crystalline glisten and rendering it at last suitable for enshrinement in the meticulous catalogue of the family pantry.

In spite of this reality, in the face of this reality, the Sugar Baby does not hold her tongue. If, as Tom Wolfe argues in his biting 1984 essay “The Worship of Art: Notes on a New God,” the Temple of Dendur stands as an unwitting tabernacle to high art as modern religion, where medieval tithes have been replaced by the corporate sponsorships of museum wings and pious pilgrimages by the migratory herds of camera-toting tourists, Walker’s statue is rather a totem to the bloodthirsty Hauka demons of Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres Fous. Like the Nigerian cultists in Rouch’s documentary, Walker’s Sugar Baby acts as a conduit for the instruments of European colonial and industrial power, bringing them forth in a grotesque performance of madness and violence. The Hauka ceremony of performing the instruments of Western power through the language of African mysticism becomes a means of embodying the forced hybridity of the colonial subject: the Hauka is the manifestation of the colonist’s precarious position as neither entirely Western nor entirely African, but rather some unclassifiable hybrid of the two. If the Western demons of Rouch’s Hauka are the locomotive, the British general, and the colonial commissioner, Walker adds to the list the industrial sugar factory, the Egyptian sphinx, and the institution of Western art itself.

Taking this idea of embodied hybridity a step further, we see how Walker’s jarring synthesis of both Black and Egyptian imagery serves also as a sort of adjectival unlatching in the vein of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. By unhooking the tightly bound package locking noun and adjective into a single linguistic token— Homer’s insistence, for example, that blood is always black, that the sea is always unwearying—Carson’s coupling of nouns with new and unconventional descriptors serves as a sort of semiotic liberation,

The Sugar Baby photo credit: Andrew Burton, NPR 12 Gabriel Samach “Suicide Demo for Williamsburg”

opening up subjects to new modes of identification, new modes of being. What Carson does for the West’s Greek and Homeric heritage, Walker does even more violently for our adopted and re-appropriated roots in Egypt. For Walker, the supposed liberation we see in Carson’s work is no cause for optimism, but rather a means of forcing us to lay our cards on the table. By taking the figure of the Egyptian sphinx and translating it into the distinctly American language of the domestic and hyper-sexualized Black stereotype, Walker insists that the sphinx not be Egyptian, but Black in the most horrific and offensive terms possible. Walker is demanding that viewers defile the sphinx, undo the process of canonization, and come to grips with our complicity in the system of racial violence and subjugation that has made this supposed refinement of black bodies into art seem so necessary and so natural in the first place.

IV. CURRENCIES OF CARNIVAL AND QUOTATION I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river.

— Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1939

At this point, there still remains a missing piece to the puzzle: Why Williamsburg? Why did Kara Walker choose for her Sugar Baby this bohemian nursery? What nourishing pap might we find in the burnt molasses soil of the East River’s banks? In essence, what happens when we recognize the sculpture’s installation in Brooklyn not simply as an arbitrary and innocuous choice—as if an artistic choice is ever truly arbitrary or innocuous—but as an active participant in the discursive web Walker is weaving?

In his 1992 novel Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau uses the setting of the industrial shantytown as the stage for what he calls a Creole discourse: a discourse whose hybridity thrives in the labyrinthine corridors of industrial sprawl precisely because it opposes the work of the urban planner, the organizer of urban networks, the layer of grids. Articulating the divide between Fortde-France and the imagined squatter village of Texaco, Chamoiseau writes, In the center, an occidental urban logic, all lined up, ordered, strong like the French language. On the other side, Creole’s open profusion according to Texaco’s logic. Mingling these two tongues, dreaming of all tongues, the Creole city speaks a new language in secret and no longer fears Babel. Here the well-learned, domineering, geometrical grid of the urban grammar; over there the crown of a mosaic culture to be unveiled, caught in the hieroglyphics of cement, crate wood, asbestos.

This Creole language—this mosaic and hieroglyphic tongue—is the language of the urban bricoleur. It is the heteroglossic discourse of the industrial sprawl, of the belching smog and oozing brick of the

sugar refinery. It is the language not of Olmsted’s park or Roche’s pavilion, but of their invisible custodians, of the hidden gears and limbs which ensured the machinery of Manhattan’s bourgeois urbanity kept running, pumping electricity into every home and sugar onto every table. It is the language of the periphery, of the industrial Brooklyn jungle which once lay a world away across the East River.

Taking up this notion of the city outskirts as teeming with an untamed hybrid discourse—of Williamsburg as the birth place of an unrestricted language that would otherwise be impossible in Manhattan—we fast find ourselves at the doorstep of the asylum we’ve been tentatively circling all this time: that of the avant garde.

In his 1993 book Avant Garde Theatre: 1892-1992, Christopher Innes notes that, “perhaps paradoxically, what defines the avant garde movement is not overtly modern qualities … but primitivism.”

Drawing on the writings of the Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin, Innes notes that this avant garde project of recovering the primitive, of overturning contemporary means of expression and reverting to an earlier, more essential mode of communication, is ultimately an exercise in the carnivalesque, in the saturnalian inversion of power dynamics and the ecstatic transgression of social boundaries. As Innes paraphrases Bakhtin, “this carnival spirit is expressed in gargantuan themes of physical appetite and excremental or genital imagery, corrosive parody, and abusive language, together with violent shifts of tone or the juxtaposition of contradictory fragments, inversion and materialistic hyperbole.”

Corrosive parody. Contradictory fragments. Gargantuan physical appetite. In almost all respects, Walker’s Sugar Baby exemplifies the carnivalesque to the syllable. In its exaggerated scale, its grotesque language of racial caricature, its play to carnal appetite, the Sugar Baby stitches together a tapestry of transgression from the scraps of carnivalesque selvage strewn across Brooklyn’s landscape.

Off the grid and rooted in the filthy soil of industrial labor, the Sugar Baby thrives and bursts out of the polluted earth like some hideous carnivorous plant. Brooklyn is sustenance for the monstrous sphinx, its polluted biome offering the promise of a liberated existence where the filth is finally brought to the surface and exposed for all to see.

Like nested matryoshka dolls, Williamsburg, the Domino Sugar Factory, and the Sugar Baby seem interlocked in a dialogue operating on three scales at once, connecting together the artistic, the industrial, and the urban such that each level becomes necessary to the construction of the others. And yet, while it would be deceptively easy to see the relationship between Walker’s sculpture and the bohemian jungle of Williamsburg as one of complete correspondence—of perfect symbiosis between organism and habitat—there in fact exists an enormously powerful tension at work between the two. Indeed, the ecosystem of Williamsburg lies not in some stable equilibrium with the primitive, but rather in a precarious balance slipping inch by inch. And it’s here that the sweetness of our optimism for the Williamsburg avant garde quickly begins to leave a chemical aftertaste.

The tension lies in the very atmosphere of carnivalesque liberation Brooklyn so seductively offers. In her 1993 book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Susan Stewart notes that the motif of the Bakhtinian carnival finds its discursive partner in the world of repetition and hollow quotation. Stewart argues that carnival and quotation function as two sides of a dialectical coin: the former serving as a mechanism for disillusionment and upheaval; the latter, a device for the restoration of meaning through the reestablishment of clearly Gabriel Samach “Suicide Demo for Williamsburg” 13 text 13

delineated boundaries. “The quotation,” Stewart writes, “lends both integrity and limit to the utterance by means of its ‘marks.’ In detaching the utterance from its context of origin, the quotation marks contextualize the utterance, giving it both integrity and boundary.”

If Williamsburg is the carnival where we are allowed to enact the ultimate transgression, the breaking of grids and the liberation of discourse, the quotation is its currency. Like admission tokens, quotations serve as the minted units of language tethering us to a subterranean economy of meaning. The carnival of the Sugar Baby is not exempt. By situating her within the industrial enclosure of the Domino Sugar Factory, Walker’s invocation of the instruments of industrial exploitation and the cruelty of commodity is at the same time an invocation of the factory as quotation. The Domino Sugar Factory—not unlike a vintage graphic tee or a mason jar of Crystal Pepsi—is a bracketed utterance, “a severed head, a voice whose authority is grounded in itself,” as Stewart writes. Walker did not sculpt the factory, but rather quotes it. The factory’s power as a statement lies in the saccharine patina of its brick, in its confinement of a racial and industrial history within the irrefutable solidity of its architecture. The carnival of the Sugar Baby thrives because the factory gives it form, its anguished cries amplified in the echo chamber of a colossal set of quotation marks.

But what happens when this balance between carnival and quotation finally slips? What happens when the carnival finally skips town, when the circus tents are whisked away and we find ourselves alone in the abandoned parking lot of an empty fairground, our pockets still jangling with this now meaningless currency of quotation?

What happens when they tear down the last sugar factory?

V. THIRTY-THREE ROTATIONS PER MINUTE Since he deserted the concert stage in 1964, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould has confined his work to records … [His work] is fixed on a mechanically repeatable object, which controls the most obvious signs of immediacy (Gould’s voice, the peacock style of a Liszt transcription, the brash informality of an interview packed along with a disembodied performance) beneath a dumb, anonymous, and disposable disc of black plastic.

— Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 1983

Ten blocks north of Domino, near the intersection of Kent and North 9th, the Rough Trade record store lies hidden behind the corrugated industrial shutters of a once abandoned Williamsburg warehouse. Racks of records trace labyrinthine coils across the store’s 15,000 square-foot concrete floor, rows periodically punctuated by the bolted stalks of upright listening stations, designer headphones dangling off like ripe fruit. An elevated iron catwalk along the perimeter peddles limited-release zines and imported lifestyle magazines. Overhead, massive industrial shipping containers cantilever above the checkout kiosk, glass windows revealing the fashionable managerial offices within. A large poster advertises the upcoming shows for the store’s adjoining 300-person concert venue, bar, and coffee shop.

Tucked off to the side of the store, a small gallery hosts a rotating series of album promotions and art installations. The month of the Sugar Baby’s debut, the gallery hosted a small exhibit on the New York City band LCD Soundsystem to commemorate the vinyl release of the band’s 2011 farewell concert at Madison Square 14 Gabriel Samach “Suicide Demo for Williamsburg” Portfolio: Christa Rousseva

Garden. Five turntables arranged around the gallery played the uncut four-hour recording on repeat, sounds of recorded applause and crowd hiss leaking from unused headphones, slabs of petrified petroleum locked in perpetual needle-guided rotation.

We find in the manicured halls of the Rough Trade record store Domino by way of Dendur—a Sackler-esque mausoleum to the industrial primitivism of a long-departed carnival, now refined into the figure of a curated quotation. As if rescued and shielded from time’s rising floodwaters, each record is displayed like a little shrink-wrapped relic; each spontaneous outburst, each moment of artistic transgression, locked in the infinitely repeatable groove of a crude, finite plate of sludge. Sealed at last in tarblack amber, LCD Soundsystem’s final show is now made perpetually final, a death infinitely reiterated on five glossy plastic discs, enacted over and over again at the drop of a needle.

If the bloodshed of the triangle trade is the Sugar Baby’s past, the refinement of black bodies through bourgeois canonization, its present, then it is here that we begin to see its future. Carnival transgression evacuated and reduced to mere quotation, Walker’s Sugar Baby is a time bomb doomed to self-annihilation. For like all works of the avant-garde, it is only a matter of time before this subversive primitivism is itself made the object of a cleansing, before its toxic reek is sealed off behind the climate-controlled partition of a museum and made into a banquet ornament for some future Rupert Murdoch and his cohort. Before it becomes infected with Stewart’s “social disease of nostalgia” and the evidence of atrocity is reduced to so many fashionable collector’s items and tchotchkes.

This is the self-annihilating fate of Williamsburg. This is the fate of the jungle after the factory is demolished and the waterside condominiums have taken its place: molasses bricks enshrined somewhere across the ocean in a Kevin Roche pavilion. By effacing the industrial object as a tangible monument to its own congealed labor, by replacing it with the repetition of a repetition—the hollow quotation of an industrial aesthetic ripped from the catalog of some chic design magazine—Williamsburg is doomed to silence. It is doomed to a history whose unpaid stewards rot in unmarked graves beneath waterfront high-rises. Glossed over in the vinyl sheen of newly laid asphalt.

VI. ELEGY

And so the Sugar Baby is consigned to suicide. It resists the curator and the grid layer in death, in the absolute finitude of its mere two-month lifespan. Better to melt away in sweet oblivion, the Sugar Baby cries, to cast my puddle of syrupy runoff into the turbid throws of the East River, to die before a concrete and glass pavilion can be erected around me. Before the cruel rigor mortis of our collective nostalgia seals its limbs in pretty sphinx-like permanence.

And so we will offer a final elegy to the drowning Sugar Baby, whose rusting helmet of a factory was stuck too tightly around its suffocating mammy head. And we will sing a funeral dirge to all the voices that drown with it, wrought perhaps in the sonorous poetry of Jean Toomer’s Cane, Lets call him great when the water shall have been all drawn off. Lets build him a monument and set it in the ooze where he goes down. A monument of hewn oak, carved in nigger-heads. Lets open our throats, brother, and sing “Deep River” when he goes down.

Alexandratext Scarangella 15 15

The Faculty Portrait

Kelly Oh / Professor Michael Lewis (Art) Lewis: Maybe I should say it’s an act of performance art? By having Kelly photographing me as I was (illegally) smoking in a college building, she was simultaneously making herself a witness to a crime, me a criminal, and the photograph the crucial piece of evidence.

My course, “The Human Image: Photographing People and Their Stories,” is ostensibly about what the title describes. Every photo tells a story, but the story is, to varying degrees, a lie. The image is an artificial construct of lighting, camera angle, pose, and a myriad of other subjective choices made by the photographer. The narrative that the viewer takes from the image may have nothing, or everything, to do with the person in front of the lens. My students understand this from the start—the person with the camera has the power to create fiction, and shoulders the responsibility.

So, my class is really about interacting with strangers in a substantial way, while making technical, aesthetic, and, ultimately, personal judgments, quickly. Not surprisingly, there’s some anxiety associated with the process. Of course, I don’t throw them into the deep end right off the bat. Students begin by photographing themselves, and then each other. But ultimately, they have to face someone with the potential to make them uncomfortable. This is the gleeful purpose of the “faculty portrait assignment”—plan and conduct a formal studio portrait session with a professor.

In some ways, working in the studio is the simplest type of portraiture one can do. Everything is under the control of the photographer. But the student also has to direct a subject who, in the normal course of events, is the person used to giving the directions. Choices have to made, equipment has to be adjusted and function properly, and the time is limited by busy faculty schedules. Terror occasionally ensues, and from this role reversal, both photographer and subject learn, and create.

-Barry Goldstein Visiting Professor of Humanities 16 “The Faculty Portrait”

Izzy Davila / Professor Gregory Mitchell (Anthropology/Sociology)

Ava Anderson / Professor Amal Eqeiq (Comparative Literature) Anderson: One thing that I took away is that even if you are photographing someone who is normally the authority and holding the power, when that person is being photographed, he or she can feel very vulnerable and nervous.

“The Faculty Portrait� 17

Doris Mbabu / Professor Tendai Muparutsa (Music)

Rachel Lee / Professor Seulghee Lee (English) 18 “The Faculty Portrait”

Kelly Wang / Professor Satyan Devadoss (Math) “The Faculty Portrait� 19

Sequence

The house where my mother grew up was swallowed by the sea. She said no matter. She hated that house. This was how it was meant to be, with salt water lapping at the porch steps and growing strange-patterned mold on the walls. Salt water sliding into the kitchen. Salt water licking bare the bones of the house. The house was built in 1962 by a man who beat his wife and daughter until the daughter ran away. The man died and his wife sold the house. She used this money to buy land far from the shore and spent her days there in silence. One day the daughter came back to the house and stood there. The lawn looked nice. A small red flag stuck into one corner of the grass warned her of pesticides. She saw a woman watching her through the window, spoon balanced in her hand. The sea began to rise soon thereafter although no one would notice for a few years. The new family’s son, wiry and spirited, splashed ecstatic in the ocean. Charts showed precipitous rises in precipitation. A hurricane hit and blew the shutters off the house. A tree pitched onto the roof. The grandmother, who had been living in the top floor, was killed. Electric wires littered the street for days. News channels called the scene post-apocalyptic. Environmental scholars referenced the sublime. People from up north with their summer homes flooded the real estate market, afraid of losing their long-term investments. My mother too moved inland. Prices dropped.

Restaurants closed. Gulls circled, mourning the sand. The family, unable to recover, also put their house on the market. They sold it for a pittance. The dolphins stopped swimming near the shore. They must have moved into deeper waters. No one really knew. But plenty remembered spotting sleek grey bodies through the waves—so close to the swimmers—and how it was so much like seeing a secret.

20 Sophia Rosenfeld “Sequence” • Naomi Medina-Jaudes Questionable

Two Poems by Sophia Rosenfeld

Honest Conversation

We meet in the diner where we had our first date, and he fills me in on the last five years.

It’s all about replacing bad addictions with better ones.

Did I know he’s gotten into music? Plays bass guitar, sings too.

He really loves it. His parents say hi, by the way.

And he wants this conversation to be honest.

Am I dating someone? Good, he’s glad to hear that.

He’s so happy to see me.

I ask him about that time, a week after we broke up, when I saw him making out with Jenna Lee on the sidewalk in front of my house even though neither of them lived near me, and why did he do that?

I guess to hurt you, he says.

See, he went to rehab earlier this year and this really smart old dude explained that everything boils down to just two things: Fear and love.

So I guess I’m a fucking coward!

He takes a swig of Coca Cola. Sorry if I’m being glib.

Jesus, this is hard. I wish I had a drink or something.

But hey, you know I loved you— And when he talks about love it’s the same way he talks about shooting up for the first time.

That crisp March day. His sunlit bedroom. Nothing on his mind but the clean-cut edges of the universe.

I hope you know I loved you Jesus, I loved you so much

Sophia Rosenfeld “Honest Conversation” • Naomi Medina-Jaudes Questionable 21

A New Dog

by Story Ponvert

LILY’S dog had been sick for two weeks, but it wasn’t until the storm struck that Lily realized it was going to die. Sheila, a Dalmatian she’d owned for nine years, didn’t bark at the thunder like usual, even though it was the heaviest storm the town had seen in over two decades. Instead, the dog lay prone in the living room, whimpering sometimes, shutting its eyes. Whenever thunder clapped, Sheila’s ears twitched.

Sheila died two days later. Lily went downstairs that morning and found her lying on her side in the front hallway, her tail tucked inward, her legs reaching out for something that was not there. For a moment, Lily was unsure whether Sheila was dead or simply sleeping, but when she knelt down and saw the dog’s eyes wide open, she understood.

She called the vet’s office and was told that someone would come to pick up the dog. Lily explained that she had to get to work.

“Okay,” said the woman on the other end. “Well, we can come by now or later. It’s up to you.”

“Just come by later,” Lily said after a moment. “I really have to get to work.”

Half an hour later she pulled up to Vigo’s, the grocery where she was working over the summer. She went inside and saw Wendey frantically bagging spinach at one of the counters.

“Hi, Wendey,” Lily said. “I’m sorry I’m late. It was—my dog died.”

“Oh, my god!” said Wendey. “I’m so sorry! But, why are you even here?”

“Rick’s already mad at me for missing that day last week. I don’t think I can miss another on such short notice.”

That wasn’t why Lily had come to work. Seeing Sheila in the hallway that morning had upset her more than she’d expected.

She’d known the dog was sick, and it had always been her mother’s dog, not hers. But her mother was in California now, and Sheila was Lily’s for the summer. Now the dog was dead, and Lily wasn’t sure what came next.

“Okay,” said Wendey, looking confused. “Well, take that counter. We’re swamped this morning.”

Twenty minutes later, Lily was bagging groceries rhythmically and easily. The crowd had died down, too, and Wendey took the opportunity to start talking.

“Are you going to get a new dog?” she said. Lily remembered that Wendey had only ever had goldfish for pets.

“I don’t know,” said Lily, bagging a carton of milk for a man whose ears were very red. “It’s really up to my mom. I mean, I’m leaving for college soon anyway.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Wendey. “I’m so excited for college. But, I guess… it’s also just gotten me thinking about all the stuff I wish I did here, you know?”

Lily looked at the blueberries in her hand. “I guess,” she said, and handed them to Wendey. “She was a good dog.”

“You were always complaining about how bad she was,” said Wendey.

22 Story Ponvert “A New Dog”

“Yeah, but that was just, you know, kidding around.” Lily had always wondered how much the extra e in Wendey’s name accounted for her personality. She wondered what life would be like if she, too, had been given one. Liley.

“Oh, okay, I get it,” said Wendey. “So you really loved her?”

“I mean, yeah,” said Lily. “I had her for a long time. It was nice having someone around besides my mom.” The man with the ears coughed slightly.

“I’m sorry about your dog,” he said. His voice was as red as his ears. “But you’re taking an awful long time with that arugula.”

“I’m sorry,” said Lily, stuffing it in a bag, shooting Wendey a glance.

After the man left Wendey spoke up again. “Well, if you do get a new dog, whatever you do, don’t do what my cousins in Arizona did.”

“What did they do?” asked Lily.

“Their dog died,” said Wendey, her eyes widening, “and when they got a new one, they named it after the old one!”

“Oh, that is weird,” said Lily. “I don’t want to do that.

Besides, if I do get a new one, I think it might be a boy.”

“Ooh, you could name it Garth,” said Wendey. “I always wanted a pet named Garth. Or a baby. But my landlords don’t allow pets.”

“Maybe I’ll name it Garthe,” said Lily.

“Yeah,” said Wendey. “Or, if you get a girl, name it Daisy.

Because then you’ll both have flower names.”

“Yeah, Daisey,” said Lily.

Lily called the vet at the end of her shift so she wouldn’t have to wait at home with Sheila for long. When she opened the door, Sheila was exactly where she’d been that morning. Lily didn’t know what she had expected. The dog’s paws were still stretched out desperately, her eyes still staring ahead. It was only now Lily saw they were fixed on a toy, a shredded purple starfish, which was sitting across the hallway underneath a chair. The starfish, according to Lily’s mom, had once been plump and smiling. Sheila had mutilated it while Lily was still young, but the collection of residual scraps had remained the dog’s favorite toy. Lily didn’t know if it was better that it had been there for Sheila to see or not.

Through the window, Lily saw a car pull up and two men get out. Already bent over to adjust Sheila’s paws, Lily slid to her knees. The men were large, with short hair, one dark and one blond. They didn’t know Sheila’s name. Lily looked down at Sheila and heard the doorbell ring.

She had left those eyes open all day, she realized, and closed them now, pulling each eyelid shut slowly. Now Sheila really did look asleep. Lily reached over and picked up the starfish, and placed it next to Sheila’s face. She straightened Sheila’s tail and tucked each paw in closer. The doorbell rang again. Lily looked once more at Sheila, and then got up and opened the door. “I found her like this,” she said, pointing into the hallway. “I’ve had her forever. What am I going to do?”

Brianna Rettig Curves • Angles 23

CLEANING UP GLASS: THE PERFORMANCE OF

JOSHUA TORRES

by Brianna Rettig

In January 2015 Joshua Torres asked me to shoot photos of his most recent musical, Revenge of the Inner City Catholic Schoolgirls.

In my first semester at Williams I had already learned that whatever space Josh works in is bound to have an atmosphere entirely his own, where camp and punk mingle like the aluminum foil of Warhol’s Factory welded together with the furious energy of a CBGB concert, and Christmas lights are almost certainly involved. Revenge was not an exception.

“Everyone in here!” Josh was calling to his cast when I arrived, as the actors grouped onto what served as center stage— an area created by crudely taping strands of Christmas lights to the Director’s Studio floor in the approximate shape of a stage. To the side, a prop table supported bottles of booze, Christ icons, a skull, and a loaf of wonder bread.

This was the fourth production Josh put on at Williams and the second he wrote himself, after Don’t Tell Tommy, a story of a group of school friends trapped by repression and drug abuse. Don’t Tell Tommy, which Josh produced in January of his junior year, was based on some of his own experiences and done in the signature manic style he had developed for his first production, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Halloween before.

Rocky Horror and The Nightmare before Christmas, Josh’s other Halloween production, were opportunities for him to put on the kinds of warped and inebriated shows he delights in, equally proportioned as theater, concerts, and dizzying dance parties. Rehearsals were optional.

24 Brianna Rettig “Cleaning Up Glass: The Performance of Josh Torres”

But it’s the shows Josh writes himself that have attracted the most attention. As Josh describes it, Revenge is the story of a group of would-be radicals who “are all killed by the combined forces of White Supremacy, the Patriarchy, Capitalism, the Prison-Industrial Complex, and Satan.” The show is more overtly political than Don’t Tell Tommy, and speaks to Josh’s increasing role at the center of some of Williams’ most heated debates. This isn’t a position he claims so much as seems to fill naturally by virtue of his energy and outspokenness. And it means that whatever Josh does, I want to see it.

That’s how I found myself huddled with the cast of Revenge of the Inner City Catholic Schoolgirls in January waiting for an anxious crowd to walk into the Director’s Studio to see inside Josh’s mind.

“Now, I know everyone is scared and anxious and… scared,” Josh was saying. “We lost an actor. And we don’t know what we’re doing!”

The tension in the cast was palpable.

Someone interjected, “Josh, the audience can probably hear you out there.”

Josh looked at his cast mate, and then grabbed the microphone without hesitation and held it to his mouth. “We don’t know what we’re doing!” he shouted into it, for all the waiting spectators to hear.

I sat down with Josh on a Sunday evening in March to learn more about him and his work. This interview was edited for clarity.

interviewer The first production you wrote at Williams was Don’t Tell Tommy your junior year. Can you tell me how that came about? josh It’s called Don’t Tell Tommy because I desperately wanted to tell Tommy all this stuff, but I just couldn’t. I was going through the worst depression and insomnia ever during sophomore year. So, I would write these songs about what was causing me complete panic attacks in the middle of Paresky, and I would post them online and tell all of my friends to watch them, and I would hope this person would change his behavior. It did not happen, but by the end of that, I had all these songs chronicling how happy I was at the beginning of the year, to my attempted suicide, to Oh, I’m not dead, now what? I brought some scenes I wrote to my psychiatrist before I stopped going. I started writing the show because I needed some kind of perspective about it. interviewer How did you feel once you were done writing it? josh I thought, Oh, this is such a bad idea. I can’t perform this. He’s going to come back, and then he’s going to know.

class, and there was a final and I hadn’t slept that entire week. This was after I had already tried to kill myself. So I hadn’t slept but I just got up and went to class.

Part of that was in there. It was part of this speech. I shortened the timeline, but it was something like, “I tried to kill myself last night, and now I’m at my theater final by 8:00 in the morning and nobody noticed.”

So a lot of people felt that.

You don’t just straight-up talk about what that show is about. There’s hidden homosexual urges, there’s alcoholism, there’s rampant drug use, amphetamine use, anxieties about becoming part of the capitalist industrial system! interviewer These were all real things for you. josh Most people know me as very fun. At that point, I was known as crazy, fun, hedonist Joshua because I was performing as that. I put on this show and no one knows what it’s about and they come and see it and it’s got nothing to do really with any of those

topics. It’s super sad. People responded to that. And that was that.

Josh proposed moving the interview to the Director’s Studio in the ’62 Center so he could show me the space he works in. josh Here we are! They’ve had to kick me out on multiple occasions. interviewer So, which production did you first put on in here? josh Basically, my friend and I wanted to do the Rocky Horror show, so I just went around to my friends and asked, “Hey, do you want to be in this?”

I had no idea what I was doing. Putting on a show is so difficult. At first, no one was showing up for rehearsals, no one was doing anything, and then I kicked our pianist out of the show for personal reasons. So we were missing like half the how. We finally had a rehearsal where most of the people were there and it sucked. It

But, you know what, I was done. I am done waiting for people to invite me to do these things. I’m done waiting for people to care about my experience beyond finding me hot or finding me quirky. It’s over. I’m not performing for that anymore.

I put it on and people liked it! I really didn’t even think my songs were good enough. No one ever taught me how to play the guitar.

I taught myself, so all I can really play are barre chords. And they loved it! Ate it up.

There were people crying. interviewer Why do you think it resonated so much? josh A lot of those people knew me, and there were things in that play that happened, that some people had seen happening and didn’t know what they were a part of.

There was this one time I was in theater Brianna Rettig “Cleaning Up Glass: The Performance of Josh Torres” 25

was horrible. I ended up slapping someone in the face by mistake. It was awkward. I wanted to cry, but I was holding it together because people are going to come see this tomorrow. If I cancel this, I’m fucked. No one will ever do one of my shows again.

So somebody found a karaoke disc and we were saved.

Five minutes before the start, there was nobody there. So I thought, Well, it’s going to be a wild time for those two people. I go take a smoke and I come back and they’re getting more chairs! We need more chairs!

Where did these people come from? It just kept growing and growing and we had this giant audience and people stayed for the whole show and they danced afterwards.

Then I did Don’t Tell Tommy. We did it right over here. I took my room and I put it here. interviewer You just recreated your room in the Director’s Studio? josh Yeah. If you watch the recording you’ll see it. I had my bed here! I was sleeping here too.

get up, rehearse, and go back to sleep. Get back up, rehearse, sleep. The cast didn’t know until after. That’s when things started getting very strangely meta. interviewer What does that mean? josh That’s when the real Tommy actually showed up. He was supposed to be in another country. And he’s like, “I want to see your show.” I asked the cast, would it be helpful to see him, and they said yeah, it’d be helpful. So he comes and he’s literally holding the lights on my friend playing herself rejecting him—a scene from last year. Everyone was looking at him like, Does he know?

Then I did Nightmare Before Christmas.

That was everything! I’d been planning on doing that since I got here freshman year. interviewer I remember walking into that and wondering why the Christmas lights were taped to the ground. When everyone got up and started dancing, they all got crushed.

There was glass everywhere.

me gone like they’ve told me, well, you keep giving it to me. So either it’s mine or you’re lying to me!

So, yes, this is the Director’s Studio. This is where I did all the general recordings for my first show. That piano covering—I slept in. There was a hole in it and I would put my face through it. I’d put it on my bed and my bed was hidden behind the couch. It was pretty sweet.

There were a couple of close calls with the janitors, who have declared all-out war on me.

Oh look! Memories.

Josh showed me a mask of Jesus from Revenge of the Inner City Catholic Schoolgirls. josh You know, I think Jesus and I would get along. We’re both countercultural.

People at this school would have called him a horrible activist. “You’re not being inclusive enough! You remember that one time Jesus flipped over tables? That completely invalidates all of his points.” interviewer What was it like working on Revenge of the Inner City Catholic Schoolgirls? That play deals with so much. josh I was never interested in making art that was entertaining. That was not the point. I did Don’t Tell Tommy because I desperately wanted to not have that conversation. I did Revenge of the Inner City Catholic School Girls because I didn’t know any other way to contribute meaningfully to the part of this campus that is trying to wake people the fuck up to what is happening interviewer Do you think it was successful?

interviewer You were actually sleeping here? josh I was actually sleeping here. I didn’t have a job. I took the month off, so I would just

josh Everywhere! Apparently, I didn’t clean up enough because I got all these angry emails.

I had to deal with that.

Then I convinced them to let me do it again. If they truly hated me, if they wanted

26 Brianna Rettig “Cleaning Up Glass: The Performance of Josh Torres”

josh I don’t know how successful it was for all people. I don’t know. The theater community did not know what they were getting into. Last year, the theater people were the ones who laughed the most at my show. They enjoyed it the most. This year, I don’t think they did. They were more like, What is this? I got mail that said, “Don’t Tell Tommy was nice! This is terrible!” I’ve always wanted hate mail.

interviewer Which do you think was harder to share?

Revenge or Don’t Tell Tommy?

need to be killed. We need to annihilate them. Which isn’t what Satanism is about, which shows a little bit more of the ignorance of this crowd

josh I was more scared… I don’t know. I remember with Don’t Tell Tommy I was horrified— horrified people wouldn’t like it. People are going to come and just hate it, hate me, please don’t hate me.

I knew Revenge of the Inner City Catholic School Girls was going to be more controversial. With Don’t Tell Tommy, who’s not going to be empathetic towards suicide? Revenge dealt with a lot more radical shit. Well, actually, I don’t think I put in that much radical stuff! Some people were disappointed, like, “Why didn’t you talk about the black panthers? Where were the black panthers?” I know, I know. I’m sorry. interviewer I wasn’t there when you reportedly went on a Satanist rant when the Pro-Life group tabled in Paresky. What happened there? josh I was trying to get them to tell me who they were with and they wouldn’t tell me they were with Williams Pro-Life. Clearly they were with Williams Pro-Life, but there was no sign. They were presenting themselves as this non-biased group. They’re not advocating for the kind of social infrastructure we would need to support the soon-to-be-born children. It’s just, “Women should not be having abortions!”

Great. Now what? Now what do we do with all these ruined lives? interviewer Is that what you asked them? josh I was too angry. I did not have a debate with these people. That was not my intention. My intention was never to engage with them. Meaningful discussion was for other people to do. That’s not what I’m here for. Never been what I’m into. Discussion leads to nothing. That’s how I feel.

So I went upstairs and got these papers and wrote “humans” and x-ed it out. Then I came down, preaching that all humans

conversations, they’re always going to undermine your anger. They’re going to talk around your points. They’re going to blame you for being dissatisfied in a way that’s public, for not suffering silently, and if you are anything like how I used to be, you will blame yourself. interviewer What role do you see yourself playing in the Williams community?

interviewer People were asking if you were making a joke, if you were protesting. What were your intentions? josh They seem to not understand how they sound when they say, “Oh, this is shitty activism.” So, you are blaming me for not making this accessible to you? That’s not what I’m here for. That’s what they don’t get.

That’s part of the problem. They think they own people. They think they own people’s actions.

You’re supposed to react to something that I’m doing. I don’t need to make it polite for you. What type of bullshit is that? They don’t realize that even by saying that they are demonstrating their privilege. And I hope they can’t sleep tonight because they’re so angry about the shit that I do. interviewer You don’t think people who say it’s shitty activism say it for other reasons? josh I think people like to be at the center of the universe. I know I do. If it’s not in a discussion, they’re not going to feel comfortable voicing their opinions.

Talking in terms of the culture on this campus, it is geared so that white upperclass men and women will hold the upper hand in conversations. What is respected here is that culture. So, in those sorts of

josh It’s really, really sad at times. I came here to escape feeling like I was not valued and not able to be sure when the next long landslide was going to happen.

None of the students here can kick me out, but a large portion of the student body would rather I not be here. interviewer I’m sure there are people here who genuinely dislike you. But back in Paresky, at least six people came up to you and gave you hugs and said thank you for this, thank you for that, let’s catch up. Do you really think that many people here dislike you? josh I was raised in Catholic tradition, I was raised in really abusive situations, and I came here and I’m constantly being told in so many different ways that I’m not good enough. I’m not doing enough. And you know, I’m not going to lie, a large part of that has ended up inside me. That’s just how I think of myself. It’s a big part of me.

For me, if you want to know what I actually think about things, you have to look at my art. It’s as truthful as I’m going to get.

Within my art, if you listen to my songs, those are the most honest I am. It’s one of the reasons why I wasn’t an artist until I got my heart broken, tried to kill myself, and needed the guitar to talk about it. Before, it was just a hobby.

I’ve been performing since I popped out my mother’s womb. She wanted us to perform.

She made it her life’s mission to make sure nobody would really know what exactly was going on in our heads. She didn’t want us to be predictable. She didn’t want us to be easy. She wanted us to be these islands.

Brianna Rettig “Cleaning Up Glass: The Performance of Josh Torres” 27

Grass Sumun Iyer Curled up in the grass, for hours, we begin convincing each other that “green” will suffice.

Each flicking tip explores its neighbor’s shape, softly and blindly— as close as we are so strikingly not.

A squeal of wind —I press my palms to my stinging eyes— exposes the yellowed underbellies of the stems.

Slices of yellow light spill over your toes.

28 6 Sumun Iyer “Grass” • Madison Weist Martyrdom IV

Amalie Dougish 29

11. To Athena Of Pallas Athena, protector of the city, I begin to sing.

Fearsome, she with Ares attends to the deeds of war, Sacking of cities and war-cries and battle.

She shields the men as they go out and return.

Hail, goddess: grant us luck and prosperity!

About the Homeric Hymns: These poems are part of a canon of poems addressed to gods that originated in early Greece, circa 7th century B.C.E. They are written in the Homeric style, dactylic hexameter, but were likely not authored by Homer. I chose to translate them partly because they’re short, but mostly because they provide fascinating insight into the poetic and religious practices of the ancient Greeks.

-Mia Dana

15. To Heracles the Lionhearted Of Heracles, son of Zeus, I will sing, the best man by much Upon the earth. Born in Thebes, city of beautiful dances, to Alcmena, united with the dark-clouded son of Kronos.

Formerly he wandered over unutterably great lands and seas Sent by the King Eurystheus.

He himself caused many wicked things and Endured many.

Now in the glorious home of snowy Olympus He dwells happily and has beautifully-ankled Hebe as his wife.

Hail, lord, son of Zeus: grant me excellence and happiness.

30 8 Mia Dana

where for art thou

Chris Seimer where for art thou • Christa Rousseva 31

IZZY IN

TOKYO

32 Izzy Davila

IZZY DAVILA

is in his third year at Williams and is majoring in studio art. At the end of last year, Izzy received a Wilmers Travel Fellowship from the college to pursue a photo series documenting street fashion in Tokyo over the summer. Inspired by his interest in fashion as a medium of self-expression, his work explores the ways people use clothing to construct their identities. His series “Izzy in Tokyo” seeks to understand the exotic aesthetic of Tokyo street fashion within the context of the city’s culture rather than from an American perspective. His subjects were stopped on the street and photographed in whatever poses they chose. “I don’t feel like I impose much stylistically onto these people,” Izzy explains. “What I’m imposing happens in the U.S., when I return back home, and it’s about how I frame them outside of just the camera.” Presenting us with direct and straightforward photographs, Izzy allows the clothes themselves—as well as the people inside them—to encourage us to question how the differences between American and Japanese attitudes toward self-presentation inform the way we dress and what we consider normal. What seems vibrant or eclectic about Japanese fashion that we don’t see in the United States? Can Tokyo street fashion show us something we might be missing?

Izzy Davila 33

Rhubarb Mousse

by Professor Darra Goldstein

Americans treat rhubarb as fruit, but it’s technically a vegetable, in the same family as buckwheat. Some say that its scientific name Rheum rhabarbarum derives from Rha, the ancient name of the Volga River, on whose banks the plants grow. Others maintain that it comes from the Greek rheo, “to flow,” because of its well-known purgative properties—Catherine the Great’s physicians treated her with rhubarb after she fell ill from eating too many oysters.

Until the early 19th century, Russia was at the forefront of the international trade in medicinal rhubarb, which was such a valuable commodity that in the mid-17thcentury it sold for three times as much as opium.

Russians have long used rhubarb in a variety of sweet and savory dishes. They also prize the plant for its beautiful rosy stalks, which bring welcome color to the garden and table in late spring. Russian 19th century chefs adapted this elegant yet easy mousse from French haute cuisine.

Ingredients 2 to 3 large stalks of rhubarb, cubed (4 cups) 1½ cups of sugar ½ tsp cinnamon 1 tbsp cornstarch 1 cup heavy cream ¼ tsp almond extract ½ tsp pure vanilla extract Place the rhubarb cubes in a heavy saucepan along with the sugar and cinnamon, stirring to mix well. Cover and simmer over very low heat until the rhubarb is just tender, about 5 minutes. Strain the juice from the cooked rhubarb into a measuring cup.

There should be about 1¼ cups of juice.

Reserve the cooked rhubarb.

Photo credit: Russian Life magazine / Alexander Sherstobitov Adapted from the 30th anniversary edition of A Taste of Russia (Russian Life Books, 2013)

Rinse out the saucepan and return the rhubarb juice to it.

In a small bowl mix the cornstarch with a small amount of the juice, then add it to the saucepan. Cook the mixture over medium heat for about 15 minutes, or until it has thickened and is reduced to ¾ cup.

Stir the thickened juice into the reserved rhubarb. Set aside to cool to room temperature.

In a large bowl whip the cream until stiff, beating in the almond and vanilla extracts. Fold in the cooled rhubarb carefully, until well blended. Spoon the mousse into a large serving dish or into individual ramekins, and chill until ready to serve.

Serves 4 to 6

34 Goldstein “Rhubarb Mousse” 32 Darra 12 Izzy Davila

Contributor Bios Ava Anderson is a freshman at Williams who enjoys photography and long walks on the beach.

Mia Dana is a prospective classics and economics major from Boston. Hobbies include writing about herself in the third person.

Izzy Davila is an artist you might not be ready for.

Amalie Dougish is an art history and practice and WGSS double major. Help her finish her majors and give her chocolate.

Krista Gelev is from Los Angeles and is misguidedly hoping to finagle an education in typography as a liberal art.

Barry Goldstein is Visiting Professor of the Humanities.

Darra Goldstein is the Willcox and Harriet Adsit Professor of Russian at Williams and, most recently, the editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets. She’s always happy when the first rhubarb of spring appears.

Beatrix Haddock; class of 2018.

Sumun Iyer grew up in South Jersey. She likes grass, running, and poetry.

Jordan Jace is class of 2018.

Rachel Lee is from New York. Her driver’s license says she’s 5’1”, but that’s almost definitely stretching the truth.

Doris Mbabu is an artist who goes to Williams College. With the camera as her storytelling tool, she wants to travel and explore the world beyond the slopes of Mount Kenya where she grew up.

Parlor Tricks is printed by Qualprint in Pittsfield, MA

Naomi Medina-Jaudes is a first-year at Williams College from Huntington, New York. She loves taking art classes and spending her weekends in the studio.

Kelly Oh is a sophomore at Williams and her favorite food is matzo. She’s also still upset they’ve dropped kitesurfing from the 2016 Olympics.

Story Ponvert is from the Elm City, CT. Brianna Rettig is a photographer from South Lake Tahoe.

Sophia Leung Rosenfeld, a soon-to-be graduate of Williams College, has plans for the future. They feature: good food, good people, storytelling, and systemic change.

Christa Rousseva is a prospective art history major from London, England.

Gabriel Samach is a senior physics and comparative literature major. He is a contributing writer and music critic for Tiny Mix Tapes.

Alexandra (Al) Scarangella is currently a freshman at Williams and a prospective art history major. At the moment, she admires Patty Chang, Liu Jianhua, and Peter Beard (among many others).

Chris Siemer tries to look for the little light lines, everywhere; sometimes they criss-cross.

Kelly Wang majors in computer science and studio art. Her limited experience with photography includes three years of membership in the Williams Photo Club, and now her first photography course this semester.

Luke Warren is an English major from Nyack, NY. Madison Weist is a senior studio art major. Next year she is joining Teach for America in Philadelphia and plans to continue painting as often as she can.

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