Ratty tempeh is a mortal sin, an unspeakable around these parts; its reputation precedes it. To partake in its horrors is to renounce the very core of one’s humanity, to shirk one’s honor and pride—and God forbid you claim to enjoy it. Brain-like in texture and appearance, the soy-based product is the bane of every trypophobe’s existence. Despite the Ratty’s many attempts to dress it up and rebrand its soiled image, tempeh dishes inevitably fall flat. An undignified, formless mush, tempeh in every form remains an afterthought in the face of the Ratty’s many culinary triumphs: Fried plantains. Vodka pasta. Pork schnitzel. Barbeque brisket.
I’d heard the horror stories even before I’d reached Brown, somewhere in that anxiety-riddled summer preceding the start of college. From my little bedroom in Jakarta, Indonesia, I’d watched as my peers took to social media to bombard the upperclassmen with questions.
Dear Readers, Happy October! Once again, we must relearn the language of fall: remembering to grab a jacket before we leave the house, fretting yet again over which Rhode Island apple orchard will be the least crowded on a weekend, making the switch from 1989 to Red (Taylor’s Version). The Thayer Starbucks’ gilded doors remain bolted shut and thus we are pumpkin spiceless, but as Taylor Swift would agree, there’s a certain beauty to pining in autumn. One of our Narrative writers quotes Ocean Vuong: “It was always October in my throat.”
This issue, our writers also encourage us to relearn our old languages and see things anew. Our Feature writer argues that tempeh is so much more than the dish you avoid at the Ratty. One Narrative writer wrestles with writing as a quest to name the unnameable, and the other reflects on ice cream shops as sites of sociological study. In
Any advice for first-years? someone would inevitably ask. The replies were generally the same cookie-cutter answers given to every incoming freshman. Take CS15 before Andy leaves. No 9 a.m. class is worth it. Wear your shower shoes. One reply, though, was a constant, crucial word of caution:
Don’t touch the Ratty tempeh!
Of the many pieces of advice we’d been given, the tempeh comment stuck out the most. Maybe it was the sheer absurdity of it: no other dish at Brown had garnered so much as a mention, let alone a warning. Hell, I’d barely even learned the name of the dining halls by that point. Yet this thought about a familiar Indonesian staple settled in the back of my mind, determined to make its mark.
After a long pre-orientation with nothing but the V-Dub to tide us over, the Ratty opened on the first
day of classes. Entering that venerated hall for the first time was momentous. Surrounded by my brand-new clique of pre-orientation friends, I marched in with the confidence of a fresh high school graduate, taking in the sights. The salad bar! The drink machines! Coffee milk! An overwhelming level of choice lay before our very eyes. Amidst our obnoxious chatter and rather misplaced enthusiasm, we grabbed our take-out boxes and shuffled, one by one, toward the food. Most of the dishes that day were, unsurprisingly, nothing to write home about. But there was one that stood out among the rest, one that stopped me in my tracks and left me gawking.
There, in all of its squishy, bitter glory, was Jamaican jerk tempeh. Brown, unsuspecting, and, most of all, untouched. The advice of my dear upperclassmen advisors had not been lost on me—far from it, in fact.
A&C, one writer makes the case for medium-hop ping as an avenue for artistic possibility, and the other takes refuge in The Great British Baking Show. In Lifestyle, read a profile on a beloved dog, and contribute your own.
I hope these pieces make you think, make you laugh, and warm your heart like the Thayer Star bucks currently is not. (It’s fine). Whether October lives in your throat, in your Spotify, or in the words you can never quite find to describe it, I’m wishing you one full of love.
Doing all too well,
Siena Capone Narrative Managing EditorBut I’m nothing if not stubborn. If nobody else liked it, then I vowed to be the first.
Defiant as ever, I spooned a heaping pile into my box and strutted out of the Ratty.
The start of the semester was the perfect weather to be outdoors. The fall hadn’t quite settled in but the harsh summer was mostly over, leaving nothing but perfectly warm sun in its wake. My then-friends, who’d gotten their food ahead of me, were lazing around in a circle on the grassy hill out front. In typical freshman fashion, they’d found even more people to talk to, and so the introductions began yet again, followed by the same few conversations we’d circled through all week: Where are you from? What do you do for fun? What are you majoring—no, wait—concentrating in? Name a fun fact about yourself.
My take-out box had begun to sag with the weight of my food, the cardboard bottom damp with moisture. I’d stuffed it to the brim with all sorts of food: Ratty pizza, marinara pasta, fries, a large salad, beans.
And, of course, the tempeh.
Eager as always, I shoved a large spoonful into my mouth—
Only to spit it out as soon as it hit my tongue.
Throughout the rest of the meal, I ate around the mushy brown pile, shoving it to the side with my plastic spoon and praying that it wouldn’t taint my other food.
Once a socially acceptable length of time had passed and I was sure nobody was watching me, I dumped the rest into the trash, shame dancing on my tongue.
Of the many freshman-year tears I cried (and there were many), these were among the most memorable. Here I was: the farthest I’d ever been from home, all alone and, in my mind, a complete outsider. In my first few weeks on campus, I’d been called an orangutan, been asked if I had electricity in my country (we do), and now, this.
Horrible, disgusting, vile Ratty tempeh.
I wanted so badly to like it, to become its one and only supporter, to sing of its merits to the heavens. I wanted to prove everyone wrong—to show everyone that it wasn’t just some weird, trendy meat substitute, and that tempeh could, in fact, be good
A year into my time at Brown, I’m still an avid member of the Ratty Tempeh Hate Club. One might even call me its most outstanding, outspoken supporter, intent on spreading the goodwill of our organization. I’ll tell just about anyone how nasty it is, and I’m certainly not shy about it.
But my hate for the dish doesn’t stem from a dislike of tempeh. I love tempeh. And not in the vegan, health-conscious, alternative-protein-seeking way. The ingredient, in all its bitter, savory glory, was a mainstay of my palate; an old, stinky friend. Polarizing, perhaps, but comforting, reliable. Something to fall back on. And having grown up with it, I can tell you with complete
certainty: Tempeh is more than this.
The fermented soybean blocks are a staple of any Indonesian market. Among an assortment of fragrant spices, pungent meats, sharp herbs, and vividly tropical fruits, raw, uncut tempeh is a pristine, silky white—and it is precisely this coloring that helps it stand out. To make tempeh, soybeans are cleaned, boiled, dehulled, and soaked before being inoculated by the mycelium of Rhizopus mold. The beans are then wrapped and shaped into a cake before being left for incubation. The mold then does its work, and, two days later, voila! Tempeh.
I will admit to Googling all that—it’s certainly not knowledge I tend to have on hand. One thing I know by heart, though, is how tempeh is eaten.
Growing up in Indonesia meant tempeh was always a staple; the neighborhood street vendors were simply never without it. Whether it came from the sun-kissed old woman with crows-feet by her eyes, or the kindly hunched man with a crooked smile, tempeh was always a genuine treat, no matter how it was made.
Everyone has their own favorite version. Dunk it in batter and deep-fry it, and it’s the perfect after-school snack: a crispy, indulgent delight, the quintessential guilty pleasure. Stir-fry it with sweet soy, shallots, peanuts, and chili peppers and you have a powerful addition to any rice dish, crunchy and light and downright addictive—you were lucky to have it in your lunchbox at school. Steam it and add it to a vegetable stew for a bit of added protein. Thinly slice it and fry it up and you have the perfect chips, rivaling any Western brand (take that, Lays!).
Tempeh in all of these forms defined my childhood. Its variety is precisely what makes tempeh so wonderful— but flavors and textures are crucial here. Like with any ingredient, you want to work to its strengths; you cook tempeh for what it is, rather than what it isn’t.
Cook it well, and you’ll hear it sing. Toss it with Jamaican jerk seasoning though, and you might get more of a shriek.
Tempeh is the comfort food of millions and millions of Indonesians, and it’s something I hold up with pride. As you may have gathered, I am staunchly patriotic, an Indonesian through and through. But I don’t do this without reason. Losing one’s culture is a reality familiar to many immigrants. So many distinct identities and histories have been relegated to a mere footnote of the American dream. Egyptian mac and cheese, broth fondue, the Andrews Commons’ “satay chicken” (satay, for the record, is always served on skewers!); all of these represent the subtle appropriation of culture and cuisine.
In order to join the ranks of fully-fledged Americans, one must prove themselves—and their culture—palatable to the tastes of the West. We don American clothes and speak the American tongue. And America, in turn, regards us as conditional equals, accepting bits and pieces of the identities we call our own. They cherry-
pick parts of our dress, cuisine and culture, branding it as the newest fad in town.
This is American Orientalism at its finest. As the exotic ‘other,’ we toe the line between fantasy and fear. Our cultures must be just foreign enough to capture the American interest, but just understated enough that we remain within the realms of American civility.
Tempeh hasn’t escaped this fate. Under the watchful American eye, tempeh has become the foreign and fantastical. It is just magical enough to be incorporated into Western cuisine—but only in an altered, muted state. I can only watch as the West strips it of its history, its identity, and its distinctly Indonesian touch, marketing it instead as a fantastic new meatless invention. A staple in vegan burgers, bacon and turkey, tempeh has joined the ranks of tofu and jackfruit as a tropical superfood, a vegetarian delight: a mystery from the East.
In the face of these bland, flavorless attempts at culinary experimentation, I mourn the desecration of my favorite food. So many people work with tempeh without any regard for what it is, forcing it into the roles of beef or chicken or pork. With such an approach, it’s really no wonder that so many people dislike it. Mediterraneanstyle tempeh, lemon-herb-crusted tempeh, Jamaican jerk tempeh—all of these dishes push tempeh into shoes it cannot fill. The fusion of cuisines is a natural byproduct of globalization and immigration. The creativity it sparks is unlike any other; so many wonderful dishes have come about as a result of it. But when ingredients and dishes become so far removed from their roots, one has to think about what is being lost.
My aversion to the Ratty tempeh goes beyond flavor and taste. The Ratty tempeh, in every variety I have seen thus far, is entirely disconnected from the tempeh I know. Its origins have all but been erased in favor of romanticizing the idea of a mysterious “Oriental” ingredient. As an Indonesian with so much love for lumpy old tempeh, it saddens me to know how widespread the contempt for it has become. It is a disservice to my favorite dish and the culture I hold so dear.
But while I’d like to give the Ratty chefs a stern talking-to, the spread of tempeh (and its subsequent bastardization) isn’t all bad. The Ratty tempeh, in some strange, convoluted way, represents my rare link to home. A twisted, forlorn version of the home I know, but a remnant of the tropics nonetheless. A reminder that my culture, however far away from home I may be, remains with me. And despite having hurled many an insult towards it, I’m grateful to have the Ratty tempeh around, if only to look longingly upon it, and reminisce upon the flavors of a childhood past.
But even I can’t pretend to enjoy it.
So to any incoming freshmen, I beg you: Never touch the Ratty tempeh—but know that it’s not tempeh’s fault!
“Cups are the socks of dishes.”
“I don't know what a woman is.”
“I would never date a man in the humanities."
Your first therapist is for a speech delay. She feeds you sentences and you regurgitate them back to her. She makes you drop pennies into a mason jar. She teaches you animal sounds, fills the house with oink and moo. After a few months, she leaves, and your voice stays.
But once you learn to name things, you will also learn to fear the unnamed things. Only when you learn the word horizon did it becoame unreachable. Only when you learn the word love does it begin to tighten like a noose. You watch the sun sink into the sea—the sky becomes a bloody cut—and you hate knowing how small you are. Your house in the mouth of the volcano, long extinct.
+
From here, you can see everything: the sand dunes rising from the skin of the earth like vertebrae, the crescent of foam where the water meets the land, the calm breaths of the ocean. Your fingers are wrinkled, rubbed raw from climbing the rocks. In the distance, the highway snakes through the valley like the vein of a stone giant, the sound of traffic a distant hum. Drops of water gather on your eyelashes like pearls. You can taste the ocean, its salty kiss on your lips. You are thirty feet in the air, where the wind prickles your neck, and it is the closest to heaven you have ever been. Do not jump into the ocean; just let yourself fall.
+
[As if you do not already know the feeling. As if writing about it in the second person would fool anyone. Gravity is a fish hook in your navel, pulling you under. You fall through a series of identical days, through the space between two mirrors facing each other, reflecting nothing, endlessly. You see yourself as a 3D image but without the right glasses: red and blue outlines, slightly offset. The feeling waxes and wanes, so when it is fading, it is also returning. You are an unfinished meal. You never say any of this, of course. The doctor gives the feeling a name anyway, and you swallow the diagnosis like a pill.]
+
That is, until the sickness begins in full. You vomit in a trash can before homeroom. You vomit in a storm drain, outside the school gym, before the Founder’s Day assembly. You vomit in the car one morning, into a plastic grocery bag. Your mother calls the doctor and asks for a referral to a psychologist.
+
Ocean Vuong claims it is always October in his throat. You
do not understand most of his poetry, but you understand this. The way it feels to have your vocal cords turn to rust. To be on the brink of a bitter winter but never reach it. Falling, but never hitting the ground.
You find the poem in your school library. On the wall, the librarian has tacked up a poster: BAD THINGS DON’T HAPPEN TO WRITERS; IT’S ALL MATERIAL. You decide that nothing bad has ever happened to you, as long as you can turn it into art.
So you devour Ocean Vuong’s poem. You collect all of Anthony Doerr’s novels. You scrawl Karen Russell quotes into your journal. When you finally get your driver’s license, you go to Barnes and Noble and buy Hanya Yanagihara’s newest book. If language is an art, you want to become an apprentice.
In your junior year of high school, you write a short story for your World Literature class. It is about a man who goes to hell. As punishment, he sees every person who he has ever loved—his mother, his best friend, his wife—but he cannot speak to them. Your teacher leaves a red-ink tattoo at the bottom of your paper: You would do well as an English major The words curl off the page like flower petals.
So you become the writer. Or, at least, you try. You join the Spoken Word club and recite poetry aloud to near-empty rooms. You send your short stories to friends and they do not read them. You enter writing contests and you lose. Still, you keep trying because it is the only thing you know to do. You can convince yourself that this is coping rather than escaping.
+
You talk to the therapist (But that’s a feeling. Yeah. I know. Thoughts become feelings become actions. So what thoughts lead you to feel sad? Stress? That’s another feeling. Oh. Right. So what thoughts lead to that feeling. It’s not a thought. It’s just a feeling. I don’t know. Okay. So how do you deal with it. The sad? And the stress. I like to read. That helps you relax? Yeah. Before bed, usually. See? Feelings lead to action. So you already have one way to manage your stress. Mm-hmm. So what else? Have you tried writing about it? Like, in a diary? Sure. Um. I don’t know. Sometimes putting things into words can help. Like, using language to process things. Oh. I mean, I’ve tried. But usually it just makes me feel worse.), and you learn that there are things you cannot learn from your writing after all.
+
You are in the dining hall, hunched over a bowl of overnight oats, when K says, But writing isn’t language
You and K are starting your first semester of college classes, both of you in awe at how much you’re learning. You spend breakfast passing knowledge across the table like salt, as if knowledge is a luxury that must be rationed. You are telling K about your Latin class, the masculines and the feminines and the transitives and the translations, always the translations. She is telling you about her linguistics class.
Writing is a symbol of language, K is saying. But it isn’t actually language.
At first, you think she is making an unnecessary observation. Why should it matter, you want to ask, what a language is if we already know how to use it. But when you see the world in its yellow leaf for the first time, you realize that you are happy, also for the first time. The feeling is a welcome foreigner. It is liquid gold in your chest. It is pumping yourself full of helium, like a birthday balloon. It is stabbing a needle through a burlap sack and seeing light peer through the hole. It is It is It is.
You do not know how to describe the way you feel. You, who have always feared unnamed things, have no choice but to leave the feeling unnamed. You have a feeling that you cannot write about. And what is writing if not a translation of feeling. What is translation if not imperfect.
Maybe K is right. Maybe she should have taken it even further. Maybe she should have said that, although every word you write is an approximation of something real, that does not make it real itself. A hyperbola approaches its asymptote but never reaches it. You fall but never hit the ground.
Language flattens feeling. It packages your emotions into something small, digestible. It is a camera shutter that moves too slowly, the blur of the image afterward, the shadow of something just out of frame. You wonder what would have happened if you had learned to feel without the filter of language. If you had never learned to speak or write, never learned words or language. Would the world make any more sense? Would you feel your emotions more clearly? Would you care if you didn’t?
When K asks how you are doing, you say, I’m doing good, and you mean it. When your advisor asks you what concentration you’re considering, you say, English, or Lit Arts, or both. You would rather stay with the devil you know.
+
Because language is the only thing that has never felt like a waste of time. So you will leap into the ocean—or you will let yourself fall—over and over again, and in the end you will write about it all. You will warp your words, like Pygmalion does his clay, until you convince yourself that your creation is as good as the real thing.
by Olivia Cohen Illustrated by lulu cavicchi
I came into work for my typical Thursday evening shift at High Point Creamery to find my coworker, Ashley, in tears. I didn't know her very well—only that she was in her late twenties, assistant manager of the shop, and that she was married to another one of my other coworkers, Sam. They lived together in Ashley's mother's condo: it's tough to pay rent in Denver on two ice cream scooper salaries, that's for sure. I stood awkwardly by the cash register, unsure what to do as I watched Ashley stack sugar cones into a pointed tower, tears rolling into her mask. As much as I wanted to grant her some discretion, I could no longer pretend I hadn't noticed. "Is everything okay?"
To my relief, Ashley seemed grateful for an opportunity to share her story. Apparently, she and her wife had brought their pitbull to live in Ashley's mother's condo while they looked for an apartment of their own. Having pitbulls is against the city of Denver's pet
ownership laws, but "Cece is different,” Ashley explained. “She's a sweetheart. The media has turned the public against pitbulls, but they've really just been historically misunderstood…"
Ashley's mother, however, already had two cats. “You know how dogs and cats fight, it's just the way they are," Ashley said tearfully, explaining how her pitbull had eaten her mom's cat earlier that morning.
The demise of Ashley's mother's cat marked the beginning of my Collection of Ice Cream Wisdom a repertoire of observations about people amassed throughout three years of work at my neighborhood ice cream parlor. That day, at the impressionable age of 16, I made my very first entry: anybody beyond their early twenties who scoops ice cream has an interesting story to tell you.
Faye, store manager by day and stripper by night, told a story on her skin: her entire left arm, from wrist to shoulder, was completely blacked out, a solid sleeve of tattoo ink. When awed customers asked her whether it had hurt to sit through, she would shrug nonchalantly. "The armpit hurt like a bitch," she'd say. Once, she told me she'd gotten the blackout sleeve in order to hide the inkedin collateral of some previous failed relationship. It was cheaper to cover it than to get it removed, she said, plus it made her look badass.
Jill worked more than any other employee, taking 12hour shifts and earning overtime pay almost every week. She was in her mid-thirties, bird-tiny and practicallydressed, never without her sensible black clogs and a tightlipped scowl. She could always be found either bleaching some surface or washing her hands. When customers inquired about her favorite among our ice cream flavors, she would respond morosely that she wouldn't know; she was on a diet to prepare for her wedding.
Sometimes I felt as though I knew more about our customers than my coworkers, even though they came in for just a few minutes at a time. After enough practice, I became confident that I could predict a person's order as soon as they walked in the door. That group of girls wearing club lacrosse team sweatshirts? One of them is going to get cake batter, and the rest will order cookies and cream. The little boy and his mom? He's going to order a large and she's going to order a kiddie. The young woman with the well-worn Nalgene bottle and horoscope tattoos on her arms is going to be brave and try the basilflavored ice cream, and the elderly man looking to treat his extended family is going to ask for butter pecan. Little kids want rainbow sprinkles, adults want chocolate sprinkles, and older folks from out of town want "jimmies." A woman in a tennis skirt and big branded sunglasses is going to
come in and ask if our lemon sorbet has added sugar, and when we inform her that yes, it has rather a lot, she won't order anything at all.
It became a game, an easy pastime, to categorize and sort everyone who stepped into the shop. I loved to think that I had everyone figured out, that I could take one look at someone and package them neatly into their little box.
During my last year of work, one man—an older guy— came in every Tuesday evening. He was always wearing a navy blue tracksuit. I don't know his name, but one of my coworkers and I called him Fred, because it felt right. Fred always ordered a classic sundae: one scoop of vanilla, one of chocolate, lots of hot fudge, just a dollop of whipped cream, and a maraschino cherry. The sundae was for his grandson, we assumed, because he was always on the phone with a kid when he was ordering. "Chocolate or vanilla, son? Both? Alright, we'll get the boy both then." I always wondered why he called every time to ask what the child wanted. Doesn't Fred remember this kid's order by now? I sure do.
One Tuesday, Fred came into the shop, seemingly on the phone with his grandson again, but he angled his phone toward us and the screen turned on. To my surprise, I saw the lockscreen of Fred's phone rather than a phone call and realized, confused, that he wasn't on the phone at all. Why pretend? I wondered. Was he embarrassed about his order? Ashamed about the frequencies of his visits? Or was he just having fun pretending to be somebody else for an evening every week? Everything I thought I knew about Fred was a construction, just as random and improbable as the pseudonym I'd assigned him.
One busy July afternoon during my last summer before college, a woman trailed by a gaggle of elementaryaged children came in and ordered six milkshakes. I was the only employee working at the time, and I was irritated. Couldn't she see that we had a line of people waiting? Couldn't her kids hold off until we weren't so swamped? I rushed through her order, feeling stressed as I imagined the restless patrons queuing up behind her. I finished the order and handed her the first two shakes. She went outside and passed both to her daughter. I then watched the little girl, yellow pigtails bouncing, run across the street and hand the shakes to two firemen in full uniform who had been called to check out a false-alarm gas leak next door. One knelt down to thank her, and she skipped back toward the shop to run the next two across the street.
Just like that, my Ice Cream Wisdom collection shrunk from a book's worth to a sticky-note reminder: at the end of the day, someone's ice cream order tells you absolutely nothing about them. But sometimes it's fun to pretend like you know everything about everyone, anyway.
In her aggressively air-conditioned studio, Asher White—musician, visual artist, writer— struggles to keep a blanket up around her shoulders as she looks for a pencil and paper. She wants to explain to me how she conceptualizes songwriting using a graph with four quadrants. The graph is structured around material constraints: low to high frequencies as the x axis, and left to right channels as the y. “Now,” she says, “It’s just like painting.”
I work primarily in painting and sculpture and am completely mystified by musicians. “I don’t understand how someone could imagine a melody that doesn’t yet exist,” I say to Asher, teeth chattering. She counters, “How do you approach making sculptures that don’t exist?”
When I tell her it’s mostly poking around, trying things on for size, and waiting for something to fit, she says, “Well, there you go.” She continues to populate the chart.
My relationship with visual art is owed to a positive feedback loop that began in middle school. Compliments on my ability to draw very skinny girls encouraged further dedication to this practice. Eventually I found myself to be an Art Girl. This vague blueprint maps onto current Brown senior Maya Polsky’s inception as a guitarist, as well as RISD senior Asher’s early days as a drummer—although both these creators had a sprinkle of child prodigy in the mix as well. Early technical ability brought positive attention, breeding an early self-conception tied to music. This phenomenon in children develops a confidence with self-expression that is difficult to claim later in life, essential to art-making, and most importantly, not restricted to whatever medium first gave it platform.
When artistic identity is brought about by early technical prowess in a given creative discipline, a label of painter, violinist, photographer—name your discipline—can obscure a deeper identification as a simply creative person. I don’t mean to defile the romance between an artist and their medium. A lifelong loyalty to a craft is a beautiful thing; when Maya speaks with me about the early days with her guitar, her voice swells with a confused emotion that I recognize as what a non-spiritual person sounds like when they reckon with the source of faith in their life. However, fluidity between abstract languages is already a fixture in many artists’ brains. Developing a flexible relationship between mediums materializes that unconscious thought process and can be a generative force in one’s work.
For instance, Maya has a heavily visual slant to her conception of sound, always coming back to form, texture, and space. “What shape is the song?” she asks the students in the introductory music class for which she TAs. “Are the notes dark
and fuzzy, or bright and pointy? Do they sound close or far away?” While I don’t think Maya should sell her instruments to buy a kiln, I do wonder what might happen to her music if she brought some Sculpey to the recording studio.
In Asher’s studio, color takes on the brunt of the translation work. Moving quickly and not making eye contact, she looks at her graph and pushes a black circle of ink out of the pen onto the bottom left quadrant. “That’s purple,” she says. Asher doesn’t wonder whether or not I understand what purple sounds like. Even as I smile instinctively at the gravity with which she talks about synesthesia, I can’t help but hear this heavy purple shape as it weighs down on the page. Nor can I help but feel a sense of relief when she restores balance and gives the upper-right corner of the chart a sisterly blob. “Dark pink.”
“All art is metaphor,” Maya says, visibly uncomfortable with hearing herself say this cliché outloud. “We are constantly looking for metaphors for our metaphor.” I call on something our mutual friend, Talia Mermin, visual artist and writer, once said to us. “Metaphor is like a spinning top—it works until it doesn’t,” (she was paraphrasing Anne Carson who was paraphrasing Franz Kafka, but in my opinion, Talia said it best). Musicians like Maya and Asher poach the vocabulary of fellow disciplines as a way of keeping their tops spinning, building a Jenga tower out of sibling abstractions. Approaching the same idea through multiple abstract languages is like adding circles to a venn diagram until the center shrinks to a truth.
When we think of songwriting as painting, or video as dance, or writing as collage, the question of whether certain ideas are better suited for certain mediums looms larger. A few years ago, I began struggling with the question of, “why paint?” Wanting to communicate my surroundings as I saw them, (inexplicable, organized, and perfect), I was frustrated with how painting fixed my world onto a canvas where it was, at best, a lesser version of itself and, at worst, a self-portrait. So, I made the descent from the light-strewn painting studio to the windowless sculpture dungeon, where a
three-dimensional practice did these interests greater justice.
But for many artists like Eve O’Shea (Brown ‘20), the question of “why paint?” is easy. It’s not that other mediums don’t interest her; she is a dedicated writer and has exciting ideas for future work in photography, but nothing can pull her focus from painting. “There’s so much left for me here,” she says about the medium. “I’m only at the beginning.” Eve has a rare kind of patience and faith, both in herself and in the work. As a sophomore in a neighboring studio, I would watch as she ritually applied washes of purple upon green upon blue with no end in sight. One day, I’d just walk in and see a finished piece. “Mastery is awesome,” she says. Painting will remain fixed on her horizon until she feels she has grasped it.
Meanwhile, Loren Wang (Wesleyan ’24), spoke to me about how a sustained focus on one medium can lead to stasis. They are eager to develop their work in performance, writing, and sculpture, but find themselves coming back to video, their original medium, despite a nagging staleness. Having worked with these tools for years, they find muscle memory kicking in. “I’m not making work if I’m comfortable,” they say solemnly. Within one mode of production, it becomes hard to tell your interests apart from your habits.
Developing a relationship with any medium involves the accumulation of neuroses and insecurities. Memories of failure linger, the pressure for novelty persists, and the question of audience demands to be confronted. Critical discourse, historical precedence, and role models can all cloud intuition and make simple decisions fraught. These mental plagues fester when you don’t take space from your work. Of course, taking a break offers its own can of worms (productivity anxiety, imposter syndrome, questioning foundational sense of self). But developing fluency in another medium can allow you to take a step back from the studio without feeling disconnected from creativity. It’s like a secret trap door between a rock and a hard place.
I have a reliable internal clock which, every two to three months, delivers an acute feeling of helplessness with the possibility of making visual art. I begin to feel like I'm throwing all the nuance in my head into a big bucket like the ones used to toss chicken wings in buffalo sauce. My dreams of articulating myself with clarity, weight, and wit die in the face of this glistening amorphous form. I am left to dump it all onto a plate, push it across the table, and hope for the best. That’s when writing, with its clauses, punctuation, synonyms—an all-you-can-eat communication buffet—becomes so appealing. But before long, the exactitude of writing becomes suffocating, and I miss the buffalo sauce. Wishing I could offload authorship and blur out ideas, the oncefrustrating ambiguity inherent to visual art now promises a unique kind of freedom. This epiphany (“art is actually great”) surprises me every time.
In a recent effort to walk the walk, I tried writing a song and found it to be one of the more uncertain and vulnerable experiences of my recent life. The 1-minute-20-second result was comfortably mediocre, and SONG?.mp3 will sink peacefully to the bottom of my files. But now I find conversations with musicians to be more elucidating than baffling, I hear decisions in music where before was only mystery, and I find myself mentally leafing through the Garage Band sound library when on the prowl for new textures and shapes.
Translation between art forms can offer a glimpse of whatever brought us to art in the first place. A new material lens is a chance to escape our own tropes and catch sight of the core values underneath. Maya tells me of an early music teacher who taught her that all music is tension and release—something called a V-I structure. She says, “all music is going somewhere and going home.” Some artists will find their home in the constant going somewhere, whereas others will only go somewhere to be reminded of where’s home.
Cake week. Episode One. As I watch the notification from Netflix momentarily block out my chemistry notes on an early Friday morning, I let out a sigh of relief. The start of autumn has officially been rung in by everyone’s favorite justification for giving themselves a break: the Great British Bake Off
I am certain it could be scientifically proven that the Earth’s atmosphere is sweeter once the world reunites under the large, white tent. With each soggy bottom avoided, an unfamiliar face smiles at you from across the street. With each Star Baker announced, a helping hand appears when you need it most. And, of course, with each Paul Hollywood handshake earned, the world’s hearts swell in joyous unison.
After marinating in sixty minutes of this frenzied ensemble experiencing the many stages of grief while tempering chocolate, I have convinced myself that I, too, could easily claim one of the workspaces in the tent as my own. Like all other fans, I start to visualize myself competing for the title of “Star Baker” alongside the beloved contestants, and a newfound sense of capability washes over me. I relish the giddy state
I find myself in after my weekly viewing of each episode; it provokes a feeling that I struggle to find in my day-to-day activities.
What secret ingredient is Bake Off whisking into their series?
I asked myself this question the first time I realized I had binged an entire collection when I had originally meant to treat myself to just the first episode. I had asked myself the same question when I caught myself rewatching whole collections for the third or fourth time. And I definitely asked myself this question when I found myself incorporating Noel and Matt’s unconvincing kitchen puns into my vernacular. Just a legend in the baking.
It can be difficult to find outlets such as Bake Off that serve as an escape from the busy reality of our lives. As Brown students, we are no strangers to the idea of burying ourselves under heaps of work. Whether such work includes completing homework and lab assignments or organizing events for the highly sought-after position that you earned in a competitive club, it often feels like we are simmering under the pressure of this list of items we need to check off.
There is always something that I could be working on, and there is most certainly always something that I should be working on. I should be studying for that exam. I should be applying for that internship. I should be doing something that proves my existence on this campus, as a student and individual, is worthwhile and valued— especially if it is for the purpose of proving myself to anyone other than myself.
This romanticized idea of taking no days off has been carved into my mind for as long as I can remember. Growing up in a school system where hyperfixation on grades and extracurriculars brewed in the hallways, the notion of engaging in activities for pure enjoyment felt oddly foreign. When I started at Brown as a freshman, I remember calling my mom over FaceTime and giving her my weekly recap of classes. She casually asked, “So are you done with all your work?” and I stared blankly back at her, confused by her inquiry. I could not fathom a world in which I had somehow ended a night by completing everything that I needed to do. While she was preparing for a well-deserved good night’s rest on the other end of the line, I was punishing myself for not finishing
future assignments by swapping hours of sleep for hours of mindless studying. After years of feeling the need to push myself to my breaking point, and often past it, I’ve found myself in the tortuous process of unlearning how to be my own enemy.
As a list-making enthusiast, I hold onto my tattered planner with great pride; the smell of its old leather, the once-sharp edges now eroded from the countless journeys in my backpack, and the numerous tasks that have been emphatically crossed out in ink are my badges of honor. Over the years of sprinkling my duties across pages until my pens have dried themselves out, my lists have grown more menial—I now reserve the top line for each page in my planner for writing Wake up, which is promptly crossed out right after. I have primed myself into equating my productivity with the amount of times I strike through a statement. I have convinced myself that I can rescue myself from a fruitless day by accounting for the simplest actions. Without even realizing it, my incessant need to feel as if I am doing something— anything —productive has erased all the luster from my beloved planner; how can it hold any meaning if I’ve resorted to overflowing it with meaningless lines?
The world is obsessed with busying ourselves. This inherent need to surround myself with quantifiable work has ravished my once-existent standards for completing my tasks—the standards which gave me something to be proud of. Giving in to this demand to absorb anything and everything available to me, no matter its pertinence, feeds into my binging tendencies; whether it’s regurgitating the same study guide that has lost its ability to help long ago, or even rewatching Bake Off for a seventh time (when it was deemed unnecessary six replays ago). I crave finishing something even if its extreme simplicity erases its meaning.
It is easy to get warped by believing I’m the only person who constantly feels run down by the daily demands of my realm, but the twelve bustling individuals dressed in aprons with every inch of themselves dusted in flour never fail to remind me that I am indeed not alone. I find comfort in watching contestants partake in the mischievous technical challenge, where they are faced with the task of producing an unfamiliar bake with little to no instructions. Unsure of what to do, with their not-so-sneaky glances filling the void
of uncertainty in the tent, I feel at peace knowing that I’m not the only one who feels like the world is challenging me to a one-on-one brawl with my overflowing scribbles in my planner.
Bake Off is my breath of fresh air from the heavily polluted to-dos that permeate my everyday life.
The friendships that blossom within weeks of baking triumph over any competition that could emerge amongst Bake Off contestants. The explicit love and support shown through their unexpected camaraderie is bittersweet. On Brown’s campus, where collaboration is highly valued, it is still rather easy to get lost in the seemingly nonexistent competition in academic spaces. In a society where we are expected to push others down in order to attain our newest goal, it is refreshing to witness a group of strangers work together to promote each other’s best work.
I find solace every time a baker centers their showstopper around a memory with a loved one. I feel relief every time a baker receives a Paul Hollywood handshake for their meticulous recipe. I am inspired every time I see a student baker pursue their love for pastries for fun only to end up walking away as the reigning winner. I love watching these bakers remind us what it means to be human.
It is far too easy to forget to step back from back-to-back appointments with our worries and remember to look around at the things and people we are lucky enough to surround ourselves with. It can be hard to recognize that you don’t need to “earn” a fun break from your overwhelming responsibilities. You deserve to do something for yourself, regardless of how much of your planner remains unticked.
Bake Off remedies the widely-accepted stressors that have infected our day to day for the bulk of our adolescent years. The series coinciding with the start of fall semester feels like the perfect reminder to grant yourself time in the safety bubble that Bake Off illustrates, and to forgive yourself for when you do inevitably get caught up in the craziness that is a semester at Brown.
Put away your notes. Open the Netflix app and get comfy. Let yourself get whisked away into the world under the baking tent for just an hour. After all, you are this week’s, and every week’s, Star Baker.
My life at Brown has been largely devoid of dogs. I often go days without seeing a single dog. And I don’t like that. My life at home was filled with dogs—my first sight after opening my bedroom door in the morning, waiting for me on the first step as I tried to go downstairs, sitting on the back doormat with her tongue out as I entered the kitchen. Everywhere I looked, Sara could be found.
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We adopted Sara as a puppy from the local humane society in 2016. To be honest, I had really wanted to adopt an older dog. I just love their calm demeanors and graying snout hairs. In the end, my youngest brother picked out Sara. She was the last puppy from her litter to be adopted.
The humane society said she was a retriever mix of some sort, but we honestly still have no clue. My best guess is she’s some mix of beagle and probably retriever, but at the time, she was just this little ball of white and brown fuzz. As she traipsed around the little pen, we thought we spotted a hint of a limp, but it ended up being nothing, perhaps just an early lack of coordination.After we filled out all the paperwork, we took her to the pet store to get a collar, leash, bed, dog food, and some toys. I had her cradled against my shoulder as we walked down the aisles. I was still in shock that we had actually gotten a dog after years of me begging my parents then years of me accepting it would never happen. But it happened. And there she was, this tiny puppy lying on a pillow in the middle of our living room. The timing was unfortunate for me though, because a few weeks later I had to leave for an overnight camp. I was afraid Sara wouldn’t remember me or that I would be lagging behind the rest of my family in terms of connection with her. I think it all turned out fine.
Sara’s weird in the best way possible. She enjoys sitting on chairs like a human, but it gets to be a problem when we only have enough chairs for the people in the house and then Sara claims one of
them when us people are trying to eat dinner. She also enjoys watching the squirrels in our backyard through the window. She rests her head on the windowsill and puts her nose right up against the glass. All our windows have stains at roughly Sara height from her snot and saliva. Closing the curtains doesn’t stop her either. She squirms her way through the folds until just her hind legs and tail are visible. We can tell when she spots a squirrel by the wagging of her exposed tail. Sara’s not so great with other dogs. She means well, but she still hasn’t really figured out how to socialize with dogs in a doggy way. When she sees a smaller dog while on a walk, she tries to pounce on it. When we did some dog sitting for a family friend, Sara tried to keep the other dog confined to our kitchen. I don’t think she slept those few nights out of fear the other dog would explore the remaining parts of our house. Sara’s really good with people though. People love Sara. My brother’s friends look for any excuse to come over and hang out with her. I’m convinced they’re only friends with him just so they can spend time with Sara (Only kidding!).
She’s definitely figured out what she can get away with depending on the family member. Sara absolutely adores my mom, or maybe she’s terrified of her. Either way, she goes wherever my mom goes and does not fool around with her. With my brothers, Sara does lots of fooling around. This ranges from obsessively licking their arms and legs to trying to steal food off their plates at meals. Sara fools around with me a little bit, but she knows
I’m too ticklish to have my limbs licked. And she knows if she’s polite and quiet, I’ll let her look for squirrels through the windows in my bedroom. Sara’s also figured out that if she hangs out on the staircase, I can’t resist stopping to pat her head or rub her tummy as I pass. Sometimes when I’m up late and everyone else is asleep, I like to go sit with her on the stairs. When I have trouble finding her in the dark, I just listen for the sound of tail excitedly wagging against the carpet. Then I plop down next to her and stay a while until she falls back asleep. Sara snores pretty loudly.
Here’s the deal: I wanted to write an article about people and their dogs. I imagined doing interviews where I’d ask people about their dogs, learn what it’s like having a dog at Brown, and, most importantly, get to spend time with some dogs.
But you know how it is. Things came up, I got busy, etc., etc. So the article hasn’t happened— yet. I’m determined to meet some dogs, so if you have a dog, please contact me at andy_luo@ brown.edu. In exchange for getting to spend time with you and your dog, you’ll both be featured in my next article!
Note: please do not contact me if (1) you do not have a dog, (2) you have a dog but your dog is not physically in Providence, (3) your dog does not consent to being featured in the article. If (2) applies to you, I’m sorry. I feel your pain. I, too, miss my dog very much. However, if you meet all the criteria and would like to be featured, I do hope you’ll be in touch!
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