post- SW Issue 04/25/19

SPRING WEEKEND 2019

APR 25 VOL 23 ISSUE 23

arts & culture

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contents

arts & culture I Hate Music Good Enough to Tweet Going Solo This Is Brown Alternatives to Water A Skeptic’s Guide to Spring Weekend

p. 5 p. 6 p. 7 p. 8 p. 10 p. 11

feature

Resonance and Reflection Morning Ritual The Closer

p. 15 p. 18 p. 20

narrative Granola Bowls or Porridge?

Meeting Myself Flow Winded The Pen Is Not A Sword

p. 22 p. 24 p. 25 p. 26 p. 28

Cover illustration by Stephanie Wu

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arts & culture

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, Welcome to our Spring Weekend issue! Thank you for picking up a copy of our magazine and giving all of us here at post- the reason to do what we do. Through this turbulent past semester, I have always had Thursday nights to look forward to—nights of late talks, too many Oreos, bouts of sugar-driven and sleep-deprived laughter.

From the last-second masterpiece that is “Midnight Murmurs” to the long-standing tradition of 9-Spot props, this semester has been delirious, delicious, and downright delightful. I want to thank everyone who has helped make it so.

Thank you to our managing editors, cute Celina, “hip” Julian, and multi-talented Sydney. Your limitless patience during final reads, your willingness to work on and through anything, and your enthusiasm for our publication inspire me every week.

Thank you to our copy editing team. Amanda, your dedication to grammar and accuracy and clarity and truth and kindness has saved us many times. Moe, Nicole, and Sonya, we would be lost without your attention to detail and readiness to read pieces from the moment you walk into the room until the moment you leave.

Thank you to our section editors. To Kathy, for giving so much to post- over your four years. Your generosity knows no bounds, and we will truly miss you so much. To Jasmine, for your bright smiles and brilliant hot post- time machines; Liza, for your delectable Ratty boxes and endless eloquence; Sara, for your many layers and discerning eye; Griffin, for your love of night walks and mastery of language; Emily, for your Chinese music playlists and ability to fill so many roles.

Thank you to Rémy, our invaluable head illustrator, who juggles so much and produces such great content.

Thank you to our legendary layout team: Nina, Jacob, Amy, and Steve. Each one of you has stayed in our office way later than you should have and done so much more than we could’ve (or should’ve) asked from you. We would not have a publication without you.

Thank you to Jeff, our webmaster, who works so hard behind the scenes to produce the artwork we see in the spotlight, featured front and center on our newly redesigned website.

Thank you to our creative and clever social media team. Camila and Caleigh, you have really helped the Brown community fall in love with post-.

Thank you to the ghosts of post-! Our beloved and wise grandmother, Saanya, our possibly record-holding most-overheard former A&C managing editor Josh, and of course, our great adventurer Jennifer—we miss you all the time, wherever you are.

Thank you to all of our staff writers and illustrators. Your work is the heart of this publication, and you are the heart of post-.

Finally, to all of the post- family: The amount of love and care you have demonstrated this past semester—for storytelling and for each other—never ceases to amaze me. I am infinitely grateful for the work we’ve done and the time you’ve spent with me in our little room filled with big props and bigger hearts. I can’t wait to see what we’ll do next. See you in the fall!

Happy reading!

Anita

Editor-in-Chief

Staff EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Anita Sheih FEATURE Managing Editor Sydney Lo Section Editors Kathy Luo Sara Shapiro Staff Writers Sarah Lettes Caroline Ribet ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Julian Towers Section Editors Griffin Plaag Emily Teng Staff Writers Rob Capron Kaela Hines Pia Mileaf-Patel

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NARRATIVE Managing Editor Celina Sun Section Editors Liza Edwards-Levin Jasmine Ngai Staff Writers Danielle Emerson Abbie Hui Naomi Kim Anneliese Mair Kahini Mehta COPY CHIEF Amanda Ngo Assistant Copy Editors Sonya Bui Nicole Fegan Mohima Sattar

HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Rémy Poisson CO-LAYOUT CHIEFS Jacob Lee Nina Yuchi Layout Designers Amy Choi Steve Ju WEB MASTER Jeff Demanche SOCIAL MEDIA Caleigh Aviv Camila Pavon BUSINESS LIAISON Saanya Jain

I Hate Music

arts & culture

Get That Sh*t Out of My Ears Written by Cathy Campo — Illustrated by Gaby Treviño

At the end of a particularly strenuous day, my hands can’t seem to reach for the remote control fast enough. In a world where music seems to be the prevailing form of escapism, I choose instead to turn to my favorite characters for comfort. Of course, we all find solace in art—but I’d rather wait until I can sit in front of a screen than to experience the relief of popping in earbuds.

More often than not, my character of choice is Jane Villanueva from Jane the Virgin. The protagonist of a five-season telenovela-esque series, her outlandish obstacles include an accidental artificial insemination, gruesome murders, and an undercover drug lord. In other words, she’s basically impossible to relate to. Whether it’s Jane the Virgin, How to Get Away with Murder, or The Good Place, all television provides a function that I don’t find in music: It’s distracting. Do you want to forget about the laundry you haven’t done in a month?

The readings you’re behind on? The 19 voicemails from your dad? Then boy, do I have news for you—that sh*t literally doesn’t happen on TV. Sure, on-screen characters deal with problems too, but they’re nothing like mine.

My biggest stressor is that I’m a senior, and I still have no idea what the hell I’m going to do with my life. Jane’s deliberations about whether she should keep her child put my woes—job applications and a lack of interest in classes—in perspective. It’s almost too easy to put a wall between myself and the characters presented to me on screen. I can safely observe Jane’s problems—sympathize, but not empathize, with the inner turmoil

she endures when (spoilers) her husband is shot and killed by a drug lord, but oh wait— he’s actually alive and just has amnesia.

Aside from giving me the gift of selective amnesia, allowing me to forget about internship rejections, TV has the uncanny ability to make me feel as if I’m surrounded by loved ones when I’m alone. In a weird way, Jane is one of my best friends. She comforts me when the stress of my own aimlessness becomes too much to handle. She’s there for me whenever I need her, for the Netflix fee of $10.99.

But, when my friends are in need, they turn not to Jane, but to Elliott Smith, Lana Del Rey, and Nina Simone for the Spotify fee of $9.99. My friends and I share many of the same woes—depression, identity formation, unrequited love—but they choose to pop in their headphones and listen to these artists on repeat: “Fooling everyone, telling them she’s having fun” (“Carmen” by Lana Del Rey). Call me crazy, but I don’t want my most distressing thoughts blasted in my ears. I’d rather ignore them forever, thank you.

For whatever reason, almost all popular songs just feel so personal and sad. Between parties and Jo’s, pop seems to be the only genre I encounter, and while it may be true that not all of it is depressing, enough of it is to turn me off from the whole art form.

These little, usually three-minute-ish pieces don’t have time to establish characters or flesh out detailed scenarios. When Julia Michaels, an artist I know nothing about, sings, “I got issues, and one of them is how bad I need you” (“Issues”), it’s impossible not to put myself in her shoes. It becomes me

asking my former lover to “bask in the glory of all our problems.” Music hits too close to home in a way that television and films cannot. I’m not anything like Jane who must face outlandish obstacles—God knows I’ve never had my baby kidnapped by a drug lord.

Meanwhile, Michaels’s scenario of a woman with issues who loves someone else with issues is so vague that it’s impossible not to relate to it.

And while we’re at it, pretty much all pop music is vague as hell. Who hasn’t, like Ariana Grande, felt “so f*ckin’ grateful” for their ex (“thank u next”)? Who hasn’t, like the JoBros, at one point been a total “sucker” for someone (“Sucker”)?

Facing music means facing my problems—it means coming ear-to-headphone with my lack of life direction. I can’t bear to sit in my room with the lights off and hear Selena Gomez remind me that I’m a “bad liar” (“Bad Liar”)—that no matter how confident I may sound about my future plans, the truth is that I’m scared and unsure. I run from course selections that might actually interest me, and instead, opt to take those that I know will be the easiest.

I run from conversations with my parents and the advisor of my concentration, which I don’t even like, and from what next year means for me. I run from music too. I admire my friends and other music listeners who find solace in melodies, but to me, music will always be a fast track to unpleasant thoughts about my painful reality.

Meanwhile, Jane isolates me from my life and sucks me into her own…so maybe our friendship isn’t so healthy. Television can be a beautiful, distracting thing, but sometimes, you just have to get your shit together and schedule a meeting with your advisor.

When it comes to spring weekend, I can’t exactly say with honesty that I’m excited to hear Mitski remind me that “no one will save me” (“Nobody”). Thanks, girl! But I am looking forward to spending more time with my real-life cast of characters: my best friends. Sharing the experience with them will push me out of my emotional headspace—and you know, the fact that I’ll be drunk won’t hurt either.

I’ll always look to Jane to help me forget about some aspects of my life, namely what exactly I’m doing with it—but there are other aspects I want to be fully present for.

No distractions.

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arts & culture

Good Enough to Tweet On the Increasing Aestheticization of Food Written by Zach Mazlish — Illustrated by Connor Gewirtz

The aestheticization of food is an inescapable reality. Every dish is an opportunity for photography, and many places cater to Instagram tastes before gastronomic ones. Twenty-somethings on their phones line up around cold city blocks for trendy no-reservation restaurants—the dings of Buzzfeed “Tasty” videos echoing out from their accumulated Facebook feeds.

Food has a long history of transcending the gastronomic and becoming artistic.

Across cultures and time periods, the upper class has turned what is meant for consumption into an object of presentation.

Think of Renaissance paintings that depict glorious cornucopias of artfully arranged fare. Contrary to popular belief, a whole boiled calf wearing a helmet first appeared in Ancient Rome, not on the Granoff menu.

But the current ubiquity of food’s aesthetic status is unparalleled in history, and it is not just a matter of rising wealth diffusing the privilege to view food as art to more people. Food is attaining an aesthetic primacy that rivals, and maybe even threatens, the rest of the art world.

Other art forms are caught in turmoil over loss of interest in aesthetic matters.

It is not hard to find articles lamenting the decline of poetry and fiction reading, decreasing attendance of art museums, or the narrowing of aesthetic criticism by millenials ready to “cancel” whoever thinks about gazing out the Overton window. Much of the “crisis in the humanities” is blamed on art’s primary value being transfigured from aesthetics to politics.

Food’s aesthetic revolution surges upwards against this prevailing trend. It’s rare, for example, that you’ll hear leftists making claims about the oppositional potential of Fukuoka-style ramen. Indeed, culinary creations are uniquely democratic.

Uniting our shared tastebuds, food welcomes the kind of low-risk, high-participation appreciation that the stuffier arts never could. Articles with titles like “Fluffy Japanese Soufflé Pancakes Have American Fans Waiting in Line” make their way into the New York Times “Most Popular” rankings, while “The Breakout Star of the Met Opera’s ‘Ring’” lags behind.

The digital age has shifted the way aesthetic material is accessed, and it’s possible food has benefited the most from

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this change. Netflix shows like Chef ’s Table and Ugly Delicious necessarily fetishize the visual aspects of food, and the promotion of restaurants by social media “influencers” bleeds into non-digital behavior. A 2017 Atlantic article mentioned that, for the first time, Americans are spending more money dining out than at grocery stores.

Food’s increased role as an aesthetic good has turned it into cultural capital, online and in the real world. When building a brand, where you eat now supplants the poetry you read and the art you collect. Is there any better way to signal one’s coolness and strike up a conversation with other young and urban types than to call oneself a “foodie” and start expounding on the local restaurant scene?

Confession time: I am as guilty of this as anyone and I don’t know how to feel about it. I have asserted my “foodie” status at many a meet-and-greet and devoured the aforesaid Netflix shows. And part of me brims with self-condemnation.

Isn’t taking aesthetic pleasure in food, rather than more traditional art forms, the ultimate form of millenial frivolity?

It is fueled by the desire for heedless consumption, and sustained attention and contemplation are far from required.

Food replacing more complex art is commensurate with the way “low-culture” items—short attention span garbage like superhero movies or Fifty Shades of Gray— will always reach peak popularity within their forms. What are critics to do but rage in ignored columns?

Furthermore, the desire to convert food aestheticization to status recognition can easily turn into the fetishization of distant cultures. It is one thing when David Chang or Anthony Bourdain travels the world and actually interacts with local communities, but there is something a little off about the love for “authentic Sichuan Chinese food” or “real Mexican food.” It tends to be more of an expression of “in-the-club” superiority than palate preference, and in doing so establishes a relation between the speaker and the foreign locale that only goes one way. There is a touch of early 20th-century artistic “primitivism” in the way the foodie collects cuisines of other nationalities—their ability to curate given by their “superior” cultural understanding.

Yet, I’m ambivalent. All these critiques strike me as an older generation’s typical cultural conservatism and inability to accept change. Movies, TV, photography, and even novels were all once decried as pulp before they ascended to their current status as high art.

And if food is stealing aesthetic attention from other art mediums, isn’t that a democratization of sorts? After all, food is universal and non-elitist in a way the Western literary canon or artistic masters can never hope to be. Food appreciation is still often used as a means of class elitism in that many of the “hottest” spots are still only accessible to a select income bracket, but it has democratic roots which other art forms lack.

The increasing embrace and appreciation of non-European culinary traditions can also be construed as a change for the better. Rather than assimilating or appropriating foreign food cultures, the millennial food obsession has created an avenue for increased cultural understanding and delivered job opportunities for immigrants looking to preserve their heritage.

It is time to start recognizing and coming to terms with food’s new aesthetic primacy. Many are participating in the transition of power from the mediums of the past to the medium of the plate without even realizing it’s occurring. Our literal taste in food now signifies as much as our taste in opera or baroque architecture once did. As someone interested in the food scene and the place of the arts in American cultural life, my feelings are still torn about this change. I’m not planning to stop wasting days away browsing Eater and lining up for Providence pop-ups, but maybe I’ll do it with a little more reflection. After all, what is modernity if not making oneself unsure about easy pleasures?

Going Solo

arts & culture

Imagining The Original Star Wars Trilogy as the First Three Years of College Written and Illustrated by Grace Wilkins

A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Back in the heyday of VHS tapes, the box set of the first three Star Wars films—on extended (read: indefinite) loan from my uncle—was my first real ticket to an epic cinematic world. At an age when my mind ran exclusively on a mix of sugar and imagination, the Star Wars universe was a limitless space for my siblings and me to explore beyond the realm of earthly possibilities.

On sick days and weekends, the trilogy played on an endless loop—starships, X-wing fighters, and a host of light-saber wielding characters rose from the piles of Lego rubble in our living room. The longer we spent in this futuristic and endearingly quirky world, the more it truly became ours to build and create.

The films’ motley band of rebels taught me a long list of important skills: namely, how to avoid death by frostbite, blaster fire, or (my personal favorite) giant trash compactor. Admittedly, some of these have been of far more use to me than others— the latter giving me little more than a completely irrational fear of the small trash compactor in my childhood home.

But the characters in these films— however surreal and far removed their reality may have seemed—showed me the power of resilience and loyalty and the importance of bravery in the face of unlikely odds. And although I have come to understand that life seldom divides itself cleanly into “light” and “dark” sides, much can be said for those who follow the Jedi and tirelessly strive towards a greater moral good.

I learned a lot from watching Star Wars. Perhaps more than I really ever knew (or cared to admit). As the years passed, and my own immediate reality began to dwarf that of the far-off galaxies, the Star Wars world faded into my periphery. That

is, until recently. Last week, one of my semi-frequent YouTube spirals landed on the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker. And, just like that, my own life and this beloved, imagined world were brought into strange proximity once again.

The movie, set for release this December, marks the ninth and final installment in the much beloved franchise.

Seeing both new and familiar characters cross the screen in iconic fashion, I was hit with a sense of nostalgia for the three movies that started it all—the trilogy that had meant so much to me as a child. This reminiscing slowly turned inwards, and I found myself reflecting upon my own impending final epoch: senior year.

Undoubtedly, my freshman, sophomore and junior years of college have not approached anywhere near the same level of cinematic drama seen in the first three Star Wars movies—and, unless you count setting microwave mac and cheese on fire, have been thankfully devoid of any ILM-level, Death-Star-destroying pyrotechnics.

But, these obvious differences aside, my life as a college student and those of the characters in George Lucas’s fictional universe speak to many of the same fundamental truths and experiences. Still skeptical? Hear this nerd out.

My freshman year (read: A New Hope) signaled the start of a new journey. It was a wide-eyed introduction to a place that—as a native Californian—really did, at times, seem galaxies away. No, arriving on campus did not place the fate of the universe in my hands—thank god—but I stepped into college with a renewed sense of purpose and a newfound feeling of independence. There were new challenges to face, new friendships to forge in the bonds of shared passions and struggles (forgive the cinematic hyperbole).

And, for a while, every college party I went to felt a little like the Mos Eisley cantina.

But at the end, I had a year of college under my belt and a firm grip on the reigns…right? Little sums up the typical sophomoric “wise-fool” attitude better than Han Solo’s iconic quip to Luke: “Great, kid!

Don’t get cocky!” My second year (read: The Empire Strikes Back) brought with it the Hoth-like “bomb cyclone” and a host of new trying experiences and weighty decisions: transferring to a new school, declaring my major, and a healthy dose of the requisite collegic soul-searching.

While maybe somewhat trivial in comparison to the threat of Imperial domination or Luke’s revelations about his father (a huge plot twist for viewers who don’t speak Dutch or German—try Googling “vader”), the trials of sophomore year reminded me to follow my instincts with persistence and conviction. To adopt, as it were, a “do or do not…there is no try” kind of attitude as I approached my penultimate year of college.

My junior year (read: The Return of the Jedi) was quite literally that: a return.

Having transferred to Brown after my freshman year, moving into my dorm this past fall marked the first time I would actually be returning to a school—there was a Star Wars-esque sense of triumph in setting down roots here in Providence. After a long period of what seemed like constant adjustment, coming back to campus felt like a hard-fought victory in the face of a lot of uncertainty and change.

But what about my senior year? And, what about the final movie we have yet to see? I find myself greatly anticipating both.

There is excitement in the story that is yet to be told. And, for me, a longing to return to the beginning as the clock winds down.

There is an eagerness to know the answers, to see how the final parts unfold in the saga I have lived—and loved—for quite some time.

Perhaps in December—and in the following spring—I will get the conclusion and the closure that I want and imagine.

But, as is true in life—and quite literally in movies—I will just have to wait and see. And whatever comes my way, I’d like to think that the Star Wars universe has prepared me well for a new chapter.

Whether or not I believe in the force, I know that some part of these films will always be with me.

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arts & culture

This Is Brown

Meta Political Action in Poppy and Childish Gambino Written by Quinn Matos — Illustrated by Halle Krieger

I was recently told in a mass email that, when engaging political issues at Brown, my options are either discourse or discourse.

Thankfully, I am a productive member of the Brown community, so I have ample opportunity to engage in discourse. In fact, it seems to be all that I’m expected to do. According to the email, it's what I have to do if I am to engage at all. I decided to engage in discourse by writing a discourse and publishing it in post- magazine’s Arts & Culture section. That way, I get my name in a magazine, you read about art, my editors eventually get paid jobs, and everyone is more cultured for it. Here is a discourse on artists who make meta music because they might have no other option. Their names are Poppy and Childish Gambino. They are first filtered through the discursive lens of a day-to-day Brown student. They are then cherry-picked so I can present them in a specific order to no particular end. Except discourse, naturally.

Poppy began by building an online following with short, eerie videos of its humanoid character, also named Poppy.

Poppy vlogs, interviews, applies makeup— basically anything one would do if they were looking to build an online following. Normal YouTube acts such as introductions and even iPhone reviews are delivered in simple statements with robotic cheer to create uncomfortable parodies with millions of views. The emulation is so watchable that Poppy creates a near-perfect critique of internet culture even as they participate in it. The Poppy project has since shifted its focus to streaming platforms, where Poppy has developed into a ready-built android

Poppy performs their role with absolute professionalism, moving with robotic efficiency between studio sessions, modeling gigs, and video shoots. The aesthetic (and the album) are summarized with “Bleach Blonde Baby”: artificial and expensive, an icon perfectly distilled from Eurocentric standards.

Poppy could never separate from their wellmaintained image, but by the second LP, Am I A Girl?, they begin to question it. Poppy’s descriptions are less exaggerated and more honest—the album’s opening lines are as follows:

otherwise known as Childish Gambino has released a varied -ography, from YouTube sketches to 30 Rock, from mixtapes to shirtless SNL performances. The music video to Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” is a recent addition to this body of work. The title demands a click and is so hand-holdey that it’s almost condescending.

(Apologies, reader.) In our defense, it is a very short setup, and it acts as a hint for the audience to make their own connections.

(You’re welcome, reader.) Gambino’s viewers can always just bump the song, mutter the flows, and continue their days as I’ll make up my face in a minute planned. But they were at least prompted to I’ll reform this state in a minute understand the video as a narrative and title Cash my check, got paid, yeah, I did it it “This Is America.”

I haven’t done my nails in a minute It starts off happily enough. In an empty warehouse, a barefoot black man picks up a Worry not! Poppy will get to reform! guitar and plucks to the lyrics: But first, optics. Then, money. Then, more optics. To their credit, if Poppy didn’t We just wanna party look and sound so expensive, they would Party just for you never get popular enough to explain how We just want the money popularity works. But conformity is narrow, Money just for you (Yeah) as explained in “Hard Feelings”: Behind him, an emoting Childish Why do I have porcelain skin Gambino half-flexes, half-dances over to With wires and electrics within? … the guitarist, smoothly strikes a pose, and My arms and my legs are so stiff shoots through the back of his head. At Is that the way you wanted it? the sound of the gunshot, the ingratiating Why am I so different? spiritual is replaced with the dark hum of What crimes will you make me commit? a trap 808, a clattering set of snares, and a quickly serious Childish Gambino groaning As Poppy sings and poses, white and the beginning to his verse. Bracketed expensive is reaffirmed as the pop star by the occasional “this is America,” the standard. Of course, Poppy can’t stop lyrics sound like a Migos word scramble— being white and expensive. Poppy’s a whip, dope, bag, strap, hunnid bands, robot. But let’s pretend that Poppy could Gucci, contraband. Gambino skates over concrete floors in a rhythmic set of jerks and swivels, staring down the viewer as a loose riot develops out of focus behind him. The rapper is soon accompanied by a set of black school children, dancing and smiling amidst perpetual chaos. For the next three minutes, the students imitate stop or look different—they risk losing the Childish Gambino as much as he imitates coveted audience they criticize for existing. them, breaking only for the artist to murder Doomed to being iconic (whatever that a choir. The video transitions to the outro may mean), Poppy is the pop star they were with Childish Gambino dancing on a car, designed to be. and the hooded guitarist back plucking in Donald Glover, I’m sure, understands his chair, thankfully free of bullet holes. the struggle—almost everyone in the United At this point it should be mentioned States has heard of him by now. Director, that “This Is America” has over actor, comedian, writer, producer, director, 500,000,000 views. The video is violent, rapper, singer, songwriter. The artist gruesome even, and everyone involved got

To their credit, if Poppy didn’t look and sound so expensive, they would never get popular enough to explain how popularity works. destined for the charts. Poppy is a robot designed to be the ideal popstar, and their features are established with Poppy’s first album Poppy.Computer. Poppy is a Carly Rae Jepsen Barbie doll manufactured in Silicon (The) Valley. Their major output is their appearance, delivered in a steady stream of short video clips. Their sideproject is bop after peppy bop of up-tempo synth-pop sung with an airy falsetto.

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paid for it. Release brought memes, views, and, above all, attention. One year later, as expected, America looks the same. Childish Gambino outlines, critiques, and profits off black death, but that seems to be a central part of his point—this is what rappers do.

“This Is America” is not a pot shot at party rap, in fact party rap seems to support the project. Everyone’s favorite mumble rappers provide trap cosigns: Young Thug, Blocboy JB, 21 Savage, Slim Jxmmi of Rae Sremmurd, and Quavo of Migos add their adlibs to the song like verbal signatures.

No, this is deeper than rap. From the barefoot fingerpicker to the church choir to Migos, “This Is America” draws a clean line of musical tradition from slavery to the present day and then collapses it into

one song. Childish Gambino suggests that popular culture, like his merry dance circle, is a distraction. Don’t get me wrong— popular culture is joy, it is knowledge, it can be the only thing to watch besides violence and concrete. But popular culture is a distraction. To encapsulate the long tradition he employs, Childish Gambino puts artist, audience, and gunfire in one warehouse, renders them inseparable, and asserts in plain text: “This Is America.”

The outro shows a very different side of Childish Gambino. The cool sequence of dance and expression is replaced by a wide-eyed sprinter, sweating as he runs through concrete woods towards the camera. Young Thug croons, “You just a big dawg, yeah / I kenneled him in the

backyard,” as the camera recedes from the artist, revealing scores of dim figures running behind him. It is not clear whether Childish Gambino is being chased or simply running with the crowd, but the suggestion is that the man dancing, shooting, and rapping in “This Is America” acts in a desperate exertion, compelled by some terrifying force in the darkness behind him.

This is the end of the thinkpiece. Now I am free to write discussion posts or outline a final paper. I am glad to have engaged in discourse. In fact, I’ve nearly forgotten that I don’t have another option. In summary: I am not an artist, this discourse is not music, Brown is not America, and you might be the audience. Thank you for reading my discourse; please leave positive comments.

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arts & culture

Alternatives to Water One Girl’s Quest to Stay Hydrated Written by Abbie Hui — Illustrated by Joanne Han

To be honest, I never follow the recommendation to drink eight glasses of water per day. Shocking, I know. Well, there might have been that one day when I was little: I remember continually filling up a small, colorful cup decorated with animal prints. I thought that there was something intriguing about that cup—my favorite back then—and I was so mystified that I kept filling it up with water and drinking from it. That day, I probably did drink at least eight glasses, if only because of that cup.

But water has never been my favorite beverage. It’s bland and boring, something I only drink when I feel thirsty, and by then it’s too late—I’m already dehydrated. If I’m ever choosing to drink water, it’s because I need to keep myself alert during classes or between workout sets at the gym.

I know water is supposed to keep my body happy, but because I dislike it so much, I search for other drinks— unsweetened tea, fruit, and vegetable juices—to stay hydrated.

Though my meal plan days are but a distant dream of the past, my credits once allowed me to frequently indulge in Runa Tea, a perfect blend of caffeination and hydration. My favorite flavors were lime and guava, perfect because I don’t enjoy overly sweet beverages. These teas are uniquely brewed with the “super leaf” guayusa, which gives them more caffeine than a cup of coffee. Because I always crash after consuming coffee—something I unfortunately learned during an evening exam—I especially appreciate the light, refreshing taste of Runa tea as I can drink as much of it as I want without worrying about this. Runa was great on days when I absolutely needed that sustained energy and clarity. Unfortunately, these clear glass-bottled teas are no longer in stock at the Blue Room. Now, I have to find herbal delight myself, brewing my own morning cup with rose or green tea bags gifted to me by my aunt or venturing out to Starbucks for some matcha. Occasionally, I’ll go to Shiru Cafe for a Capetown Sunset tea—a citrus and lavender rooibos herbal drink that reminds me of wholesome late-night hangouts and making s’mores by the backyard fire pit with my friends.

When I don’t want tea but crave a fruity drink, I’ll have some coconut water

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or juice instead. Before I found the only coconut water I actually enjoy—Harmless Harvest—I probably sampled all the ones that Costco carries, from Vita Coco’s to Zico’s. Let me be frank and say that although coconut water is an acquired taste—in part due to its many electrolytes— these coconut waters didn’t taste anything like actual coconut water. As in the kind you get from cracking open a coconut and taking a gulp, which I’ve had the pleasure of doing occasionally. When I stumbled upon Harmless Harvest and sipped its robust yet nutty flavor, complete with a pleasant aftertaste, I knew I’d found the real deal.

However, I thought all coconut waters were clear, so I was a little alarmed to see my Harmless Harvest adopt a pink hue. I later learned from a Serious Eats post that this is due to the drink’s unique pasteurization process: a low-temperature, high-pressure method. This preserves the antioxidants— the source of that distinct pink—which help neutralize the dangerous metabolic free radicals in our bodies. At the end of the day, the locally sourced coconuts hold onto their 100 percent raw quality, so it’s no wonder why this sweet, fragrant drink provides the freshest taste. Unlike water, Harmless Harvest is a little pricey but totally worth indulging in.

My dedication to finding drinks that resemble the actual taste of their ingredients—combined with the fact that I don’t eat enough fruit and vegetables— has led me to try a variety of fruit juices sold on campus and at the local Whole Foods. On campus, I gravitate toward Simply for lemonade, apple, and orange juices and Odwalla for mango smoothies.

From Whole Foods, I have tried a variety of Bolthouse Farm’s drinks, including the Acai + 10 Superblend. This drink has a thick, smoothie-like texture and an irresistible combination of acai and complementary fruit juices—from blueberries to blackcurrants to pomegranate—that I’ll drink slowly to savor. My inherent bias for mangos above all other fruits means I’m also pretty satisfied with Bolthouse’s mango smoothie. When I’ve felt adventurous, I’ve tried the vegetable carrot juice, which has an unexpectedly sweet taste and smooth texture, a surprise that hasn’t stopped me from trying out the next atypical thing— pressed grapefruit juice!

I know that drinking these teas and juices isn’t the same as eating whole fruits and vegetables, but I am nonetheless getting some more nutrients and fluid into my body.

One of these days, I may even qualify as being hydrated!

arts & culture

A SKEPTIC’S GUIDE TO SPRING WEEKEND A Breakdown of the Artists and Their Recent Work Written by Julian Towers — Illustrated by post- layout team

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arts & culture

Original illustration courtesy of post-layout team

Though sometimes mistaken for a real human being based out of Portland, Aminé Bot is actually one of hip-hop’s most sophisticated music generation algorithms— capable of seamlessly dis-appearing into millions of unrelated streaming playlists.

The formula’s success lies in its originality; before Aminé, who would have thought to swipe the friendly introspection of Chance the Rapper AND the f*ckboy braggadocio of Drake (as well as scattered saliva and hair samples from both)?

Though its expressive range spans the extent of human emotion—from I f *cked your bitch with my chain on to give me death—you can trust Aminé Bot’s flow will never be too laid-back or too aggressive, and its production will be kept consistently warm and bouncy for bangers and ballads alike. So strong is the algorithm’s appeal that tracks like “Caroline” are actually expanding hip-hop’s audience base; indie kids hesitant to enter the house of hip-hop will feel welcome upon hearing references to Björk, Quentin Tarantino, and the Spice Girls. Thanks to Aminé, they’ll move on to

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Yaeji Pop music has evolved pretty far. With internet weirdos seemingly unbagging any remaining possibilities, it’s hard to imagine ever being surprised by a song again. But, when in doubt, there will always be one surefire way for artists to catch ears: Combine two sounds that belong nowhere near each other. Enter Yaeji, whom history will remember as an innovator because she made sarcastic, novelty club music that was nonetheless easy to sleep to. Imagine The Chainsmokers's “#SELFIE” if it were on Ambien and also not a crime.

And, like the fate that would no doubt befall us if we actually fell asleep at the club, there’s something sinister lurking in the gentle throb of Yaeji’s tracks. Draining her baby-soft voice of warmth, life, and resonance, she typically recites some hilariously inane party-girl mantra (“In the German whip, counting all my guap” or “Make it rain gurl, make it rain”) as the beat ebbs hypnotically around her. Some will find the combination uncomfortably lulling—like being fed cultural ideology

through a vibrating massage chair. Others will likely bop ahead unperturbed. All will be glad they drank.

Still, there’s at least mild cause for concern. Though Yaeji builds her brand on irony, she’s clearly restless with the distance it imposes on her music. Her most recent EP collapses in bookending attempts at emotional directness; a ghastly cover of Drake’s “Passionfruit,” in particular, writes a check Yaeji’s breathy singing can’t cash.

Hopefully Yaeji can accept that, like the best artists, her music makes the most sense at its least logical.

3.5/5

Aminé

Original photo courtesy of Mary Beeze

investigate more challenging rappers—like Logic, or perhaps even Macklemore!

Aminé’s weaknesses are exposed whenever the algorithm is tested outside of Spotify playlists and forced to carry multiple songs on its own. Without a stable personality around which its diverse trend-hopping can orbit, album listeners might suspect they’ve inadvertently put

RapCaviar on shuffle. When the Aminé Corporation sends one of its many Aminé surrogates to perform Aminé songs at Spring Weekend, it’ll be interesting to see how long they can sustain the illusion.

2/5

Daniel Caesar

For those attending Daniel Caesar’s first tour in 2017, the website Fader reported there was a 12 percent chance of witnessing a marriage proposal. Though their means of statistical precision was unclear, one thing was: Caesar had been crowned the new King of Love. And for good reason. His earnest, pleading odes to true affection and romance were easy on the ear and heavy on the heart. After the many years—or rather, the Weeknds—where R&B had stood for racy & brooding, Caesar was proving that having a pretty voice didn’t mean engaging in unhealthy sex (or at least singing about it). You could make out to these tunes AND play them for your old-school grandmother.

Indeed, the only thing more retro than Caesar’s classic soul sensibility is his politics (seriously, Google Daniel Caesar politics).

But that’s beside the point. The trouble with Caesar is that his songs are so wholesome that they’re more smitten with the concept of love itself than any individual person. Though the two artists are frequently compared, a single Frank Ocean

Kari Faux is by some distance the least famous artist playing Spring Weekend. This is important; after the Brown Concert Agency announced her participation, hundreds of students were performing first Google searches simultaneously. This likely meant the single image dominating Wednesday morning bandwith was the cover of her latest EP: Faux posed on her knees, *ss raised in the air, legs spread wide, a middle finger held right where you’d think it would be, all aimed at the viewer. If they dare to investigate further,

Original photo courtesy of Justin Higuchi

arts & culture

verse will boast more proper nouns than Caesar’s debut album does in its entirety.

Considering his record is titled Freudian, it’s curious how little importance the singer’s personality has in his own music. It doesn’t help that his work runs amok with vocal— not hip-hop—duets (all women, by the way; if Caesar were truly into the inherent beauty of love, he’d ditch the heteronormativity and sing a babymaking duet with Jeremih).

It’s as though Caesar knows his airy falsetto isn’t quite enough.

One could argue that Caesar’s love songs are deliberately vague, like a musical Hallmark card.

His songs are voided of personality so that the world’s (straight) couples can easily find themselves and remove Caesar from his own work. Considering his politics, perhaps that’s not such a bad thing.

2.5/5

Kari Faux they’ll learn her big hit is called “Leave Me Alone.”

But you shouldn’t. Faux’s an incredible performer—casually gripping in her storytelling and with a worm’s ear for melody.

She’ll drip attitude but never as a means to call attention to herself. It’s like she’s making music the only way she knows how, like she doesn’t need anyone watching her. Her earliest work was skillful for what it was, mellow funk-rap unobtrusive enough to work into your bus ride (and, it would seem, catch

Original photo courtesy of Anton Mak

the remix ear of Childish Gambino), but she’s since launched off the higher platform it granted, making a deep dive into her own past.

“Here we go again…she’s rollercoasterin,” 2019’s Cry 4 Help EP begins, and the beat sounds just as woozy, like it’s warning us to get off the ride. Throughout, Faux’s drawly delivery mirrors that feeling, sounding both stoned and foreboding as she tells tales of youthful misadventure. The songs are catchy, vibey, and terrific for all the substances mentioned in the lyrics—but something feels off, so you hold on to your juul pods and listen. You’re right; everything shifts in the final track—a harrowing narrative of a sexual assault that resulted in Faux’s pregnancy. The title, the cover—everything about the project coheres into an intimacy rarely found in modern music. It’s bracing, uncompromising work. This is your Spring Weekend star.

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arts & culture

Poor Mitski, we’re told. She writes a couple of indie rock hits about unrequited love, and the world treats her diverse body of work like it’s a collective emoji. Snapchat screenshots of her album covers communicate feelings of unbearable longing and isolation.

Publications upload lists like “SEVEN MITSKI LYRICS THAT WILL MAKE YOU YEARN DESPERATELY FOR THE TOUCH OF ANOTHER HUMAN BEING.” Her true fans fight losing battles as they insist “I’m so lonesome for lonesome love” is not a representative lyric.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Even when Mitski’s not working through life’s unbearable sadness, her art feels designed to treat it. Like musical Lexapro, the short songs forego standard structure for the quickest possible route to your ailing heart—a free-verse, Emily-Dickinson-style take on rock music as nervous breakdown. With few repeating choruses, her singing rarely changes pitch; even when screaming, its volume is often overwhelmed by the roaring guitars.

It’s as though Mitski wants us to think her instruments are like her emotions: She’s not controlling them, and they’ve conspired to swallow her.

Mitski

Listeners compelled to follow should first know that Mitski’s work breaks down into a few different periods. Whichever one you require depends largely on your own emotional state. Bury Me at Makeout Creek, her first “rock” album following some boring folk excursions, is an asocial, selfinvolved, and maybe even upsetting piece of work. Catchy hooks and intriguing lyrics briefly surface only to be smothered by selfsabotaging punk rock breakdowns. If you’re truly sad, listening may feel like sinking into quicksand while watching somebody else drown in the ocean. If you want something suited for more than 12 percent of normal human moods, Mitski’s breakthrough Puberty 2 is the best balance between anthemic and despondent. Some songs even have jokes!

They’re self-deprecating, sure, but jokes! It’s not until her latest record, Be the Cowboy, that Mitski starts to leave herself behind. Signature guitars are replaced by plinky keyboards and Coachella-y electronics—switching up style so often the record can seem like a survey of dated pop music tropes. Mitski herself is still despondent, but, in an inverse of Makeout, her wailing seems more for our benefit than her own; the highlight is a disco sing-along that

Kamaiyah

Original illustration courtesy of post- layout team

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Kamaiyah doesn’t move her voice around a whole lot, but, hey, neither did Dr. Dre. The Oakland rapper brings it back 30 years to the original sounds of Gangsta rap—deep, funky bass; trebly keyboard hooks; laid-back, sing-songy flows; and annoying, album-disrupting skits. In fact, it’s almost too perfect that she’s entering the Spring Weekend lineup as a last-minute replacement: Familiarity with Kamaiyah's music isn’t necessary when her grooves are already classic. Even the most inebriated fool—with just a little borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’90s—should be able to pop and lock along without missing a single step.

If that makes Kamaiyah sound as onedimensionally retro as her (admittedly awesome) monotone, know that she’s at least a thoughtful curator. Any old-school hiphop fan can tell you the genre was rarely

Original photo courtesy of Bruce Baker

goes, “No-bodyyyy, no-boddddddy, nooooo body.” If you’re the type of Mitski fan who’ll Instagram caption lyrics when your avocado toast gets burnt, this is probably the ideal soundtrack.

3/5

an inclusive space; West Coast rappers especially took aggressive stances against women, gays, other rappers—anyone they construed as weaker. Though Kamaiyah has copped sonics from these influences, she’s left out any nasty static that might scramble her positive wavelength. Instead, you’ll find an ingratiating and charismatic humility; in my opinion, her best song is “Freaky Freaks”—a.k.a. the one where she decides she’s too high to drive her Jeep.

Hard to imagine Snoop showing that kind of restraint. And if Kamaiyah doesn’t yet have the tracks to move her off the nostalgia circuit, that’s nothing a little “Gin and Juice” won’t help you overlook.

3/5

feature

Resonance and Reflection Rehearsal Musings of Two Musicians Written by Anita Sheih and Sara Shapiro — Illustrated by Angie Kang

10:00 p.m., Steinert Choral Room We file into the rehearsal room one at a time and open our cases, revealing familiar instruments.

Anita: The cello is the largest of the chamber music instruments, crafted to fill the space it’s meant to fit. The widest parts of a cello’s body sit just between the player’s knees, where patella meets femur, connected by articular cartilage.

The smooth back rests against the player’s chest, and the long neck that supports the fingerboard hovers next to the player’s own. These points of contact make the instrument and the player one.

The player’s left hand runs the length of the fingerboard, each finger a dancer, skilled in the rhythmic tap of a fast arpeggio or the sensuous sway of a rich vibrato. The right hand holds the bow, its fingers operating less like individual virtuosos and more like unified rowers of a boat.

The bow pulls across the strings in swift, sure strokes or short, staccato sequences to achieve the desired sound and character of the music. Horsehairs pulled taut on a wooden stick glide across metal strings, sending ringing vibrations into the air with each sweep and lift. Rich or rhythmic, deep or light, all up to the pressure and technique of the right hand.

Sara: Lutheries—crafters of the smallest chamber instrument—select the wood that will become the violin with extreme care; respectfully and tenderly, the wood’s moisture is maintained through temperature and humidity control. The top plate of the violin comes from the fir tree (genus Abies), specifically spruce, chosen for its resonance and sturdy levity.

The lutherie strikes down their hatchet— the spruce is split.

While the fir is chosen out of respect for the sonic vibrations that the body will give way to, maple is chosen for its aesthetics, forming the back, ribs, and neck (assembled like a human, the violin produces sound that no body could). Its grain is lush, crafted so a flame goes up the violin’s back con fuoco.

Finally, the fingerboard is rendered from hard blackwood ebony, made to resist the fingers that will create melodies upon it.

There is symmetry to the violin—in its shape, in its grain, and in how its methodical construction transcends generations.

We position our instruments and settle into our seats for the next two hours.

When I was younger, I wanted to be just like my sister because I didn’t know who I was. I needed her approval on everything I did, and anything that she chose or wanted must have been the better option. So when my sister decided to play the violin, the same instrument that my father had fiddled with as a teen, I set my heart on playing it too.

But when I turned six, and it was my turn to begin playing an instrument, my parents would not let me choose the violin. I was devastated. I didn’t want to be different, or lesser than. So I decided to be more.

I chose the cello, a physically larger and sonically deeper instrument. Eventually, what began as an overcompensation for a lack of individuality became a major aspect of my identity, as well as a source of joy, connection, and expression.

In 1945, my grandmother, sixteen at the time, performed piano on the radio, a weekly gig (her father didn’t know). In 1980, my mom practiced her cello before school (my grandmother, too, could be heard, fingers hitting keys—silence was rare in their upsidedown house).

The cello was chosen for her as my violin was chosen for me, bestowed to my mother so that she, her sister (a violinist), and my grandmother could play piano trios day through night. In 2002, I became old enough to have my own violin—a mobile comfort in the face of a chaotic world. I wanted to play the cello, but my hands were too little, so I was gifted the smallest of the string instruments instead.

I am four-and-a-half years old (the half is important); my violin is 1/32 nd-size and can barely produce a sound.

The clear tuning A of the cello rings out, loud and true.

Here are some miscellaneous details that my adolescent brain chose to remember about the three cello teachers I’ve had.

My first teacher (whose name escapes me now): 1. She spoke with as much force as she played.

2. Just as I was a beginning student, she was a beginning teacher.

3. She had me play an instrument that was a size too big for my hands, which messed up my technique for years.

Mrs. K: 1. She was patient, and she helped me unlearn what my first teacher had taught me.

2. Her right palm had large calluses, which she would pick as I stared and listened to her correct my posture or my bow hand position.

3. On the wall of her back practice room, where we often met for lessons, she had an old, worn photo in a little black frame of one of her students posing with a grinning Yo-Yo Ma. 4. I hoped to one day also be framed on that wall.

Ms. F: 1. Her crazy curly hair always bounced around her face as she asked me about my day in her chirping voice.

2. She went to Juilliard and was much too talented to be teaching a bunch of sugar-high middleschoolers who didn’t know how to hold their bows properly.

3. When it felt like it was all too much, she would let me nap in the private practice room with the bright green pillows and the dark green walls.

When I was four-and-a-half, I did not pick up my violin and find profound beauty in it the way I imagine prodigies do. When you first start to play the violin, you don’t get to play the cornerstones of the repertoire—or even the middlings. You start with simple melodies and repetitive etudes that strengthen your fingers and ingrain decades of muscle memory, so much so that the part of your brain controlling your left hand actually becomes oversized compared to that controlling your right. You spend hours playing open strings, getting used to the pressure and speed of your bow and how they change the tone, the quality, the innate emotion of the notes, before you even begin to resist your fingerboard the way it’s built to be resisted.

You aren’t making music; you’re producing sound, and none of it makes sense.

We flip to the movement we want to rehearse and discuss areas we want to focus on and improve.

One strong marker of identity is the mosaic of stickers on an instrument's case—a tradition many music kids uphold.

But I never put stickers on my case, maybe

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because I was afraid of commitment, or maybe because I was always waiting for change. Every time my fingers could stretch a couple millimeters farther, I would move a cello size up. My mom would drive us to California, to the closest respectable cello shop, and I would sample different woods and shapes and tones of cellos from all over the world to pick the one that sung to me. With it would come a new case, freshly lacquered for infinite combinations of laminated logos and musical puns.

But to this day, the shiny turtle shell I haul around campus every week remains sticker-less. Maybe it’s because I still only play a 7/8th-size cello. But even if my hands never grow large enough for a full-size, I hope to do what Mrs. K. has told me to do since day one—practice hard and play well, because you don’t need a full-size cello to be a full-size cellist.

So how do you ever fall in love with those four strings, the bridge they rest on, and the regal scroll at the top? Some say you simply persevere and get better until your fingers move faster and your bow stroke is controlled.

This can take six, seven, even eight years of diligence until you can finally shape the music, and the instrument becomes not just your extension but as flesh and human as any part of you.

But something more has to have gotten me through the teachers who berated, the conductors who literally threw chairs out of their frustrations, the marathon-long rehearsals.

My something: I was twelve-years-old, my extended family went to Lincoln Center to hear a chamber music performance, and on the program was the Brahms piano quintet (seven years later, I would perform this piece at Brown; full circle). The melodies were traversing, the harmonies dissonant with few resolutions, the structure swelling. I didn’t think the music was beautiful, but it wasn’t created for my pleasure; it was sound that demanded to be listened to.

The composition reached within and twisted me around until my eyes burned and my blood pressure rose and my thoughts darkly swirled and spiraled, constructing labyrinths in their wake. I’d never before been affected by music, never had the transcendence of written notes through hollow vessels strangle me.

But now I saw clearly the power musicians wielded through maple bodies.

We run through the movement once and stop for further notes.

I’ve never had a problem with words.

Even though English is not my first language, it has become my primary one. I feel confident answering questions in class, explaining my feelings to others, controlling

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the letters as they fall out of my mouth.

But my fingers are clumsy. There are times when they don’t listen to me. When I’m playing and I tell them to be fluid and flexible, but they tense up, locked and rigid, gripping the bow until my knuckles turn white. When they should be prancing like nimble deer, but they trip over each other like Bambi learning to walk. There are times when they are blistered, callused, and exhausted from practice, but still can’t get the right rhythms. When the metronome ticks and tocks, but my notes teeter and topple over one another, and I contemplate casting to the ground the mechanism that so undeniably and so constantly reveals my flaws. When my face is hot and red with frustration and disappointment—at my fingers, at myself—and I declare to my parents, “I quit.”

These are the times I have to be reminded why I love classical music.

Chamber music is the most intimate of classical music forms, escaping the solitude of solos and the anonymity of orchestral playing. And, it is on those stages (sometimes not even stages, but porches or fields or living rooms) that I have felt musical intimacy most deeply—instruments speaking to one another, dueling, whispering, proclaiming, and acquiescing through layers of dissonance and harmony. Exaggerated eye contact and breathing that appear maniacal are the way I, and we, communicate, until our time is over and whatever magic we’ve created dissipates, living on in the crevices of unassuming interiors.

Full circle—sophomore year, I am performing the Brahms piano quintet, with its three-versus-two rhythm, tripping us up as we try to resist its drunkard nature and cadences of romance, despair, and chaos that can’t be expressed adequately in literary terms. That’s why Brahms turned to the piano, the two violins, the viola, the cello as the carriers of his cacophony. The day of the concert I cannot speak to anyone—I am twisted up inside, like I was seven years prior, only this time it is up to me and my fellow four to smother our audience with bows and strings and keys.

Mvmt I. (Allegro non troppo): A boat sailing through a storm, swell after swell, the wind changing and pushing and holding us back. We are moving against, with, diagonal to the wind, exalting and wailing as we travel.

Mvmt II. (Andante, un poco adagio): Docile and sweet, a lamentation, but with the permeating sense that solace is fleeting.

Mvmt III. ( Scherzo, allegro): A constrained march that wants to drive forward— if you let it, you will leave behind an instrument, and it will dissolve. Stay resolute.

Mvmt IV. ( Finale, poco sostenuto– allegro non troppo–presto, non troppo): The movement opens with dissonant sighs of grief, until finally we are unified after fortyfive minutes of feeling disparate. It’s a race to the end. We explode. (Now that I realize it will soon be over I want us to slow down, but the music demands speed.)

And then it is done, and we are standing up and bowing and my friends are hollering and I am buzzing until I am back in bed and the high is gone and all I feel is a profound lack even though I should be—no, I am— so full.

We play through it again from the beginning, keeping our new notes in mind.

The summer after eighth grade, I went to a music camp called Sound Encounters, met new friends, cried at performances, and was inspired by music to make music. And I ran into a boy from my school who also took cello lessons from my teacher. He was a year older, and I was too scared to talk to him.

The summer after ninth grade, I went with the Phoenix Youth Orchestra on a tour through Germany, where we played in stunning churches, met the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and slept on long bus rides. We snuck through the hotel hallways to hang out in each other’s rooms past hours and laughed until we cried.

The boy was also on this trip, and with a tour group of only about 40 instead of the 400 musicians at our previous camp, I couldn’t ignore him. He invited me to meet up with him and his friend, who was also older, cooler, and a bit intimidating. All of it was a bit intimidating—from sneaking away from the group to find another sight to see, to staying up late playing cards even though we knew we had to wake up early the next morning.

At one performance on the tour, the modest venue was shaped like a huge concrete cube from the outside. A closer look revealed hundreds of small, dark windows in a gridlike formation lining the exterior. On the inside, the cube was flooded with brilliant, cascading light of infinite shades, shifting and rising and breathing with our notes, each of which I heard with a new clarity, a previously withheld secret.

The boy and I agreed that this was the first time playing music made us feel truly alive.

It is 2014 and I am in Milford, a small town three hours outside of Toronto, where I spend two formative summer weeks immersing myself in chamber music. In rustic bunks that smell of festering lake water, marked with the carvings of girls before me, I exist blissfully.

During morning rehearsals, coaches struggle for the right metaphors to help their

teenage musicians grasp music that contains too many worlds for most of us—we attempt, boldly, anyway, rehearsing late into the night and walking back amidst constellations of fireflies.

In the afternoons, we plunge into the arctic water of Lake Ontario. We lay on the dock, finding spots made warm by fleeting rays. Conversation flows easily from what will be for dinner to our first loves to Shostakovich to how we wish our quartet members could count to four, dissolving into peaceful silence.

As musicians, our ears are always laboring, and sometimes it is nice to just lay.

The evenings, though, are when the bunks and the hills and the lake are imbued with unique fullness. One evening we sneak out to sleep in the mobile home of our bunkmate’s great-aunt beneath my first harvest moon— an orb so golden I feel it through the dusty ceiling. It is on the last evening that we huddle around a struggling campfire, resisting the blowing wind, and say why we are so thankful for this place: its embodiment of musicality (not intonation nor metronomic rhythms, but that which transcends technique) and the pause from life’s anxieties it allows.

A cadence—our time modulates, we go home.

The final note stops ringing, our bows are in the air, and someone breaks the magic of the silence with their first breath. We pack up and say our goodbyes until the next rehearsal.

After another summer and another music camp, I came back to school, and so did he. We carpooled to rehearsal every Wednesday night, both of our cellos puzzled perfectly in the trunk of his car. We would finish our respective sports practices (me, soccer; him, lacrosse), pile in, and head out.

During the 15-minute break of our threehour-long rehearsals, he would grab my hand as he rushed me to pack up faster, and we would run through the crisp night air to the café across the street. We would sip our hot chocolates or chai lattes and think about big questions before running back into the auditorium—just a couple of minutes late, every time.

He helped me practice for all of my auditions. We played a cello duet at his senior recital. I listened to his solo piece and gave him feedback on the accents in the runs and the proper bow stroke for that part that’s supposed to sound like how it feels to look up at the trees and see light streaming through the rustling leaves. I fell in love with it all.

After my junior year, he graduated high school. We parted ways and made only vague plans to meet up when our music camps overlapped that summer and we would both be in Michigan for a single day. We sat by the lake and watched the reeds sway, and he said that in that moment, his life felt like a movie.

Then he told me more about his trip, and about her.

We met up one final time at home in Arizona before he left for college, getting lunch at a restaurant we frequented often in our glory days. I was nervous. It was a brief, polite conversation. And then it was all over.

I never cried. I knew it was coming.

I’m not sure if I’d been steeling myself in preparation for that moment, if I was numb, if I am still numb. But now, all I feel is grateful, for learning to love, and for continuing to love music.

Pensato: a note, written but not played, not heard but felt.

“This meant that a note had to be so indescribably tender and soft that it was only allowed to be thought of.”

— (The Score, 1958) We file out of the room.

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feature

Morning Ritual

More Than the Morning (Coffee) Grind Written by Caroline Ribet — Illustrated by Cricket McNally

For a long time, I woke up early. My dad, also an early riser, would almost always come to my door when he heard my alarm go off. He’d ask,“Would you like a coffee, CR?” It was too early to talk, but on those mornings we would drink coffee for a few minutes together, finding a quiet solitude in the last moments of night and the first moments of day. It grounded me before a busy day at school; it was my special time with my dad. Our morning ritual.

One of the first things I did when I got to College Hill was scout out—first on Yelp, and later in person—where I’d buy coffee beans. I wanted the kind of whole beans that people describe as having hints of nuts or chocolate or citrus—not the pre-ground, instant stuff. I was determined to continue my ritual even far away from home.

Luckily for me, there are a lot of options here. Coffee Exchange on

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Wickenden has many kinds of whole beans, from the barista favorite Fondo Paez blend to the more complex Lake Kivu. Dave’s on South Main has beans that are a little more expensive but absolutely delicious (Quonnie is a favorite). There’s New Harvest Coffee in the Arcade, which is nice but a little too expensive for me and is also patronized by a crowd so hipster I feel like I’m going to melt when I enter the room. Of course, there are always the two Blue State Coffees on Thayer Street. The perpetually busy Starbucks. Malachi’s on Ives Street.

Sydney by the State House. Bolt Coffee in the RISD Museum. Each coffeehouse has its own character and whole bean offerings.

When I first got to Brown in the fall of 2015, many of these places didn’t even exist.

Now, each has become the site of familiar baristas, regulars I almost recognize, memories of long conversations, first dates,

paper-writing marathons, shrines of finals past.

Sometimes I feel like coffeeshops are where college happens; spend a few hours in the corner of Dave’s or Blue State and you’ll see what I mean. Students are crammed onto every possible seating apparatus from opening until closing. They’re in the corner chairs on their laptops and cellphones, engrossed in a conversation or novel or Twitter feed. Some students are in a rush.

A few have all the time in the world and lounge in the comfy armchairs, gazing out the window. Of course, actual adults are there too, holding their work meetings or picking up their morning usuals before heading off to the office. It’s the perfect place to be a student; just loud enough to count as white noise, just quiet enough to make out what people are saying.

Have you ever seen an AeroPress?

It’s a coffee-brewing device made of two plastic cylinders and a filter. After assembling the cylinders in a way that seems complicated until you’ve done it four or five times, you add in your ground coffee beans and hot water, screw on the filter, flip the assemblage over, and use the pressure of air to push the coffee through the filter. It’s among my dad’s preferred coffee-making processes, and for him brewing coffee is a form of art. He weighs out the recommended 17 grams of carefully chosen beans, purchased from our local farmers market, grinds them on the spot, and uses near-boiling water so as not to “insult” the coffee grinds. Right before I left for college, he taught me this sacred process and bought me an AeroPress and a small hand-powered coffee mill so I could make coffee for myself once I moved away.

For four years, I’ve been trying to figure out whether coffee culture is actually a fundamental part of the Brown University experience, or if my sample of friends and acquaintances just happens to be skewed towards coffee-drinkers. When I go to my humanities seminars (where surviving an entire 2.5-hour discussion without something to drink, caffeinated or not, is a universal challenge), everyone seems to have a cup from the nearby Underground or Starbucks or Blue State. On weekends, I struggle to find a single seat in any of the shops within a mile radius of College Hill, where students are hunkered down with their $3 drinks and free wifi all day.

Other days, I meet students who can “wake up just fine without coffee” or “prefer tea.” They don’t feel the need to engage in the delicious indulgence that is my favorite beverage. Some don’t like the taste. Others can’t metabolize caffeine or don’t like how the “drug” makes them feel.

A few drink coffee only when they need to pull an all-nighter, an experience that couldn’t be more different from my highly methodical, deeply personal, and semireligious morning ritual.

Getting familiar with the unique environment and unspoken expectations of campus-adjacent coffee shops has been part of the fun of caffeinating away from home. A fellow Brown student pointed out to me that “Coffee Exchange is offcampus, so it feels like a different world.”

The older crowd there, according to her, loves to “give their hot takes on … their marital problems,” engaging in the kinds of discussions that could not feel further from the collegiate talk around campus.

It’s fun to listen to, she says. By contrast, “Blue State is where you go on Sunday, and people talk about who they hooked up with.” She refuses to go to the Shop just a few blocks up Wickenden, because she “feels like a stereotype of [herself ]” there.

Plus, they barely have any tables, and it can be hard to get a place to sit.

Every coffee shop has its own character. The Underground—the week-day, student-run coffee house in the basement of Faunce—was nothing more than an idea and a coffee machine during my first year.

Now, it was described to me by barista Olivia Hinch ’20 as “the anti-Blue Room experience.” The mood-lit basement of Faunce features cheap coffee drinks, Knead donuts, and a fancy espresso machine, not to mention familiar faces standing behind the counter and ringing you up. At Bolt coffee, you have to specifically request milk in your coffee, showing your cards as a non-blackcoffee-drinking peasant. At Starbucks, you wait in the wings while people smart enough to take advantage of mobile orders stroll in and out. At Sydney, a coffee shop I patronized while working at the State House over the summer, the fancier downtown corporate people choose espresso drinks and Perriers and summer salads that look delicious but are not quite filling enough given how expensive they are. At Bagel Gourmet, when they ask if you want cream and sugar, you should always say “yes.”

I’ve found it’s possible to combine coffee culture with other interests. My friend Julia Bleier ’18 and I, who are running buddies as well as close friends, have together invented lots of training routes that end at different coffee shops near College Hill. When I have boy problems or a lot of papers due, we end at Dave’s (my favorite). When she has a lot of lab work, we run to Malachi’s (her favorite). We roll into the coffee shop sweaty, feeling superior to the people in line because it’s 7:30 a.m., and already having burned a million calories, imagining ourselves justified in ordering a whole milk latte, which is closer to a cup of steamed milk than anything else. If we

feel adventurous, we run to Borealis Coffee Company in Riverside, Rhode Island, and take the bus back. That hipster coffee shop is the type with minimalist wood tables and industrial metal stools and succulents in fishbowls on the tables, patronized by people with ambiguously ironic facial hair.

In our running clothes, you can bet we don’t fit in there.

As much as I love the Providence coffee scene, most of my caffeination still occurs in the quiet solitude of the early hours; it’s become a morning ritual all my own. I wake up a little after dawn and make coffee for myself—with whatever beans I’ve been onto lately—the way my dad taught me all those years ago. Then, I go running or concentrate on work while most students are still asleep. I need to take advantage of those morning hours because I can’t focus in the afternoon or evening, and I like the loneliness and the silence and the way I can hear my thoughts so clearly.

As I boil water, grind beans, and brew coffee, I imagine that in a few hours my dad will wake up in California and make coffee for himself. I look back on how hard it was to adjust to life in college, to make friends, to take care of myself, and to get used to working all the time. I remember all the friends, courses, interests, and workout routines that have come and gone, and the ways that my morning ritual has anchored me through the more difficult or lonely or painful moments at Brown. I wonder about moving away and moving on.

I think about which of my habits I might hold onto and others that will evolve into something unrecognizable in support of my new job and my new life. I contemplate what coffeehouses I will get to explore in a new city with new friends I haven’t even met. I map out where I will buy my beans during this next chapter and how I might avoid waking up a future roommate with the deafening sound of grinding coffee. I consider all the places that the AeroPress has come with me so far—every dorm, sublease, and apartment—and I envision where it might go next. I visualize myself in the apartment I haven’t even found yet, drinking coffee by myself in the early morning, preparing for the kind of adult life I don’t know anything about. I’m scared for graduation, but excited, too. I’m drinking coffee in anticipation.

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feature

The Closer

The PawSox Legacy and the Minor League Experience Written by Sarah Lettes — Illustrated by Owen Rival

On a sunny day in late March 1997, my parents put a baseball cap on my four-monthold head and drove me to Turner Field. The stadium had been built for ceremonies as well as track and field events for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, but had been recently retrofitted into a baseball stadium. On that 70-degree day, the Atlanta Braves were about to play their first game in the ballpark.

That first game did not lead me to an undying passion for baseball (I slept through it). But I did develop a love of going to baseball games. I relished in every minute of the fan experience. The days that I got to throw on my Chipper Jones T-shirt and a Braves baseball cap were special ones. My family would hop into the car and navigate the tangle of Atlanta highways. Once in our seats, I’d watch each pitch with bated breath, listening for the satisfying thud of the baseball hitting the catcher’s mitt or the crack of the ball making contact with the wooden bat.

After a couple innings of dedicated focus, my little brother and I, and later our little sisters, would peel ourselves out of the hot plastic seats to run laps around the stadium. We would weave through the concession stands and admire the glorious array of junk food, hoping to get our own ice cream or frozen lemonades. Then our parents would drive home while we were half asleep in the backseat of the car after hours of watching and cheering in the hot sun, our shirts sticking to our backs with sweat and ice cream staining the Braves logo on the front.

For years, watching baseball was something I associated strongly with Atlanta. Each time I heard the notes of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” it would take me back to those summer days at Turner Field.

But near the end of my first year at Brown, I realized that this iconic American sport was something that I could also experience in Rhode Island. In fact, I learned that there was a minor league team just a few miles away. So, a few people from my dorm met at the Thayer tunnel and hopped on a RIPTA bus to McCoy Stadium, home of the Pawtucket Red Sox. The bus took us up Hope Street, across I-95, and over the Seekonk River before plopping us in the middle of a sea of houses. The neighborhood was so residential that it felt impossible to have a stadium nearby.

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But after a couple minutes of walking, the ballpark came into view. The structure sits at the end of Pond Street, a subtle reminder of what had existed there before it. The Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples had originally lived on the land before European settlers came and established Pawtucket as an industrial center. In the 1830s, a man named Samuel Hammond constructed a reservoir there. Hammond’s Pond was used as a recreational area for decades, but over time fell into neglect, eventually becoming an unappealing swamp.

In the 1930s, Mayor Thomas P. McCoy requested to put a stadium on top of this swamp. According to someone who knew the mayor, he pushed for this idea “against the pressure of EVERYONE in his Democratic city organization.” But this mayor knew how to get what he wanted. He had undeniable charisma and passion and became a very influential figure in Pawtucket. At one point, McCoy was the mayor, city auditor, city comptroller, chairman of the Sinking Fund, chairman of the Purchasing Board, clerk of the city council, and the city’s Weigher of Merchandise. McCoy saw baseball as a morale-booster for local mill workers; he had been a union leader and saw a stadium as a way to not only give workers a diversion but also employ many of them who were recently unemployed.

McCoy got what he wanted, and stadium construction began in the 1930s. The project was expensive, especially because, as Pawtucket folklore tells it, trucks kept getting sucked into the swampy ground. It was completed with a final cost of $1.5 million, far above the projected $600,000. McCoy laid the cornerstone in 1940, and in 1942, the city officially celebrated its completion. At the time of opening, tickets were free with the purchase of a 25-cent defense step to support the war. McCoy passed away in 1945, and the following year the city dedicated the stadium in his honor.

Initially, the Pawtucket Slaters, a minor league team named after the industrialist Samuel Slater, played at McCoy. They left after four seasons and then, for 14 years, Pawtucket did not have professional baseball. The city used the stadium for events and treated it as a storage unit for heavy machinery and sand. That dry spell ended in 1966 when the Pawtucket Indians came to McCoy for two years before moving

to Connecticut.

In 1970, the first team known as the Pawtucket Red Sox started playing there. The team got its colloquial name, the PawSox, in 1977. That year, self-made millionaire Ben Mondor had saved the team from its downhill spiral by taking it over. However, three weeks before the season started, they still didn’t have uniforms. The Boston Red Sox general manager Haywood Sullivan sent over a set of 48 old home and away uniforms.

These uniforms bore the word “Boston,” so the Pawtucket general manager suggested they remove that stitching and replace it with PawSox, which the team has been known as ever since.

Throughout this historical rollercoaster ride, one claim to fame has stood out in Rhode Island lore: On McCoy field in 1981, the PawSox played the Rochester Red Wings in the longest game in baseball history. On April 18 at 8:25 p.m., the game began, and the teams battled it out for 32 innings (a normal game has 9 innings) until 4:07 a.m., when the game was finally suspended. By the end, only 19 fans remained in the stadium. The game resumed on June 23, and within 18 minutes, the PawSox scored a 3-2 victory after a total of 33 innings.

This hub of sports and community, once filled by millworkers and later attended by new waves of immigrants who moved to Pawtucket, is now in its second to last season.

The PawSox are set to move to a new stadium in Worcester, Massachusetts, next season, where they will be renamed the WooSox. When I first walked up to McCoy Stadium on that May afternoon, I had no idea about the history that brought that stadium into being. All I knew was that I couldn’t wait to sit down with a bowl of ice cream and forget about finals for a few hours. The first thing I noticed was how approachable the stadium was. Atlanta’s Turner Field, where I grew up attending Braves games, could fit almost 50,000 perspiring fans. In contrast, McCoy holds barely over 10,000 seats.

During my first game, my group’s tickets were general admission, so we had free reign to choose our seats (at least I think we did; if we were wrong, no one corrected us). It was a drizzly day, so we got our pick of most of the stadium, sliding into seats a few rows behind home plate.

At McCoy, you get to see talent that’s almost on par with what you would see at

Fenway, but in a much more intimate setting.

These minor league players are just at the brink, working towards their big break and a chance to move up to Fenway Park in Boston.

Indeed, famous players like Roger Clemens and Kevin Youkilis spent time playing for the PawSox in the minor leagues. Also, major league teams sometimes send players down to their minor league teams while they recover from injuries, as the Red Sox did with “Big Papi” (David Ortiz).

Beyond the high quality baseball, McCoy never fails to deliver a stellar fan experience.

After one game, PawSox reps asked fans to come down to the field and grab a partner.

They handed each pair of fans a baseball. Over 1,100 of us lobbed the balls back and forth with our partner, and together we broke the record for the world’s largest game of catch.

The following spring, I witnessed a giant candy hunt on the field after the game. Kids darted around the green grass and grabbed for Smarties and Twizzlers. The PawSox also let kids stay after some games and run the bases. On some summer nights, they fill the outfield with tents for Scout sleepovers.

I most recently attended a game at the beginning of this school year. That time, a mix of the original first-year crew and some

others whom I had told about the PawSox just the day before loaded into cars and headed out. At that point, I really should have known to check the schedule to see what kind of treat was in store, but I enjoyed being surprised. As it turned out, there was a Grease-themed fireworks show to cap off the game. It was a warm night during Labor Day weekend, and the stadium was packed with families soaking in their last taste of summer.

The sun moved its way across the sky throughout the game, casting bright shades of orange as the fourth inning began and disappearing by the final pitch. Minutes after the last ball thudded into the catcher’s mitt, one burst of fireworks shot up into the night.

Then “Summer Nights” came on over the sound system, as well as “Greased Lightnin’,” “You’re the One that I Want,” and all of the hits that gave us nostalgia for a time period none of us had ever experienced. It was the second to last game of the season, and the crowd sang along to every word as they clung on to the final remnants of summer.

On April 13th, the team played one of their last home openers ever as the Pawtucket Red Sox. Next year, they’re going to fold up their PawSox uniforms and button up WooSox uniforms, entering a

new chapter of baseball for this team. A lot has changed about McCoy since the first pitch in 1942: The stadium itself has been renovated and expanded, and the fanbase that once attracted millworkers now sport “Osos Polares de Pawtucket” (polar bears) uniforms at Tuesday home games “to celebrate the team’s surrounding Hispanic community.” The players now come from across the globe and live in a different world than the players who first took the field at McCoy. And outside the blue plastic stands, the city of Pawtucket has continued to evolve. But some things have stayed the same: the hush before a pitch, the sound of a bat making contact with a ball, and the cheer of fans that echoes through the neighborhood as the ball soars through the air. There is still a whole summer of baseball-filled afternoons in Pawtucket, so make your way to McCoy to cheer on the PawSox. Details about PawSox history came from Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game by Dan Barry; “A City Braces for Its Ballpark to Go the Way of Its Mills” by Dan Barry in the New York Times; and “History of Pawtucket Red Sox Baseball” from Boston’s Pastime website.

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narrative

Granola Bowls or Porridge?

Breakfasts with Body Dysmorphia Written by Rob Capron — Illustrated by Katie Fliegel

Content Warning: Eating disorders, body Yes, I’m an Englishman now. At least hatred, body dysmorphia temporarily. Which is to say, not at all.

I sense my American heritage is fairly The best weekends of my life have transparent to the locals. What little always begun the same way: with a “healthy” practice in the regional dialect I have breakfast of granola, strawberries, cho- received from my program—learning colate chips, and brown sugar. Episodes of the “standard” accent of Received This is Us keep me company as I eat. In these Pronunciation is mandatory at the London golden days of old, this delectable cocktail Dramatic Academy—has proved largely proved a source of reprieve and relaxation. ineffective for a blubbering twentyBut this semester I’ve gone abroad, and something who can barely pronounce granola bowls have vanished into that good words in American English. I order a black night with little to no fanfare, replaced by the coffee and see the disdain in the barista’s amicable blandness of store-bought porridge eyes as they ask if I mean an “Americano.” from my local London supermarket. My My Rhode Island ID is constantly hasty departure has left me consumed with scrutinized as a shoddily made fake; my guilt, for I failed to grant my sweet granola strict dieting and slim 5’6” frame does me bowls the send-off they deserved. I wasn’t no favors to convince bartenders I’m above there to say goodbye. I never got to say fourteen years old. This isn’t all that bad, “I love you” one last time, to cry into the really: When you’ve been grappling with coconut shavings as season three of This is eating disorders for the last seven years, Us unearthed more Pearson family secrets. the suspicion functions as an odd sort of

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compliment—especially when my free time has been devoted to strictly scheduled gym sessions as opposed to sight-seeing.

Truthfully, I have largely considered my experience abroad as beneficial: Here, I can easily resist the temptations of Blue Room muffins, spicy withs, and those dastardly delicious granola bowls.

Yes, I confess: At the time of my departure, my dear granola bowls were less of a childhood sweetheart and more of a toxic lover. Allow me to enlighten you with the history of our tragic affair. *** November, 2016: Freshmen are concerned about many things: whether or not they’ll pass their classes, make friends, carve themselves an identity. The one I’m most worried about is the freshman fifteen. The sacks of fat that wrap around my stomach are much smaller than they used to be, sure, yet the fear I might return

to my former size consumes my waking days. How can I make new friends when I’m constantly on the precipice of obesity?

Though I’m not exactly counting every calorie, I have devised an ingenious failsafe, one that allows me to indulge in—and simultaneously prevent the repercussions of—endless binge-eating sessions. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the “chewspit.” Three easy steps, repeatable ad infinitum: 1. Chew up foods you crave but do not need—i.e. pizza, sweets, desserts (shout out to Cajun apple cake!).

2. Find a suitable location to spit out the food (a napkin or empty togo box are generally accessible; if timing and location are flexible, a bathroom works quite nicely).

3. Spit out the remains, and stay fatfree!

Yet, there’s something special in this very moment. Perhaps it’s the way my girlfriend rests on to me. It could be the loop of The Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” that sways through my head. Or maybe it’s the tasty concoction of granola and chocolate that smothers my taste buds in decadent delight. It feels good to let food go down your throat.

She offers me her leftovers. “I told you you should switch sides.”

For once, I do not hesitate to eat more.

November 2018: Two minutes of sugary bliss, and now I have to work it off in a gym session I cannot possibly fit into the day.

All the chocolate and carbs and sugar are turning into blubbery fat as I speak. I need to go to the gym. But when? I can’t delay learning my lines for The Antipodes again.

I can’t cancel on my friend—that’ll be the third time this week. I can’t forget about

The granola bowls have vanished into that good night with little to no fanfare, replaced by the amicable blandness of store-bought porridge from my local London supermarket.

This system doesn’t always work, of course. Dates require constant interaction, and unless your potential suitor leaves to go to the bathroom, you’re forced to endure whatever has ended up on your plate. In such scenarios, I have no choice but to force myself to eat the standard number of calories per day, and even to try foods that are objectively bad for me, such as the breakfast burritos that draw out obscene numbers of people to Andrews on weekends. A girl I befriended insists I “switch sides” from the burrito line to the one across and try a granola bowl, specifically with coconut shavings. I doubt I will. If I’m eating junk, at least let it be junk I choose to indulge in. My daily caloric intake doesn’t grow on trees.

April 2018: Warmth envelops me, and I cannot determine the origin. As a sophomore, I have settled into the comforts of familiarity, knowing which foundations to rest upon when the going gets rough.

Weekly therapy sessions haven’t hurt either.

the response paper for Latin American History and Film. And I told Katie I’d meet her for dinner. That means I definitely have to eat more. I’d look like a moron if I made plans for dinner and then say I already ate.

What kind of friend would I be?

I have to—need to—let this tension out. Some Blue Room muffins should do the trick. I hope the second-floor bathroom isn’t being cleaned.

February 2019: Coldness envelops me, and I cannot determine its origin. Perhaps it is the caffeine coursing through my body, making my skull throb, both friend and foe to the myriad of tasks set before me. It could be my sense of inferiority, an unshakeable feeling that, despite friendships and encouragement, I do not belong in London, in the program, or in the acting world. Or maybe it’s the rush of anxiety whenever my new girlfriend offers me chocolate. I think back to the chocolate Insomnia Cookies that returned in mushy heaps to their containers, the chocolate

Blue Room muffins I sputtered into the toilet, the chocolate granola bowls that always seemed to latch across my stomach and throttle my brain. All these are foreign to me now. I swore off their seductive ways in favor of a healthier lifestyle—dictated by rigid exercise and a strict diet of chicken, whole-wheat products, organic peanut butter, and good ol’ English porridge.

What better way to maximize my fitness training than with consumption of strictly nutritiously advantageous foods? No more greasy dining halls and lunch dates with unpredictable caloric values. I am in full control of how I live. I have structure, safety, and security, both in the people I have befriended and the food I consume.

Everything is exactly as it should be. So why am I unhappy?

She smiles at me, a thumbnail-sized block of milk chocolate in hand. Even in my neurotic madness, I know to refuse her offer is ridiculous. A voice in my head devises a new rule to follow: Never reject chocolate from a girl who loves you.

And yet I do. Over, and over, and over again.

Until one day I don’t. *** In less than a week, I will be back home in Rhode Island. My London endeavors will be a fond memory. But while my semester has ended, there’s a way I can still carry London with me—to home, to Brown, and beyond.

The ingredients are simple: yogurt, granola, and a whole bag of chocolate chips thrown in there for good measure.

I think it’ll be a hell of a lot better than porridge.

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narrative

Meeting Myself

Reflections from Revisiting Symphony Hall Written by Holly Zheng — Illustrated by Ashley Hernandez

As the audience lights dimmed and the stage lights brightened, I quickly flipped through the concert program to remind myself of the pieces’ names. A tuning note from the first oboist broke through the silence of the concert hall.

Different timbres of sound emerged slowly underneath this steady note, soon weaving into a comforting harmony.

Having been on both sides of the stage, I’ve become very familiar with the “concert A,” the pitch universally used for tuning orchestras and concert bands. This time, the note was even more special because I knew the oboist playing it; she was one of the people I had befriended when I participated in the same music festival before.

Earlier that morning, on a slightly snowy Saturday this past March, I took a train north to Boston Symphony Hall.

The concert didn’t feature any renowned soloists or guest conductors; instead, the performers were high-school students.

They had come from different towns in Massachusetts for the annual three-day high-school music conference, whose final performance takes place at Symphony Hall.

I participated in this music festival during my last two years of high school.

Thankfully, Brown is close enough to Boston that I could at least attend the concert again this year. I always lament over how I attend school near Symphony Hall, one of the most stunning concert venues in the country, but seldom have the chance to see a concert there. Going to this one was an effort to change that.

I sat through the choir, jazz band, and orchestra performances before the concert band—the group that I had been part of—came on. Before the concert band musicians arrived onstage, the concert hall staff had to rearrange the stage setup, so I took this time to walk around in the corridor outside. Last year, I waited in this same corridor with the rest of the band before heading onstage. I had leaned against the wall then, looking forward to my group’s performance. Our conductor had added a short choral introduction to the opening piece so that the entire band sang before we started playing. I couldn’t wait for the ensemble to surprise the audience with this, but I also knew that when we hit our last chord, my four years of high-school music festivals would conclude. I wasn’t

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sure how dedicated I would be to music once college started, so the thought that the festival could be the last time I would play with an ensemble made me a little uneasy.

I certainly did not imagine then that I would be back in the same corridor a year later. Noticing that the concert band musicians had gone onstage, I snuck back into the concert hall and sat in a seat near the entrance. From past experience, I knew that these musicians must have woken up before five that morning to prepare for their dress rehearsal. The concert band always went first during dress rehearsals but last in the actual performance so that the staff could set up the chorus risers after the instrumental group rehearsals and leave the risers onstage until the chorus finished performing.

The tiring rehearsal schedule always posed a challenge for me and my fellow band members, but our successful performance made the 4:30 a.m. alarm acceptable. I tried to hide my chuckle as I remembered the long hours of spare time I had between our dress rehearsal and our afternoon performance. Sitting among our instrument cases, I had chatted with other musicians, sharing anecdotes about practice while trying to finish a James Joyce novel for my English class.

In the middle of the concert band’s first piece, a sonorous trumpet melody brightened the golden tones of the concert hall. Surrounded by the layers of harmonies reflecting off the hall’s acoustically ideally wooden architecture, I forgot where I was.

I was suddenly sitting under stage lights, slightly sweating, my clarinet in my left

hand, my sore right hand resting on my lap while counting the number of rests I had so I wouldn’t get lost. The trumpet melody continued behind me.

Then, I was back in my seat in the audience, looking at the musicians onstage.

The melody surrounding me had softened the boundary of time. I smiled at my old self.

When I walked out of Symphony Hall into a quiet, ordinary Boston afternoon, I realized that my return to this festival was more necessary than I had originally thought. Before I left Symphony Hall last year, I was aware that a part of me would be staying behind. Now, walking through the same corridors again gave me the chance to address the worries I didn’t know how to deal with a year ago.

An afternoon at Symphony Hall reassured me that, despite any emotions that may overwhelm and confuse me in the moment, I will be able to make more sense of them in the future. If I leave such thoughts in the back of my mind, maybe someday, a familiar place or another timeblurring melody will reunite me with them and bring clarity.

Before I walked down the stairs leading into Green Line station, I looked behind me at Symphony Hall just across the avenue, searching for a glimpse of myself standing at the hall’s door last year. Given the chance to speak to my younger self, I would let her know that everything would turn out fine.

That I’m still playing in music ensembles in college, and that every concert A still gives me chills. Most of all, I look forward to each and every performance, just as before.

narrative

Flow

Learning the Elements of Dance Written by Chanel Johnson — Illustrated by Ali Pirl

A few weeks ago, the professor of my Philosophy and Psychology of Happiness course introduced us to the concept of flow.

Flow, as he described, comes from taking action to complete a difficult task. When a person is in flow, their enjoyment of a task lies outside the boundary of anxiety and boredom, where a task challenges but doesn’t overwhelm them.

*** My friend and I first saw the hiphop dance group Impulse perform in the spring semester of my sophomore year at Brown. Halfway through the show, a group called Elements took the stage. The show’s program told me that Elements was a beginner hip-hop dance group run by Impulse that teaches students foundational dance skills and choreography. As I watched the group perform, I was amazed by how confidently and passionately they moved and began to imagine what it would feel like to be on that stage myself, even though I had my reservations about dance. *** Dancing and I have had an on-and-off relationship for most of my life. I started with ballet lessons in kindergarten, but for some reason, I stopped going. My interest in dance revived when I decided to take an African dance class during my sophomore year of high school. But I would always compare myself to my classmates. How did they do that move so naturally? Why can’t I look that graceful? I didn’t take another dance class until the fall semester of my sophomore year at Brown. The course was eccentric, to say the least; we wore strange costumes and even danced in paint. After completing it, I decided I just wasn’t freespirited or coordinated enough to appreciate

dance. But after seeing the passion and energy of Elements’s performance, I decided to give dance another shot and try out for the group.

Yet when Impulse announced the Elements Dance Workshop Series this January, I still found myself looking for excuses. You have to meet at least twice a week? I can’t manage that with my academics! Over 100 people are already interested, and they’re capping the group at 80 people!? What’s the point in going if they’re already going to be over capacity?

Despite all these excuses, I somehow found myself walking to the dance studio for the introductory meeting and being greeted by a mass of people in a small room.

Maybe I stayed because the student teachers were so welcoming and encouraging. Or because everyone around me looked like they had no idea what was going on either, and we laughed through the choreography anyway. Either way, the workshop culminated in just one performance. How bad could that be? *** Good God, I thought many times throughout the next six weeks as we prepared for our performance in the Impulse showcase. The learning curve was steep for me; I had underestimated how difficult it would be to learn and remember the choreography. For the first couple of practices, the only thoughts running through my head were What are my arms doing? What are my legs doing? What direction should I be facing? And while trying to figure all of that out, I still needed to be in time with the music, matching the chill vibe of one song or the fast-paced beat of another.

But, it was the first time in a long time that I felt fully immersed in the moment. I’m always thinking about the next five things I need to do—helpful for staying organized but terrible for enjoying myself. However, while learning choreography, I was so focused on my body interacting with the space around me that my looming to-do list never crossed my mind, something I only realized after practice ended. Moreover, after practicing the choreography so many times, I began to trust my body would remember the moves for me. With each practice, I could relax more with the music. As my psychology professor would say, I entered a state of flow.

And maybe that’s what my previous dance experiences lacked. Before Elements, I was constantly overwhelmed during workshops—simultaneously trying to keep up with the choreography and make my dancing look effortless. I was so focused on seeming confident that I ended up appearing inattentive and bored. Elements challenged me to let go of what I looked like and focus instead on how my body felt, something that the teachers emphasized.

Right before I took the stage for my performance, my friend from Impulse pulled me to the side. “I just want to say I’m so proud of you, and that our friends in the audience came to see you. You got this,” she whispered, tapping my nose with her finger.

My friend’s encouragement and my experience in Elements gave me the confidence to continue dancing after that performance, sparking my desire to grow more as a dancer. I wish I could say my relationship with dance has been smooth sailing ever since, but that’s definitely not the reality. I sometimes still walk into workshops and can’t help comparing myself to the dancers who are better than me. I still catch myself feeling discouraged when I can’t pick up choreography as quickly as I would like to. A month after the show, instead of enjoying the video of my first performance in over five years, I cringed at the tiny mistakes I’d made.

My confidence in dance is still a work in progress. My lifelong, rocky relationship with dance perhaps stemmed from my unwillingness to accept that there would be challenges in the first place. Inevitably, more challenges will come as I learn different dance styles and push myself to participate in more workshops and auditions. But as of now, challenges and all, dancing is the only activity that makes me feel centered and grounded—it’s at once a balancing act and a breeding ground for growth.

25

narrative

Winded

Confessions of an Expat Band Geek Written by Jordan Hartzell — Illustrated by Rémy Poisson

One Time at Band Camp…

Consisting of 60 hours over five days in the last week of August, camp inspired its own special form of dread, the kind that festers and then collapses in on itself when the thing you have to do gets close. But it was ultra-mandatory: No camp meant no membership in the ensemble for the entire year. Play or get played! The days were army-regimented: morning marching drills before it got too hot, then midmorning large-group work, then midday section work, then marching drills when it was too hot, then large-group work again as the summer light faded. Our director, Mr. Hill, was a squat and balding man with beady

26

eyes and crooked teeth. Too much hair gel.

He spent the days at camp telling us how inefficient we were. Lazy, too. Unable to meet expectations. Every day was the same mess of brass and put-downs: hot air all around, accented by short whistle blows.

Always sunburn.

would order us to stop playing and get in parade formation. We’d march around the school football field in silence, instruments in playing position but not making a single squeak until dismissal at 7:40 a.m. when the school day began. Roll step to honor the troops.

Into the Wild Blue Yonder!

Central Pennsylvania has a lot of vets. Memorial and Veterans Days were major events, as were the parades. For the few days before them, we used our morning practices to play “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” After we mastered a piece, Hill

Never Have I Ever…Cried During Rehearsal The band was the only school group that had 7 a.m. practices, which were held inside during the winter season. Winter meant no football and more concerts. I was second chair alto saxophone, and it was two days before a Friday night show. Our first chair player decided he’d rather go to

his baseball game than the concert, so I stepped up to take his solo. It was a short ditty—some sharps and flats for technical flair, but no biggie (sax is all about faking it anyway). But on the morning of the concert, I still couldn’t play those few measures perfectly. I tripped over the transition down to low F, which set me back half a beat and messed with the trumpets’ intros. I tried the run twice; my third time was not the charm. Hill had heard enough:

the phone from my dad (an eye doctor with a knack for giving emergency advice to his kids). Apparently a patella dislocation isn’t as dangerous as a full knee dislocation, and performing an impromptu relocation isn’t a good idea if you have zero medical knowledge or training. The kid stood for the rest of the ride, wincing on every turn.

We all sat quietly until we returned to school.

He stopped the entire ensemble to stress the importance of individuals delivering on their promises, of preparation as a form of respect for the group, and, I guess, the importance of not being a major screw-up in general, with me as counterexample #1.

He rapped his stand with the baton. Try again.

Swing Low Jazz was “Apple Honey” by Woody Herman and “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder—the best part of being in band and my sweet spot. Jazz ensemble was the only reason I hadn’t quit playing. The group was optional for band members, but participation in the marching and concert bands was a required corequisite. Some kids put down their marching instruments to riff on bass guitar, piano, or a full drum set; everyone played like they meant it.

Soloists ripped up nasty improv sections, and we all swayed when a piece started to groove. It was the kind of music that makes you close your eyes, so you can feel yourself making it.

Jazz was “Apple Honey” by Woody Herman and “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder— the best part of being in band and my sweet spot. Jazz ensemble was the only reason I hadn’t quit playing.

Shut Up, It’s Not Dislocated.

The back of the band bus was a lawless place. On the outside, it was just a regular school bus that carted us around to play at Friday night football games. But the bus always saw more drama than the field: a girl threw up everywhere, a boy got a blow job under a blanket in the back row, the driver accidentally backed into the school at an away game. On one drive home, a kid from the drum section was sitting crosslegged in a row toward the back, resting his knee on the metal siding. We went over a bump, and his knee thudded against the bus, ripping his patella out of place as if it hadn’t been attached at all. He didn’t cry or moan; instead, he stood and held himself up with the back of the seats, trying to get someone’s attention. No one believed him (the bump was tiny; you’ve got to be kidding!) until someone went over and took a look at the kneecap jutting out way too far. I walked down the aisle and rolled up my sleeves to pop it back in, thinking that I could maybe follow instructions over

You’ll Be Missed and Other Lies The band played on without me, as bands tend to do. I told myself that quitting wasn’t about the music; it was the toosevere director and the too-boring football games and the too-little happiness the whole experience brought me. I told myself that I’d keep playing, that I could separate the making music part from everything else.

Go Bruno I didn’t bring my sax to college.

Quitting, in C Minor My musical career ended in mezzoforte. Jazz just wasn’t enough anymore.

Band had lost whatever sparkle it once had, and the near-constant dread outweighed any joy. Hill said something like, “That’s too bad. I understand,” and then I might have said, “Okay, well, I enjoyed my time in the band.” That was it. It was the end of junior year, and I was six years in—four under his direction. The moment felt like a drained A-flat with a fermata that wasn’t held long enough—awkward, with no resolution.

27

narrative

The Pen Is Not A Sword On the Power of Writing

Written by Kaitlan Bui — Illustrated by Kathryn Li We often hear that the pen is mightier than the sword.

Throughout my years as a writer, I’ve proudly clung to this expression, simply believing that it promised me the possibility of transcending the bookworm archetype.

Offered a weapon to wield, one even mightier than a sword, I became a warrior-leaderpathfinder—with an emphasis on “warrior,” of course. After all, that was the juicy stuff, the stuff of power. In a world that seemed to champion CS majors and pre-med kids, I could at least hang onto this one thing, this single thread of pride. It was my battle cry. *** One of my first adventures in Providence involved bookstore-hunting.

I gallivanted down the streets with three new acquaintances (the hello-my-name-isKaitlan-and-I-plan-on-concentrating-inEnglish kind), and we eventually stumbled into a pretty little bookshop. Soft music emanated from a corner of the room. The cashier peered at us through his glasses.

Books lined the walls: 1984 and Cloud Atlas, Great Expectations and Memoirs of a Geisha. My companions had read them all and wanted to know what I thought of them.

But I couldn’t respond, because I hadn’t read any of them. So I concealed my lack of opinion with a wordless shake of my head.

Though I tried to play it cool, self-doubt flurried in my mind. What was wrong with me, what was wrong with me—wasn’t I the aspiring English major? My companions, in the reading they’d done in their free time, outshone me in my area of “expertise.” I was invalidated. Inadequate. Ignorant. Anything but powerful.

As the semester progressed, I wrote and read and wrote some more and eventually began to realize that I wasn’t becoming a “warrior” at all. Response papers that asked me to answer questions such as “What is home?” forced me to acknowledge my horrifying feeling of displacement. Academic essays were subject to intense scrutiny, and for the first time, I worried that hours of drafting would not be enough to land me an A. Even my own journal entries were flooded with confusion about identity and selfworth. Time and time again, those bookstore insecurities reemerged. My pen wasn’t doing much blocking, parrying, or slicing at all. It was only forcing me to profess how weak I was. It seemed I was anything but powerful.

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*** As freshman year winds down, I continue to reflect on my struggle with security, confidence, and power as a writer. I now see that the kind of “power” I had previously sought is unattainable. I had misconstrued the pen as an evolved weapon, stronger than the sword in the same way a car differs from a horse. I thought that I could use it to make myself feel stronger, to forge success and make my voice heard. But the truth was that the pen could not transform me into a warrior— at least not one with gold-plated armor and a jewel-encrusted helmet. Because it wasn’t supposed to. It wasn’t a sword in the slightest.

But it did demand courage. The pen, I learned, blatantly exposes our greatest insecurities.

It’s true—I can express heartache through piano keys in ways that I cannot through journal scribbles. But when I write, there appears a kind of candor I cannot find while playing Chopin. Words unmask me, even when I don’t ask them to. They become blunt and scary because words are how we most directly communicate, and writing them is even scarier because it makes them inescapably permanent. There are no walls to hide behind, no distractions to blend into.

I can only write with what I know—even my imagination is lined with personal beliefs and previous experiences. I can only write with who I am. *** Now, when I see a blank sheet of paper, not only am I filled with a nervous excitement (what kinds of stories will appear?) but also with a subtle anxiousness.

With each word, I strip yet another layer of myself bare to the world. Am I ready to do this? Am I brave enough?

Sometimes, I find that I don’t have the answers to these questions. Nevertheless, I write.

It’s not a matter of how many books I’ve read or how perfectly my essays answer the prompt. It’s not about comparison or competition or covetousness. I’ve come to realize that my true power lies in that profession of vulnerability, in my perseverance despite my insecurities.

The pen is not a sword because when I pick up my pen, my sword inevitably clatters to the ground. The pen forces the shield out of my hand, lifts the helmet off my head, and strips me of my heavy armor. The pen is not a sword because it is mightier: It obligates me to reveal my scars to all who care to look. I hold my naked heart in my worn-out hands and let the world think what it will.

top ten weekends (that aren’t spring weekend) 1.

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The Weeknd Fyre Festival 2017 Vampire Weekend Three-day weekends Halloweekend Weekend at Bernie’s That weekend you spent in Las Vegas Rebecca Black’s weekend Your carefree childhood weekends of pure adolescent poppycock “Friday, Saturday, Saturday to Sunday� — will.i.am., c. 2009

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hot post- time machine “I imagined how nice it would be if I got the $350 refund and opted to buy her a ticket to the countryside, say Idaho, where she would plant potatoes and surely be unhappy.� — Daniel Murage, “One Minute Early,� 3.23.17

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