Post- Nov. 12, 2015

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upfront

Editor-in-Chief Yidi Wu Managing Editor of Arts & Culture Abby Muller Managing Editor of Features Monica Chin Managing Editor of Lifestyle Cissy Yu Managing Editor of Online Amy Andrews Arts & Culture Editors Liz Studlick Mollie Forman Features Editors Lauren Sukin Nate Shames Lifestyle Editor Corinne Sejourne Copy Chiefs Lena Bohman Alicia DeVos Serif Sheriffs Logan Dreher Kate Webb Her Grey Eminence Clara Beyer Head Illustratrix Katie Cafaro Staff Writers Sara Al-Salem Tushar Bhargava Kalie Boyne Katherine Chavez Loren Dowd Rebecca Forman Joseph Frankel Devika Girish Gabrielle Hick Lucia Iglesias Anne-Marie Kommers Joshua Lu Hannah Maier-Katkin Caitlin Meuser Emma Murray Jacyln Torres Ryan Walsh Staff Illustrators Yoo Jin Shin Alice Cao Emily Reif Beverly Johnson Michelle Ng Peter Herrara Mary O’Connor Emma Margulies Jason Hu Jenice Kim Cover Emily Reif

contents 3 upfront shortcomings Cissy Yu

4 features

ungraspable phantom Tushar Bhargava

5 lifestyle

keeper of the peace Cissy Yu in bluebeard’s castle Lucia Iglesias

6 arts & culture happy accidents Monica Chin

reclaiming revolution Spencer Roth-rose

7 arts & culture more than meets the eye Michael O’neill

8 lifestyle

top ten overheard at brown old wolves’ tale Liz Studlick

editor’s note Dear readers, I am quite sympathetic to the frustration of being misunderstood.

For one, it’s not an unfounded worry: we find out all the time that we have been misinterpreted or come across the wrong way. For another, we are so limited in our ability to know when a misunderstanding is happening. This is the nature of misunderstandings. But it’s not difficult to tell when you have been misunderstood merely in a definitional sense--of course you have a limited ability to see when you are being misunderstood: you already understand each word as it comes out of your mouth (most of the time).

The most frustrating kind of misunderstanding comes when the misunderstanding arises for reasons completely unrelated to the content of your message. It can be exhausting to exert extra effort because it feels like others are simply not attempting to understand. It is even worse when it seems they are intentionally misunderstanding you out of prejudice, paying attention to what you look like or sound like rather than what you say.

But setting those cases aside, the form of your message can be as important as your content for legitimate reasons. When you go to a job interview, how you dress has no bearing on how good you are at your job, but it might give your employer some good ideas about how much you care about the position. When you hurt someone by being inconsiderate with your words, your intention may not have been to cause harm, but how much you care about them--a matter separate from what you said--may be just as, if not more important, as what you literally meant.

Our pieces this week touch on the importance of form. Our writers write about album covers, questioning whether they shape our perceptions, unfairly, of the music on those albums; of Bob Ross, whose achievement was in the end more than the paintings he created; and of Hamilton, the new musical that reshapes the story of the Founding Fathers, a story that’s been taught and retaught, and now reformed.

Best,

Yidi

From right to left: Yidi Wu ‘17, Abby Muller ‘16, Monica Chin ‘17, Cissy Yu ‘17, Amy Andrews ‘16, Liz Studlick ‘16, Mollie For- man ‘16, Lauren Sukin ‘16, Nate Shames ‘17, Corinne Sejourne ‘16, Lena Bohman ‘18, Alicia Devos ‘18, Logan Dreher ‘19, Ellen Taylor ‘16, Kate Webb ‘19, Katie Cafaro ‘17 (Please send us a photo at post.magazine.bdh@gmail.com)

upfront

shortcomings a comic CISSY YU managing editor of lifestyle

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features

ungraspable phantom on the east bay bike path TUSHAR BHARGAVA staff writer

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul...I account it high time to get to sea. Almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean.” ~ Herman Melville We were biking down a hill when I realized that something was wrong.

“Does my bike look OK to you?” I asked Alex*.

He turned his head to look at my bike. He was wearing his black baseball cap and it reminded me of a duck-billed platypus—my thoughts in the morning are seldom coherent.

“Your brakes are broken,” he told me, his words coming thick through the cream-cheese bagel he was chewing.

“Bro-ken?” I echoed.

“Yes, like not working,” Alex said, leaving his handlebar to make a snapping gesture.

“How do you know?” I asked as the our bikes gathered speed going downhill.

“Your brake wire,” he pointed.

I looked back and saw a silver wire waving in the wind. *** The question, always the same: How did I get here?

And the answer, always the same: following a whisper. An echo that wasn’t quite an echo. Glimpses of a destination that was familiar, but that I had never

seen.

Whispers, of course, are hard to hear.

You don’t hear them until they are repeated. Many times. Echoes are the same. And pictures, they only become unblurred if they fly by your eyes often enough...

A walk through India Point park—the clouds grey and the grass wet—passing by a tunnel with fading green letters that I couldn’t read. I had pointed and asked my friend, “Where does that lead?”

“To adventure.”

In my room—with the curtains drawn and the sound of the fan whirring—reading a book: “Thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.”

A text from a friend in New York with suggestions for what do in Providence over the summer. A numbered list of suggestions. One familiar.

Lying on the bed staring at the ceiling and the four walls, the walls and then the ceiling.

An off-chance remark: “He left behind his bike with me.”

A recent hurt that I could not forget, and with it the image of a grey tunnel in the distance.

Whispers grow louder. Echoes reverberate. Pictures focus.

It is hard to ignore the signs. *** I rolled the bike over to an empty parking lot. Alex followed my lead and

got off his bike.

“That was sick, how you stopped your bike right before the intersection. Dragging your foot so casually,” he said.

I didn’t reply. The incident would keep me awake for days; it had that familiar harrowing quality.

“Here, let me take a look,” Alex said, kneeling on one knee next to the bike—he’s studying to be an engineer and sometimes that gives him the right.

I peered over his shoulder.

He gently placed the wire between his thumb and forefinger and tried to re-attach it. He sang under his breath.

A Spanish song. After a few attempts and prodding the back tire, he stood up, brushing off the dirt on his jeans.

“Your brakes are already engaged; you’ve been braking the whole way,” he explained.

I grimaced; I had been blaming my recent fondness for Meeting Street chocolate chip pancakes for my exhaustion.

“It’s not that bad,” I lied, “Let’s keep going.”

We passed by a laundromat. An empty gas station. The sound of traffic had grown muffled. I could hear the creak of my bike as I pedalled, the rustle of the breeze in the trees and strains of the song Alex was humming. My T-shirt was drenched with sweat, but my legs had found a comfortable rhythm and I let my mind wander.

“Damn,” Alex said from ahead, and stopped his bike.

In the distance stood a hill. It was steep, almost straight up.

My foot slipped off the pedal as my bike came to a halt.

“We have to go up that thing?” I asked.

“Looks like it,” Alex said, taking off his cap and fanning himself.

Suddenly my legs hurt a lot more and I was aware of the sun burning my back.

“Whose stupid idea was this?” I asked, glaring at Alex.

He put his cap on and turned to me, “Yours.” *** “Tell me one more time why you want to go biking?” Alex asked, tossing the frisbee across the Quiet Green.

I caught the frisbee and threw it back. It wobbled in the wind and Alex had to run to catch it.

“Because it’ll be an adventure. And we’ll get to see the ocean,” I said.

“What’s so great about the ocean?”

Alex asked, throwing the frisbee; it sailed in a smooth red arc towards me.

Or at least where I would have been, had I not gone to rummage in my backpack. I pulled out my copy of Moby Dick.

“Listen to this,” I told Alex, finding the page in the book, “‘We ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.’”

“What’s the key to it all?” Alex asked.

I changed tactics.

“You can get some really good photos on the bike path,” I said, “Then you can Snapchat them to Clara*.”

Alex smiled and a faraway look came in his eyes—the look of someone thinking about which filters to use.

The journey had begun. *** The hill turned out to be a false alarm: The bike path changed directions before we reached it.

We were now cycling along a road, separated from it by a wooden fence, and there were houses with slanting roofs in the distance. Thick bushes flanked us from the other side.

Then suddenly the bushes cleared and the path narrowed to a small strip, and in front of us, on all sides, stretched the ocean.

And our heads crowded with our small thoughts and our own worries, voices and more voices, stilled to hear the sound. The soft, long-drawn breath of the sea.

Alex slowed down ahead of me, and I pulled to the side. We kicked the bike stands into place and sat down on the grass. There were red and blue flowers growing along the path. Overgrown grass covered a rusting railway track.

And the water was as blue as the sky.

I had brought along my notebook to write, but the ocean was vast and endless; I knew I could not capture it. The thoughts I tried to bottle in words shook and shuddered; they shattered the glass.

And the ungraspable phantom slipped between my fingers again, but not before reminding me what it meant to be alive. *Names in this piece have been changed.

Illustration by Jenice Kim

lifestyle

keeper of the peace

5

an interview with the chaplain

CISSY YU

managing editor of lifestyle The Reverend Janet Cooper Nelson, Chaplain of the University, has been Director of the Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life, a faculty member, and a friend to students since 1990. Here’s our conversation with her.

What are some of your proudest achievements from your time at Brown?

I think the deepest honors of this work have been the privilege of working with people in really intimate, deep moments. Some of those have been extremely heartbreaking. The passing of some very dear friends, colleagues, members of the community. There are things that the chaplain here does that have been harder than anything I imagined I could do. I was an athlete growing up. I thought hard meant organic chemistry. This was different.

But not all of these very deep moments have been sad.

I’d point to, for example, the Baccalaureate.

When I got here, I looked at the ceremony and saw some wonderful speakers invited, but the ceremony made no sense to me. Why on earth a Pakistani Muslim student should graduate singing “America The Beautiful” … it didn’t make sense.

We needed a different ceremony.

Without knowing anything about Brown, I was young enough to grab the ceremony and sit down with my colleagues, and we didn’t know whether we were allowed to, but we redid it anyway. I thought it should start with the Muslim call to prayer. We had Chinese lions. At this point, to walk into Baccalaureate is to actually see Brown—it’s all of us. And I think it’s appropriate to have it in First Baptist, in the discipline of that space. That church has Native American sensibilities largely ignored at this point: it sits on the four compass points.

It’s such a problem every year getting everyone to fit into that space, especially the poor lions,

but I think it’s emblematic of Brown. How we’re a problem to one another. Our history is a complicated container that makes us want to get out of it, but as long as we can get in there and shut the door we can capture something of who we are.

Changing Brown’s ritual culture has been a deep concern of mine. I’m interested in the way identity is embedded in the structural reality of institution and what it is that can make someone say, “This is my place.” All other aspirations are phony if you’re not willing to recreate that structure.

You’ve done most of your work in academic settings—Vassar, Mount Holyoke, Harvard, Dartmouth–and since 1990 you’ve been at Brown. Why universities for this kind of work?

Universities seem to be places that people set their hearts on from a very young age. And I think that for me, setting my heart on things has always been central to my personality and to my sense, for example, that life has a calling. Not everyone says that. But in universities, you often hear people saying “I feel called” to do this or that. Being in a setting where that’s what people are working on has felt to me like an invitation to be earnest about things.

I did find that in congregations when I worked in them, but this felt to me like the right mix of the secular and the sacred. As much as my heart is moved by sacred texts, I know them to be human constructs. The iconoclast in me does worry about their dogmatisms. I think there’s a 19th century hymn by Fosdick that says “new occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth”.

Reading that, I sort of thought, what, why would somebody put “uncouth” in a hymn? But it’s true.

There are things that, in one generation, seem absolutely true. And the way they’ve been insisted on, enforced, dogmatized, socially normed, they’re now a source of injustice. A source of oppression.

A source of harm.

That’s what interests me the most, intellectually. How does something go, in one generation or season or time, from being valorized to being really problematic? It strikes me as very important, and suggestive of the fact that the passage of time is not just some iterative process but some process of change by which new light and insight is truly dawning in some ways.

At universities, what would you say are the most effective means towards producing change?

I would say passion. You need authenticity and passion if you’re going to make change, since you’re going to have to win other people to your idea. So the passion is what fuels the intellectual precision of an idea, and universities are really interested in precision. Passion without precision is kind of a blunderbuss. You get somebody saying “I hurt!” and you have no way to help them, and it’s loud, and you notice, but it doesn’t get anything done. So what change needs is the energy of the very young, which is honed by wisdom and argument, and in that process if folks with passion keep driving it forward, that’s when you see something that’s quite akin to birth.

Universities hold that promise, but we often go away having learned the things our elders knew, without having been invited to bring that firedup idea we’ve got into being. I’m an enormously political person. As much as the spiritual, poetic, and ritual worlds appeal to me, I don’t have much patience when it’s all decorative. It needs to be about driving some new notion of justice forward.

Tell me more about issues of justice that matter to you.

A lot of my work has been with feminist issues, reproductive choice, and gay issues. This

summer, a friend asked me about the Supreme Court decision, and I told him I did my first gay wedding in 1984. I don’t do weddings because they’re legal. I’m very, very happy to see the state acknowledge these marriages, but really, religious communities have not asked the state’s permission about marriages in the past. It’s kind of been the other way.

As for campus issues, I am praying that these initiatives across the country on sexual assault are going to make a difference. Rape has been around a long time. There’s no procedure that will ever be a reply to the trauma of someone who has to get through that. I’m so not naïve about that. Lack of fairness, protracted procedures, both for those accused and those accusing… the whole thing has been a mess. This is one of the only offices on campus with absolute confidentiality, and some of what we’ve seen is enough to—well—it’s just wrong. Categorically wrong. Wrong on the part of very good people doing wrong things, and not even seeing.

Maybe your generation will literally do something different. What if a college campus could actually be a kind of incubator where different ideas about this can be fought over and worked out? My generation stopped a war that made me cry every time I met a Vietnamese student. Universities are the strangest, funniest pots of people where really big things get worked on. Maybe this is one of them.

Illustration by Katie Cafaro

in bluebeard’s castle

wandering brooklyn’s morbid anatomy museum

LUCIA IGLESIAS staff writer A white mouse in a Shakespearean doublet welcomes me in. His tunic is neatly ironed, thanks to the long-ago taxidermist who also posed him with a butler’s bearing and a hand-lettered Welcome sign. His glass-eyed gaze points me to the register. For a bargain three-buck student entry fee, I am free to wander wherever I wish in this urban citadel of taxidermy, medical ephemera, and dark contemporary art. Some murderous Bluebeard must have climbed out of a fairytale book to amass this collection of stiffening corpses.

But this afternoon he is away from his castle, and like the girl-bride he keeps locked safe inside, I am left alone to tiptoe from chamber to chamber.

To reach the exhibits, I climb a flight of stairs as innocuous as those in my mother’s office building. The stairway is a liminal space, a conduit of the ordinary, which spits me out into the gleefully freakish world of the Morbid Anatomy Museum.

Across the room stands a cabinet painted 50’s mint green. The glass door has been left oh-socasually open. Inside are jars of pickled snake and fetal badger. Grumpy twin bats are crammed in a vial much too small. An unhatched bird huddles in her new glass egg, her downy coat mussed as if caught in a breeze. That fetal plumage is so thick and sticky it seems more like fur than feathers.

This must be what the inside of Snape’s private potions closet is like.

I spy with my little eye: a child-sized coffin; a

two-headed duckling; a cabinet full of skulls; dental tools and a syringe; a pair of avian legs crusty enough to have come from the dinosaur age; gap toothed dentures—a bit ironic; blue-eyed baby Jesus wearing a tiara in a glass box.

The gallerist closes the minty cabinet door but she doesn’t latch it. Rapturous taxidermied rodents swoon in the corners, a weasel here, a mink there. Taxidermied owls glare down from their pedestals, keeping one eye on the motionless stuffed mice. A display board of black velvet holds the pearly treasure of half the Tooth Fairy’s baby tooth collection. But where did the other half go?

I step backwards and feel my elbow send something toppling. I freeze—wait for the shatter-crunch. But when I turn around I see that it’s just a plastic religious figurine that I’ve knocked to the floor. He’s unharmed. Pretending no one has noticed the racket I’ve made in the funeralparlor silence of the exhibition room, I place the figurine back on the cabinet, between the red candle and the yellow bird. But the gallerist is already sweeping towards me. I brace myself for a scolding. Will she send me to the dungeons for tea with the Iron Maiden?

“Oh, it’s just a saint,” she says. Her voice wrings out the irony.

In the next room is a special exhibit—”Opus Hypnagogia: Sacred Spaces of the Visionary and Vernacular”—featuring contemporary and 19th

century works that explore a hallucinatory realm where dreams invade reality.

In a glass case rests the ideal letter opener for all your coven mail: an ivory blade carved with the skull and pentacle.

Nearby, an accordion book of black paper yawns across an entire case, the pages inscribed with hulking animal figures and a silvery script that looks half-Elvish. Keeping watch by the door is a devil forged from black bronze. He has three horns and is absorbed in placing a party hat (or is it a dunce cap?) on a toffee-colored cat who smiles at him with kiss-me blue eyes.

I return to the ground floor where the café and cash register are, and then descend another flight of stairs. I don’t ask permission. Who do I think I am? Bluebeard’s girl bride? At the bottom of the stairs I find myself in a dungeon full of bottled and jarred dead things from every family in the animal kingdom. The cellar smells of nail polish remover and an adrenaline rush. Every available surface holds plastic Tupperware containers of beetles drying on paper towels: beetles black as lumps of Christmas coal, beetles iridescent as raindrops on a leaf.

In the center of the room, six people sit at a table sticking pins in insects—a taxidermy workshop or a voodoo ritual? Two taxidermied rac-

coons and a beaver watch from the front of the subterranean classroom.

But unlike Bluebeard’s bride, I am free to leave the castle when all of that preserved flesh presses too heavily around me. Outside, October sunshine showers off the shadows that still cling to my skin.

On the subway I read the tale of another girl who was too curious about dead things.

“She liked to pick a bud that was fat and ready to open, green-lipped and hairy. Then with her fingers she would prise the petal-case apart, and extract the red, crumpled silk—slightly damp, she thought—and spread it out in the sunlight. She knew in her heart that she should not do this. She was cutting a life short, interrupting a natural unfolding for the pleasure of satisfied curiosity and the glimpse of the secret, scarlet, creased and frilly flower flesh.”—A.S. Byatt, Ragnarok I read too many happy endings and eat too many sweets; sometimes I need something as bitter as formaldehyde to shock me into sensitivity.

After my wander through Death’s storage chambers, I feel the edges of everything more keenly.

Illustration by Alice Cao

6

arts & culture

happy accidents in memory of bob ross

MONICA CHIN managing editor of features

The scene opens with a slow, low melody in a blissful major key. The sky is a lavender that even my bitingly cynical and outdoor-averse eyes concede is pleasant, and the arms of trees embrace a river that lazily meanders its way toward me. The painting pulls me in, convincing every atom in my body, one by one, of the brilliance of nature and the superiority of this new acrylic reality to my own when, suddenly, it disappears. Before me stand a blank canvas and a red-bearded man, smiling with a flicker of pure contentment, like everything in the world is exactly where it needs to be. “Hello,” he says, directly to me, with a subtle southern twang beneath each of his words.

“I’m Bob Ross, and it gives me unbelievable pleasure to welcome you to my painting television series, ‘The Joy of Painting.’ I’nnat fantastic?”

Bob’s fingers twirl the brush with expert dexterity as he lists the colors he’ll be using in today’s episode, then mold themselves to its handle when it’s time to begin, as if reverting to their default position. “It’s really very simple,” he explains, left hand absentmindedly swirling Yellow Ochre and Dark Sienna together on the palate. “The canvas is your world, so you have to make some big decisions. You have to decide what’s in your world, and where you want it.” The camera zooms in on his new color, Van Dyke Brown, and follows his brush as it lifts a small portion from the puddle, travels up to the canvas, and begins to fashion some sort of amorphous line. What could that possibly be? I begin to wonder—before he clarifies, as if having read my mind, “This is a happy little landmass.” He’s drawing some more brown lines now, assuring me that “we have all, at one time or another, mixed a little mud.”

Past my computer screen, through the window of my dorm room, I can see the roof of Rhode Island Hall, a building that’s home to one of the most prestigious archaeology departments in the country. Beyond that, dorm room windows with lights on, silhouettes darting back and forth within. Beyond that, a city, albeit a small one on training wheels, with smokestacks adorned with blinking lights, office buildings with darkened windows, Providence’s urban hustle and bustle abandoned for the night. Beyond that, the highway, pairs of piercing eyes weaving in and out of each other at breakneck speed.

Beyond that, green mountains and a patchwork

of autumnal trees, a world that has existed long before this mad rush began, and will exist long after. Somewhere far, far beyond that, Bob Ross’s tranquil wilderness waits. *********** Bob Ross’s television series, “The Joy of Painting,” aired from January 1983 to May 1994. Each half-hour episode details his journey through the creation of a pastoral oil painting, his style heavily influenced by the scenery of Alaska. As he outlines, shades, highlights, and fleshes out his worlds, he gives general advice for painters, advice that often translates poignantly into the lives of others, conveying ideals of agency, self-care, hope, and everything in between. “Any piece you paint, anything you do, should make you happy,” he muses as fully-fledged purple mountains spring to life across one of his canvasses, seemingly of their own accord. “If it makes you happy, that is good.”

This year marks the 20-year anniversary of Bob Ross’s untimely death of lymphoma at age 52. October 29 would have been his 73rd birthday. In his honor, Twitch streamed a marathon of his show, all 200 hours of his mesmerizing paint strokes and gentle, knowing grin. “Enjoy!” read the title of the Twitch stream. I put my midterm paper aside and joined the hundreds of thousands who seemed to be complying. *********** I’m sitting on the steps of Sayles, fully immersed in Bob, when a stranger approaches from behind me. Oh my God, is that “The Joy of Painting”? she asks incredulously, plopping down next to me and peering over my shoulder at the screen.

Today would have been his birthday, I explain.

That’s sad, she responds somberly—she’s a big fan.

Are you an artist? I ask. Of course not, I can barely draw a stick figure. But Bob is so happy. I’m right there with her, and we’re clearly not alone: The forums and comments sections I’ve skimmed appear to be full of people like us, people who have no interest in visual art but find a strange appeal in Bob’s unconditional happiness, innocent wonder, and poignant commentary.

We wax on in this manner for a while longer.

Then, she is off.

Back on my screen, Bob is etching a cluster of tiny black paint streaks into a corner of the canvas. I’m having trouble imagining how this ungainly array is going to become a “lovely clus-

ter of trees,” as he’s previously claimed. And yet, as I continue to watch, it does. The cluster of pine trees bursts forth, as if it’s been hiding in the whiteness of the canvas this whole time, and Bob Ross has finally set it free. I’m almost proud of them. You go, trees. You go, Bob. *********** As this semester begins to wind down (typing that phrase made my heart sink a bit), I’ve been thinking a lot about time. Leaving a friend’s dorm at 2:30 a.m. one night, I’m walking across the main green and stop for a moment to think.

For so much of my time here, this green has been filled with crowds of students, professors, presidents, and many others. For 251 years, hundreds of thousands of these feet have pounded across its stone slabs, so many of which are now gone, entirely forgotten. There have been concerts, commencements, times when every inch is covered by crowds. For god knows how many more years, it will continue to stand; this, the oldest and most universally recognizable image of a world-famous university, an icon, a symbol as much as a location. Feet will continue to pound, names will rise and fall from lights, and one day I will be long gone, and long forgotten.

But right now, I am the only human here.

The street lamps shine only for me, and this is my green. Before I know it, I will be 10, 20, 30 years away, and this moment will be absorbed by my whirlwind of a life. Before I know it I’ll be back to staring at this green on Google images, back to searching its tag on Tumblr from time to time, wondering how it’s doing, how its new 10,000 owners are treating it. This moment will be a memory, and then nothing. But right now, I’m standing on the grass, staring at the infinite canopy of stars, my canopy of stars, trying to draw this moment out as long as possible. *********** In the blink of an eye, I’m in the back of the Rock, another night, another episode. On my screen, Bob calls forth a river to wind its way around the forest. Then, he dabs a minuscule amount of Alizarin Crimson onto his brush and, by some work of magic, no doubt, weaves it into

the blue waves, creating a late-afternoon shimmer across the water. I have been once again sucked into his painting; the water laps at my toes, birds chirp among the trees, the sharp scent of pine sets my nostrils aflame, and above all, Bob’s voice washes over me like warm water. “There, there,” he whispers as he dabs Cadmium Yellow onto the leaves of his trees, as if caring for a small child.

“We don’t make mistakes. We have happy accidents. And you learn to use anything that can happen, and that’s when it really becomes fun.

You don’t have to spend time thinking about what you’re doing. Just let it happen.” As the yellow crosses the canvas, the scene erupts into life; the water sparkles, the trees reach hopefully towards the sky, the sun becomes a beacon against the dark studio backdrop. *********** Eventually, we will forget Bob Ross. We are now 20 years into the eons that will pass without him. I know that his life was stuffed full of appearances, interviews, and promotions. I wonder, however, how long these moments—the ones alone with his brushes, his colors, and a camera, where he was king of his canvas, where he could do anything in the world—lasted for him.

Bob signs the lower left corner of his painting in loopy red ink. “There we go,” he says, with a pure honesty that seems to come from the center of the universe. “You and I. I think we have a painting.”

You have more than a painting, Bob. You have a legacy. Tens of thousands showed up to your birthday party, for a few moments of peace.

In the last few seconds of the episode, just before the credits roll, he looks directly at me. “Are you happy today?”

I am happy, Bob. I am.

Illustration by Bev Johnson

reclaiming revolution

“hamilton” redefines the american dream

SPENCER ROTH-ROSE contributing writer “If ya don’t know, now ya know, Mr. President,” raps Thomas Jefferson in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s audaciously revisionist, thematically timeless new Broadway musical “Hamilton.” To say it’s taking the nation by storm would be an understatement—the day of its opening night, a crowd of 700 waited outside the theater for lottery tickets in what has become a ritual known as #Ham4Ham. There’s a good reason why the show is so popular: Stylistically, it’s a far more accessible show to the average American than much of what Broadway has to offer. Rather than, say, the slowburning arias and perfunctory dialogue of the niche exemplified by “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Hamilton” takes an inherently 21st century tack. Miranda casts people of color almost exclusively, highlighting the diversity of what we now consider American and reconciling that diversity with the traditional story of how America came to be. Miranda, whose 2008 Tony-winning musical

“In the Heights” was heavily influenced by salsa and hip-hop, has taken those uniquely modern stylings and transferred them to the life and times of Alexander Hamilton, thus converting a Revolutionary War biography of America’s forgotten Founding Father into a “hip-hopera”. This means that, in short, Hamilton raps! So does Thomas Jefferson (played to smarmy perfection by Brown grad Daveed Diggs ’04)! Not to mention George Washington, James Madison, the Marquis de Lafayette, and eventual duel opponent Aaron Burr.

And over a backdrop of pounding hip-hop beats and smooth R&B instrumentals, they build a nation as the audience grooves along. Don’t let the catchy tunes fool you, though—through its portrayal of politics, “Hamilton” performs important political work.

The effect is stunning, and is only amplified

by Miranda’s tremendous musical acumen and deft touch with narrative. The songs would be

great even if they weren’t sung by the Founding Fathers. Inspired choices abound, from writing King George as a possessive ex-boyfriend who saccharinely begs the colonies not to “throw away this thing we had,” to framing those famed debates between Hamilton and Jefferson as old-school, balls-to-the-wall rap battles, complete with Washington playing the part of hype man. These clever re-imaginings of history serve to complement the main storyline, which sees Hamilton rise from a destitute upbringing in the Caribbean, to serving as Washington’s confidante during the war, to creating the National Bank as the United States’ first Secretary of the Treasury. Enemies are made along the way, hearts are broken, and ink and blood are spilled in copious amounts—but co-stars Miranda and Leslie Odom, Jr. (who play Hamilton and Burr and oscillate seamlessly between snarky and earnest) use every ounce of their charisma to keep the audience rapt.

Their portrayals of these household names are startlingly modern, and feel both reverent and blasphemous at the same time. Take, for example, “Guns and Ships,” Lafayette’s showcase song in which he raps at the fastest rate of anything ever seen on Broadway, according to fivethirtyeight. com (since you’re wondering, it’s 6.3 words per second—and in a French accent, no less). This lyrical swagger makes it easy to realize, given the context, that the then-24-year-old Marquis maybe was a sort of badass—an ambitious young man who no doubt would have spit fire about the French-American alliance. He electrifies the audience in this song, making us as excited about his rap virtuosity as his compatriots were about his sizeable contributions to the war effort. Every one of these characters, these figures of lore, feels flesh-and-blood. They speak in a hybrid dialect in which they drop archaic legalese as often as traditional rap fillers like “man” and “yo.” Sepia-toned

arts & culture

no longer, they chase skirts, get in fights, and use period-inappropriate slang in order to convey to modern, jaded audiences the same feelings they inspired in those around them back in the 18th century. It calls to mind the choice made by Baz Luhrmann, in his 2013 version of The Great Gatsby, that alienated so many Fitzgerald fans while introducing Jay Z to those very same bibliophiles. By peppering the soundtrack to 1920s

New York with modern musical forms like hip-

hop and EDM, Luhrmann attempted to transfer the emotions that those genres currently evoke to the party scene of the Jazz Age. If your parents don’t want you listening to rap nowadays, they most certainly would have objected to jazz.

“Hamilton” utilizes the same trick. Hip-hop is a contemporary art form: young, scrappy, and hungry. It rose from the streets, from ambitious young people of color taking the lessons they’d learned and stories they’d experienced and combining them with new sounds in order to break free of cycles of poverty and institutionalized racism. Miranda has said that he feels no historical figure so clearly embodies the hip-hop spirit as Hamilton, which is in part what drew him to the man’s story. Aspirational language is everywhere in the lyrics; talk of “rising up” and the aforementioned “I’m just like my country/ I’m young, scrappy, and hungry” are just two of the motifs that recur in the songs. Hamilton wants to prove himself, since he started with nothing and knows that he can do and be more. The way to do that, according to Miranda? Write—which happened to be Hamilton’s greatest strength. And inner city kids in the late 1980s and ’90s saw that same pathway to proving the doubters wrong, and worked non-stop to achieve it. In this way, Miranda draws comparisons between a Revolutionary War-era statesman and the pioneers of

hip-hop—and they work. Go figure.

The show’s form itself feeds into this loop of remembering. “Hamilton” tells a story of ambition and resourcefulness, and does so using a musical form that embodies that spirit. Though there is an easy comparison to be drawn to similarly individualistic “hip-hop values,” this overlooks the fact that they are also quintessentially American values. We know that Hamilton the man, who was white, worked his ass off to rise above his station. We also know that hip-hop was created by people of color with comparable ambition and work ethic. Now, we see in “Hamilton” the convergence of these paradigms—people of color playing the white Founding Fathers, who are themselves essentially playing the fathers of hip-hop by virtue of the style of music they’re performing. Miranda has made a musical about the birth of American values, using the form that arose from the values themselves. We actually see four births in this story: the man (Hamilton), the values (individualism, ambition, hard work, etc.), the country (the United States of America), and the form (hip-hop), all inextricably linked. Miranda has simply put them all together, and put them to a beat.

The importance of people of color in this cast goes even further than that, politically. Miranda told the New York Times that he sought to rep-

7

resent “what America looks like now”—but what he really does is begin to reclaim a part of history that has been largely whitewashed. Both slaves and free African Americans had an incalculable impact on the outcome of the Revolution, and simply seeing non-white bodies on stage in period dress is both validating and double-take-worthy.

Hamilton’s origins as an immigrant, too, come up at various points in the play, mostly used by salty, narrow-minded opponents after he routinely bests them in debate. We live in a time when public figures are expressing fear and hatred over an imagined loss of our country, and it’s striking to hear those same sentiments when there is no country yet of which to speak. These themes are what truly connect “Hamilton” to the landscape, political or otherwise, of today. Though we have major strides to make, there is no doubt that our country is becoming more diverse, more culturally and ethnically heterogeneous, and that barriers that were held to be impenetrable during that era are slowly breaking down. By literally re-casting the famous players of history, “Hamilton” is a fascinating new entry into the age-old conversation on what it means to be American.

Illustration by Emma Marguiles

more than meets the eye albums and their images MICHAEL O’NEILL contributing writer In early 2013, consistently beloved NYC-based indie rock trio Yeah Yeah Yeahs announced the details of their upcoming fourth album “Mosquito”. One of the items released was a first glimpse at the record’s cover art: a CGI-rendered image of a large mosquito holding a crying baby in mid-air with the band’s name spelled out along the bottom in a font reminiscent of the “Goosebumps” series. The response to the cover was less than enthusiastic: “I’m excited, but that’s got to be one of the worst album covers of all time,” stated one fan. Coverage in the build-up to the album’s release was constantly burdened by jokes about artwork, as the undeniably odd image became everyone’s mental picture when thinking of the record. Once “Mosquito” finally came out, critical and fan reception was lukewarm at best, and it’s largely considered the weakest Yeah Yeah Yeahs album. Looking back two years later, “Mosquito” had quite a few excellent songs on its tracklist, certainly more than it was given credit for, which begs the question: did the album’s cover affect people’s interpretation of the actual music?

By itself, music is strictly an audio-only form of entertainment. But many listeners, consciously or subconsciously, employ some sort of visual when enjoying music. Sometimes, the mental image one associates with a song comes from a music video, visually descriptive lyrics, or a moment in their life when they heard the piece. More often than not, however, people imagine (or physically see) the artwork from the album the song is found on. This, in turn, can alter our musical experience as a whole - sometimes quite significantly. The shapes, colors, objects, and styles on the front of a band’s CD or linked to a digital file have the potential to leave an impression on a listener before they even hear the song.

For proof of this phenomenon, all one has to do is look back through music history and how artists, deliberately or not, used album artwork to help convey the meaning of their music. Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic “Axis: Bold of Love” featured a cover as trippy and colorful as the music was. The sexually-suggestive photo that adorned the Rolling Stones record “Sticky F i n g e r s ” matched the raunchiness of the album’s sound. The rebellion behind the Clash’s “London Calling” is made tangible by the picture of Paul Simonon smashing his bass onstage. This practice is still prominent today, from the minimalist artwork of “Yeezus” to the glossy-yet-glitchy design on the front of the new CHVRCHES album.

As you can see, album covers can directly and purposely reflect the ideas behind a record. However, there is also a subliminal effect artwork can have on music fans, which mainly has to do with the colors being used.

Psychologists have proven that different pigments can trick our brains into feeling certain emotions, meaning the colors we see can change our mood all on their own. For example, the color yellow can represent optimism, friendliness, emotional fragility, or anxiety, depending on the context.

This correlation between color and feeling certainly applies to the music world as well. For instance, orange evokes sensuality.

Frank Ocean’s “Channel Orange” boasted a plain, stark orange cover that helped play into the listener’s sense of passion when hearing sex-driven songs like “Thinkin’ ‘Bout You” or “Pyramids.” Similarly, all three of Nicki Minaj’s studio albums have prominently featured pink in both the artwork and the name; as pink can indicate both sexuality and femininity, the use of these

palettes matched the moods and messages behind her music.

As illustrated by the “Mosquito” example described above, an ugly, boring, and/or distasteful album cover can hinder the enjoyment of the music it’s meant to symbolize. As good as the music may be, the mental image in the person tuning in can override their sense of satisfaction, if it’s bad enough. Dozens of decently good albums have suffered because of this concept, including Animal Collective’s “Centipede Hz”, Two Door Cinema Club’s “Beacon”, and the oftenmocked Metallica & Lou Reed compilation “Lulu”. In the case of each of these albums, some followers developed a negative perception of what was to come even before the actual release date, and the music was at least partially overlooked by media and fans alike because of the artwork. Accordingly, none of these records were hugely successful critically. Occasionally, if an album is truly stellar in quality, it can overcome poor artwork—think “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” or the David Bowie classic “Diamond Dogs”. Even then, one can only wonder if those records would be even more well-received had their artwork been improved.

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover; the same should apply to music.

However, sometimes album artwork is so striking—either positively or negatively— that one can’t help but be influenced when listening. An excellent cover can help make a good album seem like a great one; a poor one can make a mediocre album seem terrible. Even as we move into a digital age, leaving behind the days of physical LPs and CDs, the image that pops up on your iPhone when streaming a song matters. It’s up to artists to continue putting effort into the visual accompaniments to their art in order to enhance their fans’ listening experience.

Illustration by Jake Reeves

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lifestyle

Wouldn’t Bloom rejecting the mead be, like, a party foul?

Starbucks is, I think, the most incredible invention of late capitalism. (Zizek) Derrida is a clever cookie.

It took my innocence, but gently.

hot post time machine First, the images—a punch to the eyes that makes me wonder if I needed to adjust my glasses. The photos presented are from a project in which Bliss filmed scenes of a man “encased by, struggling with, and romancing the skin of another animal.” These scenes were then projected onto sculptural forms molded out of rawhide and photographed. all the flesh of his body -03/21/2013

topten lies we’ve told about our pasts 1. we once stabbed a man 2. we discovered america 3. we did all our reading for section 4. we are the inventor of toaster strudal 5. we were offered a scholarship to west point 6. we founded west point 7. we made fetch happen 8. we punched a shark in the face 9. we never really liked twilight 10. the cold never bothered us anyway

old wolves’ tales LIZ STUDLICK

under the archives

section editor of a&c Your first week here, a bespectacled boy told you they lived in the stacks.

It was on par with tales of tunnels and stepping on seals. He faded into the crowd by the second week, anyway, only to be glimpsed in cafeteria booths and strange lines of sight across quadrangles.

A different bespectacled boy told you the same week that the stacks went on forever, that if you descended far enough, you reached rows of shelves that went on past campus, farther than a person could walk before needing to rest. And then, in the darkness… he trailed off, before trying to come in for the kill. These boys liked to do this: to hint at a hoard of collegiate mythos the way that other boys flaunted caches of alcohol, only to reveal how similarly watered down and quickly exhausted they were when the time came to impress.

You know now he was wrong, but it’s not the most useless thing a boy’s ever told you. Years later, going deeper became an option niggling at the back of your mind once you’d exhausted the Perrault, the Grimm, coming up against the official version with a bitten tongue.

Fairy tales don’t spring from thin air.

The references all pointed somewhere below, rooted.

After months spent on the second floor of the library, reading and notetaking and reluctantly assembling the first draft of sanitized folklore for your thesis advisor, you began to feel the boundaries of the walls and connect the webs of broken references. You opened doors when no one was looking and quickly discovered which ones were broom closets. When you felt bold, you slid a credit card along the seams of locked ones. When one swung open to darkness, you cleared your plans for the nearest Sunday night.

Your idea of supplies was beef jerky, a pocket knife, and your trusty AarneThompson classification guide. Your

phone screen served as a flashlight as you stumbled down steps. Abruptly, you were faced with the vast expanse of stark black shelves, too-straight aisles of woods glinting in the arctic dim, lights illuminating snow-motes of dust. An abnormal stillness that required a pause, and still does whenever you come down here.

It wasn’t difficult to navigate, or maybe you’ve just spent an abnormal amount of time in archives. You found early 16th-century German works quickly, not a bad place to start, but you were already shivering. Dark blue and royal red spines, gold filigree worn away, bindings cracked and crumbling. The smell of book, right and real, somehow not just glue and tree-pulp and cloth and ink but the essence of words, perfuming the dark with the slow bloom of their decay.

You picked what seemed to be the most accessible work after flipping through a few, and stood to go, mentally cataloguing your route, and saw the flash of gray. Easy enough to convince yourself it’s a trick of the light, until a slower gray pelt lopes through the next aisle, visible over the tops of books on the lowest shelf. You don’t look at the source of the growl when it reaches the nearest intersection to you, just fling the book you’re holding at the ground and wrestle the beef jerky out as a last resort.

It took you a few days to convince yourself back down again. You packed a winter coat, only to find sauna-like temperatures and the far stacks disappearing into warm mist. The beef jerky remained. You don’t know how you thought they’d get the package open, anyhow—but their teeth must be quite sharp. The book was gone, which sucked. It was an excellent primary source.

It will take weeks for them to grow used to you, for you to learn to smell for the boundaries of their territory and

negotiate with them to get where you need to go. You’ll have many encounters like the first night, though they mostly stay out of your sight. The most difficult part is discerning what they like that you don’t need, as these original editions are hard to come by. French, German, Italian stories—they’ll eat it up, and you’ve found it handy in a pinch. You gather nonfiction when you can. They seem to be fond of military history and biographies of generals (absolutely no naval material, as that earns a distinct piss trail alongside it). Harvest records will continue to be a hit despite their bulk. They’re voracious, though, and soon you’ll find you can move away from battles and bales. You’ll give them poetry.

It won’t be long until convenience becomes the mother of uneasy rest and you curl up against shelves most nights you come down. Not much longer and you’ll find gray hairs on your clothing, fitful dreams of warm bodies against yours.

But it will be months before you see another human being down there, long after the winter has turned, long after you’ve exhausted the collection of languages you know. You’ve been teaching yourself Old Saxon, Frisian, digging to find the roots beyond the roots. There are no more doors to unlock; the library is finite in terms of space, but not in terms of content. Sometimes you find books piled on the ground where you’ve previously made camp, light teeth marks wrapped around the spine, and it’s exactly what you needed.

It’s in the process of picking one of these up that you see him passing in the dark. As he looks down, startled, at you crouched over your books, you’ll know exactly what he sees. And when he drops his own and flees, you’ll leave it where it lies and continue your hunt.

Illustration by Peter Herrara