Post- Nov. 19, 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

contents 3 upfront

#nofilter Rebecca Ellis

4 features

dear diego Katherine Chavez

5 lifestyle

family histories Section Editors of Lifestyle traditions and turkeys Loren Dowd

6 arts & culture thoughts on hatchet Anne-Marie Kommers listen to your artbeat Claribel Wu

7 arts & culture by the light of the sun Gabrielle Hick

8 lifestyle

top ten overheard at brown 4:58 a.m.

Sara Al-Salem

editor’s note Dear Readers, Thanksgiving looms upon us! Some will be going home, some will be participating in Thanksgiving, but I suspect almost all will be celebrating a period of rest. I shall tranquilize myself with food and reset my internal clock and catch up on neglected reading, and I wish you well on your own journey, traveller.

The thing I look forward to most over break is time.

This is not to demean the food, my family, or the hot bath that I always take first when I arrive back home.

Rather, without time, I can enjoy nothing else, and I find time all the more valuable because I find the the comforts of home valuable. (If you’re finding this a bit obsessive, forgive me: I happen to have many papers due before Thanksgiving.)

In all seriousness, the things we think we lack can often be attributed in part to a lack of time: though it will be good to see my mother again, nothing stops me from calling her every week (but a test the next day can strongly dissuade me). I hope that Thanksgiving brings you a reprieve, and I hope it gives you a bit of freedom to do a few of the things you’ve been putting off as well.

Best,

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

Yidi

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Post-.

(PLEASE SEND US A PHOTO at post.magazine.bdh@gmail.com)

upfront

3

#nofilter

college pre-social media

REBECCA ELLIS contributing writer Technology is the battery-powered equivalent of the girl you love to hate. This July, the New York Times published an article titled “Screens Separate the Obsessed From Life,” decrying the state of “American youths who are plugged in and tuned out of ‘live’ action”—barred from sleep, socialization and sustenance. It cites texting as a “national epidemic,” fretting over the narrowed blood vessels in the youth’s eyes and the pain in their wrist tendons.

The complaint that these anti-social networks are “poor substitutes for personal interaction” is not a new one. Nostalgia is rarely stronger than when it is about the preinternet days. Ah, what used to be done with time before the screen. Books were read. Libraries entered. Interactions undergone faceto-face.

This yearning for days past is not limited to the elderly op-ed writers of the NYT. I wonder all the time what life would be like before I could press an ‘f ’ and an ‘enter’ key and have access to an archive on a kid I went to Hebrew school with nine years ago. I imagine it less taxing, more free.

I’m not the only one. “There’s so much pressure [on social media] to create an image of happiness and success—and drinking for that matter—that it’s hard for people to come to terms with their own unhappiness.

Sometimes I wish I could just unplug,” said Sienna Giraldi, ’18, a Facebook user since age 12.

This desire to unplug makes it easy for us to redraw the past in our minds as an antiquated wonderland of no stress and no fomo. Easy living.

But imagine the people of the past looking forward to a world of instant communication, instant gratification, instant lunch plans.

“I wish I went now,” Jon Klein, a Brunonian from the class of 1981, tells me. “Col-

lege 30 years ago was hard.”

Jon’s a familiar face. He was the manager of 95.5 WBRU and wrote the odd article for the Brown Daily Herald. He chose the SciLi over the Rock, Ratty over V-dub, concert over frat party.

We like to think about Jon at Brown because he lived in this time we look at romantically like a Polaroid. A time when legwarmers and record players were not purchased from Urban Outfitters. An age before Lupo’s was grimy.

Through this rose-colored filter, we like that Jon couldn’t text, email, Google, gram, Facebook, FaceTime, inbox, snap, swipe right, swipe left. Our verbs are not his verbs and that’s refreshing.

But as refreshing as it may be, to say it is better, that we all just need to unplug, is naïve. When we started creating new verbs, our Brown broke from the Brown of the past. The same campus but, with the advent of technology, a different and less strenuous college.

When Jon forgot his wallet at home, it stayed at home. When he was late, no one knew why. There was no Hail-Mary call or text to a roommate asking them to bring his ID card to the green or explain that the meeting ran late. His only hope at contact with someone out of his vision line was a land line.

“It was the pony express version of texting,” said Jon. To make the same plans we make today in a fraction of a second—lunch at the Ratty or meeting on the green—he would have to get out his rolodex and call their dorm number. And if they were out, which they usually were, he’d leave a message with their roommate.

But not all roommates are created trustworthy. And so on the whiteboard attached to the friend’s dorm door, he would scribble his archetype of a text. “You’d come back

from a class and somebody would have left you a message on your board saying ‘do you want to meet for beers at such and such a place.’”

Today, we can still find these phone jacks and whiteboards in our dorms. But the jacks we now cover with tapestries and the whiteboard we defame with inappropriate doodles our RAs pretend not to see.

But before these items became vestigial structures of dorm rooms past, they were the only chance Brown students like Jon had of creating spontaneous dinners, weekend plans, even booty calls.

“There was nothing more thrilling than coming back to your dorm and seeing that some girl had left a note,” Jon said.

Today, there are a million and one ways to find someone and keep the spark going.

Tinder, Facebook message, Snapchat. All conducted behind the safety of your screen.

But throw it back 30 years ago and all Jon had was brute force.

“Let’s say there was a girl I was interested in in one of my classes. I would just have to organically—or artificially—bump into her because I had no way of knowing who she hung out with, where to find her, what she was into.”

There were a few ways he could deduce this information. He could try the Main Green, which was “the big place where tribes would congregate.” He could try the Ratty, another regular meeting spot. Or, last resort, the mail room, which students ventured to every day to collect letters from home.

Say it was a success. Jon got the girl’s digits, her dorm room, a scent of her perfume.

But imagine breaching that gap between stranger and significant other without the subtle flirtations the internet allows: the link posting, the mass snapping, the late night text. “It made everything a lot more formalistic—[the environment] just wasn’t conducive to hooking up because it couldn’t be off the cuff kind of stuff,” Jon said.

But you accepted the rigidity because a world in which people could interact over pulses that flew through the sky was saved for science fiction. “It’s not like you stood around thinking if only there was a way for me to instantly communicate with that girl in the third row; you accepted it because you didn’t realize what you were missing.”

But now we have been blessed with Facebook. We see the girl in the third row, look her up, friend her, message an inside joke.

Facebook has given us hope of putting ourselves on the radar, regardless of whose.

But this has only been true in the last decade. Before Facebook, Jon had only the Pig Book.

The Pig Book was a yearbook handed to each Freshman upon commencement. The books contained students’ basic information: name, home address and high school. To the left of each bio was a black and white headshot of the student, each intense in its own

special awkwardness.

Despite the lack of current dorm room, phone number, and ability to back-stalk, the books were students’ prized possessions.

“You took it in your hands and you kept it for four years. You didn’t let it out of your clutches,” Jon said.

Just like Facebook, the Pig Book served as a preliminary mating ground with most students “voraciously devour[ing] it to familiarize [themselves] with all the cutest girls.

You’d meet somebody and then you would rush and look them up in the pig book and see where they went to school.”

Unfortunately, the Pig Book couldn’t age with you the way Facebook can, and “as you progressed through Brown you got more and more mortified by your high-school photo, because of course now you thought you were much older and better looking.”

And, naturally, its search function was severely handicapped by only returning people in your year. Jon could get around this by stealing an upper classman’s copy, but those not thievery-inclined were stuck perusing photos of the same 1,000 kids again and again.

This Pig Book photo was all Jon was going to get. Unlike today, when every party can result in ten new photos tagged, and you graduate with thousands, Jon’s generation left no trace of their time here. “I have maybe ten pictures of me and my friends from all of college. I don’t think I took a picture all sophomore and junior year.” Events were enjoyed and then lost to memory.

It’s easy to romanticize this living in the moment. Doing it for the instant. The meals you ate not preserved eternally online. But we forget what it would be like if isolating yourself wasn’t a choice. Freshman year, alone in a dorm, no way to reach out to new friends. Text, Snapchat, email, all non-existent.

“My freshman year was really lonely. I felt isolated, I felt stuck with the people in my dorm and it was hard—I would’ve loved to have some means of connecting in that way social media allows,” Jon admitted.

Every teen growing up in the 21st century knows social media has its flaws. It takes us out of the moment, makes us jealous, makes our blood vessels narrow.

But it’s also given people in Jon’s position today a chance to connect in college while still confined by four cinder block walls.

The time has come to let go of social media as the girl you love to hate and instead usher it in as an (albeit slightly too clingy) best friend.

Illustration by Mary O’Connor

4

features

dear diego

the story of a recently deceased dog

KATHERINE CHAVEZ staff writer We named our dog after Diego Rivera.

When I was a baby, my parents had a dog named Winnie. She was sweet, but when I started to crawl, she became defensive against the new four-legged creature roaming the house, and she started to snap her jaw when I came near. My parents then found her a new home with family friends, and she lived a happy life.

Once I could walk on two legs, getting a new dog seemed to be always on the table. I think my parents waited until I was old enough to promise to help with taking care of the animal. (I would be the one who filled the bowl with food every morning). So when I was five years old, we went to an adoption fair at the local Petco and happened to find a medium-sized, medium-toned brown puppy with pointed ears and purple spots on his tongue.

One of the staff members at the adoption fair explained his story to us: He’d been at the pound, only days from being put down, when she had rescued him, and he’d been with her ever since. She guessed he was around a year old, and he’d already been adequately trained on where to use the bathroom and how to sit. And when we played with him for the first time, he was immediately lovable.

At the time, he had a different name, but it made my parents uncomfortable because it was too close to the name “Cujo,” who was an evil, possibly possessed dog from a 1983 movie. Looking back, the name “Diego” came to us oddly. When I was born, my father remarked that I looked like Frida Kahlo, and, although it is not on my birth certificate, I have been nicknamed Frida or Katie Frida by a number of my childhood friends and their families. “Diego” came about in connection to this, after Frida’s husband Diego Rivera. (Don’t ask me why we thought it wasn’t weird to name our dog after my nick-namesake’s husband.)

But it stuck. And from then on he was my best friend. I’m an only child, and when my parents were working or busy and couldn’t play with me, he was always there. I took to calling him a dingo (he looked very much like these native Australian dogs), but we later tried to determine his actual breed. We never officially discovered his origins, but we came to say that he was a mix between an Australian cattle dog (so the dingo idea wasn’t completely off) and a Chow Chow (which explained his curly tail and partially purple tongue).

After less than a year of living with Diego, my father got a new job. We’d been living in northern California, in a small city called Walnut Creek near the Bay Area, but the job required us to move

to Los Angeles. I was only five years old when my parents decided we would be moving, but I had already started kindergarten and had very close friends that I didn’t want to leave. I still remember it as a really hard time in my life.

Diego made the whole process a lot easier. Although we had to keep him in the kennel until the house was ready, and so we lived without him for awhile, having him made the house feel settled but exciting, and I felt that I wasn’t alone in this new place, where I would be starting school in the middle of the year.

He used to run away a lot, but his goal was never to escape. Often we’d find him nearby, and it seemed as though he hadn’t been trying to leave us, but had instead wanted to explore and lost his way when trying to come back home. One time we found him enthusiastically running with a jogger, and another time he was running around the nearby park. He was always lucky, for in order to reach the places we found him, he would have had to cross a few streets and avoid cars. Somehow he just knew what he was doing: an adventurer at heart.

Squirrels were always his greatest enemies. They tormented him at our new home, which had five large trees in the backyard that the squirrels could easily scamper up when he rushed out to chase them. Other times he had encounters with opossums or neighborhood cats. He didn’t really even like other dogs (except for a family friend’s female Chow Chow whom we came to call his girlfriend).

Until he was about 12, he seemed to be in a state of perpetual puppiness, never losing energy and

running as he always had. His only health problems came from squirrel chasing injuries or ear infections that we later discovered resulted from a dairy allergy (we had to stop giving him cheese, one of his favorite foods). As he got older, the consequences of his immense energy caught up to him. He developed arthritis in his back legs and had trouble running, walking, and eventually standing up. You could still see the energy in his eyes, but his body just couldn’t keep up.

On a Sunday evening, a couple weeks ago, my dad suddenly texted me to ask if we could Facetime. I didn’t think much of it until I saw the look on my mom’s face. And then I just knew. I had really been hoping I’d get to see him one

more time when I went home for winter break, but I also knew he was in his final days. His organs had started to fail, and my parents, now both working full time, hadn’t had much of a choice but to let him go.

I know it was best for him. And that he’s no longer in pain. I hadn’t seen him for the past two months anyway. But in my gut, when I think about going home, I can’t picture it the same anymore. He was part of why home was home. And I know I’ll be expecting him to come running to the door to greet me on December 20th. But he won’t. And I’m still working on coming to terms with that.

Illustration by Peter Herrara

lifestyle

family histories

5

students share their secrets

section editors of lifestyle What’s something surprising you’ve found out about your family history?

My great-grandfather was a U.S. representative. He sent my grandfather off to boarding school when he was a kid, mostly so he and my great-grandmother could enjoy the social scene in Washington. Apparently, my grandfather used to send them heartbreaking letters about how he wanted to go home. Fast forward to college. Because they came from this wealthy background, my grandfather decided to join the FBI instead of being drafted into the regular old army. He spent WWII doing stuff for them, including, apocryphally at least, blowing up some tower in Argentina. He then went back to Olney, Ill. (my family was small town royalty), married the prettiest girl, my grandmother, and settled into life as a lawyer, then a judge. -Lena Bohman ’18 I’ve known about the Holocaust and my family’s relationship to it (three of my grandparents fled Nazi Germany and Austria as children) since I was young, so the stories that go along with that history have never been exactly surprising to me—they sort of are all tucked away in the same mental file.

Grandpa chased through the park by kids with a noose? Yeah. Grandma’s father in hiding in his office building, and she wasn’t supposed to know where but saw his slippers under a couch there and figured it out?

Happened. It wasn’t until this summer in the Anne Frank House that this managed to surprise me: I hadn’t known Anne Frank’s first name was Annelies. My grandmother is an Anneliese. Anne Frank was only a year older than her. The story about the slippers, the hiding in an office building—I sort of felt like I’d had the breath taken out of my lungs.

Something I’d known for years, only then somehow made surprising by emphasis: one tiny shift in the story ... -Abby Muller ’16 I guess this is more about me and my family than just my family, but my mom had a miscarriage before she had me. The year I was born (and also coincidentally the day after her birthday) was when the Great Hanshin earthquake happened, and it completely demolished a huge part of Japan. We had some family there, and she was quite distressed that she couldn’t get in touch with them; they ended up being okay but had to come live at my grandma’s place for about three months. I guess what I’m trying to say is that my mom and dad went through a lot to have me here and nurture me into the person I am now, and I’m really lucky to be here today. -Anonymous Growing up, I had this great-uncle who spoke really good English and drove a nice red convertible. We all loved him. When I got older, I found out that he was involved in a drug cartel in his home country, and

he spent 10 years in prison there. He had actually snuck over to the United States and was living here illegally. For a while he worked in California as an airplane mechanic, and then he moved back to his home country. Now I only see him sometimes, but I still think of him as the cool great-uncle who speaks good English and sold heroin. -Anonymous My great-grandfather was Swiss and lived right on the border between Germany and Switzerland. During WWII he snuck a young German Jewish boy over the border and into safety in Switzerland (I can’t recall the details). Fast forward many years later and that boy’s grandson was able to locate the whereabouts of our family and gave a DVD to my great uncle. The DVD was a sort of video diary of the family that that young boy ultimately had; the video had snapshots of key moments in that family’s life—weddings, family gatherings, etc. Along with the video, the grandson had written a note saying that “none of this would have happened without [my great grandfather].” -Anonymous Something cool I found out is that my grandfather (dad’s dad) was the mayor of Norzagaray in the Philippines. And he (along with over 2000 mayors from 56 countries) signed a United Nations document calling for the release of Nelson Mandela and other South African political leaders! -Anna Dela-

merced ’16 Well my great-great-great-grandfather invented Memorial Day! He was Blackjack Logan, a general in the Civil War and one of Grant’s buddies. He’s noted usually as the founder of Memorial Day as a national public holiday. I think there was a committee involved, but he led the movement. It was originally called Decoration Day. He wanted to remember the dead after fighting and commanding in the war. -Mari LeGagnoux ’18 I found out that my great-great-grandfather was a freedom fighter during the Indian freedom struggle (and I’m sure many Indians can trace back their ancestors to the freedom movement, but I thought this was cool in any case). And my grandmother got to visit the house of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, many times when she was a school student. Also, my greatgreat-grandfather’s father was the first doctor in their village. -Minoshka Narayan ‘18 Illustration by Emma Marguiles

traditions and turkeys

giving thanks with food, family, and friends

LOREN DOWD staff writer I took a break from chopping celery to join my grandma at the stove, where she was pulling crisped pieces of sausage and bacon out of a pan and dropping them onto a paper towel-lined plate. I snuck a few pieces into my mouth before innocently returning to chop celery. My mom and grandma laughed and stole their own pieces.

Just like the stuffing recipe itself, eating half of the ingredients before the dinner was done was tradition.

In my family, stuffing isn’t just seasoned and soaked bread cubes stuffed into a turkey. It’s a stand-alone side dish with 2 kinds of sausage, bacon, taro chunks, and macadamia nuts. More central than the turkey in my Thanksgiving meal, I pile it high on my plate and smother it with gravy. My mom’s mother would show up early on the holiday, ready to get chopping and mixing. The spice from the sausage and crunch of the nuts round out the flavors of the stuffing. Regular stuffing is no match for this creation. Always the first Tupperware to go empty from the stacks that fill our fridge, my dad and I fight over the last few bites to enjoy with our turkey yearly.

Most years, Thanksgiving was a small affair.

As an only child with a family that had few relatives living nearby, my parents, grandma, and I would sit down to a table of too much food.

My grandma liked to contribute more than just the stuffing to our meal, and usually insisted on bringing pie as well. Not a baker, she picked one up from Anna Miller’s, a local diner that sold whole pies in every imaginable flavor, and always had a line winding out the door on Thanksgiving morning. My grandma would call in our order for the dutch apple pie, a combination of apple

crisp and pie. After dinner, while the pie warmed in the oven, we armed ourselves with a can of Reddi-Whip and pints of vanilla ice cream, ready to add even more to our already-stuffed stomachs.

In seventh grade, we combined forces with the couple that lived next door to us. All was well until food poisoning hit later that night, and I spent the rest of my Thanksgiving vacation in a ball on the couch watching the White House Christmas special. I refused to touch any of the leftovers, convinced that the turkey was the culprit. The association kept me from eating turkey for seven years, despite the irrationality of the situation. “But you eat chicken, and it’s just like chicken! It’s probably in your head,” people said. For a few years after, my mom bought and heated a mini baked ham for me on Thanksgiving so I would have something to enjoy. But as I got older and farther from the unfortunate year, it was turkey or nothing, so I made an exception for the holiday.

Freshman year of college, when I found myself across the continent from my immediate family on Thanksgiving, I joined my dad’s sister’s family for the festive day. They celebrated at my uncle’s sister’s home, which was large and full of friendly faces that lit up when we walked in, bearing our contributions. I met sisters and cousins and dads, all of whom welcomed me to the family. It was Thanksgiving—the dropping temperatures and dwindling daylight certainly indicated so—but it wasn’t my family, regardless of their distant relation. Sitting down to the meal, I recognized the basic components, but my parents’ signature dishware and the flavors of Hawaii were missing.

Despite the delicious food, I ended up pushing the stuffing, with its bread-pudding texture, around my plate, missing the recipes of my childhood. The company was amicable, and a home-cooked meal was comforting after months of dining hall food. But the fulfillment I felt when my parents re-created Thanksgiving dinner when I came home for Christmas was incomparably soothing.

Once again away from family for Thanksgiving when I studied abroad in Scotland, my option for celebrating was an international students event. Staff provided the traditional dishes and attendees contributed dishes from their own family or culture. A few of my American friends and I went out of trepidation toward cooking our own entire meal. The event delivered with its turkey and mashed potatoes, but our spirits sank when we discovered the lack of stuffing and green bean casserole. Distinctly American, green bean casserole had been an essential part of my own Thanksgivings—it was my dad’s favorite dish, always made with extra fried onion rings.

At my table, students contributed an odd array of dishes ranging from mac ‘n cheese to boeuf bourguignon. I contributed apple crisp in an attempt to recreate Anna Miller’s Dutch apple pie.

It was new and enlightening but the paper turkey decorations in the brightly lit multipurpose room were far from a cozy dining room.

Despite the handful of invitations from kind friends and my dad’s family in Massachusetts, I’ve decided that this is the year for Friendsgiving. Friends have always been my family too, and

I’m eager to put together a meal with their help.

My apartment’s small kitchen will have to make do for the recreation of taro stuffing and green bean casserole, and maybe even some pumpkin crunch cake. When two friends from high school offered to come up for the holiday weekend, I decided that now seemed like as good of a time as any to transition into hosting my own Thanksgiving. Being with people whose company makes me smile and sitting down to a meal made with love and familiar recipes is what I can be thankful for this year.

Food brings people together. Thanksgiving isn’t solely about the turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing, it’s about the coming together of cultures, families, and experiences. If Thanksgiving at Plymouth Plantation two years ago taught me anything, it’s that despite the holiday’s lessthan perfect history, it represents people gathering together sharing recipes and warm dishes. At home, huge Thanksgiving meals complete with sushi platters and pans of fried noodles are common. In Scotland, I dished out boeuf bourguignon next to turkey and slices of thick German bread. I envision Friendsgiving as a chance for us to bring our families’ recipes to a new table, to trade stories and enjoy friendships that have survived the distance of college. Most of all, it’s a chance to start my own tradition of food and love.

Illustration by Jenice Kim

6

arts & culture

thoughts on hatchet the desolation and allure of the wilderness

ANNE-MARIE KOMMERS staff writer I switched schools twice as a preteen, and, although each school was different, the bizarre constant that seemed to follow me everywhere was the book “Hatchet” by Gary Paulsen. All my English teachers assigned it, and luckily for me, I loved the book and eagerly reread it. “Hatchet” is about a thirteen-year-old named Brian Robeson whose parents have recently divorced. Disaster strikes when Brian tries to visit his father and his plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness.

As the sole survivor, Brian must try to live on his own with nothing but a hatchet his mother gave to him as a parting gift. I think I was especially enthusiastic about this book because of its realistic portrayal of wilderness survival; “Hatchet” is based on Gary Paulsen’s real-life experiences. I memorized Brian’s strategies in the naïve sixth-grade fantasy that I would be able to live off the land if I was ever stranded in the wild.

The summer after my senior year of high school, I unexpectedly got the chance to put my knowledge to the test. My school sponsored a ten-day summer trip in the Canadian wilderness at Quetico National Park. I soon found myself heading up north on a Greyhound bus with five other girls. The fourteen-hour journey wound through Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and finally Canada, where we were greeted by a beautiful sight: The campsite had a huge shimmering lake dotted with dozens of islands with thick evergreen trees and ancient rocks. I knew this experience with loaded backpacks would be nothing close to Brian’s ordeal. In fact, I

thought it would be a cakewalk.

Despite the gory details of “Hatchet,” I had always viewed wilderness survival through the rosy lens of adventure and natural harmony. My concerned grandmother frequently mentioned the fact that I would be using an “outdoor” toilet (the ground and the leaves). But it soon became clear that the absence of a bathroom was the least of my troubles. Every day, my seven-person crew spent an exhausting six or more hours canoeing through the lakes. Whenever an island blocked our path, we anchored at the shore and carried the sixty-pound canoes through forest trails. I sweated and tried to ignore the flies buzzing around my face as I lugged the canoe over the rocky hills, sometimes through waist-deep mud. I also had to get over my lifelong germaphobia. There was of course no soap, and because of the camp’s rules about litter we had to eat food off the ground if we dropped it.

And the mosquitoes! On our first night outside, my crew was caught by surprise by a huge swarm of them. I swiped my hand through the air and felt dozens of the mosquitoes’ tiny bodies hit my palm. We frantically tried to assemble the tents while swatting our attackers. In all, I had about 200 mosquito bites by the end of the trip. Brian encounters a similar swarm in “Hatchet”, but I had not fully believed that such a thing existed until I experienced it myself.

I began to count the days until I would be able to take a shower and curl up in a real bed. The nights were boiling hot inside the

tent, the mornings and days would leave me shivering with cold, and I always had the bad luck of sleeping on the spot in the tent that lay directly over a tree root. There’s a reason people no longer live in the wilderness, I began to think to myself. There’s a reason we advanced and created civilization. This was unusual for me. I had always loved the outdoors and spent a great deal of my childhood outside.

Yet for all the difficulties, there were some wonderful moments. Halfway through the journey we were given a rest day, and I spent a blissful afternoon reading “Never Let Me Go,” by Kazuo Ishiguro, on the grass. On the last day, I lay down on a rock and fell asleep!

I woke up feeling immensely refreshed, my backache inexplicably gone. The last night was the most magical of all. My crewmates and I snuck out of our tents once the mosquitoes had retreated for the night and spent an hour gazing up at the stars. As I looked down at the menacing black water lapping at the shoreline, I felt positively cozy on our

safe little island.

Still, I was relieved when we returned to the base camp. Dirt fell visibly from my skin and hair as I showered, and I felt as if I was scrubbing off an extra layer of skin. It was wonderful to chow down on a homemade dinner. As the bus headed home, I breathed a sigh of relief and resolved to never embark on such an extreme wilderness trip again.

But after recuperating for a few days inside, I again began to feel the pull of the outdoors. It was a small tug, and I felt satisfied merely by a walk with the dog through the forest near my home, but I started to have a vague understanding of the longing to return to the wilderness that Brian has in the sequels to “Hatchet.” There is a reason why people advanced and created indoor spaces, but there is also a reason why people continue to seek out the wilderness. The outdoors provides a peace and solace that manmade structures can never equal.

Illustration by Bev Johnson

listen to your artbeat

a club, and its creative impulse

CLARIBEL WU contributing writer At Brown, it’s simply impossible to join all the clubs or participate in all the events.

We have to prioritize how we spend our time, no matter how much we’d like to experience every interesting thing happening on campus. Yet, in the claustrophobic bustle of the fall activities fair, I was still able to find Artbeat—the clever name caught my eye, and if it weren’t for the witty pun, I might have accidentally overlooked its unobtrusive booth in the absolute anarchy of the activi-

ties fair. I was greeted by the effortlessly-artsy Mandi Cai ‘17, co-founder and president of Artbeat, who told me a bit more about the club. Art installations? Workshops? Interactive public displays? I was sold.

After the first event, Festival Fete, I had already been able to experience the creative and collaborative atmosphere of Artbeat.

Our project was to create a public art piece for this festival, and we decided to make it an interactive chalk mural. What ingredients did we need to fulfill our objective? One questionable asphalt intersection, two nostalgic boxes of Crayola chalks, a handful of creative Artbeat members, and, most importantly, a healthy amount of eager passerby willing to contribute.

We decided to make a big foot print (because how clever is it to have Festival Feet at Festival Fete?), which would subsequently be filled with the traced footprints of anyone who wished to participate.

There were no rules, of course, so the art was not limited to just footprints—and in fact the artists themselves were just as varied as their art.

The first passerby to add her footprint was a mime. She added a brightly-colored pair of footprints that were every bit as quirky and distinctive as herself. Throughout the day, she came and watched the mural develop, declaring her satisfaction through drawn hearts and happy faces. She didn’t verbalize anything, but she didn’t need to because her art spoke for her. Art is a way to communicate.

People were hesitant to join in at first, perhaps gripped by various inhibitions. One woman initially refused, stating that she hadn’t done art in years. Nevertheless, with some gentle encouragement, she surrendered herself to the call of the chalk and stooped down next to me. She went on to draw a beautiful, intricate pattern reminiscent of a Mandala (spiritual symbol in Indian religion which represents the universe). Art is a way to reconnect with yourself.

Later on in the day, I met individuals who seemed to be foreigners. Although we didn’t speak the same language, we shared a unique dialogue simply by working alongside each other. Art goes beyond borders.

Young toddlers waddled onto the mural without inhibitions, followed by apologetic parents. They were driven by the peculiar curiosity that lies in the mind of every youngster. We encouraged parents to let their kids express themselves fully, reassuring them that

it might be healthy to get a little chalk dust on their knees. Despite the fact that they could hardly talk, these toddlers were still able to communicate (in their own, squiggly ways) through their chalk art. It was especially endearing to see the parents join in, following in the footsteps of their tiny pioneers.

Art is something that belongs to all ages.

This communal masterpiece helped to bridge the gap between ages, between ethnicities, and between otherwise profoundly different experiences. It was a testament to the oneness of the human experience, an opportunity to share something special with individuals who (under different circumstances) would be considered strangers. The ephemerality of the piece made it all the more precious, as everyone knew that once regular traffic resumed, the street mural would disappear—that is, it would physically disappear. This precious, if fleeting, experience will hopefully endure in the minds of those who witnessed it.

My personal experience with Artbeat has been particularly rewarding, but there is still so much more to this club. In the following interview, the president of the club (Mandi Cai ‘17) provides a unique insight to the creative and cultural depth of Artbeat.

What was the purpose behind the creation

arts & culture

of Artbeat, and what are its goals and aspirations?

MC: Artbeat seeks to foster and unlock the artistic community at Brown by providing a platform for artistic expression amongst all students. We view art as something to be shared and interpreted differently by every person. Public art is a great way to unite students, faculty, and locals while communicating a message that sparks conversation, hence our motto ‘Find your creative impulse.’ Our future goals are to continue and expand upon our workshop series, build more public art installations that incorporate interactivity, and conduct large-scale ‘Art on the Green’ projects in the spring.

How does Artbeat use art to communicate with the student body at Brown? Through the various workshops, what else is Artbeat educating students about? How is art especially conducive in expressing these messages? Are the workshops interdisciplinary?

MC: In the past, Artbeat has collaborated with GlobeMed, Kappa Delta, and emPOWER on workshops supporting global health, child abuse prevention, and Earth Day awareness, respectively. The visual aspect of art is what makes it so powerful and impressionable—being able to demonstrate your ideas and immediately see how others react is a very rewarding experience. This

year, Artbeat is trying to integrate cross-cultural aspects of art into our workshops. One of our previous workshops on mask-making educated participants about mask-making traditions through Jewish and Chinese culture. Because the workshop occurred right before Halloween, we also spoke about the difference between appreciating and appropriating costumes.

Why is the club called Artbeat? Is there something symbolic behind the name?

MC: Every individual engages in a unique creative process and follows their own rhythm, or beat. Our mission is to provide opportunities for everyone to contrib-

7

ute their ‘Artbeat’ and inspire each other.

I find the meaning behind Artbeat to be particularly interesting. Artbeat gives people the opportunity to explore art creatively in an unintimidating context. This safe, welcoming space fosters artistic thought and in the process encourages much-needed conversation about social, cultural, and environmental issues. Art is something that extends beyond and across the borders that we create for ourselves, whether these divides are national, cultural, or personal.

Illustration by Katie Cafaro

by the light of the sun the paintings of j.m.w. turner GABRIELLE HICK staff writer Once: I stood in front of a painting for longer than usual, blinking, because I was blinded by the sun. Beside me was a person I loved, and who also loved art, and he turned to me and whispered, “This is the most amazing painting I have ever seen.”

One of the perils of studying art history— a discipline that deals with the development, philosophy, and history behind the bright and beautiful products of humanity—is what happens when I am asked to describe a work of art with words. Distill the soft swells of Mona Lisa’s face into a paragraph; in one word, specify what expression a naked Olympia wears, and, in a sentence, how that expression makes a man grow quiet. It often falls to art history practitioners to distill the nuances of a work of art, usually a visual form, into an allotted number of words, and it is in this that I find the most unavoidable failure. I could write about the sun in this painting, how it was so brilliant I couldn’t breathe, and you would never believe me.

The painting in question hangs in the Frick Collection, a house-turned-museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York. The building originally was the home of the highly successful industrialist Henry Frick, who dreamt about steel bars and the clank of the railroad and the hush of paintings in the midmorning light of his living room. I, and my companion, had the opportunity to visit the Frick Collection in a museum-filled trip to New York City this summer. Maybe it was the summer sun, but the Frick Collection remained and remains the apex of all museums we visited. At the time we went, the museum was publicizing the exhibition of Frederic Leighton’s “Flaming June,” a portrait of a woman in a luminous and diaphanous orange dress, her head nestled into the crook of her arm. It is a beautiful painting, sensual and tranquil; when we looked at it we were quiet, as if not to wake her up.

But even a flaming woman could not match the radiance of the sun in “The Harbour of Dieppe,” a painting done around 1826 by English painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, the most “versatile, successful, and controversial landscape painter of nineteenth-century England,” according to Elizabeth Barker, Turner’s biographer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. According to the Frick Collection’s website, Turner “painted three large exhibition pieces representing northern Continental ports,” one of which

is “The Harbour of Dieppe”, rather lesser known in the overall canon of Turner’s work.

Once: I stood in a different country, in front of a different Turner painting, with a different companion. This time it was England, and my father and I were at an exhibition at the Tate Britain called “Late Turner: Painting Set Free.” I hadn’t known, because I hadn’t asked, that J. M. W. Turner is my father’s favorite artist; I’d always assumed it was Monet, because my father loves water lilies. During the later years of his life, Turner, who had always been held in remarkably high esteem by the Royal Academy and the artistic community of Britain, slipped into notoriety for his increasingly abstract work, using loose handling of paint and a tendency toward the atmospheric that prefaced the oncoming style of Impressionism in the nineteenth century.

My father and I stood in front of a watercolor painting entitled “The Blue Rigi: Sunrise,” painted in 1847 of the Swiss Mount Rigi, seen from Lake Lucerne. We were both very quiet, and in the space between looking at the painting and turning to look at my father, I heard him exhale in happiness.

“Look, Gaby,” he said. “Look at the sun.”

My father is a lawyer who once wanted to be an engineer, and he never studied art history in any formal sense. But this is the gift of Turner, a man born to a barber father and a mother who came from a family of butchers.

Turner’s art, unlike certain works of modern art, is accessible; you don’t have to study art history or visual arts to appreciate the beauty of his works, to feel some shift in the spirit as you look at a mountain at sunrise or a bustling harbor awash in light. We have all felt the sun on our faces.

Turner believed in this idea, that art shouldn’t be restricted to those who could afford to access it or who had the education to “understand” it; he bequeathed his unsold, finished paintings to the British nation upon his death. The Tate Gallery in London received 300 hundred oil paintings and more than 20,000 works on paper. Unlike most North American museums that also boast of having Turner in their collections, admission to the Tate is free.

Just to the right of my bed, on the wall, I’ve tacked a postcard of Turner’s 1840 painting, “The Slave Ship.” John Ruskin, one of the Victorian Era’s leading art critics and the first owner of this painting, wrote: “If I were reduced to rest Turner’s immortality upon any single work, I should choose this.” It is a

painting of a scene so gruesome it remains immortal: a tempestuous sea, a flurry of birds and fish, the hands and shackles of the dead and dying slaves thrown overboard emerging from the water. In the sky, all the colors of a typhoon rage against the scene in the foreground, and I put this specific painting above my bed so that I might wake up every morning in the midst of such terrible beauty, into all those colors. And, cutting through the dark and the light and the terror and color, Turner painted a fierce white sun.

Proving the weakness of art historical writing, it is impossible to explain in an article of roughly 1000 words what it means to see Turner’s suns; how a painting of a harbor was so startling and beautiful that I couldn’t stop looking at it. I decided to study art history because I wanted to understand more about all kinds of art, and so that I could look at beautiful things and know a little more about why they were important. But Turner—I like to think he understood that beauty levels everyone.

I also study art history to answer the ques-

tion: Why do people love art? Why do we worship at the altar of Turner, or in the waves of Winslow Homer, or the careful light of Rembrandt? The answer to this question, unsurprisingly, cannot even exist in one form, because the reasons why we love art are as universal and as specific as why we fall in love. The reasons I love J. M. W. Turner’s art are for the same reasons and for very different reasons than why my father does. But I like to think that when any of us look at a Turner painting, no matter if we study art history or don’t study at all, there is the same reflection in our eyes, the same light. And inwardly, or outwardly, there is some exclamation that uses amazing with the meaning it was meant to hold. These are paintings that can truly, truly astonish.

Turner believed in a supreme being, but the deity that held sway over the movements of his brush wasn’t superhuman. According to popular knowledge, Turner’s last words were, “the Sun is God.” Illustration by Emily Reif

8

lifestyle

“Don’t you use a music stand every day?” “No.” “Oh, my bad. That’s a toothbrush.”

“Fuck me, I have to go home. “ “Yes to the first one, no to the second.”

She was my academic wingman for this one professor I was mildly stalking.

This is kind of creepy, but I’m, like, your number one fan. I’m so into jazz.

Edward Snowden? Is he allowed to come here?

topten cont.

11. flappy dog ears 12. Netflix 13. Michael Bay movies 14. Parks and Rec 15. .5 mm pens 16. flowery dresses that allow for conspicuous heavy eating

17. gloves 18. people who let you bor-

row their chargers when you have a paper due in 30 minutes but only two percent battery left

19. “undo” buttons 20. Jo’s staying open until 2 a.m.

21. thanksgiving break

topten (-ish) things we’re thankful for 1. corgis 2. our friends and family or whatever 3. pecan pie 4. people who move over on the sidewalk when you’re coming 5. glasses because sight and style bonus 6. doorknobs 7. sleep 8. people who match their singular nouns and verbs with singular pronouns later in the sentence

9. the John Cena meme 10. pumpkin pie

4:58 a.m.

to wait and wait and wait

SARA AL-SALEM staff writer You wake up at 4:58 a.m., and you count your blessings. At least you’re awake.

You didn’t think it would be a bad day. If anything, you had designed the week on this new sleep schedule, on this farmer’s time system. But you turned to your side, and it was there, lurking behind your morning breath.

You opened your phone, let the offensive blue light blind you as you took in what you missed when you were away.

Your friend got an A on her exam, your mom had a spamming Snapchat story for the first time, and you found out the boy you sort-of, maybe, kind-of like sometimes has found someone to bump uglies with.

So you can imagine where you’re left now. That ghost of sadness only ever needs a glimmer of a bait to throttle itself into full force. You put on your Blues playlist and you cry, because again, you’re struck with the realization that there isn’t a person you can put all these broken sentences into.

You never liked him that much anyways. It wasn’t about that. You had all these half-maybes in your life, but none of them knew you were giving them consideration—none of them knew you at all. It was about your desperate attempt to give something to someone, to anyone, who would be willing to take it.

Here is all of me, you’d say. And, interrupting, the lurk would tell you, “I will take it.” But the lurk weighs you down, pulls you into the spaces between the songs, so you tell the lurk to go away.

But the lurk plays you a picture of the life you’ve led and the life you’ll lead, whispering, “Nobody loves you like I do.”

You are exasperated! You are violently

smashing every molecule that keeps you here!

What is there, if there isn’t someone who will hold you together, who will make the blue light of your mornings bright yellow? But you pick at the friends and loved ones in your life like an old scab, and you try to say, “Please show me what love is.”

But you can’t pick at wounds thinking that’s how they heal. So you decide to disappear, but there’s no use in hiding from those whose only offense is trying to make your life fuller. You go to the mountains; you look at the art in the museums. Again and again you tell the lurk to go away, and you say to the world, “Show me something that will replace the dark.”

Maybe all of this art will fix you.

Maybe all these songs will give you your cure. Maybe, just maybe, one day you will wake up, and you will think to yourself, “What an odd time it was when I thought the world wasn’t worth sticking around for.” But maybe you can’t wait for that … maybe you have to hold your edges together for yourself, not for the version of yourself that you think the world wants. There is no use running toward something when you’re the only person you need to run to.

It’s 4:58 a.m. again, and you haven’t gone to sleep yet this time. All of that staying up to fix your life schedule was lost to the late night bruisings. You flicker from tab to tab, read emails over and over again that you can’t yet reply to, stare into the modern 21st-century abyss

that is the internet, and feel like you’re waiting. You place a finger on the center of your chest, and you think this is where the hole would be, where all your waiting would finally come and settle.

You press a little harder, hoping the resident of the hole would show up and feel welcomed, at home.

But the little part of you, the original occupant of the hole you created, calls out, tries to get you to listen. All these years you took that part of you and made it smaller and smaller until you convinced yourself the hole was always vacant from the start. Those songs that croon into your ear, that feel like nostalgia for a life you used to know, that is the small part of you that once was— and can be again. But here is what you have to tell yourself when you’re aching for some sort of magic that is not your own: You were not designed as a half for someone else to complete. You were not made to wait and wait and wait.

Your tragedy is that you live your life as though you were.

Illustration by Michelle Ng