In This Issue
Red Fin
JORDAN HARTZELL 4
Witness Windows
ELANA HAUSKNECHT 3
Hey, That's My Knife! DAVID KLEINMAN 6
Words We Never Knew ANNELIESE MAIR 5 NICOLE FEGAN 7
Fiery Red
postCover by Julie Sharpe
FEB 7
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VOL 24 —
ISSUE 14
FEATURE
Witness Windows
looking at construction, envisioning a space of belonging BY ELANA HAUSKNECHT ILLUSTRATED BY RUIHONG JIANG
I
descended four stories below ground. I wasn’t in a basement—at least, it wasn’t a basement yet. I was in the rectangular pit between Angell Street and Olive Street, a pit that will eventually be Brown’s Performing Arts Center. With me stood John Cooke, a program manager in Brown’s Facilities Management department, and Mike Kotuby, the project superintendent. “Here’s where the orchestra rehearsal room will be,” Mike said, pointing in the direction of a yellow vehicle with a shovel that looked big enough to hold dozens of violins. Nearby, a concrete wall that had recently been poured was still drying. A group of four construction workers hosed down this new surface. I tried imagining cellos and sheet music and chairs arranged in a semi-circle just a few feet away, but it was hard to picture that scene amidst the drilling
and the airhorn and the overwhelming gray of exposed rock and concrete. Then I looked up. Up, past the neat row of metal rods stuck into the wall of the pit, holding back the excavated rock so it doesn’t fill back in; up, past the elevated platform that runs around the perimeter of the pit; up, past the green construction fence. The Granoff Center for the Creative Arts hulked far above, its shining glass facade reflecting the western sky over Downtown Providence. And that’s when I realized how many there were. One, two, three... 10... 20... in that moment, I noticed how many windows surrounded the construction site. *** What’s a window? It’s a space through which to look, and perhaps also to speak or shout. It’s a surface to tap on, available for the sun to shine through. Windows
are often reflective surfaces, and for me, they serve as invitations to reflect, so to speak, on what I’m seeing. *** As a music concentrator, the prospect of a new performing arts building compelled me almost by default, but I didn’t expect to find myself so drawn to the site itself. Constantly fluctuating, this soon-to-be-butnot-yet building is its own entity. The beep of backingup trucks, the crush of gravel being poured into a dump truck, metal hammering into wood and then into rock— whole new palettes of sound emanate to reach my ears as I sit in a Page-Robinson classroom or walk under the Biomed archway toward Pembroke. Microfracturing, a technique used to blast away the millennia-old bedrock, shakes the ground beneath me as I sit on the lawn beside the tinfoil people. By way of its vibrations (perceived
Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, I hope you are finally settling into the swing of life back at Brown and finding some way to manage coursework, 9 a.m. classes, social outings, and whatever else you have overloaded yourself with this spring. With these mere two weeks feeling like two months, it is trop facile to find yourself running in the hamster wheel that is the Brown bubble, never stopping for a minute to realize your surroundings, let alone initiate an exploration outside of campus. Yet— and I hate to be the bearer of bad (old?) news—life is just going to get busier and more complicated as the semester progresses. So I invite you to take a break and try something outside of your normal routine, creating opportunity for growth. I suggest trying a new restaurant downtown, picking up a new hobby, reaching out to an old friend, or taking a day trip outside of familiar Providence. Hot tip—if you are lacking inspiration, read this week’s edition of post-, which showcases several instances of exploration, both subtle and bold. In Feature, the writer steps into the future to envision the implications of the construction of
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Brown’s new Performing Arts Center. The writers in Narrative take a more introspective and linguistic method, as one writer reflects on the stories of her parents’ relationship that made her who she is, and the other discovers new words to express familiar, old feelings to expand her way of thinking. Lastly, in Arts & Culture, one writer investigates his relationship with New England through the film Knives Out, while another writer discusses her search for identity and subsequent growth alongside Hayley Williams’s music. I am encouraging everyone to try something new and to appreciate what they have. Maybe this was sparked by my scary realization that I am halfway through my life at Brown and still feel like there is so much to discover. I also know that it is my default mode to keep stressing about the future and to be blind to the priceless friendships and experiences we have had. Anyways, I hope this issue of post- encourages you to reflect, to try, to fail, and to be present.
*Insert a Top 10 email sign-off of choice*
Caitlin McCartney Managing Editor of Lifestyle
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1. Regards, 2. Best regards, 3. Best warm regrds, 4. Yours, 5. Sent from my iPhone 6. Sincerely, 7. xoxo, 8. I love you, 9. Live long and prosper, 10. Your old friend and erstwhile companion,
both aurally and physically), the site extends far beyond the construction fence, impacting the otherwise orderly campus fabric that surrounds it. Subtly but surely, it demands attention. Last semester, I took a class that met on the fourth floor of Granoff. Each week before class started, I’d take some time to look down. What’s happening in there? I wondered. What was the role of that pile of mats, of those planks of wood? How much deeper would the hole get? When I left class, I’d often go downstairs and out the main entrance to peer through the green, tarpcovered fence that surrounds the site. If I stood a foot away, I could make out blurry silhouettes of the people and construction vehicles that I’d seen more clearly from above. This past October, I noticed that the construction team had punctuated the green fence with plexiglass sheets three feet wide, each surrounded by thick white frames. With these windows, I could walk up to the fence and observe the construction whenever I pleased rather than needing to access the (usually locked) Granoff classrooms to see into the site. Endless details revealed themselves the longer I looked: the horizontal layers of rock visible within the walls of the pit, the sheer number of tasks being done in the space at once, the people at the next window over, also looking. *** Looking down at the pit makes me think about Brown’s position on a hill above Providence. In both senses, students, faculty, and administrators are positioned to gaze upon, to study, to maintain a distance from the people and places we see below. But sight lines aren’t unidirectional. When I look at the construction site, there are times when the clouds shift and the sun shines upon the plexiglass windows in such a way that images of myself and the students passing behind me obscure my view of the people working below. Through the fence come the heavy sounds of drilling and hammering, but there are times when the voices of people walking behind me, discussing Bear Bucks and grade options, are still louder. As much as these windows invite interested passersby to witness the construction process, they also serve as a portal for viewers to reflect back on themselves. *** There’s so much to know that the windows don’t tell. When I told my advisor about my interest in the site, he immediately recalled the 200-year-old beech tree that came down when construction began: “That was a treasure we’ll never get back.” It made me wonder: What else came down when construction began? What other changes occurred in this place throughout the lifetime of the beech tree? Might orchestras have already played right here, in a building that’s since been moved or demolished? What was the area like before the beech tree was even a seedling? Before Brown, before Roger Williams? How have Narragansett, Wampanoag, and other Indigenous peoples' relationships to this land changed over time? There’s no way to answer these questions completely. Newspaper archives, collections in Brown’s libraries, oral histories, tax and zoning databases— together, documents like these might draw a vivid picture, but in trying to understand how a space has
changed over time, I’ve realized that perhaps only the land itself can hold the complete memory of how it has been occupied. This memory in its entirety isn’t available at any given point in time. And yet, as I write, the land is changing rapidly— the land is being changed, in a very tangible way. All of us who encounter the site can remember this process—the current chapter in this land’s long and inherently complex history—thanks to the windows in the construction fence. Passersby can choose to peer in, notice the changes, and document the process by taking pictures or telling a friend about what they saw when they looked. Just a few months ago, it was harder to discern what was happening on the other side of the green fence, but the windows have offered a chance to collectively bear witness as the hole continues to be dug, as concrete is poured, as foundations are laid and a building rises out of the ground. They turn what might otherwise have been perceived as a noisy nuisance marring the campus landscape into a monument of this particular moment. The windows will only be here for a while and then, presumably, they will be removed. Because soon, as the site workers build the structure taller and taller, we onlookers will be able to gaze up above the fence from our vantage point on the ground and see quite clearly how the construction is progressing. *** At some point, the new building itself will have its own windows installed. The architectural renderings of the Performing Arts Center indicate there will be a lobby with a shimmering floor-to-ceiling wall of glass that faces the Granoff entrance, just as the windows in the construction fence do now. When the building is complete, who will look through those windows from the inside and who will look from the outside? Brown exists on Providence’s East Side, which is so disproportionately white and wealthy that Rhode Island-specific housing reports give data about the East Side separately from everywhere else in the city. With this in mind, I often think about the sentence on the Performing Arts Center’s project website stating the University’s commitment to “contributing to the cultural and economic vitality of the surrounding community.” What does that mean? Who are the “surrounding communities”? And what is the entity that those “surrounding communities” surround? It seems safe to guess it’s Brown. So, who constitutes the “Brown community”? Students, faculty, administrators? Might a “Brown community” extend to alumni? What about the staff who are so vital to this campus, yet whose presence is often under-acknowledged? Or the construction workers whose activities and interactions on campus are heavily limited, even as they bring this building into being? I would like for this campus, for the imagined “Brown community,” to be a place where the widest possible range of people can all feel a sense of belonging. People from neighborhoods in Providence beyond College Hill, from communities that don’t match Brown’s historically white, high-income demographics, should feel welcome to share the cultural and educational resources that those of us with Brown ID’s can access readily. But the University’s position
“I say stupid things all the time, and I remember almost none of them.” “I’ve been passionate about finance since I was a child.”
across the river, up the hill, and behind the gates doesn’t make that too easy. It begets an image of an insular institution where, all too often, privilege simply fosters more privilege. In order for the completed Performing Arts Center to actualize its goal of “contributing to cultural and economic vitality,” Brown needs to counter the image and campus culture that has resulted from its separateness from the rest of the city. This new building is about performance, and that entails connections between artists and audience members and crew members; the Center will be inherently equipped to bring people together. In order to deliver on this potential, students, faculty, and administrators can mobilize their important kinds of influence on the university and insist that the space functions as inclusively as possible. I envision a future where people who have no affiliation with Brown will be invited to use the Performing Arts Center’s rehearsal rooms and performance spaces to incubate and showcase their own work. I envision the building being exceptionally accessible: Brown could commit to providing transport, childcare, translation, food, and more to open up the space and all it holds. What do you dream of for the new Performing Arts Center? How could this new building represent a starting point for a more just and equitable relationship between Brown and the rest of Providence (and beyond)? While the Performing Arts Center is under construction, constantly changing and each day coming more into its future self, our conception of the place it will become can also be in process. As we anticipate the future space—how the sunlight will fall differently as the building grows taller, the gradual exchange of construction sounds for those of an orchestra—we can also imagine how it will be existed in and who will get to do that existing. Whose building will this be? And, more broadly, who gets to feel belonging on this campus? In this time of construction, when the future is so tangibly at our fingertips, we must demand that our inclusive and hopeful answer becomes the reality.
Red Fin
and other places my parents built for me BY JORDAN HARTZELL ILLUSTRATED BY GABY TREVIÑO
CONTENT WARNING: Animal death “Mud Run, 2008” There’s a state park in Pennsylvania, a test site for dynamite blasts in the ’50s turned hunting and fishing club in the ’70s. Dad’s been going since he was six years old, and it hasn’t changed much. It’s a two-mile drive from the opening gates to the cabins: Red Fin, Turnaround, Eagle’s Nest, Log Cabin. They’re scattered along the dirt road, which traces the veins of the park and then bumps into the old railroad at the edge of the Lehigh River gorge. Mom tells us not to get too close to the edge where stray rocks tumble down into the river. Dad helps us steal antique blue glass insulators from the old electric line at the end of the tracks. We take the dogs off their leashes for the hike back to the cabin. There’s a deer head above the fireplace with four-point antlers and glass eyes. Dad tells us that the deer’s back half is in the chimney where we can’t see it— the poor guy is just resting there. The sofas are green and red and brown, leaves in autumn worn tan along the seams. Pine frames encase charts of local fish and topographic maps of the Pocono Mountains, february 7, 2020
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NARRATIVE leaves in November and dog-eared chapter books and fairy houses made out of acorn tops and twigs. I’m pinky promises and a salmon entrée split down the middle, dancing on tables and Pennsylvania valleys from a little yellow plane.
Words We Never Knew discovering new words for old feelings BY ANNELIESE MAIR ILLUSTRATED BY OLIVIA LUNGER
etched with light blue contour lines and the words “HICKORY RUN.” It smells like cherry tobacco pipe smoke and dirt after rain. Evergreens hold their breath to hear the waterfall, dammed at the bottom of a hill below Red Fin. Dad’s in the kitchen, putting two steaks on a plate to take out to the charcoal grill and stirring pasta every few minutes to check for al dente-ness. He’s whistling the cello part of the Aubrey-Maturin theme. Mom’s knitting in the faded La-Z-Boy with one of our dogs curled up between her armpit and hip. She holds the half-completed scarf up a little higher as she works so as not to wake the pup, unraveling her yarn to start fresh when she finds a bad stitch. One of my sisters reads on the couch with her heels tucked up under her hips, and the other just dozes in front of the fireplace.
“Love Languages” With Mom it’s the offer of an outstretched pinky, held out as an I’m sorry or a let’s start fresh or an I know you’re going through a lot right now and I’d do anything to take the hurt away. Pinky lock doesn’t mean keep a secret, it just means that Mom sees you. She’ll rest her wrist on the center console of the car with her pinky out, not saying anything while she drives with you in the passenger seat. And you’ll link your pinky with hers and look out the window, and everything will be okay because you have a partner now and you’re in it together. With Dad it’s sharing food at restaurants. Everyone else in the family has some kind of dietary restriction: no red meat, low sugar, no thisor-that. We’ll debate over the burger or the catch of the day—we had fish yesterday, but it’s so good here,
When Dad has a beer on Fridays, he’ll tell us about Mom before we were around. How she danced on tables and made pasta from scratch and ran the emergency room of their residency program like nobody’s business. “He Used to Be a Pilot” The day after my parents met, Dad drove Mom home in a car with the top down. He hit a cardinal and it exploded on the windshield. Red feathers, red insides, red in the face because Mom was crying. A few years ago it was a duck—a mama with more daughters than he had then, so Dad took off his shirt and scooped up the ducklings and sang to them while he carried the bundle home. For my 13th birthday, Dad took me to the little airport where he kept his red and blue Cessna highwing in a hangar between a neighborhood and an open field. We cracked cans of Sprite in the pilot’s lounge and he introduced me to a friend who’d be taking me for a ride in his Piper Cub, a little yellow plane in which the pilot sits behind the co-pilot. Dad explained why these planes were special, and now, years later, I don’t remember the reason he gave. I just remember taking off and looking over the yellow siding that felt much too thin to carry one full-grown adult and one newly minted teenager over Buffalo Valley. The pilot, this friend of Dad’s, tipped the wings to either side, rocking our papiermâché machine to wave at the ground before he told me over our headsets to grab the yoke and look at the horizon and take a deep breath and drive for a while. I only flew with Dad once before he stopped flying. Tragic for a flighted thing to end up on the ground. 6
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so maybe we should each get one and split them. No need to narrow it down. What about dessert? He wants chocolate cake and I want ice cream so we’ll compromise and get both. “Two plates,” we’ll tell waiters. “It’s a Heart With Her Name Inside” Dad’s tattoo is on his upper thigh, where his patients and teenage daughters won’t see it. Mom now jokes that Dad can never leave her because he’ll never find another Judi spelled with an i. When Dad has a beer on Fridays, he’ll tell us about Mom before we were around. How she danced on tables and made pasta from scratch and ran the emergency room of their residency program like nobody’s business. How on Friday nights, when they weren’t on call, they’d take $10 to buy soup from Chinatown and rent a movie. He’ll say, “You shoulda seen your mother,” and then beam like he could see her with her dark curly hair and green eyes right there in front of him. Some local shop in Philly did it, I think. He signed a waiver saying yes, he was sure, and no, he wasn’t drunk and then they carved in Mom’s name so she knew he was forever and always, like the inside of their rings. “And Other Places My Parents Built For Me” I am built of logs and fireplaces and the first few chords of George Winston’s “Colors/Dance.” I am
I'm watching a "Cutest Moments on the Bachelor" YouTube video with my friend Ben, landscape shots of tropical islands flipping to footage of intimate conversations in perfectly constructed gardens. The video cuts to a close-up of a contestant holding her face and grinning into her hands, too giddy to formulate whatever she hopes to say. She looks into the eyes of that season's bachelor and admits, repeatedly, "I'm so smitten!" I realize that "smitten" is one of those words whose meaning has always drifted past me, that blends so seamlessly into its context that I don't even think to question it. I ask Ben what exactly it means. "Oh!" He sighs into a bright smile. "It means… really drawn to. Almost like infatuated. It's such a good word." It is such a good word—it's almost muffled, like the contestant's dialogue as she giggled through her hands. It's cute and cozy, like a mitten or a kitten. Smitten. Of course, I knew this word, but I hadn't truly understood it. I immediately felt regret that I hadn't looked it up earlier. And even though Ben's explanation was patient and his expression kind, I still read confusion on his face: You write fucking poetry and you don't know the word "smitten?!" It's a word I really could have used, both in life and in a whole bunch of poems. The word was missing from me, but its concept wasn't—I must've talked around it, or thought it up in images, or shown the feeling on my face. *** That moment of learning “smitten” makes me think of a snowy evening at Brown a few years ago, when I was trudging home to Chapin through the white sidewalks, aligning my steps with those left by snow boots before me. The sky hadn't quite fallen to black, but a deep blue had settled into the frosty air, its darkness accumulating like static. At the intersection of Thayer and George, I stepped under a streetlight and looked toward the silent road, not a car or soul in sight. Suddenly I found myself inside of a memory—my view was several feet closer to the ground, but the same kind of packed snow crunched beneath my feet. Another hazy streetlight, its shade a tired orange, was thrown over uneven piles before me—and the same feeling rushed through my
ARTS & CULTURE core, viscous, frigid, and slow. Loneliness, I thought, my exhale collecting in a white cloud and streaming up through the air. That was loneliness: a night where I’d insisted on staying outside to play long after the snow had stopped drifting down through the sky, the slow and sudden capture of the atmosphere by sunset and by stars, the pale streetlight leaving an orange patch at the edge of my driveway, the sight of nobody else. This was my first memory of experiencing something bright, joyful, and communal in low light and solitude; it's my first memory of feeling lonely. And I remember it now, at a time where I can think of the correct word, when I can see its amorphous shape behind my closed eyes, can remember it elsewhere, piece it together or apart, or try to talk it out and away. That childhood night, standing in orange-lit snow at the edge of my driveway, I did not know its name. I had no choice but to feel it. Standing at that intersection just outside Brown’s campus, in a process that was both similar and had somehow occurred in reverse, I put a new word to another thing not unknown but still not yet learned. I put a word into my younger self who did not yet have the tools to pick it apart, to know it in any way outside of its pure existence. *** What do we call the new acquisition of something already intuitively known? And does this knowledge transform the nature of feeling it? It's a learning process that feels sort of like a revision. It paves the way for specificity and power, for redefinition, for intellectualization or dismissal. Discovering a word can deeply validate a feeling, allowing us to connect through shared experience. Or, it can create the possibility for misunderstanding through generalization—a single term can never truly describe the same experience across different bodies. The English language provides an extremely limited set of words to describe our emotions, which arguably encompass our most human experiences. This is partly why I love the work of poetry: It tackles the language of feeling, and therefore of connection. Sometimes I find myself at the edge of a stanza and feel, despite my frustration with not really knowing what the author describes, that I do know it in this unnameable way–that I would “know” it vocally or concretely if only there were a word out there to describe it. I try to find a word that describes this simultaneous learning and knowing of a word. It may exist in some niche corner of academia, or deeper in the internet than I am willing to search, or maybe in another language. It's a word I would love to know—the moment of learning a "new" word, the thrill or regret of its existence in a form that can be shared. The moment of either its unlearning or its unfolding.
Hey, That's My Knife!
knives out and the horror of new england fall BY DAVID KLEINMAN ILLUSTRATED BY IRIS XIE
The moment I knew that Knives Out would be my topic of conversation for weeks wasn’t the first time I heard Daniel Craig’s dulcet take on a Southern accent, or the ending twist, or even the appearance of Chris Evans’s oversized raglan sweater. It was when
our heroine finds a toxicology report with the little emblem in the top corner that reads “Norfolk County, Massachusetts”—also known as the place I’ve lived for my entire life. While I’ve been joking to people that the movie is based on my life—I’m the knife, I tell them, not the Thrombey family’s neoconservative teenage alt-righter, Jacob—it really is true that the film captured the essence of southern Massachusetts extremely well, boiling it down to one incredible throughline: a sense of being trapped. I’ll be the first to say that Knives Out probably wasn’t intended for me. From the film’s focus on Ana de Armas’s expert portrayal of a child of undocumented immigrants to its skewering of “wellmeaning” rich white suburbanites regardless of their position on the political spectrum, Knives Out isn’t exactly marketing its humor to reasonably wealthy cishet white men (and the film is made immensely better by this). Moreover, without giving too much in the way of spoilers, every piece of the film is clearly designed to make fun of murder mystery moviegoers, or at least the tropes of classic murder mysteries. The fact that the film’s victim is a mystery writer and that the main set piece is literally a bullseye made of knives, however, didn’t dissuade me from putting on my Sherlock Holmes hat. I assumed every single fact of the case was a lie and looked carefully for the ways I could be being deceived. I eagerly awaited the parlor room scene that would reveal everything I thought I knew to be an elaborate ruse. I wanted to have every single expectation subverted, and in a sense, that’s what I got. Knives Out made a point of tricking me— not into thinking I knew what was going on, but into thinking I didn’t. I constructed elaborate theories, and when the movie showed me that I’d been given the pieces all along, I had to ask myself—why did I so badly need a mystery to solve? Norfolk County, Massachusetts includes several towns and even some cities, and among its lesserknown communities is my hometown of Sharon. Sharon is the quintessential commuter town, smack dab between Boston and Providence, originally a resort town for the rich colonial families that wanted to escape the hustle and bustle of the city. In its current state, “sleepy” doesn’t do it justice—one could more easily call it “exhausted.” The characters of Knives Out seldom leave the family’s big, beautiful manor, and I can tell you firsthand that it’s for good reason. In that neck of the woods, there’s extremely little that would get you out of the house. Because I went to a private school (like I said—I’m undeniably the butt of Knives Out’s jokes) and therefore didn’t interact as much as I could have with the community, my view of the town might not be the most accurate—but that means I have
the exact same knowledge of the area that the spoiledrotten Thrombey family does. I was looking for familiar landmarks throughout the film, and I could swear I saw a train station I once commuted from to take ballroom dance classes with my then-girlfriend, but it could really have been any MBTA stop in the county. That’s sort of the point: There just aren’t that many landmarks in Norfolk County that allow you to distinguish one town from another. It’s generic; it’s standardized. It was a stroke of genius to have the film take place in the autumn, because that’s when the melancholy feeling that haunts suburban Massachusetts is at its most powerful—things aren’t as beautiful or lively as one would expect, but they are stereotypically rural New England, which is to say: quiet. You can hear a twig snap for miles, and you’re much more likely to see a car passing through to break your terrifying isolation than a person who might actually be attempting to experience the world around them. The trees are beautiful, but no one who lives here actually cares enough to get outside and experience them. That’s why the claustrophobia of Knives Out resonated so powerfully with me that at first I didn’t even notice it: That’s just what New England is like in the fall. Unless, like young Meg Thrombey, you’ve got friends nearby and a way to travel some distance to them, you’re going to be stuck inside with your family. To again attempt to explain something without spoilers, the one great reveal of Knives Out is that a character you thought you could trust is the closest thing to the crime’s mastermind. Like I said earlier, this is hardly a twist; learning that this character is evil just means everyone else was right about them. As I thought about this, I realized that, though the knives may be out, no one in the Thrombey family has a way out. For sure, they have all the privilege that money can buy—and some it can’t—but Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc refers to the family as “a pack of vultures at the feast, knives out and beaks bloody,” and no noise in the deathly quiet Norfolk County is going to drown that out. They know what monsters their family members are, and with the film’s aforementioned great reveal, we come to recognize that they know what monsters they themselves are, too. As much as the film lampoons mystery as an escape from dealing with real-world socioeconomic injustice, the Thrombeys clearly hope that patriarch Harlan’s death and even the subsequent whodunnit will serve as an escape from themselves. The twist is that we knew how horrible each and every one of them was from the very beginning; nothing was hidden, nothing was secret. The horror of suburban Massachusetts isn’t what you don’t know, but what you wish you didn’t. february 7, 2020
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ARTS&CULTURE This unease (and the white guilt that accompanies it) isn’t just a side theme of the film, but a crucial aspect of its setting, an invisible essence like the wind that carries the leaves down from the trees there. I love my hometown, but there’s a moment in the New England autumn, in the midst of all the talk of harvests and hunkering down for winter, that you can’t help but take stock of yourself, and if you come up lacking, there are no winter storms, spring flowers, or summer sun to distract you. When I’m faced with that, I bury myself in stories where things make a little more sense, where triumphs are a product of valor and defeats are lessons to learn or cruel plots to be outthought. Knives Out stripped that illusion away and showed me the world I grew up in exactly as it is, reminding me that no matter how far I may get from home, I’ll always have to come back to that cold, crisp look at who I am—the kind born from a Norfolk County fall.
Fiery Red
on hayley williams, hair, and radical change BY NICOLE FEGAN ILLUSTRATED BY ANNA SEMIZHONOVA
Hayley Williams, fiery red and heavily banged, was the inspiration for my abysmal sixth-grade haircut. A noted social rebel (noted, I say) usually found wearing mismatched Converse sneakers with a middle-grade book about astronomers under my arm, I didn’t just want to look like Hayley Williams—I wanted to be her. Hayley was doing what no one else seemed capable of: She was at once powerful, in charge, and unabashedly herself. Even at age 12, I felt a growing need to get out of my town, away from my friends, and far from everything that made me me. The hair was supposed to be step one—my transformation from Old Nicole into New Nicole, as vibrant as I could possibly get away with in my Long Island town. As might have been expected, my mom didn’t want me going red, so I settled for a set of bangs that haunt me to this day [image deleted], holding on to the notion that there was still time for me to become everything I wanted to be. *** Middle school saw me recede, riddled with mental health problems, a pervading desire to be a good student, and a resultant lack of positive memories. Those years were spent in an in-between space, still shackled to my childhood while grasping at straws in an attempt to figure out who I wanted to be. I discovered poetry and dove headfirst into writing, continued developing my weird love for extracurricular math, and was still able
to find solace in the pages of an old, dusty novel, but I lacked a sense of clarity. High school, at least, gave me a change of scenery; finally leaving behind the friends I had made back in elementary school, I found myself in a drama program with a brand new group of people. Paramore, meanwhile, spent these years working through their own identity crisis: The departure of guitarist Josh Farro and drummer Zac Farro left the remaining three members angry, excited, and ready for whatever was to come next. By the end of ninth grade, Paramore’s new self-titled album had supplied me with anthem after anthem for my fresh start. They were ready and unafraid, dropping lyrics like “If there’s a future, we want it now” and “It’s just a spark but it’s enough to keep me going.” As a scared teenager balancing aspirations of becoming a poet, a novelist, a math professor, and an astronomer, I was still paralyzed by the sheer notion that I had to become anything at all. *** By the time I got to Brown, I felt as though I should have all the answers, but I quickly realized this was not the case. I got accepted as a chemistry major and still have yet to take a college chemistry class. I diverted to mathematics and nearly failed MATH0350. Eventually, I landed on becoming an English major and also discovered a passion for philosophy. Still, I found myself presenting one way externally (my outer persona: a person who has her shit together) while wondering when the fabled inner transformation was going to begin in earnest. A continuous cycle of optimism and failure developed: Giddy with the promise that I was capable of becoming a confident badass à la Hayley Williams, I reached until my selfconsciousness kicked in and I receded yet again with no visible progress having been made. It was around this time that Paramore released After Laughter, their happy-sounding new wave album full of lyrics about hard times and fake happiness. Hayley’s lyrics once again magically found me at the time I needed them most, and I was intent on recovering from my selfimposed personal heartache—always getting closer to yet farther away from myself.
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Amanda Ngo FEATURE Managing Editor Liza Edwards-Levin
“Unfortunately, Future’s best (i.e. worst) days are behind him. Like a bizarre reverse-victim of his own anti-success, the dude’s just kinda happy now.”
Section Editor Erin Walden
– Julian Towers, "what's coming after that?" 2.1.19
“Success and failure are intimately evident in every corner of College Hill and in every competitive, insecure, brilliant student it hosts.” – Sydney Lo, “grit and bear it,” 2.2.18
Staff Writers Anna Harvey Gaya Gupta NARRATIVE Managing Editor Nicole Fegan Section Editor Michelle Liu
After years of tumult, change, turnover, and personal struggle, Hayley Williams has emerged in 2020 with a full-fledged solo career. On the release date of her first single, “Simmer,” I sat in a window seat at 85 Waterman furiously refreshing the YouTube page that promised the video would be released at 2:30 p.m. exactly. When the video finally appeared, I watched, my mouth wide open, in childlike glee. Her fire had never been brighter, the video red-tinted and deliciously dark. The videos kept coming over the next few weeks, featuring Hayley constructing and entering a personal chrysalis and then emerging from it at once gracefully and grotesquely. Paramore was still intact, and Hayley had answered the question that had consumed my mind for my entire young adulthood: How can you remain boldly your own person without cutting yourself off from the world around you? Books still in hand, math still on my mind, I exited the building with a newfound confidence. *** When I finally dyed my hair bright red in the summer of 2019, my childhood friends were all quick to echo the very same sentiment: You remind me of Hayley Williams with your red hair! Admittedly, as I walked into that appointment, I did have “Decode”-era Hayley Williams in mind, bright and dark and tucked softly underneath a purple beanie. But red felt like it was mine this time around. Hayley had graduated to platinum blonde months before, and this allowed me to use red as a way of becoming my own person rather than an imitation. At 12 years old, wracked with uncertainty about my future, I had thought the only way to be yourself was to not be seen—to not let anyone know who you are, so that no one could judge or try to change you. I was Hayley in her chrysalis, unknowable and unseeable. In her recent “Leave it Alone Interlude” video, she is seen making an ornate garment out of the very chrysalis she has just emerged from; she stares at the door to the room she has been encased within, ready to step back into the world. Hayley refuses to go unseen, and walking across campus with a head full of bright red hair, so do I.
Staff Writers Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Danielle Emerson Naomi Kim Anneliese Mair Kahini Mehta ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Griffin Plaag Section Editor Maddy McGrath Staff Writers Rob Capron David Kleinman Julian Towers
LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Caitlin McCartney
Staff Writers Eashan Das Lauren Toneatto COPY Copy Chief Moe Satar
SOCIAL MEDIA Head Editor Paola Solano HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Gaby Treviño LAYOUT Co-Chiefs Amy Choi Nina Yuchi Designers Joanne Han Steve Ju Iris Xie WEB MASTER Jeff Demanche
Want to be involved? Email: amanda_ngo@brown.edu!
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