In This Issue
The Cost of (Not) Pausing
GEORGEARA CASTAÑEDA 4
There's Something Happening Somewhere
ANNA HARVEY 2
Burning Hot -Take Roundtable! PLAAG , CAPRON, KLEINMAN, FEGAN, TOWERS 5
A Renovation Project
GRACE PARK 4
postCover by Jake Ruggiero
OCT 4
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VOL 24 —
ISSUE 4
FEATURE
There's Something Happening Somewhere
What Happens When a Woman Covers Bruce Springsteen, and I Finally Feel Seen BY ANNA HARVEY ILLUSTRATED BY ELLA HARRIS
I
remember first hearing The Rising when I was around 11, sitting in the backseat of my dad’s car as he drove me to the mall in the next town over. Released on July 30, 2002, it is Bruce Springsteen’s twelfth album, dealing primarily with the aftermath of 9/11. Of all of The Boss’s albums, it should have been the one that spoke most directly to me. I was born in 1998, making me technically among the first batch of Generation Z babies. According to the Pew Research Center, the cutoff between Millenials and Gen Z is 1996. Given these distinctions, I am supposed to know the ins and outs of the Internet (I don’t), particularly social media and the constant connectivity it engenders (I do). Those of us Gen Zs who were alive on 9/11 likely don’t remember it, which is apparently a factor that distinguishes us from our predecessors. It’s odd how the scaffolding of a secondhand memory has
defined the world I’ve grown up in, has determined the architecture of my generation. We weren't allowed to “run wild” anymore—there was a conscious, collective recognition of the world’s inherent dangers. We grew up knowing that things could get bad—really bad—but since that was all we knew, we focused our energy on the universally hard task of trying to grow up. From the backseat, I remember thinking The Rising was a good album, though it differed from the Top 40 pop that I favored in middle school. I remember it sounding raw; I could hear the scraping of Bruce’s vocal cords as he sang (screamed?). It felt like good music for driving, but I knew I probably wouldn’t willingly listen to it if my dad hadn’t picked the CD. It sounded like dad music, and while I had been raised on rock n’ roll breakfasts and the Rolling Stones, it wasn’t similar to anything I wanted to listen
to—so, for the next decade, I largely ignored it. That all changed last week, when I was walking, now 21, to my first apartment and heard Lucy Dacus’s cover of “Dancing in the Dark.” “I ain’t nothin’ but tired” she sighed in a low alto, “Man I’m just tired and bored with myself / Hey there, baby, I could use just a little help.” I stopped in the middle of the street. I was hooked. Lucy Dacus is one of those musicians I have adored for years, a patron saint of the genre I affectionately call Sad Girl Indie. Along with Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers (with whom Dacus collaborates as members of the supergroup boygenius), Dacus has lived at the emotional center of my college experience. I started listening to her in earnest when I was studying abroad in England during my junior year, feeling simultaneously ecstatic about my newfound freedom
Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, I’m a prisoner of my own personal garbage island, but that’s okay, ’cause so are you. Groundless biases, preconceived notions, sheltering assumptions, and untested fears cap our potentials and freeze our steps. Since you’ve arrived on this campus, how many new and course-altering ventures have you talked yourself out of ? What unlived lives now stalk the phantom variations of our green? First step: I advise you throw this magazine on the ground, tear off your clothes and blindly purchase a new wardrobe from Thrifty Goose Thrift Shop (50 Orchard Avenue). Next, wander into a new class: shopping period is a state of mind and never actually ends. When the professor asks who you are and what you think you’re doing, disregard their second question and introduce yourself by the label on your shirt (I did this yesterday, and now I have a whole new group of peers: Julian Towers friends AND Tommy Hilfiger
friends. Let’s hope they never meet). Now you’re an adventurous, entirely unbound human cosmonaut!! This accomplished, you’re ready to read the rest of our issue. Retrieve it from where you threw it in the Barus and Holley Café, and you’ll find it’s full of opinionated, passionate writers staking claims, making changes, and examining their lives. In our Feature this week, one writer uproots everything she thought she knew about Bruce Springsteen—a spring awakening if you will. Hop to the Narrative section and you’ll find a pair of pieces about the complications of routine and identity in college life. Finally, our Arts & Culture section has been hijacked by FIVE writers, each offering a mind-shattering hot take on films, albums, and podcasts you thought you had all figured out. Please lose yourself. Quite literally…please.
Happy reading!
Julian
Managing Editor of Arts & Culture 2 post–
Things to Do Now That It’s Cold Again 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Get used to no longer being the coldest thing in your environment Knit Blueno another scarf Get your flu shot Hide out in the post- office (help, it’s so hot here) Listen to Adele and cry a lot Burn all your midterm papers to generate warmth Migrate south with the birds Curl up under blankets and pretend you’re a cat Find a S.O.— it’s officially cuffing season again! Drink tons of hot chocolate to warm your soul
and completely lost because of it. Her lyrics are wry and affecting: “The first time I tasted somebody else’s spit / I had a coughing fit,” she drawls on “Night Shift,” the first track on her 2018 album, Historian. And though she often sings slowly and in a melodic monotone, her guitar riffs send each song soaring to heights that make me want to bang my head and dance. Dacus first covered “Dancing in the Dark” in a 2016 live show at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, but she released a recorded version in 2019. “Happy birthday to Bruce,” she said in a statement, “but also happy birthday to my dad, the biggest Bruce fan I know and the reason I’ve listened to The Boss since birth.” Like me, Dacus resisted falling for the wiry man from New Jersey in part as a teenage rebellion against her father’s taste in music. “I hated him in middle school,” she told Rolling Stone, “but if you listen, it’s undeniable that he is a poet and a keen observer of the world . . . and the songs are bops.” Similarly, I like Lucy’s music because it sounds like poetry, and in hearing her words, I finally realized that Bruce Springsteen—despite his penchant for bombast and bravado—is one of Sad Girl Indie’s predecessors. Bruce Springsteen wrote “Dancing in the Dark” because he was told he needed a hit. He fought with his manager, Jon Landau, over the request (how capitalist! How rude to demand profit from an artist!), but scribbled the song that same night. It was the first single on what is, to some, the quintessential Bruce album, Born in the U.S.A., and in 1985, it won Springsteen his first Grammy. It was also his first song to be directly marketed to a younger audience. The music video—a live concert performance directed by Brian De Palma—was filmed for MTV and features a pre-Friends Courtney Cox as a young, pixie-cutted fan brought up on stage to boogie with The Boss. It is truly an event. It begins with a slow pan up Bruce’s bluejeaned legs, tapping in sync with energetic synth. He snaps his fingers, and the crowd cheers. His white polo is unbuttoned to a deep V, and with every beat he whips his torso backward, holding onto the mic stand as if it’s the only thing keeping him from full surrender. He spreads his arms as he sings—a bald eagle surveying the landscape of his accomplishment. His legs are spread wide, feet tapping, belt buckle shining under stage lights. The stance is supposed to be sexy, but I can’t help giggling a little every time I watch the video—at one point he swings one arm like a lasso, and it looks like he’s on a mechanical bucking bronco at a dive bar. “Man, I ain’t gettin’ nowhere,” he sings, “I’m just livin’ in a dump like this.” Springsteen’s music is often categorized as “heartland rock,” a genre characterized by straightforward lyricism, its focus on blue-collar American life and its conviction that rock music is a communal affair. These ideals are present in his performance, shiny as it is. It seems like he has gotten somewhere, though. He’s singing to a massive, cheering crowd in St. Paul, Minnesota—not quite a dump, despite Bruce’s words. He’s undeniably confident, performing with his full body, filling the expanse of the stage. The mood of the video is triumphant, and ironically, this makes it feel even more dated than
the heavy synth beat does. Bad things had happened, that’s for sure (indeed, Springsteen wrote “Born in the U.S.A.” to protest the maltreatment of Vietnam veterans), but it still seemed like a hopeful time. The kids in the audience—kids like my parents—knew they would probably own a house one day, could have a steady job with a salary instead of a cobbled-together resumé of freelance work under the gig economy, and didn’t have to worry much about the hellfire of climate collapse, which seemed more like science fiction than reality back then. The video is still an exhilarating watch, but it feels like the kind of thing only accessible through my computer screen. I cannot imagine myself as Courtney Cox—though I have twice chopped off all my hair, and I do love to dance to ’80s music. The ’80s have influenced my adolescence and young adulthood, perhaps more than they should. All the John Hughes movies were filmed in and around the suburbs of Chicago, where I grew up. I have a Spotify playlist of ’80s alternative called “The Sixteen Candles House is Down the Street from Mine” because the Sixteen Candles house is, in fact, down the
different coming from a woman. I can believe that she does, truly, want to change her face. It is, after all, hard to escape in a society constantly trying to sell us products designed to do that very thing. But it’s more than that. The song reaches a different emotional plane when it’s toned down and sung in a higher octave: In its buoyant beat, there is sadness. It’s not that Bruce didn’t explore these nuances, it’s just that, when sung by a woman starting her career, rather than a man at the height of his, they’re more immediately apparent. Lucy is only 24, which means her childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood have all been steeped in the same fear, uncertainty, and (it sounds awful to say it) unavoidable hopelessness that mine have. I know I’m prone to catastrophizing, but I do not know what my future will look like; I do not even know how long I have to figure that out. Lucy captures these notes—which were, in the original song, barely hidden—in her performance. She, too, is uncertain, is tired, is living her life nevertheless because what else can anyone do? Lucy is not yet ready to fill a stadium in St. Paul, but she’s playing her heart out all the same.
The song reaches a different emotional plane when it’s toned down and sung in a higher octave: In its buoyant beat, there is sadness. It’s not that Bruce didn’t explore these nuances, it’s just that, when sung by a woman starting her career, rather than a man at the height of his, they’re more immediately apparent. street from mine (it looks largely the same as it does in the movie, except I bet the inside is no longer fully carpeted). I know the family who lives there; the eldest son and I were in the same third-grade class. All of this pop culture has felt so real to me, like it captured something integral about my teenage experience (which is, after all, the point of art manufactured by adults who want to tap into adolescent hearts), but for some reason, Bruce Springsteen didn’t feel like a part of it. I had always connected him to adulthood, to dad rock. I preferred The Smiths, Joan Jett, and David Bowie—songs for kids who feel a little weird, a little out of place. Lucy Dacus changed that. Her version of “Dancing in the Dark” is also available on Youtube as a cellphone video from a concert-goer at the 2018 End of the Road Festival in the U.K. She, too, is wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. Her shirt, however, is a crew neck, and slightly too big–it’s probably a men’s undershirt. Her black, electric guitar is strapped across her body, replacing Bruce’s synth and shielding her from the audience who sings along. She bops on her toes as she sings, a soft, shy smile playing across her face when it becomes clear the audience is completely on her side. She walks around the stage, awkwardly, endearingly. Her male guitarist folds his body in two, overcome by the music. Lucy remains upright, composed. “I check my look in the mirror,” she wails. “Wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face!” This sounds
In her video, Lucy shakes her head, her brown hair flying. I dance in my bedroom in Providence, hair pulled into a ponytail, zit cream on, wearing my own too-large shirt. I spin around as Lucy does, slightly off-balance. Despite years of ballet training, I still lack rhythm. I am trying to find my own movement, trying to feel the beat in my body, and I think I’m getting there. My vocal register is like Lucy’s, low for a woman, and I feel my voice slot effortlessly into hers as I sing along. I have lived life on the cusp—pulled toward old movies and old songs I can only access via the Internet, on the border between generations, between adolescence and adulthood. In my last year of college, I am tired— of myself, of school, of everything I’ve done. I know “there’s something happening somewhere,” and I don’t know where it is or what I’ll do there, but I want to go. According to Lucy herself, Springsteen’s lyricism is “embedded in my own songwriting inextricably at this point.” Words and rhythms bleed into and build on one another, whether they’re made for stadiums or Sad Girls, which sometimes, might even be the same. “Stay on the streets of this town, / And they’ll be carvin’ you up alright,” Bruce and Lucy tell me. Providence has carved me up, simultaneously home and hell, and like any of the places I’ve lived in for a while, I’m ready to leave it. But it’s only October. There’s still more to this place to discover and more music to give it all meaning. Until I find out, I’m fine turning up the volume, and just dancing in the dark.
“YUM.” “Excuse me?” “Sorry, not you. I was talking to the burrito.” “My Uber driver will be late… She just messaged to tell me she has a hangover.”
october 4 , 2019 3
NARRATIVE
The Cost of (Not) Pausing Healing as a FLi Student BY GEORGEARA CASTAÑEDA ILLUSTRATED BY OWEN RIVAL
Spending the first Saturday of this semester in an urgent care center on the outskirts of Warwick was not what I had in mind when I talked about “getting off the hill.” Too worried about finances to call EMS, I hastily perused Google in an effort to find places close enough to Uber to (or better yet, to find natural remedies). But all I discovered was that Providence urgent care centers seem to close at 4 p.m. on weekends—amazing, right? It was Saturday evening, and I had endured over 24 hours of what seemed to be an allergic reaction. Itching, hives, blotchy skin, frustration—you name it, I had it. And the situation didn’t get any better with medical attention. As if the universe wasn’t already sufficiently clear in its intentions to ruin my Saturday, I also experienced a negative reaction to the injection meant to reduce my initial symptoms. Nearly fainting in urgent care, being monitored by worried physicians and nurses, rushing to a pharmacy ahead of its midnight closing time before finally returning to campus… A night so terrible, it was laughable. Of course, my allergic reaction remained unmediated; no cause was found. Until a couple days later, when a doctor from Health Services informed me that my stress levels may have made my symptoms— including the hives—substantially worse. Georgeara, you need a break. Take a break. Maybe a break will help. It’s all I seem to be hearing nowadays. A break is what I want, what I know I need—but what does it really mean to “take a break,” anyway? Am I simply supposed to turn off my phone or avoid checking it for a couple of hours? Or am I supposed to delve into activities that bring me pleasure, like listening to music or reading? I’ve learned to consider my regular naps and lunches with friends as breaks of a kind, but as for learning to rest more intentionally, let alone more completely? That remains a mystery to me. My fifth semester was meant to kick off like the beginning of school usually does: returning to campus early for RPL training, immediately getting caught up in the blur of pre-orientation programs, only to be welcomed by the chaos of actual orientation events before finally being graced with the headache of shopping period.
4 post–
I tried to take a deep breath, dive, and come up for air once shopping period settled down. Of course, I’d returned to campus depleted. I had hoped my summer would be a time for restoration and refueling—a muchneeded break—yet, despite the cozy time that I was able to spend back home, I arrived on campus at maybe 35 percent. Between my summer work at a local theater guild and the complex challenges of my family life, I haven’t been able to shake the nagging feeling that nothing is in my control. Or on my side. It’s terrifying. These days, the prospect of taking a more formal break (otherwise known as leave-taking) has been on my mind, a question that I can’t let go of but won’t let myself fully ask. I can’t fathom the idea of a semester-long break without worrying about every facet of my existence. Being here on full financial aid is a steady reminder that I should use every minute of my time at Brown productively—because I don’t know how my financial aid would function if I were to stay longer than expected. I tell myself that I should take advantage of Brown’s resources, capitalize on the many doors that being here has opened for me. If I were to return home, even temporarily, I’d lose access to deans, therapy, medical care…but I’d also gain access to a different kind of time and space, away from the multitude of stressors I face here. So, what am I supposed to do? Am I in a place where I can afford to take a pause? Taking a break has always felt like a privilege reserved for the financially stable, for those who can ignore the repercussions that “days off” might cause in their budget. Unfortunately, I still feel like I have too much at stake to take a break. It’s a real risk, a leap of faith. Even writing this brings me discomfort. At 20 years old, I constantly struggle to value myself beyond academics and work. “Self-care” often feels more performative than helpful. The concept, so trendy nowadays, usually centers around individual acts: attending yoga classes, splurging on face masks and bath salts, drinking herbal tea—activities that I don’t know how to prioritize on days where I struggle to simply lug myself out of bed. Carving out time for myself to simply not try for once feels stressful, but it’s necessary. Although I have yet to fully explore healing beyond my weekly therapy sessions, I’m considering my recent decision to formally request a workload reduction as a key step towards rebuilding myself. Hearing the phrase “self-care” thrown around so frequently has urged me to reclaim it, to restructure it in a way that suits my needs and contextualizes my situation. Even choosing to use the word healing rather than selfcare is one small way I’ve learned to make peace as I move forward.
Amid the variety of obstacles present in my life, healing is messy. It consists of ugly breakdowns, evenings where an overwhelming wave of hopelessness feels dangerously close at hand, and days where no amount of sunshine seems to break through my fog of despair. It’s a slow process, and I’ve realized that I can’t reroute my way around these troubles, only charge forward, straight through them. Rebuilding isn’t easy—I’ve learned that much. But I’ve also learned that healing does not need to be an individual act. The times I feel the most whole are when I’m surrounded by loved ones who are healing, too.
A Renovation Project Reconciling Past and Imagined Selves BY GRACE PARK ILLUSTRATED BY IRIS XIE
As another herd of cackling bodies charged in through the front door, I decided to take a moment to properly survey my surroundings. It was a Saturday night in early September. I sat on the kitchen floor in an upperclassman dorm of unknown coordinates, holding in my hands two Nature Valley Oats ’n Honey bars, neither of which belonged to me. Beside me, my friends were chatting with some upperclassmen we had just met. Taking a bite from one of the granola bars, I smirked to myself and thought, “I bet high school me is real proud of me now.” But by the time I woke up the next morning, I regretted everything. With an enduring buzz in my head, I sat in the Sunlab for eight hours, desperately attempting to print code for my first CS assignment, a project that I’d been quick to dismiss the night before. “Start yesterday,” Professor Andy van Dam’s voice echoed in my head. “Today is already late.” Yes, the wise man was right—it was already late indeed. I slammed my head against the keyboard as I attempted to pinpoint exactly when things started going downhill. Was it the night of move-in day, when my failure to find the infamous “crew party” became a nagging disappointment that I wished to overcome by finding a party that could trump it? Or was it the first day of IMP orientation, when I found myself lost in a sea of new people and realized I would never be seen if I didn’t make an active effort to be noticed? Or had I already set myself up for failure the day I graduated from high school? I was an impressionable teenager who believed the classic Hollywood tropes of college life. Unimpressive high school graduates who magically evolved into successes in college—I bought into all of that. The moment I finally left high school, I vowed to myself that I, too, would begin anew in college. My high school self was quite a lost cause. As an academically driven kid in Korea (an equally academically driven country), I became accustomed to measuring my self-worth by numbers. I sacrificed all of my free time for extracurriculars and, as a result, fractured relationships. And while I was objectively smart and hardworking, my primary passions lay in English literature, marking my future as dark and penniless (at least in the words of nosy relatives and distant family friends). When I got into Brown, I decided all of this would change. Starting with a clean slate in the States, I would pursue my own rendition of the American Dream. Like a true Ivy League gal, I would be one of those “inherentlysmart-without-studying” types. I would find soul sisters and life partners that I could go to frat parties with
ARTS & CULTURE
on Friday nights. And I would drop English and find a concentration that could land me a job in Silicon Valley. In the weeks following orientation, I officially launched myself into a self-renovation project. I managed to resist the urge to drop out of CS15 during shopping period, went party-hopping on the weekends, and met more people than I ever had in the entirety of high school. But despite these victories, a nagging sense of uncertainty followed me everywhere I went. Was I truly better off than I had been in high school? Was I really someone new—someone marching towards success? By the end of shopping period, I realized I was doing everything wrong. Sure, CS proficiency, partying, and an expansive social circle were all elements that I thought were integral to an ideal college life. But, ultimately, at the heart of my college fantasy was a sense of confidence and self-assertion—both of which I was still missing. Measuring my self-worth by the number of parties I attended, superficially building connections purely to network, taking classes for the sake of my resume—I was worse off than I had been in high school. Desperate to reassemble my sense of self, I decided to return to where I started: high school me. I added an emo English class about identity to my schedule on the last day of shopping period, spent Friday night with kombucha and Flamin' Hot Cheetos in the company of a few quality friends, and started my CS AndyBot project on Saturday morning as soon as it was released. After all, my high school tendencies had gotten me this far; as much as I hated to admit it, my try-hard, nerdy nature was precisely what got me into Brown. Instead of rejecting my past, I decided to listen to it: What exactly was it that I wanted to change about my high school self ? Why did I come to Brown—who did I want to become? What was I searching for? These are hefty questions to consider and in complete honesty, I haven’t developed coherent answers yet. But I’ve abandoned all expectations I once held about an “ideal” college life and have decided to embrace the uncertainty that lies in the future. After all, the “ideal” college life doesn’t exist—especially if you can’t even decipher your present. Maybe I’ll miraculously master Java and end up in Silicon Valley, or maybe I’ll end up unemployed but with an impressive knowledge of Shakespearean plays. Who knows? I need to start being spontaneous and bold in the face of failure if I really want to avoid being held back by prior fears. The other day, I traveled to Boston University for a debate tournament. I had never gone to Boston University, I had never even done debate before, and I had never felt more inferior than I did during that experience. But, surprisingly, I was OK with it. I currently exist in an ambiguous state—one that’s neither my high school self nor my imaginary college self—but for now, I think that’s a good place to start.
Burning Hot-Take Roundtable! Five Writers Stir Controversy on the Latest in Film, Music, and... Podcasts BY PLAAG , CAPRON, KLEINMAN, FEGAN, TOWERS ILLUSTRATED BY RÉMY POISSON
content warning: Sexual assault
Midsommar, directed by Ari Aster Griffin Plaag Alright, we’re gonna d` o it: We’re gonna talk about some problems with Ari Aster’s summer horror hit, Midsommar. Be warned, spoilers await. On the whole, I find Aster’s commitment to exposing the subtle, microaggressive behaviors of the everyday male a refreshing project; rarely has assholery in cinema looked so realistically… mundane. The last thing the world needs is more dudes like Christian (Jack Reynor). The accuracy of this portrayal, along with Florence Pugh’s magnificent performance as Dani, his muchabused partner, have helped Midsommar gain traction as a favorite of feminist audiences and grief sufferers alike. Again, to be clear: I think this is awesome. Good on Aster for creating a piece of art that serves as sanctuary and catharsis for so many people. Well done. That said, Aster struggles with ending his films, and I don’t really think Midsommar is any better at it than his last effort, Hereditary. Here’s the deal: I think the details of Midsommar work to undo the catharsis of its final moments. Christian’s obviously an abusive jerk, it’s true, but the tipping point for Dani appears to be when she finds him engaged in weird cult sex with a bunch of naked Swedes. There’s a glaring issue here; namely, Christian has been drugged and more or less forced into said weird cult sex on threat of death, which makes him, in simple terms, a rape victim. We also shouldn’t forget that Dani’s moment of catharsis comes at the behest of a bunch of obviously sadistic cultists, one of whom is obviously trying to get in her pants. This complicates Christian’s death. Can we really be empowered by the murder of a rape victim in concert with all of his rapists? I don’t know; call me crazy, but I would argue that Aster can’t deliver on his own pretensions of “wokeness.” Look, as well, to his blatant ableism and ageism (in the grand tradition of exploitative horror films, Aster’s camera lingers, fascinated, on the bodies of the elderly and disabled, and it’s a bad look every time), let’s not forget the fact that, in interviews, Aster has cited his own breakup with a female partner as the impetus for the film’s creation. Flipping those gender roles looks a little
slimy on his part. By all means, enjoy the barn-burning, though. I’m as happy as anyone to watch that piece of shit get sewn into a bear costume and lit on fire. It: Chapter Two, directed by Andy Muschietti Robert Capron I never thought I would see a fifty-foot clown with spider legs roasted to death. Not by fire, mind you; I mean by words, disses, insults made by grown men and women. They point at this oddly thin-skinned spiderclown (Spider-Verse 2, anyone?) and scream, “Clown! Clown!” until he shrivels into Baby-Spider-Clown and is promptly murdered. Yes, It: Chapter 2’s ambitious narrative concludes with Pennywise the Dancing Clown, a shape-shifting alien force capable of nearly omnipotent power, essentially losing the burn battle to a bunch of nervy adults (to be fair, they did have Bill Hader). I, for one, think Pennywise kind of deserved it. His performance anxiety upon being called the literal name of his assumed form was not only the most (unintentionally) hilarious thing I’ve seen within the past year, it was essentially summative of It: Chapter 2: a movie that lacked a certain kind of confidence, both in its audience and itself, to ace the landing. This sequel could have been an incredibly poetic and terrifying look into childhood trauma and grief; instead, like Pennywise, it made me laugh. For while Stephen King’s intentions and ideas from the original novel would seem to provide a solid foundation, the film’s ultimate failure is rooted in its story structure. Taking place 27 years after the first film, much of Chapter 2’s pre-release hype centered around the adult actors who would step into the (now slightly enlarged) shoes of their younger counterparts. But this jump forward proved problematic. The largely successful the prequel had succeeded on the back of its evocative, nostalgic imagery and the winning performances of its child-actors; it was less a horror film than an amplified coming-of-age narrative, both easy to interpret and fun to watch. On the other hand, something about those childhood fears placed within an adult context makes its sequel tougher to engage with—largely because the film insists on comparing the protagonists’ younger selves every five seconds, often with no agenda besides reminding us that being an adult is hard, man. Flashback after flashback, fright after fright, all undercut with random jokes that obliterate any sense of seriousness... why couldn’t the film show the same growth as its characters, and let them conquer different fears than they did at the conclusion of the first film? In fact, the film shares most of its ills with Marvel’s interconnected Cinematic Universe, where no story is strong enough to stand alone. Aside from following the same general structure as its predecessor (only now showing adults thinking really hard about things we’ve seen already), the humor and constant visual references to the previous installment are so rickety, you’re essentially re-watching the first movie within the second. That’s a telltale sign of filmmakers too lazy to make you understand what they’re going for. By the film’s end, we’ve seen so many of the same variations on the same theme, the same takeaway, the same arc, that Pennywise—the very manifestation of fear itself—has been nullified to little more than a cartoon. In other words, a clown. “Love Bombing," episode 153 of The Magnus Archives, a horror anthology podcast David Kleinman The arc of “Love Bombing” is a fairly basic one. A 41-year-old comedian, Barbara, undergoes a midlife crisis and attends a meditation class, receiving a radical burst of acceptance and affirmation from her classmates. She gets hooked on this sense of community until she’s offered an all-expenses-paid “spiritual retreat”— secretly, a dupe to get her to a cult compound. Even then, however, our protagonist is unfazed. Barbara feels october 4 , 2019 5
ARTS&CULTURE
relatively at peace with the terrifying occurrences that begin to populate the Cult of the Divine Chain. Again, pretty basic. As horror often relies on surprise, I’ll avoid too many spoilers, but in cult narratives there are really only so many directions to go. An unexplained occurrence, some sort of ritual begins, the cult becomes much more intense, and then members start disappearing. I haven’t yet seen Midsommar, but the promotional materials lead me to believe these are fairly stock plot points. It’s not revealing too much to say that when Barbara finally reveals the terrible thing that lies in the cult’s inner sanctum it’s a disappointment. Sure, it’s horrific and brutal, but, in all honesty, I’ve seen…or rather, heard it before. Since the horror fiction podcast niche is fairly tight-knit, if you’ve listened to Magnus, you may be familiar with The Orpheus Protocol, and the plot of “Love Bombing” is almost a scene-for-scene replica of not one but two Orpheus cult arcs. First-person horror presents something of a problem, at least as far as generating suspense is concerned. The people narrating encounters with the occult have either escaped its clutches or given it a terrible reason to let them live. In this world of victims and monsters, “Love Bombing” interjects a fascinating middle ground. Barbara didn’t find her worst fear or darkest desire, but instead watched as the two blurred together. The horror isn’t in what she saw or did, but how she felt, how happy she was in a literally horrifying situation. That’s why I can forgive a lackluster climax and tired premise, because I don’t think they’re actually the point. Our childhood teachers told us we couldn’t trust our peers: just say no to peer pressure, trust adults instead. Then, the modern college coming-of-age seems to teach us that adults just don’t get it, they’re relics of a bygone era, only your peers will truly accept you. “Love Bombing” takes both of these ideas one step further: you’ll always find someone to support you, but how can you trust yourself to be worth supporting? The dryness of the story may in part result from the fact that Barbara’s path ends in the exact same place it began: regret. She’s condemned her past choices, now she’s just condemning newer ones. She regards her time in the cult with the
same disdain as her comedy career, the banality of which yields terrifying insight: the fear inherent in this piece is not that she made the wrong choice but that she couldn’t tell. Whereas most Magnus episodes and, it seems, most horror stories deal with urgent questions of what to do when you encounter a monster or what to do when you become one, “Love Bombing” asks how can you live not knowing whether you’re a monster or not? I don’t know how necessary a message like this is in 2019. In our era of climate and human rights crises, such paralysis and self-doubt may be dangerously debilitating. So I’m not going to tell you that listening to “Love Bombing” or any Magnus episode will make you a better person. But if you want to feel the deep terror that you cannot trust anyone around you, least of all yourself ? Happy October. P.S. Should an intrepid reader be inspired by this to listen to Magnus, I recommend starting at the beginning, as there is an overarching plot to the anthology. Anak Ko, an album by Jay Som Nicole Fegan 2019 has been the year that dream pop strikes back: Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell has been at the center of the cultural zeitgeist for over a month, American Football’s third full album merged the band's midwest emo roots with a floating, drifting sound, and Jay Som’s recent album Anak Ko has finally seen her perfect the genre. The artist, whose real name is Melina Duterte, has been working in the genre for a few years, making the best of what some call “bedroom pop.” Hazy and ethereal while still smuggling a slight rock edge, her past two albums have emphasized a distinctly noisy atmosphere. Her music has always been summer-y, often feeling like a sticky July night while fireflies buzz all around. On Anak Ko, Duterte once again manages to turn summer into sound, but this time, she focuses on the quiet moments of the season, opening up to the kind of all-encompassing pink sunset you see on a long drive— the kind you might even see on the album’s cover. Anak Ko is deliberately quieter than Jay Som’s past work, interested in how silence might add to the music. The title track perhaps shows this best—slow and meandering, finally settling into a two-minute instrumental soundscape, the song boasts very few lyrics save for one verse and an outro that softly hums a robotic, “Somewhere I can build, somewhere I can build it.” The music is gentle, warm, and—unlike her low fidelity roots—expertly lush. It would be incredibly easy to write this album off; for all its merits, Anak Ko still has the potential to sound boring or “like everything else being made these days.” And in a sense, I think these criticisms hold some validity. This is not the most innovative album I’ve ever heard, and it may not even be my favorite dream pop of the year (Hatchie’s Keepsake, which also came out this
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Anita Sheih FEATURE Managing Editor Sydney Lo
“2002 was a simpler time.” - Joshua Lu, “shania twain, then and now”
Section Editors Sara Shapiro Erin Walden
10.05.18
Staff Writer Anna Harvey
“In the conversation’s scariest moment, my career counselor said the word career." -Liza Edwards-Levin, “three everyday fears” 10.05.17
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summer, owns my heart). But Anak Ko has a vibe you simply cannot deny. Right now, it’s 53 degrees out and cloudy. As I love autumn but mourn summer, Jay Som has found a way to let the sun come in through the cracks of the window blinds. Autumn Sonata, directed by Ingmar Bergman Julian Towers The basic scenario here is framed with sexism, contrasting the emotional hysterics of two women with a neutral, observant (Berg)man-figure. That basic scenario is, also, body-throttling, thunderous, and dumb fucking powerful: Absentee, celebrity mom waltzes back into the life of barely-hanging-on daughter and gets a face full of, "you fucked me up." If you've ever been so selfinvolved as to idly pick up a festering, rotting relationship and pretend it’s a happy hamburger (or, y'know, a-okay), this movie sees you, and it does not like you. After a semester wherein my intense productivity permanently alienated at least a few friends (we're still pals, right, postreaders?), I could feel my cells divide while watching this movie. Get wrecked, bitch—essentially. It's fucked, but simply by existing, we affect the lives we orbit; you don't have to be a monster to leave behind a trail of human destruction, but you might as well be if you can't see the debris clinging to your shoes. Drama, in general, doesn't function off that kind of unawareness, so it's cool to see that a film can, especially a Bergman film— generally the height of closed-off naval gazing. There's still some of that here, too—nobody has a dialogue that couldn't be better handed out and distributed to highschoolers as a practice monologue. Yet, all the direct-tocamera pontificating that constitutes Bergman's basic mode here feels uncharacteristically vulnerable, the inward eye implicated rather than idealized. In general, I'd refrain from presupposing that sort of auto-critique from Bergman. Dude was an asshole who spent WW2 chilling with the Nazis and emerged with the gumption to stroke his brow over man's "little cruelties." But damn, this shit fucking plays like auto-critique, man! (Even though, again, the Bergman stand-in emerges squeaky clean with suds on his fingers. So, this is my new favorite Bergman. First I've loved, anyway. Helps that the zoom-heavy, wood-paneled Architectural Digest formal mode is the one Woody Allen cribbed for Interiors and Hannah and Her Sisters. Still piles in an extra ladle or two of expositional misery (Do we really need Mom to have both cheated on Dad and vicariously created baby sister's paraplegia/ speech impediment? Did Bergman genuinely believe that, without both, a case couldn't be mounted against her neglect or—ahem—was he filling out a 90-minute runtime?). Anyway, I know most of you are unburdened young adults. But if you somehow have a daughter at home, please call her.
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