post- 10/5/18

Issue

In This

In Memoriam

Sydney Lo

Far From Home

Grace Layer Liza Edwards-Levin

Three Everyday Fears James Feinberg

Who Am I This Time?

Josh Wartel

Katya Stambler and

Hitting the High Notes

postCover by Stephanie Wu

OCT 5

VOL 22 —

ISSUE 4

FEATURES

Far From Home

Changing Perspectives of Morgan (VT) and Providence (RI)

By Grace Layer Illustrated by Katya Labowe-Stoll

T

Letter from the Editor

he car jerks in the transition from smooth asphalt to unpredictable dirt and rock, bumping the suitcases within. The road narrows, and a soft click turns on the brights, illuminating the canopy of countless maple and birch lining Wayesses Shore Road. Behind the reach of the car’s lights, there is a darkness so complete it is impossible to tell if anything else exists at all.

At 3 a.m., the Subaru pulls into the driveway, the white stones crunching underneath. My family exits the car and enters the silence of Morgan, Vermont, crossing the threshold of the Christmas Tree House.

Morgan, Vermont, was chartered in 1780, although its first settler, Nathan Wilcox, did not arrive until 1800. It is known for Lake Seymour, a 7.01 km² freshwater lake contained entirely within the town’s boundaries. At 44°54’19”N, 71°59’25”W, Morgan is so far north that phones

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ping off cell towers in Canada and inform their owners that international data rates apply. In 2010, the total population of Morgan was 749. This small population size may explain why it is so hard to find accurate information on Morgan; why, for example, the total water surface area of the town is listed as 6.8 km² on Wikipedia despite how Lake Seymour’s size alone exceeds that; why Wayesses Shore Road is spelled Wayeeses on one road sign and Wayesses on another, and why no one seems to know which is correct, or particularly care.

Morgan is static. While my family has had three children, one grandchild, and five dogs, the Christmas Tree House has remained relatively unchanged. It is so named for its white wooden balusters on the railing that are shaped like evergreen trees. When the wind blows hard and skims across the lake, the houses in Morgan, tilted wooden structures called “camps,” creak and moan, their joints cracking as they sway.

The long weekend is upon us! If

even if eaten alone. Go to Waterfire and see

you’re new to Brown, heed my advice: it

a new film at Providence Place after—A&C

may seem like school just started, but do

has a recommendation and, should you

not squander this opportunity. The next

choose to just stay in and vegetate, can also

break is Thanksgiving, and it is a truly

point you to a new Netflix series to binge-

brutal marathon to get there. So try to get

watch.

out of Providence for a little while—there is many a farm festival and apple picking opportunity to be had. Follow our Features contributor’s lead and lay on the grass,

Happy fallventures,

Jennifer editor-in-chief of post-

breathe in the clean air, and pocket the memory for city nights ahead. Engage in

post- would like to apologize for our oversight in

a new (even frightening) pursuit, or carve

not crediting Halle Krieger for her contribution

out some much-needed alone time—as

to last week’s cover design

Narrative will show, dessert can be sweet,

The landscape is unaltered: the lake shaped like the number seven, the mountains that surround and cradle it. The Morgan Country Store has been serving this town of 749 for as long as the collective memory of the aging inhabitants permits; the building is a short, green-roofed affair with a screen door that slams against its wooden frame at every open. The store—the only one in town, on the only paved road in town—sells rentable movies, lottery tickets, expired boxes of Jello coated in a fine layer of dust, and penny candy, because no one has bothered to learn that Tootsie Rolls and Swedish Fish have experienced a price increase in the rest of the world.

II. Cigarette smoke hangs in the air at the Kennedy Plaza bus station, occasionally blowing into the faces of those waiting. Everything is grayhued; the people are covered by smoke, smothered by it. Gray coats bundle around a woman who

Post- Pumpkin Purposes (Ways to Use a Pumpkin) 1.

Jack-o-Lanterns

2.

A Deadly Weapon

3.

A coach (@Cinderella)

4.

A head (@The Headless Horseman)

5.

Basic Instagram post, Fall™ aesthetic

6.

Paperweight

7.

A container

8.

Attracting witches

9.

A reminder of the ultimate decay and heat death of the universe

10.

PIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

presses herself into the cold plastic benches.

Her black boots do not reach the ground, and she swings them aimlessly, unconsciously. Her hands clench in her lap. Eleven minutes left to wait for the 27 bus. The wind hits the passengers’ faces the hardest; clear streams appear underneath nostrils, shining in the sun, as cheeks turn dark red and numb.

Unappreciated, a small park wedges itself between terminals. When fall turns to winter and commuters start turning up their jacket collars, men in blue uniforms bring hoes and hack apart the summer flowers, cutting them from the hardening dirt. My heels click against the adjoining sidewalk, earbuds stuffed into my ears. A man with graying hair walks in the opposite direction, but instead of walking to my side, he walks up to me and puts his face in mine. He says something to me, leering, but all I hear through the sound of drums and an electric guitar is “beautiful.” Later, I cannot shake the image of his teeth peeking out from between widening lips and the sound of the 0dead leaves crunching under my shoes. It is my first month in Providence.

Providence was founded in 1636, making it one of the oldest cities in the United States. Kennedy Plaza is the geographic center of downtown, and has served as a hub for transportation since 1847 (first for pedestrians, then horse-and-buggies, and then modern cars, trolleys, and buses). Kennedy Plaza has been called City Hall Park, Exchange Terrace, Exchange Place, and The Mall before it was renamed in honor of John F. Kennedy, who spoke there to a crowd of 60,000, only days before he was elected president.

In 2010, there were 178,042 people living in Providence. This explains why there are few conflicting facts to find about the city.

III. The small building in Kennedy Plaza is full, squat, and white-tiled. A man waves a red lollipop in the air, a shiny hello to passersby. Here, the smell of cigarette smoke is muted; instead, the smell of sweat and stress lingers. It is my fifth month in Providence.

A man meanders through, weaving first towards the seats, then towards the ticket station, before settling against a tiled wall. He speaks to no one in particular.

“Last night she screamed so loud my eardrum blew.” His laugh fills the building. “I had to call 911!” He pauses for a bit. “Yeah, can you believe it?

I actually called 911!”

On February 28, 1860, Abraham Lincoln spoke to 1,500 people at the current location of Kennedy Plaza. In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt spoke on the City Hall steps; twelve years later, the same area housed a performance by Harry Houdini and a 20,000-person crowd. In 1919, the plaza hosted a World War I Victory Parade. And, in 2015, the Providence Journal published an article about Kennedy Plaza’s renovations. The construction is intended to reassert the plaza as a gathering place, a place for celebration, a place for community. I imagine Houdini wiggling overhead, the people around me craning their necks to watch his feat.

The man’s voice, lulled briefly, begins again.

“Spell beautiful.” Silence. “Spell beautiful backwards.” He chuckles. “Spell beautiful backwards, without the a. Spell beautiful backwards with an i instead of an a. Beautiful.

Beautiful. I love the letter b!” His voice fades, his words not receiving any response other than the sound of soft shuffling feet.

Beautiful. Lufituaeb. Lufitueb. Lufituieb.

Beautiful. B. I stand in the midst of waves of people, of laughter, of movement. If I stretch out my arm, I can grasp it with my fingertips and feel its warmth, the warmth of 178,042 lives mingling together to form something new, something fresh, something hopeful. It reminds me of a graffiti tag, outside of 511 Broadway, on a metal box. The box is covered in blueish-purple paint, red and green planets and yellow stars of varying sizes spread across the surface, wrapping around, so bright. The center, blue lettering on yellow background, a quote: “Something incredible is waiting to be known.”

Outside, a man walks amid pigeons and discarded tickets, speaking to a small group of people. “God bless you. Have a blessed day.” He veers away. “Thank you and have a blessed day,” he says, in the center of the plaza, in the center of Providence, his arms flung slightly out.

We are blessed.

IV. The Christmas Tree House was so named because of my grandfather, William Portway. He helped design the house in the 1980s, and when it was finished, he created the evergreen balusters by hand-cutting boards of wood. He stayed in the house from May to October every year until his wife died in 2006. He then only came up when my parents could go—two or three weeks every summer—until his death in 2013.

2014, 1 a.m., my mother, father, brother, and I were watching a movie in the Christmas Tree House. Nearly every time we came to Vermont, we rented a movie from the Morgan Country Store and laid across the furniture my grandfather had built 35 years earlier.

Something black fell on my brother’s gray sweatpants. Then another piece floated down— except this one was alight. We slowly tilted our heads upward.

Directly above us, on a wooden rafter near the top of the 20-foot-tall ceiling, rested the speaker.

It had burst into flames. Pieces of burning black plastic, mixed with ash, were falling down on us.

Amidst shouts and chaos, the flames began to spread across the entire speaker, creeping closer to both the wooden rafter and the wooden ceiling.

My mother’s search for a fire extinguisher yielded nothing. My father slammed together pots, hurling water towards the ceiling but not quite reaching, the water instead splashing across the wooden floor planks, the rush of the sink and subsequent splash forming a rhythm.

I waited, frozen, for the flame to grow. If anything more caught flame, the whole house would be lost. The house my grandfather built, that never left my family, all its memories—gone.

In a sudden slam, the screen door bounced against the wall; my brother carried in a hose with a whoosh of water. The flame was extinguished in seconds. The room was consumed by smoke, and it became harder to see, to breathe, as we realized the house was no longer in danger. We stood in the unexpected quiet. We would be blowing soot out of our noses for the next three days.

I didn’t want to stay inside, so I laid on the dewy grass, wetness seeping through my sweatshirt, and watched the sky. It opened after a few minutes, offering clusters of stars, patterns of the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, the bluish hues of the Milky Way against a velvet-navy sky. One. Two. Three. I counted the shooting stars as they glided across the sky, traveling to new locations as my head stayed cradled by dirt and grass.

There was a peaceful beauty to laying outside at 1 a.m., one of the few people awake in the town of 749, possibly the only one that the sky was entertaining in this brief moment that seemed to include in it the eternity of the universe.

Memories of Vermont were etched in those stars: my first birthday, the first time I went swimming, the first time I climbed a mountain, the first time I made a bonfire. And the quieter moments: sipping hot chocolate early in the morning, watching the glassy surface of the lake that the motor boats had yet to break reflect back at me mountains full of sugar maples and balsam firs and paper birches.

Kayaking to the middle of the lake and leaning back, feeling the hot sun dance across my cheeks.

Writing stories on the deck. Standing on the horseshoe-shaped rock in the lake right before leaving for home in New Jersey, watching the lake, in its 7.01 km² glory. A moment of pure, blissful perfection. I closed my eyes.

Later, I learned the fire truck took 45 minutes to arrive. But the time I spent stargazing seemed to have no length, no beginning or end. Everything was so darkly bright, and the air tasted cold and fresh and smelled of the sap of thousands of pine trees.

The air you’re breathing right now may be dirty. You probably can’t tell; it’s the air you’ve been breathing your entire life. It doesn’t smell dirty, and when you smack your lips together, let your tongue touch the outside world, you taste nothing. I taste nothing in New Jersey. But if you ever find yourself in Morgan, you will find yourself truly breathing, and you’ll realize you’ve been missing out on something so fundamental you never even knew you missed it.

V. There’s something beautiful about smoke clearing away. About the air becoming lighter, about the promise of new beginnings. The Christmas Tree House belonged to my grandfather’s estate after his death; we lost it in April 2018 when it sold. It will stay forever frozen in my memory. But the smoke of Providence is still able to clear, to transform, to offer a peek of a new horizon, shifting in my consciousness.

On my wall: a map of Northern Vermont and a collage of Providence buildings, one of my hands splayed on each, my breath falling even and slow.

“I can’t give up Chicken Finger Friday!”

“Okay everyone, plug your sex batteries in!”

“What if I raised my kids on diet food?”

October 5, 2018 3

NARRATIVE

NARRATIVE

In Memoriam

Mourning Ian and Missed College Tours

By Sydney Lo illustrated by Angie Kang

I

am living this autumn in a hollow timeline of things that should be happening, watching tour guides huddled beside Soldier’s Arch peer excitedly at the SciLi and Ruth Simmons Quad and thinking that I should be there with them. Ian should be there with them.

It is still warm despite the shift in seasons. I sit on the bench outside of MacMillan, checking exam dates for my fall semester classes and writing them into my planner. I flip the pages to November, my finger tracing the numbered boxes. Early Decision deadlines for most university applications are in less than a month. The final test dates for ACTs and SATs must be just before that. Regular decision deadlines are a month later, if I can remember correctly.

This fall, Ian would have been applying for colleges. The summer before I came to Brown, I’d given him all the college pamphlets and ACT test prep I’d collected during my own application process. He was just a sophomore then, but he would be reading them now. He’d probably have his own overwhelming pile of promotional materials and practice tests. He and my mother would have planned a college road trip through the East Coast and the Midwest like I did, would have visited me along the way.

In my head, we would meet up under Faunce and all go on a tour of Brown together. I would whisper additions to the tour guide’s information along the way, and my mother would take photos of us beside the Marcus A aurelius statue. Afterwards, we would have dinner at Den Den and talk about what colleges were his favorite so far and what he was thinking of studying. I wonder if he would have wanted to continue playing golf, tennis, soccer, or basketball. I wonder what he would have written his college essay on. I wonder what he’d be thinking about.

During my freshman year, the excited faces and palpable hope of prospective students had brightened my day as I passed them between classes. While I studied on the red couches of Faunce on Saturday mornings, I’d usually chat with families while they waited for their tour guides. I would recall my own tour, how I walked up College Hill, exhilarated with possibilities and picturing where I could fit into the university. I was so eager to share that experience with my little brother.

Ian passed away from sudden cardiac arrest, likely due to heart arrhythmia, less than two months before the beginning of my sophomore year, and two weeks before his seventeenth birthday. He was a

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healthy, athletic, and funny individual, whose worst health issue had been a broken arm from trying to jump three monkey bars on a triple dare. His death was surreal. I spent the rest of the summer learning to be without him, wondering what my future was without him. When I returned to Brown in the fall, the tours became one of the hardest parts of campus. I would watch them pass, herds of families and high-schoolers, and I would see Ian in them: someone wore his favorite Nike sneakers, someone shared his messy black hair, someone laughed the way he used to. I saw siblings bickering the way we used to, and parents asking pointed questions to the guides the way mine had. I saw the precipice of a future of college adventures Ian would never have.

The tours became an incessant reminder of what would never happen.

Now a year later, at the beginning of my junior year, the tours are the dull ache of a wound that does not really heal. Mourning has become a continuous imagination in parallel with reality, Ian's life progressing beside mine as a persistent string of “what-ifs.” What if we had known about the arrhythmia? What if he had survived? I imagine that, instead of missing classes for cardiologist appointments, attempting to find out if I have an arrhythmia, I miss classes to accompany Ian on tours of Johnson & Wales, Boston University, and Yale. Instead of scheduling EKGs and procainamide tests during lectures, I look over his college essay for little grammatical errors and help him build his resume. In the evening, we talk over the phone about our parents and the TV shows we’re watching and what we should do when I come home for winter break. I get to hear how he’s growing up. I know his voice. I take it all for granted. I ask him to hand the phone to Mom. “Here we have the Sciences Library, or the SciLi,” I overhear a tour guide announce, barreling into the story of Brown’s massive game of Tetris with the library windows. A tour group has moved in front of the MacMillan steps and now murmurs and stares at the building in awe. They hold little hand-outs in their hands and use them as fans in the heat. My parents still receive those little posters and brochures addressed to a person that’s no longer here in the mail. One of the students checks his phone and looks around, meeting my eyes. I manage a weak smile.

Ian would be eighteen now. All his friends are applying to colleges, deciding yearbook quotes, going to their last high school dances. He is a memory, a voice in my head, the wish that things were different. I close my planner, with its ghost deadlines and all the days that will come to pass without him. I walk back to my apartment alone.

Three Everyday Fears Climbing, croissants, and CareerLAB

by Liza Edwards-Levin Illustrated By Lauren Marin

B

efore bed every night, I list fears that rise to the surface. Some are real enough to cast a shadow over my week: midterms, flu season, fatigue. Others are so irrational, I write “not real” in the margins. I think of these as everyday fears: not dangerous, but just real enough to stick.

This week, I tried to face a few.

1. Climbing My friends queued hype songs on the ride to Sunday Night Climbing. Ringing beats turned all the way up crackled over the speaker, a throwback to Saturday night.

In the rental car—a roomy mom van big enough to fit eight of us—we rolled the windows halfway down, dancing in our seats. Since freshman year, I had promised to join my friends, to “give it a try,” and this Sunday was the first I didn’t let myself back out.

Central Rock Gym felt smaller than I had imagined.

At the counter, protein bars boasted low sugar next to a special chalk for reducing hand sweat. Climbing routes lined each wall in shapes and colors so bright they popped, yellow on purple on orange. This way, belayers on the ground could see clearly enough to yell directions to up high: “Go Rekha—you’re doing so great buddy, just try and stabilize your left foot on that little curvy hold out to the side...yeah, the one that looks like a banana…there you go, right there.” The biggest holds looked bigger than a head; the smallest, smaller than half a fist.

On an angled wall dotted with metal hooks, ropes swung, balancing climbers on either end. Wrist muscles flexed. “That’s lead climbing,” my friends explained.

Lead climbing, it turns out, means status: certification.

Brown students filtered in. A handful walked with swagger I’d never seen before, the capital-c "Climbers."

They scanned the gym expertly, mapping a course while unloading personal gear bags and slipping into harnesses. They shared an unofficial uniform: slick leggings under form-fitted tanks or graphic tees advertising activity.

My friends taught me to measure climbs by scale, ranging from beginner’s 5’6” to the impossible 5’13”. I watched Rekha scale a 5’9”—scattered, inconvenient hand-holds dotting an uneven wall—pulling herself quickly to avoid sore arms. I can’t imagine an easy climb, but Rekha made it look conquerable.

ARTS&CULTURE Maddie had climbed a 5’8” before but never on an inclined wall— her challenge tonight. She paused a few times (leaning into the harness, looking up, doubting), but she always came back, maneuvering between holds, angled sideways until she finally grabbed the top.

From below, Maddie’s climb felt satisfying in a simple, immediate way—she said she couldn’t do it, then she did.

My destination was a 5’6”, chunky holds marking a flat path. I climbed slow and tentative; I’m not used to lifting myself like this, I realized. Halfway up, my hands shook.

I found my fear close to the top—even indoors, strapped into a harness, guided by Rekha and Maddie below. Climbing to the highest hold felt like letting go, trusting, but I couldn’t trust myself yet. “I’m scared,” I repeated without thinking of anything else.

“You’re close,” Rekha promised. I grabbed the last hold and sank back into the harness before she lowered me down.

I left the gym early with Maddie and her boyfriend, Ben, all of us too tired for a second climb. We named ourselves the ACC—Anti-Climbing Club—and laughed about the capital-c "Climbers. " We shared a bar of dark chocolate and spread homework across desks. I didn’t miss the shaky fear of that wall, the flight instinct I didn’t know to expect, but my climb felt distant now. Back to school, back to Sunday night.

2. Croissants I used to do this all the time. After hours spent researching the perfect cake or pastry spot on Yelp, I could just take myself there. I had favorite desserts: the melty cookie bigger than my hand at the bakery a block from my high school, almonds croissants a train ride away.

But by senior year of high school, food became a source of fear. And even now, after a few years of practice, some strands of that fear still linger. I don’t remember how to enjoy some of those old favorites, “fear foods,” or at least how to enjoy them alone.

So this Monday, I took myself out for breakfast. I walked down the hill to Ellie’s Bakery on Washington Street to try its signature almond croissant.

Ellie’s felt friendly. Pictures of hens and handwritten menus lined the wall, advertising local ingredients and coffee specials. I knew what I had to order—the almond croissant, not a familiar parfait or buckwheat bread—and a server brought it to me ovenwarmed, with toasted almonds crumbling off the top.

I sat on a stool at a long counter, lined with morning coffee drinkers ordering their own breakfast treats...scones, rolls, a mysterious jam-filled bun. My mom used to do this all the time when she lived alone, I reminded myself. Walking for croissants—that was one of her favorite activities.

My croissant tasted comforting: nutty, rich and light, a little salty even—worthy of a strong Yelp review.

But I struggled to enjoy it. There’s a voice in my head that still exists, feeding fear into food adventures.

On a big chalkboard, Ellie’s calls itself “a place where everyone does their own thing for the love of it.”

I want to do that, I thought, looking at it—to adventure alone in search of comfort food, to savor without questioning—and it doesn’t come easily. But I guess this is how I start, learning by taste.

3. CareerLAB The future has to be more worthy of fear than climbing or croissants, but after pushing it back more than a year, my First Time Conversation at CareerLAB wasn’t the wake-up call that I expected.

Across from a career counselor, our allotted halfhour passed easily with getting-to-know-you questions, summer brainstorming, and concentration research.

While we spoke, I filled a notebook page with openended promises to myself: “check deadlines,” “go to

LIFESTYLE

open hours,” “reach out to alumni.”

In the conversation’s scariest moment, my career counselor said the word career. And yet—psychology, business, education, something where you don’t sit all day—these futures still feel remote, a couple years of conversations away.

I could do this part for now, mapping out possibilities in a comfortable chair. I could start small, or think about starting.

The future isn't a single fear, I realized...it’s full of everyday climbs, tastes, new lists to face.

Who Am I This Time?

Watching "Maniac" on Netflix

H

By James Feinberg illustrated by Halle Krieger

ow to briefly summarize Maniac? Let me begin by saying this—it’s Jonah Hill and Emma Stone, playing five parts apiece, in a ten-episode miniseries set in a retro-future where computers are sentient but line printers and fax are still in widespread use. There are multiple crisscross realities and are either extended psychoses or imprints of the cosmic connection of all living things. It’s weird and wonderful, an entirely new kind of sci-fi influenced equally by Kubrick and Charlie Kaufman and Tolkien and Scorsese and Milos Forman and Mike Nichols and Judd Apatow. It’s a genre study par excellence. It’s also deeply flawed, and occasionally uneven, and though the pseudoscience is perfectly conceived, many of the major plot points don’t really make sense. Also, Justin Theroux plays Dr. James Mantleray, a mama’s boy neurochemist with a porn addiction and a hairpiece. Needless to say by the time it was over I never wanted it to end.

Maniac is a Netflix series that dropped on Sept.

21 based on the Norwegian series of the same name.

It’s written by Patrick Somerville of The Leftovers and directed by Cary Joji Fukanaga of the first season of True Detective (Thank God for both of them, incidentally, because nobody but Kubrick could have directed it and anyone but Kaufman would’ve gone insane trying to write it). It’s a series designed for bingeing, but is practically unbingeable, partly because of Fukanaga’s masterful sprinkling of detail over every perfect frame, but mostly because every episode takes a day to mentally unpack. In that sense it’s like Noah Hawley’s Legion on FX, with which it also shares an `80s/World of Tomorrow aesthetic. However, Maniac is better, because its layering of dimensions and thought worlds is less hollow than that FX superhero program. It’s designed instead to highlight the kind of joyfully gung-ho and mystically proto-Buddhist sense of humanity at its center.

Stone and Hill play entrants in Mantleray’s pharmaceutical drug trial. The drug program is called ULP, and with the help of a computer called GRTA (Gertie, for short), it’s designed to target the trauma centers of the human brain and eliminate the need for talk therapy altogether. Good for everyone except the therapists, like Mantleray’s mother, Greta (Sally Field), who, one imagines, will wind up peddling nickle-insight alongside the squeegee men at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. How does Gertie (also played by Field) do the job? By thrusting her human lab rats into elaborate filmic dream worlds (or “reflections,” as the show’s terminology would have it) that mimic their most wounding memories, of course.

Every episode, those who’ve joined the experiment are strapped to chairs between microwave panels and transported, it would seem, to entirely different TV shows. Hill’s character, Owen, the rejected scion

of a manufacturing empire, spends some time as a 1940s stage magician/art thief/security consultant at an Agatha Christie-like upstate séance (this is one of the show’s least-complicated scenarios). Stone’s pill-popping guilt monster, Annie, in turn, has a brief tenure in a Peter Jackson fantasia as a half-elf who tried to burn her protruding ears off. And who can blame her? Middle Earth chic is so 2003.

Some of these fantasies are less engaging than others. But what’s so rewarding about Maniac is that the fantasies aren’t really the point. They’re just there to lull the audience into an awed sense of stupefaction before blinding us with a final sequence that renders it a completely different story than we’ve been led to believe. Are names popping up in real life that we’ve assumed only existed in the reflections? Are strangely familiar animals appearing in the shallow foreground?

The sci-fi that came before writer Somerville (2001: A Space Odyssey) would have us think that the fact Annie and Owen keep appearing in each other’s dreams has a strictly in-world explanation—Gertie’s gone crazy, and is bending their minds’ wavelengths together, or whatever. But the show ends with a series of visual pairings that seem to prove that the connection is more spiritual than scientific. And similar to the deeply human endings to many of Kaufman’s films, this one doesn’t feel like bullshit.

It’s hard to decide whether Stone or Hill is better on this show. They keep trading the baton over the course of the ten episodes. First Annie, separated from her sister by force, pounds the inside of the window of the pickup truck in which she’s trapped, and your heart breaks a little. Then Owen, in one of his dreamscapes, is suddenly a supposedly Icelandic spy with an untraceable accent, who fires wildly down a hallway and shouts triumphantly, “I killed many men!” For the first time since The Wolf of Wall Street, Hill is having fun, and your heart’s pretty much okay— until Stone comes along and breaks it again. It’s a tagteam effort.

Maniac is many things, by its very nature, and that’s a tightrope to walk for any show. Somewhere near the middle, in the midst of your altogether necessary mulling-over sessions, you might ask yourself why you want to go on watching these people, all so spiritually ugly, all so seemingly irrevocably broken. But it’s worth it. The ULP trial promises it can fix people, and the biggest surprise of the show is that, indirectly, and with the vital catalyst of unselfish humanity, it actually works. It’s not like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a conceivable blueprint for eventual happiness. It’s not, like 2001, supremely revolutionary. It’s an artistically complete framework that leaves one with the impression that, though we may travel insane and disparate paths to get there, the likelihood is we can all get to something close to okay.

It’s great television. Strap in.

October 5, 2018 5

ARTS&CULTURE

Hitting the High Notes Discussing "A Star is Born"

by Katya Stambler and Josh Wartel Illustrated By Rémy Poisson

J

osh Wartel: Hi, Katya, now that we've both seen A Star is Born (released today in theaters), should we start by talking about the two stars, Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga? What sort of attachments/interest do you have in them?

Katya Stambler: I have always loved the two of them and never would have expected to see them embark on a project together. Bradley Cooper is one of Hollywood's leading actors for a reason, and his talent absolutely speaks for itself.

Lady Gaga is also a superstar…I have loved her since her debut studio album, The Fame. What's so interesting about this film is that you see them in ways that contrast our ideas of them. Even though Lady Gaga is singing in the film, she is acting for the first time. Bradley Cooper, as we know him, is an actor, but in this film, he takes on his first role as a director and a singer.

JW: I think that they kind of balance each other in a bit of a strange way in the film. As you point out, one is very much a singer and the other an actor. But also, Bradley Cooper seems so masculine and Lady Gaga so feminine that I almost found the opening scenes amusing…It’s quite funny to see Bradley Cooper in a drag bar!

KS: Yes, I agree that Bradley Cooper's character is, at least at first, the archetypal masculine male.

But as the movie goes on, I think that masculinity is balanced out by Gaga's character, Ally, warmth and authenticity. You see Jackson Maine, Cooper’s character, go from a man without any ties to a man who thanks Ally for giving him a home. Lady Gaga's Ally is feminine in some ways, but I don't think that's necessarily how I would describe her character. Ally seems to have some of the qualities we associate with femininity: kindness, warmth, compassion, but I wouldn't necessarily call her feminine. What she is is a real woman with insecurities and confidence all tangled up, a true love for music and, as the film goes on, for Jackson.

JW: Their initial meeting is very cute, so much so that it has already produced a meme, when Cooper says goodbye to her in the car. But I feel the movie slows down quite a bit in the second act. Did you stay captivated by their relationship?

KS: I absolutely did. I think their relationship slows down as Cooper's alcoholism becomes more consuming and Gaga's fame skyrockets, but I think that only adds to the heartbreak of what is to come.

JW: I found Cooper's portrayal of alcoholism to be quite moving…And while it is Lady Gaga's character who is much more insecure, in a personal

and financial sense, Cooper is addicted to the double bind of singing and drinking. It's the oldest tale of the rockstar, but it hasn't gotten worn yet.

KS: Exactly, I completely agree. I think the most heart-wrenching scene for me in the film is when Cooper breaks down in his rehab waiting room as Gaga comes to visit him. His disease and what it has done to the woman he loves absolutely destroys him. Ultimately, addiction isn't onesided—addicts tend to be addicted to a variety of things because they have addictive personalities.

Jackson’s love for Ally is addictive, as are his drinking and his singing.

JW: And yet, sometimes I felt the film took itself too seriously. I found the film's refrain that songwriting is "about having something you need to say" pretty silly…It's okay, as Lady Gaga has shown, to just have style!

KS: One of my favorite moments in the film is when Cooper takes Gaga out onto her hotel balcony in LA and tells her that she’d better be telling her truth, because otherwise, she won't have legs out there. Of course, it's also okay just to have style, but I think Lady Gaga also proves that you can have style and tell important stories. Her song “Til It Happens to You” is a prime example of that.

Reader’s Note: “Til It Happens to You” is a song that Gaga co-wrote for the documentary The Hunting Ground (which focuses on rape on college campuses), and it is about the experience of sexual assault. Gaga has been open about being raped at the age of 19 and how deeply that has affected her.

JW: And how did you like the music? I know that "Shallows" is considered the front runner for Best Original Song at the Oscars, but I preferred

“Baguettes are the friends that go to Europe, for, like, one summer and therefore think they are oh-so-cultured.”

Claribel Wu, On BFFs (Bread Friends Forever) 10.4.17

“Lyrically, Shania has never been prone to the tropes of country music (pickup trucks, corn fields, bell-bottom jorts), but she’s always relished in its sounds, with guitars and banjos and fiddles galore.”

Joshua Lu, Shania Twain, Then and Now 10.4.17

the huskier "Maybe It's Time," which Cooper sings at the bar.

KS: I think both songs are interesting in their own ways. I was mostly surprised at how great Bradley Cooper's voice is! “Shallows” is great; it's on Spotify now, so I've been playing it on repeat since seeing the film on Monday...I'm actually listening to it right now.

JW: Are there any other thoughts you have about the film? Reservations or underrated parts?

Cooper is addicted to the double bind of singing and drinking. It's the oldest tale of the rockstar, but it hasn't gotten worn yet.

I thought Sam Elliot, who plays Bradley Cooper's older brother, was interesting enough that he could have had his own movie.

KS: I thought Sam Elliot was fabulous. The look he gives when he reverses the truck after dropping Bradley Cooper off after getting out of rehab is heartbreaking and so powerful...I honestly didn't have any reservations. I really enjoyed the film and was actually so moved by it that I've thought about it on and off fairly often over the past few days JW: Ahh, that is nice to hear. I hope our readers enjoy the movie and aren't too shaken by the thirdact surprise! I am sure, come Oscar season, we will be talking again about A Star Is Born.

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