Issue
In This
YA Fantasy Meeting Reality
Sydney Lo 4
New Here
Erin Lee Walden 2
A Big King in Providence Johnathan Lovett 5
Why I Left New York Jennifer Osborne, Sydney Lo, Julian Towers 4 Nicole Fegan 6
Three Queens
postCover by Bella Carlos
NOV 9
VOL 23 —
ISSUE 9
FEATURE
New Here
Queer API Health and Feeling Together By Erin Lee Walden Illustrated by Rémy Poisson
I
am walking through a fluorescent hallway. It smells like new air conditioning and pharmacy and bleach. The floor is tiled beige and the sounds of people mumbling behind closed doors drift into the hallway, which looms narrow and empty except for a coffee machine. It is very cold. It is corporate. It is boring. My face is bright red, warmed from the muggy NYC air. My pores are filled with the dirt and grime stirred up by double-decker tour buses displaying the sights of Chinatown for tourists passing through. Inside, I am suddenly freezing. Air vents hum in
the background as I am led to the sole office in this basement hall. I’m following my boss—she has short hair and tells me she is a writer and a rapper and an activist and a friend. I distract myself from the anxiety I feel about my first day by focusing on the way her dress moves. The cotton blends with the linoleum floor; it ripples and snaps into place, holding its own like paper once wet, now dry. She interrupts my trance and says, “I’m so happy you’re here. I already feel like your auntie.” And I wonder what my life would have been if I had grown up around someone like her.
We enter a windowless room lined with cubicles, located down the hall from the pharmacy. About 15 people turn in their swivel chairs as I enter. Everyone smiles. Everyone says hello. They tell me that they think this will be a wonderful summer, that I will like working here, and I am comforted. My boss says we will do introductions later, after I have completed my trainings and orientation assignments. She sits at her desk and hands me a binder that says, “Welcome to Apicha, Erin Walden, Summer Intern.” There is a logo with a rainbow flag below the text and three pieces of paper in the two-inch binder.
Classes Offered Next Semester
Letter from the Editor This week, we have a (mostly) cheery
Thanksgiving is coming and we have only
lineup to help you out of those post-
ONE MONTH OF CLASSES LEFT wigs
daylight savings blues. The days may
you out, don’t worry: There is still plenty
be shortening, but O, to be young, alive,
of time left in the semester for a journey to
and able to fight the cholesterol-induced
self-discovery, or at the very least, one to
shock of a meal at Big King! Young adult
NYC.
Marvel at the fact that when you go home for Thanksgiving, you could still be referred to as a boygenius. If the thought that
Toilets 2. (Victorian) Flesh 3. Fan Fiction 4. Organic Chemistry 5. The Awful German Language
literature technically remains ageappropriate—binge read it while you can!
1. The Private Life of the Privy: A Secret History of
Happy Friday,
Jennifer editor-in-chief of post-
6. An Introduction to Pain and Suffering 7. Bleeding Heart Libertarianism 8. The Meaning of Life 9. Psychology and Philosophy of Happiness 10. Tobacco, Disease and the Industry: cigs, e-cigs and more
2 post–
Orientation begins with an introduction to where exactly I am: Apicha Community Health Center. We talk about what happens at the center (affordable and affirmative healthcare) and the mission of Apicha (to serve underserved populations in New York City). I am the only intern in this department, which usually doesn’t have room or funding for temporary employees. The most important part of orientation is learning about my position: I will assist with Project Connect in the Community Health Education (CHE) department. Project Connect is a program specifically for API (Asian and/or Pacific Islander) LGBTQ+ youth that offers mentorship programs, workshops, leadership trainings, cultural competency trainings, and support for members of the community. My boss is the only person who works for Project Connect; she oversees all of the programs throughout the year. In the CHE department, there are SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and health insurance enrollers who help people in Lower Manhattan obtain Medicare and Medicaid. There is also a Sexual Health Education department that provides HIV and STI testing as well as assistance with attaining PrEP and PEP, drugs that prevent the transmission of HIV. Apicha was founded in 1989 as the Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/ AIDS (APICHA), a grassroots organization formed in response to the AIDS crisis and the unmet HIV/AIDS needs of API people in New York City. Today, one in five API people living with HIV in the United States are unaware of their status. Taboo and stigma around HIV and LGBTQ+ people are prominent in many API communities. In 2009, Apicha became a Community Health Center, broadening their range of services from HIV-focused practice to offer general primary care, STI testing, trans healthcare, and community outreach, among other services. I am in an incredible organization, focusing on all of the issues that I find most important—still, I am nervous. Of course, I knew from the start that I would be. I joked to a friend at the end of the school year that I was unsure if I could provide support to other people in the API LGBTQ+ community when I didn’t have any myself. Now the expected nervous feelings have arrived, the same ones that surface whenever I meet anyone new. There has always been the inevitable, “I couldn’t tell you were Chinese,” or “Do you have a boyfriend?” As someone who feels invisible by virtue of how I was raised and various other aspects of my life (gender, disposition, sexuality), it is always jarring to be thrust into the position of having to correct someone’s assumption, of having to assert an identity that can be uncomfortable to talk about. And even if the questions are never voiced, I can hear them. I can see them in the confused faces. Here at Apicha, though, something feels different. No one asks me personal questions. No one asks me why I want to work here: That is to say, no one asks me to prove anything. The head supervisor says my piercings are cool. My boss says we are just a bunch of queers sequestered into the basement. Mostly, people want to talk about their jobs; they
want to show me how I can do what they do. I listen, observe their work, and learn about healthcare. More importantly, I learn about discriminations in health and healthcare faced by API communities (language barriers, stigma, insurance and immigration status) and LGBTQ+ communities (lack of providers, high homelessness rates, risk factors including violence and harassment). I learn about the intersection of these conditions. The busiest month of the year for the CHE
We talk about having to make parents feel comfortable, about the guilt of not being able to. I hear people articulate feelings I have known but have not had the vocabulary to discuss (or anyone to discuss them with). department is June: Pride Month. I have the opportunity to attend pride parades and festivals throughout New York City. Although it is fun to march and hand out condoms and Apicha-branded giveaways, Manhattan Pride feels incredibly corporate. The event is heavily policed and regulated. Only people with wristbands can march, and each organization gets a limited number of wristbands. It is also a prime display of rainbow capitalism: the incorporation of the LGBTQ+ community into a neoliberal society only because corporations can profit off of targeting this demographic, not because there is real acceptance. This usually involves corporations that have no pro-LGBTQ+ practices showing up at pride festivals (which have historically been protests) to attract customers, sell pridethemed merchandise, and profit. Over the course of the summer, I go to many other events such as a NYC Department of Education conference for teachers on gender and sexuality, National HIV Testing Day, and Apicha workshops. I do outreach at community centers like the Charles B. Wang Center, Callen-Lorde, and The LGBT Center. I sit in on calls with The Network—a group of LGBT-specific and LGBT-supportive non-profit organizations that provide care to queer people in New York City. I spend most of my days reading, sitting in on phone calls with my boss, planning meetings, and researching. On a July night, I sit in a circle of 15 black chairs. There is Popeyes, water from the office water cooler, and instant coffee, already cold. My supervisor runs a group that pairs young members of the community with older ones. She says it is the only one of its kind in the country that has intentionally carved a space for API LGBTQ+ people, and I hate that I can so easily
believe this fact. A girl sits next to me and taps my shoulder. She asks me about the shirt I am wearing, I ask her about her tattoo. We start the meeting by introducing ourselves and talking about our weeks. My boss has us share our coming out stories, if we are comfortable doing so. People discuss their experiences in the workplace and in school, about how we act and present differently around our bosses, our family, our friends. We talk about feeling tokenized, about feeling isolated from our cultures and from our families. We talk about language barriers, generational differences, stigmas around sex (none of us had any type of “sex talk” from parents, and public school certainly does not offer queer sex education). We talk about having to make parents feel comfortable, about the guilt of not being able to. I hear people articulate feelings I have known but have not had the vocabulary to discuss (or anyone to discuss them with). I come out in front of a sizeable group for the first time, and no one says I have to tell my parents. No one says queer visibility is critical for my well-being or that to stay closeted is selfish. People just listen. That night, I return home tired. My daily commute is two hours each way. The good thing about that is I get to read. Sometimes all I can do is sit, make lists of the storefront signs I see through the foggy Long Island Railroad window. Sometimes I write poems, sometimes I take notes on what people are saying. The night creaks, but it is summer and warm, and my mom is there when I get home. She asks me if I had a good time at work, I say yes, and she says there is leftover dal in the fridge, the same one that she always makes in the big red pot, garnished with an excess of cilantro. There is ginger tofu too, if I want. My dad high-fives me when I walk through the door. I feel like the luckiest person. The summer continues, and I am full. I write a letter to my parents telling them I’m queer, telling them what they probably already knew. In response to the letter, my father sends a text message. I receive the text while at an Asian-American poetry reading, holding a warm glass of complimentary white wine. The poet on stage mentions that his husband and dogs are waiting for him to come home, and that’s all it takes for me to start crying. I find myself wiping tears from my eyes before the reading has even begun. A wave of relief floods over me. My mother says nothing in response to the letter, but still makes me dal. On Fridays, I go to the animal adoption center with my boss to pet dogs. We drink overpriced coffee and travel to community events. I learn what it means to live as part of a collective, what it means to be a just-turned-20-years-old-starting-to-feel-okaywith-life person. On my last day at the office I bake banana bread, and my boss reads a poem she wrote for me on the subway. Later in the summer, at a baseball game, my mom jokes that all the pride merchandise at the stadium has been put on sale and placed in the corner. She laughs and gives me a hat to try on. I am still overwhelmed. There is newness in everything, but sometimes I feel comfortable.
“Should I go and enrich myself?” “I like to compare myself to Jesus and George Washington.” “When I was young I thought college would be like the Vampire Weekend song where he’s talking about having sex with a sophomore. Instead, it’s like the gap between Vampire Weekend’s last album and the one that hasn’t come out yet.” November 9, 2018 3
NARRATIVE
YA Fantasy Meeting Reality Moving Past the Page
T
By Sydney Lo Illustrated by Rémy Poisson
he Brown University Bookstore smells of burnt espresso and cardboard boxes, half-emptied after the initial shopping period mayhem. With some free time before classes and nowhere better to be, I meander past the Bestsellers and the Newly Recommended, glancing out the windows at the metal scaffolding and orange plastic of Thayer Street’s recent construction. The recent rain has given the world outside a dull hue, incentivizing my reluctance to return to studying and stress. I turn around the stairs, hands trailing over the wooden railing, and find the store’s humble Young Adult section. When I was younger, I imagined that my teenage years would begin with a Young Adult Fantasy book cover, preferably one featuring some overphotoshopped teen holding a sword and staring off into the distance, and end with an “About the Author” section. Chapter One would begin in monotony, a justlike-any-other-day scenario: a 13-year-old girl lives a normal life in the small suburbia of Minnesota. From there, my life would suddenly turn into an endless, thrilling adventure—the best times of my life. Perhaps I’d discover a family secret, or learn that I was the chosen one, or maybe I’d get mutant powers from a government test site. I’d accumulate a scrappy group of friends to accompany me as I embarked upon an epic journey that would ultimately end in saving the known universe. We’d topple corrupt governments, explore magical realms, become legends. Reality sunk in slowly as my sense of disappointment escalated. I didn’t receive my Hogwarts letter like Harry Potter when I was 11. I never found out I was a demigod when I turned 12. When I was 13, I wasn’t recruited into a secret government experiment. I never learned that I was actually a mermaid, or a witch, or an alien. My life progressed, permanently in prologue phase, each day more or less the same, as I waited for something impossible to happen. At many points, I became so impatient to have my own adventure that I deliberately adopted the behavior of my favorite YA characters. I tried to take up the bow and arrow after Katniss from The Hunger Games, a four-month endeavor that ended with me still unable to hit a target more than 20 feet away from me. I got chunky blonde highlights in the fourth grade because Max did in the Maximum Ride Series. I pretended that I was clumsier than I was and that I just didn’t “get” other
people even though I did. I determined which boys in my class would be the members of my inevitable love triangle. This was not to say that I was ungrateful for my typical existence. In my head, I understood how lucky I was to not have to deal with life-or-death situations, to not have to worry about massive conspiracies or the survival of my loved ones. Instead, I went to school, worried about tests, took up silly hobbies, and spent time with friends. As I grew older, the Young Adult Novel fantasy slipped away quietly, first from reality, then from my thoughts. My friends and I stopped concocting conspiracy theories, stopped hoping that somehow our favorite novels were actually works of nonfiction. We stopped wondering about the existence of aliens and stopped thinking that the new kid in class was one. Aspirations to save the world were replaced with dream colleges, career ambitions, travel goals. We came to terms with, or perhaps simply ignored, the fact that we would never be given some paramount quest. We would have to construct our adventures with the simple, modest world we were given. By the time I came to Brown University, my Young Adult fantasy had shrunk to an affinity for Marvel movies and a habit of treating my coursework as if the fate of the world depended on its execution. Sometimes, often while studying for a midterm, I'll still wish I could escape; I’ll wonder what a younger version of myself would think of my life. There have been moments throughout the years reminiscent of the stories I’ve read, such as my decision to move across the country to attend a private university with a long, semimysterious history (I’m looking at you, Brown secret societies). In high school, I did have an intensely tightknit group of friends, although we bonded over classes and our exploration of video games instead of over defeating evil. I’d learned about my tumultuous family history from my father, how his family had immigrated to the United States from Laos after aiding US troops during the Vietnam War. I’d uncovered “powers” in writing, in mathematics, in cooking. There were events in my teenage years worthy of stories. I pick up the closest novel on the bookstore shelf, turning to its back cover. Glittery details adorn the edges of the shiny dust jacket, and reviews give the work five stars. The plot summary promises a familiar set of tropey teenage characters and escapades, and a small part of my mind lights up with intrigue. Mostly, though, it finds the synopsis startlingly dull. Now 20 years old, I’m venturing into a territory uncharted by my favorite fiction reads. After years of fantasy and science fiction filling out every aspect of my teenage years, I’m left without a baseline for what adult life should be like, barring the occasional epilogue and
the few time travel epics that I’ve read. I turn over the book again and put it back on the shelf with its other permutations. The chapter of my life that clung to YA tropes has concluded, but part of me will never cease to whisper, Maybe my real adventure is yet to come. I take a step backward and look around. I imagine blank pages, my future, extending beyond the wooden bookshelves, waiting to be written. I wonder where my story goes from here.
Why I Left New York
Love, Loss, and Thanksgiving By Jennifer Osborne, Sydney Lo, and Julian Towers Illustrated by Stephanie Wu hard-boiled romance My freshman year of college, I would schlep down to New York City once a month to see a boy from high school. We had a great time going to the Met and eating oversized pizza. By the start of sophomore year, however, my trips had become more of a chore than anything else. I booked two tickets for the first Saturday of the semester—one arriving in the city at 4 p.m., and one departing at 7 p.m., post-breakup. We met at a wafel stand, and I broke the news. He remained surprisingly stoic; instead of the usual “what, why, is there someone else, what will I do without you,” he asked me to walk with him to Central Park. We somehow ended up in Battery Park, the southern tip of Manhattan, where we had met for our first date. We walked by the Barnes & Noble and the Whole Foods, and I remembered that 16-year-old me had found the idea of eating a hodgepodge assortment of foods while browsing books to be the height of teen romance. I also began to suspect that this boy was trying to retrace our path from that first date in some eerie, morbid, and unnatural attempt at closure. When we finally made it through the gates of the park and took a seat by a fountain, he let out a sigh, said “that’s better,” and started crying. Instead of addressing this, I took some pictures of the pigeons at my feet. I offered to get him a hot dog. He said he should go home. I bought two hard-boiled eggs and an iced coffee from some soulless, stainless steel chain in the heart of corporate Manhattan, got back on the bus, listened to sad-girl musicTM, and cried for having made him cry. Then I cried about being a girl who eats hardboiled eggs with her hands while sobbing on a public bus. Since this was New York City, no one seemed surprised by any of this. I mourned the love affair for the 5 hours and 33 minutes it took to return to campus and promptly got over it during a walk to the lookout over Prospect Terrace with a supportive friend. The modest Providence skyline felt homey; the coffee milk we’d smuggled out of Andrews in the hood of my coat affirmed that New England was an infinitely better place to be than New York. Oversized pizza exists here too, along with a different Met and another art museum. There would be other boys to go to them with. a scene of grief in a midtown theater We arrived at the small theater, turning off Broadway onto one of the numbered streets. The theater’s entrance was wedged between a pub and a Jimmy John’s, and had a dark, cramped entryway with out-of-date posters hanging in a glass display. From her puse my mother pulled out our printed tickets, stained and soft from the rain, and we found our way
4 post–
ARTS&CULTURE inside into the small elevator. The theater lobby was on the second floor, painted a pastel yellow with photos from different plays in wooden frames across the walls. It felt like a small-town theater, with only the noisy traffic from below tethering us to Midtown Manhattan. We found our seats, worn from use and surprisingly close to the stage, which was meticulously decorated to resemble someone’s home. The play was a drama, well-acted and comforting in the way watching Law and Order: Special Victims Unit reruns can be. Its plot wound circles around its actors, and my mother and I shared glances with every new twist. The theater was barely heated, so we were freezing, but it felt like that was part of the play, like we were meant to shiver through each scene. Afterwards, my mother and I were introduced to the actress, and we talked while sitting on the edge of the stage and examining the various stage fixtures. She spoke about what it felt like to perform in a play after so many years and about the significance of her character. She talked about her attachment to the play in the way that people talk about their romantic partners. The conversation moved to discuss life, which led us to discuss death, and my mother and I confided to actress about the loss of my brother nine months prior. The actress spoke about her loss too, and eventually we were all crying. The actress passed around tissues, and my mother apologized for making a scene even though she didn’t have to. Through the tears, the actress and my mother exchanged a few thoughts about the world that helped them cope. I fidgeted with a prop and felt like everything in my life was doomed to lead back to his death. In the days following spring break, while sharing experiences with other Brown students, I told people it was a decent play and acted like the moment had never happened. the shawthanks redemption A freshman at NYU’s Tisch School of Arts, I had recently come to loathe every aspect of my existence: the meaningless feedback I received in workshop, the professors who woke up after election day and declared that ALL ART WAS SUDDENLY MORE IMPORTANT, and most of all, New York herself— the grime and dread and chaos and good people never getting heard. All it took was an extra banana pepper in my Chipotle one day, and I knew I would be transferring schools. Suddenly, my grades were of crucial importance; since I was attending art school, this fact isolated me from everyone I knew. While my peers were out performing improv comedy, attending gallery openings, and generally saving the world from Donald Trump, I sacrificed myself upon the altar of common core education. When "The World of Antiquity" assigned a 12-page paper on Jesus Christ, due the day after Thanksgiving break, the biblical parallels could no longer be ignored. I had denied my body in order to free my captive soul, and now, here, was the final judgement. To fly home for a quiet family Thanksgiving, however tempting, would be to invite damnation. I called my parents and convinced them that all my friends were staying. As a byproduct of my argument, I also convinced them that I had friends. Alone, raised above the city in my towering Third Avenue dorm, I spent five holy days perfecting my thesis. Spoken human contact was nonexistent. If I exited my suite, it was to jog in the vast stairwell system or to eat at the only vendor still accepting meal credit: Dunkin’ Donuts. Like a true Christian, capable of mixing meat with cheese, I would subsist upon its breakfast sandwiches. Each night, after work was done, I would thank God for his harvest and pray for
escape. Finishing my paper, I relaxed and treated myself to a Thanksgiving dinner—two strawberry Pop-Tarts, a bag of SunChips, and some turkey jerky. That night, my grandmother emailed me a Youtube link to Simon & Garfunkle’s 1970 tearjerker, “The Only Living Boy in New York.” I listened to the song on repeat, thumbing my cursor over the “submit” button as I pondered the destiny of my hard work. Years later, I would trace my attendance at Brown University to the B+ I received.
tan beachwood with granite slabs of ice, chained apart for either the fish’s sake or the customer’s. Two set menus, A (four courses) and B (six), beckon to us. Scores of starters and sakes account for much of the menu, but we’re on a budget here. Telling each other we should probably do A, we choose B. Our savings weep. But this is the game of yes and that outsiders must play. As dishes pass by, we come to learn Big King boasts atomic qualities. Though invisible from the outside, the restaurant’s four walls contain enough nuclear potential energy to obliterate all of Rhode Island (or at least, all future dining experiences within the state). Only a dramatic format can do justice to this food. BIG KING A Triumph in Six Acts
A Big King in Providence
A Restaurant Review in Six Delicious Acts
S
By Johnathan lovett
omething ceremonial hangs in the air tonight. It’s in our voices, our selfies, the way the night feels: It permeates our conversation with Miguel, our Uber driver. We tell him we’re new here, transplants from California. We’re venturing off College Hill for the first time to dine at a restaurant apparently so good it’s theatrical. We want to get to know this city—and tonight, Providence cloaks us in the smile of a host putting guests to ease. We’re delivered at Luongo Square and Carpenter Street, which is tucked in Federal Hill’s breast pocket. The area is quaint and quiet, dotted with hip bars and eateries like the The Avery and Bucktown. We’re early for our 8:15 p.m. reservation at the restaurant Big King, so we check out The Avery. Immediately we’re plunged into the bar’s jazzy, black-and-gold Art Deco. We imagine ourselves as 1920s flappers, saying everything is jake or we oughta get zozzled off some jag juice—but we don’t. Not yet, anyway. We fork over seven bucks for a Mango En Fuego. The sweet Jarritos Mango Soda and piquant Ancho Reyes Chile Liqueur, dashed with lime and poured over ice makes you feel how Baz Luhrmann would if his Gatsby scored twice as much on Rotten Tomatoes. Yes, it tastes as if Monsieur Luhrmann directed each of our sips: The opulent sugar encounters the smoldering Ancho Reyes...they clash, then converge into a box office smash. There is no clock tower anywhere near Federal Hill, but we convince ourselves we hear one. It strikes 8:15. We snap to attention and hopscotch over to Big King: Big King, the elusive. Big King, the second child of chef James Mark (after his first Providence restaurant, North). Whatever imagery the restaurant’s name made us imagine, the actual Big King doesn’t match up. No bloated emperor’s palace or mattress store. Rather, Big King is the size of a bourgeois walk-in closet. It’s tiny, nonchalant, so indiscreet you have to double check on Maps that it’s the same place you spent 20 minutes talking about with your academic dean. Who is the Big King anyway? We sit along the chef’s counter. It’s a polished,
ACT ONE Dish one descends upon us: yellowtail sashimi with slivered cucumber and chives, paired with a pear sake sauce. Six opalescent, burgundy-mauve cuts of yellowtail lounge like chairs on the deck of a sailboat, yawning along the Baltic. Biting into one is diving into fresh morning ocean. We awaken. Things become lucid. We realize we’ve gotten into something bigger than ourselves. We’re fucked. And the pear sake sauce? This potion? We enter catatonia briefly, not realizing we’re drooling like fools. But there’s no way the pear sake sauce could have gotten us tipsy. Or was it the sashimi? It doesn’t matter. That yellowtail was nuts. ACT ONE AND A HALF Out of nowhere appear two more pieces of yellowtail, cuts from the belly. Glassy skin spirals in segments, strung together over the rice bed. Several pieces of chive resemble tiny green crowns. Have we found the Big King? We wonder if this was mistakenly brought to us. Then we realize this dish is the work of a generous sushi chef. The restaurant must have pitied us for making all those whale noises during Act One. Indulging in this fish was falling into a deep, deep couch. ACT TWO A green, yellow, and red tomato salad with fried tofu (marinated in green tomato vinegar), drizzled with sesame and holy basil buds arrives like a stark New Hampshire fall. Suspicious, we Google-image-search J. M. W. Turner to make sure he’s not our sushi chef. With this dish, our predilection for hyperbole soars up, up, up. More whale noises follow. ACT THREE At this point a tall, Paul Bunyan-looking chef comes out with our next dish. He softly sets down the porcelain and proceeds to describe its contents in a low, dulcet baritone (think the lead singer of The National, delivering a lullaby). The audiobook industry could make a killing with this man. Lying seductively upon the mountain of sweet corn and chives, sporting seaweed shavings hair, are two translucent cuts of judith, conditioned with more pear sake. Oh, Judith. You sassy fish. You didn’t stand a chance. ACT FOUR Two sets of skewered grilled chicken meatballs (tsukune) arrive. These babies are glazed with tare, a sweet and thick soy sauce with dashi vinegar and raw egg yolk served with a saucer filled with more tare and quail egg. Good lord. November 9, 2018 5
ARTS&CULTURE
ACT FIVE Paired with dusk-colored crab head miso, a bowl of crab rice with fresh rock crab meat mingles with grilled scapes, itty bitty green tomatoes, and dashi. For some reason, we talk about this dish as if it were the child of our chef. “It certainly has a good head on its shoulders, you must be so proud,” we'd say to him. “Your dish sure seems like it’ll go far”—which it did, deep into our esophagi. ACT SIX Sadly, our sixth and final dish is upon us: a fried peach pie pocket with lava-flowing caramel, a sugar-dusted surface, and coffee ice cream plopped on top. We shovel the hot fried dough and gooey peaches down our gullets. Through Big King, we watch Providence open itself up, like a portal. Through this food, we are momentarily rid of our unfamiliarity and all of life’s ennui. We pay and leave, laughing into the night like two Big Kings, beginning to feel at home.
Three Queens Reckoning with Indie Supergroup boygenius
L
By Nicole Fegan illustrated by Cricket McNally
ooking at my Apple Music last month, I noticed that among my most played songs were six by indie artist Phoebe Bridgers and three by indie artist Julien Baker. Over the past few years, female-fronted indie music has become something of a specialty of mine. So when it was announced that Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus (yet another indie artist) were forming a supergroup called boygenius, all of my synapses fired at once. This was a dream come true. I had spent the past few years acquainting myself with Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus, and during that time, it became clear to me that the strength of these artists resides in their gifts for storytelling and mood cultivation. On both of her full-length albums, including her recent 2017 release Turn Out the Lights, Baker belts heart-wrenching lines about her mental illness and perceived inadequacies. Bridgers’s debut album, Stranger in the Alps, feels precisely like reliving your first heartbreak and returning to your hometown...maybe too precisely. Dacus, whose music I am admittedly much newer to, tracks all kinds of loss in her sophomore album Historian—loss of love, of faith, and of life. Any song by these artists feels entirely original and inimitable. Late in August, boygenius released three singles before unexpectedly dropping the self-titled EP in
October. Since I had recently developed an affinity for listening to albums or EPs as whole products, I had held off on listening to the singles until autumn. That way, I could understand the entire scope of the story and more accurately feel what boygenius wanted me to feel. Often, my opinions of songs change drastically depending on the vibe of the entire album. For example, a song like “The Sound of Settling” is so tonally unlike the rest of Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism that I automatically have a distaste for it, even though I may be apt to like it if it were on a different album. All of this is to say that it is very important to me how a release feels as a whole. boygenius did not deliver the holistic feeling I had anticipated. But rather felt more like a compilation of six brilliant songs, each embodying the style of one of the group’s members. “Bite the Hand” and “Salt in the Wound” contain Dacus’s deep vocals
One woman spilling her soul into her lyrics can be perceived as overly confessional, almost cheap if you do not have sentimental sensibilities. But a group of women being open about their experiences is a force—a declaration of presence and importance. and typical guitar tone—heavy and electric with a distinct emphasis on being indie rock. “Ketchum, ID” and “Me and My Dog” encapsulate Bridgers’s soft and ethereal style—the former, an understated and sparse piece featuring little more than allencompassing vocal harmonies, and the latter, my favorite of the EP. Atop an atmospheric, hazy, and layered blend of instruments and choral “oohs,” it employs an almost country-esque twang while undeniably staying in the folk tradition. Baker’s style is seen clearly in “Stay Down” and “Souvenir,” characterized by recognizable chord progressions strummed expertly on an acoustic guitar, piano sprinkled in the background, and Baker’s intimate and raw vocal performance. I have all six songs downloaded on my phone, so what’s missing here to keep me from wholeheartedly adoring this? Simply, I think it is the lack of cohesion that I so strongly yearn for in an album or EP. The formation of the supergroup loses much of the confessional, emotional power that all three artists otherwise cultivate. The EP tells disparate stories
“She found my Grindr,” he said, holding up his phone to show a series of increasingly lengthy texts from ‘MUM’.” Charles Stewart, The Fall of the Amazing Human Lobster 11.8.17
“When it comes to your technique, less can be more, and sloppiness is rarely appreciated.” The Hardy Brothers
6 post–
11.5.09
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Jennifer Osborne a FEATURE Managing Editor Anita Sheih Section Editors Kathy Luo Sydney Lo ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Julian Towers Section Editors Josh Wartel Liza Edwards-Levin
through disparate tones: Baker’s otherworldly rasp, Dacus’s deep sense of bite, and Bridgers’s breezy atmosphere. boygenius feels like an attempt to turn earth, fire, and air into one element that never quite succeeds. But maybe that is okay. After all, the three artists did not come together to form a band—on the major streaming services, the EP is under the names of all three artists, as opposed to “boygenius.” I.e., this is a supergroup—a project intended to highlight the artists’ individual styles rather than create one anew. In that regard, the EP works flawlessly, since each song is enhanced by the harmony and grittiness and softness the other singers bring to the table. However, I still cannot seem to shake the idea that an EP should feel like more than just a collection of singles. I don’t expect this opinion to be universal. In fact, Pitchfork, a popular musicreviewing site, thinks the EP’s variance of styles is a strength and that it “succeeds because their individual work doesn’t share one unified musical genre.” Is it more important for songs to be good or for an album to have a consistent tone? As is always the case when regarding art, perhaps it’s a matter of personal preference. Beyond my slight disappointment about the lack of cohesion, this group represents something larger than the music it creates. The tongue-incheek title of boygenius pokes fun at the fact that the three artists are always framed first and foremost as women in indie music, as if it were an anomaly to have women artists at the forefront of a musical movement. One woman spilling her soul into her lyrics can be perceived as overly confessional, almost cheap if you do not have sentimental sensibilities. But a group of women being open about their experiences is a force—a declaration of presence and importance. Bridgers recalled the writing process to The FADER: “Literally, every day we said to each other, ‘I feel so seen and heard,’” she said. “It was very ‘therapy group.’ We needed each other’s energy. I needed that female energy. I could assert myself and no one questioned me.” In many ways, this project feels as if it was created for the creators themselves as opposed to the listeners. It is a giant middle finger to the music critics who still frame them as “women in music.” It is catharsis—a declaration that women have emotions and can and will write about them.
NARRATIVE Managing Editor Celina Sun Section Editors Divya Santhanam Jasmine Ngai COPY CHIEF Amanda Ngo Assistant Copy Editors Mohima Sattar Sonya Bui HEAD OF MEDIA Samantha Haigood
Want to be involved? Email: post@browndailyherald.com!
HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Remy Poisson BUSINESS LIAISON Saanya Jain CO-LAYOUT CHIEFS Jacob Lee Nina Yuchi Layout Designers Amy Choi Utkan Dora Öncül Jiyeon Park Steve Ju WEB MASTER Jeff Demanche