Issue
In This
Fall Favorites
post- reminiscers 3
Raise a Glass to Susan Yund
Sarah Lettes 2 Rachel Landau 4
From Nevsky to New Dorm Griffin Plaag 5
Fantastic Films and Where to Find Them Quinn Matos 6
Are Garbage
Why All Lists
postCover by Lauren Marin
DEC 6
VOL 23 —
ISSUE 12
FEATURE
Raise a Glass to Susan Yund An Ode to the GCB By Sarah Lettes Illustrated by Connor Gewirtz
I
magine trying to describe the White House without mentioning the president. Or giving a tour of the Sistine Chapel without talking about Michelangelo. Not only would you miss the big picture, but the underlying details also wouldn’t make sense. Without a president, the Oval Office would just be a small room in a big house. The Sistine Chapel would still be stunning, but the experience would be diminished without knowing about the formative hands and mind behind the stories painted across the ceiling. Similarly, you can’t fully understand Brown University’s Graduate Center Bar, known affectionately as the GCB, without knowing about Susan Yund. Susan came to the GCB in 1991 as a bartender, became the manager three years later, and has been running the show ever since. The GCB is a small bar tucked away in the underbelly of the Grad Center dorms. Entering the GCB feels like approaching a secret hideout. It’s hidden in plain sight, beneath the large, slightly ugly, but easy-to-miss concrete block that sits several yards away from the Bear’s Lair. The entrance itself, a glass door with the GCB’s hours listed in small font on it, is so nondescript that it’s hard to believe you’re entering a bar. But once you push open the door and make your way down the steps, the smells of beer and popcorn and the sounds of music and conversation flood your senses, welcoming you into this underground world. Despite how often I’ve opened the GCB’s glass door and stepped into the cloud of beer fumes, I had never heard Susan’s name before last week. I had spent a chunk of one Monday evening attempting to do homework in the GCB with a couple of friends. With my laptop screen growing dark every time I got lost in conversation, and my hands resting on the keyboard like I was getting a manicure, I wasn’t fooling anyone. I shut my laptop and biked home, wondering as I pedaled through the still night about the origins of such a unique spot—the only place I knew where you could, in a single moment, see people playing board games, ordering shots, chatting with professors, and meeting up for dates. Curious about the inner workings of this wondrous campus bar, I emailed
the GCB and set up a meeting with Susan. Susan carved out a chunk of time for me between a day of working in the GCB and watching the Red Sox take on the Astros that evening. I walked to the GCB tentatively, unaccustomed to visiting the bar when the sun was still shining, bouncing off of Brown’s buildings as it made its way
to the bottom of the horizon. But once I stepped inside, any concept of time and season vanished. The GCB was the same as always, but everything had a slightly calmer feeling, as if someone had turned down the volume. The steady murmur of voices and clinking of glasses filled the room, which had a few more open tables and a slightly
Letter from the Editor The time has come for my last note as editor-in-chief! Get ready for some sappy expressions of gratitude: To my managing eds, Anita, Celina, and Julian: Thank you for your relentlessness in sourcing content, tenacity in hunting down every stray comma at final reads, and enthusiastic support of all my crazy ideas for post- outreach and community building. Above all, thank you for making prod night one of my most treasured times of the week—the late-night talks and chilly walks home down Thayer Street in the dark and snow really made the experience special. I have complete faith that I am delivering post- into capable hands. To my section eds, Divya, Jasmine, Josh, Kathy, Liza, and Sydney: Thank you for all the behind-the-scenes editing and lively conversation during prod night. Special shout-out to Sydney for taking on management of the Feature section next semester, and to Josh for getting A&C up and running at the start of the semester. To our layout team, Jacob, Nina, Amy, and Steve: You are the real unsung heros. Thank you for bearing with editorial delays and positioning pull quotes late into the night.
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To our copy editors, Amanda, Mo, and Sonya: Thank you for your attention to detail and help in settling midnight grammar debates. To Remy: Thank you for ensuring every post- piece comes with a lovely illustration, even if it means drawing four of them yourself. To Elena, Kasturi, and Alex: Thank you for all the support you’ve lent postduring various mishaps and prod-night crises. To all our writers and illustrators: We have loved reading and looking at your work and appreciate that without you, there would be no magazine. To you, our readers: Thank you for being here! We hope you enjoy this final issue, where we have compiled our thoughts on the albums, movies, and memories from this year and reflect on the community connections we have formed here on campus. Farewell, and happy holidays! post- will be here to greet you in the new year. Yours,
Jennifer
editor in chief of post-
older crowd than usual. A group of graduate students huddled around a table in the center of the main room, heads bobbing in conversation and laughter, and hands occasionally reaching for the pitcher in the middle. Other smaller groups sat scattered throughout the room. Two bartenders leaned against one end of the bar, chatting with each other and the regulars. When I stepped up to the bar and asked about Susan, one of the bartenders motioned towards the darts room, pointing to a door I had never noticed. Susan stepped out of what she called “a storage room with a desk,” but could be more accurately described as the office of a beer lover’s dreams. The small, brightly lit room was bursting with every beer-related item imaginable, from stacks of stainless steel kegs by the door to colorful beer tap handles on the walls. Susan greeted me, and we made our way to the barstools. She grabbed a glass of water and sat down. Over the next half hour, as the glass of water slowly grew empty, Susan shared the layers of history that rest beneath the surface of this bar so many students have come to love. A group of graduate students and faculty members opened the GCB in 1969 with a charter to “facilitate intercourse.” Besides its property lease from Brown and its charter’s expressed goal of serving the Brown community, the GCB has no formal ties to the University. Perhaps the most surprising part of the GCB’s operations is its commitment to giving. The GCB is a nonprofit private club. No one in the GCB makes money off of commissions; after employees are paid, some profits are channeled into maintenance and emergency funds, and the rest goes to charity. Susan explained that one of her favorite parts of the job is sitting down and writing out checks to organizations like the Rhode Island Community Food Bank and the Nature Conservancy. The GCB has also sponsored the local Little League for almost two decades, and Susan and other bartenders have even coached teams in the past. Susan chooses organizations that everyone can get behind and that she sees making an impact in the Providence community. As we talked, it became clear that Susan has shaped not only the way the GCB operates but also the physical space itself. The GCB was initially located below the Bear’s Lair. This large space housed six pool tables and a video game area. In 1986, the University asked the GCB to move, and it relocated to a smaller space nearby in the depths of Grad Center, which it has occupied ever since. Lovers of the GCB went through painstaking measures to save one of the bar’s most iconic pieces of art during the move. In 1978, artist The Mad Peck (Brown Class of 1967) and writer Les Daniels created a poster called “Providence.” The poster includes a series of cartoons that describe Providence as a city “where it rains two days out of three except during the rainy season, when it
snows like a bitch.” The Mad Peck had projected these iconic images onto the wall of the GCB, and another artist painted it in. When it was time for the GCB to change locations, no one was ready to leave behind this artwork—so chainsaws were used to remove this section of the wall and move it to the new bar location. Susan noted that alumni often ask to buy the piece, but thankfully for us, she rejects all of their offers. The other art in the GCB comes from a variety of sources, most of it curated and hung by Susan herself. The current collection features abstract art, a depiction of the back entrance of the GCB that bartender Bill France painted, and other pieces Susan and other employees have tacked up throughout the years. The cartoon theme extends to the bathrooms, the walls of which are covered in carefully curated comic strips. With subjects ranging from feminism to thesis advising, these comic strips have entertained scores of customers desperately waiting for their turn in the singlestall bathrooms. Susan selected and pasted each of these strips onto the walls and continues to update them when students take it upon themselves to peel strips off of the white tiles.
join the “quizmaster extraordinaire” and his wife, Stephanie, who obtained a PhD in English at Brown, and try their hand at the questions this power couple crafts. The GCB also brings Brown’s undergraduate community together. For upperclassmen, the GCB serves as an important gathering place, a watering hole where you go to feel like a whole person, not just a student, even just for a little bit. For those living off-campus and off meal plan, the GCB fulfills the function of the Ratty or a dorm common room; it’s the spot where you run into friends you haven’t seen in a while. First-year students can catch up with each other at the V-Dub’s omelette station; seniors can bump into each other at the GCB’s pool tables. The GCB provides a spot away from the hubbub of campus life, a hideaway where the only challenge is choosing the right IPA. As Susan spoke, the motions of the bar seemed to rotate in smooth ellipses around her. Bartenders floated through the rooms, collecting empty glasses and prepping the TVs for the Sox game. Customers approached the bar for a drink every now and then, nodding in greeting to Susan or the bartenders before sliding back into their
I shut my laptop and biked home, wondering as I pedaled through the still night about the origins of such a unique spot— the only place I knew where you could, in a single moment, see people playing board games, ordering shots, chatting with professors, and meeting up for dates. Other items evoke specific moments from history. A fake lizard poses in a fish tank next to the front entrance. A cigarette protrudes from the lizard’s mouth, and a sign in the tank reads “only this lizard may smoke.” Susan informed me that, in 2005, someone gave the lizard this cigarette on the night that smoking was prohibited in Providence bars, and it has remained there ever since. Susan added that before this policy existed, cigarette smoke used to fill the GCB, to the extent that one of her friends used to bring a garbage bag into which he could stuff his jacket while he sat at the bar to keep it smelling fresh. Beyond the endless operational and interior decorating contributions Susan has made, she has also built a community in this basement bar. The bartenders are a tight-knit crew; in fact, Susan’s son and one of his childhood friends work there. A community tends to form among the grad students who frequent the bar for years. Susan explained that one of the hardest parts of the job is when the grad-student regulars leave Providence after completing their degrees. However, sometimes a few stick around. Luckily, Jim, who started GCB trivia nights a few years ago, got a position as a professor at Providence College after finishing a PhD in Economics at Brown. Students can still
booths. Even while Susan spoke to me, it seemed as if she were silently directing the seamless flow of the bar. Susan was like a coach of a pro-soccer team, sitting calmly in the middle of the field as her players ran drills, passing and running in graceful, never-ending circuits around her. I returned to the GCB later that week with my roommates. The paintings hung on the walls like they always had, and the countertops reflected the glow of the lights in the same way as before. But this time, I knew who had tacked up each piece of art, who had sat in the back writing out checks to charity, and who has dedicated so much of her life to creating this center of community. I understood why I had so instantly fallen under the GCB’s spell; as I looked around the room, I could see the level of effort and care that went into creating this bar. I could see it in the decked-out map room, in the cabinet stuffed with board games, and in the walls lined with paintings. And I could see it in the impassioned pool game in the next room, the hands digging into a fresh bowl of popcorn, and the comfortable conversations of close friends. It all flowed naturally, but Susan and the bartenders had worked to put all of the pieces into place. So next time you go to the GCB, raise a glass to Susan. Or, better yet, say hello.
“I’m a fake sushi girl." “Reading is like exercise: If you do it too much, you die.”
December 6, 2018 3
NARRATIVE
Fall Favorites
A Semester's Worth of Moments
A
By post- reminiscers Illustrated by Halle Krieger
sunny Sunday—a morning in India Point Park, an afternoon kicking around a soccer ball, and an evening full of music and conversation. A late-night-turned-early-morning conversation more fun than the party we went to earlier that evening. Bingeing all of The Good Place Season 1 in a single day with my roommate while we downed hot chocolate and pumpkin bars. Watching her reaction to the finale was the cherry on top. Delicious lunch dates downtown: Sweet potato tea lattes and pumpkin ravioli can change your life. Tea time in my best friend’s bed. Friday afternoon Tealuxe sessions—drink tea while spilling tea. First 1:00 a.m. Jo’s run after three years of being at Brown. Hung around a table of friends and ate mozzarella sticks and onion rings. First spicy with too! Running around Machado in flip-flops to catch the Uber Eats driver because my drunk friends couldn’t set the pick-up location properly—the lengths we go to for our inebriated buddies. Skipping section to get ice cream and walk around with a friend on the Last Warm Day of the Semester (there’s been about seven; my prediction is wrong every time). Lurking around the Gano Street Dunkin’ Donuts at midnight in hopes of finding the mythical trash donuts. Getting chased away from the dumpster of said Dunkin’ Donuts and taking a picture with friends inside a bulldozer attachment instead. Going to New York with some friends just to be tourists in a Russian neighborhood. Buying a book of Soviet product posters and eating walnut cookies and mystery candies on the train home. Early morning breakfasts with my roommate (2-for-$3 muffin special at Louie’s or Shiru Cafe right as it opens). Finally feeling comfortable skipping parties just to watch TV with my roommates on a Friday night. Making pancakes and bacon for some friends on Sunday morning and catching up. Sitting in the Brown Daily Herald office 4 post–
during prod night, munching on addictive CVS cheddar popcorn and birthday cake Oreos, editing wonderful pieces of writing. Skipping down Thayer in onesies while belting out Shakira, purposefully ignoring the strange looks exchanged by passerbys. It doesn’t matter how old we get, how much we hurt, how hard life can seem in the present— the first snow of the year turns everyone back to children again. Missing the entire first snow of the year due to prod night. Worth it, since I got to walk home in the snow at 3 a.m. before there were any footsteps. Two-hour Ratty dinners. Returning to CVS after leaving my debit card in the self-pay machine for over four hours. It was still there! Granola bowls every weekend. Doing it for the debrief! Cozy weekend nights with friends huddled around a laptop, screaming at rom-com characters to make better decisions in their lives. Midnight music in many forms. Long, meandering walks through Providence to admire the autumn leaves. Stealing hundreds of tiny Lactaid milks from the Ratty freezer. I think I’m the reason they stopped putting them out? Hearing my esteemed and brilliant professor mispronounce Thoreau as “Thorough.” Hotpot with my cousin, who’d flown in to tour a nearby university, at Yan’s. We talked about what it meant to be Hmong-American and what we hoped to get out of university, he an incoming freshman and I a junior. We burned our mouths on half-cooked rice noodles and fried tofu.
From Nevsky to New Dorm Making Memories
By Rachel Landau Illustrated by Rémy Poisson
M
ore than two months after I left Saint Petersburg, I received a Facebook message from Dean, a former Brown University student with whom I had explored Russian art exhibitions and gallery openings. “Hey Rachel, will be in Prov in mid-September,” he’d written. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. After all, he wasn’t just a mentor—he was a friend, and he and his wife had welcomed me into their network of creatives from Russia. On a Saturday in late September, I met him on the corner of Thayer and George Street, only a few steps from the Ratty. As we drove down Brook Street, he told me about illegally having a car as a freshman and parking it outside his dorm, how silly it was to do those things back then. I didn’t recognize the name he used for Keeney—West Quad, apparently. It seems
that Brown has always been changing the names of its spaces. But even as the vernacular changes, the places remain the same. When Dean parked outside of Louie’s, he motioned at the restaurant and said that he hoped I knew it. “How could I not?” I replied, thinking of memorable post-exam lunches shared among friends. We walked over to New Dorm and took the stairs to my common room, which had hosted a small gathering the night before. There were still crushed cans and empty bags of chips scattered around the room. Snacking on a bagel, I asked Dean how the rest of the summer had been in Saint Petersburg—I had left the country months before he did. He mentioned a trip to Moscow, endless work on a myriad of projects, a private tour of the Museum of Cosmonautics. Soon enough, we began talking about the stakes of creating art in Russia versus in the United States, what creativity means, and how artists put themselves at risk through the act of creation.
I like to think of myself as an heir to the history of this university, just as all students are. Central to his analysis was the recent history of Providence. Dean traced the different areas of Rhode Island art history: Providence can rightfully claim the pre-formation of the Talking Heads, while nearby Cumberland was once home to the Farrelly brothers, the filmmakers behind Dumb and Dumber. I was especially intrigued by Dean’s story of Joe’s and Joe’s Upstairs. Citing the restaurant organization methods of Dewey Dufresne as a seminal element of Rhode Island culinary history, he sang the praises of chowders and pounds of bluefish flown in from Cape Cod. He called the interior of Joe’s Upstairs “Edward Hopper-like,” and I had no trouble picturing exactly what he meant. Talking to Dean in my New Dorm common room made the strange temporality of Brown all the more concrete. CareerLAB always stresses how useful it is to “network” with alumni, but one can have many meaningful conversations without any intention of getting an internship. I like to think of myself as an heir to the history of this university, just as all students are. I couldn’t help but recall when, while lounging around in Em-Wool freshman year, a few juniors knocked on my door, asked if they could come in, and told stories of what they had experienced in that very same room. On the one hand, it is unsettling to consider how many strangers over the course of history have eaten sandwiches on Faunce’s steps or done laundry in New Pembroke— but it is also quite possibly the most interesting thing about Brown: to be surrounded by so much memory. We also talked about the future. Having just come from Moscow and preparing to return for a performance art piece, Dean offered a lot of advice on things to see and people to meet during my upcoming semester abroad. Dean had left Providence behind many years ago, and listening to his stories of all the places one could go beyond these familiar streets was a comforting reminder to cherish these days but not grow too attached to them. The memories (and apparently the brunch places) will still be here. After Dean left New Dorm, he went to rehearse for a memorial concert to take place the next day at Nick-A-Nee’s. He and a few members of his old band,
ARTS&CULTURE The Mundanes, would go on to perform in honor of their friend Charles Reckard, a Brown alum and four-time New England Emmy award winner for excellence in broadcasting. And after Dean left New Dorm, I went back to my homework, caught up on it—nothing spectacular. I picked up the crushed cans and the empty bags of chips and went up and down the stairs to the basement trash room a few times. Later, I took a walk to East Side Market, went to a birthday party, and stayed up with my friends for most of the night talking about our favorite books. Now, in the gray state of mid-December, I think it was actually exceptional to take part in something so mundane, so material, to sit around reading on a Saturday afternoon back when the whole semester was ahead of me. There was so much time to figure out what would become my memories of this fall. I think I made good choices, and I can’t wait to tell these stories someday in the doorway of an EmWool room, on the couch of a New Dorm suite, or at a gallery show in Saint Petersburg.
Fantastic Films and Where to Find Them Not Necessarily in 2018 By Robert Capron Illustrated by Lucien Poisson
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hat’s your favorite movie? No, I get it, too broad. How about favorite movie this year? It’s a question I love asking, yet find impossible to answer. Others do too, at least in my experience. There’s the obligatory seven seconds of staring into space, the unlucky interviewee presumably racking their brains for any noteworthy piece of entertainment they’ve seen in the past few months that wasn’t an episode of The Office. And, of course, the universal response: “That’s too tough. There are just… so many to choose from.” And there are! Films span genres, platforms, lengths. That’s not even including the most crucial variable in this equation: you. Everyone responds to films differently; that’s what makes movies so special. Viewers can undergo the same carefully curated barrages of sound and image, and all emerge with wildly different responses. No wonder we want to know what others like—what does it say about them? About me? The truth is, picking a favorite movie each year is often an egregious task. Awards season pundits attempt to make the process easier: They narrow down an entire year’s worth of content to a few mustsees, while we take their word for it and proceed accordingly. But the problem persists nevertheless. How can viewers boil down everything they love about film to one perfect, self-contained experience on a yearly basis? Simple. They can’t. So why bother asking? Allow me to answer with my personal response to two films. One, a hypothetical contender for this awards season due to its timely release; the other, a nearly decades-old piece of animation. Both claim to be “fantastic.” Both have affected me greatly. The first you can likely guess from the headline. I was surprised by my degree of hatred for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. Like most people my age, Harry Potter was a huge part of my childhood. Its coming-of-age narrative proved immensely relatable (despite my being a Muggle), so a spin-off movie franchise seemed trustworthy. Yet, while the first Fantastic Beasts was amiable enough, this sequel
reeked of creative and financial desperation. To be fair, I audibly squealed when I saw the baby Nifflers (I’m not heartless). But baby Nifflers aren’t enough to carry a film. I was left cold in the theater—the magic of the wizarding world was gone. Yet the film remains tucked away in the corner of my mind—made “noteworthy” by its November release date. Its special effects will likely garner a nomination down the line, and the film will still be included in numerous “yearend” lists. Put simply, we film fans rely too much on the calendar. And yet, I remain more deeply drawn to an older “fantastic” film—one concerning a crafty denizen of a local forest whose wild instincts get the better of him. I first saw Fantastic Mr. Fox when I was 12 years old; then, I understood it only sporadically. But there was this imperceptible sense of knowing—as if the film had been made to appeal to a part of myself that I wasn’t quite aware existed yet. Yes, Fantastic Mr. Fox wasn’t released in 2018. It was only due to the whims of a friend that I even rewatched it this year. But as the novelty of my reunion with this childhood relic began to wane, an appreciation for its technical expertise, autumnal color palette, and sheer essence began to take hold. I felt as if I had been hugged by an old friend. It spoke to me—informed me—in ways entirely different from anything else I’ve viewed this year. The enthralled confusion of my childhood was replaced by a sort of understanding— not only of the film’s artistic intentions, but of my own. And that, I believe, matters more than a release date. That makes a 2009 release my film of 2018. What’s your pick?
Why All Lists Are Garbage Featuring Our Editor's Picks for Album of the Year By Julian Towers
I
illustrated by Molly Young
don’t watch TV or go on Tumblr, so excuse me if this is mansplaining. But I’ve noticed that it has become common for people who love show “X” or enjoy band “Y” to excitedly describe themselves as “X obsessives” or “Y nerds.” I find this bewildering. To me, “nerd” has always had a very sexless, very unsavory meaning. I’m not sure why anyone would want to claim it, and besides I find it applicable to very few people. A nerd is someone who engages with an element of culture so analytically, so far past the point of its original design, that it doesn’t seem like he or she actually enjoys it. A nerd is someone who could turn watching Cake Boss into joyless, dedicated labor. I know not everyone will share this definition. If anything, I’m fairly certain it originated within the Freudian snares and vapors of my own weirdass childhood. Specifically, around the age of 7, when I went to a Cubs game with my father and some of his work friends. Tagging along, not actually invited, was another co-worker—a short, sad-eyed man who presumptuously introduced himself as the group’s “real” baseball fan. But while everyone else drank beer, cracked jokes, and thrilled to the game, this man did not speak. He had brought two large binders with
Things To Do Before Winter Break 1. Seek out caretakers for contraband pets 2. End your non-relationship with that Tinder person you matched with earlier this semester 3. Fill out the winter break checkout slip and tape it to your door 4. Savor your last free beverage of the year from Shiru 5. Make a last ditch effort to save that GPA 6. Wish Blueno a happy new year 7. Finally take out the overflowing trash that you and your roommate have been passive aggressively ignoring in hopes that the other will take initiative 8. Find out how to hide all the body modifications you got this semester from your conservative family members 9. Trash your least favorite class on the Critical Review forms 10. Pat yourself on the back for surviving yet another semester December 6, 2018 5
him, and though they looked exactly the same, he would alternate between them to scrawl numbers. This was so repulsive I could barely focus. Baseball was simple, beautiful, populist—yet this man refused to enjoy it on its intended level. Instead, he had to assert his own advanced understanding, inventing some mathematical language only he understood. It seemed cosmically appropriate that he had no friends, and I resolved to never be a nerd. If I’m a tragic character, it’s because I f*cked up and totally became a nerd. Growing up, I organized my own (fragile, confused) sense of self around an obsession with pop music—one that, today, feels so innate I can forget it’s basically a coping mechanism. Never a particularly verbal, outgoing, or pleasant child, I’d come straight home from school, strap bulky, space-age headphones on my ears, and find my solace in my parent’s stereo system. Pop radio and classic albums took the place of conversations I wasn’t having with normal, school-aged children. This was in many ways my social education. It’s legitimately distressing how much precocious sexual understanding I can trace to Madonna’s Immaculate Collection. I was really weird! But like in a terrible Tim Burton movie, aggressively anti-social behavior turned out to be a hidden pathway to making friends. Awkward bus rides became iPod sharing sessions, and I could always rely on my ace Fergie impression whenever circumstance trapped me with a girl. But this presented a new problem: everyone liked music. How could I be different? I had to be different. Tim Burton movies taught me different people were the most beautiful. I decided it wasn’t enough to be knowledgeable about my music. I had to know the most about music culture—to have unique opinions about every artist that was popular or renowned. You could understand
other people in this way. Determined to expand my knowledge, I stopped listening to the songs I loved and began a quest to alphabetically conquer every CD in the house. In perhaps my most devastating and heedless error, I went on the internet. It was here that I first encountered lists. I’d spend hours just staring at them. Lists made me a nerd. They’re the low-intellect center of music fandom, obstructing more natural forms of engagement. What the list is or who’s making it doesn’t matter—all are equally useless for two reasons. 1. Duh. It’s impossible to condense opinion into an empirical framework, and the attempt will always demean the natural plurality of art. Jim and Judy value seperate things, yet both use the same listform as though there were some joining standard. Individually, a list might possess some scant meaning— perhaps the same way you learn a bit about people from their grocery shopping. But brought together, all straining for objectivity, list culture is indecipherable nonsense. A scatter bomb of groundless data. 2. Lists grant incredible authority despite requiring none at all. List-makers come down from the mountain promulgating that they’ve “processed all of the art, here is the answer.” But when someone lists their five best albums of the year, are those the only albums they listened to? Were all the albums listened to with the same care? Does this person even like music or are they working out of some bizarre, list-making sweatshop? Disclosing such information is not a factor or standard for listmaking, thus all lists are untrustworthy, and all lists are garbage. This is not to suggest there is zero value to lists; lowered from their absurd position as fact, they can be a helpful gateway to new art, as they were for me. But over time, I found that I lost my sense of music taste as something individual—a private, irrational connection between a listener and a musician. When you slap a number on a piece of art, it’s a kind of limit. You claim to understand everything the work can do for you and others. We are currently in the heat of 2018 Album of the Year discussion. Big publications are starting to release their lists, and music nerds have begun their annual tradition: complaining about how awful they are. This is always amusing/depressing because nerds are the least self-aware people on earth. Include too many consensus picks and your list is safe, creatively bankrupt, and boring. Feature too many left field selections and your list is contrarian, unreliable, and useless. This is deeply narcissistic behavior; naturally, there’s only one path to satisfaction. So over the last few weeks, my daily routine was hijacked by final progress on my own list for this magazine. I maintained a fifteen spot ranking of my favorites as the year progressed, so this last stretch
“When I started working as a barista during high school, the arrival of jugs of thick pumpkin pumpkin syrup signified an overly saccharine beginning to the busiest time of the year—a beginning that can only be described as 'basic.'” Sydney Lo, "Pumpkin Spice & Other Existential Autumnal Comforts" 12.06.17
“This is a show that celebrates weirdos, great and terrible jokes, and cheeseburgers: all things I hold close to my heart.” Gabrielle Hick, "My Heart Pooped My Pants" 12.03.15
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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
was largely due diligence—a nerd’s joyless catch-up. This work was centralized around two documents on my Notes app, respectively labeled “albums to return to” and “albums missed.” For whatever reason, the records in the former pile weren’t impressive enough to enter regular rotation. Those landing in the second either didn’t interest me or passed me by when they were released. I’d listen to a few of these a day, usually during normal commute around campus, but also at the gym, before bed, and, if the music withstood multitasking (usually ambient/electronic/gutturaldeath-metal), while studying. If my seven-year-old self could see me, he might cry. The final task is always to balance the music’s personal appeal against what appear to be objective qualities. You don’t want to be a fascist robot, but I think it’s important to be evenhanded. So: Do I hold Juice WRLD accountable for his sexism even if I catch myself singing “ALL GIRLS ARE THE SAMEE” twice a day? Is my disappointment that Travis Scott and Anderson.Paak’s newest albums didn’t match their best obscuring their quality? Does it matter that George Clanton’s Slide is the same dreamy/hazy song repeated over and over when it’s the song I’ve always heard when I make-out? I’m strong enough at this that I’ve come to view myself above questions like “favorite genre?” or “don’t you hate country music?” Because of lists, I listen to everything, although I’m not sure I understand other people any better. This year, the album that gave me the most trouble was Swimming, the final release from late rapper Mac Miller. Understandably, it’s an album that’s impossible to view detached from context. The same feelings of depression and heartbreak that gave birth to Swimming probably killed Miller, and that makes for harrowing listening. At the same time, Miller speaks with real acuity about the paralyzed anti-ambition that grounds so much human angst and waste. As the memoir of my life could reasonably be titled “Human Angst and Waste,” I relate to this in ways that preclude objectivity. But the album kept gnawing at me, and by the time I was doing my joyless round-up, I was slipping in tracks to keep myself sane. Other lists have largely forgotten it, but whatever—I feel the sounds in my bones. That’s the level most people connect to music on. Swimming is my album of the year, and that feels healthy. I can’t promise I’ll be similarly subjective in 2019, but alas, such are nerds. Anyway, f*ck lists. 1. Mac Miller Swimming 2. Low Double Negative 3. JPEGMAFIA Veteran 4. The Voidz Virtue 5. Tierra Whack Whack World 6. George Clanton Slide 7. Denzel Curry TA3OO
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