In This Issue Bad Romance
JULIAN TOWERS 7
Sweet Hearts
DANA SCHNEIDER 6
To All The Friends I’ve Loved Before
KAITLAN BUI 5
The Era of E-boys
GAYA GUPTA 4
GRIFFIN PLAAG 8
The Whole Universe in Opals
postCover by Hee Won Chung
FEB 14
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VOL 25 —
ISSUE 13
FEATURE
The Era of E-boys
the hard truth about soft-boys BY GAYA GUPTA ILLUSTRATED BY RÉMY POISSON
O
ver winter break, I did what I promised myself I would never do: I downloaded TikTok. I am quick to tell people it began as a joke. Some close friends from back home had started making TikTok dances for fun and, despite being warned about the app’s addictive videos and cringey trends, I wanted to see what my friends were up to—only that (I swear). But when I began swiping through TikTok’s FYP (For You Page), a feed that includes popular videos catered to a wide range of tastes and categories, things rapidly deteriorated. TikTok’s videos are designed to be addictive. They’re short (no more than a minute), largely feature visually pleasing dances set to trendy music, and joke about relatable—and sometimes taboo—topics that people rarely talk about on other forms of social media, like eating cereal for dinner when the dining hall food sucks, or feeling the need to straighten curly hair in order to be viewed as beautiful. I remember realizing in horror that TikTok wasn’t just a joke anymore when I rewatched a video that I thought was actually really
funny—and, worse, when I paused to download and send that video to a friend. Turns out, what I had initially found so off-putting about TikTok—users’ prevailing, desperate drive to go viral—in fact entertained me. And the more I scrolled and saved, the more TikTok’s algorithms tailored its FYP to appeal to my preferences, further enabling my vice. By the end of winter break, despite my best intentions, I had saved more than 30 TikToks to my phone. During my time on TikTok (now my secondmost used app after Messages), I came across many interesting trends, like the Renegade dance (what my friends back home first tried to recreate, consisting of claps, “whoas,” and other body swivels made famous by Charli D’Amelio), the Hype House (a mansion in LA that houses a collective of TikTok’s most elite and viral influencers), and, especially relevant to me, a surprising amount of content commiserating about the difficulties of being an ABCD, or American-Born Confused Desi, struggling to reconcile American culture at school with strict, South Asian parents and tradition at home.
But my most surprising find? The e-boy. The most popular guys on TikTok are not what I expected—they lack some of American society’s most traditional features of masculinity. Many consider themselves e-boys, or as Urban Dictionary defines them, “a boy who has black painted nails, skates, wears black clothes and chains and beanies, and they sometimes have their hair parted down the middle.” This surprised me; I expected an app that relies so heavily on physical appearance to adhere rigidly to typical (and toxic) American standards of attractiveness for men. Yet the most popular male TikTokers are not known for their chiseled abs or muscular physiques. They’re defined by their baggy dark clothing, thinness, androgyny, distinct lack of muscles, and painted nails. To be sure, the e-boys of TikTok are still objectively attractive straight white males, but their aesthetic, which has since become mainstream, draws on punk, alternative, and goth subcultures. Their viral videos often feel moody, even subversive, including intense stares at the camera which highlight their jawlines and alternative, edgy background music. Their blackpainted fingernails match the aesthetic of their dark clothing and silver chains. How has TikTok, one of today’s most popular apps, managed to popularize trends that once belonged to ostracized communities? I was first introduced to the e-boys of TikTok through Chase Hudson, a seventeen-year-old with more than 12 million followers who showed up on my FYP. I immediately noticed his painted nails and middle part (which vaguely reminded me of a young Leonardo DiCaprio) and simultaneously noticed the abundance of videos made by female users dedicated to fawning over him (just search #chasehudson on TikTok). Yet for all Hudson’s popularity and physical appeal, he’s not your typical bro-y guy. He’s not sought out explicitly for his physique; he’s also known for his emotional and edgy online persona, displaying traits which don’t typically define masculinity. I am not a longtime TikTok user, nor am I wellversed in the subcultures that e-boys draw from, but Ka’Dia Dhatnubia dissects these influences in a publication of SCAD, or Savannah College of Art and Design. Despite visible similarities between e-boy
Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, I love love. Frankly, I love everything about it. I love the warm giddy feeling of having a crush, the adventure of getting to know someone, and the deep comfort of someone getting to know you better than anyone else. I love friend love and romantic love and amorphous love— but I’m getting ahead of myself. To back up a little bit: It’s Valentine’s Day, and even though this is clearly a holiday designed entirely to perpetuate capitalism and the myth that we need a partner to feel whole, I’m always a bit enamored of the way the whole world turns pink and lovely for a day. We celebrate so many things I don’t even know about (no one’s ever fully explained Arbor Day to me), so why not love? That being said, I get the skepticism around Valentine’s Day. Do we really want CVS chocolates and a cheesy Hallmark card? Why isn’t it enough to just love the people you love all year round? I propose the radical idea: Celebrate today with the ones you love, and go buck vwild! Go crazy places with the friends you adore, Skype your
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parents and catch up for hours, and maybe even stream your favorite rom-com with your boo somewhere online. Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to be all commercial and weird—this year, whether you love love or hate love, post- has the issue for you! Our Feature talks about the phenomena of soft boys and e-boys, and how the media portrays masculinity. In Narrative, one author writes a love letter to all of her friends and meditates on the evolution of friendships, and another author uses conversation hearts as prompts for vignettes about love. Finally, in Arts & Culture, we have a piece about unconventional love songs and the struggle to emote, and another about the film Uncut Gems and its exploration of the relationship between material goods, the soul, and love. Love isn’t simple—it’s complicated and exists in many forms and iterations, and there’s no better way to celebrate its multifaceted nature than by cuddling up with a copy of post-.
Love,
Nicole Fegan Narrative Managing Editor
Tinder Bio Catchphrases 1. Here for a good time, not a long time 2. *A blatant falsehood about my height* if it matters 3. Swipe right to be on my TikTok 4. Last pic is my dog 5. Super likes are accidents 6. Swipe right, I’ll swipe you into the Ratty 7. I’ll make it weird irl 8. We don’t bite…unless you like it 9. Meet me in Blueno 10. Lookin for a waifu
fashion and emo, goth, and punk trends (mostly-black aesthetics consisting of band tees, tight jeans, and lots of layers), Dhatnubia argues that an e-boy’s style is strategically fitted to accentuate their thinness, diverging from the ill-fitting and wrinkled looks of the past era. Unlike the various communities that have inspired them, e-boys are ultimately inseparable from the internet: The e stands for electronic, after all. What defines an e-boy above all, as one Vox article explains, is that he exists solely online in the form of posts, videos, and tweets. Still, although e-boys may have been conceived on the internet, they are not bound to it. A recent Vox article discusses how some of TikTok’s most popular users are branching out to pursue mainstream celebrity status. Last month, Hudson signed onto WMA, a London-based digital talent agency representing creatives found on social media. Other famous TikTokers, like sisters Charli and Dixie D’Amelio, are doing the same. Given Hudson’s popularity on Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and TikTok, it shouldn’t be difficult for him to continue his ascent within mainstream media. And, in some ways, the e-boy and soft-boy aesthetics exemplified by internet stars like Hudson has already permeated society’s ideals of masculinity. Remember in 2010 when Channing Tatum was all the rage? Or even way back in the early 2000s, when actors like Brad Pitt seemed to represent masculinity—defining society’s “ideal” male celebrity as tall, white, and athletically well-defined? TV Shows such as The Vampire Diaries and Gossip Girl prided themselves on their chiseled male casts, as did popular young adult movies including the Twilight and Hunger Games franchises. In previous decades, the media’s most popular male characters embodied conventional attractiveness through traits like extreme physical strength, a ripped physique, and wealth. Now, think about today, when one of Hollywood’s most desirable celebrities had his breakout role playing a lanky teen falling in love in 1980s Italy (shoutout to Timothée Chalamet), when many popular teen TV shows feature introverted, shy, or emotional male leads (think Otis in Sex Education, Jughead in Riverdale, and even Joe in You, in a creepy way). If the media is any indication, it would seem that society’s standards for attractive men are changing. Aforementioned Timothée Chalamet isn’t your typical objectified male celebrity, at least not according to popular expectations of a decade or two earlier: He’s skinny and androgynous, exuding a certain intellectual charm, no doubt influenced by his repeated roles as smart-alecky students. According to the dozens of articles more or less titled “So Why is Timothée Chalamet So Popular?” his allure comes largely from what he is not. He’s not stoic and emotionally unavailable, but instead appears vulnerable and open. He’s attractive, not because he’s your traditional frat boy, but more because he resembles the cute, nerdy guy in your anthro class. The popularization of increased emotional vulnerability makes for a seemingly healthy trend, to be sure, but only when it’s genuine—and in the case of the “indie soft-boy,” it almost certainly isn’t. Perhaps you know or have heard of one (I sure have), but a soft-boy is characterized by his affinity for alternative music, films, and books; his performative sensitivity and vulnerability for the purpose of receiving female attention; and, often,
his pretentious love of philosophy that he’ll discuss with girls, again for the sole intention of impressing them. Intentional or not, Chalamet’s intellectualism and preppy style represent a hallmark of the soft-boy aesthetic. In this way, the edginess and sensitivity of the e-boy and the soft-boy are not necessarily avenues of selfexpression, but rather serve as ways to garner romantic attention. This could come from a popular expectation that vulnerability and “niceness” will guarantee romantic success, as illustrated in an SNL skit entitled “Girl at a Bar,” which portrays men pretending to be feminists and boasting about their political engagement against Trump to get girls to sleep with them. Instagram’s @beam_me_ up_soft_boi account also sharply captures the superiority complex attached to soft-boys. Personally, even I have received a fair share of Tinder messages inquiring about my thoughts on “philosophy and the universe” or suggesting we cry over Frank Ocean songs. An Atlantic article published this past October points out that today’s soft-boy is not new—popular forms of white male angst can be traced back to the likes of Kurt Cobain and Leonard Cohen—but their recent resurgence has been fueled and exacerbated on the internet by Instagram, Tinder, and of course, TikTok. Though e-boys and soft-boys may appear to subvert traditional images of masculinity, the article argues that this trend continues to portray “women as emotional suppliers rather than people,” cloaking toxic masculinity in apparent sensitivity. The pattern is particularly prevalent in music, where lyrics of beloved artists such as Rex Orange County and Hobo Johnson repeatedly rely on the woman of their desires to carry out all of their emotional labor. Still, none of this is to say that truly nice guys don’t exist. In an interview with Iona Erskine, the creator of @beam_me_up_soft_bois account, she says the difference between soft-boys and genuinely vulnerable men is that “the softboi would try to lord his nicheness over people. They have blind faith that the people they want to impress will fall at their feet simply because they’re different.” Additionally, this is also not to say that soft-boys are limited to cisgender men—emotional exploitation isn’t dependent on gender, which is why the term “soft-boi” rather than “soft-boy” is sometimes used to capture the fluidity in gender expression. TikTok and other social media platforms hold immense power over popular culture; if you’re not on TikTok, you may not realize how many of today’s top songs were made viral through TikTok trends and dances. For the moment, TikTok’s popularity doesn’t seem to be letting up, but perhaps, as all trends tend to do, the faux-intellectualism and angst of e-boys and soft-boys will die out eventually. In the meantime, I’ll continue scrolling endlessly on TikTok, admiring the e-boys I encounter from afar.
To All the Friends I’ve Loved Before a series of letters on capital-L Love BY KAITLAN BUI ILLUSTRATED BY NINA YUCHI
To All the Friends I’ve Loved Before, I’m not exactly sure how to begin this letter—just like I’m not exactly sure how or why or even when we became “friends.” Was there ever an aha moment, some sort of benchmark we passed before settling into the safe shelter we now enjoy? Did you each make a conscious decision to love and keep loving? Because I can’t remember if I did. Maybe it started 14 years ago, when we cooked up “mud pancakes” and I made fun of you for not spelling “spaghetti” correctly (really sorry about that, by the way). Maybe it was the first sleepover, the first crush, the second crush, the more-than-just-a-crush. Maybe it was our silly conversations about burning cherries, or perhaps our more serious ones about God. Was it weathering the horrible high school teachers or sneakily playing unblocked computer games? The songs we belted on the bus or the stomach butterflies before our sprint competitions (oorah, Pacifica)? Cooking street tacos together or posing for pictures on rollercoasters? I could be wrong, but I think the sticky Beijing heat plastered us together. The shared Pepto-Bismol pills and the vomit by the side of the road made us laugh and let loose. Maybe it was when we prayed over our steaming bowls of mǎlātáng, or maybe it was the panicked video call at 10 p.m., me asking you for help boarding the bus because I didn’t understand Chinese well enough. Or was it the late night “sad boy hours” in our dorm’s dingy common room? The many sticky notes we left on each other’s desks? Hours of conversation over Andrews poké bowls? Falling asleep literally everywhere, crying on the bus on the way back from church, eating too much ramen, answering NYT’s “36 Questions That Lead to Love,” karaoking ’til night’s end, walking to the Nelson for our 7 a.m. “Astronaut Training”… ♥️ ♥️ ♥️ To All the Friends I’ve Loved Before, Thank you for granting me such precious snippets of time, ones I know are fully mine because I can pause and play and repeat them whenever I want. Thank you for holding me in your arms when I felt like I didn’t belong, for reminding me that I’m never alone. You metamorphosed from “what-was-your-name-again” to “are-you-free-Ineed-to-talk.” You are the best cheerleaders any human being could ever ask for.
“One of my professors said he has an Iron Man fetish.” “I just think morals are unattractive.” february 14 , 2020 5
NARRATIVE Thank you for not obsessing over commitment, for a kindness that runs deeper than a stranger’s politeness, for your spontaneity and intentionality and forgiveness. You’ve taught me that friendship is both beauty and brokenness. Thank you for being people I can come back to, think about, and be grateful for—even if we don’t talk as much as we used to. You’ve taught me that life has its seasons, and sometimes the leaves that fall don’t grow back. That’s okay, though. The tree still stands. In short, thank you for being complicated and simple all at once, for not having a precise beginning and ending. You have managed to outstrip linear time in the same way you have outstripped age and physicality and distance. If only we approached romantic love like we approach each other, right? Cool and calm and casual. “Cupid is in the air” is just another way of saying “lonely college kids wishing for a four-letter feeling,” because when you’re 18-23, Valentine’s Day is a reminder that “you should just shoot your shot.” But let’s be honest here: You taught me that every day is a shot at capital-L Love. Ours is a romance of comradery, constancy, trust— which I’d venture to say is the best kind there is. Maybe we shouldn’t approach this Valentine’s Day kind of “love” any differently at all. ♥️ ♥️ ♥ To All the Friends I’ve Loved Before, It makes me kind of sad to think that you all don’t know each other, because you would really just hit it off and then we’d be a glittering plexus of friendships on friendships. But see, you’ve taught me this too: It’s okay to not have everything at once, it’s okay to be silent for a while—you’re not going anywhere. We might not work at some point, but that’s fine, too; we’ll just slip into something softer then. We can move on, even if it stings at first, and we can make friends with other people in other places without ever breaking the integrity and the depth of what we had. For now, I’ll just be grateful for the things you do with me—for accompanying me to go rock climbing late at night, for planning the best “surprise” birthday party ever, for blocking off some of your Google Calendar to enjoy a Ratty brunch with me. Thank you for FaceTiming despite the three-hour (or 16-hour) time difference, for reading every word of my poetry, for sending over song recommendations and giving me laptop stickers and asking me how my week was. It’s crazy that we’ve come this far. And I earnestly hope we go even further, but I won’t push or pressure you into it. It’s okay if we don’t work out at some point, even if that hurts for a while. Friendship is more than just expectation, and you are worth more to me than my pride—worth more than my need to feel needed. ♥️ ♥️ ♥
To All the Friends I’ve Loved Before, I loved you before and I love you now and I probably won’t ever stop loving you, because that’s how real capital-L Love works. Whatever happens, just know that you are as eternal as the memories we’ve made together. I’m sorry if I don’t tell you that enough. ♥️ ♥️ ♥️ To All the Friends I’ve Loved Before, My love for you is not like a rose, because the majority of roses end up at either Walgreens or Costco and are sniffed relentlessly by the general population. My love for you is not like the ocean, either—because, geez, pollution. No, my love for you is like this letter, which, even if forgotten, will always exist in some deep dark corner of the internet. Just kidding. You know I love you more than Google loves big data. You’re tucked into a corner of my heart, which is to say, forever. I hope you know that. Much Love (and I mean the capital-L kind), Kaitlan
Sweet Hearts
candy that does the talking BY DANA SCHNEIDER ILLUSTRATED BY IRIS XIE
The candy heart was originally meant to be a lozenge. The trend of the time (the 1840s) were these small medicinal candies to ease your aches and pains. Simple, sweet, and easy as that. Candy hearts became medicine for a different type of pain—saying a sweet thing out loud that can be gobbled up impolitely. The first ones weren’t hearts at all, but scalloped shapes with full meandering sentences. Stuff like “How long shall I have to wait? Please be considerate.” Eventually, they decided to be more concise. To cut to the chase and put it in a heart-shaped case. Candy hearts are simple: sugar, corn syrup, gelatin, gum, coloring, and artificial flavoring. Gelatin is an animal byproduct derived from tissue. It gives candy its form, its fluff. To be more on the nose, it’s bone dust. Pink colored flavored bone dust is wetted and put into molds, hundreds of thousands of sweet hearts pressed between machine, sheet, and mat. Ready to be pressed one last time before they are pressed into your beloved’s palm with phrases like… EVER AFTER My favorite valentine I’ve ever gotten was written on the back of a tomato soup label, and it wasn’t really a valentine, and it wasn’t really for me. You may know that
soup labels dissolve easily when exposed to water. You may also know that it is often hard to say the things we mean because they come out flatter in words than they are in our bodies. What if we thought to write to each other as if the words were dissolving, as if we could try it again, and again, and again… LOVE BIRD When I say I love bats, I am thinking that they are me and that I am trying to love that, too. How they communicate with the world so that they, the bats, might move through it—sending clicks ahead of themselves, moving the air gently with the force of their bodies, sending out waves of sound that wash over each other and the trees and the cement and the empty air. It’s such an elegant and efficient way to be exactly as they are, to be bats. CHARM ME There is something that happens between the hesitation of my hand and your shoulder and their first, final, fleeting contact. That something is a rule we have silently made and unmade—a glowing necklace, cracked and set alive with phosphorescent purple, around our necks as we crane them up to watch where the stars would be if we weren’t glowing so brightly, for this simple touch that has opened us up to the night. HOME SOON Mom loves flamingos. Always has. Most people know that they get their pink color from the food they eat. They chew with their head hanging from their long hose of a neck—things like shrimp, algae, crustaceans. Something happens between their beaks and their stomachs and all that ocean matter turns their bodies pink. Pink, like the last color the sky lets out before it goes dark. Pink, like Rihanna’s dress at the 2015 Grammy Awards. Pink, like a Hostess Sno Ball before you bite in and realize the cake is chocolate. Pink, like flamingos who most people know are pink from their diet but fewer realize are guardian angels. NATURE LOVER Sometimes when I look at you I have the sensation of wrecking, the blurred slipping forward into thinking how I might protect myself, how I might survive after this thing has stopped crashing. We drive two tons of metal at breakneck speeds and yawn while doing it. In February, a deer came barreling into the side of our jade green minivan, crunching the door on my side. It got up and ran back into the woods. The glass of the window glittered. MAGIC I’m picturing a slightly chipped pink and indigo shell blushing, lying on a clean porcelain sink. I’m picturing coniferous plants dropping their fragrant needles onto the earth so that your feet have a carpet to walk on. I’m picturing freshly washed hair. I’m picturing you smiling to yourself as you drive along the highway at sunset, the birds silently flocking away from the tree line. UR A QT With that said, you are very pretty. COOL DUDE A limb of afternoon sun is reaching its way into the bar, despite the owner’s best efforts to keep his patrons unencumbered by day. The barkeep is making his daughter a pink lemonade, swirling grenadine into Minute Maid. She’s doing her math homework at a table in the corner, and her dad checks over her shoulder, telling her she’s smarter than the average bear. ME + YOU Windmills are cutting the pastel winter blue sky
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ARTS & CULTURE on an afternoon in Providence, Rhode Island. They look like pizza cutters. I’m watching an ASMR video of sharp metal against soft dough. I’m reading a nickel paperback romance by an author who’s talking a lot about canines against skin. The blades in the machine press down against the gelatinous dough of the soonto-be candy hearts. The molar bites through a sugared xoxo. The machine presses into the expansive dough, leaving only pastel hearts behind. The body cleaves in two, to better envelop you. After many years together, we began to reminisce on what we called our “first impression” of one another. This is what we do: We press against each other to see what shape we might leave behind. The cutter kisses the dough to see itself again, and again, and again… PURR FECT Don’t trust men who hate cats. They only love things that will come when they call. BE MINE I’m slurping down a Cherry Coke faster than I should be—sipping and gratitude are counterintuitive. There’s no time. More than 10,000 Coke products are consumed every second. We have to sell ourselves as quickly. By the time I have arrived at the end of my sentence, your eyes are resting slightly above me, like the world’s most interesting TV show is happening up there. There’s something like 80,000 calories in a human body. A horse contains 200,000, and a bear three times as much. The world is a slip, and our attention goes with it. Love is a grasp. Hold it, hold it.
Bad Romance
on unconventional love songs BY JULIAN TOWERS
John Lennon’s “Oh Yoko!” for instance, is one of the most musically sublime compositions I know, and I can hardly listen to it. Lennon is so confident in the passion he feels that it becomes sexual, instinctive, unthinking. He absent-mindedly calls out her name in the bath; his “love” is enough to literally “turn [Yoko] on.” It’s too easy. Too happy. I’m not there yet. No, like an asshole, the love songs that are all about the struggle of declaring passion are the ones I can most relate to. Sometimes they’re about how hard it is to even find passion to declare. Here are three of my favorites for Valentine’s Day Listening.
ILLUSTRATED BY TALIA MERMIN
Sincere, unaugmented displays of affection make me squirm—they always have. For a while that was probably okay. Most little kids never like to see their parents kiss, for instance. When my two siblings and I added up to a collective age of 12, my parents could deploy their lip-lock as a kind of dark magic—a parenting hack to end arguments and silence temper tantrums. At the sight of their embrace, we’d set our differences aside and form a unified choir of “gross!” Today, we’re a collective age of 61, and I’m the only one who checks Twitter when Mom gives Dad a peck. I wish vaguely Freudian discomfort was all there was to it. Alas, I find I am simply unable to express sincere love, and the ease with which it comes to others makes me feel like an alien. It is, for instance, impossible for friends and family to get me to say “love you too” on the phone. Usually, I’ll hang up before I need to. My therapists have told me that sarcasm is an entrenched part of my personality, and that this is simply a defense mechanism to protect my identity. I’m not so sure. Each of the numerous attempts I’ve made at romantic relationships with other human beings has likewise crumbled around the third month—in other words, right around the time when she expects me to, y’know, emote. It’s come to the point where, on particularly bitter nights, I’ve found myself stalking FAQ pages about aromanticism. Complicating matters, I’m also a dyed-in-the-wool, too-far-gone music nerd, and 95% of pop music is love songs. How do I cope? Well, most of the time, love songs pivot around an unnamed, possibly nonexistent “boy,” “girl,” “you,” or “baby.” When “Just The Way You Are” hits the minivan speakers, I’m okay. It’s the love songs that are naked, unguarded, and very clearly addressed to another identifiable person that provoke discomfort.
“Wild Horses”—The Rolling Stones The Mick Jagger of “Wild Horses” hasn’t necessarily been a bad boyfriend. It’d be more accurate to say he’s been complacent. At the absolute worst, you might call him neglectful. We don’t hear a lot about him, admittedly, but things are ending, so clearly he’s fucked up somehow. Yet at first blush it appears there’s little he could have actively done wrong: He always brought you the “things you wanted,” and he’s never felt “bitter” or “treated you unkind.” But that’s shallow, basic, and you needed more than that. You were dying right under his nose and you needed somebody ready to save you. History tells us Jagger wrote the song about his ex-flame Marianne Faithfull—a minor celebrity (relative to Jagger) who spiraled into rock ‘n’ roll drug devastation before Jagger realized what was happening and recognized his own inadvertent role as enabler. Now, at the moment of collapse, when the easy, self-preserving thing would be to just back away and claim his “freedom,” Jagger stands his ground. Enter the wild horses of the title—a frankly obvious metaphor for the ravages of, uh, wild living, but damn if it’s not heart-melting as Jagger fights them off. The tragedy is that the beasts will drag him away, but he still dives into a struggle he can’t win. It’s a too-late declaration of love via self-lacerating retribution—it means both nothing, and yet, somehow, everything. “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”—Bob Dylan Bob Dylan is in a rather luckless position: He needs to convince you that he’s not an asshole. This is a difficult task, because he himself is unconvinced that he is not an asshole. “Situations have ended sad / Relationships have all been bad.” Fuck and run—that’s his pattern. You know it, he knows it, and after a final, particularly meaningless coital blowout, you’re about to hit the road
for good. He calls after you; you could have predicted as much. But it’s not to tell you to stay, not to promise things will be better. Dylan knows there’s no hope for that; the song will end and he’ll never see you again. But he wants you to leave knowing something here was different—you were different, you had the chance to change him. “This time ‘round it’s more correct / Right on target, so direct / You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go.” It’s a testament to the dickish character of Dylan that the disclosure of his feelings could come as a shock, something impossible for either party to believe. And herein lies the song’s haunting ambiguity; Dylan is going to be lonely not because you won’t be there, but because the asshole he’s stuck with is himself: “You’re gonna make me wonder what I’m doin’ / Staying far behind without you.” Does Bob really love you, or is he just a self-hating aromantic? Was what he felt a true spark, or merely a kink in your interaction that emphasized the emptiness of his ways? The only way to know would be if you stuck around, but why would you do that? Bob’s the boy who orgasmed Wolf, essentially, and the extent to which I relate to him terrifies me nearly as much as it breaks my heart. “Thinkin Bout You”—Frank Ocean Frank Ocean doesn’t know how you feel about him. That’s scary, and what’s worse is he hardly knows how he feels about you. He has, it bears emphasis, been thinking about you—the song he wrote is not called “conclusions about you” or “idle reflections about you.” These are serious thoughts that have produced minimal answers. But Ocean has thought enough to know something has to change. It’s his courage to make it that renders this song one of the few truly moving love songs I know. Unlike the others I’ve listed, it’s a song rooted in a specific time and place, even if many of its crucial details are fuzzy. We know you’re in Ocean’s room. Maybe you’ve been sleeping with him for a while. Maybe you’re just friends. In any case, it seems you’ve been here before and the context then was much less…emotionally naked. Shit’s a mess. All visual evidence would indicate the boy has had a rough few nights. In inviting you into this embarrassing situation, Ocean has taken the first step on the path to complete vulnerability. Immediately, he trips. The tension is unbearable, so he tries to ease it with a stupid joke about the weather. This goes so poorly he makes another one about having a beach house in Idaho. Finally, he just has to say it: He doesn’t know what you’re thinking, but he’s february 14 , 2020 7
ARTS&CULTURE been thinking about forever. Though Ocean doesn’t frame this as an ultimatum, it clearly is one. Either you feel like him and you’ll follow him into that forever, or everything ends here. There’s no going back. And, crucially, we don’t find out which path you head down. Ocean ends the song dangling in the same awkward pocket it opens in; it’s the love song as unanswered textparagraph, left on “read” for 25 minutes.
The Whole Universe In Opals uncut gems and love in the commercial age BY GRIFFIN PLAAG
Film nerds, we’ve reason to rejoice; regardless of what you think of Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite, it’s undeniable that its best picture win represents a watershed moment for the arbitrary meritocracy that is the Academy Awards. In the future, every movie-going ingenue who takes their first trip down the list of best picture winners will be forced to watch at least one subtitled, non-Englishlanguage film, and a fucking brilliant one at that. Best picture accuracy notwithstanding, though, I still think 2020 will go down as the year when one of the best films in recent memory got passed over as industry retribution for the likes of Jack and Jill and Click; I’m talking, of course, about the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, and Adam Sandler’s searing performance as beleaguered diamond dealer Howard Ratner. With the Oscars in the rearview and Valentine’s Day upon us, I’d like to posit that Uncut Gems is a love story. I don’t mean that you should show your date that brilliantly uncomfortable scene in which Howie sexts his girlfriend from her closet, where he’s hiding unbeknownst to her while watching her snap nudes on a couch. What I mean instead is that Uncut Gems exemplifies the pitfalls of romance in an increasingly commercialized and alienated world. Beneath the glitz and bustle of Uncut Gems—the hectic menagerie of the New York jewelry scene, the vibrancy of the titular gem’s ethereal blues, the near-constant noise (the Safdies refuse to filter out or lower background sounds within the audio mix)— lies a tender story about what the pursuit of wealth can do to love, an existential meditation on how to find our humanity while perpetually immersed in an economic
landscape that would rather we forgot about it entirely. The film’s opening seems like the place to start; it begins with a sequence of Ethiopian miners extracting the gem around which the film revolves, working in excruciating conditions at constant risk of injury. The Safdies herein contextualize the gem’s value in its broader history—one of exploitation and greed. Then, in a decision sure to drive away any of the critical-praise-curious grandparents who have missed the memo on the actual content of Uncut Gems (it’s a film in which Adam Sandler impassionedly screams “Go fuck The Weeknd” with a straight face—what were they expecting?), the Safdies go straight for the experimental jugular and spend at least a minute inside the gem before seamlessly transitioning within the molecular setting to a shot of the inside of Howard Ratner’s colon. It’s a funny move, for sure—you get lost in the crystalline beauty of the cells and feel a bit jarred when you realize you’ve just been entranced by Adam Sandler’s inner organs. But it’s also an important one, because it establishes an equivalency between the jewel and the body. In a sense, Ratner has become the gem. It’s as though the camera were trying to thrust the question rudely before our eyes: What is the difference between a man and his wealth? I suppose one could have a more pessimistic reading of the film, and I suppose they would be justified in it. After all, things don’t exactly end well for Howard Ratner. But there are fleeting elements of Uncut Gems that suggest to me a more positive reading, the most notable being Howie’s relationship with the aforementioned Julia. She is, in effect, Howie’s mistress; he’s estranged from his wife Dinah and spends the majority of his time with Julia at the family apartment. Some people have suggested that Julia’s something of an antagonist in the film (if you were wondering who Sandler’s screaming “Go fuck The Weeknd” at, it’s her, moments after he catches her fooling around with The Weeknd—yeah, seriously, The Weeknd playing The Weeknd—in a bathroom), but I think exactly the opposite. Indeed, Julia is the key to the love story of Uncut Gems, or, if you will, the key to understanding what it has to tell us about love. She and Howie share an obvious connection: They’re both risk-takers, they both enjoy the adrenaline rush of what they do, and—as the sexting sequence, which ends with Howie bursting out of the closet and surprising the delighted Julia, indicates—they’re both enamored of each other’s
vanity. In many respects, they’re a perfect match. But, throughout the film, Howie seems distanced from Julia. When he catches her feeling up The Weeknd, he becomes incensed with her, forgetting that the reason she’s talking to the rapper at all is that she’s working on selling him a studded necklace of Michael Jackson’s likeness on a cross. After this, Julia attempts to win him back, and he throws a smoothie at her. Then, when Howie’s at his lowest, Julia finds him in his office and shows him her new tattoo (yeah, it’s his name—I didn’t say Julia always makes good life decisions). And, at long last, when Howie’s managed to complete the sale of the eponymous gem to Celtics superstar Kevin Garnett (who, it bears mentioning, is a shockingly competent actor, even if he is playing himself ), he decides to take the money Garnett has given him and make a desperate gamble that he knows could cost him his life instead of settling down with Julia and walking away unscathed. It seems evident that Howie’s conception of value is empty; he’s more attracted to the accumulation of wealth than he is to human connection. And indeed, the promise of this wealth consistently interferes with his ability to find romantic happiness, even with a person who appears to share his values and to have a similar interest in highstakes jewelry dealing (or at least the accompanying rush). Despite what the skeptics say, I really do think Julia’s in love with Howie. She isn’t using him for his money, as he often suggests—it’s the other way around. So sure, Uncut Gems asks us to examine the ethics of capitalism through the lurking specter of African labor regimes and montages of jewels interspersed with destitute workers. It does a great job of it. But I also think it asks us to examine ourselves and seeks to remind us that love is not about assets or material goods, but about a willingness to leave them behind. “You’re my home,” Julia says to Howie as he sobs in his office chair. “You could come to me.” But Howie doesn’t. He’s become the gem. He’s become his desire for it. As Valentine’s Day dawns, and as we all continue to exist on the threshold of entrance into the same capitalist hellscape that Howie inhabits, here’s a reminder: Don’t become the gem. And if you’re feeling up to it, give Uncut Gems a watch. You’ll learn about the grand tradition of global capitalism and its potential to ruin lives. You’ll learn about what we pay when we put our success before the people we love. And if you’re not interested in that, you’ll get to see Adam Sandler in a fistfight with The Weeknd. You really can’t lose.
“You can’t turn the corner without seeing advertisements for roses and dinner specials (okay, maybe it is a capitalist scheme).” –Sarah Lettes, “20GAYTEEN” 2.8.19
“After all, where there are rocks, there’s romance.” –J. B. Novak, “romance, riches, and rocks” 2.8.18 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Amanda Ngo FEATURE Managing Editor Liza Edwards-Levin Section Editors Alice Bai Erin Walden Staff Writers Gaya Gupta Anna Harvey NARRATIVE Managing Editor Nicole Fegan Section Editors Michelle Liu Minako Ogita ILLUSTRATED BY MADDY CHERR
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Staff Writers Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Danielle Emerson Jordan Hartzell Naomi Kim Anneliese Mair Kahini Metha ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Griffin Plaag Section Editors Olivia Howe Maddy McGrath Staff Writers Rob Capron David Kleinman Julian Towers
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HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Gaby Treviño LAYOUT Co-Chiefs Amy Choi Nina Yuchi Designers Joanne Han Steve Ju Iris Xie WEB MASTER Jeff Demanche