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In This Issue

Bootleg Access

DAnielle Emerson 4

Glaciers Before They're Gone

Ethan Taswell 2 Kahini Mehta 4

To All the Boys Who Screwed Her (Over) Julian Towers 5

The Year with No Host Nicole Fegan 6

the Clouds

Ascending Through

postCover by Stephanie Wu

FEB 22

VOL 23 —

ISSUE 16

FEATURE

Glaciers Before They're Gone A Hiker's Eulogy to 10,000 Years of Ice

By Ethan Taswell

T

Illustrated by Soeun Yoon

e Moeka o Tuawe/Fox Glacier, Westland Tai Poutini National Park, New Zealand Last Year, 28 percent melted Fox Glacier, a paradoxical drainage of ice some eight miles long, alights from the airy western slopes of New Zealand’s highest mountains (where it belongs), cedes to gravity, and allows itself to spill downward through valley and ravine before arriving, strikingly uninvited, in a rainforest just above sea level.

Standing before its terminal face, confronted with substantially more ice than I had ever seen, it was hard not to marvel at its sheer mass—which is funny given that Fox, like most glaciers, is considerably smaller

than it has ever been. The park rangers drive this point home with a littering of road signs starting miles away, delineating the glacier’s past extents. After driving three miles beyond the line of 19th century extent and walking the extra mile past the terminus of the glacier in 2000 to reach what remains, it became quite clear that what appears as monstrous today is, on the whole, rather pathetic.

Standing there, I was nagged by the thought that by attempting to see the glacier while I still could, I was the reason it was disappearing. Part of it, anyway.

Tourism accounts for nearly one-tenth of global carbon emissions, with the bulk of that pollution

coming from transoceanic flights—precisely my means of travel to New Zealand from the opposite side of the world. Did I deserve to see Fox Glacier if I was complicit in its retreat? I stood there in a landscape of indescribable hardness, fluidly sculpted by the glacier, and I was selfish and I was angry and I was awed. I watched it melt.

Conness Glacier, Inyo National Forest, California 2012, 90 percent melted According to the United States Geological Survey, the vast majority of Americans have never seen a glacier. They are something to be read about in newspapers or ogled at on the green screen of nature

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, Going outside is a fallacy. Touring families traverse our campus, bringing with them small children who scurry under our legs and try to steal our $4.89 caramel shot lattes. I prefer to spend my days in solitude, musing on the fierce inevitability of my death.

But this morning, my mounting hunger forced me to eat at the Sharpe Refectory. I noticed that Brown had developed a student magazine while I’d been inside—“post-”.

Turning its pages, I accidentally sliced my finger upon their serrated paper edge. As crimson blood trickled down, highlighting certain letters and leaving others ominously untouched, I wondered if this could be a sign: Might these words predict my demise?

The first article I read concerned the slow, devastating disappearance of glaciers from the earth; that sucks, but it has also taken centuries.

Was it possible I was intended to endure as long?

But the next piece, an exploration of past friendship, reminded me that humans are not glaciers;

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our relationships are transient, fragile—and sometimes we get decapitated by elevator doors.

The trail of spilled plasma then led me to twin pieces about staged entertainment: musicals on Broadway and The Oscars at the Dolby Auditorium. My thoughts on these were less existential, though I recalled that Abraham Lincoln was shot at a theater and how that might be the way I go.

Finally, I reached terminus—the end of the magazine. Awaiting me was the story of one girl’s obsession with something called How To Train Your Dragon. Though it had dominated her life, she wrote that now she was ready to move on. I nearly dropped my muffin. Dragons are capitalist lies sold to nerds, but if it was possible for them to let go, maybe I could forget about my own death.

I stepped into the sunshine and waved hello to a small child.

Wow, what an incredible magazine. I’m going to start waking up earlier so I can chase the news truck.

Julian

Managing Editor of Arts & Culture

Songs to Power Walk to Class to, According to post1.

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“Strut” - The Cheetah Girls (Celina) “Harlem Shuffle” - Bob & Earl (Kathy) “Rosa Parks” - OutKast (Griffin) “Come On Eileen” - Dexys Midnight Runners (Nicole) "Hoover" - Yung Lean (Julian) “Misery Business” - Paramore (Amanda) “Octet in E-Flat Major, Op. 20” - Felix Mendelssohn (Sara & Anita) “Once in a Lifetime” - Talking Heads (Nicole) “There for You” - Martin Garrix ft. Troye Sivan (Kathy) “Pretender” - AJR (Sydney)

documentaries, but not regarded—as they should be— as sources of drinking water or founts of irrigation and electricity. Abstract, unreachable, they are to be discussed with scientific reverence but not witnessed.

For most of my life, I was part of this silent majority.

The first time I hiked a glacier, I didn’t even know I was looking at one.

I was a teenager, hiking in the High Sierra, east of Yosemite. I was with my dad and my brother, with the breeding mosquitoes of early August and the black bear trailing the lakeside behind us. We were on the trail to Mt. Conness, past Saddlebag and Greenstone Lakes, to the alpine cirque hanging above at 11,000 feet.

California’s drought had yet to settle into its fiveyear residency and, despite the late summer sun, the snowpack was brimming. The bowl we were in, vacant aside from our echoes, was ramparted by a parabola of granite that rose for another 2,000 feet. Suncupped snowfields mottled these slopes, cementing at improbable angles to what I assumed was the talus below.

It was only later, while crunching on a post-hike carrot and consulting the topographic map in the parking lot, that I realized the basin I had been in less than a half-day earlier was host to Conness Glacier, the largest glacier in the northern Sierra Nevada.

Sourdough Glacier, Bridger-Teton National Forest, Wyoming 2014, 42 percent melted Probably America’s most famous collection of glaciers, Glacier National Park is a bit of a misnomer, and not just because only two dozen glaciers remain of the original 150. Even before they had melted, Glacier was not the Lower 48’s most glacially active region— not even the most glacially active region in the Rocky Mountains; Wyoming’s Wind River Range claims that prize with over 100 glaciers remaining, covering 10,000 acres in ice.

A few years after traveling to Conness, I went backpacking in the Wind River Range, commonly called the Winds, a thoroughly remote piece of wilderness the size of Rhode Island. Accessing the high peaks of the Winds is hard work. Here, in the great upthrust of the Continental Divide, the air is thin, the topography scales grandly, and the weather is unforgiving yearround. After juddering down a four-wheel drive track for two hours, I shouldered a 55-pound pack and trod off from the headwaters of the Green River for a week in the backcountry with my father and brother. On our second day we met a camo-clad man named Dean, a Wyoming Game and Fish employee who, accompanied by his dog, was tracking bighorn sheep. We saw no one else for the rest of the week.

We did see glaciers. After following Clear Creek Canyon to Slide Creek, crossing the saddle, and carrying over the avalanche debris, we came to stand at the edge of the proglacial Baker Lake, cradled in the flanks of 13,120-foot Klondike Peak. A break in the hail afforded a view due south toward J Glacier, a solitary, shimmering fish scale of an ice patch perched on the mountain’s distant face. But Baker’s source loomed much closer: Sourdough Glacier.

Glaciers are often called rivers of ice, and it was not until I saw Sourdough, uncloaked by snow, that I understood why. Some glaciers, like those of Alaska’s western fjords or the Karakoram, are so long and gentle and consistently fed by tributaries

that they resemble great continental rivers—frozen Colorados or Columbias. But this glacier was not such an outflow drifting unhurriedly seaward. Sourdough bounded downstream, a cataract of jumbled ice blocks, thousands of broken igloos hurled below by an angry mountain. Testament to its unrelenting flow, the depths of untold crevasses fissured the surface, itself a strange milky blue. I stood there for a minute or an hour, huddled in my ski jacket and staring wordlessly until the summer sun was rudely shoved aside and another hailstorm swept in.

Nisqually Glacier, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington 2016, 26 percent melted Six hundred miles northwest of Wind River. A couple years later. Ideal mountain weather. These mountains—the Cascade Volcanoes, North Cascade Range, and Olympics—harbor six times more ice than Wyoming. The elevation of the peaks, their high latitudes, and the near-constant precipitation from the winter months steadfastly resolve themselves into hundreds of glaciers across Washington state, more than anywhere else in America aside from Alaska.

Sun-drenched, shorts against snow, I was ascending alongside one.

Mount Rainier, by far the most prominent peak in the continental United States, is attempted from a base camp on the stratovolcano’s southeast shoulder.

I was on my way to this camp via the Muir Snowfield, a 3,000-foot headwall rising out of the wildflowers of Paradise meadow. Directly east of Muir Snowfield is Cowlitz Glacier, frequently hidden from hikers by the spine of Anvil Rock. To the west, the snowfield drops off vertiginously into the canyon of Nisqually Glacier, a massive tongue that collects itself from the crater’s rim and tumbles into upper icefall before eventually coursing briskly through another four miles of igneous rock.

Part of the Nisqually’s draw is its visibility to tourists who make the drive to the Paradise Inn. But seeing the glacier is not the same as hearing the glacier.

Climbing a 30-degree slope is a rhythmic process: the metronomic scuff of boots on snow, the steady pant of your climbing partners struggling against the lactic acid in their thighs. As I made my way alongside the Nisqually, this rhythm was periodically interrupted by a cavernous wail—deep, resounding, speaking on geologic time, unconcerned with onlookers.

Placing the exact source of this sound proved impossible. Each time the glacier creaked and groaned in protest against the sun, there was never a hint of rockfall, calving, or flash flood to explain the emanation. Organ-like, each crevasse its own pipe, the glacier played disjointed and inharmonious notes without fear of discovery. For most of the day I labored upward, humming to the tune of splintering ice somewhere near me, only occasionally stopping to make sure that an extra-large rumble didn’t signify an impending avalanche.

Haupapa/Tasman Glacier, Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park, New Zealand Last Year, 17 percent melted New Zealand, 32 times smaller than the contiguous United States, has 10 times its number of glaciers. The nation’s largest, Tasman Glacier, runs for 15 miles from the heights of the Southern Alps to the relative flatlands of the Mackenzie Basin. Three miles wide

and 2,000 feet thick, the glacier single-handedly covers over 25,000 acres in permanent ice sheet, nearly three times the area of ice cover in the whole Wind River Range.

After a serpentine drive along the Tasman River, the road comes to an end behind a hillock of rubble, the glacier’s terminal moraine. Scrambling up this 300-foot tall debris pile provides your first view of the Tasman Glacier and its terminal lake, where meltwater runs off the glacier and pools behind the moraine. The lake is huge, over five miles long and thousands of feet deep, with boat tours consistently milling around the most recent crop of icebergs. The lake is also brand new; before 1990, there was only ice.

Few people make it onto the Tasman, and even fewer to the glacier’s eastern flank, which requires boating across the terminal lake. But in New Zealand, a case of beer is a valid form of currency. And on a misty fall morning, it bought me and a friend a ride from a cruise operator across to the Tasman’s lateral moraine, where I splashed off the bow, wet my Gore-Tex through knee-high runoff, and began picking my way across shoreline boulders.

That night, we pitched our tent by a pool of meltwater on the moraine overlooking the terminal face of the glacier. Tasman’s calving face rises 160 feet tall, an ice wall of skyscraping proportions. Though the surface of the lower glacier is covered in rock, the ice of the terminus is exposed. It is not a uniform white.

Marbled geodesically, Tasman’s ice is a candied rock, carbonic striations banding in one spot, while the royal blues crystallize elsewhere.

In the morning we ventured onto the glacier— the first time in my life I had actually stepped atop one. Each crevasse was no longer a line of shadow in the distance but now a very present danger, a potential plunge dozens of feet into a canyon of eerie translucence. And when we emerged back on the moraine—exclamatory, exhilarated, and a bit relieved to be walking on solid rock—I noticed that the entire face of the glacier had peeled off during the intervening hours and was floating helplessly: hundreds of housesized wontons floating in a glacial soup, destined to warm, to melt, and to be swept away.

Te Moeka o Tuawe/Fox Glacier, Westland Tai Poutini National Park, New Zealand This Year I returned to Fox Glacier a month ago, during summer in the southern hemisphere. Not quite one year had elapsed since I last visited. The glacier was still there. It was still impressively large, a frozen tendril reaching from mountains to sea. And while I stood rooted before the terminal face, still dwarfed by ice and rock, it was nevertheless impossible to miss the reduction in the glacier’s mass, another row of ice cubes taken out of the tray.

On the opposite side of the world, on the roof of America, the same is happening. My dad spent a summer in the Winds 30 years before I went there with him. We stood on the same ridgelines. We largely saw the same views, glaciers included. Thirty years from now, if I take my son or daughter back, they will stand, a speck on a summit, and see mountains and canyons and rivers and cliffs; they will see the sun rise (still east) and the sun set (still west); they will see bighorn sheep and wildflowers and alpine lakes. And I will point toward Sourdough Glacier, but they will see no ice.

“Oh, I have a fun story about my birth.”

“I haven’t matured since I was three years old.”

Febryary 22, 2018 3

NARRATIVE

Bootleg Access A Door to Musical Theatre

By Danielle Emerson Illustrated by Caroline Hu Picture this—a young Native girl sitting in her bedroom quietly cursing her limited internet connection. She scrolls through YouTube, clicking on videos with bizarre names; "Autumn going to bed (definitely not the Deaf West production of Spring)," "don’t do drugs part 1,” "Mean Girls Make Pink Slime On Wednesdays!!! (SHOCKING)."

Yes, this girl is scrolling through YouTube’s mini collection of illegal theatre bootlegs. And she does not regret it—in fact, she revels in it.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, this girl is me. Growing up on the reservation involved living through a variety of unique experiences—walking down to the flea market, feeding Rez dogs table scraps, and breathing in the soft scent of burning cedar mixed with frybread grease from dinner. I love these experiences. They’ve turned me into the person I am today. But there are also experiences I’ve missed, things I’ve never gotten to do.

I watched with envy as parents in films went out to Broadway shows every other evening with toddlers and reluctant teens in tow. My frustration was intense—I wanted those experiences. I craved those experiences. But they never came. My life was limited to dirt, yucca plants, and steamed corn stew.

My first exposure to musical theatre came from my mother’s scratched disc of Phantom of the Opera.

I loved it. I carried around a beaten CD player, thick and covered in peeling VeggieTales stickers. As my obsession grew, I craved visual content. Thankfully, Phantom was adapted into a movie, and it hooked me instantly. I watched that movie over a hundred times (no exaggeration). Soon, my tastes expanded into The Sound of Music, Hairspray, and Into the Woods.

Thankfully, each of these productions was adapted into a film as well that was, by most means, more accessible.

This luxury lasted until my interests shifted to a new musical—Spring Awakening. There is no movie adaption for this production. At first, I accepted this and focused on the soundtrack instead. But soon, a craving developed. I wanted to see the set, the actors, the costumes, the blocking. I wanted to see the lighting and hear the band. I wanted to sit in a theatre and see the show play out on a stage. I wanted the full experience. But as a girl from the Rez, such desires were far out of reach.

That is, until I opened YouTube.

The internet is a pool of entertainment and information. You can find cooking videos, craft DIYs,

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and college lifestyle vlogs—the whole world at your fingertips. So, it’s no surprise that I found an online community providing the theatre experiences I craved. I watched these videos late into the night, squinting at the small screen of my cell phone. I sat at lunch tables, shushing friends who attempted to talk over Ben Platt’s opening monologue in Dear Evan Hansen. I walked through parking lots lipsynching along to the songs in Rent. And as I applied to colleges and the stress of essay-writing became overwhelming, I turned to Waitress, tearing up at the tender moments and smiling softly at Sara Bareilles’s witty writing.

And I’ll admit, nine times out of ten, the video quality is awful. Shaky video footage, blurry and out of focus with inaudible dialogue and fuzzy pictures.

But bootlegs became an integral part of my theatre experience. In some ways, they were my only link to an actual one. There weren’t many theatrical performances on the reservation. I was alone in my obsession.

But the YouTube bootleg community gave me a place to channel my ever-growing interests.

It provided me access to what otherwise would have remained out of reach. Not everyone has the opportunity or privilege to attend one of these shows.

Not everyone has the time or the resources to spend on travel or hotels. Bootlegs combat these disparities; they are the first step to equal access in theatre viewing. Who are we to deny access to those of lowincome status? Who are we to deny access to those in rural areas? Who are we to deny access to young teens across the U.S. with no way to New York City?

Bootlegs shouldn’t have to exist on YouTube as illegal entities. Performances should be made readily available and distributed by a streaming service or as DVDs. Shows should be professionally recorded and shared, not contained and sheltered. These are experiences everyone should have the opportunity to partake in, whether that’s in the comfort of their own homes or within the theatre itself. Of course, such a platform can’t exist without the aid of artists, so we must ensure they are supported—whether that’s through purchasing a CD or blogging about their latest professional advancements.

Whenever homework becomes too much, or I’m looking for a good distraction, I turn to YouTube’s comforting collection of bootlegs. As a low-income Native girl from the Rez, I might never get the chance to see an actual Broadway show, but recordings, especially if shot professionally, can compensate for that.

Now if you’ll excuse me, a video titled “not a musical about a founding father Act 1” is calling me. I must answer, because who knows when YouTube will take it down.

To All the Boys Who Screwed Her (Over) From Her Best Friend

By Kahini Mehta Illustrated by amy choi

My best friend and I, we were transcendent. She transcended boundaries, and I transcended borders to be her best friend. My other friends hated it.

“I just don’t agree with her lifestyle,” one of them told me one day. I told her she didn’t have to.

My best friend acted like she didn’t care.

Most people still think she doesn’t. *** She called me up crying one night. “He called me his sex toy,” she said, heartache in her voice. “He told everyone I slept with him. I didn’t sleep with him.”

Try telling that to anyone else. When you’re the type of person who enjoys having sex, few will ever doubt that you did.

“I loved him.”

I stayed silent. I didn’t know what to say to that. *** Another time, she called me up drunk.

“He kissed me. I didn’t want to kiss him. But he kissed me. I think I need to puke…”

She didn’t come to school the next day. Perhaps it was just as well. His girlfriend wouldn’t have bveen nice about it. *** My best friend likes to paint. I think she has unprecedented talent. So when she designed a shirt for me that said slut on it, I wore it with pride.

My father hissed in disapproval. “How can you wear that out in public?”

“But Dad, what’s wrong with it?”

“Do you want people thinking you’re a slut?”

“But Dad, what’s wrong with being a slut?”

He had no answer to that.

So I kept the shirt on.

After laundry day, though, the shirt mysteriously went missing. *** My best friend has the strongest moral compass of anyone I’ve ever known.

When I saw her with a red handprint across her cheek the day after a party, my blood heated with ire. I even cried. My teardrops were the sun’s temper, bottled up and hurled at the feet of anyone who dared to hurt her.

“But he said he wasn’t seeing anyone!”

I just shook my head.

The next day, he wore a matching handprint across his face, and I, a smug grin across mine.

“Why would you do that?” my best friend hissed.

“Now his girlfriend’s going to hate me even more than she already does. Now everyone’s going to hate me more than they already do.”

I think that was the first time my heart broke.

ARTS&CULTURE *** Her first boyfriend made it through my entire interrogation.

I was almost impressed until I heard him tell his friends what a good lay she was.

I never hated language as much as I did that day, and I never felt as sick to my stomach as I did that minute.

She called me up later to tell me how much she loved him.

I felt my heart break even more. *** The next one was a good guy, I like to think. The type of pure the world bends over backwards to protect.

Maybe that’s why she never gave him a chance. *** She was a super-genius, my best friend. I think maybe that’s why they pulled her up for cheating when her answer sheet matched another girl’s.

I don’t remember that girl’s name, but I do remember that her skirt was twice as long as my best friend’s. *** When I got my first boyfriend, my best friend hated him.

Two days later, I caught them kissing.

But I also saw her push him away in protest.

So when I walked in, and he told me that she came onto him—that my best friend came onto him—I told him that he’d be better off trying his luck elsewhere.

He was making out with another girl one week later.

No one called him a slut, though. They were too busy cheering him on. *** The last time I spoke to her, she’d been recovering from a suicide attempt.

I knew some people would think: Of course she’d flirt with death—she flirts with everything, doesn’t she?

I think she’s on antidepressants now, but I can’t be sure. She doesn’t talk to anyone from her past.

I saw her portfolio online last week.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen her art so colorful.

Her Facebook status says she’s engaged to be married.

Inside my chest, I can feel my heart rebuilding itself from the tatters of years past.

I wonder if I’ll get a wedding invite. We always planned on being each other’s maids of honor. At least, she planned on being mine. She didn’t think she’d ever get married. She was so used to everyone around her telling her that she didn’t deserve love.

She’s online now.

Slowly, but resolutely, I begin to make a message out to her: “Hey. I just wanted you to know you deserve love.

You deserve it more than anyone else I’ve ever known.”

She reads the message but doesn’t reply.

I can’t blame her, though. Not after the rest of the world already has.

The Year with No Host

and past; each is a prop extending a meaningless show into longer forms of meaninglessness. Letterman just made the function impossible to ignore.

Of course, it’s not as if there had been no precedent for an unlikable host. The ’90s were, after all, the Seinfeld decade, when sarcasm and irony made their big cultural splash, and Letterman’s Late Night debut had been key in predicting that shift. The disinterest with which he interviewed celebrity guests had been a true breath of fresh air, his barbs poking through their airs and endearing him to workaday Americans. But as with much ’90s culture, Letterman’s postmodern necessary element of the Academy Awards—a

innovation was mostly a product of laziness: Speaking

ceremony that routinely honors the dubious likes of

to Vulture in 2017, he admitted, “I was single-minded

Sam Smith, Jared Leto, and Harry and the Hendersons—

in getting through my hour, and sarcasm is so easy.”

2019’s decision to ditch the emcee isn't the same kind of

Just like the Oscars, then, Letterman didn’t

terrible choice (at least, not the same as painting Billy

actually give a sh** about America’s time. Watching

Crystal in blackface—look it up). No, this was less like

him host, you can sense his delight in wasting it.

a blunder and more like a last resort. Just two months

After the opening musical number, he strides in to

ago, Kevin Hart was set for the gig, and the choice of

riff about the show already running “five minutes

the sorta-hip, kinda-young comedian suggested the

late”—a total punk move. From there, it’s on to a

Academy had finally, perhaps, set its dying-old-man

string of outrageously protracted non-jokes—the

touch somewhere near the pulse of things. But alas,

most infamous of which sees Letterman simply

the star stepped down when the history of his offensive

repeating the first names of Uma Thurman and Oprah

tweeting resurfaced—a now-familiar cautionary tale

Winfrey for a minute straight. And his triple reuse of a

that’s still much hipper and younger than Kevin Hart.

punchline about sitting Attorney General Janet Reno

But for anyone baffled by the cultural distinction

might be even worse. At first, audience laughter is as

that follows the Oscars through all its forms—be it a

nervously boisterous as ever, but as the celebrities

questionable list of winners to canonize forever or

realize they’re not being cut to anymore, it begins to

a butt-numbing television “event” to suffer through

die off. Soon, only Letterman is laughing, and he gives

right now—this year’s ceremony unbags an exciting

all his gags a big self-satisfied guffaw. Whether this

possibility: Are we finally getting rid of this sh**? If

signals his contempt for the gag or private recognition

you know the real deep-state secret about the Oscars,

of some brilliance the audience cannot perceive, it's

it’s that it’s a capitalist scheme operating under the

clear he knows he's wasting our time.

pretense of saluting artistry. As wins and nominations

Letterman’s a strong troll, and his comedic

boost box office for 2018’s films, studios reverse

terrorism would be theoretically admirable were it not

engineer 2019’s contenders from their template.

so obviously reinforcing the Oscars’ corporate mission.

Prestige filmmaking becomes a safe, homogenous

Any time the ceremony threatens to accumulate

landscape of rock biopics and weepy romances.

meaning, to be about something more than itself,

Yet cinephiles have long held faith that the

Letterman shuts it down. Jamie Lee Curtis, pointing

Oscar ceremony would one day destroy the Oscars

to an absence of female tech nominees, gets deflected

themselves. Each year, our nerdish grumbling about

with a joke about her sex life. The activist efforts of

snubs and undeserving winners is dwarfed by the mass

actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon are belittled

popular annoyance of normal people: They just want to

as “pissiness” before the stars are even allowed to

go to bed. On average, the show will unpack its trophy

speak. When Letterman is loosed on the street to talk

case across four long, arbitrary hours, with unfunny

cinema with ethnic New York taxi drivers, he chooses

schtick and self-satisfied tributes to classic cinema

to linger racistly on their inability to recite Robert De

designed to pad things out for maximum advertising

Niro’s famous line: “You talkin’ to me?” The message

dollars. If America sits through it, it’s because the

was clear: we are in control, and we have decided

Oscars still possess enough cultural mystique to gather

nothing matters.

significance around who wins them. But glamour

That's what 's instructive about the hatred for the

fades, and 2018’s ratings were the lowest yet. You can

1995 ceremony: Letterman made no effort to disguise

google Best Picture in the morning.

Oscar's inconsequences. If people hate 2019, it'll be

That’s why the solo celebrity host—a relatively

because without a host, the show was unable to hide

new concept in the ceremony’s 90-year history—

it. Will audiences be savvy enough to know? There is

has been so important: It provides the illusion of a

one symbolic moment near the end of 1995 that gives

human sensibility. Hosts are the conceptual limb

me hope they will. Letterman strides on stage with a

that can fold a cynical, focus-grouped sprawl into the

rug tucked under his arm. He finds room for a wan joke

appearance of a spontaneous evening. In 2014, when

about this hilarious incongruity, but quickly sets the

Ellen Degeneres interrupted the show and broke

tube on the ground. Stepping forward to the audience,

Twitter with a group selfie, it felt like the earnest whim

Letterman points to some unseen attendee and asks

of her dorky, internet-mom persona. In truth, it was a

“Can you help?” The camera crew have no more

product placement paid for by Samsung.

idea who this mystery figure is than the audience,

What will it mean when the show has no friendly

so they leave the camera on Letterman, creating

face to disguise its opportunism? We’ll find out

the impression that the host is now recruiting the

Sunday, but for now the answer may lie back in 1995—

viewer to help him. Turns out that’s not far from the

the popular choice for the worst Oscar Ceremony

truth, because after a long pause, the angle changes,

ever. Though nerds grit their teeth remembering the

and Letterman has been pointing to none other than

year Pulp Fiction lost to Forrest Gump, most recall it

Tom Hanks—America’s everyman! The actor seems

as the year a smirking, irreverent David Letterman

genuinely surprised and runs gamely on stage to help

Illustrated by Gaby trevino

played host. Through a series of endless unfunny jokes

Letterman unfurl the rug. Hanks asks if he can sit

and pointless detours, the Late Night star verbalized

down, but Letterman says to stay—there’s a surprise

It seems disastrous: For the first time in three decades,

the Academy Awards’ unbridled contempt for its

coming. He tells the audience to hold their applause

the Oscars will be presented without a host. While

audience—their confidence that we’ll watch no matter

as a mangy-looking dog runs in from the wings and

terrible choices are, to some extent, a conceptually

what. At his core, he was no different than hosts future

instantly begins to chase its tail in circles on the

Predicting This Year's Oscars by Looking Back at 1995's

By Julian towers

Febryary 22, 2018 5

ARTS&CULTURE carpet. Taken aback, the host introduces the animal as Sadie—his face falling—“the dog who spins when you applaud.” Though the audience quickly begins to clap its hands, the Oscars’ cynical trickery stands exposed. Tom Hanks cannot conceal his disgust. Sadie scratches her thigh with her nose.

Each year, the Oscars spin in a trivial circle for nobody’s entertainment but their own. This year, don’t let them think they’re doing it because you’re clapping for them.

Ascending Through the Clouds

Life, Learning, and How to Train Your Dragon

By Nicole Fegan illustrated by Hanna Rashidi The opening line of the first How to Train Your Dragon book is, “There were dragons when I was a boy.” There’s no warning—just the fact that there were dragons once, and then they were gone. As my official entrance to the HTTYD universe, this was an unpleasant jolt. What do you mean the dragons will be gone? I’ve only just gotten here, and I have to accept that it will all come crashing down before I even know what hit me? Certainly I had bigger things to worry about—SATs, a failing relationship, and my unending “bout” of clinical depression. But for a brief moment, I concerned myself solely with the fact that one day, the dragons would be gone and I would have to bid them goodbye.

I first discovered HTTYD in 2014, when I was 16.

While perusing 8tracks, the long-forgotten playlist website which had recently taken the internet (or at least Tumblr) by storm, I ended up listening to a playlist containing “This is Berk” by John Powell, the first song in the HTTYD score. Upon hearing it, I was spiritually enraptured; I have always had a soft spot for movie scores, but the musical mastery and Nordic bent of Powell’s song captured my attention in a way I wasn’t expecting. I watched the movie later that evening and witnessed for the first time what many people experienced as kids in 2010: The charming Viking village of Berk, our plucky young hero, Hiccup, and Toothless, the dragon with whom Hiccup forms a bond. I saw the second movie when it came out in theaters that summer, and Powell’s franchise scores soon replaced all other music as my chief homework soundtrack. How to Train Your Dragon entered my life

with a force, quickly becoming an irreplaceable fixture in my teenage life.

For the last two years of high school, everything revolved around the HTTYD movies and their music. In the hours I spent anxiously anticipating my acceptance to Brown, I needed a song expressive of the same boundless triumph I would feel upon being let in, so the glorious “Test Drive” rang in my ears all day. When I first fell in love, the overwhelming feeling reminded me of the multiple crescendos of “Romantic Flight,” which plays as Hiccup and his romantic interest, Astrid, soar through the clouds into the northern lights. But my most enduring memory of the HTTYD soundtrack involves its connection to a different movie. One night, watching the romantic dramedy Stuck in Love with my two best friends, I could sense everyone in the room making an uncomfortably close connection between me and one of its characters—a girl destroying herself and everyone around her with her tumultuous mental health. Powell’s song “Forbidden Friendship” spoke to me on repeat as I drove home. In the same way Hiccup and Toothless tiptoe around each other as the song plays, I began to feel as though I, too, were tiptoeing around my own issues.

There was no order to my high-school relationships; I was sad, and so were my friends, and we all festered in each other’s sorrow. But there was order to How to Train Your Dragon and the way the films and their soundtracks functioned in my life. Every day, there was the promise of waking up to “See You Tomorrow” as my alarm, listening to the full scores while writing essays at midnight, and watching the movies whenever I wanted to feel something both special and familiar. They laced age-old tales of friendship, love, and loss with sounds I had come to recognize as essential to my being.

To be clear, these movies didn’t solve my problems; I was still hardened and hollow and tired. Though the HTTYD movies made me feel something, it was

“That’s exactly what I meant about Alt-J being so different, because no one else could put Miley Cyrus next to French poetry and make it work.”

Aubrey McDonough, “the weirdest band of today’s alt scene” 2.18.16

“So, the movie isn’t really about jazz. I just wish someone would tell Damien Chazelle that.”

Zach Barnes, “La La Lame,” 2.23.17

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devastating that nothing else could. But soon I began to wonder: If I could fall in love with a kids movie, then could I perhaps fall in love with something I had lost all those years ago? I mean, my emotional attachment had never been about the film’s plot alone—after all, what could I, a depressed New York girl, see in the story of a medieval boy and his dragon? My obsession was more to do with the fact that I had something I could call my own—something that no one else in my life cared about, but that would remain mine through everything.

It followed me as I made my way out of my hometown, met new friends who had never seen the worst of me, and began new adventures.

Now, five years after HTTYD entered my life, the final movie comes out this weekend. I will have to face the dreadful reality that Hiccup promises in the film’s trailer: “There were dragons when I was a boy.”

Again, HTTYD was never really about the plot for me. But still—I’m not sure I’m emotionally prepared for it to end. Part of me thinks I shouldn’t make too big a deal of this; when I think clearly, I know my post-dragon life won’t look any different from what it looks like now. The music will remain in all of my playlists, and my friends will continue to lovingly roll their eyes every time I try to get them to watch the movies with me.

But despite this knowledge, when I walk into the movie theater on Friday evening, I will probably begin crying instantly. We all know, at the end of those two hours, the universe will be entirely different: Berk will lose all of its dragons, Hiccup will lose his best friend, and I will lose the one thing that has accompanied me in my pivotal transition from unhealthy to genuinely happy. But I suppose part of getting better is learning not to need the key changes of a movie score or the animation of an aurora borealis to actually feel like a human being. You see, there was a movie franchise about dragons when I was a girl, and I’m finally ready to watch the credits roll.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Anita Sheih a FEATURE Managing Editor Sydney Lo Section Editors Kathy Luo Sara Shapiro Staff Writers Sarah Lettes Caroline Ribet

NARRATIVE Managing Editor Celina Sun Section Editors Liza Edwards-Levin Jasmine Ngai Staff Writers Danielle Emerson Abbie Hui Naomi Kim Anneliese Mair Kahini Mehta

SOCIAL MEDIA Caleigh Aviv Camila Pavon

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