Post- March 3, 2016

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upfront

Editor-in-Chief Yidi Wu Managing Editor of Arts & Culture Abby Muller

contents 3 upfront celtic myths Aubrey McDonough

Managing Editor of Features Monica Chin

4 features

Managing Editor of Lifestyle Cissy Yu

trouble studying?

Cissy Yu

Managing Editor of Online Amy Andrews Arts & Culture Editors Liz Studlick Mollie Forman Features Editors Lauren Sukin Halley McArn Lifestyle Editor Claire Sapan Corinne Sejourne Creative Director Grace Yoon Copy Chiefs Lena Bohman Alicia DeVos Serif Sheriffs Logan Dreher Kate Webb Head Illustratrix Katie Cafaro

5 lifestyle a city within a bubble Rebecca Ellis inSPIRAtional Monica Chin

6 arts & culture what lies ahead for kesha Joshua Lu the revenants Lucia Iglesias

7 arts & culture the big shorts Devika Girish

8 lifestyle top ten overheard at brown the names Ameer Malik

editor’s note Dear Readers, I understand that the Oscars are, in many ways, important. Like an earthquake, the effects of the Oscars linger for days, whether you want to participate in the process or not.

Regardless of whether you obsessively watch all the movies or (like me) have not seen any of them, news about the colors of the dresses and the sour look on one actor’s face and the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio finally won an Oscar will filter through the water supply and hit you. You could have no interest whatever in movies and it is highly likely you’ll still know more than three pieces of trivial information about the Oscars. I consider this fact extraordinary.

However, the extent to which the Oscars are an institution impressed itself upon me when I did a quick Google search to write this note to you. There are pieces that cover quite possibly every aspect of the Oscars: lack of institutional support for breastfeeding mothers, controversy over fancy stunts planned by camera companies that were canceled at the last moment, and my God, racism, the racism.

This turns out to an important thing about institutions, whether it’s the Oscars or the DMV or the United States government: they tend to affect many people, most of whom are entirely powerless to change the thing. The monolithic institution of the Oscars are probably more than interesting to all the actors who suffer from underrepresentation. In any case, I find digging through the dirt of the Oscars reasonably compelling. I’ve even looked at all the dresses.

Best,

Yidi

Staff Writers Sara Al-Salem Tushar Bhargava Katherine Chavez Loren Dowd Rebecca Forman Joseph Frankel Devika Girish Gabrielle Hick Lucia Iglesias Anne-Marie Kommers Joshua Lu Ameer Malik Aubrey McDonough Caitlin Meuser Emma Murray Spencer Roth-Rose Jacyln Torres Ryan Walsh Claribel Wu Staff Illustrators Yoo Jin Shin Alice Cao Emily Reif Beverly Johnson Michelle Ng Peter Herrara Mary O’Connor Emma Margulies Jason Hu Jenice Kim Cover Clarisse Angkasa

From right to left: Yidi Wu ‘17, Abby Muller ‘16, Monica Chin ‘17, Cissy Yu ‘17, Amy Andrews ‘16, Liz Studlick ‘16, Mollie Forman ‘16, Lauren Sukin ‘16, Corinne Sejourne ‘16, Lena Bohman ‘18, Alicia DeVos ‘18, Logan Dreher ‘19, Ellen Taylor ‘16, Kate Webb ‘19, Katie Cafaro ‘17 (Please send us a photo at post.magazine.bdh@gmail.com)

upfront

3

celtic myths

roots of a culture

AUBREY MCDONOUGH staff writer When you think of the Celtic people, you probably think of ancient folk in Ireland and Scotland who wear kilts, play the bagpipes, and spend most of their time communing with nature. Maybe you think of the claddagh ring, or those maze-like patterns with the intertwined circles. If you have some knowledge of ancient history, you’re likely to conjure up the stereotype of a barbaric and primitive people living on the edges of civilized society. These are all true portrayals of the Celtic people, in the sense that popular culture and mainstream perception have adopted these beliefs as truth.

Last semester I was abroad in Scotland, studying at the University of Edinburgh. I decided to take a class called Celtic Civilization because I knew virtually nothing of the Celtic people (other than that they wore kilts and played the bagpipes). I’m not going to pretend that the class was always interesting, or that it changed my life. What did stick with me, long after I’d forgotten mostly everything that happened in that class, is one fascinating story.

The Celtic tradition claims over 2,000 years of cultural heritage, dating to before the height of Ancient Greece. The areas considered Celtic (in that Celtics languages are or once were spoken there) are Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany, and the Isle of Man. I’m going to talk about Scottish Celts in particular, because they best illustrate how a few outsiders essentially fabricated the culture and traditions of an entire people.

For some historical background, in the 1700s there were three large linguistic groups living in Scotland: the English-speaking immigrants, the Scotsspeaking inhabitants of the Lowlands (who were gradually Anglicized), and the Gaelic-speaking Celts of the Highlands. The Highlanders were considered primitive and backwards, largely due to their remote location and stubbornness against adopting English as their language. Today, the Highlands have been popularized as a Celtic region, both for possessing a high degree of cultural integrity and for having narrowly avoided complete cultural suppression during the Age of Industrialization. However, this view is inherently flawed due to the fact that many of the Highland traditions are based on invention and fabrication.

The invention of Highland traditions began with a man named James Macpherson. In 1761, he published a translation of a poem written by the third-century bard Ossian. His goal was to establish the greatness of the Scottish Celts (though he himself was not Gaelic), but he sabotaged the honesty of this effort in that much of his work was a complete fabrication. Ossian had written a ballad, and Macpherson did translate it, but he added much to his own version that was not in the original. In addition, he revived the old myth that Highlanders were descended from the Romans (as opposed to Irish invaders, which was actually the case). He created “indigenous” Highland folklore, which was actually a

mix of Irish folklore and his own invention. Despite the resulting academic dispute over his legitimacy, popular culture caught onto the main theme of his translation: the romantic concept of a “noble savage” whose culture was threatened by rapid industrialization.

Macpherson’s main legacy was establishing Gaelic-speaking Scotland as a Celtic “cultural motherland” with distinct heritage and traditions. In reality, the line between Scottish and Irish Celts is blurred. The two linguistically different groups did share similar ancestors, myths, and religious practices that would suggest they were more alike than different. Despite Macpherson’s false portrayal of the Highlands, it was adopted as gospel, and to this day many popular conceptions of Celtic mythology can be traced back to his work.

One of the most well-known Highland traditions is that each clan wears kilts of a different tartan pattern. This common misconception is so fundamentally rooted in invention and misattribution that when you consider its widespread popularity among both Celtic and non-Celtic peoples alike, it becomes a bit absurd.

The Scottish kilt, as we know it today, was invented by an Englishman named Thomas Rawlinson sometime in the early 18th century. Before Rawlinson, Highland men wore the belted plaid, which consisted of a large tartan blanket wrapped around the bottom half of the body. Rawlinson reinvented this garment into a shorter skirt, for the sole reason that it made manual labor easier for his Highland factory workers. Due to a photograph taken just after its popularization, the new garment was mistakenly connected with an old Highland family. This idea was not challenged for 40 years, during which the kilt became widely regarded as traditional Highland dress.

In 1707, the Act of Union brought together England and Scotland under one crown.

Highlanders were still considered a backwards society, but they also came to be viewed as a threat to civilization following the Jacobite Risings, the last of which occurred in 1746. That same year, in order to bring the warrior clans under government control, the king in London issued the Dress Act. This forbid “traditional Highland dress” and was punishable by imprisonment and deportation. The only reason that the kilt did not dis-

appear completely was that the Highland regiments of the royal army were exempt from this rule.

The issue of differentiated clan tartans crosses the line from absurd misattribution into intentional subterfuge. This anecdote centers on two brothers who invented themselves as the Sobieski Stuarts but were in fact the brothers Allen.

Born in Wales to an English naval officer, they changed their names and moved to Scotland, claiming to be descendants of Charles Edward Stuart (also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie).

In the Highlands, they enjoyed the patronage of nobles such as Sir Walter Scott and the Earl of Moray. They held court and indulged in aristocratic pastimes such as deer hunting, living in a delusion of revitalized Highland civilization. In their possession was a certain document of great importance, which they insisted was a 15th century authority of Highland clan tartan patterns. Despite the fact that few of their patrons believed its authenticity, they published it anyway in a work called Vestarium Scoticum (1842). A few years later, an anonymous attack on their reputation was published, revealing them to be impostors, and insinuating that Vestarium Scoticum was likely a forgery.

Today, it is recognized that neither the Sobieski Stuarts, nor their clan tartans, were what they claimed to be. The problem was that, directly following Vestarium Scoticum, several other authorities on the clan tartans were released. These works were accepted as legitimate, but what no one realized was that they drew both directly and indirectly from the Sobieski Stuarts. In the end, the Sobieski Stuarts added significantly to the tradition of a culture that they could not even claim heritage to.

Also, as an aside, the original Celts did not play the bagpipes. In ancient times, during the era of the bards, they played the harp. The bagpipes existed long before its adoption as the instrument of the Celts, though they had long considered them barbaric. They were eventually taken up as an act of protest against the Union of England and Scotland and then popularized as traditionally Celtic.

How is it possible for mainstream conceptions to be so wrong? Arguably the most recognizable Scottish Celtic traditions, the kilt and the bagpipe, do not boast any roots in ancient Celtic traditions. Moreover, the fundamental prerequisite for having a distinct cultural tradition is having a distinct culture at all. In the case of the Highlands, this too is refuted, thanks to Macpherson’s forgery. It remains fascinating to me that history could have been twisted and manipulated in such drastic ways as to produce a culture whose most prominent traditions are not genuine.

Illustration by Mary O’Connor

4

features

trouble studying? try video game music

CISSY YU managing editor of lifestyle At some point in college, you probably figured out that you really suck at studying. If you’re lucky, this happened early on, in Freshman year when you were “working with friends” in a Keeney lounge. If you’re less lucky, you’ll figure it out in your senior year, on the night you take Adderall to crank out sixteen pages of your senior thesis. Whoever you are, whatever you study, it’ll happen to you at Brown. You will plan poorly.

You will work inefficiently. You will despair of ever being able to meet a deadline without loathing yourself.

And inevitably, you’ll improve. By graduation, most of us have figured out one or two study methods that, without fail, have helped us work harder and concentrate better. For some people, it’s getting up early. For others, it’s a certain kind of Starbucks order, prepared by a certain barista. And for myself, it’s video game music.

The idea seems intuitive. Take a genre of sound that’s been designed precisely to immerse you in hours of concentration, plug yourself in, and go to work. Unobtrusive, loop-happy, and textured just enough to make repetitive tasks feel interesting, video game music does wonders for productivity.

Here are some of my favorite soundtracks to work to: Journey The first video game score to be nominated for a Grammy, “Journey’s” music accompanied players as they wandered through an eerie, beautiful desert and solved puzzles by communicating to each other via chimes and Morse code. It was apparently a gut-wrench-

ing experience. People cry when they talk about playing this game.

The game’s producers wanted a soundtrack that felt cultureless and universal, yet so terribly personal that hearing it would transport a player back to particular in-game memories. So “Journey’s” soundtrack has a sort of formlessness about it—a symphony with expanded percussion effects ebbs and flows around the cello, the instrument representing the human player. The cello’s theme appears here and there, briefly, only to be drowned out by the response of the symphony, the sand and wind and rush of the desert. Listening to the soundtrack is both isolating and inspiring—fitting for a game about smallness and wonder.

Good for: Writing the last few paragraphs of that paper, when you really need all that stuff you just said earlier to come together and seem intentional, large, provocative, etc.

L.A. Noire I spent the summer of freshman year in China. Because of the jet lag, noise, and homesickness, I had a lot of trouble sleeping.

I would lie in bed, totally awake, in a polluted, over-lit, unfamiliar city. Some nights, I would listen to the soundtrack from “L.A. Noire” and convince myself I wasn’t lonely at all, just mournful. And very tough.

“L.A. Noire’s” theme song is a very slick piece of mood-setting. Smoke rises, criminals lurk, night falls on the stylized streets of Los Angeles. For anyone with an interest in jazz, film noir, and 1940s crime stories, this soundtrack carves out that aesthetic pretty perfectly—I recommend it for reading, or

cooking, or your next long summer night spent alone. Even if you’ve never smoked, it’ll make you crave a cigarette.

Video game soundtracks rarely feature jazz as the main genre, and hardly ever do so to evoke a particular jazz period. “L.A. Noire’s” soundtrack reminds fans of late 1950’s jazz; one reviewer compares it to Miles Davis in his ‘cool’ period. It has the same mournful, dissonant harmonies and muted trumpet voicings. Andrew Hale, the composer, also has a sweet spot for the vibraphone. If you don’t listen to jazz but would like to get into it, this album would make a great start.

Good for: Doing your readings for American history. Writing your philosophy paper on Existentialism. Having an existential crisis while doing your readings for American history. Folding laundry.

Hotline Miami This is the only soundtrack on this list that I would probably love as a real album.

I also can’t describe it very well: equal parts rock/electronic, jungle/street, noir beach/ daytime nightclub, 80s disco/90s Daft Punk, guitar riffs/synth loops/8-bit bass, all of it interesting and extremely well-curated. The video game was noted when it came out for the way it showed carnage. Players not only kill a lot, but they have to walk through a lot of blood and dead bodies. The soundtrack, I think, was meant to make you feel psyched about it and then immediately feel weird about feeling so psyched.

It definitely makes email a lot more intense. House music tempos, pulse and con-

sistency make this soundtrack instantly addicting. You should check it out if you like techno, Red Bull, or the movie “Drive”.

Good for: Getting really pumped and manic aggressive about being home on a Friday night doing job applications.

The Last of Us Apocalyptic Western music might not sound like the perfect accompaniment for a night of studying, but for some reason, it puts me in deep focus mode better than anything else on this list. Something about the tension between dry horror and campfire warmth in the soundtrack both puts me on edge and makes me feel like I’m coming home.

I discovered this soundtrack in a moment of quiet midnight desperation. It was closing time in the Sun Lab, and I was tearing my hair out over of a piece of code that surely would ruin me if I couldn’t get it working.

I panic-googled “video game soundtracks,” put this on, and instantly felt calmer. This soundtrack has been my “eleventh hour” goto ever since.

Argentinian composer Gustavo Santaolalla combines two popular game genres in his minimalist score: the old trope of outwardbound Western survival and the newer one of Apocalypse bildungsroman. While other composers might have powered through and written an epic, intense, totally undistinctive symphonic score, Santaolalla made a slightly ambient work that’s very personal. It’s quiet.

It’s self-reflective. It carries you, without panic, through the hours approaching deadline.

Before you know it, you’ll be painlessly there.

Good for: Debugging code late at night.

Studying early in the morning.

FEZ/Faster Than Light This last one comes down to a tie between two mellow, atmospheric 8-bit soundtracks.

Both “FEZ” and “Faster than Light” are retro indie games that came out in 2012 to minor cult success, and they owe a lot of that to an old-school look and a strong, nostalgic soundtrack. Imagine the addicting candysized melodies of early Nintendo, but with perfectionist post-2010 sound production.

“Faster Than Light’s” soundtrack has a dark, muted, code-cracking feel to it, and the sound effects feel large, sweeping, and cool, much like the interstellar space the players navigate in the game. “FEZ,” on the other hand, was a game that popped, and the music uses 8-bit effects to evoke a cozy, greenand-blue, smell-the-flowers kind of feeling.

In both soundtracks, there are moments of childish peace and childish excitement. Perfect for taking you back to your early days of Game Boy Advance and bad Flash games on Mom’s work computer.

Good for: Finishing up the grunt work at the end of the week—answering emails, booking tickets, making plans, following up.

Relax! Music is playing. Life is a game. Everything’s okay.

Illustration by Emma Marguiles

lifestyle

5

a city within a bubble

popping providence’s make-believe fortress

REBECCA ELLIS staff writer There is a glass dome secured tightly to the contours of College Hill. Kept from cracking by tuition money and endowments, it is a well-financed endeavor meant to keep students safe and insulated within Providence. Once inside the bubble, we are encouraged to freely release our creativity, our art, and our money until the air becomes pregnant with polish. The glass fogs up and the outside world grows hazy.

While you can’t see the bubble, the sudden spiking and dropping of rates provide hard geographic boundaries.

As soon as you step onto College Hill, house prices are jacked up and crime rates sink. Olneyville, a ten-minute drive from the Blue Room, is safer than 4% of Rhode Island neighborhoods, while Lower South Providence, a seven-minute drive, is safer than 0%. College Hill is safer than 96%.

Brown University has successfully created a micro-environment of wealth, disparate from the rest of Providence.

In crime rate, education, amenities, and housing, College Hill ties only with Blackstone as the most livable out of all Rhode Island’s neighborhoods, suffering solely in the category of cost of living – a brick house lived in by colonial New England’s finest isn’t cheap.

Against this backdrop of cutesy eateries and ivy buildings, students grow comfortable. At least that was my domi-

nating sentiment last Saturday, when, in the midst of drinking a chai, the scent of cinnamon was overtaken by a strong smell of urine. Looking up, I saw the source enter Blue State and plant himself firmly in the middle of the floor. Donning sad eyes, a cropped jean jacket, and a few plastic bags, he never sat, never ordered, but just stood and let the radiator-generated warmth run over him.

Then, having sufficiently thawed his exterior, he walked out the door.

At home in New York, such an event would barely have registered, but here in Blue State, where I was unused to seeing anything but students striving for caffeination, this small, digestible dose of poverty stuck.

The next day, I saw the man again in Starbucks. He still had on the Champion hat with the tasseled pom-pom, the dirty tennis shoes and the two plastic bags – one from the Brown Bookstore and one from Second Time Around. On the table outstretched in front of him was the day’s edition of the Brown Daily Herald, which he had turned to the crossword section. If he flipped the page again, he would have found an article I had written the previous day on trendy bridal boutiques.

I other’ed this man the second I saw him planted in the middle of Blue State.

He didn’t blend into the backdrop of overpriced caffeine and carrot-ginger

soups, so I assumed he was a stranger. I wanted to know how he had fallen into College Hill.

This is what’s wrong with the bubble paradigm. It’s not a tangible glass encasing I knock my head against trying to escape; I embrace the bubble. The man didn’t fit my image of College Hill, so I re-carved the boundaries to cut him out.

Now, he was a visitor.

But, as I learned over the next few days, this man very obviously belonged on College Hill. He was reading a Brown paper, one read by few actual students, a flick of the wrist away from my article.

He seemed to populate exclusively Thayer eateries, and both of his shopping bags came from College Hill staples. My friend told me later he used to sit in on her ‘Writers on Writing’ seminar each time they had an author speak. He always clapped.

The man gazed out the Starbucks window at the torrent of students crowding around the bus stop on Thayer.

These were Hope High School students, another reminder of the ranging ecosystem of College Hill. Hope, only a two-minute drive from my freshman year dorm, contains a student body for which the average SAT score is a little over 1000 points and ¾ of students are counted as “economically disadvantaged.”

But, until a month ago, I didn’t even

know the school existed.

If the bubble is a geographic measurement, with a circumference and an area, Hope falls well within it. So does the man from the coffee shops. And so do the shootings that occur a half mile from Brown dorms and the muggings that occur in the center of campus.

By only associating the ‘Brown bubble’ with academia and affluence, like I did, it’s easy to go blind to the inequality ingrained inside, to be shocked each time something negative seems to have penetrated.

But guns, crime, and poverty have existed for a long time inside and outside Brown’s reach. It’s time to pop the bubble.

Illustration by Mithra Krishnan

inSPIRAtional

a q&a with sophia gluskin-braun

MONICA CHIN managing editor of features Here’s our conversation with Sophia Gluskin-Braun ‘17, the coordinator of Spira, a summer engineering camp for young women.

Monica Chin: For people who haven’t heard of Spira, could you give a brief description of the camp and its mission?

Sophia Gluskin-Braun: Spira is a free four-week summer camp at Brown for 1520 young women going into the 10th grade who live in the Providence area. The camp is dedicated to making science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) accessible to young women regardless of their educational or financial backgrounds. The camp also seeks to build the campers’ senses of identity by showing them that they can excel in a STEM field and by teaching them communication and collaboration skills.

MC: What do you consider when you’re planning lessons and ac-tivities for your students?

SG: We have generally decided to go for breadth. Each week we have focused on a different field of engineering. Since the areas can be pretty different, and individuals tend to be drawn to different fields, we want to expose our campers to a large variety of topics. When we are planning lessons and activities, we take into consideration the various science and math backgrounds that the

campers have. This is particularly important because the campers all come from different schools, so it can be difficult to ensure that everyone is being challenged at the right level. As such, we like to teach concepts that are not generally covered in typical high school courses but can still be taught in a way that can be accessible to students with different math backgrounds. Many schools tend to not have a ton of resources to do projects, so we want to offer a hands-on way of learning at the camp that uses a lot of creativity as well. We also want to have real conversations about gender and working in STEM fields, so we insert activities related to these issues throughout the camp.

MC: How and when did you decide you wanted to become an engineer?

SG: I didn’t know what engineering was until my 11th-grade environmental science class. Throughout my life I cared a lot about environmental issues, and this class opened my eyes to how environmental issues connect to many other issues. My teacher brought in an engineer from a college nearby, and together they planned engineering-related activities that also related to helping to solve environmental problems. I was concurrently taking a physics class and loving it, and I thought engineering would be a great way to bring together the science that I love and an

issue that I deeply care about.

MC: What is your understanding of the issues women entering STEM fields face right now? What has been your experience living through and combatting these?

SG: I can’t really speak for all women in engineering, and I think many people have had many different experiences, especially based on their identities that intersect with their gender identities.

I have experienced challenges working in a male-dominated lab. Most of the people in the lab are very welcoming, and I am so grateful for that. However, I have had experiences there where I have been made to feel very uncomfortable because of the way a graduate student interacted with me. I did not know how to bring this up, and I am in the process of figuring out how to best address this on a larger scale. I have also been struggling with feeling that I do not belong in the lab and that I am not smart enough or don’t know enough to do the work that I do.

This has made the lab work more stressful.

The lab work has also been challenging for me because I have trouble feeling that I can ask questions when I need to do so. I tend to feel like I am being a burden on others when I do this.

MC: What can schools and universities do to support women entering STEM?

SG: I think it is important for schools to collect data on the experiences of people who are underrepresented in engineering to see how they have felt with professors, students, etc. and to see how best to make a safe environment for these students.

Based on my own experience, I think it is important for schools to hire a more diverse faculty. I think it is also important to have more support for students working in labs, training for graduate students working in labs that focuses on issues of race, gender, class, etc., and also similar training for professors. I think it would be really helpful if professors acknowledged that there are problems within the field of engineering and made it clear that they wanted to be available to support students and that students can come to them if they experience anything that makes them feel uncomfortable. I think they should also advertise other resources for students, especially if students don’t feel comfortable going to professors for support when it comes to these issues.

Illustration by Peter Herrara

6

arts & culture

what lies ahead for kesha? the scary power of record labels

JOSHUA LU staff writer Pop quiz #1: What song was the first to go No. 1 in the current decade? The answer is “TiK ToK,” Kesha’s debut single (not counting her chorus for Flo Rida’s “Right Round,” for which she isn’t even credited) that made her glitter-soaked style a household name in 2010. Following it were platinum debut album “Animal” and EP “Cannibal,” garnering her six more top 10 hits and solidifying her niche in the realm of pop music. She had her haters, sure, who wrote off feel-good pop music as trash, but she also garnered a fanbase that identified with her self-empowerment themes and hedonistic love for partying.

“Die Young,” the lead single off her sophomore LP “Warrior,” was released in 2012 and peaked at #2. Its success, however, was truncated with the tragic Newtown school massacre, in which twenty elementary schoolchildren were shot. Radios quickly stopped playing the problematically titled song, and her era’s momentum skidded to a halt. The next single “C’Mon” became her first to not peak in the top 10, and she wouldn’t see it again until “Timber,” her collaboration with Pitbull that netted her another #1.

This relative lack of success isn’t too troubling; all artists have their peaks and dips.

What made fans start to worry about Kesha began with a tweet she made after she learned about “Die Young”’s radio ban. In it, she said she understood why it would not longer be played and that she was okay with it. She then added, in all caps, that she had been forced to record the song and that she had never wanted to record it in the first place. The tweet was quickly deleted.

Fans were justifiably perturbed, and soon more hints of Kesha’s lack of creative freedom came to surface. On random nights of her

tour, she would sing a song named “Machine Gun Love” that her label had rejected from her album because it sounded too rock and roll.

She later released a low-quality music video for “Warrior” album track “Dirty Love” on New Year’s Eve of 2013; her label refused to give her the funds to shoot another video, and so she made one herself. She is the video’s sole director and performer, and while it wasn’t much, it was evidence that Kesha wanted to do more than what her label desired. Her fans even circulated a petition to give her more creative freedom long before her lack of personal freedom was made public.

On October 14, 2014, Kesha filed a lawsuit against her producer Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald. In it, she claimed he “sexually, physically, and verbally abused [her] for a decade in order to make her feel completely worthless.”

There are plenty of disturbing anecdotes, not the least of which is this: “Specifically, after he drugged and raped Ms. [Kesha] Sebert, Dr. Luke took her down to the beach alone to ‘have a talk’ with her. He threatened that if she ever mentioned the rape to anyone, he would shut her career down, take away all her publishing and recording rights, and otherwise destroy not only her life but her entire family’s lives as well. He also threatened her and her family’s physical safety. Ms. Sebert wholly believed that Dr. Luke had the power and money to carry out his threats; she therefore never dared talk about, let alone report, what Dr. Luke had done to her.”

This February, Kesha’s lawsuit (or in legalese, her motion for a preliminary injunction) was denied. Her goal was not to put Dr. Luke in jail, but to get out of her contract with him and his label Kemosabe, an imprint of Sony.

She’s been promised that she will not have to record with Dr. Luke in the future, but if she wants to salvage the remnants of her music career, then according to this ruling she still has to release under his label. “There has been no showing of irreparable harm. She’s being given opportunity to record,” claimed the same judge who explained, in disturbingly capitalist fashion, that her “instinct was to

do the commercially reasonable thing.” Maybe in a different context this would be an acceptable quip, but it’s disgusting to say this to someone whose commercial success allegedly came with the price of her safety and freedom.

Pop quiz #2: Whose single “Too Little Too Late” dominated the airwaves in 2006? The answer is JoJo, and there’s a good reason you haven’t heard much from her since. JoJo’s second album was released in that same year, and through what I can only understand to be an enormous degree of label incompetence, JoJo was never able to release a third. She recorded songs – two mixtapes worth of songs, to be exact – but her label stubbornly refused to give her a proper release. She finally filed a lawsuit against them in 2013, and in January of 2014, she was released from her contract and signed over elsewhere. JoJo has released music since, but with irreparable damage done to her career.

JoJo’s case proves many things. One: Labels can and will make decisions that damage their artists’ careers, even if it’s not “commercially reasonable.” Two: Nothing kills a music career faster than wasted time. Hell, JoJo made music during her legal turmoil, but since nobody heard about it, she’s now irrelevant. Three: Contracts are binding but not always impossible to circumvent. In JoJo’s case, her lawyer used a law restricting the length of contracts for minors, and the case was settled outside of court.

Kesha unfortunately cannot use that law to her advantage, even though her contract is similarly terrible. Its worst quality is that she’s still obligated to release four more albums with them. The key word here is release, because it doesn’t mean record; even if Kesha made twenty songs a day, her label is the one that decides to actually release the music. Kemosabe’s most successful artist is far and away Kesha, even with her past years of inactivity, and not many of Kemosabe’s artists have even released albums. For example, Becky G has several singles under her belt, but the prevailing theory is that because they haven’t been particularly successful, Kemosabe and Dr. Luke don’t want to bother releasing an album that’s probably not going to sell. A similar case transpired with girl group G.R.L. and their missing album; they managed to squeeze an EP out, but after an albumless extended period of time, they disbanded after member Simone Battle committed suicide.

Kesha’s “Warrior” was a commercial failure, “Die Young” aside; even though the album received considerable critical praise, it peaked outside of the top 5 and scraped by with a gold certification. In the aftermath of a messy court case, I doubt Dr. Luke or Sony will be too excited to help Kesha get music released, and even if an album were to appear on Spotify, promotion would likely be minimal, diminishing success as well. Sony has sabotaged the careers of their artists before: Kreayshawn, a rapper known for her viral hit “Gucci Gucci” and little else, recently claimed that Sony made her album a Hot Topic exclusive in order to ruin her sales. She later announced her pregnancy, and then was dropped four days later.

What is Kesha supposed to do in her situation? Should her main goal to be as successful as possible, in order to get more albums out and please her label? Furthermore, why doesn’t Kemosabe just drop her? The notion that Kesha can freely record without Dr. Luke then becomes questionable; Dr. Luke, if anything else, is a certified hitmaker, and although he has had his missteps, producing with him is the easiest way to get on the Hot 100. The fact that he’s in charge of the label, and thus certainly has some control in what gets released from her, makes this situation even more inevitable. This idea seems to be the implication; if Kesha wants to be free from her contract, she must release successful albums. To release successful albums, she has to work with the very man she’s accused of assaulting her for years.

Contracts and commercial success be damned, it’s incredibly cruel to force someone to have to decide between her career and her humanity.

The title track of “Warrior” emblematic of Kesha’s love for self-reliance: “We ain’t perfect but that’s all right / Love us or hate us / Nothing can break us” goes the pre-chorus. But to juxtapose these lines with the traumatic stories on what she’d allegedly been forced to endure throughout her career is troubling, to say the least. The image that’s been shared the most from the trial is of her sobbing in the courtroom, her mother by her side. To see the selfproclaimed warrior in that position is saddening in ways I cannot describe.

Illustration by Michelle Ng

the revenants

two tales of the ones who came back

LUCIA IGLESIAS staff writer Now, with the sharpest teeth of winter crunching through my bones, I want stories of winters even worse. With wind-chill at 20 degrees below zero and a lace of frost trimming my hood, I listen for survivors’ tales. The holes in my coat pockets grow larger each winter, as I try to fit more stories that will keep my hands warm on long walks in the snow. Each story is different: sagas from the land of the Aurora Borealis, Shackleton’s Antarctica expedition, a memory of the sound ice makes. But one character is always the same: winter, that ferocious

howling beast, that exquisite moonlit beauty, that beguiling peril that will vanish one day in April. Winter is the agony and the awe, the danger and the delight; winter is here.

Winter is here. And it is in winter that the very best stories are lived and told. These are the tales of the revenants, the ones who came back, the ones who climbed right out of the jaws of winter. A fur trapper in Montana, 1823, whose story is told in Alejandro Iñárritu’s 2015 film The Revenant. A Brown astrophysics student in New Hampshire, 2016,

whose story was told to me in our living room.

Left for dead by his companions after a bear mauling, the trapper battles his way through a winter wasteland, surviving off of his smoldering lust for revenge. Left without directions or even the moon to guide them, the astrophysicist and her two companions climb their way up an icy ski slope, hunting for the cabin where the rest of their wilderness retreat cohort has already cozied in for the night. The stories of these revenants intertwine across the gap of centuries, for winter is the same ravening, rav-

ishing creature in both.

In the wilds of Montana or the mountains of New Hampshire, the sky can seem so wide, the world so large. But on a ferocious winter’s night, when you’ve already felt frost’s bite, the world narrows to the ring of light around your campfire, or the bright circle sketched by your headlamp. There are no walls in the fur trapper’s young Montana, and the astrophysicist still hasn’t found the door to the cabin, yet these stories exist in spaces tightly confined by the cold and dark. Winter will not give

arts & culture

them an easy escape. Once the astrophysicist is halfway up the viciously steep slope, the only way forward is farther up, following the light of her headlamp as it cuts a tiny path through the colossal dark. Once the trapper rolls off his stretcher in the lonely woods, the only way forward is to live for revenge.

Sound becomes the way in which these worlds are explored: the sound of the trapper’s breath fighting from an unfilled grave, the voice of a mother grizzly (when the trapper nears her cubs, she doesn’t say “grr”—it sounds more like “no!”), the crusty crunch of snow under the astrophysicist’s boots, silence piling up as she climbs higher and higher up the ski slope without finding the cabin. It’s near midnight and she’s thinking ice picks should have been on the packing list.

She cannot hear birds or any other creatures. Animals know winter better than we do.

The night she fights her way up the slope— only by digging her hands into frozen footprints can she haul herself up—is a night too cold for any creature but the tenacious human.

Animals teach us about winter, and they teach us about ourselves. Hunting his revenge, the fur trapper fights his way through a world where people are more brutal than nature, and the landscape never lacks for fresh corpses, human and animal, red and steaming. You learn a lot about yourself depending on which deaths hurt you more.

Only the dead sleep in the downy white of a snowdrift, yet when frost feathers the lashes of the young trapper who has laid down there for the last time, nothing could be more beautiful—in life or death.

Until a ray of dawn light curls through a helix of iced lichen. Until the Aurora Borealis unfurls above the sleeping trapper crew. The more horrors the trapper faces on his journey to vengeance, the more beautiful winter becomes.

The further the astrophysicist climbs up the slope, fearing more and more that the cabin is buried somewhere in the dark behind her, never to be found in the lengthening night, the more beautiful winter’s stars become. Orion, the hunter. The Big and Little Dippers. The

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Pleiades, seven sister stars. And Sirius, the brightest star in our sky. Away from the light pollution of her Providence observatory, the stars are so clear that she stops for a moment, lost and cold, just to look at them.

This is winter’s secret. When lips are chapped and bleeding, noses rubbed raw, bones aching with a chill that won’t go away— this is when beauty is felt most keenly, ripping along our exposed nerve endings. This is why we need revenants to bring back winter stories and survivor’s tales, tales full of winter peril and beauty. On the coldest nights, sitting around the living room, the one I want beside me is the astrophysicist who can tell me how she found the cabin by the light leaking from its window and can show me the stars that watched from above. On the longest nights, sitting around the campfire, the one I want beside me is the trapper with the worst scars, the bloodiest hands, and the best winter stories.

Illustration by Soco Fernandez Garcia

the big shorts

the oscars’ best (and shortest) films

DEVIKA GIRISH staff writer Over the last couple years, I’ve come to believe that it is in the Live Action Shorts category that the real cinema of the Academy Awards happens. Film buffs love to refer to the Oscars as their version of the Super Bowl—an analogy that is very revealing. There’s a reason why indie films are rarely recognized by the Academy: The Oscars are often less about rewarding cinema itself and, like the Superbowl, more about revelling in the commercial spectacle of it all—the successful films are the ones that know how to play the system and appeal to the right demographics, the ones that are adept at baiting and predicting and PR. Moreover, as the conversations surrounding this year’s awards demonstrated, the Oscars are plagued by a lack of racial and gender diversity, which means that they sideline a large, very well-deserving section of filmmakers and audiences.

The shorts don’t magically remedy all these problems, but they offer a refreshing, more progressive alternative. Since they lack the distribution and commercial prospects of features, they’re also free of the restrictive requirements of “mass appeal” and are often motivated simply by a desire to make good quality cinema.

The short format also allows for the kind of innovation that feature films, solidified into formulaic character arcs and three-act plots over the years, do not permit. Most importantly, without the awkward distinction between “foreign” and American films, the shorts category tends to be much more diverse and recognizes narratives from all over the world.

This year’s stupendous live-action shorts collection, for instance, brought together shorts from Kosovo, Palestine, Austria, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They span wars, religious kerfuffles, family conflict, and romance. The United Kingdom’s “Stutterer” (which wasn’t my favorite) took home the prize,

but this was a race in which everyone was a truly a winner. Below are reviews of the live-action shorts, ranked in descending order of my preference. But really, it doesn’t matter which one I liked the best or which film “should” have won.

What matters is that all of these films deserve to be noticed, watched, and appreciated.

1. Alles Wird Gut Austrian director Peter Vollrath’s “Alles Wird Gut” (Everything Will Be Okay) stretches a two-sentence plot over a 30-minute runtime, and the result is absolutely riveting.

The film starts innocuously enough, with divorced father Michael picking up his eightyear-old daughter Lea for the weekend. Soon, however, one gets the sense that something sinister is brewing underneath Michael’s anxious fidgeting and the protracted, idle c h i t c h a t between father and daughter. Then things take an ominous turn: Lea’s phone disappears mysteriously, and Michael procures an emergency passport for her and sells his car. As the clues start to add up and you realize where the film is headed, it’s like watching a perfectly-acted and -paced trainwreck unfold in slow motion.

In an interview, Vollrath described his screenplays as “treatments”—he gives his actors very little written dialogue and encourages improvisation. This approach works magnificently in this short, mainly because the actors rise to the challenge with remarkably unaffected, natural performances—especially the young Julia Pointner, who plays Lea. Thanks to them, the film somehow manages to be both very quotidian and slice-of-life and a meticulously crafted, nail-biting thriller.

2. Ave Maria The premise of Palestinian director Basil Khalil’s “Ave Maria” is like a complicated, religiously inflected riddle: While driving through a rural area of the West Bank, an Israeli family’s car breaks down in front of a remote little convent run by five Catholic nuns. The family, consisting of Orthodox Jews, needs to call for help—but then the Sabbath begins, which restricts them from using the phone. The nuns, meanwhile, are observing a vow of silence, so they are limited in their ability to help. Religious animosity further strains the interactions between the two groups. How do the three Jews, eager to leave Arab territory before night

falls, make their way out?

How they collectively, creatively solve this puzzle is the meat of this film, which manages to pull off a commendable feat: extracting deadpan humor out of an interaction between cultures and religions without poking fun at the religions themselves. One of the strengths of this film is its visual wit. The camera expertly captures the comedic nuances of the mise-enscène: for instance, the Jewish patriarch’s look of alarm when he sees pork shanks in the convent kitchen, or the flies buzzing around the toppled head of a statue of the Virgin Mary as characters bicker in the background.

As a standalone, the ingenious concept and clever telling of “Ave Maria” make it a winner. However, compared to the gut-wrenching emotional intensity of the other shorts, this film’s breezy, lightweight comedy risks being taken less seriously.

3. Stutterer In a diverse and global shortlist, Irish director Benjamin Cleary’s “Stutterer” stands out as very “millennial Hollywood” (which is perhaps why it won the Oscar): The editing is snappy and stylistic, the visuals are bright and saturated, and the tone is steeped in solipsistic irony.

The young, charming protagonist, whose communication abilities are severely crippled by his stutter, is faced with a panic-inducing dilemma: The woman he has been courting for the past six months over Internet chat is in London and wants to meet him in person. Every moment of “Stutterer” is incredibly charming—the protagonist’s self-deprecating and witty interior monologue, which throws into stark relief his difficulties with speech; the flirty Facebook chat banter between him and his online lover; the heart-melting twist at the end. On the plus side, it is an earnest and delightful film, but on the flipside, it is a rather simple and cliché story.

4. Day One The lone American entry in this category, “Day One,” is based on AFI student-director Henry Hughes’ own experience serving two combat tours in Afghanistan. The film documents an Afghan-American woman’s first day of service as a military interpreter. During a terrorist arrest, the alleged terrorist’s pregnant wife is injured. In the midst of a clash of cultures, languages, and weapons, the interpreter

is forced to deliver the baby despite having no medical experience or training.

This was one of my least favorite films of the lot. Don’t get me wrong: “Day One” is an accomplished and hard-hitting—occasionally even hard to watch—piece, whose performances and production values are quite astounding for a student film. Nevertheless, for a movie that firmly situates itself in a space riddled by topical questions of race, religion, gender, and politics, it’s curiously unclear what the film is really trying to say. There are whiffs of what seems like a commentary on Islamophobia, or on the place of women in the hypermasculine realities of war. However, the film invests more in shocking its audience with the extremities of war than in fleshing out these themes or its characters. On the whole, it comes off as pandering rather than thoughtful.

5. Shok Jaime Donoghue’s “Shok” (“friend” in Albanian), Kosovo’s first Oscar-nominated film, is also set in a war: the Kosovo War of 1998.

Based on true events, the plot revolves around two young Albanian friends, Oki and Petrit.

The two boys ride around happily on Oki’s new bike until a menacing Serbian soldier decides he wants it. This starts a series of incidents of military violence and intimidation that leads to a truly heart-shattering conclusion. I won’t spoil the ending, but suffice it to say that its emotional punch is acutely felt at a time when war and violence are making refugees of millions all over the world.

“Shok” is a powerful, excellently acted film (so many great performances by children this year!), and it sheds light on a terrible war not known to many. Its flaw, though, is that it can on occasion be heavy-handed. It has a superfluous, sentimental frame story that makes the entire central plot of the film a flashback.

Moreover, its sustained close-ups of sobbing children, the dramatic music that plays as the Albanian civilians, forced out of town by the Serbian army, walk out together in slow-motion—all these touches feel unnecessary for a film that is already incredibly heartbreaking, especially given that its subjects are young children.

Illustration by Jenice Kim

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lifestyle

A: Tame Impala is a cool band.

B (a professor): Then they should have picked a cooler name.

They were all just exceeding excellence.

They were pissing excellence.

topten vegetables 1. eggplant emoji 2. larry the cucumber (bob the tomato is a fruit) 3. ketchup 4. couch potatoes 5. eggplant parmesan 6. sweet potato fries 7. broccoli (mini trees!!!!!)

8. cornbread 9. lettuce be friends 10. okra

the names a short story AMEER MALIK

A: So I didn’t get Viola Davis tickets.

B: Can you sit outside the theater? Can you sneak backstage? Can you hand out programs?

Can you sneak into the tech booth and say you’re working audio?

Can you donate n organ?

hot post time machine

As far as I’m concerned,even fruit soup is a wonder to behold. It is less of an opinion and more of an established truth that good soup can transcend just about anything. bisque-y business -02/19/2014

staff writer During his New Year’s ritual of cleaning his apartment, Zaid opened the bottom drawer of his wood desk to find the prayer beads.

There were 99 of them, made of plastic, dark blue and strung together in a loop by a thin string. He didn’t know if they had been lying there waiting for him, or if they had just materialized. He couldn’t tell. He thought they had been lost long ago.

He picked them up and played with them, passing them through his fingers, pushing them one by one with his thumb and listening as they made the same clicking noises they always made. From the desk chair, Zaid could see the trash bin in the corner of his room.

He thought about when he first touched the beads. His grandfather had given them to him when Zaid was eight. Zaid didn’t know what they were when we saw them. A necklace? A bracelet? His grandfather told him the string of beads was called a tasbih, and that it would help him count the names of God as he repeated them during his prayers. His grandfather told him that there were 99 names, a bead for each one, but Zaid didn’t have to know them all, he said. He could pick a few to remember and repeat.

His grandfather was no longer with him, and Zaid never learned all the names. As he wrapped them around his fingers, he wondered when else the beads had been in his hands. Had that moment with his grandfather been the first and the last time until now?

Or had he clutched the beads after hearing the news of his grandfather’s death a year after receiving the gift? When younger Zaid was lying on his mattress, his face buried in his pillow, sticky from tears and snot, sobbing and coughing until his chest and throat hurt, he didn’t know that what he was doing was called mourning. But did he have the beads with him? At that age of eight, did he know the name As-Salam, The Source of Peace?

Zaid looked closely at the tasbih. It showed signs of use. A few beads were scratched, a few discolored. Zaid kept thinking. Could the beads have been thrown in the garbage years ago without him knowing or caring?

He tried to figure out what use he might have

for them now. He closed his eyes and saw 10-year-old Zaid, hiding in the basement of his childhood home, hugging himself to keep his body from shaking, hearing the roars and crashes coming from his parents upstairs. He knew all of that had happened. But completing the picture was difficult. Had the beads been in his pocket? In his hand? Lying somewhere in his bedroom? At what point was that incident real, and when did it become make-believe?

Zaid knew that terror had spread throughout the inside of his body like an electric hum invading a quiet room and clinging to the air.

But he couldn’t decide whether or not he had repeated the name Al-Wali, The Protector. It probably hadn’t made a difference. Zaid remembered the tremors of fear in his gut that had lasted for months as his parents had gone through the steps of separation.

Zaid was certain he had planned on tossing them by the time high school started.

Teenage Zaid had gained more knowledge and awareness, so he thought it was silly to believe that words had the power to change him, much less the world around him, even in a small way. He also knew that using the correct names is tricky, in life and even more so with regards to God. Someone could have grown up thinking that Al-Batin meant one thing, while someone else could have grown up believing that Name meant something else. Maybe, if Zaid had known Arabic as a teenager, he would have felt more sure about the Names. But he had too much to worry about: maintaining grades, doing activities that looked good on paper, keeping up with friends, futilely chasing romance, trying to sleep at least sometimes.

Zaid was sure that he had forgotten about the beads by his junior year in college. He remembered that he had spent the better part of a night sitting on the floor, hugging a trash can, puking his insides out, feeling as if his brain were on the verge of blowing up inside his skull. By that time, Zaid had thrown away all the declarations from his family members and elders that the consumption of alcohol was immoral. To Zaid, it made no sense that

a dietary restriction should have anything to do with morality. Looking at the beads in his hands, Zaid saw no traces of vomit, so he was sure he hadn’t been holding them while gripping the rim of the trash can. He hadn’t been begging for his sickness to end, nor had he been pleading for forgiveness. Still, sitting at his desk now, he wondered if he had thought, at least for a moment, if the sickness had been a punishment. He tried to determine if his mind had been caught between the Names Al-’Alim, The Omniscient, or Ar-Rahim, The All-Merciful.

The memory of the time when Zaid had last held the beads hit him without warning, like a splash of cold water to the face. He was ashamed of having forgotten, but the memory was so heavy on his heart that he had to bury it in a shallow part of his mind. It had been uncovered now, and he pulled it out so he could hold it before his eyes. A year ago, while Zaid was trying to make a living after college, his friend Jacob had been in an accident. Zaid learned the news from a mutual friend and sat at Jacob’s bedside every night for days waiting for Jacob to wake up. Zaid now remembered how he had wrapped the beads around his hand. He couldn’t decide on a Name, so he had repeated as many as he could. He had hoped and prayed, and when Jacob finally did wake up, Zaid held him with the beaded hand, and Jacob touched the beads.

Had praying worked? Did God hear what Zaid thought and said? Zaid wasn’t completely sure, but he knew he couldn’t part with the beads. He wrapped the beads around his hand once more and liked how they reflected the light from the fluorescent bulbs above.

Illustration by Ruth Han