Post- Sept. 29, 2016

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upfront

contents

editor's note As our production night wraps up and we cork the wine and put away our laptops, the silence makes me (the delinquent Editor-in-Chief finishing up her Editor’s note) aware of the laughter and jokes that had filled the room just half an hour ago. If you drop by for our production nights, you’ll find that Post- is a nice reprieve amidst the stress of school and job and (it’s-complicated) personal relationships. What happens here is a reminder not to take yourself too seriously.

And when you don’t take yourself too seriously, you no longer have to be wedded to one inflexible idea of yourself and no longer have to be committed to protecting that idea. You enter into that state of grace--or state of play. Our issue this week is all about what happens after that: You could say hello to our giant blue teddy bear.

You could find yourself while pulling out weeds. Or you could come out--as not (exactly) gay.

And by the way, we didn’t have wine tonight. I lied about that because I thought it was a nice touch.

Best,

upfront features 3 • a fall from grace

Rica Maestas 4 • welcome to new york

Monica Chin

lifestyle 5 • missing yourself Sara Al-Salem 5 • of soil and soul

Claribel Wu 8 • coming out

Matthew Spiegel

Yidi

arts & culture 6 • negative transaction at lil joe’s Anonymous 6 • when a stranger calls Pia Ceres 7 • the big short

Jennifer Osborne

staff

Editor-in-Chief Yidi Wu Managing Editor of Arts & Culture Ryan Walsh Managing Editor of Features Monica Chin Managing Editor of Lifestyle Rebecca Ellis Arts & Culture Editors Joshua Lu Anne-Marie Kommers

hi.

Please email alicia_devos@brown.edu.

Features Editors Saanya Jain Claribel Wu

Serif Sheriffs Logan Dreher Kate Webb

Lifestyle Editors Claire Sapan Alicia DeVos

Head Illustratrix Katie Cafaro

Creative Director Grace Yoon Copy Chiefs Alicia DeVos

Staff Writers Sara Al-Salem Daniella Balarezo Tushar Bhargava Kalie Boyne Pia Ceres Katherine Chavez Rebecca Forman

Joseph Frankel Devika Girish Lucia Iglesias Ameer Malik Chantal Marauta Aubrey McDonough Caitlin Meuser Emma Murray Jennifer Osborne Spencer Roth-Rose Celina Sun Anany Shah Annabelle Woodward Alex Walsh Joshua Wartel

Staff Illustrators Alice Cao Peter Herrara Jason Hu Beverly Johnson Jenice Kim Emma Margulies Michelle Ng Mary O’Connor Yoo Jin Shin

Cover Clarisse Angkasa

features

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a fall from grace unanticipated yet obvious responses to untitled (lamp/bear)RICA MAESTAS contributing writer illustrator SOCO FERNANDEZ GARCIA It took five years to decide to install Urs Fischer’s “Untitled (Lamp/Bear)” and it may only take a few months to resolve to take it down. Though the bear is scheduled to be on loan to the university for five years, there is already talk of cutting that loan down to just one year due to unanticipated student interaction with the piece. In other words, in five years of coordination and planning—deciding on the bear, where to put it, and when—there was never a meaningful discussion of how students might want to climb on it.

Fischer is known for massive, whimsical, and often ugly sculptures that evoke a resistance to claims that art must do something, be academic, or be critical.

In the words of Massimiliano Gioni, the curator of Fischer’s 2009 show at the New Museum, “He’s not an artist with a message.”1 Instead, he makes full-sized models of Swiss chalets out of bread for biennials, titles many of his pieces “Untitled” but then follows it with a title in parentheticals, and, of course, creates the lamp bears. His work, goofy and irreverent, arguably brings out the mischievous child in all of us. That is his strength, his allure, his thing. Whether the administration was right or wrong to bring a structure that’s famous mostly for being famous to campus, its childlike eccentricity is precisely why it is so attractive.

It seems almost obvious that college students might investigate this public work as kids would—by scrambling over the legs and up onto its shoulders.

Last week, a security guard discovered a group of students clambering drunkenly over the shoulders of the bear. In the process of climbing off, one student slipped from the shoulder and fell onto the leg, striking his head and leaving him unconscious. Though he woke up well before emergency services came to retrieve him, the incident was something of a climax to a long series of close calls in the short time the bear has been at Brown—there are shoe prints rubbed into the matte finish, graffiti on the feet, a dismantled utility door, and copious Instagrammed evidence of otherwise inappropriate play with the work.

All this comes in spite of the three security cameras aimed at the sculpture to capture every possible angle and four different signs demanding that people not climb on the sculpture. To prevent future harm done to a student or the object, a guard will likely be paid to sit with the statue night and day. The cheaper option of installing a fence was quickly thrown out, as it was understood that students would likely scale it regardless. It begs the question why administrators did consider this outcome when deciding to install a piece like “Untitled (Lamp/Bear)” on a college campus in the first place.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20. Had administrators dismissed the donation of the bear, assuming students would probably hurt the art or themselves climbing it, there would inevitably be pushback espousing the exceptional maturity of

an Ivy League student body. It would be patronizing to keep famous contemporary art from elite students because they might mistreat it. Urs Fischer is, after all, very famous in contemporary art circles.

One might reasonably expect viewers to react to the piece with caution and reverence, like they do for the Maya Lin or Giuseppe Penone works on campus.

However, Lin and Penone’s work are not exactly comparable to “Untitled (Lamp/Bear)” as they are both subtle, quietly moving, and unobtrusive. One can hardly blame students for being more rambunctious toward a giant blue teddy bear in an obnoxiously visible location. In fact, it seems almost fitting for people to grime up a sculpture praised by curators for its “perfect sloppiness.”1 The urge to play with the work is an integral element in its appeal and if Brown has the right to choose what art is suitable for its public, then that public has some right to incorporate the art into their lives.

Of course, there are reasonable parameters to how passersby might incorporate a work of public art into their daily routine. For example, it is probably safe to assume that climbing on a very tall, slippery object not intended for climbing may result in injury. But this assumes thoughtful conduct, not the search for fun, and Fischer’s work is all about fun. After all, the bear is by no means the only tall thing available to climb nor is it the only thing that students do climb. It is just the newest and

most alluring addition to the list.

The power of this particular edition of “Untitled (Lamp/Bear)” (of which there are three) is precisely its accessibility, its vulnerability. The other bears are privately owned or have been sectioned off from eager fingers with velvet ropes and pedestals. They have been placed in locations of transit—airports and walkways—not a space for reflection and relaxation like Brown’s quad. Curatorial choices that separate the viewer from the art reduce the work to the mere image of a giant teddy bear and perhaps some vague phenomenological sensation of its presence. At Brown, the bear makes not only a visual impact but a tactile one as well. It evokes more than the idea of playfulness—it evokes play.

If you ask any psychologist or education specialist, they will tell you that people learn best while having fun.

When a happy memory is integrated with useful knowledge, it just seems to stick better. Though some students may learn unfortunate lessons as a result of scaling the bear, a symbol and object of play is nonetheless an apt addition to a learning institution. It is memorable in its tactility, for better or for worse, and that memory is inexorably tied to the academic aims of its location. Urs Fischer is quoted as stating, “Art works best in people’s memories,” and with that memory, “art becomes this great, rich, flexible thing.”1 Fischer is right—his art has certainly become richer through the flexibility and nuance students have given it.

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welcome to new york tips for a summer wandering manhattan

MONICA CHIN features managing editor illustrator YIDI WU

Everybody here wanted something more Searching for a sound they haven’t heard before Welcome to New York It’s been waiting for you.

-Taylor Swift, “Welcome to New York” 1. The man who owns the oldest record store in Greenwich Village will tell you he doesn’t want to talk to you. Believe him.

2. Psychics never want to talk to you.

It’s unclear why. It’d be interesting to know what it’s like to truly believe that you can see into the future, and why one would elect not to use that ability to game the stock market.

But keep trying. Don’t ask too many questions; they’ll start to suspect you’re from the government.

3. You’ll be nervous to talk to homeless people but talk to them anyway. The man who panhandles on the corner of 28th and First will cry if you sit down and listen for too long. He will tell you that you are beautiful, but not as beautiful as his wife who died of hypothermia. He will tell you that marriage is a sham, affordable housing even more so. He will tell you, before his speech slides into incoherence, that jobs here are a needle in a million haystacks, and you should think twice before having any sort of dream.

4. A boy you meet in a poetry class will ask if you’d like to make out on his Chelsea rooftop. It’s New York, he’ll say. Take risks.

Be bold. Tell him no but end up going anyway. His apartment will smell as marijuanay as he does. This does not bode well for either.

5. Don’t bother calling your landlord when the dishwasher stops working. You are quite low in his rent-paying hierarchy, and your priority in his life corresponds. Walgreens sells cheap sponges; buy in bulk.

6. If you find yourself in a DJ equipment store, and you only have a few minutes, ask the owner about his childhood, or the weather, or anything mundane. But if you’re in the mood for an insightful tirade, ask them about music. Ask them about the way music has gone since the great “whatever decade they grew up in.” Ask if there’s anything they have that you can afford. Ask them how much longer they think they can stay open. Ask them if there’s any hope.

7. Don’t bother looking for a cheaper grocery store. There isn’t one.

8. You don’t love him. You’ll think you do, when he whispers in your ear and snakes a finger up your skirt, and your body is as bright as the jungle of neon uptown, and you’re pulsing beneath the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge and he asks if he can stay the night. But when he tells you he has to cancel again because the Guys Are Coming Over With Great-Ass Weed, don’t tell yourself that true love waits. When he stops responding to texts, don’t tell yourself that all love hurts.

9. You’ll realize, in the middle of this sea of expensive lights and cars and one-room mansions, that you don’t just hate capitalism. You hate yourself. You hate yourself for being born to parents who pay egregious rent for your closet of a room and send you monthly checks for utilities and organic groceries while they struggle, they all struggle. You are part of this, you realize, in your high-rise housing development in a jungle of other high-rise housing developments surrounded by construction equipment, scaffolding, and “Coming Soon” signs. You are one of the tidal waves crashing into the grunge capital East Village which we all remember fondly from our steel and concrete towers, but do not mourn the loss of.

10. Buy a bus ticket home, to Boston, or anywhere far away from here. Pack a duffel bag with clothes and a notebook. Tell yourself that it is okay to need to leave. It is okay that this wasn’t like the movies.

11. There is a small beach under Brooklyn Bridge. Across the Hudson, you can see the lights of Manhattan. Go sit and look.

In a whirlwind of days and places and eight million people, here you are alone, and the city is still.

12. Go to the only art gallery left on First Avenue. It’s run-down and easy to miss, but try to find it. The owner will show you pictures of an older East Village, before the high rises and Michelin Star restaurants, where the artists who the rest of the world

rejected made their home. They are all gone now, she will tell you, they were priced out by the big developers. All of them? Yes, every single one. I am the only one left. Then she will cry. Tell her you are sure they will be back some day. No, she will say. The music is in New Jersey now. Ask if you can see where the Ramones used to play, or CBGB, the birthplace of punk. She will shake her head sadly. Those have both been torn down. They are apartments now. Don’t try to rent them. They cost millions.

13. Tear up that bus ticket. Throw it out. Some things must be finished. Remind yourself of why you are here.

14. Tell him you wish he wouldn’t spit on homeless people. Shelters aren’t for everyone. He’ll say his parents built their fortune from the ground up. Don’t tell yourself that love makes exceptions.

15. Don’t stop loving New York. But your love will change. It will be less of a love, and more of a camaraderie with caveats. I get you, you will say. I will keep seeing you. But you’ve got to stop beating people up. Please, stop hurting them.

16. Write him a letter. Tell him he is swine. Rip it up. Write him another letter.

Tell him you need a break. Get ready to hear that you are nothing. Get ready to cry on the phone because he lives in a Chelsea brownstone with a chandelier, you live in a closet, and the Ramones are mostly dead.

lifestyle

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missing yourself for your sake, let it rattle

SARA AL-SALEM staff writer illustrator JENICE KIM

On medication, you are normal. On medication, you lose weight and smile more and get good grades. On medication, you impress yourself. On medication, you don’t have to rely on any friend or roommate or sibling.

On medication, you take care of yourself. On medication, you change.

You’re happy you’re not where you used to be. You know you’re so much easier to be around, that you don’t have to apologize for all your sadness to your friends and family. They tell you they’re really happy for you, that you deserve this, finally. You’re happy you don’t need or expect their hand anymore.

But ultimately, despite all the surface level glamor, you miss yourself. You miss that with the sadness came a warmth you didn’t know how to contain. You were loud and aggressive and vibrant, and without knowing why or how, you turned quiet and torn. Monday was never just a Monday—Monday could end abruptly if the wrong song played. Now, Monday is always the same: Wake up at 7 a.m. Go for a run. Go to class, stay in class until 6 p.m.

Have dinner. Be friendly with strangers on the street. Do some work before bed. Take two little pills. Go to sleep.

If the old you saw you live this way, they wouldn’t believe it. It would feel like a glass facade that might break any minute. But current you knows this is your life. You are on the other side now. This is what normal feels like.

Repeat that mantra until you don’t remember why you had to.

But the medication doesn’t make the sadness disappear. The medication takes the sadness, and all the parts of you that were in that sadness, and puts it in a small glass box in the darkest, quietest part of your body. You can’t really see it, and most of the time you forget it’s even there. But sometimes, you’re walking down the street, and you see a little girl hold her little sister’s hand, and the glass box rattles and rattles. You know what you want to feel.

You know you want to fall back into that feeling even for a second, but you can’t. You see and hear and feel the glass box, and it feels like the past you is trying to talk underwater.

Your chest heaves and your face contours like it forgot how to cry and you crane your neck far enough to let the rattle of the box out.

But it doesn’t know how. You don’t remember what you did with all of This, with none of This, with whatever This was. You close your

eyes, and you try to remember yourself. There is so little of you left, though, that you can barely care enough to really commit to that remembrance.

So you sigh because you miss yourself, but you know you have to let the glass box rattle forever. Instead, you remind yourself what the contents of that glass box took away from you.

The glass box wouldn’t let you get a job or go to that party or kiss that boy. In the glass box was the only version of yourself you ever knew, but the version did not love you. That version in the glass box hurt you badly and constantly.

Warm fires on desert cold nights hurt you.

Your mom smiling hurt you. Your sister growing so old than you couldn’t catch her hurt you. That episode of that shitty TV series hurt you. Turning 21 hurt you. Waking up some days hurt you. There was very little that did not hurt you. But what hurt you most was that living felt like swallowing salt water, but nobody could even see the ocean. All of this, the glass box contained. All of this, the glass box hid.

But you miss it anyways. You miss the you in that glass box so badly. Because the you now doesn’t know what to do with that rattle you feel when you remember a random Tuesday

of last year. The you now doesn’t know how to feel deeply, painfully or otherwise, and you miss that. You miss that deep level of feeling you had when that glass box never existed.

When all your sorrow and anger and passion and love never could fit in a box, so you felt fully. In that fullness, there was almost a calm that held you when too much got too much.

Now, it is only a dull nothing. You will keep that dull nothing because the dullness saves you, but you will always hear the glass rattling, and you will never understand what it is trying to say. And that is the sorrow you must choose to accept.

of soil and soul how wwoofing gave me a new life philosophy

CLARIBEL WU features editor illustrator JULIE BENBASSAT

Summer in Japan is a visceral experience.

The air is always thick with an inundative, omnipresent humidity and cicadas chatter constantly in the background, their rhythmic song swelling in gentle crescendos and decrescendos.

I remember noticing these details the first night I arrived in Hino, Japan.

This quiet suburban town, partitioned by the criss-crossing veins of the Tama river, had a certain special quality. I stepped out of Hino Station and felt as if I’d dissolved into one of Murakami’s mystically atmospheric novels. I turned to my friend Katie, our eyes glittering with neon signs and anticipation.

Months ago, Katie and I had made the impulsive decision to WWOOF in Japan.

WWOOF (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) is an organization that connects enthusiastic volunteers with hosts from all across the world. It is an opportunity to devote yourself to environmentalism, interact personally with the people and cultural customs of a different country, and travel economically. There we were, two freshmen sitting in Andrews Commons, buying discount plane tickets and trust-

ing that a stranger in Japan would take care of us.

Our host, Kazuko-san, did just that, acting as our pseudo-grandmother for those two weeks. Like my own a-ma, she was strict in some instances but lovingly considerate in others. Kazuko-san runs and owns Clare Home and Garden, an English tea house that offers organic home-cooked food. Every morning, after adjusting our apron and hair scarf, Katie and I would settle into the routine of things.

Our duties included gardening, making bread from scratch, waitressing, cleaning, and walking the dog*.

Katie and I came to Japan expecting to perform intensive farming. But, instead, we found that WWOOFing actually encompasses a broad range of activities. We happened to end up in a situation not too dissimilar from Kiki in Miyazaki’s endearing film Kiki’s Delivery Service. We baked fresh bread, delivered bentos to Hiro-san (Kazuko-san’s husband) on the back of a bicycle, and had comical interactions with Ku-chan, who always wore the iconic red handkerchief around his neck.

It seemed as if we had stepped into some kind of altnernate dimension—things were too precious and magical. Kazuko-san was often tough on us at work, but on the weekends she took us to her favorite ramen shop, brought us along for family trips, and relentlessly offered to buy us delicious snacks.

Because she spent her youth travelling the world with Hiro-san, Kazuko-san spoke excellent English.

Because of political instabilities in Japan at the time, the two decided to expand their worldly perspective and enter the profession of international antiquing. After dinner, with

empty plates still resting on the table, they would divulge fantastical stories about their adventures across seas.

Now, as settled grandparents, they let the world come to them. They’ve had roughly 500 WWOOFers to date, with volunteers lined up months in advance. WWOOFing is so special, because you have the opportunity to live the local lifestyle for awhile and engage in a dialogue of cultural exchange. I took Japanese for three years in high school, so it was interesting to explore the dynamics of foreign communication and understanding within the actual country.

I appreciated being in this position of vulnerability, where English was not the dominant language. I learned more by talking with and working alongside Kazuko-san in my brief twoweek stay than I had on lengthier travel experiences, often spent on generic and impersonal tours. I was blessed by Kazuko-san’s wisdom and kindness.

My experience with WWOOFing was ultimately an exercise in mindfulness. Originally, weeding was my most despised task at work.

We had to crouch in the sweltering sun, enveloped in the moist embrace of Japanese humidity. Left at the mercy of insect swarms, we pulled at a seemingly endless forest of leafy green invaders. Each time Kazuko-san offered us the task, we would accept it grudgingly, but Kazuko-san was indifferent to our self-pity.

Two months later, I have come to appreciate that. Kazuko-san might not have intended it this way, but I now think of the weeding as a Mr. Miyagi-style methodology for instilling discipline and meditativeness. By the end, Katie and I had come to enjoy this process, even love it. There is something appealing about the hypnotic rhythm that you enter once you are deep into it, something satisfying about removing the parasites by the roots to let the garden breath.

It was all relevant to me, standing at the brink of a new year at Brown. I thought about the deeply rooted insecurities that I had never dealt with, and the toxic parts of my life who were stifling my growth as an individual.

I distinctly remember a conversation we had with Kazuko-san, who was weeding alongside us. She said, “I like weeding, because I always wonder about the soil. Am I touching what used to be a dinosaur? You know, some people never see soil in the city. But that is where we all go, eventually.”

I was inspired by this concept of humble universality. Soil is something most of us don’t think about, and yet it is where we came from and where we will return to. It was grounding (no pun intended) to be able to touch a seemingly insignificant pile of dirt and feel a handful of history and existence. It put the things in my life—broken relationships, social anxieties, family tensions—into startling perspective. If I approached life like I approached weeding, maybe I would do just fine.

I tell myself now to take it slowly and intentionally. Weeding and purifying your life is a process. Some things have grown wild and stubborn, while others are just now taking root.

I used to stand up and look at the garden, from time to time, shocked at how many weeds still needed pulling. Kazuko-san would laugh and say that she just tries her best to chip away at it everyday. I tell myself now to stop standing up and sighing at the weeds around me; focus instead on what is present and in front of you, because that’s what matters. *Correction: Ku-chan is a wobbly old banana labrador who knows Hino inside and out, and for every walk, he mapped out a predetermined path which we were not allowed to deviate from. Thus, it was he who walked us.

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arts & culture

negative transaction at lil joe’s brown student responds to the haters

ANONYMOUS illustrator KATIE CAFARO

Subject: Re: Negative transaction at Lil Joe’s From: [administrator] <xxxxxxxx_ xxxx@brown.edu> Date: November 3, 2014 at 7:47:40 AM EST To: [student] <xxxxx_xxxx@brown. edu> Hello [student], On November 2 at 1:19am you purchased $6.54 worth of merchandise from Lil Joes convenience (see register receipt below). The register communication was down at the time of the purchase, so your Bearbucks account is now overdrawn for $6.54. Please visit a campus valueport or the cashiers office to add funds to your Bearbucks account. Valueport machines are located in Faunce House, The SciLi lobby, Rockefeller Library, Gregorian Quad, The Brown Office Building, Sharpe Refectory and Emory.

Failure to rectify your overdrawn status may result in disciplinary action.

Thank You [administrator]

SU CHK REFNO LISTFILE 20 7017 6009555201721835 -------------------------------Chk 7017 Gst 0 185 Evans WS5ALilJos-1 CE: 185 CC: 20 TC: 20 Trn 2276 Nov02’14 01:19AM -------------------------------Dine In 1 ALL SMALL CANDY 1.35 1 POP ROCK WATER 0.90 1 FRITO LAY 4.29 Bear Bucks 6.54 X Subtotal 6.54 Payment 6.54 ============================ ==== Subject: Re: Negative transaction at Lil Joe’s From: [student] Xxxxx Xxxx <xxxxx_ xxxx@brown.edu> Date: November 3, 2014 at 8:50:40 PM EST To: [administrator] “Xxxxxxxx, Xxxx” <xxxxxxxx_xxxx@brown.edu> Hello [administrator], On November 3 at 7:47am, I received your email detailing my ultimately unauthorized and disgraceful purchase of a

Take-5 Bar (see “SMALL CANDY”), a bag of Tostitos® Hint of Lime white corn tortilla chips (see “FRITO LAY”), and, perhaps most regretfully, an individual packet of watermelon Pop Rocks.

I (hereafter referred to as “the snack consumer”) would like to issue a formal apology. Obviously, the snack consumer should have factored in the possibility of dysfunctional register communication at the time of purchase. The snack consumer understands that he is completely to blame for the unfortunate events that transpired on and around 1:19am on November 2, such that the unapologetic and slightly threatening tone of your email is entirely justified.

this temporary deficiency in funds may have had on the University’s operations; he hopes that normalcy can be restored now that the funds in question have been returned.

Sincerely yours, [student]

The snack consumer deeply regrets his oversight, and, following your advice, has promptly deposited no less than six dollars and fifty four cents into a campus valueport machine, least his overdrawn status result in the disciplinary action ominously foreshadowed in your email.

Finally, the snack consumer would like to extend his most heartfelt apologies for any negative effects

when a stranger calls the terrifying nostalgia of netflix’s stranger things

PIA CERES staff writer illustrator CLARIBEL WU

The 80s have never truly left the American pop culture bloodstream. The period echoes everywhere from denim cuts to synth undercurrents in Top 40 songs. So in July, when Netflix dropped sci-fi horror phenomenon Stranger Things, a TV series set in 1983, it presented a world steeped in a recent past familiar even to those who did not come of age in the 80s zeitgeist.

The series’ setting draws heavily from its classic sci-fi predecessors: a small Spielbergian town — wholesome suburb, kids on bikes — and the shady government research facility in the neighboring woods. When a young boy, Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) disappears, his friends, three precocious middle-school misfits, venture into the woods to find him. Instead, they find and befriend a mysterious barefoot girl named Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown). Soon enough, townspeople become entangled in a conspiracy involving nefarious scientists and a sinewy monster with no face.

Stranger Things’s aesthetic immediately evokes Alien, E.T., and The Goonies, among others. But one would be mistaken to write off the series as unoriginal nostalgia-pandering. Stranger Things distinguishes itself in part because of its tightly-written suspense and satisfying plants-and-payoffs that give viewers a stake in the unraveling. But it’s the Duffer Brothers’ deft use of the 80s, particularly 80s material culture, that gives the

first season its bone-deep chills.

At first glance, the objects that “belong” iconically to the decade (walkietalkies, board games) seem merely interwoven into the setting—vivid and evocative props, but otherwise inconsequential. However, these materials quickly come to bear on the decisions made and fates dealt. We meet preteen Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) and his friends at the climax of an imaginative game of Dungeons & Dragons. Mrs. Wheeler announces bedtime, and Mike’s friends bike back home alone. Through the woods. In the dark.

With no cell phones.

An obvious remark, but in a contemporary age saturated with rapid technological advances, the lack of means to account for a kid’s location on the way home is shockingly conspicuous, and also somehow refreshing. There is a joy, a buoyancy to their freedom. The show’s depictions of family life do away with today’s helicopter-parenting and allow for good ol’ unsupervised kid-quests.

The screenless D&D gameplay and boys taking to their bikes ring as halcyon remembrances of a more innocent age.

Or so it would seem. What follows when Mike’s friend Will (Noah Schnapp) gets derailed in the woods introduces the horrific consequences these simpler times permit.

arts & culture

Such is the contradiction between the idealized and the not-so-innocent that fuels the show’s excitement: Stranger Things exploits the 80s to simultaneously celebrate and subvert an era that has become rosy-colored. This is no mere mimicry; rather, by steeping their setting in the nostalgic artifacts so ingrained in the time period, the Duffer Brothers are acutely aware that revisitation of the 80s warrants a meditation on the material disparities relative to 2016.

In another instance, Will’s teenage brother, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) inadvertently snaps a photograph of a looming silhouette in the woods. Enlarging the figure to identify the creature requires process and patience in a redbathed darkroom. He and an unlikely ally hold their breaths in this moment of development—of plot, character, and literal film—that is exploited for all of its slow, ominous suspense.

The visual and material aspects of the show are meant to invoke both affection and a kind of suffocation. The most ad-

vanced technology that figures into the show are the fond objects of an American childhood, long since obsolete: a HAM radio, a film camera, a boombox, flashlights, and bear traps. Compared with young people today, Mike and his friends have fewer options for solving problems. Greater chances of being discovered when the bad guys are at their tail. Fewer escape routes.

Even so, despite these supposed limitations, the ways in which “relics” are exploited, combined, and recombined by the characters are artful and often manifest in plot-pivoting surprises. These can be aesthetically ingenious: In a haunting scene, the missing boy’s mother, Joyce (Winona Ryder) devises a way to use Christmas lights to communicate with her son. These moments— chilling, yet filled with twinkling wonder—succeed in joining raw fear with visual delight.

The show’s science fiction elements are equally uncomplicated; all of the science in the show can be explained by the boys’ affable middle school teacher.

The brand of sci-fi taken on by Stranger Things does not encumber itself with overly explanatory origin stories, but rather accepts a straightforward backstory, taking off with it like a child running with scissors.

The show’s emphasis on simplicity invites reexamination of other aspects of paranormal horror and our relationships to the past. Scruffy rogue police chief Hop (David Harbour) deals sarcastic zingers on small-town life: The worst thing that’s ever happened in the town of Hawkins, Illinois, he tells Joyce, “was when an owl attacked Eleanor Gillespie’s head because it thought her hair was a nest.” But Hop, too, was made steely by a long-ago loss, and he becomes an ally to Joyce.

And here is where Stranger Things shines. Beyond clever use of 80s artifacts, the Duffer Brothers’ stripped-down approach to spooky sci-fi allows the show to bare real-life monsters: childhood trauma, parental grief, guilt for having failed to protect loved ones. At some

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point, each of the characters, children and teenagers and their harried parents alike, are forced to confront the monsters of everyday tragedies. The school bullies. The fraying friendships. The fear that no one is listening to you.

In fact, the most horrific moments in Stranger Things are the ones where the paranormal encounters the painful mundane. In a memorable scene from the pilot episode, Joyce and Jonathan are choosing a photo to use on Will’s “missing child” posters. The shot lingers on their tender dialogue, and just before it reaches the point of mawkishness, the landline rings. Joyce picks up to a parent’s nightmare: the sounds of her son’s breathing against a monster’s rippling growl.

By inviting modern viewers to reflect on a storied past, Stranger Things addresses the trepidation below the romance. Its formula for creating 80s horror with continued relevance is simple: Speak to the fears that never truly left us.

the big short making the case for short stories

JENNIFER OSBORNE staff writer illustrator TYMANI RATCHFORD

Walking into my dorm room, one of the first things many visitors notice is the collage of New Yorker covers plastered on my wall. While I hail from a country exactly halfway across the world from the the New Yorker’s office, reading the magazine became a bit of a high school ritual. After receiving secondhand copies from a friend’s mother, I would carefully remove and collect the covers before moving on to my favorite portion: the short story.

If you love literature as a low-commitment form of escape into another world, short stories allow an experience like no other, granting you access to a complete universe for twenty minutes in between other tasks. You can experience anything from the course of a life to a single, richly imagined moment, all while waiting for an open machine in the laundry room. Through the New Yorker, I am able to sample many more authors than my schedule would allow for if the modern literary landscape consisted only of novels, gaining exposure to the likes of Don DeLillo, Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, and my favorite short-story author, Alice Munro.

At the same time, short stories leave a lot open to interpretation due to their length. As Ricardo Paglia puts it in his “Theses on the Short Story,” a second, “hidden” story thrives within each of these works. In earlier centuries, this meant the presence of a twist ending, such as the protagonist’s discovery that she has imposed cruel hardships on herself to pay for a cheap trinket in Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace.” This effect is created by weaving elements of the second story in a fragmented manner into descriptions of the fictional world.

When the second story is brought to the surface, a effect is produced. Most Sherlock Holmes stories operate in this manner, bringing readers to the stories week after week.

In our modernist literary world, the second “hidden” story looks very different. Often, the second story is on equal footing with the first, producing a tension between the two that remains unresolved at the narrative’s end and leaves the reader wondering how the work reflects our own world. As Paglia says in

his “Theses,” this strategy enriches the experience by allowing the reader “to see, beneath the opaque surface of life, a secret truth.” Almost every Alice Munro story, for instance, ends with the sense of something left unsaid. In “Gravel,” the story of a woman looking back on the drowning of her older sister early in childhood and struggling to remember the events that transpired, the narrative ends with this passage: “I see what he meant. [Forgetting] really is the right thing to do. But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself, as if in triumph, and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.”

A weight of expectation hangs in the air after the story ends, showing us the narrator’s consuming need to be sure of connections in a fragmented past, to cut instability and uncertainty out of her life — a meaning that can apply to all of us, hidden in a ten–page piece of fiction.

While the New Yorker is a well-respected institution, having published established masterpieces like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and newer pieces like Munro’s “Gravel,” it is not without its faults. As Jonathan Franzen points out in an article for the magazine, the New Yorker has been criticized for having “[t] oo many stories about mopey suburbanites.

Too many well-off white people. A surfeit of descriptions, a paucity of action. Too much privileging of prose for the sake of prose, too little openness to rougher energies.” The end of many stories in the magazine may also take the second hidden-story concept to new heights, with the result coming off as “either elegantly oblique or frustratingly coy, depending on your taste.” Subscriptions also do not come cheaply, as most readers are, like the protagonists of the stereotypical New Yorker story, well-off white people. For broke college students looking to gain exposure to new perspectives, the magazine may not be the best investment. Over the last few months, however, I’ve found some options to suit both our wallets and our learning goals.

Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading: Founded in 2009, Electric Literature is com-

mitted to moving storytelling to a digital platform and ensuring that it retains a place in our popular culture. Each week, Electric Literature publishes one short story online recommended by an editor, author, or publisher. Since this premise is much like the New Yorker, quality is guaranteed. They’ll even tell you how long it’ll take to read the piece down to the minute.

This week’s story: X by Brian Evenson HiLoBrow: Founded to bridge and mingle highbrow and lowbrow fiction, HiLoBrow has published original fiction, produced reading lists in funky categories like “Best Radium-Age Scifi” and “Golden Age Fantasy,” and come up with perhaps the best idea yet: reviving that old Victorian money-making scheme of serializing long-forgotten literature. Every few days, HiLoBrow’s serial fiction category uploads a new chapter of some book that has fallen into obscurity. Each new chapter can be read in the time span one would a short story and allows you to keep up with a piece of literature like you would alternative media platforms like the TV show — a method the Washington Post hypothesizes may just save the publishing world.

This week’s text: Victor Bridges’ 1915 detective novel A Rogue by Compulsion

Online Translation Journals: While foreign literature makes up a measly 3% of all books published in the U.S., this is not necessarily true of short stories. Many online journals publish translations of foreign-language short stories, providing a global perspective free of cost.

My personal favorite is Asymptote, an online magazine that publishes short fiction, poetry, and drama excerpts in a variety of languages. If you can read in another language, you may also elect to read the piece in its original language on the site. There is also a wealth of sites with a focus on a single language or national literature — my fellow Chinese speakers should consider Paper Republic, which publishes a quarterly digital journal of contemporary Chinese fiction and poetry in translation. As translation is a creative writing project in and of itself, most of the texts selected are personal favorites of the translators and are of a generally high quality.

Or, find your own alternative! Short stories are made to fit into a busy schedule — find a few favorite sites aso that your spare moments putting off calc problem sets will always be well spent.

lifestyle

topten

A: I think a bug crawled into my vagina while I was sitting on the main green today.

B: That’s not possible A: I was wearing a tampon, I’m pretty sure it is.

B: I mean, I’ve had worse things in my vagina.

They just rubbed dirt into their genitals? I feel like I would have a lot of questions about that.

So are you like known for being bitchy over text?

I have a dick-shaped hole in my heart that he just couldn’t fill

New Email Sign-offs

1. All the worst 2. XOXO, Gossip Girl 3. [eggplant emoji] 4. I never loved you.

5. What have we done to each other? What will we do?

6. HAGS 7. Call me Ishmael.

8. Intimately 9. Please consider the environment before printing this email.

10. Carthage must be destroyed.

“

“

8

hot post time machine

One could make the case that it actually shows better judgment to forgo the Rock’s cavernous carrels in favor of cheap champagne imbibed on the Main Green (preferably in front of tours).

cleaning out aisle three • 3/25/12

coming out a sexual self-portrait

MATTHEW SPIEGEL contributing writer illustrator DORIS LIOU

Oh God, here it comes, the moment I’ve been putting off for months, when I have to tell people that I’m not what they think I am, what I’ve been pretending to be. The worst part is afterwards, when they’ll feel like I’ve been hiding something from them for years, but I’ve just gotta grit my teeth, otherwise I’ll never do it. Here I go, what I’m trying to say is—I’m not gay. Alright?

This isn’t a joke, not really, although I appreciate the rhetorical effect of turning the comingout process on its head like that. No, I meant my declaration literally: this really is me coming out to you as not gay.

You aren’t the only one who’s a little puzzled.

My closest friends and family will probably be bewildered if/when they come across this article, as would be my coworkers, my healthcare providers, the teachers and administrators at my high school, my parents’ tennis partners, the people I have never personally met but who follow me on social media, and the advertising algorithms that know the best way to hold my interest is with pictures of shirtless men. No, your confusion is understandable, because in order for me to come out as not gay in our society, I must have come out as gay at some point. That is, in fact, the case.

When I was eighteen, I stood up from my seat in my crowded high school auditorium and unevenly addressed the crowd. The atmosphere in the room stiffened suddenly when they realized what was coming, thought to themselves, “Is he about to say what I think he is?” and we all willed the horrible silence to end, and then I let it out: “I’m gay.” And I don’t remember how I ended my address, what incoherencies I was muttering when I noticed that everyone was standing up and clapping, relieved (in my perhaps ungracious recollec-

tion of that moment) that it was over and that they didn’t have to watch me struggle any more, anxious to show that they liked gay people, but that they weren’t gay, but that they liked gay people and were totally chill with it and had a gay uncle and their family only voted Republican for fiscal reasons.

That day was the first of May in the year of our Lord two thousand fourteen. I’ve been gay ever since and been okay with that. I’ve learned a lot in my two years as a gay person and have no regrets about it. So, what exactly compels me to reject the label? Let’s unpack my sexuality a little, why don’t we.

Undoubtedly, I like guys. A lot. I’m what my friends call boy-crazy, meaning I’m always crushing on some guy from afar and love nothing more than to speculate about who they are, who they’re friends with, whether they’re seeing someone, and whether they’ve ever been with a guy. Often I don’t even know their names, so I call them things like Sci-Li Boy, Ratty Boy, and Tennis Boy. (If you think you may be Sci-Li Boy, please contact me.)

Furthermore, I have never been emotionally or sexually attracted to a girl. And I suspect that, for many people, that will settle the matter. I am obviously gay, and perhaps you feel I’ve lured you through the last 500 words under false pretenses.

I’m a guy exclusively attracted to guys. What could I possibly say to convince you that I am other than gay? Well, let’s continue this whirlwind tour of my sexuality.

The thing is, I have no interest in anal sex. Really, the thought of putting a penis in a butthole doesn’t turn me on at all. I don’t dream about it or fantasize about it in my most private moments. It occupies about the same space among my sexual

desires as “straight sex,” which is to say, none at all.

It’s not that I’m worried it’ll be uncomfortable or that I’m holding out for the right guy or the right moment. Honestly—and I have no more direct way of expressing this—I have no interest in gay sex. And as far as I’m concerned, I’ve “gone all the way” with a bunch of guys without ever doing anal. This is a problem, because it places me in a no man’s land of sexuality under the prevailing paradigm: I don’t want to have sex with guys or girls. Does that make me asexual? If by asexual you mean an absence of sexual desire, then definitely not. It makes me nothing, an inscrutable entity, it makes me weird and upsets the easy hetero/homo binary in which people paint the world.

That’s all well and good, I hear you say, but he’s still gay in my book—I mean, he’s definitely not straight. But I can’t be properly gay either and not have anal sex, because gay society is curiously divided along another binary: top/bottom. If you are unaware of this phenomenon (I envy you), a bottom is a guy who habitually takes other guys’ penises up his butt, and a top is a guy who penetrates other guys. And you kinda have to be one or the other. You don’t get to choose based on your mood or the time of day or the current astrological phase of Mercury. You can say you’re vers, meaning you can go both ways, but this is a liminal space threatened by the relentless appeal of the nice, neat dichotomy, in much the same way as bisexuality. (You like both? But what do you prefer, if you had to choose?) The point is, I’m unintelligible in this scheme, too. I don’t do anal sex and don’t want to, so I can’t be a top or a bottom. The normal reaction when I tell guys this is confusion bordering on disbelief.

Like, literal unwillingness to believe. They cannot understand that I don’t want anal, at least somewhere deep down inside me.

So that’s how we got here. Because there’s something about me that doesn’t fit people’s expectations, something queer about me, and rather than ignore it, I chose to submit a personal exposé of my sexuality for the general public to peruse at its leisure. So now you know my particular sexual idiosyncrasy, but what I don’t want you to do is finish reading this, say to yourself, Well, that all seems awfully complicated, lucky I don’t have to deal with that, and slip right back into your hetero/homo binary. Queerness is not just the cause of queer people; I think we all know the feeling, or at least the anxiety, that our sexual inclinations are not quite normal. So you know the drill: stop stereotyping, stop categorizing, stop labeling.

Don’t call me weird for not being straight, but also don’t call me weird for not being properly gay; fuck heteronormativity, but also fuck homonormativity and fuck all the other normativities, I’m over them.