stone-cutters Harvard-Westlake School 2016
Cover Artist Statements Front Cover: As a Chinese-American, I find that food is one of the strongest connections I have to my heritage. Noodle soup especially evokes nostalgia and memories from childhood. My grandmother would make it for me almost every day for lunch, we eat it to celebrate birthdays, and many nights it’s a quick fix for dinner. This piece is about feelings of homesickness and longing, and returning to food as a means to connect with a home I never quite knew. I think at times there is a kind of struggle in finding a balance between one’s American identity and ethnic identity, and I wanted to show that struggle by including a lot of conflicting elements. The colors are bright and bold, but the girl’s expression is wistful and lost. The tacky blue motif is from those stereotypical ceramic bowls nearly every Chinese family has, and it’s cutting across the girl’s throat. The soy sauce was just a silly extra touch, but it ends up dripping down like a tear. I’m not sure if it’s sad, humorous, satirical, or something else entirely, but I think that reflects the complexity of growing up with both Chinese and American influences. My culture can sometimes feel alien, confusing, burdensome, but also warm and comforting, like a bowl of noodle soup. -Vivian Lin Back Cover: I actually began this painting during freshman year for a homework assignment in a figure painting class. We had the whole week to work on it, but of course I started it the night before it was due. So I set up my lamps and supplies in front of a mirror, sat myself down for about six or seven hours, and painted what I saw. I went to sleep after finishing the face, then didn’t touch it for the next two and a half years. Only the next morning when my mom commented “You’re golden!” did I realize that yes, I did look kind of golden, and very serious. I rolled with it. Senior year, I finished the chest with a similar brushstroke to the hair, painted the background, and called it my senior selfportrait. Whether the expression captured comes from the immediate scrutiny of my reflection, late-night tiredness, or some internal intensity seeping through, I do recognize a part of myself that has persisted unchanged through high school in this portrait. -Nicole Araya
stone-cutters
Stone-Cutters was printed at Southern California Graphics in Culver City on 80# uncoated book paper stock in Adobe Caslon Pro Typeface. 1,000 copies were distributed for free at Harvard-Westlake School. Harvard-Westlake School // 3700 Coldwater Canyon // Studio City, CA 91604 // 818.980.6692 // www.hw.com The editors and contributors gratefully acknowledge those in the Harvard-Westlake community who have helped to make this possible, in particular the members of the Visual Arts and English departments, and all the teachers, mentors, friends, and family who support our creative development. We offer special thanks to advisor Amber Caron for her years of service to the magazine: for her thoughtful, careful, caring guidance, and for passing on to us her passion for writing, for the alchemy of words on the page.
Front cover: Vivian Lin Lion’s Head Oil and soy sauce on cardboard 24 in. x 19.5 in.
Above: Brooke Sassa Countenance Inkjet print 18 in. x 34 in.
To the Stone-Cutters Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated Challengers of oblivion Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down, The square-limbed Roman letters Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well Builds his monument mockingly: For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth dies, the brave sun Die blind, and blacken to the heart: Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems. Robinson Jeffers
Dear Readers, It is our pleasure and privilege to share with you the 2016 issue of Stone-Cutters. This year we’ve made a few changes to our editorial process: publishing new art and writing pieces on our website weekly and redesigning the print edition. Although we have upgraded (and uploaded) some things, we’ve decided to keep others the same; namely, to forego, once again, an overarching theme for the magazine. Earlier this year, we toyed with the idea of using the theme of identity to tie the issue together, but ultimately decided against it. We felt that if we went into the selection process with a theme in mind, in essence with our hands tied behind our backs, we might be forced to disregard stronger works for others better suited to the theme. In any case, it felt superfluous to label this as an issue about identity. Is not all art, both literary and visual, ultimately about how we see ourselves and our place in the world? Whether impulsive like the works of the Fauves or the Beat Generation, or intellectual like the works of the Dadaists or postmodern writers, art is about how we attempt to capture mysterious, often elusive ideas such as identity, beauty, truth. When all was said and done, our priority was publishing the most vital, ambitious, and accomplished of the student body’s work -- which we now present to you, in this little bound book, the works we have chosen. Perhaps there is a theme to the works we ended up compiling. But we’d like to leave that for you to find. Your Editors, Emma Kofman, Sacha Lin and Lauren Weetman 2
Visual Arts 5 Flint, Michigan, 2016 by Abbie Howell ’18 6 Letters and Snapshots by Oceania Eshraghi ’18 8 Paradise by Ivan Rodriguez ’16 9 Seeing Light by Stephanie West ’16 10 Self-Portrait by Carli Chapus ’16 13 Bird and Egg by Emma Kofman ’16 14 Over Yeezy by Ava Gordon ’16 15 Blooming Flower by Gabriella Salimpour ’16 16 $1.99 by Jessica Robinson ’17 20 Stitch by Haley Wilson ’16 23 Jiufen Revisited by Vivian Lu ’18 25 Do You Know Where You Are Going To College? by Audrey King ’16 26 L.A. Series by Oliver Loshitzer ’17
28 Landscape for Hiroshige by Jordan Pulaski ’16 31 Touching Yellow by Lauren Weetman ’16 32 Eyes to the Sky by Tiffany Kim ’17 33 Two Vases by Juliana Simon ’16 34 The Intersection by Eun Seo Choi (Elly) ’18 36 School of Fish by Samantha Ho ’16 39 Barriers by Cameron Cabo ’16 43 Other People’s Clothes by Emma Sesar ’18 44 A Modernized Greek Amphora by Adam Hirschhorn ’16 Front cover Lion’s Head by Vivian Lin ’16 Inside cover Countenance by Brooke Sassa ’17 Back cover Self-Portrait by Nicole Araya ’16
Literary 4 Isabella by Jenny Lange ’17 7 Saltwater by Alivia Platt ’16 11 There by Jeremy Samuels ’16 12 Road Kill by Javi Arango ’16 17 a candle called you by Josh Friedman ’16 18 Rachel and the Face of God by Jared Gentile ’16 21 Aren’t We All Still Virgins? by Audrey King ’16 22 Gossamer Lungs by Elizabeth Kim ’17 24 Normal Nightmares by Scarlett Wildasin ’16 30 Larvae by Emma Kofman ’16 35 if you take us out of context by Emma Kofman ’16 38 i cried at the museum today by Tiana Coles ’16 40 Little Sister by Scarlett Wildasin ’16 42 if i could pluck the fruit of luck by Jared Gentile ’16 3
Isabella Late August on one of those infamous San Fernando Valley summer afternoons where the thermometer teetered at triple digits, she lay sprawled on her mother’s old tablecloth under the fruit trees in her front lawn. As she read through blue tinted glasses (that she bought only because she thought they made her look like a character in a movie) little white spores trickled off branches above, nestling themselves in the twists of flaxen hair and the division between pages 176 and 177. Now at eye level with the drying grass she considered herself lucky; she walked out barefoot and, despite the seemingly infinite families of bees dodging through the blades, her feet were marked by nothing but dirt and unpopped blisters. She faced the street and took secret pleasure in the way the cars would slow almost to a stop when they passed by her house, admiring whatever it was they saw in her that her own parents did not, before the driver would catch himself and press the gas again, speeding down the road. Jenny Lange
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Abbie Howell Flint, Michigan, 2016 Inkjet print 11 in. x 17 in.
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Oceania Eshraghi Letters and Snapshots Inkjet print 20 in. x 16 in.
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saltwater the ocean doesn’t speak but i understand it (trust me, i’ve been in enough to know.) the lips softly caress the shore and that’s how it starts; my feet get wet. then the intrigue of your underwater territory makes me go deeper i want to go deeper, but the saltwater burns in the scratches (you gave me), and soon my feet don’t find solid ground beneath them, and you say to me with a mouth full of salt that: it’s not you it’s me, and you just have to think about yourself, and it’s just not the right time, and you just can’t do this right then i realize, i can’t swim that well.
now, and
i think of me closing my eyes and jumping headfirst into wet sand i was close, but, not close enough, i guess. (i would probably do it again if you asked me to) and although my body is dry and my skin no longer stings, sometimes bits of sand fall from my hair, and when they do, i catch them and keep them in the palms of my hands. i still do not understand you but, i can say this for certain: that you are an ocean, and i hope i drown. Alivia Platt 7
Ivan Rodriguez Paradise Inkjet print 18 in. x 13.5 in.
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Stephanie West Seeing Light Inkjet print 32 in. x 24 in. 9
Carli Chapus Self-Portrait Acrylic and pen on illustration board 15 in. x 10 in. 10
There
Each movement made— every sound noticed (they all were). There was nothing to see; the air was dark. I could only sense and conjure malnourished theories purely speculative. And hope. I’d done it all before. But it was great. It wasn’t perfect, but that’s too much to ask. In me wove a congested highway of solely personal thought. I was being selfish. And it felt natural. But, more importantly, so did you. Jeremy Samuels
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Roadkill
There are, I think a million ants on the road and they make Euclidean lines. They are crawling out of its eye to the pines, warm smell, with a disturbed symmetry they keep, like old books on a shelf. The thing’s body is a punctured accordion. Lungs fallen into more relaxed geometries. Death only means it no longer plays a role in the wondrous machineBut to me the ants speak more. Their mathematical indifference and rigid axial designs, something I could learn from. Or their unfaltering ability to find home. Instead I stare at the pulp, and wonder how we got there. How memory is a woven thing and gravity, the number We call falling. Javi Arango
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Emma Kofman Bird and Egg White raku clay, white crackle raku glaze, twine 5 in. x 4 in. x 4 in., 4 in. x 4 in. x 4 in. Photograph by Dylan Palmer
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Ava Gordon Over Yeezy Acrylic on board 12 in. x 14 in.
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Gabriella Salimpour Blooming Flower Glass 11.6 in. x 9 in. x 8.6 in.
Photograph by Dylan Palmer
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a candle called you
I only have a flashlight my shining perception condensed into a beam bright and crowded in a lightless forest trees and rocks become void as they traipse from within to without the edges of my eyes I walk a thin path of dirt with bottomless sides but (like transcendence) in a shaft of moonlight I find a candle called You once lit, the universe exists without my eyes and I feel the ground beneath my feet Josh Friedman
Genie Kilb $1.99 Inkjet print 11 in. x 14 in. 17
Rachel and the Face of God
Rachel Abramowitz stared intently at the still steaming pie. She knew exactly what it was. “Is that you?” she whispered. “Rachel, we’re dying out here!” her husband lamented. “The customers are hungry, where’s that pie?” She was transfixed. The crispy, golden brown crust rippled and rose like the waters of the Red Sea, and her knife was Moses. Looking upon that Holy Creation, that most hallowed of forms raised from flour and water, her mouth salivated. It was no graven image. It was the true face of God. She closed her eyes and began reciting all the prayers she could remember while her husband made light, self-deprecating conversation at the counter to pacify the customers. He was growing angry, and poked his head into the kitchen. “Rachel, what is taking so long with this pie?” he whispered sharply. Middle age had shortened his temper. “Just a minute,” she smiled wanly. Her face was crusted by dried flour. “Hurry it up, please, love. These people do not wait forever.” He spoke with an exasperated tone and then returned to the counter. She knew it was no steam from the pie but smoke from the burning bush that had led Moses to the Promised Land. She wanted a prophecy, too. She needed one. “Tell me what to do, Lord,” she said, “I am lost. I have been lost…” Rachel started to weep. Softly, so her husband wouldn’t hear. Her tears were sweet like honey. “Rachel!” her husband yelled. “Rachel!” As Rachel wiped her tears away, the pie smiled with utter benevolence and understanding at her, with the knowledge of her life’s struggles past and present, with supreme forgiveness, with honey sweetness, with the enlightened odor of cinnamon mixed with a hint of vanilla. “I am not happy,” she told the pie, “We have not been happy for some time…we only work, every day…”
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The pie did not answer. “We will lose the store if we don’t,” she elaborated hastily, “I told Sam that shul was more important, but he refused to listen. He does not even keep the Sabbath anymore!” The pie didn’t care. “Lord, have you forsaken us?” Her voice broke as she asked it. “I don’t understand…I don’t understand why you make our path so difficult…” She put her head in her hands and cried great racking sobs. They shook her whole emaciated body, reverberating from her tired lungs to her kneaded hands. The ubiquitous smell of the pie enveloped her in a comforting embrace, holding her frail body like Isaac on Mount Moriah. But where was her angel? “Goddamnit Rachel,” her husband stormed into the kitchen, “I had to send the customers away! Where the hell is that goddamn pie?” His eyes seized upon the apple pie staring at Rachel from the kitchen table. “Why didn’t you tell me it was ready?” he demanded. She did not meet his gaze but kept sobbing, wailing. He took up the pie in his hand. “I’ll put this in front,” he said, turning to go. Then he put the pie down and held Rachel’s hands away from her face. “Don’t you understand what situation we’re in? Don’t you know how important it is to keep our composure? They want us out, Rachel. They want us to fail. If we slip up even once,” he held up his index finger, “they’ll kill us.” She stopped crying then and looked over at the pie. It didn’t look like anything. She nodded her head. “Good girl,” he said, “Jonah will be back from school soon.” He kissed her flourcreased forehead, took the pie to the front and set it on the counter. Later, a customer came in asking for apple pie. Rachel played in the back with her son while Sam cut the man a piece. Jared Gentile
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Haley Wilson Stitch Inkjet print 11 in. x 14 in.
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A r e n’t We A l l S t i l l V i r g i n s ?
Dear Plucker, Aren’t we all still Virgins?— To a certain extent. What really plucks Our rose petals, And shan’t all The petals Be plucked And neutered To fully be Plucked. And what measures The inertia To do the act of A complete pluck? Flowers can be Different too, Can they not? Flowers can be Broken, ripped, Stepped on, late Bloomers, but none Of those depend or Equal or determine A pluck either— Maybe we’ve never Faced a real plucking— Maybe we never will? Audrey King
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Gossamer Lungs
The damp press of your parted lips spells out against my skin as if we’ve only just learned the basics of braille. All these nights of your voice stark against the hollow lake, bodies like broken lamps that still burn after they’ve gone out. No one tells you how absence coats the lungs like melted liquor, how it crystallizes solstices inside my throat like black glass. I speak, and relive all the longest days. The twelfth month. I shroud myself with the skin of darker winters, just so I can remember you. Elizabeth Kim
Vivian Lu Jiufen Revisited Pen, ink, markers on illustration board 14 in. x 11 in. 22
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Normal Nightmares There’s a stack of oatmeal-crusted bowls beneath my nightstand. I’m making every moment routine, every feeling part of a backdrop, and I am the broken projector tallying all the days without violence, days unamorous, sucked flavorless, textures and hollow exchanges, reflexes and dodged glances, people I stopped knowing pervading all the paths I won’t take. My face is a mass of hardened hot glue, pores leaking battery acid while my lungs hoard lunch break poison but I refuse to stop refueling, become a collection of ends, blips, afterthoughts and I am still so enamored with you. Crawling always to the edge of my seat until I’m touching the edge of yours, seizing middle school tricks from a girl once too skinny to follow through. Now this body is an incomplete erasure, the thought you should’ve kept to yourself, but my brain can’t catch up. I live in light waves that haven’t reached us. I live in the dark bedrooms where I could forget, in the overlaps of limbs and unruly breaths. When I woke up this morning I didn’t. The banshee me satisfies attendance but chews off her own hands and slinks and hopes to sink into walls. She forces a pulse in a huddle of confused sound, a puddle of aches and forfeited ambitions, reduces life to wailing in the car and tapping fingers to regular death clock ticks. I want to tell you all of it, but if I admit I revise my dreams to keep you in them, I’m afraid you’ll become a stomach ache another cavity for my fears and errors if I divulge how many experiences are near death you will find another set of limbs, find them attached to something whole, and I will only be practice. 24
I think about you in the radio pauses, on long drives and short drives, watching my ceiling in half sleep states, tracking blotches of color on the insides of my eyelids when there’s nothing said and everything to say. I feel the vibrations in my teeth, the opportunities just under my tongue as my mouth dries around poorly phrased confessions and quiet tastes so stale. Scarlett Wildasin
Audrey King Do You Know Where You Are Going to College? Acrylic paint on canvas 15 in. x 24 in.
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Oliver Loshitzer L.A. Series Silver gelatin print 8 in. x 10 in. 26
Next page: Jordan Pulaski Landscape for Hiroshige Pen and colored pencil on paper 7 in. x 10.5 in. 27
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Larvae
They walked around under the pretense of doing things but really just enjoyed each other’s company as their eyes scanned the objects in front of them and occasionally referenced them in conversation. She decided not to tell him about all the worms she had found when she was cleaning the lettuce because maybe it would scare him off, and she had worked so hard on the salad. But still, she really wanted to tell him. Because she thought maybe the three different types of bugs she found were actually just three different stages of the same bug. One of them was transparent and glob-like and could’ve been the larva. And she thought he would appreciate her putting it all together like this. But instead she commented on how much the stuffed animals nailed to the wall affected her. And they moved onto the next room. Emma Kofman
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Lauren Weetman Touching Yellow Inkjet print 11 in. x 17 in.
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Juliana Simon Two Vases Fused and slumped glass Dimensions variable Photograph by Dylan Palmer
Tiffany Kim Eyes to the Sky Acrylic and oil on cardboard 15 in. x 20 in.
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Eun Seo Choi (Elly) The Intersection Inkjet print 11 in. x 14 in.
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if you take us out of context
if you take us out of context we sit awkwardly in the tensely cupped palms of giants that are careful not to grip too tightly the faces we try to project on our own fall flat around our too real features and our eyes see only the light from the eyes we wish were there if you touch us we feel like wet rubber and although we look smooth you cannot trace your finger gently it catches on nothing and you pull away when we think, it is of a conscious non-existence and how it would feel to be suspended in Vaseline each movement tangibly displacing the thick blurs between us and if we opened our eyes, would we see a thick grey or just the soft reflections ourselves on a ghost-yellow background that colors us in Emma Kofman
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Samantha Ho School of Fish Oil, acrylic, and graphite pencil on canvas board 15 in. x 20 in.
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i cried at the museum today
we watch the decades change from room to room, feeling like we should finally say something, loud about brushstrokes and being better people. our heavy feet fall like globs of paint on the wood, and i wonder if you’d tell me how you feel about love, and other things you’ve seen on television screens. we encounter something famous, and guess if there were drafts or that perhaps everything happened all right the first time. life, i hear, is sometimes about watching and waiting and staying inside with our heads down to die (so they can put our stuff up on display, assured nothing will ever change). we want to believe in revision, but now i am not sure - so we try to retrace our steps, moving back in time as your gaze paints a masterpiece absentmindedly on my face. Tiana Coles
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Cameron Cabo Barriers Watercolor and pencil on cardboard 24 in. x 18 in.
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Little Sister
We’re sitting on the front porch I never thought I’d see, and you feel so out of reach. What hasn’t lately? The cold shrinks my skin up against me, presses into that warm core that keeps me living when I think I can’t possibly be. It stings my eyeballs—which is a good thing—a logical reason to fight back tears. But this battle is constant. My whole body like the married couple: Stuck in a loop of the same bother manifesting itself in new monotonies. And I’m weak. In muscle I nearly never had, in resolve lost. I want to tell you how the last time you knew me I was okay, how the last time was a different lifetime. I want you to know me because I think that you could, but I’m so fucking scared. So I just look up and smile (Are you convinced?), and I say the polite things (Do I want you deceived?), until my skin hurts and I struggle to know we aren’t strangers. These past few days I drank to pretend. I kept at it until it didn’t feel like pretending. And I was up in the air but I belonged to my body. What a dizzy wonder that was, wanting to be connected to my flesh. All parts of me remembered how to move. I didn’t worry what that looked like, I just reveled in the energy, which was an old toy by the time your arm was lazy over my shoulder. More so when your hands hovered all around my surrounding space, and you clutched every time I shook. Because I got myself all the way up, carried away with happy, forgetting to check for ground. The music swelled and swallowed. I still felt it when I woke this morning, hazy and drunk but without the right setting. The alone drunk that pulled me piece from piece like the first sketch. Today I am a rough draft tearing between fingers.
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I worry that you only worry for the messy me, the happy, sloppy, edge of my seat me. Because we’re sitting on this porch in cold blood, our parents’ blood, divided into two characters that refuse to reconcile; blood still poisoned enough to share a moment no one else is awake for, and there is more silence than thought. Your hands warming each other in the safe outline of your chair, which is not even touching mine. You’re not really here with me when you don’t see imminent danger. You don’t know how you need to be. You don’t know that it is a constant, that it is the healing I crave, not the catching. I have already fallen each waking hour, each eye opening to the world, each learning I’m still in it. This is just another calamity to fill the body I’m not filling. And I am ruined when our hug is awkward. I am so much smaller than I ever thought I’d stay, while you grow in every breath. I say I love you more than is necessary, because with nothing else this has to stay true, because I know you will have to say it back. As the cab pulls away from you, towards the polite questions of strangers no one wants to answer, I give you one more smile from the backseat. I’m sorry it’s not you in the front. I wonder if it’s really that different. I watch you get smaller but I don’t seem to grow. I love you I love you I love you I revise you right off my page. Scarlett Wildasin
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if i could pluck the fruit of luck
if i could pluck the fruit of luck, allowing happy smiling mistakes, the sun would come forth, but not too close and find the bud of friendship untrampled (stomp instead the seed of hate despair and rage, the thorns of age skip mimics and critics who clink their empty glasses full of wine) i’d stumble into jungles as loud and alive as cities where ants have a seat on the subway where people don’t carry their faces in pockets and musical honey is eaten by ears wearing a hood is not considered a crime people are busy, but there’s always enough time carbon does not wander around it sits in stomachs too full to complain ships dock home to petrified ports the paintings all differ with equal appeal love is not caught at the end of a fishing pole love is something universal and real Jared Gentile
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Emma Sesar Other People’s Clothes Inkjet print 16 in. x 20 in.
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Literary Editor Emma Kofman ’16 Web Editor Sacha Lin ’16 Art Editor Lauren Weetman ’16 Associate Literary Editors Jensen Davis ’16 Jeremy Samuels ’16 Elizabeth Kim ’17 Jack Li ’17 Associate Art Editors Vivian Lin ’16 Talia Ratnavale ’17 Outreach Jenny Lange ’17 Tony Ma ’17 Abi Thomas ’17 Literature Selection Committee Jensen Davis ’16 Emma Kofman ’16 Sacha Lin ’16 Jeremy Samuels ’16 Will Dickerman ’17 Elizabeth Kim ’17 Jenny Lange ’17 Tony Ma ’17 Phoebe Sanders ’17 Zohar Levy ’18 Art Selection Committee Vivian Lin ’16 Lauren Weetman ’16 Talia Ratnavale ’17 Iman Akram ’18 Natalie Choi ’18 Faculty Advisers Amber Caron Darcy Cosper Cheri Gaulke
Adam Hirschhorn A Modernized Greek Amphora Clay 11 in. x 9 in. x 9 in. Photograph by Dylan Palmer
Back cover: Nicole Araya Self-Portrait Oil on canvas board 8 in. x 10 in.
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