Issue 18

AND Sunrise over a flat Eart AND Cloudy sky thinking S

W

A

R T

H

NOVEMBER 2017

Development and Distress

Photo essay by Vishnu Gupta

M

O

R E

CONTRIBUTORS Amaechi Abuah is a freshman from Lagos, Nigeria. Amaechi turned out all right in the end; It is what preyed on Amaechi, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams…

Jasmine Anouna is an Honors Political Science and Education major, with a minor in Spanish—although she is really a sociologist in disguise. Writing poetry has recently developed into a life-changing passion outside of academics, and she is grateful for the opportunity to share this love with you.

Daniel Bidikov is a junior from Long Island. He thinks everyone should read more classics.

Kat Capossela is a freshman from Boston. She likes fuzzy blankets and wishes she needed less sleep.

Min Cheng is a senior from Lutherville-Timonium, Maryland.

She sings too much and reads too little.

Hope-Elizabeth Darris is a freshman from New York City.

She loves to dance badly, eat mac and cheese, and watch hours upon hours of Bob’s Burgers and The Office.

Philip Decker is a senior from New York. A history major and silent film enthusiast, he is also a noted proponent of the thicc earth hypothesis.

Leo Elliot is a senior in absentia from Brooklyn, NY. He prefers to spend his free time with friends, but books and movies count.

Max Gruber is a sophomore at Swarthmore who studies Art History. He is an avid follower of hip hop.

Vishnu Gupta is a senior from Jaipur, India. He loves films, politics, food, and sleeping.

Letter policy Letters are welcome from all readers. We will not ever publish letters anonymously and we reserve the right to edit all letters for length and clarity without contacting the letter writer. Letters generally should run no longer than 1,000 words. They should be sent to swatreview@ gmail.com

How to contribute Submissions of longform reporting, personal, argumentative and photo essays, book and media reviews, short stories, poems, and anything else that seems suitable can be e-mailed to Samantha Herron, editor-in chief. Submissions will be considered from Swarthmore students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and will be considered anonymously, though will will not, except in rare cases, publish anonymously. Submissions should generally not go longer than 10,000 words.

Contact: sherron1@swarthmore.edu, cgerstm1@swarthmore.edu

Wesley Han is from Lexington, Massachusetts, but doesn’t know how to fire a musket. They delight in making homophobic straight men on public transportation question their sexuality, and take pleasure in stitching up holes in old socks.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF SAMANTHA HERRON

Hazlett Henderson graduated. Find her planting flowers.

MANAGING COLETTE GERSTMANN

Carrie Jiang is a freshman from Shanghai, China. She is really interested in film, and her favorite director is Stanley Kubrick.

FEATURES ISABEL CRISTO

Keton Kakkar is a junior from Sands Point, New York.

Intrigued by theories of interpretation and communication, they have chosen to study computer science and English literature. Their hobbies include bouldering, hiking, and trying to watch the rest of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

PERSONAL ESSAYS WILLA GLICKMAN

Jonathan Kay is an extremely emotionally available sophomore from California.

FICTION & POETRY COLETTE GERSTMANN

Abha Lal is a senior from Kathmandu, Nepal. She spends almost all of her waking hours at Sharples.

BOOKS LEO ELLIOT

Ari Liloia is a sophomore from Haddonfield, New Jersey. His favorite sounds are water pouring into a tall glass and footsteps echoing in a large room.

Abraham Lyon is a first year from Lexington, MA. He likes to read and watch movies when he’s not too busy and also he likes to not be too busy.

Joe Mariani is a Junior from West Chester, Pennsylvania. He thinks the statue of Frank Rizzo in Center City Philadelphia should be removed.

Ariana Soriano is a sophomore from northern New Jersey, who can normally be overheard discussing dogs, music, and 2

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

PHOTO ESSAYS KYUNGCHAN MIN

Design © 2017 the Swarthmore Phoenix. All content © 2017 by its listed author unless otherwise noted.

The “R” logo is based on the font Layer Cake by Luzia Prado. The “Review” logo is based on the font Soraya by Pactrice Scott. Printed at Bartash Printing, Philadelphia, PA. Please recycle this magazine.

Published by the Swarthmore Phoenix swarthmorephoenix.com

MOVIES & TV JONATHAN KAY MUSIC GABRIEL MEYER-LEE CONTIBUTING EDITOR JOE MARIANI LAYOUT EDITORS LILY GOLDMAN ADRIANA KNIGHT EDITOR-AT-LARGE LILIANA FRANKEL

“The smallest feline is a masterpiece.”

Leonardo da Vinci

more ARTS MOVIES

November 2017

Style and Substance 38

FEATURE

Sunrise over a flat Earth 4 Inside the world of flat Earther conspiracists

by Philip Decker

What we can learn from this past summer’s action films

by Jonathan Kay

PHOTO ESSAYS

Seeing China

13

“Dunkirk” 41

20

Contemporary Horror 42

by Carrie Jiang

Development and Distress

PERSONAL ESSAYS

Hollywood needs scary movies with substance

by Kat Capossela

by Vishnu Gupta

On English 8

by Abha Lal

“Persona 5” 43

ARTS

Cloudy-Sky Thinking 9

An alternate reality with some narrative control

by Dan Bidikov

by Hazlett Henderson BOOKS

Mementos 12

“Walkaway” 33

by Hope-Elizabeth Darris

MUSIC

Cory Doctorow’s futuristic novel

by Keton Kakkar

Ambient Music 45

FICTION & POETRY

“The Adventure Zone” 34

Root of all Evil

A voyage into the realm of the podcast

by Min Cheng

29

by Amaechi Abuah

Flower Boys A Riddle

Dante in Swarthmore 36

31

A review of Shea Kelly’s new book and an interview with the author

by Joe Mariani

On the experience of watching Nolan’s film

by Abraham Lyon

What’s going on for the genre in 2017

by Ari Liloia

“Luv is Rage 2” 46 On Lil Uzi Vert’s new album

by Max Gruber

Psycho Sweethearts 48

by Wesley Han

The rise of Brockhampton

by Leo Elliot

Just Add Water

“Good Nature” 50

by Jasmine Anouna

32

A take on Turnover’s latest release by Ariana Soriano

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

3

FEATURE

Sunrise Over a Flat Earth

by Philip Decker

T

HERE IS A STORM COMING,” declares Merlin the prophet, and it is the storm of flat earth. Welcome to the surreal universe of the flat earth internet, where the barrier between irony and sincerity is mangled beyond recovery, where appeal to authority is the greatest heresy, and where working for NASA is akin to getting a paycheck from Lucifer himself. Yes, there are people who believe the earth is flat, and their numbers are growing far too rapidly for comfort.

I first discovered the phenomenon this summer by joining some Facebook groups dedicated to discussing flat earth theories.

These groups are home to tens of thousands of people who have developed their own subculture, lexicon, and belief system around the premise that everything we are taught in school about the earth is a complete lie. The motivations vary, but they generally boil down to feeling special, knowledgeable and ‘woke’ while unsuspecting millions plod on with their eyes closed.

As I hope will become apparent further on, 4

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

it is quite rare for somebody to be just a flat earther: the narrative is propped up by a constellation of conspiracies without which it would become unsupportable. In this flat earth travel guide, I’m going to update you on some of the basic dogma, and then I’ll introduce you to three flesh-and-blood flat earthers. I’ll leave you with some parting thoughts at the end about the internet and its role in making flat earthism more permanent than ever before.

First of all, however, we should recognize that no two flat earthers are the same.

Few agree on a single “model” and fewer still can make their system cohere beyond the most cursory inspection. Most claim that the earth is a disc, rather resembling the seal of the United Nations, and that the world’s governments and corporations are united in a conspiracy to perpetuate belief in a sphere. Beyond this, schisms abound and few of the details have been definitively hammered out. Flat earthers are forever suspicious of one another, always on the lookout for “shills,” “sellouts” and “globetards in disguise” within their ranks.

The ones I’ve talked to say they prefer this state of affairs; it is better to be unsure of the truth than to be a brainwashed “glober.”

Religious flat earthers are disgusted by the purported claims of modern science to have “unlocked the mysteries of God” and derive their model from a literal reading of Genesis. Those who are not religious—or less so, anyway—appear to be motivated by a selective application of Cartesian skepticism in which all “globe propaganda” is subject to radical doubt, but one’s own senses can be trusted as proof of the earth’s flatness. One always wonders the extent to which any given flat earther is a troll, but many are far too emotionally invested to be keeping up an act.

Y

ou must be wondering: what do flat earthers specifically believe? The simplest place to start is with the most obvious proof of a spherical earth: photographs from space. These are all considered computer-generated imagery (CGI); not one of them is authentic, and

neither are the satellites that took them. Not only has man never landed on the moon, man has never been to space and has never exceeded the height of an aircraft. Most flat earthers do not even believe that space is real at all. Celestial bodies, like other planets, are variously described as holograms or tricks of the atmosphere, and at any rate telescopes are universally fitted with CGI filters that perpetuate the myth of space in gullible minds.

If there is no space, what do we see when we look into the sky? It is a dome, a great semispherical dome that covers the expanse of the disc. Asteroids are chunks of the dome breaking away and falling to earth, while stars are holes in the dome revealing “the light beyond,” or else floating, glittering gemstones near the dome’s “ceiling.” Within this closed system are the sun and tvhe moon, equally-sized bodies set at a fixed distance from one another that rotate, alternately casting their light over portions of the plane like flashlights pointed downward. By no means is the sun 93 million miles away: the true number is more in the region of 3,000, and it has a diameter between 32 and 60 miles (depending on the ‘estimate’). How do most flat earthers respond to the problem of annual twenty-four hour sunlight in the extremes of the southern hemisphere?

It just doesn’t happen. Video that shows it is CGI. What about the edge of the disc? Its circumference consists of a circular ice wall that keeps the water from spilling over: this is the true nature of Antarctica. Nobody, it is claimed, has ever circumnavigated the “globe version” of Antarctica, and those who try are promptly “taken out” by any combination of nefarious forces. What lies beyond the oceans on the great expanse of ice, no flat earther knows—and they are doubtful they will ever find out, as the ice wall is guarded at all points by armed security teams preventing ordinary people from investigating for themselves. For whom these guards work is a matter of disagreement; common theories include the US government, the Vatican, elite bankers, or some collaboration thereof.

This brings us to the big, bad wolf of Flatland: NASA. NASA is the go-to villain, the ultimate evil, the source of all injustice. Everything NASA touches turns to ash, everything NASA says is not just untruthful but satanic. A fifteen minute tour of the flat earth internet will fully update any newcomer on NASA’s latest deceptions.

The agency exists solely for the purpose of churning out fake images of the earth and staging rocket launches that, being unable to penetrate the dome, simply fall into the

sea out of sight. NASA is far from alone, moreover. It collaborates with other “space” agencies in a global—excuse me, planewide—conspiracy to cover up the flat earth.

Yes, this includes those of Iran and North Korea. Bring up the space race of the 1960s, and you’ll usually be told that the entire Cold War was a lie, a series of staged theatrics to “control the masses” and so on. I have personally been informed that the Soviet Union and the United States—ideologically irreconcilable societies perpetually at risk of nuclear war—gladly put aside their differences to dupe humankind about the shape of the earth.

Everything NASA touches turns to ash, everything NASA says is not just untruthful but satanic.

It goes without saying that the worldwide conspiracy is the most ludicrous cog of the flat earth machine, but it too is designed to inflate the importance of those who adhere to it. Why, for instance, are NASA and its lackeys in other nations—supposedly an all-powerful cadre capable of deceiving billions of “sheep”—also so incompetent that YouTube “researchers” can easily figure them out while educated professionals cannot? Why are so many flat earthers permitted to exist unbothered in the first place? The peddlers of the “globe delusion” have started wars, puppeteered superpowers, and engineered famines in their determination to keep the lie alive, but seem too lazy or ignorant to silence a band of internet crackpots. At any rate, press a true believer too much, and you’re at risk of being called a “globe agent,” paid by shadowy powers to sow discord on flat earth pages. The suggestion that such fringe groups even merit paid infiltration is but one of flat earthism’s many self-referential giveaways: they want to be important, worthy of being spied on.

The biggest question of all, however, is also the one that receives the least satisfactory responses: why the coverup? What about the shape of the earth could possibly motivate enemy nations to unite, academics and scientists to conspire, corporations to play along—all without a single whistleblower? There are dozens if not hundreds

of answers to this question. I have heard such varied motives as “Rothschild control,” “Freemason control,” “spreading the evolution lie,” “money,” “controlling public LIEbraries [verbatim quote],” “stealing our souls,” “enforcing the Antarctic Treaty of 1961,” “occult Babylonian black magic,” and “doing the bidding of [select all that apply] 1) NASA, 2) CIA, 3) NSA, 4) the US Postal Service, 5) ‘the ones who print the money,’ 6) Zionists, Zionism, and the Elders of Zion, 7) the Pope, 8) the United Nations, 9) Angela Merkel, 10) Satan/Lucifer.” The most frequent explanation, however, is also the most revealing: “hiding the Creator.”

Religious flat earthers are almost universally obsessed with the idea that the modern world has been designed to hide man’s “special” place “at the center of everything.”

For them, NASA’s ultimate objective is to convince the human race that it is “on a ball in empty space,” “spinning into nowhere.”

These flat earthers fancy themselves cleareyed seekers of the truth, reestablishing humanity’s central place in the universe while the globetard multitudes languish in nihilism, addicted to NASA’s godless Kool-Aid. I recall a post that posed the question: “God’s domed firmament earth vs. Satan’s spinning ball earth: which do you choose?”

N

ow that we have covered the basics of flat earth dogma, let’s meet some actual flat earthers! In my time poking around these Facebook groups, I managed to identify three rough categories of flat earther: memers, prophets, and robots.

Here I will introduce you to a representative member of each category, and what it’s like to talk to them. All those profiled here are actual people I met, reconstructed to the best of my ability.

Meet Sam. Sam is a bicycle salesman from Missouri who likes to cycle in his free time. He has a fairly short attention span, is willing to engage in discussion up to a point, and has a slippery way of shifting positions almost within the same sentence. Sam has logic and shame enough to know when he is losing a fight, and he can usually be stumped with some commitment and grit. At this point, he unleashes a ‘meme rampage’: that is, a barrage of memes he has compiled expressly to drown out anybody who threatens him. It is common for Sam to post no fewer than thirty consecutive memes like machine gun bursts, burying whatever discussion there had been in a smoldering heap of garbage. His memes include pictures of Queen Elizabeth with horns photoshopped over her hair, an “argument” claiming Australia doesn’t ex-

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

5

ist on a flat earth map (seriously), George Bush and Benedict XVI wearing “Masonic” robes, and crude, anti-Semitic images of something approximating a Rothschilds Jewish bankers-alien lizards crossover.

Sam is your garden variety flat earther, and no, he is not a troll. He is one of the ordinary foot soldiers—a common grunt of sorts who doesn’t try to defend the theory or solve any of its gaping problems. He is not really here to debate: instead, he finds “globers” willing to talk to him, tests whether they’ll fold, drowns them in incoherent ridiculousness if they don’t, and declares victory when they give up. Flat earth groups are ridden with Sams who arrive to their beliefs uncritically, who are easily offended and become comically defensive when challenged, and who ultimately rely on a stash of not-so-dank memes to do their bidding when critical faculties fail to do the job. Indeed, “globers” will occasionally post the rhetorical question, “Do flat earthers know how to argue anything without memes?” You can imagine the response.

Our next subject is Merlin. Merlin is a much more sophisticated flat earther than Sam. Although there are glaring lapses in his writing and spelling, he is mostly articulate, and his vocabulary is impressive, if misapplied. Merlin claims to be a special effects artist who has worked on “some major movies.” As to whether this is true we can only speculate, but given Merlin’s eager self-image as a flat earth prophet, it is hard to imagine him working in a professional

6

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

setting without giving himself away. Although he is much more interesting to talk to, Merlin is just as difficult to argue with as Sam is. As you might suspect, Merlin has a gargantuan ego: he claims to possess superhuman knowledge of history, philosophy and the sciences. Merlin’s appearance in a thread usually derails whatever dubious tether to reality had existed prior. He is a chatterbox of alternate dimensions, parallel timelines, the hollowness of the moon, extraterrestrial overlords, and eschatologies of mainstream science. Merlin believes that the globe’s demise is perpetually around the corner, and indeed has the guts to proffer some specific dates—the day of the August eclipse, for instance—which he invariably downplays after they fail to deliver. Time after time I’ve tried to nail him to the wall and force him to explain the mechanism by which flat earthism will gain widespread acceptance, and I’ve received in turn evocations of his own ingenuity (“the depths of my mind are incomprehensible to globetards”), earthquakes and UFOs striking fear into the public, and something about mass traffic congestion.

Merlin is an example of a flat earth prophet: someone who corrals the troops with cool-sounding, Matrix-esque pseudoscience and more than a little religious fervor. His articulateness and flair for drama have attracted a small sub-cult that doesn’t seem the least bit perturbed by the consistent failures of his many predictions. Merlin relishes his little following and, like other

prominent flat earthers, has grown accustomed to being called a genius and visionary. Unlike Sam, Merlin is not a harsh person and in his own way is almost gentle. He states that his foremost priority is to welcome as many new members to Flatland as possible, and that flat earth groups ought to be a refuge for the persecuted or abandoned. Reading Merlin’s dogma epitomizes the nagging feeling one always has when perusing such groups: that these are collections of outcasts, of sad and lonely people who probably have achieved little in life and who crave validation or kinship. It is easy to laugh at Sam’s pugnacious floundering, but talking to Merlin is almost tragic.

We turn finally to Wayne. When I first met Wayne, I was convinced for days that he is a spam account, but I learned from hearsay that he is in fact a divorced house painter from Washington State. Wayne is an infernal character who shows up at the least opportune times and leaves behind ruin. Interacting with Wayne is like reasoning with the offspring of a malicious, broken AI and a demonic combine harvester that swallows everything it inhales. Exuding a vicious stupidity that even other flat earthers have objected to, Wayne is incapable of anything resembling a rational conversation. His sentences invariably begin with one of two phrases: “This is hilarious” and “You mindless fool.” Wayne does not register what anybody says to him, friend or foe; he simply sputters along attacking everybody he meets with unrestrained acri-

Photo courtesy of NASA

mony, making wild accusations about complete strangers. Several times I tried to talk to him for an extended period, refusing to give up even when accused of orchestrating 9/11, working for Lucifer and being a pedophile. All my attempts to haul the conversation toward some kind of progress were met with attacks like “You mindless fool, you do not understand basic physics” and self-murmurings like “This is hilarious, this one thinks it is intelligent, but it is probably dumber than a cow.” Wayne’s fixation on animals and dehumanization may well be his trademark. I once saw him spit out the sentence “This is hilarious, my disgusting globe earth farm animals are hungry, I should shake the chum bucket.” In the end, Wayne blocked me on Facebook because he deemed me “a mindless fool who is filthier than the monkeys he thinks are his ancestors.”

Although Wayne’s peculiar mannerisms make him more memorable than most, he represents a kind of flat earther whose only form of “argumentation,” such as it is, consists of uninspired ad hominem. These flat earthers seem impervious to shame or embarrassment and rely reflexively on a tired palette of mechanical phrases that wear down everyone around them. Unlike Sam, Wayne requires no trigger or tipping point for his diatribes, but pounces from the getgo; and unlike Merlin, Wayne has no shred of goodwill. In talking to the Waynes of the world I found myself inescapably dragged down to their level, unable to introduce

any logic or courtesy into the proceedings.

Eventually one’s only option is to leave in defeat and hope the cyclone does not follow. I find it interesting that in my time knowing him, Wayne never posted a single meme; perhaps this is because he IS a meme.

W

here does all this leave us? What does the flat earth phenomenon mean? What did I get out of spending part of my summer in the remotest caverns of Facebook? If anything, this is a lucid case study of the internet as mixed blessing. The first rumblings of flat earthism as it exists today—dome and all— emerged in Britain during the nineteenth century, and efforts to form discussion groups came and went during the twentieth, never quite coalescing into durable organizations. They were chronically hobbled by distance and coordination problems.

You can’t just look into a phone book and figure out who is a flat earther. If you, an American living in 1960, believe in a flat earth, there might be a few dozen others of like mind in your town, but there is no way of finding out without advertising a meeting, and attending such a meeting invites stigma and opprobrium from others.

Organizing an international association— as twentieth century flat earthers Samuel Shenton and Charles K. Johnson tried to do—requires weathering humiliation from mainstream scientists and snail-paced,

member-by-member expansion.

As late as the 1990s, societies of this kind could be mortally wounded by mere logistical misfortune: a fire destroyed all of Johnson’s membership records in 1997, evaporating years of labor and research.

Now things are different, and the dawn is breaking over Flatland. Today, it is possible for flat earthers to communicate with one another without even leaving their homes.

It requires no sign-up, no newsletter, no funding, no meetinghouse. Despite being theoretically visible to far more people— tens of thousands, often—internet flat earthers are safer from ridicule or social pressure than their predecessors were, insulated by a mass online presence where one can disappear at the first sign of danger, and where all interaction is optional.

Whatever dreams may have swirled in the 1990s of controlling the internet—of harnessing it to enlighten the world through the spread of knowledge or bring harmony through professional contact—have been thoroughly dispelled by now. Liberated by anonymity and safety in numbers, people have coalesced into the groups of their choice, reading what they want, with whom they want. The internet has a place for everybody, and that means everybody: retirees, doctors, neo-Nazis, veterans, music-lovers, jihadis, and flat earthers. Some call this radical democratization, others an ungovernable disaster that has stretched human discourse to its logical extremes.

Do we want everybody talking to every-

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

7

PERSONAL ESSAY

On English

by Abha Lal

I

earned the nickname “mute people watcher” during my first week of elementary school, and it stuck for a long time. I had grown up speaking Maithili at home, a southern language—coded working class—that nobody at my posh Kathmandu school understood. Unable to communicate in Nepali, I spent my days vacantly staring at people’s mouths as they uttered words that were completely alien to me, struggling to make mine a language that wasn’t.

It got easier over time. First, I learned to tell the differences between when I was being yelled at and when I was being praised, when I was being asked to do something and when I simply had to agree with a sentiment by nodding my head. Then, words started having meaning—“kalam” meant pen, “kitab” meant book, “kursi” meant chair, and mastery over the names of maybe 30 objects was all that I needed to make myself comprehensible to teach-

Having a hybrid tongue became my defining trait, and I was happy to leverage it for comic effect. ers and classmates. Grammar came very slowly—well into third grade all my verbs were still Maithili, and I remember deliberately caricaturing my “Nepa-ithili” to make my classmates laugh. Having a hybrid tongue became my defining trait, and I was happy to leverage it for comic effect.

By the time I became fluent in Nepali, knowing Nepali wasn’t enough. The Kathmandu aristocracy that my school was grooming us to become part of was committed to conducting life in a “cosmopolitan” American-accented English, and sometime in elementary school we were expected make a bizarre shift from knowing no English at all to talking like we were characters in a Disney Channel TV show. Although profoundly weird, in some ways, this was a much easier tran8

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

sition than the one that I had to make before, because all my classmates were in the same boat of bewilderment as I was.

We suffered together, rolling our eyes at having to read aloud Clifford the Big Red Dog forty times till our teacher was satisfied that each of us could pronounce “Clifford” without enunciating the “r”s— the most important lesson they teach Nepali kids about speaking semi-convincing American English is to ALWAYS swallow the “r”s.

When I first started learning it, English felt like a costume. It was enjoyable to talk like Clifford’s human girl companion for a few hours during the school day, but I took it as a given that it wasn’t ever going to be adequate to convey the things that I was thinking and the feelings that I was feeling. There is no word for “jutho” in English—not even a vaguely close approximation, and my young brain couldn’t fathom the idea that I ever wouldn’t need to regularly reference the quotidian experiences of avoiding jutho or of making aripans with nani.

What I didn’t realize was that over time, I was going to fully claim ownership over English/ let English claim ownership over me. A language that I had assumed would always be at least somewhat foreign began to draw the boundaries of my imagination. The books I was reading were “The Baby-Sitters Club” and “Junie B. Jones;” the world that I became familiar with the intricacies of was white, American suburbia, and it wasn’t long before the protagonists of creative writing assignments that I did for class began being called “Ashley” and “Betsy.” Without realizing it, I let English dictate how I understood order, syntax, and structure, and filler words that subconsciously flew out of my mouth morphed from the quintessentially Maithili “ki-kahai-chai” to the valley girl-isms of “like” and “you-know-what-I-mean.”

By middle school, I was much more articulate in English than I was in either Maithili or Nepali. It was comfortable, “intellectual,” professional—the language of pop culture and the language of upward social mobility. I was consuming copious amounts of syndicated FOX sitcoms on TV, memorizing The Black Eyed Peas’ entire discography while becoming deeply emotionally invested in Fergie’s love life, and discovering feminism through think

pieces on the internet. The amount of media and knowledge that I had access to because of fluency in English felt like it had increased exponentially, but as my idea of

English was comfortable, “intellectual,” professional—the language of pop culture and upward social mobility. fun shifted from hearing my grandmother tell stories about Hanuman’s various escapades to binge-watching the new season of “New Girl,” Maithili started to feel more and more remote.

I still speak Maithili with my family, but the switch of thinking things in English and having to translate them into Maithili rather than the other way around has brought with it a palpable sense of loss.

Maithili isn’t the effortless reflex that it once used to be, and when I talk to my parents on the phone, conversation is inevitably interjected with validation and exasperation expressed in English. Even when I make a sincere effort to speak in “pure” Maithili, just to prove to myself that I can, I can’t utter more than five sentences without English making a rude interruption in my train of thoughts.

It feels somewhat sappy and self-indulgent to complain about knowing English when the costs of not knowing it in Nepal are much, much higher. My life in Kathmandu as an American-educated English speaking person is likely to be way cushier than that of someone who speaks only the “native” languages, a fucked-up fact of life in much of the colonialism-ravaged third world that is both uncomfortable and deeply necessary to grapple with. But the price to pay for indoctrination into the lingua franca of cosmopolitan urbanity is the loss of access to Maithili’s full sweetness and pungency, and in certain moments I’m not entirely sure it’s worth it. u

PERSONAL ESSAY

Cloudy-Sky Thinking

by Hazlett Henderson

W

here I am, it is a gray day. A thin layer of gray clouds is closing in on me, my bicycle, this city-town and all the other people in the city-town. During some hours of this day, I've seen a silent and soft rain falling from the cloud. More salient, so far into this afternoon, are the water droplets that gather on my arms as I charge into the dull rain on my bike. This, I like to think, is a transferring of cloud essence to me, and I can imagine a piece of fluff in contact with my skin. Perhaps I am even riding my bicycle in a near-fluff haze. Covered in cloud. We exchange secrets. You see?

This grayness arching into the ocean, hiding the peaks of the mountains: nimbostratus. Or, as I want to say, woolly blanket in the sky.

I think you will guess immediately where I'm going as soon as I start. But I'll start. Lately, I'm considering the point of language. In fact, I'm often considering the point of language. I imagine you are, too, as an individual tasked with the necessary joys and pains of communication.

The precision of a lab report: joy or pain?

Plot analysis: pleasure? Confessions?

Small talk?

When I first started studying a language that wasn't mine, I went nowhere. Four years in, I confused the words that sometimes mean “best” and “better,” struggling

Turn around. Walk with a quicker step.

with a misplaced earnestness to convince my teacher that there was a distinction between them when, in fact, they can both be best, or better. Three years in, I sheep-

In an environment that prizes elevated speech, the first year of a new language allowed me space to be simple. ishly looked up “to pretend” in the dual-language dictionary and felt such pride when my careful use of the verb was met with a sly grin of approval. Fitting! Two years in, I sat in the back of the classroom and gloated over my quick conjugations on paper, forgetting—let's be generous: not yet knowing—that written fluency will get you very few tomatoes. And the first year of escaping English, attempting to locate thoughts with words that could hardly mean less to me? That first year is lost to the murk of my poor long-distance memory, rightfully so.

Then, I started over. Again, a first year of a new language, timed with a fifth year of the old language to force such a cacophony of sounds and meanings into my mind that the noises coming out of my mouth were never quite what I intended. But here, in this year, things changed.

Here begins the meat of this small writing, what I want you to know and hold and carry with you! In that first year of studying something new and something notquite-as-new, a year in which the tools at my disposal could never accumulate quite as quickly as the acres I was meant to plant, I found myself in an environment that requested, all of a sudden, a certain type of expression. You must know this: the expression that prizes elevated speech, pith, an intelligent expression that pauses and considers and, finally, critiques with caution and a razor-tongued wit. In that place distrustful of anything naïvely said, naïvely done, the first year of a new language allowed me the space to be simple.

To be naïve! I championed, with my short words, the limited choices of the childlike SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

9

Puffy! Spotted while sending a birthday card. Send a birthday card, it said! speaker. What did I like? Yes, easy! Valuable!

I struggled then to define, precisely define, with just the right words, what it was that saying small things gave me. Sometimes I landed on an understanding that completely reassigned meaning, that said: the point of seeing language is seeing beyond language! The point of learning to say more is learning to say less, to need fewer words! To need none! I would write to myself, “...but one reason I like learning language is the state of being never fluent... of making meaning through partial ability... [...] the inability to express anything exactly. […] Interesting that studying language makes me feel the failure of language, the inadequacy of language” (excerpted from the past). Not just a simplicity, then, but an infusion of nuance, of complicated intentions, into the banal.

A way of layering imagined or intended notes into the innocuous: how are you?

Now, all over again, I find myself questioning the nvalue of the seemingly simple. Is there more in less? Or just less? But it's not simplicity, in and of itself, the resorting to basics, the smallness, the min10

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

imal, the clearing of space for the sake of the spirit and capturing joy, etc., etc., that gets me. This simplicity isn't a choice. Yes, you can choose to undertake the studying

The point of learning to say more is learning to say less, to need fewer words. To need none! of a new language, but the stage through which you pass – the stage of “hellos” and “goodbyes” and little else – is only a gate towards something like fluency (an entirely different topic, with its own metaphorical clouds to boot!). A necessary bane, traversed quickly or not, and one which forces into you a return to halfopen eyes and a clumsy tongue, something like childhood.

What gets me, then, is what I have found here, in this language-space filled

with small talk. It is something, I think, to which a chosen simpleness will never help you. I'll say it! The prize of humility.

At once, what you can do becomes very small. What everyone else can do, people who are unlike you in perhaps more ways than usual, becomes very large. Everyone else can share nuance. Everyone else can communicate with eyes AND lips at once.

You communicate with one at a time, with the frequent addition of hands, too. Everyone else can share intimacies! You, on the other hand, are trapped in a bubbling mind, through which you must filter everything but the ultimately essential. Unfortunately, that might be grammar. Boo! It complicates living, perhaps, is what I mean when I talk about speaking in simple sentences. And this kind of complicated living, that you choose, that forces moments and moments of bewilderment with no consequence but greater attention, is a good. At least, for me, it has been good.

First—forgive the repetition—I liked learning new language for the simplicity in speech gained by not knowing how to speak. I felt polite. I felt safe. Then, I liked

that I could imagine my speech complicated, imagine that the meaning I insinuated into a small word reached its audience, echoed in silence. Then, I rejected the simplicity as a mark of inferiority.

Now, I'm reminded of vastness.

Let's return to my day of half-rain.

When I leave the library, I'll look up at the cloud-mist. What word is this cloud?

To me, it says hush, hush. It says, sit down softly. Stand up after a while. Make a discovery in the quiet of your own mind and keep it to yourself. Other clouds want other words: a new cloud might say, throw your arms into the space in front of you, and make that space full of sound.

Loud! Another cloud might say, run to the ice cream truck (they are so melancholy!) and plop yourself under a broadleafed tree. And a last cloud, with speech recognized by most: flatten yourself into the earth, hide, whisper. Clouds have striated levels of naming, of language, too. To become fluent in clouds?

Am I more willing to read into clouds language than others? If so, it is only be-

Am I more willing to read into clouds language than others? If so, it is only because I also often find myself in need of being read. cause I, like my clouds, often find myself in need of being read. It is only a consequence of bewilderment, bewilderment and attention.

This is the contradiction of small and big talk made manifest. When you can say everything you want to say, you don't need to look outside yourself for help.

But me, I learn how to speak from the clouds. u – P.S. Look at the clouds above you? And what do you think? Send me your cloudy thoughts. Better yet, send me a picture, and tell me what you don't know how to say. (hazlettlh@gmail.com)

Play and sing! Out-sing! Out-run!

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

11

PERSONAL ESSAY

Mementos

by Hope-Elizabeth Darris

I

Eyes squinting, sweat dripping down my face, my bare feet pound against the hot sand as I run full speed down the side of the tallest sand dune in Europe.

Halfway down the sand dune I stumble and almost bust my head open. I manage to right myself and continue to sprint down the mountain, laughing and shouting as people stare at the foolish kids running down the side of a steep-ass dune.

Nothing has ever felt better than when we ran into the crystal-clear water at the bottom.

I dunk my head into the Mediterranean Sea and watch small fish pass me by. I swim to the sea foor, lay my back on the rocky sand and let out bubbles, watching as they break the water’s surface. I look at the sun from down below and only see a warped image as I collect colorful rocks to bring home to my mom. When I can’t hold my breath any longer, I quickly swim to the surface and laugh with my host sister when we realize we swam so far out we can’t see the shore.

I’m a high school graduate with a boring job and nowhere to go. It’s the middle of July and almost all my friends are out there exploring the world, having adventures. On the only blessed day I don’t have work, I meet up with my one remaining friend and we go down to Battery Park.

We waste away the day eating Oreo ice cream and watching colorful sea glass fish pass us by. We run into strange people

I’m a high school graduate with a boring job and nowhere to go. with large yellow burmese pythons draped across their shoulders as if it’s the most common occurrence in the world. In that moment, nothing has ever interested me more, and I push past my fears and pet the large snake, eventually letting it rest upon my shoulders. At the end of the day, we lie down in damp grass, our heads turned to the cloudy sky, and we take turns making up songs about pigeons and bunnies who 12

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

just wanna learn how to love.

I’m five years old and my dad and I are driving home to NYC from our little house in San Francisco. It’s the third day of this seemingly never-ending journey and I’m about to fall asleep as we reach one of many long stretches of open road.

We are living our lives and listening to Disney show tunes when we notice that to our left, the the sky is lit up by the last remaining rays of the setting sun and all is well with the world, but on the right, the sky is alive with lightning and heavy rain is pounding against grass. The earth is at war with itself and we are caught in the middle; a confused five-year-old and a worried dad, jamming out to Aladdin as we drive through no man’s land.

The same high school graduate with the same boring job, I’m just trying to get make it through the summer by exploring the city. I go to the Smorgasburg food market for the first time in a while and I decide nothing would be better on a sweltering day than some ice cream. I wait in line for an overpriced masterpiece, and when it’s finally my turn, I smile and order a Unicorn Blast. The cashier is a girl with curly, short brown hair and a septum piercing and all she does is look at me and smile back. Five seconds pass and she is still staring and smiling, but has the grace to look sheepish. Ten more seconds pass and we are holding up the line with our matching awkward smiles. She finally breaks the silence with a blush on her cheeks.

“I love your shirt, and necklace, and earrings. Your entire look... I love it.”

She quickly looks down and starts put-

ting my order into the cash register and now it is me who is left staring. I blurt out “THANK YOU” very loudly and she looks up and laughs. I smile and drop my

My total is $8 and I think to myself, this ice cream better be life changing. gaze to the ground, my heart racing and thoughts running wild. I’m making a lot out of nothing, but for the first time ever, I allow myself to actually imagine a life where I end up with a girl, and it doesn’t seem so crazy.

My total is $8 and I think to myself, this ice cream better be life changing. As I take my receipt and move off to the side, she gives me one last smile, laughs and turns to the next customer. After five minutes of impatient waiting my beautiful rainbow concoction arrives, and nothing has ever tasted better.

It is the first chilly day among humid, sunny ones, and it started with a large roach racing out from my closet. One hour later, I proceeded to get locked out of my room for 45 minutes. I am wearing my floral heeled boots to try and brighten my mood, but things go slightly more to shit when I quickly realize what a mistake it was to wear heels and a thin sweater that doesn’t protect from the harsh wind.

Feeling aggravated and bored, I wander around the Ville looking for something to do. Somehow, I end up at a little koi pond that is overflowing with tiny, bright flowers on overgrown vines that make the water hardly visible. There is a wooden balance beam, low seats, and a sculpture of a tall metal crane covered in pale blue marbles. Orange, black and white koi fish of different sizes swim below the vines, bumping into each other. As I walk closer to try and get a better look, I almost twist my ankle on the uneven stepping stones.

The wind picks up and my feet are starting to ache, and I leave the small pond to the sound of windchimes softly clashing together in the breeze. u

Photo courtesy of Little Arrow Studio

Seeing China A photo essay by Carrie Jiang

When I started taking photos this winter, I made a lot of photo trips around my hometown of Anhui, China. This barbershop is in a poor mountain village with a population of less than 100 people. The combination of light and shadow forms a curve on the old man’s back, which provides a sense of nostalgia to me.

14

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

I was walking on the old village street. The sun was setting, and I noticed a corner of an alley that resembled an ancient Chinese movie scene.

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

15

I saw this cat at the barbershop. Thanks to the sunset, the cat’s face was only half-lit. I sensed peace from the cat’s expression and gesture, which was my overall impression of this little village.

16

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

This is one of the oldest doors in the village. The ying-yang on the top and the symmetrical door handles form a harmonious spatial relationship.

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

17

� The next several photos were taken in Shanghai. This photo is one of my favorites, because I really love the combination of these colors on the wall.

� Snack stores like this can be frequently seen on Shanghai streets.

The antiquated sign tells its age. People gather in front of the store, order food, and enjoy it while standing or walking.

18

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

�

I took this photo because of the foreign woman. She stood between the gallery and the flower shop, holding a camera, and looking around with curiosity. She reminded me of my identity right now, which is that of a cultural outsider learning about and observing American culture with great passion.

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

19

Development and Distress A photo essay by Vishnu Gupta Before I ventured into Italy, I had the privilege of visiting a number of other European countries. From the pristine streets of Paris to the royal palaces of Vienna, Europe seems a transcended land, a haven of the refined and elite.

But after a while, cities seem too clean to be real, plazas blend together as one, rivers flow with the same monotony, and people remain as distant and cold as ever. Conversations in these countries didn’t constitute banter, but rather a tête-à-tête. Italy proved to me to be a much more welcoming nation—one in which things were not always perfect, but where this imperfection forced people to find peace with their surroundings, and live a warm and humble life.

As I had spent most of my time abroad in either London or French-speaking Europe, I had grown accustomed to a certain level of formality. People there don’t enjoy being photographed on the street and often asked me to delete the pictures I had taken of them, but people in Italy not only smiled warmly when they noticed they were being captured, like the man above, some even asked for pictures to be taken of them, like the three teenagers below.

Italian cities, especially the smaller towns such as Verona, reminded me of my home—India, which is both good and bad for a Western, developed nation. Sure, people in Italy spat on the streets, littered, and cursed obsessively, but they also shared food, drink, their repugnance of the authorities, their religious values, and amore, a lot of amore. It did not feel as if citizens were living individual lives, but rather wandering through existence as a collective whole— making do with what they can afford, and with what the state will afford them. Italians may not have large homes full of expensive articles, but they have large hearts and full stomachs.

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

21

22

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

23

24

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

25

26

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

27

28

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

FICTION&POETRY FICTION

Root of all Evil

by Amaechi Abuah

T

he fallout of recent events in my family had the immediate effect of creating a power vacuum, one that caused a significant shift in the local political climate late last year. In the ensuing power redistribution, and considering my wealth of technical skill and experience in absolutely nothing, I was personally handpicked by the acting parental-in-chief to spearhead the household’s ministry of grunt work.

My new responsibilities were numerous and varied, and not least among them was the daily watering of the plants. My family lives in the first of several homes in a row of semi-detached houses. This unique position bequeaths on us the rare privilege of being able to cultivate and maintain a considerable garden space, one that extends from the front of the house, all the way down one side, and then ends at the back.

It was this semi-quadrangle of controlled ecology, roughly fifty meters in length and width and bounded on all sides by a tall metallic fence, that the good plants of No. 1 Godwin Ujukwu Cl. called home. I rose quickly to the demands of this new office.

With characteristic tenacity and tact, gripping the garden hose of authority firmly in both hands, I delivered my first address to my new dominion.

“Hedges. Ferns. Shrubs. Trees and bushes of all leafages and rootings, today we stand on the cusp of a new era, a new dawn for the plants of this great state.

Never before has plantkind seen the sort of advancements and opportunities that abound in this brave new world. And yet never before have we been more vulnerable. In this day more than any other, the time has come for us to come together as one peop—plant, as one plant, I meant to say, to face the challenges that the turn of the century has faced us with. And this we will do. Yes, this we will do so that someday, our little seedlings might beat their

stems in pride and say that, truly, our grass is greener...”

Initially, my new policies were well-received. Via judicious use of well-planned executive interventions, I was able to effectively half the income water gap between androecious and gynoecious plants in the hedge sectors. I signed into law several legislations protecting the rights of self-pollinating couples in the garden, much to the delight of the political left. My health care reforms were also quite popular.

My administration was reaching its 100-day mark when I spotted a sausage wrapper in my garden. It sat there, red, wet, and inexplicable in the middle of my very-well-watered lawn. A trespasser on my hard earned tranquility. It shone with

My political career was sinking fast, and the only way to save it would be to win back the trust of the electorate. So, I changed tactics. plastic gloss and morning dew. It mocked me. Since the beginning of my tenure, I had worked hard to keep my garden as it was: a sanctuary of nature, a sea of pure green. And yet there that morning, lying contentedly before me to the dearth of my best efforts, were the very unnatural, very non-biodegradable, very NOT GREEN discarded remains of mankind’s very antithesis of nature: processed food. It’s not even real meat for chrissake...

This simply would not stand.

I cracked down on the borders. I signed executive orders reestablishing the death

sentence for roaches caught within territory lines without their papers. I started throwing rocks at stray cats.

Much controversy followed my actions to secure the state borders. There were those who said I was too tough on immigration, that cat dung and garden roaches were the stimuli that allowed small economies to grow. Others said I was merely pandering to the whims of my political godmother, that I was nothing but a puppet of the parental-in-chief, herself a wellknown felinophobe.

It was about this time that I agreed to an interview with Tree Von Noah on the Daily Show. In retrospect, the move was probably ill-advised.

“Minister Nation, I think most plants would agree that your most recent state address made it quite clear where you stand on foreign affairs. Hard on immigration, big on deportation. That’s you, yeah? But there are some plants that would say that that’s just not right. We are, in many ways, a garden of immigrants. And you yourself being the son of non-plant settlers—” “What plants need to understand, Tree, is that I took an oath when I entered office: an oath to serve and protect plants, to protect the interests of the garden against the threat of any and all external aggressors. And that, Tree, is jolly well what I am going to do.”

“Yes, well, be that as it may, Mr. Minister, it is a well-known fact that you still allow humans into the garden. Now some plants sense a double-standard at play there. Do you have any response to that?”

“Uhhh... not really?”

I quickly fell out of favor with the local media. I became the object of scathing Thyme and Newsweed articles as well as the butt of countless unflattering (though not at all unentertaining) PNK comedy skits. My beloved constituencies grew lusher and greener only when the odd-job-man relieved me of my duties on Saturdays. I could feel my re-election prospects slipping, and obsolescence hovering SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

29

just over the horizon…

It became clear to me that my political career was sinking fast, and the only way to save it would be to win back the trust of the electorate. So, I changed tactics. I founded a new state initiative: WWAMW - Water Water And More Water! I went the rounds twice with the hose every morning, at times thrice. It put quite a strain on the federal reserves but I was hopeful that that would only prove a problem for a later administration, long after my legacy had been cemented.

My gambit worked. Green Domestic Product went up 10% in the next quarter, Gross National Leafiness 15%. My approval ratings skyrocketed. Even the boldest and most brazen of my detractors fell to sullen silence. I gained state-wide celebrity status. I was loved everywhere from Pot Plant City to upstate Banana Republic.

My newfound fame exhilarated me, put a bounce in my stride and a spring in my step. Many a time I found myself strolling gleefully through my constituencies, making carefree small talk with the locals.

“Why hello, Mr. Palm. Top of the morning to you! The leaf rot is all better now I hope? I say, Mr. Palm, I was just leafing through this issue of Newsweed, when I found this very interesting article. Granted, the language is a bit too flowery and the writer completely fails to get to the root of the matter in my humble opinion but I must say, the writing style does quite grow on you...”

Mr. Palm thought I was a riot.

T

he next few months passed without event. And then, on one fateful Monday morning, I had an awakening. It was almost spiritual in nature; an epiphany, you might say. I had just finished performing my administrative duties and was on my way to turn off the tap when I chanced to look around my garden. My plants, my loyal loving subjects, all sat meekly in the morning sun, passive, quiet, contented, each one in its place. That’s when it hit me, how completely they depended on me. The more I thought of it the more it made sense. I was a being: 1. Whom (strictly speaking) they could neither see nor hear.

2. Whose true intentions their tiny plant souls could not begin to fathom.

3. Whose benevolence they completely depended on for their continued existence.

It all became clear to me then. I gave myself a promotion. I shed my ministerial title in order to ascend to this higher calling. No more would I play the part of petty 30

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

politician. I became god Precious! Precious, the watering god! The never-ending wellspring! The great rejuvenator! An unholy grin spread across my face that morning as the intoxication of my sudden deification sank deep…

Those plants suffered under my hand.

My whims were as random and capricious as they were brutish and depraved.

I would lie snoring in my godly chambers all morning, leaving the garden unwatered for days and days on end. When finally I emerged, I would stand and beam with superior delight as the garden cowered before me, their frail plant bodies trembling with barely contained desire. Satisfied with their groveling, I would expertly heft my garden hose of authority and begin my rounds, but differently this time. No longer laboring under the illusion of obligation to these lowly mortals, I let my water stream fly where it would, where I pleased.

I could barely be heard above the noise of the rain and the sound of my former subjects singing praises to their savior.

There was a new god in town.

I would approach two potted shrubs sitting right next to each other, submerge the one in endless torrents of watery blessing, cast a desultory glance at the other and then walk slowly away, slowly enough to catch its wretched sigh of impotent dejection.

The lord watereth and the lord watereth away.

I played games with the lives of plants.

When old Mr. Stamenski passed away, leaving in his stead three young banana plants sharing just one plot, it could be said that the merciful thing would have been to water the strongest of the three and spare the other two a lifetime of fruitless pain and strife. But not I. I was fascinated by their sibling blood feud. I watered all three of them just to see how long they could bear a life of existential turmoil.

I was a monster, and the garden became the bed under which I lurked.

Fortunately for most (unfortunately for one), it didn’t last.

The end of my god-dom came like the first showers of the raining season; slowly at first, and then all at once. I was administering my daily tortures when it happened: raindrops like angel tears shed for the plight of the weak and the oppressed.

The drizzle quickly increased in speed and strength becoming a torrential downpour.

I was infuriated, tilting my head back and screaming defiance at the usurper. But it was no use. I could barely be heard above the noise of the rain and the sound of my former subjects singing praises to their savior. There was a new god in town. I hung my head in defeat and obsolescence laid a hand on me like an old friend.

The next day, with an outsider’s perspective and the excellent vision that comes with hindsight, I surveyed the carnage that lay in the wake of my reign of terror. Several plants, quite sadly, didn’t make it. Others would simply never be the same, scarred for life by their first glimpse of executive power gone mad. For a fleeting moment, I wondered whether it was all worth it, exalting myself to the level of a deity only to bring desolation and death. Would it not be preferable, for the brief moment that man’s power waxed full before waning in the light of nature’s universal thrall, to do more? To be more? Perhaps the good book meant more than what most assume when it implored us to choose life…

This was, however, a fleeting moment, and soon solemn contemplation gave way once again to shameless self-servitude. I quickly began to openly slander the new administration.

“Don’t you plants realize that change can be both positive and negative? Oh sure, he has experience, but you can’t trust a career politician! He has secret agendas, I tell you! He’s a power monger! He couldn’t care less for the condition of the common plant...”

This, quite predictably, failed to have the desired effect and my garden not only survived but thrived under the new government.

Yesterday night, after prayers with the family, I requested an audience with the new minister. As the non-incumbent, I felt it my duty to give the new admin some tips. A closed-door meeting was arranged.

I was already in my room and on my knees with my hands clasped together when I was met by the new secretary. The new minister was busy attending to matters of the state, she said. I was told to leave a message. u

POETRY

Two Poems

by Wesley Han

Flower Boys I am proud to be a pansy—a term reserved by my father for my occasional failures in grunting, sweating, and general manliness.

He forgets himself—does not remember that some of our noblest ancestors were like me: the original pansies. Fair, flowery, flamboyant.

But never feeble. They knew that femininity is far from frail. No brutes were they— they skipped the booze and sipped their tea, read books, could dance, recited poetry.

They kept smooth jars of celadon-blue full of beautifying agents, powders and perfumes.

They dusted their faces with finely-ground rice; defined their brows with strokes of indigo; patted a healthy glow into their cheeks with saffron and cinnabar, a red as vibrant as the blood of their enemies, dark droplets, gems dripping from swords held aloft, clutched in pale hands, nails neatly trimmed and filed.

A Riddle I am the mask, satin-smooth, As fine as gossamer silk.

I glide like a veil of falling snow Over cracks, over fissures.

I am the rosy hue of the ripest apples, A painted glance that cuts to the core.

I am a glamour—mere shimmer and glow, the sly phantom of a kiss.

Lovely am I, but at each day’s end, The spell smears away— Each morning you may cast it again. u

They were the hwarang, the flower boys of the proud and ancient Silla dynasty, where being lovely and deadly were not mutually exclusive. They were meticulous— as careful with a brush on a face as with a blade on a body. Deft strokes, carefully placed, one-two, one-two. u

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

31

Just Add

POETRY

by Jasmine Anouna

You have never felt more connected to a being.

Words drop from your mouth like honey, caught in the careful palms of a child.

You look into his eyes, were they always there?

Suddenly your skin turns clay, a luminescent metallic— You look in his palms, honey turns to water and he drops this carefully; your body now enveloped in a watery second skin.

He takes a step back admiring the power of your vulnerability.

His thirsty hand reaches, into the space of your mind, shaping the path of your thoughts.

“There!” He says. Now you will be more wise.

He takes a broom, each bristle painfully strokes the delicate corners of your heart.

“There!” He says. Now you will be more kind.

The artist takes a step back, admiring his work— he places a mirror before you, “What do you think?”

But I cannot think I no longer recognize my thoughts, Because they are his.

My eyes are his.

My mind is his.

My heart is his.

My body is his.

For you, I am clay— just add water. u

With his teeth he lovingly rips your heart his fingers pry open its chambers.

“They are too cluttered!” He exclaims with excitement.

32

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

Photo by Colette Gerstmann ‘18

BOOKS(+) The politics of the shrug, ¯\_(0_0)_/¯

REVIEW

In late capitalism, the only freedom is Walking Away

by Keton Kakkar

W

ith its progressive gender politics and gripping plot, Cory Doctorow’s “Walkaway” (April, 2017) imagines a not so far-off Earth that is at once dystopic and brimming with hope. The novel is set in a futuristic, post-scarcity North America in which there are large swaths of abandoned land and the super rich (dubbed Zottarich in Doctorow-ese) surveil basically everything. So what do three young adults who meet at a “Communist Party”—a literal rave in an abandoned warehouse—decide Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow Tor Books, 2017 384 pages | 18.35 (Hardcover)

to do? True to the name of the novel, they walk away, and join a group of fringe anarchists who live by 3D printing materials out of biomass.

Perhaps best known for his 2008 young adult novel “Little Brother,” Doctorow is also a journalist and activist. Notable is his work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the MIT Media Lab. Doctorow cites David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” and Thomas Picketty’s “Capital” as substantial influences for the new novel, which depicts modes of social engagement outside of capitalism. “Walkaway” inherits from Doctorow’s earlier work “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,” which deals more in depth with ideas like uploaded consciousness and currencies of social capital.

Despite these similarities with “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,” a more useful foil for “Walkaway,” noted briefly in the novel itself, is a novel from 60 years ago: Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” Both “Walkaway” and “Atlas Shrugged” depict characters who choose to opt out of mainstream society. They each posit two different forms of refusal to engage, but where Photo coutesy of CNET

Walkaway’s evocative cover art

Rand’s is selfish, Doctorow’s is communal.

Rand’s book centers around an elusive place known as Galt’s Gulch. The Gulch is populated by those who Rand would dub the “producers” of the world, all of whom shrugged (like Atlas) off their duties and founded an isolated community.

A self-proclaimed Randite at twelve, I took a while to learn that meritocracy is, well, bullshit. When I first encountered “Atlas Shrugged,” the concept of shrugging and sequestering labor from the world appealed to me. We can view shrugging as a form of refusal. Where in “Atlas Shrugged,” refusal is a selfish, capitalistic notion, in “Walkaway” it is a response to capitalism. A series of articles in the August 2016 issue of the journal of Cultural Anthropology theorized the concept of refusal. Carole McGranahan says in the

introduction to the series: “Refusal is generative. Refusal might be thought of as a stoppage, an end to something, the breaking of relations. And it might be just this. However, the ending of one thing is often the generation of something new. Seeing refusal as generative moves away from default negative connotations into spaces that might be more social than antisocial.”

This concept of refusal posits that a viable form of revolutionary protest is disengagement. Rather than being against, be outside of. Refuse and walk away. Doctorow’s “Walkaway” casts Rand’s refusal of the world into a more realistic set of circumstances, a world that depicts power dynamics in an entirely different way.

The beauty of “Walkaway,” aside from its keen political stance, is what makes SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

33

for most good science fiction novels: the world building. With drone battles and the ability to upload consciousness, the novel provides enough futuristic tech to keep hardcore science fiction fans satisfied. By uploading their consciences onto computers, the protagonists are able to cheat death. These virtual instances of themselves can then be pulled down and cloned onto any machine, enabling for multiple copies of a person to exist at once.

Thankfully, the moral issues surrounding all of these futurist developments are accessible, and feel like logical extensions of present day debates.

That’s where Doctorow’s true genius shines through: in the long, highly philosophical conversations that engage the protagonists. The motto of Walkway culture is First Days of a Better Nation, but what that actually means is constantly interrogated throughout the novel. Reading those bits of dialogue feels like playing ping pong against yourself: fast paced, challenging, and immensely rewarding.

A quintessential piece of dialogue, and one (of the many) that firmly distances this book from “Atlas Shrugged,” is spoken by Hubert, Etc. (so dubbed because of his many names), about the concept of meritocracy: “It’s the height of self-serving circular bullshit, isn’t it? ‘We’re the best people we know, we’re on top, therefore we have a meritocracy. How do we know we’re the best? Because we’re on top. QED.’ The most amazing thing about ‘meritocracy’ is that so many brilliant captains of industry haven’t noticed that it’s made of such radioactively obvious bullshit you could spot it orbit” (35). Despite

the similarities between the two novels, Doctorow’s firm stance on the myth of the meritocracy firmly distances “Walkaway” from Rand’s work.

In fact, an explicit reference is made to “Atlas Shrugged” at a pivotal moment in the novel that further establishes differ-

Reading those bits of dialogue feels like playing ping pong against yourself: fast paced, challenging, and immensely rewarding. ences. The protagonists live in a communal warehouse where labor is done on a volunteer basis and resources are allocated according to need. Someone arrives at the commune believing he can run things better by implementing leaderboards and other meritocratic systems. Rather than argue with him, the protagonists simply decide to pack up and leave, to walk away.

Limpopo, one of the veteran members of the community, says to the newcomer, “You’ve made it clear that you’re so obsessed with this place that you’ll impose your will on it. You have shown yourself to be a monster. When you meet a monster, you back away and let it gnaw at whatever

bone it’s fascinated with. There are other bones. We know how to make bones. We can live like it’s the first days of a better world, not like it’s the first pages of an Ayn Rand novel. Have this place, but you can’t have us. We withdraw our company” (90). If “Walkaway” has a thesis, this would be it. Limpopo’s attitude toward this conflict is a microcosm of the rest of the novel, and the plot itself is driven by these instances of refusal. Walking away need not take physical form. For many, it’s infeasible to renounce private property and mainstream society. Refusal can have other manifestations, though, such as the refusal to engage with harmful and creepy online conglomerates (think Google, Facebook, Amazon). This, in McGranahan’s words, “might be more social than antisocial.”

It’s worth noting that sometimes walking away does not work, and the book has no illusions about that. Some characters, including Hubert, etc., die in a government sponsored raid on one of their communes. While the walkaways can upload their consciences, the deaths of their physical bodies are still violent and gory.

In real life, resistance is no easier. One of the people the novel is dedicated to, Aaron Swartz, died trying to subvert power structures. In 2011, Aaron got arrested for trying to mass download, with the intention of distributing for free, academic journal articles from JSTOR. Two years later, faced with the pressure of legal action, he committed suicide at the age of 26.

Refusing to engage with those who abuse power is not easy, but as the dedication to “Walkaway” states, “we fight on.” u

Do Good Recklessly Inside the musty world of tabletop RPGs with the royal family of the podcast rennaissance

by Min Cheng

T

his June, the weather was warm and our hearts were dry. I was working a full-time job that let me have earbuds in at all times, so my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist only lasted so long. I wanted to branch out in the audio world, so I tried a podcast. Then two podcasts. After a week or two, I was totally surrounded. When I went to sleep every night, I saw podcast cover art on the backs of my eyelids. Whenever the wifi wasn’t loading in McCabe basement, I would 34

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

take a bathroom break to furtively download the rest of the episode I was on. Then, a Tinder date who I met in Clark Park at 5:30 PM with a cheese pizza on a bench (I will never forget a single detail of this fateful day) introduced me to the world of the McElroys. Specifically, “My Brother, My Brother, and Me” (hereafter MBMBaM, pronounced muh-bim-bam), the advice show hosted by Griffin, Travis, and Justin McElroy of podcast empire fame. An ad by Griffin on the show prompted me, in an exasperated fervor of curiosity, to listen to the first episode of “The Adventure Zone.”

And it is here, dear reader, where our ad-

REVIEW

venture truly begins.

“The Adventure Zone” is a podcast in which Griffin, Travis, Justin, and their father Clint play Dungeons and Dragons (hereafter DnD). DnD is a tabletop role-playing game in which the Dungeon Master (DM) crafts a fantasy story while a party of players, with dice-rolling as the main game mechanic, decide the pacing, their character’s actions, and how the party interacts with the open world designed by the DM. Each fortnightly 60 to 90 minute-long episode of the podcast is a relatively unedited Skype call between all four players, save for tedious dice rolls and rule

checks. The show starts as a pre-written campaign with a lot of dick jokes, but both podcasting and DnD are incredibly customizable formats and the series ends up turning into so much more than the first few episodes let on. The podcast becomes a complex narrative woven together with

This is a review, but it feels more like I’m imploring you, dear reader, to give it a listen because it might change your life as it did mine. foreshadowing, flashbacks, and compelling central themes like memory and loyalty.

Griffin (Dungeon Master, audio editor, and soundtrack composer) tweeted just after the finale that his gigantic Microsoft Word document of all the campaign notes clocked in at around 100,000 words and over 400 pages. He was undoubtedly the craftsman of the major plot points, but the best-laid twists are often hinted at early on. Many times, Justin or Travis or Clint would insist on doing something unconventional that would force Griffin to adjust his entire storyline on the fly. The Dungeon Master cannot hope to construct the entire story themselves because the beautiful thing about DnD is that the characters can have as much agency to move the plot forward as they want. The Balance Arc that makes up the first “season,” so to speak, was a massive creative effort by all four of the McElroys, and listening to the second-to-last episode, as loose ends start wrapping up and final boss battles begin, I found myself choking up every couple of minutes. It was hard to believe, when I went back and relistened, that the same dudes who joked that their characters got inexplicably horny after making their first kill ended up roleplaying this incredibly moving story. This is a work that could only have been produced via a serial improvised podcast.

There are some that chastise the podcast for neglecting to keep track of logistical gameplay details, and others still who voice their concern that Griffin “railroads”—i.e., Photo courtesy of Adventure Zone Twitter

puts the story on rails and doesn’t allow for real free will in the campaign—but these criticisms pale in comparison to the passionate army of the McElroy fandom. On Facebook, the “My Brother, My Brother and Me Appreciation Group” has a membership of 38,000 MBMBaMbinos (as they call themselves), and the “The Adventure Zone Appreciation Group” has about 21,000 members. Members share fan art, animatics, fan theories, talk about live shows, and smash that like button whenever noted MBMBaMbino Lin-Manuel Miranda comments on something. It’s a place to generally bask in the comforting presence of knowing you’re not a weirdo for liking this thing that none of your real-life friends have ever heard of. Reading through group posts feels like being in an army that aggressively listens to every episode the minute it’s released and wants to talk about it right now—thank God for spoiler alerts—and everyone’s your friend and they want you to enjoy the McElroyverse as much as you can. They make wikis full of deep read details and textual knowledge. They transcribe every episode (complete with links to explanations of the cultural references constantly dropped by

the boys) both for accessibility and just for enhanced enjoyment. They, along with the McElroys, ensure that the podcast is interactive.

Since my introduction to podcasts in late June, I have dipped my toe into many aural pools, and “The Adventure Zone” is what I return to every time. It feels like calling up a friend and seeing how they’re doing. This is a review, but it feels more like I’m imploring you, dear reader, to give it a listen because it just might change your life as it did mine. I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from the show. Magnus Burnsides (Travis), in the mini-arc “The Eleventh Hour”, tries to convince a non-player character (NPC) that despite their high death count and frequent deception, the Trés Horny Boys (coined by Justin) are not bad people. The NPC is understandably skeptical. Magnus says, “...all those things that hold you back from doing good: because you can’t be as destructive as the bad guys, because you have to worry about everyone, you have to protect everyone… What if you didn’t have to worry and you could just cut out the bullshit, and do good recklessly?”

What if, indeed? u

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

35

Dante in Swarthmore, USA c. 2017 Shea Kelly updates cataphatic literature for the 21st century in new novel, “A Sinner Glimpses Paradise”

by Joe Mariani

W

e never hear from the dead though they comprise the great silent majority of humanity. If an afterlife exists, we all are destined for it and most people are already there. Shea Kelly’s new novel “A Sinner Glimpses Paradise” gives the dead a chance to speak and offers a funny and imaginative take on the all-important, unsolvable mystery of the afterlife. The book — part fantasy, part satire, and part philosophical musings about the nature of existence — is a funny and thoughtful story of a person trying to make the best of it in hell.

Hubert Raymer is a dreamy intellectual type who, like most people in this novel’s version of hell, does not remember very much about his mortal life. His friend and mentor, a wisecracker named James, is showing the somewhat absentminded A Sinner Glimpses Paradise

by Shea Kelly CreateSpace, 2017

Hubert how to keep himself out of trouble during his eternal damnation. James fails in this endeavour and in fact assists Hubert in causing so much trouble in hell that Satan and God intervene and the eternity of hell and heaven is thrown into disarray.

Three intertwining plots interconnect the book: Hubert’s story, the actions of a mysterious Satanic Cult on earth, and God and Satan’s attempts to deal with Hubert’s mischief. The book opens with an overview of an intricate, seemingly endless hell that is simultaneously tortuous, bizarre, and hilarious. Satan is cruel but also somewhat pitiful. He’s embarrassed by his horns, insecure about his inability to ever outdo God, and is always showing off and expanding hell in a futile attempt to feel good about his fiery realm.

Heaven is indeed a cloudy paradise (as hell is a fiery torture chamber). But some of the humans in heaven seem too proud and self-satisfied to deserve paradise. God is benevolent and mighty, but perhaps also not free from vanity and at times seems cruel. “Hellions” (Kelly’s imagined word 36

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

for citizens of hell) do seem nasty and petty. But some seem kind, and have lived tragic rather than bad lives. The novel’s settings range from Hell’s cafeteria to Heaven’s golf courses to archaeological digs in Latin America to secluded barns where satanic cults practice their dark rituals. It is an adventure story that never seems to fully explain itself; it is the type of book that leaves you wondering about the world and being happy, instead of tricking you into vainly thinking you cleverly solved some great mystery.

Underneath the story of the book lies the ultimate ambiguity that often underlies people’s spiritual beliefs, or lack thereof. Kelly addresses the apparent evil that exists in the world, along with the seemingly inherent cruelty of hell existing. It explores the appeal of transcendent connection with the divine while also facing the inconceivability of such a thing.

Fiction may not be philosophy, but philosophy is never entirely free from fiction.

The universal appeal of stories perhaps lies in their ability to offer a bit of truth originating from human imagination. The quiet of the dead has left a silence filled by the most sacred beliefs we can hold, and these alone tell us about what happens after death.

Kelly’s afterlife and underworld, not unlike earth, are filled with disappointing yet endearing people, mysterious reality-controlling powers, ubiquitous and meaningless pain and also indescribable sublime beauty. Some people believe consciousness only exists biologically. Some think the cessation of neural activity in the brain results in eternal nothingness. Some people in California who have made fortunes selling digital advertisements and the records of the general population’s internet activities even believe in that earthly immortality is possible because of ingenious scientific innovation. Some people believe that people who lived gently and kindly and justly and well are able to join the creator of everything in the final reality of the universe, while the evil, who choose to not co-exist with God, cease to be.

Kelly uses the traditional imagery associated with heaven and hell as the basis of his conception of the two realms, but does not seem interested in proving hell

REVIEW

to be unambiguously bad or heaven to be ultimate salvation. Hell is full of pain, but Hubert finds himself attached to more and more of the damned souls there as the story goes on. God seems to be the most powerful and most virtuous being in the book, yet he is not without his weaknesses and flaws.

A Sinner Glimpses Paradise emphasizes the eternity of heaven and hell. When Hubert is lost and almost delirious in a part of hell made to be like the Sahara desert, he realizes that his suffering means nothing. Death will not bring him to meet his maker; he has already been judged and in hell he will stay. Even the stairs he looks up at as he lies sick and abandoned in the sand are only facsimiles created by the

The quiet of the dead has left a silence filled by the most sacred beliefs we can hold, and these alone tell us about what happens after death. desert. You cannot die in hell no matter how much you are tortured; your body will simply regenerate. Your admission to heaven can always be rescinded, even by the smallest mistake. The main characters of his book are sinners, a status certified by the devil and approved by God. But Kelly demonstrates the difficulty of imagining a sinner who with all of eternity on his hands will inevitably manage to do noble and endearing things, or of believing in the impossibility of a human who would never fall from heaven.

Kelly orchestrates massive incongruities to emerge quietly over the course of a scene, which he then smashes with deeply ironic and sometimes side-splitting funny one-liners. They occur so often and are so devastating to their targets that they force you to reconsider the characters

and your own understanding of the book.

One chapter of the book details Hubert’s heart-warming relationship with his wife and their picturesque honeymoon, followed shortly her death as she gives birth to their first child. This chapter closes: “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh.”

Ultimately the book succeeds because it forces the reader to face the fact that they must try to answer the spiritual (or, if you’d rather, existential) questions of this life. It does so not by speaking from the pulpit,

but by addressing the contemporary reader in their own terms. It does not provide answers but instead illuminates ultimate mysteries that our agnostic and fact obsessed time, full of armchair revolutionaries and fanatically devoted to pursuits like revolutionizing armchairs, has tried to ignore. But no matter how comfortably we can sit and recite rhetoric, we cannot forget these spiritual questions because we are too smart and too unsure of ourselves to do so.

Kelly is a Delaware County native and long time employee of Renato’s pizza who recently completed his coursework and received his certification to teach english at Secondary Schools. His first novel A Sinner Glimpses Paradise was published in February 2017 and is available for purchase on Amazon. Kelly also maintains a blog Hollywood For Ugly People. He has started to work on his second novel, which he says will include characters based on Swarthmore students. u

Dante in the Hot Seat Postgame interview with author Shea Kelly INTERVIEW

by Joe Mariani

A

fter reading “A Sinner Glimpses Paradise,” I sat down with Shea Kelly to talk to him about his story, both the one he made into a novel and the one of his own life.

Kelly went to Strath Haven high school, located in the town of Swarthmore. Initially interested in science, in college he became more committed to artistic and creative pursuits. He majored in Studio Art at George Washington University. After college, Kelly moved back to Delco, worked odd jobs, and tried writing a screenplay.

Shea Kelly started the outline of “A Sinner Glimpses Paradise” in the fall of 2013, and the first first edition was published March 2017. Kelly published the book through Amazon. During this period, Shea started working on a Masters in English Education at where?, including student teaching last year, and working at Renato Pizzeria and writing and editing his novel.

“Other than that ordinary American childhood dream of becoming a professional athlete, I don’t think I had a dream of becoming a writer when I was young. All I wanted to do was play baseball and study paleontology. But at some point the lightbulb just turned on, and I started writing a novel.”

Making time for his writing while working and going to school led Kelly to take a systematic approach to his writing that he could fit into his schedule while also being able to finish a 300-page novel.

“I take a very scientific approach to going about my art. My writing process is an hour a day. I try to make it one page a day, and that usually takes an hour. I had that initial endeavor to write a screenplay and all the advice I got from people I knew in the film Photo courtesy of the author’s Twitter

Author Shea Kelly looming below the awning of Renato Pizza

industry was ‘one page a day, one hour a day’. I write in the morning; it’s first thing I do when I got up. When I am really focused on it, I only write four or five days a week.”

I asked Shea a few questions about the novel itself. He seemed somewhat reluctant to interpret his own writing, telling the reader to do it themselves, but he did give me a few insightful answers to some questions I had about the inspirations for the book.

One of the characters in the book who is in hell, Lawrence, was a slave owner in colonial America. Asked where he got the idea for the character, he pointed to a year he spent at boarding school after high school.

“I was one of the youngest students in my class at Strathhaven, and my parents suggested I go to the Lawrenceville School for a year before college. When I was there I felt like I was a little ovut of place.”

The book drew from a wider source of experiences than boarding school, of

course.

“We have this weird American concept of heroes and idols people we define as celebrities are worshipped. Idolatry that has become such a big aspect of American life.”

The tragic and comic aspects of hip-hop and Grunge music inspired Kelly’s taste in art and, ultimately, his novel.

For Shea, the book was about giving the human perspective on God and Satan as they are depicted in theology, literature, and mythology.

“In a nutshell the novel is a satire of the human condition. I was trying to make light of the concept that we have as humans that there is such thing as an afterlife with suffering or eternal paradise. It is hard for any one human being to wrap their mind around that.”

At this point in the conversation, Shea had to end the interview, but left me with this statement.

“My version of heaven is a catcher’s helmet, a vest, two shin guards and me getting to call a baseball game.” u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

37

MOVIES & TV Style and substance

A reflection on the action films of the summer

by Jonathan Kay

M

any people have called “Baby Driver” a music video masquerading as a movie, and they have a point. It’s practically a musical.

Shootouts feature the Tequila Song, car chases accompany the Dutch operatic rock hit “Hocus Pocus,” and everything from tire squeals to coffee cups syncs with the brash playlists Baby (Ansel Elgort) carries around in old iPods in his pockets. The choreographer even gets a mention in the opening credits.

But is it a criticism? A great soundtrack may not be “dignified,” but that’s not a problem if your goal is to entertain. “Baby Driver” makes no pretense of taking itself too seriously. Instead, like many of director Edgar Wright’s other movies, it’s unapologetically about having fun.

The 1994 Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Bell Bottoms” gave Wright the relatable reaction of wanting to direct something to accompany it. His 2003 music video for Mint Royale’s “Blue Song” was, in essence, a proof of concept: a getaway driver lip syncs in a car while robbers in trenchcoats execute a heist offscreen. It’s identical to the opening scene of “Baby Driver,”

down to the actors dancing with the wiper blades.

“Baby Driver” follows well-trod ground: a getaway driver who wants out, a boss who won’t let him. Baby lives with his deaf adoptive father, drowns out his tinnitus with a robust collection of iPods, and spends his spare time falling for Deborah (Lily James), a waitress at an old-fashioned diner. He’s also the odd one out in a crew of robbers—never the same group twice— kept in line by the fatherly menace of Doc (Kevin Spacey). Baby’s determined to pull off one last job and then hit the road with Deborah in search of an honest living.

Doc, who considers Baby his lucky charm, isn’t enthusiastic.

The getaway genre, which more or less began with 1978’s “The Driver,” isn’t easy to make. In reducing a heist to its final act, getaways sideline the slow build that accompanies the planning of the job—think the folding chairs and chalkboards of “The Italian Job” or the montages of “Ocean’s Eleven”—and often the usual climax of the heist itself. All the action taking place in the final car chase means that getaways risk feeling off-balance and abbreviated.

Without the standbys of the heist genre, getaway flicks demand originality and innovation.

ESSAY It’s odd, then, that the story of “Baby Driver” feels entirely derivative, its dialogue almost ironically tepid. The plot is as choreographed as the rest of the movie, every twist telegraphed scenes in advance.

That lack of effort in the writing was probably deliberate. Wright’s an accomplished director with an instantly recognizable and visually engaging style, and it feels like he’s trying not to distract from his spectacle without too much plot. It works, usually: in the intensity of a shootout or a car chase, the bright colors, loud FX, and brash editing infuses “Baby Driver” with undeniable momentum. But after a while, particularly when there aren’t things going boom to distract the viewer, all the primary colors of “Baby Driver” seem to fade into an incredibly well-polished beige.

That’s when you start noticing the flaws.

The getaways in “Baby Driver” are unremarkable, for example, particularly for a getaway movie. The series of e-brake turns and jack-knives has neither the selfaware humor of Wright’s “Hot Fuzz” nor the good-natured mayhem of the “Blues Brothers,” all while being less thrilling than a standard “Bond” chase.

Much of the problem is poor directing.

More screen time is given to Elgert than the car itself, cuts are too fast to build any

Ansel Elgort in “Baby Driver” 38

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

drama before each stunt, and the shaking camera stays too close for us to really see what the car is doing or get a sense of the streets through which we’re moving. Even clever stunts, like Baby flicking a line of police spikes into the path of one of his pursuers with the back end of his Subaru, are shortchanged by poor execution. Police cars appear and disappear in a matter of seconds, so there’s never really the feel of pursuit, and no gravity to the final escape.

It’s not just the car chases, of which there are really only two. Opportunities for dynamic ensemble work among the star studded cast (including Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm) are wasted with simplistic blocking and coverage.

Much of the flamboyant directing in “Baby Driver” has little internal logic and rarely serves a deeper narrative or aesthetic purpose, seemingly meant only to pay lip service to Wright’s notion of style. His lateral shots and exaggerated closeups, which try hard to be noticed, aren’t particularly distinctive for this kind of movie, and are more the exception than the rule.

Scenes like the meeting between Baby and his love interest, Deborah are shot in basic alternating closeups, preventing us from getting a sense of the actors’ body language. It’s hard to feel any chemistry and—significantly, for a supposedly stylebased movie—it’s boring to look at, no matter how much color correction Wright throws at it. The fast-paced feel that he’s aiming for comes in short bursts, undercut by the tedium in between.

Most of these shortcomings wouldn’t have been particularly noticeable in a tra-

ditional Edgar Wright movie, what have been (at their core) comedies. Without a witty screenplay to distract us, however, the failings of “Baby Driver” are laid bare.

It feels like Wright put more effort into the playlist than the movie.

I

f “Baby Driver” feels like a music video, “Atomic Blonde” edges close to a designer sunglasses commercial. It opens in 1989, days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) recounting to her superiors the events of the previous week, chain-smoking and sporting an impressive collection of bruises.

Ostensibly, she was sent into Berlin to recover from a KGB officer a list, hidden in a watch, of compromising information on undercover British operatives. Her secondary purpose, however, is to find a double agent known as Satchel. Things go sideways as soon as she steps out of the airport and into a cab, where she’s forced to fight her way out of a KGB ambush.

Nothing goes to plan: she becomes romantically involved with a novice French operative, her British contact seems to be trying to get her killed, and, when the watch is lost, she’s left with the task of smuggling a bureaucrat with a photographic memory across the wall.

Like the best spy thrillers, we’re left in doubt about who’s good and who isn’t, but the plot is usually more confusing than engrossing. Entire subplots, like the death of Lorraine’s lover when the secret list was taken, are forgotten about, and the the quick shuffling of times, locations, and perspectives make it difficult to remember

exactly what we should be left wondering about. In part, that’s because “Atomic Blonde” is more of a visual experience than a narrative one.

Shots, lighting, and costumes are meticulously composed and beautiful to look at. Like many graphic novel adaptations, “Atomic Blonde” used color with little restraint or regard for realism—at times, its tendency to contrast a vivid red or blue with a monochromatic background seemed directly inspired by “Sin City.”

That said, “Atomic Blonde” doesn’t hesitate to vary its aesthetic palette, cutting freely from the cool blues of a marble bathroom and the startling orange of a burning photograph to the blue-and-pink neon jungle of Berlin’s club scene. Even more understated staging, like a lateral shot of Lorraine at far right watching children playing on a grey street east of the Wall, was memorable, demonstrating a surprising attention to detail by Leitch.

When David Leitch first pitched the film to Theron, who held rights to the story, he wanted to create the feel of “a contemporary version of [an] 80s music video.” The soundtrack certainly accomplishes that, featuring David Bowie, Berlin techno, and the Clash’s “London Calling.” More interesting, however, is when the music becomes itself a narrative tool, cutting out with the sudden appearance of a KGB officer onscreen, offering Lorraine a lighter, or (most memorably) with that same officer stomping on a boombox playing “99 Luftballons” just after beating a youth to death with a skateboard. Although slightly more understated, this smart use of music ends up actually being more effective than that

Charlize Theron in “Atomic Blonde” Images courtesy of slashfilm.com (facing page) and fact.co.uk (above)

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

39

of “Baby Driver.”

If the acid test of a getaway flick is its car chases, that of the action flick is its fight scenes. Lorraine’s ambushed again by the KGB while investigating her dead ex-boyfriend’s apartment. Her subsequent beatdown, set to George Michael’s dreamy “Father Figure,” gave us our first real taste of Lorraine’s fighting style—brutal and efficient. The highlight of the entire movie, however, is a five minute oner in the stairwell of an abandoned East Berlin office building, where we learn how Lorraine gets those bruises we see in the interrogation room. Oners (scenes that are filmed, or appear to be filmed, in one long shot) are generally overused, but in “Atomic Blonde,” the technique wasn’t a gimmick.

The choreography feels neither fastpaced nor contrived. Instead, after the first exchange of blows, it’s a brutal slog.

Theron, who does most of her own stunts, makes no pretense at invincibility: she takes heavy blows from men twice her size, falls down, coughs up blood, and seems in constant danger of passing out. She endures, however, until the finale, groggily staring at her final opponent across the room, both clutching their sides. She’s just grabbed a corkscrew, and we’re given a full five seconds to contemplate what’s about to happen before she finally plunges it into the KGB officer’s eye.

The fight is gritty, grueling, almost oppressive, and probably the best of 2017. I could spend an entire essay on why every part of it was brilliantly executed, but the best I can do is recommend you see it for yourself.

Tension is the binding to a good action movie, and whether or not that tension makes much sense, it still gives needed drama to visual spectacle. The near-constantly tolling bells, the industrial uniformity of the crowds on the street, and the sometimes claustrophobically convoluted plot created an atmosphere of suspense leading up to the film’s final scenes. The double twist ending was, keeping with the rest of the movie, fairly contrived, but at this point most of us in the audience had decided to suspend their disbelief, so we left satisfied.

I have to take a moment here to acknowledge how amazing Theron was.

Action stars, given an over-the-top and shallow script, often have a harder job to do: they have to sell it. Particularly in a spy movie, where actors and actresses always run the risk of coming off as knockoffs of the past greats, it takes creativity to carve your own niche and skill to ground the story when it risks becoming ridiculous.

40

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

Theron managed to turn somewhat uninspired dialogue into suggestions of hidden depths to an otherwise two-dimensional character. Lorraine, surrounded by fantastical sets and an opaque storyline, manages to feel like an icon.

The phrase “genre film” has traditionally been used as a dismissal of movies that do nothing to exceed the reach of the assumptions and expectations laid out by a genre’s more original and visionary groundbreakers. A genre film is often seen as the cinematic equivalent of pulp fiction: superficial, predictable fun.

In the last five or ten years, however, that popular view is changing, as movies like “Mad Max” and “John Wick” (also directed by David Leitch) that make little pretense at a substantive plot or multidimensional characters are judged by what they do make an effort to do: give an audience a good time.

It’s interesting, then, that where flat-

Action stars, given an over-the top and shallow script, often have a harder job to do: they have to sell it. tering reviews gleefully acknowledge the lack of substance of “Baby Driver” (rated at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, higher than “Drive,” “The Italian Job,” and “Reservoir Dogs”), the similarly shallow plot of “Atomic Blonde” (rated at a passable 74%) is more often seen as a failing. What separates an unapologetic romp and flimsy nonsense? What divides a guilty pleasure from well-earned escapism? What gives critics permission to celebrate a crowd pleaser? A common phrase from reviewers is “vision.”

Vision is overrated. What’s important for a director to consider is the depth and breadth of that vision, and whether that vision is actually communicated to a viewer in an innovative and effective way. What makes Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” a masterpiece isn’t just its decades-beforeits-time vision of a neon industrial dystopia built over the shells of our present world. It was in his realization of that vision, his obsession over details, his revi-

sions and care and, above all, mastery of his craft. Vision, then, manifests itself up and down the ladder of abstraction. Artists are not just those with ideas: they’re those who can share them.

Edgar Wright had the idea to make a car movie that exuberantly embraced its soundtrack. Taken at face value, this isn’t a particularly broad vision—he accomplished it in a three-minute music video.

It wasn’t a very nuanced one, either: it was more or less Wright deciding that fun music and bright colors and screeching cars would be fun and then making a movie out of it.

We should also remember that, as “Atomic Blonde” demonstrated, a selfaware and over-the-top use of music isn’t anything particularly new—in fact, its trailer (featuring a mashup of Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead” and Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus”) even featured the same sort of choreography, matching kicks, punches, and cuts to the beat. If anything, “Baby Driver” demonstrated remarkably little exploration (either in concept or execution) of how a soundtrack can be used inventively in moviemaking.

“Baby Driver” was exceptional more in its quantity of music than how it used it.

True, it showed clear creativity, initiative, and a commitment to detail. Don’t get me wrong: forced to choose between “Baby Driver” and another installment of “The Fast and the Furious,” I’d take the former any day. But nothing about “Baby Driver” is really groundbreaking—it’s just louder.

“Atomic Blonde” didn’t have the benefit of an immediately identifiable high concept (a debatable term, in the case of “Baby Driver”). It was fresh, it took risks, and it delivered spectacle, but none of that is a fundamental alteration of the spy thriller formula. But only the release of “Baby Driver” a few weeks before could have made “Atomic Blonde” seem anything other than radically original. Leitch’s vision was remarkable not so much in its audacity but in its perfect execution. By still paying attention to the more mundane details of filmmaking—angles, lighting, pacing— that actually keep the audience entertained, Leitch and Theron made a movie that can stand up to repeat viewings.

While committing a movie to style and spectacle results in its own substance and power, having fun doesn’t release the director from doing their job well. Good movies should push the boundaries of the medium. If they involve gunshots and pop music, all the better. u

Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk”

REVIEW

Redefining the historical drama

by Abraham Lyon

C

hristopher Nolan’s films explore the philosophical and moral dimensions of memory and time by challenging what we often take for granted: the realness of reality. In “Memento” (2000), “The Prestige” (2006) and “Inception,” (2010) as well as many of his other films, Nolan dismantles seemingly sensical narratives through his powerful and distinctive artistic gimmick of nonlinear storytelling.

Nolan moves from genre to genre, seeking to redefine cultural expectations while continuing to explore the human experience within different frames of artistic thought. Nolan challenged the superhero genre with the “Dark Knight” trilogy, science fiction in “Interstellar” (2014), and detective noir in “Insomnia” (2002) and “Memento.” Nolan’s most recent release, “Dunkirk” (2017), marks a decisive shift from the fictional to the historical.

Between May 26 and June 4 of 1940, over 330,000 British, French, Belgian and Dutch soldiers were rescued from the beaches and harbor of Dunkirk, France and carried across the English Channel.

Troops evacuated onto naval ships and a flotilla of civilian boats called into service from England. The evacuation, though successful, was a retreat from a failed battle. The psychological paradox of a successful retreat provides the historical basis for Nolan’s cinematic study of the mind.

In “Dunkirk,” Nolan explores the tension between the heroism of sacrifice and the moral deterioration of war. From Cillian Murphy’s trauma to Tom Hardy’s heroism to Fionn Whitehead’s egoism, Nolan evokes raw being in his characters. In this way, war seems an apt topic for Nolan’s exploration of the mind. While in the hands of Spielberg who directed “Saving Private Ryan” in 1998, “Dunkirk” could have been a more standard, straightforward epic.

Under Nolan’s inspiration, the movie defied and redefined the genre.

“Dunkirk” is big compared to Nolan’s past works: monumental in subject, emotion, and format. Nolan shot the movie on large-format film which allows for greater detail, textures and colors, especially at scale. The colossal overhead shots of the beach and flotilla accentuated the 70mm Image courtesy of moviehole.net

Fionn Whitehead in Dunkirk

format which disarms and engages the audience. To further emphasize the “realness” of “Dunkirk,” Nolan uses practical effects instead of industry standard CGI, contributing to the vitality and devastation of the film. Even the vivid action sequences, which usually look visually modified, look and feel utterly real.

The minimalist dialogue of “Dunkirk” makes the quality of the score crucial to the theatrical experience. From the opening bombing of Dunkirk beach, the pureness of the sound engulfs the audience.

Nolan partnered with long-time collaborator Hans Zimmer to create a score of unprecedented intensity that parallels the nonlinear framing of the film. Zimmer’s use of a Shepard Tone, which Nolan had also used to great effect in “Inception” and “The Prestige,” creates the auditory illusion of continued ascent in pitch despite the fact that the score is simply repeating itself. Nolan’s fascination with patterns and loops is consistent across all aspects of “Dunkirk”—the three interweaving stories are almost a Shepard Tone in narrative, creating an illusion of linearly building intensity despite their nonlinear timelines. The narrative and the score fuse to create an unparalleled sense of intensity and immediacy in the film.

Nolan’s use of auditory silence lends a

minimalist vitality to the film. Silence pervades the opening scene as the protagonist Tommy, played by Fionn Whitehead in his first major role, sneaks from town to the beach. Nolan emphasizes minute details: the dirt and sweat, the heavy breathing, the fluttering pamphlets, the crack of a bullet. Silence surrounds each sound and intensifies the explosive moments of audio narrative. Moreover, the characters hardly speak throughout the film, lending significance to the silence and roar of war, leaving the score, audio effects and moving images to speak for themselves.

Nolan also employs a sense of narrative silence, leaving much unsaid. “Dunkirk” is a story of soldiers who are effectively nameless. Rank and nationality matter more than individuality. Furthermore, Nolan does not specify that the enemy is Nazi Germany. Nolan depicts war as people fighting people and machines fighting the earth, devastating the beautiful towns, beaches, clouds and waters of France, an act of moral, physical and environmental destruction.

However, despite Nolan’s technical and artistic genius, “Dunkirk” lacks in character development. The theatrics of the film engage the audience but do not stir any deep empathy for soldiers. The great paradox of Nolan’s art is that his clinical interest in the human experience leaves SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2013

41

him unable to humanize and develop his characters. He is largely uninterested in female, non-white characters, contributing to his inability portray the depth, diversity and complexity of the human spirit. While Nolan seeks to understand the human experience through his art, he seems unable to transcend ideas and reach into that deep well of humanity.

Nolan’s fascination with time is what makes “Dunkirk” a new kind of war movie. He is able to distill the momentous moments of war through three interweaving timelines that form a nonlinear, circular narrative.

Nolan’s conceptions of time have changed over his career. In “Memento,” time is circular and ephemeral. In “In-

somnia,” time is long and unforgiving. In “Inception,” time is slowed and contorting. Time is physical and transcendent in “Interstellar.” Finally, in “Dunkirk,” time is something altogether new. Time seems present. The constantly shifting timelines force the viewer to grab onto the moment, to not look ahead or behind but experience war in its brutal intimacy.

The three narrative timelines occur over three time periods: one week by land, one day by sea, and one hour by air. While seemingly interconnected despite temporal lapses, the three interweaving timelines do not converge until the end of the film.

Chronology loses significance in the collective narrative and the individual moment. Through his nuanced use of time,

Nolan challenges the linearity of history and redefines the historical moment.

While history is popularly considered causal and chronological, Nolan’s version of history is a patchwork of distorted memories.

War seems an apt subject for Nolan’s exploration of the human mind. After his foray into the fantastical, Nolan needed to return to history in order to develop his inquiry. Despite a lack in character development, his dexterous use of sound and silence, nonlinear narrative, and intensity creates an entirely immersive theatrical experience, ultimately making “Dunkirk” Nolan’s most cohesive and concise film to date. u

Chucky is back and better than ever

by Katherine Capossela

M

y single father started implicitly conditioning me to like horror movies when I was seven by deciding to show me the psychology behind the “The Sixth Sense.” Then came “The X-Files,” “Silence of the Lambs,” “The Shining”—all classics, yes, but movies that maybe should have been saved for a later date. It got to the point where my favorite character from “Lord of the Rings” was Lurtz, the beastly orc who kills Boromir, because I thought he was cute. I’m not kidding.

When I started dating in the ninth grade, my first boyfriend—who resembled Lurtz, now that I think of it—and I were desperate to watch as many horror movies as we could to give us an excuse to cuddle.

We ate up all the cheap ones featured on Netflix—“Oculus,” “Hush,” “House at the End of the Street”—and they were nothing but disappointing.

Sure, they packed on the jump scenes, the special effects, the quick gadgets to keep you on your toes for a minute or two, but they lacked the substance that grounded the movies from my childhood.

Plots that differed from the haunted house in suburbia or the lost teenagers in the woods didn’t exist; any sort of complexity or a motive beyond entertainment was foreign to these one hit wonders. Their sole purpose was to make some profit and get out—not make a lasting cinematic impact.

Film after film I watched, searching

42

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

and searching for any sign of a contemporary classic. I found nothing. A movie that could balance a good scare with a solid plot, with maybe a social commentary thrown in, was unheard of for a good chunk of the 2000s. As a result, I became uninterested and desensitized to horror.

Everything became predictable: “no, don’t split up; no, walking into a dark basement alone is not a good idea, no, don’t follow the strange voices.” Nothing was appealing or new to me. I felt defeated. Trailers for the latest “Purge” movie would come and go; Halloween time would pass without triggering any real excitement. I had broken up with horror.

Plots that differed from the haunted house in suburbia or the lost teenagers in the woods didn’t exist; That is, until a New York Times article applauding Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” appeared on my Facebook feed. It called the flick an “exhilaratingly smart and scary freakout,” which was all I needed to return to the theater.

A contemporary take on “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “Get Out” broke

ESSAY

down the boundaries of 21st century racism. The movie begins innocently enough: a white family invites their daughter’s new Black boyfriend, Chris, to their white picket fence house and welcomes him with open arms and wide smiles. But despite the warm greetings and good humor, there is something wrong that isn’t as obvious as a demented child or a bloody axe murderer. It’s something deeper than that, something imbedded in the roots of our shared society.

We see it when a police officer asks Chris for his license without reason or in the painfully passionate rant from the white father about his love for Obama and Black people. We see it when a family friend examines Chris’ bicep like a piece of meat and in the way the family’s smiles don’t reach their eyes. And the longer the boyfriends stays, the more these moments turn from cringeworthy to downright terrifying. That discomfort becomes the film’s real scare.

The Black gardener running full force at the viewer from the dark and the close up of the smiling-while-crying Black maid physically manifest the immense tension felt in modern-day racism and may be two of the most unsettling images in cinema.

But perhaps the most frightening aspect of it all is that these tensions aren’t just coming from white supremacists or other overtly racist groups. They are coming from liberals who claim racism is an outdated concept. They’ll invite you to dinner because that’s what hip upper class folks do and because race is no longer an issue. And they’ll smile when they tell you

stories implying that a Black person stole their Olympic gold medals and their pretty daughter.

I was still riding on the high of “Get Out” when, just seven months later, came one of the now highest-grossing horror movies of all time: “It.” People are grossly nostalgic for the white suburban 80s (“Stranger Things,” anyone?) and, for some reason, for the return of a horrifying clown. What could be a better time to adapt the 1986 Steven King novel?

A coming of age story, “It” follows the battle between “Stand By Me”-esque troops of prepubescent boys on bikes and an impressively scary child-eating clown named Pennywise. The flick uses classic horror movie tactics—jumpscares, drawn out suspension, a haunting figure—to scare its viewers, but unlike flicks like “Paranormal Activity,” the noise coming from the closet isn’t just a trapped mouse.

Here, when Georgie speaks with the salivating clown in the sewer, he gets his arm bitten off. No bullshit. Bye bye, Georgie.

That’s horror. And it takes place in the first five minutes of the movie, setting a heartracing tone for the rest of the film.

Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise in “It”

The movie comments on overcoming not only basic childhood fears, but also a serious fear that most folks don’t speak of: our own parents. Parents are supposed to be the ones to scare the monster out of the closet, to turn the lights on in the dark.

Often, however, they are the monster in the dark. In “It,” they are the abusive dad, the psychotically overprotective mom, and the parents who mourn the loss of one son by lashing out at the other. And they are much harder to overcome than spiders under the bed.

Pennywise feeds off these children’s fears and domestic traumas. The only way to defeat him, then, is to acknowledge those fears and traumas and to fight back.

The kids must strip themselves of innocence and denial; they must kill that lamb and get out.

Multilayered plots embedded with heart pounding scares separate “Get Out” and “It” from others of their kind. Their thoughtful pace and substantive content keep the viewer engaged throughout, setting high standards for their successors.

(Please don’t let their next successor be another “Happy Death Day,” please.) After these two incredible successes for horror and for the box office, I hope Hollywood realizes that the best way to earn some money is to create good products. Give the people what they want, and we will give you our money. It’s that simple. u

The alternate reality of Persona 5

by Dan Bidikov Picture this: you are a serious adult with no need for shining graphical flair or streamlined mechanisms of interaction and feedback to incentivize your focus.

There is no healthy reason to partake in escapist comforts and fantasies of control by mucking around in virtual worlds, making believe you exist in a more interesting universe. You have a big vocabulary and a wide base of cultural knowledge, and you employ sharpened critical thinking tools to tackle complex themes in sophisticated works of art. You dedicate time toward productive ends and observe mature social practices like dating and internships. You work hard and, when you have a moment, you leisurely flip through self-consciously highbrow magazines like this one, tuning your aesthetic sensibilities to match your pragmatic and progressive worldview as closely as possible. There is no room in your serious adult life for complicated toys or expensive time killers. So-called “mature rated” video games are the dangerous instruments of basement-dwelling protofascist manchildren who broadcast

anonymous hatred online and cash their supplemental income checks on offensively proportioned figurines of their favorite characters. You would never in your right mind waste hard earned currency of choice on this kind of dreck. Learn a language,

The game’s writing has its finger on the pulse of the contemporary young professional and gives palatable insights in to timeless human conflicts. read more, lift weights—these things all cost less and have positive externalities that you can immediately recognize.

I will offer a counterexample to this

REVIEW

position in the form of a newish release titled Persona 5. It is the fifth in a series of titles developed and published by the Japanese studio Atlus; there are more than four previous titles, but each installment follows an independent plot and characters, so experience is not required. The story follows a motley band of Japanese high schoolers who meet each other serendipitously, moved along in their adventures by a smartphone app offering access to a psychic alternate reality. As the game progresses, a supernatural mystery unfolds. Persona’s heroes are downtrodden outcasts, beaten down by modern life to points of no return; its villains are conventional authority figures (teacher, politician, CEO, etc.) who have been forced into depravity by subconscious molding. There is no way for anybody to win in the physical world, but a fantastical twist in the order of things gives good an honest shot against evil, freedom a legitimate chance against oppression. The game’s writing has its finger on the pulse of the contemporary young professional and gives palatable insights into timeless human conflicts.

The figurative day-to-day (ingame time is represented in the Gregorian calendar)

Above photo courtesy of YouTube SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

43

of Persona 5 has two principal components. One of them is conventional turnbased roleplaying in which the player controls four characters and several corresponding magical creatures. You walk through layers of carefully designed maze, engaging in simulated battles with the maze’s resident opponents until you reach the end. There are interesting layers of game design on top of this basic formula that figurative translation into description may not do justice. Take it on faith that the process of combat and exploration is at least a little engaging, and that if you don’t find it at all engaging you can tweak settings so that you only have to press one button and all of the interactive violence is played out automatically. At this point you may be curious about how a video game could be interesting and playable even when half of it is actionless fast-forwarding. This brings the discussion to the second component of the game, which is harder to explain because it has fewer parallels in other media.

There is an ever increasing, yet still comfortably finite, amount of things to do in Persona, and all of them are fun.

A significant chunk of Persona 5 is a gamified representation of something like real life. It’s a little different, of course, because the player assumes the role of a teenage exchange student in Japan and more notably because each decision to spend time in a certain way is part of a deterministic web of perfectly predictable outcomes rather than a nebulous fizzle of anxieties. If you say enough nice things and do enough big favors, your relationships will improve.

Improving your relationships directly translates to advantages in combat and adventuring. The dialogue is clever, the characters are compelling, and the bounty of social choices is hard to exhaust. Active social behavior is rewarded with more opportunities for interesting interactions. If you read more books, you will learn about the surrounding areas; if you take someone on a date to one of those areas, you 44

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

will advance your potential for a romantic relationship. It follows a meaningful logic in which being merciful and compassionate is rewarded. The amount of content in the game grows in exponential proportion to the player’s involvement in the existing content. There is an ever increasing, yet still comfortably finite, amount of things to do in Persona, and all of them are fun.

Persona 5 is full of sensory pleasures.

Its style is refreshing and rendered with stunning graphical quality. The score is genre-defying. The careful design of the characters and environments provokes consideration and sometimes wonder. It is an artfully composed piece of digital media. But the problem remains: it is a video game. And you want nothing to do with video games. Keep an open mind and consider, in light of the hypothetical presented earlier, the following: Maybe you wonder what the virtual world has, in the study of its nature, to offer you, a young person who is confused about how you relate to other persons both young and not. Maybe you’ve always wondered what it’s like to be a uniformed high schooler living in two realities, one in which you have to employ supernatural talents towards gruesome vigilante justice and one in which your gamified decisionmaking process determines whether or not you end up dating your high school teacher or your high school class president (inclusive or). Maybe you like music and art that is different from what your hemisphere or horizon of expectations usually hands you. Maybe you’ve some vested interest in interactive storytelling.

Maybe you’ve never played a videogame, though. Maybe one of your friends Persona 5 gameplay

Persona 5 promotional material

tried to get you to watch anime and you thought it was “dumb,” “weird,” or what have you. Maybe you don’t fantasize about the clumsy charm of your most effeminate male classmates, rendered in brilliant technicolor. Maybe your life is good enough that you wouldn’t think to roleplay someone else’s. Fair enough. But maybe you just go to bed uneasy some nights.

Maybe you wonder if the things you did that day were the right things to do on the right day. Maybe, among pending natural and artificial disaster on a global and knowable scale, you get to thinking that there is no way for you, member of the universe of physically possible choices, to make something out of your decisions that feels like a difference. Maybe you’d like a taste of life with a little more narrative control, but not too much. Maybe, if any of the above seems like it spoke to you, or if you thought my prose was slick, you could do some more research into “Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5.” u

Photos courtesy of PlayStation and dualshockers.com

MUSIC The best ambient music of 2017 The year in soothing tones, ominous drones, and vibraphones

REVIEW

by Ari Liloia ACOSTA

through the forest on the other. u

CELLULAR AUTOMATA

BY DOPPLEREFFEKT (Leisure System)

BY KILCHHOFER/HAINBACH (Marionette) Marionette has made a name for itself with its detailed black and white cover artwork and organic minimal techno sound.

This new addition to the label’s already impressive catalog, a split 12” by two relatively new synthesizer aficionados, might be better suited to walking in the woods than dancing. When producers use modular synths as their main compositional tool, they often get so wrapped up in the unique sounds their gear can conjure on the fly that actually composing becomes an afterthought. Thankfully, neither of these artists gets lost in their gear; the music here contains just as much engaging detail as the cover. Kilchhofer’s side is faster and sunnier. He anchors his songs with a central, unwavering pulse; little noises constantly pop up around it then fall back into the mix. The level of intensity is the same throughout, but the entire curtain of sound constantly shifts and changes.

Hainbach’s songs are more focused on gradual development, changing slowly in tone as new elements ebb and flow around a central melody. You can find every detail on one leaf on the first side, then walk

Even before the legendary Drexciya split up, founding member Gerald Donald was releasing minimal, robotic dance music with an unmistakably human touch under a multitude of aliases. After a long wait, we’ve been blessed with another chapter in the illustrious ongoing story of Detroit techno, so it’s time to get out the big headphones, close your eyes for an hour and pretend you’re in space. Dopplereffekt, a collaborative project featuring Gerald and a rotating cast of characters, forgo drum machines this time around to create an album that’s still unmistakably theirs—nine concise tracks of drones, synth arpeggios and laser noises, clocking in at just under forty minutes. This might disappoint fans of their last two sprawling, abstract albums, but the mileage they get out of their newly restricted sound palette speaks to their abilities as electronic musicians. Repeated listens reveal this to be their most thought out and cohesive work yet. u

Photos courtesy of Marionette Bandcamp, Resident Advisor, and Kudos Records

WAKES ON CERULEAN

BY KASSEL JAEGER & JIM O’ROURKE (Editions Mego)

Ten years after its founding, the influential electronic label Mego still releases plenty of great stuff, but they have a few pretentious vices. One of the worst: they love doing this thing six or seven times a year where they shove a group of venerable experimental musicians into a studio, record some half-assed jamming, and press it to 180g vinyl. It’s frustrating because what could be a spectacular meeting of the minds is usually formulaic, aimless, and does little justice to Mego’s legacy or experimental free improv in general. Imagine my surprise when I gave this one a listen— Kassel Jaeger and the infinitely adaptable Jim O’Rourke give us a wide range of compelling atmospheres and textures over the course of two sidelong odysseys.

The two artists take turns leading throughout the album; while one holds down the structure, the other will take the spotlight. They stick to their guns stylistically, so it’s usually clear who’s in control.

Jim has a distinctive way about a modular synth, and parts of this album could pass for outtakes from any of the archival recordings he released on Bandcamp last SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

45

year, especially the crescendo at the end of the first side. The field recordings and glistening synths that kick off both sides, meanwhile, are hallmarks of Jaeger’s work.

The dramatic shifts in style and tone never sound forced; in fact, they’re what makes the album so consistently engaging. u

ASYNC

BY RYUICHI SAKAMOTO (Commons)

ly his contributions to the soundtrack of “The Revenant” and his trio of albums with connoisseur of sine waves and static Carsten Nicolai. “Async” touches on every era of his career, but since every piece is so unmistakably his, the disparate styles never disrupt the flow of the album. You get a sense of how many genres and styles he’s influenced, if not created. The sparkly synth sounds on “Zure” and “Ubi” may have only recently become a fad among flash-in-the-pan soundscapers, but Sakamoto shows them all up. Opener and highlight “Andata” is a modern classic; the melody may be up there with his most acclaimed modern classical works, but it wouldn’t work without the white noise and field recordings that give it a sharp edge. This is an essential listen for anyone interested in Sakamoto’s legacy as a composer, and the indelible imprint of his work on generations of artists. u

COLLECTED PIECES

BY MARY LATTIMORE (Ghostly International) After his recovery from throat cancer, the legendary composer returns for his first solo album in eight years. He’s created bombastic chart-toppers, experimental electronica, and Grammy-and-Oscar-winning soundtracks; his best work has come from exploring the uncharted space between the three, most recent-

Last year, Mary Lattimore’s “At The Dam” garnered a lot of attention, in part due to its release on an established indie label and the artist’s classical harp training—unusual for the debut album from an ambient musician. Unfortunately, she committed one of the cardinal sins of ambient music: the album relied too much on the beauti-

ful timbre of her instrument; there wasn’t much there in terms of melody or structure. On this compilation of songs recorded over the past few years, the melodies are more developed, but she gets way more mileage out of her distinctively restrained sound palette—just the harp and a few effects—thanks to the way her production and songwriting support each other. On “Bold Rides,” she repeats a melody while overdubbing it, then slows the recording down to half speed and adds counterpoint.

On “Wawa by the Ocean,” she times a delay so that each bar is repeated quieter and quieter over the bars that come after it. The result is a contracting and expanding mass of melody that lasts for ten minutes, feels like three, and should be more than an hour. This album is everything I want from experimental music—great ideas executed to create great songs. u

Adding a little Luv to the Soundcloud wars New ‘Vert album embodies all that is strange and lovely in rap’s newest generation

by Max Gruber

L

il Uzi Vert is a Philadelphia-based artist who quickly came onto the hip hop scene off the back of songs such as Carnage’s ‘WDYW’, ‘Money Longer’, and ‘You Was Right’. Much of Lil Uzi Vert’s early exposure and hype came through the Soundcloud platform alongside other artists such as Lil Yachty and Kodak Black. By 2016, many of these artists quickly transcended their Soundcloud fan base and became present in the mainstream with the release of several projects and their being named to the XXL Freshman Class of 2016.

Despite being household names, many of these artists are still referred to as “Souncloud rappers”, a pejorative title

46

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

meant to separate the new school sound and style from more traditional hip hop.

Sonically, “Soundcloud Rap” is commonly recognized as falling into a couple categories. One side of this new school sound is made up of artists who tow the line between melody and rap, crooning over spacey, pretty beats. These artists such as Uzi, Lil Yachty, and Trippie Redd emphasize the sound of their vocals and general feel of the track over technical flow and MC ability.

The other camp of the new school sound is characterized by producer Ronny J’s style of abrasive beats with loud, distorted bass. Oftentimes the delivery on these tracks is aggressive and features a lot of lyrical repetition (eg. “Look at Me!” and “Audi”). The South Florida artists putting out more aggressive work include

REVIEW

the likes of XXXTentacion (although his most recent project, 17, diverged from this style), Ski Mask the Slump God, Lil Pump, Smokepurpp, and Wifisfuneral. The tracks these artists release are also increasingly short, often ending around the two minute mark which further emphasizes the catchy, repetitive nature of their music.

While they had released a plethora of hit songs between them, none of the new school of artists had released a number one album on the BIllboard chart. Enter Luv is Rage 2, Lil Uzi Vert’s debut studio album. Advertised as a sequel to his 2015 project Luv is Rage, Luv is Rage 2 sold 126,000 copies and was the #1 album on the Billboard chart for the week ending August 31. While he had seemed to claim an even portion of the spotlight before, Uzi’s debut album signaled that he was the

Photos courtesy of Tiny Mix Tapes, Lattimore Bandcamp

Album Art for Luv is Rage 2, feat. Lil Uzi Vert front and center

new school artist with the most star power.

The success of Luv is Rage 2 is the quintessential example of the generational gap in music reception: It used mass streaming and huge single power to take a sound constantly being referred to as fringe within the artform to the number one spot.

The power of mass streaming over pure sales is an essential component of Luv is Rage 2 and the new school’s success. Since the billboards shift to multi-metric consumption in 2014, streamed music has been counted in album sales with 1,500 song streams being measured as equivalent to one pure album sale. This shift has been exceptionally useful for measuring the success of newer artists as their audiences are more likely to discover and listen to them via streaming platforms. This trend is especially apparent in the breakdown of Luv is Rage 2’s sales: of the 126,000 sales, only 28,000 were pure album sales(purchases made through iTunes, Amazon, or of any physical copy) whereas the other 98,000 copies can all be accounted for by streaming.

Other artists such as 21 Savage and Kodak Black who were featured in the 2016 XXL freshman class with Uzi also saw more than two thirds of their album sales from streaming. This is demonstrative of the generational gap in hip hop consumption, as the metric most of the genre’s history has been pure albums sales. Artists whose sound is more classically routed Photo courtesy of mass appeal

in the flows and beats that older listeners have come to expect see far less of their sales through streams and more through physical sales. J. Cole, often heralded by his enthusiastic fan base as a “real” hip hop savior, saw only roughly a quarter of his total sales through streams. Legendary 90’s hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest’s 2016 album sold very similarly to Luv is Rage 2 at 136,00 sales, 111,000 of which were pure.

While many artists appear to sell similarly, the way in which different parts of the hip hop community consume their music is very different. According to a CivicScience poll conducted in April 2015, 62% of Spotify’s user base is below the age of 30. When the breakdown of album sales is examined, it becomes clear that albums such as Luv is Rage 2 are being consumed by a larger, younger group of listeners via streaming platforms. Artists who are further removed from the new wave, however, still see a large degree of their numbers coming from pure sales.

The influence Luv is Rage 2’s lead single, ‘XO Tour Llif3’, had on sales and the Billboard number one position is also especially important to consider. While Uzi’s past singles such as ‘Money Longer’ performed very well upon, ‘XO Tour Llif3’ is uncontestedly Lil Uzi Vert’s biggest song to date and one of the biggest songs of the year. As of September it had been streamed 1.3 billion times and in May it broke into

the Billboard top 10. Voted MTV’s song of the summer, the huge success of ‘XO Tour Llif3’ exposed Lil Uzi Vert to a broader audience than before. In many ways, the commercial success of Luv is Rage 2 can be attributed to Uzi’s hit single. After hearing Uzi’s biggest song, his audience both new and old were ready to manically stream whatever came next. The hype ‘Tour Llif3’ generated was strongest on the internet and on streaming platforms, not the radio.

Because of this, when Uzi announced and released Luv is Rage 2 with no more than a day’s notice, his audience was ready.

The generational divide in hip hop is everywhere when examining Luv is Rage 2.

It was released with little to no notice except on social media, its sales were hugely dependent on streaming numbers, and Lil Uzi himself is a perfect example of the new wave of hip hop crooners who are so often looked down upon by an older generation of listeners. It is important to consider that a co sign and a feature from Pharrell Williams mean this album was certainly not counterculture within the industry, but to fans this was the first big indicator of the new school’s success and ability to be the preeminent style in hip hop. With an even newer, more abrasive school of “Soundcloud” artists emerging with the likes of Ski Mask the Slump God, Lil Pump, XXXTentacion, Wifisfuneral, and more, streaming services are poised to take new, young artists to great heights. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

47

America’s psycho sweethearts

Up-and-comers Brockhampton rock the hip hop boat with “Saturation Trilogy”

REVIEW

discography that is nothing but gold. With the first Saturation, Brockhampton had already produced a debut rap album par excellence. Inventive, genre-busting, and as humorous as it as angry, “Saturation” made waves in the blogosphere. The catch is that Abstract and co. did not stop there.

Let’s review the footage. Brockhampton released their very first single and music video this year at the end of January, titled “Cannon.” By May the group had dropped three more singles, and three more stunning and energetic music videos. By June, another video and the first album. Just two months later, “Saturation II” was released, bringing the trilogy project to a monster total of 33 tracks. The group shows no signs of abandoning its full-steam-ahead approach, with a third album slated for later this year. And here’s the other catch: the work just keeps getting stronger. “Saturation II” tweaked whatever unholy chemistry Brockhampton stumbled on, and offered hooks that were even catchier, quirkier beats that did the job even better, and the same seductive fearless-cum-ironic attitude that made the first album so refreshing. The group takes its cues from

Odd Future, Flatbush Zombies, and, get this, One Direction. The music is infectious, and plays pop into hip hop for a new level of vulnerable.

Where the first album met with some skepticism from critics, the second has secured Brockhampton a new level of recognition, and an opportunity to go huge.

Brockhampton’s first national tour came to an end this past September. Viceland created a TV series following the tour, all about this hip collective on the verge of making it big. It is in a way unsurprising that Vice caught the Brockhampton wave early. Brockhampton’s motley crew image, its hipster-cum-street aesthetic, and its internet-driven auteurism are all appealing to Vice’s DIY-leaning audience. The series is titled “American Boyband,” a label Abstract has used to describe the group. A boyband because Brockhampton wants to cross the pop-idol image with that of the hip-hop underground, à twist on the model of A$AP mob or Odd Future. All-American because Brockhampton is a sum of its assembled parts: queer, straight, white, black, twisted, sensitive, and all fresh. The ambition is to cross America’s two domi-

by Leo Elliot

A

lert. We here at the Review have the inexclusive hot details on the good stuff. Stuff so good your neighbor down the hall with the baggy pants and unfiltered smokes blasted it on the Beats Pill+ all through reading week last spring, and so good that it went from YouTube confessional to Fader full profile in six months flat. The hot stuff in question is the “Saturation Trilogy” by up and coming hip-hop collective Brockhampton. Front and center in the project is Kevin Abstract, the man with the vision. Other prominent vocalists include Ameer Vann, Merlyn Wood, Dom McLennon, and Matt Champion. From beats that just are not afraid and simply will not quit to music videos that do studio premium on amateur lenses, Brockhampton are doing new and good like the best in the game do new and good. And they’re doing it all from the ground up.

“Saturation” is the right word for the mission. Brockhampton takes the music industry’s cardinal sin and turns it into their brand signature, a rapidly expanding

48

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

Photos courtesy of Pigeons & Planes

nant genres in a way that has not been done before. The industry has spent the past two decades finding new ways to bring cutting-edge rap and glittering pop together, so the Brockhampton aspiration is a lofty one. We are witnessing the moment when this kind of total ambition gets to the mainstage and has its shot at glory. Brockhampton are taking off and have no apologies.

Frontman Kevin Abstract raps on “STAR”: High school, they ain’t fuck with me Now the critics don’t fuck with me My own fam ain’t fuck with me But Viceland did fuck with me.

Vice got it right and everyone else can pay the price. Whatever is going on behind the scenes, whether the secret is certain members’ personal genius or some harmonious oscillation of talent among the whole, Brockhampton has hit its artistic stride and is taking no shortcuts. Every track they have out is solid, and both albums deliver several true bangers. They do their own videos, but actually they do their own everything. They have producers, they have photographers. It’s a rap entourage wrapped up in this boyband look stuffed inside a queer-ish artist’s collective. It’s all self-made and self-built, they are all new to the limelight, and it’s all about to go huge.

In an interview with Fader last month, Kevin Abstract stated that the end goal is a musical dynasty, replete with in-house recording studio and talent incubator.

Abstract said that one model is Def Jam, another is Apple. Apple as in Steve Jobs, the industry premium for world-cleaving genius-complex. Yeah, and these guys met in high school on a Kanye West fan forum.

The influence of West certainly shows in the music. Though the sound is different, something in Brockhampton’s attitude reflects the raging star character that Kanye West employed in his rise to the top: charismatic, self-aware, and unapologetically ambitious. Except Brockhampton places no value on going it alone. They won the hearts of hip-hopheads with a brothersin-arms ethos, and they will take the main stage with the same team play mentality.

On “GUMMY,” McLennon dismisses the fear that sudden fame might provoke the kind of ego contest that has sunk countless successful outfits: Don’t got no friends in this game, it’s me and my brothers alone They thinkin’ that we competing, that shit depletin’ my bones

The lyrics flip between cutting emotional honesty and playful self-effacement. See, “STAR” a track off the first album that has the rappers spin hilarity out of their ambition by analogizing themselves to standing celebrities. Abstract is “Heath Ledger with some dreads.” Ameer Vann raps: Nic Cage with the face off John Travolta when I take off Brad Pitt, start a fight club Turn the trap into the nightclub Vann melts a reference to Cage/Travolta flick ‘Face/Off,’ a 1997 action/thriller involving a hammy surgical face-swap between cop and robber, into Pitt’s split personalities in “Fight Club.” This moment is genius, twisting cheesy cinematic good/ bad duality into the psychic terror of dissociative identity. In any case, we know that the aesthetic regimen of the Brockhampton house includes thursday night movie marathons (they do have one, a collective house, in South Central L.A.). The emotional content is not always so coded, though.

The group will turn right off pop-culture wordplay onto a song like ‘Heat,’ Dom Mclennon delivering depressive confession in chilling fashion off a mid-song break: I hate the way I think I hate the way it looms I hate the way the things I say incinerate a room.

There is play, and there is pain. A relentless upbeat energy carries out this tension across any given track, and the result is infectious.

One early and less-polished video titled “Flip Mo” captures this intensity well. “Flip Mo” starts with members Merlyn Wood and HK Sileshi stationed in the back of a burger joint. After a few joints of another kind, the pair begin to trash the kitchen. Either they slip the bud into their customers’ burgers or their rebellious mood spreads, and the shot cuts to the restaurant floor, the patrons shedding their table-manners and beginning to toss plates, bang surfaces, and shout. It’s one part friendly food fight, one part minimum wage revolt. It’s like if weed really did cause smokers to rage against the machine as in the parental nightmare. The video seems to say, listen, all these Brockhampton guys worked menial day jobs like anyone else. Like anyone, the creative energy that makes them feel most themselves can only exist at the margins of those day jobs. Brockhampton wants us to vent that frustration and they are here to help, with

a three album mega-project apparently.

Between scenes of flying burgers, the “Flip Mo” video lingers on the glazed and dissociative eyes of Merlyn and HK. Out of numb rage, we have a pop-rap party that won’t quit.

There is, however, a big question mark hanging over the project. What is Brockhampton after the trilogy ends? The sophomore project that follows will have to trade in fearlessness for artistic maturation. The image that they have already established carries promise for further development.

Photographic portrayals of the group play with masculinity in aesthetically productive ways. There is a boy-ishness, and a sense of joyous backstreet adventure. But also a bold kind of intimacy. In one long tableaux shot from the “STAR” video, four members are arranged with limbs draped softly onto each other, the group looking straight at the camera in an almost inviting way. Like a family holiday card, but taken

[Brockhampton] is a rap entourage wrapped up in this boyband look stuffed inside a queerish artist’s collective in the tired morning-after of an orgy. Abstract and the boys have tapped into something powerful with this nod to the endless erotic layers of homosocial masculinity.

The material for a long and provocative creative future is there. The Brockhampton that we have seen so far is flashy and alluring. Is Brockhampton just that? The biz stands at attention, for now.

Brockhampton’s star power promise shows best in their newer music videos, published alongside just about every single from the “Saturation” project. They all share a distinct opening style: a still shot of the track title in vibrant high-relief block text, followed by a quip in Spanish from Robert Ontenient. These one-liners range from sardonic to non-sequitur: “me llamo Roberto y yo quiero ser famoso” or “me llamo Roberto y estamos buscando a Jaden Smith.” The guy is their webmaster, by the way. These newer videos are way more than good-for-homemade. They are polished, well-shot, and creative. They showcase the band’s defiant but erratic attitude, as when Matt Champion replaces a cardboard box for a sweater and drops bars about isolaSWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

49

tion, paranoia, and sexual prowess in the “Gold” video.

As in all else, the motto behind the new video-series seems to be excess. There are oodles of these things. For the most part, the Saturation videos take place on long streets in South Central, L.A. From Ontenient’s opener, the videos go straight into unadulterated public fun, all about the hangout spot, the late night sesh, and inside jokes. “HEAT” is one exception, where

the group plays it straight rapping about police violence. In “STAR” Brockhampton has an electric parade down the streets of South Central, L.A., members painted blue and stuffed into a golf cart. The whole bit is goofy, but it works. The improvised feel gives a sense of the camaraderie behind Brockhampton’s astonishing productivity.

Rather than undercutting the often vulnerable lyrics, the humor of the videos delivers that material with honesty and self-aware-

ness. The vibe is not teen angst, but plain old suffering capped with a hard-earned smile. The videos present Brockhampton as a family and as a way of life, together through times good and bad. This year it’s Brockhampton’s party, and we all want in.

So do yourself a favor. Pull up Spotify or your preferred medium and get familiar with Brockhampton so you know a little something when “Saturation III” drops this holiday season. u

Straining to see the good in Good Nature New album by Virginia-natives Turnover turns out a tad disappointing

by Ariana Soriano

T

urnover’s summer release “Good Nature” was highly anticipated by fans who were eager to listen to what the Virginia-based band had concocted this time around.

I was impatient for the end of the summer for two reasons. For one, I do not believe it should ever be higher than 60 degrees. Second, the end of August held the promise of Turnover’s third album, “Good Nature.”

Turnover kicked off the summer by releasing their single “Super Natural” in late June, leaving fans with a preview of the album’s shoegaze-y riffs. Although this first impression of the album seemed to foreshadow its potential, my interest began to wane after the second single, “Sunshine Type”, dropped a month later. The two songs are nearly indistinguishable, which was uncharacteristic of a band that has been recognized for their constant evolution in sound. Although I was fearful for an album that would lack musical variety, I had an iota of hope for “Good Nature.”

The album was released two days earlier than expected, and I notified the world by screaming during my waitressing shift. In spite of my obnoxious excitement, however, I was ultimately disappointed after listening to the album in its entirety. While the musical technicality of this album is refreshing compared to its predecessor, “Peripheral Vision,” it pales in comparison to the diverse tracklist of “PV.” Released in 2015, “Peripheral Vision” marked the band’s deviation from alt-rock to an intersection of indie and dream pop.

The changes in the band’s influences are apparent in the experimental riffs and compositions that resulted in an album where each song had memorable lyrics, musical singularity, and a variety in sound. “PV” was a fun 50

NOVEMBER 2017

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

album. It would surprise a listener with the upbeat tempo of “Take My Head” and harmonious interlude, “Threshold.” It captured the band’s musical growth in an album that married their musical roots with a hazier genre. The release of “Humblest Pleasures” picked up where “PV” left off, a concise yet fulfilling two-song release in 2016 that solidified what direction Turnover’s sound would take in upcoming works.

The musical diversity in previous material had been complemented by lyricism that explored internal conflict (as in “New Scream” and “Take My Head”) and post-breakup angst (heard in “Cutting My Fingers Off ” and “I Would Hate You If I

“Good Nature” is void of lyrics that you would get tattooed on your right shoulder blade Could”). In a recent interview with Noisey, frontman Austin Getz comments that “Good Nature” “attempts to answer” the uncertainty in navigating through post-adolescence that is chronicled in “Peripheral Vision.” “Good Nature” proposes the acceptance of the “natural world” and allowing life to ebb and flow. Getz reveres the essence of nature and its enigma, rejecting “the idea of any human thinking they know even a tiny bit of the infinite amount of real truth out there.” “Living Small” elaborates on this notion, discouraging materialism and encouraging minimalism. It is a great commentary on humility and appreciating nature. However, its execution is subpar.

While “Good Nature” is not a regression from the band’s past accomplishments, it definitely feels like a plateau in their sound.

REVIEW Independently, the songs are bouncy and uplifting. Collectively, they are reiterations of the same musical composition. There are a handful of measures that are musically distinct (i.e the introduction of “All That It Ever Was”), but every chorus sounds otherwise indifferent and interchangeable.

The lyrics are diluted and one-dimensional when compared to “Peripheral Vision” or “Humblest Pleasures.”

Nonetheless, it has received positive feedback in favor of the band’s continued involvement with dream pop. This album’s release has demonstrated the pure devotion of Turnover’s fanbase who, despite being critical of the new album, will continue to give the band accolades (myself included).

This may be the product of the intimacy that exists between the band and its fans, which is characteristic of this niche in the music scene. It is also the result of successful marketing, such as new merchandise flaunting a vibrant color scheme with friendly hues that are as bubbly as the band’s new sound.

Additionally, free listening parties took place in Boston and Brooklyn prior to the album’s release, allowing the fans to engage with the music and the musicians behind it.

The degree to which a devoted fanbase can absolve mediocrity is questionable.

Although the album has been another testament to the band’s dynamic sound, the songs become predictable. “Good Nature” has musical merit, but it is not a gamechanger. While the band should be commended for their growth as musicians, they seem to have played it safe and settled in one specific point on the musical spectrum, resulting in a sound that is too easy to digest - one that is void of lyrics that you would get tattooed on your right shoulder blade and musical moments that force you to catch your breath.

Turnover is currently touring in Europe and the U.S. u

SWARTHMORE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2017

51