Issue 5 Spring 2023

Front Cover: Samantha Myman

Back Cover: Lydia Rommel

STAFF

Saffron Forsberg and Teagan Hughes

Co-Editors-in-Chief

Reggie Goudeau

Features Editor

COVER ART NOTE

EDITOR’S

Fionna Farrell

Opinions Editor

Raghav Raj

Arts & Culture Editor

Isabel Hardwig

Bad Habits Editor

Ollie Axelrod, Ellen Efstathiou, Skye Jalal, Zach Terrillion, and Max Miller

Staff Writers

Julian Crosetto

Layout Editor

Maia Hadler

Art Director

Frances McDowell and Molly Chapin

Production Assistants

Hello hello! You hold in your hands The Grape’s fnal issue of the year. I don’t want to mince words here, so I’ll just come out and say that I am deeply sad about this fact. The Grape has been a staple of my life at Oberlin since I joined the staf as a second-year; some part of my internal clock is always gonna be set to, and frantically trying to pull of, the Thursday-to-Sunday rough-draft-to-fnal-draft turnaround. I love The Grape very, very much—I love how it prioritizes and preserves individual writers’ tone and style, I love how it provides a platform on such a wide range of topics and issues, I love how it’s a thing that I work on that I can hold in my hands every two weeks (or click on and stare at with my eyeballs, in the case of our concurrent online publication at oberlingrape.com). The Grape has provided me an invaluable outlet and source of community especially with regard to regional and class justice; as someone who hails from rural southern Ohio—and is still working out their feelings toward region and class at Oberlin, even as they leave—I am immensely grateful. And I am immeasurably proud of the 2022-23 Grape, from all the informative, incisive, and hilarious articles by staf and contributors to the amazing skill in art & design on display in every issue. I love The Grape, I love our staf, I love our community, and I love you for checking it out. If you’re interested in anything that’s going on here, please get involved. The Grape would love you.

I’ll miss it here dearly. I can’t wait to see all the awesome new shit this paper does next.

Sincerely, Teagan, co-Editor-in-Chief of The Grape. :-)

AUGHHHHHH! I second everything dear Teagan wrote! The Grape is defnitely one of the things I’ll miss most about Oberlin, about college. A couple days ago, nearly everyone on staf met in the old basement Grape ofce to take our big staf centerfold photo (what is a student journalism org without its traditions?). Everyone was super excited and armed with props (poptarts, a rotary phone, a couple computer monitors, a disheveled blond wig)…just full of this really earnest, dorky enthusiasm. And I think it sort of hit me then how much I’ll miss The Grape. Because that energy is really special; it isn’t something you can just fnd anywhere. I think that, to outsiders, The humble Grape can seem a little silly or lowtech – and it is – but it’s also equally true that everyone involved puts a lot of sincere work into every issue. I’ve taken my job as EIC very seriously and so has Teagan. We started meeting on Zoom to strategize last summer —Teagan in Oberlin, me in Ann Arbor — and have, rather happily, taken hardly a break since. Because, to us, The Grape isn’t so much a mere publication as it is this fabulous outlet for a particularly Oberlin sort of expression. There’s truth to that line Grape-People have espoused since I can remember: write whatever you want! And what incredible power that sentiment holds, especially in college, when you’re that precarious 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and life is so… bafing! Confusing! Pressurized! You’re a teenager and an adult! You’re silly but you’re serious! Sometimes you’re brilliant and sometimes you’re really, really stupid. The world is opening up before you in this intense, bountiful way. As a writer and a young person, having an outlet which allows you to feel, even for just a couple weeks, that something you care about matters, can mean the world. The Grape, in all its silly DIY warmth, its rejection of all things competitive and exclusionary, can be just that. I’m so grateful to have worked with a community who cares about cultivating that outlet as much as I do. And I’m really proud of what our team has accomplished this year. While it is true that The Grape attracts a special sort of person, I think I can confdently say that this group was Extra Special.

With love, warmth, and blinding sincerity, Safron, co-Editor-in-Chief

of

The Grape

Girls Who Read: Oberlin’s Women’s Literary Societies

Zach Terrillion Staff Writer

Oberlin loves its books. English and Creative Writing lie among the most popular majors. Lorain County was long Toni Morrison’s stomping ground. Last issue, I reported on speakers brought in by the English department. Scholars like Deborah Harkness come to discuss literature, specifcally regarding gender. Gender and literature are two common topics in Oberlin; they have intersected throughout the College’s history, beginning nearly two centuries ago when a group of enterprising women came together to form the Ladies Literary Societies. Amid the sexism of the 19th century, these women created a safe space to spill the tea on issues of the day, dive into books, improve their writing, and cut themselves a piece of society’s pie.

Oberlin’s frst women’s society was the “Young Ladies Association of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute.” It was founded on July 21st, 1835, for the “promotion of literature and religion,” only two years after the college was established. During this time in Oberlin’s infancy, female students were often denied opportunities to learn debate and oral presentations, topics that were often the focus of men’s studies. According to club accounts, women were denied the teaching of these topics because doing so was “worse than useless.” The start of the club wasn’t easy. The club frst met in the college’s newly constructed “Ladies Hall,” sharing it with the Young Men’s Lyce-

um Society. The Lyceum met in a bougie second-foor space with a prime view of campus. Meanwhile, the girls were packed into the tiny, dusty attic.

In 1846, the club changed its mouthful of a name to just the “Ladies Literary Society,” or the LLS. With this new name, the

Oberlin Evangelist, a local paper, found the society “has for its object the mental and moral improvement of its members, and judging from the exhibition last evening, it has been an efcient means in promoting both objects.” Long story short, the LLS was making a name for itself.

other early feminists and abolitionists. Finally, you have the one-time president of the society, Lucy Stanton, who was the frst Black woman to complete a four-year course of study at any college. According to club documents, “anybody who wanted to do the work could belong to the society.” No mat-

god Helios. They liked to think of themselves as “light bearers,” shedding light on issues of their times. Ofcial LLS accounts call the Aeolians “radicals.” They were certainly debaters. The frst question asked at their frst meeting was, “Are social faculties detrimental to the progress of the student?” They weren’t partiers. They were possibly radicals. Discussions were key to their meetings, focusing on topics like the Civil War and Lincoln’s election.

In the 1870s, as the popularity of both groups rose, they sought a new home beyond the dusty attics of the “Ladies Hall.” The result was Sturges Hall, a new center for women’s life at Oberlin. An auditorium on the frst foor played host to a variety of events. Both the Aeolians and the LLS had spacious classrooms on the second foor.

LLS hoped to boost its campus infuence. Around commencement season, it was an early tradition in society to hold celebrations of female scholarship. Women would have the opportunity to read an essay. Through organizing from its leaders, the club presented their essays to open audiences that included men. They were making a case for their club’s existence. The

This frst group of women produced some razor-sharp alums. There was Lucy Stone, a future civil rights activist, who refused to write a graduation essay upon news she might not get to read it. American poet and educator Emily Huntington Miller became a dean at Northwestern. There was also Catherine Moore Barrows (yes, THAT Barrows), among many

ter one’s background, so long as you did the readings and assignments, you could play a part in this space and then go on to great things.

In 1857, LLS’s rise was disrupted when it split itself down the middle. A group of ladies in the club decided to make their own spinof group, calling themselves the Aeolian Society.

“Aeolian” comes from the sun

One of the major architects behind the literary societies’ expansion was Mrs. Adelia Johnston. An alum of both societies, she returned to serve as the head of Oberlin’s Women’s Department and was also the frst woman to ever teach full classes at Oberlin. She sought to remove the limitations upon the opportunities of graduate women. She brought in wealthy families that helped build Talcott, Baldwin, and Peters. She also installed some of the college’s early scholarships for women students. She was among the most notable of the societies’ many girlbosses. She

Ladies Literary Society, 1935

uplifted her fellow girls and the college as a whole. Many members liked to call her “Madam J”— their “patron saint.”

This uplift led to a pretty solid body of alumni. At the turn of the century, these alumni forged a research fellowship. They funded academic study in everything from English to Art to Psychology. They helped women receive masters degrees from the likes of UChicago and Oxford. The group even funded research for books published by mainstream publishers and periodicals.

You can see these fellow girls in the piles and piles of records stowed away in Oberlin’s archives. What stands out the most from this pile might be pages from the “Hi-O-Hi,” Oberlin College’s former yearbook that The Grape briefy revived last year. A page profling the organization spans the 1890s to the 1930s. These pages give a human face to literary societies. You can see it in their group photos. The girls’ self-serious frowns. Their warmest smiles. Their mildly-uncomfortable half-smiles. They may not have all wanted to be in the photo. They were introverts, and that’s just great. They have done great things. Made a teeny bit of history. But these women were more than their accomplishments. They were humans with a great deal of quirks and eccentricities.

These women studied a variety of authors and books with a menagerie of themes and, from that, made a community. They liked their Irish stage dramas, threw costume parties, and made their own short stories, not unlike your average Creative Writing major. They had bridge parties, tea gatherings, and big stage plays around Christmastime. Jigsaw puzzles seemed especially popular. Despite the fun, they were never passive to the world. During World War I, they themed their readings around the countries involved and refected on where civilization could be headed next. They were debaters and refectors. Girls who read.

The role of women in academics evolved plenty as the 20th century continued. The culture shifted from fancy “societies” to more casual clubs and other spaces. The LLS and its spinof Aeolians faded away over time. Their longest home, Sturges, would be demolished in 1963. Today, the Conservatory buildings stand right around where these women liked to mingle. Their legacy and values still dominate Oberlin. Publications like Wilder Voice, the Plum Creek Review, and the very one you’re reading base themselves on students’ thoughts. Oberlin, specifcally its student body, values the voices of individuals. The discussions of literature and the world still sputter up every once in a while on Wilder Bowl.

An Interview with Professor of Politics & East Asian Studies, Marc Blecher

Henry Boehm Contributor

What kind of political environment did you grow up in? Were you infuenced by family, friends, or teachers?

“I was not what they called a red diaper baby or a pink diaper baby. My parents were good liberals. My dad made us listen to Fred Darwin, a liberal commentator, every night at dinner, stuf like that. So politics was a topic of conversation. I had a high school teacher—Mr. Sobel— who taught history and then for seniors a course called ‘Problems of American Democracy,’ and he had a big efect on me. Then I went of to Cornell and was in the School of Labor Relations, which was not where I got my interest in Marx and labor stuf. That place was all about labor negotiations. But in my junior year the anti-war movement hit. I went ‘65 to ‘69, so the war was on when I arrived, but by ‘67 it really ramped up. I started taking courses in Asian politics and Chinese politics from George Kahin and John Lewis, who had jointly written the premier critical study of the Vietnam War. It was what we used to go home and persuade our parents and anybody that would listen that the war was really bad. So I got involved in the anti-war movement pretty heavily, and decided that Asian studies and critical scholarship on China was what I wanted to do.

I really got excited by China, partly because of the anti-war stuf, and partly because the Cultural Revolution was on in China. It was an extraordinary movement in which Mao Zedong mobilized and encouraged workers and students to rise up against the government. So I’m learning about this while it’s happening, and I thought: Here we are in the U.S. chanting “LBJ! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” whereas in China the top guy is encouraging students to rise up. And I said “I want to live there.” Of course, I was naive, and the Cultural Revolution was a lot more complicated, but it piqued my interest.

Anyway, I studied Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. I continued to be involved in the anti-war movement among graduate students and young professors in an organization called the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. We specialized in doing research and criticism about the involvement of the Asian studies profession in the war; the ways in which some

of the scholars were working for the CIA and helping the war efort. We published a journal called Critical Asian Studies which is still going, and sponsored trips to China very early before anyone else could go. This work was not loved by all our professors, as you can imagine. I was trying to take a sympathetically critical view of China—to maintain a critical posture and to not be hostile towards what you’re studying, in contrast to the Cold War approach that was so much about ‘studying

the enemy.’ I had one professor on my dissertation committee who wrote a reference letter about my politics that blackballed me. That torpedoed my chances to get a job. Even though my record and the rest of my recommendations were great, the only place that ever gave me an interview was Oberlin.

I didn’t fnd out about being blackballed until I was here for fve years. When I did, I went to George Lanyi, the chair of what was then called the Government Depart-

Illustration by Maia Hadler Art Director

ment. He taught classes in comparative communism, which was anti-communist, and I taught courses in comparative socialism, which was critical but more sympathetic. I said ‘George, I just found out about this blackball. How could you hire me? Especially you, because we don’t agree on anything!’ I can still hear him saying: ‘Well, you know, when we see this sort of thing we pay no attention whatsoever.’ So they were true liberals at Oberlin, not in the sense of being on the left but rather of respecting free debate. If it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t have gotten a job. So that’s that backstory. And I’ll always be very grateful to Oberlin College. You know I have my criticisms of what’s going on on-campus nowadays, but those old values of Oberlin College are still very important to me—and in fact they are the reason for my worries about the current direction of the college.”

How would you assess the successes and fail ures of the student movements of the ‘60s?

“I think we failed. We thought we were the beginning of something: a new world, an Age of Aquarius. We were crit ics of social life that had been created during the post-war boom, even as we benefted tremendously from it. We were big critics of everybody living in the same suburban subdi vision, the same house, the same boring, empty life. People like Marcuse really spoke to us. One of the famous phrases from Hegel is ‘the owl of Minerva only takes fight at dusk,’ which means you can only know something when it’s be ing completed historically. And in the fullness of time, I realized that it wasn’t the beginning of anything; it was the end of something. And it really was the end of Fordism: the post-war consumerist, state-regulated, welfarist, unionized economy.

The counterculture was kind of libertarian: ‘I want my freedom to do whatever I want. I want my freedom to drop out and go live in the forest, take drugs, and not get one of your stupid, middle-class, corporate jobs, and just be stoned all the time and leave me alone and don’t tell me what to do.’ Which is not a particularly left political program. If you go back and read a lot of the stuf—the famous Port Huron Statement that was the founding document of SDS—it’s quite libertarian, seeking freedom from the government. And you could see why, because the government was fghting the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement happened, and the government was racist and militarist. So it was really like a dialectical aufhebung. We were resisting it, but in ways that were totally stamped by it. But I think it was mainly a failure. That’s because we were kids and didn’t really know what we were doing. Moreover, the backlash against what the ‘60s were, which drove the neoliberalism of the ‘70s and beyond.

But mainly that was caused by capital getting fed up with post-war economic policy, which included high tax rates that produced a much more equal distribution of income from the New Deal up until 1970. The top income tax rate was 90%. It also involved big unions that could force capital to the table. So capital fnally undertook an organized political counter-attack, including attacking unions. That actually started here in Oberlin, with Reagan’s defeat of the air trafc controllers’ strike, and it was a worldwide thing. This also happened in England, in France, and beyond. French students had May ‘68, where they tore down the place, and in China radical students were lambasting the party. There was something with the zeitgeist, in the air. And they sort of fed of each other. I’ve never fgured out whether all these movements had some kind of common root. But anyway, it all went bad. My whole life I haven’t had a single presiden-

couldn’t lose. But Reagan and his people fgured out a way to keep the planes fying and really squashed those guys. They thought they were highly skilled workers who were indispensable, couldn’t be replaced, and they would win, but Reagan and his people were very tough-minded. A similar thing happened in England. Thatcher got elected and she ruthlessly crushed the much more powerful, experienced, organized miners’ union. They staged a two-year strike but she also was tough as nails and eventually beat them. And that was a big shock.

So anyway, for my role in this, it wasn’t very much. I’m mainly a scholar of China. I wasn’t doing Marx stuf much. My politics were about anti-imperialism and foreign policy, not labor politics or Marxism. When I studied China, Marxism wasn’t a tool I needed to fgure out what was going on in China. But then, around 1990, I started to think that maybe Marx could help me understand neoliberalism. After all, Marx was a student of capitalism, not socialism. So, in 1990 I started to get interested in it, and began to ofer Marxian Theory (POLT 239). I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Which book that you’ve written are you the most proud of?

“My frst one was about the Cultural Revolution, entitled Micropolitics in Contemporary China. I developed my own database for explaining why diferent people participated in the Cultural Revolution in diferent ways. But it really proved out some important arguments about why people joined the left-wing rather than the right-wing based mainly on their class background rather than their education, gender, age, or connections.

Tied with that is a book I published in 1997 called Tethered Deer, which was the frst book to analyze middle-level government in China. At that time, a lot of people in the China

field were studying what the top leadership was—like Kremlinology, but for China. And then a lot of others of us were studying grassroots politics, at the very bottom, which is a lot of what I did too. But this was the frst book in the feld that looked at county government. And I’m very proud of it because it was also one of the frst books by an American that was based upon feld research in China. The frst book was written on the basis of interviews we did in Hong Kong because we couldn’t go to China at the time. But for this one we actually went to China in 1978 and continued going. We made several trips over two decades. It took that long because we didn’t really understand anything after the structural reforms started in 1978—the whole game changed and we really had to re-educate ourselves. So I’d say those two. You asked for one, but you got two.”

What’s your favorite political joke?

“I’ll give you a short one. George Bush is campaigning in a senior home and he’s going around and shaking hands. He starts chatting with one resident, who seems unfazed at talking with the President. Finally Bush says ‘Do you know who I am?’ And the person says ‘No. But if you ask at the front desk they’ll tell you.’”

What advice do you have for the student activists of today?

“Get active! My watchworks are Gramsci’s great maxim that you heard me say in class: ‘Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’ So, even though you know things are bad and look hopeless, don’t ever, ever give up.”

A Message from SLAC— Collective Action

Izzy Sanchez-Foster and Brandon Denton Contributors

This semester, the school has taken dramatic steps towards creating the neoliberal college they want to see. We saw the outsourcing of Student Health, the erasure of the Finney Compact, the destruction of Wilder’s basement, the uprooting of dozens of hundred-year-old trees, constant construction, the upcoming destruction of Barrows…we could continue.

But, we have also seen enormous displays of student power. As students, we came together on October 6th to protest the inequitable changes to our school. With only two days of organizing, over a hundred students participated in a noise demonstration at the Board of Trustees meeting in the hotel. Directly following this, we participated in a huge protest and our collective anger led us to spontaneously occupy Mudd and hold an hour-long conversation with administrators and trustee members. This amazing display of unity and solidarity was something we had never seen at Oberlin before, and made me incredibly excited for the future.

In a conversation SLAC organized the following day, it was clear that the issues motivating people to act ranged widely, but were extremely interconnected. The root of them was a lack of student power and infuence in school services and daily operations. We believe the solution is to bring back the community cooperatives, and through them, create a culture of activism; a culture that bridges town members with students and campus workers, that redefnes our community through solidarity rather than division.

Oberlin was once home to the Oberlin Consumer Cooperative, which started as a buying club amongst students and faculty in 1938. In 1940, they became a non-proft and eventually served the entire Oberlin community with a bookstore, grocery store, restaurant, children’s clothing store, credit union, laundromat, and a Greyhound ticket service. Taking inspiration from this, SLAC and Students for Energy Justice (SEJ) are interested in working with our entire community to create new services that provide for all of us. We are in contact with Oberlin Community Services (OCS) and in the beginning

stages of forming a student, worker, and town member cooperative. We, as a community, will solidify the scope of the cooperative over the next semester; but as of now, we see a need to provide services which redistribute the concentration of wealth, labor, and skills we have on campus. The cooperative is a perfect avenue for bringing Oberlin High School students into the college, or expanding services like the Free Store or the SWAP book co-op beyond only students. Through a cooperative, we can establish a mutually benefcial network that eliminates the “towngown” divide. SLAC would like to encourage students, student organizations, workers, and town members to come together to make this radical change a possibility.

To succeed in changing our campus and empowering ourselves as workers, students, and town members, we need a culture of organizing. We know that every year the incoming frst years bring a wave of new energy, new ideas, and new passions. It is essential that this energy and passion for change is nourished early, and we believe an essential piece of that is the Disorientation Zine. Starting now, we are looking for any students, organizations, town members, and more who are interested in helping develop this essential resource for the incoming class. The Disorientation Zine is an essential resource for educating about Oberlin history, activism, and resources. If you are interested in helping with writing, art, editing, or anything else, please reach out or look for our interest form on Instagram and our website (@SLACOberlin, OberlinSLAC.org).

Let’s take an active step in creating the College we want to see. Because even though our presence on this campus is not permanent, our impact ripples through for years after we are gone. The actions you choose to take at Oberlin will also shape you, and help you understand what role to take in the world. It is time we build community power and empowerment and take back the campus from the unaccountable trustees and their money-focused agenda.

Shit Sci-Fi Hall Does

Zach Terrillion Staff Writer

For me, the heart of my Oberlin life lies on a bookshelf in the southern lounge on the 2nd floor of Noah Hall. It is a series of polaroids cast in that signature uncanny 2000s lighting. A group of Obies who graduated long ago. They’re posing in outfits drawn from the great IPs of sci-fi and fantasy. Star Wars. Lord of the Rings. Anime. All of that. You also find piles of board games on this bookshelf, whether it’s multiple varieties of Catan or card games about ninjas that wield tacos. It’s freaking weird. Sprawled across the 2nd floor of Noah Hall, Sci-Fi Hall is a weird place. And that’s its greatest strength. If you’ve ever even considered calling yourself a nerd, this is for you. Welcome, you’re home.

Current student Eva Bergeron had Sci-Fi Hall thrust upon them. She was invited to a hall event by her friend Reid Bobrownicki, who had been a part of the Hall since his first semester. The event was a game night for a wacky dating sim, Monster Prom, based on choosing which weirdly attractive creatures one would romance and take to the school dance. In her words, “I was brought into a world of weird people who play weird games.” From there came waves of D&D sessions, plans for the year’s Obiegame, and a regular playthrough of the Ace Attorney series. It was the golden age; in the eyes of current fourth-years like Eva, “it was the type of Sci-Fi Hall you want to emulate.”

Sci-Fi Hall has been through many different stages, with its institutional memory more fragmented. It was founded in 2001. It has shifted through various locations over the years, from the 2nd floor of Langston to the entirety of Barnard. Classic traditions include things like a long-time rivalry with the former Classics Hall, which included the horrific conflicts of Nerf Battles. There were pageants, proms, and a three-hour road trip taken every semester to the nearest White Castle to, quote the official description from the hall’s records, “eat inhuman amounts of sliders.” During Sci-Fi Hall’s time on Langston’s 2nd floor, they divided themselves into various Harry Potter-themed-wings, featuring “Gayvenclaw” and “Huffleslut.” In the heart of this Langston space was the “Party Zone.” This was a place for members to hold spontaneous hangouts, play games, and do homework. During the mid-2010s, Sci-Fi Hall had a bit of a salacious reputation. It was dubbed the “strange, sexy” Hall with “rumors of il -

licit activity,” to use Bergeron’s words. The sole remnant of Sci-Fi Hall’s spicy era is “Sexy Jenga,” a very cursed version of Jenga where all the blocks are inscribed with some very concerning and non-COVID safe dares.

I joined the Hall in Fall 2021 as I entered my second year. My choice to join the Hall was a spontaneous decision. I wanted the chance to grow my social circle, but I was panicked. I was in some fandoms. I had my particular interests. However, was I a full-blown gamer dungeon master? I entered a space in flux. The Hall had just moved back into Noah, with piles of boxes littering their new lounge.

Still, on the first Friday of the school year, there was a public announcement for a Nintendo Switch game night. I didn’t own a Switch, but I checked it out. The rest was history. The teeny “dark academia” dorm room was filled with nerdy gays in KN-95 masks running two simultaneous games of Smash Bros on two different T.Vs. among a pile of unpacked Magic: The Gathering decks. That night itself was magical. The people were kind, open, and so weird. It wasn’t the wildest event I’ve attended or organized, but for some reason, it’s the one that’s stuck out the most. It’s the type of moment that leaves a warm tug in the stomach. The feeling that you’re home.

Eva’s moment of clicking with the Hall came with her first organized “scream night,” which is exactly how it sounds. She and several others on Hall trekked to the North Fields in the pouring rain, trudging through the mud to let out unholy, primal shrieks. “It was fantastic. It was so stupid,” she says. For her, Sci-Fi Hall involves “community in the strangest of circumstances.”

As the seniors in the Hall continue to graduate, the memories of the old sexy, White Castle-traveling Hall fade away more and more. The institutional memory is small. One of the main repositories is a Tumblr blog from 2012. It’s titled “Shit Sci-Fi Hall Says.” The blog is mostly memes of which it would require a Sociology Ph.D. to unravel the meaning. It describes the Hall as a “place of alternate timelines, no sleep webs, insanity, and wonderfully quotable lack of context.” Within it, you find a photograph. A picture captured at a particular moment in time. You can’t qualify it or take it away. It truly lacks context. The Hall finds itself at the tip of two other timelines: recapture the past or embrace

the future? Some strange circumstances indeed. The blog references some traditions that remain today. The biggest is “Squidmas.” At the end of every semester, the Hall comes together to give gifts to one another. It enshrines the “squid” as our main mascot. No, we don’t really know why that is. You also have the big event of the season, Barbie Night. Our gaggling party converges in a random room in Wilder to drink to episodes of Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse. Common themes of our drinking game include classism, homoeroticism, and Schlond Poofa (no, I will not elaborate). You also have new traditions like cursed PowerPoint Night. These traditions are likely to continue and evolve next year as Bergeron is set to assume hall leadership as the Noah RA. They are nervous about losing a bit of the Hall. “Nothing ever matches up to your first experience at a place. As we lose people who are so key to Sci-Fi and that vision, I’m worried there won’t be enough to add to the spirit.” Still, she remains excited about what’s to come. The Hall is currently looking to make itself into a full-scale campus organization. It wants to organize a real board with a president, treasurer, and the works. These plans are all a part of an initiative asserting the Hall as a space for the “nerdiest people on campus.” This initiative kicked off during this year’s Culture Fest, where the Hall played host to a cosplay contest that invited both students and community members to participate. It was the first time Sci-Fi went beyond its “illicit” circle and moved out into the whole town of Oberlin to maximize the number of people involved and associated with the space.

This max-involvement may be what defines the modern Hall. Sci-Fi has moved its base of operations to the online sphere. Its signature Discord server, manned by the Sci-Fi Hall council of Bergeron, Bobrownicki, and Gwen Crossman, operates with over 100 current students and alumni. It is where you learn about upcoming events, send cursed memes and TikToks, and even debate the politics of the times. There are spaces to share vents and rants alongside goals and accomplishments. However, this Discord is not the end-point to Sci-Fi Hall. There is also the “Venn-Diagram.” Many Sci-Fi Hall members crossover with other organizations; this includes co-instructing the D&D Exco, the planning of Obiegame, and Oburlesque (l can’t emphasize the crossover in the third club enough). “Sci-Fi Hall was a very in-person Hall before,” said Eva. “If you were walking down the Hall, you could easily stumble upon and join in on an event. People do miss that in-person aspect.” Still, members like Eva are embracing this digital future: “the online presence allows for more planning and an easy central space.”

Overall, Sci-Fi Hall has said a lot of shit and meant different things to many different people over its two decades of history. It’s an online nexus. A rancid party joint. It traces to a bookshelf that holds together so much history. That history gets more distant every day, but there is a fascinating future on the horizon. For Eva, “I’ve met all my closest friends there. It’s the community I’ve always turned to.” There is one thing about Sci-Fi that never changes: its value.

Culture Fest: The Value of Community and Coalition

Reggie Goudeau Features Editor

Last Saturday, April 15, 2023, the MRC hosted Oberlin’s frst Culture Fest in collaboration with plenty of parties. From students, faculty, and individual ofces on campus to community members, this was an event by and for the Oberlin masses in all capacities. My partner and I volunteered at the event for several hours, and had frsthand experience seeing the fun everyone in attendance experienced.

Before anything else, I’d like to comment on how accommodating this event was to volunteers. We had a break room in Peters Hall where we initially checked in, and that we could return to anytime. It had water, snacks, and the sweet embrace of air conditioning. Even if people did not feel like returning all the way there, the information table had water as well for volunteers, vendors, and attendees alike. All events featuring unpaid student labor should have these features at the bare minimum.

Beyond this, the event occurred on a gorgeous sunny day. My partner worked near the bounce house, and I manned the information table alongside Hannah Bouillon. Around nearly every walkway of Tappan Square there were tables for different organizations and departments on campus, along with a food section. The bandstand also featured multiple artists and bands performing, adding to the energetic yet peaceful ambiance of the day.

From Noah Sherman and his band to the Langston Middle School and Oberlin College Gospel Choirs respectively, there was al-

most always music in the background. I also loved how, although there were a fair amount of bands like the previous and OSteel, there were also individual students like Damian Goggans who were able to shine. I even got a chance to perform a few R.E.G hits of my own during the Culture Fest Open Mic.

While the music was a clear highlight, the general events happening and showcases from some clubs were also unforgettable. Sci-Fi Hall’s costume contest had lovable nerds from across campus donning gear from noteworthy video game, anime, and cartoon franchises. One of my personal favorites was my friend Ren Waldman’s cosplay of Levi from Attack on Titan. The OCircus showcase from Waldman and others was fun to witness as always. While I sadly had to attend to other matters before AndWhat? performed, I’m absolutely confdent they killed it like they always do.

The event even had some curveballs that were well worth seeing or experiencing. For instance, there was a build-a-bear station at one of the tables, and a strongman competition run by fourth-year Ali Alotbi during Culture Fest near the Oberlin College Bookstore. I know that I missed a great deal of what was ofered, even while attending for most of the event’s duration. That’s not a bad thing, but simply a testament to how much culture was packed into this day. No matter where you looked or spent your time, if you came to Culture Fest, there was at least one thing to love and appreciate.

Photo Courtesy of Zach Terrilion

Wednesday’s Rat Saw God: A Coagulated Country Careener

Sebastian Cruz Contributor

In the eyes of many, country music has fallen from the state that it occupied “way back when” (the “back when” still as frustratingly undefined as ever.) The institution of pop country, its Billboard-topping, chart-stopping, quality-lopping ubiquity, has been a major sticking point against the genre, hence the whole “everything except rap and country” opinion that’s become an example of music consumption snobbery, and yet, still retains its adamant listeners. But when one looks closer just beneath what the radio plays, a rich tapestry of alt-country history reveals itself, going both forwards and backwards all at once.

Thus: Asheville, NC foursome Wednesday, composed of the typical vocals/guitar/drums composition with lap steel wizard Xandy Chelmis rounding out the quartet. On new album Rat Saw God, Wednesday seeks to fully push the alt-country standards of straightforward, confessional, descriptive songwriting into the hazy high territories of shoegaze and 90’s-inflected alt rock. Much akin to Jake Lendermann’s solo ventures as… MJ Lendermann, the band’s main virtue is this exact fusion of the fuzz with the frank. Alt-country acolytes like David Berman and our very own Oberlin alum Jason Molina indirectly fuel Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman’s own blithe observations through an America that, while remaining the deeply colorfilled landscape so romanticized, now retains a subterranean sadness and melancholy

that can never be separated from it. This leads to an album that is mostly comprised of these strangely ornate run-throughs of America’s bruised heartland. Oftentimes, Hartzman’s observations are presented without a clear affect. It’s not a monotone per se, more so a casual glance of everything that speeds by her fast. The “hot rotten grass smell” on the song of the same name, “a sex shop off the highway/with a biblical name” on “Turkey Vultures.”

“Quarry” is perhaps the most encompassing of these inter-song vignettes. It’d be a waste to simply list them devoid of their musical contexts, but suffice it to say that Hartzman’s portraits run the gamut from darkly hilarious (“The kid from the Jewish family got the preacher’s kid pregnant”) to starkly dysfunctional (“The Kletz brothers’ parents fight in the yard in their underwear/Bobby and Jimmy sit in the baby pool with lice in their hair.”)

That undercurrent of deeply-embedded darkness heralded earlier was no fluke: Hartzman is careful to completely rend the scene entirely with her band to helm the vanguard with her. The curdled milk-esque guitar scuzzes barrel through the right and left channels on the roiling “Got Shocked” and the equally roiling yet romantic “Chosen to Deserve,” a paean to the vulnerable, ugly conversations one has with the one they love, as the images of mid-day alcohol-diluted and Benadryl-loaded debauchery leads into the final small epiphany on an album full

Illustration by Julian Crosetto Layout Editor

of them: “Now all the drugs are gettin’ kinda borin’ to me/Now everywhere is loneliness and it’s in everything.”

No mention of songwriting ambition can sidestep the most obvious case: the true, meaty opener of “Bull Believer” was, and continues to be, a disorienting spot, for its final three and a half minutes (out of a total eight and a half minutes) easily knock the wind out of whoever happens to be carried into its tempest. The grisliest tune of all, the song details the titular “bull” flailing against its worst vices. There are choked whispers of bottles, blood and “a corpse with a spirit.” It all breaks. Calling upon the immortal Mortal Kombat catchphrase “finish him,” Hartzman, harnessing “the lightning [that] comes up from the ground and goes up to the sky,” shreds her voice into a double-barreled spectral rage/ anguish. And with only two words, too.

Nothing else on the album comes close to such an intensity. The following “Got Shocked” gives a brief comedown summary: “First I felt the thunder then blacked out at band practice/I’m told that I screamed and stood up/Then I sat down and wept after the amp got unplugged.” “Bull Believer,” thus, made me wonder: how come nothing else on the album reaches that emotional peak? Hartzman doesn’t clue any of us into an answer, however, the lack of emphasis on the most harrowing emotional pockets aren’t the most important moments at all. There’s a certain oxymoronic dichotomy with how she treats the battered and bruised personal parables of “Bull Believer” vs. what she sees in her day-to-day. She is privy to accidents, deaths, bad trips and bad highs, all with a crackly, distant and curious vocal timbre that suggests a certain weariness. The commentary on these events are scant, because what right does she have of her own perspective on all of these tragedies? She already has her own.

Everything ends on the relatively quiet “TV in the Gas Pump,” the duskbasked ode to the roads she passes through. The Panera Breads and Dollar Generals and Starbucks may as well be local fare. It’s never explicit, but there’s something almost small about every corner of the world Hartzman moves through. Not miniscule small, just compact. Almost quaint in their little oddities. The “TV in the gas pump/Blares into the dark,” so she purports. There’s a lifetime of desperation, stoned days and drunken nights buried all around in that dark, and Hartzman is worried that if she blinks, she might miss it.

The Sacramento Kings Are Awesome

Purple Beacons and Mid-Range Pull-Ups

Max Miller Staff Writer

After every win, a Sacramento King lumbers over to a big pur ple button. They are handed a microphone, occasionally uttering a few words of excited fan appreciation before leading an arena-wide countdown. Upon reaching the end of the sequence, the player pushes the plastic button, igniting a purple beam of light located on top of the Golden 1 Center. The purple beacon is sent into the cos mos, almost as a peace ofering to the ever-evasive basketball gods.

This custom is a new one. This season is the beam’s frst. It could not have picked a better inaugural season.

The Kings have stunk for a long, long time. The last time they had made the playofs was in May 2006, back when fedoras were trendy and the iPhone was unreleased. Ever since then, the Kings seemed to be on a treadmill, putting together the same disappointment year in and year out. They’ve had their share of top-tier talent (love some good Demarcus Cousins), but never put together a competent enough team to even be in the outskirts of the playof picture, not putting together a winning season since their last playof berth.

But something about this year was diferent. Through multiple trades, draft acquisitions, and a much needed coaching change (Luke Walton was absolutely incompe tent, Mike Brown is a wizard), they changed their identity. And they started winning. This year, their potent ofense helped them attain the 3-seed in the gauntlet that is the Western conference. The Kings are truly a force to be reckoned with. Perhaps more im portantly than the winning, though, the Kings are, for once, fun.

The Sacramento Kings are exciting in a way unlike any other small market team in recent memory. They are not fun to watch only due to a top-15 player; the Kings do not have the luxury of hav ing somebody the level of Giannis Antetokounmpo, nor a 2007-era Stephen Curry-caliber player, who helped lead the eighth-seeded “We Believe” Warriors past the top ranked Dallas Mavericks in the playofs’ frst round. (Funnily enough, the “We Believe” slogan was borrowed from the Kings’ 2004-2005 marketing campaign.) In stead, the Kings have somehow put together an ofense-heavy ros ter that is exceptionally fun to watch as a cohesive unit. Whether it is De’Aaron Fox’s clutch mid-range jumpers, a Domantas Sabonis post move, or a Malik Monk three point barrage (is there anything more fun to watch than a microwave scorer?), it feels that some player is always making a big-time shot in a big-time moment. Hell, even Alex Len (Alex Len!) had a huge stretch in Game 2 of the Kings’ frst round series against the Warriors.

The Kings have harnessed the energy of an underdog, a lower seed on the verge of knocking of a title favorite, likely due to the 16-year playof drought and their current matchup against a cer tain aforementioned Bay Area juggernaut. And while I am unsure whether they will escape this frst round matchup victorious (I re ally hope they do), I believe in what the Sacramento Kings have created, both in terms of team building and culture. They have fostered an environment that the Californian capital has so badly missed for so many years. No matter the result, they have fnally put together a young roster with a bright, bright future. And to that, I say, Light the Beam.

Illustration by Derya Taspinar and Frances McDowell Contributor

Bodies are Fluid On Film: a Lush Kaleidoscope of Bodily Excess

Saffron Forsberg Editor-in-Chief

“I am neither a victim nor an executioner. I am a living work of art,” jeny, the subject of Laura Huertas Millán’s 2018 jeny303, tells us as, before the camera, they get ready for their day. They rub perfume on their pulse points and speak openly about sex work, a heroin addiction, a boyfriend. It’s all on hazy 16mm. Jeny303 is the third short film presented as part of the Bodies are Fluid film screening, curated by students Nat Becker-Stevens, Oscar Ertman, Ella Powell, and Pete Staub, with assistance from visiting assistant professor of Cinema Studies, Dr. Jennifer Blaylock, and presented in Hallock Auditorium last Monday, April 17th. The screening was the product of a winter term project entitled “Decolonizing Cinema History’’, its content inspired by the AMAM’s extensive “Femme n’ isms: Bodies are Fluid” exhibit, which opened in January.

Jeny303 is just one such video portrait featured in the screening project – which showcased a wide array of experimental art films centering the body at its most visceral, honest, excessive, and beautiful. From Barbara Hammer’s seminal 1974 Menses, to Cheryl Donegan’s 1993 Head, to A.K. Burns and Katherine Hubbard’s 2014 Untitled (shaving performance 2010), to White Afro, a 2019 film by Akosua Adoma Owusu, the curation project was just as much a stand-alone ode to radical, queer embodiment in contemporary art history as it was an apt supplement to the AMAM’s exhibit. Before the screening, student Nat Becker-Stevens stood before the audience and told us this screening would investigate those “fluid bodies” at their most literal and tangible, as well as in their fluid concep -

tual premises. This is surely communicated by the sixth film screened, Vicky Smith’s 2014 Noisy Licking, Dribbling & Spitting, which, just as it says on the tin, and as clarified in the accompanying program, was “made with the mouth alone”. Like the AMAM’s rich investigation of queer, trans, and fem embodiments – that which lent special attention to those subjects who present oft-neglected states of embodiment: fatness, transness, gender nonconformity/ambiguity, physical disability, and old age – the screening never shied from even the most tactile notions of bodily fluidity.

Indeed, upon entering the Allen’s largely-visual exhibit, one is immediately greeted with Heesoo Kwon’s 2019 Leymysoom Mogyotang, an audio-visual work wherein Kwon places museum-goers directly within the subject position of the piece. Head sandwiched between provided headphones, the viewer is guided through the virtual interior of a Korean bathhouse. It is here that one watches the beautiful, almost-unnerving fluidity of the body through Kwon’s perspective. Kwon’s bathhouse is a realm where, submerged in hot water, figures shrink and expand. In another scene, figures assist one another in the shedding of gooey, latex-like flesh, thus revealing bodies that are jade-like in color and almost amphibious. They smile sagely. They are as fluid in identity, in being, as they are in their own physical bodies. Like jeny, like the many other subjects who center both exhibit and screening, they exist as neither victims nor executioners, but rather as living works of art.

Illustration by Derya Taspinar Contributor

No Shoes, No Music, Just Prayer: On Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou and Jerusalem

Raghav Raj Arts & Culture Editor

In a nondescript car going down some nondescript highway, a besuited man tenderly speaks orders into his Amazon Echo device. “Alexa, pause my podcast,” he utters, and the droning voice in the background cuts out. “Set my temperature at home to 71 degrees,” he says, and it cuts to a picture of his Amazon Smart Thermostat raising the home’s temperature. “Turn on the lights,” he says, and the music floods in.

The rest of that commercial is negligible; his wife comes home, uses the Amazon Echo to call him during his drive to the hospital (where he’s a cardiologist?), and tells him to have fun at his job. More important is the song in the background, Emahoy Tsegué-

Maryam Guèbrou’s “Homesickness,” which imbues the whole affair with as much humanity as a commercial for Amazon could possibly muster. It is a strange, surreal synthesis that brings a music supervisor for some advertising agency — hired by a comically evil corporation to market a listening device that farms you for your precious data — towards the work of an Ethiopian nun who spent the last four decades of her life in a monastery in Jerusalem before her passing earlier this year at the age of 99. Perhaps that’s the purest expression of Guèbrou’s genius; there is no corporation whose muck obscures her music’s light towards the divine.

For the longest time, the sum of

the Western world’s knowledge of Guèbrou’s music was a single CD from 2006: Ethiopiques 21: Piano Solo (originally titled Ethiopia Song), a 16-song compilation released by Buda Musique that draws from the thirty years worth of charity albums Guèbrou released from the 1960s onwards. Assembled by musicologist Francis Falceto as part of Buda’s longrunning Ethiopiques series — which spotlights traditional and popular music from Ethiopia released during the 1960s and 1970s — it’s a wonderfully put-together compilation, an essential primer to the pianist’s beautiful, tender compositions.

The role of Buda Musique in disseminating Ethiopian music into the contemporary Western consciousness is undeniable; equally undeniable, however, is the tension between the label and the artists it has so eagerly promoted. Artists like the late saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya and the legendary composer Mulatu Astatke, both of whom have been featured in Ethiopiques compilations and have had volumes dedicated entirely to their work, are not shy about their distaste for the ways Falceto and Buda took advantage of their music without adequately compensating them.

Mekurya, in a 2012 interview with The Ethiopian Reporter, speaks pretty candidly about these feelings of exploitation: “Though he made tons of money with it, I sold my album with one thousand birr back in the 70’s to him… He talks good things about me but I did not make a dime out of it. Even if he was able to contribute to the recognition of our music worldwide, on the other hand he used us. He is making tons of money. I do not work with him; I work with other musicians and promoters, and I think he is not happy with that fact.”

entioning Astatke, Mekurya asserts that the father of Ethio-jazz “despises” Falceto, and “does not want to see his face.” Buda Musique may have played a large part in bringing this era of Ethiopian music back into the contemporary consciousness, but in monopolizing it under its interna -

tional copyright, it has stripped the very creators of this music from the fruits of their work. It’s a business model that stands directly at odds with Guèbrou, who released records to raise money for the poor, the orphaned, and those ravaged by war in Ethiopia.

Her story has been told countless times, but it’s one worth repeating. Guèbrou was born in 1923 in Addis Ababa as Yewubdar Guèbru. (Emahoy, as she’s commonly referred to, is a religious honorific.) Her father, Kentiba Gebru Desta, was a high-ranking official during emperor Menelik II’s reign, and served as mayor in Harar and Gondar.

At age 6, Yewubdar, along with her older sister Senedu, was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland, where she saw a blind pianist perform at a concert. It’s a moment that the pianist recalls in a 2017 BBC radio documentary about her, “The HonkyTonk Nun,” as a sort of genesis. “It remained in my mind, in my heart,” she said. “After that, I was captivated by music.”

After studying piano and violin at the school, she returned to Ethiopia in 1933, attending secondary school, serving as a civil servant, and playing music for the Emperor Haile Selassie at his palace until his exile two years later after Ethiopia’s occupation under a fascist Italy. Three of her brothers were executed; Guèbrou was sent to a prison camp on the island of Asinara, and then to Mercogliano. After the war, she studied music in Cairo under Polish violinist Alexander Kontorowicz before returning to Ethiopia, where Kontorowicz took charge of the Imperial Bodyguard Band, and Guèbrou was employed as an assistant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Guèbrou’s spiritual awakening occurred when she was in her 20’s, at a crossroads in her career. She had received a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and was potentially on her way to becoming a concert pianist when the opportunity fell apart for reasons that the pianist has mostly avoided discussing.

Jerusalem cover art, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou

This part of her story is, as journalist Amanda Petrusich writes in her wonderful essay memorializing Guèbrou for The New Yorker, is a little blurry: “Emahoy fell into a heavy depression, refusing to consume anything other than coffee for twelve days. She was taken to the hospital, and it briefly seemed as though she might not survive. An Orthodox priest gave the last rites. Emahoy slept for more than twelve hours, and then, she said, she woke up with a peaceful mind.”

After this, she decamped to the Gishen Mariam monastery, located in the far corner of the Wollo Province, on top of a holy mountain. With no running water or electricity in the monastery, she slept on a bed of mud. It’s here where she was given her religious name, Tsegué-Maryam. In her interview with the BBC, she recounts: “I took off my shoes and went barefoot for 10 years. No shoes, no music, just prayer.”

In the 1960s, the patriarch who led Gishen Mariam passed away, and Guèbrou reunited with her mother in Addis. She also returned to her music, intensely studying the work of St. Yared, the sixth-century Aksumite composer whose work is the foundation of liturgical music for the Ethiopian Orthodox church. Most of Guèbrou’s widely-available music comes from this period between the 1960s and 1970s; in 1984, she fled Mengistu Haile Mariam’s regime and the ongoing famine for the Ethiopian Orthodox convent in Jerusalem where she’d spend the rest of her life.

Nearly three weeks after she passed away, the archival Portlandbased label Mississippi Records released a new album of unreleased and virtually inaccessible piano pieces from Guèbrou. The label, whose mission statement focuses on “discarded music of the world,” collaborated with the Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Music Publisher, a non-profit established to preserve and remaster the composer’s body of work, and to fund music education for children in underserved communities. The album is called Jerusalem, and it draws on songs on her scarcely-found 1972 record Hymn of Jerusalem, along with some of her home recordings.

Even beyond her recent passing, there’s something profoundly timely about Jerusalem’s release. The album arrives as the spring comes into full bloom, a perfect metaphor for the graceful and delicate sound of Guèbrou’s piano, which cascades and meanders with a distinct, vernal effervescence. She wields the instru -

ment in a sort of divine communion, every arpeggiated rise searching for the light ahead. As Petrusich beautifully puts it, it sounds like “a sparrow alighting on a branch; a wildflower bending toward the sun; a tiny, persistent sorrow.”

I’ve been listening a lot to Jerusalem over these past few weeks. It lingers in my headphones when I’m studying, and the swaying melodies of songs like “Have You Seen Assayeheghn?” pitter-patter into my head when I’m

bears — “The Home of Beethoven,” which invokes the titular maestro’s late-period sonatas in its use of space and syncopated, floating progression — and in terms of the home she left behind. The first song here, “Famine Disaster 1974,” is a deeply elegiac composition; in the liner notes, Guèbrou talks about joining a group of Red Cross volunteers and witnessing firsthand the horrors of the famine, the haunting sight of “the lifeless, sad eyes gazing at you,” and the weeks and

leave one’s home and country to go afar and live in a strange land.” And then there’s “Woigaye, Don’t Cry Anymore,” named after her late brother, who heard the composition a few weeks before his death and was so moved to tears that he requested his sister name the song for him. Like all of Guèbrou’s most powerful compositions, it is both achingly somber and utterly breathtaking, radiant even in its grief.

Yet, despite all the profound sadness found within Guèbrou’s music, there is hope. The darkened sky may be forecasting a violent storm, but on “Movement From Rainbow Sonata,” she reminds us in the liner notes of Noah’s covenant, a stunning streak of color appearing across the sky — “the sign of mercy.” For “Aurora,” she invokes an endless sky whose twinkling stars are fading into the night, the dawn of a spring morning in praise of the lord. And while writing about “The Pilgrim Song,” she again offers a prayer: “Heavenly Father, chase the night and let shine thy Light.”

At the center of it all is, to date, the only recording of Guèbrou singing — “Quand La Mer Furieuse,” perhaps the most deeply affecting composition on a compilation that’s full of them, and maybe the most overwhelmingly gorgeous thing that she ever made. A tender hymnal, the song is helmed by her voice, a jarringly expressive instrument as ghostly and captivating as her work on the piano. Searching and almost child-like in its innocence, it reminds me a lot of a composition from the Ethiopiques release, “The Song of the Sea”; indeed, in French, the song translates to “when the raging sea.”

walking around campus.

When I’m riding my bike on the trails, I’ve found that sometimes the birdsong melds into the music; the title track, in particular, seems to eagerly welcome the chirping bluejays, goldfinches, and chickadees into its aching, classical vein, a song as influenced by liturgical music as it is by Debussy or Satie.

Jerusalem often captures a singular composer reckoning with her past, both in terms of her musical fore -

weeks of depression that followed the experience.

There are those tangled memories of a childhood spent in exile that permeate songs like “Farewell Eve,” a song that Guèbrou dedicated to her nieces. “Indeed,” she says in the song’s notes, “it is always sad to

In the notes for the song, she remembers the ocean liner voyage to Switzerland, the one she embarked on at the age of six with her eldest sister. They were some of the first Ethiopian girls to ever study abroad, a fact that can only really exist as a footnote in the grand scheme of her remarkable life. Even before her death, Guèbrou’s work was constantly entangled with her past, with her faith, with a God whose kindness and sacrifice she forever embraced.

She is gone now, leaving so much left unsaid, but her music — her memory — is still here, still serene, spiritual, and completely spellbinding into eternity and beyond. “It was too hot in the cabin to sleep, so we went outside on the deck,” she wrote. “Watching the beautiful sea and the waves going back and forth, I could not forget it.”

Illustration by Molly Chapin Production Assistant

Taste the (Piss-Flavored) Rainbow: Bud Light and the Long Haul of Corporate Allyship

Fionna Farell Opinions Editor

Abandon, fruity people, your fruity cocktails, for the summer comes bearing great news: America’s #1 frat-phro

all beers, is now for everyone, and not just people who don’t have opinions—i.e. the Bud Light of people.

gender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, who, two sips and one March Madness jab later, would stir up the media storm

the company. Mulvaney casually inserts that, like the sports fans out there celebrating the big W for their teams or whatever the fuck, she will also soon be celebrating her 365th day of womanhood. For the sole purpose of emboldening her, and aggravating braindead podcast-bro transphobes, Bud Light has put Mulvaney’s face on a specialedition can (not available to

By the immediate uproar that ensued across the most pitiable spheres of the internet, you’d have thought it was the visage of Saddam Hussein they put on the blue tin. Mere hours after Mulvaney’s ad surfaced, Twitter was ablaze with umbrage from not only runof-the-mill red-pilled Floridians, but also some of the most sizable corporate monoliths. For example, the worldrenowned Florida seafood chain, Grills Seafood Deck and Tiki Bar, claimed that

it would be eliminating Bud and Bud Light from its restaurants. Of Coors, that is only the valiant thing to do, when, to owner Joe Penovich, Anheuser-Busch Corporation is the one “causing all this division and anger in our society.”

Meanwhile, redneck Jesus Kid Rock might have won the award for most innovative anti-Bud protest. A couple days following the Ad of Ignominy, Mr. Rock made Candace Owens cream her skirts when he took to shooting up packs of Bud with a machine gun in an open field. “Grandpa’s feeling frisky today,” intoned the Kid. “Fuck Bud Light, and Fuck Anheuser Busch.” After that silver-tongued bastard, how could other women-defending men of culture do anything but follow suit? I think my favorite reaction would have to come from the EIC of the National Review, that handsome far-right devil Richard Lowry, who conducted a taste test between Bud Light and water. Even in these trying times, there are at least some things we can agree upon.

All this media consternation, along with several, if nebulous, calls to boycott Bud

Continued on page 17

Illustration by Maia Hadler Art Director

Light ultimately begs the question: just why do people care so much? I have been wracking the brain and scratching the head over this for a long period of time, and I’m still not sure I have the answer. Even amid these politically tumultuous times, this sort of upheaval has far breached the point of inanity. I would expect even the most seditious toddlers to behave better when they have their own consumer mainstays stripped away from them.

Any objective, i.e. unabashedly liberal-leaning, observer would perhaps attribute these inflamed reactions from the right to a generalized phobia of progressive ideals. Hating on love and inclusivity, that tends to be these people’s thing, according to people with a house in Cape Cod. But it is critical for us to consider that, even if it doesn’t make anything less mind-bogglingly stupid, the situation is perhaps a bit more complicated than that. Much of the anger directed towards Bud Light seems to stem from something beyond the standard “protect our kids” transphobic idiocy; for a lot of Bud Light drinkers, the idiocy came from something intimate. The ad

was a personal affront. Or rather, it struck at the most open and tender wounds inflicted by the modern-day tirade of the woke. The woke mob doesn’t just want your vote; it also wants your identity, your soul.

Obviously, just this mindset alone is as ridiculous as the virulent reactions it has spawned online and across America’s classiest bars. Whether its main demographic likes it or not, Anheuser-Busch, like any multi-billion dollar corporation, knows that the hard truth of 2023 consumerist America is, you’ve gotta appeal to the young to stay afloat. Unfortunately for the old boys, this means making beer that is equally unenjoyable for everyone. The newlyCoronated Bud-foes out there don’t have too much cause to fret, though. Thanks to Seth Weathers—no, you should not know who he is—-Bud sees formidable competition with the newly-touted “100% UltraRight Woke-Free Beer.” No, I am not making that up—-but the beer seems to be dropping from breweries everywhere, sadly, due to, you guessed it, a bit of a marketing slip-up.

Despite the really insane brew-haha (do forgive me; puns are my chosen form of inebriation) that has come of this incident, it does give cause to deeper reflection about the nature of progressive marketing and corporate allyship at large. That is, if one would go so far to characterize Bud’s marketing decision as such, as opposed to what a cynic might simply call pandering. With pride month upon us, it is important to hold corporations accountable for their ostensible values and those they choose to promote. After all, this is far from Dylan Mulvaney’s first rodeo in the advertising world. She’s worked with the big three for women everywhere—Nike, Adidas, and Tampax. While it is ultimately a good thing, no matter how you spin it, for companies to be practicing and promoting inclusivity, we also need to be cautious when wokeness is ventriloquized for shmoney. It is no easy skill to tell the difference. But we must always be critical, nonetheless. The sad irony of this situation is, it is often the marginalized voices whom these companies “stand for” that ultimately end up getting swept aside.

On Lena Dunham Apologia, Girls Revivalism, and Liberatory Loserdom

Catherine Gilligan Contributor

When HBO’s Girls first came out, it was deemed a revelation. Hailed as a “brilliant gem”, the show was received as the crown jewel of chick TV, mumblecore SATC for a new crop of NYC transplants navigating sex, love and friendship. Dunham’s writing was praised for its honesty, wit and astounding ability to tap into the 24 year old female psyche. Over time, however, the tide shifted. Many people began criticizing Girls, deeming it whiny, vulgar, grating, even anti-feminist. While plenty of the critiques were warranted, namely addressing the show’s glaring issues with race, just as many were bad faith readings of what is, all things considered, an astonishingly selfaware piece of television.

Lena Dunham’s career followed a similar trajectory to that of her show. Initially lauded as the voice of a generation upon Girls’ initial success, people quickly soured on Lena. The daughter of influential and affluent NYC art world types (like so many of her fellow Oberlin alumni) Dunham has been characterized, not entirely unfairly, as

obnoxious and out of touch. This is of course exacerbated by the fact that she has been extremely vocal about politics, namely feminism. A fervent and very public supporter of fellow #nastywoman, Hillary

tique” begins and ends with her personal encounters with “mansplaining”, “manspreading” and getting told to smile more (as opposed to, say, FGM). Unfortunately, due to her seeming inability to shut

she wished that she had an abortion on a podcast about reproductive rights. She disclosed a series of pre-sexual experiences she had with her sister in her memoir, which despite being more or less

warm statement defending a friend and coworker who was #MeToo-ed in spite of a credible allegation made against him.

Clinton, Dunham has come to embody the archetypal “white feminist”; a coddled liberal white woman who’s “poli -

up, Dunham even found herself cannibalized by her Boss Lady brethren after a series of PR slip- ups. She said that

developmentally appropriate, were weird enough to immediately be used as ammunition against her. She made a luke -

Dunham has made blunder after blunder, some inane, some legitimately harmful, all of which have been used to firmly sort her into the camp of Reviled Female Celebrity (think Amy Schumer, Jameela Jamil, Amber Heard). In many online circles, it is no longer enough to find someone annoying- you must also find reasons to deem them morally reprehensible. The real reason most people can’t stand Lena Dunham is because she’s irritating; she’s loud and self-involved and not quite conventionally attractive enough to espouse typical celebrity nonsense without getting scolded. However, in a culture where finding someone grating is no longer sufficient grounds to dislike them, these are replaced with much more serious accusations on her character, ones that were pervasive for a very long time.

So why is everyone I know between the ages of 17 and 24 watching Girls right now?

Illustration by Frances McDowell Production Assistant

Girls is so fucking funny. It is perhaps the most brilliant depiction of 20-something upper-middle class white women ever captured on camera. Dunham manages to create a razor sharp satire with boundless empathy, as mean spirited as it is generous to its truly awful and excruciatingly familiar cast of characters. All of the Girls feel textured in a way that characters on television usually don’t; their bizarre sexual neuroses, their astounding narcissism, their

hysterical meltdowns, their barely cogent worldviews, their desperate desire to be loved. It’s a testament to the strength of Dunham’s writing that her characters feel so relatable, even to the vast constituency of those who are not grad students whose parents pay their rent. This is because Dunham doesn’t just write “strong female characters”she writes characters that are fully realized in their personhood, as flawed and unlikable as they are compelling.

My personal theory as to why so many young women are revisiting Girls now is because, without jerking her off too much, Dunham inadvertently created the antidote to the current feminist microwave ten years too early. Girls was fundamentally incompatible with the feminist movement from which it was born, the age of lean-in corporate girlbossery that had little patience for fuckups like Horvath. In a similar turn, Girls is in tension with the current era

of so-called “dissociative feminism”. Fleabag, who I consider to be the embodiment of this detached, nihilistic “born with pain built in” type, is the anti-Hannah. While Fleabag can turn to the camera, collar bones protruding, and deliver some cutting, self-aware quip on her own glamorous dysfunction, Hannah can only shove the Q-tip deeper into her ear and cry about it to her ex-boyfriend. Hannah, Marnie, Shoshanna, even Jessa, are all losers because they’re

allowed to be. They don’t need a veil of ironic detachment to engage with the world; they feel everything deeply and fully. They don’t have to come off as nonchalant; they care so deeply about the world around them. And in simply permitting her female characters to exist in all their complexity and contradiction, Dunham crafts a narrative far more liberating than anything mainstream liberal feminism has offered women in years.

Carry Me, Ohio: a Final Tribute to Home

Teagan Hughes Editor-in-Chief

To paraphrase Chris Tebbetts’ Me, Myself, and Him—a young adult novel I remember nothing else about—2019 was the year I became from Ohio, rather than simply being in Ohio. I grew up in and around Athens, a small college town situated in the southern Ohio foothills. Most of the people I knew and loved while living in Athens were, believe it or not, also living in Athens. The state of Ohio was a fact of life. I knew when beginning my college search that I wanted to stay in Ohio in order to remain close to my family, which eventually led me, as all roads purportedly do, to Oberlin College.

At Oberlin, my Ohioan-ness became an uncomfortable part of my identity. Mentioning my hometown to fellow Obies often elicited a response of “I’m sorry” at varying levels of genuine pity, a response it had never occurred to me to expect. And when it wasn’t pity, it was surprise—as if to say, “oh, I didn’t think you could exist here.” I became distinctly aware of my regional identity, in the same way that you occasionally become aware of—and subsequently struggle to regulate— your breathing or blinking. My home had been shaken loose inside of me. I didn’t know when to mention it and when to keep quiet; I didn’t

know how to navigate conversations involving it even tangentially. I tried to write through it—a rambling Winter Term project, a portfolio’s worth of geography-based poetry, venting text messages to my mom—and eventually amassed a body of work that, honestly, just kind of goes in circles. Most of it was, and will remain, private, but there were the occasional publicfacing pieces.

I recently reread the first article I published as a Grape Staff Writer, “Cicadas Aren’t Coming to Oberlin This Summer, and Other Myths About Ohio,” from June 2021. In it, I defend the state of Ohio from fellow Obies’ accusations of boringness, worthlessness, and nothingness. I don’t believe, now, that it is as strong of a defense as Ohio deserves. Reading it back, I can feel my nineteen-year-old self walking on eggshells. Referring to the Ohio jokes I still hear on a daily basis (think cornfields), I asked: “Where do these attitudes and misconceptions come from, and how valid is that origin? Are they based on a narrow perspective of our surroundings, or a bigger and more accurate picture? Is it possible that they are rooted in deeper socioeconomic biases that may warrant further examination?” I didn’t provide a definitive answer, de -

spite knowing full well the one I wanted to give. Every claim in the article is couched in a disclaimer or punctuated with the question mark of plausible deniability; the whole thing is characterized by a tone of extreme caution and a willingness to concede.

I was afraid of ruffling feathers. It was my first time expressing these indignant feelings for an audience, and I was afraid of coming off too accusatory or too bitter. I was afraid, too—maybe even more afraid—that no matter what or how I wrote, the premise that I had something worth defending, that I had something worth loving, would be dismissed out of hand. So I tempered myself. My fears were wrong; the response to my article was kind and I remain grateful for it. But I believe that I’m capable of being less tentative now, and I would like to provide a supplement to my second-year self before I graduate and move one state over.

I was inspired to revisit my first article in writing by fellow Editor-in-Chief Saffron Forsberg’s incredible article “Rich Cat, Poor Cat” from the April 14th, 2023 edition of The Grape. I very highly recommend you seek out this article in print or online, at oberlingrape.com. In it, Saffron addresses and refutes the

“mythical narrative that Ohio was a place I should think myself too good for,” a narrative manufactured by city-dwellers who routinely express shock that they, the enlightened ones, ended up in such an insignificant place. The sentiment Saffron identifies here is a sentiment that caused a great deal of alienation for me upon moving to Oberlin.

As a first-year, the brand of anti-Ohio-ness that is a staple at Oberlin made me feel very out of place, very quickly. As aforementioned, I heard a lot of “sorry” in my early days. I heard a lot of jokes about cornfields and the “middle of nowhere.” (I used to reenact my experience meeting fellow Obies for my family on breaks: “ugh, I can’t believe I go to school in Ohio, why did I come here, it’s just corn out here, I can’t believe people actually live here, I hate it already…anyway, where are you from?”) I received occasional comments on my attimes-notably-Ohioan voice and manner—the connotation usually being: it’s weird, change it. People would express excessive shock at the places and experiences that had been inaccessible to me growing up (“what do you mean, you’ve never been to a Trader Joe’s?!”), which could cause discomfort for me in social settings, especially when

the places or experiences I had apparently missed out on were markedly upper-class. Someone once told me that I was from the worst place anyone could be from, which is a thing no one should ever say to anyone else.

The cornfields and “middle of nowhere” jokes—sometimes boiled down to just the word “Ohio,” spoken in a tone of disgust—are the most common derisive comments I hear, and I have long argued that these jokes are inescapably rooted in classism. In truth, what’s wrong with a cornfield? What’s wrong with a state that has a lot of them? Nothing, or at least nothing unique. But the way that Oberlin students talk about cornfields, or being in the “middle of nowhere,” it becomes a euphemism for “there’s nothing of value here.” The homes, the communities, the land—nothing to see out here. Nothing worth considering, documenting, fighting for, loving.

Oberlin students that aren’t outright dismissive or derisive towards Ohio sometimes treat the state with a strange irony; a “tongue-in-cheek” attitude, as Saffron identifies it in her piece. There’s this pervasive sense among sects of Obies that rural Ohio is perhaps a quaint shoebox diorama that exists solely for their amusement; i.e., the amusement of

those who came from, and will someday return to, sizable cities. It’s as if those of us from rural Ohio will stop living our lives once they are no longer visible to others who seek entertainment and enrichment in engaging with us. Some people seem to hold the belief that close observation of curious Ohioan going-ons will ultimately serve the observer by making them a better or more well-rounded person (or, at the very least, giving them a fun little story to tell back home). There’s a style of semi- to fully ironic Ohioan immersion practiced by numerous Oberlin students—oh, isn’t this quaint? Isn’t this cutesy, homey, peculiar?—that serves primarily to belittle and overwrite rural Ohioan narratives. I’ve often witnessed my home flattened into a backdrop—especially for use in student art, which can easily tip over to the wrong side of exploitative.

The belief, subconscious as it is, that rural Ohioans do not lead three-dimensional lives— that our lives only exist when they intersect with “the outside world,” for others’ amusement—is also rooted in elitism and socioeconomic prejudice. It stems from the same place as the outright dismissiveness and disregard discussed above. In Obies’ Ohio, rural Ohioans often become set pieces, if we’re there at all. Our lives, our work, our communities are not significant enough to warrant continuity. This is an attitude that people from cities and suburbs often hold towards rural areas in general; it is not specific to Ohio. Classism and stereotyping aimed at rural areas is inescapable nationwide, especially toward the Midwest, Appalachia, and the South. The Ohioan dimension of it is just uniquely pervasive at Oberlin.

I told myself I was leaving disclaimers behind in writing this piece, but this one feels obligatory: bad things happen in Ohio. Of course they do. Our state legislature is a captured institution—gerrymandered beyond belief—and it is only one of many Ohioan institutions worthy of sharp, sustained criticism and even total overhaul. I don’t mean to say that Ohio is a dreamland. I mean only to say that it is my home.

Ohio is not a wasteland, or a utopia, or a show put on for the enrichment of those unfamiliar with rural life. Ohio is a place. Like any place, it may be hated, idealized, derided, exalted. Like any place, it is a home. I love Ohio dearly. It was not a conscious choice on my part to develop an affection for my home state, but it is a choice to make space for that affection inside of me, and to voice it to others. I do not wish to, nor do I claim to, speak for or represent Ohioans at large. I simply write this piece as a rural Ohioan who thinks that Ohio can be a pretty wonderful place. I want to encourage careful consideration of one’s attitudes toward the state and toward rural areas in general. If undertaken thoughtfully and genuinely, such consideration can be fruitful in helping root out subconscious classism and elitism. It’s worth making a home in Ohio, whether you’ll be here for four years or a lifetime. And it costs nothing to respect those who have.

Ponzi-tively Outrageous

Lydia Rommel Contributor

I am grateful to be at Oberlin. But sometimes I can’t help but think of a man named Charles Ponzi, and how gleefully he would have grinned at the blind mouse students of the modern liberal arts college. A Ponzi Scheme is a form of fraud in which new investors are promised a high return at little risk, and their money is used to pay previous investors. Often, investors won’t withdraw their money for a long time, and the mastermind lies about profts being made. It functions only when there is consistent input of new investors, and if everybody believes they are getting the high returns they were sold on. I now have almost a year of college under my belt, and my cynical side has begun to see parallels between the Ponzi scheme and the American liberal arts education.

More and more, high school graduates feel that a university education is compulsory, buying into the idea of a great reward. The ‘investors’ buying into the scheme here are students, and the college system can only continue to function because of the constant infux of their money. And though it is an Oberlin student’s worst nightmare to support the capitalist chains which restrict our society from a co-operative socialist freedom (...or something), we are surprisingly complicit in the scheme.

Most of my classmates who aren’t in STEM have no idea what they’re majoring in. Unfortunately, that’s what happens when a degree is worth more than an education—you show up because it’s expected of you. A 2017 Harvard study found that between 2007 and 2010, the percentage of nationwide job listings requiring a degree rose by 10%. Nine out of ten jobs that required a degree did not difer in duties or responsibilities from jobs that didn’t require a degree. This is not because jobs became more diffcult, but because employers began to overvalue credentials. Oberlin students adopted that same perspective when choosing colleges: didn’t we end up here partly because of the reputation, the aesthetics, the image that an Oberlin degree calls to mind? This echoes the poor investor’s entry into a Ponzi Scheme: pursuing greater rewards, often superfcially or image-driven, ignoring the risks (such as 6 fgures of student debt) to attain it.

To temper my previous criticism, I’d like to acknowledge that we are obviously learning here at Oberlin. And our personal goals may be just that, to edu-

cate and better ourselves. But simply because we are American college students, our individual goals will not change the fact that our tuition money and our presence here supports the capitalist employment cycle. Colleges can try to set themselves apart from it, but it’s undeniable that they aren’t just there to mold young minds, but to certify them for labor. It has always been true that information is public property, especially now with accessible internet resources, so holding a degree doesn’t automatically make you smarter or more wellinformed, it just makes you marketable.

We all buy into it, every day. But how much of our learning could be selffacilitated if we weren’t burdened by the necessity of a degree? Most of us lack the drive and discipline to teach ourselves, and that’s not necessarily our fault. The job market in the United States is such that we aren’t taught to value learning, but position and progress. What does my true learning matter if I have nothing to show for it? And even if a handful of people embrace a combative viewpoint, what does it matter (if they have nothing to show for it)?

Ponzi schemes typically collapse when investors realize they’re being conned, when the authorities get involved, or when the economy experiences a downturn and investors try to withdraw their contributions. College enrollment has been dropping since 2019, and has not picked back up with the return of in-person classes. The job market, which represents the general economy in our liberal arts Ponzi analogy, is also

in a highly competitive and unfriendly place. Though colleges are far from a fnancial crisis of the sort that would topple their scheme, the decrease in applicants in context of the inaccessible job market is akin to investors trying to pull out amid a sinking economy. Realistically, colleges are so deeply entrenched in the market and in donors’ pockets that the lowered applicants won’t matter. But as a member of the so-called ‘investors,’ it’s consequential to know how we afect this scheme, which does not have our best interests at heart.

If this article has left you feeling hopeless, just remember how the wicked Charles Ponzi died: after being imprisoned for decades, he sufered a heart attack, started going blind, then had a brain hemorrhage that paralyzed his left leg and arm, and fnally died with no friends at his bedside. Though macabre, it’s a nice reminder that it’s not always the mastermind who ends up on top! But since Oberlin students can’t just mysteriously cause horrible illnesses for those who run the college system, we’ll have to start with ourselves. Consider your place in this greater scheme: who are you supporting, and do all your actions correspond to your values? What are your values? Are you learning for yourself, or for someone else? Thinking critically about your position in this context, and maybe it will start to feel less hopeless.

Illustration by Julian Crosetto Layout Editor

Registration Sucks, and It’s Just Getting Worse

Ellen Efstathiou Staff Writer

Registration is always kind of a mess. You have to wake up super early and then pray your wifi works fast so you can get into all the classes you want before someone else does. This is especially true when registering for the spring semester when you’re a first year. You’re the last group to go, and there aren’t a lot of spaces left in classes by then. Last year, I had to memorize the course numbers of my classes to make sure I was fast enough to get into a class that only had four spots left when I registered. (Luckily I was fast enough! Yay for me, sorry to everybody else.)

And the registration problem is only getting worse. Oberlin keeps accepting more students and keeps losing professors.

Let’s look at a microcosm: the Creative Writing Department (because I know about the Creative Writing Department). Now, this is the only major that you have to apply to get into at Oberlin. And it is competitive, especially this year. This spring, the department got the most major applications it’s had in a long time. This is because there have been more 100 and 200 level courses for people to take to get interested in the major. However, this becomes an issue when it gets to higher levels because there simply aren’t enough professors for the amount of people that want to major.

This is obvious if you browse the classes for next year. The professor for a significant number of classes is listed as simply “Staff A&S”. This is true for several departments, not just Creative Writing, and a lot of the classes are the

lower levels. Which is no doubt discouraging for stu dents that want to get into a department. Especially if you have to deal with a waitlist. It’s a lot easier to email a specific professor about getting into a class than it is to get on the auto matic waitlist and hope that things will go well at the start of the next semester.

The intro level classes are also the ones that a lot of people will take even if they’re not plan ning on majoring in that department. This is the en tire point of a liberal arts college: that you can take classes in areas you’re in terested in without major ing in those things. So, if there’s only enough space in a department for majors to take those classes, isn’t that taking away from the entire point of Oberlin being lib eral arts? And people that want to major will be upset that there aren’t enough spaces for them to take the required classes, and people trying to get their distribution requirements are upset that there aren’t enough spaces for them. So clearly, there aren’t enough spaces for anyone at all.

So, what can we do about this?

Unfortunately, it’s not up to the students. We don’t have control over whether Oberlin is hiring professors to be tenuretrack and whether Oberlin pays its professors fairly. The fact is though, we need more professors to handle the amount of students at Oberlin. The numbers sim ply aren’t adding up. In the meantime, I guess the only thing we can do as students is continue being stressed about registration.

Illustration by Maia Hadler Art Director

300 Police Cars Donated to Oberlin to Protect Black Students from Harm

Reggie Goudeau Features Editor

Here at Oberlin, students generally believe that one person can change the world. However, they usually don’t expect the change to come from the generosity of one alum.

Preston White ‘84 (he/him), an Oberlin graduate with a B.A. in Africana Studies, has recently donated 300 police cars to the college to better support Black students on campus. He still needs to fund the training of more police to occupy these cars, but until then, all faculty members and Safety and Security Officers will have a free police cruiser.

“I’ve always felt safer whenever I saw a cop driving by my dorm back in the day,” said White. “I don’t partake in illegal substances or alcoholic beverages, and neither do my friends, so they’ve never given us a reason to be scared.”

Born in Wellington, Ohio, White comes from a family of police officers and lawyers. “My family upholds justice, but they’re not scary, at least not to crimi nals. The White legacy is not one of hate, and we only exist to protect our com munity.”

Denis Cordman (they/them), a Black fourth-year at the College, had words about the change to campus life as well. “I’m not even fucking surprised any more. I thought that this would take at least another year to happen, but Oberlin is famous for innovating in all of the wrong ways,” said Cordman.

“I can’t even walk to the Arb without there being at least three cruis ers parked there, and many more surrounding Tappan. I’m so par anoid that I’ve begun assuming everyone is an undercover officer.”

Although Cordman does not seem thrilled by this reality, White is more than pleased with this result. “Even without loyal officers in them, it’s so beautiful to see a place like Oberlin so pro tected. In my ideal world, every car would be a police cruiser by default, and the actual officers would have tanks,” said White.

One more individual on campus with strong feelings about this is Theresa Sharingue (she/her), a visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy who is one of many faculty members with a new police cruiser. “Honestly, I’m not too sure about this decision, but I needed a new car anyways,”

said Sharingue.

“The only major problem I have is that we didn’t get any training on using these, so sometimes I accidentally turn on the sirens when I ride past the Afrikan Heritage House on my way to class. I’m sure they feel reassured by the

Illustration by Molly Chapin Production Assistant

Quiz: Huge Friend Group or Outdoor Class?

Isabel Hardwig Bad Habits Editor

The weather is getting warmer, which means that every available lawn is overrun with massive, formless groups of people. Naturally, you might start to wonder: is that a friend group so large that it makes me insecure about my own social life, or is it just an otherwise-unrelated bunch of people continuing their education outside? It’s impossible to tell, which is why we at Bad Habits have compiled this real-time survey to guide you through the situation.

1. Can you overhear any of their conversation? What are they talking about?

a. They’re talking about this one guy that they all knew in sixth grade named “Parker Pims.” I think it’s an anthropology class.

b. I can’t tell; those who aren’t maintaining a silent, soulful eye contact seem to be mostly whispering into each other’s necks. Maybe it’s a club meeting.

c. They are discussing “the readings”--possibly some kind of secret friendship code?

2. Hmm, okay, that’s a tough one. Are they all participating in a group activity?

a. They’re making color-coordinated anklets with letter beads that spell out all 16 of their names. I think it’s an environmental sculpture class.

b. Yeah, a lot of them seem to be touching each other under the shirt. Don’t know what that’s all about!

c. Mostly they are taking notes in their notebooks, probably about how much they all love each other and how they’re going to Country Skateland after this.

3. Still so hard to tell! Are they all roughly the same age?

a. Yes, and they have the same haircut and the same piercings and the same pair of jeans, which fts all of them even though they have such diferent body types, and which they send back and forth whenever one of them needs a little magic in their life. I think it’s a computer science class.

b. Think so. I can’t really get a good look at their faces, since most of them are buried in [JOKE REDACTED].

c. One of them is much, much older than the rest, and he seems to be doing most of the talking. I want to be part of this friend group so bad I am going to die.

Answers:

being an outdoor class! It’s like a normal class, but outside, and it’s very special.

Mostly C’s: Your suspicion that these people are a massive, tight-knit friend group is unfounded; signs point to this

Mostly B’s: Common mistake! This is an orgy.

I regret to inform you that this is actually a huge friend group! Though they might act like classmates, or casual acquaintances, these people are the best friends in the world.

Mostly A’s: Though you might feel like this is an outdoor class,

4. Hey, one of them is your friend Ralph! Maybe you can ask them what’s going on here.

a. Ralph says that they don’t actually like me that much, and have been slowly distancing themselves so they can spend more time with these people, who are all best friends. I think it’s a biology class, since Ralph is a biology major.

b. Ralph seems kind of busy and also annoyed to see me. I will ask later whether they have a friendly or more professional relationship with the person currently sucking their nipple ring.

c. Ralph says that this is PHIL121: Philosophy and Morality. That’s such a cool group chat name. I hope Ralph can get me in with these people at some point.

5. Doesn’t sound like Ralph’s going to be much help. Are they all going their separate ways after 50 minutes?

a. They’ve been here for eight hours now, and they’re laughing more every minute. I think it’s a politics class.

b. It took a little less than 50 minutes before they all joined together in a singular, collective moment of ecstasy. Maybe class let out early because it’s so nice out? I love it when professors do that.

c. At about minute 47, half of them were pointedly looking at their phones, and a few people started packing up their bags so they could leave the absolute second the clock ticked over. I can’t wait until they’re all godparents to each other’s children.

Illustration by Maia Hadler Art Director

Grain Silos I Can’t Wait to Get Grain Entrapped In

Ellen Efstathiou Staff Writer

A Red One

Classic barn color for a classic case of grain entrapment.

Those Big, Metal, Connected Ones

Maybe by getting grain entrapped in one of these, I’ll be able to get to all the others..

The One I See on the Drive into Oberlin

It’s close to home, so I don’t have to travel far. Plus, have you seen it? There’s no better grain silo in the world.

The “Tiny Silo Home”

Apparently someone is turning grain si los into houses. I’m sure I’ll be able to find some grain to put back in there once I’ve bought the place.

The First Modern Silo

Built in 1873, it might be a bit harder to get grain entrapped in than these other ones because they’re cone shaped. But I have gumption.

The One in the Abandoned Field

I don’t want to bother anyone if I start screaming.

The One My Parents Told Me Not to Go Near

I’ve only got a couple more months of being a “rebellious teen” before I have to be responsible and not get grain entrapped in any grain silo I see.

One That Has Corn in It

I like corn, and I believe that I could eat my way out of the silo if there was corn in it.

The One in the First Picture Google Shows You When You Google “Grain Entrapment”

The person in that picture seems extremely calm. I want to have a calming grain entrapment experience also.

The One That Leads to a Magical World

Exciting! Like a way scarier way to get to Narnia.

That One Over There

Oh yeah. That one right there is great.

Illustration by Lydia Rommel Contributor

Stoner Update: New Study Shows

100% of Other People are Cops

Officer Hudson Kassen Contributor

Among the world’s stoner community, a lot of myths get passed around. You may be familiar with some, such as the “forever weed,” the idea that different strains will affect you differently, or when people say that eating the filter is “gross” and “doesn’t do anything.” While most of these rumors are exactly that—rumors—they still get shared from person to person and have a tendency to spread like wildfire, and most of them revolve around one subject: cops. To a stoner, cops are the only thing scarier than looking in the mirror, so a group of researchers at Oregon State University decided to look into some of these myths.

The research team aimed to settle if cops can lie about being cops if you ask them directly, if there is a definitive way to spot a cop from a distance, and to finally determine whether or not you, specifically, act like a cop. After several months of exhaustive research and comprehensive data analysis, the team was unable to settle the questions they had initially intended to study, but found out something much more sinister about the relationship between cops, smoking weed, and you.

After only a few weeks, the research group realized that they would not be able to find a definitive answer to any of their original questions; however, when compiling their data, one of the team members noticed an odd detail. Curious about the inconsistencies they had found in their work, they followed them down that rabbit hole and quickly reformulated their hypothesis. After conducting a few more rounds of testing, the team discovered something startling: everyone is a cop except for you.

While this news may come as a shock to some, the team from Oregon State is quite confident in their findings. In their words, “everyone around you is a cop, and not only are they cops, they can totally tell that you’re high right now and they’re just waiting for the right time to get you.”

Illustration by Emerald Goldbaum Contributor

Rejected Student Speaker Applications

Flip Ptarmigan

Aspiring Speechwriter

What If You Put Two Sandwiches Together Into a Double Sandwich, a Graduation Speech By Me

“Imagine that college is like a BLT, and after-college is like a grilled cheese. They’re both great on their own, but together they’re taller and have more bread.”

East High Schoo l Oberlin College Commencement

Speech

“We’ve survived so many hard things together . . . the AP Calc test . . . the time a bird flew into the cafeteria and everyone threw chairs at it . . . when Mr. Rolf’s fly was down and it was really funny but also sad. The adult world isn’t going to know what hit it!”

A Commencement Speech

by Guest Speaker Richard Fairbrass of Right Said Fred

“I’m too sexy for my love, too sexy for my love; love’s going to leave me. I’m too sexy for my shirt—too sexy for my shirt— so sexy, it hurts. And I’m…too sexy for Milan. Too sexy for Milan, New York, and Japan. And I’m too sexy for your party, too sexy for your party, no way I’m disco dancing! I’m a model… you know what I mean. And I do my little turn on the catwalk; on the catwalk, on the catwalk, yeah, I shake my little tush on the catwalk! I’m too sexy for my cat, too sexy for my cat; poor

pussy! Poor pussy cat! I’m too sexy for my love, too sexy for my love—love’s going to leave me. And I’m…too sexy for this song. Thank you.”

In Defense of the Vest: an Oral History of the Waistcoat at Oberlin College

“There’s been a lot said in the commencement speech space about the waistcoat: it’s ‘dorky,’ it’s ‘uncool,’ it’s ‘anathema to most people you meet at parties.’ But I’m here today, in front of you, the class of 2023 and your precious families, to prove the merit of the humble vest. In the following 120-minute oral history—” [gets yanked offstage with a cane]

What I Learned From My Time Here

“There were these two pigeons on the sidewalk having some kind of bird fight—awesome—and I looked away for a moment, and when I looked back, there were just a couple feathers floating on the breeze. Once you realize that birds can explode, it really opens up your worldview; I wouldn’t be the person I am today if not for that one critical juncture. A couple years later, my girlfriend said

MAY 2023 EVENT CALENDAR

Flip Ptarmigan Event Wrangler

MAY 1, 3PM - ???, Tappan SquareTruck touching endurance contest

This is that thing where like 20 people touch a truck and then progressively more of them pass out or have to leave for food, water, etc., until there is only one person left touching the truck and that person wins the truck. The Center for Student Success is gonna park a big old truck on Tappan Square at 3pm and everyone’s gonna touch it.

MAY 3, 1PM, Wilder Bowl - Politics department lemonade stand

There will be a politics department faculty lemonade stand to raise money for politics to keep happening.

MAY 4, 3AM, Philips Gym multipurpose room - Jazz

You better believe there will be jazz here.

MAY 6, 2:45PM, the Cat in the Cream - Contact Improv Comedy show

For the first time ever, the contact improv and improv comedy communities will unite to perform one show wherein everyone does improv comedy while touching each other so, so much.

MAY 9, all day, Decafe - Decafe brings back big communal pot of soup for one day only

Do you guys remember when there was a big pot of soup in Decafe and it was different every day and you could ladle out your own little cup of soup? I used to get soup and a bagel every day for lunch. I miss it.

MAY 10, 12AM, King 339 - Jazz

You better believe there will be jazz here.

MAY 12, 11AM, Rice 100A/B - Faculty cup stacking competition

Faculty across all departments will compete in a high-stakes (tenure) cup-stacking competition.

MAY 12, 8PM, King 106 - A cappella showcase for secret a cappella groups

All the a cappella groups that haven’t really made a big deal out of it in the last four years will be performing the songs that they’ve been practicing in secret.

MAY 14, 9AM, Apollo editing labJazz

You better believe there will be jazz here.

MAY 15, 1PM, North Quad - Ripley’s Believe it or Not traveling show Wow! Don’t know where we got the money for this.

MAY 17, 11PM, the ‘Sco - Economics department close-up magic show

Come see visiting economists in shiny white gloves perform such astonishing tricks as the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” and the “Money is Real, I Promise.”

MAY 18, 10:30AM, Tappan Square - OMTA 5K

Start training now for OMTA’s debut performance of “Misery Calls,” the only musical that features 600 people going on a five-kilometer run.

MAY 18, 12PM, Free Store - Jazz

You better believe there will be jazz here.

MAY 19, all day, Wilder Main - Guy in fox costume on typewriter

For my high school’s commencement week, the administration hired a guy in a fox costume who would write poems for you on a tinnnnny little typewriter, and Oberlin College is proud to announce that they’re bringing him in!

MAY 20, 8AM, South Gym - Boffin g Boffing.

MAY 20, 2:30PM, Dye Lecture Hall - Speed typing competition

If you’ve ever thought, “wow, I must be pretty fast at typing,” now’s your chance to prove it! Prizes include first-choice housing next semester and a commemorative tote.

MAY 21, 9:23PM, North 216 - Indigo Girls cover band

Hey, my friend is gonna be learning “Closer to Fine” on guitar and you should all come hang while she works it out.

MAY 22, 9AM, Grape office (Burton basement) - Jazz

You better believe there will be jazz here.

Illustration by Maia Hadler Art Director

Grape College Essentials

J. Dilla Staff Writer

This one is for all of the incoming frst-years who just committed to Oberlin. You’ll soon be inundated with lists of college “essentials” that you “need” from everyone you know— from the college to your mother to YouTubers and so forth. Closing out my frst half of college, I feel it would be somewhat apt for me to ofer you a list of my own essentials: things that I have both found useful and that no one told me to bring. I hope to share some of those things with you now.

Come March or April, a shift in the campus begins to set in the air. The bitterness of winter here makes the oncoming of spring all the much sweeter. And something you will learn about this, my sweet little prospies, is that if the sun is out, Obies will be sunbathing in Wilder Bowl.

If the sun is out and it is 38 degrees, Obies will be sunbathing in Wilder Bowl. If the sun is out and so are the yellowjackets, Obies will be sunbathing in Wilder Bowl. If the sun is out and Paul Revere rides in on horseback warning us of an oncoming British invasion, Obies won’t be able to hear him over the SZA in their earbuds as they sunbathe in Wilder Bowl.

For this, I recommend bringing an extra top sheet for all of your impromptu picnics. It’s both a practical object and a social one. It’ll be light enough to carry with you all day, and big enough to sprawl upon with others as they pause to chat on their walk from Azzies to King. And to sunbathe upon, of course.

2. Wine-bottle opener

This might be the only thing you truly need from this list. A beer bottle or stray Mike’s Hard can be opened with the proper edged surface and a little determination. The task of opening a bottle of wine without the proper tools is much trickier. Small as she might seem, I promise you do not want to be caught without her. Otherwise, you might end up on the foor of a Barrows dorm room, reading a WikiHow article about how glass expands when you heat it by a fame. Save yourself the trouble altogether and toss one of these into

your IKEA cart before you come to college.

3. A lighter

On the topic of fre—I don’t smoke, but I am jealous of the bonding moment that happens outside of a party when a smoker needs a lighter, and someone else is able to provide one. I suggest getting one and carrying it on your nights out, so you can wait for the chance to be that savior. If you’re looking for a way to make friends, this is better than keeping an extra umbrella with you on a rainy day. And if you have a really fun one (i.e. Pearl Tolliver Shaw’s lighter collection—see The Grape published 2/17/2023), you might spark a fun conversation about how you picked it up of the Appalachian trail, or are really trying to beat those arson charges from setting Barrows on fre last month.

4.

Little Tikes Wagon

I found mine in a trash pile on the side of the road, but if you’re not that lucky, storebought is fne. I’ve found it most helpful for lugging flm equipment from AV to my dorm room, but there are many uses for this little vehicle. You can also:

• Carry your friends around in it for a dramatic entrance!

• Walk it around campus on a leash and ask pedestrians if they’d like to pet your dog

• Tie soup-cans to the back of it and drive with your fellow newlywed into the sunset

• Ofer a creative daytime transportation alternative to the student shuttle for extra cash

5.

Bundt pan

In college, if you are so lucky to have friends, and if those friends have birthdays, you might fnd yourself in the position of having to bake them a cake. In this case, I recommend that you acquire a Bundt pan. Frosting and decorating an entire cake requires a whole host of tools that are just not feasible in your dorm room: piping bags and piping tips and whisks and bench scrapers and mixing bowls.

Unless you’re into the aesthetic of food looking truly awful, attempting to put together a birthday cake in a dorm kitchen is something that will only lead you to frustration. In comes the Bundt pan. The mighty little Bundt pan takes care of all of that decorating for you. You just take your cake out of the oven and it’s already beautiful and ready to go.

(It can also be used as a mold for a large, adventurous jello shot.)

6. Ear plugs

You can’t always control who’s DJing, but you can control the volume level.

7. Socks, Clothes for the Winter in General

This one is still a work in progress for me. I am fortunate enough to have originated from the glorious negro-heaven that is Atlanta, Georgia, and to have never truly known winter before I came to Oberlin. Coming here, my suitcases were packed with only sundresses and a single winter coat rated for the arctic tundra that my mom bought me a month before move-in. And nothing else in between.

This, I’m learning, was not sufcient. There are a whole host of winter accessories (hats, gloves, scarves, SOCKS) that I barely knew existed, let alone how to wear and layer them on my body—almost two years later and I still don’t know. So, I can’t give much advice about what winter clothing to bring, but I can say that you will need it. Here are some suggestions, judging by what I see people wearing on campus:

• Random scraps of fabric that can be tied around your head, making your face look like a bread basket.

• A colorful vintage-looking, but surprisingly warm winter coat.

• A leather coat with a cheeky embroidered design on the back.

• Fingerless gloves, for some reason.

• Ill-ftting sweaters that were presumably stolen of of a grandparent’s still-warm body.

• Uniqlo socks.

I hope this all helps!

Director

1. An extra top sheet

Illustration by Maia Hadler Art

Grape Yearbook 2023

Yeah, we got bored at this point and stopped working on it. Have a great summer!

Signatures:

Across

1. Faucet water

4. Rental contract

9. At an unspecifed time, in text speak

12. Zilch

13. Collection of songs or pictures

14. First-person plural past of “be”

16. Glowing red sign

17. A quiet stretch at the plate

18. Uptight

19. Immediately after doing or saying something

21. Frank and Joe, the detective brothers

23. Drake’s running partners

24. A Hallmark birthday ofering

25. Belonging to a lady

28. Benny Blanco song with Khalid and Halsey

32. Complies with instructions

33. Eloise’s European vacation spot

34. A horse’s mouthpiece

35. Soaks in water to soften

36. Despises

37. Netted material

38. Acronym for stock exchange in Shanghai

39. Web pages

40. Calmness, harmony

41. Type of turtle

43. Attractive or exciting quality

44. Additionally

45. Close podmates

46. Aladdin’s tapestry

49. Middle Ages-era measurement for precious metals

53. Actively dealing with a problem

54. Misplay

56. Network of blood vessels or nerve cells

57. Unmixed and unmastered

58. Feeling bitter regret, particularly about a specifc day

59. Mexican slang for friends

60. Antonym to 40 Across

61. Drake’s free ofering

62. Amused, but not Laughing Out Loud

Down

1. Uber’s New Yorker relative

2. Dot in Morse code

3. Passages, sometimes unpaved

4. Mascara locations

5. Rihanna repeated phrases

6. An objection or condition

7. Greater than the __ of its parts

8. Stress of a topic

9. EGOT winner accolades

10. Ship

11. Thank God!

12. Fresh

15. Chicago trains

20. A very large amount

22. Oberlin College of ___ and Sciences

24. Feels concern

25. The most unpleasant possible outcome

26. Trait of over 40% of American adults

27. Parking pay station

28. Already consumed

29. Iron or steel shaped like a letter

30. 70s dance music

31. Classic Nas diss track

33. Paved outdoor area

36. Williamsburg, Brooklyn epidemic

37. Units in 4/4

39. Clearance rack boast

40. Drama onstage

42. Toronto basketball player

43. Culture Club Boy

45. Leap in the air with an arched back when threatened

46. Northwest Atlantic fsh

47. To start over; to begin ___

48. Ottavina ___; a stanza of eight lines of heroic verse

49. Three musicians

50. A bird’s wooded home

51. Individual unit

52. Weekly UK publication aimed at educators

55. Captain Morgan’s life’s work

Clues by Max Miller Staff Writer