Issue 6 Spring 2022

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Vol. 69 NO. 6

OBERLIN’S ALTERNATIVE STUDENT NEWSPAPER

ISSUE 6 COVER ART Front Cover: Levi Dayan Back Cover: Emma Kang

Priya Banerjee and Levi Dayan Co-Editors-in-Chief Izzy Halloran Managing Editor Wyatt Camery Features Editor Liza MacKeen Shapiro Opinions Editor

Letter from the Editor Priya Banerjee Editor-in-Chief

Hello everyone! It’s me, Priya, one of your Editorsin-chief. What you are holding in your hands is our very last normal issue of the year. Boy oh boy!

Time really flies when you’re having fun! What a whirlwind it’s been running the Grape this year.

For one thing, Levi and I ran this whole thing for three semesters instead of the standard two. We’ve got more issues under our belt than anyone ever, and that’s pretty special. It’s been a pleasure and an honor and I’m so sad to be leaving you all behind. But don’t worry, I’m not done yet. We’ve got one more Commencement issue coming out on June 3rd.

It will be extra special and extra different from our normal stuff, so keep your eyes peeled. I’ll say goodbye for real in that one.

Love you, Priya Art by Eva Sturm-Gross

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Saffron Forsberg Arts and Culture Editor

Anna Harberger Layout Editor

Juli Freedman Bad Habits Editor

Eva Sturm-Gross Art Director

Fionna Farrell, Teagan Hughes, Anna Holshouser-Belden, Raghav Raj, Emma Kang Staff Writers

EST. 1999 May 20, 2022

What

are

Wyatt Camery

Features Editor

Obies

listening

Richie Kausche Contributor

Art by Eva Sturm-Gross I’m Nowhere and You’re Everything - Chris Thile 7th house - Saȃda Bonaire Old Home Place - The Dillards Ring of Fire - Ray Charles Goodbye Earl - The Chicks Fact 2 - Poison Girl Friend Happiness is a Butterfly - Lana Del Rey The Flag is Raised - Bladee & Ecco2k jazz/lofi hip hop radio chill beats to relax/study to Weekend - Earth and Fire Midnight Train to Georgia - Gladys Knight & the Pips Just Another Case - Cru Mystery Lady - Don Toliver, Masego To Each His Own - Patrice Rushen Green Light - John Legend Alone Together - Billy Uomo Honeybody - Kishi Bashi Gone Down the River - Fletcher Johnson Anna Sun - Walk the Moon Here For a Good Time - George Strait Scared Money - YG Best Friend - 50 Cent Yah / Element (Medley) - Joy Crookes Birds and the Bees - Schoolboy Q

When Richie approached me a few months ago to recreate one of those “What Are You Listening To?” videos, I knew I had stumbled across a genius. After weeks of me and Richie seeing each other and saying, “should we do it this week?” or “this week looks kinda busy for me, let’s hold off,” we finally got it done on Thursday, May 12. It was a glorious day, with the sun beating down, illuminating the AirPods in our peers’ ears, which our eyes were fixed on. I’ll admit, not everyone was listening to music so we had to ask for recent favorites, but we tried to collect as much live data from the field as possible. I had a wonderful time interrupting my peers’ days and disarming them with the not-tooinvasive question of “what are you listening to?” - I felt not only connected to everyone on campus but also to humanity at large.

Below is a list of what we found in three different locations, Wilder Bowl (and around Wilder), Tappan Square, and the Conservatory (the lounge and Bibbins).

Wilder Bowl Monte Carlo - Remi Wolf Old College Try - Mountain Goats Threatening Each Other re: Capitalism - illuminati hotties The Nutcracker - Tchaikovsky Feel No Waste - Drake Common Language- Madison Cunningham How to Be a Heartbreaker - Marina and the Diamonds Flashing Lights - Kanye West Man on Fire - Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros Tití Me Preguntó - Bad Bunny Gloria - Laura Branigan Waiting on Words - The Black Keys Alison - Elvis Costello A Tareeq - Ghazall “saw tooth wave being amplitude modulated by a sine wave” Star Witness - Neko Case Sleep - Ivor Gurney Take Five - Dave Brubeck More Than a Feeling - Boston Paradise By the Dashboard Light - Meatloaf Illow the sun - the olllan

to??

Purple Haze - the Jimi Hendrix Experience Mrs. Officer - Lil Wayne Guilty Pleasure - Bryce Vine Last Supper - Upsahl Accordion - Abstract Orchestra Bound 2 - Kanye I’ve Never Been in Love Before - Gary Bartz But Not For Me - Ella Fitzgerald Soldier, Poet, King - The Oh Hellos Sitting By the Riverside - The Kinks Shed - Title Fight Brush Your Teeth - Raffi Wagon Wheel - Old Crow Medicine Show Farewell, Angelina - Joan Baez Idontwannabeyouanymore - Billie Eilish (Coffee’s For Closers) - Fall Out Boy Shifts and Tides - OneRepublic I Got a Shot - Jack Harlow Chuper Amigos - Jenni Rivera

The Con Morbid Stuff - PUP Violin Sonata (on Cello) - César Franck Diabelli Variations - Ludwig van Beethoven At Kocheri Gate - David Kanaga Mistake - Daniel Tiger Distance - Emily King Read Between the Lines - Mapache A Cruel Angel’s Thesis - Yoko Takahasi Love Shot - Exo Tappan Square Steampipe Coffee - Circus No. 9 Luchini AKA This Is It - Camp Lo Ego Trip - Nikki Giovanni The Heart Part 5 - Kendrick Lamar Good Memories - Lucki La Isla Bonita - Madonna Didn’t Cha Know - Erykah Badu Newjack - Justice Something to Someone - Dermot Kennedy

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Oberlin’s Overwhelming Financial Incompetence Reggie Goudeau Staff Writer

I’m more than sick of writing about pay issues I’ve experienced and gradually losing faith in things changing for lowincome, first-gen students at Oberlin. I used to enjoy most of my jobs and contributed to on-campus events and resources, even when things went wrong. Sadly, this institution’s repeated pattern of making my obligations outside of class harder by not paying me on time has sucked the life out of me.

Many activities, positions, and organizations I used to participate in and manage now either drain me, or take too much time out of my limited schedule.

While I’ve had many trying semesters here at Oberlin, these past two have to be the most difficult. I’ve had five jobs during this semester, and many of them have not been the most prompt with paying me.

The worst part about this is that these past two semesters are far from the first time this school has made making a living impossible. I often go between the Offices of Financial Aid and Student Accounts for an hour or so once every semester.

They rarely help me much besides putting me on an unhelpful payment plan.

Once, they managed to find an extra scholarship or grant, which decreased my estimated contribution by a fair amount. Besides that one notable positive moment, I don’t have much good to say about these supposed resources.

I also have to remind each party that I’m a Questbridge student every year, which means that I should have no student loans after college if I work off my debt at whatever college I

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matched to (in this case, Oberlin). There are only four Questbridge students at Oberlin in my class year, and some aren’t even finishing their academic careers here. While many problematic factors at Oberlin harm low-income, first-gen students like me, the lack of care with our financial situations here is one of the most demoralizing.

Only having these issues would be bad enough, but my experiences with many jobs here have somehow been worse. My job problems began during my last semester working for America Counts. Despite what would later occur, I still enjoyed the majority of my time with the program. When I worked at Langston Middle School, I almost always looked forward to walking down there and helping my class. They even liked my Soundcloud music, man.

Anyways, during this time, I was in school during the summer semester and assisting the program with assembling packets to distribute to locations like the Oberlin Public Library.

This job was my only Bonner service site, and since this group was relatively new, we did not have many things to do initially.

For context, I’m able to work a select few jobs that pay me both per hour through the Community Based Work Study Program (CBWSP) and allow me to receive hours as a Bonner scholar. These hours then go towards Bonner stipends worth $250 each, and Bonners can earn up to three of these a semester. I went on to have a meeting with Susan Pavlus, my boss at America Counts concerning my lack of hours. I did this weeks before the deadline to get my last

stipend. While the available hours to work gradually improved, I was still short by about 15 hours of receiving my final Bonner stipend in the last month of school that semester.

In these final weeks, one of my last tasks for work was to attend a two-hour final reflection with the other tutors on zoom.

Unfortunately, I had class during the two times this was held, and Susan never responded to my emails asking when I could make them up. While those two hours may not have gotten me all the way to that stipend, I still would have appreciated the opportunity to earn them.

During the spring semester of 2021, I began working at Oberlin Community Services (OCS), and worked from October until December of that year. Once again, I did not mind the work here and got along with the staff.

Still, a miscommunication with the site’s coordinator Rosa Gadsden went on to make my time working here that semester unnecessarily stressful. I asked to get credit for working CBWPS and Bonner hours.

Sadly, my supervisor only signed me up to be a Bonner, and I found this out two weeks into the semester after randomly asking when I’d be paid.

It was too late to find a new Bonner service site that could pro-

vide equivalent hours, so I had no choice but to tough this out. I worked a total of 41.5 hours during that time, and I would have received $415 in my actual bank account had this mistake not occurred. In all fairness, Brandi McVety had a meeting with me concerning this issue, and helped me take steps to withdraw a $400 loan that Bonner will pay back if I complete all of the program’s requirements until my senior year (they’ll pay back up to $2000). Said loan helped me manage tuition during that semester, and I might not have gotten all of it paid off without the assistance. She also helped me get another extra service site at INTO the Hope Collection that paid me for CBWSP and Bonner hours. Still, this entire situation was one of many instances where someone else’s mistake placed a great inconvenience upon me for no reason. I’m getting paid for my hours there as of this semester, and enjoying my time there far more as a result.

During this semester on March 24th, I checked my direct deposit notification and calculated my hours to see that my job forgot to pay me for my time as a Speaking Associate. I was missing out on $50-60 because of this mistake. My boss Laurie McMillin initially thought I was incorrect, but did fix the issue the next day once she confirmed something was wrong on her end. On April 22nd, another mistake from my superiors led to my check getting delayed once again.

Apparently, they forgot to put my name on the list of Writing Associates getting paid biweekly on April 11th. My boss made an emergency appeal to get me paid early, but still, I’m so sick of being forgotten by everyone here. To put the icing on this cake of sewage, Brittnei Sherrod at the Bonner Center forgot to request my $250 Bonner stipend this same Friday, and I received this the following week too. I thought my article about not getting paid for months while working on

the Review’s Special Issue made this clear, but getting my money on time is a huge priority. If I need to keep writing and shouting for this place to do better, I’m more than willing to do so by this point (even if I’m sick of it).

Things are looking slightly better as of now ever since I’ve gotten put on to the few Oberlin resources built to fix matters like these. I recently had a meeting with Dean Harmony Cross and relayed as much of this information to her as I could. While she did admit there’s no guarantee she can fix this, I simply appreciate the fact she’s planning to advocate to the Office of Financial Aid for me. If nothing else, It’s nice to know that some people recognize working five jobs and getting paid occasionally is not okay or normal. If you’d like to help with my wellbeing paying for tuition and other miscellaneous expenses here, my cash app is $ReggieTheG, and my Venmo is @ReginaldGoudeau.

Art by Martina Taylor

The Oberlin Doula Collective Mobilizes for Reproductive Rights Teagan Hughes Staff Writer

On May 2nd, POLITICO published a leaked draft of the majority opinion in Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. If the draft opinion were issued as is, it would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark SCOTUS decision that has ensured abortion access in the United States for forty-nine years. In response to this leaked draft, a number of student organizations on Oberlin’s campus have begun mobilizing for reproductive rights.

One of the student groups organizing in response to the leaked opinion draft is the Oberlin Doula Collective, Oberlin-based organization of abortion doulas. A doula is defined by ODC’s website as “a non-medical reproductive support companion who provides emotional, physical, and informational support to people who are experiencing pregnancy or an outcome of pregnancy.” There are different kinds of doulas that assist in all aspects of reproductive health; ODC is specifically made up of abortion doulas. According to their website, an abortion doula “keeps people company before, during, and after their abortion procedures, and helps improve patient comfort and self-advocacy by providing basic pain-management techniques, breathing techniques, imagery, and/or comforting conversation.” The Oberlin Doula Collective underscores the importance of non-medical emotional support for pregnant people. “I feel like in our American medical system, sometimes the emotional aspect of things can be…fallen by the wayside by medical professionals,” said Bella, a member of ODC’s leadership circle. “The work that medical professionals provide is essential, especially in this realm of things, but there’s obviously so much stigma attached to receiving an abortion…and the stigma attached to it causes not everyone to have a proper support system, and so as people, we can’t separate the medical from the personal.”

Currently, ODC offers virtual support in the form of a hotline that operates via phone call and text. ODC also offers educational workshops on reproductive justice, as well as trainings in which the participants can become abortion doulas themselves.

Bella indicated that, although ODC has long been anticipating this outcome, the recently leaked opinion draft increases the urgency of their work. “I mean, we have a clinic partner in Cleveland [Preterm Clinic], and they have planned for this for some time now,” said Bella. “It’s tragically not unexpected, and so they’re expecting an influx of patients coming in in these next few months.” This urgency compounds the already existing difficulty of mobilizing for reproductive rights in the current political climate. “We are a community organization and not a school club,” Bella said, “and so we definitely want to and seek to do outreach in the local community, but it is difficult around an act that is so politicized, and stigmatized, and weaponized against people.”

In planning their upcoming events, including several trainings and a fundraiser, Bella emphasized that ODC seeks to center the voices of people of color and working-class people, “especially as reproductive justice was founded by Black women in the late 1990s.”

For more information on the reproductive justice framework, Bella recommended the activist collective SisterSong, found online at www.sistersong.net. “As is the case, people of color and poor people are going to be the people that are going to be the most affected by a ban like this,” Bella said, “so we seek to have our services benefit all people, and not just people who have privilege.”

Bella noted that, while threats to reproductive access often spur discussion of voting and political advocacy, grassroots community support is another crucial piece of the puzzle. “I think that it is important for those groups to work hand-in-hand, and I also think that the support that we provide is unique, and it is not what people most think of, and it is not the most widespread,” Bella said. “Even if it’s going to be, ‘abortion’s illegal in Ohio,’ like I said before, it’s legal other places and it’s gonna still happen, and so I think people who have the training and ability and knowledge to support people in abortions is so, so important. But I also obviously wish that it wasn’t—that that support work could be more readily available to people regardless of legality.”

The Oberlin Doula Collective has planned a number of immediate next steps in the form of several trainings and a fundraiser. On May 21st and 22nd, ODC will offer abortion doula trainings in Wilder 101 from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Additionally, there will be a fundraiser on Tuesday, May 24th featuring performances by a number of local musicians as well as an art raffle to raise money for abortion funds. For those interested in participating in doula training or donating artwork or performances to the fundraiser, ODC can be reached via phone at (440) 253-9477, via email at oberlindoulacollective@ gmail.com, or via Instagram @oberlindoulacollective.

an interview with

ROSS KARRE

Orson Abram Contributor

Ross Karre is a percussionist, artist, and creative director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. He was recently hired as the Associate Professor of Percussion at the Conservatory. Karre graduated from Oberlin in 2005. I sat down with Karre to discuss his new position and return to Oberlin!

OA: I’m really excited to be interviewing you! First off, I want to start off with a simple question; what are you excited about when returning back to Oberlin? What are you expecting in terms of the campus energy and being a professor at the school where you were a student? I assume it must be somewhat uncanny.

RK: I don’t think that the experience will be noticeably uncanny for me, because I have been back a few times, and so much time has elapsed. I’ve had so many experiences since then, artistically, and what I discovered there was a specific type of creative approach to music and I am really grateful for that. Oberlin was quite formative, especially a few specific projects and experiences in 2004 and 2003.

But, so much has happened since then that I don’t feel like remotely the same person, so the uncanniness is going to be pretty muted on that level. Instead, what I’m most excited to return to is a creative ‘buzz’ of the Oberlin environment and to support that creative impulse that’s a pervasive part of the DNA of Oberlin. That’s what I’m most excited about and how it fits into my own interests.

You also asked about the difference between my current lifestyle/career and the next one… my day-to-day now is producing concerts and playing in them, and I also have a big teaching component to my life but it’s part-time. It’s part-time at the New School and part-time at the State University of New York in New Paltz and that’s a little more classroom-oriented, with a little bit of applied

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Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre R studies and private studio work. I love that and I didn’t know that I loved that until I started teaching at those places) . I think one of the most exciting places to be is a sandbox of creativity where there are these occasional peaks and valleys of intensity, where it feels like a professional environment and there’s a lot at stake, like one’s junior or senior recital or a big orchestra concert, big CME (Contemporary Music Ensemble) concert, big OPG (Oberlin Percussion Group) concert with a world premiere; all those things aren’t different from performing them professionally. But, in between, there’s so much, so many new experiences that everyone’s having at all times that it feels like an almost utopian creative workspace. I have been in lots and lots of creative projects, since graduating, of course, and it’s hard to match the vitality, joy, spirit, and curiosity that one can experience at Oberlin, so my goal is just to make sure that that’s primed at all times with as much energy as I can offer. I guess I’m curious if you feel that the place still has that quality to it, or if it’s regaining that as people come back in person. I’ll find out when I get there and join that spirit and community of creative people.

OA: Yeah! It definitely feels that now, with junior recitals and senior recitals people can go to- The whole aspect of the physicality of performance is being reignited. Classes in the TIMARA department, for example, are having in-person concerts, and all of this type of energy is coming back. The spirit feels different now regarding that, and I’ve had those experiences you discussed and they have been life-changing already.

I think, in a lot of ways, Oberlin still has that creative vitality that you were talking about.

RK: It’s really great to hear that! The memories that I have are of circumstances where people came together with no specific plan or even a repertoire choice, but just the desire to do something, and then the conversation about what to do, why to do it, and how to do it was pretty new for everybody. But those are also things (the What, Why, and How) that I do all the time, and I really find a lot of joy in, and so I think, just joining those conversations, asking questions, and being helpful and supportive in those projects is what my main approach will be to start and then we’ll go from there.

OA: That’s so enlightening and obviously inspiring to hear! I’m very interested in the technological shifts between 2004/2005 and now- technology has completely changed, but in a lot of ways, contemporary music has not stopped being cutting edge. I know you do a lot of work with electronics, so I’m curious: How are you going to do that in a conservatory percussion performance manner; teaching students to work with technology in a different/a more creative way than what they’re used to. I’m curious if you can expand upon your approach for that.

RK: I think of myself as just joining an already expert and creative crew of faculty and students who are focused on digital literacy. I don’t want to be cynical about it, but it’s a bit of a liability if one isn’t digitally literate. In addition, now more than ever there’s a

viability to the DIY model. So one’s digital literacy is essentially just an extension of their acoustic literacy now. Before, if there was an OPG concert with a fixed media part, Davidovsky or something, then we would bring in the experts to manage that. We’re (you’re) going to be the experts. That’s a really, really important aspect of the DIY model. The DIY (stands for do it yourself gets stereotyped as being under-resourced or inexpert, but actually it’s not quite true. The DIY can also be a choice, and it can be an artistic craft in and of itself, which is that one only does artistically what they can manage within their economy of means within what they know how to do. So my goal is to make sure that the know-how-to-do umbrella is as broad as possible and obviously includes digital work, (but it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone needs to know how to program a really professional sound console, how to program a lightning console, how to do things that tend to be more of an expert thing), But just to understand what those tools are capable of doing, and then have your own little DIY kit that is in your command that’s just an extension of your professional craft. It’s not lost on me that the pandemic and everybody hooking in from their dorm rooms and home studios has already offered a lot of savvy and literacy in this space, so now it’s just a question of “okay now disconnect it from the zoom now connect it to something else” and what do you want it to sound like between those connections? How do you want this to enhance or alter your voice as an artist? And so as you can tell I’m not approaching it from like a “you need to know how to do this in order to be an artist”, but rather, “this is the tool that can expand your voice. Check it out-let’s see what you think of it”.

OA: That’s fascinating to think about from the perspective of the pandemic really being a time and place for that to emerge in especially with performers. I’m also very curious about coming to an institution that had both liberal arts and a conservatory- you were only a conservatory major officially, but you very much associated with the cinema studies department. I’m curious about your experience with that and if that was the place that began your knowledge of and love for technology and the need for technological literacy- was it like using that film equipment that really sparked that?

What was it for you that really created that relationship to technology?

RK: So I started understanding the need for being aware of digital technology, not as a craft, for which you need a separate collaborator, that’s sometimes the case- but also understanding the same way- I don’t know how to play the cello, but I also understand like some of the mechanics of the cello so that, if I have a conversation with a cellist, I’m not harmful to the collaborative conversation. So that’s just an awareness thing. My first experience was playing, this is just kind of lucky in a way but, there was a piece that I played in my senior year of high school for timpani and tape and I didn’t know that there was the person who should plug all the cables into the speaker. I just did it myself.I remembered from marching band days that you could plug in a microphone to the speaker and

then make the metronome sound on the football field.

Those were the initial experiences and then we got to have really random Winter term projects, in particular with a pianist and musicologist named Michael Gallope, who was a really important figure in organizing projects at Oberlin while I was there. He asked if we would play this piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen called “Kontakte”. I didn’t know this from that, you know, in terms of electronics or the history of Stockhausen’s music or the history of that piece, and Christoph Caskel’s percussion legacy and any of that stuff.

Instead, I just thought it was a piece and started learning it and, of course, Michael Rosen (Oberlin Percussion Professor from 1972 to 2021) knew a lot about it and helped me understand how important that piece is with the cycle of works that accompany it from the late 1950s. I learned about spatialized audio, and why we will need to reinforce the sound setups and mix it and blend it and started to get the itch for what an enhanced ,enhanced version of percussion could be.. I’ve always had an also an appreciation for that era of electroacoustic music and specifically Pauline Oliveros’s contribution to that in the early 60s with her piece for David Tudor called “AppleBox Double” (solo percussion and contact microphones) and the gap between those two experiences (2003 when I played “Kontakte” with Michael Gallope and then recording the “Applebox Double” is just kind of a book ends of electronics as just another part of the percussion craft.

And there’s tons of instrumentalists who aren’t professionals who consider electronics as a part of their worlds in that same way; not only people using pedals and looping and things like that, but just that their sound actually doesn’t exist acoustically, it only exists by way of modification through digital or analog electronic means; and I think that that.helps to reinforce the fact that this is not a separated craft all the time that’s handled by sound engineer experts, but it can be DIY and that can be very creatively liberating.

OA: When you graduated from Oberlin and UCSD, I’m curious how you began to adapt to the New York lifestyle of hustle and bustle and, as you say DIY, and i’m very curious about translating your art into that type of setting and what you are specifically good at, and almost on a way, transitioning back when you begin this job at Oberlin. I’m curious about your process with that, but also what you think/you maybe hope that process will be when you come back here.

RK: Thanks for that question. So in 2008 when the economy crashed the previous time (before the pandemic crash), there was a low in hiring and so I was on an academic track and it didn’t work out because a lot of those jobs were frozen and instead I just decided to stay in school and finish an MFA in film. That reinforced a certain kind of attention to just being available as an artist; to be in service of projects. I realized I was always going to be the projection designer for this production or the percussionist for this production, rarely doing anything with solo artistry. That’s true. I also only have one album that I’ve released of solo pieces.

Most of my work has been collaborative and supportive. I think that that’s also going to be my approach

Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre R 6

Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre at Oberlin; if students say “hey can I do this thing”, I want to just be the person to support, ask the right questions, and say. “this is how it could be done or it was done at this kind of venue and blah blah blah”,the very practical kind of how-to aspect of it. But also I’m interested in asking why- what’s driving this artist and really getting to the core of that, because the other line of my work is always about that: curatorially, fundraising, writing grants, you have to constantly be asking the why and being able to distill that in a clear way.

So when I moved from San Diego after the MFA to New York, it was with the idea that I’ll just be available to everybody, for whatever (mostly percussion), so I played 80 concerts a year with International Contemporary Ensemble with the last 11 years basically until the pandemic. And I also started to film concerts and started a little company to do that, and that was my lifestyle for all those years. Gradually, the other layer of curation and administration and creative producing (and then finally teaching) added into it.

So that’s a little sequence of what happened and the way that manifests at Oberlin is a distillation of all those experiences into a kind of resource; available to everyone. So yeah, I’ve had a lot of conversations with Peter Swendsen (Current Oberlin Conservatory Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs & Professor of TIMARA) about that and I’ve had a lot of conversations with Tim Weiss (Conductor of Oberlin’s Contemporary Music Ensemble and Sinfonietta) and the leadership just about the practical considerations, but never leaving the fact that what I think Oberlin does well is make very creative and empathic people; people who know how to join a collaboration compassionately, bring absolutely all of their creativity, but not a lot of ego, and yeah I’m gonna keep that model alive, if possible.

OA: Well, thank you! I’m branching off of you discussing your film company/your film work and I’m curious about how your experience in the Cinema studies department has shaped you as a musician and whether, when you come here, are you going to collaborate with that department as well? What’s your philosophy regarding the collaboration of film and percussion as we know it and art (studio art, video art, etc.)?

RK: I have a lot of dreams about it, what it can be, but i’m coming in a little bit patient with just getting the lay of the land and understanding what’s possible. The good thing is that Rian Brown-Orso (Cinema Studies Professor) and I are really close friends and we’ve done a lot of collaborations. So we’ve talked already- just fun ideas and stuff. My main goal is to make sure that this Percussion studio feels like the right place for all of the people in it, that’s my main goal. So I’m going to come in more just listening and understanding what people’s goals are, and how I can understand what goals are related to what I know to be some expectations after you graduate, either for graduate school, for professional freelancing, or being a large ensemble and that’s my priority. I think, in order to achieve that priority, I have to also create a lot of opportunities for collaboration between the Percussion area and Cinema studies, or the percussion area and visual art, dance, theatre, TIMARA, and that’s absolutely desired. So I just want

to figure out what is possible- Tom Lopez (TIMARA professor) and Peter and I are already talking about activating the Wurtzel with some percussion activity, or maybe like annual recurring conversations between TIMARA and percussion. Those are just barelybubbling-to-the-surface conversations, but my focus is really on the 12 to 15 of you all as percussionists in the studio, and growing that studio, not necessarily in size, but in the world’s awareness for what the studio is and how awesome an environment it is and what it can be. And by listening to each of you, and checking the temperature/getting the pulse of what your goals are, that will ultimately shape what the department feels like, more so than any of the other top down curricular concepts that I’ll be bringing to the table. But, there are some curricular concepts that I’m excited about, but they aren’t going to be surprising. Being good at percussion, and I mean that, from a boring technicalchops perspective to an awareness of its history, lineages etc. is critical, and I’m definitely prioritizing that.Supplementing that, when you look at the lineage of the history, you see tons and tons of collaborative history between percussionists and non-percussionists, and I am interested in thinking about expanding the history and lineage that was talked about for many years at Oberlin, from the early 20th century orchestral percussionists and think “okay well, what starts with Christoph Caskel, Sylvio Gualda, Robin Schulkowsky and Steve Schick and that group of people and where else was that happening in the world” and let’s chart that and understand it, and then allow that to define a lot of the motivations of what we’re doing so that it’s never inattentive to history-that’s not a goal at all , but truly understanding the context in which that work was made and wondering aloud, “maybe that context is relevant now, because we can do it differently”. It’s not about that kind of star-power cult of identity, it’s more just about “what were those artistic contexts?

What are they now? How do they inform each other?” and that awareness will actually create new generative ideas. At the core of everything that I’m interested in is creating new things, whether that’s a new way to approach “Scheherazade” or a new way to approach crash cymbals. We as percussionists actually have a responsibility to that. We aren’t regurgitating anything. We are a generative craft so we’ll keep that going and that’s really exciting for me.

OA: Great! Thank you, I think we’re wrapping up now, so as a very different question than what we’ve been discussing, I’m curious, what’s inspiring you right now? Are you being inspired by any visual art, music, films, etc, and if so, share, please.

RK: Thanks for that question, wow! So many things.

I’m really inspired by the fact that New York City and it’s contemporary music scene is back in a major way.

There’s a lot of great things happening right now.

We just finished a project of Du Yun’s opera (Oberlin Alum!) with the lead singer of Deerhoof, Satomi as the lead cast member… fantastic. So that was really a great experience. The artist Autumn Knight is a really close collaborator now, and we’ve done several projects and they are by far the most engaging (socially, politically,

artistically, technologically) that I’ve done, so definitely if you’re writing in the Grape, plug for Autumn Knight, an incredible artist. The other things that are exciting to me is a completely different approach to to the ethics of gathering and collaboration that is inspired by the last three years of struggle,challenge, Reformation, and reparations, and I feel like people have a much deeper ,more honest awareness, for themselves-self awareness- and how that is manifesting in their artistic expressions or through some collaborations. It’s a really cool environment to work in right now, so I hope that’s true and Oberlin, and if not I’ll do my best to support that.

OA: Great! Another question just popped up in my mind right now- What do you do outside percussion?

I know that’s a very kind of typical question, but i’m also curious whether your very meticulous and detailed philosophy of your own artistry etc., permeates in the other things of what you do like such as this film company, you were talking about etc.?

RK: It definitely does. The common principles are really related to a service-based approach to art. Like I said, I’m not initiating a lot of new projects, but I facilitate a lot of new artistic projects and bring a lot of creativity to that whenever that’s desired. I think the generosity of creativity- not overstaying my welcome in a space or being too too loud in a space of collaboration- but just being available to it and really attentive, responsive, is really true in my percussion playing, but it’s impossible for it not to be true in the video part of what I do. Sometimes I also feel like video is still new or sometimes I feel like less of an expert, because I am less of an expert of video than percussion. So I feel more, (I don’t know what the word would be for like playful or childish or some sort of immature version of a craft) compared to the thing I’ve been doing for over 30 years. That’s an interesting discussion, too, I think in terms of the differences, but otherwise, everyday, my Google calendar is just like this this this this this this this, sometimes it’s videos, some days it’s conversations like this, sometimes percussion and each day has that kind of mesh and I’m the same creative person in each of those. I just change the language, like I talk about a Mike Balter Rattan Handles in one and an SDI cable in another, and I joke with that with my colleagues, but it’s not that different for them.

Levy Lorenzo, Nathan Davis, several of my colleagues are constantly jumping between different expertise or creative spaces and you kind of switch language, but the core of a generous service-based approach to work is always there.

OA: Well, I think it’s 5:30! Thank you so much for spending your time with me. I hope you got as much out of this as I did; this was really enlightening and thank you!

RK: Of course! Yeah, happy to chat and I look forward to working together in August.

OA: Very soon! Thanks!

Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre Ross Karre 7

“ I J u s t Wa n n a M a ke D u mb S h i t ,” in interview with...

Pat t i

Harrison

Teagan Hughes

PATTI: The last interview, I felt, like, a big booger in my nose. And I was like, “is there a booger in my nose and Jane isn’t gonna like me?” And then there was a huge booger in my nose, but I don’t know if it was visible—I almost said “audible.”

Staff Writer

Juli Freedman

Bad Habits Editor

When I decided to embark on the mission of bringing a comedian to campus my first choice was 100% Patti Motherfuckin Harrison. I fell in love with her while staying up all night in my Barrows double (sorry Jude!) replaying this Comedy Central karaoke spoof where she belts “Yes my dad is police and he is noble and brave! And when my grades are good enough he lets me drive his truuuuuuck!”

Since then we have seen the meteoric rise of Harrison from the cult following around I Think You Should Leave and Shrill, her tender performance in Together, Together, her recent box office flick The Lost City, and I must include one of my personal favorites: honing in her classic charming vulgarity in working on Big Mouth. Yet, if you have only witnessed Harrison on the big and small screens, you are really missing out. A Woman’s Smile, with fellow superstar comic River Ramirez, and Disease Sleuth are some of the most gut-bustin’ podcasts I would totally trap a baby in a hot car with me if that was the only way they were gonna listen. On her Instagram (@party_harderson) you can dive into her visual talents drawing M&Ms with bleeding assholes or Bart Simpson with gigantic knockers and a gun with the caption “I washed my pussy for THIS?!?” And then there is the rare opportunity that one gets to witness Harrison on stage. This is where her genius really shines. If you were not in Finney the night of May 4th, I am devastated for you. I just know that was one of the best shows I’ll ever see. She has this kind of grace and strong instinct that guides her shows from a raw earnestness to an off-the-wall absurdist dance performance that really captures all of your attention. She also just happens to be super fuckin chill, really supportive of young comics, has awesome politics, a real tastemaker, and is one of those people that is just so casually hilarious in conversation that it kind of makes you froth with rage. It was an honor to interview someone I have admired so immensely for so long, and to have the interview make me like them even more. Crazy.

The interview has been cut down and edited for clarity

8

JULI: [laugh] No, make sure to put that in the final cut. You had a good ride here? You all settled?

PATTI: Well, what I’ll say is, um, I was a little bougie Mary Antoinette bitch and flew first class. I flew United. It was a red eye flight and I sat in a seat that was up against a wall that didn’t recline, and there was, like, no TV. I didn’t bring a neck pillow, ‘cause I just assumed the seat would recline, and it was one of those things where the window was, like, too deep set-in for me to lean my head against anything.

I just tried to sleep sitting straight up on the plane and it was just cool because it was like having a worse experience than sitting in coach, but I paid like $1 million more for it. I will be marching tomorrow and I invite everyone to march with me, ‘cause this just can’t happen to anyone ever again.

I’ve been sobbing. No, I was, it was fine. It was, like, a short flight. Thankfully it was, like, four and a half hours. But I do feel loopy. I’m just gonna talk about how I’m a little tired for about half-hour, if that’s okay. I’ve been to Oberlin one other time. It’s kind of, like, overcast and foggy—feels like I’m in, like, Ireland.

JULI: [laugh] Wait, what’s the last time you were in Oberlin for?

PATTI: I’ve only been here one time, and that was sometime between 2011 and 2013. I went to the improv festival [Oberlin College Improv Conference] here. I was on my college improv team and I met one of my best friends here.

She went to OSU, her name’s Mitra [Jouhari] and she was on their improv team. So both of our teams, like, performed and bombed, and then we kind of bonded. I always wanna say “trauma bond,” but that’s not the right term, but it should be the term. I hope it’s one of those things that colloquially changes. Because anytime I say something about it, I’m like, “oh, you, like, trauma bonded with a coworker because you both had a bad boss,” people are like, “no, that’s not trauma bonding. Trauma bonding would be if

your boss hit you and then hugged you.” Well, I don’t know if that makes a bunch of sense. But, um, anyways, I really, I had so much fun at the festival. I met Nicole Byers, Sasheer Zamata, and Keisha Zollar, who were on an improv team called Doppelgänger, and they came and did improv workshops, and it was so cool and it just felt really exciting. And that was a fun time for improv. I think I, like, I did a really bad Latinx accent on stage and just bombed, rightfully so.

So, we all learn. Um, and so I sued the school and I won. I got 3 billion dollars.

JULI: So this is, like, Patti Harrison’s apology tour right now?

PATTI: [laugh] Yes. I’m coming back to reenact that fateful day! Um, no, I’m excited. I’m excited to be here.

JULI: Nice. We can get to some of these questions that we had. Teagan, what was the one that you wanted to get to first?

TEAGAN: I think, to start off with, do you think in terms of performing at colleges—it feels like some people maybe really like to perform at colleges; others, not so much. Do you feel any certain way about performing for specifically college audiences? Or, do you think it’s comparable to other kinds of venues?

PATTI: I really love it. I just feel like it’s such a specific kind of experience as, like, a performer, because I think the specific situation that I’m in right now is that I haven’t performed for most of lockdown and I’ve only started to kind of get back into stand-up a little bit. I did a week of shows at the Soho Theatre in London last year, and that was really fun. And that was my first time performing, like, that much stand-up in, like, all of lockdown, I’d done, like, a few Zoom shows, whatever. But I haven’t really done shows since. I did a show at USC that I kind of bombed at a couple of months ago, but it was still so much fun. It can be pretty forgiving because I think college kids are excited just to see, like, a comedian they know, even if you’re not nailing everything. I feel like it’s a fun place to kind of experiment and toss out new material. My past couple shows that I’ve done have been really rough, but, like, really fun.

CONCERT REVIEW

Helado Negro

@ T h e ‘ S c o, 5 / 1 7 / 2 2 Raghav Raj Staff Writer

Though it’s probably ridiculous to consider this anything other than coincidence, a part of me wonders if the arrival of Helado Negro at Oberlin’s Dionysus Disco on Saturday, May 7th — a pleasantly sunny day after a week of dreary downpours— was some sort of kismet. (Maybe that’s a convoluted way to open a concert review, but bear with me.) If there’s any feeling that mirrored his show that night, one of the ‘Sco’s more packed shows in recent memory, it’s that unmistakable feeling of finally basking in the daylight after an eternity spent hiding from the rain.

As Helado Negro, Roberto Carlos Lange makes ethereal pop music that defies categorization, inflected with the gentle earnestness of folk and smeared with the vibrant colors of psychedelia. His moniker means “black ice cream” in Spanish; aptly, Lange’s music is both bilingual and refreshingly sweet. Throughout his performance at the ‘Sco, he oscillated gracefully between English and Spanish, approaching themes of love, anxiety, and identity within the Latin American experience with a featherlight touch, warm and inviting as he swayed on the stage.

Most of his set at the ‘Sco consisted of his excellent 2021 record, Far In. The album is one of Lange’s more languid, breezy excursions — rich with incandescent and sun-soaked textures — but hearing it live, what’s perhaps most remarkable is how tightly rhythmic it all sounded. Helmed by the synths, bass, and guitar of Wye Oak’s Andy Stack, as well as Pinson Chanselle’s deft, brilliant work behind the drum-kit, the trio sounded remarkably locked in with every shape they took, from the rave-up synths on “Aureole,” to the skittering, spaced-out funk of “Hometown Dream.” Even on the sparse, hymnal melodies of a song like “Thank You For Ever,” the rumbling toms and brittle backing vocals swept the song into an effusive rush of warmth, a swirling, breathtakingly cosmic storm.

At the center of this storm, of course, was Lange, whose voice is simply one of the most transfixing things I’ve ever heard. His falsetto is a fragile, delicate thing, an extraordinary instrument that gracefully pitter-patters and pulses through dense sonic textures like a warm knife through butter. Even as he playfully bantered with the crowd — cracking jokes, offering insights on performing in Ohio, asking audience members their astrological signs so he could toy with the lyrics of “Gemini and Leo” — his vocals sounded lithe and malleable, drifting into birdsong coos on “Wake Up Tomorrow” as eagerly as they bounced around the bassline anchoring “There Must Be A Song Like You” (which, in my opinion, sounds strangely similar to the melody of “Blade Runner Blues”).

One of the last songs that Lange played was “Pais Nublado,” a standout cut from his previous album, 2019’s timely This Is How You Smile. Its title effectively translates to “cloudy country,” a song about resilience, community, and positivity as acts of defiance in the face of looming political anxieties. As he reached the chorus, Lange tipped the microphone towards the audience, beaming as they eagerly sang along.

Throughout the night, Lange’s boundless, glowing positivity was what stood out the most, an immediately infectious exuberance that lingered in the air long after the doors had closed.

Even at its most pointedly political, his performance was joy as an act of resistance: liberating, beautiful, and utterly revelatory.

By Henley Childress

Arcade Fire and the Importance of (Not) Being (Too) Earnest Fionna Farrell Staff Writer

Because it is populated by humans, it seems that the earth is very often on the verge of apocalypse.

Perhaps now more than ever—just a little. Our music is, and always has been, very well aware of this fact.

For better or for worse.

If you’ve ever turned on a television, you’ve probably heard REM’s runaway smash hit “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” which reckons with the end through birthday parties, cheesecake, and Lenny Bruce. Or maybe you’re a bit more of a sentimentalist and cry along to Bowie’s “Five Years,” wondering when exactly it all went wrong. These are just a couple

of—notably pretty old—examples.

Apocalypse looks and sounds a lot different now.

Maybe that’s because the past two years have particularly sucked ass. In these dire times, dystopia feels like less of an imagined, though perhaps imminent reality, but a distinctly present one.

We are desperately searching for a way out—or maybe just a cooler spot in the hellfire for a few minutes. Something along the lines of confirma-

tion that we’re still here somehow.

On May 6th, Canadian rock group Arcade Fire released their sixth album, WE, which attempts to do these things. And, to their detriment, so much more.

Arcade Fire is one of those bands with, like, eight members.

They toss around enormous multicolored beach balls at their concerts.

They have a thing for yearning choruses and biblical imagery. Until, that is, they get tired of

that and try their hands at disco— which, for 2013’s Reflektor, was successful; there is a gloriously palpable dark, nervy energy to that album. In WE, that energy is lost and reduced to hokey platitudes.

If I’m coming off a little harsh, it might be because 2022 has left me a hardened, brittle shell of a human being. I am no longer the marshmallow I was in 8th grade, when Reflektor came out. But I’m not upset—I thank whatever God is up there every day for that.

Call it perspective, call it the loss of innocence, or just call it life, but I find it harder to believe in certain things now. But this doesn’t mean I’ve completely lost my soul yet. The line “We’re just a million little gods causing rainstorms, turning

every good thing to rust” still causes some eye-perspiration for me. As does, honestly, the entirety of the album Funeral, which is timelessly exciting and heartwrenching. WE tries so, so hard to be either of these things but instead plateaus in a tired simulacrum of genuine emotion.

Whereas Funeral finds propulsion in its thunderous urgency, its ability to transcend time and the chaos of the mortal universe, WE finds itself imprisoned by these concepts.

This is essentially due to the fact that the album has nothing new to say—or hear.

Tale the title of the record’s opening track “Age of Anxiety I” — if this is only the first age of anxiety we’re living in, then I think I’m about ready to turn in. Here are some of the prized lyrics

9

Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Har Not rough in that I’m bombing per se, but that, like, they’re not airtight. I’m adlibbing a lot and leaving a lot of room to, I guess, have organic discoveries—please, like, cut my eyes out when you see me. It just feels reinvigorating too. Anytime I talk to college kids after shows, or anybody who’s been coordinating the events, there’s just this excitement about comedy. And that is really nice, because I think I’ve just been grinding in New York and LA for so many years.

Like, I haven’t been doing comedy for as long as some of my peers, but I do feel like you can get a little pissy and jaded, being oversaturated with it. So it’s nice to not only meet people who are, you know, brighteyed about it, and remind you why it’s fun and cool.

JULI: That’s so dope. There’s definitely a lot of excitement about having you here. It’s been like a big buzz.

PATTI: Well, everyone should know the show is gonna be loose! [laugh] This is gonna be really fuckin’ loose. I found out I can’t use a projector. I, like, screamed when that happened. My PowerPoint! My 20-minute PowerPoint! I’m usually like, I can just do this long-ass PowerPoint. I’m a good training-wheels person for students who do the events for the school, because I throw a bunch of shit at you really last minute. But my temperament is very timid.

I’m just happy to show up. And, um [laugh] and bring smiles.

JULI: [laugh] Well, let me know if you really need anything. I’m definitely on the team with coordinating stuff.

PATTI: I need 15 VR headsets. [laugh] Like, I mean, I need them. When I say “need them,” I need them. I’m in trouble. Uh, no, that’s nice of you.

JULI: I was sort of interested too about your process as an artist, but not just standup, but also, you’ve been really into acting lately. I’m really a fan of your visual art. I’ve always been curious about that side of you.

PATTI: Well, thank you, that is very nice of you. I feel like I have been kind of all over the place in terms of going for whatever opportunities I can. It’s interesting to enter the entertainment industry as a comedian, because I think there’s a lot of assumptions made about you. Because people are like, “oh, you are a comedian—you wanna act, right? Well, audition for this!” Or like, “oh, you’re a comedian. So, you’re a joke writer?

So, you wanna write for TV? Do you wanna write for TV? Do you wanna write this?”

So, it’s a different path. It’s a different way into acting…I’ve gotten to do stuff that isn’t necessarily super comedic, which I didn’t really expect to happen. I did this movie Together Together that’s very wholesome. Not

at all the movie I ever thought I was gonna do. It’s painfully sweet. I initially told Nikole Beckwith, who wrote and directed it, that I don’t know if this movie’s for me. The script is really interesting, but it’s just, like, a completely different thing. And then I met with her, and she was just rad. That is just kind of what I aim for—am I gonna have fun doing this? And is it not gonna eat up my soul to do it? I think creative process-wise, you know, I haven’t been feeling super inspired in lockdown. I’ve been pretty depressed and kind of working on getting back into therapy and my mental health and stuff.

From a creative standpoint, it’s not a super prolific place to be in. I’m not making a ton in that regard, like writing my own stuff, which is why acting and voice acting is fun.

I’ve done a lot of voice acting in lockdown. I think that’s been a really nice thing to kind of supplement the lack of creativity that I’ve felt. So, as far as creative process goes, I think it’s literally just like, I think of something stupid, I write it down in the notes app in my phone without context, I look at it later, I have no idea what it means. It’ll be like “blueberry head.” I like to write it down at 4:00 a.m., like, crying-laughing in my bed like “haha bitch, you are changing the world!” I look at it the next day and I’m like, what the fuck is “blueberry head”? What is “panda grandpa”? What is any of this shit?

It’s not a good fucking system. Don’t use it.

It’s bad. When I say the show is gonna be loose tonight, a lot of things that I’ve worked into doing on stage are things that I kind of ad-libbed and got a good response, and I’m like, “oh great. I learned at that moment that this worked on stage.” I’ve never had a tight standup set, ever. A lot of my stuff that I do is—I just remember beats, I don’t remember specific jokes. I’ll have to perform the same bit 20 times before I start to remember a cadence. But I think the most consistent thing that I perform is comedy music. That’s pretty much the same, but the riffing and stuff in between I think is where I have the most fun. It’s anxiety-inducing. But when it pays off, you organically discover a lot of stuff that way. I feel like the hardest I laugh is in conversations with my friends. Sometimes, it’s like an in-the-moment thing. I think something that’s unnerving about comedy is how much comedy is people acting like they’re speaking off the cuff when it’s like, you’ve done the same thing 100,000 times. It’s an art form that is built around lying and being good at it, which I love. It’s really cool. I lie to my family all the time.

TEAGAN: We know that you moved from Ohio to New York, and we were wondering— PATTI: Who the fuck told you that?! [laugh] No, go ahead. Sorry.

TEAGAN: We were just kind of wondering about how you found your comedy people

in New York—if it was a really intimidating process, or if people there were welcoming, you know; just anything about that.

PATTI: It was intimidating, but I had people. Mitra, she was living in New York.

She had moved there before me, and I think she was there for, like, a year before I moved there, but she was already taking classes at UCB [Upright Citizens’ Brigade] and had met other comedy people. Her and her friends asked me to do a show that they were hosting that no one, um, went to, except for, like, one person. It was a lot of saying yes to anybody that had a show. But it was really intimidating at first. Especially when you’re going into a space and it can be really cliquey. I think the best thing in that situation is not to take stuff personally as best as you can, because comedians are the most sensitive, mentally unwell group. It’s like, the odds of you running into someone who’s a high-spectrum narcissist is so high if you’re running in comedy circles. There

were people who I felt miffed by, who I shouldn’t have felt miffed by. I learned later and became friends with those people later. And I’m like, oh, if I would’ve worked harder to just focus on myself and doing comedy and being friendly, but not taking it personally if someone doesn’t want to be friends right away or something. But, um, I killed a lot of people in New York. I killed a lot of people in New York. I feel really sad about it. Just like a ton of comedians. [laugh] JULI: As a preface, I had a professor kind of put a gun to my head to ask this question about what it means to do comedy in this day and age.

PATTI: I’m so happy to hear they’re giving professors guns at this school! Yes. Continue.

JULI: Reading a lot of your interviews, you seem to answer a lot of questions talking about how you don’t like answering the

Art by Amelia Connelley

Patti10 Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Har

rrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison same questions. It seems like you just get a lot of attachments to bits that either you didn’t necessarily feel like was your voice, or whenever you describe it, don’t seem to put a lot of societal commentary onto it. I’m just sort of wondering about like your opinion in this sort of process where you get asked a lot of questions and then you respond about not wanting to answer the questions you get asked, and kind of what you feel about when people talk about comedians these days as being like, “they must live for this political moment right now, ‘cause it’s so horrible, and now they get to make a bunch of jokes about it and save us all, and be these philosopher kings!”

PATTI: Well, I have to say first off, I hate this fucking question—no, I have thought about how many interviews that I’ve done where I’m just like, “I wish I didn’t have to talk about—” and it’s like, okay bitch. If I really didn’t wanna talk on it, if I really didn’t wanna listen to myself talk, I would email them in advance and be like, “don’t ask me these questions.” But I don’t, because I wanna be, like, on my soapbox. Everyone’s working through their stuff. Yeah, I think that it’s just such an interesting time. This very specific set of factors have become foundational in the discourse around our societal behavior, and how social media informs that, and how being a comedian on social media has changed the dynamic of what your function is. I don’t know. I think about this kind of thing too much, in a way that I feel like I’m, like, conspiracy theory-pilled or something. I’m like, social media is just social media and the versions of it that we have right now suck. And I really would love to be able to be happy and off social media and feel confident in my career and feel like I’m not missing out on stuff or missing out on job opportunities because I’m not keeping up. Social media has become so integrated in the way that success in the entertainment industry for comedians is obtained. I think it creates a lot of people who play into behaviors on social media that are really unhealthy. I think behaviors just spread so quickly. Without people stopping and asking themselves why they’re behaving the way that they are or why they’re saying the things that they are on social media. I felt like that’s a reason why I wanted to leave Twitter, is that it felt very much like people patting themselves on the back. It felt very unproductive. It was like an echo chamber; like scary animosity where there wasn’t discourse. People claim that it’s a tool for discourse. I don’t think it is. I think any corporatized platform that essentially becomes an algorithm shopping base is not where you’re gonna have your anti-capitalist revolution. I think people ingest messages through comedy, and comedians can get through to people. I think it would be more important if we were having comedians who are being more thoughtful

about the way that they’re speaking about things like politics. But I just feel like now what’s incentivized is dunking, and dunking on someone politically. It’s no one’s job to teach anybody anything, like, no individual person’s job, unless you’re literally a teacher. Um, and then it’s not even your fucking job. [laugh] Honey, walk out of the classroom! [laugh] Put on your Louboutins and walk out of the classroom! Leave those fucking little kids to die on their own. They can make their own little peanut butter sandwiches and learn about isosceles triangles on their own. I just feel like now, comedy as a way to get through to people would mean that at the core of that sentiment, whatever the joke is of the comedy, is appealing to the humanity of a person who disagrees with you, and you’re changing their mind or something, or helping them open their eyes about something. There’s just a lot of mean comedy right now—and I’m not omitted from that. I look at who I was on Twitter in 2016 and I cringe; I was so snarky and there was just so much animosity. I just feel like people are really scared right now. The advent of social media, the accessibility of so many things happening all at once—you, now more than ever, can see every horrible thing happening a million times a day. And there’s the virtue signaling. And then it’s like, this is happening as Trump’s happening. And then it’s like, okay, Trump, pandemic, Ukraine, police brutality, Roe V. Wade. I don’t think we have the brain capacity to healthily process this much information. And I think this idea that a comedian’s gonna come in, and we’re gonna have another, like, Charlie Chaplin, that’s like [Charlie Chaplin voice] “everybody wake up!” There’s just so much idealism on the internet, and I think idealism is hope so it can be a good thing, but it just doesn’t practically play out in constructive ways.

The majority of the kind of comedy that we’re seeing is not, like, you know, changing the world. I think there’s a lot of just divisive stuff. And again, I’m not omitted from that, which is why I just wanna, like, make dumb shit. Like, I just wanna make dumb shit.

And I feel, when I talk about me not wanting to answer these questions all the time, a lot of the time they’re about being trans and trans representation, and it feels insulting to me. I’m like, wouldn’t it be amazing if I could just make stuff that was funny on its own. And then someone who didn’t agree with me politically saw something that I did, and liked my work. And then that could help open a door to another branch of them, maybe being like, oh, if this person is cool and they believe in these things, maybe there’s something to that. I don’t know. I think people are just scared and acting out.

It makes sense to wanna look to comedians or celebrities for political guidance. But I think it’s a trap, and I think social media is the cheese on the mouse trap. Ha ha.

JULI: I really like everything you have to say, and there’s so much to pull from that.

There was this quote that you had that I really liked where you just talked about how there would be a mom that’d reach out and be like, “my kid is trans and really looks up to you,” and then they would go on your Twitter and see a tweet like, “Vanessa Hudgens is fucking a dog.”

PATTI: I’m just—I’m just sharing. I’m just echoing, or I’m boosting news. That was a thing that happened.

JULI: I’m interested in knowing kind of what you’ve been consuming lately. I know you said you weren’t necessarily in a huge writing phase during lockdown, but has there been anything that’s inspired you? I would also really love to know more about Disease Sleuth and the process of that. I’m a huge Disease Sleuth fan.

PATTI: Wow. Talk about trauma bonding.

Um, no, that’s really nice. I think that was, like, three or four weeks into lockdown. I was like, I’m gonna make the best of this.

And what? Produce a podcast all by myself on GarageBand. It was so much work and I will never do that again. It just sucks because I spent so much time making that, and I think you are the only person who listened to it, which is amazing. But then it’s like, my friends make a podcast; they go in, they’re like, “yeah, I go in for a half hour a week, we do it 10 times and I make $45,000.” And I was like, I made this for free! It is a thing that I had so much fun making. The big thing is, I really had a blast making it and it was a very healing moment to make that in lockdown. I just texted everybody and was like, I’m gonna make this podcast and I’m gonna do a bunch of fake commercials. You just send me an audio clip of you saying kind of whatever you wanna talk about, or I can write something for you. So I wrote some commercials for some people. Tim Robinson wrote a commercial on it for Percy Amber’s Popular School. It’s an ad for a girl whose school can make you popular. That’s his daughter doing the voice, which is so funny. And it’s one of my favorite things in that. I can’t remember what she said, but she’s like “if you don’t get popular in eight days, you can come and kill me.” [laugh] It’s so stupid. It’s so fucking funny. Wait, what was the other question, what I’ve been consuming? Yeah.

Um, oh my God. It’s actually trash. I play video games. I got Elden Ring and I started playing it, but it was too hard. It scared me.

It was pretty scary to me. A lot more stressful than what I wanted, ‘cause I was playing Ghost of Tsushima and that game is a lot chiller. And I was like, oh, I would love to have this kind of vibe, but like in a mythological sort of like, Skyrim and Elder Scrolls aesthetic or whatever, but it’s not that. So I’ve been watching this horrible, horrible

fucking reality show. It’s Spanish, but it’s called Love Never Lies in English. It’s so fucked up. There’s six couples, they go to a resort. Do you know? Have you seen it?

JULI: No, what is it on?

PATTI: It’s on Netflix. It is one of the craziest shows I’ve watched. Six couples go to a resort. And so there’s a group pot, it starts at $40,000. And each time someone tells the truth, they get a thousand dollars, and each time someone lies, they get a thousand dollars taken away. It’s supposed to incentivize everyone telling the truth and pushing each other to tell the truth, because each couple could leave with a hundred thousand dollars. The first, like, 20 minutes of the first episode they’re all partying and having fun.

And then they go into the lie detector and it’s like, “have you ever cheated on her?”

And they are like, yes, ‘cause they want the money. So then everyone’s sobbing in fetal position. And it’s so funny because there is an English dub, and there’s, like, 12 girls in the show at one point. And there’s, like, two girl voice actors doing the voices for all the girls. And then there’s, like, a couple of guys, and there’s a gay couple. And the guy voice actor they have is doing this gay voice so hard. [laugh] They’re all speaking in Spanish, and you can hear the dialogue really quietly below it. There will just be people on all fours heaving, screaming, crying, like truly gutturally having a mental break. And the VO—the English dubbing never meets that level of energy. It’s always like—it’ll literally be like a girl who’s like on the ground, screaming, like tears everywhere, having a full emotional breakdown, and the dub will be like [monotone] “how dare you put your dick in someone else that is crazy. You’re a pig.” [laugh] It’s so funny. They’ll show the house footage, and it’s just, like, two people dancing in the corner, and then there’s just someone over sitting on a couch, crying, just at any point in the day, ‘cause they’re all like processing all these horrible secrets that have come out about the relationship.

What makes it really intense to watch is that there are a lot of reality shows that I feel like the people are so hyper-aware that they’re on a reality show that they’re really playing into it. And in this, everyone feels real. All the women are so gorgeous. All the men are [laugh] like so ugly. There’s, like, one cute guy, and he fucked everybody on earth apparently. But he is devastated anytime his girlfriend is like, “it breaks my heart that he would have sex with someone else.” He immediately is, like, sobbing. It’s just crazy. I don’t watch a lot of reality shows, but that is what I’m watching right now. So I guess my actions speak louder.

JULI: You seem to also talk about it in interviews sometimes, but I wanted to know about your fascination with horror and gore movies. I didn’t know if you had any recom-

rrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti Harrison Patti11 Harrison

Arcade Fire continued on that track: “Fight the fever with TV/ In the age where nobody sleeps/ And the pills do nothing for me/ In the age of anxiety.”

I’d like to say it gets better, but it doesn’t. In fact, it gets worse. Try to hold back a cringe while you hear Win Butler—now well over 40, who writes like a twenty year old who has just read Huxley for the first time— drone on about “unsubscribing” from it all. In a song called “End of the Empire I-IV”, the effort becomes not earnest but offensive. He helplessly croons, “The algorithm prescribed / Do you feel alright?”

No I do not. But I think Win Butler does not realize he is a large part of the reason why. In 2022, we need more than just earnesty to get us through. I have no doubt that these lyrics, and their accompanying melodies which so tepidly mirror the group’s earliest efforts, come from a genuine place at heart. However, the idea of a collapsing world isn’t new anymore—-at least not new in the way that it was in 2010, when doom almost felt like potential. When technology and the like incited excitement as much as it incited dread. WE’s music is just lukewarm; the lyrics are simply bad. When dystopia is more than a sci-book (one of which, conveniently, the album is also named after), we need something to not just “move” us, in those mawkish, maudlin ways that we have been used to

Patti Harrison continued mendations, or wanted to talk about if that ever impacts your style.

PATTI: I mean, I do think gore and violence, graphic violence, plays a large part in my sense of humor. Because I think it’s a coping mechanism from the shock of seeing it too early in childhood. Like, just watching way too many horror movies too early, unsupervised and, like, going to rotten.com as a kid and seeing that stuff is traumatizing, and having no one to contextualize dead bodies on the internet. I think the way that me and my friends coped with it is, you know, humor. There are horror things that I like a lot that are super formative. I think Child’s Play—like, Chucky was really scary for me growing up, and still is. I still have Chucky nightmares pretty regularly; not as regularly as I used to have them. I watched it when I was, like, four and was really traumatized by it because I had sisters that were just young, they’re, like, kids too. So they thought it was funny that I thought Chucky was scary. So they would use Chucky as a bargaining tool, God, to make me brush my teeth.

They’d be like, if you don’t brush your teeth in 10 minutes, Chucky’s in the basement right now and he’s gonna come up and he’s gonna talk to you! I’d be like, I’m brushing my teeth! [laugh] I don’t wanna talk to Chucky! [laugh] Tell him, thank you for being generous. So I think it’s like, Chucky is something I make a lot of jokes about now because it has, unfortunately, been such a huge part of my life. Recommendation wise, I just watched this movie called The Untamed that was really crazy. It’s this Mexican horror movie about this girl who finds this couple’s cabin in the woods where they keep this really grotesque monster in it. And it has sex with you. And like, it’s the best sex of your life. So then she like starts bringing people to come in the town to have sex with it, because it changed her life. There’s a story arc about repressed homosexuality. It was very interesting. It is a very graphic movie; it’s pretty sexually graphic. They actually don’t show the creature that much. My friend recommended it to me, and I thought it was gonna be, like, a creature feature, it’s gonna be, like, a lot of creatures, but it’s way more about the closeted brother who’s really messy and toxic. We were watching the movie for an hour and it’s just family fighting. And then the big sex monster comes and you’re like, oh yeah, this is what this movie is about too. The big thing that fucks you. Uh, Riki-Oh, that movie has fucked me up. Did you ever see that? It’s just, like, a martial arts movie. I think it’s a Japanese movie, and it’s just a guy going around, beating people up. I don’t remember the premise of it, but the fighting, it’s all practical effects and it’s so violent. Like, it’s over the top. He punches people’s jaws off, or he’ll punch someone through their head and it’s just blood. From an effects standpoint, it’s an incredible movie. So, if you can stomach blood; but some of this stuff is disturbing. Like, I think there’s a part where a guy goes to punch, and he punches the guy’s punch and, like, explodes the guy’s hand. Jealous?

JULI: [laugh] that’s pretty dope. I think Teagan actually might have to dip right now.

PATTI: I’m gonna run too, I think.

JULI: We’ve kept you for long enough. This was great.

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Before, but to uproot us. We need to start somewhere totally fresh.

I think that there are lots of bands that do that. However, their music might not be so amenable to the common ear. I don’t say that to sound pretentious—imagine an Obie doing that on purpose?---but rather, what I mean is that music that really “says” something can be quite subversive and therefore jarring. Lyrically, melodically, and in pure terms of its album art, albums which criticize the “dystopia” as not just an abstract ideal, but as a fastidiously constructed reality don’t sugarcoat the truth. Nor do they over-sentimentalize it; in the late stage capitalist hellscape, what is the point of talking about being “wild and free”? Of pretending you’re living in a Black Mirror episode (but not one of the bleak ones—-the one about the lesbian couple that everyone likes)? Maybe the only way of truly coping in the dystopia is not to pretend that we’ll transcend it, but by picking it apart shard by shard.

In other words, sometimes “irony” (or whatever the opposite of earnest is) gets us further than earnesty—-it is the latter bends towards delusion, the former, away from it. Now, I’m not saying that’s true in some cases, or that artists should forsake their sentimental impulses in order to create something more “real.” Too much irony can have its consequences, just like being too “earnest.” Both of these extremes have the potential to shape an eye-rolling version of un-reality. Only, those who do it “ironically” presume themselves to be smarter than us mortals with emotions. For example, there is an artist who goes by the moniker Turtlenecked who I’ve been checking out recently—even his name feels like a shot at something (perhaps at pseudo-intellectuals named Harrison, which is his real name). Whereas Butler tearfully laments the TV fever, Harrison snaps with a snark: “Reality TV! I’m not here to make friends!” We might smile for a second, as we would at a stale joke.

The thing about “irony”, though, which is perhaps more compelling than earnestness, under modern circumstances, is that it gives us room to laugh at the world. And at ourselves. Sometimes—quite often—it is bitter laughter, like when listening to a song called “Proud Boys” by a hardcore group (Show Me the Body, if you’re interested) and then remembering, well, just what it is the song is about. Speaking of punks who like to use humor to play with us like that: Philadelphia hardcore band Soul Glo recently put out an album called Diaspora Problems that is equally funny as it is important—-perhaps important because it is funny, in its absurd, sardonic way that makes us do a double take instead of cry. Some of its song titles include: “Gold Chain Punk (whogonbeatmyass?)”, “Coming Correct is Cheaper”, “Jump! (Or Get Jumped!!) (by the future))” and “Driponomics”. That last one is my favorite.

Songs like this and what they reveal about our society, once we dissect them, show us that earnestness isn’t lost in humor. Humor, rather, can be a vehicle for it, only in a mutated form that we’re not quite familiar with yet. One that perhaps makes us writhe uncomfortably, instead of reaching for the tissue box. In the end, it’s all about finding the line between irony and earnestness and tracing it with caution and deliberateness. To, if nothing else, finding something relatively important to say. In that light, here are some other albums that I find rail against the “dystopia” successfully, through their humor that layers something real: The Koreatown Oddity’s Little Dominique’s Nosebleed, The Knife’s Shaking the Habitual, Surfobrt’s Keep On Truckin, and Deep Tan’s Diamond Horsetail. From there, the list goes on. Silver tongues and scathing wit have no bounds in genre. Cloying, bottomless wailing certainly does, and it’s whatever genre Arcade Fire is trying to be right now.

Interview with Vikram Perry: The Trials and Tribulations of a Barrows RA Cal Ransom Contributor

Vikram Perry (they/them), a fourth-year history and musical studies double major, has spent their entire college career living in a dorm that has a reputation as one of the most run-down dorms on campus, available only to first-years, Barrows Hall.

They describe themself as “curmudgeonly,” a bit like a gnome that has always guarded a lawn– watching the freshmen, who are like young seedlings, start their life in the Oberlin “garden.”

They sat down with me and told me a little about what they’ve learned through their time being an RA. So could you tell me a little bit about what your first year living in Barrows was like?

Yeah, I was on the second floor. It was a good first year. I really liked my RA. We were quite close. I went to a lot of their card games and we played cards. And I had a good group of friends and two of my friends lived in 224, which is this giant room. It’s like a lounge that got converted into a double.

And so we all sort of wound up having that become a hub for a number of people and we sort of hung out in that room a lot. My first semester, a sort of 20-ish person friend group formed, which then started to split up and break apart a little bit. But as far as the freshman year experience goes, it was pretty good. There were tensions and things that changed. But when I was going through it, it was a very useful resource for me, the hall and the cohort of people.

Having a space that’s just first years.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

Can you tell me a little bit more about your RA? What were they like? I heard you mentioned something about card games.

Well, the first day of orientation my parents left, I was doing fine. And then around 10:30 at night I was like, “Wow, I’m a little sad.” I was going to go see and ask if my

friend was up. And it turns out he was playing cards with our RA in the kitchen. So I sat in and hung out with them and played cards and then continued to do that semiregularly, whenever they would arrange a game. And it was very good. I stopped going in as regularly as I found my own people, but that RA is still my friend to this day.

We maintained a friendship after I was at their residence.

But, you know, that was a really good first impression of my RA–I’m quite lonely and I don’t really know what to do in this new weird space.

And then, oh, look, I can play cards. That was good.

That’s really awesome. So when you were thinking about becoming an RA, what was that process like for you?

A little bit complicated. My RA had been really helpful for me. And I wanted to provide that. I didn’t have a particular want to live with any of my friends or anything. I didn’t have a particular want to be in another building. But I mean, you know, this building is kind of crappy, but it also just has never really gotten on my nerves in the way that I think it gets on a lot of people’s nerves, as much as I live the joke of like, “Barrows is a crappy dorm”, I’m also just like, eh, it’s fine. It’s a room.

And a friend of mine had been going through something really hard that first semester and I had spent a lot of time helping him through it, so I’d gotten to see a lot of what RAs do in crisis. And I thought it was something I could probably do. So then I interviewed. It was a funny thing because I think I came into it with a sense of like, everything about this is going to be about crisis, so the thing I need to let them know is that I will be okay in a crisis. And I think that actually isn’t what they’re looking for. So I actually got waitlisted as an RA, and my now best friend did make it, but then he had to drop out of the program. And so a month before coming back in the second year, I got this email being like, you’re off the waitlist.

How did you feel getting that notification?

I felt good. I felt stressed

because all of a sudden I was like, Oh, I gotta move, and I had to come back early for training. There was a real sort of immediate change of plans.

But it was nice. I was glad to do it. And I was on the second floor, but on the other side of the second floor so that I hadn’t really moved at all, it was kind of fun.

That’s awesome. What was it like your first semester? What were the challenges that you had trying to navigate your first semester as an RA? Well, my first year as an RA was actually kind of crazy. I had a really lovely hall. And they all really liked me. I think my residents generally liked me. But they all really enjoyed the vibe I was putting down for whatever reason.

So, you know, we had our initial hall meeting and they all clapped afterwards. And it was a funny thing because those hall meetings are boring and hot. It’s not a fun time.

But they were all so genuine.

And so it was really quite nice. But there were some pretty significant challenges that semester, which I don’t want to get too into the details of. But I did wind up actually having to deal with a number of crises, which was a funny thing to have felt like, well, I guess this wasn’t really what they were looking for, but wound up being quite useful that I had gone through various processes with what do you do when there’s an emergency.

And so that was something that you kind of picked up on your own working with your friend as opposed to, like through the training.

Yeah, the training is not really about crises because they don’t happen that often.

But my friend freshman year had been going through such intense stuff and so had a number of nights where I’d had to call an RA who then called the area coordinator.

I was familiar with that process, to a degree that was kind of funny. Although stressful at times.

Yeah, for sure. And can you tell me more about the area coordinator?

I’m not familiar with that

term.

Yeah, so our supervisors are the area coordinators. And so if there’s a call that RAs can’t deal with we will call them.

And students can also call them. You can always call up campus safety and ask for the area coordinator on call.

OK. Interesting. Yeah, that’s a resource that I don’t think a lot of students know about.

It’s not super well-communicated. I mean, the entire process of RA duty is not super well-communicated. I don’t think everyone always knows what the duty board even is...

Moving forward in time when COVID started being a thing, what was it like being an RA during that time?

It was a weird time because it kind of relied on us to be a different thing than I like to be as an RA. The way that that our job is set up is really quite confusing on a like a

philosophical level because it is half building community and half policing community and those two things–maybe this is getting into my own politics about the police, but I don’t actually think those two things are fundamentally possible and they are at odds with each other. And so I have some trouble with that.

It was the first time as an RA that I really had to deal with my coworkers and other students moralizing the issue.

And I also came off of being totally isolated for about 10 months. My mom is immunocompromised, so I saw maybe two people that weren’t in my family the entirety of that time. I got there the first day and I had a panic attack because there were like six people in a lounge. There’s way too many people all of a sudden. And so I got used to that and I got used to this sort of moralizing. But it was a thing we had to talk about.

I don’t think our jobs are best done If you are consistently moralizing the actions of a bunch of 18 year olds, especially for their first year.

You mentioned there’s more that first years need in terms of sharing resources and our emotional states are different than people who have been here for a while.

What are some techniques that you have built up to help first years?

The way that I have framed my job in my head is that basically the goal of being an RA Is to develop a community and be trusted enough by your residents, such that if there is a crisis, you will be a person that they turn to.

And for me, what that means is that I try to not make assumptions about the drama of the hall or who’s dating who or whatever. I don’t want to think about y’all in that way. I have my own opinions and politics and worldview, and of course, if I’m challenged on it by one of my residents or if I’m asked about it, I will happily share but my goal is not to inscribe my own personal feelings on to residents. If they want to talk

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A Trip to the Grape’s Archives:

Vintage Porno Reviews and the Sports Section Anna Holshouser-Belden Contributor Whether this is your first time reading The Grape or you spend all your waking hours consuming page after page of our publication until your hands are stained with ink and your eyes are watering, you’ve hopefully picked up this paper for some reason or another. Maybe the cover art was particularly intriguing, maybe you’re a crossword enthusiast looking for something to do besides the Wordle, maybe you’re waiting to meet up with a friend or looking for something to read in between classes.

No matter what has actually compelled you to pick up this issue of The Grape, our campus’ beloved alternative newspaper has a twenty-two-year (almost fifty semesters!) history dating back to the first published issue in 1999, complete with Lena Dunham as our Features editor and comic strips that would make your dad’s jaw drop. The un-finished product of this history comes in the form of the copy you’re holding in your hands today, and has transformed again and again as it travels through generations of editors-in-chief. This curious staff writer decided to take an educational trip down to the Grape’s office in the Burton basement in order to find out what the Grape is really all about, and fish through the stacks of yellowing issues in order to pull out a few lost highlights for our readers. The old issues were full of surprises, from the now-extinct Sports section to vintage porno reviews in Bad Habits. They are finally here to be shared with the public after years locked away.

My first stop once I got to the archives was figuring out the answer to a question I’ve now pondered since I started working for the Grape: How old is this publication anyway? I found my answer from a torn piece of printer paper reading 1999, under which one relatively-thin newspaper lay. The paper claimed to be the first-ever copy of the Grape, published on October 11th, 1999. Which, for reference, was the year the majority of the class of 2022 was born, three years pre-9/11. It was the year of Bill Clinton’s impeachment and acquittal, the election of Vladimir Putin in Russia, and the premiere of Spongebob Squarepants on Nickelodeon, all whilst Y2K caused masspanic about the fate of the internet. Three years prior to the invention of the popular BlackBerry phone and eight years prior to Steve Jobs’ transformation of the digital world, The Grape was up and running, and their official Mission Statement was as follows: “The Grape is printed by the Oberlin College Political Publishing Organization, a student group in the process of being

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chartered. It serves as a vehicle for the publication of social and political opinion; provides a means by which opinionated students and faculty and other community members can voice their feelings on issues of a political or social nature; maintains a diversity of opinion; ensures a permanent forum for political and social discussion within the Oberlin College community; promotes well-written, considerately thought out essays and letters which enhance the understanding of various political viewpoints through their lucidity.”

Within this issue was an interview for National Coming Out Day 1999 with the first openly gay Oberlin student–Roger Goodman ‘68, then a 53-year-old recovered addict with AIDS–in which he unpacked his experiences with queer spaces in mid-60s Oberlin. Also included was an anonymous letter entitled “A Single Woman’s Cry For Straight Men,” a guide to choosing political party affiliations in the 2000 election, a segment on diversity statistics within the classes of 2002 and 2003, and a tidbit on womb chairs being sold for $3890 at retromodern.com accompanied by a drawing of a dancing skeleton. Clearly, The Grape was already on its path to the unconventional journalism we know today.

I don’t know if the editors who put together the October 1999 issue could’ve expected exactly where “vehicle for the publication of social and political opinion” would veer in the early 2000s, especially with the recurring segment of vintage porn DVD review that ran in the Bad Habits section—one of the more entertaining and far-fetched pieces the archive had to offer me on my visit. Published during the 20042005 academic year, this segment offered exciting titles like “Legal at Last I: Barely Legal Babes Get Down…While Sobbing Openly” and “Buckskin Bo’sun: This is the Cutest Porn Ever and It’s About Seamen (huh huh huh).” The section editors would sit down together and watch their X-rated finds and write two-page spread reviews including a rating out of 10, favorite scenes and attributes (ex. “Taking socks off first +30,” “Gee Whiz Dialogue +80,” “Cuddling -50”) adding up to a comprehensive numeral score topped off with either a recommendation or warning to stay away.

In 2022, I’m guessing a series of vintage porn reviews could quickly lead to twitter cancellation drama, but in 2005 it was witty and just vulgar enough for students to read on Wilder Bowl after class while listening to Gwen Stefani or Ludacris on an iPod shaped like a brick. Almost as outlandish as vintage porn reviews—at least for today’s The Grape—was the short-lived Sports section, covering Kobe Bryant’s (RIP) rise to athletic

fame, pay disparities in NFL contracts, the Oberlin football’s record losses in the early 2000s, and the daily lives of athletes in and out of the locker room. The sports section provided an interesting juxtaposition of Oberlin campus life, directly following the arts, successfully providing a diversified student-life profile for readers. As today’s students may have noticed, if you want to read about Oberlin’s athletic population you head to the Review for your fix; I think it’s important for us to know it hasn’t always been this way, and here at The Grape we have a history of sports journalism that drew in a wider population of the student body!

Some of my favorite segments found in archives were not in fact the fulllength articles, but the entertaining sidebars and extras. Many of us today know all about the “Oberlin Overheard” Instagram account, with an impressive follower count of 3,161 and juicy quotes often containing the words “yeobie” or “polycule”. Without easy access to the internet, however, one of the longestrunning sections of The Grape was birthed; “Overheard in Oberlin” in the Bad Habits section. With a new multi-page spread of killer quotes each week, this page-turner of a subsection contained gems such as “Every time I masturbate, God makes it snow” and “Is Che Guevara the Folgers guy?” An additional long-running favorite was the “Letters” section, featuring correspondence

between Oberlin students and community members to editors and writers at The Grape. Letters could be completely anonymous or signed, and the opening page of the Opinions section always contained a letter from The Grape’s staff to the greater Oberlin community on a topic of choice. In the Letters section, town or school events could be announced, political arguments could be had, and general opinions or musings could be shared from a wider variety than just staff members, in a more casual manner than a fully fleshed-out article. Then there were recipes: everything from “Drink Drank Drunk,” instructions on how to make Long Island Iced Teas on par with The Feve’s from the comfort of your own dorm, to the more straightforward “Apple Saffron Cake.”

There was an orientation issue that included an “Oberlin Bucket List” for new students, an alphabetically organized glossary-style guide of Oberlin specific terminology like Above Ottica, CDS, OSCA, Splitchers, and more. A guide to Oberlin dining halls and restaurants followed, along with profiles on random first-years found lounging on Wilder Bowl. Perhaps the most vile of contributions was a spread of gross photos of clogged sinks and inedible food labeled “Oberlin Jank” informing new students just what exactly they were getting into.

Of course, on the other hand, there are some things about The Grape and the consciousness of the students writing it that

continued have remained unchanged over the years.

For example, recurring fake ExCo catalogs, reviews of performances at the ‘Sco and the Cat, and countless complaints about the administration can be found deep into the archives. In the very first issue appeared an article on protests surrounding mass firing of CDS workers eerily similar to those happening these past few years, twenty-two years later. Overall, The Grape remains the “vehicle for the publication of social and political opinion…a means by which opinionated students and faculty and other community members can voice their feelings,” with an even higher diversity in terms of genre as the years have passed, with past editors shaping The Grape into a publisher of everything from the arts to sports to comedy and comic strips. After surviving through Lena Dunham’s participation and a global pandemic, The Grape’s archives continue to have much to offer up to curious eyes. This staff writer sincerely hopes that whomever has happened upon this issue has gained as much as she has from the history of such a campus favorite, regardless of whether you’ll flip right back to the crossword and move on with your day, or share tales of “Legal at Last I” and the price of womb chairs in 1999 to your friends.

Interview with Vikram Perry continued to me as peers outside of being an RA next year we can have a conversation and I might be more likely to fight people. But then the flip side of that is that you really have to be jovial and kind. I’m sort of curmudgeonly, but you know, in a way that I think is endearing. I try to be a kind presence in the hall and say hi to people in the lounge and stop and chat and talk sometimes. And of course, you have your events, but spontaneous ways of interacting are quite important because it gives people a sense of, “Oh, Vikram, is a person.” And then from there, if there’s something that somebody needs, they can contact me. That has been sort of my guiding force.

Yeah, I definitely see that in the ways that you’ve been interacting with people in Barrows. And then since COVID, has there been more responsibility on you as an RA to like kind of help with the social dynamics? I know a lot of people are having mental health issues with the pandemic.

Have you dealt with more of that?

I think that is true. It is a thing that has been noticed by every RA to some degree.

Last year, when everything was quite strict, it was hard for everybody. I felt my own mental health waning in a way that made it hard. I got the sense that most of my residents were consistently probably a little lower than they might have been. But I think I didn’t actually see more intensity because my previous year had been quite difficult. This year, my hall has actually been

quite remarkably chill. But I have a lot of coworkers who have not felt the same and have felt more of that question. But for me, I like all of my first years and all them are easy…

Easy going?

Easy going. But I think there have, you know, there continue to be sort of sort of social issues and factors that are difficult. In spring of 2021, there was this issue where some people were gathering in the laundry room as a place to be private but emotional because not enough people were allowed in each other’s rooms. Situations like that were sort of difficult because those were common spaces and that’s not great. It was a tricky thing. You’re supposed to maintain social distancing, but people need to be hugged sometimes. This year, because the social distancing guidelines have been more relaxed, it’s been a lot easier, I think, honestly, because people can hug each other.

Yes, for sure. You’re a graduating senior this spring. What experience do you take from being an RA and dealing with people who are going through such major changes for four years? Is that going to impact your life in the future? And if so, how?

I think so. I hope that being an RA has helped me be more willing to watch people change. I think it’s easy to look at a person and nail them down. In my years at Oberlin, in the last two especially, I have become oddly more cemented in my beliefs and

ideas. But I have felt myself become less judgmental of people who are not cemented in their ideas and beliefs. I’ve gotten the sense of like, “Oh yeah, no, you change a lot”. And I’ve seen myself change and I’ve seen at least 80 different residents of mine change. And it does, I think, shape the way that I see growth. I’m hoping to maybe go into education or social work or something, and I think being in RA is an exercise in just consistently being kind to people who are living a different part of their life from you.

I’m hoping that that’s one thing that I can keep as a skill.

Yeah. It’s very interesting hearing a senior be like, “I don’t know what I’m going into” because as a first year, I’m like, I need to figure out my major. I need to know what I’m doing.

If you really have a plan that’s awesome.

But also we’re all struggling. I mean, you have put stuff out there like, I’m actually going to be living in Oberlin next year. So I have to have a job. So I’m putting out feelers for a lot of different things, but I don’t have a sense of career.

There’s a lot I don’t talk about as much in this building as outside of here. But I don’t know what a career is with the current sort of economic reality and existential dread of the future that is present for Gen Z. I don’t know what doing the same job for forty years looks like when I feel like maybe the world is over in thirty. So I’m just trying to figure out both what I want to do and what

form of happiness I can find in my life, and how much of that should become tied to a sort of career. How much do you let capitalism rule the life that you live?

A very Oberlin perspective. Yeah. And one last thing - I feel like you very much separate Vikram the RA from Vikram the person. Is that true?

Yeah, I mean, I think I think it’s true. I do.

I do separate them. It’s not so much that I separate my person from being an RA. But we go to Oberlin where the idea of the hot take is this hot commodity. And I I think that that’s fine, but I don’t feel like that is as fun for me to share with all my residents because I want them to feel comfortable with me. I think the only thing I really separate is, you know, I think of myself as a pretty radical person. I am. I’m quite political and I’m currently doing a private reading on sort of the revolutionary history of the Global South. I’m going to be reading a lot of revolutionary theorists and actors and what they had to say about their various socialist experiments in the 20th century. Those kinds of things and the way that I view our existence, how we live morally, ultimately, they’re just the political side, to the thing I’m saying about kindness. It’s about cultivating kindness for a group of people. I think, you know, being good too, politically, is about cultivating that kindness in a more global sense.

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Do Oberlin Commencement Speakers Represent A Shift in its Values?

Valentine, a Marshall Plan official under the Truman administration, Staff Writer and 1938 saw James McConaughy, former governor of Connecticut, Historically lauded (or ridiculed, depending who make an appearance. It seemed that you ask) as one of the most liberal colleges in America, many more university presidents— Oberlin has accrued quite the roster of notable comand people who had worked with mencement speakers over the years. Perhaps the one the actual president—were being caveat being you might not recognize all of their names at ushered in. first glance.

When the world itself There are the “big four” that might jump out at was changing, this did not mean you as you scroll through the pages-long list: Woodrow that Oberlin had to change its Wilson, Maya Angelou, MLK, and, for fun, David Sedaris values—far from it. Leading into (maybe you’ve even heard of Florynce R. Kennedy or the 1950s and 60s, Oberlin hosted Harvey Gallagher Cox…). But beyond those few historian array of speakers who, if themcal iconoclasts, who actually constitutes the majority selves established, railed against of Oberlin’s commencement speakers? Who does our the injustices of the establishment. school invite to send its graduates off into the world, with Yes, this obviously included figures a vision of its values still fresh in mind? like MLK, who spoke in 1965, but It is no surprise, as the college was founded by also myriad lesser-known figures a Presbyterian minister and a missionary, that the first equally involved in the civil rights handful of Oberlin’s commencement speakers were also and other adjacent movements. As theologians and ministers of various sorts. This goes for early as 1949, Oberlin invited Ralph Oberlin’s first ever speaker, Frank Gaunsaulus, who was Johnson Bunche, the first African a pastor at the prominent Plymouth Church in Chicago.

American Nobel Peace Prize winner Many of these early speakers, though, were known as and key founder of the UN, to speak much for their social advocacy as they were for their at commencement. Some other noreligiosity. Take Lyman Abbott, for instance, who served table activists who spoke during this as editor-in-chief of The Outlet, a liberal periodical that period include Roy Wilkins, Richard chronicled the urgent need for various social reforms.

G. Hatcher, and Pete Seeger—who Almost all of Oberlin’s early speakers, in this regard, were you may have heard of. by some means attached to the inchoate seeds of progresComparing these speakers sivism that were beginning to bloom across the country— from the past to Oberlin’s current both socially, politically, and spiritually. round of commencement speakers As Oberlin began to establish something of a might cause one to grimace slightly. name for itself, though, its speakers seemed to adopt It would appear that, over the past a different nature leading into the 1930s. As opposed decade or so, we have traded truly to theologians, ministers, and philosophers, the school progressive, if established, voices welcomed decidedly more public—which, in many cases, for those less exciting ones of the meant more bureaucratic—figures to its podium. Maybe corporate milieu. As stated earlier, it all started after Robert Frost came in 1937 (I always simply because a name is “established” does not mean knew he was up to something). 1938’s speaker was Alan it is automatically a slave of the evil neoliberal machine.

Fionna Farrell

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However, have Oberlin’s speakers over the past handful of years really had something to say? Like their predecessors, have they put their words into action? Perhaps Art by Eva Sturm-Gross

The Case Against Public Sex Offender Registries Juli Freedman

Bad Habits Editor For a campus whose leftist presence seems highly critical of the criminal justice system and police surveillance, why does the practice of utilizing an archaic, invasive, faulty technology seem to be an almost nonpartisan issue, and one defended without any real look into its consequences? When presenting this idea to advocate for the outlawing of public registries in my Cultures of Surveillance class and in the The Grape writers room, there is a kind of palpable tension. I get it, it’s a touchy topic. To want to repeal this system seems like a betrayal to survivors and what will keep them safe. Most of the criticism of the registry I have seen in the media is from those like Brock Turner’s mother, whose motivations stem from wanting to salvage her son’s reputation.

It is difficult to find any kind of productive conversation about these public registries, but if you allow me, I want to wrestle with this topic from a viewpoint that prioritizes survivor safety and transformative justice.

The Jacob Wetterling Crimes against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Regisration Act was the first federal mandate that required a statewide database of sex offenders was passed by U.S. Congress in 1994, which required that the demographic information, place of residence , and the description of offense or offenses be available to law enforcement in order to monitor registered sex offenders (RSOs). In 1996, Megan’s Law was an amendment to the Wetterling Act which mandated that states were now required to make registration status information publicly available. Both the Wetterling Act and Megan’s Law were named after high-profile child abduction cases wherein a child was abused by a stranger, which sparked a moral panic around “stranger danger”. The reasoning behind Megan’s Law was that if the public was aware of who in their neighborhood has committed past cases of sexual offenses, then they could

protect their unsuspecting children from registered sex offenders believed to have high recidivism rates. While this may be a solution if most sexual abuse cases were caused by a registered sex offender whom the child did not know beforehand, or if registered sex offenders had unusally high recidivism rates, this assumption does not align with the data.

According to studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Administration for Youth and Families in 2018, 77.5% of cases of maltreatment against children is perpetrated by the child’s parents, with a 3.7% of perpetrators having a relationship marked “other” to their victim. In cases of sexual abuse, according to the National Children’s Advocacy Center, the trend remains the same: it is more likely that a child will be abused by someone they already know. The presumption that sex offenders have higher recidivism rates stems from faulty essentialist ideas rather than the fact that “significantly, virtually every class of offenders has a higher rate of recidivism than sex offenders” (Dr. Diana Rickard in Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control). In fact, in a 2011 study following the recidivism rates impacted by both registration and notification laws, researchers found that while there are benefits to the reporting and registering of sex offenders to local authorities, there is an increase in “recidivism among registered offenders, perhaps because of the social and financial costs associated with the public release of their criminal history and personal information.”

So who are there registries protecting? Online public registries are considered to fall under the scope of “Crime Control Theater” (CCT). Much like you hear TSA referred to as “security theater,” CCT refers to technologies that only provide an illusion of safety to combat issues that require more complex and nuanced approaches. While the registries may combat some moral panic, by providing online registries as the sole solution to child sexual abuse, we are letting vulnerable popula-

tions down. If the money that was funneled into keeping these websites running was redistributed to sexual education efforts in elementary schools that would focus on consent, bodily autonomy, and warning signs of abuse, we may actually see a decrease in cases of long-term sexual abuse. If children had an understanding of abuse, they may feel more inclined to confide in their teachers or another adult in order to receive protection. But again, this is not an issue with one solution.

Everyone who appears on the public sex offender registry has already served their time and have completed or going to complete mandated therapy, so why is it just sex offenders out of all offenders that have to have their picture, address, and criminal history displayed in one place? If we think about the state of our justice system, the difference between who appears on the registry and who gets a slap on the wrist can come down to racist, classist, and/or homophobic, biases of the judge. Not everyone who appears on the registry has actually committed the crime they are guilty of whether they did not commit a crime at all or were manipulated into taking a plea deal which included crimes that they did not commit.

The public registry’s negative consequences of stunting community reintegration and heightened recidivism, outweigh the promise of community safety— which it does not sufficiently achieve— that are rooted in stigma, false perceptions of recidivism rates, and systemic oppression. It is time to abolish it. *Parts of this article were adapted from my research paper for Cultures of Surveillance. If you are interested in looking further into my sources, or in how juvenile regisited sex offenders approach college admissions, feel free to shoot me and email jfreedm2@oberlin.edu and I’ll gladly send along my research.

Commencement Speakers continued most critically, do their voices and presence align with Oberlin’s values or undermine them?

Maybe there are two different answers to that question. Oberlin would never invite anyone who might incite a small or large uprising among students—-i.e. we will usually invite someone who at the very least says they are liberal. However, while in the past, this entailed civil rights legislators and open-spirited activists, now it means Apple executives and Foundation presidents.

Here I allude to Lisa Jackson and Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation, both of whom have spoken at commencement within the past five years. It certainly feels ironic when an executive at one of the largest corporations in the world reminds Oberlin students to “stay woke”----I only wish that I were paraphrasing. Ms. Jackson surmised that “staying woke” is “what we still need from you, Oberlin.”

Who is this elusive “we”? The entire rest of

the world? That certainly seems like a heavy weight to put on a bunch of 22-year-old’s shoulders. Whereas, in the distant past, it was real leaders who invoked Oberlin students to join them, Oberlin students have now taken on the role of “leader.” It can’t help but feel a little condescending—-like Oberlin is inherently separate from the rest of the world, and no more than an amalgamation of its stereotyped “wokeness.” More often is Oberlin now being called out, as a singular, autonomous entity, than called in to join the efforts of others. Collective, universalized efforts upon which the very name and spirit of the school was built.

What does this mean or signify about how Oberlin has changed? Has the school entirely lost the spirit of radicality that once existed at its core? I don’t want to come out and say that this has to be the case. If there’s anyone who’s still fighting, it’s the students. So long as we are cognizant of and actively try to reintegrate posi-

tive change into every sphere of Oberlin, then I do think the “original” spirit of Oberlin will always exist in some way. That certainly amounts to more than nothing.

However, it’s undeniable that the institution, in itself, is not moving in the direction that we’d hoped. Oberlin’s new era of commencement speakers seems to serve as a microcosm of this. Which foundation executive or Board of Trustees member will we be hearing from next year? As for closing out 2022, the graduating class will be hearing from Joshua Angrist, an Oberlin alum and MIT economist—-who also is head of MIT’s School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative and researches the relationship between human capital and income inequality. No one ever said that these speakers necessarily have the wrong ideas. They just might not be putting them out there in the right places.

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Joni Mitchell and the Utilization of Enthusiasm Zane Badawi Contributor

I have a tendency to latch onto musicians and listen to them almost exclusively for weeks or, if I have a real affinity for them, months at a time, which has led to some questionable phases of musical obsession, including but not limited to a Fall Out Boy phase, a Panic! at the Disco phase, and entire eras of the Beatles and Nick Drake, which very often overlapped. I even spent a whole year thinking Pink Floyd was the greatest thing to ever happen to music. My point is, when I get into a musician or group, I really get into them – no dillydallying, no tiptoeing around. It’s either all or nothing for me. My latest obsession is Joni Mitchell, the singer-songwriter icon whose unique guitar tunings are almost as numerous as her songs themselves. Her name often gets lumped in with the likes of folk revivalists such as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, and I think that’s a damn shame. With all due respect to those giants of the industry, Joni Mitchell is not like them. My thoughts about her and her music have been brewing in my head for a while now, so, rather than boring my poor girlfriend with random garbage she doesn’t care about, I’m spreading them out here.

The first thing that struck me when I started listening to Mitchell was the variable nature of her style. She wrote some ridiculously catchy, groovy, upbeat songs, like “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” and “Raised on Robbery,” which capture many aspects of the human experience, from youthful romance (“In France They Kiss on Main Street”) to longing for home (“California”). But, in each album, these bright songs shared the stage with melancholic piano compositions, like “River,” or frenzied, experimental soundscapes, like “The Jungle Line.” That’s the great thing about her catalog; she never stays on one idea for long. She hops from place to place, from style to style, from guitar to piano to dulcimer, all the while penning captivating lyrics that somehow manage to match her beautiful instrumentals in terms of quality. It’s not every day, or even every decade, that we see someone who is so outstanding both lyrically and sonically, someone who is as competent in poetry as they are in musicianship – but Joni is the exception, and she is one hell of a wild exception. Better yet, her voice is something incredible. Many

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of her songs’ vocals include sharp turns in pitch direction, opera-like vibrato, and ridiculously broad range, all of which she pulls off with ease.

Anyway, that’s enough talk about what Joni Mitchell could do; let’s discuss what she did do. I’ll just come right out and say it: I think her output from Blue to Hejira (For the Roses, Court and Spark, and The Hissing of Summer Lawns between them) is a perfect fivealbum run, with each having its own distinct aura while maintaining a perfect assortment of styles. I have plenty to say about For the Roses and The Hissing of Summer Lawns, but I’ll just focus on Blue, Court and Spark, and Hejira here for the sake of (a bit of) brevity.

Blue speaks almost exclusively about love and loss, and it paints a bleak but hopeful picture of life in which sadness is ever-present but doesn’t tend to last long – and how could it when Joni has such a knack for writing heart-warming songs? Love can take many forms

in this context, such as a mother’s love for her child, or that joyous feeling that comes with being in an intimate relationship with someone you can’t get enough of. Loss, on the other hand, is presented as a part of and, at the same time, the antithesis of love – losing the spark you once had with a lover, or losing a child because you don’t have the means to care for them.

Court and Spark is full of lush, rich, and often jazzy tracks that feel deeply personal. They feature ‘me’s and ‘you’s and everyday occurrences like train rides and career qualms that manage to entertain the listener with relatable lyrics and ear-catching stories, metaphors, and imagery. This was somewhat of a refrain from the confessional songwriting Joni had gotten used to in her previous albums, more focused on painting landscapes than conveying ideas. Even so, Mitchell has a lot to say, and there are plenty of themes to be found throughout the eleven tracks, from feeling misunderstood to longing Art by Eliza Youngman and Olive Polk

for love in a lopsided relationship.

Hejira feels like a haphazard road trip, spurred on by a heartbreak so profound you can’t help but up and leave. Meditations on aimlessness and Joni’s sense of self give context to the instruments that are just bare enough to deliver a lonely and, at times, uneasy tone. This album features some of Joni’s most powerful songs; whether she’s reminiscing to a friend-turned-acquaintance or describing the isolation of her lonely travels, her words leave a mark on you that does not quickly fade. I truly think Hejira is Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece; it perfectly captures everything that makes her so great. Her poetry, singing, instrumental work, and general atmospherebuilding all culminate to create something much more than the sum of its parts.

I’m writing about Mitchell’s music here because I want to spell out how much I love and respect the art she created. In an article that will be over a year old by the time this is published, Jeff Slate made his opinion known that the likes of Joni Mitchell would be forgotten by history, a mere footnote compared to Dylan and the Beatles, if she’s even that lucky. But I think Slate is as wrong as he can be. Take Harry Styles for instance: he performed a fantastic and faithful cover of Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” on BBC Radio 2, and he even stated that he was “in a pretty big Joni hole” while writing his second studio album, Fine Line. I think being a major inspiration for one of this generation’s most prominent songwriters and pop stars warrants a bit more than a footnote, but that isn’t really the point. Joni Mitchell will not be remembered because of who she inspired, but

how she inspired them. She very well may (and definitely should) be considered among the most important songwriters of the twentieth century in a few decades’ time – a marvelous and idiosyncratic example of just how great pop music can be. And that isn’t to say that Joni Mitchell is underrated by any means; she is already one of the most celebrated singer-songwriters to ever pick up a guitar, and the amount of praise Blue receives from critics is ridiculous (she has other albums, guys). Still, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say most of the spotlight is taken up by other artists, people who were more immediately influential and could be seen as products of their time, Dylan foremost among them.

Now, I’m as much a fan of Dylan as anyone who cares about twentieth-century pop music, and maybe even a little more than that. I mean, my high school senior quote was a Bob Dylan lyric, which, yes, I absolutely regret choosing. But despite all my love for ol’ Bobby Folksinger, I have to admit his songwriting can get a bit repetitive after a while. The five-or-so-chord songs that make up a huge chunk of his discography, while featuring some incredible lyrics, can get pretty damn uninteresting for people craving more than just profound writing. I don’t think that’s really a criticism, it’s more of an observation on his style; he writes songs that are more revered for their words than their music. He’s a great poet and an above-average musician – that’s not a sin.

But what is a sin is the fact that he so massively overshadows his contemporaries. Artists like Neil Young, Jim Croce, Bert Jansch, Paul Simon, and, yes, Joni Mitchell just can’t seem to reach the legendary status that Dylan

has achieved. But I think all of these artists, especially Joni Mitchell (I don’t know if you can tell but I kinda like her stuff), deserve as much credit as, if not more credit than, Bob Dylan.

That’s why I’m writing this down. I have over 1,300 words at this point, all of which I’ve written during midterms week. I am so passionate about this that I really can’t help but spill all of my thoughts onto paper, even if it means I’m doing this instead of studying. Make no mistake, this is no objective review of Joni Mitchell’s catalog, this is a huge fan gushing over her music because he has too much time on his hands. I absolutely adore everything about her music and the more I listen, the more I find to love. It’s a silly thing, but her music gives me something to gush about. I feel like being a college student has removed a lot of passion from the things that I once did solely because I liked to do them.

The stress of keeping up appearances and maintaining my GPA is now balanced out by me turning my focus as often as I can to the things that I love, which is how this article came to be. Hopefully, it inspires you to listen to Joni’s music, but if it doesn’t, I hope it at least inspires you to rediscover something that you love and just spend some time gushing over it. Admire it, enjoy it, and talk about how much you love it to anyone who will listen – I bet they’ll be happy to hear about your passion.

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NDAs I’ve signed and what they were about Juli Freedman

Bad Habits Editor Boy have I signed quite the number of NDAs in my thousands of years on this planet. But what these bastards didn’t even see coming. . . I don’t know what the fuck an NDA is! New Dance Alert? These bozos just push a paper in front of me and are like do not tell anyone about this, as if a silly piece of paper (that I will eat later) is gonna stop me. No way! So here is a list of the top 4 NDAs I have signed, and what they were really all about.

1. Being Rihanna’s Surrogate

Shocked? C’mon! I mean we could all smell a fake belly from miiiiiles away. Rihanna and A$AP (yeah we are on a first name basis) plucked me off the street and shoved me in a van saying “damn girl you would be so hot pregnant” and I was like “Oh I actually get that a lot! Thank you!” and the rest was history. They have been so chill. I asked if I could go to Cedar Point and do all the loopy ones and they were all like “yessss bitch.” They made me sign this NDA during the first trimester, but I think they would be cool with me telling you all this since we are so close.

2. Being a producer on the Bachelor

I briefly worked on Claire’s season, where she is most notable for being the oldest bachelorette. I think they said she was 39, but in real life, that girl was 85. My main job was spoon feeding her soup, popping in some Werthers when she got cranky, and sponge bathing her.

I mean it was pretty weird. Not because of the old thing, but more so the fact that they were saying that these guys were in their 30s, when most of them were pretty fresh out of high school. I said something about prom and this one guy was like “I can’t wait to go to prom next weekend at my local high school with all my high school friends” and they took him out back and shot him. I forget what that NDA said but it was a really great showbiz learning experience!

3. Writing Every Dua Lipa Song

Me and Dua were chillin poolside when she turned to me and was all like “oy mista, me arse hurts! My bird is total fitted but I don’t know whether to ring him on the telly” and I was like “they should really make some NEW RULES about this” And she was like “Mate, that’s brilliant! You fooken wanker,” and we have been collaborators ever since! I did end up writing the whole song and then every song since while she brushed my hair with a golden comb. But she is just so insecure about her songwriting abilities, I did what every good best friend would do and let her have it and signed that NDA, whatever it means.

4. Faking Bob Saget’s Death

My dad’s close friend (who thinks I am really mature for my age) Bob came up to me shaking me by the shoulders all like “I am in some real deep shit Freedman! Don’t tell your dad!” and I was all like “Calm down jabroni! What’s going on??” and he was going on and on about like wire transfers and secret accounts in the Cayman Islands and the dolphin trade and I was like “you are making noooo sense old man.” And

I swear he stared right into my soul and said, “you are the only one I trust, I need to know if you have a trap door casket guy” and I was like “for sure” and he gave me the most tender kiss on the forehead. Anyways, I am not sure what he said to my guy but I do not know where he is.

Oh and I had to sign some paper in the midst of this. RIP Bobby Sags.

Art by Martina Taylor

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This is The Oberlin Grape’s recurring installment of Ask Dr. Gags, an advice column from our resident sexolo-

gist Dr. Gagatha McCreampie. If you have a question about sex, intimacy, dating, or how to seduce a lover with a little trail of peanut M&Ms (pretty self-explanatory) feel free to reach out to Dr. Gags by emailing thegrape@ oberlin.edu

Dear Dr. Gags, Your column has really helped me navigate intimacy during my first year here at Oberlin.

I was wondering if you could help me out with one last question before the year ends? Should I stay with my girlfriend and do long-distance over the summer? It was so easy when we both lived in Hark together, we would meet in the communal shower every morning and talk about our days over a bowl of burnt beans each night. But now I’m scared!!

SOS Dr.!!!, Naked and Afraid of Long Distance Dear Naked and Afraid of Long Distance, It feels like just yesterday I was ending my Freshman year at Lewis & Clark in 1932.

God, I miss college! Back then, we also used to shower together (we were all single when we got in the shower…). Anyways, I adore long-distance questions. Ultimately, this is a decision you must make for yourself, but I can help guide you along.

A few questions for you–how much do you like your girlf? And how long have you been going steady? I know I’ve brought this up a few times before, but when I was in that open-relationship with Andy Warhol in the 60s, we did long-distance for a few months while he was traveling the world looking for inspiration for his f*cking Marilyn Monroe pop art and that soup can sh*t!!

Since sexting wasn’t invented yet, we had to send disgustingly graphic letters with polaroid pictures and detailed illustrations. It was real hot at first, but got old fast. Luckily for you, there are so many more ways to get nasty via the internet!

Stay hopeful cookiepie.

Dear Dr. Gags, My girlfriend is a mermaid and I can only cum using vibrators. It is a tricky situation because I want to cum blast so hard, but I don’t want to electrocute her! Gah! Help!, Down Where It’s Wetter Dear Down Where It’s Wetter, First off, congratulations! I heard that mermussy hits sooo different. It’s at the top of my bucket list! Okay not onto your “problem” (god people keep sending me questions that aren’t real problems, you are all just crazy and irrational! Do you smell any gas coming from that light?), have you even asked your merGF if she likes getting shocked? I once went to this underwater BDSM club off the Florida coast, and the merbitches there were obsessed with grinding their raw mermussy all over these ooey gooey electric eels.

They could not get enough of it. I don’t know if your merbae is a total prude or whatever, but I think if you took the time to explore her culture you would see that electrocution is maybe what

Ily, Gags!

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Reggie’s Ridiculous Reviews: Future’s “I Never Liked You” Reggie Goudeau Staff Writer This year has been a minor struggle for finding new releases as of late. We get a gem like the Fivio Foreign album every once in a while, but most of the other recent Hip-Hop albums have been kinda mid. Thankfully, my boi Future has finally returned to save the rap game, and he outdid himself this time. I know that Kendrick Lamar guy is dropping something soon, but right now, I need to highlight one of history’s greatest lyricists (Kendrick I love you plz don’t hurt me). Future has so many fantastic quotables and tracks from here, and the deluxe songs only added more heat.

His intro, entitled “7:12 PM” here, is spot-on (as most Future intros tend to be) and features him perfectly in his element. He’s back with the ungodly amount of drug abuse and dealing and outlines that lifestyle well.

Sometimes he’ll mention it in an obvious line meant to get someone’s attention. For instance, the line “I got molly with the crystals, but I been back doing X” is memorable despite its simplicity. Other times he’s talking shit on such an elite level that listening to his bars gives you the equivalent of post-nut clarity. The bar about him shooting up the church and taking shit up with God since he’s the god on Earth was absolutely ridiculous. Still, that ridiculousness is what makes Future such a fantastic artist.

That first song easily rivals all of Mozart’s discography, but Future made sure to keep that momen-

tum up throughout the whole project. In the brilliantly named “I’m Dat N****” (yes it’s censored in the official title), he makes one of the most profound statements I’ve ever heard. The line “Fucked her in the ass, made her pee-pee” still brings a tear to my eye weeks after my first listen. “Keep It Burnin” with Mr. West is also very saucy, and has one of the best hooks and beats of the album.

“For A Nut” is also effective as the spiritual successor to “Pushin P,” and I still struggle with choosing between the two. On the one hand, “Pushin P” has gems like “I just fucked a cup of water” and the iconic “pesbian” line.

Still, “For a Nut” has more fantastic chemistry between Future, Gunna, and Young Thug along with other funny bars. Future’s line “Buy a Birk’ for the bitch fore’ I buy her flowers” is more of the potent toxicity I love. Young Thug made me laugh hard as fuck with a simple but effective line. “I just put some diamonds in her butt” as well, which speaks for itself. I feel like this might be the real reason Thug is getting put away besides the RICO charges.

The following two songs are easily in my top five tracks from the album. “Puffin on Zootiez” is one of Future’s most fantastic melodic songs up there with the likes of “Codeine Crazy” and “Too Comfortable.” The way this nigga rode the beat here was inhumane, and he had plenty of memorable lines here too. Even the simple ones like “You fucking me good, bitch you helping me win” are

An Oberlin History Lession: Izzy Halloran

Managing Editor

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so vivid and relateable that I have no choice but to keep listening. Other quotes like “Count up some millions then take some more drugs” have a similar effect. On the other end of the Future song spectrum, we have the next song called “Gold Stacks.” This cut is one of the best songs showcasing Future’s rapping side I’ve heard as of late, and the beat here is nutty. ATL Jacob outdid himself across this whole project, and I hope he continues to bless more artists with these instrumentals.

While I can’t review every song in-depth, I’ll conclude this with a few more of this thing’s most memorable moments. Future has fantastic chemistry with the added features on his deluxe, such as with 42 Dugg and Lil Baby on the track “Like Me.” “No Security” featuring Babyface Ray is another banger where Future plays off his feature’s energy perfectly. I might have to highlight the genius of Mr. Ray’s album “Unfuckwitable” eventually, but for now, I’ll stick to Future. Finally, the track “Holy Ghost” from the original album is the opposite of the title. This demonic instrumental featuring Future on go-mode once again corrupts anyone who listens, and I love feeling the darkness. Future deserves the lifestyle featured in this song where he’s in his big truck getting his dick sucked. Mr. Hendrxx did the damn thing, and I give Future’s recent tale of addiction and debauchery 8 percs outta 10.

Parties Pre-Covid

As the class of 2022 moves out of Oberlin and on to our fast-paced lives in the Big Apple, the City of Brotherly Love, the City of Angels, and the Windy City, now is the ideal time to pass down some Oberlin history.

Everywhere I go on this g*dforsaken campus I hear one question over and over: “What were parties like at Oberlin before this whole Covid mess? I would give anything to know!!!” Well buckle in, you’re about to get the history lesson of a lifetime.

One simple answer to this complex question is that they were just better! Allow me to take you on a trip back to a random spring evening in 2019. The air is crisp yet gentle as it flows through your slip dress. On your way to Mickey Mart, you twist your ankle as you fall off your platform clogs, but even that can’t ruin your spirit.

Clutching the mango white claw you purchased with your Connecticut fake id, you gulp that guy down as you stroll along Main Street. When you arrive at the party, you see 7 hot people smoking in a large circle. You make prolonged eye contact with 5 of them as you float to the door. Just as you reach for the handle, the tallest, sexiest, curliest-haired lesbian slams the door into your face, but she’s so weird-looking that it doesn’t hurt a bit. She touches your bare shoulder as she whispers an apology in your general direction, and you nod and squeak “It barely got me!” but your bottom lip is bleeding heavily

into your mouth. Now is not the time to turn back. You have spent too much of this year sitting on the floor of a divided double in South, staring at your crush in Stevie, and smoking a shocking amount of weed in the Barrows ruins (RIP), that you need to know there is more to Oberlin than that. So, you persist.

The stairs are long and steep, sticky with spilled diluted vodka and sweat. When you make it to the top, you are hit by a gust of the hottest air you have ever felt in your nineteen years. In a moment of weakness, you wonder if you should turn back, but the road behind you is just as frightening as what’s ahead. You push on.

Above-Ottica is one of the most beautiful apartments on campus, despite being half-ugly. Through the cloud of smoke, the intoxicating poppers smell, and the mist of Santal 33, you spot that guy with a beard that’s been staring at you in history class all semester, posted up in the kitchen. And although he has a longtime girlfriend, he will flirt with you <3 The line to the bathroom is long, but worth it! Behind the toilet hangs an imitation Eva Hesse sculpture, the one that looks like a bunch of hanging ball sacks. As you touch the sacks, you make a promise to yourself: I will never spend one more Saturday night getting high in East.

NEW Water Park Opens in Oberlin Juli Freedman

Bad Habits Editor You know what they say: there is nothing college kids love more than swimming in their own piss!

So lucky for us, the highly anticipated Squirtland opens up this weekend and boy do they have much in store for this splash zone!

Waterslides! Lazy Rivers!

Face Paint where the paint is nooooot waterproof and the guy doing it is a very heavy breather! Here at Bad Habits (recently seceded from parent company The Grape out of spite), we got all the insider scoop before the official opening. We sent resident pool jets masturbator, Juli Freedman, on the scene to talk to some stoked, or should we say soaked, employees.

JULI FREEDMAN: Thanks guys for meeting with me, I know it must be pretty hectic right now with the grand opening LEVI DAYAN: You got some nerve meeting with us PRIYA BANERJEE: Really fucked us over with the whole split. We thought you liked The Grape!

Art by Eva Sturm-Gross JF: and dental, which actually will cover my fang implants LD: Don’t look at me! You tricked me into giving you $50 bucks for what you said would be a necessary procedure! You said your teeth were falling out!

JF: Well according to SFC, my fangs are a very necessary procedure PB: Please give us back The Grape!

JF: No, now go on tell me more about your job as squirters LD: We tell the kids when they can slide down the slides PB: I work at the squirtdog booth. It’s like a hot dog but the bun comes pre-dampened.

JF: *huuuuuge hyena cackle* LD: We greet the guests with a song.

PB: God, why are you telling them about the song?!?!

LD: I don’t know I guess I have just lost all human dignity JF: No, please sing the song!

LD and PB: “Because I’m Squirting! Clap along if you feel like a squirter without a slide! Because I’m squirting!

Clap along if you’re wet and along for the ride! Because I’m Squirting! Clap along if you know what squirting is to you! Because I’m Squirting! Clap along if squirting is what you wanna do!”

JF: *slow maniacal clap* PB: That song was off the record right?

JF: perhaps. . .

LD: You have to say off the record before you say what you want off the record!

PB: I thought I did! FUCK LD: Please Juli, without Bad Habits, The Grape is tanking! And we know that you need us too! I heard that the campus has not been receptive to your “edgy” stuff!

JF: It’s very European!

This campus will never get it *lights out cigarette on

beret* PB: Yeah Juli, we will do anything to have The Grape and Bad Habits reunite for good!

JF: Hmmmm, anything?

PB: Yes, really, anything.

JF: Okay, well if you say anything, I want a lifetime pass to Squirtland LD: Done JF: And whenever I pass you guys in the hallway, I want you to sing that song LD: I guess we can do that JF: And I want Priya to give me cool girl lessons. I want to know what you know. I want your clothes, your hair, your shoes, and a boyfriend.

LD: Aren’t you like gay or somethin— JF: Hush! Yes I want a super steamy boyfriend to talk at.

If I am not pretty, popular, WITH FANGS, and not at arms length softly petting the hair of my new puppy boyfriend by graduation, then the Grape will be ALL MINE FOREVER. Deal?

PB: Deal.

LD: You really think you could make it happen?

PB: Oh, for The Grape, I’ll make it happen LD and PB: *jumping for joy* Grape! Grape! Grape!

JF: Oh, and one more thing LD: You already have a lot of things JF: One Squirtdog PB: Really?

JF: Yeah it sounds kinda good

JF: Why don’t we leave the past in the past, just for the sake of this interview. So what is the role you have here at Squirtland?

LD: Mmmmm PB: Do you wanna say?

LD: Not really PB: I don’t wanna say either LD: Our job is . . .um. . *cough* squirters *cough* JF: WHAT! I can’t hear you!

PB: Squirters! All team members here are called Squirters!

JF: Oh this is too good LD: Well we wouldn’t have to be squirters if we didn’t get kicked off our own paper!

JF: Awww mommy daddy miss their cushy little office and their 300k/year salary?

PB: They are paying you how much??

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Institutional Memory Preservation Society:

WOBC WALL GRAFFITI

Oberlin students have recently been shocked by plans to renovate Wilder that involve demolishing WOBC. Students are fearful for the station’s future not because of its place at the center of campus life or its independent programming, but rather because of the threat to WOBC’s sacred parchment— the wall graffiti. For it is on these walls that students have engaged in the kind of dialectical argumentation that simply isn’t available in classes or books or whatever.

So in the interest of maintaining this vital piece of institutional memory, we at The Grape will provide a selection of WOBC wall graffiti for eternal preservation.

Levi Dayan

Editor in Chief

Rejected Bops from WOBC Ellen Efstathiou Contributor

Everyone here knows about WOBC, that pinnacle of music amongst an extremely musically inclined campus, and sometimes it also has talk shows.

What people might not realize, however, is that when WOBC receives music to add to their vault, a lot of it is bad. There are a lot of bad musicians out there, and I’ve kept all their songs in my Spotify playlist: Rejected Bops from WOBC. Here’s the worst of what music-kind has to offer.

What combination of farting, walking, and talking will allow her to thrive? Lizzy Young is from France. Is this what it’s like in France? They just fart and walk and don’t talk? Is Holiday of Yule diss track is apparently no longer available on Spotify. You can listen that why the French language sounds so weird? If that’s the case then I’m never going to to it on deezer, though, and I don’t even know what that is. This cross between an SNL France! I can eat cheese and wine elsewhere!

Digital Short and an edgy teenager somehow thinks that it’s inevitable to be pepper sprayed at a Christmas party. Make sure you’re listening to the first Cranky Christ4. Happy Birthday Birthday Boobs by The Balboas. This was the first entry mas on the album (that’s right, this is part of an album) because the remix later on is to my playlist, and I don’t think anything is ever going to top it. The sarcastic tone of the the exact same thing, but with a different beat under it. Put this song on next Christsong is really what elevates it beyond just any old bad song. Now, at first glance it might mas to make it weird for the whole family! seem like the boobs are being celebrated, but that is nowhere near the truth. Instead, the singer mocks the boobs and the boob-haver for how bad they look on their birthday. So 2. Time to Play by Paul Nickels. This song is from the album With Friends play this song for someone with boobs that you hate on their birthday, and maybe they Like These and considering there are twelve faces on the album cover and he only has won’t realize until later on that you were mocking them. three monthly listeners on Spotify, he might need to reconsider some of those friends.

This song is really only useful for either a movie montage of a band getting ready to 5. Save the World Today by Igor Anicic. This We are the World wannabe is soooo record or if you’re an introvert pumping yourself up to hang out with people. Either vague. The listener is repeatedly told to “save the world,” but no directions are given on way, it’s super generic and you’ll find yourself skipping it every time it comes up. how to do this. And I’m a follower, not a leader. At one point, Igor tells us to “change the way the world is spinning round.” Now, I’m no man of science, but I am taking Astrono3. She Farts While She Walks by Lizzy Young. I’ve heard that every song my 100 right now, and I’m pretty sure if we changed the way the world was spinning, that tells a story, but I don’t know what story this is supposed to be telling. The first lyrics would be pretty bad. Our seasons would be all out of whack! In short, Igor Anicic is trying we hear are “She farts while she walks, she doesn’t know how to talk.” What does this to destroy us under the guise of saving the world with Facebook inspirational quotes. mean!? I understand farting while walking, that’s happened to everyone, but why can’t she talk? Is the farting the way she talks? Can she not talk because she is farting? THESE ARE ALL REAL SONGS. LISTEN AT YOUR OWN RISK.

1. Cranky Christmas by The Bad People. At least they’re self aware! This

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crossword!!

ACROSS 1. Component of blood, plural 7. Doctor of Dental Surgery 10. Not serious 11. Center of the Earth 12. Place for eating in a park 14. Like a good neighbor 15. Morrison of Lorain, Ohio 16. Airport security 17. Modus operandi 18. Type of salt 20. If you are close, than I __ ___ 22. Write this if you have something to add at the end of a letter 23. Pen tip 25. ….on the side of caution 26. Something done out of passion 28. What’s written next to the picture of the Cheez-It on the box 30. British slang for man 31. Birds that resemble blackbirds 33. Not yet a teen 34. The answer to this one is ASTENSE DOWN 1. Computer brand 2. Portable computers 3. People from China and Japan are these 4. A fastener made of rubber that attaches to a surface using the force of air pressure 5. Lion’s hair 6. A friend gives you one of these when they drive you somewhere 7. South or Barrows

8. Beats by this guy 9. For this animal, males get pregnant instead of females 11. It takes forever to do this to onions 13. House 14. Take one of these if you get too close

17. Takes it all in 19. Michigan Infrastructure & Transportation Association 21. H2O below 32 Fahrenheit 24. Neckties made of chords secured with a clasp 26. Small amount 27. The answer to this one is FSUT 29. Vital life force 32. Southeast 27

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