Issue one Spring 2022

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Vol. 69 NO. 1

OBERLIN’S ALTERNATIVE STUDENT NEWSPAPER EST. 1999 March 11, 2022

ISSUE ONE COVER ART

ISSUE ONE COVER ART

Front Cover: Wilson Crook

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

Back Cover: Tucker Panitch

Saffron Forsberg Arts and Culture Editor

Anna Harberger Layout Editor

Juli Freedman Bad Habits Editor

Eva Sturm-Gross Art Director

Fiona Farrell, Teagan Hughes, Nico Moreta, Raghav Raj, Emma Kang, Anna Holshouser-Belden Staff Writers

Jules Crosetto, Olive Polken, Molly Chapin

Letter from the Editors Priya Banerjee and Levi Dayan Co-Editors in Chief

Hello to all of our faithful readers! Welcome to the first issue of the new year. Not much has changed here at the Grape since the last time you saw us, but we do want to let you know about a special project that we are working on. The Grape is making a yearbook for the Class of 2022! We were really bummed that Oberling stopped publishing the Hi-O-Hi sometime in the early aughts so we decided to take on the task ourselves. If you are a member of the Class of 2022, the Office of the Registrar will be reaching out to you in the next few weeks with a form to be filled out with your name that you would like to appear in the yearbook and the option to submit a headshot. If you don’t have the perfect headshot on hand…don’t worry! Because we will be hosting a yearbook photo day where you can get your photo taken by us! Oh, and another thing. We want to include all of the amazing photos of you and your friends that we know you’ve taken these past four years. We also want photos of anything else you’ve taken: campus features, party pics, ‘Sco shows, Chance Creek trips…literally everything and anything.

Email your pics to thegrape@oberlin.edu to have them featured in the yearbook! We love you and we are so excited.

XOXO, Priya, Editor-in-chief

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Production Assistants

Talking dance, discipline, and decolonization with Ami Dang Levi Dayan Editor in Chief

Like many of us, Ami Dang - composer, educator and Oberlin alumnus - has been keeping herself very busy as the world has slowly opened up. Dang briefly worked as a visiting professor in the TIMARA program during the summer semester. Presently, she’s set to go on not one, but two back-to-back tours - one accompanying The Weather Station on the European wing of her tour, beginning only a few days after this article will have been published, and another immediately after with fellow Baltimoreans and (half) Obies, Beach House. On top of this, she is also in the process of working on a brand new record, her first full-length since 2019’s Parted Plains. I first interviewed Ami Dang in the fall of 2020 while I was working on what would become the first of many articles about pay equity for musicians in the streaming era, and in the summer of 2021, when she returned to the college as a visiting professor, I met her for the first time. I intended to write a profile of her the next semester but never had the chance, as she left her teaching position soon after. So it was a great pleasure to not only speak with her, but also see her perform live for the very first time this past Friday. Her performance weaved remarkable sitar and vocal techniques with throbbing electronics - including sub bass deep and heavy enough that it felt percussive at times - courtesy of her partner Zach Christensen. Her performance was a rare chance to witness a group of students - many of whom, based on those I talked to, were not entirely familiar with her music - discover and become entranced by a great artist in real time. In return, Dang seemed more genuinely joyful to be performing at the ‘Sco than any other artist I’ve had the chance to see. This sense of kindness and openness is something I’ve heard spoken to by both students and luminaries alike, and it was such a great pleasure to speak with her and have her share her kindness and her passion for music with me.

You’ve done a lot of work focusing on acoustic environments and the relationship between space and sound structures. How does that kind of work differ from playing at Sco or similar venues?

Honestly, I don’t even feel like my practice has really been very focused on researching, or thinking about space and sound. I definitely think about it, but I don’t feel like I spend a lot of time in my process, focusing on, like, any one specific site. And so I think I just kind of take every space for what it is, you know? I mean, I definitely appreciate when I’m in a space that really adds something to the performance, but for me, the ‘Sco is like the best neutral club. Because there’s way worse than that. I mean, I performed at the cocktail hour of a wedding a few months ago. *laughs* One thing that’s nice about the ‘Sco is that the sound is great, those subs are really nice. For me, the number one thing hands down is a good sound system. And if the room is beautiful, but the sound system sucks, then that’s not ideal for me either, especially because in my music I use a lot of sub bass. Unless they bring in an outside system, a lot of concert halls aren’t equipped for that full range kind of electronic music. That’s changing more, obviously, but they weren’t really always designed for that.

Something I’m actually thinking about is doing more site specific work. I had kind of completely shifted to being a recording artist, but I do think of my work as sometimes

more conceptual, and sometimes more research driven, even though ultimately it is just sort of experimental pop.

Recently I’ve been thinking about working on a project that’s multimedia, or site specific, or more like an installation, as opposed to the typical thing of recording an album and touring it, which is very industry driven. I think of my work more as a process rather than a product.

What was your gateway into working within electronic music and then coming to the conservatory?

High school, for me. I mean, this was a different time when not everybody had GarageBand on their laptop. So I got exposed to ProTools by taking this music technology class my senior year of high school, which was the first time they offered it. But I think even before that, I was interested in timbrely electronics. I also took dance classes as a kid, which I was into at the time but don’t really do so much anymore. But I took ballet, jazz and modern, and it was actually more through dance that I was exposed to timbrely music than through my music education. I think maybe my dance teachers were looking for more left-of-center music than my music teachers, because I was in choir and also taking sitar lessons, which were very strictly situated in Hindustani classical music. So it was more through dance that I got interested in that kind of music, and then I was like “maybe if I take this music tech class, I’ll be able to record myself or record my voice and then see what I can do with it.”

I didn’t actually apply for TIMARA right away. I came here as a college student, and then my first semester, maybe during orientation, I found out about the TIMARA program, got into some of the first classes and then I applied to become a major. I was double degree for a bit, and then I dropped the non-TIMARA part of it.

It’s interesting that dance was your gateway into experimental music, considering the historical relationship between the two. I’m thinking particularly of John Cage and Merce Cunningham.

Exactly. And, in terms of artistry and choreography, I think contemporary dance is more widely supported than, let’s say, the funding of contemporary composition, which is the musical equivalent. I mean, most people are funding orchestras playing music that hasn’t been new for more than 100 years. Here, there’s a lot of people who uphold contemporary music - and you also have plenty of people who don’t - and out in the world it’s even slimmer. It speaks to the way music has developed in our culture, where there’s highbrow and there’s lowbrow, there’s serious art and there’s pop, there’s high art and there’s everybody else, there’s “Western” and “Other.”

In terms of Indian Classical music, are there any musicians that influenced you or that you are particularly fond of?

Good question. I’ll be honest, I don’t follow as much Indian Classical as much as I feel like I should *laughs*,

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Ami Dang continued or people think I have. But there’s this amazing singer, Kaushiko Chakraborty. She’s just out of this world, has insane control over her voice, I mean it’s just wild.

Her work is really phenomenal. Also, really, my guru, Anupam Mahajan. I took a gap semester while I was here at Oberlin, I came here and then kind of realized there wasn’t really support for Indian Classical music, or at least not the level where I was. And then I ended up taking a gap semester and going to New Delhi, and I established a relationship with my guru there. I took voice lessons too, and also tabla lessons, which I only ever did during that time. But it gave me a really solid foundation for understanding tal - rhythm in Indian music. And so I just took all these intensive music lessons in Indian music during that era. She’s a phenomenal player, she has not been recognized nearly enough for her work.

Relatedly, during your performance last night you talked about how you incorporate the sitar into a non-traditional context, which irritates some people, but you view it as just the only natural form of expression for your music. Are there any people who you’ve taken influence from in terms of using the sitar in that kind of non-traditional setting? Because at the same time, people have been decontextualizing the sitar for decades.

Yeah, that’s true. It was so popular in the West in the ‘60s and ‘70s, with the Beatles and whatever else, and definitely that influence was there for me. It’s funny, because I don’t have a ton of fans of that generation, but then every so often, there’ll be like a 60-something year old head at a show who’s like “yeah, I haven’t seen a sitar in 40 years!” But I can’t really point to any specific artists. I think for me it was kind of like growing up within this household where there was kind of a cultural clash.

My parents are pretty religious, kind of conservative, and the soundscape at home was Bollywood, Indian Classical, Light Classical, and my family is Sikh, so Sikh religious music. And then, you know, top 40, everything else I listened to and that my sisters and my friends listened to, and also what I heard in dance class. So to me it’s just like such a natural expression, and what I make comes out of all of that more than any specific artist.

It’s funny, as I was asking that question I was trying to think of non-conventional usage of the sitar outside of The Beatles, ‘60s/’70s pop music and also corny New Age-type stuff, and I was drawing a blank. What was coming to mind for me was less so music incorporating the sitar and more the kind of Indian-influenced music that represents more of a genuine cultural exchange, like the Coltranes and Terry Riley.

Yeah totally, 100%. Definitely stuff like La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, the Dream House, and they learned from Pandit Pran Nath, all of that is amazing. And of course, Phillip Glass. I did listen to that Phillip Glass and Ravi Shankar collaboration, and I’ve listened to that album Einstein on the Beach so much. That has definitely influenced my work, and also validated it to some extent. I feel like I’ve gone through a lot of cycles

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of asking myself “should I be making this? Do people like this? Is this interesting? Why am I doing this? What is cool?” Because there’s a lot of those questions when you make any kind of art form. And so then, when you see that there is a history and a lineage to this music, it helps validate your work. I mean, my family is not very artistic, my parents were always like “hey, just keep tinkering with your noise making… things,” *laughs* and my sisters are all like “I just like your sitar clean, without all the other stuff.” You know, you hear that a lot when you’re making music that doesn’t really have a frame of reference for most mainstream listeners. So then hearing something like the Indian Classical influence on Einstein on the Beach was huge.

It’s interesting how that works, where it’s like on one hand it’s music that’s given this unfair, kind of embarrassing connotation because of trends in the 60s/70s, but then on the other hand, it’s also one of the foundational building blocks of contemporary music.

Yeah, and I think on the other side too, I’ve reflected a lot on the way oldies Bollywood has affected my work. That music is so straightforward, you know, it’s like pop music in India, but when you listen to Bollywood music from the ‘40s through the ‘70s, it has that warm quality that all music from that era had. Like, you can hear that tape delay on the vocalists from that era, and that’s not what they’re doing now. But I feel like that has influenced me a lot, because I was thinking “ok, how can I take those effects or that timbre quality and take that further?” Back then there were all these really twangy sitar choruses and it sounds like there’s 10 people playing sitar on one track.

And that music is all mids and trebles because obviously in that era there was no sub bass or bass, and then you combine that with my interest in electronic music, deep house, and also hearing that music on huge systems.

Something I love about live music is that it’s a tangible, physical experience just as much as it is an aural experience. You can feel the music in your body more so in a live hall than if you’re listening to a recording at home.

It definitely makes sense that Indian music has had such a major influence on new music. At the same time, you were talking a little bit about how there are these rigid structures and rules within Indian musical forms. And it feels like with any form of contemporary music, there’s always some sort of deconstruction of these structures. How do you square those two things with your music?

I mean, I hated sitar in the beginning because my mom kind of did the tiger mom thing of, like, “it’s 10 PM and you haven’t practiced? You have to practice before you go to bed.” I definitely grew up in that environment, and as much as I resented it at the time, obviously, it’s made me in some ways a better musician. But I think I just do not have the discipline or rigor to do what it takes to be *just* a classical player, in any way, as opposed to just doing what I want. So I just didn’t have the discipline, but I love music so much, and in some ways I think that can drive you to create and think of something new and

different, because it’s so inspiring.

Answering the new music part, it’s interesting because there are people who are exclusively interested in the avant-garde. I mean, I like harsh noise music, I like new music, I like Indian classical, but I also love pop music. And this probably goes back to me growing up as a dancer, but I love dance music too. I remember at one point, as an undergrad, I was really not at all making pop music, I was trying to make very abstract work, which was kind of the definition of new music. I was also doing interdisciplinary work, like working with dancers and doing video art and installation. And then I remember just hanging out with friends singing some top 40 song and some of my friends were like “why don’t you ever make pop music? You love pop music!” I feel like I’m constantly working between the elements of Indian Classical music and the elements of avant-garde, and even within avant-garde, the highbrow sort of New Music and the “lowbrow” noise music. I fell into a noise scene right after college, and was playing totally disgusting basements and warehouses with other harsh noise artists.

And that was really a huge influence on my work for a spell, but also I still liked pop music, so there’s always a push and pull.

That idea that everything has to either fall in line with a specific kind of rigid structure or become its own rigid structure is pervasive, especially within academia, and even within new music.

I mean, don’t get me started on academia. I was shocked at how little the music curriculum has changed in between when I was here as a student and when I came back as a visiting professor. I mean, they’re just now finally fucking starting to talk about decolonizing the curriculum and that’s still gonna take another two generations to happen, if it fucking happens. The way that Western conservatories are accredited, there’s no room for music that is “Other,” like pop, or folk. I mean, there’s room for jazz, but even the way they treat it, it’s like they have a chokehold on what is and isn’t jazz. And to me, it just doesn’t make any fucking sense, because the reason we have so many people who are just so attatched to very traditional composition from composers who died 100 years ago or more is because of the way it’s been taught. The curricula that art schools have, where you basically have to learn a little bit of every medium, and you’re taught in this very multidisciplinary way, feels totally different. You focus on something specifically, but it can be on anything, it can be on a concept, it can be on a process, it can be on a medium, but it doesn’t have to be any one thing. If music were taught that way, our cultural landscape would just be entirely different. The way we interface with music, around the world, is a systemic failure.

Oh, absolutely. Especially in America, where there’s basically no funding for anything.

Right. And I’m still dealing with it, not here but out in the world. I left because I got a job with a small nonprofit called New Music USA which is a wonderful organization, but I’m also dealing with it in a different role,

interfacing with people who all have their own musical tastes, musical references and backgrounds. So, I combat that everywhere. I mean, as a visiting professor, you don’t have any power over changing the curriculum.

Even higher up, with more progressive forward-looking conservatory faculty, there’s no one person who can make that change.

Which is kind of ironic given our slogan. One person can change the world, but no one person can change the curriculum.

Yeah, no. And the other thing is these conservatories around the country, they’re all keeping with each other but they still can’t give up on maintaining white privilege.

What’s the process been for working on your new album?

This album is a little more singer-songwriter with an electronic production focus, as opposed to Parted Plains, which started with just me throwing on some droney electronics and jamming on sitar, and then as the process of making the album unfolded it became more composed. I’m not a very prolific lyricist, but when I do write lyrics, I always want to say something meaningful. And so this album is definitely imbued with some of my critique of our society, of the world and what’s happening. A few of the songs were written during the pandemic, a few were written earlier, I think the earliest song goes back to 2015 or 2017. I do this a lot, where I’ll start a track, drop it, then come back to it like a year

or two later. So a couple of the songs on the album have been kind of lurking around for a while and have gone through some iterations. And then this is probably common in most of my music, except for Parted Plains, but even though I’m not overtly religious I’ve always been really inspired by Sikh music. So, I’ll adopt basically a hymn or a verse from Sikh scripture, called a Shabad, and it’s all about achieving a peaceful and self-satisfied state of mind, and once you do, being less emotionally affected by the world and what’s around you. I think that’s a very relevant kind of thing to contemplate. I mean, we’ve all been there.

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SOSHA offers agency and community through letter writing campaign Teagan Hughes Staff Writer

Survivors Of Sexual Harm & Allies, or SOSHA, is currently holding a letter-writing campaign aimed at providing survivors an avenue by which to share their personal experiences in whichever way they choose. First conceptualized in February 2020, SOSHA is an independent organization run by Oberlin students that supports and advocates for survivors of sexual harm on Oberlin’s campus. The letter-writing campaign began accepting submissions on February 21st, and will run through March 19th. Those who submit a letter may choose whether they want their letter to be shared privately-that is, read only by the SOSHA board--or publicly, in weekly installations that will begin in April on SOSHA’s social media outlets.

Once all letters submitted for publication are shared, the SOSHA board hopes to create an art installation involving the letters. Ella Newcomb, the SOSHA board member helming the campaign, says that “The goal with this program was to allow a space for students to share stories and know that someone is listening.”

Newcomb, who is a current third-year, serves as SOSHA’s Chair of Community Support. In running this campaign, Newcomb says that she aims to “provide anonymity where it’s desired, and to create visibility where it’s needed.” She emphasizes that although the campaign is called a “letter-writing” campaign, the materials submitted to the campaign need not be letters in the traditional sense. “While it’s called ‘letter-writing,’ your thing can take whatever form you want. I know for me as a survivor, when I write about my experience it can be very difficult, so I always choose to write through poetry…Some people wanna submit music, some people wanna submit a drawing--that is totally fine. I think it’s really important to remember that in telling your story, you should have agency not only over what is said, but how it is said.”

College third-year Emma Hart and Confidential Student Advocate Riley Hall began developing the idea for SOSHA in February 2020; SOSHA was officially founded seven months later, in September 2020. Newcomb says that SOSHA grew from the recognition of the College’s lack of community for survivors. “There wasn’t a communal space,” Newcomb says. “Survivors often sought support from the Counseling Center, or from Riley Hall, who is the Nord Center Confidential Advocate. There are support systems through Title IX and the SHARE office that work specifically one-on-one with survivors, and that is primarily pertaining to legal advice, as well as academic accommodations, residential accommodations, and those kinds of things. The support that was lacking was a space where surArt by Eva Sturm-Gross

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vivors could feel not alone, feel believed, feel supported, and have a community that’s around that shared identity.” To that end, SOSHA hosts biweekly listening sessions, as well as various forums, workshops, and socials.

The organization is not affiliated with or sponsored by the college; it is entirely student-run. The lack of college affiliation presents occasional challenges for the organization, namely attaining funding and booking meeting space. Newcomb says that SOSHA does all of its own fundraising, “but typically, the kind of things that we offer survivors don’t cost us anything, just our time.” Though it is not college-affiliated itself, SOSHA collaborates with several collegeaffiliated organizations to share resources and practices, as well as plan events. According to Newcomb, SOSHA collaborates with the Oberlin Doula Collective and is developing a relationship with the Sexual Information Center, or the SIC. In addition, “our biggest collaborator right now is Barefoot Dialogue, through the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life. They’ve been a really great resource,” says Newcomb, who also serves as a Barefoot Dialogue Facilitator. “They support us in allowing us to use their specific practices in listening sessions, and additionally are actually sponsoring Take Back the Night this semester, which is great.” Take Back the Night, SOSHA’s flagship annual event, will be held this year on April 22nd.

SOSHA’s current letter-writing campaign will culminate in a reception in Wilder Hall on March 19th, during which participants who have not yet submitted letters can write and submit. “My goal with having that space is having people that are trained in supporting people to be there,” Newcomb says. Riley Hall, Oberlin’s Confidential Student Advocate, will be present as a resource for attendees, as well as SOSHA board members.

Until then, participants may submit letters to the letterwriting campaign in one of four ways: dropping them in one of two mailboxes outside of the Confidential Advocate’s office in the basement of Peters Hall, emailing letterstoSOSHA@gmail.com, sending them via DM to SOSHA’s Instagram profile, @oberlin_sosha, or using a Google Form that can be found on the same profile.

The Oberlin Tree Massacre Nico Moretta Staff Writer

Bear with me because I love trees, but… I believe, crazily enough, that the flora and fauna of this town are easily Oberlin’s greatest treasure.I mean, some of the unique privileges of Oberlin are going on beauty walks, runs or bike rides, exercising outdoors, and exploring the Arb. Over the summer, I had the humble pleasure of taking tree-enthusiast Max Bauder’s TreeCo ExCo. Ironically, this tree-loving coincided with the 1st phase of the Sustainable Infrastructure Program (SIP).

Now, nobody should be opposed to the school’s mission to reach carbon-neutrality by 2025; however, it’s safe to say the element of tree-removal, intrinsic to the plan’s exhibition, was left untransparent. The school has rectified this since with the open discussion about when, where, and how many trees will be scheduled for removal. Yet, the evident arboricide that occurred (and will continue to occur), still deserves to be examined. Personally, I don’t want to read into why the school decided to leave the student body and townspeople out of this decision because there’s ultimately only one answer to carbon-neutrality here now. However, I do think its unfolding process, backward as it is, shows our detachment to the Oberlin environment, an environment that we are all obviously grateful for, albeit misguidedly.

In order to examine our predicament, I’m going to go back into a little bit of Oberlin history, so get on your, um, horses, and trot on over to ‘stumpville’ with me. Yes, stumpville. Do you know the luscious green space that centers Oberlin? Well, presently it’s known as Tappan Square, but it’s actually gone through a whole assortment of names and functions. Once upon a time, around 120 years ago, the bulk of Oberlin campus resided within the Square, or, then, just known as…wow: Campus. Now, if you’re not familiar with Oberlin’s founding, then here’s the short: In 1833, the Presbyterian ministers’ John Shipherd and Philo P. Stewart’s search for settlement in the once ever-expanse that we now weirdly know of as Ohio came to a close. Tying their horses to an Elm sapling, they allegedly evaded a meeting with a bear, and took it as a spiritual sign to build Oberlin around this young tree.

Oddly enough, that initial site, which is now Tappan Square, was where “early settlers began removing trees between 1833 and 1836 … in order to create space to build the college.” The space, then By Ila Astin donned “‘stumpville’ due to the large number of tree stumps left behind during the clearing” is relevant to us once again, for the Oberlin we’ve seen in the past 8 months (and will continue to see) is certainly a stumpville.

Priya Banerjee Now, it’s no secret that you need to clear land in order to Editor in Chief build, and, in our case, in order to rebuild.”It is not easy to have a good stand of trees and a good lawn at the same time.” (George On February 22nd, The Jones) However, trees carry history! They carry the history of this Allen Memorial Art Museum town much more than a building ever could. Because Tappan had opened Forms Larger and been so heavily deforested, the Historic Elm, once sapling, of OberBolder: Eva Hesse Drawings lin was one of two trees left standing by 1846. While I’m not sure in the Stern Gallery, the travelhow long this deforestation went unchecked, I do know that it was ing exhibition’s final destination the student body that made the concerted effort at rebeautifying after being installed at Muthe campus and town: “In 1836, as Tappan Hall came into use, the seum Wiesbaden in Vienna and students occupying it war upon the stumps, and under axe and fire Hauser & Wirth New York. An thay rapidly disappeared.” (Andrew Auten) It was the residents of accompanying 400 page volume Tappan Hall, the people who had to deal with the deforestation of Tappan to be the ones to clear the stumps of stumpville, and to begin of Hesse’s works on paper, entitled EVA HESSE OBERLIN, was the planting of the over 100 elms that would come to define Oberlin published by Hauser & Wirth in the coming century.

In 1898, the student body celebrated its first Arbor Day. The in March of 2019. The Allen is task? Well, the then “Ladies’ Grove,” or what’s now known as the Arb home to the Eva Hesse archives including 300 works of art in had been bought by the school in order to improve the under forested area. After years of empty plans that never came to fruition, the addition to over 1200 personal objects, letters, journals, and student groups like the arboretum and parkway committee and the documents once belonging to

Eva Hesse at the AMAM the late-artist. The collection was donated to the college by Eva’s sister Helen Hesse Charash. Ellen Johnson, art-world superstar and professor of contemporary art from 1945 to 1977, had a keen interest in her work and in 1967 invited Hesse to Oberlin as a visiting artist. Hesse so impressed Johnson during her two day visit that an exhibition of her works on paper was installed along the halls of the art department.

Shortly thereafter, Hesse’s 1966 sculpture Laocoön was acquired by the museum. It was Johnson’s early support of the artist that compelled Helen to choose Oberlin as the site where Eva’s memory and legacy would be preserved.

Forms Larger and Bolder presents Hesse’s life and work chronologically beginning with her student work completed at Cooper Union, and culminating in the sculptures done at the pinnacle of her career just years before her untimely death.

Her early drawings of gouache and ink reveal the beginnings of shapes and forms that she would become central later in her career. The second section of the exhibit turns to the brief period of the artist’s life in Germany, her once homeland that she fled during Nazi occupation. The work that came out of this period marks a turning point in her practice as she shifted from two-

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Oberlin Trees Massacre continued botany club would gather willing students in a ritual tree planting effort. Thus, the Arb everyone now enjoys, walks through, and explores is the product of the yearly effort made by the student body to actualize this town’s beauty.

The Oberlin tree planting history doesn’t end there. In 1903, following the lead of the students, the Olmsted Brothers, the children of famous Central Park architect Frederic Law Olmsted, put forth a plan “that called for removing all the buildings from the square to create a green space.” The Olmsted Brothers brought with them the ethos of Oberlin’s newfound foresting conservation efforts, putting the trees before the buildings. It was at this time when the college, after learning the importance of greenery, adopted a professional tree-planting program. The tumult of deforestation, however, reared its ugly head again when a plague of Dutch Elm disease swarmed the town, killing our most precious Historic Elm and many other beloved trees. While the college made its efforts, the impassioned response to this unfortunate tree virus came twenty years later when the college hired landscape architect Edward Thompson. He certainly made the campus more beautiful “than it had ever been before,” but his success to me were in engaging the community.

“Come plant a tree” reads a headline from the now defunct Oberlin Observer. “If you can handle a shovel and a rake, you’re invited to make your mark on Oberlin… a mark that may flourish well into the next century.” You see, within Thompson’s article is the implied understanding that planting trees is a community effort, that the canopy is of concern for everybody because trees are very much alive embodiments of history. Now, I’ve strayed far from the present, but there’s one last historical moment to touch on: John Frederic Oberlin, our school’s namesake, himself was a tree freak! And he made it clear that community and tree-

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planting were intrinsically tied.

I mean, children were “expected to bring a certificate from their parents, that they had planted, in a spot described, two young trees.” He even posed 20 questions to his parishioners on varying subjects of morality, spirituality, and community; number 12 being: “Have you, in order to contribute to the general good, planted upon the common at least twice as many trees as there are heads in your Family?”

Maybe there is some madness in all of this. Oberlin is much more developed than in the 19th century, and tree planting is an entirely new industrial effort, but the truth is Oberlin should offer the community a chance to plant some of these trees that will end up living here for “well into the next century.”

Why not continue this practice that is quite literally rooted in this school’s/town’s culture? The ritual tree plantings of Ladies’ Grove and downtown streets by students, faculty, and community members would be a great tradition to revive in some capacity, or at least in this one instance; “we must be engaged in the landscape instead of walking past it on our way to class.”

(David Orr) It might be an actual way for us and the community to engage with SIP beyond walking past mud pits and small talk with construction workers.

If not, we might see stumpvilles repeated over and over again.

Phase two is coming! What about the other five? I mean, it would be a sweet way to make up for Oberlin’s tree blunder of 2021, and I know students would show up. I’ve never planted a tree; I’d love to. I know Reverend Brian K. Wilbert is concerned about this. Did you know that it was Reverend A.D. Barber who planted the infamous Tappan Elm in 1836? How about we even copy the words of Thompson verbatim: “Come plant a tree… If you can handle a shovel and a rake, you’re invited.”

Email me if anyone’s interested in actually doing this.

‘From a principle of love, you plant trees for the public benefit.”

Eva Hesse at AMAM continued dimensional to three-dimensional. Her ‘machine drawings’ of amorphous pipes and parts evidently reveal her increasing fascination with form and space. Evolving from these machine drawings came a merging of sculpture and painting with her two-dimensional lines morphing into mounds of rope extending from the flat plane in such pieces as Ringaround a Rosie and An ear in a pond.

She returned to New York in 1965 intent on sculpture. This period is the focus of the final segment of the exhibition. The walls of the gallery are not filled with drawings and paintings, but instead pages removed from her sketchbook detailing plans for future sculptures. Small sketches of rudimentary forms are hung next to photographs of

the completed sculptures they were based on. Her scribbled handwriting crowds the pages alongside calculations and lists of potential titles. The Laocoön is the only sculpture present in the entire exhibition.

The sketches and notes present alongside the sculpture offer an insight into the artist’s mind. The Hesse archives at Oberlin allow for the artist’s work to be understood in a way that relates directly to her life, a rare addition to an artist’s oeuvre of work. Her work is transformed in the context of her notebooks; it becomes hyper-personal in proximity to her most intimate documentations of her process. Walking through the exhibit feels almost like an intrusion on her private thoughts, with postcards from friends and photographs of the artist further supple-

menting the materials hanging on the walls. We become acutely aware of Eva’s physical presence with the imprints of her fingers on the Laocoön and the chickenscratched to-do list torn from her sketchbook. Under a glass case is a framed five dollar bill that Eva had labeled as the first sum of money she earned from selling her work.

This exhibit makes clear the tightly wound relationship between Hesse’s personal life and work. In a 1970 interview with art critique CIndy Nemser just months before her death, Eva spoke repeatedly on the absurdity of life as the impetus driving her work. Her artist statement for a 1968 exhibition is a telling message: “I would like the work to be non-work. This means that it would

find its ways beyond my preconception.

What I want of my art I can eventually find. The work must go beyond this. It is my main concern to go beyond what I know and what I can know. The formal principles are understandable and understood. It is the unknown quantity from which and where I want to go. As a thing, an object, it accedes to its non-logical self. In its simplistic stand it achieves its own identity. It is something, it is nothing.” The Allen’s Forms Larger and Bolder offers the viewer an uncharacteristic window into Hesse’s oeuvre that aligns with the artists own prioritization of the personal and the self present in her work.

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Album Review: Angel in Realtime Jonah Covell Staff Writer

To say Dave Le’Aupepe and indie rock quintet Gang of Youths have been through a lot since their last trip to the studio would probably be an understatement. Ahead of the release of 2017’s “‘Go Farther in Lightness,” they moved from Sydney to London and watched their homeland popularity balloon just as they set up base overseas. The next year, Le’Aupepe’s dad, Tattersall, died.

Tattersall’s story and secrets dominate the group’s new record: angel in realtime.

After Tattersall’s death.

Le’Aupepe tracked down his father’s birth certificate, prompting a string of revelations. His father had claimed to be 70 years old –– in reality he was 80. He’d lived the last 50 years of his life telling his wife and two kids that he was born and raised in New Zealand, the child of a Samoan and a European Jewish refugee. In truth he was born and raised in Samoa, fully indigenous by blood. In his 20s he moved to New Zealand, fathering and abandoning two sons. Later on he moved to Australia, where he met Dave’s mother and began the life the younger Le’Aupepe knew.

Despite its focus on loss and history, the new album sounds like a joyous yell. It forms an exuberant paean to Tattersall and life itself. In keeping with Gang of Youths’ history of jubilant, dinosaur-sized stadium rock about cancer, divorce, and suicide attempts, angel is in love with living and proud to broadcast its heart in a giant wall of sound. Gang of Youths overwhelming earnestness and uninterest in irony has been cited as a reason the band hasn’t

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me.”

caught on in the United States. Even when self-aware, Le’aupepe refrains from employing irony, instead opting for self deprecation. On early highlight “returner,” a variant on the disillusioned rock star trope, he sings: “Send my regards to the shapers of the industry/ It’s highly unlikely they’ll be as blatant as that/ I got love for the theorists and the punks and the idealists / But let’s be honest, I’m only in it for the cash.”

Le’aupepe’s lyricism unapologetically reaches toward high intentions, but never without a wink and a grin, admitting he sometimes has no fucking clue what exactly he’s working at. On “forbearance,” a track where he ponders switching places with Tattersall, he cracks: “But I’m still the asshole down here nonetheless/In the comedown affray/Came to fix what I fucked up today/’Cause the world is not done with

Sonically, angel, though no brave experiment, does show Gang of Youth opening up their palette and leaving behind the U2 + Springsteen sound they’ve sometimes been stuck in.

Notably, a dynamic synths frames “tend the garden,” while Maori artist Shane Maclean contributes a striking prayer in Te Reo, which becomes the centerpiece of “spirit boy”. Throughout, the group samples from Cook Islander hymns to a powerful effect, especially on opener “youn in everything” and “unison”. angel in realtime. suffers from one major flaw: it’s simply too big.

Stretching 13 songs, 67 minutes, and a whole lot of string arrangements, listening to the whole thing in one go can feel overwhelming. Many of the songs are of the start soft and swell to a powerful climax variety, which can feel the tiniest bit formulaic by the end. The 7-minute finale “goal of the century” is made up of entertaining references and familial meditations, but offers no new ground to cover. The album’s tone of endless jubilation can work against the lyrical content. By the time “the man himself” comes on, the lines “I dunno if I’ll ever feel right / And let everything change to things that can make a man grow tall,” sound too much like affirmations, belying their questioning nature. angel., though outsized in its merits and flaws, is a work to be admired. Le’Aupepe and co. have done something pretty uncommon in this age: staking a claim for music that is an intimate, honest outpouring –– that just happens to be joyous and maximal.

Review: Babytron – Megatron Raghav Raj Staff Writer

Despite the constant, halfhearted insistence that there’s a bright future ahead, right now’s a pretty bleak time for professional sports in Detroit.

The Lions, as always, are in some sort of freefall. Their star QB left this past offseason to immediately win a Super Bowl with Los Angeles; the Lions, on the other hand, were the second-worst team in the league, posting a dismal 3-13-1 record. The Tigers and Red Wings, two franchises whose teams showed some glimpses of hope in the early 2010’s before ultimately squandering all their talent, haven’t reached the postseason since their respective 2015 seasons. The Pistons haven’t won an actual playoff game in 13 years; as of writing, they’re currently one game away from dead last in the Eastern Conference.

I say all this not to rub salt in the wounds of the Detroit faithful (sorry guys), but to emphasize the extent to which Michigan rapper BabyTron’s music serves as a sort of revisionist history. If you try to piece together a picture of Detroit from the 21-year-old hellion’s slick, smooth-talking rapid-fire braggadocio, you’d probably think that it’s Championship City. His new album, Megatron, borrows the nickname of Calvin Johnson, the Hall-of-Fame Lions wideout known for his freakish physicality and his unreal playmaking abilities; though he may be a scrawny guy with a dirt-stache and a haircut that kinda makes him look like Drake Bell (his words), Tron’s athleticism on the mic is often just as breathtaking.

On Megatron, much like a prime Calvin Johnson, he’s pretty much unstoppable. Tron’s raps, undeniably, are a force unto themselves. They bob and weave between pop-cultural ephemera, elaborate scam strategies, and seas of double cups, zigzagging through bouncing 808s and colorful samples with dry, ruthless precision.

His off-kilter flow sounds perfectly at home on any beat he hops on (for proof, listen to off-album cuts “Prince of the Mitten” and “King of the Galaxy,” two songs released on Youtube earlier this year with 39 combined beat switches between them). Even over 23 tracks, on an album that stretches just past the hour mark, BabyTron’s barrage of bars never gets boring.

It helps that these are some of the tightest beats he’s ever hopped on.

After having rapped over the Harry Potter music for Bin Reaper 2’s opening track, his affinity for John Williams

soundtracks continues here; “The Lost World” has Tron essentially in conversation with producer Danny G’s booming revamp of the entire Jurassic Park soundtrack, a breathless volley of raps that coasts between soaring horns, tense string work, and clattering percussion. On “Extra Butter,” he’s effortless over Mark A’s chop of the Bernie Mac Show theme, deadpanning references to Rocky and Rajon Rondo in the same breath he’s making fun of you for not having a car.

Even when he’s rapping on a normal beat, no one’s touching his pristine shit-talk. The album kicks off with “Letter to Cornelius,” with Tron addressing cornballs and haters; purely on a rhythmic level, listening to a bar like “Had to play the Faygo off a bag of Better Made/shit, I threw a stack up and made the weather change” unfold is astounding, a pitter-patter of internal rhymes that sounds even better over a mournful horn sample. On “Cobra Kai,” he’s firmly in pocket, rattling off lines about VLONE, Jeezy, and Call Of Duty, calling himself “Tron Wilkes Booth” as a 80’s synth pop sample unravels. The beat on “6 Star Wanted Level” practically morphs around him, finding a sweet spot between soulful vocals and menacing piano as Tron boasts about

everything, from the quality of his weed, to how he got kicked out of recess as a kid.

It’s not entirely an individual display; the guests here aren’t his usual compatriots, but Tron’s excellent curatorial spirit still manages to keep Megatron intact as a coherent whole.

On “Stupid,” GlockBoyz TeeJaee’s ice-cold bars play a nice counterpoint to Tron’s lyrical detours, anchoring the bass-heavy, “Wack Jumper”-esque beat to the Earth. Even better is “Chess Players,” where Tron and SOBxRBE’s Daboii team up to absolutely tear down the Southside Rich beat, a piano arpeggio that sounds as good with Daboii’s menacing bite as it does with Tron’s careening flow. And though GTP DaiDoe’s flow is perhaps far too drowsy for a song called “Huge Lifestyle 2,” Tron fills the sparse piano warbles with enough confidence to make up for them both.

The best songs on Megatron find Tron firmly in his comfort zone.

“Crocs & Wock” is maybe the most quintessential Tron beat here, a skittering blast of tinny synth samples.

It’s an ideal platform for his incessant flexing — about the ice on his neck, his thousand-dollar sneakers, the cards he’s scamming, the Backwoods he’s smoking, the drugs he’s mixing, the cash he’s

raking in. On “10 Toes Wherever,” one of the more densely allusive cuts,Tron references enough basketball players to put an all-star starting five on the court.

With a corrosive bassline, it creeps like a Hellcat on the Detroit streets, a prowling, potent display of flexing and trash-talking.

Then there’s “Jerry Rice,” which takes the BabyTron formula and sublimates it into a three-minute morsel of unmitigated brilliance. On an album like Megatron, a showcase of excellent production from start to finish, Machu’s beat on “Jerry Rice” stands out, gleaming like a jewel. Anchored by a slick saxophone riff, the bounce of its Detroit-style drum programming is transformed into something opulently suave; Tron, in turn, proceeds to eat this beat alive, delivering a potent, breathlessly witty string of shit-talk. In ways only he could ever really do, he manages to weave topics like Fairly Odd Parents, Tristan Thompson, and Ice Cube into a relentless string of disses, offering nonsequiturs like “brodie pulled up with a long clip like a movie scene” before going back to counting his cash. Like most of BabyTron’s best work, it’s funny, but also deadly serious — a balance he strikes so effortlessly that it makes my head spin.

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Timara Faculty Recital: Jessen x Stine Levi Dayan Editor in Chief

The conservatory’s TIMARA faculty recital program continued recently with a performance by Eli Stine, a teacher in the TIMARA program and an alumnus of the conservatory, alongside bassoon player Dana Jessen, an educator with the conservatory who has performed with orchestra lead by Anthony Braxton and Ingrid Laubrock, among others. The performance consisted of five pieces spanning several different mediums: “Vestigial Wings” (2018), a piece for video and multi-channel sound composed by Stine; “Copiale Interlude” (2019), a piece for bassoon and fixed electronics

by Jessen; “of an implacable subtraction” (2014/15), a piece for bassoon and fixed electronics by Paula Matthusen; “Where Water Meets Memory” (2020/21), a five-part piece for multichannel sound including strings, glockenspiel, and a choir, also composed by Stine; and finally “Through a Fragile Traverse,” a piece for bassoon and fixed electronics composed and performed

by Jessen with a video accompaniment created by Stine. These five pieces were performed in immediate succession with one another, with no breaks and no applause until the very end of the performance.

The five pieces each covered a wide array of stylistic ground while staying unified in their exploration of dynamics and sound. Stine’s pieces called to mind the recent Steamroom recordings of Jim O’Rourke in their usage of shimmering electronics, field recordings, and string instruments that would often build dramatically before abruptly cutting out. At points on the five-part “When Water Meets Memory,” the sounds would jump from speaker to speaker at a lightning pace, an effect made even more visceral by the fact that the piece was the only one not accompanied by visuals, or a live performance from Jessen. Jessen’s performances were sparser but similar to Stine’s in their usage of dynamics; Jessen utilized the full range of her instrument, whether it be resonant low-end drones or sounds at the very upper range that sounded as much like a violin as a bassoon. Perhaps most impressive was her usage of breath, particularly during the

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last piece “Through a Fragile Traverse.”

Jessen would sometimes make gasping and shouting sounds into her instrument, making it feel as though it was one with her own voice. At one point, she put down her bassoon and started blowing into different shapes she made with hand, creating a range of sounds that made me think she was holding a tiny instrument.

I first became exposed to both of these musicians through their collaboration on a piece composed by the great George Lewis titled “Seismologic,” which was included on a recording of his work titled “The Recombinant Trilogy” released just last year. Relistening to the piece while writing this, its usage of dynamics and spastic channel shifting was definitely call to mind the performance I had seen a few nights prior. Jessen’s bassoon-playing ranged from menacing, guttural grows to squelching, squealing lines, which were then frantically manipulated by Stine’s electronic treatments that made it feel as though the piece was dancing in my head. I had no idea at the time that the piece was recorded at Oberlin, nor that its performers were both involved with the Conservatory, and I continued to be unaware until just a few days ago when my friend, Sam informed me of the recital. The peculiar position of being someone who is obsessed with experimental/New Music/whatever you want to call it, while also not being able to read a note of music–and feeling very disconnected from the Conservatory– leads to a lot of surprises. I feel like some Oberlin students, who may feel as though they’ve exiled themselves from “culture” and “society,” are unaware of the rich musical history that Oberlin has facilitated over the years. Avantgarde music in particular has flourished at Oberlin, thanks in part to the TIMARA program and the way it made electronic experimentation more accessible to its students in a manner that, at the time of its founding, was as radical as any kind of musical institution could be. Stine and Jessen’s performance was a reminder that these sorts of insular music communities are just as important in expanding the vocabulary and possibility of music as any of the more recognized cultural hubs in the country.

Godessmen, $quib at the ‘Sco Anna Holshouser-Belden Staff Writer

After a long Winter Term/Omicron hiatus from live music, Spring Semester at the ‘Sco started off with a bang on Friday, February 18th with a show featuring two of Oberlin’s own student musicians: Goddessmen and $quib a.k.a Penina and Brock! Both TIMARA majors and practicing musicians of many talents with a focus in the electro-acoustic realm, the two artists let us know their thoughts on their recent show at the Oberlin ‘Sco, their ambitions and inspirations, and what’s coming up for them on–and–off campus.

Goddessmen, also known as Penina, is a first-year TIMARA major here at Oberlin and a long-time musician from Berkeley, California. Penina works primarily in what she describes as “experimental electro-acoustic freak-folk.”

In high school, Penina started writing and producing her own songs under the names Goddessmen and Penina BG, while at the same time playing in a folk duo called Mac and Penny consisting of banjo, guitar, and vocals. She says that neither her band or solo work done in high school was super “official” nor performed live,

Art by Eva Sturm-Gross

but that she was always around music in her day-to-day life. Music under Goddessmen, Penina BG, and Mac and Penny can still be found on Soundcloud, although Penina states she has shifted to the more experimental sound of her newer music since her highschool years.

The performance at the ‘Sco was advertised under the name Goddessmen, but wasn’t just a solo performance by Penina. She sang lead vocals and played guitar while a band made up of Dylan Hamburger on lead guitar, Xander Cox on bass, and Brock Bierly on drums played five of the six songs on the setlist. On the last song, Penina sang and Milah Brown played viola. It was the group’s first time performing together after having met for just a few rehearsals before the day of the show. The set list went as follows: “Sweet Talkin’ Guy” by The Chiffons, “Congratulations” by The Chantels, “Black is the Color” by Luciano Berio, “I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water” by Stonewall Jackson, “Silver Dagger” by Joan Baez, with Olivia Rodrigo’s hit “good 4 u” closing out the set strong.

Their show was composed en-

From Antigone (AtGN) to Olympus Reggie Goudeau Contributor

Performing in Zora Howard’s 2021 Antigone (AtGN) was by far one of the most valuable experiences I’ve had at Oberlin. I played the Guard, a mildly incompetent but loyal servant to Kreon.

While playing this role, my best line is still near the beginning of my opening dialogue with Kreon. I knew someone had buried a body against Kreon’s wishes, but I wasn’t tryna get clapped by him or his other, more intimidating bodyguard. To prevent this, I tried to explain that I wasn’t “...affiliated, associated, or incorporated in the wrongdoing.” Even beyond valuing individual practices and the final project, I loved all of my castmates and the chance to hop back into the performing world. Naturally, I couldn’t miss Olympus, a musical directed by Miss Caroline (Professor Caroline Jackon Smith) and student Cyril Amanfo ‘22, that involved my other previous castmates Tony Singfield and Gaby Castillo.

To be frank, these niggas went crazy and put on one of the best shows I’ve seen at Oberlin. I was stunned at the talent that came together for this production from beginning to end. And though a two-and-a-half-hour show can be pretty intimidating to watch, let alone perform for several days, the cast had no problem filling up that time with beautiful music, lots of laughter, and incredible choreography. The play focused on the two lead characters, Aphrodite (played by Fafa Nator) and Hephaestus (played by Gabe Gomez). Though they are supposed to take the throne as king and queen, the two are not internally mature enough to come to the task. Hephaestus even refuses the crown at first since he’s unsure of himself.

As such, this nigga Ares (also known as Thandiwe onia Augustin-Glave) swoops in trying to claim it for himself, and the rest of the play is the battle for control of Olympus.

Amid the central conflict, there are plenty of entertaining side plots, such as the blooming relationship between Tesis (Graciela Fernandez) and Artemis (Bianca Berger), that can’t happen until they unpack their own demons. Even before they confessed to each other and embraced, I loved their adorable bond and apparent chemistry (in terms of acting and intimacy). This whole show felt very queer in a beautiful way, and I could feel this energy emanating from much of

the cast. The play also features Athena (or Evyn Lundy) trying to pass on her mantle to the next generation and Dionysus (Michael-Anthony Mitchell) coming to terms with his alcoholism. Alongside these plots lie fight scenes, plenty of dance numbers, and plenty of great dialogue. The group went all out with everything from the music to the lighting in every scene. I have to shout out the sound team, ensemble, and everyone from behind the scenes who worked so hard here too. Their respective energy, tunes, and other contributions made the show better than the main cast already did.

There were way too many highlights here, so imma be mentionin’ a couple of my favorites. The damn rap battle was the most hilarious and intense thing I’ve seen in the Wurtzel. The bars were too powerful, and I could feel the rest of the audience sweating from the heat’s intensity. Almost every scene with

Ares was terrific, and I could tell Diwe had a fun time in the role. Ares was a complete menace from his introduction until his defeat, and watching him revel in his dickheaded behavior was fantastic.

He reminded me of the character “Kreon” from Antigone, a traditional pastor who does not respect women, gay people, or really anyone but himself. Whenever my boi Ares came on stage, I imagined “Thought It Was A Drought” by Future playing in the background. His lackey Enyo (Karah Innis) was also a great character, and their interactions related to the central theme of Olympus: getting people to grow a spine and believe in themselves very well. As such, it was perfect timing when Enyo turned on Ares following his defeat in the play’s conclusion.

Speaking of perfect timing, whoever was responsible for the running joke of Apollo controlling the music while never getting a solo deserves an award.

I appreciated when he finally got his solo too, and would not have been mad at seeing more of them. Even without Apollo, this show’s soundtrack was just as entertaining as the rest of it. The whole cast, including the ensemble, clearly spent a lot of time rehearsing these songs with and without choreography. One of my favorites was Ares’ opening song when he took control of Olympus. It sounded sinister yet triumphant and motivational, like Ares’ widespread stage presence. It makes sense since I’m generally a fan of Disney’s villain songs for characters like Scar and Frollo.

I got little to no bad things to say about the show, and I fully believe the cast deserved to sell out every night twice. Props to errybody who helped put this together in any capacity. I doubt this sorta show finna happen any other time while I’m at Oberlin. Still, I’m glad I had the privilege of experiencing it, and I hope others who saw it felt the same way.

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Album Review: Hell on Church Street Wyatt Camery Features Editor

I have only recently become a Punch Brothers fan. This is in part due to my private studies with Chris Eldridge, guitarist for the band and Oberlin Class of ‘04.

A gem of Oberlin’s “celebrity” alumni, Eldridge is not only one of the most creative acoustic guitar flatpickers working today, he has been a wonderful musical mentor for me and my peers the past year. While I could write this whole article about my time working with him, I will refrain and, as he has encouraged me to do, simply focus on the music. His main artistic project, the critically acclaimed string band Punch Brothers, released their sixth studio album, Hell on Church Street, on January 14.

Before we dive into the music, allow me to provide some context.

Hell on Church Street is unlike any Punch Brothers project as it is a cover album through and through. It is a reimagination of Tony Rice’s seminal Church Street Blues, a stripped down solo venture from

the late acoustic guitar titan. Eldridge worked with Rice during his time at Oberlin, and remained close for the rest of Rice’s life. In a genre that typically serves the ensemble, Rice’s album is an intimate presentation of his unmatched flatpicking ability, understated yet inviting vocal stylings, and penchant for interpreting other songwriters’ songs, from traditional bluegrass to contemporary singer-songwriter styles. Punch Brothers issued the following statement on the album: “No record (or musician) has had a greater impact on us, and we felt compelled to cover it in its entirety, with the objective of interacting with it in the same spirit of respect-fueled adventure that Tony brought to each of its pre-existing songs.” Indeed, Punch Brothers’ reworking of Church Street Blues showcases their ability to construct (and subsequently play) a highly conceptual and cohesive arrangement using the traditional instrumentation of a string band.

They lean into the conceptual element of this talent on this record. And why not? Punch Brothers have resisted the “bluegrass” labels from the outsiders while being distanced from the in crowd. Covering the most famous bluegrass album of all time then presents an interesting challenge, on top of the fact that it is performed by one man (and his brother, with whom I share a name) while they are five. They have wrought every emotion — particularly, dread, longing, and confusion — out of these songs that they can between their 27 collective strings (and voices).

Wielding those strings at points more as vessels for sound generation than traditional bluegrass instruments, the album sometimes leans more emotive sonic tapestry than toe-tapping,

in a most enrapturing way, though. For bluegrass fans, this album won’t be just another Tony Rice hack. For non-grass fans, it’s a testament to what an acoustic string band is capable of.

String band music breeds a tension within it, between the individual and the band. This tension is exemplified by no band better than Punch: they are all bonafide virtuosos. It’s a true all-star group, but they don’t read like that at all, mainly due to their “song-first” approach. In concert, you get to see their mind boggling talents as individuals, but what really stands out is how unified they are, and how effortlessly they seem to enact what Eldridge calls the “mind meld.” It’s certainly one of the greatest musical feats I’ve witnessed. On the Hell on Church Street tour, they use only one microphone on stage, in the tradition of bluegrass. Each player weaves in and out of the song when necessary, guiding your attention like magicians, starting and stopping on a dime as if they were one. I’ve worked on this tension between the band and individual with Eldridge and my own band here at Oberlin. Particularly in his Mindfulness in Music Making course, we picked apart the anxieties and challenges of being a musician. Applying this to string band music in particular, we then wondered how we can best utilize our own talents for the greater sake of the music. In much string band music, you hear otherworldly technical work, which makes any young player want to play as fast and hard as they can. Yet this leads to tension, both physical and mental. Eldridge’s main focus in teaching is easing tension, primarily physical, when playing your instrument. Alleviating this frequently ignored problem can lead to more fluid, comfortable, and economical playing, producing better tone.

Zooming out, the individual player also faces a tension of wanting to showcase their skills. Yet when playing with a band, you can further alleviate these tensions by staying present, and listening to and supporting your bandmates in what they’re playing. Punch Brothers do both of these things so exceptionally well. Yet, as virtuosos, sometimes even they can overdo it. Indeed, Eldridge has described the dangers of making heady and complex music. Marrying pop and classical music on bluegrass instruments isn’t always easy listening. After all, as Eldridge has frequently reminded me, we’re all just human, expert or novice, picker or listener. While some arrangements on Church Street may seem overwrought compared to Rice’s recordings, they offer a thoughtful, unique listening experience of songs which have been recorded many times before. If you want the beautiful, straight ahead (although technically complex) approach that Rice brings to these songs, that’s wonderful. It’s still always going to be with us. If you see Punch Brothers’ version as a new way to experience the tunes––not a replacement––then I think their new album is a pretty exciting opportunity. An acoustic band working with material from generations past, Punch Brothers inject vitality and electricity into these songs on Hell on Church Street.

Art by Eva Sturm-Gross

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Godessmen and

$quib continued

tirely of covers. Penina explained that she doesn’t often perform her original music live, since the set-up of an electronic show takes a lot of prep time, and because she views her music as something deeply personal. As someone who works best producing her music alone, her music tends to reflect hard times in her life. The songs on the February 18th set list are mostly ones she was introduced to by her father during her childhood, especially “Sweet Talkin’ Guy” and “Congratulations.” One of her proudest accomplishments with this show was this dedication to her father and to the songs that he used to sing to her, and that she is still very much attached to the music of her childhood. Her cover of “Black is the Color,” an Appalachian folk song rearranged by Berio, which she first heard done by Patty Waters as a free jazz rendition and is another song that she holds close to her childhood.

Penina released an album on Spotify under Goddessmen titled Invitation to the Spirit House in 2021, which she wrote and self-produced during her gap year. She’s produced music for friends as well, and likes to collaborate on the production process. Her favorite music she’s released is “Back to the Car” from her album, “Crawl” and “Look in the Mirror,” which are available on Soundcloud, her work with Penny and Mac, and the music she has yet to release.

In terms of inspiration, aside from her father’s taste, Penina credits PJ Harvey and Karen Dalton as her main musical idols. Penina is also feeling very inspired

by Oberlin’s renaissance and medieval chorus, Collegium Musicum, and a class on the history of gregorian chant.

She spent her winter term working on an album that uses recordings of the choir, cello, vintage synths from the TIMARA basement, and people talking, along with vocals, which she says will be out soon to stream. Penina credits her friends for being so interested and accommodating of her music, and the TIMARA program for supplying so many useful resources.

The second performer of the night was $quib, a ‘band’ consisting of second-year TIMARA major Brock Bierly and a fictional character named Fish/Krotida Satyra. Brock’s thinking behind the fabricated figure of Fish/Krotida Satyra centers around the ideas of modern communication and the self. During our interview, Brock mentioned a problem that all aspiring artists, musicians, etc. are all too familiar with: there’s no one way to learn how to make art, but the reality is that in order to learn what you want to do, you just have to start doing it. Artists just starting out are often intimidated by the prospect of making mistakes, constantly being compared to peers. Brock describes his history with music as dating back pretty far into his childhood: playing around on Garageband in elementary and middle school. At seventeen he started releasing music under the first of many pseudonyms, $quib, and wanted to come up with a way to address the way artists communicate with their listeners. He decided to come up with this fictional band member as a way to comment on anonymity and lessen the “emotional stakes.” Brock was able to write “L’Hôspital”, a song he has described as his “Creep”, which he wrote in just two days. The song speaks on his relationship with a “fake” band member through the lens of the transactional professions of landlords and art buyers.

Discussing the decision to perform under the name $quib, Brock offered me several explanations behind the name. Mainly inspired by an octopus–like character named Squib in the cartoon Baman Piderman, Brock also draws from two separate definitions of the word squib. The first of which can mean “short satirical piece of writing” or “small explosive.” The second being a dollar sign in place of the “s,” which can only be credited to there being another artist under the name Squibs, and wanting some distinction. Brock describes $quib’s style as “tongue-in-cheek,” including prosaic lyrics on friendships, social anxiety, and modern communication’s involvement with the internet. With $quib’s layer of anonymity, Brock was able to relax on what he describes as the “neurotic” side of music production, and more easily give into creativity. $quib’s first mix came out on soundcloud in 2018 with a song called “Bullet,” who’s guitar chords Brock took from the song “Mass Appeal” by Dean Blunt. Under $quib, Brock has released an EP entitled $quib along with two singles, “Righty” and “Crown”.

The $quib setlist at the ‘Sco just a few Fridays ago consisted of all the songs off his EP: “L’Hôspital”, “Le Wedding”, “Tetragram for Duties”, and “Bullet”; along with his singles “Righty” and “Crown”, a new song called “UN”, and a cover of the song “Experimental Film” by They Might Be Giants. Two of the songs were slightly remixed, including “L’Hôspital.” Brock described the show as a “karaoke set,” with all his mixes pre-recorded aside from the vocals which he added live onstage. He described feeling like a member of the audience at his own show due to the aspect of not creating his mixes live.

He enjoyed “galunking around” onstage, listening to his music through louder speakers than usual without feeling too high-stakes. One nerve-wracking moment from Brock was the debut of his newest song, “UN,” which he has been working on for nearly a year, a starkly different production timeline to his two-day writing process on “L’Hôspital.” The name for “UN” is after the United Nations, but coincidentally fits into the theme of Frenchlanguage articles used in “L’Hospital” and “Le Wedding”.

He described it as having a “through-composed” and “layered” sound with a very “$quib-like” lyrical content, though having a more controlled, meticulous production process uncharacteristic of his previous work under the pseudonym.

In late 2020, he released a second EP under another one of his pseudonyms, Homechild, called Love Is Worth in The Heart the Planet of Start Planet Earth. The EP contains four songs, and contains an even greater degree of anonymity than $quib. Brock says it was more of a one-off project very tied to a nostalgia for his childhood, making it less of a public project in some ways. He also created an album with a friend under the name Bucket of Ohms, titled 83. It contains nine songs and was released in 2021. Additionally, Brock has been involved with a band/project called The Carloses since 2017, a group of ten people from the US and UK that forged their collaborative relationship online. For his winter term project, Brock worked on an album with The Carloses that is expected to be released on streaming platforms in April or May. When asked why he uses so many pseudonyms

instead of releasing music under his own name, Brock replied that his pseudonyms are a way of categorizing his music into different “boxes” with different feelings or sounds, each reminding him of a unique time and place.

He compares his collection of names to “Pinterest-boardlike” categories that help him identify these different periods in his life. When talking about his newest song, “UN,” which has yet to be released, Brock says he isn’t quite sure where to place it within those categorial boxes.

He likens the lyrics to his previous lyrical work, but feels his production process and referenced experience have changed dramatically since his work under $quib.

He describes his time at Oberlin as inflaming certain insecurities and patterns of thinking that affect how and what he makes. His newest approach to creating art is doing it in a way that isn’t “trying to be corny,” or a sort of performance for others’ reactions, but instead as more genuine to himself. Brock isn’t sure about the future of $quib, and may be shedding the fake band mate for real ones, pointing to his group projects with The Carloses and Goddessmen as the inspiration for this shift. In terms of what he’s most proud of, Brock highlights $quib as an extremely important milestone, and an experience that he looks back on fondly, though he calls his upcoming “UN” the “best thing [he’s] ever written.”

Keep an eye out for new music from Brock and/or one of his many pseudonyms!

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London Bridge is Going to Fall Zoey Birdsong Contributor

Elizabeth II (last name unknown) has been queen for 70 years, longer than anyone else in royal history. Her reign has seen the invention of the polio vaccine, the liberation of Nelson Mandela, and the liberation of Britney Spears.

She’s served as a stoic leader during wars and times of peace, and a silent one during sex abuse scandals involving her son, Prince Andrew. Due to recent health setbacks and canceled appearances, speculation has begun about whether her term limit is about to expire. The death of the monarch is a big deal in Great Britain, so big that it has a widely accepted code name: Operation London Bridge. Because I’m a fan of intricate plans and find high profile deaths interesting, Operation London Bridge has been a morbid fascination of mine for quite some time.

Operation London Bridge is comprehensive, and specific. It details every aspect of her death, including the order of who will be notified via secure line and contingency plans corresponding to each of her likely places of death. BBC has an alarm from the 1930’s that will sound, kicking off media coverage. Many news outlets already have coverage ready to release, and British television stations will be forbidden from playing anything comedic

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for days. The movement of her body is predetermined, and her funeral is planned for exactly ten days after her death. During the funeral, most businesses will close and the movement of the entire country will come to a halt.

Countries usually only enter periods of mourning like this when multiple people die unexpectedly and tragically.

Britain is prepared to gracefully orchestrate this state of crisis on a moment’s notice.I won’t bore you with any more details, but I think it’s worth Googling, especially if you love organizational structures.

The whole concept behind Operation London Bridge is undoubtedly over the top, but the internet will have an almost equally predictable response. I don’t doubt that there will be an onslaught of memes celebrating her death followed by condemnation. There always is when a controversial public figure dies, and all of us have been on both sides of this debate at one time or another.

I don’t pretend to believe that I won’t enjoy these memes, but my guess is that good old Gen Z will cross some lines.

I don’t know where exactly the lines are, but I know

Want to check your work?

Here are the answers to this issue’s crossword:

they’ll be crossed. Along with memes, I also expect quite a bit of justified critique about the royal family. The monarchy is a symbol of heteronormativity, racism, colonialism, and other things we tend to dislike at Oberlin. When the time comes, it’ll undoubtedly be an opportunity to call all of this out.

Humans have always made a big deal about death, but I think social media and cancel culture have taken that to a new extreme. Death is nature’s way of canceling people. We don’t need to debate about whether the next dead celebrity deserves our respect. They’ll be dead. Our energy would be much better spent talking about how we can build a better future for those that will be here to see it. How can we act today to ensure that the teenagers of tomorrow won’t cancel us on the future equivalent of Instagram? So, as for me, when London Bridge finally falls, I’ll be watching my favorite work of planning come to fruition and leave the internet to tear itself apart.

Art by Amelia Connelly

The Last Word on Kanye Fionna Farrell Staff Writer

A few months ago, I made the rare decision to intentionally watch SNL. Although I only tuned in because the best Culkin brother (Kieran) was hosting, one of the skits featured a then-mildly-funny quip about the rapper formerly known as Kanye West—a remark that has since permanently imprinted itself onto my brain. “Kanye changed his name to Ye,” Dionne Warwick comments to a very confused Jason Mraz, “Is that after the sound people make when he leaves the room?”

That episode premiered on November 6th of last year, back when Ye was only making one or so headline a week. By that point, the media had sifted through the Donda residue and were now intent on showcasing their rapier-wit with all the name jokes. While we, as readers, viewers, listeners, consumers, felt like we had been through it all—in 2021, what was there new to say about the self-loving rap iconoclast? Kanye’s antics — excuse me, Ye’s antics — are that nebulous substance that seems to exist in the ether all around us.

But, over the past month, things have gone — forgive the unforgivable pun — south for West at a rate faster than it took him to drop Donda 2, which begs the question: what even constitutes going south for this man, who seems to defy the very notion of direction itself? Does it even exist, or will Ye stay at the top forever, even when he brings everyone he knows —and claims to love —down?

Indeed, Ye seems to have been doing that a lot lately. As is widespread knowledge to anyone with a smartphone, West was married to “mother, millionaire, law student, and billionaire” Kim Kardashian for around seven years. Kim filed for divorce from Ye in February of

last year, and, for some time, the proceedings seemed relatively amicable. In fact, multiple sources claimed the divorce to be a mutual affair, one even citing that Ye let Kim file first “in order to give her dignity.”

No one said Ye wasn’t generous.

Several Donda listening events later, after Kim continued to show support for Ye, things took a dramatic turn for the worse in early November. This is when Pete Davidson, comedian-turnedYe’s-kryptonite, entered the picture. Even though Kim and Mr. Davidson were only “hanging out” at the time, gracing the Staten Island food scene with their presence, Ye took to sourly unfollowing Kim on Instagram. And that is only when they were in the liminal “talking stage” that haunts the rest of us mortals on Earth.

As Kim and Pete got more serious, steadily accruing the relationship milestones for famous people, Ye suddenly took it upon himself to become Kim’s knight in a black bodysuit. The notions of a “mutual” divorce flew out the window.

According to Ye, that was just a media ploy. Also according to Ye, God told him that he needs to fight to bring his family back together. Not through honesty, communication, and humility, but rather, a string of fifteen cryptic Instagram posts on Superbowl Sunday.

Ye has since deleted those posts, in which he flaunted his new moniker for Pete “Skete” Davidson. But, of course, the internet has allowed them to live on in infamy. Many of the posts contained poorlycropped images from seemingly private text conversations. One of these appeared to be a conversation with Pete himself, in which the latter appeared to offer West something of an olive branch—and was, of course, denied. Ye captioned the photo in his screaming letters: YOU WILL NEVER MEET MY CHILDREN. It would be an understatement to say that Ye’s blatant attacks on Pete, along with his continued harassment of Kim and invasion of her privacy, is concerning. But “concerning” is a word that falls under the valence of the normal.

It is something you use to demonstrate your empathy towards someone, who perhaps finds themself in a situation that you, too could experience. What’s happening here is nowhere near normal. Ye’s outbursts have bounded past the petty and unhinged; they are now downright deranged, with less-than-subtle insinuations at violence. It is not just concern, but fear we should feel for Pete, Kim, the West children, and—even if he’s all the way at the bottom of the list—Ye himself.

Naturally, the first real “threat”

Kanye West, The Game EASY, official music video

came in song form. On January 16th, Ye dropped a new single called “Eazy” with The Game. Some of the lyrics go a little like this: “God saved me from that crash/ Just so I could beat Pete Davidson’s ass/ And my new bitch bad/ I know illuminati mad”. The new “bitch” in question might have been Uncut “Jamz” Gems actress Julia Fox, whom Ye dated and wore lots of latex with for roughly six weeks.

On the third of this month — coincidentally, the same day that Kim was declared legally single — Ye released a video for “Eazy” which is no less than disturbing. In the video, an animated West carries around a decapitated head and appears to kidnap, tie up, and bury alive a claymation caricature of Davidson.

At the end, a title card reads: “Everyone lived happily ever after. Except you know who,” with “Skete” crossed out. “[Just kidding] he’s fine.” The video has already received backlash from virtually all directions. Many are calling West’s behavior scary and are encouraging Kim to get a restraining order.

But, others, somehow, are still worshiping the video for its artistic “vision.” And while the voices that scold

Kanye seem to be the most popular, they are not always the loudest. On every Instagram post threatening to tear Pete down, you can find thousands of commenters declaring Ye the “GOAT” forever.

“Ye da GOAT, no cap. Like if you love Ye. Like if you still love Ye.” Just over the past three weeks, Ye has gained three million Instagram followers — which may not seem like a lot to Kim’s 282 million, but definitely was to his twelve.

Like with so many celebrities, Ye’s life has become a spectator sport to us —but instead of watching him masturbate his own ego in a variety of eccentric ways, we now watch him destroy things and hurt others. That is not just Ye being Ye — it is harassment and abuse, and it demands our unanimous scorn.

Ye is clearly a mentally ill man. But two decades of his every move being praised, written about, and subject for debate in high school locker rooms has definitely put him on a pedestal that is hard to get down from. Ye might believe he is invincible. Maybe we should stop thinking about him. Maybe we should stop writing about him. If there’s one thing that abusers don’t deserve to be, it’s relevant.

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Mercurial World review by a Magdalena Bay Superfan Jules Crosetto Contributor

On February 22, 2022, Magdalena Bay came to the Sco. You could say I freaked out. If you aren’t familiar, they are a synth-pop duo based in LA…and my favorite band.

They are currently touring their latest album, Mercurial World, and let me tell you, the album is good, but live, it was otherworldly.

To be honest, I wasn’t planning to write this article. In fact, when at the show, I was so enamored with their performance that I’m not sure how much I remember–just a feeling of euphoria and strobe lights–but I will try my best to paint a picture of the experience.

The Mercurial experience was as much about the music as its visuals. I’ve been to countless shows from big and small artists and have never felt like I have been served a complete experience like that of Mercurial World. The show was MCed, so to speak, by Cheari, a creation of Magdalena Bay and the subject of track seven on Mercurial World.

She manifested as a low-poly floating head projected onto a screen behind Mica (the singer) with a computer-generated Siri-esque voice. Mica would frequently engage in some playful banter with Cheari in between songs;she even got her own brief solo towards the end–her digital ballad was truly angelic. Cheari’s presence and theatrical interactions with Mica took the show to a whole new level and, dare I say, another world–a Mercurial World.

Cheari was essential in bringing the audience to the Mercurial World, but what really transported me was the lights. The strobe lights flashed with the beat of the music, and the visuals on Chaeri’s screen perfectly accompanied Mica’s performance. I was in awe, especially at a venue as small as the ‘Sco. It was incredible what they were able to accomplish. Perhaps it’s just because of how much I love Magdalena Bay, but it’s truly difficult for me to put into words how amazing the lights were. They perfectly complimented the music, choreography–all of it–and elevated the show to a whole other level.

Lastly, we have to talk about our human performers, Mica Tenenbaum, Methew Lewin, and Nick Villa who is touring with Magdalena Bay as their drummer. Mica wore a black bodysuit airbrushed with a graffiti-gemstone pattern. Mathew wore a similarly painted outfit that combined the two looked perfectly at home in the Mercurial World. Not one of the principal members of Magdalena Bay, Nick commanded the show from the back of the stage despite not having a coordinated outfit. Mica’s stage presence is, how do I say, unmatched.

She shifted effortlessly from an emotionless mercurial being staring off into the crowd into a passionate performer throughout the show, completing the Mercurial World effect. And her chemistry with Mathew as a performer–don’t even get me started.

Magdalena Bay’s music is hot. It just makes you want to dance. Listen to the album, is what I’m trying to say. I’ve never been to a concert quite like Magdalena Bay’s. If you missed it (or even if you didn’t) I would highly recommend grabbing tickets to their next show.

Although I’m not sure there is any better venue to see your favorite band than the Sco. PS: Listen to Dawning of the Season then Secrets (Your Fire), the transition from song to song staggering.

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Photo by Toby Tenenbaum

jackass forever Raghav Raj Staff Writer

Maybe it’s damning irony. Maybe we’re all the better for it. Whatever the case, it’s incredible that for the past two decades, the most towering monument to suffering in the history of the visual medium has also brought forth some of the purest expressions of joy captured within the human experience. It’s a long way out from its inception as an MTV show, and its principal stars are perhaps all too old to keep doing this, but the latest entry into the series, Jackass Forever, proves that the Jackass franchise still innately understands the beauty in pain the way nothing else does.

Here’s a brief summary of what exactly happens in Jackass Forever: people are smacked, sucker punched, electrocuted, stung, rocketed into lighting fixtures, doused in gallons of pig semen, psychologically tortured, and in one bit that’s especially nauseating (even for cameraman Lance Bangs, who appears in the film so he can vomit in disgust), a guy accidentally soils his pants attempting a Dirty Dancing-esque lift. Genitals, in particular, are treated the way I assume a prime Mike Tyson would’ve treated his punching bags — when they’re not

being pummeled by particularly elaborate devices, bit by a turtle, decked by hockey pucks, stamped by pogo sticks, pecked at by a vulture, or swarmed by bees, they’re getting absolutely decimated by one of the hardest hitters alive.

Enduring even a quarter of this sounds like punishment ripped from the notebooks of Marquis De Sade; in Jackass Forever, all of this incessant brutality is taken in good fun, accompanied by fitful spells of on-screen laughter, toothy shit-eating grins (not literally — fortunately), and a truly heartwarming sense of camaraderie. The ability to transform living nightmares into mo ments of genuine warmth remains untouched, the sort of thing that only Jackass is really able to do. Furthermore, there’s something genuinely delightful in the way Jackass Forever opens up their formula to younger, more wide-eyed test dummies. In welcoming this bevy of acolytes and admirers into the fold, the film feels livelier, even more earnest in its delights, free from the constraints of becoming a legacy act.

Among these new cast members: Zach Holmes, a YouTube stuntman (and Art by Olive Polken

an example of Jackass’s influence in the Internet Age), who in Jackass Forever, hang-glides into a cactus plant. Rachel Wolfson, another YouTube creator with the distinction of being the first woman to join the crew, offers a long-overdue counterpoint to the “boys club” attitude commonly associated with Jackass; she licks a taser a few times, then takes several stings from a venomous scorpion to her lips like it’s nothing. (Wolfson might be the most infallible member of the cast, a pretty impressive achievement amongst these guys who have dedicated their lives to copious amounts of pain.) My favorite of these new characters is a surfer who goes by the name “Poopies,” perhaps the wildest card of the bunch. Quite honestly, he’s everywhere here, but my favorite part is the bit where he’s annihilated by a miniature tank that pelts him with paintballs.

Of course, to affirm Jackass as a cultural institution of sorts, there’s no shortage of familiar faces here. Among the usual cameos — Spike Jonze, Rob Dyrdek, Tony Hawk — the guest list includes rapper/annoying guy Machine Gun Kelly, who gets smacked off a stationary bike by a giant hand into a

swimming pool; Eric Andre, who gets hit with an uppercut by a food truck selling cold-brew coffee (something that’ll hopefully happen a lot more often if he continues to shill for NFT’s); and Tyler, The Creator, who’s reunited with fellow Odd Future buddy (and new castmate) Jasper Dolphin before getting electrocuted as he plays the piano.

It’s a surreal, truly gratifying thing to see all these people here; there is perhaps no better testament to the doors that Jackass forcefully blustered its way through. Without Jackass, MGK doesn’t have “Wild Boy,” the trashy, Steve-Oname-dropping frat-rap hit that made him a star (perhaps not a good thing, but a thing regardless!). Without Jackass, there is no Eric Andre Show, no Loiter Squad, probably no [Adult Swim] either.

It’s admittedly a little ridiculous at first glance to call a prank show where dudes get hit in the nuts one of the most important cultural touchstones of the past decade, but there’s no denying the extent to which Jackass opened the gates for all the weirder, more subversive strains of comedy to emerge. It’s hard to imagine a pop-culture landscape — especially in the

age of the internet — that isn’t imbued with Jackass’s distinct brand of madness or its unabashed, juvenile silliness.

Jackass Forever essentially brings the chickens home to roost, a disarmingly heartening experience that makes for one of the most genuinely uplifting theatrical releases in recent memory.

Of course, this updated crew of torture victims isn’t just Jackass marveling at its influence; a lot of it comes from a place of necessity. Past the tragic death of Ryan Dunn in 2011 and the cataclysmic falling out with Bam Margera, most of Jackass’s familiar faces have been getting battered into submission for well over two decades — the youngest of Jackass’s core cast, “Danger” Ehren McGehey, is 45 years old. (A brief sidenote: Ehren, by all accounts, is the MVP here. His junk is positively annihilated in the “Cup Test” challenges, and he’s still able to take being nearly bitten by an actual brown bear, while strapped to a chair, adorned with chunks of salmon, and drizzled with honey, like a champ.) Age, along with the constant physical harm, has very much taken a toll on this ragtag group of masochists, even if their headstrong attitude and rousing enthusiasm doesn’t reveal it.

There is no testament to that sentiment like Johnny Knoxville, who even after all these years, remains the beating heart, swollen testicles, and undeterred soul of Jackass. In terms of performers who truly put their bodies on the line for the sake of entertainment, no one is as utterly committed as Knoxville. He is a performer whose complete, wanton disregard for his own well-being puts him in an upper echelon with the likes of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Like those two, he is easily one of the greatest physical comedians of all time, a peerless showman whose bravado is rivaled only by his sheer ballsiness.

In Jackass Forever, even if Knoxville’s mostly content with taking the back seat and serving as the film’s sadistic Master of Ceremonies, he still manages to cram in a few truly breathtaking acts of self-destruction. In one, he’s shot five stories into the air out of a cannon and into a lake, wearing a suit of feathers like a modern-day Icarus. Apparently, when Knoxville crashed into the water, he landed so hard on his legs that he couldn’t sit on hard surfaces for weeks afterwards.

In another, he’s once again sent flying, but this time it’s by a raging bull (a frequent character of its own within the Jackass universe), which charges him head-on while he’s attempting a magic trick, causes his body to flip in the air oneand-a-half times, and lands him forcefully

on the side of his head.

For someone who has spent a lifetime gloriously defying death, it’s perhaps Knoxville at his most poetically, devastatingly mortal. He is 49 years old, and he’s just been knocked out completely cold for four minutes, having suffered a broken wrist, a broken rib, a concussion, and a brain hemorrhage. In the months that follow, his neurologist will essentially tell him his body can’t handle any more of these sorts of stunts. It is his curtain call, the culmination of his life’s work, the pinnacle of a horrific art he’s sacrificed everything for. Still, because he’s the greatest goddamn showman alive, he’s able to crack a joke as he’s carried away on a stretcher: “that bull didn’t like fuckin’ magic.”

In a film like Jackass Forever, a film that’s maybe as deeply cathartic as anything I’ve seen in theaters in recent memory, I don’t think there’s any moment that tops the audible sigh of relief that everyone around Knoxville lets out after hearing him say that. It’s not so much a sigh as an outpour of laughter, a release of all this pent-up concern, felt through these whispered half-jokes and wordlessly worried glances. It is a warm, collective exchange, a display of support and encouragement that serves as a reminder of Jackass’s most resonant strength.

Though Jackass appears to be about people doing wildly dangerous, utterly terrifying things to themselves, it is first and foremost about a bond, about a gang of misfits, freaks, and weirdos all united in their insurmountable bouts of suffering and the joy that follows. It is a breathtaking, communal thing that, perhaps by some grace of divine intervention, has endured all these years, mostly intact against all the conceivable odds. To see a film like Jackass Forever succeed the way it has, even in such uncertain times for movies and the world at large, is like watching a shooting star: it is a fleeting thing, a flaming ball of gas (literally — they finally manage to set a fart on fire here, a thing they’ve spent years attempting to do), hurtling into a horizon it may never return from. Yet, in a beautiful act of cosmic fate, it is here. Right now, in this blissful communion we share with the screen, it is here. If for that, and that alone, we should all be so grateful.

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Are we on the precipice of a Vibe Shift?

Emma Kang Staff Writer

Allison Davis wrote an article published in The Cut titled “A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will Any Of Us Survive It?” This article was based on a Substack entry by “trend forecaster” Sean Monahan where he discusses the upcoming “vibe shift.” They bring up the past three vibes that they’ve lived through which were “Hipster/Indie Music (2003-09), Post Internet/Techno Revival (201016), and Hypebeast/Woke (2016-20).”

Whether or not I think these are entirely right, these are consequently three eras of fashion and culture that I somewhat remember because it was around 2010 that I started actually using the internet and paying attention to Seventeen Magazine.

What is a vibe shift? Davis writes that “In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated.”

Davis argues that the two years of the pandemic put a soft pause on pop culture and its impact on how people lived their lives. Calling the culture shift “unnerving” and vocally worrying about her “survival odds,” she says that she felt like she spent the last few good years of her life in her apartment in “cute lounge pants” on her couch “gobbling antidepressants.”

“There’s been a real paranoia that people have. Everyone coming out of hibernation being like, What are people wearing? What are people reading? What are people doing? And it was different than when everyone had gone into the pandemic. It unsettled a lot of people,” Monahan says.”

This ‘vibe shift’ is obviously born of the pandemic, but not in the way they are describing. The trends that have been created in the past ten years were created because of the internet. Information and images have never been able to be spread faster. You can constantly see what people are wearing and what people are doing, which is why Davis kept bringing up FOMO and the brief respite the pandemic provided from those feelings. When trying to shield yourself from the pandemic, it doesn’t matter what’s cool; but now that Covid is over for the third time, what’s cool matters again. And obviously, what’s cool is determined by the youth.

A demographic neither Davis or Monahan bring up are the pandemic high schoolers. The kids born in

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2002/03 and after, who are now 18, 19, and 20. The important thing about them is that they attended and graduated high school online. Even if some of them were still kind of hanging out with each other in person, there was an immediate halt to the actual experience of being inside of a building with other 16 year olds. Classes were online and clubs, sports, and events were more or less canceled for the graduating classes of 2020 and 2021. My brother, born in 2003, 19 years old, didn’t actually finish his junior year of high school and had his entire senior year of high school online. A lot of these kids were kind of fucking off, living with their parents, not able to hang out with their friends, or talking to that many people IRL — hence the rise of TikTok. I don’t credit TikTok as the actual apex of the vibe shift, realistically it’s just social media as a whole, but there is something distinct about the people who graduated high school even just two or three years after me.

I noticed it almost immediately when I got back to campus after a year of being away. I attribute this to contextless image sharing, which is something incredibly easy to do on all social media platforms. Instagram, Twitter, TikTok,

and Pinterest revolve around this idea of online curation of the self. You can find a hot girl or micro influencer you think is interesting or cool, and apply the parts of their online persona that you like to your own. I think this started happening more and more during the pandemic, especially when the eight hours of high school you’d usually attend suddenly turns into like five hours of sitting in front of a computer in your room. I feel like I was beginning to see people’s online personas walking around in Decafe.

In addition to being able to copy and paste parts of different personalities, clothing has become incredibly easy to source online. Clothes have always been an enormous signifier of who’s hot, but now, along with the help of micro trends and fast fashion, fashion subcultures are more visible than they ever have been before. Fifteen years ago, it wouldn’t really be possible to find every article of clothing that a celebrity is wearing in a paparazzi photo. But now, in the comments section of a tiktok, you can find a head-totoe breakdown of Bella Hadid’s street fashion, who designed her outfit, where to buy it, and maybe most importantly, where to buy a dupe. Fashion is inher-

ently inaccessible, but now with the popularity of fast fashion, thrifting, and buying clothes second hand online (depop, poshmark, ebay, etc, etc) there is an illusion of information and accessibility.

I see people post ‘mood boards’ on tiktok that have ten images every second for a twenty second video. The images never have context and are often sourced without any context.

Because these images are often obscure and where they come from is a secret, it’s now akin to not knowing who made a celebrity red carpet look. Except now, instead of actually having to participate in a subculture to know about it or even lie adjacent to it, it can be replicated.

It’s not that artists aren’t being credited, it’s that no one wants them to be. There is increasingly less of a need to have an actual understanding of art and culture to place yourself within that sphere. There is a massive amount of content being shown to us through our phones everyday and we are soaking it right up. The issue is that content has literally no real information propping it up.

Ultimately, Davis and Monahan are confused about the new vibe but have some predictions: “People going off in a lot of different directions because it doesn’t feel like there’s a coherent, singular vision for music or fashion,” says Monahan. He talks about the revival of indie sleaze and irony, but I think his unclear understanding of what’s going to happen next is because trends are being watered down.

Buying into a trend no longer requires actual knowledge or interest in its origins. No one knows what movie that girl is from, no one knows the context of the artist they like, no one knows that song is a sample, and it’s because they don’t need to know.

The rapid online content distribution that defines the social lives of today’s youth abandons authenticity in lieu of aesthetics. Tik Tok and Instagram let young content consumers replicate the trends they see on their screens quickly and cheaply with no context needed.

Trends have become separated from their cultural origins, and their dissociated form becomes a clueless cultural moment in of themselves. And so I agree that the vibe is shifting: we’re entering the age of the poser.

Art by Dan Ha Le

An Intimate Discussion with Filmmaker Howard Bongiovi

By Jared “Absolutely Shredded” Franklin If you stayed on campus through winter term, you may have noticed film crews and cameras swarming the least expected locations. It turns out that the person responsible for this was not Noah Baumbach or any other relevant filmmaker, but actually recent Oberlin alum Howard Bongiovi. You may wonder “isn’t his dad really rich or something?” and “is this movie really important enough that they had to block the laundry room in Talcott?”

These are all questions I sought to answer when I sat down with Mr. Bongiovi for an interview last week.

LEVI: Thanks for taking the time to talk with me Howard. How are you doing today?

HOWARD: WHAT? LEVI: Uhh I’ll just move on to my first question.

ning, middle, and end, and every end is the beginning of another story.

But its mostly gonna focus on the poor people on the margins of society that nobody fuckin gives a shit about except for me. This movie is gonna finally ask the existential questions that most of the ignorant pigfucking hicks that walk among me are too fucking pussy to even think about, like “why is the hookup culture here so wiggidy wiggidy wacked up” and “why do all of these so called communists have clean shoes.”

LEVI: I see… well, I have to ask you about the elephant in the room…

HOWARD: OKAY.

HOWARD: AHH WHERE IS IT

LEVI: So what is this movie, and what is it about?

LEVI: Oh no no that’s just a figure of speech

HOWARD: The name of the FILM thank you very much is CLEVELAND STEAMER. basically its about people from all walks of life brought together by a small liberal arts college in Ohio. Every person has a story, every story has a character, maybe even two or three characters, every character has their own story, every story has a begin-

HOWARD: OH SHIT NOT ONE OF THOSE TOO LEVI: Listen, just sit down and put down the wrench! I’m talking about your dad. I mean, he’s a pretty famous rockstar, don’t you think this might be a case of nepo…..

HOWARD: I’LL PUNCH YOU IN THE DICK

Art by Eva Sturm-Gross

to even be considered as a remote possibility, and you were basically handed that opportunity straight out of college…

AND SUE YOU! my dad doesn’t have SHIT to do with my FILM. LEVI: Really? It says here he’s the executive producer…

HOWARD: LISTEN FUCKO, I DIDN’T SPEND FOUR YEARS IN BUMFUCK RURAL OHIO…

HOWARD: WRONG. LEVI: … Not to mention his music is all over this movie. I mean, how else would an “indie film” afford the licensing to those songs?

LEVI: Oberlin isn’t rural Ohio, we’re part of a metropolitan area with more than two million people living in it…

HOWARD: WRONG AGAIN and just goes to show how little you understand about music.

That’s Springsteen playing during all of the sex scenes and stuff.

LEVI: Well, that still doesn’t change the nepotism thing! Those songs cost even more to license!

HOWARD: NO THEY DONT! My dad could destroy springsteen with his left testicle!

LEVI: Ok look, I’m not trying to make any statement about the quality of your dad’s music…

HOWARD: AND YOU DONT NEED TO. The Blades of Glory soundtrack speaks for itself.

LEVI: Uh, yeah, it does.

But look, all I’m trying to say here is that, like, doesn’t it seem a little weird that someone who clearly comes from a deeply, deeply privileged background, someone who didn’t even spend a second out of college before being given the chance to direct their own movie, is now making a movie about people living in poverty?

HOWARD: NOPE. LEVI: … just, nope?

HOWARD: yeah.

LEVI: I’m confused. I mean, being able to direct a film is something that would be completely off the table for the overwhelming majority of people, and for the remaining fraction of people would require a lifetime of struggling

HOWARD: FUCK YOUR STATISTICS. This is a place where there are ZERO influencers whatsoever and EVERYONE is poorer than me, if that isn’t rural then NOTHING is. Do you seriously expect me to spend FOUR YEARS in this poop crusted turdhole and NOT make a movie about it?

LEVI: Ok, I’m beginning to think maybe it might be best if we just stop talking about the movie.

Um, could you give me some of your influences?

HOWARD: WITH PLEASURE. Let’s see, uhh, I think Lars von Trier is fucking sick, Gaspar Noé too. Really anyone who’s as good at pointing out how totally fucked up this weird little thing we

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This is the Oberlin Grape’s recurring installment of Ask Dr. Gags, an advice column from our resident sexologist Dr. Gagatha McCreampie. If you have a question about sex, intimacy, dating, or pubic lice, feel free ot reach out to Dr. Gags through emailing thegrape@oberlin.edu

This is The Oberlin Grape’s installment of Ask Dr. Gags, an advice column from our resident sexologist Dr. Gagatha McCreampie.

If you have a question about sex, intimacy, dating, or skank-core rave vibes, feel free ot reach out to Dr. Gags through emailing thegrape@oberlin.edu —----------------Dear Dr. Gags, I started having sex at my partner’s place because my roomate is alwaaaays there. Everything was going good until I saw their hideous cat staring at us during sex. They said she can’t be alone so she has to stay in the room, but I know she wants in. Do I put her down or put down this relationship?

— PussyPatrol Dear Pussy Patrol, Have you heard of this little phenomena called “same room sex?” Oh you haven’t! Well let me turn you on to something that will also turn you on. Get this little frisky critter her own hunkalicious mate. Really spiky penis. You know, all the works.

A few hits of that catnip later and they will be raw-catting it super primal style. Now, while you and your human are going at it, so will the felines! Everybody wins!

Spiky Penis, Dr. Gags P.S. And hey I’m not implying a swingers situation but if you want to put that litter box together, who am I to stop you?

Dear Dr. Gags, Hey Doctor, I really need advice on a possible big purchase. Have you ever heard of a s*x swing? I think you connect it to the ceiling and it works like a swing but for intercourse. Do you have any experience with this product? Can you DIY it? Any advice would be helpful!

—DIY Sex-Haver Dear DIY Sex-Haver, Oh you sweet little idiot, do you know who you’re talking to? I have been a board-certified sexologist for over 35 years now!

I love questions like this so much, it reminds me why I chose to major in Coital Studies my second semester at Lewis and Clark. So yes, I have heard of a sex swing. I have even partaken on occasion.

When shopping for a swing, remember to test it out before buying it. I can’t even count how many times I’ve bought a cheap swing and wound up with a hairline fracture in my buttocks and vag. This is a purchase you’re going to want to splurge on!

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Safe Swinging!

Dr. Gags —-----------------------------Dear Dr. Gags, I just started seeing this hot lesbian who really wants me to commit but the problem is I’m about to go home and I kind of want to kiss my high school boyfriend Mitch who was the quarterback on the football team. Should I Uhaul it with this lesbo or go back to football dick?

— Happy U-Haulidays Dearest Happy U-Haulidays, Oh, sweetheart, this is a gorgeous conundrum to be in! I can understand your struggle, as I was such a lesbian for a few years in the 80s. It was a free for all back then. Andy Warhol and I had an open relationship for 7 years. We had sex all over his art about those soup cans. Truthfully, Honeybuns, I think this is a decision you must make yourself. Here’s what I can say: is your lesbian up for an open relationship? Perhaps you two can have a little romantic dinner and check-in about this problem. And I must say, I love the sound of this meathead Mitch, but he seems like a short-term hookup. Why can’t you have both? I juggle dozens of lovers, picking up my kids from school in my minivan, and being a world-renowned sexologist. I am living proof that you can, in fact, have it ALL! Love you my little lesbian <3.

Mwah Mwah Mwah, Dr. Gags —-----------------------------------------------Dear Dr. Gags, I’m thinking of having a baby, is it weird to ask my Econ professor to be the father? Should I ask him in office hours?

—Supply and Pregnand Dearest Supply and Pregnand, Baby, you simply are not thinking big enough. Oberlin Econ professor??? He could be major fucked up as we know Oberlin is famous for hiring sickos. Why reach for the stars when you can shoot for the moon?

When I was looking for some hot sticky sperm for my third child, Phallucity, I was also thinking of the econ route. The guys are ugly, old, like ancient, but smart with that cash coin if you get what I’m saying. Which is why I went straight to the top. My friend was all like my friend Milton is a big econ guy and once I saw he had a wikipedia I was effin sold. That’s right, there is a McCreampie-Friedman baby roaming this earth. She is weird and not my favorite. But, she’s got biodaddy’s free market capitalism, which if I knew what that meant I would probably think its cool.

Right? I’m scared of her.

Well I might have a little left in my freezer if you want.

Full-On Frenching, Dr. Gags

Long Distance Relationship Updates Juli Freedman Bad Habits Editor

Art by Eleanore Winchell

Ahhh high school what a time. You meet your friends who let you barf up Fireball in the bathroom all alone. You meet that teacher that changes your life and then sends a flirty Facebook message after you graduate. And for those of us that are reeeeally lucky. . . you meet the love of your life. And you can’t just throw that all in the trash just because you wanna screw a few college boys (who, yes, will get way too much joy from choking you)?!? You say goodbye to the days of physical touch and hello to the days of fighting with your no-aspiration-in-life-gamer-boyfriend Wyatt in the Barrows kitchen at 3am. And how do I know all about this? Well if you are deep into the Juli lore you would know that I have had not one, but two, long distance relationships (LDRs) while here at Oberlin. I actually loved being in them because I despised hanging out with my boyfriends, who knew it was a gay thing? So as our resident LDR expert, I wanted to find out how the kids are making it work these days! I interviewed one lucky freshman on the very first day of orientation and then met back up with her after Winter Term to answer the age-old questions: Does this whole love thing work? And if it does work are you both still good people? And how much do you like being around your boyfriend who doesn’t care for any of your passions and is just kinda annoying and gross?

MALIA McDONALD Malia McDonald is a first-year intended biology major from the Bay Area, California. She met her boo Chris “Lil Cranky” Cringle when they were cast as the leads in their high school’s take on Our Town. They kept their love a secret for the sake of the theater arts, but once their drama teacher caught them 69ing in pioneer garb, they knew they couldn’t keep it hidden any longer. Malia and Lil Cranky applied to Oberlin together, but while Malia was welcomed home with a big package, Lil Cranky was left in the dust with a measly rejection letter. It was then they decided to make it work.

Orientation JULI FREEDMAN: Malia McDonald!

MALIA MCDONALD: Hello Juli! What A beautiful day it is outside!

JF: Is it okay if I start off with some questions about your long distance relationship?

MM: Go right ahead!

JF: So how long have you guys been together?

MM: Well we started dating junior year of high school so, it’s going to be almost 2 years in a couple months!

JF: Congratulations!

MM: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Too bad you couldn’t have stuck it out, you must have been really weak and not

in true love like I have been.

JF: Cool! How have things been going since getting here?

MM: I mean I miss my little tiger but we text and call all the time. Oh my god, speaking of! He’s calling right now, I’m gonna pick up.

JF: Oh okay MM: Hey soulmate! [. . .] yes i love you too. What am I wearing!?! You naughty boy! I’m wearing exactly what you picked out for me. I love when boys pick out my outfit especially when they have no taste! Mhm yeah !

Oh yeah! Yeah Im cumming right now. No I promise.

The sound of you chewing makes me sooooo wet JF: Should I leave?

MM: Yeah talk to you in a few months i guess!

Last Week JF: Malia! Malia!

MM: Hey Juli!

JF: I wanted to catch up from our last conversation.

How are things with you and Lil Cranky going?

MM: Oh that’s long over JF: Really? Aw, I thought you guys were soulmates!

MM: Stupid Juli you cant meet your soulmate in high school. It was honestly so embarrassing that you stayed in LDRs for two years. Cringe alert!

JF: So have you given up on love?

MM: Oh no not at all. So sure you can’t meet your

Howard Bongiovi continued call “life” is. Uhhh also that guy who plays poker and has guns and fucks all those bitches.

So no, long distance may not make you a good person, but short distance can also make you evil. And some people will just live alone for the rest of their lives and it could be you and that’s okay!

and Sons.

time. Anything else you want to let our readers know?

LEVI: Huh. Interesting.

HOWARD: YES AS A MATTER OF FACT THERE IS SOMETHING ID LIKE YOU ALL TO KNOW. when I am finished directing my movie CLEVELAND STEAMER I fully anticipate that I will transcend my human form and have super freaky sexual experiments with ghosts and shit so if i’ve ever done you a favor please pay me back sooner rather than later.

LEVI: Wait, you mean Dan Bilzerian?

HOWARD: DONT FUCKIN INTERRUPT ME MOTHERFUCKER! but yeah that guy. Also Ayn Rand, Gary Vaynerchuk, and the hit folk group Mumford

soulmate in high school, but you totally can in your Intro to Comparative Lit class at Oberlin College!

JF: So you have a new bae?

MM: Big time. See as a freshman, I am such a hot commodity. Barely legal. It sucks that for your freshman year your LDR was monogamous so your 18 year old body, or as we all know it as your prime, was wasted by not banging like a wild bird. So I tasted everything from harkies to townies until I found the one.

JF: That’s pretty neat. Tell me more about him!

MM: Well since it is obvious that you want to steal him, I just want to say that he is madly in love with me and I am madly in love with him. His long body is like a worm. His voice is also very worm-like. He only wears black t-shirts and you can see every single one of his dandruff flakes on it. Oh god it’s so hot. He is so good at fucking. He may only be 19, but he fucks like he’s 20. I’m his Brookline Baby and not you, not the world, and not his positive COVID test, could keep us apart!

JF: Oh shit he has COVID MM: Some would say the most infectious disease of all is jealousy and honey. . .you reek.

JF: This was such a great interview!

HOWARD: DAMN FUCKIN RIGHT IT IS INTERESTING LEVI: Well, Mr. Bongiovi, it looks like we’re out of

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Teagan Hughes Staff Writer

SmoCo Ever tried to prepare a nice blunt after class but accidentally ripped it? Maybe you’ve been looking for a new bong, but don’t know the best place to shop/what material it should use. If any of this sounds like you, please join StoneCo! We teach plenty of stoner norms from giving rolling workshops, to finding a perfect ratio of weed for packing bowls. We also have a mandatory smoke session once a month, but you can bring your own smoking material for COVID safety.

OasisCo Everyone loves those two bantering blokes from Manchester! But did you know Liam takes his coffee with two creams and a tablespoon of vinegar? In this ExCo, we will learn all about the personal lives of the captivating Gallaghers, and about their acrimonious fraternal relationship. The final assignment will be flying to England and following one of them around all day with binoculars, attempting to gather some new intel of our own. (Some of you will have to take one for the team and follow Noel; we can’t all follow Liam.)

BundyCo Nooooo not that one you little true crime whore! This course is on America’s favorite TV dad Al Bundy! You know, from King of Queens. He plays Jay on Modern Family now. Some would say he is the KING of Queens. The critics over at Wikipedia rave over this “misanthropic, working-class father of two who is portrayed as a somewhat tragicomedic figure” Every week we will watch this show because I have never seen it.

SimonCo

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Hey guys I’m Simon. Ah don’t look at me! I’m a pretty shy guy. I like collect coins, I know it’s stupid, but I don’t know, it is stupid, you think it’s really stupid right? Oh you think it’s cool? Pshh you must be lying. Oh you think I’m the most handsome boy at this school?!? Stop it! I know you’re teasing me because no girl would ever say that, especially when Toby McDonald goes here. Oh he’s so cool. All the girls love him. I bet he would never collect even a single coin.

Take it back! You don’t love me! I’m sorry. It’s just I get so worked up about this stuff I become a huge jerk.

I just never thought a girl would be interested in little ol’ me. But if you like me, and like really like like me, pinch me because I feel like I’m dreaming. Maybe we can go for a drive in my dad’s Toyota Yaris sometime…

LadyCo In this course, taught by Mary of Miss Mary’s Charm School for Naughty Girls, one will transform from an ugly grotesque un-ladylike caterpillar into a polite beautiful woman butterfly. Classmates will learn skills such as how to properly set a dinner table, dress modestly, and hold in their farts. Meetings will be held in the great Oberlin Dinner and Dance Hall, and clothes that can hold your fart-filled balloon body will be provided. We ask students to not bring any sharp objects and ladies will become so full of farts even one tiny scrape can leak months worth of old farts. But don’t worry, we will be conducting regular check-ups to make sure none of the older farts have fossilized in the stomach of our promising princesses. This course will conclude in one royal ball to introduce our ladies to high society (if they do not explode).

little dangly earring your girlfriend gave you, take off that nail polish, and join MANCO! What do we do, you ask? We’re just a buncha dudes who wanna let loose, and we do everything from smashing shit that didn’t get sold at Empty Mugs to Jackass movie marathons to scratching our friends at LadyCo to get some of the farts out so that we can light them on FIRE to playing Call of Duty allll night long!! We also have our own co-op where we only eat raw meat and listen to Steely Dan and KISS (the band–we would never kiss each other). Only requirement to join is that you can’t own a bed frame. Meets in Wilder 211.

PleaseJoinMyBandCo I’ve put up posters all over campus but none of you fuckers ever listen so here we are. Join this ExCo and you’ll be a part of my band. It’s gonna be a cosmic mix of Arctic Monkeys, Tame Impala and Car Seat Headrest, I know you guys love that shit so please just join the fucking band and ease my misery, if you don’t it’ll just be me on bass and my dad on drums and I swear I’m gonna go reverse Oedipus on his ass.

FarAwayMagicCo You’ve heard of close-up magic, now get ready for faraway magic! In this ExCo, pupils will learn to stun audiences with card tricks and disappearing coins from distances of 10 feet, 25 feet, and 50 feet! This storied form of magic utilizes absolutely no audience participation, and requires no skill whatsoever because the audience truly cannot see shit.

MolesCo

ManCo Are you tired of all this “femmeboy” bullshit? Do you feel emasculated by your new mullet? Here at liberal arts college you might be in danger of getting turned into a little fairy princess after one too many Euphoria and wine nights with the girls. Rip out that dumb

Perfect for aspiring pre-meds, this is the ONLY ExCo where all students get the opportunity to look at my moles and tell me if you think I should be worried about them.

Reggie’s Ridiculous Review’s: Market Madness Reggie Goudeau Contributor

*Although this is based on a true story, each person, business, and product here except the items purchased at Family Dollar have been altered or exaggerated.

So niggas went to the market this weekend, and all-too-much fuckery occurred. I forgot bout the trip until my partner, Makayla, reminded me, and they was pretty enthusiastic bout gettin fresh produce. I usually survive with my diet of Pop-Tarts and Pepsi, but my partner wanted to cook real food for some reason. As such, we left at 10:15 to get to the bus near Wilder.

ably thought his hippie glasses could make him seem more sober, but he was not succeeding. He asked us to buy him some food, and despite my insistence that I had no cash on me (a true statement), he still stuck around. Eventually, my partner just gave him $2 to get him away from us for the time being. Makayla also saw him chugging a bottle of Hennessy before going to ask other locals and visitors for the same thing. I can’t blame this nigga for being drunk constantly if he really is homeless, but this shit was not a good look regardless. I’d rate this interaction with Henny Hank 2 dollas outta Makayla’s pocket.

After escaping Hank, the two of us waited for hours in the market as many other random The ride there was chill, and we got to the people passed us by. Things were relatively market after like 45 minutes. We were vibin’ peaceful until two more interesting characters and purchased some fruit here or seasonings popped out. In one corner we have “Vodka there for a while. Then, one vendor I’ll name Victor” in a blue coat with a lil beard. In the “Strawberry Steve” spotted me and asked me other we have “Racist Rick,” a short nigga to buy some of his fruit. He had a red shirt, with a receding headline and glasses. Both of and a grey uncle lookin’ ass hat on tryna catch them were pretty chummy, and seemed like me lackin. Steve was the first of many mildly they either knew each other or were too faded sketchy characters I encountered, but he was to care about each other’s personality. I’d pretty harmless. The dude just really wanted buy either since Victor pulled out vodka from me to buy some of his stuff, and I’m pretty his goddamn coat and shared it with Rick. I sure he grabbed a random assortment of shit wasn’t actively paying attention to their ramand offered it to me for $10. Besides the obvi- blings, but Makayla picked out some golden ous strawberries, he tried to include apples, quotes from them. Victor apparently tried to starfruit, blueberries, and what may have been clown me for layin’ down and dissociating, a bag of Scooby-Doo fruit snacks. He began but once again, I ain’t notice. Even if I did, I’m offering sum of his stock in Bitcoin near the not tryna square up with a nigga who got coat end, but I dipped before he could finesse me. vodka. I’d rate my time with Victor two weird Overall, I give Steve’s stand ⅗ strawberries. niggas invading the market outta five.

After escaping, Makayla and I went to the most bootleg Family Dollar I’ve seen. The place looked like they sold Chedda Squares and Heated Cheesies. We would’ve usually ignored spots like this, but the market was unsurprisingly bare in the winter. Niggas were willing to try anything once we ran outta food stands to browse. I got way too many bags of unopened Decafe snacks in my dorm anyways, so I ain’t feel like spending money on more food. We did make two notable purchases here, though, such as the legendary Nintendo DS classic, “ATV Quad Frenzy” (yes, the title is unaltered). We also picked up “Spider’s Web, A Pig’s Tale” (yes, this is also real) to watch once we find a random DVD player lying around. Even tho I ain’t pick up any food, imma give Family Dollar five Chedda Squares outta five for making me laugh.

While walking back to the market, Makayla and I saw the second shady character of our adventure, “Henny Hank.” Hank was taller than Steve, the first of several Black people we encountered, and visibly tipsy. Our boi prob-

about to get back to my partner. Sadly, our good friend Henny Hank reappeared to make my life worse than before. I kept reassuring him that I had no cash until he eventually asked me to take him somewhere with a card for food. Desperate to get away from this man, I agreed and bought him a burger and fries to go from the nearest place. After wasting $15 and a decade’s worth of pride, I managed to finally get back to Makayla.

Once that happened, I just waited in silence for the bus to arrive while slowly dissociating. I’d rate my final interaction with Henny Hank one lone teardrop streaming down my face (and a free mental breakdown).

If nothing else, ATV Quad Frenzy is surprisingly addictive even if I can’t stop falling off my fuckin’ ATV. Anyways, despite the fantastic media Family Dollar had to offer, I gotta give this trip one copy of “Spider’s Web, A Pig’s Tale” outta ten.

In conclusion, I’m done trying to eat healthy since it only ever leads to despair. After all, my Pop-Tarts and other snacks have rarely failed me the way this school consistently does.

Racist Rick went on at one point about how Black lives don’t always matter (he was Black) and mentioned how Chinese people are responsible for sum’ ion even remember honestly. The point was that he was drunk and clearly playing for the yt man’s team.

Meanwhile, Vodka Victor was singing several random songs in the market. He was pretty flat and should’ve stuck to his range, but I respected his attempts. The man thought he was The Weeknd or something cause he tried flirtin’ with literally every legal feminine-presenting person who walked in his path. Again, I respect his dedication despite knowing his methods ain’t getting him pussy. I’d give Racist Rick one month of mandated anti-racism training outta five.

On top of everything else we’d been through by this point, I had to use the bathroom for hours. After the last odd nigga encounter, I decided at least one thing needed to improve that day. I had Makayla watch my stuff, and I scoured the local area until I found a Cafe with a restroom. I used it, left the place, and was

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Movies that were Actually Filmed in Oberlin Fionna Farrell Staff Writer

It’s no secret that Oberlin has become the new Hollywood. I can remember the surge of excitement I felt when hearing Greta Gerwig’s husband would be making his new movie here— maybe he’d bring Greta to work one day! I was so jealous of all the extras from Joshua Sperling’s class who got to meet Adam Sackler last summer.

As it turns out, though, Obiewood is far from a new phenomenon. Acclaimed directors, from Bergmann, to Michael Bay, to that alumnus who won’t shut up about their short film, have all utilized this idyllic campus for over a century.

According to some new and extremely taxing research, here are some films you might not have known were actually shot at Oberlin: The Shape of Water: This Cold War film about a lady’s hot and steamy relationship with a fish was directly inspired by Oberlin. Rumor has it that the fish-man was extricated from our very own koi pond as a tadpole fetus. The secondfloor Fairkid bathtub was utilized for the particularly tender scenes, so that

explains that weird flapping noise you may hear at night.

Mad Max: Fury Road: Charlize Theron at Oberlin? I always knew there was something about her. Such a long legged girlboss only deserves to shit in the second floor Peters bathrooms.

Tom Hardy also planned to join the coverband showcase that year, in his one-man band The Tommas and the Papas, but apparently was overcome with “stagefright”...my brother still won’t explain to me what he was doing that night. You owe me an explanation, Dylan.

shot every deleted scene from the movie in King 127, i.e. when Pinhead and Deep Throat become lovers, or consider the moral repercussions for demons for stealing from Decafe.

Gladiator: This Ridley Scott epic— about a gladiator, btw—actually shot all of its colosseum scenes at the arb.

It looked a lot different back then—especially the arb castle, which, believe it or not, was the emperor’s castle (or wherever tf Marcus DeNiro lived)!

Fellini Satyricon: Some of it is in Latin, and we all know what language people at Oberlin took in high school.

Urban legend has it that all the orgy scenes, so like half the movie, was shot behind the Azzy’s curtain, because Fellini said it felt “queer and phantasmagorical” back there.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II: I don’t know if you’ve ever been in King at night— and, no I mean night night, not 7pm for your exco on trees—but it definitely gives psych ward vibes. They actually

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules: The movie that makes Orson Welles turn in his grave, and it’s all thanks to me. I had an English teacher in elementary school named Miss Botnick and the

actor who plays Rodrick is called Devon Bostick, so I brought them together, and she told him to do acting, and the rest is history. The Heff home was actually on South Professor, but it was, like, destroyed because of too many visitors.

Devon and I have a non-parasitic relationship and he may or may not pay my tuition with his Kid spoils.

The Trials and Tribulations of a Non-Euphoria Watcher Izzy Halloran Managing Editor

I’ve been scared to say it out loud for a while, but I think I’m ready now. . . I don’t watch “Euphoria.”

It’s shocking, and it might even leave you speechless. It might even shake you to your core. As a Euphoria-presenting person, nobody expects this from me. And believe me, I’ve tried. But after the first episode, I could tell it wasn’t for me. I don’t need to watch a group of beautiful misfits struggle through high school while facing a plethora of real-life obstacles because…

I lived it baby!!! Guys, hear me out. I’ve been Rue (sad, curly hair), I’ve also lived Jules (long legs, loose canon), and Jacob Elordi (himbo), Cassie (jugs), Maude Apatow (brown hair), and Dominic Fike (handsome and easy on the eyes). And don’t get me wrong, I usually adore these kinds of shows. I have seen The Secret Life of the American Teenager. One Tree Hill. Switched at Birth. Degrassi for G*d’s sake (it taught me everything I currently know). I haven’t told anyone this, but I even watched The Sex Lives of College Girls.

In our current day, it is rare to find someone else who does not partake.

Euphoria content is all over my Tik Tok, twitter, and instagram. I can’t escape her. And yes, I do watch the content. And yeah, I might even throw a like at it. Maybe once or twice I’ve sent it to a friend, but that was because I needed to talk about how crazy that fight between Zendaya and Jules was.

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By Henley Childress

Let’s just enjoy these next two years before Season 3. Let’s make these the best two years of our lives.

I am the Creator of Wordle and I am Stuck in this Hole

By The Wordle Guy

a very solid-looking tarp covered in sticks and leaves, and then ended up in a hole (LACKS PARTY VIBES).

If there’s one thing that I miss, other than being dry and seeing the sun (WOULD ENJOY SLIGHT LIGHT), it’s knowing what words you guys up there I know, I know! The world can’t get enough of are using these days. I miss when people would come Wordle. But people keep asking me, hey Wordle man, up to me and start telling me things like my vowhat happened to you after the New York Times got cabulary has grown so much lately (GREAT) or the a hold of your nifty little game? ever-popular please please please make it PENIS, I Thanks for asking! Mostly I’ve been in this hole.

Gonna be real here: it’s not a great hole (LARGE). In fact, it has lots of less-than-ideal hole attributes (EMPTY) but I try to look on the bright side (WEIRD SMELL) and acknowledge that there’s tons of worse places I could be than this hole right now (CRABS OFTEN CRAWL ABOVE MOUTH). We’ve all had years where we’ve sold our deeply successful word games for a million dollars and then immediately gotten stuck in a midsize hole (WATER RISES QUICK) that we just can’t get out of. It’s the universe’s way of balancing the scales, y’know? You get pretty lucky for a while, and then bam! Hole.

When you work with words a lot, people start assuming that the hole you’re in is a metaphor (WOULD NEVER BLUFF ABOUT HOLES). Maybe, if they’ve had a rough 2022, they’re like yeah, haha, same. But when you try to commiserate about the water and the smell and the crabs, they bail real quick (FALSE ALARM).

But I’m keeping an eye out for fellow hole-sufferers, because really anyone could get stuck in a hole like this. I’d like to normalize it. Probably even someone you know has gotten an exclusive invite to a soiree in the New York Times personal isolated forest (GREAT PARTY VIBES) but, while looking for it, happened to step on

start by guessing PENIS every day and am emotionally devastated whenever it’s not PENIS, it would be so funny, please (YOURE RIGHT THATS SUPER FUNNY).

I digress! But if you’re ever in my neck of the woods (VISIT THESE WOODS BRING ROPES), you should shout down some of the five letter words you’ve enjoyed lately. I’ve been taking the time to explore some new favorites myself (BALLS BALLS BALLS BALLS BALLS CRABS TOUCH BALLS) and I’m glad that this whole experience can have something positive come from it (TRULY UPSET ABOUT DITCH SITCH).

For those of you who may be in a similar situation (SUCKS), I want to spread a message of hope and resilience (LARGE DITCH SUCKS). We will, eventually, work out a way to stack some of the various crustaceans on top of the skulls of past hole-dwellers, pull ourselves above the surface of the scummy water, and reach the upper world again (STACK FALLS; SUCKS).

For now, please wish me luck in my journey through this hole. I’ve been absolutely overwhelmed by all the support I’ve received for Wordle, and I would love for some of that to translate to support in getting me out of this hole (WEIRD SMELL WORSE AFTER NIGHT COMES). If you like stretching your brain and working out puzzles, I can think of some things for you to do in the New York Times isolated forest (EXTRA CRABS AFTER NIGHT COMES). Just some food for thought.

Sincerely, The Wordle Guy (BALLS BALLS BALLS BALLS BALLS BALLS CRABS CRABS BALLS BALLS AHHHH)

Art by Eva Sturm-Gross

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YOUR AD HERE! Have something to feature, sell, or say? Send an email to

thegrape@oberlin.edu

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ACROSS 1. When pizza night in OSCA happens 12. The second installment of Alec Baldwin’s infant in the workplace movie 13. Wrinkles and sagging skin are a result of this 14. What Ohio State football spectators might yell from the stands 15. Trump’s ‘huge’ 16. A small town in Croatia with a name meaning ‘clay’ 17. Where you might go to buy a book or some yarn in Oberlin 18. A gathering of friends to feast, and the theme of this year’s Big Parade 26. The water goes down this in the sink 27. The fifth Roman emperor 28. Something belonging to Anna’s sister 29. A Chinese mythical hybrid creature resembling a winged lion 30. Kim Kardashian and the Real Housewives are examples of this kind of person 32. What Sally does at the seashore DOWN 1. Who you are competing against on a popular online auction website 2. Anna Wintour is the editor of this magazine 3. Applying your digital signature 4. The scrambled name of Jim Henson’s creation that resembles a blue fuzzy tube with a horn for a nose

5. The answer to this one is ‘YBG’ sorry 6. The fourth sound in Julie Andrews’ “Do-Re-Mi” 7. How you might bid goodnight to Justice Ginsburg over text 8. Slang for when you are really wasting your time 9. The answer to this one is ‘DTOIL’ sorry 10. The answer to this one is ‘AWSNI’ sorry 11. The opposite of me and mine

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