Oberlin Students Tell Their Stories Through Tattoos

Juliana Gaspar

Arts & Culture Editor

When walking through campus in the warmer months, students can be seen showing off their tattoos. Tattoos are often meaningful; they may give insight into a person’s hobbies, interests, and experiences. They may also just look cool. Either way, many students on campus have stories to tell through their tattoos.

College third-year Finn Miller shared his personal stories behind his two tattoos. Taking inspiration from his connection to Judaism, Miller applied religious phrases to his own experiences.

“One of them is on my thigh, and it’s the Hebrew word hineni, which means ‘I am here’ or ‘I am ready,’” he explained. “But for me it doesn’t have that much of a religious meaning. It’s more that I reached a point in my life with my gender transition and also with my mental health where I finally felt like I was showing up authentically as myself, as a trans man. Feeling male and also feeling like I was more in charge of my day-to-day life, rather than having my feelings overtake my day to day.”

Miller also explained a tattoo on his bicep.

“It’s ehyeh-asher-ehyeh, which is ‘I am what I am,’ but because of the complexity of Hebrew grammar, there’s no present tense of the verb ‘to be,’ so it can also be ‘I was who I was’ and ‘I will be who I will be’. … The meaning of it is to remind myself that whoever I was in the past was enough to get me to where I am today, who I am today is enough to get me to where I’m gonna be in the future, and all those versions of myself are equally valid and equally helpful.”

Miller doesn’t want to stop his tattoo collection there. He plans to get more, and this time he wants something visual rather than another quote.

“I constantly think of getting more,” he said. “One of the ones that I want is more picturesque, rather than the text that I have right now, but I think that’s where the Hebrew works well because … it is somewhat picturesque in a way. Other people can’t necessar- Miller’s tattoo (top left), Friedman-Park’s tattoo (top right), Taylor’s tattoo (bottom See Students, page 12 left), Sach’s tattoo (bottom right)

ON THE RECORD Hannah Belmont, College Third-Year and Comedian

Photo Courtesey of Hannah Belmont

Adrienne Sato

Senior Staff Writer

College third-year Hannah Belmont is a Theater major from Chicago. She has been performing stand-up comedy for a little over a year, and in that time she has hosted and performed in countless shows and events around Ohio. Last semester, she led a stand-up comedy ExCo and formed the Stand Up Comedy Coalition, a group of Oberlin students who host comedy shows on campus throughout the semester. Last weekend, they hosted “Laughin’ in Tappan,” a standup show in Tappan Square.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In a previous interview, you said you started doing comedy in high school with the speech team. How did you get from there to here, where you’re doing all these shows and going to all these open mics?

I started standup specifically a little over a year ago. It was like June of 2021 — I’d been meaning to go to open mics, but COVID happened right after high school, so I couldn’t immediately. I did my first open mic at this place called The Comedy Shrine, which is now closed, sadly, but I was like, “Oh, this is really fun.” So then I just kept going. I used to only go once or twice a week, and now I go to open mics pretty much every day of the week.

Have you gained anything in particular from your experience in standup or in comedy in general?

Yeah, I would say it’s definitely helped me. It’s helped me socially a lot. I used to be super shy and nervous about talking to new people, and standup has definitely helped me get to know new people. It’s definitely helped me learn also how to interact with adults. I’m the youngest one in most scenes — in Cleveland, I’m the youngest that I’ve met at least — so I’ve definitely learned how to interact more with adults, specifically men, which is interesting. Like kind of asserting myself in social situations.

Seeing that this is typically a somewhat older field, have there been specific challenges or benefits of being younger?

Yeah, there’s been a couple challenges. Specifically with being a young woman, you have to prove yourself more. You can’t just be funny, you have to be significantly funnier than other people or otherwise people wouldn’t take you seriously. A lot of the time, people are very excited with a young comedian. They either get excited or competitive. Thankfully, I’ve interacted more with the excited people.

Comedy is really tied to identity in some regards because it’s revealing your personal experience, and I know that some artists and comedians like to use performance as a way to express themselves or to process things. Would you say that comedy functions in that way at all for you?

It is a thousand percent me kind of coming to terms with things. A lot of people joke, and a lot of people were saying this on YikYak too — they were like, “That comedy show was just a bunch of comedians trauma dumping.” I’m like, yeah, that’s a lot of what it is initially. Most people don’t know that I’m bisexual until they see my stand-up because that’s just when I talk about it. Most people don’t know I’m Jewish until I talk about it in my stand-up. I feel like for a lot of people and for me, standup feels more comfortable because it’s like you’re making fun of yourself for things that you’re kind of insecure about, but you’re beating other people to the punch. So it’s definitely got a lot to do with identity.

Stand-up can be very personal, and people who don’t really do [standup] don’t see it as that. They’re just like, “Oh, this is a stupid joke,” but a lot of people use humor to cope with things that happen. So yeah, I definitely feel like it’s very connected to identity.

Is there anything in particular that when you go to a show you want audiences to take away?

I usually go into a show thinking that I want people to be surprised. When I do stand-up, I dress purposefully incredibly girly. I don’t look like I do stand-up. Most people, when I go to an open mic, are like, “Oh, are you singing? What are you doing here?” So I like when people are confused by me, which sounds weird. But I look very girly, and then I’ll go on stage, and I’ll say a really outlandish joke about something that’s weird. I like when people are like, “I wasn’t expecting that.” I want people to be confused and surprised, in a good way.

How is it that you come up with your content? Is it spontaneous, or do you have a running list?

I do it mainly spontaneously. In comedy, there are two main kinds of writing: passive and active. Passive just comes to you. Like you’re just walking down the street and a joke will go into your head and then you just write it down from there. That’s typically what I do. I have a hard time with active writing, which is where you sit down and just write jokes. Like, “I’m gonna come up with them right now.” I don’t know how people do that. I’ve done that maybe once or twice, and the jokes are never as good as when I just spontaneously come up with them.

So is comedy something that you’re interested in doing in the future as a career?

Yeah, I would like to. Honestly, this is probably my favorite artistic endeavor that I’ve done because it’s very independent. You get to be your own manager, essentially, and I really like that aspect of it. It makes it easier to do it as a career. Not money-wise, obviously — it’s difficult to make a living off of, but it’s a good thing if you have a day job and then you go do comedy and then you hopefully make your way into being able to live off of that. It definitely will take a while, but hopefully I can do it as a career at some point.

The Stand Up Comedy Coalition will put on three shows at Oberlin throughout the semester. The Coalition will host a comedy variety show on Oct. 27, which will be open to student performers, and a show over Oberlin parents weekend that will feature a student opener and a guest performer. Lastly, on Dec. 2, the Coalition will host a variety of Chicago comedians at Oberlin, including many of Belmont’s close friends.

Continued from page 10

stir after Wilde split from her loveable, mustachioed fiancé, Jason Sudeikis, in November 2020. The pair released a statement that they had separated amicably and would continue to co-parent their two children. Two months later, Wilde and Styles were spotted acting like a couple at a wedding, and their relationship was quickly confirmed to be romantic. Some Styles fans criticized Wilde because of the 10year age gap and because of Wilde’s role as Styles’ director, while others labeled these criticisms as unfair, remarking that countless male directors have engaged in similar relationships. Still other fans dismissed the pairing of Wilde and Styles as an elaborate PR stunt. Needless to say, the couple attracted abundant media attention — Styles’ dating life is a popular subject of scrutiny for Twitter and tabloids alike.

In April 2022, a year after Sudeikis and Wilde split up, Wilde was delivered custody papers from Sudeikis while delivering a speech about Don’t Worry Darling at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, and the bad blood became obvious.

At around the same time LaBeouf was removed from the project, he was also making disturbing headlines. His former partner FKA twigs filed a lawsuit against him, citing “relentless abuse” and sexual battery. He had also recently admitted to lying about childhood abuse in his semi-autobiographical film Honey Boy. A month after the news of LaBeouf’s lawsuit, Variety reported that LaBeouf was, in fact, “dropped from the film” due to “poor behavior,” stating that “his style clashed with the cast and crew,” including Wilde, who ultimately fired him.

The legitimacy of this claim would soon be called into question. In August 2022, LaBeouf told Variety that he wasn’t fired at all; he actually “quit the film due to lack of rehearsal time.” LaBeouf substantiated his version of the story with texts and videos from Wilde attempting to convince him to stay in spite of Pugh’s uncertainties about him. So, was Wilde actually protecting her female lead from a volatile and unpleasant costar? Or was she simply trying to safeguard her own image by retelling the story of LaBeouf’s departure to make herself look like the good guy in the eyes of the press?

Pugh did little to defend Wilde against character assassination. She also did little to promote Don’t Worry Darling on her social media, leading many to believe that there had been a falling out between Pugh and Wilde, blossoming into a cold war of sorts. One of the few statements that Pugh made about the film was a complaint about the outsized attention given to her and Styles’ sex scenes.

“When it’s reduced to your sex scenes, or to watch the most famous man in the world go down on someone, it’s not why we do it,” Pugh said. “It’s not why I’m in this industry. Obviously, the nature of hiring the most famous pop star in the world, you’re going to have conversations like that. That’s just not what I’m going to be discussing because [this movie is] bigger and better than that. And the people who made it are bigger and better than that.”

Fast forward to present day: the cast of Don’t Worry Darling had a tumultuous press panel early this month. Pugh was a no-show. Styles, perhaps one of the most extensively media-trained celebrities in recent history, said ridiculous, ineloquent things about Don’t Worry Darling during interviews, one example being, “My favorite thing about this movie is, like, it feels like a movie.”

Meanwhile, Chris Pine seemed to dissociate as he sported, according to Twitter, a “first female prime minister for a European nation” style bleach-blond bob. Styles and Wilde appeared to keep their distance on the red carpet, which stirred up rumors of a breakup. And, of course, there was “Spitgate,” a video clip in which Styles appeared to spit on Pine, which was dissected to no end on social media. The film festival was an absolute PR disaster.

In the midst of all this scrutiny and hullabaloo, critics have called the movie visually stunning yet conceptually uninspired. Will all of this media attention make Don’t Worry Darling a more successful piece of media than it would be otherwise?

Don’t Worry Darling is a superficially disastrous project, but it’s sensational, and therefore has a kind of twisted success regardless of its quality. In our attention economy where mental focus equals capital, a movie doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be talked about.

Students Embrace Tattoos as Self Expression

Continued from page 11 ily tell what it is from the outside. I like that kind of mystery. I get to decide what’s on my body, and I get to decide the meaning without people assuming from sight.”

College third-year Claire Schmelzer also has a tattoo of a quote that not everyone can decipher at first glance. It’s her only tattoo, and it’s written in Elvish.

“The meaning of the tattoo is, ‘This too shall pass,’ and it’s written in Sindarin, which is the Elvish language that J. R. R. Tolkien came up with when he was writing the lore behind [The] Lord of the Rings,” Schmelzer said. “The quote is said by Gandalf. … It’s something that my parents heard in [The] Lord of the Rings and it’s something that they would say to me pretty much any time that I was having an emotional breakdown in front of them. ‘Claire, this too shall pass.’ It was something that I heard a lot growing up and also would try to keep in mind for myself.”

The tattoo serves as a constant reminder for Schmelzer that everything will eventually be okay.

“In the books, it is literally the end of the world,” she said. “It’s an issue so big that I cannot even comprehend the problems that they were facing, and it really did pass, they were right. I think it’s just a good thing to remember, and it looks dope.”

College third-year Martina Taylor’s first tattoo also helped them feel more in control of their emotions in a broader way. Although their first tattoo doesn’t carry specific meaning, the reasoning behind their decision to get the tattoo does.

“The first one is a snake on my right arm,” Taylor said. “I got it when I turned 18. It was COVID summer, and I was in a very conservative school for 13 years. I needed to do something bold and something I [was] a little bit scared of.”

Often when advising against getting a tattoo, people warn that it will be on your body forever. This, however, did not faze Taylor when getting their second tattoo. Instead, the permanence of a bug on their leg holding a magic wand was a source of comfort.

“My second one I got this summer,” they explained. “I moved to New York for a job that I got myself. So there were a lot of big changes in independence. My bug is my little guide, because it wasn’t a very fun summer. So the bug was a little guy to keep me company.”

When choosing a tattoo artist, some pick those with a clear vision and good technique. Others choose the artist based on their art. Both of Taylor’s tattoos have been done freehand, giving the artists creative license.

“All of mine are freehand, so I want to continue that,” Taylor said. “They draw on you and they’re really communicative. I feel like it’s almost less of a scary commitment to me, because I’m really, really present with it being made. Whereas if it was just like a piece of flash or something they made beforehand, I think I would spend hours deliberating on how I felt about it.”

College third-year Shira Friedman-Parks has five tattoos: one on her thigh, one on her ankle, one on her arm, and two nipple tattoos.

“None of my tattoos have meaning,” Friedman-Parks said. “None of them have really been planned. I follow a lot of tattoo artists. I really like the idea of collecting art on your body over time, which is why I wanna spread it out. I’m really into flash. I really, really like flash as a concept. So I follow artists I like, and if I see something that they post that I really like, I’ll save it. If I feel so inclined, I’ll make an appointment.”

Friedman-Parks explained how her favorite tattoos have helped her feel more comfortable in her body.

“I really like my nipple tattoos,” she said. “I’m not gonna lie. Those are my favorite. It hurt, like, a lot. They’re stick and pokes. Using a machine would be crazy … I had already kind of stopped wearing bras, and now I never do because [the tattoos] are just so great.”

Tattoos can not only improve one’s connection to their body, but also to their culture and heritage, according to College third-year Claire Rothstein.

“I designed [my tattoo] myself, but it’s a Hanafuda card, which is a Japanese card game that I grew up playing, and it’s this specific card with grass and then the moon over it,” Rothstein explained. “It’s one of the higher ranking cards in the game. I always felt really disconnected from my Japanese heritage, and it was important for me to have something that shows that I am Japanese. It took me a really long time to feel comfortable and know enough about my culture and my history and my family’s history. It was important for me to have that on my body.”

College third-year Robbin Sachs also has a tattoo that represents a memory from childhood.

“The first one I got was a lighthouse, and it’s the lighthouse I went to as a child,” he said. “My family is from the north of Germany — I grew up in the south, though — and the lighthouse is like a very Northern thing. So, it’s home.”

Not all of Sachs’ tattoos have sentimental meanings. He is most proud of two tattoos that form a pun.

“One of [my tattoos] is a quote on my arm, and it says ‘words, words, words,’ because I wanted a quote to encompass all possible quotes. Then there’s a little ‘1’ on it, and there’s a footnote on my ankle with the source,” Sachs said. “I thought of that when I was 18 and I thought it was the funniest thing in the world. So I got it. It’s a footnote. I looked it up and I hadn’t seen anyone doing it.”

Tattoos may have meaning or they can be more spur-of-the-moment, but either way, they are art as self expression.

“Get tattoos? I advise it,” Rothstein said. “Do it. Even if your parents hate ’em, get ’em. That’s my statement. Your money, your body, who cares? Unless it’s gonna be you in 20 years … but then that’s you in 20 years. You deal with that.”

Schmelzer’s tattoo (left), Rothstein’s tattoo (right)

CONSERVATORY

September 16, 2022 Established 1874

IN THE PRACTICE ROOM Q&A with CourtneySavali Andrews, Professor of Ethnomusicology

Gracie McFalls Senior Staff Writer

Courtney-Savali Andrews, OC ’06, is the newly appointed assistant professor of African American and African Diasporic Musics in the Conservatory. This semester, her courses include Introduction to African American Music, an interdisciplinary course that blends music history, ethnomusicology, and Africana Studies.

In addition to her degrees from Oberlin in Africana Studies and Piano Performance, Andrews holds a masters degree from Arizona State University in Musical Direction, and a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Wellington. From 2009–2012, she served as a Fulbright Fellow in New Zealand where she researched and taught classes on ethnomusicology. Outside of academia, Andrews has worked with the Seattle Opera as a collaborative pianist, and as a church musician and leader in Auckland, New Zealand.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your journey from being a double-degree student at Oberlin to becoming a professor?

I arrived here at Oberlin as a Classical Piano major, which is an instrument of the European tradition, and an Africana Studies major. Once coming to Oberlin, I learned about Black classical composers and the long legacy that is attached to Oberlin Conservatory, and that started to come through in my playing.

My father is African American from Alabama, and my mother is of Samoan heritage from American Samoa. My father is a musician. He’s a jazz Hammond B-3 organist. I grew up in the jazz and blues clubs with him, and my siblings and I are trained conservatory musicians, but we were the only Samoans I was aware of in the U.S.

The types of courses that were offered then allowed me to not only express my African-American heritage through my music, but to also start to see connections to my Pacific Islander identity. My professors, especially Professor Caroline Jackson-Smith and Dr. Wendell Logan, were really supportive of me exploring both of my identities in conversation with one another.

I was musical director for many of Caroline Jackson-Smith’s theater productions in the Theater department and was also a musical director for five Black churches in Lorain County by the time I graduated from Oberlin. I come out of the Black Baptist church, and playing gospel and Negro spirituals in those particular contexts is where I would bring what I was learning in Oberlin to the real world.

After leaving Oberlin, I went to Arizona State University for my master’s and doctorate and then to New Zealand on a Fulbright to study Samoan opera singers coming out of New Zealand. That Fulbright turned into a Ph.D., and that’s when I realized what I was doing was musicology. It took me six or seven years in my program to even admit that.

So for 13 years, I would come from New Zealand to the Samoan Islands through Hawaii, stop in Seattle to visit family, and then back to Oberlin. I’m very connected to the community in the town and the College here, and I think that’s what allowed me to be top of mind when there was a vacancy for someone to come and teach Intro to African American Music.

Do you have a favorite definition of ethnomusicology that you like to use?

Ethnomusicology is the study of cultures in society through the exploration of their musical expression. As musicologists, we go about understanding their social context by using ethnography as our methodology. So that means being among the people and learning from them about their existence and expression. You’re not stuck in the archives. You work on field sites. You have to work out your insider outsider context. You have to learn how to properly engage with people. And it’s culturally specific.

What’s been the biggest lesson you’ve learned from being an ethnomusicologist?

I learn all the time, every day. This work makes you very sensitive to how you engage with people. You are researching facets of their life while also learning how to do what it is that you’re researching. Even when I’m teaching, I’m always trying to figure out what the best approach is going to be to get the best questions out of the students.

I have also learned to take into account that I am a Black- and Brown-presenting person that is engaging with other Black and Brown peoples, and there are very specific pivots and protocols that make that relational space mean different things.

Do you have a favorite part about teaching this course or teaching in general?

There is a research project that I’m really excited about that students do in second semester that was inspired by the lockdown. Every student researches a figure, band, or particular subgenre of Black music coming from their exact neighborhood.

I did this to illuminate a couple of different things. One is to bring together their experience of having an immediate threat to their life. Two is that all of these different reactions to that process reminded me of the ways that Black peoples have come through the Middle Ages, have come through transatlantic slave trade, and have navigated their lives over generations. The goal is for the students to identify figures that have always had to do that in places that they call home and to identify whether Black and Brown people are still in their neighborhoods.

I do that every spring. It’s challenging, but it gets to the heart of the music, the people, and identifying your relationship to it.

How does it feel to be teaching the class that you took as a student, especially one that Dr. Logan taught for so many years?

It’s trippy because I can remember what it was like to sit in class and learn African American history, and American history in general, through this lens of Black music. There was a lot of unlearning that happened there. Now I’m on the other side, looking into the eyes of confusion, pressing up against students’ understanding of history. It’s really rewarding, but it’s also very challenging. I’ve revamped the class to answer issues that we’re constantly facing with the pandemic and George Floyd, and still within the context of Black Lives Matter, so that when students crash into whatever the news cycle is telling us, there’s a way that the course has already addressed that.

The music always keeps score as to what is going on between Black people’s overall existence and their context in America.

Volume 152, Number 2

Conservatory Performances to Honor Nathaniel Dett

Ginger Deppman

In 1908, Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882–1943) graduated from Oberlin College and Conservatory with a double major in Piano Performance and Composition. The first Black student to graduate from Oberlin Conservatory, and he went on to become an influential teacher, composer, and performer throughout his life. His numerous achievements have only recently begun to receive acclaim in the Conservatory community.

In 1900, Dett composed his first piece: After the Cake Walk, a ragtime characteristic march. Dett then enrolled in Oliver Willis Halsted’s Conservatory of Music located in Lockport, NY, where he composed his second piece, a piano march and twostep titled The Cave of the Winds. In 1903, Dett began his studies at Oberlin Conservatory, where he took a five-year double-major track. In the summer after his first year at Oberlin, a patron at the Cataract House in Niagara Falls, NY, noticed Dett’s talent during a performance, and provided financial support for him until he graduated.

The time that Dett spent at the Conservatory deeply influenced his composing style and aspirations. In a written interview for The Black Perspective in Music journal, Dett mentioned that over the course of his studies at Oberlin, he became motivated to compose and perform music inspired by spirituals that were sung to him by his family growing up.

“[T]he most vivid and far reaching memory I have of Oberlin was the result of a visit of the famous Kneisel String Quartet, who played as part of one of their programs a slow movement by Dvořák, based on traditional airs,” Dett wrote. “Suddenly, it seemed I heard again the frail sweet voice of my long departed grandmother, calling across the years; and, in a rush of emotion which stirred my spirit to its very center, the meaning of the songs which had given her soul such peace was revealed to me.”

After graduating from Oberlin in 1908, Dett took up a post at Lane College in Jackson, TN. Three years later, Dett became the music director of Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City, MO. In 1913, he moved to the Hampton Institute, becoming the institution’s first Black director of music. During his 19 years teaching there, Dett founded the Hampton Choral Union, the Musical Arts Society, and the Hampton Institute Choir and School of Music. He also continued his education at Harvard University with Arthur Foote from 1920–21, and then in 1929, he studied under Nadia Boulanger at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France. In 1932, Dett received a master’s degree from the Eastman School of Music.

Dett continued to compose pieces throughout his career, including his influential Chariot Jubilee (1919), an extended motet for tenor, chorus, and orchestra. After receiving his Master of Music degree from Eastman, Dett took up a post as the choral conductor at Bennett College in Greensboro, NC. In 1942, Dett returned to Rochester, NY, and worked at a local church while contributing to the United Service Organizations to support the U.S. efforts during World War II. While serving as a music advisor for the USO, Dett suffered a heart attack and passed away Oct. 2, 1943.

R. Nathaniel Dett’s extraordinary accomplishments have left a deep imprint on Oberlin Conservatory. The Oberlin Orchestra, Oberlin College Choir, and Musical Union are honoring his legacy by performing his composition The Ordering of Moses in the upcoming months three times — twice in Finney Chapel, on Oct. 13 and Jan. 17, and once at Carnegie Hall on Jan. 20. When asked about the importance of these performances, the Conservatory’s current Orchestra Director Raphael Jiménez spoke of Dett’s experiences as a student at Oberlin.

“For the Oberlin ensembles, bringing to life the oratorio The Ordering of Moses has a special significance,” Jiménez said. “It is impossible not to think that Nathaniel Dett was walking around this campus in the early 20th century. He would go to his piano and composition lessons passing by Finney Chapel as it was being built. Dett graduated in 1908, precisely the year that Finney Chapel opened. Playing his music in this building feels very special indeed. By incorporating African-American musical traditions into his music, Nathaniel Dett most definitely answered the challenge that Antonin Dvořák presented to American composers in the 1890s by asking them to find a distinctive American musical voice.”