TUFTS OBSERVER
OCTOBER 28, 2013
VOLUME CXXVII, ISSUE 4
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OUR RETRO OBSESSION ( PAG E 2 )
UNPACKING HISTORY ( PAG E 1 8 )
OFF TO THE RACES ( PAG E 2 6 )
HARKENING BACK: OUR NOSTALGIC OBSESSION by Evan Tarantino
WILL VAUGHAN
BEN SILBERSTEIN
BERNITA LING
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CREATIVE COMMONS
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, THEO S by Bernita Ling
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ROBERT COLLINS
THE KINK IN THE LINE by Robert Persky
18 ALISON GRAHAM
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A NOSTALGIC WONDERLAND: DAYS AT THE RACES by Alison Graham The Observer has been Tufts’ student publication of record since 1895. Our dedication to in-depth reporting, journalistic innovation, and honest dialogue has remained intact for over a century. Today, we offer insightful news analysis, cogent and diverse opinion pieces, creative writing, and lively reviews of current arts, entertainment, and culture. Through poignant writing and artistic elegance, we aim to entertain, inform, and above all challenge the Tufts community to effect positive change.
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EDITORS editor-in-chief Molly Mirhashem managing editor Nicola Pardy production director Ben Kurland asst. production director Bernita Ling section editors Anika Ades Justin Kim Aaron Langerman Moira Lavelle Gracie McKenzie Alison Pinkerton Kumar Ramanathan Nader Salass Evan Tarantino Flo Wen publicity director Stephen Wright photography director Knar Bedian photography editor Alison Graham art director Robert Collins lead artists Griffin Quasebarth Eva Strauss lead copy editors Liana Abbott Sarah Perlman copy editors George Esselstyn Eve Feldberg Brett Mele Katharine Pong MT Snyder Nate Williams staff writers Ellen Mayer
CONTRIBUTORS Sophia Adams Reema Al-Marzoog Madeleine Carey Lily Herzan Brenda Lee Ben Silberstein
COVER BY: Robert Collins
October 28th, 2013 Volume CXXVII, Issue 4 Tufts Observer, since 1895 Tufts’ Student Magazine
TABLE OF CONTENTS Harkening Back: Our Nostalgic Obsession by Evan Tarantino 2 feature Government Shutdowns: Partisan Then, Partisan Now by Moira Lavelle 6 news Pink Sneakers Take the Senate by Katharine Pong 8 news Theo’s by Bernita Ling 10 campus & prose All the Way Up Here by Lydia Pezzullo 12 poetry inset Back to the Past 13 photo & prose The Kink in the Line by Robert Persky 17 poetry Not Your Father’s History by Aaron Langerman 18 opinion The Challenge of Our Time by Allison Aaronson 20 opinion & culture Dancing With Androids by Kumar Ramanathan 22 arts & culture Window to the Present by James Gordon 24 arts campus A Nostalgic Wonderland: Days at the Races by Alison Graham 26 off blotter By Moira Lavelle and Aaron Langerman 28 police
RE TU FE A
OUR NOSTALGIC OBSESSION
FE E UR AT
by EVAN TARANTINO
M
iley Cyrus is everywhere these days. On TV, in the newspaper, all over the internet— and chances are you’ve heard her name during a random eavesdropping session over the last two weeks. Her stunts have earned her a #trending status on Twitter, and although the word ‘trending’ connotes social media today, trends have always been at the heart of our cultural identity. Trends are where we search for a sense of self-image, ruffling through countless styles, aesthetics, and cultural tendencies until we find the mix that fits best. Present trends dominate the cultural conversation simply because of their extensive exposure and their current relevance. Despite this, most are short-lived and fleeting, and thus we see no real commitment in participating. Continuing with the Miley example, Ms. Cyrus is everywhere in print and digital media. As a result, most people in the US know at least a little something about her, without exerting any real effort to keep up with her twerking abilities. It’s easy to stay aware of present trends, but that awareness doesn’t hold much permanence.
Past trends, however, manage to maintain an immortality that the present cannot. They are fixed, established elements of a deceased aesthetic that still holds stock in society. The power of nostalgia (culturally and commercially) feeds off the notion that, as we become more and more disenchanted with the present, our already glorified sense of the past is amplified tenfold. There will always be a demand and supply for resurrecting, romanticizing, and repurposing the past. We are in a constant state of retro resurgence. Renowned music critic Simon Reynolds, in his 2011 book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, catalogues this resurgence within the pop culture machine. In his eyes: “As each decade unfolds, there’s a bit more of an archive, and that archive becomes more accessible, too.” Accessibility nowadays is synonymous with the Internet, and in Reynolds’ words: “Youtube... that’s a real threshold. A lot of the stuff that fans used to trade—like degraded copies of videos with clips of people on TV shows in the 60s and 70s—is all going up and becoming common property.”
RE TU FE A So the Internet has given us this unparalleled access to the past. Mix that with the ever-increasing power of the brand, and the social demand fulfills itself. The advertising world has seized the potential associated with our generation’s perception of the past. The industry understands our fascination with the novelties of what we have heard about, researched, and studied, but have never known ourselves. Marketers also realize that, as Fred Davis put it in Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia: “The country is struggling with financial troubles—housing foreclosures, rising food prices, high unemployment,” and are thus reviving “the brands of yesterday with the hope that they will tap into peoples’ desire for simpler, happier, less stressful times. They believe their brands can provide safety, comfort, pleasure, or joy—a tonic in today’s uncertain world.” Facebook, Skype and Twitter all have vintage-style ads designed and developed, with the hope that vintage might be the design direction for the next viral ad campaign. Pepsi and Mountain Dew throwback editions are now permanent additions to the family—packaging straight from the 1970s, real cane sugar and all. Companies like Ray-Ban are repurposing 60s and 70s eyewear styles that harken back to the days of afternoon scotch and cigarettes. And they wouldn’t be doing so if such initiatives didn’t sell. But let’s get back to scotch and cigarettes for a second. Mad Men: we can all agree on its general brilliance, but the hype has reached staggering levels. I’ve heard of about 40 Mad Men-themed parties within the past year. No joke. And on two occasions I’ve heard guys in suit shops asking for a “Mad Men-type suit”. There’s no doubt that the period style and grace of AMC’s pampered star
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makes you want to don a quality threepiece, throw on a slim tie and have a Lucky. And guess what? If you search “Don Draper suits” on Google, GQ and Esquire are there to fulfill your desires, with complete Draper Lookbooks. Not to mention Brooks Brothers sneaking in there for a quick pitch. Thank AMC for creating the allure, and the others for getting it to you—stat. It’s nostalgic demand and supply, fabricated and ready for your immediate consumption. In the music industry, throwback culture looks a little different. When Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories hit the market last May, 19,000 of the units sold during its first week were LPs. Although this accounts for a mere 6% of total sales, it raises the question: Why are record labels still catering to the throwback niche in the midst of the Digital Age? And, more importantly, why is the musically-inclined consumer still providing a niche market for these products? The latter is obviously tied to the former, and a chunk of the explanation lies with DJs and vinyl as the technical, traditional mixing tool. The rest is rooted in defying the digital ways that dominate musical culture today. Analog purism retains a certain depth and character of sound that only vinyl can fulfill. There are few who subscribe to this notion with any degree of sincerity, and many who subscribe to it based solely on the nostalgic image that vinyl perpetuates—Laid back, lo-fi, old school, however you want to describe it. And it is through this image that the music industry capitalizes on the same nostalgia that retro advertising exploits. Retro music evokes simpler times in the overwhelming infinity of today’s digital music choices. Back then, you had roughly 22 minutes per LP side, and that’s all there was to worry about.
And just like with throwback advertising, the consumer avidly responds to the simplicity of vinyl. Although labels incur greater costs by producing LPs, the consumer demand for analog secures them a worthy payoff.. Michael Framer, who reports on all things analog via his site Analogplanet.com, affirms that “none of these companies are pressing records to feel good. They’re doing it because they think they can sell.” And with 25 million LPs pressed last year alone, it seems like a worthwhile endeavor. But it’s not just the labels that take full advantage of our nostalgic vulnerability either. Bands like Fleet Foxes, with hair, beards and harmonies echoing the 60s and 70s, do their part as well. They look to the past for inspiration, and translate select aspects of that inspiration into their own image. That image is then projected to the fans, young and old, who revel in it. The problem with this kind of nostalgic projection is that it reduces the past to only its most iconic, dominant representation. It is as if the original aesthetic or cultural tendency passes through a custom filter designed by whoever has decided to resurrect it. Take vinyl, for example. The skips, the crackling, the “hassle” of it all relative to a digital music file are inconsequential to today’s buyers because they are instead concerned with theimage and glorified “feel” of analog. Josh Bizar, the director of sales and marketing for Chicago music gurus Music Direct, commented in an interview with The New York Times on how they “never expected the vinyl resurgence to become as crazy as it is, but it’s come full circle.” He went on to imply that it has even become a means of generational differentiation for some. “We get kids calling us up and telling us why they listen to vinyl, and when we ask them why they don’t lis-
FE E UR AT
ten to CDs, they say, ‘CDs? My dad listens to CDs — why would I do that?’” While we would expect to distinguish ourselves with future trends instead of fads from the past, it seems that the opposite is true. Some are reaching behind the music preferences of the Baby Boomers in order to, well, stand out. So where does yearning for yesteryear leave us today? Simon Reynolds posits that there should be a call for concern. He realizes how the past fulfills the retro allure that the present cannot, but worries that it is too motivated by fear of The
Now. “It’s fun to relive our pop culture history,” said Reynolds in an interview with Collectors Weekly. “But,” he posits,“is the fun based on being scared of what’s going on now, and hiding in the past?” Reynolds’ question holds significant water, and as Fred Davis points out, marketers are clearly taking advantage of this insinuated fear. There is a certain security in the past that makes it easily applicable and marketable to the society of the present. Mix it with a heavy dose of glorified nostalgia, and you’ve got a scrumptious cocktail, prepped for the masses.
At this point, repurposing the past is a cultural staple, a constant that is invoked in everything from television, to brands, to music, each in its own regard. But the fear that Reynolds alludes to is still very real. Past trends are, and should remain, sources of inspiration for innovation in the present. But we cannot allow ourselves to get lost in them. All that we can really do is enjoy the retro cult—60s style, throwback branding, the wonderful world of analog and more— without letting it impede our ability to cope with the present. O
There is a certain security in the past that makes it easily applicable and marketable to the society of the present.
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GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWNS: Partisan Then, Partisan Now
ROBERT COLLINS
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By Moira Lavelle
ednesday, October 16 concluded three weeks of government shutdown. Congress’ inability to agree on a federal budget by the deadline led to a complete furlough of all “non-essential” government employees and agencies. All those who were not considered necessary were sent home without pay until the government could figure out the budget. Over the three-week shutdown, news agencies and politicians alike spoke grandly about the shutdown and what it signified for our country. Yet despite the fanfare, the U.S. government has faced this sort of financial crisis many times before.
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Since 1976—when the Budget and Impoundment Control Act was passed, giving Congress an October deadline—there have been 17 government shutdowns. But today’s politicians and critics argue that we have learned nothing from these past shutdowns. “I’ll buy you a Coke Zero if you can tell me what the government shutdown was about in ’95,” exclaimed Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, “What was the issue? Nobody remembers!” In the fall of 1995 there were two shutdowns under the Clinton administration. The first shutdown began on November 14
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and lasted through the 19th. Less than a month later, governmental employees and services were again furloughed for three weeks from December 16, 1995 through January 6, 1996. Then, as now, Congress was deeply divided and frequently unable to compromise. But this is only the beginning of the list of similarities between the 1995 situation and our most recent shutdown crisis. In 1995, Bill Clinton faced a hostile Republican Congress led by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Republicans lobbied for their “Contract with America” platform, which promoted smaller government. Gingrich and his comrades promised to lessen regulation and government involvement in the economy as well as balance the increasingly unstable budget by passing a Congressional amendment that would require a balanced budget in seven years. This disagreement was only compounded by an argument over Clinton’s Medicare project and its solvency. Clinton vetoed the budget, and in response, the Republicans in Congress refused to pass a stopgap measure to fund the government. The government was shut down for six days. Government employees were sent home and “non-essential” federal functions ground to a halt. The first shutdown of 1995 concluded on November 19th, when President Clinton agreed to balance the budget in seven years with the addendum that the budget must “protect future generations, ensure Medicare solvency, reform welfare, and provide adequate funding” for projects such as Medicare. However, the 1995 Congress was unable to agree on the implementation of the new budget, and the government was promptly shut down again on December 16th, remaining this way through the start of the new year. Republicans were in no rush to pass a temporary budget, as they believed that the prospect of default gave them significant leverage in negotiations. But much to the chagrin of the Republicans in Congress, the treasury at the time had the power to borrow from govern-
ment employee retirement trust funds and was able to prevent the threat of default for at least a couple of months. With their leverage gone, Republicans were more willing to negotiate and the parties eventually reached a compromise on January 6, 1996. Republicans were largely blamed for the 1995 shutdowns; the public condemned them for prioritizing their political agenda over the country’s economic stability. Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had been at the forefront of many of the arguments, fell sharply in popularity. Conversely,
shutdown. There was again harsh contention between a Democratic president and Republicans in Congress. However, the current Republican leader Mitch McConnell is the head of the minority party and doesn’t have the same amount of support that Gingrich boasted in 1995. The impasse over budget spending was coupled with a Republican plan to deprive funding for President Obama’s universal healthcare program, much like the side arguments over Medicare that occurred in 1995. This most recent shutdown lasted so long because current Republicans, like those in 1995, saw the threat of default as leverage in debate. Our current deficit is estimated to be around $750 billion—three times what it was at the beginning of the last shutdown crisis—so defaulting would be even more of an economic calamity today. One of the main differences is that unlike Clinton in 1996, Obama is not up for reelection—which is lucky for him because he has not garnered the same surge in approval post-shutdown. Additionally, public opinion places blame fairly equally on both parties for the 2013 shutdown, with the Republicans perhaps bearing a slightly heavier burden of the load. The real question, though, is if today’s deeply partisan government will be able to avoid the more serious error of the 1995-96 Congress and escape a second shutdown. If negotiations fail, we may see the same plunge back into crisis—sequestration or deep, comprehensive budget cuts. Some Republicans see this threat as another favorable bargaining chip on their side, but it is largely agreed that sequestration would be profoundly damaging to the U.S. economy. To avoid this, Congress has already agreed that the “perfect” budget compromise they have been aiming for over the past few years is impossible, and that sights must be set lower. But it remains to be seen if the partisan rancor that has become so common in today’s politics can be set aside to firmly resolve this financial crisis, or if we will suffer similar consequences to the crisis of 1995. O
“I’ll buy you a Coke Zero if you can tell me what the government shutdown was about in ’95. What was the issue? Nobody remembers!” -Senator Lindsey Graham
President Clinton was lauded as having “won” the shutdowns and benefitted from a boost in approval ratings from a projected 48% approval before the shutdowns, to 53% after. Many analysts believe this boost carried through and helped Clinton win re-election later in 1996. The shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 cost the equivalent of at least $2.1 billion in today’s dollars. Economists explain that the shutdowns slowed down economic growth greatly that quarter, but that the economy grew at least as much as it had lost in the next quarter. This year’s shutdown resulted from many of the same mistakes as the 1995
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Pink Sneakers Take The State House
Katharine Pong
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REEMA
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AL-MAR
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endy Davis, the Democratic state senator hailed as a feminist fighter in pink tennis shoes, has announced she will be running for governor of Texas. Her candidacy announcement came exactly 100 days after the legislative filibuster that caused her rise to national political prominence as a champion of women’s rights. On June 25, Davis stood and spoke for 11 hours in opposition to the Republican-backed Senate Bill 5 (SB 5), which sought to further restrict abortion rights
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in the state of Texas. People across the nation took note, watching the live stream and spreading the news through social media. President Obama tweeted, “Something special is happening in Austin tonight.” Others echoed his sentiment and tweeted their support using the hashtag #standwithwendy. Although SB 5 was eventually passed, Davis and her filibuster came to serve as a symbol of women’s rights for liberal supporters and the Democratic Party. The filibuster also galvanized Democrats, giving them a boost of morale and momentum as well as financial support. In the two weeks after her stand, Davis received almost $1 million from campaign contributors. Many of these contributors donated $50 or less, demonstrating the grassroots nature of her supporters. In the conservative state of Texas Davis will fight a hard battle to be the first Democratic governor elected in nearly 23 years. The Republican Party has enormous support within the state; in the 2012 presidential election, Obama lost Texas by nearly 1.3 million votes. It is evident that in terms of party politics, the Democrats are the underdog. Davis’ opponent will likely be Gregg Abbott, the current attorney general of Texas, making her status as the underdog even more apparent. Abbott has been called “one of the most popular Republicans in the state” and an “almost unbeatable candidate” by independent political analysts. His conservative stance on issues like the environment and the Affordable Care Act, which situate him in opposition to the Obama administration, makes him a clear choice to represent Republican interests. In addition to popular ideological support, Abbott enjoys a strong base of financial support —he has already raised more than $20 million in campaign funds.
Davis, however, whose candidacy has been described as a “shot in the arm” for the Democratic Party, has her own appealing personal and political traits. A brief look at Davis’ personal story shows that she has overcome some hefty obstacles in the past. A single mother at the age of 19, Davis raised her daughter in a trailer park in Fort Worth. She then took classes at a community college while working two jobs and attending Texas Christian University before eventually paying her own way through Harvard Law School and getting elected to the Texas Senate in 2008. Her inspirational narrative will play a strong
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Davis is creating a bridge between the realms of feminism and politics.
politician who places importance on issues like education and health, notably omitting discussion of abortion and filibuster in her candidacy speech. Even if Davis does not win the election, her presence in the race has the potential to revive the Democratic party in Texas and help attract other voters to the party, specifically people of color. Analysts point to the growing Hispanic population, noting that this voting bloc has the potential to make Texas a competitive state for Democrats as the year 2020 approaches. Davis’ candidacy may also encourage other female candidates to run for elected office nationwide. In a society that seems to discourage women from running for office, her presence in the gubernatorial race is a display of empowerment that may inspire other women to run. A recent article in The Washington Post attributes women’s lack of political representation in the United States primarily to their not running for office, something that results from external and internal messages that they are unqualified to run. Furthermore, Davis is creating a bridge between the realms of feminism and politics. Her candidacy, coupled with her vocal emphasis on women’s rights, makes her not just a politician who values feminism, but also a political feminist. Her rise to prominence means the pulling of feminism into the mainstream world of politics: no longer do feminists have to look to fringe candidates to represent their priorities, but rather they can look to someone like Davis, a member of one of the two major political parties. A voice for women’s rights is finally finding its audience and developing its influence in Texas and the country as a whole. O
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part in her campaign by appealing to voters’ emotions. Davis’ personal appeal as a candidate provides an opportunity for Democrats to gain a foothold in the realm of Texas politics. Politically, she looks to represent the Democratic liberal side of both controversial as well as less heated issues. She seems to be taking caution to appear as more than a single-issue candidate who focuses solely on women’s reproductive rights. She’s also making a concerted effort to establish herself as a
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Theo’s Interview and photos by Bernita Ling
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few weeks ago, Theo Friedman, a Tufts junior, hosted the Observer and seven other guests at his house for an eight-course, fine dining experience. While Theo introduced each dish, we struggled to restrain ourselves from devouring each gorgeous plate: roasted shiitake with avocado emulsion and pickled shallot, pickled beet with beet salad and shaved walnut, and other extravagant dishes. Theo’s culinary skills have not gone unnoticed: he managed to snag a job this summer in the kitchen at Wd~50, a fine dining estaurant in New York City. We followed him around the weekend of the dinner party to get the inside scoop on his thoughts and experiences about the food industry.
Observer: Why did you start doing these dinners? Theo Friedman: The main reason is for me to continue my cooking. It’s a passion of mine, something that I love doing, but I don’t get much of a chance to do it when I’m at school. It’s also a way to test out ideas that I’ve been working on, recipes and flavor combinations that come into my head in the middle of class. It’s also just a way to bring people together, to gather my friends and spend time together eating food, which is one of my favorite things to do. I like to entertain and to nourish—to create a space not only for people to eat, but to interact as well. O: Was food a large part of your childhood? TF: From what I can remember, everything I’ve done has been focused on food. I’ve always been a super adventurous eater; there’s nothing that I don’t love to eat. My dad and I relate to each other through food. We would always be the ones picking apart the carcass of a chicken while my mom and brother looked away because they thought it was gross. It also became an artistic outlet; I actually thought I was going to be a photographer, but I found this new way of incorporating art in my life. O: What is the most satisfying part of the cooking process? TF: I love the transformation of ingredients into something finished. I guess I could say the grocery shopping, because it is where the ideas on the paper start turning into a reality and I can start to see what the final product will look like. I smell, touch, and taste things, and that is the true source of inspiration. That’s what gets me excited. O: You made two desserts at the dinner; have you ever considered become a baker or a pastry chef? TF: The flavor combinations I am drawn towards would fall under [those categories] However, I don’t like to see the categories of savory courses and sweet courses. I also like to blend the lines a little bit and serve things that you would usually find in a savory course in a dessert, and vice versa. I don’t categorize things; I see flavors just as flavors, regardless of what category they fall under. O: What are your career goals? Will you become a chef? TF: I thought I would before my job this summer. That’s not to say I didn’t have an awesome experience, but it was also a very real one. I will do something with food, I know that. I would say that right now I am on the road to becoming a chef, but I am a guy who likes adventure and spontaneity. If an opportunity presents itself that seems really attractive to me, then that’s probably what I’ll do. This is all that I am passionate about, all that I love doing. It’s what makes me happy; if I’m going to do something every day, why not do something that makes me happy? O: How does your education play into your future career in the food industry? Will you go to culinary school? TF: Everyone asks me, “If you’re so interested in food and being a chef, why didn’t you go to culinary school?” I wanted and still want a liberal arts education, regardless of what I do.
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I think it is very important to learn how to think, learn how to learn, and get a pretty broad spectrum on things before you focus on one thing for your career. I think that some of the best chefs take on the philosophy of a liberal arts education, in that they incorporate not just food in cooking, but a lot of other ways of thinking, philosophies, and views about food. It makes me a little nervous because I do feel like there are some foundations and fundamentals that I will miss by not going to a culinary school, but I think that a sense of inadequacy is healthy at all times. I don’t think you should ever feel fully adequate. O: Are there certain chefs whose work you follow closely? TF: Hands down, Grant Achatz. Words cannot describe my feelings for him. Obsessed. My idol. All that. He’s so cool. He changed the dining scene in America. What is just so admirable is his mentality. It’s that of pushing forward, and constant innovation. Constant, constant innovation. That’s what he’s really known for. I’ve read his biography three times, I just want to find out as much information about this guy because he is truly a genius beyond cooking. His goal is to evoke the emotions of his diners, and to create an emotional dining experience, and make it something more than just food. O: What’s it like to work in a real kitchen? TF: There are some things people don’t realize about working in kitchens. You don’t sleep. You work around 15 hours a day. Most of the time, you don’t eat. It’s exhausting work, without stating the obvious. You are on your feet the entire time, [the work is] extremely high energy, fast-paced. You need to move as fast as you possible can. Faster than you think you can. It’s hot. It’s 120
degrees, away from the stoves, as soon as you step to the stove, you feel your face start to contract and your eyes start stinging. A lot of cooking consists of boring, repetitive tasks. Some days this summer I cleaned mushrooms for five hours and picked edamame beans for five hours. It’s stuff that no one really thinks about. I got to the restaurant around 10-10:30. Right off the bat you have your prep list from the night before, you know exactly what you need to do—you get going. If you’re a good cook, you’ve prioritized and strategized. You start memorizing other people’s work habits so that you can maximize your efficiency. You have to have everything in its place, it’s pretty straightforward, you prep up to 6 o’clock. If you got all your prep down, service should be smooth for the most part. You can take a breath, definitely not relax, but breathe a little easier. Service would be from 6:00 until depending on when the last table came in, anywhere from 11 to 12:30. Then you break down your station and put everything away. And then you clean, for hours. That’s another big thing that people don’t realize. Cleanliness and organization are probably the two most important things about being a cook, and being able to write a prep list. A monkey can put a pan on a stove and put a piece of fish on the pan, wait three minutes, and then flip it. That’s the easy part. It’s more about organization, strategy—that’s what leads to being a successful cook. O: What is fine dining culture to you? TF: No one has to go out to eat. It’s the whole experience. I think that food not only nourishes you, but it really brings up emotions and memories, and creates new emotions and memories. O
For behind-the-scenes action, check out our video coverage on www.tuftsobserver.org
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IT TAKES AN UNBELIEVABLE NUMBER OF SWITCHBACKS TO GET ALL THE WAY UP HERE By Lydia Pezzullo
your throat is a room of expensive speakers playing nothing but low-fi cassettes, not even good ones you are as real as tape hiss. we are listening to some band’s depressing album and we know most of the words the curdled-milk voice is saying so we throw them out the windows like cheeseburger wrappers and watch them bounce back down the road i don’t see the stuffed animals from the 1980s still crucified on top of the telephone poles. you point them out to me but I am too busy with both of us surviving this mountain highway i feel held and i feel holding and the sun drops down a whole sea of daytime, honey on our shoulders, a real live ocean. this car is a thousand miles late for an oil change and both front tires are underinflated and i say nothing about this, and i shepherd us up the world in my death machine, still smelling inside like the wet-dog-smell of a long-dead dog who still haunts the air conditioning system dogs are better people than most people. you are sticking your bright-beaming-honest-to-god head out the window, mouth open, laughing, squinting your eyes in the oncoming sun.
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EVA STRAUSS
BACK TO DIRA DJAYA
THe PAST
OCTOBER 7, 2013
TUFTS OBSERVER SOFIA ADAMS13
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Clockwise from TOP LEFT: Madeleine Carey, Knar bedian, Lily Herzan, Lily Herzan
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BRENDA LEE
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The Kink in the Line By Robert Persky Michael and I are soul searching, physically searching with a car through America, but it isn’t going the way we planned, since everything is too expensive, so tonight we talk and we turn the car towards home, because this was not the trip it was supposed to be, because we didn’t find the answer to our fates, and now I pause, because there’s a thunk, and because the car bumps like we’re rolling over something, so we slow to discover that something, and there’s a body behind us, so I look at Michael and his terror, and I shout at him to keep moving and that we can’t really see what happened, and we move, because he listened, and we pretend, because we don’t want to confirm what happened.
Michael is here, at my request. It’s been five months and fourteen days. I am trying to tell him that the scene replays in my head, but he cuts me off. He tells me to be quiet and that nothing is wrong. But we know I’m a little weird now. He knows that I started to smoke more weed and that I stopped driving cars. Maybe he’s noticed that I’m quieter, a little more in my head. Small things trigger my memory and the terror. I tell Michael that I might have PTSD, but he doesn’t want to hear it. He tells me to smoke less. I’m smoking more.
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not your father’s history
by Aaron Langerman
H
istory is more than a set of facts. It is a philosophical claim that there is a shape, a process, an internal logic to the disorder of our existence. In Western society, our relationship to history—the way we conceptualize how the past implicates the present—has changed drastically over the past five hundred years. Today, historians study the past in terms of a temporal chain of cause and effect: one historical event has particular causes and particular effects that explain the following Broadly speaking, Western society has held to three theories of history: the medieval biblical narrative, the enlightenment notion of historical causality and progress, and the modernist conception of history as catastrophe. The story, for my purposes, begins with the medieval imagination. Divine Providence, it was believed, had already prefigured events on earth with religious significance. The sacrifice of Isaac, for instance, prefigures the sacrifice of Christ. To explain, the sacrifice of Isaac foreshadows the sacrifice of Christ, and the later ‘fulfills’ what the former announced. 18
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events. Yet, people haven’t always imagined history in these terms. Every society constructs its own notion of what is considered to be objective truth, in terms of how it gives order and significance to the past. By understanding that even history has a history, the field can be a study of how humans relate to their pasts in radically different ways. At its core, then, history becomes a study of what it means to be human, and thus reveals how there are vastly different ways of experiencing selfhood.
Benedict Anderson, Professor Emeritus of International Studies at Cornell University, sums up the medieval attitude in that “a connection is established between two events which are linked neither temporally nor casually… It can be established only if both occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence.” The present, then, is not a link in an “earthly chain of events,” as Anderson puts it, but representative of something eternal—God’s providence. The spiritual autobiographies of the Puritans are steeped with this outlook. In Mary Rowlandson’s narrative of captivity,
for instance, the Native Americans raid her town, murder her six-year old daughter, hold her and her other children hostage, and nearly starve her. Yet, she does not view her captivity as the result of the historical chain of events that pitted the English settlers against the indigenous people of America. She insists, instead, that it is the result of God’s providence, as God tests her faith and, against all odds, seeks to show her that He is indeed good. This type of event is prefigured in the Bible by the captivity of the Jewish people to the Egyptians or the parable of Job. According to ART BY ROBERT COLLINS
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are the causes that led to the outbreak of the war?” and, “What are the war’s effects?” Enlightenment thinkers placed faith in the idea that understanding this chain of cause and effect could lead to “progress” for humanity. Progress, not God, would lead humanity to redemption. Hegel believed each stage of history moved closer to a comprehensive, rational unity (Spirit) and that in the final stage, yet to come, the Spirit will become fully self-realized. Even Marx, despite his scathing critique of the status quo, believed that history moved through these stages and that, in the end, the proletariat would inevitably overthrow their oppressors, creating an egalitarian communist society. History, for these thinkers, irrevocably leads to some conclusion that resembles utopia. After the pointless bloodshed of World War I and the wholesale slaughters of World War II, however, the modernists and post-modernists articulated a much more pessimistic view. In 1940, a few weeks before the Nazis invaded France, influential German-Jewish philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin fled Paris for Spain. During his brief stay in Paris, Benjamin wrote his era-defining essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which articulated his thoughts on how the promise of “progress” was justifying state-sponsored genocide. The most famous passage of the essay centers on the metaphor of the angel of history caught in a storm. History, Benjamin argued, was an inescapable calamity. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” he wrote, “[the angel of history] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet… But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris
There is no final phase of history, the modernists realized. History simply is.
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this mindset, events on earth—our history—are important only as parallels to the biblical narrative that God has given us. It’s unsurprising, then, that the clock and the calendar were of little significance to the medieval mind. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment marked a rupture in this medieval mindset. The scientific notion of cause and effect put an emphasis on the concept of temporality, or the aforementioned calendar and the clock. Through this paradigm, each event is the result of what precedes it and the cause of the following event—A leads to B leads to C. German philosopher Walter Benjamin referred to the idea as “homogenous, empty time.” This means that time exists as an endless phenomenon that can never be “filled,” in contrast with the biblical narrative where certain moments of time are altered or “filled” by God’s grace with religious significance. The Enlightenment’s calendar continually marches forward, regardless of what humans do; it is homogenous because it is not universally affected by any particular event. To quote Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty of the University of Chicago, “Events happen in time, but time is not affected by them.” The advent of the newspaper in the 18th century was a direct expression of this new temporal imagination. Readers could, for the first time, imagine thousands of other individuals connected by a set of temporal events because of the date at the top of each day’s newspaper. Politics, business, wars, culture, and other stories unfolded, and still do, as the result of a causal chain. The imagination that a newspaper requires of the reader—connecting disparate events from different parts of the globe by a calendar date—forms the foundation of our modern conceptualization of history. When students study World War II, for example, the important questions are, “What
before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” A few weeks after writing this manuscript, Benjamin, forced to return to Nazi-controlled France by Spanish police, committed suicide. Benjamin’s hopeless pessimism represents a nihilism implicit in modern historiography. Events are part of a link of cause and effect, but history isn’t ‘leading’ to anything in particular. There is no final phase of history, the modernists realized. History simply is. As much as we’d like to think we learn from the past, the past’s atrocities can always repeat themselves. The historian’s role is no longer to help humanity realize the end goal of existence; instead, it is meant to be coldly objective, discerning how historical facts fit in a chain of cause and effect that doesn’t lead anywhere in particular, as if the historian were a simple recorder of the past. Charting the ways that Western society’s historical imagination has transformed over the centuries does more than simply give us insight on the development of modern historiography. It shows that each era develops its own normative articulation of how to view history, giving its own shape to what it sees are the internal processes of history. Rather than believing that our current understanding of history has finally become ‘objective,’ it may be more useful to view it as an expression of our modern attitudes towards time. The study of the history of our historical imagination reveals that there are wide-ranging ways of experiencing what it means to be an individual in a society with a history. By focusing on this dimension of history—how selfhood itself, simply defined as our relationship to our past, society, and ourselves, undergoes ruptures and changes—history can be resurrected from the gray, detached, nihilistic study of cause and effect. This understanding breathes new life back into the monuments of the past by allowing history to be more than a study of facts; instead, it’s the study of what it means to experience history, what it means to relate to the past in different ways, and, more broadly, what it means to be a self in the world and how that experience of selfhood may indeed undergo change. At its root, history can be a project of humanism, through a quest to discover what it means to be human. O OCTOBER 28, 2013
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a forgotten epidemic
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hen I first heard the letters A-I-D-S strung together, I was watching the film version of Rent, the acronym registering as an ominous unknown in my mind. I was eleven at the time, sitting on a hopscotch rug in a dusty attic, wedged between a bouncy ball and my best friend. I didn’t want to admit my ignorance, so I waited to ask my parents the meaning of this elusive term. “It’s a disease,” they explained, trying to simplify, since I was still young. “It was a huge problem in the ‘90s and was viewed as a death sentence. Now, there is medicine so that infected people can live relatively normal lives. They still haven’t found a cure, but it’s not such a big problem anymore.” My first understanding of AIDS was that it was obsolete. As I grew more aware of the world around me, all of the information I received concerning AIDS generally implied that this conclusion was correct. Many people praised the development of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) as the light at the end of the tunnel for infected individuals. There were success stories on all fronts, with The New York Times reporting that “nearly half of New Yorkers with H.I.V. are now 50 or older, ages many never dreamed of reaching.” This optimistic view of the decline of the virus was echoed by most of the public. In a 2009 report, the Public Agenda, a nonpartisan research network, stated, “In 1995, just under half of the public (44 percent) named HIV/AIDS as the most urgent health problem facing the nation—since then, that figure has dropped to six percent.” It took me seven years and a trip halfway around the world to recognize the extent to which HIV/AIDS is not “over.”
Last year, I spent two months living and working in South Africa, the nation with the fourth highest prevalence of HIV. South Africa has a national prevalence rate of 17.8 percent—astonishing when compared with the 0.6 percent prevalence in the United States. I worked in the Kwanokuthula Township of the Bitou region, an area with a reported HIV prevalence of 30 percent (the real number is most likely higher, due to underreporting). I spent my days shadowing a home-based health worker named Apesh, walking around Kwanokuthula and visiting patients. Our patients were quite spread out, so we spent a lot of time talking and traveling. We talked about everything from our favorite meals to race relations in South Africa and grew very close. One day, while stumbling along between the wooden shacks and discussing patients, Apesh stopped suddenly, looking at the ground. “The patients are very open with me,” she said. “Because I, too, am positive.” I cracked. I had already met many people suffering from HIV, but this was different. Apesh was not a patient wasting away; she was my everyday companion, a mother, a wife, a gospel singer, and a barbeque lover. Suddenly, AIDS seemed sharply, painfully real. That day, every time we met someone, Apesh told me if they were HIV-positive. The guy we passed on the way to the bathroom. The woman who owned the fruit stand. The patient whom I thought we were treating for a hip problem. It affected everyone, yet no one was talking about it. AIDS is not a relic of the past, abroad or in the United States. According to the World Health Organization, 34 million
PREVALENCE RATES OF HIV, 1990-2008
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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.6%
people are currently living with HIV. The virus still has a large impact in the US, but it is overwhelmingly affecting racial and ethnic minorities—the people with the least control over the national conversation. In a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 38 percent of African-Americans aged 15-17 said they were “very concerned” about HIV infection, while only 17 percent of white teenagers interviewed expressed the same fear. This disparity could explain why 64 percent of young people polled by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2012 said they “rarely” or “never” saw any news coverage about HIV/AIDS in the last year. HIV/AIDS is largely a problem of the underrepresented and underprivileged, but this does not mean that it has disappeared. While many gains have been made in the advancement of drugs and the accessibility of treatment, there has been little success in decreasing the number of new HIV infections. The number of new US cases per year has remained relatively constant throughout the past decade. Despite this failure to inhibit infection, health teachers and policymakers continue to insist that AIDS is a “preventable disease.” This may be somewhat applicable to the Western world, but it is much more complicated in the so-called “developing” world. Yes, infections are greatly reduced by the use of condoms, but in South African society, which deeply stigmatizes contraception, encouraging their use can be an uphill battle. One of my patients, Phumla, was infected by her husband— an all too common story. Many men hold jobs in the trucking industry, causing them to spend long periods of time away from their families, and many seek compan-
17.2%
SOUTH AFRICA
.5% DATA: CIA WORLDFACTBOOK & AFRICAN NATIONAL SURVEY
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IN SOUTH AFRICA ...
to the twin taboos of sex and drugs, HIV is seen not as a mere virus, but as more of a moral issue. Even though a high percentage of the population is infected in Bitou, almost everyone keeps their positive status a secret. This can seriously interfere with treatment. Apesh explains, “If Home Based Care comes to your house and you are young, they will start gossiping, saying you have HIV.” Many people reject treatment for this reason, preferring to die in dignity. Conquering AIDS will take more than straightforward medicine: treating AIDS means talking about AIDS. Uganda is widely known as an AIDS success story, most likely because of the introduction of open and honest communication. Theorized to be the virus’ place of origin, Uganda experienced an initial surge in infections during the late 1980s. Unlike most other leaders at the time, Ugandan President Museveni was outspoken about the crisis, advocating sex education and an “ABC” approach (Abstinence, Be Faithful, Contraception). This approach resulted in a sharp decrease from a prevalence of 18 percent in 1992 to only 6 percent in 2004, according to The World Bank. Increased conversation about HIV/AIDS has also provoked productive results in the United States. For example, basketball player Magic Johnson escalated openness about HIV when he bravely announced his positive status in 1991. AVERT, an HIV/AIDS information and resource center, describes how “in the month after he revealed his status, the number of people being tested in New York City increased by almost 60 percent.” Sometimes it seems that people only discuss the virus when it is in fashion, as some type of activist fad. It is easy to join
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ionship elsewhere. This has led to a widespread culture of extramarital sex. While infidelity has become somewhat expected, it is still considered an uncomfortable topic and is rarely discussed. As a result of this silence, condom usage within a marriage is especially unacceptable because it implies a lack of trust. In any sexual situation, proposing the use of contraception implies that the asker is HIV-positive, and so “preventable” becomes much more complex than it initially appears. While the HIV pandemic in the “developing” world is often recognized, it is usually viewed as a crisis of resources, and one that will abide once treatment becomes available. Again, this is a very limited view of the issue. Access to treatment is essential, but overcoming HIV/ AIDS is impossible without addressing poverty and stigma. South Africa recently began providing Antiretroviral Treatment (ARVs) to its citizens, yet the situation there is still dire. Treatment alone is not enough; successful intervention must also consider cultural context. Phumla, the patient mentioned earlier, is on ARVs, but she is often unable to take them because she doesn’t have food. ARVs cannot be taken on an empty stomach, and missed pills will eventually result in resistance to treatment. Phumla has been advised to give her son formula instead of breastfeeding him so as not to pass on the virus in this way. She laments that she does not always have access to clean drinking water, and so giving her son formula is not always the safer option. HIV is further complicated by its status as a “physical, social, and emotional disease,” as described by a local nurse. Strongly tied
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Reframing HIV/AIDS as a problem of the present by Allison Aaronson
in AIDS activism on World AIDS Day, when Lady Gaga shows up in a condom suit or Bono makes a speech. We must remember that people die of AIDS-related causes every day, not only on December 1st. Advocacy is not simply a trendy topic of discussion, but rather should be a sustained effort. Posting a Facebook status and wearing a red ribbon are nice gestures, but they do more to serve that person’s image than to contribute to the cause.
“
33%
AIDS is not a relic of the past, abroad or in the United States
It is likely that HIV will be the challenge of our time, as the disease implicates issues of sexism, homophobia, and poverty. Stephanie Nolen, author of 28 Stories of AIDS, elaborates, “AIDS is not an event, or a series of them; it’s a mirror held up to the cultures and societies we build.” We commit ourselves to “never again” stand by as atrocities occur, but is AIDS not also a genocide, albeit a biological one? As Bono declared in a 2010 speech, “History will judge us on how we respond to the AIDS emergency… whether we stood around with watering cans and watched while a whole continent burst into flames… or not.” HIV/AIDS is not a problem of the past; it is the crisis and the opportunity of the present. O
10% 14% ... ARE HIV POSITIVE
OF MALE ADULTS
OF FEMALE ADULTS
INFOGRAPHIC: BEN KURLAND & KUMAR RAMANATHAN
OF DISABLED PERSONS
OF MEN WHO HAVE SEX WITH MEN OCTOBER 28, 2013
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n many ways, she’s a walking contradiction—an R&B artist who takes in equal amounts of neo-soul and indie rock influence; a black woman who has achieved commercial success by singing about robots; a musician with radical politics; a performance artist working on a multi-part concept album over six years and counting. But Janelle Monáe has done all of those things, and she has done so with a powerful political message. That last achievement is perhaps her most defiant: that of breathing revolutionary life into music that is about liberation, race, gender, class, sexuality, queerness, robots, and the future all at once. Monáe released her first EP, Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase), in 2007 as the beginning of her multi-part concept album inspired by the classic 1927 sci-fi film Metropolis. She followed up in 2010 and 2013 with The ArchAndroid and The Electric Lady, which make up suites II through V of the seven-part story. The story itself follows Cindi Mayweather, an android who violates protocol by falling in love with a human, Anthony Greendown. She becomes a fugitive, ostracized by mainstream human society while revered by android rebels and sympathizers. As her story and escape turn into legend, she comes to be seen as the Archandroid, a messianic figure thought to be able to bridge the gulf between humans and androids and end the oppression of the latter. At the core of Monáe’s music is her alter ego, Cindi Mayweather. Like David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust or Eminem’s Slim Shady, the alter ego provides an artist a partial liberation from the expectations and constraints placed on their own identities. But that is not all the alter ego does for Monáe. Cindi, and androids in general, are blank slates for her to talk about marginalized people. The historical and cultural references are everywhere—in her music videos, androids experience relationships forbidden by social norms, are bought and sold at auctions, and have their bodies objectified. “I speak about androids because I think the android represents the new ‘other.’ You can compare it to being a lesbian or being a gay man or being a black woman,” Monáe 22
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told the London Evening Standard in a 2011 interview. “What I want is for people who feel oppressed or feel like the ‘other’ to connect with the music and to feel like, ‘She represents who I am.’” Monáe isn’t just using androids as metaphor, though—she is a futurist, with serious concerns about how we will treat artificial intelligences in the future. Will we be able to accept their experiences? Will we expect them to be new slaves? If they rebel against their programming, will we see them as freaks? She and her collaborators have been known to participate in discussions about The Singularity is Near, a futurist manifesto, and those influences underlie all her music. In a 2010 interview with the science and entertainment blog io9, she expressed hopes that her music will raise a consciousness that prepares us to one day interact with artificial intelligence. Both in that respect and continuing the metaphor of android-as-the-oppressed, she describes the character of Cindi as “the mediator, between the mind and the hand. She’s the mediator between the haves and the have-nots, the oppressed and the oppressor. She’s like the Archangel in the Bible, and what Neo represents to the Matrix.” While anticipating the future, Monáe does not forget her past. She situates herself distinctly within the artistic tradition of Afrofuturism, and her songs frequently refer to historical moments of social justice movements and milestones. “Sally Ride” is a ballad named after the first female astronaut; “Ghetto Woman” is an ode to her mother and the other powerful black women that fought for civil rights; “Q.U.E.E.N.” features her and legendary neo-soul musician Erykah Badu challenging the patriarchy and heteronormativity. Through Cindi, Monáe is building revolutionary music that can speak to the political struggles of different, intersecting marginalized identities. In “Sally Ride,” she sings: “Just wake up Mary, there’s some amazing news / Wake up Mary, you got the right to choose / Real love.” Those and many other lyrics could easily be interpreted as referring to anything from queer rights to abortion, but that very
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by Kumar Ramanathan vagueness gives the metaphor its power. In talking about android liberation, she can talk broadly about about radical inclusivity—the task accepting everyone’s humanity, even if they defy society’s dominant definition of “human.” The revolution is for everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re female, black, queer, or android; there is space for you in this world. That same pluralism infects her music, leading her to draw from a wide range of influences. While her musical style is largely unified around R&B techniques, she draws freely and equally from rap and rock, and adopts many of the innovations of neo soul, funk, and psychedelic pop. Her guests are similarly varied, drawing from the pantheon of groundbreaking African-American artists (Erykah Badu, Prince, OutKast), modern vi-
The revolution is for everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re female, black, queer, or android; there is space for you in this world. sionaries (Solange, Miguel, Esperanza Spalding), and even indie rock (Of Montreal). Despite espousing a politics of liberation, Monáe doesn’t reach for any kind of utopia as so many political philosophies do. In setting her story in the future and mirroring the very oppression we see in society, she readily admits that we might not be on some long moral arc that inevitably bends towards justice. But she also explicitly recognizes and references the many historical figures and movements that allow her to flourish. In doing so, she advocates for a revolution that is constant and permanent, always ready to fight on a new frontier, always active. And that itch for action breathes life into all of her music. At some of her concerts, Monáe’s team distributes “The Ten Droid Commandments” to her audience. The Commandments, steeped in the mythology of GRIFFIN QUASEBARTH
her story, at once subvert religious orthodoxy and display an unashamed reverence for live music. “If you see your neighbor jamming harder than you, covet his or her jam,” reads the Second Commandment. Monáe wants us to get up and dance, to love doing it, and to love everyone else that’s doing it. Dance is a radical form of expression for Cindi Mayweather—in this world, androids are not programmed to dance and they come under legal threat for doing so. The very act of moving to a beat becomes the ultimate form of self-expression and rebellion against social and legal norms. Monáe and her Wondaland Arts Society (her collaborators) pay acute attention to the physical potential of their music – a 2013 Pitchfork interview revealed that as they worked on The Electric Lady, they brought early versions of songs to Atlanta strip clubs to test if they were conducive to dancing. She wants her audience to live the music, and similarly to live out radical inclusivity. If we better understand oppression, maybe when we do one day encounter androids, we can avoid recreating the same systems of injustice we have seen so often in history. In both her musical inspiration and her storytelling, Monáe brings a new dimension to gender, race, and sexuality politics in popular music. She honors and respects historical and current suffering and those who have fought to alleviate it, but she does not get trapped in solemnity. Even in those rare tracks that aren’t made for dancing, she finds a way to get people moving, swaying, and living out the music, rather than turning it into a stale text. As the sixth Droid Commandment reads, Monáe is asking you, daring you, to “abandon your expectations about art, race, gender, culture, and gravity.” Social revolution is like music—it must be made and re-made over and over again, shared constantly, carved out anew for each person and each era. Janelle Monáe and Cindi Mayweather both dare us to move, to rebel, to challenge the oppression that we find all around us, to love radically and universally. They dare us, in their own words, to dance apocalyptic. O OCTOBER 28, 2013
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WINDOW TO
THE PRESENT James Gordon
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ROBERT COLLINS
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e seem to have entered a new golden age of television. Television shows have acquired the same cult-like followings that were at one time reserved for musicians. Amid the craze, one television genre in particular calls attention to itself. The period drama—a genre defined by period pieces that use elaborate elements to convey the essence of a particular era—has taken the spotlight and reached an unprecedented level of popularity. The period drama has come to command the stage of modern television, rekindling an appreciation for the lost art of storytelling and bringing a new present-day relevance to the dynamics of our past. With this sudden rise of the period drama, shows like Downton Abbey, Mad Men, and Boardwalk Empire have come to capture the attention of American audiences, acquiring both devoted fan bases and remarkable praise. In total, these three shows combined have raked in a total of 42 wins out of 176 Emmy nominations. According to PBS, season three of Downton Abbey attracted a whopping 24 million viewers over the course of its seven-week run, making it the highest-rated drama in the history of PBS. Meanwhile, an impressive 2.7 million viewers tuned in to watch the season six finale of Mad Men, which aired in June 2013. Whether it’s the gangster dealings in 1920’s Atlantic City, the egoistic competition of the 1960’s New York advertising world, or the post-Edwardian era drama of the aristocratic Crawley family, there is no doubt that American audiences have become deeply invested in period drama television and more notably, the complex applications of our society’s dynamic past. However, it still appears odd that such an evolved genre should thrive in a television landscape dominated by Honey Boo Boo, Real Housewives, and Jersey Shore guidos. It seems that while much of the “guilty pleasure” reality TV that litters our programming reflects the deterioration and flaws of our society, programs set in the past serves to remind us of the “good ol’ days” before teenage pregnancy granted young girls stardom and an MTV show. We seem to revel in the glamorous depictions
of the past in an attempt to forget the faults of the present. That being said, at a closer glance, it becomes clear that many of the prevalent social injustices present in shows like Downton Abbey, Mad Men, and Boardwalk Empire are even more backwards and antiquated than those in programming placed in the present day. These shows have braved through their fair share of criticism for depicting strong sentiments of racial tension, rigid gender roles, and mob mentality all in the name of historical accuracy. For instance, Downton Abbey effectively addresses issues of class conflict and racial tensions when the youngest daughter
By memorializing the past and presenting it in the realm of the present, these shows allow their audiences to gaze upon our social issues from a distance. of the Earl of Grantham—the patriarch of the noble and dignified Crawley family— runs off to marry an Irish driver. Fueled by their resentment of the driver’s low class breeding and Irish roots, the Crawley family spirals into a whirlwind of outrage and disapproval. Meanwhile, AMC’s Mad Men confronts the rise of feminine power and the decline of male sovereignty through the shifting gender roles in the work place of 1960s America. With a plot full of women divorcing their cheating husbands and ambitiously climbing the corporate ladder, Mad Men is as much about the women as it is about the men. By grounding these shows in historical eras, the creators have discovered a way to make strong social commentaries from the past connect to the pres-
ent. Period television engages with these social issues without appearing overly forthright or confrontational, restoring relevance to the issues of the past without drawing direct parallels with the viewers. We’ve finally begun to transition out of a period where much of the television available to viewers was centered purely don gimmicks and stunts that appealed to our less-than-sophisticated sensibilities. It’s refreshing to finally find shows that demonstrate consideration for an evolving plot, character development, and thematic consistency. By memorializing the past and placing it in the realm of the present through the craft of storytelling, these shows allow their audiences to gaze upon our social issues from a distance. Utilizing historical periods introduces social issues in a way that is distant and foreign enough so as not to make viewers feel criticized or uncomfortable, but real and authentic enough to make them appear relevant to the present day. The skillful storytelling applied in these shows draws in viewers, subconsciously encouraging them to relate the struggles of the characters to their present day lives. Whether it is the forbidden love in Downton Abbey or the defiance of gender roles in Mad Men, viewers invest in the characters and come to identify with their circumstances. Moreover, the resurrection of the period drama has managed to reintroduce the often-underrated art of storytelling when the American audience needed it most. With a struggling economy and growing political tension—among other mounting social strains—viewers were in dire need of some form of escape. That escape came through television, but television that took on an entirely new form. It came in the form of the period pieces: shows that transport viewers to a different era, allowing them to relate to and invest themselves in the plights of the characters while simultaneously removing them from the struggles of the present. By capturing the essence of the past, period television serves not only as a form of entertainment but also as an important vehicle for social commentary. Don Draper is no relic of the past— he’s a mirror to our present and a guide to our future. O OCTOBER 28, 2013
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A NOSTALGIC WONDERLAND: DAYS AT THE RACES
by Alison GRAHAM
PHOTOS BY ALISON GRAHAM
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he next time you feel the Tufts bubble closing in around you, consider an outing beyond the typical Boston destinations. Stop dragging your feet across campus and head over to Suffolk Downs, where 1200-pound horses gallop gloriously at 40mph around a track of ten-inch deep sand. They thunder past you and the energy is infectious—both that of the horses and the fans who frequent the stadium on race days. Located right on the Blue Line, one stop before Wonderland, Suffolk Downs is another world entirely. Dressed to the nines in your Sunday best, you’ll feel as lost as Alice as you wander down the quiet dusty road leading up to the stadium. As you en26
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ter the venue you’ll realize that you may as well be in Wonderland as you walk into a crowd of old men chortling together by the TV screens and betting machines in their Saturday sweats. While some fans have been coming here for decades and clearly know how the betting ought to be done, anyone can place a wager for as little as two dollars. People cheer for horses with names like Moon over Parador and Good Humor in the same spirit as the fans that once came to watch Seabiscuit and Funny Cide, who raced here in the early days of the thoroughbred racetrack. The track, which opened in 1935, was built to accommodate tens of thousands of people, and as one gentleman who has been
coming since the 1950s recalls, back then, it was a special occasion. “This is what we did for entertainment. People would line up their beach chairs and make a day out of it.” Now that he is retired, he says, “I come every race day.” Certainly, one may question whether these regulars who come four times a week are really coming to see the horses. Betting is big here, and when faces focus on the races—pursed lips and eyes squinting at the screens—the intensity across all visages adds a fascinating element to the otherwise rowdy dynamic. But outside at the track is a thoroughly dramatic scene. While horses are the obvious stars here, it’s easy to miss the pint-sized
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jockeys on their backs—and even easier to overlook their essential role in all that goes on at the races.The constant training and dedication of a jockey are details to which most fans are oblivious. Janelle Campbell is a twenty-eight-year-old female rider, but her four-foot-eleven stature, bright copper hair, and constant smile evoke the energy of someone much younger. Janelle admits that she didn’t start riding until last year, which is unusually late for most jockeys. “I never wanted to be a rider,” Campbell confesses. But she grew up with horses, and the responsibility of taking care of them. “My whole life, horse poop,” she laughs. She spent much of her life with her grandmother’s horses near her childhood home in Amesbury, exercising and grooming them, and performing them in shows. “I started from the bottom and I worked my way up to this point,” she says. Campbell first started coming to the Downs at age eight to learn the ropes from her aunt, Tammi Piermarini—the only other jockey in the family, and third-ranked female jockey for all-time wins in the United States. Asked about the shows, Campbell explains, “You wear a three-piece suit, walk, trot, and canter around the ring and that’s about it... It’s who’s got the prettiest horse,” she laughs. But while traveling around to horse shows on weekends throughout high school, Janelle also earned her trainer’s license and learned to ride without any fancy schooling. While studying for two years at a small college in Newton, she practiced riding under her aunt’s guidance. In 2001, Campbell starting working full-time at the racetrack as a pony rider, helping to warm up and guide the racehorse to the starting gate. Often, these ponies are retired racehorses, but Campbell rescued hers from a slaughterhouse. When she bought him, right off the van, she says: “He was in manure, a bag of bones.” Now, she recounts proudly, he’s “happy and fat, living life on the farm.” Since then, Campbell has found homes for a lot of horses. Janelle Campbell felt content as a pony rider, but one day she was asked to dress up as a jockey and mock-race a horse, when she realized that, “Hey, this is kinda fun!” But she has not forgotten where she comes from. Unlike jockeys who leave the upkeep to the trainers, Campbell enjoys spending her free time with the horses. “I
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talk to them every morning,” she says. “I carry candy in my pockets. Every barn I go to, they all get it. They love peppermints. I go through five pounds a week.” It’s no wonder, given that Suffolk Downs houses around 800 horses, with each horse racing only once every two weeks. The grounds are so expansive that most fans neither notice the stables located far from the racetrack—where Campbell spends all this time—nor could they guess all that goes on here. Every day, she rises at 4:30, in order to arrive at the barns by 5:30. From 6:00 to 10:00, she and the other jockeys get on whatever horses the trainers want to warm up, so depending on the day, she could exercise nine horses or none at all. After the daily training, she and the other jockeys head to the jockey room for lunch and an hour-long nap. “I always get my nap,” she says. She is very serious. “I love my nap, can’t live without it. All the girls nap.” It sounds like a nice life. “Easy,” she agrees, but is quick to emphasize the physical stress that she experiences on the track. At the beginning of a race, the horse is fired up. But “from the quarter pull home, when you’re pushing the horse home, that’s the hard part,” Campbell explains. It’s the horse’s 1200 pounds against her 100. “The last stretch of the race. You drive ‘em; when they stride out you push ‘em. You push on their neck and help them go forward. They get tired and you want to keep their momentum going. It’s like cheering someone on: ‘Come on, you can do it!’” Jockeys bear the intense pressure of having to drive home a racehorse while also remaining vigilant of the track, but Campbell worries less about horses speeding along her path than she does about other cars on the road. “You can tell what horses think,” she explains. “You watch their ears. You see everything, see the horses next to you, in front of you. But you watch their ears. When the horse is running and the ears are up, you be cautious because [the horse] could just start slowing down and put the breaks on. [Horses] are more alert when they’ve got their game faces on: the ears are flat back and they’re running.” Knowing the horse like this takes time, and Campbell emphasizes the importance
of practice. Jockeys aren’t paid for training hours, but these morning hours are essential. Campbell shares a locker room with the four other female jockeys, one of whom is her aunt. She herself isn’t competitive with them, but among all the jockeys, she says, “There’s always drama in the colony.” “We’re one family,” she says. “I’ve grown up with all these people; you know everybody. We call it ‘As the Racetrack Turns’— it’s like a giant soap opera, sometimes like high school. New girls would show up, and it’s all ‘I don’t like that girl,’ or ‘Why’d you do that to my horse?’ You know.” Often, competition is bred from the biggest struggle of most jockeys: maintaining a very low body weight. Luckily, Janelle is one of the only jockeys she knows of who doesn’t have to worry about this at all. Everyone on her mother’s side is naturally tiny. She eats whatever she wants, and at 99 pounds, she even has to fill her saddle with packs of lead in order to meet the 124-pound requirement. This standard applies to both men and women jockeys, and although they compete in the same races, women are a minority on the track. “It’s never been equal,” Campbell says. “It’s starting to, maybe now, but it wasn’t.” When her aunt started racing in 1984, there weren’t many female riders around. “Nowadays? You have to be a strong woman. That’s about it.” Despite their competitive drive, the jockeys celebrate each other’s successes. They’ve all been in the same place, before the race, and as Janelle describes it: “You get that pit in your stomach, dry mouth, and you’re so excited.” When the bell sounds, that excitement translates to power, precision, and speed. The jockey-horse teams fly by in all their dusty majesty, invigorating the crowd with their adrenaline. Everyone watches as they make their one-mile loop around the track, eyes tracking them in the distance, but a minute and a half later, it’s over. There’s a while until the next race, but until then, the ins-and-outs of Suffolk Downs are just as entertaining. There is tremendous opportunity for betting and people-watching, or simply breathing in the unparalleled combination of dust, fried food, and manure in the distance and imagining the days when such events were more popular than television. O OCTOBER 28, 2013
TUFTS OBSERVER
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AS EX TR
POLICE BLOTTER
By Aaron Langerman and Moira Lavelle
Night Climb
Greek Break In
Family Feud
Twice in the past two weeks, officers have received reports of students on the roof of Dewick. The first group of four had no explanation as to why they were on the roof. They were sober and the officers asked them to leave. A week later, the second group of three was discovered in the same place, also sober. When asked why they were on the roof, they replied, “For the experience.” Apparently, climbing onto the roof of Dewick is the new alternative to getting weekend wasted.
Officers received a call from students reporting that four college-aged males appeared to be breaking into Theta Chi fraternity. Officers arrived on the scene and saw signs of an attempted break in: screens were removed from windows and there were handprints on one window. Officers did not find any of the culprits. Theta Chi had been closed since the fire one week prior. It seems the Tufts public cannot go even one week without the wild ragers that Theta is so known for….
Officers were dispatched to the Campus Center because of a report of a disturbance. On the outside patio, a fight broke out between two intoxicated males. They were arrested for disturbing the peace. Upon looking at their records, however, officers discovered they were brothers who had no affiliation with Tufts but had both been previously arrested for fighting. It just so happens that this first offense occurred a year ago on October 28 at the exact same spot. Needless to say, these brothers have made a tradition of beating each other senseless at Tufts each October.
Oct 12, 1:24 am & Oct 19, 12:53 am
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TUFTS OBSERVER
OCTOBER 28, 2013
Oct 20, 2:30 am
October 12, 8:24 pm
Alison Graham
OCTOBER 7, 2013
TUFTS OBSERVER
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