Kitsch Magazine: Fall 2018

Kitsch

art by Leo Levy

WRITERS

Olubanke Agunloye Alyssa Anderson Annika Bjerke Jean Cambareri Sarah Chekfa Elise Cording Annie Fu Kevin Goh Christopher Hansen Gaela LaPasta Anna Lee Abigail Mengesha Pegah Moradi D. Albè Bogetti Pérez Angelina Shi

ARTISTS

Olubanke Agunloye Annika Bjerke Olivia Bono Stephanie Carmody Annie Fu Anna Lee Leo Levy Sophie May Nadya Mikhaylovskaya Magic Sun

Cover Art by Abby Eskinder Hailu

Letter

from the

Editors

Trash.

Cotton ball. Contact cases. Coffee cup. These are the things we threw out before sitting down to write this letter. After all, when it comes down to it, what isn’t trash? It is everywhere. But what is “trash” really?

trash,n.

/traSH/ something worth little or nothing; domestic refuse; that which is discarded.

A general equivalent to garbage, litter, junk, debris, or rubbish, trash is often times overlooked even though it is ever-present. Even the preceding definition fails to cover its multiple crevices and layers. In the contemporary world, trash represents a dynamic set of terms that shift with context, location, politics, culture, and society. This issue of kitsch explores this complexity. In “Visualizing the Lifecycle of the Disposable Coffee Cup,” Alyssa Anderson explores a world where human beings aren’t aware of how much trash—ahem, coffee cups—we produce. Olubanke Agunloye’s “Trash or Keep: Hand-Me-Downs from the Late 90s to Early 2000s” tackles the dichotomy of the valued and the valueless as she dives into a box that contains her siblings’ handme-downs. A treasure box? Most probably! Gaela LaPasta agrees in her visual essay as she captures the sentimentality, beauty, and possibility conveyed by thrifted objects. Similarly, in “That Weird Part of YouTube and Why It Exists,” Christopher Hansen thinks online trash is empowering, “If people love these things, they will most definitely love you.” And who’s going to argue with that?

Yet, trash is not only about rainbows and unicorns. Annie Fu’s satirical narrative in “Meditations of the Year in 2050” exposes trash’s threatening quality through the vengeful of voice of a Nestle Pure Life bottle (yikes!). Fuckboys, the walking and breathing embodiments of trash, get called-out in Elise Cording’s “Living Inside a Man’s Mouth” as she dissects toxic masculinity through her dating experience. However, Jean Cambareri cautions against call-out culture— specifically, that of social media—because, “people are being called out for their [trash] actions [and] there is no thought behind it. In the end, there are no consequences because of it.” Cleary, this issue of kitsch exposes the contradictory nature of trash, but that’s not all; the conception of trash is always evolving. So as you dumpster dive into this pile of opinions, photo essays, and personal reflections, we hope you question what trash means to you, and—trust us—your answers will surprise you.

-Annika & Abby

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• On the Plaza 6 • Insta-Poetry 7 • ode to every man who writes about love 8 • Trash or Keep 9 • Meditations of the Year 2050 10 • That Weird Part of Youtube 12 • Thrifting Visual Spread 14

ing

In • Thoughts on a Kiss 26 • Apex 28 • This Game is Trash 30 • Living Inside a Man’s Mouth 32 • Awkwafina 34

&L

n

• Beneath the Rich and the Crazy 16 • The White Trash Identity in Bastard Out Of Carolina 18 • May I Have Your Attention Please? 20 • Theorizing the Final Girl 24

Z oom

Zoom

e i st

in g

O ut

• The Grimy Grimy Story 37 • Visualizing the Lifecycle of the Disposable Coffee Cup 41 • Cancelling Culture 46 • Poverty Porn 48

Chicken bones - Colin Mackey ‘19

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Honestly, I can’t even think of it - Sophia Mathews ‘22

My dignity - Anonymous

Chopsticks + Gum - Akanksha Jain ‘20

ON THE PLAZA Egg shells - Annika Bjerke ‘19

Receipt for my new candle - Anonymous

Chilli cup - Megan Morgan ‘19

I ripped a hole in the crotch of my 7th pair of pants this year. So, I threw those out.

- Kaushik De ‘19

Paper towel - John Correa ‘20

My GPA - Anonymous

My hopes and dreams - Anonymous Banana peel - Vegen Soopramanien ‘20

M&M wrapper - Anna Semler ‘19

Popcorn bag - Blanche Shao’19

To-Go box - Eleana Shiferaw ‘21

Your mom - Anonymous

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Insta-poetry by “kitsch”

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ode to every man who writes about love

by Sarah Chekfa art by Olubanke Agunloye

I want men to stop writing about love pretending they know how to feel I feel more when I touch a hot iron than you do when you climax (because that’s what you think love is, right?) the jolts of pain glow like creeping tendrils of electricity smugly breathing heat on my skin and you still won’t eat your lemon sour patch kids you hate how they taste just like you hate the way I started to taste when I told you to stop pretending you know how to feel because you only know how to feel when you’re on top of me and I just want to tell you that we learned not to lie in kindergarten maybe you were absent that day but I wish you would just grow up and eat your lemon sour patch kids

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Trash or Keep: Hand-Me-Downs from the Late 90s to Early 2000s

by Olubanke Agunloye art by Stephanie Carmodie

Before thrifting or vintage clothing became such a popular pursuit, growing up with older siblings equated to hand-me-downs for the majority of my childhood.

I recall searching through baskets and bags of old unwanted clothes every time a new season began. As a young kid, I was able to watch the experiences and memories made in each of these pieces. These early 2000s hand-me-downs became my first “going out” get-ups, my first mature pieces, and my first work clothes, and I was able to see the lives they lived before they fell into my possession. These days’ vestiges of the first part of a millennium characterized by “cultural hand-me-downs” have been creeping back up into pop culture and fashion. Now pieces that, for a period of time, were seen as frumpy are appearing in more recent collections of high-end clothing companies for tons of cash. Although some of these pieces are long gone and are sent to the Salvation Army for the next person to find, should I regret not preserving all these pieces I’ve seen cycle through my household over the years?

just over the brim of the jeans was the ideal get-up for the angsty female teen. Movies like Thirteen elevated this trend. Scenes from Degrassi where Mindy wore the thong and low rise pants combo set the precedent for what “sexy” should look like. Influences from the girls in this media made getting dressed for school a battle.

My sister would overdo the low-rise look and my mom would threaten to throw the “haggard pants” in the trash.

Owl Sunglasses:

An image of the Olsen Twins wearing these shades that covered a good 30 percent of their faces was plastered in the middle of my sister’s collage of Vogue magazine cutouts. It was the first time I saw this seemingly burdensome eyewear. These glasses went to work, the beach, and outings with friends. It always seemed as though as soon as you had these specs on you, you were somebody.

I begrudgingly remember the days where the terrible combination of the duck face and the owl glasses could be featured on our AIM, MySpace, or Facebook profile pics. Though they were a hit back then, today, these oversized specs can mostly be seen on cute suburban middle-aged women.

The Puffer Coat:

When Vogue was still mostly in print, brands like Eko and Baby Phat would advertise these elaborate puffer coats with fur, gold accents, and mixed fabrics. I recall being 5 and watching my eldest sister beg for a black and white Baby Phat puffer coat from Macy’s during our annual back to school shopping trips. All their friends had the same oversized coat for the next couple of winters. Amongst the guys the bigger the coat the cooler they seemed to be. These oversized coats would drown kids in bright colored nylon material. But because Kimora Lee Simmons and Ashanti were wearing them it was a valid piece in our wardrobe.

Graphic Tees and Pants Too Inappropriate for School Dress Codes:

Another emblem of teenage angst through clothing was the oversized graphic tees that had a curse word or two, a naked girl, or maybe some very realistic looking guns, or anything of that nature that could get us sent home early from school. The shirts were bought at Zumiez or Spencers, stores we might spend a good hour loitering in as we goofed off with our friends. For the girls, it was the draw-attention-tomy-butt phrases written in cheesy cursive fonts: words like “Cutie,” “Baby,” “Juicy,” and “Off Limits.” My favorite hand-me-downs of this kind were these booty shorts with “Good luck” plastered on the back.

Low Rise Jeans:

“The bigger the midriff the better” was the mantra a lot of teen girls seemed to live by. The mid-section exposure accompanied by thong straps peeping out

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Meditations of the Year 2050

by Annie Fu art by Annika Bjerke The American Dream was really starting to come together at the beginning of the 21st century,

as I remember it: it appeared first as a few discarded bottles on a playground, then as clothes

thrown out with tags still attached, flags rippling perpetually in the schoolyard at half mast, excess swinging from overcrowded coat-hooks, tied around mom’s shopaholic eyes, picking dad’s pocket, filling my nostrils, tangy and sour, like the spoiled dairy from the last night’s dinner, painstakingly untouched. Always growing, adding, in any way possible. From sunrise to sundown we were in an arduous race against time to use, use, use. These accumulating mountains of refuse were what kept us looking forward, churning, churning, working to our ideal reality and keeping our nation on track until that fateful day, when we woke up and realized we had achieved our wildest dreams: we were

finally, thank God, literal pieces of trash.

Most people reincarnated as the slender, translucent, and flexible yet hard-bodied, your average plastic straws. Rumor has it you had to verbally say the keywords “Global warming isn’t thaaat serious” to even move up the social hierarchy. Plenty of people became aerosol cans and clouds of air pollution too, but once you looked up enough tiers, you reached the REAL trash. Scott Pruitt? That man reincarnated as the entire Great Pacific garbage patch on his own.

I had the honor of becoming a water bottle. I won’t lie, it’s probably because of legacy (my father had a key role in pushing for the Dakota Pipeline), but I didn’t take it for granted by any means.

I still worked hard and was at the top of my class in both pointless and intentional waste. I’ll never

forget that day when my homies and I had the big reveal party— we set up a stage with a couple of

spotlights and a large black curtain, then individually unveiled our new forms to each other. I can’t lie, I was a little nervous to go when it was my turn, but when I thrust aside that curtain and showed them my transformed slender, cylindrical plastic body, I received nothing but support.

“Oh, my God, Steve, you look amazing.” Kelly said. “What brand are you?”

I smugly rotated to the side to let everyone see the logo on my new plastic ass.

N E S T L E P U R E L I F E, set crisply against a background of serene blue, caught the light and glimmered as everyone gasped in amazement.

“Oh shit, homie. That’s insane, congrats!” Connor said. “Nestle’s a huge company...damn.

I’m real happy for you...”

His voice trailed off near the end, and I caught a slight hint of resentment. In our past lives,

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Connor had always been the one that hesitated a little whenever we threw our Keystone cans onto the house lawn, so his lack of genuine support didn’t really come as a surprise, and nor did I care. I knew my banging body was something to be jealous of.

Afterwards, we all sat around and bonded over our new shared non-biodegradability. The

talk got pretty philosophical, I can’t lie. We all agreed that to have our physical form finally match our existence in value was truly liberating. It freed us of our previous heartbreakingly painful roles of being both the most superior beings on the planet as well as having a finite lifespan. Facing the simple paradox of the immense power granted to us paired with the knowledge that anything we did was futile? Unbearable. It was ridiculous that we were placed on the Earth for a set amount of time and YET were still expected to choose the ludicrous option of preserving the so-called “natural beauty” of our planet over endless purchasing of items we didn’t need. No way— how I saw it, since I was going to die soon, this bitch Mother Nature was going down with me. First of all, I couldn’t have a woman beat me in anything, and second, my 708th frosted plastic bag with the stark red “THANKYOU” repeated on it five times used way too much non-biodegradable material for me to pass up. Looking back on those decisions and whether I would’ve done anything differently, I know

that I prefer this passive, uninvolved and therefore not liable existence to the alternative of making small sacrifices any day. This is America, and the dream is undoubtedly alive and well,

THANKYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU very much.

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That Weird Part of YouT

by Christopher Hansen

Youtube has been shaping our definition of modern celebrity for years, but before the site became a dependable source of income for independent creators, it served as a platform for some of the internet’s most random content. Youtube is unique in its success in distributing user messages to the masses, and once acquired by Google, the company provided a vibrant and stable environment for creatives online.

This made Youtube a great place to—as the company loves to say—“Broadcast Yourself.”

If they weren’t “good,” the first uploads were at least genuine in their message and attempted to channel emotion through the digital landscape in entirely new ways. In the mid-2000s, people were experimenting, asking themselves, “what would others find interesting?” Some early Youtubers—if they could even be called that back then— found the answer and saw their subscriptions skyrocket. You may recognize some of their names: Smosh, Nigahiga, and Fred. People wanted comedy; more importantly they wanted relief, which these honest videos supplied in abundance. But what do I mean by honest? Comedian Bo Burnham conveys the idea on the H3 Podcast when talking about his favorite video, Cooking with Hoarders: Cooking hot dogs and peaches: “The internet to me is, like, dirty and weird and crazy and, like, so human.” An honest human is still imperfect—every human is imperfect—but their desire to share their imperfections with the world through their art, or other form of expression, is something to admire.

Fortunately, experimental content is still thriving, still acting as a defense against the overwhelming expectation of perfection imposed on us by our society’s culture and corporations. You may have

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Tube and Why it Exists art by Olivia Bono stumbled across one of these videos, wide awake at 4AM with nothing to watch. You may have laughed and you may have thought, “Why does this exist?” But think of what the world would be like without the weird. There would probably be nothing left—nothing enjoyable, anyway. The entertainment from these videos may be fleeting, but the deep message of these videos is nothing if not concrete: life is crazy, so get used to it.

And people are getting used to it. My high school physics teacher has a pretty tough job, but he gets a kick out of watching airport luggage auctions on Youtube. I once sampled a compilation of weird 90s commercials for an English project, turning a stressful assignment into an afternoon of fun. This weirdness and craziness doesn’t just define the internet, it defines us. We each think we are weird compared to others, but this Youtube phenomenon assures us that we are not the only weird ones out there. We are swamped by ads and social media posts that tell us what we should do and provide for us an image of what we should be. The lack of exposure we have to diverse personalities in popular media leaves us vulnerable and searching for authority. We think ourselves inadequate and look for a guide to show us the way. These videos bring us back to reality. You are not a failure if you stray from the crowd. And you should embrace who you are.

Channels with dumpster dives and hydraulic presses get millions of views. If people love these things, they will most definitely love you. So free yourself, be yourself, and, most importantly, “Broadcast Yourself.”

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by Gaela LaPasta

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A wedding dress

hanging under dull fluorescent lights in a box thrift store off the highway tells no tales but

conjures up a multitude of possibilities.

The joy of thrifting

lies not

only in the story behind the garment but also in the new stories that it can tell.

We change,

we transform,

we cut off the sleeves, we give away our prom dresses,

we wear our mother’s jeans

from the 80s and they come back into fashion in the 10s.

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We’re lucky to have these opportunities

to reimagine in the greyest, worst lit treasure trove.

Old memories fade like a pair of jeans and new memories are encoded on them until the seams rip and they become kitchen rags or fire kindling.

New life is born and it is

beautiful as it is mundane.

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BENEATH THE RICH AND THE CRAZY A Brief Critique by Kevin Goh wealth? You find them in none other than the Goh family, particularly Rachel’s ex-roommate Goh Peik Lin, and Oliver T’sien, who identified himself as “one of the poorer Asians” (although she is by no means poor). These characters are portrayed by juxtaposition as unapologetic oddballs (quite possibly an allegory to the stifling nature of the inner circle), and the Goh residence is clearly, entirely free from the common

Jon Chu’s rendition of Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians reached cinemas in August 2018 and enjoyed plenty of positive reception, particularly for its inclusiveness in featuring an all-Asian cast. As a Singaporean, it was comforting to also see Singapore portrayed on the silver screen. Beneath the romantic overtones that made this film the romantic comedy it is, however, are questions of culture and identity drawn along East-West lines. Plenty of elements intentionally woven into the film converge to create a striking juxtaposition of Eastern and Western cultures, and a delineation between what’s good and what’s not for the Crazy Rich Asian.

The movie’s plot revolves around the tension between American-born-and-bred Rachel Chu’s individuality and Eleanor Young’s traditional commitment to notions of identity, inheritance, ancestry, family, and other Confucian values. Sure, the Youngs are “crazy rich,” but it is of course of no coincidence that the wealth they possess predominantly comes from real estate and has been cultivated and passed on from generation to generation. In particular, the Youngs deem themselves “sociologically distinct” from families such as the Taiwanese, which were identified in the film to have profited from “very new money” —as opposed to the Young fortune. True to tradition, Eleanor also believes strongly in the woman’s role in the household—giving up on a Cambridge education for life in the family. Throughout the film, there are further references to notions of inheritance, gender roles, and inherited gender roles. We find that while Eleanor disapproves of Rachel, Eleanor herself is disapproved of by her mother-in-law. Amanda Ling, the lawyer whom Rachel meets at Araminta’s bachelorette party, speaks unabashedly about the role of “good old-fashioned nepotism” in landing her a cushy job as a lawyer.

Where are the outliers in this elusive circle of

Eleanor confronts Rachel. Warner Bros. Pictures.

Peranakan influence prevalent in the rest of the movie.

And so, the movie’s leading characters find themselves in an ancient empire that sticks to traditional values and allows no deviation from the (Asian) norm.

Entering the fray is hopeful Rachel Chu, who by design turns out to be a professor in game theory—one of the frontiers of the relatively new field of behavioral economics. Consider, first, that traditional economic theory disapproves of landed and inherited wealth as economically unproductive and likely an inequitable distribution of resources. Then, consider also that Rachel’s advocacy of microloans for their role in uplifting women and giving them greater economic autonomy— though the scene where she speaks to Princess Intan

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How did this competition in values pan out?

Despite the occasional play on other Asian nationalities (e.g. identifying the Beijing Billionaires and the Taiwanese Tycoons), the central identity for most characters in the film lay in their Asian heritage. In comparison, it was the American nationality that was explicitly and frequently provoked, and disparagingly: “do you know how many children are starving in America”; “she’s AsianAmerican”; “is that an American accent I hear?.”

Along with this, the main purpose of setting the film in Singapore (besides staying true to the novel) was really to facilitate a twist on typical Western-Eastern comparisons, since Singapore is an exemplar of Asian economic success.

Thus, in a kind of reverse racism, the white man/woman is treated as sociologically inferior in this isolated Asian elite bubble—so isolated, in fact, that while racism usually plays purely on appearances (e.g. the color of one’s skin), there is great resistance to Rachel’s attempted entry despite their visual similarities; she is a “banana,” yellow on the outside but white on the inside, and therefore cannot be admitted.

This tension comes to a climax in one of the final mahjong scenes where Rachel identified herself at the end as an “immigrant,” even though the Young family technically are immigrants too; suggesting a qualitative difference in immigrants based on their countries of origin.

Less explicit but (and perhaps as a result, as is often the case in film) more striking are the numerous modes of imagery and symbolism, not just the dialogue, that point towards the response of the Asian elite to Western ideas and institutions. It is arguably intentional that at her introduction, Eleanor Young is found (halfheartedly) reading the Bible in a cell group. This group of rich housewives later self-identifies as Methodists, which originated as a working-class movement from the Church of England and Anglicans (a working class that these ladies certainly had no part of). Had the movie chosen to portray a more traditional and representative picture of Asians, they would perhaps have chosen to feature Eleanor at a Buddhist temple.

Given the historical significance of Methodism to the working class, this introduction of Eleanor, and the

later comment on spending $20 million for weddings as a measure of “Methodist frugality,” hints at an underlying dissonance between their fundamentally (though artistically exaggerated) Asian characters and Western ideas. It was previously mentioned that the only residence in the movie free of Peranakan influence is the outlying Goh residence, which used as inspiration for its interior design Trump’s restroom (could it get

Rachel Chu meets Princess Intan. Warner Bros. Pictures.

any more capitalist than this?), but consider also that when Colin marries Araminta the church is usurped by a Peranakan atmosphere. In this we might therefore see a tug-of-war between Western and Eastern ideals, though predominantly the former are getting crowded out by the latter.

Ultimately, Crazy Rich Asians offered a critical examination of Western and Eastern values by means of romantic comedy. Much of this might have been obscured by symbolism and brief lines of dialogue.

However, perhaps this comparison bore itself out clearly, maybe the most clearly, in one of the movie’s most memorable scenes. Near the end, when Eleanor and Rachel play an intrinsically Asian game of mahjong, and the film never makes the effort to explain the rules of the game. Notably, this scene was never in the book – one of the rare occasions where Director Chu opted not just to take out elements from the book, but add to it. In catering to an Asian audience that would not need the game explained, the movie might have generated a response in the audience that mirrors what it attempts to do on-screen for its characters: a prioritization of East over West.

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The White Trash Identity in Bastard Out Of Carolina

by Abigail Mengesha art by Annika Bjerke

As much as it is a coming-of-age novel, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina is a sociological exposition of poor white life in the American South during the Civil Rights Movement. Narrated by Ruth Anne Boatwright—commonly referenced as Bone— the book examines notions of identity, poverty, sex, religion, and race. Allison manipulates point of view, and the interactions, responses and consciousness of characters to vividly portray a type of whiteness that is derogatory and disregarded: the “white trash” identity.

an illegitimate one—Bone’s father does not appear on the birth certificate—according to the law. Anney is aware of the stigma that comes with the stamp, since it burned her as much as the labels society branded her with, “no-good, lazy, shiftless.” Hence, Anney has enough entitlement and privilege to actually believe that she could fight to get it removed from Bone’s certificate.

This sense of pride is what reveals the paradox of the “white trash” identity as it is also present in the other Boatwrights. For instance, the uncles feel entitled to peace and a better life regardless of the crimes and atrocities they commit. So, as much as Boatwrights face injustices, they have certain privileges and pride that they wouldn’t be able to afford if they weren’t white.

Moreover, Bone repeatedly mentions a form of familial destiny, one that is tainted with doom and toxic patterns. Ranging from alcoholic men and overworked women, the Boatwrights can never escape the struggles of their predecessors: “Stupid or smart, there wasn’t much choice about what was going to happen to me, or to Grey and Garvey, or to any of us. Growing up was like falling into a hole.” Specifically, Bone’s retrospective self confirms that “[her] body, like [her] aunt’s bodies, was born to be worked to death, used up, and thrown away.”

Hence, “white trash’s” multifaceted, derogatory nature gets revealed. It expands beyond the expanse of race; after all, it is also the lovechild of poverty, gender and geography. Like other societal constructs of identity, “white trash” is utterly and completely dependent on the stereotypes of poor white families in the South.

The unambitious and criminal Boatwright men, the overworked and mistreated Boatwright women, and the numerous and wild Boatwright children fit society’s caricature of “white trash.” Therefore, other aspects of their identity get disregarded, reducing them to mere generalized avatars.

Also, this revelation exposes a homology with racism, specifically, one faced by African Americans.

Despite the dramatic difference between the two forms

The book’s narrative technique presents a firsthand account of the “white trash” identity and reveals its contrast against white-pride. This dichotomy—between “white trash” and white-pride—gets introduced in the beginning as Bone’s mother, Anney, relentlessly strives to the get the “ILLEGITIMATE” stamp removed from her daughter’s birth certificate. Shortly, Bone makes an insightful and retrospective observation, “Mama hated to be called trash, hated the memory of every day she’d ever spent bent over other people’s peanut and strawberry plants while they stood tall and looked at her like she was a rock on the ground” . To Anney, the stamp on the certificate was a confirmation of their “trash” status, and her white-pride will not let her have it. What distinguishes white pride from regular pride is the degree of entitlement involved in the emotion. Due to her whiteness, Anney feels entitled to get the stamp removed, regardless of the fact that Bone’s birth is truly

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For instance, even though the Boatwrights aren’t discriminated against because of their skin color, their behaviors—even their name—serve as genealogical traits that can’t be scraped off. They are stuck in this cycle of being regarded as worthless human beings who don’t deserve respect, because of who their parents are and the amount of money their family has. So, when Bone’s ex-friend, Shannon, reduces the talented, black choir singers to “niggers,” Bone responds as if she was the one attacked by the hateful words, because Shannon’s “…tone pitched exactly like the echoing sound of Aunt Madeline sneering ‘trash’ when she thought …[Bone] wasn’t close enough to hear her.” Hence, Bone draws a link: the poor are as disenfranchised as African Americans in the pre-Civil Rights South.

Alternatively, she also exposes another relationship between the struggles of African Americans and poor white families in the South: they have a resilient fire inside of them. Bone’s first interaction with a black family—when she visits her aunt—reveals this similarity. As the little black girl stares at her from one of the basement’s windows, Bone sees herself looking back at her. Both girls have so much anger and frustration inside of them. The little black girl has been oppressed her whole life because of her racial identity, while Bone has forever been mistreated because of her economic status. For similar and different reasons, the young girls have grown up at a rate that doesn’t match their physical age.

In addition to poverty, abuse fuels Bone’s aforementioned anger. Sexually, verbally and physically abused by her stepfather and emotionally neglected by her mother, Bone has been spinning in a whirlpool of guilt and blame throughout most of the novel. As she tries to make sense of her stepfather’s abuse, she follows both dark and light paths. As much as Glen uses sexual abuse as an outlet for his insecurity, frustration and rage, Bone uses masturbation as a way of releasing her anger. She continuously orgasms to images of fire engulfing her town and to a watching audience as she resists a molesting Glen. Sex becomes more than an act of satisfaction or means of reproduction, it becomes a power instrument. Yet, as much as this enables Bone to release her built up frustration and rage, she falls upon religion and gospel music as alternate

means of therapy. In a way, they feed the spiritual and emotional hunger she has been subduing. Baptism ceremonies become a way to get love and attention—“there was something heady and enthralling about being the object of all that attention”—while gospel music becomes an outlet for her pain: “This was the real stuff. I could feel the

“‘This was the real stuff.

I could feel the whiskey edge, the grief and holding on, the dark night terror and determination of real gospel.’” whiskey edge, the grief and holding on, the dark night terror and determination of real gospel.”

In the end, Allision draws in all of these to reveal the complexity of the “white trash” identity. Shame and pride appear to reach an agreement when the birth certificate reemerges after it has been forgotten for the majority of the book. Symbolically, the birth certificate was the physical manifestation of Bone’s position in society. As long as the “ILLEGITIMATE” stamp exists, Bone cannot escape her history. So, when Anney decides to give Bone her birth certificate after successfully getting rid of the stamp, she gives her daughter a chance to start over, to escape the rage and pain she had to endure because of the abusive father figure in her life. In her last attempt at motherly affection, Anney is giving Bone a chance to escape the shame associated with her “white trash” family and eventually build a sense of pride. Yet, this paradox of shame and pride doesn’t get neutralized, because Bone fails to escape the cyclical nature of the Boatwright family. Due to sexual abuse and emotional abandonment, she was bound to be who she was going to be, someone like her mother, a Boatwright woman. In the end, the birth certificate was just a shallow representation of identity as it only fed and threatened Anney’s white pride. In actuality, Bone’s “white trash” identity is solidified through other important rudiments: poverty, sexual abuse, gender, and rage.

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May I Have Your Attenion Please?: The Marshall Mathers LP & Me

by Pegah Moradi art by Annika Bjerke

1. Public Service Announcement 2000

0:07

2. Kill You

0:50

Slim Shady does not give a fuck what you think/If you don’t like it, you can suck his fucking cock/Little did you know, upon purchasing this album, you have just kissed his ass/Slim Shady is fed up with your shit, and he’s going to kill you.

When I was just eight or nine years old—rosy-cheeked and not yet allowed to watch cable TV—my parents, brother and I sat in a polite row on our dusty purple lawson couch that we’d hauled from Idaho to Virginia and watched this Iranian comedy on DVD, the only type of movie that was really safe to watch as a family: No kissing, no sex, no adult language. The Iranian censors had made sure of it.

Someone in the movie referenced Eminem in one way or another and, as it goes when your entire family is culturally disconnected, someone (probably me) asked who that was. My brother was four years older than me and, in my infantile eyes, the apex of cultural wisdom. He sat contently in the early 2000s puddle of grunge and adolescent angst. He once yelled at me when I broke his Weird Al CD and at another point tried starting a band with Aaron Dickinson from across the street despite not really liking rock music (or knowing how to make music at all). He played Xbox. He knew the name of nearly every player on nearly every roster in the NBA. To me, he was—for those years, at least—quintessentially cool.

My brother, with this American expertise under his belt, said something to the tune of, “Oh, he’s this rapper who hates women,” and I recall in my hazy memory just sitting there, only half understanding the movie, angry that anyone would listen to this guy who hated women in the first place. How could anyone hate women? What on earth did that even mean?

I invented violence, you vile venomous volatile vicious/Vain Vicodin, vrin vrin vrin!/Texas Chainsaw, left his brains all/Danglin’ from his neck while his head barely hangs on/Blood, guts, guns, cuts Knives, lives, wives, nuns, sluts — bitch, I’ma kill you!

At a later date on this unpredictable timeline, I’m 21 and in the midst of rapping “Without Me” from The Eminem Show at a birthday party at a karaoke bar. I do three or so Eminem songs throughout the night, including “Rap God,” which at a six-minute runtime is an almost cruel karaoke choice. Something’s wrong, I can feel it!/Six minutes. Six Minutes. There’s no sung chorus. Everyone stops paying attention at some point, because they’re understandably drunk and bored. I’m sober and floored at this twisting subliminal satirical lyrical labyrinth that I’ve stumbled into, or really that I’ve knowingly sprinted into, head first.

I am definitely trying to show off, whether it’s how skilled I am, or how skilled Eminem is, or how much I’m one of those insufferable I’m-not-like-the-other-girls-I-listen-to-hip-hop types. I do “Without Me” perfectly and “Rap God” near-perfectly. I get tripped up by that damn fast part that I haven’t practiced since Eminem was momentarily cool again back in high school. Uh, summa-lumma, dooma-lumma, you assumin’ I’m a human/What I gotta do to get it through to you? I’m superhuman. I used to do it flawlessly on-demand for a bunch of juniors on my high-school debate team. They would absolutely lap it up.

I forget that in “Rap God” Eminem spits “gay lookin’ boy” three times and later recounts breaking chairs and tables “over the back of a couple of faggots,” and that in “Without Me” he calls electronic music artist Moby a “fag” and tells him to “blow me.” Or maybe I’ve chosen to forget, but regardless the

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Watch & Listen words still inelegantly show up on the TV screen, and there’s this embarrassing timespan where I silently bob up and down to the beat for a couple of bars or so, waiting for the lyrics to disappear. I don’t do the same for “Cum on your lips and some on your tits,” though; those words seem to come packaged in with the swagger I’ve appropriated in this karaoke performance. They pour out of my mouth with a popping intensity, and I can feel my eyes getting wider and my brows furrowing, as if to intimidate everyone there, as if to say watch me. The few people in the room who are mildly vibing with the song pause for just a slice of a moment to shift their gaze towards me, to see if I actually said it.

5. Who Knew

0:47

8. The Real Slim Shady

0:35

I’m sorry, there must be a mix-up/You want me to fix up lyrics/While the President gets his dick sucked?/ Fuck that! Take drugs, rape sluts/Make fun of gay clubs, men who wear make-up/Get aware, wake up, get a sense of humor/Quit tryin’ to censor music: this is for your kid’s amusement/But don’t blame me when little Eric jumps off of the terrace/You shoulda been watchin’ him, apparently you ain’t parents.

“A lot of what he says makes me uncomfortable,” remarks Janet Maslin, a critic for the New York Times. “But the bottom line is if it’s good, you have to acknowledge that, and it is. It’s very cathartic to listen to him.” Maslin is a small, proper woman with arched eyebrows and the classy yet bold aura of Emily Gilmore from Gilmore Girls. She exists with the confidence and poise that’s common among older female journalists, those who came from the Hillary Clinton generation of professional, educated white women who are rarely photographed outside of a suit.

Maslin is also an Eminem fan, or so I suspect. She has covered the spectrum of Eminem and Eminem-adjacent material, ranging from Em’s own film 8 Mile to a collection of stories titled Vanilla Bright Like Eminem that have little to do with the rapper. In a 2002 piece for The New York Observer, Paul Slansky described Maslin as “[liking Eminem] more than either of her teenage sons do.” It’s supposed to be funny that Maslin likes him, of course, because she’s this prim, elite New York critic, but instead she can’t stop listening to this wide-eyed fucker in a tank top whose eponymous album has a minute-long skit where you vividly hear a man getting his dick sucked.

I want to defend Maslin so badly, partly because I want to shed the armor of irony I coated my Eminem fandom in after he became uncool. (If she’s allowed to like him, then so am I!) But I also want to agree with Maslin to clear my conscience, because if this haughty woman who professionally critiques art thinks these bars are good, then they must be great. It’s the same reason why I’ve been obnoxiously sending my friends PDFs I’ve scanned of Mark Cochrane’s “Moral Abdication: Or Just Father-Son Bonding with a Creepy Edge” from The Vancouver Sun in 2003, where the English professor expends a good amount of effort close-reading and analyzing figurative language in Eminem’s lyrics. I’m trying to prove that he’s brilliant, not to just to me but even to the academics who turn their nose at pop culture.

Cochrane compares Eminem to his “other favorite poet,” Anne Carson, by some grace of God placing these two very, very different artists on the same plane of genius. And it’s so, so satisfying.

But I am a perpetually nervous woman and as such I am still anxious that Eminem is duping Janet, Mark, and me by playing to our weak, stupid hearts. Why else would “Stan”—a stunningly calm and somber hip-hop ballad that laments the crazed misinterpretation of Eminem’s supposed satire—come right after “Kill You?” Feminist women love Eminem/”Chicka, chicka, chicka, Slim Shady, I’m sick of him/Look at him, walkin’ around, grabbin’ his you-know-what/Flippin’ the you-know-who,”/”Yeah, but he’s so cute though.”

I’m being tricked again, because I begin to feel for Eminem after he oscillates between a heartwrenching masterpiece and a slimy, goofy, violent bopping tune like “The Real Slim Shady,” then back to a dark, moving elegy on his creative suffocation. I’m getting tricked, but I love it, like I’m playing some kind of perverted game. Em and I are both in on it: He switches from these enchanting tracks to a nasty, buzzy, aggressive party tune. If you listen closely, you can hear him smirk while he pivots.

Richard Goldstein wrote in 2002 that Eminem’s music was pop pornography, and that if he rapped

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Watch & Listen about black people or Jews the same way he rapped about women and gays, nobody would give it a moral pass. “There is a relationship between Eminem and his time,” Goldstein claims. “His bigotry isn’t incidental or stupid, as his progressive champions claim. It’s central and knowing—and unless it’s examined, it will be free to operate.”

I like to think of myself as a feminist, at the very least in the way that nearly every college-educated woman in the northeast who’s read a single Teen Vogue article within the past three years considers herself a feminist. I play around with revisionist scenarios in my head: Would I have been as seduced

by Em’s bombastic boasting, coupled with what Cochrane calls his “wounded vulnerability?” had I lived fully in his cultural moment? Would I have been as eager to fall into his traps if I had been one of the women of Eminem’s time?

I met Eminem around the time of Encore, but I didn’t get to know him until Recovery, when I could take him in on HOT 99.5 on the way back from middle school track practice. I think I fell in love with him in high school, around the Marshall Mathers LP 2, well after his prime had long since vaporized. I got to him too late. I was finally caught up to the culture I had grown up in, finally tuned into the same wavelength as the rest of the world. But I had missed the last train, and instead was sitting on the platform, alone, waiting for something, (anything!) to come.

I have a mysterious soft spot, or nostalgia even, for the gross turn-of-themillennium boyhood angst that hung in the air when I was barely old enough for even the semblance of a cultural moment to register in my mind. It’s possible that I’ve constructed it, this revisionist nostalgia for a time period I didn’t quite belong to, the world of the 90s kids who were too young to really be 90s kids, but who still remember, like, Lizzie Mcguire and Tamagotchis. I don’t think I’ve made up this feeling, though; rather, it’s specific to the childhood I had, surrounded by disgusting boys in a small town we only called a city on a technicality, breathing in alt rock and anxiety and those graphic T-shirts with long sleeves nested under them like the entire mood of the moment could be broken into particles of pollen.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that when we were children we had the highest understanding of culture, albeit not until after we’d grown out of it, because culture emanated through the air, through your skin and immediately into your memory without ever stopping to register elsewhere in your brain. There was no irony, no need to avoid being stereotyped for the things you liked.

(And how could you be stereotyped? You were a child, a stereotype in and of itself.) There was no cultural criticism. There were no listicles on

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Watch & Listen the top 40 beach reads and there was no catching up on episodes of Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Culture was just in the air, pure and simple, and we inhaled it along with the rest of our breath.

It doesn’t matter, I guess, whether I would have liked Eminem had I been 21 in 2000, because I’m 21 in 2018 and I like him despite all the evidence as to why I shouldn’t. I still lose my mind at the sound of that riff: May I have your attention please? I mean, can you believe it? That this poor white kid from Detroit would read the dictionary in his home because he had nothing else to do, and he ended up captivating the entire world?

17. Under the Influence

4:20

18. Criminal

4:32

So you can suck my dick if you don’t like my shit/’Cause I was high when I wrote this, so suck my dick!/’Cause I don’t give a fuck if you don’t like my shit/’Cause I was high when I wrote this, so suck my dick!

I grow sick of listening to Eminem after I’ve run through The Mathers LP for the sixth time or so.

This happens a lot with music, but it especially happens with Eminem. His nasally voice grows grating, and his lyrics become bitter. It happened with “Heat” from Revival, where he fantasizes about a woman over this really exhilarating rock and roll beat. The crassness begins to get tired, and I notice it most when I’m singing along and the words just feel ugly and bumpy. I suddenly have to say something like “I ask does she want a computer lodged in her vagina/Said my dick is an apple, she said put it inside her.”

By some rabbit hole of Google searches, I end up on the Eminem subreddit, which I’ve surprisingly never stumbled upon before. The cursor turns into a middle finger when you hover over a clickable link.

The page, with a header that says “EMINƎM” next to Marshall Mathers’s rather unremarkable silhouette, is cringey to look at. His slouching posture is much less captivating or subversive when he’s 46 with an adult daughter and a heavy legacy to tend to. The page celebrates his accomplishments as though Revival and Kamikaze weren’t both utter busts, as though Eminem still could swallow down the entire zeitgeist with a single syllable. It’s like living in an alternate, deluded universe where Eminem’s nasty, horrific shock rap is still even marginally relevant, where this 46-year-old man somehow still has it, even though “it” was so deeply and inextricably linked to his youth and virility and spunk.

Earl Sweatshirt once said in an interview, “If you still follow Eminem, you drink way too much Mountain Dew and probably need to like, come home from the army,” and that’s when I knew for sure that it wasn’t cool to like Eminem anymore, that he’d lost his touch. I once told a friend I would never wear Eminem merch because “I would look racist” and it turns out earlier she’d bought me an Eminem sweatshirt as a gift for my birthday. It was such a thoughtful gift, too: She’d endured weeks of me blabbering on about Kamikaze and Eminem’s prowess, and any normal fan would want to support and represent the artist they love, right?

I’m listening to Kamikaze in Temple of Zeus, where the Cornell leftists meet the VSCO aesthetic sorority women. I’m feeling gloriously incongruous. Greatest in the world, greatest in the world, greatest in the world/No lie, I might be/The best to ever do it, the best to ever do it, the best to ever do it/I feel like the greatest. An acquaintance—one of a couple of men who consistently message me after I write anything about Eminem for the student newspaper—comes up to me and starts telling me about how Eminem hasn’t been good since he got sober. I start to clap back, but then a wave of exhaustion comes over me. I’m tired. The train has long left the station.

I’m a criminal!

‘Cause every time I write a rhyme These people think it’s a crime To tell ‘em what’s on my mind I guess I’m a criminal!

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Watch & Listen

Theorizing the Final Girl: Carol Clover and the Cultural Value of Scream

by Anna Lee art by Nadya Mikhaylovskaya “What’s your favorite scary movie?” Early in Wes Craven’s 1996 slasher movie, Scream, the killer asks the protagonist, Sidney, this now-iconic question. Sidney replies that she doesn’t watch scary movies, because “They’re all the same, some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act, who’s always running up the stairs when she should be running out the door.

It’s insulting.” The ensuing scene, ironically, shows Sidney running up the stairs to escape the masked killer, however, she also fights back and cleverly uses her computer to call 911. It’s this kind of twist on classic horror tropes that distinguishes Scream from other horror movies of the time.

Sidney’s response to the killer’s taunt epitomizes the fun and ingenuity of Scream: its self-awareness helps center the movie on female characters in a way that partially subverts the sexist bullshit typical to horror movies. Scream focuses on young women and the way they choose to live their lives—especially their sexual lives—and how society reprimands them for their choices, no matter what they are. It’s not an entirely feminist movie, but its meta style and repositioning of classic horror techniques makes it a piece of popular culture worth examining through a feminist lens.

Scream’s most notable self-reference is when a character lists the “rules” of the slasher movie genre. Randy, the horror-loving Blockbuster employee of the bunch, says: “There are certain rules one must abide in order to successfully

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survive a horror movie. Rule number one, you can never have sex. Sex equals death, okay? Number two, you can never drink or do drugs. It’s the sin factor... And number three, never, ever, under any circumstances say, ‘I’ll be right back.’ Because you won’t be back.” The movie shows characters breaking every one of these rules, leaving the audience to wonder which rules the narrative will follow and which it will rewrite.

Scream still follows most of these rules, despite its ironic allusion to them. Though the movie allows Sidney to survive in spite of her sexual activity, the movie still very much relies on the visuals of beautiful women dying. When a woman is killed in Scream, she is tortured: the killer plays games with her or kills her in an overly expressive and creative way. When men die, it’s generally quick, and the camera doesn’t spend much time with them. The one aspect of the “sex equals death” rule that Randy omits is that that rule mainly applies to female characters. Tatum (expertly played by a blonde Rose McGowan), Sidney’s best friend, is connoted as the most promiscuous character in the movie (she delivers lines like “Stu was with me last night” with a wink and a smile) especially compared to Sidney, who rebuffs her boyfriend’s advances when we first meet her character. Thus, in traditional horrormovie style, it would follow that Tatum is punished for her sexuality and killed in one of the most graphic ways possible - electrocuted, with her head stuck in a garage door.

Watch & Listen

If you’re a horror fan, you’re probably familiar with the trope of the “final girl”—a term coined by University of California, Berkeley film professor Carol Clover in the late 1980s—which refers to the sole female character who lives to defeat the killer at the end of the movie. In Scream, Sidney is the final girl. While this role might seem like an example of a feminist hero, Clover argues that in fact, the final girl lives because of her adoption of masculine-coded traits and therefore does not constitute a feminist character. In other words, the final girl succeeds because she is not “fully feminine.” She’s, in essence, not like other girls, and that is why she is not subjected to the graphic deaths that the other girls are. She exhibits apparently masculinecoded traits and yet is still recognizable, visually, as a woman. The male spectator can thus align with her emotionally, as she is similar to a man, but he can also objectify her sexually by virtue of her appearance as a woman. Sexually objectifiable as she is, the final girl doesn’t have sex. She doesn’t accept the phallus in that way and is therefore able to wield the phallus herself. She wields the phallic weapon, the knife, and is thus masculinized in the moment of her triumph over the killer. She is not a feminist hero because she is constructed by men and typified by the male violence to which she

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inevitably resorts.

Though Clover’s argument here makes some sense if looked at specifically within the realm of the slasher genre, it is also deeply flawed.

Firstly, to define any action as masculine is not valid unless one can specifically define masculinity— which is difficult to do because masculinity doesn’t exist within a vacuum; its definition and behaviors are distinct based on chronological, cultural, social, and political location. Secondly, to say that violence is inherently masculine implies that conversely, passivity is feminine—which in itself is a sexist and regressive notion.

Clover theorizes that slashers are the best movies to study if you want a glimpse of contemporary sexual attitudes and gender constructs. She writes, “slasher films present us in startlingly direct terms with a world in which male and female are at desperate odds but in which, at the same time, masculinity and femininity are more states of mind than body.” I disagree with her implicit assertion that masculinity and femininity are typically states of body rather than mind, but I wonder if she’s right about slasher movies like Scream—do they show archetypes of men and women and their interrelation in clearer ways than other movies, and what does it mean if they do?

Thoughts

a

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by Anna Lee

on Kiss

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Zooming In

I

t’s easier to imagine the past with opened eyes. It’s true. We are convinced, obviously, that this is impossible, so every time that we want to relive a memory that has stumbled upon our unsuspecting minds, we close our eyes and surrender and wait. Then, our brains, deprived of light to be turned and reflected, and, frankly, bored, compare the darkness behind our eyelids to the undersides of our childhood beds, the emptiness of space, the sleeping screens of our iPhones… The memory is lost in the uncontrolled, instinctive vanity of us trapped inside ourselves. We realize: we can’t remember ourselves without the present, and we can’t see ourselves without the past: we forget.

But who are we anyway? and why? and where? We are anywhere and nowhere, we inhabit the interstice, like the inhabitants of the fictional city of Leonia, imagined by Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities.

On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday’s Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services…

Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse.

Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands… The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher… A fortress of indestructible leftovers surrounds Leonia, dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains.

by D. Albè Bogetti Pérez art by Annie Fu

We are caught in a stream of refuse, in the inescapable infrastructure of production that has ground against us since our necessarily extra-corporeal births: from the moment we emerge from the hospital, shackled with a bracelet and our first scars and a bill for “services rendered,” we are treated as a means of production, as a resource to be redefined and refined. We are wheeled from the hospital into the ecosystem that razes ecosystems, into the grid of goodbyes whispered to our guts: we are forced to forget that we are bodies.

Skin feels the fabric of forgotten shame. Mouths taste jars of baby food spiked with myths of significance.

Eyes see statues of gods who can’t save us (or themselves (or ourselves)). And ears hear the garbage truck coming to collect the smells now intolerable to nannied noses, or else to collect the pieces of our bodies that don’t fit onto the conveyor belt. Difference is dismissed as inefficiency. Don’t talk to me about flaws.

No, yes, let’s talk about flaws. Despite the efforts of parents and politicians and pediatricians, here we are with them. Maybe we’ve made it because we share Leonia’s instinct to constantly expel, to reject: maybe the instinct to close our eyes when we are touched by the past is the rejection of the present around us, the trap, the pain of time in ruins. Here we are with our flaws, fragile fledglings being [redacted] by fiction. Here we are with the difference that the Anthropocene has tried so desperately to erase. Here we are together.

I want you to imagine something. Go through the whole process as instructed: close your eyes, be distracted, then confused, then lost, open your eyes again, then join me. Ready?

We’re sat at a table. It’s made of marble. The moon is shining through layers of glass and automatic shades; the sun is absorbed by black clothing. Voices rise up and echo in symphonic cacophony. We drink overpriced oat milk cappuccinos from paper cups: we are drunk.

In this rare moment, we the drunk crowd surprisingly, subconsciously accept our imperfection, our inability to function without help; our conscious thoughts, as usual, are completely different and completely wrong. We think we are helping our brains. Our brains think nothing. We are driven to drink not by thought or by care but by the pressure to overcome our imperfection through consumption. We are driven to consume so that we can produce, so that we can fulfill a collective need for meaning and money. It’s part of our contract with this place: we are given four years to turn as many of our flaws as possible into products, or else to discard them.

We as students in the commercial world trade these flaws for cappuccinos, classes, and a degree. We pass

“We know that we, too, are cities on the verge of destruction.”

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Zooming In through the university like cardboard boxes sent with two-day free shipping: we are folded, filled, and discarded.

Soon we will be part of the mountains growing on all sides, growing ever closer to collapsing on this campus, on this commercial campus. But it doesn’t have to be this way!

When will we begin the revolution?

The truth is that we are complacent. We feel in every moment the pleasure of shaping the city as it shapes us. It gets its form only from our graduated influence: physically, in the buildings that bear our names and the weights of our (imagined) fortunes, but also in the defunct currency of ideas, pages, words, cries for help and of joy that we leave behind. But let’s not think that this temporary, half-involuntary divinity spares us from change.

As the city is renewed each day, it preserves itself in its only definitive form: yesterday’s sweepings.

The truth is that we are scared. We know that we, too, are cities on the verge of destruction. We, too, are defined by the matter that passes through us, by the ideas, pages, words, cries for help and of joy of others that pass through us.

Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia’s boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption. The boundaries between the alien, hostile cities are infected ramparts where the detritus of both support each other, overlap, mingle.

The ramparts that we construct around us isolate us: we are constantly pushing against each other through the fabricated filth of our flaws. We are no longer a we; we never were.

I am pushing against you, and you against me. Why? When will I begin the revolution? Why do I allow the principles of profit to turn my perfections and imperfections into waste? Why do I say prayers to products?

When will you begin the revolution? Why do you allow the principles of profit to turn your perfections and imperfections into waste? Why do you say prayers to products?

The only way to escape the constant erasure of our world, its interminable desire to define itself at the expense of me, of you, of us, is to use our flaws to love each other. The only way to escape the communal solitude, the solitary multitude of this world is to bring down our mountains and destroy the cities that use our bodies and our minds as products. We must not let our flaws be wasted; we must make of them a new world in which they and we are beautiful. It is the only way to close our eyes and see.

The mountains between us are growing, and we are confusing comfort with depth, digging deeper holes for ourselves in the pleasurable depression of individualism. We have been made into an artificial people that cannot — or wants not — escape from a reality that is timeless in its temporality, a crowd permanently dissolved in the city.

But not me. Not anymore. I’m not a part of that multitude; I’m a part of this one, of mine, of myself. I left the city.

Here I am outside the city, ready to enter it again with stones in my backpack, looking for beauty and opportunity and connection, for these things and more can be found in the exchange between the city and its mountains, in our interstice.

Here I am with my flaws: I’m beginning the revolution. Will you join me?

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Zooming In

Living Inside a Man’s Mouth

by Elise Cording art by Annika Bjerke

When I dove headfirst into the dating scene at Cornell during my sophomore year, I didn’t know that I was sure to meet some classic characters. I immediately became enamored with the “masculine frat boy”—charming, self-assured, flirtatious, always in control. There was a certain sense of safety and danger in a guy who would hold his bedroom door open for me as he welcomed me in to take shots of cheap vodka together during the mixer. But little did I know then that throughout our ensuing relationship, I would hold only a superficial amount of power. A guise of hospitality while I was at his house prohibited me from taking any actions, even getting a glass of water for myself, while we were together. He held all control over the space, the initiation of plans, and consequently the situation. Unsurprisingly, we would rarely spend time together outside of his fraternity house, where it was necessary to conform to the expectations of an allmale space. I either had to play the role of the girl who didn’t know anything and had to be taught how to play poker and smoke a blunt with the boys (aka the “cute dumb” feminine character who gains favor through the stroking of the male ego) or I had to pretend to be “one of the guys,” meaning I did not protest, be myself, or state opinions (which are actually masculine actions under normative societal standards, but definitely not allowed by a female being “one of the guys”). Instead, I simply drank, smoked, and put on the demeanor that I didn’t give two fucks about anyone or anything.

This is how to survive in a man’s world. You either play the inferior feminine role that is expected of you as a woman or you play the slightly more powerful role of a woman enacting and conforming to the masculinity around her. (But don’t forget, although you may feel more powerful while playing “one of the guys,” you will never be taken as seriously as a man, no matter how much masculinity you project.)

You might be wondering at this point, why the hell I stayed with this guy for any amount of time at all. Long story short: men capitalize on vulnerability and use it to their advantage for as long as they can.

It’s perhaps a side effect of the tendency to provide and protect, leading to a masculine “Spidey sense” for vulnerable women. The beginning instinct may be to care for her, but this heightened sense of power can easily lead to manipulation. For example, a woman is vulnerable after a recent breakup and wants love and affection. He isn’t looking for any sort of commitment, especially not emotional investment because his life is “way too busy” to put in the time and effort of actually caring for another person, but giving her affection meets his sexual needs. So he allows her to believe he might love or care about her in a deeper way, texts her once every couple hours to keep up painstakingly long conversations that don’t ever get far enough for him to need to be vulnerable or share real information about his life, and invites her over once or twice a week to get his dick wet. With the right girl caught in the right place of loneliness, it’s truly a brilliant system. Kudos to you, fuckboys.

“Long story short: men capitalize on vulnerability and use it to their advantage for as long as they can.”

There is a silver lining, however. After my painful “casual relationship” with someone who held much more power over me than he did real care or investment for me in his heart, I realized I had let my self-worth be determined by someone else, and had given my agency away without even knowing it.

I realized that the power imbalances of gender that I see in society can easily transfer into my romantic and sexual relationships if I’m not careful about who I choose to date. In other words, if I was to date a man, I needed to find one who loves women (for more than just their bodies), sees my feminine power, isn’t afraid to be feminine himself, and was not raised on patriarchal mindsets and then surrounded by a fraternity house of toxic masculinity. Now, I’m

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Zooming In women. Because the feminine is seen as inferior and useful only as a tool of enhancement to the masculine experience, some men come to believe they are owed not only sex from women but also unreciprocated emotional support and nurturing.

I believe it could be possible for toxic femininity to arise, if women and feminine energy were viewed as powerful in society and masculinity was suppressed as much as femininity is today. But even so, the consequences for humanity would not be as harsh as those of toxic masculinity, because femininity allows for a softer way of being in the world, a way of existence less focused on insertion and more on experience. The feminine energy is constantly moving and feeling into situations, often acting in rhythm with the surrounding balance of energy rather than imposing its own distinct beat. (Pause to remind you that when I say feminine energy, I am not speaking about women, for women are filled with both feminine and masculine energy.) On the other hand, masculine energy is assertive and confident to stand on its own.

Without femininity, people would be less inclined in emotional sensitivity, which allows us to notice what others are feeling without them expressing emotions verbally. It is an important force in the act of caring and empathizing. This is why I believe men who live within the confinements of strict masculinity are lacking in their abilities to love fully and cannot embody the amount of vulnerability necessary to make deeper connections with others.

Because toxic masculinity is such a deep running current within our society, both men and women must be aware of the roles it plays in their own lives and adjust their actions accordingly so that we can live based on our own values, rather than the masculine values imposed on us. Men who embrace their feminine energies and release their fears of being emasculated will soon see that they are much better able to connect and relate with people, both in the dating scene and in everyday life. And women need to stop wasting their time with men whose lack of vulnerability, love, and respect do not match the treatment that every intimate partner deserves both inside and outside of the bedroom. Women need to be with someone who completely recognizes and admires their worth, who makes them feel powerful, who gives them more agency rather than less, and someone who lives into their own femininity to have a fuller experience in the world. If we do not change our own behavior to release ourselves from the masculine status quo, we will all continue to live inside of a man’s mouth.

aware that I’m stereotyping, and I send my sincerest apologies to the soft-hearted, the non-masculine, the non-heterosexual, and the women-respecting fraternity boys out there who are openly fighting the good fight to consistently be decent and loving human beings. But for deeply masculine men, it’s hard to be loving. For those whom masculinity is a hard and fast value and constant state to be upheld, the box you live in is stronger than the love trying to escape its walls. Fraternities, as well as the dominant societal norms for men, uphold the value of masculinity, and by looking down on femininity in men and in the world, they restrict a large part of any man’s lived experience.

Masculinity in and of itself is by no means a bad thing—it is simply an energy of human experience, not restricted to men but present in varying degrees in people of all genders. The continuum of gender as a spectrum between man and woman shows that we all have our own unique balance of feminine and masculine energies. Yet it is when feminine energy is suppressed within individuals and undervalued in society that the concept of “toxic masculinity” comes into play. Toxic masculinity is hyper-masculinity, an unnatural state of valuing the masculine above all other ways of being, denying feminine expression from male individuals, and generally perceiving femininity as inferior. Toxic masculinity normalizes aggression and hyper-heterosexuality, promoting the perception of women as powerless, sexual objects.

It creates unfounded feelings of male entitlement to

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Zooming In

An Interview with Conor Garity

by Annika Bjerke

On a blustery Monday morning in early November at approximately 11:43 AM I received the following email: “Hey! No rush but I think I’m here? I have an orange jacket on and I put a dark green hat on too. On a bench next to a trio of heads of people, across the room from the statue of a lady without a head.”

I looked around, spotted the orange jacket, noticed the surrounding heads—there are indeed a lot of heads in Zeus—and made my way over from the soup line. World, meet Conor Garity. Conor is an aspiring game developer, working out of our very own Ithaca. He is currently in the process of developing a game, ironically named, “This Game is Trash.” Naturally, in line with our theme, I decided to pursue this video game and the man behind the curtain.

AB: Tell us about yourself and how you came to this idea.

CG: My aunt gave me a couple blocks of clay when I was 11 or so and I started making my dinosaurs or whatever. I used to play video games a lot, not so much anymore. Somehow, at some point, it came together and I just decided that’s what I really wanted to do… I went to school for computer science but left once I had a clear idea that this is what I wanted to do with my life. Once I knew the information I needed to know, coding and whatever, I left to really focus on this.

AB: So about your game, how does it work? Why did you choose trash?

CG: Honestly my game is as much about trash as Mario is a plumber, but his game is not about plumbing. My brain is kinda dark, I have a dark

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Zooming In sense of humor.

But my heart is like that of a kid’s. Like for example, I’ll be in the middle of writing down this gritty detective story, and I’ll stop and think, what if everyone in this world is a penguin? And that really excites me.

That’s what gets me out of bed at 3 in the morning and be like, “Oh my god! I’m a genius.” In this world, garbage men are praised like celebrities and because of that, a lot of people strive to be garbage men. I guess the theme I am trying to present is, what is the reality of people who pursue their dreams? Why are there so many more people that have a dream that they’re not fulfilling?

So you play a character who wants to be this great garbage man. He meets a bunch of other characters along the way and they all represent one of the realities of what will happen to you if you follow your dreams. There is a dog for example, here [Conor at this point peels off the lid of one of the 3 Tupperware containers he brought with him and pulls out a clay figure]. So this little dog, Jumbo, makes movies like Pup Fiction or Paw Shank Redemption—I’m really proud of those names. He puts his heart into his movies, he dresses the part [Jumbo is wearing a beret, the true sign of a film genius] but no one shows up to his movies and he starts to think that they aren’t good and that he’s not cut out to be a movie director.

He has a lot of insecurities so you want to help him out and get other characters you know to come to his movies so he feels less insecure.

There is another character that’s a dropped scoop of ice cream. He had big dreams, but then one day he was dropped. He’s only going to live 3 days before he melts away, so that character represents the idea that when you go to follow your dreams sometimes stuff just happens to you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And the trash is just kind of there. I think my initial idea was if my dreams failed, I’d be okay being a garbageman. I think I wouldn’t hate that as much as other people.

AB: How would you like players to react to your game?

CG: I’d like them to pay me, so I can continue...That’s the number one reaction. I just don’t want to be so alone in making it, and it would be cool to be able to talk to other developers because, like writing a book, it can be a little bit of a lonely job where you are just by yourself and all you have is your rat to talk to. I guess more than anything it’s how other developers react. I would like the art and the writing to get some credit ideally. Like, “ey this is good,” from some of the developers I look up to because that’s what I really care about.

It can be really nerve-wracking especially if it feels like your dream isn’t going anywhere. I’m sure we could all relate to that.

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Zooming In

A w w a a Awk kwaffiin na na Shi

li

by Ange

art by Annika Bjerke

Awkwafina, also known as Nora Lum, is a 25 years. And, in a period social media has taken self-described girl from Queens, rapper, actress to calling #AsianAugust, a record number of media and comedienne. She rose to viral fame in 2012 with starring Asians premiered—from Lana Condor in her debut song “My Vag” and has remained in the Netflix’s To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before to the cultural zeitgeist ever since, making appearances notably all-Asian cast of the aforementioned Crazy on MTV’s Girl Code and hosting her own online talk Rich Asians. show. This year, her career got new life when she It’s an era that I never thought would acted in two of the biggest films of the summer: come. Mickey Rooney with buckteeth and squinty Ocean’s Eleven and Crazy Rich Asians. Rolling eyes playing Mr. Yunioshi is no longer socially Stone, The Washington Post, and Entertainment acceptable (if it ever even was). The message is Weekly have called her a breakout star, Variety clear: in conversations about diversity, we have a listed her as part of their “New Power of New York” seat at the table. list and Refinery29 even went as far as tto o rrefer e f e r I’d be amiss to take it for granted. to this past season as “the The history of Asians summer of Awkwafina.”

The message is clear: in American entertainment is And in October of this long and storied. Mirroring in conversations about year, she was the second Asian how African-Americans are American woman to ever host often subject to dehumanizing diversity, Saturday Night Live. portrayals, replaced by I’m excited.

Her caricatures in blackface predecessor, Lucy Liu, hosted and relegated to oft-harmful eighteen years ago and I was archetypes such as ‘the too young to even watch, let mammy’ or ‘Sambo,’ Asian alone understand the cultural Americans experience significance of the moment. To me, Awkwafina’s objectification through ‘yellowface’ and actual performance on Saturday Night Live doesn’t stereotypical depictions. matter as much as the occasion. While we don’t This is more than others taking our culture actually have much in common, for some reason, as a costume. It is a lack of understanding of us as as an Asian American woman, when I see her and people. others like her, I can’t help but see myself. Her The first Chinese woman to step on accomplishments feel like something I share in.

American soil did so as part of a sideshow act.

These past few years have been monumental Renamed Afong Moy to make her name more easily for the representation of Asian Americans in pronounceable to the public, she sat in a room Hollywood. In 2015, Vietnamese American Kelly and performed tasks such as wearing traditional Marie Tran became the first woman of color to play Chinese garb, using chopsticks and speaking a lead role in the Star Wars franchise. In 2017, Fresh Mandarin to amuse a paying audience. Most of the Off The Boat became the first primetime American populace had never seen an Asian person before, sitcom starring an Asian American family in almost and so her ‘exoticism’ was exploited by the men

we have a seat at the table.

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Zooming In who ran the exhibition and she became something to be gawked at, an object of curiosity rather than a person.

Nearly a century years later, Anna May Wong became the first Chinese American Hollywood star.

In casts that were predominant white and often filled with mocking and openly racist Orientalist depictions, she became the sole face of earnest diversity, and the roles given to her became the template for how Asian actors would be seen for years to come.

Outside of her movies, she was well-spoken in English and could speak French, German, and Mandarin. Her family had been in America for three generations and she exemplified the fashions of the times, even being voted “The world’s best-dressed woman” by the Mayfair Mannequin Society of New York. However, when the cameras were on, Wong was only given roles that what would later typify the archetype of a ‘dragon lady.’ Perpetually foreign, mysterious and villainous, she would be forced to adopt an accent and wear a slinky version of traditional Asian garb. She would tempt the (often white) protagonist, at times, even fall in love with him. But it was a futile venture—that love could never be returned. Legislation such as the Hays Code forbade interracial relationships on-screen.

Time after time, she expressed her frustration with the lack of depth in her roles and the fetishization of her race. “Why is it that the screen Chinese is always the villain?” she once said, “And so crude a villain­­—murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass! We are not like that.”

Once, it seemed that she would have a chance to exercise her potential. Pearl S. Buck’s incredibly popular novel, The Good Earth, about the tribulations of a Chinese farming family, was about to be adapted into a movie. It was a rare depiction of Chinese people in a positive light, and Anna May Wong viewed this as the role of a lifetime, her chance to escape the role of the exotic and two-dimensional villainess.

However, when it came down to it, MetroGoldwyn-Mayer had already cast a white man as the lead. And Anna would never be allowed to play his love interest.

In the end, they never even considered her for the role she wanted.

And so that’s why, when movies like To

All The Boys I’ve Loved Before and Crazy Rich Asians tell the story of women who fall in love, come of age, and just happen to be Asian, it feels like a success. After hundreds of years of viewing Asian women as objects, as perpetually foreign, as uncompromising villainesses, it is important to see that we are—as the star of the TATBILB, Lana Condor, puts it—“normal fucking people.”

To see them love and be loved in return is a stark contrast to the absolute rejection of Anna May Wong’s affections in her films.

It is indubitably a triumph.

But I still worry.

In TATBILB, the three sisters at the heart of the movie are a mixed-race family, raised by their white father after their Korean mother passed, but none of the actresses are half-Korean. In fact, Lana Condor isn’t even ½ white.

When Crazy Rich Asians set out to cast their leading man, a kind of Chinese Prince Charming, they ended up casting Henry Golding, who is biracial and of Iban ethnicity.

I believe these actors exemplified their roles perfectly, but the thoughts still race in my mind: when they cast siblings with three actresses of different ethnicities, are they relegating us still to ‘other’? Do they view us all, regardless of percentile or heritage, as the same? How much does the white father in TATBILB work to establish familiarity? His very presence reminds the audience how American, how regular the whole family seems. If the Korean mother had raised them and she had been present in the movie instead, would the characters have been received the same way?

Is the only way Lana Condor will be accepted is if she half white-washes herself?

What would have happened if Crazy Rich Asians had casted a fully Asian male in the romantic lead? Without European features, would he still be viewed as manly or handsome? Would the audience still be able to connect? Or would that be too foreign, too strange?

I don’t want to be the perpetual foreigner of a century ago, treated like an object, reduced to only my race. But, if I want to be accepted by American society, do I have to treat my ethnicity like a footnote, align myself to their beauty standards and reassure them that I do relate, that we do have things in common? I don’t want to compromise to

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Zooming In

conform.

I understand why the depictions of Asians in these modern roles are important and normalizing, I understand why Anna May Wong felt trapped in the roles she performed and how they contributed to harmful stereotypes that we are still trying to break free from now.

But nothing changes the fact that when I grew up in a place where I always felt different, because of how I looked and how I was raised, it was people playing roles like Wong’s who helped me understand and be proud of who I was.

Though many problems accompanied the portrayal, a Dragon Lady wielded her ethnicity and sexuality with power, imbued her heritage into everything she did. In the context of the films, she stood alone, refused to let anyone, whether they rejected her affections or condemned her plans, to change her motivations or who she was. She was uncompromisingly Asian—and she helped me to

be as well.

There is so many things wrong with all these portrayals, but that doesn’t mean they are without value or meaning. I don’t know the right answers to all the questions I’ve asked.

As I wrote this, Saturday Night Live had just begun. Awkwafina was onstage speaking about Lucy Liu’s appearance on SNL all those years ago.

“I was a kid and I didn’t have a ticket, so I knew I wasn’t getting in. But I just wanted to be near the building. And I remember how important that episode was for me and how it totally changed what I thought was possible for an Asian American woman […] I wasn’t able to make it into the building back then, but 18 years later, I’m hosting the show.”

Of course, the journey’s not over. But we’re in the building now. And I’m happy with that.

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by Sophie May

[.,THE GRIMY, GRIMY STORY .,]

Without the sanitation workers on the job every morning, the city’s garbage quickly began to pile up on the streets— According to one newsreel that aired during the strike, every day brought close to another 10,000 tons of garbage out into the streets with no one there to collect it…

Visibility and Violence during the 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strikes By: Sophie May “Urban infrastructure, when it works well, is nearly invisible. Buddhists call housework “invisible work” because you only notice it when it’s not done.” –Robin Nagle

New York city’s residents began to feel the effects of the strike, as the streets filled up with the waste that they were used to having disappear as quickly as it accumulated…

Striking in response to the city’s failure to meet their demands at the bargaining table, the sanitation workers were risking it all to engage in an illegal work stoppage. Despite the attempts of USA Leader John DeLury to pacify the workers… …They walked off the job by the hundreds.

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Unlike in the New York strike, the city of Memphis started to use violence against the black sanitation workers almost immediately.

Non-violent protestors were clubbed, tear-gassed and shot on the streets of Memphis. After one particularly large protest on March 28th, 1968…

“They lined the streets at subsequent marches, their rifles fitted with bayonets pointed at demonstrators.”

-Smithsonian Mag, 2018

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Throughout the sanitation workers’ strike, Martin Luther King Junior was a constant supporter and an integral part of the struggle. King returned to Memphis repeatedly, with the support of the SCLC and the NAACP to speak with the workers and protestors who were facing police brutality and racist retaliation at every turn.

Mayor Loeb was still holding fast, but the protestors kept up, in the memory of Dr. King and in the knowledge that they could not go

back to work under the conditions they were facing without a union contract.

He famously gave his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech to a crowd of sanitation workers and protestors in Memphis. The following day, he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel…

“Sanitation workers, it turns out, have twice the fatality rate of police officers, and nearly seven times the fatality rates of firefighters.”

-The Atlantic, 2013

Dedicated to the sanitation workers who bravely went on strike in NYC in 1968 and especially to those who risked everything fighting for their rights, for their lives and for a union in Memphis.

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Zooming Out

Visualizing the Lifecycle of the Disposable Coffee Cup

by Alyssa Anderson

Coffee is the liquid gold that oils America’s gears. In this meritocracy, time is money, and coffee is productivity. It stains every carpet in every office; it brews constantly across the nation. Good ol’ America, always in a rush, always on the go, nothing screams luxury more than a vessel of energy at our disposal - we can leave the house with nothing, have a cylinder of coffee delivered right to our palms, then after those 10-25 (depending on desired pace) glorious sips, we open our hands and let those paper cups slide right into the trash can. A reliable and non-committal morning routine, we are not only addicted to coffee but also to the convenience at which we attain it.

The coffee cup takes on an image of mysterious ephemeral beauty in our memories; we think of the feel of the smooth paper, of the intoxicating smell that escapes from the pill-shaped hole in the lid in a small stream of steam. We experience the cup of coffee for usually less than an hour. We might leave it on our desks and let the last few sips of coffee become an obsolete lukewarm puddle, or we could devour the goodness in less than ten minutes and ditch it on the next block. We leave them in our cars, we leave them on benches, in gutters, in taxis, on the subway. The convenient lightness of the plastic-insulated paper cup, the lid and the tiny plastic plugs that come with them, and the cardboard sleeves allow us to take them wherever we please, however far or wide. We also might not carry them far at all - often just the few steps between the counter at the shop and a table five feet away.

To contextualize the existence of any object, we must return to the basic rules of the universe. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. This is enough to crush our illusion of the coffee cup’s ephemerality: when the liquid from within warms

our hands, we have no impulse to look further than that moment and ignore all implications of where the cup came from or where it will end up. The First Law reminds us that this vessel did not fall from Eden into our transient possession, but is the result of various inputs. Raw materials enter complex, energy-intensive, inefficient manufacturing methods to be molded into our morning cup; paper from around the world and petroleum-based plastics morph into the vessels we toss over our shoulders after we’ve kissed it enough times. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed: the cup does not physically disappear once it leaves our visual landscapes. Although its role as vessel is officially over, it persists in all its matter as the disposable coffee cup. Its “innovative” makeup of both paper and plastic makes the cup nearly impossible to recycle, even though the charming paper leads consumers to believe otherwise - the cup rests in mountains of compacted garbage in landfills for the rest of its days, which could last hundreds of years. We, as the sole beneficiaries of this object’s existence, do not benefit for nearly long enough to rationalize the production process and arduous afterlife of the disposable coffee cup.

Throughout its history, we have aggressively dissociated the disposable coffee cup from both its means of production and its future as waste. We continue to remove these components of the story from our visual landscape: we see the untouched cups only in groups of 10 or 20 on the espresso machines of our coffee shops and hide the ex-vessels in covered bins and opaque trash bags. The pushed-away truths of the factory and the landfill never enter our sight and therefore are more convenient to overlook. By analyzing the disposable coffee cup as matter that can neither created nor destroyed, both as raw material and the refuse of

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Zooming Out society, we can no longer deny the longevity of these cups’ lifespans.

nose to rest and not hit hard, hot plastic with every sip; a sheltered roof under which foam can gently rest undisturbed; a heat buffer between liquid and mouth, allowing coffee to cool as it is funneled from insulation to the palate across the plastic bridge of the lid. Soon, the Traveler lid was the only lid, so much so that it made the decision of material for us - would foam or paper cups follow us into the future?

The solidification of the paper cup as the quintessential object of a coffee-drinking America occurred with the choice by Starbucks to follow Solo into the shining gates of lid heaven. In 1987,

Pre-Consumption: Raw Material and the Desire for Convenience

How did the quintessential disposable coffee cup achieve its perfect form? The perfect storm was brewing in the 20th century: a sanitation scare, a society on-the-go, accessibility to cheap materials and labor, and the capabilities of mass-production led to the development of our cup. The sudden necessity for single-use vessels sprung up after the rise of Germ Theory, and the soon-after horror of the Spanish Influenza. As germ theory took hold, society required a solution to access clean drinking water that prevented neighbors from exchanging saliva. Enter Lawrence Luellen, a lawyer-inventor type from Boston—he developed the first disposable cup in 1907. This “paper cup— almost more of a paper bag at that point—...didn’t have to be shared, and...could be thrown away after use,” therefore mitigating the spread of germs. To solidify the fate of disposable objects, 1918 brought the Spanish Influenza into the picture; now, “a healthy fear of germs wasn’t just for hypochondriacs anymore” it was a matter of life or death. Disposable cups grasped their hold in society as a manic obsession with sanitation swept across America.

So now, coffee. While water is number one, a necessity to maintain life, coffee was (and still is) in a close second as far as liquids go—therefore, adaptations to the disposable cup had to be made to accommodate hot drinks. The coffee cup that would uphold its shape and design into the 21st century took several developments to reach its peak trend. Before the sleek cups we know today, the cups of the past that held hot beverages “came with handles,” and were “obviously meant to mimic mugs.

The design thought of everything. It included what its competitors forgot: a perfect nook for the

“the new owner of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, had to choose what sort of disposable to-go cups his stores would carry as they underwent massive planned expansion throughout the U.S.” - around the same time that the Traveler lid appeared on the market. Desiring the “sleek…[design and] functional” qualities of the Solo Traveler lid, Starbucks needed a lid that would keep its foam high and its customers happy.

Now that the lids and our paper coffee cups manufactured the perfect coffee experience, there was one more problem to solve that defined our coffee cup experience today: the unbearable heat that seeps through the cup. For a reason unbeknownst to man, coffee is served at the temperature of the sun. “In 1991, Portland, Oregon, dad Jay Soren-

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Zooming Out son... invented the Java Jacket, an insulated cardboard sleeve that slides over a paper coffee cup” after spilling “hot coffee on himself while dropping his daughter off at school.” Simultaneously, more and more insulation was being added to the typical paper cup design by manufacturers.

Now we have our prototype. We found the one, the recognizable cup that a barista leaves on the counter for us to snag as they call our name - we don’t even have to look to know it’s ours.

We can imagine what it looks like, as it exists in its perfect form, so we don’t have to gaze at it as we consume it. It exists in our minds as instantaneous, as disposable: defined as an object “intended to be used once, or until no longer useful, and then thrown away.” Author Mira Engler in her novel Designing America’s Waste Landscape creates a scale for how we value our objects and surroundings: “durable objects and places are valuable, the transitory are valueless, and the negatively valued are rubbish.” The disposable coffee cups that we welcome into our lives for mere minutes or short hours exist as valueless. Our infrastructure allows us to gracefully make them disappear, and our value of them as transitory, meant to be disposed of, prevents us from feeling guilt or loss when we toss them. Although we call it valueless, the “25 BILLION cups” we use every year in America are made from raw materials and energy, all of which have intrinsic as well as ascribed social and monetary value.

A lot goes into making this ephemeral vessel - a lot that we don’t see as consumers, most of which is lost in translation in the seeming simplicity and our transitory possession of the object and hidden by lack of exposure. As we can gather from the development of its design, the production of these coffee cups requires many different materials and many different machines. In one year, the production of our yearly 25 billion valueless vessels deforests and pulverizes “9.4 million trees” and uses 20.25 billion gallons of freshwater. While people around the world suffer from lack of access to freshwater, we watch 20,237,500,000 gallons wind down the drain in the form of valueless objects.

We love the warm moments we can pick up on any block, the ability to “grab a cup” with friends on a whim. We love the convenience of disposable culture. We mindlessly hand over cash or card, or maybe a few quarters, in exchange for a paper cup filled with something that feels good for our mind, body, and soul. While the transitory nature of the disposable coffee cup renders it valueless, the associated culture usually carries weight - is it enough to validate the costly “life cycle of extracting raw materials, processing, manufacturing, transporting, using, and disposing of” these objects?

“We love love the the “We convenience convenience of disposable disposable of culture.” culture.”

First, let us consider the cultural obsession with the “Anthora” cup, the cup that screams New York City. It borrows its colors, blue and white, from the Greek flag, “and its type design distinctly recalls Ancient Athenian lettering.” The cup was the “first handleless paper to-go coffee cup,” which contributed majorly to the design of today’s average disposable coffee cup found across America.

The cup, “designed by Czech-American immigrant Leslie Buck in 1963, with its aesthetics embedded in Greek Classicism, represents the idealized perfect form - an invaluable trait to market a cup of steaming confidence. Not only does the Anthora sell coffee, but also the old New York laced with lively immigrant culture and community.

Marx’s commodity fetishism complicates the theory of the disposable coffee cup’s complete lack of value. As an object, it exists in our lives so that we can make it disappear. However, the cup is a commodity: it hardly represents the human labor or materials that went into it, but instead holds the value of convenience. Marx discusses the dissocia-

During Consumption: Mindless Blindness in Instant Gratification We love our coffee, so we love our cups.

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Zooming Out

and to rid of, not only dissociates the consumer from the lifecycle of the paper cup, but also that of the coffee itself. The fetishization of on-the-go coffee as an instinctual mindless pick-me-up removes not only all of the implications of the cup but of all the labor and social relations that went into the drink and the experience. “Think, for example, of the cup of coffee that you might have bought before sitting down to read this text. In that simple transaction, you entered into a relationship with hundreds of others: the waitperson, the owner of the coffee shop, the people working at the roaster, the importer, the truck driver, the dockworkers, all of the people on the ship that brought the beans, the coffee plantation owner, the pickers, and so on.” The coffee and the cup both seem to come to us from nowhere, from our very own magical, bottomless pots of gold from which we can scoop from at our leisure - both the coffee and the cups seem to be in limitless supply. In “The Lifecycle of the Disposable Coffee Cup,” the imagery of the endless stream of coffee coming from the heavens references the perfect convenience of coffee and

tion of material and labor from final product through analyzing the production of a table: “Yet for all that [labor and transformation] the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent.” Our cup continues to be the pulp of trees cut down, the petroleum that formed the binding polyethylene, even though it is transformed into a clean-cut, hyperdesigned vessel. For all that, the cup remains transitory, valueless, disposable - but for a moment, it holds something else that makes us want it. It holds a value of fashion and culture, of belonging - as in the Anthora. It represents consumer values and status - the logos of local coffee shops, hand-stamped kitschy art, or the big green Starbucks circle. Although it is not a huge cost, we also pay for the cup when we buy coffee, even though we ask for a “latte” and not a “latte and one disposable paper cup.”

We consume these cups at absurd rates around 68.5 million per day; 95,000 per 2 minutes.

The obscurity of the coffee delivered to us in disposable cups, completely ours to have and to hold

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Zooming Out its accompanying paper cup vessel, and how little work must be done to attain this luxury.

heterotopia. Foucault describes his heterotopia as a modern reaction to the “themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world.” The suspension of objects in a wasteland; the representation of our crisis of hyperspeed production but snail-paced waste decomposition; the cycle of raw material to emitted gases and liquids back into the earth in the closed cycle of the universe; the accumulation of our past, of our history as consumptive and irresponsible beings. Here, we express “the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place.” The landfill is our perfect heterotopia: we place boundaries around it and contain our mistakes, hold them hostage. So, now that we know where the cup came from and where it will go, do we continue to sip our coffee and choose to ignore our compartmentalization of these ugly truths?

The cup lives a long, full life - far longer than our own. We created this monster, “across the [complex, wasteful] life cycle of extracting raw materials, processing, manufacturing, transporting, using, and disposing of products.” We sip our coffee knowing that “products and packaging account for 44 percent of greenhouse gas emissions,” while we yell at people who drive their non-electric cars to work and take long showers.

So...should we kick the cup?

Post-Consumption: The Heterotopia of the Landfill The last time we see our coffee cup, we drop it into some sort of receptacle that swallows it for us. That is where we say goodbye, and we expect it to say the same. We leave these cups behind, however, so they can only continue their lives on earth in pure purposeless misery, somewhere among the rest of the 728,000 tons of trash Americans produce every day. The cups tumble through inefficient transportation processes that ultimately throw them off at the last stop: the landfill.

We adopted the practice of gathering our trash into one consolidated resting place from the ancient Greeks in Athens. “One of their most copied innovations, the municipal dump” cleaned up the internal city while sanctioning off a specified location for the artifacts of their civilization: their waste.

We do the same - remove our waste from where we live and breathe, dedicating acres and acres of vacant land to our refuse. A heavily ironic juxtaposition lies in the fate of the iconic Anthora cup - perpetually held in its slowly decaying existence in the dump designed by the Athenians. Our last goodbyes are not the end - “tens of thousands of years from now, plastic from billions of paper cups will lie undisturbed at the bottom of an abandoned landfill—by which time the Anthora design will be nearly as ancient, in relative terms, as the ancient Greek amphora designs that inspired it.”

We are a society in denial of the length of the lifecycle of objects that we design as disposable, as is evident in how we conceal the cups we leave behind. The Second Law of Thermodynamics contextualizes the incredibly prolonged death of the coffee cups: “the state of entropy of the entire universe, as an isolated system, will always increase over time,...and the changes in the entropy in the universe can never be negative.” Even though we no longer see these objects, they neither disappear nor sit harmlessly. As entropy takes its toll, as the materials of our once vessel slowly degrade, greenhouse gases are emitted and harmful chemicals released in the form of liquid.

The landfill emblematizes the Foucauldian

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Call-Out Culture is — Here is Why

by Jean Cambareri art by Magic Sun

Did you see Logan Paul’s suicide forest video? He’s so cancelled! What about Taylor Swift, with her snaky alter-ego? She’s cancelled!

Or Julianne Hough, who wore blackface on Halloween? Cancelled! How about everything Kanye West has done and said in the past few months? He is, most definitely, cancelled!

But Logan Paul is still making youtube videos (most of which are racking in at least a couple million views), last year Taylor Swift’s most recent album sold more copies in one day than any other album had in a week, Julianne Hough’s 2017 wedding was People magazine’s cover story, and Kanye’s Ye (which was released suspiciously soon after his TMZ outburst) went number one on the charts.

So if all of these people, who have offended the public in dramatically different ways and made mistakes with widely varying severities are all somehow shipped off to the same “cancelled” island, and then are still able to continue their lucrative careers, what exactly is cancelling anyway? More importantly, what good is it doing anyone?

Let’s start with the easier question—a simple definition of what cancelling is and how it has affected social media rhetoric within the past few years. Urban Dictionary simply defines it as a word used “to dismiss something/somebody. To reject an individual or an idea.” While this is true, it seems to be a bit more complicated than that.

Cancelling culture has heightened the already hypercritical rhetoric on social media, and has deepened divisions that were already present.

Take Logan Paul’s infamous Japanese suicide forest video for example: while Paul was dumped by millions of fans and shunned by most of his peers in the Youtube community, his viewer and subscriber count continued to increase, and loyal fans were happy to go on the defensive for Paul’s seemingly unforgivable actions. In this case, “cancelling” Paul not only created division among his fans, but it also acted as an accidental publicity stunt, and after a half-baked apology, he was back to making the same kind of content that got him into trouble in the first place. He was even earning more views than ever before.

If you have a Twitter or Instagram account, or basic internet access, you have probably witnessed this rising prevalence of call-out culture, or “cancelling” culture over the past few years. Sometimes it’s nearly impossible to scroll through social media without seeing a new careerending scandal, whether it be the resurfacing of a celebrity’s insensitive tweets from their adolescence, a politician’s offensive video, or a social media star’s poorly judged post. Just in the past few months, a handful of celebrities come to mind that fulfills each of these categories.

Riverdale star Charles Melton was scolded for his insensitive body shaming tweets from 2012, youtube stars Jason Nash and Trisha Paytas were called out for the lack of maturity in their “break up” videos (the pair was reportedly back together a few days later), and well, do I need to pick an offensive thing Donald Trump has said on tape?

At times it feels unfeasible to keep up with the hashtags and keep track of the seemingly

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Therein lies the second question that I sought to explore in depth—what good is cancelling culture doing anyone?

I have always felt uncomfortable with this trend of call-out culture, but I have never been able to identify my problem with it. Logically, people who say and do insensitive things should be called out by their peers, and I like the fact that through social media we are able to foster a more politically aware community, but a lot of the time, that just isn’t what call-out culture accomplishes.

A few days ago, I randomly stumbled upon a Trevor Noah radio interview on “The Breakfast Club,” in which he talks in depth about the divisive nature of today’s political climate, and how media often acts to deepen those divisions instead of bridging them. Although in the interview he is specifically speaking about racist people who are “banned” or “cancelled,” I believe that his words can be applied to the issue at large.

“The problem is that when you shun racists, when you cut them out of society, where do they go to?” he begins.

“When Donald Sterling with the Clippers has his racist tirade, what happens to him? They give him a billion dollars and he goes home. Is that guy not racist anymore?” he continues.

“All we’re doing is we’re banning these people. Where do we ban them to? That’s all I want to know,” he says.

With this statement, he is boldly and succinctly identifying the problem that I have had with cancelling culture all along. His questions, in a lot of ways, target its problem. The problem is not that people are being called out for their actions, it is that there is no thought behind it. In the end, there are no consequences because of it.

When people are merely attacked for their actions

by a mindless swarm of internet users who will forget about the situation in a few days, no one is really held accountable, and nothing is learned. In essence, when everyone is cancelled, no one is really cancelled.

The greatest example of this is sitting in the White House right now. No matter how many times Donald Trump has acted unethically or tweeted something insensitive, he is not held accountable for his actions because call-out culture is promoted by the nonstop pace of today’s media. Once we find something or someone else to focus our attention on, those who have been “cancelled” are able to bounce back without a scratch. No one is actually holding them accountable, no one is following up, no one is teaching them in a rational manner why what they did or said was wrong.

The remedy to this cultural phenomenon is difficult to identify, especially given how strongly it has influenced online dialogue surrounding socio-political issues. However, since it has intensified social media’s hypercritical rhetoric and deepened present divisions without any progressive results, something has to be done. We can start by taking a step back and doing our own research before coming to conclusions. Thinking as an individual instead of following a mob mentality increases the weight that each accusation and “call-out” holds because it is no longer a simple part of some strange trend.

Moreover, we need to make sure that the accused are held accountable for their actions instead of just saying so on our online platforms. Whether this be by not supporting their future projects, unfollowing their social media, or in extreme cases, making sure they are tried in a court of law, some follow-up of their “banning” needs to be done. After all, this will make “cancelling” culture more than a mere dismissal; it will make it a step towards a revolution.

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Poverty Porn: How To Unsubscribe From Slum Tourism

by Abigail Mengesha art by Leo Levy Tired of your generic island destinations? Monthly visits to museums and art exhibits?

Well, the tourism industry has a solution for you: slum tourism. It’s no secret that the world is abundant with inequality, so why not include it in your plans this summer? After all, it’s something completely different, maybe even trendy. So, why not go for it? Well, there are multiple reasons as to why you should do some research before booking that ticket to Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro, or any other third world city.

In the most reductive understanding, slum tourism is a form of sightseeing that involves visiting impoverished urban areas. It has been around for decades, but it started when well-off Londoners headed over to surrounding slums to ogle the poor. It became a formal commercial offering once tourists began venturing into the Lower East Side of Manhattan and more recently, began traveling to Johannesburg to observe the places where the anti-apartheid movement first started. Since its founding, the sector has been grounded in the inequality gap between the rich and the poor. As the world’s population grew and as capitalism’s influence around the world increased, so did the popularity of slum tourism.

Yet, a good deal of people argue in defense of slum tourism since it builds awareness and empathy. Instead of ignoring poverty, privileged people actively seek to experience real perspectives as a result of this movement. For instance, when Krishna Pujari and Chris Way began Mumbai’s Reality Tours and Travel to organize tours in Dharavi, they were trying to challenge the bias linked to slums. The tours aspired to show the positive side of the slum: its numerous small businesses and the inhabitants’ rigorous work ethic. At the same time, the company strived to make the tours ethical: enforcing a no-camera policy, limiting group sizes, employing guides from the inhabitants, and ensuring visitors are dressed appropriately. Besides, according to BBC, the company donates 80 percent of its profits to its sister company, a charity called Reality Gives. As

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a result, it appears that tourists are not exploiting the area since most of the money they spend on the tours are being sent back to the slums.

Moreover, certain intellectuals argue that slum tourism is not an exploitative goldmine executed by foreigners but one adopted by the districts as a way of tackling insignificance, disabling regional taboo, and empowering the urban poor amidst the absence of action from governments and the failure of urban policies. For instance in Bangkok, a slum’s inhabitants used tourism as a shield against the government’s eviction plan. Contrary to popular belief, slum tourism appears to be an empowering affair.

So, what’s the problem?

As much as companies like Reality Tours and Travel have ethical integrity and strive to do “the right thing,” they don’t provide real means to alleviate the immense inequalities that produce slums. Even if the majority of their profits are sent to charities, slum inhabitants from around the world complain about the lack of any real change in their communities. Slums are settlements, neighborhoods, or city districts that cannot provide the basic living conditions necessary for their populations. They are the result of rapid urbanization within a developing country. As more people from rural parts of the country migrate to cities, their demands for housing don’t match the city’s supply. As a result, migrants are forced to construct informal settlements on any open land.

The formation of slums reveals that there can never be a surface solution. Even though Reality Gives, Reality Tours and Travel’s sister company, strives to provide equal access to opportunities to the youth hailing from Dharavi’s folds, it doesn’t provide any preventative solution. In a way, the process becomes a temporary fix for the growing problem. As long as governments don’t take action and implement productive urban policies, urban migration decreases, and the economy of the overall country improves, the problems of slums shall persist and nullify charities’ and individuals’ good contributions. So for each “saved” community member, there will be an urban migrant taking their place, maintaining the slum’s existence.

Additionally, another fact contradicts the empowering benefits of slum tourism: most companies are jump-started by Western foreigners instead of community members. Reality Tours and Travels was brainstormed by Chris Way, a British man, while a slum tourism company in Nairobi was devised by a Dutch aid worker. Admittedly, they have native partners that understand the ins and outs of the slums, which result in the success of the firms, but why wouldn’t the city’s inhabitants themselves design these tour companies if slum tourism was going to truly benefit their city? Their people? This is because slum tourism mainly empowers the empowered. When taking a gap year, when spiritually frustrated and/or emotionally trapped, Westerners travel to third world countries for emotional enrichment. Through the window provided by slum tourism, these tourists view the “authentic” form of life presented by the tour companies. The tours are based on just observing the inhabitants so they don’t provide any insight on the structuralism of poverty. Hence, they either provide a romanticized version—where people are perceived to be hardworking and optimistic despite their hardship—or a voyeuristic version—where people are reduced to pitiful and overworked animals. In both cases, tourists feel better about themselves and the world. In the romanticized version, they get inspired by the inhabitants’ optimism, while in the voyeuristic version, they get self-satisfaction from empathically responding to the sufferers. Yet, in both cases, the slums’ inhabitants don’t benefit.

Furthermore, not all tourism companies are ethically sensitive. In Nairobi, small organiza-

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tions allow tourists to take pictures when they tour the city’s biggest slum, Kibera. This results in a contemporary human zoo that gains income from poverty voyeurism. Wealthy tourists usually target children and working women with their cameras either to romanticize or exaggerate the whole experience. Furthermore, they could sell these pictures to make a profit, while benefiting none of the slum inhabitants. In this case, slum tourism becomes a factor contributing to the commercialization of poverty. The sector becomes the market, the companies develop into the suppliers, and the tourists convert to consumers, while the inhabitants and their poverty are lessened to commodities.

So, what can be done?

Currently, the expansion of slums and the popularity of slum tourism are on a steady rise and won’t go away anytime soon. Consequently, calling for the complete obliteration of the industry becomes unrealistic and rash. Instead, governments and companies should work together to make this sector of tourism socially mindful. Corresponding government officials should draft and implement slum improvement plans while making strides against high urban migration, unequal distribution of public resources, and the lack of investment in local businesses.

The policies should also cover, but shouldn’t be restricted to tour company guidelines and educational requirements.

At the same time, tour companies should brainstorm and carry out hands-on campaigns and programs that come as a package deal with the tours. Instead of throwing money at a non-profit organization, these ventures truly benefit the community while giving tourists a well-rounded and realistic experience of the slums. The programs could include but not be limited to educational campaigns that help the slums’ micro-markets, political movements that challenge and demand the government to invest in the areas, and volunteering programs that are concerned with youth mentorship.

By implementing such policies, governments and tour companies can steer slum tourism towards a more socially conscious direction. Instead of remaining an industry that empowers the empowered, slum tourism can eventually benefit the communities as much as it benefits the tourists. Therefore, it can shed its voyeuristic and commercializing shell and reveal a new form, one that does not cash-crop on poverty and promote the vicious commodification of poor people. Once this is achieved, slum tourism can ironically be a tool that eliminates its very own profit generators: the slums.

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Thank you to everyone who made it possible

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