Kitsch Magazine: Spring 2022

kitsch Vol 20 No 2||Spring 2022

plastic

Meet the

e Editors!

kitsch Vol 20 No 2

editors-in-chief

zooming-in editor asst. zooming-in editor watch & listen editor asst. watch & listen editor bite size editor

Chloe Wayne E.D. Plowe Jean Cambareri Ori Ben Yossef Sofia Paredes

writers Ori Ben Yossef Brandon Chandler Vee Cipperman Lillian Hwang-Geddes Evelyn Kennedy Jaffe Christina Lee Grace Lee E.D. Plowe Shehryar Qazi Jameson Rivera Havi Rojer Stephanie Tom

Spring 2022

Vee Cipperman & Stephanie Tom art editor asst. art editor social media editor copy editor web editor

Havi Rojer Christina Lee Sarah Bastos Selene Xu Carrie Kim

artists Lilly Bjerke Vee Cipperman Jennifer Guo Lillian Hwang-Geddes Christina Lee E.D. Plowe Havi Rojer Chloe Wayne

cover art Havi Rojer

in this issue...

Bite Size Plastic–Adj.

8

Made in PVC Waifu Heaven

9

Fridge Poetry

10

Plastic Ads

11

A Review of the Album GLITCH PRINCESS by yeule

15

Where the Heck is Good Aspec Rep??

17

The Real Thing: Loving and Feeling Loved in Ouran High School Host Club

22

Spotify Playlist

24

Watch & Listen

The Vinyl Review: Eight Motivations Behind It Stay Soft, Get Eaten: The Melancholy of Mitski and Working for the Knife

26 29

Of Monster Houses and Men: Looking back on the Film Monster House

34

Polly Pocket

37

do plastic girls have plastic feelings too?

40

Headless Barbie

42

What You Will Leave Behind

44

The Trash I Keep in My Forest

46

The God Cone

48

Zooming In

Zooming Out Monolids, Spam, and Robots Memes About Microplastics Turtle 9

53 55 58

Letter from the Editors

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Dear Reader, In this uncertain, overlapping space between a pandemic and what lies beyond, we turn our attention to the possibilities of contradiction. We consider how to reconcile our existence in this nebulous state with our forward-looking lives as young artists, students, and activists. Here at Kitsch Magazine, we’re considering plastic: elasticity, materialism, and combination, both in the world around us and within ourselves.

When we think of plastic, we think of the hybrid: the half-formed, the cyborg, the yet-to-be-known.

Plastic is the false and impermeable that necessitates the natural and organic. Plastic is iPhones and advertisements and people. Plastic is toxic and tantalizing. Plastic is flexible and firm. We are plastic; plastic is us.

In this issue, we invite you into the intimate politic of plastic with all its possibilities. Join us at the intersections of media, material, and selfhood, and see what plastic says to you. Learn about the complex, cross-national history of cosmetic eyelid surgery among Koreans in “Monolids, Spam, and Robots” by Grace Lee. Explore a friend group’s reasoning for the modern comeback of vinyl records in “The Vinyl Revival” by Shehryar Qazi. Join in on a conversation with Kitsch art editors Christina Lee and Havi Rojer about asexual and aromantic characters (or lack thereof) in “Where the Heck is Good Aspec Rep??”

Enter the places where plastic facilitates creation and identity. Discover the gum that creates living beings with the elephant-trunked protagonists of E.D. Plowe’s “The God Cone.” Reflect on the uneasy permeability of bodies and materials in “do plastic girls have plastic feelings too?” by Chloe Wayne. Take part in a reflection on iconic fashion dolls and body dysphoria in “Headless Barbie” by Evelyn K.J. This past semester, Kitsch has come together to make new memories and explore new possibilities.

We’ve crafted collages and drawn cool bugs in each other’s living rooms on Art Nights; we’ve tested the inscrutable boundaries of InDesign during magazine layout; we’ve recommended new bubble tea flavors to each other; we’ve traded pieces back and forth to gather more ideas. As always, Kitsch thrives on truth, fun, and creativity, but there was something special about our thirst to try new methods this semester.

If this is your first time diving into the pretty, plastic pages of Kitsch Magazine, we welcome you. If you’re returning for the second, fifth, or eighteenth time, we welcome you back. Your support gives us the means to make authentic, experimental art, and your attention makes our messages worth writing. We hope you find some material within these pages to craft the person you are meant to be.

Love and gnomes, Vee and Steph

6

Level 1 -------Bite Size

7

Plastic - Adj.

by Jameson Rivera art by Vee Cipperman Plastic (Adj.) 1630s, “capable of shaping or molding a mass of matter,” from Latin plasticus, from Greek plastikos “fit for molding, capable of being molded into various forms; pertaining to molding,” also in reference to the arts… Hence, “capable of change or of receiving a new direction.” (From “Plastic,” Online Etymology Dictionary) I. The mind is plastic not elastic a fine stroke of luck We receive of change no more than dollar store flip-flops, molten by hot tarmac. The glial a fine jelly under our skull-caps jolts bending into bridges.

Remembering, learning. Never returning to the form held before — not silly putty stretching and never retaining a mark. Never recalling the tongs. We are not stuck, but always becoming something else instead.

II. Before plastic This thing so ubiquitous, even nefarious We had to invent it. Ante-plastic world, fibers sans polyurethane slickness, leather and hide proliferating the home— wood and stone, pewter and tin, glass and rotgut rioting. The tree burns to heaven, but plastic uniquely a product of that which so resembles it. In the beginning, versatile, an innovation Spewing forth polyps.

Bite Size • 08

Medicine, technology, art: how cheap How accessible. The future shining bright as day-glo.

III. Now nostalgia, for those who were born in a more tactile world, on the precipice of the Cloud.

An unraveling cassette, city lights blurred car window, plastic fruits vegetables scattered, beads toys cups shoes charms dials buttons.

You could still hold, still grasp the ribboned VHS. Plastic, for all its faults, loud, blatant beautiful tastelessness restaurant awnings in purple mauve jelly sandals, blinding blue butterfly clips, magenta vinyl and teal bakelite.

Many commonplace things today share corporate sensibility.

The obsession with professionalism.

The digital world untouched and unheld, more easily taken from us.

IV. Not to suggest that there is nothing wrong with even gaudy, vulgar — kitschy — plastic.

Like any tool put to the flame to close the mold. A hand wielding the torch, the system of the world, no creation can refuse to shiver over the web where it lies bound. Alone, Plastic cannot be evil, nor derogate.

No — it is what it is.

“Made in PVC Waifu Heaven” by Chloe Wayne

Bite Size • 9

Fridge Poetry

by Havi Rojer and Friends man want luscious purple breast moan

smell the moon egg boy is a mess

I ache for

I want an enormous butt

the whisper language

of my mother forest she love s me still

but I sleep frantic

when will swim

you

in

raw

I d a the sea drool ed it s ugly symphony

to some

over us

mist y

together we rose

friend ship

blue and languid

a thousand tiny monkey s in the sky

use

him

she

sit

rust

worship

beneath

his

tongue

delirious

please death

meat time

though women

Bite Size • 10

cool

he

sweat

goddess

honey

finger

garden

run

water s

sour with a wind in

trudge

spring

gorgeous chocolate a s s sausage

storm

a summer lake away

rain urge d

me

to rip my blood y

hair out

Plastic Ads

by Lillian Hwang-Geddes

Bite Size • 11

11

12

Bite Size • 12

Bite Size • 13

13

Level 2 -------Watch And Listen

14

A review of the Album Glitch Princess by yeule

by Shehryar Qazi art by Lillian Hwang-Geddes We are living in a sort of golden era of “abrasive,” experimental pop music. Led by luminaries like AG Cook of PC Music, SOPHIE (rest in peace), Charli XCX, and Rina Sawayama, avant-garde pop has rarely sounded weirder while sounding this pleasant. Glitch Princess by yeule is a quite interesting charting of these edges of pop music.

Dealing with themes of loneliness and identity, set to avant-garde production combining the ethereal sounds of shoegaze and the glitchy, distorted style of break-core, yeule creates a powerful exploration of the “self” in the age of the Internet, where its easy to feel endlessly distorted in a thousand different ways with the pressure of being at everything, everywhere, all-at-once being hard to resist. The album opens with the track “my name is Nat Ćmiel” and with the most direct statement of identity possible: listing your name and things you like to do while being filmed around in one’s department and backed by some really glitchy electronic production. The song is framed as a series of contradictions and resolutions: liking to eat but not the lingering of food, liking being a boy and being a girl, liking fucking and being fucked, and so on.

The delivery of the next track “electric” is backed by a gentle soft piano track that morphs into heavier synths to complement the artist’s crooning. A deeply confessional song about love to stave off suicidal thoughts builds into a chorus of the artist screaming prettily punctuated by the line “touch of you, electric.” Electric segways into “Flowers are Dead,” a comparatively somber, quieter, and eerier affair with yeule glitchy delivering their characteristic lyrics about loneliness and feeling unlovable over a gently raging synth production. The drum plays intermittently to modulate the energy of the track: once the slow drums kick in to complement the other production choices, the track gets a bit more interesting.

yeule creates a powerful exploration of the “self” in the age of the internet Next up is “eyes,” one of the quietest but most haunting tracks on the album. Framed by a light piano composition, yeule delivers their darkest lyrics thus far about feeling unwelcome in their body: feeling the need for exorcision and freedom from the demons inside them with “eyes like fire,” a more party friendly (but still pretty weird) part 2 with varied vocal melodies and intense, stalking production. The key and drum machine work quite well together on “Perfect Blue ft. Tohji,” almost as well as on an Ecco2k song. The song, however, fails to stand out beyond the title for me. Perhaps because Perfect Blue is one of my favorite films, I wish the track was more experimental in its production rather than a somewhat sad lush pop song with slightly edited vocals. That being said, the lyrics are a quite harrowing first person account of a toxic and destructive relationship, framed within the album’s overall themes about being not welcome in your own body with yeule likening themself to a broken toy transformed into a plaything by love.

The next track “Don’t Be So Hard On Your Own Beauty” is one of the standouts on the album. Yeule delivers some of their most powerful Watch & Listen • 15

lyricsism yet, combining the imagery of earlier tracks of eyes, fire, splitting organs, and the radiance of love into one stellar track about feeling less isolated through love. The music video is also equally fantastic, with the most impressive use of reversing video I’ve ever seen.

“Fragments” follows. One of the more experimental songs on the record, the production gets increasingly distorted and glitched as the track goes on, but always maintains a certain ethereal and ephemeral quality. The vocals undergo a similar metamorphosis on the track, with what sounds like a scream becoming part. “Too Dead Inside,” the next track, is one that can only be described as an existentialist bop. It’s probably the song on the album that would raise the least eyebrows if played at a party, primarily because the production is extremely fun and bouncy throughout the song. The lyrics are as depressing as the rest of the album, but the fun pop production helps cushion their impact

on one’s psyche. I will always appreciate songs you can both dance and cry to.

“Bites on My Neck” is my favorite track on the album. I’m always a sucker for captivating lyricism over roaring electronic production that uses screams (which is why “Tears” is my favorite song off of Pop 2). The quieter parts stand as a perfect contrast and lead in to the more intense parts of the song, and it just works to create a complex and endlessly replayable song. The next track “I <3 U” has the misfortune of following my favorite song on the record, but also at this point in the record the themes of the lyrics and production choices feel quite well explored, so outside the last minute, it is a comparatively uninteresting affair. The same cannot be said of “Friendly Machine” which has some grabbing production that echoes between a wall of sound and a comparative quietness. The songwriting here feels like a nice wrap of the album’s themes of the self, love, alienation, and identity, and the repetitive strong structure is a callback to the opening track, effectively opening and ending the album on mediation of identity through a statement of what one likes and doesn’t like. I do quite like the penultimate track “Mandy” because of its abstract, conversational lyricism and the noisy, industrial production (thank you Genius dot com for using those two words to describe the percussion, because they fit quite well.)

The next track is what I remember provoking the most discussion when the album first came out: a full 4 hour 44 minute ambient track co-produced with Danny L Harle. I will admit I have only listened to the first hour of this composition and can’t really say much more about it beyond it sounds ethereal and features yeule’s voice in the production in a quite subtle but impactful manner. I will try sleeping with this track playing every night for the rest of the school year so I can truly talk about it with some modicum of authority. Feel free to ask if I am experiencing any psycho or physiological changes while conducting this experiment. Perhaps you should join it as well. In any case, please do give the album a listen because the world is only getting weirder, and its nice to hear this being reflected in the music that is coming out.

Watch & Listen • 16

Where the Heck Is Good Aspec Rep???

Asexuality and Aromanticism in Media art and writing by Christina Lee and Havi Rojer A friend once asked me, “What’s it like not falling for people?

Blissful?” Sexually, I don’t fall for people. Romantically? It’s complicated. (-_-) Asexuality and aromantanticism are not well known by most of the general public. According to AVEN (Asexual Visibility and Education Network), “​​[a]n aromantic is a person who experiences little or no romantic attraction to others” and “[a]n asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction.” Many people who are asexual are also aromantic, but there are also many others who identify exclusively with one label or the other.

Of course, like any other queer identity, asexual folks and aromantic folks–referred to under the umbrella term aspec (asexual/aromantic spectrum) can experience these orientations in unique and multifaceted ways and to different degrees. For example, I identify as demi-romantic, demi-sexual, and bi, meaning that I only develop sexual and romantic attraction after an intense emotional connection, and I can experience that attraction to multiple genders.

And me? I’m mostly aro, very ace, and naturally oblivious to sex- and romance-coded signals. I’d say I’m 99.9% ace: that is, not sexually attracted to others at all, but with a 0.1% margin of error, in case something happens someday. In terms of romantic orientation, I think I’m 55% aro (not romantically attracted to anyone or interested in romance at all), 40% confused (selfexplanatory), and the remaining 5% is probably bi (I find people

of multiple genders attractive, both aesthetically and personalitywise).

Christina is an engineer, as you might be able to tell, hence the math. :) Guilty as charged. :3 Now you, unlike many other people, know two aspec folk!

Congrats!

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when we say that we don’t experience romantic or sexual attraction? Unnatural?

Unfeeling? Cold, heartless, or disloyal? Prudish and uptight for steering clear of sex? Pure, innocent young children who don’t really know what they’re talking about? Fresh-faced late bloomers who’ll grow up and get there with someone someday? Perhaps the thought that something about us must be broken or inherently wrong flitted through your mind. Or perhaps you’re struggling to understand asexuality and aromanticism as something real — perhaps it feels too artificial, too inhuman, too inorganic and alien to apply to people.

If you feel this way, it’s probably largely due to how the media portrays aspec folk. Let’s look at a few examples of aspec or aspec-coded characters in media.

Watch & Listen • 17

If I only had a heart–that is, if I could only feel and love again – that is, if I could only be human again! The Tin Woodman desires to have a heart not because he wants to have an intrinsic part of a complex organic lifeform’s circulatory system back in his body, but so that he can love again. He is inhuman not because he is made of metal all over, but because he does not romantically love his former girlfriend. Such representations in the media surround us from an early age, relentlessly hammering into our minds the notion that romance is A Necessity To Be Human. Not only is it an intrinsic part of being human, it is inseparable from one’s organic being. There are no other options presented. A flesh-and-blood human being who does not feel romance? Who does not desire romance, who does not understand romance? Impossible! A person who feels romantic attraction at some moments but does not at others? Preposterous! Someone for whom romantic attraction cannot be an option unless they form some sort of a connection with another? Pah, that’s called being choosy!

We’ll start with one who isn’t written with the most sensitivity.

Almost everyone is familiar with the iconic yellow form of SpongeBob SquarePants. While SpongeBob isn’t necessarily a bad character per se, he is a rather terrible example of an aspec person to base perceptions of others on, especially given that he stars in a show aimed towards children. SpongeBob is confirmed to be asexual by the creator of the show and is consistently portrayed as extremely childlike and immature, despite being old enough to live independently and hold a job, both of which imply that he is an adult.

Now, I’m not saying that SpongeBob SquarePants should be a sex icon (that would be HORRIBLE), nor that he shouldn’t be allowed to be goofy in a kids show. I do, however, think it’s important to acknowledge that he is not a good representation of asexual folks in the real world. Sex isn’t a requirement of adulthood. One doesn’t need to “check off” having sex as a milestone of maturity.

Then there is an aspec-coded character familiar to many: the Tin Woodman from L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. The basic gist of his story is this: once upon a time, the Woodman was a flesh-and-blood human man, a young woodcutter in love with a young lady. This young lady toiled as a personal servant to her (actually) evil witch of an aunt. The witchy aunt, who did not want to lose her source of free labor, did not want the lady marrying the Woodman and leaving. The solution, apparently, was to curse the Woodman’s ax to slip and cut off his limbs. Each time he lost a limb, the Woodman employed the skills of a craftsman friend, who would replace it with one made of tin. Eventually, having run out of limbs to dismember, the ax cut him in half. After the craftsman replaced his torso, the Woodman became entirely made of tin. And because the Woodman became a hollow, heartless body, he stopped loving the young lady. How could he possibly love, now being made of cold, hard, unfeeling metal?

Watch & Listen • 18

Moving into better representation of aspec characters, let’s talk about one of my all-time favorite kin characters (don’t you dare call me cringe): Peridot! Or, more specifically, Peridot Facet-2F5L Cut-5XG. Peridot is an alien from the animated show Steven Universe. She is

an extremely complicated character who begins as a villain and, over the course of three seasons, becomes not only an ally of the main protagonists, but also a friend. Peridot was confirmed asexual and aromantic by a storyboard artist of the show a few years ago, but fans suspected that this tiny ball of anger and logic was aspec long before. Unlike the other Crystal Gems (alien rebels who, along with the titular Steven, help to defend the earth from their expansionist

homeworld empire), Peridot initially sees humans and human emotions as illogical and worthless. She does come to respect both the people around her and their feelings, but one thing she continuously struggles to grasp is romantic intimacy, which, among the alien Gems, can take the form of a physical fusion between two or more gems into one.

Although fusion is a nuanced and potentially platonic form of intimacy, it has multiple similarities to sex and romantic relationships. All gems involved typically consent to fusion (although there are important exceptions that mirror toxic

relationships or assault) and fusion begins with a dance between individuals. These dances are often implicitly romantic or slightly sexually-coded, although Steven Universe is a kid’s show, so nothing is overly explicit.

understanding others. After this particular episode, I not only related to Peridot because of our similar personalities, but also because of our similar attitudes towards intimacy. She may not have been confirmed as ace until a few years after the episode aired, but it meant so much to me as a teenager to see a character who I loved feel the same way I did about such a large societal expectation. The only possible concern I have with Peridot as an aspec icon is her alienness. She is a fantastic character, and of course the fact that she is not human is essential to the show, but I would caution against the common false narrative that all aspecs are also lacking in some essential aspect of humanity.

Another better example of an aspec-coded character is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brilliant, single-minded eccentric of a consulting detective: Sherlock Holmes. Through Dr. Watson (Holmes’s housemate and self-appointed chronicler of his cases), readers see that Holmes is dispassionate and cold – except for the moments he is talking about an investigation – and keeps to himself – except for Watson, who becomes one of Holmes’s best (and only) friends. Periodically throughout the stories, Holmes sinks into lethargy when he is not pursuing a case or conducting an experiment. For Holmes, his work is what provides the zest and drive of living life, and that does not include romance or sex. Indeed, as he states in The Sign of Four, Holmes believes that “[l]ove . . . an emotional thing” (used here in a way that conflates romantic and sexual attraction and relations) that is an unwanted potential distraction to his investigative work, which relies on “true, cold reason,” which he “places above all things.”

Thus, Holmes’s declaration that “[sic] I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment” clearly states how his work provides him all the fulfillment he desires. Having romance and sex in his life would distract from that joy and detract from that fulfillment in his life.

While some of Holmes’s behavior does fall under the distant,

For Peridot, fusion is not only unnecessary, but actively distasteful. At one point in the show, she attempts to fuse with another, permanently-fused, Gem in order to better understand her. Peridot is nervous even before she begins to try and fuse, and her anxiety only grows as the two begin to dance. However, before they can actually fuse, Peridot steps back and exclaims that she “can’t do it.” To her surprise, the other Gem is not only respectful of her withdrawn consent, but is touched that Peridot even made the attempt to understand fusion and to understand her.

Peridot’s struggle to feel comfortable with fusion mirrors the way many asexual and aromantic folks try to force themselves to engage in sexual or romantic relationships. When I first saw Peridot in Steven Universe, I immediately related to her well-developed personality: she is stubborn, intelligent, logical, introverted, self-assured, and good-hearted, although she has difficulty Watch & Listen • 19

aloof nature usually ascribed as the default aspec personality, it is important to recognize how Conan Doyle wrote Holmes’s personality as a multifaceted one. Holmes maintains a distance, but he is unfailingly courteous and respectful when dealing with others, regardless of age, gender, or occupation. Although Holmes is not above small lies and manipulations in order to obtain information he needs, as a rule, he refuses to take cases that do not pique his interest, no matter how wealthy and influential the client. In fact, he often goes to great lengths to ensure a client’s well-being or peace of mind (or at the very least, to break the truth to them as gently as possible).

Holmes has few friends, but he holds deep trust and affection towards the ones he has – especially Watson. Aside from the very fact that the self-proclaimed introverted Holmes invites Watson numerous times to accompany him on his investigative forays, there is a rare moment in The Adventure of the Three Garridebs where Holmes explicitly reveals how deeply he cares for Watson.

At an armed stakeout, James Winter (a wanted criminal and counterfeiter, the target of said stakeout) unexpectedly fires some shots, and a bullet grazes Watson in the leg. Holmes immediately strikes Winter over the head with his pistol and incapacitates him before rushing over to check on Watson. Watson himself says of the moment, “It was worth a wound – it was worth many wounds –to know the depths of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask . . . For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.”

she “[doesn’t] wanna have sex at all. Ever. With anyone.” She follows this by saying with despair, “I think I might be broken.”

This was when I began to tear up, watching the episode. Florence’s words echoed the ones I’d felt inside for years. I’d never before seen a character on TV articulate so simply the fear of nearly every aspec person- that we are somehow broken or lacking because we don’t feel certain types of attraction.

Jean Milburn’s response truly set off the waterworks for me. She softly explains to Florence what asexuality is, in a way that not only validates Florence’s experience, but also reassures her that love is not exclusive to sexual relationships. She finishes by telling her, “Sex doesn’t make us whole, and so, how could you ever be broken?” Well said, Dr. Milburn.

Florence represents a pinnacle of aspec representation. She is not defined by her asexuality, and has friends, aspirations, and a personality that do not rely on her being asexual. However, her asexuality is an important part of who she is, and in the show, she is validated in that identity. Unfortunately, she is only a minor character in the series, but all the same, other writers could take a lesson from Florence’s amazing characterization.

This is what I appreciate most about Sherlock Holmes as an aspec-coded character: the aspects of his character that align with aspec stereotypes do so because that is how he was written as a human being. There is nothing wrong about meeting a stereotype–so long as one keeps in mind that the stereotype is not the entirety of the person, and that the stereotype is not a requirement for a person to relate to an identity or a community!

I’d like to end this piece with one of the best representations of asexuality I’ve ever seen in mainstream media: Florence from Sex Education. Before I begin, I’ll admit that I haven’t actually watched the show, but a single scene alone made me feel so seen in my asexuality that I actually cried. Florence is a talented actor, and while rehearsing for a production of Romeo and Juliet, is pressured by the other theater students to play Juliet as a sexcrazed teenager. They suggest that Florence should have sex with the actor of Romeo to bring further realism to the show. Florence, distressed, bursts into the office of the school sex counselor and exclaims, “I don’t want to have sex!”

The counselor, Jean Milburn, is patient and helps Florence to articulate her thoughts, resulting in Florence’s declaration that Watch & Listen • 20

We’ve now presented you with five aspec characters ranging from the cringe to the cathartic. Obviously, there are many more fictional aspec folks out there we didn’t have room to talk about, and myriad others we haven’t even heard of yet! Aspec rep is out there, it appears, but it’s usually buried deep. Even when characters are explicitly on the asexual or aromantic spectrum, we’ve seen how they’re too often written merely as stereotypes, or else, even when they are complex and well-written, they are nonhuman, which further alienates aspec folks in public perception.

The solution? More human representation of aspec folks. That is to say, a wide variety of complex depictions of aspec folks in the media. We need both blatantly explicit statements announcing an aspec character’s aspec-ness to the world and hidden, hinted-in-passing references subtly slipped in. We need stories centered on a character’s struggles with their slight or non-existent lack of sexual or romantic attraction, but we also need stories about something entirely unrelated to coming out or identity–stories centered on characters, on people, who just happen to be aspec.

After all, being aspec is beautiful! How amazing it is that human beings are able to experience such a wide range of feelings for one another, whether platonic, sexual, romantic, or something else entirely undefinable. Love, in any form, is worthy of celebration, and what better way to do that than through the kinds of stories that have defined our species for hundreds of thousands of years? ~ <3 <3

“The solution? More human representation of aspec folk.

””

“The Real Thing”

Loving and Feeling Loved in Ouran High School Host Club

by Ori Ben Yossef art by Havi Rojer

“the Host Club is the one place where the students can feel unconditionally loved” Ouran High School Host Club is a 2006 anime series featuring seven students — Haruhi, Tamaki, Kyoya, twins Hikaru and Kaoru, Honey, and Mori — who run the “Host Club,” a space where female “guests” request these (mostly) male “hosts” to charm them during one-time encounters similar to dates. In Tamaki’s words, “the Ouran Host Club is where the school’s handsomest boys, with too much time on their hands, entertain young ladies who also have way too much time on their hands. Just think of it as Ouran Academy’s elegant playground for the super-rich and beautiful” (E1 2:36).

This recurring quote begs the question: of all the ways to spend “way too much time,” why start a Host Club? There must be a very good reason that the students (except Haruhi) commodify their personalities as a way to pass their time. Kyoya claims Watch & Listen • 22

that the choice stems from their “mutual egocentricity” (E17 9:49), but my reading will uncover a much more vulnerable motive for the Host Club’s existence. It will also spoil the show. So, enter if you dare.

Initially, the boys appear to be loved and popular with no other worries, but the show later reveals some of their traumatic life stories. For example, Tamaki had to decide to leave his sick mother because it was the only way his grandmother would sustain his mother’s healthcare costs (E25 18:51–20:27). This event marked the heartbreaking end of a close familial relationship. I infer that Tamaki founded the Host Club to avoid repeating that fate: the Host Club allows Tamaki to feel love in short-lasting doses without the fear that the rug will be pulled out from beneath a long-lasting relationship.

Even though the other boys are dealing with different issues in their family and personal lives, the Host Club similarly gives them the space to feel loved and validated.

The twins Hikaru and Kaoru, for example, were lonely and reserved throughout childhood. However, the Host Club gives them a place to express themselves and be appreciated, which has helped them make friends and feel comfortable around their peers (E9 3:18–4:02). In addition, adults often tell Kyoya that he can never become an heir to his family because he is a third son. The Host Club serves as a space where that dialogue is absent and Kyoya’s accounting work is valued.

Although we don’t usually hear much from the young girls who request the Host Club’s services, Princess Ayanokoji (a guest) hints that they, too, use the Host Club to keep their fragile emotions afloat. In the first episode, when Haruhi (a girl) joins the Host Club as a host, Ayanokoji throws Haruhi’s bag out the window and into a pond, telling Haruhi that she is “always going to be a second-class citizen” (E1 17:27) because Haruhi, unlike most other Ouran Academy students, does not come from a super-rich family. In doing so, Ayanokoji reveals her fear of losing her superiority and inherent worth.

The Host Club gives the guests an experience of exclusivity, of praise, to which only they — and no “second-class citizens”— are entitled. In a world that doesn’t always treat the girls as the princesses they learn to believe that they are, the Host Club is a dependable source of praise which keeps the girls’ expectations from shattering in their faces.

One particular guest, however, threatens to burst the bubble that Tamaki has constructed for himself and his friends. The penultimate episode (E25) introduces Lady Éclair Tonnerre, the daughter of a wealthy French family whose firm becomes increasingly influential in Japan. To ensure their own family’s financial security amidst the resulting economic turbulence, Tamaki’s grandmother enjoins Tamaki to privately entertain and marry Éclair in exchange for the chance to see his mother. Unlike the other Host Club guests, Éclair represents the future — and the emotions — that Tamaki formed the Host Club to avoid.

When Tamaki and Éclair are alone in the music room (E25 13:29–17:00), Tamaki refers to the other hosts as his “family” (14:40). During their conversation, Haruhi comes in, irritated that Tamaki has separated from the other hosts. Éclair asks Haruhi if she is jealous, and Tamaki gushes about the possibility that Haruhi admires him. Éclair then realizes that Tamaki has feelings for Haruhi. Once Haruhi leaves, Éclair tells Tamaki that the Host Club is “not real family […] So stop playing house” (16:37). Then, she throws Tamaki onto a couch, hovers over him, and asks, “Wouldn’t you prefer the real thing? Because I can give it to you, you know” (16:46).

To Éclair, “the real thing” refers to a permanent, official relationship that would advance Tamaki’s family’s financial status. In contrast, a relationship between Tamaki and a lowerclass “shrew” (E25 16:27) like Haruhi would be worthless and unviable. As long as her relationship with Tamaki is “real,” Éclair doesn’t care how coldly they treat each other. By grabbing Tamaki’s hand and throwing him onto the couch, literally restricting his range of motion, Éclair hints that she would physically and socially restrain Tamaki if he were to marry her.

This type of love might seem “real” to Éclair, but to Tamaki, it represents his family’s attempt to compete financially by sacrificing healthy relationships.

To outsiders, the Host Club establishment seems pointless.

As Tamaki’s father, Yuzuru Suou, puts it, “dreaming only postpones the inevitable” (E25 9:37). However, when the hosts and guests alike have families and communities with extreme expectations, the Host Club is the one place where the students can feel unconditionally loved and escape the chronic coldness at the heart of the Ouran universe’s super-rich family structure.

Maybe Tamaki is right, and the Host Club is a “family” after all.

Host Club love may seem superficial or self-destructing, but to some Ouran students, it is the most real type of love there is.

Watch & Listen • 23

The Vinyl Revival 8 Motivations Behind It

by Shehryar Qazi art by Vee Cipperman The renewed interest in Vinyl as a platform for experiencing music is in full swing. Vinyl records saw a 50% increase in sales in 2021, and with 41.7 million records sold it surpassed both CD and digital album sales. With a continuous 16 year rise in sales and a Gen Z that is coming into the market considering vinyl as an interesting and proper format to experience music, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be slowing down anytime soon. I am interested in the question: after being near-death for so long, why did a format that is generally pricey and requires a separate, rather immobile device to play music experience such popularity at a time when nearly all songs you can think of are accessible within 10 seconds from a device you are compelled to carry around with you at all times?

I think part of it is the human interest in the past, and the past has never been more accessible than in today’s time. From museums to antique shops there certainly is a desire that animates us to “own” the past in some sense, to have it on display and with it all that it may signify. This is also visible in the type of media that is being produced: from the 80s revival of sorts in 2020 with Nostalgia Ultra and After Hours topping the charts, the tradition of drum machines and synths hang like a nightmare over the brains of the living. However, to keep myself grounded and away from speculation, I decided to ask my friends why they collect vinyl. I know why I collect vinyl, but I am more interested in why others do so.

T]he past has never been more accessible than in todays time.

From my rather unscientific survey, there emerged a few reasons why my friends bought vinyl. I share nearly all of these reasons so I suppose it is not as useful of a grounding mechanism as I thought initially. Without delay, these are the reasons why my friends (and I) buy vinyl records.

1. To support artists: Artists barely make money from streaming. It takes around 250 streams for an artist to make $1. 1 million (!) streams pay between $3,000-$3,500. A vinyl pressing generally costs anywhere from $5-$15 (its an economy of scale: it’s cheaper to print more vinyls), and they generally sell for around $30. I got my vinyl for Jubilee by Japanese Breakfast for $35. The album has around 60 million streams on Spotify. I assume it cost $10 for Jbrekkie to go out and manufacture those records. With my very rudimentary arithmetic skills I determined that Japanese Breakfast got around $200,000 for the Jubilee streams. Assuming Jbrekkie pocketed the $25 in profit from the sale of the Jubilee vinyl, the entirety of the Spotify streaming revenue is matched by 800 sales of the record. In other words, my purchase of the vinyl alone was worth the same monetarily as 6,250 streams. This is a rather extended way of saying that if you want to support artists, you should Watch & Listen • 26

buy their records (and go to their shows, and buy their merch, and so on).

2. Owning a physical version of something you care about: Physical items can hold memories far better than digital items can.

This, for me, is most obvious with books where the pages of the physical book preserve traces of your physical reactions to reading it (teardrops, annotations marks, spills, etc.) but also embody your memory of reading. There is a similar, visceral feeling to owning records. Playing a record is a far more fulfilling experience than listening to things on Spotify on your headphones. Thumbing through your collection, sliding out a particular record, carefully unwrapping it, placing it gently on the record player, pressing play and waiting for the needle to drop down and hit the groove just right to get the music playing and fill up the room feels almost ritualistic and spiritual in comparison to listening to things on Spotify, where the

act of experiencing music becomes akin to scratching an itch: you think of something and then you just play it. This ritual experience of vinyl is only heightened if the record is one you care about. There is something about the bounded accessibility of physical media that remains desirable in a world where most media is instantly accessible. It reminds me of John Berger’s notion of experiencing art in a world before it was reproducible on a mass scale: there was something hallowed about the art piece in its setting, with one having to make a pilgrimage of sorts to see it. This sense is weakened in today’s world, but I think it still persists and is somewhat inherent to items you can experience with your senses directly more real than items that are mediated by a digital screen.

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3. It’s cool: self-explanatory, it’s pretty cool.

4. It supports local record stores: This wasn’t a reason as universal as the ones mentioned above, but buying records from your local store directly supports it and the local art scene. Consider this an endorsement for Angry Mom Records, without which Ithaca would be at least a 5% worse place to live in.

5. Packaging: Often, artists add cool little touches to physical records that would be far less accessible and fun to experience digitally. The remastered version of You Will Never Know Why by Sweet Trip comes with a Nosferatu-esque comic book printed on the inside of the packaging. Records of classical music often come with blurbs on the packaging that give background information about the recording of the piece and short explanations of the piece itself that are quite valuable for everyone from untrained to seasoned listeners of classical music. The packaging adds an extra visual aspect, which is most realized in music videos and shows, to the musical experience that is normally quite diminished in streaming.

6. Quality: This one is rather tricky. People often swear by vinyl being far superior in quality than streaming platforms. That may be true, but the difference isn’t that noticeable unless you own a very high-end setup or are just used to terrible headphones. I think a good pair of speakers definitely helps a record fill a room up more so than its streaming counterpart, but it’s unclear how much of that is a virtue of the speakers and not the record. Nevertheless, I like the occasional pops and interruptions in the listening experience inherent to vinyl. I do not know particularly why I like this, but it’s an upside.

7. Discovery: Crate-digging is a very pleasurable activity for me, someone who was weaned on used book stores. Record stores often have crates holding used records for cheap underneath the tables where newer pressings are held. I do realize it works somehow like a slot machine: you repeat a rather mechanical gesture in anticipation of a reward of a sweet, sweet payoff. However, much of our internet life is structured around these addicting triggers and crate-digging seems less pernicious than other activities modeled after a similar thing, so I will continue to do it. A related point is that only 10% of music recorded is available on streaming, with the other 90% being available only through physical formats like records.

Crate-digging is a very fun way to discover interesting music that you may not be able to find elsewhere.

8. Music Creation: There’s a lot of music on vinyl that is hard to access otherwise, making it a fruitful source for samples.

My friend also made “these soundscape noise type things where I’d use a record as a component of the piece among other things. And I’d fuck with the playback speed a lot too”(My Friend, 2022). So yeah, one can do a lot of interesting musical experiments using records.

I hope the above eight reasons communicated why vinyl records are seeing such interest in our times. Perhaps you are motivated to start your own record collection after this! However, I would be remiss to mention the environmental impact of vinyl production. A central component of vinyl is plastic polyvinyl chloride (PVC), the production of which emits 12x more greenhouse gas than the production of other physical media. PVC products, including vinyl, are sometimes stabilized with toxic metals like lead. Vinyl production in America is also done in very outdated plants, causing the entire production process to be needlessly wasteful and polluting. However, this is not to say that streaming is environmentally safe, either. The internet runs on data centers that are powered by electricity. On a 1:1 level, streaming has a negligible effect on the environment, but when aggregated, streaming is estimated to emit around 200 to 350 million kilos of greenhouse gas. It is a sobering thought that something as life-affirming and enjoyable as music is inextricably tied to petro-capitalism, but it is a necessary consideration in our present discourses around the environment.

Watch & Listen • 28

Stay Soft Get Eaten

On The Melancholy of Mitski and Working for the Knife

by Stephanie Tom art by jennifer guo

The first time I went to a real concert was during this past February break when I went to see Marina in-person at Terminal 5 with two of my friends. Unsure of what exactly to expect, I predicted close-knit crowds of sweat and screaming, of being blocked by taller heads and cell phone cameras obscuring my view of the stage. But after waiting in the humming darkness of Terminal 5 before Pussy Riot took the stage as the opening act and

finally hearing the confetti cannons explode with the opening bars of Marina’s latest single “Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land,” all I can remember is the sheer joy and exuberance of being part of an emotive collective. Over the course of two hours, my friends and I were subsumed in a crowd of young adults as excited and emotional as we were to relive sonic memories from our adolescence.

We left two and a half hours later, basking in the post-concert Watch & Listen • 29

glow. While I had walked into Terminal 5 without any expectations for what “concert culture” looked like, I was pleased with the entire experience. There was the clear respect that the fans in the crowd had for the artist and each other – an unspoken agreement to not rush the stage or jostle one another roughly while vying for a better view; there was a reverent hush that fell over the theater when Marina sat down at the piano to play a somber song. There was also that same respect that the artist had for her fans as she attempted to engage with every dimension of the crowd, walking all across the stage to sing into cameras held close up to her, her hand outstretched with the microphone to encourage fans to sing along during certain choruses.

I don’t know what concert culture is supposed to look like, but I am conscious enough of these boundaries that shape the relationship between artists and their fans. When mediated appropriately, the relationship is a pleasant one, as I was fortunate to experience with Marina. However, when the fraught boundaries of respect and parasocial intimacy are broken, the responsibility of taking blame for the repercussions tends to fall onto the artist, strains the fan-artist relationship moving forward, and stains the fandom’s culture as a whole.

That’s what happened in late February with Mitski, when she posted a statement on her opinion of concert culture and cell phones and received so many accusatory responses that she deleted the thread shortly afterward. In the since-deleted thread, Mitski encouraged her fans to enjoy the experience of the show in the present moment instead of focusing on filming the set.

Mitski recently came back from hiatus late last year in October 2021 when she announced a new single – “Working for the Knife” – before the release of her latest album, “Laurel Hell,” in February 2022. The announcement came as a surprise, with the artist’s social media accounts surfacing again after having been deactivated during her musical absence. Her return from hiatus marks her first new album in four years after “Be the Cowboy” was released in August 2018, as well and her first tour in three years after she announced her “last show indefinitely” in September 2019.

The aforementioned tweets were posted after the first few concerts that she did on the “Laurel Hell” tour, coming from her public account @mitskileaks when she posted a thread of tweets asking fans to enjoy the performance in the moment.

“I’m not against taking photos at shows (though please no flash lol),” she wrote. “But sometimes when I see people filming entire songs or whole sets, it makes me feel as though we are not here together. This goes for both when I’m on stage, and when I’m an audience member at shows.”

She went on to explain that she hoped for a better experience all around, and that looking away from phones during the set enhanced the live performance for everyone involved. “I love shows for the feeling of connection, of sharing a dream, and Watch & Listen • 30

remembering that we have a brief miraculous moment of being alive at the same time, before we part ways,” she continued. “I feel I’m part of something bigger.”

She closed the thread with a reminder that this was just a gentle suggestion that she hoped for fans to take into consideration. “I don’t want to be greedy, I’m fortunate to get to play,” she added. “Just putting out there that sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can experience magic at a show. But only if we’re there to catch it.”

Reading the tweets, Mitski made a reasonable request –– one can only imagine how she feels, pouring her heart and soul into a

musical performance to a sea of silver camera lenses that obscure the faces of people underneath. The tweets couldn’t even be taken as a hard and fast rule, merely a suggestion as opposed to other artists such as Alicia Keys and Bob Dylan who have expressly banned phones and recordings during their concerts. However, despite the seemingly unobtrusive nature of this statement, a debate exploded in the comments underneath, with an equal outpouring of responses from frustrated fans rejecting her statement as well as support for Mitski and her opinions.

One Twitter user who disagreed with the artist’s statement replied, “Bestie that’s great and all, but some of us have mental

health issues that cause dissociation & i film to remember the moment i’m not looking at my phone the entire time just to press record on.” Other fans jumped onto that sentiment with similar responses, claiming that “the message of her tweets was insensitive to people who struggle with disabilities like hearing/ vision impairments or memory related disabilities like ADHD and depression,” as tweeted by user beck (@darlingg1itter).

Following a slew of responses in this vein of conversation, Mitski eventually deleted what was a very ordinary and polite request after the dogpiling in her comments once her statement was blown out of proportion.

The Commodification of Artist as Art Mitski’s return to the public eye came after a three-year hiatus in which she took a break from the industry in order to find herself again. She anticipated the frenzied fan responses to her announcement, setting the record straight in one of her last tweets before deleting her socials.

“Y’all, I’m not quitting music!” she wrote. “I’ve been on nonstop tour for over five years, I haven’t had a place to live during this time, & I sense that if I don’t step away soon, my self-worth/ identity will start depending too much on staying in the game, in the constant churn.”

In the five years prior, Mitski’s fame had increased exponentially. While “Bury Me at Makeout Creek” (2014) received warm reviews, including her first Pitchfork rating, her next two albums – “Puberty 2” (2016) and most notably, “Be the Cowboy” (2018) – propelled her to mainstream fame that was only heightened once TikTok popularized her hit single “Nobody” during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020.

As such, the nature of her fandom had expanded dramatically as well. No longer were her fans solely the jaded young adults who were drawn to the folksy, alt-rock, and indie-esque sounds of her first two albums, but now that she had entered the pop scene, her fanbase got a lot younger as well, including teenagers who

were discovering her through memes and social media in the wake of her absence. As such, there is also a noticeable difference in the perception of what is an appropriate way to engage with an artist.

According to testimonials shared online over TikTok and Twitter after the concerts that Mitski has played so far this year, teens have shown up to sit at open-floor venues, stone-faced and nonresponsive through the entirety of her sets. If they were responsive, they were demonstrating enthusiasm in the wrong ways, with concert crowds reportedly yelling sexualizing comments and other stale Internet meme references at her in the midst of her sets.

As an artist, Mitski performs her concerts as art pieces – she acts very deliberately, to bare her soul in ways that are haunting, melancholy at times, but ultimately always purposeful. To disrespect her as an artist by treating her like an Internet meme, the “TikTokified” caricature of her that social media has created during her hiatus – to her face, no less – is insulting, and “fans” should really call their obsession with her into question at that point.

Mitski hinted as such in her deleted Twitter statement regarding the minimization of phone usage at her concerts. “When I’m on stage and look at you but you are gazing into a screen,” she wrote, “it makes me feel as though those of us on stage are being taken from and consumed as content, instead of getting to share a moment with you.”

The Melancholy of Mitski Like all artists, Mitski recognizes that she must deal with the undesirable inevitability of potentially being seen only as a consumable caricature and not as a person. However, she deals with double the scale of these consequences as an Asian woman. Like all Asian women, Mitski is seen more as an object of desire rather than as her own person, a cultural phenomenon that is only heightened by her rapid ascension into celebrity.

After “Be the Cowboy” was released to mass applause and accolades (e.g. being named as one of the best albums of 2018 by 24 critically acclaimed publication reviews), Mitski’s rebranding as

“mitski is seen more as an object of desire rather than as her own person 00 • section

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the figurehead of “sad-girl music” began. Through her lyrics emotional connection, regardless of who you are.

emotionally spilling over on topics like mental illness, identity (crises), and the exhaustion of growing up in a world that is constantly on the verge of apocalypse (in every conceivable manner), Mitski resonates with a generation of young adults who have had difficulty expressing these troubling truths and who draw comfort and kinship from the catharsis of her music.

With her hiatus in late 2019 post-ascension to her status as a cult-figure for “sad-girl music,” her scarcity and disappearance from social media made her even more attractive as a figure.

Furthermore, when TikTok popularized her hit songs “Nobody” and “Washing Machine Heart” and introduced her to a new audience, a new generation of fans was drawn in to meet Mitski through the Internet’s construction of her.

One thing to recognize about Mitski’s discography is that her work is very much tied to her lived experiences, primarily centering her identity as a mixed-race woman of color. Keeping that in mind, yes, you can acknowledge some of her earlier music as sad; yes, her music can be listened to universally; however, it cannot be flattened to the point of erasing her own identity, folded into the music and lyrics, for the purpose of fans to project their own impressions of marginalization onto her as a canvas.

For example, one of the songs that best expresses this flattened reception of Mitski is “Your Best American Girl” off of her 2016 album. The song’s lyrics ostensibly paint a portrait of otherness, with Mitski describing the song in an interview with NPR as being about “wanting so badly to fit into this very American person’s life, and simply not being able to, just fundamentally being from a different place and feeling like I would just get in the way of their progression in their life.”

It’s understood that this is a song about feeling othered due to her identity as a mixed-race woman, even in a relationship with someone she loves but will face challenges with because “sometimes life or your backgrounds just kind of get in the way, and there’s nothing you can really do about it.”

However, the fandom has been in disagreement over how fans without that shared identity can enjoy the song by rewriting their own impressions of the lyrical meaning of “otherness.” One fan tweeted that “[they] have personally flipped the meaning of the words to relate to [their] gender instead of race because [they’re] white” and that “trying to be your best american GIRL while being non-binary hits hard.” While responses to this tweet had snowballed into heated arguments, I personally have mixed feelings about this take. Of course, the point of discourse here is not to invalidate gender identities in any sense; no one is invalidating this reading of the song and self-resonance. In fact, good music is meant to resonate with listeners and strike an Watch & Listen • 32

Rather, I think that the issue emerges when fans center their own marginal identities, loudly, to the point of writing over the original artist’s identity. I’ve seen fans argue that because Mitski never makes mention of race explicitly in her work, and that since there is a separation of artist from art, that one doesn’t need to listen to her music with that framework in mind, and that Mitski has ascended to the state of being emblematic of these “sad-girl” feelings outside of race.

However, in ignoring Mitski’s background, one fails to understand the full scope of her music and performance. In an interview with The Guardian in late February, Mitski went into detail about the inspiration and drive behind the choreography of her performances from the “Be the Cowboy” tour in which she attempted to best represent the feminine archetypes of the album.

“I was dealing with being an object that’s looked at,” she said. “Being a woman, an Asian woman, there are all these different projections that people put on me, and I guess the choreography was me trying to figure out how to deal with that.”

Implicitly, you cannot separate the art from the artist, because an artist’s life fundamentally influences the way they approach their craft. Furthermore, it’s important to note that marginalization in one aspect of your identity does not absolve you from being an oppressor in another way, and certainly never allows for you to be unfairly mean-spirited. For the fans that fail to recognize Mitski’s lived experiences as a mixed-race woman of color, not only are they being disrespectful to Mitski’s musical integrity, but also to her as a person. By enjoying Mitski and her music in a vacuum, you are consuming her craft apart from her, feeding into the cycle of non-consideration for manners or basic kindness extended to the artist as a result.

Working for the Knife While “Laurel Hell” is a stunning work and an excellent return to the public music scene, Mitski didn’t originally want to make this album.

“In order for me to survive in the music industry as it exists, I had to stuff a pillow over my heart and tell it to stop screaming,” she told Rolling Stone in an interview late December last year.

“After a few years of doing that every single day, my heart really did start to go numb and go silent. And the problem with that is that I actually need my heart — my feelings — in order to write music. It was this paradox.”

She was tired of being swallowed up by the industry and potentially losing herself in the process. “I could see a future self, who would put out music for the sake of keeping the machine

running,” she said, “and that really scared me.”

However, Mitski eventually came back to music because she was contractually obligated to produce at least one more album for her label, Dead Oceans. As such, she took her time writing and producing, in no hurry to return to celebrity or the public eye of scrutiny again. I can’t blame her, with the ways that people (especially younger, white fans) have treated her since she came back having been quite disrespectful across the board, especially online.

Since her hiatus, Mitski has been canonized online and is seen as a canvas for others to paint across and use, told to fit into the persona that fans have sensationalized and run away with, to the point that when she voices her own opinion and self in truth she is shut down (as is the case with the deleted Tweets regarding phone usage at her concerts). People want to pigeonhole her as the “sad girl” all the time – but Mitski is no longer that person, and doesn’t want you as the listener to hold her on a pedestal of teen angst. In response to a fan saying that her music is for “sad bitches,” Mitski said earlier this year in a video with Crack Magazine that “The sad girl thing was reductive and tired 5-10 years ago and it still is today. Let’s retire the sad girl shit, because sad girl is over.”

Now that her contract has technically been fulfilled, I would understand if Mitski quits music after this, quite frankly. I have loved her quietly and from afar ever since I discovered her entire discography after graduating high school, falling in love with “Be the Cowboy” when it was released and soon after with every other album that came before that. I have loved all of the ways that she has been vocal in her work about her emotions and identity crises, the ugly and the beautiful. It is through an appreciation for Mitski’s work that I have also found a way to unpack my own complicated feelings and been more open about them, in order to come back to myself more whole than I had been before.

If Mitski eventually leaves music, I would be disappointed, but as a fellow Asian woman creator, I especially get it. My labor is my life, and to have it torn apart and spit back in your face while simultaneously being beholden to an image of you that other people have constructed is exhausting and unfulfilling. There is no certainty as to where the future will take us, but wherever we end up on our creative journeys, I hope it is kind to us. Maybe Mitskithe-figurehead-of-sad-girl-culture will fade into obscurity in the next few years and we’ll never have the privilege of experiencing another album release from her ever again, but no matter what happens, I hope that Mitski Miyawaki, the woman behind the works, is doing well.

Watch & Listen • 33

Of Monster Houses and Men Looking Back on Monster House

by Brandon Chandler art by Christina Lee Oh, Robert Zemeckis … you magnificent bastard…

You would have thought that directing the Back to the Future trilogy and Forrest Gump might make it hard to direct another film that would come close to the popularity and success of those movies, but apparently not. In the early 2000s, Zemeckis began working extensively with motion capture film technology for his company ImageMovers, creating such classics as: The Polar Express, every 2000s kid’s favorite Christmas movie; that one Beowulf movie no one saw (and that apparently, Neil Gaiman wrote); the nightmare-inducing A Christmas Carol, starring Jim Carrey; and my personal favorite, Monster House.

Monster House, released in 2006, was one of those films that stuck with me as a child, in part because of how terrifying I found it. It wasn’t just the plastic-looking faces of the characters (a signature trait of all of Zemeckis’ motion capture films), but also the terrifying visage of the house itself. It was that iconic image of the possessed house appearing in trailers and posters that haunted us 2000s kids’ dreams for months, even after the film’s release. Personally, I wasn’t brave enough to see the film in theaters: I opted for the coward’s route, watching it on videoon-demand months later. The sight of the house roaring and shrieking, the wooden rafters bristling in rage as it contorted itself into a terrifying face of pure hatred, became burned into my eight-year-old mind and was fodder for my nightmares for months afterwards. The fear of waking up in the middle of the night and going to the bathroom or kitchen for a drink of water, only to be swallowed up by the house and suffocated under the grip of its “tongue,” never to be seen again, was enough to keep me in bed all night, no matter how badly I wanted to get up.

Last year, I rewatched the film for the first time in over a decade, as memories of the house and the characters had been stirring in my mind amidst the pandemic-induced boredom. The Watch & Listen • 34

film is quite enjoyable despite the characters’ rubbery-looking faces, offering a fun Halloween-themed thriller for kids of all ages (well, maybe all kids over the age of 13). For those who may not have seen the film, the premise is simple: a tween boy named DJ and his friends investigate the mystery of the “possessed house” across the street after its owner, the cranky Mr. Nebbercracker, has a heart attack on his lawn (right in front of the kids, too, so you can enjoy the full effect of Steve Buscemi voicing Nebbercracker’s dying gasps as the cantankerous old coot’s dying face twists in a grotesque, rubbery way that could only have been created using motion-capture technology). DJ is your typical wide-eyed, impressionable suburban kid who enjoys spying on his neighbors; however, considering the haunted house’s active presence, he at the very least has a good reason for his snooping.

Motion-capture horrors aside, the film does have a certain charm. The actors bring a genuine energy to their roles that definitely brings the characters to life. However, I found the story behind Nebbercracker and his possessed house to be the most touching aspect of the film. Towards the end of the film, viewers discover that the house is possessed by the spirit of Nebbercracker’s deceased wife, Constance, who had been heckled and mocked all her life as the “fat lady” in a traveling circus. Nebbercracker, feeling sympathetic, offers her a life with him and the two of them elope. They settle down in a nearby town to build a home of their own. Constance meets a rather unfortunate end one Halloween, when several of the local teens make fun of her size. Subsequent events lead her to stumble into a cement mixer that buries her in the house’s unfinished basement. This was one of the few emotional beats in the story that I still remembered, over a decade later, as I had been touched by Nebbercracker’s acceptance of Constance watching the film back then. Believe me, I was flabbergasted to have found a touching story of body acceptance and love in a

film called “Monster House.” The film doesn’t oversell it and paint Nebbercracker as the “noble white male savior” or “white knight” or anything just as clichéd; it instead underscores his kindness to show that there’s more to him than the cranky old psychopath that DJ and his friends initially thought he was. Aside from the horrors of the house that one originally comes to see, it’s a well-placed twist and one of the best parts of the film.

So, that’s Monster House! Come for the nightmares — stay for the body positivity! It’s a film I’d definitely recommend if you’re looking for something both relatively light-hearted and spooky. It’s one that feels like it has aged relatively well, with the exception of some of the more artificial-looking motion-capture face animations. Coming back to the film nearly 14 years later, I was really surprised by how much I connected with the film’s heart, rather than over the scarier aspects. Sure, the film still has its creepy moments, but I connected with the message of acceptance that the story communicated with Nebbercracker and Constance much more than I had as a child.

All in all, check it out! It’s definitely worth a watch or two.

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level 3 -------Zooming in

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P O L L Y

P O C K E T

Art and Writing by VEE CIPPERMAN

I blend with the waters and slide, everlasting, to

the

deep.

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Rows and rows of little shoes glow, like Christmas lights, like the camera-flash reflection on bottle-blonde hair.

I arrange them by size and by color. I favor black boots, shiny like beetles, and hot pink kitten heels. I make pairs of orange sandals and indigo slip-ons. I sort. This game is less about the dolls than about their teeny tiny shoes, the size of half a fraction of a fingernail.

For every birthday and Christmas, I ask for Polly Pockets. From the age of two onward, I gather sets upon sets: cruise ship Polly Pockets, rockstar Polly Pockets, ice skating princess Polly Pockets. Plastic cars and ponies fill my room. My mini shoe collection grows and grows. I worship in the plastic cult of bold aesthetic decadence.

My dolls take many names and shifting stories. Now, she’s a duchess. Now, she’s a witch. Perhaps the one with the sterner face is an entrepreneur. Perhaps the one with brushable hair is a famous fashionista. They’re all and always style connoisseurs, swapping outfits six times a day like Queen Elizabeth no matter what they do. Those plastic faces never change, but dolls can always shapeshift.

I lay out towns and narratives. I lay out little shoes. They prance across my floor, a bright parade of thoughts and fashions. I stuff them in my baby sister’s hands. She should hold them. They’re precious – the most precious things that I own. With these, I can make a person anything I want. It’s all about the changing. And the shoes.

I am, I think, a hedonist. I learned that early on.

I have owned three important pairs of shoes in my life.

The first was a pair of shiny, navy buckle shoes. My mom put them on me in a Nordstrom’s, and they pinched my toes and heels. I wore them to school over thick, itchy stockings.

They bit my feet until I bled. Damn leather. Damn dress code.

Damn Velcro that caught the itchy stockings. My mom put twin band-aids on of the blisters and said that I’d break the shoes in. You know what? I did. I broke them in so badly that the plastic sole, like a thick pad of sun-hardened gum, separated from the leather in October. I taped them together for months. In June, I tossed them. In August, my mom brought me a second set, less shiny.

The second was a pair of novelty Vans. They’re still residing somewhere in my closet, stretched and worn. Back then, the soles were bean-shaped honeycombs of white that smelled like tar. A band of vermillion traced around the heels, and roses in red and pink patterned the cloth. Those shoes didn’t fit the school dress code, and they didn’t match any clothes I owned. I wore them proudly outside the house, the school; I wore them to the grocery store and birthday parties.

I wore them, alongside my blue t shirt and beanie, at my high school’s orientation barbeque. I met my first friends in those Zooming In • 38

shoes.

The third is a pair of slick Jeffrey Campbell loafers, which my mom picked out in 2019 after I graduated. They glitter like Polly Pocket combat boots, but they’re big and heavy with hard rubber soles. These shoes eat rocks. These shoes are the suspension beams for days on the streets of New York. I can wear them in a blazer or in blue jeans. I wear them every day when I move out.

I am obsessed with doll customization. Mass manufactured faces transform into masks of the intricate feminine. Flimsy, boxy clothes give way to ruffles and glitter and layers of frills.

The artists craft clay to the small, shiny bodies; they spray them with sealant; they paint them with acrylics and pastels. It makes the artificial thing more crafted, and more real. Sometimes adding pigment works like that – it shows the inner color.

There’s an artist I follow who’s gotten more ambitious over the past few years. She started by turning prettygirldolls into prettiergirldolls, and she was so good at it – she could sew the smallest sleeves and light living sparkles in their eyes. But the artist wasn’t satisfied. She kept working things over and over again. She learned 3D printing and body mods, clumsy at first, then astounding. She turned prettygirldolls into radiant dragon dolls, into haunting mermaid dolls, into Halloween monsters with terrifying fangs. Her craft enraptures me. She’s going to be a mother soon; she’s going to have a real baby. I half expect the kid to come out sparkly and winged.

That’s just how I’d mother myself, if I was a mother to myself. I would paint my face with vibrant colors and seal them in place so they’d never wash off. I would craft myself a longer, stranger body out of clay. I would give myself wings and coat myself in glitter, a beautiful and monstrous child, a singularity born from a machine-made collectible. I would build a brighter self for them.

People are customized dolls, in a sense, from the moment they exit the box. Their beauty depends on the skill and the scope of the motherselfartist.

I found a 1983 Pembrook wool suit for $30 at a thrift store near Ithaca. It came with a tailored pale periwinkle suitjacket and two skirts, one penciled and clean, one pleated with sharp bands of black. It fits me perfectly, the shoulderpads adding soft slopes to my frame, the skirts swishing gently at my calves. This suit is worth hundreds of dollars. I wear it with a plastic string of pearls.

It’s funny – one of my friends said I dressed like an 80s girlboss secretary, and the designation stuck. But I can’t wear this outfit in public. I put it on over a creamy white blouse, and I marvel at myself inside my bedroom. I touch my face with crimson lips and electric blue eyeshadow, a messy Marilyn Monroe, a parody of naturalism. I wear high, unwalkable shoes. The beast

in the mirror is no organic figure, but a crafted one, a doll; no right-minded person would think otherwise. They will see my pigment and my vintage and my eyeliner wings, and they’ll know that I have made it all myself. Proto-woman, parodywoman, not-woman-really-at-all. I am loudly artificial. I am made of pure blue plastic. I blend with the waters and slide, everlasting, to the deep.

When I go out, I wear pieces alone. Only the blue. Only the blazer. Only the pearls. I wore them all together at a costume party once, and my name was Polly Pocket.

imagine.

Barbie sits and consumes, a black hole in the cultural consciousness. Polly flits back and forth like a pixie. She takes many, many more forms, and notforms. You reach out to touch her – she may not be there.

It’s less about “woman,” all-possible, than “woman,” impossible. The central definition is a violent lump of plastic. The meaning is the story that you’re adding. Polly isn’t plastic; they are outfits, shoes, and stories. It’s about how you make it. The body dissolves into art.

My art is the body I choose.

Polly Pocket never earned the cultural cachet of her cousin. This, I know. Barbie dominates our discourses of dolls, distortions, and the plastic feminine. Barbie stands, cool and fluid and genital-free, in the limelight of mass-market womanhood. When concerned feminists and conservative defenders write in denial/support of a doll, it is Barbie they flock to, not Polly.

But Barbie’s was never the brand that I loved. As a child, I found her remote and intimidating. Her face was uncanny and fixed. Her shoes were less ephemeral. You cannot lose a Barbie shoe unless you’re really trying, or you shove it up your nose. You cannot curate a Barbie with hundreds of outfits and lives, because her clothes are expensive and difficult to change, and she’s already lived every life you could imagine.

Barbie sits and consumes, a black hole in the cultural consciousness. Polly flits back and forth like a pixie. She takes many, many more forms, and notforms. You reach out to touch her – she may not be there.

It’s less about “woman,” all-possible, than “woman,” impossible. The central definition is a violent lump of plastic.

The meaning is the story that you’re adding. Polly isn’t plastic; they are outfits, shoes, and stories. It’s about how you make it. The body dissolves into art.

My art is the body I choose. Polly Pocket never earned the cultural cachet of her cousin. This, I know. Barbie dominates our discourses of dolls, distortions, and the plastic feminine. Barbie stands, cool and fluid and genitalfree, in the limelight of mass-market womanhood. When concerned feminists and conservative defenders write in denial/support of a doll, it is Barbie they flock to, not Polly.

But Barbie’s was never the brand that I loved. As a child, I found her remote and intimidating. Her face was uncanny and fixed. Her shoes were less ephemeral.

You cannot lose a Barbie shoe unless you’re really trying, or you shove it up your nose. You cannot curate a Barbie with hundreds of outfits and lives, because her clothes are expensive and difficult to change, and she’s already lived every life you could Zooming In • 39

do plastic girls have plastic feelings too?

by Chloe Wayne art by Lilly Bjerke doesn’t your blood rush with newfound vigor? the sight of something so exposed like prodding the veneer of skin on an egg yolk just to watch the potentiality of life ooze onto a half-assed avocado toast but i am not meant to be put on display i am not readily consumable the naked eye gawks at such an unrefined display of humanity it’s repulsive the lining of her stomach leaves much to be desired indeed her skin has topography like a grease-covered pan do you think it was purposeful? the way one nipple juts out more than the other? the way the pores look like vast craters, threatening to swallow you whole? don’t look inside of me. don’t look through this cellophane skin, don’t look for what is immaterial for there is no treasure in a pillaged, sunken boat its dilapidated wooden body threatening to melt into gray waters much like how there is no soul in a pilfered vessel (body) yet you place your sweaty forehead on my ghastly skin just to feel the coldness of an unfeeling being this meat-sack some non-existent creator willed into fruition for i am constantly on display yet i am not the product of some socialite’s faux-existential art piece nor am i a prized pony to be prodded and poked you do not comment on the quality of keratin in my mane nor do you see value in my messily-fashioned snout or hold up 10s at the sight of my lopsided trot bundles of skin manhandled with lust Zooming In • 40

it’s funny the same mechanism that attracts people— self-superiority— is the same mechanism that deters them after getting their fill of self-righteous mockery like a hammer, the thought cracks open their skulls paralyzes their minds with the poison of fear wouldn’t it be shameful if I were like that? so i am used and thrown away for some odd purpose that isn’t borne out of necessity but like a plastic bottle my contents are violently drained then haphazardly tossed without second thought i’ve come to think that the only necessity for them is differentiating themselves from the undesirables

to dissect the flaws of an imperfect being, is to put a self-proclaimed label on their emboldened chests declaring i am better than this iam what ? not undesirable the truth is: it’s really scary how I wish for my body to be locked away how I wish for my body to be indispensable is plastic ever afraid of its apparent immortality? sometimes i wish to extend my mortality i would like to be put into a blank room not a liminal space but a place where the discordant shrieks of laughter fade where i am alone with my creature comforts funny those comforts are plastic too for there is security in knowing you cannot be left for those tangible beings lack sentience for they can only accept what is thrust onto them like me? but sometimes i laugh at myself what a fickle, childish being I want to be left alone please go away I say to some but please love me please stay by my side

i guess what I am really saying is that i wish these immaterial impulses would stay stagnant perpetuated in time-space i guess the truth is the real truth is those self-proclaimed labels discussed earlier those are gilded not in gold but in blood for once you bloody the carcasses of the unloved tear at their nailbeds like animalistic beings ravage their innards, poke a finger through their ventricle wiggle their intestines just to see them animate then lick their wounds to pretend such animalistic impulses don’t exist you are just masking the inevitable we worry so much about becoming primordial harkening back to a simplistic age where our mortality wasn’t center-stage in a cyclical existence for each breath carries the reminder of disposability for when we wash the blood off of labels we hope to see plastic bottles but all we see is a decaying organism falling apart at the bone trying to proclaim its beauty by feasting on the disfigurement of others every worry every lie weighing at the pits of our stomach elongating our torsos till they hit the blood-soaked earth i guess just like the rest

I say to one

i guess

for when some cross the threshold of this sacred space my heart beats wildly the particulate of my body is thrust into anarchy every touch of the door handle pricks at my skin

nothing. tell me would you like to be plastic too?

Zooming In • 41

Headless Barbie The morning sun is beginning to stream through the curtains when he asks me, “What’s your favorite part of your body? Like what do you think is the sexiest part?”

I’m laying on my right side, propped up on my elbow, my left arm drifting in front of my torso to expose the curve of my waist. My clothes are long gone. I think for a little while before replying.

“My neck and shoulders…they make me feel graceful?” I guess what he is going to say before he opens his mouth. I know the way his eyes rake me up and down—I’ve practiced this pose in the mirror. He is indignant when he laughs out,

all fours due to the tiny size of her feet and the massive weight of her boobs. Despite this, Lemonade Girl has the woman’s body I strive for, and her adventures in my bathtub know no bounds— we are nude and free, and as far as I know, my crotch is also an impassable plastic surface.

That shameless bliss soon passed with the onset of puberty.

My body began to burn with shame and inadequacy. My mother reassured me that the women in our family were late bloomers, and that my body would fill out over time. Even then, I agonized over my flat ass, my lazy-eyed boobs, my knobby knees. It didn’t help that my teen years coincided with the skinny jeans and

“My body is perfect.—it holds me, it protects me, it carries me through life. I just want it to look the way I want.”

“How could you say that when your ass is right there?”

I was right. The curtains fall on a flawless performance.

I had a small pile of Barbies in my childhood — some were well-intentioned birthday gifts, others were hand-me-downs.

My favorite two were a pair of scented dolls that I aptly named Coconut Boy and Lemonade Girl. They were part of the surfer collection that Barbie made at one point, and in order to let them stand on the flimsy, five-inch-long surfboards that every child promptly lost upon acquisition of the dolls, they had flat feet, a stark contrast from the perpetually tiptoeing traditional Barbie. I’m sure you have heard of the absolute horror that is the traditional Barbie body to scale: she would have to walk on Zooming In • 42

leggings trends for young girls. Some mornings, I was doubled over on the bus with the dread of other people seeing my body sloshing in my throat. I wore the same sweatshirt for weeks on end and paled at the thought of the locker room. Fear curdled at the back of my mouth at the mention of a prom dress, or lingerie.

All I wanted to do was mask my body’s inability to fulfill its duties as a woman’s body.

I once sat at my childhood best friend’s kitchen table as her older sister, who must have been eight or nine at the time, sprinted out to the backyard yelling “HIDE THE BODIES!!” before furiously scrabbling in the dirt beneath the dogwood tree, a pile of naked and decapitated Barbie bodies by her side.

A friend of mine in college described to me how, when she

by Evelyn Kennedy Jaffe art by Havi Rojer

was younger, her Barbies nearly met a similar fate at the hands of her younger brother. Their uncle had convinced him that it was tradition to rip the heads off of your sister’s Barbies. “It’s just what you do,” he had said, inciting the mutilation of the Barbie body.

If only we could handle our bodies the way we handle Barbies.

It’s freeing and still a bit disturbing to realize you want to treat your own body as you would a plastic husk.

I spent a long time in the land of worshipping my body’s femaleness, praying my boobs would get closer together or my hips narrower, but even as I began to fill out my shirts, even as I laid in beds with people telling me how much they loved my woman body, I felt like I was putting on an elaborate show. It felt like I was lying to everybody, lying to myself, the acrid taste of failure rising in my gullet. I began to return to clothes that ensconced my body, that felt safe. I began to consider what I really wanted to look like.

After years of wanting a drastic hair change, I finally worked up the courage to get a mullet when they came into the queer fashion scene in the fall of 2020, shortly after I had added ‘they’ to my email signature. The mullet progressively got shorter and purpler, and I gathered an array of silver jewelry in my ears.

Undressing before a shower one day, I caught sight of myself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. I had the sudden urge to find a giant to pop my head off of my little plastic body, and bury the rest of my form beneath the dogwood tree. It seemed almost comical how at home I felt in my head and how alien I felt in my body.

My beautiful female body, finally “bloomed,” finally “filled out,” finally loved by swimsuit companies and Victoria’s Secret, might as well have been a decapitated Barbie carcass. The dissonance between my head—ears carefully decorated, hair shaped to my liking—and my body—beyond my control, but exactly what was expected of me—was nauseating.

Wanting different from your body is met with a lot of resistance.

When I correct my boss about my pronouns, she demands an explanation of why, and when I stammer through it, she snipes that she believes God gave us all the perfect bodies. Her implication is that I should not change my body. My question is why not? My body is perfect—it holds me, it protects me, it carries me through life. I just want it to look the way I want.

Barbie and I aren’t all that different. She never asked to be in heels all the time. Maybe Barbie wants to cut her tits off, too!

Zooming In • 43

What You Will Leave Behind

by Grace Lee art by Christina Lee If you’re lucky, you’ll live to see the year 2100. If you’re really lucky, you might get to see 2120, maybe 2125. If you’re really, really lucky and science advances at the rate that it is, you’ll get to see 2150. And if you’re really, really, really lucky and science finds a way to store your consciousness beyond your mortal body, maybe you’ll get to see the year 3000. But no matter how many vitamins you take or how many times you transplant your consciousness, there’s an expiration date on your life, a death in some shape or form. Rest assured, though, you won’t be erased immediately. So here are three things, three painfully human things, that will outlast you.

1. Your kids (if you have them) (probably).

Do you want to keep affecting the world after you’re gone? Do you want your ideas and memory to continue to exist even when you’re six feet in the ground? Have kids. Through them, your weird quirks (how you make pancakes, the way you do laundry) and your deepest traumas (your inability to be vulnerable, your conception of love) will live on, rippling out through the rest of the human race in a butterfly effect that guarantees you some degree of immortality. Reproduction is a basic human instinct for a reason — yes, it appeals to our primitive little monkey brains, but it prolongs our presence on this planet, making sure that we live on in some form or another for at least one more generation.

And that allure of extra life, the same allure that drives alchemy and Lord Voldemort, is impossible to ignore when the world seems dedicated to forgetting you. In a world of seven billion people, we want to be special, want to be remembered, and having children is the most conventionally acceptable way to achieve that.

2. Pollution.

Plastic takes about 450 years to decompose. That means that in 2472, a turtle might choke on the final remnants of your plastic straw, and a bird might get its beak stuck in the deteriorating form of your six-pack beer ring. You can outlive yourself through plastic Starbucks cups, plastic grocery bags, and plastic water bottles. We might develop flying cars, the cure for cancer, and time travel in the next 450 years, and the packaging of your last Amazon order would be there in the dirt to witness it all. Which brings up the other aspect of “immortality:” it’s inherently selfish. You don’t know how any of the things in your life will age, how they’ll transfer into the future. It’s shortsighted to create things that will outlast us, especially when those things will most likely make our planet uninhabitable for humans one day, bringing about the end of our species because of our own hubris and self-importance.

Zooming In • 44

3. The Voyager probes.

When you are dead, your kids are dead, the Earth has been swallowed into the Sun, and the Sun itself has condensed into a white dwarf, there will still be the Voyager probes. For the next five billion years, they will be at least partially intact, travelling through our galaxy, remnants of a long-dead planet and civilization. And on those probes will be golden records, conceptualized by Cornell’s own Carl Sagan. They will have the sounds of a mother kissing her baby, a storm crashing into the ocean, a train passing by. They will have the images of highways, our molecular makeup, a woman eating grapes at the grocery store. There will be Mozart, Peruvian wedding songs, and Stravinsky. And finally there will be greetings in 55 languages, saying “hello,” “have you eaten,” “we wish you the best.” This is the closest we’ll ever get to immortality. It is our attempt to connect to extraterrestrial life, to explain to them the things that matter to us, to show them the music, images, and words that have defined our society. It’s short-sighted, naïve, and hopeful. It’s inherently human, and it will carry that flawed, selfish, beautiful sentiment into a universe where we will have all been dead for billions of years.

Zooming In • 45

​​​​The Trash I Keep in My Forest Art and Writing by Havi Rojer

Zooming In • 46

I have a forest in my mind where I keep all my memories. The important memories, the ones that have shaped who I am, take the form of towering stone figures. Less critical memories, like a nice afternoon by the lake or a dinner with a friend, are smaller—statuettes, you could say. As the memories fade, their corresponding statues accumulate moss and lichen. Small bugs or fungi take them over and the stone foundations crumble into dust.

I have a forest in my mind where I keep all my memories.

Parts of the forest are light and airy, filled with life. Small animals flit among the branches of maples and birch trees. I keep some of my best memories here. Immortalized in stone is the statue from when I got accepted to university. I can run my fingers across the stonework and feel the wrinkles in my off-brand Cornell shirt. My father dances with me at my Bat Mitzvah in another statue; my mother visits me at college in a third. This part of the forest is filled with family and friends, and I walk among these statues when I need to remind myself of past happiness.

Not all areas of the forest are so welcoming. As one walks deeper, the trees cluster more closely and the understory darkens. The statues, too, grow more angled — harsh depictions of negative memories. Most are small. There are myriad tiny anxieties and challenges a person faces on a daily basis. These statues appear suddenly between thickets of hawthorns and pines, posing a tripping hazard to those unaware. There are some bittersweet memories here, as well. My grandfather’s death was no doubt a tragedy, but the coming together of my family to ease his passing makes the memory more nuanced. Even deep into the forest’s nighttime, rays of moonlight dapple the statue of his bedside passing. I like to think they symbolize his essence.

Even those dark parts of the forest are good to visit, sometimes. I often miss my grandfather, and remembering his death reminds me that it was just a part of a life well-lived. Recalling my battle with depression a few years ago reminds me how strong I have become.

I consider myself a Taoist, following a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of balance. Yin births Yang births Yin; Light births Dark births Light again. There are cycles in all things.

I struggle to keep this philosophy in my mind in the part of the forest you inhabit. In contrast to the brightness of the daytime forest, or even the subtle starlight illuminating the nighttime forest, the statues of you were baptized in fire. Here, the trees don’t resemble trees so much as charcoal, their bark blackened beyond recognition. Most of these memories are still hot to the touch. Whenever I walk here, I feel the lingering ache of the scars you gave me. Even the memories that should have been good — our first kiss, the night we spent curled up in your bed, all those meandering walks together — have found their way here, the stone distorted and melted into gruesome shapes by the heat of your flames.

I wish I could avoid this place. I really do try. But like the sun draws the earth in with its gravity, I find myself brought here again and again. So I bury it in trash. You know the sort: small lies, bitter thoughts, the parts of me I wish you didn’t bring out. I pile them atop all your statues. I cover your face with forced amnesia; I block out the words you said to me with those stupid advertisement songs that stick in my brain. This part of my forest is a landfill of plastic bottles and crumpled paper, and I keep all my memories of you buried beneath it.

I’m working on being better, though. Therapy has helped me to move some of the trash aside. I stare at a statue of us and feel nothing.

Small miracles, right? I know progress isn’t linear. That’s okay.

I’ll work on forgetting how I feel about you, and eventually I’ll forget you, too. Your statues, exposed to the sky above, will decay into pebbles and particulates, and in time, I’ll be free of you. Then, finally, my forest will truly be my own again.

Zooming In • 47

The god cone Our cosmology is an infinite deli sandwich.

by e.d. plowe art by havi Rojer We appeared in a grass meadow dotted with fir trees, and stayed there as long as we could. Avia and I were made for each other. After a certain amount of years of being left alone, we stood in our curved shelter, the sun streaming through tiny holes in the grass roof. Branches drilled deep into the earth and a cross-hatched ceiling held us down in our low gravity home.

It began with ABC-gum. She smirked, poked out her tongue, and signaled with her eyebrow morse code that she would drop the wet white gum into my palm. Our long snouts grazed the tops of each other’s feet. I reached around them to catch the glob.

Our elephant trunks don’t always please me. Our creator obsessed over the details of our noses, which were consequently much more textured and vivid than the rest of our bodies. Our bodies cast a squishy humanoid shadow. I love my body, how my snout reanimates the concept of a tree, but the shape of my swinging shadow is discordant.

Where my love had gotten the gum in our almost-barren land began to irk me.

This was her third chew since Sunday. Why didn’t she take me with her? Avia, I ask, where did you get the gum from? From what pinecone or bush? “We have a plastic tree,” she said. Our great tree.

Like from what our flesh is made, she said.

Plastic doesn’t grow on trees, I said. How can we have a plastic tree? Our trees are already made of plastic-flesh, they cannot make more, that is a creator thing to do. I was sweating, and my trunk became slimy, which only occurs under great stress. This bodily function spooked me further.

“My love, my love,” Avia says, “it’s alright! I will show you.”

Avia took a small bushel of fir bristles and whisked the slime from my snout. It splatted quietly on the floor, then disappeared. I dropped the gum where the little puddle vanished, expecting the same fate of the waste. But the gum, the wad of Zooming In • 48

plastic, simply sat there. It did not fade to the dirt floor. I gave a restrained roar, and Avia was all the more patient and smug.

She picked up the gum and placed it on the cutting board where two small white wads sat perfectly still, then moved to put her boots on. I followed, and we left our shade into the blue sunlight.

We reached the great tree, whose head belongs to the mist, in under seven minutes. The great tree had white pine cones the height of Avia’s hands and the width of my foot. They were just out of reach, most densely placed and tightly furled at the highest points of the tree.

Early in our lives, we saw a white cone bloom with sunlight and release wet white seeds with a sudden rattling noise. The explosion of molten plastic. The seeds fell and dispersed into the tall, dry grass. The next day, there grew yellow flowers, and in their center sprouted smooth eggs. We learned not to step on perfectly smooth rocks, as they might yield pheasant, peacock, or goose. We found no pattern to explain when they became hatched. The only year of hatching, blooming, growing, occurred so early in our lives, however, that we became uninterested in the goings on of the great tree. We became accustomed to a very small number of dead-eyed life forms which wandered our plain. I have never been sure if they are hungry, or desire anything at all. They have rarely met my gaze, so I never asked.

Twisting her head back from the great tree trunk, Avia said: “Hello? Do you not see this?”

The pine cones no longer populated the great tree on a density gradient, crowded at the top of the tree and sparse near the ground, but every poor limb was weighed down. More pine cones sat planted in the earth like eggs in the ground flowers, and drooped from the tree’s lowest branches. The tree looked infected. Avia grabbed at a cone which rested from a branch at our eye level. She plucked it from the branch, and held it out in her hand to show me. Bright

white, the cone’s scales soaked up the light beaming upon it. The light shined back at me. Avia peeled back a scale and stuck her pinky into the body of the unconsenting fruit. With a crescent openmouthed smile, Avia retracted her pinkie from the cone. On the tip of her finger was a white firming sludge.

“So that’s where it came from.”

I do not like mystery. Once, Avia and I were both suspended in the air. When our eyes opened we were the size of balls of yarn.

Our tacky skin dripped with dew from the clouds. We knew only kneading and light, for the creator’s hands began to smooth and stretch us under the new sun. The creator took turns so we could watch each other open up. With each pulling from our snow white plastic bodies, with each spooling of our to-be guts, language and images piled behind our eyes like horse dung. We accepted that they were ours, more ours than our bodies. Once we had all of our organs, our creator thought it appropriate to give us necks so we would no longer have to crane or crack eye sinews to see our bodies.

The creator fingered our ribs and spines on its way to tug our heads from our bodies. Then necked, we looked up to see our artist, and all we saw were the teeth of an open mouth. Thunder followed a hot breath sounding HA HA HA. Shivering from the salivating face, we looked down and nearly lost all the innards we were given. Below our feet and the wispy cloud carpet was a white translucent surface, and a rainbow surface beneath that surface, and a black one under that, and probably a million beneath that one.

They ranged from green or snowy, orange like a low sun, or speckled with moving dots. Worse than the infinity of planes below was the gaping hole directly below our feet. The hole had no bottom, but illuminated the stratification of the planes so far our eyes were barely equipped to discern. We could not express our awe, so the creator gave us faces. It saw how we checked on each other, even before gawking at our above and below — it gave us the fifth limb of love so we could reach across the air space between us, our trunks.

“I had to show you, my love,” Avia said.

Repulsed, I plunged my middle finger into the sappy center of the pine cone. The body was smooth and hard, unlike our fibrous grass or soft dirt. Its plastic was warm. A wad of the white stuff attached to my finger as one of the pine cone scales slid into a mush. I removed my finger, brought my trunk to it and sniffed. It smelled like Avia. Like the gust of wind that comes once a month.

Like the rain we hear at night, but never see. Like the inexplicable feeling of dropping from the sky.

I rolled the white wad between my index finger and thumb, and saw that it took on the shape of a skull.

With the tip of her trunk, Avia pinched the ball from my finger Zooming In • 49

and placed it in her mouth. She shucked the gum from her own pinkie, too, and began to chew.

“It can’t taste that good,” I joked.

Avia continued chewing with a fully stretched jaw, and stepped closer to me. She threw her truck over my shoulder and wrapped it softly around my neck, thrumming slightly against my temple. She brought her hips and breasts to mine in a full hug. I did not harden. The smacking sound of her chewing slowed, and I could feel a tiny heartbeat in her cheek against mine. She was letting me think.

If this material, from which we were sculpted, was now handed to us by a tree, what were we to do with it? Surely life stuff is not just for chewing, though it may taste of soil and citrus, Avia said, though it may keep busy our jaws. Surely this gum in Avia’s mouth has no will to aliven. Wouldn’t it want to remain buried in a safe pine cone? And if we were to sculpt, where would we get our clouds? Where would the void hole open? Where would the little forms go?

Avia then spoke with an unwarranted clarity and conviction.

“I don’t think our creator’s rules apply for our creations,” she said, smacking.

“Who willed this?” I asked.

“Definitely not our creator,” she said, remembering its smiley arrogance.

I began to grow irate, complexness tore through the front of my head and I wanted to bash it into the tree trunk. Where are my tusks?

I whined, and Avia took a step back.

“Why do you think we never had a hatching or a growing again after that one year?” she asked.

My mind was still tearing, so I retorted something about shelter-building.

“No, baby, it’s because we ought to spawn; aren’t we capable?”

When we landed in our plain all those years ago, our skin turned the color of late summer grass. We were relieved to be in a place of unblinding light. The evergreens felt like wealth, like enough company on their own. Calmer than the creator, cooler than the crackling fires within our new bodies. When we saw the light of the pinecones the first time poking through the trees, we did not rush to view the new movement.

“Let’s go home,” I said, “I’m tired.”

Avia took a deep breath, and her eyelids fluttered. She smiled.

“So let us go,” she said with a mouth full of plastic.

In another breath, we were home under our branches, the light changed bluer with the incoming darkness. Our cosmology is an infinite deli sandwich. We are most certainly not meat, probably lettuce or tomato instead. Clouds pass over our sun Zooming In • 50

and create nighttime. When the clouds pass over our sun, we worry silently. If thunder and lightning come, Avia and I have discussed, that may mean another bipedal, binocular creature would require a shelter. More trees to cut down.

Back at home, on the table sat Avia’s previously foraged gum. The three globs had hardened, looking like eggs. Avia spat her gum out, and placed the bigger chunk upon the cutting board alongside the drier pieces.

“Hmmm,” she said. She brushed her hands on her thighs, and collected the three dry bits, leaving her trunk swinging as she worked to stick them together.

“Clearly they need to be lubricated,” I told her.

“My jaw is tired,” she said.

I gathered the gum from her hands and placed the plastic between my teeth, wetting the gum with my tongue. It tasted of Avia, again. While I chewed, Avia, hunched, began to finger the fresher gum on the board. Her index fingers wiggled as if she were making vibrato two cello strings. Her middle fingers hooked the middle of the gum body. Her pinkies curved around the back of the gum. Her thumbs massaged the bottom, unsticking it from the porous wooden board. Avia’s hands became spiders at work. Her trunk she braced against the wall.

I chewed and watched the fall of her chest when she remembered to exhale.

Something rose up in me, a tensing of internal muscles, a coiling around my spine. Jealousy. I placed my hands on Avia’s waist, and I pushed myself slowly into her backside. I wanted to nestle in that warm space between the softest parts of her flesh, break her open, and take her wetness. It had been a long enough day. I extended my trunk over her shoulder to her belly, and we pressed together. She reached around to caress my face, then removed me from her entrance.

“Look,” she said, gesturing towards the white shape on the cutting board.

The glistening glob pulsed. A little breath. No head, but lovely eye sockets. No mouth, but a trunk, which twitched once, maybe twice. My gum rolled on the dirt floor, having dropped from my lips. It twitches, too.

Later, Avia and I will cover ourselves in dry moss and settle into our shallow ditch bed. We will hold each other. In our plane it is never cold, nor hot, but if any rain were to enter through our roof, the moss would catch it and not disturb our rest. A small piece of moss will cover the breather on the table, and the dusty one on the floor.

art by ED Plowe

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Level 4 -------Zooming out

52

Monolids, spam, and robots The Korean War resulted in over six thousand war brides. In the direct aftermath of the war, these women got married and prepared to move thousands of miles away to America, a nation with a culture and language unfamiliar to most of them. And in the midst of this preparation, this time of great transition, many of their American husbands were thinking about how their wives looked too “Oriental”, too “expressionless.” Thus, modern cosmetic eyelid surgery in Korea was born.

About 60% of Korean people have monolids. Dr. David Ralph Millard believed this 60% would never fit into America, always carrying that distinct marker of their Asian heritage. So he popularized double eyelid surgeries, predominantly for South Korean war brides, as a solution, and many Koreans lined up to get on the operating table.

Simultaneously, they were buying Bush’s Baked Beans and Spam in great quantities, all part of a larger cultural push to be grateful to American culture and American soldiers for protecting them from the horrors of Communism.

After years of poverty and war, South Korea wanted to modernize and find economic prosperity, and earning the American stamp of approval seemed like the best way to start.

by Grace Lee art by Havi Rojer people want to look more white. While it is impossible to deny American influence on Korean beauty standards, many of these ideas existed before Western beauty standards had been introduced to Korean society, and they have continued to evolve and change in their own way since then. The other problem with this myth is that it oversimplifies the relationship between American influence and Korean beauty standards. Koreans do not get plastic surgery because they are jealous of white people or because they independently decided that white people are more attractive than Asians. Their actions are influenced by decades of Western colonization and racism, a myriad of cultural factors that cannot be simplified to merely wanting to look white.

Dr. David Ralph Millard’s racist ideas continue to affect American culture as well. When Millard declared that monolids made Koreans look “Oriental” and “emotionless,” he fed

In modern Korea, plastic surgery remains popular. It’s advertised in subway systems, on TVs, and many will even arrange surgeries for their teenagers as a comingof-age gift. Entire families who have monolids will end up with double eyelids through surgery, and it’s an open secret that most, if not all, Korean celebrities have gone under the knife at least once to alter their features. It’s the result of a deeply-rooted beauty standard in a relatively homogenous society. There is one vision of beauty–big, double-lidded eyes, a high nose bridge, and pale skin–and the pressure to conform to it, especially for women, is undeniable. The common misconception about this ideal is that Korean Zooming Out • 53

into a myriad of stereotypes and myths about Asians in general. There’s the classic stereotype of Asians being stoic, quiet, and robotic. It manifests as the model minority myth, which attributes the success of individual Asians to some sort of cultural programming or standard instead of personal hard work or drive. It shows up in the media with characters like Tran from New Girl or Lilly from Pitch Perfect, two Asian characters who did not speak or sign a single line in their respective works. There is a distinct lack of agency that comes with these messages. Asians are always quiet, good at listening to authority, and devoid of the rich inner lives that white people are inherently gifted with. It is also important to note that the effects of this stereotype can also vary with gender. The West stereotypes Asian women as being submissive and willing to listen to their male partners; they emasculate and dehumanize Asian men for their supposed lack of emotions, making it easier to justify colonialism, war, and brutal racism. This superficial beauty standard has real consequences for Asian individuals in every sphere, from media to professional settings.

Even though American history has strongly influenced Korean beauty standards, I’ve personally heard many Americans comment on how superficial, materialistic, and crazy South Korean plastic surgery is. While such a strict beauty standard absolutely harms people, these comments are often made without knowledge about the historical and cultural context of plastic surgery in South Korea. How can you assign value to plastic surgery when it is the result of an oppressive and damaging power dynamic between Korea and America? It is decontextualizing, harmful, and reductive to deride both individuals and societies for plastic surgery without recognizing the misogynistic and racist roots of these movements, especially when such beauty standards and stereotypes continue to be spread in Korea and in America. When your eyes themselves are a part of the problem, it becomes impossible to detangle yourself from their negative connotations without fundamentally altering your face through plastic surgery. Those who feel like they have to get eyelid surgery, who get it because of a cultural standard with such problematic origins, are victims, and placing the blame on them for that choice ignores the racist and colonialist influences at play.

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Memes About microplastics

by Shehryar qazi Microplastics are tiny bits of plastic that have been the subject of increasing scientific concern because of their potential polluting effects on our bodies. While the effect of microplastics on the body are still relatively unknown, they’ve been detected in human blood and lungs. Key point: they are everywhere. Most of these plastics (polyethylene, PET plastic, and polystyrene) enter our bodies when we come into close contact with plastic packaging and products, such as water bottles, shopping bags, and other single-use plastic items. Scientists believe that microplastics may have cell-damaging effects; studies have shown that raised levels of microplastics in rats correlate with inflammation in the small intestines, lower sperm count, and giving birth to smaller young. Humans currently have nowhere near the same levels of microplastics as the rats in the studies; however, with plastic pollution set to double by 2040, the effects of microplastics on the human body have not only piqued the interest of the scientific community, but also that of the general public.

2019, then you probably have a good idea of the kind of people I’m talking about. Although dietary changes and the lack of exercise associated with modern life are the primary causes to blame for lower sperm counts, microplastics have nevertheless come under the spotlight as a major contributing factor.

As a disclaimer, this piece is not a science-based review of the effect of microplastics; rather, I am more concerned with the memetic representation of microplastics.

Firstly, there are absurd memes about microplastics. I use the term “absurd” because unlike ANPRIM memes, they do not explicitly present a larger critique of society. A couple examples of absurd microplastics memes are as follows:

Recently, I’ve encountered a lot more memes about microplastics in broader internet spaces. I became curious about this shift: how did microplastics, which I had first encountered in a relatively niche space, become so widely adopted by early 2022 memes? Memeitic popularity is somewhat inexplicable, but one can arguably glean clues as to why a certain topic blows up by looking at its social context. Upon looking through many microplastics memes, I found that they can be sorted into two broad categories: the absurd and the anprim. While there are other categories and countless subcategories one could use as an approach, the two aforementioned categories are sufficient for a general overview.

I was first introduced to microplastics by way of internet spaces about bodybuilding. I am not a bodybuilder, but I like the sport. By nature, bodybuilding is very maximalist and focused on the hyper-efficiency of losing fat and building muscles. Something that helps bodybuilders approach these two foundational goals is a high testosterone count: more testosterone helps build more muscle, and more muscle burns more fat. Thus, bodybuilders are constantly concerned with maximizing their testerone count.

Many go as far as injecting anabolic steroids (external sources of testosterone) into their body. There is growing concern within bodybuilding spaces (especially where it overlaps with the “manosphere”) over declining sperm counts. If you know of the earlier, largely debunked craze over phyto-estrogens in soy, or the delightfully terrible neologism that was “soyboy” around Zooming Out • 55

The main purpose of absurd memes is to be a meme for the sake of being a meme: to be funny and make viewers laugh. When transforming something into the subject of an absurd meme, one usually renders it in a format that’s already widely considered humorous, such as the Kirby guzzling meme shown above. Another good example is the Spyro the Dragon meme, in which some of the original text has been painted over and replaced with “oils and microplastics.” When the replacement text is random or nonsensical — everything from “cum” to “my grandma’s apple fritters guys she makes really great apple fritters” — Spyro is the synthesizing presence giving the meme absurd meaning.

The clearly random juxtaposition of an adorable, rotund purple reptilian to any number wildly unrelated string of words clues the viewer in to the fact that there is no serious intent behind the meme’s construction. When the replacement text is “oil and microplastics,” however, Spyro’s presence provides a touch of sarcasm that, without detracting too much from the meme’s main design of providing passing entertainment, temporarily draws the viewer’s attention to the implications of the words. Spyro becomes a method of transmission, a meme surfboard riding the waves that are microplastics-related issues — a surfboard that washes up on the shores of the viewer’s mind, delivering a couple seconds of brief reflection on the unassuming vastness of the ocean representing the problems stemming from microplastics pollution. Yet, all absurd memes run the same risk of being oversurfed. That is, overused and clinging to past patterns, resisting newly forming currents of humor, to the annoyance of the majority of meme-viewers. Microplastics memes are no different.

ANPRIM memes, on the other hand, carry a critique of industrial society and the modern life that it has produced and are usually far from light-hearted. Some examples are as follows:

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Underlying each of these memes is the same critique, a mimesis of the opening line of Ted Kaczynski’s The Unabomber’s Manifesto: “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” The memes are expressions of frustration over the powerlessness of individuals trapped in the clutches of modern industrial society, individuals forced to become depositories for the byproducts of society’s manufacturing

“The memes are expressions of frustration over the powerlessness of individuals processes. Some could argue that anprim microplastics memes are merely offshoots of the reactionary right memes about Kaczynski’s work that emerged in mid-2018. Worth keeping in mind, however, is the increased reach of leftist and progressive critiques into the present day’s meme-generating space. ANPRIM microplastics memes created in 2022 have been created in a meme space imbued with more balanced political influences, making them more likely to be general critiques of an industrial society than being reactionary or eco-facist statements.

In sum, microplastics act both as subjects of fleeting, lighthearted joke memes and as a potent symbol of the ways industrial society violates human bodies in memes with darker, more pointed humor.

Zooming Out • 57

Turtle 9

Inspired by Fox 8 by George Saunders

by Shehryar Qazi art by Havi Rojer Deer Reeder: First may I say, sorry for any werds I spel rong. Because I am a turtle! So don’t rite or spel perfect. But here is how I lern to rite and spel as gud as I do!

I meet a new frend on the beech . He is shy, so he doesn’t tak but I sware he is vry fun! I had never seen him before but he looked hungry. I asked him what he was doing there. I didn’t get a response. I asked him his name. I asked him if he would like to eat.

He didn’t say anything.

Hunger, presumably.

Poor mr and ms beetle, caterpillar, and slug family 2! I am sorrey I told them while in my mouth. Mr beetle said tried to knock in my mouth trying to get out. I try to voice something and accidentally swallow slug jr. AAAAAA I am now very sad but my friend is hungrier than I am sad. He is saying no words and not moving at all. I know he needs food. I meet up Turtle 7 and she has a lot of fish and seaweed. I thank her and monch on the seaweed, setting up the fish and bugs and many creatures infront of my friend.

Not a glance.

He was very big and his shell was very large. I could tell needed a lot of food. I look around for food a lot of it. I do not like eating any moving creatures, i Get really sad. Snails especially. Something about the shell.

How stupid of me! Surely such a great turtle will not gorge on these tiny offerings! Me and Turtle 7 start talking.

I look and see some worms. I scuttle over. They burrow away, but one stayed. I caught him in my mouth, mumbled sorry, scuttled back and put him infront of my friend. I told him look! Food! But he was unimpress. He didn’t even look at it. I knew it was a tiny little worm and such a big guy wouldn’t bother with leftovers. I help the worm dig awy.

What is this shit why isn’t he eating I mean look at him he’s so big! We need big food for him What do you mean The stoar we need to go to the stoar

So I scuttle again. I walk and walk and walk across the beach. I meet Turtle 7.

Ugh not the stoar but oh well

Turtle 7 and I have a strange relationship. I will not relate the details here but I will let you know it was strange. I ask her what she is up to and she told me she just laid eggs

You know I cant reed well please come with me

My heart flutters

Amen

Anyway she asks me what I was up to and I tell her about my new friend. She says oh cool i would like to meet him. I say sure but he needs food. She agrees to join me. We split up and I go to land and she to sea. We agree to meet when the sun is a bit more down.

We plod to the stoar together. Sun goes down a bit more. We get big food for my big friend.

Shore

Do you even kno his name ugh I hunt. I didnt like doing it but my friend was hungry so I needed to.

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I do not does it matter Yes of course you are doing so much for him without knowing his name I dont think it does Well I disagree We reech back to my friend. Who still ahs not moved or spoken bcause he was so hungry.

We put the big food infront of my friend. Sun is going down and I need to be home soon in water I tell him so I beg him to eat.

He stares, silently into the distance.

AAAA Turtle 7 plod me and told me too look there is something written here FISHER Oh is that his naem seems weird PRICE Oh.

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