post- 10/09/2020

In This Issue September and October Jordan Hartzell

Am I Home?

Alisa Caira 3

Pod People

Olivia Howe, Amelia Wyckoff, Jasmine Ngai, Victoria Yin 2 4

Ben West 5

Show Me My Body Moe Levandoski 6

Be Gay, Do Crimes

postCover by Jeffrey Tao

OCT 9

VOL 26 —

ISSUE 4

FEATURE

Pod People

where relationships start and covid doesn't end

By Olivia Howe, Amelia Wyckoff, Jasmine Ngai, and Victoria Yin Illustrated by Chloe Chen

W

Olivia Howe hen my parents dropped me off in front of Keeney in September 2018, we were all thinking it: I would never really live at home again… Except winter breaks. Except freshman summer.

Except quarantine. I had already stepped out of my childhood and closed the door, holding my foot over the edge of a life I wanted so much to drop into. This independence required all the flags of teenage rejection: the eye-rolls on FaceTime, the monosyllabic texts, the “you just don’t get what it’s like to live at Brown” rants. I spent my first year bristling at my mom’s hail of questions and at my dad’s unrippled silence.

Back home last March, I bit off conversations, stuffed myself into my room to glaze away the hours “working.” But as I realized my friends would indefinitely remain muffled voices in my headphones, I took a big-girl breath and decided to re-meet my parents.

For my mom, I set aside the pretense of eternal homework on weekends to renew our tradition: Sunday Baroque radio and a long bike ride in the bitter hills. I let my mom gush about yet another of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and tried to hear what she loved in the cellos that sawed my nerves.

Later, as we rode, I laughed with her about the icy sweat on our necks and the family of Canada geese babbling on the roadside.

At first, my dad and I mostly pelted each other with our respective political anxieties at the dinner table. As the spring unfolded, I began to accompany him on forest walks like I had when I was five, and I let the leaves remind me of the love we share for quiet. Pausing at the old quarry in the woods like we always did, he pointed to a pine tree polka-dotted by woodpeckers, and I showed him an eft and a memory from school.

As I stepped back into their life, we softened.

My mom left me in peace; my dad checked in with me. And I was able to give them my time when they wanted it.

This fall, I hesitated about returning to a restricted Brown. I had two friends at home, and I

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, This opening makes me feel like Jane Eyre. I’m in a stranger’s house (the editor’s note that is usually filled with Amanda’s wit and rabbit stories), I’m falling in love (with post-, more each week), and there’s a madwoman in the attic (it’s me). And like Jane, you and I are running out on the moors of midterm season, calling for our Rochesters, or maybe that one TA who somehow always answers you at 2 am.

If these references to a melancholy 19th-century cursed hetero romance aren’t encapsulating your semester, you probably have spent your free time more productively than I have. Then again, true entertainment is hard to come by these days, unless you get a rush from picking up the craft project you abandoned in middle school or timing how soon the sun finally sets each day. Maybe our days aren’t so different from a 19th-century Gothic, trapped in an icy fortress (when will ResLife turn on heat? It’s a game at this point) and trembling at the slightest encounter with another person (from joy or losing the ability to converse with-

out pausing to unmute, I don’t know).

Wherever you’re staking out this fall, and whatever you’re doing to make the sunshine hours count, I hope you’re finding a kind of home. In this issue, our writers are trying to settle into theirs. The Feature brings together four stories on how Covid has affected our relationships within our homes and apart. In Narrative, one writer reflects on the places she has lived and the home she wants to make for herself, and the other shares the routines her family has established in their home during quarantine. Over in Arts & Culture, the writers use innovative music to experience the body as a home and search for home in the queer representation of Money Heist.

Right now, you might feel like you’re trapped in the attic or being blasted by the winds of the Midterm Moors. The “comforts of home” are as inaccessible as the Ratty comforts section. But today, let us at post- welcome you to our home. It’s crazy, but it’s real.

With Open Arms,

Olivia Howe

A&C Managing Editor

2 post–

Pandemic Pick-Up Lines 1.

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If Covid doesn't take you out can I? So... come 'round here often? (at the OMAC testing center) Tested positive for vibez (negative for Covid) It's a good thing you're wearing a mask, aren't goddess's faces supposed to be blinding?

I'd let you join my pod ;) Are you Covid-19? Because you take my breath away.

You can't spell quarantine without "u r a qt" Did Covid give you a fever or are you always this hot?

I'd pin your video on my Zoom screen What if we both raise our hands in the breakout toom... haha jk... unless?

NARRATIVE would never get the chance to live with them again.

Amelia Wyckoff Depending on texting for social interaction has not been good for my anxiety. I’m an overthinker: I analyze a missing exclamation point or a terse abbreviation and immediately jump to conclusions.

In an article entitled “Are All My Friends Mad At Me?” Katie Heaney writes, “If the vibe with a friend seemed off over text, there was (and still is) little you could do about it except text more—or wait and hope you’re wrong.” For the first few weeks of quarantine, I felt paralyzed with anxiety as I waited for friends to text me back or ask me to FaceTime.

So, when a friend of a friend from home whom I had flirted with over a year ago reached out, I wasn’t expecting much. I was deeply depressed and we had nothing to talk about. Small talk was impossible— with nothing to fill our days, the usual “what’s up” quickly became boring. He texted, “let me know if this is too fucking ‘middle school sleepover’ energy but…” and we began to text about things that usually only come up during 2 a.m. pillowtalk or long, drawn-out dinners.

For our first FaceTime, I put on mascara and a T-shirt (that I hadn’t already slept in). I’m usually hyper-aware of how I’m being perceived: I worry about my appearance and my social skills, if I’m being funny or engaging or, ironically, genuine enough. FaceTime eliminated the usual stressors.

Only one tiny rectangle of myself was visible, and I could hang up whenever I wanted. But I didn’t want to. We brushed our teeth together on the first date, and I went to bed feeling happy without any caveats.

My relationship history has made it hard for me to navigate boundaries and express my needs, but I told him exactly what I was thinking every time we picked up the phone. This summer, time was abundant, and digital communication encouraged long conversations, making our intimacy easy and uncomplicated.

In September, he drove from Nashville to Providence to visit before heading to his school in a nearby state. Our first in-person walk from his car to get takeout was awkward, but we quickly fell into step. Two days later, we decided to embark on something I thought I’d never try: a long-distance relationship. Over FaceTime, I told him how much I missed him. He joked, “Don’t make it weird. We’ve only hung out three times.”

Jasmine Ngai For my middle school friends and me, today’s “new normal” of socially distanced interactions has been our norm for years.

Many consider middle school a time rather forgotten, marked by multicolored braces, fads deemed “cool” for at most a few months (anyone remember Silly Bandz?), and sweaty dances in dim,

overcrowded gyms. Starting seventh grade at a new school, I predicted I’d want to erase the next two years from my mind. Yet, somehow, things eventually fell into place, and I gained a group of friends that never lost touch. After I moved to a different high school, then again when I moved across the country for college, we managed to stay connected—even if some years brought just one reunion at our hometown’s Chinatown festival each summer.

Nearly 10 years later, Covid-19 brought us all back to the same city and nearly the same school (hello, Zoom University). Yet quarantine meant there would be no annual festival meet-up this year, no bubble tea outings or spontaneous hot pot dinners.

Every New Year’s Eve since high school, we’ve played a knockoff online version of Cards Against Humanity over video chat until the clock struck twelve. But when quarantine began, our virtual game nights became a staple of those early, quiet weeks. We chose an online social deception game called Among Us, which Keith Stuart of The Guardian describes as “10 crew members trapped on a spacecraft, carrying out menial tasks…but at least one of them is an imposter who wants to sabotage their work.”

Players must find the imposter amongst themselves, leading to hasty accusations, strategic alliances, and impassioned defenses. In recent weeks, Among Us has exploded in popularity, but we still see it as our own little escape from reality.

We rarely schedule our virtual game nights in advance; it usually starts with someone messaging the group chat to see if others are free later that evening. The ritual of game night, these long-lasting friendships, is what I need. The chaos of the world stands in stark contrast to the steady stream of messages in our group chat.

Honestly, I’m awful at online games. After months of playing Among Us, I still don’t fully understand how to complete each task. I’m terrible at lying, problematic for a game based on social deception and strategy. But taking refuge in the online spaceship that houses our group Zoom call— that’s enough.

I don’t make it to every game night, especially since starting school a month earlier than everyone else and moving to a time zone three hours ahead.

Even during the pandemic, life and deadlines get in the way. Still, when I hear a soft “ding” at midnight, that distinctive high-pitched Facebook Messenger notification, I’m always tempted to stay up until 3 a.m, laughing my head off at inside jokes and sipping the “tea” that’s inevitably spilled between rounds of Among Us: stories of new and failed relationships, career plans, classmates we haven’t thought about in years… The subjects change as we grow—from middle school to high school to college. But there’s one constant: I’m tethered to them and to these game nights for life, long after quarantine passes.

Victoria Yin My corner of the third floor in the toothpastecolored apartment on Williams St. faces east and south, and in the mornings it’s like I’m in the world’s biggest light box. The peace lily basking in a beam of warm sunlight on my nightstand is usually the second thing I see. The first is my girlfriend’s soft, peaceful face across from my own, unperturbed by the glow. During her last day at Brown in March, we wandered campus together in the kind of shock that turns everything humorous and nonsensical. When she left for the airport, me standing in the middle of Charlesfield as she drove away in an anonymous Uber, we made a pact to see each other again as soon as possible. Month after month of hours-long FaceTimes, Zoom calls, and Netflix Party movies passed slowly and painfully. We wrote long, pretty letters, and pressed flowers against them. We stuffed recipes and poems (from her) and silly doodles and paintings (from me) in the envelopes. I miss you from the moment I wake up, we’d write. In July, she finally convinced her parents to let her book a flight from Los Angeles to Des Moines after three months of long-distance. On the drive back from the airport, the physical experience of being in the same space as each other was overwhelming, but in a good way.

The pandemic has changed the playing field for couples, leaving many to face the problems, aspirations and future of their relationship head-on. Luckily for us, difficult conversations and senseless arguments did nothing to hinder our goal of reuniting. In Iowa, we had water gun fights, picked blueberries, baked pies, and spent a lot of time lying in bed, relishing the ability to do nothing together. Now, we spend our days Zooming into different classes in the same room, cooking together, and making late-night commutes to the other’s apartment. It’s hard not to take all my fear and stress a bit more lightly with the comfort of my best friend by my side.

Am I Home? musings on a

space-based emotion

by Alisa Caira Illustrated by Will Nussbaum

The first home I knew lasted the longest. This home, located on a quiet street on the outskirts of Boston, changed as much as I did over the past 18 years. It shaped my conceptions of the word “home” as much as I changed its walls and furnishings. It was there that I learned what makes a physical place a spatially-based sentiment. When my parents and I began our efforts to make the house a home, the backyard was cracked cement and a chicken coop.

The house was one-story, with four rooms and an unfinished basement. There was a dog I was allergic

“Mega bats… some sort of bat that was, like, mega.”

“I gotta say, Thomas Jefferson's campaign jig kinda slaps.

Like, you could stride over a mountain to that.”

October 09, 2020 3

NARRATIVE

However, entering a new period of home-making is no small task. to (which no one knew yet) and a porch where I bounced in a small baby bouncer that hung from the ceiling.

But soon enough, this house changed, and the ways it was a home shifted along with it. Soon, there were two brothers and a new level added to the house to maintain. The basement was finished. The walls were painted (for the first time). The first dog died, and when we tried to adopt a second, she was quickly returned as my allergy became apparent. After that, I became a much less cranky child, less sniffling and more eager-eyed.

We almost moved once, but I vetoed the idea because I wanted to stay in the same middle school district as my friends. I later regretted the choice when I grew to resent the house that had become my home. As I grew taller, the floors started to feel cramped and the corners felt worn with dirt. I asked my parents if we might reconsider moving or if I could study abroad. These plans were swiftly rejected and the same home remained. Then I began to realize that I, to some degree, had the power to change it. When a flood ruined our kitchen at age 11, I helped my mom plan to redo it. Around the same time, I painted my walls bright purple, revitalizing the childish pastel pink. I got a new bed frame, drew some art for the walls and thought I had the coolest room ever—for a year.

Soon, those walls were bright blue, then pastel blue, but the pink carpet I hated never changed until just this month, when the smell and dirt of 20 years became too much for my parents and they finally pulled all the carpets out. I wish 13-year-old Alisa could know that one day she would get exactly what she wanted.

Yet, when the carpet did change, I wasn’t even there to care about it. It had been two years since I physically lived in the house after moving away for college, and many more years since I had actually felt at home there. Sure, I had found ways to make it home-like—putting my favorite art on the walls, keeping it tidy, spending time with my family—but it didn’t feel like a home that I put time into, and more importantly, I just didn’t feel an emotional connection to it. My family continues to live in this

4 post–

house, calling it home, but my childhood room fades away into a guest bedroom as I more consistently define my own boundaries of home and the sentiments attached to them.

When I moved into my new apartment this fall, I realized that unless another worldwide disaster hits, I hope to never make my family house the place I consider my emotional “home.” I would like to keep visiting, of course. But I would also love to believe that I am actively defining my own concept of home and what it means to create one. I hope that this will continue to lead me farther away from the physical space that defined the first 18 years of my life.

However, entering a new period of home-making is no small task. Whether moving to college, switching dorm rooms or moving into an apartment, there are vital questions that must be answered about what home is to you. For me, there were clear stages in my ability to create a space that felt like home. My first dorm room consisted of hand-me-downs, scattered postcards, and magazine clippings. I haphazardly bought storage containers from Target as I tried to check off the basic list of college essentials. My first self-invented home worked, but it still lacked that emotional connection I yearned for. Often that first year, I would stay out late at libraries or at friends’ to avoid the glaring sterileness of cinder blocks and tiled floors.

Since then, all of my homes have been more fitting—more distinctly “me”—but alarmingly brief.

My second home, a two-month long sublet, was lovely in every way aside from its brevity. It was my housemate who made that house a true home as we cooked dinner, tended to our many plants, and worked hard to maintain the space we had sought out so carefully. After that, I spent five months living with my boyfriend, creating a space that was livable but retained the essence of a house filled with boys who didn’t want to put much effort into the space around them.

When I moved out, I put greater effort than ever before into curating my new dorm room and soon enough, nearly every surface was covered with knickknacks, memories of cherished moments, and small things that truly mattered to me. Yet, that home was short-lived too; quarantine and Covid-19 sent me back to my parent’s house prematurely.

My perception of home is changing again, as I once again move out and unload my belongings into a new house I’m subletting for six months. I am beginning to wonder why I care so much, why I carry so many objects with me from place to place. Does

dedicating time and effort to unpacking, arranging, and taking care of these things create a home for me?

Even if for only a few months at a time, compared to the long 18 years my first house claimed?

I think it does. I think so a bit more each day as I clean my own dishes, vacuum my own rug, clean my own sheets, and accumulate more knick-knacks than I could have ever imagined. I have only lived on Brook St. for about a month now, but I know the familiar sounds that greet me at night. I know how long it will take me to reach the mini-mart or Bagel Gourmet. I just bought a desk chair off Facebook Marketplace that fits my desk perfectly. When I spend time in this house, I am at ease with the routines; I am familiar with my housemate’s schedule and when my cat will demand attention. It might have taken a few frantic days to unpack all the boxes I stuffed with candles and posters, books I didn’t ‘need,’ and more. But now, when I look around me, I feel so proud of the space I have created out of the scraps of furniture and objects that I am always on the lookout for. I know I am home.

My mom’s biggest grievance about me is that I will buy things I don’t need as long as there’s a good enough deal and I assume future me will like it. She tells me that I can figure those things out in the future.

Yet, now, as I move again and again, I am so grateful for the things I carry with me from space to space. It almost feels like a home is a puzzle assembled with the things I furnish it with, and my presence simply completes the picture: laying on my bed, sitting at my desk, reading in the sunlight of the window. There is more to home than the objects I fill it with or what the space looks like, but these comforts make settling into a new space much easier. They make me feel like I can be home anywhere, so long as I can find a table to present my shrine of memories and a pillow to rest my head on, and that’s enough for me.

September and October stills from home

By Jordan Hartzell Illustrated by Sable Bellew My dad has picked up airbrushing over the last month. He told me this morning that he’s expecting a new acrylic green in the mail. At night, after work, Dad has been going out to his barn, a tall-ceilinged open workspace with a kiln, most of a canoe, glassblowing materials, some miscellaneous wood—and metal-working equipment. He paints fine detail on models of Range Rover defenders and Corsair fighters, sending updates to our family group chat. The airbrush tool is small and sleek, a precision instrument for the trained craftsman. Dad is convinced that it takes some kind of natural-born skill to stay inside the lines, but that he’s still trying to learn. He wants to paint a miniature house next.

My parents’ close friend, whom I call “Aunt” and whose husband I call “Uncle,” passed down a pair of clip-in cycling shoes to me a few months back. Aunt Yvette had only worn them once or twice, and she was so glad that we had the same-sized feet. We’ve had a stationary bike in the basement for years, which I had always ridden with sneakers secured into flexible silicone cages. Clicking in the new shoes took several minutes, during which I accidentally kicked the bike and broke off a tiny plastic shard of shoe-bottom. Now I ride a few days a week—interval challenges mostly—click click and go. Off to nowhere, spinning the flywheel with my toes tipped down and the heels of my hands pressed into the curve of the

ARTS & CULTURE

Show Me My Body

anatomy of a musical body ache

By Ben West Illustrated by Talia Mermin

handlebars.

In the morning, Mom plays George Winston’s Autumn. The music is quiet and twinkly, and the chords feel like fire in the fireplace and trees turning orange-y red. In the afternoon, she’ll switch to jazz: Art Pepper on the sax or Oscar Peterson on the piano, usually. I couldn’t name any of the songs playing, but I know the way that each one sways. Notes swingy-er than the cadence of our fingers on the keyboards, but no less pressed. At night, it’s Billie Holiday. Powerful and sweet, my favorite music. She’s for all times, but at night her voice fills the yard up to the treeline, the corners of my sisters’ empty rooms, under our eyelids. “I heard somebody whisper "Please adore me” // And when I looked, the moon had turned to gold!...”

I’m not religious or terribly spiritual, but I keep a small wooden Buddha in front of my window, head bowed and hands folded open upon the lap. Next to the Buddha are a few candles. One is supposed to smell like Rhode Island, a gift from my college roommate to remind me of school. It’s a little sharper than the way I remember campus, but the candle’s brand is called “Homesick” and I am. I have another called “Pumpkin Soufflé” to make mornings smell like a bakery. When it’s warm, I open the window and pretend that passersby can smell it, too.

I have never been one to make my bed. Chronically late to school in my teens and stereotypically messy, it was a luxury I ranked below packing a lunch and (sometimes) brushing my hair. But I get it now, I think. A small accomplishment, a degree of freedom under control, a space folded up and tucked under a pillow. I usually open my blinds before I pull the flat sheet up and fold it over a little. Four pillows, even though I sleep with just one underhead. White duvet and a pearly quilt—my mom’s old one—at the foot of the bed.

Mom and Dad started letting our dog Percy sleep in bed with them. She’s a 4-year-old boxer with the proportions of a puppy and the attachment of a duckling. They never used to let her upstairs, let alone in their bed with them. But now there’s a fuzzy red blanket spread across the king bed and a few of her stuffed toys (a bear, an alligator, a moose) scattered on top. She spreads herself flat at calf height or tucks into the crook of their backs, a puzzle piece and proud inhabitant of the foot of the bed. My room is across the hall; when Mom wakes up, I hear nails on the wooden floor and a whisper, Do you want to see Jordan? It’s the best part of my day: all wiggles and a tongue seemingly disassociated from a thinking brain. Pouncing on me like I’m a bird and rolling onto her back, legs straight into the air while her stumpy

tail moves a mile a minute. Every day like I won’t be in the same spot, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, waiting for her to come in.

Most nights, Mom and I watch an episode or two of The Blacklist. It’s about an international criminal and his inexplicable drive to aid the FBI—one agent in particular—in exchange for immunity for years of federal crimes. Dad recently fixed the living room TV, but we used to watch on a laptop balanced atop a pillow on Mom’s lap. We pause to curse out the characters or guess the end of the episode. In the morning, Mom will ask me what time we can have our date tonight. 8 or 8:30, usually. We’ll watch until around 10:30 or 11 p.m. and then head upstairs. Mom will read, I’ll call a friend and then go to bed.

Dad cooks a bunch of different foods for the week on Sundays so that we can have them for lunch and dinner, mixed in with whatever fresh thing we’ll whip up day-of. He’ll grill chicken and bake asparagus, often tossing chili or turkey meat sauce on the stove: we’ll have it for lunch over the next few days. Always brown rice in the rice cooker, a new staple. Microwave reheat and mix ’n’ match meals are my favorite. We eat separately together.

Last week I FaceTimed my older sister Sydney while I fed my dog a blueberry. If you say gentle first, she’ll put it in between her lips and carry it away like it’s a butterfly wing to enjoy quietly, alone. I do that every so often, to remind her about the good things.

Mom installed bird feeders outside the windows to the patio. A late summer storm knocked them over once, so now squirrels sometimes come to pick at the few seeds still strewn in the mulch. Mom loves the tufted titmouses and cardinals. Blue jays, too, but they’re a little more shy. She’ll stand at the window, arms folded, telling me that he has been here every day this week! The bravest ones don’t mind us standing by, proudly cracking sunflower seeds for us to see.

Others flit away when we approach. With autumn fog rolling, the chirping comes later in the morning, and most of the finches are gone by now. Sparrows and starlings are regulars, loud and greedy. They’re still welcome.

I doodle a lot more now than before. I like spacefilling curves and loopy shapes that fit together to fill up the page. It’s meditative, ink on paper, sometimes markers (for the feeling). I’ve tried sketching but can’t get past two dimensions, so I’ve learned to stick to single-line faces and bare cartoons. I keep some of the drawings in a notebook, scattered among todo lists and notes to self; others are just on scraps of paper later thrown out.

I wish, just for one day, that everyone would pry their headphones off of their ears and let their music tiptoe down their legs and scamper around the grimy subway station at Prospect Park. To let a pigeon’s yawn and Ariana Grande seep into the depths of a taxi driver's gut and spill out again into the lap of a family on their way to synagogue. To watch the Johnny Cash–inspired head-bobbing of a 55-year-old lawyer manifest itself in an 87-year-old Italian grandmother with an alligator cane. To let the benches in Central Park bleed their music into the souls of the people memorialized upon them.

We can listen with each other.

Before I proceed, I must confess that I don’t feel entirely comfortable with how I currently write about music, so I plan on dipping into other interpretive mechanisms. This means eating music, nibbling at its edges, until it bites back. I have always seemed to vomit forgotten SAT words onto a blank page and blindly thrash around for the right way to present them. I then expect my readers to clean up my puke while I move on to my next episode of shallow sonic reconciliation.

But one day the music devoured me. Show Me the Body (SMTB), hardcore punk architects and a trio of sonic creators that require utter chaos as a prerequisite for breathing, taught me to stick a finger into my belly button and pull out the 20 years’ worth of sounds that had been stuck inside of me. SMTB has taught me to squeal, to yelp, to break down, and to call my dad more often. SMTB has taught me to snuggle with Bear Bear again, my childhood stuffed animal (who’s staring at me as I write this). SMTB has taught me to say “I love you” to my friends, even the ones I don’t know well enough. SMTB has taught me to try driving a different route every time I go to the same doctor's office. SMTB has taught me to look at my reflection, and to look at yours…

When I slipped on the feeble rug of traditional western music and plummeted quickly and deeply into the sounds that make me pant and wheeze, I was warned to go slow. These sounds that SMTB both evade and personify are usually labeled as “out,” “experimental,” “hardcore,” “harsh,” “messy,” and other disgruntled adjectives that mask fear.

Nevertheless, I seem to have found myself overtly and rapidly embodying these descriptors after reckoning how these horrifyingly delicious sounds have always invaded, invigorated, and invited themselves into my being. These noises are nudged and stirred out of their sonic homes to hang out with us for a reason, so we must let them.

My embodied reaction, and its necessity to interface with sound, is not an experience I alone have. Namely, it is in the approach of Esperanza Spalding, a sonic creator and thinker, who uses her voice and upright bass to shove jazz into a different dimension entirely. She centers the body as the vessel for creating and perpetuating music.

Pauline Oliveros, an experimental electronic composer, sonic forager, and investigator who peels noise from the most peculiarly intimate places, encourages us to listen with our feet and with the spaces around us. Leaping off of this beauty, I personally want to knead a culture of sonic awareness into my body’s unique versions of itself, October 09, 2020 5

ARTS&CULTURE

and to embody a definition of pandemonium that is so two-faced it doesn't bear any relevance to me anymore (though sometimes I do need Bear Bear when I mosh).

CORPUS, founded by members of SMTB and other sonic morphers, is a poignant collective of underground musicians that seek to uplift Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists. They mold these practices of embodied and communal listening into their everyday musical and personal lives. The group’s motto is: “CORPUS IS A COMMUNITY. COMMUNITY BUILDING IS DIRECT ACTION. CORPUS IS ABOUT MUTUAL RESPECT. RESPECT BUILDS SOLIDARITY. CORPUS IS BUILT ON HARD WORK AND PRACTICE. INTELLECTUAL WARFARE IS MANDATORY. INCREASING SELF DEFENSE AND AWARENESS IS PARAMOUNT. CORPUS IS EMPOWERMENT AND BECOMING FREE.” Their words thought of each other, together.

We can realize, together. *** Hungry (Performed with Dreamcrusher) I want to slurp music up into my mouth, digest it, and let it unearth the insides of my body.

Dreamcrusher, a harsh noise commander and cultivator, excavates my senses of expectation and lets them decay to the point of rust. Then, they collect my remnants for me and smirk as they watch me attempt to put them back together. This is a feat I may not be able to appreciate until much, much further into my consciousness. A feat that would make every being in NYC simultaneously brawl. *** SMTB’s second public adventure, Corpus 1, is the album that extended an invitation to burn, cuddle, burp, and poison me.

Sometimes it is their lyrics, and sometimes it is how the lyrics tear at my skin.

In the neoliberal echelons of the music criticism website and magazine Pitchfork, this album has been chastised for being too confused because of its use of 20+ collaborators. But to me, this perplexing conglomeration of soundmakers is precisely what we need in order to advocate for communal embodied investigation. What is distinctly different in SMTB’s approach to collaboration is that the moldable skeleton of each piece is curated by their collaborators, rather than by themselves. This flows directly into their relationship with their listeners/ viewers/feelers. Watch a video of SMTB performing 6 post–

live and you will see everyone's bodies get so entangled that they plunge onto the concrete. Look closely now and you might see every one of those bodies being hoisted towards the sky by a fellow mosher…just in time to be crumpled downwards again. This cyclical bombardment of thrashing and care is soothing, motivating, and subtly masochistic in the same sense that if you chew for long enough, Dreamcrusher’s Grudge2 (a categorically disruptive album) will give you lockjaw. SMTB, in their visceral and snarly approach to organizing sounds, not only lets their audiences move differently, but also lets them sigh differently. *** Everything Hate (here) (Performed with Moor Mother) I want to shove music into my knees and let them uncontrollably quiver.

Moor Mother (who vocalizes the world as a product of herself ) has shattered my conception of persistence. She bends jazz, hip-hop, and experimentalism into each other so poignantly that those genres evaporate entirely and, in turn, create a new sense of provocative normalcy. She relentlessly compels me to think about time and how I can dance to it and throw up on it. As my tears sometimes do, when I can’t reflect, when I can’t feel myself, Moor Mother’s sounds dribble through my thighs and down into my knees, spinning them into a frenzied cocoon of disorientation. They shudder the same way they do when I show up at my doctor’s three times in one week, for an issue that doesn't make sense and doesn't seem to matter. The music tells me that things will be okay, and helps me heal. *** Consequently, as much as I need to feel this music inside of me, it needs to escape me as well. When I hear the mellifluous screeching of Julian Cashwan Pratt’s banjo I am pushed to sneeze. To let a little bit of my body permeate into the sonic atmosphere and confuse the sounds that whiz around me. This sonic and fluid imposition into the world makes me think that Johnny Cash might even like SMTB. Not only can we listen together with our ankles and our chins, but also with our precarities. A ll of us can find each other’s headphones. *** Taxi Hell (Performed With Justin Flammia) I want to throttle music hard enough that i t seeps into my blood from the tips of my fingers.

This is my favorite song to pretend not to know, so I am able to rediscover it every morning.

Sometimes I need to forget it. The classical guitar punctures my memory and my fingers, as I stare at where my calluses are, and touch where they used to be. Julian sings to where my fingernails meet the flesh in a pulsating tremolo. What do you do with your fingers when you scream? *** Feel CORPUS. As we depart from our momentary sonic and textual journey together, I will continue to think about how this prescribed disarray that SMTB’s music is soaked in will change every time I listen to it. It already has, over the course of me writing this. It is also vital to envision where SMTB’s music has yet to poke us, or where it may never be able to. After all, we each have the agency to comprehend sound how we see fit and by no means is SMTB the sole vessel for thinking and feeling our way through this. Without privileging the sonic realm any further, all sounds, if we indulge them, have the beauty to listen to us as well. The allure of coming up against perpetual modulations of sounds, such as SMTB’s, allows me to indulge in a recurring dialogue with my body. These sounds cause a resurgence in my ability to relocate my process of introspection and, in turn, change my approach to interpreting my surroundings (both human and non-human). Together, we have the ability to entangle our bodies in a catastrophic and profound game of sonic hide-and-seek.

We must reimagine our musical stories as we press our bodies against a mirror so hard it shatters and the glass cuts us open.

Be Gay, Do Crimes

radical normalcy in la casa de papel

By Moe Levandoski ILLUSTRATED BY Moe Levandoski It’s hard to pin down exactly which secret ingredient in Netflix’s La Casa De Papel (Money Heist in its English translation) makes it so enthralling (other than the conveniently placed cliff-hangers at the end of every. Single. Episode.). Something about the adrenaline of a 12-day standoff against Spain’s best investigators, the romance of a heroic anti-establishment robbery, the ultimate human weakness for love (or is that just me?), the aesthetics of a swath of red behind an army of Salvador Dali masks against a melancholy grey ground. Maybe it’s that, going in, you expect a heist, but you definitely don’t expect the heist to stretch across multiple seasons and become increasingly labyrinthine until you have absolutely no idea how they’re going to get out of this but they’d better, doggonit. Maybe it’s just that the cast is…hot? Whatever the reason, this show is like whatever addictive substance you care to insert here. And to my little gay heart’s delight, the characters are not all cishet.

To be fair, the range of the show’s representation isn’t particularly radical. Across the four seasons that are out on Netflix, the show’s band of characters includes two gay men, a trans woman (even though it sucks that she’s played by a cis actress), and a few characters who are...maybe bi? Even so, something about seeing queer characters in this context was exciting to me. The reason hit me during my search for a good thinkpiece on the show’s treatment of queerness. (I didn’t find even one. Please contact me if you know of any.) I accidentally read a

ARTS&CULTURE

The radical–fluidity, dissolution of binaries, socialist tendencies–is hidden behind a run-ofthe-mill TV genre. comment (which we all know one should never do) that amounted to “IF THE FACT THAT THE CHARACTER IS QUEER DOESN’T IMPACT THE PLOT THEN WHY DID THE WRITERS HAVE TO MAKE THEM QUEER!!!” I found this hilarious not only because of this commenter’s insightful take on the age-old adage “they’re shoving the gay agenda down our throats,” but also because, when a character is queer but it’s not the main plot device, that’s quite literally the entire point. It’s nice to see the rest of the world wake up to the struggles of being queer via dramatized coming out narratives, but also: We’re normal people. We do normal things. Like, you know, rob the royal mint of Spain.

At the start of the series, a mysterious man who calls himself the Professor gathers a motley crew of criminals in a grand mansion outside of Toledo, where they carefully study his master plan for a nigh-impossible heist. The crew adopts city names as pseudonyms, vowing never to reveal their identities to each other and to never—so help us God never—form any intimate relationships. (If you haven’t already guessed, they don’t do very well on that front.) We expect this story to play out like most other heist stories: they plan the heist in intricate detail, they tie up their loose ends, and at the climax, they pull it off (or don’t). Instead, in the first episode, we are immediately launched into action via a truckload of paper bobbins that is also carrying eight robbers in red jumpsuits.

This is only the first way that La Casa de Papel surprised me. The show is constantly blurring the lines laid down by the dominant socio-political paradigm. The radical—fluidity, dissolution of binaries, socialist tendencies—is hidden behind a run-of-the-mill TV genre. In the first episode of part three, as Tokyo flees the police in Cinta Costera, we catch a glimpse of a graffitied wall that reads “a cop is not a friend.” In a refreshing break from mainstream TV’s collection of glorified cop shows, the police in this show are not the heroes: They are the villains, the torturers, and the abusers. Granted, the majority of heist movies position the robbers as the “good guys” and the cops as the “bad guys,” but this one

features Bella Ciao, the anti-fascist anthem of the Italian Resistencia, as a sort of theme song.

The Professor’s crew isn’t petty thieves, either: These guys are Robin Hoods, the resistance. The heisters aren’t just stealing for themselves, they’re stealing from the government, for the people.

(Although they do keep plenty for themselves. But also, these are people who’ve been beaten down by life, so I think they get a pass for wanting to live in luxury for a bit. But I digress.) The literal translation of La Casa de Papel is “house of paper.” “What is this?” says the Professor as he holds up a bank note during a confrontation with Inspector Murillo, the negotiator. “This is nothing, Raquel. This is paper.”

And that is the core of the show’s motivation: an all-encompassing structure like paper money, in which we place so much symbolic and economic value, is just arbitrary and made up. A radical politics contained within a show that, before you’ve seen it, looks pretty average.

And you know what else is all-encompassing even though it’s arbitrary and made up?

Cisheteronormativity. Seeing queer characters in any kind of entertainment, while more common now than it used to be, is still a pleasant surprise rather than a given. And in a world where being heterosexual and cisgender is the norm, those who differ often have their personhood coopted for dramatic narrative effect. Usually when a character is deemed queer, their entire storyline revolves around the isolation of being closeted, the fear and uncertainty of coming out, the danger of living openly as themselves, often death—and just maybe, if we’re lucky, the joy and fulfillment of building a chosen family. Adversity narratives are important, of

“As I have learned here, less is more, moderation is key, and change is often for the better.”

—Hannah Duron, “Breaking Pointe,”

10.02.13

“After what feels like hours have gone by, I nod to myself and quietly decide that something has changed: It has been changing all along, but only now am I able to perceive it.” my grandparents’ Subaru.”

—Anneliese Mair, “Tense of the Sky,” 10.11.19

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Amanda Ngo a FEATURE Managing Editor Liza Edwards-Levin Section Editors Alice Bai Ethan Pan ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Olivia Howe Section Editors Maddy McGrath Emma Schneider

course. But sometimes you would rather see yourself printing counterfeit bank notes than relive all of the trauma to which your community is subject.

As a baby gay, way back in ninth grade when I was still on Tumblr, I conceptualized queerness as a set of discrete identities that, on the whole, didn’t align with “heterosexual” or “cisgender.” But as I’ve taken a relatively shallow dive into queer theory, I’ve come to understand queerness as something broader, something radical. This is not to say that everyone who falls under the queer umbrella considers being true to their identity a radical act but to say that lately I’ve found comfort in knowing that I don’t have to fit into a neatly described, static box, that I can be mutable and multiple and simultaneous. Which means that my identity can be radical and completely average at the same time.

Although the show’s queer rep is far from perfect, this is why I’m excited about the way La Casa de Papel has written its queer characters. In a media gestalt of narratives about coming out, trauma, and adversity, characters whose queerness isn’t a major plot point are radical in their normalcy. They are not tragic heroes (or if they are, it isn’t because of the tragedy of their scorned identity); they’re just characters—committing treason and negotiating their intimate personal relationships, sometimes falling in love and sometimes being assholes, often under gunfire or at least under constant threat of arrest and imprisonment—who happen to be queer.

The show, unlike most others, makes the radical ordinary, and the ordinary radical. The storytelling, aesthetics, and characters take center stage in a way that you can’t help but love.

NARRATIVE Managing Editor Jasmine Ngai Section Editors Siena Capone Minako Ogita Christina Vasquez LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Caitlin McCartney Section Editors Kimberly Liu Emily Wang

COPY CHIEF Mohima Sattar Copy Editors Laura David Kyoko Leaman Aditi Marshan Eleanor Peters SOCIAL MEDIA EDITORS Tessa Devoe

CO-LAYOUT CHIEFS Joanne Han Iris Xie Layout Designers Briaanna Chiu Jiahua Chen WEB MASTER Amy Pu

STAFF WRITERS Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Editors Eashan Das Julia Gubner Danielle Emerson Kyra Haddad Jordan Hartzell Jolie Rolnick Nicole Kim Chloe Zhao Gus Kmetz HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Elliana Reynolds Gaby Treviño Victoria Yin

Want to be involved?

Email: amanda_ngo@brown.edu!

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