post- 03/13/20

In This Issue I Bought a Used Nintendo DSi DANIELLE EMERSON 6

846 Castro Street

JORDAN HARTZELL 5

Lost and Found in Translation

JASMINE NGAI 4

JULIAN TOWERS 7

Nerve-ous Breakdown GRIFFIN PLAAG 8

From the Mess to the Masses

postCover by Hee Won Chung

MAR 13

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VOL 25 —

ISSUE 19

FEATURE

Lost and Found in Translation

on language-learning, age, and starting from scratch BYJ ASMINE NGAI ILLUSTRATED BY ANNA SEMIZHONOVA

N

OTE: The University is mandating that all students studying abroad in Western Europe return home by Friday, March 20, 2020.

Hoi! Mijn naam is Jasmine. Ik kom uit de Verenigde Staten. Ik spreek Engels.

On the very first day of Beginning Dutch class this semester, my classmates and I were posed a question: “What made you choose Amsterdam for study abroad?” For me, there wasn’t really a clear answer.

All I knew was I wanted to explore somewhere new, and while my knowledge of the Netherlands itself was limited to stroopwafels and the color orange, I thought that my love for both of these things almost compensated for the absence of any logical decisionmaking. Quite simply, spending my spring semester at the University of Amsterdam just felt right. But for others, their choice of destination was based on more practical reasoning. “English is widely spoken here” was a common answer. So far, my firsthand experience in Amsterdam verifies this claim: English is ubiquitous here, and it is possible to get by without knowing a single word of Dutch.

Dutch was not a language I’d ever imagined myself learning. In fact, I was only enrolled in the class because it is required by Brown’s Office of International Programs for those studying abroad. Yet the process of language learning has always fascinated me, and I had enjoyed foreign language classes in the past. I hadn’t started the process of learning a new language from scratch since my first elementary school Spanish classes. Looking back at my first three years of college, I regretted my decision not to continue learning Spanish or enroll in another language course.

As the beginning of my semester abroad approached, I began to feel growing excitement about learning Dutch. What did I have to lose?

Still, just a week before my departure, I started getting cold feet about spending a semester in a country I knew next to nothing about. Doubts about my ability to learn a brand-new language became a recurring source of apprehension, leading me down a rabbit hole of last-minute, panicked Internet research. Scouring websites in the middle of the night when I should have been packing, I was relieved to find reassuring quotes from sources like

post- moments (@195 Angell)

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers,

There is enough space in this editor’s note to fit in the phrases “I love you” or “I’ll miss you” approximately 227.6 times. In this academic year alone, we said goodbye to nine post- staff members and hello to 10 new ones. By the time you read this, we will have put out 19 issues in this volume. These are all the facts that I’ve counted up during my last night in the office at 195 Angell, before post- moves on to our new location come fall. I’m not a numbers person at all, but I don’t know how to turn all my sentiments into words on the page for this semester’s last full issue of post-.

To try is to say thank you to our former managing eds and editors-in-chief for working so hard to ensure the magazine’s smooth transition into our current staff ’s nowslightly-inkier-hands. Thank you to our newest recruits for bringing such vibrant energy into this building’s worn (but well-loved) space. Thank you to everyone—readers and staff alike—who have stuck with post- across so many stretches of time.

To try is to say I love your dedication, curiosity, and passion. To try is to say I will miss this building, these

4 post–

Language Partners, a language education company in the Netherlands, calling Dutch “probably the easiest foreign language for native English speakers to learn” and citing the similarities between Dutch words like “appel,” “banaan,” and “tomaat” and their English counterparts. I took a deep breath between stuffing T-shirts and toiletries into my alreadytoo-heavy luggage. Learning Dutch would be easy enough, right? Yet, after arriving in Amsterdam, I stared in awe at the long names of the metro and tram stops that comprised my daily commute to school. Amstelveenseweg? Bilderdijkstraat? Henk Sneevlietweg? How could I ever expect to become familiar with this language when I couldn’t even begin to pronounce these names, which seemed so long that my eyes glazed over after reading just the first few letters?

I’d forgotten how clueless a beginning language class could make me feel. Each day, we sing simple songs to introduce ourselves and complete connectthe-dots worksheets to practice saying numbers. We riffle through the pages of our textbook, searching for momentarily lost vocabulary words, and stumble

late nights, these wonderful people I’ve come to know over the past few years, months, and weeks. 227.6 is simply a factor too small to contain what this year has meant to me.

This week, post- is a mixed bag of change, of nostalgia.

In Feature, a writer elaborates on her new experiences in Amsterdam and her decision to learn Dutch. In Narrative, one writer indulges in her transition from pre-med to tech, and another writer seeks to relive the joys of Nintendo. And in Arts & Culture our writers look back at the movie Nerve and the album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix to reflect on how social media and musical attitudes play a role in their lives.

Take care of each other in these turbulent times. It may be difficult to immediately know what to do. But to try is to say we’re doing okay right now, and we’ll see you all again very soon.

With So Much Love,

Amanda Ngo Editor- in-Chief

1. The evening we introduced the crew to White Cheddar Cheez-Its 2. Literally whenever Sydney or Nicole brought in baked goods 3. Anytime we hit 4 a.m. delirium because of a misplaced comma 4. Spring Weekend Edition 2019 (iykyk) 5. post- talent show (we’re not just editors, you know) 6. That prod when RISD layout turned our assignment board into calligraphy 7. The time Amanda waged a style war against New Yorkers in the office (“in line” vs. “on line”) 8. Thursday, 2/13/2020 (the night we initiated our new post- babies) 9. When the ghosts of post- visit 10. All of it—the whole damn thing

through sentences, unable to will our throats to make the elusive guttural “g” sound that I can’t imagine ever mastering. I’m fully aware of my struggle to reach even a toddler’s level of Dutch proficiency.

Growing up, I’d been one to ruminate over the smallest mistakes until they overwhelmed me. Between this and my naturally shy personality, throughout childhood, I’d do my work quietly and diligently in the back of the classroom to conceal any potential flaws, reluctant to raise my hand even when I felt confident I knew the right answer. Beginning language classes don’t work that way, though—competency takes active, vocal practice, and I’m almost never sure I know how to pronounce the words correctly. And while I’ve been actively pushing myself to speak up in class since starting college, I still find myself hesitant to raise my hand in Beginning Dutch. It’s taken time for me to understand that making mistakes in this class is not a sign of pure incompetence or disrespect for the language—it’s part of the learning process.

I’m constantly uncomfortable with how much I don’t know about Dutch, but I’m beginning to embrace my discomfort with a newfound understanding that each blunder I make is necessary for improvement.

Despite the awkward sentences, nervous laughter, and cheeks flushed with embarrassment that accompany my all-too-frequent mistakes, I’m reinvigorated by even the slightest successes— introducing myself in a full, fluid (albeit short) sentence, counting up to 20 without glancing down at my textbook, understanding snippets of conversation on the metro. Although I have the crutch of English to fall back on here in Amsterdam, there is something to be said about learning Dutch in the place it’s most widely spoken. Opportunities for everyday victories are only truly possible here (after all, when would I ever hear someone asking “Waar kom je vandaan?” in Providence, Rhode Island?), and while I’m not quite proficient enough to order meals in Dutch yet, I’m confident I will get there one day.

I believe that picking up a new language as a college student can be extremely rewarding, despite language acquisition research tracking brain activity and recognition of grammar usage by age, which suggests otherwise. Researcher Monika Schmid describes this in The Independent, suggesting that “our capacity to learn a language diminishes gradually over our lives.” It’s a commonly held belief that young children learn languages more easily than adults, and Schmid presents several explanations why: adults are more likely to be preoccupied by concerns and tasks other than learning the language, children tend to be more motivated to learn, and grammar rules of one’s first language are less likely to interfere with a child’s language learning than an adult’s (due to less time spent with their first language). However, as Dana Smith writes in a 2018 Scientific American article, “This is not to say that we cannot learn a new language if we are over 20…our ability to learn new vocabulary appears to remain constant, but most of us will not be able to master grammar like a native speaker.” In other words, there is still hope for adults beginning to learn a new language. Even if fluent mastery of the language’s nuanced grammatical rules is improbable, familiarity and competency can still be well worth the effort.

While the ideal age for language learning has passed for most of us reading this (college-aged

students), the benefits of learning a new language remain immense—even at our ripe old ages. These include facilitating more meaningful interactions and communication with a wider range of people, opening doors to greater employment opportunities, stimulating the brain, and simply being an enjoyable pastime. Furthermore, learning a new language can help illuminate the mystifying idea of untranslatability. I’m currently taking a class on world literature and globalization, which explores how different translations can alter, take away from, or add to a story’s original intent and meaning.

Let me tell you about my favorite Dutch word, gezellig, a word that defies translatability. According to the website Awesome Amsterdam, “Some people describe gezellig as being cozy, but that doesn’t begin to cover it…it stands for something or someone cozy, nice, homey, friendly, snuggly, fun, comfortable or enjoyable… but no word can really sum it up. It’s a feeling rather than a word.” So far, my time abroad has been defined by a collection of gezellig moments: dimly-lit dinners with new friends and massive traditional meatballs, serene solo bike rides at sunset, spontaneous jazz concerts and open mic storytelling nights, hours of browsing every bookstore I come across, wandering past hidden alleyways and winding canals at dusk, getting lost without any fear of actually being lost. Just as my choice to come to Amsterdam in the first place simply “felt right,” these moments just feel gezellig to me, though I can’t conjure an exact definition of the word, either. I never thought I’d be able to sum up this first, whirlwind month-and-a-half in Amsterdam with merely a single word. I can’t in English, but in Dutch I now can.

This week, I began volunteering as an English teacher for a class of seven- to eight-year-old Dutch students. My co-teacher (also a Brown student) and I were told that these children have had no prior English training; their current familiarity stems mostly from television, film, music, and other forms of popular media. Going into this week, I felt excited to share my love of language with these kids, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also intimidated to be their first formal exposure to English.

I walked into the first class not knowing what to expect. Fortunately, it went smoothly: The kids eagerly counted to 20 with us and shared their favorite colors out loud. The class consisted of many different learning styles, with some students nearly falling out of their seats to get a word in, while others timidly attempted a new phrase with our encouragement. Still, no matter their dispositions, all the students eagerly embraced the opportunity to begin practicing a new language, an attitude increasingly rare among students my age. In a 2008 study from Leiden University, it was found that 8-year-old children are more dependent on learning from positive feedback (such as, “Good job!”), while 12-year-old children and adults rely mainly on learning from negative feedback, which emphasizes their mistakes, to inform their future actions. Perhaps this reduced inhibition observed in younger children explains why my own 8-year-old students seem more likely to take risks in the classroom than my 20-yearold peers. College students and adults alike have much to learn from the open enthusiasm of these kids, and we need not hide behind the excuse of being fully “past our prime.” Language learning may take more effort after

childhood, but it’s still entirely possible—a personal reminder for myself as I begrudgingly complete the next assignment for my Beginning Dutch class.

These kids are still young, at a prime age to learn a new language from scratch. Yet no matter how old we become, we’re never irreconcilably far from this sweet spot, either.

Hoi! Mijn naam is Jasmine. Ik woon in Amsterdam.

Ik spreek Engels… en een beetje Nederlands. Tot ziens!

846 Castro Street i used to be pre-med

BY JORDAN HARTZELL ILLUSTRATED BY TALIA MERMIN

It took me all of freshman year and half of sophomore year to realize that I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but that I sure as hell didn’t want to be a doctor.

I ignored a lot of signs that the whole pre-medical thing wasn’t for me. I remember sitting in a stuffy CareerLAB office while an underclassman pre-medical advisor told me that I should shadow a doctor at the hospital over the course of the semester. I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself from asking her why I would ever want to do that.

I remember sitting in Professor Zimmt’s office on the verge of tears while he tried to convince me that if I didn’t bother learning thermodynamics and instead got really good at memorizing orbitals that I could maybe get a B in his introductory chemistry course. I spent more time thinking about how I could take the fewest number of premed classes possible than I did actually studying for those classes. So the summer after my freshman year, when my computer scientist uncle told me that his graduate school friend needed an intern who knew some Java for his tech firm, I packed for San Francisco and never looked back. *** I had known Peter for most of college because we both used to work out late at night in the Keeney Quad gym. We went rock climbing at the same place in Warwick, but we didn’t spend a lot of time together. He said that the most surprising things about living with me in San Francisco were that I was messier than any of his male roommates and that I ate more cherries than anyone he’d ever known.

We rented an Airbnb in the Castro District for the three-month period of our internships. For the first week, the kitchen table was piled high with company T-shirts, socks, backpacks, and water bottles which all screamed Tech Intern. Peter and I each had our own room; Peter’s had a little sun porch that sat above the back alley we shared with four neighboring flats. The renters were two married women, Julie and Janet, whose names Peter mixed up for the entirety of the summer. They lived downstairs and let us walk their daughter’s guide dog, Wilson, who loved us because we’d sometimes give him leftover noodles. Once, they left us with a bottle of white wine that we’d borrowed to make Italian food: Keep the rest! You must have wine with dinner! The side wall of the family room was made up of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked down Castro Street to the rainbow flags at the center of the neighborhood. On the rare mornings that weren’t thick with Bay Area fog, we could see all the way to the Financial District and the top of a little hill in Oakland. On these days, the light tan walls and area rug would heat up in the sun so that the whole place was baking by 9 a.m. Most mornings, Peter and I would just

“Right now, this campus is one collective brain cell.”

“I can cram 12 different restaurants in five different locations into two days. That’s fine.” march 13 , 2020 5

NARRATIVE

miss each other or mutter an uncaffeinated “Can I come into the bathroom to brush my teeth?” before I walked to the MUNI station on 17th Street to get to the Financial District, and he walked the other way to catch a bus from the Mission to Dogpatch.

We didn’t talk too much about work, unless one of us accidentally broke the company website (Peter) or submitted code that prevented other developers from working on the company’s product (me). Evenings were usually spent rock climbing at snazzy gyms filled with Tech Bros and Beautiful Californians and then getting tacos in the Mission District or making 9 p.m. dinners while dancing in the kitchen. Afterwards, we would watch TV shows or read on the soft blue couch in the family room or eat jam-flavored ice cream at Salt and Straw. Peter is pretty specific about music, and my taste is copycat because my older sister has been making playlists for me since I was a junior in high school. So I let him pick the tunes while he’d stir the spaghetti carbonara: Peach Pit, Twin Peaks, Beach House, and Khruangbin.

I had promised that I’d chop vegetables and do all the dishes if he did most of the cooking. By the end of the summer, we had playlists of the songs we liked best, had ranked our favorite burrito spots and taquerías, and had made almost everything that each of us could cook (even though my list was just toast and sauteed spinach).

On weekends, we’d eat fruit in Dolores Park or link up with the few other kids we knew in the city to go hiking up by Mt. Tamalpais. Our friend Catherine threw dinner parties once a month where everyone would bring a dish, drink red wine, and dance before and after dinner. We’d sit in mismatched chairs around the table or on pillows on the floor and talk over one another until we’d forgotten what time it was and the fact that Ubers are more expensive when it’s past midnight. One Sunday morning, Peter and I rented bikes in Golden Gate Park and cycled the couple of miles to the Golden Gate Bridge, where we thought condescending thoughts about the tourists taking family photos and not moving out of our way. Biking over the bridge itself was slow and windy and terrible, but we both screamed like banshees as we flew down the hills in Sausalito, wailing past fit cycling moms in Lycra and not realizing how sunburnt our shoulders were getting.

Some mornings, I’d leave notes on the mirror in dry erase marker to let him know what time I thought I’d be home.

He’d draw the sun wearing sunglasses. *** And I’m not sure if things feel figured out now. I still eat a lot of cherries and don’t want to be a doctor. But I’m still subscribed to the pre-med email list at school, and I think I’ll keep it that way.

6 post–

I Bought a Used Nintendo DSi an impulse purchase of joy

BY DANIELLE EMERSON ILLUSTRATED BY BRENDA RODRIGUEZ

I’m not usually the most impulsive person, but, a couple weeks ago, I bought a used Nintendo DSi: a cute, sky-blue handheld system, with a miniature backpack for a case. The system came prepackaged with three used games: Big Brain Academy, New Super Mario Bros., and, my personal favorite, Mario Kart DS. Looking back, the decision seemed to come at the height of a personal crisis. A part of me just wanted to feel a glimmer of the instant gratification I had felt back in elementary school—the lightning flash of emotions targeted toward the section of the brain that detects and distributes mental “rewards.” Now, all of this sounds a little clinical. A strangely calculated math equation, intent on delivering as much “happiness” as possible: Nintendo DSi + Mario Kart DS + struggling college student = a direct path to instant paradise. But, of course, it’s not that simple.

I struggled with the idea of the purchase for a few days prior to completing it. I questioned the quality, the timeliness, and, ultimately, the cost. Adding fuel to the fire, Facebook, knowing my increasingly crumbling will, kept providing strangely specific ads: “Student discounts for Nintendo Products,” “Free shipping through Amazon,” “Game Bundles Available,” spend

your money on us, dammit! And, I’ll admit, I did spend a couple hours scrolling through various sites. Rather than tackling school work or addressing my growing list of responsibilities, the Nintendo DSi was all my head seemed interested in. For a while, I obsessed over the pink XL version. It was bold, a little quirky, and eyecatching. The pink DSi XL was definitely a “Clyde.”

You see, I do this thing—I name all of my electronics.

They all carry personalities, and that’s a fact. My laptop is Marrrk (with three r’s), my phone is Rooonald (with three o’s), and my old DS lite from sixth grade was Matty. But damn, were pink DSi XL’s expensive. The cost seemed to be my only barrier. So, for a short while, I gave up, reluctantly exiting the bright Facebook ads just begging to be clicked on by my cursor.

Memories of my red DS from middle school lingered. One Christmas, my nalí (paternal grandfather) gave me a black plastic lunchbox to use as a case. Over time, the edges frayed and became worn, tearing a bit near the handle. I carried that lunchbox everywhere.

The pockets kept my growing collection of DS games organized and safe, the soft interior kept my rolled up charger from garnering dents and stains, and the small compact size fit perfectly into the front pocket of my backpack. Eventually, my younger brother also got a DS lite—a glossy black system with a gray Mario case. We dueled like crazy. Multiplayer on Mario Kart became our way of settling arguments, and long car rides were filled with Mario Bros. battles. He was always Luigi. I was always Mario. We declared wars on Plants vs. Zombies.

I, the regal and humble Plants. He, the chaotic and hungry Zombies. My brother and I weren’t the closest pair as children. But these games brought us together in a way that didn't really require the pressure of speaking or filling uncomfortable silences. I know many people would argue these games distanced our relationship, but our compatible systems only seemed to strengthen it, if only for a few hours at a time. Browsing online at the DSi years later, I wanted those feelings back. Or, at least, something similar to those feelings.

I dawdled a bit in my disappointment; the lack of reasonably priced DSi was a weight in my stomach, an unreasonable sense of loss. But, around this time, a close friend of mine was also searching for a new laptop. Noticing my personal plight, she introduced me to a new site.

Before this, I’d never heard of Mercari. My knowledge around used item selling sites was limited to eBay, Letgo, and Facebook Marketplace. Back home, nobody really sold things online. We just walked down to the local flea market or drove around ’til we found a couple of yard sales. You sort of just...crossed your fingers and hoped to find what you were looking for. But Mercari was different. There were dozens of options

ARTS & CULTURE showcasing exactly what you were looking for—with varying prices, or course. I let myself get excited again.

And though I couldn’t find a pink DSi XL, I came across a $40 DSi system and game bundle. So, for once in my life, without thinking twice, I placed it in my cart and bought it. It came in the mail half a week later. I felt that old rush of childhood excitement as I tore open the package. It fit comfortably in my hands, the buttons crisp and both screens unblemished. I was met instantly with the old zing after switching it on, followed by the soft hums of the DSi home screen.

The moment I saw it come to life, I realized something. It didn’t matter whether the old emotions of the DSi experience came back. It didn’t matter if I never felt that old rush of instant childhood gratification.

Because emotions aren't that simple—Nintendo DSi + struggling college student doesn't equal being happy. But memories (whether they’re childhood DSirelated or not) + struggling college student does equal something closer to being content.

It’s been about two weeks since, and there’s one thing I can say with absolute certainty—I still crush it at Mario Kart.

Nerve-ous Breakdown

social media and 2016's nerve

BY JULIAN TOWERS ILLUSTRATED BY GABY TREVIÑO

Shit’s tough, man. I’m a thesis-writing, job-hunting senior struggling to eke out a meaningful existence amidst the death throes of his final semester. Moments of quiet are plentiful—more than ever before—but rarely do they offer my tortured mind any rest. Sunrise to sunset, each day is spent processing and reprocessing my choices from the previous 22 years. Identity formation, adolescent angst, failed relationships, nerdish retreats into shitty, embarrassing art—my moral investigation has thus far spared nothing. The goal is to metabolize my mistakes and regrets and convert them into life lessons. Fuel for futurity. Maybe then I’ll lead a life of will and intention.

This understood, I believe I will now sound like .87 percent less of a doofus bozo when I reveal my most recent object of obsessive existential contemplation.

Perhaps you recall among summer 2016’s moderate box office successes a motion picture entitled Nerve?

No? Emma Roberts and a thirty-year-old Dave Franco star as high school seniors? He sings Roy Orbison’s #9 hit “You Got It” to the customers of a late-night diner and they later share an extended sequence fleeing a New York fashion boutique in their underpants? It’s kind of got a Black Mirror for pre-teens vibe? Machine Gun Kelly has a significant supporting role playing (essentially) Logan Paul? Please tell me you remember this. Please do not render me the last remaining cultural archivist of the motion picture Nerve.

This will be humiliating, but I’ll reboot your memory. Roberts plays Vee, apparently short for Venus (her mom is played by weird-ass-cinema icon Juliette Lewis, so this checks out, actually). It’s expressive of the screenplay’s quality that 90 percent of Vee’s characterization is accomplished by making her the high-school photographer. The girl’s an introvert, doomed to observe and not participate. She even declines her admission to CalArts because her single mother wants her to stay in New York. Though she’s tight with one mawkish, Troye-Sivan-looking internet boy who crushes on her and says things like “I spend a lot of time on the dark web,” her friends are generally all cooler than her. One of them is even a viral internet mischief artist rolling in some serious bank; the plot is put in motion when she sends Vee a link.

Enter the titular Nerve—an online truth-or-dare game of dubious legality. Users can sign on to either film themselves as visible players or cough up a subscription fee and observe the antics as anonymous watchers; it’s the latter group that creates dares for players to either decline, fail (in both instances losing the game), or complete for a cash prize. Alas, Nerve sacrifices some of its already spare realism with its PG-13 rating: These teens dare each other to moon their classmates and fart in public—not to, like, stab a baby. But, taken as pure social commentary, the film’s basic import comes through. Nerve’s economy is self-perpetuating—like capitalism itself—and the game can’t be shut down because each user constitutes a server…like, y’know, capitalism itself…kinda.

Shortly thereafter, the Nerve-playing friend, frustrated at our heroine’s inaction, exposes her affections to an uninterested crush. Imagining a future of social misery, Vee instead opts to claim her agency.

She’ll participate. After completing a dare by kissing “stranger” Dave Franco, the two are forced by watchers to join forces and play together. She hops on his motorcycle, they ride into Manhattan, and in no time Vee racks up even more watchers than her friend. There has been a firebrand lurking behind the wallflower the whole time; but, alas, all is not groovy. The internet is bad, folks. Vee’s dares soon reach a fierce pitch of (still PG13) danger (e.g. cross-apartment tight-rope walking), and her agency is revealed to be an illusion when all the money disappears from her family bank account (CAPITALIS-). A conclusion is reached when the city’s watchers gather in a big arena for some reason and Vee can deliver them/the movie’s audience an impassioned monologue about why social media is evil.

Obviously, it’s a terrible movie. But listen: We don’t decide which works of art will ultimately travel alongside us. Most of my favorite films, books, and albums have not and will not alter the course of my life even a little.

I don’t think I’ve had so much as a single conversation about Close Encounters of the Third Kind, whereas I can look back on Nerve and find that it has exerted measurable effect upon my human destiny. In exactly three paragraphs’ time I will have imbued this fact with significance, but for now you are free to laugh at me.

To be fair, I did truly love the film when it came out. Like Vee, I was an 18-year-old high school senior whose parents were ambivalent about my acceptance to art school. Like Vee, I’d been a quiet, mumbly goomba across 13 years of education, and I was ready to stop taking cues from the cool kids and lame parents in my life. Like Vee, I wanted Dave Franco to love-me-tenderif-only-for-one-night. And, most crucially, I hated social media. High school had been a cycle of watching Snapchat stories, seeing some party I wasn’t invited to, and devising my own Snapchat story to make it look like I’d had something better to do. Wasted energy. The film

had foregrounded my classically individualist, deeply western notion of human agency—everyone’s either a watcher or a player—to show how the digital world would render it impossible. On social media, even the most fiercely independent had their moves dictated by someone else to some degree. After watching Nerve, something in me decided that I was going to live outside that system. As the aforementioned internet boy says when he logs onto Nerve, looking at his options of “watcher” and “player”: “Can I choose neither?"

So yes, I loved Nerve. I simply shared too many circumstantial nitty-grittys with the film for its obvious defects to register. This was not the case for my internetsavvy friends, who exited the theater mocking the movie.

I could have joined them, but—though I did dress my earnest love for the film in irony—Nerve had taught me to hold my ground and be an individual. Part of claiming agency was deciding the terms of my own hipsterdom; coming up with highbrow excuses to enjoy low-culture garbage like Nerve checked that box. Looking at a text I sent our group chat proselytizing on the film’s behalf, I find the phrases “paper-snowflake chain of pure pixiestick energy” and “fascinating internet-age subtext.”

But spewing all that bullshit about this stupid movie had a grievous cost. I deleted all my social media right before beginning college, and it would have been too embarrassing to stop and ponder the influence Nerve held on my decision. Maybe it had none! But, because I didn’t consider the possibility, that’s something I have to spend hours of my life dealing with now..

Four years without social media was a mistake; I denied myself the internet’s obvious utility and never reaped the rewards of my imaginary escape. Arguably, I wasted even more time, as I was forced to rely on friends to send me photos of tweets, tell me about parties posted on Facebook, and inform me as to what TikTok was. When I started charting my course into the entertainment industry this year, the limits of my networking reach were stark; every alum I’ve talked to thus far has expressed horror at my lack of social media presence. They tell me to create a Facebook before I do anything else. And they’re right; I live in a digital world, and to deny this fact is pigheaded. From now on, I’m playing the game. I told you: Shit’s tough, man.

I rewatched Nerve last night; no longer a teenage nerd, the terrible movie was embarrassingly obvious.

Like, Machine Gun Kelly, my god. How could I ever have accepted that? There remains, however, one interesting subtextual loop-di-loop worth unraveling.

For all its evils, digital media does liberate Vee; only after understanding herself as someone worth watching does she realize she has something to say (about the evils of digital media, sure, but bear with me). As I spend these last days of my college education struggling with my past, I’ll do well to remember I live in the present. Time to log on. march 13 , 2020 7

ARTS&CULTURE

From the Mess to the Masses

synth flourishes that can really only be described as smug. Or maybe sanctimonious. Either way, you know the type, and they don’t usually hit it big.

For me, at least, Phoenix soundtracked much of middle and high school; I grew up with them, spinning Wolfgang on perpetual repeat, absorbing the world with rose-colored glasses and, I guess, through rosecolored headphones. Because that’s the thing about Phoenix: They’re way too happy. Almost annoyingly happy. There’s often something sort of tongue-incheek at play with that happiness, admittedly— Wolfgang self-consciously draws equivalencies between itself, Mozart, and Franz Liszt, enfolds 20thcentury wartime imagery both in its album art and its subject matter, and adopts a generally skeptical attitude about life writ large—but there’s still something damningly optimistic about it, possessed as it is with this pink-washed joie de vivre. As that same Pitchfork article puts it, “it’s truly universal— everybody live, love, die.”

Lately, Phoenix has been on my brain again after a long post-high-school hiatus; call it what will you will—a lust for nostalgia, maybe—but with warm days and sunshine beginning to sneak into my final semester’s weather reports, I find myself spinning them yet again in an attempt to recreate that cloying sensation of genuine laissez-faire that Wolfgang used to conjure for me back in my teen years. It’s sort of a resurrection of an old defense mechanism; life is scary, I have no idea what’s going on, so let’s all be post-ironic and dance. This worked wonders for me while I was worrying about who to ask to prom, where to apply to college, studying for the SATs...you know, all that pain-in-the-ass shit that seems weirdly appealing now when held up against the pressures of making enough money to not die and deciding what to do with the remainder of your life. The hope, these past few weeks of Phoenix revisitation, has been to turn the pressures of the present into the pressures of the past, to don those rose-colored glasses again and remind myself that, even in the face of great uncertainty, there will always be flip white French dudes with quaint indie beats to placate me.

The problem with this strategy is that it isn’t working. As hype as I might get when “Lasso” shows up on my shuffle playlist, there’s something sort of empty about its sonic promise that everything’s going to be okay. And I think I’ve sort of figured out why this is, and in the same fell swoop as to why Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix never delivered the legacy that indie publications promised it was poised to. The answer, simply put, is privilege. Or, perhaps, an increasing awareness of that privilege. Look, I won’t lie to you: When I was fourteen years old I thought my

on privilege and dance culture's forgotten indie darlings

BY GRIFFIN PLAAG ILLUSTRATED BY GABY TREVIÑO

Pitchfork’s Best New Music article for Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix sort of sums up the collective confusion of the indie world by noting that “these guys are just a few Chris Martin-isms away from staggering ubiquity. They’re a bona fide ‘should be bigger’ band.” And this seems roughly correct, speaking as (I suppose) a member of the indie world; probably the weirdest thing about Phoenix is that they’re antecedents of nothing, kings of a specific cultural moment that was quickly moved on from in order to usher in a wave of Billboard hits checking in at about 100bpm and deeply concerned with what I guess you might call nebulous malaise. It’s strange that a collection of commercially polished once-poised-tobecome-universal sugary bleeps and bloops from only a little more than ten years ago can feel so immensely nostalgic, like a relic from a time long past. Seriously, those late-2000s Taylor Swift hits feel like they belong to roughly the same moment as the present; Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (2009) might as well be from the dungeons of prehistory, in terms of sonic relevance.

Let’s back up a minute. If you don’t know who Phoenix are (maybe due to those missing Chris Martin-isms, I guess), a brief synopsis: They’re a bunch of French dudes who started making 80s-inspired indie pop bangers right around the beginning of the new millennium and quickly rose to a place of relative prominence in the indie dance scene. For an idea of their cultural context, tracks from their full-length debut United have been known to crop up in my dad’s running playlist. Lead singer Thomas Mars croons on top of relatively inoffensive reimaginations of new wave beats. Their whole thing is comfortable synthwashed saccharine glory paired with faux-mysterious reticence to talk about what their lyrics mean (Mars and bandmates get straight-up ornery in interviews when people try to press them for explanations).

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, their fourth LP, can pretty fairly be called their most successful effort; “1901” reached the low 80s on Billboard charts, which isn’t anything to be scoffed at from a band operating in the venerable tradition of pretentious hipsters making intentionally esoteric tunes complete with idiosyncratic beats, lofty metaphorical goals, and

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Amanda Ngo

"As I step into the night and am greeted / by the quiet lull / of an empty campus and the stars speak / to me / Words of beauty, revealing / what is missed / in the frenzy"

FEATURE Managing Editor Liza Edwards-Levin Section Editors Alice Bai Erin Walden

-Raelee Fourkiller, “home is?”

3.15.19

"But at the end of it all, I still have my closest friends who have carried me through everything, a thicker skin, and a collection of stories that weren't funny at the time but I swore I'd laugh at later. Now, at least, I really am laughing."

-Caroline Ribet, "brown bear loners” 3.15.19

Staff Writers Gaya Gupta Anna Harvey NARRATIVE Managing Editor Nicole Fegan Section Editors Michelle Liu Minako Ogita

problems were leagues more significant than anyone else’s. I thought the only other person in my grade who seemed to really understand the hype surrounding Phoenix not returning the crush I had on her was the Mount Everest of adversity. I figured the B+ I’d been given on my latest examination on Dante’s Inferno was a sign that god had forsaken me. I was a deadmiddle-class cishet white kid coasting through a high school experience where opportunities were handed to me on silver platters day-in and day-out, and I figured that was just about the hardest life anyone could possibly be put through.

I don’t want to minimize high school Griffin’s emotional turbulence as being entirely irrelevant; we’ve all got stuff to deal with, after all, and there were times in high school when Phoenix served as a real emotional refuge for me. But the problem is that they were reflective of a refuge of privilege, and as I’ve wizened up over the years (and grown increasingly aware of the fact that my earthly problems, though existent, are pretty low on the list of “worst problems”), the solution that Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix provides doesn’t really hold up as satisfactory anymore. The ethos more or less rings as: Worried about war and death and suffering and shit? S’all good, dude—grab a jamba juice and hit the rave. And yeah, in an empty, rose-colored, synth-infused way, that can feel kind of good. But there’s a reason the music scene left the ostensibly prodigious sound of ’09 Phoenix behind in the last decade; that Pitchfork bit about true universality? Yeah, that’s a load of shit. Not everyone’s problems can be wished away with some ironic references to 20th-century European politics or a cute little drawing of pastel-colored bombs (see album cover).

I’ll always be grateful to you, Thomas Mars, for the sunsets your music gave me the space to watch.

But as I stand upon the threshold of graduation and emergence from the bubble of Brown (a privileged refuge in itself ), I think it’s time I find better solutions to concerns both personal and global than a supercazh shoulder shrug. Time to bust out some realer shit to dance through the hard times with.

Staff Writers Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Danielle Emerson Jordan Hartzell Naomi Kim Anneliese Mair Kahini Mehta ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Griffin Plaag Section Editors Olivia Howe Maddy McGrath Staff Writers Rob Capron David Kleinman Julian Towers

LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Caitlin McCartney

SOCIAL MEDIA Head Editor Paola Solano

Section Editor Christina Vasquez

Editors Cecilia Barron Tessa Devoe

Staff Writers Eashan Das Lauren Toneatto COPY Copy Chief Moe Sattar Copy Editors Kyoko Leaman Aditi Marshan Emma Schneider

Want to be involved?

Email: amanda_ngo@brown.edu!

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HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Gaby Treviño LAYOUT Co-Chiefs Amy Choi Nina Yuchi Designers Joanne Han Steve Ju Iris Xie WEB MASTER Jeff Demanche