In This Issue
Loosening the Reins
Jordan Hartzell 3
I6 Ways of Looking at a Petoskey Stone
Siena Capone 2 Laura David 4
Wait How Do I Do This? Emma Schneider 5
I Didn't Know It at 15 Adi Thatai 5
The Birth of the Uncool
postCover by Gaby Treviño
SEPT 25
VOL 26 —
ISSUE 2
FEATURE
6 Ways of Looking at a Petoskey Stone on amateur geology By Siena Capone Illustrated by Iris Xie
Title inspired by “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. 1. As a focal point. hen the shores of Northern Michigan turn themselves inside out, my Mom and I are there. In the winter, Petoskey State Park is a literal freeze frame: The rocks are suspended in gray motion in the ice, a glistening shelf, a work-in-progress, stuck. I don’t dare step on them. It feels strange to see my breath in the air at the same time as I can see the water breathing against the sand, the confluence of whites and grays and blues that is a beach in winter. We’re looking for a pattern. For what is both unmistakable and near impossible to find. For a tortoise hit by a shrink ray. For a nugget of folklore, a fishbowl centerpiece. We’re looking for the Petoskey stone, Michigan’s beloved state rock. Most of our rock collection (yes, you are about to read an article about rocks) centers around the Petoskey stone, the hexagonal heart of the North. It takes a lot to stand out as a Michigan rock. You’re up against the glowing “Yooperlites,” the fulgurites (created when lightning strikes sand and best harvested during a thunderstorm), and the Leland
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blues. In a dry patch of rocks, Petoskey stones probably won’t stand out—until the water draws back from the shore and their pattern is exposed, like a turtle rising to the surface of a pond. Petoskey stones straddle three forms of solid objects: fossil, coral, and rock. They’re the parting gift of glaciers that dragged themselves across the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, pressing coral formations into little stones with the geometric imprint of a tortoiseshell pattern. In northern Michigan, they’re a gift shop’s wet dream. Find them dangling off of women’s ears in goofy bars filled with taxidermied deer and loud men. Find them on the keychain of a snowmobiler gunning down otherwise-quiet winter trails. Bumper stickers, mugs, magnets—they’ve been bent into every shape imaginable for profit and joy. But before Petoskey stones were a tote bag print, they were mouths. Their tortoiseshell pattern is that of a polyp skeleton, a polyp being an individual multicellular animal who lives in a corallite. In their soft, living form, these polyps had mouths framed by tentacles, the memory of which you can see today in the little lines radiating out from each “eye” of the stone. It’s strange to envision the hexagonaria of polyps fluid and fleshy 350 million years ago, waving
beneath the water back when they dwelled on the seafloor, no beachgoer in flip flops around to plop them in a bucket. That they could feel and touch, rather than simply be felt and touched as they are today. In passing through millenia, they passed from subject to object, being to bracelet. 2. As a pastime. Many people are amateur geologists without knowing it. One hobby website describes the activity like this: “The great thing about rockhounding is that most people typically start collecting without realizing that they are actually participating in a hobby. Most people will just see a cool rock on the ground and pick it up because it looks nice and they just want to keep it.” An accidental hobby. One that finds you, in your backyard or on the beach. As an avid endorser of doing pleasant things for their own sake (like knitting, sitting under trees, and trekking across campus on a whim to moodily cram Insomnia Cookies in my mouth), the idea of amateur geology pleases me immensely. All those years of combing Michigan beaches for rocks with my mom, I hadn’t known that I was doing anything other than pointing at beautiful things.
Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, I hate being perceived. The thought of walking out of my apartment, donning my little mask, listening to my little tunes, and rounding the corner just to be seen by someone unbeknownst to me? Embarrassing. I’ve had folks tail me for blocks telling me they were trying to get my attention, but I would be too lost listening to my eloquently titled “vibes” playlist. What did they see in those thirty seconds of trying to flag me down? Me, gazing forlornly at the trees? Me, gazing forlornly at the cracks in the sidewalk? Me, forlornly imagining I’m in a dramatic music video? How mortifying. While I hate knowing that I just roam this earth, seen, processed, and identified, I do love giving recognition where it’s due. After a late-night trial on Zoom, we were able to kick off post- last week with relatively few hitches aside from our classic dose of sleep deprivation. And this week has only felt fuller, smoother, and more cheerful with the addition of our new staff: Ethan, Siena, Kimberly, Emily, Laura, Eleanor, Julia, Jyra, Jolie, Chloe, and Amy. I have the deepest appreciation
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for old and new staff alike, and I trust no other team more to get us through these Zooming productions. This week, our articles are also about growth and belonging. In Feature, a writer delves into her passion for amateur geology and comments on cultural memory. In Narrative, one writer details her evolving relationship with horseback riding, and another writer shares her experiences around forming first-year friendships via GroupMe. And in Arts & Culture, one writer embraces her love of Taylor Swift’s maturing discography, and another writer is inspired by Jai Paul to break through the veneer of what is cool to seek something more important. Kind reader, whether or not you appreciate being perceived, I hope you feel seen in our content this week. As always, post- aims to listen to our writers and to share stories that resonate with you.
Take Care,
Amanda Ngo Editor-in-Chief
Things We Miss About Pre-Quarantine Days 1.
Not being afraid of cotton swabs.
2.
Hugging your friends
3.
Not using Tinder to find out who's back on campus
4.
Music festivals
5.
A conception of the passage of time
6.
Hope
7.
Complaining about the Ratty but still living in it
8.
Smiling when a random person pulls up to your gathering
9.
Communicating with facial expressions
10.
Coughing in public without then having to loudly explain that you were choking on your own spit.
NARRATIVE Apparently, if you ask a Canadian or an American, we were rockhounding. If you asked an Australian or a New Zealander, we were fossicking. One website even called us pebble pups. (Like a cool rock: I’ll take it.) I like that rock hunting doesn’t require special preparation. Unlike other outdoor pastimes, you don’t need rods or boots or paddles, just to be out in the world with your eyes open. Deep pockets are a plus (but for those of us wearing “women’s” jeans, we don’t hold our breath). Stones can be found almost anywhere, from backyards to construction sites. And as a nostalgic person, it feels grounding to stake a physical claim in a memory each time I place a new rock on my nightstand. 3. As a house. The coral polyps that dwelled in Petoskey stones know what it’s like to live with roommates. In each hexagon on the rock’s skeletal pattern, a little marine organism lived. I think of them when I walk down Thayer as it gets dark, past the geometry of lit windows in apartment complexes. Hexagonaria percarinata is reminiscent of the six-person “pods” we’ve fenced ourselves into here at Brown. In lovely and cruel ways, being human is cellular. The comparison between humans and coral polyps ends with their natural disasters. As humans, when we see danger on the horizon, we evacuate, reassess, chart a course and proceed—or at least try. But when mud and silt smothered the polyps, there wasn’t much to do but let it. The coral petrified, staying stuck in a constant repetition of itself throughout time. These coral fossils lay at the bottom of the sea for millions of years, ghost towns on the ocean floors. Which makes you feel a little less sorry for yourself during quarantine. What coral polyps lost in each other, they gained in humans: After all that time in solitude, they’ll wash up somewhere new, sometimes as the good luck of a girl and her mother. 4. As a past time. In my first poetry workshop at Brown as a firstyear, I was thinking of home. One poem ends: there’s a bit of rubble between the yearbook pages but I like it that way. to be constantly wandering through years turning over rocks for hopes of finding a thing I’ve felt before, perhaps a Petoskey stone or astroturf plastered to the last page, June on loop, somewhere between the final score and see you next summer If a Petoskey stone could write home, I wonder which one they’d address it to. They went extinct long before the dinosaurs, but remained fossilized spectators. They lived during the first forests of trees, the first recorded insect fossils. Across forms, times, and places, they watched the world begin and end and begin again. We can trace these microhistories with the rocks in our backyards. If you’re a particularly ambitious collector, you can gather samples of minerals and rocks and examine their hardness, transparency, and color to give your neighborhood a palm read.
If the rock is sedimentary, it may have come from somewhere near rushing water; igneous rocks are hardened souvenirs of volcanoes. Rocks are little historians. They remember when my home in Michigan was a farm. They remember the land in this state before it was stolen from the Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawotami people. They remember when the apple orchard we visited as kids was full of people instead of overgrowth. For me, looking at rocks is one antidote to evolutionary FOMO, like learning a lover’s past traumas and triumphs and seeing them more fully for it. 5. As a myth. For northern Michiganders, Petoskey stones are local celebrities, like that kid from your neighborhood high school who was on Shark Tank. Step outside Michigan and they’re relatively obscure, but within northern Michigan’s economy and culture, they rule. Big Petoskey stones can reel in $300-400 apiece. Snowplow drivers in rural northern Michigan often find them lodged in mounds of snow, mixed in with street dirt and eternal Michigan ice. Even as a kid in southeastern Michigan, Petoskey stones maintained a mythical allure. In picture books about Michigan geography, the stones represented the tears of a mother bear (now the beach known as the Sleeping Bear Dunes), weeping for the two cubs she lost to Lake Michigan fleeing a forest fire. I’ve since learned that many picture books depicting Michigan history—The Legend of the Petoskey Stone, Tears of Mother Bear—were written by non-Native people under the guise of Ojibwe legends. These writers appropriate the Native tradition of oral storytelling, profiting off of fabricated “authentic” Native American culture with the well-known instrument of the Petoskey stone. If there is a legitimate legend of the Petoskey stone’s origins, it’s not mine to know or tell. One story I am learning is that of the troubling misidentifications that have followed the Petoskey stone, from hand to hand and beach to storefront. 6. As a tether. At Tahquamenon Falls (or the “Root Beer Falls”) in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a sign reads: Take nothing but pictures. Leave nothing but footprints. It’s illegal to take rocks from US National Parks like the Falls, yet humans have never been isolated from nature: We grew up on this planet, alongside these stones and icy water and sand. And nature has its own agency. These things leave footprints on us—leave pieces with us, as we do with them. When my mom and I look up from collecting stones, we see the icy water of Lake Michigan—winter or summer, always too frigid for swimming. We see dune grasses, dimples in the sand, and our minivan in the parking lot. Later, we’ll deposit our haul of stones and minerals there. This collection can’t exceed 25 pounds by Michigan law, equivalent to the weight of an average two year-old, or three gallons of milk. My mom and I don’t dare ask “ready to go?” because any moment could be the moment. Any dry stone she dips into the water could come out victorious, dark and damp in the sun.
Loosening the Reins
musings of a (former?) horse girl by Jordan Hartzell Illustrated by sable Bellew I learned to fall off a horse before I learned to stay in the saddle. Once, during a lesson, Mom put a $5 bill under my butt and told me that I could keep it if I could stay seated while my horse cantered around the arena. When your horse trots, you should stand up in your stirrups partially and sit back down following the cadence of the horse’s movement—this dance is called “posting.” For cantering, though, you should stay seated, letting your torso move slightly with your horse’s forward sway. It’s all very elegant when you’re not clenching onto Abraham Lincoln’s face to save up for a Webkinz. *** I was not an intuitive rider. For me, riding was about the rush. The pony I rode was named Twinkie, short for his show name: Twinkle Toes. When I first started riding, younger than I can remember, I was told that he was 26 years old and married to a bigger dappled pony named Apples. Twinkie was small, loved cheese Ritz crackers, and acted up during lessons. He was a pain and I loved him for it because I was a pain too. Twinkie and I took every chance to run and jump over obstacles during training. When you jump on a horse, you stand up slightly and lean forward. It’s a balance between trying to keep your torso still while remaining flexible enough to react to the impact of the jump. When Twinkie’s front hooves hit the ground, I would lurch forward, only to be yanked back when his hind legs followed suit. It was less an art than a romp for the both of us. We made a strange little team. I pushed him to try bigger jumps and more complex sequences of movement, and he, never worn out, kept me on my toes. We both thought riding was more about fun than discipline. I stopped riding by the time I entered middle school. I was wildly mediocre at soccer but decided that it should be my “thing.” I loved my teammates, my uniform with the number 15 on the back, and the way I got to slap hands with everyone at the end of a game. I couldn’t tell you the last time I rode a horse. *** My older sister Syd left riding to do her own “thing” too. Syd has long limbs and loves a welldesigned leotard; she’s a natural-born ballerina. She ended up taking classes in jazz, modern, and other styles of dance I don’t remember. I do remember how long her recitals were, and how beautiful she looked in her costumes. When Syd was in the 2nd grade, she fell off her horse and landed elbow-first. Her supracondylar fracture required a three-hour surgery, leaving her inner arm with a smiley-faced scar from two pins and a long, horizontal incision. The physical therapist said that she’d probably get around 110 degrees of extension back—by some stroke of luck, she ended up with a freaky 190 degree hyperextension that she’ll show off if you ask nicely. As soon as she was cleared to
“It’s like a portable baby. I mean I guess babies are portable...” “Yeah I’ve been thinking a lot lately about, like, demonic consumption.”
september 25, 2020 3
NARRATIVE
leave the hospital, Mom drove her straight to the barn. She had a big clunky cast from shoulder to wrist and was probably on enough pain medication to sedate a Great Dane. But Mom tacked a saddle onto the slowest, most gentle horse in the barn and plopped Syd on top, walking her around the barn for an hour. Our riding instructor held her leg in place on the saddle so that she wouldn’t sway with the horse’s gait—getting back on the horse in the most literal sense of the words. After a while, the draw of ballet was stronger than that of riding, and she traded breeches for tights altogether. Looking back, Syd knows that breaking her arm revealed her fundamental discomfort with riding—she never had total control over her horse. Horses evolved to be skittish: A plastic bag blowing into the arena might as well be a coyote, and an unexpected car horn is a lion. And survival-wise, this is probably a smart adaptation; but having a horse spook out from under you can be incredibly unpleasant or even (in Syd’s case) dangerous. Ballet, on the other hand, has very few external factors. It’s all about a dancer’s control over their own body and their ability to command their space on the stage. Her hyperextended elbow made for an eerily elegant 5th position, anyway. *** My oldest sister Ally was best. She had more than an armful of equestrian champion ribbons and a sleek show jacket with tails longer than her forearms. She’d wear her hair in a low bun and a hairnet—not a strand out of line. Stiff, collared shirts tucked into fitted jodhpurs with tall, sleek, polished boots. It was all very beautiful. Which is funny because riding is a dirty, empathetic, soulful thing. She quit too, just not until high school. Once, when she was riding bareback and bridleless (imagine the movie Spirit), her horse was frightened and took off galloping around the arena for almost half an hour before calming down, yet Ally stayed upright the whole time. She could communicate through touch and body language, and she liked the animal care part as much as the sport part. She competed in both “hunter” events (where the rider and horse are judged subjectively on how the movements look together) and “jumper” shows (where rankings are decided upon the speed and accuracy of moving through a course). As riders get better, they typically “grow out of their horses.” A novice violinist does not typically play a Stradivarius. So as Ally got better, she was asked to ride on larger, fancier (that is, more highly trained) horses. She felt a particular bond to Connor, a bay-colored thoroughbred we’re told is related to the famous racehorse Man o’ War. While Ally became a top-notch competitor, Connor became increasingly tense. He resisted jumps, demonstrated signs of pain from overperformance, and was hesitant with movements that he had been executing correctly for years. So Ally stopped riding and started working with Connor on the ground: She spent months without strapping on a saddle, choosing instead to cultivate a 4 post–
relationship with him following a philosophy called “natural horsemanship.” Within this paradigm, upgrades to fancier horses aren’t necessary because a rider can accomplish the most impressive moves walking next to their partner. And that was always Ally’s view: She and the horse were partners. Now she’s about to be a real-life veterinarian, but I think she still sees her patients as her partners. It’s still a dirty, empathetic, soulful thing. *** Our family moved from a residential neighborhood to a farm in rural Pennsylvania when we were young and all still riding. We have two pastures and a handful of horses that nowadays just stand around and eat grass. It’s funny, now, to be kind of a horse person and kind of not. Our horses seem very happy, but I’m not the one caring for them anymore. I know who likes which treat and who stands out in the rain instead of seeking shelter. I understand how their little herd operates: Who’s in charge and who plays most. But I don’t know how they move and how it feels to land a jump with them. I miss that feeling: The challenge of trying to fluidly match my movements with theirs while I’m riding. I miss Twinkie more. Maybe someday I’ll slap on a pair of breeches and go back to riding. But our barn smells sweet, and sometimes I’m up early enough to see the horses laying down with their big heads tucked into the dewy grass. And that’s enough for now.
Wait How Do I Do This? on making friends online... at home... alone... during a pandemic By Laura David Illustrated by Iris Xie I’m really tired. I’m sore from sitting on my couch for too long and I’ve been peering into the abyss that is my computer screen for the last four hours straight (well, actually, the last six months, but I figure we should take the tally day-by-day). I used to be so productive, so on the ball, so…motivated. But here I am, not even knowing the day of the week and just starting the Econ module I should have completed at least 36 hours ago. It’s just been one of those days. My inner monologue mocks me: Welcome to online freshman fall, kid! Normally when I’m feeling like this, I go out to see my friends. I’ll burst through someone’s front door, run up the stairs, flop on their bed, and talk excitedly as time slips by unnoticed. After a few hours of therapeutic chatter, I’ll leave feeling transformed, like the main character at the end of a coming-of-age movie. Now—one pandemic and a graduation later—
life looks different. There are no stairs to run up, nor beds to flop on, nor long chats to be had. Instead of wearing each other’s clothes and sleeping in a puppy-pile, we wear masks and wave from six feet apart. For a while, that was okay. We tried the Photo Roulette rounds, the group FaceTimes, and even the socially distanced picnics in the frigid March air. Over the next five months, we attempted every outdoor activity imaginable in an effort to spend as much time together as possible before Fall rolled around. One by one, though, our numbers began to dwindle. Come September, everyone had moved away. Correction— everyone else had moved away. After a week at home alone and a string of unanswered FaceTime calls, I was smacked in the face with a hard truth: Our whole reality had changed. My friends were now scattered at college campuses across the globe, yet I still woke up in my childhood bedroom each morning. They were balancing move-ins and orientations and full course loads, while I—and the rest of Brown’s freshman class—could only pass time with one measly remote course. What’s a girl to do? After six months of quarantine, banana-bread baking and family walks weren’t going to cut it anymore. I had to find some friends. New ones. Online. Gulp. Full disclosure: For the amount of time I spend on my phone, I’m surprisingly bad with social media. Though I may have recently diagnosed myself as a TikTok addict, I somehow still can’t seem to muster up the willpower to answer my DMs in a timely manner. Send me an actual text and half the time it will take me at least 3-5 business days to respond. Honestly, you might as well call me the USPS at this point. So, it’s safe to say the thought of making university friends online was far from appealing to me. Maintaining established relationships over the Internet was one thing—the occasional text check-in would usually suffice—but forging new connections was completely different. After the initial post-college-acceptance rush of sifting through Facebook introductions and Instagram follow requests, I fell off the Brown social media map. While hundreds of unopened GroupMe texts piled up day after day as my classmates got acquainted with each other, I only got acquainted with my extensive list of saved Netflix movies. I essentially went full Boomer, questioning how well people could actually get to know each other online. But what ultimately held me back the most was the fear that I had somehow already missed out on building these pre-campus friendships. I worried that since everyone had been talking for months, they’d be wary of newcomers trying to insert themselves in the status quo. The more notifications I got in our chat, the more paralyzed I felt—I didn’t think I could keep up with their banter, so I gave up before I’d even tried. To make matters worse, I was simultaneously hearing reports from my high school friends that they were having the time of their lives (or as close to it as they could get in a pandemic) on their campuses. I felt like an aimless wanderer stuck between two worlds, an imposter who belonged nowhere. It was only after this come-to-Jesus moment that I realized how much I’d been missing. Buried in the neglected mound of messages was the sense of comradery I longed for: A series of running jokes on our class’ collective sleep habits, music recommendations, a string of decently harsh roasts, and recurring Zoom invites to a bi-weekly game night. All it took was watching the chat’s raunchy rolling commentary unfold on GroupMe during one first-year info session for me to be hooked. Despite my tardiness, making the transition from voyeur to participant was surprisingly easy. All it took was a few witty replies and I was holding my own with the group chat regulars. We’re an odd bunch, I’ve discovered—we’ve probably gotten
ARTS & CULTURE a little too comfortable with one another (since we can hide behind our screens) as we blurt out sensitive pieces of personal information, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Alright, back to me and my couch. It’s been a weird day and I’m in need of a laugh. My high school friends might be busy right now, but there’s 1322 (according to the latest GroupMe count) first-years that will gladly share a good TikTok or two to tide me over for the afternoon. Today’s Wednesday, which means it’s Zoom game night. Maybe I’ll pop by for a bit; I could use a round of Cards Against Humanity, or a lighthearted debate on the validity of button-ups as a certifiably gay article of clothing. This online first-year social scene is an interesting world to stumble upon. Technically, none of us know each other, but somehow we feel totally comfortable talking about almost anything together. Once we finally make it to Providence, it’ll feel more like a reunion than an introduction. As strange as it may sound, I already feel like I have a home at Brown, despite not having set foot on campus yet. Sure, freshman fall might not be the endless dorm party I’d always imagined. But until that fantasy can come true, I’m lucky to have this little community that lives, for now, in my pocket.
I Didn't Know It at 15
the newfound maturity of taylor swift's folklore By Emma Schneider Illustrated by Naya Lee Chang When I think back on myself as a child, I come up with many obnoxious qualities: I was a stickler for the rules, a teacher's pet, and a musical purist who believed my ignorance of pop music made me superior to my peers. My parents had raised me on a steady diet of opera, and while they didn't explicitly prevent me from experiencing anything else, it was pretty clear that they had a standard that they wanted to maintain. The only moderately popular music that ever found its way into my house was in the form of my mother’s Joan Baez LPs. Is it any surprise, then, that the voice that found me from Top 40 radio was Taylor Swift? Her voice was dramatic, the exact manifestation of emotion expanded into space. In the same way that opera could stretch one romantic second into hours, she took one emotion and turned it into a 3-minute-and-51-second song. Her style was a slow bleed from country into pop music—a space where I felt comfortable. My daily allotted 15 minutes of computer time changed from obsessively searching for the last scene of Tchaikovsky’s Eugine Onegin to watching the music videos for “You Belong With Me” and “Love Story” over and over again as my mother watched the walls she’d carefully constructed collapse. Taylor Swift held my preteen heart in her hands. She understood how I imagined the heartbreak that I’d never felt would be. But it didn't last. I began to see myself as a girl
who was mature for my age. Taylor Swift didn't fit into that meticulous self-image. “You Belong With Me” changed into “Wish You Were Here” and the sounds of my life drifted away from pop country and into the psychedelic rock of Pink Floyd. I wanted to be cool, and Top 40 radio was not cool. Though I still knew all the words to any Taylor Swift song, when I heard the tunes leaking into my surroundings from a classmate’s headphones, I never sought them out. I had become a girl who lived and died for alt-rock, who dissolved into indie folk, who lurked in record stores, and who imagined herself penniless in New York City trying to make it with an electric guitar. Opera became a secret passion hidden in the same brain crevice as Taylor Swift’s romantic ballads. But my friends—who didn’t maintain the same cool veneer as I did—pulled me back to her. I was 16 when it happened. It had been two years since I listened to Taylor. She reminded me of a time I considered embarrassing, before I’d discovered vintage jackets and didn't know about putting toothpaste on my acne. Then a friend offered me tickets to Taylor Swift’s 1989 tour––I lived in Boston, right? I didn't live in Boston. I went anyway. If you’d asked me what I had expected from the concert, I’d probably have said something about being excited to support my friend experiencing something she loved. I wouldn't have told you that the concert took me from a skeptic into a consecrated Taylor Swift believer. As we held hands—our light-up bracelets glowing in the Foxborough Stadium normally occupied by diehard football fans––I melded with the throngs of adolescent girls in religious ecstasy. Taylor talked about all the hardships we’d gone through in order to make it to the stadium that day. I felt desperately in love. My friend had tears pouring down her cheeks. And when Taylor announced that she’d reworked some of her old music, the tears just kept coming. Say you’ll remember me… We definitely wouldn't forget. I listened to 1989 on repeat that summer. I played it for my mother, who liked Taylor Swift no better then than when I’d begun to obsess over her six years before. I played it for my dad who pretended to understand. I listened to the album as I fought airsickness on the plane to visit my grandparents. I listened to the album when I thought about how much I loved my boyfriend and I listened to the album when I was mad at him. I was still listening to 1989 two and a half years later when my boyfriend and I broke up and I finally experienced the heartbreak Taylor sings about so well. I never touched Reputation or Lover when they came out and I tried to ignore the various scandals and political criticisms of her work. I didn't want to break the magic spell I was under. I was still listening to 1989 until the end of July this year. Then my Twitter feed exploded. Taylor had released a new album! It was DIFFERENT YET THE SAME! It was queer? The lyrics were amazing. I decided I had to listen to it. I’d been listening almost exclusively to sad indie folk. Quarantine was breaking me and I was going to break out of my rut to try something new. What I found on folklore was the perfect mix of everything that I’d loved about Taylor when I’d started listening to her at the age of 10 and a noticeable lack of everything that had made me afraid to listen to her most recent albums. Gone were the commercial clang and the obsession with image. Instead she was telling love stories. Instead she suddenly had the sounds of the bands I’d been listening to for the past couple years. Did we have the same music taste, locked away in our rooms? Mine in small-town Massachusetts, hers in a mansion in Newport, RI? She was the old cardigan that I’d forgotten under my bed and had taken out to find out it fit like it was brand new.
The influences of this album are obvious. Anyone who has been a Phoebe Bridgers fan could recognize the cover art of folklore evokes the album art of Punisher. The first time I listened to folklore, walking down the street approximately half an hour late for a distanced dinner gathering, I wanted to arrive later so I wouldn't have to stop listening. It was odd. My first impression was of having popped into a version of Punisher with more commercial appeal. The orchestration is lush, while the influence of producer Aaron Dessner (The National, Big Red Machine) is probably the origin of the indie sound. The songwriting, however, is still 100 percent Taylor. Mitski, another favorite of mine, is known for writing songs about characters she’s made up; she does not write songs about herself (at least not openly). Taylor Swift, in contrast, tends to write both shamelessly and self-consciously about herself for her entire career. Her exes are encoded in her songs, her loves are all intensely personal. In folklore, while she hasn't lost sight of herself, she is free of that intense self-focus which made her teenage anthems so relatable and crippled Reputation—a record that was supposed to break free from the expectations she and others had set for her, but that emphasized them instead. At last she takes on the personalities of others, but it doesn't feel performative. It’s just Taylor. “Betty” is written from the perspective of a young man, and “the last great american dynasty” is sung from the perspective of a grand house on the beach. In her isolation, the world opened up before her, at the same time as COVID-19 made the real world become claustrophobic around everyone else. A lot of the hype around folklore seemed to stem from the fact that fellow nostalgics desperately wanted Taylor Swift to release another record that felt worth our adoration, but that didn't feel as stale as the Fearless-era Taylor we grew up with. Unlike her previous albums, folklore had no rollout—unless you consider the one Instagram post about it an announcement. There was a building anticipation for something that no one even knew they were waiting for. There was no frenzied panic about the release of the album. In its place was a selfpossessed calm—a first for Taylor that indicated maturity. The album clearly states: We have all grown up. No more songs about being 15. Instead Taylor has released an album that understands what it means to have been 15 once.
The Birth of the Uncool
on jai paul and desirability politics By Adi Thatai ILLUSTRATED BY Solveig Asplund Growing up, it didn’t take me very long to realize that I was wholly and hopelessly uncool. From racist elementary school rejections of friendship to the “popular” girl in high school posting a photo of me on her finsta captioned “hello my name is Baljeet,” the first-generation Indian American mantra has been made clear to me: erase your culture or be erased. It’s september 25, 2020 5
ARTS&CULTURE not that I’ve been isolated because of this—I’ve been blessed with a wonderful family and countless close friends—but rather I quickly learned that within this white supremacist culture that loves claiming yoga, chai, and chicken tikka masala as its own, I am deemed undesirable. My lack of assigned social worth wasn’t something I mourned. By my senior year of high school, after normal adolescent spells of crippling insecurity, I felt comfortable in the unrelenting status placed on me: the uncool Indian guy. I no longer cared for popularity or social capital—or more truthfully, I gave up hoping for either. My first semester at Brown, although overflowing with beautiful faces and liquid-gold laughter, was underpinned by the return of likability politics to my life. At the center of the hurricane of orientation and shopping period lay my fears of not making friends, not sticking out enough to fit in. I needed to be interesting, alluring, charming, and attractive—adjectives that, as an earnest Indian American kid, had never been associated with me. Brown constantly reminded me of this. On my first day of classes, I overheard a clerk at the bookstore telling her coworker that “only the nerdy Asian kids buy graph paper.” I blushed at the graph notebook in my hands and put it back on the shelf. At that point, my understanding of American cool centered around carelessness, a too-cool-to-try, sad-white-skater-boy type of self-destructive ennui that felt perversely achievable. Before I knew it, the presentation of my identity shifted in the pursuit of cool. Authenticity took a backseat in the carnivorous search for likeability. I only later realized that what’s cool is whiteness and its voracious appetite for the destructive appropriation of marginalized cultures. Before I understood the impossibility of someone like me achieving this, I had already lost myself in the futile pursuit of hip anhedonia. I first listened to British Indian singer, songwriter, and producer Jai Paul at the suggestion of a friend. I put on Paul’s 2007 demo, BTSTU, at the end of the first semester while cleaning in my room, as was my Friday tradition. The song starts with a bizarre metallic wind flitting from left to right, followed by a repeating, silky, layered vocal line that sneaks in. I listened attentively as Paul began to murmur over the layered vocals in a delicate falsetto, Don’t fuck with me, don’t fuck with me. That’s when I stopped sweeping. A thick bass drum and a cutting snare came in, and a few bars later, I thought my speakers had exploded. The beat dropped, and weaving in and out of a stunning, imploding metallic synth, Paul sang, I’m back and I want what is mine. I was floored. The sounds on BTSTU are the kind you can’t imagine exist until you hear them, and once you do, the limits of music change permanently. Safe to say, BTSTU – Demo is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard, and the next months were spent listening to the little else Paul had released, in furious search of
the little known about the reclusive star. I quickly found that following the official 2010 release of BTSTU on Soundcloud, Paul’s career took off. A trailblazer of internet hype, after just one song, he was signed by XL Recordings, BTSTU was sampled by Drake and Beyoncé, and an album was rumored to be in the works. Despite the excitement, Paul kept deep in the shadows: no interviews, no social media, no statement. He dropped another earth-shattering demo, jasmine, and the indie world realized that BTSTU wasn’t a fluke and Jai was an undeniable talent. After a year of radio silence, on April 13th of 2013, Paul’s debut album appeared unannounced on Bandcamp, only to be taken down just a few days later, accompanied by his first ever tweet: To confirm: demos on bandcamp were not uploaded by me, this is not my debut album. Please dont buy. Statement to follow later. Thanks, Jai. For people like me, Jai Paul’s story sounds too familiar. A brown-skinned artist has his creations, life, and narrative taken from him by a Western world that thinks he exists to serve their personal interests. Also, I think BTSTU makes a great postcolonial rally cry for reparations: Don’t fuck with me…I’m back and I want what is mine… Exploitative, click-obsessed music media was quick to claim the leak was Jai’s own doing, a hype tactic like his reclusiveness, despite Paul’s communications. In response, Paul went silent for six years, reappearing in 2019, when he released a statement alongside a still unfinished version of the 2013 leak onto streaming services, as well as a brilliant double B-side of two new songs. Jai’s statement, sensitive and pained, outlines the emotional fallout after the leak. “I guess having that dream torn up in front of me hit pretty hard… I was in quite a bad place for some time,” he writes. He credits therapy and the founding of the Paul Institute, a studio where he develops talented artists, as helping him to think about returning to music. This past summer, the Paul Institute quietly released their Summer 2020 EP, filled with retrofuturistic pop and sultry R&B synth leads. Half of the artists on the EP are South Asian. For many, even a decade after their releases, BTSTU and Bait Ones are a revelation about the limits of what music can sound like, an intimate and intergalactic sonic journey far away from this universe, complete with laser zaps and synths that sound three-dimensional. For me, however, Jai Paul takes me home, the sonic equivalent of that shrinking space between ‘Indian’ and ‘Western’ that defines so much of who I am. In a house with my Bollywoodloving parents and older sisters, I grew up on filmi, music written for Indian movies. Outside of the Vani Jairam sample on Str8 Outta Mumbai, the surface of Paul’s music—drawing on Prince, D’Angelo, and Michael Jackson—doesn’t sound anything like the filmi I grew up with, but Desi culture pulses at the core of every one of his songs. Paul’s layered, distorted,
“I remember seeing the leaves of the bushes waving and dancing in the wind, a swirl of shadows and light that swayed to the sound of a running faucet and splashing water. A small thing, but enough to make me marvel.” - Naomi Kim, “To All the Dishes I’ve Washed Before” 9.20.19
“We listen. We reflect. We respond. Our practice is a social activity. In those moments, we’re all present.” - Danielle Emerson, “Listen to the Coyote” 9.21.18
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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Amanda Ngo a FEATURE Managing Editor Liza Edwards-Levin Section Editor Alice Bai Ethan Pan ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Olivia Howe Section Editors Maddy McGrath Emma Schneider
and expansive production are as colorful as Holi, as explosive as my dad’s chicken curry, and as bright as our annual Diwali fireworks, while his smooth falsetto and memorable melodies are as sweet as my aunt’s gulab jamun and as pretty as a young Kajol. His use of off-kilter rhythms and syncopated handclaps is often attributed to J Dilla, but to me, it sounds like the head-wobbling, shoulder-bobbing tablas that drive those ill-advised dance numbers at every crazy Indian wedding. But the success of Paul’s music is not a commercialization of ‘exotic’ Indian culture for Western ears—Jai takes the Western and Indian in stride, and in his case (as I hope in mine), the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. Listening to Jai Paul’s music, I feel seen. Still, representation is about more than that: it’s about creating narrative freedom for those in society who are given the least. For me, Jai’s narrative is liberating. Sure, with his loyal Western fans, Jai proves that Indian people can be alluring even within this culture that worships whiteness. But more importantly, Jai says it simply doesn’t matter. As made clear by his tiny discography and allergy to attention, Jai is unconcerned with approval. Deep in Paul’s videogame-like website appears a compilation of online references to him: let’s talk about how Jai Paul missed his chance; Who’s a bigger dickhead, Jai Paul or Jay Electronica?; I’m 100% convinced that man leaked his own album. With or without his devoted audience, I think Jai would remain the same. Sure, he might still be publishing music, but his perfectionist, selfcontained approach to songwriting seems to come from meditative and creative joy. Jai Paul shows me that as an Indian American, as a person, I can live well without being perceived well. This simple realization, that being well-liked isn’t a worthwhile pursuit, liberated me. Now, I’m far from free from insecurity, but in small moments, when the racist Skechers TikTok song comes on, I’m compared to Baljeet, or a clerk stereotypes my graph paper, I might just keep that graph paper in hand. More often now, I’m liking what I like because it brings me joy. Acting the way my intuition directs me to. I’m not there yet, but it’s a big step in the right direction. Thank you, Jai.
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