Lara Smith

Beginner Astronomy

BY LARA SMITH

The first time I see a sky full of stars (and I mean real stars) I am around eight years old and visiting my grandparents in southern Germany. I say real stars because the light pollution in New York City, where I grew up, leaves the entire night sky a grayish yellow, no shining specks in sight. Before I see stars in Germany, they are a novelty that featured only in big, glossy printed pictures my father keeps on the glass dining room table. The pictures are taken from his telescope, the Calypso, the product of a doctorate in astrophysics he completed the year I was born. His relationship with stars proves to be confusing for me. In preschool, when I am questioned about my father’s profession, I respond: “He’s an astronaut.” When other preschool kids eagerly ask follow-up questions, I insist: “Yes, yes. He has been to the moon.”

Throughout kindergarten, on evenings where I am lucky enough to be allowed TV, I watch animations of orbits on educational DVDs. I sink into a big brown leather armchair in front of my father’s television, folded up so that my knees touch my chin. Mesmerized, I watch the digitized planets slowly spin around the sun while the tiring drone of the narrator fades in and out of my awareness. Sometimes I watch the same episode three or four times in a row, staring at my dusty reflection in the black screen before the automatic replay begins. The visuals stick: long after these astronomy programs have ended planets continue to orbit around my mind.

I have my first existential crisis at the age of seven while washing my face in a marble bathroom. I am blowing bubbles in the water that I cup to my face, absorbing the slight echo, the darkness of my cupped palms, when, suddenly, the remarks of a DVD narrator speed through my brain. The disembodied voice reminds me how space expands in infinite directions, endlessly. For the first time, I am aware of my ability to think. I understand myself as a mind, contained in a body, contained on an earth, contained in a universe, contained in … something unknown? My legs start to shake. I think I feel the forward motion of the planet barreling through the universe. We stand on a tiny dot covered by layers and layers of the unfamiliar, like a Russian doll. In

Illustration by Jace Steiner

my mind, tremendously large and colorful planets spin together, shrinking smaller and smaller until only a starless night remains.

I pass out on the floor.

The summer night I first see stars in person, I am lying on an old orange and green checkered blanket with corners so tattered that the threads dissolve into the grass beneath it. Beside me are my younger cousin, Hanni, and a neighboring farmer’s daughter. Both are fast asleep. Distant wisps of adult conversation blow towards us with the wind from the patio. The barbeque has been abandoned, it seems, after the group opened yet another bottle of wine. The musky and familiar scent of cigarettes overwhelms my senses as I lie there, trying to capture the enormity of the universe in a single image.

After the guests leave, I pull the soft quilt over me. The shutters of my grandparents’ windows close. I listen for the start of my mother’s car in front of the garage and imagine her driving back to her apartment in the dark, headlights illuminating the road ahead of her. Everyone is drunk and happy and asleep. Crickets converse in the neighboring wheat field as I lie on the dewy grass letting the wetness soak through my clothes. I feel exposed under the stars which shine over the entire world and, like bil-

lions of glimmering eyes, see everything we do. I lie with my arms outstretched, offering them all there is to see of my soul.

Years pass and, under the dull yellow night skies of New York, less and less light infiltrates my life. At sixteen, I end two difficult years of substance abuse by overdosing on my bed. In the throes of a drug-induced psychosis, I am floating in a universe similar to the animated replicas I saw as a child. Here, millions of light-years away from earth, I do not hear the 911 call or the ambulance’s arrival. Instead, everything is eerily quiet and I can reach out and touch the darkness with my warm, shaky fingers.

Months later, I am kayaking and whitewater rafting down the Colorado River with a rehabilitation program. During the day, I find myself caught atop the slimy river rocks, feeling my blood course through me like the murky water between my fingers and the current underneath my kayak, pulsing go, go, go. I fall in love, badly, with one of the instructors. At night, I lie next to a new friend, Emma, squeezing her soft, fleshy palm. One night I wake up early and see the entire Milky Way like a belt around us. Under the Colorado night sky, I think of the blind hands searching in the dark on my bathroom floor, on my bedside table, for the little round tablets of ecstasy that made my life worth living. And, suddenly, I am a child again at my grandparents’, and, suddenly, I am blowing bubbles in my palm. This is all me, I realize. In the early morning hours, for the first time, I reconcile my adult weight against the early abandonment of my mother.

That September, when I return to New York, I face a haunted city. Afforded the opportunity to move, I take it. I apply to an international school in Germany. There, I find a room with a long, cement balcony, and big, glass windows. During frequent rainy days, I hear nine different languages spoken in my dorm. When the weather is warm, my friends and I go out on my balcony after class to read or tan. Once it gets too dark, we sneak bottles of wine in the sleeves of our jackets and return to sit on the concrete, still warm from the day’s sun.

During a quiet weekend of my second semester at school, I decide to spend a night with my grandparents, who live less than an hour away. The house remains unchanged—like a tomb, dark, cold, and damp. Their voices take on an underwater quality, a fogginess that comes with the territory. My senses abduct me back into childhood. I stare warily at each object my grandmother sets before me. “Eat,” she says, pushing my plate closer. Hours after they have gone to bed, I remain sitting at the poorly lit kitchen table, brushing crumbs off the floral oilcloth and taking sips of my grandfather’s stale liquor. I drive back to school that night in the dark. I am tipsy and drive over the speed limit. Once I hit the halfway mark, I pull over on the empty autobahn and find myself splayed over the concrete, suffocating. I throw up onto the black tar road and stare at my spoiled shoes. I focus on breathing in and out. Ein und aus.

Half an hour later, when I am in sight of the campus lights, I park the car and walk across the cracked street flanked on either side by fields of growing wheat. The wheat swishes in the wind. I let my tipsy body sway with it. Once I arrive, the dorm is empty. Everyone else has signed out for the weekend. They are backpacking through the rainy German countryside, completing a wilderness certification. As I walk past the dark and vacant rooms, I discover that one light is still on: Andi’s. I jog back to my room and then return to her door, swinging a crate of dark beer by my side. Nights in March are still cold in Germany, so I lie across her narrow bed while she ransacks her closet for warmth. We pull layers of sweatshirts over our black clothes and don her duvet like a joint cape, the final insulatory measure. Andi fishes a weathered plastic bag from under her bed, filled with sample-sized bottles of tequila. “Mother’s milk,” Andi toasts. Mother’s milk, I reply.

Out on the balcony with Andi, I use an app like a telescope against the night sky. While talking in soft voices about the things in our lives we cannot understand Andi and I are at first unable to follow each other's fingers and line of sight. Hesitantly, I try to name the figures in the constellations. Eventually, the basic planets elude me. I feel like a child once more as I reach out to touch Andi’s hair, sleek and black and impossibly straight. It threads between my fingers as I touch the back of her neck. Silence falls between us. Supported by a red beanbag, withered from snow, wind, and sun, Andi and I sip our foamy beers with numb hands. My red knuckles sting as I bring them closer to the heat of my body. Around us, the night stretches endlessly. I feel myself drop. This is me, I want to tell her. This is my life, I want to show. This is what I’ve gone through. These are the things that I cannot forgive. But I am too deeply cradled. To break the silence now would be irrevocable.

Arie Esiri

On Naija neorealism.

BY VICTOR OMOJOLA

If Arie Esiri, SOA ’19, were to make a Nigerian sci-fi film, there would be no flying cars. Instead, “things would just work,” he says. “There would be buses that come on time. There would be well-paved roads. There would be a healthcare system. There would be an education system.”

It is this optimistically pragmatic vision of society that enables Esiri’s first feature, Eyimofe (This Is My Desire), to flourish. The film offers a dual portrait of a mourning engineer and a financially burdened hairdresser. Depleted and drained by corrupt government and rigid gender norms, the pair envision futures beyond Lagos, in Madrid and Rome.

Duality is a recurring theme in Esiri’s personal life—he co-directed Eyimofe with his twin brother, Chuko, who wrote the film. While Arie was perfecting his craft in the dungeons of Columbia’s Dodge Hall, Chuko was doing the same a few stops down the 1 train at Tisch. Though Eyimofe is not the brothers’ first collaboration—their short films Goose (2017) and Besida (2018) premiered at the LA Film Festival and the Berlinale, respectively—the work has proven a star turn for the filmmaking duo. In a glowing New Yorker review, Nigerian-American novelist and Columbia alum Teju Cole called the film “a study in goodness,” both “artful and luminous.”

Eyimofe, which premiered at the Berlinale in 2020, took home Blackstar’s Best Narrative Feature prize in Philadelphia and five awards at the African Movie Academy Awards, including Best Director. Most recently, Eyimofe was nominated for Outstanding International Motion Picture at this year’s NAACP Image Awards and will be released on the Criterion Channel in April.

I intentionally forgo any detailed visual description of the film because I find it all quite hard to describe. Shot on stunning 16mm, Eyimofe brings out the tireless thrill and textured timidness of Lagos. I suggest seeing it for yourself.

Esiri spoke to me while at work for Blacktag, an entertainment platform based in New York that he described as enabling “alternative Black creators to make and tell their stories without any filter or having to pander to any sort of Eurocentric agenda.” Our conversation left me thinking about some of my favorite things—things which, I have also since realized, are simply difficult to define: home, film, Africanness, neorealism, and the fifth floor of Dodge.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

…

The Blue and White: Your Instagram handle is nepahastakenlight. Most Nigerians will probably chuckle or shake their head at that. But for people who might need more context, could you explain the significance of that handle?

Arie Esiri: NEPA is the Nigerian—well, was the Nigerian electrical power authority. I believe that’s what the acronym stands for. But whenever the power or the electricity is cut off, which happens regularly in one day, usually for an extended period of time, that’s something that we used to exclaim in my childhood, growing up: “NEPA has taken light.”

And when I first had to do my email and write an email address—I don’t know how old I was, like 13 or something—for whatever reason, that's what came to me: nepahastakenlight@hotmail. com. And it’s the exact number of letters that they allowed you to use at the time. And it stuck. It’s a wonderful reminder of home and a not-so-wonderful reminder of home as well. The other day someone sent me the Instagram handle “NEPA has brought back light.” And I was quite amused by that.

B&W: What can you say about the state of the Nigerian government right now?

AE: A bit of a letdown, really. I always say in Nigeria, we talk about politics as much as the British talk about the weather. I’m just constantly baffled. We have infinite amounts of resources, I think, to have a fairly functional state. But the powers that be just seem to thrive off the chaos. I think there’s business in it as well. There’s lots of business to be made where things don't work. So yeah, the gov-

ernment is frustratingly as entrepreneurial as the people. And we just kind of need them to just do their jobs, which they don’t.

But beyond that, I think … we’re beginning to understand that it’s something that we’re going to have to try to change as citizens, which is what we were seeing with ENDSARS. I'm just hoping that the politicians will start reckoning with some of the things that they’re putting us through, that they hear us eventually. But it’s a constant plotting.

B&W: Speaking of electricity and fixing things, we can turn to the film, right? We have our protagonist, who’s an engineer. He’s working with wires. He’s trying to fix things constantly. But Eyimofe is also a film about immigration, yet our protagonists never leave their city, let alone their country. It’s centered around Italy and Spain, but it doesn't center Italy and Spain. So I’m curious: Why tell a story about characters who fail to fix? They fail in their mission of leaving Nigeria.

AE: Because I guess that’s life. Part of the ambition to keep everything in the country—and sometimes we refer to the film as an intramigrational story—was to keep the focus on the lives that the people are living and the circumstances that push them out. It was also important to understand—in the context of migrational films— how we are most often seeing these movies made by people that are not from the place, that are particularly interested in the trauma of this journey, which usually happens on the boats or in the detention camps on some border, whether it’s Algeria or on the other side of the Mediterranean, wherever it is. The journey, I think, is what has persisted in the landscape of migrant films. As people that are indigenous to this place, where we have a lot of people that are trying to get out, I think it was important for us to keep everything within the one place and understand that these people are not making these decisions lightly. They’re not just waking up and saying, “Oh, you know, I fancy being in Italy tomorrow. Or Spain.” There are a set of very particular circumstances that push everyone away, but ultimately, they have something to lose by leaving: family, identity, all those sorts of things.

That’s why it was important to keep them there, I think. But also because that’s part of the story. Many people decide not to leave in the end or don’t get to the point of making that perilous journey. Many are fortunate to escape that and find meaning back home and purpose in a way to make do. Many, sacrificing a lot, like Rosa does. Unfortunately, in this story—as it is with many stories—the road that the women walk is a much, much more complicated one for various reasons.

B&W: You mentioned other stories. I’m always curious about what texts—so feel free to mention not just films, but also, mention films—filmmakers are thinking about, consciously or subconsciously, when they’re crafting their own projects.

AE: My twin brother, Chuko, wrote the film. He mentions a lot James Joyce’s The Dubliners. I think for him, that was just sort of the feel of the place. The feel of Dublin in his work, I think, was something that he wanted to emulate filmically, as far as the way he treated Lagos. Just like the relationship to a place. I know that that book was very, very important for him. And he loves Dickens. He’s a really, really big fan of Dickens. But film-wise, we looked a lot at New Taiwanese cinema. So the works of Hou Hsiao-hsien and particularly Edward Yang. I think of a movie like Taipei Story, which is a very, very pivotal reference for this movie. Again, that’s a film where you are completely immersed in the city through the choice that the filmmaker is making and how he’s staging his scenes. I come out of that movie feeling like I have some understanding of this city that was completely foreign to me in every sense of the word.

I talk a lot about films that give you permission to make other films. I think Ousmane Sembène's Mandabi is that film that sort of helped me see our film. There’s a really beautiful part of the movie, where there’s an exchange of money. And the hands are moving at a slightly slower frame rate to the rest of the film. So it’s like a very mild, slow motion. And that was visual language that I used or I borrowed to speak to—or rather, to elaborate on the various bits in the film where we have people that are doing work, that are engaged in some kind of manual labor. And they’re very hard to find actually. I don't think I’ve said this in any of my interviews, but it’s an easy thing to miss. They’re things like the laundromat that Rosa and Grace visit before Rosa’s date. They prepare these coal irons. And I think that was shot in slow motion. There’s a lady that’s, I think, pounding

yam or stirring a big pot of what we call poundo, which is sort of like the powdered version of yam, the floured version that you meld and make into a type of fufu. That happens in slow motion. And there are a few other bits, a few other things that happen in slow motion. That was born from that film. That really, really helped me see our movie, I think, in a real way.

B&W: Absolutely. I wrote down a quote from Wole Soyinka. He said that “the Lagos of today is what preoccupies, agitates, repels, and seduces and from wildly different causes. Lagos is truly a Joseph city, a garment of many colors, textures, and stylists.” How did you capture the wide coalition but also intense colors of Lagos?

AE: Simply just by letting it exist in the frames. A lot of the wide shots that you see in the film or the stuff that takes place in busy market streets or in some of the busier neighborhoods—a lot of that wasn't fully choreographed. My first AD will disagree with that. We definitely had people planted in different places, and we got people to do things again in many instances. But the market scenes, for example. Or, I think the scene where Rosa is walking through the market stalls and trying to sell her perfume.

B&W: Beautiful shot.

AE: Our actor Temi Ami-Williams did that for real. And we were in a balcony somewhere far off in a really long lens, relatively hidden from the crowd. And she was really trying to sell it. And I think towards the end of the thing, someone goes, “How much?!” Someone actually asked her “how much is this thing?” and she just said a price. [She] was like, “2,000.” All of that was a genuine interaction. Someone was genuinely trying to buy the perfume. Our whole thing was to turn up somewhere in Lagos and shoot the scene and not control too much of what was happening in the background. And I hope that helped give a sense of the city, of its rhythms. But then, in the scripting, we carved out quieter moments as well because they do exist in Lagos. I think it’s very easy to go to Lagos and make the place look overly energetic … handhelds, whip pans and all that kind of stuff. We weren’t interested in portraying the scene that way because I don’t think that’s how I experienced it. So that was it really. Not controlling what we couldn’t control and controlling what we could in smaller, more intimate spaces.

B&W: Yeah, I think you definitely see that. There’s something about the film that, like you’re saying, you feel the intensity and the dynamic nature of this space. But you do have a certain stillness of the camera at times. I think that was really neat.

I do want to ask about your time at Columbia, specifically. Someone mentioned to me recently—and I’m not sure how tongue-in-cheek they meant it— but they said that you get your cinematographers from NYU and your directors from Columbia. And you obviously got an MFA in filmmaking from the School of the Arts. But let’s say for an undergraduate at Columbia who is lamenting the lack of technical instruction that they’re receiving in their classes, how do you see the film and media studies, the history, the theory playing into the student’s eventual work with film production itself?

AE: I think at Columbia the program is a little bit more academic than it is at NYU. And you just have to understand whether or not that is going to be useful to you or not.

I had come from a background working on set, so when I was getting ready to go to Columbia, I was already working as a camera trainee and in camera departments and working on the gaffers and that kind of thing. And for me, I think going to film schools was a more intellectual pursuit. For example, our film was a multi-protagonist film. And I studied multi-protagonist structures, which my brother didn't do, right? So in Christina Kallas’ script analysis class, we literally spent weeks looking at various types of multi-protagonist stories,

Illustration by Rosaline Qi

how they are put together on a script level, the general concerns of the mode of filmmaking and in various themes, tropes, that kind of thing. And all of that really informs the way that I gave notes on Chuko’s writing, and it changed the script a good amount, I would say, just having that understanding and having studied that.

I think it’s very, very helpful as well, not to go from film undergrad straight to an MFA. I think it’s always helpful to have some kind of world experience, doing something or anything else. Recently, I’ve been talking about how I feel—feel free to cut me off if I’m rambling too much.

B&W: You’re okay.

AE: I feel like there are filmmakers that understand life. And I think that there are filmmakers that understand movies. And I think it’s better to be a filmmaker that understands something about life as opposed to just being someone that it’s just cinema that you’re doing and you’re just recreating your favorite films or versions of that.

And some people do that successfully, but I think it can be quite a burden to bear when you’re just an undergrad filmmaker and then you’re an MFA in film and it’s just film, film, film, film film. And you're not experiencing what is happening around you or getting a moment to understand how life is rendered in real-time.

B&W: I’ve had similar conversations with film friends lately about that distinction. With certain directors, you can tell that they were trying to make a movie. And other directors, it’s like they were trying to make art, I feel. That was their primary motivation.

Also, you just mentioned Dodge, and yeah, Dodge fifth floor. It’s really a wonderful place.

I get the sense that you and your brother get along well. It’d be hard to make a feature film with someone who you didn't get along with. But I am wondering, were there moments on set when you guys did disagree on things?

AE: I mean, of course, yeah. I mean, there were moments. It’s so funny, I remember doing a short film with him and we argued over whether or not we should show a sandwich in a particular shop. And that was a really funny one because the DP was from NYU. And then the person running sound was from Columbia. And there was this complete divide of, like, schools of thought.

There were very few times on set that we had disagreements. But occasionally, I would go and say something to an actor and the actor would be like, “Oh, but your brother just said something else.” And I'd be like, “He did? Ignore that.” That maybe happened a couple of times.

But for the most part, we have the same references, we love the same films. Chuko showed me the movie that made me decide to start directing. We’re constantly sharing. So it’s mainly fun. And a lot easier to make movies together than not.

B&W: Which film did your brother show you?

AE: Bicycle Thieves by Vittorio De Sica.

B&W: That’s one of my favorite films as well. You mentioned in past interviews the importance of Vittorio De Sica and other Italian neorealists. But there is a quote from Bazin, who said, rhetorically, “Is not neorealism, primarily a kind of humanism, and only secondarily a style of filmmaking?” Assuming that you do agree with that, I’m wondering in what ways you hope your filmmaking embodies neorealism as a greater philosophy and ethos?

AE: Embodies neorealism, did you say?

B&W: Yeah. And in philosophy and an ethos, as opposed to just technique. You know—depth of field and long takes.

AE: I think the whole idea is just to create cinema that allows life to unfold in real time before your eyes. I was saying recently in another interview that we actually kept moving away from cinema and coming to real life with certain things. There were certain scenes that were written … very cinematic. I keep using this scene as an example: the mourning scene when, for Mofe, the tragedy happens. And Mofe in mourning—he originally, in the script, was experiencing that on his own. And then it made sense … to have this quiet soliloquy. And it’s dark and moody. And it’s a very interior kind of moment. But it wasn’t true to life. The decision to be in on the experience of this person in this situation in this societal context was way more interesting … than the cinema version of that.

In essence, it’s relying on everything that the culture gives and trying to find some kind of truth to the scenes and … maybe we stay true to the neorealist fabric of making films, which is kind of anti-cinematic in that way. But, of course, you are conscious of the frame and how removing cinema also is full of manipulation, manipulating the im-

age to make this cold thing feel real and lived in. I think that’s the power of these movies. They really take you to a place and you’re lost for an hour, an hour and a half, in a specific world. Asghar Farhadi does that so well in his movies. I saw A Separation when it came out and I remember coming out of that movie and forgetting that it was all in Farsi, that I hadn’t experienced that in my own language. But I fully understood what was happening on a human level. And I think that’s the most important thing. There is a manipulation in that as well. You are still using cinema, you are still using shots, and depth of field or lack of depth of field to get that effect. And I think, yeah, the realist and the neorealist films that achieve that are the most successful.

B&W: That scene in particular, after the tragedy and the family is singing the hymns in that hallway. I watched this movie on a Friday, and then I showed it to my family the next day. It’s one of those moments that feels like you’re holding up a mirror: A moment that you know so well that you haven’t seen on screen before.

You mentioned A Separation and that same filmmaker’s new movie A Hero just came out, so I’m wondering what your favorite 2021 releases were.

AE: I haven’t seen many films this year, unfortunately. I’ve been dying to see Drive My Car, which I will be seeing on Sunday. But I have a funny feeling that that’s going to take the biscuit just from everything I’ve heard. But I’ll be seeing that with my brother, who I haven’t seen in two years since the lockdown. So we’ll be seeing each other in London, and we’ll be going to watch this movie. So I wish you’d asked me this question after that just so I could put it against everything else.

Benedetta, I thought, was crazy. I thought it was a bonkers movie. But you know what? I saw a film that I really—that I loved. It was a movie by Panah Panahi called Hit the Road. That was it. I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed Macbeth as well. I was oddly inspired by it. I think also just the Coens not doing something together … I think it struck in that way as well. I don't know if he’s ever made one without his brother. So I think it resonated in that way. And I think that I had some kind of special attachment to it for that reason. But also it was just great to see this spectacle, I hadn’t been in the cinema for a while and I just really enjoyed how it was rendered—the staging, you know? I just thought it was superbly directed. I wish I’d given you more titles and movies. That’s what this is telling me—I should have seen more movies.

B&W: I’m excited for you to see Drive My Car. I don’t want to give anything away but it’s insane.

I’m going to end with a Sembène quote.

AE: Nice.

B&W: He says, “The artist is a mirror. His work reflects and synthesizes the problems, the struggles and the hopes of his people.” So, what are some of the problems, struggles, and hopes that you think today’s generation of African filmmakers are reflecting? How are African filmmakers today being mirrors?

AE: I can’t speak for everyone. All of our situations are so different.

I try to lean on the hope part of that quote, because escaping the problems and the struggles, it’s just very hard.

But this is why other De Sica films like Miracle in Milan are so important to me as well, because I do want to lean a little bit more on fantasy and try to imagine and depict a Nigeria that I would like to see.

I think part of the struggle, again, infrastructurally, just means that making movies back home is hard. That’s what we want to try and change or undo. We just want to remove the barriers that make making films at the scale that we would love to difficult. That’s the main challenge for us right now. It’s like, how do we make it feasible to make work, to keep producing stuff, and to be ambitious in our imaginings of our country? I think that's what we’re maybe up against the most. We have to fight to be able to make the films that we want to make that show our country the way it is and the way we want it to be. I think right now that that's what we are struggling with—being allowed to speak freely through cinema. And in order to do that, we need to be able to dream, and dream big. And to be able to do that we need to have the right things in place. And a government that is working for us and systems that are working for us and allowing us to do that. And everyone benefits, right? Like, we get more stories, we get more money put into that industry. And hopefully, we also get to change the way we see ourselves and others see us, but most importantly, the way we see ourselves.

Am I Drunk Enough?

BY CHLOË GOTTLIEB AND DANIEL SEIZER

Negative

9:30 p.m.: Calling all senior nite sluts!! U know the drill: cocktails at ours before Amity. We’ve already started drinking, have you??

Ibook it out of Uris upon receiving this text. Senior Night only sort of gets fun at 11:30 p.m. when mass heads start to show. So, we have to be at the pregame no later than 10:30, which leaves me an hour and a half to fight for a shower slot, cook and eat a meal, perform my signature Sexy Eye Twitch to seduce the bodega guy into giving me a deal on White Claws, put on the same outfit as last week, submit a discussion post, and get fucking sloshed.

I’m halfway undressed by the time I reach the EC lobby. I toss my clothes at my suitemate and dive headfirst into the asbestos-riddled communal shower. I frantically rinse my body of the Remedial Frosci grime, in anticipation of the Amity Hall filth. I know I will never be clean enough. Once my entire body is slick with moisturizer, I begin the Sisyphean task of texting the pregame details to everyone I’ve ever met. emma if u dont come im gonna kms. Amity is always packed but never with anyone remotely likable, so it’s imperative that I corral the troops.

Towel wrapped around my body, I stir my tequila-soda-lime with one hand and submit a homework assignment on Courseworks with the other. I set the toaster to high to start making my world-famous Olives On White Bread. It’s the quickest way to get carbs inside your body (other than beer). I’m running behind and my suitemates are already debating which of their three Going Out Tops matches tonight’s energy. andrew make sure u bring the fckin margaritaville machine tn. The olives don’t go down easy, but down they must go.

It takes roughly the length of the new Twigs album to get a group of six out the door and to the pregame: Hair needs to be straightened to within an inch of its life and pits must be waxed raw, all while downing three Trulys. Mask, wallet, Senior Night punchcard—the checklist of essentials rests in my fracket’s trusty pockets along with my beerfor-the-road. Hey michael On My Way! meet us on 113? There’s a word in German that means “The subtle shame felt when drinking from an open container in the elevator next to people on their way to Butler.” This is that.

The front door to the pregame is ajar, and thank God for that because half of us are about to piss our pants. I say hi to my Lit Hum nemesis, my marriage pact, and the girl I’m scheming on (platonically). I’m handed a margarita and use it as a chaser for a shot of Jäger. It’s still not enough to bear the conversation with that weird dude from my NSOP group who told me he could tell who was circumcised just from looking at their face. yeah i think it’s apartment 3C but just listen for Drake. I finally understand the Law of Mass Action from chem when the pregame clears out in 30 seconds. I’m somehow stuck waiting to pee for the fourth time.

Outside of Amity and with 30 people in tow, I cut in line with Isaac, who told me last week he would never show his face here again. The bouncer is checking vaccine cards but not IDs tonight, so I’m expecting lots of freshmen who are awaiting a package from China. I toss my jacket on a pile of about 60 others and hope for the best.

With God and poppers by my side, I slither my way to the far corner that has a bit more oxygen. I am not drunk enough, but along the way I encounter the ancient Amity Hall Scrolls of Knowledge. Scrawled in Muji pen:

A Visitor’s Guide To Surviving Senior Night* 2 drinks

A schtickle of shrooms

A 5 mg edible 3-6 more drinks

Poppers to taste *You may black.

I compress steps two through four in a mere seven minutes. I take a swig of my gin and tonic …

Affirmative

… YOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Fucking. Love. This. Song. I hear it literally every week and every single time it sparks the same amount of boundless joy. There is no greater high on God’s green earth than this bar mitzvah playlist the DJ plays every Wednesday. Anyone who's anyone is here; the entire men’s heavyweight crew team, every Barnard sociology major, and some “forever young” GSers. Someone texts me asking where I am. i am quite literally here, r u? Every Senior Night attendee has a personal journey they must follow to get to the bathroom. It normally involves three classmate run-ins, two brawls, and a minute where you have absolutely lost anyone you know. This is my Vietnam. Tonight, I’m dodging one couple mid-coitus and all the people who haven’t texted me back. The line is infinitely long, but by the time I reach the front I haven’t actually seen anyone enter or exit the stalls. When my twink and I finally reach our turn, someone throws a large female condom at my head, shouting, “Enjoy the clam shack!”

As I leave the bathroom, Straight Michael hands me a beer. I place it on my head. “No,” he says and holds it to my mouth. “Like this.” Right. He makes it abundantly clear, borderline offensively so, that he is not buying me a drink, there’s just a $20 minimum here. And I shouldn’t get any fucking ideas. i’m by the really tall guy, do u see me. Someone spills poppers into my drink, but it’s already down the hatch. When the DJ plays “Cheerleader” by OMI, I see new colors. Rachel, im gonna live FOREVER

My entire body is fully torqued and a nice gentleman is teaching me how to dougie. Someone

taps me on the shoulder. Oh my god, Isaac’s here? Isaaaaac. I need to take him to Chef Mike’s Sub Shop. He deserves it. Our sweat mingles as our bodies become one, united by the free abandon found only in da clerb. Someone shines an iPhone flashlight into my pupils and a look of horror flashes across their face. I don’t know why. This is what senior year is all about. The drinks are hitting, the windows are sweating with condensation, and my suitemates are starting to give me the look. The goodbye-to-all-that look. I suggest that we stay until the next bad song. It’s not my fault they are all fucking bangers! We stay another 35 minutes. DJ Doesn’t-Have-Spotify-Premium turns on the mic and throws out some bday shoutouts. Inexplicably, he yells, “WHO SIGNED THE COLUMBIA HEALTH COMPACT?” Scattered yelps and groans arise from the crowd. When the beat drops, he screams, “WELL YOU’RE ALL BREAKING IT!” Oontz oontz oontz. So true, king. This is our cue to leave. Illustration by Oonagh Mockler On the way out, I pick up my coat. It is absolutely drenched. Doesn’t matter—thanks to the magic of binge-drinking, you never notice the cold on the walk home. I fill out my green pass. When you do it this late, it lasts forever! I open a text thread with an unknown number which I’ve already texted my full name and social security number to. I double down, lov yu girlie let’s get lunch see you next wendfesday. I dump my body in my dorm bed. Finally, I can pass out to Sex and the City. (Obviously the original, not the reboot, And Just Like That … airs on Thursdays.) Thinking I’m logging into the HBO portal, I type my username and password into a discussion post on Canvas and publish it for the whoooole class to see. I just wnt to see carrie and bigggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhl;l;l;l;l;l;l;;l;;;;;;;;;;; L;; ;;l; ; ‘’’

Lily in the Gilchrist

BY NICHOLAS ALLEN

... I was sitting in the Gilchrist in the corner in the back there minding myself when who walks in but Lily in her leather-lace coat and rubber heels followed there by a band of rattlers and cowboys swinging in with women with wings, teeth flashing like the snow-stained lightning behind them, but what was I to do but carry on drinking rain and eating smoke? floorboards thrashing rumbling now as the band tumbles in from the white, all this in the town of Paint in the heart of the desert mind you, tumbling in like the flakes outside the warp-windowed wall... suddenly my glass is hollow and nothing else to smoke so up I step on over to Ray who fills me up and slips a pack, Lily blazing me a stare from the other end and I see my reflection in her painted nails again then back in the corner I see her blazing all the other cowboys as many looks as she can sell, and I remember that smile from another storm another place with bear stew and her architect son... yes lightning blazing like Lily behind the blizzard, she striking Gilchrist’s gloom for a moment before abandoning it again, no more snowmen, never an Easter dress, she leaves her coffee and camel soup I see her leave our life behind and leave with her – I turn to watch myself watching us leave without Me Illustration by Maca Hepp

BY CY GILMAN

ACROSS

1. Seize by force 6. Old-school school teacher 10. Bitter craft beers, briefly 14. Purchases at University Hardware around move-out time 15. Bubonic bug 16. Cum in cum laude 17. Amazonian queen? 18. “Woe is me!” 19. Soothing succulent 20. Becomes chronic 22. Fundamental unit of speech 24. Fred's neckwear, in Scooby Doo 27. Follows Stella 28. Portraitist Alice of a 2021 MET retrospective 31. Quatrain scheme 33. Generally defined as 1/16 teaspoon 34. Sch. home to Cornel West 35. Political alignment of 8chan users, probably 37. It goes between tic and toe 38. Former Laker Gasol 39. State formerly part of Portuguese India 40. Obamacare, abbr. 43. Headless Sleepy Hollow inhabitant 45. “Rough Translation” broadcaster 46. Carnival Cruises and Icy Hot spokesperson Shaquille 49. End-of-sem feedback for a prof. 50. Cross words, abbreviated? 51. How many student-workers are paid 53. Coca-Cola and its peers 55. Like the author of this puzzle at 3 in the morning 57. Like many banned books 61. “Zip-___-doo-dah...” 62. Where you might get a CUID replaced 65. Senior Night host, briefly 66. Classes 67. Zuko’s uncle in Avatar, the Last Airbender 68. Organization with IQ-based admissions 69. Greens and blacks, for example 70. Conspicuous consumption? 71. Possible cause of EC fire alarm

DOWN

1. Radio station home to “Looong Sooongs” 2. Cast member’s part 3. Econ major’s dream job, for short 4. Darwin’s Theory of ______ Selection 5. Putin’s political forbears, in a way 6. CU School of the Arts deg. 7. Each and every 8. Swing a scythe, say 9. Writer Gessen for the New Yorker 10. “___ That Way” 11. Add in heaps 12. Kind of weight or war 13. “Jesus H Christ!” 21. Directionless magnitude 23. Dickensian child 25. More than right 26. LA’s La Brea ___ Pits 28. Commonly severe allergen 29. It’s four after Delta 30. Cancel button 32. Whopper alternative 35. Renowned Harlem venue 36. One who plays with their hands 40. Conservative Coulter 41. CAVA workers are trained in it, abbr. 42. 45-across host Shapiro 43. It will hold your horses 44. Politician Perón 46. “Actually, hold up!” 47. Pool plaything 48. California state motto, via Archimedes 50. Structural twin of a compound 52. Writer Mishima 54. Frequent development between housemates 56. The Yukon, for one: abbr. 58. Altoids vessels 59. “You never had ____ good!” 60. What the C stands for in CYMK 63. Drink often separated into “naughty” and “nice” batches 64. “Your” of yore