Volume XXVII, No. V
November 2021
THE BLUE AND WHITE The Undergraduate Magazine of Columbia University, est. 1890
Editorial Board DOMINY GALLO, CC ’23, Editor-in-Chief LYLA TRILLING, CC ’22, Managing Editor HAILEY RYAN, BC ’22, Publisher SAMIA MENON, SEAS ’23, Illustrations Editor BENJAMINE MO, CC ’23, Literary Editor KAT CHEN, CC ’24, Assistant Literary Editor SAM SACKS, CC ’22, Director, The Blue Jay ANNIE POOLE, BC ’24, Layout Editor DANIEL SEIZER, CC ’22, Assistant Publisher Senior Editors GRACE ADEE, CC ’22 SYLVIE EPSTEIN, CC ’23 CY GILMAN, CC ’22 CHLOE GOTTLIEB, CC ’22 ELIZABETH JACKSON, CC ’22 NICOLE KOHUT, CC ’22
BROOKE MCCORMICK, BC ’22 SAM NEEDLEMAN, CC ’22 VICTOR OMOJOLA, CC ’24 SOPHIE POOLE, BC ’22 ELIZA RUDALEVIGE, CC ’23 CLAIRE SHANG, CC ’24
Staff Staff Writers ALEXANDER AIBEL, CC ’23 CHLOE KOK, BC ’24 EMILY BACH, BC ’24 TARINI KRISHNA, BC ’23 ZIBIA BARDIN, BC ’25 BECKY MILLER, BC ’24 COLE CAHILL, CC ’22 WILLA NEUBAUER, BC ’22 MICHAEL COLTON, CC ’22 LEAH OVERSTREET, CC ’24 EDIE CONEKIN-TOOZE, CC ’22 JAI QURESHI, CC ’23 BELLA DEVAAN, CC ’21.5 MICHAELA SAWYER, CC ’25 CAT FLORES, BC ’25 CLAIRE SCHWEITZER, CC ’24 SADIA HAQUE, BC ’23 SARAH SHAPIRO, BC ’25 ANOUK JOUFFRET, BC ’24 MUNI SULEIMAN, CC ’24 ANNELIE HYATT, BC ’24 STYVALIZH URIBE, CC ’24 JADEN JARMEL-SCHNEIDER, CC ’22 SONA WINK, BC ’25 KELSEY KITZKE, BC ’23 Staff Illustrators LILLY CAO, CC ’22 HART HALLOS, CC ’23 MACARENA HEPP, CC ’24 VICTORIA FU, CC ’24 MADELEINE HERMANN, BC ’23 HAZEL LU, CC ’24 VANESSA MENDOZA, CC ’23
OONAGH MOCKLER, BC ’25 AMELIE SCHEIL, BC ’25 JACE STEINER, CC ’22 ROSALINE QI, CC ’22 AEJA ROSETTE, CC ’22 REA RUSTAGI, SEAS ’22 PHOEBE WAGONER, CC ’25 MAYA WEED, CC ’22 TAYLOR YINGSHI, CC ’25 JANICE ZHAI, CC ’25
TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S
Vol. XXVII
FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS
No. V
FROM THE STAFF Letter From the Editor Bwecommendations
Dominy Gallo The Blue and White Staff
4 5
Sona Wink
6
Claire Schweitzer
7
Ben Mo
8
Jaden Jarmel-Schneider
10
CAMPUS CHARACTERS Venice Ohleyer
Claire Shang
11
Henry Magowan
Eliza Rudalevige & Alexander Aibel
14
AT TWO SWORDS’ LENGTH Am I in Trouble?
Becky Miller
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ESSAYS We’re All Boring Compared to the Beats A history of the Lucien Carr Murder.
Victor Omojola
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What’s Done Is Done On adaptation, originality, and The Tragedy of Macbeth.
Sam Sacks
21
A Night With Pedrose at Kind Regards
Hailey Ryan
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FEATURES Told Between Puffs The rise and fall of the Juul.
Owen Park
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BLUE NOTES Anything Goats On the most important ranked-choice election of the year. Bible Buddies Missionary at Columbia. Towers Upon the Hill Among ever-higher buildings, where do we stand?
THE SHORTCUT My Brother’s Green Grass THE CONVERSATION Ohad Meromi On looms, lamps, and Lukásc.
Sam Needleman
30
Michael Colton
34
HUMOR Dear Dante, Season 5
Mae Bippart Butler & Cy Gilman
36
THE CROSSWORD Morningside Munchies
Cover by Maya Weed // Postcard by Aeja Rosette
theblueandwhite.org
@theblueandwhitemag
Letter From the Editor T
he Blue and White is in a renaissance this issue. We’ve brought on an impressive set of new writers and illustrators and welcomed three new editors. We’ve lived up to our thoughtful, if poorly timed, March 2020 declaration that we are a “defiantly print magazine.” Everything’s changing, and we’ve morphed confidently into something new. Old hang-ups and dated visions fall away. I’m an eyes firmly forward kind of person, not least because behind me are so many goodbyes I wish I didn’t have to say. But as I’ve edited this issue—and what a pleasure it’s been!—I’ve found a staff wrestling with attachments to the past. Even as this issue’s pages burst with excitement at the colorful newness of this novel life we now lead, notes of nostalgia permeate the prose. I see our writers and their subjects struggling to let go of what once was, even as they marvel at what’s next. I admit, I understand. What to let go of and what to preserve? What’s an old habit worth kicking, and what’s a tradition we need? It’s a question this institution asks of us as we drag, piecemeal, our Core. A question this unreal age makes obvious as a new old world emerges in chaos. A question our generation faces as we wriggle into resigned adulthood. A growing-up, growing-old, moving-on, keep-in-touch question for always. So where does our staff look for answers? Claire Schweitzer observes, with bemused wonder, the Biblical ilk with their scriptural certainty in things that never die (p. 7). Ben Mo traces our changing skyline, and the “development” it signifies, with unease (p. 8). Becky Miller reflects wistfully on a time she sees as lost, when Beatniks made loud trouble unimaginable now (p. 16). Owen Park’s brother character watches once-green grass in flames (p. 28). Victor Omojola probes the politics of adapta-
tion, when the Early Modern meets the motion picture (p. 18). Eliza Rudalevige and Alexander Aibel scuffle, obliquely and pettily, in mixed blank and rhyming prose (p. 14). Claire Shang chronicles with awe how Henry Magowan built, from the campaign of a now-dead political giant, a postmodern leftist information machine (p. 11). Hailey Ryan documents ambivalent dependency on old addictions reborn in USBs (p. 24). Some pieces—as ever, here at The Blue and White—are here for the pleasure of it. Sona Wink opines on goat politics (p. 6) and Jaden Jarmel-Schneider reassures you that Venice Ohlmeyer, who’s “hot in a space alien kind of way,” thinks you, dear reader, are funny (p. 11). Sam Sacks enjoys a night on the town (p. 21), and Dante instructs us how to signal we’re “On the market for casual sex with academics, but also maybe something more serious” (34). Sam Needleman enchants us with an electric conversation about sculpture (p. 30). Indeed, even amidst reluctant abandonments and uncertain futures, fading memories and the deafening advance of an hour from now, the staff this month have captivated me with their unrelenting capacity for joy. I hope to capture an ounce of it for myself, as I look ahead to my last issue at the helm. I know I shouldn’t ignore the impending goodbye, but old habits die hard.
Dominy Gallo Editor-in-Chief
Read our full Novemver issue and more online at theblueandwhite.org! Follow us on Instagram @theblueandwhitemag and Twitter @blueandwhitemag. Contact us at blueandwhitemag@gmail.com to submit a pitch, Measure for Measure, or Shortcut.
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Bwecommendations
We all are definitely reading for pleasure right now—because we prioritize it. Dominy Gallo, Editor-in-Chief: Marguerite Duras, The Lover. Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market.” Lyla Trilling, Managing Editor: Project X (2012). Nicole Kidman’s AMC commercial. Hailey Ryan, Publisher: PSLs and PLL (pumpkin spice lattes and Pretty Little Liars). Kat Chen, Literary Editor: Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013). Benjamin Mo, Literary Editor: Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies. Samantha Sacks, Director, The Blue Jay: “My Bad,” This American Life. Delicata squash. Annie Poole, Layout Editor: Latkes before Hanukkah. Fury Consignment Store in Seattle and online. Daniel Seizer, Assistant Publisher: Keke Palmer, “Bottom’s Up.” Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Season 11 (Bravo). Grace Adee, Senior Editor: Coco & Clair Clair, “Sims 2.” Mint Oreos. Sylvie Epstein, Senior Editor: LulaRich (Amazon Prime). Birthday Girl, “New Years Eve.” Cy Gilman, Senior Editor: Ambrose Akinmusire, Origami Harvest. Zhoug sauce as salad dressing. Chloe Gottlieb, Senior Editor: Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Elizabeth Jackson, Senior Editor: Scenes From a Marriage (HBO). Nicole Kohut, Senior Editor: Giuseppe and Jürgen from The Great British Baking Show, Collection 9. Brooke McCormick, Senior Editor: Scenes From A Marriage (HBO). Capri Blue Volcano Candles. Sam Needleman, Senior Editor: Titane (2021). Joy Williams, Harrow. Kenji Mizoguchi. Victor Omojola, Senior Editor: Love and Anarchy (1973). Nicole Kidman’s AMC commercial. Sophie Poole, Senior Editor: Buying corsets on Depop. Hannah Seidlitz, “Notes from Underground.” Eliza Rudalevige, Senior Editor: R. Zamora Linmark, Rolling the R’s. Not crossing the picket line. Claire Shang, Senior Editor: Anything Katie Kitamura has ever done or said. Shoulder pads. Zibia Bardin, Staff Writer: Knit/crocheted skirt and shirt sets. Colm Toìbìn, House of Names. Cole Cahill, Staff Writer: Jessica Pratt, On Your Own Love Again. @raynecorp’s videos on TikTok. Michael Colton, Staff Writer: Lil Simz, Sometimes I Might be Introvert. Edie Conekin-Tooze, Staff Writer: Maid (Netflix).
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Spotify’s “Disco Forever” playlist. Bella DeVaan, Staff Writer: @joecoscarelli’s Instagram story. Edith Heath ceramics. Cat Flores, Staff Writer: Maniac (Netflix). Cariño, “Llorando En La Limo.” Sadia Haque, Staff Writer: Eden Appiah-Kubi, The Bennet Women. NPR’s This American Life. Annelie Hyatt, Staff Writer: James Baldwin, Just Above My Head. Capitalisn’t podcast. Jaden Jarmel-Schneider, Staff Writer: NTO, Julian Baumgartner’s Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration. Kelsey Kitzke, Staff Writer: Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body. Tarini Krishna, Staff Writer: Zinzi Clemmons, “The Suburban Strategy.” Becky Miller, Staff Writer: Anything Seth Rogen. Nicole Kidman’s AMC commercial. Willa Neubauer, Staff Writer: Benny Safdie’s son. Leah Overstreet, Staff Writer: Courtney Barnett, Avant Gardener. Wilco, Heavy Metal Drummer. Michaela Sawyer, Staff Writer: Donnie & Joe Emerson, “Baby.” Muni Suleiman, Staff Writer: Stephanie Chang, “Lotus Flower Kingdom.” Harryween. Sona Wink, Staff Writer: Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. Nick Drake, Bryter Layter. Hart Hallos, Staff Illustrator: Doing spooky activities with friends, laughing a LOT. Madeleine Hermann, Staff Illustrator: Bon Iver’s self-titled album. Trader Joe’s pumpkin butter. Hazel Lu, Staff Illustrator: Happy Together (1997). Yura Yura Teikoku, “JIKAN.” Vanessa Mendoza, Staff Illustrator: Crip Camp (2020). David Epstein, Range. OITNB (Netflix). Oonagh Mockler, Staff Illustrator: Frank Herbert, Dune. Rolling Stones, “She’s A Rainbow.” Amelie Scheil, Staff Illustrator: Cinnamon Apple tea bags from Ferris. Laufey, “Like the Movies.” Jace Steiner, Staff Illustrator: Critical Role: Campaign 3 (Twitch, YouTube, Spotify). Rea Rustagi, Staff Illustrator: Tennis, Young & Old. Phoebe Wagoner, Staff Illustrator: Buzzfeed “Which Hogwarts House Am I?” quizzes. Maya Weed, Staff Illustrator: The “Folk Frights” playlist on Spotify. Taylor Yingshi, Staff Illustrator: TV Girl, “Lovers Rock.” Your Name Engraved Herein (2020). Janice Zhai, Staff Illustrator: 48 Under, “Marigold.”
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Anything Goats
Girls. Skittles, of the Eat Your Greens Party, takes her coffee “light and sweet” and watches Seinfeld. On the most important ranked-choice election Buckles would live in San Francisco if his family of the year. wasn’t pulling him toward New York. I pictured an English undergrad, bored with their internship, BY SONA WINK e locked eyes, Chalupa and I; her, gnaw- sitting at an ill-lit desk crafting literary gems like ing on a leaf, me, sipping a decaf Lipton. I these: “Have you read Infinite Jest? Mallomar has. hadn’t expected to encounter goats on my travels Well, not so much ‘read’ as ‘ate the pages,’ but he through Riverside Park, but that fateful Tuesday still found it to be a digestible work of literature.” afternoon, leaning against a fence, I stood beside a There was something at once amusing, upsetting, dozen horned mammals. The serendipity of the sit- and profound about the inordinate amount of deuation, combined with Chalupa’s rectangular pu- tail someone poured into these goats’ imaginary pils and wild horns, made me feel as though I’d just lives. This flashy, intricate campaign stood in stark encountered aliens. A poster to my right informed me that this particular trip of goats had roamed contrast to the urban propaganda I’m used to. In my hometown of Philadelphia, public two acres of thicket in Riveradvertising is so mundane, so utilitarside Park, between 119th and ian, that subway riders actively avert 125th Street, since mid-July. their eyes: an eggshell-yellow backChalupa and her pals were ground, a message in Ariel font about not just any goats—they were Narcan, image upon image of Mayor protectors of the environKenney’s massive chin. These goat ment, sentient lawnmowers posters, bathed in hot pink with quipeating invasive plants on the py, culturally relevant one-liners, grab steep slope between the street your attention and don’t let go. Riverand the riverbank. side Park Conservatory’s “GOAT vote” Late that night, eating is a masterwork of coalition-building: plantain chips on my bed, I Illustration by Samia Menon an eco-aesthetic to appeal to organic looked into the circumstances of my animal encounter online. I soon entered stroller moms; political jargon to entertain the Cothe bizarre world that is the Riverside Park Con- lumbia activist sphere; cuteness and bright colors servatory’s goat PR campaign, “We put the Goat to enthrall the children’s vote. I underestimated the back in Gotham.” Last month, they conducted a prowess of this Conservatory employee—their at“Ranked Choice GOAT Vote” with contenders tempt to generate excitement about their projects Chalupa, Skittles, Buckles, Mallomar, and Ms. Bo clearly worked on me. It was no lonely undergrad Peep. Each had a campaign poster accompanied typing out those slogans: This was the work of a by a lengthy biography cataloguing their passions, professional. Whoever crafted this bizarre PR Narnia knew exactly what they were doing. TV preferences, and ideal vacations. Weeks passed, and I forgot about the goat elecChalupa, a member of the Grand Old Goat Party, enjoys Lena Dunham’s 2012 millennial comedy tion. It was a chilly afternoon when I decided to
W
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BLUE NOTES take a walk up Riverside and visit the old trip. With no campaign to advertise them, they were still darn cute. When I arrived, the familiar corridor was empty. The campaign posters were gone from the fences; the goats, nowhere to be seen. I must have missed the election. Down the path, I saw five posters leaning up against the side of a maintenance shed: Chalupa, Skittles, Buckles, Mallomar, and Ms. Bo Peep. Behind the Conservatory’s wild spectacle were five mediocre goats. They had no real accomplishments or TV preferences; they didn’t care about politics. They roamed, they ate, and they left. Why does one conduct a goat election? What value can something so ridiculous bring to the world? I was initially captivated by its surface-level comedic value, but I stuck around for something more. The election acted as a mirror. We’re all just Chalupas and Mallomars, constructing identities out of meaningless combinations of TV preferences and coffee orders, pretending we’ve read Infinite Jest. In the end, no one actually has, and no one ever will. I looked into Chalupa’s photographed eyes one last time. “Hungriest goat this side of the Hudson,” the poster boasted in hot pink italic font. Those oblong eyes, vacant yet content, looked beyond these petty human politics. Chalupa knows better.
Bible Buddies
Missionary at Columbia. BY CLAIRE SCHWEITZER
I
first met Ashley Kim when I accidentally joined the John Jay Society, thinking it was a secular debate club. At the club’s weekly meetings, members back up their arguments not only with the usual murky cocktail of philosophical principles, but also with obscure scriptural references. Up for debate one recent Friday evening: “Resolved, That the West Created the World.” Kim, CC ’24, told me that the leaders of the group were formative in her decision to become a devout Christian. In an attempt to use our solid, if distant, friendship as a basis for extra honesty, I asked Kim whether she could see that peculiar but omnipresent siren—swag—as a scale-tipper for those weighing conversion. “I did notice,” she admitted, “they have tons of perks. ... I could imagine how that could be very alluring.” But our acquaintance-
NOVEMBER 2021
ship didn’t exactly loosen her lips. “What would actually make someone stay within a community like a Christian one, most of the time, would be having a faith connection or stronger relationships.” Becca Seely, the co-pastor at LaMP (the Lutheran, Methodist, and Presbyterian campus ministry), was more wary of indulgences, even as she acknowledged her complicity. “People can be manipulative about giving free stuff,” she said. “We give free succulents. …We try not to make it transactional but a way of showing love to the community.” I don’t think many Columbians would say they resent religious people, regardless of their materialistic impulses. But most balk—even gawk— when someone eschews the secular consensus. A good Modern Orthodox Jew, I’ve admittedly made Christian students the butt of several jokes; they’re part of a small and exclusive group of identities that feel permissible to make fun of. It also includes men. Maybe the laughter hastened my craving for a Club Fair awakening. There I was, minding my business and rashly giving my email to the Kayaking Club, when a holy chorus of Christian club recruiters beckoned. I was hooked. Shortly thereafter, the line and sinker: On a weekday night outside Low, my ears were accosted by acoustic praise songs, and in Lit Hum, a classmate compulsively resolved every Biblical contradiction with a reference to God’s tripartition. No swag in hand, I didn’t convert, but I did grow curiouser and curiouser about these organizations that hide in plain
Illustration by Samia Menon
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BLUE NOTES sight. Given their visibility, Christian clubs make surprisingly little information available to the public. (Considering the types of clubs on campus that are given coverage—like the marching band or FIJI—that’s probably a good thing.) They’re also quite different from other religious groups on campus: For Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish students, overarching organizations contain distinct subgroups. So I asked a Columbia alum who remains involved in her Christian club what she loves so deeply about the group’s mission. When she didn’t say anything substantive, I asked Allegra Walker, CC ’24, a member of Canterbury, an episcopal student organization. Walker was contacted by a non-denominational Christian about Bible study during her first year. She attended and was immediately put off because they divide their groups by gender, which she “thought was really sus.” For Walker, Canterbury is different: a “progessive” and “welcoming” space. Discussions with fellow club members informed her that “there has been homophobia and transphobia in other groups and that other groups are conservative.” To Walker’s interlocutors, while members of such clubs “don’t always say things openly,” their politics lay plain that they do “not really welcome trans, queer—LGBTQ in general—members of their communities.” Walker criticized other clubs’ proselytising techniques while commending Cantebury’s milder approach. “You could definitely say us having a table at the club fair is proselytizing,” she said. “We just don’t tend to agree with making [people] feel pressured.” She compared the process to her own memories of connecting with colleges during athletic recruitment. Still insufficiently catechized, I went online and found group websites that clearly express their intent to “to promote God’s word.” On the site of the Christian Union Lumine, one of the most well-endowed groups on campus, I found events called, “Is God the Same Throughout the Bible?” and “Capture the Light Capture the Flag.” I thought back to the goodies they’d offered me: ice cream, a t-shirt, boba, barbecue. I also thought about attending; my mouth watered for wafers and wine. Then I remembered that to argue cogently whether God is, indeed, the same throughout the Bible, I would have to have at least skimmed the book first.
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Towers Upon the Hill
Among ever-higher buildings, where do we stand? BY BEN MO
C
rowns tend to settle upon the highest of heads, and this latest fit of skyscraper mania spells a coup d état. Waning are the glory days of Riverside Church’s towering dominance. The Vandewater’s golden coronet, illuminated at dusk, conspicuously adorns Low’s bald dome. It’s an audacious sort of declaration, the 32-story, 385-foot kind. Now, a newcomer arises: 100 Claremont Avenue jostles its way out of the Union Theological Seminary’s central courtyard to lay claim as the tallest building north of Central Park. Feel that stir in the air? Look up and you might just find its source: the crane-swung facade panels suspended high above our heads, cocooning 471 feet of luxury development as it juts into the sky. Property around here comes at a premium. The Jewish Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary have both gambled on new neighbors, selling off parcels of their property for the development of the Vandewater and 100 Claremont, respectively. The JTS will invest the $96 million it gained from the sale in a performing arts space, a new residence hall, and a new library; with its $125 million, the UTS will fund its campus rehabilitation initiative. Restoration, maintenance—these, I think, would typically underpin the ethos of “rehabilitation.” But any onlooker would agree that the UTS’s silhouette, its image against the sky and in the public eye, has shifted fundamentally in the name of supposed preservation. Image is a fickle thing. In a palliative move, the developers of 100 Claremont have pledged $5 million towards the support of the Morningside Heights community. $1.1 million of this reserve has been allocated for use by local community-based
THE BLUE AND WHITE
BLUE NOTES organizations, including P.A.’L.A.N.T.E., a group whose mission is to “fight homelessness and the displacement of vulnerable tenants.” The Vandewater’s ingress has arguably been less fastidious, even standoffish. After all, its website lists its neighborhood of residence as “Another Upper West Side.” Picture a cobblestone motor court, a 70-foot lap pool, a pet spa. If the consensus is that luxury finds itself progressively out of place as street numbers increase, the developers cling to the cachet of the
set against its surroundings, often with an unsavory cultural and demographic distinction attached. In this case, the distinction is implied, if not declared outright. In a press release by Daiwa House, a Japanese firm partnered with Lendlease to construct 100 Claremont, the development’s location within Morningside Heights’ cultural and academic scene mentions that Columbia is “a member of the Ivy League.” (A footnote clarifies that the Ivy League distinguishes a collection of “prestigious private universities.”) Illustration by Vanessa Mendoza Low’s full declaration—“A university that is set upon a hill cannot be hid”— contains a directive with great thrust. Our university demands our being seen. The development of these aberrantly tall buildings in Morningside Heights reinforcing the elite appeal of our acropolis emboldens an exclusive, enclaving self-regard. From all directions, these skyscrapers—with considerable consequence for Manhattan’s skyline as a whole—become visible markers, map pins, denoting a new hotspot of inventive demand. We are flattered as Ivy Leaguers and interlocutors in the great intellectual pageantry of our sanctuary. Yet as we gaze upon these soaring citadels, within which apartments retail in the millions, a sense of estrangement erodes any suggestion of self-importance they might inspire. After all, whose buildings are they? Within our enclave, itself physically and ideologically constructed in opposition to surrounding neighborhoods, we encounter a dissonance that urges broader self-scrutiny. Consider how, as encouraged by developers, residents of these towers look upon Morningside Heights—indeed our central lawns—as their backyard. Upper West. I might add that in actuality, 100 Claremont Still, both development teams have harped on doesn’t exist. In true commitment to the multiMorningside Heights’ contentious moniker, the ples-of-100 rule followed by luxury housing devel“Academic Acropolis.” For the hellenophiles among opers across the city, 100 Claremont Avenue is an us, perhaps this is a point of pride. As Seth Low, invented address, replacing its actual site of 3041 namesake of Low Library, remarked in 1897, ours Broadway. Names are tweaked, images are inventis “a university on a hill.” The luxury appeal of these ed, and neighborhood boundaries are redrawn for developments is achieved through its anomaly: The the sake of market appeal—a public eye. We are Vandewater’s marketing centers on Morningside unhidden, seen. But who is looking up, and who is Heights as an enclave. By definition, an enclave is looking down?
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CAMPUS CHAR ACTERS
Venice Ohleyer
BY JADEN JARMEL-SCHNEIDER
V
enice Ohleyer, CC ’22, is funny. Her hair is green, but it was pink last year, and sometimes it’s rainbow. She wears bright clothes and shimmering eyeshadow and had bangs for seven years. Her average Goodreads rating is 4.07 stars from 163 reviews. She is, unabashedly, and according to herself, “famously” a transfer, and a Dartmouth student once described her as “hot in a weird space alien kind of way.” On Instagram, she is @effervenice and in person, she is vibrant and gregarious, with a contagious laugh and a bright smile. These are the things you may already know about Ohleyer; but she wasn’t always a comic, at least not according to her. Ohleyer only began performing in high school. Secretly, it was always something she was interested in, but growing up as a “die-hard rule-follower,” she preferred to stick to school. When she began LaGuardia’s theater program (that produced Timothée—as in, “bae”—she told me), she hit the ground running. At first, she played almost exclusively dramatic roles, and went along with it. But a year in, she was cast in a scene from the somewhat critically acclaimed 1998 romance drama, Gia, wherein a boyfriend (her) confronts his cocaine-addict model ex-girlfriend after she breaks into his apartment. With the tactfully sarcastic delivery she has mastered, Ohleyer says that the character “has to struggle with the difficult situation we often find ourselves in.” It was in that scene, as her fifteen-year-old self screamed at her imaginary girlfriend before pulling her in for a dramatic kiss, that she knew drama couldn’t be her medium. The next semester, she switched gears. Ready to embrace comedy, she directed and acted in a scene that can only be described as a performed survey course on absurdity. The script is lost and the details are foggy, but as she remembers it today, the scene opens with a spandex-clad dance number and continues into a J.K. Simmons-inWhiplash-style tirade, before culminating in the entrance of a character dressed as a cat and the revelation that it was all but a dream. Ohleyer still laughs as she’s telling this story, and it’s clear that the preparation and performance of these scenes were formative for her. Since then, she’s come to
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realize that she can only enjoy dramatic acting in certain contexts. Comedy, on the other hand, she’d be happy doing in any capacity: “That’s what having a passion is.” Ohleyer has a knack for finding humor in the absurd. “What happens more often than not,” she said, “is that there will be one thing I notice as weird or funny, ask why is that weird or funny to me, then I hone in on an angle, then write jokes for it.” Indeed, she arranges many of her bits around a weird fad, attitude, or social dynamic, then finds their humor in satirizing it. In her most recent Twitter video, constructed around the recent trend of Tweets beginning with “I don’t know who needs to hear this,” an anti-masker cascades into a litany of short chirps, some interrupting others, which Ohleyer described as “random platitudes and very specific facts that have no pertinence to anyone’s life,” all beneath background music you might expect to hear in a pharmaceutical commercial. In the penultimate chirp, with her hand placed over her heart, she earnestly delivers the line: “Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” Her humor finds its inspiration in the absurd, then leans headfirst into it. It
Illustration by Hart Hallos
THE BLUE AND WHITE
CAMPUS CHAR ACTERS is, unsurprisingly, very funny. Ohleyer articulates her process with philosophical clarity. She thinks there are some people who are naturally gifted and hilarious, but every medium, even comedy, has a “form you have to practice.” And practice she does. The crucial practice, according to Ohleyer, is finding humor in “everything, little things, or anything. … You have to think things are funny to be funny.” Even more, practicing humor takes encouragement. Ohleyer disagrees with humorous stoicism—she has made it her mission to laugh at everyone’s jokes, even if it needs to be forced. “Why would you hold back laughs?” she asked. “It’s the most fun thing.” Ohleyer carries this principle in every aspect of her life: in Columbia University Sketch Show where she writes and acts, in Latenite where she directs, in Memento Mori which she organizes, in Spec where she pioneered a Borowitz Report– style humor column, and in our interview, which had me laughing through my list of questions. But there’s no better forum for this practice than in Fruit Paunch, where Ohleyer is the president. According to her, there’s a myth about improv, that everyone who does it is naturally funny. But this isn’t the case. It is 60% following the rules and 40% having a sense of humor, give or take. It’s all about the yes, and. Despite her poised stage presence, Ohleyer described comedy as an “ongoing journey in being confident.” Next up is a senior independent study one-woman show inspired by Fleabag and Get On Your Knees and a “parody performance art piece, feminist dance spoken word” Latenite sketch. After graduating, she hopes to launch into the world of twenty-somethings in comedy in New York. She’s already started organizing events and performing at open mics, and hopes to continue alongside a full-time job next year. So much of Ohleyer’s conception of humor is generous. She insists that with practice, anyone can be funny. But I don’t quite believe her. I think she is naturally funny, funnier than most of us. Like her high school self, Ohleyer still follows the rules, but this time, they are new rules—rules that affirm the humor she sees buried inside each of us. It is a humor that is all-encompassing and non-performative, one that values laughter and joy as fundamental activities in life. Venice is funny, and she thinks you’re funny, too.
NOVEMBER 2021
Henry Magowan
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BY CLAIRE SHANG
f you stand outside a certain nondescript office building in Dumbo, you’ll see a free-standing whiteboard, just visible through the glass wall, that reads “Gravel Institute 1st Anniversary!” And if you’re lucky, as I was, you’ll shortly thereafter see Henry Magowan, CC ’22, jogging to unlock the door of his months-old headquarters, brushing past the height-adjustable conference tables sourced from Facebook Marketplace, and the “sweaty towels” wall sign left over from the space’s last life as a pilates gym, and the electric bike parked in the entrance, which he rides down from Morningside Heights twice a week. Of all things, the bike is what he explained to me first: “The fun is the speed.” This description is also applicable to the Institute itself, which, in a nutshell, is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that releases political “explainer” videos around twice a month. Since last September, it’s amassed 300,000 Youtube subscribers, 360,000 followers on Twitter, and 75,000 on Instagram; its most-viewed videos are “Why America Sucks at Everything,” narrated by David Cross, and “What They Didn’t Teach You About the Civil War.” But understanding the Institute is impossible without understanding what came before it. In March 2019, 88-year-old former Alaskan senator Mike Gravel, GS ’56, launched a bid for the Democratic nomination for president. Or, more accurately, it was launched on Gravel’s behalf by Henry Williams, CC ’23, and David Oks, now at Oxford but then in high school. Gravel, who passed away in June 2021, was best known for reading the Pentagon Papers into the public record in 1971. His staunch anti-war, anti-establishment bent characterized his unsuccessful presidential run in 2008. During the debates, Gravel stood at the end of the stage, among Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama. “And he goes after all of them for being, for lack of a better word, stooges of the military-industrial complex,” Magowan remembered happily. Mostly, Gravel’s campaign staff did not want him to win the nomination. But Williams and Oks hoped that Gravel—as a symbol for a radical, steely progressivism—could push the eventual nominee to take more progressive stances, like decriminalizing sex work. They also worked to achieve this goal of Gravel
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CAMPUS CHAR ACTERS as gadfly by frequently deploying acerbic tweets personally attacking fellow candidates. Magowan met Williams through their freshman fall stint as partners on Columbia Debate Society, and soon joined the campaign to head its finances. In a flurry of slightly puzzled press coverage, the trio was christened the “Gravel Teens.” With his experience as treasurer for the Boulder County Young Democrats and his knowledge of campaign finance law, Magowan was at first “instrumental in preventing us from getting sued,” said Williams. By the time the campaign ended in August, as Magowan’s sophomore year was starting, he had achieved its one main financial objective: meeting the 65,000 donor threshold to qualify for the debate stage. “It ended up being, like, 71,365 people,” said Magowan. Off the top of his head, he added that three-quarters were younger than 36. The campaign was always intended to be about more than just one election. At the summer’s end, the Teens flew to visit Gravel in California. Together, they identified a “vacuum in one part of the left”: its inability to address the “huge problem on the right” of political propaganda, especially in the form of innocuous-seeming Youtube videos. The Gravel Institute, then, would directly counter decade-old PragerU, not an educational institution but a media hegemon releasing multiple videos a week—like “Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy” and “Where Are the Moderate Muslims?”—to its three million Youtube subscribers. PragerU’s flashy animations are bolstered by an annual marketing budget of at least $10 million. What else was there to do as a college junior during a pandemic? Despite his title as co-founder and CFO, Magowan is employed as an independent contractor because of his part-time status—no different from his co-founders, the “fleet of animators,” the set designer, and the many other nodes in the Institute’s global web. The Institute technically has just one employee—Tymon Brown, who oversees video production and happened to stumble into our interview. As soon as he stepped into the office, Magowan said, by way of greeting, “You have to see this, holy shit!” The two ducked into the filming studio in the back. This studio was the reason for establishing a headquarters this summer. Renting filming space in New York every month was unsustainable—over $10,000 for three days, said Magowan—and now the team can shoot more frequently. He envisions the office
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becoming an event space for leftist organizations across the city, so they went to Best Buy and got the biggest TV they could find on sale. One of the interior rooms is, for now, only occupied by a ping-pong table. In mid-October, the studio was beginning to come together. Magowan had largely negotiated the office’s two-year lease on his own, and is now overseeing renovations. Standing in the corner, we looked up at the newly installed steel grid system, the latticed pipes on the ceiling constituting a professional-grade lighting system. He stepped back, swept his arm across the empty room. Next to be installed, he narrated matter-of-factly, would be a cyclorama, a 25-by-15-foot curved white wall that will backdrop videos and give the impression of boundlessness: an infinite expanse. “We’re run by, basically, two 21-year-olds and one 20-year-old,” he said. “We don’t know what we’re doing, so [Brown’s] the adult in the room.” But this demarcation was certainly a self-discrediting, a dismissal of the sense of boundless possibility that furnishes the office. Before the office space existed as a tangible marker of the Gravel project, “reaching out to people online [was] the story.” Its moral, then, was that while there will always be more qualified people than you, there might not be any with as much gumption. After all, Oks and Williams had first tracked down Gravel’s email on a defunct website, a natural beginning to the campaign Magowan characterized as a “viral political marketing strategy.” And when the trio sought funding for their transition from campaign to Institute, they cross-referenced their Twitter following with LinkedIn. They found a Columbia alum who had worked at Tumblr in its earliest days; at a dinner party he hosted for the nascent Institute, Magowan, a glass of wine in, was fully “in pitch mode.” Soon, he realized he was handing his phone to David Karp, founder of Tumblr, who went on to contribute $25,000. After Karp’s seed funding, the Institute has been successfully crowd-funded through Patreon: three or four thousand donors a month, averaging “$8.17, the last time I checked.” This effortless precision underpinned Magowan’s conversation; even when he spoke of his dreams, it was with a conviction that suggested he knows he can make them happen. As Williams described, he’s “ruthlessly, very effectively pragmatic.” Next for the Institute is establishing a 501(c)(3)
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Illustration by Brooke McCormick
CAMPUS CHAR ACTERS
charity—the Gravel Institute Foundation, or “TGIF,” Magowan pointed out, smiling before he even got the letters out. In high school, a bulk of Magowan’s political work was spent registering young people to vote, and his obsession with sustainable political actions continues to this day. The projection is that tax-deductible charitable donations will allow the Institute to scale up its video-making capacity. Ambitiously, Magowan wants to release 100 videos this year. Or, “at the very least, one video a week.” The Institute has started releasing short documentaries alongside their animated explainers. In April, the three co-founders went to Quito for eight days, bringing one sound guy and a professional documentarian. It was finals week; it was also the Ecuadorian presidential election. Progressive International, the group that invited them, assembled an election-observing team, and Magowan found himself effectively embedded into the headquarters of Andrés Arauz, the socialist candidate. He taught himself how to use a camera to avoid having to bring another contractor on the trip, and practiced the Spanish he grew up speaking with his Nicaraguan mother. Now, he wants to travel more: to Spain, to film a video on Mondragón, the world’s largest co-op, as “a different way of life to the financialized industrial capitalism that we experience today”; to Portugal, to document the country’s campaign to legalize all drugs, which was a Gravel campaign policy. One day, he wants to retrace Che Guevara’s solo motorbike trip from Argentina to Peru—he already has the bike, af-
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ter all. “I always have stuff going on in the background,” he said at one point, ever the “entrepreneur.” And Gravel himself largely understood this. “He recognized that there was some sort of transaction going on, where he was getting one last hurrah and we were getting to use his name,” said Magowan. But at the same time, “it wasn’t that simple.” After two years of collaboration, Williams referred to Gravel as a “surrogate grandpa.” Magowan described him as a mentor, a friend, and, most of all, a genuine hero. His hands remained in front of his body, fingers interlocked, for much of our two-hour conversation. By his side sat his water bottle, adorned with just two stickers: a Columbia crown and a fading Gravel Institute logo. “All I’ve ever known is doing both at the same time,” he said, when I attempted to suggest that the campaign and Institute had monopolized his college experience. It’s easy to be startled by all Magowan has already done, but from the start, he’s been thinking of all that he has yet to do. He has a tattoo on his arm with a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. He got it with two of his high school English teachers when he went home for his first winter break; they were in a book club together. The line is delivered by Billy’s mom, bedridden with pneumonia, who asks in a moment of rare self-awareness, “How did I get so old?” But for Magowan, far from regretful, the quote is a permanent reminder that he will never stop moving.
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AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N GT H
Am I In Trouble?
the consequences of your actions, but this level of maleficence is a new low, even for somebody who owns seven ridiculously small dogs and two ridiculously large horses. It is a no bones day, and I am not mentally BY ELIZA RUDALEVIGE equipped to deal with such betrayal. What did you do, you ask? What did you do??? o, you’re not in trouble. I mean, that depends on what your definition of “trouble” is. Do It’s more about what you didn’t do—which is conyour actions practically guarantee that every time sider my feelings at all when you decided to throw I encounter your weaselly little form henceforth, our sacred bond to the wolves. And these wolves I’ll have the urge to lean over and vom all over are being kept on a Greek yogurt-only diet in a my thrifted-vintage-Y2K-officecore patent leather zoo in Greenwich, Connecticut, so they’re really chunky loafers? Yes! But if you get really nitpicky fucking hungry. They’re gobbling up our hardearned friendship like they’re mentally ill and our with— What was that? Okay, fine, I got the loafers at memories are a bag of Takis—nay, like they’re bisexual and the crystal deZara. But really, there is pot is having a clearance no ethical consumption sale. They’re ravaging the under capitalism, so I’m hallowed halls of our intiin the clear. And anymate alliance with the feways, we were talking rocity of a scorned soprano about YOU. II. How could you throw As I was saying, beaway the times you sat on fore I was interruptmy shoulders wearing a ed by an incompetent trench coat so we could rat-person with the both sneak into EC? Or the reading comprehension time we built an impenlevel of the Riverside etrable, bean-y smelling raccoons—although, fort out of all the unwanted actually, I think that’s veggie burgers at JJ’s? Or giving too little credit to the time that we crashed the raccoons. I once saw Deantini’s retirement party a particularly chunky by bursting out of a threespecimen steal Ottestiered carrot cake and sa Moshfegh’s newest releasing a live lion cub? novel from a homie Oh shit, you’re right, that with a wolf cut. I bet those fuzzy little ninIllustration by Oonagh Mockler hasn’t happened. Yet. No, you’re not in troucompoops have a better grasp on the unhinged feminist canon than my ble. I’m just disappointed, really. Jesus fucking Republican ex-boyfriend ever will. And better Christ—I was confirmed in the eighth grade, so I can say that—I am DISAPPOINTED. We’re oral hygiene. As I was SAYING, you’re not in trouble. Un- talking freshman-getting-their-first-B-on-a-paless you think that me unconditionally ending our per disappointed. No, freshman-getting-theirfriendship is the same thing as being in trouble, first-B-on-a-paper-and-quickly-realizing-thatwhich you obviously don’t. That would imply that nobody-wants-to-hear-them-whine-about-it you had a crumb of esteem for my companionship disappointed. Oh my god, I am John-Jay-diningin the first place. As it stands, I’m getting about as hall-smoothie disappointed. You are my fourth much respect as season-one Paris Geller. I mean, least favorite person in the world right now, after really, how could you? I know that you grew up Lil Huddy, Amber Heard, and whoever was rein Westchester and have never once experienced sponsible for the demise of Club Penguin.
Negative
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AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N GT H Nope. You’re still not in trouble. I am actually being very reasonable about this, so stop gaslighting me. Honestly, you’re being so crazy right now. Take a chill pill. I have a value size pack of NyQuil Liqui-Gels in my canvas tote if you need to borrow one. Of course, that will only increase the value of our sizable interpersonal debt. Now that we aren’t friends anymore, you have to start paying for your drugs. And my drugs! Wait, I’m getting carried away. You don’t have to support my ironic budding opium habit, but I am still mad at you. I have an underwater Peloton/dialectical behavioral therapy session in seven and a half minutes, so I have to go squeeze myself into a purple latex scuba suit. And no, you can’t join, because it’s happening in Dodge, and we all know that you don’t have a green pass. And don’t you DARE do that thing where you write a long poem because you feel butthurt and excluded. An AB rhyme scheme cannot solve all of your problems! Not with that attitude! No. This is a private lesson with me, myself, and my remaining dignity. Alexa, play “Better Than Revenge.
Affirmative BY ALEXANDER AIBEL
W
ell, my time has come. My time has come, and I am done, I don’t think I’ll ever see the sun. It’s been a while since I started this run, no pun, it’s not fun, but I am definitely done. I messed up. I surely did. I can’t even say, “But I’m a kid!” The jig is up, the chase hath ended. I must surrender, and get this situation mended. I’m usually better, and don’t mess up. I never end up being a schmuck. I have excuses, I really do! That guy in my class inspired me to! Peer pressure did it, ’twas not I. I couldn’t so much as hurt a fly. So why are they after me, hunting me down? I must be in trouble, they chase me like hounds. Now let me zoom out, and tell you ’bout myself. Trouble didn’t always find me without much help. “A pleasure in class!” my teachers said, and now they probably wish I was dead! I tried so hard just to mind my business, but now I’m in trouble—so says some witness. See, I’m just like the rest of those pests who find
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trouble. I’d finally escaped that goody-two-shoes bubble. Everything was great, even last week. Every living second felt like a treat. There was no cause for worry, nothing made me hurry. I didn’t have scurvy, nor feel unworthy. But now they’re after me. The chase is on. I definitely fucked up—no help, even from Mom. I hate consequences, I really do! I would rather go to the zoo (and I HATE the zoo). I hate seeing animals locked up in the Zoo; they should definitely be free roaming in their natural habitat. And SeaWorld sucks. Okay, okay, I might admit it. But when you hear my complaints, you’ll vote to acquit it. “Aibel didn’t do it!” you will chant, so I hope. But, right now, I just don’t know how to cope. For I am in trouble, oh how did I get here. My heart is broken, just like King Lear. What did I do? Why am I screwed? Did I really go out of my way to deserve all this pursuit? At this point you’re likely wondering what I did. Did I take my car and hit a kid? Did I rip off a teenager and sell some mids? Did I participate in the Squid Game? (No, this is not a game, and no, I am not doing this for fame, but for sure, I am most definitely lame.) I need to vent about my troubles. I wish I were still my old self—so lovable! Oh, it’s over, my time is up. I can no longer run amuck. It’s been a good ride, and I’m a youthful 20, but life won’t be the same, though I think I’ll live plenty. For now I’m tainted, unholy, impure. My heart is aching, I want to stroke my dog’s fur. I’ve said I’m sorry three or four times—now what do I do? Just sit here and cry? I hate being in trouble, it’s really no fun, but you still don’t know what it is that I’ve done. Okay, I’ll tell you—keep it on the down low, because I’m not looking for any new foes. You threatened to rat me out! But I always fall on my sword. I don’t get why you’re doing this— will you get an award? Now, I’ll confess, I promise I will, but please don’t judge me, for this is no thrill. Just kidding, I can’t, I don’t know what I did. I hath not manipulated toys like my name is Syd. I did not repeatedly call you Stupid. You questioned what I didn’t do, but what did I do? Because it seems our friendship is over, laid to rest like DJ Screw (RIP).
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E S S AY S
We’re All Boring Compared to the Beats A history of the Lucien Carr murder.
BY BECKY MILLER
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trolling down Broadway, Panda Express leftovers in hand, I stopped at the book stand on 114th to scour the selection. My eyes caught a familiar title. “Naked Lunch!” I cried, perhaps too loudly, searching for someone, anyone who cared that I had read all the great Beat novels in high school. The woman behind the stand perked up. She wore a lot of scarves. “Those crazy Beats started out right in this very spot,” she said. “You know, the Lucien Carr murder happened just one block away from here.” That sounded interesting—I wanted to know more. Careful to conceal my ignorance, I replied, “Oh yes, the murder, I have known of it for some time, but I could use a refresher.” Her eyes lit up at my interest. Before I knew it, she was unravelling the details of that hot August night in 1944, nodding to the shop across the road, gesturing west toward Riverside Park, and tossing me up to 125th Street. Restless and bored during a sweltering summer, Lucien Carr and Jack Kerouac went out drinking. This was a typical outing for the pair, who lived and socialized in Morningside Heights with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Carr was at the center of the social circle. As Ginsberg famously put it, “Lou was the glue.” The air was heavy, the sky dark. Carr and Kerouac were sweaty, disappointed, and planning to drink themselves silly. Although they had planned a maritime odyssey across the Atlantic to Paris—where they would retrace the steps of Arthur Rimbaud and wander across Europe—the pair found themselves still kicking around Columbia. Their dreams kept them up late the night before, and by the time they reached the docks, the boat had embarked without them. So, that night, instead of crossing the Atlantic, Kerouac, the restless dropout of both the U.S. Navy and Columbia, and Lucien Carr, an idealistic, charming College sophomore, nursed a pint or two. The West End—now the board game café Hex & Co. on 114th and Broadway—was the 1020 of the 1940s: the hangout spot for revolutionaries. After a couple hours of shit-shooting, Kerouac paid his
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tab and walked uptown, past Low steps and toward his girlfriend’s apartment on Amsterdam. Crossing campus, he ran into an old friend of Carr’s, the 32-year-old David Kammerer. Kammerer asked for Carr, and Kerouac pointed him to The West End. “And I watch him rush off to his death,” Kerouac later wrote in his autobiographical novel, Vanity of Duluoz. Kammerer found Carr and they drank together until 2 a.m., before the two, thirteen years apart in age, stumbled over to 115th and Riverside. Formerly Lucien’s Boy Scout troop leader, Kammerer had followed Carr from St. Louis to the University of Chicago to Columbia. He was working as a janitor in New York and on the fringes of Carr’s circle of friends. Back in Missouri, Kammerer had taken Carr under his wing, mentoring him in literature and in life. To the casual observer, the two seemed close. But, over time, Kammerer had developed an intense attachment to Carr, and now grew increasingly anxious at the idea of losing him to the merchant marines and a lifetime of adventure. Lying in Riverside under the summer moonlight, Kammerer made what the New York Times later reported as an “offensive proposal.” Carr refused his advances and a physical fight ensued. The scrawny sophomore was reportedly losing until, in an act framed by Carr’s lawyers as self-defense, Carr stabbed Kammerer twice in the chest with his Boy Scout knife. Some, like the bookstand owner on 114th, claim that these two swift jabs gave birth to the Beat generation. That Carr’s blunt knife was the source of all of the boundless cross-country drives, the morphine- and benzedrine-induced midnight walks through strange cities, the pages and pages of typed words—all of the revolutionary thought, born of that night. In the immediate aftermath, Carr, unaware if anyone had witnessed the murder, frantically covered his tracks. He used Kammerer’s shoelaces to tie his hands and feet together, weighted his dead body with rocks, and pushed his former Boy Scout leader
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a ne s ion by V t a r t s u Ill
doza sa Men
into the Hudson. Running on adrenaline, Carr ran to wake up William Burroughs, another old buddy from St. Louis, and then Kerouac. Having enlisted their help, Carr buried Kammerer’s glasses in Morningside Park. The men then ventured to 125th Street and disposed of the bloodied knife in a subway grate. Kerouac and Carr, two aspiring seamen landlocked by Manhattan, wandered the island that morning. They stopped at MoMA, bought hot dogs in Times Square, and went to the cinema to see The Four Feathers, a 1939 British war adventure about honor and weakness. The two friends procrastinated, tried to prolong their independence, their youthful license to fun, before Carr turned himself in to the district attorney. The defense painted the murder as a sort of honor killing, arguing that the young, handsome, sharp Carr was stalked and pursued by the disturbed, relentless Kammerer. This logic, eagerly bought by the jury, earned Lucien Carr only two years in the Elmira Correctional Facility upstate. The day following Carr’s confession, Kerouac and Burroughs were also arrested as material witnesses. Burroughs’s wealthy father came to New York to bail him out, while Ker-
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ouac’s family refused. The judge would not allow his girlfriend to pay his bail unless the two got married, which they did, on August 22, 1944. After the woman at the bookstand finished the story, I thanked her and continued walking, but her enthusiasm lingered in my mind for weeks. Carr’s generation had inspired her, and her fervor inspired me, so I continued retracing Carr’s impact on the Beats after the friends’ paths parted. While Carr was in jail, reading poetry in his cell, Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg began their careers as literary giants and bohemian nomads. Kerouac embarked on his nationwide expedition that inspired On the Road. Ginsberg graduated from Columbia and was promptly sent to a mental institution. Burroughs moved to Mexico City. They were scattered across the hemisphere, no longer drinking and fighting and philosophizing in Morningside Heights. All four men attracted danger—in 1951, Burroughs shot his wife, although he claims it was an accident. Carr, on the other hand, completed his two-year sentence and began a nearly 50-year career at United Press International, rising from copyboy to news editor. He faded from the public eye and
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E S S AY S lived comfortably in SoHo with his wife while his college buddies raged at the epicenter of American counterculture. On a recent trip to the Butler stacks, I read through postcards, letters, and poems written from Kerouac and Ginsberg to Carr between 1957 to 1975. They clearly loved each other. In one letter, Kerouac, keeping Carr in the loop from his stable SoHo perch, began the note, “Dear Lou, Just a love tap, old boy” and signed off as “Jackiboo.” In another, Kerouac, bored of writing and meditating in the woods, admits, “sometimes I wish I was in NY where I could drink wine with you … must say, if it hadn’t been for your kindness and cheerful hospitality and et al that last trip of mine to NY would have been a gloomy bust.” Ginsberg and Kerouac’s correspondence detailed all of their quotidian doubts and musings: one of them wrote a play but didn’t know if it was any good, someone missed this friend or that one, someone wished there was more money to travel. “Life sure is weird and inevitable,” Ginsberg wrote Carr from Amsterdam in 1957. Though he evolved into a literary and cultural behemoth, during this period, Ginsberg was spending what little money he had from Howl’s sales to hop between
Morocco, Chile, England, and Paris. In all of the letters I read, there was no mention of Carr’s sentence, or of Kammerer. The four were just Columbians on a lifelong, desperate search for adventure. And all along, their friends from Morningside Heights remained dear, even as they shaped a generation’s culture with their passion, unorthodoxy, and violence. It seems like they had fun. And although I do not condone stabbing or shooting your wife, I somehow find myself nostalgic for the kind of excitement these men experienced in their college years. Especially now, feeling so sheltered and isolated after a year of college from under the covers, dropping out and becoming a merchant seaman doesn’t sound so bad. At least I’d get to sail the seas. Legend has it that Carr sprayed his roommates’ rooms with a firehose while they were sleeping. Once, when a friend asked why he was carrying a jar of jam across campus, he replied that he was “going on a date.” Ginsberg wrote in his journal, “Know these words, and you speak the Carr language: fruit, phallus, clitoris, cacoethes, feces, foetus, womb, Rimbaud.” From thence, the Beats. As Ginsberg wrote Carr, “Life sure is weird and inevitable.”
What’s Done Is Done
On adaptation, originality, and The Tragedy of Macbeth. BY VICTOR OMOJOLA
F
ollowing an all-student screening of The Tragedy of Macbeth at the 2021 New York Film Festival was a brief Q&A session. Before asking their question, one audience member raised their hand and eagerly shared that they and the student sitting at their side had just finished filming their first feature-length film. They made sure to add that they were from Minnesota and that they had financed their project independently. Minutes prior, the Q&A’s two respondents, Frances McDormand and Joel Coen, had entered the room as opposites. McDormand, the film’s Lady Macbeth and one of its producers, practically danced onto the stage while Coen, directing his first ever film without his brother, maintained a muted disposition. Still, Coen’s excitement at the words of the young filmmaker hailing from his home state
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was unmistakable. He responded with a reference to his own first feature film, which his then-girlfriend, McDormand, also starred in. He smiled while recounting a particular episode in which he and his collaborators, driving around Minnesota, looking for potential investors, fell victim to the notorious midwestern winter. Skidding on a patch of ice, their car hit a vehicle parked in the driveway of the house they were approaching. This provoked an intense discussion about whether to inform the homeowner of their blunder before or after asking for money. Blood Simple (1984), he explained, was crowdfunded, and he was thrilled to hear that today, nearly four decades later, films could still be made in such a manner. Coen’s elation is understandable considering the commercial structure, past and present, of the
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E S S AY S film industry, in which burgeoning filmmakers live at the mercy of a few large corporations. The standard of vertical integration used by streaming services like Netflix and Amazon only increases the imbalance in this system. And of course, the never-ending discourse surrounding the blockbuster film franchise, often centered around the opinions of Martin Scorcese, is enough to make any cinephile want to scream in a fit of madness rivalling that of Macbeth’s titular character. Such debates coexist with a slightly more nuanced phenomenon: the prevalence of adaptations over original screenplays. Indeed, just as market-tested, profit-driven Marvel epics dominate Hollywood at the expense of smaller-budget, art house films, the adaptation maintains a firm grip on the film industry. This begs the question many critics have pondered after seeing The Tragedy of Macbeth: Why exactly did Joel Coen and Frances McDormand feel the need to make it? Casey Rogerson, CC ’24, told me effusively that “they had such a clear vision for what they wanted it to be, and it was cool to see them execute that.” Rogerson is an aspiring screenwriter studying Film and Media Studies and Creative Writing. He also has acting ambitions and a background in theatre. In fact, Rogerson is currently involved in a production of Macbeth by Columbia’s own King’s Crown Shakespeare Troupe. It is no surprise, then, that he believes The Tragedy of Macbeth was worth its making based on the acting performances of McDormand and her co-star, Denzel Washington, alone. In general, Rogerson feels certain that despite being the latest of over 20 film or television adaptations of the work, this Macbeth “proved the need for its existence.” He continued, “this one felt really current, it felt very original.” Annette Insdorf, film historian and professor of film at Columbia School of the Arts, praised the work’s cinematography, shot in a “glorious black and white.” She also appreciated the performance of “the extraordinary Kathryn Hunter” as the witch. Insdorf described that “after uttering predictions to Banquo and Macbeth, the three images of her transform into birds that ascend. This is the kind of breathtaking cinema that would not be possible on a stage.” Insdorf ’s comments not only help one recognize the particular brilliance of Coen’s adaptation, but also situate the film amongst warring theories of
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cinema and its relation to the theatre. 20th-century film theorist André Bazin, for instance, spent much of his career trying to define the unique semiotics of film through its basis in realism. And yet, during the Q&A, Coen spoke of his desire to construct a deeply stylized film as opposed to, say, Justin Kurzel’s more immersive take on the Shakespearean tragedy from 2015. This isn’t to say that for a piece to be specially suited for film, it must reflect Bazin’s vision. But the tension illustrates an ongoing conversation concerning adaptation of the theatre. Must a filmic work deviate strongly from its staged forebears to be worth producing? If the answer is yes, then, as Insdorf points out, the monochrome cinematography and avian symbolism, among other elements of The Tragedy of Macbeth, should qualify it for the screen. However, Coen’s choices reflect a great deal of influence from the endless catalog of thespian Macbeth remakes. Shakespeare’s original verse is virtually untouched and the film, at times, feels as if it exists in a closed environment—as if the screen is merely a two-dimensional backdrop. Insdorf also contended that the value of any filmic version of the Scottish play lies in the filmmaker’s ability to provide “a new prism for appreciation and understanding.” For her, elements like the film’s colorblind casting of Washington as Macbeth make the work a worthwhile venture. When asked about the film’s noticeable lack of Scottish actors, Coen joked that in making the film, he did not care much about the country of Scotland. The anecdote is humorous, but also speaks to the reasonable claim that Macbeth’s usefulness as source material comes from the freedom it gives filmmakers to place and re-place it in new social and cultural contexts. Serenity S’rae, a Theatre Arts major in her junior year at Boston University, often writes about the experiences of the everyday Black person. As a Black woman, S’rae feels she occupies a notoriously unambiguous space in the American psyche but, in reality, is more difficult to locate. “I often felt in this middle place,” she said. This reckoning with identity, which all Black artists must undergo, is related to her appreciation for Shakespeare: “I think audiences have and always will kind of gravitate towards the beauty of the language and the freedom of the language and also the non-specific stereotypes [of] race or gender.” One might call this a certain freedom of the
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E S S AY S Shakespearean identity—one that allows for and towards efficiency and, therefore, repetition. And demands Insdorf ’s new prisms of comprehension. what is adaptation but a form of repetition? The flexibility of the playwright’s characters speaks For a young writer, the idea of succeeding with to the longevity of their adaptability in rapidly original material within such a system can be warping historical situations and through different daunting. Proving that your work is as worthy of interpretive lenses. It also offers a compelling de- the screen as the words of Shakespeare is no small fense of this particular Tragedy of Macbeth. task. Admission to a writer’s room often hinges on Still, S’rae expressed apprehensions concerning one’s ability to imitate a pre-established writing style the industry’s fondness for adaptation. S’rae is cur- in a speculative script. Gaining traction in the biz rently working in Los Angeles as a developmental is largely contingent on mastering the lingo already intern for State approved by the machine. Street Pictures, But S’rae is hesitant to a Black-led prosuggest that screenwriters duction company should abandon their origwhose most reinal projects completely becent success was cause, as evidenced by The The Hate U Give Tragedy of Macbeth, estab(2018), directed lished stories and franchisby company head es are usually managed by George Tillman, established filmmakers. “If Jr. During her they’re gonna go with adtime with the aptations,” she said, “they’re company, S’rae gonna have a big-ass writer has found that, in to do it.” Indeed, both S’rae general, producand Rogerson connected tion companies their interest in the film value IP—intelwith their appreciation for lectual property its stars, both behind and intended for a in front of the camera. This film or television makes one wonder: Are film adaptation— adaptations only legitimized Illustration by Jace Steiner above all else. when they’re executed by S’rae takes slight issue with this. “I think we can be trusted, proven, and well-liked artists? so much more original. I think it also just makes Had Coen and McDormand decided, in 1984, to people a little bit more fearful of original content,” make a highly theatrical screen rendition of Macshe said. “They kind of want to stick with the good beth, it would have seemed derivative, frivolous, ole canon that they know or things that they know un-noteworthy, and, most importantly, not ideal for work and sell. And ultimately, that’s the goal of ev- launching a career. But today, as two well-known ery production company, is to have the next hit and film artists who set out to create something that to sell and make a lot of money.” personally galvanized them, they were able to do One does not have to be a disciple of Theodor just that–and, all things considered, do it well. Now Adorno and the Frankfurt School to recognize the bolstered by the commercial behemoth that might accuracy of S’rae’s comments. The film industry is no have squashed their 1984 attempt and unobstructed more than an industry. Its structural rigidity, then, by the need to succeed, they could do today what is highly relevant. The dwindling of major industry thousands of filmmaking hopefuls could not. Conplayers, the infatuation with proven franchises, the sidering, then, this marriage of established artists hunger for IP, the reliance upon established art- and established stories, perhaps the best explanaists, and the predilection for adaptation are merely tion for why Coen and McDormand endeavored to different spokes on the same restricting film reel. make The Tragedy of Macbeth is also the simplest: Hungering for profit, the film industry veers ever because they could.
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THE BLUE AND WHITE
E S S AY S
A Night with Pedrose at Kind Regards BY SAM SACKS
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t’s me. Podcast Director and Resident Party Girl, Sam Sacks. Perhaps the second title more aptly describes my summer self—the girl who turned 21 and then 22 in a pandemic and found herself in the throes of hardly masked jazz clubs, rooftops, bars and dance clubs. The summer marked the peak of my party career. Back in school and exceedingly vulnerable with my flimsy Pfizer shot, I’ve mostly retired my dancing shoes. But on the evening of October 23, I wiggled them back on again, at Kind Regards on Ludlow Street. If you’ve seen cool girls post Insta stories of disco balls reflecting red and purple light over faceless masses, you were likely looking at the club. Kind Regards has risen to prominence in the Columbia bubble due to Pedro Damasceno, CC ’23, known on Instagram and on the DJ scene as “Pedrose.” He started playing there in July, bringing the uptown scene all the way (45 minutes and two transfers) downtown. He and I took Science of Psychology together our first year. His John Jay room had the intoxicating scent of Santal 33, a drawer entirely dedicated to neat rows of trident gum, and warm lighting not so different from the upper level of Kind Regards. I joined Damasceno for a Saturday set—he normally alternates between hosting parties and DJing. Earlier that day, he texted me, Part of my pre–Kind Regards ritual is to get either a Greek salad or arepa nearby. Here is my diary of our night together. ··· 5:39 p.m. | Damasceno tells me to meet him at the 116th Street subway at 6:00pm. I propose we convene a half hour later as I scarf down half a tuna sandwich and leap into the shower. That’ll cut into our dinner time, he texts me, but okay. 6:39 p.m. | I tell Damasceno I’ll catch the 116th Street train when it gets down to 110th. Meet me in the last car, I text him. Unfortunately, I miss the train that Damasceno boards, so he disembarks and waits for me on the 110th Street platform. I find him looking impeccably put together, in a vintage black shirt that reads “CHOPPER RIDE
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OR DIE” and a black wool blazer. He lets me peek inside his ivory leather tote bag that contains possible costume changes: a bucket hat, a black turtleneck, a pair of chunky frames. While we wait nine minutes for the next downtown 1, he explains to me exactly how the evening is going to go. It’s clear he’s lived this night many times before. 6:54 p.m. | “I have this theory on DJing, this analysis,” Damasceno tells me, as we slip into newly open seats on the 1 train. “On one extreme, you have a bar mitzvah/Quinceañera DJ.” I don’t interrupt Damasceno to tell him just how well my years of Jewish day school had acquainted me with this kind of DJ. “No disrespect to those DJs, those are people who are hired to play exactly what the crowd wants to hear. You are not hiring them for their music taste. You’re hiring them just to be a person in a room, performing a function.” Then, there’s the “DJ who makes their own music. You’re there to listen to this person’s music taste.” When Pedro’s booked at Kind Regards, he has to strike a balance between the two ends: a style he describes as “Hollaback girl, Drake,” and the 80s synth/techno/Baile funk he loves. 7:03 p.m. | Damasceno takes my notebook and draws a graph with time on the X axis and mood on the Y axis, charting for me the trajectory of his ideal set, versus the sort Kind Regards demands. He’s a performer who speaks scientifically about his craft. 7:16 p.m. | On the A train, he tells me he’s constantly looking at his audience to gauge whether or not his music is landing. “I’ll focus on a couple people in the crowd that are feeling the music or not feeling the music, and try and play for them.” 7:34 p.m. | It starts to drizzle as we walk into Patacon Pisao on Essex Street. Damasceno orders an arepa with grilled chicken, lettuce, tomatoes, “very light salt—just a little bit of salt,” and is dismayed to find out they have NO CHEESE. I order a vegetarian arepa and am also shocked to find out they have NO CHEESE. We wait almost 20 minutes and step out of the restaurant with our massive, foil-
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E S S AY S wrapped sandwiches in tow. 7:58 p.m. | Damasceno asks the teenager behind the counter at Bel-Fries (next to Kind Regards) how long an order might take. He likes to bring food to the guy working the door, but we don’t have the five minutes to spare. I feel a bit responsible for whatever change in the KR ecosystem this mishap caused. (Without fries, will the shortlist Damasceno Facebook messaged to the doorman not get let in? Will the bouncer faint with fatigue and let the horde out front shove their way through the door? ) 8:00 p.m. | We waltz in briskly and make a beeline for the white-scalloped DJ booth. The upper level of Kind Regards looks like a sexy art deco living room, with pink and blue leather couches, wood walls, and stained glass windows. Damasceno picks up a menu—folded hot dog style, as though it were a reservation placard—from the table closest to the bar to show me his graphic design work. The only other masked woman in the bar scolds him for “touching her menu during a pandemic.” 8:09 p.m. | I watch the waitress in a slicked ponytail and cinched black long-sleeve shirt go around to light each grapefruit-scented candle with a tiny blowtorch. She hands Damasceno a couple of drink tickets. While he plays music for a very tame audience of couples lounging languidly on the couches, I ask if he ever gets bored. No, he tells me. “I’d do this for free.” 8:20 p.m. | The three thirty-somethings sitting directly across the DJ booth,“pandemic lady” (as he calls her), and her two friends, become our target audience. The women slurp oysters and cocktails. Damasceno puts on a song and watches for their reaction. I dutifully update him about their body language after each track begins. 8:36 p.m. | He slips me a small yellow drink ticket with the date written in sharpie on the back. “Tell the bartender Pedro wants a sparkling water,” he says. 9:00 p.m. | Damasceno finally cracks pandemic lady with Snoop Dogg’s soulful “Let’s Get Blown.” We glance at each other in triumph as she lifts and sways her shoulders from her seat. 9:28 p.m. | I ask the Brazilian boy who has been hanging by the DJ booth all night if he wants to take a smoke break (eat the rest of my Arepa outside). He met Damasceno at Kind Regards this summer and now comes to hear him frequently.
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When I ask how they met, he shrugs and tells me, “All Brazilians meet.” It was a silly question. 9:42 p.m. | Damasceno maneuvers the mixer with a fairy-like touch. He slides slidey things up and down and rotates dials, he spins the quintessential wicka-wicka spinny disc. He alternates hands. It’s like he’s painting, or playing piano, or hacking into a protected computer system. 10:00 p.m. | The Kind Regards basement opens and Damasceno grabs his USB stick and his ivory bag and hurries down the stairs to play his 10-12 set. The empty room is very cold with black and white tiled floors. There are imitation Greek busts in each corner, red lights shining up at each supple and armless statue. We enjoy a momentary calm before the upstairs crowd follows us down. 10:07 p.m. | A woman in a red bandeau asks Damasceno if he takes requests. He says no. 10:29 p.m. | A brunette in a plaid coat asks Damasceno to play ABBA. Over the blasting music, Damasceno asks her to listen harder—to listen more carefully to his music. I find his response a bit condescending, until I realize that he’s already playing a prolonged intro of “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” He opens both of his arms, like the Christ the Redeemer statue, as the chorus ensues without his pressing a button. 10:34 p.m. | Natalia in the plaid jacket wants more ABBA. 10:40 p.m. | A blonde girl with a face-frame haircut tells Damasceno,“THIS ISN’T THE MUSIC THAT YOU USUALLY PLAY.” Damasceno replies, “I don’t play hits. You must be confusing me for someone else.” 11:00 p.m. | We enter the final hour of Damasceno’s set. He’s playing hits. Tiktok songs, “They wanna see me do my dance / In these thousand dollar pants,” Kanye’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing.” The basement is totally packed. Four separate groups have ordered bottle service and I can smell the residue of sparklers through my KN95. The crowd is mostly white millennials with very unadventurous fashion choices—men in open button-ups over boring shirts, women in business-casual crop tops and gold necklaces. Everyone has their phone out to take flash videos of the night. Damasceno seems oodles cooler and younger than the crowd he DJs for, and they notice. There’s a group of men who spend their entire night near the DJ booth moshing, and rotating, and dapping up Damasceno,
THE BLUE AND WHITE
E S S AY S calling him the “GOAT.” One guy in glasses and the world’s tightest button-up shirt imitates Damasceno’s swift hand motions on the mixer. I exit the booth and walk around to ask him if he also DJs. “No,” he tells me—just “really into this guy’s stuff.” 11:10 p.m. | A man in his late 30s with a quarter-zip fleece and layered puffer vest—no doubt from the bowels of the financial district—asks for “Mo Bamba.” Damasceno leans over to tell me that dude just asked for the song that goes “hoes….. calling.’’ We both laugh. 11:37 p.m. | Damasceno plays “Mo Bamba.” I look at him, aghast. He yells over the terrible, ter-
rible, song: “Honestly, I just wanna see everyone have fun.” On his way out, puffer-vest finance trash gives Damasceno an earnest fist bump. “Thank you, man. I really appreciate it.” It’s a beautiful moment. 11:58 p.m. | Within his last 10 minutes, Damasceno puts on “Hey Ya,” “Crazy in Love,” “Promiscuous,” a Drake song I don’t know, and “One More Time.” The crowd goes wild for all five. About to get off the 1 train at 110th | I ask Damasceno for parting words. “Connecting with humans over sound is so instinctual, and hopefully we can all do it a little more.”
Illustration by Maya Weed
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F E AT U R E S
Told Between Puffs The rise and fall of the Juul. BY HAILEY RYAN Warning: This article contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. ver the course of a balmy October week, I sat down with some of my favorite nicotine addicts to discuss their relationship to vaping. I spent a lot of time that week at Columbia Smoke Shop Inc., a storefront on 108th and Amsterdam that is, surprisingly, not affiliated with the University but is, unsurprisingly, feeding the nicotine addictions of our nation’s brightest. At the start of each interview, I pulled a cool mint Puff Bar out of its sleek, technicolor packaging, brought it to my mouth, and slowly inhaled. I’d bought this one, I told myself, for journalistic purposes alone. For the article. As the toxins entered my body, I reassured myself that if I did find myself addicted to nicotine again, at least it was in exercise of my First Amendment rights. When the interviews began, nothing but silence, white clouds, and the lingering scent of artificial sweeteners filled the room. This was a feeling I knew all too well: the seductive first inhale, the intoxicating head rush, the tingle of guilt. As their name suggests, e-cigarettes have a confused, hyphenated existence; they re-iterate an older, supposedly more destructive vice. In the end, they are still cigarettes, but updated and rebranded. Cigarettes, flavorized. Before these thoughts could leave my mind, I was taking another hit. And then another, in preparation for my interview. And then another, interrupted by a conversation that only made me want to take another hit. As cool-ice-scented thoughts rushed through my mind, I couldn’t help but ask myself: Why am I doing this? The inheritance of vice. The concept of e-cigarette was first introduced in 2003 by Chinese pharmacist Hon Lik, who patented a device that used a heating device to vaporize liquid nicotine. Soon after, Stanford graduates James Monsees and Adam Bowen invented the Pax, a device that allowed users to vaporize marijuana or tobacco. Pax Labs immediately took the market by storm; the company
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raised $46.7 million in series-C funding. Pax Labs’ financial success, in turn, inspired the invention of the Juul, a device designed for “adult smokers looking for an alternative to traditional cigarettes,” according to Juul’s website. Smokers themselves, Monsees and Bowen were the first to satisfy their nicotine addictions without the carcinogenic tar that makes cigarettes lethal. They discovered that by combining nicotine salts with benzoic acid, they could administer the same immediate and satisfying rush that cigarettes supply, but without the laundry list of toxic ingredients. A Juul contains but five ingredients: nicotine, propylene glycol, vegetable glycerine, benzoic acid, and flavoring. The Juul also introduced the element of choice to the smoking experience. The company encourages consumers to decide between nicotine strength—either 3% or 5%—and between flavors—mint, mango, creme, tobacco, menthol, fruit, Virginia tobacco, and cucumber. Juuls are sleeker, tastier, and, most importantly, healthier than cigarettes. At times, this makes it easy to forget that Juuls only perpetuate the American nicotine addiction crisis—as of last year, nearly 40 millions adults and 4.7 million middle and high school students smoke nicotine products, according to a 2020 CDC study. Millennials and Gen Z-ers have thus ended up adopting, even embracing, the very addiction we grew up learning, from government-funded health class and graphic TV commercials, was the ultimate sin. E-cigarettes are bewitchingly inconspicuous—they smell more of perfume than of garbage, taste more like candy than like tar, and look more like pens than like drugs. They package the toxic substance so sleekly, so satisfyingly, it’s hard not to fall for the ruse. For many college-aged people, the rise of the Juul in 2017 was a time of youthful jouissance and ignorance. Every young addict can recall the first time they vaped. One Barnard senior, who requested anonymity, fondly remembers hitting her younger brother’s Juul for the first time in
THE BLUE AND WHITE
F E AT U R E S 2017, kickstarting her affair with nicotine as a high school junior. “I enjoyed it because I loved mango pods. I just kept getting mango pods and kept on doing it.” She couldn’t help but beam when recalling her first Juul, which her best friend had carved his name into. From then on, the metallic machine felt like an extension of her friend and the memories they shared. It’s as if her relationship to her Juul has more to do with the rituals surrounding it than the drugs it delivers. In fact, it wasn’t until I directly asked if she was addicted to her Juul (which she recently quit, only to buy a Myle disposable vape), that the concept of addiction even crossed her mind. “I feel like maybe I’m trying to trick myself by saying it’s not an addiction, so it’s not as scary, but maybe it is an addiction.” She took a hit of her grape-flavored Myle. “Because why would I have that internal urge if I was never addicted to it?” “Could I take a hit?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself. We exchanged vapes, smiling at each other in between puffs. The spectre of the Juul. The Juul era’s untarnished veneer abruptly crumbled when upper-middle-class parents and politicians joined forces to crack down on Juul Labs in the beginning of 2019. Suddenly, the public narrative surrounding e-cigs shifted: The company was no longer seen as offering safe and innovative alternatives to cigarettes for adult smokers in the process of quitting. Indeed, ultimately, Juul Labs needed a sustainable market, unlike the aging addicts of the cigarette years, and found one in our generation. What originally sold as a temporary palliative for older smokers became the engine behind a new epidemic among impressionable youth, stylish but just as devilish as Big Tobacco. The effects of this narrative shift reverberated across the country. Suddenly, parents everywhere sat their grown children down and interrogated them until they admitted that they, too, had been hooked. My mother called me in distress, begging me to stay away from the now-notorious nicotine stick to protect my asthmatic lungs. “I feel like by my sophomore year, it was becoming increasingly embarrassing to own a Juul,”
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explained another vaper in the senior class. At this point, Columbia students had ceased sneaking hits down their shirts during lectures and sharing puffs in line for the bathroom at Amity. Some took to their Snapchat stories to document a new Juul ritual: ceremonially throwing away their pods. A girl I met at a bar constructed a shadow box for her Juul that now collects dust on her mantel. Another smashed his Juul with a hammer, sprinkling the stannic pieces and mangled wires along the Hudson. My best friend and I made a pact to hold each other accountable, pledging to never buy a Juul again. We were in mourning, lamenting the loss of our collective and ever-so-intoxicating delusion. The ersatz Juul. In October 2019, the efforts of local and federal legislatures, anti-Juul advocates, and the FDA to combat the youth nicotine epidemic came to a verdict: Juuls were found guilty and officially taken off the market. Anyone who has taken Economics 101 could tell you what happened next. While Juul Labs was busy fending off a fusillade from suburban moms in a series of legal battles, entrepreneurs, opportunists, and disappointed vapers took advantage of this gap in the market, felt by the 11 million Juulers now scrambling to get their sweet nicotine fix. Companies like Puff Bar, Myle, and Stix found a loophole in the laws regulating Juuls that allows fun flavors to persist if sold as one-timeuse, disposable vapes—spawning an entirely new genre of nicotine addiction. One bar, at around $11, can contain as much nicotine as two or three packs of cigarettes, the concentration cut by the shrill sweetness of the taste. When disposables last most users no more than a couple of days, vapers end up inhaling the equivalent of multiple cigarette packs a week. Juuls may have disappeared, but the addictions haven’t. “Juul regulation of mango pods helped people stop Juuling, but then people just switched to disposable vapes. I’ve seen a lot of underclassmen holding disposable vapes. It’s like they toned down the flavors with Juul and it’s popularity then died down with the younger generation,” explained an anonymous student vaper. Today, disposable vapes dominate the market, and sales have doubled since 2019. I chat-
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F E AT U R E S ted with Ali, the store manager of a local smoke shop, about purchasing trends over the last couple of years. He explained that since the ban on flavored Juuls in 2019, disposable vapes have become his most popular product and the store’s primary source of revenue. When Governor Cuomo banned flavored disposable vapes in New York State in May 2020, it threatened the livelihoods of bodega owners like Ali all over the state. But because flavored disposable vapes remain available for purchase online and in other states, some shop owners continue to sell them illegally, keeping them hidden beneath the counter. In fact, fun-flavored disposable nicotine products are so accessible that few people even know they’re breaking the law in purchasing them. Despite their illegality, the products remain the number one seller at many local smoke shops. I left my conversation with Ali shocked. Ultimately, disposable vapes are nothing more than ersatz Juuls, both worse for the environment and for our bodies—so how can they remain so popular? I took an investigative hit of my quickly-dying Puff Bar, and asked myself: How is this justified? The admission of addiction. “I feel like it tricks you into thinking that you’re not doing as much harm to your body, in terms of having an addiction, because it is temporary,” explained the same anonymous senior at Barnard. Unlike owning a Juul, which is embarrassingly per-
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manent, disposable vapes, after delivering the same satisfying rush, can be dismissed as mere phases, drunken mistakes, party favors, even. It’s this that keeps us coming back to them, the way they let us throw away our shame. Another student vaper admitted, “Any attempt to quit has always been: I leave my Juul at home and then scrape by with disposables until I go back. It happens every time.” On the surface, disposable vapes perfectly suit this generation: nicotine addicts with commitment issues. But more than that, they are the result of failed legislation. Juul regulations sought to save a generation of young people from the nicotine addiction of our parent’s generation
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F E AT U R E S amidst a dearth of long-term studies on the health impact of e-cigarettes. To a certain extent, the government was successful: This year, 11.3% of high schoolers reported that they currently vape, down from 27.5% in 2019, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Protection. While fewer teens are taking up e-cig smoking today, this has little bearing on the already addicted. Instead of eliminating youth nicotine addiction by regulating its most eminent distributor, the legislation has young people going to local smoke shops and offering cashiers upwards of $50 for one mint Juul pod and buying unregulated, counterfeit disposable vapes beneath shop counters. The law didn’t eliminate e-ciga-
rettes—it only forced suppliers and customers to be more creative. But as a former-ish vaper myself, it seems reductive to understand the disposable vape phenomenon as merely continuing the same strand of addiction. An addiction is something that is both chemically and socially wrong. With cigarettes, smokers must step outside to display their sin, to inhale a destressor that is fittingly crude and undeniably destructive. Disposable vapes are confusingly colorful and uncomfortably cute—a strangely stylish way to sustain the habit. The extent of their destructiveness is also unclear. With no studies on the long-term health impacts of the e-cigarettes and counterfeit vapes flooding the market, Illustration by Samia Menon every puff is a gamble. It’s suitably nihilistic for a generation defined by acute anxiety for our quickly dying planet and increasing resignation to imminent doom. More than an addiction, throwaway vapes are an admission— that the government regulation failed us and that we have irreversibly failed our environment. We’re a generation already hooked, hurtling in a direction we inherited from generations past. Ours is a chemical romance made in our image: Insta-worthy, unsustainable, and uncertain. I took one last ceremonial hit of my Puff Bar before the lights flashed, signalling that it was dead. Maybe this time around, I’ll actually quit. Or, better yet, maybe I’ll buy a Juul.
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My Brother’s Green Grass BY OWEN PARK
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y older brother’s son had been missing six years when he decided to move to Los Angeles in a U-Haul with its roll-up door tied down to the bumper with wire. The whole process happened very abruptly; from conception to reality, it took less than a month. I wasn’t sure why six was the number, but that’s how it seemed to me. Six years until a person was allowed to stop looking, to give up some visible portion of hope. My brother traded the atmospheric eyes of his neighbors for a little bit of sunshine and dry heat, and travelled just where he knew he could find them. I didn’t blame him. But not long after he had gone there, my mother called and told me he wasn’t speaking and wouldn’t take his meals, pleaded with me to go over and be there with him, for as long as was needed. I had always quietly dreamed of living in a place like LA, and there wasn’t much keeping me where I was. Not everything has to be hard. I was sleeping on a brand new air mattress right next to his bed in a little more than a week, no longer surprised when California greeted me as I awakened. My brother lived in a cul de sac that was crowned by a thick, vibrant lawn. The lawn was one of the first things I noticed there because it was so deep and elegant in its greenness. A few days after my arrival in Los Angeles, we stood at the center of the cul de sac following a long walk up from the bus station, our arms carrying microwaveable pot pies and bags of pork rinds and other barren, give-up kinds of groceries. “What a nice patch of grass,” I remember saying, feeling like I could stare at it forever. It always caught the sun in just the right way. It reminded me of kiddish races, of breathless gasping in unison, and of our father. My brother nodded, almost smiling a little, and this made me smile, too. “I wonder why someone doesn’t build on it,” I said. His house itself wasn’t much. There was our bedroom, adjoined by a toilet and a small shower, with a bony kitchen and a living space that identified itself using only a blank, soot-outlined shadow of a sofa that must have been there be-
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fore my brother moved in. The sofa looked like it might have exploded right in that spot, plastered like a blackened sneeze of its old self against the rotten-eggshell walls. It occurred to me that I no longer knew what my brother did for money; we had not really known each other for a long time by then, time enough for his boy to be born and live a little before he was an absence to the eye. And I learned nothing, even as we bunked together again. My brother made sound only when absolutely necessary, and then just in toneless grunts. The best you could hope for was a lone, skinny word. I wanted to ask him where his wife was now—I had met her once—but I never found the gumption. My mother had been right: I had to beg him to eat, too, feeling gratified when he peeled the buns off my In-N-Out burgers. It was frustrating. In the fall, after I’d been in California two months, we returned home from another bus ride to find that whole lawn on fire. Smoke billowed above the cul de sac, as though the neighborhood was performing some kind of community ritual, but my brother and I were the only ones outside. In fact, other than the sound of crackling blades, the area was totally silent. What I found so odd, what I remember most about the fire, was that it went right up to the border of the lawn but no further, containing itself neatly within the grass, its flush, living color replaced with sputtering black and orange. I don’t know how long I went on studying those flames, but when I looked over to see my brother’s face, I found him far away from me and knocking on the door of a house that wasn’t ours. He knocked on it vigorously with the meaty end of his fist. A short man in square glasses opened the door. “What?” he said. “That fire!” cried my brother. Already, he’d strung along a record number of words for the time we’d been together. The short man and I were both taken aback by the volume of his voice. “What’s going on? All that grass is on fire! Shouldn’t we evacuate?”
THE BLUE AND WHITE
T H E S H O RT C U T “Oh, you must be new,” said the man. He chuckled a little. I remained standing a few yards away from them, looking at the back of my brother’s head. “The grass burns every year, just around this time. It’s no big deal. No one’s in danger.” “But it’s burning,” said my brother, his voice splintering and growing fainter. “It’s burning.” “Yes,” said the man. “It is.” He looked off-put, and closed the door and went back inside his house. “It’s okay,” I called to my brother. Slowly, he returned to my side in weird even steps, like some vaguely remembered imitation of walking. “I
guess it’s natural.” Closer now, I noticed the red rims of his eyes. “It’s burning,” he said again, and I didn’t answer him. We stared at the fire for a while longer, and it glowed and moved in its self-enclosed manner. No one else in the cul de sac came out of their houses. Eventually, we even began to hear the laughter of children, the sound of dinners being prepared as the lawn smoked into nothing. And my brother hasn’t made a sound since, except once, when he really had to use the bathroom but I refused to move out of his way. Illustration by Brooke McCormick
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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N
Ohad Meromi
On looms, lamps, and Lukásc.
BY SAM NEEDLEMAN
O
had Meromi is as whimsically dishevelled as you’d expect a Brooklyn sculptor to be. Hunched over coffee on a recent morning in a Clinton Hill courtyard, he looked like a mixed-media assemblage: button-down, sweater, beard, half-fried baritone. And like any great sculpture, he soon revealed his whole to be greater than the sum of his parts. That’s a feat when the path for left-tilting Gen X artists is, at this point, as well-trodden as Flatbush Avenue. Most everything Meromi has to say is thoughtful and complex, off the cuff without an ounce of reactionary self-righteousness. He came to the United States from Israel well into adulthood. After receiving his MFA from Columbia in 2003, Meromi launched what remains, two decades later, one of New York’s most inspired careers in sculpture. He makes large, colorful installations that often consume galleries or public debates, offering exuberant alternatives, inside and outside, to the still-dominant dogma of the white cube. In its playfulness and freneticism, his work alerts you to the vapidity of the discourse surrounding whether art is, or should be, political. The answer is always yes, no, and maybe so. Meromi’s sculptures buzz with the distinct intellectual vigor of childhood, so it was fitting that I met him across the street from his daughter’s school, where he’d just dropped her off. The air was cool for the first time in recent memory. On the eve of his journey to visit family in Israel, he squeezed in a conversation with me before heading to his studio to tie up loose ends, and to untie tight ones. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. ··· The Blue and White: Are you going to the studio today? What are you working on? OM: Just, like, 16 different projects simultaneously. B&W: Do you decide what you’re interested in doing before you go? Or do you go in and follow
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your impulses? OM: I’ve been kind of failing in doing everything. It’s been a very complicated year, and I’ve done a lot of smaller things. Historically, I was never really interested in small figures. I was interested in big figures because—this dialogue with monumentality, and this automatic thing that happens to you with your body. When you encounter a big sculpture, it automatically makes you into this imaginary space of being a kid next to a much bigger figure, which is a space I’m interested in. Small sculptures and figurines are kind of like action figures. They need a story, they’re held by your hand. I find myself doing a lot of those recently. All of these stories collide in the studio. I don’t have a healthy routine. Part of being a sculptor—or the type of sculptor that I am—the studio is six different workstations. The work is all over the place. I get more excited about a new technique. I’m building a loom to make a rug, and then not knowing what to do with the rug, because it’s like, What is this thing? When I was in Columbia, the first thing I did is build a loom. Then I made a video about me weaving one rug on that loom. And now, I’m starting to maybe build another one, maybe a slightly less reckless one. Because I’m older and slower and wiser. B&W: Not to get sidetracked by looms, but I’m really interested in them. I grew up in New England, and looms were part of field trips! Weaving on looms! What is interesting to you about the loom? OM: I mean, I love anything craft. I don’t know how to answer that. What’s not interesting about a loom? B&W: [Sigh.] Yeah. OM: It’s this fascinating, beautiful thing that has been so important in the development of computers and aesthetics and the Industrial Revolution. It really excites me, just to figure out how this thing is made. And then, how could I do it? Then, how could I change the color? B&W: In your work, there’s a certain strain of
THE BLUE AND WHITE
T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N left-wing, Jewish, funky aesthetics that I associate with Maira Kalman—an aesthetic that an Israeli person in the U.S. might take up. Do you feel that where you’re from has a mark on your work? OM: Definitely. I mean, I left Israel at 35. B&W: What was the decision to come to the U.S. about? Was it a specific program or a specific artistic scene? OM: My wife was going to do a Ph.D. in English at Johns Hopkins, and I was like, I might as well find something to do, and I was lucky to get into the Columbia thing, which was a fun program. B&W: What kind of an institution has it been for you? OM: Coming from Tel Aviv, and falling into the U.S., Columbia is a great club to fall into. You make nice friends. It’s a privilege. And art grad school? What could be more fun! You get in a room, a lot of smart people will pass through New York, they’ll go in and give you feedback. It’s fantastically useful and a really creative time for me. I used it as an opportunity to experiment. I spent most of my time doing formative, communal, improvisational stuff for video. As I got away from it, my thoughts about grad school and the price that it costs, and the system in general—I think there’s many problems with it. I still, you know—I like art schools. They’re important to me. There’s a type of conversation that is possible in art school—and school—that doesn’t happen anywhere else—not in the art magazines. Some idealism can only exist there. “Here, as a group together, we believe that things should be different.” This is a tough moment, but I like art schools. I hate them, but I like them. It’s like home. B&W: Are you interested in direct political life in your work, or is it more abstract, the way that Israel and Palestine influence you? OM: You know, I switch back and forth. When I go to the studio, when I make stuff, I want it to be political. But then, why would I make something political if this is going to be exhibited in a gallery in Chelsea? I have a lot of questions about what, exactly, is good politics. I’m looking into … these dialogues between Benjamin and Brecht and Lukásc. And they’re arguing about, should it be social realism or expressionism? And what’s more effective to serve a revolution? And then,
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the different cominterns are coming up with the decision of, like, what’s the official state type of art? And they’re going against it. That would be amazing, if theoretical debates about the presentation would be—we’re talking about painting and theater—would be so linked to politics. I do believe art has the potential of working within language, like opening the horizon of the possible, of what has a word and what doesn’t have a word. But it couldn’t be direct, in most cases. And what you do see is direct responses, like political slogans or political posterwork. That is better off in a rally. There’s a lot of finger-pointing in the art world, like, “We’re good and we’re not going to touch all this bad stuff,” which I—first, I don’t feel that I can participate in, being privileged, white, male, 54, served in the Israeli army, and all of that shit, and now lives in Brooklyn. But also, I don’t appreciate it that much, because there’s a lot of finger-pointing by people who kind of are conveniently assuming that they are not part of the problem. And hey, fuck it, we’re all part of this problem. B&W: In the art world, one of the things that’s so enraging is obviously the extreme financialization of all of these conversations. It’s hard to feel like there’s an authentic political discourse happening when it’s incentivized by, or, at least, in some way imbricated in, this horrible structure. OM: When one talks about politics, it’s as if they’re putting aside the whole money thing and pretending that this is a pure space that isn’t tainted. B&W: You’ve done many public installations—Long Island City, Downtown Brooklyn. What kind of a city is New York to do public art in? There’s the Public Art Fund. There’s definitely an institutional tradition here. There’s also an insurgent tradition of public art. OM: I grew up looking at public art, or looking at the public sphere and being interested in the public sphere, and seeing the square and architecture. B&W: When you say public sphere, do you mean something political, something specifically architectural, both? OM: I don’t know—the street, the place we share. The park, the city square. The place that the society is expressing itself and negotiating it-
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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N ions about public art, people get to express their idea of their ownership of public space, and they become citizens. They’re saying, I hate this ugly pink bubblegum thing. I would do more of those. I don’t think I’m going to be doing another public artwork for the city, ’cause there’s a long line and I was lucky to do one, but it’s a super fun thing. And hard, and complicated. I still think awful public art is better than no art. B&W: Obviously, the Public Art Fund does many good things, but there’s a lot of spillover of tokenistic, self-satisfied curation. OM: Or just plain ugly. Or something that gets in the way. Or these sad attempts to beautify something—it would be cheapest to just put a mural there. But I still think that with public art is better than without. I prefer seeing artworks in the city rather than in Storm King. Storm King is beautiful and everything, but it’s beautiful without the art. And most street corners would benefit from one of those Calders. B&W: You have a daughter who’s relatively young. If you could influence her art education in some way, who would you want to expose her to? OM: When I was teaching at Columbia or at Bard or at Rutgers, there’s always this thing— and I remember as a student, the most valuable thing they had were the slideshows,
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self. Going to art school, I was first very cautious about doing anything in this space. I was usually cherishing the white boxes as a space for—you know, it’s not oppressive, it’s there for a month, only people who are interested would come in and look and think about my speculations there. I wasn’t thinking about it as a place for commerce at the time. I thought about it as a fantastic place where one could speculate about what art could be, what public art could be. I’m so skeptical about this particular milieu that goes in that place—my milieu. I grew more and more fond of, like, can you just do something in the street and talk to people and do the dirty work of taking responsibility for the street? And just participate, and do our mistakes. So in a way, the outdoors is more exciting for me now. Doing the public artwork in the city was involved with so much bureaucracy and going through, like, 15 different agencies, and the level of transparency needed for the whole process. And on top of it, a rather ugly public response. People are saying, Don’t you prefer to just have a private client? And I’m like, No, this is actually—that’s the best place. This is where, in a way, public space comes to be. It’s part of the thing, and that’s the beautiful part of the thing. In all of these opin-
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THE BLUE AND WHITE
T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N where my teacher would just show me: This is interesting, and this is interesting. I always failed at that. I was always afraid that I will show the people that are important to me, and then the students will yawn, because students yawn, and that would ruin it for me. Why would it be interesting for them? The stuff that I was impressed with at one point that I still have a warm point in my heart—Robert Smithson. I don’t know how important Robert Smithson is today. I take my daughter to the Met, which is one of her favorite places. She reads Percy Jackson and is very good at Greek mythology, and she can tell me what the stories are. There’s something about this place, which has its problems. But still, it’s this place that is full of treasures and full of images and full of history. In a way, that’s our favorite place to go to. She would go anytime, which is great, because I would go anytime. Usually without a particular plan. It’s like getting lost in the park and discovering something. There’s always a good treasure there. B&W: Do you stray away from wall text when you’re at the Met or in any museum? OM: I’m dyslexic anyhow, so I can’t stand and read. I just look. She’s a reader; her mother is a writer, she’s a writer, she reads the wall text, and I leave it to the problematic thing of just looking at the things. All of these beautiful clothes, or naked bodies, all of these different stones. It’s fantastic. B&W: New York has SculptureCenter. Do you think of it as a good city to sculpt in? OM: It’s a horrible city to sculpt in! I have a second-story studio. Logistics here is impossible. If you’re a sculptor, or the type of sculptor that I am, that does have to do stuff with his hands, you need a junkyard, and a place to put stuff, and a place to park. I used to laugh with my painter friends that painting is a little bit like stacking money in a wallet. It’s very practical. Sculpture’s like—you’re kind of stuck with weight and the space that it takes. It’s not particularly convenient to just put it in a storage house somewhere for a long time. It’s possible, but it’s expensive. And that’s part of the charm of it for me, the excitement of it. It’s a real thing that you can bump into and climb on afterwards. The level of commitment
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it requires is tough. B&W: You debuted in New York in 2005 in a gallery show. Roberta Smith praised your doit-yourself recklessness. Do you think you were reckless then? And are you still reckless now? OM: I don’t remember her use of that word. I mean, I don’t think I’m reckless. B&W: Or the do-it-yourself aspect? OM: Yeah, the do-it-yourself, and the whole producing an object that is not necessarily a commodity, but it’s another thing—it’s a prop, it’s like I’m using the gallery as a space of some sort of dialogue or fluid mode of social interaction, somewhere between architecture and theater. When you make stuff for the city, you cannot do it DIY. It needs to stand there, it needs to take the weather and take the use of people. If I had my way, that’s what I would have done in the gallery every day. It’s not that good for commerce, but there are in-between places. There is still room for art that is a negotiation of ideas and materials. I’m older, I don’t know how reckless I am, and it’s not as if I have that many gallery shows at the moment. But the DIY thing is definitely still there. It’s like Lou Reed. By his third album, he learned how to play guitar, but is it still a DIY thing? B&W: You make lamps. Two beautiful lamps. OM: I do a lot of stuff from my home or thinking about the domestic space. A lot of the two-dimensional work that I do is directly considered for this idea. You know, there’s the street, there’s the market. Somehow, domestic space gets an important place there, and it is important for my life, especially now. B&W: Were you influenced by Memphis at all? The lamps seem to bear a trace of Sottsass. The postmodern set. OM: Yes, I guess so. They started from being made from leftovers, from sculptures and geometric shapes. Yeah, I’m definitely looking at these things. But they came from the practical. They do stuff, which I like, and they came organically from the process of playing with shapes and materials. I like decorative things—decorative things are important, too—but this field of functional art is. ... I pour the concrete bases and I paint the edges. Sometimes, you’re so bored from the didacticism that you see on museum walls. So you have to go to the design to get—uch! Yellow! Or something sensual.
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HUMOR
Dear Dante, Season 5 Dear Dante, This one’s good. I’m not totally sure about this, but I think my cute TA totally has a crush on a friend and classmate of mine. Should I tell them or anyone else? I can’t tell if they already know. SEAS ’24 Dear BIG MOUTH, Congratulations on being published! I can tell it means a lot to you. Otherwise, why would you have taken the time to fax me a three-sentence-long handwritten letter, begging for my advice about a problem that may very well exist only in your head? At the risk of going out on a limb, I’d guess that it’s because you’re jealous of your friend, you’re in love with your TA, and you’re ready to homewreck. I love it. You’re probably questioning how I came to those conclusions. But don’t worry about it, I assure you that to the rest of us, it’s painfully obvious that you’ve been scheming on this “cute” TA for months. It’s even more clear that this “friend and classmate” is actually neither of those things to you: they’re an enemy. If they weren’t, you’d have gotten them laid by now. What I prescribe is a healthy dose of actualization. Seduce your TA. Dump your friend. Ride off into the sunset. It’s a simple equation, all you need to do is input a little bit of social engineering to make this thing work. When approaching situations like these—in which you’re hoping to simultaneously win over the affections of a much more intellectually capable individual than yourself and make a friend seem unappealing enough to ensure you’ll never compete for anything ever again—you should consider keeping things civil and private to avoid a public fuss. Have you considered that? Good. Now throw it out the fucking window. This little lover’s quarrel is a mess and you should own it. At your next class, get ready to rumble. The first step is taking down that backstabbing “friend” of yours. If they’re is anything like the person I’m imagining you to be, they’ll be incredibly easy to embarrass. A stray banana peel should do the trick. Lay the trap right in the middle of the lecture hall at the beginning of class, and make sure it’s in your friend’s path … … They’ll see the banana peel, stop, and take it to the trash can, like the weak-willed individual you
both are. While they do that, you’ll have a chance to get to the podium and tell the class about a time that your friend did something really embarrassing. Drunk texted their boss, wet the bed, submitted to a campus advice column, you get the idea. Your aim here is to completely destroy their reputation in the eyes of your TA and alienate them from the rest of your classmates. Locking down the sexy academic—who I’m picturing as a mix of Elle Woods and Robin Williams from Good Will Hunting—will be simple. On the day of the big prank, it’ll all fall into place; it’s just a matter of wardrobe. I’d recommend wearing a sweater with a blazing red O embroidered on the upper right shoulder. The O stands for “On the market for casual sex with academics, but also maybe something more serious.” Your TA, having read the classics, will know that. They’ll see you in your new sweater and take note. And later that night, when they log onto Canvas, still wondering if they correctly interpreted your signal, you’ll be patiently waiting in their course inbox. Your message doesn’t need to be so complex. A simple: “Hey, how are you doing, I saw you sweating in class at the sight of my sweater and wanted to let you know that I’m totally into it. Also, I see the way you look at [FRIEND’S NAME], and I just wanted to say that they’re the single least trustworthy person I know, and are apparently really bad at relationships. Anyway, let’s hang ;),” ought to do it. Try not to make your DM’s too complicated, but you also want to seem simultaneously flirty, fun, and way above your classmates in beauty and maturity. Make sure to reiterate that you’re the hot one, that you deserve attention, and that your TA should not engage with any communication or vibe-floating from anyone else in class. It’s best to put some space between your dateability and that of your classmates, and to do so early. You never know what sort of tricks and gambits your classmates are being prescribed by other advice columnists on this campus. I heard Spec is telling people to take steroids in order to appear more conventionally attractive. Who knows what you’re up against, it’s a madhouse out there. But it’s your madhouse. Follow the steps above, and you can own it. Let me know how this goes. Best of Luck, Dante
Postcard by Aeja Rosette
NOVEMBER 2021
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Morningside Munchies
BY MAE BIPPART BUTLER AND CY GILMAN ACROSS 1. What you might get if you don’t have time for a PCR 6. Null partner 10. Mirror image 14. Expunge 15. Looney Tunes corporation 16. Verdi work set in Egypt 17. Paul who shared the 1933 Nobel in Physics with Schrödinger 18. *Salad at Samad’s* 20. Percussive musical genre with Afro-Brazilian roots 21. Temper tantrums 22. Some CU SWU members 23. Gothic, in a sense 25. Roughly 27. *Hot drink at the Sunday Greenmarket* 31. Bundle of sheets 35. Actor Gulager of old TV Westerns 36. TV hit w/ NeNe and Kim 37. With Nast, The New Yorker’s business daddy 38. North Indian clay oven 40. Philosophical putty? 42. “We’ll fight you with _____ power!” 43. Extremely long stretch of time 44. Odd morsel 45. Douchey muscles, abbr. 46. *Fiery pork pie at Mama’s Too* 49. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Author 51. Distinction, slangily (see Sept 2021 puzzle) 52. Sick days, abbr. 55. “greater,” dicere hic Latine 57. A sharp equivalent 61. *Purim treat at Hungarian* 63. Half of a vinyl 64. Bit at the bottom 65. Name with James or Jones 66. Seeds of a Spec feature, perhaps 67. Number
68. Time to jam, informally 69. Plan of action, slangily DOWN 1. Comrades 2. Section of 16-Across 3. Possible Milano order, for short 4. Allende of Chile 5. Collection of plague stories 6. Winery vessels 7. Song played before NHL matches, sometimes 8. Drink 9. Someone in the red 10. Two pi 11. Do like leafy greens left too long 12. Lightbulb, figuratively 13. Casual denials 19. Buckeye sch. 24. siete + uno 26. City of Paris? 27. SILENCE=DEATH organization 28. Spirit vessel? 29. _____ Wars: conflict between Rome and Carthage
30. End for super or inter 32. Arrive at 33. Decorate 34. Conductor Zubin, formerly of the NY Philharmonic 37. Montaigne’s “Of _________” 39. South Indian crispy pancake 40. What “/” may mean 41. WNBA star Jewell ____ 43. Those who say “OK Boomer,” arguably 46. Subsides 47. Cancel out 48. Cardi put the pussy on ______ 50. They come before OP? 52. Degrees on the picket line 53. Starchy vegetable common in Southeast Asia 54. Augury 56. Iranian leader 58. One of a mendacious sort 59. “___ _ dash of ... ”: recipe words 60. Cause for class struggle? 62. Nog precedent