First-Person Scooter by Nassau Weekly

This week, the Nass surveys a hostile world, finds meaning in the senseless, and explores new ways to heal.

The Nassau Weekly

In Print since 1979 Online at nassauweekly.com

Volume 46, Number 3 March 5, 2023

First Person Scooter

Steep a Pot of Chinese Philosophy: This Princeton Business Owner is Selling Natural Balance

By Juju Lane

6 9

Escaping the Werewolf: Alex G, Deep Ecology, and Our Increasingly Hostile World

By Charlie Nuermberger

Prufock’s Letters

By Daniel Viorica

Nass Recommends: 100% Twilight Princess Speedrun (with Commentary) by YouTuber bewildebeast.

By Peyton Smith

A Sprawling Smallness

By Sofiia Shapovalova

Corecore and the Logic of Montage

By Tommy Goulding

Wayward Lines: Setting a Soundtrack to Saidiya Hartman

By Mollika Jai Singh

Twenty Years On

By Henry Moses

Carrot Cyanotype

By Juliette Carbonnier

Steep a Pot of Chinese Philosophy

Steep a Pot of Chinese Philosophy: This Princeton

By JUJU LANE

Want a recipe for perfect health? You might ask Paul Shu. He’s in his 80s, short and fit, with good posture and a full head of silvery salt-and-pepper hair. He’s also an avid gardener and beekeeper.

“I think everybody can live to 100, not a problem,” Shu tells me as we sit in his shop in downtown Princeton, NJ. “Maybe even longer.”

What’s his secret ingredient?

Well, Shu has lots of ingre dients, none of them secret. They’re proudly on display, piled in tall stacks against the walls, inside color-coded tins. Green is for green tea; red is for black tea; yellow is for oolong; blue is for herbals. Personally, Shu prefers oolong—he’s a ver itable connoisseur.

Shu is the owner, propri etor, and walking advertise ment of Holsome Teas and Herbs, a one-stop shop for all things that make you feel like a responsible adult: nutritional supplements, vitamins, essen tial oils, loose-leaf teas. Plus the fancy infuser teapots that are the real harbingers of adult hood, at least for me.

During my visit to Holsome on a wintry afternoon, an el derly lady purchased a huge quantity of single-serve aroma therapy bath salt packets, chat ting with Shu in Mandarin as she hauled countless armfuls to the register. Two teenagers in oversized jackets bought a small measure of Irish break fast tea. To a visibly anxious middle-aged woman shopping for a friend’s birthday gift, Shu recommended sencha green tea with matcha. “It’s really calming,” he promised her.

Holsome also functions as an apothecary of sorts. The

shelves boast alternative health

early from Mobil. Shu opened Holsome Teas and Herbs the next year in an effort to return to his roots—not only to turmeric, burdock, and ginger root, but also to his heritage. “It is part of our culture,” Shu says. “Since we were little, we hear about it. We see people

In fact, both of Shu’s grandparents practiced Chinese herbal medicine. For Chinese people in his grandparents’ generation, he explains, those who did not go into government would turn to medicine. “The least you can do is to help people,” says Shu. “If you cannot be a good administrator, you can be a good doctor

try, and he conducted industrial chemical research for Mobil Oil Corporation for much of his career.

In 1995, he was able to retire

Shu had seen how Chinese herbal medicine could help people. During his childhood in China, he remembers local people calling on the house when they were sick. His grandfather would make late-night visits, by carriage or boat, to visit patients far away. “This is not like you go to a medical center or you have insurance,” he adds with a wry smile. In such a decentralized system, herbal medicine was central to health care provision in rural areas.

Many of these patients were

Volume 46, Number 3 4 PAGE DESIGN BY BENJAMIN SMALL ART BY CHAS BROWN

Health, harmony, and history with Paul Shu, owner of Holsome Teas and Herbs.

Business Owner is Selling Natural Balance

poor farmers or workers, Shu says, so his family would provide them with free medical care. His grandparents would write formulas for mixtures of herbs, which patients could buy at a local shop—“like drug stores, they had all the herbs there,” not unlike the Holsome shop today.

When Shu was starting Holsome in 1996, he noticed several trends in the U.S. that he believed would bolster the success of his herb and tea shop. “Number one,” says Shu, “I felt people in this country begin to be interested in a natural way of health.” He noted the rise of the supplements industry and spotted a lucrative opportunity in selling high-quality teas and natural remedies. “At the time, just as a business sense, I can sense herbal medicine is coming.”

However, once wellness entered the mainstream, many independent natural health stores were unable to compete with larger companies and drug stores selling the same, now-trendy products. There had been, Shu recalls, “so many supplement shops—vitamin this, vitamin that. Guess what? ...They’re gone. They don’t have a way to compete. But for me? I survived. I prosper because what I have here,

they don’t have.”

And what exactly does Shu have that others did not? Quite simply, he offers customers a worldview along with the tea and health remedies that he sells. One look at his business’s logo—the first “O” in “Holsome” is a yin-yang symbol—suggests that there is a philosophy underpinning Shu’s work.

The goal of herbal medicine, as Shu sees it, is simple: “To restore your equilibrium, that’s it. Yin-and-yang is really in everyday life. You always have opposite sides.”

“It’s all derived from a philosophy of balance, by understanding nature, the interchanges, the transformations,” he continues. “You never do anything excessive, that’s Chinese philosophy. We follow the middle road.” - - - - -

While I’m chatting with Shu, a well-dressed and jewelry-adorned local lady stops by the shop. She’s here to ask Shu about an herbal product she’d purchased, because she had noticed it was a slightly different color from previous batches of the same product.

Shu points out that herbal medicine, like anything that grows naturally, is not completely standardized. Variation should be expected. “All the cars on the assembly line, they’re the same, right?” he says. “But cherries, tomatoes... you expect all the celeries are going to look the same? No.”

“Well actually,” the woman interjects, “for a lot of people in the American supermarket — they do. They get all the carrots whittled down to this size,” she draws two fingers close together, laughing, “and they think they grow that way!”

“Anyway, this is perfectly normal,” Shu assures her.

The lady acquiesces. She goes on to tell Shu that she had begun developing shingles while traveling, so she’d started self-medicating with an antiviral herbal medicine “that you gave me in case of COVID,” she says.

“That’s good for shingles,” Shu confirms.

“So I took one pill, and the next morning, I noticed really a dramatic difference,” she enthuses. “It actually ran its

CONTINUED ON PAGE 15

Volume 46, Number 3 5

THE WEREWOLF

ALEX G, DEEP ECOLOGY, AND OUR INCREASINGLY HOSTILE WORLD

CONTENT WARNING: mentions of rape

In January, we watched Avatar 2, which was three and a half hours long, and I only had to pee once. The aliens won, and we emerged, hesitantly, into the four floors and basement of the Palisades Center, a complex that can only be called a megamall. Women in kiosks hawked marijuana-infused gummies at us. We purchased them. The spinal column of the mall contained a multi-storied ropes course, and looking down across the four identical floors below us, I felt what I imagined I would feel when I see the wolf in the speargrass. The beast coming on to me. Spectral eyeshine flickering and spitting. It wants me to know it’s there.

The mall subsists off this commercial carnivory.

It sees its market competitors shot down by poachers and clings to a predatory mode of survival.

All these metabolic forces coursed through non-descript, neatly tiled hallways. Latticed security gates shuttered defunct storefronts. Things smelled new, recently developed. We participated in the Carnivalesque and left.

A few days after the excursion, a teacher whom I knew for years and had considered a mentor was charged with rape of a minor. Boys I knew came forward. The attorney representing one victim said, “From what I know, this is one of the most disturbing cases I’ve ever seen in my career. And I’ve been around the block.” In infinite wisdom, he predicted that the case would cause “a chilling in the community.” All the small-scale, local magazines tore it apart.

My friends texted me, “I’m still in shock. How did none of us hear anything about it.”

My mom texted me, “Please keep reaching out to your younger brother. It’s a lot for him to go through alone.”

That day, local TV crews showed up at our all-boys high school, and I texted my younger brother, and he didn’t respond. I wrote in my journal, “In the spring, my brother escaped the werewolf by cutting the tops off strawberries and tossing them to our chickens, who were ravenous and would eat anything we fed them.” And then, I scratched it out. Then, I wrote it down again exactly the same way.

These days, it feels easy to feel like everything is after you. There are a million wolves hiding in the environmental substrate

“There are a million wolves hiding in the environmental substrate I’ve called speargrass. The reality is that they’re not even wolves. When they get home in the evening, they take off the wolfskin and look just like us.”

By CHARLIE NUERMBERGER

I’ve called speargrass. The reality is that they’re not even wolves. When they get home in the evening, they take off the wolfskin and look just like us. The wolves are anything and everything that preys on us. These

deceiver-wolves who walk quietly through the neighborhoods and eat up little boys.

In the Prose Edda, a wolf named Enemy swallows up the moon at the end of the

March 5, 2023 6

ESCAPING

PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY ART BY HAZEL FLAHERTY

It feels like we inhabit a hostile world, and we seem to be witnessing the failure of major systems of all types: social, political, economic, biological, climatic, ecological, spiritual. We can draw lines linking collapsing networks with fatalistic ease. We know where the wolves are hiding; they’ve moved into the megamall.

My friends worry deeply that capitalist aesthetics have stalled culture. This essay is not about that.

I devour a grotesque amount of music by Alex G, formerly known as Sandy Alex G, and Alex Giannascoli before that. His most recent album, “God Save the Animals,” received significant and well-deserved critical acclaim. Reviewers invented terms like “hyperfolk” to categorize the genre the artist has assembled for himself. The lyricism sounds acceptably complex. The instrumentation feels radically homegrown. And there’s a marked difference from some of his earlier material, which is washed in a sort of Philadelphian lo-fi melancholia.

Alex has a kid on the way, with band member Molly Germer. Tracks like “No Bitterness” and “Early Morning Waiting,” not to mention the contemplative single “Miracles,” sound really, actually happy. He works his way into a dark and noisy place on the record, but even songs

like “Ain’t It Easy” and “Blessing” punch out a hopeful insistence.

Across the entire album, he leans into a charismatic Christian tilt, which I regularly associate with evangelism, spectacular megachurches, and my

brother’s hand-raising girlfriend. This new spiritual discourse is most explicit in the record’s benediction, “After All,” where he sings, “After all people come and people go away, but God with me, he stayed.”

Giannascoli posits an

informal, conversational relationship with God, a resigned optimism, and, as the title suggests, an inclusion of animals in all his prayers. It’s thematic content I’d usually disregard or treat with mild condescension. And when “God Save the Animals” dropped in

September 2022, I mostly wrote it off.

Now as we’re emerging from the winter, picking our heads up from snow banks that never really formed, I’ve reconfigured my relationship to Alex G’s newly discovered faith. I won’t be devoting myself to his God of babies, drug-runners, and oceans, but I think Giannascoli has found an appropriate cosmological vehicle for the way we should be living in our 21st-century lifeworlds. The work is to rediscover an ecological faith. Ecological in the sense of our social relations to human and nonhuman agents: the ficus in my common room, the melanistic squirrels in the south of campus, rainstorms. The work is to pray, as Giannascoli suggests in “Miracles,” for the sinners and the children and the animals.

In the album’s promotional art, Alex G fixates on parrots, which makes sense. They speak, or at or at least mimic speech, so it feels easy to align them as persons. The work is to horizontalize, to reconnect, to love deeply.

I hesitate to call this deep ecology. Scholars, like Ramachandra Guha in 1989, criticized an early, American iteration of the concept, for its entanglement with imperialist projects as well as its orientalist invocation of belief systems like Taoism and Hinduism. Critics have also compared it to Indigenous, object-oriented ontologies. Early

Volume 46, Number 3 7

world.

deep ecology prioritized a fascistic, imaginary notion of “untouched wilderness.” A new, deeper ecology needs to integrate wilderness and human settlement as social spaces, or conversely, as Timothy Morton suggests, “an ecology without Nature.”

Morton also writes that “The ecological thought insists that we’re deeply connected even when we say we’re not.” He says that we are suspended among all these floral, faunal, mineral persons faithfully, wholly. He speaks to the intractability of belief; we are done up, part and parcel.

We need huge, unending biospheric hope. Loving the speargrass. Pulling the rubber wolf mask off.

Cutting the tops off strawberries. Tossing them to our chickens.

I’ve been thinking about how, if you channel deep enough into any discipline, you plumb a floor of spirituality. You have to cover the gaps with faith; it is the boson that holds things together, and the whole complex is so huge and complicated and beautiful that humility is forced onto you. The sublime bottom of the pit.

There might be a point when the waters recede, and I heat my house with clean hydrogen, and we finally discover a rational explanation for the depth of a field-like ecology, the associated mysteries. Until then, we are faithful.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger was another thing I ate up while wintering. McCarthy probes similar implications of extending beyond the human, most poignantly, I think, in Child of God, where he writes about “the slow green occlusion that the trees were spreading” and “the diminutive progress of all things in the valley.” That book is about a serial killer.

His late-stage career is decidedly more annihilative and presses deeper into quantum physics, ultimately to the depth of religiosity. Cormac manages to pry open some faith in The Passenger, writing, “I had heard this voice in my sleep and I could still hear the echo of it and it said: If

something did not love you you would not be here. And I said okay.”

Things are here to get you. They are wolf and human and predate on you relentlessly. They occupy the speargrass. “Woah Lord, help me,” writes Frank Stanford. “Help me and my brother get through this tookover land.”

The teacher charged with sexual abuse was denied bail. In the detention center, he was isolated from other detainees. He was placed on suicide watch. The local magazines, and all my friends but not my mother stopped talking about the whole lycanthropic affair. When he tried for bail again, it was granted to him.

When we arrived on campus, we walked through neighborhoods, unused baseball diamonds to the lake that they dammed up and harvested ice from. It was quiet and muddy, and we forgot how early the sun set in February. Geese fanned across the sky, filled it. It was nice that they could come home so early. The moon still hung softly above us. When we returned to campus, the neighborhood was lit yellow with families in their homes.

In The Passenger, McCarthy writes further: “He thought that God’s goodness appeared in strange places. Don’t close

Charlie Nuermberger is here to get the Nassau Weekly.

March 5, 2023 8

PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY ART BY HAZEL FLAHERTY

PRUFROCK’S LETTERS

By DANIEL VIORICA

3. Faster, you and me. Running now, perhaps forgetting that all my time spent waiting doesn’t end so easily. From here, to where we were before, which, while solid (I know, I’ve touched it) seems a cinderblock to sunrise. A fine one, painted thick tan, perfect for those lovely blinkless afternoons staring at nothing, thinking.

Of what? You?

Mente mia, che presaga de’ tuoi damni, Al tempo lieto già pensosa e trista, Sí ‘ntentamente ne l’amata vista Requie cercavi de’ futuri afanni

Let us go now, til it be that all you and I can see is made the slightest bit unstable; along these fine rain-slickened streets run along these sticky, glowing streets and see (for the first time, you know, for me) steam breathed from sewer grates, snowflakes caught in headlights like the sunlit motes of dust that spin above my table.

Those specks still float across my sight. The doctor says not to worry, or at least there isn’t any hurry— Just my mind’s nebulae, or maybe just detritus: pens and styrofoam, clothes, cups, unread books which make it hard to focus when I’m writing at my table.

(All my weeks are gone. All my hours still are holding on.)

(If all my weeks are gone my hours still toss and turn even when I’m sleeping feeling the slightest itch, the slightest charcoal burn, the heater gently creaking, a source I’ve been unable—)

I never thought about the smell of smoke. Now I’m always thinking about the smell of smoke

I find in doorways, in grey wide open space, reminding my heart to race. But why? For attrition. For both joy and repetition.

And would you exchange that sunset for a kiss an image—even half imagined—for this?

(So the days have flown, whittled sharp hard deep. As to the bone.)

Volume 46, Number 3 9

PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG

Nass Recommends: 100% Twilight Princess Speedrun (with Commentary) by YouTuber bewildebeast.

By PEYTON SMITH

Igenerally don’t watch others play games, and I don’t really even play many video games anymore. But for some inexplicable reason, on a procrastination-heavy Thursday afternoon, YouTube recommended me a 6-hour speedrun of a game that I have never played before. Perhaps even more confusingly, I clicked on the video and thoroughly enjoyed all 388 minutes of it.

I had the pleasure of stumbling upon a 100% Twilight Princess run by Zelda speedrunner bewildebeast, who holds the world record for this and many other Zelda speedruns (although this video did not depict the world-record run).

This video, filmed after his run, featured extensive commentary by bewildebeast explaining his route. Having played two games from the Zelda Franchise, Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild, but not the critically

acclaimed Twilight Princess, my initial, split-second decision to click on this speedrun was motivated by a general desire to learn further about the game’s story, progression, and atmosphere. In the first few minutes, when bewildebeast mentioned while skipping the opening cutscene that Twilight Princess is one of the few Zelda Games to allow you to do so, I learned that this speedrun would provide little of that. But what bewildebeast’s commentary offered—a portrait of how speedrunners “optimize” game mechanics in ways, both unintended and intended, by the original developers—is something infinitely more interesting.

First, I would like to establish that I do not consider myself an avid watcher of speedruns, (a fact that further adds to the mystery of YouTube’s recommendation). However, prior to watching bewildebeast’s commentary, I was not without a removed appreciation for speedrunning, primarily motivated by video essayist and game critic Hbomberguy, who

did a video on the topic (I also highly recommend watching his video). After all, one cannot help but appreciate the precise skills involved in executing a run, in addition to the creative community efforts that go into shaving off time.

Despite having respect for speedrunning, I never especially enjoyed watching speedruns of games I have played. Take another game in the Zelda franchise, Breath of the Wild, for example. Breath of the Wild is a particularly popular and fast speedrun because after players exit the tutorial area, they can go straight to the boss fight, woefully unequipped. And so, when I watched a Breath of the Wild speedrun for the first time, I was excited to see how players would skillfully navigate the puzzles and traverse the vast landscape to reach the boss fight whereupon they would unleash a perfect set of sword combos. Instead, the top speedrunners completely skipped many of the puzzles and much of the time-consuming navigation by clipping

through walls, exploiting glitches, and launching themselves across the domain of Hyrule. After viewing these 20-minute speedruns of a game I spent a hundred hours on, I was left stupefied; they seemed to be playing a completely different game than I was.

Having no previous experience watching or playing Twilight Princess, I entered bewildebeast’s video with no expectation of how the game is intended to be played. Sure, seeing bewildebeast maneuver Link solely in forward rolls hinted at the peculiarity of the gameplay, but I had no idea of the larger progression of the game. Only when bewildebeast mentioned how his run deviated from “casual” play did I realize how unconventional his progression was. For example, the Master Sword, which is the most powerful sword in Twilight Princess, enables players to defeat enemies much faster compared to early-game weapons, to portal around the map, and to transform between wolf Link and person Link, providing

further ability and flexibility. These are all valuable qualities for speedrunners. However, the Master Sword is designed to be available to players only after they defeat three out of nine dungeons. In just the first half hour of the playthrough, bewildebeast is able to access the area in which the Master Sword resides—having not completed any dungeons—by positioning an enemy close to a ledge, launching a charge attack, and jumping onto an otherwise totally inaccessible area that just barely enables access to the Master Sword area. After obtaining the Master Sword, bewildebeast is now able to complete early areas of the game that never accounted for these expansive powers.

If there were no commentary, I would have very few cues from the raw game footage to notice these major sequence breaks. Apart from the funky textures of the out-of-bounds ledge, the acquisition of the skyward sword was seamless. Bewildebeast simply worked within the coded physics of

Volume 46, Number 3 10 PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG ART BY HANNAH MITTLEMAN

In cheerful defense of shortcuts.

combat and movement to traverse a hard-to-reach but technically accessible area of the map. The developers never intended this sequence, but bewildebeast, with this very act, demonstrated how speedrunners could operate in a liminal space between this original intent and the coded infrastructure, fashioning a novel way of approaching gaming.

Bewildebeast’s commentary focused on explaining these major sequence breaks, such as the Master Sword glitch, and more minor, but constant, optimizations, which aggregated over the course of the speedrun. One such trick that is frequently utilized is called a Long Jump Attack (LJA) in which the player throws Link’s boomerang over a void, pulls out his sword once the boomerang is over the void, and executes a jump attack, inexplicably allowing the player to jump farther than a normal jump. This trick is employed frequently to reach various ledges, but also to avoid character triggers that would force dialogue, a decision that saves mere seconds during each encounter. The LJA is not a sequencing-breaking glitch

in the same sense that the early Master Sword is, but they are both side effects of coalescing combat mechanics and game physics that operate within these marginal spaces. I never expected to become so hypnotized watching a speedrun of a game I have never played, which was enjoyable in large part thanks to bewildebeast’s stellar commentary that manages to be accessible to those who are unfamiliar with the game or speedrunning, while also clarifying the more intricate aspects of his run. Bewildebeast recorded his commentary not during but after conducting his run. One may expect his commentary to function more as retrospective, critiquing elements to be improved next time; but instead, the video acts more as a walk-through, enhancing the amount of insightful, calm intelligence available to the audience during the six-hour video. Apart from the content of the comments, bewildebeast’s dialogue assumes an ASMR-like quality, his clear voice taking an understated tone, producing a soothing effect on the audience, which is another important

quality for a six-hour endeavor. And yet the video is never boring, helped by the nuggets of dry humor bewildebeast sprinkles throughout.

Even if the Zelda franchise or speedrunning are completely foreign concepts to you, bewildebeast’s 100% speedrun of Twilight Princess offers an immaculate primer to an unconventional approach to media in which masters of the material go far beyond what was ever intended by the creators, deriving their own objectives and journey. One need not experience all six hours of bewildebeast’s Twilight Princess gameplay to fully appreciate the liminality and constant optimization of speedrunning; however, I implore other completionists like myself to slowly chip away at the video, treating watching the run as its own kind of complete journey, which fortunately does not have to take a contiguous six hours.

If there were no commentary, the Nassau Weekly would have very few cues from Peyton Smith to notice these major sequence breaks.

Volume 46, Number 3 11

A Sprawling Smallness A Sprawling Smallness A Sprawling Smallness

“She wanted to relive the memories, the ephemeral emotions of happiness she felt when she was younger – unmolded. She did not account for the fact that she was a different person hoping to feel the sentiments of years ago.”

By SOFIIA SHAPOVALOVA

Home Home had always been a strange concept that somehow eluded her—it had never been a place. How could it be when that place was in constant flux? Indeed, the notion of tying a home to the physical realm was foreign to her. Rather, home was a feeling. Somewhere she knew she was when a certain sense of belonging enveloped her, like the warmth one feels when in the embrace of their favorite person. Home was indefinable. It was not a house or a street. It was not a city.

And yet, that was what she told others when asked where home was. She gave the name of a city because this was the accepted custom. The other students at her university were like ultrasonic bats, conditioned to return to their cities with the advent

of each break. She thought she could understand the appeal. Home was meant to be a refuge. A respite from the neverending stream of demands being a university student required—the cliché malady all young adults suffered from. A month to escape from the pristine construct of higher education sounded nice. And she was oh-so-tired. Tired of the constant push forwards and the cookie cutter environment, where everyone molded themselves into figures they thought would be best received by the judging masses of Higher Education. So she made herself believe that going “home”—the city her family happened to reside in for who-knew-how-long— was the cure to the fatigue. This city, however, was not one she could properly call her own.

Neither was she prepared for the disillusionment that would follow the return home. At first, she thought she was happy. Happy to embrace the family she hadn’t seen in months and happy to no longer feel as though she was on constant display—no performance to put on, no need to please. Soup never tasted quite as nice in the dining hall either, and there was never a reason to wake up in the morning as anything less than well rested. She was

excited to see old friends too. To share stories and experience the Good Old Fun of The Glory Days together again. She wanted to relive the memories, the ephemeral emotions of happiness she felt when she was younger, unmolded. She did not account for the fact that she was a different person hoping to feel the sentiments of years ago.

This city that was meant to be her haven felt, at once, much too small and much too sprawling. The townhouse her family presently inhabited had never seemed so insignificant before. It, too, had been cookie-cut, bland and unattractive just like the entire row of buildings on the street. The space inside it, strangely, felt empty. There was furniture—some new, some that had been with her family since the dawn of time as she knew it— but not nearly enough of it to fill the looming space. Her bedroom (a space she’d offered no design input on) had a bed, a desk, and a bookshelf. Neat. Reasonably sized. Stifling. And there was no escape from this house. Although she could walk out the door at any moment, the space outside was perhaps even more bleak than the interior. The city that hosted the house was sick and in an eternal state of misery that

suffocated her. Slowly, subtly. No one could see.

She found, too, that these thoughts in her mind amplified until they commanded her full attention towards them. The notion of being trapped flitted around constantly until it pushed her towards the precipice of insanity. She felt she could not go anywhere, and so she receded into her own circling ruminations. Wake up. Look out the window. Why doesn’t the sun greet her? Gray. Freezing. Why is she always so cold? Slippers. Sweater. Cereal. Why couldn’t she taste it?

Her body executed the necessary actions appropriately, but the core of her self was elsewhere—inside, yet intangible. She saw her friends, and she smiled, and she laughed at all the right moments, nodding her head in affirmation and making pensive noises of accord when people would check to see that she was following. Or, rather, she saw herself doing these things, as if there were two copies of her: One that was her real body, walking about and functioning as a normal human being, and the other was her true essence—a shadow that walked alongside unseen. A shadow in danger of evaporating.

She was frustrated most of all

for changing without noticing she had done so. She could not identify this intrinsic shift, and that only vexed her further. She simply knew that when she spoke to the people she once called closest to her, she had never been farther away. But where was she?

She realized, then, that some part of her fiercely hated the city she was bound to—a city she thought she’d said goodbye to long before. Perhaps she was merely projecting her own anger and confusion onto an entity that was easy to blame. This was simple to do when the city itself was dying, streets ridden with litter and desolate buildings decaying in the humidity of the lake that claimed the valley. She wanted out within a week of her return. This desire she carried within her as criminally condemning evidence. She was ashamed that what was meant to be home felt much more like a prison—a city where hope came to die.

She was lost, and there was no place she could go. Only fleeting feelings to chase. The feeling of home she did not even begin to know where to find.

Indeed, the notion of tying Sofiia Shapovalova to the physical realm was foreign to the Nassau Weekly.

Volume 46, Number 3 12

PAGE DESIGN BY TONG DAI

Corecore and the Logic of Montage

“This genre’s title, corecore, makes a totalizing claim on the thousands of balkanized subgenres and subaesthetics that fleet past the user: only a certain set of objects and clips can be dazecore or college dormcore, but corecore encompasses all such ‘cores,’ all these oddly particular aesthetics.”

By TOMMY GOULDING

“ Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse– these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them”

– Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

There’s a new kind of TikTok that’s been showing up on my For You page. It usually draws you in under false pretenses: A girl doing her makeup is explaining her dating

preferences to the propped-up camera, a man in sunglasses walking through New York explains why and how you should invest. You are listening to what they say, assuming they will continue for 15, 20 more seconds, or however long before you cut them off. A sudden cut shows you your error: Now a group of women on a dormroom floor are sharing their “icks,” now a bit of Fox propaganda reveals (or endorses?) some latest late-stage horror. The transition complicates your viewing experience: You begin the TikTok presuming a direct relationship between the person talking on your screen and the account posting the video, a passing of the microphone as you scroll, from one suburban bedroom to another. The cut reveals that you are in fact interfacing with an invisible curator, someone who is stitching together the refuse of their hours of TikTok scrolling into rapid contrasts, unsettling conjunctions, montage. The videos are organized under the hashtag “corecore.”

The clips relate, or they don’t. They tell some positive story in their content or are presented in detached irony

and disappointment. They are “about” anything from climate crisis, men’s mental health, the commodification of dating and dating apps, sexism, or TikTok itself. Some curators betray genuine talent in video editing, with overlaying audio and visuals, scraps of poetic text (written by the user?) that bleed over onto the screen in gentle pastels, creating surprise art-house pieces in miniature. Others simply stitch one clip after another, perhaps with an underlying sound selected from the app’s archives. This genre’s title, corecore, makes a totalizing claim on the thousands of balkanized subgenres and subaesthetics that fleet past the user: Only a certain set of objects and clips can be dazecore, or college dormcore, but corecore encompasses all such “cores,” all these oddly particular aesthetics. Corecore is not a new aesthetic, but rather a new form that promises to include all prior aesthetics, even if only in distorted, heavily stylized, or ironically juxtaposed form.

Corecore differs from the compilation, a form common to Youtube and TikTok, in its rejection of a title,

organizing principle, or announced purpose in the bringing together of collected clips (“Premier League Winning Goals,” “cody & noel funny moments”). These TikToks are different from edits in their potential ambivalence, or hostility toward the subjects they treat. The gaze of the curator on the visual scraps is usually critical: By cutting off the speakers in these clips they take the speech out of its original coherence, making the words so much noise in the atmosphere the video is creating. It is a kind of shattered articulation, the remaining fragments of which serve a new purpose: To illustrate the invisible editor’s own cultural viewpoint, shaped by and constructed out of hours of TikTok scroll.

The purpose of corecore is in some way to create TikTok in miniature. They explore the formal and sensorial implications of an app that produces a constant, mindlessly, and soundlessly curated stream of content to the user’s screen.

In the videos, human beings usurp a function that has long been consigned to the algorithm: The gathering and presentation of loosely related

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clips to a viewer. Corecore is a framing of this exchange of media and time between app and human, turning the apparatus of the app itself into intentional art. It is a genre that mimics its own venue, its site of presentation, stylizing and accelerating the sensation of content overload.

It’s interesting to watch the young users of this app become aware that they have introduced something entirely new into the world of media. TikTok is not a platform well suited to community-building or written introspection. Comments have a very low character limit, and videos appear one-by-one on the For You page, disrupting the possibility of long threads and the backand-forth response that creates online communities. The self-reflection of commenters on corecore is halting, often deflated by others certain that nothing ‘that deep’ is going on here.

Even so, there is something unmistakably subversive about these videos. They disrupt the monopoly of presentation that the big apps claim over us; they trouble the messages of social and sexual inadequacy that rocket to the top of the viral lists; and they present in alluring and disorienting form the horrors of climate crisis, deadeyed grind culture, and the commodified world of sexuality and dating that young people today stumble through.

There is one video in particular that struck me. It opens with an interview of men on the street: “You would raise a son but abandon a daughter?” “Exactly.” It’s a cheap shot in a lazy gender war; no context, no provocation, just glib misogyny and grating laughter. Then the music and logic of montage begins. The Guggenheim’s crowds, circling upwards, clouds in autumn, the moon shot on an iPhone, traffic in the night from an overpass, a train interior, fireworks. Layered over one another. A group of female friends in London, a shot of Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A lonely bald man (he reminds me of Nabokov) in a windy field with a briefcase. Then, a shot from a movie I don’t recognize: A blonde little girl and a young woman, also blonde (her sister?), in her twenties, swaying in a whirling teacup at an amusement park. It is dark, and the lights behind them are bright. The girl is on the verge of tears, looking with some discomfort or desperation at her sister. The sister, made-up, in a black dress, looks with love, exhaustion, and humanity at the child across from her, as the background blurs around her. The camera flicks between them both, then cuts to the two girls working the steering wheel of their cup together. Daughters.

It is a video about nothing, insofar as the disparate clips,

taken from TikToks, movies, and camera rolls mean nothing until we draw the constellations between them. It is a piece about women experiencing life, friendship, disappointment, celebration, mundanity, travel, love, sisterhood, daughterhood. The montage strikes the viewer in a way that a stitched response to the original clip, a point-by-point litany of offenses and grievances, could not. It is both a convincing refutation and work of aesthetic brilliance, formally inventive and visually delightful. And touching, bringing tears to my eyes as I think about my sisters, one older and one younger.

This is what corecore can do: Disrupt the darker energies of online life, and out of them create an intentionally crafted version of content overload, one which leads the viewer to thought, feeling, and experience, rather than self-loathing and exhaustion. These videos, produced by small accounts (there are no big names, nor well-known producers of this genre), are a powerful response to our particular moment of modernity.

It’s interesting to watch Tommy Goulding become aware that they have introduced something entirely new into the world of the Nassau Weekly

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Wholesome Holsome

general.

course within a week, which is unusual for shingles.”

“Usually your body will fight it out,” says Shu, “but if you take some herbs, that will speed it up.” He asks if she needs to restock on ginseng, but she’s all set.

Despite selling products that claim to have health effects and offering guidance to customers like this woman, Shu has no institutional training in either mainstream biomedicine or traditional Chinese medicine. In his grandparents’ era, traditional Chinese herbal doctors gained their knowledge primarily through selfstudy—Shu has too.

“I’m not trained as a professional. A lot of the learned knowledge is very easy for me,” he says. “I’m a chemist. I do research. I’m a good problem solver. So that’s how this has become a very unique, very special place in town.”

All the same, Shu says, “It’s not gonna be clear-cut like doing chemistry — you know, A plus B equals C and D. Herbal medicine is based more on the natural.” But Shu has a complicated relationship with chemistry, and with humanity’s manipulation of nature, in

The ideology beneath herbal medicine is distinct from the worldview that dominates the realm of pharmaceutical medicine in the United States and Europe, he explains. “Right now, the medicine developed here is very new.”

On the other hand, he says, the healing system of Chinese herbal medicine is the product of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge. “It’s a different approach. We are based on a natural way to heal—to get you cured with minimum side effects and toxicity,” he claims. “Everything involved is from nature.”

His framework of health and illness draws a corollary between the body and the planet itself. “When our body is running harmoniously, you’re healthy. If something’s wrong or invaded by infection, then you get sick,” Shu explains. “Just like the earth—sometimes it gets too warm. So the earth is not running smoothly now, with all the extreme weather.”

Shu has serious qualms about modern applications of chemical engineering that produce things he deems “unnatural,” including man-made drugs. “In nature, so many things are to be discovered. But now, the pharmaceutical

companies—they only believe in what can make money. They alter nature. That creates a lot of problems.”

Shu views nature with a deep reverence. His philosophy of health is based on what he views as the contrast between what is “natural” and what is man-made. “We evolved in nature,” Shu says. “You find the answers because all evolved together from the earth’s birth.”

Shu sees a large divide between Western ways of thinking and the philosophy he grew up with. “People are so ignorant… they think anything man-made is better,” he says. “You violate the natural law.”

patent that—you cannot claim ‘that’s mine,’ because it’s in nature.”

“So what do they do? They can use chemists to modify the structure,” Shu continues, “even to enhance a certain part of the molecule to make it even more powerful... to lower cholesterol.”

What then? The companies do some animal testing, he says, to confirm that their synthesized statin is effective. “You get 51% of benefit, 49% of side effect. Still, the benefit is greater than the side effect.”

In Shu’s view, pharmaceutical drug development follows a familiar and troubling pattern. He walks me through the development of artificial statins, which are used to lower cholesterol, as one example of this process.

First, Shu says, drug companies discover a substance in nature that has healing effects, like the red yeast that produces natural statins. Then the companies study the natural substance to determine the chemical structure. They can try to sell the natural statin, he notes, “but they don’t have exclusive right to it, because you cannot

But the chemical modification, Shu claims, has consequences. “Because of that small change in the molecular structure, when we ingest it, our bodies say, ‘we’ve never seen this before.’” A synthetic statin might have the same structure as natural statin, he says, but it’s not the same. “It achieves the purpose of lower cholesterol, however it also harms other things. Therefore, when you take the statins you have to watch out for your liver.”

Here, Shu draws further parallels between body and earth. Take the ozone layer, for instance. “Suddenly we’re losing ozone layers. Why is that? Because we create some chemicals that escape to the atmosphere and interfere

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with ozone.” He is referring to Freon gas, formerly used in refrigerants, which has damaged the ozone layer. “Mother Earth says, ‘we’ve never seen the Freon before.’ We reject it. That makes our ozone sick.”

Shu takes issue with chemical engineering that ignores side effects. His examples are wide-ranging and often laced with pointed cultural and political critique. “The United States during the Vietnam War—they used the Agent Orange. And then now, agriculturally, they use the RoundUp.”

He looked at me intently. “What’s the consequence? They don’t care.”

and healthfulness of nature is so strong that artificiality itself is cause for concern. However, many years ago, a pharmaceutical drug saved his life.

As a toddler, Shu contracted a bacterial illness due to contaminated drinking water, resulting in severe diarrhea. “And my grandmother, my father’s side, got the same thing—she died.”

stroke, but eventually that drug is gonna kill you.”

Shu’s belief in the goodness

During WWII, he says, there was an extreme shortage of medicine. Without treatment, Shu became extremely dehydrated and was on the verge of death. “I was lucky because my mother’s best friend’s husband just returned from the United States. He brought some samples of what’s called sulfa drug. That was very effective... so I was saved because he brought back some samples. I was lucky.”

I point out that sulfa drugs (sulfonamides) are manmade. Yes, Shu accedes, but you wouldn’t use sulfa drugs every day. He agrees that pharmaceuticals can help people regain health in serious, acute situations.

But he doesn’t think the same applies to chronic illness. “If somebody has high blood pressure and then takes high blood pressure medication, that’s wrong... You lower blood pressure, maybe reduce risk of

Shu believes that many of the chronic illnesses that plague people today are the results of modern life, namely “the waste products we produce, the sewer, the air, the pollution, the chemical emissions.” This ethos is internally consistent with Shu’s own life experience, as his near-fatal childhood illness was caused by contaminated drinking water.

As for his own healthcare nowadays, Shu sticks to reishi extract and lots of tea. “I almost never take any medication,” he says. “I don’t want anything long-term, internally.”

So, while he’d be glad to sell some herbs if you visit his tucked-away Princeton shop, Shu doesn’t even think they should be necessary. “The idea is you don’t need to take any medicine, including herbal medicine,” he says. Assuming, of course, you live a Holsome lifestyle.

“If you live this way, the naturally healthy way, you’re not supposed to be sick,” says Shu. “Holsome is really natural, balanced, ideal. That’s it.”

Surely there’s some merit in viewing the earth like a body, and in considering the complex interplays of the chemical

compounds that affect both our bodies and earth. However, unmitigated suspicion of pharmaceutical medicine can lead to widespread denial of empirical results, giving rise to anti-science movements like the COVID-19 anti-vaccination campaign in recent years.

Also, having dealt with serious chronic illness myself, and years of prescription medicine to treat the illness, it’s hard to grapple with claims that longterm medication use is inherently a bad thing. That line of thinking puts the chronically ill in a catch-22, with nothing to work with but advice to live more naturally. Whatever that means. (And it usually means buying some “wellness” product.)

But hey, I have nothing against tea. I drank three cups of (organic!) tea—ginger, lemongrass, and peppermint— while writing this. Another cup while editing. Not sure if this tea affects my health at all, but I’ll keep on drinking it, and keep my fingers crossed.

I’ll check back in at age 100, if I last that long. Never hurts to hedge your bets.

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Juju Lane’s framework of the Nassau Weekly draws a corollary between the body and the planet itself.

WAYWARD LINES Setting a Soundtrack to Saidiya Hartman

With Hartman on the page and Noname in the ears, a Nass writer examines the musical tradition of documenting Black struggle.

By MOLLIKA JAI SINGH

Jazzinuf on shuffle is my go-to study soundtrack. Jazzy, swinging instrumentals are usually good for reading, writing, and playing around with my online calendar. But, usually, I’m not reading Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. The way Hartman animates not only the unjust imprisonment and persecution of Black folks, but the vibrant loves and lives that precede those terrible events, just doesn’t work with coffee shop jingles.

Hartman knows this— she evokes the blues: “If their refusal to submit and battle with the law were celebrated or memorialized in The Ballad of Arthur Harris or May Enoch’s Rag, such tunes have been forgotten.”

She speculates what lyrics that ventriloquize Arthur Harris might have sounded like, using lines from his trial transcript.

In the notes, Hartman cites Bryan Wagner, a scholar she says “contends that the blues emerge in the

confrontation with police power.” Wagner discusses one popular song by Jelly Roll Morton about Robert Charles, who, after being assaulted by the police, killed several officers; this song was never recorded.

Harris and Charles were able to fight back against the police officers, who both initially used billy clubs. Charles was later shot non-fatally in the leg. Today, police using guns with a hundred years of improvement behind them and lethal force with the support of the legal system and huge police unions prevent Black targets’ stories from even reaching the point of self-defense or retaliation.

Music about these killings also has the advantage of a century of technological advance. Whereas the song about Charles was popular but never got recorded, protest music today gets recorded first and is distributed that way, not relying on individuals learning and performing the songs around town or waiting for an artist to get their big break in recording—Jelly Roll Morton was touring for decades before he got into a recording booth. Today, artists like Noname can release their very first mixtape online.

Noname, by the way, is

the one to listen to while reading Saidiya Hartman. Last month, Noname Book Club, a nationwide organization the rapper runs online, read Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Noname, too, speculates what lyrics might speak to people after a noted confrontation with police power. Unlike Hartman, however, Noname’s work is putting those lyrics to music.

In “Song 33,” Noname elegizes George Floyd and Oluwatoyin Salau, a young activist who went missing in June 2020 and was found dead. She also responds to J. Cole, whose first release after the murder of George Floyd was largely a critique of Noname’s online activism: “shit, it’s something about the queen tone that’s botherin’ me.” Noname asks in “Song 33,” “When George was beggin’ for his mother, saying he couldn’t breathe / You thought to write about me?”

Noname has cited blues musicians Buddy Guy and Howlin’ Wolf as inspirations; she is familiar with the tradition in which she has made a space for herself. She is friends with and collaborates with Chance the Rapper, a musician who, like her, writes and speaks about Black struggle. Reading Hartman,

Noname’s words from June 2020, noting those in her industry who were absent from the conversation, rang in my ears: “poor black folks all over the country are putting their bodies on the line in protest for our collective safety and y’all favorite top selling rappers not even willing to put a tweet up. n[*****] whole discographies be about black plight and they nowhere to be found.”

The historical record— and record executives— left Jelly Roll Morton and any Harris/Enoch lyricist behind, but today’s artist-activists are everywhere. Noname wants them to sing, yes, and also to speak.

Volume 46, Number 3 17 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG

Mollika Jai Singh, by the way, is the one to listen to while reading the Nassau Weekly.

TWENTY YEARSON

“I was a swimmer in the night. The moon on my face, I dove off rocks and cliffs. I swim in my dreams and they sound like the breaths of fish past my face.”

By HENRY MOSES

y name is Roy and out there I can see the end. I can see the end and it has a sound. It sounds like a pulse and it rattles the windows of this

My sister came down and I followed her lead, afraid of being alone up there. Down here it’s warm and we didn’t need to pay for heat. Just a fire when we wanted. Just a flame to warm this home.

My sister left this world ten years ago and I’ve been alone since. I hear her voice and I see her face. Walking in the desert it comes to me like a bird song or a falling leaf.

Therefore I’m okay. Therefore I stay down here alone. Therefore I stay here all day.

I sit on my porch or in my kitchen and look out there. I go out and look for her. I

dream.

I dream by day and by night. About everything. My name is Roy and out there I can see the end.

My dreams have a sound. They sound like a bird chirping to its friend or a tree rustling in the wind.

When we first came down here 20 years ago things were different. The land was greener and the streams wetter. Since she left we’ve been on due course to complete dryness. A wide deadening, everything in its tracks.

Her body was dry. On the horizon I saw her lying. I knew right away. I dropped to my knees and covered her in my tears. With each tear she became more alive. First her hands which I held

and then her face.

It rains once a month. I can see the end out there and it has a sound. It sounds like the end of a storm. The pitter patter is slowing down on the roof of this home.

We bought this home from a woman whose number was in the newspaper. We paid in cash fast and got the keys. In darkness we moved our things in. A duffel bag for me and one for her. A Chinese lamp with painted poetry. A quaint few lines about mountains and streams, clouds and stars. A chest that fit perfectly in the trunk of her car. A chest full of letters and bills. Letters from Germany and China.

We sat on the porch on summer nights and spoke of distant friends and

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distant lands. Earlier we hiked up mountains and splashed through streams. We could conjure views on this porch. The desert became green and the valleys filled with moisture. With our words we remembered it all.

I was a swimmer in the night. The moon on my face, I dove off rocks and cliffs. I swim in my dreams and they sound like the breaths of fish past my face.

This morning I cut my hair, like I do on the third of every month. I lay the sheet down under my chair and

place the mirror opposite. I commune with myself. We speak of our past and of the weather. We make deals for the future and blame each other for our mistakes. We share coffee and bread.

The first morning in this house I drove out and bought a gun. I was worried about wolves and coyotes, lone pack animals wandering up to us in the night, trying to crack us. Maybe they’d lost their way.

At night, on the porch, we’d read our letters in accents. With memories, we’d cry.

Once she left, they had to go too and every Sunday I’d burn a few more. At night time with embers flying skyward, I’d have a small fire in front of the porch. I can see the end out there and it sounds like paper aflame and the crackle of wood. It sounds like the steam of my piss on the coals.

In the mornings I talk. This morning too. I speak with friends over breakfast at diners and I speak with her on the porch.

This morning there was fog. It rolled in slowly and stayed long. This morning I read the letters that were left. There were only a few and I cried. I cried to letters from her. I cried to a letter from a friend in Germany. I cried to a letter from a friend in China. I cried to the wind and I cried to my face in my coffee. I cried to my cracking skin. I cried to the fog.

Since Henry Moses left the Nassau Weekly’s been on due course to complete dryness.

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