Unrequited Love

This week, the Nass investigates the future of art, probes at prosopganosia, and contemplates a cure for heartsickness.

The Nassau Weekly

Stern

Unrequited Love

Editors-in-Chief

Sam Bisno

Sierra Stern

Publisher

Allie Matthias

Director of Recruitment and Campus Outreach

Lara Katz

Director of Fundraising and Alumni Engagement

Anya Miller

Dear

Since we came to Princeton in the fall of 2020, this little paper has remained a constant source of inspiration, camaraderie, and much mirth. We’re honored to usher in the 46th volume of the Nassau Weekly.

Managing Editors

Lucia Brown

Charlie Nuermberger

Business Manager

Jana Pak

Senior Editors

By Julia Stern

As the Nass celebrates its first year of full financial and editorial independence, we welcome a range of new voices. We bolster our strong tradition of reflective and creative writing with an explicit emphasis on journalism and culture, taking full advantage of our long-form format and alt identity to produce a magazine unlike any other on campus—one that offers something for everyone every single week. The spirit of the Nass has always been that of courage, experimentation, and empathy. This issue’s stunning prose and illuminating investigations into literature, the self—and yes, love—encapsulate our vision for 2023: a publication for all readers, writers, and artists.

Lauren Aung

Alexandra Orbuch

Junior Editors

Frankie Duryea

Isabelle Clayton

Otto Eiben

Sofiia Shapovalova

Daniel Viorica

Head Copy Editor

Beth Villaruz

By Emma Mohrmann

By Charlie Nuermberger

As anyone who has ever attended one of our pitch meetings in the beloved basement of Bloomberg Hall knows, the Nass is first and foremost a community. Truthfully, the two of us are, by this point, washed up. It is only through the tireless work of our dedicated and immensely talented masthead and contributors that we manage to pull this thing off each Sunday. This year we hope to expand our Nass family, engaging our readership through a fresh focus on recruitment, archival work, and the audiovisual space. We embrace our paper’s vibrant past, and we forge ahead.

Enough from us. Turn the page!

Sam Bisno and

Sierra

Stern, Editors-in-Chief

Design Editor

Cathleen Weng

Assistant Design Editor

Vera Ebong

Art Director

Hannah Mittleman

Assistant Art Director

Emma Mohrmann Events Editor

David Chmielewski

Audiovisual Editor

Teodor Grosu

Web Editor

Jane Castleman

Social Media Chair

Ellie Diamond

Historian

Julia Stern

Social Chair

Kristiana Filipov

This Week: About us:

8:00a Chapel Being Yoga

4:45p LCA

Design & Production for Theater Co-curricular Class

6:00p Friend Center

Malcolm X Memorial Lecture

2:30p East Pyne

German Department Soccer Event Champions

League: RB Leipzig vs. Manchester City

12:30p Chapel

After Noon Concert Series

Verbatim:

Overheard in the Architecture Library

FormerIvybickeree: “Other than us, who do you think has the richest interior life?”

Overheard in a Slightly Drunk Room

Friendafterhearingan acquaintance’sname: “That sounds like a pornstar name for colonialism.”

Overheard in Gender & Sexuality Resource Center

Girl: “All the eating clubs are bad…the Blackest music they know is Starships.”

Overheard in RoMa dining hall

Studentwho’sinoverhishead: “I make literary references so people think I’m clever.”

7:30p 185 Nassau

Reading by Rodrigo Toscano & Katie Kitamura

5:00p Garden Theatre

A Screening and a Conversation: ‘Black Panther 2: Wakanda

Forever’

6:00p LCA

The Way of Washi Tales: Conversation + Book Launch

4:30p 185 Nassau

Fund for Irish Studies: Screening of Documentary Lyra and Discussion with Director Alison Millar

1:30p LCA

Hip-Hop Techniques and Foundations with Liam Lynch ’2

All Day LCA

Washitales: An Exhibition by Visual Artist Kyoko Ibe

Got Events? Email David Chmielewski at dc70@princeton.edu with your event and why it should be featured.

Overheard in Addy Hall RaceTheorist: “White guys love talking to Black people. It makes them feel cool.”

Overheard while Watching The Last of Us ApocalypseAdvocate,dreamily: “If the apocalypse happened in our time, we would barely remember capitalism.”

Overheard over pork rinds and milkshakes

Personwhohaswalkedmany pathsinlife: “I beat the former prime minister of Palestine at a game of trivia.”

Overheard in NCW Navigatorofbefuddled aspirations: “Yeah.. I was at a pregame last week and like, we just sat around and talked — there was no, like, activity… so I guess it was just like, a networking pregame?”

The Nassau Weekly is Princeton University’s weekly news magazine and features news, op-eds, reviews, fiction, poetry and art submitted by students. There is no formal membership of the Nassau Weekly and all are encouraged to attend meetings and submit writing and art. To submit, email your work to thenassauweekly@gmail.com by 10 p.m. on Tuesday. Include your name, netid, a word count, and title. We hope to

8:00p Chapel

Organ Concert: Various Venerable Variations

7:30p LCA

Lost Girl by Kimberly Belflower

All Day Art on Hulfish You Belong Here: Place, People, and Purpose in Latinx Photography

For advertisements, contact Abigail Glickman at alg4@princeton.edu.

Overheard trying to look straight

Gayjunior: “I don’t know. You just sort of have a gay face.”

Overheard at Schouse

Consultantboy: “It’s not union busting, it’s strategic realignment to maximize shareholder value.”

Overheard in Firestone

Seriousstudent: “Alright, enough messing around. I’m resorting to lo-fi.”

Overheard talking about sports you did as a child

Unabashedsadomasochist: “Did you ever play the game where you squeeze the lemons in each other’s eyes?”

Overheard at NCW Bridesmaid: “It’s gonna be the straightest thing I’ve participated in. She’s fully marrying a man.”

Overheard in a decrepit quad Brokecollegestudents: “What if we sold Pickle Me Elmo?”

Overheard in a bus Fan-ficaddict: “I know you’re not into explicit gay sex, but I’m going to recommend something that has… a lot of it.”

Submit to Verbatim

Email thenassauweekly@gmail.com

Instagram & Twitter: @nassauweekly

We meet on Mondays and Thursdays at 5pm in Bloomberg 044!

Sally Rooneyand the New Amorous World

“In part, the devastation of Conversations with Friends lies in its ability to pinpoint the impurities that taint how we care for one another, without offering a clear or optimistic way out.”

By SIERRA STERN

Although it’s impossible to say how much of herself Sally Rooney injects into her work, her debut novel, Conversations with Friends, comes across as the troubled inner monologue of a Rooney surrogate – naturalistically pretty, palatably Marxist, and a keen observer and patient translator of the contemporary

Irish social scene. Detailing an affair between Frances, the narrator, and Nick, a married older actor, Rooney’s unconventional love story approaches intimacy and affection through a feminized Marxist lens, balancing an intellectual disdain for heterosexual power structures with Frances’s naive belief in a fairytale ending for herself and Nick. The result is knife-like in the stomach of any twenty-something girl; Frances’s fraught romantic relationships, family troubles, and feminine self-loathing occur parallel to a grisly endometriosis diagnosis. Her coming of age is, in many ways, a painful molting.

Communication between Frances and Nick occurs both in-person, often at glamorous social functions, and over email, painting a portrait of the hybrid on and offline relationships that characterize contemporary dating. This novel found me at a time where its meaning felt maximal; I read it on an airplane, flying back to college after weeks of spotty connection with my school friends. I had complimentary Alaska Airlines cell service, and I kept an ongoing dialogue with my boyfriend about my nauseating and depressing read.

I was convinced that Rooney’s niche ecosystem of young Irish intellectuals would be foreign and educational to me as a newly minted young adult. Rooney’s characters acknowledge their white privilege and are all politically progressive, sometimes even anarchist, in a cutesy way they can get away with. In reality, my experience as a non-white American college student is not that far off. I surround myself with people like me. Sounding smart is easy, but self-knowledge is difficult. It’s the classic

condition of a Princeton student, so wrapped up in doing well that she often forgets to be good and kind. I hold the same leftist views as Rooney in an intellectual sense, to the effect of a constant uneasiness in the way things are, but not necessarily a political fervor. Through this lens, I think often about power: white power, black power, the power of men over women, the power of love over me. Rooney explores power too, asking fundamental questions about heterosexuality, monogamy, and age in today’s dating landscape.

Conversations with Friends seems to posit a way of loving, relating, and existing that attempts to break free of the heteronormative conventions of the moment. Other, less psychological, forms of media are trying this too; in the (now canceled) Gossip Girl reboot series, three classmates form a “throuple,” to the disapproval of their parents and intrigue of their peers. This relationship ultimately fails, with two members choosing to stay with one another while the third is effectively abandoned.

In the show, polyamory meets a conservative end, proving itself too complicated to last. In Conversations with Friends, Frances and Nick’s extramarital relationship falls apart, until it doesn’t, and the two decide to rekindle their romance in the novel’s final moments, despite Nick’s continued marriage to Melissa and Frances’s undefined romance with her ex-turned-best friend Bobbi.

In Conversations with Friends, dinner table politics are focalized, but not often synthesized. A reader finds themself an inconsequential guest at mealtimes, privy to snatches of meal time debates that Rooney often leaves undigested. These passages appear to stand alone, existing for their own sake as much as to move along the central narrative. The effect is borderline pedagogical. For that reason, I’m tempted to characterize Conversations with Friends as a Marxist novel. While its characters function sympathetically and romantically, a hard and informative edge evokes other Marxist fictions, even philosophies. For instance, Bobbi is

the utopian of the group, her pursuit of love, or many loves, reminiscent of Fourier’s The New Amorous World

In this partial manifesto, Charles Fourier, a utopian socialist of the 18th and 19th centuries, proposes a social order wherein feelings are central to economic development. He identifies the existing relationship between emotions and capital, wherein our innate desires are only acceptable within the constraints of social conformity. In Fourier’s utopia, our careers, relationships, and leisure are determined primarily by our desires. In Rooney and in life, desires delicately navigate rigid economic and social worlds. Wealth disparity and the economization of love comes to light in the novel. Both Bobbi and Nick are generationally wealthy, whereas Frances is poor, her lifestyle unreliably financed by her alcoholic father. When Frances runs out of money to live on, Nick offers her a cash loan, which she takes. The effect is that of a subtle prostitution, although Rooney doesn’t seem overzealous about proving this

point; there are many ways in which Frances is using Nick, and they each hold power over the other. While Frances is far from economically driven, she is driven by a desire for security, potentially to remedy the constant uncertainty she faces surrounding her father’s wellbeing. Bobbi seems to prefer more ephemeral dynamics –while Frances writes all of the poetry she and Bobbi perform, Bobbi is the superior reader, with a gift for translating the permanence of words into a meaningful moment in time. Of all characters in the novel, Bobbi is the most unwaveringly progressive, refusing to allow Frances to call Bobbi her “girlfriend”. When Frances attempts to weaponize her relationship with Bobbi against Nick, Bobbi warns her, “Don’t fucking use me, Frances.” Although Bobbi is quickly characterized as the more vibrant and strong-willed of the two young college students, she frequently displays self-awareness beyond that of Frances, who often chases power over passion. Fourier criticizes the hetero-capitalist world for its

treatment of women as “merchandise”. In his writings, gendered power dynamics and monogamy are undivorceable from capitalism, and he proposes an alternative of liberated sexual networks, wherein one’s pleasures are not limited by one’s assets or the nuclear family structure.

How can we love like communists? In the strictest terms, Rooney suggests that we can’t. Far from crafting a polyamorous manifesto, Rooney exposes the fault lines of dating in general, daring us to separate love from economics, security, and self-esteem. In part, the devastation of Conversations with Friends lies in its ability to pinpoint the impurities that taint how we care for one another, without offering a clear or optimistic way out. Conversations with Friends is not so much a guidebook for navigating contemporary love but a state of affairs, even of crisis. The ending of the novel suggests something uncertain on the horizon; Frances is

doomed to reprise her fraught relationship with Nick. In an interview with PBS NewsHour, Rooney disclosed that previous endings of the novel were less ambiguous, assigning a definitive outcome for Frances and Nick. That Rooney, who is content to have her first novel considered a love story, saved the ending for last suggests that happy endings, or endings at all, are not focal to Roonian love. Frances’s endometriosis renders her possibly infertile, and although Frances jokes with Nick about having a family together, they both know that their love will never have a nuclear future.

Still, the pursuit of utopian love, or loving for love’s sake, is not a futile one. While Rooney’s ending is explicit in its reverence for the past and disinterest in the future, this lesson can be applied more figuratively. Love that detaches itself from capital and control requires present-mindedness and an appreciation for long-over romances. Our fear

of endings makes us crave them; movies are reshot and books rewritten to alleviate the discomfort of ambiguity. Throughout the novel, Frances hurts and bleeds and faints, and yet Conversations with Friends remains a love story. The relationship between Frances and Bobbi, in particular, proposes friendship as paramount, romance as optional, and sex as inevitable. We all love in networks already, be they comprised of friendships, romances, or some blurry other thing. And although we cannot love like communists yet, we can creep towards utopia in subtle ways. We are commodities in our relationships. The feeling of worthlessness after a heartbreak, the lunches we keep like appointments to preserve tentative friendships; there are countless ways in which we assign and uphold valuations of ourselves and others based on looks, prospects, and other qualities that may one day translate to capital. The way

we love now is an alloy, a mix of feelings, obligations, and obstacles. The de-commodification of desire might not cure heartbreak, but perhaps it would soothe us. In embracing the humanity in ourselves and others, we will discover what it’s like to love each other with no ulterior motives: Not as business partners, but as friends.

The Nassau Weekly found Sierra Stern at a time where its meaning felt maximal.

A Beginner’s Guide to Heartbreak

I have to admit it. Finding the Princeton Crush did feel nice, even if it only gave me the smallest taste of what life would be like with the Princeton Partner—the one person so special that even the mere thought of them would bring me joy. I can’t pick out a specific moment when I fell in love with them; it was more like a series of small moments— meals, problem set sessions, late-night conversations, you name it—that eventually convinced me to see them as a crush. Over time, thoughts like “Hmm, what if…” and “Maybe this could be…” started to pile up. Before I knew it, I woke up every morning yearning to see their texts.

get rejected. What if it was like last time, where I misinterpreted a hangout as a date, and the Princeton Crush had to awkwardly tell me that they didn’t see me that way? Or that other time where they already had a Princeton Partner? (And in every case where that partner was white, it only reaffirmed to me those persisting stereotypes about how Asian men like me just aren’t that attractive— stereotypes, of course, that I fight within my consciousness

every day.) Or what if—and this might be the most painful possibility of them all—they never end up rejecting me directly? In other words, I’d have to connect the dots myself; a slow, sinking realization that would leave me at a loss for words. The moment after I confessed my feelings to them, the world came to a standstill. The Princeton Crush was shocked.

By JUPITER DING

Iused to be in love with the Princeton Partner: An abstraction of the romantic partner who I’d meet and fall in love with during my time here. I think a lot of other people are in love with them, too— the pursuit of the Princeton Partner consumes some people more totally than others. Some, apparently, have succeeded in

finding that person. Most have not.

I think my parents want me to find a partner because they want to see me grow up and “become a man”—whatever that means—but perhaps more importantly, they want me to find comfort and stability. My sisters want me to find a partner so that they can have someone who’ll help make fun of me. And my friends want me to find a partner because it means having an unwavering, unshakeable source of happiness on this campus. At least, that’s what we think it means.

Though coming up with replies made me anxious, the talking came so naturally. I know it’s cliché, but sometimes our conversations would be hours on end. It didn’t feel like we were talking about anything important, but that didn’t matter; we were perfectly happy with living in those moments for as long as we could, finding new things to tease each other about, learning so much about each other without ever asking for it directly.

Even with all those moments, I started to doubt that I had actually found the Princeton Partner. My friends told me to think positively—I had plenty of reasons to think that they might have mutual feelings! All I needed to do was ask.

But often, I found it easier to think of ways that I might

A writer’s encounter with the tantalizing, bewildering phenomenon of the Princeton Partner.

No, they were confused. No, they were pensive. No— they were sorry. Honestly, it could’ve been all these things. I’m not entirely sure anymore.

I remember waiting for them to say something back. From their face, I could tell that the memories we had shared were running through their head—I knew that look all too well. I had gone through this scene too many times to not know what they would say next.

I haven’t forgotten that moment of waiting. It felt like it would last for an eternity. The

times over.

People have told me not to feel bad about it, but how much of that is just them trying to make me feel better? How much could they really know anyways? They don’t know all the things I was doing to try to push my crush into that mythical role of the Princeton Partner, all the things I was doing during those seemingly trivial conversations where I was falling in love and wishing so badly that my crush was doing the same.

My telling of the tale of the Princeton Crush certainly isn’t the only one, but I still hope others can get something from it. At the very least, I hope people know that they aren’t the only ones going through this.

Even if the Princeton Partner—or just the Partner— is real; even if being with the Princeton Partner would make it so, so easy to forget about my past heartbreaks, I’m not going

to wake up every day being in love with the idea of them. If I have to be completely honest with you, I’m not really in a rush to find them; the search itself takes so much energy. Besides—it’s not like having a partner will make my past magically disappear. The work of forgetting has to start with me.

funny thing is that, by immortalizing it in this essay, I’ve ensured that it will.

I’ve thought about these stories so many times that the details have gotten all jumbled together, and the names of those I’ve loved have started to sound meaningless. It’s not that I wish I had never met these people—even now, I still value the memories we’ve shared—I just wish I had never been obsessed with them. I’m sick of how, even months and years later, the most random things remind me of those periods of infatuation: Taylor Swift’s “Lover,” chocolate ice cream, my olive green T-shirt—I don’t need to go on.

I felt a lot of things after getting rejected—disappointment, anger, frustration, depression, regret. But there’s one feeling that’s really stuck with me: Guilt. It’s the guilt of hiding your true intentions—your intentions as the Princeton Hopeless Romantic—from somebody you care about. It’s the guilt of trying to pressure someone into the role of the Princeton Partner. In my head, I’ve apologized a thousand

And yet, I like to think that there’s some worth in remembering these stories. I’ve learned a lot of things: how to recognize that you enjoy spending time with someone, how to be honest with yourself about your feelings, how to decide which ones to act on, and how to initiate hard conversations (no matter how awkward they might seem), how to lean on your loved ones in the aftermath, how to realize that someone who was previously the Princeton Crush can, well, still be your friend, and how to move on.

The Nassau Weekly remembers waiting for Jupiter Ding to say something back.

THE NASSAU WEEKLY, 30 YEARS AGO

By JULIA STERN

What were Princeton students writing about thirty years ago? We’re jumping back in time to February, 1993 for some woeful poetry, questionable health advice, and dining hall commentary from our forefathers at the Nass.

Some wisdom for your post-Valentine’s Day weekend, and for all those seeking their Princeton soulmate:

“Valentine’s Day comes upon us once again this Sunday, thereby compelling me to remind y’all of this universal truth: Princeton men and Princeton women are not meant to be together.

The types of young guys and gals who impress the admissions people at West College range from the introverted intellectual to the scholar athlete to the alumni child to the idealist to the fluke, as you may have noticed.

What all of us have in common, though, is exactly what makes us wrong for each other. We have too much drive (and not enough park). But the idea of mixers with neighboring colleges still appalls us, perhaps because we know, deep down, that we need mates who can understand simple math and language skills. So we torment ourselves, weekend after weekend, with the search for the perfect Prospect Avenue hook-up (as if there were such a thing).”

And a touching poem for the lonely undergrad:

“If Shakespeare were a Princeton undergrad, he would write something like this:

O woe, o woe, o woe, o woeful day, Methinks I cannot wait until tomorrow

All ‘cause my gentle heart was led astray

St. Valentine has only brought me sorrow.

Maybe someday she’’ll love me like I thought,

And make it worth all the wars I’ve fought.”

- Sean L. McCarthy

February 11, 1993 Issue

Caught the flu? Try this “home remedy,” a Southern tribute to the healing powers of Jack Daniel’s:

“In all the hullabaloo about false advertising, none of the newspapers running the story as a chuckle item bothered to print the damn recipe, even when it was called “William Faulkner’s Hot Toddy Recipe.”

As a displaced Southerner, I found this to be a grievous error, and eagerly sought out the area code for Lynchburg, Tennessee.

Ah, Lynchburg... I took a tour of the JD distillery in the balmy days of August, reveling in the bitter irony that, even if I had

been twenty-one at the time, I still could not have bought any charcoal-mellowed finery in the town. Get this, it’s in a dry county. If you work there someone asked our guide, “How long you been workin’ here?” and he responded, “I never work. This is play. Call this work? Shoot, I been playin’ here for almost thirty years”—you actually get a pint or two with your paycheck. They can give it away, they just can’t sell it.

Oh. You want the recipe. Sorry. Guess I lost track of my priorities there.

Take one 6-8 oz. glass. Fill approximately half full with Jack Daniel’s. Add one tablespoon of sugar. Squeeze 1/2 lemon and drop into glass. Stir until sugar dissolves. Fill glass with boiling water. Serve with potholder to protect patient’s hands from hot glass.

See, that’s the beauty of it. You can’t make it yourself—a true friend with an extra nugget of kindness (and a healthy supply of whiskey) has to make it for you.

If you haven’t got any, and you’ve got the flu, give me a call. I’ll be right over.”

- Matthew Robb February 25, 1993 Issue

And a peek into the evolutionary saga of Dining Hall Services, detailing the origins of Princeton’s weekend brunch:

“During their first two years at Princeton, students are held at the mercy of DFS, required to pay between four and five dollars a meal for at least fourteen meals a week. In a survey taken last year, sophomores ranked the DFS “experience” as their least favorite aspect of Princeton, giving it a 2 1 out of a maximum rating of five. Now, it seems as if someone above has finally responded to the dissatisfaction-DFS is undergoing a transformation. [...]

The current complaints about DFS stem from food which while nutritious and digestible, cannot be described as delectable. DFS offers functional food, the culinary equivalent of sensible shoes or a Volkswagen Bug. At its best, the food service offered occasional extravagant special dinners, such as a semi-formal Winter Holiday meal and a New Year supper complete with bottled sparkling grape juice. At worst, DFS has dished up atrocities including fish that look like chicken, chicken that looked like ham, and turkey nuggets which, tragically, looked exactly like turkey nuggets. The waffles are as dense and flavorful as the ceilings in Butler. A few safe bets included cheese steaks, dinner rolls and Ti Pizza (81500). [...]

More long-term projects include features like a short order grill, a daily stir-fry selection,

and two specialty bars every night (as opposed to the onebar-per night system currently in effect). The new system will be tested seven days a week in Butler College’s Wu Cafeteria next fall; if it proves successful, it will soon be implemented in the other dining halls. This further expansion of variety will be accompanied by an upgrade in quality already exemplified by the recent addition of Dunkin’ Donuts to the breakfast menu. Dunkin’ Donuts may not necessarily prove more appealing to everyone, but by using an outside brand, DFS at least is able to offer four or five different choices of pastries. Orefice also hopes to start a new Sunday Brunch service modeled after Cornell’s. It would begin at ten ‘clock with a traditional breakfast line, complimented by a pastry table and cappuccino bar. At eleven o’clock, the Princetonians regularly sleep through. He plans to scale down major expenditures like extravagant holiday meals in order to raise the overall quality of regular meals. “A lot of it is in labor and food, shifting our labor dollars to different areas,” Orefice says. “A lot more students are eating Monday dinners than Friday dinners. We don’t need the same number of people working Friday as Monday.”

W.T. Patterson February

11, 1993 Issue

Revolutionary or ripoff?

By JULIA STERN

For $20, you can spend your Friday night in an abandoned boiler room. That may sound unappealing, but it’s how I spent my Friday night in NYC, and for entirely voluntary reasons. I had joined a group of friends to visit ArtecHouse. An art exhibit concealed in one of Chelsea Market’s former boiler rooms, ArtecHouse describes itself as a “home for innovative experiential art,”

WHAT IMMERSIVE PROJECTOR EXPERIENCES

MEANFORART

where the primary medium is the projector. One of the owners, who calls himself “Sandro,” describes the work of ArtecHouse, based on the combination of ART + TECH + HOUSE, as “redefining the 21st century with experiential innovative art created through technology.”

The theme of ArtecHouse’s current exhibit is “Magentaverse,” in partnership with the paint company Pantone that deemed magenta the “Color of the Year.” When we entered ArtecHouse, we walked past a bar with luxury cocktails —where a friend promptly paid $12 for a tiny glass of sparkling rosé—and then we visited

the first of two exhibits, a sensor-based “interactive band.” I found this part of ArtecHouse to be the most compelling, with its surreal animations of cymbals and harps, a vision of “interactive” art that felt truly futuristic. But it was off to the side, dominated by the main exhibit. For the ten minutes we played with the band, we were the only people in the room.

It was the main show that captured the crowd’s attention. Inside the expanses of the boiler room itself— coating the walls, floor, ceiling in vivid light—a 22-minute projection of abstract, magenta animations played on repeat. We laid on the concrete floor

watching the spectacle, feeling only slightly nauseated as we whirled through magenta seascapes and intestine-like tunnels. We watched two complete cycles of the animation, and then an attendant kindly prompted us to leave. I wondered if I had just witnessed the cutting-edge of art. I felt relaxed, but I didn’t feel amazed. More than anything, I felt confused: what is ArtecHouse? A visionary art exhibit? A disguised cocktail bar? A scam?

The concept behind ArtecHouse may seem oneof-a-kind, but ArtecHouse is a single example of the experiential, projector-based art exhibit. Despite ArtecHouse’s prominence

in the world of projector art, the idea of an immersive projector experience began with the 2008 “Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive Exhibition,” an exhibit created by artist Annabelle Mauger and displayed in Les-Baux-de-Provence, France. In the following years, the concept of an immersive art experience based on Van Gogh’s work exploded in popularity, with five major companies offering traveling Van Gogh shows across the United States. Like ArtecHouse, animators created special videos for the exhibits, but unlike ArtecHouse, these animations depended on “bringing to life” Van Gogh’s paintings, not creating new visuals. However,

the set-up is similar — abandoned, industrial sites are turned into Van Gogh dreamlands, where whirring projectors coat the walls with the Dutch artist’s paintings. While tickets for ArtecHouse are $20, tickets for Van Gogh shows can cost as much as $100.

Inside the boiler room, I thought back to the summer of 2022, when I had attended the Pittsburgh Immersive Van Gogh experience. On my visit, they charged an absurd amount for parking, requested an additional fee for Van Gogh floor cushions, offered an overpriced cocktail bar, and featured a gift shop filled with tacky Van Goghthemed items planted

directly next to the exhibit exit. Immersive Van Gogh made no attempt to disguise its main purpose— money-making. Van Gogh’s art and legacy seemed both to be afterthoughts.

Along with ArtecHouse and Immersive Van Gogh, it seems that an array of projector-based art exhibits have popped up overnight, their garish advertisements everywhere, even on the sides of city buses. Of course, the immersive projector experience isn’t only about the visual spectacle of animation. The genre of “immersive projector experience” has grown ubiquitous, largely thanks to the “Instagrammability’’ of its striking visuals, which serve

as an easy backdrop for an eye-catching— but recognizable—photo, the perfect addition to any well-curated, modern Instagram. Though left unsaid, treating your immersive art experience as a one-hour photo shoot is perfectly acceptable — even expected. In ArtecHouse, we spent probably half of our time taking photos. Groups around us spent the entire hour taking photos. I still have a photo of a blown-up Van Gogh daisy streaked across my face. I justified it as a “souvenir” of my experience.

Even with new Instagram content, I left both my experience at ArtecHouse and Immersive Van Gogh feeling a bit stumped, a

bit frustrated, wondering: That was it? Beyond the immediate beauty of vivid, moving projections, my first impression of both exhibits was that I couldn’t pinpoint the substance behind the animation— what made it meaningful. Of course, there is value in beauty for the sake of beauty. And coolness for the sake of coolness. But immersive projector exhibits market themselves as something more than a cool, beautiful exhibit—they claim that they are using tech to revolutionize art, to expand the ways we experience, create, and interact with art. As we wandered the streets of Chelsea, I thought of the “cutting-edge” art of the past: Warhol, Duchamp,

Rothko, Pollock. It’s fair to say that these examples of “cutting-edge” art have something substantial behind the aesthetics—they weren’t “cutting-edge” solely for their novel techniques or intriguing appearances, though those aspects certainly played a role in gaining recognition. But have ArtecHouse and Immersive Van Gogh actually revolutionized art?

Perhaps they have. Even if projector art is not as radical or ground-breaking as its creators claim, there is truth to the notion that our new cultural love of immersion in art has fundamentally changed what we expect of art, and what has now become outdated. On one hand, the museum experience includes many

downsides that immersive art does not. As opposed to museum legs, tiresome lines, and tiny, intelligible plaques, watching the surreal, absorbing animations of the immersive art exhibit is effortless. They play, you watch. You absorb the beauty of the animations. You relax. There is no pressure to understand, to interpret, to be interested, to not be bored. It is art dedicated to the pleasant experience of consumption.

ArtecHouse, however, is not limited to first-hand consumption. Being honest, my friends and I probably would not have visited ArtecHouse if we had never seen the Instagram photos. The “Instagrammabality” of these exhibits is what makes them so popular, not

to mention so profitable. And in a world where social media can make or break art’s “success”—especially considering the alluring marketing power of going viral—immersive projector art almost entirely relies on social media to succeed, a link that is indeed new, and potentially radical. In hindsight, the part of ArtecHouse that seemed most “cutting-edge” was the sensor-based interactive technology, the surreal “band” that my friends and I played at the beginning of our visit. However, is it only a coincidence that the least “Instagrammable” exhibit was also the least popular?

With our compulsion to share our lives on social media, we have likewise gained a compulsion to share

art—thus, we have begun to experience art in a way that is tainted by this obsession with “shareability,” and to expect our interactions with art to always meet this standard. Subtly, skillfully, and sensationally, immersive art has harnessed these new compulsions. If art is meant to reflect our cultural values, then ArtecHouse and immersive Van Gogh shows, with their answer to the demands of the social media age, have hit the nail on its head.

I left ArtecHouse feeling confused, and that feeling has not faded. Even with these reservations, however, I was eager to post my own photos from ArtecHouse and contribute to the thousands of social media photos tagged

at ArtecHouse. I uploaded them to my Instagram story, making sure to tag the location: ArtecHouse NYC.

I hadn’t completely bought into the concept of ArtecHouse, but the exhibit’s Instagram-worthy visuals had nonetheless awakened my own impulse to share. And as soon as I clicked “Share,” my personal photos became a part of ArtecHouse’s online universe. As such, I played a role in drawing in the next wave of ArtecHouse customers, contributing a tiny piece to the exhibit’s success—and, more crucially, to the magnetism of the immersive projector experience as a whole.

The Nassau Weekly absorbs the beauty of Julia Stern.

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

i miss the scent of you

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma

mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma

mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

emma mohrmann emma mohrmann emma mohrmann

By CHARLIE NUERMBERGER

Sweat on slate like spilt brain ejaculate, like old sun god’s been plugging holes with lead again, old dog dying of heat stroke again, it’s Thursday, and a series of freak thunderstorms is set to just tear across the county this afternoon, into the evening, the night, hot, body-shedding morning: the sun will never set.

Cicadafather, we have annihilated the world away. Just hot, froggy silence, Spasms, like our cat’s walking on stilts again, our joints coughing up ash: restart my heart, charioteer.

The first night after Cicadaboy emerges, he hits a deer on the way home. The animal kicks and jumps, convulses. Things tend to get sloppy while moving at high speeds. The fur. Its spine. Seeing this all through his rearview mirror, he whispers Christ, this is awkward without moving his mouthparts. He pulls over to the side of the road, which runs parallel to a river, which seems to be moving faster than normal.

In the seconds he spends walking over to the deer, it keeps moving. He looks in both directions to make sure other drivers aren’t going to pulverize his spine, like he ruined this quietly jerking deer. Eyes reeling. It must have come here with other animals. Ribcage inflating. Huh-huh-huh. Back down again. Right eye released from orbit.

Well come on man. It’s not like I ran you down. It starts howling.

Someone said one time see the boy. This boy is sawtoothed, switchcaned, built from three bundles of broken wicker: He’d look like a cowboy if he wasn’t so skinny.

See him running, from dark, shushing fields, out of the earth, rhizomes, Cicadamen, those phantoms of his father through the pulpwood: Smoke and a silverness. The moon. Sometimes, he thinks about hayflick limits, radiometric dating, then he looks in the mirror

Cicadaboy emerges: Eye-opener, tear-jerker, foot dragging in the undertow, now this is glamorous, Rockwell, Brookline, the manor is burning. All the color fields. Time to go to sleep.

He emerges again. Cicadaboy practices transcendental meditation. Cicadaboy gets the spins. Cicadaboy vomits into his mother’s hostas.

Cicadaboy emerges, and this time, he has a manifesto: I’ll be the pearldiver. I’ll be running among the cats, chariot clipping at my heels. I’ll tell loneliness to run away.

Cicadaboy, it is the easiest thing for me to say I want you happy always and without interruption. And oh, honey, it was so dark I didn’t see you.

Come snowmelt, we’ll call the daffodils wildflowers again. I’ll dig up the creek and say Look at all I’ve done for you. I’ll dig up so many little cicadababies. Waters rise, and we’ve come to this world wet with melted snow and calf tongue, newly filled creeks —

All The Things You and I Sea

“You look Right into the mirror and recognize what you’d drawn, part by part. Then you blink and completely forget what you’d seen, where you’d been –– or rather, you can’t really tell whether you had ever seen anything in the first place.”

By GRACE KIM

PREFACE

Prosopagnosia: a neurological condition characterized by the inability to recognize the faces of familiar people. [Prosopagnosia is a spectrum rather than a binary condition.]

– [Source: Google]

FISH EYE

Silence holds a humming I can never put a note to when I’m lost within the ocean-bottom plains of your cheeks, within the craters and valleys of your nose, eye, other eye, and lips. I have been here

before, time and time again. I am never drowning yet I never know where I am. Fish are stupid like that, you know. Silence roars as you catch me. It’s eye contact that strikes–hooks into me and I’m a wide-eyed fish and you swing the rod backward, lifting me from a long wandering. With a raised eyebrow, you hold my gaze up against the palm of your hand and I drip anxiously with saltwater, death, maybe a little bit of cold blood. I laugh, lungs shaking with every breath: Sorry, I zoned out. You smile and unhook me from metal. It was a stupid lie.

The truth is that your ocean-bottom plains are a deep indigo, but then the truth is also that if I really focus, I see the entirety of the sea in the reflections of your indigo: playful teals, serene midnight-blues, and gentle periwinkles of each person I miss.

No really, the truth is that if I really focus, I can see your face in each person I love: my

childhood best friend with her choppy bangs, my no-longerso-baby baby brother, my favorite sixth-grade teacher with his painted ukulele, the neighbor who used to bring us homemade cookies each Christmas, and everyone in between. It’s not that I see you all as the same person. Rather, I like to think that I see the sea’s shades of blue, in return for being perpetually lost within its oceanic landforms.

That might be the only thing I truly love about prosopagnosia. Unhooked, I lay on the body of your boat, flopping until I find myself on the edge. I throw myself back into the ocean head-first: the way everything is.

*** YOU, ME, MORNINGS.

You’ve always liked to have control is quite a defiant way to admit that control has always liked to have you.

Control possesses you with the need to micromanage your own time, your emotions, your thoughts, your productivity. Control is your puppeteer, but you comply because how else would you have gotten all the way here? You don’t have an answer, so you even thank control; you yield as it scrapes fingers through your scalp. Still, control is helpless to What you are unable to do. That Something possesses control, confuses control, controls control, cannot control—which freaks you out more than you think it does.

You stare at the mirror a bit too long and your heart starts to hammer at your ears, tumbles through your stomach, claws its way back up your esophagus and croaks at your uvula, begging to be vomited. In this moment, control becomes a lost myth. You don’t know what is Right and you don’t remember if you’ve ever been Right, if you’d lost Right at some point in your development—but ever since you learned that This is not Right, you are sure it is Wrong.

You always look Right into the mirror, but you are always lost. Wrong. You can never see more than one feature at a time. An eye. Another eye. Nose. Lips. A mole on your cheek. Each time your gaze shifts, you forget the last feature entirely. You close your eyes and recall absolutely nothing. Again, your heart begs, again.

At last. In your late high school years, you realized

that you need not recall anything if you create it all. Each morning, you rock on the university-provided chair in front of your desk, one ankle held captive under the opposite leg’s thigh. Sliding your small vanity mirror closer, you open the smaller compartment of your desk for a not-so-carefully dedicated, thinly spread pile that consists of eyeliner, mascara, lip tint, maybe 56,000 hair ties, two claw clips, and still more.

And so, every morning, (still admittedly sometimes in a toxic-patriarchal-beauty-standard-pursuing way instead of a self-expression way) you draw your eyes with eyeliner, determining exactly where each eye starts and where it ends. You draw your eyelashes with mascara, draw your lips, conceal exactly what you want to be concealed. When you finish painting, you perceive your work through the tiny mirror, part by part.

You look Right into the mirror and recognize what you’ve drawn, part by part. Then you blink and completely forget what you’d seen, where you’d been—or rather, you can’t really tell whether you had ever seen anything in the first place.

***

THE THINGS YOU SEA

1. Apology is a constant in your life. You’re sorry for not recognizing her, it’s just that she was wearing glasses last time you two met. You’re sorry

if you didn’t say hi. You do say hi or smile at people you recognize, but you also do this to people who make eye contact with you. Better safe than sorry.

2. Chuck Close, face blind. 86th Street Subway Station. Dreaded winter gust to treasured summer breeze just four times. Pixelated portraits. Chuck Sienna. Chuck Zhang. Move closer. Eyes divert between pink trapezoids, blue ovals, diamonds, pixels, angles, tiles. Staccato. Wrong yet Right. What we see.

3. Sometimes, smiles and frowns can be too small for you to see. Instead, you see pauses of thought, fingers tapping quietly in annoyance, closed shoulders, postures tilting towards and away from, endearing eye contact. You might be overthinking this. Doubt, doubt again.

4. Attractiveness is surely a social construct. You usually see one feature at a time, and everyone is a little unique, a little beautiful. Your younger self could not see what it was that made one celebrity the most gorgeous woman on the planet, while another comedian cracked self-deprecating jokes about her supposedly objective undesirability. Confusion stemmed into curiosity. You studied what attractiveness meant, what you did not see. Apparently desired features are a little different in different cultures, but facial symmetry is a generally constant factor.

5. You want to tell me something. What is it? What you’d actually learned from symmetry is that people occupy multiple planes. There’s Point A, for example. Lines of points make vectors just to direct themselves towards Point A. People love A. They laugh with its mediocre jokes, want to talk to it, smile at it.

6. Then, there’s Point B. Point B is on an entirely different plane from A. While vectors span across multiple planes to point towards A, vectors span across multiple planes just to point away from B. People don’t hate B, but they don’t quite want to actively talk to it, laugh with its jokes, smile at it. You realize parallelism doesn’t exist in these.

Films with several characters are your favorite soap operas; they keep changing outfits and there are too many for you to track. Your friends laugh with the Anderson film playing as you try to keep up. The porter becomes the bus driver; the millionaire’s wife becomes the prison guard; and the child becomes a criminal, loved yet running from society yet back again in her family’s arms then back alone yet cut to the next scene and she’s still with everyone else. *** POOL OF DREAMS

In your dreams,

everyone is faceless but not headless. You’d never really thought about it too deeply, but when you think about seeing in your dreams, you see round, blank slates of skin. Hair sprouts from the top and bodies are attached below.

Silence is comfortable, holding a steady hum as you float peacefully; you need not swim to survive in the lukewarm temperature of an indoor pool as you do within the thrashing waves of an ocean. Tiles repeat themselves throughout the flat, unvarying floor of the pool. The neon exit sign is a distinguishable bright red. Silence, inside you, innately, subconsciously, passively, speaks in names. Silence controls everything and everything is dead, peaceful, Right. You do not think because you simply are Right. You believe it.

Slowly floating upright, you wade towards the exit. The tips of your feet compress against smooth tiles with each push off the ground. You need not look down, for nothing exists there.

You open the door. A gust of wind dries the chlorine on your skin, crackling it into white specks. It all waits in the distance. As you walk, sand digs into your toes and the palms of your feet, swollen with water. At last the sea wakes, roars, wraps itself around your ankles and pulls you back towards it. You throw yourself back into the ocean head-first: the way everything is.

In Grace Kim’s dreams, the Nassau Weekly is faceless but not headless.