A STUDENT LED MAGAZINE
DEAR READERS,
We are thrilled to present the third spring edition of our student-led magazine. As the academic year draws to a close, let‘s take a moment to reflect on our journey together.
In our first edition, we explored cultural trends and events, along with tips for enjoying Vienna. Our second edition took a more serious turn, addressing political matters and concerns.
This edition focuses on closure. We reflect on the challenges we‘ve faced this year and consider what could be improved. But don‘t worry, you‘ll also find lighter content, including a piece of „Dr. Strangelove“ advice and a film review.
I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to all our contributors for their creativity and dedication, enriching our experience at CEU and in The Stand. Special thanks to our graphic designer, Charlotte Pasewald, for bringing these editions to life.
Thank you for reading The Stand. Wishing you all a restful summer break.
Alexandra
Pavlovičová.
ZOOM HOUSING: A STUDENT’S REALITY CHECK
ELI CELESTE-COHEN
It is difficult to fully express the dismal nature of Zoom housing which CEU foists upon its incoming undergraduates. Our situation is morally and practically wrong on so many levels that I’m not sure where to begin. And while my perspective is just mine, it is not unique. Every peer I talk to thinks Zoom Housing must go.
Okay. The rip-off price tag exploits foreign students who do not have resources to understand Vienna’s actual rental market. With Zoom I paid €500 each month for a shared room in an apartment with six people. We all shared one bathroom and we each had a half-shelf in a meter-sized fridge in a kitchen suitable for two people, not six. And this is in the fifth district, so it’s not the prime real estate of Vienna.
We’re getting scammed, and there’s an entire market of data which backs up what I’m saying. I now pay €600 per month on a threemonth rental contract for a furnished studio tenminutes' walk from CEU where an extra €100 gets me a flexible contract with my own room, kitchen, bathroom and balcony. Shared flats in
nicer parts of Vienna nearly always cost less than €500 per person, and each tenant has a private room and lives with less people. I have peers who each pay €350 for a shared flat with individual rooms. For residence permit applications in 2023, Austria’s MA-35 calculates Vienna’s expected accommodation cost at €327.91 per month, the same figure used to calculate CEU’s PHD stipends. Vienna is known for having one of the most affordable rental markets in the world. Why does €500 with Zoom housing get so little?
There are other problems too. They fired the student residence assistants halfway through the year without reason and then offered to rehire them for half of their initial salary. But the RA’s initial salary was only unpaid accommodation, so their re-offer expected the RA’s to begin paying €250 a month for their shared room. They demand that students switch dorms, six months into their contract with only a week's notice, right in the midst of exam week. During their rushed re-assignments they disregarded explicit statements made earlier in the year by students
who had requested to be placed with roommates of the same gender. This was only done so Zoom could rent the vacated apartments –previously advertised as CEU’s student residence- to nonstudent tenants. They’re notorious for delaying the return of security deposits while overcharging and overexaggerating apartment damages. The problem is all these actions are within their contractual rights. How did CEU allow such draconian contract law to be imposed on their students? Who negotiated these contracts? What to do. It’s clear to me that CEU should sever all ties with Zoom Housing. Not offering any options is better than encouraging its students to get taken advantage of by such a lamentable organization. But if the bureaucratic apparatus of CEU doesn’t have the energy to find a new partner, at least restructure the student contract’s exit clause to three months instead of six. Or better yet, let tenants leave at any time with a month’s notice, and just watch what happens. To CEU’s higher-ups: The relationship between students and administration does not need to be
antagonistic. It is firmly in your interest to cultivate a positive relationship between students and the university. See the bigger picture in that CEU is a young university and its reputation relies on the reviews of its current student body. I implore you to reaffirm that CEU students deserve fair living arrangements. Or don’t. I recommend incoming students explore housing availability elsewhere.
ONE: If someone suggests phil (the bar/ cafe/bookstore) as a place for a first date, ghost them and never look back.
TWO: If your date is American, there are no data privacy laws protecting them. Find out as much as you can about them on Facebook, online yellow pages, and Zillow before the date. If you can’t find any info about them online, that’s also a red flag. Knowledge is power, better safe than sorry, you never know with Americans, etc.
THREE: a first date, it’s always a good idea to go to a very loud bar, like Café Monic or ZWE on Wednesdays (free jazz). This is so that when you repeatedly say “who?” to their favorite band/artist/ movie that you’re too above-ground to know, they will have to assume you just couldn’t hear them over the music.
FOUR: Never go on a second date with someone who spends the entire first date bragging about their drug usage. I once went out with someone who bragged about how much ket they had done with their friends during the police’s anti-drug visit to their high school. Dating him was like dating a volatile roller coaster: exciting but never again.
FIVE: If they ask for your Letterboxd, move forth with great caution. If they ask for your Goodreads, cancel the date or walk out of the g-damn place. Rate Your Music (or as I like to abbreviate RateUrNmusic) is self-explanatory. RYM users don’t go on dates.
SIX: If you do exchange Letterboxd’s, or they—God forbid—offer it up unprovoked,
you have just unlocked the keys to this prospect’s red flag collection, however minimalist or abundant it may be. Some No-Go Top 4’s include The Godfather Part II, Fight Club, Pulp Fiction, Persona, 500 Days of Summer, Interstellar, The Color of Pomegranates, Pearl, The Square, Mulholland Drive, Dead Poets Society, Pi, Life of Pi, Stop Making Sense, True Stories, and Supersonic. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
SEVEN: Anybody who talks about Jean Baudrillard, Mark Fisher, or Le Corbusier, and, as the kids say, “think they cooked,” should be avoided at all costs. Their inferiority complex is not your summer project to resolve.
EIGHT: Any diehard fans of The Smiths, The Cure, or My Bloody Valentine... Unless you find enjoyment in comforting someone after nervousinduced impotency... do not do it. Bonus commandment: You cannot fix a cis man who listens to Aphex Twin. They only get worse with age. Stop trying.
NINE: So your date is wearing Vans in 2024. Are they unemployed? Most likely. Are they 16? You probably shouldn’t date them. Do they skate? I would rather be a minor’s +1 to any given function than be seen in public with an adult skater mall grabbing his board by the lightly scratched trucks.
TEN: If they refer to Favoriten as “the hood” or allude to it being somehow more dangerous than other districts, they are unlovable. It is the golden rule.
WONKA!
I can’t say I know a lot about recently released kids’ movies, but I was on a long flight from San Francisco to Frankfurt last month and was compelled to check out the genre. All I had known of Wonka (2023) before seeing it was that Timothée Chalamet stars as Willy Wonka in an origin story musical. What I watched while flying over Greenland and eating mixed nuts was something much more ideologically charged than I was expecting. It left me wondering if kids’ movies are just like this now.
In Wonka, we follow the strangely Oedipal story of Willy Wonka, a chocolate addict and small-time dealer who wants to be successful in an artisanal sense rather than in the conventional one he sees around him based on capital. His dream of chocolate success is all in his mother’s image, who taught him the art of chocolate making and who he has chronic flashbacks of. He arrives in a city with no money except for a few coins that he gives out to other people in need on the streets. Through some Murphy’s Law of the market, he is forced into, essentially, indentured servitude and is consistently exploited by his landlord/employer into doing unpaid labor in a laundry room to pay off false debts.
In the laundry room, he unionizes the workers and technologically innovates the whole operation by hooking up a dog to a complicated system of levers and pulleys (which is definitely speciesism, but I’m somewhat of a speciesist anyway). In this, he automates the housework and
frees the diverse group of workers from unpaid menial labor. Via the most obnoxious musical theather rhymes you’ve ever heard in your life, we find out that the coworkers are professionals in their own trades and passions. Like Wonka, they were tricked into this indentured servitude with confusing contracts.
Besides the blatant Marxist-feminist overtones, Wonka also faces corruption, monopoly, police brutality, and worker’s rights discussions. A large theme throughout Wonka is class hatred and combating it. The bourgeois owners of the chocolate “cartel,” as it’s referred to in the film, literally gag at the word “poor” when discussing their chocolate enterprises and customers. But it’s not just the filthy rich who participate in class hatred. Wonka’s landlords/employers are implied to be working or lower-middle class based on accent and education (and were villainized in a different way for their class, but I guess you can’t have it all), also ridicule Wonka’s friend and coworker Noodle for being “poor.”
Willy Wonka himself is also apparently working class, and he was exploited and caught in the trap of debt from the beginning. However he has a dream of, not just social mobility, but a complete reworking of the chocolate economy. When he frees himself from the chains of the laundry room and exploitative landlords, he creates his first chocolate factory. He has “employees,” the others from the laundry room, but it’s more of a co-op. One could even see this first chocolate factory endeavor as a commune or mutual aid community, painted in a completely positive light. Mutual aid doesn’t stop within the factory. In exchange for means of subsistence (chocolate) and a promise to help get Noodle out of debt (mutual aid), Noodle gives Willy education in return—an education he was denied in order to master his trade in chocolate making. They are stronger together. Wonka’s clear statement is that
GLYNNA NATHAN
without the entire co-op involved, there would be no mobility.
Another happy surprise in this film was that the only working-class characters who are villainized (mentioned above) are small masters who love the system. With another hour of runtime, I’m sure they would’ve covered this base of internalized class hatred. I digress.
Even within Willy’s first chocolate factory, the cashier who is part of the co-op asks the customers if they would like their change in money (means of exchange) or in “edible form,” or chocolate (means of subsistence). We know it’s means of subsistence and not just a luxury item being used as a means of exchange because the cashier explicitly refers to the chocolate as “edible form,” and the characters seem to be replacing all other forms of food with chocolate, as seen in the scene when Noodle eats chocolate for the first time. The dismantling of the entire structure of the means of exchange is what makes Wonka and Willy’s mission truly revolutionary.
He doesn’t just want to be successful in the chocolate business under capitalism. He fights back against police brutality, monopoly, justice system internal corruption (beyond the entire system being inherently corrupt, of course, which is also implied in Willy being fined by a cop for loitering), exploitation of workers under capitalism, and imperialism. In the end, he pays what he owes in reparations to the Oompa Loompa (“the little orange man,” as he’s called), and Willy apologizes for exploiting the cocoa resources of Loompaland for his own gain. He even offers the Oompa Loompa a job as the Head of Tasting, which one can assume would garner at least some substantial role in the co-op or a Board of Directors.
Needless to say, I was stunned speechless over my Lufthansa-issued peanuts. While Wonka was so artistically devoid and eardrum-strangling
that I can’t even comment on it, its message leaves an imprint. Willy Wonka’s roots are in the labor movement, fighting against all forms of material class hatred and exploitation that he encounters along the way of promoting artisanal cooperative production—and now every impressionable adolescent and Timothée-Chalamet-thirsting adult knows it.
Whether explicitly through Wonka beating up a cop, or implicitly through the obvious callbacks in the final set design of Wonka’s second factory to none other than Metropolis (1927) (one of my favorite dirty red movies), Wonka begs questions and feeds discourse. The willow tree looking over the pond in the beginning scenes of Metropolis is replicated in the final scene of Wonka. Wonka (2023) is not to be overlooked—show it to your kids this May 1st!
I WANT TO BE POLITICAL!
GIULIA REBECCA CONTE
No, it’s not a typo. I don’t want to be a politician (sorry dad for the disappointment), I want to be political. Neither solely or primarily when I go to the polls, or when I claim that good reasons exist to vote in the first place. I want to be political. Not even just when I try to convince you that investing in gold is the foxiest move one could pull right now, since the American elections will undoubtedly shake the market thus increasing the value of gold, that goes up when the economy goes down (PPE rizz).
What I mean is that I claim the right to express myself without the absurd limitation of political impartiality. We get thrown into a political context at birth, we do politics at home, in class, in the street, we do it when we choose what to eat and who to eat with. Politics is simply another dimension of our human identity, and requiring a-political discussions means asking for a continuous and inescapable small talk. Those who prefer us not to express political ideals and politically laden opinions say that doing so is preferable because it won’t “trigger” the sensitivity of those who disagree with such beliefs. What these fellow beings are actually requiring is that we avoid being “partitical”
and not “political”. It may be a good idea not to mention xy leader in every other sentence, or not to affiliate oneself with a specific positioning on the spectrum. This makes for an environment built on beliefs and dialogue around such beliefs rather than on dogmatism.
So, please, next time you raise your hand during that one politics seminar don’t just yell that you label yourself as an anarchist or as a Liberal, tell me what led you to that identification. Try your best not to be dogmatically partitical. But please, never forget to be political. It’s an enormous gift you got endowed with at birth. The luck of being part of a social sphere that your existence inevitably impacts and is impacted by. That’s being a political thing.
S o, to wrap up: it’s not enough if you tell me that both parties involved have faults and merits yet what we should really focus on is the humanitarian crisis; no, it’s not enough. I wish to hear what your stance really is on the conflict. And no, you won't offend anyone if you express your points as a respectful human deserving of this title.
Let’s not auto-censure ourselves for fear of being political, for there is nothing to fear in that.
COFFEE ACCELERATOR PT. II
I have written about our quick lives already. I have written about the pressure of being awake and steady at all times, I have addressed the severity of our caffeinated lives. I have not revealed, however, what happens if we start not living otherwise. Committing a time crime bounds us to imprisonment. Imprisonment in our crazy routines, plans for every minute taking away a moment of pleasure without the chance to feel it.
Each of us living in our cell: how come we are not repelled by the constant desire for competition, ambition, recognition. Life moves fast, so don't miss a thing, they say.
I say life can move slower if we let it.
If we do not stop this, we become victims of our own choices. We become enchained.