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Editorial Board
Claire Shang, CC ’24, Editor-in-Chief
Sylvie Epstein, CC ’23, Managing Editor
Kat Chen, CC ’24, Digital Editor
Tarini Krishna, BC ’23, Publisher
Daniel Seizer, CC ’22, Publisher
Hart Hallos, CC ’23, Illustrations Editor
Madeleine Hermann, BC ’23, Illustrations Editor
Annie Poole, BC ’24, Layout Editor
Benjamine Mo, CC ’23, Literary Editor
Eliza Rudalevige, CC ’23, Literary Editor
Samantha Sacks, CC ’22, Podcast Director
Senior Editors
Grace Adee, CC ’22
Dominy Gallo, CC ’23
Cy Gilman, CC ’22
Chloë Gottlieb, CC ’22
Elizabeth Jackson, CC ’22
Nicole Kohut, CC ’22
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Sam Needleman, CC ’22
Willa Neubauer, BC ’22
Victor Omojola, CC ’ 24
Sophie Poole, BC ’22
Hailey Ryan, BC ’22
Lyla Trilling, CC ’22
Brooke McCormick, BC ’22
Staff Writers
Alexander Aibel, CC ’23
Emily Bach, BC ’24
Zibia Bardin, BC ’25
Cole Cahill, CC ’23
Iris Chen, CC ’24
Michael Colton, CC ’22
Margaret Connor, BC ’23
Andrea Contreras, CC ’24
Cat Flores, BC ’25
Sadia Haque, BC ’23
Jaden Jarmel-Schneider, CC ’22
Anouk Jouffret, BC ’24
Kelsey Kitzke, BC ’23
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Miska Lewis, BC ’24
Justin Liang, GS ’24
Will Lyman, CC ’23
Becky Miller, BC ’24
Leah Overstreet, CC ’24
Ellida Parker, CC ’24
Anna Patchefsky, CC ’25
Jai Qureshi, CC ’23
Michaela Sawyer, CC ’25
Sarah Shapiro, BC ’25
Dariya Subkhanberdina, BC ’23
Muni Suleiman, CC ’24
Sona Wink, BC ’25
Staff Illustrators
Maca Hepp, CC ’24
Mac Jackson, CC ’24
Hazel Lu, CC ’24
Vanessa Mendoza, CC ’23
Samia Menon, SEAS ’23
Oonagh Mockler, BC ’25
Rosaline Qi, CC ’22
Aeja Rosette, CC ’22
Rea Rustagi, SEAS ’22
Amelie Scheil, BC ’25
Jace Steiner, CC ’22
Betel Tadesse, CC ’25
Phoebe Wagoner, CC ’25
Maya Weed, CC ’22
Taylor Yingshi, CC ’25
Table of Contents
It's good to be back in blue.
Letter From the Editor
by Claire Shang
Bwecommendations
by The Blue and White Staff
Blue Notes
Cocktail People by Chloë Gottlieb, Anouk Jouffret, Tarini Krishna, Brooke McCormick, Sam Needleman, and Sam Sacks
Campus Characters
Harris Solomon by Nicole Kohut
Morgan Levine by Sam Needleman
Features and Essays
Staging New Features by Muni Suleiman
Anywhere But Here by Hart Hallos
An Underground Playground by Kelsey Kitzke
An Education in Life by Elizabeth Jackson
Measure for Measure
Lily in the Gilchrist by Nicholas Allen
The Shortcut
Beginner Astronomy by Lara Smith
The Centerfold
by Maya Weed
Dear Dante
Season 7 by Michael Colton
ATSL
Am I Drunk Enough? by Chloë Gottlieb and Daniel Seizer
Verily Veritas
In Which Our Hero Joins a Community of Like-Minded Peers by Cy Gilman
The Conversation
Anne Higonnet by Bella DeVaan
Arie Esiri by Victor Omojola
Daniel Alarcón by Cole Cahill
Bayeté Ross Smith by Muni Suleiman
The Crossword
by Cy Gilman
The Postcard
by Jace Steiner
The Print Issue
Layout by Annie Poole
A Letter From the Editor
It's time to play the music ... it's time to light the lights ...
This is my favorite time of year—just before spring unfurls in full, when each new day of sunlight still feels like a gift to be marveled at and savored and accepted, tentatively. Soon, when spring is solidified, we might get lost in the world’s new backdrop; it’s better that the cast of winter remains for a little. That we’re decidedly in between things allows us to see how the spectacle of spring forms, to find the processes explaining the sublime.
Our March issue is all about performance, which is to say this very balance of the organic and the orchestrated. For the most part, our writers, finding themselves in the presence of art and artists, take these pages to celebrate, to reveal and revel. It’s an exercise in ekphrasis, which is itself an exercise in attention.
Our four long-form Conversations are each about how art is presented and interacted with: Victor Omojola talks neorealism with director Arie Esiri; Bella DeVaan and art history professor Anne Higonnet walk through the Met Costume Institute exhibit; Cole Cahill speaks to Daniel Alarcón about storytelling and Spanish-language podcasting; and Muni Suleiman learns from Bayeté Ross Smith what it means to be Columbia Law School’s artist-in-residence. In our Campus Characters column, you’ll find Columbia seniors with similar devotion: to poetry, for Morgan Levine, and playwriting and production, for Harris Solomon.
Other pieces praise the possibility of performance. Muni Suleiman considers deeply both what diversity in theater looks like and how it might be achieved, starting with an examination of our campus ensembles. Kelsey Kitzke takes us into Barnard’s Movement Lab, where the ability to move becomes artistic inspiration and source material. And in our third installment of “Anywhere But Here,” our Cut-inspired column, illustrator-turned-writer Hart Hallos brings us to the Q to watch his suitemate in the prelims of New York’s largest drag competition.
And even for the haters of art lurking among our readership, I’d urge you to stay with us. After all, we haven’t forgotten about the important things in life. Our print issue opens with our Blue Notes, in which six writers tell us who they are through their cocktails of choice; it closes with Chloë Gottlieb and Daniel Seizer who ponder an age-old question: “Am I drunk enough?” Cy Gilman—vis-à-vis our trusty mascot, Verily Veritas—takes us through what must be only a lightly fictionalized frat rush. And if you find yourself scrambling over spring break plans, our in-house sage Michael Colton has your back (somewhat).
With all this talk about performance, I’d be remiss if I didn’t briefly implicate myself. New to the job, I’m finding the position of editor-in-chief to be its own performance, chiefly one of competence. But it’s my favorite time of year, when things that will imminently become settled fact still feel precarious and precious in their newness. I’m marveling in and savoring every moment in this role and every piece in this magazine, and I hope you’ll join me in the latter now.
Claire Shang
Editor-in-Chief
Illustration by Madeleine Hermann
(excerpted from cover)
Bwecommendations
To eat, to drink, to binge, to read, but mostly to chess.
Claire Shang, Editor-in-Chief: Gowanus. The StairMaster. Caio Fernando Abreu.
Sylvie Epstein, Managing Editor: The Avett Brothers, “February Seven.” Salmon over sesame soba noodles. Big scarves.
Kat Chen, Digital Editor: Craig Thompson, Blankets. ELIZA, A Real Romantic.
Tarini Krishna, Publisher: Fotografiska. Laura Les, “Haunted.” Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Daniel Seizer, Publisher: Danna Paola. FKA Twigs, Caprisongs. Tommy Genesis and Charli XCX, “100 Bad.”
Hart Hallos, Illustrations Editor: Liz Phair. Buying, selling, and eating NFTs. Hilary Devaney, Projections (on view at Harkawik from Feb. 26–April 2, 2022).
Madeleine Hermann, Illustrations Editor: Dan & Drum, “Mona Lisa.” Chai lattes from Liz’s Place. Mitski, Laurel Hell. Wordle. Staff Writer Kelsey Kitzke’s lemon pasta.
Annie Poole, Layout Editor: Peter Luger Steakhouse.
Benjamine Mo, Literary Editor: Beach House, “Myth.” NYC Ferry, Astoria Route.
Sam Sacks, Podcast Director: The Trojan Horse Affair. Bodhi (kosher vegetarian dim sum place in Chinatown).
Grace Adee, Senior Editor: Marry Me (2022). Black Country, New Road, Ants From Up There.
Dominy Gallo, Editor Emeritus: Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. Amia Srinivasan, “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” Nina Simone, “Lilac Wine.”
Cy Gilman, Senior Editor: Julie Roset. James Meek, “Did I invade? Do you exist?” (London Review of Books). Paper extensions.
Chloë Gottlieb, Senior Editor: Chess.com (the app). Beer Buddy (the app). Beer buddy (a friend).
Elizabeth Jackson, Senior Editor: Sara Bareilles, “Once Upon Another Time.” The Open Ears Project (Spotify).
Nicole Kohut, Senior Editor: Summer of Soul (2021). Daisies (1966).
Brooke McCormick, Senior Editor: Call My Agent! (Netflix). Casa Magazines. Mama’s Too, bruschetta slice.
Sam Needleman, Senior Editor: Andrzej Å»uÅ‚awski. Pretzel shortbread cookies from the pork stand at the Greenmarket. John McPhee, “Giving Good Weight.” Drinking out of a can with a straw.
Willa Neubauer, Senior Editor: Justin Bieber fandom. Love is Blind, Season 2. From a Basement on the Hill, Elliot Smith. Aaron Altaras’ Instagram (@aaronaltaras).
Victor Omojola, Senior Editor: Station Eleven (HBO Max). Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven. Saba, Few Good Things.
Sophie Poole, Senior Editor: Jean Rhys.
Lyla Trilling, Senior Editor: Hoop Dreams (1994). Peter Luger Steak House.
Zibia Bardin, Staff Writer: Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World. Marco Polo tea from Mariage Frère.
Cole Cahill, Staff Writer: Big Thief, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Volume Three” (The New Yorker).
Iris Chen, Staff Writer: Jo Ann Beard, “The Fourth State of Matter.” Samurai Rebellion (1967). “It’s Not Your Fault You Can’t Pay Attention. Here’s Why,” The Ezra Klein Show (Spotify).
Michael Colton, Staff Writer: Saba, Few Good Things. The Righteous Gemstones (HBO Max). George Harrison, Early Takes Volume 1.
Margaret Connor, Staff Writer: The New Pornographers, “You’ll Need a New Backseat Driver.” Alberto Moravia, Il Conformista. Hungarian Pastry Shop, peach & hazelnut cake.
Sadia Haque, Staff Writer: Queens (ABC). Rachel Lynn Solomon, Weather Girl. Maisie Peters, “Brooklyn.”
Jaden Jarmel-Schneider, Staff Writer: Getting your friends into chess.com then not saying anything when they take the credit. Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections.
Anouk Jouffret, Staff Writer: Joan Didion, A Year of Magical Thinking. Orville Peck, Dead of Night.
Kelsey Kitzke, Staff Writer: D. T. Max, “Hanya Yanagihara’s Audience of One.” Being roommates with Illustrations Editor Madeleine Hermann and writing about it for the Valentine’s Day issue. Florence + the Machine, “King.”
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Justin Liang, Staff Writer: W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. The Marías, CINEMA.
Will Lyman, Staff Writer: Garth Greenwell, Cleanness. And Just Like That … (HBO Max). Solange, “Locked in Closets.”
Becky Miller, Staff Writer: Love and Basketball (2000). As Good as It Gets (1997).
Ellida Parker, Staff Writer: Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future. Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). Le Tigre, “Eau d’Bedroom Dancing.”
Michaela Sawyer, Staff Writer: Parliament, “The Motor Booty Affair”
Muni Suleiman, Staff Writer: Tony Kushner, Angels in America. bell hooks, All About Love. Learning how to love and be loved radically.
Sona Wink, Staff Writer: Getting a concussion and listening to the entire Dune audiobook in the dark.
Hazel Lu, Staff Illustrator: Beach House, Bloom. The Walkmen, Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me is Gone. Danton Boller Quartet.
Vanessa Mendoza, Staff Illustrator: Tara Westover, Educated. Encanto (2021).
Oonagh Mockler, Staff Illustrator: Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation. Fleabag (Amazon Prime). Ben & Jerry’s, Cherry Garcia.
Rea Rustagi, Staff Illustrator: Big Thief, “Breathe in My Lungs.” Ian Frazier, “The Vertical Farm.”
Jace Steiner, Staff Illustrator: Quinton Reviews, “The Failure of Victorious” ” (Youtube). Opiartsy, “Hyperpop for Cybergayz” (Spotify). Enjoying moments.
Phoebe Wagoner, Staff Illustrator: Squishy yet chalky rubber grapes.
Blue Notes
Cocktail People
by
Chloë Gottlieb
Anouk Jouffret
Tarini Krishna
Brooke McCormick
Sam Needleman
& Sam Sacks
On spritzes two ways, elderflower and Negronis, Fireball and Jameson.
Campus Characters
Harris Solomon
By Nicole Kohut
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Illustration by Maya Weed
Although he denies it, Harris Solomon, CC ’22, has earned his status as a campus character through three separate avenues of fame: 1) the “guy in mustard button down shirt who looks like Timothee Chalamet at Hillel,” 2) the Varsity Show newbie donning a diaper, and 3) perhaps most notably, the writer, producer, and cast member of Bard Overboard, an off-Broadway comedy that debuted at the SoHo Playhouse in November.
Those who managed to snag a ticket to any of Bard Overboard’s four sold-out shows exited the playhouse feeling like a VIP with a dash of vertigo—and not just because some Haim sisters could be spotted in the crowd. For nearly two and a half hours, playgoers got to experience the impressionable nooks and crannies of Harris Solomon’s mind, every moment brimming with excitement, humor, and a little bit of sex appeal. Now, a few months after the commotion has died down, Harris remains a man of simple pleasures—a Milano M5 on olive focaccia with balsamic glaze and the not-so-occasional Silver Moon cinnamon roll.
What few know, however, is that before Harris could fulfill his destiny as Columbia’s newest auteur, he played an infinitely more important role: the tech guy to my Violet Beauregarde in our fifth grade production of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Thankfully, as time went on, Harris found his way to the stage and I found my way off of it. Over years of friendship, aided by the close proximity of our childhood homes, the file named “Harris” that rests on my computer’s desktop has grown to include a medley of his many projects, including the eulogy he gifted me for my 20th birthday. While I’m certain that, in a few years’ time, I will have sufficient material to write and profit from a cutting-edge musical memoir based on Harris (see Lin Manuel Miranda’s Tik, Tik … Boom!), one unanswered question stands in my way: When did the transition from booth tech to artist extraordinaire occur, and how?
In pursuit of answers, I met up with Harris to chat over a plate of “THE Dish,” a delicate balance of sushi rice with teriyaki sauce, fried tofu, and frozen vegetables that Harris perfected when we lived together our junior year. While I wait for Harris to wrap up a Zoom meeting for the Varsity Show, which he is co-writing this year, my eyes scan the rest of the room, taking note of Girl Scout cookies and Brazil nuts before landing on six large cases of Vintage Italia Penne Straws huddled in the corner. A present from his worried mom, Harris tells me after catching my gaze. He tosses me two bags—marinara and lemon garlic—to taste test, and it’s not long before we forgo “THE Dish” in favor of the weird pasta chips. The cannellini bean flour and xanthan gum crunching between our teeth creates a symphony similar to the soundtrack of our elementary school snack chats, and our conversation can finally begin.
Unlike many artsy Angelenos, Harris has never studied under Stella Adler and his parents are not producers. Instead, Harris became starry-eyed for the stage during a two-week sketch comedy class at his middle school led by a “hip, young, cool guy” from CalArts who would soon become his mentor. Presented with this neat history, I briefly kid myself that my burning question has finally been answered—the missing puzzle piece has fallen into place, and I can now continue laying down the tracks for a future biopic. But nothing about Harris Solomon could ever be that simple.
Before I can pivot to another line of questioning, Harris throws his legs into the sky, using them to propel his body from the crack of the couch onto less-than-stable footing—a physical mannerism I have come to know well, and a sure sign that his previous response should not be taken for anything more than a prelude. And so the true origin story begins: “Actually—I feel like you’ll get this—if I look way back into my life, part of my identity was getting our group of friends in elementary school to crack up,” he says. I remember this well. Harris would trot around the playground, finding comical ways to relay the relationship status of his cooler best friend to many ladies-in-waiting—or, as Harris prefers to call it, “fending off the press.” While Harris is most certainly a leading man in today’s world, the many years spent serving as a member of another’s entourage provided him with extensive joke-telling practice and fundamental comedic source material. Raw criticism spewed from the mouths and minds of sequin-wearing nine-year-olds has served as excellent fodder for material like Bard Overboard.
Despite its success at the SoHo Playhouse, Bard Overboard was originally intended for an audience abroad—in Scotland, to be exact. While visiting the Edinburgh Fringe during the summer of 2018, a starstruck pre-frosh Harris instantly knew that he wanted to return with a production of his own—and he knew exactly how to do it. Like a true Columbia hard-ass, he studied every element of the festival to determine how to craft a smash-hit play. For instance, Harris tells me that he deliberately constructed Bard Overboard around a comparatively large ten-person cast so that his play would stand out against the one-to-two-person shows typical of the Fringe. As for the plot, though it has evolved substantially, Harris initially thought to write about a group of cruise ship actors when he remembered, simply, that “Everyone knows Disney cruises, so that’s a thing that can get some attention.”
Unfortunately, the production was put on hold when the 2020 Fringe was canceled due to Covid. Nearly a year later, when the world was beginning to regain its color, Harris’ play faced a new challenge—New Yorkers. But tailoring the script to an audience with lots of opinions and limited free time was just the beginning of Harris’ to-do list. After scheduling rehearsals to accommodate his cast of current and graduated Columbia students, reading contracts, and laying down rental deposits, Harris schlepped to his grandmother’s (oftentimes flooded, most always moldy) basement in Queens to build the set with his Penne Straw-fueled biceps. Despite these troubles, Bard Overboard soon premiered at the SoHo Playhouse which, years earlier, staged the debut of Fleabag—a show that inspired Harris to “do both [writing and acting] … and thank God for that because I think I would go crazy if I had to choose one.”
I want to ask him about that second half—the acting half—but before I can, Sam Needleman, our third and final roommate from way back when, interrupts with a FOMO-fueled phone call. “Hey, bubby,” Harris answers after swiping my phone off the table. Moments later, Sam is with us on the couch, Penne Straws in hand. The completion of our triad sparks something in Harris, and soon he’s revealing all the juicy secrets behind each character of his play.
He tells us that he strives to be the antithesis of his own Bard Overboard character—a leotard-wearing narcissist with a BFA from the University of Central Florida. “I don’t feel like I’m that person, but I think there’s a place in everyone’s mind that is that … you know, that’s hyper jealous and is so ambitious and wants to do everything and thinks he’s God’s gift to the world … you know, everyone! Because we’re built that way in a world that values that.” When I ask him about Winston the Wonder Weasel, the cruise ship’s sexually charged mascot, Harris delivers a less wistful response: “I mean, I guess he’s just a furry.”
Not long after Sam makes an unwanted exit, Harris reveals that, despite the unique qualities he’s built into each character, he sometimes sees them as a single unit: “I wanted to show someone who was coming to terms with their fate. Someone who had a dream and was able to realize—well, this sounds very basic—but they were already doing what they wanted to do, they just had to look at things another way.”
“So, kind of like you?” I suggest.
Harris settles into the couch, shoots back up again, and does a little dance before pushing out a formal response.
“Yeah? Maybe … I DUNNO!!! Perhaps …”
Then a shy smile.
“Maybe a little like me.”
Morgan Levine
By Sam Needleman
I have been lucky to know, in my four years of half-fledged college life, four full-fledged graduates of Beyoncé’s high school: two very tall dancers and two very short poets. They’re a buoyant bunch, and they have all assured me, unprompted and on separate occasions, that a public arts school in Houston is a special place to come of age. “H-town till I drown,” they say, and they seem to mean it. They aren’t suburbanites like the kids supposedly from Boston; they aren’t malcontents of the Sun Belt sprawl like the kids from LA and Miami. They really do hold H-town down, and they do it artfully.
“It was a given that you were interested in something and doing something creative … you didn’t have to
Illustration by Mac Jackson
prove it,” short poet Morgan Levine, CC ’22, told me on a recent afternoon in Hungarian, gently knocking their more pre-professional peers here in the Northeast. It was getting tantalizingly warm, and hindsight was suddenly 20/20 for the ’22s. Levine, normally an energetic optimist, was expressing regret over time not well spent, people not met, literary salons not hosted. Above all, they seemed overwhelmed and perplexed by the careerism ensnaring their classmates, fellow artists included. They were making the classic case for art for art’s sake, and it’s never been so well-timed. “There has to be some kind of commune or arena where you can volley out creative impulses without having them be immediately hierarchized,” they said.
How to resist? Write an English thesis on ekphrasis, of course. What better antidote for post-grad pressures than artful descriptions of descriptions of art? Though postmodern poetry, especially Ashbery, is the central tile in Levine’s mosaic, their historical sweep is much broader. “The first ekphrastic description in the Western canon is Achilles’ shield,” they told me, insisting that the concept was porous from the get-go. “Even then, when you think about it, and the verbs that are being used, it can’t possibly be a direct representation. People are getting in fights and throwing shit in there! That cannot be going on in the shield itself.”
Fair point. And it’s not as if things got any clearer. “After Stein, you can describe a pin cushion by saying ‘sparkly sparkly sparkly’ over and over again,” they pointed out. So if what a poet describes ekphrastically isn’t necessarily a work of art—maybe it’s a text, maybe it’s an object, or maybe, said Levine, it’s the passage of time—then the lines between art criticism and literary criticism, between criticism and art itself, are quite blurry. Levine loiters there, and anyone racing ahead or lagging behind befuddles them: “You’re gonna only look and not taste?” Spoken like an artist at school. “Everything should be together,” they declared. “My goal has always been to merge.”
It’s difficult, of course, for a senior to insist on this sort of merging when everyone around them suddenly seems more interested in mergers and acquisitions. “You kind of watch people’s physical contours shift,” Levine said, recounting with disappointment and defeat the endless job searches, which too often entail abandoning passions. They described their friends “flitting back and forth” between campus and the nebulous world beyond. They offered an alternative, the one they know best: “Poetry is about creating and paying attention and allowing things to have a resonance beyond their physical contours.” A few hours with Levine serves as an edifying reminder—if you needed one at all—that consulting can’t hold a candle to poetry. For Levine, what can? Maybe going to Spain on a government-funded program, Ashbery in hand, Ben Lerner–style. If most post-grad paths are clichés, you might as well pick one that will let you eat good croquetas, go to the Prado, and break even.
They’ll be great at all of the above, I think. Levine tends not to traffic in superlatives, but I do: They are perhaps the best poet on campus, the smoothest barista at Journalism Joe, the most talented editor of the Columbia Review, and the host of the most sublime Central Park coloring parties. I hear that they also have one hell of a WBAR show and the best Instagram story on campus—a torrent of sumptuous reposts. “They posted my cake one time!” a Blue and White editor told me ecstatically, and, upon seeing the picture, I gave Levine as much credit for disseminating the glorious Maira Kalman–esque confection as I gave the editor for baking it. I imagined Levine, quarantined in Texas, periodically putting down Autobiography of Red to send spates of square pleasures to their followers.
Perhaps the only venue where they command more respect than Instagram is the Review, where they now enjoy a cushy emeritus perch. When they invited me to a recent meeting in Kent, I arrived late, bowed to all the literary heavy-hitters, set a three-minute timer, and bet myself a pint of mint chip Häagen-Dazs that “enjambment” would be mentioned before the beep. It was—and positively, at that! A rainbow-haired, turtlenecked Levine mostly kept quiet, including during a fierce debate over a poem about top surgery, but their slow Houstonian nods said it all. “I feel like you’ve been sitting on something,” one of the more loquacious editors finally said, turning to Levine, and the old sage launched into a sermon that somehow held the room rapt while loosening it up. “Mmm,” said everyone, all at once. Next poem.
While the editors weighed a piece “for Pollock,” I watched one of them google Pollock. I thought about Levine’s admirable mission to read every plaque in the Met, not as a pretentious auto-didactic project, but as—you guessed it—a sort of poetic practice. I wanted them to take me there and maybe read to me, but our trip was stymied by homework and Levine’s formidable February social calendar. At least we bumped into each other at an après-ski–themed party in the wee hours of my deadline. While we lounged on a couch—vodka-cran for them, whiskey for me—I turned to them and demanded the highest form of ekphrasis: the party report, a genre at least as old as Plato’s Symposium. Not all EC events are worthy of a drunken close read, but if hordes of seniors in white cable-knit sweaters don’t constitute an objet d’art, I don’t know what does.
“There are no flashing colored lights, which I consider a huge element of a good party,” Levine, ever the epicurean, said. “One bright white light—it’s like the moon. A bunch of people are moving!” Levine’s buddy, by the door, motioned for them. “Oh, shit. We’re gonna go.” And just like that, they were off to a party down the hall, their description still dangling as lightly as one of the cut-out snowflakes affixed to the cement walls.
“My way of accessing truth about the world … is by paying better attention,” they told me in Hungarian. After that chat, I told a friend that Levine is remarkably articulate. Just then, déja vù: I said the same thing to their face on Rockaway Beach a couple of years ago, stopping them mid-sentence, as if the spirit moved me. I had to say it! Even in languid summer conversation, their precision was astonishing, distracting. And as I caught myself marveling too myopically at their diction, I got a little anxious: Shouldn’t I be listening to what my friend is saying? Maybe; too bad. Their words became, Stein-like, too vital and pleasurable to tamper with, like sea glass or the carrot salad that Patti Smith is known to eat at Uma’s, just up the boardwalk.
Photo credit: Mac Jackson
Features & Essays
Staging New Features
Student ensembles do Broadway their own way.
By Muni Suleiman
Illustration by Kat Chen
I only learned of the Columbia University Black Theatre Ensemble in October, when it revealed its existence just to interrupt a quiet dinner with a friend. As an assistant director to their fall play, Once on This Island, she had to cut our dinner date short to make rehearsal. So there I was on Low Steps, alone but with new knowledge. And as a Black student, it mostly left me perplexed—that such an organization existed at Columbia, but also that I’d been utterly unaware of this fact.
I wouldn’t hear much more of it until late January, when I spotted a call for writers posted in Lerner. The posters advertised weekly co-writing sessions for film and theater writers, workshops with film and theater professors, and a writers’ room—all part of the Ensemble’s IncluBIPOC workshop program, an environment of “positive creative growth, as we create a writers community here at Columbia.” With no demands for prior experience or skill, this was an open invitation not only into a world for Black writers but into the vibrant and supportive community that is BTE.
…
In recent years, there has been growing mobilization directed at Broadway’s lack of diversity. Though more Black actors have reached Broadway stages, those behind the scenes, including playwrights, also need diversified spaces. Plays and playwrights provide the voice through which acting is interpreted. If the narratives we place on the stage aren’t inhabiting diverse perspectives, we run the risk of undermining more visible efforts toward diversity.
Broadway flung open its curtains for the fall 2021 season to unveil seven plays by Black playwrights: Chicken & Biscuits, Pass Over, Trouble in Mind, Lackawanna Blues, Skeleton Crew, Clyde’s, and Thoughts of a Colored Man. The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020 brought public demands to diversify the theater industry, and the season promised a meaningful change from the relative lack of Black-written theater on Broadway in previous years. But two years later, the commitment hasn’t stuck—as of now, Skeleton Crew and for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf are the only Black-written plays still running. The explanation for each ending varies—financial backing and the impact of the Omicron variant have played major roles. Nevertheless, there remains a clear difference in the amount of real estate Black and white playwrights are allowed to occupy on the “Great White Way.”
For one, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s Pass Over was the first play to open on Broadway since March 2020. After a pushed-up opening date, low ticket sales triggered industry voices, even before the first show, to question the play’s ability to survive its limited run. All major theatrical productions are financially risky endeavors; given the institutional and cultural barriers that can make Black-written plays seem like even greater risks, this pre-existing instability makes such shows even more difficult to produce.
As I read more and more into these stories of professional Black theater, I was particularly intrigued by how the conversations on Black playwrights and diversity on Broadway mirrored similar conversations that I also was hearing on Columbia’s campus.
…
Columbia’s connection to the professional theater world is twofold. On one hand, current members of Columbia theater spaces may become the famous actors, directors, and writers of tomorrow. On the other hand, the way that Broadway looks right now plays a major role in influencing the future of the theater community— inspiring those who see theater as a welcoming space while turning away those who do not. The theater industry’s racial and financial barriers, therefore, recreate themselves when there are no structural changes enacted to oppose them. While Columbia is an institution in which barriers to theater involvement are very much present, it is also a space for students to contest such barriers by encouraging broader participation in their theatrical groups.
Though optimistic about the accessibility of Columbia and Barnard’s Theater department, Kay Kemp, CC ’22, who helps lead BTE, noted the racial and financial pressures that potentially deter Black students, even those with high school experience, from engaging in Columbia student theater. “Theater is such a centralized, wealthy media,” they said, creating a need for an organization like BTE. “You cannot work in theater without a certain amount of exposure and backing.”
The same can be said of requirements upheld by clubs or productions prior to participation. When productions require prior experience, knowledge of the theatrical canon, or labor-heavy commitment, it can discourage those from marginalized backgrounds; such students are less likely to have had access to that prior experience, or may need to manage a job alongside academics and extracurriculars in order to support themselves.
Jane Walsh, CC ’23, has found similar issues in the audition process. She noted that, for hundreds of years, “theater has been, frankly, really not a diverse community just because of how it’s been structured with the casting, the audition process. You have to know certain people to get anywhere.”
Walsh is the co-president of Latenite Theatre, an experimental comedy theater group that produces an anthology of eight to nine student-written plays. Like BTE, it attempts to diversify its membership through a recruitment process that removes barriers to entry. The club maintains a casual audition process in which preparation is discouraged, bias training is done prior to casting, and production casts are large so as to include as many people as possible. “Shows are only better if you have a diverse range of playwrights, actors, directors,” emphasized Walsh. “[We] definitely try to do a lot of work toward it, but also I hope that we’ll never be complacent.”
Latenite and BTE share another rudimentary but essential practice: Both groups regularly put on student-written plays, rather than productions of canonical work. Walsh explained the significance of this long-standing practice: “I think sometimes so much of the theater world is so focused on redoing, that it’s so hard to break in anything you write to be seen anywhere.” Given the whiteness of the theatrical canon, frequent productions of student plays provide opportunities for budding writers of color to have their work performed, and for college theater spaces to diversify their material.
For Latenite and BTE, then, inclusivity is not limited to making participation more accessible, but also making all types of participation acceptable. Both clubs allow for first-time playwrights to write and produce their work without the pressures of being The Next Best American Play. One of Walsh’s favorite parts about Latenite plays, for instance, is that “there’s not a lot of emphasis on them being really good. The stuff we make is like stuff that’s just weird and halfway through.” Sometimes the plays don’t make any sense, and they don’t have to.
Kemp similarly emphasized BTE’s commitment to versatile productions, noting that they accept “people who are like, ‘I want to direct this thing.’ We’re just like, ‘Then direct it.’ Everything that we’ve done has been—this was a passion project from somebody. Was on the board or wasn’t on the board, it doesn’t matter. If you want to do theater, we’ll make it happen.”
While Latenite and BTE have made likewise efforts to make theater spaces more accessible, they’ve approached making them more diverse in different ways. They’ve created internal structures that differ not only from each other but also deviate from professional theater practices: At Latenite, that takes the form of color-evasive theatrical spaces, while BTE has created an identity-conscious space.
Typically used in reference to theatrical casting, as well as hiring practices at large, the term “color-evasive” refers to the disregard of one’s race, ethnicity, and/or gender, or not finding these identities relevant to a position if it does not explicitly call for specific identities. Latenite undergoes an anonymous submission process in which “everyone has the fair chance to have their play be selected,” and “people will discuss the plays for what they are,” as Leul Abate, CC ’23, Latenite’s co-submissions commission chair, described. Anonymity is maintained for as long as the writer wishes, at times even extending well into rehearsal, so qualifications like writing experience are not emphasized in the submission process.
For all it may do to reduce bias and requirements of experience, though, an anonymous and color-evasive process by definition cannot guarantee that a diverse array of playwrights are included in the anthology. Identity-consciousness, on the other hand, acknowledges and embraces that identities—including but not limited to race, ethnicity, and gender—can inform how a role or position is fulfilled. It goes beyond the concept that anyone can write a play and join their community, consciously recognizing and actively working against the barriers that specifically impact Black, Indigenous and Playwrights of Color. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, BTE wishes to develop as it dismantles: Another primary aim for the group is to further the theatrical artistry of its participants.
It was through BTE, for instance, that Kemp was able to turn their experience with whiteness in the theater world into a source of creative inspiration: “I acted, and then got to college and was like, ‘Oh, there's nothing on this campus that I want to be in. Because there's nothing on this campus for me.’ I went back to writing when I was like, ‘Well, nobody's going to make that but me. There's nobody on this campus who's making work like that right now.’”
The organization functions both as an artistic and a mentoring space, especially through projects like the IncluBIPOC workshop which—at the time of writing—remains open for any Black and other writers of color. It not only provides the resources for those who wish to develop their theatrical interests, but also establishes an identity-based community outside theater. Kemp described BTE not only as the Black Theater Ensemble but also as the Black Teaching Ensemble. “I feel like an important thing about [the IncluBIPOC workshop] is I am listed as the head writer, but that does not mean that I’m not learning,” they explained. “It actually means that I get the opportunity to learn more from these people who are new and have fresh voices and ideas. I'm not teaching anything. We’re all sitting around and teaching each other.” It’s these aspects of BTE’s environment that contribute to Kemp’s description of BTE as a community theater.
Formally, Kemp is BTE’s resident playwright, as well as one of its co-presidents, alongside Madison Hatchett, BC ’22, and Emily Ndiokho, BC ’22. In practice, the ensemble’s structure is much more decentralized, with the distribution of artistic work far more fluid than the rigid roles assigned on paper. Those who might otherwise feel unwelcome in theatrical spaces are thus offered an opportunity—not only for bit-part participation but for immediate immersion in the creative work of the ensemble. They might be experiencing, for the first time, that ideas outside of theatrical convention can be celebrated, as opposed to shunned.
“That’s extremely important—learning how to collaborate with people,” said Hatchett. “You don’t need to have experience ... You’ll learn just by the virtue of being in that space.”
Distinct from an approach that deemphasizes the quality of the plays to endorse creativity, BTE’s communal ethos and decentralized structure not only includes students without a traditional theater background, but also recognizes what they are capable of. Kemp summarized BTE’s messaging: “We’re making art like, ‘Hey, we think that stories are really valuable. We think that your story is really valuable, and we want to make it easy for you to tell that story. I want to give you tools. We don’t want to give you a framework, but we want to give you tools.’”
The depth of BTE’s communal support structure—artistic and otherwise—allows its members to produce something audiences might not see anywhere else on campus.
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Even with the inclusive approaches of BTE and Latenite, there are still difficulties in trying to diversify theater on Columbia’s campus. For one, a strict timeline for auditions means that, even if one wanted to include as many people as possible in a production, there’s a limited time frame for recruitment. Moreover, there still remains larger institutional barriers within and beyond the university itself that these clubs cannot overcome themselves.
“We can’t change what’s going on at this university for people of color. We don’t have that capacity if we tried … we have to change the way that we’re making work to make it more accessible to those people,” Kemp reflected.
But BTE and Latenite are still valuable, serving as the campus conduits for stories. A “safe and restorative space,” as Hatchett described BTE, allows more people into the industry as well as the audience, whether theater is a long-term career aspiration or not.
“Just because some of us on this e-board want to pursue theater full time doesn’t mean that you have to take theater extremely seriously,” said Hatchett, in a reminder that these student ensembles value theater as process and not product. “You don’t have to be a theater person just to have people that you have fun with. That’s what rehearsal spaces are designed for.”
Anywhere But Here
Down the runway with Paloma LaMona.
By Hart Hallos
Illustration by Phoebe Wagoner
Are you pro or anti gender norms? If yes, you might have heard of a little something called drag, which has been sweeping New York City ever since Season 10 of Rupaul’s Drag Race aired in 2018. Kidding! The drag scene’s recent influx of performers is no joking matter. Local competitions offer students, artists, and twinks vital exposure and connections in an industry where Exxposure and Connie Xtions might be the names you need to know to get booked.
Enter Paloma LaMona, CC ’23, who started performing in drag in June of 2021. In her first competition that September, she placed fourth and earned the judge’s gushing praise. But Paloma doesn’t just perform—she designs and makes her own costumes, does her own hair, and mixes her own performance audio. To walk into Paloma’s room is to walk into a veritable drag atelier: Wig heads gaze proudly over a floor dotted with pins and sewing patterns, and the entire back wall disappears behind a packed clothing rack.
It’s a slight change from two years ago, when Paloma and I (famously) lived on the same John Jay floor. But there might have been signs: JuliaÌ€n, Paloma’s out-of-drag identity, didn’t not wear heels to our 8:40. Since Paloma’s birth, I’ve followed her to gigs and competitions around the city—including last month, for a preliminary round of Lady Liberty on the third floor of the Q. Maybe it was food poisoning from the night before, or maybe it’s because I’m an empath, but something about the night felt special. You want to find out why? Okay, but you’ve got to control your erection.
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5:39 p.m.: Paloma and I decide to meet at an up-and-coming psychedelic brunch palace that plays God to day-in-my-life-NYC TikTok: Carlton Arms Suite 8A. It’s also where we both live, and where I often run into Paloma and their whirring sewing machine on late-night trips to the bathroom.
6:52 p.m.: A knock on the door reveals itself as Dominique: Paloma’s roommate, a makeup artist, and SEAS student. She’s shimmering in a mint-green slip and matching sparkly eyeshadow, sipping Fireball from a Dixie cup. I opt for blue Gatorade, memories of vomiting in the communal bathroom still fresh.
7:10 p.m.: The next knock is Paloma and her boyfriend/dutiful drag helper, Julian. Both carry a huge bag stuffed with supplies; I spy an entire roll of paper towels, some boating tape, and a lavender Telfar mini. My eyes refocus on the huge pink poinsettia in Paloma’s hair—somehow chic when paired with a black knee-length down jacket and hot pink Crocs. We walk briskly to the subway, Paloma nervous about missing the 7:30 call time.
7:25 p.m.: We discover that we’re missing black eyeliner, which Paloma had planned on using to add a beauty mark. Possible solutions include a packed eyebrow pencil or Dominique and I doing a mad CVS dash, but the pencil is too light, and Paloma wants us to be able to enter together. The beauty mark is abandoned.
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7:39 p.m.: Paloma goes straight to the dressing room upon arrival. Dominique, Julian, and I check out the empty second floor, which will host the sex party Qruisers later tonight. The floors and walls are Despicable Me black, decorated with graffiti and papered with posters of Elvira and hunkily-rendered cartoon characters. Passing by a Ned Flanders with particularly bulging pecs, I realize it’s okay to be gay.
8:06 p.m.: The third floor is also classic Gru-core (Grore?): cold black walls, vaguely industrial fixtures, and a high ceiling where iridescent plastic snowflakes dangle loosely. The pre-show crowd is us and the DJ, who sways somberly while puffing on a Juul. He’s wearing a cropped gray hoodie and black mesh boxer briefs layered over white cotton briefs, so the pre-show music is incredible. A club mashup of “good 4 u” and “Watermelon Sugar” plays, and everyone in the room simultaneously cums. Shaken from the collective orgasm, I stagger down blue-lit stairs to the first floor—a jazzier vibe, think big velvet curtain—to get cash. A possibly-bearded man (though I could be projecting) performs intensely on the piano, but no one is paying attention. Above the bar, stock footage of Earth as seen from outer space plays.
8:15 p.m.: Dominique and I decide it’s time for a drinkey-poo (industry term!) at the third floor bar. I ask someone whose porn I’ve watched on Twitter if he is in line, and he replies, “Yes,” in a way that makes it clear he is extremely attracted to me. In a pleasant and possibly sex-party–related surprise, I spot blue Gatorade behind the bar and get one, receiving with it a small gray puzzle piece. The mural across from the bar features two boys in medieval-esque attire (neck ruffles and jockstraps).
8:25 p.m.: I ask Julian how he thinks Paloma is feeling. “Nervous,” he replies. Tonight’s prelim consists of a runway, a performance, and a lip sync between the two top-ranking contestants. Lady Liberty is a staple competition in the NYC drag community: Winners earn scene recognition and have been known to appear on a certain RuPaul drag show. Tonight’s hosts, Brita Filter and Nicky Doll, introduce the judges, seated with a bird’s-eye view above the stage.
8:34 p.m.: The first contestant walks the runway in a satiny, pastel bodysuit embroidered with rhinestone avocados. Midway through, she pulls an actual avocado out of her bra and hands it to someone else in the front row. Obviously, I am crushed. I realize the “runway” of Lady Liberty is a small stage three feet above the ground, which contestants ascend via apple box and descend via shaky staircase. Brita offers an arm to contestants who seem like they might snap an ankle.
8:42 p.m.: Paloma is the eighth and final contestant to walk the runway. She’s adorned in cascading tiers of ruffled bandana fabric: blue, pink, white, pink, and blue again. Brita clocks the trans flag reference immediately. What Brita doesn’t know is the painstaking process and repeated dorm floor consultations that went into choosing each specific shade. The judges don’t know that each tier was hand-ruffled by Paloma over weeks of late-night lounge sewing sessions, or that the entire outfit, including matching headband and shoes, was rhinestoned by Paloma and Julian during finals season. Still, I watch the crowd nod approvingly as phones are rushed out of pockets to record the moment. As Paloma exits the stage, Nicky Doll reads the description she wrote for herself: “A little hood, a little classy, and proud of it.”
9:10 p.m.: Performances begin with live singing that leaves the audience unstirred. After each number, contestants walk around collecting tips in a plastic fish bowl. Audience favorites include the highest jump split I’ve ever seen and a TikTok-themed performance.
9:39 p.m.: Paloma is the final performer of the night. When she walks out in full Dora costume to the Dora theme song, a judge rushes down from their seat to tip her before she has even started lip syncing. The performance follows Paloma as a grown-up Dora: working at a job she hates, getting fired from said job, disappointing her parents, and drinking tequila. One of Paloma’s earrings—a gold bamboo hoop, worn for both the runway and performance—falls off midway and clatters to the ground. But when she kicks it determinedly offstage, sending it flying into Julian’s lap, the audience cheers. I glance at Brita, whose beam is unmistakable.
9:47 p.m.: Dominique and I nab another round of drinkey-poos during votey-poo time. Every puzzle piece cast into Paloma’s fishbowl fills me with a little bit of hope—until I notice one contestant’s bowl is conspicuously empty. It’s almost as chilling as the half-shaved head I just spotted in the crowd. Dominique and I savor the final minutes of votey-poo time by dancing alone near the bar (in a cool way), and I spot a Grindr match but don’t approach after convincing myself he was catfishing me. Cue the And Just Like That … theme song, hun!
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10:02 p.m.: Brita and Nicky call the contestants up on stage, where Paloma, who drunkenly “fell” at the end of her performance, has a spot of blood forming through the knee of her tights. After a lot of gay drumrolling (in which gay people do a drumroll), the top four are announced: the second contestant, the fourth, the one who performed the TikTok number, and … Paloma! We absolutely lose our shit. Another round of drum rolls (less gay but more vers), and the fourth- and third-placing contestants are eliminated—leaving Paloma, holding hands with the other TikToking member of the top two. Later, Paloma will tell me that “people in the scene” told her to prepare for the top two lip sync after her Dora performance, but onstage, her surprise seems genuine.
10:13 p.m.: The top two lip sync is a classic drag anthem—“Levitating” by Dua Lipa—that even Brita admits has too many words. Both of Paloma’s knees are bleeding through her tights now. Still dressed as Dora, she claps to the beat, mashes my face with her hand, and steps over her opponent’s onstage barrel roll. Before I can process what’s happening, the song is over and Nicky and Brita are announcing the winner of Lady Liberty: PALOMA LAMONA! I watch Paloma’s face crumple as the space around me dissolves into cheers. Dominique and I jump up and down together; I get squashed amidst a crowd of people trying to get pictures; DJ Double Briefed-Up whispers (shouts) into my ear: “Your friend is such a fucking star.”
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10:30 p.m.: My proposal of c’mon guys let’s just check out Qruisers for a little bit is roundly rejected (virgins!), so Dominique and I chat with contestant Lori Lu as we wait for Paloma. She teaches music to children, and says that they love her drag—“they want to touch everything.” As we leave the bar, someone hands us t-shirts wrapped in plastic. I ask what they’re for, and he mentions something about it being our lucky day. When I see what’s on them—No SHIRT, No SHOES, No GENDER, with a small Corona Beer logo underneath—I can’t help but agree.
10:52 p.m.: Paloma’s blood spots are growing slowly, but she’s more focused on recounting the night—were people living, can you believe that judge tipped her, why would someone barrel roll? Most importantly, she is already starting to plan what to wear for the semifinals. There’s a future here that is impossible not to feel excited about. A name—Rupaul—flickers excitedly and nervously on our tongues as we fantasize on the subway ride home.
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11:34 p.m.: Paloma gets her first taste of the glamorous life of a Lady Liberty winner—a wig cap duct-taped to her hair. Quora offers no help, so Julian takes matters into his own hands, cutting Paloma’s hair in the dorm bathroom. Paloma winces as she cleans her knee scrapes. She will later reflect on the evening as “pain. But also good things happened.”
1:07 a.m.: We end the night in the lounge of Carlton Arms 8A, eating Koronet Pizza and watching Too Hot To Handle. If I were more poetically inclined (sorry: lame), I’d highlight the circularity of the moment: The very space where Paloma made her runway outfit from scratch, mixed the audio for her performance, and so often works on her craft is, for tonight, the space where she can just enjoy the win. But all I can think about is the delicious taste and widespread variety of Corona©’s new line of 2022 Pride Products! With new Hard Seltzers That Use They/Them Pronouns, everybody can join in on the fun—because life is a cele-GAY-tion! #Ad.
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Photo Credit: Hart Hallos
Photo Credit: Hart Hallos
Photo Credit: Hart Hallos
Photo Credit: Hart Hallos
Photo Credit: Hart Hallos
An Underground Playground
Discovering Barnard's Movement Lab.
By Kelsey Kitzke
Before I could step into Barnard’s Movement Lab, I had to take off my street shoes—a reminder that in some ways, this is a dance studio like any other. Upon entering, I wasn’t greeted by a typical studio’s floor-to-ceiling mirrors, wall-mounted bars, and panoramic windows. Instead, the Movement Lab features stage lights, sound systems, and six different projectors—four project onto the walls and two onto the floor. Even as I found myself struck by the artistic possibilities around me, the bottoms of my feet tethered me to the cool dance floor—an uncanny convergence of the digital and the tangible. Of course, this is just one of the University’s many state-of-the-art performance spaces. But what distinguishes the Movement Lab from other venues is its dedication to exploring the intersection of movement and technology.
Tucked away behind an inconspicuous white door on the lower level of Milstein, the Movement Lab’s learning environment stands in stark contrast with the bustling study spaces and classrooms above. Curiosity in college is most often channeled toward predetermined goals: We learn new skills to complete a project, write a paper, take an exam. The Movement Lab, however, is designed to encourage “lateral exploration,” as associate director Guy de Lancey called it. Others used the simpler word “play.” The Movement Lab is a place for playing—with the technology, with bodies, with space, and prioritizing discovery over the final product.
That’s how Noa Weiss, BC ’21, the Lab’s post-baccalaureate fellow, explained the eclectic array of equipment we came across during my tour. Weiss turned on the six projectors, each displaying a different looping video of a serene landscape. The videos are often used at the weekly meditative Stillness Lab, one of the most common ways that non-dancers interact with the facility. Jellyfish floated below me, a cat jumped through swaying tall grass in front of me, and lava poured down the volcanic rock to my right. When I mentioned that I couldn’t imagine what lava could possibly sound like, Weiss used the studio sound system to demonstrate its crackling. Oh, and these are the skeletons, he added, pointing to the two long black bags of complete human skeletal models. A human anatomy class meets here, too.
First conceived during the development of the new Milstein Center, which opened in 2018, the Lab was proposed as a space on campus to give physical form to the intersection of art, movement, and technology. “We thought it should be like a sandbox,” de Lancey said, “just filling it up with all the latest technology.” The Lab’s equipment constantly evolves to meet artists’ desires. The result is a highly flexible space especially beneficial for the student artists-in-residence (SARs) that the Lab hosts each semester.
Last fall, the Lab’s adaptability had a clear utility: In becoming somewhat of a film studio, dance majors could shift their thesis projects from the stage to the screen. But the Lab has since been able to resume a broader range of in-person activities. And as a space dedicated to the creative utilization of technology alongside bodily movement, the Lab is poised to challenge what the return to the “physical world” even means.
As opposed to other “movement labs” on campus that understand bodily movement through scientific research, Barnard’s Movement Lab attracts more artists than scientists. Still, these artists represent a wide variety of artistic and technical backgrounds. Current SARs Eli Duncan, BC ’22, and Sophie Paquette, CC ’23, highlighted that the Movement Lab and its technology have provided some freedom from the restraints of their other artistic disciplines, allowing for a new kind of engagement with art and the physical body.
A combined architecture and visual arts major, Duncan uses the Movement Lab to experiment with virtual reality. It’s a rare opportunity for him to act upon his passion for the crossroads of architecture and installation art. “It’s really exciting—the idea that you can just take anything that you make on the computer and then instantly enter into it physically, or somewhat physically,” he said. Initially, Duncan used VR to “test out” ideas for the “real world,” but he described that playing with the technology has allowed him to discover an entirely new visual language. He’s become fascinated with the uncanny juxtaposition of real images and surreal transformations, describing a software process that projects photos of real textures (like close-up images of flowers or food) onto three-dimensional virtual surfaces to create a bright, colorful, and chaotic viewing experience. Rather than gawking at the hyperrealistic techniques in classical paintings, Duncan is interested in seeing the flaws the technological process reveals in his art.
Though she has a background in creative writing, Paquette said that her interest in the Movement Lab stemmed primarily from her experiences as a roller skater. When she took up skating a few years ago, she discovered her body could move in ways she hadn’t experienced before—a form of creativity that didn’t require being hunched in front of a computer screen. When we met, she showed me the bright purple roller skates that she’s carefully painted and tweaked herself, a manifestation of her artistic approach to skating and her interest in construing meaning through movement. Recently, Paquette has been utilizing the Lab’s motion capture suit to project her movements onto an avatar displayed on the Lab’s walls, experimentation grounded in themes of learned movement and muscle memory.
Paquette joked about the motion capture technology’s imperfections: As she moves, the avatar might completely contradict her movements, its arm impaling its torso or otherwise splaying wildly. “It’s just a different way of thinking about my movements that they’re being read, like they are legible, but also that they’re being transformed [by the technology],” she said. But she also highlighted how the technology’s imperfections are a big part of its potential: “It doesn’t matter if my movements aren’t super perfect because they’re going to be warped through the avatar anyway.” While motion capture might seem physically alienating as a medium, it lets Paquette pursue a new kind of artistic embodiment in which she’s learning the body rather than operating it.
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In part because of his architecture background, Duncan resisted the idea that this technology connects the digital and the physical worlds. “When you're in a space, you feel like you can pick up on the presence of things that are physically around you, and VR is a completely visual medium where there's no actual mass or volume that surrounds you,” he said. Sometimes, though, VR plays tricks on your body: Your arm tingles when you put your hand through a virtual wall or you feel like you’re falling as you walk down a virtual hill. Sound is particularly tricky, Duncan explained. “There’s so much that we absorb and process about spatial environments like based off of the sound that we hear, and so I’m definitely really interested in using sound as the main property that kind of keeps it grounded.” In the VR experience Duncan is building, you maintain an understanding that the world you’re in is virtual—he’s not trying to trick you into its tangibility. But the experience also forces you to surrender to how your body and brain will try to make sense of the nonsensical. As a result, it’s the imprecision in the technology—its failure to create a hyperreal experience—that shapes the artistic process and product.
The Movement Lab maintains a close relationship with the dance department, where director Gabri Christa is also a faculty member, and with the campus’ dance community. Dance and art history major Sophia Fung, BC ’22, emphasized the Lab’s specialness as a campus performing arts space. President of CoLab Performing Arts Collective, a group dedicated to building a community for creators of all kinds to present their work, Fung hosts its semesterly showcase in the Movement Lab, where she is also a SAR this spring. She highlighted both the Lab’s access to an array of technology and its intimacy as a performance setting, particularly for experimental or unconventional works. “I think that a lot of artists are drawn to the kind of expansive ideas that you can have in the Movement Lab, because you can have so much more interaction between, say, yourself and the projection, as a mover,” Fung said.
While the Movement Lab emphasizes fun, curiosity, and play, it doesn’t shy away from the biases this new technology can initiate and illuminate. The Lab isn’t pushing a world in which technology rules supreme over our lives and bodies; it’s invested in critiquing the racial, gendered, and classed implications of the world of technology.
“This technology is new and exciting and pretty accessible and also so racist,” Weiss said while discussing the Lab’s work with media artist LaJuné McMillian’s “The Black Movement Library Potrrait Series.” The October installation consisted of motion capture representation of Black performers from their online archival project Black Movement Library, designed to push against the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of Black movement in existing databases.
It’s exciting to play with the latest technology, to wave at your virtual avatar and see it wave right back. But as de Lancey noted, the Movement Lab’s always been about more than marveling at the latest gadgets: “If we get past the first phase of wonder about it—like, there’s you waving, what does it mean socially now?”
Illustration by Madeleine Hermann
An Education in Life
On Life at the End of Life, companionship, and care.
By Elizabeth Jackson
Scroll through the spring course listings for the American Studies Department, and you’ll see titles that seem to fit squarely under the department’s suggestive but ambiguous name: “Race, Poverty and American Criminal Justice,” “The Problem of Social Class in Post-War American Literature and Culture,” “Equity and Access in Higher Education.” Eventually, though, you’ll come to an entry that seems to have little to do with America specifically: “Life at the End of Life.” Don’t we all, after all, live and die?
Broadly speaking, Life at the End of Life is about palliative care. The course has a traditional seminar component, in which students discuss readings on facets of care at the end of a person’s life and listen to guest speakers ranging from chaplains to physicians to English professors. Between two and four mandatory volunteer hours with palliative care patients each week complement these seminars, during which students are paired with one or two “long-term companions” receiving care at Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in East Harlem. Companionship this semester is mediated through Zoom, but in years past, students worked with patients at the facility. In addition to spending time with and providing individualized support for their long-term companions, students might be called upon to assist with general tasks in the nursing home, like distributing coffee or organizing entertainment.
More broadly, but perhaps more accurately, Life at the End of Life is about reconceptualizing relationships to ideas that scare and overwhelm many of us. Death. Illness. Autonomy. Spirituality. Care. Intimacy. It is about confronting these hard themes rather than avoiding them, as American society often suggests we do.
Most of the students and teachers I spoke with mentioned the stigmatization of death and illness in American society, with some comparing this stigma to attitudes in other cultures. Rebecca Yao, CC ’22, remarked that “especially in America, we don’t really talk about death at all. It’s kind of taboo,” an attitude that contrasts with her experience with family in Taiwan. There, death is “talked about a little more widely,” though even these conversations, she acknowledged, may not be sufficient to cultivate a sense of societal comfort with death.
Changing the way we perceive death may also involve changing the way our society and medical professionals treat the dying. Hana Ghoneima, the teaching assistant for the class, mentioned that in some cultures, there is a greater sense of community surrounding death and dying. She referenced a recent study of Kerala, India that found death to be, as she described it, a “communal, social thing. It’s not a medicalized isolation.” Ghoneima elaborated that “if a person is dying there, they’re not sent to a fluorescently lit room where they stay by themselves.” The patient doesn’t experience isolation as a default, punctuated by periodic visits; instead, they are enmeshed in a social fabric of friends and community workers, who offer prayer or food or companionship. She connected this community mindset to the discussion-based nature of the class; the format helps to drive home the idea that death must not be borne entirely alone, despite the tendencies of American health care and society. Nevertheless, the class does not completely nullify the sad connotations death still holds for many. Instead, Nicholas Kime, CC ’22, describes the ultimate takeaway from the class as “the ability to live amidst the discomfort and be okay with that.”
In addition to recontextualizing death, the class also calls upon students to consider different conceptions of care and the medical system. Kime commented that even though the medical profession typically prioritizes the extension of life at any cost, in a palliative context, such a philosophy may not be the best or healthiest thing for the patient, depending on one’s definition of healthy. Zoe Lin, CC ’22, further explained that compared to other areas of medicine, palliative care is much less concerned with diagnosing problems and much more about managing relationships between the patient and their loved ones. Palliative care professionals often deal in the unquantifiable: the emotions of patients and their loved ones, including grief. We often think of the ultimate goal of medicine as finding a “cure,” said Lin, but in palliative care, there typically is no cure. “The shift has been, let’s think more about healing—not just of the body, but also of relationships and their community. And do they feel like they have any regrets, and if so what can we do to maybe make amends?”
Lin emphasized the importance of a varied roster of healers in the context of palliative care, including chaplains and spiritual counselors. In one class, a spiritual counselor explained that the most important phrases a person can say to a palliative care patient are “Please forgive me,” “I forgive you,” “I love you,” and “thank you.” Lin asked the counselor what happens if patients or their families struggle to say these things so explicitly—in her own experience in Chinese culture, saying “I love you” can be unexpected. The counselors underscored that people may communicate these sentiments differently, potentially nonverbally; for loved ones and caregivers the task is twofold, both to identify and then interpret intimations of intimacy.
Care, particularly in the palliative context, is often found in simple acts, like remembering someone’s coffee order. Kime recounted his own experience working in-person coffee duty with a professional caregiver, saying that he would man the coffee cart while she told him the residents’ orders, which she knew by heart. The caregiver also brought a speaker, and she’d sing. “All these old people dancing, jacked up on caffeine with so much sugar in it,” Kime recounted. “And then this incredibly kind woman just singing so loudly, beautifully, dancing with some of the residents when they would come by.”
Part of caring sympathetically and effectively may also mean changing our natural responses to particular illnesses. Students are sometimes paired with long-term companions who suffer from dementia, and do not always experience reality in the same way as the students. One of Kime’s two long-term companions experienced severe dementia. Sometimes “you just need to, not play along, but entertain whatever they say and whatever situations and worlds they build for themselves,” he summarized. “That’s the world they’re in, and acknowledge that reality. And if you don’t, it’s going to be worse for them and for you.”
Sometimes, accepting the terms of his companion’s reality meant subscribing to outlandish premises, like a belief that she was on the run from bank agents. Never predictable, their interactions were defined by their variety, ranging from silly to poignant. One day, she might request that he write a letter asking the Pope to visit; another time, she spoke about being ready to die. “I didn’t know her well,” Kime remembered, “but the fact that she confided that in me. It’s so weird, like [a] handing off of responsibility, but it’s also so beautiful, in a sense.”
Dr. Craig Blinderman, who directs the course and Adult Palliative Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, explained that reconsidering how we interact with dementia patients involves focusing on what this person can still experience rather than dwelling on the abilities and memories they’ve lost. He recounted a guest lecturer who encouraged students to observe what they were seeing without attempting to impose a cognitive frame on it. For example, students were meant to refrain from making value judgements or placing events in a context of earlier experiences The exercise allowed them “to explore reality as it is without the filter of our cognitive functioning to give it meaning or provide it with a context and so on.” Blinderman pointed out that some people that work with patients with dementia might view the condition as a “terrible loss” and irrevocable fall from an “idealized state of human functioning.” But it’s perhaps more productive to focus on the things these patients can experience, which are often more sensory than higher-order cognitive.
“What is that like for them, to feel the water touching their face, to experience chewing or to have a sensory experience of the sunlight hitting them? And what might that bring up for them? The memories might be shifting or disappearing or fading, or they might be mixed and hard to muster, but what else is there?” Blinderman asked.
The long-term companion structure lends itself to developing intimate relationships over short periods that are nevertheless unlikely to persist for years into the future. How do volunteers and caregivers strike a balance between the opposite imperatives of developing empathetic connections with patients, while preserving the emotional distance required to continue working without consistent pain? Lin commented that doctors are often trained to view their patients as diagnoses and “bodies that they need to heal” before engaging with them emotionally, implying that the secondary nature of the emotional connection may help some doctors to bear the loss of their patients.
In addition to maintaining professionalism, though, some shared that caring effectively for patients requires being fully present to every emotional moment. In discussing his own weighing of emotional intimacy and distance, Blinderman described a “flow” between home and work, and between tasks at work rather than the establishment of discrete boundaries. “I want to be completely engaged in that moment when someone is sharing something that’s tender or difficult or challenging. And then the next moment it may be something else. I may be talking to a nurse about getting the right pain medication dose, and then I’m going to be in that moment, right? And then the next moment might be reading a novel at home and being in that moment.” Phrased in terms not dissimilar to the strategies students in Life at the End of Life learn for patient care, Blinderman’s approach for himself is also one of accepting reality by allowing it to “flow through you as opposed to creating a sense of distance.”
One of Life at the End of Life’s central messages is that care—like death, like life—should be everyone’s concern. The responsibility to care falls not only to doctors or chaplains or family members but also to strangers who, in caring, become friends; it falls to listeners, to talkers, to those of us who can. One of the last memories Kime shared with me was of standing in front of a window with his long-term companion: “[It] looked straight onto a brick wall, and she was like, ‘Nicholas, look at the birds!’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, the birds!’ She goes, ‘Look at all of them,’ pointing at her church.”
“It was so sweet,” he reflected, “sharing that with her, her joy from living in her reality, where she was able to look outside of that window into a shaft and then make something really beautiful.” And as we go on, there is suffering. There is death, and grief, and perhaps even forgetting. But there are also brick walls to be made into birds, dances around coffee carts, and tenderness—to be given and gotten and held fast in our hands.
Illustration by Rea Rustagi
Measure for Measure
Lily in the Gilchrist
By Nicholas Allen
... I was sitting in
the Gilchrist in the
corner in the back
there minding myself
when who walks in
but Lily in her
leather-lace coat
and rubber heels
followed there by
a band of rattlers
and cowboys
swinging in
with women
with wings,
teeth flashing like
the snow-stained
lightning behind
them, but what
was I to do
but carry on
drinking rain
and eating smoke?
floorboards thrashing
rumbling now
as the band tumbles
in from the white,
all this in the town
of Paint in the
heart of the desert
mind you, tumbling in
like the flakes
outside the
warp-windowed wall...
suddenly
my glass is hollow
and nothing else to smoke
so up I step on over
to Ray who
fills me up
and slips a pack,
Lily blazing
me a stare
from the other end
and I see my reflection in
her painted nails again
then back in the
corner I see
her blazing all
the other cowboys
as many looks as
she can sell,
and I remember
that smile from
another storm
another place
with bear stew
and her architect son...
yes lightning
blazing like Lily
behind the blizzard,
she striking
Gilchrist’s gloom
for a moment
before abandoning
it again, no more
snowmen, never
an Easter dress, she
leaves her coffee
and camel soup
I see her leave our life behind
and leave with her –
I turn to watch
myself watching us
leave without
me
Illustration by Maca Hepp
The Shortcut
Beginner Astronomy
By Lara Smith
Animated Illustration by Jace Steiner
The first time I see a sky full of stars (and I mean real stars) I am around eight years old and visiting my grandparents in southern Germany. I say real stars because the light pollution in New York City, where I grew up, leaves the entire night sky a grayish yellow, no shining specks in sight. Before I see stars in Germany, they are a novelty that featured only in big, glossy printed pictures my father keeps on the glass dining room table. The pictures are taken from his telescope, the Calypso, the product of a doctorate in astrophysics he completed the year I was born. His relationship with stars proves to be confusing for me. In preschool, when I am questioned about my father’s profession, I respond: “He’s an astronaut.” When other preschool kids eagerly ask follow-up questions, I insist: “Yes, yes. He has been to the moon.”
Throughout kindergarten, on evenings where I am lucky enough to be allowed TV, I watch animations of orbits on educational DVDs. I sink into a big brown leather armchair in front of my father’s television, folded up so that my knees touch my chin. Mesmerized, I watch the digitized planets slowly spin around the sun while the tiring drone of the narrator fades in and out of my awareness. Sometimes I watch the same episode three or four times in a row, staring at my dusty reflection in the black screen before the automatic replay begins. The visuals stick: long after these astronomy programs have ended planets continue to orbit around my mind.
I have my first existential crisis at the age of seven while washing my face in a marble bathroom. I am blowing bubbles in the water that I cup to my face, absorbing the slight echo, the darkness of my cupped palms, when, suddenly, the remarks of a DVD narrator speed through my brain. The disembodied voice reminds me how space expands in infinite directions, endlessly. For the first time, I am aware of my ability to think. I understand myself as a mind, contained in a body, contained on an earth, contained in a universe, contained in … something unknown? My legs start to shake. I think I feel the forward motion of the planet barreling through the universe. We stand on a tiny dot covered by layers and layers of the unfamiliar, like a Russian doll. In my mind, tremendously large and colorful planets spin together, shrinking smaller and smaller until only a starless night remains.
I pass out on the floor.
The summer night I first see stars in person, I am lying on an old orange and green checkered blanket with corners so tattered that the threads dissolve into the grass beneath it. Beside me are my younger cousin, Hanni, and a neighboring farmer’s daughter. Both are fast asleep. Distant wisps of adult conversation blow towards us with the wind from the patio. The barbeque has been abandoned, it seems, after the group opened yet another bottle of wine. The musky and familiar scent of cigarettes overwhelms my senses as I lie there, trying to capture the enormity of the universe in a single image.
After the guests leave, I pull the soft quilt over me. The shutters of my grandparents’ windows close. I listen for the start of my mother’s car in front of the garage and imagine her driving back to her apartment in the dark, headlights illuminating the road ahead of her. Everyone is drunk and happy and asleep. Crickets converse in the neighboring wheat field as I lie on the dewy grass letting the wetness soak through my clothes. I feel exposed under the stars which shine over the entire world and, like billions of glimmering eyes, see everything we do. I lie with my arms outstretched, offering them all there is to see of my soul.
Years pass and, under the dull yellow night skies of New York, less and less light infiltrates my life. At sixteen, I end two difficult years of substance abuse by overdosing on my bed. In the throes of a drug-induced psychosis, I am floating in a universe similar to the animated replicas I saw as a child. Here, millions of light-years away from earth, I do not hear the 911 call or the ambulance’s arrival. Instead, everything is eerily quiet and I can reach out and touch the darkness with my warm, shaky fingers.
Months later, I am kayaking and whitewater rafting down the Colorado River with a rehabilitation program. During the day, I find myself caught atop the slimy river rocks, feeling my blood course through me like the murky water between my fingers and the current underneath my kayak, pulsing go, go, go. I fall in love, badly, with one of the instructors. At night, I lie next to a new friend, Emma, squeezing her soft, fleshy palm. One night I wake up early and see the entire Milky Way like a belt around us. Under the Colorado night sky, I think of the blind hands searching in the dark on my bathroom floor, on my bedside table, for the little round tablets of ecstasy that made my life worth living. And, suddenly, I am a child again at my grandparents’, and, suddenly, I am blowing bubbles in my palm. This is all me, I realize. In the early morning hours, for the first time, I reconcile my adult weight against the early abandonment of my mother.
That September, when I return to New York, I face a haunted city. Afforded the opportunity to move, I take it. I apply to an international school in Germany. There, I find a room with a long, cement balcony, and big, glass windows. During frequent rainy days, I hear nine different languages spoken in my dorm. When the weather is warm, my friends and I go out on my balcony after class to read or tan. Once it gets too dark, we sneak bottles of wine in the sleeves of our jackets and return to sit on the concrete, still warm from the day’s sun.
During a quiet weekend of my second semester at school, I decide to spend a night with my grandparents, who live less than an hour away. The house remains unchanged—like a tomb, dark, cold, and damp. Their voices take on an underwater quality, a fogginess that comes with the territory. My senses abduct me back into childhood. I stare warily at each object my grandmother sets before me. “Eat,” she says, pushing my plate closer. Hours after they have gone to bed, I remain sitting at the poorly lit kitchen table, brushing crumbs off the floral oilcloth and taking sips of my grandfather’s stale liquor. I drive back to school that night in the dark. I am tipsy and drive over the speed limit. Once I hit the halfway mark, I pull over on the empty autobahn and find myself splayed over the concrete, suffocating. I throw up onto the black tar road and stare at my spoiled shoes. I focus on breathing in and out. Ein und aus.
Half an hour later, when I am in sight of the campus lights, I park the car and walk across the cracked street flanked on either side by fields of growing wheat. The wheat swishes in the wind. I let my tipsy body sway with it. Once I arrive, the dorm is empty. Everyone else has signed out for the weekend. They are backpacking through the rainy German countryside, completing a wilderness certification. As I walk past the dark and vacant rooms, I discover that one light is still on: Andi’s. I jog back to my room and then return to her door, swinging a crate of dark beer by my side. Nights in March are still cold in Germany, so I lie across her narrow bed while she ransacks her closet for warmth. We pull layers of sweatshirts over our black clothes and don her duvet like a joint cape, the final insulatory measure. Andi fishes a weathered plastic bag from under her bed, filled with sample-sized bottles of tequila. “Mother’s milk,” Andi toasts. Mother’s milk, I reply.
Out on the balcony with Andi, I use an app like a telescope against the night sky. While talking in soft voices about the things in our lives we cannot understand Andi and I are at first unable to follow each other's fingers and line of sight. Hesitantly, I try to name the figures in the constellations. Eventually, the basic planets elude me. I feel like a child once more as I reach out to touch Andi’s hair, sleek and black and impossibly straight. It threads between my fingers as I touch the back of her neck. Silence falls between us. Supported by a red beanbag, withered from snow, wind, and sun, Andi and I sip our foamy beers with numb hands. My red knuckles sting as I bring them closer to the heat of my body. Around us, the night stretches endlessly. I feel myself drop.
This is me, I want to tell her. This is my life, I want to show. This is what I’ve gone through. These are the things that I cannot forgive. But I am too deeply cradled. To break the silence now would be irrevocable.
The Centerfold
By Maya Weed
Dear Dante
Season 7
By Dante Alighieri
As Reincarnated by Michael Colton
Dear Dante,
What do kids at this school do for spring break? It’s coming up and, honestly, I have no idea how to make a plan for the week. A couple of my (crazier) friends are planning a ski trip to Vermont, but I’m kinda worried about falling behind on my work if I go with them. Any tips on making the most of spring break without jeopardizing the rest of my semester?
–SEAS ’25
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Dear SPRING BREAKER,
You’re not alone in feeling stressed out or overwhelmed ahead of break. It’s no easy thing to balance your social life with your academic routines when approaching a week-long gap in the semester, and you’re definitely not alone in trying to find the right way to do so. There are, to be sure, dozens of students at this school who struggle with this same thing. I like to refer to this bunch as: Not Invited to Miami.
A few years back, I was a boring, nervous first-year, not unlike yourself (although definitely a little more confident, and not very boring at all). I was in the same position you are now; just two weeks out of break, I had no real plans set and little desire to risk a dip in my stellar GPA. Something changed for me, however, when I saw how all of the most popular, interesting, and all-around likable people I knew were spending the week. That’s to say, all the cooler kids do go on Spring Break, and they were absolutely right to bully me for ever considering staying on campus for the week.
I’m kidding, of course. I’ve never been bullied. And I’ve also never once considered skipping Spring Break. If I had, I never would have made it to where I am now, i.e., on the personal contact lists of Pitbull, Matthew McConaughey, and Christina Aguilera. I guess what I’m saying is, you need to change course, and to do so quickly. Let’s chat logistics.
My first piece of advice is one you should expect if you ever read my column, which I doubt you have, given your trepidation and clear lack of party experience. It’s fairly simple, and it goes like this: ditch your loser friends, they’re holding you back. I know you’re looking to feel included, but I beg of you, find someone else to include you. If the best that your “crazier friends” can do is plan a trip to Vermont, then you’re surrounded by a bunch of accountants. The only thing “crazy” about a trip to Vermont is the amount of burnt orange Patagonia merchandise you will come across. You’re better off leaving that crowd behind and heading to the Sunshine State where, at worst, you’ll have front row seats to a Channing Tatum look-alike contest.
In terms of preparing financially for your one week of authentic college life, I’d suggest inheriting a huge sum of money from a late relative. If that’s not an option, I’m sure your parents can cover it. You’ll need a healthy dose of greenbacks in order to “make the most” of the week. Just working back-of-the-envelope, I’d say about $6,000 dollars should be enough—about 300 for an iPhone 12 Pro fisheye lens, a few hundred more for to rent a Tesla, and about a thousand more for rental/personal liability insurance on the car and yourself (you absolutely have to use the self-drive feature if you want to fit in down South). The remainder is on reserve for either gambling or investment into DJ Khaled’s new line of cryptocurrency. Housing should, of course, also be hooked up by your family. I’d recommend finding a close relative or family friend with a house right on the beach—that’s where I met Christina.
Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t address your question about keeping up with schoolwork while you’re on vacation. This is me addressing that.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let me tell you about what Pitbull said to me when I first met him. We were walking the white sands, chatting about our favorite brands, when he looked me dead in the face and said, “Dante, live life. Don’t let life live you.” Afterward, we raced through the sea on jet skis. With the salt kissing our cheeks and the wind brushing through our hair, we were invincible—that is, until he crashed into a small fishing vessel. That clumsy goofball hardly even noticed, and that’s when I knew his advice was genuine. There’s something about watching a man book it away from a shipwreck while smoking a cigar that just screams confidence and class. And isn’t that what spring break is all about? I mean, you clearly have no idea. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn! It’s as simple as having a lot of money, forgetting about your school work, and impressing a mid-tier rapper with your knowledge of his lyrics.
Dale.
Happy vacationing,
Dante
P.S. If you see me in Miami, just, like, be cool.
Illustration by Aeja Rosette
ATSL
Am I Drunk Enough?
By Chloë Gottlieb and Daniel Seizer
Negative
9:30 p.m.: Calling all senior nite sluts!! U know the drill: cocktails at ours before Amity. We’ve already started drinking, have you??
I book it out of Uris upon receiving this text. Senior Night only sort of gets fun at 11:30 p.m. when mass heads start to show. So, we have to be at the pregame no later than 10:30, which leaves me an hour and a half to fight for a shower slot, cook and eat a meal, perform my signature Sexy Eye Twitch to seduce the bodega guy into giving me a deal on White Claws, put on the same outfit as last week, submit a discussion post, and get fucking sloshed.
I’m halfway undressed by the time I reach the EC lobby. I toss my clothes at my suitemate and dive headfirst into the asbestos-riddled communal shower. I frantically rinse my body of the Remedial Frosci grime, in anticipation of the Amity Hall filth. I know I will never be clean enough. Once my entire body is slick with moisturizer, I begin the Sisyphean task of texting the pregame details to everyone I’ve ever met. emma if u dont come im gonna kms. Amity is always packed but never with anyone remotely likable, so it’s imperative that I corral the troops.
Towel wrapped around my body, I stir my tequila-soda-lime with one hand and submit a homework assignment on Courseworks with the other. I set the toaster to high to start making my world-famous Olives On White Bread. It’s the quickest way to get carbs inside your body (other than beer). I’m running behind and my suitemates are already debating which of their three Going Out Tops matches tonight’s energy. andrew make sure u bring the fckin margaritaville machine tn. The olives don’t go down easy, but down they must go.
It takes roughly the length of the new Twigs album to get a group of six out the door and to the pregame: hair needs to be straightened to within an inch of its life and pits must be waxed raw, all while downing three Trulys. Mask, wallet, Senior Night punchcard—the checklist of essentials rests in my fracket’s trusty pockets along with my beer-for-the-road. Hey michael On My Way! meet us on 113? There’s a word in German that means “The subtle shame felt when drinking from an open container in the elevator next to people on their way to Butler.” This is that.
The front door to the pregame is ajar, and thank God for that because half of us are about to piss our pants. I say hi to my Lit Hum nemesis, my marriage pact, and the girl I’m scheming on (platonically). I’m handed a margarita and use it as a chaser for a shot of Jäger. It’s still not enough to bear the conversation with that weird dude from my NSOP group who told me he could tell who was circumcised just from looking at their face. yeah i think it’s apartment 3C but just listen for Drake. I finally understand the Law of Mass Action from chem when the pregame clears out in 30 seconds. I’m somehow stuck waiting to pee for the fourth time.
Outside of Amity and with 30 people in tow, I cut in line with Isaac, who told me last week he would never show his face here again. The bouncer is checking vaccine cards but not IDs tonight, so I’m expecting lots of freshmen who are awaiting a package from China. I toss my jacket on a pile of about 60 others and hope for the best.
With God and poppers by my side, I slither my way to the far corner that has a bit more oxygen. I am not drunk enough, but along the way I encounter the ancient Amity Hall Scrolls of Knowledge. Scrawled in Muji pen:
A Visitor’s Guide To Surviving Senior Night*
1. 2 drinks
2. A schtickle of shrooms
3. A 5 mg edible
4. 3-6 more drinks
5. Poppers to taste
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*You may black.
I compress steps two through four in a mere seven minutes. I take a swig of my gin and tonic …
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Affirmative
… YOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Fucking. Love. This. Song. I hear it literally every week and every single time it sparks the same amount of boundless joy. There is no greater high on God’s green earth than this bar mitzvah playlist the DJ plays every Wednesday. Anyone who's anyone is here; the entire men’s heavyweight crew team, every Barnard sociology major, and some “forever young” GSers. Someone texts me asking where I am. i am quite literally here, r u?
Every Senior Night attendee has a personal journey they must follow to get to the bathroom. It normally involves three classmate run-ins, two brawls, and a minute where you have absolutely lost anyone you know. This is my Vietnam. Tonight, I’m dodging one couple mid-coitus and all the people who haven’t texted me back. The line is infinitely long, but by the time I reach the front I haven’t actually seen anyone enter or exit the stalls. When my twink and I finally reach our turn, someone throws a large female condom at my head, shouting, “Enjoy the clam shack!”
As I leave the bathroom, Straight Michael hands me a beer. I place it on my head. “No,” he says and holds it to my mouth. “Like this.” Right. He makes it abundantly clear, borderline offensively so, that he is not buying me a drink, there’s just a $20 minimum here. And I shouldn’t get any fucking ideas. i’m by the really tall guy, do u see me. Someone spills poppers into my drink, but it’s already down the hatch. When the DJ plays “Cheerleader” by OMI, I see new colors. Rachel, im gonna live FOREVER
My entire body is fully torqued and a nice gentleman is teaching me how to dougie. Someone taps me on the shoulder. Oh my god, Isaac’s here? Isaaaaac. I need to take him to Chef Mike’s Sub Shop. He deserves it. Our sweat mingles as our bodies become one, united by the free abandon found only in da clerb. Someone shines an iPhone flashlight into my pupils and a look of horror flashes across their face. I don’t know why. This is what senior year is all about.
The drinks are hitting, the windows are sweating with condensation, and my suitemates are starting to give me the look. The goodbye-to-all-that look. I suggest that we stay until the next bad song. It’s not my fault they are all fucking bangers! We stay another 35 minutes. DJ Doesn’t-Have-Spotify-Premium turns on the mic and throws out some bday shoutouts. Inexplicably, he yells, “WHO SIGNED THE COLUMBIA HEALTH COMPACT?” Scattered yelps and groans arise from the crowd. When the beat drops, he screams, “WELL YOU’RE ALL BREAKING IT!” Oontz oontz oontz. So true, king. This is our cue to leave.
On the way out, I pick up my coat. It is absolutely drenched. Doesn’t matter—thanks to the magic of binge-drinking, you never notice the cold on the walk home. I fill out my green pass. When you do it this late, it lasts forever! I open a text thread with an unknown number which I’ve already texted my full name and social security number to. I double down, lov yu girlie let’s get lunch see you next wendfesday. I dump my body in my dorm bed. Finally, I can pass out to Sex and the City. (Obviously the original, not the reboot, And Just Like That… airs on Thursdays.) Thinking I’m logging into the HBO portal, I type my username and password into a discussion post on Canvas and publish it for the whoooole class to see. I just wnt to see carrie and bigggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhl;l;l;l;l;l;l;;l;;;;;;;;;;;
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Illustration by Oonagh Mockler
Verily Veritas
In Which Our Hero Joins a Community of Like-Minded Peers
By Cy Gilman
Illustration by Taylor Yingshi
Verily Veritas frequently thought about decline. At night, after a few sips of bénédictine, he would sprawl his body across Low Steps and gaze at the pillars of Butler, imagining them as naked stumps. “Nothing besides remains,” he would exclaim into the empty twilight air. “Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away!” Often, Verily’s nostalgic rapture would be punctured by the gaggles of students drunkenly loitering on the steps, nodding their heads to a high-BPM soundtrack, and calling out, “Man, are you okay?” or “Yo, Hamlet’s delivering his monologue!” They had no appreciation for Ozymandias, of course; he supposed that few had even heard of Percy Shelley. Still, he made sure to inform them that the poem was an ingenious commentary on civilizational decline.
Verily cursed the commonplace—for these hecklers were terribly common—and eyed a hackathon tee with loathing. He mourned the ripe renown that had made the school’s name so fragrant. He mourned Romance, now out on the town, and Art, a vagrant. Verily thought, and thought, and thought—and thought about it.
Verily Veritas, born too late, he would mutter to himself, wandering under Columbia’s firmament, crisscrossing the purgatorial stretches between Broadway and Amsterdam. It was on one such walk where, casting his gaze plaintively to the heavens, as he often did, Verily’s view of New York’s starscape was suddenly obscured by a dark green banner with “ΑΔΟ” printed in large white letters. Our hero was reluctant to extricate himself from a self-diagnosed state of sublime melancholy, but the sight of prominently displayed Attic lettering was intriguing enough to buoy his spirits and prod at his curiosity. He turned to the glowing door of the dimly lit brownstone. On it was written: “Nu Chapter Headquarters of the Alpha Delta Omicron Fraternity of the National Panhellenic Conference.”
Verily’s wide eyes were as round as a capital Omega. Had there been, all this time, tucked away in this lonely corner of the Morningside acropolis, a surreptitious circle of philhellenes, an underground network of budding Socratics? So long had he dreamed of Thebes and Camelot—had he now found it? Verily tore open the door
and followed the pulsating noises up the stairs.
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…
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Our hero soon found himself inside the house amid four men playing a strange game that involved a small orange ball and a series of red cups. Verily suspected they were engaged in a round of episkyros, and determined to enter the foray for the next round. Around the table were clumps of men engaged in animated conversation: One was explaining at length what he thought were the problems with modern art. Another was gesticulating wildly on the subject of something called “kryptos.” The deep pitch of the assembled voices was matched only by the deeper pitch of the blaring subwoofer.
Verily felt a full-fisted tap on his shoulder. “What’s up, man, welcome to Meet the Brothers.” Verily turned to his right and looked up to face a student with a dark, short-cropped tuft of hair, and a hulking gait. “I’m Bellicus Brutus, but the bros call me Bo. I’m the pledge master here, but you already knew that. I’ve been an Alpha D for two years.” Verily gaped back at him, thinking that his newfound acquaintance very much resembled the Penseur that stood watch over Philosophy Hall. Our protagonist even went so far as to picture, for the sake of comparison, his Herculean friend nude and crouched in the penitent pose of mental labor, and concluded that the resemblance was indeed uncanny.
Verily shook himself out of his reverie, remembering that the fleshy person facing him had continued to speak. “No hazing, of course—that’s against the rules! We just do, like, a fucking ‘initiation ceremony,’” Bo noted suggestively. “Just, like, beer and pushups—that kind of shit. Like, if you already work out you’ll be fine. Do you lift, bro?”
Verily was beginning to squirm underneath his turtleneck, whose fringes were getting sticky in the cramped brownstone heat. “My hours of exercise are devoted to the rigorous development of my cerebral muscles,” he pontificated. “I take to heart the words of Socrates, in his exposition on Diotima’s ladder: that a love for fine ideas outweighs the love we have for a beautiful body.” He let his eyes gloss over Bo’s frame before adding, “My modus operandi is to contemplate the beauty of Perfect Forms.”
It may be left for the reader to decide whether Bo was only halfway paying attention, or if he got stuck in his attempt to recall the meaning of the word “cerebral”—but his reaction was a laugh that sounded just like someone coughing into a tuba. “Bro, are you talking about, like, Lit Hum shit?” he guffawed. “Didn’t it say in the book that that Soccertitties dude was, like, butt ugly or some shit like that?”
Verily cleared his throat and stiffened his back. “Socrates possessed an aesthetically deficient body, which fell into further disrepair from his own neglect,” he explained, “but he was loved by the most beautiful youths of Athens because of his command of Truth and the force of his oration.” Bo shot a quizzical glance to his left, then took a real shot of something thick and muddy, as Verily continued: “Upon reading the Symposium, I too proclaimed to our seminar that, like him, I had refrained from bathing and shaving for the previous month. I then announced directly to the more beautiful members of my seminar that, as Socrates did unto Alcibiades, I too would not take them as a lover even if they were to lay in my bed and put their arms around me.”
“I dunno man, I do somethin’ kinda different with the people that lay in my bed and put their arms around me.” Bo’s reaction was somewhere between alarmed, puzzled, and vaguely turned on. “I mean, look man, even if you’re into all that Greek stuff, why copy the ugly dude? Aren’t there some of those peeps who were built, too? Like that tall white David sculpture thingy—that dude is fucking chiseled, bro! You could go, like, that route, right? I mean what you’d have to do is …”
As Bellicus continued to talk, Verily (who, during this conversation, had been taking swigs of sweet liquid from a red plastic cup of unknown origin) became increasingly convinced that this beautiful man was, in fact, a man of thick intellectual fibre. Bo was evidently adept in classical philology, throwing off Greek and Latin names for every muscle, bone, or limb on the human body. “Yo, once you pledge, you can come lift with me and my buddies at Dodge,” the pledge-master yelled cheerily over the ambient thumping. “I’ll show you the ropes—your fucking pecs are gonna swell up like you won’t fucking believe, bro.”
After Verily left the party and returned to his room, his mind wandered down many long, searching, meandering roads, as it often did. Questions lingered: How many pounds could Ajax Telamon have bench pressed? Could this Bellicus teach him how to throw a discus? How many grams of protein were in a poppyseed strudel? But under all his imaginative haze was a clear vision of himself, Verily Veritas, in the image of an Olympian athlete, doused in olive oil, crowned with a laurel wreath, his mind and body in perfect harmony. Verily was going to go to the gymnasium.
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Verily quickly realized, supine in the second circle of the Dodge Inferno, that the oil had been a bad idea. His slick hands slid back and forth across a metal bar, which loomed over his head. A drop of sweat fell from his right cheek.
“Okay VV, I’m spotting you, so you’re all G about safety and stuff,” Bo pronounced from above him. “Just remember to grip the bar at about a shoulder’s width apart and lift evenly with both arms.” Verily lifted the bar out from its stationary rack, and as his thin muscles began to engage, brother Brutus became increasingly animated. “OK! Let’s start firing up your FUCKING ENGINES! Take it down … then allll the way back up. Ariiight, not too fucking bad for a noob. How does that feel?”
“I must admit, I am beginning to feel my heart beat a tad faster. I do suppose my face must appear rather sanguine at the moment.”
“Fucking LEAN into it bro! Let the fire FUEL YOU. Let’s fucking GOOOOO, c’mon you FUUKIN pOOssAY, downnnnn … and UHHHHHPPPPFFFF!”
“I am starting to sense a pattern to this. There is a rhythm, a symmetry, a cadence to it. It is rather beautiful.”
“NONE of this looks fucking beautiful to ME, you SKINNY PIECE OF SHIT! Get in the fuuuuucking GROOVE, bro, GRIND THIS OUT–come on, one more, let’s FUCKING GO!—DOWN! ... UOOOUUUHHHP!”
“You know, good fellow, I believe I may truly be capable of this!”
“OH YEAH?! You better fucking show me ’cause I DON’T FUCKING BELIEVE YOU. LET ME FUCKING SEE IT you FUCKING WIMP! One fucking more! DOWN! UUUUUUUP! Tell me right fucking now—can you fucking do this?”
“I have, contained in the set of my abilities … ”
“Nah, bro, COME ON! Stop fucking WAFFLING—say it like I say it, read my sweet fucking lips: I GOT THIS, BRO!”
“I … got this … breaux?”
“C’mon, like you FUCKING MEAN IT! I GOT THIS, BRO!”
“I got this, bro!”
“There you go! DOWN! UP! I FUCKING GOT THIS, BROOOOOOO!”
“I fucking got this, bro!”
“DOWN! UP! I MOTHER-FUCK FUCKING GOT THIS, BRO!”
“I FUCKING GOT THIS, BRO!”
“Did I just hear Verily Veritas say bro?” a voice called out from the staircase. Footsteps followed, and Amare Aspera entered the weight room with a squash racket slung across her back. “Verily wha—are you rushing a frat?” she blurted out, turning her head and glaring at Bellicus, who replied to her in the same tone of voice with which he had previously addressed our protagonist:
“RUSHING? This dude right here is one of the BROS—VV IS A FUCKING ALPHA DEEEEEEEE, BABY!” The pledge-master tried, enthusiastically and unsuccessfully, to give a high-five to Amare, who was busy muttering to herself in exasperation.
“My dear Amare, I believe your conception of this situation is utterly incongruous with reality,” Verily called back to her, his back still arched over the weight rack. A pool of olive oil was beginning to form around his feet. “This organization of which I am a member is a fraternal order of the Hellenic variety—it is very much in keeping with my classical sensibilities.”
“Verily, that’s a fucking frat!” Amare stammered, and turned back towards the stairs. Verily watched her leave in smug disbelief, until he noticed Bellicus nodding in silent acknowledgment. Had this man inducted Verily Veritas into a frat? Verily had heard tell of such rabbles from those of his acquaintances most embedded in the nether regions of Columbia party life. He knew of them as intellectual black holes, filled with gaggles of oafs and mercenaries, where answers to intro-sequence exams circulated alongside cans of cheap beer. And Verily, above all else, was a man of impeccable intellectual integrity and bibulous refinement. Even the word “frat” had an uncouth sound—could Verily possibly countenance joining an organization with such a brash fricative in its name?
Verily looked up with horror at the goliath who had so misled him—looked at his lying eye, his mischievous lips—and sat upright on the lifting bench. “There has been a grave misunderstanding between us, my dear man,” Verily announced to him. “I no longer have any desire for membership in your little club, and thus do not have any reason to maintain your acquaintance.” And with those words, Verily picked up the strigil stashed underneath the lifting bench, and began to scrape the olive oil off of his body.
The Conversation
Photo credit: Bella DeVaan
Photo credit: Bella DeVaan
Anne Higonnet
An afternoon at the Met.
By Bella DeVaan
Illustration by Jace Steiner
As I prepared to meet Professor Anne Higonnet at the Met, I freaked out a bit about what to wear. It was only natural. Since graduating from her “Clothing” class—which premiered on Zoom in the fall of 2020—her sartorial expertise has inspired more intentional dressing. Finally, I landed on a sweater (a loose gesture to shibori dye techniques), a skirt (made by a nostalgic local designer), a blazer (playing with gender?), and cowboy boots (triumphantly copped on eBay). Timeless principles of craft, sustainability, self-expression, and function inform my choices. Sure, everything I wore may have been black, but that was simply a nod to the dramatic, monochromatic tendencies of Cristóbal Balenciaga. Thank you for the vindication, Professor.
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On any given day, a Higonnet lecture could cover Harry Potter sorting tropes, the diasporic design sensibilities of Grace Wales Bonner, BestDressed on YouTube, or Malick Sidibé’s photography. Her idiosyncratic, roving, yet scrupulously edited syllabus met us students where we were: in the suspended reality of our childhood bedrooms or deep into clickholes, and thinking hard about how we might want to be, inside and outside, online and off.
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Higonnet has taught art history in many creative incarnations, though often in conversation with the contemporary. She is an open-minded, versatile pedagog, the stalwart instructor of “Intro to Art History” at Barnard and the brain behind popular interdisciplinary courses like “A Virtual Enlightenment” (in which students coupled curatorial and computer acumen to create immersive, digital exhibits of 18th-century life) and “Collecting” (in which students considered private ownership and the politics of display). She’s an expert on the woman impressionist Berthe Morisot, the detective who discovered the true authorship of “Young Woman Drawing,” an advisor to Denise Murrell’s revolutionary “Posing Modernity” and “Black Models” exhibits, and perhaps the only person on Earth capable of contemplating the Nirvana Nevermind baby alongside Leo Steinberg’s analysis of child nudity in theological painting. “Today’s values dictate all of our perceptions,” Higonnet writes.
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As New Yorkers settle back into taking museums for granted and Columbia students attend “Clothing” in person for the first time, I figured there was no better moment to check in with Professor Higonnet. I hadn’t only been her student online; during the halcyon days of Art Hum in Paris, I followed her through summer-packed museums, whisking past the unnecessary and pausing, purposefully, in front of masterworks. “Move like water,” she’d say, ushering us awkward student-tourists where we needed to go. “And now that you’ve come all this way,” she’d smile, “you should go the last few inches and look.”
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This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Readers are encouraged to open the hyperlinks as they go, for visual references.
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The moment Professor Higonnet and I enter “America: A Lexicon of Fashion” at the Met Costume Institute, she points out that the exhibit has been set up for the social media generation.
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Anne Higonnet: When you look at the rectangle, it’s the proportions of the cell phone photo. The way in which each outfit has been isolated in a box, and even the way that they’re stacked, it’s like an Instagram format: one, two, three, four …
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The Blue and White: Gridded. What do you think that does to the garments?
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AH: The good part is that it shows the Costume Institute delegating a lot of the news of the exhibition to visitors, and it’s democratic in that it’s allowing visitors to choose which of these images to put online. The bad part is that it limits the degree to which the objects can interact with each other meaningfully.
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We pause to look at the one-word labels affixed to each mannequin, the “lexicon” superimposed on the American fashion panoply.
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AH: It’s always semantically dangerous to try to attach one word to an outfit.
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B&W: Your class is about not applying these spiritual categories to styles of dress, but thinking across space and time, to see patterns in how dress happens and is perceived. Obviously, everything here is sharing a craft element and a kind of durational element, but what do the words do to then parse these styles? I’m a little confused.
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AH: I think the intent was to make the meaning of something extremely clear by distilling it to one word. But I think most people don't know why that word and not others … and I am myself not sure.
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We look at four stacked mannequins—“commemoration,” “continuity,” “celebration,” and “connection.”
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B&W: It seems like it's consonance over here with all the Cs. [laughter]
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AH: There’s another “on the one hand, on the other hand” about this exhibition, which makes me wonder whether the Costume Institute isn’t at a very, very important crossroads in its history. There’s no doubt that the way in which the Costume Institute was organized in the past was wildly successful: so many visitors, so much interest in the Costume Institute and Anna Wintour. Its coordination with Vogue had been, I think, more productive than not, and it’s a financial stroke of genius to earn the budget of the Costume Institute in one night—
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B&W: And to create an art-historical spectacle while doing it.
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AH: Yes, exactly. And to extend the productivity of the Costume Institute into the Gala, it’s a bit like what I was saying about believing that people will relay the images of the show based on what interests them. The Gala has become a part of the Costume Institute’s cultural work, but which is delegated to a group of extremely culturally influential people. On the other hand, the whole fashion industry is so predicated on a kind of traditional femininity and so predicated on horrible waste—because fast fashion has pushed clothing to be, by some measures, the third-worst sustainability issue on the planet. One wonders how long such an important part of the museum can continue to be predicated on those gender and environmental assumptions. Before it just doesn't even appeal to people anymore, or it’s just too ethically bankrupt.
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B&W: I thought we saw that at this year’s Met Gala—a wink of what’s to come with AOC's presence, and the ways that popular opinion has turned on the wealthy people we lionize and give this artistic authority in these events. And yet, everybody still loves it.
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AH: And yet everybody still loves it! And that is a really important thing to remember—that the way through to sustainable clothing is not to get people to stop loving getting dressed up.
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B&W: It’s not to take away the joy, or the expressiveness.
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AH: No, I don’t think that’s ever gonna work. And just saying you have to buy less? I don’t think it’s going to work, either.
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The basic idea of the show, which is maybe not articulated as clearly as it could be, is that there used to be two antonyms. There was French expressive fashion, which was about creative craft, multiplied by spatial imagination. And then on the other side was supposed to be this American sturdiness and practicality and utilitarianism.
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What the Costume Institute is saying is that they don’t want to think of American fashion anymore as the opposite of French fashion—they want to celebrate the expressiveness and the autonomous creativity of American fashion. And that sounds good, especially when it means that you include so many different kinds of designers, and you have so many really, really young designers. It’s stunning.
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B&W: To have Bode, and Puppets and Puppets—
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AH: And have so many of the clothes in this exhibit made within the last five years. Back to this issue about femininity and a culture of throwaway obsolescence—
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B&W: —and how that relates to American self-fashioning—
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AH: Exactly. Is this celebratory idea that American fashion has escaped from one side of this old equation to the other just a way of masking that the whole equation has to be set aside as a thing of the past? Could it be that the Costume Institute has to play a part in a fundamental conceptual rethinking of clothing? So that it’s clothing, not fashion; or clothing, not costume?
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I am myself trying to think through whether there’s some fundamentally different way in which we can think about clothing, including the gender binary part. There are a few outfits for men [here], but the message of so many of the outfits being for women is really continuing this bond between fashion and femininity, without rethinking what clothing could be for a genderfluid world, or one in which femininity is not the only gender that's associated with fashion.
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We meander downstairs, stopping before the “Cascade” ensemble by EMME Studio from 2021.
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B&W: I read about this designer, Korina Emmerich. She’s the only Indigenous designer in the show.
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AH: This is also one of the outfits I am seriously tempted to try to get for myself.
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B&W: I mean, come on. Look at those buttons!
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AH: I don’t know what is more formally fun and wonderful about this. Is it that you’ve got four different—and maybe there’s a fifth one under there—plastic buttons? Is it that the stripes are clustering in just the right places? I love how you’ve got two sets of stripes around the hips to show how the jacket goes: that’s how you know that there are parts of the suit! And then the sleeves move up from those hip stripes, and then the other sleeve stripes move upward from the chest stripes?! Plus, the slight flare of the skirt is wonderful.
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This is the new outfit that just most perfectly does something that’s as much about the specificities of history as about a fantastic timeless design, because there’s something so satisfyingly forward-looking about taking these blankets—which were so much about a commercial relationship between white people and Indigenous people that exploited Indigenous people—and then she turns it into something that’s so her. Although, one always has to be a little bit skeptical when you say [reading from the plaque] “they use upcycled, recycled and natural materials while minimizing waste.” Then you ask yourself, okay, minimizing waste by how much? One percent? Eighty percent?
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B&W: Do we need to see some numbers here? [laughter.]
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AH: Maybe yes, maybe no, as far as sustainability goes. But the idea is that that’s a positive thing to say about an outfit?
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B&W: And coupling that definition of sustainability with the sustenance and survivance of history? That’s clearly happening, too.
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AH: That I just love. Because instead of getting very mournful or angry about the past, it's saying, what do we need to do now to make things better? And the thing that is being asked for … addresses particular environmental exploitation, which just has to stop. This is one of my very, very favorite things in the show. I feel if everything in the show were as clear as this … and you took off the word, which I think is, by the way, an invented word ...
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The word is “sustentation.”
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AH: I checked in Webster’s Dictionary.
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B&W: You did?!
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AH: I think it’s not a real word.
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B&W: I’m not convinced. I love what you’re saying, though, about doubling the contemporary and the historical concerns. That's always been what I’ve taken away from your teaching—we’re living today. It’s going to color the way the past looks to us. What do we do?
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AH: Yes. What can be done right now? Plus, there’s just something joyful about looking great.
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B&W: You can still look great and care about all these things, is what it’s telling us. Do you have any others that are speaking to you like this?
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AH: Some of them are just so much within the fashion world, and that’s pretty much what I have to say about it.
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Professor Higonnet leads us past some collegiate sweaters, bearing “H” and “P,” a double entendre for Tommy Hilfiger and Perry Ellis (the designers) and Harvard and Princeton (the universities).
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AH: I just have to say, it’s so sad that in New York, you’ve got a homage to Princeton and an homage to Harvard, but nothing about Columbia. Where’s Columbia? Come on, we’re in Manhattan. Okay, enough of that.
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We pause before Heron Preston’s redesigned uniforms for the Department of Sanitation from 2016.
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AH: In formal terms, at first glance, it looks like the greens clash. But then the more I look at it, the more I think, actually, it’s a really subtle bunch of greens and graphics. And then it turns out that it’s a uniform that was designed for the New York City Department of Sanitation. Here we are now, on our New York home turf. I love the nod to the local concerns—
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B&W: With the word “responsibility.”
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AH: I love the idea that every job can have a gorgeously designed uniform. I think that’s very democratic. It seems to me that the Department of Sanitation deserves a super stylish uniform. And having a prestigious designer devote himself to that project is great. Then there’s something that you can’t know unless you read the label, which is that part of his design of the uniforms is actually a [reading from the plaque] “curation of thrift-store finds and decommissioned sanitation worker garments.” That idea of taking the old uniforms, going to the thrift store, and blending it with a really gifted formal vision is one of the great ideas of how to go forward. There are a lot of Department of Sanitation workers; we’re talking about a lot of uniforms. If we could be doing this in more and more sectors? Really taking things that are already made and improving them through style? I think that would be a really, truly modern design thing to do. So Heron Preston as well as Emmerich—these really seem to me to be what the exhibition could and should have been 100% about: visionary ways forward.
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B&W: I know Virgil Abloh and Vanessa Friedman were talking about how the American fashion show is about aspiration. Friedman wrote “it’s homesteading of a new kind” that this exhibit is all about—really plumbing the possibilities of what American fashion could be.
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AH: I want us to aspire to gorgeous excess. But what I’m hoping for is that our mindset changes in a way that when we see a redesigned thrift store item, that’s something we aspire to, because we aspire to be saving the planet. I would really like aspiration to not be conspicuous consumption or landfill.
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We pause to look at a Naval Reserve uniform designed by Mainbocher, from 1942.
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AH: This is the third thing that I really love. There’s so many things one can say about that historical moment. But like the Preston, I love the idea that fashion turned some of its energies to giving back to people who serve the nation. Look, I’m in art history, so I think the U.S. Women’s Naval Reserve deserved a beautifully designed uniform. I think that’s part of what America should give the essential workers of the country, something beautiful to wear. Although, of course, we say, “Ugh, why a skirt?”
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B&W: [reading from the plaque] “Retaining a touch of femininity.”
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AH: Ah, could women not be wearing pants? But, alright, it’s 1942. There is a beautiful awareness of the femaleness of the anatomy, giving it so much presence and dignity. And it’s so much about the quiet, quiet design details—like exactly how big the buttons are, and that there are four of them, and where the stripes are. And it’s so subtle. It’s so perfect. That’s the side of couture that I think gets lost in so many accounts of fashion history, where we’re drawn to what is spectacular and obviously sculptural about clothes. But what really excites me is when there’s just beautiful equipoise between acknowledging the body and its functions and then creating something better-looking than the human body for it to wear. To me, that’s the deep magic of good design.
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B&W: Performing it more quietly, and for someone who’s not being photographed as the purpose of their wearing of the garment—that it’s going to work for them and how they spend their day.
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AH: I think when women wore this uniform, there was a subtle way in which they looked in the mirror and said, “Wow, I look good.” And then they felt good, and people looked at them and said, “Oh, they look strong. They look dignified. They look purposeful.” And that had an effect on how they were treated.
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B&W: A huge takeaway I’ve had from your teaching is how to more intentionally navigate a museum, how to make the most of it once you show up. What are some of your cardinal museum-going, exhibit-going rules?
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AH: Everyone has a tendency to get stuck on the first things they’re seeing. So I try to go through and then I let myself love a couple of things: three to five. They catch my eye or I think about what they mean, or they’re the ones that really strike a resonant note in the larger scheme of history.
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And then, on my second time around, I just go look at my favorite things so that as I leave the exhibit, I’ve imprinted my very, very favorite. No one should have any shame in only remembering three to five things.
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B&W: The goal is not to be encyclopedic about it.
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AH: No! Then nothing means anything. It’s good to just be very focused. And then, as you know, when an exhibit is very crowded ... “Be like water.”
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B&W: That reverberates in my ears.
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AH: Museums are not as packed anymore, but parts of them are still full. The trick is that you just stand on the edge of the crowd and you—just slowly, like water—go in through the cracks. Once you’re in front, then you just stay there. You get close, even if it takes a couple of minutes to infiltrate, and then you stay in your spot because you have to believe that those who want to really concentrate on something deserve to spend more time in front of it. No one should feel guilt about, “Oh, I’m going to let other people see it.” If you need to see it for 15 minutes, you need to see it for 15 minutes. And we all love our cellphones and taking pictures. I think the key is to take pictures erring on the side of excess when you first go and then look at them afterward and be a fierce editor.
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B&W: You’re saying delete, delete right away.
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AH: Delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, so many times. Just save the most important things. Partly because if you want to show off to your friends or family what you’ve seen, it’s a very good opening line: “I only want to show you the two things I loved the most,” because then everyone is intrigued. “Oh, what do you love the most?” And they automatically think: “Why did you love it the most?” That’s your way into really good museum storytelling.
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B&W: That’s the nectar. If you're willing, would you take me to something that you could spend more time in front of? Something you like to take a peek at whenever you’re here?
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AH: I have a number of things. But I'm gonna show you something you might not expect. Because it has nothing to do with my period.
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We leave the exhibit.
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B&W: When you were an undergrad, or first realizing your intellectual and academic interests, did anything help you decide that this was what you wanted to do?
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AH: I knew I loved art, and I knew I wanted to teach some kind of art history. And that just came on me, out of the blue. When I was an undergraduate, I thought I wanted to be a costume department curator. Because I took textiles and women so seriously, I wrote my senior thesis on a woman artist named Sonia Delaunay. I wrote about her textile designs, and I argued something which, 40 years later, seems completely banal—like, of course!—which is that she arrived at a completely abstract form of art through textile design, through that flatness of fabric, and the process of designing geometric fabric. But at the time—
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B&W: That doesn't sound banal to me.
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AH: Well, at the time it was a heretical thing to do. To write about anything that was not painting, sculpture, or architecture. I didn’t think it through, but it was the beginning of what I’ve been interested in.
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We pause in the corner, by a window and several fragments of Roman sculpture.
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This is an object I’m very fond of.
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B&W: “Julia Mamaea.”
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AH: Yes, from the Roman Severan period. I am very touched by how you come at it from this angle. It’s very realistic, and yet there’s a satisfying degree of stylization. Then, as you walk around, you realize that part of the head has been shaved off by some terrible accident. I am very touched by how we’ve arrived at a moment in history when we can accept that the signs of the damage are in a way quite beautiful, and we can see that there’s a whole new composition and a whole new way of thinking about the representation of a person that can include damage.
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B&W: That may be enabled by the damage.
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AH: That’s enabled by the damage. It’s also the effect of surprise. If you look at it from here, it’s mostly—or at least half—damage. When you come around, it’s whole again. And then, because my sense of art objects is always zooming back and forth from the microscopic to the macroscopic, I do love discovering that she was a powerful woman, if only because she was the niece of an empress and the mother of an emperor. And I love how she’s in front of a window that you see Central Park through. I love how she’s in this corner, where there are all these fragments from the past on one side and all these living trees and natural light on the other side. You can look at her like this and have the trees behind her, or you can look at her against the background of all the fragments.
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It reminds me of how much New York has done for the public over time. The whole idea of having Central Park in the middle of Manhattan is so great. Even if we have to keep pushing it to be a better and more inclusive and more democratic museum, the whole idea of the museum is so civic. So I love seeing the completely natural and the completely artificial civic gestures in this one corner.
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B&W: Coming together.
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AH: Yes. And so I've dragged you all the way to this corner—
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B&W: Happily!
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AH: Because there are actually very few places in the Met where you can see art objects in this kind of way.
And! There is a contemporary artist, James Welling.
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Professor Higonnet and I look at pictures of James Welling’s “Julia Mamaea” series on my cell phone, inspired by and depicting the damaged marble Mamaea bust.
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AH: I just love that a work inspires a work of contemporary art. I have a friend who wrote an essay about the Wellings. It’s a sculpture that, in academic terms, is also doing what I was saying about being from the past, but also the present—it’s a work which inspires contemporary artists to do new work and inspires new scholarship.
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B&W: You were mentioning how New York City is bringing that element into the art, too. How has being in New York lent a new element to what you study and do?
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AH: It does for me as a teacher what it does for many, many students at Columbia and Barnard, which is that it makes you feel like you’re at one of the great energy sources of the universe. This is one of the most high-pressure—in good and bad ways—places to go to college. If you want to go to college at twice the emotional and intellectual speed as normal, this is the place to be. And if you want to keep rethinking what teaching is, you want to keep rethinking what art history is, this is the place that inspires that. I’ve had some very unexpected latter-day changes in my teaching career, and I don’t think that would ever have happened someplace else.
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B&W: What latter-day changes are you referring to?
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AH: Well, the “Clothing” course—
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B&W: The.
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AH: The “Clothing” course is—oh, is about one-tenth an art history course. I’m just grateful the art history department is letting it in. It’s nine-tenths other fields, scholarship, and insights. And it’s a New York City melting pot course, the melting pot of ten departments.
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B&W: You teach distillation really well. Why do you think that’s important to the way that people express their thoughts on art and clothing?
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AH: It’s also about life. Even though I love the long-form argument … those who know how to make Twitter and TikTok and Instagram work for them rule the universe.
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So there’s that. And then … you’re a lawyer arguing in front of the Supreme Court; you’re a developer pitching your neighborhood redesign to the mayor’s office. In every important career, there's a moment when you have to persuade people fast.
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B&W: Another thing I associate with your class is how generous you are with letting students bring in their own contemporary references.
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AH: Oh, but that’s not generous at all. It’s totally selfish. That’s when you let students realize, themselves, how any issue that’s important enough to learn about is still relevant today, in some shape or form. When you realize why you care about something now, that’s the beginning of realizing why you care about anything. Just jumping into the deep end and deciding I’m supposed to care about this column? It never works.
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We happen upon the enormous Marble column from the Temple of Artemis at Sardis, from 300 BC.
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B&W: Well, it’s not holding anything up! [laughter]
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AH: That one’s not even holding anything up.
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The easiest way to start to learn is by starting with something that you already care about. A big problem with a lot of super brilliant research academics is that they have learned to care about things that no one else cares about, and they forget how long that learning process was. We do all begin somewhere. I think a lot of teaching is just remembering how one began.
Arie Esiri
On Naija neorealism.
By Victor Omojola
If Arie Esiri, SOA ’19, were to make a Nigerian sci-fi film, there would be no flying cars. Instead, “things would just work,” he says. “There would be buses that come on time. There would be well-paved roads. There would be a healthcare system. There would be an education system.”
It is this optimistically pragmatic vision of society that enables Esiri’s first feature, Eyimofe (This Is My Desire), to flourish. The film offers a dual portrait of a mourning engineer and a financially burdened hairdresser. Depleted and drained by corrupt government and rigid gender norms, the pair envision futures beyond Lagos, in Madrid and Rome.
Duality is a recurring theme in Esiri’s personal life—he co-directed Eyimofe with his twin brother, Chuko, who wrote the film. While Arie was perfecting his craft in the dungeons of Columbia’s Dodge Hall, Chuko was doing the same a few stops down the 1 train at Tisch. Though Eyimofe is not the brothers’ first collaboration—their short films Goose (2017) and Besida (2018) premiered at the LA Film Festival and the Berlinale, respectively—the work has proven a star turn for the filmmaking duo. In a glowing New Yorker review, Nigerian-American novelist and Columbia alum Teju Cole called the film “a study in goodness,” both “artful and luminous.”
Eyimofe, which premiered at the Berlinale in 2020, took home Blackstar’s Best Narrative Feature prize in Philadelphia and five awards at the African Movie Academy Awards, including Best Director. Most recently, Eyimofe was nominated for Outstanding International Motion Picture at this year’s NAACP Image Awards and will be released on the Criterion Channel in April.
I intentionally forgo any detailed visual description of the film because I find it all quite hard to describe. Shot on stunning 16mm, Eyimofe brings out the tireless thrill and textured timidness of Lagos. I suggest seeing it for yourself.
Esiri spoke to me while at work for Blacktag, an entertainment platform based in New York that he described as enabling “alternative Black creators to make and tell their stories without any filter or having to pander to any sort of Eurocentric agenda.” Our conversation left me thinking about some of my favorite things—things which, I have also since realized, are simply difficult to define: home, film, Africanness, neorealism, and the fifth floor of Dodge.
The Blue and White: Your Instagram handle is nepahastakenlight. Most Nigerians will probably chuckle or shake their head at that. But for people who might need more context, could you explain the significance of that handle?
Arie Esiri: NEPA is the Nigerian—well, was the Nigerian electrical power authority. I believe that’s what the acronym stands for. But whenever the power or the electricity is cut off, which happens regularly in one day, usually for an extended period of time, that’s something that we used to exclaim in my childhood, growing up: “NEPA has taken light.”
And when I first had to do my email and write an email address—I don’t know how old I was, like 13 or something—for whatever reason, that's what came to me: nepahastakenlight@hotmail.com. And it’s the exact number of letters that they allowed you to use at the time. And it stuck. It’s a wonderful reminder of home and a not-so-wonderful reminder of home as well.
The other day someone sent me the Instagram handle “NEPA has brought back light.” And I was quite amused by that.
B&W: What can you say about the state of the Nigerian government right now?
AE: A bit of a letdown, really. I always say in Nigeria, we talk about politics as much as the British talk about the weather. I’m just constantly baffled. We have infinite amounts of resources, I think, to have a fairly functional state. But the powers that be just seem to thrive off the chaos. I think there’s business in it as well. There’s lots of business to be made where things don't work. So yeah, the government is frustratingly as entrepreneurial as the people. And we just kind of need them to just do their jobs, which they don’t.
But beyond that, I think … we’re beginning to understand that it’s something that we’re going to have to try to change as citizens, which is what we were seeing with ENDSARS. I'm just hoping that the politicians will start reckoning with some of the things that they’re putting us through, that they hear us eventually. But it’s a constant plotting.
B&W: Speaking of electricity and fixing things, we can turn to the film, right? We have our protagonist, who’s an engineer. He’s working with wires. He’s trying to fix things constantly. But Eyimofe is also a film about immigration, yet our protagonists never leave their city, let alone their country. It’s centered around Italy and Spain, but it doesn't center Italy and Spain. So I’m curious: Why tell a story about characters who fail to fix? They fail in their mission of leaving Nigeria.
AE: Because I guess that’s life. Part of the ambition to keep everything in the country—and sometimes we refer to the film as an intramigrational story—was to keep the focus on the lives that the people are living and the circumstances that push them out. It was also important to understand—in the context of migrational films—how we are most often seeing these movies made by people that are not from the place, that are particularly interested in the trauma of this journey, which usually happens on the boats or in the detention camps on some border, whether it’s Algeria or on the other side of the Mediterranean, wherever it is. The journey, I think, is what has persisted in the landscape of migrant films. As people that are indigenous to this place, where we have a lot of people that are trying to get out, I think it was important for us to keep everything within the one place and understand that these people are not making these decisions lightly. They’re not just waking up and saying, “Oh, you know, I fancy being in Italy tomorrow. Or Spain.” There are a set of very particular circumstances that push everyone away, but ultimately, they have something to lose by leaving: family, identity, all those sorts of things.
That’s why it was important to keep them there, I think. But also because that’s part of the story. Many people decide not to leave in the end or don’t get to the point of making that perilous journey. Many are fortunate to escape that and find meaning back home and purpose in a way to make do. Many, sacrificing a lot, like Rosa does. Unfortunately, in this story—as it is with many stories—the road that the women walk is a much, much more complicated one for various reasons.
B&W: You mentioned other stories. I’m always curious about what texts—so feel free to mention not just films, but also, mention films—filmmakers are thinking about, consciously or subconsciously, when they’re crafting their own projects.
AE: My twin brother, Chuko, wrote the film. He mentions a lot James Joyce’s The Dubliners. I think for him, that was just sort of the feel of the place. The feel of Dublin in his work, I think, was something that he wanted to emulate filmically, as far as the way he treated Lagos. Just like the relationship to a place. I know that that book was very, very important for him. And he loves Dickens. He’s a really, really big fan of Dickens.
But film-wise, we looked a lot at New Taiwanese cinema. So the works of Hou Hsiao-hsien and particularly Edward Yang. I think of a movie like Taipei Story, which is a very, very pivotal reference for this movie. Again, that’s a film where you are completely immersed in the city through the choice that the filmmaker is making and how he’s staging his scenes. I come out of that movie feeling like I have some understanding of this city that was completely foreign to me in every sense of the word.
I talk a lot about films that give you permission to make other films. I think Ousmane Sembène's Mandabi is that film that sort of helped me see our film. There’s a really beautiful part of the movie, where there’s an exchange of money. And the hands are moving at a slightly slower frame rate to the rest of the film. So it’s like a very mild, slow motion. And that was visual language that I used or I borrowed to speak to—or rather, to elaborate on the various bits in the film where we have people that are doing work, that are engaged in some kind of manual labor. And they’re very hard to find actually. I don't think I’ve said this in any of my interviews, but it’s an easy thing to miss. They’re things like the laundromat that Rosa and Grace visit before Rosa’s date. They prepare these coal irons. And I think that was shot in slow motion. There’s a lady that’s, I think, pounding yam or stirring a big pot of what we call poundo, which is sort of like the powdered version of yam, the floured version that you meld and make into a type of fufu. That happens in slow motion. And there are a few other bits, a few other things that happen in slow motion. That was born from that film. That really, really helped me see our movie, I think, in a real way.
B&W: Absolutely. I wrote down a quote from Wole Soyinka. He said that “the Lagos of today is what preoccupies, agitates, repels, and seduces and from wildly different causes. Lagos is truly a Joseph city, a garment of many colors, textures, and stylists.” How did you capture the wide coalition but also intense colors of Lagos?
AE: Simply just by letting it exist in the frames. A lot of the wide shots that you see in the film or the stuff that takes place in busy market streets or in some of the busier neighborhoods—a lot of that wasn't fully choreographed. My first AD will disagree with that. We definitely had people planted in different places, and we got people to do things again in many instances. But the market scenes, for example. Or, I think the scene where Rosa is walking through the market stalls and trying to sell her perfume.
B&W: Beautiful shot.
AE: Our actor Temi Ami-Williams did that for real. And we were in a balcony somewhere far off in a really long lens, relatively hidden from the crowd. And she was really trying to sell it. And I think towards the end of the thing, someone goes, “How much?!” Someone actually asked her “how much is this thing?” and she just said a price. [She] was like, “2,000.” All of that was a genuine interaction. Someone was genuinely trying to buy the perfume. Our whole thing was to turn up somewhere in Lagos and shoot the scene and not control too much of what was happening in the background. And I hope that helped give a sense of the city, of its rhythms. But then, in the scripting, we carved out quieter moments as well because they do exist in Lagos. I think it’s very easy to go to Lagos and make the place look overly energetic … handhelds, whip pans and all that kind of stuff. We weren’t interested in portraying the scene that way because I don’t think that’s how I experienced it. So that was it really. Not controlling what we couldn’t control and controlling what we could in smaller, more intimate spaces.
B&W: Yeah, I think you definitely see that. There’s something about the film that, like you’re saying, you feel the intensity and the dynamic nature of this space. But you do have a certain stillness of the camera at times. I think that was really neat.
I do want to ask about your time at Columbia, specifically. Someone mentioned to me recently—and I’m not sure how tongue-in-cheek they meant it—but they said that you get your cinematographers from NYU and your directors from Columbia. And you obviously got an MFA in filmmaking from the School of the Arts. But let’s say for an undergraduate at Columbia who is lamenting the lack of technical instruction that they’re receiving in their classes, how do you see the film and media studies, the history, the theory playing into the student’s eventual work with film production itself?
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AE: I think at Columbia the program is a little bit more academic than it is at NYU. And you just have to understand whether or not that is going to be useful to you or not.
I had come from a background working on set, so when I was getting ready to go to Columbia, I was already working as a camera trainee and in camera departments and working on the gaffers and that kind of thing. And for me, I think going to film schools was a more intellectual pursuit. For example, our film was a multi-protagonist film. And I studied multi-protagonist structures, which my brother didn't do, right? So in Christina Kallas’ script analysis class, we literally spent weeks looking at various types of multi-protagonist stories, how they are put together on a script level, the general concerns of the mode of filmmaking and in various themes, tropes, that kind of thing. And all of that really informs the way that I gave notes on Chuko’s writing, and it changed the script a good amount, I would say, just having that understanding and having studied that.
I think it’s very, very helpful as well, not to go from film undergrad straight to an MFA. I think it’s always helpful to have some kind of world experience, doing something or anything else. Recently, I’ve been talking about how I feel—feel free to cut me off if I’m rambling too much.
B&W: You’re okay.
AE: I feel like there are filmmakers that understand life. And I think that there are filmmakers that understand movies. And I think it’s better to be a filmmaker that understands something about life as opposed to just being someone that it’s just cinema that you’re doing and you’re just recreating your favorite films or versions of that.
And some people do that successfully, but I think it can be quite a burden to bear when you’re just an undergrad filmmaker and then you’re an MFA in film and it’s just film, film, film, film film. And you're not experiencing what is happening around you or getting a moment to understand how life is rendered in real-time.
B&W: I’ve had similar conversations with film friends lately about that distinction. With certain directors, you can tell that they were trying to make a movie. And other directors, it’s like they were trying to make art, I feel. That was their primary motivation.
Also, you just mentioned Dodge, and yeah, Dodge fifth floor. It’s really a wonderful place.
I get the sense that you and your brother get along well. It’d be hard to make a feature film with someone who you didn't get along with. But I am wondering, were there moments on set when you guys did disagree on things?
AE: I mean, of course, yeah. I mean, there were moments. It’s so funny, I remember doing a short film with him and we argued over whether or not we should show a sandwich in a particular shop. And that was a really funny one because the DP was from NYU. And then the person running sound was from Columbia. And there was this complete divide of, like, schools of thought.
There were very few times on set that we had disagreements. But occasionally, I would go and say something to an actor and the actor would be like, “Oh, but your brother just said something else.” And I'd be like, “He did? Ignore that.” That maybe happened a couple of times.
But for the most part, we have the same references, we love the same films. Chuko showed me the movie that made me decide to start directing. We’re constantly sharing. So it’s mainly fun. And a lot easier to make movies together than not.
B&W: Which film did your brother show you?
AE: Bicycle Thieves by Vittorio De Sica.
B&W: That’s one of my favorite films as well. You mentioned in past interviews the importance of Vittorio De Sica and other Italian neorealists. But there is a quote from Bazin, who said, rhetorically, “Is not neorealism, primarily a kind of humanism, and only secondarily a style of filmmaking?” Assuming that you do agree with that, I’m wondering in what ways you hope your filmmaking embodies neorealism as a greater philosophy and ethos?
AE: Embodies neorealism, did you say?
B&W: Yeah. And in philosophy and an ethos, as opposed to just technique. You know—depth of field and long takes.
AE: I think the whole idea is just to create cinema that allows life to unfold in real time before your eyes. I was saying recently in another interview that we actually kept moving away from cinema and coming to real life with certain things. There were certain scenes that were written … very cinematic. I keep using this scene as an example: the mourning scene when, for Mofe, the tragedy happens. And Mofe in mourning—he originally, in the script, was experiencing that on his own. And then it made sense … to have this quiet soliloquy. And it’s dark and moody. And it’s a very interior kind of moment. But it wasn’t true to life. The decision to be in on the experience of this person in this situation in this societal context was way more interesting … than the cinema version of that.
In essence, it’s relying on everything that the culture gives and trying to find some kind of truth to the scenes and … maybe we stay true to the neorealist fabric of making films, which is kind of anti-cinematic in that way. But, of course, you are conscious of the frame and how removing cinema also is full of manipulation, manipulating the image to make this cold thing feel real and lived in. I think that’s the power of these movies. They really take you to a place and you’re lost for an hour, an hour and a half, in a specific world. Asghar Farhadi does that so well in his movies. I saw A Separation when it came out and I remember coming out of that movie and forgetting that it was all in Farsi, that I hadn’t experienced that in my own language. But I fully understood what was happening on a human level. And I think that’s the most important thing. There is a manipulation in that as well. You are still using cinema, you are still using shots, and depth of field or lack of depth of field to get that effect. And I think, yeah, the realist and the neorealist films that achieve that are the most successful.
B&W: That scene in particular, after the tragedy and the family is singing the hymns in that hallway. I watched this movie on a Friday, and then I showed it to my family the next day. It’s one of those moments that feels like you’re holding up a mirror: A moment that you know so well that you haven’t seen on screen before.
You mentioned A Separation and that same filmmaker’s new movie A Hero just came out, so I’m wondering what your favorite 2021 releases were.
AE: I haven’t seen many films this year, unfortunately. I’ve been dying to see Drive My Car, which I will be seeing on Sunday. But I have a funny feeling that that’s going to take the biscuit just from everything I’ve heard. But I’ll be seeing that with my brother, who I haven’t seen in two years since the lockdown. So we’ll be seeing each other in London, and we’ll be going to watch this movie. So I wish you’d asked me this question after that just so I could put it against everything else.
Benedetta, I thought, was crazy. I thought it was a bonkers movie. But you know what? I saw a film that I really—that I loved. It was a movie by Panah Panahi called Hit the Road. That was it. I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed Macbeth as well. I was oddly inspired by it. I think also just the Coens not doing something together … I think it struck in that way as well. I don't know if he’s ever made one without his brother. So I think it resonated in that way. And I think that I had some kind of special attachment to it for that reason. But also it was just great to see this spectacle, I hadn’t been in the cinema for a while and I just really enjoyed how it was rendered—the staging, you know? I just thought it was superbly directed. I wish I’d given you more titles and movies. That’s what this is telling me—I should have seen more movies.
B&W: I’m excited for you to see Drive My Car. I don’t want to give anything away but it’s insane.
I’m going to end with a Sembène quote.
AE: Nice.
B&W: He says, “The artist is a mirror. His work reflects and synthesizes the problems, the struggles and the hopes of his people.” So, what are some of the problems, struggles, and hopes that you think today’s generation of African filmmakers are reflecting? How are African filmmakers today being mirrors?
AE: I can’t speak for everyone. All of our situations are so different.
I try to lean on the hope part of that quote, because escaping the problems and the struggles, it’s just very hard.
But this is why other De Sica films like Miracle in Milan are so important to me as well, because I do want to lean a little bit more on fantasy and try to imagine and depict a Nigeria that I would like to see.
I think part of the struggle, again, infrastructurally, just means that making movies back home is hard. That’s what we want to try and change or undo. We just want to remove the barriers that make making films at the scale that we would love to difficult. That’s the main challenge for us right now. It’s like, how do we make it feasible to make work, to keep producing stuff, and to be ambitious in our imaginings of our country? I think that's what we’re maybe up against the most. We have to fight to be able to make the films that we want to make that show our country the way it is and the way we want it to be. I think right now that that's what we are struggling with—being allowed to speak freely through cinema. And in order to do that, we need to be able to dream, and dream big. And to be able to do that we need to have the right things in place. And a government that is working for us and systems that are working for us and allowing us to do that. And everyone benefits, right? Like, we get more stories, we get more money put into that industry. And hopefully, we also get to change the way we see ourselves and others see us, but most importantly, the way we see ourselves.
Illustration by Rosaline Qi
Daniel Alarcón
On the necessity of storytelling.
By Cole Cahill
The distinction between fiction and nonfiction makes sense for practical purposes. Their respective styles sort media into discernable genres; blur the lines too much and you run into a crisis of credibility. Most writers specialize in one or the other—Daniel Alarcón doesn’t.
These days, Alarcón is busy with stories grounded in truth. He’s the creator and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, a Spanish-language narrative journalism podcast featuring stories from across Latin America. He also executive produces El Hilo, a news-focused spinoff of Radio Ambulante, with VICE Media. At Columbia, he teaches audio reporting at the Journalism School. According to the MacArthur Foundation, he’s also a genius: They awarded him their titular fellowship last year.
With my Spanish comprehension just barely reaching the bar for Intermediate II, listening to Radio Ambulante is an exercise in constant rewinding and frequent Google Translating. Fortunately for me and the rest of the English monoglot community, Alarcón writes much of his fiction in English. His first published short story, City of Clowns, which ran in a 2003 issue of The New Yorker, is reportage despite being a work of fiction—the story takes place in the Lima of his childhood, told with the visceral accuracy of a documentarian. Before I even spoke to him, it was clear that a journalistic focus on communicating the truth infuses all his work, whether or not the characters happen to be real.
He managed to fit in a Zoom conversation with me last month between the start of his work day and an editing session at 9:30 a.m. We had the chance to talk Columbia, radio, and the fiction–nonfiction debacle.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The Blue & White: You teach at Columbia Journalism School, and you also went here for undergrad. Something made you stick around; can you tell me about your experience coming here as a young adult, how your time here established your writing and storytelling, or your life in general?
Daniel Alarcón: I have, as you might imagine, quite a bit to say about this. So I arrived in New York, in Morningside Heights specifically, in 1995. I was born in Peru, but I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Like a lot of people, I had these visions of New York as a place to remake oneself, as a place to find oneself. I remember reading books about New York, the jazz scene, the hip hop scene, the writers that I admired. It just felt very much like this mecca. For me, applying to college was essentially a way to get to New York. My relationship with the city has changed, obviously. But there’s no denying the powerful attraction that a city has for a certain kind of young person. And I was certainly that kind of person.
So, I got to New York and there were a couple of things that struck me. One, my classmates generally were super smart. And that was exciting. New Yorkers somewhat disappointed me. Native New Yorkers, I felt, were somewhat provincial. And that’s something that took me a while to realize, but there’s an elitism of thinking you live in the capital of the world where you don’t have to visit the world because the world is going to come to you. That is a really strange and unique variety of provincialism that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from people living in such a cosmopolitan place. Also, the general snobbishness of New England rich kids was surprising. I hadn’t encountered that before, that variety of snobbishness.
Having said that, I loved the city. I had great professors, I made great friends. There’s a reason why I’ve come back, and a lot of it has to do with, in spite of the things that I said, wanting to raise my kids here and have some opportunities that I didn’t have growing up in Birmingham. Just at a certain basic level, the simple things of living in a city. I quite like taking the bus to school with my kid and being able to get a bagel—silly things like that. But also the intellectual community that I’m a part of here at the J-school is vibrant and exciting and it’s an honor to be a part of it. On a very basic level, to teach at your alma mater is a real privilege. And the story of how I got here is also surprising in that I was a creative writer who did journalism on the side and then started a radio project in my basement. And then five years later, I was teaching audio at the journalism school at Columbia University. That, in itself, is so wild to me. It still trips me out, you know?
B&W: Could you tell me a little more about those origins?
DA: About how Radio Ambulante started? Sure. So three little backstories. One, my father’s first job in Peru as a teenager was a soccer announcer on a big radio station in southern Peru. So we had a great appreciation for radio. Two, which you also need to know, growing up in Alabama, my father didn’t want us to have Southern accents. I think it has to do with an awareness of the power of accents to tell people who you are and his understanding that the nightly news didn’t talk like that, so you shouldn’t either. Three, we made these little radio programs for our family in Peru, and we would record these cassettes and send them by mail to our family, and our family in Lima would send cassettes back.
So I had this background and interest in radio because I grew up listening to NPR in the car by force on the way to school. I wrote a novel called Lost City Radio. The protagonist is a woman on a radio program. At the time, I was a young writer and they were taking me to festivals and whatnot. I got a call from the BBC. The BBC was like, “Hey, we read your book, would you like to do a radio documentary with us?” It was the culmination of the three sorts of family things that I mentioned, and to get this invitation was a real exciting opportunity. I pitched them a couple of ideas, they accepted one, and I flew to Lima. They sent a producer from London and we did a radio documentary and spent ten days recording interviews. When the producer took all that material and went back to London, I didn’t get a chance to edit with him. He just basically sent me a finished version a month later, and it was good. The problem was that … I’d done interviews in English and Spanish. Whenever someone spoke English—because it was for the BBC—I did it in English, or when someone spoke Spanish, I would do simultaneous translation. Almost all the interviews in Spanish had been cut, and that was a big source of frustration for me. It comes out in January 2008 and it’s fine, but I was unhappy with it. I started having this idea of “What if there was a space to do radio like that in Spanish?”
Fast forward a couple of years. A friend comes to the Bay and we have a coffee and he has this fellowship … and I was like, “How do you get one of those?” Because they give you a bunch of money to do a project. He’s like, “Oh, all you have to have is a great idea.” And I was just joking, and I was like, “Oh, I have a great idea. I want to do This American Life in Spanish.” And he's, like, “Sold!” So I go back and I tell my wife this, well, my girlfriend at the time, I was like, “You should quit that terrible job and I’ll do the editorial part and you run the business for it and we’ll just do it. How hard could it be?”
B&W: So you have your book Lost City Radio, the shows that you produce now, and I didn’t know that your father had worked as an announcer. How do you describe the power of radio or audio storytelling as a medium, one you’ve clearly continued to return to?
DA: The power of radio for me is related to the power of literature. In particular, the way we listen to the radio now—walking through the city with your earbuds on—often mirrors the experience of reading a great book where you feel like the author is whispering in your ear. It’s like a three-dimensional novel. With audio, I feel like it mimics that.
My approach in journalism and literature has always been very similar in that, when I’m writing, when I’m making something up in literature, I feel like I’m interrogating my characters. I’m interviewing them, I’m trying to understand them. I’m walking into spaces with them and trying to figure out what side they’re on, what the power dynamics of a room might be. And when I do journalism, whether it’s in print or audio, in English or in Spanish, I'm doing, or attempting to do, much of the same thing. So for me, my approach to both is complementary, and I don’t think I would be a journalist—or certainly not a good one—if I hadn’t done so many years of making stuff up.
I’ll give you another example. When we plan a big story on Ambulante, we imagine who we’re going to want to talk to. When you plan an interview, you imagine what they might say. You’re doing imaginative work in order to prepare a piece of nonfiction because you have to be prepared for what happens. You have to know what you’re looking for. You have to be prepared for surprises, of course. No doubt—you might have an idea for a story, and the story turns out to be completely different. But it’s just as likely that if you do the work of imaginary listening, of using your imagination to propel yourself in the future and try to think about what the situation might offer you, it’s just as likely that you’re going to encounter some part of the reality that you’ve already dreamed up.
B&W: What do you think producing a true story via audio gives you that fiction doesn’t? And then the other side of that—what do you think fiction writing gives you that an audio documentary might miss?
DA: I think there’s two things. Obviously in fiction writing at a very basic level, you’re making it up, although my process feels more like discovery than invention. And you can do X-rays on your characters in ways that you can’t in reportage because of the limitations of how much people trust you. In fiction, I always have access to my sources, because I’m carrying them with me. Audio is also a different beast in part because of the information that the human voice gives you. I mentioned accents earlier, pauses—you can hear someone thinking and that you might not be able to discern from reading the transcript of a statement. Certainly not the cleaned-up transcript of the interview that you and I are doing right now. You’re not going to notice when I pause or the way I talk or the way thinking sounds. You can hear that in audio, and I think that’s lovely. There’s so much information to be gleaned from those voices that you won’t get from the transcript.
B&W: I completely agree. I wanted to talk a little more about Radio Ambulante. Even though the episodes often take really different shapes, you’ve said in different words that a core idea behind the show is moving through cultural and linguistic boundaries in the Spanish-speaking world despite geographical barriers or borders that might exist. If that’s an apt description of how you see the project, how does that take shape in certain episodes you’ve done, and how does the show bring together such different types of storytelling under one banner?
DA: I think the core of your question is “What is a Radio Ambulante story? What is the mission of Radio Ambulante?” So, one, we felt, as Latinos living in the United States, that the stories of Latinos and Latin Americans in general fell into two camps. Either from the right–the dangerous brown “other,” the person to be feared or reviled. And then from the left, it was often the helpless victim, the person to be pitied. Now the reality is that if you are Latino in the United States and you live in a community of Latinos and people from different backgrounds and countries, the reality is obviously much more complicated and thankfully much more interesting. And we felt that that wasn’t often being portrayed in the stories that we were reading. In the Spanish language media, it was different, but also the Spanish language media had different commercial concerns. Diario, the Spanish newspaper in New York, or Telemundo or Univision are very different from what we were trying to do. They serve a purpose, that’s fine, but it wasn’t the kind of storytelling that we were interested in doing. With the demise of outlets like Etiqueta Negra, it also felt like there were few places for these kinds of stories. So we wanted to create a kind of tapestry of stories that was just a little bit more complicated, a little bit more subtle, a little bit more entertaining and a lot less simple. So that was one thing.
The other thing is that early on, we went to Miami for a meeting with an executive at Univision, and we told them our idea. And he was like, “Look, Mexicans only care about Mexico, and Puerto Ricans only care about Puerto Rico, and Cubans only care about Cuba, and Colombians only care about Colombia. So you’re not going to find a regional audience for these stories, because if you do a story about Colombia, they only listen to it in Colombia.” And we left that meeting really dejected, and we started thinking about it and we were like, we don't think he's right. [My wife] Carolina and I were living in the Bay Area at the time, and we’d go to parties and meet Chileans and Colombians and Mexicans and Peruvians. And people would tell stories and they were hilarious and it didn't feel to me that there was an issue of translation, it felt to me that in fact a good story had no borders. The cultural and linguistic borders were very fluid when it came to stories. So we rejected this person’s naysaying and pushed on.
And I think that’s a really important element of Radio Ambulante, which is why when you go to the website of Radio Ambulante today, you’re going to see stories from Honduras, from Mexico, from Chile, from Peru, from Colombia, all next to each other. And that’s one of the things that makes me really proud, when you get to see that. We wanted to always tell stories that were locally produced, or produced with great local knowledge, so that someone from those countries would still learn something and wouldn’t feel like they were being talked down to. But they were also inviting, so that if you have a story and it’s about Colombia, we give you enough information so that you can still enjoy it even if you don't understand the particulars of politics in Medellín or culture in Bogotá.
The other thing I think is not so much a principle but just the way things worked is we just threw ourselves into it, we learned in public. And I think if you see the arc of the growth curve and the learning curve at Radio Ambulante from the first season to more recently, the early stories were one-voice stories, we do one interview and then write around it. And now the stories are much more complicated and sophisticated and ambitious. And that is something that again I'm really proud of.
B&W: Outside of your own work, I’m curious what you find to be the most interesting or compelling public storytelling right now.
DA: I love Pop-Up Magazine, which is a live storytelling event that tours all over the U.S. I just love the hybrid format of performed-narrative journalism. I think when it’s great, it’s amazing and even when it’s not great, it’s interesting. I continue to read The New Yorker every week because it’s such a well-made magazine and well-reported, and I feel like I learn something all the time. In terms of storytelling, like film and music and even TikTok, they all have sorts of versions of this cutting-edge stuff. I’m watching Station Eleven with my wife, this adaptation of a novel that’s brilliantly adapted. I think if you look at shows like Squid Game and Succession and all these high-level novelistic, film and TV productions they are just extraordinary. But I’m also really drawn to the creativity of storytelling on these formats, like TikTok or Twitter threads that I think are so interesting because they’re so surprising. And so outside of my comfort zone—I can’t imagine ever doing a TikTok. But I think that there’s obviously a lot of sophistication there and you can find a lot of success doing it. So anyway, there’s just a myriad of ways to tell stories, and I’m excited about all of them.
Illustration by Samia Menon
Bayeté Ross Smith
Law through a new lens.
By Muni Suleiman
Illustration by Rea Rustagi
Humbled, not only by the stream of professional, collected students pouring in during what seems to be rush hour, but also by the face-off between me and the building’s security guard, I stand quietly by the cool, brutalist exterior of Columbia Law. If I had known that a Columbia undergraduate ID did not warrant access to the building, I would have spared myself the embarrassment. Despite the guard asking, it is not any pre-law aspiration that calls me into the building.
After some minutes, Bayeté Ross Smith, the Law School’s inaugural artist-in-residence and my reason for visiting the premises, convinces the guard to pardon my undergraduate status and leads me to the fifth floor to see one of two of his video installations. His work during this residency is an extension of his Art of Justice series, which engages the legal community with socio-political art, media installations, and programming. He offers to show me part of the work—a video project within a small-scale installation. Due to installation delays, the video project isn’t yet finalized in its presentation, but with the calibrations and headphones already prepared, we forge ahead. The first is located in a bright lobby decorated by law students chatting in chairs, the other in a dark hallway graced only by the bench on which we converse.
The videos are episodes of Ross Smith’s Red Summers, a project which explores the past and present of racist terrorism from 1917 to 1921. With the help of a Kinect sensor and headphones, I am first transported to contemporary and 1917 East St. Louis in “How white mobs firebombed homes and decimated a Black community in Illinois” and then to contemporary and 1921 Tulsa in “Tulsa race massacre at 100: an act of terrorism America tried to forget.”
The room we sit in for our conversation is decorated with pieces from another of Ross Smith’s series, “Taking AIM.” This project dissects “violence and our societal relationship to violence,” and asks “who is considered a threat and who is considered a victim” in our world? The images, one of which features an adult Ross Smith framed within a shooting range target, along with questions of history and temporality—themes explored in all of his art—loom large as we speak.
The Blue and White: A critical element of your work is making sure that it is accessible and relevant to people’s daily lived experiences. When you place your art in these lived spaces as opposed to a gallery exhibition, what do you think is different about how people interact with it?
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Bayeté Ross Smith: There’s a history with fine art being connected to elite people and elite spaces. That doesn’t mean it was only connected to elite people and elite spaces, but when we delve into the history of visual art as fine art, it’s often not accessible to, say, the average person. The fine art gallery system, as well as—to some extent—museum systems, don’t always meet people where they are. For me, it’s important for my artwork to not be sequestered in the proverbial ivory tower of the art world. It’s important for artists, when they can, to have their work to be used as a tool for developing critical thinking and education and learning. I’m very interested in this idea of art and media as tools for social change, so it’s very important to bring it into non-traditional spaces that are part of our daily lived experience.
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B&W: Putting art in a space where daily life and daily experiences happen just serves to, at least subconsciously, have people think about these concepts. It’s really useful, especially in a law school space, to be keeping those in mind when one is doing their studies or even working towards practice.
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BRS: It is important for us to look at art as a service in that we provide a service as artists, not necessarily all the time, but a substantial portion of the time.
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B&W: Looking at the exhibition that I experienced downstairs, you’re seeing in real time how the history of the past and the present overlap with each other. You said that it was important to look at how the present is built on top of the history of the past.
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BRS: What’s happened in the past directly influences the present and allows us to understand what has transpired so that we can imagine a speculative future that is more productive and more joyous, so to speak.
With the 360 VR work I’m doing, I wanted to create an experience that made people feel like they were in a physical place and they’re able to look into the past and see what had transpired there literally overlaid on top of daily life in that place now. Through the use of technology—such as extended reality, virtual reality, augmented reality—we can give people those experiences anywhere where they have access to technology or the internet in the world.
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From an American standpoint, I don’t believe that we think about history over a long enough time frame. We’re very quick to move past something once it happens. That can be useful, but that can also obscure our ability to understand and learn. We will think of something as ancient history, whereas in another society in the world, ancient history or not, it’s still relevant to how they’re processing the way things work today. I wanted to remind people of that. I know that the history of these incidents of mob violence in the early 20th century are part of a continuum, and they’re not discussed in terms of our history nearly as much as they should be, and in some cases they’re deliberately hidden and not discussed. So I wanted to create something that could be a corrective, connected narrative, but also make it experiential so that it resonates.
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B&W: I think another part of social justice spaces right now is the discussion around critical race theory. I don’t think critical race theory is even being taught in contemporary American schools. I believe it’s this form of censorship of not only the violence that our country has committed, but also it inhibits people from being able to understand how these events definitely informed our past, but are also informing our future.
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Making this history more accessible is important to the people that it impacted, but also the people that need to hear it to challenge their own biases and challenge their own perceptions.
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BRS: Hopefully they will. You know, if they’re willing.
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B&W: If they’re willing.
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BRS: William Dunning was a scholar here at Columbia and was supported by Columbia in crafting an inaccurate version of how and why the Civil War took place, and the role Black Americans played in making this country the country that it became. That’s very specific, and that’s very intentional. You also have, then, organizations like The Daughters of the Confederacy creating curriculum for schools—and for some odd reason having the power to lobby and having that curriculum accepted on a state level all throughout the country. And again, that curriculum promoted this idea of the lost cause, gave an inaccurate depiction of the Civil War and why it took place, an inaccurate depiction of Reconstruction and how it took place, and created an inaccurate perception of African Americans at that time. So, a lot of people fighting against critical race theory are actually fighting for indoctrination they underwent, but calling the corrective narrative that actually is telling them a more truthful version of the history “indoctrination.” It’s ironic, but it’s also a very American thing to do.
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B&W: To talk about the Art of Justice project, from what I understand, it’s been a multi-year series of art and media installations with programs that address sociopolitical issues while also specifically engaging with the legal community. What is the significance of this project to you?
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BRS: An important point to raise about the work that I make and how I represent it is that my work is not about telling people what to think. The goal is to create scenarios where people are forced to question their pre-existing beliefs. Everyone’s pre-existing beliefs are different, obviously, but what that means … just like Black people aren’t a monolith, lawyers aren’t a monolith, Republicans aren’t a monolith, gun owners aren’t a monolith, people in the infantry, in the army aren’t a monolith. The type of message that can resonate with people and get them to think with more intellectual rigor and nuance about a particular subject of importance to society is going to shift and change depending on who that person is.
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B&W: As you’ve been working on this project, have you learned anything about your own blind spots or have your ideas of its reach changed over time?
BRS: Well, we’re still somewhat in the beginning phases. I’ve done some work and I’m doing some work here at Columbia Law School now. I’ve done some work with Saint Thomas University Law School’s Intercultural Human Rights program, and I’m in the process of developing some programming with the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and hopefully the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, but the latter is much more in just conversational phases.
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In terms of my blind spots, this has been an ongoing discovery over the past 10 years or so, but what jumps out at me is I realize that lawyers and people with legal education and policymakers and even people one might normally assume would be more conservative are a lot more open to engaging in the subject matter than I would suspect the average quote—unquote progressive, to-the-left person would think. I’ve had some surprisingly great conversations and engagements and takeaways from dealing with someone who comes from a family of lifelong Republicans or someone who is a prosecutor.
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B&W: I’m also curious about what exactly inspired you to go into specifically legal spaces like a law school or a district attorney’s office. Was that always a goal that you had in mind? Was that a conscious change in direction that you made?
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BRS: My goal with my work has always been to engage with as broad a range of different audiences as possible in a variety of ways that fit into a daily lived experience.
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But specifically thinking of targeting the legal community for engagement and developing a way to create spaces where they could engage in and embrace my work … I started having that idea maybe about seven years ago.
That stemmed from a realization I had from talking with someone who used to be a lawyer and is now a professor at a law school. And through the conversation with him, just realizing that a lot of people who go into professions that determine policy have legal education, as well as lawyers in general being at the forefront of impacting, not necessarily official policy, but if you were to take, even say, a corporate law firm—those are people who potentially influence the way businesses function and what some of the parameters are.
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And then obviously there’s people who are directly involved in the criminal justice system. In addition, I was also thinking about policy makers, whether they're people who hold official leadership positions on the local, state and federal level, as well as various policy influencing organizations, be they thinktanks or other elements of society.
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B&W: It’s as if bringing art that is meant to challenge your own biases and challenge your own perceptions serves as a reminder in the minds of students to apply their knowledge outside of school, but also within it.
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BRS: I think you’re on the right track there.
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The way people think and respond to my work can be a reflection of their biases, but it can also just simply be a matter of it not always being about bias, but just being about perspective and what their perspective includes and what it doesn’t include, which isn’t necessarily a bias. It’s just that it hasn’t entered their frame of vision. We all have a different way of seeing the world and our way of seeing has its merits, but it also has things that we’re not aware of. How do we broaden the frame?
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B&W: What are some topics you’ve taken on that have received interesting reactions, or that have helped you further understand your own perspectives?
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BRS: This particular installation here at Columbia Law School is about violence and our societal relationship to violence. Starting with the questions, who is considered a threat and who is considered a victim? And then how does the perception of victim or threat impact the likelihood of someone being involved in interpersonal violence? And then how does that scale up or down on a group level and on a larger societal level? And then, by extension, what does that say about our contemporary and historic societal relationship to violence? When is it deplorable? When is it acceptable? When is it recreational? How do we mark that in history?
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Some of the other topics that are very interesting to me are the idea of nationality and how nationality intersects with identity and what our perception is of someone being a citizen.
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In the “Passing” series, I thought it was interesting to play around with passports because passports are probably our most official, globally-accepted document that defines us. For the most part, everyone in the world looks at that document as a definitive starting point of who someone is. But then it’s also potentially arbitrary.
What is considered artistic is interesting to me. Not necessarily what is considered artistic, but what is considered high art or extraordinarily created, intellectually creative. As someone who comes from hip hop, it’s just very fascinating to know how intellectually rigorous and profound the impact is of that culture and the amount of brilliance and intellectual sophistication it took to create that culture and have its global impact the way it’s had.
But you know, I suspect that it’s a culture that’s not given the credit it deserves as one of the genius movements of the world because it’s essentially associated with Black people, Puerto Rican people, other groups of Latin Americans, and ghettos. So it’s not often aligned with—
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B&W: The perceptions of high art.
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BRS: Yeah. Or the perceptions of an intellectually profound art and creative movement like the Renaissance period, for example.
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B&W: Or even the enlightenment period.
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BRS: Right. But if you look at hip hop, it’s permanently changed quite a few things in the world. Like, even if you go beyond looking at music, just how we look at language and what we can do with language and how language can be used. What can rhyme and the use of rhyming.
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Or even visually. Hip hop permanently changed the visual landscape of the world. You can’t go anywhere in the world that I know of and not see burners on the walls. Hip hop also shifted our understanding of what public art can be. But it’s not thought of in that regard. Those are the types of things that are very interesting to me in terms of our preconceptions and why we think a certain way about certain things.
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B&W: By the time that your residency here at Columbia is over, what do you hope the law students or people that are part of the Columbia Law community get out of it?
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BRS: It’s always important to question your pre-existing beliefs when you step into a situation as a person with legal education and legal training. It’s important to do that throughout your career, and that it’s important for lawyers and other people with legal education to constantly be thinking about the role they play, and the role the law plays in resolving some of society’s most pressing challenges.
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In addition to that, I hope to inform and provide information, or at least lead people to information they didn’t know about what has happened and what is happening in our society.
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B&W: I think it would be really interesting for you to elaborate on empathy and empathy’s role in your work.
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BRS: That’s interesting because while I think empathy is important, I also think it’s overrated to a certain extent. When I say that what I mean is as people who live, and in many cases grew up in North America, South America, Western Europe—I mention those regions because I feel very confident in my understanding of the general core ideologies in those societies—as people who grew up with the cultural and societal backgrounds that we have, the reason why I think empathy can be overrated is because we should be capable of acknowledging the validity of a perspective that’s foreign to us.
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Empathy does obviously play into the details, but quite often I feel like people use empathy as an excuse for not treating our fellow humans and the life on this planet with the proper respect. You don’t need empathy in order to understand some basic fundamental things.
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B&W: How do you think photography conveys this message?
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BRS: Photography is a very useful medium of art making because, in my opinion, it’s the most accessible. Everyone can make a photograph and everyone can look at a photograph and feel like they understand it. Most people don’t feel like they need to have a specific background or set of training to interpret a photograph.
Also, what I was saying previously about framing—how what is excluded from a frame is as important as what’s included, and how we each have a different way of seeing in the world—that becomes very apparent through photography in a very direct way.
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You can see how multiple photographers frame certain circumstances and instances when you see multiple photographs of the same subject matter. So I think from that standpoint, it’s a very useful entry point to a lot of these topics.
B&W: I’m fascinated by introducing these pieces into a classroom. My own personal belief is that classrooms can suffer from not looking at things in an interdisciplinary sense, and not bringing in real-life applications. Classrooms can be hindered by theory. Theory is based on real life, but real life also informs theory. When you have art, or even just depictions of real life events, it can make learning and teaching more immersive and more productive.
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BRS: Well, that’s something I hope ends up happening as a result of all this. I’m working with a specific set of faculty and administrators here at the law schools just because that’s who has been working with me and getting me acclimated to working here. I’m definitely open to having conversations and collaborating with more people here, more of the professors particularly, in terms of looking at how what’s installed can relate to what might be being discussed or examined or studied in their classrooms.
The Crossword
The City, Squared
By Cy Gilman
The Postcard
Illustration by Jace Steiner
Our Print Issue