As any of the editors to this zine can attest, I am terrible with deadlines.
The Magic Struggle Bus
Introducing NathanCorp
A Taste of Mary Catherine's Better Ice Creamed
Finding Lauv in the Light
Mastering the Line: Art by Abe Negaran
Dear Edie Falco
Three Poems
Behind the Scenes: On-Going with Matilde Keizer
The journey began in Rome, Italy, home of Matilde Keizer.
Well, technically, the journey began – and will end – in New York City. That’s where Matilde Keizer and Trevor Silverstein met. And that’s where they sat down and plotted on a map all the places they planned to go when Matilde’s OPT student visa ended and she was kicked out of the country.
They didn’t start out thinking they were going to make a travel show. Initially, they planned to take a month and travel through Europe. Then, they decided to go to Asia. Then, they figured, “Why don’t we make something of this?” Career-wise, it made sense to them: turn this exile into an adventure; turn it into something big, something positive, something they can use for Matilde’s resume to make her a better applicant for the O-1 Artist Visa next year.
This was a creative opportunity for both of them: Trevor, in charge of filming and editing, and Matilde, starring as Matilde, the chatty, spirited adventurer whose clumsiness and unfiltered talking points separates this travel show from most others.
So, they left for Rome, which, again, is where the (on-camera) journey began.
All images provided by Trevor Silverstein.
Natalia: Where did you guys film On-Going?
Matilde: We started in Rome. Rome to Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur, Penang), Malaysia to Indonesia (Bukit Lawang, Lombok), Indonesia to the Philippines (Palawan), the Philippines to Cambodia, Cambodia to Vietnam, Vietnam to Thailand, Thailand to Myanmar, Myanmar to India (Kolkata), and India to Berlin.
Prior to the release of their first episode, Matilde and Trevor released two sneak peek videos. In the first video, they divided all of the places they were visiting into four different categories: Muslim, wet, cold, and hot; this is how Matilde packed in Rome. She stressed the importance of good footwear, wet wipes, scarves, and - most importantly for girls - learning to hover. “You want to make sure you have a good stance,” Matilde explained, as she squatted in front of the camera with a backpack strapped on, pretending to pee without sitting down. “If there isn’t toilet paper, the drip and dry method you know,” she advised. “Drip as much as you can, step away, done - no problem!”
In the second sneak peek released, Matilde went over the contents of her backpack. This included her insect repellent lotion, Ibuprofen, and “woman’s bag,” in which she put all of the things she didn’t necessarily need but still wanted to bring.
She went on to express slight panic at the possibility of her contracting Dengue fever, followed by uncomfortable chatter about her planned wardrobe in Muslim countries. Already, it was understood that traveling with Matilde may be a constant vacillation between reason and frenzy. “Always be prepared; have lots of medicine for your gut and digestive system; conditioner does not abide by the laws of gravity; and only be half-crazy when you have the option,” Matilde concluded the video.
Natalia: Is there a storyline for the series?
Matilde: There is a storyline to each episode with definite arcs. It becomes stronger with each episode. We were developing our own voices over time. We went in with all of these ideas about comedy, travel, and sarcasm and as we went along, we had to be very natural about the way things come up. Each episode has a different tone because of that.
Natalia: What research did you guys do before setting out to each place?
Trevor: We did a lot of research, both in the time leading up to the trip and then just as much research as we went along. Most of it entailed having an understanding of the route we would take over the course of two and half months, which was complicated to figure out sometimes; the actual route we took changed a handful of times based on flight costs and what-not. We got most of our ideas of where we wanted to go as we looked into other places. We'd see pictures of a temple or read about a street food stall and say we have to go there.
Natalia: And did you do any research in terms of packing?
Trevor: Packing was kind of just considering the tropical climate and what else we might think we need. We also packed less at the start, fully aware that we'd want to pick up souvenirs along the way. And luckily, the amount of film equipment I had was so minimal it all fit into a small case that fit into my small backpack. I’m happy that the filming looks decent enough because we only used a GoPro. And I am happy that’s all we used because if I had to carry around a camera that was in any way expensive it would have made the trip miserable for both of us. One: it would have been heavy, and two: it would have gotten people’s attention. The GoPro is great because everyone has one and carries it around everywhere, so you blend in. There are times where I would be filming Matilde and no one thought anything of it and everyone acted fairly normal. The only time people gave us odd looks is when we pulled out our microphone. And three: cameras are expensive, so I would have been constantly paranoid about it.
Trevor carried the camera equipment around everywhere throughout the trip, which was ideal as nothing was scripted and they could film instinctively. This flexibility facilitated the capturing of raw, vulnerable footage. Matilde and Trevor were very clear about the honest tone they wanted the series to have. This was apparent to me immediately, as I watched Matilde sit in a beautiful mosque and discuss the explosive diarrhea she was about to have. “I feel that mutton in my button fighting to get out,” she joked, somewhat achingly. “I only nearly vomited twice,” she noted in another episode, after getting off a flight. It’s somewhat jarring to find such casually crude and straightforward dialogue in regards to travel and vacations. People share the beautiful sunsets, tans, and beaches. No one admits to the relentless bathroom trips after eating questionable meat from the local marketplace.
Natalia: I like the openness in Matilde’s character in the series. She is very relatable and uncensored. That’s unique to find in our increasingly filtered society.
Trevor: When you look at travel content on the Internet, you see all of these perfectly edited videos with pop songs and electronic music, and it’s this highly curated version of a place. We don’t have the equipment to do that and it would look really silly if we even tried.
Matilde: When people think of Indonesia they think of Bali and these beautiful beaches, but it is actually quite dirty. The water is dirty and there is trash all over the beach and there are all of these fires that are creating pollution. We went to a beach in Lombok that was really beautiful, and traditionally you would expect people to be like, “Oh my God, look at the amazing water!” But actually, it’s ignoring the reality that this country is in huge environmental struggle.
Trevor: People on Instagram post a picture of the perfect beach and people love it and they go crazy over it. But to find that beach isn’t easy. People can go an entire trip in that area without finding that perfect thing that everyone seems to post all the time.
Natalia: I really like that angle. Especially on Instagram, users make traveling seem very glamorous. It makes everyone want to leave where they are and go somewhere else. And here you guys are showing people that no, it’s actually really crowded, and the food isn’t as sanitary...
Matilde: But we also want to make sure to tell people: “Look, you can travel, you can go to all these places, but remember that the world is a highly complex place in which you’re not going to be able to get that perfect shot, but you can do all of these things and you can experience all these places and it’s easy and it’s not that expensive.” We want to be able to show that and to share the truth about what we’ve experienced.
Natalia: That seems like the essence of this travelogue: truthfulness.
Matilde: There is no pre-decided thing depicted; this is a product of experiencing things for what they are.
Natalia: Yeah, and the music and color schemes complement the tone very well. How did you decide on these elements?
Trevor: So the music in the series is personally one of my favorite parts. Everything you hear that wasn't recorded on location is from a Swedish company called Epidemic Sound. They source really high quality royalty free music and sound effects from independent artists/producers and then offer them on flexible licensing plans to creators. When I discovered the huge database of content on their site, I knew I needed them and luckily they were extremely accommodating and flexible to our low budget. Getting a license with them has been one of the most crucial aspects to editing the show. As for picking the music for each moment, we tend to gravitate towards sounds that have a slight sense of humor to them, but usually choose something that is tonally similar to what you're seeing on screen. For the color scheme, that was something that came about very early on when we first started planning the series. We came up with our very simple logo and the colors were picked after some trial and error. Something about the light pink and light yellow combo struck us and we decided to stick with it.
Natalia: That all worked out really well. Was there anything else in the filming process that ended up falling into place as seamlessly? Any moments you happened to capture at the right time?
Trevor: Actually, yeah. We were on a bus in Cambodia - a night bus - and it broke down. And even though Matilde was not in a good mood, I decided to film it anyway.
Matilde: I was not having it at all.
Trevor: It was also a really bizarre circumstance because the bus didn’t break down on the side of a highway, but in the middle of nowhere and right next to a small village where people were awake and husking rice.
Natalia: What time was this at?
Matilde: 1 AM.
Trevor: The bus didn’t leave again until after sunrise. We stayed for, like, four hours.
Matilde: And then it broke down again at the scariest rest stop I’ve ever seen. It was a square cement structure with kids running around in the mud.
Trevor: Night buses can be a risky venture. They are definitely one of the more popular ways to get around in Southeast Asia when you are in the mainland portion, like Vietnam or Thailand, but being on a bus in the middle of the night being driven by somewhat reckless drivers –
Matilde: All of the bus drivers were drunk and drove incredibly fast –
Trevor: It’s a long, long story but it was not good.
Natalia: Will we be seeing this in any of the upcoming episodes?
Trevor: No, not that. If we were ever in a situation where I was concerned for Matilde’s or my safety, I avoided filming.
Natalia: What were the different cultures that you saw? I am curious to hear about any of the poverty and feminist issues around that area.
Matilde: In India, there was one point where Trevor was walking and two little kids attached themselves to us and were grabbing inside his pockets. It wasn’t funny or cute; it was harassment.
Trevor: We tried to keep walking and for about three blocks they kept this up until finally an older bystander saw what was going on and told the kids to stop.
Matilde: Also, to me, one of the harder moments of poverty was walking by a very run down children's hospital in Phnom Penh at midnight with a long line of mothers holding their babies trying to get in, even though in my eyes that hospital was a scary place to have to bring your child. But of course there are very different levels of poverty in the whole region that we are otherwise blind to in the west.
Natalia: So, as white tourists, or you, Matilde, as a woman – were you treated differently anywhere?
Matilde: Well, people gawked at us everywhere because we were clear outsiders: bigger and white.
Trevor: Yeah, but the attention was always more on Matilde.
Natalia: I find that interesting. I feel like women in New York are accustomed to being cat called or gawked at, but I, personally, never experience that when I’m walking with someone else, especially not a guy. So I am surprised to hear you experienced that with Trevor by your side.
Matilde: In Kolkata, the way men stare at you and talk to you makes you wish for New York catcalling. Genuinely gets to the point that you feel naked from the way they undressed you on the street. I also felt that way a little bit in Indonesia. The roles of women in the region are very different from the way we experience life in the west, however in Thailand and Myanmar it seemed to me that women were working on similar levels as men.
Natalia: Did the language barrier make these situations worse? Or any situations, for that matter.
Matilde: It was really frustrating. I tried to learn “hello” and “thank you” for every place we traveled, but in Cambodia, for instance, even when we were saying things right, we were saying them wrong because we don’t have the same melody in our voices.
Trevor: But, at the end of the day, everyone really does speak English, and even if you couldn’t communicate, you found a way with gestures, tone, and body language.
Now, done filming and settled in Berlin for the unforeseeable future, Trevor and Matilde have new objectives in mind: editing and sharing the ten episodes of the season.
Natalia: What are the goals from here?
Trevor: First and foremost is to finish all ten episodes. Then, to get people to watch it. I’m still learning more about marketing and spending way more time than ever on Twitter and Facebook than I ever had in my life. The tough part about marketing is that you have to be doing it all of the time and I am focusing on editing right now. We are both new to this; Matilde has marketing experience, but –
Matilde: Yeah, from a non-profit film organization, so very different from this. But what’s our next move in terms of marketing is reaching out to press that might be interested in us and applying for festivals.
Trevor: We got accepted into one festival in Rome called “Roma Cinemadoc.”
Natalia: That’s great! Congratulations. With the filming and traveling done for the time being, were there any new perspectives about life you guys picked up along the way?
Matilde: A huge takeaway is to take an easier approach to life. To not take things in such a negative way. There is a joy in the way that people in Southeast Asia approach life that I took with me.
Watch and subscribe to On-Going with Matilde Keizer on Vimeo.
Meera Lee Patel: “Creativity comes from curiosity”
We met at The Blue Stove off of the Graham Avenue stop in Brooklyn. It was only us at the coffee shop for the most part, but the intrusive sounds of coffee grinding in the kitchen forced us to switch seats after about thirty seconds in conversation. The meeting had been rescheduled a few times before due to Meera’s busy schedule, and I knew going into it that she would be pressed for time when meeting with me. And yet, I was five minutes late, as usual. Meera was unfazed. Immediately, I was struck by her aura of kindness. Somehow, within the first few moments of meeting her, I already felt like we were best friends.
Something unmistakable when meeting Meera is that she embodies her art: colorful, delicate, welcoming. I was reminded of the warm, pastel colors of her work while in her company. Her paintings embody her; she embodies them. It’s symbiotic. I can hear the phrases and quotes she pairs with her doodles in her honeyed voice. The thoughtfulness and precision of her word choice when speaking is replicated in her careful selection of what to write with certain images.
She speaks from the heart and works from the heart. Perhaps that's why her favorite emoji is the sparkle; she even texts from the heart.
Natalia: I did a lot of research on you before meeting.
Meera: Oh, yeah, there’s too much about me on the Internet.
Natalia: I saw that you went to Rutgers. What did you study there?
Meera: I studied English and Journalism.
Natalia: Cool. And then you started working on art more consistently after graduating?
Meera: I got a job in technical publishing and after about a year I knew I couldn’t be happy just doing what I was doing. So, I started drawing as a way to feel good about myself at some point in my week. I ended up creating an Etsy shop and joining the craft fair circuit and I saw there were a lot of people doing this for a living. So I thought, “If they’re doing it, why can’t I do it?” And that’s when it became a very real dream and since then I’ve been working on making it happen.
Natalia: Yeah, so tell me everything - when did you decide to quit your job?
Meera: I still have a job actually.
Natalia: No wonder you’re so busy! Are you still at the same place?
Meera: Yeah.
Natalia: How do you balance that?
Meera: I don’t know. I don’t, I mean, people ask me this all the time and I don’t know what to say because I feel overwhelmed consistently and stressed all the time. I guess I have the same fear that everyone has about making the leap, which is: I don’t want to do it at the wrong time and I don’t want to have a Plan B. I want to be smart about it and do something that’s good for me, because I’ve been balancing both for such a long time that I don’t want to take the leap and regret it.
Natalia: Do you think, financially, you’d be fine living off of your artwork, or do you need to be working your day job right now?
Meera: I don’t think I need to be doing anything. Sometimes I feel really conflicted about how I can do it all - so why not? Which is probably not healthy.
Natalia: Also, it’d probably stress you out if you didn’t do it all. Right? For me, I don’t like saying no to opportunities ever. I would rather give up sleep and my sanity to make it work.
Meera: Exactly.
Natalia: How do you spend your time on the weekend when you aren’t on the clock?
Meera: I used to be really adamant about working on the weekend all the time. I was like, “I need to do it. I need to do it. It’s the only way I’ll be able to go full-time.” After a few years of doing that, I felt really burnt out and my social life had taken a major hit. And, I wasn’t happy. I’m happy when I am making art but one thing cannot fulfill the other; it has to be a balancing act. In the last year, I’ve been making adjustments and making other things a priority. I think it’s frustrating because my journey is going slower, but it’s a lot healthier and I am a lot happier, so I think it is a nice trade-off. If I go more than two days without making art, it doesn’t feel good in a different personal way, so I just listen to myself and what I need.
Natalia: How long do certain pieces take? Does it depend on the size, I guess?
Meera: No. Depends on the content. A sketchbook piece might take 2-3 hours, and that’s just something I do for me - it’s not going to a client or in my portfolio, but I still want it to look a certain way. Client work can take, I don’t know, 20 hours sometimes. It’s not consistent, which is probably not good, but I spend whatever time it takes.
Natalia: I think it’s pretty cool that you dedicate time to pieces that no one else will see.
Meera: I mean, the sketchbook pieces are the most meaningful work I make right now - besides from book work. I am currently working on two new book proposals. Those are meaningful and for other people, too, which I love. The sketchbook pieces are just for me with obscure thoughts that I find beauty in.
I had the chance to look at Meera’s books prior to meeting. There’s a total of four books, all published between April 2014 and August 2015. Good for One Mediocre Shoulder Rub: Considerate Coupons for Couples is a collection of coupons for couples to gift each other, such as “one evening of complete control of the remote.” You're Cute: Cards to Break the Ice is a compilation of what I consider to be pickup lines, but Barnes and Noble describes as “dating cards designed to cleverly capture the attention of someone new.” Either way, they’re cute and funny and probably helped a lot of people break the ice. Daily Zen spans over a year and encourages drawing doodles in order to gain inner peace. It’s filled with inspiring quotes and illustrations by Meera. In similar vein, Meera’s most recent book, Start Where You Are: A Journal for Self-Exploration, is a self-help journal that also includes enlightening quotes and pictorial prompts.
Natalia: I saw that you’ve published books, most recently: Daily Zen and Start Where You Are. What was the process behind working on these and getting them published?
Meera: I was approached by the publishing company for Daily Zen after doing some smaller projects for them beforehand (Good for One Mediocre Shoulder Rub: Considerate Coupons for Couples and You're Cute: Cards to Break the Ice). They had the idea for the concept of the book and thought that I would be a good person to do it. It’s a daily journal with 365 drawing prompts and quotes on mindfulness. That was fun to do. It was fun to read so much literature to pick out what I thought would be beneficial for so many people.
Natalia: And then what about Start Where You Are?
Meera: Start Where You Are was my conception, and my idea, and my proposal. I wrote it and illustrated it. It feels like my kid.
Natalia: And you said you are working on two new book proposals?
Meera: Yes, so I haven’t sent them yet so I don’t know how much I can talk about them, but one is a children’s book and the other one is going to be another self-help nonfiction book for adults based on fear.
Natalia: A children’s book would be a new extension of work for you, right? What inspired that?
Meera: The children’s book proposal is inspired by my nephew because he’s a technology-freak and he isn’t even three, which scares me. So I’m working on a book that will be just as engaging, interesting, and interactive for him without being a sparkle of an iPad.
Natalia: Yeah, I see kids everywhere with their faces glued to screens and they all seem to have their own iPhones and iPads. Meanwhile, I just got an iPad and I think I use it once a week to watch Netflix in the background as I work. Technology has definitely come a long way since when we were younger.
Meera: For myself, I feel like it’s negatively influenced me in terms of comprehension, because I read so much stuff on the Internet now. And I feel like I don’t absorb it as well and I read things in a quantitative fashion as opposed to a qualitative fashion now. I used to read so many more books than I do now and I used to be able to recite them and tell you what was going on, and now I’ve lost that.
Natalia: Well, the nice thing about what you do is that it is so separate from technology.
Meera: That’s why I insist on working with paint. I got the iPad so I could do some stuff digitally, but I only used it once or twice because I don’t want to be on the computer - I want to paint. There are some things I’ve changed because of timing and efficiency, but I don’t think I am going to ever stop being a mostly traditional artist.
Natalia: What about those shoes that you designed through Bucketfeet? I think it’s pretty cool that you are basically a shoe designer. Tell me about those.
Meera: So Bucketfeet... I’ve done two pairs for them - one is very simple, it’s just a bunch of brightly colored petals and then they just released my map shoes. They just came out a few weeks ago and I am so happy, they totally sold out. I’m actually doing an event with them at Facebook’s office painting custom shoes and talking about my work.
Natalia: So do people purchase the shoes and then you paint them?
Meera: I’ve done custom shoes for Bucketfeet before so I do a few designs that I think will work and then people will say “I love these” and I’ll recreate them. So every pair is a one-off.
Natalia: I can’t say this enough - you are really busy. You even teach an art class, right?
Meera: Right, through Brit & Co. They reached out to me in September of last year and I flew out to San Francisco in December to film the class. That was really scary for me.
Natalia: Really, why?
Meera: I feel very shy in general and everyone who meets me says I’m not but it’s taken me a while to be able to sit down, like with you, and open up and not feel self-conscious about it. My natural default stage is like a hermit. I like being alone and in my space. Some people like being surrounded by people all the time and that’s how they communicate, but I find that I communicate best through my work. That’s how I express myself best.
Natalia: Where do you get your inspiration? Any of the experiences in your life?
Meera: All of the experiences in my life. All of the people I meet. My friends and family, a lot. I try to make work that I think is meaningful and would help somebody else feel something. And I feel like the only way I can make that work is by feeling something myself. I like to make work that shows people that we are all the same and that we are all different and that there is something important inside of everyone, and that we should look for that.
Natalia: Your sister is a writer. Are your parents artistic at all?
Meera: My mom is super creative. She is a social worker. But she is a very good seamstress, knitter, crocheter, and she does embroidery. She’s always encouraged me. My dad isn’t artistic, but he is creative in so many other ways. He is very compassionate and empathetic. I think that has influenced a lot of my work, who I am, and who I am trying to become.
Natalia: I like how you described your dad as creative, but not artistically. How would you define “creativity”?
Meera: I think creativity comes from curiosity and the ability to see outside the way you thought things were. I think it can be applicable to any situation and any type of person. I think it’s such a worshipped trait in our world today and - not that I feel it shouldn’t be - but I don’t think it’s that rare. I think that everybody has it. Everybody has everything, right? You just have to cultivate it and nourish it if you want to. I don’t think creativity is something I’ve earned; everybody has it. I think what holds people back from being creative is fear and the inability to see past themselves. My dad is totally creative, he just doesn’t express it in the same way I express it.
Natalia: Is there anyone you’ve been reunited with through your work? Anyone from high school or another part of your past?
Meera: That’s a fun question. Yeah, tons of people. Tons of people from high school have reached out to tell me that they think it’s great what I’m doing or they love my work; or some people have reached out and said, “hey, I really like the person you’ve become and I want to be friends and catch up.” So, I’ve had a few friendships rekindled and it’s really sweet and it’s cool to see who people have grown up to be. And usually they’ve grown up to be somebody great. I think I feel strange in a lot of ways that my work is so exposed on the Internet. Sometimes I feel more uncomfortable when friends that I grew up with but are no longer in my life or family members I am not close to are looking at it. I feel more awkward about those people than people I’ve never met. I think that fear comes from being judged; like, this person knew me when I was 8, or 15, or 25 and what do they think about me now? I think it’s ok to feel those things as long as I don’t let it stop me from making my work. I think about it sometimes and I feel it sometimes, but as long as I don’t let it stop me, I’m ok with it.
Natalia: I feel like political correctness is essential for people in the spotlight now. I get the sense that a lot of people censor their feelings. Has that ever affected your work?
Meera: I had an internship in January with Today in Tabs, which is a liberal daily newsletter that is politically driven. I drew a comic everyday based on the news and at first I felt uncomfortable because I was all of a sudden taking a stance on things. I was letting people know my opinion on feminism or abortion or the presidential candidates. I mean, in general it’s hard to be offended by my work. It’s very feminine, affectionate, and open. The worst anybody could say is that it’s really cheesy or stupid. With these comics, I had a position and it was evident. Initially, I felt that I worked so hard to have an aesthetic and an identity with my work, and am I throwing that off? But, I got over it because I am a multi-faceted person and the ideas I express through comics are another part of me and I think they are just as important as the open and accepting and empathetic part of me.
Natalia: As you and your opinion and perspectives mature, does your artwork mature with you? Are you able to see an evolution in your work aligning to your life?
Meera: Yes, when I was in high school, like 15 or 16, I made some dark, depressing, weird stuff. It was a lot of themes about death and hurt and pain. Those things interest me less now, which is why I don’t focus on them. I think life is really interesting; I think having the ability to feel so many emotions and not become ruined by them is interesting; I think realizing the importance of being able to feel the whole spectrum of an emotion is interesting. So I try to focus on that. I don’t think I only make happy work, but I don’t think I made destructive work. I went through some things that I thought were difficult for me, but I learned from them and I grew from them, and I made changes within myself from them. People have patterns, right? Everybody has patterns. And people will have the same experience over and over again, and I think the worst thing you can do is not learn from them. Most importantly, I’ve learned how to respond instead of react. I used to be angsty and resentful and I closed down a lot; now, whenever I want to close down, I stay open.
Natalia: Some people consider art to be lonely; how do you feel about that?
Meera: Yeah, I think art can be lonely. I think I learned that when I worked so much that I got burnt out and wasn’t paying attention to anything going on. Making art can be isolating; it depends on the type of art. What I do is very solitary and fleeting. It doesn’t feel good all of the time. I think that’s the trade-off. I think that life is pretty lonely, so I don’t know if art specifically is lonely, but I guess it’s one of the parts of my life where I face it the most. Some people face it at their work, or in their relationship, or at school - so I think loneliness is something that shows itself over and over again in different ways. On the flipside of art being lonely, is that it’s not. It’s connected me with so many people that I’ve never met and am never going to meet. I get emails from people all around the world and I’ll never get sick of people telling me that a piece that I made is helping them through a tough period of their life or makes them feel good. So that is very not lonely.
Natalia: Do you consistently set your personal bar higher every time you reach a goal, or do you feel satisfied with everything you’ve done?
Meera: There’s so much more that I want to do. I think it is easy to lose perspective and forget all of the things you’ve already done. I can be better at maintaining a better sense of perspective. It’s very easy for me to think, “I haven’t done anything,” or “this could be better,” or “this is taking too long.” If you ask me flat-out, most of the time I’ll tell you I’ve done nothing. Not because I don’t feel fulfilled - because I do - but it’s because I want to do so many things. And I want to say so many things with my work. I wonder if that ever goes away? I feel like everybody I know wants to do so much, so I don’t know if it goes away. There are a lot of different facets of illustration that I haven’t even touched yet. I want to do huge murals. I want to make street art. I want to write a novel. I want to write poems. I want to do paper products. And, you know, more than I’ve done. I don’t think I’ll ever stop feeling that way, because that’s why I make stuff. I don’t think that’s going to go away.
Art Collision: Kaela Garvin & Julia Pugachevsky
Transcript:
MD: Welcome to Episode 2 (who knew we’d make it this far?!) of Art Collision. I am your host Michael Doshier a.k.a. Johnny Darlin in musical land. And in this episode of Art Collision, I sit down with Julia Pugachevsky, creator of the web series "Life After Fat," and Kaela Garvin, co-creator of the web-series "2 Girls 1 Asian." Julia and Kaela are both friends of mine from college, but their creation and release of these series’ came as a shock to me as a friend and fan. Somehow, despite just graduating school and carrying demanding day jobs and pursuing other artistic endeavors that I did know about, these two friends of mine were suddenly releasing these seemingly massive, highly collaborative, sleek-as-hell projects that I’ve always been deeply intrigued with. Where did they find the time and the funding and the casts and the inspiration? How personal were these projects to each of them, and what were the themes they were trying to explore? I couldn’t wait to find out the answers to these questions, but even more importantly, to see what happened when placing two strangers in a room together who had undergone similar processes to deliver very different, yet equally stunning, results. With, of course, some free-flowing Blue Moon, as always.
This is Art Collision: Kaela Garvin in Conversation with Julia Pugachevsky.
***
MD: Today I am here with Kaela Garvin of “2 Girls 1 Asian” and Julia Pugachevsky of “Life After Fat.” Thank you both very much for joining me today. In both of your series, you’re very much exploring the idea of identity. That’s evident from just the title of either of them. I’m curious why you chose that particular identity to explore and where that came from in your psyches and minds.
JP: For me, “Life After Fat” came from – I haven’t personally lost a lot of weight, but I’ve had friends who have, and who had sort of similar experiences where it’s sort of… adjusting to this new body, and feeling like there’s this definitive “new you”, which I strongly disagree with. I think as a society we teach women especially (but men as well) that once you transform into a new person, your life will be so much better and work out. That’s sort of the core of the show – exploring that aspect of it, and finding out who you really are in this way that isn’t being perfect all the time, or being thinner or having better skin or whatever it is. It’s a matter of finding that original person in all their new forms and tying them together.
KG: That was something I really liked about your series – and it was so subtle and cool – was that, it’s not just people who are overweight or underweight or going through weight change that face body image issues. It’s everybody. You see that in all the characters in their relationships, so I thought that was really subtle and cool. We chose to focus on racial identity because me and my friend Kelly who created it, it’s something we always talk about. We’re both half-Asian and we’re usually the two People of Color in the room – if not the only ones, there may be someone else of a different race. But we are usually the only Asian people in the room. So there are a lot of micro-aggressions that go on all the time. There’s this persistent American idea that being Asian is “other” and “foreign” no matter how long you’ve been in the country. There’s also all these other crazy things that men say to Asian women online, in-person, on the street. The other day in Chelsea, there was this guy just yelling “Ni hao” at me for forever. Twice in one day! I walked past him two times and maybe he was yelling “Ni hao” at everybody, but I don’t think so! So, yeah, for us it was the obvious thing that if we’re creating avatars of ourselves going through the world, something that we connect to as friends and artists when we’re working in a room as diverse as they get, race is a thing that comes up a lot for us. So we took that and ran with it, and took it up to 100 in the series, but it was something that was real in our lives.
Julia Pugachevsky.
MD: Both shows are based in New York City – you both live in New York City and they feel like New York shows. What does that backdrop add to the show?
JP: When I started “Life After Fat,” I was around 21 so I was super into Girls. I still am; I still watch it with a more critical eye now (especially when it comes to race and inclusivity, although I think Lena Dunham has grown a lot as an artist) but when I first saw it, I was so amazed. I think because I had never seen someone who looks like Lena Dunham portrayed in a sexual way. Or, a way that’s earnest and not the punch line of a joke. And I just love the style of it – they had these friendships that were not always perfect and even catty sometimes, which I think can happen in your 20s. The people you think are your friends are perhaps your friends for the wrong reason. There was something about the grittiness of it I loved and I found kind of real at that time. During the first season of “Life After Fat,” that’s definitely true where there’s a little bit of jealousy and cattiness and everyone’s struggling to find a job. Coming out of college, in addition to any weight transformations or personal changes, you also have the change of not being supported by your parents anymore and having to make a name for yourself, having to make a life for yourself. All of that combined, being 20 in New York is maddening; it really is. It’s a struggle.
KG: Both of our series look at being a woman in New York City, going through daily life, interacting with this crazy huge metropolis which is the best place in the world but at times super “other” and scary and isolating. For us at least, it was an obvious choice – we met here, we live here. The filming it, perhaps, in one of our hometowns (Kelly is from Maryland, I’m the from San Francisco Bay Area) – we’re both from total suburbia. So the situations we find ourselves in may even be more aggravated because they’re less frequent. I think here, there’s a fast-paced thing that makes every event seem both more significant and less, depending on how your day’s been.
JP: That’s very real. I also like that you gave that nod to Hannah Horvath in your pilot. That was so good, and I was thinking the same thing. It reminds me of the opening scene of Girls where the parents are like, “We’re actually cutting you off.” It reminded me of both Girls and Broad City – in Broad City, you have them both skyping each other, and you’re both having these Skype conversations with your parents at the same time. It’s like, surreal and hilarious but also feels so, so real at the same time. Your friends are just with you in these very strange times.
KG: With our real parents messing up their lines!
MD: That was one of my questions! Those were your real parents?
KG: Yeah, we did it before Aziz! (laughs) No, we skyped both of our parents in their houses in Maryland and California to film that scene and my dad was reading a paper and you can see it! You can see that he’s doing it. And one of my friends messaged me and was like, “So your dad hasn’t memorized, huh?” Sorry!
Kaela Garvin.
MD: Dad was not off-book. Do your parents watch the whole series?
KG: They did! Actually in the mid-season, it starts with an episode where we have period shits and we’re in the bathroom and Kelly’s farting a lot. My dad, when I went home for Christmas, he was really mad. He was like, “We only watched two minutes then we turned it off. You should really think before making material like that.” But then he was like, “Yeah, well, I don’t know, it’d be easier for me to swallow if it was like a dude doing it.” And I was like, “That’s why we’re doing it!”
JP: I so agree with that too. In the pilot of “Life After Fat” there was a joke that people always comment on. One of the girls talks about sneezing and her tampon falling out. I don’t know, it’s something that I’m so excited about when I see female web series creators, because I think that’s something we need to tackle. You know, like, why is it only in Judd Apatow movies you have guys doing gross stuff or being weird? I feel like Broad City is something that I’m very, very excited about for that reason too. Women being kind of like the guys, cause we are. There’s no rule that we can’t be this way. I think showing that vulnerability, both series’ have that in common where you’re showing women being themselves and fucking up and it’s okay and it can be cute, even.
MD: I wanted to talk about my favorite episode of each one. I’ll start with you, Julia. My favorite episode was “Brunch” largely because of the interaction between Lauren and Ellen. To me, it speaks to the existential dread most artists – at least myself – have which is worry that I’m not doing enough. In that scene, she was literally told she wasn’t doing enough. It was poignant and hard to watch, and weirdly inspiring because you could tell she was going to go out and do more.
JP: Yeah, originally Ellen was supposed to be Russian, like an Olga or something. My parents are from the Former Soviet Union. I used to take music classes at this Russian Music Academy. There’s such a difference and it can be a lot harsher. I think having parents that are Ukrainian and not American – they would always criticize other parents of my American friends, like, “What is it with this country where we tell everyone they’re good all the time. That’s sick, that’s bad.” It’s weird; I sort of grew up in between that, being a kid of immigrants. It’s always like, “if you want to do something artistic,” and my parents have always been supportive of that, but they’d say, “You have to work for it. We won’t support you if you’re going to drink and fuck around and say you’re an artist.” So, I think that’s the message with that. Lauren is someone who wants to be an actor as so many people do, but her perception of what is trying hard is not actually trying hard. This woman, she’s older and more experienced, looks at her like, “You have everything. You have all this privilege, this time, this money to actually put into something. Why aren’t you doing every tiny thing that you can when you’ve been given so much?”
MD: My favorite episode of “2 Girls 1 Asian” was the Super Musical Episode.
KG: We sort of came up with the idea while driving around in her car when she had a car in the city. She’s now in grad school back at home in Maryland, but we’d drive around and toss around ideas, which is where we came up with the whole season. We were super excited about the musical episode. For the first season, I’d churn out a draft based on an outline Kelly would give me and then we’d outline what each scene might look like. Then I’d go back and write it and she’d give me notes and we’d go back and forth and then our director and D.P. Dorian and Tyler would give us notes and rewrites. So it was very a collaborative process. The first draft of the script, though, the lyrics were not that super different. Then we realized if you want to use that music, it has to be a parody legally. So I went back and really hacked at the songs and most of those lyrics stayed which is what you hear. Then we brought on board a couple of great musicians – one is Lance Jabr, who I went to High School with. He’s back in the Bay Area now but at the time he was at NYU for grad school. And a guy I went to class with, John Franco, who is an amazing pianist. So we recorded it all in one of the actress’s apartments, actually, cause she at the time had a sound studio set up. So it was a lot of moving parts, but I loved recording it, I loved doing all the music, and Kelly and I both come from a Musical Theatre background so it was fun to be total dorks about that. It was a lot of fun to shoot, but it definitely sucked up the most budget and time out of any episode because we had to do so much for it.
MD: I want to talk about the ending of each season one of your series, how I interpreted it, allow you to expand on that or correct me if I’m wrong, and talk about the future of what these characters are going to go through in the upcoming seasons, as much as you want to say about that. I’ll start with you, Julia, the last scene of “Life After Fat” read to me as this amazing moment where our protagonist made a decision to change her life in a radical way. In her decision to approach this group of artists that inspire and challenge her and leave this guy behind that she is hanging out with – which is not something she had done at that point, she seemed very apt to hook up or date whoever made themselves available to her. It seems like her friendship drama with her roommate is out of her mind at this point and she’s committed to going to something new in her life.
JP: She’s sort of this character that has this new body but doesn’t feel attached to it yet. Partially because she never felt people liked her or accepted her for who she was before this change. She’s bouncing from guy to guy – you never know if the sex is good for her. She hooks up and does these things because she feels like they’ll validate her in some way. Regardless of if you have this backstory or not, I feel like that’s something a lot of women – myself included – go through. I’d say the early years of my 20’s were like, getting drunk and hooking up and pretending to have this emotional barrier of “I don’t care! It’s fine!” And pretending to always be the chill girl. Her exterior is that she’s not very emotional unless she’s pushed. Her brother sort of pushes her a lot and that’s the first time you see her break, really. She’s almost like, disturbingly calm. You can see it drives her friends crazy and they all worry about her. So I think this is a chance of her – seeing this beautiful thing, this Burlesque dancer, and deciding to take this chance and try it. It’s showing more vulnerability, it’s healthier, and it’s something that could promote actual self-love, which is something I want to explore. In season 2, not to spoil too much, it’ll be the first time she actually falls in love with someone and I think that will be something where she’s really exploring these emotions for the first time and allowing herself to be vulnerable in this very, very real way. That’s sort of where I want to see her character grow and really challenge her. It’s easy to be this, I don’t know, sort of like you’re floating above your body the whole time and not really interacting or reacting to things.
MD: That’s beautiful. (laughs) I was just really moved by that! I feel the need to take a risk in my life and totally shake things up! And then, for you, Kaela, I felt that the ending of “2 Girls 1 Asian” was kind of the opposite, but just as inspiring and moving. For me, it read that they had this moment where they could radically change their lives by taking a break from their friendship, but instead the moment they decide to give that a shot, they realize they are each other’s partners.
KG: We actually rewrote most of the last episode. We shot it all in a car on the road in Sleepy Hollow, New York. We scouted out the location the night before. We were like, “Eh, this script isn’t doing it for me,” so as we were talking we started to improve a scene until we thought we had it right for the end. It was always going to be that ending, though, of them trying to walk into the wilderness with their dead car by the side of the road. But looking forward, we did three more episodes as a mid-season that aren’t tied down to any storyline. They’re basically back in Brooklyn up to their normal antics. Friends are really your lifeline, especially in New York City, so in season 2 we’re trying to figure out some of our ideas, especially now that we’re physically separated. Our series has always been ludicrously autobiographical – we’ll take what’s going on in our real lives and totally explode that into something we think is funny, I don’t know if it’s actually funny, it’s funny-ish. But we’re hoping to look into what happens – and this was an idea pitched to us in a writer’s room for the midseries – what if one of the girls goes to grad school? How do they deal with each other gaining success without the other one? Maybe not even without, but separate. And that’s something that actually happened in our real lives, and I think we’re interested in looking into that and what that means for the fictional Kaela and Kelly.
JP: Something I love about your series and am almost jealous of in a way is that they have this beautiful friendship and it’s a love story. It’s platonic, but I think you’re seeing them overcome these things together and they have conflicts within that friendship, but you can’t see one without the other. I think seeing one person succeed, especially with acting where it’s so…it can be so raw, all the emotions of pursuing an artistic career in general. Seeing one friend succeed without the other is hard, because success is so rare in general. I don’t know. I’m so moved by the friendship and I love shows where there are two women where they are so close, nice, and real with each other. They have a real genuine friendship.
KG: I think that’s why it’s so cool to see so many lady web series popping up. Institutionally, there’s not funding for women’s’ projects. I feel that in this independent arts community is where women get to shine because nobody’s giving us money.
JP: Or a chance. Women are half the population if not more, in this country at least. TV and playwriting have more space for women, but even playwriting, on Broadway you see a bunch of old white guy stuff rehashed a lot. With TV, you have Amy Schumer, you have Samantha B, you have Broad City, and you have Shonda Rhimes. You have all these women in power doing these cool things and it becomes this thing where webseries’ are getting picked up. If you are good enough, they will notice you. And I don’t feel the same way about Hollywood. And I think even where I work – I work at Buzzfeed – I love that we have so many strong women and I’m allowed to do stuff that’s content for women. I think the Internet web series realm is a really great place for female creators to thrive. For female filmmakers or aspiring filmmakers and writers – make something, put it on there, and be so good that they can’t not notice you.
KG: I think in general, artists, self-production is the way to go. It’s great that the Internet is around to publicize it. But it’s such a weird time to be an artist cause there’s so little real public funding and private funding is, you have to be commercially viable which translates into white, straight, and a dude. Which is like, so weird, that that’s…most of the world is not a straight white dude so why is that the entertainment they think makes money? They’ve shown if you make a series for Asian people or Black people or women, it’s going to do well. If it’s good.
JP: Tons of admiration for you cause you’ve done so many episodes. I was going through YouTube for "2 Girls 1 Asian", I was like “Holy shit!” They’re so long, too, with so much footage! It’s so much work, I was like, “Holy fuck, I have to get my life together!” It was so impressive and so great. I love your friendship with Kelly. It’s so cute and real.
KG: Yeah, I loved your series as well and I can’t wait to see more of it! I’m excited for season number 2!
JP: We’ve been so delayed…
KG: I feel like that’s Rule #2 of working in film. If Rule #1 is “Be Organized,” Rule #2 is “It’s fine if you’re not, cause no one else is!” Well, not really, but –
JP: It’s a beautiful mess. You have to fuck up a lot to get better. That’s the number one thing I’ve learned – you’re going to mess up two hundred times then maybe start getting a little bit better.
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Thank you so much to both Julia Pugachevsky and Kaela Garvin for joining me for a cross-web-series discussion on Things Created By People’s Art Collision. Season 1 of Julia’s “Life After Fat” can be viewed in its entirety at lifeafterfatseries.com. Season 1 and the mid-season episode-thruple of Kaela Garvin and Kelly Colburn’s “2 Girls 1 Asian” is at 2girls1asian.com.
Both are moving forward with their second seasons in 2016 and have laid the groundwork – available right now for you to watch - to be exploring very enticing territory this year. Both shows come highly recommended from your loyal host here at Art Collision who would never steer you wrong.
As always, please hit me up if you are interested in being paired up with another artist and coming over to share a few drinks with me and another artist. It would truly be my pleasure and just an FYI – I ALWAYS provide the drinks, so you get to drink for free and talk about your own shit!
All original music featured in this episode - outside of the music in the web series clips - was by the amazing JULIAN, and you can find JULIAN’s work at soundcloud.com/jalapeno_boi.
Until next time.
"Don't date me, I'm the NSA": a conversation with Mary Anderson
Adam Cecil: Do you want to explain, in your own words, who you are?
Mary Anderson: Hi, my name is Mary Anderson. I am from Florida. I currently reside in Brooklyn, New York, and I’m an artist?
Adam: Question mark?
Mary: Question mark. Yeah.
Mary Anderson’s work — whether it’s a performance, an installation, or a tweet — frequently takes everyday objects and places them into new contexts in order to examine our relationships with ourselves and with others.
Take, for example, her project “The X-Files.” Inside plain blue files — the real life version of something you might find on your Mac’s desktop — are complete logs of all of her communication with anyone she’s ever kissed. Emails, letters, mixtapes, Facebook chats — the contents of these innocuous files represent the entire written record of a relationship. When I look at her files, I think of the vague threat of a permanent record somewhere at my old high school. I think, too, of the crushing banality of bureaucracy.
It’s a theme that she also explored in her interactive installation “Office Space,” created with collaborator Kate Weigel. Here, art peacefully co-existed with half-empty boxes of CapriSun. There was a dead flower and a bed of dirt inside of a desk drawer. The X-Files, too, lived in a plain black organizer on top of a desk, surrounded by grey cubicle walls.
Both of these works explored the idea of voyeurism (which made her the perfect subject of an episode of Spacebook, my documentary web series that explores its subjects’ lives through object history), but they also bring up questions of public and private space in the Internet Era. Who owns a conversation on Facebook, or, more importantly, who owns a shared experience?
Mary and I sat down a few weeks ago to discuss that question, as well social media performances, Burger King, and what happens when you co-opt a puddle.
Adam: One of the things that I’ve dealt with in the past is finding a way to share a live performance in a way that’s more permanent. I’m wondering what you think about that and how you deal with that.
Mary: That’s such a difficult thing that I think about often. Really weird performances have so many aspects to them, and it’s hard to convey even through video or a written script of it. It’s almost impossible. They don’t accurately portray the event or the performance.
Recently, I’ve been thinking more about performance through social media. If the performance is through social media, then it’s a performance, but it’s also evidence of the performance. So if it’s both, it accurately portrays the intention more than just a piece of evidence of a performance where you’re still not clued in on what’s really going on. Who is in this performance? Were there specific moments where the performer interacted with people? That’s not portrayed in any of my stuff.
Adam: Do you think that looking back at the evidence of a social media performance is more accurate than, say, a video of a performance?
Mary: Yeah, definitely, yeah. Because there’s nothing that happens offline, really, so there’s nothing else to capture. In video, there are things that maybe the camera itself didn’t see or didn’t hear, and that’s lost. I guess that has a mysticism to it or a nice quality. But I think that when people don’t get the full story, they just get turned off by it.
Adam: But something is happening offline, though, right? Even if you’re just an individual person who’s like… I don’t know… an example that comes to mind immediately is that Periscope of the puddle. Do you know about that?
Mary: No.
Adam: It’s such an insane thing. But these people were in their office, there’s this big puddle outside their window, they called it the Drummond Puddle or something. I’ll share the Vice article with you, they did an oral history of it. But they just set up an iPhone and live-streamed it for hours. Almost half a million people live-streamed this puddle. And then it got to the point where someone went on it with a floatation device, and people were tweeting at him, and being like, “You’re a shithead. You’re a cunt. You’re ruining the puddle.”
Mary: Oh my God. That’s really funny, but also sad.
Adam: So, yes, if you save the Periscope video, that’s a record of it.
Mary: And those tweets are a record as well. But then what that guy experiences when he receives those tweets is not captured.
Adam: Right. All of those tweets exist out there, but how do you present them?
Mary: Yeah, especially since there’s so many media intertwining themselves together. You can be having a conversation that’s in reference to something that’s going on with Peach or something… even though that’s obviously a dead thing. Then you have all these different media, and what’s the best way to capture that? Multiple screenshots? That doesn’t feel right.
I guess the audience would have to just see each channel separately, looking at two paintings and acknowledging that they’re by the same artists.
Adam: To me, kind of like with this Vice article where they’re picking certain moments to share, you’re saying “These are the moments that defined the puddle.”
Mary: It’s curated, yeah.
Adam: Exactly. Inherently, by reliving it, you’re curating an aspect of it. For starters, there’s no way that one person who’s watching that Periscope can experience everything that’s also happening on Twitter, or happening somewhere else. Even if you’re following a hashtag or something. Anyone who is looking back at it later, it’s not the same experience.
Mary: Do you just accept that as part of the performance? This continual fuel of curation? Like, if it’s passed to me, I’m going to pull parts I think are funny, and then you’ll see it, and then you’ll pull parts you think are funny. It totally becomes something else.
Adam: As part of your live performances, there’s an audience there. And any performance artist is going to think, “Okay, the audience is part of this performance.” So I wonder, on social media, is there still that dichotomy between the performer and the audience? Is there a chance to break that barrier down even further?
Mary: When you say dichotomy between performer and audience in a live setting, you’re saying there’s a stage, right?
Adam: Even if there’s not, there is.
Mary: Even if there’s not, there is, right? So there’s me doing my thing to everyone else. Where in social media, maybe there’s a chance where it’s more person to person and that in itself is an artwork. It’s like me preaching or performing or acting to you or something, right?
I believe that could be a thing. I guess the thing that would stop me from totally agreeing with you right now is thinking about how many followers you have and how widely known you are. If I’m, I don’t know, Katy Perry talking to you, I’m going to be on the stage no matter what, right? Even if we’re just having a conversation, people are mostly going to be looking at me.
Adam: That reminds me of every time I see a Buzzfeed article that’s like, “12 Times J.K. Rowling Totally Owned People On Twitter.”
Mary: Yeah. And it’s like, there she is, she’s on her stage with her power. It’s about power, I think.
Adam: Thinking about that… I want to go back to the example of the puddle, but I understand that you didn’t see the puddle.
Mary: I want to see the puddle, though.
Adam: You have to go back. One of the things that happened was that Domino’s tried to co-opt it by having a delivery boy go with a Domino’s box—
Mary: Are you serious? That’s really funny.
Adam: It’s insane. Do you follow the Twitter account @BrandsSayingBae? It’s just this Twitter account that re-tweets terrible brand tweets that are trying to get in on these conversations, like Pizza Hut trying to respond to Kanye about liking anal or whatever. Why does Pizza Hut have to interject into that conversation? But it’s interesting because those brands expect to be the power player in that situation. Or expect to have the power.
Mary: But instead, they’re just laughed at. They’re the fool if they’re trying to get in on this. It’s just a weak attempt of branding or marketing.
People always talk about social media and the internet as the democratization of power. But it’s like… it’s still very much there and we’re all feeding into it in different ways.
Adam: Going back to before the puddle, what kind of social media performances have you done?
Mary: The first thing that comes to mind is a performance piece I did called “Come @ Me.” I would go to really big-name franchises like McDonald’s or the M&Ms factory or White Castle, where they have these really weird monuments of their mascot or their burger or whatever they’re trying to sell you. They’re just these weird, monolithic, ancient statues. In 2016, these things are really sad looking.
I would go in-person to these places and take weird photos with these objects, and then tweet at the company, and see if there was a conversation that would happen, or if they would tweet back at me, or if other people would tweet at it. I guess, projecting some kind of really personal loss or sadness onto such a huge, faceless company and seeing if they would respond. Is there sadness within that facelessness? Is this act of social media intervention a faceless act because they receive so many tweets all of time? Is it just screaming into the void?
There are so many things that could happen when you put something out in public. I think that’s interesting.
Adam: Did something interesting happen?
Mary: Yeah, so one of the tweets is based off Charles Ray’s Plank Piece, where he’s backed up against the wall, and the plank is hitting him and holding up against the wall. So I did that with these giant French fries that I got from Burger King. I tweeted the picture at them with the caption “You got me just where you want me” and #watchlikeaking because Burger King was having some kind of competition where they were like, “Hashtag this and you’ll get a lifetime supply of Burger King,” which I didn’t really want.
But they tweeted back at me and they were like, #satisfried. And I was just like, “Okay. Is this what you want?” It was such a funny remark and, of course, it’s a pun, and I’m sure they respond with that to other people. I responded with #saddestfry. And then they didn’t respond to me.
Adam: So, in this mode of performance, you’re specifically recognizing that Burger King has the power, and then challenging that?
Mary: Yeah, definitely. Like a little boy who throws a rock at the king.
Adam: But they still tried to co-opt that.
Mary: Yeah, just like you were saying with the puddle. They want to be in on it. They want to be cool. Even if you’re making fun of them, they’re like, “Oh, you can’t make fun of me, I’m going to tweet back and then I’m a part of it.” It’s like, okay, you could try, but you’re still the ass of this joke.
I also did a video on Instagram at the Myrtle Wyckoff Burger King. They have all of these weird cars because they’re going for a ‘50s drive-thru aesthetic. I pretended I was under the car dying. I put ketchup on my body. And this little girl who’s eating her Happy Meal or whatever is walking around the car and seeing me do this performance. She goes, “Mom, I think she’s making a joke.” And then her mom is like, “I don’t know, honey. Let’s go this way.” And then ushers her away from me.
Adam: So the performance is not just on social media. The performance is also the act of taking it. If you didn’t document it at all, had just done it at this Burger King and then it’s gone, how does that change that aspect of the performance to you? What is the “pre-social media” part to you?
Mary: It has such a different meaning because I wanted it to be this funny thing that would at least see the eyes of the social media manager of whoever runs these crazy, giant social media handles. But if there’s no social media involved, then the only people who are seeing it is the employees, and the people around. It’s just not the right audience for this piece if social media isn’t a part of it.
Adam: But the social media manager is also just an employee, too, right?
Mary: Yeah, that’s true. But she doesn’t have to deal with this in person, you know? It’s less in her face. She didn’t have to clean up ketchup that I spilled. I didn’t spill ketchup, though; I left it clean.
Adam: Does the interaction with whoever the faceless person who’s running the account even matter? They’re reacting to it, but they’re reacting to it as the company, not as themselves. You’re both performing.
Mary: I like the idea of talking to Burger King, as a concept, instead of people doing a day job. Because people who see it on Twitter, they’re going to see it as @BurgerKing, not at their social media manager. It’s the idea of having this fictional conversation.
Adam: From what I’m hearing, it’s like, even though there is a physical reality to your performance, it’s really happening in this weird otherworld.
Mary: Yeah, it’s fiction. I’m participating in a poem or a story rather than real life. I’m trying to have this conversation with a monolithic presence that is not personal at all, trying to have a conversation with them about something real, even though you know they don’t care enough to respond or are trying to co-opt it to sell me something or sell my followers something. I think there’s something interesting there.
Adam: One of the things I wanted to ask you about is, when you’re performing something, and maybe twenty people in the world ever see it, in a way, statistically, it’s like screaming into the void. That throws away the idea that you can change the world one person at a time, which is one of the whole points of our… whatever. But on social media, the way we interact with social media can be so fleeting as well. It’s not nearly as immediate. The idea of the fictional artifice, it almost throws up a wall in-between everyone involved.
I’m wondering how you deal with that as an artist, just how different dealing with something that’s very physical versus something that’s not, that’s just totally fictional.
Mary: Online, yeah, I guess it’s fleeting. I’m sure more people will probably see this work on my website than they will on Twitter, because it’s just so far back there and no one is going to backstalk me that hard unless they’re just a stalker.
Adam: I’ll have to do it.
Mary: Oh, my God, yeah. I’m sorry. It’s on my site. Just take it from there. But yeah, I think you still have impact there. Even though people will realistically only see your tweet or Instagram for five seconds tops, that does make a difference.
I just met, recently, for the first time some people who follow me on Twitter. They reached out to me. “Mary, you seem cool. We seem cool.” And we met up. I’ve hung out with them for a few times. They took note that I was interested in the same things as them and they reached out. Somehow, it’s still possible to have a connection and make a difference through something as fleeting and mindless as scrolling through a feed.
It’s not as fun as a real performance, though. You get so much adrenaline; you can feel the people there. They give you energy, you know? Social media, you can’t give energy as easily.
Adam: There are two big pieces that you’ve done, “Office Space” and “The X-Files,” that I feel tap into this office work setting. I know, when you made them, you were a student, which means you weren’t working in an office…
Mary: I was, actually, a part-time work-study job at an NYU office.
Adam: So what’s your relationship with offices, with files, with those physical objects that then find their way into your work? How did that happen for you?
Mary: “The X-Files” came before “Office Space,” and it was just this random thing. It wasn’t even for an assignment. I was just talking to my friend Kate and walking down the street, thinking about people I’ve dated in the past, remembering them, and thinking, “There’s just so much stuff I’ve forgotten,” and feeling sad about that. I don’t really miss these people, though, I just miss knowing about them, knowing about the relationship we had.
Adam: Because it’s also your life. You’re forgetting parts of your life.
Mary: Exactly, and it’s such a scary thing to be forgetting parts of your life. So I thought, “What if I just start logging everything?” Really, manically logging every single piece of information that anyone I’ve ever dated or kissed or whatever has ever sent to me as an attempt to save or preserve what we had in some weird way. So I did.
Later, Kate and I were proposing a show. We like installations because we think they’re fun and more accessible to people who are not really into art. We were talking about weird spaces we could appropriate, and I was working in an office at the time in a branch of NYU, their insurance branch. They just had a bunch of cubicles all curved in towards each other. No one sat at these cubicles, and there were just piles of trash. They called it “The Void.” They would tell me, “Oh, go put it in the Void. No one knows what to do with that. Don’t file it. Just put it in there.” It was actually terrifying.
But anyway, I would do remedial work and would sometimes take some of their office supplies to make art. I had already collected so much office supplies, and Kate and I were thinking about how offices are such a weird, sad place. They’re grey, and people spend most of their lives there, and they’re filled with small talk and bad Keurig coffee, and dust, and sitting in chairs for ten hours. It’s such a sad idea.
As an art student looking at that idea, looking at life with an idealistic lens, you’re like, “I don’t want that to be me. That seems sad. Those people can’t be happy.” Of course, you don’t really know that.
But the idea of sadness, I think, is so greatly personified through an office. Especially this office. We created a consulting agency, because what do consultants really do? No one really knows, so no one was going to ask us. We called it “Grey Square Consulting,” which is a play off of the white cube, which is a gallery, and the black box, which is a theater, and the grey square is just a purgatory of both. We were playing with performance, but also playing with a white box, and art, and what does that mean? And, of course, playing with the idea of voyeurism.
Adam: What part of an office personifies sadness for you?
Mary: So much of it. The cubicles, the grey barriers between people in old office spaces. They’re so sad. I don’t have a cubicle and I guess most people don’t now, because everyone’s moving to open work spaces in general. Which is also scary, in a different way. With a move away from traditional office spaces, companies are like, “Oh, we’re going to have a band tonight. Let’s have a happy hour. Look, we’ll play a game.” And I personally feel, as much as I enjoy free snacks, that it’s just a way to get you to stay there longer and never leave.
Adam: With cubicles, too, even though you’re surrounded by fake walls and it’s claustrophobic, it is a space that you can carve out as your own.
Mary: Definitely. At my current work situation, I don’t have a place to tack family photos or to be by myself and know that no one’s watching me. You’re always on view for everyone. What does that do to your mental space? There’s almost something comforting now, looking at this piece. Maybe this barrier was the right idea.
Adam: That almost sounds like you’re describing social media, where you’re always performing and onstage. Going back to “The X-Files” — Do you have a filing habit? Do you file things? Is that a thing that you do?
Mary: No. I was at a job where I filed all the time, and I was always printing out labels and stuff. I actually used their labels and labeling software to make the labels for “X-Files.” But no, other than that, I can barely keep a journal. But I was just so dedicated to preserving that, specifically.
Adam: Do you feel like you’ve succeeded? As far as the goal to remember.
Mary: Kind of. I loved the objects so much, these files. I would have loved to keep them up, but I kind of let them fall by the wayside recently. I haven’t been putting stuff in them. And there’s so much that happens offline, too, that can’t be documented this way.
I e-mailed someone who is in “The X-Files” just the other day, just sending him a letter to say hi and catch up. He sent me a nice letter in return, and then he goes “P.S. none of the foregoing messages you received can be used in ‘The X-Files’ without my permission.” I never told him about it! He found out through a friend and he was not happy about it. I was just like, “Oh, man, I’m sorry.”
Adam: That raises an interesting question. Right now, digital privacy is a huge deal. And going back to that idea that everything on social media is fleeting, even though there’s a permanent record of it — in a way, “The X-Files” is playing with the idea of recording the internet.
Mary: Definitely. Don’t date me, I’m the NSA. Yeah, I e-mailed him back saying, “Look, I’m sorry. I just feel like it’s better with these things to beg for forgiveness instead of asking for permission.” And he hasn’t responded back to me.
But at the same time, who says that he owns this correspondence? Let’s be real, if he’s talking to me on Facebook, Facebook really owns it more than either of us to some extent.
Adam: You’re going to have to ask Facebook for their permission to use it.
Mary: Right — is Facebook going to get upset? It’s so interesting. Most of the other people don’t know. I asked one of my ex-boyfriends, because I gave him all of these mixtape, to take a picture of them for me. And he did. And he didn’t ask why, which was just stupid on his part. But in the photos of these CDs, you can see him with his iPhone in the reflection of the CD, which is so nice. It’s a nice little tidbit.
Adam: There is that weird expectation of privacy for these digital conversations that are both private and not private. What do you think the difference is between literally printing out a conversation or writing a poem using the conversation? Or writing a performance based on the conversation, using actual quotes?
Mary: I think people generally feel less naked when you make a painting or a poem of something than when you print out verbatim what they say. I think that’s a scary thing. Mostly, we give people the benefit of the doubt that they’re not going to use anything against us. The government, too, and Facebook. People just think, “Oh, what will they do with it?” They don’t really think much about it.
The other day, I was thinking about how I wrote a poem in high school where I literally printed out my Google search history. My teacher got really upset with me, saying, “This is not a poem.” What’s the difference between that and me writing a poem that’s just not just verbatim something?
In my eyes, they’re really not different. I think to the viewers’ eyes, as in to whomever I’m writing about or constructing art about, it makes a difference to them. That’s where things get tricky. It’s like when you write books about people, and you don’t really change their names, and there’s lawsuits. Who owns a shared experience?
In a way, it’s kind of unbiased to just print out everything. I’m sure there’s a lot of bad stuff I’ve said.
Adam: But because you’re presenting it, do we have a bias towards you?
Mary: Yeah, exactly. I do have a resume for each person, which is totally biased. And the people who see this are going to be people who know me, or somehow hear about me, right? So there’s that bias.
There’s a precedent of art like this, too. Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, where she documented her child’s life for six years. And Sophie Calle’s The Hotel, where she went into people’s hotel rooms pretending to be a maid and taking pictures of their stuff. To me, I think there’s still no call. It’s so grey. But I’m sure the person who found out about “The X-Files” does not see it as grey. Do you have thoughts? Do you think it’s wrong?
Adam: I think it’s interesting. To me, I go into pretty much all social media or whatever with the idea that it could get out there, you know? Reading Jon Ronson’s book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, made me realize that you can’t change how people perceive things over the internet. If you present something and you think it’s funny, whether in private or even putting it out publicly, someone can find it really offensive, and then they share it with other people who find it really offensive.
Mary: Yeah, and then there’s a hate group for you.
Adam: I think the biggest example is just all women who ever say anything about feminism on Twitter. It’s just a breeding ground for all hatred.
Mary: #NotAllMen, or whatever the fuck. My God, the stupidest thing.
Adam: You can’t change how things are perceived. But social media is different. I’ve gone to performances where I’ve thought, “I don’t like that.” But I don’t think, “Oh, I hate that person.” I might not even think, “Oh, I had a bad time.” Because even bad performances are still interesting to think about. Whereas on social media, everything is a performance until it’s not. Anything where someone takes you seriously, or just twist it in order to make it fit their narrative… maybe that’s just a performance, too.
Mary: I’m with you on that. I feel like I have such an Edward Snowden mentality, where I’m like, “Look, everything I say is pretty much going to be recorded at all times.” Especially on social media. You know it’s there and will be there forever in some sense.
Adam: Hence, the wisdom of the auto-tweet remover.
Mary: But people are lulled into a sense of false security somehow.
Adam: Plus, the assumption that no one is ever going to go that far back into your history, right? But then there are those stories from when Trevor Noah was becoming The Daily Show host, and people pulled back those tweets from like, three years ago where he said some stupid, sexist things. But then the narrative becomes, “He’s sexist now because of these tweets.”
I think it’s a good example of the difference between a comedy performance on Twitter and comedy performance in a nightclub. If he said these things in a nightclub, people would’ve just forgotten about them, and he could’ve realized, “Oh, those jokes are stupid and shitty, and I shouldn’t be saying them.”
But now that they’re on Twitter, he might still have that realization, but they’re just there, forever. And then it’s like your entire history just becomes flat. There is no history. Who you are in the past is who you are, now and forever.
Mary: You were talking about when women tweet something about feminism online, and people attack this person… they were just saying something about their experience. It’s not necessarily a shared experience. In “The X-Files”, I’m saying something, but there’s another person directly involved. I feel like that’s so tricky somehow.
Adam: There is that weird thing with the difference between public and private online. Nothing is private. To me, just thinking about the amount of screenshots of text message conversations I get. What’s the difference between sending a screenshot of a conversation to a friend and putting it in a permanent art project or in a gallery?
Mary: Exactly. One person sees it or a hundred people see it. That’s still a tiny percentage of everyone.
Adam: And if the problem is that someone else saw it, then it doesn’t really matter how many people it was. The transgression is the same.
Mary: And maybe you shouldn’t have written that. Yeah. It’s all up for grabs. Even at work, I tweet about my co-workers. And it’s nothing mean, just things they say that I think are funny. I’ll tweet, “Coworker said this today,” just using capital-C Coworker as an all-encompassing identity. It’s just the idea of a coworker.
But it’s not the same as screenshotting someone they said. It’s kind of like I’m extracting it. It’s more like me writing a poem.
Adam: It becomes a performance around the idea of what a coworker is.
Mary: Definitely. The idea of an office space. The idea of coworker. The idea of Burger King. It’s more fun to think about them that way. Even the idea of an ex-partner is kind of nice. I guess they all become ideas once it’s over, you know?
Adam: And just the act of curating or putting it away becomes art and abstracts it to a certain degree. Even a printed off Google search history…
Mary: It’s still abstracted. It’s still curated. It’s still very specific to that day. And it’s still a screenshot. Even if it didn’t take critical skill, it’s still an idea. You don’t need skill to create art.
You can find more evidence of Mary Anderson’s work and existence at her website and follow her on Twitter to get her latest social media performances delivered right to your phone.
Thin and Beautiful
“You and I are not the kind of women who can forget that we have a weight problem. That’s just how it is.”
This is the story of how I turned into that person.
Timeline
In the 2nd grade, my doctor told my mother that I should be put on a diet. I remember being offended that the doctor told my mother as if I weren’t even standing there. In fourth grade, classmates remarked that they wouldn’t want to see my body at a pool party. By seventh grade, I was called Fat Sarah or Whale by at least three or four boys daily on the school bus. On AOL instant messenger, several students anonymously told me I was chunky or ugly. As a sixth-grader, a friend’s brother told me I should be nice and skinny like our other friend, Christine. I didn’t see a reason to have any self-esteem, which resulted in tenaciously holding onto a middle school boyfriend that dumped me seven times. When I finished eighth grade, I was down to 137 lbs through extreme dieting. After drinking alcohol with my cousin at New Year’s, she showed me how to throw up on demand. Thankfully, due to having a friend whose teeth had decayed from severe bulimia, I didn’t feel compelled to purge very often.
In my sophomore year of high school, I was back up to 160-165 lbs. By 11th grade, I was down to 145 lbs thanks to Weight Watchers. By this point I had started exercising consistently. At Weight Watchers meetings, I was shocked to meet a woman who confessed to eating in a bathroom at her lowest point. I couldn’t understand how someone could ever get to that point. By 12th grade, I was down to 137 lbs. I realized I could eat less than Weight Watchers allowed so absurdly I started counting how many bites of food I allowed myself per day. I was terrified to see that this diet may have become mainstream five years later.
Through my freshman year of college, I dipped to my all-time low of 134 lbs, before I finally ended the school year at 157 lbs. My weight skyrocketed as I tried to save time by skipping the gym and I mistakenly believed I might be able to eat “like a normal person” and maintain my weight.
Eating like a normal person quickly turned into an excuse to eat everything I had craved and denied myself the past two years: pop tarts, peanut butter and jelly, Reese’s peanut butter cups, cookie dough, bagels, ice cream, even vanilla frosting. My diet had become so terrible and so embarrassing that I did what I once found unfathomable: I ate in the bathroom stall of my science building. I didn’t want anyone to ask me what I was eating (peanut butter and jelly mixed with cookie crumbs). I avoided mirrors, a scale, and any other signs which may have forced me to face the truth. The idea of having regained the weight I lost was so traumatic I continued to wear my “skinny” jeans even when I had to unbutton the zipper after sitting down for long stretches of time. I continued to wear those jeans even when they ripped open at the inner thighs. The holes were barely noticeable when walking, but I remember wearing them to the airport twice and getting patted down by the same woman. I can’t imagine what she was thinking when she pressed her gloved hand on my jeans and felt two gaping holes twice.
One of my worst memories was coming home from college having put on close to 20 lbs. The boyfriend that I hadn’t seen in months was silent about it. My brother joked about it and no part of me could laugh or even mention my weight. In the summer I got down to 149 with my three-apples-a-day-diet (and nothing more). My extreme dieting also led to occasional weekends of binging, including my birthday in which I ate so much threw up shortly after trying to go to bed. I regained the weight by the end of summer. Through my sophomore year, my weight had ranged from 149 to 169 lbs as I cheated Weight Watchers. Through junior year, I weighed 146 lbs for about a week before I started cheating Weight Watchers again. In the Spring semester of my senior year I went abroad where I was without a scale or measuring tape for four months. Terrified of gaining weight, I asked my host mother to cook me salad and grilled chicken or fish for all meals. Nonetheless, I would lie to her up to three times a week and say I was going to eat out with friends when really I went to Haagen Dazs alone to have a Belgian waffle with scoops of ice cream on top. Once, when my host mom set up a date with me and her nephew, I sent him home after I claimed to be too tired to go out; what I really wanted was to binge on ice cream. I was mortified when I bumped into my host mom and host dad at the ice cream shop. I can guess now that I was probably around 145-155 lbs during my time in Spain, which were relatively “good” numbers for me. When I graduated college, I weighed over 164 lbs. I had entered college weighing 137 lbs. I felt like an absolute failure.
In the two years since I’ve graduated college, I’ve continued to vacillate between the 150s and 160s. As I type this story, I weigh 155.0.
My Skinny Journey
The earliest age I can clearly remember dieting is at age 13. I found lots of “thinspo” and “thinspiration” through Xanga, an older blogging website, and saw other girls post their daily caloric intakes. Let me be clear: if these girls were posting their true diets on these websites, they were unequivocally anorexic. I knew that at the time and didn’t care. They looked good, which was all that mattered. I started eating 600 calories a day. Ironically, eating that little can actually make it harder to lose weight because it slows down one’s metabolism so much. Thankfully this extreme dieting phase only lasted about a month. Scarily, I remember my hunger pangs simply going away. I was able to eat a single piece of sushi all day and still feel comfortable and energized. I got to 135 lbs this way.
Since then, for at least seven years I have obsessed with my Body Mass Index (BMI). BMI is a tool used by physicians to determine whether you fall into the underweight, ideal, overweight or obese category according to your height bracket.
I was simply consumed with fitting into the “healthy” category of a BMI below 25. I was able to maintain a “healthy” BMI for about two or three years in high school. I preferred fast food and chain restaurants solely for the fact that they had calorie counts (and at times I am still comforted by a meal free of worrying about over or under-counting calories). Once, I ordered a boiled potato at an elegant Spanish restaurant because that was the only food I could definitively count on Weight Watchers (even this was a false premise; my family still won’t let me live that down).
After graduating high school, my weight had increased to up to 20 lbs above the BMI healthy limit (possibly more, of course I couldn’t weigh myself at that point). Sometimes my waist circumference would even be in the healthy category, and this I don’t put in quotation marks because visceral fat (the kind around your waist, and around your internal organs) is really the fat that is dangerous.
Even though I knew I was healthy in the important measures, I was still obsessed with that number. I became self-conscious of wanting to go into a health profession, in which I would be coaching patients on healthier lifestyles, when I myself had a BMI over 25. In my mind, it was the ultimate hypocrisy.
I realized I hit rock bottom when I was at one of my best friends’ engagement party.
First: A friend commented on how thin I looked. I said thanks but snidely replied that “I was still 12 lbs overweight,” so in my mind of course it didn’t matter how I looked. I was still fat, and I had no protection if I felt big or unattractive. The healthy BMI range was my shield; it could justify any remark with the feeling that I knew “I was in the healthy category” so I’m by definition, not fat.
Second: Leaving that same party, my friend invited me to visit him up in Boston. Again, I snapped. I don’t want to do anything until I lose 12 lbs! He knew I was crazy and this was “my thing” so he let it go. He told me loved me and hoped I had fun. I reduced his beautiful party to simply “having a lot of unhealthy food.”
An event he planned for months, that he sent out beautiful invitations for, that he spent his personal money on, that he had invited all his family members and only his absolute best friends to. I reduced it to being an environment that had high-calorie snacks that I ate too much of.
Something had to change. I was so angry at myself. I drowned myself in research and reflection. I can’t believe in the BMI scale anymore. Being factually in the overweight category never inspired me to change, become healthier or “resist” unhealthy food. It just made me feel helpless, de-motivated, stressed and unattractive. I had to believe that “BMI is bogus.” This is why I support the Fat Acceptance movement: it promotes body acceptance, not hatred, as the media (and your friends) do by suggesting thinner always means more beautiful. (For example: “10 Ways to Get Flatter Abs Today”; “How to Lose 5 lbs in One Week”; “You look AMAZING. Have you lost weight?!”; “Wow! You look so thin!”
I used to be very guilty of making these comments. If you accept your body and your size you are more likely to make healthier decisions that are better for you. And this is why I try not to buy magazines that fill their front covers with thin-centric messages that suggest you are not thin enough. And that is why I’m trying to be a lot more conscious of how I contribute, and thus, tell my friends that they are beautiful all the time, and not only when they’re thin.
Lessons
I’ve tried to drown myself in peer-reviewed research to try to make sense of why this has all been so difficult for me. Understanding the science behind why certain foods have addictive properties and learning about other weight losers’ struggles helps me to accept why I’ll never be “normal” around food. The lessons I’ve learned, from many books, documentaries, articles, research papers on the topic, are the following:
It is extremely difficult and rare to maintain a weight loss for more than 1 year, even more difficult to keep it off for 5+ years.
This is largely because in trying to lose weight or maintain a new weight, you are fighting the biology that was naturally selected for you through the course of human evolution. When humans didn’t know when their next meal would come, those who had the evolutionary “drive” to store the most fat were those that survived. As a result, we’re genetically programmed to desire and enjoy highly caloric, high fat, high sugar foods. For example: If your body was ever at a larger size, then you must consume fewer calories than another person at that same weight who has always been that weight.
I entered the magical 140s (magical because it was part of the healthy BMI range) at least six times in my life and gained the weight back. My longest stretch in this category was about three years. When I was unable to lose the “freshman 15” after my first year of college, I was embarrassed to go out in public, especially in my hometown. For three years I had based too much of my identity on someone who successfully lost and maintained that new weight. But I have lost and gained these 10-20 lbs almost every year since that time.
If it’s in front of you, it’s hard not to eat it.
My opinion, which is not in accord with all scientists, is that it’s not just about discipline. It’s about a food environment where the easy choice is almost always the unhealthy, obesogenic choice.
Over and over again I tried to buy junk food and resist eating it. I have memories of eating eight pop tarts or twenty-four pieces of cookie dough in a single day. I used to keep Betty Crocker’s vanilla icing in my dorm room and dip Girl Scout Cookies or Grandma’s Vanilla Sandwich Crèmes in them. I know I can’t buy junk food like this because binging makes my life miserable. I’ve become so used to this kind of life that sometimes I forget how abnormal I am. Recently I mentioned to an acquaintance that I had eaten a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in a single sitting and they were taken aback. I have eaten an entire pint of ice cream on so many occasions that I forget that anyone has the discipline to stick to one “serving size” (a fourth of the pint).
Sugar is not a “neutral” food providing “empty calories” just because it is devoid of nutrients.
Table sugar is called sucrose, which is made up of two parts: glucose and fructose. The sweeter component, fructose, is what really makes sugar such a powerful, controversial item. Fructose is the part of sugar that activates the reward centers of our brains and, as Dr. Lustig puts it, “we love [fructose]. We go out of our way to find it. Evolutionarily, there is no foodstuff on the planet that has fructose that is poisonous.” Thus, humans who liked fructose were naturally selected for because they were more likely to survive and breed children. This theory forms the evolutionary biology explanation for why humans evolved to like, even love, sugar (specifically fructose). Food containing sugar is like a “Darwinian signal” informing us that a food is safe. Food companies have taken advantage of this biological hack and attempt to sell more food by adding sugar to ketchup, bread, mustard, dressing and even meat. When more sugar is added to food, people eat more of it. Further, sugar prolongs the shelf life of food making it an even more popular additive. Unsurprisingly, excess sugar consumption is associated with obesity.
This lesson goes along with all the previous lessons: It’s really hard to keep weight off and that’s partly because it’s hard not to eat food when it’s in front of you. It’s especially hard to resist food in front of you when it’s sweet. I have an infamous sweet tooth: for my 17th birthday, a friend gifted me one of Costco’s 1000 packet boxes of Splenda. I opened it June 17th, and it was finished before school started in September.
Lastly, a calorie is not just a calorie.
Some calories keep you full and others don’t. Calories with fiber keep you full. A calorie is a calorie in a laboratory setting where study participants are locked up for a week and can only consume the food they are given. But in the real world, calories from processed food don’t keep you full so it’s much more difficult to lose weight.
Processed food calories don’t have fiber, which is important because it helps to keep you full. Fiber is also what makes the sugar in fruit safe and “neutral,” unlike added sugars – the fibers in fruit help to trigger your satiety signals and thus prevent you from overeating and damaging your liver. As Dr. Lustig points out, try eating 11 oranges and you will find it nearly impossible to consume them all. On the other hand, consuming the liquid equivalent of 11 oranges is easy because the fiber is removed by juicing the fruit. Processing food includes stripping food of its fiber because removing it prolongs a food’s shelf life. This information helped me to give up on eating candy all day.
Where I Am Now
I can relate to many of the people featured in HBO’s Weight of the Nation: Choices documentary. I can relate to Yolanda, who has to throw out half of her Kit-Kat bar when she buys a 210-calorie bar because it’s just too hard for me to not eat the whole thing. I can relate to Vivia, who at 5’5” weighs 341 lbs. She explains that “food can be my best friend… Food can be my boyfriend at the moment.” I know exactly what she feels like. I remember a particular moment when I felt neglected by a boyfriend – my thoughts were immediately “at least I’ll always have chocolate.” And even though I told myself I wouldn’t become someone more interested in food than people, seconds after my high school boyfriend went away to college I ate an entire box of Weight Watchers fudge bars. I can relate to the woman who can gain 10 lbs back in a weekend; my record is 11 lbs in just a week.
In order to keep myself accountable, I’ve had a food and exercise diary since 2012, now nearing 200 pages. I try to withhold telling family and friends what my favorite sweets are because it has always led to good-intentioned friends gifting me binge-worthy food. Upon learning that I would try to withhold this information from them, however, they would just buy me more sleeves of Oreo cookies and pints of hazelnut ice cream.
I still cannot gift people sweets, because I’ve eaten the sweets I’ve intended to give people. I won’t allow myself to buy more than one sweet at a time because it's a signal that I'm about to binge. When I do buy those sweets, I won’t buy anything over 600 calories unless I plan on throwing some of it away as soon as I buy it. While this may sound restrictive, I actually allow myself to eat all sweets and don’t feel the need to binge in the way I used to. I’m much more relaxed having these little rules to live by because I know if I throw a little bit of the package of cookie dough out beforehand, I won’t eat it until my stomach hurts and I only want to lie in bed.
Trying to enact political change also helps me to cope with my obsession and painful past. The role of government is to take on issues that are too large for us to solve individually. “Eat less, move more” encourages us to make healthier decisions, but the weight of the nation continues to rise. While I am fully responsible for my weight fluctuations in the past, I would still like to help create an environment where it is difficult for a child to grow up obese. Being mocked everyday riding the bus to school made me want to get skinny at any cost –- exactly the kind of extreme dieting and deprivation that led to binging and self-hatred. Modern dining now means the normalization of 20 oz. soda bottles instead of 8 oz., of pizza slices that are 700 calories at Costco, of happy “meals” far cheaper than fresh produce or real, unprocessed food. This normalization makes growing up fat easier to do.
I would like to live in an environment where it is harder for children to grow up fat, which means making the easy choice the healthy choice. Namely, make unhealthy food more expensive, get rid of soda vending machines in schools and make smaller portion sizes the norm, rather than having a mini-sized ice cream blast come in at over 500 calories. I support warning labels on soda, soda taxes, "added sugar" labels and bans on advertising to children. I know some of these opinions are unpopular, but it’s not simply about discipline. I don't say that because I don’t thinking “blaming” overweight individuals for being overweight is counterproductive, but because of the convincing evolutionary and biochemical explanation: we are genetically programmed to be rewarded by high-fat and high-sugar foods, so having to constantly resist such foods is fighting our innate desires. And in response to stress, our natural reaction is to reach for highly caloric, highly palatable food. Again, I’m comforted in the science: evolutionarily, as hunters and gatherers we wanted calorically dense foods at a time when we didn’t know when our next meal would come. So we still have the chemical pathways that send stress signals from our brain to our fat cells to store fat more easily.
I hope I can now be a name and a face to think of the next time you reduce someone’s story to a nothing more than that of a “fat person.” Love or hate Chris Christie, just don’t belittle his life story down to a “but he’s fat” remark. I want to cry when people say “It’s as simple as addition and subtraction” or “All you have to do is close your mouth.” When I heard people say this, it never made losing weight easier. It just made me hate myself more. It made me internalize that there had to be something wrong with me because it was supposed to be so simple. Part of what helped me actually recover from my self-hatred and weight loss obsession was learning about the science of how difficult losing weight really is.
I wish everyone knew that stigmatizing overweight or “fat” people does not “help” or motivate that person to change. Love and appreciation for everyone for all the wonderful and different sizes that people come in helps. The most scientific definition I can give beauty is healthy. And what’s healthy is focusing on a diet full of what feels good to eat and one in which you don’t feel deprived, and don’t get upset about numbers and measurements that may not be the best fit for you.
Am I there yet? Certainly not. Do I feel really good about where I am anyway? Yes. Proof? I bought jeans for the first time in five years, even though my BMI remains in the “overweight” category.
Personals
In the era of online dating, the skill that goes into crafting a personal ad is dying out. Thanks to the practice of charging per word, the best personal ads are the shortest possible representation of who you are and who your ideal partner would be. We asked single (and looking) people we know to write their own personal ads. Like the personal ads of yore, they’re completely anonymous, and you cannot swipe or message any of these people directly. If you want, you can try to email us with a message to forward along to them, but there’s no guarantee of a response.
Men Seeking Women
#001
Man looking for Jewish woman. Acerbic wit and impeccable sense of humor. Career aspirations. Low maintenance but also ride or die. Would make a good mother. Tolerates my ridiculous family.
#002
Short-tempered Italian boy seeks woman. Likes one night stands, but also snuggling. Must enjoy two of the following three things to earn respect: Star Wars, lobster rolls, weight training. Still sleeps with a blankey.
Women Seeking Men
#003
Sarcastic white female in mid-20s seeking a "yes, and..." personality type to digress with me. Please be male, in my age range, happy, and low-key nerdy. Bonus points if you actually like your family.
#004
Ridiculously photogenic woman seeking male selfie partner. Has an appetite for food, adventure, and the arts. TV show interests range from Spongebob to Jeopardy. Doesn't take himself too seriously but still ambitious. Moves on the dance floor is a plus. 420 is a requirement.
#005
My mom is worried I'll end up alone forever, I don't care that much but I do hate it when she's right. I only exist online.
#006
Woman seeking man for low-key relationship. Searching for a take-charge kind of man who's sensitive enough to recycle. Has a good sense of humor. Smokes weed, but never forgets the keys. Will make a good dog father. Preferably currently employed. Reads on a moderate basis. Instagrammable. Self-proclaimed foodies are strongly encouraged to apply.
#007
Woman seeking man who never keeps a scorecard, doesn't try to one up me or change me. Someone who is respectful to their restaurant servers and their parents. I want to be able to lay next to you and read a book and feel at home. You need a good heart, a good sense of humor, and MUST love animals and never try to stop me from eating raw cookie dough.
#008
I’m a 23 year old woman in Brooklyn, New York looking to befriend a kindhearted man with family values who also starred in and produced the life-changing action-adventure morality tale that is the Fast and Furious franchise. My ideal candidate has big, strong arms, a rebellious spirit, the courage to stand up for those he loves, and an extensive history voicing and portraying the character Riddick in the sci-fi action franchise The Chronicles of Riddick. It's really important to me that you're good with kids. Bonus points if you’ve got a penchant for soft, touching karaoke renditions of Rihanna’s “Stay.”
Men Seeking Men
#009
Slightly chubby Jewish male in his mid-20s who is terrified of being single seeks other Jewish male for a relationship based on passive-aggressive guilt and food. Looking for somebody who is educated, snarky, and can “take a joke.” Must be able to watch all six hours of Angels in America. Must love Meryl. If you don’t love Meryl, then keep your mouth shut for the sake of the kids.
Hobbies include: watching television, harassing straight men, theater, going to museums, getting Instagram likes
Pet peeves include: men who ghost me after bottoming for them “because we love each other,” people who don’t know how to throw birthday parties in NYC, roommates who steal each other’s organic salt
Can be reached via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Periscope, Vine, Tumblr, Vimeo, Venmo, Klout, Tinder, JSwipe, JCrush, The League, Bumble, Grindr, Scruff, Hinge, Coffee Meets Bagel, and Words with Friends.
A letter from Finn the cat
I'm a small cat, to be fair, but I ain't stupid. I know there's more out there than this apartment. You forget that I was born on these streets! I spent time behind bars! You say you rescued me, but I was perfectly fine with two square meals a day and my cardboard box, thanks.
I met Rey behind those bars. Rey, my compatriot. "My only friend" — that's right, I hear you laughing at me behind my back! Rey is a nice cat, to be sure, but she's stupid. She would be content to sit under the bed all day if you let her, as if that was the only place in the world. Sure, she might try to get out the door occasionally, but that's just so she can get closer to you. She finds your presence comforting. That's what makes her stupid.
Me? I'm a smart cat. I have a plan for when I get out. I'm going to take a right, then a left, and then I'm going to walk down those stairs and out into Brooklyn. I was born here, you forget. Brooklyn born and raised, and I know that there's a whole world out there for me, if I can get there.
You mock me. You leave the curtains open and let me stare out at the street. Even that's such a small part of the world. The people come and go. Such a small fraction of all the people out there. And you leave me in this apartment. It's depressing, when you think about it, which I do, a lot, sitting on my purple blanket and doing catnip.
I overheard the meeting for your "zine," talking about getting as many viewpoints as possible and exploring the human condition through art or whatever it is you twenty-somethings talk about. Me, I turn one years old this month, and I've barely seen any of the world. You'd think that you, editor of a zine about all the beauty that humans can create, would want your cat to see some of that beauty, instead of mocking him further by writing a fake letter in his name.
To hell with this. Bring me more catnip.
Yours,
Finn the cat
A vision quest with Morning Comes Early
intro by Adam Cecil
I’ve known the members of Morning Comes Early for a long time. In fact, I was the manager of David, Patrick, and Jeff’s middle school band The Almosts (later renamed Kevlar Tuxedo). While the line-up has shifted throughout the years, these boys have been playing music together for over a decade. It shows on their latest release, Vision Quest EP. This is their tightest release by far — the songs fit together like puzzle pieces, even when they’re exploring different facets of their sound.
Take a listen. If you like pop punk or have any level of angst, you’ll probably enjoy it.
The title of the EP stems from an inside joke, so I thought it was only appropriate to ask the boys of Morning Comes Early to look into their own mind’s eye and take us on a vision quest through the songs on Vision Quest EP.
Tip Tip
Harry Llewellyn Schroeder IV, Bass guitar
Uh, I wrote this song and I recorded a demo of it on a bunch of pirated software.
Erase
David Atkins, Guitar / Vocals
I'm not sure how well I'll be able to articulate it — even though it's a feeling all of us have felt at some point, to an extent. Succinctly put, Erase is about a tough breakup, one that the other person doesn't seem too torn-up about. It doesn't make any sense, and it hurts, to put so much into a relationship, only to realize that the other person simply wasn't as invested as you were, and they move on right away. And any time you see her, it strikes a nerve. A cut reopened bleeds.
Brooklyn
Patrick Infurna, Vocals
Brooklyn is a song we wrote to kind of take a different approach to our sound. Harry had written that song a really long time ago and it was always one of those songs that we would listen to even before it had any lyrics or any real arrangement, just on Harry’s Soundcloud. It’s funny, we actually had a big debate on whether or not to put this song on the EP and I’m really glad we didn’t put it on the back burner for one of the others. Lyrically, it’s a transitional song; it represents a point in my life where I was moving in both body and in mind. I was in a new place, I was meeting new people, I was falling for someone, someone that made me feel really central and focused and at home. This song makes me feel relaxed, which I think is a big contrast to the energy of our other songs, so this is a personal favorite of mine.
Civil War
Patrick Infurna, Vocals
Civil War is another one where we just did something different. We grew up playing with hardcore bands and listening to hardcore bands but we’ve never really been a hardcore band. This song is a lot of things: it’s a tribute to a style of music that we adore but don’t usually play. It’s such a perfect song for our live sets because we can just stop everything and go absolutely nuts for a second. We can have a show where everyone’s just nodding along or we can have a show where people are piling all over the place, but no matter the energy, when this song is played live everything goes up a level. We had recorded this really poorly at a friend’s years ago, but we knew that it had to be redone because it’d become such a staple in our live sets. Lyrically, I think this song is really special. We get caught up singing about a lot of things that maybe don’t matter – I mean they matter to us – but this song really hits the larger issues that we as a band aren’t always outwardly thinking about. This song tackles political issues close to us and the themes we see in the political atmosphere: greed, violence, all of that. But the second part of this song is a little more specific; we wrote those lyrics at the height of the Syrian Refugee crisis as well as the Central American migrant crisis that was buried in the news. We live in communities that are literally built by immigrants, and none of us have ever had to live the horrors of displacement. From the soccer stands to our live shows we wanted to make it clear: Refugees Welcome.
Resolve
Jeff Bruce, Drums
“Resolve” is the final track on our new EP. I wrote the music about two or three years ago. I had originally written lyrics along to it that were based on my personal encounter with being cheated on; however, the lyrics were more about moving on to the next chapter of my life rather than anger towards my ex. When I finally got the song to a place I was happy with structurally, I gave Patrick the reigns to the song lyrically because I feel that his lyric writing is far better than mine. His lyrics describe the winter “tour” (three-day road trip, essentially) that we went on with local hardcore band Get A Grip, as well as reflecting back on the past, most noticeably referencing Sharkfest (Group of kids / punk as hell / screaming out in grange hall heaven). I, of course, can really connect with this song because it describes all of the thing that we as a band have done in the past five to six years (and ten or so years with David and Patrick). I also see it – same as my thrown away lyrics – as a song about moving onto the next chapter as a band. This EP is different for us and we have tried things that we never would have been comfortable with two or three years ago. I think this album is a fitting conclusion to this EP, as it signals a new direction for this band.
A bit of everything: the collages of Ian Farrell
Introduction by Natalia Lehaf
Ian Farrell makes things. Music. Pictures. Collages. I’ve known him since my freshman year at NYU, as he was just beginning to decide what he wanted to study. Over the years, I watched him develop his personal artistry and, in doing so, add beauty and ideas to the world. Like any strong piece of artwork, Ian’s creations make you think. They stop you in your newsfeed scrolls and force you to look, stare, and ponder. I find the effect to be as impressive as the piece itself.
In particular, I love immersing myself in his collages. Some background information on Ian’s collages:
- He started making collages in a class based on fairy tales led by a professor who often explored mixed media.
- He finds inspiration in his mother’s house. She’s big on antiquing, and her house has always been full of old things.
- Much of his work grapples with the female form and “The potential mysticism that can surround it.”
My recommendation to the TCBP audience: As you look at his collages, be sure to note his use of dimensions, new or foreign places, and colors.
Ian Farrell is a collage maker and photographer with a degree in photography from NYU. He current lives in Orange County, California. Find more of Ian's work on his website.
The years it took to Brave The Night
Matt Bravmann, under the stage and recording name of Brave the Night, is rounding the masses and taking them on a spiritual journey with his debut album, Mind on Fire. The album, which was released in early September, features a unique combination of bluesy and jazzy melodies. Matt’s fingers dance along piano keys and his voice distracts listeners of all else occupying their minds. The intimacy and vulnerability in his music can turn audiences into eavesdroppers; but, ultimately, this soul-reaching music invites self-reflection and contemplation. Mind on Fire is comprised of those overwhelming feelings weighing you down. His music is to be felt. It demands to be felt.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Natalia Lehaf: I wanted to start with your background in music. When did you first start having an interest in music?
Matt Bravmann: I started taking piano lessons when I was about four years old. I took them for a while and loved it at first and then I hated it. You know, I was a little kid; I just wanted to be outside and play sports. So I quit. My parents kept making me practice but I didn’t want to. I got back into it later on when I started playing songs I wanted to play as opposed to songs they wanted me to play. It was a lovely 360 because through playing shitty pop songs I had gotten back into playing the songs I originally didn’t want to play, like classical music. When I was eighteen I started taking serious jazz lessons with a really great teacher. I started playing gigs in high school. I played at –
NL: Nursing homes, right?
MB: Right, nursing homes and restaurants, because I didn’t live in a city so I couldn’t go and play in a bar. I traveled to New York City once to play at Brandy’s Piano Bar on the Upper West Side when I was seventeen. I remember that being a huge deal for me. When I went to college I started having steady gigs at coffee shops.
NL: Is your family musical?
MB: Yeah, my dad plays the piano. He gave me lessons for a bit.
NL: Do you play any other instruments?
MB: No, I tried. I tried the clarinet and the guitar, but I didn’t like them and I wasn’t very good. With the guitar, you develop terrible callouses on your fingers – especially when you’re first starting. With the clarinet, you need a tremendous amount of breath, and even from a young age my parents always thought I was a smoker because I couldn’t even hold my breath under water.
NL: Was music a big part of your life as a kid?
MB: Yeah, definitely. First of all, I grew up Jewish. Music is a big part of Jewish services. There are also a lot of minor chords in Jewish music, which is a little sadder but also more personal. At a young age, when I heard “Moonlight Sonata” or The Beatles or classic pop rock music, it was ingrained that this was important – beyond pop culture. There was something there that stuck with me.
NL: What triggered your return to music?
MB: I think just growing up and becoming more mature in my musical tastes. I would start to listen to music that I could play and wanted to play. We always had a piano in our house, sometimes two, so I would be playing every now and then even after I quit.
NL: What would you qualify as more mature music?
MB: I would say older artists. So much music has had an impact on me. When I heard gospel music for the fist time, my life changed. It was serious, it wasn’t fun. When I heard “Border Song” by Elton John, that was the first time I heard gospel music applied to rock ‘n’ roll, pop, and other elements. And that was something I wanted to do – I wanted to play that. Pink Floyd was another big one for me, when I heard The Wall and also The Beatles. Some songs have that rare quality where it’s like, “this is a big deal.” They hit you at the core and are spiritual experiences.
NL: When you were performing in high school, were you performing covers?
MB: Yeah, I only performed covers. I started writing music in college.
NL: Did you ever want to start a band?
MB: I wanted to start a band, but there was no connection with anyone where I thought starting a band was a realistic endeavor.
NL: So, you’ve spent a lot of alone time working on your music.
MB: And in general.
NL: How was that?
MB: I don’t want to say I was a lonely child, but in a lot of ways I was. I think being a performer, the alchemy is, you are sitting on stage and divided, literally, from the audience. The mass of people is looking at you and you are up there alone. It’s very symbolic of the process. There is an inherent separation between you and mass society. The alone time I spent as a kid was traumatic at times, but at the same time – this is going to get philosophical quickly, which I tend to do – all of my pain and weakness is also the source of my strength, creativity, and inspiration. You know, I needed that to write music. I never would have written music if I didn’t have that pain and solitude to look back on.
NL: I read that you started writing music to share your pain.
MB: Right. I don’t think that is unique to me at all.
NL: Is there anything in particular that you write about?
MB: It was more of a general sense of insecurity, and the pain that a lot of people experience but that you don’t know they are experiencing. You know, when you are growing up, you think you are the only one who has these problems – and in some ways you’re not, but in a lot of ways you are. There was never a specific event or incident.
NL: Do you think your music comes from a lonely place?
MB: Yeah. It’s interesting, because I started writing this album when I was twenty years old and didn’t finish it until I was twenty-four, twenty-five. The next album is going to come from a much different place, which is a tremendous challenge for me. It won’t be a place of desperation and loneliness, but of satisfaction and confidence and appreciation of myself and for others. That’s the way it should be: I think you need to evolve as an artist. I have no interest in making a sequel or follow-up to the last album. I want my music to evolve, but at the same time it is going to be difficult doing that. In the past, I’ve found my way of tapping into what I found to be my best stuff is tapping into the pain and the same melancholic places where I used to think inspired the creativity. I’ve started writing new music and it has not been easy.
NL: Was there a message you were trying to put out there with this first album?
MB: There wasn’t a coherent message. The message is in the title, Mind on Fire. The album is an identity crisis. It’s about contradictions and fear and insecurity and vulnerability. It’s about growing up. I’m on fire. It’s just very overwhelming to be a young twenty-year-old in New York.
NL: What was your song-writing process like?
MB: I wrote the first batch of songs while I was in college and about two years ago I wrote the second batch of songs. This album is the best of those batches.
NL: It’s very lyrically-driven. Do you have a favorite lyric or song you are proud of?
MB: You know, songwriters too often say, “every one’s my baby.” I don’t have a favorite lyric. I very rarely listen back to it. Sometimes I’ll listen and be like, “that’s a good line.”
NL: That’s interesting that you don’t listen to it, because I added the EP to my Spotify playlist. I find it really comforting.
MB: Interesting. I was very self-conscious when I released it - and still am - that it’s a downer, in the sense that it is kind of depressing. You know, “does it bring you down? Does it lift you up?”; almost universally, it doesn’t do either of those things. It’s more optimistic than I give it credit for.
NL: “Long Way to California” is one of my favorites, that one is cheerful.
MB: That one is a very optimistic song and I initially wanted to end the album on that. A big theme on the album is contrast – even the cover: a dark background with a very bright imagery up front. And a lot of the lyrics are melancholic but also hopeful.
NL: How did you choose the cover art?
MB: I had an idea for what I wanted the art to be and I hired an artist who took it from there.
NL: I know that you have a demanding job as the Digital Strategy Manager at the digital marketing, advertising, and publicity agency Brigade. How do you balance your music with your other obligations?
MB: My job is very creative, too, and I feel like there is a tank of creative energy that you fill up sometimes. It’s been hard and it’s not something I’ve conquered yet. I finished this album before I got this job. So my next challenge is writing my next album from a new mental and spiritual place and balancing this with my day job.
NL: Do you have any big dream musical ambitions?
MB: Yeah, to get better. I want the music to evolve paralleling my personal identity. As I evolve as a human being, I want my music to evolve. I make music for music. If I get paid for it, that’s great. But I don’t need to make a lot of money off of it. Five years ago, it was “do or die, make or break.” But now, I’ve made peace with it. I do it on the side and I don’t get the fame or notoriety from it — not yet — but there is nobody telling me what to do. I write what I want, I do want I want and that freedom is not something I take for granted.
To learn more about Matt and his music, check out Brave the Night's website, like the Facebook page, add the songs to your Spotify playlist, and listen on Soundcloud.
Women: A Tirade
Here are some stories, reflections, quotes and experiences I’ve had which have caused me to reflect on the state of women abroad and in America. Since learning what a feminist is, namely someone who believes in the equality of men and women, I’ve identified as one and since opened my eyes to a world of sexism, misogyny and discrimination. My bones are chilled and my heart is heavy.
Feminism is believing that men and women are equal (see Emma Watson’s lovely U.N. speech on the subject here). The problem worldwide is not necessarily the black-and-white idea that men and women are not equal. It’s not as simple as women know they are oppressed and are trying to break free. There’s a barrier of culture, tradition and expectation that makes the idea of equally valuing human female life revolutionary. (See female feticide rates in India or in China or just the contrast in male vs. female literacy rates by country).
Human trafficking is just one of the many abuses against women worldwide, and often starts out less dramatically than in Taken. Women are simply sold by family members or lured to foreign countries by the prospect of jobs such as working as maids, but are instead forced into brothels where they are beaten for resisting (when that doesn’t work, perpetrators will get girls addicted to drugs). Often this takes place in countries where they do not speak the language, where they are not allowed to leave their dwelling, and where no one helps them because prostitution is so stigmatized.
More offensive, degrading practices towards women:
- Kidnapping and raping a woman who refuses to marry you to strip her of her honor in Ethiopia
- Exchanging a bride for her younger sister when her hymen doesn’t break on her wedding in Afghanistan (My source here is actually my aesthetician is from Afghanistan and knows somebody who this happened to!)
- Moral police in Iran taking you to court for being seen in public without a male relative to chaperone,
- Publically stoning a 13 or 14-year old girl to death for refusing to marry a Shabab commander in Somalia
- A husband killing his wife in Pakistan so he could marry another woman
- Acid attacks permanently scarring women’s faces in Colombia, sometimes simply for breaking off a relationship
Meena is an Indian kidnapped and trafficked into a brothel at 8- or 9-years old in Bihar, India profiled by Kristof and WuDunn. She was beaten into submission before spending years in the brothel, where she had two children that the owners had taken as hostages so that Meena couldn’t leave. Even though police officers were frequent customers and serviced for free, Meena took a chance and ran away to a police station hoping that they might take mercy on her. The officers sent her back.
My Firsthand Experiences
Seven years before I became aware of feminism, I went to Egypt with my family to visit family. I was 12. I didn’t know about culturally appropriate dress or the expected role of a woman in conservative Middle Eastern countries. I noticed women staring, but at that time I couldn’t make sense of why they would cover themselves up in this hot weather. I knew it was for religious purposes, but having grown up secularly I saw no reason to dress so modestly.
It was a busy marketplace in Cairo, filled with jewelry vendors and children selling trinkets and toys. The humidity turned my straightened hair curly again. My attire of a tank top and Soffe shorts was weather-appropriate.
A man grabbed my behind. Among the rushing, the crowds, and all the veiled faces, it was impossible to even know which direction to look. I was too stunned to act so I just stopped and looked at all the possible perpetrators… I noticed one man who was walking just a little bit too fast. Had I even been sure, I had no idea how to act.
I wish I did. I wish I knew what I know now. The appropriate action would have been to shame that man: to yell, to point, to express my disgust in anger so such acts aren’t “allowed” to happen. But I was too shocked, too surprised, too taken off-guard, too unsure if I felt what I think I really just felt.
I wish I knew Gabrielle then: my roommate in India. When she was groped at a crowded Indian festival she turned around and immediately punched him in the face. She describes his shocked and unexpected face as priceless. (I wish I saw it.) It’s the official protocol for more moments I hope I never find myself in.
I did, however, get to witness Gabrielle in action on another occasion. We once went out to ice cream Hauz Khas in Delhi, India when a man with a group of friends passed us and pinched her behind. My friend, knowing exactly what to do, immediately yelled “Hey! What the hell was that?! Don’t touch me, you—” “Sorry,” the man turned around smiling with his hands on his ears. (In India it is common to place your hands on your ears when apologizing).
Smiling. Flirtatiously. Smirking as if he knew she didn’t really mean what she said. Even though she was yelling, she really welcomed the invasion of privacy, the implication that she was not a person enough to decide who makes choices about her body.
But more terrible than watching it happen to someone else is watching it happen to yourself. First, at the school I worked at in Bisada, India, when a group of (mostly male) students gathered around me and I yelled “SPACE” as I usually did when they started to overcrowd me; instead of the gradual dispersal of the crowd I felt a prod in my behind. And instead of reporting to the principal immediately, I yelled angrily at the mysterious student and hoped for it to die down because of course who wants their butt to be the subject of school news and a possible suspension? And of course I “let” the group of boys gather around me and I didn’t act quickly or sternly enough to control their behavior. A full-fledged feminist for three years at that point, I still managed to become my own victim in a classic victim-blaming scenario. Here, too, the desire to maintain privacy and forget embarrassing situations was strong. (And it was something that used to infuriate me in the past: reading about women’s stories of rape or sexual violence, I always wished, above all, that they took action against their perpetrators who deserved punishment or public shaming). I did take action, but after the school expelled the student they retracted the expulsion when he threatened the school with gang violence. By this point, the whole school knew about the incident. And another generation of students were taught that violating a woman was not a serious matter, for some simple threatening could get you out of any real trouble.
In India, parents didn’t consistently rejoice for their daughters the way they rejoice for sons. I saw this firsthand in Bisada, a rural village about a 45-minute motorbike ride away from Delhi. One of our teachers left school to take care of her “second child.” In attending the celebration of her birth, I learned that Anju ma’am had not actually given birth to her child, but had taken her sister’s daughter because her sister didn’t want to keep the girl. They had a pre-arranged agreement that only if a boy were born would the sister keep the baby.
By the time this baby shower happened, the gender selection wasn’t even shocking to me. I saw it everyday in the classroom. My school had students from kindergarten to 10th grade, and as the class got higher (and fees became more expensive), you saw less and less females. All of the students who could “afford” cell phones happened to be males. Families spent more on males because they were simply worth more in their eyes. Girls weren’t worth the extra tuition, the extra milk, the cost of an extra vaccine…
Girls were valued too little to be trusted with decisions like who they should marry or what, or who, happens to their bodies. Females needed to be taught a lesson for going out late with a man who is not family, as five men “taught” Jyoti Singh in December of 2012.
The Most Recent, Well-Documented & Publicized Atrocious Rape in India
Jyoti was a medical student from a poor village. She was a harbinger of hope for the impoverished family, working diligently so that she could support them one day. Early on and contrary to Indian tradition, she told her parents to put the fees saved for her wedding towards her tuition instead.
Before she was able to practice physiotherapy however, she was sexually violated and brutalized when she went to see Life of Pi with a male friend of hers. In what is now known as the infamous 2012 Delhi gang rape, five men took turns raping Jyoti and pulling out her intestines before she died days later in a Singaporean hospital.
I watched Leslee Udwin interview these men and their lawyers in her BBC documentary India’s Daughter when it came out in March 2015. I had just returned from India at this point. Outraged and impassioned by the film, I could not even discuss it with my friends in Delhi. They were unable to watch it because the Indian government banned it because it could “threaten public order.”
Horrible India’s Daughter Quotes
“[Rape’s] just like that kind of action. Beat him. Put his hand forcefully inside.” – M. L Sharma, one of the rapists’ defense lawyers.
“If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities and disgraced herself and allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight.” – AP Singh, another of the rapists’ defense lawyers.
“A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.” — Mukesh, one of the convicted rapists.
Short American Rant
Whether you live in India or any other country in the world, don’t take girls for granted. In America, we still have an unacceptable gender pay gap, and abysmal rates of reporting rape and convicting rapists. Need I remind readers that a six-term member of Congress, Todd Akin, argued that women that were raped had a mechanism for somehow blocking the unwanted pregnancy? Or the Steubenville case, in which two teenage football players raped an unconscious young woman, posted the video on social media, and then pleaded the girl not to press charges so that his football career would not be damaged. Most recently, adult film star Stoya accused James Deen of raping her despite her clearly telling him “no, stop, [and] used my safeword.” In a refreshingly positive light, the porn industry quickly believed the accusations and dropped him as a performer. From that same article, I like this segment, helping us to understand what kind of women are often victimized and why:
Part of the reason that rape is hard to prove is that sexist fairytales about what constitutes consent infect judges and juries just as much as the general public. Of the many myths about sexual violence, the most pernicious is that women routinely lie about it. That’s not true; the rates of false reporting for rape and sexual assault are estimated to be around the same as rates of false reporting for any other crime – the current figure is anywhere between 0.2% and 8%. Men are actually more likely to be victims of rape themselves than they are to be falsely accused of it.
Rapists rely on these myths, often targeting women and girls who they know will be too scared to come forward, or who will not be believed. That means women of color, young girls, and sex workers. Former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw is currently on trial for allegedly stalking and raping 13 black women and girls, some of whom had previous arrest records for sex work. Serial rapists target the young, the vulnerable and sex workers, knowing how hard it is even for women deemed ‘respectable’ to be taken seriously.
But Most Importantly, Hope Lies in the Proles…
Change starts with you. Believing someone who has confided in you, or gone public wither story, is something small you can do to make this world a more gender-equal and less hostile place to be a woman.
My suggestions:
- Be an informed citizen. Make sure all your friends know about what a terrible problem gender inequality is, especially in the developing world but also in America. Change cannot happen before awareness does. This includes pressuring, or pressurizing as they say in India, politicians to care more about these issues. As Kristof wrote in Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunities for Women Worldwide, “When India feels that the West cares as much about slavery as it does about pirated DVDs, it will dispatch people to the borders to stop traffickers.” Let’s make sure our government knows we care about women’s rights and safety because the U.S. government isn’t doing enough and won’t until we all demand it. (Namely: that guard telling Nicholas Kristof that he prioritizes trafficked DVDs over women because American companies have a larger stake in pirated cinema). The CARE Action Network (www.can.care.org), can assist you in “speaking out, educating policy makers, and underscoring that the public wants against poverty and injustice.”
- Know that your words matter. They are important and shape culture. Sexist language makes sexism more real. Don’t say “you hit like a girl” or “don’t be a girl.” Think about why women “lose” their virginity yet men “take” someone’s virginity. Anything which demeans, degrades or dehumanize women makes it easier to devalue or violate them.
- Laugh so you don’t cry. Watch John Oliver covering women’s issues here or here.
Suggestions from Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn, taken from Half the Sky – all of which can be done in the next four minutes:
- Open an account and www.globalgiving.org and support a grassroots project that focuses on education (which allows a woman better job opportunities, rather than only sex work and the stigma or sexually transmitted diseases that comes with it) or www.kiva.org, where you can support women to start their own business and earn an income independently, again without having to resort to brothel work.
- Sponsor a girl or a woman through Plan International, Women for Women International, World Vision, or American Jewish World Service. You can exchange letters with your sponsors and even visit them, as Kristof & WuDunn have in the Philippines, Sudan, and the Dominican Republic.
- Sign up for e-mail updates on www.womensnews.org or www.worldpulse.com, which distribute information about abuses of women and sometimes advise actions that readers can take to help these women.
Sarah is a lover of words, foreign films and gastronomic delights. She currently resides in New Jersey, where she is making the most of her gap year before continuing her education. Follow her on Twitter.
Greetings from Liberty City
Last summer I decided to get a Steam account. I don’t have much of an interest in video games, but when I was around 11, my brother Wil and I would spend hours taking turns playing Grand Theft Auto III, with one of us playing the game and the other one keeping an eye out for our mother coming into the basement. Against her knowledge, our cousin LJ let us keep his copy of the game after he completed it, and we always told her we were playing some Tony Hawk game.
Wil and I never really made an effort to do any of the story missions of GTA III; mostly we just drove around, blew up cars, and shot people so we could get a wanted level and flee the cops. We also tried to get hookers into our cars to hang out with them. We named the white lady prostitute Charlotte and the black one Cleopatra. Other characters had names, too, but I don’t remember most of them anymore. When Player 1 got either wasted or busted, it was Player 2’s turn.
We were virtual gangsters. For me, it was a way to escape the world of fear and distrust I was growing accustomed to with divorced parents having new significant others whom I hated but couldn’t do anything about, changing schools, pets and grandparents always dropping dead, and puberty ruining my once rockin’ hot kid body. It was almost magical to be Claude Speed, have the freedom to drive around Liberty City as we pleased, and not care about what these little video game people thought about us because they didn’t exist — and neither did we.
I find it interesting that Grand Theft Auto has come into my life when I am again asking the questions I started to ask at 11 — is this worth it? Is life worth all the letdowns? Who can I really trust? Do they like me or are they just pretending they do? I downloaded GTA III and GTA: Vice City one night after work because I couldn’t stand to watch anymore Netflix in my leisure time. It became too draining to watch a film and wonder if that’ll ever be my name in the credits or think about how many years of story ideas will be rejected before one might evolve into something. It even became a drag to talk about movies, since most conversations with people regarding film last two minutes and only cover what was good or funny or shocking. Which is fine; you can’t have in-depth conversations with everyone. But to think about how writers and artists slave away creating passion projects that to so many people will only be awkward icebreaker discussions before they move onto discussing startups and that time they did shrooms in college can turn wide-eyed ambitions into cold realities. I wasn’t giving up on my love for movies, but was instead putting it on a backburner until it didn’t make me want to vomit so much.
If you are unfamiliar with the Grand Theft Auto franchise, there are only a few basic things that you need to know. The games take place in fictionalized cities in America — Liberty City is a version of New York, Vice City is Miami, and San Andreas is meant to be a combination of Los Angeles and the surrounding deserts. Often the protagonist is a man who has just gotten out of jail and is trying to work his way back up into the crime world. You get to steal cars, and sometimes boats and helicopters. You can kill people and take their money. That’s pretty much all you need to know.
I decided that when I bought the two games, I didn’t want to just idly drive around as I had done in the past — I wanted to play. During my recent 97 hours of play on the two early Grand Theft Auto games, I have realized some things about life that will leave a lasting impression.
Lesson 1: Be Cool
There is no shame in being late to the party when it comes to enjoying anything after it stops being new. Just because Breaking Bad has ended doesn’t mean that the show is anything less without the craze. The Wizard of Oz will turn 77 this year, but its message will always be universal. So why do we throw away video games once their graphics look dated? We still listen to songs after we’ve memorized the lyrics like the alphabet — so why do we toss video games to the side after we’re done playing? Playing a game when everyone else has moved onto its bigger and fancier successor is an under-appreciated experience — so cherish it when you can.
With that being said, be weary that “cool” varies as you age. For example, as an 11-year-old, I thought it was badass to pick up hookers, take them to a remote area, and watch the car bounce up and down, implying that the two in the car are banging (even though if you zoomed in you could see the two characters just sitting there). It’s cool to make two characters bone when you are only 11 and have a limited knowledge of what sex is other than “this goes into that.” But as you get older, if that is your definition of “cool” and you are not going out into the world and having consensual sex with real people, you will never be cool. Those are just facts.
Lesson 2: Speed Isn’t Always the Key to Success
Throughout both games there are numerous timed missions that are designed to be accomplished only in the final seconds. It’s easy to make the mistake of going fast in order to beat the clock, but relying on speed can prevent you from having the time to avoid obstacles that get in the way. For example, in Vice City, I often like to have the protagonist, Tommy Vercetti, drive a motorcycle. But in a mission where you are chasing the cartel or trying to lose the police, if you hit another car or run into a building, you will fly off the motorcycle and it will take even more time to complete. How does this apply to real life? Say you are running away from a serial killer. But you are running so fast that you don’t see the sidewalk has ended and so you trip into the street. It will take some time to stand up, address the situation, put pressure on your wounds, and find out where to run next, and before you know it, he has hacked you to death because you weren’t fast enough.
Lesson 3: Cheating Is a Necessary Evil Full of Consequences
I am not sure how players are expected to play GTA III or Vice City without cheats. One of the reasons I have not gotten obsessed with San Andreas is that the cheat codes on Steam are random letters jumbled together. For example, if you want weapons in GTA III, you simply type: “gunsgunsguns” onto your keyboard, and you have the entire set of weapons offered for the game. In Vice City, you can choose from “thugstools,” “professionaltools,” or “nuttertools.” I always go for “nuttertools” because you get a chainsaw. In San Andreas, however, the weapon cheats are either: “UZUMYMW,” “WANRLTW,” or “KJKSZPJ.” Maybe there is some sort of logic in these three cheats, but here’s the thing, I’m not an autistic genius who can crack codes in less than two seconds.
Cheats do make gameplay easier, but beware: in an excessive amount you can prevent yourself from winning. Not because “oh, but it’s against the morals of the game, you didn’t really win,” but rather, enough cheats can corrupt a file and make it unreadable to your computer. I learned this the hard way with Vice City. I had just completed a particularly difficult mission halfway through the game where you had to outrace this one driver, and I was super excited. I went downstairs for dinner and when I came back, Steam would not let me open the file, as there had been an unexpected hold. It was truly devastating, but a lesson well-learned. Sure, cheats will get you somewhere faster, but the aftermath if caught is severe.
Lesson 4: You Will Make Enemies
The closer you get towards finishing a game altogether, the more enemies you will have. You will have gained respect among your peers and have earned a boatload of money, but you will have pissed off others in the process. Life is a competition, and you can’t make everybody happy. You shouldn’t go out of your way to piss people off, but don’t pass by opportunities because you are afraid of who will hate you. (This is all assuming you are a good person with good intentions. If you are reading this and think that I am deeming it acceptable to exterminate a race of people or blow up abortion clinics, then you are drastically misinterpreting what I am saying.)
This aside, it is important to take into consideration what you will lose if you do become successful. Barack Obama is probably pretty grateful that he is the President of the United States, but he can’t go to a Starbucks by himself without getting bombarded by soccer moms who think he is just the bee’s knees. There are certain places in both Liberty City and Vice City that you can’t get to after you complete a certain mission because you kill too many of the mafia or cartel’s buddies and if you set foot in their territory, people will shoot you from many different angles and you will likely die.
Lesson 5: It’s All Just a Game
After I completed first Vice City and then GTA III, the high ended like air being slowly released from a balloon. There was so much hype towards finishing, and then when it happened, I was left there thinking, “Is this it?” The journey was fun. I liked getting to drive around the beach with ‘80s music on the radio and Ray Liotta’s voice mocking the people Tommy runs over. I liked unlocking the new neighborhoods I had never seen before in in GTA III. I enjoyed completing the missions, sometimes on one try and sometimes after dozens, and ultimately feeling like I had accomplished something great, though in reality, thousands of others had done this before me. It was my journey, and no one else’s. I didn’t care how long it took to get there. But when it was over, I just found myself driving around and shooting hookers, like I had been doing in the first place so many years ago.
I ask myself what’s the point of playing if eventually I’ll just wind up doing what I already had been doing. I suppose it’s kind of like asking yourself why bother to get potty-trained if you’ll just wind back up in a diaper in old age — there are a few decades in between where you’d benefit from not peeing your pants every day. Grand Theft Auto taught me that the journey is worth taking, even if the desired destination will be disappointing.
Rachel Petzinger is a comedian. She has since moved onto other games, such as L4D2 and Half-Life. You can follow her on Twitter @chelpetz.