Originally added to Roving Brooklyn in April 2014. For more information on Roving Brooklyn, please read our letter.

Snapchat can be used to send nude images to other people. Nothing is stopping them from taking a screenshot of those pictures. Only trust.

Advertisements have long come under fire from activists and social commentators for featuring unrealistic portrayals of female beauty. With Photoshop, models can be altered even further.

With these two realities in mind, digital artist Kathryn Leslie takes the average and mundane and turns them into something "sexxxy," using Snapchat's drawing features to alter photographs with crude stick figures of women in a state of undress. Leslie's simplistic drawings serve to underscore the twisted nature of how we are asked to view the world.

Sex sells, so why shouldn't sex sell everything? And yes - even Easter.

Statement from the artist:

I wanted to explore the female form through Snapchat. The cartoonish female I've created reflects what I see as the absurdity of women in advertising. Her body serves as a metaphor for the rigidity and stiffness inherent in society's perception of women and of the feminine role.

Furthermore, because each piece is inherently ephemeral and transient, the images in this gallery are documentation of my art, not the actual pieces themselves. Some pieces in this series are not shown here, as we were not able to preserve them before they were destroyed by Snapchat; those creations are gone forever.

However, have they truly disappeared? Are they forgotten, or do we forever remember them? The same could be asked of much of the media we consume daily.

Plus, I've also gotten really good at drawings cartoons of women in Snapchat.

- Kathryn Leslie, April 2014

On Hiatus

Thomas Baldwin · June 7, 2015

Welcome!

Thank you for visiting Roving Brooklyn. As you can see, it’s a little different than the last time you visited. You may be asking yourself, “What happened to Roving Brooklyn? Is it dead?” I would answer you with a resounding, “Yes and no!” We have decided - for the time being - to put the name Roving Brooklyn and the website on hiatus.

When Adam and I launched Roving Brooklyn over a year ago, we hoped that it would be a platform for our fellow New Yorkers to pursue their artistic endeavors, and to explore new ones for ourselves. We have been more than pleased with the success and reception of our projects such as Spacebook and Dear Rachel, but the success of our zine, Things Created by People, has blown us away.

TCBP has been a powerful tool for us to pursue our goals. With each issue, we’ve expanded our artistic network in and outside of NYC, and each issue has provided enriching and diverse content to our readers. The nature of the online magazine gives us the ability to host not only articles, fiction, poetry, and photography, but audio and video content as well. We felt that Roving Brooklyn’s goals and objectives as a collective had been fulfilled in TCBP.

Adam and I got together and asked ourselves, “What is Roving Brooklyn doing that TCBP isn’t or can’t?” We couldn’t come up with a clear answer! We are pleased with the traction our online publication has gained, and we want to make it the focus of our future work. We don’t want to give up the name Roving Brooklyn, or give up the hope that it can be something different from, but just as impactful as, TCBP. We expect to re-launch the Roving Brooklyn name with a new focus and new goals in the future. We hope you will come along for the ride!

Sincerely,
Thomas Baldwin
Co-founder of Roving Brooklyn & Things Created By People

P.S. You can still see all of the old projects at Roving Brooklyn both here at TCBP and around the web. Check them out:

Spacebook
Dear Rachel
Sexxxy Art Project
The August Corpse Project

article

Selected Tweets (Book Review)

Brittani Hilles · June 7, 2015

Selected Tweets, by Mira Gonzalez and Tao Lin. Published by Short Flight/Long Drive Books. — *Selected Tweets*, by Mira Gonzalez and Tao Lin. Published by Short Flight/Long Drive Books.

I first encountered Mira Gonzalez’s poetry in college when her first book, I will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together, had a certain kind of ring to an insecure, just turned twenty-year-old. Her poetry has a self-awareness to it that made me feel less alone in poor decision making, especially since she takes way more drugs than I ever will. This emotional quality resonated with me, being an educated twenty something with a job, an internship, and on track to graduate from an excellent college, but still somehow feeling lost in the world. I read Tao Lin’s works for the exact opposite reason; while Mira seems to care despite her insistence that she doesn’t, Tao is completely estranged from his emotions. His characters interact with each other in a detached, selfish manner, not that far off from people I know. Their work functions in a similar way within the “alt lit” category, but each have a different effect emotionally.

Selected Tweets, a collaboration between Mira Gonzalez and Tao Lin, is not new content, as all their tweets are freely accessible on their twitter accounts, but somehow the thought of combing through thousands and thousands of tweets and crafting two hundred pages of a timeline seemed like something that would speak to me differently than reading twitter on my phone during my lunch breaks or scrolling through it while trying to drag myself out of bed in the morning. They start pulling tweets from 2010 and end in 2014, using tweets from multiple twitter accounts they run. These multiple twitter accounts are meant to track different moods of the writers; for example, Mira has a @Miracrying account for her depressed tweets and @Miraunedited for her NSFW tweets. The tweets track the two writers from New York to California, through bad drug trips and live tweeting movies, all boiled down to spare thoughts strung together in a crafted timeline.

I started reading Selected Tweets straight out of a hangover from my 23rd birthday party. I had been whining about turning twenty-three for the past month, mostly because a) it makes me feel too old to be making the same mistakes I’ve been making, now that I’ve graduated and have a full time job, and b) I should have my life much more together than it actually is now that I’m supposed to be a “real person” at 23. Throughout reading I had to take anxiety naps on my parents’ couch, stressing about the security deposit on a new apartment and work emergencies coming through my email. Taking notes on the same iPhone note as an in-depth breakdown of my finances seemed appropriate until I grew jealous of the fact that the writers could afford drugs and their rent.

Mira’s first tweets on her main account sound like typical college student tweets. I’ve had the same conversations, but in the dining hall, not on social media. She writes these tweets as stream of consciousness; they don’t seem as fully formed as the later tweets. As the months and years progress, she starts to get wittier and her tweets start to resemble her work, becoming fully edited and thought out. There is a traceable timeline through her life starting with college, dropping out, moves, and job changes. She doesn’t shy away from posting heavy topics on social media: the boys she sleeps with, the drugs she does, and all as explicit as a late night bar conversation. It somehow works, maybe because they mostly deal with insecurity and depression, and the self-awareness of insecurity and depression. With appearances by her eating disorders and her emotional unavailability, reading her tweets is like spiraling into the darkest corner of early twenty something life, but it works as a relatable timeline.

Her thoughts on everyday life and pop culture have a sly humor to them. Among my favorite tweets, even before reading this book, are when she harnesses Drake lyrics to her depression. One of the best ones, “no old friends either”, takes what should have been a celebratory lyric and makes it about being lonely. Who hasn’t listened to Drake’s music and felt the angsty “I’m better than you” feeling and then realized that actually, you aren’t Drake. I’m pretty sure none of the people I hang out with started from the bottom; can we feel we can celebrate being here? Then again, I’m not sure Drake started from the bottom either.

She tweets about her lack of emotion, and the very fact that she draws attention to it proves just the opposite. Her sexual adventures showcase the gender differences: even though she sleeps around like a guy, there is a different way she discusses it as a girl tweeting. My own last “romantic” encounter closely resembled her tweet, “Ramble nonstop until the person gets overwhelmed and stops paying attention to you.” She obviously cares about what this other person thinks of her, and what Twitter as a whole thinks of her; however, showing her detachment makes it ok to be broken off and unavailable.

I may be speaking for myself or simply the group I surround myself in, but her tweets are a good estimation of the feelings of those trying to pursue something greater than the typical, and the selfishness of choosing your own emotions over anyone else’s. A close relationship may lock you out of pursuing your own interests. Depression from not being good enough or not creating the art you want to make. Eating or not eating your way into looking the way you think you should. Mira is smart, funny, and talented, which shines through in seemingly inconsequential tweets.

When I got to Tao Lin’s section, he provided a different challenge. While I could piece together Mira’s tweets to a semi-story and connect with them, Tao’s were too fragmented, too much like thoughts and not enough substance to hold my attention. He is more disconnected than Mira, less emotionally observant. His humor is different than hers, and I think taken better as actual tweets. I was a little drained reading them pieced together for pages. His tweets range from describing dreams (they feel bleak), his thoughts on the world (“sperm whale are kind of shaped like Xanax bars”), to his immediate actions, including minute details into his eating habits. It’s like reading stream of consciousness writing, except of someone who is consistently high.

Tao's thoughts border on existential, and he is less self-centered than Mira. Although he recounts his random actions, it comes from a place outside of his own experience, and from a place of his interactions within the world he lives in. It works less when put together in a book form, however, as it becomes tiresome to read his collected thoughts. They started to blend together, and I began to skim while reading, nothing sticking out in my mind. His different accounts are confusing as well. I almost wish the accounts were presented as a single timeline. At the end of Tao’s section comes his poetry from the notes on his iPhone. The notes don’t differ much from his tweets; he states several time how he is experimenting with stream of consciousness. I think that these notes work as well as his Twitter account, which is what makes it so amusing to read on Twitter. I much prefer to read his thoughts as tidbits while scrolling through my feed, as it functions more as a thought and holds my attention longer than in a collected work. I also may have absorbed his philosophical wisdom if I had read it in an altered state of mind.

In between scrolling through the 400 pages of tweets on my iPad and mainlining massive amounts of water, reading these tweets years later, I realized not much has changed since I started reading Gonzalez’s and Lin’s previous works at twenty. I still drink too much when overwhelmed emotionally, I still shut down when someone upsets me, I still have a fascination with the unattainable. But reading these tweets as a collected group is a comfort because we don’t have to figure these things out. I’m sure someone meeting Tao or Mira would picture them as semi-functioning people (they both are able to pay their rent?) but they use Twitter as an outlet for their darkest thoughts and emotions, which is not that far out from those who seem to have it all together.

Selected Tweets is available from Hobart Books. Review copy provided by the authors. You can follow @Tao_Lin and @miragonz on Twitter.

Brittani Hilles works as a book cheerleader (or in publicity) at Macmillan. Her hobbies are networking, gin, and depressing literature. She rarely tweets at @bch248 and will respond to an email at brittani.hilles@gmail.com probably sooner than a text.

video

Spacebook Episode 11 - "Infurna"

Adam Cecil · June 7, 2015

Thomas Baldwin came to me in 2013 with an idea: record audio of people talking about the objects that were in their desks. I told him we should take video instead, and make it about the whole room, not just their desks.

From the inception and at its core, Spacebook has been about object history. Thomas and I believe that every object has a story, and that the stories you choose to feature in your room(s–we quickly expanded beyond the confines of the bedroom) say something about you.

Around the same time that Thomas and I made the first Spacebook episode, I saw the Long Portraits of Clayton Cubitt. Long Portraits are exactly what you think they are (unless you think they are something other than the video equivalent of a photographed portrait, in which case, Long Portraits are nothing like you think).

Cubitt’s portraits reveal so much more about the subject than a single frame could. Take this Long Portrait of Graciella Longoria, recorded on the first anniversary of her father’s death:

Cubitt’s portraits can be excruciating to watch. He is asking his audience to spend up to five uninterrupted minutes watching a single subject. The subject does not leave the frame. The frame does not move. But the audience’s patience is rewarded; the portrait of Longoria is much more complex, more emotional, and more three-dimensional than just a single frame.

(Cubitt continued to explore how video [and other things] can change the traditional portrait in his series Hysterical Literature, which features women reading while an assistant “distracts them with a vibrator.”)

In his One Shot Stories series, Josef Kubota Wladyka takes the idea of a Long Portrait one step further (or one backwards): he adds words. A voiceover, to be specific. While you can argue that adding words to a portrait defeats the purpose, the strength of a good story is hard to deny.

It also fits well into the aesthetic of Spacebook. The idea coalesced quickly: a long portrait, taken inside or in front of a larger space that means something to the subject, and a voiceover explaining why it has meaning. I wanted to make the first one of these portraits in 2013; it took me two years to finally do so.

I find this idea–this new way of making a Spacebook episode–interesting for many reasons, chief of which is the change in dynamic between private and public spaces. In many Spacebook episodes, the objects in the subjects’ private spaces are artifacts of experiences in public spaces–museums, foreign cities, high school. (See Episode 3 - "Bramhall" for the prime example of this.) In these new Spacebook episodes, I will be able to explore the personal, private stories behind a subjects’ connection to a public space. While it is not a perfect 180 turn, it is a great and interesting parallel.

Spacebook has been a lot of things over the two years since Thomas and I made that first episode. Above all, it has consistently been a place of experimentation–in style, in form, in subject matter. This mini-series of long portraits is another step in that history of experimentation.

Click here to read more about Spacebook and watch past episodes.

Adam Cecil is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is also the Managing Editor of this zine. You can find more of his work on his website.

essay

Home

Natalia Lehaf · June 7, 2015

"Are your roommates home tonight?"

It was inorganic phrasing though the intent was clear. I was at an apartment party in Brooklyn, celebrating the end of a friend’s battle with lymphoma. It was a small gathering, but just big enough for there to be a new person for you to meet in each corner of the loft. To this very day, I have no recollection of the name of the sandy blonde haired boy I was speaking to that night. I do recall the feeling of warmth rising from my cheeks to my ears as I blushed with slight, hopefully unrecognizable, embarrassment at his question.

“My roommates? Yeah, they are.” I frowned. My roommates have probably been sleeping since 10pm, I silently added. I then imagined my mother and father innocently in bed, a muted black and white Arabic soap playing on the television, my father’s snore stifling nighttime’s suburban cacophony.

I felt no need to offer the fact that my parents were my roommates. As well as my two older brothers. And my dog. And a cat that would probably be pissed if he knew I referred to him as "mine."

***

It was May 2013 and I was graduating. I had been dreading this moment since September, as it was a year earlier than my original classmates. But that was always part of the plan. NYU was my dream school; its tuition was my father’s nightmare. Subtracting a year from my path to a humanities degree was my aim in order to relieve the financial stress.

Moving home to New Jersey upon graduation was also part of the plan.

That summer, I found myself involved in constant conversation about my unemployment and living situation. I received phone calls on Monday afternoons from friends and family inquiring about my employment status. As if it was normal for a person at work to place a personal call. I am since convinced purgatory is sitting in your childhood bedroom on a Tuesday afternoon eating stale chips and watching Breaking Bad as a post-grad, periodically checking your spam folder to see if maybe you missed a potential employer’s response.

When I finally accepted (read: was offered) a job in the fall, my old worries were replaced by new ones. All of my friends were experiencing the same routine I so badly wished I still had: classes, sorority events, early (and free!) film screenings at the Cantor Film Center, the luxury of peeing in any NYU building they pleased. I was working a 9 to 5 (sometimes 6, 7, 8) job that had me frowning most weekday mornings as I got ready. It wasn’t a job I wanted, but one I felt obligated to accept simply because it was a job and I felt shame for being unemployed for the summer as it was. As much as I dreaded going to work everyday, it became an escape; a way back into the city I loved, a reason to be there, to pretend I was still part of it.

Albeit, work could only keep me for so many hours. I still wasn’t waking up to the sounds of construction that I once detested but began to deeply miss. Waking up in the bedroom I grew up in all my life felt foreign. The Die Hard posters on my wall, the mess of clothing covering any suitable path into and out of my room, the sound of my brother brushing his teeth in the bathroom in the morning – all of these signs of normalcy felt wrong. There was an electrifying quality of New York City life that I craved, but more than that – I felt like moving home meant I was moving backwards.

I resented my living situation and stayed in New York five nights a week. I was at Dollar Beers every Tuesday night (yawning by midnight as my friends were just getting started) and spent many nights on a blown up air mattress in my friend's narrow kitchen (complete with a slanted tile floor) in the West Village. I would say goodnight to my friend, whose hospitality remained persistent and unwavering despite the inconvenient size of her apartment, and attempted to sleep in the dark space, large enough for my twin size air mattress alone. I spent many nights peering through the dark at the shelf of pantry goods in front of me – mostly spices and oatmeal - feeling somber. It never made sense: my nights out were generally great or mediocre, at worst; and yet, I felt sad going to sleep. It wasn’t the discomfort of my back or irrational fear of rats running across my body, as these were things I ignored at least until the sun rose. It was a longing; a deep and equal combination of lacking and wanting.

It’s an ingrained habit that I call my parents everyday. During my nights in New York, I would text my parents when I arrived in the city, when I reached my (initial) destination, and make time to call at a reasonable hour feigning my bedtime. Their voices, whether tired, bored, or blocked out by the welcoming recognition of my dog barking to my voice in the background, would make my heart sink a little. This happened every time I spent the night away from home. I missed my parents. I missed my house. I missed walking in to see my aunts and uncles drinking coffee or scotch (depending on the hour) or my parents watching a movie in the family room. I missed my dog scratching my feet until I removed my socks so he could lick my feet and his desperate pleas for me to never go away ever again.

My house was a home I enjoyed being at. It was filled with love and security and it offered a place for me to hide when stressed or annoyed. My family provided a drama-free, problem-free zone. Walking into my house was equivalent to a sigh of relief. And after months of making a home on friends’ couches, I began to prefer my own bed.

I think in order to make a home, the people you choose to live with trump the location of choice. This isn’t the same for everyone. Some people prefer living alone, or living in the “perfect” apartment with complete strangers. But for me, walking in to a face I want to see is what makes a home. My last year at NYU was part of the reason leaving New York City was so hard; I came home to a roommate I would gladly pry my eyes open all night just to stay up and talk to and lived down the hall from a best friend who supplied me with ingenious advice and, if not, a sympathetic “Oh, Nat” every time I had a problem. I was waking up to the company of people I couldn’t wait to hang out with, and for that, I was spoiled.

In the past two years, my friends have gone their separate ways, no longer making the hallway of Palladium, an NYU residential hall, the central location of convenience. My cherished roommate, Tamara, moved to San Francisco; my constant source of advice, comfort, and irritation, Josh, began to work inconsistent and long hours as an investment banking analyst; and, I, of course, had moved to New Jersey. Things were changing regardless of our wants. Oddly, I found it relaxing. I never wanted to look back at my past year and find myself in the exact same place.

Moving doesn’t need to be physical. I’ve found that living at home, though juvenile in reputation, has propelled me into adulthood faster than living on my own in New York would. I’m less spontaneous and more if-you-want-me-there-give-me-24-hour-notice. I don’t know if that qualifies as adulthood or the result of me no longer packing my travel toothbrush in my purse, but I would like to believe it’s the former. My friend Sal’s response to drama is, “I make too much money for this shit.” I follow the same concept, just tweaked a little: I have too little time for this shit. Living a dual-residential lifestyle is difficult and exhausting; the only way I can make the most of it is if I spend my time in the company of people who add to my life and make me happy. Living in New York set me on a routine in which I saw the same people every day. Commuting has forced me to carry an agenda around that allows me to write down reminders to grab dinner, drinks, or see a show with all the interesting people in my life that are easy to lose touch with.

And sometimes commuting has forced me into contact with people I have lost touch with, as I take the bus into the city with my former high school peers. Apparently it is more likely for me to run into an old friend on a late NJ Transit train than a bar in New York. Just ask my friend Rono Yick, who found me grumpy and tired on an 11PM train home but still thought it was a good idea to sit next to me. Rono is actually one of the few high school peers I’ve ran into in transit that has offered an optimistic point of view of commuting. Usually, I share sighs and grumbles with people, complaining about delays or the two hours of our day reserved for the road; not Rono. Rono told me, “It’s definitely challenging, and it keeps you away from living a ‘normal’ life with co-workers and friends in the city, but I think living at home is where I need to be. If it gets in the way of work, then I will consider other options.”

That was nice to hear, simple and true. I have friends who live of equal or longer distance to Manhattan from Brooklyn than I do from New Jersey, and while we agree that commuting sucks, it is something we make do for the sake of building a home. I read and write more than ever with my 50-minute bus commute to and from work. I see extended family and friends in the same weekend. No, I can’t be in two places at once, but I do my best to make it work for everyone, most importantly myself. It’s a tiring lifestyle – unique and common in its own respects – but never boring.

Natalia Lehaf is a writer and audio/visual artist living in New Jersey. Find more from Natalia on her website.

article

What Koreans, Afghans, and Greeks Can Teach Us About Homophobia

Jonathan Friedel · June 7, 2015

America has recently accomplished some real progress in gay rights; 37 American states allow same sex marriage, the Defense of Marriage Act was shut down, 61% of Americans support same sex marriage, and 70% of Americans can legally get married in the state in which they live. In contrast, Korea recently attempted its first ever gay pride parade. It was filibustered by conservative Christian groups, and banned by the Seoul Metropolitan police. In Korea’s latest survey on moral issues, 57% of the population said that homosexuality was “morally unacceptable,” while only 18% said it was acceptable, the rest said it was a moral non-issue. Yet, in Korea, male-to-male physical affection is ubiquitous. The same grumpy old men who would curse and spit at a man kissing a man will openly hold hands with their friends after a Saturday hike. It is common to see heterosexual, mid-20s Korean males holding hands or sitting on each other’s laps. Korea is one of the most homophobic countries in the developed world, yet Korean men can express their love for each other - verbally and physically - without the fear of being perceived as gay. Despite America’s recent progress in gay rights, the same American males who verbally support gay marriage still fear showing any outward signs of affection for other men. Though Americans have achieved some progress in gay rights, we have established a strict dichotomy of gayness and straightness that makes it extremely difficult for heterosexual men to have deep, serious friendships. The cultures that are the most homophobic are also the most comfortable with male-to-male physical affection. They reap the benefits of close male friendships while American men languish in isolation, too afraid to admit that they want and need to be vulnerable and close with another man.

Close, intimate male friendships are essential for mental and physical well-being. Dr. Dean Ornish says “I am not aware of any other factor – not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery – that has a greater impact on our incidence of illness, and [chance of] premature death.” According to one study, friendship is more effective at treating depression than cognitive therapy or antidepressants. And, yet, 1 in 5 Americans over the age of 45 reports feeling lonely on a regular basis, and 1 in 5 college students reports being “chronically lonely.” Niobe Way, a Professor of Applied Psychology at NYU, blames a sort of masculine posturing that American men tend to develop in the course of their adolescence. One student, who was interviewed on the topic of friendship while a freshman in high school, told Way:

“[My best friend and I] love each other… that’s it… you have this thing that is deep, so deep, it’s within you, you can’t explain it. It’s just a thing that you know that person is that person… I guess in life, sometimes two people can really, really understand each other and really have a trust, respect and love for each other.”

But, by his senior year, he had this to say about friendship:

“[My friend and I] mostly joke around. It’s not like really anything serious or whatever… I don’t talk to nobody about serious stuff… I don’t talk to nobody. I don’t share my feelings really. Not that kind of person or whatever… It’s just something that I don’t do.”

Korea has one gay celebrity. If you Google “Gay celebrity in Korea,” the only result will be “Hong Soek-cheon.” For many Koreans, homosexuality is a lurid, outlandish concept. One Korean American who returned to his ancestral homeland said that Koreans “completely ignore the reality of gay people who exist. They pretend that it’s just this fairytale from the West.” Many Americans view Korea as the same kind of uncanny, alien place. Maybe you are one of the 10 million people who saw Conan’s recent video, where he swam in pools and sat in close proximity with old, naked, sweaty Korean men, while they commented on each other’s bodies. This sauna was in New York but it was still a mostly accurate representation of the Korean sauna experience. It was, however, sanitized for American audiences. They missed the part where old naked Korean men soap up each other’s plump, glistening buttocks. This is usually done between friends, but it is also acceptable to ask a stranger “could you please suds-up my buttocks?” (Or some approximate translation if your Korean is up to par.) In Korea it is completely acceptable to caress the dimples on a strange man’s lower back. But, sadly, if you kissed that same man on the lips, you would be met with stares, shock, and likely even shouts of profanity and reprobation from old men who weathered a regime that once arrested men for having long hair or women for having short skirts. In cultures where homosexuality is taboo, heterosexual men can experience a level of comfort with each other that people in more “progressive” cultures cannot.

Homophobic societies consider homosexuality to be so improbable that they are completely comfortable with being physically affectionate and intimate with other heterosexual men. Many straight, relatively progressive Americans can’t put their arms around another man because they fear being perceived as gay. Most Americans would consider it unthinkable to hold hands with their friends, as my students do when a game of English Grammar jeopardy can be won or lost by just a few points. Many straight, relatively progressive Americans will never know the comfort and closeness that comes from participating in a massage train. Many will never experience “the [platonic] love between a man and a man which is more powerful than that between a man and a woman,” that a Greek friend of mine described.

My time as a Protestant Christian missionary in Greece taught me a lot about how much homophobia obstructs the function of healthy, male friendship. Growing up in the states, I remember, at the age of 8, feeling a distinct sense of shame that I still gave my Dad a goodnight kiss on the cheek. I remember my friends returning from a bible distributing, house building, sightseeing trip to Ethiopia and hearing the shock, wonder, and lurid excitement in their voices when they recounted school boys walking hand in hand on dirt roads. When I flew to Greece and started working with a Christian nonprofit that catered to Afghan, Iranian, Iraqi, Moroccan, and Syrian refugees, I remember talking with a friend and trying to hide my discomfort when he gave me a friendly neck message. I tried to smile when an Albanian friend would rest their hand on my thigh while we drank coffee together, and I tried to forget the violation of a coarse beard against my cheek when an Afghan would greet me with a traditional kiss once on my left cheek, then my right, then my left, then my right again. But, once I got used to it, I found a sense of almost delirious happiness in constantly being close to other people. I felt closer to people with a single digit English vocabulary than I have with some people I have talked to for years. I became comfortable talking about my doubts and fears rather than repeating the same jokes, rating the same women, and rehashing the same games and matches and fights. But, when I came home, I found that when I would laugh at a friend’s joke and pat their thigh, the look in their eyes would be like someone who had just seen a huge wasp land on their nose. In their eyes I saw that feeling love or connection with another man was something to be feared. Behind those eyes lay an American mind that perceives the enjoyment of another man’s touch as intrinsically, irretrievably “gay.” And, even if we profess to be progressive, as long as we think that feeling gay or being seen as gay is something to be feared, we continue to give homophobia control of our affections.

In the 4 months I spent in the U.S. after returning from Greece, the first man to say “I love you” to me was my partner. My beer pong partner at a frat party near Union Square. He was clutching my shoulder in one hand and a PBR in the other. It turned out he was from New Jersey too. We had met in line for the urinals, talked for a bit, then our conversation stopped until both of our respective penises were no longer visible. “I fucking love you man, we should definitely hang out in Jersey sometime,” he said, before leaving to meet up with a Tinder date, never to be seen again. Drunken “I love yous” are the only time most American males get to express affection for another man, and they are a poor substitute for a true, deep male friendship. These friendships require throwing off the feelings of shame and latent homophobia that still run in supposedly progressive minds. They require the boldness to shout, as Jonah Hill and Michael Cera say in the privacy of their tent in Superbad:

EVAN: I love you. Why don't we say that everyday? Why can't we say it more often?

SETH: I just love you. I just want to go to the rooftops and scream, "I love my best friend, Evan."

[...]

SETH: "Boop."

Jonathan Friedel is working as a token white guy at a cram school in a suburb of Seoul, South Korea. He is also the founder of the Monmouth County Chocolate Milk Mile, and has sat in the back of police cars in three different countries.

script

A Farewell to the Queen of Conway

Michael Doshier · June 7, 2015

A virtual play by Michael Doshier

We’re in Conway, Arkansas. It is night.

You take the exit and drive onto the Waffle House parking lot off US-65. Two seconds ago you crossed the city limits and now you’re here at its welcome center. Outside, teenagers dressed in either camouflage or Abercrombie smoke cigarettes, give each other piggy-back-rides, and generally act a fool. They’re a little tipsy. You’re intimidated but only cause they’re so young and immediately remind you of being that young, an emotion layered in complications ranging from jealousy to nostalgia. You walk in after gifting them with your precious nervous smile.

You sit at the booth and a 25-year-old waitress named Kasey takes your order. She’s a stunning Scarlett Johansson beauty – dirty blonde, a sweet face with crooked and missing teeth, a body to die for, and a welcoming, truly sexy alto voice and southern accent that makes your heart melt like the cheese grits on the cooker. She smacks her gum and gives you a smile. You just order a coffee, which I can humbly but confidently inform you is a mistake. I don’t care how hungry you are or are not - get the hash-browns –smothered, covered, chunked, and peppered. You won’t regret it (for at least another hour or so).

Please press play:

Over by the jukebox, which is playing this mess of a “song” (“Waffle House Family Pt. 1” is its name. There is, mercifully, no part 2) another Waffle House employee sits at a table, folding up images of Sassy Patty (late 50s), placing each photo in an envelope. You notice this process but pay little attention. She doesn’t notice you. She’s focused. She smiles to herself. She cries to herself. She leaves, and, with much hesitation, drops the envelopes in the mailbox by the adjacent motel. She kisses the palm of her hand and pats the mailbox twice. Once firmly, once incredibly gently. She lights a cigarette and moves to her truck, as the smallest tinge of the sun rises in the distance as if to accompany her on her way home.

I haven’t been back in years, but tonight, I’m feeling nostalgic (the teenagers got to me too) and I can’t sleep. I’m staying at my parents’ house for the holidays. I need a coffee and a chocolate chip waffle to fill the stomach with blood and pass me the fuck out (or however the human body works). I also need some company, being back at this establishment so deeply, intrinsically connected to my adolescence – a place where I once thrived at the ages of those kids outside. I used to make people just like you nervous (and yes, we are making fun of you once you’re inside.)

Tonight, I sit across from you.

On the one hand, I feel as if I have not found my soul mate. I’m not sure if I’ve ever been in love in a real way, so I know I haven’t been in love in the soul mate way. But on the other, more prominent hand – the hand that you learn to throw a ball and masturbate with (my left hand) – I know that Sassy Patty was my soul mate.

Sassy Patty enters.

Sassy Patty was the night manager at one of the two Waffle Houses in Conway, Arkansas. The one we’re at right now. She wasn’t always the night manager. Like any worthwhile achievement, she worked her way up to night manager, the ladder of which included strong recommendations from my friends and I as we sat at our booth – THIS very booth actually - and wrote letters to the CEO of Waffle House about how perfect she’d be for the job. This wasn’t the only time we did that, either – one time, one of Patty’s waitresses

SASSY PATTY
interns

waitresses… Kasey, was in trouble with management for apparently yelling at a customer in a way that felt racially charged. Kasey assured us she had a black boyfriend, so we spent all of our energy that wasn’t being used inhaling hash-browns to write to Management about the progressiveness of Patty’s particular Waffle House (which we did – and do – believe in, by the way, but perhaps we should have considered gathering more proof than Kasey’s unseen and possibly fictional better half before attaching our names to Project Save Kasey’s Career). This was our relationship with Waffle House – it was our home, and Sassy Patty, and whomever Sassy Patty liked on her staff-

SASSY PATTY
And whoever didn’t bug the shit out of me OR fuck shit up all the time behind the counter.

… were our family. We were 18.

Now look, I’m a writer in the sense that I really, really want to be. The new screenplay I was working on earlier this year featured a 20-page section about Sassy Patty. Two young adults visiting her at her home and smoking cigarettes out her window, discussing the ins and outs of her life, her opinions on current affairs and pop culture – which she would have even if she actually had no idea what she was talking about.

SASSY PATTY
I’m right here, jackass.

Hey Patty, I’m struggling to remember something – who was the first person to win American Idol again?

SASSY PATTY
Kris Motherfuckin’ Allen, that’s who. Only one that matters anyway.

See.

It was a perfect Sassy Patty scene in that it didn’t progress the plot at all. In that way, it was similar to my time spent within the confines of this Waffle House in that it was a break from plot – a gated community, a shielded “safe space” with her.

The scene made no sense in regards to advancing the overall story, and the script was running fifty pages long. It had to be cut. Then, about a week after highlighting her section and pressing the delete button, I got a call from my best friend Raven informing me Patty had died. Months ago, actually; her second family just hadn’t been clued in yet.

Are you familiar with the idea of a “safe space”? Well let me tell you one thing, you’re sitting in one right now. And it’s a great idea, too – that we are responsible for creating an environment in which everyone is comfortable and welcome. It’s something I heard a lot about in R.A. training in college – something you get certificates for to place on your door so people know you’ve been trained to provide a space where they can feel safe.

Sassy Patty did not need any training.

Sassy Patty was a pioneer of safe spaces, having created one at her Waffle House without even realizing it or being told to.

Patty truly loved the Waffle House and would remind us constantly that

SASSY PATTY
This is the best Waffle House in the STATE!

And then, to celebrate, we’d put “Friends in Low Places” on the jukebox and scream it together, her smoky growl taking the melody to places so low, Garth Brooks never dared dream them.

I knew Patty from the ages of sixteen to twenty-one. That particular Waffle House was the place to be, as it was one of only two establishments – the other being the other Waffle House – open 24/7, and teenagers hate sleeping at hours kept by adults. We would go there after we’d completed whatever our other night activity was – drinking, sobering up, watching movies, driving aimlessly around, or talking about deep shit while smoking packs on packs of cigarettes on our elementary school playgrounds. But visiting Patty at the Waffle House was never the after-party to any of this mindlessness; no, the other stuff was the pre-game. We were hungry and tipsy to the point that the mere concept of hash-browns left us in a daze of desire, let alone hash-browns covered, smothered, chunked and peppered (Waffle House language for cheese, sausage, tomatoes, and jalapenos added). And yet that wasn’t even why we went. Not even close.

You know, I’ve only been to the other Waffle House in Conway once, and it was because I was high and pleaded with my friends that I couldn’t go entertain a conversation with Patty in this state. I was terrified I’d act weird and she would take it as shade, or that I would act obvious and she didn’t approve of drugs – this is a few years before the medical marijuana progress of today, plus the state I was in was purely recreational. I later learned Patty wasn’t a stranger to a little Greenpeace International herself, and would have been totally fine with this part of my life. 23-year-old me wishes he could go whisper it into 18-year-old me’s ear so I could’ve gotten one more night with her.

From the ages of 16 to 18, I learned all about her time in the Navy. The time she got into a bit of a tiff with a fellow SEAL. This anecdote, interestingly, derived out of some Sassy Patty life advice.

SASSY PATTY
I learned in the Navy that quitters don’t EVER win. Quitters get rolled under the staircase so that Sassy Patty don’t get in trouble! That’s what happens to quitters!

The woman on the receiving end of their brawl woke up and survived, by the way, and became one of Patty’s best friends (which is not surprising and sort of sums up Patty’s entire thing in a nutshell).

I learned all about all of the years she had spent as a truck driver before joining the Waffle House team-

SASSY PATTY
I was the best trucker in the state!

I learned of the great love between her and her husband. I learned that he had passed and, while Patty went on an occasional date, she never expected to marry again. That was her one true love and he was gone. There was no point – and if you didn’t really catch my tone, Sassy would say that sentence as if it were a truly-meant shrug. I learned that this was one of the main reasons she didn’t fear death and instead embraced it, so that she would be reunited with him.

I learned of Sassy’s great love of Harry Potter.

We always tipped her well, though I hope well enough. I always remember feeling so awkward about the moment the receipt came. She was our friend, and we spent every night with her we could, yet the receipt was a reminder that Sassy didn’t get off ‘til 7am and couldn’t leave with us.

Patty and I took an immediate liking to each other that grew and grew as if it could never stop. Perhaps I wasn’t the most “popular kid in school,” a concept I don’t remember very well now but vaguely know was, like, a thing I thought about occasionally – BUT at Waffle House, it was cool to like Sassy Patty – and Sassy Patty loved the crew of which I was a proud member. She didn’t just love us, she knew our names. We were greeted, personally, one by one, when we walked through the door, like royalty. So we were always the coolest at the Waffle House; no matter who else was there that night, we ran the show. You can take all the pictures you want with this woman and caption them on Facebook about how funny she is and what a good time you had, but I’m over here laughing ‘cause I know Patty secretly hates this and probably you. She whispered it to us.

And then, after one final tearful night, I left.

For years while studying writing in New York, Sassy Patty was my muse. It started after I presented a sketch about her to my freshman class and got the biggest laughs of the day. I called her to let her know what a hit she was, hoping she understood they were laughing at her big vibrant incredible personality, not at a stereotype. …Hoping that I hadn’t painted her as a stereotype.

For the rest of my time in college, I continued to write about her – placing her in all sorts of scripts she could star in – not some actress to PLAY her, but ACTUALLY her. I made it my mission to make Patty Motherfucking Lytle a star! And every time I’d go home for Winter Break or Summer Break or Spring Break, she’d ask:

SASSY PATTY
When am I gonna see ya on TV?!

And I’d explain, “YOU’RE going to be the one on TV, Patty! YOU are the star.” And I genuinely did think I was going to make this woman a star – this woman who was one of a kind, in the actual sense of the expression that makes you THINK about the expression, not just acknowledging it’s a cliché set of words and you know what they mean when put together. There was

No.

One.

Else.

Like.

Her.

In.

This.

World.

She was the only individual that was this. This wholly unique, wholly perfect creature deserved the spotlight whether she wanted it or not (I never asked).

The closest I ever came was giving her a copy of the script I had written for her. She read it in the booth next to me, noted the inaccuracies I had made, but cried a bit and said she would be framing it. To celebrate, we put “Friends in Low Places” on the jukebox and screamed it together, her smoky growl taking the melody to places so low, Garth Brooks never dared dream them.

I never came out to Sassy Patty; I was far too protective of losing our bond and the many risk assessments I’d done in my head had always bolted out of the closet screaming a resounding “NOPE!” I wasn’t used to adults taking kindly to gays at this point – not enough of us in Conway had come out yet to watch our own community make the slow, beautiful progress it can boast now, nor had I moved to New York yet and seen a world where literally no one gave a fuck (except one randomly homophobic R.A. I met senior year who was probably super fucking terrible at creating safe spaces). And Sassy was a tough, God-fearing, Southern-with-a-capital-S woman.

The wannabe-progressive, rally-attending, hopefully-forward-thinking, hopefully-less-ashamed-of-myself-now version of myself cringes that I never let her know the “real me” or whatever – I guess the complete me, as I was never realer than I was at Patty’s Waffle House. To be honest, it just wasn’t worth it to me. If Patty was homophobic, I didn’t want to know. And I didn’t want her to know either, because losing her as the sun that set my soul ablaze with comfort and contentment in this place whose fabric I was never quite able to weave all 6’4” of my body and spirit into naturally and without shame, would’ve crushed me.

I don’t think she would’ve had a problem with it, though. When I asked her what she thought about Lady Gaga, she said

SASSY PATTY
She reminds me of Boy George. I loved Boy George when he came out! People always tellin’ me, “But Patty! He’s a queer!” and I would say, “Hell, I don’t care!” (singing) Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon, you come and go, you come and go.

Once while I was here with my friends Kalee and Marina, I was paying my tab and told Patty gleefully, “Marina and Kalee are on a date!” This wasn’t true, and I never told Marina and Kalee – both straight – that Patty spent the rest of her days believing they were lesbians and together – but I was drunk and morally saw nothing wrong with testing these waters using my unknowing buddies.

SASSY PATTY
Well that’s nice! Looks like it’s going well! Why are YOU here with ‘em?! Come out and smoke a cigarette with me and give them some time alone! Jesus CHRIST, Michael!

See. I probably had nothing to worry about. And before our cigarette break, to celebrate the fake lesbian date happening before us, we put “Friends In Low Places” on in the jukebox and screamed it together, her smoky growl taking the melody to places so low, Garth Brooks never dared dream them.

I learned of Patty’s health problems my sophomore year of college while I was home on break. She told me over a cigarette that her doctor had demanded her stop smoking and she had a check-up the next week she wasn’t feeling hopeful about. A few weeks later, I heard she’d been fired for missing a shift.

And then, I couldn’t get a hold of her. She wasn’t answering her Facebook messages and her phone was disconnected. I asked around for new numbers, and finally got one from a reluctant employee I found on Facebook who told me shit had gone down when she was fired, and I wasn’t allowed to let anyone know where I got the number. I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t expect Sassy to go without a fight.

I got ahold of her one more time over the phone. She told me she was doing better. Living with her family. I was happy to hear this. I promised her the next time I was in town, I would visit her no matter where I had to drive and I told her I loved her. And that was the last time I ever spoke to Sassy Patty.

You turn to look at our angel, but she’s out for a cigarette break. The sun has started to rise with a bit more intention, casting her shadow through the window and over our table between us. Kasey asks you if you want more coffee. Do you? That one’s entirely up to you.

I’m sorry I’ve taken so much of your time this morning, I just thought you’d like to know the history of this place and the star of this stage we’re sitting on. We’re enjoying our coffee on a Broadway set whose star flat-out murdered five nights a week in her prime. She was killer. She did the damn thing and never apologized once for it. And at this point, I’m unsure of my purpose without her – if my little rant is about appreciating your friendships because they can be taken from you, if in that sense it’s about the temporality of life. If it’s about the first person who I felt accepted by, or the first place where I felt accepted. If it’s The Amazing Tale of Two Wacky Worlds Colliding – that of a Rough-and-Tumble Navy-SEAL-Turned-Trucker Meeting a Sensitive, Closeted 16 Year Old and Forming a Six-Year Friendship that Felt Life-Long. (That does sound pretty epic, though, so let’s go with that one.)

All I know at this point is that Sassy Patty was one hell of a woman and has made many, many lives much, much happier and her death has shaken me.

SASSY PATTY
Aww thank ya, baby, that sure is sweet of ya.

You’re back.

SASSY PATTY
A cigarette only takes three minutes to smoke, baby!

One Christmas there was a Christmas tree hanging upside-down from the ceiling at Patty’s Waffle House. I guess this was Management’s decision because when we asked her about it, she responded

SASSY PATTY
We decided it was a symbol of how upside down the world is. Other than that, I can tell you it’s straight retarded.

The world is an upside-down place, Sassy Patty. And that statement is offensive.

It’s gotten even more upside down – if that’s geometrically possible – with you gone. I pray there are other “safe spaces” for kids like me in places like Conway, Arkansas. I pray that each kid that needs one gets her own Sassy Patty whether in the local Waffle House or elsewhere. I honestly pray for these safe spaces for everyone whether they manifest themselves in a Waffle House or a bar or a Drama classroom or a drag club. I wonder if any of the employees at the other Waffle House of Conway were someone else’s Sassy Patty. I wonder if the space contained within every Waffle House’s perimeter is magical for those willing to see it this way – or perhaps forced to, given their daily experience in other spaces. One time, the rapper Fabolous – do you know Fabolous? No? Well, good. This dumbass went on an anti-Waffle House Twitter tirade, and I so distinctly remember how intensely my blood started boiling, how deeply offended I became and how silly I felt but how legitimate it all felt as well. All I could do was press the stupid “Unfollow” button, a move that he didn’t notice but one that made me feel so powerful for having stood up for something I believed in. I wonder if anyone else un-followed him that day for similar reasons. And then I wonder if any of these attempts to turn her legacy into something universal and accessible for all can even be valid, keeping in mind that she was so deeply one-of-a-kind. That maybe she was just our angel we were lucky to know. And maybe other people get something great, but no one else gets a Sassy Patty.

What I do know is, Patty, you formed the only truly safe space I’ve maybe ever found. And I thank you for it every day.

I hope you’re dancing with your husband. And I hope that even in heaven, you bring this song to depths so deep and places so low, even Garth himself hadn’t dreamed em.

Please press play:

Care to join?

SASSY PATTY
Blame it all on my roots, I showed up in boots, and ruined your black tie affair

The last one to know, the last one to show, I was the last one you thought you’d see there

SASSY PATTY
And I saw the surprise, and the fear in his eyes, when I took his glass of champagne

And I toasted you; said “Honey, we may be through, but you’ll never hear me complain!”

WAFFLE HOUSE FAMILY
Cause I’ve got friends in low places, where the whiskey drowns, and the beer chases,
My blues away; and I’ll be okay
And I’m not big on social graces, think I’ll slip on down to the oasis!
Oh, I’ve got friends in low places!

Michael Doshier is a writer and musician based in Brooklyn, NY. He is the creator of the electronic rock project Johnny Darlin and his visual EP Mr. Monogamy, all available at johnnydarlin.com.

Letter from the Editor, Issue Four

Adam Cecil · June 7, 2015

Thank you for reading and watching and listening and seeing this issue of Things Created By People. This is a good thing to start a letter with.

While it is not our goal to become the next Buzzfeed, we care a lot about growing our audience and making the people who read our zine happy.

We don’t just do this for ourselves–we want to make sure that it’s worth our contributors’ time to submit, to go through the editing process, to sit down with us and talk to us about their art. We want to make sure that their art is seen and appreciated.

Right now, that’s all we have to offer. It’s a shitty offer, honestly. The worst thing you can tell an artist is “we pay in exposure.” Exposure doesn’t pay the bills.

We don’t have the ability yet to pay our contributors, but it’s coming. It is on our minds, but more than that, it is on our roadmap. It is our number one goal for the next year. We have no idea what form payment might take. We can’t tell you when it will come. But it will come, and hopefully it will look like money. (If it makes you feel any better, all of the editors have spent a lot of real, actual dollars to make this whole thing happen, so we’re in a similar–or worse–boat than you!)

In the meantime, here’s our deal: if we have to pay you in exposure, we’ll make sure it’s real, actual exposure. For our contributors, that means helping spread their new and ongoing projects–writing, film, dance, painting, music–over Twitter and to our newsletter subscribers. We don’t want to just promote your piece in our zine; we want to promote you as an artist.

A big part of making that worthwhile will be growing our audience. In the week after we released the first issue of Things Created By People, fewer than 40 people read it. In the week after we released Issue Three two months ago, 800 read it. We’re optimistic that we can grow this number much higher within the next year.

Of course, passing visitors do not matter if they don’t stay to engage in future issues or with our contributors’ other projects. To speak of it in business-like terms, we need to convert those visitors into Twitter followers and newsletter subscribers. Our newsletter is especially important to us; it will allow us to directly communicate with our audience in a way that is much more intimate than a tweet. It’s an essential part of our community building efforts in the next year.

How can you help? If you are a contributor, you can help us by spreading your work and the works of your fellow contributors far and wide, on Facebook and beyond. You can also help us by encouraging friends to sign up for our newsletter, signing up for the newsletter yourself, and by sending us your latest projects. If you are not a contributor, you can do most of those things as well.

Oh, by the way, did you notice that we completely revamped our website? It’s much more mobile friendly than the last site, so please, read everything on your phone or tablet or smartwatch. We have contributor pages for the first time, allowing our contributors to have their own page on the site. We’ve also made the archive a lot more fun to explore.

In your digital possession is the fourth issue of this zine. It is the last in our first volume. The next time you read a letter from the editor, it will be in the fall, and we will have been doing this for an entire year. We look forward to doing it for many more.

Thank you for reading and watching and listening and seeing this issue of Things Created By People. This is a good thing to end a letter with.

Yours,
Adam Cecil
Managing Editor

photography

Photography by Elena Mudd

Elena Mudd · April 20, 2015

Elena Mudd is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. Originally from Burlington, Vermont. This is the shortest autobiography she has ever written. Her website.

video

Home Video: Road Trip

Adam Cecil · April 20, 2015

This video is about road trips. It is also about home videos and the act of making them.

This video addresses Rick Prelinger's idea that the American road trip is a product of a bygone era, or in other words, dead.

Just like home videos.

Almost everyone carries a high-quality videocamera in their pockets. Everyone is shooting videos all of the time, some as short as six seconds, some as long as movies.

Everyone is documenting everything.

But you wouldn't call them home videos.

If you listen to the full interview with Rick Prelinger, which you can find at KCRW, you will hear him talk about the ephemerality of home videos. The home videos that he used to create No More Road Trips? was abandoned. No one wanted them, not even the descendants of those who recorded them.

We live in a world defined by ephemerality. We document everything, gather our likes and hearts, and then move on to the next thing.

And yet, we find ourselves scrolling through old Facebook posts. Do you remember this Instagram? This Vine was so funny. I can't believe I used to look like that. Whatever happened to that old place, to those people?

We rarely gather around as a family, Dad dragging out the old projector, Mom making popcorn, to watch old home videos. But we still remember. We still make the past our entertainment. There is still an audience for our nostalgia.

The home video is dead. Long live the home video.

Adam Cecil is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is also the Managing Editor of this zine. You can find more of his work on his website.

essay

The Stomach Bump

Rachel Petzinger · April 20, 2015

You’re not supposed to ask an Alzheimer’s patient, “Who’s this person, what’s his name? Do you remember him?” It insults them, but Nana never had that reaction. She giggled and sometimes remembered I’m Rachel; other times she called me Debbie or Linda. Debbie is my aunt. I have no idea who Linda is.

My brother Wil and I spent most of our time before kindergarten at our grandparents’ house in Holiday City, a quiet retirement community in Toms River, New Jersey. The houses were all pastel-colored one-storied homes with neatly kept lawns like the neighborhood in Edward Scissorhands. I went on walks with my grandfather and was always annoyed at how he would stop and chat with any neighbor who was sitting on their porch, taking out garbage, getting pulled out on a stretcher. I can’t remember my grandmother ever going outside unless she was with someone.

I remember her mostly in the kitchen, in a floral apron always equipped with tissues. She kept her silk white hair out of her face with dozens of bobby pins. Her dark skin was wrinkled like paper. Her eyes, though brown, had blue linings on their limbus. Sometimes she played Go Fish with us. When one of my favorite Beanie Babies ripped, she sewed it back together like it was nothing. She taught me how to write a Z in cursive.

When I was 9, after my grandfather died, Nana moved into my father’s house in Allentown, NJ, where Wil and I lived half the time after our parents divorced. We had to share my bedroom while my dad rearranged the house. I remember they argued a lot, but I don’t remember about what. I think most of them were misunderstandings. Her catchphrase for a while was, “May the Lord strike me down!”

At our dad’s in the summertime, Wil and I spent the days with Nana, since we didn’t go to school in Allentown and didn’t know anyone within more than a block radius. We had a neighbor, Pat, who was super awesome and always bought us toys because she hated her teenage daughter. Plus, she let us swim in her pool when she wasn’t there. (I liked Pat until I was 15, when she got drunk and insisted that she rub sunscreen on my badly sunburnt legs. That freaked me out.) Around noon, Nana would trot next-door and tell us lunch was ready, and we’d beg for five minutes, and she would say we weren’t even supposed to be there anyway. She never understood that Pat allowed us to trespass.

Nana and I would watch That’s So Raven on her bed. She got a kick out of Raven for some reason. She called her “the girl.” We watched American Idol, too. She spoke so highly of Randy Jackson. She would go, “That one, that feller, he’s reasonable. He’s the nice one.” The Twilight Zone was reserved for New Year’s Eve, when SciFi ran marathons (before they changed their name). I was glued to the TV for the episode “The Eye of the Beholder,” even though Nana called out the twist at the beginning. She chirped up, “Isn’t she actually beautiful and they’re piggies?” I was amazed by how smart she was when I saw the ending.

On her birthday in 2005, I won the lead role of Gertrude McFuzz in our school’s play, Seussical the Musical. (Some people will tell you Gertrude is not the lead, but they are wrong. She is the most important character in the whole story.) Wil and I came home from school and couldn’t find Nana anywhere. She was always in the kitchen making dinner when we came home. Her bedroom door was closed, so I peeked in. I saw her sitting in the dark with the TV on. She wasn’t paying any attention to it. I turned on the light.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked.

She lifted her head and her eyes slowly lit up, as if it took her a moment to come back from a sad memory. “Oh, hello.”

“Happy birthday! How old are you?”

“Too old,” she chuckled. Wil made a b-line for her remote control and then her forehead for a kiss. He put sunglasses and a tiara on her and insisted that I take her picture with my nifty new camera phone.

“Hey, Nana, guess what? Rachel is going to play a stupid bird onstage –“

“Shut up! I’m telling her. Nana, I’m going to play the lead bird in our school play.”

She clapped her hands together and exclaimed, “My little actress!”

Over the next few months, she began giving me a lot of her possessions. She had a little knickknack of a Japanese boy, a knickknack of an old man reading a newspaper called Good News. A couple kissing on a bench, a candle with a dog next to a fire hydrant. They all showed up on my dresser one day and I thought maybe it was Wil pulling a prank on me without actually knowing how comedy worked. But when I tried to return them to her, she shook her head.

“No, no, I want you to have them.”

“Why? Don’t you want them?”

“I want you to have them.” She handed me a book called The Tragedy of X. I had never heard her talk about books or movies or anything that she had read or watched on her own. It prompted me to ask her what her favorite movie actually was.

She thought a minute. “I can’t remember the name… Judy Garland. She’s a girl. It’s in color. Some of it.”

“Do you mean The Wizard of Oz?”

“Yeah. That one was good.”

I pestered her that entire day with questions about her past. It hadn’t occurred to me until then, at 13 years old, that this woman knew everything about me, (even how I liked my peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwiches) yet I barely knew a thing about her outside of being my grandmother. Unlike my parents, or even my grandfather, who always made sure their stories would live on through Wil and me, Nana never spoke anything about life before 1992. All I knew about her childhood was that she was the youngest of five kids and hated her older sister, Jenny, who one time (allegedly) held her head under a faucet. That was all I knew of her life before my birth. I tried to get more out of her:

“Was the Great Depression tough?”

“Huh? Yeah. I played baseball.”

“Did you like Elvis?”

“Don’t stand so close to the stove.”

“I’m not.”

“You’ll catch on fire.”

“I’m nowhere near the stove! Can you still speak Italian? What does fongool mean?” I asked, knowing full well what it meant.

“It means put plates on the table.”

On March 8th, 2006, she woke up and complained that her stomach hurt, but we were running late for school and I told her to feel better. My father called later to tell Wil and I that she went to the hospital for an ulcer.

My play was later that week. “Will she still be able to see me be Gertrude?”

“I don’t know, Rachel.”

She didn’t get better later that week, that month, or that year. She was in the hospital for the whole summer and then was put into a nursing home. Every time we visited, Nana became less and less of the woman I had known for fourteen years. We used to sit in the cafeteria because the rooms could get stuffy and, depending on who Nana’s roommate was at the time, smelled like either urine or too much perfume. Whenever I would say that I felt bad with her stuck there, my dad would say in the kindest way possible that it’s her own fault for not taking care of herself. I thought she took care of herself okay. She liked Oreos and Entenmann’s pound cake, but I never saw her eat in excess. In fact, even when she was in the hospital and couldn’t be fed without help, she still offered everyone her food. When she couldn’t speak, she would pick up a soggy piece of bread and hold it in front of me in case I wanted it.

I fed her in the nursing home because she was too weak to feed herself. My dad and my brother used to roughhouse with each other in their seats, which made me angry because it seemed disrespectful. But at some point I no longer minded it. Maybe this is what we would be doing if we were at home. Maybe this makes it feel more like old times. My dad wasn’t as close to Nana as he was his father, but I know in his own way, he cared about her. For a while, every visit her wheelchair would be so dusty you could write the Bible in it. Each visit he would speak to management and say something needed to be done, and nothing ever was, until finally Wil and I heard him through the walls ripping the manager a new one in his office. Her wheelchair was spotless after that.

There were these two sisters in their 60s who were always there visiting their 100-year-old mother. Every single time we visited, no matter what day of the week or what time of day, they’d be there. They were the only people Nana would talk to. It was a relief that she had a place to sit and she wasn’t alone. They told me I was a good granddaughter, feeding my grandmother like that. But one day, the three of them weren’t there and we never saw them again.

“So, Nana, who’s this?” my dad would ask, pointing to Wil. Unlike me, who, with the exception of puberty, has generally looked the same throughout life, my brother has never looked like the same person for more than 6 months.

“Hummm… Bill,” she guessed.

“Your son? That’s me,” he teased.

She smiled, thinking she was correcting him. “My man, Bill.”

The three of us shared a laugh and she joined in. Even if she didn’t get it, it was just nice to see her laughing instead of crying that she wanted to go home. I think our biggest laugh together was one time I asked her if she had a bellybutton. I never knew the whole story, but apparently after she gave birth to my aunt, her bellybutton had to be removed, or something. I’m not positive if that’s even true or if she was, as she would say, “pulling my leg.” Either way, I asked her if she had one, and she goes, “I don’t know, let me check,” and lifted her shirt all the way up, exposing her breasts to us. We all lost it, and that time I think she knew what we were laughing about. The first boobs Wil saw were his grandmother’s.

That’s how visits typically went until I was 18 and heading off to NYU. Though she couldn’t hold a conversation before, she soon couldn’t even answer basic yes-or-no questions. I visited her the day before I moved to New York and found her wheeling aimlessly around the hallways. She didn’t understand that when I tried to take her into the cafeteria, we were visiting her. She didn’t know who any of us were.

During spring break of 2011, when the rest of the world was busy torturing Rebecca Black, Nana had to go into the hospital again. I didn’t pay much attention to how serious my dad was making this time sound, since he’s the kind of guy who every time someone has a cold, he’s preparing their eulogy. But it soon became clear that for once my dad’s exaggerations were realistic. We all knew what was around the corner.

On March 19th, 2011, my mother took Wil and I to see Nana. We found our father beside her. She was hardly recognizable. The nurses wrapped gloves around her hands to keep her from pulling tubes, but when they were off, you could see her long, yellow nails. Her hair that she had once meticulously kept in bobby pins was greasy and strewn about, and her fragile body was mangled and twisted in sheets and tubes. On her stomach was a giant unshapely bump that stuck out about 10 inches. I just assumed it was more tubes and ignored it.

“You guys know what that is?” my dad asked.

Wil shook his head, and I answered confidently, “Yeah, just her tubes.”

My dad responded, “Her stomach. That’s her food. But she has no more muscle, so it all just sits there.”

“Okay, stop talking.”

“You remember Alien–”

“SHUT UP!” I screamed.

If my dad’s girlfriend hadn’t been in the bathroom, she would’ve yelled at me to respect my father, and how I’m ungrateful. But thankfully she wasn’t, it was only my parents, Wil, and what was left of Nana. I looked in her eyes, and she returned back a conscious gaze that I hadn’t seen in years. She cupped her hand under my chin and announced loudly and proudly, “I love you.”

The next day she was asleep for the entire visit. My dad and Wil went to the cafeteria to eat, but I wasn’t hungry, so I stayed in the room alone with her.

I took off her glove and held her hand. It was cold. For a long time, I sat in silence wondering how long it had been that they were downstairs eating. I wondered about how maybe Nana had already seen that episode of The Twilight Zone and she wasn’t really a genius after all. I thought about how I would never have one of her world famous peanut-butter-and-jellies again, even though it had already been years since she made one. I guessed it was already too late to ask the truth about her bellybutton.

I gently squeezed her hand. “Hey, you know what, Nana? When I was in 8th grade, you missed the performance of the century. I was Gertrude in Seussical. I can sing you a song if you’d like.”

I fixed up her blankets and sang quietly, since this was a private show: “There once was a girl-bird, named Gertrude McFuzz…”

I had to catch a train back to New York, since spring break was over. I took one last look at the woman who taught me how to write a Z in cursive and left. I never saw her again.

Rachel Petzinger is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her webseries, Dear Rachel, just debuted its second season.

fiction

Drift

Ben Miller · April 20, 2015

Here is how you embalm a body: first, undress it and lay it down. Massage it carefully. The limbs will become stiff soon and you wouldn’t want them to freeze in an awkward position. Close the eyes and glue them shut. If they look sunken, stuff a little cotton behind the eyelids. Close the mouth. Make an incision under the left clavicle and insert two tubes: one to pump the formaldehyde in, one to drain the blood out. Be sure to get both tubes inserted snugly into major arteries. Begin pumping. The process will take several hours. Keep massaging the limbs and torso to make sure the fluid is evenly distributed. When done, be sure to powder the sewn-up incision with makeup so it doesn't show. Dress the body. Some especially leaky bodies require a plastic layer between the skin and the clothes. Cut the clothes up the back, pull them tight across the chest of the corpse. Make the face up. Do something to the hair.

This, according to late night internet searches I've been making for the past three hours. It might not seem the best thing to be googling late at night, but I couldn't help myself. It’s dark in my room, yellow light from the window casting a dim stripe across my legs. I move a lot when I sleep, tangling the sheets and leaving dark sweat stains. Tonight I woke up dreaming I was at an open-casket funeral; expected, as always, to kneel and pray to the corpse.

The first corpse I saw was Aunt Mary, a distant relative who lived down the South Shore. The undertaker went overboard with the makeup – blue eye shadow, blush, scarlet lipstick. They tried to do up the viewing room to look like a normal home that just happened to have a coffin in it, but the fabric on all the chairs felt antiseptic and scratchy and the wallpaper had a plastic sheen. You were supposed to ascend this little staircase set up next to the coffin, kneel, and say a prayer to the body. I kept my eyes screwed shut until the last "Amen," then opened them and looked at the blank face until my mother's touch pulled me away.

On the way home, some of the family that had driven down together stopped at a fried clam shack off Route 24 in Bridgewater. There were four around the table - my mother, my aunt Ann, our first cousin Ellen, and me. That Loretta Lynn song was playing, "Stand By Your Man." The place had a TV showing college football, glistening cakes rotated in a glass vitrine. The waitresses wore aprons that cut off above the knees.

After a beer or two, Ellen took to talking about her upcoming divorce (Boston accent: more divahhz than divorce). She had enormous breasts that heaved as if to emphasize her speech. Her hair; shiny, black, was cut short and hairsprayed into a glossy, motionless trapezoid.

"He's an asshole," she said. "I married an asshole." Her husband Billy (not the father of her children, that was Jim, who'd died of M.S.), had been cheating on her with the receptionist at the flooring company where he installed tile. Ellen's friend Joanne had told her Billy was running around behind her back. "I know where she lives," Ellen said, "so I got the kids in the car and we went over there to show her the kind of family she's breaking up."

My mother and aunt caught each other's eyes across the table. They had gone to college and married men they met there.

"And we got there," Ellen said, "And Billy's there! In his clothes, thank god, the fucking rat."

"Oh Jesus," my mother said. She gestured at me.

"Well, it's an education," Ellen said. The waitress set three baskets of fried clams down in the middle of the table. "Anyway," she said, "I couldn't very well stay with the cheating bastard so that's that. Asshole." She crunched a clam in her mouth, I got a whiff of cooling fry-oil and perfume.

Ann said, "You did the right thing, babe." I kept my ears open.

"Aunt Mary," Ann went on. "She was a beauty when she was young."

"Yeah," my mother said. "She looked like Sophia Loren or something."

"But the mouth she had!" Ellen said, pushing a basket of clams towards me. I ate one. "Only time I ever heard anyone call someone a fried rat's asshole, that's for sure."

"But she was a looker," Ann said.

"Fat lot of good it did her. Her first husband was a homo, her second husband was in the mob, and her third husband was Jewish."

"Ellen," my mother said, sharply.

"Didn't say he wasn't good to her ‘til he died, the sweet thing," Ellen said.

"The mob?" I asked, perking up.

"Yeah," Ellen said. Big guy named Victor. That would have been around '72-'73, right?"

Ann nodded. "Yeah, must have been. I remember him from when I was about ten."

"He set her up in this big house in Jersey with white carpet," Ellen said. She had diamonds. She showed up to Christmas Eve in a Lincoln."

"Didn't it end with him in jail," my mother asked.

"Yeah," Ellen said. "Dad told me they got him for taxes, but I remember someone drunk on Christmas Eve telling me he shot some guy and threw him in the East River. She and I both. Boy, can we pick'em."

Now, I live by the East River, on the Brooklyn waterfront. Late evenings in summer, the park is breezy, the water silver, the sky orange-pink. The river seems to flow in two directions at once – wavelets on the surface skitter north with the wind, underneath, rolling swells swim towards shore. Where the crests meet, they do a kind of two-step. On the bank, boys with bicycles sit smoking, bored dogs sniff at tall grass; in the background, a three-legged water tower hovers menacingly, looking like a monument aliens might have left rusting, waiting for their return. Black fabric billows loosely off half-finished condo towers.

It was just last night, there, that this latest sleeplessness began. At first, the body just looked like a piece of driftwood or something, a shopping cart, maybe. A fixed-wing plane buzzed overhead, the thing in the water floated closer. I got up, and walked out onto the pier to see what it was.

The thing coalesced into the shape of a person. "Is that someone swimming? Gross." I heard some girls say, smoking cigarettes off the pier railing. Then the chilling, terrible limpness of the arms became visible, the head lolling freely with each swell of the river.

Swollen, distended, blue, the body floated towards me. The man had been muscular, with the body of an athlete, but water had bloated the fingers into fat sausages, pulled the slack skin up off his torso so it twitched nervously with each change in the waves. The distended penis floated on the surface. I heard the girls scream as the body approached the pier feet first, the last thing I saw before it dipped underneath were the eyes – open, green and glassy – and the loose, rotting jaw.

When I was a kid, lying in bed and failing to fall asleep, I looked up at the windows that rose up to my left and imagined strange men trying to break in. I'd have already checked the locks. I usually managed to convince myself that the burglars would be stopped, or at least temporarily immobilized, by the window blinds - how, I thought, could they squeeze through the clanking tin slats without being noticed? Surely by the time they snipped away a kidnapper-sized hole I would have time to scream, to run out into the hall and slam the door behind me. Tonight, I lie awake again, thinking of Aunt Mary’s body in her coffin: lips lined, hair fluffed, cheeks stuffed to unnatural plumpness, fists clenched around a cross. I think of my grandmother, who was cremated; her casket rolling along a conveyor belt into the ovens. I think about how bodies are embalmed, the clinical violence of it. There is nothing to do to a corpse. You stuff it full of chemicals, you burn it, you float it in the river. At least the swimmer kept some fish alive, I think, and then I am asleep, at least until the next morning. You take it day by day by day.

Ben Miller is a writer and researcher in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with a wide range of interests, from historical research to fiction and criticism to classical music performance. He tweets @benwritesthings, learn more at benwritesthings.com.

photography

Photography by Tennessee Nunez

Tennessee Nunez · April 20, 2015

*"This photo is of my girlfriend in the woods, showing how nature is both a glimpse into the past, and an entity in the present."*

*"This photo is from last summer, and is of a daughter and mother, throwing a seashell into the ocean to honor the mother’s late brother; in essence, a family reunion."*

*"This last photo is of a machine dousing a frozen airplane wing with hot water, rebuilding its function to fly properly."*

Tennessee Nunez is a 21 year old rapper and photographer based in NYC, currently studying at Hunter College. Find him on Instagram and Soundcloud.

essay

Warped Tour Taught Me How to Love

Nick Boyd · April 20, 2015

Older Brothers, Pop Punk, and the Flaccid Inevitability of Cool

*The author and his older brother at Warped Tour.*

“What the word ‘over’ really means is that your expectations of a place, your fantasies of who you might become there, have been confounded by the persistence of you.”

— Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Oh, the archetypal older brother...

That mansion on the hill of masculinity, that gatekeeper of "cool," the champion and the fuck-up. Older brothers are responsible for a whole litany of the word's passions and sensibilities. Accordingly so, I would not be here today if it weren't for my older brother Alex. Four years my senior, Alex provided a clear picture of success in my preteen mind as he spent his high school years establishing a unique teenage identity for himself, a life that I spent a great amount of time daydreaming about as I pictured myself in his shoes in my own upcoming teen years. All the while I was blissfully unaware of the fact that the whole thing–the scene, sensibilities, and identity for which Alex found himself–would quickly be rendered extinct by the swift tide of popular culture and the frivolous nature of "cool."

You'd be hard pressed to call Alex a nerd. He rode mountain bikes, looked people right in the eye, and his existence had a funny way of inciting freshman girls to write paint pen love notes all over his Nissan Pathfinder. He had friends, lots of them, and some of them even had vaginas. He was voted "Most Attractive" in his senior yearbook; the result of a vigorous campaign by his mischievous friends, but an undeniable testament to his overall popularity regardless. Despite all this, somehow, someway, the climate and sensibilities that defined youth culture in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina from 2003 to 2007 allowed a popular teenager like Alex to spend his weekends moshing at NC Hardcore shows, driving cross state with attractive girls to see bands like Jack's Mannequin, and skanking across dance floors at amateur Ska shows. In a feat made possible by an early preoccupation with Minor Threat, inherent pressure surrounding his status as the first kid out of the gate in our family, and a lingering private school imposed skittishness regarding illicit substances, Alex did it all sober as a whistle.

Alex's friends had an aforementioned Nth wave Ska band called the BFGs. After their occasional shows, Alex and his friends would drive across town to Cookout (North Carolina treasure, Fast Food Mecca, Drive Thru Only) and at least once, he brought me along. I remember sitting in the back seat, sweaty from the physical toll Ska demanded that night, watching him and his friends intently as I dreamed about my turn at the car, the cool friends, the cute girls, and the basement shows. Just then, two of Alex's friends pulled up next to us in their car, triumphantly blasting Brand New's "Seventy Times 7"–quite possibly the best Emo diss song ever–as they passionately shouted lines from the song at Alex, who returned the favor. The same kids had a garage band of their own and they tried out for their high school talent show with a cover of "Seventy Times 7" but were disqualified for that pesky line where Brand New's JesseLacey implores former bandmate/Taking Back Sunday's Syd Barrett, John Nolan, to "have another drink and drive yourself home," and to "think of me when you forget your seatbelt and again when your head goes through the windshield." Brand New was cool. Alex was cool. They were all so fucking cool.

I was thirteen.

Alex showed me who I could be and the Warped Tour showed me who I was. Determined to define myself through the pages of Alternative Press magazine, I spent hours combing forums for New Found Glory b-sides, bee-lining through Borders and Best Buy in search of the CD racks, and sitting alone in my bedroom writing sappy emails of adoration to the members of Yellowcard. All the while, each and every year from age 11 on, I attended the now infamously shitty Vans Warped Tour. Somehow, I had managed to establish my identity through a world that was neither cool nor smart, and I couldn't have cared less. I placed my coveted Fall Out Boy hoodies and macabre Senses Fail t-shirts front row center in each and every single yearbook photo without question. I had somehow found confidence in the individualism afforded to me by one of the biggest rip-off scenes in the history of guitars. The Warped world gave me a confidence that manifested itself in the form of the Taking Back Sunday t-shirts (plural) I wore to school damn near every day and that time I gave the Queen Bee of my 8th grade class Panic! At the Disco's A Fever You Can't Sweat Out for her birthday. Hell, I even dabbled in a Hot Topic studded belt from time to time. Fuck 'em.

When considering the years of my life as a nerd, the years wherein Warped Tour was king, I am disturbed by the warmth of my nostalgia. Despite the fact that my life between the age of eleven and fifteen involved the most self-loathing and alienation I have experienced in my entire life, I have no doubt those years were the purest time of my life as a music fan. Physical media was dying and I was coming alive. Still, the wheel of popular culture moved on and it wasn't soon before I started hanging out with kids who listened to Arcade Fire, unbeknownst to the fact that I was about to truly understand the consequences of cool.

I didn't care much for 2007. The year marked the moment where American Pop Culture in the 2000s finally got the hangover it deserved, facing the repercussions of a half decade spent upholding a pop landscape wherein bands like Fall Out Boy, Green Day, and even Bowling For Soup stood and sold alongside artists like Kelly Clarkson and Justin Timberlake. Sure, The Offspring and Green Day cashed their fair share of checks in the nineties, but we're talking about a time where My Chemical Romance's "Helena" played in dentists' offices for pete's sake. Songs about driving fast in the summer and crying on bloody sleeves got very, very popular which of course lead to them being very, very hated, especially by the nerds of the Indie Rock world. As I was wearing checkered Vans slip-ons to school dances and fighting the good fight without shame, the musicians in my favorite Warped bands–many of whom started out as teenagers themselves–were nervously changing their sound, style, and haircuts in a desperate attempt to combat the critical cries of sad nerdy music critics. Despite all the exasperated tears and emotional anthems the scene churned out over the years, every artist seemed dead set on finally becoming "serious." New Found Glory replaced screeching synths and snotty kiss-off anthems with Benmont Tench assisted lounge piano ditties. Brand New, a band once capable of producing a line like "drop me like a brick off a rooftop of your high school," left the overpasses, mix tapes, and magazines of Long Island in favor of making The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, a record as bloated and disingenuous as its title. The scene upon which I formulated my entire identity had become such an embarrassment that its own leaders rejected it publicly in the form of the "serious" follow up record, a feat only ever really pulled off with integrity by Blink-182.

For a year or two I eschewed new albums entirely, floating in a purgatory of endless listens of Catch-22's Keasbey Nights. At fifteen, I felt like I had voluntarily tied myself to the mast of a sinking ship, blind with loyalty and devotion, only to witness the captain abandon his helm entirely in order to spend his time churning out half-assed murky instrumental explorations of white dude existentialism. As I stared into the incoming abyss, I wondered how cold the water would be, realizing my fate was plainly due to my steadfast allegiance to the ship, the scene, the whole thing that almost every single person in my life found childish and irksome. Icy water lapped my face as the tidal wave of high school social life rose in front of me yet still, for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what people saw in those bearded mopes in Fleet Foxes.

There's another kind of older brother. The kind who read James Joyce recreationally, identifies "cool" as a product of inaction rather than action, and considers the preservation of good taste within the family to be an imperative, damn near an heirloom of self-respect that was worth fighting for. That was Graeme for ya. Three years older than his brother (and my best friend) Harrison, Graeme made it through Dylan's discography before leaving for college and his teenage angst was soundtracked by Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. One time I was sleeping over at their house and he woke me up in the middle of the night to hand me a Dave Eggers piece about The Flaming Lips and the concept of "selling out," inexplicably printed out and delivered to me for reasons that were and are beyond my comprehension. Years later in my twenties, I asked Graeme about the incident and he couldn't recall it ever happening. He never seemed to care much for me and in those years I never knew what to make of him. But to Harrison–my best friend and his baby brother–he was fucking cool.

No one wants to hear what the guy in the Motion City Soundtrack shirt has to say about Sufjan Stevens. For me, this lesson became strikingly clear upon entrance to high school as I surrounded myself with timid proto-Hipsters like Harrison and confidently asserted things like "Arcade Fire sounds like U2 recorded through a bathroom wall and I really fucking hate U2." I would say that I spent that year fighting with Harrison about records like Funeral, Come On Feel the Illinoise, For Emma Forever Ago, and Ragged Wood, but typically arguments need more than one participant. He valued my opinion of his music just as much as he valued my music, meaning not at all, which wouldn't have been an issue had I not valued his opinion on absolutely everything more than anyone else's in the world. For months, I stood fast behind the "Arcade Fire is bathroom wall music" position, a sensibility linked to both my fondness for the lyrical specificity of pop-punk and aversion to the mounds of reverb that laced Indie Rock at that (and most) times. Perhaps I was fumbling with the wiring Alex installed within me years before, trying to hear past the unfortunate echoes of what was formally cool.

Then one night it snowed in our sleepy Southern town and I trudged through the moonlit roads to the tune of Arcade Fire's "Tunnels." It was beautiful and I felt like an asshole. Yeah, it was bathroom music but that wasn't going to keep me from sitting on the pot a little longer. I considered forgetting all about my attraction to "Tunnels," bunny hopping over the rabbit hole, renewing my Alternative Press subscription for life, and getting a nautical star tattoo the moment I turned 18. You see I was scared to admit I was wrong, scared to give up power to Harrison's taste, and scared to abandon the musical world that made me who I was.

But I didn't forget about it. I returned again and again and soon devouring the whole record. This snowy moment and the weeks that followed marked my first formal introduction to indie rock, a world immediately defined by controlling feelings of perceived ignorance and the corresponding guilt and shame they create. I wore Funeral down and quickly began gathering some opinions on other hip records at the time: Bon Iver (sleepy but not boring) and Sufjan Stevens (wordy, weepy, reminded me of Forgive Durden's Wonderland). Proud of the hard listening I had put in, I went to Harrison and began our first of many shop talks. Like a dentist trying to talk shop with a doctor at a dinner party, I engaged Harrison sloppily. He humored me, opting to reply not with antagonism but with watered down discourse. I felt like an idiot but it felt good to fit in again. That night, we drove with our friends around town, down the same streets Alex did to "Seventy Times 7," except now "Rebellion (Lies)" played and I sang along in the backseat.

Surprisingly, Hipsterdom at seventeen actually offered me the same freedoms and independence I had witnessed in a teenage Alex. Harrison's voracious taste and commandeering influence turned his trash-laden BMW into a classroom, offering lessons on '60s Soul, Bowie, Animal Collective, "96 Tears," LCD Soundsystem, Clipse, Deerhunter, My Bloody Valentine, Pixies, Dinosaur Jr, and the untouchable Pet Sounds. We spent countless hours driving cross state to see bands at Carrboro's Cats Cradle and Asheville's The Orange Peel. Years after the BFGs were defunct, my own high school friends started a garage band called Graham & The Crackers and managed to book some local shows, covering songs we loved like Twin Shadow's "Forget," and Phoenix's "1901," and drawing a significantly less raucous crowd in the same venues my brother skanked about in.

Although Harrison's taste was my north star of sorts, I did manage to find some of my own musical loves during those years. Drawing upon my Warped predisposition for the loud and the snotty, I poured over records like Jay Reatard's Blood Visions, unlocked mixtape rap with Lil Wayne's Da Drought 3, and came full circle with my pop-punk past via Wavves' King of The Beach. I grew to approach my scene kid shame by out right pretending the Warped Tour never happened. I bought Vampire Weekend t-shirts and frequented Good Will, leaving the merch table purchased punk shirts that comprised the entirety of my wardrobe for years untouched on my shelves. After four years and a couple tense moments–most notably a drunken spat over who "discovered" Illmatic first–me and Harrison's strict power dynamic, that master/pupil relationship, faded. I might not know more than him but I knew what was cool, cool enough for the two of us.

As far as I was concerned, Graeme and his subsequent influence on Harrison were a far cry from Alex's brotherly influence on myself. Maybe it was Alex's fault for the identity issues I suffered at the hand of cool growing up. Graeme was preternaturally opposed to the kind of loud, sleezy, whiny, youthful amateur hour culture upon which Alex built his entire independence. He taught Harrison to be a discerning listener, to begin a life-long dig in search of hidden classics within the annals of popular music, and to value taste above all. This gentle brotherly air of musical supremacy may have saved Harrison from the four MxPx albums I bought in the 2000s. It certainly kept him from the Hawthorne Heights show I went to in lieu of a school dance when I was thirteen. However, if given a chance to go back and do it again, I wouldn't change a goddamn thing.

Alex introduced me to the singular pleasure of belonging–sweat drenched and hoarse–amongst a community of individuals bound by nothing more than unquestionable love of somebody else's noise. Harrison introduced me to the treacherous reality of belonging that lies in the the inevitable exclusionary element that occurs when those on the inside confront those looking in. Years later, the whole thing looks silly. Pitchfork is writing articles about the absolute uncoolness of Sufjan Stevens. The biggest DJ in the world in the world is the kid from From First to Last. Tide comes in, tide comes out, and this lesson in cool made me realize that as long as it feels good, it is good. This ethos was delivered through mosh pits and side-swiped bangs and directly led to my love of both pop and dance music. Never again will I whole-heartedly define myself through the taste and sensibilities of another, not a big brother, a best friend, or a band, for that feeling of belonging that leads one to a scene or identity can be beautiful and all encompassing but it is always inevitably fragile. What Alex could have never taught me was the treacherous part of belonging that lies in the inevitable exclusion of those who don't belong. I had to come upon this realization myself through harsh experience from the inside and outside of a scene, an experience specific to my passage through the Warped world that would have been completely absent had I been cool since day one, reared on Brian Eno straight out of the womb. All the studded belts, Hot Topic trips, Senses Fail t-shirts, and Warped Tour dates meant something. As important as punk was for the creation of my personal identity, this failure of cool was even more integral. The wheel of pop culture moves on and the coolest thing I can do is take it all in.

Nick Boyd is the New York Editor of Shuf Sounds and the founder of Sorry Records. You can find him on Twitter.

article

Depictions of and Challenges to the New Woman in Hannah Höch’s Photomontage

Thomas Baldwin · April 20, 2015

When one thinks of the Weimar Republic, images of cabaret, women in short haircuts and pencil skirts come to mind. The New Woman was also represented in these images and is almost synonymous with the era itself. While many artists of the Weimar Republic criticized and challenged the political and cultural assumptions of the Weimar Republic, very few called the idea of the New Woman into question. Hannah Höch was a German artist active during the Weimar Republic, whose photomontages critique and question the role of the New Woman in German society. Combing through the rapidly expanding popular print culture in German, Höch’s photomontages and other projects during the Weimar Republic simultaneously challenge German culture and society’s perception of women.

After the armistice ended the First World War, it became easier for artists to travel around the continent. One of those artists, Richard Huelsenbeck, returned to Berlin from Zürich and brought with him the spirit of Dada. The Zurich Dadaists’ interest in Cubism and Futurism, the spirit of confrontation and experimentation, and their enthusiasm for performance and spectacle found a new audience in the turbulent German capital. Calling themselves Club Dada, rising and later famous artists—such as George Grosz, John Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde, Johannes Baader, and Raoul Hausmann—collaborated on publications and exhibitions.

These artists, however, lived in a more politically radical environment than the sleepy town of Zürich. The armistice was only the beginning of a long and arduous transition of power within Germany. Kaiser Wilhem II had abdicated the throne and fled the capital shortly before the armistice was signed and the much of the Navy had already mutinied. Major cities across the nation, including Berlin, were beginning to be controlled by councils of mutinying sailors and soldiers. The workers and sailors council in Berlin was one of the strongest, and it was led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, co-founders of the German Communist Party (KPD).

Club Dada was mostly comprised of Communist party members or artists with communist sympathies. Höch was part of the latter group. Regardless, all members felt their hopes shattered and already betrayed by the new republic. Höch herself described a “feeling of alienation” as a driving force for the political and acerbic art that the Club Dada produced between 1917 and 1922.¹ These exhibitions culminated in the 1920 exhibit titled, “The First International Dada Fair” (“Die Erste Internationale Dada-Messe”) from June 30th to August 25th of that year. They constructed sculptures out of found materials and propaganda posters with nonsense slogans. Most importantly, they experimented with the newly invented medium called “photomontage.”

Nearly every member of Club Dada claimed to have invented photomontage, but Richard Huelsenbeck, the unofficial historian of the Dadaists, supports Hannah Höch’s description of how she and Raoul Hausmann invented the practice.² While on a vacation with Hausmann in the Baltic, they noticed many of the mothers and widows of the town had small, postcard-sized paintings of men in uniform. Where the painted head should have been, however, was cut out and replaced with a photograph of a son or husband pasted onto the paper. This mixing of mediums fascinated the pair, who began experimenting while still on their vacation.

The major themes and characteristics of Hannah Höch’s photomontage work were established early in her career during the Dada years. This is not to say that she remained trapped in a certain style or that she did not develop after the Dadaists disbanded in 1922, but rather that her Dada works establish common themes such as androgyny, satire, and popular mass-media imagery that continue to play a significant role in understanding her oeuvre throughout the decades following. Höch’s most famous work, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany) (1919) (Figure 1), was exhibited at First International Dada Fair in 1920 and one of the best examples of Höch’s early mastery of the photomontage medium. The salacious and long title propagates the agenda of the photomontage - to use the sharp weapon of montage and Dada critique to attack the fat, bourgeois gut of the new Weimar Republic. Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser maps out the “Dada” and “Anti-Dada” forces in the new Weimar Republic in a swirling circular diorama. The “Anti-Dada” elements in the top right corner of the photomontage are surrounded by the “Dada” on the bottom right below them.

Figure 1. Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany), 1919-1920, photomontage, Nationalgaler… — Figure 1. *Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands* (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany), 1919-1920, photomontage, Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz Berlin.

The abundance of newspaper clippings and photographs from which Hannah Höch was able to choose during the Weimar Republic reflected a cultural shift in journalism. After World War I, Germany experienced a publishing boom. Advances in technology made cameras lighter and photographs easier to develop. The largest of the post-war publishers was Ullstein Verlag, who had the widest circulated and most influential newsmagazine, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (BIZ). By 1930, BIZ had a national circulation within Germany of 1.85 million copies, with its nearest competitor’s highest circulation hovering around less than a million copies.³ The popularity of the BIZ was due mostly to the abundance of photographs in its pages. With the technology to mass produce photographs, the whole German population consumed them in abundance. At the time, photographs were considered at least as important as the content of the story—if not more important than the stories to which they were attached. This philosophy would later influence and shape other publications such as LIFE magazine in the United States. Höch understood the power of the quantity of images and exploited them for their familiarity and impact. She notes, “that the image impact of an article - for example, a gentleman’s collar - could produce a stronger impression if a photograph of one of them were taken, cut out, and ten such cut-out collars were just laid on a table and a photograph made of them.”⁴ Repetition and unique arrangements drew the eye and the attention of both readers of magazines and patrons of art galleries. BIZ was a consistent source of photographic material for Hannah Höch’s photomontage, most likely because her employment at Ullstein Verlag made it easy for her to obtain copies of the company’s publications. There were three major types of photographs that Höch sampled from this publication: candid political photographs, ethnographic photo-reportage, and advertisements.

The power and influence of Ullstein Verlag was buoyed by the many smaller and more specialized news magazines that it published alongside BIZ. Die Dame (The Lady) sought to create a market for the working Weimar woman, who made up around 35 percent of the working population by 1925.⁵ The articles and advertisements of Die Dame frequently featured idealized photographs of the New Woman, especially bourgeois iterations of this idealized type. Höch most certainly would have seen these depictions of women in the print media, because Höch worked at Ullstein Verlag shortly after her arrival to Berlin in the late 1910s and worked for Die Dame as a pattern designer for the clothing section of the publication. Höch even used these patterns in her collages in the early 1920s, and some of the patterns might even have been of her own design.

Androgyny, a common identifier of the New Woman, and political satire went hand-in-hand in Höch’s photomontages and play a prominent role in Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser. Within the “Anti-Dada” corner of the photomontage is World War I war hero General Field Marshall Friedrich von Hindenburg, but his head rests upon the body of a modern dancer, identified by Maud Lavin to be Sent M’ahesa.⁶ Other political figures, such as President Ebert, are also depicted in this way. Ebert is identified by his goatee and his head has been transplanted onto the body of a topless dancer. Höch renders these serious masculine figures of authority and power both silly and using allusion to the New Woman to call their manliness and power into question. The establishment of the Weimar Republic led to a shifting of the German culture to a more liberal one. The shortage of men after the war led to an influx in the number of working women in Germany. Many of these female laborers began wearing more masculine clothes and cutting their hair shorter, creating an androgynous look that became synonymous to the New Woman in Weimar Germany.⁷ Jula Dech sums up this transition well: “Taboos of sexual deviancy were thrown out with the Wilhelmine corset. Homosexuality, transvestism, and bisexuality were discussed often in the new republic and, at least in the large cities, practiced.”⁸ Dech also mentions the psychoanalytic notion proposed by Otto Weininger and Magnus Hirschfeld of “das dritte Geschecht” or the third sex.⁹ This theory of the third sex argued that there was an inherent sexuality that, like the androgynous dress of the New Woman, combined characteristics of both the male and female genders into one body.¹⁰ This sexual liberation and experimentation was something that Höch not only commented on in her work, but also in which she participated. She was part of this new movement of female labor as a pattern designer at Ullstein Verlag, she dressed in a more gender-ambiguous manner, and (as mentioned above) she had a romantic relationship with the female Dutch poet, Til Brugman, from 1926 until 1935. For the male politicians, this androgyny most certainly emasculated them, because being associated with the androgynous ideal of the New Woman was probably not something they desired or made them look powerful to the traditional bourgeois. The style that gives power to the Weimar woman takes power away from the men in charge. This photomontage demonstrates well not only how Höch used photomontage and mass culture to criticize society, but also how Höch is actively thinking about the relationship between mass culture and its ideas about women of the Weimar Republic.

After a period of only a few photomontages depicting women, Hannah Höch began collecting images in 1926 to serve as future source material and inspiration. This Scrapbook (figure 2) is a collection of photographs taken nearly exclusively from Ullstein Verlag publications such as BIZ and Die Dame. She collected the photographs over time, deciding the order and creating the book in 1933 by pasting the photos into an issue of Die Dame.¹¹ The Scrapbook’s themes are pulled from the mass media and suggest, “how Weimar women, particularly those who like Höch considered themselves to be New Women, may have interpreted New Woman stereotypes.”¹² Unlike her previous photomontages, all of the images in the Scrapbook exist in their entirety. None of the images are violated or cut; they are arranged neatly side by side without overlapping or obstructing one another.

Figure 2. Pages from Hannah Höch’s  Album (Scrapbook), 1933. Scan from Hannah Höch album. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag. 2004. n. pag. — Figure 2. Pages from Hannah Höch’s *Album* (*Scrapbook*), 1933. Scan from *Hannah Höch album*. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag. 2004. n. pag.

Many pages of the Scrapbook, such as those in figure 3, show how Höch montages images of Western women and women of non-Western cultures explore how print culture treats the idea of the New Woman. As one can see in the facing pages of the Scrapbook in Figure 2, Höch connects images from Ullstein publications from Germany’s former colonies, a common feature of Weimar newsmagazines, to the New Woman. Although not all of the women in these photographs are nude, the nudity of the white woman in the bottom left corner is connected across the page to her African counterparts in the other images. Höch decontextualizes an erotic photograph by juxtaposing it to ethnographic images of nude women. These same associations between Weimar women and foreign subjects are made on other pages that connect more explicitly to images of the New Woman that inhabit Höch’s Dada photomontages such as Schnitt mit Küchenmesser.¹³ Modern dancers on the left page of figure 3 and a photograph of the burlesque dancer are placed with photos of a Balinese child dancing in a trance and two sumo wrestlers in a pose that resembles a tango. The short hair, the nudity of the burlesque dancer, and the freedom of movement are representations of the New Woman that Höch connects to the non-Western women and ideas of the Scrapbook. By placing these obvious identifiers of the New Woman, the modern dancer with short hair, side-by-side with these exotic photographs, Höch equates her ideas about the New Woman with the otherness of non-Western cultures. Even though it may seems as if women were liberated in the 1920s, Höch shows that she feels the idea of the New Woman is divorced from her actual lived experience as a woman in German society, and that she herself doesn’t feel like a New Woman.

Figure 3. Pages from Hannah Höch’s  Album (Scrapbook), 1933. Scan from Hannah Höch album. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag. 2004. n. pag. — Figure 3. Pages from Hannah Höch’s *Album* (*Scrapbook*), 1933. Scan from *Hannah Höch album*. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag. 2004. n. pag.

These associations between exotic women and cultures and the New Woman became important in works such as Denkmal I (1924, Figure 4), an early work in the series Aus einem ethnographischen Museum. The standing figure is a photomontage integrating both the ethnographic and the female imagery that might have been found in a publication such as Die Dame. The head and torso appear to be taken from separate African statues and photomontaged together, and the figure has an arm with a balled-up fist that appears to be of an African person of unknown gender. The legs of the figure in Denkmal I are taken from images of Western women - the left a ballerina slipper and the right an inverted arm bent at the elbow. The elbow is the top of the leg with both the forearm and the upper arm extending down. The hand and fingers of the arm extend the furthest down, as if it were a foot extending out in a dance-like pose, connecting it to this repeated trope of the New Woman as a dancer.

Figure 4. Denkmal I: Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (Memorial I: From an Ethnographic Museum), 1924, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin. — Figure 4. *Denkmal I: Aus einem ethnographischen Museum* (*Memorial I: From an Ethnographic Museum*), 1924, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin.

Her choice in ethnographic material and the style in which she frames her works in Aus einem ethnographischen Museum indicate that she was focusing on how the framing of a work contextualizes or changes the context of a work. The bottom of Denkmal I has a black rhombus that appears as if it is a base or a pedestal for the photomontage above it. A framing device such as a pedestal appears in several other members of the Aus einem ethnographischen Museum series. These pedestals create the context for the museum that the title of the series implies, that these works are being exhibited in a pedagogical context for education and instruction, not for religious or social function. Instead, this photomontaged object is placed on a pedestal and treated as a Western object d’art, obstructing or preventing an true understanding of the object. This fragmentation of the context for the work is reflected in the photomontage itself, which combines disparate images to create a new whole. In many cases in Höch’s work, including Denkmal I, the composite of the photomontage is something grotesque and unnatural in appearance. The grotesque object on the pedestal creates a contradiction, “The base, which traditionally presents the wholeness and perfection of an object on display, is used by Höch in these works as a pedestal for her fragmentary, grotesque, and sometimes humorous montages of multicultural fragments.”¹⁴ Höch presents a sculpture in this photomontage that is broken and ugly, a critique of her ethnographic and New Woman subject similar to that expressed in the Scrapbook, but not yet an explicit condemnation.

Marlene, 1930 (Figure 5), is an example of the stronger stance Höch takes against Weimar culture by the end of the decade. By combining the base of a column and a pair of bare legs, Höch creates a sexual obelisk, at which the men in the lower right corner stare and cat call under the sun of a smiling woman's face. The presentation of the female figure remains important from Denkmal I. The legs are removed from their original context - the person to whom they belong - and are placed on a pedestal. This juxtaposition of men ogling a pair of legs without a body or a face to accompany allows Höch to reveal the imbalance of male and female representation in the media. Although women gained a larger role in society during the Weimar Republic, Höch remains unsatisfied with the progress of society in which the New Woman is objectified in the sex symbols of the time, such as Marlene Dietrich, a film actress that Höch alludes to here by name.¹⁵ The smiling lips in the top right corner appear to smile down approvingly on this scene, perhaps indicating the approval of the media on this type of objectification. The female subjects of Höch’s photomontage work only represented printed representations of women, but with the allusion to Dietrich, Höch’s critique expands to film, the other main engine of Weimar mass culture.

The use of images of the New Woman such as the dancers in Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser, the African and Oceanic photographs that Höch associates with the alienation she feels towards the idea of the New Woman, and their use within the photomontages of the late Weimar Republic indicate an increasing skepticism on Höch’s part to any actual change in women’s roles and freedom in society. Much like the main character of Irmgard Keun’s novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, Höch realizes that one is more likely to find the New Woman in the pages of Die Dame, on stage at a cabaret, or the film Der blaue Engel than in the actual streets of Berlin.

Figure 5. Marlene, 1930, Dakis Joannou, Athens. — Figure 5. *Marlene*, 1930, Dakis Joannou, Athens.

Höch quoted in Taylor, Brandon. Collage: The Making of Modern Art. New York: Thames. 47. (Back)
Makela, Maria. “By Design: The Early Work of Hannah Höch in Context.” The Photomontages of Hannah Höch. Germany: Cantz. 1996. 59. (Back)
Lavin, Maud. Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. 51. (Back)
Höch, Hannah. “A Few Words on Photomontage.” Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader. ed. Jason Gaiger and Paul Wood. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003. 113. Print. (Back)
Lavin, 4 (Back)
Lavin, 19 (Back)
Peukert, Detlev J.K. The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. New York: Hill & Wang, 1993. 96. (Back)
Dech, Jula. Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands. Berlin: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989. 62. “Mit dem wilhelminischen Korsett werden auch die Tabus abgeworfen, mit denen sexuelle Abweichungen bis dahin strikt belegt sind. Homosexualität, Transvestitentum, Bisesualität, werden in der neuen Republik relative offen diskutiert und - zumindest in den Metropolen - auch praktiziert.” (Back)
Dech, 62 (Back)
Lavin 186 (Back)
Lavin, 73 (Back)
Lavin, 74 (Back)
Lavin, 75 (Back)
Lavin, 163 (Back)
Lavin, 185 (Back)

Bibliography

Dech, Jula. Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands. Berlin: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989. 62.

Höch, Hannah. “A Few Words on Photomontage.” Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader. ed. Jason Gaiger and Paul Wood. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003.

Lavin, Maud. Cut with the Kitchen Knife : The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Makela, Maria. “By Design: The Early Work of Hannah Höch in Context.” The Photomontages of Hannah Höch. Germany: Cantz. 1996.

Peukert, Detlev J.K. The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. New York: Hill & Wang, 1993.

Taylor, Brandon. Collage: The Making of Modern Art. New York: Thames.

Thomas Baldwin is an editor for Things Created By People and currently has almost no social media presence.

article

Dolly Parton is the South's Queer Matriarch (And We Need Her)

Michael Doshier · April 20, 2015

In Dolly Parton’s classic song “Coat of Many Colors,” she sings of a do-it-yourself garment her poverty-stricken mother made her back during the “seasons of [her] youth.”

I recall a box of rags that someone gave us
And how my momma put the rags to use.
There were rags of many colors, and every piece was small,
And I didn’t have a coat, and it was way down in the fall,
Momma sewed the rags together, sewing every piece with love,
She made my coat of many colors that I was so proud of.

Parton sings about how her mother likened the coat to Joseph’s coat of many colors from the Bible, and later of how the kids at school laughed at her upon arrival. Yet Parton stayed strong, informing them that, “one is only poor, only if they choose to be.”

In many ways, the narrative told within the song is indicative of the sewed together package that has made Dolly Parton an unlikely gay icon of sorts: pride, mockery, pride in the face of mockery, all due to a non-consistent, multi-layered, cheap and colorful object. Parton has connected to a variety of queer fans—from gay men, to lesbians, to drag queens, and beyond, and Parton’s queer appeal, like her coat of many colors, is stitched together from many different fabrics.

During the 2006 Kennedy Center Honors, Dolly Parton sat firm and proud. She watched, smiling, as country music superstars sang her praises one after the other. A standard loop of Parton’s country devotees covered her classics: Shania Twain with “Coat of Many Colors,” Carrie Underwood joining Parton’s original duet partner Kenny Rogers for a rendition of “Islands in the Stream,” Allison Kraus with “Jolene.” Somewhere within this mix, though, something peculiar happened. Pop star Jessica Simpson took the stage to sing Dolly Parton’s soundtrack anthem “9 to 5.” Simpson was the only performer there outside of the country music genre. She had, of course, been a competitor in the pop boxing ring, battling it out with the likes of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.

Simpson flubbed Parton’s lyrics and later asked to have her tribute removed from the special before it aired on CBS. This moment, though, becomes interesting when examining it in the context of Dolly Parton’s own career, particularly in the early eighties. At the time of Parton’s Kennedy Center Honors, Simpson was in the midst of a career makeover: she was a little over a year away from releasing her first country album in 2008, after recording it in Nashville, the exact town in which Parton made it big. It’s hard not to see her performance at Dolly Parton’s tribute as part of a career strategy, just like it’s hard not to see the trajectory of Dolly’s film roles circa 1980 as part of a career strategy: Parton was starring in her first feature film, Nine to Five, alongside Hollywood actresses Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, had left the Nashville country music circuit to work with pop producers, and was gaining mainstream exposure left and right. “From Dollywood to Hollywood!” she would later exclaim while performing at the 2006 Academy Awards, and this moment in her career represents just that. The difference between Jessica Simpson’s move toward country and Dolly Parton’s move toward mass-exposure and pop is that Dolly Parton portrayed herself as both hyperaware and willing to discuss this career move as just that—a career move.

“I carry a gun, and she carries a gun in the picture!”: Dolly as Camp

This openness is one of the many reasons why Parton’s film career exposed her to the possibility of being a “gay icon.” As an actress, Parton was not cast to play different roles, but rather, to portray Dolly Parton if Dolly Parton had a different life. This isn’t an insult, or even an assessment of which she isn’t aware herself. In her 1980 Rolling Stone cover story, Parton laughed about the techniques of the more serious actors on set of Nine to Five, saying:

It’s funny how everyone gets into character. I’ve never had an acting lesson in my life... I was lucky in the respect that they had written it according to my personality; I carry a gun, and she carries a gun in the picture! She was really just me as a secretary, so I played it like that.

Examining Parton’s filmography as merely an expansion upon her true self, then, viewers and fans get not a collection of parts Parton became, but rather, parts that became Dolly. So when these roles involved something like camp, Parton herself became camp.

In his essay “The Cinema of Camp (Aka Camp and the Gay Sensibility),” Jack Babuscio sets out to describe what “camp” means and why it connects so successfully to gay audiences. He writes of the notion of a “gay sensibility,” something that camp—“never a thing or person per se, but rather, a relationship between activities, individuals, situations, and gayness”—aligns itself with, therefore relating to the lives of queer people, despite not being explicit. He writes:

I define the gay sensibility as a creative energy reflecting a consciousness that is different from the mainstream; a heightened awareness of certain human complications of feeling that spring from the fact of social oppression; in short, a perception of the world which is coloured, shaped, directed, and defined by the fact of one’s gayness.

He goes on to assign camp four basic principles that create this layered atmosphere: irony, aestheticism, theatricality, and humor. In regards to irony, Babuscio writes, “Camp is ironic insofar as an incongruous contrast can be drawn between an individual/thing and its context/association.” This, he argues, appeals to the gay sensibility because, “The inner knowledge of our unique social situation has produced in us a heightened awareness of the discrepancies that lie between appearance and reality, expression and meaning.”

In Nine to Five, Parton plays Dora Lee, the sexy secretary of misogynist boss Franklin Hart. She befriends coworkers Violet (played by Lily Tomlin) and Judy (played by Jane Fonda) after they realize she hasn’t been sleeping with Franklin, as he’s claimed. One scene from Nine to Five in particular is interesting because it takes up over fifteen minutes of the film without seeming to move the plot along whatsoever. It involves Parton, Tomlin, and Fonda smoking a joint that Tomlin’s character previously confiscated from her son and, very stoned, fantasizing about the ways they’d like to get back at their evil boss. The film gives each of their fantasies an elaborate daydream sequence, and Parton’s involves creating a reverse situation to the one Dora Lee actually lives in: she becomes Hart’s boss and he becomes her prey. At the end of her fantasy, the office turns into a rodeo, Parton as the cowboy and Hart as the cattle. She ropes him (as he desperately tries to escape her office) in “Five seconds! Just five seconds, folks!” the rodeo announcer marvels.

This is a textbook example of what Babuscio is referring to with his “incongruous contrasts.” Parton’s scene sets up a fantasy: one in which she, as a female secretary, becomes the boss of the man that actually holds power over her. On top of this, her fantasy is accomplished in a distinctly Dolly Parton way: she’s a cowboy. This segment of the film also functions as camp based on what Babuscio says about the gay sensibility and humor:

Camp can thus be a means of undercutting rage by its derision of concentrated bitterness. Its vision of the world is comic. Laughter, rather than tears, is its chosen means of dealing with the painfully incongruous situation of gays in society.

These women, having been subjected to extreme sexism in the workplace, and now existing in the same house discussing it, represent this “concentrated bitterness.” Yet Nine to Five chooses to have them toke up and get giggly, instead of complain in anger.

“That’s what I wanna be, Mama! I wanna be trash!”: Dolly as Queer

With Dolly Parton bringing her raw self to each role, being strikingly honest and candid in every interview she gives, and generally operating as prideful in the way she looks, dresses, and acts, she becomes a “fully out” individual. When asked about constructing her image on British talk show Parkinson in 2007, Parton responded by explaining her inspiration: a social outcast from her childhood. “I really patterned my look, a real country girl’s idea of glamour, after what they call the ‘town tramp,” she starts to explain before the audience erupts into laughter. She continues:

You know they have them in a mountain town, there’s always a few loose women. But this woman—I thought was beautiful. She had this beautiful peroxide hair piled on her head, and red nails, high-heeled shoes. And I just thought she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. And mama said, “Oh, she ain’t nothing but trash!” So, I thought, “that’s what I wanna be, Mama! I wanna be trash!”

Parton’s version of glamour lies within a social outcast of her conservative hometown. Here is a woman who feels her most beautiful when dolled up as what society considers “trash.” Dolly Parton may be straight, but she is certainly non-normative in her image, and very proudly so. Part of Dolly Parton’s on-screen excitement for queer people is that she represents the idea that a straight person, when fully “out” as an individual, can queer any situation in which she’s placed. She is a queering agent.

One of the best moments to illustrate this comes with her next film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982). Parton plays Mona, the Madam of a small Texas town whorehouse, who has continued an ongoing affair with the town sheriff Ed Earl (played by Burt Reynolds). The whorehouse is treated as something largely void of controversy; everyone seems to know its purpose and enjoy its services (“Right from the beginning, the little house was kind of special, like a home away from home,” our narrator explains with glee). It isn’t until it becomes the subject of a statewide broadcast by sensationalist newscaster Melvin P. Thorpe that anyone seems to argue there is anything abnormal or amoral about it. On top of this, the town sheriff, an archetype usually in charge of maintaining order and moral code within a conservative southern environment like this, is sleeping with the exact woman running the whorehouse. And on top of that, he’s also seeing another woman, a relationship Mona calls his “in-town wife,” more public and acceptable than his “secret” relationship with her. Furthermore, the majority of the town seems to know about Ed Earl and Madam’s affair, and simply doesn’t care. When Melvin P. Thorpe comes along to shoot a special on the town’s amorality for allowing such rampant sin via the whorehouse, the town’s inhabitants anxiously await the Sheriff’s arrival to run Thorpe out of the town (and they cheer when he does so successfully.)

Here we have a film about the inhabitants of a small town in Texas cheering for and siding withthe rampant prostitution right under their noses. This is a certainly a non-normative environment, or at least non-normative portrayal of a standard setting. And Dolly Parton, likeability on fleek, pretty much runs this town (in one of her first scenes, she’s donating to the Little League fund and is praised for her continued generosity to the town: “The town council will probably vote you another plaque!” Parton responds: “I hope not, I got a closet full of them now!”) She is the glue that holds the queer non-normative environment together, and keeps it operating as such. Like with Nine to Five, Parton knows she’s been asked to play the “Madam” version of herself:

I’ve often said… that I honestly do look like a whore or a high-class prostitute, not even so much high-class with the makeup and the bleached hair and the boobs and the tight-fittin’ clothes and heels. [Madame Mona] was everything that I am, except that I’m not a whore. But if I hadn’t made it in this business, who knows?

Parton also gets another chance to emasculate her men. In their first scene together, Dolly Parton reveals she has purchased Burt Reynolds a new type of underwear she’d like for him to wear when they engage in foreplay. “What the hell is this, a Japanese slingshot?” Sheriff Ed Earl asks. Parton responds: “No, it’s jockey shorts with little silver snaps on the side!” Parton’s character is already acting in a non-normative way, as the “buying of sexy underwear for a partner to wear” scene in cinema usually plays the other way, with the male gifting lingerie to the woman. Sheriff Ed Earl staunchly refuses to wear them for a long time until Parton exclaims, “Well fine! Then I’m getting dressed and going home!” to which he immediately responds, “Well fine, I’m going to the bathroom and…trying these on,” he sighs, “It’ll be like putting two bowling balls in a marble bag.” Parton responds, unimpressed: “Braggin’, braggin’.”

Parton and her prostitutes are never slut-shamed at all during this film, except by the disgraced outsider, and once by Sherriff himself (who calls Madam Mona a “whore” in a heated argument) but this is treated as his ultimate mistake, he hates himself for it, and eventually delivers a sincere apology. This is progressive and sexy. This town is a southern, sex-positive atmosphere where the prostitutes enjoy their work and homosocial camaraderie with each other, the men pay and treat them fairly, and there is no shame to be found within the confines of consensual bedroom playtime. When, in her first number on screen, Parton explains the whorehouse, singing, “there’s nothing dirty going on,” she’s not denying that sex is occurring behind closed doors, she’s simply denying that that is “dirty” in some way.

“Drag Queen, Drag Queen, Drag Queen, Drag Queen, I’m Begging of You Please Don’t Take My Man”: Dolly as Ally

In Parton’s Rolling Stone cover story, writer Chet Flippo asked her, “What’s the most outrageous thing you’ve ever done?” Parton tells a story about how after rehearsal one day, she and her friend Judy were riding home in cars driving parallel to each other and they began engaging in some girlish fun. “Anyhow, I just pulled up my shirt and I flashed them with one of them. Well, they just about wrecked because they thought it was so funny…so the next time around, I mooned them!” Then, still unsatisfied with the extent they’d outdone each other, at the next stop sign, Dolly ran around the cars stark naked, laughing in the moonlight.

This relationship with Judy and the fact that her husband of forty-six years acts more as a looming fact more than an actual partner the public ever sees are two of the reasons that many have questioned Dolly’s sexuality. In a 1977 interview with Parton, Barbara Walters asked about her marriage, “What about when you’re on the road weeks at a time? No temptations?” Dolly responded:

[My husband Carl Dean is] the kind of person and I’m the kind of person that if, by being apart, we were to meet somebody, I would never tell him. He would never know and it would never hurt him. And it’s the same way with him. I wouldn’t want to know it. As long as he loves me and as long as he’s good to me… I don’t think that it matters. I’ve got better things to do than sit in my room and wonder, "Oh, what’s Carl doing tonight?"

This may be the closest a country star from small town Tennessee in 1977 can get to describing an open marriage without invoking severe controversy. And this behavior hasn’t gone unnoticed (or un-queered). In Jean Carlomusto’s documentary L Is For The Way You Look (1991), a group of gay women recount a time when they saw Dolly Parton at a primarily lesbian function. They tell the story with such detail and excitement, each adding their perspective as if any missing detail from the previous installment of the story was the most vital part. This sort of wishful thinking makes perfect sense; Dolly Parton being an openly queer person would be something of extreme excitement for queer people. She’s a country music star. She’s a Christian. Parton being a lesbian would complicate her entire personhood, making her a queer Christian body.

In Queering Christ: Outrageous Acts and Theological Rebellions, Lisa Isherwood writes, “The queer Christian body is a transgressive signifier of radical equality.” She continues:

It attempts to subvert the weight of patriarchy upon it through counter cultural actions. This body lives in the world but is not chained by its narrow definitions and hierarchical power systems. It is a body that acts stubbornly in the face of life as it is, and is a space in which creative rebellion is rooted in the everyday business of life. In the language of Christianity, it is a redemptive space.

It is here in examining Parton’s religion and its history with queer people that we come across a complicated fact: she is a fierce ally to the gay community. “Well I think the gay people have always liked me because I’ve always been myself, I’m not intimidated by how people perceive me, I don’t judge or criticize people…I think all people have the right to be who they are, we’re all God’s children and God should be the one to judge,” Parton says after being asked about her gay appeal on Larry King Live. One of her favorite stories to tell in interviews is the time that she entered a Dolly Parton drag contest, exaggerated her various beauty marks and makeup, then received last place. In one concert, she dedicated perhaps her most acclaimed song “Jolene” to her drag queen fans, telling a story about how they were hitting on her band one day before the show, temporarily changed the words to “Drag queen, drag queen, drag queen, drag queen, I’m begging of you please don’t take my man.”

This spirit exists in the same body as a fierce worshipper of the same Jesus that queer people have been killed in the name of. I am here to argue, however, that Dolly herself exists within a queer body, even if she is a straight, married woman, and thus she embodies Isherwood’s aforementioned description of a “redemptive space.”

Parton’s queer fandom often exists in the southern, rural, small-town audience.

Now we get personal.

For young queer people growing up in the south or in strictly country-music-loving homes, Parton could very well be the closest thing to a “gay icon” or ally they were exposed to. I’ve noticed this myself. This piece originated as an assignment to explore a gay icon of cinema and while I was conducting my research, those from cosmopolitan areas ask me why I didn’t choose to write about a more obvious gay icon (like Judy Garland), whereas those from the rural south immediately understand the queer connection to Dolly.

It is for this reason that Parton’s spirituality plays a very important (and “redemptive”) part in her connection to her queer fans. In the documentary Hollywood to Dollywood (2011), gay twin brothers Gary and Larry Lane from North Carolina plan a cross-country trip from Hollywood, California (where they currently live) to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee to present Dolly Parton with a screenplay they’ve written for her. Throughout the film, they discuss what Parton meant to them growing up in a very conservative, restrictive environment under the control of parents that still to this day do not accept their “gay lifestyle.” They lament the fact that they must live a “double life” and don’t get to share their cherished relationships with their parents. However, when it comes to Dolly, Larry makes a point about her position as an ally that immediately turns maternal:

All we want is our parents to be proud of us. And when there’s that one thing that they don’t accept about you, it’s very, very difficult… I think [Dolly] would embrace that one part of our lives that our mom doesn’t embrace. I remember early feelings of acceptance from her. I remember being like, “Well, she could accept me.”

In a sense, Dolly Parton’s existence as an ally is queering Christianity for her queer fans: instead of it being something oppressive to their bodies, sense of worth, and developing sexuality, she frees it to become something of comfort: Their idol, who fully accepts them and has lived her own life in a specifically non-normative fashion herself, is also a Christian. She is also a Christian just like, hypothetically, their mother that disowned them upon their coming out is a Christian. She is a Christian, so they too can accept their sexualities and reconcile them with religious beliefs and, like Parton and the queer Christian body, embody a space of “creative rebellion.” On top of this, she provides a space for queer visibility in the country music circuit. In an interview conducted in Hollywood to Dollywood, a fan explains, “Dolly’s concerts are the most diverse events you’ll ever find. You’ll see a Southern Baptist pastor standing next to a drag queen.” Zoom in on this image of the pastor and the queen sitting together singing the same song, and we see the embodiment of Isherwood’s “creative rebellion.”

It is interesting that Larry and Gary chose to model Hollywood to Dollywood as a road movie. Dolly’s story is also one of traveling: planning her escape from her poverty-striken hometown from the moment she could dream, then loading a Greyhound bus to Nashville to become a country star. Then, her eventual travels from Nashville to Hollywood to entertain crossover success. This narrative of traveling and its association with Parton reaches a pinnacle when considering Parton was asked to compose a song for the 2005 road movie Transamerica, about a pre-operation male-to-female transgender on a cross-country road trip with her son, who doesn’t know this is his father or that this is a biological man. And what did she do other than make a direct lyrical connection between the pre-op transgendered body and the Christian, pre-Christ:

Questions I have many, answers but a few
But we’re here to learn, the spirit burns, to know the greater truth
We’ve all been crucified, and they nailed Jesus to the tree
And when I’m born again, you’re gonna see a change in me.

These lyrics are working on many levels, intertwining Bree’s narrative with that of Jesus Christ himself and that of the “born again” Christian. Regarding the former, Jesus arose from the dead three days after his crucification. This mirrors the idea that once Stanley (Bree’s given name) is officially “dead” during his transition surgery, Bree will then emerge from the ashes. Regarding the latter notion, that of likening Bree to the saved, baptized Christian, we see a very tender correlation between two “rebirths.” When Bree is “born again,” or, emerges from her sex change operation, we will “see a change in [her],” as in she will be physically female, just like when a Christian is “born again” they will have turned their life around for the better. They have devoted their lives to Christ and therefore can be expected (and held accountable to) being kinder, gentler, and more forgiving toward others. In intertwining Bree’s narrative with that of the “born again” Christian, Parton is strongly arguing within the song that Bree has a right to this life and will benefit from doing what makes her happy. “I wanted to write [the song] because I love the message of that movie,” Parton explains, “That everyone has the right to dignity in their lives.”

Dolly Parton occupies the queer space with us all (even you straighties), but especially us southerner queers who are currently fighting for our protections in states like Arkansas with bills like SB202, aimed at confusing the world into thinking they’re anti-discrimination bills when they’re actually anti-anti-discrimination bills aimed at us. Us southern queers who are living in places, or are from places, where our states are lagging behind the rest of the nation in recognizing same-sex marriage or trans rights. We are the states that nearly universally take Dolly Parton appreciation into Dolly Parton worship. And this is the woman who has proven time and time again in both the roles that she takes on film, the songs that she sings on vinyl, and the life that she lives as an individual and public icon – that she is on the right side of history.

There is always skepticism within queer communities when a pop star modernizes their beliefs on queer rights issues during major career moves. During release of her seventh album Femme Fatale, accidental gay icon Britney Spears promoted it largely at gay clubs as a launching point, hoping we would all forget her “ew” reaction when in 2002 a reporter asked her if her refusal to change the female-admiring lyrics to the Stones’ “Satisfaction” in her cover was a shout-out to her gay fans. Let’s also not forget the sudden and seemingly invisible lyric change of Taylor Swift’s pre-domination era track “Picture to Burn” between album and single versions - from “So, go and tell your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy; that’s fine, I’ll tell mine you’re gay” to “You won’t mind if I say…” (A masterful chorus lead-in that literally works better than the previous homophobia).

But Dolly Parton herself is already a queer person, even as a straight person. At the very least, she’s an agent of queerness within a normative industry–film or country. And she has proven to be able to masterfully create these “redemptive spaces” in her work, religion, and interviews. So, I call on Dolly to speak her mind about these moments in time as they happen, even just as a measure of comfort. Just as I call on us all to find comfort in her words as these laws and the people passing them come for us: “I really do think I stand for being proud of who you are, and not worrying a lick about what other people think,” Dolly says. She goes on, “And I feel fortunate I’ve never had to be anything but myself.”

Michael Doshier is a writer and musician based in Brooklyn, NY. He is the creator of the electronic rock project Johnny Darlin and his visual EP Mr. Monogamy, all available at johnnydarlin.com.

article

Laughing Out Loud

Sara Miller · April 20, 2015

“Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”

— Chuck Klosterman, pop culture critic

Set-up - joke – punch line - hahahaha.

Laughter has always been the natural psychological derivative to humor, but in the age of television, in which entertainment has divvied up all content producing shows into two categories - comedy and drama (and the now emerging “dramedy,” an amalgam of the two) - audiences are acutely instructed to understand what is funny, or at least, what is meant to come across as “funny.” Comedy comes in all shapes and sizes – it’s broad slap stick, it’s muted intellectual humor, it’s situational, it’s conversational – but the recent trend (in terms of critically acclaimed modern television, which often appears to be mutually exclusive to what is commercially successful) is an evolution into single camera, often “mockumentary” type series. The overarching “comedy” signifier would more accurately be broken into two, with the advent of single-cam constructing the great sitcom divide, leaving modern multi-cam shows (think Cheers, Friends, Seinfeld in their heydays compared to Big Bang Theory, Two Broke Girls) appearing antiquated and contrived. But more so than the filming devices employed in the production of modern sitcoms, this divide has created a shrewd awareness on behalf of critics and audiences alike when it comes to the ways in which laughter is prompted. Of course, I am speaking of the laugh track and the polarization it has created in a television landscape that both embraces and resists it.

Traditionally, laugh tracks were heralded into the world of sitcom as a means to counter the fundamental complication of television viewing: creating a theater-like, communal experience in the home. The laugh track itself dates back to the 1940s, when sound engineer Charley Douglass forever changed the relation of constructed humor to forced laughter with his attempt at compensating for the non-theater experience of television through the creation of the “laff box.” Douglass built a two-and-a-half foot high device that looked like a mix of an organ and a typewriter (pictured below).

Its keys, when connected to the laugh recordings, created a range of responses for any joke, big or small. One key produced a woman's laughter, another a child's; a mix would create big laughs, a single would create a minor one. Douglass even went so far as to update his device every few years or so, mixing and matching different laughs, retiring old and introducing new, to keep up with audiences. And so, the entertainment industry was granted a device that would “sweeten” a show with built-in laughter, whether comically deserved or not. Soon after it’s debut on The Hank McCune Show in 1956, the laugh track became a crutch television comedies could rest upon and a staple in the industry. There was of course the common disclaimer “this show was filmed before a live studio audience” that seems to circumvent the use of the “fake” laughs the track provides, but even in these cases, as evidenced by older shows Happy Days and The Mary Tyler Moore Show as well as the newer Two and a Half Men, the live, “real”¹ giggles and chuckles are enhanced with canned ones.

The overwhelming current of laugh tracks throughout the ‘60s and well into the ‘90s was no grand experiment either; psychology researchers jumped on the phenomenon and verified that laugh tracks increase audience laughter and the audience’s rating of humorousness of the presented comedy material. Bill Kelley, a psychology professor at Dartmouth College who has studied the brain’s response to humor, validates the popularity of using a laugh track: “We're much more likely to laugh at something funny in the presence of other people.” By hearing others laugh -- even if it's prerecorded -- the cause will encourage the likewise effect. A 1974 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people were more likely to laugh at jokes that were followed by canned laughter. The scariest element of this confirmation is the concept that the sound of laughter itself can evoke infectious laughter – that you don’t need a joke at all. Because laughter exists in two entities – as an expression of emotion and as a decidedly social signal - the addition of the laugh track complicates whether this reaction to humor is entirely self-determined or whether modern audiences have become “programmed” in their responses to what passes as a joke.

Throughout the years, critics have lamented the provided “safety net” as well as pointed out the insulting factor to viewers that comes with the laugh track. Karal Ann Marling, a professor of American studies and art history at the University of Minnesota, voiced concerns about the sitcom staple: “Most critics think that the laugh track is the worst thing that ever happened to the medium. I mean, anything can be passed off as hilariously funny, if you've got people laughing like maniacs in the background.” Marling offers a popular opinion, “let me be the laugh track.”

At the turn of the century, something happened in the relationship between audience viewer and laugh track in that the latter was suddenly (after existing on some of the most popular and critically acclaimed series of the previous television era) a symbol of the unsophisticated show or sitcom. Comedies came along like The Office, Arrested Development, Modern Family, the animated Simpsons and South Park, all managing to have large followings, positive critical response applauding the more subtle, clever humor as a departure from easy jokes, huge cultural cache, and the ability to still garner laughter without ever forcing the canned laughs on viewers.

This new age has signaled a shift in both the way showrunners create their shows as well as how viewers consume the material. And this shift has been able to find its footing through the transition to single-cam; by departing entirely from the structure in which laugh tracks were the norm, sitcoms have been able to change the way to tell a joke. This new age of television highlights humor in details, in editing, in long-running jokes that would not have worked if not for the deviation from multi-cam form. Mitch Hurwitz, creator of Arrested Development commented on this new innovation: “When you don't have a laugh track, you can make the clothes funny. We can make a sign funny. We can make the way somebody walks funny. The makeup can be funny.”

David Cross as Tobias Fünke in Arrested Development. — *David Cross as Tobias Fünke in* Arrested Development.

One of the greatest advantages of ditching the laugh track is the ability to write the script in which flow is not interrupted and space (read: time) is not given to the recorded laughs. Shows like 30 Rock and Community often have lightning-fast pace, jokes flying, landing and then a new joke suddenly piles on, that makes episodes of these series have more room for funny material, despite being the same length as an episode of Big Bang Theory. 22 minutes can now be filled to the brim with jokes both large and small.

But make no mistake – the laugh track is far from extinct. Its presence on many network shows seems as vital as the incorporation of music and editing. The most popular show on television – with the highest paid stars – Big Bang Theory makes no effort to hide its loud, constant recorded laughs. The canned laughter works like clockwork, coming after the same repetitive character quirks – Sheldon does not understand social conventions, Raj cannot speak in front of women, Penny cannot communicate on the same intellectual level as the others. Every episode’s script is a Mad Libs of the one before, just replacing the one-liners and punchlines with new material – but the “humor” behind the writing stays exactly the same. Or How I Met Your Mother, a show that ran 9 seasons, each one not filmed in front of a studio audience and each episode of every season containing consistent streams of recorded laughter.

Some critics and fans found the track a strange addition to a show that relied on crisp editing and a complex fast pace for subtle jokes to land, but the creators stuck by it. “We like the laugh track. I don't know how else to say it. It feels right. I get a little tired of the dusty old equation that single cam = daring and original and multicam = lazy and uninspired. I find that facile. I look at the White Stripes as an inspiration. Yes, they played old songs... but they found exciting new ways to play them. On our best days that's what we've tried to be.” So maybe it’s as simple as “we like it, get over it if you don’t”; or perhaps, the narrative on which the show was based – friends in the city looking for love – functioned on such a derivative level of so many other sitcoms to come before it (Friends is obviously the go-to example) and the jokes crafted by the show’s comedy writers needed the cushion of the track to ensure viewers would believe the show to be funny. And perhaps, maybe, the laugh track on a modern sitcom that plays in similar fashion to the single-cam ones without it would stand out from the lot as unique. I don’t know, perhaps.

In terms of popularity, it’s clear we are not witnessing the death of Douglass’s invention. The truth is that even in this “Golden Age” of television, comedies without laugh tracks fare worse than those that choose to employ the old trope. So indeed, those 14 million people tuning in for Big Bang Theory in comparison to the million or so tuned in to each episode of Community’s final season on NBC, believe that the communal experience the laugh track creates still matters. Comedies like Louie and Always Sunny in Philadelphia might be deconstructing the formula of “classic sitcom” but CK’s and the Sunny crew’s viewerships pale in comparison to less critically acclaimed shows like the departed Two and a Half Men and even the new Charlie Sheen vehicle Anger Management.

And just as we insist that cord-cutting is a reality and more viewers will relocate solely to Netflix, the numbers prove that more people are watching traditional television in the last few years than in the recent past; our proclamations against the laugh track might be all talk, no substance as well. The numbers can speak for themselves, and they say the laugh track continues to keep audiences comfortable in between punch lines, just as it always has.

On the wholly other end of the spectrum, one television reviewer, not concerned with commercial popularity of shows, critiqued: “Laugh tracks are the deathly shrieks that bellow in the background of television sitcoms in an attempt to turn a malignant punch line into something a little more benign. They are false advertisements, telling the people, 'This is good,' when what’s hidden underneath is bad.” Now, while this is an over-generalization of the trope, many modern audiences would agree that the track is no longer a necessity to “getting” humor on television. But we must take into consideration something else: the laugh track on a multi-cam sitcom feels fake to modern audiences (or so cry certain critics), but television series and the stories we consume through this medium are indeed fictional in and of themselves. On a mutli-camera show – take older Friends or newer 2 Broke Girls – the comedy lies in jokes that are born from contrived plots and situations. The seams of construction are obvious, but there’s also something honest in their presentation.

The actors are in hair, makeup, full costume. They are positioned intentionally; they look and sound rehearsed. Live studio audience or not, the players stand on their mark, under intense lighting that accompanies television production, and then the jokes are set up, the actor with the punch line will hit their cue with a premeditated delivery, and then of course, pausing for laughter. The entirety of the form, from script to shooting to presentation, is a constructed media product, so perhaps the manufactured laughs simply align with the illusion of reality that is the sitcom.

Modern television viewers who might be accustomed to single-cam can find watching a multi-cam show to be slightly jarring. Most new single-cam sitcoms, notably 30 Rock, Scrubs, and Girls, are shot as small films, eliminating any sign of fabricated performance “boosting realism, by inserting multiple distancing layers (editing, music, specific camera lenses, etc.) between the viewer and the actor.” The absence of the laugh track in addition to these other elements mark all that appears on our screens as “real” and the jokes can hit their mark in a way that makes the humor feel less broad and more grounded. But this in essence – the appearance of reality – can be interpreted as more of an artificial construction than the laugh track itself. One entertainment reporter put it, “The live studio audience, a set that is very obviously a set, or even a laugh track, as simple and stupid and taken for granted as it is, are subtle and powerful tools that shape our viewing experience. An agreement between the actors, the set and the audience is loud and clear: We’re putting on a show for your entertainment. For 21 minutes we experience, in the teeniest-tiniest way, the essence of comic theater.”

In any case, laugh tracks are polarizing, whether it’s viewers feeling as if they are treated as unintelligent enough to understand the humor on their own or whether it’s critics believing that the trope allows shows to mask mediocre comedy writing. Laughter itself is an expression of relief, one that is related to alleviating anxieties concerning culture, status, politics, what have you. Laughter is an equalizer in which the public can unilaterally interpret humor and let out a positive vocal response. It’s cathartic, it’ exhilarating, but it may be becoming more of a forced social construction than an innate desire. Television has always taught “morality” lessons, tales that reassert hegemony, stories that make a statement for social issues concerning race, feminism, and almost every cultural movement. But canned laughter teaches audiences something too; it can either act as an intermediary from show writer to television viewer – instructing them on how to watch an episode and connecting them to the material – reaffirming the faux-reality of fictional sitcoms or can insult and disturb the entire construction. Laugh tracks, still in very active use though it may not seem like it, will continue to be employed as long as audiences are laughing along to it. And in the meantime, the single-cam, mockumentary-type sitcoms might come to be a passing trend in which audiences feel disturbed and isolated by silence – especially as television becomes an entirely individual experience with new mediums, such as Netflix and Hulu, allowing viewers to be one-on-one with their show and craving the sound of laughter. If there’s one thing that’s certain in the debacle presented by the prerecorded tracks, it’s that laughter is physically, undeniably infectious.

Use of quotes because it would be outrageous to accept even the audience laughter as entirely authentic given the extreme laughter coercion techniques employed by television productions. (Back)

Sara is currently a senior at NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study concentrating in Media Theory and Entertainment Criticism. She will soon be moving on to the next phase of life: unemployment. To stay tuned for her inevitably self-deprecating descent, you can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Letter from the Editor, Issue Three

Natalia Lehaf · April 20, 2015

People walk slower when it’s Spring. They’ll risk being late for the scenic tour. They’ll forgo a nice meal to eat an ice cream cone in the park (post-Instagram). The wind, though dreadful to bare skin, is a small part of the magic.

When it’s Spring, we value our time differently than the colder seasons prior.

Dear readers, watchers, listeners -

It may be getting warmer outside, but that doesn’t mean our burdens melted away with the snow. There is a lot going on in the world. Sometimes, we focus on the grander aspects of humanity that touch more lives than just our own¹, but more often we concentrate on a tiny portion of the Earth’s mass: ourselves. We put all of our energy towards our own stirring yet static lives.

I have a belief that people intuitively seek drama. They look for the problems. They see a cup half full and wonder, why not a plate of food, also?

We spend hours thinking about the people who don’t swipe right back. We wake up dreading a menial task that by no means defines our lives. We wonder why our messages go ignored. We find ourselves sitting with a frown on our faces and are unable to articulate why. We feel misunderstood.

It’s human nature to desire the things we don’t have, nor understand. It’s easy to look at celebrities² on Periscope and wish we lived a comparable lifestyle.

We forget to acknowledge the stability in our lives: supportive families and friends, moving bodies, disposable income. It’s an ugly truth that cancer cautions us to value our health and deaths in the family help us recognize the blessings each person in our life represents.

Time pushes us forward and there’s never enough time to sit back and be satisfied with how and with whom we've spent our time.³ Life is hard and even so, the world doesn't owe us any favors. Every day we wake up, we surrender our control to the Universe and keep trekking on, hoping it will play nice.

The Sun on our skin feels nice though. And the springtime reminds us that taking a moment to experience this complimentary comfort from the star of our Solar System is never a waste of time.

Adam, Thomas, and I carefully selected pieces of art we felt would best enlighten and entertain our audience. We want to not only draw in more eyes and ears to the talent of our contributors, but we want our audience to ponder the different perspectives neatly compiled in this issue.

Yours,
Natalia
Editor

As Thomas evaluates in his essay, artists prove to be creative threats to social conventions. (Back)
Some celebrities deserve our attention, as Michael displays with his eloquent and comprehensive analysis of Dolly Parton's character, fame, and influence. (Back)
It seems there is always time for Netflix, a name that also pops up in Sara's essay. You will read about nostalgia surrounding lost time in Nick and Rachel's pieces. (Back)

photography

What Technology Does for Us

Natalia Lehaf · February 22, 2015

This is the beginning of an ongoing project in which I photograph people with a screen in front of their faces and record what they are doing in that moment.

Transports Perusing the London Natural History Museum's website (as it had just opened). — *Transports*
Perusing the London Natural History Museum's website (as it had just opened).

Updates [others and oneself] Posting a picture of her breakfast to Instagram; browsing Reddit. — *Updates [others and oneself]*
Posting a picture of her breakfast to Instagram; browsing Reddit.

Connects Texting a friend who was running late. — *Connects*
Texting a friend who was running late.

Entertains Guessing the place Hazel and Gus travel to in "The Fault in Our Stars" on Trivia Crack. — *Entertains*
Guessing the place Hazel and Gus travel to in "The Fault in Our Stars" on Trivia Crack.

Informs Checking her work email on a Friday night. — *Informs*
Checking her work email on a Friday night.

Find more from Natalia on her website.

essay

Poke

Adam Cecil · February 22, 2015

Taylor died. I don't know how, or when, exactly. But he is, in fact, dead, and never coming back. I know this because I saw it on Facebook.

We called him "Black Taylor." It was the kind of joke that faux-liberal white teenagers raised in rural Vermont would find funny. Black Taylor wasn't black, but he wore a lot of white t-shirts and loose jeans and loved rap music. He was an amateur rapper himself.

He became fast friends with one of the RAs, which is what the Governor’s Institute of Vermont called their camp counselors. I don’t remember the RA’s name, but he also loved rap music. One day the RAs were allowed to teach their own class, and this guy taught a class on the history of hip-hop. He was also a semi-pro birdwatcher.

It was 2007. Facebook wasn’t really a thing. I only got one because my friend Bailey had one, but all of my friends were still on MySpace. The people I met at the Governor’s Institute were a little older than me - thinking about college, about SAT scores, about sex. I thought about those things, too. The difference was that those things were actually happening to these people.

They all used Facebook. When they weren’t off in the woods making out, they would spend their free time huddled around the few internet-connected computers in the student center. They wanted to know what their friends at home were doing. They felt removed. I felt removed, too, but from the people in front of me, as I stood on the edge of groups and watched them talk and laugh like they had been friends for years when in fact they’d only met days ago. I laughed when they laughed, pretending to feel included.

There was a White Taylor. White Taylor was white, blonde, very skinny with bulging eyes. The popular joke was that he was a crack addict. White Taylor wasn’t White Taylor just because we needed some to complete the nickname yin-yang. White Taylor came from a rich family. White Taylor was going to Bates. White Taylor wore polos.

This was the Governor’s Institute of Vermont on Current Issues and Youth Activism, where we knew enough about racial inequality to make the joke, but never had to confront the realities of it outside of our bubble of white privilege. We were literally up on a hill, at the School of International Training, looking over Brattleboro, Vermont, the city that proclaimed that it would arrest George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for war crimes if they ever stepped foot in city limits. We were morally and intellectually superior. It was implied and we believed it.

I walked in on Black Taylor taking a shit. The dorms we were staying in had communal bathrooms. I pressed open the door to a stall and there he was: backwards baseball cap on his head, loose jeans bundled at his ankles, and his eyes staring at me from his throne up on the hill.

I apologized and backed away into my own stall, right next to his. He laughed. We made awkward small talk. I was done before him, washed my hands, and left. It was the only private interaction we had together, the only time he had really acknowledged my existence in any significant way.

And then Taylor died.

Not right away, but eventually, the same way all of us will. I found this out a few years later, on Facebook, when one of our mutual friends from the Governor’s Institute left a message on his wall. Miss you. Can’t believe you’re gone. Taken before your time. His wall was full of messages like these; some just short sentences and others long essays on their friendship. All addressed to someone who would never read them.

And now they're gone. His Facebook was deleted at some point by a friend or family member.

At the end of the Governor's Institute, there was a bonfire. A girl with a guitar sang Green Day's "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)." Someone played along on a fiddle. It was a tired song then, but the circle of teenagers around the fire, me included, sang under their breaths. It was an amazing experience, we told each other. We would never forget it. We'd stay in touch. Facebook me!

I only found a few pictures from that camp on Facebook. One had Black Taylor standing right in the middle of a big group, me included. He was standing with his chin in his hands, looking up towards the sun.

He used to be tagged in the picture, but he's not anymore.

Adam Cecil is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is the managing editor of this zine. You can find more work at his website.