What We’re Loving: Spring Break 2018
There’s something about “Moon River” that feels eternal. Written by Henry Mancini and first performed by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 Hollywood Golden Age classic Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the song “Moon River” has since been covered by countless artists, including Andy Williams, Elton John, and Louis Armstrong. Now Frank Ocean, the alternative R&B and rapper, has thrown his name into that revered group.
Ocean’s cover of “Moon River” allows the best of Ocean’s instinct for romance to shine through, but maintains the inexplicable haunting sadness of the song. The single opens with two voices — one high pitched, one low — harmonizing to the opener, “Moon River, wider than a mile / I’m crossing you in style.” In style, indeed: Ocean’s smooth yet fearlessly inventive style is evident from the get-go. As the song transitions to “just” Ocean’s voice (I say “just” with scare quotes here because Ocean’s music is never just his voice, there are always other musical flourishes and arrhythmias), he leans into each word of the song, making us hear it in a new light. “Wherever you’re going I’m going the same” is stunningly multi-layered, each layer a different version of Ocean’s take on the line. We see how for Ocean, “Moon River” is a dynamic being — despite being such a recognizable classic, in Ocean’s hands the song is nothing but water.
— Sylvie Thode ’20
If you’re in the mood for heart-in-your-throat action, badass women, and unafraid political commentary, head to the theater nearest you to check out Black Panther. With all the requisite stunning visuals, cool gadgets, and ridiculously choreographed fight scenes of its Marvel siblings, it has all the right pieces to make for a good, classic superhero movie — with some twists. The film shifts between the fictional Wakanda, a highly advanced nation that has historically protected its people and resources by pretending to be a third-world country, and the real world we know (and love?); in doing so, it allows viewers to escape into a fantastical universe while simultaneously keeping us firmly tethered to reality. The characters, portrayed with precision and heart by a predominantly African American cast, are written with surprising complexity: we have a hero who is neither perfect nor infallible, faced with a villain who is as much a victim of the world as a monster created by it. Black Panther is a 2-hour spectacle full of sound and fury — it is easy to be swept up in the intensity of the story, the extravagance of the universe. However, as you emerge from the theater, blinking in the sunlight, you may find yourself lingering over the questions — of progress, of oppression, of duty and morality, of human generosity in an “every nation for itself” world — posed by the film. You may find that despite its embrace of fiction and fantasy, Black Panther presents conflicts and dilemmas that are very much a part of the real world.
— Liana Cohen ’20
Of Toko Shinoda’s “Relativity” I might say something like: the distinct, even conflicting forces and desires in a person’s life — elemental and unsullied — stand their ground on the page. Yet she imagines their particular forms and trajectories on a single plane, frozen in a momentary composure, an achieved peace and balance. Many parts of the self, many natures, make up one paradoxical yet simultaneous image of the self or of the world. I might say, a chaos of conflicting essences ultimately achieve harmony through the shared qualities of speed, integrity, and purity. Everything can be itself and still get along with everything else, she’s telling me. Whatever I say, the painting will do a better job at explaining itself — Shinoda’s artworks are distillations of calligraphy and writing, in which she was versed from a young age. Strategically, the title word “Relativity” is stated as visual essence. Perhaps, she makes a word meaningful through the combined effect of its particular sounds and connotations. Beyond that, her work always seems infused with the natural. In “Relativity” lies a muddied blue-gray path through yesterday’s snow behind a frosted windowpane, bisected by the dash of a cardinal from a branch in shadow. That red arrow darts through a fixed time frame like a brush stroke on blank white.
Toko Shinoda is 104 years old and is the only living person featured on a Japanese postage stamp. Originally from Manchuria and a student of calligraphy, she briefly moved to New York in 1956, whereupon she really began working in abstract art. There, she was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art before returning to Tokyo, where her success continued. She still picks up the brush each morning.
— Remi Shaull-Thompson ’19
Over spring break, I got to catch up with one of my favorite columns: the Diagnosis section of The New York Times magazine. I’ve been reading it since I was a kid — a budding hypochondriac hanging on to every word, noting obscure symptoms that I was certain I had (but certainly didn’t). Strange bruises. A cough that wouldn’t go away. Lower back pain. Psychosis. In those days, the author (Dr. Lisa Sanders) invited readers to crack the case and post their diagnoses online, where the first to get the correct answer received a reward and eternal bragging rights. Nowadays though, Dr. Sanders walks you through the medical mystery. She takes you from the first inklings of “something-is-not-quite-right” to the endless hospital visits to the sudden turn for the worse to the genius doctor who saves the patient’s life. Admittedly, it can get repetitive. The same tropes of illness appear again and again: the vigorous woman who is suddenly overcome with weakness; the old man with a litany of preexisting conditions; the young student who is inches away from death.
But the repetition doesn’t dull the suspense and fear of reading the Diagnosis. Like the patient and her family, I’m worried when the first symptoms begin. I lose sleep when they became more severe, when the patient is checked in to the emergency room. I feel hope when a doctor takes an interest in the case. I feel hopeless when the tests come back negative.
Most of the endings are bittersweet — a diagnosis is made, but treatment is slow and full of hurdles. The patient may never get back to what he once was. In this way, the Diagnosis column doesn’t sugarcoat or shy away from reality. But that’s precisely why I love it. The Diagnosis column, more than anything, makes me want to be that genius doctor who discovers the missing detail in the case file and saves the day. Whether I’ll ever get there, I suppose, is the true medical mystery.
— Katie Tam ’21
For fans of Alison Bechdel, Roz Chast, or Dan Clowes, Everything Is Flammable, Gabrielle Bell’s graphic memoir about the time she spent in California with her mother after her mother’s home burned down, will definitely strike a chord. But to only talk about this book in comparison to the greats is a disservice to a work brilliant in its own right. Equal parts episodic and narrative, the memoir is unafraid to let the mundane appear mundane; Bell’s ink presents California not in its vistas, New York City not in its skyscrapers, but in their dusty trailer parks and molding apartments. There is an intimacy that the work engenders so quickly and so deeply that even the uglier sides of our protagonist, the emotionally needy, habitually depressed New York cartoonist, provoke only empathy. This penetrating empathy might be, in fact, Everything is Flammable’s greatest display, more than anything that might typically spark awe in the graphic form — nothing as obviously excellent as Fun Home’s watercolors or Blankets’ snowscapes can be found here. Instead, the sense of grandeur and completion comes from boxy, straightforward, six-panel pages that find the landscapes of the interior, that gather their strengths from what is not immediately visible and sights that may have been, without a telling as excellent as this, forever unrecognized. Bell’s is a world that does not call attention to itself, does not suggest anything but the simple truth, does not offer anything but a compelling story assembled from the ashes of a razed home. The work is not so incredibly sad as its premise might suggest, and rarely does the work choose to indulge in anything resembling a sadgasm, even when the material might be ripe for such an overload. No, more often than tears, what Everything Is Flammable might provoke are chills, the spine-tingling vibrations that occur when a person lays a world bare, turns it inside out, to present only the rawest of all expressions. Oh, and if you thought Lady Bird made you want to reach out to your mom, oh boy, are you in for a Skype call after this one.
— Paul Schorin ’19
At dinnertime on March 24th, my friends and I retired to the Dubliners restaurant on F Street, Washington D.C. As we were waiting to be seated, I overheard a white-haired, bandana’d man mulling over the day. He leaned forward on one arm toward his two companions. “I haven’t felt this inspired since the ’60s,” he said.
Estimates place the March for Our Lives’ crowd size anywhere from 200,000 to 800,000 individuals. As for myself, I don’t know if I could say — Pennsylvania Avenue was so packed for several blocks that it was hard to see, let alone move. Yet as Emma Gonzalez stood at her podium in silence for 6 minutes and 20 seconds — the approximate amount of time of the shooting that took the lives of 17 of her classmates — the enormous crowd watched the stage and broadcast screens in stillness and solemnity.
An anti-March van — featuring images of arms, Jesus, and the apparent remains of aborted infants with slogans like “Love Always Protects, Keep Your Guns” and “Make America Good Again” — could be seen patrolling the area around Union Station, outside the grounds of the March. It was the only counter-protest I saw the entire day. Otherwise, the March featured an incredible atmosphere of solidarity and, most noticeably, diversity. I remember seeing individuals from all walks of life: men, women, and queer folks; Muslims, Jews, and nuns; whites, blacks, Asians, and Latinos; and people of all ages, from babies carried by their parents to seasoned, wrinkled activists like the one I overheard at the Dubliners. The teens presenting speeches expressed, for example, pride in their Cuban heritage and concern for the ubiquity of gun violence in the lives of the urban poor. Students, of course, were everywhere, but so were their teachers.
Around 5 PM, workers wearing neon-yellow jackets began removing the hundreds of posters woven into the fence outside the Smithsonian’s Sculpture Garden. The scene evoked some anxiety about how much the day, and the movement, would matter. At the restaurant, though, as we were heading to our seats, long after the march had ended, a man gestured to our “March for Our Lives” t-shirts, nodded a little, and said, “Right on.”
— Julia Walton ’21
Fed up with the frigid temperatures in my home town of Columbus over spring break, I decided to retreat to warmer climes in the pages of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad. It’s the work that catapulted him to fame, and as a Twain aficionado, I decided it was a long-overdue read. Rare is the book that can make me laugh out loud once in its duration, but, I kid you not, this one had me laughing out loud on just about every page. The notoriously irreverent Twain pulls no punches in his descriptive traipses across Europe and the Middle East. Perhaps most interesting is not his descriptions of the places he sees (they often didn’t live up to their literary and pictorial representations) but rather the people he encounters, both fellow travelers and locals. He makes an early binary classification of his itinerant compatriots. There are the “pilgrims,” or the holier-than-thou crowd ready to weep at Christian “relics” and parade their contempt for non-believers. By contrast, there are also the “sinners” — of which Twain, naturally, counts himself a member — who drink, smoke, gamble, and otherwise disport themselves without such haughty seriousness. Choicest among the travel tales are Twain’s near-scalping by a French barber (and his avowal of eventual revenge) and his accounts of the hypocritical “pilgrims” in Israel. But, of course, every chapter is well worth a read, at least for the inevitable laughs along the way.
— Myrial Holbrook ’19
Stockmann who discovers that the town’s water source, sustaining the local spa industry, is irreparably contaminated. Dr. Stockmann attempts to convince the town of this unfortunate reality and is met by resistance from business leaders, local politicians, and the anonymous masses. The production, scattered with references to “deplorables” and an ignorant majority, is intentionally staged to place Stockmann in the Trump era. These alterations in the script emphasize its portrayal of elitism, small-town political drama, and the mob mentality.
In contrast to this starkly contemporary rendition of An Enemy of the People, the conventional understanding of the play interprets Dr. Stockmann as a parallel to Ibsen, whose previous play, “Ghosts,” was received with much scandal. Both Ibsen and Stockmann represent individuals in tension with the public, and the production highlights this motif through costuming the central characters in bright pants and dresses, distinct for the townspeople, who blur into anonymity in black clothing. The original context of Ibsen’s work, however, is lost in the modernization of his dialogue. I found myself frustrated by the projection of modern themes onto the play in such a heavy-handed manner, which seemingly upset the context of Ibsen’s work. Somehow, this attempt to make the production relatable limited the strength of its timeless themes to the modern era.
Ibsen was “uncertain” about calling the play “a comedy or a straight drama,” but The Goodman’s production was overwhelmingly tragic. In a contemporary context, the play’s central tensions — can an individual provoke change? How does one escape capitalistic power structures? — appear all too familiar; with the transferability of Ibsen’s 1882 play to today comes a sense of resigned hopelessness about the circularity of history.
— Simone Wallk ’21
We modern-day movers and shakers are rarely offered rabbit holes to fall down. It’s funny, but maybe not funny “ha-ha”. Navigating a multitude of high-pressure environments is difficult, sure, but it seems there’s a “No Peeking” rule in place now, too: don’t look beyond your place, your position, your path. With no rest nowadays for both the wicked and the virtuous, The Band CAMINO’s discography opens a space for itself and its listeners when nothing else will do the trick.
Songs like “For a While” and “I Spend Too Much Time in My Room” don’t move the listener; far from it. The Band CAMINO offers rabbit holes for their listeners to fall down, a chance to free-fall, weightless, down to some unknown space. Each of their songs are pits, dug using traditional teenage angst for a shovel and intelligent nuance as the spade to carve away some rougher edges.
Their lyrics are emotional, yes, and at first glance can arguably be found in some other angst band’s songs. But these lyrics are smart. Without being overbearing or excessively descriptive, The Band CAMINO lets us take 4 minute, 32 second breaks where we feel as though every facet of our ambivalence is spoken to. Other bands may cater to a wide range of emotional experiences: loneliness, fear, rage, joy, nostalgia, regret. Only The Band CAMINO can let us wrap ourselves in these emotions simultaneously, layer them on top of one another, and feel a brief respite from the black and white of the twenty-first century, if only for a while.
— Andrew Tye ’21
I had never understood why my friends would pay to see the same film or show twice — that is, until I saw Daniel Haitchik’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, a musical adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s cult novel of the same name. After leaving the Berlind Theatre on opening night, the first thing I did when I got home was buy another ticket. I was sufficiently haunted.
Set in Australia on Valentine’s Day of 1900, Picnic begins innocently enough with the exchange of love letters and a chorus of addresses to St. Valentine before the upperclasswomen of Appleyard College embark on a field trip to the Hanging Rock. The Rock, rendered in this production by Annabel Barry ’19 as a stark red wooden backdrop, looms over nearly the entire show.
Yet everything else on stage is far from static: after the disappearance of three beloved students, presumably at the hands of the Rock, nothing is the same. The younger Appleyard girls nonetheless attempt to resume their Valentine odes: yet lyrics like “let it be me” place their songs in a sinister new register, especially with the top voices of Haitchik’s arrangements now permanently missing. As the show continues, however, the girls’ voices change with each passing song, the highlights of this progression being “Come Away Death” and “Whisked Away.” Grief is what transforms voices of girls into those of adults.
Indeed, most of Picnic’s plot deals not with the mystery of the Hanging Rock tragedy, but the mysterious consequences of tragedy’s aftermath. As Theater department seniors Nico Krell, Emma Watkins, Alison Light, Meagan Raker and Jared Brendon Hopper put it in their prefatory note, “Ultimately, this becomes a story about a school having to deal with the hole left by classmates who never come back.” Another school that, after February 14th, has to deal with the hole left by classmates who will never again come back.
— Nicolette D’Angelo ‘19
