The magazine of the Columbia Spectator
26 September 2013 / vol. 15 issue 3
the
eye
HOW COLUMBIANS
A Room of
TREAT THEIR SPACE
Their Own
PHOTOS BY VANESSA HOLLANDER
a
A ROOM OF
THEIR OWN
IN THIS ISSUE
03
eyesites
04
how columbians treat their space pg. 07
ideas
CRISIS OF FAITH
by Alejandra Oliva
BY VANESSA HOLLANDER
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
06
interview
WILLIAM THEODORE DE BARY
by Camille Peterson
With the
creation of
each issue of
The Eye, there
is cause for
introspection.
Here are
photos of us in
our space. Just
like the images
in this week’s
lead story, we
will let them
speak for
themselves.
11
music
SMOKE ON THE SCREEN
by Ana Diaz
12
music
ISLANDS IN THE STREAM
by David Salazar
14
20/20
BINGING ON BREAKING // by Benji de la Piedra
WHO WEARS THE PANTS? // by Pooja Pandey
15
view from here
GOING SOLO
by Megan Kalllstrom
Editor in Chief Rikki Novetsky
Managing Editor for Features Alison Herman
Lead Story Editor Zoe Camp
Managing Editor for Optics Laura Booth
Senior Design Editor Annie Wang
Art Director Suze Myers
Head Copy Editor Natan Belchikov
Associate Editors for Features Carolina Gerlach Parul Guliani Kierstin Utter Dunni Oduyemi
Eyesites Editor PJ Sauerteig
View From Here Editor Adina Applebaum
Deputy for Multimedia Wilfred Chan
Interview Editor Qiuyun Tan
Visuals Associate Editor Hannah Sotnick
Fiction Editor Eric Wohlstadter
Social Media Deputies Kelly Lane
Amy Zimmerman
Production Staff Anna Espinola Rachel Han Sofia Lyons Kimberly McDonald Elisa Mirkil Kristen Montano Tamsin Pargiter
Mallika Patkar Isabel Narea Ji Hee Yoon Andrea Zhu
Copy Staff Michelle Marchese Jess Pflugrath Emma Sarachan
Spectator Editor in Chief Sammy Roth
Spectator Managing Editor Finn Vigeland
Spectator Publisher Alex Smyk
eye.columbiaspectator.com
facebook.com/theeyemag
Twitter/Instagram: @theeyemag
Contact Us: Editorial: (212) 854-9547
© 2013 The Eye
eye@columbiaspectator.com
Advertising: (212) 854-9558
Spectator Publishing Company, Inc.
YEEZUS AND CC
the modern Swaghili translation
by pj sauerteig
Contemporary CivilizaHEGEL
tion is hard. Mastering the
great thinkers of the West
Uh, pop a wheelie on the Zeitgeist
in rapid succession, beUh, I’m finna start a new movement
ing guided all the while
by a hapless SusDev grad
student—it can even get a
SIGMUND FREUD
little overwhelming. So,
She lookin’ for her daddy,
in honor of Kanye West’s
call me Big Poppa
recent visit to campus, The
Eye had an idea: Why not
use Yeezus lyrics to sum
KARL MARX
up the West’s great thinkI throw these Maybach keys
ers? Consider it a little
cheat sheet for when you
just can’t make it through
the reading. Never say The
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Eye—or Kanye—never did
Your
titties,
let ’em out, free at last
anything for ya.
MARTIN LUTHER
Fuck every question you asking
If I don’t get ran out by Catholics
ADAM SMITH
Shit I’m chilling
Trying to stack these millions
ST. PAUL
My whole life in the hands of God
MACHIAVELLI
I’d rather be a dick than a swallower
OPEN LETTER
to those studying abroad
by suze myers
HEY GUYS. WE NEED TO TALK.
We were fine with the initial
Facebook post. Happy for you,
even! The Instagram of your
plane ticket was a bit much, but
we’ll let it slide this time. We only
rolled our eyes a little when your
“arubaaaaa 2k13 :)” Spotify playlist showed up in our News Feed.
Even your dozen daily Snapchat
selfies were tolerated with minimal mimed vomiting.
But then came the blog. Then
the corresponding Twitter, then
the supplementary photography
Tumblr, the travel-specific Vine
account, and finally, the mass
email chain to which your Great
Aunt Harriet keeps hitting reply all. To this we say: enough is
enough. We fucking get it. You’re
studying abroad.
This is just jealousy speaking, of
course. While you’re touring the
Italian countryside on a baby-blue
Vespa, we’re dying a thousand
slow deaths in the flood-lit bowels of Butler. But your constant
flow of social media updates has
left us a little mystified as well.
We think it’s great that you’re on
the roof of a jungle-themed nightclub in the center of Abu Dhabi,
wearing a stomach necklace and
sucking on the beefy neck of a
man named Bjorn, but did you
really have to Instagram it from
seven different angles? Was your
first taste of authentic Greek yogurt in Santorini truly worthy of
four blog posts? And—be honest
here—did you really have to make
your profile picture that shirtless
selfie of you lying in the snow on
Mount Kilimanjaro? Your nipples
look cold, bro. Put that Patagonia
back on.
This isn’t to say we don’t enjoy some of it. Your Vine of Kate
Middleton’s motorcade passing
through Oxford went viral on
Buzzfeed, after all! But when your
travel muploads outnumber the
number of Throwback Thursday
posts of all 70 of your sorority
sisters, it’s probably time to ease
back on that social media push.
After a while, all your photos of
Malta’s beaches and Austrian
meat platters (side note: should
you really be eating that much
schnitzel?) and David’s marble
dick start to blur together for all
of us left here in New York.
Start a revolution, ye world
travelers, and throw your Nikon
off a bridge in Zimbabwe! Crack
your iPhone on the floor of a
mosque in Cairo! Leave your
MacBook on a train headed to
Lausanne! Take a break from all
that social media climbing and
get back to actually living. Bjorn’s
neck isn’t going to suck itself,
after all.
xoxo,
THe Eye
03
CRISIS OF FAITH
COPING WITH CHURCH CLOSURES ACROSS NEW YORK CITY
been full of legal battles and heartache,
not just for the parishioners of Our
Lady Queen of Angels, but also for the
other churches in Manhattan that were
closed down that year—some, such as
St. Vincent de Paul and Mary Help of
Christians, as part of the redistricting,
and others, such as Our Lady of Vilnius,
because of the intersection of structural
issues and dropping attendance. Mary
Help of Christians was finally demolished earlier this summer to make way
for condos. St. Vincent de Paul, Our
Lady Queen of Angels, and Our Lady of
Vilnius are all still standing, but shuttered. Nearby nunneries still use Our
Lady Queen of Angels, but the parishioners are locked out.
Margarita Barada is 89 years old,
and she’s been going to Our Lady
Queen of Angels almost her entire
life—a good portion of the 127 years
that the church has been open. “They
broke my heart when they closed
this church,” she said, in English and
Spanish. Our Lady Queen of Angels
was once a primarily Puerto Rican
and Dominican church. The parishio-
by alejandra olivia
04
ners’ current informal Masses in the
park are held in English and Spanish,
alternating, and sometimes translating, for members who don’t speak
either language perfectly. These services date back to when the church
was first closed, beginning more as
protest vigils than worship. However,
over time, they’ve evolved into their
current form, allowing the women
to discuss their faith and mourn their
shuttered church. The other closing
churches around the city have also
faced similar struggles, and their pa-
illustration by anna espinola
In a little park adjoining some housing projects in East Harlem, there’s
a group of seven women standing in
a semicircle, singing quietly. It’s the
weekly meeting of what’s left of the
congregation of Our Lady Queen of Angels, and they’ve been here every Sunday morning, rain or shine, for the past
five years. In 2007, a list was released of
about 10 churches that would be closed
throughout the Archdiocese of New
York as part of a formal “redistricting”
of parishes, including Our Lady Queen
of Angels. The years since then have
rishioners have responded with equal
measures of grace and grit.
St. Vincent de Paul in Chelsea was the only church in the
city that still offered a mass in
French, and was a hub for Haitian and French-speaking African
immigrants, says Olga Statz, an
attorney and former parishioner
struggling to save the church. Key
in this process, and in the struggle
to save the other closing churches,
was the Landmarks Preservation Commission. St. Vincent de
Paul has enormous historical and
artistic value—it was the first
racially integrated church in the
country and a gathering place for
prominent French New Yorkers,
including the artists who helped
decorate its interiors. To gain
landmark status, an application
explaining a building’s historical
and social value must be submitted to the LPC. If the application
is deemed worthy, then a public
hearing is held, where different
parties can argue for or against the
preservation of the building. For
example, Mary Help of Christians,
another church closed at around
the same time, had its application
rejected by the LPC, and the lot it
stood on was sold for $41 million
to a condo developer. The LPC is a
government entity, a branch of the
city’s administration, and as such
should theoretically be unbiased
in its declaration of landmark
status. However, Statz claims that
the archdiocese used its influence
in the city government to prevent
St. Vincent de Paul’s application
from receiving fair consideration.
She cites the rejection of their application four times at the administrative level, without a public
hearing, as proof of the Catholic
Church’s meddling.
Service was a major element in the
ministry at St. Vincent de Paul—many
of the people who came into the church
were undocumented immigrants, some
of whom were not even Christian.
Part of the mission of the church was
to help these immigrants and provide
a cultural and spiritual base for them.
Given each of the other churches’ connections to immigrant communities,
it feels as if the archdiocese is against
the churches of immigrants. Granted,
it seems like one can’t throw a stone in
New York without finding an immigrant community and a church that
serves it. There is no way to close a
church without robbing some people of
their spiritual home. Still, the extensive
reach—which can even be intercontinental—that the churches often have
cannot be ignored.
“There was a woman, Christine,
who told us that before she came
to New York, back in her village in
Togo, other people told her, ‘There
is a church in New York, St. Vincent
de Paul, you must find it,’” Statz
says. “That’s the kind of reach we
have, that villagers in Togo have
heard of us.”
One of Statz’s biggest frustrations
about the closing of St. Vincent de
Paul is that the people it aimed to
serve—recently arrived immigrants,
the very poor, those without a
voice—have been left in the lurch.
Her fight against the archdiocese
is fueled by a desire to see this
community reborn.
“I notice it’s poor people’s
churches being closed,” Statz says.
“These are the people that make
up your rank and file, these are the
people that fill up the collection
plate, these are the people who need
to be married and baptized and buried, that keep the church functioning. And instead of closing the doors
to these people so disrespectfully, so
ignominiously, you should be thinking, ‘This is our future.’ Right now,
the Catholic Church—not all of it,
but a good chunk of it—is black and
brown and poor.”
Our Lady of Vilnius, located by
the entrance to the Holland Tunnel,
was also a church of immigrants,
founded by Lithuanians and more
recently a center for Portuguese
and Puerto Rican immigrants, says
Christina Nakraseive, a parishioner
whose grandparents were founding
members of the church. Our Lady
of Vilnius was not a church built by
wealthy immigrants and as such had
more modest interiors—the basement had a charming disco ball—and
several niches around the church
featured haphazard arrangements of
technicolor saints, artificial flowers,
and tiny plastic crosses. But to Nakraseive and her friend Elaine Derso,
the church was a spiritual and community haven. “I never really felt at
home anywhere,” Derso says. “And
as soon as I walked into the doors at
Our Lady of Vilnius, I knew that that
was what I had been looking for.”
The church was closed because
a structurally unsound roof made
holding services unsafe for parishioners. However, Derso suspects the
archdiocese of taking the insurance
payout intended to fix the church.
The parishioners paid the insurance
every month through their tithes,
but since the policy was in the archdiocese’s name, the payout was sent
to them and never forwarded along.
The archdiocese could not be reached
for comment about either the in-
surance money or the Landmarks
Preservation Commission.
Still, what ultimately leaves these
parishioners aching is not necessarily the loss of a building, but the loss
of community. Nakraseive told a story
about a Lithuanian immigrant studying at Juilliard who played the piano
at mass. Growing up in Soviet Lithuania, he hadn’t been raised within the
church, and so Father Sawicki, an exfirefighter from the Bronx, would yell
out which piece went with that part of
the Mass. “At one of our last Masses, he
stood up and said, ‘You know, I think
there’s something very spiritual happening here.’ And that was something
we heard a lot about the church,”
Nakraseive says, her voice breaking.
For Derso, once the chair of
the committee Save Our Lady of
Vilnius, the commitment to her
church is greater than that to the
Catholic Church. “At our first
says. “In a Mass, there’s no way
that we would be able to do this, to
discuss the readings, anything like
that. This has brought me closer to
God.” The small meetings that the
former parishioners of Our Lady
Queen of Angels have are full of discussion, but still have many of the
same elements as a traditional Catholic liturgy—including a blessing,
typically done by one of the women
there. This violates the Catholic
prohibition on women serving as
priests, but in the small park in East
Harlem, there’s really nothing stopping them. The community also has
a somewhat feminist bent—one of
the people most involved in helping
to save the church was theologian
Ada María Isasí-Díaz. Up until her
death last year, Isasí-Díaz sent the
women a short spiritual reflection each week. For the women at
Our Lady of Vilnius, there was also
“What ultimately leaves
these parishioners aching is
not necessarily the loss of
a building, but the loss of a
community.”
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
meeting [of the committee to Save
Our Lady of Vilnius], I just looked
around, and I said, ‘You know
that we can get excommunicated
for this?’ And everyone stayed,”
she says. Since the closing of the
church, the community around it
has largely dissolved.
This is less true for Our Lady
Queen of Angels, although Barada
laments the loss of service groups
that once operated out of the
church. However, for these women, there’s an additional anger that
dates back to the night the church
was closed. Patty Rodriguez was
one of the women holding vigil
at Our Lady Queen of Angels that
night and one of the six women
arrested for trespassing after the
archdiocese found them inside.
While the charges were dropped,
there is still the indignity of arrest, not only by the city but also,
indirectly, by the Catholic Church.
Nevertheless, Rodriguez is grateful
for the opportunities that the closing has given her.
“I think fighting the Church has
made me a better Catholic,” she
something reaffirming about the
femininity in the church. All of the
stained glass windows, mounted
over light boxes in the absence of
natural light, depicted different
incarnations of Mary. A traditional
Mass literally only allows for the
voices of men in leadership roles,
but if anything, the campaigns to
save the churches across the city
have been vocally and strongly
feminine. From writing proposals
and suggesting lawsuits to gathering
in the park on a Sunday morning,
the leading voices are all female.
Although these women aren’t explicitly challenging the patriarchy of
the church, their activism is challenging the limited position women
have been allowed to occupy in the
church historically.
For all of these women, the
fight isn’t over. Last Sunday, Rodriguez mentioned that someone’s
husband had told her that the
new Pope was personally answering correspondence. Thus began
the letter-writing portion of the
campaign to save Our Lady Queen
of Angels. a
05
to deal with both. You have to recognize that the
combination is irreducible in all human experience.
What do you think is the one essential thing
that we need to learn from East Asian texts?
I don’t think there is any one thing. You need to
learn to read the texts. The process is very important. You read the texts and size them up for yourself. Then you get together with your peers and
discuss to see what they think. Have they drawn the
same conclusions? Have the classics spoken to them
in the same way? Then, you have that check. Your
first reaction is subjective, but once you articulate it,
it becomes objective. It’s out in the open. Then it can
become the basis for conversation.
WILLIAM THEODORE DE BARY
In your book, Nobility and Civility, you mention
that Confucius focuses on the “true nature of
leadership.” What do you think world leaders
today could learn from Confucius’ teachings?
The key concept is trust. There has to be some
common element that provides the basis for dealing
with other people. They know that they can trust
your word, that you will act according to your word,
and that you can come together to deal with shared
problems because you can, to some extent, count on
somebody else to be a true human being. The importance of trust is true for all people, but it’s especially
important for the leader. You can recognize that
when you look at our present Congress. To the extent that we have any hope of resolving the current
problems in Congress, it depends on certain people
in Congress being recognized as promoting genuine
conversation and compromise.
What first interested you in East Asian studies and in developing Columbia’s East Asian
studies program?
It started with the first class I had in Hamilton
Hall, which was Contemporary Civilization taught
by Harry Carman. At that first class, when I was sitting in the front row, he said, “Of course you know
that CC is just civilization in the West. What we
need is some young people to prepare themselves to
include Asia in the process.” Well, I didn’t have any
good idea what I wanted to do. That seemed like an
appealing idea to me, so I started learning Chinese.
In my book, The Great Civilized Conversation,
I consider the key word to be “conversation.”
This appears very early in the writings of former
Columbia professors John Erskine and Mark Van
Doren. What they were doing was picking up on
the conversation with the great minds of the past.
That is the best way for you to come to terms with
your past—everybody has to do that. There isn’t any
fixed quantity or canon that can sum up your past,
but you can get the best access to it by reading what
the great minds said about the issues that were
foremost in their minds.
Do you have any words of wisdom for current
Columbia students regarding the Core?
The most important thing I could say to them
given the conditions that exist now with respect to
the Core requirements—they are not focused on a
“core.” You have a Global Core and what is, in effect, a distribution requirement that goes off in any
direction you want. It doesn’t bring people together
on “core” issues. The only way I could suggest they
do it is to take the courses we designed for the Core—
Asian humanities and Asian civilization—and not the
alternatives that have been proposed. If they take
those classes, then they would make a start on a genuine world conversation. If they don’t do that, then
forget it. Their education is aborted after they take
Lit Hum and CC. They don’t progress in a normal
way to expand that same process to a larger world.
The other thing I would tend to emphasize is
that I don’t think global centers contribute to the
undergraduate learning process. Students go out to
commercial centers in the rest of the world, and all
they get exposed to is commercialism. They’re not
going to learn the culture of those countries—they’ll
take what’s immediately available in the current
culture. It’s just academic tourism, and it doesn’t
add up to anything.
You’ve been an advocate for bringing nonWestern thought into the Core for a while.
What do you think makes the expansion of the
Core imperative for a college education?
We’re living in one world. And if we want
to understand our world the way we think we
can understand the West through CC and the
humanities, we have to extend that same process.
Do you think there are significant
conflicts between Eastern and Western
philosophical tradition?
There are differences, but I don’t think they’re
fundamental. You’ll find both that there is a great
deal held in common as well as that there is a
great deal of difference. These things go together—
common values and different contexts. You have
What do you think the most important impact
of a global conversation would be?
Most important would be simply that they’d be
able to talk together—and if they talk together, recognizing that they share certain things in common,
they can appeal to those common values to deal with
their differences. That would apply to any international problem. a
Professor William Theodore de Bary, the John Mitchell Mason professor of Asian
humanities and provost emeritus of the University has been a presence at Columbia since his freshman year in the College in 1937. After serving in World War
II, he came back to Columbia to earn his master’s degree and Ph.D. in 1953. His
lifelong dedication to conversations between Eastern and Western civilizations
and his active advocacy of a Lit Hum-style East Asian core have won him enormous respect in the Columbia community and worldwide. CAMILLE PETERSON
sat down with professor de Bary for a chance to hear some Columbia wisdom.
06
A Room of
Their Own
HOW COLUMBIANS TREAT THEIR SPACE
Thirty-four residential communities. Almost 8,300 undergraduates. From Carman to the Quad, from East Campus to Cathedral
Gardens, from special interest housing to Greek-life brownstones.
How do people treat the modest square footage allocated to
them while they’re at school?
Before arriving at Columbia, some of us had envisioned the
exact twin XL sheets we would fit onto our beds, the most unique
arrangement for our standardized furniture, and whether we
would shun our high school photos in favor of concert posters.
And some of us couldn’t care less about these things, knowing
that the space is ours for only a few months before it is relinquished in May, stripped clean of our possessions and in need
of a fresh coat of paint.
Yet the sheer volume of conversation that accompanies the
housing process is a testament to its importance in our lives. In “A
Room of Their Own,” photographer Vanessa Hollander explores
just how much our spaces become manifestations of ourselves—or,
at any rate, of who we are at Columbia.
“Shooting this made me realize how important rooms are as
means of expression,” Hollander says. “People use clothing as a
daily method of communicating the mood they’re in that day, but
rooms can’t be changed as frequently.”
“Most people I photographed collected pieces of the most significant aspects of their lives as decorations,” she adds. “It feels like
we must feature photos and art from our best friends, letters from
home, posters of our favorite bands, and souvenirs from travel on
the walls of the tiny space we’re given.”
photos by
vanessa hollander
ALICE MAY BC ’16
PLIMPTON SINGLE
VANESSA HOLYOAK
KATIE GIRITLIAN BC ’16
PLIMPTON DOUBLE
FRANCES COCKSEDGE CC ’16
ADP DOUBLE
BC ’17, REID DOUBLE
DAKOTA CENETA CC ’16
NUSSBAUM DOUBLE
KIANI NED BC ’16
BROOKS SINGLE
KIANI NED BC ’16
BROOKS SINGLE
MARCUS HUNTER CC ’15
IRC SINGLE
PJ SAUERTEIG CC ’15
WATT DOUBLE
SMOKE ON THE SCREEN
image via facebook /vaporwave
STRUGGLING TO DEFINE THE VAPORWAVE AESTHETIC
It’s something any child of the
’90s can picture: computer-generated dolphins diving into a pixelated,
purple-and-pink sea; sprinkled ghostly
vestiges of Windows 95 error reports;
old-school Japanese ads for Atari.
Visual samples like these are the distinguishing feature of a niche Internet
music scene, controversially named
“vaporwave.” This sonic aesthetic has a
small but devoted fan base that enjoys
the music’s “chill” beats and earnest,
unaltered sampling of the commercial
sounds of the recent past.
“At its finest,” Ian C., a self-described synthesizer enthusiast, says,
“vaporwave is sampledelic ’90scheesiness worship.” Translation? Vaporwave is a micro-scene born solely
of the Internet, carried and nurtured
through channels like Bandcamp,
SoundCloud, and of course, Tumblr,
the last of which provided it with a
medium for expansion beyond simple
“sound” and into a more nebulous
culture or “vibe.” “Sampledelic”
refers to its reliance on samples from
a variety of ’90s sounds, combining
soundtracks from 8-bit games, easylistening tracks, and other elements to
form a relaxed, trippy composition.
Like its name implies, the inspiration behind the music is foggy at best.
The etymology of “vaporwave” is best
understood as an ongoing Internet joke.
In 2009, the artist known as Pictureplane allegedly named the “witch
house” genre. After its departure came
something called “seapunk,” marked
by turquoise colors and a punk-goth
look. In March of last year, the New
York Times ran a piece headlined “Little
Mermaid Goes Punk: Seapunk, a Web
Joke With Music, Has Its Moment” and
claimed that “Like LOLcats and pedobear, [seapunk] is an inside Web joke
that feeds off its own ridiculousness.”
And while many claim vaporwave came
from seapunk, continuing the “joke,”
that’s not entirely accurate. After all, Ian
C. states, the first vaporwave musicians
didn’t even have a name for their music
when they began mixing; someone
else decided to label them. So while the
name might reflect the ridiculousness of
“seapunk,” its music has an entirely independent genealogy—hence the worry
that “vaporwave” is killing vaporwave:
that thanks to this label, musicians are
losing their credibility and individuality, as well as respect among those who
move in their circles.
Because the exchange of culture on
the Internet is such a nebulous process, it seems pointless to seek out the
origins of these interlacing terms. But
the terms are important, and artists
are often dismayed when they are
carelessly interchanged and misused.
There is, in fact, a resistance within all
microcultural phenomena to naming
and labeling. The Chicago Reader ran
a story earlier this year exploring the
anti-label attitude in relation to vaporwave. Metallic Ghosts, a 17-year-old
musician, told the Reader, “As soon as
you name something, it’s going to take
off and die.” Accordingly, the Reader
ran another story just last week commemorating the confusing one-year
“anniversary” of the birth-and-death
of vaporwave.
Another artist whose music had
been haphazardly labeled “vaporwave” by the first Reader article is
Jonathan Dean, who records under
the name Transmuteo. He feels it’s
time to set the record straight about
what exactly “vaporwave” is and,
perhaps more importantly, what it’s
not. “I’m still not sure if I have ever
made something that could be classified as ‘vaporwave’ in the most precise
sense of the term,” Dean states. His
track “Executive Lightbody” is part of
Hi-Hi-Whoopee’s vaporwave-scene
compilation, but “that track so selfconsciously co-opts the techniques
and aesthetics of vaporwave that it
achieves a kind of conceptual detachment all its own.”
In fact, the track “could be viewed
as a satirical jab at vaporwave perversely delivered during the flush of
its growing visibility,” says Dean.
Importantly, it “bears little resemblance to the rest of [his] work.” The
track purposely exaggerated what are
considered common characteristics
of the vaporwave genre. Dean used
“Ableton Live’s warping tools, added
reverb, and EQ’d the track until it took
on some ‘shopping mall jam’ qualities.”
In highlighting these aspects, Dean
responds to the label “vaporwave” by
parodying it and pointing out its inaccuracy. Coincidentally, he emphasizes
how un-vaporwave the rest of his
music actually is.
Dean was also concerned with others using “vaporwave” interchangeably with “chillwave.” The terms, he
says, “are only useful with reference
to specific and distinct qualities that
merit the coining of a new genre.” That
is, they should be used to point out
differences, not similarities, between
sounds. In the case of chillwave versus
vaporwave, “vaporwave is distinct in
that it is a technique as well as a set of
generic qualities.” Where “chillwave
evokes nostalgia by cleaving towards
the hackneyed synthesizer presets and
standardized structures of retro pop,”
vaporwave “doesn’t recontextualize
or evoke the past, it recapitulates the
past with subtle mutations ... which
render the past dreamlike, meditative,
euphoric, or regressive.” The difference
between chillwave and vaporwave is
thus one between pastiche and collage.
Dean’s focus on the word “nostalgia” is worth examining further. Vaporwave falls in line with a more “retrofuturistic” nostalgia, or a nostalgia for
a future that existed in the imagination
of a past era. Instead of placing “retro”
around the post-war boom of the ’50s
and ’60s (think The Jetsons), the future
being yearned for is the one dreamt up
by the economic prosperity and Cold
War thawing of the ’80s and ’90s (think
the dystopian visions of The Matrix, the
hacking “lone gunmen” of The X-Files,
or the English-Chinese pidgin spoken on
the TV show Firefly).
But trying to decipher what exactly
vaporwave reflects or embodies defeats
the genre’s purpose. This is where the
“vapor” part comes in. The word itself
is a play on the tech-world concept of
vaporware, which refers to software or
hardware that is unveiled and advertised but never realized. Vaporware is a
commercial ghost, never released nor
confirmed to be an abandoned project.
“Vaporware” has multiple meanings
under the umbrella of undelivered
promise. It can be both a forgotten project and a calculated fiction, intended to
keep customers loyal to a given corporation. Some have called the promotion
of vaporware akin to “selling smoke,”
making the name quite literal.
Vaporwave is an undelivered genre,
existing only in the vapors of cyberspace, if at all. It summons eye rolls and
fragmented explanations from those
who know it for what it is: a placeholder. The place it is holding, and the
thing it is holding it for, seem inscrutable. Some would argue that that is the
point: striving for inscrutability in the
age of information.
To embrace the impossibility of
naming or qualifying vaporwave is
to embrace the ’90s, the ambitious
visions of reaching an impossibly
clean, huge technological future that
the sci-fi media of the time described.
Vaporwave is a way to embody this
future that never came—or, perhaps, a
way to make fun of it.
Turn up the volume, kick back, and
take in the familiar sights of Windows
95 screensavers and choppy CGIs. It’s
perfectly fine—and encouraged—to
not understand. a
by ana diaz
11
ISLANDS IN
THE STREAM
THE MUSIC INDUSTRY MOVES
BEYOND ILLEGAL DOWNLOADING
goal and piracy not necessarily the
means to achieve it.
Part of the change in the music industry has come from the
increased availability of places to
stream content rather than download it. Free streaming services Pandora and Spotify, for example, pay
for the music by running ads every
few songs and putting a cap on the
amount of music someone can listen
to in a month. Both services also
allow for a paid, ad-free experience.
With Spotify, this translates to a fair
amount of subscribers.
According to Spotify spokesperson Graham James, there are currently 6 million people worldwide
who pay for Spotify, either unlimited ($4.99 per month) or premium
($9.99 per month). Although specific data for the U.S. isn’t available
(the company only tracks its worldwide users), the paid subscribers are
only a little more than a quarter of
Spotify’s 23 million users.
“What I think Spotify is, is a
reaction to consumer behavior,”
James says. “If you look at what
happened back in ’99, you have
Napster, and that gave music
consumers every song imaginable
for free. The problem with Napster
was that it was illegal and didn’t
compensate the rights holders or
the artists.”
James is right that the furor
over Napster’s business model—
theft, essentially—led founder
Sean Parker to turn it into a paid
service. Though this new model
compensated the artists—as anyone who has ever downloaded an
album illegally knows—it didn’t
quite satiate the music consumer’s
need for free music.
“People want all the music in
the world and they want it for free,
but you have to have a service that
compensates artists and writers,”
James says, adding, “Our competition is piracy.”
And if a new report done by Internet security company NetNames
is to be believed, Spotify has a lot
of competition. The report, “Sizing the Piracy Universe,” which
was released on Sept. 17, details a
by david salazar
12
growing number of people stealing content, positing that the
bandwidth used by those seeking
copyright-infringing content grew
159 percent between 2010 and 2012.
“As well as looking at the
amount of infringing bandwidth
that we see online, we’re also trying
to estimate the number of users who
are accessing infringing content on a
regular basis,” NetNames Director of
Piracy Analysis David Price says in a
video that accompanies the report.
But examining the study itself
makes clear that it largely focuses
on video piracy, and there’s a lot
of guesswork involved in looking
at piracy. While it details that “327
[million] unique internet users
explicitly sought infringing content
during January 2013 in the three
regions” of North America, Europe,
and Asia-Pacific, that doesn’t necessarily mean that their searches
weren’t in vain. Besides, NBCUniversal—perhaps not an entirely
disinterested party when it comes
to making piracy appear rampant—
funded the study.
ILLUSTRATION BY ISABEL NAREA
The Recording Industry Association of America is scared of
what’s happening to the music
industry. More specifically, it’s
scared of what’s happening to the
money in the music industry.
On its website, the RIAA announces that, “Since peer-to-peer
(p2p) file-sharing site Napster
emerged in 1999, music sales in
the U.S. have dropped 53 percent,
from $14.6 billion to $7.0 billion in
2011.” Pretty alarming, right?
Not so fast.
In terms of the RIAA’s interests,
it needs to be understood that the
association is comprised of record
labels. Suddenly it makes sense
that it’s so concerned with the disappearing money.
Compound the RIAA’s bias with
its conflation of correlation and
causation, and the fact that music
piracy might not be quite as big a
problem as it has been in the past,
and you get a portrait of a changing landscape in the music industry, one in which ownership of
content might not be the ultimate
On the other hand, an earlier
report by The American Assembly, a group that describes itself
on its website as a “non-partisan
public affairs forum,” and which
was started at Columbia in 1950 by
acterized by the copying, sharing,
and downloading of music, movies,
TV shows, and other digital media.”
The data for the study come from
a sample of about 2,000 Americans
and 1,500 Germans who were se-
“If piracy is a complement
to actually buying music,
the report suggests that
streaming might well be the
remedy for piracy that James
believes Spotify to be.”
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
then-University President Dwight
Eisenhower, paints a nuanced portrait of music downloading among
residents of the U.S. and Germany
The study examines what it calls
“copy culture,” or a culture “char-
lected at random for a phone survey.
(This wasn’t guesswork based on
bandwidth, but rather conversations
with real people.) Its most interesting
finding was the fact that most of those
who said they used peer-to-peer ser-
vices such as BitTorrent or What.CD
to download music had actually paid
for more music than those who didn’t
use these services. And, in general, it
may not be as big a problem as Price
and his report suggest.
“Overall, American Internet users
buy significantly more songs than
they download for free by a ratio of
roughly 7:4,” the American Assembly
report says. “As copying and downloading for free diminish in the 30- to
49-year-old group, purchasing remains the same, suggesting that these
practices are mostly complementary
to legal acquisition, not strong substitutes for it.”
And if piracy is a complement to
actually buying music, the report
suggests that streaming might well
be the remedy for piracy that James
believes Spotify to be, and might explain iTunes’ push to get people to use
iTunes Radio—essentially a streaming service Apple has made native to
the iPhone, including it in its latest
mobile operating system, iOS 7.
“Copy culture fills the demand
for a cheap, convenient, universal
music library—a ‘celestial jukebox,’” the study says. “As legal
streaming services become better
direct substitutes for file sharing,
there should be evidence of a shift
toward those services.”
And this shift does appear to
be taking place: Of the 30 percent
of Americans who have copied or
downloaded digital music files for
free, “46 percent indicated that
they now do so less because of the
emergence of these services,” the
survey says.
This attitude is especially prevalent among those in most Eye readers’ age group. According to the copy
culture survey, 62 percent of the
18- to 30-year-old demographic said
they copy or download less music
because of streaming services. And
among those who use peer-to-peer
services, that number is 66 percent,
with almost a fifth of that group paying for streaming services.
But for streaming companies like
Spotify, the sheer number of users
is enough to keep them enthusiastic
about their mission. “There’ve been
over a billion playlists created on Spotify, so that can give you a sense of the
level of engagement,” James says.
Whether that engagement translates
into fewer stolen copies of “Wrecking
Ball” remains to be seen. a
13
20/20
W
HO WEARS THE PANTS?
I’m all for women’s leadership. I even
like to say that my favorite position is
CEO—take that as you will. The thing about women
in power, however, is that it often looks and feels
like men in power, just in female bodies. And with
the return of the power suit on runways and in the
boardroom, female leadership is taking on a new style.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal announced
the return of the power suit on fall 2013 runways. A
“power suit” is often a pantsuit, with strong lines
and sharp edges reminiscent of a well-tailored men’s
suit. It was all the rage in the ’80s—and three decades
later, it’s making a comeback. High fashion designers
such as Christian Dior, Gucci, and Giorgio Armani are
bringing the power suits back—this time, without the
shoulder pads.
These suits are a far cry from the workplace fashion
that we have gotten used to. Michelle Obama’s style,
with its well-cut, colorful dresses and cardigans, is
being thrown out the window, in favor of a darker,
sleeker look. These looks will have “knife-edge sharp”
tailoring, but are “more flattering ... more feminine”
than the “football-player look associated with 1980s
women’s suiting.”
While this look does give women more of an
intimidating stature, it sacrifices much of their
B
INGING ON BREAKING In recent weeks, my friends and I have developed a ritual for watching Breaking
Bad. When Sunday night finally arrives, my roommate Floyd cues up the latest episode on his laptop and
hooks it up to his TV via HDMI. As the stream buffers,
the remaining four or five of us prepare the chairs,
gathering in a neat circle around the screen. Behind
us hangs the room’s requisite “Breaking Bad” poster,
which features a troubled Walter White sitting heavily
in an old lawn chair as he stares off into the middle distance over the backs of our heads. “All hail the king,”
it declares, making the boxes and boxes of meth and
cash behind him rather difficult to ignore. We break
out the snacks and crack open some beers, chatting
the whole time. Floyd hits play and we keep talking
over the recap of previous episodes. Naturally, a band
of fanboys as dedicated to the show as ours needs no
reminders of what’s already past. Instead, visions of
the show’s indeterminate end dominate our conversation. While we speculate, the big question continues to
hang in the air: What will be the fate of Walter White?
Before going on any further, I must first make a
confession. I’ve barely watched Breaking Bad. I only
started a month ago and I have managed to see the first
five episodes of season one and the second half of the
currently airing fifth and final season.
In my defense, allow me to recount my recent acquaintance with Breaking Bad.
After two months of research and teaching high
school students this summer, I went west in search of
a break. I spent 18 August days in California, staying
14
a commentary
: on pop culture
“feminine” identity in the process. But, as Giorgio
Armani told the Wall Street Journal, “Power once,
and power now, are very different. Now power can
be feminine.” Armani’s definition of “feminine” is by
embracing the shape of a woman’s body and adding
curves to the power suit, yet it still looks a whole lot
like a man’s suit.
The problem with women and power is that
they must seem more and more masculine in
order to attain it. Women chop off their hair,
adopting bob cuts and pixie cuts. They get breast
reduction surgeries, as in the case of Barnard
President Debora Spar. They wear long pants that
hide their legs and heavy blazers that give them a
shape they don’t even have. Why is it that women
have to look like men to lead? The public praises
female leaders, pointing out the handful of
female CEOs to justify the overwhelming number
of white middle-aged men who are in charge.
They applaud Hillary Clinton, urging her to run
for president, to bring a feminine perspective
to the job. Yet Clinton herself is famous for the
pantsuit and her classic short haircut. If Hillary
Clinton had long blonde hair and wore flowy
dresses, would we take her as seriously? Why is
femininity something reserved for the kitchen,
the bedroom, a lush garden full of flowers?
Ironically, according to a study done by
Northwestern University in 2008, voters choose
male candidates based on their competency and
sense of alpha-male dominance, while they choose
female candidates based on their attractiveness
and approachability. This double standard, where
women can only be elected by acting feminine, but
can’t be taken seriously unless they act masculine,
is creating a dead-end street for women seeking
positions of power. Should they wear a floral skirt,
or should they wear trousers? Should they solve a
situation with gentleness and diplomacy, or should
they address it with aggression and militancy? The
public sets an impossible bar for women to reach,
then calls them various names for not conforming to
its double standard.
The return of the power suit only affirms the notion
that women must behave like patriarchs if they want
to be taken seriously in our patriarchal world. They
dress in strong lines and sharp edges, cover their
curves, cage their breasts. The return of the power
suit may not seem different from any other arbitrary
fashion trend, but it is evocative of what our society
wants women to look and behave like today.
So, ladies, grab your black blazer and layer it over a
flowy dress. Force somebody to take you seriously.
with various friends along the way. About halfway
through my trip, I met up with Floyd, who was also
on vacation, and our housemate Isaac, a native of
Davis who had spent his summer back home. Over the
course of the next week, I was struck by the amount of
TV that Floyd watched on his computer. At any and all
free moments during our stay at Isaac’s, Floyd’s Netflix
was fired up and ready to go. He was clearly putting in
work on something that mattered to him.
It didn’t take long for me to gather that Floyd had
been bitten by the Breaking Bad bug. Thanks to my
News Feed on Facebook and some loose snippets of the
show that I had caught on-air back in season three,
I already knew that the show was good enough to be
mentioned in the same breath as The Sopranos and
The Wire. Only by watching someone else watch the
show did I realize just how good—or, to be more precise, how captivating—it really is.
Breaking Bad is a terribly engrossing show, the kind
that demands verbal responses from its audience. No
wonder Floyd was hooked. In an effort to catch up, he
had spent the month prior to California marathoning
the previous four seasons at a breakneck pace. As I still
held vague notions of doing the same, I tried to ignore
Floyd’s screen. But that proved impossible even when
he plugged in headphones; more than once he could
not resist the temptation to slap me on the shoulder
and launch into a whirling explanation of the very
scenes I was trying not to look at.
At this critical juncture, I had three options: 1) Leave
the room; 2) Tell Floyd to shut up, probably more
than once; 3) Give in and just start watching in medias
res. You can guess which one I went with in order to
maintain a healthy relationship with my dramatically
addicted friend.
As summer drew to a close, I thought I’d try my
hand at the now venerated Breaking Bad marathon.
For a number of reasons, I didn’t get far. When I arrived back at Columbia a month ago, Floyd was all
caught up, as was Isaac, who lives just down the hall
from us. Add to that the fact that our third roommate Aaron has been watching Breaking Bad since
it debuted in 2008, and pretty soon I was caught in
the same bind as I had been in California. For the
past three weeks, I have lived among those who have
witnessed Walter White’s tragic transformation in its
entirety. And I have done so with pleasure, savoring
each tension-filled shot for all it’s worth to me.
Human beings have always counted on stories, both
real and fictional, to bring them together. At this very
moment, Breaking Bad is reaching its peak of cultural
pervasiveness. As I mentioned before, it’s a show that
makes its viewers talk. That’s why I decided to plunge
into the series—there was too much talk to keep
avoiding it, because avoiding the show meant avoiding
my friends who watch it. We live in an era of unprecedented access to an unimaginably vast array of stories
recorded in diverse media. As individuals, we don’t
just decide which stories are worth our engagement.
Each of us controls how that engagement occurs. As
revolting as this may sound to purists, I do not regret
the path that my Breaking Bad-dom has taken. There
will be plenty of time to catch up after next Sunday.
—BENJI DE LA PIEDRA
—POOJA PANDEY
GOING SOLO
illustration by hannah sotnick
THREE DAYS ALONE IN THE DESERT
I woke up to a chunk of ice soaking through my tent and melting against
my forehead. It was snowing in the desert, and I was completely alone.
I went on Vision Quest at the end of my senior year of high school. At
Marin Academy, this quest, derived from Native American traditions, is a
non-required rite of passage. The gist is this: After a few months’ preparation with fellow students and leaders (most commonly teachers and
alumni), everyone goes, as one group, into the desert. You spend two nights
together. Then, on the third morning, every student ventures out into the
desert for three days by him- or herself. You take what you want—so long as
you can carry it yourself, you can bring it. Many students choose to fast for
those three days, though I did not. There is a safety system, which pairs you
up with a partner who has chosen a camping spot relatively close to yours.
You leave rock piles for the other to check, either in the morning or afternoon, to show that you are still alive. Other than that, though, those three
days are yours to spend as you will, to think about what you want. There is
no curriculum, no guide, no teacher.
It is just the sand and the wind and the sun—and you.
This wasn’t my first solo camping trip, but it was the first that I felt
prepared to take. If college graduation is the entrance into the “real world,”
high school graduation is the exodus from all that we know to be real:
home, family, friends. When you make such a transition, when you remove
yourself from an environment that you know, whether you love it or hate
it, you inevitably lose some of the things that have made you, you. VQ for
me was the closest I could get to throwing a figurative pair of absolute value
signs around my soul. What was I like when I was the only thing inside
my head? What was I like when I didn’t have relationships to maintain,
or deadlines to meet, or emails to read, or communication in which to
engage? More importantly, what did I want to be like when I didn’t have
all those things to take care of? I thought VQ might show me the answers,
and so into the desert I went.
I wrote roughly 40 single-spaced pages in a journal, about anything
and everything at all, and was a little ashamed that I didn’t fill more. I read
the entirety of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in two days. I loved it so
much that I started it over again, even though I had Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner with me, too. I walked around my camp and tried to find the best
places to sit and read and write. I sang to myself as I cooked hot chocolate
and ramen, and danced around my campsite to keep myself warm. Every
night, I watched the sun go down between the mountains, and howled with
the other Questers—our one form of explicit contact—as it sank. I zipped
the tent shut and closed my eyes as the first stars began to twinkle. I made
a pebble cactus, sun, and lizard for my rock-pile buddy, and always signed
them with a heart and my first initial. I took pictures on my camera whenever the moment seemed too beautiful to be real. I took a lot of pictures.
But more than simply doing things I liked to do, I tried to look for the
little things, those that I so often let pass me by as I was walking along my
street to school. I tried to focus on that which was in front of me. I tried just
to gaze at the far-off lake, its lightness or darkness determined by the sky,
sometimes cloudless, sometimes gray. I tried to look at the soft leaves of
the sage brush, at the slope of sandy ground upon which I sat, to fill in their
stories and imagine how I fit in. What had walked here before I had? What
else had seen this view? Ironically, while the snow on the second day blanketed the entire area in white, this revealed the land to me even further.
Coyote paw prints were sprinkled around my tent, and my tracks looked
out-of-place and cumbersome next to the tiny prints of rabbits and birds
that had stopped by the site before I had woken.
Looking back on it, the emphasis that I placed on the aloneness of this
experience feels almost strange to me. I went into the desert to find those
absolute value signs, to see what I was like when I was truly by myself, but
the idea that I would somehow exist in a vacuum on Vision Quest seems
awfully short-sighted to me now. I was alone, yes, but I was never lonely,
or even by myself. Life is too omnipresent and full to let us be alone. In my
self-absorbed, or rather, species-absorbed mind, I was the only person
in the desert, and that made me alone. But even in the desert, which we
normally consider to be arid and lifeless, there was so much life that surrounded me. From the ants I brushed off my water bottles to the plants that
sheltered me from the worst of the wind, I couldn’t have been alone if I had
tried. I didn’t discover the essence of my soul, but I caught a glimpse of myself, of my place, in nature. And how I allowed myself to relate to life—what
my identity in the context of other organisms was—turned out to be a lot
more important to me than knowing who I, “alone,” was.
Two years later and 2,900 miles away, I don’t think about the desert daily. I think about Spectator, and classes, and jobs. It’s easy to feel alone.
But sometimes, when I hear leaves whispering to tree trunks in the
night, I still feel that reminder that life is everywhere—that I am never
alone. On moonlit nights, I can even still hear my classmates’ howls if I
listen closely enough. a
by megan kallstrom
15
find your home at the eye
email EYE@COLUMBIASPECTATOR.COM
to get involved