Bahar Orang
Senior ANDY Editor
A few nights ago, I watched Pan’s Labyrinth for the first time. It’s a Spanish film about a young girl who escapes her broken family and war-torn environment by indulging in fantasies that come from her many fictional books.
The story inspired in me a kind of emotional turmoil that can only be matched by my frustrated hate-love affair with the likes of other extremely sad films (e.g. Life is Beautiful). The movie was shocking and made me cry, but I was also left feeling sorely confused. The young female protagonist triumphs in the face of imaginary evils and emerges as the princess of a fictional realm, but in “real life,” she is not so lucky. In fact, her desperate desire to engage in her fantasies ultimately leads to the film’s tragic ending. I was left, heartbroken and distraught, wondering – what was the purpose of it all? Her beloved books gave her moments of happiness, but – they were ineffective as a means of contending with her reality. For the first time ever, I was convinced – maybe she should have read less.
The film is far more intricate and gorgeous than this brief description of my own personal struggle with the story. It is likely that I have missed the point. Please watch it, come find me in the Silhouette office, and convince me that I am wrong. I can be very easily convinced that reading is what saved her, and not what killed her.
This is a work of art that has deeply affected me. In this semester’s final issue of ANDY, we have included works of art that have moved our writers in some way. Send us yours?
Cooper Long
Assistant ANDY Editor
Not many movies play at Westdale Theatre, but the select few that do are almost always high calibre. Unfortunately, The Way Way Back was an exception. I saw the film this summer and was unimpressed by its clichéd coming-of-age story about a teenager vacationing with his family in a sleepy seaside town.
I was surprised, then, when David Sedaris used a similar premise to craft the most affecting thing I read this semester.
In his autobiographical essay “Now We Are Five,” which appeared in The New Yorker on Oct. 28, Sedaris chronicles a recent family trip to a beach house off the coast of North Carolina.
Sadly, Sedaris’ family is incomplete. His estranged adult sister Tiffany committed suicide shortly before the vacation began, and her absence lurks underneath Sedaris’ characteristically wry anecdotes about beaches and BarcaLoungers.
Even though summer vacation is far from mind in first semester, Sedaris’ piece struck a chord. I am happy to be back in school and reconnecting with the people that I have gotten to know over the past four years. Yet, I am also always mindful that at this time next year most of these same people will have graduated and scattered in different, far-flung directions.
I do not want to liken anything that I have experienced this semester to the loss of a family member to suicide. Nevertheless, Sedaris’ delicate balance of humour and pensiveness absolutely captured my current state of mind.
When I look back on the first three months of my fourth year, I think about “Now We Are Five.”
Bahar Orang
ANDY Editor
This Halloween I’m dressing up as Amy Winehouse. I experimented for a long time before finally mastering the hair. I tried several different techniques and experimented with several different household objects before settling on a loufah, which I will shove beneath a thick lump of hair. I also plan to don the thick black eyeliner drawn from tear duct to hairline. I’ll complete the look with her many tattoos drawn all over my body. When people ask me what my costume is, I’ll respond with very, very bad renditions of “Valerie” or “Back to Black.” It will all be part of a larger costume - the 27 club - musicians who died at a startlingly young age. There will be a Kurt Cobain - with shaggy hair and an oversized 90’s plaid shirt. There will be a Janis - complete with fuzzy locks, hippie pants and large round glasses. And there will be a Jimi Hendrix - with a fake guitar and a brightly coloured vest hanging from his torso.
One particularly crude friend insisted that we add a second layer to our costumes, which shows how each musician died. She got really creative and (in very poor taste) suggested that my Amy Winehouse interpretation include white make-up powder somewhere on my face. We decided against it.
As we brainstormed more possibilities for our costume, we started realizing how utterly strange it was that all of these fantastic, ground-breaking musicians all died at the same age - at a young, awfully specific, but still very random age. When I imagine myself at 27 - I imagine that it’ll be at the peak of my life - I will be a fully formed human, an inspiring artist, I will have mastered things, I will have loved and lost, I’ll be as good-looking as I’ll ever be. I don’t imagine that I’ll be on a stairway to heaven.
I’ll reach that age in a few short years - to imagine dying at 27 is terrifying, unjust, surreal. And these musicians - all of them brave, beautiful, and talented, makes it even more scary and unfair. It’s also decidedly spooky. My friends and I have only covered a few of the club’s members. The club’s Wikipedia page includes quite a long list of musicians who died at 27 - from Chuck Barry to viagra 20mg for sale Brian Jones. The artists span many generations and musical genres.
And all of them were supposedly found with white lighters in their pockets - just three years shy of 30. It’s weird.
Perhaps some higher power is calling it to our attention - perhaps someone or something is saying - look at what’s happening! Take notice! Open your eyes to these problems - problems of drug abuse, suicide, and celebrity culture - look at what you’re doing. You silly humans!
We have responded with a group Halloween costume. I will sport an orange loofah in Amy’s honour.
For the past several weeks, my Facebook newsfeed has included at least one status, link, or photo about Miley Cyrus and/or Robin Thicke. People have had a lot to say about these two. There were the people who found “Blurred Lines” offensive, and the people who didn’t know what the big deal was. There were hilarious parodies, disturbing photomontages, and impassioned talk about rape culture. There were the people who analyzed Miley’s performance and then the people who analyzed these analyses. The conversation permeated all forms of social media, classroom walls, and conversations with friends and coworkers – it was simply everywhere. I learned what it meant to “twerk.” I learned that people do not like Miley’s tongue. I learned that Robin Thicke is married with kids. I learned interesting, informative debates about cultural appropriation, along with meaningful insights about how art develops from the blending of different cultures.
I hadn’t watched the MTV awards and I hadn’t heard “Blurred Lines” until sometime in early September.
That’s not to say that I have anything against pop culture. In fact, I seem to defend it more often than criticize it. I like to listen to Katy Perry when I work out and I know all the words to most Eminem songs. There are many things to enjoy about popular culture. Most of our “highbrow” entertainment was popular culture at some point. Like Shakespeare. Or Mozart. Or Mark Twain. And no one can justly reject The Beatles, who once had their faces on enough merchandise to clothe and house a small family.
And the recent explosion of Miley and Rob proved two things. First, that popular culture is inescapable. No matter how indie your films, how alternative your rock, and how far you hide and hate the Britneys and Madonnas – you can’t avoid it. It will find its way into your conversations and into your subconscious. If you go to stores or on the computer, then it is pretty much inevitable that it will affect your life in some way. And for this reason alone, we can’t discount it. The fact is that pop culture is produced to be as immediately accessible as possible, so chances are that we will all consume it in one way or another. Second, popular culture reflects the culture – the ideas, the beliefs, the stereotypes, the fears – of the moment. Miley twerks, and this expresses something meaningful about women, about our bodies, about black people. Robin rhymes “hug” and “fuck,” and this too reflects something disturbing about how our society deals with the body, with power and with sex. So again, we cannot discount it.
But I also believe that while they may reveal valuable insights about our culture, there really are more important things to also pay close attention to. I know it’s a tired argument. But there is so much fantastic, poetic, wonderful, moving art available out there, even just around the corner. Pop culture is not usually designed to make us think or feel particularly deeply. They are often the television shows that we can watch while doing five other things, or the music and the movies that are entertaining but that don’t trouble us with messy thoughts. It is not designed to change our lives; it is designed to make us spend as much money as possible. I admit that it can enjoyable, but the magnitude of the obsession with Miley and Rob was unnecessary. There needs to be balance.
We should always try to think at least a little critically about the pop culture we consume. I don’t object to dancing to “Blurred Lines” and I don’t think that after said dance we should go home and write an academic paper on it. But I think with every top-40 song, with every Hollywood film, and every passing television show that we watch, it’s important, maybe life changing, to be active in our consumption rather than passive. Easier said than done. I am regularly guilty of being a passive consumer. But I really do want to make more of an effort to wonder about how people are represented, to compare it to other art forms by other kinds of artists, and to object, at least in my mind, to some of the things that are done and said and sung.
This past summer, I had the opportunity to teach an English class for foreign exchange students from China. I wondered how, in the short time we had together, I could offer them a glimpse of this city that they might find inspiring in some small way. I’ve spent a lot of time the past few years thinking about place – what makes places meaningful? What makes them worth caring for? What draws us to a place? What drives us away? They’re questions that I took for granted before I moved to Hamilton, before I traveled to Europe, before I dated someone outside my cultural background, and before I met my Chinese students. But a sense of place, a sense of home, is inextricably tied to our identities, it sparks and resolves conflict, and it is literally the foundation upon which we construct our entire lives and histories.
And so I wondered, what can I say, what can I express about Hamilton as little more than an admiring Torontonion? What sideline stories could I share with individuals who had never even been to Canada? Could it be meaningful? Could it be authentic? Could I ever truly claim any part of this city for myself?
And so I turned to Tings Chak, who came to Canada as a little girl, and then later moved to Hamilton from Thornhill for McMaster. Her graphic novella, where the concrete desert blooms, is about this journey across cities and continents. Everyday in class we read aloud from her book, and learned about her story and the stories of the other people she met. She speaks about art, activism, and the physical and cultural landscape that is Hamilton. After reading about her conversations with Brian Prince, we visited Brian Prince Bookseller’s and spent some time as a class marveling at the pretty books. She writes about her first hike through Cootes, and we promptly followed suit on one particularly green and sunny day. And the little drawing of herself floating on her back in the tiny pool of Chedoke Falls inspired my own effort to find those falls. I eventually discovered them after two failed attempts and several hours of walking off the trail over giant rocks and near frightening cliffs.
Her work opened hours of discussion and sometimes debate in the classroom. I listened as they spoke about cultural workers in China, and we talked about issues of censorship. We asked questions about loneliness and homelessness and wondered what the cure might be. We acknowledged the story’s accessibility and thought about why we sometimes make it so difficult to understand and relate to simple, human ideas. We thought about the arts and the kind of storytelling it offers and the communities it can build – within whole cities and inside tiny classrooms.
I hope that, in the coming year, ANDY can ask some of those same questions and tell some of those stories, and that it too can have a place in Hamilton’s strange and lovely narrative.
Bahar Orang
I’ve grown up watching Woody Allen’s films, so he will always have a soft spot in my heart. When I was a little girl, the black and white Manhattan had me totally bewitched and lusting after an obscenely romanticized New York. When I was in my teens, Penelope Cruz made me question the boundaries of my sexuality as I planned a future honeymoon to Barcelona, with my husband and wife of course.
But now, in my university environment, where I’m surrounded by radical opinions, open debate, and am constantly challenged to reconsider, I must take a closer look at my love affair with Mr. Allen. Long story short: What’s the deal with his obsession with women? Long story even shorter: Does it ever become…sexist?
He once said that he’s “always felt more sanguine about women than about men.” He finds them "more mature, less bellicose, most gentle” and he insists, “They're closer to what life's supposed to be about”. He’s been called “the ladies man” of cinema because nearly all his films feature women in every important lead and often in every important supporting character. Allen usually plays the man, or has another actor be his stand-in. And in a male-dominated cinematic realm, he is unique in this sense. He constantly creates passionate, layered, gorgeous, mesmerizing female characters. The actresses of Allen’s films have together won eleven Oscars. And Blue Jasmine is true to form.
Cate Blanchett is sure to steal the Oscar this year with her powerful portrayal of a modern Blanche Dubois. Woody explains that, in many ways, his fascination with women was the result of his relationship with Diane Keaton, who came to be the star of many of his films. No one can deny that he offers movies that are filled and focused almost entirely on female characters and female relationships. But is that enough?
I can’t help but identify a key pattern in most of his women; they’re all nuts. And Jasmine is perhaps the nuttiest of them all. Allen is almost unkind, almost merciless in his destruction of this woman. At times it was hard to watch. I regularly felt that odd compulsion to laugh, the way you sometimes feel a laugh bubbling in your chest at a funeral. I felt thoroughly sorry for this woman who clearly had severe psychological problems while likely suffered from drug abuse and alcoholism. Blanchett gave us a fantastic performance (she blue me away, hah) and Allen gave us a clever, clean, fresh and exciting story – but her character, her neurotic mess of a character – was only the next in a long line of Allen’s crazy ladies.
While I may daydream about a love triangle with Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz – barely any part of me would like that dream realized. Cruz, or Maria Elena, routinely has mental breakdowns and tries to kill herself while Johansson, or Cristina, is so lost and confused that her character effectively becomes the laughing stock of the film. And Penelope Cruz is basically as far as he will venture off Western soil – his women are always white, beautiful, and upper middle-class. While this may be a tired argument against most forms of Western entertainment, I strongly insist that it’s time for this seventy-seven year old to discover what lies beyond the clichéd cities of love and culture. Why can’t he discover Midnight in Tehran or go To Punjab with Love?
It pains me to discredit Woody, it really does. And don’t get me wrong, Blue Jasmine is a smart, entertaining film – you should see it. But as an almost-women from a minority background who sincerely hopes to remain fairly sane for at least the next thirty or so years – Allen’s forty-nine films leave something to be desired.
On one particularly lonely night, a young girl who often pictured herself as a stick-figure drawing in the world, quietly realized that her one true love in this life would always be her bed. The bed’s love was never tested by every sleepy girl who came along. The bed was loyal and warm and lovely. Each night its blanket-arms opened wide and cuddled her to sleep. Its pillows were the soft shoulders upon which she rested her head. Its scent was fresh and familiar – like the smell of your favourite flower, a fresh inhale and a familiar exhale. She could read with her bed. Or eat ice cream with her bed. Or watch television with her bed. Her bed was a wonderful listener; it kept all her secrets, dried all her tears, and lulled her to sleep just when her thoughts became too painful to bear. But on this particularly lonely night, sleep was just out of her reach. Close enough to touch, but not quite close enough to hold.
She sat up, wrapped her arms around her skinny legs and leaned her head against a nearby window. She looked up at the stars and was so taken by their playful beauty that she felt a curious desire to count them. She somehow believed that by counting them, she could claim a small kind of ownership over them. She knew that this made very little sense. Even the night sky doesn’t own the stars. When one star ricochets away with a twinkle in its eye, the sky may be lucky enough to quickly gather its stardust to remember it by. But she began counting anyway, hoping that maybe she could have just one tiny star for each night she had shared with the bed, each night that it had cradled her like the sweetest lover a tired girl could ever know.
She counted one star for the night her heart was broken by a boy who replaced her as swiftly as she would have replaced a jar of peanut butter. A second star for the night she reflected on her poor grades and felt unworthy of her parents’ love and money. A fifth star for the night her heart ached for the backyard swing set of her childhood. A twelfth star for the night she closed her eyes, clasped her hands and prayed for the first time. A thirty-fourth star for the night that she fell asleep reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and woke with her cheek pressed against the page where Arthur finds out that the Earth is a supercomputer that discovers that the Answer to Life is 42. She remembers that she took this as some kind of sign, a friendly wave and knowing smile from the universe.
With that, the young girl suddenly realized that she had lost count of her beloved stars and had to start over.
By: Bahar Orang
Begin with an early dinner at Bread Bar. Order the vampire slayer pizza and ask for their extraordinarily addictive hot sauce. Take the fresh flower in the little vase at the centre of the table and put it in your hair. Talk about Batman, how much you hate the casino, the new My Bloody Valentine album, and the little things that make you feel nostalgic.
Walk down Locke Street and try to put together the Concrete Poem, where each line is on little plaques in the pavement. Remember ANDY's favourite line and quote it when you propose a few years later - “Where do I come from/ Where am I now/ Where am I going/ A map/ of my thoughts/ move fast/ like horses around a track.” Look in the window at Fenian Films and write a silly plot for a short film together. Discuss favourite books when you walk by Epic Books. But then admit how little you really read. Regret not buying flowers first from La Jardinere when you walk by it, but find out ANDY’s birth flower (yeah, that’s a thing) for next time.
Take the bus to Hammer City Records. Walk around, take a profile shot of ANDY looking through records and get a little black and white print out for your boring desk job when you’re older and these silly, lovely days are long gone. Talk to random, cool, interesting, friendly people. Buy an ‘80s punk band’s B-side record. Listen to it late into the night together. Enjoy it only vaguely but feel deeply moved by the moment, and see right through ANDY's feigned, but still somehow very charming, interest.
Head to The Brain for a cozy drink. Talk about life goals, your greatest fears, crummy artists you secretly love, how badly you want to feel each other up and how much you’re falling for each other.
Take ANDY home and put on “Thinkin’ about You” by Frank Ocean and stay up all night and discover weird things you have in common, but also find out that there are many things that you hate that ANDY loves. Start making out and eventually fall asleep in each other’s arms. Wake up wanting to say "I love you," but decide to hold back for a few months. Feel like a cliché.
By: Bahar Orang
1. Lana Del Rey: I recently read an article that was a plea for everyone to stop talking about Lana Del Rey, an article that I whole-heartedly agree with in theory, but can’t seem to follow in practice. In fact, the article incited me to revisit Lana Del Rey and promptly continue to listen to her music nonstop. I’m undeniably seduced by her tacky ghetto earrings and corny varsity jackets and supposedly collagen-enhanced lips. And her sexy, deep voice that shattered windows on SNL in 2012. And her quintessential American-culture references and vintage-indie-music-video-montages that have apparently been around long before her. Her allegedly manufactured gimmicks have won me over. Shamelessly.
2. Scarlett Johansson: I will always hold true to my belief that she’s a very talented actress. I saw her for the first time as a preteen in The Horse Whisperer, where she gracefully matched Robert Redford’s emotion and intensity. She gave an equally honest and convincing performance in Ghost World and Lost in Translation. But I suffered through The Island and The Nanny Diaries shortly after. I also had mixed feelings about her role in Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around Comes Around” music video, where the storyline was alarmingly bland, but I still couldn’t tear myself away from the explosions and Scarlett’s lips.
3. Zooey Deschanel: I’ve watched 500 Days of Summer approximately 500 times. In fact, I left the movie with an entirely wrong message. I was in denial, praying for the sequel (500 days of “fall”-ing back in love) that would bring Tom and Summer together. Zooey was like a fun, cute, indie Katy Perry counterpart who was so much more interesting (replace cupcake breasts and candy cane-printed underwear with retro bangs and frilly, pastel-coloured sundresses). But then came New Girl and she reached her cultural saturation point.
4. Taylor Swift: Where to begin with this country-pop recently turned rocker-chick? She switches from American Girl in Paris to Red-Dress-Vixen to Dirty-Hair-Punky-Girl-Person-Thing. Ninety-nine per cent of her songs are about boys, Romeos, chasing after boys, boys who she knows are trouble, boys who belong with her, boys she’s never getting back together with, boys with the same name as her, and the list goes on. But I downloaded the entire Red album and played it on repeat for several days. Even as I write this, I feel the inexplicable compulsion to belt out singing, “I don’t know about you but I feel twenty-two-ooh.” And what’s more is that I’m not twenty-two nor do I feel twenty-too (ooh).
5. Diablo Cody: First came Juno, then came Jennifer’s Body. The former won several important awards and the latter I watched through as many YouTube clips I could find, cringing all the while but somehow enjoying the way it filled a hole in my chest that is constantly yearning for bad high school horror films.
6. Jennifer Lawrence: Oops, wrong list. She goes on my “world’s most awesome people list.” Who can resist her self-deprecating humour and unassuming beauty? Not me, not Peeta, not Bradley Cooper, not anyone.
There is an identifiable pattern to my list. These are all individuals that I find stale and superficial, but, embarrassingly, that I can’t quite seem to shake off. Pop culture: 1, Bahar: 0.
By: Bahar Orang
Before I watched the film, I was skeptical about its title. “Amour” or “love” felt far too generic: I expected a tired storyline to match its overly-ambiguous and overly-ambitious title.
But instead I was left feeling touched, moved, distressed, melancholy, somehow nostalgic and strangely serene. It was a flux of different emotions that kept washing over me in the hours, days, weeks and months that followed.
I still find myself wondering about the film, trying to come to terms with the very new, very confusing ideas and possibilities the film offered.
I was forced to truly revaluate my most basic beliefs and ideals about love and relationships, particularly how those notions may change – no, must change – in the face of death.
By: Bahar Orang
When I was seventeen years old, autumn came like every other year. The air was slightly cooler, the leaves slightly crisper, and the heart slightly nostalgic. With it came a pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks, with “even the leaves fall for you” scrawled in boy’s handwriting across the white of the cup. My love interest at the time was the non-committed type who played guitar very badly, occasionally plagiarized poetry, and loved the sound of his own voice.
At the time, my heart melted with all the warmth my gold and maroon Gryffindor scarf and woolen cardigan could muster. Several years and a few tumblr searches later, I now know that he wasn’t the first to pen those words. Nonetheless, I am reminded of that day whenever a gust of wind blows a brightly coloured leaf in my direction.
Corny quotations aside, there is something inexplicably charming about autumn. Like all other seasons, it’s the careful combination of scents, sounds, and scenery that evoke an entire spectrum of emotions. It’s the soundtrack of crunchy leaves and indie music, the aroma of drinks with floating marshmallows and sprinkled cinnamon, the strange satisfaction of sunny days and cold nights. I can finally pull out my oversized flannel shirts, I feel a curious desire to watch either Annie Hall or The Graduate and “I Can’t help Falling in Love With You” plays on repeat for a startling number of hours as I do my readings for school.
There’s something about autumn that fills you with an inner peace touched by a kind of longing. Longing for the past, for memories close enough to touch, but not quite close enough to hold. Longing for warm hugs and a shoulder to rest your head as you read those books and watch those films. Longing for inspiration, comfort, warmth, beauty, romance, melancholy, childhood and serenity. Longing for the ability to take a mental photograph of the stunningly beautiful images of the leaves all red and gold around you. But before any of these things can materialize into anything beyond the wanderings of a mind already tired by school, it’s all erased by the first snowfall of the year.
