Summer 2015 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

This spring, Joan Didion became the new face of the French luxury brand Céline, and the fashion blogosphere dissolved into a lilac-scented pleasure cloud. Céline dressed Didion in black; maxi-skirt wearing girls from Tumblr domains far and wide re-blogged the writer’s LA packing list. Before the literary world could cry “commercialization,” the fashion world cried, “She worked at *Vogue*!”



Even outside of the oversized-clutch toting demographic, commentators praised the ads, lauding the fashion industry for its newfound respect for brains and beauty. The purveyors of all things hot-or-not had finally given smart women their scented seal of approval—what a victory for feminism. Never mind her National Book Award. Didion finally made it when they stamped her face on the back of a $1200 leather jacket.



With a spritz of eau-de-Didion, Phoebe Philo did to Didion what popular culture has done to women writers for years: She made her pretty. I first read Emily Dickinson in a blue picture book; on the cover the branches of a white-blossomed tree folded into the shape of a heart, a white dove nesting in its tip. “Pink, small and punctual” appeared on page two; “Wild Nights” was nowhere to be found. Children’s publishers sell fake gold lockets with *Wuthering Heights* and *Jane Eyre*. You’ll find Austen quoted in as many works of Tumblr-ism as criticism. Harvard calls its only undergraduate course centered entirely on the novelist “From Jane Austen to Chick-lit.”



Female writers still carry baggage, and not just the history-of-marginalization kind. They carry 2 skirts, 2 jerseys or leotards, 1 pullover sweater, stockings, face cream, and the rest. For marketing purposes, it helps to be pretty—or at least, to wear fashionable sunglasses, to write works whose titles might be written in cursive over curly-haired silhouettes on pink hardcovers. It helps to accessorize.



Austin Dickinson once recommended that his sister write more simply. “I’ll be as *simple* as you please, the *simplest* sort of simple,” she promised him in a letter. “I’ll be a little ninny—a little pussy catty, a little Red Riding Hood. I’ll wear a Bee in my Bonnet, and a Rose bud in my hair.” 46 years later, Lawrence Knowles featured a drawing of Dickinson alongside a selection of her poetry in *The Golden Treasure of American Songs and Lyrics*. The white-dressed poet lounges under a tree, a rose bud in her hair.



That image of Dickinson would persist—even as scholars restored her original manuscripts, wrote about her bisexuality, and attempted to compensate for the gender bias with which her works had been read for years. In 1976, just a few years before R.W. Franklin reprinted Dickinson’s original fasci- cles, PBS produced a television version of the play *The Belle of Amherst*. In the first scene, Julie Harris, white-dress clad, carried a cake on screen—made from Dickinson’s own recipe.



The next day, *The New York Times* printed an article titled “The Poet’s Black Cake,” alongside a portrait in which an aproned Dickinson, rendered as a tight-smiled housewife, holds out her Bundt. The piece concludes with a quote from Harris, who, asked what she’d say to Dickinson if she had the chance, replies: “I’d ask her to show me how she made her rye and Indian bread.” If the seventies had Tumblr, the quote would have been typed up in Edwardian script and re-blogged next to a picture of Miss Emily in the kitchen.



Lest you think it’s just the silly seventies, visit any bookstore to purchase titles like *A Brighter Garden* and *Emily*, each featuring some variation of the pastel watercolor flowerbed, the pretty white-dressed girl smiling over her roses. Never mind that Dickinson’s poems about death and sex breach typical garden party etiquette. We need only smooth out Emily’s punctuation, cut her erotic odes, and paint a few pink hearts in the margin. (*The Poetry for Young People* edition counts nineteen.)



We infantilize rather than analyze. After all, it’s easier to assess Austen’s contribution to rom-coms than to consciousness, less threatening to transcribe Didion’s packing list than her psychoanalytic profile, more polite to talk about Dickinson’s spring days than her wild nights. We make writers “women writers,” and then we make them girls.



Male poets can be marketed toward children, too. Poetry for Young People also sells a hardcover Robert Frost Collection. It opens with a three-page account of his life and includes commentary on each of his poems. The biographical information in the Dickinson edition contains only brief mentions of the poet’s childhood, telling us, “Emily was much like other girls.” Then, of course, come the hearts.



And you’ll find no Robert Frost paper dolls. No Fitzgerald novels sold with lockets. No black-bearded silhouettes of Hemingway against any colored background. Male writers don’t need the add-ons. Their work, popular culture tells us, needs no accessories to sell.



Sometimes, the accessories don’t need the women writers. Etsy.com sells a collection of *Pride and Prejudice* purses: hardcovers with pages removed, lined with pink cloth, featuring beaded handles. Nine by six inches, the reviews promise, roomy enough for your lipstick and perfume. (Does one who totes an Austen purse spritz herself with Didion, or do novels and nonfiction clash?). Not quite wide enough for a book.



The Ce?line campaign might be one small step forward for the fashion industry, but it’s a giant slap in Didion’s sunglassed-face. Didion, who spoke sardonically in a 1977 *Paris Review* interview about the “fragility of Joan Didion myth,” has always been hyperaware of the attention given to her physical appearance in popular culture. Then, she claimed that she dealt with stereotypes about women writers by “just tending my own garden.” Today, the 80-year-old icon who consented to Ce?line’s campaign seems to have retired to the rosebeds. When the *New York Times* asked the face behind the glasses why she thought the campaign made such a sensation, she only said, “I don’t have any clue.”



Like the owner of hollowed-out Austen novels, the Ce?line consumer (though she might consider her brand more tasteful) has no need for the writer’s prose. Under the guise of a “literary aesthetic,” she claims the female writer without her work, without her complications, without her strangeness. Didion, leather-jacket edition: the simplest sort of simple.



A feminist victory? I’ll believe it when Calvin Klein features Norman Mailer in a denim campaign. I’ll believe it when I see those $1200 jeans, Mailer’s face grinning on the left ass cheek. 

*Twenty-thirteen was the year I got super into SoulCycle. It’s gross but I don’t care because I need it and I love it (ha ha so gross). Actually, wait, that’s completely misleading because I only got into it two months ago. Whatever, it’s the best. *



*— Mary HK Choi, the awl.com*



 



Replace “SoulCycle”—the spinning phenomenon sweeping the affluent, pro-fitness nation—with “heroin,” and Choi seems clear-cut for a dependency diagnosis. She has all the telltale signs: skewed perception of how long she’s been on the drug; repeated revulsion at her “gross” behavior; recognition of the compulsion but complete inability to stop. The habit consumes Choi’s resources and displaces old vices. She “stops buying clothes, shoes, cigarettes, weed, cocktails (what a racket) and pounds of bulk gummy candy” to pay for the privilege to “zone out for a spell.” She ends by proselytizing: “SoulCycle feels gross, is gross and I’m grateful to have found it. If you’ve ever suspected you’d be into it, get over yourself and go.” Even as she reviles the cultic exercise class, she desperately pulls others into the fantasy.



Choi’s story epitomizes the emerging micro-genre I’ll call the “SoulCycle Narrative”: personal pieces structured like tales of addiction and published on blogs and local news outlets, even in *The New York Times*. The dealer of choice is the exercise franchise SoulCycle, which, for 34 dollars, offers 45 minutes of pedaling on indoor stationary bikes, in the dark, with house music blaring. Printed on the candle-lit studio walls is a manifesto with lines like “we inhale intention and exhale expectation.” Instructors shout a mixture of encouragement, dance instructions, and new-agey, spiritual mantras: “I want the next breath to be an exorcism.” Exercise is not an uncommon contemporary addiction, but SoulCycle dresses its junkies in exclusive style1, and the new narcotic for the rich has transformed a single Upper West Side studio into a national franchise with over 1,200 employees in 40 cities. What distinguishes the SoulCycle Narrative most of all, though, is that it recounts a distinctly postmodern addiction: affirming dependence as transcendence, abandoning critical distance, embracing the irrational with irony.



Though “addiction” did not arise as a medical term until the nineteenth century, people have been telling tales of dependence for millennia. Roman historian Seneca wrote, “excessive alcohol will destroy the mind and magnify character defects.” The Bible is littered with concern over Noah’s delight in drink. Recent archeological evidence suggests 30,000-year-old cultivation of opiates, the drug that spurred the modern addiction narrative with Thomas De Quincey’s *Confessions of an English Opium-Eater* in 1821. The genre passed through Charles Baudelaire’s riff on Quincy in *Les paradis artificiels* to its more recent forms in William S. Burroughs’ *Junky* and Caroline Knapp’s *Drinking: A Love Story*.



From Quincey to Knapp, the addiction narrative traces similar story arcs with similar language. In an intimate, confessional register, it begins by recounting trepidation, building to the climactic moment of first exposure. Those initial experiences are tinged with rapture and breathless nostalgia; the retrospective narrator cannot help but yearn for unpolluted intoxication. Then comes the slow descent, coated in motifs of monstrous transformation, of being taken over by a demon. Loss of mind follows loss of friends until...rock bottom. The result is slow, painful recovery, reconciliation, and—in the better tales—shrewd insight.



The SoulCycle Narrative fits comfortably into these tropes and story arcs. Like a teeneager taking her first bong-hit, the cycling protagonist is anxious as she anticipates the initial class. She finds herself overwhelmed by social codes: online reservations booked days in advance, waitlist lurkers waiting for no-shows, an insider language with inscrutable phrases like “tap it back” and “add a quarter turn.” (Translations: Move the buttocks to the rear of the bike, lengthening the spine; increase the bike’s resistance to maximize calorie burn in the thighs.) But once the spinner takes her first endorphin-toke, there’s no going back. “The body has no choice but to submit,” says David Holmes in a pando.com piece, and the “emotional misery your fucked-up life’s been serving you” vanishes in the room just as when a fiend enters his opium den or Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole. A perfect mix of upper and hallucinogen, spinning grants the narrators energy, escape, and transcendence. In a piece on *The Verge*, Nitashak Tiku reluctantly attends a first class with the sole aim of speaking with Twitter’s CEO. Unsurprisingly, the social media hotshot’s a SoulCycle devotee, and Tiku thinks she can leverage the cycling endorphins to start a conversation despite the strobe lights and techno. She fails, twice, but along the way SoulCycle becomes her “new best friend.” Drugs have always been great companions, and by the narrative’s end, Tiku hardly remembers the reason she first came to the class.



Next comes withdrawal from old communities. Holmes is reticent to advertise his habit because he thinks he will be unfairly judged as “a person who craves status and exclusivity.”2 He hides from watchful eyes and cites other cyclers who are even more dependent. Several pieces quote fanatics selecting apartments due to SoulCycle studio proximity, ensuring their dealer is always within reach. One woman rearranges her work schedule to leave prime class-booking time free. “I would do anything I could to afford these rides,” she says of her thirteen-class-a-week lifestyle. “Don’t knock it until you try it” says a shirt. “This isn’t spinning, it’s a way of life” echoes another cycler.



In the classic addiction narrative, those statements would signal a turn toward crisis, the first hints of rock-bottom, withdrawal, and treatment. The SoulCycle analog, though, makes no such move. Holmes opts for the perplexing resolution, “if we are elitists, then it’s a close-knit community of elitism—an in-crowd of equals,” fully embracing his drugged-up cohorts, all but glorifying the economic barrier to being “equal.” He acknowledges the transience of the high, the need for another fix within hours—but ultimately affirms his behavior: “Surely there are worse things to be addicted to.” So the SoulCycle Narrative ends not by confronting the drug, but by accepting it, indeed celebrating it. While the habit may be expensive and indulgent, the narrative deems it beneficial and, mostly importantly, connective.



Connection, in fact, is what makes SoulCycle a distinctly postmodern addiction. The traditional narrative of dependence is told by an outcast whose consumptive habits have made him a modernist monad: someone, like Edvard Munch’s subject in *The Scream*, who stands alone, observing the world at a harrowing distance. But the SoulCycle spin-off reels with spiritual exclamations of how riders pedal—and breathe and exorcise—to a single beat: a transcendence of subjectivity that spurns ecstatic wonder without any of the darkness that makes most addicts shriek. In his famous case-study on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson calls this the swap of modernist “expressions” for postmodernist “intensities.” Intensities are “free-floating and impersonal”—developing between cyclers rather than within them—and they are dominated by a “peculiar kind of euphoria.” If modernist addiction confronted the horror of isolated expressions, postmodern addiction ends with the acceptance of relativism and affirmation of irrationality. The moral quandary of a connection so soaked in wealth is forgotten amidst all the endorphins. If the body has not broken down, if the pack rides together, the next squat can be popped like a pill without shame.



Postmodern addiction, then, no longer plagues the individual, but rather satisfies her so fully she forgets the rest of the world. Perhaps most insidiously it allows for and incorporates its own critique. Though the SoulCycle Narrative is filled with complaints about the price and the practice—half the riders, like Choi, revile themselves for going—any objections are irrationally abandoned at its end. Jameson, too, noted that postmodern capitalism elides distance between an analyst and a cultural phenomenon, so “the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable.” The SoulCycle Narrative is too bound up in its own luxury to hit rock bottom, too connected to the pack of riders to stop and think about its place in the broader cultural fabric. The critic holds her ironic relationship to spinning right up until she enters the candle-lit room. But then, in the wake of her contemporary spiritual nihilism, a rider’s connection to that pack is simply too wondrous to resist: “the visual culture of consumerism” fills her “voids” and she is blinded in euphoria. She will die gloriously, sweating like the Übermensch in a room beyond good and evil—even if the rest of the world burns.



 



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1 Literally. The brand has an overwhelming assortment of paraphernalia: water bottles, skull-shirts, leggings, sweats, fingerless gloves, bandanas, “embroidered cashmere socks,” even their custom candles. Plus, there’s supplemental material on the best Soul-music, Soul-diets, Soul-lifestyle. For every Bob Marley and White Castle reference in stoner tales, there’s an Avicii-remix or chia-seed smoothie in those of the cycler. The bike itself comes for a reasonable $2,200: the equivalent of two months of every-day SoulCycle or a few-year membership at a well-equipped gym. 



 



2Never mind that he clearly is that person. “I am one of the privileged few who have reserved their spots for the 8:00 AM session,” he says, describing the intense competition for bikes that causes people to pay double ($60+) for priority access. In the SoulCycle addict community, “privilege” does not denote the financial luxury of affording a class, but rather the good fortune to have beaten out other riders for a bike. The “unprivileged,” one presumes, are those who clicked too slowly, who remain burdened with that extra thirty dollars. A January *New York Times* piece “A Race to the Front Row” describes the “status symbol” of peddling in the front of a class. By delineating the haves and have nots within a spin community, the article boldly ignores the status symbol of just belonging to the community. Sterilized, safe competition arises between members of the elite—for a front bike, for a favorite instructor. 

Somewhere downriver in the nation’s conscience, magnolias are in bloom. Slavery is having a moment in American culture. It has made its presence felt across the arts, from plays such as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' *An Octoroon* or Suzan-Lori Parks’s *Father Comes Home From the Wars*, to art installations like Kara Walker’s *Marvelous Sugar Baby*, an homage to the “unpaid and overworked Artisans” of plantations past. James McBride’s *The Good Lord Bird*, a picaresque retelling of the abolitionist John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, won last year’s National Book Award for Fiction—the same year that *12 Years a Slave* won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and just two years after the release of Quentin Tarantino’s *Django Unchained*. Louis C.K. has done slavery stand up, while in one recent sketch, Key and Peele went so far as to put themselves on the auction block. Slavery has even insinuated itself into video games, with the recent release of two new versions of *Assassin’s Creed* that make it a central subject. A century and a half after abolition, slavery has become—of all things—popular.



Or, more accurately, the unpopularity of slavery has become popular, its uncomfortable infamy universally interesting. America is passing through a period of antebellum fauxstalgia, a perennial revival of interest in slavery which is equal parts a memorial and an exorcism. We have passed through this mo- ment before. Fifty years ago, the Civil Rights movement and its aftermath carried slavery forcefully into the national consciousness, interrupting decades of anxious silence, compulsory ignorance, and revisionist nostalgia. Scholars like Eugene Genovese educated the country on *The World Slaves Made*, while artists like Malcolm Bailey used the Middle Passage to highlight continuity between the past of slavery and the present of legal segregation. (Bailey’s “Separate but Equal” is a modern blueprint of a slave ship, with white and black figures chained on opposite ends of the hold.) The popular peak of this resurgence was the television mini-series *Roots*, starring LeVar Burton as the enslaved Gambian Kunta Kinte. *Roots*’s searing melodrama, now forty years old, remains the dominant image of American slavery. Its continued popularity, evident in Kendrick Lamar’s recent track “King Kunta,” suggests that our own era of recalcitrant racial injustice has an affinity with this earlier time. As in the seventies, we seem to have run up against the hard limits of American racial progress. Moments of rude awakening like these seem to demand a ritual return to slavery as the origin point of American racial injustice.



And yet, our own obsession with the antebellum period is, by comparison, strangely depoliticized. Today, slavery is a subject that allows audiences to feel morally engaged with violent racial injustice while remaining safely distant from its contemporary ravages. It is a cultural placebo politics, enabling a liberal public that craves the chance to engage with questions of race to do so without the discomfort of proximity. Audiences have confused the antebellum world’s problems with those of our own, so much so that *The New York Times* is able to call Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ *An Octoroon*—the revival of a melodrama more than a century old—“the most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today.” This is itself an eloquent statement about race in America today. It speaks volumes about the liberal public’s desire to think about contemporary racial injustice *through* slavery—and through slavery alone. Pick almost any black writer, and if they’ve written a book about slavery, it’s become the most celebrated of their works. Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, James McBride, and Ishmael Reed have published many excellent books, but *Kindred*, *Beloved*, *The Good Lord Bird*, and *Flight to Canada* are the ones people read.



On the side of black artists themselves, the subject of slavery can, ironically, enable a certain freedom. It satisfies the liberal public’s craving for black artists who “express themselves” on the issue of racial injustice, while avoiding the contemporary specificity that might make that same public feel implicated. Its historical remove also allows these artists to avoid having their work reduced to political statement or personal grievance. Creating art about racial injustice *today* risks making you look like a propagandist. Creating art about slavery, or that deals with contemporary racial injustice *through* slavery, allows you to remain a serious artist.



This is not to deny that the art of antebellum fauxstalgia has often been both beautiful and politically provocative. It is only to point out that the antebellum world has become in many ways a segregated district of the national imagination, a closed arena where the country can exorcise its racial demons without touching too closely on the here and now. It is the only context where representing racist violence—and violent black resistance to racism—is reliably acceptable. Audiences are ready to applaud the vengeful Jamie Foxx of Tarantino’s *Django*, to bleed with Lupita Nyong’o in *12 Years a Slave*, and even to backstab overseers as the escaped Ade?wale? in the game *Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry*. They are less hungry for stories of resistance set in more recognizable worlds. It’s hard to imagine a blockbuster about Black Panthers facing police in the 1970s, or about the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, when members of the local black community defended themselves against thousands of rioting neighbors armed with guns, bombs, and planes. These conflicts, which took place between free people in an America recognizably our own, are more dangerous than slavery—which, for most Americans, is less a historical period than a mythic locale. Staging our national anxieties around race within the safety of this myth is a popular alternative to telling and listening to the riskier stories of other periods, especially our own. It is because we wish to avoid ourselves that we build so many imagined plantations—effigies for our General Shermans of the screen, stage, and page to burn down.

On March 5, 2012, if you logged into Facebook, a video entitled “KONY 2012” was sure to pop up as every third or fourth post. 



Perhaps at first, you ignored it. However, after seeing it posted over and over again for hours, maybe you clicked on it, and watched at least some of the 29 minute, 59 second video. Even if you only watched the first few minutes, you learned that there is a warlord named Joseph Kony wreaking havoc in Uganda with a rebel militia group, that he is kidnapping children from their homes to make them unwilling soldiers, that the situation is getting worse, and that something must be done. It is a call to arms, for the people of America to do their part to combat a foreign terror. Like many of the other people on your Newsfeed, you probably felt horrified, outraged, catalyzed. And maybe, just like them, you shared it.



KONY 2012 is remembered today as one of the first Internet trends to spread like wildfire across feeds from Twitter to Facebook, Tumblr to YouTube. As most of its proponents and critics will remember, the fall of KONY 2012 and Invisible Children came as quickly as its rise to fame. The organization was simply unprepared for the rapid onslaught of support (at the time of the video’s release, Invisible Children had one intern to fill 500,000 orders of their $30 “call to action” kit). Within two weeks, the organization’s founder and the narrator of KONY 2012, Jason Russell, was famous himself, though unfortunately due to a nude mental breakdown on the streets of San Diego.



Like with Britney’s change of hairstyle or Kanye’s defense of Beyonce, KONY 2012 showed the world how quickly fame devolves into infamy. Invisible Children closed in December 2014, just under 2 years after the video was released, and Joseph Kony remains at large today. Ultimately, the disaster that was KONY 2012 remains more “famous” than the warlord it sought to blast into the spotlight.



When a campaign is as unprepared for mass sensation as was the KONY 2012 publicity stunt, could it be that virality actually hurts the cause it hopes to relieve? This question came under serious debate in late 2014 due to the retraction of a *Rolling Stone* article entitled “A Rape on Campus.” The piece, which focused on the rape of a student pseudonymously dubbed “Jackie” at the University of Virginia, went viral on social media when it was published in November. The article, written and researched by Sabrina Erdely, used Jackie’s heart-wrenching story to comment on the injustices of unreported and unpunished rape on colleges across America.



Like the KONY 2012 video, the graphic details of the article made readers feel horrified, depressed, and then incensed: why was no one talking about this major problem as fervently as this article? Could journalistic publicity, more delicately handled and less flashy than KONY 2012’s video, help Jackie and girls in similar situations? As with KONY 2012, social media users shared the piece in hoards, urging others to read it and work to help end rape culture on college campuses.



Unfortunately, also similarly to KONY 2012, the downfall of the article’s viral success came quickly, and swiftly. Soon after its publication, outlets such as *The Washington Post* began to point to blatant discrepancies in Jackie’s story, unraveling a chain of spurious journalistic practices that began with Erdely and wound their way up to Rolling Stone’s top editors.



In April, the Columbia School of Journalism compiled a lengthy report on the problems with both the article and the practices surrounding its reporting. In an introduction to the report (which *Rolling Stone* willingly elicited and published), Managing Editor Will Dana writes, “Sexual assault is a serious problem on college campuses, and it is important that rape victims feel comfortable stepping forward. It saddens us to think that their willingness to do so might be diminished by our failings.” Here Dana succinctly summarizes the dangers of viral, incendiary stories: when the method by which the specifics of a crisis or crime is criticized, the problem itself runs the risk of losing its credibility.



Though many of the accusations in the article, and of Jackie’s story, were ultimately proven to be untrue, the actual percentage of rape reports that are deemed false is believed to hover at or below eight percent. Because of the sensational popularity of its article, and its subsequent retraction, *Rolling Stone* must face the consequences of having potentially hurt, and not helped, its campaign to end rape culture on college campuses. Sexual assault, and the bureaucracy involved in the process of getting help and pressing charges is still a very real problem for many students. However, a highly publicized article that pointed fingers, and had to, in turn, point one back at itself, was not the correct method of activism.



The social media users that contributed to the virality of KONY 2012, “A Rape on Campus,” and other such stories are ultimately not to blame for the failings of seemingly reputable organizations and news outlets. If a nonprofit or a magazine is generating content to start a moral revolution, the information they share should be rigorously fact-checked down to the last detail. Invisible Children should have had resources at the ready for the fame that was to follow, and *Rolling Stone* should have published an article it was able, willing, and proud to defend.



If a story is too good to be true, or even too bad, or sad, it probably is, especially when it comes neatly packaged in an explosive article or well-produced and easily shared YouTube video. Topics that are messy and complex are just that—they have solutions that are difficult to grapple with, and must be conveyed with the utmost care in order to convince naysayers. If an organization creates a digestible form in which to catalyze readers, viewers, and ultimately, sharers, there is most likely a large chunk of the story missing.



In real life and online, we have an obligation to be our own skeptics. We must constantly sift through the click-bait, listicles, articles, and videos thrown at us in every direction—even, and perhaps especially, when they come from supposedly reputable sources. The world cannot be saved in a click, nor should it be. Examining and investing in important causes should not be discouraged, but we must be careful not to believe everything we read, especially when it comes with a shining, tantalizing “share” button, ready to broadcast a cause around the world. 

At the time my father was living in a barn. Granted, it was a nice barn, squat and rectangular, red with a gambrel roof, and to be perfectly honest he lived in an annex off the barn’s tail end. A cozy room, heated in the winter by an iron stove, it had a couch, a desk, a few makeshift bookshelves, even a small television set that he rarely watched. He slept there alone; I don’t know how he spent his mornings.



I tended to define my father’s relationship to the barn in terms of prohibitions: This was the barn, for example, from which he ran the vineyard that he didn’t own, which produced the subpar grapes that we couldn’t eat, which were turned into a subpar wine we couldn’t drink (and of which, today, there is not a single extant bottle). But more importantly, this was the barn where he’d lived since our parents had separated. (The divorce would come later, after he’d started renting a home on the other side of town.) No big drama, this separation. I would have been eight or so at the time, too young, in a general sense, to understand the vicissitudes of marriage, the mechanism of divorce, and too young again, in our particular case, to have ever witnessed a genuine motion of love between my parents.



My brother, Grady, and I—he would have been eleven or so—spent a lot of our time at the barn. He, responsibly, helped our father with various chores (weeding, lugging, pruning), while I fiddled about errantly, spray-painting rocks or hammering together discarded pieces of wood. I had free rein of the premises, a bountiful prospect, considering that in addition to the vineyard my father also ran a peony field. There was an industrial cooler inside the barn where we kept the freshly severed flowers in five-gallon buckets of water. I’d sometimes ask my father to lock me inside it; I would pummel the inside of the door, half-laughing, half-crying to be let out, and he, playing along, would refuse. I would settle back in faux resignation, allowing the chemically cooled air to envelop me like a wintry cocoon. Alone in the dark, I sensed in my chest a new, dull, nagging sensation, which I couldn’t have known, at the time, was dread.



To satisfy a different taste—it was a business, after all— we also dried the peonies. The entirety of the barn’s attic was devoted to this occupation; a constellation of muted blooms hung from their stems on a haphazard scheme of wires, string, and clothespins. The air up in the attic was dense, dusty, soporific. I can remember inhaling deeply, experimentally, and feeling the concoction settle in my lungs like warm syrup. When I got tired, too strongly steeped in the smell, as I considered it then, of antiquity, I would retreat to the cooler, to the coolness and damp below.



Looking back, I can see that it was around this time—post-separation—that my father started allowing us to flirt more and more openly with danger. He bought my brother a BB gun, whose pellets we loosed at pigeons and the barn’s shingled roof. For me he bought a small sword at a psychic fair. I wasn’t allowed to tell my mother about it. Likewise he allowed a senile neighbor to gift me a rusty machete with a whalebone handle that had, by the effusive geezer’s account, seen action in the Mexican-American War. I sanded the handle down to get some of its old glow back, and together my father and I sharpened the blade with a portable Dremel tool. I held one weapon in each hand and massacred the bushes in my father’s backyard.



One Christmas, he bought my brother and I bows and arrows, neat, springy, lacquered things with bungee strings and real—very real—metal-tipped arrows. We became warriors, little Robin Hoods bounding about and crouching and loosing our deadly darts at trees and bushes, fences and the small animals we occasionally glimpsed: rabbits, mostly, nervous puffballs that lanced spectrally away while our arrows struck nearby earth.



After a while, one week or two, we got bored. We started playing a daredevil game in which we fired arrows straight into the sky, so high that they disappeared against the gray, ghostly welkin. Then we ran about in wide circles with our eyes upflung, trying not to get impaled by the rapidly descending shafts. As we played with the bows we could sense their power weakening, the strings thrumming flabbily and failing to send the arrows any interesting distance at any interesting speed—for two weeks we had forgotten to unstring the bows, and now the wood was slack, recoilless, the string little more than a faintly elastic yard of cloth. A ruined gift.



***



One morning, our father drove us—that is, Grady and I—to the Rural King (a farm supply store) on North Saint Joseph Avenue. He’d often take us along with him on these periodic trips, business excursions, as it were, to gather bags of mulch or spare hoes or other farming supplies. While he wandered about, Grady and I would hurry to the store’s rear, where they kept the chicks and ducklings in corrugated steel tubs bestrewn with woodchips.



Somehow, I think by dint of continual begging, we’d convinced our father to buy us ducks. Giddily, our fingers folded over a tub’s rim, we pointed out the ducks we wanted, and our father directed a bored-looking, lank-haired teenage attendant.



Granted, the precise mechanism of extraction lies outside the purview of my memory, as does the series of actions that took us from the back of the Rural King to the cash register and out, in the parking lot, to our father’s truck. Regardless, I know for a fact that we left the store with six snowy-white ducklings contained in a cardboard box.



A small wonder, that box. Like a dollhouse come to life. There were half-moon holes in its sides through which the sour smell of duck shit wafted and the truncated piccolo of their quacks came to us, fleetingly, along with occasional flashes of pale yellow (a wing), toxic orange (a foot), and blister black (an eye). Phantasmal, these bursts of phenomena. I recall, even then, being under the dreamy impression that the box contained not six live ducklings but an obscure system of wires, tubes, and gears, capable of producing and then relaying these discrete images to my brother and I—like a television, or something more complex still.



Grady held the box on his lap as I plumbed its apertures with fear-hyped fingertips, my pulse stirred to drum-taps by a mixture of anxiety and hope. Beside this minor drama, our father sat driving the truck. His palms were pressed to the pleather of the wheel; he stared ahead at the inrushing pavement; he might have been mildly, comfortably proud of himself. Outside, the sky was grey, the landscape winter-ridden and muted to the point of non-existence—or at least that’s how I remember it: an extended tracking shot of frost-plated cornfields cut with telephone poles, unbearing trees, and uniform homes (low-gabled, white, with aluminum siding). If I tease my memory, the houses sprout chimneys; a cozy smoke chuckles forth, billowing out and bleeding into the sky.



In reality, though, it was springtime—funny the falsehoods that memory supplies. How to describe a Midwestern spring? To be short about it: abundant, terrible, suffocating. A classical scene of renascence, like a pastoral torn from its frame: sweet fields spangled with itinerant beasts, lowing and leaning and loafing, all of them dumbly expectant. The trees become swampy and depressed, over-burdened with foliage and invasive vines thick and corkscrewy as hawsers; smooth wire fences are bent to absurd angles by the crushing weight of waves of honeysuckle; a whole host of hidden insects scores a grand, ear-numbing, dimensionless buzz that radiates along the sinusoidal countryside like an electric knell for the magnificence of the decay to come. High flourishing now, sweet colors, the frilly bunting of rebirth. Only later the fall, decadent, into decay.



We drove to the barn. It had a small backyard enclosed by a black wooden fence. Beyond this fence spread an unworked field full of high grass that swished and fluted drily in the summer winds. It ended in a murky line of trees. In the corner of the fence, we built a chicken wire pale and placed the ducks inside: a temporary structure, slack-sided, held in place by a few slivers of pinewood traced through the wire’s latticework and driven, by a rubber mallet clumsily wielded, into the rich black ground.



That first day was a joy. We named the ducks, chased them about, held them aloft as their spatulate feet flapped wildly. They scuttled here and there, trailing one another about the yard in wide, sinuous arcs, spreading and testing the bright half- moons of their inchoate wings. They quacked without cease—brief, dry, firecracker pops—their beaks seesawing steadily in loosing these bursts, as though crank-turned, wholly mechanical. To me they seemed delicate, clockwork automatons sheathed in fine feather coats.



And while we watched the ducks, our father watched us, the sidelong rays of dying daylight tilting the cast of his ruddy complexion into something more closely resembling bronze. As a consequence of working outdoors nearly all his life, my father had, and still has, very red skin, sun-warped and interlarded with elegant webs of burst vasculature, like the pattern a drop of ink makes as it spreads through the crazed enamel of an ancient vase. Back then he wore coke bottle glasses with faux tortoise-shell frames. He was fifty years old, somewhat thin and tired-looking. He usually smelled, pleasantly, of sweat shed in the open air.



Beyond these details, most of my memories of him revolve around a general impression of senescence, of age overworked. I can’t say exactly where he was as we played with the ducks, how precisely he fit into the scene—in my memories he is mostly a presence: a disembodied voice, for instance—but it seems appropriate, in retrospect, to place him in a folding lawn chair, a beer in his hand (Foster’s) and, as I said before, the dying sun in his eyes. Watching his kids and adjusting his posture. Happy they were happy.



***



A few days after we purchased them, the ducks began to disappear—though ‘disappear’ isn’t really the right word. They left their mementoes: a severed wing, a tuft of bloodied feathers. We saw drops of blood pendent in the grass: rubies spilled by a harried thief.



Some creature, our father told us soberly, was creeping in from the adjacent field, at night, while we, and he, slept. Subtly parting the tall grass, it leapt the wooden fence and took its pick of the frightened ducklings. In the morning, we’d find the remaining ducks scattered about the backyard, huddled and hiding in various nooks and corners, their necks curled and bent fantastically, preposterously, so that their heads rested under their wings. The beast, whatever it was, coyote or fox or wild dog, had disassembled the chicken wire pale, carelessly compressing its walls, uprooting the pinewood stakes. We fixed it, straightened out the skein of wire, and placed the ducks back inside.



I don’t recall any speeches from my father, any half-hearted explications of the circle of life or food chains or any other anodyne ramblings. I do remember that he began to set traps, black wire rectangles with a trip inside, baited with uncooked hotdogs. Hipped on retribution, I recommended that he stay up all night on the barn’s roof with my brother’s BB gun, waiting for the beast to show up. A recommendation he didn’t take.



So things went, the ducks plucked in the night, one by one, until they were gone. My father continued to set his traps. I remember thinking they were dumb, dumb, dumb; he’d never catch anything that way. But I don’t think I told him this.



One day, in the midst of the killings, I climbed up to the attic, hoping, maybe, to gauge the potential efficacy of my BB gun plan. The big loading window was open, and its double doors, angled at the top like those of a chapel, were swung wide to accommodate the breeze: a dry, pure zephyr. Periodically, someone—most likely my father—would open these doors, hasp them into place, and allow the attic to ventilate over the course of a day, allow the stale, baked air to escape. The peonies, as I ducked beneath them, rattled drily on their clotheslines, like bones: a vast, morbid set of wind chimes.



I reached the window and gazed out for a long time at the field of high grass, undulant—waves in the crinkled summer light. The field gave out a grand sigh, disconnected in its intensity from the subtlety of the field’s movement. As if there were an ocean, broad and unarticulated, hidden just out of sight. Natural ventriloquy, I think now, but not then. Then all I could feel was a terrible foreboding, a fear of hidden venom. Somewhere in the thicket’s weave, I knew, our oppressor lurked, biding, poised. Where or what it was we couldn’t know, we would never know, and it struck me, forcefully, as an aspect of fate, that we wouldn’t know. So much so that I felt myself becoming resigned to the mystery.



Then my father caught something.



***



It’s strange to think what dimly stays with you, what reveals itself willingly, at the touch of thought, in all its banal detail. I think of my father’s barn, mapped onto my brain by near-constant traversing and exploration. Strange, too, to find what fades—beyond a few scenes of play and a handful of vivid images, I don’t really remember too much about our ducks. And yet it’s strangest to consider what remains most clear, colorful, and precise, what plays back ceaselessly, like a loop of film.



For instance, I have a distinct memory of my brother and I watching our father drown a raccoon.



The raccoon, a sleek, pursy thing, moon-eyed with fear, is locked in a cage that lies in the bottom of a disused concrete trough. A hose hangs over the trough’s lip. Sharply I spy on the hose’s head an inverted cupola of water, a bright droplet, dangling like snot. Slick and lethal. I watch it drip.



For sound, there is the mad snarling and clacking of raccoon-teeth on cage-wire. For motion, the neutered acrobatics of attempted escape. A punch of red tongue adds color; a gurgly, slaverous, small-dog growl undergirds the soundscape. My eyes, transfixed, refuse to leave this desperation. Somewhere, our father turns a faucet. I hear a dry creak. The hose tenses, hisses, and begins to pump the trough full of water.



The raccoon erupts, turning eel-like in the spreading water, its coat dense and opulent. Soon half the cage is submerged. A black snout pokes periscopically through the cage’s upper lattice-work, searching for air, but no such luck. Up, up, up the water goes, until the cage is completely flooded, and the raccoon disappears beneath a braided surface. There are small agitations in the watery glass, bubbles of air and wavelets, the only signs of submerged struggle. Eventually, all settles. My father turns off the faucet, and the memory ends.



I recently asked my brother about this memory. I was curious about certain details, and half-hoping, at the same time, to revel fondly, like a nostalgic lush, in the absurd antics of our childhood. He recalled the ducks, their various demises. He remembered the black wire traps. He even remembered being shown a raccoon in the bottom of the concrete trough. But the actual drowning, he insisted, was done out of sight. My father, with a bit of prodding, confirmed this version of events.



As sharp as the scene and its details are in my head, I have to admit they’re a complete fabrication. I can’t say exactly when this false memory first took root in my mind, or why it did, or what legitimate memories it might have shoved carelessly into oblivion in the process. All I can say is that, until very recently—until a few months ago, in fact—I had borne this confabulation around, cradling it like a relic, relating it to friends, turning it about in my mind. And not once had I questioned its veracity.



Strangely enough, when I felt the dislodged scene begin to fade from my mind, I didn’t experience the dim, dull, toothy ache of extraction you might expect, nor the clean sting of excision. Instead there was a certain ecstatic liberty about the disappearance—as when a weight or pressure applied to the skin is suddenly lifted and the hitherto depressed flesh bounces back, filling its natural bounds, and then, for just one moment, attempts to move beyond the corporeal, into unarticulated space.



***



One more memory, this one real: We’re zooming through the darkling vineyard in my father’s truck. He; me; Grady. It’s a Sunday night, probably. The windows are rolled down. Outside, the foreign smell of grapes dangles over everything like a lazy stitch in the atmosphere.



In the cab of the truck, my face lit only by the dim fluorescence of the dashboard clock, I feel incredibly small.



We’re driving to the fallow field that lies behind our father’s vineyard, hoping to startle and disperse the deer that congregate there in the night, sometimes inspiring one another, by sheer confidence of numbers, I suppose, to dart into the vineyard and nibble at our grapes.



We don’t do this all the time. It’s a treat. We’ve usually got to beg him, and he’ll say no, no, there’s really no point tonight as we’re driving along, and we’ll crumple into ourselves, portraits of disappointment, until he turns sharply at the last moment, a surprise, and we revive.



We reach the fallow field. My father turns his headlights on high to catch the deer’s eyes, which bloom madly in the outer dark like a constellation of diseased stars. He chooses one with our help, and we buck off in pursuit. We come closer and closer to the singled-out deer, following its balletic dives and jukes with a bloodhound’s determination, closing in so tightly that I can imagine the dashboard and windshield disappearing before the galloping hind-quarters, the intervening material dropping away like so much illusion.



It’s then, at the climactic moment, that my father presses his foot to the brake pedal, the truck’s cabin dips forward abruptly, tipping my unseatbuckled self forward, and the deer makes its getaway, prancing through the waist-high bunches of Johnson grass until it’s reached the edge of the headlights’ range, at which point it disappears, without even a backward glance.



I gasp and turn to my father, who is dimly feigning distress, turning and twisting his hands in the dark, as if to signal something like, I guess it got away.



 

By now, the Islamic State’s (IS) deft command of media is well recognized. The group, previously known as ISIS or ISILI, began receiving widespread attention for its publicity campaign in the summer of 2014. In June, the group established the al-Hayat Media Center, a production agency aimed at reaching Western audiences. Shortly thereafter, the new center released its first video titled, “There Is No Life Without Jihad.”1 The video is a thirteen minute plus production featuring three Western jihadists who urge devout Muslims worldwide to join and fight for the Islamic State. The video is long, somewhat overproduced, and absolutely gorgeous. Since then, the Islamic State has released countless texts, videos, and images that display increasing technical and strategic proficiency in what some have termed, “The Jihadi War of Ideas.”2



Two weeks later, the group proclaimed itself a caliphate, revealing the strategic timing in the foundation of al-Hayat. The Islamic State seeks exactly what its name purports: to establish and expand the caliphate. In order to demonstrate legitimacy as such, the Islamic State requires an extensive media plan to project an image of stability, strength, and active expansion, or “offensive jihad,”3 and the establishment of a new media center points to the Islamic State’s intimate understanding of this. The content of major IS media productions explicitly constructs this image by portraying a high-powered military force that is in active conflict with its enemies, and this more aggressive content is complemented by depictions of social and political stability, economic prosperity, and just governance. Less explicitly, but perhaps more importantly, control of and proficiency in media production and dissemination is itself coded as synonymous with power.



This focused attention on the role of mass media by an extremist group is not new. The Islamic State shared deep ties with al-Qaeda, beginning as a localized branch once known as “al-Qaeda in Iraq.”4 As such, its recognition of the power of media is informed deeply by al-Qaeda’s own emphasis on mass media, both distributed by Western sources and generated internally. However, the glossy, highly produced graphics and videos published by the Islamic State indicate that its understanding of media has expanded and diverged from its foundations. Moreover, the immense quantity and direct-to-viewer distribution model indicates that this is an altogether new phenomenon in extremist media and even the field of propaganda. This is not the single take, 4:3 aspect ratio, al-Qaeda video of the early 2000’s. This is not even its Inspire magazine of the early 2010’s. This is a top-down industry of production with a comprehensive strategy, realized vision, and unified message: we are here, we are strong, and we are coming for you. This is Islamic State Media.



 



I: “Don’t hear about us. Hear from from us.”5?



*Development & Distribution Models*



Since July of 2014, the Islamic State has released hundreds of videos,II innumerable images, and a multilingual digital magazine, issued monthly.6 Beginning in 2013, it has even published an annual report, al-Naba, broadcasting statistics of the group’s activities and successes, complete with an attractive and useful at-a-glance infographic.7 Though the open distribution of this material creates an impression of transparency, reliable information detailing the internal workings of the Islamic State—much less its media production—is difficult to find. The group is not exactly keen on broadcasting its military or governmental structures, nor is it about to lift the veil on its prolific media operation. Consequently, little is definitively known about the group’s media production infrastructure. But by piecing together content released by the Islamic State, the unknown aspects of its production and distribution models can be conjectured.



The Islamic State claims three major media centers. Each is separately branded with its own logo, but it is unclear exactly how the responsibilities of each differ. It is entirely possible that the branding exists to create an illusion of a more expansive media network than is actually in place. A progenitor of the Islamic State established the al-Furqan Institute for Media Production late in 2006. Al-Furqan has released videos in both English and Arabic and is most infamous for the recent “Jihadi John” decapitation videos of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, American aid worker Peter Kassig, British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, and Japanese journalist Kenji Goto. It is also responsible, at least in part, for the “Lend Me Your Ears,” series, featuring captured British war photographer, John Cantlie. The I’tisaam Media Foundation was established in 2013, and it is considered to be the principal media center.8 It is responsible for producing the IS annual reports, a Twitter app, and much of the Arabic-language content; however, in the months leading up to establishment of al-Ha- yat, it published English-language content as well.9 The al-Hayat Media Center was established in June of 2014, and of the three, it has received the most attention by far. This is because it creates the most English-language material of any of the branches, is explicitly aimed at Westerners, and publishes some of the most intensely branded content. Al-Hayat is responsible for the monthly magazine, Dabiq, the later Cantlie videos, and a feature-length film, titled Flames of War.



It is likely, though unconfirmed, that the three media centers are somewhat centralized. Access to the internet does not appear to be particularly obstructed, so there would be little need to decentralize, and a primary hub might benefit from economies of scale including the cost of infrastructure and the opportunity to share expertise. In addition, the presence of both a central aesthetic and cohesive message, as well as an apparent ability to pass on projects, suggest that the centers cooperate closely. At the very least, these details indicate strong central roles akin to artistic and creative directors. Decentralized media offices spread throughout IS wilayats, or governorates, also publish content on a daily basis in support of a broader media campaign. This media is generally far less involved or polished but simply dwarfs the three major media centers in terms of discrete quantity. The majority of high-level production, however, originates from the three media centers, which can effectively be assumed to be one centralized agency.



In terms of the process of production, some network of photographers must be in place, based on the geographic reach covered by the images and videos. There are even occasional and accidental appearances of differently outfitted cameramen in some IS videos, suggesting that they might be purposefully deployed. The exact roles and organization of these photographers is unknown, but the abundance of combat footage, particularly in the film Flames of War, suggests high levels of coordination in the field. The equipment and software used is also near or approaching the industry standard, at least in the independent film world. That the videos are in high-definition 1080p is overemphasized as an indicator; most mobile phones produced today will shoot in 1080p. What is actually indicative is the evident use of interchangeable lenses, stabilization rigs, and particularly, ultra slow-motion cameras. The Islamic State’s command of photography, however, is far overhyped. It is certainly proficient in production, but it is not at the level of, “something you’d see on ESPN,” as one expert commented.10 Angles are sometimes clumsy, footage is often over-exposed, and color correction is atrocious, though improving. To overstate technical mastery is somewhat of a distraction from the larger picture: the Islamic State has assembled an industrially sized production network that can nimbly turn around astounding amounts of content at a moderate to high level of production.



After the media is gathered from the field, the process of post-production is much the same as anywhere. Media is edited, exported, and finally, distributed—the easy part. The Islamic State’s method of distribution is basically Twitter.11 The production center uploads new content to one of several free hosting platforms, including YouTube.com, Archive.org, VK.com, or an old-fashioned web forum of al-Qaeda’s day. Several members of a logistics team on the ground in Iraq or Syria then begin posting the download link to Twitter, and their job is to keep the link circulating even as their accounts are actively shut down.12 It is then up to IS fanboys13 to download the video and spread the link, and there is no shortage of accounts to do so. One study estimates that up to 90,000 Twitter accounts are in support of the Islamic State.14 Of course, not all of these accounts are actively re-posting links, but it only takes a handful to a few dozen to garner considerable attention. From there, the media is picked up by more conventional outlets, and it more or less spread itself.



Except that it has never been done before, this model does not appear particularly sophisticated because at its root, it is not. To its credit, the Islamic State is still among the first to harness new media, and it is also strategically gaming it. The I’tisaam Media Foundation released a now dismantled Arabic only Android app that, once downloaded, automatically posted tweets from the Islamic State through the user’s personal Twitter account.15 Translated from Arabic as “The Dawn of Glad Tidings,” it not only guaranteed an almost constant social media presence, but it also posted at wide enough intervals to narrowly avoid Twitter’s spam detection algorithms.16 Furthermore, the Islamic State strategically controls the rate at which content is posted such that each major release can have its own time in the spotlight. One Twitter fanboy even complained to the Islamic State when there were too many big and small releases in a single day. @ ShamiWitness tweets: “#IS needs to restrict the content ,duration and frequency of video released by its Wilayat media offices.” The logistics team will also “hijack” temporally relevant hashtags to reach an even broader audience.17 For instance, the group tagged some of their tweets #WorldCup during soccer games, infamously placing the image of decapitated head in front of soccer fans worldwide with the text, “This is our football, it’s made of skin.”18



This is a distinctly new enterprise in publicity that is entirely up-to-the-minute, the scope of which was previously simply unattainable. Never before has digital camera technology been good enough and inexpensive enough to implement the Islamic State’s vast network of eyes on the ground. Never before has the internet been fast enough nor cloud storage cheap enough to produce and distribute high quality content at such a breakneck pace. And never before has there been a generation as widely saturated and practiced in image creation. The Islamic State has capitalized on each of these developments to create an unprecedented, direct-to-viewer publicity model. In combination with its willful prioritization of mass media to spread a unified message, the Islamic State has created a network that is not only unprecedented in scope, but also requires a new theoretical model altogether.



 



II. A New Management of Savagery?



*Theories of Propaganda & Mass Communication*



The Islamic State’s media strategy originates with al-Qaeda as much as the group itself. Osama Bin Laden himself emphasized the revolutionary power of mass media, writing in a letter to Emir Al-Momineen: “It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its ratio may reach 90% of the total preparation for the battles.”19 It is also apparent that al-Qaeda has had a considered model in place as early as 2004. Al-Qaeda draws heavily upon the writings of Abu Bakr Naji, the pen name for a jihadist scholar, and principally upon his work, The Management of Savagery. The web-released book is just short of a manifesto produced specifically to provide al-Qaeda and jihadists around the world a theoretical model, with practical applications, for waging jihad. The book describes a complete strategy in service of re-establishing a caliphate, but it foregrounds the role of mass media as a tool utilized by superpowers and jihadists alike. As proposed, the media strategy outlines a three-prong approach: to win support among Muslims, to project an image of amplified power, and to disrupt what Naji refers to as the Western “media halo,”III which is the projection of an image of not just overwhelming, but total power.?



The impact of this document on IS media strategy is acknowledged by analysts,IV and its influence is quite visible in the content itself. The Islamic State actively seeks to recruit, to amplify an image of power, and to tarnish the image of the Western world as invincible.V However, al-Qaeda promotes attacks directly on the West in hopes of dismantling apostate regimes propped up by Western governments; whereas, the Islamic State seeks to actively establish and expand the caliphate.21 This fundamental difference means that the Islamic State needs to demonstrate legitimacy beyond an inflated image of strength, and this necessity results in a dramatically evolved strategy within the framework outlined by The Management of Savagery. In contrast, al-Qaeda’s approach to media stays closer to the theoretical text, and as a result, is fairly passive. Strategies rely largely on controlling what information the established media infrastructure can access. Manipulating media depictions in this way, though light in terms of resources, is difficult and unreliable at best. And Naji’s only explicit tactic is exaggerating the use of force, like using more militants and explosives than necessary for any given operation. For a decentralized and often disparate organization like al-Qaeda, that’s okay—the fire of jihad can always burn within each member of the network. But for the Islamic State, there are tangible parameters of statehood that must be fulfilled. Without them, it is nothing, and no one is coming to the rescue. The Islamic State projects legitimacy both by broadcasting the supposed actualization of its state to the world and by controlling an extensive media network previously only associated with universally recognized, highly powerful entities.



To date, the Islamic State counts over 20,000 foreign fighters among its ranks, several thousand of whom are known to be Westerners,22 but the degree to which IS propaganda has had an impact on these statistics is unknown. The Islamic State’s call to arms reaches beyond the scope of propaganda when some Muslims believe that, “to die without pledging allegiance is to die jahil (ignorant) and therefore to die a ‘death of disbelief.’”23 Additionally, recent writing has speculated that film propaganda is essentially ineffective at substantively influencing public opinion24 and at best, can only reinforce already held opinions.25 However, this perspective does not account for the rise of new media and digital landscapes.26 In a field that is rapidly evolving, the sparse discourse that exists is left lacking a model to account for it. Contemporary writing often only documents these changes, failing to propose substantive frameworks for analysis. Even strong theoretical essays frequently make this kind of comment: “This well-wrought argument simply does not hold water in the age of digital video and new-media propaganda. The flow of information is incalculably faster today, and viewers are far more sophisticated.”27 These things are true but hardly even point in a new direction, much less travel in it. In order to move forward, IS media must be considered as “open,” postmodern texts28 and analyzed with the most recent modern mass communication models.



Twentieth-century propaganda models typically focus on medium and message crafting, assuming a high degree of control over distribution. This concept, of sending the right message to the right audience, is increasingly obsolete since it is now impossible to perfectly implement, given nearly universal access to information technology.VI Rather, the current assumption must be that any given message can spread anywhere, even though it might not. Under this condition, Sean Heuston, Professor of English Literature at The Citadel, suggests that, “propaganda film has changed from work to text in a process first described by Roland Barthes more than thirty years ago in his essays, ‘The Death of the Author,’ and ‘From Work to Text.’”30 Barthes might have chafed at the idea of a work definitively “changing” to a text, but Heuston’s point is compelling. The inability to control the audience necessitates an abandonment of the false presumption that a message can be communicated in perfect fidelity.31 The literature on mass communication strategy seems to be shifting in this direction as well: “a meaning cannot simply be transferred, like a letter mailed from point A to point B. Instead, listeners create meanings from messages based on factors like autobiography, history, local context, culture, language/symbol systems, power relations, and immediate personal needs.”32 State departments worldwide have largely failed to embrace this paradigm shift, preferring a “message influence model” shaped largely on a 1950’s understanding of the telephone.33 The Islamic State, on the other hand, has embraced the concept of propaganda as Barthesian text intuitively if not explicitly.



Islamic State media can be understood in this way partially because the group’s legitimacy is deeply dependent on broadcasting an image of uncompromising ideology. There is no room for substantively different messages. There are often differences in its construction and presentation of media, indicating that it is designed with divergent audiences in mind,34 but to stray too far from the group’s core ideology would catastrophically undermine IS legitimacy. And regardless, the Islamic State is by no means sheepish in proclaiming its divine right to rule; the group distributes as widely as possible, apparently unafraid of what unsympathetic audiences might make of it. In utter scorn of an obsessive control of distribution, the Islamic State’s media, “featur[es] the very kind of content that Western politicians and diplomats have hoped [would] dissuade people’s attraction to the group.”35 Instead, the Islamic State has attracted thousands of foreign supporters. The content is deeply manipulated to portray a consistent ideology, and this consistency allows for a strategy of maximized distribution with the anticipation of multiple interpretations.



Furthermore, it is evident that the Islamic State actively avoids including an Author in its media, such that the question of intention cannot even be properly asked.VII In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes explains that: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”36 By removing this presence, the Islamic State creates media that is only text. In the infamous decapitation videos, “Jihadi John’s” face is not concealed to protect his identity. It was only a matter of time before British or U.S. intelligence agencies identified him, as he sports a British accent, obvious even after an applied audio distortion effect. His face is concealed to prevent an association with one man, a “final sig-ified.” The video establishes him as a symbol—an open-ended signifier. Similarly, when depicting an image of an individual IS fighter, Dabiq magazine often obscures his face. A startling exception to this is when the IS fighter has died in battle.37 Then, the face is shown plainly, and it signifies, rather definitely, a martyr. The use of John Cantlie as a reporter is the primary departure from this consistency. He has appeared in multiple videos and is listed as the writer of several articles in Dabiq. His visible inclusion provides each text an Author, and it is perhaps the most identifiable misstep of the IS media campaign so far. Portraying Cantlie raises doubt as to his intentions and sincerity in an attempt to ascertain the text’s meaning. This doubt is manifested by a Cantlie article in Dabiq, fending off accusations that, “the videos are scripted, and that perhaps [he has] no choice in the content.”38 Regardless of how persuasive, Cantlie’s very presence will always allow for the designation of text as work, ultimately casting doubts on his sincerity and the narrative. However, it is a departure that closes off only a tiny portion of an otherwise overwhelming open narrative, which effectively gives viewers the chance to see whatever they want to see.



 



III. Looking Good



*Aesthetics*



In all of the coverage of Islamic State media, aesthetics has received the least attention by far. The discourse advanced by popular Western media and scholars alike has been limited to superficial “look” and “wow” narratives. They progress little further because just below the surface, these narratives are built on a pretension of surprise that “they” could do “that.” The Islamic State has indeed done “that,” creating media within an ostensibly Western visual language with the stylistic sensibilities of contemporary new media. This should be far from astonishing. Due to its reach, the Western visual language can no longer be claimed as Western at all but universal. It is only still perceived as Western because it was developed in the West, and the overwhelming majority of media creators continue to be wealthy Western entities. But the rest of the world has learned and fully inherited a common visual language, whether it likes it or not. To properly “encode” an image so that it can be read, or “decoded,” globally, it is not only the best option, but necessarily the only one.39 The reason that a phenomenon like IS media has never been seen before is twofold. The first is simply that the technology of image creation and distribution necessary for the Islamic State’s high level of production is only now widely available. The second is that only a miniscule number of people worldwide are literate image writers. Nearly everyone can and is taught to read images—advertisements depend on it after all—but few are versed in the process of image writing. IS media is a phenomenon of exceptionally literate image readers putting forth the concerted effort to write for the first time, but with little practical guide as to how. And the aesthetics of IS media are deeply influenced by its creators’ high literacy of image reading but apparently still-developing literacy of image writing.



The majority of Islamic State media emulates contemporary, in-the-field documentary conventions, the most identifiable being the use of multi-camera, multi-angle setups for any given scene. This means that an IS production often runs multiple cameras simultaneously to capture an event. The angles are then cut together such that there is an unbroken temporal thread documented from different vantage points, a convention distinctively characteristic of documentary. Though including multiple angles is more expensive and time-intensive, the practice persists because documentaries purport to capture authentic events, meaning there are no opportunities for retakes. Logistically, it ensures that at any given time, at least one of the shots is serviceable. This practice is also used in interviews, so human errors can be edited out, and the narrative can be simplified or manipulated. To supplement the documentary aesthetic, IS productions also employ conventions like a slightly shaky camera and roving reports. These practices are certainly used for some of the same practical reasons that any other production might, but they are also often used unnecessarily. The Islamic State can be seen mimicking the aesthetic with little regard to motivation in order to lend an extra layer of authenticity to its media.



Despite the popular narrative of the Islamic State as extraordinarily skillful in media creation,40 as well as its largely competent emulation of documentary aesthetics, other unmotivated choices within the visual language reveal highly literate amateurism. Examples can be identified in just about every IS video. The decapitation videos, for instance, are shot primarily in a two-camera setup, with an occasional third that appears to have been shot at a later time. In the first shot, the camera is angled straight on, and the prisoner and executioner speak into the camera, the prisoner kneeling next to the defiant envoy of the Islamic State. The second shot is at a forty-five degree angle to the subjects and is used for cutaways. Both the high degree of image curation41 and the the direct address of the camera indicates that the video favors performance over authenticity. With this in mind, the inclusion of a second angle does not make sense exactly. The cuts between the two angles are also unmotivated since it is quite clear that many of them are just switching within the same take. Moreover, cuts to the second angle actually detract from the power of previously constructed symbols in the establishing shot, though admittedly, not that much.



IS media also displays amateurism in frequent breaks from the 180 degree rule. This rule is universal across all types of realistic, representational audiovisual production. Given two subjects in conversation, it mandates that all angles originate from one side of the two subjects, drawing an imaginary line between them. The camera can be placed on either side of that line, but once determined, the camera and all subsequent cameras used in the production must remain on the established side. If the rule is broken, it can be an extremely disorienting experience for the viewer. Imagining the camera as a fixed spectator of the conversation, that spectator can turn her head to view nearly 180 degrees of the conversation, but she cannot travel to the other side of the subjects. When there is only one speaking subject, the rule is softer but still applies with an unpictured or imagined interlocutor. IS media breaks this rule with abandon, placing the camera on either side of most conversations at typically equivalent angles. This occurs in countless videos but most clearly in “Uncovering an Enemy Within.” It is likely unintentional, but the consistency in departure, combined with the sheer quantity of videos, results in the development of a new aesthetic aspect to the Islamic State’s visual language. The assumption of an unpictured interlocutor is at its core stagey and artificial, and the break is not particularly disorienting simply because there is only one subject—it is just not that confusing. The movement from one side to another prevents the audience from projecting another interlocutor, creating an intensity of focus on the subject. Consistent departure from the rule justifies the choice and develops an intensified aesthetic, notably devoid of a composed, behind-the-scenes Author.



While this new aspect could be designated as accidental, the Islamic State’s use of glitch imagery is situated purposefully within conventions of the language. The glitch literally indicates some sort of disruption, either benign, like a glitch on a television or a streaming video, or violent and purposeful, like the hijacking of a channel of communication. Either way, something unexpected disrupts the intent of the viewer and distributor. Prior to the Islamic State’s rapid rise on the ground and in the consciousness of Western media, the glitch came to be associated with the violent disruption of terrorism. There are countless instances of this phenomenon in Western media post 9/11, from the promotional aesthetic of the television series 24, to the Mandarin’s “lesson for America” in Iron Man 3. In turn, this association has transformed into an idea of the glitch as originating from something morally “bad.” The Islamic State would have been a prime target for this sort of representation in Western media, but instead, it has appropriated the glitch as its own. The decapitation videos all begin and end with an effect that imitates a glitching television, accompanied by a distorted buzz. This signifies a broad sense of disruption, and the videos actively denote themselves as such. They also open with clips of foreign, Western leaders taking a stance against the Islamic State before proceeding to the prelude of the execution. The clips of the leaders also contain a glitch effect while the segment of the prisoner and executioner is crystal clear. In juxtaposition, these visual effects simultaneously signify Western leaders as morally “bad” or even “evil” while disassociating the glitch from terrorist organizations. In effect, the Islamic State has aesthetically appropriated and somewhat redefined a signifier that has often denoted terror- ists, against the West.



IS media stands in stark relief of what has come to be expected of terrorist organizations. Low-fidelity images have come to be expected of extremists and non-Western entities alike. Perhaps arising from a capitalist ideology, distrust of low-fidelity or even just poorly designed media is common in the West. Low fidelity images are evidently also anathema to the Islamic State, and it overcompensates by employing sometimes beautiful, often overproduced graphic design. This includes simple 2D animation, more complex 3D modeling, and compositing, or the use of multiple layers to achieve a dynamic, glossy look. Examples are endless in IS media; even a subtitle could be considered basic compositing. Dabiq benefits greatly from composites, partially because it is easier to work with still images, and when done correctly, the technique is often unnoticeable. The composites in Dabiq include upwards of half a dozen individual images resolved into one highly dynamic whole. The composites are far more noticeable in IS videos because they are typically composed of text and simple geometric patterns animated and overlaid on the video. These effects attempt to imitate the aesthetic of contemporary new media but as before, without much concern for motivation. The overuse is not all that uncommon or noticeable, however, except in creating the impression. Though many pieces of IS media are overproduced, this level of production aggressively contradicts the idea of the low fidelity of non-Western, terrorist media. The Islamic State relies on its media receiving attention and that media projecting legitimacy. This overproduction achieves both ends by drawing attention to the now broken stereotype of terrorists as lo-fi and demonstrating legitimacy by actively creating and manipulating aesthetic sensibilities, an unmistakable signifier of affluence and power.



***



The prevalent Western media reaction of being surprised and impressed with Islamic State media is a natural one. What the Islamic State achieves with mass media is a new phenomenon in propaganda, distribution, and even production itself. Though the model for media production and distribution has been evolving particularly rapidly for the past decade, IS media represents a massive disruption and paradigm shift, not in any one sense, but taken as a whole. However, rehashing a discourse of “wow” without progressing it any further is irresponsible and morally lazy at best, if not bankrupt—not because that discourse is fueling the propaganda machine and not because that is precisely what “they want.” It may very well be fueling the propaganda machine insofar as any awareness of the Islamic State fuels the propaganda machine. Individuals who might be receptive will likely seek it out to some degree anyway. It is morally treacherous if the credit given to the Islamic State comes from a pretentious place, and based on popular journalism on IS media, it almost certainly does. Under the guise of credit, this traditional discourse propagates the idea of the enemy as not only powerless to write media, but also as savage, barbaric, and unable to even engage in aesthetic conversation, much less control it.



Plenty of the Islamic State’s activity can be identified as universally heinous,VIII but heinous activity does not necessarily make a barbarian. The creators of IS media are real people with high degrees of visual literacy and aesthetic and design sensibility. The forceful realization of this fact is one source of the shock. For millennia, nations have been able to get away with characterizing their enemies as evil and barbaric, but the ever expanding accessibility to the infrastructure of image manipulation and mass communication is finally dismantling this strategy for good. But the other, deeper shock, which can shake to the very core, is the depiction of horrifying, nonfiction content in an arguably beautiful and explicitly aesthetic object. If this is not apparent from the gut-wrenching anxiety that accompanies the viewing of a real execution in high definition, then it can be viewed in the countless forums that comb through IS media, attempting to find the tiniest shred of evidence that the more horrific content is “faked.” The forum lurkers are so convinced that it must actually be fictional. It simply cannot be real. Because—good things are supposed to be made by good people. Well, not anymore.



 



 



I. Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. In June of 2014, the group, which has gone through many self-styled identities, rebranded to simply the “Islamic State” at the establishment of the caliphate.



II. The majority of which can be found at Aaron Y. Zelin’s blog, “jihadology.net”



III. He goes on to explain the efficacy of the media halo as all-encompassing because, “people are subservient to it not only through fear, but also through love because it spreads freedom, justice, equality among humanity, and various other slogans.”



IV. “In addition to their own experience, the Islamic State’s leaders are eclectically drawing on extensive Arabic literature on global jihad- ist theory of guerrilla war, politics and governance, such as the writings of Abu Bakr Naji and Abu Mus’ab al-Suri.”20?



V. The Islamic State’s approach to countering the Western media halo is significantly different from that prescribed in The Management of Savagery. While Naji recommends exhaustion and confrontation of the enemy, the Islamic State achieves similar ends through direct violence to Western citizens and a narrative of IS perseverance in the face of airstrikes, rendering the image of the West impotent. Refer to “Inside Halab,” narrated by John Cantlie.



VI The best example of modern propaganda might be the Bush administration’s use of “free speech zones,” which controlled where dissenters could protest in the President’s public appearances. By placing these out of view of the cameras, the images propagated by the media depict the full consent of the American people and the uncontested power of the President.29



VII This, in turn, could help explain the sparsity of information regarding its media production model.



VIII Even among diehard Islamic State Twitter fanboys, there appears to be a degree of disapproval at some of the Islamic State’s action, especially regarding reports of rape.



 



 



 



1. Olivia Becker, “ISIS Has a Really Slick and Sophisticated Media Department,” Vice News, July 12, 2014, https://news.vice. com/article/isis-has-a-really-slick-and-sophisticated-media-de- partment.



2. Steven Corman & Jill Schiefelbein, “Communication and Media Strategy in the Jihadi War of Ideas” (Report #0601 to the Consortium for Strategic Communication, Arizona State Uni- versity, April 20, 2006).



3. Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” The Atlantic, March, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis- really-wants/384980/.



4. Gina Ligon et al., “The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant: Branding, Leadership Culture and Lethal Attraction” (Report to the Office of university Programs, Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, START, University of Maryland, November, 2014).



5. Michael Weiss & Hassan Hassan, Isis: Inside the Army of Terror (New York: Regan Arts, 2015), Chapter 11.



6. “The Islamic State’s (ISIS, ISIL) Magazine,” The Clarion Project, September 10, 2014, http://www.clarionproject.org/news/islamic-state-isis-isil-propaganda-magazine-dabiq.



7. Alex Bilger, “ISIS Annual Reports Reveal a Metrics-Driven Military Command,” Institute for the Study of War, May 22, 2014, http://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/ISWBackgrounder\_ISIS\_Annual\_Reports\_0.pdf.



8. Azmat Khan, “What ISIL’s English-language propaganda tells us about its goals,” Al Jazeera, June 20, 2014, http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/articles/2014/6/19/how-isil-is-remakingitsbrandontheinternet.html.



9. Ibid.



10. Sam Biddle, “How ISIS Makes Its Blood Sausage,” Gawker, February 6, 2015, http://gawker.com/how-isis-makes-its-blood-sausage-1683769387.



11. Ibid. 12. Ibid.



13. Michael Weiss & Hassan Hassan, Isis: Inside the Army of Terror, Chapter 11.



14. J.M. Berger & Jonathon Morgan, “The ISIS Twitter Census” The Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, No. 20, (March 2015): 9.



15. J.M. Berger, “How ISIS Games Twitter,” The Atlantic, June 16, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/ isis-iraq-twitter-social-media-strategy/372856/.



16. Ibid.



17. Paul Fucito, “Al-Qaeda’s Media Strategies,” (George Washington University, 2006).



18. Jay Caspian Kang, “ISIS’s Call of Duty,” The New Yorker, September 18, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/isis-video-game.



19. Steven Corman & Jill Schiefelbein, “Communication and Media Strategy,” 3.



20. Michael Ryan, “What Islamic State’s New Magazine Tells Us...,” The Jamestown Foundation, August 1, 2014, http:// www.jamestown.org/programs/tm/single/?tx\_ttnews%5Btt\_ news%5D=42702#.VVFIadpVhBc.



21. Aaron Y. Zelin, “The Islamic State’s Model,” The Washington Post, January 28, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/ wp/2015/01/28/the-islamic-states-model/.



22. “Brits abroad: UK citizens abroad joining the Islamic State Group,” Channel 4 News, April 20, 2015, http://www.channel4.com/news/brits-abroad-uk-citizens-jour- neying-into-the-islamic-state.



23. Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” The Atlantic.



24. Sean Heuston, “Weapons of Mass Instruction: Terrorism, Propaganda Film, Politics, and Us,” Studies in Popular Culture, Vol. 27, No. 3, 2005: 59. 



25. Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? (New York: Cassell, 1999), 239-240.



26. Sean Heuston, “Weapons of Mass Instruction,” 60. 27. Ibid, 61.?28. Ibid, 60.?29. Ibid, 66-67.



30. Ibid, 60.



31. Steven Corman, Angela Trethewey, & H.L. Goodall, Jr., “A New Communication Model for the 21st Century: From Simplistic Influence to Pragmatic Complexity,” in Weapons of Mass Persuasion (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2008), 152-154.



32. Ibid, 156. 33. Ibid, 152.



34. Scott Shane & Ben Hubbard, “ISIS Displaying a Deft Command of Varied Media,” New York Times, August 30, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/world/middleeast/isis-dis- playing-a-deft-command-of-varied-media.html?\_r=0.



35. Michael Weiss & Hassan Hassan, Isis: Inside the Army of Terror, Chapter 11.



36. Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, ed. Stephen Heath (Great Britain: Fontana Press, 1977), 147.



37. “Allah’s Messenger,” Dabiq, Issue 2, 18-19.



38. John Cantlie, “The Real Story Behind My Videos,” Dabiq, Issue 4, 52.



39. Steven Corman, Angela Trethewey, & H.L. Goodall, Jr., “A New Communication Model for the 21st Century,” 152-154.



40. Sam Biddle, “How ISIS Makes Its Blood Sausage,” Gawker.



41. Marshall Sella, “How ISIS Went Viral,” Medium - Matter, October 19, 2014, https://medium.com/matter/the-making-of-the-worlds-most-ef- fective-terrorist-brand-92620f91bc9d.



 

At the age of thirteen, I went to my first concert. It was performed at the Qwest Center in Omaha, Nebraska by Gwen Stefani—Gwen, the modern blonde bombshell, fashion maven, and self-declared American ambassador of all things Harajuku. The performance was part of her Sweet Escape Tour. She slid up and down the stage, platinum hair set unwavering on top of her head, accompanied by four dollish Asian women who mouthed lyrics, fluttered hands, swayed their asses to the beat of “Wind It Up.” My then-best friend, who had invited me to the concert, waved her renegade camera in the air (no smartphones yet in 2007). To sneak it past security she’d hidden it in an empty tampon box. Her younger brother, forced upon us by her mother, fell asleep in the row in front of us.



For the next few months, I would listen to Gwen’s “Hollaback Girl” on repeat on my MP3 player, lying on top of the cool sheets in my parent’s bedroom. It was July, but their windows faced west, so in the late afternoons the room was always cool and dark, permeated by that kind of woozy clarified shadow which filters through Venetian blinds. Sometimes, my friend and I would sit, bare-kneed on the hot cement in her backyard or mine, and we would look up pictures of how to tease our coarse black hair into perfect ringlets. It was the summer after seventh grade. She was more popular than I was, and she always wanted to make me over by painting my nails, as if a different color were the secret to a second skin.



The highlight of that summer was when she received, as a birthday present, a set of Harajuku Lovers fragrances, including bobble-headed bottles of Love, Angel, Music, Baby, and Gwen herself wearing plastic Marilyn Monroe hair and a so kawaii outfit. For those who don’t know, Love is the pretty one, Angel is the sporty one, Music is the artsy one, and Baby is the cool one. Gwen is the leader of their posse. In commercials and music videos, she stands in front; their images are encompassed by hers. In the bathroom, my friend would choose one of the Girls, perform a temporary decapitation (the spray nozzle was underneath the bobble head), spray her wrist and necks, and set the little bottle on the counter, where it would sit smiling among its sisters. I would imagine that the little perfume figurines had travelled all the way from their native land: Tokyo’s Harajuku fashion district, an expanse spreading from Harajuku Station to Omotesando, where, according to legend, otakus roamed freely in their dark makeup, Lolita dresses, and almost-perfect curls.



And then I would be so bored, in my hot midwestern summer with my nails painted a sparkly pink, quickly chipping as I dragged them back and forth over concrete sidewalks. I wondered how Gwen’s Harajuku Girls got to be so beautiful—and they were beautiful, though always silent. Only Gwen ever sang, or spoke. The Girls only meowed, sometimes, dressed in cat costumes with black whiskers streaked on their porcelain faces, in the music videos or under bright concert lights, their red-red-lips barely moving save to replicate that cattish “O”. A round spot of blush on both cheeks, a cultivated body, a patch of red on the lips—was that really all it took?



As if in answer, an emphatic “No” comes from Harajuku district, in the 2000s dominated by Japanese street fashion. In the first years of the millennium, a movement gains momentum called Decora, which takes accessorizing far beyond even the standard set by Gwen and posse. In Decora, beauty is found in excess. A Google image search produces pictures of Decora girls—and boys—wearing colorful wigs, long socks, a medley of layers, and ring upon necklace upon bracelet upon ring. In a documentary, a Decora girl says she takes two hours to put on her outfit before heading out to walk the streets with a group of similarly-dressed friends. Some cover their mouths with faux medical masks, as if guarding against a disease of plainness, the dull life of a salaryman or woman.



A secret: There is no such thing as a single Harajuku Girl. She is a block of city by the train station, she is fantasy, she is pure Gwen creation. In the Harajuku district, if you take a walk around the block, the women are mostly civilians. The humdrum crowd is occasionally interrupted by a variety of mostly young people, teenagers, pimpled and sweating under a vast array of subculture styles, wearing gothic Lolita dresses, or covered in pastel amulets, or smelling faintly of hairspray. They are not all alike. They are not all beautiful.



***



I couldn’t quite tell the Girls apart when they were onstage. Their outfits were different, each one embroidered with her name—Love, Angel, Music, Baby—but their makeup was the same. Perhaps they were intentionally cast that way, but I couldn’t tell them apart however I tilted my head. Gwen calls their identity a ping-pong match of culture, America bouncing back the best of couture Japonais. The Girls don’t speak in public, by contract. They hover around Gwen like four silent familiars or human Decora accessories. I wonder if they all use their own perfumes, beheading and recapping their tiny selves each day.



But perhaps Gwen is right, and cultural back-and-forth is an accurate description. A slice from the Japanese side of the table: One of Japan’s most popular pop phenomenons, a girl group called Morning Musume, will turn seventeen this year. Fear not, the group members never become old. Membership is renewed as older performers “graduate” and fresh girls move up the ranks. The group has become a veritable institution, a nation in and of itself, fueled and fed by fans ranging from preteen girls to adult men. This year marks the twelfth generation of performers. The girls grow up together, perform together, and promote themselves together.



Morning Musume’s mastermind is a bleached blond man-child who goes by the name “Tsunku.” In photos, his face is surgically smooth, and he’s usually surrounded by his girls, who pout and make victory signs with their hands. Until the early 2000s, Tsunku headed his own band, a Japanese rock group called Sharam Q. Nowadays, he commands the Hello! Project, a vast network of interchangeable girl groups of which Morning Musume is but the flagship. Hello! Project has a performer for every taste. The name of the groups sound like space cadet units in some alternate universe, where fruit and dessert names are bubbled with sexual references: Pocky Girls, Shugo Chara Egg!, Coconuts Musume, etcetera. One popular group, Minimoni, auditions performers with the caveat that their height must be under four feet eleven inches.



Members are moved from group to group as the need arises and as their ages change, but over the entire empire presides the constant and omnipotent Tsunku. No matter the group, Tsunku designs the costumes, writes the songs, determines the makeup, and choreographs the dances. No matter the group, the girls are expected to remain virginal, at least in public. In 2007, the same year as Gwen’s Sweet Escape tour, group member Yaguchi Mari (Morning Musume, founder of Minimoni) was caught in a relationship with a member of a boy band. She was eventually ejected from Hello! Project. Despite their enforced purity, the girls are each expected to publish swimsuit photo books for their fans, the sales of which are so popular that they require their own charts.



Tsunku says his role is benevolent. He has said that his girls are so busy with their performing lives, that they don’t have time to experience the normal emotions of adolescence—so he recreates those emotions for them in the lyrics, the thoughts of a teenage girl written by a middle-aged man. A typical Musume music video involves choreographed group dance with kawaii hand gestures, elaborate baby-doll dresses, simple upbeat lyrics, and plenty of computer-generated sparkles. The singing is nearly purely choral. Everyone opens their mouths at the same time, and even if one voice is singing, it comes as an overlay as the performers strike poses and smile into the camera. Like the performers themselves, the songs resist time. A section of 1997’s “Morning Coffee” could be transplanted into 2014’s “What is Love” with little notice from fans.



Tsunku’s imaginings must strike some marketable chord. Morning Musume has sold about 18 million album copies in Japan alone. The American market, however, has proven harder to crack. Morning Musume’s second ever concert in the States was held at the Best Buy Theater in New York on October 2014—a single 4 p.m. show on a Sunday, it was hardly a knockout event. Perhaps American audiences are uncomfortable with the power dynamics and sexual politics governing the group members. More likely, though, the ultra-cute aesthetic and ultra-synchronization, not even translated from Japanese language, had not quite found their place in the American pop lexicon.



This miscommunication has forced American audiences to depend on the cultural translation of performers such as Gwen Stefani. Like Tsunku, she becomes the intermediary between reality and representation. The lyrics to her song “Harajuku Girls” are easy to understand:



 



You’re looking so distinctive like D.N.A.,



?Like nothing I’ve ever seen in the U.S.A.?



Your underground culture, visual grammar?



The language of your clothing is something to encounter



A Ping-Pong match between eastern and western



Did you see your inspiration in my latest collection?



Just wait ‘til you get your little hands on L.A.M.B.



’Cause it’s super kawaii, that means super cute in Japanese.?



The streets of Harajuku are your catwalk, bishoujo you’re so vogue.



 



But what exactly is she translating? Does she draw upon the aesthetics of Morning Musume or the titular Harajuku district? If so, are the girls of the real Harajuku district mimicking a mass produced pop culture, or are they subverting it through excess? Japan is silent on the matter; few people in the country are fans of Gwen. Like Morning Musume’s lackluster appearance in the States, Gwen’s Japanese platform never quite took off.



None of these thoughts came into my mind in the summer of 2007, as I lay on the cool sheets, mouthing the words to “Hollaback Girl.” In the music video, Gwen and the group perform “American High School” the way pop culture imagines it to be. Like Tsunku, Gwen dresses her girls in school uniform, albeit in short cheerleader skirts instead of sailor suits. They prance their way through the traditional high school type spectrum, from punk girls to jocks to band geeks, though, in this high school, everyone is inexpressibly cool. My thirteen-year-old self would have wanted to be a part of her posse, even if I’d have to remain (contractually) silent.



The Harajuku Girls have dispersed now, gone their own ways. Their real names are Maya Chino, Jennifer Kita, Rino Nakasone-Razalan, and Mayuko Kitayama. Maya lives in Los Angeles and teaches at a dance academy, Jennifer performs in hip-hop companies, Rino is now a choreographer, and Mayuko was a backup dancer for Britney Spears’ Onyx Hotel tour—after that her internet trail is lost. In memory, Gwen’s girls are as virginal as Tsunku’s. They never had a life, save that brief one lived as silent priestesses at the altar of pop rock.



Two years after the concert, my friend is working at a local ice cream store, when she swears Gwen Stefani walks in the door and orders a chocolate sundae. She wore sunglasses and sweats, but she had her trademark hair and signed her name on the receipt “G. Stef.” I don’t believe her, because of the unlikelihood of Gwen Stefani visiting a Coldstone Creamery in a Nebraskan strip mall, but it’s a pleasant fantasy.



***



There is an antiquated philosophical concept that regards the movement of the celestial bodies—planets, sun, and moon—as the movement of glass spheres. When ancient astronomers looked to the arc of these bodies across the sky, it must indeed have seemed like they were attached to invisible surfaces in the sky. The concept explains that as these glass spheres move, they rub against each other and emit harmonics: musica universalis, the music of the spheres. This music is imperceptible to human ears, but it resonates under all of nature. For the Pythagoreans, followers of Pythagoras in the 5th century B.C, mathematical patterns governed the music of the spheres and, in turn, mortal harmonics and rhythms.



The 2014 Morning Musume song “Beyond Space and Time” takes a very literal interpretation of this astronomical concept. The music video begins with the girls, dressed in gauzy blue dresses, pretending to play invisible instruments. It pans out to reveal a galactic background, filled with floating chrome spheres and a rotating vortex of stars. The girls dance with mathematical precision. They form a line and arc their arms in perfect succession. The lyrics go:



 



By the time we are united



Beyond the time and space



I wonder if this planet?



Will be purified.



 



Gwen never released any outer-space-themed songs. That mantle was taken up by another bleach blonde and fellow Japanophile by the name of Lady Gaga, whose given first name, coincidentally, is Stefani (the two could be twins) and who became the next big thing with the release of her 2008 album The Fame. By that time, I had graduated from my first concert to awkward eighth grades dances, almost always tuned to the beat of “Poker Face” and “Just Dance.” In the big gym decorated with fairy lights, my classmates and I would sway in circles facing each other, staring from face to sweaty face, uncertain in our femininity, if that was even the right word. Eventually, the more bold among us would pair up and drift into the interior circle (where the chaperones couldn’t do a thing), enacting a carnal ritual which Morning Musume’s cheery choreography never reveals, though it pulses under the surface.



Five years later, Lady Gaga released her third studio album, Artpops. The cover, designed by artist Jeff Koons of balloon animal fame, features Gaga with a shiny blue sphere wedged between her legs, surrounded by fragments of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Gaga promoted the album as a cross between pop culture and high culture, an elevation of her music and a catapulting of her body into the realm of art.



By comparative metrics, Artpops flopped, with first week sales at less than a third of Born This Way’s. Critical opinion on the album is divided; some call it over-the-top and euphoric, while others find it relentless and exhausting.



While Artpops’ sales chart followed a downward trend, Gwen Stefani updated her Harajuku Lovers fragrance collection, giving it a new look and a new name: Pop Electric. The perfume bottles are the same bobble-headed figures of Love, Angel, Music, and Baby, but with what she calls a modernized design. In a 2014 interview with the Home Shopping Network, Gwen officially lexiconized “artpop” by using the word to describe her collection. This prompted an ecstatic tweet from Gaga: “I love you even more Gwen Stefani. Thank you for using ARTPOP as an adjective. It made me smile #ARTPOP.” The collection’s sales description reads, “Harajuku Lovers Pop Electric are inspired by modern street murals and sculpture, looking like they were formed in simple vinyl, dipped in molten, lustrous color scheme, then frozen in time as the metal drips over the doll’s body.” A full set sells for $200, retail. The scent of each perfume is still tailored to each Harajuku Girl, as if a perfume could capture the essence of a person.



But maybe all this is crying wolf. It’s been a decade, and Gwen regrets nothing about the Harajuku Girls. Maybe the Girls don’t have any regrets, either. For all I know, they could be making a killing on their former names; Gwen’s clothing line, L.A.M.B (Love, Angel, Music, Baby) can still be found on the occasional preteen at the shopping mall. And Lady Gaga, unlike Gwen, has succeeded in becoming popular in Japan. In 2013, wearing anime eye makeup and a bow bigger than her head, she participated in and won a kawaii-contest on Japanese television—defeating Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Japan’s current Decora queen bee. Maybe cultural translation has become easier since Gwen’s heyday in the summer of 2007. Maybe they’re doing the world a service. How many, like me, have listened to their music in the late afternoon, watching dust motes dancing in the light, imagining planets singing in their perpetual motion?



As for the immortal Tsunku: On April 4, 2015, he was invited onstage for the entrance ceremony at Kinki University, his alma mater. The new students were expecting him to sing some hit songs from Sharam Q. Instead he stood there for nearly a minute, saying not a word. Then a big monitor displayed a message: “I’ve chosen to live by throwing away my voice, the thing I had treasured most,” it read, “Regret would have no meaning. I will go forward from now on.” Tsunku’s vocal cords had been removed due to laryngeal cancer. While the audience looked on, he blinked under the blue stage lights, a tear shed or two, shy, smiling, silent.



Despite this setback, Kinki University was treated to a performance after all. When the message ended, Tsunku strummed a guitar, and his girls sang for him.



 

Like all great genesis stories, this one begins with words.



My brother Ben and I were in the backyard, ages three and seven respectively, replaying the usual game of “restaurant.” Our kitchen was stocked with pebbled meat paste and stoney buns, our dining room an avant-garde array of Wiffle Balls and hula-hoops. Business was booming, and so was boredom. A plot twist was in order.



A customer, conveniently imagined by my brother, complained of rocks in her food; just like that, Ben and I were freed from the tedium of fry cookery. We scanned the verdant plane in front of us: pinking dogwood tree on the left, weathered play structure to the right...slide, ladder, swings. Swings. With a whim, those flappy yellow cradles turned to gliders: precious points of access to thinner air, means of purging our impatient energy.



Yet even flight could not satisfy for long.



“The controls are going out!” I screamed, tugging the ropes of my swing to shake its wooden frame. Taking my cue, Ben began to keen: “We’re crashing, we’re crashing!” We tumbled from the cloudy apex of our paired arcs, pitching and reeling into what would become the defining adventure of our twinned childhoods.



Noses and piggy toes buried in grass, we lay quite still.



“Where are we?” Ben peered at me, a dun colored baby bird dressed in athletic shorts. His baseball head, smooth and round, featured keen blue eyes. Normally sharp, the eyes were further whetted to a point, honed by all of the anticipation that a big sister can foster in her little brother.



The answer came quickly.?“We’re in Greshema, John.” Ah, there it was. A new game and a new word. Let there be light. Anticipatory, I scuttled across the grass, knelt into the shrubs, and let Ben hold his peanut butter breath.



From the lavender bush, my brother watched as an unfamiliar character emerged. I spread my plumped little calves, crossed my arms, crinkled my brow and beamed a smile. Now I was what I knew a man to be: a kneaded conception of fathers, grandfathers, chapter book heroes, and newscasters.



“Hello,” said the unknown Gresheman. His timbre was an eight-year-old treble, maneuvered into an unconvincing lower octave.



“I’m Kollini.”



 



Immediately after our introduction, Kollini (playacted by me) baptized Ben and I with new names: Yonder and Sora. Miniature husband and wife, Ben and I were Yonder and Sora in the two different backyards of our two different houses. First, we lived in the play fort, later, in a different, roomier play fort, and finally on taut trampoline blackness. Greshema was a fluid place, unconcerned with logistical technicalities. Redrawing borders to accommodate new school zones was never an issue.



Kollini was, of course, ever present. In our first backyard, he lived atop a large decorative boulder; in our second, he upgraded to the under-the-deck suite. He definitely had dreadlocks, rarely wore a shirt, loved to roast red meat, and was a philosopher-musician. He had a jolly voice, probably inspired by the stylings of Tigger.?Kollini, our dearest friend in Greshema, was simply one character of many. With a cast of almost two dozen personalities, Greshema was a well-populated land that packaged itself into neatly monogamous relationships. Yonder and Sora, Kollini and Gina, Saka and Shing Ying, and Shakayao and Preña all made their homes in various corners of the backyard, settled between branches and tucked inside of shrubbery. Not everyone in Greshema was married. After all, Ben and I knew some single people, so any projected world had to incorporate a few. Old Woman, a wise storyteller, made soap from sundry flowerbox herbs. Coach, a bachelor who lived in the arborvitae, was the local cheerleader. He coordinated all of the festivals, sporting events, concerts, and circuses that constituted a holistic Gresheman life. Yonder wasn’t so fond of Shinee, a frizzy haired ginger who sometimes sprung from the gardenias. Her desperate crush on him, a passion she expressed by jumping on his back and tugging at his hair, infuriated little Yonder. Shinee came out when I wanted an excuse to bother.



In spite of this vast congregation of faces and plots, an outsider observing Greshema in motion would see only two people, not twenty. This was no game for friends and next-door neighbors. There was too much history to cover, immense sanctity attached to the convoluted names and politics that a stranger was sure to get wrong. The shortage of children in our immediate family complicated Greshema’s demand for multiple personalities. Ultimately, the solution was a simple and bossy one. Ben would play Yonder, and I would play everyone else. As such, Yonder lived in a world completely outside of his control. A mind four years more developed than his, well versed in historical fiction novels and the tropes of children’s fantasy, spun him up in mythic candy floss: in exaltation and conflict, surprise illnesses and miraculous healings, storybook trials and perfect redemptions. Through it all, Yonder’s best friend was Kollini. Ben’s best friend was me.



 



Greshema was a moveable feast of storyline; the game could thrive anywhere. When Ben and I were at our cabin, clambering over boulders and between thin trees, sucking at the spiced Cascadian air, then Yonder and Sora were in Australia, visiting dear friends Batman and Batgirl. When Ben and I were at the beach, Yonder and Sora stayed with a quiet scholar friend, Tom (the appropriated name of our grandfather), and his wife Cecelia. Grandma’s house was Asia, where Buzz Lightyear (who happened to be Yonder’s cousin) and his wife made their home under a willow tree. The logic of these distinctions always made complete sense. Continents of the adult world calmly submitted themselves to the continents of ours.



Traveling the globe in Mom’s minivan, Ben and I would bicker. I would sit with a stack of chapter books, reading them as if the task were salaried. Ben would arch a finger and poke my shoulder repeatedly until I slapped him away. In response, he would attempt to steal my share of the bagged snacks. Once home, I would tease him relentlessly or abandon him for some melodramatic journaling. Ben would retaliate by sneaking into the piano room and giggling at my mistakes. He liked to pinch my legs with all five fingers. One time, I kicked him below the belt.



Yet while a significant part of our day-to-day relationship was defined by clash, our games (Greshema chiefly, but others too) were escapes from the grind of siblinghood. In our makeshift spa, I made Ben over with hair gel and various flavors of chapstick. The two of us went “camping” with our plastic baby dolls. We played stuffed animals and Pooh Bear Lego construction site, “school” and “hospital” and “art gallery” and “circus.” We ran our own business called Office Co. Each Christmas morning, we woke unnaturally early and lay on our backs like mummies, deliberating over what Santa’s gifts might be. We wrote puppet shows. We created elaborate brackets for racing Hot Wheels and rubrics for trading Halloween candy. Imagination was our saving grace. It mined away hot, disparate layers of age and gender, exposing the cool and bedrock affection beneath.



 



Every proper game needs a villain; Greshema had several. Piggy and Mrs. Piggy Poops, along with their accomplices, Moosey and Mrs. Moosey Van Moosey, were the supreme mischief-makers in Greshema. They vandalized Yonder’s house with ashy paint, poisoned his food stores, and kidnaped his pets. Piggy and Moosey spoke in high raspy voices, moved in sporadic twitches. Their titles were their only endearing traits. Although Yonder was infuriated by Piggy Poops’ shenanigans, one mention



of the swine’s full name would dissolve the hero into giggles.



Conflict was essential to the flow of our game, and Piggy and Moosey reflected the largest injustices Ben and I ever faced: classmates that didn’t share the scissors or smushed precious clay projects, parental chastisement, cookies we stole from each other. Generally, though, Greshema was a serene land, just as ours was. Its constitution, bound in stapled orange construction paper and decorated with a silver paint pen, outlawed wars and money. Everyone had someone to love. Everyone had a bush to shelter under. No one was mentally ill. Nobody aged, and nobody died.



 



Two and a half years ago, Ben and I stood on the outskirts of Asia (our grandmother’s backyard), ages fourteen and eighteen respectively. We surveyed Buzz Lightyear’s old stomping grounds with trepidation. This part of our game, Grandma’s realm of berry picking and frogs in the hot tub, had denatured itself. The lake with ducks did not delight. The wispy cat, wandering around the edges of the patio, skulked with head down.



As Kollini and Yonder, we caught fish with our bare hands, pulling the silvery figments from chalky rivers of bark dust. We served as delegates at global leader King Continent’s terrifying meetings, fighting for the sovereignty of a suburban backyard. We wrote songs at harvest time, facing the chilling possibilities of starvation before heading inside for Mom’s pasta with sausage. When Piggy tried to fool us by putting on a disguise, impersonating one or the other of us to try and spark a fight, we could always tell that it was him. Piggy was a good actor, but Yonder and Kollini knew each other as only the dearest of pals can.



Now though, Kollini and Yonder seemed distant, treasures interred in a safe, combination forgotten. Now we were plain old Kate and Ben, no longer muscled and dirt-smudged, drained of omnipotence and tidy endings. Frightened, we watched as our mother and her brother embarked on another distinctly sibling adventure, off to uncharted lands. We knew that this journey was in store for us, too, and we felt utterly unprepared. Mom and Uncle Gregg were laying their mother to rest.



Ben looked at me. A masculine chin was scooping the baby fat from his cheeks, cheeks six feet up and brushed with acne. The clean, sweet blue eyes, though—those were the same perpetual gems of my little brother.?



“Do you realize that we’re going to have to do this someday?” he asked me.



?“Don’t say that, Ben,” I said.?



Yonder trusted his sister and friend to make things right. I, Kate, helped Ben with math homework. When we were played cooking show, I, Kate, made him frozen waffle sandwiches. Later, I read him bedtime stories. In Greshema, I, Coach, gave Yonder the gold medal at the karate contest. I, Sora, I forgave Yonder for carousing with Kollini.



I gave him waffles, stories, and answers, and I tried to make them nice ones. Yet now the adventure was cruel. Greshema was inaccessible by boat, plane, or train, and I was as lost as the brother I had always tried to lead.



 



The last time Ben and I saw Kollini in the flesh was before our final move. Now, at seventeen and twenty-one, Ben and I have never tried to pencil Greshema’s landscape onto our new yard. It has no fence. We are too big to crawl under the trampoline to sort our foodstuffs for winter. The impetus behind 95% of the characters lives in another state, procuring a Bachelor’s Degree. We’re older.



He’s no longer corporeal, and he doesn’t like to play, but Kollini hasn’t abandoned us quite yet. When he reveals himself, occasionally, it is not in Greshema, but in lengthy letters, or over brunch tables, or in the contours of frozen yogurt. He taps the wires of phone conversations Ben and I share, listening to talk of girlfriends and high school and the complicated quest for faith. At my Grandma Nette’s funeral, Ben and I clasped our hands on a lighter, illuminating a purple candle of remembrance. Kollini was one of the mourners.



Sometimes I feel like Kollini’s going to disappear someday, that Ben and I will find ourselves abandoned. When I don’t call or text enough, or when I consider never moving back home, or when I simply don’t go home for months and months, I hope he doesn’t give up on me, on either of us. I hope he grows up, too.



 



Every childhood winter, without fail, Greshema’s lawn grew crispy with frost and the trampoline veiled itself in rain. Mom would require a few months of indoor revelry, laced with art projects and Mario Kart races and blanket forts, and we would comply. Greshema was still there, of course. There was something about the characters that could only exist outdoors, in the backyard, where the housecat tigers and lapdog wolf roamed free.



Each spring, the reunion was sweet. On Oregon’s first warm day (sometimes the second but never too late) Kollini emerged from under the deck. Immediately, he would begin to scribble a list of plans: “Let’s hunt, let’s fish, let’s run a race, let’s exercise, let’s play with the Gresheman wolf, let’s have band practice!”



Band was one of Greshema’s most joyous pastimes. Yonder was the dancer. He had center stage to perform his leaps and twirls, but there was really no competition. The star of the show was always Kollini.



Kollini played the two sticks. A traditional Gresheman instrument, the two sticks were a pair of shiny plastic baseball bats, one black, one yellow, one clenched firmly in each hand. They were tapped together in syncopated rhythms, swung about in the air like flags, accompanied by Kollini’s lyrical voice. He played songs like “The Fish” and “The Tiger.” “The Finale” was a perpetual crowd pleaser.?



The two sticks were joyous, mirthful, entirely senseless. As Kollini played them, Yonder danced in glee, tracing spirals around his blood brother. Neighboring houses heard the shrill melodies and incessant banging with annoyance. The rich symphonic chords did not ring for them; they could not feel the pulses of fraternal ritual.



When our own house inevitably announced dinner, emitting tasty scents and Mom’s exasperated voice, Ben and I peeled off our Gresheman names with regret, probably fighting about when we would put them on again. After one of those summers, we never would. Our hours in the game would pass away.



As Ben and I dashed from yard to house for chicken and dumplings, as we said goodbye at a dormitory door, as we gain educations and in-laws and paychecks and the salty loves and losses of age, the thwack of the two sticks endures, envelops.



Our hearts keep time to the beat of our world, and our friend Kollini hums along.



 

Where does Marcia from Minnetonka go at night? Who’s the lucky man?

Mindy and I say things under the jasmine trellis during lunch break. Where does Yvonne from Iceland smoke? Does Katherine from Texas spend tip dollars on cocaine, or is that a lie good as any? If Talia from Denmark and Mark from Boston are fucking in the swamps, where do they fuck, and how? Does she lie on her back, does he? Who takes the weight, is what I’d like to know.

There are many reasons why you would choose a mail-order bride. The first of which––loneliness––is one that you would not admit to yourself, or at least not without careful repackaging. You’re just so busy; you don’t have time for dating. And the women in the area don’t understandyou. Maybe that’s why you fear them. Although that, too, you would never admit.

Summer is the most languorous season. Boundaries deliquesce and bleed into each other the way the calendar warps, slowing toward the crescendo of heat and gathering speed with crisper weather’s approach. Accordingly, the newly renamed summer issue is an envoy to be savored slowly, stretched between May and September, lounging in extended afternoons until the fireflies come out. Suitable to sinusoidal sun waves and climate-controlled cabins alike, the summer issue travels with you. Like many in the estival months, the issue indulges in self-analysis, trending towards meta-reflections on media, narrative, and representation. Columns offer: an examination of how the cultural reappearance of slavery supplants contemporary issues of race, a polemic on the commodification of women writers, and two cautionary analyses—one of our postmodern addiction to SoulCycle, the other of click-happy social media activism.



The Features Board largely remains cloaked in the innocence of youth, with three pieces that attempt to understand childhood, or rather, the childhoods of each writer as they consider the moments that seem to define them, those waddling ducks in the back of their minds. Only one braves the adult realm, unpacking the media strategies of the Islamic State and their moral and aesthetic implications.



This cycle, the Fiction Board publishes “Congregation” and “Love on the Installment Plan.” The stories have about as close to nothing in common as possible, but the board likes to think that both are seasonally appropriate. “Congregation” describes a summer spent on Cape Cod; it is the kind of sprawling, meditative, first-person narrative that could only unfold during the warm, languid months. “Love on the Installment Plan” tackles the subject of mail-order marriages with playful aplomb—a surprising tone that makes it all the more haunting, touched with an air of midsummer madness.



The art in this issue manipulates space in novel ways, compressing and expanding it into otherworldly landscapes. Interior Courtyard, Guiding Light, and Currents entreat the viewer to traverse their virtual expanses, while I Lived Here, Wave, and Forest permit a few stylized glimpses into distant places. Spatial awareness informs, but does not alone define, the value of these pieces. Adrift in a dimming seascape, peering down a corridor populated with figures of art history, and thrust into the commotion of Beijing, the viewer, too, is incorporated into subterranean narratives.



The poetry this round is a rollicking ride. Preston Craig’s “Preparation ritual” experiments with space and silence. Loose and elusively underspecified, it is a dance step we don’t know the name for. Alice Ju’s “Sestina of the Missile JFK” is obscenely full and full of force. With tremendous syntax and end words that have no business working perfectly in a sestina, she seems to have found a subject fit for her form, or the other way around, or made it so. Read this aloud. Michael M. Weinstein’s work too deserves the adjective, already spoken for, “loose,” or perhaps “loosened,” though it is heavy with grace and a scrupulous, responsible care for words. “Official Happiness”—wry and without histrionics—is about outer space and being alone. “I’m sad I’m not a beast...” is based on “??? ????? ??? ? ?? ?????,” by Aleksandr Vvedenskii (1904–1941), a poet who felt strongly that his words were just right the way they were. The present version, however, is more of an imitation than a faithful rendering. We at the Advocate don’t always publish translations, but when we do, they’re loose—and they’re damn good.



The fall semester promises a website tinkered to maximize readability. But, for now, the Design Board brings us melting psychedelic visions and the Tech Board maintains a dynamic, ever-growing online and social media presence. Look for them on Twitter and in the blogosphere, and, in the meantime, flip this issue’s sticky pages to the thaw of summer precipitation, from cascading monsoons to air conditioner drips or the condensation on an icy beverage.

*After the poem of the same name by Alexander Vvedensky* I’m sad I’m not a beast



asprint down some blue lane



whispering confidences to my



 



       self : let’s wait a little



       we’ll go walk in the woods with you



       to gawk at the paltry leaves



 



I wish I were a star



running seeking that one nest



to drown in – none



could hear that star making creakings



to embolden the silence of fish



 



       I have a complaint



       : I’m not a rug , nor a hydrangea



 



I’m sad I’m not a roof



falling – little by little – in



for whom death is only a moment



wet with rain



 



       I dislike that I’m mortal



       I’m sad I’m inexact



 



I’m sad I’m not a chalice



I hate that I’m not pity



I’m not even a copse



that sheathes itself with leaves



 



       It’s hard to be with the minutes



       Who have wasted me so badly



 



       It’s terribly offensive to me



       That I’m visible currently



 



It’s awful to me that I move



not at all like a worm



The worm rips burrows into



the earth and plants conversations



 



       Earth , where are your works



 



the cold worm says to her



and Earth , disposing of the dead



, keeps quiet



 



       ( she knows it’s not like that )



 



I’m scared I have before me



two identical things



I don’t see how they’re different



how each one lives , independent



 



I’m scared I have before me



two identical things



I don’t see how eager they are



to look like one another



 



       We’re sitting with you , wind



       atop this deathly pebble



 



and here , at the tip of the letter



I put down the word *box*



I set *box* in its place



: its substance is thick dough



 



       I don’t like that I’m mortal



       I’m sad I’m inexact



 



       I still have a complaint



       : I’m not a rug , nor a hydrangea



 



we’ll go walk in the woods with you



to gawk at the paltry leaves . . .



I’m sad that on those leaves



I won’t see the unnoticed words



 



       called : instance , called : immortality



       called : view from the beginning



 



I’m scared I’m not an eagle



I’m sad I’m not a seed



The worm crawls over all



He bears monotony



 



I’m scared that I’m unknown



I’m sorry I’m not flame

The cosmonaut returned to Earth said moonshine



was what he’d missed, and wurst. He described



space: weightlessness feels nice, there is plenty



of candy stuffed in the hatch-flap, et cetera



and the kids think you’re a hero. You distract



yourself with streets named after you, men in stiff-brimmed hats



glinting their teeth and their brass buttons, jangling your hand…



 



those thoughts are off the record. Asleep on the ceiling



of someone’s utopian dream, the poster toddlers warble



encouragements from rosebud mouths: Glory



To Breastmilk, To the Countryside Electrified, To War



Bonds and Corn and the bravery of slow



animals who have no choice. Glory to your mom



and the soldier who opened her like a fat clutch



 



and closed her up again, tenderly



and left for the front before you weaseled your



wet red way out. The pipes of your *Stalinka*



are still leaking sour water from the birthmark spreading



its tea-colored mold across the white. Your life



will be busy and short and in the end you’ll lose



sensation in your legs. Two hundred million friends



will weep as newscasters gasp platitudes



 



in the imperial tongue. The birch trees creak and sway,



creak and sway above the grove where the young



pioneers of tomorrow will carry your corpse



carnations, whistling The Motherland Hears,



The Motherland Knows… Your last thought: Korolyov



patting the pure white fuselage lovingly, grinning,



“The bastards, they’re recording everything.”



 



 



*  Stalinka: the colloquial name for a style of apartment building constructed in the Soviet Union



between roughly 1935 and 1960.



** Korolyov: Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov (1907-1966), lead Soviet rocket engineer and designer



of the Sputnik and Vostok spacecraft in the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Space Race in the 1950s and 60s.

**Preparation ritual:** *You must atlas the vessel before burial. Sweeten* 



                                                                                                *the thread that joins* 



             *the feet to the throat. From the groundwater in the uncontacted soil, draw out tasteless precious metal* 



*that slides through your hands* 



 



blessed Anthony I’m talking to you because I’ve bent myself like this before. And because there is 



                        something sleeping in my throat, 



                        a warmth growing 



 



                                                                    *like butter. Invite this glowing substance into your blood. Let it eat* 



                                                                    *the unlocking muscles, not so different from plant fiber. Let it fill* 



                                                                    *the chips and ridges and reach the cool center* 



 



When I smoke, Anthony, feel it stir. 



When I speak, feel it curl 



 



*of the bone. Braid your hands into the reeds around you *                  



                                               The something burrowing in my blood? His back 



             lit through the window. 



                                     Anthony let me forget let me not 



                                     call his name in the grocery store. 



             *A river will blink back at you. Let that be action too. The river will* 



 



*replace the ribs.* Let me forget the ridges 



of his first teeth. *Watch the pitted sand* 



 



                                                                       *remove itself* 



                                                                                    *from the creases of your palms.*  



                                   It’s raining and our hands are backboned together over the gearshift at a stoplight. It’s  



                                   raining on TV and I’m still waiting. I’m waiting and the weather is failing to comply.  



                                   Anthony, I’m pushed right up against my skin. 



                                                                                                          *Kiss the wrists, thick* 



 



                                                                     *with mud and oil.* Look, 



                                   the repeated image of a consecrated body.  



                                                                     *Look, Anthony,* 



                                               there is nothing left to consecrate. 

You skitter mad,



Jack,



misguided ballistic



with a lazy left eye and your high-pitched



whine of a fuselage dripping



coolant immediately crystalline to leave your flicker-



 



trail in the stratosphere. We watch you flicker



by again across our televisions tonight, nomad-



ic the way we could never be boxing up our palace of refrigerated paint-drips.



Here on the couch we commune with you, Jack,



you blockhead, in thinking there is more than adamantine space garbage in the pitch-



black, and going ballistic



 



among the weird, ancient, stars and ballistic



vibrations of the kinds of true science we flick



through at breakfast, in magazines, trying to figure the evolutionary origin of teeth. Pitch



us another perfect white orb, drive us just mad



enough for the American past-time of jack-



hammering detritus and patenting the feeling like the flotsam-feeders we are, dripping



 



with pride like the crackle-pop of your cassette tape voice box which, yet unfinished, drips



school glue at the slightest oscillation. Perhaps, then, it is for the best that the intercontinental ballistic



missiles went unfired, although they were undeniably shaped like lightning bolts, you genius, jack-



booted thug. One flick



of a switch would have made uranium boom towns of all our vacant lots and cataclysmic mad-



houses for our traveling salesmen pitching



 



themselves asunder, who now, door-to-door, sing slightly off-pitch



and only of you. And so drippily



we venerate the one who, barreling upward, kept us safe, like the one who made



glow-in-the-dark, the one who made stars. And so though the ballistic



reports came back conclusive the thought might have flickered



quietly across the Midwest like the seconds before snow that you would come back, Jack.



 



Jack,



our idiot savior, for whom we flock to where cities fall dark as pitch,



where constellations flicker



most conspiratorial. Come morning, we will read the greatest story ever told on cereal boxes, dripping



milk from our chins because *ballistic*



means moving under the force of gravity only. You skitter mad,



 



Jack, throw us a wink. Drip



us another pitch, plans for a new kind of ballistic



to a new shape of moon, and we will flicker to you, madly.