Arts & Culture

‘A Real Pain’: What It Means to Remember 

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In 2022, Jesse Eisenberg released his directorial debut, When You Finish Saving The World, to mixed reactions from audiences. With A Real Pain, Eisenberg steps into the director’s chair once again. Where When You Finish Saving The World struggled to find its footing, A Real Pain confidently delivers the story of two opposite cousins on a heritage tour of Poland. Since its premiere at Sundance this past January, I’ve been looking forward to seeing how Eisenberg would handle a comedic tone in a film exploring the lasting generational trauma of the Holocaust. With A Real Pain, Eisenberg has definitely found his stride as a writer and director, expertly balancing comedy and melancholy in turn as his characters travel through their grandmother’s homeland and unpack their own past. 

The film centers on David (Jesse Eisenberg), an uptight husband and father, who is often overshadowed by his abrasive yet charismatic cousin, Kieran Culkin’s Benji.

Arts & Culture

The Second Coming of American Folk Music

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In its essence, folk music is music for the people — an art form inextricably intertwined with the soul of a region. Its nature is inherently visual, conjuring vivid imagery with just a single cultural descriptor. Scottish folk music brings to life a kilt, a bagpipe and swelling stretches of bright green land. Chinese folk evokes drums and dragons — loud sounds and bright colors. “American folk music,” on the other hand, brings to mind a banjo-wielding, Appalachian hippie, tall grass, rolling hills and the snowy peaks of remote mountaintops.

Arts & Culture

Exploring Cornell’s MFA in Creative Writing First-Year Reading Series

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At 5 p.m. on Nov. 15, 2024 at Buffalo Street Books in downtown Ithaca, Miklos Mattyasovszky and Sam Samakande of the Cornell MFA in Creative Writing program could be seen reciting their fiction and poetry respectively to an eager group of writing enthusiasts. I was among the crowd of young and old people alike who gathered to listen to these talented writers. I had to trek down from campus on foot but it was absolutely worth it. I sat through the event with ears that devoured every word spoken, every image described and every idea proposed.

Arts & Culture

A Romance Reader’s Guide to High Fantasy

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When J.R.R. Tolkein, often recognized as the Father of High Fantasy, writes “Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger,” in The Fellowship of the Ring, it seems like a piece of advice both Frodo and you yourself should probably follow. So, naturally, I’m going to show you how to do the exact opposite! 

The complex worlds and weirdness of fantasy can indeed be a complicated adventure that confuses and intimidates as much as it intrigues and fascinates, making many readers turn away after taking one look at the brick-like volumes that make up the fantasy section. As someone who frequently switches between romance and fantasy, I know how jarring it can be to jump into high fantasy after reading a cozy love story. Wars between different magical species are pretty far removed from your average small town romance after all. If this sounds like something you struggle with too, then come along.

Arts & Culture

Parallax: The Revival Issue

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Asian Pacific Americans for Action is a campus group dedicated to Asian American activism at Cornell. Since 1972, APAA — formerly known as the Asian American Coalition — has pursued their mission of empowering and advocating for the Asian American students on campus. The organization was integral to the establishment of Cornell’s Asian American Studies Program, just one example of a rich history of meaningful change made on campus. APAA has held teach-ins, screened films and documentaries and collaborated with other minority student groups to continue working toward its goals of activism and justice. Day-to-day and year-to-year, APAA displays a commitment to social justice and fostering change.

Arts & Culture

Marisol Escobar’s Self Portrait: Existence in Modernity

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In late 2023, the largest retrospective of the artist Marisol began its journey at the first of four museums. Marisol (full name: Marisol Escobar) was a French-born Venezuelan artist who is associated with the Pop movement and best known for her larger-than-life wooden sculptures. 

Marisol: A Retrospective is an expansive exploration of Marisol’s artistic eras: her earliest works in sculpture, her height of Pop sculpture, 2-D color pencil drawings, ocean inspired art, costume creation for dance companies, anticolonial solidarity and public monuments. 

In his accompanying essay “You Will Not Catch Me Alive,” artist Alex Da Corte writes: “Two faces have I, one to laugh and one to cry. And for Marisol Escobar, through closed eyes and mouths cast in plaster, one to scream and one to shout and one to pierce the night.” 

Corte’s words are apt: Marisol’s works pierce, present in my mind long after I left the museum. One thing that struck me throughout Marisol: A Retrospective was how sees. Marisol seemed to see in a way that cut right down to the core of an object or action, and she manages to recreate that perspective so transformatively. Perhaps part of this is how sculpture works in general.

Arts & Culture

We Should All Get the Punch Line

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In a social climate that increasingly feels more suffocating than stimulating, humor provides a rare reprieve — a means to engage with societal tensions without the weight of an impending sense of doom. Long a staple of cultural critique, political humor offers a lens to address contentious issues while avoiding the pervasive bleakness that dominates much of today’s conversations. Nonetheless,  as scrutiny seems to tighten its grip on most judgments, one might wonder: Can humor find its place as a form of resistance, or has it simply become a safety valve for a broken system? From the sharp satire of The Onion to the renowned acuity of New Yorker cartoons to the more recent proliferation of meme culture embraced and mobilized by Gen Z, political humor cultivates a fertile, if volatile, space to flesh out political moments in ways that resonate more broadly. However, under the weight of algorithmic echo chambers and deepening political divides, its power to resonate broadly has become few and far between.

Arts & Culture

WILLIAMS | Latasha’s Life

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The country knew Latasha Harlins primarily by the grainy image broadcasted again and again on the courtroom television and on national news networks: a tussle between Latasha and the proprietor of that Los Angeles convenience store in 1991; a harrowing bang when the shopkeeper pulled the trigger of a gun she took from beneath the counter, and fired a deadly shot into the back of Latasha’s head. The proprietor had mistakenly assumed that Latasha intended to steal a carton of orange juice, and shot her after the physical altercation that ensued, after Latasha had placed the orange juice on the counter, and after she began walking away. Though it’s been 33 years since the 15-year-old was killed, Latasha is on my mind; I recently read a chapter from Brenda E. Stevenson’s The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins for my American Studies course, History of the Cops: Racialized Policing in the U.S. Gripped by Stevenson’s recounting of Soon Ja Du’s trial — and the key role that that grainy surveillance video of the shooting played in the proceedings — I stumbled on an altogether different videographic representation of Latasha Harlins — her life, not her death: Sophia Nahli Allison’s A Love Song for Latasha (2020). In the brief documentary film, Allison practices a sort of past and present Afro-futurism that entreats us to imagine how Latasha’s young life might have bloomed. The film is palpable, dreamlike, with images of shoes tossed over telephone wires and Black girls’ gap-toothed smiles, alongside oral histories from Latasha’s cousin, Shinese, and her best friend, Ty.

Arts & Culture

Haruki Murakami and the Uncertain Walls of Our Reality

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Haruki Murakami, household name of Japanese literature, has released yet another masterpiece: The City and Its Uncertain Walls. The City is a reworking of a short story of the same name from 1980, which Murakami makes relatable using his stunning finesse of the magical realism genre. Magical realism is a particularly popular genre that invites the idea that even in the regular places we frequent every day, in the tedium of everyday life, there may be something magical that could occur. At any moment we may be swept away to some unknown place or encounter some magical creatures. Murakami in particular thrives in this genre, taking us from the all to known landscape of modern Tokyo and the sprawling Japanese countryside to the dreary unnamed town where part of the story takes place, and  from the ordinary office workers of the Japanese capital to the magical unicorns of the unnamed city. 

The three-part story follows an unnamed narrator as he navigates through life.