Emma went off to high school this year, and I won’t pretend I haven’t been keeping tabs on her–just a little bit. These things are just so easy to follow these days—the new sophomore boyfriend, the long list of assigned schoolbooks she’s already come to loathe, the stunning array of swear words she’s taken to throwing around.  All this information is at my fingertips, and all thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and the team at Facebook.

It’s convenient, yes, but beginning to prove a bit startling. My own arrival on the Facebook scene was midway through high school; since I was already part of an established circle of friends, I used it only to maintain friendships with those I already knew quite well. The charade of mass meeting-and-greeting online wasn’t a fact of life until I arrived at Brown last fall; thus, it became, in my mind, a “college thing.”

So you can imagine the bewildered sort of astonishment with which I’ve witnessed Emma’s high school existence taking shape online before my very eyes these past few weeks. Just as my class did while college freshmen only last year, fourteen-year-old Emma and her classmates are making and maintaining new friendships with the click of a mouse and growing increasingly attached to the parallel reality of Facebook-land.

It has me reeling just ever so slightly and tormented by questions of how far this can go. Can I expect to one day find myself, age thirty-something, feeding my five-year-old a nice after-school school snack and helping him friend his kindergarten classmates on Facebook? I shudder at the thought.

My own freshman year in high school was the last Facebook-free school year in memory. I made my friends in class and on the cross-country team that year, rode the train to and from school with them, went out to movies and football games with them on the weekends. Phone numbers and screen names were exchanged.  My teammate Jenna taught me how to send my first text.

These days, I look back on that year with something of a heightened attention to physical sensation – as if a winter wind cutting through my sweatshirt at dusk on the back field during practice, the taste of Dunkin’ Donuts hot chocolate on an autumn afternoon before play rehearsal, the sound of a bright blue locker slamming shut with a clunk, were the simple pleasures of a simpler time. Will I look back on freshman year at Brown and remember only the over-bright glow of a computer screen?

I’ve started to wonder, with a small trace of yearning, what a Facebook-free Brunonia might have been like.

And so, via Facebook (what else?), I turned last week to the class of 2008 – Brown’s freshmen in the days when I was a Lauralton Hall freshman, and the class who saw the arrival of Facebook firsthand that year—to find out what’s changed around here since the advent of friending, Facebook, flickering screens, and the internet at-large.

Across the board, sentiment among them is similar: irritation with Facebook’s “stalkerish” nature, a certain toleration for its pitfalls in light of usefulness in event-planning and long-distance contact, a love for complaining about it, and an amused memory of a time when the site was completely new and unknown.

“My impression was that ‘thefacebook’ (as it was then called) was a service provided by Brown itself. This seemed to fit with the whole send-us-your-photo-upon-admission thing,” recalls Brandon Diamond ’08. “Offering an index of student names, contact details, and snapshots made so much sense that it took me as surprise to learn that the school didn’t provide anything nearly as comprehensive as Facebook.”

Everyone I spoke with wanted to talk about the changes that have characterized Facebook itself, which have caused such uproar in recent years. Yeah, yeah, I thought, we all hate the new Facebook. What else is new? But as more and more responses turned up in my inbox, I realized that Diamond—who today is in the process of founding his own social networking site, socialkey.com—has it exactly right when he says, “Facebook solves a different problem today than it did in 2004.”

On a gray Friday afternoon in the bookstore café, Ed Cheung ’08 MD ’12 explains what many of his classmates have told me: that the site’s many changes have transformed it from a tool that fostered face-to-face interaction into one that is beginning to supplant it. During his freshman year, students posted their phone numbers and room numbers to their profiles so that friends could use Facebook to further seek them out. Today, Cheung says, “You just skip that whole step.” As far as event-planning went, he explains, “You would make phone calls!”

Evan Kalish, ’08, explains to me—in a Facebook message—that back then, the site was “a safe place to share your information, particularly because only authentic, real, other anxious Brown students were going to see who you were. Back then, we didn’t shield our profiles from non-friends like most people do today.”

“We also had a ‘Courses’ box – seriously, you input all of your classes and it knew what they were,” he adds. “Your friends could see what you were taking, and you could click to see all your classmates by course. It was beautiful.”

Alexander Dean ’08 remembers, “By far the central purpose of Facebook was to look up the relationship status and sexual orientation of people you were interested in. Now most people don’t even post that stuff, which, for me, defeats most of the point.”

Of today’s Facebook, Cheung says, “Now I hate it” – and all but one of his fellow ’08ers with whom I spoke expressed a similar dissatisfaction. That one exception is David Ellis ’08, who now works for Facebook and sees nothing problematic in the way of life the site has helped to create.

“Abstraction of social life can lead to alienation, and some classmates were addicated to MMORPGs,” Ellis tells me in a Facebook message. “But friends can help by imposing face(-non-book) time IRL.” I wasn’t following, but a quick Wikipedia search turns up some answers. IRL? Ah. Interesting.

In real life.

The Facebook of 2004 brought these Brown students together, by helping them find ways to connect in the real world. Since then, we’ve tolerated each of Facebook’s little changes, but those little changes have added up. These days, the more dangerous Facebook version 2009 is rapidly pushing us apart, to the point that we’re connecting less in the real world—blowing past each other on the street without even saying hello—all because we know we can access each other on Facebook when the need is more pressing and the timing more convenient.In the year 2009, there’s no need to maintain small relationships with kindnesses and cordialities—the site is doing that work for us, and we’re growing all the lazier for it.

My high school class joined Facebook halfway through high school. Thus, we joined as a community already shaped by two years of real -time spent in one another’s presence. The Facebook that Emma will know over the next four years, and the Facebook of my college years, is one which handily relieves its users, faced with new places and unknown people, of the effort required to forge a close community and create an individual identity within it.

“Can I imagine my time at Brown without Facebook existing?” asks Dean. “Easily. I doubt it would have been very different at all.” His classmates express similar confidence that the site, whatever its benefits and whatever its downsides, doesn’t make that much of a difference in the way the real world runs. “Overall, campus culture wasn’t revolutionized, but it likely suffered due to the addictive nature of the beast,” says Rody Tadenev, ’08.

“It’s just different,” agrees Cheung. “And that’s okay, right? Everything changes. Brown is a very dynamic place and always will be.” He laughs. “Brown used to be mostly Republican back in the day!”

“It’s the people that makes Brown,” he adds. “I don’t think the goodness that I found has changed.”

And yet a hint of nostalgia creeps into these former Brunonians’ recollections from time to time.

“To me it’s really sad,” says Tadenev. “And I look back to the Good Ole Days in Hope College, before news feeds, Scrabulous, and Google searchability.”

For my part, I have to agree—and wonder why—if the changes to this site bother us so much, we continue to put up with them, even as they separate us from one another more and more with every passing day. I’m a little nostalgic myself—though it’s for a Brown I never really knew.

My suitemate tells me about Brown in the days when her father attended, when social interaction meant Pembroke women inviting Brown men to dine with them in the Andrews dining hall.

In the bookstore café, Cheung tells me about a friend’s father, who used to ride his dirt bike up the stairs of Sigma Chi and jump out the third floor window with his friends into snow banks. We both laugh as we wonder how long it would take, in today’s world, for someone to whip out a phone and post photos to Facebook.

On a Friday night a few weeks ago in ADPhi, no one’s following the 1920s theme precisely. In this pleasant convivial hodgepodge of eras, in this whirl of suits and dresses and jazz music, I can’t be sure quite where in history I might be—but everyone’s dancing with style and gusto, and there’s nary an iPhone in sight.

I look around and see a Brown I could have loved just a little bit more.

Emma wants to know when she can come and visit me. She’s dying to experience the college life. I can’t speak for college days of old—I’d like to have known them myself. But as for the college life I lead?

Well, Emma, the funny thing is this: with the click of your mouse, you pretty much already know.

Filed under: Features by Kate Doyle
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I bought War and Peace in an airport bookstore. This was an incredibly impractical decision, though it was a very nice copy. The pages were smooth and thin and the spine had a softness that allowed the book to splay apart so I was free to hold a mug of tea with both hands or eat an overly-large bowl of cereal.  It was a big copy, but not as big as an art history book—you could still measure your progress in inches read and not feel depressed. But I was carrying a laptop as well, and later, as I ran from the Alaska terminal to the American terminal, I admitted to myself that the decision was pretty silly. I felt macho, paying for that book, I won’t lie—I was definitely thinking that the salesperson would be pretty impressed, not to mention my fellow passengers.  Every aching, arm-straining step felt like karmic retribution for my pretentiousness. In penance, I promised myself that I would not read a word of any other book before I finished.

The book had a tempo, steady and slow, as if set to a metronome. Characters were hit by catastrophe, recovered, fell in and out of love, had children, died. The war, alternatively in the background and foreground, seemed interminable.  Even the most shocking developments were tempered by the thickness of the remaining pages. The story marched on regardless of major deaths or scandal, impartial in a way that put my own life in perspective. It is much easier to forgive a car that cuts you off on the freeway when you are thinking philosophically about the scope of the universe. I started to think of the book’s immensity as more of a comfort than a burden. The foreign universe was not oppressive as much as reassuring, operating with a deep structural logic astounding in a work of fiction.

As I read, I completely ignored themes, social commentary, anything that could be a possible essay topic. On a very basic level, to analyze is to be removed from the world of the book, to look at the characters with eyes always rooted in our world. As one Comparative Literature concentrator laments, “I can’t even read Harry Potter anymore without analyzing the racial analogies in the Mudblood/pureblood conflict.” There is something terrible in being so conscious while you are reading that you know exactly how many pages you have read and, more importantly, how many pages you have left to read. Every underline is a physical reminder that books are not little portals into other imaginary worlds but physical objects, ink on paper. The greatest obstacle to my non-academic approach to reading W & P was a complete ignorance of Russian culture, but as I read, it became like learning a new language. I am sure that I mistranslated elements, and in all likelihood I missed what makes the book a Great Book. But it was wonderful to read a Great Book as just a very good story and nothing more.

Tolstoy’s world was glued to my world for those months that I waded through it, its atmosphere permeating my life, providing a backdrop to everything I did. Yet only a few months after I finished the book, the details of the plot had already blurred together. Still, I vividly remembered that feeling of submersion. Without analyzing the plot or memorizing quotes, the experience of reading the book became more memorable than its actual substance. Rereading the first chapters now is like smelling sawdust or hearing the song my alarm clock played during high school. My experience with War and Peace transformed it from a book to a depository of memories, perpetually preserving that summer when I lived halfway between Seattle and Tolstoy’s Russia.

Filed under: Lifestyle by Annike Finne
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I can only imagine that first-time feature film directing is no simple feat — and if, like Drew Barrymore, you’re trying out the director’s chair for the first time while simultaneously holding down the fort in front of the camera, well then there’s no doubt you’ve got a whole extra set of challenges.

So all the more points to Barrymore in my book for Whip It—not only an admirable directorial debut, but also just a plain old good movie, chock full of likeable, relatable characters and plenty of good clean fun.

Still, there’s something lovably, charmingly absurd about the film’s solution to Barrymore’s need to be simultaneously in front of and behind the camera — that is to say, the way the slight absentmindedness of her character, airhead roller derby fanatic Smashley Simpson, conveniently keeps Barrymore offscreen whenever possible (Smashley has a habit of rolling up late in scenes featuring the team in its entirety, giggling breathlessly, “Sorry I’m late!” or else running off early at team get-togethers for a bit of roughhousing with her fiancé).

But, as with everything else in Whip It, you’ll find yourself having too much fun to worry about it unduly. Little quirks and inconsistencies like these make the movie all the more endearing. Set in that funny kind of faux-past so trendy among the indie-flick likes of Napoleon Dynamite and Juno, Whip It’s universe is one where, for the convenience of certain plot points, no one has a cell phone to track each other down at a crowded roller derby, yet Google image search is always an option for keeping tabs on someone.

Somewhere in the midst of this difficult-to-pinpoint half-past/half-present, seventeen-year-old Bliss Cavendish (Ellen Page) is biding her time in small-town Texas—going to school, working at the local diner with her best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat), and quietly putting up with the beauty pageants her well-meaning mother (Marcia Gay Harden) forces on her. Then, on a whim, she sneaks out one night with Pash to a women’s roller derby competition in Austin, and, smitten with the sport, ends up lacing up her old roller skates, lying about her age, and joining the team.

Certainly the plot has its formulaic moments — girl finds her true calling but hides it from her family, meets charming if imperfect dream guy but alienates her best friend, must learn to reconcile new existence with old. Still, what Whip Itlacks in originality of plot is negligible compared to what it does have: a delightful cast of brave, flawed, lovable characters, who make wonderfully (and, when need be, painfully) real what might otherwise be a fairly ordinary coming-of-age story.

The Cavendish parents (Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern) will doubtless make you look at your own parents in a new light, and from personal experience I can predict with great certainty the grin that will break out on your face when Alia Shawkat’s Pash beams from the stands, “That’s my best friend!” From Kristen Wiig as the surprisingly maternal tough roller-girl who draws Bliss into the fold, to never-to-be-underrated Ellen Page, who pulls off her role as Bliss with her usual charm, Whip It has the unusual distinction for a movie of its genre of leaving no character under-explored.

This charming story of growing up has more depth than perhaps its previews have let on. Underneath the feel-good indie vibe, to say nothing of the inherent fun of watching the likes of Barrymore, Page, Wiig and more strap on their skates, lies a sweet story of growing up, and a story that cuts no corners in plumbing the depths of its characters, who have a lot more to them than is readily apparent.

Filed under: Lifestyle by Kate Doyle
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Family Weekend: a time for Brown students to take a break from their hectic studies, rehearsals, and club meetings to enjoy the convenient free shows and recitals presented specifically for the occasion.

The highlight of this weekend was PW’s quirky production of The Clean House by young New York playwright and Brown alum Sarah Ruhl. This Pulitzer Prize-nominated script chronicles the lives of Matilde—a free-spirited and delightful young housemaid/comedian who hates to clean just as much as she loves telling hilarious jokes—and the family for whom she cleans, surgeons Lane and Charles. Lane convinces herself that Matilde will not clean because she is depressed; Matilde, on the other hand, would much rather tell jokes in her native Portuguese and recall blithesome tales of her parents before they died than spend all day cleaning.  After a series of Portuguese jokes, the introduction of Lane’s obsessive-compulsive sister, and the discovery of red, lacy underpants in Charles’ laundry, Lane’s façade crumbles when she realizes that her husband has cheated on her with an elderly patient from the hospital where he works. Things go from bad to worse for Lane when, after she fires Matilde, Charles and his mistress abruptly decide to rehire her, symbolizing the further decay of all that Lane has worked for.

The Clean House is a true ensemble piece; no one character is more important than the next. In the PW production, each actor performed in a way that did not upstage or outshine his/her costars. One such example of a controlled performance was by Sakina Esufally, who played Matilde. What was most amusing about her performance was the fact that she avoided contrived emotions and bizarre punch lines—conventions that are seen too often in comedic plays. Instead, Esufally gave a genuine performance, receiving peals of laughter throughout the production. Yet she struck a serious chord with the audience by not milking her scenes for superficial jokes or punchline laughs—a sign of an actress who understands her character and the art of performance.

Abby Colella, who played the obsessive-compulsive sister named Virginia, took her comedic timing to the next level. Making character choices that may seem over the top, Colella knew when to push a joke forward and when to hold back, saving the essence of her build-up for when the audience would least expect it. When her character was first introduced, her mannerisms and the way she delivered her lines were a bit jarring; however, once her character was further developed, everything fit like a glove and her actions made sense.

Lily Mathews, who played Lane, Matilde and Virginia’s counterpart, was reminiscent of a film actress on stage. She allowed the audience to see her emotional demise throughout the course of the play rather than just reciting her lines and hoping that the spectators picked up on what was going on. She let her mind delve deep inside herself to find those true melancholy moments and brought them effortlessly onto the stage for all to see. That difficult task undoubtedly required an open mind and a performer not afraid to be vulnerable or expressive, which Mathews brilliantly accomplished.

Alex Kryger and Ivy Martinez rounded off the cast with their portrayals of Charles and Ana, Charles’s mistress. Both performance can be summed up in one word: sweet. The chemistry between these two performers felt genuine and real. Each time they embraced, which was quite often, there was a sense of authentic passion in the air that put smiles on the faces of audience members and warmed the hearts of many. Not only does it take a quality performance to translate real emotions onto the stage, but it also requires actors to become free with each other—to allow each actor to know a little something extra about their fellow cast members as a way to depict relatable emotions to an unsuspecting audience.

Director Emma Price took a tough and juicy play and made sense out of it. She answered the “whys”  and “hows” that the playwright left up for interpretation and made the script work for her performers, which ultimately rewarded the audience with a successful and intimate production.

Rating: Three and a half witty Portuguese jokes out of four!

Filed under: Lifestyle by Kerry Hall
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Hi Hardies,

I thought up a game while drifting over Colorado called “Tap that Ass or Take a Pass?”  I toss a few situations your way, and you decide whether to invite her up in your balloon, or drop the tether instead and float off alone.

—She slept with your roommate once or twice, but that was weeks ago.  OR: You slept with her roommate once or twice, but that was weeks ago.  Roommate swap?

—Slurring her words like a Southern temptress (even though she’s from Vermont), she says, “You’re not as drunk as me!”  You disagree: You ARE as drunk as her.  At least you think so, but that whole independent subjectivity thing is tricky.

—You had a fling on, say, Spring Weekend, but it was supposed to end there.  Suddenly, a week later, you wake from a nap to find her sitting at the foot of your bed (your roommate let her in).

So eager for a response, I could barf!

Falcon

FRANK: Falcon! You sly dog, you. Not only was the balloon stunt a hoax—and rather impressively, my boy, the talk of the national news media last week—but your question seems to indicate you’re a great deal older than six too! Damn you’re good.

I should tell you that Joe will not be joining us this time for our weekly excursion. Unfortunately, he had to go home to Bayport to see the Hardy Family (one of those emergency situations), but he’ll be back next week (I miss you, Joe).

Situation One: Joe and I have a rule. Well, it’s a more of a principle, really (not that it’s ever been violated to date—that I know of…). Regardless, the rule is no sharing (or swapping) partners between us no matter how many weeks, months, or years have gone by. We have also respected this rule (again, to date) when it comes to other siblings too. No one wants to come between blood relatives—pun possibly intended—which, as we all know, can be a really messy experience. Now, when this came up a couple of weeks ago, Joe contended that there was a qualitative difference between, say, making out with someone at a party once or twice and—to borrow the colloquial term a friend of mine has been abusing lately—fucking (“Slept with” is a nice euphemism, Lil’ Falc, but oftentimes “fucking” is more honest—you’ll learn this when you get older). I can concede the point. Especially for us Brunonians, who tend to skew rather prude (you may recall our colleague Allie Wollner’s column from a few weeks back), kissing and fucking do not usually feel like the same thing. So, to sum up, unless the girl’s Helen of Troy, or, if it’s more of a love connection thing, a second Juliet, you should avoid hooking up with your roommate’s former fling or, even more so, your former fling’s roommate! They both may say it’s cool (this is much more likely with the former situation) and be wrong, not realizing the depth of their feeling until you’re in too deep. Take a pass.

Scenario Two: The Southern Belle from Vermont is probably also a dish best avoided. First of all, you don’t very well want to tryst with a girl whose grammar is bad (she should have said “You’re not as drunk as I am”) because it goes to follow that other things with her could be bad as well. If she’s willing to let the way she freaking talks slip by the wayside, who knows what else could be bad about (and with) her? And, if she’s trying to gauge your drunkenness in such a coarse way, it probably ain’t because she’s sensitive and doesn’t want to take advantage of you. Independent subjectivity is tricky. So is radical insecurity. Take a pass.

Scenario Three: If you like the girl, goddamn are you lucky. Tap that ass, and keep your roommate in controlled substances for the rest of the month to say thank you. If you don’t like the girl, all the things I said about Scenario Oneno longer apply. Foist her on *him. And be sure not do anything else illegal, Lil’ Falc! It may be okay on national television, but not in the Hardy ethos. Many things are permitted—age teaches us this—but to be a gentleman of love and sex in the Hardy school, deception isn’t one of them. Stay in school.

—xoxo Frank Hardy

*The same suggestion should also apply for any combination of genders.

Filed under: Lifestyle by The Hardy Brothers
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