NYU DC StoryCorps

Highlighting NYU Washington, DC students and their experiences!

NYU DC VIOLETS I Fiction I Lost

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By Lucy Pham

There is a key to everything.
The key to success, the key to happiness, the key to life, you name it.
But what if, you lost it? What if one day, you woke up, and the key to your deepest secrets, was gone?
You panicked, frantically searched for just anything you could recall.
Anything.
Nothing.
You are now forced to ask yourself the age-old question.
Who am I?
Who am I without the verses, where shall I be without the imagery, what do I do now?
What happens if a poet forgets?
Will they remain a poet, trying to make sense of the world by piecing together any fragmented rhythm?
Or will they let go of what once was?
They could accept that the words they wrote would never make sense to them again. They will become a reader, consuming others’ work while attaching their own interpretation to them.
Why were you a poet in the first place? Why go the extra mile to hide behind words only you understand, why spend hours thinking of a metaphor that vaguely connects to you, why convince yourself to keep going? Because writing is your coping mechanism, you keep on going until everything makes sense.
Is it worth it, being a poet? Does all that make you a poet?
It might come back. The joy of it all, writing. You turn into a completely different person. You might be a little girl, a man, a demon, whatever you feel like. You never reside in one spot, you are constantly exploring.
What happens if a poet forgets?
I guess I’ll have to find out.

NYU DC VIOLETS I Nonfiction | Boxing

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By Candice Yang

Living in different places brings me various experiences and feelings. Studying in Washington, D.C. is definitely unlike my life in my hometown Nanjing. I can find new things in D.C. every day, but sometimes I miss the feeling of familiarity, and boxing returns this feeling to me. Boxing is one of my favorite sports. When I am in China, I usually go to these courses several times a week, and because of them, I make friends and become more confident. However, balance gym does not have the classes I want, and one suitable site has moved to other places. In the second semester, being more familiar with surrounding areas, I found a gym focusing on boxing. It is fantastic to have similar happy experiences again. I love this place, and I love boxing with people in that place. I usually go boxing four times a week by biking. On the bike ride, I find many interesting things which could not be brought by essays and readings. For instance, you suddenly see a lovely dog looking around curiously through car windows. When crossing a street, a man says to you “Hey, let’s go, cross the street,” pretending that you are close friends. You see sweet couples on scooters; you ride through a rain of cherry blossom petals, you open a bottle of Sprite when waiting for green lights but finding it begins to spray without control (maybe because of the uneven road) … All of these things were what I experienced before, and there is more waiting for me to discover. My life here in D.C. becomes more like home and more interesting because of boxing, which makes me love it more

NYU DC VIOLETS I Opinion I Lil Nas X is Killing Country Music. Thank God.

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By Charles Smith

Lil Nas X just released a remix of his hit song “Old Town Road,” now with Billy Ray Cyrus. Lil Nas X calls it “country trap,” mixing banjos and 808s, rap flows and country blues. A week ago, the original got kicked off its high perch on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Billboard decided it wasn’t country enough. The song’s still 7th on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop.

That act of gatekeeping lets us know something: This song is good.

Billboard has no idea what music is. For commercial purposes, they have to organize all the sound out there into digestible types. This method works great to understand where the common ear is right now, but it’s no art history.

Popular music genres aren’t separated by lyrics or composition, which is how Billboard divides its music. It’s a lot simpler than that—genre is a feeling. Rock critic Robert Christgau defined punk as any “short-fast guitar unit that gives me a thrill.” Sure, maybe that implies ragged yelps against power and a lotta distortion, but that’s not what punk is.

Punk is stripped back music. It noticeably withholds complexity to draw out strength; like Jonathan Richman sings, “Kind of far away, kind of dignified.” Hip-hop falls out of the punk tradition and retains that ethos. These guys aren’t just bad at their instruments—they don’t even play instruments (except the producers, bless them).

What hip-hop gives in return is commitment to fun and personality. They’re so done with live instruments that hip-hop started sampling old tracks. “Old Town Road” is sampled from the Nine Inch Nails song “34 Ghosts IV.” Yeah, punk, funk, jazz and rock are burnt. Why not pick among their ashes?

Since the beginning, it’s been obvious that hip-hop is an alloy. Tribe added a little jazz; Rage added a little funk. Ski Mask started by rapping on rock tracks; goofball outlaws like Lil Uzi have drawn out the punk again. Since the 90s, hip-hop has reformed pop.

Hip-hop absorbs genres and leaves them in the phase between sincerity and parody. Hip-hop’s sample aesthetic threatens to make a music world where genres fall together or cease to carry any meaning.

Country critic Grady Smith mourns that country is evolving towards other genres: “Pop, hip-hop, R&B and country are all almost going in the exact same direction. And that’s boring! Then we’re gonna lose all that beautiful variety that makes these distinct genres special.”

Nice ear, Grady! Sounds like country music has an identity problem. It’s called the changing color of the American consumer. That explains all their talk of tradition and purity. Doesn’t matter, we’ll leave country music out to dry.

In the meantime, the adults will be over here riding horses.

We have all the sound in the world at our fingertips. Why draw lines between it? The worst thing we could get is cooler music.

Now, Lil Nas X is swallowing country in hip-hop. Thank God.

NYU DC Violets I Nonfiction | The Oven

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By Michael Lee

I work at a bakery in Brooklyn. Everyday, I bake bread, watching it rise in the stone oven. I don’t get paid very much, and I barely get by on rent. But seeing the bread rise in the oven, I, too, can see myself rising from all my problems. And sometimes that means doing things you don’t want to do. I resort to trading – not trading stocks. I mean trading company information, as a middleman. Yes, it’s not legal. But it wasn’t me. It was my desperation.

Everyday, I bake bread, watching it rise in the stone oven. I see myself rising above my problems. I see myself with enough money to pay rent. I see myself happy.

Can you smell smoke in the air? Something’s burning.

I return home, a small apartment above the bakery. The front door closes behind me, and all of a sudden, there’s a knock. Opening it, I see badges and uniforms. Cops.

I didn’t mean to do it, I say. I needed the money, I cry out.

The cops ignore my pleas, placing cuffs on my wrists. They walk me out the door. And that’s when I realized. I left the oven on.

___

Birds whistle sweet harmonies from their nests. Cars honk in the rush hour traffic. Smoke fills the thick air. Flames roar from what was the bakery. And a few blocks away, a little girl says to her mom, “Something’s burning.”

NYU DC VIOLETS I Nonfiction | Interview with Professor Nancy Michael

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By Carol Wu

A singer. A designer. An author.

It often slips our minds of the fact that, outside of class, professors lead creative and thrilling lives. Take, for example, Professor Nancy Michael. She is an alto singer for two choirs, though she is a former soprano; a costume designer for musicals like White Christmas, Children of Eden, and The Secret Garden; and a contributing author for the soon-to-be published book Practical Approaches to Teaching Beowulf.

Yet, life does have a way of making detours. For Professor Michael, it involves the rewarding, but patience-straining responsibility as a mother and doctorate candidate.

Currently, Professor Michael is working towards a PhD in English at Catholic University, where she’s teaching Intensive English in addition to her Cultural Foundations classes at NYU Washington, DC.

Michael never expected to pursue a path in education. As a child, Michael’s dream was to become a coroner. Later, in high school, she wanted to become a marine biologist, entering Boston University’s marine biology program. Along the way, her musical endeavors in vocals, as well as piano and wind instruments, made her a choral director hopeful. It was at Villanova University, where Michael completed her Masters in Theater, that she considered the possibility of becoming a professor. During an academic showcase, Michael presented on her research paper, and the faculty praised her for the potential she has as a professor. Her love for school and esteem for quality education only strengthened the decision for her to teach.

Michael has made her way along the east coast from her childhood home in the outskirts of Philadelphia to Boston for undergraduate, Pennsylvania for Villanova, and DC for Catholic University. At present, Michael lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia with her husband Jason and her five-year-old son John Adams, whose talkative and stubborn behavior is not so different from President John Adams. In six months, Professor Michael will defend her dissertation, and she is excited for the leisure time she’ll have, when she can spend more time reading fantasy novels like Stephen King’s.

And to her Cultural Foundations class, Professor Michael says, “If you don’t ask questions about [something], [then] you can’t figure out what you really believe about [in it]… All we can do is scratch the tip of the iceberg. Everything we do, there’s so much more going on underneath of that, in a 75-minute class, that you don’t get time to do.”

“So question everything.”

NYU DC VIOLETS I Nonfiction | More money, more profit? A statistical analysis of the top and bottom 5 of the 50 most invested movies ever

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By Michael Lee

On a Friday night, just when you can finally relax, there is no better way to spend it than going to the theater and watching a movie you’ve been dying to see. However, we seem to forget how much money goes into making these movies. Most of them cost millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions, to produce. Sometimes these movies don’t get the return of money they expect them to earn.
That also begs us to ask the question, does putting a lot of money into a movie guarantee a high return? Absolutely not.
On the contrary, we can analyze the returns of the highest budgeted movies, specifically the top and bottom five movies on USA Today’s list of the top fifty most invested movies.
The top five most invested movies are in the chart below (values represented in dollars).

This chart show us that the most invested movie Avatar yielded the highest return in revenue of over three billion dollars. And for all of these movies, revenue was at least double their production budget and over a billion dollars. Further, four out of five of these movies gained back at least triple their production budget. This case shows a positive trend between budget and profit.
The bottom five most invested movies are in the chart below (values represented in dollars).
The trend of success seems to be the same narrative for the bottom five movies on the list. All five movies have gained back at least two and a half times their original production budget costs. However, only three of the five movies have recouped at least triple their production cost, opposed to the four out of five from the five most invested movies. Also, only two of the bottom most movies have grossed over a billion dollars as opposed to the top five movies grossing at least a billion dollars in revenue. While there is a successful gain in profit amongst the bottom five movies, it is certainly less than the profit from the top five movies.
If anyone has at least three hundred million dollars lying around and wants to spend it on producing and releasing a movie, statistics will tell you that you are almost guaranteed to gain back a billion dollars (warning: do not try this at home).

NYU DC Violets I Hear Me Out | Next Time, Talk to your Uber Driver

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By Sophia Yufei Wang

The car is arriving in one minute. I looked up from my phone. It’s here. As usual, I pulled the door to the back seat and shoved my groceries to the inner side and ducked into the car. After a classic how-are-you-doing opening, I shifted my eye to the outside of the car, staring at some random street views and then turning to my entertaining phone for a break.

“So you did a little shopping in Trader Joe’s eh?” asked Anthony the Uber driver. Wearing an apricot woolen jacket, my uber driver was a black man in his late 50s. I used to just say yes and then rest in lasting silence. It’s not that I don’t enjoy talking to people, but I tended to think a one-time conversation with a stranger was empty of meaning. But at that night, for some reason, I added a little bit more, “Yes, and Trader Joe’s is always my favorite one stop shopping.”

So we began talking about our favorite groceries. I kept going on about my reasons to side with Trader Joe’s, a California-based nationwide chain of grocery, and brought up Whole Foods Market, an supermarket chain known for its organic food, as my second top. “Yeah, you know, the integration of Whole Foods within Amazon is quite something,” he said. “It’s a good deed.”

He later explained that he worked as a farmer before. Back then, he only supplied his harvest to a few groceries in the neighbourhood. Now, many small independent groceries are facing shutdowns. I asked if he thought those shutdowns were bad signs for his farm business. “Well, I mean, those independent stores are squeezed out of the market, but Amazon indeed did a better job than those stores,” he said. “And the magic card Amazon plays is the logistics.”

After the integration, Amazon has made its way by connecting local suppliers and products with a wider range of city dwellers. Relying on a giant e-commerce platform, Amazon offers its prime members grocery delivery on Amazon Fresh and online pickup at Amazon Lockers. There are also Prime Pantry and Prime Now targeting household essentials delivery and same-day delivery for everything you can imagine and need.

“I am happy to see that the food I grow can reach out to such a considerable number of people,” he smiled.

Afterwards, Anthony also mentioned his amazement towards Chinese e-commerce platforms like Alibaba. Millions of merchants and businesses were springing up on Alibaba, he said, and it took only several searches before putting an order on food you have been craving for weeks. “That’s the power of logistics,”he concluded emphatically on the last word.  

When I came to New York for the first time, I felt overwhelmed by seeing hustle and bustle everywhere. I always received a series of “excuse me” whenever I made a sudden stop. My first impression of D.C., however, goes to the other extreme. Near the NYU DC campus, you have to go out during lunch time to spot large gatherings of people. No matter the size of the city, opening up a friendly conversation between two strangers can be challenging. You just don’t know whether it’s worthwhile venturing an icebreaker with little chance of reciprocal kindness.

We’re living in a paradox. We all have been taught when we were kids to not talk to strangers. Meanwhile, we are imagining what could have ever happened if we said hello to the person standing next to us on the line at Starbucks or the person sitting beside us on the train.

After talking to Anthony that night, I have tried to be more engaged in a lively conversation with my uber driver. And soon after, I met a retired lawyer who encouraged me to not fear for those so-called experienced senior legal consultants in the future and to show my young charm; another time, a musical lover played the soundtrack of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child after we exchanged our latest musical viewing experiences.

Once you put your pick-up location and destination on the Uber app, you tend to think that’s the end of the story. But for that route connecting two locations, there’s always so much untold beyond what shown on the map.

NYU DC Violets I Nonfiction | Interview with Dr. Tammy Krygier

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By Carol Wu

At the mere age of 5, Tammy Krygier fell in love with the mysterious wonders of the forgotten pharaoh Tutankhamun from the enchanting tales of a children’s book. Since then, her life would forever be linked to the sandy terrain and fertile river banks of Egypt.

Krygier’s thirst to learn about the Egyptian culture was insatiable. She absorbed every drop of information from the books she read, but soon, even that wasn’t enough. She had to see these stories come to life at museum exhibits. Still, children’s books and museum exhibits were just the foundation to the beginning of her education.

Krygier began her higher education in her hometown Buffalo, New York, where she attended SUNY Buffalo. Later, she studied at Johns Hopkins for her Master’s and PhD. While her general  interest is in Egyptology, she specializes in Egyptian art and archeology.

While studying at Johns Hopkins, Krygier began teaching. Originally, she had hoped to work in museums. However, she enjoyed teaching so much that she decided to pursue a career in education.

Krygier is a lecturer at NYU DC, teaching Cultural Foundations I. Krygier has previously taught at Hood College, McDaniel College, and her alma mater Johns Hopkins.

Krygier has gone on study abroad trips with her students, exploring Europe and Egypt. She finds it refreshing to see the looks on her students’ faces when they experience a place or object that they’ve only seen in a textbook.

“Their whole faces light up,” Krygier smiles.

One fond memory Krygier has is from a study abroad trip to Alexandria, Egypt. When her students learned that her birthday was coming up, they surprised Krygier with a birthday cake, and upon the cake stood a stylized statue of the goddess Sekhmet, looking on with intense eyes and daring lioness prowess. Krygier views Sekhmet, along with the cat goddess Bastet, as her alter ego.

When she isn’t reading historical fiction, Krygier pursues artistic endeavors, such as sketching or jewelry-making.

Although Krygier isn’t lecturing at NYU DC for the spring semester, she has some words of encouragement for her former Cultural Foundations students.

“I see my role, not so much as feeding you information, but helping you to realize how much you already know and how much more you can learn.”

Krygier lives in Baltimore with her husband, daughter, and five cats – Danny Blue, Bastet, Krinkle, Guinness, and Herbert.

NYU DC Violets I Nonfiction | Spring’s Coming

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By Brian Espinosa

The snow falling so delicately from the gray sky, as if planned so precisely on where and when it would land on the ground. At first, everything is powdered with a fine coat of snow. But, little by little, the layers grow. It seems endless as if the world is going to be buried under snow. But even through all the cold and wind, life continues. A little rose, red as blood begins to bloom, though weakly at first. It ushers in the call that change is approaching. Animals will soon come out of their long hibernation. Children, imprisoned in their homes by the piercing cold and the perpetual snowfall, will soon be able to play and run around in the park. Then, all the layers of snow, collected over the long winter, will finally shed. And a new season will finally come: Spring.   

 

NYU DC Violets I Nonfiction I Directed Energy Weapons

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By Charles Smith

“I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.” Hamlet II.ii.351

 

I wish I never watched The Matrix. For the uninitiated, it’s a movie where this guy finds out he’s been living inside a huge simulation. I saw it with my friend and his mom when I was a kid. After the movie, I couldn’t go to sleep. Hushed, I asked my friend how Morpheus knew he was in the Matrix because wasn’t it supposed to be a perfect replica of life? My friend wanted to know if I knew when I would shut up. His answers got shorter and shorter till he was just mumbling. Even so, I kept talking, I didn’t care. I was sure he didn’t exist, anyway.

This self-absorption was what came to mind while I watched Frank Hawkman, in the front seat of his black sedan in a Youtube selfie, talk about “gangstalking.”  Frank Hawkman is a white twenty-something with a full color tattoo of a rose on the right side of his neck. He’s wearing black Clubmasters, a black hoodie, and a hat that says, “DETROIT HUSTLES HARDER”. If you look closely, he has a slim silver septum piercing that hugs his nose like a glob of snot. He’s smoking a joint. He inhales, holds the smoke, and blows it directly at the camera.

And Frank narrates: “I’ve traveled in almost every continental U.S state.” He pauses to exhale his smoke. “Besides Hawaii.” Frank ashes and takes another pull. “I’ve done a lot of travelling, I’ve seen a lot of things, and my life’s been a fucking complete trip. And it’s only gotten crazier. I really got what I bargained for when I said I wanted an adventurous life, I didn’t think I was gonna get anything like this. Let’s get into it. I’m a targeted individual. TI for short.” He rolls up the car window.

Frank is a self-proclaimed victim of gangstalking, a worldwide operation where a person is targeted for covert harassment by a network of operatives who are seemingly innocent strangers. TIs are constantly looking over their shoulder, and a lot think that their friends and families are taking part in the stalking. The harassment is invisible to anyone but the TI, so they shut themselves off from anyone who isn’t similarly targeted.

What’s crazy, though, is that they love to talk about the experience. Frank Hawkman posts a video a day on the topic. It’s a twisted take on the belief that the world revolves around oneself: TI’s are so dangerous that they have to be under 24-hour surveillance. When they act up, they’re subjected to orbital bombardment from satellite mounted directed energy weapons (DEWs) that cause anything from headaches to instant death. When a friend of theirs dies, it’s induced heart attack—induced cancer—induced suicide.

The members of one message board surrounding gangstalking refer to themselves as “protagonists”. Aren’t protagonists people who do something? TIs, by and large, are people to whom things are done. Nevertheless, their situation is heroic. Each TI is up against the full-frontal force of the United States government and all its corrupt subsidiaries. They have police, attorneys, employers, therapists, friends, family, and space cannons after them, and they’re still kicking. Like a paranoid Rambo.

It’s also kind of like a kid who comes home from school and can’t find his parents and starts building a whole case file to explain their mysterious deaths before mom walks through the door an hour later. At least, that’s what I did… I had to talk to these guys. Maybe they could relate.

I posted on one of their forums that I was working on a report on criminal activity and was interested in researching gangstalking, so I needed some TIs to interview. I got a couple responses, regulars on the message board. I noticed that one of them, TargetedDistanceHiker, had been posting Frank Hawkman’s videos. Considering this, and Hawkman’s insistence that he’s a big traveler, I guessed that it was Hawkman.

            Hawkman was fine doing a video interview, so I got his number and tried to set up a time. He doesn’t wake up until two on weekdays, so we decided on a three o’clock interview. I got a text the next day at five; he’d just woken up. I got on FaceTime and called him. He has a lot of rose tattoos: one on the back of each hand, and one on his upper chest. I asked if there was any meaning. “Nah, decorative,” he said. It looks like he used to have gauges in his earlobes; now the lobes sag open.

            Hawkman says he’s not special. In fact, he thinks that most TIs are just unlucky. They get blacklisted somehow and become test subjects for some government R&D test studying neural networking. Besides that, he said, the other gangstalking theories were just made up by crazy people. I didn’t pursue that. I wanted to know about the blacklist. He mentioned that it’s a revenge thing, that you piss off the CEO of a Fortune 500 and your name is forever sealed. “Yeah- I pissed off the VP of State Farm, I pissed off his daughter. Smash and dash type deal. I was just a douchebag, she wasn’t happy. And daddy had connections. So, I got put on a list, and that was it,” he explained. “Damn, that’s wild,” I said. We talked for about an hour and then got off the phone. I just stalked Frank Hawkman, and all it took was giving him a little attention.

I agreed with him that gangstalking is a worldwide epidemic and must be stopped. I’m using his own testimonial to write a low hitpiece about his passion. Sue me. I changed the dude’s name to “Frank Hawkman”, so his real identity’s secure.

            Anyway, he kept mentioning that this would have never happened without “all the technology we’ve got today.” Gangstalkers rely on GPS, tracking chips, and internationally connected conglomerates to organize their attacks. I did another interview over text, with this guy who called himself Caribou. According to him, Hawkman’s insane for believing in any of that coordination.

Caribou told me the idea that limitless ordinary people are constantly stalking is a half-baked fantasy. Its just not realistic, in fact, it’s “logistically impossible, financially unfeasible, and operationally implausible.” The myth of gangstalking damages the credibility of TIs, makes them sound like crackpots. What’s really going on, says Caribou—well, I’ll just quote him:

“Mind control is used to make TI believe that we are being we are being harnessed and/or watched by hundred of strangers; for example: A TI jerks off in the morning and his coworkers be MCed [Mind Controlled] to will say a word(ie vacuum cleaner) when he is within earshot. Every time he jerks off, a coworker or a strangers will say the same word:vacuum cleaner, wherever he goes.”

            The more you chase this TI phenomenon, the wackier it gets; it’s all backstabbing and false-flags, so I’ll stop here. My point’s that this conspiracy doesn’t take any specific coordination or mind control tech to work—its an ancient paranoia. It’s a rustle in the hedge and now everything’s out to get you. That has been around since long before State Farm, long before vacuum cleaners. Check out this part from a poem called Kaddish, by Ginsburg:

“But you stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner, and spied a mystical assassin from Newark,

So phoned the Doctor—‘OK go way for a rest’—so I put on my coat and walked you downstreet—On the way a grammarschool boy screamed, unaccountably—‘Where you goin Lady to Death’? I shuddered—

and you covered your nose with motheaten fur collar, gas mask against poison sneaked into downtown atmosphere, sprayed by Grandma—

And was the driver of the cheesebox Public Service bus a member of the gang?  You shuddered at his face, I could hardly get you on—to New York, very Times Square, to grab another Greyhound—“

            That was 1956. Forget that State Farm and vacuum cleaners were around back then. I’m trying to say it doesn’t take much to be a paranoid. Believing yourself a TI’s no different than thinking people laugh behind your back, or that we’re all living in the Matrix.

            As it turns out, Caribou insisted that I read this book called The Matrix Deciphered, if I wanted to grasp the full truth. It’s a small world. Maybe he was watching.