PORTFOLIO 1
SCREENPLAYS
A room filled with boxes except for a desk with a stereo.
CARDO, 20s, slouches down on to some boxes looking exhausted.
ASH, 20s, walks in with two glasses of ice water.
When he has only a bit left, Cardo pours the rest onto his hair and shakes it out like a dog.
PROSE
EDITORIAL
INT. HELENA & ZOE'S ROOM - DAY
HELENA, a lanky college girl with full lips, wakes up in her dorm room. Close by, her roommate ZOE is doing work at her desk. The room is covered in kitschy posters and stickers.
Helena pushes all the shag hair that’s on her face out of the way with her fingers, groaning.
She kicks away the covers to reveal her pajamas: black lace underwear and a neon sports bra.
She checks the time on her analog clock from the 80s. 3:20 pm. Other contents on her nightstand include a bottle of prescription pills and birth control.
“I want to live in a dollhouse,” she says, staring at herself naked in the mirror.
“What?” He says, blinking his eyes open.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” She turns around on the ball of one foot. “I thought you had woken up when I got out of bed. You groaned loudly.”
“What did you say before?”
He is the painter who chopped off his ear. She is the soul singer who got booed off the stage for her incoherent babbling. He is the deaf composer who cried because he could not hear the audience’s applause at the end of his piece.
He is the tortured artist: the cliché that if you aren’t a chain-smoking cynic, then what really inspires you? Psychologists often talk about the concept of the “mad genius”—the belief that we must have some sort of neurosis in order to be the great creators of our time. Because of this stereotype, our society has become obsessed with the idea that pain equals art, yet pain is only part of the human experience, and the artist brings into play an entire spectrum of emotions in his art.
Jungle Song
One Eye Shut
Dollhouse
This Is Your Art On Emotion
The Orgasm as It Relates to Writing
“Do you like your job?” I ask my mother. She is heating up leftover casserole. She puts one hand on her hip like she’s a little mad at the casserole. Or me. Or maybe both of us—two meat casseroles from the same old lady.
My mother comes home from work without light in her eyes. Dad works hard too, but I don’t see his eyes often. They are always reading stock reports of the NYT. We call him Newspaper Face.
“I like being a mother,” she says, looking at the frying pan.
Your Opinion is Now Live
Facebook prohibits hate speech. Ideological debate, on the other hand, is encouraged. Given increasing intensity surrounding topics such as race, free speech, gender, and sexuality, how do we discern between what is controversial hate speech and what is contrarily a difference of opinion? How does that, in turn, shape the way we react?
The difference between fundamental disagreement and pure hate speech can be difficult to pinpoint. When this ambiguous language appears online, things can get even messier, given the public nature and quick type-and-enter posts and comments. These aspects of online engagement create a discourse that can be overwhelming to navigate. Yet, there are trends and guidelines one can use to engage conscientiously in these virtual forums.
Cyber Labels
In 1952, John Cage released 4’33”, a musical composition of complete silence performed first by pianist David Tutor, who played not a single note of music for the four and a half minutes of the piece. In 2014, funk band Vulfpeck released Sleepify, an album of 10 silent songs, onto music streaming site Spotify.
These musical works, set 60 years apart, use the same shock-factor concept but for very different motives. Cage’s piece turns the audience into the joke, showing that people pay for good music because someone told them to pay for that good music. The ambient stirring, coughing, and whispering coming from the audience become the music of Cage’s composition. For Vulfpeck, it was less the commentary and more the extra royalties they would receive from Spotify.
A Dumpster's Spoils
Senior Rachael Kadish’s gloved hand sticks a magnetic light on the inside of a Trader Joe’s dumpster. Her hands dig around until they find a garbage bag that feels heavy and rip it down the middle. Three dozen loaves of Trader Joe’s Fresh Artisan Bread spill out.
“Usually we don’t even take this back because we have so much already,” she says.
Kadish has been dumpster diving for two years, ever since she learned she could feed an entire household by foraging through grocery store garbage every few days. Senior Rebecca Herman accompanied Kadish that November night on her weekly trip to Trader Joe’s. In 2013, they were both living in the Crafts House—Tufts’ cooperative living environment—when they began diving together. Now, it’s a weekly routine.
Euromaidan: The Enduring Struggle for a New Ukraine
Members of Parliament are throwing punches in session. Men in suits and ties climb tables, grip hair, and restrain in chokeholds. Speaker Volodymyr Rybak shouts, “Stop! What are you doing!” but his calls for law and order fall on deaf ears. This is the Ukrainian Parliament, circa March 19th, 2013.
This all too familiar scene, reported by BBC, broke out between President Viktor Yanukovich’s Regional Party and the nationalistic far-right group, Svoboda, after the Regional Party’s parliamentary leader gave a speech in Russian. Although similar violent brawls occurred in the Ukrainian Parliament in 2010 and 2012, they did not attract much media attention because they were accepted as fairly commonplace in the post-Soviet state’s politics. Nowadays, however, Ukraine resides in the international spotlight due to increasingly violent protests spurring from President Yanukovich’s refusal to sign agreements with the European Union. The protesters claim that joining forces with the European Union would benefit all of Ukraine’s citizens. While the youth point to notions of “freedom” and “global human rights,” older constituencies stress “economic security” and a “normal, European democracy,” according to the Washington Post.