Today, many on campus know Chmba Ellen Chilemba ’17, better known by her stage name CHMBA, as the DJ who performed at President Danielle R. Holley’s 90s-themed inauguration party. The talented musician has opened for musicians like American pop star Madonna and Benenise singer-songwriter Angelique Kidjo. Her second EP, “Okongola Caucus,” came out earlier this year.
Pop-punk is back.
In the past two years, Paramore, Simple Plan and Taking Back Sunday have all released full-length albums. Say Anything, Green Day, Busted and Hawthorne Heights are coming out with new songs. Amidst the revival of a genre they helped pioneer, it only makes sense that Blink-182 would come back as well — though, to be fair, they’ve been consistently releasing since 1994.
A small desert town in the midst of the Cold War, a science competition for kid geniuses and an alien landing: these are all part of the play at the center of “Asteroid City,” Wes Anderson’s newest film. The film frames itself as an anthology television series retelling the history of a play called “Asteroid City.” We meet the playwright and the actors and gain a description of the setting.
The story kicks off when the play itself begins. By putting these different narratives on top of each other, “Asteroid City” positions itself as a discussion of grief and self-realization. Anderson’s ability to dive deep into the fragility and beauty of the human experience, even within the strangeness of his own style, is what makes him an enduring modern filmmaker.
Mitksi’s music manages to encapsulate universal emotions in two or three minutes. She uses simple metaphors and beautiful music to represent things that can’t quite be captured in words, which is likely what inspires the undying devotion of her fans. Arguably, there’s not a person alive who can listen to a Mitski song and not relate in some way. Beyond simply inspiring empathy in her listeners, Mitski makes pain feel precious, longing feel divine, and happiness feel infinite.
Amid the rainy weather of friends and family weekend, members of the Mount Holyoke College community gathered in Rooke Theatre for a sold-out performance that marked the first theatrical production of the 2023-24 school year. Soccer balls were kicked — not into the audience, as Melanie Cosdon ‘26 mentioned to the Mount Holyoke News with pride — whistles were blown and the audience was moved to tears.
An innovator in the architectural world, Julia Gamolina is a New York City-based architect, writer and educator best known for her digital magazine Madame Architect, which both highlights the stories of and builds community for women architects.
Gamolina was invited to speak in Gamble Auditorium on Wednesday, Sept. 27, for the event “Towards Madame Architect: Dialogues for a Different Future,” where she talked about her startup and offered career advice to students.
“Renfield” is a ridiculous, campy and excessively gory new adaptation of the story of Dracula — it is fantastic, provided that those adjectives appeal to you. The film pays its dues to the Draculas that came before it, even making direct cinematic references to the 1931 “Dracula” starring Bela Lugosi. The backstory comes in a “flashback” montage that recreates moments from that film, including the iconic lighting that illuminates just his eyes. Set in present-day New Orleans, Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), Dracula’s familiar, finds himself hoping to escape Dracula’s control. He has been serving Dracula (Nicolas Cage) for 90 years, bringing him victims and defending him from his enemies. In exchange, he receives agelessness and a fraction of Dracula’s powers, which he activates by eating insects.
Amazon Prime Video’s Emmy-winning comedy “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” has returned to the streaming service for its fifth and final season. In an attempt to stir up some hype for the show after a disappointing fourth season, only three episodes of the last season have been released. The remaining episodes will be released one at a time in the coming weeks. Hopefully, the upcoming episodes will be just as exciting and fresh as their serialized method of release because so far, season five is carrying on just like season four — redundant and forgettable.
“The Moors” begins slowly. It is evident early on that this play is a “Waiting for Godot” situation, and Master Branwell, whom Emilie is waiting to meet, will not be making an appearance and perhaps doesn’t even exist. The repetitiveness of the scenery leaves the audience feeling stuck in the moors, just as the characters are. We find the characters moving from room to identical room.
Nobody ever wants to pay taxes. The sentiment is in the air — April 18 is Tax Day! — as well as the arts. “Funmilayo,” the fourth production in the African opera series at Mount Holyoke, explores just one moment in the rich life of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti: when she fought British colonial rule in what is now present-day Nigeria through protests against a special tax imposed on women in the 1940s.
Yo La Tengo, a New Jersey-based band founded in the 1980s, released their 17th album, “This Stupid World,” in February. The album’s nine songs trace topics such as aging, death, and perseverance. Photo courtesy of Ricardo Romanoff via Flickr.
By Lucy Oster ’23
Arts & Entertainment Editor
I am always wondering if life is either good or bad — a reductive way of looking at the world, but I can’t help it. Lately, I’ve been reluctantly settling on the latter, as romantic heartbreak looms eternally and trains tip and spill poison. When I feel like this, I turn to people with years on me, who have seen so much bad and good that they’ve learned to take the two extremes with a grain of salt, knowing it can all change so quickly.
“This Stupid World,” released on Feb. 10, is the 17th album from New Jersey-based band Yo La Tengo. Clocking in at nine songs, a respectable number for an objectively late-career release, “This Stupid World” does not blow up the Yo La Tengo sound established on prior albums such as their previous 2018 album, “There’s A Riot Going On,” in any way, and that can be appreciated in a world that can be so destructive otherwise. After all, how can artists remain authentic and produce something unorthodox if they’ve spent decades consistently releasing albums? Specifically, how can an independent rock artist continue writing music about love and sadness, the most obtuse yet overdone topics? The answer to these questions has yet to be discovered, but it’s clear that Yo La Tengo has a clue, and their new album can help steer you through the messy nuances of life.
The album starts as expected for an indie rock band: with a lot of messy guitar and a steady drumbeat. Yo La Tengo formed in the 1980s, and this will likely affect their music style for as long as they produce it, with rougher-sounding musical attributes and soft vocals defining the band. These sounds are present on the new album, and especially in the two first songs on the album, “Sinatra Drive Breakdown” and “Fallout.” The songs on “This Stupid World” are generally lyrically lean with longer musical interludes. The lyrics that do emerge are poignant to many aspects of life. The album, after all, has a title that seeks to define the world, and the band has certainly been around the block.
“Fallout,” the first single and the album’s most-played song on Spotify, is about a desire to “fall out of time” because “every day it hurts to look.” The sentiment is not positive, but it’s delivered in an honest tone. As I listen to the song, I cannot always disagree with the desire to fall out of time briefly, and I feel relieved that I am not so alone in it.
Much of the album seems to cover aging and even death. “Until It Happens,” asks the listener to “Look away from the hands of time” and even “Prepare to die.” The last song on the album, “Miles Away,” wisely remarks: “The pain creeps in anyhow / You feel alone / Friends are all gone / Keep wiping the dust from your eyes.” The “keep” in the action of wiping the dust from your eyes is key to “This Stupid World.” Consistency and keeping on will change one’s perspective on life from bad to good and back again forever until it all ends.
Nuance is everything in this stupid world, and everything in “This Stupid World” as well. The songs are sonically harsh with soft lyrics, and the meaning behind the lyrics is full of nuance as well. “Sinatra Drive Breakdown” has the lyric “I see the moon rise as the sun descends.” Change is the only constant that we can rely on. Still, not all of the songs on the album are so bleak, as not all aspects of life are. “Tonight’s Episode” is bouncier than the other songs in Yo La Tengo’s repertoire, with fun lyrics about walking dogs, milking cows and the Japanese dish Shabu-shabu. Vocalist and guitarist Ira Kaplan even remarks, “I’ll show you a yo-yo trick.” Kaplan and one of the other members of the three-person band, Georgia Hubley, are married, and that domesticity shines through in “This Stupid World.” Married life also appears on the album in sadder ways, such as the song “Apology Letter,” where Kaplan sings, “If I were to smile at you / Would you smile at me?”
At the beginning of “Aselestine,” the second single, Hubley chuckles in the song’s prelude before sharing a gentle song. The lyrics are not sweet, proclaiming, “Where are you? / The drugs don’t do / What you said they do.” Yet, the tone is lifting and a release from the sonically harsher noises. Here, Yo La Tengo demonstrates that a compositionally soft song can encompass some of the bleakest lyrics, the opposite of their usual mode of louder songs and sweeter lyrics.
“This Stupid World” reveals that we cannot separate the bad and good from life. They are intricately tied up together, and they both make the other stronger with their contrast. I can, and even have to, appreciate both if I want to enjoy living even a little bit. After all, as the album’s titular song says, “This stupid world / It’s killing me / This stupid world / Is all we have.”
Poet Maggie Millner, left, sits beside author and Assistant Professor of English Andrea Lawlor, right, at Riffraff Bookstore and Bar, in Providence, RI. Photo courtesy of Kylie Gellatly FP ‘23.
By Emma Watkins ’23
Managing Editor of Content
“I became myself. / I became myself. / No, I always was myself. / There’s no such person as myself. ” The opening lines of Maggie Millner’s “Proem” reverberate due to both her clever use of exact rhyme and the introduction of the dynamic, ever-changing narrator. On the dust jacket at the opposite end of the book, Millner’s author photo gazes directly into the reader’s face, her reclined posture echoing the ease and intimacy with which her poetry and prose reveal her thoughts on love, queerness, sex, identity and discovery. Millner joined author and Mount Holyoke Clara Willis Phillips Assistant Professor of English Andrea Lawlor in conversation at Riffraff Bookstore and Bar in Providence, Rhode Island, on Friday, Feb. 17. In the hour that followed Millner’s selected readings, the two authors, which Millner referred to as “the best possible pairing,” discussed queer literary traditions and the playfulness of experimenting with form.
“I became myself. / I became myself. / No, I always was myself. / There’s no such person as myself.”
Drawing readers in with an eye-catching mirrored title and a bright red and pink cover, Millner’s 2023 debut, “Couplets,” proclaims itself a love story. At the reading, Millner wore a bright pink tube top that echoed the color saturation of her book. According to the book’s dust jacket, Millner’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Poetry. Millner’s website lists her as “a Lecturer at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review.”
According to the book’s synopsis, the main character of “Couplets” finds an “escape hatch” from her life and begins an exploration of “queerness, polyamory, kink, power, and loss, humiliation and freedom.” With descriptions from critics referring to the book as “sexy” and “seductive,” readers can expect a glimpse into the physical realm of Millner’s love story, but “Couplets” offers much more than that. Millner carefully yet boldly explores feelings of uncertainty, anticipation, attraction and self-discovery by intimating the hot-yet-tender moments of a new relationship while also candidly discussing the hauntings that a past love can leave.
The main speaker’s voice contains contradictions — witty and poignant, irreverent and reflective. Millner showcases this style in the poem “4.4.” The speaker addresses their class of students stating, “Evidence / must precede argument. Verbs are the heaviest / lifters. Change is constant and inexorable. / The Oxford comma isn’t really optional. / You will fall in love. The relationship / will end, though not at the same instant / as the love. Some version of this will continue, / maybe forever, happening to you.”
Millner explained that through writing in heroic couplets, she unexpectedly found her own escape hatch from feeling, in her own words, “restless with the contemporary lyric poem.” When explaining her choice to write a book in this style, Millner stated that she was interested in playing with poetic history and tradition but didn’t initially intend to write this book in rhyming couplets. She noted that couplets as a form “enact closure” due to the way that the rhyming pairs complete each other before the next group of lines. She explained that the process of writing this book was a cycle of “push [and] pull between continuation and closure that allowed her to experiment with the “subtleties of syntactic flow.” Lawlor and Millner both agreed that this kind of writing allows for a “queer[ing of one’s] syntax” that can be “playful” and “campy.” Millner described couplets as an “infectious” form, prompting Lawlor to reference Adrienne Raphel’s review of the book for The New York Times — which was written entirely in rhyming couplets.
Millner is clearly passionate about the craft of her poems and spoke excitedly about the writing process. Kelsey Warren FP ’25, a Mount Holyoke student who attended the event, appreciated how Millner dug into her book’s creation. “It’s exciting to hear from a writer whose work cracks open the genre binary and moreover get some insight into how Millner navigated the tension between poetry and prose, as well as her journey to letting the content find its form: experimentation and openness,” Warren said. “The talk reminded me that a book doesn’t always know what it wants to be when you begin it and to delight in the process.”
