I’m not going birding (and why I belong here anyways)
(04/25/23 1:50am)
They say the first thing you learn at Duke is just how stupid you are.
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They say the first thing you learn at Duke is just how stupid you are.
Last week, I had a rather unsettling dream. My subconscious built a world where I and everyone else live in exactly 800-year increments, and every cycle, all the world’s inhabitants are put in a large warehouse. The walls slowly close in, shrinking the warehouse until there’s no space at all, gradually killing the inhabitants. When there’s no one left, everyone resurrects and lives for another 800 years, renewing the cycle.
Welcome (back) to Duke! Durham has a vibrant arts scene to offer, but getting to know a new city can be a challenge. So, consider this week’s worth of activities your introduction to the Bull City!
When I first learned about hyperfixations, everything suddenly made sense. Of course, I learned about them in a Twitter thread, because how fitting for the app where I find most of my new interests to be the one that taught me about myself. I couldn’t believe that I’d never heard of hyperfixations before — they explained so much of why my hobbies and interests were so inconsistent, all-consuming and a bit random. My hyperfixations dramatically alter the way I experience culture, for better or for worse.
In the 37th season of “Survivor,” Angelina Keeley was a mess. Her antics in the reality competition show included: voting somebody out for their jacket, negotiating with the host for some rice, constantly bringing up that negotiation when convenient, humiliating another contestant with a fake advantage, losing a clue to an advantage of her own and generally just being a classic reality show villain. Needless to say, Keeley is among my favorite “Survivor” contestants ever.
It’s the Grammy Awards Show, 2013. The camera turns to Jack Antonoff. He throws his head back, his face framed by his signature black glasses as he rips into a twenty-second guitar solo to the delight of the roaring crowd in front of him.
What can I say about “Red” that I haven’t already? It was the first album I ever reviewed for Recess. If I’m going to talk about anything on “Red,” new or old, there’s really no better place to start than “All Too Well.” The song I called the “crowning jewel of ‘Red,’ if not her entire discography” got a massive upgrade in a new (er, old) ten minute version, titled “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault).”
It’s Hispanic Heritage Month, and I am still not that good at Spanish. I can understand it well, and if I’m comfortable, I can hold a decent conversation. Otherwise, I’m a bumbling mess, unable to string thoughts together at all. What that means for me is that I find it hard to call myself a Latino, even by the broadest of definitions. If I can’t even speak “Castellano,” as my relatives call their language, what claim do I have to the culture?
UNC must be a sad place. How else, then, does anybody come up with such a depressingly bad ranking of Taylor Swift’s discography? Our, ahem, friends in Chapel Hill clearly can’t be trusted with the monumental task of ranking 158 of Swift’s songs if this is what they come up with. For brevity, here’s the top and bottom five songs in the ranking of The Daily Tar Heel’s “Resident Taylor Swift Expert,” Ira Wilder:
In season two, episode two of the Northern Irish comedy “Derry Girls,” the character Mrs. De Brún is introduced. A fiery and passionate English teacher, she inspires her pupils to new creative heights through a healthy curriculum of hitting things with bats, cigarettes and wine parties. In one of her first scenes, Mrs. De Brún reads the class’s poetry submissions aloud — more than half of them are about dogs. The class is uninspired, boring! For Mrs. De Brún, that’s unacceptable.
I watched the first five episodes of “Loki” all at once. Certainly not by choice — I don’t have Disney+, so a friend invited me over to catch up with Loki and his antics with the Time Variance Authority (TVA) before the season finale the following week. For a good five hours, I was captivated — between the spectacular worldbuilding and attention-grabbing fight scenes that have come to define Marvel, “Loki” dramatically expanded the scope of its cinematic universe. That was, until the last episode, where the show suddenly fumbled the ball entirely.
“I want it to be, like, messy.”
I haven’t watched a lot of movies this year. Actually, there are only three I can remember: “Miss Americana” (a documentary), “Godmothered” (a random Christmas movie) and “Up” (an animated movie from 2009). Should this make me unqualified to write a review of the Oscars, the biggest award show of the year for cinema? Well, yes. It doesn’t help that I didn’t even watch the award show myself, but that’s besides the point. Why? Because nobody watched the Oscars this year.
It’s 2009. I’m fresh out of first grade and on the neighborhood swim team. For my eight-year-old self, it’s a good time to be alive – hours under the sun, wasting my time playing handball in the sand pit and sharks and minnows in the pool. At practice, my friends and I would race each other, and at meets, we’d sit in the bleachers and cheer each other on. There, on these metal benches, is where I’d make one of my earliest memories of music – where else better to scream “She’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers”?
“Life Support” is an album of strings. They’re featured in the opening track, the interlude, the hit single, the closing track and almost every other song on the record, so when “BOYSHIT” opens with a loud crash of horns and a bouncing hook that declares “I don’t speak boyshit,” you might think it’s antithetical to the rest of the album. However, you’d be mistaken: through and through, Madison Beer’s debut album is brash, straightforward and, most importantly, confident.
The Easter eggs started slowly. First, a photo hit twitter of HAIM posing in front of a gas pump labelled 13. Then came a TikTok video conspicuously zooming in on the one and three of a car’s gear shift. Soon after, a final photo, this one a group shot in front of a 76 gas station, contained the code “T76S0218” in the background. It wasn’t long before HAIM fans pieced together the clues: on February 18, for the extended edition of their 2020 summer album “Women In Music Pt. III,” the fan-favorite “Gasoline” was getting a remix with the queen of thirteen herself, Taylor Swift.
After being pushed back two months because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 Grammy Ceremony date is set for March 14th. See the full list of nominees on the Grammys website here, and fill out predictions of your own and compete against Recess in these 13 categories by filling out this form.
Ever since Bob Dylan released “Blonde on Blonde” in 1966, the trope of returning to your roots has permeated the music industry for decades. At this point, we’ve come to expect it from our crossover pop stars (ever heard someone say they want the old Taylor Swift back?). Who we don’t expect it from would be the reigning princess of pop, so when Ariana Grande dropped “Positions,” an R&B-embellished pop album in the vein of her debut record, “Yours Truly” (2013), it shocked the world to the tune of one million likes on Twitter.
From the ninth floor of the hospital, you can see really far off into the distance. Once your eyes move past the miles of trees and trace the Congaree river, they’ll eventually land on the few skyscrapers that mark Columbia’s downtown. Hovering on the horizon is a familiar gray sheet of clouds that gently transitions into a friendly sky blue.
It has been a long day for Katy Perry. It is 4:30 in the afternoon, and she’s running late to the next virtual press conference scheduled for her media day. When she finally clicks on the appropriate link, she’s whisked into a Zoom room filled with nearly 350 college journalists, all eager to ask the living legend herself a battery of pre-screened questions.