In 2013, a high schooler named Semi made a vine called “Another 6 Sec Rap.” This past week, the TikTok user Ondreaz Lopez created a video of himself dancing to Semi’s tight lyrics: “I’m Semi, I stay automatic / money add then multiply, I call it mathematics.” Lopez is wearing black skinny jeans, chains, an Iron Maiden t-shirt over a long sleeve shirt, with a middle part: a classic e-boy. This video has 2.2 million views, with reactions ranging from appreciation for his outfit and his looks, nostalgia for Vine, and the one very important comment by laxla.p, “My sis: ‘don’t come in my room with your bs’ Me: — ”.
On my “For You” page, the app’s portal to an infinite number of trending TikToks, I’ve seen hundreds of high school TikTok creators recreating Lopez’s dance to Semi’s lyrics. Many of these videos are accompanied by the captions: “me on my way to annoy my grandma ’cause I’m bored,” “I became an e-boy for this,” and, in an interesting twist, “me walking into my basement to see what person I kidnapped will be licking my toes clean tonight.”
This is, in essence, what TikTok is. It’s young people, mostly Americans and mostly high schoolers, picking up on a multitude of references and inspirations as a way to entertain and express themselves. Most Yale students aren’t making TikToks or even watching them. So, obviously, my unwavering dedication to my daily TikTok regimen is an asset to this campus. TikTok is reminiscent of Vine, but the videos are usually 15 seconds long and can last as long as 60. Most of the videos are set to clips of music and depict a related trend. “Old Town Road,” Lil Nas X’s inescapable anthem, was made famous on TikTok, where the song’s drop was used to animorph average teens into country cowboys.
TikTok involves a whole lot of lip syncing to songs, media audio bites, or any string of words, both funny or serious, taken from other internet users. The app is invested in the constant transformation and creation of memes, and its users are very smart about it, although rarely self-aware. It’s a painfully cringey medium, with videos ranging from entire high school baseball teams standing and flexing into the camera, girls demonstrating how they are catfishes through makeup transformations, teens doing complex coordinated dances in the streets of their subdivisions, or people just staring into the camera flipping their hair and biting their lips. These videos beg the ultimate question which can’t simply be answered in a biweekly Herald column: Why?
The Semi trend is a complex intertwining of digital-era cultural references and the Gen Z desire to look hot and be out there on the web. TikTok trends pick up on suburban teens’ anxiety surrounding identity, presentation, and the desperate need to be attractive, interesting, and maybe funny. And the stakes, let me tell you, are high. TikTok is one of the only digital media platforms that doesn’t favor actual celebrities, and so regular kids can benefit enormously from creating good content. What do our country’s teens want out of their digital experience, and what is important to them? TikTok might just be able to tell us, and so, I’d argue this means that it’s a damn good way to understand America.
When Yung Lean makes lo-fi art rock, he goes by the name Jonatan Leandoer127. Jonatan Leandoer127 dropped the album Nectar on Jan. 25, 2019 — but name Yung Lean wasn’t even mentioned once in the album’s press releases. Yung Lean, the Swedish musician and totemic sad boy, who became famous at 16 for his depressive cloud rap, is now 22 and is trying to reinvent himself.
Yung Lean started on SoundCloud and rose to fame in 2013 when his music video for Ginseng Strip 2002 went viral. He went on to release the EP Lavender and his first mixtape Unknown Death 2002, and then the single “Kyoto,” his most popular track to date. “Kyoto” dropped right as I was learning to drive, and I spent hours driving my friends around with the bass turned all the way up, the car vibrating to the track’s heavy reverb and lush synthesizers. Even then, I knew Yung Lean himself not a talent. Instead, Yung Gud, Yung Lean’s friend and producer, uses echo and autotune to envelop Yung Lean’s despondent, hollow voice. This lavish production allows Yung Lean to posture as the leader of the sad boys. Literally, because Yung Lean co-opted the term to name his crew Sad Boys Collective.
“I got an empire of emotion / … / Coke filled nose, too weird for them other fuckboys / Catch Lean and Sad Boys,” Yung Lean mumbles to the camera in the “Kyoto” music video, standing in front of a row of Arizona teas in an Asian convenience store. His lyrics are filled with references to luxury brands, drugs, Arizona tea, and Japanese culture. Like many SoundCloud rappers, he’s an outsider. He’s a mix of internet meme and rapper, using imagery of early 2000s internet nostalgia: vaporwave, flip phones, Microsoft Paint, and anime. Primarily, Yung Lean has cultivated a devoted fan base of boys between the ages of 13 and 18 through pure sadness.
His lyrics capitalize on the aesthetic of performative melancholy. His earliest tracks in 2013 and 2014 built a cult fan base on insincere emotional anguish. In “Yoshi City,” on Unknown Memory, Yung Lean raps, “I’m a lonely cloud.” In “Die With Me,” Yung Lean says, “I’m worthless, I’m nothing.” On “Gatorade,” Yung Lean covers all his usual bases: self-harm, luxury, and apathy. His fans speak his language, express his lifestyle, and manifest his sadness as a foil for self-absorbed masculine wallowing. They are immersed in the image of his movement: Hawaiian print, bucket hats, red-tinted sunglasses, Xanax, lean. Lean’s lyrics are filled with women-caused pain, drugs, violence, and aesthetics. This, in association with depression, has the ability to create a dangerous cult of young sad boys who conflate mental health with a contemporary culture and aesthetic.
After his initial success in 2014, Yung Lean went on to release two albums of the same ilk, suffer from addiction to the substances he rapped about, get hospitalized, and move back to Sweden to live with his parents. When he dropped Stranger in 2017, he finally managed to reach genuine emotional depth, drawing on his own personal experience as well as his nightmares. But while he was encountering real hardship and exhibiting sincere growth, the landscape of rap has come to adopt his hazy, melancholy, insincere cloud rap style. His artificial sadness became mainstream, but somehow Yung Lean doesn’t seem able to participate in his genre’s success. His most recent album as Yung Lean, Poison Ivy, was an unimaginative regression.
Only months after Poison Ivy, Yung Lean might have a new audience in mind with Jonatan Leandoer127’s new rock album. Nectar casts the old Yung Lean’s lyrics in a new compelling light, applying his disaffected sensibilities to a new genre. Without the clichés of his cloud rap, he’s able to transform the sad boy into something more profound. “I wonder why / You treat me so good / When I’ve been so sad / I put a curse on myself,” Leandoer127 sings at the beginning of Nectar’s “Razor Love.” As Leandoer127 reflects in what feels like a truthful way, he takes responsibility for his past, accepting his role as a player in an actual music scene instead of just an internet meme phenomenon, and moves past the sad boy.
Out by the thin metal bones of the cellphone towers, the dilapidated railroad depot only barely held its rotting wood roof supports in place and sweated green down lichen-covered stone. There was a group of boys that hung out around there. They didn’t play football and weren’t the class clowns and didn’t even graffiti the shops on Main Street. They just sat in a line on the railroad platform as trains — ones that hadn’t stopped in Wilmington for as long as anyone could remember — pitched down the thin strip of track; long strings of boxcars carrying grain and meat and auto parts towards Braidwood and then onto Pontiac. The boys were hefty with bodies that slid solidly into tractor seats and bodies that were meant for the grain elevator or for hog tying. They wore camo purchased from the Bass Pro Shops in Joliet and had wheat colored hair cut flat and straight across greasy foreheads. Some of them had already thought about the army; some of them already helped their father out at the three pump gas station or handed out shoes at Riverfront Lanes or were frying up potatoes at PT’s on 66 or at Nelly’s.
They didn’t talk too much but would hit each other’s caps down over their eyes, passing around a Lucky Strike or a Marlboro Red, peering over the soft porno magazines of girls with long hair wearing cowboy boots and wet Wrangler T-shirts. They knew a lot about hunting and a lot about guns and would compare a Remington M870 Shotgun to a Savage M220 Stainless Rifle to a American Safari Magnum or flip through photos with stubby fingers swiping on cracked screens: turkeys with crumpled tawny feathers and speckled deer strapped down onto the beds of rusty pickups and geese limp and thin held up by wind cracked hands. No one would call them nice boys, but the town felt a great deal of gratitude towards them anyway.
Maureen had been scared of them for a long time. The boys from her school were small and wore khaki pants fitted to thin legs. They wore round glasses that were sometimes tortoiseshell and combed their hair back with pomade. But Maureen was alone with very little to lose, and she thought she could come up to them on the railroad platform and be sullen and they would respect her and maybe think she was hot.
“Wouldn’t it be so fun if you brought a Wilmington boy to prom?” Maureen’s father asked from behind the printed newspaper he had to read because there was no wifi at home. The family had been in Wilmington for over four months and Aaron had adjusted to his new lifestyle with an ease that miffed Peggy. “All those boys from school would be literally terrified. You should do it my dearest daughter.” Aaron had started ordering the Chicago Jewish Star so that it could be thrown on the grass next to the mailbox and get a rise out of the local churchgoers. He left that newspaper there for days before picking it up and then intentionally read it sitting on the porch. There weren’t many exciting controversial things happening in small town Illinois. Besides the Confederate flags that were hooked onto the back of trucks and waved from second stories and were taped inside windows facing busy streets, Aaron didn’t have much to complain about. Sometimes he wished that just one person would say something antisemitic to him so he could tell his friends all about it.
“Yeah maybe I will dad,” Maureen muttered to herself, pulling her car up to the railroad depot, parking in-between the rusting snouts of the chevy wagons and the big white pickup with the eight shovels stored in the back. She smoothed out the wrinkles in her Chicago Cub’s T-shirt — her most down to earth piece of clothing — under her thick red flannel, under her down winter jacket. She bent down to check her ‘real girl’ ponytail in her side mirror, then straightening up and strided towards the train tracks.
When Maureen returned to the octagon house she felt seen. The boys at the platform had tolerated her presence just long enough for her to feel impressive before they all rambled away without explanations. Next week she was expected at the prairie reclamation to see the bison up close, they told her it would be fun for her. There was this one boy, who was even wider than the others and had set up a home gym in his family’s shed out back and now had thick cables of muscle roping from his wrists to his concrete shoulders. He was no Leonardo DiCaprio, but had said something about going to Church with his grandmother and Maureen’s heart warmed in a certain way towards him. He had gruffly said that they should “hang out,” before he got in his truck.
— — -
Maureen fucked the large boy who was kind to his Grandma. They had watched half of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and when enough was enough Maureen had let the health class condom fall out of her pocket, and then picked it up as suggestively as possible. Things moved from there. Maureen insisted that the act would take place on the caned balloon settee across from the suit wearing portrait of Martha Cox. It was satisfactory and cursory, it got the job done. She asked him if he watched internet porn and he said no that shit was for losers. She asked him what he thought about the view over Bay Island. Losing your virginity was supposed to be goddamn monumental and it hadn’t been.
Peggy had been out selling her dream catchers and Aaron was with his data consulting buddies, and it was approaching Thanksgiving and there was a leafy wreath hanging over the fireplace with three gourds lumpily tilting on their sides by the back door. The box elders and the maples and the buckeye were bare, with sharp branches shifting uneasily in the wind, their leaves in piles of crumpling brown debris in the center of yards, mulchy at the bottom and dry at the top.
By IL-53 N the prairie was a hazy mass of golds and taupes, the prescribed burns leaving a gauze of smoke over the grasses, pluming up into the crisp air. The bison loped through the smoke with their heads to the ground in their groups of calfs and cows. The bulls wandered alone, one right up against the highway, pawing at the hardened earth, dried bluestem caught in the hair hanging shaggily from his front legs. The bull was pathetic, standing there with the smoke behind him, covered with plant debris, hunched and worn out.
— —
When Peggy and Aaron finally had sex again, for real, after an unmentionably long hiatus, Maureen was with the train depot boys, squeezed into the warm cab of a truck, next to a girl with three streaks of pink in her mousy brown hair. They were 30 in all, the boys and their girlfriends wearing boot cuts jeans with embroidered flowers on the pockets and their sisters with plastic blue glasses from the nearby Walmart and skinny uncles with spots of dark blood on their face from old razors. Nicole drove her open top Suzuki jeep, her two boys in the back bundled up under wool blankets.
Aaron started speaking in a southern twang midway through this trial run, his nerves simmering up to the surface as he began to cry hot nervous tears. Peggy, who has described herself as tender, couldn’t muster up any amount of sympathy and went to watch Jimmy Fallon videos on her hidden iPad locked in the downstairs bathroom until her husband calmed down. And then it turned out to be a lovely night.
The bison at night huddle together for warmth in a slight dip as the prairie nears the marsh wetlands at the preserve’s northwest corner. It had rained recently, a pelting and unrelenting flurry of stinging rock hard droplets and now the mud flecked up in oblong chunks onto the the truck beds.
“They used to do this all the time back before Brodie’s woods were bulldozed,” the boy driving yelled into Maureen’s ear. “Mud bogging, mudding, whatever you want to call it.” he laughed, “You take your ATV or your truck or whatever you’ve got and the mud splatters everywhere, and you see how fast you can fucking go.”
And suddenly the vehicles were stopping and everyone was getting out wearing thick leather boots and canvas jackets over hoodies tied tight around the neck, and the people lumbered out across the prairie, the brackish grasses coming up to their waists. Nicole tottered unsteadily over, her pregnant torso extended and her hands clasped over her stomach. Her boys ran into the darkness and she didn’t try to stop them.
“It’s like cow tipping, but way more dangerous,” one boy shouted to the other. They held wooden stakes and crowbars and baseball bats, and some had shotguns slung over the shoulders. Maureen wasn’t an animal lover, but she asked the boy who went to church with grandma if they were going to hurt the bison, and he had said no, definitively. These were tools for personal protection, obviously.
White flashlight beams shone harsh over the stiff side-oats grama and cord grass, angled with broken stalks cracked by late November winds. Maureen was comforted knowing Martha didn’t have a chance to see the bison before she died.
They were hers. She saw them every day.
There were 30 bison, dark massed shapes in front of the orange of the half moon, the grass springing up around them.
“We’re just going to wake them up, and then they’ll run, and then we’ll run.”
“Right back to the cars ok.”
“Yeah, obviously, ok.”
And then they were all yelling, and Maureen was yelling and she charged at the bison and wanted them to be scared of her. And the bison all stood up, at once, shaking and rolling and snorting. Their breath sounded hot and musty. Their horns glinted streaked white hovering above massive heads over bodies that weighed 2,000 pounds. And they were running, quickly, the group splintering in all directions. The flashlight beams were bouncing now, from animal to animal, from the ground to illuminating the gray of the sky, a bat was flung across the field and struck an animal which emitted a low disgruntled bellow.
“Run — just fucking run!” A woman screamed, her voice high and shrill, terrified. And they were all laughing in some kind of way, as the animals charged behind them, people tripping and falling and then pulling themselves up and continuing to move. Maureen’s arm was tugged at, and it was Nicole kneeling in the grass, her jeans unbuttoned and covered in a clear liquid.
“This is where my baby is going to be born,” Nicole pulled the other woman closer to her, her teeth gritted tightly together. “Right here in this field, with these bison here, right fucking here.”
“Are you kidding?” Maureen shouted, but she was trapped again as she knelt in the bison wallow, the rainwater soaking through her socks and her shoes. She felt the skim of the brackish water’s surface against her hands as she reached to pull off Nicole’s jeans and her underwear and extended her arm to stroke the woman’s sweat drenched hair, the pale sheen of her face. The ground was physically shaking, hooves and heavy legs pounding across the ground. The engines of the trucks were gunned, the sick sloshing of tires over wet mud fading away from the wallow until Maureen could hear the smooth slither of the rubber as the trucks heaved themselves up over the flooded ditch beyond the shoulder of the highway.
Maureen was leaning over Nicole, low, pressed to the ground as the bison charged towards them. They were still coming, their hooves still pounding the ground, the bulls who had looked so forlorn now in control of the prairie. And Maureen thought that maybe she was going to die.
And then the prairie rippled into a deep orange blaze around them as the underbrush beneath the sedges finally caught onto the controlled burn. The smoke rolled into the air, obscuring the bison and their confused brays, consumed by the dense carpet of low flame and heavy smoke. And the bison turned around, loping back towards the dip where they had been sleeping to muffle around until morning. Nicole grasped the mud beneath her, squelching it out between dirty knuckles, her other hand grabbing onto Maureen’s hand as she said the only thing she knew how to say in this scenario. “Push!” She bellowed, like a coach or an overbearing parent at a sports game. And two hours later the baby girl squealed as its head and then its limbs and torso emerged into the cold November air.
Maureen returned to the octagon house, her jacket had been burned and cut open, her knees were bloody, her sweater was coated in afterbirth. She took off her soiled clothes, her underwear, her bra, and left them in a pile by the yard. John had come for Nicole and put out the nearest section of prairie burn with a fire extinguisher, and then drove Maureen home in a solid silence, because this was real life and a grown woman’s baby did not have to be put in the hands of a high school senior.
Maureen sat on the icy slats of the porch swing, the bitter air slicing at her, the neighbors across the street finally looking, peering around flowered blinds and exclaiming that there was a girl sitting outside. Naked, when it was almost winter. She breathed in firmly, and then she stood up, stretching her arms out towards the sky full of stars. She padded down the porch steps, knelt down in the flowerbeds and groped under the porch until she felt the rounded corner of the iPhone 3, with the sticker on the back in yellow that said “Aaron Resnick” with the family’s old Chicago address listed below it. She unzipped the plastic bag, wet from the rainwater collecting under the porch. She unlocked the phone, the sickly screen lighting up her pinched face from below in blues and greens. And she decided that now, probably, was the best time, right after she had witnessed the miracle of goddamn birth, to connect with her own family. And so she pulled open safari and then dragged her finger to open browsing history and flipped through Xvideos and RedTube and YouJizz, because that was what it was all about in the end, anyway.
A Flatland was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
American Vandal Season 2 opens on an extended scene of every student at St. Bernardine’s shitting their pants. Shot after shot of kids in uniforms lifting their skirts up, pulling their khaki pants down, throwing themselves into trash cans, sitting down next to lockers, banging on bathroom stall doors.
This season of American Vandal, released on Netflix on Sept. 14, follows in the footsteps of the first season as a mock crime thriller. Over the span of eight episodes, a mysterious school crime is laid to rest, and Peter and Sam, the teenage documentary makers, assist a falsely accused perpetrator in his quest for justice. And, as you probably guessed, this season’s crime is all about shit.
The Turd Burglar, introduced in the first episode, is an unidentified criminal with an active Instagram account who terrorizes the school with a series of poop-related crimes. There’s the Brownout, in which laxatives are put in the lemonade and the entire school shits their pants publicly, shown in excruciating detail over and over again; the dramatic moment that a Piñata is hit open and shit is flung across an English class; and the incident at a basketball pep rally when poop is shot out of T-shirt cannons onto the entire school. In the previous season, the crime involved dicks drawn on cars, which perpetuated the show’s uniquely charming theme of making a huge deal out of inconsequential things. With the severity of the poop crimes, season 2 loses that charm. Due to the number and scope of the Turd Burglar crimes, the first three episodes take it for granted that the average viewer finds videos of people shitting their pants hilarious. And, yes, I laughed out loud, but a show like American Vandal should be funnier than just a couple shock value laughs.
Shock value gets old, whereas the show excels in capturing the details of high school. American Vandal’s attentively crafted friendships and communities provide a lasting humor that makes this show the funniest and most original comedy since The Office. I was disappointed that the drama of this season didn’t pick up sooner. But thankfully after the poop was pushed to the side, the characters and the real story of social-media-fueled dispossession came to the forefront.
This season is set at a Washington State Catholic school, St. Bernadine’s, replacing the first season’s public school hooligans, overachievers, and potheads with a more individualized and polarized cast of characters: a rich lesbian with a fabricated Instagram persona, an uber-religious chubby boy who can’t handle sex-ed class, and a perpetually friend-zoned theater boy.
This season’s plot, though at times reaching into the absurd and the implausible, is driven by unique characters and complex interpersonal relationships. In this show, the actions of the community have consequences. Bullying, belittlement, public opinion, and friendships shape the main characters of the show as well as devastate them. By the end of the last episode, I was not laughing. I was left shaken and upset by the show’s depictions of the cruel realities of coming of age.
The main character of the show is Kevin McClain, who is suspected, from episode one, of being the Turd Burglar. He is described as a normal, popular boy until the fourth grade, when he shits his pants in gym class and is then dubbed “Shit Stain McClain,” making him a social outcast, presumably forever. Through the course of middle and high school, Kevin’s alienation intensifies. He starts his own terrible EDM band and becomes obsessed with fine teas. The show does an incredible job capturing the essence of his character: the nerdy, peculiar boy devoid of social awareness. He wears a pageboy hat and uses SAT vocabulary he doesn’t understand in an attempt to seem smarter. The show makes fun of him for his peculiarities while also making the audience sympathetic to him as a character that has been forced put up all his defenses. Kevin cautiously walks the line between pity and distaste, which is impressive as well as convincing.
The other protagonist is DeMarcus Tillman, a beloved black basketball star who comes from a different background than most other St. Bernardine students. He is the antidote for Kevin’s almost too upsetting isolation and weirdness. DeMarcus is funny, personable, confident, and genuinely nice. He also is portrayed as able to get away with anything by way of his star status. A good amount of screentime is devoted to him taking phone calls in class, yelling at kids in the hallway, and high-fiving nuns. Unlike Season 1, which was centered around a virtually all-white high school with white main characters, St. Bernadine’s student body is far more diverse.
Unfortunately, because DeMarcus’ athletic skill apparently cancels out his outsider status, the show erases any room for commentary on race and class. When Peter and Sam accuse DeMarcus of being the Turd Burglar, the school is so caught up in idolizing DeMarcus that they refuse to entertain this prospect, leading to Kevin commenting that ‘athletes’ always get away with things, whereas he can’t. The show pits DeMarcus against Kevin, making DeMarcus appear as the privileged one at the school. For a show with such an over analyzation of high school, American Vandal misses the opportunity to explore actual experiences of being black and low income at a white private high school.
Neither Kevin nor DeMarcus fit in for their own reasons. But that’s the key to high school, isn’t it? Does anyone truly “fit in”? Popular books, movies, and TV shows often focus on this turbulent period of life, making for widely relatable content for viewers of all ages across the country. Friendships formed in high school are complicated and intense because they exist in such an insulated environment, making it the perfect backdrop for the seemingly petty affairs in a show like American Vandal.
The show relies heavily on viewers’ abilities to relate to the minutiae of high school, but what makes American Vandal’s second season relevant in 2018 is not its relatability but its commentary and focus on social media. I know we’re past the stage of asking “is social media bad?” but high school can’t be portrayed simply in a social-media-less vacuum. In this season social media isn’t simply a tool used to solve a crime, but acts as a character on the show. The Turd Burglar is an online persona and a person. Instagram is a landscape where classmates deceive each other and are also angered by deception. Instagram has the power to ruin someone at St. Bernadine’s, which is a place where a character’s girlfriend breaks up with her because of a lie in a post. This may be overly dramatic, but the show’s exaggerations flesh it out as more than your typical high school drama.
A significant portion of the show is made out of close-ups of Instagram posts, Snapchat videos, pictures and videos posted to FaceBook, Twitter and YouTube. This is hard to play with and especially hard to make fun of in more than a “haha, that’s a funny photo,” way. It’s the reality of the age we live in, as cheesy as that sounds, and even in comedy, social media has to be taken seriously. The biggest crime that the Turd Burglar commits is tagging all the kids shitting their pants on Instagram, an extreme version of cyberbullying that calls into question the interaction between the digital world and real life.
American Vandal Season 2 is a show about poop, and how poop is funny. Which is pretty juvenile. But it’s also a show that’s self aware enough to surpass this surface level theme. It handles its subject matter with varying degrees of delicacy but succeeds in not taking itself too seriously. American Vandal fights the urge to sink into melodrama as its characters deal with the aftermath of bullying, secrets and messing up. Through the drama of a poop afflicted school, the show forces a community to interact. If you want constant laugh out loud humor about high school and characters that are genuinely funny, the first season of American Vandal will do the trick. But, although slow to build entertainingly, Season 2 crafts a landscape that weaves social media and real life into a cohesive world that successfully satisfies a craving for high school nostalgia while also commenting on the complexities of coming of age in the digital era.
American Vandal, Season 2 was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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Less than a year ago, I was crunchy. I was the woman wearing a maroon flannel over a knit green sweater over baggy jeans over Blundstone boots, practically brandishing a baking tray and saying, “take a fucking muffin,” in your worst Berkshires day-hike nightmare. I could have left lecture and gone Alpine-ski-camping at any moment. Or at the very least knitted and watched the sunset from a porch swing or rolled in literal mud with a golden retriever named Kombucha. Least to say, it was a total disaster.
I mean, I’m from a city. I love cement and I like being stressed. I also love drinking out of plastic straws. Crunchy just isn’t me. But more than that, crunchy is when you’re in high-school and you want to have a THING, and you also go to private school and the cool thing is to look like you’re destitute. This is a sucky thing. High school is also when girls are supposed to look nice and fun, and who the fuck cares about that now?
Last Monday, I truly realized how far I had come in my quest for style reinvention: Less than a week after Yom Kippur, the day I repented for all my past style transgressions, my Kenzo Polo tee, freshly purchased from Grailed, arrived in the mail.
“What’s Grailed?” you ask, a mere novice in the online purchasing of high-end menswear. Well, let me tell you. It’s a community marketplace targeting the personal need of style-forward randos who want to buy expensive stuff for less money. On Grailed, shoppers don’t merely want, they covet. And that’s me, a damn materialist, searching for big new materials.
Picture this: a neon red polo with a spread collar and breast pocket, made legible with thin black strokes. At the neck, there is one elegant black button and two more hidden below. Beneath the collar reads “KENZO,” each letter a different color: blue, green, yellow, red, blue. Beneath “KENZO,” “POLO” is written in subtle red stitching. It’s an item that guarantees an era of self-redefinition. But what does the public think?
“Bold statement,” says Molly Ono, ES ’20. You’re right Molly, I’m just a shy woebegotten wallflower trying to finally be noticed by wearing bright colors.
“Who is Julia getting revenge on?” Jack Kyono, PC ’20, was heard asking an unknown conversation partner. Good question, Jack. I’m getting revenge on my previous self, for rejecting my cosmopolitan roots and getting into this whole “nature” thing a little too hard.
“Hot 93.7 Tell ’em why you mad” says Fiona Drenttel, BF ’20, apparently quoting a popular Connecticut radio station. I think I agree?
More importantly, what does this shirt say to me, the protagonist of this saga? Well, it signifies a new epoch in my personal appearance. It’s not enough to not look crunchy, because then I’m simply floating in style limbo. It wasn’t enough to throw my red flannel shirt in the garbo, use Sun-In to make my hair a brittle yellow-blond (in a way that makes you say “huh, weird”), and purchase pink tennis shoes that looks like they’re floating on big-ass rafts. It’s time for me, a lover of menswear and a lifelong reader of GQ magazine, to enter the world of high-end big-name streetwear. Supreme, Palace, Bape — I’m coming for you. Am I a hypebeast in the making? Not yet, maybe not ever, but I can sure try my be(a)st.
Beets to Beast was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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Wedged between I-91 and the Quinnipiac marshlands sits Universal Drive — an isolated, mile-long stretch of big box stores containing your usual cast of characters: low, pale concrete buildings with chunky geometric rooflines, undulating concrete curbs of meager landscaping, acres of yellow-lined parking spaces, and their wide entrances. If you pull into North Haven Commons, one of the shopping centers on the strip, you’ll find Best Buy, Red Lobster, Big Lots, PetCo, and Buffalo Wild Wings. Two hundred thousand square feet of retail and restaurant space, all tucked into prefab boxes, surrounding 1,000 parking spaces on a cracked asphalt lot.
Looming front and center is the recently vacated Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us. After closing in April 2018, all that is left of North Haven Commons’ former anchor store is 40,000 square feet of unused retail space.
The challenges ahead for North Haven Commons are familiar to many malls and strip malls across the country. The amount of retail space closing in 2018 is poised to break records, with an expected 90 million square feet of space being vacated by distressed retailers — including Sears, Guitar Center, RadioShack, Sports Authority, and Macy’s. This mass closing of “brick-and-mortar” retailers has been dubbed the “Retail Apocalypse.” Credit Suisse reports that by 2020, 25 percent of all U.S. malls currently operating will be closed.
Toys “R” Us joined the list of companies filing for bankruptcy in September 2017. By June 18, 2018, it had closed all of its 735 stores. The demise of Toys “R” Us by the overall causes of the Retail Apocalypse: rising rents, over-expansion, changes in consumer habits, e-commerce, and debt.
The Retail Apocalypse is visible everywhere: in indoor suburban shopping centers, in open air strip malls, and in “power centers” — a term often used to describe an expansive conglomerate of discount big box stores. In a power center like North Haven Commons, Toys “R” Us is considered an anchor store — a large retailer with broad enough appeal to attract a large cross-section of shoppers. Doug Gray, the president of Eclipse Development Group, a land development agency based out of Irvine, California, is the creator of North Haven Commons. As an experienced developer, Gray remarks that anchor stores are “how the power centers, such as North Haven Commons, came into being. People want to park as close as they can, to shop specifically at that retailer. So what you hope, as a retailer, is that you can get synergism between tenants, so that somebody will cross-shop.”
With the loss of a big box anchor store, North Haven Commons will face the fate of many other malls and strip malls: fewer customers. “Vacancies are like cancer,” Gray tells me grimly. “And it spreads. Because all the sudden, the people who would normally shop at Ulta at night don’t want to go there ’cause there’s a dark box right next to it. So they don’t feel as safe as they would have, had the parking lot been more full with cars and people. So, yeah, they’re in a tough situation.”
For North Haven, the challenge now is to fill that vacant space — or risk the decay of the entire mall. Universal Drive, as a shopping strip, brings a great deal of outside revenue into the community. June Williamson, a professor of architecture at the City College of New York, who has studied suburban landscapes, explains how strip malls collect revenue, “The reward [for strip mall development] is often tax-based. Whether it’s an increment on the sales tax, or it’s the property tax that the community receives… they’re bringing in revenue from residents outside their community, and they’re capturing it within that town through this property tax mechanism.” The closure of a big box store like Toys “R” Us, therefore, can have widespread consequences on the financial standing of the town as a whole. “When the businesses close, it often produces a significant gap in the municipality’s budget — which hurts,” Williamson adds.
The North Haven community recognizes the store’s loss. In comments to the New Haven Register on the closing of Toys “R” Us, David Cadden, a professor emeritus at Quinnipiac University’s School of Business, says, “A space that remains vacant too long results in a zombification of retail centers. If you go into a mall or shopping center that has only 30 or 40 percent of the space filled, it’s going to creep you out and you’re not going to go back.”
The strip mall evolved as more and more of the American landscape became devoted to consumerism.
The ancestor of the contemporary power center is the Taxpayer Strips of the 1920s and ’30s. These were lines of humble storefronts that eventually gave way to department stores, movie theaters, and banks, that then began cropping up at major intersections. The 1940s saw the development of strip malls anchored by department stores and supermarkets. New American development was decentralized, resulting in the physical separation of shopping and other services, and creating sprawling outer suburbs. By the ’60s, outparcel buildings began to flank the older malls, creating rows of strip buildings along the road whose disorderly signage and loud, exaggerated look prompted Lawrence R. Rockefeller to call the American roadway a “ruined landscape” and inspiring Lady Bird Johnson to launch her campaign as First Lady to promote scenic beauty of suburban landscapes.
By the late ’60s, the strip mall had toned down, taking on earth tones, shingled roofs, and brick and wood paneling to attempt a friendly, neighborhood look. The 1970s, however, saw an explosion of discount department stores: Target, Kmart, Walmart. The ’70s also saw major institutional investors underwriting strip mall lease requirements, calling for tenants with top credit ratings — something that was only achievable by national retail chains. Those retail chains grew by square footage in the ’70s and ’80s. Their signage became standardized, their landscaping and parking areas swelled, and they began servicing areas as far as 15 miles away.
For decades, corporate growth meant expanding into larger and larger real estate. In the 1990s, increased specialization of malls and stores created the power center — which reflected Wall Street’s fondness of architectural uniformity — and the “category killer,” a warehouse-type store that sells just one kind of product, like Toys “R” Us. The power center’s massive parking lots reflect government regulations that mandate minimum parking requirements and positioning of stores away from the road.
Today, 90 percent of space in large malls is leased to chains. Malls built since the ’90s look virtually all the same. The strip mall has no wish to be a social or cultural center, and instead exists along access routes and travel corridors, reaching outwards from the edges of cities towards national expressways. They often are the first impression someone has of a city, and are passed through without any type of social encounter or experience. It’s gotten to the point where no one wants to build strip malls any more. North Haven Commons may be one of the last.
The North Haven Commons development was completed in 2008, designed in a homey, Prairie style theme. “You have to create a sense of place, and it has to be an event to go shopping,” says Gray. “If you just do something like 99 percent of what’s in Connecticut — which is just the stale, bland monolithic development, people go there only because they have to.”
North Haven Commons is situated on the edge of the Quinnipiac River wetlands. “For many years, it was a steel reclamation yard, and then an auto wrecking yard,” Gray tells me. In 2004, Eclipse Development Group took on the challenge of developing the site, which had been contaminated with PCBs following years of industrial use. The group’s website reads, “although the River makes for a beautiful backdrop for this development, the care and precautions we needed to take along with the approvals from the appropriate governing bodies were fairly intensive.”
David Sacco, YC ’82,the project engineer for TPA Design Group, which implemented the development, says that “it was a difficult site for some reasons. There were some more soil conditions that had to be dealt with… and also being on the riverfront side, it needed to be built to consider flood implications. The development itself is not subject to flooding — it’s high enough that that’s not an issue, but that’s one of the things that needs to be considered in a site like that.”
Gray originally wanted Dick’s Sporting Goods to be one of the major tenants at North Haven Commons, but they didn’t sign on fast enough and so he put in Big Lots, which pays less rent. After meeting with brokers and thinking of potential site plans, Gray looked at access visibility and then after conducting intensive research and creating a competition map, decided what tenants to bring into the development. He negotiated with the tenants on placement of spots, and then signed them on.
Gray believes in synergy between tenants. “The tenants you tie together help each other. And that’s why I always put food with them. Because with larger developments, it keeps the shopper within the development the longer, so more money,” Gray says. His development contains restaurant pad buildings, which are on each side of the entrance to the parking lot, and are finished on all four sides to attract customers to eat.
“Look, retailers don’t understand real estate — hell, 90 percent of them don’t even understand retailing,” Gray tells me. For him it’s common sense for retailers to work together. Gray’s original idea for the power center was to add in a fire pit and an outdoor eating space. “They’d drive by and see it on the way to the Target, and go oh, that’d be nice,” he says. But the Connecticut brokers were not receptive to that idea.
“Well, one of the things that you find in the Northeast is that there actually are old downtowns and main streets,” Williamson comments. If you were to have a walkable center, you would put it in the historical downtown. “There’s a sense in the Northeast that you can have both — so the big boxes go in one location where you just want to build it as cheaply as possible, and then if you want to go out to eat and sit outside and so on, you’re gonna go where there’s remnants of that kind of experience.”
Williamson and Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor at Georgia Tech, write in their book, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, about the idea of a “good place.” This is the kind of place where locals would socialize and hang out. It’s a diner, bar, coffee shop, or even a hair salon or hardware store. Suburban landscapes lack a place to grow social capital outside the hierarchy of the home, the workplace, and the school. The strip mall creates dependence on the car, aiding in this suburban isolation. Dunham-Jones and Williamson write that the strip mall is the “willing suppression of local identity by national systems of corporate investment and mass consumption.”
But in Retrofitting Suburbia,Dunham-Jones and Williamson propose a second life for derelict big box stores and strip malls. They suggest redesigning and reimagining the strip outside the realm of retail chain stores. Suburban residents are already used to the architecture of the malls and strips that surround them, so instead of tearing them down there is an easier and more economical action: putting something else in the storefronts. For the North Haven Commons’ empty Toys “R” Us, Williamson suggests putting in a gym, maybe with an indoor pool, or a memory care center for seniors with dementia.
“The wellness centers, where you might have a running track inside and workout areas and maybe an indoor pool. Pop some skylights up in the roof. You can turn it into a public library — things like that,” Williamson tells me, “Then, on the flip-side, there’s also industrial-type uses. Whether it’s hydroponics, for growing marijuana, things like that that use the large footprint building.”
Currently North Haven Commons is utilizing a different method to fill the Toys “R” Us: a Halloween City. Its banner in orange and black is strung up where the old store’s signage had once been, but only temporarily. On Nov. 1, the North Haven Commons location and the other 250 or so Halloween City pop-ups will close, and the strip mall will have to continue looking for permanent tenants.
“Some folks say, well, why does it matter that a Halloween store opened up, we know that’s only temporary, well yes, but for the temporary two months, it’s bringing people to the plaza,” Richard LoPresti, the chairman of the North Haven Economic Development Commission, says.
To further benefit from the closure of Toys “R” Us, Party City is now expanding to open another pop-up, Toy City, planning to open 55 locations this season. “The Toy City concept is a logical extension of our brand — one that allows us to leverage our existing pop-up store capabilities and capitalize on the category whitespace that has recently been created,” says Sara Davis, a PR representative for Party City, the company that owns Halloween City.
Party City isn’t the only retailer to leverage Toys “R” Us’s downfall. According to USA Today, JCPenny, Walmart, and Kohl’s have increased their toy offerings. Toys “R” Us also created the majority of the 3.5 million square feet of vacated retail in 2018, which CNN reports will start being filled by Ross Stores, TJX (parent company to TJ Maxx, HomeGoods, and Marshalls), and Burlington Coat Factory.
“Defying the Retail Apocalypse” according to Business Insider, is Dollar General, which is opening 900 new stores and remodeling 1,000 locations in 2018. TJX and Ross, both discount retailers, are planning to open 238 and 70 new stores respectively. Forbes even goes as far as to report that the performance of the inline strip center is holding up well as populations grow around the strip mall and new types of tenants come in. Mostly when retail spaces become vacated, strip mall owners turn to other big box retailers to fill the void. “There’s a long list,” Williamson says. “[Developers] have connections with those who set up leases with the chain retailers. And that’s the world they’re in. So, unless something forces them to move beyond that world, that’s where they’re gonna stay.”
Although there’s not much the town can do about chain stores closing, Michael Freda, the first Selectman of North Haven, told the Record-Journal, “we have a relationship with the plaza owners. We’re working to ensure they can find a retail replacement, but it’s up to the plaza owners to determine what businesses they allow in.”
Williamson hopes for the retrofitting of big box stores, but recognizes that things can do well in some markets and poorly in others. Experiential and service-oriented strip tenants are filling the spaces of what once were exclusively retail stores. In North Haven Commons, Image Laser Hair Removal is right next door to Vein Clinics of America — medical clinics that are more and more frequently moving into strip malls. Nicole Azimov, the Medical Liaison at Vein Clinics of America, says that they’ve been at their North Haven location for two years now. She is in favor of the clinic being in the power center, “I would just say that storefront property in general is easiest to have…your logo is in front of the building…and there is more visibility at the front of the complex.” They’ve embraced their commercial location, and advertises on their website that they are “next to Buffalo Wild Wings in the same plaza as Olive Garden — Red Lobster.”
In 2018, there aren’t many large scale strip malls being built. Sacco says that TPA “hasn’t done anything of that size and configuration since then,” making North Haven Commons their last significant power center. “In the last 10 years…they’ll be some combination of retail, plus residential, plus commercial, rather than something that is purely retail space,” Sacco says. Most new buildings are mixed-use, and according to Gray, “everyone’s moving back towards the city. So you’re seeing much more urban development happen.”
It seems like we’ve seen our last strip mall going up, but as Gray comments, “Again now, will that shift over time? Sure. Retail’s in a constant state of flux.”
The country also is still dotted by the existing strip malls, over 65,000 of them according to the New York Times. In a country that contains 23.5 square feet of retail space per person, we’re still wondering what the changes in the retail landscape will look like. Thinking of solutions, Williamson says, “There is a lot of room for good design here with a strong vision that could come from a civic leader, or an elected official, or some developer who owns a number of properties and is willing to do something different in some special location.”
Williamson takes one more look at the picture of North Haven Commons and is inspired with another idea. “Yeah. I’m looking at this, and it would be really interesting, if they were all to be vacated, to imagine putting agriculture on the parking lots…you can put down a barrier over the asphalt, bring in fresh soil, and go from there.”
Malls “R” Us was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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