I have to say, I bet if you made some kind of vitamin-water drink called “Astronaut Pee” you would probably do brisk business among both the kids who like edgy/gross things demographic and those who are easily susceptible to claims about “ions” and “osmosis” and “Science.” Given NASA’s crash for cash right now it seems like it might be something worth looking into.

Photo by iurii, via Shutterstock

“If you need strong anonymity or privacy on the Internet, you might want to stay away from the Internet entirely for the next few days while things settle,” and it’s not a terrible idea even if you don’t need those things. Everything is terrible, everything is fake, we are all riding along on rapids of misplaced confidence and beautiful illusions that all will be okay while the world remains ugly and insecure. Why would the Internet be any better when the Internet is best at making everything the absolute worst version of what’s real? It wouldn’t. Life’s not that sweet. Life’s not sweet at all.

As one ages, one gives up a few of the youthful struggles against the generations that came before, and one tends to finally accept more of the common precepts of society. For instance, I now own a pizza peel. For many years I burned my fingers and clumsily threw pizzas from the oven onto the counter. Those days are behind me now. It’s okay.

With that one exception, however, I stand by our exceptional pizza recipe. Sure, you can have the Times Timessplain the making of pizza to you, if you wish! If that makes you feel fancy and validated, so be it. But we know the truth, which is that you can make a pizza out of anything, just as long as your oven is exceedingly hot.

by Bijan Stephen

A few months ago, at the stroke of midnight, I found myself — quivering, and naked but for sturdy running shoes — in the hallway of my college library. I was surrounded by two of my best friends and twenty or so acquaintances; we held bags of candy and bags of our clothes, waiting for the signal. Our leader raised her hand.

“T-B-I!” she cried out. “Y…T…B!” we answered in unison1. And then, loudly, we were off, down six flights of stairs to confront the inevitable spectators.

College campuses, as places, as settings, are these arrested works of beauty, where faces, festivals, and feelings change, but, fundamentally, the state of things remains the same. It’s a sentiment reflected in contemporary literature, where the campus reads as an enchanted place — unfocus your eyes a bit, and it fades into the background; squint, and its role is thrown into sharp relief.

About a month after I desecrated a public study space with my nudity, I was a freshly minted university graduate. To stoke an immediate nostalgia, a friend who ran with me lent me one of the first campus novels I ever read: Donna Tartt’s 1992 masterpiece, The Secret History. Looking back, I’ve become convinced the book first dropped into my lap at a particularly opportune moment; I read it while I still lived in New Haven, eating and sleeping and dreaming fewer than ten minutes from where my last classes were held. As I fell deeper into the novel’s murder-mystery-in-reverse plot — and its airlessly beautiful campus — I even caught myself filling in my own adventures, which all happened not so far south of Tartt’s Hampden College in Vermont.

I was captivated, as much by the prose as by how strongly I identified with Richard Papen, who tells the story. In the beginning of the novel, Richard is painted as a disaffected suburban youth, someone whose sensibilities skew sensitive, whose dreams rub up uncomfortably against the realities of small town life. In the first line of the first chapter, Richard introduces the Greek concept of hamartia, the idea of the fatal flaw:

Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

It’s a sentiment with which many undergraduates identify, though I’m not sure how many would put it so eloquently, but it certainly depends on your definition of picturesque. If we take it to mean “the best four years of your life,” I think many more might agree.

From out west, born into a thoroughly average family of modest means, Richard refashions himself into a consummate aesthete immediately after arriving at Hampden, the better to fit into its rarified atmosphere. Richard stands for every kid who’s ever been seduced by bright lights, by the big city, by the promise of the unfamiliar. Though I never went so far as to deliberately conceal my background from my peers (and I’ve also never committed a murder), I felt a similar pressure to conform. To be something. In other words, I was — and perhaps still am — one of those hopeless kids.

I grew up in Tyler, Texas, a small city nestled in what’s known as the Piney Woods, the southeastern corridor of the state. I came of age as a black male in the deep South, near one of the old hearts of the Confederacy; it’s not a stretch to say I never felt like I really belonged. Tyler is notable for perhaps two reasons, one surprising: its smallness — of ambition, of mind — and its large, industrially perfect roses. In this rose city, the summers are blistering, winter has a bite, and the pine needles are always, always green. It’s also never seemed so far away as it does now, eleven months after graduation, eight months in New York City — here, there’s no green left.

I left home as quickly as I could after graduation. Now, I like to imagine I arrived to college just as disoriented and elated as Richard. With its intricate life and obscure rhythms, that campus sprang into my consciousness fully formed, as a single, immovable — as it seemed then — object. It was beautiful, sun-drenched, and, most importantly, the opposite of Tyler; I was deliriously happy to feel, for a moment, that I was somewhere I belonged.

Four years later the place hadn’t physically changed, but my sense memories of it had laid its geography bare. Students had come before me and gone after me, until suddenly I was at the front of the queue, naked. Perhaps this is what makes the campus such a compelling setting for fiction: like a stretch of coastline, lively waves of fresh faces bring steady but imperceptible change. Like Tyler’s pine needles, campus fiction is evergreen in its sense of timeliness. Fully two decades after the publication of The Secret History, the story remains shockingly fresh. This is the genius of the genre — if the sex, drugs, and tensions are immediately familiar, it’s because they’re fundamentally the same. Don’t you remember meeting your neighborhood friendly drug dealer?

Two or three years ago, when I worked as an editor at my school’s alt-weekly, I was tasked with writing a piece on staying in town after graduation. At the time I wasn’t sure how to approach the topic, and so ran aground on a deadline. In hindsight, how I decided to end it — around three or four in the morning — feels a bit hyperbolic.

Our bright college years are brief indeed, and staying in New Haven can’t change the finality of graduation. Four years from now, no undergraduates will remember our names; we’ll become faceless alumni, quickly forgotten.

This, I think, is the essence of why the campus novel holds its weight as a subgenre of fiction. In transience there is enchantment, and there is also the reminder that time flows inevitably forward. The university years are no more than an eddy in a tide pool, quickly created and just as quickly dissipated. I left Richard and The Secret History with an acute sense of what had stayed behind after commencement. More than the ceremony itself, finishing the novel marked an ending — or, at least, a chapter closed.

A few months ago I made an unplanned trip to my alma mater. While the brilliant yellows and deep reds of the leaves were exactly as I remembered them from years ago — because the interstitial seasons are the most beautiful, most collegiate of all — I felt a sense of unreality invade, a new awareness of how I’d aged while the world passed this place by. It was a feeling I remembered from the last pages of The Secret History.

The next morning, I mentioned as much to a friend who’s still an undergraduate. “It’s this crazy place that we’ve only understood through books,” she said in reply. “A lot of people here only think of life in terms of literature!” In fiction’s refraction of life we see as though through a glass, more lit than dark.

1 As you may have guessed, “TBIYTB” is indeed an acronym. It’s borrowed from the Robert Browning poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” first published in 1864, whose opening lines read: “Grow old along with me!/The best is yet to be.”

Bijan Stephen has written for The Paris Review, Killscreen, and Noisey. Photo by Sodanie Chea.

“Kate is perceived to be more ‘one of us’ than other pop/rock figures, one of the extended family. There’s a feeling that she’s ‘stayed the same’, that success ‘hasn’t spoiled her’. She’s someone you might have known at sixth-form college, or at your Saturday job (the artier kind, obviously: knick-knack stall at the local market); but definitely a scream down the pub, with her packet of Silk Cut and pint of proper scrumpy. At the same time, people are drawn to her peacock’s-tail otherness, the slightly recherché taste for odd bods like Ouspensky, Gurdjieff and Wilhelm Reich. She has the soul of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but the robust mien of Mrs Thatcher at a 1980s cabinet meeting.”
 — Some thoughts about Kate Bush.

Apparently everyone from The Walkmen has a solo record coming out (see also) and I have not been disappointed by any of them thus far. We’re All Young Together “drops” next month. The title track with Alec Ounsworth sounds like a terrific Andrew Bird outtake, the Karen O. number is great… I cannot ever remember being less antagonistic to “family-friendly folk music.” It’s really something.

“I put the e-cigarette on charge in my iPad charger, which I have done countless times before. I heard a huge bang that sounded like a firework. I turned around to see a ball of fire weaving about. I saw Laura running away and thought somebody had thrown a firework. A punter pointed to the e-cigarette that I had been charging and it was still smoking. It had burnt through the vinyl floor as well. When the battery exploded the end shot across the room and hit one punter in the stomach and left him with a red mark. I just keep thinking what if this had happened while I was charging it at home. I might have been out and the damage could have been horrendous. When I looked back at the footage I saw how close the fireball came to Laura’s head. If she was stood a couple of inches to the right she could have been badly hurt.”
 — This near-tragic story offers a video component in which you can “Watch e-cigarette EXPLODE and set fire to barmaid in busy pub,” although if you are the sort of person to whom that appeals I have to imagine you have already heard about it from whatever sick fuck listserv provides you with your human misery video links.

“There are people who are part-way up the scale, high enough to warrant an assessment for psychopathy, but not high enough up to cause problems. Often they’re our friends, they’re fun to be around. They might take advantage of us now and then, but usually it’s subtle and they’re able to talk their way around it.”
 — Are you the psychopath or the psychopath’s friend? And how would your friends describe you if asked to make that choice?

How are you to know the shape and dimension of your dreams, much less the dreams of those you share a stage with? In the beginning — and we’ll begin with Tom, because this story is his story as much as it is the story of the band; he’s the one telling it — in the beginning he was just playing with people, because that’s what Tom did. He played the guitar and David played the bass and Danny played the drums.

They were all music students in Boston, then, just mixing and seeing what might match. They played together a few times before Danny said to Tom, “Hey, I have a band called Via Audio, and I think you should join it.” So Tom did. They had already constructed most of what would end up an EP — Danny and David and Jess, who Danny saw singing and playing guitar on the street in Boston. He saw her and thought she was cute. That was part of it, certainly, but she could write songs too. Danny was the leader. He saw in people the kind of creative energy that might make a match, and he found Tom’s, which was to fit in, to be sensitive to what the music wanted. Tom thought: these are interesting musicians, it will be an interesting time; no matter what, we can go where ever we want.

Danny said he wanted them to be a live drum and bass band, but the process of figuring out what that was, what the band should be, that process never stopped. Danny demoed a song for Tom. He was proud of it, and Tom listened and liked it and wrote in his part, and they had their first track, “Developing Active People.” They put the track up on garageband.com and everyone loved it, so they went on tour. They toured from ’03 to ’05 with just that four song EP.

In Ypsilanti, Michigan, they played a show for just one person. In Nashville, no one came, so they set up on stage and the other band set up where the audience was supposed to be and they had a jam session. They toured out of a van Danny bought, an old Dodge. Before long it started to fall apart, its cylinders misfiring until eventually everyone figured out that if you put your gear in certain vans they just die, and that you have to have a Ford.

Eventually Kill Normal records out of Connecticut brought them on and paired them with a lot of punk and emo bands, an all ages crowd, this young skater scene in Hamden. Then Jess got their EP to Jim Eno, the drummer for Spoon, who was also a producer, and they were invited to South by Southwest, and Danny moved to New York. This was 2006.

Around the same time, Danny started making music with Elizabeth, who became Elizabeth and the Catapult. Danny and Elizabeth were working on the Catapult so much that eventually David and Tom had to tell Danny, “If you don’t want to be in Via Audio, you should just do what you want to do.” And he was like, “Yeah, I think that makes sense.” So he kind of left, but he left them with a bunch of songs he had written.

They still had Jim Eno’s attention, and they still went to South By Southwest, where they got a deal, and recorded their record in Austin, at Eno’s studio. By the end of the year Tom and Jess and David had all moved to New York, and were very ready to get serious. They got a good review on Pitchfork, they were getting decent tours, they had momentum but still felt poor and kind of sick of driving a certain distance to play a show, only to have the pay cover the gas money. They fired their manager, not because they blamed him, really, they just needed better connections. They got a new one, and at the end of 2007 they played Red Rocks with Spoon and the Flaming Lips. Danny was still playing with them, though everyone kind of sensed it was his last tour. They’d fight because they were upset about that. It was just beneath the surface, Danny’s leaving.

It felt like they were accomplishing something, but the thing was falling apart. Then, in December, they toured the whole country with a band called Tiger City. It was a hard time, a deliberately nasty time. They fought the way old couples fight, knowing just what to do or say to drive the other person crazy. Then Danny left for good.

In January they found a new drummer named Adam who could perform Squarepusher songs solo on the drumset. On his third rehearsal with the band, David got a call, went upstairs, came back and asked: “Hey guys, you want to go to Japan and open for Spoon?” So they did. They also played at an Apple Store in Tokyo, and ate some food Tom thought was really terrible, like chicken tendons. He also noticed unsettlingly specific cartoons on warning signs. On one, about where not to swim, there was a man weeping while he drowned.

Soon after they were back in the States and touring still, up in Michigan, Tom fell asleep in the back of the van and woke suddenly to hear David cry out, “Oh shit, I’m sorry everybody!” He looked out on the left side of the road and saw black ice and snow, then he looked out the right side and saw the same. They he was pressed up against the side of the van and there was just snow, covering all the windows. The van was stuck in a drift in the median. The first tow truck arrived after two hours and broke its winch trying to get them out, because of all the equipment, maybe. They were stuck there another three hours.

The band made another album. Each album was so different, it was a whole new chapter.They got a loan from David’s aunt to go back to Austin, to Jim Eno, and there was even some money leftover to use for publicity. The album came out and Pitchfork gave it a negative review and, well, it mattered more than any of them wanted to admit. They toured less, there were fewer opportunities, they began to do other things, play backup in other bands.

Still, slowly, from 2010 to 2011 they began to assemble enough songs for another album, did a Kickstarter to raise money for it, and raised $9,500 of the $8,000 they needed. They were hardly playing any shows, and when they finally did book one, it was the last David played. They drove all the way down to North Carolina, because someone from Yep Rock records had promised to check them out. By this time they had finished the album, “Natural Language,” and it felt like it might be their very best. The songs had come spilling out. Danny had even come back to produce it. Anyway they made the record, despite it all, and now no one was getting back to them about distributing it. Yep Rock was a possibility, but then no one from the label came to the show. Afterwards they agreed to pretend that never happened because it was pretty much the worst thing ever. They drove the 10 hours back home.

The next day David said the band felt like a job, and he just wanted to play music, and he had just talked to their booking agent, too, and both of them were done. “I think it would be irresponsible for me to continue,” he said. “In order for you to break up, or do something good, I have to leave.” So he left.

Tom and Jess didn’t know anyone else to send the record to, but they owed their Kickstarter backers a record, so they sunk some of their savings into a small run and set up a release party at Glasslands. A few weeks after booking the gig, Jess went out to visit her boyfriend in LA and decided to give things a real shot, and move out there with him. Tom gave her his blessing. “Listen,” he said, “the band is fun but I wouldn’t want the band to get in the way of my life, and you shouldn’t let it get in the way of your life.” They decided to accept the possibility that this might be Via Audio’s last show.

The drummer who played with Jess and Tom that last night at Glasslands was an old friend of Tom’s. They’d been playing together since they were 12. On bass was another guy they knew from school in Boston. Halfway through the set they played a song called “Reservoir,” one of Tom’s tracks on “Natural Language.” The song is about a place, Otis Reservoir, where his grandfather built cabins and where his family went, growing up. The song is also about that very particular feeling, the feeling of losing someone, and how the memories we share with that person are bundled up into certain places, and certain times. It’s about how that feeling of loss can be so very bittersweet, and how you don’t need a picture to remember it. It can’t be remembered in a picture, anyway.

At the end of their set, over the applause, Tom lifted one arm and shouted. He was back from the mic, it barely picked it up. “And that is why you must rock on my friends, no matter fucking what,” he said. And the crowd, several dozen friends and family and fans and fellow musicians, clapped hard and long, and Tom and Jess sat down to play one last song, just the two of them, together, under the bright red lights.

Ryan Bradley is a writer and editor in New York.

If you ever take the A from Fulton Street into Brooklyn you’ll know that the entire trip, whether it is simply the single stop to High Street or the grand tour to the end of the line, starts with a sense of desolation and despair in a dank hole with dour lighting and never really gets better, as each successive second you spend loping listlessly into Brooklyn brings mounting dread and the increasing certainty that life is a cruel joke in which you are both subject and punchline and that even as desperate as you felt waiting for the train in the first place — as sad and agitated and hopeless and bereft of joy — it was probably going to be the best part of your day. So you have to imagine that this furry visitor at least offered its fellow riders a brief break from their own thoughts. Which is nice.