OCT 5 – VOL 20 – ISSUE 4
In this issue... Clemency, Country Music, and Carrots
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FEATURES Charlie Brown Comes Home
Editor’s Note 3
Dear Readers, Perhaps what was most tragic about the Las Vegas shooting was that it no longer surprised us. The event fell on
– Jack Brook
midterms week; discussion and concern was given merely
cursory space in our schedules. It was allowed to occupy our thoughts up until the moment we realized that, unlike a
5 LIFESTYLE Renderings
problem set, there was no consequence for forgetting about it— and in this way, shock, mourning, and empathy passed us by.
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– Divya Santhanam
No New Ideas
This is not a guilt trip, nor is it a call to action. Let us not be so privileged as to demonize those who have long felt too helpless to call a senator, too insignificant to raise an objection, too jaded to believe change will ever come to pass.
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– Dianara Rivera
Rather, let this only be a reminder: that it is never out of our ability to feel basic compassion for our fellow human beings, and never too foolish to grieve a loss that somehow touches us all.
7 ARTS & CULTURE A Good Vegan Place is Hard to Find
Best,
Kathy
features editor
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– Alicia DeVos
Shania Twain, Then and Now – Joshua Lu
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Hot Post Time Machine Oscars landing in the hands of young, brilliant artists brightens the future of cinema; Oscars in the old, scary hands of Mel Gibson do not. — 02.23.2017
Post- Staff Editor-in-Chief Saanya Jain
Layout Chief Livia Mucciolo
Managing Editor, Features Jennifer Osborne
Creative Director Grace Yoon
Managing Editor, Lifestyle Annabelle Woodward Managing Editor, Arts & Culture Joshua Lu
Head of Media Claribel Wu Features Editors Anita Sheih Kathy Luo
Head Illustrator Doris Liou
Lifestyle Editors Amanda Ngo Marly Toledano Divya Santhanam
Copy Chief Alicia DeVos
Arts & Culture Editors Celina Sun
Josh Wartel Assistant Copy Editors Zander Kim Layout Assistants Eojin Choi Julia Kim Media Assistant Samantha Haigood Staff Writer Andrew Liu Anna Harvey Catherine Turner Chantal Marauta Claire Kim-Narita Daniella Balarezo Daniera Rivera Eliza Cain
Emma Lopez Jack Brook Karya Sezener Natalie Andrews Sonya Bui Sydney Lo Veronica Espaillat Staff Illustrator Caroline Hu Erica Lewis Harim Choi Kira Widjaja Nayeon (Michelle) Woo Cover Illustration Vincent Chen
Charlie Brown Comes Home How the Clemency Initiative Saved One Man from Life Imprisonment
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obody stays long at the Anthony P. Travisono Intake Service Center in Providence, Rhode Island, and nobody wants to. Serving as the first stop for over 1,200 incarcerated people on their way into the criminal justice system each month, conditions are poor—the stale confines reek of musty clothes and pepper lingering from the mace spray often used by corrections officers. Unlike most prisons, which offer GED classes, self-help programs, and therapy groups, the Intake Center has nothing for the incarcerated individuals to engage with. For the administrators, there never seems to be a point, because most people are transferred to another facility within weeks or right after their trial. But one man, Charlie Brown, almost spent the rest of his life there. In 2004, Charlie Brown became the only man in the history of Rhode Island to receive a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense, after being convicted for possessing more than 50 grams of crack cocaine— equivalent in size to a Snicker’s bar—with intent to distribute. Prosecutors, using a common DA tactic, invoked a sentencing enhancement statute that would take into account his two possession of marijuana charges from years before and push the mandatory federal sentencing guidelines up from a minimum of ten years to a minimum of life. The prosecutors meant to pressure Brown into agreeing to testify against his co-defendant. Faced with a life sentence, Brown still plead not guilty. His two other co-defendants, facing lesser charges, did the same. Brown continued to appeal the two older marijuana charges, however, and since this aspect of his sentencing had not technically been finalized, he remained at the Intake Center—a facility not designed for long-term care— through a legal error. On the day of Charlie’s sentencing for his possession of cocaine charges, a class from a local elementary looked on, the students crying as judge Mary Lisi declared: “Congress has given up on you...I don’t know how you will spend the time that you will have in prison without being able to look ahead to see a day when you would be released. There’s certainly no incentive for you to better yourself, and perhaps what you will do is spend the rest of your life deluding yourself...and blaming everyone else for the situation you find yourself in.” Brown spent his first night at Intake reflecting on the judge’s words. Years later in a letter to his lawyer, Brown wrote that he realized he had a choice to make about the way he would live the rest of his life: he could turn into the type of person the judge and correction’s officers expected him to become—violent and withdrawn—or he could try to overcome the dehumanizing environment he had been placed in. “My choice from that day forth was to no longer let any negativity dictate my future decisions or actions,” Brown wrote. “I decided to embrace change and focus all my
energy positively, going forward.” *** Lying in a cell on his first night, Brown remembered the choices he made over thirty years ago, as a fourteen-year-old, about how to approach his life. At the time, he attended the vocational track of what was then known as Central High School Tech. Brown always had an intuitive ability to make things, but instead of being challenged in the classroom, Brown recalls that his teacher kept having him do the same boring electrical wiring exercises over and over, long after Brown had mastered them. “I felt like school failed me,” says Brown, who dropped out at the age of fifteen. Around the same time, he was kicked out from his grandparents’ home because they mistakenly thought he was selling drugs, and faced the prospect of having to move back in with his estranged mother. The allegation that he was selling drugs wasn’t true, but it was about to be. “There used to be people selling drugs right down the street, I watched the cars come through like clockwork,” Brown says. “When I was working I was making minimum wage...and I look at the drug game, and I see these images of gold and jewelry on TV. And I’m thinking, I want that to be me. I was gonna be my own man. I was gonna make it so nobody could ever kick me out again.” One day, he says, he found himself staring out the window of the Burger King where he had recently begun to work. He stared at the street, thought of the possibilities that lay there for easier money. He decided to quit his job and spend more time with the guys on the street. Brown always had an entrepreneurial mind and an eye for organization, along with meticulous attention to detail. By sixteen, he says, he became the main man on his block, and anyone who rolled up to Rhodes Street and asked for Charlie Brown would be greeted by six or seven men, asking why. By eighteen, he had quit drinking and smoking to maintain a lucid mind at all times. As he built up a drug business, he focused on legitimate entrepreneurial endeavors as well: He learned mechanics and bought his own auto-shop while simultaneously entering the real estate industry where he purchased and restored old houses. He says he kept his illegitimate earnings separate from his other businesses. “I wanted to make it in legit business, and my heart was in that,” Brown says. “But I also wanted to keep the street cred—the power and respect—of my other life.” But the “other life” soon became unsustainable. On June 3, 2003, Providence Narcotics Detective Scott Partridge peered through a small hole in a fence next to a Burnside Street apartment complex. The first floor, owned by Brown, had become a crack house; Partridge—whose team had been staking out the place for a month— watched as Charlie Brown took out a plastic peanut container, unscrewed a false bottom,
and removed a couple plastic bags filled with white powder. Within minutes, a narcotics force had busted Brown and his two partners. *** During his time at intake, Brown woke up at 5 a.m. every morning, a habit he has maintained for thirteen years. He would lie awake in his cell in a state of contemplation during the hours before his 7 a.m. shift at the cafeteria, where he worked into the afternoon for two dollars a day. Later, when he had a break, he went to the library, where typewriters sat atop desks and stacks of law books covered the walls—thick, outdated, and full of impenetrable legalese. For a few hours every day, Brown heaved some off the shelves and devoted himself to studying his case. He also had to confront, for the first time, the other side of the drugs he had once sold, watching new arrivals experience the excruciating effects of withdrawal. “What they had to go through, to see the life sucked out of them—I had never really looked at it like that before, never really saw the consequences of my actions,” Brown says. “I understood the effects that it caused in other families—that I caused by even being involved with that. That’s something I didn’t want to be a part of anymore. I couldn’t take back what I did, but what I could do going forward was try and prevent that same process from happening again with someone else.” He became a calming presence in the
intake center: the person whom suicidal inmates could talk to as the representative for the Samaritans LifeLine program, the surrogate father figure for the young guys doing their first sentence, and the next best thing to a lawyer for anyone looking to understand the ins and outs of the criminal justice system. From 2004 to 2009, Richard Baccaire, caught in the turmoil of a serious alcohol and drug addiction, passed through Intake over a dozen times by his own estimation. On each occasion, he saw a curious thing—the same man in the chow hall, serving coffee: Charlie Brown. “That was a strong guy right there,” Baccaire says. “To just get up in that rotten stinking place every day and fight. Nobody has ever been in that building for as long as he has.” Brown carried himself with quiet pride and tremendous self-confidence. Yet despite serving as a role model and informal counsel for dozens of others, he found it difficult to stay positive during the nightly lockdowns, when all he had to eat was peanut butter and jelly and a 25-cent bag of chips. The burden of imprisonment weighed heavily on him, especially after he missed the birth of his first grandchild. “I lost so much the day I was put behind these walls and was completely out of almost everyone’s mind when they heard the words ‘life,’” Brown wrote to a friend in 2008. “I been through a lot and this is a lot to go through alone, but everyday I wake up
retroactive application of new legal amendments decreasing the federal sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine offenses. But people like Brown who were facing life in prison could not receive retroactive reductions for Section 851 statutes.
“Faced with a life sentence, Brown still plead not guilty.”
ready to fight. I don’t know how I keep doing it, but I’m just glad I do.” *** Brown ultimately received legal assistance from Judith Crowell, the defense lawyer his family had originally hired to work on his case—when she’d urged him to take the plea deal, he’d hired another lawyer. Crowell still ran into Brown a couple times a year while passing through Intake for her work; eventually, she began to offer him free help with his post-conviction appeal, intending to remove one of the previous marijuana charges and bump his sentence down from life imprisonment. Crowell knew the post-convictions appeal was a legal Hail Mary, but she tried her best. Then came the clemency initiative. Launched in 2014, the Obama administration offered incarcerated individuals serving sentences of 10 years or more for nonviolent offenses the opportunity to apply for sentence commutation, provided they had prison records clear of misconduct. Most people serving long sentences for nonviolent crimes had been collateral from the “War on Drugs,” a campaign that imposed the harsh mandatory minimum sentences and policies that disproportionately affected people of color, ultimately repealed by Congress in 2010. “Depending on whether someone was sentenced before or after those decisions, you could have two people in the same cell with similar criminal histories, crimes, and one could be serving life, and the other could be serving 10 years or less—that’s disturbing,” says Cynthia Roseberry, the project manager for the Clemency Project 2014, an organization that helped facilitate clemency petitions. “These were cookie-cutter policies that didn’t take into account individual circumstances.” For weeks, the two frequently met at
Intake, setting the clemency application process in motion. To qualify for the program, Brown had to drop his appeal, leave Intake, and transfer to Hazelton, a federal penitentiary in West Virginia. Forced to eat his meals at a table designated for East Coast natives, Brown had to keep his head down in order to avoid the numerous stabbings and brawls that occurred at Hazelton. However, he finally had the opportunity to take classes, and he enrolled in as many programs as he could. As Brown and Crowell moved through the clemency application, corresponding via post, some major changes in the criminal justice system since Brown’s incarceration became apparent. In 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder had directed prosecutors to avoid invoking the Section 851 statute Brown’s prosecutors had invoked to increase his sentence based on past drug charges. Under a 2007 federal legal amendment, Brown’s two marijuana convictions would be counted as a single conviction since they occurred on the same day, disqualifying him outright from the Section 851 statute. Crowell calculated that if all these new factors had been applied at the time of his sentencing, Brown would likely have received a sentence of around 11 years, not including the opportunity for parole. Brown would already have been free, and his co-defendants already were. “This is not about a grave miscarriage of justice where the person didn’t do it,” Crowell says. “This is about a grave miscarriage of justice in that the laws have changed as we have become more enlightened. In order to get clemency in the past, you have to admit guilt in the first place.” One of Brown’s co-defendants, who had faced the same charges but without the Section 851 statute enhancing them, had already been released from prison in 2011. His sentence had been reduced through the
Even Judge Lisi, who was known for her judicial severity, showed her support. “If I were to be sentencing Mr. Brown today, unfettered by the mandatory life term, I would not impose such a sentence,” Judge Lisi wrote in a letter she submitted to the White House pardon attorney on Brown’s behalf. Crowell worked for two weeks over Christmas, the only free time she had with the courts out of session, to finish Brown’s application for the Department of Justice. Then came the wait. The Obama administration had promised 10,000 incarcerated individuals would have their sentences commuted, but they were unprepared for the enormous influx of applications and lacked sufficient resources to handle all of them in a timely manner. When Brown’s name didn’t come up on either of the first two lists of incarcerated individuals cleared by the initiative, he wrote to a friend for support. “I really need to hear something soon,” Brown wrote. “But until then I’m gonna continue to hold all my fight inside until I get the good news. Don’t feel bad for me, just get ready to feed me with some good food.” Crowell finally got to deliver the good news in May, when a number with a D.C. area code called and left the message she had been cautiously expecting to receive for months. She immediately called Hazelton, where Brown felt the tension of a decade in prison lift off his shoulders, years of patience rewarded with one presidential pen stroke. “I woke up the next morning like, ‘Oh, the fight’s over’,” Brown says. “It felt funny, crazy, strange, that I didn’t have to wake up anymore and fight that life sentence.” After he was released from prison in September, Brown sent Judith Crowell a note reading “Thank you Mrs. Crowell your [sic] a life saver”, along with a bag of Life Saver candies, both of which Crowell still keeps in the drawer of her desk. *** On a December morning last year, Charlie Brown clears fresh snow off Bellevue Avenue outside his grandmother’s house in South Providence, the sky above still dark. Wet slush seeps in through his shoes because he doesn’t own proper boots yet. “I already made someone smile this morning,” Brown says. “A lady stopped by and told me how proud she was of me.” By sunrise, the driveways outside his grandmother’s and his neighbors’ houses will be clear, and Brown will have left for work, where he unloads Bentleys and Mercedes as a longshoreman at the Davisville docks for 33 dollars an hour. Brown revels in carrying plastic grocery bags into his grandmother’s home. The bags contain orange juice, cornbread mix, ginger snaps, sausage for breakfast, instant coffee,
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and everything else the old 83-year-old woman bundled up in blankets watching the nightly news needs to get through the week. A few months before Brown came back, other family members had told her the house wasn’t livable—they’d have to sell it and take her to her son’s home. Then Brown arrived, filled two full dumpsters right up to the rim with the garbage and clutter of old age, retiled the roof of the home, fixed the plumbing, and said to her: “Time for you to come home, grandma. I know you’ve missed it.” “He’s paying me back now for all my time,” says his grandmother, Elizabeth Cassell. “For all I did for him when he was small.” *** Five months after Brown left the Hazelton Federal Correctional Institute, President Obama left office, bringing the clemency initiative to a close. Obama ultimately granted clemency to 1,927 people—more than the previous nine presidents combined. But those receiving clemency represented only five percent of the 36,544 petitions he received, and he ended his final term with over 7,881 still pending. From the outset, the Obama administration had faced criticism for failing to provide sufficient support to process the thousands of petitions from incarcerated individuals. “...The clemency initiative is moving too slowly…,” reads an open letter to Obama from the Sentencing Project written in June of 2016. “No person in prison who meets the criteria for relief should still be behind the bars when you leave office.” Deborah Leff, the Pardon Attorney in charge of overseeing the clemency initiative for the White House, had resigned earlier that year in January, protesting the lack of resources in her department to effectively handle the influx of petitions. This meant, she wrote, that “the requests of thousands of petitioners seeking justice will lie unheard.” Although the initiative eventually received additional resources, it became clear as Obama exited office that the initiative promised greater change than it ultimately delivered. Flawed as it was, however, the clemency initiative had represented a promising turn from the historically retributivist stance of the executive office on crime. There is virtually no chance that the problem will be resumed under Donald Trump, who had previously criticized Obama’s sentence commutations as an endangerment to public safety. Charlie Brown remains an enduring testament to a brief period of reform, when hundreds of incarcerated individuals were given a chance to prove that the policies that had kept them from the outside world for so long had been mistaken in their severity. But resting in his grandmother’s driveway, Brown is focused only on the construction work he still has to do. “I don’t make up for lost time,” Brown says. “I’m just trying to be me by taking care of today, making sure tomorrow is the best it can be.”
Jack Brook
staff writer
Doris Liou
he ad illustr ator
Seo Jung Shin
staff illustr ator
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Renderings
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My Grandfather in Perspective
ustic cupboards and light gray walls. An old man and a young girl. The camera clicks too fast. Her eyes wide and adoring, the girl is still looking up at her grandfather. In his lap, she is surrounded by the familiar warm scent of clean clothing, incense, tobacco, and paan. Her grandfather looks straight at the camera, the edges of his mouth curved into a quiet and gentle smile. They fit together, in ways that words cannot describe. The bright green of her shirt complements the sandy brown of his own; her innocent eyes accentuate his serene half-smile. The photo captures a bond infinitely deeper than the oceans that separate the old man’s and the girl’s homes, or the 60 years that separate their births. Within it lie deeper intricacies, moments, and memories that only the two people in the photo will fully understand. He types the fanciful stories she imagines aloud, laughs at the way her eyes pop out of their sockets when she begins to recount her day, steadily corrects her hand as she draws the banyan trees outside. She loves his large glasses, his long earlobes, his patience, and his throaty laugh. Every day, they walk across the street from their house to Nageswara Park. The girl winces as she walks barefoot on the sharp pebbles in the park’s pathway. Her grandfather squeezes her hand, laughing. They watch the exercise circle of laughing men at dawn, the dogs resting in the shade of the palm trees, and through the fence, the
milkman beginning to cycle around the city. In the evening, they travel across Chennai on his scooter, the girl tightly clutching her grandfather around his waist, screaming with glee as they hurtle across Adyar River, through the T. Nagar shopping district and the small bazaars, the world around them blurring into specks of color and light. *** Twelve years later, I wake up to sunlight streaming through the window. I wipe my eyes groggily in the warm, soft covers of my parents’ bed. For the first time in my near memory, I smile as I wake up. My mother sits on the bed with the home phone. Confused, I look up at her, the events of last night rapidly infusing into my brain. Something is terribly wrong. Her face is twisted, strange, unfamiliar. “He’s gone,” she says. There is silence. Then my breaths become rattled, cries are forced from my mouth. There Is Not. Enough Air. To. Breathe. Rapid breaths turn into shrieks. Inhale. Something is tearing within me, ripping and crushing and pressing my lungs all at once. I can hear myself screaming; I can see myself in the mirror disheveled and broken;
“Four years after my grandfather’s death, I remain.”
I can feel myself shaking. I am china scattered across the floor. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. Every breath is like a foot crushing the few shards that are left. I am now yelling for my grandfather, shouting to the heavens to send him back. My voice echoes, reverberating against the pale green walls. I lie back exhausted. Feeling my mother’s arms around me, I close my eyes. They say near the end it was as though he was falling asleep, gradually and softly. And a year and a half after his death, I feel him slipping from my memory, gradually and softly. Our memories are now slowly becoming intangible, fading as they reach the edge of my mind, like ripples in a pond. I no longer accidentally tell people I have four grandparents or feel surprised when I receive an email reply from my grandmother instead of him. I no longer expect to hear his voice on the phone, or dissolve into tears every time I see his picture in the family room. I can no longer remember where the wrinkles were on his face, his exact assortment of collared T-shirts, or his height in relation to mine. While his life has ended, mine continues at a breathtaking speed. In the years to come, he will become tainted by my subjectivity and perceptions. As I change and he fades, he will develop into a character of my invention. I can only guess his thoughts, his reactions to the events in my life. Both he and I are rendered helpless to Time, the
ultimate mediator of the human experience. My grandfather’s life and death have ultimately changed my perception of what living life truly encapsulates. I used to believe that success was defined by immortality, by being remembered after death, like Einstein and Curie and Austen. But Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Jane Austen are no longer people; they are historical figures— characters in the lives of the living, subject to our interpretation and manipulation. Their story is over. And so, perhaps it’s not about the glorious moments in which we stand triumphant, or the extraordinary adventures and accomplishments that we vow to never forget, but the moments that seep under our skin, the feelings that could never be quantified but tint the world we see around us. The photo of us stands on my dresser. Though I will someday forget the time and place the photo of my grandfather and me was taken, the experience of being with him on that summer day in 2001 can never be taken away from me. I will always be thankful for our shared collection of Agatha Christie novels, for our religious solving of Sudoku puzzles, for our moments savoring hot dosas on the streets of India. I will always be grateful for our little moments.
Divya Santhanam sec tion editor
Lun (Duairak Padungvichean) illustr ator
No New Ideas
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t is 3 p.m. in San Francisco. We are making dumplings in the apartment of Chanel, one of the fellows in my cohort this summer. She is living in the heart of Chinatown with a full time staff member from the Chinese Progressive Association. My friends and I are admiring the apartment aloud, saying how there’s so much light, and how the space looks so cozy. The password to the wifi is “webelievethatwewillwin” and hot water is already bubbling on the stove. There is a light brown L couch in the corner of the apartment, sidled in next to a bookshelf. It reminds me of a similar couch in my friend’s apartment back at Brown, but I let thoughts of Brown float away with the whistling on the stove. I am not alone here, not taking dizzy 7 a.m. showers, nursing 3 a.m. headaches in fluorescent library lights. Instead I am wrapped up in the quiet rustling behind me as my friends on the couch snatch pillows from each other, their garish laughter interrupting all soothing sounds around me—the bubbling water, soft rustling, calming music. A year ago at Brown, I had finally given up on work on a couch strikingly similar to this one. I was studying with a friend but we had been naturally growing apart. Between classes that left me constantly pulling all nighters and a club I was holding up by myself that few people showed up to anyway, I was trying to convince myself I was all right with the aching in my back from sitting too long in lonely places and the barrenness I was slowly learning to hold close to my chest. Here, I am standing at the table a few
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Suspended Somewhere
steps away, back relaxed and the dumpling wrappers starchy on my skin. Flour sticks to my fingers and somehow finds itself on the long edge of my sweater. Eddie, another cohort fellow, points it out and I laugh, embarrassed. “Don’t worry,” he teases, “It adds character.” It is a stupid little thought but the parts of me that are always tensed tight are learning to loosen a little with every too-nice-to-be-real interaction. Sometimes it all feels ridiculous, but some part of me that has been conditioned to be performative and competitive is slowing down to the tinkling of the pot cover. We are all wearing the same sweater: dark blue, well-fitted, with sleeves that are long enough to pull over my knuckles. “Know History Know Self” is printed across the front of the sweater, alongside a kid with one fist raised and a “Fight For Ethnic Studies” sign clenched tight in the other. Eddie sold these to us; he was helping fundraise for APEN, the organization he’s working for this summer. As typical of my cohort, we all snatched them up as quickly as possible, because organizers love to do everything together, and organizers love to find every way to build. A year ago at Brown, I wouldn’t have thought this was worth it. A year ago at Brown, I would’ve measured this (and myself) by arbitrary measures of prestige—am I at the breaking point yet? Have I pushed myself enough? A year ago, my friend’s housemate was in the kitchen getting off a call with her long distance boyfriend and asking me about my-
self, probably just trying to be polite. She was a grad student at Brown, an aspiring English PhD, just passing through the common space, but I was dejected and frustrated and running out of sympathies for myself. She said she studied English too and suddenly my composure snapped and I was crying about how there are never any safety nets in this place. I thought I knew my limits but then I’d taken one class too many and all of a sudden it was like I had never learned anything here at all. I began talking to my friend’s housemate who I didn’t know and telling her that I had been thinking about an English PhD all along but something was always messy every semester and this was the semester I was finally supposed to get it together. I thought I had finally gotten all the adjustment pains out of the way, but how can you ever know anything in this damn place anyway? Nothing is ever stable. I told her that I have invested everything into the work and the loneliness and telling myself that it only feels so painful because nothing good ever comes easy—but at the same time I am so tired, tired of always hanging by a thread like this, tired of learning so precariously. On the last night of my first week in San Francisco I stayed with another staff member from CPA and he asked me a lot of questions, like most organizers like to do: How are you feeling? What do you need? What is coming up for you? I’m thinking about sustainability, I told Jonathan. I’m thinking about what it means to keep these types of moments always float-
ing to the surface. He told me about Pam Tau Lee in response. Pam, a badass Asian American organizer that founded CPA many years ago, is still in the organizing business even though drop-out rate is high and few organizers ever stay in the industry past 30. Somehow she escaped burn out, he said, and he once asked her why. She told him to “find your crew and build with them.” I was tempted to roll my eyes but here in the Bay we are making dumplings together and the soft music is punctuated by garish laughter and I am thinking about how that phrase somehow never leaves my head. I am not thinking about the grind—not thinking about the dizziness, the headaches, the 4 a.m. fluorescent lights. I am thinking that the angle of the light as it hits my napping friend on the couch is some kind of lesson. I am thinking about pressing the dumpling wrappers together like some kind of simplified origami. My mind is still fixated on the flour stain on the bottom of my sweater but the part of me that is always afraid everything is going to fall apart is suspended somewhere in the tangled light in my friend’s hair, in the endearingly cliché tarot cards and vegetarian cookbooks stashed in the bookshelves.
Dianara Rivera
contributing writer
Chieh En Lee illustr ator
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A Good Vegan Place is Hard to Find
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eing vegan isn’t easy. Last semester I tried it on a rotating schedule—one vegan week every four weeks—and found it to be challenging. (For those wondering, of the three remaining weeks, I was vegetarian for two and had no restrictions for one.) I completely avoided encountering many of the challenges vegans face, especially since I had a designated end time for each period I was vegan. After all, it’s not nearly as difficult to do something for a set amount of time as it is to do it without an end. But there is one area in which I felt I could understand the vegan struggle: eating out. To help other vegans here at Brown, the Post- staff and I have amassed this list of vegan-friendly restaurants near campus, ranked from best to worst. If you’re vegan, or if you have any vegan friends—you’ll know if you do—try some of these places. Garden Grille 727 East Ave., Pawtucket Chic enough for a date yet casual enough to feel comfortable in a T-shirt, this is one of my favorite restaurants in Providence even when I’m not on a vegan diet. The mushroom and sweet potato tamales perfectly blend sweet and savory, and the Korean tacos invigorate the typical vegetable palate with their sweet chili tempeh. Though it may tempt, stay away from the gluten free vegan macaroni and cheese—it will only evoke thoughts of the shortcomings of vegan cheese—and stick to Garden Grille’s excellent vegetable-based dishes. The restaurant takes no reservations, but luckily the neighboring Wildflour Bakery, run by the same owners, gives a free coffee to anyone waiting with a Garden Grille buzzer and has excellent vegan chocolate chip cookies.
Kabob & Curry 261 Thayer St., Providence It’s pretty much impossible to attend Brown University without knowing Kabob & Curry. Its vast selection of delicious, vegan flavors makes it more than deserving of a place on this list. The menu includes helpful symbols for locating items that fit into certain dietary restrictions, and the location couldn’t be more convenient for Brown students. Alu gobhi and bhindi masala are two of my personal favorites, and no meal is complete without vegan naan. And vegan Sunday brunch is a great deal, with plenty of vegan options and a special price for the vegan buffet. Den Den Café Asiana 161 Benefit St., Providence The original Den Den, this one requires a short and completely worthwhile walk downhill. I cannot praise the yaki udon bento enough: The udon noodles are thick and delicious, and the seaweed salad and pickled vegetables provide an exquisite contrast to the flavorful noodles. It comes with miso soup—not mentioned on the menu—but this can be replaced with a small side of broccoli. Japchae is another delectable but different noodle dish Den Den offers; the noodles are smaller and almost clear, and they’re made from sweet potato yet taste nothing like them. Regardless, they’re a delightful option. Rasoi 727 East Ave., Pawtucket Rasoi, the winner of the Reader’s Choice Award in the Providence Journal, rivals K&C in taste and quality. Covering a wide range of Indian cuisine, from both the
A Ranked Guide to the Best Local Vegan-Friendly Spots
north and south, it provides plenty of vegan options. Must-tries include hot idli sambar, which combines fluffy rice cakes with crackling lentil soup, and classic okra masala speckled with red peppers. If you’re feeling adventurous, ask the server for nimboo soda—lemon soda with a spicy twist. It may be far from Thayer, but it’s definitely worth the taste. - Divya Santhanam The Grange 166 Broadway, Providence This one is a fabulous brunch pick. Not only does it offer many classic breakfast and brunch meals, but any instance of eggs can be replaced with tofu. It’s not really brunch without a benedict, and thankfully, The Grange recognizes that with their savory tofu benedict with seitan sausage and black pepper biscuits. Don’t expect it to taste like the usual eggs benedict; expect it to taste better. The roasted veggie bowl is another winner for those leaning more toward the lunch half of brunch, and it includes avocado, fulfilling yet another millennial brunch trend. Veggie Fun 123 Dorrance St., Providence This vegan/kosher restaurant is perfect if you’re craving Asian dishes made with veggies, tofu, or soy protein. Though it does require an 18-minute walk (or five-minute Uber) downtown, their ambiance, spacious seating, and delicious options make it worth it to leave campus once in awhile. I especially recommend the scallion pancake, Korean-style clear noodles, and the sweet and sour sesame soy protein. To finish off the meal, be sure to order their fried soybean-based ice cream (they’ll even put a candle if it’s your birthday!). - Eojin Choi
Che! Hut 8 Stimson Ave., Providence Che! Hut is about “challenging what’s on your plate” through completely plant-based meals. But you won’t even remember that anything is missing when peppers of all colors come out wrapped lovingly in a spring roll. To boot, the ebullient chef Natasha Daniels will keep you entertained with skillful demonstrations that make you believe that you, too, could effortlessly whip the noodle bowl with roasted mushrooms, tamari, and thai basil. Past weeks have included Mexican, Indian, and Thai-inspired meals—drop by next week to discover what Natasha has in store! -Saanya Jain Apsara Palace 783 Hope St., Providence What Apsara lacks in ambiance, it makes up for in flavor and pricing. A good meal includes the vegetable nime chow—the appetizer plate comes with two for just $2.75. Deciding what to select for the main course is a challenge indeed: The eggplant garlic sauce stir fry and broccoli oyster sauce stir fry are excellent, tasty options. With anything, make sure to order both vegetables and tofu.
Alicia DeVos & Post- Staff copy editor
Claribel Wu
he ad of media
Shania Twain, Then and Now
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002 was a simpler time. George W. Bush was barely in his second year as president. The Iraq War was still in the distance. Taylor Swift was 13 years old, Beyoncé was part of Destiny’s Child, and Ashanti was being played on the radio. The majority of us were in elementary school. And 2002 was also the year Shania Twain’s last album Up! came out to critical acclaim and commercial success, before Shania retired from the public sphere and began her residency in Las Vegas. But now, 15 years later, she’s back with her fourth album, Now, and poised to hit No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart. It’s exceedingly rare for an artist to remain relevant for over a decade, and most artists would not have been met with such a warm welcome if they opted to effectively disappear for 15 years. But Shania Twain is not like most artists, even ignoring the fact that she holds the record for best-selling album by a female artist in the United States. Shania’s impact
resonates still through the country music soundscape; practically every female country artist owes her career in part to Shania, whose immense success demonstrated to the world the powerful charm of country music. Even the recent trend of successful pop artists going country, such as Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus, can be traced back to Shania.
“Much can be forgiven if the output is still high quality, but that cannot be said... for much of Now.” But the Shania of now in her latest album Now is a different Shania. The Shania
A Country Music Icon Returns of the past relished in uninhibited positivity and brightness. Love songs like “You’re Still the One” were touching paeans of monogamy and heterosexual love, and even tracks like “That Don’t Impress Me Much” were no more than playful remarks of how women just want someone to keep them warm at night. That past Shania loved exclamation marks, using them liberally in her song titles, and indeed her bombastic voice seemed to assume that there were always exclamation marks waiting at the end of her lyrics. The song titles of Now feature no exclamation marks, and much of its songs are sung similarly without exclamation. She still sounds occasionally joyous, like in the singles “Life’s About To Get Good” and “Swingin’ With My Eyes Closed,” but even then her voice lacks the thrilling confidence of her previous work. Other songs feature a world-weary Shania (“Home Now”), or a generically despondent Shania (“Because of You”), or a defensive, anxious Shania (“I’m Alright”). Many of these differences can be attributed to her voice. In the 15 years since her last album, Shania battled Lyme disease that left her vocal cords damaged, and unfortunately it shows—Shania’s voice in Now sounds strangely filtered and almost robotic, as if her frail voice were being propped up with egregious editing. But Shania has also spoken about how her divorce from then-husband Robert John “Mutt” Lange left her, at least figuratively, without a voice, stating in an interview on the Oprah Winfrey Show, “I figured mentally that I would never sing again. I hadn’t written a song without this man in 14 years….How do I get started now?” Mutt was also her producer and songwriter, and even if Shania’s voice was not literally affected by their split, her music still suffers as a result. But even if the album doesn’t feel typically Shania, it’s arguably the best representation of Shania to date—Sha-
nia wrote and produced each song, and in an interview with Rolling Stone, she says she went as far as to tell anyone working on the album with her to “forget her other records” because she did not “want to be related to Mutt’s productions at all.” Lyrically, Shania has never been prone to the tropes of country music (pickup trucks, corn fields, bell-bottom jorts), but she’s always relished in its sounds, with guitars and banjos and fiddles galore. Now is marred by a disappointingly standard pop production that only occasionally errs on the country soundscape; “Poor Me” is the worst offender, with synths that sound directly plagiarized from the Chainsmokers’ song “Don’t Let Me Down” with Daya. Much can be forgiven about dramatic changes in style if the output is still high quality, but that cannot be said for “Poor Me,” a conglomerate of weak hooks and emotionless delivery, and for much of Now. None of the music is necessarily bad—it’s a consistently pleasant album—but it lacks the charm and personality of her previous work. In the context of Shania’s career, Now is a fine album that represents her as an artist and should satisfy fans who’ve been waiting over a decade for new music. Unfortunately, an album that’s only good in a certain context is arguably not good at all. It’s great to have Shania back, but part of me is still waiting for the Shania of back then.
Joshua Lu
managing editor
Erica Lewis
staff illustr ator
On Thursday, the world will be treated to a rare Harvest Moon, which occurs only once a year. As you look into the night sky...
Things About the Moon 1 Bruno Mars talks about it 2 It’s made of swiss cheese 3 According to an old song, it’s a heavy drinker 4 400,000 pounds of man-made materials are on it 5 Carl Sagan worked on the U.S. govern-
days “If you don’t shower for ten you, are and no one is there to see you really unclean?”
ment’s plans to blow it up. 6 We landed on it (maybe?) 7 It entered Aries on Oct. 4th 8 Your moon sign controls your emotional energy. Or not. 9 The moon orbits 239,000 miles away from the Earth (Still closer than Perkins!) 10 The moon may be anti-feminist. (No woman has ever walked on it).
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“I m o cute stly use L guys ... an inkedIn to d my dad. stalk ”