The College Hill Independent Vol. 34 Issue 7

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COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

MARCH 24 2017 34

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COVER

INDY

Ovine Eden Claire Schlaikjer

NEWS 02

Week in Our Art Has Failed Us Ivan Rios-Fetchko & Eve Zelickson

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Not a Safe House Camila Ruiz Segovia

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A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 34 / ISSUE 07 MARCH 24 2017

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Bustin' Through the Façade Vuthy Lay, Makoto Kumasaka, & Cameron Kucera

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They Said We Needed Ads Jane Argodale, Shane Potts, & Jack Brook

ARTS

FROM THE EDITORS It’s been a bad week for Ed Sheeran. First, Drake’s new “Playlist” More Life broke the Spotify record for most streams in a single day, a record previously held

by Ed Sheeran’s ÷. What’s more, after receiving criticism on the internet over the striking lyrical similarity of his hit single “Shape of You” to the TLC 90s classic “No Scrubs,” he quietly added TLC members Kandi Burruss and Tameka Cottle to the track’s credits.

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Pedro Letria Will Weatherly

FEATURES 11

A Vogue Rogue Kion You

A bad week for Ed Sheeran is a good week for The Indy.

SCIENCE

Every Dumb

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Scrub Having the name of Ed Emits Rude And stupid Negative vibes.

Causerie & Effect Fatima Husain

OCCULT 13

Is This the Real Life?

Robin Manley

METABOLICS — SS

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This is Spinal Tap! Nora Gosselin

LITERARY 17

thunderstorms mock me and so does the concrete Fadwa Ahmed

EPHEMERA 15

5 Weird People Anne Bonesteel

X 18

MANAGING EDITORS Will Tavlin Kelton Ellis Dolma Ombadykow

ARTS Ryan Rosenberg Will Weatherly Saanya Jain

NEWS Piper French Hannah Maier-Katkin Roksana Borzouei

FEATURES Julia Tompkins Erin West Andrew Deck

WEEK IN REVIEW Sam Samore

METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick

METRO Shane Potts Jane Argodale Camila Ruiz Segovia Jack Brook

SCIENCE Fatima Husain Liz Cory

TECH Jonah Max Malcolm Drenttel

X Liby Hays Nicole Cochary

OCCULT Lance Gloss Robin Manley

LIST Lisa Borst Jamie Packs

INTERVIEWS Patrick McMenamin

STAFF WRITERS Eve Zelickson Marianna McMurdock Signe Swanson Josh Kurtz Zack Kligler Brionne Frazier Chris Packs Kion You

LITERARY Stefania Gomez Isabelle Doyle EPHEMERA Anna Bonesteel

Letters to the editor are always welcome. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

Morphologies Liby Hays

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Gabriel Matesanz

DESIGN EDITOR Chelsea Alexander

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Frans van Hoek Teri Minogue Ivan Rios-Fetchko Maria Cano-Flavia Pia Mileaf-Patel Kela Johnson Julie Benbassat Anzia Anderson Isabelle Rea Claire Schlaikjer

DESIGN & LAYOUT Celeste Matsui Andrew Linder Ruby Stenhouse

COPY EDITOR Miles Taylor

SOCIAL MEDIA Jane Argodale Signe Swanson

WEB MANAGERS Charlie Windolf Alberta Devor BUSINESS MANAGER Lance Gloss

SENIOR EDITORS Alec Mapes-Frances Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs MVP Robin Manley THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT — 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG / @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN OUR ART HAS FAILED US Eve Zelickson and Ivan Rios-Fetchko ILLUSTRATION BY Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN BY Andrew Linder BY

I JUST WANTED TO GET STONED AND WATCH X-MEN

ON THE ROCKS Last week, French performance artist Abraham Poincheval took up residence inside a rock for seven days at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo museum. In order to contextualize Poincheval’s art in the broader context of rock-living, we turn to the beloved echinoderm Patrick Star, who dubbed a brown boulder his home for over 18 years.

Poincheval is a slim, stogie-smoking Frenchman who enjoys stew and spending dangerously long amounts of time in incredibly cramped places. Star is a flubberous, flushed sea starfish who prefers Krusty Combos to stew, but like Poincheval finds peace and serenity inside mineral aggregates.

After emerging from the rock, Poincheval told Agence FrancePress that, inside the rock, he “didn’t feel oppressed at all, but very well-connected to the rock.” Poincheval’s rock had air holes for him to breath and a small cubby to hold a supply of water, stew, and dried meat. Cables were inserted to monitor Poincheval’s heart and serve as an emergency video feed. Poincheval chiseled a small capsule below his rear to defecate.

Star lives a life of luxury in comparison. His house flaunts a TV, two green chairs, and a lamp. Star is also known to lift and carry the entire rock dwelling when he dreams. In the episode “Home Sweet Pineapple,” when Star dreams spiders are attacking him, he picks up his rock and bashes SpongeBob repeatedly with it. Poincheval’s humble abode was a 10-ton stone and there is no indication that he ever tried to lift it. Star’s house was a small pet rock that grew into a large, spacious one. Poincheval’s rock is a limestone boulder and has showed no signs of growing.

Both share strong connections to their hideouts and have whispered sweet nothings into its porous frame. “I thank it very much for having been so enthusiastic about welcoming me,” Poincheval told National Public Radio. Describing his time in the rock, Poincheval said, “it’s this sensation—you have to be in a fluid state, a kind of particle in the middle of this mineral world, that’s rather strange and rather meteoric.” Star, who has called the rock his home for much longer than Poincheval, expressed a similar disposition in his song “Under My Rock.” “It’s cold and hard and kinda grey, but it’s the only place I’ll ever stay,” Star crooned. Poincheval’s goal was to travel “through geological time,” and become the “beating heart of the rock.” This view, on the other hand, didn’t resonate with Star as profoundly.

For his next performance, the fearless fellow plans to squat inside a glass encasement and incubate chicken eggs with his body heat until they hatch. The Guardian reported that the endeavor is planned to take 23 days over which Poincheval will consume solely rich ginger in hopes of maintaining a body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius.

Perhaps it’s time for a spa day.

-EZ

(Note: this was going to be “Week in Capitalism is Weird,” but let’s be honest, what isn’t a week without capitalism being weird? Anyway, that didn’t happen.)

With midterms in full swing, what could be better than indulging in a late-night procrastination bout in the form of a big-screen thriller?

Perhaps this collective desire to stave off real work manifesting all across the nation is why Logan just became the highest grossing Wolverine movie ever: domestically it’s made $180 million in two weeks (or about $550,000 an hour, if you’re into comparing salaries.) Movies make money all the time—so what?

A quick detour to remember that capitalism, to keep us satisfied, pretends to offer salvation by taking the critiques levelled at it and offering itself up as a solution. There are plenty of problems and dilemmas to be critiqued in the current moment: rampant inequality; an international refugee crises; supralegal corporations destroying nature via climate change and fracking; or simply the deep, unlocalizable anxiety resulting from economic and cultural shifts that leave us without a sense of who we are. So, the capitalist system must do some recuperating, because it can’t allow for a real revolution. Someone has to point out the things we all know are wrong with the world, give us a pretty (but hollow) solution, and sell that back to us. What is infinitely reproducible, easy to distribute, and can be tied to other commodities (sequels, action figures, $9.75 popcorn)? The action-packed, CGI, superhero movie!

Enter Logan. Also, enter hardcore spoiler alert. What should have been a cut-and-dried, Wolverine fueled blood-bath of Adamantium claws, car chases and explosions (maybe with a little romance, some drinking, a life lesson) instead tried to address every problem mentioned above. Inequality appears as poor farmers facing mega-farms (in 2029?). Wolverine’s petri-dish daughter, Laura (with admittedly really sick spikes on her toes) is a Mexican refugee fleeing the evil corporation that created her, as well as dozens of other future-soldier, “GMO-Mutants.” Because if it wasn’t wildly apparent that this is a nature/science battle, the movie makes it perfectly explicit: that poor farmer? He grows organic corn. The mega-farm? They do GMO. Dad-Wolverine and Daughter-Wolverine enjoy their quintessentially American, blood-filled road trip and arrive at the Canadian border only to be found by the Evil Multinational. In a wild plot twist, the super-heroes kill all the evil people and wander back to nature where they feel most at home. But Wolverine, to save his daughter, does what Wolverine never, ever does—he uses a gun. Proving, yet again, that the only way to beat ‘the system’ is to give up any of your moral or ethical commitments and become as evil as what you are trying to fight. The film ends with a touching moment (in the focus groups kind of way) in which Laura rotates Logan’s gravesite cross (it seems not even Hugh Jackman wants to make another X-Men movie) and turns it into an ‘X,’ framing the path that the young mutants take, into the woods and 40 more years of X-Men films. (12-year old mutants have a high return on investment). There’s an Oedipal drama in there somewhere, too—just for good measure.

It seems to have worked! Logan, on top of a boatload of money, has a 92 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Art, the great challenge to “the system,” the realm of big ideas, the land of revolutionary potential, has failed us and the critics love it. Congratulations, capitalism—you won this round!

(But really, $9.75 for popcorn?)

-IRF

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

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LAS NIÑAS DE GUATEMALA State crime, femicide, and a blaze at a children’s home

BY Camila

Ruiz Segovia ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Will Tavlin

content warning: sexual violence, child abuse Quiero, a la sombra de un ala, contar este cuento en flor: la niña de Guatemala, la que se murió de amor…

On the morning of March 8, 2017, a blaze broke out in a classroom at Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción, a state-run children’s shelter in Guatemala. Teenage girls living in the shelter began screaming soon thereafter.

Trying to escape, they ran to the classroom’s main entrance only to find that the door was locked. An article from Guatemalan newspaper La Prensa Libre reports that staff members were present at the shelter’s facilities. Still, “nobody came to the girls’ rescue.” Within minutes, the screaming was replaced by a devastating silence. By the time local firefighters and the Red Cross extinguished the flames, news of the lethal fire had spread throughout San Juan Pinula, the small town on the outskirts of Guatemala City where Hogar Seguro is located. Not long after the incident, worried mothers began gathering outside of the shelter, pressing their hands against the concrete walls fencing off the children’s home. They were waiting for the worst.

But for hours, as the article from La Prensa Libre states, families were blocked from entering the shelter. Mothers, unable to find out the fate of their loved ones, sobbed in desperation. As ambulance workers began pulling out tiny female bodies covered with black sheets from Hogar Seguro, the sobbing intensified. According to government authorities, 17 girls died of asphyxiation during the fire, and 23 more died due to severe burns in the days following, bringing the fire’s death toll to 40 young women. President Jimmy Morales declared three days of national mourning.

A day earlier, on March 7, a large group of children had fled Hogar Seguro. Andrea Barrios, a coordinator at Colectivo Artesanas, a local organization providing legal support to some of the victims of the fire, estimates that more than 60 girls and boys abandoned the facilities by that afternoon.

Though originally founded in 2010 to shelter vulnerable children, Hogar Seguro—Spanish for “safe house”—had become anything but that. Barrios told the Independent that the shelter had a long history of neglect and abuse.

Reports of sexual violence, poor treatment, and overcrowded conditions emerged within the first year of the shelter’s operations. In 2010, the UN Committee for the Rights of Children expressed concern “for the high number of children living in the institution... as well as the weakness of supervisory systems.” According to the New York Times, 750 children were living in a space designed for 400. In 2016, Guatemala’s Office of the Attorney General requested assistance from the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights to operate the shelter. These calls for action, however, did not lead to any improvements.

Hoping to bring about change, the children mobilized. In 2013, a group of teenage girls living in Hogar Seguro filed a complaint for sexual abuse and violence against the shelter. But in Guatemala, where, according to official figures from the Guatemalan government, only two percent of cases make it to court, the girls’ voices were quickly dismissed. La Prensa Libre reports that, from 2013 onwards, children frequently escaped the shelter in small groups.

In search of lives free from violence, many children quietly left during the night, often for wage labor jobs. For over three years, the abuses and escapes at Hogar Seguro continued without major repercussions for the shelter’s administrators. On the night of November 2, 2016, a large group of girls, some of whom were pregnant, fled the shelter. The scandal led to the resignation of Miguel Ángel Herrera, director of Hogar Seguro at the time. The shelter’s

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condition, however, remained precarious. Three months later, in February 2017, at least three government institutions, including Guatemala’s Office of the Attorney General, recommended “the gradual closing” of Hogar Seguro, directly responding to numerous local NGOs demanding the shelter’s permanent closure. But the children could not wait any longer. By the afternoon of March 7, a large group of them had fled the facilities once again.

Fearing a new scandal, some staff members called the Anti-Riot Squad of the National Police, requesting the prompt capture of the children. Barrios told the Independent that this request was “totally illegal.” A legal procedure would have required that staff filed a formal complaint, taking the children to court. But by the end of the day, the police had tracked down and returned the majority of the missing kids to the shelter. In a recent interview, several children told UNICEF that police officials hit them and violently dragged them back to Hogar Seguro. That night, while 40 police officers surrounded the shelter’s facilities, 52 boys were locked in an auditorium and over 60 girls were locked in a single classroom. The girls were given some mattresses to sleep on but did not have access to food or a restroom. Several local advocacy groups argued that the lockdown was meant as punishment for attempting to flee the facilities. In a statement published on March 10, the feminist collective La Cuerda declared that “the girls were punished for their efforts to denounce state violence.”

Many in Guatemala believe that the girls intentionally started the fire in order to end the night-long lockdown and more generally as a means of protesting the abusive conditions under which they were living. Barrios, from Colectivo Artesanas, agrees with this assertion. “They wanted to make national authorities pay attention,” she told the Independent. “They were fearing for their lives.” According to La Prensa Libre, “a group of girls set their mattresses on fire,” hoping the shelter’s staffers would open the doors after noticing the smoke. Still, nobody came to their rescue. “The girls were given a death penalty because of their act of rebellion,” reads a press release signed by dozens of Guatemalan feminist organizations. +++ Como de bronce candente, al beso de despedida, era su frente, ¡la frente que más he amado en mi vida!

The Network of Ancestral Healers, a feminist indigenous group, described the events as “state femicide,” the state’s deliberate killing of women.

According to the UN High Commission on Human Rights, Guatemala has the highest rate of femicide in Latin America and ranks third worldwide. Profound levels of corruption within the justice system and the police facilitate these killings. With near impunity, perpetrators can commit femicides without the fear of legal repercussions. “Let’s not forget that these girls were living in a state-run shelter. The Guatemalan state is to blame for their deaths,” Ianza Mercedez Hernández, President of the Guatemalan Women Association told the Guatemalan newspaper Público. Feminist organizations, like La Rueda, have also noted that police officials played an implicit role in the tragedy; they were the ones who brought the girls back to the Hogar Seguro after they had escaped the shelter. State neglect was also evident in the court’s dismissal of the girls’ legal complaints. In light of the profound levels of violence against women in the country, some viewed the girls’ protest as an outstanding act

MARCH 24, 2017

of courage. “They had everything to lose and they knew it. These girls knew the dangers they were facing, and still did it,” Sofia González, a Guatemalan college student in the capital, told the Independent.

victims remains unknown. Without a complete list of names, some of the white coffins carry the bodies of unidentified girls. In the meantime, many mothers are still waiting to know the whereabouts of their daughters. It is unclear whether they will have an answer in the near future.

+++ +++ Eran de lirios los ramos; y las orlas de reseda, y de jazmín; la enterramos en una caja de seda…

Forty small coffins covered with white silk were built to carry the girls’ bodies. “The color white was chosen to represent the innocence of the girls,” a spokesperson of Funeraria León Cardenas, the funeral home that the government commissioned for the girls’ services, told La Prensa Libre. But the funeraria faced multiple challenges while completing its duties. Such challenges provide evidence for Hogar Seguro’s complicit role in the tragedy and exposed the mishandling of the case by Guatemalan authorities. First, the funerary home had to recover all the bodies. “It was a really difficult task to complete,” said the funeraria’s spokesperson, “because some girls were sent to San Marcos, and others to Petén and Jutiapa.”

After the fire, the injured were sent to different state hospitals around the country and private clinics in the United States—some because of family preference, but mostly because of the inability of any single Guatemalan hospital to process all of the injured. Some of these girls were among the 40 fatal victims of the incident, but others, while it is unclear how many, remain under medical supervision. In general, state authorities have failed to provide precise information regarding the numbers, and locations of both fatal and non-fatal victims. Without this information, it is difficult to determine the total number of girls who were injured by the blaze. Authorities claim that the overcrowded conditions of the shelter made it impossible to keep accurate records of the children living in the facilities. But had the state met the demand for more shelters, the children would have lived in safer conditions.

On March 10, two days after the tragedy, Guatemala’s National Forensic Institute tweeted a screenshot with the names of the victims who had been identified: 17 in total. On March 11, the institute tweeted a second picture, this time with 30 names. At the time of publication, the total number of fatal

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Iban cargándola en andas, obispos y embajadores; detrás iba el pueblo en tandas, todo cargado de flores…

“It was not the fire,” read a banner at a protest on March 9, “it was the state.” That day, hundreds of protesters gathered outside of Guatemala’s Presidential House, shouting, “Guatemala is NOT a safe house.” Since the day of the tragedy, Guatemalans have taken to the streets across the country to express their outrage. In Guatemala City, some protesters dyed public fountains blood red. Also in the capital, a different group of protesters piled charcoal and barbie dolls in a heap at one public park. A small banner next to the installation read justicia. On Twitter, #GuateDeLuto, Spanish for “Guatemala is mourning,” became a trending topic. Online and offline, numerous protesters called for the resignation of President Morales.

On March 8, before the news of the fire spread, women in Guatemala had peacefully marched to commemorate International Women's Day. In Latin America, where gender-based violence remains a central issue affecting women, Women’s Day protests are solemn acts. “Stop killing us,” is a popular chant that young girls learn in the region. But for the Guatemalan girls of Hogar Seguro, the chants had no effect. The fire felt like their last scream for justice.

CAMILA RUIZ SEGOVIA B’18 believes that Latin American girls deserve the right to protest.

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WHITE WALL A call to action

BY Vuthy

Lay, Makoto Kumasaka & Cameron Kucera DESIGN BY Celeste Matsui On the corner of Benefit and College Streets, it would be easy to glance over the Radeke Façade, which looks like just another stretch of New England brick and mortar. To a passerby, the façade seems to be a nondescript length of building adjacent to the upper entrance of the RISD Museum. The handleless pair of doors are the only reminder of the abandoned function of the original entrance.

Founded in 1888, the doors of the Radeke Gallery were once only opened to those living on College Hill.

Students and visitors alike would study the museum’s earliest collections of mechanical and industrial artifacts.

Looking out towards the East Side of Providence, it is easy to imagine the trustees of the University Club, plump from an afternoon lunch, waddling across the street and onto the museum's doorstep.

In many respects, the museum has not changed.

Aside from tourists and school groups, museum-goers are still predominantly white and upper-middle class.

What bars other demographics from engaging with the museum? David Osa Amadasun interrogates this issue in his article, “Black People Don’t Go To Galleries,” in which he asks, “Could the rejection of particular cultural tastes and activities impede...the realization of hopes and dreams such as going to university or getting into a certain career?” A similar dynamic in the museum space begins to call into question the RISD Museum’s metrics in defining a valuable cultural artifact.

Underrepresented folks often feel uncomfortable in institutions like the RISD Museum because such institutions fail to fully acknowledge their presence. When these institutions do not fully engage in the nuanced histories and interests of the Providence community as a whole, a sense of unease inhibits them from the work within the museum's walls. We acknowledge this project does not capture the full scope of the issues that arise when critiquing our cultural institutions, but hopes to scratch the surface.

White Wall is a pop-up gallery and performance space on Benefit Street that resembles a white bamboo screen and arch. This piece began as a manifestation of the invisible socioeconomic barriers that limit many in the greater Providence community from fully accessing the museum’s resources and content. We seized upon the cast iron fence which bounds the Radeke façade as a starting point for discussing larger cultural issues of museum inaccessibility. By extending this fence with

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white bamboo poles, we seek to position the existing architectural barrier as representing the broader social barriers that inhibit people of color from engaging with the museum.

The zip-ties that lash the bamboo together reflect the piece’s rapid assembly and temporary existence.

However, the scaffolding that makes up the structure also allows artists to attach work in a low cost, low-tech way (zip-ties, string). The varying heights of the horizontal bracing allows for a range of different sized works to be displayed. The focal point of the project is the arch, which soars above the roofline of the gallery and concentrates attention on the inaccessible door. This arch reacts to the stepped paths and platforms across the street and transforms the doorway into a performance space.

We not only demand more from our institutions, but strive to individually break down the subtle barriers that prevent our struggling communities from equally and meaningfully connecting to the resources around them. How do we dismantle the personal strategies— coping mechanisms of self policing and intellectual rejection—that somebody builds for themselves to avoid painful situations of feeling out of place or inferior? How do we increase the value of art institutions for these folks?

We were unsatisfied with this passive critique of museum practice, and we see this wall as an object that

can begin to propose a regionally responsive model for museum curation and civic engagement. This model seeks to position the museum as an inclusive cultural beacon by giving voice to local artists and reflecting, through content, the diversity of cultures that makes Providence a successful and progressive city. White Wall is a laboratory for experimentation with new methods of outreach and engagement with the arts. However, our project only has the power to initiate actions that the museum must itself continue in order to fulfill its mission statement to “educate and inspire artists…and the general public through exhibitions, programs, and publications.”

Our project was inspired by the late museum director, Alexander Dorner, under whose name the prize is dedicated. Prior to his time at RISD, Dorner was known for proggressive art policies that put him in direct opposition with the Nazi Party, eventually leading to his escape from Germany in 1938. As the museum director at RISD, he reorganized traditionally displayed works into dramatic installations which appealed to the Providence public in new and exciting ways. Highly concerned with community engagement, he worked for installations that appealed to a greater variety of people.

In 1941, a false accusation by the FBI connected Dorner to the Luftwaffe and he was forced to resign.

Building upon Dorner's vision, we imagine a public space for sustained engagement. We want folks from the

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Providence community to use words and forms that push against the moral fabric of these institutions that stand as barriers for entry. White Wall should be swarming in bodies—graphic pastes, smears of color, and loud voices drowning out every inch of white. Bodies of medium physically climbing the walls of the RISD Museum. We want only the slightest hint of an opening, overflowing with ambitious quantities of textile, plaster, and found objects. We want the museum to flex its atrophied muscles under the pressure of a collective Providence expression.

We want to see something else, something new, something different. We want to confront the gentry with the frustrations of those who don’t fit into the white cube of the art world. These collaborations could be anything from poetry slams to street art, video screenings to paintings and sculptures that conflict with or build upon the wall. This installation is meant to stand out. Hopefully, the work on display will engage passersby with earnest content from Providence artists—all of them. Ideally, this project will force the museum to re-evaluate their distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and allocate more resources to support and

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exhibit local artists.

These moves toward a more regional patronage could enable the museum to take a bold stance in response to the repugnant actions taken by the Donald Trump administration to cut the National Endowment of the Arts. We are particularly inspired by the incredible work being carried out by local NGOs—organizations like New Urban Arts that have successfully created a safe and supportive space for youth to develop their own individual creative practices. We are currently in the process of promoting White Wall as platform for members of these institutions to display their work to a broader audience of museum-goers and students. Hopefully, these connections will build relationships between members of these communities.

We want to introduce a new participatory model of engagement that hasn’t been attempted at museums in the past. We want to try and fail until we get closer to creating a refuge out of this museum. We want folks to have a new relationship and understanding of it as a public service. We want folks to understand why accessibility and relatability are important for how we function in our day-to-day lives.

VUTHY LAY, MAKOTO KUMASAKA, & CAMERON KUCERA RISD '18 encourage you to contribute to this project. Here are a few opportunities to engage with the RISD Museum: – Rhode Island residents who identify as an artist or designer can receive a free museum membership – Free museum admission every Sunday from 10 to 5 – Extended evening hours every third Thursday of each month until 9pm – Art + Design Lab ( Friday 3 to 5) – RISD Art Circle (Saturday 11 to 2) – Summer Teen Intensives – The Museum Guild also invites undergraduate students from local colleges and universities to become ambassadors for the RISD Museum Contact us by e-mail at whitewallmuseum@gmail.com.

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A SURVEY OF BREAKING BONDS Causeries on science and environment Fatima Husain ILLUSTRATION BY Teri Minogue DESIGN BY Dolma Ombadykow BY

Colored Collars I saw a sign from the Farm Equipment Association of Minnesota and South Dakota while browsing a gardening thread online the other day. It read: “DESPITE ALL OUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS WE OWE OUR EXISTENCE TO A SIX-INCH LAYER OF TOPSOIL AND THE FACT THAT IT RAINS.” The sign looked old in the picture, and it was curiously held up by a single staple on the bottom right of a rectangular piece of cardstock. The old sign probably owes its endurance to the rigidity of the cardstock.

Though these farm equipment associations were founded separately in the late 1800s, they merged in 1963 and continue to successfully serve the two states’ current farm equipment needs. A cursory glance at the association’s website reveals a small array of family-owned farm equipment small businesses.

These days, however, the image of family farming has been corrupted. Few young Americans aspire to plant next year’s corn and represent blue collar America. Agribusiness—well, that’s not for family anymore. It’s white collar.

In the beginning, white collar jobs threatened blue collar jobs. Then, automation threatened blue collar jobs. Now, automation threatens both—but the rain and topsoil remain irreplaceable. What a time to be alive.

Hair Care Science Fair There’s a woman sitting in the raised chair, gleaming at the mirror in front of her. She gently strokes her long black hair, running her fingertips along the strands. She is nervous. She is excited. Her hair is new, not simply a result of her haircut. Her hair has been reset. Her stylist is happy, too—bad results could have been catastrophic, much worse than a bad haircut.

Perms, permanent straightening, relaxing, Japanese straightening, Brazilian blowouts—these all popular modern hair treatments with promises to tame hair that doesn’t want to cooperate. Unlike gels or traditional heat straightening, which undo themselves the moment hair is wet, permanent hair treatments alter the bonds in hair that give them their characteristic bounce or straight nature and reset them to a desired style.

A stylist usually applies basic, acidic, and conditioning chemical agents in succession from the scalp down to the ends of the hair, only interrupting the chemical party for a brief hair setting session—then back to chemicals. The results of these science-rich procedures are instant and received well if done properly. However, if one of the chemical agents is left on a person’s hair for too long (or too short a time), dead hair becomes even deader.

The treatments can only change hair that has already grown, and those who opt for permanent hair treatments often return every few months for a touch-up. Some things we just cannot change about ourselves.

Time, Exteriors I work in an organic geochemistry lab and spend most of my time at the fume hood, working with thousands-of-years-old remains of bacteria and algae in lake and soil sediments. It’s usually their cell membranes that are preserved over time, so, in a way, only exteriors matter. According to time at least.

Fleeting Carefully wrapped in plastic and stored in freezers in neatly labeled tubes, lacustrine—or lake—sediment cores contain vivid stories about their past environments. They usually record up to tens of thousands of years. Within a sediment core, it’s possible to find multi-thousand year old plants that precede civilization as we know it today. Sometimes, a playful blue mineral will appear. Vivianite: it gets darker the longer it is exposed to light.

Don’t miss it.

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Nucleation In mineralogy, one must look at a thin section of a rock to determine its order of crystallization. One mineral may be wrapped around another, indicating that it formed, or nucleated, after the mineral it surrounded. Depending on the temperature and pressure conditions, different minerals have different requirements for crystallization—unique characteristics in unique situations.

Perhaps we follow a similar system as we grow and develop socially. Others wrap around us; we wrap around others. It depends on the situation.

Slip I used to have a friend who dragged her feet along the ice so that she wouldn’t slip. I tried to tell her that static friction was greater than kinetic friction, but she didn’t believe me. She slipped a lot.

Big Crunch Many biochemistry and biology students learn in their introductory classes that most of the compounds they work with and learn about are L (-) enantiomers, as opposed to D (+) enantiomers. Enantiomers are compounds that are nonsuperimposable mirror images of each other, just like left and right hands. Most biomolecules are built from L (-) amino acids, which rotate light leftward when light is passed through them. D (+) enantiomers rotate light rightward.

Once these L (-) enantiomers are buried, they change. Over hundreds of thousands of years, L (-) enantiomers morph into D (+) enantiomers forming a mixture of enantiomers. At some point, the mixture of L (-) and D (+) enantiomers compounds is fifty-fifty: a racemic mixture. Because the compounds in the mixture rotate light in opposite directions, the net light rotation of the mixture is zero, and the racemic mixture does not rotate light at all. The changes continue, and the once L (-) biomolecules become predominantly D (+) molecules.

There’s a theory that the universe expands and contracts and then expands again repetitively. The big crunch. Assuming the circumstances are the same each time the universe expands and contracts, it is possible to believe that there have been many universes before us and many universes to come. And if the circumstances are truly the same each time—and that nothing is random—then perhaps we’ve lived many times before and will live many times again. L (-) enantiomers will always predominate in living organisms and convert into D (+) enantiomers in the same manner and in the same order.

Considering the age of the universe (around 13.8 billion years old) and the age of Earth (around 4.54 billion years old) how long have we really lived?

Heat Death The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed—only transferred. In stars, matter transforms into many different types of energy, most notably light and heat energy.

E=mc2. The mass-energy equivalence.

Energy flows from the center of stars to the surfaces of stars—from areas of high energy concentration to low energy concentration. It is this dispersal of energy that may set an expiration date on our universe as we know it.

Lucky for us (and the extraterrestrials), stars contain mechanisms to sustain the outward flow of energy. Fusion reactions in the interior of stars, such as our own magnificent sun, produce energy by burning hydrogen to make helium.

Each time hydrogen changes to helium, energy is released.

Eventually, the sun’s hydrogen will run out, but we will already be long gone.

FATIMA HUSAIN B’17 wonders about the eventual heat death of the universe.

MARCH 24, 2017

A HISTORY OF TWISTED SPINES Scoliosis treatment under scrutiny Nora Gosselin ILLUSTRATION BY Lillian Xie DESIGN BY Andrew Linder WRITTEN BY

“What I would like to do is begin with a small incision in front, which would likely require us to break her third and fourth ribs, then cut around to the spine and begin the fusion surgery.”

A doctor told said this as I stood barefoot in his office at age 13. The doctor—whose name I have left behind, the memory too cold, too cutting, to hold onto—smiled with each word. What a puzzle he had been presented, in the challenging shape of a twisted spine snaking its way through the body of a 13-yearold girl.

There is an old and strange mythology surrounding the back—an intricate weaving of religion, legend and medicine. In his research, orthopedic surgeon Charles Mehlman points to ancient Hindu writings from 3500-1800 BCE as offering some of the earliest descriptions of scoliosis and its treatment.

“Scoliosis” comes from the Greek skolios, meaning crooked. Plato believed that a flexible, functional spine was the result of divine intervention. Hippocrates later classified five categories of spinal deformity—kyphosis (hunchback), scoliosis (lateral curvature), seisis (what he considered “burst fractures”), dislocations, and general fractures of the spinal processes. He also developed truly torturous treatments for such conditions, including the Hippocratic ladder, board and bench. Each device involved binding the patient either horizontally or vertically to wood and applying weight, with the hope of pulling the spine straight. In his work On Joints, Hippocrates warned against the false “physicians of spinal healing,” who used such devices to astonish a crowd, as spectacle alone, with no concern for the results. Hippocrates, who also penned the famous tenet“Do no harm,” was well aware of how thin this line between patient and spectacle might be.

Social norms about what the body should be— how it should move, what it should do—have long enforced the malicious and false binary of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal.’ Here, physical abnormality becomes a perverted and erasing descriptor that has the potential to remove individuals from society altogether by reducing them to their bodies alone and casting them to the agentless margin. In discussing matters of the back, the arbitrary line drawn between what is physically normal and abnormal neglects the simple medical fact that all spines curve. These curves are known as lordoses, and they allow us to stand upright; conditions such as scoliosis, kyphosis and lordosis (swayback) are all simply extremes of the normal.

Physicians, scholars, and religious authorities have historically made a complicated and violent connection between moral virtue and a healthy, straight spine. Medical historian Fay Bound Alberti traced this connection to the Book of Leviticus, in the Old Testament, which declares that anyone with a hunchback is forbidden to make a holy offering of food. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus heals a woman whose back is bent and twisted, restoring her ability to stand.

Physical deformity has thus been understood as a manifestation of immorality in the body—evil twisting its way out, with the deformed requiring salvation, not earthly treatment.

The ‘normal’/‘abnormal’ binary is also tied to class differences and the historical ostracization of the poor. One of the most mainstream portrayals of spinal deformity comes from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The twisted figure of Quasimodo is described as “a creature of the devil,” isolated and “hideous.” His poverty manifests in the perversion of his physical body, and he becomes a spectacle, for all to see and abhor. Hugo’s depiction of Quasimodo picked up on a centuries-old association between beggars and people with hunched backs, which, even today, is interpreted as a vulnerable position of solicitation and need.

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This twisted union between the poor and the deformed is intensified by the expense that comes with pursuing treatment. Though I sometimes worry that I see the world lopsided because of my distorting curves, I can clearly see my privilege in receiving such treatment immediately. I was given this gift of a back brace, and though I ached, sweated, and chafed in it, I was also able to prove what I could do with its help.

My aunt, however, who bears the same painful curves, grew up without the means to pursue treatment. Just a generation apart, she and I carry the weight of this condition in two radically different ways. +++ I felt utterly abnormal seeing the knotted rope of my spine lit up in Technicolor on the x-ray board that day in the doctor’s office; how could I have not felt this internal architecture? I had never before considered a spine to be anything but a straight line, drawn with a ruler, with care, and borne upwards like those dreary hanging models shown in school. This was the ableist norm—the invented categorization—so prevalent and tacitly accepted that I didn’t even recognize its existence until I no longer fit into the category of “normal.” I suddenly felt as though my body, this tender casing, was working against me; I could feel its malicious, sideways bend and I wanted desperately to get out. Reminded of Hippocrates’ devices, I daydreamed that a car would hit me and somehow knock my spine straight.

I have three curves in my spine: one in my lower

back approximately 40 degrees to the left, another 33 degrees to the right, and a final kink snaking 25 degrees back to the left. These curves are measured using the Cobb angle, which runs from 10 degrees (mild) to 90 degrees (severe). When growing children present with curves between 25 and 45 degrees, doctors prescribe back braces to prevent the curve from progressing; however, they do not ‘fix’ the back, and rarely reduce curvature at all. There’s an uncertainty in the modern approach to treatment when it comes to curves around the 40-45 degree mark—where I fell.

Some doctors immediately recommend spinal fusion surgery, while others are more hesitant, aware of the risk and long recovery period such a procedure entails.

Spinal fusion represents the complicated intersection of old medicine and new technology. It is an incredibly recent practice, often praised as modern and cutting-edge. At its most fundamental, however, it is quite primitive. As the Scoliosis Research Society describes it; metal implants are placed “onto the spine that are then attached to rods, which correct the spine curvature and hold it in the corrected position until fusion.” That is, you stick titanium rods in your body, and wait to see how they weather time and activity.

Statistics from ScoliSmart clinics show that 26 percent of fusion patients were unhappy with the outcome of the procedure. 41 percent of those interviewed experienced no pain reduction post surgery. 33 percent lost all correction obtained through surgery within 10 years. These measures often come down to a question of pain; for some scoliosis patients, fusion is necessary to manage back pain and lead a normal life. Others feel, as I did, pushed towards this option prematurely, by a medical culture that prioritizes immediate results and seeks a cure.

Ultimately, I took the former route, and was fitted for a back brace, instructed to wear it for 24 hours a day. Once again barefoot in a doctor’s office, I was handed a hulking piece of seamless white plastic, a perverse rendition of a classical Greek torso that accounted for my curves. That day I also met an 8-yearold girl who gleefully pulled up her t-shirt to reveal her own brace, painted with blue and gold sunflowers.

Her mom told me that she would wear the sunflowers everyday until she stopped growing—likely, seven or eight years.

I don’t remember feeling anything when I put the brace on for the first time. I lay down on my bed, sucked in my stomach, and carefully did up the Velcro straps. I moved awkwardly those first few months, unable to sit or pick things up with ease. I worried about the brace showing under my shirt, worried about people bumping into me and gawking at my hardness.

I was jealous as I watched my friends take on those soft, lilting curves of puberty—like the first, hesitant crocuses of March come up from the earth—while I was left stiffly bound and concealed.

But in moments of discomfort and embarrassment, I thought about the girl and her sunflowers, about the pride she felt in her hulking plastic frame and her humped back. Faced with a history of making the deformed into spectacle, this girl occupied her brace not simply as a patient, reduced to her body and to her diagnosis, but as a person growing and living.

Like her, I celebrate rather than curse all my kinks and curves. My spine is my trunk, lovingly, willingly and crookedly putting down roots and bearing my years. I can do nothing but thank it.

NORA GOSSELIN B’19 still has that smelly back brace in her closet.

METABOLICS

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The President of the Amigos da Terceira Club poses with Genuine Madruga, the legendary solitary seafarer at the club's 23rd anniversary in Pawtucket. Much could be said about the power relation between the two subjects in this picture, and yet none would account for the expression of humility and thankfulness that the man sincerely offered to the event's photographer. Like me, this photograph was uninvited.

Pedro Letria is a Portuguese photographer whose work often deals with displacement, a subject stemming from Letria’s repeated migrations and assimilations. Born in Portugal, he has since lived in the United States and Italy; while abroad, his work has often returned to Portugal and its diasporic reaches. While pursuing an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design from 2010 to 2012, he completed a series of photographs of Portuguese social clubs and businesses in the Providence area, which he first published in 2014 as a book of images and interweaving narratives, titled The Club.

The Club makes it clear that his entrance into the Portuguese community in Providence was a complicated re-encounter with the country of his birth. The images he produces—often of inscrutable scenes in darkly lit interiors—provide both a sense of place and a jarring feeling of dislocation. The accompanying texts Letria wrote for the series are personal stories told by his subjects. They also include Letria’s own reflections on the estrangement he felt entering into spaces which were at once his own and entirely foreign. For Letria, it’s impossible to detangle the displacement and alienation that emerges in photography, the photos themselves, and the narratives they can and cannot provide; looking at the work is a process of forestalling interpretation. Viewing Letria’s work might simulate the same kind of unsettlement which he has experienced for much of his life.

Early this month, Letria spoke with the Independent about his own interpretation of The Club and the aftermath of its publication. As we Skyped between Providence and Portugal, it felt oddly fitting to sit in the city he photographed while he reflected from his home country—as if we were occupying the distances through which he sees tradition, language, and belonging. +++ The College Hill Independent: I wanted to start by asking about your entrance into these social clubs. You didn’t enter a social club until 2011—were there unique aspects

or functions of Portuguese community in Providence that you had to learn and integrate into your practice? How did your motivation to investigate your own displacement figure into this process?

Pedro Letria: I was looking around for things to relate to when I was in Providence, and I ended up moving a bit. Between 2010 and 2011, I ended up moving to East Providence and I found a huge Portuguese community tyere. I wanted to figure out what they did, and would go into the supermarket and find all these products which are out of place, so to speak; you couldn’t find them at other supermarkets but [there] you could find all these Portuguese symbols that were easily available. From there, I contacted a few people that I had met, and asked them to tell me how their connection to Portugal was something that they were still keeping alive. They said, very naturally, “just come by our social club.” The first time [I went] it was interesting, immediately I was in a kind of capsule, not just a time capsule but a geographic one. You’d walk in and the people were drinking Portuguese beer and watching Portuguese soccer and speaking Portuguese. But the minute they stepped out, they were Americans, not Portugese; everything about them, their work schedule, the way they organized their family, and the schools their kids went to, it’s all perfectly integrated into mainstream Americana. In that sense, it’s when I began to think I should make some pictures here, without thinking of doing any major project, just because it was fun to be around.

I started making pictures, and people did something unplanned: they started telling me the stories of their lives. They weren’t just longing for home, people were channeling something through me, wanting to let me know what may have come around, whether they still felt connected or not to their histories in Portugal. From then, printing the pictures and sitting down and writing just kind of flowed. When it came time to put together a thesis, it made sense to center the work on pictures made in the community, with the community, and then with my own text on one level addressing each picture, and another text which would contextualize my attempt to make sense of these pictures today.

It might be understood from the meekness with which the hands belonging to the two gentlemen on the left rest on the table that they were the losers of the last round of sueca, and that the expediency displayed by the others may be synonymous with victorious good fortune, but given the normal distribution of players, which instructs that partners should sit opposite each other, nothing could be farther from the truth, and unless there are more discrete terms of agreement, we are in the presence of genuine goodwill.

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The twin-engine plane careened over the island of São Jorg down towards the simple runway. Aboard, most passengers as they grabbed the arm rests. At the Amigos da Terceira C mainland is averted, and instead, I am assuaged that all thin the good will of the Holy Ghost.

OUTSIDE T

An interview with photo BY

Will We

PHOTOS BY

Pe

DESIGN BY Chels

The Indy: In the written accompaniment to one of the photos, a man tells you, “your reason for taking pictures is bullshit,” but that he did not care. What kind of relationships did you aim to build? What shared understanding of your work did you have to develop with your subjects, and in what ways are the resulting text and image an interrogation of that relationship?

PL: I never viewed what I was doing as any kind of anthropology. The usual exercise of going into a community, collecting data, interpreting it and then seeing how people respond to their own outsiderness…well, that just never made sense. I was much more selfish. Like anybody who is taking pictures, I was going in, getting a picture, coming out. The picture and the text were working in a different way. The text was allowing our conversation to carry on. I was not limited to the there-and-thenness of every picture that exists, I could actually make things up. And I did, I made a lot of things up. There is an interpretation of mine as to whether making pictures in that club was of any importance to their character.

I didn’t feel very welcome, unlike most of the other clubs, probably because I was as unwelcome as anybody is when they have a camera. People aren’t very interested in having their pictures taken. What I was doing with that camera was using it in a way of entering these spaces, and then measuring my own closeness to these people’s experiences, simply by carrying around this artifact. They never saw the pictures I took of them. They

Luís Neves is an engaging man and a singer capable of a real hi formed every weekend at Portuguese social venues across the E the hall at the Amigos da Terceira Club for its 23rd anniversary couples swarmed the dance floor and their bodies inched closer have to make them wait for it."

MARCH 24, 2017

ge, describing an arc over the volcanic ridge, and nosed made the sign of the cross and their knuckles whitened Club, in Pawtucket, the issue of independence from the ngs Azorean can be simply put down to a bird of prey and

THE CLUB

ographer Pedro Letria

eatherly

edro Letria

sea Alexander never saw what I wrote with the pictures.

The Indy: You describe one of your subjects, a girl in a bridal dress shop on Warren Avenue, as “enter[ing] a rarefied space, one wholly emptied of men and where history is written with the truth of experience.” Another photograph shows a conversation where you are “not a part of the circle, for there are instances I will never understand and others I am not meant to.” How do you go about retaining the quality of these scenes that is both altered by your presence as witness, and beyond the reach of your interpretation?

PL: Hearing those texts read back to me… they sound kind of lofty. I didn’t plan them to be that way. The first one is a reflection on how I was in a space of the feminine, I was in a place men don’t go—it’s where women try on their bridal costumes. Being a girl, she’s inheriting this way of things—she’s simply part of it and she has to rise up to it. In a sense, the things that happen in the bridal shop, the personal narratives, they’re all written by women, and written by women who, for most of them, were not even born in the US. This photo is about people understanding that part of their function is to have a certain relationship with family, and family has to do with not only helping others but carrying on some kind of tradition.

The other [photograph] is about my own estrangement. If you’re sitting next to a table of people playing

igh C. For the last three years, his band, Centerfold, has perEast Coast and that is no mean feat. His booming voice filled y. As the lyrics became more daring and the tempo slowed, r. "I know what they want" Luís told me afterwards. "You just

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Eva will be the ring bearer in her cousin's wedding and she was brought to Ana's Bridal Gowns, on Warren Avenue, for a fitting, by her grandmother. Silently, she glows with the attention and knowledge of having entered a rarified space, one wholly emptied of men and where history is written with the truth of experience. Ana is from Ribeira Grande, on the island of São Miguel, in the Azores, and all the women in her family are seamstresses. "As a child, I would run away from my mother's call to help out because I didn't want to sew, and would run to hide in my aunt's house. But everyone there was sewing too, so there was really no escaping it."

cards, and you’re not playing cards, they’ll always look at you suspiciously, right? You could help them cheat or tell somebody on the other side the cards that somebody on your side is holding—you know what I mean? If you’re not part of that game, if you don’t take on the rules of that game, you’ll never be accepted. I see that as a metaphor for me being allowed into this space. I [wasn’t] really given a chance to be a part of the conversation. Nobody invited me to play cards, I didn’t try and belong in that sense, or try and wise up to them and pretend to be something I was not. I kept my otherness because it was true. Those people are there making a living and I was there observing; it’s a very different point of view.

If you look at the text that underlines the book, you’ll see that I’m making connections to my own personal history as somebody who was taken out of [Portugal] when I was small, returning here some years later, and then went out again. I then came to the US, then back to Portugal, then went to Italy. I was always dealing with difference, [both] cultural difference and personal difference. My references were always off. As a teenager, I’d go out with friends, I’d imagine telling jokes that nobody laughs at because they had a different register. Nothing bad ever happened to me [because of that difference], but there’s a question of having to come to terms with the fact that I am applying to the world around me different kinds of [learned] rules. You can’t get rid of them. You can’t say, “I know rationally I’m not supposed to deduct things this way in this context.” Your mind does it for you. There was a lot more rationalization of that going on than [for] somebody who is always living in the same country, or always sharing the same set of values.

The Indy: How has your relationship to your work changed as your relationship to place has changed? Is this relationship the same as your relationship to Providence and the Portuguese community here?

PL: That’s a great question, and something that I’m still trying to deal with myself. There’s something in this work that is really fundamental—my connection to language.

I learned to read and write first in English, and then moved back to Portugal. I had never written until this moment [of making The Club]. Until 2010, I had never sat down to write. I’d write stuff for school, but I never imagined that it could be for my work. One of the effects of coming back to Portugal was that, being away from English, I simply stopped writing. I have done one project with writing since The Club, but somehow it did not make sense for me to do everything here in Portuguese and then sit down and write in English.

In 2014, The Club was published in book form by a Portugese photo-book publisher. Since then, I’ve worked on a series of photographs that will appear in a show without any text, and I wrote a film script, which I’ve directed, that is all in Portuguese. That film script is performed by actors; I realized my own displacement issues have to take a back seat [in the project] because it is much more about the workings of language. [The project] doesn’t have to do with being in Portuguese or English, but more about the way I’m looking at photography’s relationship with fact and fiction, and writing’s relationship with truth and fiction. In the show that I’m having in May, I’ll be showing a set of pictures in one gallery, and in another, I’m projecting the film. People will be looking at the pictures, which are wholly factual, unmanipulated, and yet they’re completely removed from context and very misleading. In the film, they will see two well-known Portuguese actors in a scene in a bar, talking to each other, and yet everything they say is absolutely real and true.

Trying to answer your question, it simply became very difficult to keep an activity of writing in English making sense. That said, every book I’ve been reading for the past four or five years has been in English. The Club and being in Providence really gave me the space, both physical and intellectual, to look at how the work comes together, and how we are able to throw upon [a work] some kind of meaning as we inherit an interpretation of how we connect to it and to the world.

Is it a dream or lie if it does not come true, or is it worse? And the sign flashed its warning in the world it was forming. Show me slowly what I only know the limits of. Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove. I am sentimental, if you know what I mean. Inside the covers of the Holy Rosary music book, Steve, the baritone player, kept these beloved lines and made them his.

ARTS

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WADING THE

IN-BETWEEN Constructing Asian Identity in Comme Des Garçons and Get Out

BY Kion You ILLUSTRATION BY Carly

Paul DESIGN BY Ruby Stenhouse During this year’s Paris Fashion Week, Rei Kawakubo, the 74 year-old Japanese founder of the high fashion clothing brand Comme Des Garçons, pushed the bounds of her avant-garde designs with a 2017 fall/winter women’s line entitled “The Future of Silhouette.” The show’s only semblance of normalcy was found in its setting: a basic white runway, and in the models’ shoes, a collection of gray and black Nike runners.

Everything else, however, bore an unusual aesthetic: models walked onto the runway in clothes reminiscent of bulbous cocoons, assuming silhouettes akin to wriggling bacteria under a microscope. Kawakubo’s fabrics were shocks to tradition, including what appeared to be aggregations of lint, tinfoil-like silver lining, and wrapping paper. “Lumps and bumps,” the nickname for Comme Des Garçons’ 1997 spring/summer line, could be used to describe her newest season’s zeitgeist: an amorphous woman trapped in an absurdist deconstruction of conventional silhouettes.

With the disoriented facial expressions of the models, many of whom seemed lost on the runway, Kawakubo’s overall message with her newest line became clear: a sharp critique of conventional feminine beauty, a direct challenge to the fashion world itself (Comme Des Garçons has remained independent as fashion conglomerates such as Kering and LVMH have bought out hundreds of luxury brands), and a momentous leap forward into fashion’s incredible unknown. Her directorial spirit at the helm of Comme Des Garçons mimics its maverick beginnings around the time of the second wave feminist movements of the ’60s and ’70s. Comme Des Garçons, a French phrase translating roughly to “like boys,” is ironic, because if anything, Kawakubo’s designs are clearly not ‘like’ anything. Kawakubo’s art could be described as anti-fashion, as her 2016 fall/winter collection, “18th Century Punk” suggested. Punk, an iconoclastic style Kawakubo loves, expresses the part her clothing has played in cutting open the margins of what fashion can be: liberating.

Andrew Bolton, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, said recently, “We are in a period where fashion, and designers, are increasingly regarded as disposable. Rei [Kawakubo] has been singularly dedicated to a creative vision, reminding everyone of how valuable that is.” In a Eurocentric, male-dominated fashion world, Kawakubo found her footing by staying stubbornly true to her personal notions of beauty, an individualism that resists the restraints on what she, a Japanese woman, is ‘allowed’ to do. Through her independence, Kawakubo subverts and transcends the visual scrutiny and racial expectations within an industry built on both. +++ The racial expectations of a visual medium manifest in Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed film Get Out, which presents a portrait of America’s insidious colorblindness.

Get Out is filled with satirical moments brazenly calling out contemporary modes of racism that operate within white, well-to-do communities branding themselves as progressive. The lion’s share of Get Out focuses on a diametric tension between African American and white characters, with an almost entirely Black and white cast, except for one specific moment in the film. When the protagonist Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is paraded around to white ‘shoppers’ at a cocktail party who are vying

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for Chris’s body, an older Japanese man named Hiroki Tanaka (Yasuhiko Oyama) abruptly asks Chris in a heavy accent: “Is the African American experience an advantage or disadvantage?” The very next scene of Get Out shows a slave auction masked as a Bingo game, in which Tanaka is seen in the very back row, almost hidden from the viewer, bidding for Chris’s Black body.

By being represented as the model-minority foreigner attempting to integrate himself into white America, Tanaka embodies a common representational trope of Asian Americans. Jordan Peele seems to be saying that Asian Americans have gripped their minds around trying to find a space for themselves in white America, which has only inhibited them from racial liberation.

Claire Jean Kim elucidates the awkward in-betweenness Asians experience in America through her theory of racial triangulation: Asians are generally perceived in the societal eye as superior to Blacks, yet can never fully be a part of white America, so they are perpetually caught in a position of racial limbo. Tanaka endeavors to be white, wearing the same cocktail party garb as everyone else and bidding on the same Black body, but cannot shake himself of his stuttering accent and Japanese complexion. Tanaka’s white peers include him nominally and physically within their coterie, but in a tokenized fashion.

I watched Get Out and left the theater in a constructive, musing disorientation. The exuberant claps and hoots from the audience when Chris kills the white Armitage family compounded with my constant mental movement back to the pivotal Tanaka line haunted me.

I was enveloped in a serious case of cognitive dissonance—the one dimensionality of Tanaka infuriated me, and as an Asian American, that one question this is all we get? repeatedly rang in my mind. Peele’s point cut through nevertheless: Asian Americans are not just complicit bystanders, but active participants in anti-Black racism. Get Out lambasts Asian Americans for shunning other people of color in pursuit of whiteness, a zero-sum ideal.

Tanaka drapes himself up in a curtain of ignorance and fruitlessly throws himself into the unflinching wall of white America. Any semblance of liberation is lost to a desire for inclusion, which unwittingly excludes Tanaka even more. +++ I recently saw a Kawakubo ‘dress,’ or in her words, a ‘woman’s ensemble,’ in a museum, a piece from the “18th Century Punk” fall/winter line of 2016. This ensemble is thematically similar in its top and skirt pieces, as both are cut from the same black fabric and laced with jacquard floral prints. At the same time, the two parts could not be more different: the top visually references the staunch power and integrity of samurai armor, while the skirt references 18th-century panniers, European undergarments that vastly extended the width of skirts to highlight elaborate woven patterns. Kawakubo deliberately blends her Japanese heritage with Western influences, but is careful in dividing the two (the top and bottom are separated by a strip of bare skin). Through a distinct intermixing, her identity as expressed through fashion thus becomes wholly Kawakubo.

Kawakubo said in an interview that “being born in Japan was an accident. There is no direct correlation to my work,” emphasizing a distance from the political forces surrounding her. Although there may not be a “direct

correlation” between her work and growing up in Japan’s then-American cultural regime, Western influences such as American denim, patchwork, and flannel designs are undoubtedly present in Comme Des Garçons clothing.

Instead of simply appropriating American designs as is, Kawakubo mangles and weaves disparate American elements together, creating shirts and jeans sewed together with odd, clashing patches of flannel. As a result, a subversion and modification of external influences defines Kawakubo, allowing her to be known as an artist before being known as Japanese. +++ As a person is watched, they become a powerless object to the viewer. The gaze is a powerful tool—especially in visual mediums such as film or fashion. In Get Out, Tanaka's one dimensional simplicity is heightened by his susceptibility to the audience's eye. Tanaka’s appearance and accent distinguish him from the rest of the film’s characters, and so the audience gazes at Tanaka with both wonder and disbelief—how could a person of color be a part of this utterly amoral brutalization of others? Jordan Peele leaves the audience to answer it for themselves.

Kawakubo’s fashion subverts the objectifying power of the gaze. In fashion, the object of gaze—the model and her clothes—can be uniquely inhabited by the observer through purchasing and putting on that same clothing. It is through this medium that Kawakubo operates; she snatches away visual objectification by allowing her viewers to take part in the art of fashion (although runway clothes are usually caricatures of the

MARCH 24, 2017

clothes actually sold to customers). As Kawakubo said in an interview with Interview Magazine, “when you put on clothes that are fighting against something, you can feel your courage glow. Clothing can set you free.”

Both Kawakubo’s clothing, which debuted in Paris, and Tanaka in Get Out, which debuted at Sundance in Salt Lake City, become visual subjects of largely Western audiences. The multi-dimensionality of Comme Des Garçons juxtaposed with the one-dimensionality of Tanaka diverge in combatting racial stereotypes, the legacy of which is easy to latch onto: there is no overt “racial” element to Kawakubo’s clothing, and thus the audience contends with Kawakubo the individual, rather than Kawakubo the person from Japan. But there is no “individual” element to Tanaka, who loses all semblance of individuality for the sake of assimilation into whiteness. The gaze thus becomes a poignant factor in audiences’ mental constructions of racial categorization, whatever the medium may be. +++ Kawakubo famously said of her clothing that she “never intended to start a revolution,” but only created what she “thought was strong and beautiful. It just so happened that my notion was different from everyone else’s.”

After Yves Saint Laurent, Kawakubo is the second designer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which will open on May 4, 2017. The exhibition has been entitled “The Art of the In-Between,” and considers Kawakubo’s exploration of the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

often reduced tensions between the East and West, male and female, past and present. There, her lifetime work will be gazed upon in adulant admiration and critical curiosity, as hundreds of thousands of visitors encounter the artistic masterpieces Kawabuko has crafted since 1981, the year she debuted in Paris.

What Peele may have inadvertently done with Get Out is give Asian Americans—who continue to be forced into stereotypical filmic representations, or denied it altogether—a substantial portion of high profile screen time in a Hollywood film this year. Historically, films featuring Asian characters have depicted Asians as either a ‘yellow peril,’ seen in the evil genius series featuring Fu Manchu, or as the honest and benevolent detective Charlie Chan, who could not speak proper idiomatic English and was often played by Caucasians in yellow face.

This trend hasn't changed. In the past two years alone, Tilda Swinton was cast as the ‘Ancient One’ in Doctor Strange, Emma Stone as Allison Ng in Aloha, and Matt Damon as William in The Great Wall. Asian characters are erased in in Hollywood through their depictions by white actors. Get Out's treatment of Asian representation is thorny, and although the film rightly criticizes Asian Americans who find social capital in their proximity to whiteness, the criticism is done so by a non-Asian person of color who implicitly offers suggestions to Asians on how to navigate their positionality.

In contrast, in the Comme Des Garçons Paris Fashion Week show, Rei Kawakubo constructed her own imaginary, a liberating vision from within. Kawakubo, when discussing the socio-political influences behind

her designs, states that “growing up in postwar Japan has made me the person I am, but it’s not why I do the work I do.” For Kawakubo, her art “is a very personal thing— everything comes from the inside.” +++ Is the African American experience an advantage or disadvantage? It is a question coded with tensions: would it be beneficial for him, presumably in the eyes of whites, to trade bodies with Chris? Tanaka is aware of how much he sticks out from the prim white elite he is surrounded by, yet he nevertheless bids on Chris’s body, entranced by the pleasures of at least physically being near to whiteness via ownership of a Black body. In opposition, Kawakubo, who with her diminutive stature, blunt banged hair bob, and punk black garb entered into a fashion milieu dominated by men such as Calvin Klein and Giorgio Armani unabashed, carving out a space for herself. Through her unwavering pusuit of her notion of beauty, Kawakubo thus grew in fame to the likes of Klein and Armani. The disparity between Kawakubo and Tanaka becomes a difference in navigating the “in-between,” a difference between conformity and individuality. That difference means a lot.

KION YOU B’20 wades.

FEATURES

12

DESIRING BIG BROTHER

BY Robin

Manley ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Celeste Matsui

Consider a peculiar reversal—BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING has been replaced by watching Big Brother.

YouTube commands: “Broadcast Yourself,” and we obey enthusiastically.

At Universal Studios, visitors are informed over the loudspeaker that someone is watching. They are comforted by the message.

We thrive on exposure and visibility, deriving pleasure from the constant, repeated revelation of the banal facts of people’s everyday lives. Hidden cameras and mobile recording technology have been appropriated from the realm of surveillance and employed to project these mundanities. Reality television shows, online webcam streams, and social media not only provide a glimpse into the lives of others, they create a powerful and enticing outlet to share our own. The formation of communities around this public revelation of people’s everyday activities is a dramatic departure from a culture that claimed to value a strict division between the public and private.

Today, the desire for visibility is powerful. The second season of Survivor had so many applicants that Federal Express had to temporarily halt deliveries to the producers doorsteps. During one season of Big Brother, the producers offered $50,000, the value of the show’s third place prize, to anyone willing to leave the show immediately. None of the participants took the offer— not even one of the three up for elimination that week— arguing that the experience of the show was worth more to them than the money. In the case of JenniCAM, a college student named Jennifer Ringley installed a camera in her dorm room that broadcast a live, 24-hour feed of her daily activities to the internet. At one point Ringley took down the device. She reinstalled it soon after, claiming that she “felt lonely without the camera.” +++ ...it is irrelevant to get upset with talk shows or reality shows… For they are only a spectacular version, and so an innocent one, of the transformation of life itself, of everyday life, into virtual reality… we are moving around in the world as in a synthesized image.

We have swallowed our microphones and headsets… We have interiorized our own prosthetic image and become the professional showmen of our own lives.

- Jean Baudrillard, “The Virtual Illusion: Or the Automatic Writing of the World”

13

OCCULT

Modern surveillance has developed in tandem with media technology—from the printing press came the novel and its imagined national community; the camera captured the streets of Paris like a crime scene; the closed circuit camera maintains a perpetual watch on urban space. Yet, surveillance has transformed once again: the gaze is no longer a function of pure discipline and control—it functions as a democratic tool, politically and socially liberating.

Reality television is the archetypal genre of this era of surveillance—participants desire and compete to become the objects of absolute observation. Audiences are engrossed by the spectacle of everyday life. +++ ...the possibility arises that, for a growing number of people in contemporary Western society, surveillance has become less a regulative mechanism of authority (either feared as tyrannous or welcomed as protection) than a populist path to self-affirmation and a ready-made source of insight into the current norms of group behavior.

- Vincent Pecora, “The Culture of Surveillance” In 1971, PBS destroyed a family. For seven months, producers with cameras followed the Louds, a wealthy family from Santa Barbara. They had intended to chronicle the Louds’ daily lives. Instead, the 1973 television documentary An American Family broadcast the family’s slow disintegration—through the separation and ultimate divorce of Bill and Pat—into living rooms around the country. We cannot know the counterfactual destiny of the Louds without PBS. We do know, however, that this was the first reality television show on American airwaves.

In the age of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Real World, the details of our digital personalities—often radically distinct from our actual personal worlds—are disseminated through cyberspace to reassure ourselves about the pseudo-drama of the everyday; a lonesome wish that fights with my mom aren’t so different from those of Kim and hers.

The desire for exposure is not limited to reality television and their participants. Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm reverses the threat of visibility, leveraging instead the threat of disappearance. EdgeRank determines the order that posts are displayed on a user’s newsfeed.

The algorithm decides what content is rendered visible and invisible, all for the sake of promoting participation on the social media platform. The algorithm is based in part on users’ ‘affinity’ for each other, where likes and other kinds of quantifiable engagement help Facebook determine which relationships, and which people, matter most. The more active a user is on Facebook—meaning the more people a user interacts with—the more people

MARCH 24, 2017

see their posts, and the more visible their posts become.

Facebook mobilizes the threat of invisibility to encourage participation.

In 2014, Facebook and partnering data scientists published the results of a study they conducted on over 700,000 active users in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study revealed that for a week in January 2012, Facebook altered the newsfeeds of these users, blocking positive, uplifting content for some users and negative or upsetting content for others.

Though the user agreement that all account holders are required to sign before using the web service maintained the project’s legality, the manipulations revealed what we had suspected to be true all along; that, as the Atlantic reports, our computers and phones are “not a perfect mirror of the world.” +++ Whereas visibility as a consequence of the panoptic arrangement… is abundant and experienced more like a threat imposed from outside powers, visibility in the Facebook system arguably works the opposite way. The algorithmic architecture of EdgeRank does not automatically impose visibility on all subjects. Visibility is not something ubiquitous, but rather something scarce.

- Taina Bucher, “Want to Be on the Top? Algorithmic Power and the Threat of Invisibility on Facebook” Reality TV is pop-ethnography. The genre attempts to reveal the sacred and primitive elements of our communities. To that end, it has transformed the digitized world into a real time social-psychological experiment, isolating sets of subjects and meticulously recording their behavior under controlled conditions. The experiment, however, is not confined to the studio. We are all implicated, placed on both sides of the microscopic camera as both subjects and observers. +++ ...the desire for surveillance has had a paradoxical side effect, inexorably transforming the world not into the stage immortalized

by Shakespeare but into a real-time social-psychology experiment in which we are increasingly both test subjects and detached clinical observers.

- Vincent Pecora, “The Culture of Surveillance”

+++ Where is the secret of banality, of nullity that is overexposed, lighted and informed on all sides and that leaves nothing left to be seen because of its constant transparency? The veritable mystery becomes the mystery of this forced confession of life as it is… It is both the object of a veritable dread and a dizzying temptation to plunge into this limbo – the limbo of an empty existence stripped of all signification...

- Jean Baudrillard, “Telemorphosis” An impossible question: how real is Reality TV? The uncertainty of surveillance demands the assumption of its presence; in Reality TV, the certainty of surveillance requires its denial. This demand to act as if the camera isn’t present is an absurd paradox. The imitation of authenticity is meaningless. It is a system of social deterrence. Television does not manipulate us or inform us; television is the genetic code of social relations whose truth is now indecipherable. +++ Against this artificial paradise of technicity and virtuality, against the attempt to build a world completely positive, rational, and true, we must save the traces of the illusory world’s definitive opacity and mystery… The only justification for thinking and writing is that it accelerates these terminal processes. Here, beyond the discourse of truth, resides the poetic and enigmatic value of thinking. For, facing a world that is unintelligible and problematic, our task is clear: we must make that world even more unintelligible, even more enigmatic.

- Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion We must be like that which searches for its shadow—In the face of the extermination of illusion and profusion of positivity—an artificial utopia of technicality and illumination—the role of the intellectual is to defend opacity and mystery. Even if humans are doomed to disappear, we can practice disappearance artistically. Renounce pure verification; embrace enigmatic thought. We must encourage systems to implode into their own absolute systematicity, affirm them in a radical form that highlights their absurdity.

ROBIN MANLEY B’18 genuinely loves Cutthroat Kitchen.

Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process. Reality TV performs the perfect dissection of our everyday workings. We trap ourselves in a museum of the present, where no secret escapes examination. Absolute illumination is a subtle extermination—the abolition of mystery, the plunge into indifference and monotony, the terrifying resignation to existence stripped of all significance.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

OCCULT

14

www.theindy.org

Classifieds The Indy

By: Jane Argodale, Shane Potts, & Jack Brook

PERSONALS—WOMEN SEEKING MEN Will You Be Mine, Lincoln Chafee?

Me: An attractive and successful 31 year-old professional, recently moved to Providence.

You: Lincoln Chafee. From the moment I first set eyes upon you on my laptop screen as I livestreamed the first Democratic presidential debate in fall 2015, I knew that we had to be together. Though your campaign was ill-fated, though I’d never been to Rhode Island (to be honest, I needed to look at a map to remember where it was) I immediately made plans to leave my high power job in Los Angeles and move to the Ocean State to be with you.

Lincoln, I love you. Your goofy, lovable smile. Your poor choice of senate vote after your father’s death.

Your scandal-free career. I know that there is nothing that would make me feel happier than to comb your hair every morning and cook your dinner every evening, for the rest of our lives.

When you find this, please send me an email.

–feelthechafe69

PYROMANIACS WANTED FOR WATERFIRE Do you have an uncontrollable urge to set things on fire? Bored of committing arson and setting off illegal fireworks? Why not set them for the city of Providence and make fires for the sake of culture—or just to blow off steam? WaterFire Providence is looking for the best arsonists pyrotechnicians to put on spectacular bonfires for veterans, teachers, and the larger Providence community. You will create fires for, as the Providence Journal writes, “the most popular work of art created in the capital city’s 371-year history.”

Why burn a home when you can burn several torchlit bowls and send them down the Providence River, for all to see? Why burn your ex-lover’s possessions for Facebook Live when you can use one of our braziers for a larger purpose? We at WaterFire are looking for talent, skill, and—most importantly—passion.

If you’re looking to start big with your fires, please send resumes and images of previous work to H20Fire@hotmail.com. WaterFire needs you to keep burning strong.

COMMUNITY—LOCAL EVENTS First Official Meeting of the Campaign for Rhodexit California, Texas, and Alaska all have their own campaigns for secession. Why not Li’l Rhody too? The Campaign for Rhodexit is a coalition of Rhode Islanders from across the state who support a strong, prosperous, independent Rhode Island. We will no longer stand for living in the shadow of 49 larger states!

With our historical towns, busy ports, CVS, and thriving seafood industry, we will show our strength as North America’s newest and smallest country.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Design: Ruby Stenhouse

Our first meeting will mostly be an organizational one, where we discuss our steps moving forward: - Strategies for fundraising and campaigning - Making our first set of flyers to distribute - Deciding on our slogan - Creating a website and Facebook page The meeting will take place at 6pm on Wednesday at Captain Seaweed’s Pub on the East Side of Providence.

Your first ’gansett is on the house. All Rhode Islanders welcome. Participants are invited to stay afterwards for a game of Cards Against Humanity.

If you can’t make the meeting but are still interested in participating in the campaign, email us at rhodexit@ gmail.com.

BUDDY CIANCI FAN CLUB We are looking for an experienced psychic, someone well versed in the art of the occult. As part of our annual gala in memoriam of Buddy, we are hoping to perform a seance to bring back his spirit and ask him some pressing questions on the state of the Ocean State. We have listened to the recent, popular podcast, Crimetown, and disagree with its portrayal of Buddy as a manipulative, cunning, and scheming politico. Cianci was one of the nicest men we have ever known. He was selfless, bold, and courageous. He also made the best sauce we have ever tasted, find Mayor’s Own Marinara in a supermarket near you.

Specifically, we want to ask Cianci if he has listened to the podcast, and if he agrees with its portrayal of his associates. Specifically, if the allegations are untrue, we look to Buddy for advice on what to do in retaliation against Gimlet media, Marc Smerling, and their libellous speech.

Buddy is a legend, period. We here at BCFC want to honor his legacy, and we want him to tell us the best ways to do so. This is serious business. Silly clairvoyants need not apply. Contact buddyfans@yahoo.com for more details.

Maybe your train came, or your bus, but you flew out of the room, gracefully I might add. Hopefully I can see you again? Tinder? My phone number is 201-6051474. If anything, I’ll be there tomorrow. Same place same time?

- adminL@gmail.com

REQUEST FOR DONUTS I am days from death and all I have left is one final request, which is, from the bottom of my failing heart, to have a donut. From Dunkin’ Donuts. My wife is dead, our cat Joanne was euthanized two years ago, and my siblings and children live elsewhere. I think back on my life and wish I hadn’t spent so much time in the office... but they always had such good donuts there. I just want one of those wondrous chocolate glazed beauties again.

I will give you my estate, I have no one left to give it to, just bring me as many as you can carry. And come quick, I don’t know when I’m gonna croak but I want to do it with the sugar of Dunkin running through my veins.

PERSONAL CARE Herbal and holistic treatments for people with chronic and pre-existing conditions. Worried that you will no longer be able to afford healthcare after Obamacare gets shafted? You won’t need it anymore after all if you purchase our holistic medication starter pack guaranteed to give you the quality health care you deserve and maybe even used to have. But don’t think about that. Think about how great it will be to be treating your body without needing insurance or vaccines.

For more information contact: HolisticHealth@earthlink.org and you’ll receive ten dollars off our fungi fusion pills, which are excellent for treating cases of athlete’s foot and sexually transmitted diseases like crabs.

FOR SALE MISSED CONNECTION It’s a balmy day, the first of Spring. I’m at Kennedy Plaza, next to the screaming man whose hand has been slashed, bleeding profusely. You’re next to the man cracking the bullwhip, the sonic booms overtaking everyone’s eardrums. All anyone can pay attention to is the ongoing fight for attention between the two characters, but all I notice is you. Your black hair, your black eyes, your sweatshirt for the Society for Creative Anachronism. You are electrifying and magnetic, it’s just unfortunate that no one else sees you in the bedlam.

You stared at me for about seven seconds, I keep count.

It was a knowing glance, but knowing of what? I knew that I wanted you, did you feel the same? Was the piercing look one of fear? A beautiful creation like you has nothing to be afraid of, well, except for the bleeding man, who suddenly announced that he was carrying a knife.

Last three slices of my Fellini’s pizza from Thursday night. Pepperoni, anchovie, and mushroom. Slightly nibbled in places but well below market price at only $4.50 for all three. I hate to let them go but am really full and don’t like to waste food so… call me at 401676-2325.

MCMANSION BOAT Has twice circumnavigated the globe, crossed the Bering Strait, served as a gunship in World War I and has thrice traversed the Atlantic. But even better for living, with luxury four bedroom suites, three bathrooms, a jacuzzi, tennis court, bowling alley, home movie system, helicopter pad, personal chef (comes with the boat, live-in quarters), art gallery, and an Olympic pool (why swim in the ocean when you can swim in lukewarm chlorine?). Great for hosting bougie parties and impressing people with your material wealth. Not for sale, get your own.

METRO

16

thunderstorms mock me and so does the concrete

Fadwa Ahmed ILLUSTRATION BY Isabelle Rea DESIGN BY Andrew Linder BY

(for 3 days i have known but expected nothing) i watched every minute bring itself in fractions i waited 15, (but really 9 months ) and said words i had recited from a script, different; (they existed once for me and twice for him) and he said no thing (in layers of off-white mumbling translucent enamel on thin teeth) and i waited in off-white for 3 days (fractions of more) knowing but not expecting until he waited for me in a night off-black with light pollution that smeared the sky old blood on black underwear there were 8 shadows between the 2 of us and how can you protect yourself when you have 8 shadows i saw my first city rat his only words (this boy has all of the words, in an accent that is not his and twice his) his only words i love you as much as i can as much as i can (yes i could have guessed we can’t have you Overflow now can we can we your stuff is the releasable kind the relievable kind the kind that only comes in the light of your incandescent light bulb and blotches of ink on your sheets) I break all of your windows still

17

LITERARY

MARCH 24, 2017

I S T Joni Mitchell Cover Show Aurora, 8pm Have you ever tried to sing a Joni Mitchell song? It’s hard as heck. This sounds like a great time though. Catch me missing all the high notes while humming along to “My Old Man.”

THURSDAY 3/30

FRIDAY 3/24

Claudia Rankine: On Whiteness ArtsEmerson (Boston), 6pm free, ticket required Poet, critic, and MacArthur fellow Claudia Rankine will speak about the role of whiteness within larger conversations about race. If you can’t make it up to Boston, I’d strongly suggest checking out her book Citizen, or the collection of essays she compiled, The Racial Imaginary (which features work by Brown MFA student and Indy emeritus Diane Exavier!).

SATURDAY 3/25

Spaghetti Dinner Fundraiser Direct Action for Rights and Equality, 340 Lockwood St, 4pm $5 suggested donation Join DARE for dinner and conversation. Honestly, you should donate as much $$ as you can. DARE does incredible work, and I bet their spaghetti will be delicious.

Empowering Educators of Color Conference Providence College, 8am This weekend will be the first of an annual conference series hosted by the Rhode Island Coalition for Educators of Color.

Panelists and workshop leaders include local teachers, activists, and poets, as well as students from the Providence Student Union and Youth in Action.

SUNDAY 3/26

And Still I Rise: Great RI Women Reading Maya Angelou Providence Public Library, 2pm Heads up: the Providence Public Library consistently has some of the coolest events around. This sounds amazing, although I couldn’t find any information about who these great RI women specifically are.

3/24 – 4/6

MONDAY 3/27

Go buy some books at Paper Nautilus (5 South Angell St.) before they close! Everything there is 25% off. In a statement to the Indy, owner Kristin Sollenberger writes: “What I see today is small independent shops opening as people seek escape from the screens that seek to consume every idle moment (not to mention those that spend their whole work day in front of a screen). And secondhand shops offer a depth and serendipity that new bookstores cannot. Books from all eras nestled together by subject offer a broad view and the chance to discover something unexpected. Paper books allow quiet concentration, imaginative thought and true solitude, there is no google tracking device in a paper book.”

Hearing on Earned Sick Days RI State House, 4:30pm Join the RI Working Families Party in urging legislators to pass the Healthy and Safe Families and Workplaces Act, which would guarantee all Rhode Islanders the right to earn up to 7 paid days to use when they are sick, need to care for a family member, or are escaping domestic violence.

13th Screening & Discussion William Hall Library (Cranston), 6pm Director Ava DuVernay’s 2016 film powerfully traces continuities between slavery and the current prison industrial complex. It’s a must-see.

FRIDAY 3/31

Annual Not College Fair New Urban Arts, 3:30pm Each spring, New Urban Arts hosts an opportunity for high school students to learn about opportunities and career training routes that don’t include four-year college. This year, organizations from CCRI to City Year to the Steel Yard will be in attendance.

SATURDAY 4/1

Tiago Gualberto South Providence Library Conference Room, 3pm Gualberto, an Afro-Brazilian visual artist who has an ongoing collaborative art project on display at the RISCA Atrium Gallery downtown through April 21, will host a conversation, workshop, and demonstration about contemporary art.

SUNDAY 4/2

HP Lovecraft’s Legacy Ladd Observatory, 1:30pm Honor the life and contributions of Providence’s most famous fantasy writer by looking through a solar telescope? idk. The observatory slays though. Bring a date.

MONDAY 4/3

want to plug your event? email listtheindy@gmail.com. send nudes ;)

TUESDAY 4/4

Civics and Politics Film Series Presents 1984 Cable Car Cinema and Cafe, 7 pm, $10 The Providence Center for Media Culture continues its Civics and Politics Film Series with 1984. This screening, held in conjunction with 90 independent cinemas nationwide, will benefit the Rhode Island ACLU.

WEDNESDAY 4/5

TUESDAY 3/28

Unlocking the Power of LinkedIn The Empowerment Factory (Pawtucket) Network work work work work

Visiting Artist Lecture: Catherine Opie List Art Center, 5pm Catherine Opie is one of my favorite photographers. She’s spent decades making subversive images of queer and trans subjects, as well as really nice landscapes. The New Yorker just did a big profile of her a couple weeks ago, and it’s a huge treat that she’s coming to Providence.

WEDNESDAY 3/29

THURSDAY 4/6

Palehound, Edgar Clinks, and Teddy Farkas Machines with Magnets , 8:30pm $10 in advance / $12 at the door One Indy editor played a show with Palehound once and says they’re “very chill and nice.”

Poultry Seminar Leeway True Value (North Smithfield), 6pm