The College Hill Independent Vol. 36 Issue 4 by College Hill Independent

THE COLLEGE HILL A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY INDEPENDENT

36 • 04 02 MAR 2018

THE

INDY COVER

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 36 / ISSUE 04 MAR 02 2018

Sidetrack Hazel Elsbach

NEWS 02

FEATURES 15

Week in Review: Unwanted Commodities Paige Parsons, Mara Dolan, Harry August

SCIENCE

Terms of Employment Will Weatherly

11 That's AMOR Mariela Pichardo

Lesson Plan Emma Galvin

Character Assasination Liby Hays

MOZZARELLA CHEESE: It is a CRIME to eat mozzarella cheese in ANYTHING other than NATURAL LIGHT. HARD-BOILED EGGS: Exceptional hand warmers and social organizers, especially in the winter. There is no stronger bond than between two people who share a joint hard-boiled egg. Apples occasionally serve this purpose. As spring approaches, I am having increasing trouble reconciling the ethicopolitical consequences of eating eggs with the sensual allure and radical potential of a hard-boiled soirée. My rubber chicken GLIMBUS reminds me of this conundrum daily. My current stance is this: first the egg-union must take power, then we can ABOLISH THE EGG! -CP

METRO Harry August Erin West ARTS Nora Gosselin Cate Turner Isabelle Rea METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Eve Zelickson

SCIENCE Liz Cory Tara Sharma TECH Paige Parsons Olivia Kan-Sperling OCCULT Zack Kligler Gabriela Naigeborin EPHEMERA Maya Bjornson

The Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

Oh! Vanishing point! L,M&M

Loaves and Fishes Zak Ziebell

MISSION STATEMENT

OATS: In the kitchen I ate at last night there was an open bag of raw oats. I LOVE oats they are buttery and silky and TRANQUIL. Like pansies. I have a recurring dream in which I am vacuuming oats from a white shag carpet. As I tell this dream to more and more people I become less and less soothed by it. I am now restless.

FEATURES Sheena Raza Faisal Ruby Aiyo Gerber Neidin Hernandez Paula Pacheco Soto

14 X

Lord of the Rings Isabelle Rea

11 A.M., 2/26, 20 y.o.: I ate breakfast alone. I was inspired by the concurrent deepening/thawing of winter and current planetary arrangement. It was a celebration. This is our state:

NEWS Isabel DeBre Chris Packs

Exit Stage Right Wen Zhuang

EPHEMERA

FROM THE EDITORS:

WEEK IN REVIEW Julia Rock

Sharing is Caring Gabriela Naigeborin

LITERARY

ARTS

We Are the World Ted Catlin

OCCULT

METRO 05

Through the Grapevine Paula Pacheco Soto

LITERARY Isabelle Doyle Fadwa Ahmed LIST Jane Argodale Alexis Gordon Fadwa Ahmed STAFF WRITERS Galadriel Brady Mica Chau Ella Comberg Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Liby Hays Anna Hundert Lillian Kirby Lucas Smolcic Larson Mariela Pichardo Ivy Scott

Marly Toledano Sara Van Horn Kayli Wren Kion You Wen Zhuang COPY EDITORS Shuchi Agrawal Grace Berg Benjamin Bienstock Seamus Flynn Sasha Raman Caiya Sanchez-Strauss ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Eve O’Shea Claire Schlaikjer

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism. Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond. The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor. SPRING 2018

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Julie Benbassat Alexandra Hanesworth Kela Johnson Halle Krieger Sophia Meng Pia Mileaf-Patel Teri Minogue Ivan Rios-Fetchko Ella Rosenblatt Kelly Wang Dorothy Windham Katya Labowe-Stoll Remy Poisson

Mariel Solomon Ella Rosenblatt

WEB MANAGER Alyssa McGillvery

DESIGN EDITOR Eliza Chen

SOCIAL MEDIA Fadwa Ahmed Pia Mileaf-Patel

DESIGNERS Bethany Hung Amos Jackson Laura Kenney Katherine Sang

BUSINESS MANAGER Maria Gonzalez

X Zak Ziebell SENIOR EDITORS Jane Argodale Kelton Ellis Robin Manley Gabriel Matesanz Will Weatherly

ALUMNI RELATIONS Julia Tompkins MANAGING EDITORS Jonah Max Katrina Northrop Signe Swanson MVP Will Weatherly

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN

BY Harry August, Paige Parsons & Mara Dolan ILLUSTRATION BY Dorothy Windham DESIGN BY Katherine Sang

UNWANTED COMMODITIES

Better Koch than Pepsi “Koch funnels millions into Brown, riling the left,” shouted the front page of the Providence Journal this past Saturday. The Journal article revealed that the Koch Brothers have donated about 3.2 million dollars to Brown University since 2008. As the article outlines, this money was donated to the Political Theory Project (PTP), a think tank at Brown University led by libertarian political theorist John Tomasi. The research center, which describes its mission as investigating “the ideas and institutions that might make societies free, prosperous, and fair,” runs a yet-to-ever-be-published undergraduate philosophy journal and a student organization so boring students are paid to be in it. In 2016 alone, the organization received more than 600,000 dollars from the Kochs, prompting allegations from national organizations, like UnKoch My Campus, as well as both Brown students and faculty. As one activist says in the Journal article, “The Koch network is essentially buying the legitimacy of Brown University for their own private gain.” But what I don’t understand—and I think readers will share this confusion—is why people are so upset about the Koch brothers’ money being used to support academic initiatives. Is it really so bad for a sweetened carbonated beverage corporation to support the PTP? Is it just that critics would prefer a Pepsi? Who doesn’t like the refreshing taste of a cold Coke? For instance, the article quotes Brown Professor J. Timmons Roberts saying, “They fund research to support their extreme positions, and to capture the hearts and minds of young people.” But is it really so “extreme,” Mr. Roberts, to enjoy the taste of Coke’s bubbly sweetness? As anyone who has imbibed a Coke product (say, an Honest Tea, or perhaps even a Fuze Tea) knows, not only the hearts and minds but also the mouths and midriffs of young people will be hooked on the gently sweet taste of soft beverages, like an Odwalla, before they even have a chance to be indoctrinated by the PTP. Plus, critics refuse to acknowledge that the downsides of Coke funding hardly compare to the alternative of not being able to drink a cold hard Ciel at the end of a long day spent theorizing about the free market. For the sake of argument, however, I think the liberal critics do have one fair point to make: Professor Tomasi frequently stresses the importance of pluralism— meaning that he brings speakers from both sides of any debate to speak. But my question to Mr. Tomasi, one that critics have curiously not mentioned, is: isn’t it hypocritical to proclaim these pluralistic values and then so clearly take a side on the enduring Koch-Pepsi debate? That complaint, however, is not major enough to warrant such fierce criticism of the PTP. After all, Coke is often a champion of progressive causes that critics like Professor Roberts, an environmental alarmist, support. Coca-Cola’s 2016 Sustainability Highlights reports that 50 percent of their lemons grown in 2016 were “from more sustainable sources than in previous years.” After all, it’s not like Coke founders helped build oil refineries for Hitler or anything like that. In conclusion, it seems like there are more questions than answers about why people are so upset with the Koch’s beverage money making its way into Brown. Or maybe I’m just confused. -HA

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Repent, Reuse, Recycle “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” This is the Genesis verse heard around the world as Christians gathered on Ash Wednesday, this year on February 14, to mark their foreheads with the sign of the cross and begin the penitential season leading up to Easter. Plastic microbeads, however, do not return to dust as easily as our mortal flesh. Thankfully, the Church of England has officially declared that single-use plastics are the sacrifice of choice for this year’s Lenten period of fasting. “Conservatives care about conservation,” said no American ever. Also said British member of parliament Vicky Ford to the Telegraph UK. Ford has led the charge of 41 conservative politicians, as well as thousands of Christians, to commit to carrying tupperware everywhere they go for the next month and a half. It all began with a prophetic message from the beloved Sir David Attenborough on his fall 2017 BBC documentary series, Blue Planet II. White hair blowing in the wind, standing before the blue sea, Attenborough pulled at the heartstrings of the nation as he narrated over devastating footage of poisoned animals. “I genuinely have a hate for humanity when I watch blue planet 2” reads one angry Twitter reaction among many responding to the series. This isn’t quite the message of the gospel, but the sentiment impassioned the masses. In the months following, a wave of action swept the U.K.: the Queen announced a plan to decrease plastic usage on royal estates, the Scottish Parliament banned plastic straws, and a ban on plastic microbeads has taken effect in Britain. Several businesses, including the BBC itself, have followed suit (Al Gore is crying tears of joy). Lent, a period of fasting leading up to Easter, is meant to emulate the 40 days Jesus spent in the desert praying and resisting the temptations of the Devil. Reimagine the Devil as all plastic surfaces and the desert as our grocery stores, and you have the consumer hellscape of temptation thousands of Brits have been living in for a few weeks now. Often miscast as a time for self-improvement, Lent is really a reminder of our own mortality. The Independent thinks there is no better way to dwell on the ephemerality of life than to consider that the wrapper you’re about to toss will outlive your body by several centuries. Thankfully, the Church has provided a handy Lenten calendar with enthusiastic messages like “The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers; the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants …” (Isaiah 24:4-5), along with tips to start using bamboo toothbrushes and to avoid the mini bar of snacks and drinks in your hotel room. If our beloved blue planet is to make it to 2050 without tons of plastic in the ocean outweighing tons of fish, as is currently predicted, then the Indy predicts that the plastic fast will have to span into the season of advent, aka Christmas, that holy time of hyper-consumerism. -PP

Gifts Keep on Giving Since the turn of the new year, several households across North America have been baffled to find a stream of Amazon packages on their doorsteps—packages they didn’t order. Molly Schoenecker of Minnesota, for instance, has received 24 anonymous packages since last fall. And the Schoeneckers are just one of the families affected. Molly, who lives with her mother, initially thought it was nothing: “I didn’t think much of it at first. I thought it was funny.” But before she fully embraced her good luck, one box arrived that was definitely more unnerving. “This one is bad,” she told her mother, when she opened the third unopened package. It was a sex toy. That’s when Schoenecker decided it was time to start investigating. She first called Amazon Customer Service, who provided her with the name and email address of the anonymous sender. She didn’t know who he was, so she sent some inquiring emails. The Independent has no intel on the content of these emails, but speculates that subject lines may have read “we have your cookie cutters” or “misplaced sex toy.” But even such wild emails weren’t enough to get the mysterious gift giver’s attention. Schoenecker never heard back. In the past week, her family has received even more packages, whose contents included baby booties, essential oils, a hair straightener, and another sex toy. They are reportedly planning to donate all (all?) of the items to charity. The Schoeneckers are not alone. Another couple in Boston, the Gallivans, has received more than 25 packages from Amazon that they did not order. When asked what it was like to be caught up in such an enthralling mystery, Mrs. Gallivan responded, “We’re just plain, ordinary people.” Mr. Gallivan added, “We don’t want any part of this. But the packages keep on coming.” Keep on coming, they do. In late January, several Canadian university student unions began to receive stacks of boxes. The content of these boxes was similarly erratic: cell phone chargers, odd kitchen appliances, and an intermittent sex toy. Students initially believed it was some sort of hoax from a rival university, but became skeptical when the items’ worth topped 1000 dollars. “It seemed like an awful lot of money to be spending on this elaborate prank,” one student mused. After months of futile complaints to Amazon Headquarters, the Gallivans called in backup. Sean Murphy, an investigative journalist from the Boston Globe was stumped as well, and followed up with his own memo and inquiry. The company finally replied. “As the bad actors get smarter, so do we,” they wrote. “Amazon is constantly innovating to improve the customer experience.” -MD

WEEK IN REVIEW

THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU Columbia graduate workers give a lesson in labor

content warning: sexual harassment On February 1, a group of graduate workers and faculty at Columbia University gathered in front of the Low Memorial Library for the “Rally to Tell Columbia to Stop Breaking the Law.” Many of those gathered were members of Graduate Workers of Columbia (GWC), a union of teaching assistants and researchers from departments across the University’s two New York City campuses. Two days earlier, on January 30, university president Lee Bollinger announced in a campus-wide email that Columbia administrators, “convinced” that “the relationship of graduate students to the faculty that instruct them must not be reduced to ordinary terms of employment,” would refuse to bargain with the GWC. Their declaration came as an illegal refutation of a 2016 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision that established the bargaining power of graduate workers at private universities. Bollinger, stating in his letter that Columbia’s refusal would last “until the legal process has been allowed to run its course,” performed the deft feat of expecting a trip to court without acknowledging the violation that will put him there. More broadly, Bollinger’s letter seems to demonstrate the University’s refusal to hold two ideas in its head at once: that its graduate workers can be both students and employees of the University simultaneously. The assertion of this possibility has been central to graduate workers’ movements at private institutions across the country, including the GWC. At the rally, as graduate workers huddled under a statue of Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of knowledge and learning, they raised circular signs bearing the logo of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), the GWC’s union affiliate which represents more than 60,000 workers in higher education nationally. Negating the legacy of over three decades of the UAW providing higher education workers with legal and advisory services for negotiations, Bollinger’s letter represented the UAW as “an outside party involved in what are ultimately academic and intellectual judgments by faculty members.” Despite this account, the GWC’s grievances are fully their own, and almost none of their concerns can be characterized as ‘academic’ or ‘intellectual.’ Chief among them is their right to earn a living wage: in 2016 the average annual salary for a teaching assistant at Columbia was $22,686, according to the salary aggregating service Glassdoor, which is below the median teaching assistant salary of $26,796 and below the national average for parttime work at $24,500. They lack comprehensive vision or dental insurance, and guaranteed research funding varies widely between departments. Researchers and TAs also face late or irregular paychecks, jeopardizing their housing and their financial security. A union contract could provide an opportunity to bargain for higher wages and more standardized benefit structures—an agreement along the lines of countless others forged between the UAW and employers across multiple industries. While many of these stipulations would increase immediate costs to the university, the exact sum remains indeterminate without a final negotiated agreement. The GWC’s grievances are representative of a growing trend of universities loading ‘casual’ labor onto its graduate workforce. With the decline of tenured or tenure-track jobs in academia, from 57 percent in 1957 to 30 percent in 2011 according to the New Yorker, graduate workers are taking on a steadily rising amount of universities’ undergraduate instruction and research,

NEWS

often with low pay or uncertain funding. Columbia’s denial of laborers in word, the GWC argues, has allowed the University to abuse their labor in deed—a combined operation which points to the extent that private education in the US increasingly engages in a brand of financial exploitation which maintains a rhetorical investment in the idea of a prestigious education’s enduring “academic and intellectual” value. +++ The debate over graduate students’ right to define the nature of their labor, which has been waged for almost 70 years within American private universities, has been all but settled among their public counterparts. Organizing rights for graduate workers at public institutions have long been guaranteed, because these institutions fall under the jurisdiction of public sector labor law, which has established protections and limits on collective bargaining rights. Such continuity in the public sphere makes the NLRB’s contentious legacy all the more startling: for workers at private universities, the Board has ruled against collective bargaining in four cases since 1972, and overturned these rulings twice. Far from deciding on any cohesive stance on bargaining’s impact on the status of students’ education, these decisions have largely been determined by the party allegiances of the Board’s presidential appointees. Appointees under President Clinton ruled for graduate worker organizing at NYU in 2000, while in a case brought by Brown University to a Republican-majority NLRB under President Bush, the Board found that students could not be considered employees. In 2014, Columbia graduate workers filed a petition for official recognition of the GWC, after requesting and being denied voluntary recognition from university administrators. Two years later, then under President Obama, NLRB overturned the Brown University decision, opening future possibilities for union organizing and bargaining at private universities. When Columbia graduate workers voted to join the UAW with a 72 percent majority in December 2016, the GWC became only the second union of private university graduate workers in the country, behind NYU. In his lone dissent to the Board’s 2016 decision, Board member Philip Miscimarra echoed University administrators’ opposition to unionizing on academic grounds, arguing that “the Board resembles the ‘foolish repairman with one tool—a hammer—to whom every problem looks like a nail; we have one tool—collective bargaining—and thus every petitioning individual looks like someone’s ‘employee,’” again characterizing graduate workers as the exception to a narrow conception of labor, predicated on the industrial legacy of unionizing. Central to these arguments is the defense of the ‘mentormentee relationship’ between graduate students and the faculty who instruct them. Columbia administrators have proposed that debates over working conditions would deprive instructors of their authority over students in matters of academic policy. In an amicus brief filed to the NLRB by all eight Ivy League schools, university administrators argued that “the services performed by graduate student assistants are embedded in the very fabric of their educational experience, it is impossible to isolate one from the other,” and that bargaining has “the potential to transform the collaborative model of graduate education to one of conflict and tension.”

Olga Brudastova, an international PhD student in Civil Engineering at Columbia and a member of the GWC’s bargaining committee, attested in an interview with the Independent last Friday that the union has had to “prove again and again” that this fear of conflict between instructors and graduate workers is not grounded in empirical fact. A 2013 Cornell University study found that union-represented graduate student employees report higher levels of personal and professional support, unionized graduate workers receive higher wages, and both unionized and nonunionized graduate workers report “similar perceptions” of academic freedom. Brudastova explained that these benefits can serve as an advantage for whole institutions. “A lot of universities get a lot more funding [with unions in place], or their graduate workers perform better because they are not frustrated with their pay, their benefits, or their livelihood,” she said. “They can dedicate more time to working on their research and teaching.” The power of unionization, she argued, comes not from dismantling the relationship between instructors and graduate workers, but from providing further protections when that relationship is abused, a possibility which is conspicuously absent from universities’ wholesale defense of the authority of their instructors. For teaching assistants and researchers at Columbia, there are currently two options available to students who feel targeted, harassed, or otherwise unfairly or inappropriately treated by their faculty supervisors. The first is filing a complaint within the University, which, in Brudastova’s view, can often be subject to departmental and administrative bias. The second is seeking legal action through state or federal channels, which often lacks transparency, as well as being time-consuming and costly. A more accessible option, known as mutual arbitration, offers a third method, in which an arbitrator mutually selected by the union and the University decides whether the University provided appropriate protections, whether an employee was compensated fairly, or whether a participant in the case violated the law. The possibility for a more efficient and neutral legal recourse is especially urgent for graduate workers targeted by sexual harassment; according to a 2015 survey by the Association for American Universities, 22 percent of female graduate students reported being sexually harassed by a faculty member, with 18 percent reporting harassment from a co-worker or supervisor. Students with disabilities and queer, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary students reported higher rates of harassment across the board. Privileging the sanctity of the relationship between instructors and graduate workers—employer and employee—discourages victims of sexual harassment from coming forward in a situations in which tenured faculty are pitted against researchers and TAs, whose employment is anything but secure. This uncertainty is integral to graduate workers’ status as ‘casual labor,’ which administrators have the ability to terminate on a whim, often without transparency or an opportunity for due process. Many union contracts contain fair grievance procedures in which employers have to declare a justification for an employee’s dismissal for possible appeal; currently, no formal process informs the termination of TAs at Columbia. In June 2015, the GWC delivered a petition against the wrongful termination of Longxi Zhao, a PhD student and teaching assistant in chemical engineering at Columbia.

MARCH 02, 2018

BY Will Weatherly ILLUSTRATION BY Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN BY Katherine Sang

An investigation by university administrators cited four allegations against Zhao, including that he had used the word “fucked” in an email to students (the email reads, "I have to manually input all your scores because I am really fucked up with this coursework system”), for which he was summoned to a disciplinary with a dean for allegedly “harassing others,” according to the Columbia Spectator. An additional allegation against Zhao was an “unapproved” trip home to China, for which Zhao attests he had verbal permission at the time of his departure. In the description of the incident on their website, the GWC claims that Zhao’s supervisor had expressed discontent with Zhao’s trip home earlier in the semester, “because in his words, ‘I don’t trust China.’” When challenged, he became angry and told Longxi to ‘remember who feeds you,’ shutting down the conversation.” Reflecting on the incident, Brudastova said that “[Zhao’s] case was just so clear: he was treated as a worker before being treated as a student.” Because the GWC lacked official union status at the time of the incident, Columbia administrators ignored their petition, and without a job or a research adviser, Zhao was forced to leave the University and return to China. +++ Against the University’s emphasis on collective bargaining’s supposed threat to the foundations of its academic process, organizers at Columbia point to policies that have little to do with pedagogy, and much more with profitability, as the driving factor for Columbia’s antiunion campaign. “From all [faculty and researchers’] grants,” Brudastova told the Indy, “the University takes a lot of indirect costs and fees, and we cannot negotiate over it. This is despicable, because [faculty] brings in the money, and yet they are charged for contributing to the University, for having a chance to work for the University.” She argued that these fees are often channeled towards the construction of new facilities and administrators’ salaries, which have little tangible effect on the education or well-being of Columbia students. Among the costs incurred by the University, Columbia has added the price of fighting the GWC itself. For several years, the University has hired Proskauer Rose for legal representation in cases against the union, a law firm that has represented Pfizer, IBM, and Walmart, and that has been named the “800-pound gorilla” of labor relations by US Legal 500. An op-ed in the Spectator estimated the firm’s fees to range between “several million to tens of millions of dollars.” The firm’s influence was publically visible in a 2016 memo to Columbia faculty: administrators’ advice that faculty could not assert that unionization “will” have negative consequences, but that they could share the opinion that it “could” or “might,” matches instructions given in an internal memo to Walmart supervisors leaked in 2014. Following Columbia administrators’ refusal to recognize the GWC’s vote to unionize, it appears Proskauer Rose has guided the University to break the law over giving graduate workers a seat at the negotiating table. “Corporations [break the law willfully] all the time,” Brudastova said, “but we were all hoping that they would not be a part of corporate America in that sense.” She speculated that the University is expecting to gain favor in the ensuing legal case under the NRLB’s new Republican majority, following Donald Trump’s appointment of

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

William Emanuel and Chairman Marvin Kaplan. Despite Bollinger’s claim, in the aftermath of the 2016 election, that Trump “challenge[s] the central idea of a university,” Columbia administrators stand to directly benefit from this presidency’s pro-business ideology. Despite potential opposition in the NLRB, Brudastova reported that the GWC is prepared to file a legal case. Before doing so, it is providing another opportunity for Columbia to drop their opposition against the vote to unionize. Barring this, the union is planning another vote, this time to allow its bargaining committee to authorize a strike of researchers and TAs. Such a work stoppage would put further pressure on the University’s leadership—and demonstrate the crucial role of their labor in providing research and instruction by enacting the consequences of that labor suddenly coming to a halt. Embedded in these consequences is the essentially circular nature of contemporary higher education. With national tuition costs rising at around six percent annually according to Buzzfeed News, a degree from a private institution is becoming an increasingly expensive commodity,

and with a greater share of instruction and research loaded onto graduate workers every year, these employees are increasingly tasked with providing this value. This is the value enshrined in the ‘mentor-mentee relationship,’ and the value that ensures that, for Bollinger, students can never be “reduced to ordinary terms of employment.” But by negating the education these workers provide in the name of that education itself, Columbia administrators are selling graduate workers’ labor back to them, with a higher price tag and almost none of the profit. On strike or in court, the GWC stands to offer the University a refutation in turn: if they are exploited as laborers, they will organize as laborers—a lesson for which graduate workers deserve full compensation, and which Columbia has yet to learn. WILL WEATHERLY B’19 is more like a 125-pound, average chimp of labor relations

NEWS

OUR COLLECTIVE RESISTANCE AMOR's rapid response to state violence BY Mariela Pichardo ILLUSTRATION BY Eve O'Shea DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

Lincoln, Rhode Island resident Lilian Calderon never returned home on January 17. While attending a routine check-in meeting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to legalize her documentation status that morning, Calderon—who has lived in the US for 27 years—was forcibly taken to a detention center in Boston and scheduled for deportation to her birth country of Guatemala. There, despite requesting additional information about her detainment such as where she would be taken and what would happen to her, she received no answers; the officials she spoke with simply said she was going to be kept in custody. At a press conference held two days after her release on February 12, Calderon said the comment she heard most often from those involved in her case at South Bay House of Corrections was that it didn’t make sense. She and her husband, Luis, had met with ICE to verify the validity of their marriage. Luis is a US citizen and sponsored his wife of two years, with whom he has two young children, for US citizenship. While speaking with an ICE official, Calderon says, the validity of her union was verbally acknowledged and the agent agreed to approve the petition. However, just minutes later, she was detained and denied the opportunity to inform her husband of the agent’s determination. Calderon remained in custody for nearly a month; she was required to watch videos on preventing sexual assault while detained and forced to attend classes on living with HIV and drug addiction, among other issues, despite being unaffected by them. Each time she questioned the necessity of her participation in these activities, she was threatened with solitary confinement if she did not participate. As a law-abiding mother of two with no criminal record, Calderon is one of the millions of undocumented immigrants who have been promised safety under the Trump administration; Calderon is what the administration would describe as a “non-priority” for deportation due to her clean record. However, as she highlighted at the press conference in Providence, there are many undocumented immigrants in similar situations that are currently in ICE custody and being prepared for deportation. “[Our administration doesn’t] tell you that all the women in those [detention] units are moms and grandmothers. They’re daughters,” she noted. Last week, the Boston Globe reported that Calderon is just one of seven undocumented immigrants who were arrested by ICE last month while meeting with immigration officials in Rhode Island and Massachusetts to fix their immigration status. Her experience is the worst nightmare of many in Rhode Island’s undocumented community. Luckily for Calderon, she was able to communicate with her husband via payphone at South Bay, who subsequently contacted her lawyer and reached out to community organizations for support. Her case caught the attention of the Massachusetts and Rhode Island chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who demanded and achieved her release through a federal court order earlier this month. Her release is also largely due to the support she received from the Providencebased community collective Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance (AMOR), which has led community efforts to achieve Calderon’s freedom by providing the community with real time updates about her case, sharing petitions for her release, and protesting her detainment. The organization has also served as a support system for the Calderon family by accompanying Luis to press conferences and

METRO

issuing their own public statements to call for Calderon’s release.

Resistance through solidarity AMOR is a conglomerate of six local organizations: Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), Colectivos Sin Fronteras, Fighting Against Natural Gas (FANG), Refugee Dream Center, and Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (Coyote RI). They came together last year in response to the election of Donald Trump, which they anticipated would lead to increased local and state violence against communities of color and other politically vulnerable groups like immigrants and Muslims. While each organization within AMOR exists to serve specific communities on a day-to-day basis such as FANG working with victims of the natural gas industry and Refugee Dream Center working with refugees, the populations they serve are often affected by multiple issues beyond the focus of a single organization. AMOR centralizes community resources by bringing them to a single location and consolidates the efforts of these organizations by creating a network between them. As stated in the collective’s mission statement, AMOR seeks to mobilize marginalized communities to resist instances of violence and to demand the accountability of those causing harm on interpersonal, local, state, and national levels. It offers crowdsourced resources such as translation, transportation, court and appointment accompaniment, child care, and legal and psychological services to disenfranchised communities experiencing violence, particularly those who are undocumented, low-income, and non-English speaking. Though Calderon had never worked with AMOR prior to her detention, the organization immediately offered its support to the Calderon family and demanded her freedom on Facebook once it learned of her predicament. AMOR reached out to her husband, Luis, and has since been present at demonstrations and press conferences, speaking out in support of Calderon’s release. “Lillian is a Guatemalan woman who came [to the US] at three years old,” AMOR’s director, Catarina Lorenzo, said in Spanish at a Providence vigil/demonstration for Calderon’s release in January. “She knows the United States, not Guatemala.” Over the past month, AMOR has used its network to mobilize in support of Calderon’s case. The collective’s member organizations have each expressed their public support for Calderon and shared petitions for her freedom. At January’s vigil, Lorenzo reiterated AMOR’s stance on the Calderon case publicly, stating, “We are fighting to prevent her deportation.” Due to the community support garnered by AMOR and the legal support provided by the ACLU, Calderon was released on February 12. A petition circulated by AMOR has received over 4,000 signatures and despite her freedom, continues rising by the hour. The Massachusetts chapter filed a lawsuit in Boston for her freedom earlier that month, on the grounds that her detention is a violation of her civil liberty of due process and a violation of federal immigration law. The mother of two was granted a 90-day temporary stay of deportation by a federal judge in Boston, who questioned the constitutionality of her detainment and has requested further details from ICE agents.

Community rapid response While Calderon’s freedom is a victory for AMOR and the Rhode Island community, for the undocumented in the state, it has made the threat of detention tangible. Though this is not the first time a Rhode Island citizen has been detained or even deported under the Trump administration, the visibility of Calderon’s experience has caused many undocumented individuals to recognize the real possibility of their detainment in the future. In an effort to relieve the fears aroused in the undocumented community, as well as in other communities likely to be targeted in our contemporary political climate, AMOR has opened a 24/7 emergency response hotline. The free service is a rapid response resource created to support marginalized communities that are likely to experience police or ICE raids. The hotline will provide those in need with court support, legal services and funds, community support, trainings, and transportation. Callers can also be connected to free or low-cost mental health services and work with AMOR to create a family preparedness plan if they fear they will be detained. Through its hotline, which can be reached at (401)675-1414, AMOR seeks to support immigrants who fear for their safety: those who are concerned about the process of obtaining documentation, and those who have been contacted by ICE. Callers have the opportunity to speak to a trained volunteer in their preferred language regarding any questions or concerns they have and will be connected to resources accordingly. The languages offered by the hotline at this time are limited to English and Spanish, but AMOR says it will expand these options as it receives volunteers proficient in other languages. The organization is actively seeking out individuals proficient in languages frequently spoken in the area. Lorenzo says volunteers are held to a strict policy of confidentiality regarding all interactions with clients both through the hotline and the other sectors of AMOR. Citing sex workers as an example, she says that people have historically chosen not to seek help through hotlines due to fear of having their information shared. Stereotyped and stigmatized groups such as the undocumented, sex workers, and STI positive people tend to be fearful of disclosing these identities with others due to the anticipated ramifications of their secrets being shared. This can have negative ramifications on vulnerable communities in that they may not seek help, even when they need it most. “Part of the goal of AMOR is to build something that is not just a temporary reactionary system, but to defend us against the institutions that we’ve seen in our communities for hundreds of years,” said DARE activist Sophia Wright at the hotline’s launch party on Valentine’s Day. “Fighting against police violence, fighting back against immigration and detention and recognizing that those things are intentional.” It is no secret that the United States has achieved its wealth and global success through the systematic disenfranchisement of communities of color. The incarceration and detention of primarily Black and Brown people in the modern day are the US’ contemporary means of attempting to halt and even stop the immigration of people of color, which is occurring as more and more immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa in particular arrive in the US.

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Over the past two months, the Trump administration announced that it will be ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for immigrants from Latinx countries such as Haiti, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Under TPS, refugees from countries experiencing hardships such as armed conflict and environmental disasters have been allowed to live and work in the US legally without fear of removal. However, despite continued turmoil within these countries, their deportation will begin next year. Last month, President Trump reportedly referred to countries in Latin America and Africa, like Haiti, as “shitholes” and stated that the US would benefit from receiving more immigrants from countries like Norway rather than Haiti or countries in Africa. Though the deportation of Brown and Black undocumented people is by no means unique to the Trump Administration and occurred in greater numbers during the Obama Administration, President Trump has agitated public sentiment surrounding immigration, particularly of individuals who are undocumented and from Latin America and Africa. Both he and those involved in his administration such as Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller have criminalized immigrants from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti and claimed that they add little to this country; history shows that quite the opposite is true. His comments preferencing Norwegian immigrants are codified; at their core, they are xenophobic and anti-Black.

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Coalition building Wright, who was previously employed at the AMOR member site Colectivos Sin Fronteras, and now works at DARE, which has been especially present in supporting Calderon by participating in protests and press conferences, cites AMOR as having allowed her to draw the parallel between immigration detention and incarceration. While explaining the history of AMOR, Wright noted that the significance of the collective lies in its potential to build solidarity and coalitions among groups that, on the surface, seem to be marginalized in disparate ways. “[It] was the biggest thing we could do to unify our fight against one system that breaks down communities of color and claims that it’s different,” she said. The parallels between immigration detention and incarceration can be clearly seen in Calderon’s personal account. Though she was just three years old when she came to the US, while in ICE custody she was treated as if she had committed a crime—as if she deserved to be punished. Calderon was threatened with solitary confinement each time she raised a concern about senseless policies in the detention center, such as being assigned a caseworker who was ignorant of immigration policies despite that being her sole reason for detention. The payphones available for those in custody to call their lawyers often didn’t work and though guards were notified, they did nothing

about it; guards solely recommended that detainees wait for what was often two to three days, when their case workers arrived. Immigration detention and incarceration are similar in the sense that both immigrants and incarcerated people are stripped of their agency. They become reduced to (inmate) numbers and begin to be perceived as criminal, regardless of whether or not they have truly committed a crime. In an interview with the Independent, AMOR director Catarina Lorenzo, noted that while the conglomerate was created out of a desire to build community and care for people experiencing violence, it was ultimately created out of the necessity to mobilize and to collectively combat oppressive political, social, and economic systems. The structural racism that has historically limited Black mobility in the US, while different from the xenophobia experienced by immigrants, needs to be considered equitably and in tandem. As previously stated by Wright, the structure harming them—white supremacy—is the same. By working together, thinking about the similarities between their struggles, acknowledging what makes their experiences unique, and ultimately showing up for each other politically, socially, and economically, they will have the best opportunity to achieve liberation from their oppression. To symbolize the centrality of inclusivity and unity in its efforts, AMOR has woven the idea of collectively into each element of its existence, including its logo. Though the Spanish word for love, AMOR, is the acronym of the organization and has been made distinct through the replacement of its ‘O’ with a red heart, its creators added black hands with broken chains in an attempt to prevent the romanticization of the experiences of those the organization is meant to serve. The hands are indicated of “all people who are suffering,” which includes but is not limited to Black people, Muslims, the homeless, the undocumented, LGBTQIA+ folks, and women. Though the heart of AMOR is its inclusivity, its commitment to supporting all people has served as its greatest barrier in receiving financial support to carry out its work. Unfortunately, since the organization’s conception, it has found difficulty in funding its efforts. “There are people who don’t like the name ‘resistance,’” Lorenzo says, referring to the ‘R’ in AMOR. “It’s difficult finding funds, especially when working with immigrants, who are [regarded as] criminals in this country. Working with sex workers, LGBT folks, Muslims...” The unapologetic nature of AMOR’s solidarity has made it difficult for the organization to find sponsors due to the stigmatization of the groups it works with. Particularly in the age of Trump, where every decision can have a polarizing effect on customers, many companies and organizations are hesitant to attach their names such a radical organization. The organization has been able to fundraise enough money to fund Lorenzo’s position and those of two part time employees. However, as with most non-profits, the labor required to run AMOR is far greater than the compensation its leaders are receiving. +++ In less than 90 days, the Calderon family will be revisited by the seemingly realer-than-ever possibility of her deportation. Lorenzo says that for as long as Calderon likes, she will have the vocal and physical support of AMOR. “We will do all that we can [for those who call],” Lorenzo says. “But we will not make promises for things we can’t make happen. People get tired of promises.”

MARIELA PICHARDO B’20 has seen what solidarity looks like.

METRO

WITHOUT REPORT

Tension following allegations in Rhode Island schools BY Emma Galvin ILLUSTRATION BY Rémy Poisson DESIGN BY Ella Rosenblatt content warning: sexual and racial violence in schools. In July 2016 the Rhode Island General Assembly made a change to the language of mandatory reporting laws in Rhode Island schools. Under previous legislation, mandatory reporting laws required teachers to file a report of suspected abuse to the Department of Children, Youth and Family (DCYF) when it was at the hands of a parent, guardian, or state-licensed child care program. However, potential abuse at the hands of fellow school personnel themselves was conspicuously absent from the legislation. The new law would specify protection for abuse at the hands of school employees, agents, contractors, and volunteers, as well as create a mandatory 24-hour reporting period for these cases. Fall and spring passed and many teachers and students remained unaware of the new policy. All that changed in May 2017, when the exposure of a multi-victim child abuse case at the Henry Kizirian Elementary School brought the new policy changes into public discussion. James Duffy, a gym teacher of 30 years, was charged with six counts of second-degree child molestation and a single count of simple assault. But for the first time in Providence schools, an administrator was also charged with failure to properly report sexual abuse to DCYF. Principal Violet LeMar had begun an internal review of Duffy after reports of inappropriate sexual contact, but she had alerted neither the family nor the State of any allegations, a necessary step under the new policy. LeMar and other administrators claimed to be unaware of the change; a program was launched during the fall of 2017 in an effort to familiarize teachers and students with mandatory reporting laws. These trainings emphasized that a report from a teacher or student of alleged abuse was to be brought immediately to the attention of DCYF, before an internal review was conducted. Accused school personnel would be put on administrative leave and a state investigation would follow. By November 2017, six months after the incident at Kizirian Elementary School in Providence, more than 50 teachers had been accused of sexual misconduct and placed on leave. Forty were able to return to work by the end of the month when the allegations proved false, but the sheer volume of reports left administrators, teachers, and parents reeling. In a November 17 letter to the superintendent, the Providence Teachers Union described

METRO

this new era of increased allegations as a “crisis” where students are “taunting teachers with threats of contacting DCYF.” The letter went on to say, “This crisis has caused a climate in our schools that is not conducive to teaching and learning. Students are emboldened to make allegations at a whim knowing that the teacher will be removed from the building with no questions asked!” The Union demanded additional internal procedures be put in place to ensure there is “reasonable cause” for investigating an allegation before it is taken to the state level. But with two additional high profile cases of confirmed sexual abuse in the past year in Warwick and Cranston, the State is hesitant to loosen mandatory reporting policy. As State Representative Joe Soloman told the Independent, “The safety of our children is our number one priority right now.” “It’s traumatizing for the whole school community,” said one educator who wished to remain anonymous. “[The allegations] become the subtext of every interaction with students.” For some teachers, this environment feels hostile, even silencing. Another educator reflected, “Nobody can say anything right now. It’s too high-stakes right now. Anything can be used against you.” In the face of such uncertainty, some legislators are pushing for expanded surveillance systems to capture video footage of what is happening in every classroom, auditorium, and hallway. Councilman John Igliozzi says that cameras are “imperative” to “protect both students and staff.” But some teachers and administrators have hesitations. Principal Brent Kerman of William D’abate Elementary told the Indy that he doesn’t see cameras as “a feasible option nor would [the school] have the money to maintain them long-term.” Teachers themselves remain divided, one reflected, “I find cameras on one hand practical and on the other horrifying. They can help clear up disputes when someone gets shoved or punched, but there’s also so much they cannot see. I care so much about my students and the camera isn’t going to capture all the social scaffolding that supports an interaction.” “There seems to be a lack of understanding of what’s reasonable,” says Providence Teachers Union President Maribeth Calabro. “If I place my hand on a child’s shoulder to redirect him, I’m not going to do that anymore for fear of upsetting the child.” But the question of what is ‘reasonable’ in schools has always been a source of much debate. For instance, in the fall of 2017, cell phone camera footage captured a 15-year-old Black student being pinned to the ground by a white Assistant Principal at Central High School after reportedly cutting a lunch line to get a carton of milk. The administrator claims he was trying to “gently guide [the student].” He resigned, but there were no charges sustained despite video evidence

of unnecessary physical force. The student, however, who was immediately charged with two counts of simple assault, later had the charges dropped when the video went viral. As one Providence teacher reflected, “You can’t discuss sexual abuse in schools without discussing race. As teachers we see injustice every single day.” This is not to decenter the trauma of sexual abuse, but rather to consider the larger political context within which we understand violence in schools. In Providence, 80 percent of faculty are white while the student body is 91 percent people of color. For many young Black and Brown students, safety in schools has never been a guarantee, or even a promise. With increased police presence, zero-tolerance disciplinary practices, and heightened surveillance, schools can actually facilitate and expand state violence. As similar methods to these are being considered to address the issue of sexual abuse in schools, one has to reconcile that the concept of safety is already a flawed premise. A tense silence has fallen over the Providence School District. On the one hand, teachers are apprehensive of any interaction or comment that might make them susceptible to allegations of misconduct. On the other, the history of mishandled abuse sits heavy on the conscious of school administrators and policymakers alike. In the backdrop, on January 22, 2018, Violet LeMar was found guilty of failing to comply with DCYF policy. She faces a one year suspension sentence and 150 hours of community service hours at a sex abuse shelter. Duffy remains on paid administrative leave in the pre-trial phase. According to many teachers, the policy as it stands is perpetuating its own type of harm. One teacher explains, “I can’t go anywhere near students right now… and for some kids that is damaging. A lot of them come in with trauma and really need that love. Touch is a big part of that.” In a discourse polarized by the binary of guilt and innocence, one finds it difficult to capture the cruel and nuanced nature of school violence. This is not to diminish the trauma of victims, but rather to understand how a cultural fixation on individual instances of abuse can distract from larger systems of power at work on teachers and students alike, and how kids are still the ones ultimately paying the price.

EMMA GALVIN B’18.5 wants to be a teacher but also really really doesn’t.

MARCH 02, 2018

AGAINST THE WIND Climate discourse and its call to action BY Ted Catlin ILLUSTRATION BY Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN BY Eliza Chen “Providence has a troubled but productive history with the sea,” Barnaby Evans said to the attendees of the monthly Jewelry District Association meeting in Downtown Providence on February 13. Evans, who is best known for creating the beloved event WaterFire, was speaking to a small group of engaged citizens about the environmental concerns Providence faces, specifically the rising sea levels due to climate change. “We’re going to be getting 9.6 feet by 2100, but that doesn’t even include the storm surges and swell heights that would happen during typical storms,” he went on. The National Atmospheric and Oceanic Association (NOAA) puts that same prediction slightly higher, at nine feet ten inches. Currently, a large portion of Downtown Providence is on land that is less than ten feet above sea level. By 2100, unless some sort of drastic action is taken, Kennedy Plaza, City Hall, and many other focal points of the city will be flooded. Hurricane seasons will inevitably heighten these predicted day-to-day conditions. With the city’s occasional storm surges, the NOAA predicts that Providence could be facing waves that are 30 feet higher than today’s sea levels. At this height, the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier, which was constructed in 1960 and designed to withstand surges only up to 25 feet, would prove futile. Evans spoke pragmatically about the future of Providence, but ended his speech by proposing a massive infrastructure project to combat rising sea levels caused by climate change: a 40-plus foot high wall that would stretch across a large portion of the Providence Harbor, larger than the current Fox Point Hurricane Barrier by I-195. Treading the fine line between reactive and proactive rhetoric, his presentation revealed the difficulties of talking about climate change. News coverage about changing ecosystems often prompts major environmental infrastructure projects, like a Providence hurricane barrier. “The problem is that leadership can’t get elected with such large-scale plans,” Evans lamented. “We need to change the mindset of the electorate.” But changing public opinion involves heightening awareness about the future that climate change will bring, while ensuring that people understand how and why climate change is happening. The news we consume about climate change most often covers crisis-level weather events and comes from national news outlets. In the past year, the most highly covered weather events were hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, which hit North American coastlines and the Caribbean. In national coverage, news anchors use myriad ways to discuss major weather events, from data and Doppler maps to the personal stories of those affected by storms. While each of these narrative techniques plays a part in covering these weather crises, the media’s language often refers to storms as monsters with minds of their own, thus orienting viewers towards an antagonistic relationship with the environment. On August 26, Rob Marciano of ABC reported live from Port Lavaca, Texas during Hurricane Harvey, saying, “This storm continues to impress,” adding, after a pause, “unfortunately.” Yet this kind of reporting is tame compared to the usual hyperboly. Reporting for ABC on September 11 about Hurricane Irma, Elizabeth Vargas said, “There’s no turning back now. Hurricane Irma: Monster Storm.” Vargas makes a point to emphasize the destruction that the hurricane had caused, implying that

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this confluence of condensation, winds, and air pressure had malicious motives as it moved across the state of Florida. In national news coverage, weather events are positioned as an enemy for survivors, first responders, and local officials to overcome. Even technical names anthropomorphize storms, portraying them as humanoid enemies. Hurricanes were first given human names in 1957 to prevent confusion over the multiple hurricanes that hit the East Coast each year. This naming succeeds in giving each storm a distinct identity. However, referring to this phenomenon as personification is ultimately inadequate, as the language quckly turns to a kind of demonization, referring to the storms as inhuman forces. Whether it’s a monster storm with stubborn determination or wrathful waves striking the coast, the media’s language so clearly depicts extreme weather events as an enemy for humankind to defeat that it creates a dangerous paradigm in which to establish ourselves in relation to the environment. Global warming is occuring as a result of humans treating the environment as a resource to extract, pillage, and use for our own gain. By portraying storms as savage, erratic beasts, the narrative of human dominion over nature is continued. Only 62 percent of Americans believe that climate change is caused by humans, according to a Gallup poll in March 2017. According to an article in the journal Nature Climate Change by Stephan Lewandowsky, Gilles E. Gignac, and Samuel Vaughan, public concern surrounding the dangers of rising CO2 levels is actually decreasing. As news coverage continues to describe weather events as an enemy that we must defeat, and due to the overlap between climate change and extreme weather events in the public’s mind, climate change is included as a thing to conquer. +++ “Providence has a natural geomorphology that consists of 30-plus hills,” Evans explained. This geomorphology made the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier constructable in 1966, and it is what makes another, taller, longer hurricane barrier viable in the future. Such a project would cost millions of dollars, but it might be the only thing that would keep wealthier areas of Downtown Providence dry with rising sea levels. This kind of infrastructure project, essentially a wall, mirrors the rhetoric of climate discourse that positions humankind as wholly separate from nature. Barriers serve to protect privileged populations from the effects of climate change, providing a solution to the symptoms of a warming planet rather than working to address the underlying causes. Additionally, these projects concretize the narrative that plays out daily in the news coverage of weather events: to be safe, humans must fight nature. However, there are other outlets that give readers climate-based coverage in ways that encourage more nurturing relationships between humans and the ecologies they exist in. ISeeChange provides an online forum for citizens to self-report various weather-related and environmental updates in their areas. Each post (usually including a photo, some text about the user’s experience, and a location tag) is automatically attached to a string of data taken from the time of the post, ranging from temperature and CO2 levels to wind speed and

cloud coverage. This site helps to increase awareness about climate change while, unlike alarmist news stories, promoting the idea that we exist as living beings within the environment, not apart from it. There can be problems relying on individual sightings though, especially if they are taken out of context. Seeing a large number of sightings in your local area that seem to dispute global trends can cause users to draw misleading conclusions. However, ISeeChange publishes summaries of the sightings in different areas of climate and the environment, consciously working to prevent those kinds of localist conclusions. A series of sightings about irregular levels of snowfall posted on February 2 covered the effects that climate change can have on the quantity and intensity of East Coast snow storms. “A little snow isn’t unheard of in Spring Hope, North Carolina,” the author of the story wrote. “Autrey said that her town, located 30 miles northeast of Raleigh, can usually expect a few dustings a year. The most recent winter storm brought four inches of snow to her backyard.” The post juxtaposed this sighting with a sighting from Paonia, where there are usually many snow storms moving through the area in the winter. “January 9 in Colorado and it’s 50 degrees,” the sighting stated. After bringing in scientific opinions on the causes for these seemingly oppositional sightings, the author explains that “climate change affects winter weather patterns and [we] note that in some cases a warming planet can cause a colder, snowier winter.” In these summaries, ISeeChange often tends towards a kind of sensationalization too, but in a way that is less dangerous than the sensationalism of national news networks. By bringing together local sightings from across the country and combining them with the expertise of university academics and NASA-employed environmental scientists, ISeeChange raises awareness about climate change by treating the environment as a system of interacting natural elements, rather than a malevolent entity intent on damaging human society. +++ The discourse around the changing ecosystems we live in is an important impetus for creating major environmental infrastructure projects, like a greater Providence hurricane barrier. Besides massive economic costs to the state, even with federal funding, there is also the question of what a 40-plus foot wall emerging from the Narragansett Bay would do to Providence’s image. Our climate change coverage is nearly as unstable as the ever-changing environment which we inhabit. Rising sea levels are a reality, and to protect those who are not able to move inland when the water comes up, governing bodies have a responsibility to act. How we classify our relationship with the environment is crucial to the kind of action that we will see in the coming decades. If narratives that depict a histrionic, demonic environment continue to make up the majority of our news coverage, then the action we see will follow suit. TED CATLIN B’20 wants you to stop calling the weather mean names.

SCIENCE

TAXONOMY OF CHARACTEROLOGY Part One: Character Generation Strategies You can’t go far in the way of thought, belief, or abstraction without encountering characterological constructs. You have a character like God, for example, that accounts for natural phenomena. You have figures of speech, relating a human subject to something non-human through a shared quality or qualities, and, in that tradition, metaphor, abstraction, art and so on. Companies, cities, nations and the planet are treated as characters in popular discourse. Occupations are characterological. You’re a banker, you’re a chef, you’re a Santa…—each with a corresponding type of hat. But this ‘Taxonomy’ is less a broad take on the characterological paradigm than a COLLECTION OF STARTING-POINTS for POP-CHARACTEROLOGICAL GENESIS—compiling

I. POSITIVE CONSTRUCTIONS: CATEGORICAL ANTHROPOMORPHISM The easiest way to churn out a cast of characters is to make the characters variations on a theme, or subcategories within a closed set. In this way, the characters will be differentiated but retain a common essence. The personality and design of the characters should correspond and counterinform one another, if one subscribes to the popular school of hyper-communicative, narratively-oriented character design.

from the iconic to the more recondite, dating from the mid-19th century to the present day. Part one is intended as a creative reference, lowering barriers to entry for the characterologically disinclined. It focuses on esoteric, critical, formally invenitive or coded examples within the characterological discipline. The more straightforward political stakes of charcterology— its propagandistic dimension—will be explored more fully in Part Two. -LH

CHARACTER-GENERATION FORMULAE

TLDR; Beginner’s guide to Characterology, taking into account narrative, illustrative, socially critical, and promotional applications of character design, multi-national franchises as well as internet vernacular culture.

C. ANIMALS– J.J. GRANDEVILLE'S CARICATURES (MID-1800S) “At first sight, Grandville animals, dressed up and performing as men and women, appear to belong to the old tradition, whereby a person is portrayed as an animal so as to reveal more clearly an aspect of his or her character (...)the lion, absolute courage: the hare, lechery.”

A. GEOMETRIC PRIMITIVES– STEPHEN UNIVERSE (2013–)

(The first Cartoon Network series created by a woman and the first to depict LGBTQ+ relationships between central characters).

“But as one goes on looking at Grandville's engravings, one becomes aware [of] the opposite movement to that which one first assumed. (…) These animals have become prisoners of a human/social situation. The vulture as landlord is more dreadfully rapacious than he is as a bird. The crocodiles at dinner are greedier at the table than they are in the river(...) The movement that ends with the banality of Disney, began as a disturbing, prophetic dream in the work of Grandville.”3 >BONUS CREATURE FEATURE<

MIT’s mascot is a beaver– "Nature’s engineer." “There is this Bauhaus theory of design, which was a test: There’s a cube, a cone and a sphere. And you would have to know, intuitively, which one would be red yellow and blue. And the implication was that if you didn’t have that intuition, then you were just truly not a designer1.”– Rebecca Sugar, Series Creator

B. COLORS– PRIMARY-COLORED HEROES VS. SECONDARY-COLORED VILLAINS2

1“The cone is yellow because it’s sharp and directional, the cube is red because it’s strong and grounded, and the sphere is blue because it’s fluid and loose.” 2 Categorization from tvtropes.com

ARTS

D. OPERATING SYSTEMS—OS-TAN MEME One of the most popular iterations of categorical anthropomorphism internationally is the cast of anime/manga4 style girls. Artworks are shared on forums and online communities like deviantart. The OS-tans, for instance, personify different computer operating systems (as well as applications) though their clothing, accessories, and personalities.

The personification of Windows ME-tan was supposedly inspired by perception of the operating system as unstable and crash-prone, in the way of a “fickle, troublesome girl.” 3 From John Berger's 1980 Why Look at Animals? essay. 4 Anime = animation, manga = comics

BY Liby Hays

SKETCH YOUR ORIGINAL CHARACTER HERE

The OS-tan meme functions as a parody of moe (pronounced [mo.e]) aesthetics—a genre of anime defined by the strong affection viewers feel towards characters. Moe protagonists tend to be “naïve and not overly independent,” qualities which are explicitely intended to 'foster a protective feeling' 5. Characters are almost always depicted as white schoolgirls with super-stimulus features—big eyes, shiny hair and bow-legs.

SEE ALSO: E. THE FOUR ELEMENTS– THE FANTASTIC FOUR (1961-) By Jack Kirby and Stan Lee–1. Mister Fantastic-Water//2.The Invisible Woman– Air// 3.The Human Torch– Fire// 4.The Thing– Earth F. THE FOUR HUMORS— SCOOBY-DOO! (1969-) 1.Daphne– Sanguine (blood)// 2.Velma– Choleric (yellow bile)// 3.Fred–Melancholic (black bile)// 4.Shaggy– Phlegmatic (phlegm)// 5.Scooby– eclectic G. THE ALPHABET– THE GARSHLEYCRUMB TINIES (1963) by New England illustrator Edward Gorey–“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs…” H. THE 12 CHINESE ZODIAC–FRUITS BASKET (1998-2006) Big-selling shojo manga by Natsuki Takaya, adapted into an anime. I. THE FOUR PHASES OF FREUDIAN PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT– CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (1964) by Roald Dahl–1.Augustus Gloop (Early oral phase-suckling)//2.Violet Beauregarde (Late oral phase-chewing)// 3.Veruca Salt (Anal phase)//4. Mike Teevee (Phallic phase)

II. NEGATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS: PHANTASY & DETERMINISM

Characters are often formulated to address a problem— they are negative constructions in the sense that they are brought into being to address a lack. The void they fill might be symbolic and come across through their role 5 Via AnimeNewsNetwork.com

MARCH 02, 2018

in a story (the realm of phantasy). But characters also live as technologically, economically, and politically-mediated entities, and can be profoundly shaped by these external forces (determinism). (The dichotomy posed here between diegetic and extra-diegetic is convenient, given limited space, but all examples could be investigated from either critical perespective.)

A. DIEGETIC PROBLEMATICS- Characters fill some void through their function within the diegesis.

B.EXTRA-DIEGETIC PROBLEMATICSCircumstantial constraints radically shape the characters' design and legacy.

1. KILROY

2. FLICK

a.JIMBO (1988) comic book character by underground cartoonist Gary Panter INSPIRED-> b. BART SIMPSON (1989-) by Matt Groening (Panter’s

best friend at the time). “I owe Gary Panter a lot of money…” –Matt Groening

B. EYE STYLES– 3. EWOK 1. WINDOWS ME-TAN

2. ALEX MACK

3.HYOUTANTSUGI

1. WINDOWS ME-TAN (PT.II) Void type: Desirous In the case of Windows ME-tan, the metaphoric relation between an unpredictable, crash-prone software and the plucky, emotionally transparent anime heroine points to a larger characterological problematic—the trope of female characters as fractured, hysterical, and constructed from the outside-in to fill ‘the void of desire.’ The fact that the OS-Tans personify hardware also links them to the trope of femme sex-bots—servile humanoids that are literally assembled and controlled by the owner or engineer, on shows like 2002’s Cho-bits. 6

2. LIQUID HERO ALEX MACK (1994-1998) Void type: Spaciotemporal The Nickelodeon live-action show chronicled the dayto-day life of a girl who, after being contaminated with a top-secret chemical, gained the ability to transform into a puddle of water instantaneously. 7

3. HYOUTAN-TSUGI ,THE ORIGINAL TROLL– Void type: Qualitative The Hyoutan-tsugi was the signature emblem of Osamu Tesuka, known widely as the ‘Godfather of Anime and Manga' for creating series such as Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, and Buddha. The Hyoutan-tsugi was based on a childhood drawing by the artist's sister of the fruiting body of a mushroom, but is often mistaken for a patched-together pig releasing pressurized air through its chin. The character appears in nearly every comic in Tesuka’s expansive oeuvre. It often materializes as an expression of intense emotion, replacing a character’s head or being kicked in a fit of anger.

In other instances it pops up as an easter egg, hidden on a character’s sleeve, in the background, etc. Its inexplicable insertion into intense dramatic sequences, coupled with its blank stare and furious quivering seem to anticipate troll humor/meme humor on present-day forums and social media.

6 For more on this topic, read Thomas Lamarre’s excellent 2009 book of media theory, The Anime Machine 7 When Alex liquefies, her clothes liquefy as well—the actress was uncomfortable being naked when the character returns to her solid state.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

4. PISSING CALVIN

1. KILROY (1940S)– Determinism: Political determinism Kilroy is a drawing of a small bald man overlooking a wall that began showing up in soldiers’ graffiti during World War II. He is accompanied by the caption, ‘Kilroy was here,’ meaning ‘Kilroy’ like ‘solidier,’ is an identity anyone can take up in passing. The doodle began showing up internationally, under various guises: 'Other names for the character include Chad (in the U.K.), Foo (in Australia), Smoe, Clem, Flywheel, Private Snoops, Overby, The Jeep (as both characters had sizable noses), and Sapo.'

2.TOY STORY (1995) & A BUG’S LIFE(1998)Determinism: Technological determinism The reason Pixar’s first movie was about toys and second movie, insects? Since it was highly difficult to achieve a smooth range of motion with computer animation at the time, they built stories around stiff, segmented or doll-like kinds of characters.

3. EWOKS from STAR WARS: EPISODE VI (1983)– Determinism: Economic determinism George Lucas has been accused of inventing the Ewok characters to sell stuffed plushes...

4. PISSING CALVINDeterminism: Ironic inverse economic determinism(??!) Bill Waterson, in a legendary display of artistic integrity/ antiestablishmentarianism, turned down potential billions by refusing to merchandise his popular comic strip characters, Calvin and Hobbes. Ironically, Calvin’s image resurfaced as one of the most puerile and proliferant pieces of bootleg kitsch in American history, the Pissing Calvin graphic (most often seen as a bumper sticker.)

3. 1. SHOJO ‘GALAXY’ EYES– A mirror regression of orbs

within orbs; intergalactic affect. Pictured: Illustration by Tadatsu Yoko from the cover of 1960's Margaret shojo manga magazine. 2. LECHEROUS EYE TROPISM– Artist Mike Kelley points out how in Californian hotrod art8, the characters' eyes distend phallically in a savage parody of the male gaze. Pictured: Ratfink, by lowbrow legend Big Daddy Roth. >BONUS COLLECTOR'S TIP (RATTED OUT)< When appraising vintage Mickey Mouse collectibles, the general rule is: the longer the snout, the higher the price. 3. PROLIFERENT EYES– The Shoggoth from H.P. Lovecraft’s 1931 At the Mountains of Madness is described as “a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light.”9 The monster seems to anticipate Google’s ‘Deep Dream’ neural network, which generates imagery teeming with psychedelic eyeballs. Pictured: Shoggoth Model by Shengu Models.

C. FUGITIVE MORPHOLOGIES– Characters with missing, enshrouded or condensed body parts.

5. ROY G BIV– Determinism: Mneumonic determinism Ah, Roy G. Biv, the most elusive of characters, present only when light refracts through droplets of water, or passes through glass at the right angle…

III. STYLISTIC CONSTRUCTIONS: THE FRANKENSTEINIAN APPROACH This approach to character generation involves stitching together design elements/body parts from pre-existing characters. These elements will encapsulate a certain characterlogical lineage or genre-amalgam.

A. SPIKY HAIR (A BRUSH WITH FATE)Rumored accounts of tonsorial influence. 1. FEMME-

a.BETTY BOOP (1930-)– Great Depression-era sexy-cutesy cartoon by Max Fleischer INSPIRED-> b.SAPPHIRE from PRINCESS KNIGHT (1953-56) by

Osamu Tesuka, making Betty Boop the true manga progenitor. 2.MASC-

A. ANDY CAPP– English comic

strip character/Hot Fries Mascot. B. HOMER, THE HOME DEPOT MASCOT– since 1981. C. CHEECH WIZARD– Underground

comics character by Vaughn Bodé, runing in National Lampoon Magazine, 1967-1975 D. GOSSAMER– from Looney Tunes. E. STRONG MAD– from Homestar Runner web cartoons (2000-2010). F. LEGS-GO-ALL-THE-WAY-UP GRIFFIN– from Family Guy.

TAXONOMY OF CHARACTEROLOGY PART TWO: CHARACTEROLOGICAL CONTROVERSY 8 Associated with car customization & the Hells Angels 9 "Teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an infectious disease, this nameless horror..." Lovecraft excerpted in Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus

ARTS

V A

I N T G A G I

HAPPI One of the threads linking so-called “global cities” together runs through their subway tracks. I always found it soothing to ride the subway back in São Paulo—the yellow line, the one I would most often take, looked almost as neat as the ones in Tokyo. One of the newest and most central lines in the city, and the first to be operated by a private company, the yellow line is known for its distinctively “technological” features. Bright colors and disembodied announcements in both Portuguese and English make their way through the spotless stations that dot the line. Alongside the platforms, a black barrier containing a series of automatic gates that only open upon the train’s arrival keeps passengers safely away from the tracks below. Inside each car, small TVs relay the most recent news, in addition to information about the weather and all sorts of advertisements. The nearing of each station is accompanied by the recording of a jazzy jingle played by a saxophone. The tone of the yellow line is almost satirical, as if it were welcoming passengers to some sort of dystopian modernity. These ads playing on the TV roll by my eyes one by one, marking the seconds of my daily trips. I can never tell what they say, as their movement is quick enough to prevent me from focusing on the content of any one announcement. It feels as if I am allowing my mind to rest in these ads. In exchange, I allow the concatenation of words and signs from different sources to imprint onto my eyeballs and inhabit my headspace. I become embedded in the ads as they become embedded in me: their dissolution thickens the disorienting mass that I confuse not only with my thoughts, but also with the inner workings of my mind. The images that jump from one idea to the other teach my thoughts to jump from one image to the next. I do not remember what I have just seen, I do not recall thinking about it, and yet this is already my station and I need to get out. +++ The integration of the means of communication into networks of transportation secure an interdependent circulation of people and products. The primary purpose of marketing, or at least one which is closely related to the effectiveness of the functions it performs, is to communicate desires. In some cases, this means bringing together

OCCULT

E N

disjointed desires: those of the producer and those of the consumer. In other cases, it involves expressing a desire of the seller to the consumer in such a way that the consumer confuses her desire with the one being communicated to her. The communicated desire must, however, be autonomous and abstract enough to tap into the more concrete immediate goals of the people to which it is being transmitted. In order to ensure a smooth circulation of desire, the current traveling along the producer-consumer chain of communication must strategically interfere with the inner current of one’s thoughts and feelings. This is where attention to the language being employed comes in: like a vessel that determines the shape of the liquid inside it, the language of the ad defines the idea that it carries. The words say themselves: they say what they contain and, in doing so, they tell us what they are. Careful wording addressing competing desires allows for contradiction to remain at a standstill and, perhaps more importantly, to go unnoticed. Careful wording and conceptualization are key for the establishment of a sense of coherence that optimizes the purchase of products belonging to different collections across a maximal array of target groups. It is such efforts that allow companies like Apple to advertise previous generations of the iPhone while investing most of its resources in showcasing the latest version of the product. Two ads, one for the iPhone X and one for the slightly more obsolete iPhone 8, occupy the same space—but the space is shared, not disputed. One of the pictures presents us with two iPhone 8s, each in a metallic color. Perfectly vertical and touching one another but slightly, one of the iPhones intersects the other perpendicularly, its reflection clearly announcing itself on the other one’s glossy shell: “A new generation of iPhone.” Water-resistant and made entirely out of glass, the iPhone 8 stirs up the desire for effortless novelty. On top of the first image, stretching across one’s entire field of vision, a second picture gives a horizontal view of the iPhone X. The text underneath it further conveys a sense that this most recent version of the product is a promise, something looming on the horizon: “Say hello to the future.” If the iPhone 8 is “now,” the iPhone X is the “future;” if the iPhone 8 is “immediate,” the iPhone X is “impending;” and if the iPhone 8 is “new,” the iPhone X is “nearing.” Apple makes the unknown desirable, and eases the task of welcoming an indeterminate future that,

now equated with X, we would have no logical reason to look forward to. Now the future can be pre-ordered; all it takes is that we greet it happily as it approaches. +++ Trying to decipher ads while in Japan became one of my most cherished pastimes. The ones whose general meaning I could not make out on my own would be decrypted with the help of my friend, whose knowledge of Japanese was akin to mine. Working on these precarious translations in conjunction with her was like putting together blocks of different shapes and sizes; we would try, even if in a fragmented way, to devise the floor plans of an unfamiliar building. She was better at breaking down the kanji—the logographic component of the Japanese writing system—and working out the meaning of their compounded apparitions, whereas I held the upper hand when it came to making sense of the katakana, the Japanese syllabary used for the transcription of foreign words, most commonly the ones taken from English—a language which was more familiar to me than to her, as she had never lived outside Brazil. Some weeks into this little conjoined exercise, I started picking up on a curious pattern. Ads more rich in katakana, especially the ones that included words actually written out in English, referenced the concept of “happiness,” or similar ones in the same semantic field, more often and more directly. Ads that look formally different thus index the communication of different desires. For some reason, explicit references to “happiness”—as the logical outcome of acquiring a specific product, enrolling on a specific program or being provided a specific service—were more present in ads heavy with English words. Ads written exclusively in Japanese were nothing out of the ordinary; they would make evident the appealing qualities of the products being advertised and call attention to how effective these products were for performing whatever function they were meant to perform. Time and again, these would include the image of some endearing and familiar-looking character, or that of a charming and attractive actor. When happiness was referenced, it did not seem to be hierarchically above any other positive subjective qualities associated with the product, thus becoming part of a larger net of positivity

MARCH 02, 2018

BY Gabriela Naigeborin ILLUSTRATION BY Jonathan Muroya DESIGN BY Bethany Hung

rather than setting the tone of the ad. Conversely, in the case of most of the ads containing words in English, associations with happiness that were as vague as they were straightforward would overlay the discourse, promoting the more specific functionality of a brand or product. “Panasonic: feel happiness”; “Go to Tohoku! Be happy!” The distilled desire for happiness seemed to call for a foreign language to contain it. Happiness, understood as something that could follow from a mere economic exchange, was communicated in English. Was the idea that happiness could be acquired by any resourceful consumer, so long as that person had a desire, a goal, and a clear motivation tying these two together, as foreign as the words that expressed this possibility? The association between consumerism and the promise of happiness did not strike me as especially surprising. But it did call attention to the fact that this association is not equally obvious—or at least not the rule—everywhere. Indeed, the kind of advertisements that I would see back home played with other desires, desires that spoke more to their audiences. This does not mean that desires are defined on a national basis, but rather that they are fluid enough to manifest in different forms, and communicate through different means. I do not desire happiness when I express myself in English any more than I do in Portuguese. Nonetheless, my relationship to happiness, and the way I go about my longing for it, are configured in slightly different ways depending on where I am, and by whom I am surrounded. +++ A couple years ago I went to a lecture by social psychologist Shigehiro Oishi, from the University of Virginia. The talk centered around his research on cross-cultural conceptions of happiness. One of his projects consists of an extensive survey on how happiness is defined in dictionaries across different countries, in addition to an investigation of changes in the official American definition of happiness across the past century and a half. The word for “happiness” found in the linguistic tradition of most countries surveyed—a group containing both Japan and Brazil—includes a translation of the word as “luck,” “good fortune,” and implies the idea that happiness is tied to an alignment of favorable external circumstances. Such associations, however, seem more far-fetched in American English, which could point to an estrangement of the idea that the environment poses constraints not only to the individual psyché, but also to collective experience. With luck and external conditions in exile, happiness is turned inwards in a twofold manner: it pertains more to the realm of subjective internal feelings than to the state of interpersonal relations, and the control over it is removed from the social locus and relegated to the individual. Interestingly, this understanding of happiness is not present in most English-speaking cultures, and has only become mainstream in the United States within the past century. The shaping of the concept is historically determined, and different threads and developments in Western culture inform the variations that are observed

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Reaching past

self-care

across different English-speaking traditions. There was great debate among ancient Greek philosophers, and also in the context of tragedy as a genre, as to what role luck and destiny played in the course of people’s lives. The approach to happiness in Greek drama and poetry tended to attribute favorable outcomes to events outside the scope of an individual’s agency. Writers such as Aeschylus centered plots around actions determined by superhuman entities. What mattered in these plays was not the course of individual human action, but rather the way in which human action reflected the will of the gods, the way in which it conformed to circumstances brought about by external influence. Human will was, bluntly, irrelevant. Tragic fate is not necessarily that which has already been written, but rather that which no human hand can write. The human is only happy when she is fated to be happy—that is, when natural or supernatural external forces determine that it be so. Individual happiness does not matter nearly as much as the overall movement created by means of the complex articulation of individual parts of the tragic apparatus. Tragic outcomes tend to be the strongest, and elicit the most intense feelings of catharsis, precisely when they explode the contradiction between what the individual wants and where they end up. The frustration of such desires is what is nowadays read as a “sad ending,” although sadness was not meant to be the primary feeling elicited in the audience. Instead, the expected reaction was one of awe at, and fear of, the ineluctability, invincibility, and incontestability of the forces lying outside the scope of human control. The salvation of such desperate desires through the intervention of unexpected power of event—deus ex machina, a concept thought to have first appeared in the work of Aeschylus himself—is the result of similarly impersonal action. On the other hand, discussions of happiness in ancient Greek philosophy were somewhat more divided on questions of agency and fate. Socrates understood happiness to be at least partially under the individual’s willpower. Following in his steps, Aristotle defended the view that the individual was an agent in the attainment of her happiness, but nonetheless emphasized the idea that this happiness was contingent on the availability of resources, and on the presence of favorable circumstances, that would allow for a happy life. This “internalizing” view, which allows for more individual agency relative to the forces exerted by the environment, was recuperated with the Protestant Reformation throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. This reform in Western Christianity helped establish the theoretical and ritualistic framework that allowed believers to pursue earthly happiness, while still ensuring that this quest would retain the status of religious endeavor. The Enlightenment worked to render the religious question of salvation secular and transformed it into a question of happiness. Finally, as research by Oishi and his colleagues shows, usage of the word “happiness” to reference fortunate or luck-determined outcomes has been in decline since the 1920s, although this use of the term would not be “officially” deemed archaic until 1961, with the release of a new edition of Webster’s Dictionary.

The current American understanding of happiness also bears close ties to modern consumer culture. During the 1920s, with the expansion of mass media in the advertising industry, companies began to endorse the view that consumption is a means to accelerate the country’s modernization process, bringing modern life into each and every household that subscribes to this kind of relationship to objects. Advertising companies thus quickly adopted an approach to selling that focused on the products’ capacity to enhance the expression of one’s desires, and to satisfy those very desires. Underlying the race for accumulation of objects was the ambition to accumulate happiness, now attainable in its private form. +++ This much is true: here I feel more in charge of my own happiness—more in charge than I ever could be. The “pursuit of happiness,” which figures as one of the unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence, is not self-evident, and to me is not even desirable. To have full agency over my happiness is a Sisyphean task. I do not want to think of happiness as something residing entirely in me, especially if it is something to be kept under my unremitting vigilance and control. This is why I am hesitant to say, when others compliment my willingness to take out a few minutes every day to cook or meditate or swim or go to the movies or do whatever it is that does not involve my direct obligations, that I am engaging in “selfcare.” Yes, I am taking care of myself, but to think of this practice as a parallel set of circumscribed actions that one must take individually, for the sake of individual sanity is—as the modifier “self” announces—an individualistic way of going about wellbeing. Happiness, the way I understand it, is not individual, or at least not entirely so. In this sense, it should not be approached at an individual capacity, taken up as an individual enterprise. If understood as something to be constructed and experienced collectively, happiness encompasses a notion of justice, acknowledges the importance of support systems, and highlights the interplay between factors that are internal and external, controllable or outside the individual’s control. When read as a “taking care of oneself” that is inherently dissociable from the radical kindness involved in taking care of others, self-care becomes a trap, as it outsources the responsibility for a community’s mental and physical health to the individual. It is dangerous because it divides and individualizes, allowing for divestment in support and healthcare systems that count on a better, more equitable distribution of resources. Maybe if our happiness were not a burden for us to bear individually, it would not be as much of a burden. GABRIELA NAIGEBORIN B’19 is looking forward to her therapy session next Thursday.

OCCULT

WATCHING THE OLYMPICS ON TV Thoughts on those very wonderful games

BY Isabelle Rea ILLUSTRATION BY Rémy Poisson DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

Every couple of years, the normal schedule of televised sport is upset by a two week long global tournament of sports and games. The Olympic Games make their entrance with a grand orchestral tune and promise to award many precious medals. The basic contradiction of sports broadcasting applies here too—the majority of people involved are doing the exact opposite of participating in athletics. Instead, they sit on a couch or in a chair, watching a screen. In the case of the Olympics, where the stakes are higher and world records are up for grabs, how does the viewer’s experience change? In other words, what does it mean to watch ‘the best of the best’? The Olympics, more than any other televised sporting event, profiles individual performance and individual achievement. Most regularly aired and viewed sporting events involve teams, with the exception of tennis and golf. While these more common sports have a place at the Olympic games, they take a backseat to the more unusual individual events, many of which only show up on viewer’s screens once every four years. By nature of their rarity, these events in some way define the Olympics as a stage particularly defined by its individual performances. If one general purpose behind the Olympic Games is the identification of ‘the best of the best’, then the actual feats completed by the athletes promise to be of top quality and skill. The ideal of absolute universal dominance animates the performance with a superhuman quality; the gold medal winner is, after all, the most super of humans at their sport. And most often, the highest of skill levels does not visually disappoint. There are spins in the air and turns on ice, there are heights and speeds reached that redefine the limits of the human body. While the witnessing of ‘the best of the best’ inspires awe in the moment, it is difficult for the viewer to know where to turn after this instant emotion. As viewers, after watching something so extra-human, we must come back to terms with our own unchanged reality, our couches and living rooms, and our simple humanness. It is not clear what to do with our amazement at a superhuman act: What can we do with it? What is its use? We don’t know what to do with all the greatness. If we wish to retain any level of the romance of the Olympic feat, we have no other place to turn but back to the screen. Specifically, we might look to the only one whom the result of the event will certainly affect: the athlete. In an attempt to understand what it means to the athlete to be completing this feat, the viewer will now take up a project of finding the person in the athlete, or humanizing the superhuman.

ARTS

+++ To reach a relatable human quality in the Olympic Games is to unearth the individual from a dehumanizing structure of objectives. To produce objective winners, the design of the tournament reduces the individual athletes to approachable units. Homogenized bodies, each reduced to name, country, and eventual score or time, and each a similar shape and in similar dress, act as action figures. On the screen, we watch the body move through positions and actions that are not only unfamiliar to the average range of human movement but also standardized within each event. Each achievement calls for specific formulae that dictate how the body should move to achieve an ideal result. It is not creativity that generates such unusual body shapes and actions, but an external set of rules, similar to the clear rules that will decide how the performance is scored. This is especially evident in races, where the plurality of figures moving their bodies in the same way abstract human bodies into something more mechanical. When pictured from far away, the racing athletes could be any sort of uniform object. For the most part, Olympic television programming contributes to this dehumanization. The number of events and limited time require speedy and spare coverage that ends once the results are decided. A concentrated screen means that the image of the athlete is never free of numbers. Sleek, plastic looking bands and bars, often dotted with corporate logos, clog up the image of the athlete in their environment. The network transitions into advertisements only after reducing the performances to names and numbers, displaying them all together in a list. The major divergence from such an objectively-interested and formulaic structure takes place at the end of each event. For the brief moment that a rigorous schedule allows, the viewer watches the superhuman performer make the transition into conventional, upright personhood. The expected exhaustion and general stimulation leave the athletes raw, or unprocessed. Here the athlete is most human, insofar as ‘human’ means a reflection of the viewer on the couch. For a few seconds or minutes, before they become aware of themselves or their results, we see a human without a comprehensible feeling, only the suggestion of feeling itself. But after a few minutes, the visible emotions congeal into something more clearly categorical. We see on their faces joy and disappointment, alternately, a combination of both. Tears exaggerate the simple and digestible

emotions and turn the characters into approachable, more relatable characters. As the Olympic structure transforms athletes into units for competition purposes, the athletes are simultaneously flattened into an emotional unit for the audience to consume. The awkward balance between humanization and distance exposes itself in the marginal Olympic spectacles outside the events themselves. The Olympic interview, when shown, perhaps promises the most clear insight into the genuine nature of an athlete. However, an interview usually dissolves into a recitation of basic lines: “I went out there and tried my best,” “I am just so happy to be here,” “I have been looking forward to this day since I was a little girl.” At the award ceremonies, emotion again appears flattened and performative as the athletes step onto podiums of different heights, spatially configuring their objective results. While emotion is not missing, the emotional subjectivities that a viewer uses to humanize the performances become almost as formulaic as the scoreboards. +++ If we, as viewers, are left confused as to what to do with the awe we experience when we witness the physical talent on screen, then we must attempt to humanize the athlete and see something of their perspective. After all, the question of why we watch the Olympics has its parallel in the question of why the athlete chose to devote the time, money, and effort of a lifetime to be this good at one thing. Beyond the physical risk of injury, the Olympic experience renders the athlete’s entire life a risk, as it has been dedicated to this sport. To put it extremely, the athlete has one chance to perform their life, and the viewer gets to watch them do it. From this we can at least extract a more clear reason for the intrigue of an Olympic feat, or an explanation beyond the awe. An Olympic performance gives us an image of a life. It satisfies an internal desire, or at least an inclination, to condense and flatten achievement into something to see, feel, or consume. The human body and its achievement, which remains as the subject of the Games, becomes palatable. But this can only emerge as a product of the tension between an imposing structure and the raw and physical body itself.

ISABELLE REA B’20 got points deducted.

MARCH 02, 2018

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EPHEMERA

CHISMEANDO CON RUBEN

In English, the word chisme translates to gossip. Chisme is a cultural practice in Latin American and diaspora communities, an implicit understanding of how our communities are constructed and preserved. Chismosas, or gossipers, are the aunties, the mothers, las comadres: the women in the neighborhood. They are the everyday characters and matriarchs whose discussion of other people’s lives and actions is a crucial component of their survival. This has led to the notion of chisme as a feminized practice. More than just a word to be translated, chisme is also a transgenerational experience and tradition that serves to create safety and community through secrecy. In recent years, chisme has been reclaimed by Latinx communities in the US. Latinx platforms like Mitu, Remezcla, and Pero Like have published extensive

FEATURES

content on chisme, showcasing its role in Latinx pop culture through videos, memes, and blog posts. Queer Xicano Chisme’s platform is built on chisme, but does not restrain itself to grappling with it as a fun, merely social activity. “Chisme is gossip, oral history, shade, news, and ancestral knowledge as practiced by many Chicanx/ Latinx folks” he describes on his Facebook page. Ruben Angel, also known as Queer Xicano Chisme, is a writer, blogger and activist. As his name suggests, his work grapples with issues of identity and intersectionality in the Latinx and Chicano communities. An

East Los Angeles native of Mexican origins, he strives to make social critique accessible through creating dialogue on social media platforms like Facebook—from which he launched his career in 2016—Instagram and Twitter. From Xicanx nationalistic discourse on Aztlán to Shakira’s whitewashing transition, QXC’s platform leverages the power and accessibility of social media to unpack complex discussions of tradition, identity, sexuality and representation that, while crucial in the lives of queer and trans communities of color, are often confined to gated institutions that do not include such an audience. Through his podcast, memes, and essays, Ruben grounds such issues in current affairs and the everyday experiences of his audience. The podcast Bitter Brown Femmes, one of his latest projects with friend and activist Xicanisima, comes at

MARCH 02, 2018

A conversation with Queer Xicano Chisme

BY Paula Pacheco Soto ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Ella Rosenblatt

social justice issues and discussion about la cultura with a comedic twist, with episodes discussing the #MeToo movement and current discourses on sexual assault, the role of race in Latinx communities, (white) feminism, and centering the perspectives of femme, queer, and trans people of color. Yet, Queer Xicano Chisme’s platform doesn’t mean to essentialize the complexity of Latinidad, Xicanismo, and other identities. Rather, it is a space for dialogue to arise. He states that himself, inviting the audience to bring to his attention if he “might fall into problematic territory.” Ultimately, as a self-defined “sissy brown boy,” Ruben Angel creates a sort of representation that is disruptive and steps away from identity politics into uncensored, sometimes uncomfortable discussions necessary for individual empowerment and community liberation.

The Independent: How did you become Queer Xicano Chisme and what situations in your life led you to establish this platform? Ruben Angel: I went to school for English, and I always wanted to be a writer. I thought that my calling was fiction but ultimately I think I did a lot better when I got into critique and personal narratives, so I became interested in writing for social media. At the time, BuzzFeed was hiring Latinx people for Pero Like, their Latinx brand. Kat Blaque, who is a YouTuber, came to my campus to talk one time and she invited me out for drinks and I told her, “I really love what you do. I know you work for BuzzFeed, and I’m thinking of going down that route too,” and she said, “No, don’t work for them. You won’t have the right to anything you create under them,” which sounded horrible, but being poor, I needed something else to do instead. “Trust me, you don't need anything,” she said, “I started with my computer camera,” and now she's featured on the cover of magazines and really is one of the foremost voices in the black trans community. In the back of my head I was like, “That's not going to happen.” Then Pulse happened. I started writing a bunch of posts on my personal Facebook which started reaching a lot of people. I realized there was a need for the voice that I have, that people reacted to it. But I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I was never good with social media. I don't think I really knew who I was for the first few months, I was just trying to see what the heck my platform was. Then slowly I started seeing that people enjoyed when I’d unpack things, so I started doing that and spreading resources through it. I slowly moved from Facebook to Twitter. People on Twitter are really radical. I could work on my own. Although people in it might be intentionally obtuse, Twitter is a tool that a lot of folks use to subvert the academy and I wanted to be one of those. I think that's where I can be my full self and talk about anything. Nothing is off limits. Like tweet about eating ass at 5 PM. The Indy: In the process of constructing your voice through social media, when did you begin to integrate chisme? RA: Chisme, in the way that I use it and that I believe in it, came from my closest friends in college. I realized that a lot of the ways in which students of color survive on college campuses are not by going by the brochure... a lot of it is actually through word of mouth. I think it’s a form of ancestral knowledge, passed on from generation to generation and something that we, as Latinx people of color, bring into the academy. We are used to that being how we keep records and keep each other safe in our own communities, so that's kind of how I developed this

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

theory with my friends. I don’t think there was one single thing. It helps me think about how I survived as a queer person of color in East LA. In the early 2000s there were no safe spaces—there wasn’t even a lexicon for it until like 2004. When I was coming into my identity, I only found other queer and trans people by word of mouth. That's how you would find out about this place or that club and find each other. That was one of the ways I had manifested chisme throughout my life. [Chisme] is also important for people that are first-generation and second-generation immigrants to the US. Sometimes their parents come with no documentation, no pictures, and they have no proof that they existed before coming here, so they rely on word of mouth to tell their stories. This is something that is engraved into our community. And we kept those forms of history keeping through colonialism. I own chisme because it is a very feminine form of communication, and I am a person that has had a very feminine experience. I'm not always going to be correct and respectable and that is the other side of chisme. Chisme sometimes is messy and incorrect and I want to own up to that. The Indy: How do you expand that into the work you do on social media? How do you manage being hyper-visible but also trying to maintain secrecy? RA: Chisme has always been one of the crucial tools that survivors use. The system isn't here for us, the system barely ever persecutes abusers. Survivors are left to fend for themselves. To protect other femmes sometimes you have to do it on the low, especially in activist spaces where a lot of the time people protect abusers because they do “good work.” They work for the community so they get a pass. Often times we’re only left with chisme. It's easier to do away with the survivor because it's easier to do away with people who have less power, and rape and abuse are ultimately about power. The #MeToo movement revolves around people saying the truth and hoping that someone will believe them. I don't think that's new; I think the hashtag is new. As for keeping these traditions in social media I think that a lot of Latinx people fail to be critical of the culture, they think criticism of Latinidad should be reserved for the academy, like ethnic studies or history or literarure. We have a lot of people who are very dogmatic, very much about worshiping icons: Selena, Frida, pan dulce. These things are untouchable. Rarely are our people up for critique, rarely are they open to discussion. And so I think the way I use chisme is to start a new label of discussion beyond the academy. I don't want to be one of those academics who stop bringing back to the community, those who produce work that only white people read. I don't care about white people reading my work. I want queer and trans people of color reading and engaging with my work. The Indy: You were talking earlier about Latinx icons and symbols that are so grounded in our identity and have become almost mainstream. What are your thoughts on these contradictions of trying to reclaim tradition?

Something that we have to remember is that, from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican folks have tried to pass as white. So we are constantly immersed in a struggle between people trying to assimilate into whiteness while others try to reclaim indigeneity. I think a little of my work is trying to say that there's another way. That people can both not subscribe to nationalism and not subscribe to whiteness. So they can respect the culture while also critiquing it. I just want people to do the work of reclamation and think of how some things are not meant for us to reclaim, and maybe your energy will be put to better use by trying to uplift other people. The Indy: Throughout our conversation, we’ve used Spanish and English, and also terms like Latinx. How do you navigate your own use of language? How has this been received by the communities you work with? RA: If I'm in a Spanish-speaking community like back home I’d just say Latino... or if I'm feeling very spicy I would say Latino/Latinx. Just so we start hearing those. You have to understand that this is not a popular lexicon in our communities. It is better to not use them so as to meet people where they are at. By the same token though, I also understand that there are people who don't have this luxury of not caring so much about language, especially people who use the non-binary because that's the right identity. So what happens to their identity when we switch languages? Again, language should be reflexive. Educating in the moment. Ultimately, I'm speaking to a US context, specifically online. That's who my audience is. I wouldn't want to impose myself on people in Latin America that might have another use of language. I understand that there're going to be differences. I also have other people around me who use different articulations and that also helps me figure out what are the best ways to communicate. For example people who are Puerto Rican, Dominican, people who I didn’t grew up around in LA. People who have a different understanding of what these identities mean. I try to see where they're at and where their people are at. I know that some people in Argentina for example use Latinx. We should be able to have this exchange if you want to move forward. The Indy: You have said that you’ve been getting a lot of attention that you didn't expect. Where do you see your platform going in the future? RA: Ultimately, I want a book. Currently, I'm working on setting up my website and writing longer essays—personal essays [and] cultural criticism. One of my favorite things to do outside of these issues of identity is pop culture. I want to explore this more and make it a habit for people to be critical of what’s going on their TV and what that says of the world we are living in. Even beyond that, I do want to write fiction one day. PAULA PACHECO SOTO B'20 encourages you to visit www.patreon.com/QueerXicanoChisme

RA: I’ve found some of my best allies to be Central American and Caribbean people. In my experience Chicanos are the ones who are resistant to moving forward, and I think it's because a lot of us of Mexican descent haven't had to push notions of identity or culture forward because Mexican culture is ultimately one of the most powerful in Latin America. Because of Mexican hegemony, our traditions are imposed on other Latinx, especially in a US context, especially in the Southwest.

FEATURES

“I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin” — A.R.

DRIVING 1. Coming close to the center of an intersection, those ‘all way roads’ kind—a damned four-way, where the road opens up into a flower with an unfortunate limit in petals or a box with all four flaps hanging down and out. Either the car can push onwards—not without batting a wandering eye at the road down that way and the road down that other way—or it can indulge in curiosity and speed down one, indulging in it’s wonder—focused. What it cannot do is stay stagnant, in place. This is where I learned to drive; this is where I learned the consequences of my decisions. Down one way, I might uncover a pair of a neighbor’s cast off shoes, lying maudlin in the yard, a good reminder that things once depended on are equally subject to being consigned to oblivion. Oblivion might lie even further down, either on this same road or the one that I did not choose. 2. The decision of which way—decisions—are always difficult ones; I wish that I might have known that a “fork” in the road really meant a relish fork or a carving fork, the ones with the two tines and not a salad fork or a dinner fork, the ones with the four tines, but now that I’ve quickly approached a fate I was never prepared to confront—fight or flight? Bite the bullet, determine one road and speed down, carrying confidence in that this road might be the only one for me. Maybe I’ll station my four wheels down into the pavement, and wait to fly. 3. By the time I’ve come to a decision of either/or, I’d have arrived so close to the center that all things moving, I am in center of all four flaps—inside the box: the green Subaru hatchback, the 2007 yellow Camaro, even the faint-hearted Toyota Prius and all things not moving: Baker St., Harrison Ave, Broadway, are all unflinching in their resistance. 4. Go ahead then—I bring myself to the front, I approach the fight. The fight in this case being that which I do not want to confront—that my choice of one meant that I’m inherently, completely, barred from all else. I inch forward, the center point flattening as I come over it—questions run through my head of: do I speed through? Do I stop and let it point me? Again, might I fly? Buying time, I cruise, I sing along to the coming lines of “Is This Love?” and the complete state of affairs last a total of three seconds, maybe four if the cruising falls into a coasting. I can’t tell you, Corinne; I can’t tell if this is it but I can say that I am willing, willing and able. A.R. hoped to dive, saw diving as the ultimate plunge into the unknown. For me, right now, I’ve learned how to drive and have faced an all too similar plunge—the unknown as the abyss of all questions unanswered and all options deprived. Alas, I will never know what lies ahead down the road less travelled. 5. I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I, I’m willing and able I’m willing So I lay my cards on your table … Oh someone tell me if it’s ******

MEANS OF EGRESS 15 PROSE POEMS & A LOVE LETTER TO ADRIENNE RICH

DIVING

written by Wen Zhuang design by Wen Zhuang & Ella Rosenblatt

6. I reach Act II: face to face with A.R., having climbed down the ladder that hangs innocently by the door, confused still as to how I am to dive when situated at the bottom of the ladder. What motivates one to climb down the ladder, to administer an act of further drowning? Or downward, flying? 7. Toes clenched, fingers firm, eyes fixed—from here to the end measures much longer than from here to the beginning. By cowardice or by courage, if the ground is found silken and snug, I would hold all the candor of love and of sincerity and wipe away all those flippant fears, and barefaced tricks. I’ll dive, plunge deep into the concrete, immersing all of me within the ocean of the underground. That is, if the ground is found silken and snug. 8. For A.R., the gun is loaded prior, the armor adorned early on—it’s one of an equipped, trained dive. She has prepared all her life for this dive, learning the consequences, and training through the most promising executions. I wonder about the confidence felt by A.R.—knowing she could either completely fail or prove herself excellent. I wonder about the confidence felt by all those ruminating on these divergent possibilities. To fail or to prove myself? As if I had to a choice! To be a real competitor in Diving with a capital D, as a recognized act of athleticism, one must never completely fail (0) or prove completely excellent (10). According to NBC’s Diving 101, to be a 0 one would face discharge; to be 10, one might risk being forgotten, disregarded, and be condemned to watch the dives on solid ground, missing the water, missing the fight. 9. I wonder about the weight of A.R.’s armor. I’m carrying my own from a previous stage, one of many parts. Hoods, check. Mirrors, check. Tailgates, check. Bumpers, check. Headlights, check. Doors, check. I’ve learned the tricks of the trade by now, having to choose where I am to split in the intersection—how I am to split on this diving board. With diving though, I’m indulging in the ‘all’ in ‘each.’ Diving proves as much fight as it is flight—equal parts learning to leave as it is learning how to enter, or to re-enter. DROWNING 10. I can’t say Act III was forced upon me, as I willingly followed A.R. Now, I’ve reached ground, beginning to feel my surroundings. 12. A maternal comfort—hugged so tight at every point of my body that I can almost hollow out a portion of the sea. This ground and these walls are indeed silken and soft—wrapped in this tissue, I find one end of a long rope. I begin charging upwards, my fingers again, firm, and my eyes, again, fixed. Each grip loosening and tightening with more fervor than the last. Outside must be clement weather for this time of year, the waves crash only slightly—the currents rather unperturbed, and when I’m focusing only on my movements, I feel like a fish out of water, in water. A fish out of water, in water, swimming in water— swimming. 13. If I don’t reach shore, what might become of me? Is it too soon to wander these sad, barren desserts? Tell me when would be appropriate, for a person of my stature, to wonder about these pipe-dreams of mine? INTERMISSION DRAINING: All participants, in this case A.R. and I, must abide to all-regulated and safe-tested Exit procedures and stipulations in order to ensure the possibility of drivers and divers after us. First to define what it is. EXIT. My face compresses at the edges and as it contracts and expands, the muscles all around my face meet my hands in firmness. I stand firm in the face, firm in the hands, firm in the feet. I stand with many holes, knowing that I’d have needed to have a lot to be losing so much. I’ve dove and I’ve sampled that which lies underneath. Now I’m again unearthed, fuzzy in the eyes but firm in the hands. EXIT, HORIZONTAL. The exterior above the water felt much less harmless. Now I’m standing here, soaked and beaten, my skin having developed creases at every layer, wrinkled as if I had aged much throughout the entirety of today. Water is quick to leave and not good with retaining itself, though easy to regenerate; we do so often. Check back in a few hours, and I’ll be swimming once more, tied together by a not-too-different long rope, not climbing this time, dancing. EXIT DISCHARGE. Come to think of it, all things end. Exiting is not quite an exception to that fact. Exiting cannot be eternal. However, one must Exit to know where the Exit leads, where it ends. EXIT DISCHARGE, LEVEL OF. Back to these god-damn, life-sucking, solitude-seeking, horizontal planes. Unfortunately, being back on a horizontal plane confines my body to a set of structured movements. I must learn to drive once more—to move around, to assess the spaces around me for adequate means of egress. Dante’s daydream must be my reality, bound to the knowing’s and the guiding’s of an instructor, just as lost as I am, but with much better, promising presentation. FIRE EXIT HARDWARE. How does panic end? How much do we lose? For all that it’s worth, I’m grateful that the panic hasn’t caused my fingers to shrivel and to stagger; it hasn’t caused me my only way to lift out and stand up. I might be able to go down the ladder again--this time my act might be unbeknownst to A.R. I’ll go down, rung by rung, faster than she did, faster than I will, faster than was originally written. DRYING 15. Act V: Now that I’ve tripled, quadrupled my resistance against fire, I’ve been wrung out to my bone. I continue to crave the sea, the salt, the water and the freedom. The dead up on shore are never not placed salute-position, face up, staring at a board of darkness, or feeling themselves filled with the dirt of the earth. The dead down-under, however, face a not too different sort of erasure—gentle, never foreceful. When we go under, they who we are separates into all those who we also are, but never had a chance of meeting. Each part of us breaks, disseminates, and leaves. Still erased but, by cowardice or by courage, they who we are remain in the particles now so tiny, that they may float to all the ends of the Atlantic. I’ve wrung myself out now so I must walk onward with these two feet.

LITERARY

MARCH 02 , 2018

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

May I be bold to ask at what that contains, That paper in your hand?

Second Gentleman:

First Gentleman: Yes; ‘tis

the list

(Henry VIII Act 4 scene 1)

on Friday the 2nd...

A washing machine is born 10PM @ Finlandia co-op (116 Waterman Street) A party with drinks, bands (Test Tube, Strawberry Generation, Ossa), and a DJ (Eli Backer). $3–5, proceeds go to entertainment, booze, and the new washing machine in LW’s house.

on Saturday the 3rd...

The Basement Series 2.0 9PM @ 52 John Street Not sure who is DJing, but this is allegedly a techno party. Dress code according to the Facebook event is “dark, underground, original.” $3 cover, but it’s just a suggestion~

on Sunday the 4th...

on Tuesday the 6th...

Amerika Square screening Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs (111 Thayer Street) Screening of a film that explores the experience of the ongoing refugee crisis and financial crisis in Greece. Free

on Wednesday the 7th...

CupcakKe with Mercedes, Shane Slaughter, Cathy Cathodic 8PM at the Met (1005 Main St, Pawtucket) Definitely not one to miss. $20 advance, $25 day of~

on Thursday the 8th...

ASHES: A Journey to Self-Love

Shrek the Musical

3PM @ Rites and Reason Theatre at Brown (155 Angell Street)

7PM @ East Lyme High School (30 Chesterfield Road East Lyme, CT)

A choreodrama by Zoë Flowers that explores racism, sexuality, and body image. Free.

on Monday 5th...

Free Waffle Donuts (Waffoughnuts) and Coffee PVDonuts (79 Ives Street) 7:30AM–12:45PM “Free” is a bit of a lie because they make you donate to a kickstarter for a “British double decker bus cafe” to actually receive your waffoughnut, but hey.

SomeBODY once told me.. $10–14

Astrological Weather How are you? Doing OK in this time of fish and sea monsters? I hope so, because you have to buckle up for this full moon in Virgo opposite sun + Neptune in Pisces (i.e. you’ll soon be swimming in a cognitive-emotional swamp [that’s what happens when you mix water and earth, yeah?]). Don’t try anything new this week — no new food, no new friends; you will make a mistake. If you must go on a “date” and/or spend your “money,” go to Shrek the Musical (as long as you’ve seen at least one Shrek movie [and I promise that is the most you will be able to handle]).