The College Hill Independent Vol. 39 Issue 10

INSIDE: SUPPORTING ACTIVISTS AT THE BROWN CENTER FOR STUDENTS OF COLOR, HOW CES IN RI HURTS THE HOMELESS, AND THE HISTORY OF DIGITAL STREETS

A Brown/RISD Weekly / December 06, 2019 / Volume 39, Issue 10

the

Indy

From the Editors

Contents

Every Friday morning, you wake up, softly scramble your eggs, and settle down on the sofa with a freshly minted edition of the 39th volume of the College Hill Independent. You have come to rely on its steady presence; you cherish the silky grain of its centerfold. It is your companion.

Cover Boxed BunKnee Eleanor McQueeny materials: puppet-wire, foam, sculpey, felt set- childhood dollhouse, sculptamold, wood, miniatures, portal, my heart, shell, push light, love

News 02 Week in Comfort Food Gemma Sack & Alan Dean

07 Chile Despertó Jacob Alabab-Moser, Izzi Olive, & Paula Pacheco Soto Features 04 The Making of a Ghost Star Su 17 Buzzed Morgan Florsheim Metro 05 The Cold Shoulder Deborah Marini, Loughlin Neuert, & Peder Schaefer 08 Ephemera Comics Suzanne Antoniou, Alana Baer, Jonas Boone, Natasha Brennan, Lucinda Drake, Isabela Lovelace, Sindura Sriram, & Claribel Wu 11 Science + Tech Mapping Capital Ella Comberg

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.

15 Arts Video Star Isabelle Rea

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.

18 X Best of the 2010s Indy Staff, Jorge Palacios, & Alex Westfall

News Jacob Alabab-Moser Izzi Olive Metro Victoria Caruso Alina Kulman Sara Van Horn Arts Zach Barnes Seamus Hubbard Flynn Features Mara Dolan Mia Pattillo Science + Tech Miles Guggenheim Matt Ishimaru

06 DECEMBER 2019

Ephemera Eve O’Shea Sindura Sriram X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Comberg Ella Rosenblatt Tiara Sharma Staff Writers Roxanne Barnes Alan Dean Muskaan Garg Ricardo Gomez Anabelle Johnston Jennifer Katz Sophie Khomtchenko

VOL 39 ISSUE 10

You scrunch your eyebrows at the sentence you’re editing, words blurring before your eyes, when suddenly a figure bounds into the room with her distinct swagger, the widest grin, and a new pair of eclectic earrings. She booms out a classic, “Hey y’all!!!” in a sing-song voice. Of course it’s MD. The room-wide greeting isn’t enough, as she goes around hugging everyone individually, asking how they are, how was their day, she loves that scarf! If you’ve been pining after her cheek-kisses, just know that it won’t be long until you too can receive MD’s showers of affection.

She has far too big of a heart (and social adeptness) to let someone slip by without making them feel welcomed, wanted, adopted. It’s astounding how many people MD juggles in her life and still manages to pay the utmost attention to.

Everyone thinks MD is flirting with them, but that’s just because she oozes love.

Sorry Capt. Seaweeds bartender, who gave us all free drinks after MD chatted with him in the 20 mins before we arrived, she has a bf. But don’t be fooled by the charm—MD is a force to be reckoned with. Just being in her presence makes you feel ten times more capable of doing anything.

My dear MD, how grateful am I to have spent hours with you lying on the floor of the Rock, bopping to Dolly Parton and the Dixie Chicks, reading naked, attempting InDesign. Thank you for lighting up conmag every week, for pouring your precious love into us all, and for inspiring us to live as fully as you do.

Mission Statement

13 Literary Divorce(e) Zach Barnes

Literary Catherine Habgood Isabelle Rea

Nothing gold, honey, can stay. It has been our privilege to be your puppeteers this volume. We pass along the strings to SAM. -BCT

03 Save the BCSC Concerned Brown Alumni

Week in Review Gemma Sack

But the days are getting shorter, the nights colder, and you sense that something’s off. The Indy might not be what you thought it was—or, at any rate, it’s changing fast.

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.

Emma Kofman Dana Kurniawan Deborah Marini Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Emily Rust Issra Said Peder Schaefer Star Su Kion You Copy Editors Grace Berg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Christine Huynh Cherilyn Tan Design Editors Ella Rosenblatt Christie Zhong Designers Anna Brinkuis

Kathryn Li Daniel Navratil Katherine Sang Illustration Editor Pia Mileaf-Patel Ilustrators Alana Baer Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Fatou Diallo Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stoll Eliza Macneal Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Owen Rival Charlotte Silverman Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Stephanie Wu

Art Director Claire Schlaikjer Business Somerset Gall Emily Teng Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Bienstock Muskaan Garg Pia Mileaf-Patel

Managing Editors Ben Bienstock Tara Sharma Cate Turner MVP Mia Pattillo *** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Alumni+Fundraising Chris Packs Senior Editors Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

week in comfort food

BY Gemma Sack and Alan Dean ILLUSTRATION Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN Kathryn Li

subway’s complex, varied flavor palate. Lewis’ meal sourcing their social justice-funding milk from “happy was a humorous stunt; churro ladies, most of whom are cows” raised in “Caring Dairy” farms are deliberate “Everybody get their plates, sit down, and eat,” immigrants, are simply trying to make a living. As one deception and false advertising. commuters heard, loud and clear, in a subway car in Twitter user, sharing a video of the meal, pointed out, Meanwhile, halfway across the world, a technoNew York City on Sunday, November 24. Rather than “& somehow the churro ladies are the big issue…” logical breakthrough has been made in the very same the typical announcements of signal malfunctions and Celebrating Thanksgiving is rarely, if ever, a form field of cow happiness. In the frosty Russian countrytrain traffic ahead, riders of this L train were treated of resistance: the holiday, which perpetuates roman- side outside of Moscow, the emotional well-being of to a much more pleasant disruption to their journey: a ticized white myths about US settler-colonialism dairy cattle let out to pasture in the dreary, gray winter full Thanksgiving meal. While the train was stopped, and erases the genocide of Indigenous peoples, often is being tackled head-on with a solution apt for the new a few passengers set up the feast on a white-clothed garners criticism, and even calls not to participate. decade: virtual Reality goggles for cows. Yes, much table, complete with mashed potatoes, stuffing, collard Indeed, since 1970, Native Americans and others have like Ben & Jerry’s has for years allegedly pulled wool greens, candied yams, macaroni and cheese, sparkling instead participated in a National Day of Mourning. over the eyes of self-styled "progressive purchasers," cider, and a whole turkey—much more appetizing than This year, President Trump claimed in a speech that so too shall the cows of Russia have their eyes covered the NYC subway's official bird, the pigeon. All passen- the so-called “radical Left” has declared a "War by digital wool, enticing them to yet-unseen levels of gers were invited to take a plate, a glass of cider, and on Thanksgiving." Many people on Twitter have quality milk production with the sweet, bright, green come aboard the literal gravy train. responded to the #WarOnThanksgiving with a healthy hues of a simulated summertime landscape.

This guerrilla Thanksgiving was organized by serving of derision. One user parodied that ever-AmerWhile Ben & Jerry’s is busy seeking to tempt local comedian Jodell Lewis, who spent months ican form, the wartime letter home, saying, “The customers with the promise of happy, frolicking cows, preparing for the festivities, choosing a target, plan- war has begun. I am on my way to the Bowling Green the Russian farms in question will let the caliber of ning his strategy, and organizing catering. Together campground to fight in the Battle of the Carbs. I will their dairy speak for itself, as they circumvent the with local rapper Christopher Dupree and chef Brandi bring my mac and cheese....you’re going down scal- need to physically build the calm, pleasant environBaxter, Lewis “wanted to entertain and bring a little loped potatoes!” And bring the mac and cheese they ment needed for such excellence in the fields, instead excitement to commuters as well as feed New Yorkers did, from Bunker Hill to the fortressed subway tunnels. investing directly in what matters most: the cows’ who might be hungry,” as he explained to the New York The #WarOnThanksgiving (and, more broadly, minds. This great leap for cowkind creates an entirely Post. He chose the L train as his banquet hall to draw all that the holiday stands for) is, in fact, very real. new quandary for the animal rights movement—rather attention to widespread commuter dissatisfaction with From New York City to Chile, where protestors have focusing on human perception of the cows’ physical long wait times caused by seemingly endless construc- burned train cars and toppled colonial statues, dissent conditions, Big Dairy has moved us into uncharted tion on the L line: “After waiting 20 minutes for a train,” in the subways belongs to a growing global move- territory, reorienting the debate to the cows’ own he noticed “how dreary and upset riders were at the ment resisting austerity, neoliberal economic poli- perception of physical conditions that do not, in actuinconvenience the new construction provided.” cies, and imperialism. And so, ironically, the L Train ality, even exist.

Long wait times are not the only grievance Thanksgiving feast, with its reclamation of public With the future of pure, untainted milk lying in commuters have with the city’s subways. Lewis’ space and celebration of commuters’ joy in the face wait, Russian students, IT specialists and veterinarrogue feast follows nearly a month of protests against of underfunding and over-policing, is part of that. We ians labor away at the bovine Matrix, adapting headincreased policing of fare evasion in the subways, at the Indy would like to join in and offer a season- sets to the anatomical specifications of cow skulls and which disproportionately targets low-income riders ally appropriate holiday greeting to the MTA and the developing 3D models of warm, soothing pastures. and people of color. These tensions have been NYPD: Eat your heart out.

Here at home, however, good old American milk slips simmering for years: commuters have long been infubehind as a domestic fifth column of environmenriated by the subway system’s crumbling infrastruc- -—GS talists, lawyers and shadowy ‘Organic Consumers ture, and many see the governor’s choice to devote Associations’ drag Ben & Jerry’s to the District of hundreds of millions of dollars to policing rather than Columbia Superior Court. At issue is not the degree to to necessary repairs as misguided and out-of-touch. GREENER GRASS FOR GRAZING which the “Caring Dairy” program actually lives up to Illustrating popular frustration at such austere poliits name, but that Ben & Jerry’s has greatly exaggercies, in response to a report that fare evasion costs NYC Take a big, decadent, moral bite of “Justice ReMix’d,” ated the percentage of their milk sourced from these $300 million annually, comedian Jaboukie Young- one of Ben & Jerry’s newest flavors. Not only is the farms. To wear the badge of honor that is “Caring White tweeted: “so we can try to catch all 500,000 chocolate and cinnamon ice cream full of “gobs of Dairy,” farms are required to commit to giving their people or have like two billionaires pay taxes.”

Spicy Fudge Brownies,” but “a portion of the proceeds” cows the daily outdoors time and place them in animal With tensions running abnormally high before the from each purchase will also go to vaguely defined welfare monitoring programs—technology-induced holiday season (and trains running normally slowly), projects for criminal justice reform across the United bliss does not yet seem to form part of the equation. the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) temporarily States. Parallel in spirit to the mixture of binge-eater This constitutes but one part of what environmental halted construction in an attempt to quiet the grum- shame and slacktivist pride one is supposed to feel after activists have described as the company's history of blings of hangry commuters. “When we announced downing a pint of their admittedly tasty ice cream, Ben “greenwashing," the central role of “liberal politics and pausing L Project construction to help New Yorkers & Jerry’s own corporate mission is oriented around environmentalist claims” to Ben & Jerry’s brand, from enjoy their Thanksgiving dinners, we didn’t mean three distinct imperatives: “to manage our Company their fully-employed “activism manager” to the twee have dinner on the L,” an MTA spokesperson said. for sustainable financial growth,” “to make the world electoral puns labeling the cartons of ice cream lining “It’s always nice to see people enjoying the subway, a better place," and “to make fantastic ice cream—for supermarket shelves. but remember our employees work hard to keep the its own sake."

The question of “Empower Mint” thus seems to system clean and get riders on and off of trains quickly.”

This attempt at branding, as a corporation that be a pressing one for consumers and livestock alike.

The MTA clearly believes that these Thanksgiving is thoughtful, responsible, and thoroughly above While soon cows wearing VR goggles will “in place of consumers have not shown sufficient gratefulness in exploiting anything but our collective craving for Russian reality see a summertime field,” according to time for the holiday. sugar, is one that has largely succeeded in the minds one Russian news source, American ice cream-buyers The gastronomic nature of Lewis’ infraction also of American consumers. As the Boston Globe reported may instead get a glimpse of their own realities of draws attention to other issues of repression in the on November 18, “For decades, Vermont-based Ben & production, what lies behind the façade of two bubbly subways. In the last few weeks, the NYPD has arrested Jerry’s has enjoyed a reputation as one of the country’s men from Vermont with a penchant for puns. Cows a number of unlicensed churro vendors in subway most progressive, forward-thinking companies." This and humans alike, we may all prefer what is simulated stations, sparking a public outcry defending the widely reputation, however, in the final weeks of the decade, for us, whether it is an alternative to the bleakness beloved ‘churro ladies’ (whose churros, this Indy editor now finally seems to be coming under threat, not in of rural Russia, or the cruel systems of exploitation notes, are delicious). The L Train feast, which the police regards to its projects, but its produce. Ben & Jerry’s undergirding our everyday consumption, that lie at the ignored, could then not help but highlight the incon- has suddenly found itself on the receiving end of two heart of the “Americone Dream." sistencies in the NYPD’s attempt to water down the class action lawsuits, alleging that their claims of

MOVABLE FEAST

—AD

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

02

SAVE THE BCSC We, the undersigned alumni of Brown University, write to express serious concern with the troubling atmosphere and recent heartbreaking student experiences at the the Brown Center for Students of Color (BCSC), formerly known as the Third World Center (TWC). Over the past five months, the Campus Life administration has failed to follow BCSC-established policies and practices and has subjected students to broken promises and poor and inconsistent communication. This lack of transparency, coupled with the administration’s refusal to include students or staffers in Center decision-making, undermines the TWC/ BCSC’s mission to be a space for and by students.

Lesson 3: Collective leadership doesn’t matter.

BCSC Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan commitments require that 50% of all search committees be comprised of undergraduates. Administrators and faculty outnumbered students four to three on the original director search committee. By September, an undergraduate student and a faculty member resigned due to concerns about the process. The remaining undergraduate tearfully reported “feeling really alone” and described the experience on the committee as “scary.” The TWC/BCSC legacy of shared governance is being broken. The BCSC cannot continue as a training ground for leadership when student voices can Our deep sadness about the current situation stems be so marginalized in the functioning of the Center. from our own memories of the Center during our time at Brown. For many of us, the Third World Center was Lesson 4: Commitments don’t matter. the first safe and truly intersectional space that we had ever experienced. It was the place where we felt heard, After instructing students to attend her office hours where we could support each other, and where we built for updates on the search and the future of the BCSC, relationships with some of the best friends of our lives. Nicole Truesdell was missing from these office hours Many of us served as student staffers at the Center; we and remained unreachable for 10 days. After promwere vital to its programming and proud to be stewards ising students a halt to the compromised director of its dynamic culture. The unique configuration of the search and assuring them of collective involvement TWC enabled us as students to practice shared gover- in next steps, she unilaterally selected and hired an nance, community-centered leadership, and develop a interim director: Dr. Charrise Barron, a finalist candiliving practice of trust, transparency, and accountabil- date from the very search Truesdell had promised to ity—a practice of transformative justice—that built the halt. After a student sit-in, Truesdell made additional foundations of our future selves. agreements to rescind the interim offer to Dr. Barron, to work with students on all decisions going forward, The experiences of current students, however, suggest and to ensure that BCSC professional staff would be that in stark contrast to the many positive lessons and given supplemental pay for the extra labor they have life experiences we gained at the Center, students taken on since the director’s termination. All these today are learning different lessons. Here is a brief commitments have been broken or remain unfulfilled. summary.

Lesson 5: Accountability doesn’t matter.

Lesson 1: Community members are disposable.

This disregard for student voices has persisted.

After seven years of service to Brown, the director of Students have met with Truesdell’s supervisor Eric the Brown Center for Students of Color was suddenly Estes and University President Christina Paxson. Both terminated from his position with only two weeks’ pay have refused to discuss any of Truesdell’s decisions as in lieu of prior notice from Nicole Truesdell, his super- well as the controversy of the current interim director visor of 15 months. The reason given for his termina- being a finalist from the ‘halted’ search. Instead, they tion was underperformance and lack of leadership. continue to suggest that students hold “conversations” Under his previous supervisor, however, he earned with Truesdell and Estes. Students are understandably ratings of “exceptional” and “exceeds expectations” wary of doing so due to Truesdell and Estes’ unwillingand had even won a campus-wide award for excellence ness to take accountability for the damage they have in leadership in 2017. The director offered to provide caused to students and staff. documentation to human resources directly contraIronically, transformative practice is still alive and dicting allegations made by Truesdell but was ignored well at Brown. This fall, current students at the Brown and rebuffed by HR. Additional requests for an inde- Center for Students of Color have launched two direct pendent review were also ignored. HR went so far as action protests, circulated a petition gaining over 370 to say that the challenge of a supervisor’s version of signatures, published an op-ed and historical timeevents meant that he was unfit to carry out his duties line, organized a BCSC staffer walkout, and engaged as director of the BCSC. This reveals a deep structural in numerous talks with administrators of Campus Life. injustice in Brown HR staff policies. Regardless of how They have led with a desire to understand, advocated one feels about a particular employee, current HR poli- for lasting change, and have met each other as well as cies provide no real grievance process for staff, leaving administrators with radical compassion and undying them vulnerable and sending the message that all of grace—even as they continue coursework. This speaks them are disposable. At the same time, students have to the legacy of the BCSC/TWC, the dedication of witnessed an administrator repeatedly tout transfor- the professional staff, and the Third World Coalition mative practice while exploiting this broken process to whose struggle has always been to push the University summarily fire a beloved community leader. towards justice. In this present moment, the Third World Coalition offers this administration an opportuLesson 2: Transparency doesn’t matter. nity to learn again.

We implore the University to engage these In non-compliance with BCSC practice regarding staff students in concrete discussion and negotiation to transitions, Truesdell issued no notice to students of mitigate the past and continued harm caused by recent the director’s departure. It was only when students university actions affecting students and staff. At this returned to campus to begin work on this summer’s time, we additionally urge alumni group leaders to Third World Transition Program (TWTP) that they hold dialogue with current students and professional were confronted with the shocking, undeniable fact staff at the BCSC to create effective avenues of support. that he was no longer at Brown. Many more students We envision this message will encourage alumni and only discovered the director had been removed by other parties to support the current students and the receiving bounce back emails when they reached out legacy of the BCSC. We hope that Brown takes this to him for support. When asked, Truesdell said he left opportunity to embody its core values of integrity, for personal reasons. The lack of communication and responsibility, and service to the campus community. transparency led to more confusion and anger among the students. Students are learning that truth-telling CONCERNED ALUMNI B’88-19 urge you to sign can be optional. their petition at tinyurl.com/BCSCAlumniPetition to support student activism and the BCSC.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Sincerely, Dania Matos, B’99-’03 Rakan Aboneaaj Stephanie Medina, B’10-’14 Ana Almeida, B’08-’12 Ruth Miller, B’15-’19 Carlos Aramayo, B’10-’14 Marc Briz, B’10-’14 Nicolas Montano, B’13-’17 Jess Brown, B’12-’16 Joelle Murchison, B’91-’95 Jieyi Cai B’13-’17 Ruhan Nagra, B’06-’10 Nia Campinha-Bacote, B’11-’15 Ralanda Nelson, B’08-’12 Julian Chan, B’88-’92 Vitor Oliveira, B’11-’15 Gareth Chen, B’13-’17 Oluwatomisin Onabanjo Manuel Contreras, B’12-’16 Uche Onwunaka, B’15’-’19 Asante Crews, B’13-‘19 Katelynn Pan Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn, B’08-’12 Nicole Parrish Sayantani DasGupta, B’88-’92 Maldonado, B’08-’12 Sarah Day Dayon, B’11-’15 Hector Peralta, B’12-’16 Tala Doumani, B’13-’17 Tho Phan, B’07-’11 Sierra Edd, B’14-’18 Daniel Prada, B’08-’12 Brian Elizalde, B’15-‘19 Jae Rice, B’12-’16 Waldo Feng, B’83-’88 Kara Roanhorse, B’14-’18 Maya Finoh, B’13-’17 Rahil Rojiani, B’09-’13 Camera Ford, B’12-’16 Jose Rodriguez, B’08-’12 Justice Gaines, B’12-’16 Nicolette Rodriguez, B’07-’16 Ry García-Sampson, B’08-’12 Aanchal Saraf, B’12-’16 Natasha Go, B’06-’10 Malcolm Shanks, B’07-’11 Sharina Gordon, B’09-’13 Courtney Smith, B’06-’10 Tilly Gurman, B’91-’95 Jacquelyn Silva, Stephanie Harris, B’10-’14 Jason Sperber, B’92-’00 Hisa Hashisaka, B’10-’14 Justine Stewart, B’07-’11 Clarion Heard, B’08-’13 Sana Teramoto Courtney Hoggard, B’15-’19 Yasmin Toney Victoria Huynh, B’15-’19 Paul Tran, B’10-’14 Chinezi Ihenatu, B’11-’15 Nancy Truong, B’13-‘17 Karynn Ikeda, B’05-’10 Bee Vang Iman Jenkins, B’10-’14 Naomi Varnis, B’12-’16 Soyoon Kim, B’14-’19 Tran Vu, B’06-’10 Isissa Komada-John, B’06-’10 Justin Williams, B’08-’12 Aditya Kumar, B’13-’17 Kehli Woodruff, B’90-’94 Lina Lalwani B’15-’19 Chahney Young Jenny Li Hinds, B’08-’12 Brian Lin, B’08-’12 Arisa Lohmeier, B’10-’14 & many others who have shown support in their Manuel Ávalos, B’15-’20 own ways Reducinda Avila, B’90-’94 Daniel Bernard, B’08-’12 Russyan Mark Mabeza, B’11-’15

Alumni Stand in Support of Student Activism

BY Concerned Brown Alumni DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

NEWS

03

The Making of a Ghost Photographs are the closest thing we carry to memory.

Though not pure representation, they can bring relief to a story, let it be told with artifacts. They allow us to bear witness to mortality, what shimmers with a reflection of before. +++ I began modeling when I was ten years old. As a figure skater, it seemed that I only needed to be more concerned with figure in order to become a model. +++ There is always excitement in learning the countless bodies I must wear. To mark the curve of their shoulder blades, the point of their waists, all the hollows of their bones.

When I do this, I understand that the body begins with what the mind illuminates. That the state of flesh is not absolute, I could move it over and over until it is here. That in pulling this density of glamour and lumen through my body, I must be wrenched open.

This is to all the ghosts that have inhabited my body.

BY Star Su ILLUSTRATION Star Su DESIGN Christie Zhong

he didn’t hold the umbrella over me. I remember that A line by itself quivers. Though singular, it will he didn’t want me to be nervous, since he was the one remember the remains of everything drawn before. A doing the work. line by itself holds the phantoms of what was, could be, always carved.

I do not remember that he didn’t walk further than the second plank. That is the distance of regard.

Whenever I shower, I check which lines have been broken, lifted. +++ (see Fig. 3) When my friends come over, they find it strange that I do not own a mirror. I do not know how to inform them +++ that I am always aware which parts of me must remain visible, which parts must be wrapped in a glowing He asked me to choose which ones I liked from the shroud. shoot. This was the first time a photographer had ever asked me to choose. As I looked through the pictures, In skating, I learned to look in the glass walls I was afraid of all the well-made moments that would surrounding the rink. To see the double that appeared slip through if I did not make the right choice. When I and name its arrival as mine. To see no further than the have spent this body forming this body, I do not want to surface of reflection, for its weight was more bearable let the shadows of this effort disappear. than the audience beyond the glass.

Throughout the shots, I noticed a blur. My smile In modeling, I learned to examine photos of myself not concentrated on the left dimple. My fingers hover over for what they revealed, but for what to hide next time. a branch, a button on my jacket, stray strands of hair.

How dark was preferable to light. How a lower neck- When my limbs have doubles, I realized that I was line masked the fact that I did not have breasts. How falling. The passage, each frame through the other, clothes erase, veil, restore. illuminated the limits of what was asked of me.

+++

+++

As we walked through the cemetery, he barely looked Looking is framed within us. It continues calibrating up from the camera. I gestured toward the trees draped wherever we stand. The mirror does not offer a way in in russet, tombstones crumbling at the crossroad, a or a way out. pond softened with tears of maple.

I know he did not find these beautiful, because he only pointed to the earth. The only nature that mattered to him was what could be formed under his gaze. I look through his camera, through him, until I see myself on the ground. I slip into place with the cemetery’s breaths. The tomb is a theater, desire for strange, soft flesh.

+++ With each pose, I am doing what others have done for eternity. There are no names for traditional modeling poses. My body is recognized only when it can be carved (or eroded) into a pattern that has mattered before.

What ghosts must I overwhelm to produce a story that does not believe in ghosts. +++ I consider this one where he had asked me to lay on the ground. Try to look like you’re burning. Unclip the clasp. Let the thin gold chain be still. Kissed upon the clavicle.

+++ On the way to the bridge, we passed by an abandoned car in someone’s front yard. As he photographed me, a We stopped when the sun slumped violet across the window to the house beyond the yard opened and an river. Only the darkness halted him from taking more. old man began to watch. Though I could not hear what he said, I can describe the shape his mouth had formed. +++ Lying on the hood of the car, I got nine mosquito bites.

When modeling, it is important to lie with lyric I am not sure which wound mattered more, which gaze complicity. Lying in every sensation. To bathe your pinned me raw. body in attention that makes you consent to destruction. Go into a night with limbs that will be shifted, +++ folded, loaded into a cartridge of light.

It is important to recognize that behind the ready+++ made veil of photos, there lies a body. Thus when a subject unmakes themself, they are not afraid to be At first, he thought that we had arrived at the wrong cast as a ghost. To look down, at a body that has faded bridge. The planks were so distant that the river to take on color and life elsewhere. appeared in clear light, forty feet below. +++ We walked around the bridge, trying to match the pictures he had seen on Instagram. We circled until his I do not remember who first suggested that I was round. camera could align the bodies—mine, the river, the sky, It does not matter, because I believed them. This began a horizon formed by fragile wood. the attempt to become more oval.

I remember that he didn’t ask if I was afraid of heights. I (see Fig. 2) remember that as the rain began falling with precision,

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+++ Sometimes, if you stare at someone with enough intensity, you can see a force field of color around their body. +++ A photograph is rendered readable by what it has buried. There is relief in finding what can be named.

Here, the candle is lit, blown, burning in symmetry. To take a photograph of something is to participate in its mortality. Now, let it be wicked.

The final step in becoming a ghost is to raise what you have chosen for a body.

+++

FEATURES

04

When Harry lost his home in October, he went to one of Rhode Island’s largest emergency shelters: Crossroads Rhode Island. He needed a safe place to stay the night, out of the cold and off the streets. Instead of a bunk and a locker, he was given a date two weeks out for an appointment with an assessment officer from the Coordinated Entry System (CES), an intake program initiated in 2018 that governs the majority of the shelters in Rhode Island. If he had chosen to, Harry could’ve stayed in the Crossroads lobby for 24 hours.

After that, CES rules would’ve forced him outside again to wait for his appointment. The front desk at Crossroads was forthright: The Providence Rescue Mission—a Christian, night-to-night shelter operating outside of CES with thirty beds and a no-tolerance policy for drug and alcohol use—was his only option, because all other Rhode Island shelter beds are now bound by CES and its ‘shelter placement’ process.

“That just doesn’t work for me,” Harry said. “If I’m homeless and I’m trying to get into a shelter and I have to go through them and wait two or three weeks for a bed, by then I could be dead.” After staying at the Mission for three nights, Harry started sleeping in a tent instead, choosing not to continue with the assessment process.

Gerard had an appointment set up with CES for the end of October, but missed it after being jailed for a month after a domestic violence incident. Once he was released, he didn’t have a CES intake completed, so none of the shelters would let him in. On his first night sleeping outside, somebody stole all of his possessions: blankets, cash, documents, and insulin. “I had no place to go,” he told the College Hill Independent. “I’m 52 years old, diabetic, insulin-dependent, and I got no help … They just pushed me away.”

In late September, Lydia, a pregnant mother of seven, planned on sleeping in Roger Williams Park with her boyfriend and five kids, ranging in age from two to 12. In June, her landlord had more than doubled her rent, and the summer saw the family’s savings spent on lodging in a Providence hotel. By September, when the money ran out, Lydia was unable to get a spot in an emergency shelter for her and her children.

If it weren’t for funds from a nightly outreach team from Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE), a volunteer group from Brown University, Lydia would not have gotten into a hotel that night.

In a interview with the Independent, Lydia phrased her problems with CES succinctly: “They didn’t help me.”

The stories of Lydia, Harry, and Gerard—whose identities the Independent has chosen to protect from repercussions with pseudonyms—mirror dozens of interactions that the authors of this piece, all outreach workers through HOPE, have had on and (mostly) off the record while working directly with people experiencing homelessness this fall. Our experiences with the system as outreach workers were frustrating and drove us to try to understand CES and how its successes and failures are gauged, often questionably, in the boardrooms responsible for implementing it.

Before the implementation of CES for families in May 2018 and for individuals in December 2018, those who needed a place to stay were able to walk into emergency shelters in Providence, Pawtucket, Westerly, and Woonsocket and get a spot for that night if one was open. What changed? New requirements for federal funding outlined by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) called on Continuums of Care, regionalized committees that oversee services such as case management and shelter, to institute a “standardized assessment tool” for the allocation of resources.

In the past, resources were distributed according to arbitrary lists and didn’t take into consideration immediate need and client vulnerability. The stated goal of CES was to cut out the potential for

discrimination and to clarify the system, making finding shelter and housing easier. This coordinated intake approach should facilitate more comprehensive data collection, promote more accurately targeted resource distribution, and connect people to services specialized for their lived experiences. On the permanent housing side of the equation, run by the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless (RICH), the system seems to work well, allocating resources in an efficient and fair manner. But Rhode Island’s Continuums of Care split from most other states in extending the mandate to shelters. All emergency homeless shelters in the state have to operate under this new program, run by Crossroads Rhode Island, or risk losing funding.

In Rhode Island, those close to the ground say the system managing emergency shelter is failing.

“It’s November, and we’re dealing with folks who are going to end up dying,” said Barbara Freitas, executive director of the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project (RIHAP). “It’s not, ‘they’re not going to get in for a few days and it’s no big deal.’ People are going to die.” +++ Megan Smith, an outreach worker at House of Hope Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit that strives to fight homelessness in Rhode Island, is just as worried. As she explained to the Independent, Rhode Island’s implementation of CES is an unacceptable answer to a complicated problem. “There are no tweaks around the edges that will fundamentally fix [CES],” she said. “At its core, it doesn't feel like it’s rooted in the right philosophy, which is hearing what people who are experiencing homelessness need,

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A flawed system is endangering RI’s homeless building up a system that connects people to resources as they exist, and using what is learned to advocate for additional resources from people who can provide them.” For Gerard, this would have meant an assessment before being released; if ‘coordination’ is truly the goal, then jails, prisons, and hospitals that temporarily hold people experiencing homelessness need to be integrated as well.

In other states, Continuums of Care have outlined coordinated entry systems that do not obstruct emergency shelter and emergency care, adhering more closely to HUD requirements which specify that the “coordinated entry process must allow emergency services...to operate with as few barriers to entry as possible.” Peter Kellerman, the co-director of an emergency shelter in Vermont, assured the Independent that, in his state, CES is primarily a data-collection system that does not delay immediate access to emergency shelter. The Vermont Continuum of Care empowerers localities and has built-in room for flexibility. “When someone’s health and safety is in play,” he told the Independent, “the rules can kind of go out the window.”

Theresa McDevitt, Coordinated Entry Manager for Diversion and Assessment at Crossroads, wrote to the Independent that the system is “identified by HUD, nationally, as a best practice.” But the Rhode Island variety of coordinated entry fails to meet the standards

that it sets for itself. The RI Statewide CES procedure manual highlights the importance of CES assessments and referrals being readily accessible, yet the numbers show this isn’t the case.

Performance data obtained by the Independent in October from the Rhode Island Continuum of Care showed that the average wait time between initial assessment and shelter placement was 21 days for families, 15 days for transition-aged youth, and nine days for individuals. As of November 1, there were 67 individuals and 57 families on shelter waiting lists. While there is no data that gives the average wait time to get an initial appointment, Bill Chamberlain, associate director of RIHAP, said that assessments are often booked two weeks out. On November 25, the earliest CES assessment appointment that could be booked was for December 11, a 16-day wait. That can make the time from initial contact with CES to a placement in an emergency shelter in Rhode Island anywhere from three to four weeks for an individual and up to a month for a family. When the Independent spoke to Lydia on November 16, she said that she had not heard from CES regarding shelter placement since her assessment in late September. These lengthy wait times put families—like Lydia’s—and individuals in danger and defeat the purpose of emergency shelter.

Additionally, appointments are hard to schedule and hard to travel to. When they are booked so far in advance, keeping track of them becomes secondary to survival. As forces of racism, sexism, and ableism limit access to resources across the board, these barriers fall particularly hard on marginalized people. For people of color, already disproportionately overrepresented in Rhode Island’s homeless community, waiting outside for a shelter to open up carries a host of other consequences in a city that pursues petty crime along racialized lines. For women, staying outside alone is never safe, but is sometimes the only option.

Issues of access also disproportionately impact those with cognitive and physical disabilities.

Answering detailed, personal questions about trauma precludes many from even considering the CES assessment, and the traumatic nature of shelters in America—Crossroads included—makes the primary point of assessment infeasible for some who have been there in the past. When these soft barriers (discomfort, alienation, and distance) prevent assessments, harder barriers (metal and plexiglass) shut individuals out physically. McDevitt told the Independent that “we need to do more, as a state, to ensure that the highest need clients are getting to the front door.” But the problem is the front door itself. If the system were to reflect the needs and demands of the people it serves, the “front door” of CES would be more accessible and would meet people where they are—whether that’s through assessments being administered by outreach workers, over the phone, or via clinics operated at meal sites.

Will Lawlor, another outreach worker with House of Hope CDC, echoed Smith, repeatedly pointing to his belief that the system doesn’t work for many, especially the most vulnerable. “You need an appointment to go to a shelter if you’re homeless,” said Lawlor.

“That’s nuts. A shelter is supposed to be a safe haven.” +++ Evidence from the streets is overwhelming: caseworkers, service providers, and homeless people have said that more people are sleeping outside this winter, the wait times for shelters are long, and making assessment appointments by phone is difficult. But to Crossroads, and the CES bureaucracy, the data leads them in a different direction. In a presentation to community partners last month at RICH, Alex Moore, the Director of Program Outcomes and Evaluations at Crossroads, discussed how Crossroads tracks clients after they exit coordinated entry. Moore claimed that a rise in the “self-resolution of homelessness” and a drastic drop in entry to shelters were clear successes of the system. By running CES entry and exit data through a set of self-derived formulas and filters, he has categorized some 42% of families and 16% of individuals that have lost contact with the system as having “likely self-resolved their cases.”

What does it mean for someone to be placed in this category? CES removes a “client” from the system if there is no contact over 30 or more days, during which time (according to protocol) CES attempts to reach a client three times. When no contact is made, and when there are no updates in the central HMIS database (filled in by caseworkers and other accredited

06 DEC 2019

BY Deborah Marini, Loughlin Neuert, & Peder Schaefer ILLUSTRATION Illustrator DESIGN Anna Brinkhuis

individuals), CES labels a client as self-resolved. But Crossroads does not confirm whether people have ended contact for other reasons, such as if they’ve left the state, been jailed (like Gerard), or fallen through the cracks. A victim of domestic violence diverted back home to their abuser is counted as “likely self-resolved.” As of November, if someone who is homeless dies, the formula marks them as being “likely selfresolved.” Harry and Gerard would all be counted as “likely self-resolved” by CES standards, but both are currently living outside. Lydia is also counted as a success, regardless of the fact that CES has not reached out to help her.

Moore’s presentation also noted the abrupt drop in entry to Harrington Hall, the largest shelter for men in Rhode Island. From December 2018, when CES kicked in for individuals, until April 2019, entry into the Hall fell sharply from 214 to 98 clients. For the 98 men who still have a reliable bed, the drop in entry and rise in stability is a good thing: more case working, less fighting, better services. Moore seemed to take this exodus, during a month where average nighttime temperatures hovered around the low twenties, at face value. Members of other organizations at the meeting, however, weren’t satisfied. Where did 116 men go?

Did they all suddenly find affordable apartments?

Was there a rapture in Rhode Island? Moore seemed confused by their questions. “The data doesn’t lie,” he repeated, then pointed to the content of his previous slides, arguing that a lot of them had “likely self-resolved” their homelessness. The severity of the plunge in entry numbers, and its timing, call into question the possibility that these men could have faced diversion to any state other than homelessness during the most dangerous time to be sleeping outside.

In effect, the wide reach of this data filter labels those failed by CES—the disenfranchised, the incarcerated, and the dead—as success stories. With this filter, Crossroads is looking at their work through rosetinted glasses. If CES and Crossroads are convinced that the only way to do right by 98 men in Harrington Hall is to lock the door on 116 others, they cannot be allowed to pretend that they are helping the latter group, whose calls pile up in jam-packed answering machines and whose tents crowd the Providence River. +++ CES and Crossroads are not solely to blame for wait times and closed doors. A staff member’s sudden departure in October left them short in the communication department. In terms of supply, Crossroads also consistently references the fact that there are no ‘empty’ beds in the shelters operating under CES, and so the wait times for shelter are out of their control.

However, while every bed is assigned by CES to a person, if this person doesn’t show up to the shelter the bed remains unfilled for the entirety of the night.

Smith told the Independent that on any given night there are empty beds at Harrington Hall, and that she’s heard of numerous men who have been turned away.

There are 112 spots in Harrington Hall, but the data put forth by Moore says that only 98 men stayed in the shelter this April, and that from April to October, the monthly inflow never climbed above 108 men.

Additionally, according to Chamberlain, Crossroads has cut 75 emergency winter spaces over the last fifteen years. This decline is in part due to a stricter adherence to fire codes and health and safety concerns, but is also indicative of winter shelters growing increasingly inflexible. Crossroads chose not to apply for Winter Overflow funding this year, meaning that the dining hall will not serve as a backup

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

emergency shelter for clients, as it has previously.

This decision is antithetical to Freitas’ conception of the shelter network, which she thinks should act as an “accordion” that grows and expands to meet the community’s immediate needs on dangerously cold nights.

Rigidity in the shelter system is a departure from years past. “In the old days, if you walked into the shelter and there was a spot, you got a spot,” said Chamberlain of RIHAP, who experienced homelessness himself in 2012. “Five years ago, you would walk into Harrington Hall and you would get a spot, and this is recent memory.” Shelters are, inarguably, unideal places to stay, and many people—some of whom are scared, some of whom have been traumatized by or in specific shelters in the past, some of whom are incapable of living in such close quarters with other people—choose to instead sleep outside and only rely on shelters during dangerous weather conditions and other unscheduled events. These people are still operating under the assumption that the lobby of Crossroads will be open to them when they need it this winter, and they are not going to be ready with a completed CES assessment and shelter referral when the first big snowstorm hits.

Currently, there are three beds in Harrington Hall that are reserved for emergency referral by street outreach workers. The front lobby of the Crossroads location on Broad Street has five available benches in the lobby, and the community room has space for 25 mats. Conversations with people experiencing homelessness make it clear: Occasionally shelter staff will will bend or break CES rules for you, but most of the time they won’t.

Ultimately, CES has stifled the flexibility of Providence’s shelters. Smith recounted a story of a client who was threatened with ejection from Harrington Hall over weekly absences. Policy dictates that clients cannot be absent more than two nights a month, but Smith’s client was leaving on Sundays to spend time with a family member. Smith argued that the new rules are often used as a crutch to justify inhumane treatment of people. “Why wouldn’t we want someone to maintain connection with their family?” she said. “And when I asked that question and asked that question, what I got was that ‘these are the rules.

This is the system.’ But we have created the system.

You don’t get to create the rules and the system and then fall back on the rules and the system.”

Crossroads says that it is underfunded, understaffed, and drowning in CES calls and assessment appointments. It says that more money needs to be invested into CES in order to hire more people to staff the hotline, to provide more resources for diversion, and to pay to train other service providers. (Amos House is the only other service provider currently trained for giving assessments.) Outreach workers and case managers are eager to be trained to do CES assessments to lessen the burden on Crossroads, but the trainings have not occurred. “We, the House of Hope outreach team, among others, have been asking when can we get trained,” said Smith. “We keep getting told different things. At first they were updating their rollout, now it’s data standards…I understand data standards, but doesn’t that put the cart before the horse here—that we can’t get people into shelter as fast as we should because we are missing demographic information in a database?”

When asked about the lack of training for other organizations, McDevitt said by email that staff at Crossroads and RICH are “discussing training schedules,” but that trainings have been delayed because of “system processes and implementation changes”

and new HMIS (Homeless Management Information System) standards for data collection. She stressed that CES wanted to be confident in the “process and procedure before training other service providers.” +++ The struggles of CES don’t take place in a vacuum.

That hundreds of people in Rhode Island are living outside without a place to call home is indicative of a wider housing crisis in the state, with people unable to afford rising rents due to stagnant wages and a lack of government support for affordable housing and rent control. Righting larger systemic inequities so no one lives out on the streets is a longer-term goal, but current logistical problems with CES—such as wait times—are endangering people now, and the backload and dangers will only get worse in the winter months ahead.

But even with shorter-term fixes, the question remains of whether Rhode Island’s iteration of CES is the right system to help homeless people in Rhode Island. “Unfortunately, I think CES is an entrenchment of some challenging narratives around homelessness—namely, that if we push people hard enough into the shape of our system as it is, or push them hard to make the formal economy and the housing market work for them, that’s going to solve things,” said Smith. “I think that’s false. It makes me sad that we’re entrenching that system, and not having their needs take the center.”

CES as implemented in Rhode Island has created a system that demands compliance to stringent data standards and assessments in order to access basic resources, and in doing so has prioritized data collection over sheltering people. To those running CES, the numbers tell them that the way they are operating right now is acceptable, and that they are making a primarily positive impact. This centralized data lets Crossroads more clearly articulate, at least internally, a resume of success that doesn’t clearly exist. There is always a need for more shelter beds, but Crossroads’ interpretation of the data belies just how acute, and urgent, this shortage is. Their formulas are at odds with the actual experiences of those experiencing homelessness and the community partners engaged in on-the-ground work. “Nobody likes to admit that they are doing a bad job, but they are,” said Freitas, who also sits on the RI Continuum of Care Board. “We are doing a bad job.”

While we at the Independent can’t accurately guess at CES’s future, we do know what will happen this winter if the system doesn’t change. Rhode Island’s homeless population will continue to live without adequate emergency access to shelter. Each night without a warm, safe place to sleep is another night exposed to the elements and another night at risk of theft and violence. We also know what has already happened, to people like Harry, Lydia, Gerard, and so many others like them who have faced the barriers built by CES. That harm cannot be fully undone, and, as Lawlor told the Independent, homeless folks can’t wait for the rest of us to figure out how to get it right.

CES needs to hire more staff, train more people to do the assessments, and place the needs of people experiencing homeless at the center of the system—creating a CES that works for everyone.

DEBORAH MARINI B’22, PEDER SCHAEFER B’22, AND LOUGHLIN NEUERT B’22 are disappointed that Ben Carson didn’t reply to their emails.

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CHILE DESPERTÓ October 26

Chile has long been heralded as one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America and an example of global renown for the success of its neoliberal economic model. Yet Santiago youth protesting a metro fare hike in mid-October set off a nationwide wave of popular mobilizations. Since then, Chileans have taken to the streets out of discontent with the status quo, namely a system of governance unresponsive to their basic social and economic needs. This has been the largest wave of protests in post-dictatorial Chile, with marches that have reached 1.5 million participants in the capital alone. As these demonstrations have been violently repressed by police forces and the military, at least 22 people have been killed.

The National Institute of Human Rights has so far filed 458 complaints against the government for torture and cruel inhuman treatment, and 88 for sexual violence.

Over two hundred protesters have been shot in the eye by police with rubber bullets, and international watchdog groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have identified state policies expressly intended to harm protesters.

rights violations under Pinochet and suggest reparations to victims. Although the report confirmed thousands of cases of human rights violations, including assassinations, it only led to a few convictions, and those with political responsibility for these systematic abuses were never held accountable.

But I think Professor Rodriguez is absolutely right in that recent governments’ emphasis on upholding an image of democratic restoration through the crafting and molding of a historical memory has obscured the structural harm of the dictatorship, especially in leaving the neoliberal economic model unquestioned.

Such superficial changes also neglected the spearheading of a much-needed process of social reconstruction and rethinking how people relate to the state and each other.

In many ways, I think that what we are seeing today in the streets—what Chile has been experiencing for over a month and a half now—is the transition we never had. It is a painful confrontation with our past in its economic and social dimensions. While that is a diffiWe sat down with PAULA PACHECO SOTO B’20, cult and contested process, at least it is not the aided, former Independent news editor and an organizer of the fabricated transition we once had. movement in solidarity with Chilean demonstrators on Brown University’s campus, to discuss her views The Indy: Among protestors, how do demands for on the recent movement. Earlier this month, Paula change in Chile diverge? At the panel, you spoke about organized and participated in a panel at the Watson the change in progressive discourse towards doing Institute entitled “Chile Despertó: Understanding “away with the whole system,” as opposed to reform the Social Crisis in the Latin American ‘Oasis.’” The within existing political arenas. Is this realistic? panelists, including Paula and other academics and activists, discussed the legacies of neoliberalization in PPS: People are not interested in a merely representaChile, especially with regard to education and Chile’s tive democracy anymore. We have to understand the history of student activism, as well as the role of collec- current political moment as still part of the transition tive memory in social movements. The Indy spoke with from dictatorship—people are rejecting the economic Paula about her perspectives on recent political devel- (and political) dictatorial model, even if by optics we opments, the politics of the protest movement, and live in a democratic nation. On November 14, people the incorporation of women’s and Indigenous peoples’ commemorated a year of the assassination of Camilo voices in the movement.

Catrillanca, a Mapuche weichafe who was murdered in cold blood by the militarized police, the Comando +++ Jungla trained in the United States and Colombia.

When the police kill with impunity—not only in the The Independent: Professor Daniel Rodriguez context of the recent social mobilization but also opened the panel by situating the recent protest move- consistently for decades before—what kind of democment within the broader context of the role of histor- racy are we talking about? When the processes of ical memory in Chilean politics since the end of the truth and reparations of the dictatorship were nothing Pinochet dictatorship. Do you agree with him that the but cosmetic, what kind of democracy are we talking emphasis on accountability for individuals during the about? When we still have a constitution written in dictatorship who committed human rights violations the 1980s behind closed doors, by the accomplices of has meant, in turn, continued impunity for the depri- a dictator? vation of social rights?

Any talks with the president have failed so the movePPS: Yes and no. I don’t think the project of historical ment has become increasingly unaffiliated with formal memory has necessarily been about accountability in political parties. Since the 2011 student movement, the first place. Instead of accountability, Chile’s tran- which demanded an end to privatized, marketized sitional justice model was one of convivencia, allowing higher education, we’ve seen the proliferation of both perpetrators and victims to coexist within the extra-institutional spaces like cabildos and popular new democratic project created after the dictator- assemblies based on residential areas. ship. In that sense, I think the methods of supposed accountability were just gestures seeking to reassert The Indy: In mid-November, President Piñera Chile’s democratic success at the international level, announced that there will be a referendum in April rather than meaningful changes to bring peace and 2020 regarding the creation of a new constitution. Do reparations into the lives of victims of human rights you view this development with optimism? violations. Take the Rettig Report, which was a truth commission created in 1991 to investigate human PPS: No. I am maybe glad that there is something to

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work on, but I do not trust this government and do not trust any deal they strike. Of course I am saying this as a person who is in the United States—I cannot physically participate in the streets and don’t have to carry the physical and emotional toll of being on the streets everyday for a month. But still. We should not forget that we need “peace” because the President himself declared war on the people on October 23. On Friday, after this “deal for peace” was written between the opposition and government, Abel Acuña, a 29-year-old protestor, died of a heart attack in the midst of a protest because the police prevented paramedics and the ambulance from saving his life by using rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons against them. Who is this peace for, then? It is not peace just because the government wants to call it so. They don’t want peace, they want passivity—without a real compromise to truth and reparations, to accountability.

And, even worse, they want us to wait until April. They are blinded and indolent to the urgency of the demands of the people.

I am still going to vote in April, but before that, I hope the scenario radically changes. We owe it to the young people who began this revolution. They need to be able to vote, a right not currently provided to young people under the age of 18. We need to include parity law for different genders and quotas for our Indigenous people to have a central role in this new constitution. The Constitutional Assembly needs to be delinked to the political establishment and constituted from territorial organizations, civil society, and everyday people.

It must reflect the feminists, queers, grandparents, secondary students—all of those who have taken to the streets for the last 20 years in Chile. We cannot fail in this new transition as we did in 1990. And part of that is a process of true accountability that overthrows the old political establishment through democratic means.

The Indy: Last Monday, November 25, was the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, for which hundreds of protestors in Chile took to the streets. What has the role of women been in this current movement so far? Have demands for gender equality, including the end of gender-based violence, been prioritized?

PPS: I think feminists have, without a doubt, been at the forefront of the social mobilization, and have done incredible work to bring a gendered understanding of social rights and political participation into the discussion. Same goes for sexual orientation and gender minorities. Feminists have been challenging patriarchal and machista culture within the movement, while refuting the idea of women being in the sidelines of political transformations. That has meant positioning demands for gender equality, and sexual and bodily rights, including the right to abortion. That has become increasingly relevant as state repression continues, because the bodies of women are especially policed, surveilled, and assaulted. There is sadly plenty of testimony to that, as women have been forced to strip upon being detained by police forces, and they have experienced non-consensual touching and threats of rape at alarming rates compared to their male counterparts.

06 DEC 2019

Paula Pacheco Soto on the Chilean student movement in historical perspective

BY Jacob Alabab-Moser, Izzi Olive, and Paula Pacheco Soto DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Still, the demands of feminists aren’t just focused on sexual and bodily rights, but encompass the fact that women suffer some of the worst consequences of this “precarization of life” under the current economic model—charged with oppression in the household, at the workplace, and in relationship to state. Chilean women are more likely to work in precarious jobs, without a contract, making around 30% less money than men, while also being solely responsible for household chores and childrearing. All of this in a context where abortion is available only in extreme life or death circumstances and the state fails to provide adequate support for women in terms of maternity leave and childcare. That is why feminists are not fighting these fight alone, but in coalition with workers’ unions, territorial assemblies, and the people in the streets.

The feminist fight obviously translates to the upcoming constitutional process, and feminist coalitions are emphasizing the need for this text to be written from a gendered perspective, to recognize and guarantee sexual and reproductive rights, and to ensure a life free of violence for citizens—a process that is encompassing of the diversity of families that exist in our country. I think more broadly, when thinking about the revolutionary process in Chile today, it has to center these perspectives (feminist and dissident perspectives, for example) that are really about reconfiguring relationships of power, rather than just seeking particular concessions from the current political and economic order.

October 22

November 21

The Indy: How has the current movement incorporated the demands of Indigenous people in Chile?

PPS: That’s a tough question—I don’t know if I have a good answer or if others would agree with me. I think broadly, people in the streets want to reclaim and make spaces for the Mapuche struggle. There is a sense that the violence experienced by people in the streets today is what the Mapuche have experienced for centuries, increasingly in the last few years with the militarization of their ancestral lands, and hence that our calls for the government to be held accountable for human rights violations must encompass the claims of Indigenous people to justice and self-determination.

But of course, it is hard to put that into practice, and it is a fine line between inclusion and cooptation.

In more concrete terms, there is an attempt to ensure quotas for Indigenous participation in this new constitutional process. Currently, Chile does not have a system of quotas that ensure Indigenous political representation, even though there are Indigenous parliamentarians who have been elected. Of course that would mean including them in a process that still centers the Chilean state and the national project, and that is not necessarily in the best interest of the independence and self-determination of Wallmapu, the territory the Mapuche inhabit. The current social mobilization cannot turn into a nationalist movement, and instead must work to reframe ideas of territoriality, belonging, and people’s relationship to politics and the state.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

October 28: I'm still thinking about this light from Monday. Let everything burn.

Photos and captions by @diegoreyesvielma

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ISABELA LOVELACE

SALVE

CLARIBEL WU

LUCINDA DRAKE THE COVEN

PLEASE DON'T TALK TO ME WHEN I'M MEDITATING SINDURA SRIRAM

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EPHEMERA

NATASHA BRENNAN

HOLD ME CLOSE

LUCINDA DRAKE & JONAS BOONE

MESSAGES OF AFFIRMATION CLARIBEL WU

NYC

SCREW YOUR PRE-DEFINED SQUIRREL NARRATIVE

CLARIBEL WU

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ALANA BAER

SUZANNE ANTONIOU

SINDURA SRIRAM

EPHEMERA

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MAPPING CAPITAL

BY Ella Comberg DESIGN Claire Schlaikjer

Urban disinvestment on the small screen Vince Staples’ music video “FUN!” opens on a digital rendering of the planet Earth. The camera zooms in rapidly—as many of us do on our own computers—to see an urban neighborhood from above. In this case, it’s Long Beach, California’s Ramona Park neighborhood, labeled on this map as “Norfy.” The user of whatever computer we’re inside pulls a little yellow man from the map’s sidebar and onto the streets. Suddenly, we are on Google’s Earth, inching along Google’s streets.

Set to the pounding digital beat of Staples’ song, the music video closely replicates Google Street View, the imaging project that the search (and data) giant has undertaken since 2007 to photograph every street in the world. Those images, once stitched by Google into a three-dimensional, virtually walkable, and seemingly infinite map, are so immersive that they feel like life as we live it. Except in this version of the technology, the streets of Ramona Park aren’t quite Google’s, nor are they the streets we know in the real world. In this iteration of digital mapping, people—young Black men, women, and children—have digitally visual lives that are visibly both dynamic and devastating, overpoliced and FUN. They have unblurred faces and moving, living bodies, not the frozen, blurred ones they would on Google Street View. Over the course of the music video, they light a vigil for a shooting, get in a street fight that an onlooker records on her phone, play double dutch, and steal a white neighbor’s bicycle. They also steal her phone, which she’s using to call the police, who then arrive and arrest Staples and his peers. They do it all in the space of an alternative Google Street View until, at the very end of the video, the user who’s been navigating the scene is revealed: He’s a tweenage white boy sitting in his room on his laptop. The video ends when his mother calls him to dinner. As if afraid someone will think his virtual wanderings improper, he quickly shuts his laptop, and the video cuts to black. +++ Surely you’ve walked virtual streets. I certainly have.

Almost every day, I find myself in digital Baltimore, gliding down streets lined with three-story brick row homes, many of them painted in light pastels.

Sometimes, I’ll see a piece of graffiti on one of these facades that reads “No shoot zone,” a marker of the unsanctioned organizing and self-preservation practices undertaken by Black activists in the city. Other times, I’ll land in Watts or on the South Side of Chicago, coming upon scenes of sun-drenched sprawl in the former and verdant density in the latter.

I am most touched by the scenes, which I find in northern cities, of children walking home from school, clutching their coats closed in the freezing cold, backpacks unzipped, straps falling down unceremoniously.

These are moments of narrative that peek through a technology that otherwise tries to suppress markers of humanity in an effort to de-identify. For me, Google Street View becomes a point of contact with the poor urban communities that I snaked in and out of, grew up in close proximity to but never fully inside; spaces I knew intimately but that were never quite my own. It is the most practical tool for accessing the hyper-specific places that I’m now geographically and socially removed from. It is also, as the “FUN!” video shows, a totally perverse, obviously reductive, and exceedingly common way to do so.

My favorite scene ever emerged when I was Google-walking around West Philadelphia, where I grew up. A house stands alone in an otherwise vacant lot. If you use the tool that allows you to go back in time to earlier Street Views of this place, an image emerges of two boys, a girl, and their father on the stoop, barefoot in the summer of 2007. When you pull the map forward to 2018, the girl has aged to look like she’s in her late teens, sitting on the stoop once again, this time with a terrier. But I don’t know the whole story; in fact, I know almost none of it. I can’t see inside the house,

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and even if I could, that wouldn’t be enough to compile a life narrative. The moments I come upon on Google Street View are really only the tip of the iceberg. They indicate what’s hiding behind the visual map, in the lived world that the technology tries, unsuccessfully, to convey in full. But this might not even be the same girl. I can’t tell because her face is blurred.

military origins and into civilian life; researchers at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard, namely, began to collaborate with defense contractors and city governments in service of a hyper-logical—that is, computerized and anti-human—vision for the built environment; and the Aspen Movie Map, a dinky proto-Google Street View, was born. This moment, when the relationships between the corporation, the military, the +++ research university, and the planning departments of American cities were laid bare proves incredibly useful Google Street View, of course, does not aim to tell life in understanding the black-boxed urban imaging technarratives. It aims to show the whole world. But as nologies of today, whose true intention often remains my digital wanderings and “FUN!” show, even with purposefully obscured. infinite visual data, certain images present far more compelling narratives and aesthetics than others. +++ In the examples I’ve given, these have been scenes of American urban poverty. These are not isolated Like many functionally inoffensive technologies, examples. In recent years, a number of “Street View including the internet itself, Google Street View photographers,” most famously Doug Rickard and Jon has its roots in the military. Researchers at MIT’s Rafman, whose work fixates on derelict and disturbing Architecture Machine Group (now the MIT Media Lab) scenes respectively, have risen to fame on the internet acquired a contract from the Department of Defense’s and prominence in the art world. Most praise for these Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1977. As media artists has centered on their ability to use a seem- historian Aubrey Anable writes, they were asked “to ingly banal tool to produce photography that feels develop a computer-based surrogate travel system like photography, not a screenshot. Little attention, that the military could use to train personnel for urban however, has been given to the content or geography combat.” By virtually experiencing a place before of these photographs, which all gravitate toward attacking it, military officials hoped soldiers would poverty—in things and in people—as it manifests in the have a more informed understanding of the spaces street. where they would fight. With this as their program, the The neighborhoods Rickard, Rafman, and I MIT team began tinkering. Eventually, they produced look at on Google Street View are uniquely compel- a station wagon with four 16mm film cameras strapped ling for a number of reasons. The clearest is a kind of to the roof programmed to take photos every ten feet. voyeurism, made possible by Google’s massive visual They tested it on the streets of Aspen, Colorado. The data cache, that allows wealthy people with no interest virtual environment that the team developed from in actually going to poor neighborhoods to feel like these images asked users to sit in an Eames chair in they are experiencing them, perhaps sympathetically, a dark room, where they used a joystick to navigate by way of digital watching. (The last few seconds of Aspen’s newly virtual streets.

“FUN!” gesture to the problem of white spectatorship.)

The so-called Aspen Movie Map has clear mechanThere’s also the undeniable fact that poor Americans ical similarities to Google’s roving cars, which would are forced into the public realm in ways the wealthy be introduced some thirty years later. Alongside these almost never are. “The camera only captures who’s on technical similarities, Aspen also delineated the relathe street during daylight hours,” says Rafman, “while tionship between military technology and urban most, let’s say, white-collar workers are in their offices development, mediated through the digital map. The somewhere. People like prostitutes, people living wealthy, small, and well-kempt ski resort town of on the street, they have much more of a chance to be Aspen offered an easily manageable and mappable test captured by the camera.” Rickard likewise shows bus site for students and researchers to try out their new stops, public parks, back alleys, and stoops—places technology. Unlike the cities still recovering from the where poor Americans can’t hide from Google’s eye, race riots of the late sixties—places largely understood inhabited by people whose houses aren’t wrapped with by intellectuals at universities like MIT in the language fences that even Google’s eight-foot-tall cameras can’t of crisis and, oftentimes, war—Aspen was appealingly see over. uncomplicated (that is, white and wealthy). In its But these critiques only really scratch the surface of exclusion, the city remained free of the poverty and the argument one could make about Google’s imaging resultant instability that so defined the elite imaginaproject as it relates to the decimation of the country’s tion of American cities in this period. It was, in many poorest urban neighborhoods. I have, it seems, fallen ways, what the MIT researchers thought the city of the into the trap of user experience. As tech reporter future could be.

Alexis Madrigal writes in the Atlantic, “They've built How could city planners replicate the placid model this whole playground as an elaborate lure for you.” Aspen represented in more traditional American cities?

Madrigal is referring to the ways Google Maps gathers The answer came in the form of military technologies massive amounts of user location data, but the state- like the Movie Map. As historian Jennifer Light writes ment holds true in the context of how we talk about in her book From Warfare to Welfare, after the failure the images they produce as well. The black box, which of urban renewal in the late sixties to ameliorate urban prevents us from seeing most of what famously-eva- problems from traffic to poverty and crime, city governsive tech companies do with the data they gather, also ments looked to the RAND Corporation, Lockheed means that options for critique itself are limited to Martin, and other military contractors to provide algowhat we can see on the screen. The viewing public is rithmic solutions to the problems of mostly Black cityforced into formalism: How does the camera convey dwellers. Coincidentally, after the Vietnam War, many condescension? What are the politics of viewing of these companies needed to adapt their technology people of a different class or race positioning than you to a commercial terrain. The City of Pittsburgh’s planon the screen? Questions like these, which populate ning department, for example, hired Calvin Hamilton, the history of photography, are renewed with the new an early military planning researcher at Harvard. tool Google has hoisted upon the public, but they don’t When Hamilton brought with him tools for digital respond in any particular way to this technology itself. mapping from Harvard, Pittsburgh began to create What we should be asking, really, is how the camera (or, computer simulations of urban space. the corporation that owns and navigates it) produced Unlike Google, planners and consultants in the very thing it photographs.

Pittsburgh admitted that planning based on an unreal To think beyond a criticism of individual use—of and too-simple map impacted their decision-making. voyeurism—we must look back to the late seventies. Hamilton was clear that “in no case are these models During that era, computers began to shift from their

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photographic reproductions of reality. If they were, they would be so complicated that they would be of little, if any, use.” As Light writes, “every complex urban problem had to be defined in more narrow terms so it could be modeled.” Indeed, much of the goal-setting conducted by planning departments in collaboration with defense consultants in this period, such as reducing urban blight and improving residents’ quality of life, could not be quantified and therefore could not be solved with these tools meant for more precise military problems. When narratives became numbers so that planners could input them into their new computers, the solutions appeared successful on the computer, but devastated real urban life. If you just looked at the computer, though, you wouldn’t know it.

In Rickard and Rafman’s work, in “FUN!,” and in thousands of people’s own virtual wanderings, we see the lineage of the Aspen Movie Map, both as an actor of disinvestment and as an emergent technology. But that seemingly uninterested eye obscures the reality that MIT, Lockheed, the Defense Department, and the like were in fact deeply interested in the decimation of urban life in the second half of the twentieth century, just as their analogue in Google (and ICE, and Stanford, etc.) continue to be interested in the redevelopment of those same areas. We don’t have to look very far to see this relationship. In fact, it’s right on our screen. Of course, it’s not that we can see the ‘defense intellectuals’ of the sixties or Google today actually doing anything in the Aspen Movie Map or on Google Street View, respectively; all we see are their effects, which become palpably illuminated when viewed through the tool that played a role in their production. This is the power of the image—specifically, the dialectical image, as Walter Benjamin termed it: “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.” +++ WeWork, the world's largest coworking space company, released its IPO statement in August, defining itself as a tech company to much pushback. Many critics were quick to point out that WeWork is, clearly, a real estate company, albeit a stylish and massive one. We might think of Google as WeWork’s inverse: Although it is categorically a tech company, the conglomerate has branched out into real estate in recent years. I’m not referring to the concrete and devastating ripple effects Google has had on the Bay Area’s real estate market.

The company is now literally a landlord: Sidewalk Labs, a project nestled under Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is, at this moment, building a neighborhood from the ground up in a Toronto neighborhood they’ve dubbed “Quayside.” When completed, the neighborhood will serve as a model for what the ‘Smart City’ can be. By installing sensors to gather information about, say, pedestrian movement, wastewater flow, and traffic patterns, the Smart City can supposedly develop in response to these data. We can hear echoes of the failure of algorithmic planning from the sixties, loud and clear.

Despite the reality that the algorithm—in the hands of Sidewalk Labs—will determine what

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happens in Toronto, the company continues to use the tools of civic engagement to make the public feel like their input will affect design decisions. Media historian Shannon Mattern has called this process “mapwashing.” Sidewalk Labs takes up the grassroots tools of civic planning (Post-Its, maps you can draw on, whiteboards) to perform what Toronto-based activist Bianca Wiley calls “engagement theatre”: a show will be made of gathering public opinion and nothing will be done with it.

The Aspen Movie Map and, later, Google Street View follow a similar formula. As an emergent neoliberal individualism began to overtake city governments in the seventies and eighties, those ideologies translated quite directly into the built environment as corporate real estate interests took the place of city planners and citizens. As Anable has argued, the rhetoric of individualism—today, innovation—is clear in the digital mapping infrastructures of the late seventies, literally made tangible as a man with a joystick navigates his built environment. In the Aspen Movie Map, individualistic navigation made users feel as if they had autonomy to construct the whole world just as civic engagement does today. Anable puts the problem of walking digital streets this way: “Human-focused interfaces meant to bridge the problems of scale between the individual and the city ended up creating ways for individuals to explore vast spaces, ‘Datalands,’ without ever leaving their homes. Which, in the age of urban crisis, was an exceedingly fearful and conservative response to the 'monumentalism' of the modern city.”

It is hard to overstate how stark a deviation the Movie Map, and personal computing more broadly, marked from the mainframes that had confined computing to institutional settings (like university basements) until the seventies. An updated interface, however, did not change the fundamental fact that the computer and the city were both hardwired by research and defense intellectuals, and that those intellectuals were interested in employing tools of war planning on the streets of poor neighborhoods. Urban fate, even if physically navigable on the computer, remained largely overdetermined.

Sidewalk Labs’ work is not limited to Toronto.

The idea of the Smart City has pervaded urbanist ideas about what modern planning should look like worldwide, with Sidewalk Labs’ Toronto experiment only serving as the most tangible model for the ways algorithmic planning can trickle down to other American cities. In early 2019, for example, Sidewalk Labs began packaging and selling information, like commute routes gathered from the location trackers embedded in individuals’ Google Maps app, to city planning departments. When we look at a poor neighborhood through Google Street View, we’re seeing the devastation wrought by urban planning efforts of the late-twentieth century; we’re also visualizing sites for redevelopment through new algorithmic models, like commute data. What we are certainly not seeing, however, is poverty as it’s lived.

If Google’s algorithms determine not only the way we live our digital lives, but even the brick and mortar of urban life, then there’s no space outside of programmed existence. I think of my long commute in high school, those Kawasaki trolleys introduced in

the seventies, which never came on time and always left me freezing in the street in the early hours of the morning. In the evening, they’d be packed to the gills with the city’s working class and school children.

Whenever I’m on one of those trolleys, jerking through underground tunnels, I curse the fuss over the MTA. This is what it actually feels like to suffer, I think, it’s so bad that no one even knows to complain. But of course, that suffering wasn’t the product of public officials or corporate charity forgetting to help, as it often felt it was; it was the product of bad, militaristic planning. I felt, not coincidentally, like I was in the trenches, sliding down icy hills and into my hyper-policed high school, where we waited in line each morning to go through metal detectors to prevent us from getting shot or stabbed inside as people did outside. This was no mistake; when I look at my high school through Google Street View, I reproduce a congruence between the medium and its message, between digital, militaristic planning and hyper-individualistic viewing and navigating. Perhaps this is why it feels so right, why I do it nearly every day.

If there’s no way out of digital life, there are only ways through it. I always come back to the “FUN!” video as an answer to this somewhat devastating conundrum. Yes, the video offers a critique of the reductive nature of Google Street View as a mechanism for vicarious experience of urban poverty for those outside of it. But it also, before we realize who’s watching, offers a reimagination of the way digital life can function. As Ruha Benjamin, a scholar working at the intersection of race and technology, has explained, there is a degree of “facticity” to the surveillance of Black life, “from slave patrol to stop and frisk to internet.” That Staples and his neighbors will live on a screen within a screen in the music video is almost self-evident given this history. But at the same time as surveillance is problematic, as Shoshana Zuboff has written of Google in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, “If you are not on our map, you do not exist.” What do we do, then, with the map we have?

This is perhaps one of those occasions when art is the most appropriate response to a political phenomenon. We do not have access to the code that underlies Google Street View, the data it gathers from users, or Google’s corporate masterplan. What we do have is an infinite and powerful cache of images that mandates visual critique—that mandates art. But not all art that takes Google Street View as its medium answers this problem with the same force. Rafman, Rickard, and many other white artists re-photograph poor people of color in digital streets as a means to despair. Staples’ film, on the other hand, produces a more productive critique. “FUN!” recognizes the failure of the justice system and the devastation of gun violence, for example, while also offering an alternative to total subsumption into the digital system. Staples posits a kind of lived autonomy, but it’s not the same farce of freedom produced by the corporate map. On this new kind of map, only slightly different from the one we know, a new kind of life emerges.

ELLA COMBERG B’20 only navigates Google Street View from an Eames chair.

SCIENCE + TECH

12

D I VO R C E ( E ) Oscar rose from his seat

still crying and started to clap vigorously. He felt a little possessed and a little self-conscious, battering his hands against each other like that, demonstrating—to whom, it wasn’t clear—that the show hadn’t discomposed him completely; that he was moved, but still functional. He kept clapping, his weakly propped-up smile repeatedly crumpling under the pressure of his own feeling, until the cast bowed and exited twice over.

When he finally stopped to wipe his cheeks, his hands came away slick with tears and snot. He bent down to grab his Playbill and shuffled along with the crowd out of the theater and onto 48th Street.

It was such a rude environment to be thrust into, Oscar thought—these tourists, these smells, these awful screens. It stopped the theater crowd up short, for a moment, as they milled about on the small swath of sidewalk under the lights of the marquee. Oscar looked around and saw himself uncomfortably reflected in his fellow patrons: white, gay, middle-aged, and stiff with a quiet haughtiness that masqueraded as the lingering daze from a profound experience of art. Not that Oscar hadn’t just had such a thing; the show was one of his favorites, Falsettos, a musical about a gay couple that by its end becomes a musical about AIDS. But he felt the experience being stolen away by the commotion of the street, and by the resentment it stirred up within him. A tan, wrinkled woman in a cowboy hat unwittingly bumped into him as she strolled by, wrapped up in a conversation with her tall, gray-haired partner, the crackle of her drawl cutting through to him as she disappeared back into the crowd. “I could never live here!” he heard her saying. Oscar raised an eyebrow in qualified assent, and then tucked in his shoulders and walked briskly to the subway.

On the train, he slid into a seat, letting his head lie against the map behind him as he closed his eyes. After a few stops he became restless and pretended to peruse his Playbill, but it was so soggy with with his weepy fluids as to be embarrassing, a sorry testament to his own predictability. He noticed a young gay couple standing a few feet away, kissing, smiling at each other every time their lips drew apart. Oscar stared at the ass of the one closest to him, trying to remember something, and then saw the same Playbill tucked neatly into the back pocket of the man’s tight black jeans. He shoved his own inside his jacket and once again leaned back his head and shut his eyes.

Niles brushed up against his leg the moment he came through the door, his tail up straight, flitting back and forth, even landing a soft thwap on Oscar’s calf.

Oscar threw his jacket on the back of a chair and picked up the purring cat, nuzzling his face in the soft white fur as he walked toward the bedroom, where he gently tossed the animal onto the bed and then began to undress. Standing in his underwear, he thought about journaling, imagining the lines curling out across the page, the stuff of his day followed by a few thoughts on Falsettos, from which would emerge a conclusion resolute and radical, or perhaps sappy and self-absorbed; did it make a difference, really? He scratched his stomach and let his hand roam into his underwear. He considered masturbating, and recalled a porn video he’d found a few days ago online that had been good; had he bookmarked it? He took his hand out of his underwear and sighed, overburdened with possibility, and then crawled sheepishly into bed.

The bell rang a little after nine the next morning.

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LITERARY

Oscar exited the kitchen to press the buzzer, the loud unclenching of the lock echoing up from the building’s door three stories below. He returned to the griddle, flipped two pancakes onto the plate keeping warm in the oven, and turned off the stove.

There was a hollow knock, and then, “Hello?”

Oscar went to the door, which was standing ajar, and pulled it further open. “Daddy!” Everett, about four-feet tall with thick brown hair down to his shoulders, rushed in to hug him around the waist. Oscar laughed and tried to tuck some of his son’s mane back behind his ears. Andrew stood smiling in the hallway, his blonde hair ruffled, his shirt unbuttoned at the top and looking alluringly unwashed. He seemed to have been whooshed out of his own apartment and sent drifting along the currents of the morning up to this one.

“Go grab plates and silverware, and pour yourself some orange juice,” Oscar said to Everett, who ran off into the kitchen, eager to oblige.

“Do you want to come in?”

“No, thanks, I’ve got to go. Here’s his bag.”

Oscar stepped into the hallway to take it, a bright red backpack weighed down with a change of clothes and whatever book Everett was onto now. He let it dangle in one hand, and with his other reached out to take one of Andrew’s. Andrew let him, though Oscar knew this didn’t necessarily mean he wanted his hand held; he could be non-confrontational to a ludicrous degree. This had made their separation slightly surreal, Oscar remembered, thinking of when Andrew had finally decided to leave him, and how apologetic he had seemed, how he had tried to skirt around the issue. “We’re just on different paths,” he’d said. True enough, though it seemed too kindly oblique; at the time, Oscar’s path had been going by way of a twenty four-year-old’s asshole for the previous five months.

But now Oscar went ahead and held his hand, taking advantage of his ex-lover’s passivity just a bit, brushing his thumb across Andrew’s knuckles, skating gently over the craters in between. They stood close, but awkwardly, their eyes cast down, their focus pooling together on their hands, tenderly held and regarded with a cautious curiosity.

“Have a pancake,” Oscar murmured.

“I’ve got to go.” Andrew’s hand slipped away. “Bye, Everett,” he called. He turned to depart, but Everett appeared on the doorstep.

“Wait!” They hugged, and then let go, and Andrew began to descend the stairs. Everett offered a final “BYE,” not intentionally shouting but blaring nonetheless, and waved giddily.

“All right, come on. Pancake time!” They reentered the apartment and Oscar shut the door.

“I think you forgot the salt again,” said Everett, sitting on the couch with a plate of two pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Niles was kneading the cushion next to him, his furry rump perilously close to the sticky amber mess.

“What? No!” “Mhmm.”

Oscar forked a piece off of Everett’s plate and

tried it. “I didn’t! That’s a delicious pancake.” Everett giggled; it was an irreverent, not-exactly-funny running gag, and stung Oscar a little more than he let on.

“So what movie should we watch?”

“A musical!”

Oscar smiled at hearing this. He looked through his DVDs until one caught his eye and he plucked it off the shelf, prematurely smug at his own rueful irony.

“The Gay Divorcee,” he said, presenting.

The title was surprisingly bitter on his tongue. He looked at Everett’s non-reaction, just a slight hanging open of the mouth as if he’d meant to say something but had stopped to catch his breath, and wondered suddenly why he’d gone for the dumb joke, sensing the two of them suspended in the awkward disequilibrium of a failed double entendre.

“Not gay like your dad and I,” he said, thinking it one of those moments when he was glad no one else was around to see him parent. “‘Gay’ used to mean ‘happy.’”

“That’s funny,” Everett said.

“Yeah, it is.” Oscar made an accidental moue.

“What about ‘divorce’?”

“I guess that one’s stayed about the same. Like with your dad and I.” Everett nodded and ate more pancake.

Oscar wondered if he should caveat what he’d just said, something about Obergefell, but then he threw the DVD case onto the couch and said, “Here, put it on,” before going into the kitchen. He rested his forehead against the freezer, suddenly dizzy with self-loathing.

They weren’t even technically divorced yet; why had they decided to use the word with Everett? Did they think they wouldn’t go through with it? Did they think their son would hold them to it? That seemed backwards, even cruel.

“Daddy, it’s starting!”

“I’m coming!” He took out his phone and scrolled through his camera roll until he found a picture of Kyle. It was the one nude he still had, a full-body, in-the-mirror type, one hand grasping the back of the neck, the elbow crooked behind the head, the arm-pit hair revealed in its full span; further down, the erect cock, jutting sharply upward with a faint curve to the side. Oscar stared at the picture, almost wishing it still turned him on, as if that might offer a perverse vindication. He pressed the little trashcan icon in the corner.

“Delete Photo” popped up. He stabbed at it with his thumb and then dropped the phone onto the counter and went to join his son on the couch.

The confusion of the title now long-forgotten, Everett delighted in the film. He sat so rapt before the Astaire and Rogers routines that Oscar couldn’t help but suspect that he was raising an incurable romantic.

Oscar adored them, too, as he had since he was even younger than Everett. He loved the “Night and Day” number, Astaire and Rogers sitting in front of a seaside rear-projection as obvious as it was lovely before rising to take the floor, the music repeatedly quieting and then revving up again, quieting and revving up, and the two of them adjusting the intensity of their steps accordingly. They could tap dance pianissimo. It was

06 DEC 2019

BY Zach Barnes DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

all so delicate, with only the hint of sex; Oscar always thought he caught it in the proximity of their noses.

It seemed impossible to huff each other in like that without stirring up an erotics of some kind or another.

But it was the plausible chastity Oscar most envied.

He tried to imagine Fred Astaire sending nudes, and couldn’t—or, no, perhaps he could. Oscar felt his thought experiment turning against him as he began to picture Fred Astaire’s cock, of no great girth but graceful in its length, and realized he was becoming faintly aroused.

The film ended, and they left the apartment to go on a walk to the farmers’ market at McCarren Park, stretching their legs after their morning movie, Everett swinging an empty tote bag in one hand and holding his father’s hand with the other. He danced over every crack in the sidewalk for a few blocks, but then got tired and started lagging a little.

“See that, Fred Astaire had to be a real athlete,” said Oscar. He didn’t know how to encourage his son to exercise, since he barely did himself, but maybe this was the way. Everett gave a quiet “mhmm” and picked up his pace.

They arrived at the farmers’ market and dawdled through the stalls, choosy in how they filled their tote.

Everett always took a particular thrill in seeing melons at the market, gleefully incredulous at the presence of such ostensibly exotic fruits at such a local venue.

After some rather dramatic knocking and sniffing, they settled on a certain cantaloupe, petite enough that Oscar wouldn’t have to race through eating it after Everett left, and before it turned spongy and sour.

They were waiting in line to purchase it when Everett nudged him and said, “Daddy, look, it’s Kyle!”

Oscar didn’t quite understand until he followed Everett’s pointing finger and saw him, the man whose cock he’d disappeared into the digital ether a few hours ago, buying pickles at a stall a few yards away. He tried not to groan audibly. “Yes, you’re right,” Oscar said.

That they should actually meet seemed far from inevitable; Oscar could be masterfully evasive. Having paid for the cantaloupe, he guided Everett out of the tent and turned his head shiftily, hoping to prevent a recognition. But Kyle had never been one for the vaguely anti-social tact Oscar liked to exercise, and instead nearly bumped into them, enviably blithe.

“Hey, guys.” Kyle winked at Everett.

“Oh, hi,” said Oscar. Kyle was tall, with a tuft of curly brown hair and a lean, slightly pointed face. He wore a long-sleeved shirt with a wide boat neck that exposed his collarbone. Oscar remembered when such a garment would have driven him mad, when he would have been unable to resist the drive to gnaw on that gorgeous, teasing stretch of clavicle. He looked at Kyle now, feeling the prickling of neither antipathy nor desire. Seeing him and Andrew in the same day brought on a hazy wave of confusion and regret.

Former lovers were such odd palimpsests of emotion,

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Oscar thought, inscribed and re-inscribed with so many different feelings as to be nearly illegible in the present.

“We watched The Gay Divorce,” Everett said. “Have you seen that?”

“Uh…no!”

“It’s with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.”

“Oh, I love them! They made a lot of good ones.”

“I’m gonna watch them all.”

“Sounds like a great plan,” said Kyle. “You want a pickle?”

“No thanks.”

“Ok. Well, I’ve got to go, but good to see you, huh?”

Everett nodded.

“Bye, Kyle,” said Oscar. Kyle smiled at him and waved as he walked off. Oscar felt chastened, almost, by the relative ease of the interaction.

The two of them perused a few more stalls as they made their way toward the loop around the park. “You know, it’s The Gay Divorcee, not the The Gay Divorce,” said Oscar.

“What’s a divorcee?”

“A person who is divorced. Actually, the musical was originally called Gay Divorce, but they had to change it because the code office—the old-fashioned ratings people, I guess you’d say—thought that while a divorce itself couldn’t be gay, a divorcee could be.”

“Weird.”

Oscar nodded. They passed dogs leaping over each other on the green and a birthday party with a whitepainted clown speaking Spanish to a boisterous group of children. After walking the full loop, they settled on a bench, and Oscar dug into their bag. He offered an apple to Everett, who took it with both hands. He bit with gusto, and then winced and spit onto the ground.

“What is it?” Oscar said, putting his hand on Everett’s back.

“My tooth!” Everett smiled at him to reveal a void in the very center of his upper row.

“Oh! Come on, let’s find it.” They both knelt down, combing through the grass surrounding the piece of apple. The two of them rooting around together, Oscar took comfort in their simplicity of purpose, and when he found the little fleck of white, lightly bloody and gritty with dirt, he got up on one knee and stretched out his palm, the tooth sitting minuscule in its center.

Everett examined it curiously and then took it, rolling it around in his hand as they both stood up and began walking back toward home.

LITERARY

14

VIDEO STAR Emma Chamberlain and the relatable YouTuber

BY Isabelle Rea DESIGN Isabelle Rea

At the end of the video “REVIEWING YOUTUBE’S HQ *insane*,” YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki joins YouTube star Emma Chamberlain on screen and passes her an iced coffee. “Oh my God, Susan. Thank you Susan,” says Chamberlain. The two turn to smile at the camera before the video pauses, a little tune plays, and the image zooms in. While Wojcicki’s name is made visible on the screen, the relationship between the two women is left unaddressed.

Two years ago, Chamberlain’s videos usually garnered a steady and relatively humble 1,000 views, until the viewer count after one post titled “we all owe the dollar store an apology” blew up almost instantly to 500,000. Within a year, her account hit 5 million subscribers; now, at 18 years old, she has over 8.5 million. Her videos almost always trend, and the popularity of her style of vlogging and editing has landed her a spot in this year’s TIME 100 Next Most Influential People in the World. Dubbed “relatable” while being undoubtedly aspirational to her teenage fanbase, Chamberlain has found a successful formula to maintain her online personality.

While Emma Chamberlain is a big deal for YouTube, YouTube is an even bigger deal for Emma Chamberlain.

At the beginning of the video, Chamberlain offhandedly notes the coincidence that YouTube headquarters happen to be located in the same town where she grew up. The uncanniness of this fact is extreme.

Not only did YouTube provide Chamberlain with the online platform on which she could share her videos, but it also furnished Chamberlain with a financial system, culture, and community that reshaped her life—the same life that she continued to broadcast on her channel. When it comes down to it, the content of Chamberlain’s videos is less a creative project than a presentation of YouTube at its most profitable. +++ Whereas many YouTubers might gain traction from prior adjacency to fame or presence in a different type of media or platform, “relatable” YouTubers tend to emerge specifically through the popularity of the YouTube-specific videos they produce. In fact, they tend to be much more uniform than the word “relatable” might imply. This group of girls, including others like Summer Mckeen, Ellie Thumann, Avrey Ovard, and Hannah Meloche, are all conventionally pretty, skinny, and white, with bubbly personalities. That they’re termed “relatable” perhaps stems from the fact that at the start of their careers, the experience of these girls mirrored that of their fanbase: middleclass white American high schoolers. Yet in use, and especially as the material circumstances of YouTubers evolve, the term “relatable” has less to do with experiential similarities between viewers and YouTubers, and more accurately suggests a type of performance that produces an effect of intimacy.

The originality of Emma Chamberlain’s onscreen personality and editing style prompted her rise in the ranks of YouTube royalty. Chamberlain has a particular manner of speaking and acting on camera that appears overwhelmingly familiar and raw, while simultaneously being extremely funny. Much of this relies on hyperbole: Chamberlain exaggerates her emotions and opinions, adding false intensity that reads as well-executed mockery. In the Dollar Store haul video where Chamberlain shows off 12 items bought with 12 dollars at a dollar store, the off-brand hard lollipops she purchases are “the funnest candies I think I’ve ever seen.” She pops one in her mouth, makes a dramatic expression of disgust and says “oh god.” After spitting it back into the wrapper, she says “Oh yeah, so good. That doesn’t taste like medicine at all.” Chamberlain maintains playful but committed sarcasm, as if her act is an unexplained bit that we are all expected to understand. In this way, and others, her

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audience is implicated in her performance. Speaking about the blue plastic recorder, she claims “If you didn’t play these in elementary school, I’m so sorry, your elementary school must have been horrible.”

Here, her fake enthusiasm or rage is at once something to laugh at and a way for her to make herself vulnerable to her viewers. Her sincerity is inauthentic, but it’s an inauthenticity that feels overwhelmingly sincere. Her act is executed so well that it doesn’t feel like a persona, and perhaps, at points, it isn’t. This must just be exactly what Chamberlain is like, thinks the viewer as they are drawn in to the allure of her company.

It is normal, in vlogs, for YouTubers to speak directly to the camera, remaining aware that what they film will eventually by watched. The YouTuber greets the audience at the beginning of the video and says goodbye at the end, fills the audience in on information they think is relevant, and provides advice or recommendations that are intended to seem personal.

The trick lies in playing to an anonymous group of potential viewers to which your video might appeal, while maintaining the feeling of one-on-one intimacy and companionship. Chamberlain’s style works this paradox expertly. She fires off turns of phrase that anticipate the viewers, or suggest that she remembers they are there with a quick “I don’t know about you,” or even simply, “You know what I mean?” Yet the viewer is also in no way precious; of the orange plasticky hair extension headband, she insists, “Try to tell me this doesn’t look good. You can’t. ’Cause you’d be lying.”

Perhaps one of her most effective “relatable” techniques is Chamberlain’s way of drawing her viewer into an imaginary shared space of understanding. When Chamberlain explains, “Like Skittles, Starbursts, Jolly Ranchers, they’re fine, they’re good,” the viewer is more inclined to agree with her on this point, and suspend their own sense of judgement in order to participate in Chamberlain’s bit. Again, if we look closely into Chamberlain’s form, it becomes clear that her style relies heavily on her specific way of communicating with the individual viewer at home— she narrates through ideas and trains of thought to her audience as if they are universally experienced.

Chamberlain further orchestrates the relationship by putting herself in a humble and vulnerable position; she makes fun of herself and privileges her more embarrassing stories. Moments that once would have appeared awkward and uncomfortable if caught on camera are emphasized in Chamberlain’s videos, as she dances freely, only to trip and fall down.

This summer, the title of Chamberlain’s W Magazine profile made a bold claim: “Creating Emma Chamberlain, the Most Interesting Girl on YouTube.”

To justify the superlative, the writer narrates a scene in the interview: “Chamberlain instinctively whips out her portable video camera and zooms in, rather comically, on the plate of pasta in front of her and then records her own bug-eyed response. ‘My eyes are watering,’ she says at the restaurant, biting into a piece of bread. ‘I’m emotional. This is like my dream come true.’ Then she reaches for her camera again. Welcome to Emma Chamberlain’s channel.”

Hyperbolic emotion, the suggestion of her own vulnerability: these qualities are distinctly Chamberlain. Yet “interesting” does not seem like the correct term to describe this sensibility. While incredibly compelling and humorous, Chamberlain does not show off any particular skills or knowledge. When she vlogs, she allows the viewer to follow her around her life in Los Angeles or on vacations and work trips. Getting coffee, working out at a spin class, getting her nails done, and going shopping at popular teenage shopping spots like Brandy Melville and Urban Outfitters—this collection reads like a list of various lifestyle-oriented activities, but in fact, it’s a nearly exhaustive account of what Chamberlain chooses to record. The extent to which Chamberlain repeats these few activities

feels almost ironic. After seven minutes of watching Chamberlain eat room service or food ordered on delivery apps, one wonders why so many viewers put up with such banal content, even if it is mediated through a friendly and engaging personality.

The majority of Chamberlain’s oeuvre is pretty typical of YouTube vloggers. She cooks, travels, and reviews trends and products. She films ‘transformation’ makeovers into different personas, or various beauty procedures, like getting her nose pierced or dying her hair. All of these can be interesting in their own ways, but crucially, this is normal YouTube material. In other words, when it comes to content, Chamberlain is not particular. She doesn’t talk about specific music, books or movies. Not only are her videos void of political or global issues, but Chamberlain avoids controversial topics altogether. Her more original videos feature challenges that Emma generates for herself and then completes. In “I’M PREGNANT,” she wears a fake pregnancy bump while getting coffee, shopping at Target, and doing floor exercises. In one of her more daring challenges, Chamberlain lives on her balcony for 24 hours. In general, these interventions mainly involve a rearranging of her everyday activities or, at her most inventive, dabbling in some light arts and crafts.

Thus the ‘interest’ in Chamberlain lies more in the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’ or ‘what.’ We could read the writer of the W magazine profile to suggest that Chamberlain’s specificity, or perhaps her talent, comes from how she responds to things. In these moments of perception or analysis, Chamberlain can best perform her sarcasm and engage her audience in vivid descriptions and “takes” on banal things that happen to her.

While the descriptor “relatable” speaks to Chamberlain’s style of speaking, it certainly does not extend to a real intimacy with Chamberlain as a person. Imperfections and jumpy cuts do not logically contribute to a heighted knowledge of the identity behind the sarcastic, funny, and awkward YouTuber.

In fact, what her viewers are most curious about is withheld: her secret boyfriend, or the falling out she had with two relatable YouTuber best friends. These realms of Chamberlain’s life are rigorously theorized in the comments section. But on online forums dedicated to solely her, or on YouTube gossip channels, not a word of it is uttered or even suggested in the “relatable” videos she posts. +++ Chamberlain’s “relatability” surpasses her warm and open rapport—it becomes a quality that informs the form and composition of her videos. Chamberlain is known for her editing style; in fact, TIME includes Emma in their “most influential” list because her editing style “spawned a subgenre of young creators following her lead.” Chamberlain manipulates her filmed footage with zooms, pauses, filters, sound effects, and repetitions. She creates a video of continual stimulation, where the typical visuals of vlogging are slightly distorted in a way that is surprising, exciting, and most pertinitenly, engaging to watch. Her videos feed off of imperfections: if she captures a strange gesture or awkward facial expression while recording, she might zoom in to isolate the weird moment, or slow it down, or play it again with a funny sound effect.

Her style might even be described as clownish as Chamberlain uses the manipulability of digital editing to exaggerate and mimic the gestures and idiosyncrasies of her own personality.

In the 1970s, film theorists identified the illusion of reality as the attractive quality of conventional narrative films. Careful cuts created perfect temporal sequences that enveloped the spectator in the make-believe scene and encouraged them to abandon themselves for the world inside the screen. This ideal form

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of cinema might be loosely identified in the evolution of vlogging styles. Earlier YouTube vloggers perfected their videos with smooth transitions and carefully controlled temporalities. The recorded segments retained a quality of perfection that suggested they were one of many takes. Then came Chamberlain, who created one of the first popular vlog channels to explicitly upset the ideal of formal cohesion in the vlogging world. Chamberlain’s intervention involves opacity: she abandons the ideal of smoothness or cleanliness of previous editing processes by making her edits obvious.

For example, in the middle of the vlog, Chamberlain will drop in a clip of her commentary from the moment of her editing. The temporal structure is hardly ever realistic when the footage incessantly starts and stops, sometimes repeating like a broken record.

While discussions of Chamberlain’s particular popularity focus on her novel style, they do not acknowledge the fact that Chamberlain’s intimacy, honesty, and relatability are not truths but effects of Chamberlain’s videos. Despite the amalgamation of gimmicky filters of editing software, Chamberlain’s videos still register as cohesive and easily digestible. In fact, Chamberlain’s editing works to enhance the allure of the video, attracting the viewer with surface level simulation rather than seamless reality. A different filmic reference offers a model for Chamberlain’s style: the cinema of attractions. In contrast to voyeuristic, immersive, narrative based films, film theorist Thomas Gunning identifies early Avant-Garde cinema as the “cinema of attractions.” These non-narrative productions rupture a self-contained story or world with magical spectacles of film-making; the “attractions address the viewer directly, soliciting attention and curiosity through acts of display.” By engaging the surface and performing to the viewer, these works embrace the function of film to show rather than to represent. Chamberlain produces a “cinema of attractions” through digital means, adding carnivalesque gestures and machinic movements as appeals to her spectator. Goofy face warps and inserted comments speak directly to the experience of the viewer. Postproduction camera effects and filters emphasize the surface of the image, making it a space of excitement, fun, and surprise. +++ The term “relatable” contrasts another prevalent descriptor and popular category of social media influencers: aspirational. In a profile published in the Atlantic this summer, Chamberlain is denied this quality: “In fact, she doesn’t make her life seem very aspirational at all: In many of her videos, she looks

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

like she just rolled out of bed.” Out of bed, and into her luxurious Los Angeles apartment, where she might pull on a sweatshirt featuring a cartoon of herself. She doesn’t have to worry about school—she dropped out and moved to LA alone. Despite persistent attempts in the media to describe Chamberlain as an anti-influencer, the activities she now showcases in her videos and on social media are not feasible for non-wealthy teens. She leaves her house for several rounds of intricate coffee drinks, flashy exercise classes, and the more than occasional tropical vacation, but she stays in to film extensive clothing hauls and enjoys Postmated health food dinners.

Chamberlain’s transformation from quirky high schooler to LA it-girl required significant funds. The social media analytics site SocialBlade predicts that Chamberlain has earned up to 2 million a year in ad revenue in her two years of YouTube work. This sum does not take into account any earnings from sponsorships, personal merchandise sales, and collaborations with brands to create Emma-specific products—of which Chamberlain has plenty. The affordances of such a wealth certainly shows. Over the course of her YouTube career, she has switched out her old clothes, belongings, interests, and friends for ones new and improved. With her Louis Vuitton handbag(s) and Gucci belt, Chamberlain will still perform as “relatable,” but her look can only be sought after.

If Chamberlain’s videos were never about anything particularly interesting, then it was not difficult for the subject matter of her videos to shift into this newfound luxury lifestyle. Her airy modern apartment with quirky furniture serves as the backdrop to multiple videos. She vlogs vacations in Fiji and Hawaii. When Chamberlain posts a fashion week vlog, the flight, hotel room, meals, makeup, clothing, and activities are all bought by Louis Vuitton. A YouTuber will often spend money to create specific content for their video, and the money spent is considered an investment in their channel. But in Chamberlain’s case, the impact of her YouTube earnings on the content she produces feels structural rather than incidental.

Beyond her expenditures, the culture of YouTube seeps into Chamberlain’s world. All of Chamberlain's friends are other YouTubers, presumably those she mingled with at conventions, brand events, and collaborations. For two years, Chamberlain’s position as a lifestyle vlogger has forced her work and life to overlap, blurring the boundary between the two categories. Her relationship to real life and things is so embedded in her YouTube personality that when she does reference a specific product, she jokingly qualifies her comment with “not sponse,” as if one would expect Emma’s recommendation to be bought.

It is as if Chamberlain’s weekly videos have become effects of her career, and thus inseparable from the structure YouTube has provided. Chamberlain doesn’t use YouTube simply as a platform on which to upload her creative content, and her viewers and subscribers are not isolated witnesses of her videos. Instead, the structures of advertising and marketing tie the action of watching YouTube directly to the content they see: the life of the YouTuber generated by the money they earn, the brands she works with, and immersion in the YouTuber community. That Chamberlain frequently ends her videos with “If it wasn’t for you…” is an admission of her utter dependence on the viewers that catalysed her success. +++ When we recognize the extent to which Chamberlain’s YouTube success is generative of her channel as a whole, the collapse of YouTube star into the YouTube offices seems almost allegorical. The premise of the video has the potential to force the viewer to recall what remains invisible when we watch short videos on the internet: the fact that YouTube is not a neutral platform but a profit-making company— and that YouTube needs our views just as much as Chamberlain does. Instead, she fires off a series of ratings: the chair in the lobby receives a 6/10, and the next point of interest, a massage chair, gets a 10/10.

Nearing the end of Chamberlain’s “tour,” we realize we have barely learned anything at all about YouTube’s headquarters; after all, we could have guessed there was a VR room and a smoothie bar. Again, Chamberlain’s video presents us with almost arbitrary, commerce-oriented material, continually mediated through Chamberlain’s calculatedly engaging personality and editing style.

Chamberlain leaves her acne uncovered and doesn’t edit out her on-camera burps, but little imperfections can’t prevent her teenage fanbase from dreaming about a life like hers. Her “relatable” style, which feeds on humorous honesty, represents a kind of aspirational model that isn’t based on perfection.

Chamberlain is chill, fun, and down to earth—most of all, she’s likeable. It is the viewers choice as to whether or not Chamberlain’s company is worth sitting through vlogs of mediocre cooking, banal days-in-her-life, or sponsored monologues about skincare, all interspersed with unskippable ads. Millions have already decided to keep watching.

ISABELLE REA B'20 is not sponse.

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BY Morgan Florsheim ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Daniel Navratil

catalyst

It was a Wednesday afternoon in mid-March of 2013 and I was seated in a chair on the basketball court of my high school gym. Something buzzed above my left ear and then halted, and after a nudge from the hairstylist behind me, I stood up to cheers and whoops, stray hairs falling around my feet. I ran my hand through my freshly shorn locks, which stood just an eighth of an inch off my scalp, and grinned.

That would be the first of many head rubs that afternoon, as more than a dozen of my peers and I, twelve of us just freshman at the time, were given buzz cuts in front of a crowd of cheering classmates, family and friends. It was part of an annual daylong event in our small suburb just north of Milwaukee called Buzz Cuts for Cancer. The idea behind the event was simple: get a bunch of teenagers to shave their heads in exchange for money pledged to the MACC fund, a local nonprofit dedicated to funding childhood cancer research. The hair that was cut off in the process would be donated to Pantene Beautiful Lengths, an organization that makes wigs for patients who lose their hair to cancer treatment.

Somewhat shockingly, it was a hit. Year after year, students signed up months in advance, sending out emails to family members and asking other students for pledges in the hallways. Throughout middle school and early high school, many of us idolized the girls that came before us. Prior to seeing them, I’d accepted the rigid version of femininity that had been packaged for me in TV and movies, the kind that required make-up and a straightener and probably Photoshop. But here, right in front of me, were these magnificent young women with buzzcuts who seemed to hold an almost mythical quality, their confidence and striking beauty unparalleled. If you’d asked me, I would’ve said the sun itself shone out of their near-bald heads. Older girls proselytized, too, saying buzzing was hands down the best decision of their lives. I was convinced.

The event really got started at lunch time on the Wednesday before spring break. In the front hall of the main building, a crowd of students began to gather even before the bell signaling the start of the lunch period. Then the ​buzzies​, as the students shaving their heads were called, lined up for the first chop of the day. The energy in the room was palpable, electric and joyous, overpowering any of the nerves we had going in. Since I was buzzing, my long curly hair was haphazardly arranged in a handful of ponytails around my head. When I took my seat in one of the three hair cutting chairs, the 14-inch ponytails were snipped off in full by one of the student organizers and handed to me to hold, a bizarre exchange that resulted in a roar of cheers.

The second phase was after school, but plenty of people attended anyway. It took place in the school gym, where hairstylists who had volunteered their service stood behind chairs. I usually hated being the center of attention—as a child I had notoriously hidden under a table when a restaurant full of people sang happy birthday to me—but this was different. I didn’t have to perform my emotions; my excitement had been building the whole day for this moment, and the feedback from the crowd was so wholly positive that it felt like I could do no wrong. My cheeks already hurt from smiling. It took less than five minutes for the hairstylist to remove the last few inches of hair from my head, and then it was done; I was handed back to the crowd who embraced me and rubbed my head

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and showered me with support. The warmth that surrounded me was immense and uncomplicated, the hugs continuous, the affirmations loud and genuine.

I was simultaneously more exposed—aware of tiny movements of air over my near-bare scalp, my facial features abruptly thrown into focus—and enveloped, swept up into people’s arms, their fingers grazing the fuzz on my head, engulfed by the tenderness of their words and their touch.

Most girls who buzzed agreed it was best to do it freshman year––to give your hair time to grow out before college––and we were glad it was in March so we could have “like, a normal haircut” before summer hit.

Which is to say we were 14-year-old girls, not Mother Theresa. We did it because it felt good to do something good, but also because we would be praised and called cool and beautiful and remarkable and all the things that freshmen in high school want to be known as. We could try on this new identity—one that suggested we were confident, unbothered by the perceptions of others, badass—as a collective in a familiar place where we knew it would be accepted. All the while, we could feel comfort in the knowledge that we would be able to climb back into our former, safer selves if we wanted to by the time we were off to the next phase of our lives.

There were twelve freshman girls in total who buzzed, together with a smattering of upperclassmen girls and a number of boys who shed a couple of inches of hair in exchange for less substantial pledges. Doing it alongside a group of girls I knew and admired made the choice to participate infinitely easier. We were bonded together by that day, forever a part of the Buzz Class of 2013. It stuck with us, as we giggled and shrieked in the locker room that afternoon, staring at ourselves transformed, as we complimented each other that day and in the days to come. The tether between us was still there months later, when we compared mullet lengths and discussed the best methods for styling our uneven locks (headbands, big earrings, tiny ponytails). It was still there years later, too, when we exchanged five-year-anniversary texts and stood back in awe at how the experience had changed us.

At 14, a buzz cut was liberation. It was something in the indescribable feeling of clippers going over your scalp, of standing up from that chair in the gym suddenly lighter, of going for a run with the wind rustling through what remained of the hair on your head. It was just hair, but it was more than that, too— it was freedom from pressures to look and present ourselves a certain way, to fit neatly into the starkly gendered box of teenage girlhood. In this tiny act of subversion, it was as if we suddenly discovered that the rules and expectations for girls our age were a sham, that we could get far more out of skirting them than we could by playing along. Gone were the long tresses, the braids and hairbows and hair twirling as a flirting mechanism. After that day, our femininity felt spiky, unexpected, r​ adical​even. It was what we decided it was.

And then, buzzing was a choice I made to change myself. It was a choice that felt grown-up, that adults seemed to respect, and it opened up a world of other choices. For so long, I had relied on my hair to distract

from the features I didn’t like as much—the nose I’d inherited from my grandmother, the freckle on the corner of my mouth—and I’d quietly accepted the person who I was as if it had been assigned to me, as if I was predestined to be a frizzy-haired, low-ponytail-wearing cross-country girl. Now that it was gone, I was surprised to find that I didn’t feel naked so much as unburdened. Like I had an opportunity to redefine how I wanted to see myself and, by extension, who I wanted to be. I began to observe the things I admired in other people, their easy laugh or attentive listening, and strived to emulate them in my own actions. In some ways, it felt like I was being reborn into the world, suddenly an independent being.

A haircut functions as an external cue, an outward shift that causes observers to note a difference. People seem to assume the confidence of a person who gets a drastic haircut. When the outside world reflects that back at you, it becomes far easier to embody. As I walked into my classes the next day, I knew heads would turn, eyes would be on me, and I didn’t mind.

I stood up straighter, held people’s gaze, strutted as much as an awkward, lanky, graphic-tee-wearing teenager can strut.

Whenever I say that I used to have a buzz cut, usually after someone requests to see a picture, people almost always lament that ​they c​ould never have a buzz cut. ​They​would look terrible, citing their square face or weirdly shaped skull or sharp nose. I thought that too. But here’s the secret: everyone looks good with a buzz cut. I mean, it’s just your face. Your hair can’t look bad if you don’t have any.

When I feel anxious or restless or like I’m spiraling out of control, I cut my hair. It doesn’t have to be a buzz, just enough of a trim to tap back into that freshly-shaved confidence. I feel it coming before it happens. I get this dizzy recklessness, some strange humming energy overtakes me and before I know it, I’m standing in the bathroom on the third floor of North Caswell Hall, holding scissors in my hand. Or, it’s senior year of college and I don’t know what I want to do with the rest of my life and now seven inches of my hair is scattered on the floor of a randomly chosen barbershop on Wickenden Street. Invariably, I stare giddily at my reflection in shop windows as I walk home alone in a post-haircut glow, feeling lighter and renewed once more. The tiny hairs scattered over my neck and settling into the divots above my collarbones are all that remains of my former self.

This is the reason that my hair hasn’t stretched much past my shoulders since I graduated high school (my hair did, in fact, grow out in time for college). I will always prefer a change over waiting to see long locks in some far out future. In the most literal sense, a dramatic chop allows me to change the way I look at myself, and I use it to spur change in other areas of my life. It walks the line between control and careless abandon, a deliberate choice to let go. Feeling overwhelmed? A bob can help with that. Need to make a life decision? How about a pixie cut? I’m running out of inches to work with, but I can always fall back on the buzz if all else fails.

MORGAN FLORSHEIM B’20 would like to give you a haircut.

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1. Black Lives Matter 2. Krill 3. Moviepass 4. Ben Bienstock's glo up 5. Resurgence of the Jewish Left 6. Get Out 7. Married at First Sight 8. Uniqlo 9. My parents’ divorce 10. The Vine with the lawnmower that flies through the air

1. Matt Ishimaru’s dog 2. Solar eclipse 3. Baggy pants 4. CRISPR 5. Legal weed 6. Chill Obama 7. The Social Network 8. Nats winning the World Series 9. ASMR 10. The end of those NYE glasses with the 00s for eyes

1. “California Girls” by Katy Perry 2. “Put a bird on it!”

3. Bobo cultural renaissance 4. Asian American culture + identity 5. RipSticks 6. Eyebrow inclusivity 7. Obama 8. Frances Ha 9. Meno-/gorp-/normcore 10. My high school 2010 Honda Civic

1. Vine compilations on YouTube 2. Finishing middle school 3. Adblock 4. AOC 5. Public transit movements 6. “I'm actually at capacity right now” 7. Quitting the debate team 8. Manic pixie dream girl backlash 9. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend 10. Gravitational waves

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1. Being a teen 2. Video where guy opens door to 20 cats 3. Milkshakes with slices of cake on top 4. Sexuality 5. Mindhunter 6. Storytelling podcasts 7. Mainstream K-pop 8. Azealia Banks/Elon Musk/Grimes situation 9. Poke bowls 10. American Apparel

1. AOC “Lisztomania” video 2. SEPTA key 3. Watching the news about Benghazi every morning in homeroom 4. Ben Lerner 5. Munchkins in a cup 6. The ’90s coming back 7. Jake and Amir 8. Bridgegate 9. Teachers’ strikes 10. Small shirt/big pants

1. Sincerity 2. Romanticization of the everyday 3. To-go drinks 4. Changing your mind 5. Being able to watch childhood videos of yourself 6. Kale 7. Personal devices 8. Sneakers 9. Instagram 10. Miniature

1. Katie McGrath in Merlin 2. Katie McGrath in Jurassic World 3. Katie McGrath in Supergirl 4. Katie McGrath in Dracula 5. Katie McGrath in King Arthur 6. Katie McGrath in Slasher 7. Katie McGrath in A Christmas Princess 8. Katie McGrath in “From Eden” 9. Keira Knightley (McGrath lookalike) 10. Katie McGrath in Secret Bridesmaids (2020)

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1. Mimosa trees 2. Moonrise Kingdom 3. Noname 4. Shoplifters 5. The idea of frogs 6. Between the World and Me 7. Free improvisation 8. adrienne maree brown 9. Society 10. Cats

1. Ctrl (SZA) 2. Joining Twitter 3. Oat milk 4. High Maintenance 5. Salad Days (Mac DeMarco) 6. Easy A 7. Insecure 8. Bachelor in Paradise 9. Kanye-Trump Oval Office interview 10. Darcie Wilder’s months of the year

1. “I smell like beef” 2. Sketch comedy by women = considered cool 3. The Bon Appétit test kitchen 4. David Brooks’s sandwich academy 5. Cynthia Nixon’s gubernatorial campaign 6. Before Sunrise trilogy 7. Jhumpa Lahiri/Mindy Lahiri 8. Purple smiling devil emoji 9. Oat milk 10. Instagram DMs

1. Google+ 2. Psych the Musical (on DVD) 3. TJ’s dark chocolate PB cups 4. Boats 5. Usher live in concert 6. Open-toe shoes (all-weather, all-terrain) 7. Ratty Plantains 8. Tiny plastic food 9. Thick paperback books 10. Expensive/cheap dessert experiences

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1. Frank Ocean 2. Sticking to the union 3. FaceTime 4. Between the World and Me 5. Twin Fantasy 6. Kombucha 7. “On Liking Women” 8. Frumpiness 9. “how to write an Alt-J song” 10. Boundaries

1.My kumquat tree 2. Frank Ocean 3. Corduroy 4. Big Thief 5. Icelandic skyr 6. Quashie 7. Biscoff cookies 8. Vampire Weekend 9. Meeting a llama 10. Death of my apricot tree

1. Things being better than expected 2. Phoebe Waller Bridge 3. BA youtube 4. Roasted Brussels sprouts 5. Wearing dresses again 6. Hozier 7. My mom’s twitter 8. Parasite 9. My first “I Voted” sticker 10. Blue Room muffins

1. Cast-iron cookware 2. Hand-me-downs 3. Find My Friends 4. Collaging 5. Hot water bottles 6. Cycles 7. Affective punctuation 8. Honey 9. Hangry 10. STS

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1. My twin cousins in 9th 1. Oat milk grade letting me take 2. The RealReal a selfie with them at 3. Compilation video of Thanksgiving Owen Wilson saying “Wow” 2. Brutalism (as an attitude) 4. The demise of skinny jeans 3. Kimoji 5. The incoming Little 4. 1968 Women remake 5. Whistleblowing 6. Greta Thunberg 6. Impermanence 7. The total solar eclipse of 2016 7. Joe Trillo 8. Kehinde Wiley’s 8. Vibe check portrait of Obama 9. Saying goodbye 9. The scrunchie comeback 10. 0__0 10. @leandramcohen

1. Tumblr feminism/ Rookie mag 2. Trap music 3. Edward Snowden 4. Tinder 5. Slavoj Zizek as celeb 6. Mugglenet Fanfiction 7. Customization 8. Novelty food 9. Glee 10. Dog filter

1. Blue & black vs. white & gold 2. Bernie Sanders 3. Armpit hair 4. Moonlight 5. USWNT 6. “history of japan” 7. Naomi Klein 8. Vampire Weekend 9. Hamilton 10. Catan

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Never Again Action, a group of Jewish organizers, immigrants, and allies, will be holding two simultaneous actions: one at the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls and the other at the headquarters of UMB Bank in Kansas City. A little recent history: UMB is representing bondholders who invested $130M in the prison and are suing in objection to the Wyatt’s suspension of a contract with ICE. Join this mass action in solidarity with incarcerated migrants!

Show up to demand the shutdown of Wyatt and the abolition of ICE!

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Never Again Northeast Action: Rhode Island Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, Central Falls, RI 02904 3:30-11:59PM

This tribute concert will celebrate “the art, the music and the beautiful heart” of the aging--but not dead yet!--rocker. Take a downtown train to the hostel on the West End and sob along to timeless dad rock. All ages, $15 cover, $10 if you donate a used coat. All proceeds go to Amos House shelter.

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Join many members of the Indy staff in attending the 103rd annual lessons and carols choral concert in Brown’s historic and regal Sayles hall. The service will relay all the big stories from the Bible, along with chorus and audience participatory singing. When everyone lights their candles during silent night... chills. Hot cider and cookies will treats. Free and open to all.

7-12PM - The Good Will Engine Company (41 Central St., PVD)

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Greta Thunberg. Okay, now that I’ve gotten the yt climate activists’ attention…

Henlo! There is a global emergency!

It’s called climate change! And Sunrise Providence is tryna do something about it! Join climate strikers across the globe in fighting for climate justice, sustainable energy, and a livable future. It’s also cuffing season, so like come for the strike, stay for the climate cuties XD

4PM - Sayles Hall at Brown University

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Memorial Park, South Main Street, PVD 1-3:30PM

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George Wiley Center, 32 East Ave, Pawtucket, RI 6-8PM God, I love an open house. I also love organizing-themed carols. If you do too, scoot your booty on down to the George Wiley Center to check out the amazing work they’ve been up to this year. This event is also a great opportunity to learn how to get involved with their current organizing efforts as a community member, ally, volunteer, or intern. Psssst: I hear there’s gonna be a holiday tree lit up with demands for basic needs.

Berklee Silent Film Orchestra: The Phantom of the Opera Avon Cinema, 260 Thayer St, PVD Team Phantom assemble! The Berklee Silent Film Orchestra (go off I guess) is performing an original live score to the 1925 CLASSIQUE: Phantom of the Opera. There’s gonna be a literal bravura soprano vocalist (go off) who’ll be singing the film’s operatic solos IN SYNC with the screen. Come having “Prima Donna” memorized or don’t come at all. Also, Team Raoul need not show up—your king has weak dick and we all know it!