The College Hill Independent: 6 April 2012

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT V O L U M E

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T HE COL L EGE HIL L INDEPEN DEN T NEWS

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FROM THE EDITORS WEEK IN REVIEW CAROLINE SOUSSLOFF, ERICA SCHWIEGERSHAUSEN

BIAS IS PERSPECTIVE CHRISTINA MCCAUSLAND

METRO

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UNPOPEULAR DOREEN ST. FÉLIX

BORN, DIE, TAXES MALCOLM BURNLEY

OPINIONS

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IT’S COOL MAN ANDREW LEE

FEATURES

9 REALLY COOL 1 0 CARTEL

EMILY GOGOLAK, ELLORA VILKIN

“When he was shot,” AP’s Matt Sedensky declares, “Trayvon Martin was not the baby-faced boy in the photo that has been on the front pages across the country.

And George Zimmerman wasn’t the beefy-looking figure in the widely published mugshot.” Rather, the article suggests, the juxtaposition of Martin’s puff-cheeked smile and red Hollister Shirt with the menacing glare of Zimmerman in his orange jail uniform is a deceptive image, invented by a narrative-hungry media, in which good and evil, innocent and guilty, are comfortably predefined. Along with the revelation that Martin was suspended from school for having marijuana residue in his backpack, conservative bloggers have scoured his social media accounts to turn up pictures that more “accurately” represent the menacing black teen they want him to be. In one more recently circulated photo, Martin is pictured wearing a white tank top and gold caps on his teeth.

The implication here is that if AP and the Brietbart crowd can find enough evidence that Martin conformed to the “thug” image stubbornly associated with young black men in America, Zimmerman would have been more justified in profiling and, ultimately, shooting him down.

This is disgusting stuff, particularly because it might work. Trayvon is tragic because he was perfectly innocent, round-cheeked and smiling, carrying Skittles and canned iced tea. (Skittles sales have apparently jumped in the past month; the candy circulates at rallies and marches in his honor). Our outrage seems to depend on this image. The widespread indignation over Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s freedom is a good sign that we haven’t all drunk the post-racial Kool-Aid. But until we are ready as a nation to condemn, unconditionally, the unjustified harassment, beating, or murder of young black men— either by police or Zimmerman-style “Samaritans”—we’ll have to keep playing this game, to prove each and every time that this kid was not a “thug,” that he’s worth our compassion. We’re not there yet.

-SAB

EPHEMERA

SOFIA CASTELLO Y TICKELL

INTERVIEWS

1 2 GOD, PORN, NOTHING TIMOTHY NASSAU

ARTS

13 1 4 UNDER CONSTRUCTION FLAME WAR

DREW DICKERSON

ALEXANDRA CORRIGAN

FOOD

1 6 PLANE PRESENTATION LUCAS MORDUCHOWICZ

SPORTS

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CLASHING CYMBALS MALCOLM BURNLEY

LITERARY

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WESTWARD GREGORY CONYERS

1 9 PRIMITIVE PROBLEM DAVID SCOFIELD

ABOUT

MANAGING EDITORS Chris Cohen, Belle Cushing, Mimi Dwyer ∙ NEWS Alex Ronan, Erica Schwiegershausen, Caroline Soussloff ∙ METRO Sam Adler-Bell, Grace Dunham, Jonathan Storch ∙ FEATURES David Adler, Emily Gogolak, Ellora Vilkin, Kate Welsh ∙ ARTS Kate Van Brocklin, Jonah Wolf ∙ OPINIONS Tyler Bourgoise, Stephen Carmody ∙ INTERVIEWS Rachel Benoit ∙ SCIENCE Raillan Brooks ∙ FOOD Anna Rotman ∙ SPORTS David Scofield ∙ LITERARY Michael Mount, Scout Willis ∙ X PAGE Becca Levinson ∙ LIST Alex Corrigan, Dylan Treleven, Allie Trionfetti ∙ BLOG Christina McCausland, Dan Stump ∙ DESIGN EDITOR Mary-Evelyn Farrior ∙ DESIGN TEAM Andrew Beers, Jess Bendit, Abigail Cain, Olivia Fialkow, Jared Stern ∙ CHIEFS Annika Finne, Robert Sandler ∙ ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Diane Zhou ∙ SENIOR EDITORS Gillian Brassil, Malcolm Burnley, Jordan Carter, Adrian Randall, Emma Whitford MVP: Becca Levinson Cover Art: Chihiro Hashimoto Beta Rho Delta Fraternity Composite (1st F+M Brother Initiated)

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news

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Life is a Highway

by Erica Schwiegershausen

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WEEK in

ood news for those of us who still can’t tell our left from our right: last week Google released a video of a blind man riding to Taco Bell in the company’s self-driving Toyota Prius.

This technology—which uses radar and lasers to scan and record a 3D map of its surroundings enabling it to navigate streets, obey traffic rules, and avoid obstacles—is not entirely unexpected: Google announced its self-driving car project in 2010, stating a goal of “making driving safer, more enjoyable, and more efficient.”

The video celebrates Google’s 200,000 miles of safely-executed, computer-led driving, but it will be at least a few years until self-driving cars hit the marketplace.

In February, Nevada became the first state to specify regulations for testing driverless vehicles, but many predict that it states with more complex traffic problems won’t be as quick on the uptake.

In other surreal auto news, a highlight of this year’s New York Auto Show is The Terrafugia Transition, a flying car that was cleared for production last summer by the U.S. Highway Safety Administration.

Described as a “roadable aircraft,” and designed to “provide pilots the convenience of a dual-purpose vehicle,” the street-legal airplane—which looks more like a hybrid plane/helicopter than an automobile— features wings that fold up to fit in a standard home garage. Unfortunately,

REVIEW A

Illustration by Robert Sandler

Stop Making Cents

by Erica Schwiegershausen

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anadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced last week that the Royal Canadian Mint will stop producing pennies this fall, as part of the federal government’s latest round of austerity measures and budget cuts. Calling the penny “a currency without any currency in Canada,” Flaherty explained that the 1.5 cents it costs to produce a Canadian penny—now worth a twentieth of its original 1858 value—makes the transition to a penny-free economy the rational choice. Penny production in Canada costs $11 million a year.

The coins will remain legal tender until they eventually disappear from circulation.

Reactions are mixed. Many believe pennies to be little more than a nuisance—New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, and Sweden are among the countries that have already eliminated their lowest coin denomination. According to Flaherty, pennies “take up too much space on our dressers at home” and “far too much time for small businesses trying to grow and create jobs.”

Others are more sentimental, mourning the loss of a plethora of aphorisms. And some worry that the elimination of the one-cent coin will lead to price increases.

“It’s another way for merchants to nickel and dime their customers” web developer Theo Danilov told the Associated Press.

Although Derek Burleton, the deputy chief

economist at TD Economics in Toronto told Yahoo!Finance that he doesn’t see this as “being a major impact on the consumer price index.”

In response to inquiries regarding the future of the American penny, the US Treasury has stated that there are no plans to eliminate the lucky coin, though Obama indicated during his 2008 campaign that “we’ve been trying to get rid of the penny for some time.” For now, the administration is simply looking at the possibility of using cheaper materials. Due to inflation and the rising price of zinc, it currently costs the US mint 2.41 cents to make a penny—composed of 97.5 percent zinc and 2.5 percent copper—resulting in a loss of $60,200,000 in 2011.

But the penny has its backers. The zinc lobby, for one, and the advocacy group Americans for Common Cents— an organization of penny enthusiasts that “attempts to ensure that accurate information about the penny is widely disseminated.” According to the group’s website, pennies.org (the home page features the poll: “What’s your favorite Lincoln Bicentennial penny design?”), two-thirds of Americans support keeping the penny in circulation. The group maintains that eliminating the penny is a losing proposition, pointing out that, after all, “pennies add up to millions of dollars every year for charities across the country.”

there will be no flying demonstration of the $279,000 flying car at the April auto show, but the company—which claims it is targeting sales at “fly-in” communities where residents own small planes or ferry in and out of town—will be soliciting $10,000 down payments.

Meanwhile, scientists are hard at work developing a GPS for the galaxy. The BBC reported this week that German scientists are developing a technology that will allow spacecraft to navigate the cosmos by picking up X-ray signals from pulsars—highly magnetized neutron stars that rotate rapidly, releasing emissions at a steady rate that researchers believe is ideal for interstellar navigation. With the means to detect the pulsar emission rates, a spacecraft could determine its position in the galaxy with an accuracy of five kilometers. Currently, spacecraft position is determined by studying the time radio communications take to travel to and from satellites, a complex process that is often off by several hundred kilometers.

Werner Becker, a Professor at the MaxPlanck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, told the BBC that the GPS-like device they envision probably won’t exist for another 15 to 20 years, but he is optimistic about the technology’s applications. According to Becker, increased exactitude in autonomous navigation may make interplanetary missions—including manned trips to Mars—far more feasible in the future.

You Are What You Wear

by Caroline Soussloff

t the intersection of fashion and science, Dr. Adam D. Galinsky of the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management has recently published a study that suggests that the clothes we wear inform our self-perception and behavior. Of course, the idea that our clothing has an effect on the attitudes of other people is, ahem, well-worn. One need only look to “power suits” or the iconic red tie/flag lapel pin ensemble preferred by presidential candidates during televised debates for examples. More recently, the tragic profiling of Trayvon Martin’s hoodie has brought these snap judgments to bear on the public conscience.

Galinsky’s study is one of the first to scientifically examine the impact of outfits on the self. Other examples include a 1988 study by authors M.G. Frank and T. Gilovitch, which found that “professional sports teams wearing black uniforms are more aggressive than sports teams wearing nonblack uniforms,” a conclusion that Gadinsky et al. cite in their report in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Galinksy’s team conducted their series of experiments using lab coats. They found that when participants put on lab coats after having been informed that they were “doctor’s coats,” they began to emulate the focus and meticulousness associated with the surgical profession. When viewing nearly identical images side-by-side, they were able to identify and record the differences faster than participants wearing coats that had been described to them as “painter’s coats.”

The study found that not only is the “symbolic meaning” of clothing important, but also the “physical experience of wearing the clothes.” Participants who wore “doctor’s coats” also demonstrated sharper attention than those who simply sat in view of doctor’s coats on their desks.

Galinksy entitled his study “Enclothed Cognition,” referencing its place within the field of “embodied cognition,” which examines how physical stimuli influence psychological processes. Embodied cognition, a relatively new area of cognitive science that began to gain traction in the 1990s, finds it roots in linguistics. In 1979, the seminal text, Metaphors We Live By, explored why we experience certain physical sensations when describing psychological states. For example, we describe power relationships in terms of “over” and “under,” moods in terms of “up” and “down,” and love in terms of “hot” and “cold.”

The evidence for these associations extends beyond the realm of language to physical perception. As one of the coauthors of Metaphors We Live By described to Scientific American in 2011, in a University of Toronto study, “subjects were asked to remember a time when they were either socially accepted or socially snubbed. Those with warm memories of acceptance judged the room to be five degrees warmer on the average than those who remembered being coldly snubbed. Another effect of affection is warmth.”

The fields of embodied and enclothed cognition are still new. Galinsky et al. suggest future avenues of research in light of their findings: “Does wearing the robe of a priest or judge make people more ethical?

Does putting on an expensive suit make people feel more powerful? Does putting on the uniform of a firefighter or police officer make people act more courageously?” For now, they conclude, “Although the saying goes that clothes do not make the man, our results suggest that they do hold a strange power over their wearers.”

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6 april 2012

THE BIAS BUSINESS The Engineering of Opinion in the Media

by Christina McCausland Illustration by Becca Levinson

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n February 29, Rush Limbaugh, conservative media’s most famously outspoken commentator, called Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” (among other things) for testifying before House Democrats in favor of contraception coverage by private insurance. In a political moment where reproductive issues have been both especially visible and particularly divisive, these remarks initiated a controversy large enough to merit its own Wikipedia page. A social media-driven campaign called for a boycott of companies that sponsor Limbaugh’s show, and, despite Limbaugh’s March 3 apology to Fluke, over 50 advertisers have pulled their funding.

Although Limbaugh’s comments have been generally acknowledged as inappropriate by members of all political parties, the situation lent fuel to liberal accusations of Republican misogyny and the existence of a “War on Women.”

Conservatives have dismissed these accusations as a contrivance of the liberal media, meant to distract from more pressing campaign issues and to portray conservatives as extremist and backwards.

They have labeled the media’s attention to the controversy as hypocritical—on CNN, Michelle Bachmann noted, “I’ve had [misogynistic] things said about me during the course of running for the presidency.

There was zero outrage about these statements on the left … This is something that is completely wrong.” Commentators have specifically targeted Bill Maher, who called Sarah Palin a “boob,” a “twat,” and a “bimbo,” insisting that if Limbaugh’s comments are considered reprehensible enough to boycott his sponsors, an Obamasupporting super PAC ought to return the $1 million recently donated by Maher. This sentiment has been echoed by commentators pointing out that the sort of misogyny expressed by Limbaugh isn’t confined to the conservative side—in addition to Maher, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Matt Taibbi, and Ed Schultz all have histories of sexist outbursts against political women, but have never be held accountable in ways

as high-profile as the recent Limbaugh controversy.

At the core of these accusations is the oftinvoked conservative refrain of liberal bias in the media. According to this narrative, journalists and media outlets are liberal to a degree that is unrepresentative of mainstream America and spin the news to reflect this. Limbaugh is a particularly vocal proponent of the idea that the mainstream media leans to the left, though the notion can be traced back to the Nixon administration, which, as the pioneers of the White House propaganda machine, invented the strategy of condemning media criticism as unfairly liberal.

All concerns with the truth of it aside, this conflict as used by Limbaugh is an ingenious rhetorical tool—it not only creates a specific niche for Limbaugh to fill. On his website, he notes that his show’s archives are “fabulous for… battling liberal media bias.” It also automatically undermines any attempts to oppose him (anyone against him is just a part of or brainwashed by the liberal media). Finally, it gives conservatives (or at least, the kind of conservatives who listen to Limbaugh) a persecuted identity around which to rally. These sorts of tactics are not limited to conservative commentators. Jon Stewart’s brand of satiric “infotainment,” for example, uses a similar rhetorical strategy to hamper any opposition. If anyone wants to criticize him, Stewart may always retreat behind his primary identity as comedian, thus making opponents look stupid for taking him seriously.

Commentators like Limbaugh, though ostensibly media figures, seem to play an oversized role in conservative political discourse. There are definitely equally outspoken liberal media stars—Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow—but none of them has a regular audience as huge as Limbaugh’s, which is estimated at over 15 million listeners a week, making it the top-rated talk radio show for 15 years. Wendy Schiller, political science professor at Brown, points out that Limbaugh’s huge and dedicated

audience makes Republican leaders wary of crossing him—“Republican politicians are fearful that Limbaugh can erode support for them among the most conservative members of the Republican party,” she said.

This was evident in the GOP candidates’ lukewarm responses to the Limbaugh-Fluke controversy.

The correction of liberal media bias is also taken on as a model for other conservative commentators like Bill O’Reilly (whose Fox News show bears the slogan, “the No-Spin Zone”), as well as networks and journalists meant to communicate news (as opposed to “talk”). The Fox News Channel’s various pointed slogans—“Fair and Balanced,” “We Report, You Decide”— explicitly highlight the network’s emphasis on correcting the apparent liberal bias, while also implying that Fox is the source for unbiased coverage. The late Andrew Breitbart’s electronic journalism empire at Breitbart.com was established explicitly to “capture the lies” he saw perpetuated by mainstream media.

Regardless of whether or not these sources actually present the unbiased news they purport to offer, they all invoke the mainstream liberal media bias as part of their foundation. And despite the usefulness of the “liberal media bias” as a rhetorical device, there appears to be a real demand for alternative conservative media analysis like that of Limbaugh and other conservative commentators. In 2011, the 13 most viewed cable news programs were all on Fox News Channel, making it the top cable news channel for the past ten years. If these conservative-leaning shows and conservative talk radio are so overwhelmingly popular, they must fill a certain niche—the bias they aim to correct seems, at the very least, to be something perceived by their audience.

There are countless media watchdog organizations and websites devoted to exposing and correcting media bias from both ends. Among the most active, Accuracy in Media and the Media Research Center work against the liberal media bias, while

groups like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting or the Media Matters Action Network aim to reveal “conservative misinformation”—and all of them have enough content to be fairly convincing.

Accordingly, a Pew study released in February shows that the number of Americans who believe that there is political bias in the news has increased in the past four years, and though Republicans tend to express more concern about this than Democrats (49 percent and 32 percent, respectively), the percentage of people who see a “great deal” of political bias in news coverage has risen across party lines.

Schiller notes that “people have become saturated with a purely ideological stream of news and they want a little more balance … so you’re seeing some business decisions made by networks that reflect [this].” She points out that some cable news networks have recently begun to shift toward the center—“the president of Fox News is trending Fox a little more centered than it used to be. And MSNBC has hired a whole slew of Republicans … as commentators.”

That this shift is a business decision points to an understanding of how news media works that transcends the party bias described here. Above all else, news media is a business in the hands of only a very few huge conglomerates (the “big six” control 90 percent of media) and is accordingly motivated by revenue. Sensationalism, which is what Limbaugh is known for, is generally in the interest of media corporations because it is entertaining and leads to quick ratings and advertising profits. Similarly, the discord created by schismatic issues (like reproductive health) produces impassioned public interest and therefore leads to more viewers while also creating the illusion of productive political discourse. Limbaugh’s infamous insensitivity, then, is really just good business.

CHRISTINA MCCAUSLAND B’12.5 reports, you decide.

metro

the college hill independent

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A DIOCESE IN ARMS Growing Gap Between a Bishop and his Flock

by Doreen St. Félix Illustration by Robert Sandler

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n February 22, hundreds of Rhode Island’s Catholic faithful filled the pews of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, located on 30 Fenner Street in Cathedral Square, to attend Ash Wednesday mass. Consecrated in 1889, the cathedral is the mother church of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence. The Most Reverend Thomas J. Tobin, Bishop of the ecclesiastical district, celebrated the mass. During his homily, Bishop Tobin reminded the congregants of the spiritual significance of the then-impending Lenten season, encouraging them in the practices of devotion.

Mary Antoine sat in the second row.

She says the Bishop’s “tone changed” when he told them that Lent was also “a time to reorder their priorities.” From his green marble pulpit, Bishop Tobin warned the church to “repent for the sins of our community, for the sins of our nation.” The office of the Providence diocese views the renewed effort to legalize same-sex marriage in Rhode Island as a state sin. It considers the passing of the Obama Administration’s Health and Services Mandate, requiring all employers to provide contraception services to their employees, to be a national sin.

The Diocese’s positions align with both the official teaching of the Catholic Church and with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

But Antoine, who has been registered at the North Kingstown parish of St. Bernard for more than two decades, doesn’t agree with them. “He’s the leader of our community; he has the interests of our faith at heart,” she says, “but his statements sound more like an angry politician’s than a Church servant.”

Mary Antoine is one of the 700,000 Rhode Island residents affiliated with the Catholic Church. Established by Pope Pius IX in 1872, the Diocese of Providence was originally composed not only of Rhode Island but also four counties in Massachusetts. Today it spans the state of Rhode Island. There are just over 150 parishes; after forced closures in 2009, only nine Catholic high schools remain.

Compared to other dioceses, its geographical size is small.

Yet Rhode Island ranks as the most Catholic state in the United States, with the Catholic community accounting for

59.5 percent of its population. And Rhode Island Catholics are also some of the most politically liberal. A July 2010 study conducted by David Walker, Vice President of the research firm Greenberg, Quinlan and Rosner in Washington D.C., finds that 63% of the participants who identified as Catholic support same-sex marriage.

Although efforts toward same-sex marriage have been defeated in the Rhode Island legislature yearly since 1997, Walker says that “largely because of Catholic voters, marriage equality is inevitable in Rhode Island.”

WITHOUT A DOUBT When Bishop Tobin accepted the canonical duty to lead the diocese of Providence in 2005, he made a sacred vow to “teach, sanctify and govern” the fractured church. In the ‘90s, allegations of sexual abuse against Bishop Louis E. Gelineau had racked the community’s conscience. In the early 2000s, the Bishop Louis Edward Mulvee’s $36 million molestation lawsuit settlements had affected its pockets. As the diocese’s eighth bishop, Tobin sought to revitalize trust in the community’s disillusioned relationship with its leadership. “I was not ordained to be irrelevant,” he said at the time of his installment. His choice of coat of arms intertwines representation of the church with symbols of the state. A blue background signifies the Virgin Mary, while silver anchors refer to Rhode Island’s maritime importance.

Like the bishops who preceded him, Bishop Tobin considers his leadership to represent the Church’s commitment to Rhode Island. And Bishop Tobin does champion some of the social justice concerns of the largely liberal diocese in his support of certain progressive programs and policies.

The Rhode Island Catholic Conference (RICC), which serves as the vehicle for the Church in the public policy arena, operates under his direction. The organization supports a progressive tax system and fair labor practices by employers. Bishop Tobin and the RICC have also publicly opposed the enforcement of federal immigration laws while fighting for the rights of undocumented immigrants in Rhode Island. The RICC sponsors Mandiemento Nuevo, a not-for-profit corporation that provides financially feasible housing for

qualifying families. Dozens of families have found affordable housing at one complex, Renaissance at Plain View, in Pawtucket.

As an official arm of the Church, the RICC also directs much of its energy toward opposition to abortion and gay marriage.

The majority of Bishop Tobin’s speech in the public sphere is directed toward these issues.

Bishop Tobin publishes a weekly column titled “Without a Doubt” in the Rhode Island Catholic, the diocesan newspaper, in which he expresses the conservative social positions of the diocese with rhetorical force unusual for a church leader in a liberal state. His February 10 column against the federal HHS Mandate closes with the declaration, “This is the United States, not North Korea.” Even parishioners who agree with his arguments may dissent from his manner of public expression. “I don’t support the mandate. But I was shocked when I read Bishop Tobin’s statement,” says Kevin Johnson, who attended the Ash Wednesday mass. Bishop Tobin’s similarly combative March 14 column, “Five Problems with Homosexual ‘Marriage,’” anticipates a renewed effort by advocates of same-sex marriage, denouncing their proposal as “an ill-advised social experiment with unpredictable outcomes.”

POLITICS FROM THE PULPIT Bishop Tobin’s approach often precludes sustained engagement with his opponents in the public sphere. His same-sex marriage column describes the proposal as an attempt to “[enshrine] into civil law immoral activity.” But according to Protestant Reverend Gene Dyszlewski, Chair of the Rhode Island Religious Coalition in Support of Marriage Equality, “the effort to pass marriage equality in Rhode Island is driven by a belief that all of our families deserve equal rights.” Dyszlewski says that he and fellow liberal religious leaders were “disheartened…at the Bishop’s missive.” The level of public visibility in Bishop Tobin’s criticism of liberal Catholics is also beyond the norm. One of the most notable instances of this took place in 2009, when Bishop Tobin’s opposition to Catholic pro-choice Congressman Patrick Kennedy, former U.S. representative for Rhode Island’s 1st congressional district, escalated to the level of a public feud. Bishop Tobin encouraged Rhode Island priests to deny communion to

Congressman Kennedy.

Antoine, who is pro-choice, finds the Bishop’s entrance in the political fray obtuse. “Sometimes he’s Senator Tobin,” she says. “If the state doesn’t belong in the Church, then the Church shouldn’t be in the state.” Antoine and other liberal Rhode Island Catholics are not alone in such sentiments. Millions of Catholic Americans are choosing political sides in their religious affiliation. And these sides are often to the left of their leadership.

But “the problem with Bishop Tobin,” according to Michael Sean Winters, a journalist for the National Catholic Reporter, “is that he is so entirely defensive.

[Using his office], he has declared a cultural war.” In fact, Bishop Tobin employs this martial metaphor in his own speech. In his gay marriage column, Bishop Tobin says that he is prepared for the diocese to be “fully engaged in the battle,” from his headquarters in Cathedral Square. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bishop Tobin has said that had he not been ordained, he would likely have gone into politics.

Winters, who opposes abortion, argues that Bishop Tobin’s approach to public engagement is detrimental to the health of the Church in Rhode Island. Winters says that it reduces “the forgiving culture of the Catholic faith to moralism.” “It’s really bad theology,” he says, because it turns “the altar rail into a battlefield.”

DOREEN ST FÉLIX B’14 is a sin of the community, a sin of the nation.

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metro

6 april 2012

N O N P R O F I T S S AY N O Will Brown Bail Out Prov idence?

by Malcolm Burnley Illustration by Robert Sandler

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ith 600 signatures, a ten-foot protest banner, and demands for $4 million, three dozen Brown University students marched into the university’s administrative offices on March 9. They were representing Brown For Providence, a student group lobbying for increased payments by the university to the city government, at the request of Mayor Angel Taveras. Taveras, facing a $22.5 million budget shortfall, is asking for $7.1 million in emergency assistance from the city’s nonprofits—including $4 million from Brown—nearly tripling of the current sum they pay of about $2.5 million annually.

Chants of “Brown Should Pay Its Fair Share!” erupted from students on the Main Green after they resigned their petition to an administrative assistant, having found President Ruth Simmons absent.

Rebecca Rast, one of the student leaders for Brown For Providence, echoed the group’s frustration at deadlocked conversations between the city and school. “We should be helping Providence in a time of crisis,” she said in front of the brick edifice of University Hall. “Brown has a responsibility.”

Legally, since first breaking ground on University Hall in 1770, Brown has maintained the tax-exempt status established in its original charter. It currently pays just $3.6 million annually to the city—$2 million as part of the current voluntary agreement reached with Mayor David Cicilline in 2003, and $1.6 million in taxes on non-educational property. But Providence’s current fiscal crisis has left Rast and other city residents wondering whether Brown now has an ethical obligation, given its $2.5-billion endowment and nearly $1 billion in untaxed

property holdings, to buffer its struggling host city, which has exhausted other alternatives. “The city is facing a huge deficit and we don’t want to see taxes go up in the city of Providence,” Rast said.

Despite raising taxes incrementally over the last decade, Providence’s doubledigit unemployment rate has shrunk its tax base, and those funds are intended to cover almost 50 percent of the city budget. While debt has risen, so has the cost of borrowing, as major ratings agencies have repeatedly downgraded the city’s credit. On March 14, Fitch downgraded Providence to a BBB rating, two steps above junk-bond status, and Moody’s followed suit two weeks later.

The effect—making loans unaffordable because of exorbitant interest rates— eliminates bond-issuing as a feasible budget plug until Providence shows sustained signs of a turnaround and its rating recovers. In the meantime, Taveras has imposed drastic cost-cutting to reduce the deficit by $88 million since taking office in 2011, including controversial decisions to lay off teachers and close four elementary schools.

Taveras has now come to Brown in need: Brown’s operating budget of $834 million exceeds the city’s by more than $200 million. Without relief from non-profits

by June, Taveras has threatened, the city will file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. Were Brown taxed like a for-profit business, it would pay between $27-38 million annually on its property, a figure envied by state legislators trying to chop away at tax exemptions. A bill introduced to the House Finance Committee by Representative John Carnevale (D. Providence-Johnston), supported by the Mayor, would remove

certain tax exemptions from non-profits.

Provisions in the current legislation would allow cities to charge non-profits the equivalent of 25 percent of what they’d pay if fully taxed, and could bolster Providence with approximately $24 million on its balance sheets for this year. However, the bill is still in committee, and its chance of passage in the full House is uncertain.

“The big dog in town is Brown,” says Michael Van Leesten, who chaired the Commission to Study Tax Exempt Institutions, appointed by the City Council in 2010 to assess the impact of non-profits.

“Everyone knows it’s the anchor institution in town.”

ACCOUNTABILITY Since last spring, President Simmons and Mayor Taveras have engaged in closeddoor meetings to discuss increasing Brown’s annual contributions by $4 million, a three-fold increase of its current voluntary payments. According to Taveras, an agreement was reached last December, but when Simmons brought the proposal to the Corporation—the university’s financial authority and Board of Trustees—she was stifled. “The Corporation indicated that the president could move forward with a portion of what was being discussed,” explained Marissa Quinn, Vice President of Public Affairs at Brown. The Corporation was only willing to double, not triple the university’s payments, and tested Taveras’s resolve with his asking price. “The Mayor was disappointed with what we presented and rejected it,” she said, “and there’s been a hiatus in the discussions.”

Over the last month, the two sides have

resumed meetings after being brought back together by Governor Chafee B’75, who hopes to avoid an embarrassing summer of insolvency in his capital. Yet almost a year after negotiations began, the two sides have yet to reach a deal, and the potential for municipal bankruptcy grows more tangible.

Providence would join Harrisburg, PA as the only other state capital to make such a filing.

While some target Brown as the only benefactor capable of saving Providence, others argue that non-profits have no obligation to bail out the city. Not only does federal 501(c)(3) law provide protections from property taxation, but universities contribute healthily in tourism and jobs (Brown is the second-largest employer in the city, with almost 5,000 employees).

Furthermore, non-profits played no role in the city’s outsized union problem. Due to decades-old pension contracts with city retirees, offering generous 5 to 6-percent cost-of-living adjustments—almost twice the rate necessary to keep up with inflation—Providence’s pension liability has ballooned to $901 million, the city’s starkest budget sinkhole.

“We’re different than the unions,” says Daniel Egan, President of the Rhode Island Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, who voiced the need for long-term structural changes in the city, as opposed to relief from higher-ed institutions.

Taveras has commissioned a city council subcommittee to work on pension reform and asked the unions for a 20-year COLA freeze, but thus far they’ve balked. “They’re a liability to the city’s budget and financial data sheet—we’re not,” said Egan, whose organization represents Brown, Bryant

metro

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

University, Johnson and Wales University, and Providence College.

Pension difficulties drained the city coffers back in 2003, when it faced a $60 million deficit, and the four private colleges and universities promised to contribute $48 million over 20 years to the city. In light of the current crisis, only a single institution— Johnson and Wales­—has agreed to increase its contribution (by about $1 million annually). “We thought we had a long-term solution in 2003. There needs to be some solution that doesn’t have us back at the table in six years. Righting that economic ship on the back of one sector is troublesome to our membership,” Egan said.

Quinn adamantly concurred: “We will not re-negotiate the 2003 agreement.”

PILOT THROUGH “You look at New Haven, you look at Massachusetts. We’re looking at what other communities are doing,” said City Councilman Seth Yurdin, who is working with the Mayor on fixing the deficit. “The city’s in a financial crisis, but that’s not the moral argument for institutions to pay more.

We’re saying that tax exempts here need to be at the same levels as elsewhere.”

Almost 25 percent of Providence’s budget is spent on city services absorbed by non-profits—including police and fire protection—which they receive pro-bono.

Contributions from the 2003 agreement are known as PILOTs, or payments in lieu of taxes—essentially, voluntary compensation from non-profits that substitute for property taxes to afford these services. According to a 2010 study by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, over the past decade, PILOTs

have been instituted in 18 states and 117 municipalities including Pittsburgh, Boston, and Philadelphia. PILOTs vary from lump-sum figures, like Brown’s $2 million to Providence, to percentage-based contributions according to property values.

During the recession, many cities have leaned on non-profits to leverage PILOT increases.

Boston’s PILOT agreement was brokered in 2009 by Mayor Thomas Menino, who asked his city’s 28 higher-ed and medical institutions to voluntarily pay 25 percent of what they’d normally be taxed.

Though the Lincoln study called Boston’s system “the most revenue productive program in the country,” non-profits collectively contribute just $15 million each year, or about 20 percent of what Menino requested. Even so, Boston collects almost six times what Providence receives from its 2003 agreement, in part because hospitals collectively contribute $6 million to Boston.

Providence’s medical centers make no voluntary contributions, though they own $1.2 billion in property value. Although Taveras has also had meetings with hospital leaders, their lack of sacrifice irks Egan, who insisted that before the colleges and universities boost their own payments, the hospitals should step up. “We have a struggling economy with families struggling and asking for financial aid for the first time.

And then our city is asking us to pay more than we already do, without going to other players as well.”

But healthcare providers in Rhode Island, hit by a swell of uninsured patients during the recession, are heavily indebted.

In the last five years, uncompensated care

in hospitals in Rhode Island has risen 58 percent, and two hospitals in the state— Westerly and Landmark—have been forced into receivership. In total, uncompensated care now costs hospitals $160 million.

“The financial liability of hospitals in our state was never strong,” says Ed Quinlan, President of the Association of Rhode Island Hospitals. “The economy and the reduced funding by state and federal government are contributing to the financial instability of hospitals.”

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD In his State of The City address in February, Taveras described Providence’s finances as “tumbling into a black hole,” and staked non-profits as the cog to avoiding the fate of neighboring Central Falls. But when the receiver of that city, Robert Flanders—who had been hired as an advisor to Taveras— told Bloomberg News on March 27 that bankruptcy was unavoidable in Providence, the Mayor responded by saying “Providence is not Central Falls. I will do everything in my power to avoid that.” Taveras dropped Flanders as an advisor days later, trying to salvage optimism that a deal remains attainable before summer.

What remains to be seen is whether Brown will sweat, or circumvent, Taveras’s June deadline. The school is preoccupied with its own timetable for transitioning to a new president and administration on July 1, when Christina Paxson will replace Simmons. At her introductory press conference, Paxson responded to questions about handling discussions with Providence. “I’m very much of the view that universities and cities and regions should

7

be partners. The current negotiations, President Simmons has had very productive conversations with people in the city,” she said, acknowledging that her predecessor has more familiarity with the terrain.

In her final State of the University address on March 15, President Simmons made no suggestion of an imminent agreement when questioned about it.

Instead, she reiterated the University’s steadfast position, saying it has a “strong recognition that we will not thrive if Providence does not thrive.” That rhetoric is echoed on the other side. “If the city’s not successful, then the tax exempts won’t be successful,” Councilman Yurdin says.

A frustrated Van Leesten said that the commentary, despite an appearance of common ground, hasn’t changed from two years ago when he was doing research for the commission. Yet the stakes keep rising. “Brown doesn’t want to be nationally or internationally known as a school in a bankrupt city,” Van Leesten says. “We should get the big brains together…and recognize that we’re going to rise and fall on each other’s swords unless we work together.”

MALCOLM BURNLEY B ’12 is exempt.

8

6 april 2012

opinions

P S Y C H E D E L I C THE SUPER SAFE ACID TEST

by Andrew Lee

T

here are tales of people taking psychedelic drugs and jumping out of buildings, going permanently insane, or accidentally overdosing. There are stories of children becoming addicted from LSD-laced candy, of psychedelics frying people’s brains, of the ever-present threat of terrifying flashbacks. In 1966, the chairman of the New Jersey Drug Commission called LSD “the most dangerous threat facing our country today…more dangerous than the Vietnam War.” Today, the United States classifies psychedelics as having a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use.

But these claims are gross misrepresentations. Psychedelics are still often severely misunderstood, and many societal attitudes towards them are unjustified, inconsistent, or misinformed.

In part, drugs are condemned because of their addictive potential. Since psychedelics are often grouped together with other psychoactive drugs, they are commonly assumed to be addictive as well. But psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin (the psychoactive chemical in magic mushrooms) are widely accepted by the medical community as nonaddictive. Unlike many addictive drugs, psychedelics do not directly activate dopamine neurotransmission in the brain’s mesolimbic pathway, the area of the brain associated with reward and addiction. In a review on psychedelic drug pharmacology, David Nichols, a pharmacologist at Purdue University, stated that psychedelics “do not engender drug dependence or addiction and are not considered to be reinforcing substances.” Further, the review notes that no scientific literature reports successful attempts to train animals to self-administer psychedelic drugs, a common measure of addictive potential.

Physiological harm, the other predominant source of anxiety over psychedelic use, is also lacking evidence in medical and scientific communities.

The Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances assigns psilocybin a high safety profile—far higher than many commonly used legal drugs, such as aspirin. A classic publication on the side effects of LSD by Sidney Cohen in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases observed that “no instance of serious, prolonged physical side-effects was found either in the literature or in the answers to the [study’s] questionnaires.” A more recent review of neurophysiological harm from psychedelics by John Halpern and H.G. Pope at Harvard University drew a similar conclusion: “there are few, if any, long-term neuropsychological deficits attributable to [psychedelic] use.”

Furthermore, the risk of death from overdose is almost non-existent. The lethal doses of LSD and psilocybin are around 1000 times their threshold doses (the minimum amount for a discernable psychoactive effect). For comparison, the lethal dose of alcohol is only 10 times its threshold dose. Given these facts, it is unsurprising that a recent review of the pharmacology literature on LSD in CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics reports that there are no known cases of human overdose from LSD. Even for non-physiological harm, psychedelics rank extremely low. For example, a 2010 study by David Nutt,

former chief drugs adviser to the British government, asked drug-harm experts to rank various drugs on measures of harm to the user and to society. The measures included factors such as risk of death, damage to mental functioning, loss of relationships, and so on. Psilocybin was at the bottom of the list, and LSD was third from the bottom. In contrast, the highest ranked drug for harm was alcohol.

There is further evidence to suggest that psychedelics even have potential benefits.

For example, a recent study in the Journal of Pharmacology ran an analysis of data from clinical trials in the 1960s and 70s that investigated the efficacy of LSD in treating alcoholism. The results indicated that even single doses of LSD significantly reduced relapse rates for recovering alcoholics.

Even in non-therapeutic settings, there is evidence that psychedelics can have benefits.

In a 14-month study conducted by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine on the effects of psilocybin on healthy adults, a significant majority of subjects rated the psychedelic experience as being among the most personally meaningful experiences of their lives, as one of the most spiritually significant experiences of their lives, and as increasing their sense of well-being and life satisfaction. The relative scarcity of research still only allows tentative conclusions to be drawn. But the evidence is promising, and should not be discounted.

The most valid justification for negative judgments about psychedelics is in their potential for psychological harm.

Psychedelics can lead to bad trips, intense and disturbing experiences during which the user experiences negative emotions such as anxiety, alienation, confusion, and fear.

The potential to cause these experiences, combined with the unpredictable nature of psychedelics, largely drives the view that psychedelics are harmful, dangerous, and worthy of condemnation.

The risk of psychological harm from psychedelics is undeniable, and is clear reason for caution about psychedelics.

But to infer the sweeping conclusion that psychedelics are universally condemnable is short-sighted. Taking a psychedelic drug is not tossing lots and hoping for the best. Although psychedelics can be unpredictable, the risks can be minimized in systematic ways. The Consumers Union Report on Drugs, a classic compendium of drug information by medical professionals, mentions that research on LSD and psychotherapy demonstrates “that the setting in which the drug is given, the expectations…prior to the experience, the reassurance given the patient as the trip progresses, and countless similar ancillary factors are…essential safeguards against adverse effects.” These safeguards recognized by medical professionals reveals the importance of drug education—telling people that acid will fry their brain is an ineffective scare tactic, but warning them about factors that can lead to psychological hazards is productive advice.

Furthermore, the incidences of bad trips are often disproportionately represented— empirical evidence indicates that bad trips are quite rare. In a comprehensive long-term study at UCLA, 221 out of 247 in the study had no negative comments at all about their LSD experience and the subsequent

effects. The majority of the 26 with negative comments also reported that the experience helped them in some ways. Further, a survey study sent to 66 researchers who had used LSD or mescaline on human subjects concluded that “with proper precautions [psychedelics] are safe when given to a selected healthy group.” Though bad trips certainly exist, they are not the perennial and unpredictable risk that media portrayals might suggest.

The potential for psychological harm must be put into perspective—there are safeguards that will minimize the risks, and the incidence of bad trips is lower than might be expected from popular reports.

There are many accepted activities that also have minor risks of disaster—skydiving, for example. Just as it is irresponsible for a person to skydive without a parachute, it is irresponsible to take psychedelic drugs without your friend’s chill sober older brother.

A rational assessment of the basis for condemning drugs reveals that the case against psychedelics is very weak.

I have only been able to provide a brief and cursory review of the empirical conclusions concerning psychedelics, with even less room for interpretation

and analysis of these conclusions. But the evidence is overwhelming that many popular views about psychedelic drugs are false or misleading. This is not a prescriptive argument that people should use psychedelics. Psychedelics are powerful substances, and many people should be turned away from them. But they can also be catalysts for self-understanding, emotional healing, creative insight, and meaningful shared experiences. Further, the case of psychedelic drugs provides some general lessons about how our society should approach drugs. Drug education and drug policies should be grounded in empirical research and rational evaluation, not conventional attitudes or sensationalized stories.

ANDREW LEE B’13 also advocates for aspirin.

the college hill independent

features

9

C I L E D E H C Y S P

by Emily Gogolak and Ellora Vilkin

I COULD QUIT WHENEVER I WANT Looks like one good trip really could change your life: according to a metaanalysis published last month, taking LSD may help alcoholics put down the bottle.

Norwegian scientists pooled data from six clinical trials published in the U.S. between 1966 and 1970, to measure the effect of a single dose of acid on patients suffering from alcoholism. Of the new study’s 536 participants, nearly 60 percent of those who took the drug either cut back their drinking significantly or quit, compared with just 38 percent who took a placebo. Only eight “bad trips” were reported overall, with positive effects lasting between six and 12 months.

According to the study’s authors, neuroscientist Teri S. Krebs and clinical psychologist Pål Ørjan Johansen, a single dose of LSD was as effective as daily doses of Vivitrol, Campral, or Antabuse, the medications approved by the FDA to treat alcoholism. “Given the evidence for a beneficial effect of LSD on alcoholism, it is puzzling why this treatment approach has been largely overlooked,” said Johansen, a fellow of Harvard Medical School.

Scientists aren’t exactly sure why a single dose of acid has such powerful effects, but it likely has to do with the mind-bending experience of tripping.

“Psychedelics probably work in addiction by making the brain function more chaotically for a period—a bit like shaking up a snow globe—weakening reinforced brain connections and dynamics,” said Robert Carhart-Harris, a psychopharmacologist at Imperial College London in an interview with Nature. Like other hallucinogens, LSD can trigger powerful hallucinations and a perceived expansion of consciousness. As supervisors of one trial in the Norwegian study reported, “It was rather common for patients to claim significant insights into their problems, to feel that they had been given a new lease on life, and to make a strong resolution to discontinue their drinking.” That’s why for problem drinkers prone to relapse, repeated doses of acid might help break the cycle. “LSD may stimulate the formation of new connections and patterns, and generally seems to open an individual to an awareness of new perspectives and opportunities for action,” said Krebs and Johansen to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

If acid seems like a wonder drug, researchers warn that tripping out of addiction is hardly a sweet escape. Acid might help boozers sober up, but the process is emotionally exhausting. In

early LSD trials during the ‘60s and ‘70s, researchers thought the drug would work by annihilating alcoholics’ egos to make way for a spiritual awakening. While modern efforts focus more on LSD’s effect on serotonin levels in the brain, there’s still an afterschool special’s worth of negative side effects to contend with. Tripping comes with the risk of increased blood pressure, sweating, nausea, and tremors; periods of extended psychosis or profound depression; and uncontrollable flashbacks, to name a few.

For chronic addicts, though, the risk of psychedelics might be worth it. Evidence is growing that drugs like MDMA, or ecstasy, and psilocybin, or mushrooms, might be helpful for treating disorders from depression to post-traumatic stress disorder. Experts are calling for continued research into the link. Commenting on the Norwegian study, Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Matthew Johnson said, “Although this meta-analysis does not replace the need to test the approach in new, well-designed and rigorous clinical trials, it puts some more muscle behind the interpretation that the older literature shows hints that psychedelic therapy might really help addiction.”

THINK L S D IFFERENT In January 2006, a dapper white-haired Swiss man stood at a podium before a crowd in Basel on his 100th birthday. “It gave me an inner joy, an open mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes, and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation,” he said. The birthday boy = Albert Hofmann. It = C20H25N3O, aka lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).

Back in the Lab Basel in 1938, Dr. Hofmann isolated psychoactive substances of psilocybin and psilocin from Mexican magic mushrooms (psilocybe mexicana) to make that soon-to-be-famous magic of his own. Flash forward to Basel nearly seven decades later for “LSD: Problem Child and Wonder Drug, an International Symposium on the Occasion of the 100th Birthday of Albert Hofmann,” where over 2,000 researchers, scientists, artists, and historians gathered to talk about, well, tripping. Wired magazine called it the “scientific coming-out party” of the drug Hoffman fathered—the one he hoped would soon work its way from the fringe into the mainstream. “I think that in human evolution it has never been as

necessary to have this substance LSD,” he said. “It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be.”

Among the attendees of the Wonder Drug event was none other than one of our era’s greatest Wunderkinds, the late Steve Jobs. Following a Freedom of Information Act request by media outlets after Jobs’ death, the U.S. government released his FBI file in February, which, to no one’s surprise, revealed among other things that SJ indeed liked his LSD. A lot. He even told New York Times reporter John Markoff in 2005 that LSD was “one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life.”

And to top that, he said that Microsoft’s Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.”

Another big hitter at Hoffman’s Baselsymposium was Kary Mullis, the surfer/chemist/genius who claims that LSD helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), an indispensible technique now used in medical and biological research labs everywhere. During an interview for BBC’s 2008 Psychedelic Science documentary,

Mullis postulated: “What if I had not taken LSD ever; would I have still invented PCR?” He replied, “I don›t know. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.”

And the very concept of DNA itself ?

LSD might have had a hand in that discovery as well. Scientist by day, hippie by night, Francis Crick, the Brit who discovered DNA along with James Watson in 1953, was known for throwing nuit blanche psychadelic ragers, with no shortage of acid. And in 2006, the London paper The Sunday Mail reported that Crick told friends that he first saw the double-helix structure while experimenting with LSD. Now that’s a trip that made history.

Ten years before Albert Hofmann would synthesize the first batch of LSD in 1936, Dr. Curt John Ducasse taught his first philosophy class at Brown University. The Angoulême, France-born philosopher and paranormal enthusiast would become department head just four years later; he was so popular, in fact, that he was asked to teach part-time even after reaching the compulsory retirement age in 1951. It’s no mystery why Ducasse’s classes were perennially packed: the impish, slight man was known to lecture on topics like telepathy, extrasensory perception, and life after death. “So many people are hemmed in by tacit beliefs and disbeliefs, by conformities and the things they take for

granted,” he said, “that they shut their eyes to the fact that the material world is not the whole of this world.”

Ducasse was also tapped to support emerging research into psychedelic drugs.

On May 14, 1965, William Mellon Hitchcock wrote to Ducasse asking him to serve on the Sponsoring Committee for some of the first experiments into the applications of various hallucinogens.

Ducasse agreed, calling the research “important;” as always, though, the avid logician was concerned with legitimacy.

Writing to Hitchcock one week later, Professor Ducasse showed remarkable foresight of his own: “In this field the line between open-minded but responsible

investigators on the one hand, and on the other, cranks or addicts of the marvelous, is often elusive and largely a matter of personal opinion.”

He had reason to be skeptical. Two years earlier, Harvard professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later known as Baba Ram Dass) had been fired when the University decided their experiments with LSD and mushrooms were too radical. Years later, Hitchcock would provide the men a new location for their psychedelic exploits in his family’s Millbrook Mansion—a property that would become notorious in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

AN INVESTIGATOR OF THE MARVELOUS

COMPUTER SCIENCE ON ACID I’ve tried to think about CompSci before while on acid, because I read somewhere that it helps you visualize a program better, but my tripping usually ends up more Videodrome than A Beautiful Mind. LSD definitely changes your perspective in ways that help you think about abstract things, but in my experience, any CS insights I’ve had have quickly slipped away, replaced by, “Why do I spend so much time pushing buttons on a metal box?”

–Anonymous #1 A lot of people say the brain is like a computer: algorithmic, deterministic, and predictable. If this is true, acid is like injecting a virus into your computer—it’s poison for your brain. One of the most amazing things acid does to me is distort time. Parallel events that should be happening in sequence feel like they’re processed separately and out of order. For example, let’s say I’m tripping on acid, and you say to me, “Hi, Stranger!” and then a bird flies by. To me, the bird may fly by, I think for some reason that the floor is moving like a kaleidoscope of fractals, and then I hear “Hi, Stranger!” The strangest part is, the time distortion is visual in nature.

It enables incredible insights into seemingly mundane things, and enables one to visualize problems in entirely new ways. In math and computer science, we’re often taught to think in n dimensions to solve difficult problems. Sober, this seems daunting. On acid, it becomes trivial—why couldn’t you picture something in n dimensions?

–Anonymous #2

OFF THE MARGINS M e x i c o’s D r u g Wa r R e a c h e s t h e C a p i t a l

by Sofia Castello y Tickell Illustration by Diane Zhou

A

t approximately 6:00 am on January 11, 2012, the decapitated bodies of an unidentified man and woman were found in a burning black Honda SUV at the entrance to a luxury mall in Mexico City. Two heads—presumably those of the victims—were found a few meters from the car, along with a note written on hot pink cardboard and signed by the gang Mano con Ojos. The discovery ignited fears of a shift in the Drug War’s zone of influence from border cities and outlying states to Mexico’s busy capital.

The two bodies were found in the city’s Santa Fe district, a busy and highly policed area that is home to diplomats and wealthy Mexicans, and contains one of the country’s top private universities, in addition to upscale bars and restaurants.

A few hours after the January incident, the Mexican government released the first set of statistics to quantify drug-related deaths since January 2011, when it ceased to provide such information in the interest of “national security.” After receiving repeated demands for information, the government acknowledged that 47,515 people had died in drug-related violence since 2006.

The figure reflected informal media tallies, although the reliability of these estimates is up for debate because it can be difficult to determine whether some deaths are directly related to the drug war.

“Everyone’s obsessed with the drug count in Mexico,” Peter Andreas, professor of political science at Brown University, told the Independent, as he discussed the shock impact of the deaths in Santa Fe. “Fancy mall, right? Beheadings. Telling you two people died in Mexico doesn’t capture that.”

Attacks have generally been limited to areas outside Mexico City, which was

considered to be relatively sheltered from the violence. Statistics compiled by the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego reflect this; the capital saw 181 drug-related homicides last year, compared to 1,940 in state of Chihuahua and 1,536 in the state of Guerrero. A total of 12,386 drug-related homicides were recorded last year.

The attack’s visibility was the largest factor in its impact, argued Angelica Duran Martinez, a PhD candidate in political science at Brown University whose dissertation focuses on drug-related violence.

“The biggest objective of high profile violence is basically to infuse fear, create a sensation that whoever is carrying out that violence is powerful… that the state is not powerful enough to attack them,” she said.

Octavio Rodriguez Ferreira, of the Trans-Border Institute, viewed the attack as more of an interaction between cartels than a jibe at the government.

“This is obviously a message, and the organizations are using the bodies to send messages to their rivals,” he said. “I didn’t see this particular event having a huge impact on the general situation of Mexico City. I see it more as some sort of message directed to someone in a very violent way.”

The attack was carried out by Mano con Ojos, a splinter group derived from the Beltran Leyva cartel, which has been responsible for a number of publicly displayed decapitations on public roads, by football fields and in back alleyways.

Extra forces have since been dispatched for additional vigilance in the neighborhoods where the gang is known to operate. Many had hoped that the capture last August of Oscar Osvaldo García Montoya, the gang’s leader at the time, would serve to weaken

the group.

“The thing with these splinter cells, I think, it is not clear how long they can last,” said Duran Martinez. “You see on the one hand the strengthening of the bigger ones, like the Sinaloa cartel, Los Zetas, and then you see the proliferation of smaller cells, but I’m not sure these cells can be as powerful.”

No one will contest that struggles for dominance, maintained by a combination of bribery and violence, and bolstered by the work of long-term informants, have led to grisly shows of power throughout the country. Nonetheless, questions of whether drug-related violence is moving to the capital, and the impacts such a shift would have, remain to be fully answered.

In many ways, Mexico City, colloquially known as “DF” (short for Distrito Federal), is markedly separate from the rest of the country. This carpet of lights strung between volcanoes—a sprawling cultural and financial center, home to 19 million people at last count—represents a disproportionate sector of wealth, power, and government influence.

“Mexico City is the brain and the heart of the country,” said Rodriguez Ferreira. He argues that the capital is too well staffed and coordinated to suffer from the problems that have spiraled out of control in other parts of the country, and that the costs of operating visibly in the capital would be too high for cartels.

But cartels do have a presence in Mexico City, said Duran Martinez, both for money laundering purposes and because there is a large market for drugs. Some have credited the lack of high profile brutality to an informal truce between cartels not to

infringe upon the capital, but a number of other factors have likely prevented violence from gaining a foothold.

“The problem is not that there are no trafficking organizations,” she said. “It’s more that the conditions—geographical, political, the conditions of law enforcement—are extremely different in DF than in the rest of country.”

Levels of general violence in Mexico City have dropped significantly in the last twenty years. This has been largely attributed to a series of police reforms. All officers now respond to a centralized command, and the installation of 13,000 CCTV cameras around the city last year has likely detered violence.

“Using violence in Mexico City is not really smart,” said Duran Martinez, adding that its dense geography does not allow for the level of isolation that occurs in dispersed cities like Juarez. “It’s a city where if someone commits a very visible act of violence, the police can arrive very quickly.”

As for the police forces themselves, “it would be naïve to think that there is no corruption in Mexico City’s police, but maybe it’s not as bad as it was in the eighties and maybe it’s not as bad as it may be in other parts of the country,” she said.

In a controversial move last December, the entirety of the state of Veracruz’s police force—800 police officers and 300 administrative staff—was dismissed and replaced by the navy, due to corruption.

Drug-related homicides had risen from 52 to 350 between 2010 and 2011, according to data complied by the Trans-Border Institute.

In a public address on February 9, Mexico’s Secretary of Defense, Guillermo Galván Galván, made a rare public admission that while the government

continued to fight for control in some areas, it had lost control in others.

“Of course there have been errors,” he said. “It is evident that in some areas of our national territory, public security has been totally overtaken.” A statement of this magnitude—from the Secretary of Defense, no less—indicates not only the breadth of the problem, but also rising awareness and accountability.

The last six years of the Drug War have had a deep impact on Mexico’s international reputation, leading to a decline in tourism from 3.28 million international visitors in 2005 to 2.07 million in 2011, according to the Secretary of Tourism’s official figures.

The US State Department issued a travel warning on February 8, advising against travel, in whole or in part, to 14 of Mexico’s 31 states. No advisory is currently in effect over Mexico City. Government officials have stressed that the majority of violence does not take place in tourist spots, but caution is advised given the scale of the violence.

Rodriguez Ferreira maintained that “Mexico City is very safe in comparison with other states.”

Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that levels of safety can be carefully zoned. Many surrounding municipalities, which for all purposes make up a part of the capital, have experienced significant episodes of violence that do not enter the consciousness of the larger population.

“Usually what happens in the outskirts of Mexico City, and of any metropolitan city for that matter, doesn’t get into the news as much as other things,” said Duran Martinez.

“Those two beheaded bodies in Santa Fe created a wave of articles about how violence was spreading over to Mexico City, but they were really just two beheadings.”

The extremely public placing of the bodies in the center of an affluent neighborhood engaged the Mexican elite, a sector of the population that has only rarely had to deal with drug-related violence.

“Much of the power in Mexico is in Mexico City,” Andreas said. “Business as usual has been able to take place there without thinking too much about the drug war and the drug trade.”

Relationships between drug traffickers and the elite have varied from complete separation to unnerving proximity in a 2007 drug bust in an upscale neighborhood, which yielded $200 million.

Impacts of the drug war on elites have been minimal in comparison to other groups—most consisting of stories of kidnapping or unfortunate run-ins, rather than targeted drug homicides—and have prompted increased security measures.

“I don’t think that they have taken the toll of violence that much, and when they do they react somehow,” said Duran Martinez.

Parallels might be drawn with the northern city of Monterrey, which was known for its wealthy inhabitants, quality education, and safe streets until a battle between the Zeta and Gulf cartels exploded onto the scene. The number of drug-related homicides in its state, Nuevo Leon, rose from 610 in 2010 to an astounding 1789 last year. Many privileged inhabitants left the city for the United States or Mexico City after a slew of murders, kidnappings, and open battles between the cartels led daily life there to be too dangerous.

“This is a war between the cartels. You

don’t want to get caught in the middle,” said Teresa Canales, admissions officer for the American School in Monterrey. “You need to be very careful about where you go, who you see, and these are things you didn’t really think about before.”

The kidnapping and murder of the 14-year-old son of Alejandro Marti, a Mexico City businessman who owns a series of sporting goods stores, prompted the creation of an organization called México SOS to counter violence and corruption in the legal system.

Duran Martinez described such moves as “highly individualistic efforts, like people were somehow affected by criminality, so they ended up creating these highly public organizations, supposedly to combat crime.”

A different attempt to spark a movement for peace was made by Javier Sicilia, a poet whose son was kidnapped, suffocated and gagged along with six of his friends outside a nightclub in an act of drug-related violence in March of last year.

He organized two marches—the first, on April 6 of 2011, drew 25,000 supporters, and the second, on May 5, was replicated across the world in 17 major cities, and in 20 cities in Mexico. This is the largest protest so far against drug violence.

“The government, up until the emergence of that movement, kept saying that the only people dying in Mexico were criminals,” said Duran Martinez. She added that Sicilia’s largest achievement was “to start visibilizing the victims of violence, and showing that not all the people who were losing sons and relatives and family members were criminals.”

The fate of Mexico is closely tied to that of

its capital, and in this sense, Mexico City’s resistance of drug violence is a good omen.

Upcoming presidential elections, which will take place on July 1, will provide fertile ground for dissent on the drug war. The fact that violence has escalated so significantly during the term of the current president, Felipe Calderón, has led many people to doubt the virtues of his party. Promises of peace will likely play a large role in the campaign.

Despite what Duran Martinez called a “window of opportunity for changing policies dramatically,” she cited a lack of specific and particular proposals for a change in strategy, and therefore doubts the government’s strategy will deviate.

With regard to consistency, and continued stability in the capital, Rodriguez Ferreira’s predictions are somewhat hopeful.

“Violence is starting to at least stabilize, nation-wide,” he said, pointing to a shift in the trends of violence. “Maybe in two or three years, we will start seeing a little decrease in the intensity of violence.”

SOFIA CASTELLO Y TICKELL B’12.5 is watching escalation.

12 interviews

6 april 2012

BORED ST. GEORGE Who are you, Georges Bataille?

Georges Bataille on André Gillois’s Qui êtes-vous?

Translated & Illustrated by Timothy Nassau

W

hat to make of Georges Bataille?

In 1930, André Breton said that he was “psychasthenic,” that he had a “conscience deficit,” that he lived in a universe that was “soiled, senile, rancid, sordid, bawdy, insane.” In 1945, Sartre wrote that he was “paranoid,” “crazy,” and needed psychoanalysis. His ex-wife married Jacques Lacan.

This July will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Bataille’s death and it’s still hard to know where to put him: a former surrealist whose complete works were edited by Michel Foucault; a philosopher who wrote pornographic novels and founded a society dedicated to human sacrifice.

Here, in 1951, at age 53, he appears on André Gillois’s radio show Qui êtes-vous?

(Who are you?) to answer that question. His interlocutors are members of the intelligentsia of the era: Jean Guiot, Emmanuel Berl, docteur Martin, Maurice Clavel, Jean-Pierre Morphée, people no one has ever heard of.

The selections I have translated from the broadcast are presented as a simple question and answer to avoid confusion. Some things have been omitted.

Qui êtes-vous?: Two signs on George Bataille’s face strike me as dangerous, but I will strive to atone, in the sketch of his portrait, for whatever disparagements this preamble might contain.

In the back of hollow sockets, two eyes lit by a glare frozen in mercury, with no discernible eyelids, seem to peel back the skin of his interlocutors, and his voracious jaw seems ready to tear them apart. That cannibal drive, intellectualized, cerebralized, is never not worrying, and it gives his entire face, voluntarily stony, a hypnotic power that stupefies anyone who looks at Monsieur Georges Bataille. Less obvious is the slight asymmetry of that square face, as if it were projected beyond itself, his high forehead, his steely blue hair, his burrowing nose, his long mouth that alone animates this anxious face seemingly deprived of human warmth.

The upper portion reveals the deep, intense emotion that its possessor must tease from a word, an idea, a vision; the lower conveys the cruel pleasure and painful delectation.

Monsieur Georges Bataille undoubtedly exerts a seductive power over those that listen to him.

QEV: What activities or things make you especially happy?

Georges Bataille: Oh, God! QEV: Your hesitation speaks volumes about the amount of things that make you happy.

GB: The first thing I can say is that I must be more or less like everyone else, and that, well, ultimately, I’m sure everyone knows that what makes people the happiest are the most intense feelings. But I would add, on a personal note, that what I find most interesting in feelings of happiness or rapture is closer to that of someone like Saint Teresa or Saint John of the Cross than what I first mentioned so enthusiastically.

QEV: Do you have a tendency to see the world in a favorable or unfavorable light?

GB: Favorable, definitely. Even though everything I’ve written seems to suggest the opposite.

QEV: What is, in your opinion, the most important goal we can set for ourselves in life?

GB: Obviously, I am a philosopher, to a certain extent at least, and my entire philosophy consists in saying that the main goal you should have is to destroy your habit of having a goal.

QEV: How do you explain that you consider life favorably while you say that your writings demonstrate the opposite?

GB: I believe that everything I have said that goes against taking life in a favorable light has to do with what I said earlier: that I think you must avoid having any goals, and hold to it. Insofar as you do have a goal, I think then you must look at life entirely unfavorably. Because, first of all, that goal is limited by death. But as long as you live in the present moment, there’s only occasion to see things in the most favorable way possible because you have not the slightest concern for the future.

QEV: The destruction of the goal, that’s the very moral of the Buddhists, isn’t it…?

GB: That’s right.

QEV: Who say that you should never do something for its gains…?

GB: Exactly.

QEV: With the Buddhists, it is likely that the destruction of a goal, in actuality, makes a place for God. What occupies the place that you’ve made?

GB: Well, I would say, simply, with a play on words, that it’s to replace God… QEV: Yes, but would you say more basically that destroying your goals, as you want to do it, makes space for God, or for nothing?

GB: God or nothing, it doesn’t matter. In reality we leave the door open.

QEV: Right, but is it this nothingness that you accept?

GB: You cannot say that from the moment you eliminate any kind of goal, there can even be nothing. Nothing is already saying too much, because we don’t care. Isn’t that right, that there cannot be an object of thought that is called nothing.

QEV: It’s a matter, then, of welcoming whatever you feel at the moment?

GB: It’s a matter, ultimately, of eliminating the order of thought, order accumulated by millennia of humanity.

QEV: Yes, but for what?

GB: For the disorder of thought that I find

pleasing, that seems, in short, to contravene our general frustration. In the disorder of thought poetry is born, for example… I’m not saying that I meant to say poetry earlier, but it’s a clue. There is something profoundly poetic in any disordered thought.

QEV: Disorder in relation to what order?

GB: The very simple order I spoke of earlier, the order you need to have when you want to pack your suitcase for the train.

QEV: Yes, so poetry is the opposite order of the suitcase, but it’s also an order…

GB: Exactly.

QEV: Do you have a particularly poetic way of packing your suitcase? I mean do you throw your clothes in all pell-mell?

GB: Oh no! Not at all, I’m very orderly when I pack my suitcase.

QEV: Can I just ask you this question: why do you write?

GB: In the end, it’s what I know best, and it’s what I have the most trouble saying. I could respond simply that it’s what most nearly resembles the absence of a goal.

Though, when I align sentences, I have a goal, don’t I? I always have a plan: I know what I’m going to say, more or less. But, nonetheless, I only write to eliminate all goals. And, in the end, it’s always a plea, a moral plea for the elimination of the goal.

QEV: You would have your life be a sort of elimination, an asceticism of elimination, have all your goals falls away, all that is of this world, to arrive at an approach, to permit a sort of, shall we say, presence and not an absence, pure presence in fact, to manifest…

GB: Pure presence, absence, it’s the same thing. Because, when you say presence, you imply an object; if you eliminate the object, the absence of the object is a presence and that presence is thus defined as an absence.

QEV: Yes, but still, something positive, something concrete that would be neither of this world or of the goals of this world, that would be you… that would come from you…

GB: That’s already too much, isn’t it? I only have one aspiration insofar as I still have goals, and that is to eliminate myself. It’s natural that…

QEV: Well this is new!

GB: It’s natural that I should come under serious criticism, because, ultimately, not now or ever have I picked up a revolver, or poison. I think it’s more fun—and more cowardly—it’s more fun to try to eliminate oneself through mental or sensory gymnastics. I also believe it is humanly more interesting because that’s what man is. Man is at bottom an ill-begotten story, with all kinds of problems. He is forced, at some point, to realize that part of him is a considerable

failure, and should be liquidated. But if he eliminates himself, he eliminates everything.

That’s a problem. There is always, I believe, in man, that necessity to eliminate and save himself.

QEV: I notice that we always find ourselves back at God. Because for those who eliminate man, what is left over once man is eliminated, I don’t see how that can be given any other name.

GB: Yes, you’re right, but you sadden me at the same time because, what can I say, theologians, I mean the people who instituted, so to speak, the existence of God in the world, seem to me, if you want, very far off. They seem too serious.

QEV: I want to ask you, at what age did you feel, for the first time, this feeling that, indeed, you had to eliminate yourself ? At what moment did the rupture occur, between a childhood spent, like all childhoods, between roughhousing and boredom, and the awareness that man should have no goal, but should still think deeply about himself to reach towards the image you propose?

GB: Well, I remember fairly precisely, it must have been near 1919, 1920, that these things became conscious at least.

QEV: How old were you?

GB: I must have been 22 or 23 years old.

QEV: It was only at 22 or 23 that this idea of striving to destroy, shall we say, your habits or your life, we could say, came to you?

GB: Thinking about it now, that’s not quite true. It took a more serious turn at that moment because I no longer had faith. Because I had broken with the idea of faith once and for all. While, before, the idea was limited

by Catholic beliefs. But, still, within those Catholic beliefs, I remember I imagined that heaven was the elimination of oneself.

QEV: You were on the path of sainthood, and you renounced it around your twentysecond year.

GB: I don’t think that, to the degree I had Catholic faith, I was on the path to sainthood in the slightest. I was perhaps just as much on the path of sin. It was mixed, if you really want, but saintliness certainly did not predominate.

QEV: All this discussion of the mysterious goals that are in you, and that must be destroyed, is not satisfying me.

GB: Me neither.

The full interview, which occurred on May 21, 1951 in Paris, can be downloaded from the French National Audiovisual Institute for €1.49 at boutique.ina.fr.

TIMOTHY NASSAU B’12 loves nothing.

ARTS 13

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

H O W C A N O N E W O R D F R O M B E N M A R C U S’ S BLACK TWISTED HEART BE TRUSTED Marcus and Exper imental Fiction

by Drew Dickerson Illustration by Julieta Cárdenas

I

n his cheekily-titled “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life As We Know It: A Correction,” published in the October 2005 issue of Harper’s, writer Ben Marcus defends what he terms “experimental fiction” against its detractors— most publicly Jonathan Franzen, author of such bestselling books as The Corrections and Freedom. Marcus was, at the time, author of two novels—1995’s The Age of Wire and String and 2002’s Notable American Women—and an illustrated novella, 2002’s The Father Costume. He received an MFA from Brown University’s Literary Arts program and served as fiction editor of Fence for several years (a position also held for a time by Jonathan Lethem). Since then, he has published another novel and taken up a teaching position at Columbia University.

For better or for worse, the elapsed time has also served to cement Marcus’s status as a controversial literary figure—if literaryscene politics can still be said to exist and command popular attention—thanks in large part to his Harper’s essay. Almost seven years later, the author is still mentioned in near constant conjunction with his polemic.

On March 1, Ben Marcus gave a reading at Brown last month while touring his anxiously awaited book The Flame Alphabet.

The novel, released by Knopf in February, details a fictional plague that spreads through the language of children. The book follows Sam, a father of one, as he struggles to keep his family together in the face of this new, word-borne disease.

In many ways, The Flame Alphabet is a novel of conventions. We follow a single, more-or-less reliable narrator through three narrative acts—this compared to his earlier Notable American Women (Vintage) with its multiple, conflicting points of view and The Age of Wire and String (Knopf ), which relies on a vignette style construction. When I expressed this point to Marcus over our table at Blue State Coffee in the University Bookstore (where copies of his latest, loudly colored hardcover were on table-display), he returned: “It’s okay that you say that.

Everyone’s saying that.” Evident from his tone was his disagreement.

“Why Experimental Fiction Threatens” may or may not be the sensational polemic it is often characterized as being. The essay was written in response to a series of articles and stories by Jonathan Franzen published in The New Yorker, including “Mr. Difficult”—an attack on the late work of William Gaddis (the article’s uni-faceted angle should be obvious from its title)—and “Two’s Company,” a short story about which Marcus pronounces: “to write experimental fiction, is to be a miserable narcissist, obsessed with the pleasures you left behind.”

Marcus told me that he “was really arguing against a series of claims,” that Franzen’s pieces were not belletristic, but propositional.

Franzen’s concern is that the writer does not occupy the place of cultural primacy he or she once did. He makes a scapegoat of experimental fiction, claiming that it obfuscates and makes literature prohibitively difficult. The experimental writer is a fringefigure that compromises the legitimacy of the entire medium in his navel-gazing, hyper-complex work.

Meanwhile, Marcus holds that literature that engages in conservative pandering is, in fact, doing the reader a disservice in its closing of the text. The distinction between

experimental and mainstream, as Marcus sees it, is one of the readerly versus the writerly book, irrespective of sales figures or publishing house. That is, meaning and significance as derived from the work by the reader versus prescribed to the text on the part of the writer. If the nonconventional exists in relation to the conventional, the territory it occupies is necessarily reactionary.

“Why Experimental Fiction Threatens,” then, can be read as Marcus’s attempt at denotation by something other than disassociation. “I really wanted to suggest,” he said in the course of our conversation “that there’s room for everyone. The categories are hard and there’s room for counterexample.” Considered in this light, the Harper’s piece is not attack, but advocacy.

For lack of a less problematic term, Marcus belongs to this tradition of experimental fiction—literature whose primary concern is, among other things, critical interrogation of the preconditions by which its own being is possible. Ben Marcus’s first two works engage with problems like narratorial reliability, the problems of plot structure, and the fundamentals of language. All but the last are absent from The Flame Alphabet—and though this last theme is detailed, its treatment is explicit where before it might have been more ambiguous, multivalent.

Such a move is necessarily either artistic growth or commercial concession. But has Marcus closed his text? Are we, on finishing The Flame Alphabet, left with the naïve takeaway that language is imperfect but necessary, so be careful with it around the ones you love? Maybe. But this should not be our only criterion for the novel’s success or failure.

In creating a disjunction between the conventional and nonconventional, Marcus perhaps did himself a disservice.

Unquestionably, challenging fiction needs advocacy, and “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens” is a well-argued, engaging essay.

However, in putting it forward, Marcus effectively and paradoxically chained himself to his shattered plot and syntax.

In championing the experimental, Marcus denied himself access to second-order experimentation: forays into the more conventional. Counter-intuitively, it is the staid, old forms that offer new possibilities for Marcus. “What I’ve started to really feel…I don’t mind the delivery systems…

It’s quite a strange book, I feel fated to have a certain set of ideas. This is more difficult, more ambitious.” If experimentation is Marcus’s first principle, certainly he’s allowed to experiment with conventionality.

In this way, it’s possible to save The Flame Alphabet—but I’m not sure that’s necessary.

Apart from the politics of what it is, it is still a successful and engaging read. Separated from the Literary and Historical Ben Marcus, Ben Marcus’s work still stands.

DREW DICKERSON B’14 is necessarily either artistic growth or commercial concession.

14 arts

6 april 2012

ASPIRATIONAL AESTHETICS Architects Make Buildings Talk

by Alexandra Corrigan Illustration by Becca Levinson

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hat kind of spaces do we make now? And how are they made?

Architecture teaches, more purely than philosophy, what our society or state holds most important. Buildings are aspirational aesthetics. Architecture links the past (what we hold important and want to remember) with the future. It doesn’t capture a single time, but an imagined future space.

The present becomes a fertile reference to understand the future.

This past month, two architects came to Brown University to present very different ideas. Both presentations spoke to the question of how we build spaces and places that have a better relationship with our contemporary world. In the first, on March 5, Swiss “nomad” Not Vital gave a presentation on his life’s work entitled “When Architecture is Sculpture.” Primarily an artist, Vital works to expand sculpture to an extreme—and absurdist—scale.

He represents a particular tension of the role of the artist and the necessity of the subtle. Unlike many other popular artists in his field, his sculptures and architectural elements have no evidence of any hand or craftiness. Instead, the works’ ideas are crafty: one of his outstanding pieces is a “House to Watch the Sunset” in Agadir, Niger.

His speech echoed loudly three days later when Bjarke Ingels, of Bjarke Ingels

Group (BIG) spoke to a packed audience of 600 in Brown’s Salomon Center auditorium.

Both architects had the wildly optimistic appeal of a speaker at a TED conference, pointing towards a future in which we fix our way of life onto our surroundings. It is as if interior life is inherently incongruous with the material world, and they have the cure. As opposed to Vital’s subtle, quiet nature, however, Brown professor Dietrich Neumann calls Bjarke Ingels the “rockstar” of the architectural world. Neumann nearly aligns Dutch Ingels with the late 20th century’s controversial “starchitects,” whose extravagant and extravagantly-priced buildings have been slowly deflating in value in the private market. Post-modern and post-colonial scholars’ preoccupation with space influenced the starchitecture phenomenon more than ever, creating a generation of architects with theories and grandiose commentary on contemporary society, which translated into grandiose buildings. As starchitects, deconstructivists, and the buildings of their peers (think: Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas) age, BIG takes over.

BIG DESIGN, BIG NAME BIG’s firm has a larger-than-life presence.

Ingels read through descriptions of giant structures including museums in ditches, buildings over highways and parks that

were entirely black. He did not frame his dialogue in the language of compromise, however. Instead, Ingels’s speech first set up impossibly opposed ideas: a highway system and a safe apartment building, or a museum that must take up no space above ground.

He then managed to forge the seemingly impossible out of existing surroundings. In one example, he presented an apartment building on the west side of Manhattan that couldn’t afford to have a courtyard, green space, and still be a safe place to live. He then showed a video of plans approved to be built this year of that exact building as JayZ’s “Empire State of Mind” played in the background. He and his design firm confirm that what we want is okay, and even can be seen and lived in the future. Ingels’s creation of large-scale urban design for communities is design-panacea to capitalism. One of his main categories for framing his designs is “hedonistic sustainability.”

BIG’s rigorous questioning of the possible proves that architecture is the megalomaniac’s art. The architect, unlike the artist, must create something that makes possible the inhabitants’ way of life. The slow processes of designing, funding, and building structures requires the architect to decide on his or her insight into the future. Like elected officials, the drafting of a blueprint is akin to drafting a constitution: what kind of structure should we and our society live

in? What kind of morals do we aspire to?

The decisions about how we live are also aspirational. Distant ideals of the future are envisioned spatially. To find the blueprint of the future, we only need to seriously consider architecture without limitations of utility or aesthetics. Architecture once lay in a middle ground between pure aesthetics and pure utility, which limited spatial structures to traditional aesthetics and traditional utility.

This is now changing.

FUTURE ISLANDS With the advent of new technologies and communication, globalization seems to suggest that we’re entering a “placeless” world. Scholars who disagree exist in fields as disparate as literary theory, politics, urban planning and film theory. The list could go on, but the point illustrated is that the concept of architecture as between therefore not accountable to aesthetics or socio-economic-political reality. This might explain new fields that connect these ideas of spatiality: psychogeography, urban studies, anthropological theories of art.

From starchitects to BIG and beyond, new architects’ all-encompassing attitude shows that they understand just how powerful architecture is to choose the philosophies they make concrete. Ingels showed his hand in administering social justice in his redesign for Copenhagen

arts 15

the college hill independent

parks that only included input from Arab immigrants in the city. As Ingels remarked, “We don’t eat Indian food to be nice to Indians. Therefore, we don’t use Moroccan architecture to be nice to Moroccans.”

Both encouraging hyper-competition and eschewing old, dated ideas of design, he shows his hand in reworking entire social structures of his home city.

BIG and other firms embody this realization of architecture’s relationship to philosophy and its ramifications of designing our entire world. Le Corbusier’s famous description of architecture, the “machine for living,” derives from and should be held accountable to larger philosophies and understandings of space. Our world isn’t becoming placeless. Rather, the places are inconstant and definitively express new aspirations. The creation of new spaces, from installation art to public projects, are a rich field for understanding what the human condition is today.

DREAM HOMES Compared to Ingels’s rockstar notoriety, Not Vital is an enigma. He speaks in a quiet Romansch accent. Romansch, as he loves to explain, is what he speaks at home: a derivative of Latin only preserved in the unreachable, inhospitable valleys of the Swiss Alps. His name appears crafted as an ironic, aloof artist’s gesture. But Not Vital is,

simply, a traditional Swiss name.

His works range from small sculpture to giant buildings to an entire island in South America (made of crystal!). His houses are titled: House to Look at the Moon, House to watch the Sunset, House that sinks into the snow so deer can play.

Vital’s work appears child-like in its optimism, but inflicts a stark view on society’s spatial state. It asks, as do many anthropologists and other scholars, how and for what purpose the globalized world has been made. Have social, economic or political conditions gone so far as to make some forget to look at the moon without a material reminder? Vital’s buildings are impractical, and yet he lives in them. More than a “lifestyle,” his way of life begs the same questions as his art. Is there something disturbed about the natural order that this hope and creativity are relegated out of utility to art?

Of course, part of Vital’s work speaks to not only a phenomenon of experiential art but also to the current importance of minimalism in Europe. Swiss Minimalism is today most famously embodied by Peter Zumthor and Herzog & de Meuron, who use organic materials to create largescale, peaceful structures. They avoid the vernacular, ornamental, or kitsch in favor of the sustainable and refined. However, even as building materials get cheaper, labor and

the label of an elite design firm have become more expensive. Minimalist structures give the appearance of simplicity and frugality in a visual lie of omission. Not Vital’s works mimic this minimal look, but show its absurdity through the play with its own necessity. Do we need a House that sinks into the snow so deer can play?

IS THAT HIS REAL NAME? Vital’s prodding of the false-superficiality of design is onto something. Architectural criticism can help to explain philosophical and cultural implications of minimalism.

In a recent editorial, Columbia professor Thomas De Monchaux compared Europe’s politics of austerity to architectural minimalism. He wrote, “Those who, consciously or not, exploit the aesthetics of austerity as a way of framing a debate on public ethics may discover, too, a hidden cost.” Once the epicenter of a seemingly seamless progression of architecture and philosophy, the EU now shows its fractures.

Like statesmen, architects BIG and Not Vital seem to feel the need to fix their home continent through design. Bjarke Ingels assigns himself large-scale social problems, revitalizing public space and discourse about responsibility of urban structures. Vital also takes on this role of a citizen of the world by humanizing the European legacy of minimal architecture.

Both architects are European through and through, embodying a certain tension in the decline of the continent. To look to the future, we can look at who is building it today. Which is what the committee for architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, did when it shocked architecture observers in February. By announcing the winner as a subtle and unknown Chinese architect, Wang Shu, they embraced the fact that the most spectacular, societyconstructing design is not in Europe. The first Chinese national to win, Shu makes large-scale buildings with an emphasis on local, sustainable materials. Architects are still trying to design the future by bridging architecture’s timeless and timely gaps: aesthetics and utility; hedonism and social justice; exciting and sustainable; small and big; the new and the old.

ALEXANDRA CORRIGAN B’12 is dreaming of invisible cities.

16 food

6 april 2012

HAUTE CUISINE

by Lucas Morduchowicz Illustration by Annika Finne

I

n the 1960s, men were men, the scotch was strong, and airplane food was gourmet. Grilled filet mignon with buttered green peas and croquette potatoes, caviar with eggs and toast, Dover sole stuffed with crabmeat on a puffed pastry, sautéed veal with a brandy cream sauce. This inflight fare might be making a comeback.

Airlines are in fierce competition for first and business class customers—especially after the near collapse of the industry after 9/11 and rising fuel prices. U.S. Airways has spent $2 billion to upgrade service for its first and business class customers, and many competitors are following suit, even employing celebrity chefs to design menus.

Appealing to the traveler’s palate, however, is not an easy gig. Lufthansa recently partnered with the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics to sponsor a scientific investigation into the complexities of airplane food. The study aimed to find out why customers have such an aversion to their tray-table meals. The results were surprising: Lufthansa found that people’s ability to perceive sweetness and saltiness fell up to 30 percent while in conditions similar to an airplane.

“Food tastes differently in-flight than when consumed on the ground. At 35,000 feet the sense of smell is dulled, making subtle flavors nearly impossible to detect,” American Airlines Director of In-flight Dining and Retail Alice Curry told the Independent. This is in part because the air inside of the cabin is so dry and the pressure so low that passengers lose around a third of their ability to taste. The atmosphere inside airplanes is carefully controlled.

Environmental control systems keep humidity low inside of aircrafts in order to prevent condensation, which leads to electrical malfunctions and corrosion. On top of that, at high altitudes, air pumped

in from the outside has an extremely low humidity and pressure. The change in pressure pushes bodily fluids upward, and they are more easily lost due to the low humidity. Because of this, passengers are thus thirstier and their ablity to smell is hindered, causing some loss of taste. Eating in the air is much like eating with a cold— only strong tastes make it through.

According to Lufthansa, this would explain the popularity of tomato juice and strong wines on flights, beverage choices that, like wearing sweatpants in public and falling asleep on strangers, only make sense in-flight. When on the ground, many travelers shy away from the bold flavors in tomato juice and full-bodied wines, but in the air, these beverages benefit from a reduction in taste perception. Chefs, also, can compensate for their customers’ dulled senses. John Besh, a meal designer for Lufthansa and also a regular on the Food Network and owner and executive chef at Restaurant August in New Orleans, is one of many fine-dining chefs that are expanding their repertoire to include food in the air. In response to diminished taste on planes, Besh told Salon.com “It’s not hard to make up for that. A touch here or there—lighter, citrus, spicy flavors are incredible. You really can still taste them.”

Another recent investigation at the University of Manchester into the nature of the almost universal disdain for airplane food has revealed surprising results that are not as easily solved with an extra lemon squeeze. Researcher Andy Woods found that the loud noise of the engine was detracting from passengers’ ability to taste. Taste and smell are the two most important senses to the perception of flavor. However, there are numerous other factors that contribute to the way people perceive taste including expectations, color of the food, plating, and

the environment around the eater. Woods’s research added level of noise to that list.

His study showed that at high levels of background sound, people lose some ability to taste.

Woods gave 48 test subjects blindfolds and headphones that were either extremely noisy or silent and asked them to give responses about the level of flavor of a variety of things. Participants with noisy headphones reported much less sweetness and saltiness as well as more dislike for the food than those without headphones. On the other hand, researchers found that the noise did enhance their perception of the food’s crunchiness.

Although higher levels of noise did lower test subjects’ ability to taste, not just any noise did the trick. When test subjects listened to loud music that they enjoyed rather than noise, they reported that the food was actually more enjoyable. Similarly, if they disliked the loud sounds they were hearing, they liked the food less.

Sound levels are, unfortunately, not under the chef ’s control. Neither are the limitations of cooking up batches of food that are getting sent all over the world.

One of the main obstacles to making good airplane food is the sheer complexity of the logistics that go into getting the food from the ground onto customers’ plates in the air.

“Chefs must take into consideration spacing constraints and the ability to heat food inflight as they design their menus,” Curry explains.

Most airlines use catering services such as Gate Gourmet or LSG Sky Chefs.

Airline meals are first prepared cafeteriastyle in huge quantities at industrial kitchens hidden away in airports. Hundreds of meals are prepared at once and loaded onto carts, which are then dispatched to airplanes.

In the air, meals may be reheated in a

convection oven and served up to hungry, if hesitant, passengers. Chef Besh claims that this challenges even the pros: “The real issue is the sheer, vast quantities of food, made in multiple kitchens across the globe, and finding the fish you can buy in 500-ton lots.

The food is going to lose a touch of soul in the process.”

Considering the odds stacked against them, airplane menus seem doomed to fail.

Still, several airlines have hired celebrity chefs to create menu items for their in-flight meals. American Airlines recently added celebrity chefs Richard Sandoval, winner of numerous culinary awards and executive chef at several prestigious restaurants, and Marcus Samuelsson, winner of Top Chef Masters season 2 and executive chef at the Red Rooster. Other companies hiring celebrity chefs include Singapore Airlines, which hired Gordon Ramsey, United, which hired Charlie Trotter, Delta, which hired Michelle Bernstein, and Air France, which hired Joël Robuchon.

With so many airlines on the brink of failure, these branded chefs add an appeal that sets otherwise similar companies apart.

As passengers witness a renewal of airplane luxe in first and business class, haute cuisine seems to be reaching new heights—even up to 35,000 feet. Or maybe those old menus only sound tasty on paper, and 1960s passengers wouldn’t have been able to tell their filet mignon apart from a mostly-beef patty.

LUCAS MORDUCHOWICZ B’14 always wears sweatpants and orders tomato juice.

sports 17

the college hill independent

MARCH-ING MADNESS Striking a Balance in Pep Band Culture

by Malcolm Burnley Illustration by Timothy Nassau

I

n the first half of the first game of March Madness this year, Kansas State’s freshman point guard Angel Rodriguez stepped to the foul line to complete an and-one play—when the chants began: “Where’s Your Green Card?!” Three times, members of the Southern Mississippi band, KSU’s opponent, heckled Rodriguez with racial taunts insulting his Puerto Rican heritage. Although he missed the free throw, KSU prevailed, and USM was forced to reckon with a first-round exit and a chorus of criticism over the band’s embarrassing behavior.

The five students who led the chants had their scholarships revoked and were required to complete cultural sensitivity training. USM’s athletic director personally apologized to Rodriguez, who later forgave the band (making the coy correction that Puerto Rico is a commonwealth, so citizens do not need green cards to immigrate to the US). On March 15, the same day that the taunts drew national coverage, an antiimmigration bill modeled after Arizona’s controversial law was passed in Mississippi’s state legislature, leaving some to draw connections between the two incidents. An isolated moment of racism suddenly equated USM with Mississippi’s history of racial intolerance, and was a damaging note for the reputation of pep bands across the country.

“The pressure on the band is to rouse the other team and heckle them,” says Ryan Kopacsi, the band leader for Virginia Commonwealth University’s pep band, the VCU Peppas. “If you can get in another player’s head, you can change the outcome of the game. However, you’ve got to be a little more tactful and a little more classy. They went over the line.”

Kopacsi, 33, has been directing the Peppas for 14 years, and is well-versed in the rights and wrongs of brass behavior. “I’m probably the most hated band director in all of America,” he admits. Kopacsi is a former

male model prone to tearing off his pants during Peppas performances, and relishes his combative reputation. “I feel like Ric Flair sometimes,” he says, and likens his role as band leader to that of a pro wrestling antihero—adored by allies, hated by opponents.

“I’ve had other coaches tell me some mean and nasty things, which is ok, because I’ve told them some mean and nasty things, too.”

A degree of rabblerousing is appropriate for pep bands, Kopacsi insists. “At this point in D-1 college athletes’ lives, they need to be able to handle criticism,” he says, though he reminds his band before each NCAA tournament to be conscious and selfcensoring of their comments. According to Kopacsi, the Peppas’ two main functions— nudging his basketball team toward victory and amplifying the arena—are inclusionary to needling opponents. “If some player gets arrested for credit card theft, that may be something you want to heckle the player about.”

But the synergy of school spirit and rabid cheering can spiral out of control, as evidenced by the racial slurs flung by the USM band. Too much leeway with band behavior leads to slip-ups, verging on regular fan rowdiness, that can prove damaging when displayed by representatives of the school on a national stage, like March Madness with USM. Yet too much seriousness and you wouldn’t have a pep band. So what are the proper boundaries of pep band provocation?

WALKING THE YARD LINE Wilson Baer, a trumpet player in Brown University’s Pep Band, and Vice President of its Band Board, has an idea of where to draw the line. “I think picking out a player and chanting at them is fine,” he told the Independent. As long as its within the context of the game—fumbling a pass might warrant a “Butterfingers!” chant—or poking innocent fun at a player­—a goofy haircut

might earn him the nickname Rogaine—is fair game for Baer and the Brown Band.

“But USM was taking it too far,” he believes.

Rather than wreaking havoc with opposing players, Brown’s band has traditionally preferred hell-raising with other bands. In 1973, five Brown students were arrested by Massachusetts State Police after stealing Harvard’s iconic bass drum, “Bertha.” The students disguised themselves as ABC television reporters who were interested in doing a segment on Bertha, and then smuggled the drum into their truck.

Before making it back to Providence, the police apprehended the students, and soon after, Harvard placed a restraining order against the Brown band to protect Bertha.

But this past football season, some Ivy League hijinx drew scrutiny similar to the USM incident. Last November, Columbia’s marching band, the self-proclaimed “cleverest band in the world,” was reprimanded for altering the school’s fight song. In lieu of celebrating its 0-9 football team, the band sung a parodied version of the fight song:

We always lose lose lose by a lot and sometimes by a little we all were winners at the start but four years has taught us all the value of just giving up, cause we really suck why are we even trying? we always lose lose lose but we take solace in our booze.

The band was suspended one game, and prevented from traveling with the team to its season finale at Brown. The Head Manager of Columbia’s Marching Band, Peter Andrews, denied a request for an interview for this article. But Baer defended the band’s improvisation: “I don’t think they were in the wrong at all with that cheer.”

But for Kopacsi, Columbia’s stunt was

no less a violation of band code than USM. “Just because the band shows up every game, doesn’t give them the right to slam their own team. They don’t need someone in their own family telling them they’re terrible.”

THE MAIN ATTRACTION Producing bravado without crossing into mocking—racial or institutional selfridicule—is a tricky line to toe for a school’s pep band. “We’re not necessarily there to make friends with the other team,” Kopacsi says. “But you can get on other people’s nerves without being disrespectful.”

To achieve that balance, Kopacsi tries to charm opposing fans before games, knowing he’ll be killing their team in chants during it. On the road before games, like during VCU’s Final Four run last year, the band performed free public concerts in Chicago, Houston, and San Antonio.

With permission from his administration, Kopasci crammed 29 tubas, trombones, and horns into a motorized paddleboat and serenaded pedestrians along the riverwalk.

“So often, bands see themselves as elevator music. We’re clearly not the main attraction, however, we think of ourselves as the main attraction.”

Injecting himself into the game with verbal back-and-forths with players or coaches within the arena, he doesn’t take it personal when fans tell him to shut up— that’s the quintessential mark of success for a pep band leader. “At that point, I know I’ve won. I’ve taken your head completely out of the game and put it on some dork who leads the band.”

MALCOLM BURNLEY B’12 played in the orchestra.

18 literary

6 april 2012

MONKEY FACE

by Gregory Conyers Illustration by Annika Finne

I

f the man in the West once lived somewhere else, he has forgotten about it. The sky has soaked it up. If the monkey whose face appears on a tuff tower in central Oregon remembers the monkeys of Africa and Asia, his expression doesn’t show it.

We, those who have come three thousand miles, remember the East via the warm car hood. Or we think we do; the War of 1812; 9/11; the Met; the War of Southern Independence; Katahdin; the Land of Lincoln; but we also can’t summon it or measure it in front of the little lichen and fissured face on a winter morning.

No other climbers appear all day.

Perhaps they’re home, over the mountains.

Only families walking off Christmas dinner try the chilled dust—families from Madras, and Terrebonne, and Culver. They watch us scramble over the broken lower section and around the corner of the climb’s shoulder that’s less like a shoulder and more like axe edge honed from a shoulder bone.

Ted ties in from the bottom of the pile and I tie in from the top, and this double act of tying the doubled figure eight doesn’t recall the real and the represented or life and art but is the start of the climb, what we came here to do. With the knot tugged tight and the rope softly piled at our feet the stone begins to flow under us like a glacier slipping into the sea. A foot goes in, and

hand comes out, and back in, and out again and up and the other foot up and the other hand up.

Out we go around the shoulder blade and then up the neck into the mouth where we feel like we’re crouched in the actual soft but present breath of the West. The mouth faces east, actually, but east of here is more range country. We’d forgotten about east of that. And east of that, if we cold see over the gentle sloping gradient of the amber waves of grain, would be another ridge. And east of that, if we could see over the oldest ripples in America, would be the old familiar salty seaport towns that are not ours, not the placard of colonial rule anymore.

We both breathe the central Oregon chill and then Ted crawls over the place where the tooth just back from the canines should be and out and then up the world’s shortest pitch. The world’s shortest, but not really when the world is also only about as big as the next hold plus a sense of the one after that. Eyes, ears, and nose function like knees and shoulders: not as receptors but as actors. The world seems cut off at the friction rubber underfoot. The rock smells of evaporated rain. The rain is gone and we are here. The rain is gone and the rock is here.

The land below the monkey looks zoned for growing in the summer and for deer and cows the rest of the time. The river below looks like it comes from somewhere

in the west and is indubitably headed for somewhere else in the west, probably where steelhead swim and where sea lions eat them.

The clouds look like stacked UFOs teetering over the mountains, which themselves look like flinty hardened bits of Domino’s granulated sugar.

The monolith proffers profound minutiae, and these cracks offer a road, path, way, passage. A broken wall, a needle tip, and we emerge to the warmth above.

Metaphors come later, in a coffee shop back east with photos and the gear under the empty backpack in the closet. There on the crown of the monkey the metaphors bow to reign of the sky and the sky ties the scene together. No one really gets Crater Lake until they lean forward over a cliff to look down the slope to the shoreline. No one can feel the mind of the monkey until they stare between their feet on the summit and eat lunch.

We’re here for the accumulated human activity and the benefits therefrom. We have to leave to find accumulated geologic activity. The switch from the former to the latter relaxes its tension in short order, but the opposite move seems fine for a while until the ache enters the chest and thinking explicitly about the monkey only makes it worse.

The hanging double rappel line down to the flats is jarring in its straightness. The

blue and the red ropes don’t twist together but hang like the double yellow lines on the road back to the airport. At the bottom you can cup your friction device to warm up your hands. The grainy taste of the wind dissolves in your mouth, touching the tongue in the old familiar way, stimulating the same palette that sampled the salacious air of University dorm rooms and salty summer nights by the barbecue when nothing was wrong and the long vapid expanse of week weekend week became the only landmark on the narrow horizon, like the Little Prince chasing the sunset on his little planet, hoping to one day find an eclipse, but alas, the world is too small for that when life is only seven days long, a far cry from the limitless long indigo sunset of the West, a place that was pronounced closed but is reopened every time we rekindle the spark in the imagination, latching on to the granite and drinking the nanogram drip of adrenaline again, two hundred feet above solid ground.

Here, though, the growing importance of moustaches in the under-thirties creeps back in. The New York Times has a relevant article. The cappuccino slowly deflates. In the West a climber on a sandy patch has forgotten all this.

April 6–April 12, 2012 Email ListtheIndy@gmail.com

The List friday the 6th textiles sale 10–11am // risd beach (waterman & benefit) come get your cool ‘n cheap textiles, y’all. clothing, knits, prints & more. proceeds go to the textiles senior show. enough is enough: march against police brutality and police murder 8pm // atwells avenue (under pinecone statue) “we march in remembrance of the hundreds who have died...at the hands of an institution that perpetuates racism, criminalizes poverty, and tears apart communities.” no hate in our city! show 9pm // building 16 (olneyville) hosted in partnership with libertalia. doomsday student, idiot vehicle, lolita black, in heat. live bait: “boys will be boys” 10pm // the black box at 95 empire st // $7 come hear (and maybe share?!) stories on this month’s theme. live bait is providence’s only award-winning, cult phenomenon, true-life, adult, storytelling show. saturday the 7th book sale 12–4pm // knight memorial bookstore thousands of books for $2 or less. occupy providence general assembly 2–6pm // libertalia (280 broadway) what comes next? indy vs. bdh kickball deathmatch 3pm // pembroke field // wear stripes & cheer

pens aren’t as strong as swords. and we are going to tear the shit out of you. come for quippy trashtalk. and journalistic machismo. it’s annual. and we usually lose. heels on wheels glitter roadshow 8:30pm // building 16 (olneyville) // $5-10 a touring queer performance-art cabaret of thought-provoking glamour! local folks open, and the monthly fuchsia is now queer dance party follows it up. sunday the 8th easter sunday brunch buffet & kids’ fun 11am–2pm // providence marriott // $32.95 adults, kids 6-12 $15.95, kids 5 and under free. photo opportunities with the easter bunny. easter egg hunt at 1pm. reservations required for brunch. call 401-553-0400. live pop music: brother to brother 7:30pm // 133 club (east providence) // cover tba east providence’s neighborhood “cheers”-style bar. monday the 9th recorded future?: temporal analytics and 21st century media 5pm // brown/risd hillel, 2nd floor (80 brown st) the roger b. henkle memorial lecture delivered by professor of literature at duke university, mark hansen. caleb’s crossing: indian and english gods in early new england 7–8:30pm // providence library (empire street) brown university anthropology professor

william simmons explores the historical and mythic context that underpinned caleb’s religious crossing, drawing on the religious beliefs of the wampanoag communities of martha’s vineyard and the theological perspectives of puritan clergy including roger williams, thomas mayhew and john eliot. tuesday the 10th rhode island state police media summit 9am // state police headquarters (scituate, ri) colonel steven g. o’donnell, superintendent of the rhode island state police, will speak on state police media policies and credentialing. q&a to follow. rsvp to barbara laird at blaird@risp.dps.ri.gov jenny boully reading 2:30pm // mccormack family theater (brown) cross-genre writer jenny boully, author of ‘not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them,’ will read from her work. wednesday the 11th in my absence: a senior thesis exhibition 7–10pm // list art center, floor 2 (brown) closing reception. cecilia salama is a visual artist at brown. her sculptural works meditate on figural absence. civil liberties and the war on terror 7:30pm // carmichael auditorium (brown) come join us as we listen to journalists/public intellectuals chris hedges and stephen downs speak. black pus, mounds, buck gooter, kokomo 9pm // as220 // $7 loud pus as sound ecstacy, seeping out your ears.

thursday the 12th sculpture, photography senior exhibition: opening reception 6pm // woods gerry (62 prospect st) // free come see the culminating works of risd’s 2012 sculpture and photography bfa’s joyful gnosis: mind, meditation and the music of the spheres (lecture-demonstration) 8pm // grant hall (brown) // free first installment of a 3-day residency. hykes is a world-renowned composer-singer. his practice links contemplative practice, throat-singing and sacred chant. bellows, many arms, groke, mongrel 9pm // building 16 (olneyville) // donation face melting freak out powerhouse, heavy horns, ether diving, etc.

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