The College Hill Independent Vol. 33 Issue 1

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY SEPT 16 2016

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THE

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 33 / NUMBER 01 SEPT 16 2016

INDY

COVER

Images from Chile on the Anniversary of the Coup Mark Benz

NEWS 02

Week in Review Jane Argodale, Liz Cory, & Camila Ruiz Segovia

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This Summer in the Philippines Shane Potts & Camila Ruiz Segovia

METRO 03

Policing Poverty Will Weatherly

FEATURES 07

Praise the Lorde Cherise Morris

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Snow in Cuba Stefania Gomez

ARTS 09

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In Absentia Will Tavlin

FROM THE EDITORS Last week­—while searching through the Indy's Google Drive for a document we recently started called "mission statment????"—we stumbled on a similarly titled file from 2010: "should the indy have a mission statement?"

"We happily inhabit the space of irony whereby we are wholly funded by Brown and yet largely ignore much of what is going on at Brown in favor of casting our sights down the hill," drafted some former Managing Editor who is now probably a content creator at Vice. Our document contains similar anxieties, if more neurotically expressed: what are the Indy's politics, and who gets to decide? What's the point of trying to present relevant and critical reporting on the university's dime and timetable? How do we contend with the fact that our only real institutional memory exists in the archives of our Google Drive, and with the realization that Dick, the guy who has faithfully delivered this newspaper to coffeeshops and pizzerias around Providence every Friday for ten years, surely knows more about the Indy than anyone who's ever served on its staff?

We're still not sure. The 2010 doc didn't answer its title question, and ours might not either. Four months from now, we may not have figured out our mission, but our hope is that someone—a careful reader, our closest friends, or, just as likely, Dick—will.

Notes on Notes on Camp Liby Hays

— SLJ

METABOLICS MANAGING EDITORS

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Newsfed Anna Hundert

SCIENCE 13

NEWS

Epi-When?

Dolma Ombadykow

Baked Mei Lenehan

EPHEMERA 13

Twine Flu Mark Benz & Patrick McMenamin

X 18

Camila Ruiz Segovia Shane Potts Liz Cory METRO

Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Marianna McMurdock

LITERARY 17

Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs

ARTS

Will Tavlin Ryan Rosenberg Kelton Ellis FEATURES

Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick Dash Elhuage METABOLICS

Mailroom Surprise Liby Hays

Sam Samore Isabelle Doyle SCIENCE

Fatima Husain TECH

Jonah Max OCCULT

Sophia Washburn

EPHEMERA

Daniel Chimes My Tran Bryn Brunnstrom Erica Lewis James Zhang

Patrick McMenamin Mark Benz

DESIGN & LAYOUT

LITERARY

Stefania Gomez Marcus Mamourian

X

Liby Hays Nichole Cochary

Celeste Matsui Meryl Charleston Andrew Linder WEB MANAGER

LIST

Charlie Windolf

Malcolm Drenttel Ruby Stenhouse

BUSINESS MANAGER

Dolma Ombadykow

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

Gabriel Matesanz STAFF WRITERS

Hannah Maier-Katkin Corey Hébert Kim Meilun Jack Brook Eve Zelickson Dolma Ombadykow Saanya Jain Anna Hundert Andrew Deck Signe Swanson Josh Kurtz STAFF ILLUSTRATORS

Frans van Hoek Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Ivan Rios-Fetchko Maria Cano-Flavia

SENIOR EDITOR

Alec Mapes-Frances MVP

Gabriel Matesanz The College Hill Independent — P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

WEEK IN BAD PUBLIC RELATIONS FLAMBOYANT HAIRSTYLES AND BIG EGOS

...CAN YOU USE THAT IN A SENTENCE?

You don’t have to be a bright politician to see why it is a bad idea to invite your worst enemy to your country. After Donald Trump called Mexicans rapists, drug traffickers, and criminals, anyone would assume that the last thing Mexico’s President, Enrique Peña Nieto, could possibly think of doing was inviting the Republican candidate to Mexico. Right? Last week, when rumor had it that Trump was making a last minute visit to the US’s southern neighbor after an invitation from the Mexican President, Mexicans could not believe it. A bad joke for sure. But some hours later Trump tweeted: “I have accepted the invitation of President Enrique Peña Nieto, of Mexico, and look very much forward to meeting him tomorrow.”

Many Mexicans got rightfully angry. It took them less than five hours to organize not one, but three protests against the meeting in Mexico City. Most of us, however, were just really confused about the whole situation and wonder: what was Peña Nieto thinking when inviting Trump and what was Trump thinking when accepting the invitation? Call it bad public relations, but I believe there is something deeper going on.

Just think about it. What do Enrique Peña Nieto and Donald Trump have in common? A lot. First, the obvious: flamboyant and questionably real hairstyles.

They would be nothing without their iconic quaffs.

Then, the ugly part: the entire Mexican people disdain them. But ultimately, what unites Trump and Peña is their gigantic egos. Only two men with incredibly massive self-esteems could agree to such politically blind plan. They probably thought that they had the power to convince one another of their own political agendas. #ToxicMasculinity.

Trump went all the way down to Mexico to tell Peña Nieto he was going to build that wall. As for Peña Nieto, was he trying to convince Trump that Mexicans, his people, were good and well-behaved?

Not certain about that. But what’s clear is that, even though both men were physically together in the same meeting hall, no actual dialogue happened.

Proof of that was that the first thing that Trump tweeted after leaving: “Mexico will pay for the wall.”

Meanwhile, Peña Nieto’s first tweet said this: “At the beginning of our conversation, I made clear to Mr. Trump that Mexico will not be paying for the wall.”

You may say that this is what disagreement looks like, but I actually think that during the meeting, both men simultaneously talked for an hour and left thinking that they had given a lesson to their enemy.

–CRS

G-A-F-F-E. Gaffe. That thing Gary Johnson’s campaign manager really wishes didn’t happen on live TV last week.

On Thursday, Johnson, the Libertarian presidential candidate, was interviewed on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” when he drew a big foreign policy blank. Pressed by the show’s co-host Mike Barnicle to explain what he would do about Aleppo if he were elected president, Johnson found himself in a corner.

Surely he knew what Aleppo was...or could it be A.L.E.P.P.O.? C’mon Gary, he may have thought to himself. You’ve studied this….You’ve trained years for this! But Johnson was running on no context here. Just some sounds, ah, leh, po, tossed into the air. Out of options, Johnson ever-so-casually asked, “And what is Aleppo?”

Apart from being the largest city in Syria, Aleppo is a central battleground in the country’s ongoing civil war and refugee crisis. It’s in the news every day. Aleppo is definitely a place a future leader of the United States should be familiar with. Barnicle, dumbfounded at Johnson’s flimsy response, simply replied “You’re kidding...” Twitter was outraged, and #WhatIsAleppo quickly started trending. But Johnson himself may have been the most upset by the blunder.

“I’m incredibly frustrated with myself,” Johnson said of the flub in a follow-up interview. He later released a statement to CBS News saying that he did, in fact, “understand the dynamics of the Syrian conflict,” but when asked about Aleppo he “immediately was thinking about an acronym.” He added that, if he were elected, he would have “daily security briefings that, to [him], will be fundamental to the job of being President.”

While some may attribute Johnson’s fumble to his party’s generally isolationist bent and relative disinterest in foreign policy, it seems Johnson may just not be studying his Important Facts hard enough. In July, the New Yorker reported that Johnson asked an aide “Who’s Harriet Tubman?” while being directed to a convention room named after the famous American abolitionist.

The third-party candidate is still fighting to reach 15% in the polls in order to qualify for the presidential debates. It’s not yet clear how this incident will affect his chances of securing a spot on the stage. However, it sure couldn’t hurt to start reading the news.

– LC

DOUBLE DOUBLE TWITTER TROUBLE When considering whether or not to take a day off of school or work, most of us don’t think of finding a doppelgänger to fill in for us while we stay at home to nap and play Super Smash Bros. But clearly, we just haven’t been thinking as creatively as the Donald Trump supporters who managed to get #HillarysBodyDouble trending on Twitter.

After appearing to collapse and leave early from a 9/11 tribute on Sunday, followed by the announcement that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia, Hillary Clinton was seen outside her daughter’s home in New York hours later looking happier and more well-rested than she had earlier. Trump supporters pounced on photographs of Clinton on social media, claiming that Hillary was now hiring a body double to appear in public while she stayed inside with a cup of tea to watch Netflix or something, which sounds like a great idea to me. Besides lacking the gaunt, frail, and pallid countenance of others cursed with the notorious common and curable inflammation of the lungs, these observant Twitter users noted “subtle hair differences,” a “different nose,” and an index finger that wasn’t long enough in the new photos.

Though Hillary’s plan to fool the press was foiled by these detectives for the people on Twitter, I still hope she got in a solid evening of binge-watching in—exactly what I plan to do once I finish writing this sentence. –JA

BY Jane

Argodale, Camila Ruiz Segovia, & Liz Cory ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

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FLYING SIGNS

PVD's Moving Battles on the Criminalization of Poverty Will Weatherly ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz

On June 30, 2015, Michael Monteiro was issued a summons by a Cranston police officer while panhandling on a median on Plainfield Pike. For ten years, Monteiro had used what he collected from passing motorists and pedestrians to supplement his Social Security disability benefits; his disability only allowed him to stand at the median for an hour at a time. He carried a sign reading: “disabled, need help, thank you, God bless.” The officer informed him of his court date, where his punishment could be either community service or a fine of up to $200, and told him that if he did not stop panhandling he could be arrested. When Monteiro reported to the Cranston Municipal Court that he didn’t have enough money to pay the fine, the Court dismissed the charges, but ordered Monteiro to cease panhandling at the median at Plainfield Pike.

The Rhode Island ACLU soon took up Monteiro’s case. Anti-panhandling ordinances, they argued, violate a panhandler’s First Amendment rights by restricting the content of their speech. They argued that these laws are selectively enforced, targeting panhandlers while leaving other forms of public solicitation, such as fundraising, untouched.

Cranston’s anti-panhandling ordinance was struck down in a federal court settlement in April of this year, and the city of Cranston was ordered to pay Monteiro $6,475 in legal costs, court fees, and compensation for the emotional distress Monteiro suffered due to the Cranston police’s harassment.

Cranston was far from the only municipality with anti-panhandling ordinances on the books; according to a 2014 study by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, 24% of the 187 cities it

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METRO

surveyed had implemented citywide bans on panhandling, and 76% enforced bans on panhandling in specified city locations, such as on medians.

Following the Cranston suit, the ACLU of RI and Providence homeless advocacy organizations, including the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project (RIHAP) and the Homeless Bill of Rights Defense Committee (HBOR), worked in a coalition this spring to pressure Mayor Jorge Elorza to suspend Providence’s anti-panhandling ordinances.

HBOR member and Providence College sociology professor Eric Hirsch led a group of students conducting interviews of 100 Kennedy Plaza pedestrians in November 2015. His results found that although 52% of those questioned were homeless or formerly homeless, 95% of citations and 94% of arrests (for behaviors such as loitering, panhandling, or smoking) were experienced by homeless or formerly homeless people. Megan Smith, HBOR chair and case manager at the Warwick-based House of Hope Community Development Corporation says some people simply won't get arrested for soliciting. “...Rhe firefighters out there with their fund, or the Pee Wee footballers or cheerleaders who you see on North Main St, they won't get arrested,” she says.

"Who you see getting arrested are people who ‘look homeless.’”

The coalition argued that anti-panhandling ordinances are an unconstitutional infringement of panhandlers’ First Amendment rights and in violation of Rhode Island’s Homeless Bill of Rights. The first of its kind, this Bill of Rights was passed in the US in 2012 and affirms that “no person should suffer unnecessarily or be subject to unfair discrimination

based on his or her homeless status.”

In February, Mayor Elorza ordered Providence police to cease enforcement of the city’s own anti-panhandling ordinances: ordinance 16-20, which prohibited “aggressive solicitation,” (punishable by fines of up to $500 and up to 30 days of jail time), and ordinance 16-26, which prohibited loitering at a bus stops or terminals (punishable by fines of up to $100). In a letter announcing the decision to former Executive Director of the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless Jim Ryczek, Mayor Elorza wrote, “being homeless is not a crime, and I have instructed our police officers not to treat it as such.”

However, enforcing a law against panhandling (and the poverty it suggests) is not the only way to criminalize panhandling. Providence business leaders and officials have been busy in the months since February drafting proposals to combat signs of poverty by finding new strategies for expelling or locking up the people mired in it. +++ One particularly vocal organization has been the Downtown Improvement District (DID), a non-profit partnership of property owners and business leaders with the Providence Foundation, led by former mayor and partner of Paolino Properties, Joe Paolino. Paolino Properties’ building at 100 Westminster overlooks Kennedy Plaza, where many panhandlers station themselves due to heavy foot traffic. “I don’t think they want to be sleeping on sidewalks,” he offered at an August 18 DID meeting to address downtown panhandling and homeless-

SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

ness. “They should sleep in a bed, not the sidewalk, right?”

The proposed strategies to combat panhandling in their September 6 meeting notes are split into two parts, “Social Service Needs Action Points” and “Enforcement and Legal Issues Action Points,” with the latter betraying the DID’s willingness to continue the city’s reliance on police and security infrastructure, especially in the downtown sector. In addition to Paolino, several members of the DID’s Board of Directors own downtown developments, including Richard Lappin, co-owner of Regency Plaza Apartments, and Evan Granoff, owner and developer of the Providence Arcade. Their plan mandates that the police address the issues of sitting on sidewalks owned by building owners as well as on public sidewalks by “maximiz[ing] effectiveness” of cameras in Kennedy Plaza and creating a “downtown-wide network” for “comprehensive security communications.”

Although this growing security network is prohibited from enforcing the ban on panhandling itself, Providence officers are able to act on a slew of other bans against ‘nuisance crimes,’ many of which are similarly targeted, including public drinking, public urination, and disorderly conduct. Since the DID meeting in mid-August, Mayor Elorza has increased foot, bike, and horse patrols in Kennedy Plaza; Providence Police Major Thomas Verdi told the Providence Journal that these officers had made two dozen such arrests in the first 10 days of increased patrolling.

Barbara Freitas, Director of the RI Homeless Advocacy Project, described one moment in last week’s DID meeting: “[Paolino] was holding up pictures of our [homeless] folks, saying, ‘What can we do about this guy? What can we arrest him on?’ He had pictures taken of people sleeping in doorways at his building. ‘What can I do about this guy?’ Your plan is not to help; your plan is to arrest as many people as you can.” +++ As arrests targeting other crimes of poverty escalate, the threat of ordinance 16-24 still looms on Providence’s books. The halting of its enforcement remains a fully reversible policy of the Elorza administration, and Smith described discussions with the Providence Council to fully abolish the law as a “non-starter.”

ACLU of Rhode Island Executive Director Steven

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Brown said that “there is nothing formal to be done” as long as Elorza’s policy of non-enforcement holds; should the ordinance be reintroduced, the ACLU would quickly challenge their constitutionality under the First Amendment. “I think [Elorza’s halting of the ordinances] was a compromise,” said Barbara Freitas. “When this all went down, maybe he really did believe that this harassment of folks was very wrong.

But when he started putting out the extra police, I was like, this is how things change. He bowed to pressure from the people [saying] ‘you gotta do something, you gotta change something about downtown.’”

Advocacy groups have been vocal about the changes they believe would be effective in reducing panhandling and homelessness downtown; the RIHAP proposal “Reclaiming Our Public Spaces” suggests that the DID should support the construction of a centrally located day center for homeless services, and for property owners to include units for individuals whose rent is subsidized through state housing vouchers. These measures would provide tangible opportunities for business leaders and private institutions to pair with social service agencies, but many advocates are skeptical of the DID’s willingness to cooperate. “We really think that Paolino was duplicitous,” Eric Hirsch told the Independent. He cited an instance early this month when Paolino invited advocates to a promised discussion of potential strategies, only to later court the press into a publicized announcement.

“I think the idea was that he was going to bring all of us advocates there for what we thought was a meeting,” Hirsch said, “but really it was going to be him announcing his plan. It would appear that we were all supporting a consensus.”

This past Wednesday, organizers from the HBOR and RIHAP convened at the foot of Paolino’s building at 100 Westminster, determined to express the contrary. RIHAP director Barbara Freites took the microphone. “Here’s some wisdom for you, Joe: moving the problem somewhere else is still a problem.” The group marched to the Rhode Island Convention Center, where Paolino had scheduled the announcement of his plan during a Providence Foundation board meeting.

Once there, the group encountered security personnel standing at the base of the escalators into the Center, barring protesters not initially included in discussions with the DID. Several journalists were also barred access to the conference, including reporters from RIFuture, RIPR, and the Providence Journal. RIFuture

reports that several individuals asked Paolino if the publication could have access to the conference, who responded that only designated individuals would be allowed. After the meeting, he claimed that the barring was “inadvertent.”

In response, Mayor Elorza planned an announcement of a proposed plan to address panhandling and homelessness on September 15th, which the Independent was not able to report on past its time of publication. Although Eric Hirsch stated that Elorza had said very specifically that he would not support Paolino’s plan, the DID chairman thanked the Mayor for his assistance during his Wednesday conference: “I give the Mayor credit. He recently took action when he called for more [police] presence in Kennedy Plaza.”

Across the state, anti-panhandling legislation is coming up for debate. Over the past few months, legal advocates in Johnston, Cranston, and Warwick were able to repeal those cities’ anti-panhandling laws, while Newport and Pawtucket were prevented from enacting such ordinances entirely. Last week, Cranston’s City Council unanimously passed a resolution encouraging Rhode Island’s General Assembly to take on the creation of a ban statewide, and as their resolution stated, “to enable the City of Cranston and other communities to protect the health, safety and general welfare of their citizens.” Steven Brown says, “I have no idea how they would pass an ordinance that would pass constitutional scrutiny. If the city can’t do it, I’m not really sure how the state could either.” Barbara Freitas agrees that it will be “a long road ahead,” reflecting an uncertainty both for the state of Rhode Island and, perhaps more crucially, for the often precarious lives of the panhandlers themselves.

In the meantime, Smith is still telling panhandlers about their protections against arrest. During her outreach efforts for House of Hope, she passes them a card detailing the volunteer services available to observe panhandlers should they want evidence of police harassment. The card reads: “We want to make sure they keep their word.”

WILL WEATHERLY B’19 encourages you to report any incident of police harassment to the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless at (401) 721-5685.

METRO METRO

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DUERTE'S SHABU NIGHTMARE Drugs and Death in the Philippines At a dinner celebrating his victory, President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, elected in May, had this to say about drug users and dealers in his country: “Please feel free to call the police, or do it yourself if you have a gun. Shoot him [a drug dealer or user] and I’ll give you a medal.” Such draconian statements underscore the severity of Duterte’s drug policy. As the mayor of Davao City on the southern Island of Mindanao, he publicly admitted his involvement in death squads that claimed the lives of more than 1,000 citizens from 1988 to 1998.

Rather than minimize his correspondence with these illegal squads, Duterte used his participation as a political pledge. “If by chance that God place me there,” Duterte says on his weekly show Gikan sa Masa, Para sa Masa (From the Masses, For the Masses), “watch out because the 1,000 [people executed] will become 100,000. You will see the fish in Manila Bay getting fat. That is where I will dump you.”

Since his election in May, Duterte has overseen the extrajudicial killings of over 1,400 people, 60 percent of which are the result of police operations.

The rest are the responsibility of vigilante groups, also endorsed by the President. Police officers and vigilantes alike have no reason to fear lawful repercussions, as Duterte has offered to pardon them. “The President can grant pardon, conditional or absolute; or grant amnesty with the concurrence of Congress,” he said at a Fellowship Dinner at the San Beda College of Law in July. “I’ll use it. Believe me.”

Though Duterte claims that there are 3.7 million drug users in the Philippines who are also responsible for rape and theft, many news outlets put the number of drug users closer to 1.8 million.

The population of the Philippines is around 100 million. Of the drugs abused by two percent of the population, shabu—methamphetamine—is the most popular. 98 percent of drug arrests made in 2015 were shabu-related. Though only a small percentage of the population of the Philippines uses shabu, information from the 2008 UN World Drug Report shows that the Philippines has the highest methamphetamine prevalence rate in the world at six percent. Nationally, the poorest regions of the

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NEWS

country, such as Mindanao, have had the highest percentage of shabu users, though the drug is consumed by people from all socioeconomic statuses.

“It is cheap,” says one Filipino local interviewed by VICE News, “very cheap. It can be afforded by ordinary people.” The Filipino drug trade is a huge industry, grossing 8.4 billion dollars annually. Many Filipino residents cite a demand for increased productivity for shabu use. In areas of poverty, shabu is seen as the go-to drug for those looking to work longer hours and make money.

Duterte seems to command the support of the people. With over 40 percent of the popular vote in May’s election, Duterte won in a landslide. Much of his support comes from citizens in barangays, or neighborhoods, around Metro Manila, an estimated 92 percent of which are affected by the use of shabu. “I cannot take it anymore,” said a local informant when asked by VICE why he had chosen to work with the Filipino police, “I want to see them in jail. I wanted them to be arrested and put in jail.”

Before Duterte, citizens saw very low rates of law enforcement for drug traffickers and peddlers, many of whom did not fear the criminal justice system. “If the death penalty should come back into our justice system,” the informant goes on, “I think [that would be] the best.” In cities where drug use is increasingly becoming an issue, many Filipinos are reassured by Duterte’s previous tenure as mayor. A city of 1.3 million people, and a prominent hub for tourism, the crime rate in Davao City fell to one of the lowest in the country as a result of Duterte’s punitive and bloodthirsty administration. “If you are doing an illegal activity in my city, if you are a criminal or part of a syndicate that preys on innocent people in the city,” he told reporters in 2009, “for as long as I am mayor, you are a legitimate target of assassination.”

Besides a rise in extrajudicial killings, Duterte’s call to arms has also triggered an alarming crisis of prison overcrowding. With the normalization of police brutality promoted by Duterte’s rhetoric, it is not arrests and detentions that have led to mass incarceration but rather the fear of assassination. Seen as the best alternative to potential murder, thousands of drug users and dealers in Philippines have

chosen to surrender themselves to state authorities.

By mid-August, an estimated 100,000 people had arrived in prisons voluntarily. But without available space to house all of those fearing persecution, prisons are overpopulated with harmful conditions. The Quenzon City Jail, for example, originally built for 800 people, is today housing more than 4,000 prisoners who sleep either standing or resting one above the other. To make matters worse, those imprisoned are likely to stay for many years. A historically corrupt judicial system and the current criminalizing approach to drugs make chances of a fair trial, or a trial at all, disturbingly slim. +++ The Philippines’ drug war has striking similarities to United States’ own War on Drugs. During the presidencies of Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton, the discourse around drugs increasingly shifted from one concerning health to one concerning security, and hence drug users and dealers were cast as criminals. Famously, in 1971, Nixon declared that “America's public enemy number one was drug abuse,” coining the expression “war on drugs.”

Under the Reagan administration, incarceration rates for users went up, with many being jailed for nonviolent offenses. As the Drug Policy Alliance states, the number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 in 1997. The US War on Drugs was waged in urban areas—Baltimore, New York, and Los Angeles were key battlegrounds. The Clinton Administration, with a $13.2 billion budget of drug reform in 1995, spent $7.8 billion on interdiction and eradication, while only $5.4 billion was spent on education and rehabilitation programs.

Today, American attitudes toward drugs are slowly shifting. With the rise of heroin use in suburban enclaves and the decriminalization of marijuana, the American public is starting to see drug abuse as a public health issue. With drugs like shabu fueling an illegal, billion dollar, global enterprise—according to the 2015 UN World Drug Report, much of the crystalline methamphetamine in the Philippines

SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

BY Shane

Potts and Camila Ruiz Segovia ILLUSTRATION BY Andres Chang

originated in Mexico—leaders have taken drastic measures to eradicate both trafficking and use in their countries, failing to focus primarily on treatment programs for users. The Philippines, however, seems unable to take a rehabilitative approach to the growing issue, as treatment centers in the country are few and far between. “We suddenly got swamped,” said Dr. Vicente, who heads the National Center for Mental Health, to the New York TImes, “It’s a crisis, but at the same time, we can take advantage of this crisis to help these people.”

There are less than 50 accredited rehabilitation centers nationwide, and most are full.

The Drug War in the Philippines, in its extremely violent persecution of drug users, differs from the American Drug War, and perhaps from any other Drug War waged around the globe. Duterte’s approach is simply unprecedented: never in the four decades of the modern history of drug prohibition has the criminalization of drug users been taken to such bloody extremes. And as the number of victims begin to grow by the day, the failures of his drug policy become harder to ignore. +++ International outcry against President Duterte’s open disregard for human rights treaties and diplomacy codes has been shockingly belated.

Though local and international reports of extrajudicial killings came in as early as May, at the start of Duterte’s presidency, no prominent international human rights organization addressed the events until late June. By the last day of that month, Amnesty International published a statement imploring President Duterte to “break the cycle of human rights violations,” and to “fulfill his inauguration pledge to uphold the country’s commitment to international law.” Two weeks later, on July 12, the Human Rights Watch, followed by stating that a “credible and independent inquiry into the alarming increase in police killings is urgently needed.” The United Nations, usually the first organization to speak against these type of heinous, state-perpetrated crimes, remained silent until early August. On

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

August 2, the International Drug Policy Consortium issued a letter, signed by over 300 nongovernmental organizations, calling the UN to take action. Only then, on August 3, did the UN Secretary General and the Director of the Office of Drugs and Crime release a statement “condemning the apparent endorsement of extrajudicial killing, which is illegal and a breach of fundamental rights and freedoms.”

Even more concerning was the lack of response from heads of state. In spite of the spiking number of deaths, no nation publicly addressed the events in the Philippines during the initial months of the killings. With the uncomfortable exception of China—which praised Duterte’s determination to tackle the country’s drug problem—silence reigned.

The United States kept quiet too, even when Secretary of State John Kerry visited the Philippines’s capital, Manila, in late July. A response seemed forthcoming when President Obama scheduled a meeting with President Duterte in Laos earlier this month, but the Obama administration cancelled the event after the Philippine leader, in a dramatic tirade, insulted the US President. Overall, there remains an absence of international pressure to cease the ongoing massacre. Even if Duterte has demonstrated unwillingness to listen to the few who have criticized him, a call to action from the international community is overdue. As bodies pile up in the streets of Manila and policemen hunt drug users to their deaths, the Philippines has become the latest actor in the ongoing, international Drug War tragedy. Under the current international drug prohibition regime, people who use or deal with drugs are criminalized around the globe. It is in the global context of drug illegality that extremely punitive drug policies like those promoted by Duterte can arise locally. While the damage of the drug war is endured at the global scale, its occurrence is rarely made public in the areas of the Global South.

Indeed, what we are witnessing in the Philippines today is a local manifestation of a draconian system of global prohibition, one in which we share a common responsibility.

SHANE POTTS B'17 and CAMILA RUIZ SEGOVIA B’18 think that the War on Drugs is a failure.

NEWS

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TO THOSE WEAVING MIRACLES FROM DUCT TAPE, SPINNING GOLD FROM BROKEN RECORDS, CONJURING LOVE A Graduation Speech

BY Cherise

Morris

I wrote this in May, four days before my graduation from Brown University, and delivered it at the Africana Studies Department graduation ceremony.

Months after realizing that life in a white supremacist institution will destroy you. After countless days of knowing it will kill you, as white supremacist institutions are apt to do. And over the year, the white supremacist will make you feel even more worthless than the worthlessness you felt about yourself before entering. Take this as a reminder to never forget where you come from, to never lose yourself in the terms of the institution, because your survival is contradictory to its existence.

The irony is… I’m still here. +++ MAY 22, 2016: I’m thinking about graduation and I don’t quite know what to say, so I guess I’ll start with where I’m standing, at Brown, on this land. Here we are.

Thinking about the physical site of Brown makes me unhappy. We cannot let the grandeur and beauty and celebration of this weekend obscure, from us, this place’s true form. Brown is a site of historic trauma and violence. Brown was built quite literally upon the backs of enslaved Black people. Built on Native land with no plans of justly repatriating that land to the Narragansett people who brought it into existence.

It was built from the displacement of Black, brown, and poor communities, and shady investments in industries that destroy the lives of folks from these communities everyday. Brown is a site of pain and extreme violence; I cannot emphasize that enough.

And Brown put me through the wringer, because places like Brown were not built for Black poor girls like me; they were not made to nurture us, never intended to feed our souls. Places like Brown don’t care if we see our way through. But here I am, we made it, persisted and survived, despite this scarred land we are on, in spite of this institution. And I have worked my behind off for this diploma—honestly, shout out to my own damn self—but this diploma will never be

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FEATURES

a complete measure of our worth.

Africana is the first space at Brown to grow out of opposition to the violence of this institution. I’m standing here, thinking about what got me through the thick and thick of it. And how and why I was even drawn to this department in the first place, and I can only think to thank Black women. I stand here on the shoulders of giants. Black women, visible and invisible, known and unknown to me, who raise their voices everyday, put out their hands and hold my spine in place. I walk in the grace of the light that billions upon billions of these women’s footsteps carved out. Leading me by the hand, the legacies of these women have shown me the power inside of myself.

And the single most important thing I take away with this Africana diploma are the words of the Black women who gave us life before we knew it.

One central question that we discussed frequently as Africana concentrators was: What are the conditions of freedom? Angela Davis let it be known that freedom is constant struggle, and Black women gave birth to that struggle. Black women brought freedom into this world, nurtured freedom even when as the world was no friend to them, they held it up on their shoulders with the whole world, and loved freedom in the face its betrayal, they held onto freedom and fashioned new images of it beyond the imaginations of everyone else. Images of it that fit them. Black women made freedom their own, even as the world told them that they were destined to be the most disrespected, the most unprotected, the most neglected. +++ Marsha P. Johnson told us that we should pay it mind. And she was right.

Harriet Tubman never lost a passenger. She never left anyone behind. She showed us the way.

June Jordan let it be known that love is life-force and decades later Charity Hicks, a water warrior, implored us to wage love.

Assata Shakur let it be known that we have nothing to lose but our chains.

Toni Morrison hit the nail on the head when she said that out of the desolation of our realities, we invented ourselves.

Nina Simone sang our freedom with no fear.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote us recipes to expel our fears: Take one broom of anger, and drive it off.

Maya Angelou set the record straight that “there is a kind strength that is almost frightening in Black women.”

Audre, praise the Lorde, said it all. But my per-

sonal favorite, when she let me know that the Black mothers are whispering in our dreams, that if we can feel, we can one day be free.

Octavia Butler let us know that we could write ourselves in and that our futures are limitless. +++ Not too long ago I stood in this building and said to someone “all my life I’ve had to fight,” invoking the words of Alice Walker by way of Sophia from The Color Purple.

But those are just the words that were recorded, written down, and remembered. And that makes me sad, because my most important lessons, my first formative forays into getting free are not written in a history book; they will not be recorded in an archive, or uplifted in a scholarly journal. That is an experience that so many of us share. The everyday warriors who taught me how to think about freedom are here with me physically and spiritually. My mother and my sister taught me to weave miracles from duct tape, taught me how to spin gold from broken records and conjure love from the darkness and that the most powerful words that a black woman can ever say are no. no. hell no. These women taught me how to breathe. The course that’s been most foundational to my time as an Africana Studies concentrator has been life as Black woman learned through the resilience and beauty of Black women around me.

Our work is cut out for us, leaving here today with these diplomas, we must always give reverence to the lessons, and most importantly, the words of our most sacrificed communities. We have a duty to uphold and center the narratives that have not been written into the history of our oppressions, because in this resilience lie so many of the keys to our freedom.

CHERISE MORRIS B.MA’18 also believes the rainbow is not enuf.

SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

LORE Stefania Gomez ILLUSTRATION BY Esther Kim BY

I. At one time or another, I guess I’ve been in love with all my friends. This is what Judith Butler taught me when I was introduced to her theory in a class about the secret architecture of people. Then came a peculiar process known as coming out. I reinhabited my memories in a way that felt something like rearranging of a set of objects of whose aesthetic harmony I had once been convinced. When I was done, my past friendships with women were incomprehensible.

When Todd Haynes—a filmmaker—studied this architecture at the same institution, I imagine, in the same way, some things were made hazy, and others quite plain. Haynes and Butler entered my college life in the same lecture, the week my friends and I abandoned our worship at the throne of normative sexuality for the throne of a select few films and their accompanying soundtracks. That week, I began to sleep every night in the bed of a girl who bore a striking resemblance to Rooney Mara. My friends and I began to believe movies could break chains, could save our lives, and that lesbians were the highest evolved form of humans.

I was as unsure about the difference between loving my girlfriends and being in love with them as I was sure that Haynes’s films were some of the best ever made, and that when he and Butler wrote, they were writing for me. 1988’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story was a film about the way women’s bodies—our bodies— when mediated, became objects that decayed, like the quality of film itself as it was reproduced illegally over and over from the few bootlegged copies that remained in existence. Watching it felt transgressive, like discovering some dark and shameful secret about myself. 1998’s Velvet Goldmine was about how queer people who make art—us—are not of this world, and will therefore outlast it.

When, in 2015, Todd Haynes directed a movie called Carol about a romance between two women, in which he cast Rooney Mara, it seemed not only fitting, but even preordained. It was almost as if the other women and I in that lecture about Judith Butler had willed Carol into existence, and we rejoiced.

II. I see Carol in a theater in Havana. Movies are the only things that get to the island before they get to the States.

It’s about New York City, Christmastime, a woman who runs away with a woman.

It screens at the Cine Yara. A boy who works as a projectionist at the theater on the next block down from the Yara meets me after his shift to see it.

For some weeks, I have been sneaking him up the stairs to my second floor apartment late at night, in the hopes of catching the watchman asleep, in the hopes that the story I will later try to summon to this page might remain absent among the hearsay passed between floors

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like the dilapidated elevator, its stick and lurch.

For some weeks, when there are no more questions to ask about his peculiar and foreign life, when the things in the projectionist’s mind are like something etched but without cipher, I have been asking myself about the sorts of stories that could be told between a person like him and a person like me.

Before the film, we wait in a line of a hundred to get in, and beside us, someone crosses into the street and deals with a dog that lies nearly dead there: both back legs in one fist, muzzle dragging. On the sidewalk, it shudders.

border of myself for the sake of it, just to see where I end, hoping the salt will wear me down enough to justify all the concrete.

It is easier to have a border. It is easier to keep things out than in. For example, trying to remember what someone said and how he said it, sitting on a long wharf of cement pocked by saltwater and humid air. For example, destroying yourself before someone else can do the same from across a country or a language or body of water. For example, closure.

VI. I am written wrong on a shred of paper he draws from somewhere. Still, I say, show me again how you have the right words and I do not.

III. Carol is not subtitled. When Cate Blanchette finds a cassette tape in the wall of the motel room she shares with Rooney Mara, the revelation rolls through the audience a moment late, like seafoam or bad dub.

The projectionist tries funny business. I am thinking about things that circle: toy train set Cate Blanchett buys from a department store, fabric on Rooney Mara’s glowing body.

After, a 50-cent vanilla cone with his money. He has never felt snow, I remember in the quiet, and he will never know about the girls.

In the Cine Yara, between the house and the projection cabin, eight metal rungs. Between the cabin and the screen, light whirred through negatives of Mara and Blanchette.

‘Blanchette’: a name that means ‘white.’

In the last row of the theater, their bright faces and teeth, the projectionist, the dark house, I, trying to describe Times Square in December. It all comes out like lore.

IV. In Havana, there is a cement border between one realm and the next where everyone goes to neck. There are stairs that lead into the sea that seem too huge for human use. Maybe they would be appropriate for a different species. Giants. Beings not of this island. The water is too deep to swim in for most. Some humans slip on prostheses to elongate their feet or tie dirty Styrofoam together with plastic, and float. We watched their torches glow from the cement. In the morning, around their shoulders in stacks will hang small fish.

There are laws against this sort of behavior, enacted one day after many thousands of humans, starving, surged over and down the great steps. Now, every night, many thousands of humans perch to drink rum and watch the waves where the sharks surfaced then. On the border of cement, there is a border of bodies. Around the border of cement, there is a border of sea. Under the border of sea, there is a border of bones.

VII. These are the subtitles, the footnotes, the evidence recorded on tape. This how to hear the final consonants of words a person does not say. This is how to address someone formally. Remember what happens to direct and indirect object pronouns when they meet one another. Remember so you can say it right when you say, I’ve forgotten the word I was taught. Remember how the Spanish translates closer to something like, the word I was taught has forgotten me.

This is the word you forgot, that means ‘boulder’ and rhymes with a word that means ‘by yourself.’ Have you found it in a dictionary? Be sure to find it in a dictionary.

These are the terms of endearment. These are the terms of endearment for the woman who washes the dishes, the one who sells paper in a washroom for a dime, for a friend, for a man, for a cab driver, for the sky. This is how you do not understand what is being said. This is how difficult it is to explain it to you when your words are not concordant, are fractured, do not agree. This is how a person would want you if you did not have to be explained the ways in which you are not sufficient, how you have not given yourself enough to it all: as much as the sky.

VIII. There is so much left to say, the projectionist says, and no ways to say it. There is something I cannot touch, but that touches me. It is something like a border.

IX. As a condition of gaining custody of her character’s daughter, Cate Blanchett must cut ties with Rooney Mara with the exception of occasional phone calls, during which, in order to avoid incrimination, neither speaks.

X. V. During the rainy season, the border floods. Waves curl over cars that drive by. It’s as if the sea is reclaiming the land slowly, with great care. I, too, push up against the

My last night on the island the waves that broke over the border reached the far side of my building, bigger than they’d ever been. When the projectionist called me, just before light, all I could hear was the ocean.

FEATURES

08

GESTURES IN ABSENCE On the 15-Year Memory of 9/11 Will Tavlin ILLUSTRATION BY

James Zhang

A thousand 9/11 stories are the same. Ask any New Yorker who watched the event in real time what they saw that day and they’ll tell you as much about the planes as the bridges packed with masses escaping Manhattan, the complete dissolve of structures and protocol, the white ash raining over Brooklyn. Mine: I didn’t see the towers fall.

From Hoboken, New Jersey, our teacher explained to our first grade class that a plane had hit New York. I imagined a Boeing 747 landing on Fifth Avenue, its wings neatly lined up with a cross street fitting perfectly along the grid.

There is a formula to the 9/11 personal narrative. It serves to describe as much as it does to subdue. It takes a great commitment to memory to reconstruct the city’s collective trauma without an individual’s personal narrative escaping it, overtaking it. As John Updike, writing in the New Yorker’s issue following the attacks, recounted: “My wife and I watched from the Brooklyn building’s roof, the south tower dropped from the screen of our viewing, it fell straight down like an elevator…. We knew we had just witnessed thousands of deaths; we clung to each other as if we ourselves were falling.” There are ten accounts like his in the same issue. There are thousands like his retold yearly.

From rooftops and city streets, the situation was rendered incalculable. The city bore witness to the birth of its own phantom limb. A collective trauma of absence: what was once there, painfully, viewed in an instant, was not. +++ Every story must be told. This was the great challenge facing the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation’s 13-member jury as they embarked on the most closely watched and contested memorial competition in American history. Managed by the joint city-state Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), the competition, announced in 2003, quickly received 5,201 proposals from 62 countries. Each proposal followed a simple set of guidelines: that the site provide space for contemplation, that it convey historic authenticity, that there be a separate resting place for unidentified remains, and that the World Trade Center footprints—the geological scars made from the fallen towers—were to be made visible. Art critic Nancy Princenthal, covering the jury’s deliberation process in her essay “World Trade Center Memorial,” writes that, above all, “the guidelines tried to ensure that the memorial’s concerned public—a community understood as both subject and audience—be defined, and honored, as explicitly as possible. Each victim was to be ‘recognized’ individually.”

It was evident, at a public forum held to review the guidelines in 2003, that the process would be difficult.

Namely, the various interested parties—firefighters, first responders, office workers, local residents, victims’ families—called for the memorial to contain individual forms of recognition. “Particular passion was aroused by the demand that firefighters be designated as such, and identified by their engine companies,” writes Princenthal. “Most insistently, heroes were distinguished from victims.”

Meanwhile, larger political forces were warring over Ground Zero’s long-term future. In his New Yorker article “Stones And Bones,” Adam Gopnik details the negotiations between the developer Larry Silverstein (who had leased the World Trade Center buildings shortly before they collapsed), Port Authority, and New York’s then-governor, George Pataki. Together these three actors decided the fate of the site’s economic and cultural renewal. As Gopnik writes, Pataki, aligned with the public’s demand to preserve the tower’s footprints, and resistant to Port Authority and Silverstein’s rebuilding agendas, ultimately resolved to include both. “Two seemingly contradictory ideas,” writes Gopnik, “that it was necessary to keep the site ‘sacred’ and also necessary to rebuild it for commerce—governed the design of the site from the beginning.”

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ARTS

It is thus a great achievement that the winning 9/11 memorial design, Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s Reflecting Absence, somehow satisfied the memorial’s major and minor political players. The memorial has been lauded for its simplicity: two 200-square-foot sinks, literal footprints of the north and south World Trade Centers, positioned adjacently in a plaza of 400 sweetgum and swamp white oak trees. Streams of water fall 35 feet into the memorial’s basin before disappearing into a central, darker, well. On the outer edges of the pools are the list of names of those who died.

To be a visitor at Reflecting Absence, however, is to be subject to a barrage of seemingly contradictory ideas regarding death and how it should be retained in the public consciousness. As a site to “provide space for contemplation,” Reflecting Absence is frustrating. Couched under the newly built One World Trade Center, bustled beside Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus transportation hub, and under the bawl of the waterfalls, introspection is overtaken by distraction. It is the first in a long list of criticisms that have assailed Reflecting Absence since its opening to the public in 2011. As Gopnik—after watching a security guard chastise a group of kids for standing on a granite bench—critiques, “the idea that we celebrate the renewal of our freedom by deploying uniformed guards to prevent children from playing in an outdoor park is not just bizarre in itself but participates in a culture of fear that the rest of the city, having tested, long ago discarded.” The memorial’s design imposes more contradictions onto the visitor. Gopnik writes: “a cemetery that cowers in the shadow commerce; an insistence that we are here to remember and an ambition to let us tell you what to recall; the boast that we have completely started over and the promise that we will never forget.”

While right-wing voices, historically partial to nationalist displays of strength in memorials, have criticized the lack of a singular patriotic imagery, critics on the left have noted, with some dismay, its likeness to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. Princenthal cites two examples of such critiques: in the New York Observer, Clay Risen, critiquing all eight of the memorial competition's finalists, called each design’s use of Maya Lin’s Minimalist vocabulary a “crutch, rather than an inspiration.” Architecture critic Paul Goldberger agreed, writing in the New Yorker that the eight semi-finalists “could be commemorating any sadness, not the particular horror of the World Trade Center disaster, and most of them have the bland earnestness of a well-designed public plaza.”

Risen and Goldberger’s allegations that Reflecting Absence conforms to Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial are not unwarranted. Both Lin’s work and Reflecting Absence rely on a Minimalist style: clean geometry, gently sloping lines, and polished granite listing the names of those lost from each memorial’s respective tragedy. But Princenthal distinguishes Lin’s memorial language as a “Minimalist dialect” rooted more in the radical pursuit of emotion than it is in a reductive formal design. As Princenthal notes, Lin’s memorial asserts that “written language—including the perceptual space it creates as well as the meaning it conveys—is every bit as important as pure form.”

In a 1996 interview with Tom Finkelpearl, Lin characterized her work as “anti-monumental, intimate... The way you read a book is a very intimate experience and my works are like books in public areas.” The Vietnam memorial can literally be read, and interacted with, like a book. The names are listed on the wall chronologically. To pass through the memorial is to walk through the Vietnam War’s history of death. One slowly descends downwards into the gash, the height of the wall appearing to grow higher, the list of names, longer. The simplicity of the memorial has invited visitors to make their own personal additions, mementos. A bottle of Jack Daniels; a loved one's favorite record. The personalized objects, like annotations, began appearing next to the name of their subject, usually brought by victim's friends and families, usually crying.

But the fundamental success of Maya Lin—that her memorial asked the viewer to participate in keeping alive the memory of what was once a never-ending, violent intervention—is totally absent in Arad and Walker’s work.

Reflecting Absence doesn’t create space for real commemorative practices that, as Lin generated for the Vietnam War, could reify and resituate the public’s collective trauma—it never could. The stakes of its political interests were always too high.

On one hand, the memorial needed to appease the public’s interest in individual representations. That one of the 9/11 memorial jury’s guidelines required recognition of the victims of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing is noteworthy; the six who perished in 1993, named alongside the 2,977 victims in the towers, indicates a commitment to representing the public’s pluralism by placing it, defining it, and limiting it under the umbrella of ‘terrorism.’

Reflecting Absence subscribes to the same politicized agenda president George W. Bush put forth in the wake of the attacks: security before sanctity. Personal mementos brought to the site are strictly banned (although the memorial staff places one white rose in the carved-out names of victims on their birthdays). American political legacies were also at stake. A 9/11 memorial that did anything besides reinforce the conditions of its own production— the supposed strength of its nation—would not have fared well for the public image of its proponents. So we are told how to move, what to remember, what was destroyed, and exactly who the victims were, through a memorial that forecloses the possibility that the city itself was a victim— that in watching disaster in the sky, something could be mangled besides the towers themselves.

Thus, if Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial is experienced as a book, Reflecting Absence is experienced as a lecture, one of conflicting ideas and muddled conclusions.

Its failure is not solely in its attempt to tell you what to think, but that the conclusion has already been reached.

That, in the words of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, “it will be a place where people say ‘never again.’”

It isn’t. Reflecting Absence is the political answer to a question beyond politics. A loss of colossal immensity is still felt through the fabric of the city today. +++ Three years before the towers fell, in 1998, artists Paul Myoda and Julian LaVerdiere had a studio on the 91st floor of 1 World Trade Center. They were working on a public art project, funded by the downtown New York public arts organization Creative Time, dedicated to genetic technologies. The project: mounting, on the tip of 1 World Trade Center’s spire, a bioluminescent beacon.

Illuminated by the natural chemical reaction between luciferin and luciferase in the presence of ATP, which occurs naturally in single-cell plankton, it was intended as a kind of signal. To be, as Myoda (now a professor at Brown University) noted in a 2002 lecture at Columbia University, “an artificial star, faintly visible above Manhattan’s skyline. A blinking, shimmering, point, which said, simply: here, there is life, as well.”

September 11 crashed their studio and with it the entire project. In the days after the disaster, the New York Times Magazine, with prior knowledge of the bioluminescent beacon, asked Myoda and LaVerdiere for an artist’s response to the attacks. Privately, the artists—both of whom, from their rooftops, watched 9/11 unfold—discussed the phenomenon of the phantom limb. “The World Trade Center was invisible, unmade, in the world of dust and dirt and fire and body parts, but somehow remade in our imaginations,” Myoda said in his lecture. “The experience of phantom pains revealed itself…. The tingling, oftentimes maddening, sensation attendant with the loss of a limb is prevalent in medical literature; the sense that something is there—a something which undeniably SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

hurts—but cannot be rubbed, cannot be allayed, cannot be given even a momentary respite.”

Their artistic rendering for the project appeared on the cover of the September 23, 2001 issue of the Times Magazine: two light beams mapped onto the new, now towerless Manhattan skyline, faded to the point of near-invisibility. The image, originally entitled “Phantom Towers,” gripped the public. With the help of Creative Time, and the money for their bioluminescent beacon still at their disposal, Myoda and LaVerdiere snowballed their image into an actualized installation on March 11, 2002.

As an object it was peculiar. Up close, 88 high-powered xenon lights rocketing upwards, its light particles appearing to vibrate in midair. From afar, the individual lights appeared as two discrete beams. “The phenomenological effect,” said Myoda, “was heretofore unseen; the tallest, brightest image in history. The visual effect of three-point perspective, strangely personalized the image; it warped above one’s head, no matter where one was located. Facing it, and looking above, was the same experience as facing away from it, and looking above.” Their translucence offered a ghostlike quality. Atmospheric conditions change their appearance too: cloud cover and fog concentrate the beams and heighten their visibility; on a clear night the wave-particles dissipate, fading outwards.

As Myoda emphasized in his lecture, “on such a large scale, nerve endings, raw and severed loose, needed something to grasp, something to close the loop. Something that even momentarily avoided the mediating interference inherent in an image, a scrim, screen, or interface.” Tribute In Light, in this way, gives a literal form to the city’s trauma: a rendering of the phantom limb so many witnesses looking at the skyline intimated for years. A haunting specter. There, but not quite. Gestured, but not articulated. What was once there, painfully, still is not—and it doesn’t have to be.

Tribute In Light, in its success, signals absence in its positive form. An absence that isn’t quite absent. It is a type of void located somewhere in the cavernous pits of

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Reflecting Absence, clunkily shoveled into its name, lost in the roar of the waterfalls, but truer, more lucid, more self-evident in the twin beams catching the ceiling of the sky.

The politics of land are largely evacuated. Tribute In Light is not about landscape but about the skyline, because land had nothing to do with the terror felt by the millions watching the towers fall and everything to do with the act of looking itself. You can find it in YouTube clips, stories by survivors: onlookers from their rooftops as close as TriBeCa and as far as Far Rockaway, all watching, staring, witnessing, from their streets and rooftops, the century change before their eyes.

Speaking to me in his studio in Providence, Myoda recalls that the night the lights turned on—in March 2002—was assisted by an absolute quiet. A small navy of passenger boats and ferries had assembled in the harbor for a total and unobstructed view of the installation. Out of the quiet came a sudden cascade of boat horns; a singular roar, the sound of many as one. Myoda says you could hear it throughout the island. “One of the workers who was down there a lot came to us and thanked us. He said: ‘instead of people coming down here and looking at the pit, it's the first time we’re looking up.’”

WILL TAVLIN B’17.5 is looking.

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10

FEEDING TIME Meditations on the Tasty revolution

BY Anna

Hundert

ILLUSTRATION BY Julia Tyler

The hands arrive out of the off-screen space. They are disembodied, or rather un-embodied, as if having never belonged to a body at all.

There is no smashing or pulling or undoing here, not unless it is visually satisfying like the peeling of a banana without brown spots. Hovering hands combine pre-measured ingredients. The pre-measured ingredients are neatly arranged in colorful bowls. Measured and arranged by whom, I cannot say. That is the beauty of the passive voice; the preparation for the preparation of food happens outside of the pixelated box. Going beyond the refrain of seen and not heard, the kitchen space and the cooking body must be hidden at all costs.

And in the end, bites disappear from the cookies.

They are eaten, but there is no body that eats, no chewing or swallowing. No digestion. No hunger.

The eating body must be hidden at all costs; its waxing and waning is not pleasing to the eye, the pleasant swell of skin over the jeans’ waist, the deep inhale of full-ness that spreads to the toes. The touching of food to tongue is not pleasing to the eye. The dirtying and cleaning of bowls is not pleasing to the eye. It is all too revoltingly cyclical, the digestion of food and the dirtying of dishes, the waxing and waning, always hungry again.

They call it “women’s work” when the work is cyclical, when there is no product or proof that the work has been done. The laundry is only clean for so long before it becomes dirty again and must be done again. It is a practice in reproduction, re-production.

We say I’ve done the laundry and I’ve done the dishes but these English figures of speech fail us as language has always failed us, because we are never done. I push bleached cotton into my body every month and it blooms inside me. I ache with the rust of life, knowing that my body preheats on schedule like an oven preparing itself to bake bread.

The short video does not tell you that you must preheat the oven. This step is essential, as any baker knows.

And whether or not we were born with wombs, our work grows and shrinks just as our bodies grow and shrink, inhaling and exhaling, waxing and waning like the phases of the moon. They tell us to take up less space so we tuck in our stomachs like neatly pressed shirts, we iron out our wrinkles each night and wake up with new ones each morning.

The short video is compact, it is permanent, it is a product. It is about fifty seconds long yet it also lasts forever. It does not exist in time in the way that food exists in time. Food cyclically becomes waste, either by rotting or by being consumed. Food goes cold, it goes bad, it goes.

Perhaps the most difficult part of cooking a meal is the intricate timing of the different components, turning over the chicken when it is halfway cooked, ensuring that the peas aren’t steamed into mush. To be clock-wise is a special kind of wisdom. They say your biological clock is ticking and it sounds like a threat. My mother says that if you listen closely, the rice will whisper to you when the time is right. She bends down so that her ear is level with the stove.

The short video does not exist in time. In the video, time is the number in the corner; it is not the desperate ticking of the clock that says your guests are eight minutes late and the shepherd’s pie will soon become lukewarm. The disembodied hands have no guests to entertain except the viewer, who consumes content instead of food. And there is no waste except the wasted time.

The word video itself is only present tense, after all.

Translated from the Latin literally, I see. The present tense is everywhere in time and it is nowhere in time.

It can express continuity but not cyclicality, not the waxing and waning of foods and bodies, the sharp flare of heartburn, the piles of dirty dishes. +++ We sense the link somewhere in our bowels, the connection or analogy or intimacy between the cycle of eating and the cycle of living. We know that each sustains the other, we know that the ritual of food preparation is not so much an act of production as it is the continuation of a cycle that has lasted for as long as we have had teeth to chew with.

There is an Etruscan tomb outside of Rome where the dead are buried in an underground kitchen, built to scale with carvings in the walls to look like pots, pans, and utensils hanging from hooks. The Etruscans knew something about how food preparation moves through time cyclically, how it is tied to life, how it is tied to decay. Perhaps they felt that link somewhere in their bowels, just as we do. They didn’t know how our bodies break down food and build themselves up with new molecules, but perhaps they knew that our

bodies are made of broken bread, that our bodies are broken bread.

For people of my faith and my mother’s faith and her mother’s faith, the cyclical nature of food is there in the liturgy: do this in remembrance of me.

For people of my faith, bread is a kind of continual resurrection. It is not the second coming but rather the coming and coming and coming and coming each week.

For people of my father’s faith and his mother’s faith and her mother’s faith, there was no time for the bread to rise. The cycle of baking was broken off and although they say that liberation is sweet, it is no wonder that matzo feels like dry knuckles when it lies tasteless upon the tongue. It is no wonder that they are forever returning to the land of milk and honey.

L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim: next year, in Jerusalem. For people of my father’s faith, communal dancing is always done in circles.

I have learned that ritual consumption underpins daily consumption underpins ritual consumption. That there is always a prayer before eating even when the prayer is unsaid, may this food enter our bodies, may this food strengthen our bodies, may this food become our bodies. We hear it somewhere in our bowels. +++ The hands are soft-knuckled as if they have never washed dishes in scalding water. They are not red and cracked like the hands of my mother and her mother and her mother.

The short video is compact, it is permanent, it is a product. It is proof of somebody’s work, some body’s work. It is proof that a person cooked and proof that a person produced a video. Sometimes I think of the person who set up the camera, who twisted the screws and rotated the focusing lenses, so that the big eye could steadily face down at the hands. Sometimes I think of the body attached to the hands, how they still have to choose what to wear every morning.

I have learned to value work only when there is proof that work has been done. But cooking is always an undoing—melting down the cheese and chopping up the onions. And there’s the rub, the friction.

There’s the cognitive dissonance of the linear videos in our news-cycle newsfeeds that spoon-feed the eyes: the content is too deliciously wholesomely phallically straightforward. We do not flip through it like a recipe book, folding down the corners and spilling our own creations at the edges. We scroll down down down.

And the hands arrive out of the off-screen space.

They call it “women’s work” without understanding how our work grows and shrinks just as our bodies grow and shrink, how we are running in circles even while standing still. My mother would say it’s because we make the world go ’round. Her mother would say it’s because we must always repeat ourselves to the men. At eighty-nine, she still separates compost into the green compost bin after every meal. She imagines the food scraps sinking back into the earth that gave birth to them.

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+++

Short, sped-up videos of aesthetically pleasing food preparation, as popularized by Buzzfeed’s viral spinoff page “Tasty,” have infiltrated Facebook newsfeeds with cheese-stuffed crusts and gooey chocolate chips.

We couldn’t possibly resist those mouth-watering thumbnails and seductive, click-baiting titles like Wait A Minute, You Can Stuff A Cheesecake Into a Chocolate Chip Cookie. Or, Here’s What Happens When Chocolate Makes Love To Cookie Dough.

“Tasty” becomes more evangelical when it comes to bread. This Chocolate Star Bread Is Literally Heaven On A Plate. Mac ‘N’ Cheese Breadsticks Are Here to Change Your Life Forever.

Click it—you know you want to—and you will enter another world, an enchanted land where disembodied hands combine pre-prepared ingredients, where an hour can pass with a snap of the fingers, where anything can be stuffed with anything if you just believe. Press share; pass the plate.

We will write about it again and again and again until carpal tunnel ravages our wrists and dish soap razes our knuckles. We will spin ourselves into circles until nothing straight is left in this world. For people of my father’s faith, communal dancing is always done in circles.

Pause the video and remember what it feels like to burn your tongue on soup when you are deciding whether it needs more salt. Stir clockwise, then counterclockwise, then clockwise again. We will write ourselves into circles, producing content that comments on content, never pausing to consider the sensation of contentment that only comes after a good meal.

Observe how cheese divides itself into strings, how onions turn to a golden brown from the heat of a skillet’s breath. And if you listen closely, the rice will whisper to you when the time is right.

It is nice to know that the world is mutable, shapeable, that we can flatten it with a rolling pin and then braid it into pretzels. That we can fold other flavors into our bodies and lives as easily as folding dough. I have learned that it is better to press your hands into the flour than to toss it from a pre-measured bowl.

Then sprinkle salt generously—do not let it lose its savor. I am just beginning to learn what it means to be the salt of the earth. Another pinch, with a flourish. It is no wonder that these videos are so satisfying; it is no wonder that we feel the urge to share.

ANNA HUNDERT B’18 is learning how to cook.

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METABOLICS

SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

A TOUGH PILL TO SWAL Big Pharma and the brand name bubble

BY Dolma

Ombadykow

ILLUSTRATION by

Maggie Tseng

At the end of August, the pharmaceutical company Mylan made headlines for raising the cost of the EpiPen to over $300. The EpiPen, a plastic auto-injector used during anaphylactic shock in response to an allergic reaction or asthma attack, contains 0.3 milliliters of epinephrine. This volume has an average wholesale cost of just under $1, with the container and needle adding an estimated $3 to the total manufacturing price.

Sold exclusively in packs of two, people at risk for anaphylactic shock are required to shell out over $600 for access to the EpiPen product, which has only a one-year shelf life.

This cost increase can be largely attributed to Mylan’s strategic awareness initiatives, and they’re not alone. Data from BBC News suggests that nine out of 10 major pharmaceutical drug companies spend more money on marketing than research and development. When Mylan acquired the EpiPen from the pharmaceutical company Merck in 2007, the product (then $57) was held under strict FDA regulations that limited marketing to patients with a history of anaphylaxis.

In 2008, Mylan increased their lobbying budget fivefold. By the end of that same year, the FDA had relabeled the EpiPen to extend drug access to additionally include people at potential risk for anaphylaxis. Since then, public awareness campaigns funded by Mylan around the reality of childhood allergies have highlighted the EpiPen as the only trusted treatment for anaphylaxis, with these campaigns further encouraging parents to stock EpiPens everywhere their child spends time: in the car, at home, school, their grandparent’s house—the list goes on. More than this, Mylan’s lobbying efforts in Congress and their initiatives within public schools have ensured that the company will always make a profit at the hands of worried parents and local school systems. The results of Mylan’s lobbying efforts are staggering: while an average 150 people die from anaphylaxis each year in the US, an estimated 3.6 million prescriptions were filled for the EpiPen in 2015, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Through arguing for the necessity of the EpiPen and essentializing the product through name brand recognition marketing (akin to the work of Kleenex and Band-Aid), Mylan has established an estimated 99% control of the epinephrine market.

To challenge this hold, two alternatives to the EpiPen have appeared in recent years. However, in late 2015, Sanofi’s Auvi-Q, the leading alternative, was recalled due to inconsistent drug volume in its injectors. The only alternative left on the market, Adrenaclick, doubly suffers from an unfamiliar dispensing apparatus and a lack of name recognition. Coupled with the 20% increase in reported childhood allergies in the US in the last 15 years, the recall of Auvi-Q created the perfect storm for Mylan’s opportunistic monopoly, allowing them to drive up costs with no real competition to keep prices down.

As Vox reported this month, the US is the only developed country in the world that allows drug companies to set their own prices, “maximizing profits the same way sellers of chairs, mugs, shoes, or any other manufactured goods would.” The more than 400% increase in cost for the medication since 2007 has made the EpiPen a billion dollar product, and this upward trend mirrors pay raises among executives across the company, with CEO Heather Bresch’s personal salary rising from 2.4 million to 18.9 million since 2007—a 687% increase. In an interview with CNBC last month, Bresch responded to critics of the price increase by claiming, “no one is more frustrated than I am.”

This month, Mylan introduced a “$0 copay

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SCIENCE

card,” which provides low or no cost options to patients with good insurance coverage. Despite its name, however, the savings program only reduces the market price for the EpiPen by $100 for underinsured patients. Additionally, Mylan is working to produce a generic alternative that would be available at half the market price, with accessibility similarly limited to those with low-deductible insurance plans. While each of these solutions attempt to recover Mylan’s public image, they do little to actually bring treatments to low-income and underinsured patients.

for developing irreversible cirrhosis (when healthy liver tissue is replaced with scar tissue, preventing proper liver function).

While acute and chronic forms of the infection can be reversed by Gilead’s options before cirrhosis occurs, the costly drugs are not available to patients as a method of prevention. Instead, a patient’s liver must have

+++ Mylan is certainly not alone in their price gouging. Martin Shkreli, foul-mouthed “Big Pharma Bro” and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, raised the cost of Daraprim nearly 6000% in September 2015, similarly capitalizing on a product with no viable alternatives. Exorbitantly priced brand name drugs have become an industry standard, and according to a report published by Market Watch in April 2016, five of the ten most expensive prescription drugs in the US are treatments for Hepatitis C. Sovaldi, at $84,000 a month, is the most expensive in the country, followed by the second ranked Harvoni, at $79,200. Both made by Gilead, the two drugs have controlled the market for Hepatitis C since Sovaldi’s FDA approval in 2013. With a curative success rate of up to 95%, older technologies (at lower price points) simply can’t compete, and strict patenting laws ensure that generic alternatives won’t become available until 2029, when Sovaldi’s patent expires.

Hepatitis C-related deaths outnumber all other deaths due to infectious disease in the country, with an estimated five million Americans currently affected. Since 2010, the rate of infection has increased by more than 150%, following trends of increased injection drug use among young people across the country. The mortality rate of people infected with Hepatitis C is expected to triple by 2030.

In September 2015, the New York Times reported that while Medicaid coverage provides discounts for Sovaldi, the cost still hovers around an average $600 per pill, while Gilead promises to provide an average 46% discount for those without insurance coverage, bringing the average cost to $540 per pill depending on eligibility. In order to receive discounts from either payer, however, patients must abstain from the use of drugs or alcohol for a full year, have advanced liver disease (but not too advanced, depending on the payer), and be prescribed the treatment course by an infectious disease specialist.

Limiting discounted treatment options to patients with advanced liver disease, who otherwise have an estimated five or fewer years to live without treatment, presents a massive failure to address the larger issue. Acute Hepatitis C leads to chronic infection in 85% of cases, with chronic infection then leading to advanced liver disease a quarter of the time. Further, acute Hepatitis C is often asymptomatic, which increases the likelihood of developing chronic infection due to little medical intervention, resulting in an increased risk

SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

LLOW just the right amount of cirrhotic tissue before they can be deemed ‘sick enough’ to be graced by the treatment discount—not to mention that the average discounted price of $540 per pill for 12 weeks of treatment still costs over $45,000, about 87% of the average annual income in the US. Cost for treatment, compounded by other risk factors and a general stigma around the diagnosis, means that Hepatitis C-related liver disease is disproportionately left untreated in minority populations living below the poverty line. Beyond this,

African Americans are twice as likely to be infected as the general population. Despite these staggering numbers, however, a study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2008 found that African Americans were only 38% as likely to receive antiviral treatment than white patients, with the treatment discrepancy strongly suggesting provider bias among physicians, as well as the outrageous price tag, as barriers to care.

Systemic roadblocks that limit access to care have become a matter of life or death. This past month, a Pennsylvania court deemed that the state prison system’s Hepatitis C protocol, which has provided treatment for only five of the 6,000 prisoners currently infected, is unconstitutional. Citing budget restrictions, the state prison system effectively waits for prisoners to “be on the verge of death” before providing Gilead’s drug, according to an attorney working on the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther, who was denied antiviral treatment last year. +++ Gilead has justified Sovaldi’s price tag in part due to their $11 billion acquisition of Pharmasset, the company that originally developed the drug, in 2011. A Senate investigation into Gilead in 2014 found that the treatment cost was set “simply to make money,” according to a Democracy Now! report. This industry-wide trend of corralling patents for life-saving medications clearly privileges the financial wealth of pharmaceutical companies and the nebulous intellectual property rights attached to the drug development process above the health and survival of people in need.

In response to critics of the high treatment costs, Gilead struck deals with generic drug companies in 91 developing countries to offer treatment at a lower price point. Per Gilead’s agreement with local generic drug companies in India, for example, the cost of a full treatment course is set at $900, just 2% of the American price tag. However, Indian officials have argued the cost is still overwhelmingly out of reach for the majority of the nation, with the average national income hovering around $1500 annually. These national contracts require that patients provide proof of residence before providing access to the medication, ultimately disqualifying refugees and other migrant populations, as well as people living in “middle-income nations,” like Brazil and China, which still hold largely disproportionate distributions of wealth. As Gilead has done in the US and elsewhere, pricing access to treatment based on assumed wealth and average annual income not only defines the right to health -on capitalist terms, it also reifies geopolitical boundary-making as a determinant to health in the first place. As we’ve seen with Hepatitis C and other costly diseases, leaving the fates of millions to the ebb and flow of consumer markets becomes a luxury of the healthy and wealthy.

In late 2015, The World Health Organization (WHO) added Sovaldi and Harvoni to their “essential medicines” list, which identifies drugs that they believe should be affordable and accessible to all, regardless of national affiliation, insurance coverage, or ability to pay. This falls in line with the WHO’s preamble, written in 1948, which identifies health as a human right. Doing so has had major implications for the global health efforts of the new millennium,

as have generic drug interventions more broadly.

In the late 1990s, for example, a multi-year patent battle between US pharmaceutical giants and the South African government erupted in response to pandemic levels of HIV/AIDS in the region. In this instance, campaigns for cheaper drug options cited the World Trade Organization’s agreement on intellectual property rights, which provides governments the right to override patents and engage in compulsory licensing only in the case of emergencies.

In the US, generic drug companies have gone a long way towards improving access to affordable healthcare, especially for under-insured patients.

Before the patent expired in 2009, Imitrex, a medication used for the treatment of migraines, was priced between $30 and $40 per pill. Though paling in comparison to the cost of Hepatitis C or HIV/ AIDS treatment, the cost of Imitrex meant that people experiencing otherwise debilitating migraines would have to pay nearly $100 a day to pharmaceutical companies in order to continue work, far exceeding the federal minimum wage, which promised a little more than $65 for the average eight hour workday in 2009. When the patent expired, the copay for underinsured patients dropped to an average $15 for a pack of 9 pills (about 4% the cost per pill compared to the brand name), improving access to the drug by leaps and bounds.

However, as is the case with Sovaldi and other new-to-market drugs, access to affordable generics is still overwhelmingly limited, with US intellectual property rights privileging the financial wealth of drug developers over the bodily health of its citizens. Additionally, generic alternatives aren’t always the carbon copy drug that they’re made out to be. Though the Price Competition and Patent Extension Act of 1984 simplified the process for bioequivalent generic drugs to come to market after patents held by original drug developers expire, extensive research into complications around the aesthetic quality of medications have shown that the physical appearance of generic drugs, in addition to the re-naming of these alternatives, often produce lower treatment outcomes. In a study of over 10,000 heart attack patients published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the research indicated a strong correlation among patients halting medication after switching to a generic pill that looked different from the drugs they were used to. The patenting act of 1984 upholds the original drug developer’s right to a unique appearance, called “trade dress,” to identify the product’s manufacturer, meaning that generic alternatives must look physically different from their brand name counterpart.

Compounded by extensive marketing efforts and the household recognition that provides a leg up to brand name drugs in the first place, some pharmaceutical companies have even begun producing their own “authorized generics,” providing virtually equivalent drug options at a lower cost and under a different name. With these moves coming from makers like Mylan, which recently announced plans for the release of a similarly “generic” EpiPen for half the cost of its increased name-brand price after last month’s uproar, the guise of the generic drug continues to falter to the profiteering of Big Pharma.

And while this pressure from the public may have forced Mylan to make an effort to readjust their costly prescriptions, it’s hard to imagine a similar public outcry against Hepatitis C drugs like Gilead’s, in which the image being propagated of those who need the drugs are not young children.

DOLMA OMBADYKOW B’17 thinks pharmaceutical bureaucracy is intentionally opaque.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SCIENCE

14

NOTES ON GAY SOFTCORE CAMP When Gay Sex Loses its Politics

Andrew Deck

ILLUSTRATION BY Julie

Benbassat

The first ‘gay-themed’ feature-length film I watched was Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds.

Like many closeted eighth graders, I had turned to YouTube coming-out confessionals for affirmation.

But what started as watching Tyler Oakley pour his heart out soon spiraled into a thorough education in bad gay film. “Recommended videos” exposed me to series of student short films about locker room romances and sleepover sexual tensions. Mixed in was a sprinkling of montage videos featuring Queer as Folk fan-favorite couples (e.g. “Brain & Michael: Bad Romance,” “Stuart & Nathan: Illuminated”). This YouTube rabbit hole culminated with Sloppy Seconds, my unfortunate introduction to gay softcore camp.

Sloppy Seconds (2006) is not so different from the first Eating Out (2004). Both plots can be boiled down to the question, “Is he gay?” In Sloppy Seconds, Kyle, played by American Idol ninth runner-up Jim Verraros, attends an art class with his friend Tiffani von der Sloot. They are both attracted to Troy, the class’s nude male model, and concoct an ill-advised plan to expose his sexuality. Kyle pretends to undergo conversion therapy and begins dating Tiffani so he can suggest a threesome to Troy. Troy discovers their deceit, sleeps with Kyle’s ex-boyfriend, and then announces he is bisexual to the cast of characters. He is met with a resounding, “There’s no such thing!” The film concludes with the “ex-gay” minister of Kyle’s conversion camp having sex in a Porta Potty, only to be caught by his mother, whom he then ejaculates on. It’s farce, but only if you replace the trope of mistaken identities with illegible sexualities. Take it as the Midsummer Night’s Dream of cruising, jockstraps, and straight-gone-gay fantasies.

It is all too easy to rip apart a film that was never meant to be taken seriously. Eating Out and its companion films Sloppy Seconds, All You Can Eat, Drama Camp, and The Open Weekend are firmly rooted in camp; they’re frivolous, hyperbolic, kitschy, and unashamed of it all. The film is an unnatural depiction of gay life, and of life in general. Its characters are caricatures, its production value is B-film quality, and its driving storyline is on par with middle school gossip. It never wants its audience to examine it with a critical eye, and in fact asks that you don’t. It’s all in good fun.

While queer cinema that finds recognition among mainstream critics tends to lean into heavy drama and serious romance—think Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011) or Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (2014)—Eating Out keeps it light. There is no moment of anguish over discovering the t-shirt of a long-lost lover and no one races to the train station for a final goodbye.

Rather, there are depictions of unromantic, uncomplicated sex between characters hardly developed beyond their most superficial sexual interests. For example, there is no real investment in the character arc of Troy, the nude model, other than to set up the climactic revelation that he would consider having sex with our ‘twink’ protagonist, Kyle. Unlike the historical subset of mainstream gay film, such as Philadelphia (1993), Milk (2008) and Pride (2014), there is no explicit interest in queer civil rights figures. Eating Out is nowhere near a biopic. And as a franchise focused entirely on the lives of cisgender gay white men, these films don’t reach into the areas of queer cinema that explore the gender binary or the experiences of queer people of color.

Rather, Eating Out and its kin stand apart in an entirely different subsection of films featuring gay male protagonists, films that share the franchise’s formula for sexy, campy comedy. You’ll find them in full force under Netflix’s “Gay & Lesbian” section. There is Latter Days (2003), in which a Mormon missionary falls in love with his promiscuous gay neighbor. Is It Just Me? (2010) features a lonely writer who meets the

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perfect hunk online but realizes he used a fake profile.

Longhorns (2011) has this official description: “A group of Texas frat boys go to a cabin in the woods and ride each other.” Going Down in La-La Land (2011) follows an aspiring film actor who comes to Hollywood but ends up a gay porn superstar. And Another Gay Movie (2006)—a Scary Movie-like spoof of the previously listed films—and its 2008 follow-up, Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild!, only solidify the genre’s existence.

Beginning in the early 2000s, LGBT film distributors churned out this genre of gay softcore camp, filled with and fueled by unromantic gay male sex.

The framework for these films appears to have been intermittent sex scenes interspersed with comic relief, as filmmakers tried to walk the fine line between infusing their films with hypersexuality and assuring the audience that this is not porn, it’s comedy. In the tradition of softcore before it, most nudity happens off camera, but the rare full-frontal shot keeps the audience coming back. Every installation of the Eating Out franchise and many other films in the genre feature shirtless men on their posters, and the innuendo-filled titles only affirm what is already obvious.

In all its campy glory, gay softcore films have come to occupy a notable place in the world of queer cinema.

+++ In her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” perhaps the definitive work on the subject, Susan Sontag argues that camp’s artifice and exaggeration is inevitably unnatural. As she puts it, “nothing in nature can be campy” as camp connotes a manmade artificiality.

This unnaturalness is certainly felt in the fictional universes within gay softcore camp, in which everyone is white, everyone is having sex without implications, and the struggles of being queer in heteronormative society are rendered unimportant. Put simply, the realities of living as a gay man do not motivate these films. Sontag further contends that camp is depoliticized. Camp’s preoccupation with aesthetics, in her view, slights any content and breeds a sensibility that is “disengaged—or at least apolitical.” In other words, the superficiality of camp discourages a deeper examination of its content and precludes a piece of camp from self-awareness, from acknowledging the power dynamics and political context it may play into.

This absence of self-awareness is, for Sontag, camp’s definitive quality.

That's not to say that viewers of these films are unable to see the queer political issues they exhibit.

SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

For one, the genre of gay softcore camp reproduces the trope of the hypersexualized white gay male. Every scene in these films is motivated by the sexual desires of men, and every named character in the Eating Out franchise is white. The only female characters in the films are sidekicks and self-described ‘fag hags,’ whose desires and interests are configured in relation to their gay male friends. The narrative purpose of these ‘wing women’ is solely to help their gay guy friends get off.

Often left sexually unfulfilled by the closing credits, the representation of Tiffani von der Sloot and company advances a construction of sexuality that prioritizes male desire. Alongside the ‘fag hags’ you’ll find the ‘twink’protagonist, who fawns after gay men fitting neatly into the chiseled, masculine, white-guy mold: the more abs the better; jock vibes are a must; midwestern farm boy is always a plus.

Sex positivism also drives this genre. Gay softcore camp advocates in a passive way for unabashed gay male sexuality in everyday life. It depicts gay male sex free of guilt or shame. Each film—from Sloppy Seconds all the way to Longhorn—makes no secret that it thinks sex is fun and that the sex lives of gay men should be unconstrained. So in the most absurd sense, these films are about gay sexual liberation. That may seem like overreaching, but it’s in large part because the language of ‘liberation’ is inextricably political and Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds doesn’t feel political. As Sontag argues, the medium of storytelling ensures it does not. But regardless of its superficial depiction, gay male sex positivity is built into these narratives. +++ At one point, advocating for sex positivity was a tenet of the mainstream gay political movement. Like these films, that movement was dominated by the interests of white gay men—its most visible proponents. But for this subset of gay activism, sexual liberation was about destigmatizing gay sexuality, shedding self-hate, and emancipating oneself from sexual repression. It was also about having a lot of sex, but in the discourse of this political movement it was often taken as more than that.

The bath houses that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century in San Francisco’s Castro and New York’s Village, where gay men went to explore their sexuality, epitomize this ideology. These spaces, which embraced gay sex positivity, were seen by the community as rejecting not only normative heterosexuality but monogamy and the stigmatization of many sexual practices.

In the 1980s, as the mass media and scientific community labeled ‘gay promiscuity’ a dangerous threat to public health—with diseased blood configured as a byproduct of unconstrained gay sexuality—sex positivity in the gay political movement was turned against itself.

Right-wing politicians used the practice of sex positivity among gay men as ‘proof’ of wrongdoing and the ‘source’ of AIDS. At times this rhetoric made its way into internal debates on gay sexual liberation. LGBT activists like Larry Kramer wrote scathing critiques of uninhibited gay sex. Bath houses that had once been seen as symbols of gay liberation were pointed to as shameful origins of infectious disease. Vocally supporting gay sex positivity in the late ’80s and early ’90s was not only mired in social stigmatization, but in the widespread conception that gay sex was harmful. Saying gay men should have as much sex as they want was a bold statement in a politicized conversation.

By 2006, the conversation had changed. It would be wrong to diminish the continuing work of AIDS activists in the queer community, whether fighting against HIV criminalization laws and blood donation bans or fighting for better access to healthcare and treatment.

But for the white gay men who survived the AIDS crisis, civil equality and same-sex marriage came into focus

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

as a central political goal in the new millennium. And the social justice issues facing trans people and queer people of color finally came into a blurred focus within mainstream activism, which had for years ignored those voices and lives. Sex positivity did not leave the gay community. Cruising did not end. The Folsom Street fair is still held every year. Grindr exists. And the shaming of gay sexuality by conservative leaders is, unfortunately, far from outdated. But the mainstream dialogue on gay politics shifted away from AIDS culpability, and saying gay sex is good shed some of its indexical weight. +++ Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds says gay sex is good frequently and energetically, and it first said it in 2006, which makes it a film uniquely positioned for political analysis. Released as part of the rise of gay softcore camp and in the midst of a shifting queer political landscape, Sloppy Seconds, and films like it, pull at a gay generational divide. As camp, they do so without wanting to or trying. In 1986, for the gay men who lived through the emergence of AIDS and saw gay sex positivism as a conversation central to their political future, “It’s all in good fun” wouldn’t have cut it. Released in 2004, the first Eating Out spawned five sequels and a genre. It was only able to do so because it came at a time when, within the queer community, an uncritical portrayal of gay sex positivity wasn’t seen as politically charged.

While gay softcore camp plays into a history of sex positivism in the gay community, it does so without self-awareness. And if viewers try to see through the shallowness of camp and read a political message into these films, they will often come up dry. That’s because while gay softcore camp is an odd product of the gay political movement and its mutable trajectory, it cannot be its continuation. As we look to the future of the queer political movement, and a conversation reorienting towards intersectionality and increasingly nuanced understandings of oppression, a genre defined by the sex lives of white gay men is not an answer to our call.

While these films, collectively, can be read as a document of gay sexual liberation, they are not liberatory.

ANDREW DECK B’17 should stop watching bad films on Netflix’s “Gay & Lesbian” section.

ARTS

16

TOM AND ME AND JERRY AND ME AND TOM AND JERRY BY

Mei Lenehan There are two coils really blazing, flames really up and up, their necks stretched up-out, licking the air.

Jerry and I hide from Tom inside the oven, 13 minutes— Jerry’s freaking out like a real hophead.

His face is graphic in the heat, and I didn’t ever really want to see a mouse sweat, I didn’t ever really know mice had pores.

He’s chasing an imaginary fly with his eyeballs and he won’t listen to me, to me that it’s not a real fly, to me that he’s sick is all.

Not that much longer until blueberry filling bubbles up, She’ll come lean over the door with mitts on, hot air’ll hit her chest and it will feel just like the taste of hot and buttery, on her chest.

I press my thumb into Jerry’s eye, and like in a falling dream it goes right through into inside, I’m pop-corning and my own screaming is narrowing my vision into a straw.

19 minutes— Fists up and up.

Idling back and forth in perpetual character selection mode, Jerry will not look at me.

I’m seeing his skin for the first time, it’s real red raw and missing most fur.

This isn’t fun anymore

and it’s been over a year now since Tom pulled out all but two of his claws.

Jerry’s tail looks like if a drain snake could have split ends.

I didn’t ever really know mice could crispen.

27 minutes— The timer is going off and my bones could split straight-down longways right then, She coos when the hot air enters her cleavage.

Jerry is slumped against the back of the oven, he is smiling and I want to punch him.

His joints clicking, I am amazed he is capable of any movement at all, and it’s an honest miracle his body makes it to the kitchen floor.

I find Tom in the living room by the window, I can hear deep indulgent inhales coming from the kitchen, There is nothing I can do to stop hysterically laughing now, my eyes feel hot but I’m not crying, laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing.

Light from outside cascades over his fur, his back a landscape of rolling grey hills, the land is shifting back and forth slightly.

It’s beautiful and I want to live there I can’t hear myself and I don’t know if it’s me who’s laughing or Tom now.

The field of tall grey grass rises and falls just the same and I see he has pulled out his last two claws.

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SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

Sate the Dusty Tween In Your Life

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The contents of each basket are hand-picked to correspond with your tween’s unique personality, blood type and favorite time of day to shoplift gift baskets.

guide book? I think it was the pink ones.. or wait, the red... you try first.

Text & Model

by Liby H. libyhays.com @crypt_futurity

3.Be-Tween You And Me: A Handful of Gorp Thankfully I just found some 1.Be-Tween Food And Art: gorp in my pocket, so we can Alinea Main Entree This platter is an entree at the worry later about the berries. three Michelin star-rated Chi- Don’t tell the other guy about cago restaurant Alinea, where this though, I don’t want head chef Grant Achatz plates to share. his flavorful and inventive bitesize morsels with panache(!) 4.Be-Tween 3 Scrumptious Flavors: Squeeze Play Liquid Candy 2.Be-Tween Life And Death: A breast feeding surrogate Foraged Berries with a bonus Green Apple One of these is safe to eat, Witch’s tit. do you remember from the

5.Be-Tween Waking and Sleep: Four Loko Keg Named for its four ingredients: caffeine, paint thinner, water, and water(reprise) 8.Be-Tween Supplication and Atonement: Insulin Bacterial 6.Be-Tween Plant and Animal: Culture Chlorofresh Liquid Chlorophyll It seems quietly tragic that we Promoted as an “Internal have to kill the genetically modDeodorant,” one can only ified bacteria that synthesize assume it serves to clean insulin for diabetics out the half-digested food in order to harvest it. scraps, leaving one with the sparkling-clean interior of a 9.Be-Tween Netflix and photosynthetic plant. (Side Chill:Pretzel IUDs question: Do some plants Note: These are actually photosynthesize too often and to scale! need to diet?)

10. Be-Tween Old and Neo: 7.Be-Tween Beggar and Neopets Omlettes Chooser: Wonder Balls (Bacon, Carrot and Pea, Rotten) I support Wonderballs even These were given out for though the world has cast free at the Giant Omelette in them aside, the packaging Tyrannia, the being an edible chocolate Jurassic-themed Neopets ball and the inside being a world. This is one of the two non-edible temporary tattoo easiest ways to feed your Neop seems like a novel reversal et for free, alongside the of the edible-within-non-edGiant Jelly of Jelly World (unnavible-packaging convention igable from the map but for an we see dominating the food elusive click-node.) It’s a moral market these days. dilemma among users whether

FAQ: Who are the Dusty Tweens?

A: Dusty tweens are so called because of their dusty appearance. This may be due to the fact that they lived during the transitional period when black and white film was first turning to color and existed in dusty grey tones with the subtlest hint of pastel.

you should keep your pet sated or let it perpetually ‘starve’.

For me, the expression on its face is just too sad to bear and since food is free, why not! P.S. the omlettes are often rotten, and the rotten omelette looks exactly the same as the normal cheese one.

11. Be-Tween Present and Past: California Pizza Kitchen Leftovers Neither completely consigned to the past nor wholly tangible in the present, these scraps might make a nice meal for a hungry ghost. If they fall through him or her you can rebag, refrigerate and serve later to a corporialized guest!

(Although ghosts are much nicer than any other kind of guests, imo.)

LIST 9.16

9.19

BEOWULF: A THOUSAND YEARS OF BAGGAGE (until 10.9) A silly retelling of the story at Trinity Rep.

JULIANNA BARWICK @ Aurora Pitchfork-approved, ambient looping beautiful soundscapes. Barwick’s work “may at first seem small, private, and modestly appointed ... but once you settle in, it feels as vast as the universe in there.” & Free!

MUSHROOMS OF RHODE ISLAND (2-4pm) Bristol -- Audubon Society If you’ve got the afternoon free, why not head down to Bristol via the East Bay Bike Path and spend a few hours with the good folks from the Audobon Society learning about Rhode Island’s native shrooms. Don’t expect to find the *fun* kind. Do expect to leave full of foraging skills. Registration Required. $10/members $14/non-members.

STRENGTH OF MY FATHERS @ Mixed magic (until 9.25) A group of Black men meet on the stagefor an evening of dance, theater, and poetry.

DESDEMONA A PLAY ABOUT A HANDKERCHEIF @ Aurora (until 9.17) In this retelling of the tragedy of Othello, pulitzer-prize winner Paula Vogel seeks to give the martyred wife the treatment she was denied by Shakespeare. Vital, sexy, political; Vogel’s Desdemona makes her case “in a world that fails to acknowledge how limitless women can be.”

9.17 THE FEELIES @ The Met Classic old-school alt-rock. Your Mom used to listen to them. Very good feels.

Don’t miss out.

ANNUAL WOONY RIVER RIDE The Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council does great work organizing the community around protecting this beautiful river/park/bike-path/ecosystem. This Saturday go for a bike ride and finish up downtown for a big afterparty at Waterplace Park.

9.18 BIODIVERSITY FESTIVAL @ Blackstone River State Park POETRY READING by 2016 Galway Kinnell Poetry Contest winners and judges @ Park Place in Pawtucket.

9.20 95.5 WBRU PRESENTS CHVRCHES @ Lupos Another Pitchfork-approved party at Lupos.

Coming from the golden age of replacing u’s with v’s (2011, not 150 BCE), Chvrches has each and every one of your synthpop needs covered. $30/$35 (eek)

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9.21 TOUR OF THE STEEL YARD The steel yard is a Providence gem. Offering classes and community events in the industrial arts , their work is scattered all over town. Head over this Wednesday for a free public tour to see all the amazing projects they’re working on.

CURSE, KINTAAN, WAVY TOMB & REVERSE ENGINEERING @ MWM LOTS OF NOISE AND BLEEPS AND BOOPS. AT RHODE ISLAND’S BEST NAMED AND NOISIEST VENUE: MACHINES WITH MAGNETS. $8 DARE’s 30TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION After three decades of liberation-minded organizing and anti-oppression community building, this legendary Providence collective pauses for a moment of reflection and cake. Join them.

9.22 13TH ANNUAL PROVIDENCE IMPROV FESTIVAL (until 9.24) Improv troupes from around the world converge on Providence “The Laugh Capital” Rhode Island this week. We’ll be there to savor the jokes that fall flat.

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