The College Hill Independent March 3

THE/COLLEGE/HILL

INDEPENDENT VOLUME XXII, ISSUE 4 MARCH 3, 2011 BROWN/RISD WEEKLY

PTSD in RI [5] Zombies in FL [15] Lady geniuses [9]

As war wages throughout Libya, the end may be near for Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi.

The longest serving dictator alive, Qaddafi is best known for punishing Western imperialists with style; although responsible for countless war crimes, Qaddafi may be the flyest man on the planet. A lover of horseracing and flamenco dancing, the dictator also sports an impeccable wardrobe and enjoys surfing the net. Like most dictators, Qaddafi also suffers from a number of irrational fears. He hates staying on upper floors of buildings and prefers not to fly over water. The Col. also insists that when seeing a doctor, all examinations and procedures are recorded on film so that they can be reviewed by other doctors he trusts. As the Indy looks forward to a new democratic Libya, we say farewell to the self-proclaimed “King of Kings of Africa” with a timeline of Qaddafi’s greatest hits. -EF June 7, 1942 – Muammar al-Qaddafi, son of a Bedouin herdsman, is born in a Bedouin tent in a desert on the outskirts or Sirt, Libya.

September 1, 1969 – Qaddafi leads a small group of junior military officers in a bloodless coup against King Idris. At 27 Qaddafi aims to become the new “Che Guevara of the age,” inviting any and all anti-imperialist groups to Libya for shelter and weapons.

1970 – Qaddafi adds title of prime minister.

1972 – Drops title of prime minister, attempts to buy a nuclear bomb from China.

Announces that any Arab wishing to volunteer for Palestinian terrorist groups “can register his name at any Libyan embassy and will be given adequate training for combat.” Finances the “Black September Movement,” the group responsible for the Munich Massacre at the 1972 Olympics.

1973 – On the prophet Muhammad’s birthday, Qaddafi delivers the “Five Point Address.” Summer vacation is canceled; children are taught Qaddafi’s philosophy instead. Engaging in political conservations with foreigners becomes a crime punishable up to three years in prison. 10 to 20 percent of Libyans are formed into a secret police by Qaddafi’s Revolutionary Committee. The regime begins to execute dissidents publicly and rebroadcast the executions on state television.

March 1973 – The Irish Naval Service intercepts Claudia, a vessel carrying Soviet arms from Libya to the IRA. 1977 – Tries to buy a nuclear bomb from Pakistan.

1980 – Assembles “The Revolutionary Nuns,” a group of handpicked female bodyguards trained in the martial arts. Although virgins, the Nuns are allowed to wear high heels, paint their nails, and wear lipstick.

1995 – In response to a peace treaty between Israel and the PLO, Qaddafi expels 30,000 Palestinians living in Libya.

June 1998 – Qaddafi’s favorite bodyguard, Aisha, is killed in an ambush after she throws herself across Qaddafi’s body to protect him from bullets. Qaddafi and seven other female bodyguards are wounded.

1998 – Escape to Hell and Other Stories by Qaddafi is translated into English.

2002 – Qaddafi purchase a 7.5% share of Italian football club Juventus for $21 million.

2004 – The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) verifies a stockpile of 23 metric tons of mustard gas and over 1,300 metric tons of precursor chemicals.

October 2004 – An astronomy enthusiast, Qaddafi orders the construction of the Libyan National Telescope Project for nearly 10 million euros.

2006 – Following the US bombing of Libyan military airbases supporting terrorism, Qaddafi claims that his adopted daughter, Hanna, was killed in the attack.

Unheard of prior to her death, reports of “Hanna’s” age varied from 12 months to 6 years.

2007 – Qaddafi arrives in Paris with his 400 person entourage. The group arrives on five planes with a Saharan camel.

March 2009 – Qaddafi names a stadium after his friend, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

September 2009 – Attempts to erect a tent in Central Park after landing in New York for the 64th session of the UN General Assembly. Moves tent to an estate belong to Donald Trump, until local government forces claims need for a permit. At the conference, Qaddafi speaks for one hour and 36 minutes, during which he blames a foreign military for the H1N1 outbreak, accuses Israel of assassinating JFK, calls for a one-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and refers to Obama as “son of Africa.” Remains on first floor of the UN after refusing to climb 36 stairs.

2010 – During a visit to Italy, Qaddafi pays a modeling agency to assemble 200 young women, to whom he lectures about converting to Islam. Each woman is given a copy of the Qur’an.

2011 – Hires Serbian, Ukrainian and Ghanaian mercenaries to combat Libyan rebels.

THE INDY IS: MANAGING EDITORS Gillian Brassil, Erik Font, Adrian Randall • NEWS Emily Gogolak, Ashton Strait, Emma Whitford • METRO Emma Berry, Malcolm Burnley, Alice Hines, Jonah Wolf • FEATURES Belle Cushing, Mimi Dwyer, Eve Blazo, Kate Welsh • ARTS Ana Alvarez, Maud Doyle, Olivia Fagon, Alex Spoto • LITERARY Kate Van Brocklin • SCIENCE Maggie Lange • SPORTS/FOOD David Adler, Greg Berman • OCCULT Alexandra Corrigan, Natasha Pradhan• LIST Dayna Tortorici • CIPHRESS IN CHIEF Raphaela Lipinsky • COVER/CREATIVE CONSULTANT Emily Martin • X Fraser Evans • ILLUSTRATIONS Annika Finne, Becca Levinson • DESIGN Maija Ekey, Katherine Entis, Mary-Evelyn Farrior, Emily Fishman, Maddy Mckay, Liat Werber, Joanna Zhang • PHOTO John Fisher • STAFF PHOTOGRAPHERS Drew Foster, Sarah Friedland, Annie Macdonald • SENIOR EDITORS Katie Jennings, Tarah Knaresboro, Erin Schikowski, Eli Schmitt, Dayna Tortorici, Alex Verdolini. COVER ART Emily “Lemon” Fishman Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. Send yours to The College Hill Independent, PO Box 1930. Brown University, Providence, RI 02912. Contact theindy@ gmail.com for advertising information. // theindy.org // The College Hill Independent is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

THE ISSUE: News WEEK IN REVIEW

by Emily Gogolak, Ashton Strait, and Emma Whitford

UNREST SPREADS IN IVORY COAST

by Erica Schwiegershausen

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Opinions “SAVING WOMEN” IS NOT A JUSTIFICATION FOR OCCUPATION

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by Amanda Labora

Features LIFE AFTER WAR

by Simon Van Zuylen-Wood

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Metro DERAILED

by Alice Hines

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Arts CANADIAN BEACON: AN INTERVIEW WITH SHEILA HETI

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by Dayna Tortorici

BAD MAMAS/SUPERMAMAS

by Eve Marie Blazo

SWEAT AND BLOOD

by David Adler

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Sports THE OAK TREE MASSACRE

by David Adler and Edward Friedman

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Literary GOD’S TRUE ZOMBIES

by Rita Bullwinkel

EPHEMERA: Qaddafi speaks for one hour and 36 minutes at the UN General Assembly in 2009.

FROM THE EDITORS:

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WEEK IN REVIEW Illustration by Emily Martin

The Most Dangerous Place for a Racist Billboard

Last Wednesday, Texas-based anti-abortion group Life Always erected a racially charged billboard on the corner of Watts Street and Sixth Avenue in SoHo: an adorable black girl with a pink hair bow and matching pink dress stands next to a slogan reading “The Most Dangerous Place for an African American Is In the Womb.” The nonprofit wanted New Yorkers to be aware of its claim that Planned Parenthood targets minority groups. According to spokesperson Marissa Gabrysch, “There’s… just a huge disproportion [in] that African Americans represent 13 percent of the U.S. population yet represent 36 percent of abortions in the United States.”

Pastor Stephen Broden is a member of the board of directors for Life Always. He’s glad that New Yorkers who have seen the billboard can now empathize with the 36 percent of African American women who have had abortions: “The reaction to this billboard is centered on trauma; abortion is traumatic, it is the emotional and physical trauma that women face after abortion that necessitates access to post-abortive healing services.”

Councilwoman Letitia James voiced the astonishment echoed by many viewers: “To compare abortion to terrorism and genocide is highly offensive.” Not to mention that employees at the Mexican restaurant below the billboard allegedly faced threats of violence.

Almost immediately after it was erected, an upswell of complaints convinced the outdoor advertising company that endorsed it to take it down. The billboard disappeared last Friday, but the image of 6-year-old Anissa Fraser, the stock image model selected for the billboard, is immortalized on the internet.

Luckily, the billboard wasn’t enough to shift those in the pro-choice camp to the other side.

Mayor Bloomberg assured New Yorkers: “I’ve always been in favor of a woman’s right to choose, and nothing that any billboard or anything someone puts up is going to change my mind.” –EW

FOXY RUSSIAN BIOLOGISTS

Humans began domesticating gray wolves at least 15,000 years ago, presumably as soon as the technology developed to weave miniature booties and four-legged sweaters so that Fluffy and kind didn’t get cold in the winter.

This tango with nature has led to many questionable creatures (read: Pomeranians); nonetheless, researchers in Russia are hoping to recreate the domestication process with one of Fido’s closest cousins: the silver fox. Russian biologist Dimitry Belyaev leads a team of researchers at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics (ICG) who have been breeding silver foxes since the 1950s, trying to replicate the process that turned Canis lupus into Lassie.

The experiment has had remarkable success. After years of selectively breeding those foxes which are most amenable to human contact, the animals now actively seek human attention and, for all intents and purposes, behave exactly like dogs, complete with tailwagging, face-licking, and attention-seeking behaviors. Belyaev hopes the experiment will not only finally justify the premise of Fox and the Hound but also shine a light on the process of animal domestication in human history.

However, it could have interesting implications for human evolution as well. Researchers have proposed that the genes that encourage increased sociability in animals might have also occurred in our early primate ancestors, allowing us to live together cooperatively and, eventually, build complex societies.

For those desperate to acquire their own, the internet company SibFox.com purportedly sells domesticated Russian foxes. Unfortunately, their Rainbow Boulevard address in Las Vegas and the fact that those foxes which are not used in the ICG experiment or adopted by researchers are sent to a coat factory undermines the legitimacy of the establishment.

It looks like it could be a while until everyone can have their own fantastic Mr. Fox. –AS

Fancy a scoop?

Awkward first date reaches the point of bad icebreakers.

Boy: So, what’s your favorite ice cream flavor?

Girl: Um… I don’t know. Mint-chip probably.

You? Boy: Definitely breast milk.

He wasn’t kidding. A new trend has taken the ice-cream world by storm: breast milk.

Last Friday, Icecreamists, an ice-cream parlor in London’s Covent Garden, debuted its latest concoction. Meet “Baby Gaga.” Fans turned out in droves for the rare offering, intended to promote breast-milk awareness among mothers. Flavored with vanilla and lemon zest, containing the milk of over 15 women, and selling at 14 pounds a scoop – that’s $22.50 – this Gaga sold out as soon as it launched. All were screaming for ice cream, but the Icecreamists assured customers that supplies would soon be restocked. “We have had an amazing response -- many women have come forward and offer to give us milk,” owner Matt O’Connor told Reuters.

But, breast milk, really? “Some people will hear about it and go yuck – but it’s pure organic, free-range and totally natural,” O’Connor said. And if you think donating your milk is a bad idea, think again. Victoria Hiley, 35, sold her milk to the ice cream shop after responding to an Internet ad. It’s a “recession beater,” she said. “What’s the harm in using my assets for a bit of extra cash?” she added. Paid 15 pounds (about $24) for every 10 ounces of her milk, Hiley may be onto something.

If you’re lactating and thinking of making some extra cash, however, you’re out of luck. Breast milk won’t be hitting the Thayer Ben and Jerry’s anytime soon. On Thursday, the BBC reported that Icecreamists removed Gaga “to make sure it was fit for human consumption.” Gaga samples were sent to the county lab to test for hepatitis – not something you usually catch from the casual ice cream run. The local Councilor Brian Connell announced: “Selling foodstuffs made from another person’s bodily fluids can lead to viruses being passed on.” Who knows if Gaga will make its way back to Icecreamists, but here’s to a great attempt at viral marketing. –EG

3 |NEWS

MARCH 3 2011 | THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT | www.THEINDY.org

Unrest Spreads In Ivory Coast

by Erica Schwiegershausen Illustrations by Annika Finne

T

he three-month political stalemate in Ivory Coast has seen a surge in violence in recent weeks, raising concerns that civil war may be imminent.

The situation further deteriorated this week as Abidijan’s Abobo neighborhood came under renewed attack by the forces of incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo.

The attack on the Abobo neighborhood, which supports Gbagbo’s opponent, former prime minister Alassane Ouattara, is the latest in a series of attempts by Gbagbo to maintain power through force after losing the disputed election this past November.

This outbreak of violence hit the region after a three month post-electoral struggle between north and south. Gabgbo’s term expired in 2005, but he managed to repeatedly postpone elections until last November. Following a three-day wait for results, Ouattara was declared the winner with 54.1% of the vote. However, before the end of the day the Constitutional Council, headed by a supporter of Gbagbo, invalidated the result, claiming that the votes in seven pro-Ouattara northern regions had been rigged and declaring Gbagbo the true winner.

The international community is unconvinced by these unsubstantiated claims, and has widely refused to recognize the Constitutional Council’s verdict.

Even the typically timid UN has been so bold as to call Ouattara the winner. However, Gbagbo has refused to step down, rejecting proposals of African delegations which offer amnesty and comfortable exile abroad. In the months since the election, Ouattara has been inaugurated and the presidential rivals have set up opposing governments.

The current violence is reminiscent of the country’s brief civil war in 2002, when an uprising of northern rebel forces left the country divided between the north, controlled by the New Forces, the rebel group currently backing Ouattara, and the south, which remained under control of Gbagbo and the government army.

Many hoped that the 2010 election would help heal the north/south divide and reunite the country, but presently such an outcome is looking less and less likely.

Gbagbo has maintained power, despite his loss of the presidency, by continuing to pay the salaries of soldiers and key civil servants, though his access to the country’s treasury has been curtailed since mid-January. The Ivorian army has remained loyal to Gbagbo, although his current lack of funds means that nearly half of February’s army and civil service workers won’t be paid. For now, however, the army continues to fire machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades into neighborhoods it describes as “infiltrated by pro-Ouattara rebels.” The UN estimates that about 500 people, mostly Ouattara supporters, have been killed since the election.

Now, citizens are fleeing the capital and surrounding neighborhoods at an

alarming rate. Abidjan is collapsing under Gbagbo’s brutal fight to stay in power, with businesses shutting down and employees being laid off. Many banks have closed, all A.T.M.’s are out of service, and cash is increasingly rare. Nine newspapers opposed to Gbagbo have closed, citing that they could no longer withstand police harassment and constant threats of violence against their journalists. All over the country, citizens are scared, hungry, and without work or money. It is believed that the New Forces are moving south along the border, and there is widespread fear of what will happen when they reach pro-Gbagbo strongholds.

In Abidjan, formerly one of West Africa’s most prosperous cities, lines of women can be seen fleeing on foot, balancing their possessions on their heads to the sound of nearby gunfire. On the narrower sections of the Cavalla River, rafts packed with hundreds of Ivorians make their way to the safety of Liberia.

Grago Malhn Michelle, a refugee from Bahieleu, told the BBC that he fled after an armed soldier confronted him in his home: “While I was in the room he came to me with a gun and knife in his hand. I blocked the knife and it gashed my hand.

These were government soldiers. There were no rebels in the village. After they did this to me, they took all my belongings and carried them. They just came to harass me and take things from me. I never did anything.” Currently, between 300,000 and 400,000 Ivorians have been registered as internal displacees within neighboring Liberia, a number which will likely put a strain on the country of 3.5 million, which is still recovering from its own 14year civil war.

It is unclear how the present situation in Ivory Coast will develop. Although Gbagbo has shown no signs of relinquishing power, he is feeling increasing pressure to step down. His army has suffered an increased number of armed assaults in recent days. Last week gunmen affiliated with the New Forces captured several small towns in the country’s west from Gbagbo’s forces. Such attacks have been aided by increasing defections by Gbagbo’s troops.

Unfortunately, the future of the world’s largest producer of cocoa looks bleak. Gilles Yabi, the West African director of the International Crisis Group told Time: “The best scenario, which in fact is quite bad, would be a country that remains divided with two separate administrations with the possibility of military confrontation in the future.” For now, unrest is spreading, Ivorians are fleeing, and Ouattara remains confined to a lagoonside hotel under 24-hour guard by U.N. peacekeeping officials.

ERICA SCHWIEGERSHAUSEN B’13.5 is not controlled by the new forces.

MARCH 3 2011 | THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT | www.THEINDY.org

OPINIONS| 4

“Saving women” is not a justification for occupation

by Amanda Labora // illustration by Annika Finne

On Tuesday, March 1, Oliver Rosenbloom B’13 wrote an opinions column for the Brown Daily Herald discussing Brown students’ perception of the military. He claimed that those who oppose ROTC based on the military’s history of discrimination ignore the military’s role in enforcing human rights around the world, specifically citing improved women’s rights in Afghanistan. Amanda Labora B’12.5 disagrees.

R

osenbloom’s argument is based on two fundamentally wrong, and downright irresponsible, assumptions.

The first is that American military intervention has improved the lives of women in Afghanistan. The second is that cultural attitudes—in particular those toward women—can be altered by external intervention. But such American-led “civilizing missions”actually endanger the position of women in places like Afghanistan.

But don’t take my word for it. In her recent book entitled A Woman Among Warlords (2009), Malalai Joya—Afghanistan’s youngest female member ever elected to parliament—addresses the difficulties women face in Afghanistan, including those that resulted from the American occupation. According to Joya, who worked as an underground teacher for girls during the Taliban’s reign, things are now worse for Afghanis—especially women—than they ever were under the Taliban.

“More than seven years after the U.S. invasion,” she writes, “we are still faced with foreign occupation and a U.S.backed government filled with warlords who are just like the Taliban. Instead of putting these ruthless murderers on trial for war crimes, the United States and its allies placed them in positions of power, where they continue to terrorize ordinary Afghans.”

These same warlords were behind Joya’s 2007 suspension from parliament

for “insulting”—or as I would argue, denouncing and exposing—fellow representatives in a television interview, as well as the multiple rape and death threats she has received since taking office.

Anyone who has taken the time to learn about the history of Afghanistan would know that foreign intervention— whether at the hands of the Soviets and the Americans during the Cold War, or America, Pakistan, and Iran after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989—is largely responsible for Afghanistan’s status as a “failed state.” According to Barnett Rubin, the author of The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (1995), it is the underlying social fragmentation of Afghanistan, resulting from decades of warfare and foreign intervention, that prevented Afghanistan from developing a stable, centralized, and legitimate form of government after the Soviet withdrawal. The last thing Afghanistan or its women need is an American occupation.

Rosenbloom is right to refer to the mistreatment of women as “barbaric,” but his use of women’s rights as a justification for continued occupation is misguided. In fact, this argument reminds me of those made by European colonial powers in the Middle East, in particular that of France with respect to its colonial project in Algeria. Who can forget the images of French women—the wives of colonists— “liberating” the Algerian woman from her oppressive veil? The reality is that attitudes are not likely to change as a result of foreign intervention. If we have learned anything from the revolutions sweeping across the Middle East—first in Tunisia, then Egypt, and now in Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen—it is that real change begins and ends with the people.

The recent sexual assault of CBS news correspondent Lara Logan in Cairo sparked heated debate in the American media regarding women’s issues in the

Middle East. Reactions to the attack have run the gambit, with some blaming Logan for bringing the attack on herself, and others blaming Islam.

As Rachel Newcomb rightfully pointed out in the Huffington Post, “blame the Muslims” is not an acceptable response to the Lara Logan story. What happened to Logan is terrible and reprehensible, but it is not representative of Egyptian men or the Egyptian revolution. People are right to question what the revolution could mean for the future of women’s issues in Egypt, but we can be certain that change is not going to come from anyone but ordinary Egyptians.

Based on what we are hearing from Egyptians on the ground, there is reason to be hopeful. Many of the reports Mideast Reports received from Egyptians over the course of the protests have pointed to a decreased incidence of harassment in the streets.

Radwa al-Barouni, a translator and professor at the University of Alexandria reported the following on protests in Alexandria: “It’s an amazing sense of community, it’s like the government has been bringing out the worst in people for so, so, long, and this is finally bringing out the best in people. I mean, there’s no sexual harassment—nothing! I finally feel safe walking around the people I’ve been afraid of for most of my life.”

And now, in the wake of Mubarak’s fall from power, one website calling for crowd-sourced reform in Egypt, kolena. org, is showing an increased emphasis on women’s rights. The site, which takes suggestions from individuals, and ranks them based on votes, lists “Protecting Women” as third on the list of things that need to be changed in the “new” Egypt. These changes are the result of domestic, popular movements, not foreign intervention.

Rosenbloom is also right to point to

the sacrifices that American troops have made all over the world. American soldiers risk their lives every day to protect American citizens. Any panel evaluating the presence of ROTC on campus should consider the positive things the American military does. However, the evidence he uses to support his argument is problematic and troubling. As American citizens, we have a responsibility to question the actions our government takes abroad, especially when human rights abuses are used to justify occupation. As the democratic movement taking place in the Middle East has shown us, American foreign policy has a history of being painfully shortsighted. Our strategy of backing oppressive dictatorial regimes—like that of Hosni Mubarak—with billions of dollars in foreign aid hasn’t made America any safer, nor has it proven to advance human rights.

AMANDA LABORA B’12.5 is a former research assistant for the Brown Afghanistan Working Group (BAWG) and currently co-manages a blog, Mideast Reports.

5 |FEAtuRES

I

n 2003, having waited 15 years in the Rhode Island National Guard for the opportunity to deploy overseas, Vinnie Scirocco deployed for Iraq and trained at a base. Three months later, without seeing combat, Scirocco was physically injured and given honorable discharge. “I didn’t feel like I completed my mission,” said Scirocco, now the State Commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). “To the day I die I will probably always feel that way. No pill, no conversation with anyone at any educational level can change that.”

After six years of road rage and constant guilt Scirocco checked himself into the Veteran’s Affairs Hospital in Providence and was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

A childhood friend of Scirocco’s, who was deployed at the same time and remained in Iraq, developed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) shortly after Vinnie’s discharge, after shooting and killing a baby girl. He was a gunner on a Humvee that patrolled the streets of Baghdad, where civilian vehicles are not allowed to pass military vehicles. A family desperately trying to get to the hospital chanced it and passed the Humvee. Scirocco explained the aftermath: “So he shot at the car. What you hope to do is shoot in between the husband and the wife. You didn’t want to shoot at anybody…Well, there was a little girl in the backseat who got shot and killed. This friend of mine, he’s a father. He’ll never be the same—no matter how many times I tell him, ‘It’s not your fault; you had to do that,’ he’ll always feel guilty for that—he can’t take that bullet back.”

Both Scirocco and his friend undergo therapy and take medication for PTSD. They’re both saddled with a heavy, inextinguishable guilt. But one of them never saw action, while the other did. The problem with diagnosing PTSD when no identifiable trauma has occurred is not necessarily that veterans will be getting benefits they don’t deserve, but that the misdiagnosis can lead to a dangerous reliance on prescription drugs, or an overestimation of one’s own mental health problems.

The condition’s implied emphasis on outside trauma rather than manufactured neurosis has done much to de-stigmatize the admission of mental illness among soldiers. And the more PTSD is destigmatized in the ranks of the armed services, the argument goes, the more active soldiers and veterans will feel comfortable seeking psychiatric help. And then the Army suicide rate—which this year surpassed the civilian one for the first time—might start decreasing. But PTSD diagnoses may overemphasize trauma and de-emphasize soldiers’ own understanding of duty, patriotism, and camaraderie.

A study of four Rhode Island veterans reveals that guilt over not serving was equally responsible for fragile mental health as trauma sustained while in battle.

Dr. Tracie Shea, who works with PTSD patients at Veterans’ Affairs Medical Center in Providence suggests there’s a fundamental difference between a veteran’s and a civilian’s PTSD. “I’ve certainly seen cases in which people feel less bothered by the memo-

MARCH 3 2011 | THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT | www.THEINDY.org

LIFE AFtER WAR ries. They can manage it better, their quality of life is better,” Dr. Shea says. After administering group therapy with other veterans, Shea always asks what they found most helpful. “They always say ‘to be with people they… can understand and connect with.’ But once they leave here, it’s back out in the cold world, the disconnective world.” The disconnect in question is not simply between PTSD and nonPTSD, but military and civilian.

Herein lies the harsh irony of the veteran PTSD case: the safe return to civilian life can be more debilitating than active duty. The pace of life is slow and unregimented; the concerns of others—a flat tire, a long line at the grocery store—seem absurd.

A fall 2010 study published in the journal Aggressive Behavior found that stressors related and unrelated to battle were equally responsible for anti-social, violent behavior among US Marines. “Boredom or monotony” and “concerns or problems back home” were two of the leading complaints cited.

A college student enrolled in the Rhode Island ROTC program at Bryant College, who asked to remain anonymous for this article, says that when soldiers return home they often find it impossible to recreate the camaraderie they experienced in the course of duty. It’s also offduty where they begin to confront their agency in battle. “It’s not ‘til afterwards that you realized that the person you shot down had a wife and a kid,“ Smith says.

“You’re lookin’ through your scope, you get the order and you do it. I think that’s a big thing with it. You [come] back and you see somebody freaking out or really upset over something very, very trivial.”

Of the 8 million Vietnam veterans, about one million are thought to have had PTSD upon their return from duty, according to a 2006 RAND Corporation Study.

Many of these are among the estimated 600,000 veterans that killed themselves.

By comparison, 58,000 US troops died in Vietnam. It’s thought that one of the reasons Vietnam veterans were so prone to suicide was that they had to cope with symptoms for ten years before the PTSD diagnosis was even introduced into the DSM in 1980.

One local Vietnam vet with PTSD, 64-year-old North Providence resident Armand Briere, said the day he came home from war in July 1968 was the happiest of his life. Lacking any hope of a fulltime career and unable to explain how he felt to anybody else, Briere self-medicated with hard drugs he picked up overseas, and overdosed several times. He can’t bring himself to talk about the details of his PTSD symptoms, particularly the flashbacks and nightmares. Though he reveals no desire to go back to war, he found himself re-engaging in a brutal, death-defying military consciousness, both inadvertently and on purpose. The heroin he took, he said, was like “dying and coming back.”

The ony work he was ever capable of doing—until his body gave out on him—was physically exhausting, and he has chronic carpal tunnel syndrome to show for it.

The flashbacks themselves have lodged themselves in his mind inexorably, and

have had him revisiting scenes of death every day for forty years.

Fellow Vietnam vet Roseanna Evans has the same diagnosis and experiences similar symptoms—like embarrassing duck-and-cover reactions to fireworks and periodic outbursts of public violence.

But these symptoms materialized during the Gulf War, after she already had PTSD from Vietnam. Though no less serious, her initial PTSD was not suffered in combat, but on an army base in Oakland, California.

Evans, who is 60, grew up in a military family stationed in Newport, RI. It had been her dream since childhood to serve in the Air Force. Deemed too light at 100 pounds, she instead took up with the Army and was sent to Oakland, California in 1969. In the politically-charged Bay Area, Evans was vilified. “They asked the women to march in the parade. We got bombarded by bags of defecation, we got bottles of urine thrown on us, we got spit at, we had bricks… thrown at us.

And then we was called out—our names, we were told we were either gay or prostitutes. At the age of 18 that’s kind of hard to deal with.” Throughout the 70s, on reserve duty, Evans was periodically homeless in Oakland, sleeping on park benches.

In 1970 she became pregnant from a rape by a fellow soldier on the base.

Evans developed a crippling guilt complex later that year. “I was supposed to go over to Vietnam and do the desertion forms—that was my job. [If you were] pregnant, they would not send you over. I had to train to this kid and he took my place.

When Saigon got hit—he got blown.” After an explosion on a military base in Kuwait during her National Guard service in the Gulf War, images of Saigon—which she never actually saw—flooded back.

Neither of these traumas were sustained in battle, but they were a direct result of war-time circumstances. When Evans cries, it’s not about the rape, but about her pregnancy, which she holds responsible for another man’s death. Like Vinnie Scirocco, she was blocked from active duty, and felt she hadn’t served her country. That’s why, two decades later, once her children were old enough to be on their own, Evans re-enlisted to serve in the Kuwait war with the National Guard.

She didn’t know she had PTSD, and the symptoms were badly exacerbated upon her return.

Until recently, it was difficult for veterans like Evans to prove they had PTSD. As Evans puts it, “We wasn’t shot at, so we didn’t have PTSD.” In July 2009, General Peter Chiarelli, the Vice Chief of Staff of the US Army, and one of the foremost supporters of improved PTSD treatment, announced that the VA was repealing a policy which prohibited non-combat veterans from getting help.

While cases like Evans’ underscore why this policy is a good one, they raise the question: what exactly constitutes PTSD? If Scirocco got PTSD in Iraq, surrounded by war, but not because of a traumatic event, and Evans got it in America, but through a series of traumas, do they really have the same illness? Another study of PTSD incidence conducted in 2008 by the Rand Corporation identified

18 different criteria for PTSD and found that the percentages of afflicted veterans changed considerably when they applied different definitions to the same samples.

The official DSM Definition is vague, but emphasizes three main criteria: 1. The subject must be exposed to a traumatic stressor in which the subject or someone close to the subject is put in peril. 2. The subject’s reaction to this stressor must be fear. 3. The subject must reexperience the traumatic event and avoid stimuli associated with the event.

California-based researcher Dr. Paula Caplan argues that no veterans at all should be diagnosed with PTSD, suggesting more precise terms like “battle fatigue” and “shell shock” for dealing with mental battle scars. Caplan, who has a forthcoming book on the misdiagnosis of PTSD among veterans, argues that the PTSD label “pathologizes” and further stigmatizes veterans’ mental problems, which she says are a normal reaction to war. “We should never say that because somebody is traumatized by war [they have PTSD],” Caplan says. “We shouldn’t use that term. We should say they are traumatized by war.”

Caplan thinks the only way to rehabilitate veterans is through routine engagements with civilians, especially those willing to listen and talk. When “World War II veterans are going to the VFW halls or American Legions, are there guys and women… talking about how traumatized they are? They’re just drunk out of their minds.”

Evans, Scirocco, and Briere are all unemployed or retired. Without their active involvement in the VFW, they say they’d lose hope completely. While Caplan’s vilification of VFW branches may be irresponsible, she’s onto something in seeking a better distinction between the psychological toll that occurs from war and that which occurs from trauma. Caplan argues that what we call PTSD is essentially a normal reaction to an extremely unnatural set of circumstances. This interpretation too has its flaws—for it would imply those that aren’t diagnosed with PTSD are somehow abnormal. And by extension, it might suggest that veterans like Scirocco and Evans who are haunted by their inability to fight for their country, are the deranged ones, while those who wouldn’t dream of going back, like Briere, are better adjusted.

Couched in a veteran’s inability to readjust to civilian life are two primary impulses.

One is to seek out those who understand their torment. The other is to perform a service for their country—a drive that impels so many to enlist in the first place.

For many veterans, serving in battle carries with it infinitely more meaning than staying home and getting a part-time job, or even taking care of their own children.

Providence VA clinician Dr. William Unger notes two factors in particular that make some veterans want to go back to war—even those who know they have PTSD. “Guys leave with a snapshot of their life—but what happens when they’re gone? Babies are born, kids learn to drive, wife gets a new job, these are all good things, but they don’t fit the picture you had when you left,” Unger says. Second,

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Perspectives on PTSD from Providence Veterans

by Simon van Zuylen-Wood graphics by Robert Sandler

many patients, numbed and unable to love their families again, yearn to reunite with their comrades. “They’re closer to [their comrades] than anyone else. Guys often talk about going back because they left their buddies.”

Others, like Evans, were desperate to return to war out of sense of national duty, even when it was an abject impossibility. “When 9/11 hit I wanted to go back to war, but because of my mental and physical state I was told I couldn’t,” Evans said.

Scirocco is still tormented by his discharge. “I was injured and I couldn’t go back. I guess that’s kind of why I volunteer with the VFW,” Scirocco said. “For me that’s a way of being able to give back. But I’ve realized I think the one thing that my comrades in the VFW share is that when we raised our hand for our country…that commitment didn’t end with our service.”

Other able veterans who want to reenlist after being diagnosed with PTSD are not prevented from doing so. Dr. Shea says many veterans are extremely happy to return to combat for second deployment and often report better second experiences after clinical treatment in between deployments. Nevertheless, Shea adds that “there is evidence to suggest theeffect of this stuff is cumulative, depending on the amount of exposure they get with subsequent deployments.”

Today’s soldiers returning from the Middle East are more frequently diagnosed upon discharge than any previous generation of American soldiers since PTSD was introduced to the DSM-III in 1980. Part of this increase is due to better reporting methods. All members of the military must check in with a VA specialist immediately upon return from duty. Members of the National Guard do the same, and then again at 30, 60, and 90 days af-

ter their tour of duty is complete. But as Rhode Island National Guard Press Liason, Lt. Col. Denis Riel notes, “The issue is [what happens] once that process ends— a lot of PTSD symptoms don’t manifest for months, if not years.”

Another reason for high incidence of PTSD is that a higher number of citizen soldiers—National Guard and Army Reserves—is deploying than ever before.

National Guard soldiers, who have much less training and are less equipped for battle, must return home two weekends a year and make a rapid readjustment rather than live on the army base. In January, the Army revealed that half of this year’s soldier suicides were committed by National Guard soldiers, though they make up only 20 percent of the total pool. 145 National Guard troops killed themselves in 2010, compared to 65 in 2009. In 2010, 156 full time soldiers committed suicide while on active duty; 162 did in 2009. It’s impossible to gauge how many veterans commit suicide every year, since the army doesn’t keep track once soldiers are discharged, but a 2010 study by the California newspaper Bay Citizen found that the proportion of California suicides by veterans is about two to three times higher than that of non-veterans. As veterans get older, the likelihood of suicide increases. The study also notes that the incidence of fatal car crashes, motorcycle crashes, and “accidental poisonings” are all significantly higher among veterans than non-veterans.

It should come as no surprise that the National Guard doesn’t exactly tout PTSD statistics to potential recruits either. During the recruiting interview I underwentm the officer did not mention PTSD of his own accord. When I asked if it was something to worry about, he admitted it was, but that a lot of soldiers “faked it” in order to get medical leave.

Still, increased PTSD awareness does

not seem to discourage soldiers from serving. The anonymous ROTC student told me, “When you raise your right hand and swear to defend the constitution of the United States against enemies foreign and domestic, PTSD isn’t really on your mind.” He also feels that his primary responsibility is to those who served, not himself.

“It’s really difficult to say ‘Hey Commander, I have PTSD, I need help, and I’m not going to deploy.’ Your buddy who you fought with six months earlier who might have saved your life and you might have saved his life—[he’s] going back. Your obligation and your affection and your love for those people is pretty much [more important than] some issues you might have.”

East Providence resident Amanda Octeau, 29, served in Iraq with the Army.

After four years of treatment for PTSD, she is again ready to resume classes at the University of Rhode Island, where she double majors in psychology and biology. Despite having studied PTSD in her coursework before she enlisted, Octeau was not deterred from service. She recognized the symptoms of PTSD in herself, but she denied herself treatment, out of a desire to be a “superwoman” and a reluctance to stop her service.

Octeau adds that although the military leadership has made it easier and less embarrassing for veterans to seek mental health, an admission of PTSD can hurt one’s job prospects in the military.

“I think people are trying to impress their higher command,” Octeau says. “It is very competitive…. Even if your commander seems nice, it might affect [your] job down the road.”

While many veterans are fast overcoming the stigma of talking about PTSD and seeking counseling, these Rhode Island veterans have lingering effects which

they say no doctor or medication can cure. Drugs for anxiety and sleep, anger management counseling, “cognitive behavioral therapy” to reinforce positive association—all of these measures have proven effective at VA Medical Centers in correcting erratic behavioral patterns.

Perhaps impossible to improve, however, is a marked inability upon discharge to readjust to the routines of civilian life, which leaves veterans treading a line between wanting to die and wanting to re-engage a military ethos through violence, a return to combat, or rigorously oppressive work ethics.

Briere said his daily ritual of housekeeping, bartending, and organizing parties at the VFW branch that’s ten houses down from his own keeps him feeling busy and helpful. The same goes for Scirocco and Evans. Octeau, though she fills her time working hard in school, finds less and less time to talk out her problems, mostly because a vast majority of local VFW members are much older than she. The blanket definition of PTSD treats the veteran like any other trauma patient. Not only are many depressed and suicidal veterans being diagnosed with an illness they may not have, but they’re being treated for it.

Late in his life, in a period when he psychoanalyzed World War I veterans, Freud noted a reluctance among some patients to resist psychoanalysis altogether.

He termed this destructive impulse the “death drive,” which resisted meaning and classifications altogether, as well as the possibility of improvement. This dangerous desire to repeat is especially pertinent among the veterans studied here. But it’s crucial that when a veteran says he or she wants to go back to battle, it’s not just out of a masochistic death-drive, but out of a longing for camaraderie and national service, and for that remarkable interplay between disciplined regimentation and adrenaline-rush that comes with battle.

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MARCH 3 2011 | THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT | www.THEINDY.org

DERAILED The stalled gentrification of Providence’s American Locomotive Works

by Alice Hines // photos by the author and john Fisher

“W

e want to make Providence the coolest place in the world.” It was 2006, and Bill Struever, the developer who had helped Baltimore, MD see biotech officies in soap factories and condos in crumbling mills, was in Providence. Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse had picked out three old factory buildings on the West Side’s Valley Street—U.S. Rubber, Nicholson File, and American Locomotive Works, all former industrial giants—to transform into a twenty-first century yuptopia.

The project, dubbed ALCO (for American Locomotive Corporation), would be the largest investment in the city since the Providence Place mall. It would reuse historic structures according to principles of green building. There would be offices, mixed-income condos, and restaurants. There would be a public riverwalk and a Sheraton Four Points hotel.

These dirty factory bricks held fragile dreams of renewal. What if instead of jewelry companies we could have organic food distributors? What if the Woonasquatucket river were a public park instead of a health hazard? What if a five-star hotel could bring five-star guests?

Today, only the first office-park phase of the project has been completed, which lives up to the retro-chic image on the brochure pages. 24-pane windows let light into the airy offices of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation (RIEDC) and United Natural Foods, recruited from Dayville, CT in 2008. The sign—steel letters spell out ALCO atop a stylized train racing into a factory wheel— looks neither new nor old, its colors perfectly faded.

Next door, where condos and affordable housing should be, windows are boarded. To walk around the site, the former U.S. Rubber factory, one must first hop a sagging chain-link fence where a weather-worn ALCO banner hangs. The building itself is not dilapidated, only dingy. It fits with the rest of the used-car lots and auto-body shops around it—except that it’s unoccupied. Prior to ALCO’s inception, the space was the home of small manufacturers and artists. According to a 2004 survey by the Partnership for Creative Industrial Space, in 2004 there were 21 small businesses with 152 employees on the ALCO complex.

ALCO is not the only project in limbo.

Struever Bros. pulled out of Rhode Island in 2009 after the real estate market crash.

Dynamo House, the enormous power plant that was to house a new Heritage Harbor museum and a hotel, sits empty on the Providence harbor. Many of the contractors that built Struever Brothers’ Calendar Mills (rented by non-profit United Way since 2008) have yet to be paid, and are suing. For now, these projects wait for new developers, investors, and money to come Providence way.

From ONA’s perspective, developments like ALCO only end up hurting the residents of the neighborhood they want to improve. Issues of rising property taxes, foreclosures, and jobs for local residents were raised before the City and Planning councils with each new Struever Bros. project, beginning with Rising Sun Mills in 2003.

In 2000, the median sale price of a home in Olneyville was $55,000. In 2006, the year of ALCO’s proposal, they peaked at $265,000.

COLONIAL INVASION? For some, the ALCO dream was more like a nightmare. The Olneyville Neighborhood Association (ONA) called the new developments part of a “colonial invasion” in a 2007 letter urging United Way not to legitimize Struever Bros. by moving into one of their buildings. At the first City Planning Commission (CPC) meeting about the project in 2006, Xander Marro, local artist and ONA representative, brought up the discrepancy between the median neighborhood income at the time, $19,000, and the income of the “workforce” market making upwards of $50,000 for whom ALCO would price its apartments.

ONA’s offices are not far from ALCO in Atlantic Mills, an industrial building also on the Woonasquatucket. Though Atlantic Mills is considered by architectural historians to be one of the most important mill buildings in the US, it has yet to be redeveloped. It is home to English For Action, an ESOL non profit, a smoke shop, furniture warehouses, and, as rumor has it, the kind of illegal work-live studios that made the Olneyville art scene famous in the ’90s. On Saturdays, the place fills up with Dominican families who come for flea-market housewares. It’s a microcosm of the neighborhood and the kind of diversity that ONA wants to preserve.

The building is also one of the ten most endangered in the city, according to the Providence Preservation Society.

“Plagued by neglect, lack of maintenance and fire hazards, Atlantic Mills is at risk,” the society stated in their 2010 annual press release. If the space were to be renovated, it would likely involve a private developer and result in elevated rents and property values.

THE MACHINE CRASHES ALCO was one of RI’s last boom real estate projects. Its first phase was completed in 2008, and the scramble to finance phases two and three revealed a political machine willing to fight for the idealism of redevelopment.

In late 2008, an $8 million Tax Increment Financing (TIF) plan was approved for ALCO by three different city committees within a matter of months. A TIF is an interest-free loan that a developer borrows through city government to finance a project with “civic value.” The city in turn takes out a loan with interest and uses future tax revenue from the project’s increasing property values to cover the difference. Some of the tax revenue is also allocated for civic improvements on the project, in this case a public walkway along the river, rent subsidies, and the construction of “workforce” housing units.

For Judith Reilly, a West End resident with a knack for paper trails, ALCO’s TIF approval was more than suspicious. Thom Deller, director of the Providence Redevelopment Agency (PRA) and Struever Brothers’ main point of contact, asked the City Planning Commission (CPC) to approve the TIF during their October 21, 2008 meeting without supplying any of the detailed financial projections, and before his own agency, the PRA, had had a chance to vote on whether or not it fit with overall plans for the neighborhood.

Deller then pushed the project to the forefront of the City Council’s agenda under the argument that it needed to be approved before the end of the year or lose money on property reevaluation. Financial projections that came out just days before the December 15, 2008 City Council meeting showed much larger costs to the

city than what Deller had previously suggested to the CPC. ONA would later file a conflict-ofinterest ethics complaint against Stephen Durkee, the Chair of the Planning Commission who also happened to be ALCO’s architect. According to ONA, who videotaped the October 21 meeting, Durkee had abstained from voting but had controlled the meeting’s direction and stipulated what concerns could or could not be raised. ONA and Reilly also filed jointly on a complaint to the Attorney General against Deller for withholding the financial projections, and the PRA for not bringing up the project in their meeting prior to it being voted on by the CPC. Reilly calls this “semi-legal stuff that doesn’t pass the smell test,” and points out that all of this was going on right when Struever Bros. was in the midst of massive financial difficulties because of the realestate crash. At the time, this was public information. On October 27, 2008, the Baltimore Business Journal reported that Struever Bros. had laid off 20 employees. On December 2, Struever Bros. put Tide Point, one of its biggest Baltimore projects, up for sale. On December 1, the Providence City Council approved the TIF. In retrospect, it’s hard not to see the TIF as a bail-out.

Neither the Attorney General nor the Ethics Commission did anything about the complaints—Durkee was acquitted, and Deller slid by on the grounds that the financial projections had been at a private consultant’s office. (As Reilly points out, this is a huge problem for all future openrecords cases, since public agencies now only have to hire a private consultant to protect records they don’t want anyone to know about).

The loan, meant to go out by February 1, 2009, was never issued. Presumably by that time, Struever’s dire finances were such public knowledge that it was indefinitely postponed. Technically, since the TIF was never repealed by the City Council, it could be approved at any time, even with Struever Bros. completely out of Rhode Island.

McCormack and Baron, a Saint Louis, MO based developer who came on board in 2007 to work on the affordable housing component. Around the the same time that Struever Bros. was applying for

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These dirty factory bricks held fragile dreams of renewal. What if instead of jewelry companies we could have organic food distributors? What if the Woonasquatucket river were a public park instead of a health hazard? its TIF, McCormack and Baron applied for a tax exempt bond financing from Rhode Island Housing. The proposal was approved preliminarily by RI Housing on December 17, 2009.

It was right around this time that this new loan was approved that the Providence Journal reported that the city was still owed $93,000 in consulting fees for the TIF preparation, taken out by Deller in anticipation of the TIF being issued.

(The city is still owed this money.) Anne Berman, of RI housing, says that her organization was not worried when this news appeared because the applicant, McCormack and Baron, was a “very well respected and seasoned developer.”

McCormack and Baron officially took over the project in October 2009, according to the Providence Journal.

As of now, the RI Housing loan has also yet to be issued. McCormack and Baron is still working on “cobbling their finances together,” Berman says. She emphasizes that part of RI housing’s job is to provide financing where other sources wouldn’t, and is optimistic that project

will move forward in the not too distant future.

PLANNING AND FORGETTING No one knows what will happen to ALCO. But what the project’s history reveals is a city government that is pro-development—a particular kind of development.

In this case, of offices and upper-income housing.

Eileen Grossman was the owner of a local jewelry manufacturer, Dressup Inc., that was relocated when Struever became interested in 2006. According to Grossman, the relocation was the “nail in the coffin” for her business, though it took place at the developer’s expense.

She disagrees both with the subsidies and with the way the city prioritizes new residential and commercial spaces over old, local manufacturers already under threat from outsourcing. Grossman inherited her company from her father, who started it in 1948. She is now a GOP Volunteer Coordinator and an active member of the RI Tea Party.

In 2009, according to a McCormack

and Baron’s proposal, ALCO phase I was 60 percent occupied by businesses that emploed 180 people. This is only 30 more than were counted by the Partnership for Creative Industrial Space in 2004, prior to redevelopment.

Who was meant to live and work in ALCO? Local workers making $19,000 a year were probably more suited for employment at manufacturing companies like Grossman’s. Reilly points out that the city has an interest in fostering ALCOstyle redevelopments not only because of historic preservation, green building, and neighborhood growth, but because of tax revenue.

John Sinnot, Senior Development Director at Struever Bros., said something similar in a 2006 letter to City Planning: “We are working daily to restore historic mills and create new built environments that will both contribute to the growing vibrancy of the area and expand the tax base.”

Not that the city has seen any money yet. United Natural Foods was lured to RI in part by a tax-stabilization package nego-

tiated by their neighbor, the RIEDC. The housing component—regardless of whether it was truly “affordable”—remains unbuilt and uninhabited, and thus nontaxable. Meanwhile, median home prices in Olneyville, which peaked in 2006 at $265,000, dropped to $115,000 in 2008.

Though it has been crippling, the housing crash will not end Rhode Island’s dreams of redevelopment—or corruption. The current administration has yet to make a comment on the Olneyville gentrification debate. However, development of jobs, real-estate, and business was a focal points of Mayor Angel Taveras’ campaign last year. Providence is watching closely to see what he will make of the waterfront land emerging from the highway 195 wreckage. Meanwhile, with Struever Bros. gone from the state and the news, it’s easy to forget that that old U.S. Rubber factory on Valley street was once supposed to look retro, not ruined.

ALICE HINES B’11 loved hopping that fence.

photo courtesy of Lee Towndrow

11 |ARTS

MARCH 3 2011 | THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT | www.THEINDY.org

The resurrection of Mildred Pierce

BAD Mamas/ Super mamas

by Eve Marie Blazo Illustration by Charis Loke Design by Joanna Zhang

A

man is shot, collapses, and dies. He mumbles “Mildred” and falls to the floor of an obscenely well-furnished living room. Thus begins Mildred Pierce, the 1945 film noir and melodrama, directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Joan Crawford in the eponymous role. Mildred Pierce is the story of a divorced, single mother determined to provide her churlish daughter a life of luxury by any means necessary.

Todd Haynes B‘85, the prolific independent film director best known for Safe, Far from Heaven and I’m Not There, will be direcing the miniseries version of the classic film. The five-part series, premiering March 27 on HBO, will star period-piece virtuoso Kate Winslet in the titular role, Evan Rachel Wood as her eldest daughter Veda, and Guy Pearce as Pierce’s second husband Monte. “She gave her daughter everything,” the tagline for the trailer reads, “But everything was not enough.”

Rather than attempting to remake the original, Haynes has looked to the 1941 novel by James M. Cain that inspired the film. Curtiz’s version displaced Cain’s narrative of a working class woman’s struggle against social injustice, instead injecting murder and suspense into the narrative. Cain’s novel—unlike the film—contains no murder, no mystery, and no flashbacks. And neither will Haynes’s version. So don’t expect Winslet to resurrect a crazy-eyed Crawford.

This is no made-for-TV melodrama, nor is it a thriller. There’s more sex, more naughty couplings, and way less theatricality.

“The frankness with which [Cain] dealt with Mildred’s sexuality, her relationship with Monty, and the complexity between the two women characters—mother and daughter—was so much more nuanced, and so much more relevant and relatable, than I ever truly felt about the original film,” Haynes says in an interview with Collider.com, “which is a beautifully stylized piece of Hollywood operatic, noir filmmaking. [Cain’s book] felt modern and contemporary and approachable, and that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to take it on.” Haynes wanted to honor Curtiz’s film, but also “bring elements out of it that might have been overlooked in the original production that was so codified and stylized that you missed the real human nuances and conditions that

made it feel incredibly modern and relevant, and I think we did accomplish that.”

Curtiz’s film begins at the end of the Pierce story.

We don’t know it yet, but the man who died was Pierce’s second husband, and so far we think she’s the killer. We first see Pierce wearing a massive mink coat, strutting along the Santa Monica pier, and for one fleeting instant, she seems to contemplate jumping off of it. In the next scene, sitting in a police station, Pierce begins to tell the story of the events that led to her demise. The screen dissolves into a bright, cheery, humble home in Glendale.

Pre-powerhouse Pierce appears wearing an apron, baking pies, while her husband, Bert, flops down on a sofa in the background. We hear Pierce in voiceover: “I felt as though I’d been born in a kitchen and lived there all my life, except for the few hours it took to get married.” Within the next few minutes, Bert accuses Pierce of spoiling their eldest daughter with inane material items, and Pierce criticizes Bert for his lack of ambition, sternly ordering him to go “pack up.” After a series of tragedies—all seemingly induced by Pierce’s decision to leave her husband—we witness her transformation from dowdy, maternal housewife to wealthy, ambitious restaurateur. Pierce becomes increasingly masculine, dressing in broad, padded-shouldered suits, and guzzling scotch, claiming, “It’s just a little habit I picked up from men.”

As Pierce settles into single motherhood, she meets her soon-to-be second husband Monte, a wealthy layabout. After a spontaneous sexcapade at the beach, Pierce returns home to find her youngest daughter dying of pneumonia—Hollywood-style punishment for motherly negligence. By the end of the film, Pierce has lost both husbands, her youngest daughter, her business, and at the very end, her beloved Veda. The implicit message: career women can only achieve happiness if they relinquish their occupational ambitions, redomesticate, and give up their financial and sexual independence. She must be purged of her excess (her whiny, money-hungry daughter Veda), and deprived of her sexual threat (big shoulders, big bucks) to the male business world.

Feminist film critics have interpreted Mildred Pierce as a warning to independent women to ‘know their place,’ lest they end up bad mothers and child-less spinsters. Reflecting the subjection of ‘woman’ as a social type, Mildred Pierce sent the message to American women in 1945, who achieved working status during wartime, that female autonomy was a threat to their families and to society. The year 1945 marked not only the return of the troops and the transition to a post-war economy, but also the revocation of women’s temporary economic freedom and the reconstruction of gender boundaries. The reconstitution of the family unit was of dire necessity to return ‘rightful’ order and ‘normalcy’ to the nation. By the end of the film, Pierce is punished for transgessing the gender line, for rattling the structure of the nuclear family, and must perform a final capitulation to her ‘proper’ role.

As if being a threat to cultural order weren’t enough, Pierce’s subjectivity has been characterized by some critics as an aberration, an illness, even pathological. Pierce’s independence is interpreted, by writer Stanford M. Lyman, as the outward manifestation of a latent, incestuous lesbianism toward her daughter Veda. According to 1970s feminist film theorist Pam Cook, in “Duplicity in Mildred Pierce,” the conclusion is less extreme: viewers judge Pierce extra harshly for indulging Veda’s penchant for consumption, thus the mother-daughter bond is read as dangerous. “Solidarity among women (represented

by Veda and Mildred) represents the greatest threat to patriarchy,” argues film scholar Janet Walker.

“Female collectivity provides a vision of the world without men.”

“It is clearly the mother-daughter relationship that is extremely problematic in both the film and the novel,” Mary Ann Doane, pioneer in feminist film theory, George Hazard Crooker Professor, and chair of the Modern Culture and Media department at Brown, told the Independent. “There is a certain impossibility associated with the role of the mother in a patriarchal culture and it has to do with spatial metaphors of ‘over-closeness’ and ‘excessive distance,’ usually linked to the working mother. There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground for the figure of the mother.”

MARCH 3 2011 | THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT | www.THEINDY.org

So what have we learned? A career woman lives a split life, divided between motherhood and business. Bad mothers drive their daughters to murder and society into ruin. And women in love, or women in general, are a threat to penis-power. But Veda has an attitude problem, and her negative bonding works to protect patriarchy, ensuring her mother’s love will be destructive and self-defeating. Pierce’s love is something closer to masochistic, and Veda’s may be nonexistent.

The closing image is a long shot of Pierce walking away from the camera with her first husband, the father of her children, her arm bound to his, approaching a gargantuan, sun-drenched archway, while in the foreground, two black women scrub the steps of the police station. Everyone and everything in its proper place outside the Hall of Justice. The end.

the issue of seriality and television will undoubtedly be of great concern to him.”

“Haynes is somebody who, across all of his work, is very interested in what conventions different media forms offer. He plays with media form and conventions to get us to think about the very mode he is using to tell the story... Haynes directed the television short Dottie Gets Spanked, using television form as a commentary on television,” says Joyrich, “In that way, I think Mildred Pierce could be perfect for [television]... Television allows for ongoing narration because of its serial form. Serial form allows for really involved, multiple intersecting narratives— you can come up with a complex social and familial network. I think that form itself has a lot of potential for what you could do with it as a commentary on family dynamics and the complex relations of what hold people together.”

“But no film is a simple inscription of ideology,” Doane argues, “and this film brings aesthetic pressure to bear on the contradictions of such an ideology.” Lynne Joyrich, Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown, offers further insight: “Even though the narrative closes as this promotion of heteronormativity, viewers remember the moments in which she’s tough and strong, and when she’s bonding with other women. [Pierce] will never be a typical wife and mom, she’s going to find some other fabulous thing to do.”

Pierce’s on-screen fabulosity is reflected and reinforced by Crawford’s real-life star-image. Just like Pierce, Crawford was a single mother—and according to later accounts of her adopted daughter (whom she disinherited), Crawford was a very, very bad mommy. The press maintained Crawford’s starimage as a woman rising up from struggle, just as Pierce is depicted as a fighter who rises to the top of the social ladder. Crawford’s real-life bootstrapping augmented the believability and self-referentiality of her onscreen roles, which epitomized the ‘independent woman’ trope of the 1930s and 40s. Her highly publicized downfall (she was dubbed ‘box office poison’ prior to nabbing the Academy Award for Mildred Pierce), was integrated into her star-story as just another obstacle she had to overcome.

I’ve seen Mildred Pierce at least five times, and my mother could triple that amount. For the women in my family, it’s been a hallmark of strong womynism.

I asked my mother what she thought about Pierce and patriarchy. She got very defensive, claiming that Pierce is a survivor, an ambitious, bad-ass supermama, and that of course she returns to work after her reunion with Bert. Contrary to said feminist readings, my mother’s Pierce is a role model, a rebel, a heroine of early Hollywood. But even as a black woman, my mother overlooks the infantilization of Pierce’s black maid, played by Butterfly McQueen, and the glaring omission of successful, or positive images of women of color in the narrative just so she can experience “something beautiful to look at, a glimpse into a life that’s not mine. The politics of it don’t mean anything to me.”

Synthesizing my mother’s take on Pierce with the critical consensus, Joyrich notes, “[Mildred Pierce] speaks to so many people and can be powerful so many years later, frankly because those issues are still with us. We look at the film now and it can seem dated, but issues of struggling to balance work life and home life, internal peace with ambition and desires for success, are all still big issues in our time…

The film opens up more than it can close off. It is never closed and contained because it leaves spaces and gaps for viewer to get pleasure out of it.”

“

A career woman lives a split life, divided between motherhood and business. Bad mothers drive their daughters to murder, and society into ruin. And women in love, or women in general, are a threat to penis-power.

Pierce carries her connotations with her, but Haynes’s vision is sure to offer new insights to this 70year old story. Doane, who taught Haynes in the 80s, reflects, “When [Haynes] was at Brown, he took a course from me on the ‘woman’s film’ and saw many of the films that had an impact on his filmmaking,” says Doane, “He has always been interested in the ideological implications of form and the cultural ordering of sexuality… Because Todd was a semiotics concentrator at Brown, he has often been seen as too intellectual and unemotional, as though intellect and emotion were absolutely incompatible. But I think that his uniqueness resides in the fact that he is able to collapse that opposition, to push the spectator to simultaneously feel and analyze emotion. He knows film theory extremely well and at the same time he undermines all the stereotypes of coldness and abstractness that are usually associated with theory…

Because Todd is so attentive to form and medium,

”

The reappearance of Mildred Pierce is a testament to the endurance and continued relevance of the story. Haynes slips his own reading of Pierce into the film’s gaps, as does my mother, extracting new pleasures and possibilities from the Pierce story. But it is also Pierce herself who perseveres. Despite the confines of genre, racial stereotypes, and heterosexist norms, Pierce transcends her own containment. She survives in time and crosses racial boundaries. Most of all, I guess my mother relates to Pierce--after all, she’s a mother too.

EVE MARIE BLAZO B’12 loves her bad-ass supermama.

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MARCH 3 2011 | THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT | www.THEINDY.org

13 |SPORtS

THE OAK TREE MASSACRE O

n the evening of January 27, a man’s gruff voice came over the AM radio to football fans across the state of Alabama. “Al from Dadeville,” as he was called, had pronounced himself the proudest Alabama University fan in the nation; as proof of his devotion, he had driven down to Auburn University to destroy the 130-year-old symbol of Auburn pride that has haunted Alabama fans for years: the beloved Toomer oak trees.

Every year, after major Auburn football victories, fans gather at Toomer’s corner— named for State Senator Sheldon Toomer, who brought Auburn to prominence when he founded the Bank of Auburn— where they drape toilet paper over the oak trees at the corner to celebrate the Auburn Tigers’ glory. The origin of the TP ornamentation is unclear, but gathering at Toomer’s corner is Auburn’s most storied tradition. Al from Dadeville boasted of taking an herbicide commonly known as Spike 80DF to the oaks, assuring listeners that there was no chance of survival.

Signing off like any good Alabama fan, the Dadevill-ain solidified a new chapter in the Auburn-Alabama rivalry: “Roll Damn Tide!”

That Damn Tide (Alabama’s slogan is drawn from its mascot, the Crimson Tide) has crashed waves against the Auburn Tigers for over a century. The cornerstone of the rivalry is the Iron Bowl, the annual match between the two schools renowned for its unrestrained hostility. The Iron Bowl is rivalry at its finest—Alabama has 40 wins to Auburn’s 34, with sides often alternating wins year to year since its origin in 1893 (there was a forty year hiatus 1907-1948). In fact, ESPN ranked the rivalry only one spot behind Yankees-Red Sox in their list of the top ten rivalries in the history of sports. But the joy of a wellmatched rivalry comes with great animosity, and with great animosity comes lessthan-great sportsmanlike conduct. The Dadevillain is merely one in a long line of overzealous fans on both sides to push the limits of acceptable fandom. Back in 1993, one of the Toomer oaks was set aflame by enthused ‘Bama fans after an Auburn victory in the Iron Bowl, and panic ensued in a packed crowd of Auburn celebrators. More recently, in 2005, an Alabama fan injured seven Auburn fraternity members, stabbing five of them the day before the Iron Bowl, as he cried out, “Roll Tide!”

Sports Rivalries Then and now

by David Adler and Edward Friedman Illustration by Annika Finne identity is

Al from Dadeville’s real Harvey Almorn Updyke Jr., a name that screams “you’re lucky I only kill trees.”

If there is any upside to this story, it is the discovery of the character of Mr. Updyke.

His mug shot says it all: a mean grimace, sweaty wisps of hair across his forehead, upturned villainous eyebrows, and a black-and-white striped shirt that looks half prisoner, half referee. A retired Texas State Trooper, Updyke named his son “Bear,” after the heroic Alabama football coach Paul William “Bear” Bryant, and his daughter “Crimson,” after the Alabama University mascot. Tracking the radio call back to his home in Dadeville, the police arrested Updyke, charging him with a Class C felony of Criminal Mischief for violating the sylvan sanctity of Toomer’s Corner. For his enthusiastic vandalism, he faces up to 10 years in prison. His police record includes another arrest for criminal mischief in Williamstown, TX in 1996, and a theft charge in 2004, also in Texas—though neither charge appears to be related to sports fandom. Meanwhile, Alabama University released a statement saying they have no record of Updyke having been a student there.

ALABAMA ACCORD? In the aftermath of the incident, as would be expected for such a long standing heated rivalry, retaliation ensued. Grassroots media outlets throughout the state exploded with rage over the crime of the Dadevillain, referring to him as “The most hated man in Auburn” or “The most hated man in the Southern states” or even “The most hated man in America.” One fanmade image shows Updyke’s mug shot with the caption, “If found, please hog-tie and bring to Auburn, Alabama.” Death threats were reportedly sent from Auburn fans to his home, forcing his family to pull their children out from school. And according to Birmingham News, when Updyke visited a Wal-Mart, out on $50,000 bail, his car’s tires were slashed.

Surprisingly, although the individual perpetrator has been demonized, his actions have inspired a new unity: fans from both universities have joined together in solidarity over the lost oak trees. On February 19, the Auburn community gathered for the “Toomer’s Tree Hug,” an event to mourn the loss of the Auburn oaks that “reflected the depth of pain and frustration” in the small town, Associated Press reports. One Auburn fan shook his head in mourning over the dying trees: “I don’t understand why anybody would just maliciously [kill] a tree that’s not bothering anybody.” One powerful image shows a woman’s hand laying a roll of toilet paper in a bed of roses at the base of the tree that reads, “Get Well Soon.” For Alabama University, while a small minority of stubborn fans celebrate the fall of the Auburn tradition, many have pitched in to help the grieving Auburn community. An organization called “Tide For Toomers,” run

by Alabama football fans, has raised over $45,000 through its Facebook campaign to save—or, if they are truly lost, replace— the Toomer oaks. Alabama coach Nick Saban even teamed up with Auburn coach Gene Chizik to issue a joint statement expressing that this incident “is not what the greatest rivalry in college football is all about.” Out of the violence seems to have grown a new harmony, at least temporarily, for the rival universities. In this hearwarming scene, however, many have forgotten about Mr. Updyke and his felony charge. Let’s just hope the judge is an Alabama fan.

DAVID ADLER B’14 and EDWARD FRIEDMAN B’14 did time for seconddegree sapling slashing.

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RIVALRY THROUGH TIME With March Madness approaching quickly, sports rivalry becomes a choice topic. College basketball fans from around the nation are currently preparing to undergo a grueling month’s worth of dedicated fandom, and the marquee matchups of the NCAA tournament will no doubt feature many infamous rivals. It is impossible to deny that rivalries are the most compelling aspect of a sporting event. They elevate the competition to a level of emotional significance that transcends the physical act of sport and provide far more entertainment than a regular game detached from a history of feud, even for those of us uninvolved in the rivalry itself. However, rivalries can often expose the dark, pitiful underbelly of sports fandom—drunk old men slinging fists over whether the receiver’s feet were or were not inbounds when he caught the ball. Here, we look back on sporting allegiance gone too far.

When in Rome Among the most ancient of all sports violence were the Nika Riots of 532 B.C.E. at the Hippodrome chariot races in Constantinople. The classical brawl—catalyzed by a volatile combination of preexisting civil unrest and chariot faction pride— dwarfs anything that modern fans could offer.

At the end of the January 13 racing day, the two leading sporting factions of the day— the Greens and Blues— stormed the palace of Emperor Justinian I to protest the imprisonment of fellow fans from each of their ranks. Not stopping there, the enthused fans burnt down the Hagia Sophia, along with much of the city. The Nika Riots lasted over a week and claimed the lives of a whopping 30,000 Roman citizens. In the end, Justinian let his true colors show, expressing his support for team Blue (and throwing a little gold their way). The Imperial troops finished off the haplessly abandoned Greens. Peace was restored to the Eastern Capital of the Roman Empire. Rebuilding of the burnt, gutted city began. They kept racing chariots.

Of course.

Killer Babe The rivalry of the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox offers a history replete with competition and pranks, some more tasteful than others. The teams first met in 1901 and the rivalry was cemented when, in 1919, the Broadway producer and owner of the Sox sold his starting home run record-setter Babe Ruth to the Yankees in order to finance a production of No, No Nanette. Ruth’s hitting prowess would go on to propel the Yankees to seven World Series, of which they won four. The Curse of the Bambino, as it came to be known, has haunted the Red Sox ever since.

Rumbles and beatings outside of games and at Cambridge sports bars colorfully pepper the last decade of the rivalry, but nothing comes close to the actions of one Nashua, NH Yankees fan in 2008.

45-year-old Ivonne Hernandez rammed her car into a group of Red Sox fans outside a Nashua bar after they allegedly taunted her for the Yankees sticker in the back window of her 1997 Dodge Intrepid, injuring several and killing 29-year-old Matthew Beaudoin. Hernandez claims that the group had harassed her, slammed on her windows and shook her car after she cited the deficit of Red Sox championships. She was convicted of second-degree murder in December of 2009. 20 to 40 years—that Red Sux.

Those Hooligans Heated as our American rivalries can get, across the pond they’ve been doing it longer (and better). While Football Hooliganism transpires globally, Europe has fervently extended the violent lengths to which beer-sodden fans, known as Hooligans, will go. Today, gangs of such hooligans, known as “firms,” brawl with the support of a terrifyingly calculated organization behind them, occasionally associating themselves— most often unofficially— with extremist political movements.

One such firm, the Continental Football Hooligans, have cornered the market on signal flares as DIY pyrotechnics and even (if you’re a good shot) projectile sabotage.

Italian Football’s first fatality occurred 30 years ago in the class-divided Lazio-Roma rivalry when a fan was hit in the eye by a flare and died from the resulting injuries.

In recent years, in the fierce AC MilanInternazionale rivalry, the AC Milan goalkeeper was struck by a flare in a 2005 Champions League quarter-final. Why is it taking America so long to catch on?

15 |LITERARY

MARCH 3 2011 | THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT | www.THEINDY.org

GOD’S TRUE written and illustrated

by Rita Bullwinkel In Florida things are pastel. You can’t get a cup that’s bright yellow. It has to be faded. Brand-new worn out.

That’s the way they make things there. Sunwashed and diluted. Light light pink sunglasses with white white hair. A reflection of what some living, vibrant human might look like. That’s how most everyone looks. Generally, real people don’t live in Florida. Just ghosts who are being held in Limbo for punishment of gluttony or for charging interest on loans.

Dreama May When the dead give birth to children things split open and rip off and it can be very expensive to replace, especially if you want it done by a good surgeon. When Dreama May gave birth she was already dead, but her child, to most every one’s surprise, was living. A living child in Florida, her doctor said, now that’s an unnatural thing.

What shall he do, the doctor asks, how ever do you expect to raise a living child among those who have already passed? Many of Dreama’s neighbor’s thought the child should be sent away immediately. Put him up for adoption in a nice living state, like New Hampshire, they all said. Give the child a chance at a normal upbringing. But every time Dreama considered such a thing she realized just how much of an impossibility it was. She and her husband, Larry, had never had any children while they had been alive, and now, due to some unnatural phenomena, here they were in Limbo, in Florida, with a child they could finally love and watch grow and share a television set with.

They decided to name the child Austin. Austin Bilby. And with all the love Dreama May’s lifeless heart could muster she clung to that child.

Raised him and reared him, watched him grow hair and grow up. She would look at him, going swing dancing with dead girls from across the street. She would smile, her smile creasing with the plasticity of her artificially constructed face. When he was old enough it seemed that every night, when she said goodbye to Austin and sent him out on the town, that the days were shortening before Austin would have to leave Florida to go be with his own. Sometimes, Austin would look at his mother, at her permed wildly white hair, her tattooed eye liner, her gradually decaying flesh, and he would kiss her on the check, feeling the give of the skin below, wondering where his mother’s body would move to next, and knowing it would be a place very different from where he was heading, a place where either things were burned and never buried, or a place where light ran wild and clouds were solid. He liked to dream of his mother and father bouncing in between God’s hopping stones, leaping from one rain cloud to another, but truth be told, he wasn’t exactly sure where they would be destined to go. Either option, he thought, sounded better then up north.

Cassadaga Cassadaga’s vibrations reach for miles beyond its city limits, all of the mediums’ psychic powers simply emanating out of their homes, beams of light escaping through the cracks under their doors and the spaces between their curtains. Sometimes at night, Austin would see a little stream of photons bounce around his room, knowing that there was only one place from which they could have come. Boasting the largest community of the living in Florida, Cassadaga also contains the largest number of psychics per square mileage in the world.

The city of seers and palms, tea leaves and shakras, meditation and communication. Come, let me look into you and tell you. Some people who visit Cassadaga are dissatisfied with the results, but naturally no one can control the spirit world. The dead are more unpredictable than the living and often less inclined to oblige you with reasonability. In peak months, Cassadaga becomes very crowded, and with all the minds floating about it’s hard to tell whose is whose. When the mediums sleep, they unlock their skulls and let their brains float up out of their heads like balloons, their spinal cords stretching like rubber bands out of their backs and anchoring the brain to its respective owner. Sometimes, if you come to Cassadaga late at night, you can see the brains floating out of the chimneys, bobbing in the light humid breeze, sweating, slightly, because of the crowd of souls that surround them, invisibly petting and plying the mediums’ brains to wake. Before Austin left Florida to head up north his mother would take him to Cassadaga to get him used to being around living people.

Austin would walk up to a medium and ask, may I touch you? My mother says it’s good practice. And he would feel around their arms and their skulls, sometimes happening upon the latch that unlocked their brains (We must warn you, they would say, that not all people up north have skull latches). But, truth be told, the mediums were often more interested in touching him then he was in touching them. A living child in Florida, they would ponder, is it possible that he’s truly alive? Or is he maybe dead and alive at the same time? Can he communicate with the spirits who have already left Florida for the next worlds? They would corner him: tell us Austin, who do you like making love to better? The living or the dead? And Austin would blush with vivacity and reply that he had never made love to a living girl before, but that he liked dead girls very much.

LITERARY| 16

MARCH 3 2011 | THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT | www.THEINDY.org

ZOMBIES The

Tampa Room

The first time Austin took me to Florida he took me to visit his grandparents in Tampa. Watch, he said to me, how the memories of the old stabilize like crystals, completely stagnant, solid, un-changeable by even the most visual evidence. Watch how the bungalow porches and the beach towels collage themselves into a single image, double-exposing both the past and the present, creating the illusion that time is both greater and less severe at the same time. His grandparents lived in a small, Easter-blue house in Temple Terrace, Tampa. Inside there was a room that reeked of formaldehyde. Everything was goo and gave a little when I touched it. The photographs the china the pink flamingo wall paper the disco couches the decaying smell were all slightly more pliable than they should have been. Just bending, soaked so heavy in memories that their physical substance could barely sustain the weight of their existence. On the couch a couple sat, hand in hand, jaws open, in many ways combining and exchanging substance with the couch, molding into a single, preserved entity. Gravity had taken their skin and dealt with it and their brains were slowly dripping out of their noses and onto their shirts.

On Exotic Lovers Loving a Floridian is like loving Frank Sinatra. Though he might be handsome, he is dead, so really my love is confined to a kind of removed admiration. A sulky, beaten kind of love that floats in between two people but that never really sticks to anything solid. It wafts and travels between realms but, ultimately, it can never translate substance for substance because what does an upbringing with drawls and cracker barrels and overcrowded artificial beaches have to say to the upbringing of reality? (One where people are alive and colored and sit on wooden chairs instead of plastic ones.) The unease of the unfamiliar, however, is undeniably sexy, forcing my mind to jump realms into a place I have only seen in pictures and pornos. Knowing that when our mouths meet his mouth has been in all sorts of places before mine. Florida places. In alligator swamps and in theme parks and in faded looking ice cream shops. His mouth has been in Cuban sandwiches and in girls with bleach blonde hair, on river boats and in towns filled with psychics. In his fat mother’s uterus and on his mother’s poodle’s back. On his grandparents’ formaldehyde foreheads and in zombies’ flesh. A fawn in the cold reality, absent of the bitterness that comes with stark definition, one can only love a Floridian if one accepts their utter separation from the rest of the world, their otherworldly upbringing that has made them so divergent from the standard color wheel, their dilution that stands so stark in the face of vibrancy.

Gator Tacos Try one, he said. It might taste like chicken, but really it’s dinosaur. Not a bird, no, the other kind that somehow survived that giant asteroid that hit the earth 65 million years ago. The animal that represents the ultimate undead. He called them God’s true zombies. Somehow all of their relatives were massacred and they hid under the couch and survived, thrusting their ancient, prehistoric looking bodies into modernity. Just swaggering with scales and claws, popping out eggs that won’t grow up to fly, destined to be the mascots of the modern Neanderthal, the Florida football fan. They wallow in the river and in the swamp and breathe moss onto the trees, sucking out the remaining color of the people who are still alive, diluting the air with their reptilian breadth, fading vibrancy with humidity, turning the world pastel. Waddle, waddle, they slide in between the river sludge and the fan boats. Austin says to escape them you have to zig-zag.

They’ll never catch you if you run like a goon. Just act like an idiot, he says. That saves most people.

On the Mons Venus Before Austin moved out of Florida to the land of the living he dated a dead girl who was a stripper. She worked at the world famous Mons Venus. At the Mons, everything yellows like a faded photograph, like a set of weeks-old unbrushed teeth. The aging plastic seems to permeate even living people’s brains, so that when their skulls get smashed open all that falls out is a one dollar thrift store bag. At the Mons Venus people smash their skulls against the table to see what’s inside. All the insides fall out but there are gutters on the counters to drain the contents away. At the Mons, there is a VIP room shaped like a UFO that you have to go up a tiny tiny winding staircase to access. Once inside there are purple plush seats and a large draining facility for people to suck out their brains with. Then, if you pay the Mons enough, they’ll fill your brain with pocket size strippers.

They usually insert them with a hole they make in the very center of your forehead. And so they dance in my brain, puncturing my spinal column with their clear heels and their yellow teeth.

Gnawing with their fingernails against the shag rug near my frontal lobes. Dancing, dancing till the rest of the plastic lining my brain cracks under the weight of their tiny feet, splintering into my bloodstream, and God decides it’s time for me to leave Florida, it’s time for me to go home.

MARCH 3 2011 | THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT | www.THEINDY.org

17 |ARtS

That Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel was sold out on Friday, February 25, for Girl Talk, né Gregg Gillis, reflects little about the quality of the music itself. Concertgoers, sweaty and packed to the point of immobility, had instead come to get down with their friends and maybe even bump into

S W E AT

an attractive stranger—the shirtless man bent over his two laptops onstage meant very little.

Over the last few years, Gillis has undergone a remarkable self-transformation from crowd-pleasing mash-up artist into the marketable brand he is today. For his fans, the enjoyment of the music is now merely an added bonus to having the opportunity to take part in a sort of cultural tradition of going to see the massively famous DJ, who grew to prominence after his 2006 album Night Ripper exploded across the nation. His music is a colorful collage of melodies and rap verses that combines genres from several decades. But in his most recent release, All Day, it seems Girl Talk has made this collage so messy that listeners have to struggle to find their way. The mash-ups on display Friday night were so convoluted that the music was largely unrecognizable. Occasionally the crowd would erupt with excitement when a memorable melody surfaced, but in mere seconds the excitement was muted as the song was mutilated. In Gillis’s attempt to blend so many songs together into one whole, he lost sight of the reason why fans signed up in the first place: they trust him to feed them throw-back anthems and party songs that they can recognize and dance along to—essentially, music that can serve as a conversational safety net when flirting with the cute girl at the party. The sounds that come off All Day may work with the headphones on, but in the context of a concert, the nuances of every transition are so blurred that the music just sounds sloppy and disorganized.

As the mash-up craze fades into the distance of cultural relevance, Gillis’s concerts have gotten progressively more extravagant. His early shows featured

AND

a geeky Gillis at his PC, showing off his extensive knowledge of pop culture and savvy DJ techniques. He now employs so many extra embellishments—from confetti and balloons to rolls of toilet paper propelled onto the crowd to a massive light board at the back of the stage—that it’s clear Gillis has shifted his primary focus away from the music in order to give his audience a larger experience—and keep them interested. The addition of these accessories is no surprise: while he could get away with showing up with just a laptop in hand when he was playing in some kid’s basement, fans paying $35+ to be packed shoulder to shoulder into a large-scale venue expect Girl Talk to bring the party. And ultimately, he did just that.

The crowd burst with screams as confetti fell from the ceiling; fans even took pieces of toilet paper home as souvenirs. But this added showmanship shouldn’t mean giving up the music and creativity that originally converted so many into his loving legions.

The just-press-play DJ style that Gillis has adopted in his recent shows is a letdown for fans looking to see Girl Talk at work, as his early creativity has been largely sacrificed in his attempt to provide the crowd with the same sounds that come off his album. But for most of the audience, the music stopped being important long before they walked through the doors of the show—all that mattered was that there were loud sounds to get freaky to. The over-packed crowd at Lupo’s was having a great time, and surely Girl Talk’s next visit will sell out just the same, so that’s a job well done. I just wonder whether the crowd would have even noticed if Gillis had not shown up at all and simply let his album play start to finish.

B LO O D

Musical Theater with girl Talk and gwar

Illustration by Becca Levinson

by David Adler GWAR is a band that should be kept away from the squeamish; the blood, semen, and vomit on display at their Wednesday, February 23, show at Lupo’s left many in numb disbelief. The metal group, now in their 27th year of touring, is renowned for their over-the-top costumes—the lead singer as “intergalactic humanoid barbarian,” bassist with war paint and oversized Styrofoam warrior’s armor—and for the brutal onstage massacre of politicians and pop culture figures using rubber props attached to masked men. The result, of course, is fountains of fake blood that drench bloodthirsty crowds who revel in the violence.

The band built a reputation early on in their career as innovators in the genre of “shock rock,” acquiring a massive fanbase through their highly controversial performances that pushed the boundaries of tastefulness. Albums like Phallus in Wonderland and lyrics like “Ripped out guts / Gouged out eyes / If you kill them / They will die” demonstrate GWAR’s dedication to vulgarity. While this focus on provocation can be inane and cheesy, I left the show on Wednesday covered head to toe in fake blood, with memories of debauchery that I could never forget—for better or worse.

For their second song, a fake Sarah Palin emerged from the back of the stage, strapped to some metal contraption. “La-

dies and gentlemen, it’s the next president of the United States,” lead singer Oderus Urungus (Dave Brockie) asked the crowd, “Should we disembowel her?” The crowd erupted with cheers, throwing fists into the air. Palin’s intestines were then carved to pieces, red and green blood spraying across the venue onto excited fans who clearly knew what was coming. Next up was Lady Gaga, who GWAR ridiculed for her ‘fashion-forward’ attire, dressing her as a toilet bowl. “Oh my god, Lady Gaga is eating fecal matter,” Urungus screamed, “What should we do?” The crowd demanded her death, and so, swords in hand, the band proceeded to disembowel the pop star as her breasts projected blood in thick streams onto the audience. For their encore, Brockie came out onstage and said in shocking matter-of-fact manner, “Now it’s time for me to bleed my AIDS-infected blood on you from my giant penis.” And so he did, holding onto his prosthetic penis for good aim. The fans, not one bit surprised by such antics, held their hands up to receive his gifts.

It’s an incredible feat that the members of GWAR, now in their late 40s, are able to continue to put on such hectic over-the-top shows night after night.

However, the bluntness of all of these antics, together with the bored commentary of the lead singer, imply that perhaps the band has gotten tired of its own perfor-

mance. The murderous acts onstage may have changed over time with respect to who was on the wrong end of the disembowelment, but it was clear that GWAR is not making much of an attempt to evolve artistically. Their music was played dispassionately; the band walked casually on and off the stage, too old to muster the energy to make the music come to life. The mosh pits in the crowd were weak, and the demographic was a bit confused, split between twenty-something metalheads screaming for more blood and dads standing quietly towards the back in Patagonia parkas, reminiscing about the first time they saw GWAR twenty years ago. Still, I walked away like most of the crowd: thoroughly entertained and impressed by the quality of costume design and the sheer amount of fake blood. The highlight of the show definitely came when one eager fan who managed to find his way onstage approached the bassist to prove his fandom, at which point the bassist punched him in the face and tossed him back onto the crowd. It’s good to know the spirit is still alive, even if it has gotten a little too old.

DAVID ADLER B’14 wears Patagonia.