The College Hill Independent V.30 N.10

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT V 30 N 10 | MAY 1 2015 A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY

managing editors Rick Salamé, Stephanie Hayes, Zeve Sanderson news Dash Elhauge, Elias Bresnick, Sebastian Clark metro Cherise Morris, Sophie Kasakove arts Eli Pitegoff, Erin Schwartz, Lisa Borst, Maya Sorabjee features Matthew Marsico, Patrick McMenamin, Sara Winnick SCIENCE Jamie Packs TECHNOLOGY Wilson Cusack SPORTS Sam Bresnick, William Underwood interviews Mika Kligler literary Kim Sarnoff EPHEMERA mark Benz X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff list Polina Volfovich, Tristan Rodman design + illustration Alexa Terfloth, Ben Ross, Casey Friedman, Nikolas Bentel, Noah Beckwith Cover Editor Jade Donaldson Senior editors Alex Sammon, Greg Nissan, Lili Rosenkranz, Tristan Rodman Staff WriterS Athena Washburn, Camera Ford, Dominique Pariso, Eli Neuman-Hammond, Erin West, Jane Argodale, Malcolm Drenttel, Samuel Samore STAFF ILLUSTRATORs Caroline Brewer, Lee Bernstein, Natalie Kassirer, Polina Volfovich BUSINESS Haley Adams, Kyle Giddon Cover Art Casey Friedman MvP The Family

VOLUME 30 | ISSUE 10

news 02 Week in Review

alex sammon & kyle giddon

METRO

FEATURES 07 Dispedagogia sara winnick

12 90s Kids

sara winnick & casey friedman

03 5 to 9

INTERVIEWS

jane argodale

05 RIPTA Singers’ Alliance sophie kasakove & lisa borst

ARTS 09 GregSun SunGreg greg nissan

11 DFWtheFuck?

eli neuman-hammond

SPORTS 04 Moneyed Ball$

sam bresnick & william underwood

13 A Brief, Wondrous Chat mika kligler

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Toe tags

indy staff

LIT 17 Poem Pals

kim sarnoff, rick salamé, mika kligler & eli neuman-hammond

X 18 Condé Nasty

layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

fROM THE EDITOR S The Indy is about to go on summer hiatus and when it returns to newsstands in September we will no longer be its Managing Editors. Over the past five months we editors have tried hard to give you a left-leaning newspaper with imagination. The paper has run pieces about homophobia in local pro-wrestling, about downtown surveillance, about rape culture, and about access to translation services in activist organizing. We’ve run poems about loss and essays about struggle, defiance, and hope. We’ve also just done some weird stuff. We haven’t covered everything: we regret not writing about Roberto Quinilla and others’ lawsuit against Gourmet Heaven for the latter’s violation of labor law. We’ll say it now: we wish them luck. Most of the pieces in this issue were written before the demonstrations in Baltimore started and we don’t know what will be happening there by the time this appears in print. One of the drawbacks of running a weekly is that it can’t effectively cover situations that are dynamic and changing day-by-day.

To the protestors in Baltimore, wherever you may be come Friday: we wish you luck and safety.

But what we hope to claim we have done over the past five months, if anything, is give you a paper that takes broad views of its subjects, that steps back from the often myopic coverage of the local dailies to question basic assumptions, to go over foundational questions one more time. The Indy summarizes, synthesizes, and hopefully fills some small gaps left over in the spaces between hundreds of items of coverage on individual protests, committee hearings, victories and defeats that take place on a diurnal register. In the fall a new team of Managing Editors will join you and redefine the paper for themselves, but in the meantime it will be up to you to keep pushing, keep fighting, and keep taking a long view. We wish you luck. –RS, SH & ZS

P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent, weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

a family-run publication, is published THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN FAREWELLS

by Kyle Giddon & Alex Sammon

Jack Bruce is dead. Kurt Cobain is dead. Cream and Nirvana are gone while SUM41 is going strong.

There is no justice in the world. But this is one power trio I simply can’t do without. Tristan Rodman, Alex Sammon, Kyle Giddon. Call them the quintessential quipsters, the stooges sans Iggy, the weekly wisecrackers—whoever they are, I’m sad to see them go, man. I’m just glad that, in the wake of the break-up, Alex and Kyle are able to give us some parting words.

Our dearly departing seniors. :((((((((((((((((((((((

BOAT SHOW! Four days of sunny skies. All four days, sunny skies—this is the way I like it. This is the way I like it when I am shopping for boats.

I am in Sarasota, Florida, on the gulf. The Suncoast Boat Show. Once a year, the last week of April, the best of us arrive.

What a place to shop for boats. There is sunlight on the pier.

A breeze is in the air. Westward, a shallow shelf of sea extends for over one hundred miles. This is where I like to shop for boats.

I prowl along the docks. Avast! My eye catches a sight to behold—a 40-meter yawl, a towering mast of baby blue, a simple tautness, origin Westport, Connecticut. Its name?

Capital Gains.

“I want that boat,” I say, “I want that boat. I want that boat. I will do whatever it takes to buy that boat. I will spend whatever it takes. I will pursue this boat to the edges of the earth.”

I lower my cigar. My hand slides against the plexiglass, and I sigh. Smooth as can be. Perfectly waxed. Supple, elegant. Refined. I tap some carbon fiber—light as a feather, hard as diamond. I catch my reflection in the handrail. I am shopping for boats. This boat. And soon it will be mine.

You can’t have this boat.

You can’t touch this boat.

Na na na na. –KG Cooperation The past 50 years have seen some seriously sick summers.

So sick, in fact, it’s tough to pick a resounding favorite. The summer of ‘69 might be the obvious choice, at least according to Bryan Adams. Or ‘67’s acid-fueled Summer of Love. Even the summer of ‘89, with Kid Rock as campaign manager, has surged into close contention as of late. What a time to be alive.

And while these obvious heavyweights certainly have their strengths, perhaps the most epic, summer-to-end-all-

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summers flies below the radar—the summer of ‘72.

“What” you may wonder indignantly, “has the summer of ‘72 done to earn a spot in the pantheon of legendary summers?!”

Yet, what the summer of ‘72 lacks in anthemic ballads and titular drugs it makes up for in finality. It is, of course, the summer that Alice Cooper issued the indelible creed that would motivate the youth for years to come— “School’s out for summer.

School’s out forever.

School’s been blown to pieces.”

Thirty-two all-time summers later, those words ring ominously true. What was supposed to serve as a rallying cry for mythological binge drinking, mullet-wearing, and promiscuity unleashed has instead become the sorry tagline of a faltering public school system: lack of after school programming, decreased funding for the arts, crumbling facilities.

Alice Cooper, progenitor of Alice Cooper’s Solid Rock foundation and the Rock Teen Center, is a man with a conscience. He is a man who cares about legacy, not just revelry, and will not see his legacy sullied like this. “Blacking out should not come at the expense of vocational programs,” reads the long-lost extended version of “School’s Out.” And Cooper is not the only one. This week, the golfing community in Mesa, Arizona has turned out en masse for Alice Cooper’s Rock and Roll Golf Classic, a hardcore fundraising opportunity for the Center, which teaches teens dance, drums, guitar, and voice lessons for free. The event is a local favorite, second only to the Cooper’s annual Christmas Pudding show.

“School’s out completely!” a younger Cooper unknowingly eulogized. Youth gets soo wasted on the young. –AS

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OLD TIRED ETHICS Sex Work In Rhode Island

by Jane Argodale illustration by Blaine Harvey Early in April, undercover Providence police posted escort ads on the website Backpage.com, and arrested 22 respondents for soliciting sex at the hotels where they were waiting to meet the women they had contacted. “Operation Backpage” was carried out in hopes of curbing the rise of sex trafficking in Providence. “They’re not necessarily women. Many, many are kids,” said Mayor Jorge Elorza of the ads on Backpage.

Just a few weeks earlier, I contacted and met 25 year-old Madeira Darling through an ad on the very same website. She explained that, as a dominatrix, she does “your standard beatings, bondage, humiliation, forced feminization, roleplay,” all of which are legal under Rhode Island law because Madeira does not actually engage in sexual contact with clients. Laws on kink-related sex work vary from state to state, and the exception Rhode Island makes is “incongruent” with Rhode Island’s criminalization of prostitution according to Erin Basler-Francis of the Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health in Pawtucket. She added, “For most, sex is a biological drive. That drive creates a market. When it comes down to it, sex work is a service industry, and deserves to be treated with the same standards.” Sex work is a broad term, including professions like porn acting and dancing along with prostitution, which is most commonly associated with the term.

In most states, prostitution has been considered a misdemeanor since the early twentieth century. Until 2009, prostitution was legal in Rhode Island, after a decades-old loophole was discovered in the law. In 1980, after years of legal battles, a group called “Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics” (COYOTE) succeeded in getting lawmakers to remove language from prostitution laws COYOTE felt was unconstitutional. This change in language, unbeknownst to lawmakers, meant prostitution was technically legal, a discovery made in 2004, when lawyers representing eight women arrested for prostitution in Asian massage parlors were successfully able to get their cases dismissed by pointing to the wording of the law. In 2009, Governor Donald Carcieri signed a bill making prostitution illegal again, saying “I think it’s been a black eye, frankly, in our state, that we’ve allowed this to go, for whatever the reason is, for far too long.”

The movement to criminalize prostitution was in part led by University of Rhode Island professor Donna Hughes, who researches sex trafficking and sees the criminalization of prostitution as an important step in its prevention.

However, according to Basler-Francis, “Laws that criminalize sex work make it harder for people who are trafficked to seek assistance from police.”

Outside of her job, Madeira Darling works to organize sex workers and protest the criminalization of prostitution in Rhode Island. “I don’t like seeing my friends unsafe. Arresting them isn’t right, it doesn’t improve conditions for anyone.

Rape and STDs are more common, and it prevents things like labor safety laws from being enacted. You can’t picket as a hooker. And so many

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sex workers are vulnerable in some way—they’re trans, or poor, or undocumented.”

Darling is also a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labor union whose Providence chapter has done work to organize and inform local sex workers. In February, the Providence IWW posted a guide to sex workers’ rights in Rhode Island, ranging from advice on dealing with law enforcement (“You have the right to ask a law enforcement officer for their badge number, name, and other identifying information. This information will be useful if they are violating your rights,”) to rights in the workplace (“You have the right to form a union, attempt to form a union, or join a union whether or not there is official union representation at your job”).

Police can use condoms as evidence of prostitution, which, Darling explained, discourages their use and leads to high rates of STDs. The lack of protections for sex workers also extends into legal sex work. In strip clubs, dancers are independent contractors rather than employees, preventing them from getting the benefits fulltime employees receive such as breaks.

Though Darling identifies strongly as a sex worker, she recognizes differences between her experience of sex work and that of others. “I’m really privileged to be doing legal work as a white woman from an upper class background.

Men often say they like me because I’m classy, or I have good teeth. That’s why I can get paid more.” Yet it’s still a common misconception that Madeira is a prostitute. Sex work is a broad term, and according to Erin Basler-Francis, “One of the main misconceptions about sex work is that it only encompasses prostitution—which is where most of the images of sex workers are pulled from in pop culture—forgetting that porn actors, dancers, camgirls, prodoms, et al. are also engaging in sex work. Beyond that, sex workers are crammed into two boxes: the poor, strungout street worker and the workers who do sex work because they love sex work.” This dichotomy excludes those like Darling, who view their work as a normal job that helps make a living.

The misconceptions about sex work like Darling’s aren’t limited to a conflation of sex work with prostitution, Darling explains, but also include the conflation of BDSM with abuse. “It’s confused with non-consensual abuse. Of course, that happens in the community, but that isn’t what it is. And the surface power dynamic isn’t always the underlying power dynamic. It’s not visually obvious. Dominants can be abused, even raped.” It’s also not necessarily more difficult to be in a submissive role. “There’s a lot of work involved in being a dom [industry lingo for the dominant partner in a BDSM encounter], and in my case, it’s the sub [the submissive partner] who’s being serviced, they’re the boss, they’re the one telling me what to do. I can have a shitty level of control sometimes. If I’m having a shitty month and need money, I’ll do things I wouldn’t do—like I normally wouldn’t do golden showers,

but I did them when I’ve needed the money. It’s also physically demanding—if you flog someone for an hour, your arm’s gonna hurt.”

In spite of the job’s drawbacks, it’s still a steady job, because in the sex worker economy, dominatrixes are always in demand, according to Madeira. “There’s a gender imbalance in the BDSM community. There are more male subs than female doms,” Darling said. “And people have some really specific, elaborate fantasies. It’s hard to find a partner who’ll do that.” She added that a number of clients often also have issues with their sexuality they find difficult to discuss.

“I often will get a client who really needs a therapist. Men seek out sex workers because they feel safe opening up to them—you see so many men crying as a sex worker. So I listen, and try to get them a referral for a therapist. You need boundless empathy for the job.”

Darling has friendships with other sex workers, and has found an online community of sex workers on Tumblr. “Sex workers form bonds, because it’s not easy to talk to others. We swap stories about work. We’re very human. I have zero compunction about seeing a body naked. It’s not gross, it’s human, it’s vulnerable. It’s a caring profession like any other.”

The same day that the news came out about Operation Backpage, Donna Hughes penned an op-ed in the Providence Journal on the movie Pretty Woman and the myth of prostitution she claims it perpetuates. “Prostitution is not a romantic comedy any more than domestic violence or acquaintance rape are funny love stories,” Hughes writes, calling clients “cruel men” with little concern and even sometimes malice for the workers they pay. Yet others, like Darling and Basler-Francis, question the conflation of sex trafficking with prostitution, and the safety Hughes claims criminalization brings. According to Basler-Francis, “When people talk about sex work, they focus on the sex and not the work.

Sex work is a job, and like all jobs, there are a number of occupational hazards—except for sex workers, the hazards are more dangerous because the job itself is illegal. Sex workers are denied labor protections because society has issues with sexual agency.”

JANE ARGODALE B'18 is a broad term.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE DEPARTMENT Funding Athletics at Brown

by William Underwood & Sam Bresnick

On March 7, the Brown men’s basketball team concluded its 2014–15 season with a road loss to Harvard, the eventual Ivy League champions, sinking the Bears’ overall record to 13–18 and locking the team into a tie for last place in the conference with Penn. The loss was the final disappointment in a season that included highs (such as an upset win over Providence College), many lows (including multiple five-game losing streaks), and instability within the program, evidenced by the departures of an assistant coach and three players over the course of the season, including the team’s leading scorer.

The futility of the 2014–15 Brown men’s basketball team is not an outlier in the school’s athletics department.

Indeed, Brown’s 38 athletic programs—the second highest number in the Ivy League and the fourth highest number in the country—as of 2014 had the fewest Ivy League championships in the prior decade: 15, or four fewer than seventhplace Dartmouth and 90 fewer than first-place Princeton.

The Brown University Athletics Department Strategic Plan 2014–2019, released last fall, responded to this poor record, which includes the lowest average overall finish in the annual Ivy League standings over the past decade, by arguing, “we owe it to our students, and the tradition of excellence at the university, to change [that record].”

How to do so, exactly? The Strategic Plan offered by the Athletics Department includes references to competitive salaries for program staff, improvements to facilities, financial aid matching for incoming student-athletes, and increased funding, given that Brown currently has lower expenses than any other department in the Ivy League. As the report observes, there is a direct correlation between expenses and program success in college athletics. Spending more means winning more.

In 2013-14, the Brown men’s basketball program received $208,792 in total funding—less than men’s rowing, men’s ice hockey, and football—but received $16,061 per participant, the highest total of any program at the University.

Most of that money is spent on personnel, uniforms, travel expenses, and recruiting. For comparison, Harvard—the Ivy League champion—spent $326,691 on men’s basketball in the same year, or $20,418 per participant. Beyond those numbers, it is difficult to determine how money in the Athletics Department is allocated.

The US Department of Education’s report on equity in athletics documents that $7,682,470 of Brown’s 2014 athletic expenses—totaled at $19,547,026­—is not earmarked for specific programs. Even more frustrating is the impossibility of viewing how much money is actually lost. The Athletics Department operates independently from the University, and is reimbursed for its expenses at the end of each season.

May 1 2015

So, if the Athletics Department incurs roughly 20 million dollars in expenses, for example, and only makes ten million dollars in revenue on its own, the University will reimburse the Department that difference. As a result, Brown’s expenses and revenues are reported to be exactly equal, both across the Department and within each individual program. This process hides the Department’s large losses from the public eye.

In a report on revenues and expenses in Division I athletics, the NCAA observed that Division I-FCS programs (of which Brown is one) generated in 2012 a median net revenue of negative $10,219,000, not including Direct or Indirect Institutional Support—the money given by the University to offset an athletics department’s losses. It seems likely, then, that the Athletics Department loses money, given that its expenses exceed the median Division I-FCS program by more than $5,000,000. Yet, the way that athletics expenses are reported occludes any certainty. +++ The Theater Arts Department is also underfinanced. In a recent class, a professor within the Department openly told students in the class that the Department would be letting every adjunct professor go due to financial constraints. In the Spring of 2014, graduate students at Brown protested a cut in financial support that left many students without funding beyond their fifth year of study. What justifies that Brown field the fourth largest athletics program in the country while doctoral students are unable to secure funding for their final years and adjunct professors are let go due to financial constraints?

The Athletics Department’s Strategic Plan gives a number of reasons, most of which fall under two general categories: community building and the experience of the studentathlete. The first of these rests on the claim that successful athletics cultivates pride among the university community.

“Competing in NCAA and other postseason championships,” the plan argues, “brings positive attention to both the athletics program and the University, while serving as a platform to mobilize an entire parents, friends and alumni base.” When athletics are promoted on campus, the report goes on to suggest, the University can more easily engage alumni and student networks. Yet, observing the near empty stands at many Brown University sporting events, that mobilization remains unfulfilled. Brown seems much more likely to rally around the open curriculum than the football team.

More convincing than the financial benefit of athletics or its contribution to the cohesion of the Brown community is the possibility that athletics bring students to campus who represent an array of backgrounds and perspectives that might be excluded from Brown otherwise. Importantly, too, these students—roughly 900 of Brown’s 6,000 students–gain in athletics participation “an enriching educational experience” that serves “as a complement to the classroom for learning, collaborative problem solving, teamwork, accountability, maturation and growth.” That’s the story offered by the Athletics Department Strategic Plan.

Increasingly, however, the great value of the studentathletic experience has come under scrutiny. The Pac-12 Conference—one of the NCAA’s wealthiest—recently released a study finding that Pac-12 athletes routinely spend 50 hours per week on their sport and are often too tired to study.

One Brown men’s basketball player reported practice being

scheduled at 6 am the morning before a third of the team had a midterm at 9 am.

The Brown Daily Herald outlined last week how Katie Flynn—head coach of Brown’s softball team—has verbally abused players throughout her tenure at the school. Flynn publicly humiliated team members in front of their peers, making recurring comments about players’ bodies. Only three of the team’s 12 underclassmen in 2012 remain on the team.

The report is troubling, and it is tempting to regard the case of Coach Flynn and the softball team as an isolated, extreme incident. Yet the atmosphere described by the Herald pervades other programs as well.

The Brown men’s basketball program displays similar problems. Current and former players who spoke to the Independent anonymously told multiple stories of how head coach Mike Martin mismanages injuries, punishes players who privilege their academic work, and creates a culture of distrust and hostility within his program. One former player recalled how he was unable to enjoy any success the team attained because of how it reflected on Coach Martin. “I didn’t want to win if it made him look good.”

Multiple players described how Coach Martin fails to develop meaningful relationships with his players, and consistently does “whatever he thinks it takes to win”—though Brown’s record might suggest otherwise—despite the toll this attitude takes on players. It comes as no surprise that so many players leave the team. The departure of three players from the 2014–15 team echoes previous years, in which even seasoned upperclassmen receiving significant minutes of gametime elected to leave the team rather than continue to play for Martin. Players recalled how they were unable to complain to higher-ups in the Athletics Department, assistant coaches, or even trainers who enabled Martin to pressure injured players to compete. Is this the “student-athlete experience” the Strategic Plan invokes to authorize almost $20 million in athletics expenses every year to fund an uncompetitive department?

The point of this, again, is not to argue that Brown should defund its Athletics Department. However, it’s difficult to argue, as the Strategic Plan does, that the University should augment the athletics budget when the Department exhibits little ability to spend money effectively. It’s hard to tally the intangible value provided by the Athletics Department, but it’s clear there have been significant losses in terms of players’ health and happiness, as well as university funds. Recouping those losses, and executing the Athletics Department’s vision to “develop a high degree of trust and respect throughout the campus community,” begins with credibly disclosing the cost of athletics at Brown.

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BUSES INTO LAND SHARKS Alternative Theater in Providence

by Sophie Kasakove & Lisa Borst illustration by Layla Eshan

This is Rapid Transit They changed it last week, the 11 Broad St And the 99 in Pawtucket The opposite of a plaza, no convention, no center Not enough door for hospitality to enter The system is out of control Who keeps moving the landmarks?

They broke up the A and now B is too far Buses churn like land sharks You have to connect three times just to stand where you are.

— Can of Worms (Two-Stent Heart), Tenderloin Opera Company The Tenderloin Opera Company was founded by playwright Erik Ehn in September 1995 in San Francisco; it transplanted to Providence when he moved here six years ago. Every Friday at 1:30, around 10 of the constantly shifting membership of the Company meets at the Mathewson Street United Methodist Church in downtown Providence to write, read, and sing their stories. The group is made up of people who are homeless or formerly homeless, as well as friends and advocates.

The workshops culminate in the production of about two operas a year.

This past Saturday, the Tenderloin Opera Company (TOC) performed their latest opera to a small audience at The Church, a 45-minute production entitled “Can of Worms (Two-Stent Heart)” that was written collaboratively by the Company over the past year. The performance alternated between spoken narrative—in which the dozen-or-so performers shifted fluidly between roles—and bouncy, bassand keys-driven outsider-pop songs. Like most of the company’s work, the performance directly addressed issues of the homeless experience; sardonic jabs about the Kennedy Plaza renovations appeared multiple times through the performance, and one song, called “End of the Month,” centered around food stamps: “How many days til the first? / $200 gone in a snap.” The performance also frequently devolved into surreal fantasy: buses morph into sharks; a dog helps a woman give birth to a baby, which then turns into a cat. Each production has a specific theme; one of the themes of this year’s opera, Ehn told the audience before the performance, was schizophrenia.

Many members have found their way into the company’s ranks by word of mouth, or, even more often, by accident. The Mathewson Street Church is the site of several services and programs for people who are homeless and, until recently, ran an overnight shelter. The end of Tenderloin’s practices coincides with meetings of the Speakers Bureau, a volunteer-based program that offers debate and speech classes to the homeless. These projects, as well as a weekly community dinner at the church (which serves around 300 of Providence’s nearly 5,000 homeless people), bring together a small but active community of the homeless and their advocates under one roof on Fridays. Many of these projects, like the Speakers Bureau and Street Sights, a newspaper by and for the homeless, are initiatives of the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless (RICH). +++ The Tenderloin Opera Company’s nontraditional membership, radical politics, and sight-specific content places it alongside several other alternative theater initiatives in Providence. For example, one of Tenderloin’s partners, The Manton Ave Project unites young people living in Olneyville with professional artists in a variety of free storytelling workshops. The Everett Dance Company, based in the Mount Hope neighborhood, brings together performers across cultures, generations, and economic backgrounds to explore social issues through performing arts. The most widely known community arts space in Providence, AS220, has become a national model for inclusive, public-access creative programming.

Ehn—who currently serves as head of playwriting at Brown University (formerly the dean of theater at CalArts)—explains that Providence’s small size makes it a perfect place for these sorts of projects to have an impact in a way that was impossible in a larger city like San Francisco. “Providence’s urban environment has the cultural diversity, abundant history and a range services that help create space for artistic expression as well as the urban problems of poverty, discrimination, and poor urban planning that spur activism,” says Ehn. “Activist theater is welcome here.”

The community is vibrant, but grassroots spaces for performance are limited and frequently shut down. DIY theatre spaces come and go across the city: this winter, for example, saw the closing of the Summer Street Dinner Theatre, a longrunning series of performances and dinners hosted in a warehouse space on the West Side. Its final show featured performances by the Tenderloin Opera Company, as well as by Beth Nixon, a Rhode Island native and Providence-based interdisciplinary artist who works under the self-reflexive name Ramshackle Enterprises.

Like Tenderloin, Nixon’s work features wandering plots, as well as enormous, meticulously crafted cardboard props. A heavy-hitter among many of Providence’s (frequently overlapping) alternative performance communities, Nixon mentors at

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

New Urban Arts, has helped make props for the Tenderloin Opera Company’s appearance at PRONK, and is a frequent performer at AS220.

“It’s heartbreaking when DIY spaces keep getting shut down,” Nixon told the Independent. “The loss of Summer Street is huge; they hosted so many amazing shows. My other favorite was Building 16, and before that Fort Thunder….

There are a couple others I’m not going to mention, because the more you mention them, the more they risk getting shut down.” +++ About halfway through the opera, the bus finally arrives.

NARRATOR: All of a sudden, a Ghost Bus—the “U-Line”­—stops by. The driver scoops them up. Next to them is Diamond Dog, who got on the wrong bus—this is a new/wacky bus line that sprung up during the Kennedy Renovation… The bus goes underwater to the Rocky Point Amusement Park, which has been rebuilt under the sea.

Like many arts initiatives that work with underserved communities, the Tenderloin Opera Company functions at once as a platform for creative expression and as a catalyst for critical, issue-specific awareness. “Can of Worms (TwoStent Heart)” weaves in and out of the fantastical, juxtaposing scenes specific to the experience of being homeless in Providence (like riding the RIPTA bus to the shelter or getting kicked out of the emergency room for disorderly conduct) alongside bizarre, dreamlike sequences (a tree outside a Providence homeless shelter gets drunk, a chatty cloud of smoke talks to the protagonist about her impending death). Indeed, the play’s frequently surreal narrative is meant to reflect the schizophrenia of its two protagonists, Ruth and Lawrence—both of whom are experiencing homelessness in Providence. The opera—which Ehn calls a “love story between two schizophrenics”—tracks Ruth and Lawrence as they meet, get married, and die, and then again as their ghosts find each other again under the Narraganset Bay. In many ways, the opera’s plot functions to raise awareness of the specific experience of facing homelessness and mental illness: watching it, one can almost (and only almost) grasp what it might be like to, for example, witness the disorienting destruction of Kennedy Plaza as a person experiencing homelessness: “We are desperate to find our way / 99 is not the R so far today / And Pawtucket Ave., no longer served / ...We are walking, walking again.” But, in its bizarre surreality, the opera also functions as a radical departure from reductive, essentialist narratives of homelessness.

MAY 1 2015

“All you have to do is scratch the surface of reality and it becomes surreality,” says Ehn. “What it’s like to be schizophrenic and homeless in Providence is extreme and any fantasies you build up around the facts don’t even rise to the level of the reality, so our fantasy actually represents a kind of restraint.”

Nixon, too, believes in fantasy as a tool for activist art, one that can diverge from essentialism or didactic storytelling. “Sometimes folks working in marginalized spaces essentialize or glamorize those spaces,” Nixon says. Oftentimes, people expect Nixon to facilitate art that explicitly reflects the condition of the group she’s working with. “But my approach is more like, these people share this experience in common, and along with that there are other parts of their humanity that, like all of us, could benefit from being expressed and painted and reimagined.” +++ After the last musical number in “Can of Worms”—a quietly slow tune called “Cool Change”— the company performed a final song as an encore, one mostly unrelated to the opera’s narrative. Called “For Wendy Tallo,” the song is a tribute to the death of a chronically homeless woman. Wendy Tallo was found dead in the Trinity Cemetery in October, 2014. Her death occurred within two months of the death of another homeless woman living in Rhode Island, Irene Weh, whose body was found in the same cemetery. Her death was speculated to be a suicide, but members of TOC believe firmly that both she and Weh were murdered.

Unlike the rest of the opera, the text of “For Wendy Tallo” does not circle around its subject matter with fantasy and dream imagery. “I still remember the last time I saw you / You stole a beer from June and motioned me not to say anything,” the song goes. “And it was getting late so I said / I am leaving Broad, going home / I said I love you, and be safe.”

Based on a letter written by a TOC member and friend of Tallo’s, the song departs from the company’s typical mode of meandering storytelling. It doesn’t conflate, hyperbolize, or disguise—instead it presents, simply and directly, a mundane scene: two real women in one real, familiar location, a Broad Street unobscured by talking animals or drunken trees. “And you said you love me, and be safe too,” the company sings. “And then this happened.”

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INCLUDED Special Education in Providence and Beyond

by Sara Winnick

On Tuesday, April 14, the cafeteria monitors at The Grace School are Dylan and Jada. Anthony handles the library. The teacher giving the morning announcements tells the 86 students of Providence’s The Grace School to “Remember to BARK!” before handing the microphone to a student I assume is not Dylan, Jada, or Anthony. A tiny voice says: “The R in BARK stands for Respect. Respect yourself and others. Give everybody personal space. Let them have private time.

Include everybody in play.”

The stakes of personal space, private time, and inclusion are higher at The Grace School than at other elementary schools in Providence. One-third of its students have severe disabilities, spanning the areas of speech and language, vision and hearing, behavior, and motor control. The inclusion model of the school places those students inside the same classrooms as the other two-thirds of students who are not identified as having special needs. Psychologists, therapists, and co-teachers assist in the classroom, making sure every student receives the support they need.

The inclusion philosophy of The Grace School extends beyond ability and disability. Meeting Street, the umbrella non-profit that runs The Grace School and other special education initiatives, chose its Eddy Street location specifically to attract a diverse demographic of students. Seventy-five percent of Grace School students receive partial or full scholarships to cover the $8,900 cost of annual tuition; scholarships come primarily through donations and federal aid.

Meeting Street’s $22,779,460 budget not only helps low-income students attend the school on a scholarship, it also purchased facilities strikingly welldesigned, accessible, and expensive. A 20-minute tour of the school reveals an indoor pool with the necessary infrastructure to allow every student to safely enter and exit the water, and a gym with bikes specially designed to accommodate physical handicaps. The wide ramps throughout the school are color-coded: brown means incline, where you have to wheel your wheelchair; green means flat, where you can rest. The library has computer screens that pull forward onto the laps of children who can’t reach a keyboard. There are SmartBoards, audiobooks, and iPads. There are no stairs. +++ “It was small,” says Fiori Berhane, former New York Teaching Fellow and Special Educator at Madam CJ Walker High School in the Bronx. “It was one floor of a school and we had 600 kids. And we had one bathroom. With four stalls. And it was 83 percent girls. So you can just imagine a certain level of over-crowdedness, it would take five minutes to walk 25 feet cause there were so many kids in the hallway. And trash. Trash was ubiquitous.”

Though CJ Walker High School is an unspecialized public school, according to Berhane, its proportion of students with special needs is five times the national average. At 40 percent special education (SPED) students, the stakes of personal space, crowdedness, and private time are arguably even higher at CJ Walker than they are at The Grace School. CJ Walker, however, has drastically fewer resources.

Berhane explains, “There was a lot about it that just made it structurally impossible to do your job correctly. And that was a big part of being a teacher there. It wasn’t just like the school was crowded, we also didn’t have enough books. Some kids needed literacy help but there wasn’t a room to do it in or there weren’t supplies to do it. I mean, on a day-to-day basis everything just didn’t work.”

Mainstreaming, or including students with special needs in public, general education classrooms, is a recent development in the United States. According to a report by the National Council on Disability, only one in five students with special needs was able to attend public school until as late as 1970. The minority of SPED students included in public schools were placed in separated, under-resourced classes that exacerbated learning difficulties and increased stigma against the non-normatively abled. Most states had laws in place that actively excluded such students from enrolling.

The first steps to admit students with special needs to public schools began in the late 1950s and early 60s, as a result of desegregation and the Disability Rights Movement. Brown v Board of Education proposed new definitions of equality and equity that expanded the project of public education. The Disability Rights Movement used the same rhetoric of broader inclusion and requisite resources to advocate for the inclusion of students with disabilities. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act first made federal funds available to help districts serve students with disabilities as a way to incentivize inclusion.

In the early 1970s, the gap between legislation and implementation was large. In 1971, the Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children (PARC) sued the state of Pennsylvania for denying access to public education to 282 mentally handicapped children in the state. PARC won the case in federal court; the decision declared that all students with special needs were entitled to a “free appropriate education” in the “least restrictive environment possible” until age 21, an enormous victory. Because the PARC case was a debate about inclusion versus exclusion, the phrase “least restrictive environment” meant the least isolated learning environment. Full inclusion of SPED students in mainstream classrooms was the goal. Students with disabilities, however, require extra accommodations to render general education classrooms non-restrictive. The PARC decision not only mandated that students previously excluded from schools, or from mainstream classrooms within schools, had to be included; it also stated that such students were legally entitled to whichever accommodations rendered those classrooms “least restrictive” for learning.

The following year, seven handicapped students sued the District of Columbia for expelling them from schools because of the severity of their disabilities.

In the case of Mills v The Board of Education of the District of Columbia, the DC Board of Education argued that the students had been excluded because the district did not have the money to cover the costs of accommodations. The federal court ruled that lack of money did not justify excluding students with disabilities, who were entitled to equal treatment at any cost under the 14th amendment.

The PARC and Mills decisions represent the largest federal investment in meeting individual needs of a specific group of students in the history of US education. The cases began a process of investing thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of federal dollars to serve students with special needs.

With a legal mandate to educate students with special needs for free, and massive amounts of federal funds made newly available, the percentage of students identified as SPED rose significantly in the last three decades of the twentieth century. This rise was due in part to a greater awareness and attention to special education, as well as a decreasing stigma against having special needs.

However, as historian Adam Nelson points out in “Equity and Special Education,” many school districts also realized they could maximize state aid by maximizing the number of students they placed in special education, and identified

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students accordingly. In the four years between 1977 and 1981, the percentage of students identified as having learning disabilities rose by 83 percent nationally. +++ According to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a person qualifies as having a disability if they have a “physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.” Under the Rehabilitation Act, “major life activities” include eating, sleeping, standing, and learning, as well as the ability to read, concentrate, think, or communicate.

In the education world, the term “special needs” encompasses three disability categories: physical, mental, and emotional. Physical impairments, such as deafness or visual impairment, usually require specific, materials-based interventions. A student who is blind, for example, requires reading materials in Braille.

Mental disabilities, categorized broadly as “generalized learning disabilities,” encompass a wide array of diagnoses. Generalized learning disabilities refer to students with significantly low IQ scores, or difficulty learning through a specific area of the brain, i.e. dysgraphia (deficiency in ability to write), dyslexia (read) or dyscalculia (calculate). The third category, emotional disabilities, constitutes the least defined area of disability, and involves things like “oppositional defiant disorder,” when students exhibit patterns of argumentative or angry behavior.

Beyond specific areas of categorization, all students have different abilities.

Students with excellent hand-eye coordination, fine-tuned motor control, or an ability to sit still are often more successful in the classroom than students who don’t have those skills. A student who loves math may have a harder time with reading. Most students get frustrated with authority from time to time. The diagnosis debate looms large: what separates a student with trouble focusing from a student with ADHD? What is the difference between preferring science to having dyslexia? Although the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has guidelines for identification for special education categories, to a certain degree where the line is exactly drawn is arbitrary.

The name ‘special’ education comes from ‘specialized’ education—education that caters to the unique needs of a specific student. In the language and literature of special education, ‘specialization’ is referred to as the process of ‘differentiation’—tailoring classroom curriculae and pedagogy to meet the unique needs of each individual student. Though differentiation has specific applications when working with a student with special needs, it is largely recognized as a good teaching practice for all effective educators.

Amy Rego is one such effective educator. As a resource teacher at the K–6 Highlander Charter School in South Providence, she describes her job as “a specialist who collaborates with classroom teachers for different ways to help students learn.” Rego received a teaching degree as a Special Educator from Salve Regina before completing the Providence Alliance for Catholic Teachers Program at Providence College. Though she is trained as a special educator, she presented her work to the Independent as useful for working with any student: “Just like with everything, the way that people interpret information is different, so when we’re looking at curriculum and common core standards, it’s our job to think of all the different ways and representations we can use to help students learn and grow.” Similarly, Chief Operating Officer of Meeting Street, Amanda McMullen told the Independent, “One of the really amazing things that I think comes

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particularly from having a special education background is that those teachers have a training and almost a natural bent to meet a child exactly where they are.

It benefits all students.”

Though differentiation and specialization are, in Rego’s words, “best practice for all students,” there are important differences between students who have been identified as having special needs and students who have not. It would be dangerous to conflate a student with cerebral palsy, for example, with a student who is able-bodied. However, many students have significant learning needs that do not fall under the category of special needs. For example, the experiences of students who are homeless, or students who are refugees, profoundly impact those students’ ability to succeed in school. The largest difference between a student with an identified learning disability and a student whose family is temporarily living in a shelter may only be that one is guaranteed an intervention regardless of its cost, and the other is not.

Despite the profound legislative, judicial, and monetary investment the United States has made in educating students with special needs since 1960, the current educational landscape is not a simple binary of identified SPED students receiving the resources they need and non-identified, non-special education students not. Even within the realm of the 12 percent of SPED students nationally, there is a divide between schools that are structurally able to comply with the law and schools that are not. Highlander Charter School, for example, caps its classes at 18 students. Only 11 percent of the students in the school are SPED. Such students and their teachers have the support of people like Amy Rego, who spends her days discussing how to best meet their individual needs.

Ms. Rego told the Independent, “students [at Highlander] are getting exactly what they need. They are in their least restrictive environment, and are given tools to succeed within the regular education classroom.” She adds, “I definitely think it’s unique.”

Highlander Charter, like The Grace School, operates outside of the traditional system of public education. Both schools are housed in beautiful, newly renovated buildings, serve a specific and small demographic of students, and leverage private and public funding to comply with a federal mandate to provide a free, appropriate education to students with special needs in their least restrictive environment. CJ Walker High, on the other hand, is a regular public school.

It does not have new facilities, shared planning time, nor the ability to select its students. It does not have the privilege of complying with federal law. Brehane explains, “Underserved communities and under-resourced schools can’t follow the mandate of the law. A lot of the kids should have stayed in a less restrictive environment but we didn’t have enough rooms in the school to do it. We just didn’t even have enough manpower, not even to do the kind of documentation that is necessary to comply with the law. So the law just becomes a punitive action when you don’t have enough resources to meet the needs of kids who have, who really have, a lot of needs.”

SARA WINNICK B’15’s least restrictive learning environment is Brown.

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ONE MORE SUCK AT YOUR LIFE The Lyrical Mutations of Can and Sun Ra

by Greg Nissan illustration by Pierie Korostoff She can have she, like her birthday, sooth To sing swan song - Damo Suzuki, “Sing Swan Song” (songmeanings.com) vs.

Shaking her shimmer like you buzz, They soothe to the sing swan song - Damo Suzuki, “Sing Swan Song” (lyricsmania. com)

+++ It swaps best friends every decade—squealing guitars, lounge-warm keyboards, a jazzy drum and bass loop—but the voice is pop music’s undeniable favorite child.

Music critics certainly haven’t ignored this fact: the front(wo)man is almost always the one with the mic to their lips. Say, Mick Jagger’s sassy croon, even when the rest of the band is hanging on Keith Richards’s every strum. It makes sense beyond the obvious fact that the singer is the one up front. He or she’s the one who gets to tie music’s abstraction to some sort of concept, to give it a what. Isn’t that connection—the swelling emotion of music tied to life as it’s lived—what we want?

So why do so many critics ignore lyrics, or at best sequester them to analysis removed from the music and the singer’s performance? For every Greil Marcus, the original Rolling Stone review editor who explicates in reference to how they’re sung, there are 1,000 reviewers happy to stamp “and the lyrics are ___” at the end of a review. There are plenty who would claim the decline of lyrics, such as John Tierney’s 2011 New York Times article about psychologist Nathan DeWall’s “discovery” that pop lyrics have become more narcissistic. But even bad lyrics can be revealing: a top 40 club banger resting on “make the night last forever” still takes an aesthetic position. As it refuses to elaborate what its imperative means, it seems to suggest, listen to the music, not to what I’m saying, and let the blandness of the phrase open the music up.

As almost anyone who’s visited a lyric website can attest, lyrics read pretty badly without music. Take the legendary opening lines of America’s most legendary lyricist’s defining song, Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”: Once upon a time you dressed so fine You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?

If you turned this in for a creative writing workshop, I can only imagine the pandering you’d secure yourself. But when Dylan snarls the scathing lines, his pinched voice like salt in a wound, accenting the rhymes with a violent percussiveness, they don’t seem so trite at all: a blistering take down of “slumming it” as an upper middle class brand of tourism. The secret’s not in the lyrics, or Dylan’s voice alone: it’s in the way his voice brings an angle to the lyrics, brings language into a living body.

An industry around lyrics is booming; Google has begun to offer lyric search results in its contest with Genius, a lyric listing and explication site that has become the new standard for online lyric sites. Its listings feature analysis from anonymous users all the way to Nas. Even on Genius, lyrics live in a fantasy world: they’re treated with high school English analysis, and the vocal performance disappears to make way for this interpretation. And, as with the lyrics of Can’s Damo Suzuki that begin this article, what happens when a singer mines the gray zone between sonic and semantic content, when it’s not even clear how to write them down? +++ Sun Ra was from Saturn, plain and simple. After he teleported to the planet in college, he was convinced to drop out, change his birth name, and change the world. When the influential jazz musician and Afrofuturism pioneer was asked

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about his connection with his birth name in the documentary Cosmic Swing, he said, “That’s an imaginary person, never existed…Any name that I use other than Ra is a pseudonym.” Ra’s music with his band The Arkestra, especially in their New York period in the 60s, seems to confirm his impossible origins: their free jazz finds the pressure points where music bleeds into noise, and on the flip side where atonal noise greets us like some ethereal music. A murky jazz jam will shoot off into a whining unaccompanied horn for four minutes, then back to earth and its rotation.

Ra’s embrace of Black nationalism and his cultivation of Afrofuturism, where he posited his own view of the African diaspora’s history, refused to abide by the state’s approach to blackness. His musical experiments are inseparable from this role, as he didn’t merely want to change how we perceive sound, but to aim this perception toward American’s destructive tendencies. While most of Ra’s musical innovations and derangements take place at the instrumental level, there are moments in his oeuvre where he shatters standardized language into gorgeous technicolor shards. His moniker is its own linguistic doubling, a unique name that can’t be reduced in its duality without colonizing: the English word “Sun” and the Egyptian sun god. And as with the spelling of The Arkestra, Ra’s otherworldly status allows him to curb standard language toward his own invention.

Nowhere is this more lyrically clear than in 1982’s “Nuclear War” off the album of the same name.

The track, recorded during the Arkestra’s tamer, swing-influenced Philadelphia period, is sonic white bread compared to the interstellar jazzfucks of his earlier work. But its lyrical call-and-response is a perfect instance of his extraterrestiral revisions of language. When Ra took the album to Columbia records, positive he was sitting on a potential mainstream breakthrough, they turned him away for lyrics like, “It’s a motherfucker, don’t you know / if they push that button, your ass gotta go.” The nearly eight-minute single, a laid-back piano groove, was eventually released on Britain’s post-punk Y Records, and then in Italy two years later.

If you look at a lyric website for this song (here a Tumblr lyric page called Lyrica Aesthetica), here’s what you’ll find for the first verse: Nuclear War Nuclear War They’re talkin’ about Nuclear War Nuclear War Nuclear War They’re talkin’ about Nuclear War This transcription is horribly off, by necessity. Ra coins his own pronunciation of “nuclear,” huffing the word out as something phonetically closer to “nooka-lur.” This isn’t the “nook-you-lur” that George Bush would drop decades later.

Ra’s bouncy pronunciation is odd, yet pointed: the way “nuke” emerges as the first burst of sound over bubbling piano seems to unearth the knee-jerk horror in “Nuclear War,” as well as the verb “nuke.” This may seem like an over-reading, giving conceptual gloss to a mistake, plain and simple. But you’d be wrong to think Ra is ignorant of the “correct” pronunciation: as the song progresses, his background singers obediently echo his phrases, a Greek Chorus with the needle stuck. In cleaner voices, they sing “nuclear war,” standard American pronunciation. This call-and-response takes on a sinister dissonance, as Ra later drawls about “mutation” and “radiation.” Sometimes the two versions of “nuclear” are sounded at once, the mutation layered over the standard. From this dissonance emerges Ra’s self-realized power as an otherworldly alien: to refract the limits of human communication into fresh utterances. All the while, the chords swell, slowly cruising toward a resolution the lyrics suggest will never be reached in the face of imperialist destruction. When Ra finally whispers “you can kiss your ass goodbye” at the song’s end, it almost sounds like a graceful send-off to earth, an effect beyond eerie.

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For Ra, standard pronunciation is not merely a pedantic linguistic concern. How could it be for someone so foundational to the development of Afrofuturism? Standard American English has been used for racist means to degrade Black American culture for deviating from this standard, itself a theoretical fiction. Ra dramatizes this white linguistic imperialism and its resistance, with a simple echo of the term “nuclear war” that better accommodates the complex code-switching that being Black in America necessitates. Ra is bold enough to face this hegemony and riff of it with musical spark above a trotting beat, to improvise his own form. Sun Ra’s mutation embraces the varieties of speech as creative elements, not ones to be corrected. Flattened to a lyric website, this subversive motion loses force, collapsing into the standard it pushes against. Sometimes, that’s what’s at stake in severing performance and music from semantic content: a white-washing, reverting to bland abstracts. “It’s a motherfucker, don’t you know,” Ra yawps. +++ Can is one of those perennially-cited bands whose influence is touted much more than their actual music. Even if you haven’t heard them, you’ve heard them.

When Radiohead digs into a trance-like drum and bass groove, that’s Can talking. When Stephen Malkmus of Pavement’s vocal freak-outs split open his candy melodies, that’s Can talking. But a first listen of Can’s albums with Japanese frontman Kenjo “Damo” Suzuki—a string of four from 1971’s Tago Mago to 1974’s Soon Over Babulama—is startling to say the least. With such charismatic frontmen like Malkmus and Thom Yorke championing their sound, it’s surprising to hear Damo Suzuki’s half-singing, half-squealing, and sometimes whispering in broken English or no language at all. Unlike the voices of rock music’s pantheon, Suzuki’s seems forever out of focus, perched on the border between sound and speech. And that’s exactly why he’s such a seductive frontman: he draws attention in spastic bursts to the voice’s primacy in music and how singing can communicate ideas and feelings where language breaks down.

Can was a peculiar assemblage of musicians from Cologne, Germany.

Keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and bassist and producer Holgar Czukay studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the most influential avant-garde composers of the twentieth century. Disenchanted free jazz drummer Jaki Liebezeit, who became famous in Can for his “Motorik” beat—essentially, a chugging kick-kicksnare-kick—provided the rhythmic bedrock to Can’s experimentation, along with Czukay’s hypnotically simple bass lines. Guitarist Michael Karoli emerged in a younger generation with psychedelic rock inclinations. This amalgam of free jazz, oddball ambient electronics, tribal percussion, and noodling guitar work was already an uncanny brew with American singer Malcolm Mooney at the helm.

But the band’s canonical work comes with Suzuki, whom Can noticed busking on the street in Munich in May 1970 after Mooney’s departure. They asked him to perform with them that night.

Can was interested in what “world music” might look like. It’s not the world music popularized by Paul Simon’s Graceland, which married African musical traditions and musicians with Simon’s pop stylings. Less than the appropriation that’s become a primary color in rock ‘n’ roll (think Mick Jagger’s southern accent on Exile, or the existence of the Stones at all), it’s a dramatization of appropriation, crashing cultures into each other rather than merely borrowing choice elements. This schizophrenic approach calls attention to the variety of sonic communities and creates something that doesn’t merely take one foreign element into the building of rock ‘n’ roll, but dissolves the whole edifice.

1971’s Tago Mago, the album that put the band on the map, is chock full of long improvised jams. It’s a different kind of jamming than the circle-jerk soloing found in many jam bands and prog rock groups of the time. Czukay cribbed Miles Davis’s technique of recording long jams and then manipulating them in the studio. The result is free-flowing “instantaneous compositions”—often just the pounding madhouse of Can’s rhythm section—to be curated later on. The most famous of the album’s tracks is the 18-minutes-and-change “Halleluhwah,” a gut-punch funk beat meandering with trance-like simplicity and high-frequency guitar squeals. Suzuki’s first verse is a surreal mash of images, made even more so by Suzuki’s almost-unrecognizable pronunciations. The title itself takes a phrase of religious jubilation and blends it with Karoli’s “wah wah” pedal, a word of ecstasy blurring into a sonic reverie. Suzuki’s first verse, in languid mumbling and ecstatic shrieks:

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Did anybody see the snowman standing on winter road With broken guitar in his hand, onion peeling sleepy eye?

It’s my recording station man I record in his head Knowing that too big mouth, oh ice can flow away, one knows

The grammar is as distorted as Suzuki’s pronunciation. But for a band of such cultural amalgamation, this isn’t Suzuki’s weakness: in fact, its his borderdwelling strength, drawing attention not to foreign language as an ornament of anthropological interest, but to any language as an echo chamber that is not synonymous with sensory experience, yet inseparable from it.

The cathartic break comes when Suzuki, his voice almost married to Koroli’s guitar cries at this point, rattles out, over and over, “Halalalalalalalalalalalaluwah.”

He loses himself in a sort of la-la glossalalia of song, chanting his invented word where the semantic meaning is far less important than the possessed intensity Suzuki brings. His lyrics and antics are hardly a utopian dream, but an unravelling of how language conveys meaning in music. Liebeszeit’s fixed drumming becomes more a means of “sense making” than Suzuki’s lyrics, as the frontman is caught in a linguistic and stylistic Bermuda triangle. Suzuki is more than just an anti-frontman: he twists and shouts his words until we can’t tell front from back, only aware of the various angles and tongues one can sing from. +++ I wonder if there’s a possible future in which music journalism doesn’t cut the head off the beast before deciding what creature it is. In a marketplace that depends on quick consumption, it’s hard to imagine linguistic erosions like those of Sun Ra or Can garnering the same attention as songs with “messages,” or tracks with a decided lack thereof. Which only makes an appreciation of these gray zones between language and music all the more important: to attest that lyrics are not merely a means toward a neatly categorized product, but a rattling exploration of what it means to mean. While these groups aren’t necessarily connected in a historical lineage, Ra’s linguistic “mutations” help me understand Can, and vice versa. As Suzuki spits out on Ege Bamyasi’s “One More Night”: “One more Saturday night…one more suck at your life.” The mutation, Suzuki’s mishearing breaking “Saturday night” into shards of other words, begets a new and far more thought-provoking meaning. When I listen to the experiments of artists like Sun Ra and Can, I get the sense that lyrics aren’t just a recapitulation of themes in a tradition, but a subversive forward shove toward a new meaning, a new angle, toward one more suck at your life.

GREG NISSAN B’15 is sonic whitebread.

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ABOUT A FILM About a Book

by Eli Neuman-Hammond

I’m a person writing an article about a movie (The End of the Tour) about a person (David Lipsky) writing an article about a person (David Foster Wallace) who writes (most prominently Infinite Jest), but it’s probably a mistake to begin this article with that deadly pronoun (I), as it has really been quite problematic since Wallace’s suicide in 2008. Much of the ever-growing posthumous literature on Wallace seems captivated with trying to represent, or even "resurrect," in the words of movie reviewer David Fear, Wallace’s illusive pronoun since his death. The American public has proven unready to let Wallace go. A somewhat voyeuristic, memorializing, and exploitative conversation has emerged alongside a field of critical work on Wallace: Lipsky's recently published book (which serves as the basis of the new film); two recent biographies; the newly compiled anthology of Wallace's work; and, now, The End of the Tour: On the one hand, an artist’s product can’t be understood abstracted from the artist’s life; however, to see the artist’s text as a cryptogram, holding a secret and powerful knowledge of the artist’s life, is a shallow relationship to that work. In The End of the Tour, criticism of the romanticized idea of Wallace, and the relationship between the person and his work, gives way to romanticization itself. It’s not a failure of a movie (it premiered to wide acclaim at Sundance this year) and it will no doubt satisfy many of Wallace’s fans, but its core idea— to offer a window into the real David Foster Wallace—is a fundamentally flawed point of departure. +++ The movie follows aspiring Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) as he interviews Wallace (Jason Segel) at the end of his 1996 book tour for Infinite Jest. Imagine Almost Famous translated out of a musical context into a literary one. For the most part, a protracted conversation between the two writers—one aspiring and the other on the crest of critical success—deputizes for a traditional narrative.

The one, intrigued by the success of the sprawling masterpiece of the other, wants to see if that other lives up to the words he has written. It’s likely a similar desire that has driven the film’s audience into the theater in the first place: the chance to meet a once-in-a-generation writer, a mega-hyped ‘genius’ destined to revolutionize literature.

In this sense, Lipsky is at the center of the film: it’s a tease when the audience sees Lipsky instead of Wallace in the first shot of the film, in which the young man sits in a cave of books, writing on his laptop. Wallace’s appearance is skillfully deferred, and the audience realizes that the movie is going to be about Lipsky, the reporter who gets to peep in on Wallace, instead of Wallace himself. It’s a perfect set-up to reach that unreachable (except via imagination) person we want so badly to understand. Lipsky is a fan of Wallace, but, like most of the audience, doesn’t actually know him.

The trick of The End of the Tour is that it plays at undoing the reductive, questionably exploitative work of a journalist writing for Rolling Stone, whilst accomplishing that very work once again in the form of a movie. The two writers speak often of the interview process itself: the license a writer has to twist words, frame actions, and paint a picture—a picture that will, above all, grab readers and sell magazines, even, potentially, at the expense of the interviewee. Both

feel ambivalent about the whole endeavor—Wallace for fear of misrepresentation and/or looking egocentric and Lipsky because he empathizes with Wallace. Both, after all, are writers. The End of the Tour is not the Rolling Stone article: it is an image of the raw material for that article, before it gets sifted and manipulated with the ever-important quarterly earnings report in mind. But the difference between a real conversation and an image of that conversation is substantial.

The movie is a conversation on display, rendered for an audience to relate to, take pleasure in, and pay for, not a private, safe, unprofitable conversation between two writers.

Furthermore, any trust between Lipsky and Wallace (which might have been genuine back in 1996, when they actually spoke to each other) is a façade here. Wallace is not around to vet his own representation, which, although it might in some ways act as a tribute and an expression of truth, also turns him into a commodity.

One of the most potent recurring themes for David Foster Wallace was the impossibility of connecting to human beings via a spectatorial relationship to a TV screen—it’s always “to,” never “with.” In his essay “E Unibus Pluram,” he remarks that “to the extent one begins to view pseudorelationships with Bud Bundy or Jane Pauley as acceptable alternatives to relationships with real humans, one has commensurately less conscious incentive even to try to connect with real 3D persons, connections that are pretty important to mental health.” In “Federer as Religious Experience,” Wallace is limpid about the same basic fact: “The truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.” In other words, while television is far from condemnable, it is insofar as it presumes to substitute for real relationships. There’s maybe something perverse about an image that tries to say, “I’m real.”

The End of the Tour’s lack of narrative and apparent artifice, rather than making the film a more appropriate mirror of reality, makes the whole film feel a bit awkward. The film doesn’t tell a story as other recent biopics do (The Social Network or Walk the Line, for example), but merely gives the audience an entry-point into a presumed ‘real’ experience—a conversation with Wallace. Under the weight of this mission, Segel’s performance often gives way to reality: words ring hollow, gestures seem uncanny put-ons. +++ But the most troubling aspect of The End of the Tour is the Wallace Estate’s forthright objection to the film. In a public statement from April 2014, the Estate said that “The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust, David's family, and David's longtime publisher Little, Brown and Company wish to make it clear that they have no connection with, and neither endorse nor support The End of the Tour.” The statement continues: “The individuals and companies involved with the production were made keenly aware of the substantive reasons for the Trust’s and family’s objections to this project, yet persisted in capitalizing upon a situation that leaves those closest to David unable to prevent the production.”

An expositive film on Wallace might have worked against the undue and damaging romanticization of Wallace as a ‘disturbed genius’: this one capitalizes on it. Lipsky is an example of the fan who doesn’t believe in Wallace-as-a-

human being, and instead looks for spectacular displays of intelligence at every turn. Instead of just being with Wallace, Lipsky searches for a narrative that frames Infinite Jest as some comeback from heroin addiction or a hospital stint. Lipsky refuses to believe in Wallace as a person, and instead sees a genius in full control of his character: everything he says is carefully chosen, every atom of ‘regular guy-ness’ is a façade.

Wallace protests, asserting his humanity, but does not convert his interlocutor—first in an argument as the two drive back to Wallace’s home, then at home, in a violent disagreement that erupts when Lipsky fishes for details about Wallace’s past.

But in spite of these explosive conflicts, the film makes no substantial criticism of Lipsky’s relationship with Wallace: the two writer-bros part with tears in their eyes, and we cut to a scene of Lipsky eulogizing Wallace, years later (in spite of the fact that the two only spent a few days together and kept in zero contact afterwards). Perhaps if director James Ponsoldt had pushed their dynamic to a greater extreme, showing how romanticizing one’s idols obfuscates their humanity, he might have continued in Wallace’s tradition of critiquing American modes of escapism. Except now the object of critique would be the connection between an audience and the critic himself.

Here it’s worth mentioning the conditions under which I saw the movie: in a big auditorium packed full of educated white people, many of whom would, I imagine, cite Infinite Jest as a favorite book. In other words, surrounded by Lipskyites, who, I worry, might be willing to overlook the Wallace Estate’s objections and the exploitative nature of such a film for the sake of getting a glimpse of their idol, just as Lipsky was willing to overlook the moral implications of writing an article (or, in the end, a book) that would sell. +++ Of course, The End of the Tour must be read in light of Wallace’s suicide, if not just because his not being alive is likely the only condition of possibility for the film, then also because his not being alive frames the film, serving as the entry and exit points of the movie. Before entering the movie, Wallace is dead—then, within the movie, at the beginning, Wallace dies again, and Lipsky proceeds to remember the time spent with him, before ultimately cutting back to the present in which Wallace just died—and then the movie ends, and Wallace is dead (really) once again. Because of this flashback format, the question of Wallace’s suicide lurks behind every Lipsky-Wallace conversation. Then, when the movie snaps back into the present, we hear Lipsky eulogize Wallace, ending the film in a moment of mourning. The whole movie/memory (which is Lipsky’s) is on account of Wallace’s death—and so to some extent it is a memory meant to explain Wallace’s death, or at least make it commensurate with Wallace and his writings. It’s also worth mentioning that the book on which The End of the Tour is based came out soon after Wallace’s death.

The market in which Wallace's work lives has in some senses been carved out by his death—it’s made it even more culturally profitable to read his work, and so economically profitable to make work about him. But now we’re seeing this market fold in on itself, and shape the work from which it springs. Wallace’s work (and work about it) is now such that, when read, because of its economic and cultural position, in fact critiques its own reading. How to reduce this paradox is beyond me.

ELI NEUMAN-HAMMOND B’18 is a Foster child.

The End of the Tour is coming to theatres in a limited-release on July 31.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

A REVIEW OF DOPE

by Sara Winnick & Casey Friedman

The frame freezes: a grey Gameboy rotates as it falls, dark red blood splattered across the square screen. Early on in the newly released 2015 film Dope, lead character Malcolm (Shameik Moore) speaks of the dangers of being a nerd in the under-resourced, mostly Black community of Inglewood, CA. The shot depicts violence divorced from the context that created it. The image does not—and arguably cannot—speak to the decades of redlining and zoning laws that systematically diverted resources from schools, libraries, and businesses in non-white neighborhoods like Inglewood. We see only a Black man holding a gun, a Black ‘nerd’ playing Gameboy in line for food, and a glossy, well-lit still of the blood stained 90s emblem. In Dope, survival is a game; violence simultaneously muted, glamorized, unexplained.

Dope, written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa, tells the story of Malcolm, a young Black man who (as he points out in a tired, sarcastic tone in the film’s opening scene) is from a “poor, crime-filled neighborhood, raised by a single mother, do[es]n’t know [his] dad blah blah.” Malcolm attends an underserved high school but dreams of becoming, in his words, “a man of Harvard.” Unfortunately, early in the film Malcolm is saddled with a bunch of MDMA, and through an inconvenient coincidence he is forced to sell the drugs in order to get into college, with the help of his two best friends.

If the plot line sounds ridiculous, it’s supposed to. The film is self-aware and obvious with its hyperboles; Malcolm and his self-identified ‘nerdy’ best friends are decked out in brightly patterned 90s gear. Ultimately, though, the film’s satirical voice is subtle to the point of disappearing; as with the Gameboy shot, the consistent mix of extreme violence and stylized montages runs the risk of pacifying lived realities of structural oppression.

The bloodied screen is one of 12 shots shown in quick succession; the others show mundane high school scenes of bullies and band practice. Placed among these everyday images the shooting begins to seem ordinary and may speak to Malcolm’s necessary desensitization to violence from growing up in Inglewood. But it also—intentionally or unintentionally—gestures at a reality of structural violence that many viewers may only be familiar with through other mass mediated depictions of Blackness, like the nightly news. +++ Dope offers viewers nuanced depictions of Blackness in comparison to one-dimensional stock Black characters like the ‘token Black best friend’ or ‘the magical negro.’ One of the focuses of the film is about the relationship between taste, aesthetic, race, and identity. Malcolm identifies as geek: he and his friends are into punk music, skateboards, doing well in school—what he and his classmates identify as “white people stuff” early on in the film. Throughout his brief escapade in drug selling, the trio has to combine their stereotypically white qualities (computer science, chemistry) with stereotypically ‘Black’ actions (selling drugs, carrying a gun). At the end of the film, Malcolm challenges dichotomous assumptions of what constitutes white and Black behavior in his college essay to Harvard, which constitutes the film’s final monologue.

Malcolm, thus, represents a more nuanced, complicated, and ‘successful’ drug dealer than usually makes it to the big screen.

A young Black man who deals drugs—even one who uses computer science, chemistry and punk music to outsmart the adults around him and get into Harvard—is still a young Black man dealing drugs. Dope tries to break stereotypes of Black criminality by telling us Malcolm has good grades, ex-

MAY 1 2015

tracurriculars, test scores, but these are details about Malcolm presented through dialogue; audiences don’t see him doing homework at all throughout the film. What we do see him do is deal drugs. The one scene in the film where he does sit down to take a test is interrupted by a drug dog raid and ends with Malcolm in a bathroom holding a backpack of molly. So while Dope offers perhaps a degree of humor, complexity, and humanity to a certain kind of young, masculine Blackness we have come to expect from mass media, it does so by affirming the very stereotypes of Black criminality it attempts to disrupt. +++ What’s even more dangerous than the presentation of any singular character in Dope is the way the film defines race and racism. In Dope, race is reduced to a set of habits that roughly map onto a ‘nerd’ vs. ‘hood’ dichotomy. The descriptor ‘nerd’ is used synonymously with ‘white’ in the film. It means riding a skateboard, doing homework, staying in on a Saturday night. Blackness is its opposite: congregating in the street, carrying a gun, dealing drugs. The movie is self-conscious about this false binary and by the end, it has successfully disrupted it. Malcolm defies our understandings of whiteness and Blackness by creating a racial identity with attributes of both categories.

However, the problem with a hobby-based definition of race is illustrated most clearly by a scene in which Malcolm walks through the metal detector at his school with a backpack full of MDMA and a gun. The alarm rings, but Malcolm is waved through by the security guards. Supposedly, his ‘geek’ identity (defined by his stereotypically white attributes) renders the idea that he is carrying dangerous substances unfathomable. He is not stopped or searched. Later on, Malcolm and his friends use the school’s chemistry and computer labs to distribute drugs via the Internet. He says, “Nobody’s going to suspect a thing, we’re just geeks doing what geeks do.”

One way race operates, however, is by coding people phenotypically and judging their actions through the lens crafted by centuries of cultural narratives and systems that oppress or privilege based on race. As Michelle Alexander points out in The New Jim Crow, the activities of white fraternity members and Black gang members are remarkably similar, but our understandings of the same actions vary drastically depending on the skin color of the actor. When young white men congregate in large groups, drive fancy cars, smoke weed, and listen to hip-hop, they are viewed as youthful and harmless.

When Black men do the same thing, they are violent, dangerous, criminal.

The image of the young Black male gangster is part of a cultural narrative that dates back to slavery. Following emancipation, Black men were depicted as violent, dangerous, and incapable of self-control in order to justify lynching them to ‘protect’ innocent white women. Criminalized Black youth inherit the legacy of Black men as lawless, aggressive, and incapable of control. This narrative determines in part how young Black men’s actions are read and received.

It is therefore unlikely that a Black man, even in his own school, could walked through a metal detector with drugs and weapons in his backpack and not be at least stopped, at most searched or arrested. Race as a structural reality—beyond a set of individual hobbies or aesthetic choices—operates such that no amount of studying, punk music planning, or 90s hip-hop

knowledge could protect someone from being read as a young Black man, and therefore dangerous. The problem with Dope’s hobby-based definitions of race is that they don’t capture how race fully operates beyond personal stylistic choices. Race cannot be worn and removed depending on the situation; suggesting this overly individualizes race and ignores the confines that structure places on behavior. It has the potential to blame any Black man who is stopped and searched at a metal detector for not making the same ‘nerdy’ choices as did Malcolm. +++ It is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible to present three hundred years of racial oppression in a single film. And it is unfair to place the burden of explaining that history on a single Black director depicting, in part, his own experience. It is also unfair to state that Dope is completely sociologically or historically void—we see Malcolm’s school, his neighborhood, his home. But the images of systemic injustice in the film are incomplete. They provide enough information to gesture at a sociological and lived reality, yet then step away from giving the whole picture, setting the audience up to make dangerous assumptions about behavior and culture.

This would not be an issue if every viewer watching the film also grew up in Inglewood, or was otherwise familiar with racism’s structural and cultural legacies. Many viewers, however, do not fit this description. And in the absence of such an audience, the film’s nuances are too easy to misinterpret.

Malcolm attends an underserved school with a metal detector, yet he has nearly perfect SAT scores. By not mentioning the racial bias of the SAT, or showing how difficult it is to learn when your school is under-resourced, Malcolm’s character connotes that hard work is all it takes for a Black man from Inglewood to end up with the credentials to apply to Harvard.

The audience sees Malcolm and his friends avoiding dangerous areas as they ride home from school, but it’s couched in the terms of a video game: avoid the traps. The beautiful production and constant sunny weather tell us that everything is going to be okay.

In an interview for the Sundance Film Festival, Famuyiwa speaks about what it’s like to be a student where he grew up: “These kids have to face not only the daily struggles of gangs and drugs but also the low expectations sometimes of their schools, the teachers who don’t want to be there teaching them, the system that assumes that they’re up to no good even when they’re not.” Famuyiwa describes the systems that form the backdrop of his film. To a viewer who does not have this understanding, however, in a cultural context of either extremely negative images of Black people, or the rare exceptions used to say those systems do not exist, it’s going to take more than a paused image of blood on a Gameboy screen to unpack the racial realities that Famuyiwa’s film presents.

Dope is coming to theaters on June 19.

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STRANGE ABSENCES A Conversation with Junot Díaz

by Mika Kligler illustration by Teri Minogue

JD: I just am not so sure—again, I’m cautious about this—that writing about a guy who has a fucked-up world view around women, or who lives in an overwhelmingly masculine world… to me there seems to be a lot of value in that. And if you’re going to focus on a guy who lives in an overwhelmingly masculine world, well I mean shit, there are going to be some sacrifices, and certainly there are going to be some casualties in that there aren’t going to be a ton of women represented.

The question would be therefore: how do we represent the first without acknowledging the ontological damage that that literature does? I guess I thought that in some ways this whole project, if we’re talking about Drown directly, was a worthy error. For the reader, the worldview is suffocating, problematic, kind of awful. So I think, yeah, folks would long for a much more varied, real, and nuanced view. But that wasn’t the remit, man. That wasn’t what was at stake.

I tend to just argue for a closer reading of what’s happening structurally. If Drown had any success, it was in the ways in which it tracked the fatal arc of those universes. Yunior is encased in awful solitude, and that is intimately and tragically balanced with his inability to imagine women.

I guess my feeling around this is that because books speak to each other, and books are in conversation with each other, I never thought that this book would stand alone in great solitude. There was always the sense that its silence around women, its silence around women’s subjectivity and women’s agency would be in direct conversation with all of these books where none of that is true. I thought the idea was that the worldview would be damned, and not so much the writer. I don’t mind being damned if that helps the worldview be damned. It just felt like an okay risk to take. But I know the flaw is quite terrible—for some people, unforgivable.

At the time, I found no way around it.

The Indy: Do you think you’ve moved away from that strategy of allowing other books to speak to the agency of women?

JD: See that’s where I get a little nervous—it wasn’t like I transcended, or have become more talented…I stand behind the book even now. Let’s say I had done The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao first, and then I was suddenly struck with: yeah, I want to write what that world was like when I was 16, 17, 18. It’s nightmarish, myopic, patriarchal distortion. I wanted to write it from inside of it, and if that came next, I probably would have deployed the same exact tactics.

The shock of that world—to have it represented with no escape, I felt was part of the claim of the project.

The Indy: You do seem though—I mean yes, maybe you’re condemning this patriarchal worldview, but you do have a lot of sympathy for Yunior and for your other misogynist characters.

On the phone, Junot Díaz speaks more slowly than I thought he would. His books talk fast— Yunior, the Dominican-American semi-autobiographical narrator who runs through all three of Díaz’s works (two short story collections and one Pulitzer-winning novel), has a fierce high-low machismo voice, and when he calls the Haitian dictator Papa Doc “P-diddy,” you’re right there with him. Díaz, who was born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to New Jersey when he was a kid, tells me that his work is pulled along by the “strange, troubled, vibrant, half-crazed diaspora”; he writes around immigration and alienation, masculinity and misogyny, post-colonial intimacies of all sorts. He is avidly and outspokenly political, but has also been criticized on numerous occasions for the misogynist characters that populate his fiction. Here we talk about writing women, science-fiction, and Sun Ra. The College Hill Independent: “Otravida, Otravez” is your only short story with a female narrator—could you talk about writing women? How do you access female voice and why don’t you do it more often?

Junot Díaz: I don’t do it more often because my socialization and my training in conventional masculinity make writing women—authentic-sounding women—actually quite challenging.

It’s very hard being the average guy who grew up where I’m from, who wasn’t necessarily trained to be the best observer of women. And I would argue that in fact it takes a lot of work to get women right. To get them right at all.

The Indy: You’re often challenged about the misogynist characters in your work and you usually respond—correct me if I’m wrong—by saying that first of all, representation of misogyny is distinct from reification or endorsement of misogyny. And secondly, that you’re mapping male subjectivity with feminist aims in mind—you’re interrogating masculinity in the same way, maybe, that academics are starting to interrogate whiteness as opposed to blackness.

So I get this, I agree with you for the most part, but I also feel that sometimes in mapping male subjectivity, you erase female subjectivity. Your first book, Drown, fails the Bechdel test (at no point do two female characters speak to each other about something other than a man).

How do you balance exploring masculinity from the inside, through a misogynist narrator, without eliminating the agency and subjectivity of women all together?

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JD: But it’s literature, it’s not a political platform. The idea is that you’re writing about human beings, and that if people lose sight of the human being, and only see a political framework, it stops being art. I mean of course I have to create characters who are fully human. But I would argue that creating sympathetic characters, characters who are fully human, doesn’t always include sympathizing with them.

The Indy: So this is sort of a different approach to the question of gender, but I was wondering about bilingualism in your work. There are a few scenes in This is How You Lose Her where we see that Yunior struggles to express himself in Spanish, even though he identifies as Dominican.

I’m wondering about Yunior’s relationship, and your relationship, to the gendered metaphor of the ‘mother-tongue.’ If that holds weight for you.

JD: Oh yeah, I mean the idea of patria was always fascinating to me in Spanish. “The fatherland” as a female-ending word. I think one of the great debates in diasporic culture has everything to with how one maintains, holds, or loses the mother tongue. I was fluent in Spanish, almost entirely lost my Spanish, and then regained it enough to be functionally bilingual. So having been what I jokingly call an immigrant twice in language, first in English and then in Spanish, made me want to give both that complexity and challenge to my characters.

The Indy: When you’re writing, how well do you get to know your peripheral characters? Does the process of mapping out characteristics differ when you’re writing male and female peripheral characters? Do you think about different aspects of personhood?

JD: I think that’s sort of a leading question. It’s not a series of cupcakes, where you say okay, let me work on cupcake one, and then that’s done and you move on to the next cupcake. We’re talking about a world. You use what you can to represent that world. And some of the characters are absolutely minor but utterly essential, where as some characters are central and yet do almost no lifting in the story.

And I think that what’s missing in a discussion like this one is the powerful work that absence and silence does, at least in my fiction. Because my fiction is all about the people who aren’t present. It’s all about the gaps. Often, what we need most in the story is not present; look at the women who are disappeared from Yunior’s life. Their absence drives his incredible agonies and his incredibly bad choices. In a book like Oscar Wao, the absolutely central characters

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

are missing. Where’s Trujillo? Where’s Oscar’s father? Where’s Lola’s rapist? Somewhere else, one would be tempted to draw in these figures. But I think I’ve discovered that my work gains enormous power from absence. Because being Carribean, you create long-lasting relationships with absence and silence. I tend to write my characters by thinking about and developing the central relationship that I can erase, that can haunt the entire story. That’s why I’ve always enjoyed the idea of writing in the tradition of the post-colonial gothic. Because all of these stories are haunted by these terrifying, strange absences.

The Indy: That seems to fit into the idea of writing about the diaspora—an absent home being central to the narrative.

JD: Yeah, Yunior is a very strange character, cause he is clearly fluent in both New Jersey and the Dominican Republic. There’s this strange thing with him, because who is haunting whom?

‘Cause he’s got access to the homeland, and he clearly takes advantage of it, so I think the reader has to ask: what’s really hanging over this?

The Indy: Thinking about diaspora—you’ve spoken in the past about your use of science fiction as a metaphor for the alienation of the immigrant experience. One of the epigraphs to Oscar Wao is a quote from The Fantastic Four. Can you talk about this a little? Why are you so interested in sci-fi and what do you think it does for your work?

JD: Oh because of all its massive strengths. First of all, its tradition of estrangement, its tradition of being able to engage, through estrangement, the unspeakable, the collective social silences, its ability to present us with new worlds, but also to use those worlds to both trouble and confront us with our already existing world. And some of science fiction’s standard tropes resonate very strongly with me. If you look at the standard science-fiction divisions, you have societies represented in starkly hierarchical ways. There’s nothing like growing up poor in New Jersey next to a landfill to resonate with this idea that the rich people live up in sky cities in the clouds and the poor people are reduced to mere savagery underground, which is a standard science-fiction trope. A lot of the tropes take on a lot more power when you realize that beneath their fantastic veneer is this horrifying social reality that for many people isn’t extinct.

The Indy: The other use of sci-fi that’s fairly predominant these days is in the afro-futurist movement. Do you see yourself and your work as part of that tradition?

JD: I was nourished by most of the afro-futuristic texts. I’m one of those people who feels very strongly identified with afro-futurism as this kind of dispairic, argued-about aesthetic and critical movement.

As a creator, it’s a different situation. I deploy a lot of strange, afro-futuristic tropes in Oscar Wao, in small elements. But in the end, I feel like things tend to collapse around me. There was a book that I wrote at the same time as Drown. And it sort of shadows Drown, but I never published it. And I meant it to be this really wildly afro-futuristic novel. Like Sun Ra level.

Everybody was of Afro-Caribbean descent. It was a pan-African science-fiction fantasy, and the main character is actually named Shakur, because I was so in love with Tupac Shakur in those days.

And it was just this awful ridiculously literal and obvious book that never had any life. But again I always thought that it was a blueprint of my interests, if I only had the talent for it. Just because you have these desires and these interests doesn’t mean you can dance the dance.

The Indy: Who do you think your audience is—because you’ve sort of attracted this audience where there’s a large contingent of white, middle-class, NPR-listening Americans who really love your work. So I guess I’m wondering if you write to open people up to narratives that they’re ignorant about, that they don’t necessarily see or look for otherwise? Or do you write to connect with the Oscars and Yuniors of Santo Domingo and New Jersey?

JD: I wrote my first book because I belong to a community that is overwhelmingly erased, overwhelmingly silenced, that is vilified and misunderstood. To be a poor person of color in this society means that you’re already a problematic body. And I grew up in this community in a way that made me realize that this kind of erasure and silencing was not only just fucking not right, it was deeply damaging. In our community we didn’t have a lot of spaces where we could use art to have conversations with each other and with ourselves about what was happening. I think that that’s what drove me to write and what continues to push me as a writer. So many stories are absent, so many stories need telling, so many stories need artists and folks to bear witness to them.

The strange part about where I’m at as a writer is that I’m working, like most artists, on the tiniest scale—just one point in the universe. And I don’t know that I’ll be able to do more than that, because it certainly doesn’t feel like one can even cover their own point with any ability.

But in the end, the silence is so complete that almost any intervention will be useful for success.

Even if it’s an artistic failure, it will provide a space of deliberation where we can have the types of conversations we need to have.

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INTERVIEWS

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TO E TA G S ZS

In his glory days, Zeve Sanderson was an NCAA Division I athlete. Now he’s sitting in Conmag, delicately popping the yolk out of a hard boiled egg, finding new satisfactions. His career in independent media is like football was for Bo Jackson—it technically came second, but does it really make sense to rank when you’re always among the best? He reads more about David Foster Wallace than he ever wanted to, but he brought his sweatpants along for companionship. Now, in early retirement Zeve Sanderson often waxes poetic. He uses metaphors to criticize people’s bad metaphors, he smiles when he stands up for a dramatic reading of Vice News. He puts his warm, dry hand on your shoulder and leans a little too close. There are two colons in this sentence, he says, with a sagacious smirk. And we all laugh.

SH The other night Stef asked me what “fuckboy” meant. I ask her the same of “cheeky,” “keen,” and “wanker.” Fig jam? Fuck I’m Good Just Ask Me. Stef listens to smart people use too many words to explain what they mean. She interjects casually, mindfully, in 3 word snippets that simultaneously synthesize and affirm. She restates a more articulate and important version than what she heard. She gives all the credit to the speaker.

We met in a 9am class where I would fall asleep next to her in the last row of seats, then stare at her plaid high-tops to try and stay awake.

Now I wake up late, wondering if today is the day I will finally rock green eyeliner, up my social media presence, run every hill between Benefit and North Main. It usually isn’t, so I settle for an all black outfit, a tiny tupperware of roasted vegetables, an extra minute of conversation to ask a friend how she’s doing, if she’s okay, and then listen.

EP If he wasn’t called it everyday, he’d forget his own name. “Hm…Elmer?” he’d wonder while puffing on a 27 with effortless grace and legs tightly crossed, looking like Audrey Hepburn if she’d grown up hitting tre flips by day and warehouse bat mitzvahs by night. Sweet Keys Pitegoff.

The Berlin Bruiser. Ellis the Sensitivo Hedonisto. The Yarmouth Yuck-Yuck. Names aren’t the only gap in his mind—gap year in India ring any bells? That’s where he got those ill, like, prayer beads he wore freshman year. He never did explain those as the autumn nights burned down to their filters, but he could explain most anything else with a debate champ’s fervor: the semiotics of monuments, the best oats to bring on a canoe trip, or how to make a bong out of a Seeds of Peace camper.

Ellopus is the longest-tenured vegetarian I know, yet the least likely to hit you with a rant about his desire to be submerged in a hot tub full of tofu (he is, however, overwhelmed by other desires). That doesn’t mean he’s rant-free. Tell him you work for Bain Capital and he’ll gesticulate wildly about the fallen arts patronage system of yore. Tell him you’re moving to Bushwick to pursue performance pediatrics and he’ll remind you he interviewed for Bridgewater, he’s no closedminded hipster (“I was acting as a sort of double agent. An agent provocateur, if you will”). If he wasn’t born to the most benevolent of parents, he might have ended up a dirty capitalist pig.

Now he’s just a sorta dirty sorta capitalist black bean burger, with a twinkling star in his left ear that shines nary as much as the wonder in his eyes. Shine on you crazy teuton.

ES Erin’s humor always startles me, though it shouldn’t; she’s consistently hilarious. But there’s something about her seamless mid-sentence transition from a New Jersey to Rhode Island accent, her ability to make a pun involving both the Marxist Feminist canon and the playlist of NOW 16, her casual references to post-human cyber communities, that catch me unexpectedly. It’s like the time she bleached her hair white yellow, or kept a 40-pound rabbit as a pet in her bedroom.

She knows the fastest bike route to anywhere in Providence and makes a mean tahini-lemon-ginger roasted root vegetable. Her genius is the kind that surprises you, even though, in retrospect, it’s exactly what you’ve come to expect.

SB “You just don’t see 7th graders finish around the rim like that,” he says, his sparkling bovine eyes widening. “And just wait until he grows into those deltoids.” The rate at which he fondles his stomach hair seems to be increasing. Sam is dressed to run a half-marathon, but he’s taken his parents’ station wagon to the Rock every day this week.

The noise from the party downstairs interrupts. He descends the stairs in a fluster, ready to chide the happy-go-lucky hedonists with Mom-like gusto, but he’s already three Golden Monkeys deep and a shot of Liquid Modernity puts him over the edge. He puts his hands up and screams “I LOVE COLLEGE!” to four quietly chatting sophomores. As Young Thug blasts from the speakers, he turns to someone he’s never seen and stammers, “This is Chingy, right? I really think I need to wax my arm hair.”

Sam begins to panic: “Mijos closes in eight minutes! I promised Peter I’d pay him a visit.”

He clips Matt’s leash on (he agreed to walk him every night in exchange for a vat of Matt’s mother’s kimchi) and slips on his putrid Vans.

As the salsa verde from tonight’s special (a Fluke and al pastor combo) trickles down through the wily shrubs of his beard, he ponders the permutations of Georges Perec and whether his high school girlfriend got any work done (her butt’s almost as big as his now). He consults his phone for both, as it buzzes with news the party’s ended. “Alright, let’s go, c’mon. It’s time for second dinner. Are you coming?”

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TOE TAGS

WU “Will,” the cashier at the gourmet BBQ restaurant calls, brandishing a checkered styrofoam box filled to the brim with Chicago’s finest ribs. “It’s William. My name is William,” he replies testily, his Southern drawl veiled by years of friendship with yankees. He flicks his perfectly coiffed hair, re-tucks in his crisp striped shirt, and heads towards the table where a glossy-covered Sports Illustrated lays open dogeared to an article about WWE’s sudden rise.

“Hello, Will,” William says condescendingly.

“Hello, William,” smiles Will, his eyes bloodshot from a night spent playing Civilization IV. “So, how about those games last night?”

“Games!” snorts William. “I don’t have time for games. In the morning I must defend my dissertation that locates Christian speech in postmodern psychoanalysis.” He pours a tiny glass of Lagavulin 15 year.

Will shrugs and washes down some collard greens with a Gansett. “Tough day at work.

Zeve and I put in a cobbled driveway.”

William laughs pityingly and dabs the corner of his mouth. “Well, shall we get on with this?” and with that reaches into his leather satchel, dropping the week’s fresh Indy next to him.

Will slides his chair around the circular table and nestles next to William, opening up the paper as the two begin to read MM Have you ever heard Matt Marsico talk about Xbox? It’s sick. So rad.

Have you seen Matt Marsico play drums? It’s obscene. I mean like, stupid. So cool. He starts playing so energetically that it’s a little worrisome. Is it physically possible? Will he tire himself out too quickly? It totally slays.

Have you ever watched Matt Marsico read? He reads so fast. And he just smiles, like all the time.

Has Matt Marsico ever given you a hug? Has he held your hand? It’s absurd. But it’s not like, dumb or anything. It’s just sweet. Sweet.

PV Once I met Polina Volfovich. Oh boy. “I want to be better, faster, stronger,” she said. She was wearing 15 sweaters. “Absolutely,” she said as she pulled off a sweater I didn’t even realize she was wearing under her other sweater. Her voice was relaxed but purposeful, like her layering. She was wearing something in silk. She seems to be always wearing silk.

Once I watched from afar as she climbed a mountain. She had a bucket in one hand and a stop sign hefted over her shoulder. She got to the top and emptied the bucket, which was filled with sand, then stood the stop sign up in the little pile she’d made. It glittered red in the sunshine and I heard her whisper to herself, “Boy oh boy!”

Once I sent Polina an email. Between the words: silk, sand, tangled hair. She asked to keep close, and I did. Even though she was probably just addressing her mom, or the media artist from New Delhi who kissed her on the cheek that one time.

Man oh man, I’m glad I met Polina. Now, everybody call your mothers.

CF His glasses are round, tortoise shell, and somewhere at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea. “Interesting” is his highest compliment. He wishes people talked more about social class, so he made them do it for hours once in a windowless classroom in the Rock. When he finished he went to the beach, then the desert. He can be convinced to go on an adventure, but not to stay awake past midnight. He always orders popcorn.

Casey has secrets and asks good questions. If you are crying he will tell you that your feelings are real, but not based in reality: you are pretty, you are kind, you are smart. He will come over at 11pm and read your text messages, fall asleep in your bed, not stay over. “Hey kid, you’ll be okay,” he will say in a grandpa imitation that is either inadvertent or intentional. He nudges your shoulder then smooths his crew neck sweater. Pulls at his collar, straightens his glasses, and clutches his keys. You believe him.

AS Alex has just picked out his short sleeve button-down shirt for The Newport Crude Oil and Caviar Association annual “Surf and Turf ” Gala. It’s 8:15pm and the invitation said 7, black tie.

He meant to pencil it into his little black book (next to Duck and Bunny with the Indochina heiress and Jacques Ranciere with the boys), but it ended up in the little red one instead. He gets into a 2013 Tiguan, passenger side, and changes Carly Rae Jepsen to Titus Andronicus as he bops his head.

He tosses the keys to the valet and smirks, “Bunch of assholes in there, chomping at the bit, right?” Before he kicks open the mahogany doors, he nibbles a shoplifted sour straw and slicks back his Midas-touched hair.

He grabs a drink (he’ll have what she’s having) and spots Prexter Briffnit, Chancellor of the Association. He sashays toward the mogul with a twinkling smile no good Marxist is supposed to have, but hey, he didn’t pay for the privatized dental care. “Mr. Briffnit, quite a profile in the IFJ! I’d love to pick your brain about incorporation strategies some time.” Prex begins to babble, but another prize flits across Alex’s baby blues: Shelley Carnegie-Briffnit, the Bard freshman rolling her eyes at her father’s logorrhea. She spies Alex’s high-top Vans and flashes him a sultry glance.

Within fifteen minutes, they’re underneath a canopy, on top of the sheets. “This house must have been paid for with blood diamonds,” he scowls, unhooking her bra. “You’ll visit me this summer, right?” she pleads. “I saw the CFO of Exxon spill shrimp cocktail sauce on the carpet like it was the Prince William Sound,” he quips. “In the Hamptons?” she begs. He abandons the burden of his intellect with a seductive eyebrow raise. “In the Hamptons,” he concedes.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

GN Greg is going to the doctor. He can’t sleep, he can’t get up, and he’s taking Ubers everywhere.

The burden of entertaining everybody has caused a stress fracture in his right foot. It takes him three minutes to walk a half-block, ample time to put the finishing touches on some new verses.

Normally he’d handle the ailments himself, but lately Marla’s been onto him. Sicher ist sicher, the Germans always say.

The door to the office of Dr. Diego Cannabis, MD lies ajar. The receptionist knew he was coming, as did everybody else in the building. There are only two things to read in the waiting room: one copy of NME, dated April 2007, and a perforated page of Calvin & Hobbes. It’s highly uncommon for a doctor’s office to feature both a recording studio and a small publishing arm, Greg thinks to himself, but Dr. Cheeb had some spare parts lying around, even after that devastating flood. “You’re late,” the good doctor notes, but Greg could’ve sworn he booked the appointment for 10:04.

There are no windows, only the glow from the bulb of a filthy projector. When it’s dark you can’t see the ash. The examination chair tilts back, casting shadows onto the wall. “At last,” Greg thinks. “I’ve found myself.”

AM 2263 AD mother_goddess_seeker420: hello? mother_goddess_seeker420: they told me to come here and you would speak 2 me… offer me advice @ my future. i am in greatest need mother_goddess_seeker420: i brought you an offering as they said i must-- v rare antique from the Old Net

12 minutes ago LR She was the sort of girl who handed you her orange dreamsicle when you skinned your knee.

For whom the branches had carefully arranged themselves to let through a ray of reading light.

That laughed at bad jokes and walked in the rain. For whom the pudding on the dinner table had been specially made. Who held on to photos long after they’d faded. For whom sweatshirts hung loosely and swished slightly when she spun. Who kept a plastic red necklace in a box with gold earrings. Whose protruding tongue had ruined the 5th grade class picture and made the principal smile. For whom, in the middle school gym, the last dance had been nervously saved.

Whose lamp light flickered and died, pink sheets soaked in moonlight, silent sailboats below in full bloom.

She was the sort of girl who took you one night by the bridge and showed you the lillies.

Who told you how valiantly they fought, stretching tirelessly into the sunlight. How one day they grew greedy and bold, climbing one another so high their stems began to bow.

Who found a lily beneath the dark tangled mess, tucked it behind her ear and beamed, teeth bright in the moonlight.

mother_goddess_seeker420: hello? please !!! respond to me addiemitchell_4ever: ... addiemitchell_4ever: i am here my child. speak

5 minutes ago

WF Will took an ethics course about animals that changed his life. He believes in animal rights. He tells me about it one cloudy afternoon as we ride a bus to Pawtucket. “It just makes sense, when you actually think about it.”

Will makes sense and actually thinks about things.

Excerpt from Chapter 7 of Animal Farm, George Orwell, 1945 The animals gathered around the barn, spreading gossip of the newest political upheavals.

“It is just as Commander Napoleon told us,” said Boxer. “Four legs good, two legs bad.”

He stopped and considered for a moment, twitching his piggy nose.

“Except for Will Fesperman. Commander Napoleon says that Will Fesperman is okay.”

LB “Liberal Zionism is not a contradiction in terms, asshole. Netanyahu’s just a little rough around the edges. What do you mean it’s obvious that I have two brothers?”

“The Bernstein Family Thanksgiving Football Match? What do you mean we’re trying to be like the Kennedys?”

“Minertha in my plumes? I could’ve played golf here. Or softball. Even the rowers were looking at me.”

“Nap time? What do you mean you think I inherited my grandfather’s narcolepsy?”

“Rampant deforestation? What do you mean my brother studied abroad in the Amazon?”

Lee of fiery mane. Lee of frequent naps. Lee beats all the boys at one-on-one. Seriously, we’ve been there.

Office hours will be held Wednesday at Whiskey Republic.

Any questions?

CM Shit. I had it. I know I had it. I know I had it before I went to bed. Actually, no, I didn’t have it before I went to bed. I knowingly lost it before that. This is why the Sigma brothers call me Comedown Connor, isn’t it? Shit. Why did I leave the spare key on the key ring with the regular key? It’s fine, there’s only so much sand on the beach. It has to turn up. The tide did rise, though-science is all around us. But no time for that now. Shit. It’s also a rental car. My dad’s rental car, too young to drive it legally. Maybe I left it with my phone...in the car? Shit. This is just like the time I lost that Ducks briefcase my dad gave me. In the Grand Canyon. Took me forever to live that one down. Not again. This bums me out. Deeply. I’m really not used to coping with hardship like this—I’m from San Francisco for Christ’s sake. Shit.

HA The phone rings. Haley Adams slides her finger, smooth as silk, against the iPhone glass.

“DJ Halestorm,” says the voice on the other end, “It’s Barack Obama. The President.”

Haley wonders if she has time for this call, because she has many things on her mind.

There are enchiladas in the oven and the kitchen smells of fresh Wisconsin cheese. She’s in talks with Sodastream about an eponymous flavor pod, Burnett’s by Haley. She’s addressing a Christmas card to Donna Hustler while explaining to local high school students that the word “civic” is a palindrome. Raj Chetty keeps Snapchatting her as she runs regression discontinuities. Besides, she’s drawing up the guest list for Barbourfest—and everyone is invited.

“What do you have for me, Barry?” she finally says into the phone.

“I need a playlist,” says the President, a note of hope in his voice.

A pause. “Hell yeah,” Haley says.

“Anything I can do in return?” asks Obama.

Haley smiles coyly. Her eyebrow piercing glistens like Fort Knox. “I’ll send you an invoice,” she says, and rides into the sunset wearing a pair of Chacos.

SW Sara Winnick is having a party and you’re all invited. It’s in a pink house whose rooms are wallpapered with unframed canvases, glowingly inhabited. Walk in, and behold Sara: she’s wearing a black velvet dress under a black sweater, yet somehow her shoulders are still bare. She’s painting her nails gold to match her hoops, surrounded by dancing people but it’s her house and she’ll paint her nails if she wants to—she paints one of yours too.

Fingertip freshly adorned, you move towards the dance floor with tears on your cheeks.

Sara takes your hand and you find yourself on her porch as the chill of the night settles. The wind whistles through empty birdcages and she lays a blanket over your lap. You remember a bag of knuckle-sized m&ms you found in the 2nd floor computer cluster earlier and know she must have left them there for you. “There are many ways to live a meaningful life,” she assures you, and you show her a picture of a kitten. “I don’t like animals,” she says, gently rubbing your shoulders.

In the morning, once she’s done thinking about big issues and small children, she will ask you to craft or bake or bike with her and you will go. She’ll say how’s it going, and she’ll actually wanna know, because even though she may not care about small animals she cares about you.

KG Kyle sinks back into the supple leather of his chair. He’s got that summertime, summertime sadness, and a looming deadline on his campaign speech. But he’s not in a Lana mood right now.

No, it’s a Bruce Springsteen kind of night, again, and it’s gonna be a long walk home.

Kyle generally isn’t one to worry over the initial drafts; instead, he lets his ear judge and goes by the rhythm. This time, though, he’s stumped. The words of his campaign advisor race through his mind. “Do not, I repeat, do not make jokes about fucking your mom, Kyle.”

Kyle was born in the Rock and he’ll die in the Rock (except it’s not called the Rock anymoreit was renamed the Giddon Gubernatorial Library when he became governor of New York in 2034). But outside those brutalist walls, the words don’t flow as easily. His brow is furrowed beneath his vintage crystal Warby Parkers. Maybe a reading of the lyrics to his favorite song would suffice? Born to run, America, we were born to run. No, no, it’s all wrong. He meditatively massages cocoa butter into the semicolon tattooed on his shoulder. Remember, Kyle. Remember who you are.

Smiling softly, Kyle pencils the mom-fucking joke into the conclusion of his speech.

You’re a loose cannon, Kyle.

I know.

MAY 1 2015

TOE TAGS

□ 16

I SUPPOSE

by Rick Salamé, Kim Sarnoff, Eli Neuman-Hammond & Mika Kligler Illustration by Caroline Brewer

I got tired of waiting, so I microwaved my bag of lentils and gave it to her.

Did you hear, she asked, about the man who got trapped?

I nodded and lifted another slab of snow.

Why didn’t he call anyone for 19 days?

I suppose, when you get to that age, you’ve been through a lot, and you don’t want, to call someone, and tell them, it finally happened.

–RS

I spoke to the trout skull after the flood.

Are you molting, I asked, as his bones flecked in current?

He flecked, and I knew I had picked the right question.

Who carries your bones now?

I suppose, in the echo, you don’t want to know that your body was sound.

–KS

Night-ghost, you are denim stretched taut over smoke.

Where did the bee get its buzzing liquor?

It falters and sways and finally sinks toward the old mirror, burning, through itself and into gone.

Was it just a cotton-sheltered dream?

I suppose it was the liquor store.

–ENH

I rub my feet together when I sleep, as if they are little bodies wrestling.

On the phone, mom asks: are you sleeping enough?

You seem restless. She’s menopausal, wideawake from 4am on.

I’m not implying anything but do you ever think you’re spending too many hours on craigslist?

I suppose I feel like I’m always trying, these days, to put things back on shelves I can’t quite reach.

–MK

18

□

LITERARY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Speakers include Dr. Lucy Spelman, a Doctor of Zoological Medicine and storyteller Len Cabral. Get your performative gesticulations ready.

RISD STUDENT + ALUMNI ART SALE 10 AM to 4 PM // Benefit St between Waterman and Hopkins // Admission is free but the art is not Fresh young artist work at below retail price.

DOWNCITY CINCO DE MAYO BLOCK PARTY

11 AM to 6 PM // Westminster St between Dorrance and Mathewson // Admission is free...

Indy List once recommended that,

on a Tuesday, its readers should take advantage of the “Two-for Tuesdays” deal at Geoff’s Superlative Sandwiches. At crit, this rankled many. “Why are we shilling for Geoff’s?” asked then-News Editor Alex Sammon. The List remains a non-advertising entity. But it’s Tuesday, and I can’t recommend anything other than to find a sandwich from one of the many delicious institutions in Providence—Cafe Choklad, Chez Pascal’s Wurst Window, Olneyville NY System, Seven Stars, North Bakery, Ellie’s Bakery, Lotus Pepper, Bagel Gourmet Ole, hell, even Geoff’s—and chow down.

8PM // Machines with Magnets, 400 Main St, Pawtucket // $8 Celebrate the release of Full Communism, the first LP from Downtown Boys with a bill also featuring Fleabite, Secret Lover, and Lovesick.

PUBLIC ACCESS

WRITING-IN-THREADS

6PM to 8Pm // Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, 154 Angell St, Providence // Free For Franesca Capone’s MFA thesis, a number of poets have taken to translating their work through fabric.

Weaving and poetry, together at last.

10PM // Aurora, 276 Westminster Street, Providence, RI 02903 // No cover DJ Nick Hallstrom spins again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And this time with guest DJ Randy Delgado.

YONI WOLF

9PM // Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, Providence // $13 (advance), $15 (day-of)

TIME TRAVEL TO 19TH CENTURY PROVIDENCE WITH STEREOPTICON 6PM // Aurora, 276 Westminster St, Providence // Free w/ RSVP

WHY?’s Yoni Wolf has a unique speak-sing drawl, and his show at the Columbus will be with frequent collaborators / Anticon records pals Serengeti.

:

dependents The week in In College Hill ’s Providence, RI at the Brown Independent be ball for the kick Daily Herald in The semester. third straight 5. as score w 6 to

.com

9AM to 4:30 PM // The Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway St, Providence // $50 (GA), $25 (student)

Data is unruly. Take control! This workshop will include best practices for doing research with sets of data, including metadata annotation. Oh yeah.

DOWNTOWN BOYS RECORD RELEASE PARTY

mail

Sleep in.

12PM to 1PM // Hecker Room, Rockefeller Library, 10 Prospect St, Providence // Free

y@g

TEDxPROVIDENCE

Draw some exotic animals, and draw some less exotic animals. Lauren Sitterly, RISD’03 will talk about each animal’s anatomy and movement, and this promises to be way less uncomfortable than drawing a human model. Tickets available at liveanimalstudy2015.eventbrite.com

BEST PRACTICES FOR MANAGING YOUR DATA

eind

Can you imagine describing this to somebody from 2005? All the food trucks gather at the Alex and Ani City Center, ready to feed each other (and you).

2PM to 5PM // Edna Lawrence Nature Lab, 13 Waterman St, Providence // $15

: Lis tth

EAT DRINK RI FESTIVAL: TRUCK STOP 5:30 PM // Alex and Ani City Center, 2 Kennedy Plaza, Providence // Admission is free, but the food trucks are not

LIVE ANIMAL STUDY

later )

Back rubs and neck rubs provided by the Brown University Relaxation Project. Or, BURP.

A full exhibit of stereoscopic images from the Providence Preservation Society’s archives! I’m geeking out over this, and by the time I got around to writing the listing, the registration was already full. You can email info@ppsri.org for a spot on the waitlist.

r aga in (u ntil a little

1PM to 2PM // Memorial Lounge, Stephen Robert ‘62 Campus Center, 75 Waterman Street, Providence // Free

Also $1 burgers at Bar Louie in Kennedy Plaza. It’s too late for some of you but the others could join this party of one. It’s not advertising, it’s just where I’ll be.

Neve

FREE MASSAGES

But the party is not! Shake your time-shifting booty, and celebrate three days early. Details are pretty sparse right now, but there will be tacos, and there will be a pinata.