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from the editors

I think I’m ready.

news 2

The Indy was founded in 1990. The first commercial internet also. Our new site theindy.org is quick and principally easy. From astrology to gardening to punk rock, just select by pushbutton.

Don’t forget the three Ws. You know, I think your son would really enjoy this NASA website.

Wow, she’s really clicking.

Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. By the end of today you’ll be taking your wife and kids surfing on the net like a pro! Something about thanks or learning. It was so nice getting to know ya.

— GD, AR, SR

ephemera

david adler & simon engler

metro 5

Enter the Void emma wohl

9 It’s a Bird anna rotman

features 4 7

Relax

ellora vilkin & doreen st. felix

Call of Booty emma janaskie

14 Start Down tristan rodman

If you’re still in the market for a computer, make sure you tell your dealer that you’ll be using it to access the internet. Dial up, log in, now justaminute, there’s a lot to think about. Just ask any digital native, we’re all writing probing critical essays about our relationship to the internet.

Here at the Indy, we can’t even agree whether the word should be capitalized or not.

Faster modem. Mow-dem. So...I’m on the net?

Week in Review

arts 11 12

Keisha Fabo raillan brooks

Dance, Dance, West Virginia grier stockman

sports 13

Golden Reciever lizzie davis

Media digest 3 Oh, the Places You’ll Go

science 6 Crime Waves megan hauptman

12

keep close College Hill Independent PO Box 1930 Brown University Providence RI 02912

theindy@gmail.com twitter: @maudelajoie /// theindy.org ///

Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress. Campus Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org

all of us

13 Oceanside edward friedman 18

annie madonald

WEEK IN

by David Adler & Simon Engler Illustration by Alex Ronan

GIANT FINISH

WAR IS OVER

his legs are well-muscled, taut, rippling. He is nimble. When you hear his name you think of consummation, ultimate pleasure, Dionysian joy. He has hooves.

You’re guessing that I’m talking about Pan, the randy forest satyr. But you’re wrong—it’s actually a horse of which I speak. The horse is named Giant Finish, and he is the most recent entry to Saturday’s Kentucky Derby.

Giant Finish is a successful horse who has won over $130,000 in his career.

Most recently, he came in second place at the March 2 John Battaglia Memorial Handicap at Turfway Park, in Florence, Kentucky. At press time, he is in the back of a van being driven to Louisville, where he will race other horses around a track.

But before he gets there, before he has the chance to make the future, you ought to know a little about his past. For example, who is Giant Finish’s mom?

If you were wondering, his mom is Apocalyptic, a female horse from New York.

Also, what’s Giant Finish’s affiliation (“horse squad”)? In answer to that he races for Sunrise Stables, of Versailles, Kentucky.

Finally, who is the human behind the horse? Actually, there are always many humans—jockeys, trainers, owners—behind every horse. With that in mind, you ought to recognize that there is one man who is particularly—even intimately— connected to the Giant Finish story. That man is Adam Cohen, who bred the talented colt. In other words, Cohen set up Apocalyptic (Giant Finish’s mom) with Hickman Creek (another horse, male)—and when the two of ’em had a baby, it ended up being Giant Finish. Well done, Adam.

Still, Giant Finish is a newcomer, and he’s no top seed. But his breeder is hopeful. “He’s been training well and you don’t get a lot of chances to get to the Derby. He’s got a really competitive nature. We know he’s a longshot,” Cohen told Blood-Horse, an equestrian magazine. “What can I say? You only live once.”—SPE

here’s diplomacy: Monday, April 29. A white tablecloth over a long banquet table. On the left, a cohort of Japanese men in suits and ties huddle close with forks and knives; a cohort of Russians, big-bellied and bald, whisper to each other on the right. No one really speaks the other’s language, so instead they trade gifts. Prime Minister Abe Shinzo offers a pair of skis and a ski outfit to the Russians. President Vladimir Putin offers a bottle of wine from 1855, the year the two countries once signed a treaty of friendship.

MAY 03 2013

it’s hard to tell whether the news here is that World War II is almost over or that it is still not over. But over this tableclothed luncheon, Russia and Japan moved one step closer to eating the apricot. “67 years after the conclusion [of WWII]”—after the bomb, after V-day, after lots of handshakes—leaders of both countries agreed that the situation “looks abnormal.”

Their battleground stretches out from the Northern tip of Japan, an archipelago of 56 islands that dot the Western Pacific. In Russia, they are known as the Southern Kuriles. In Japan, they are the Northern Territories. 6,000 square miles and 19,000 people—some of them Japanese immigrants, settled as early as the 17th century Edo period; others from Russia, explorers set out to hunt sea otters. In the Russo-Japanese War, the islands became Russian; in the Siberian conflict two decades later, they became Japanese. And in 1945—when Stalin gathered with Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta—Russia again claimed the islands from “the treacherous attack of Japan.” That was six months before Japan’s surrender to the allies, and the dispute over the territories has never been settled.

And for good reason: they are beautiful little grass-covered things. Volcanic smoke sweeps downward into the valleys where streams of sulfur trickle toward the shore. The fish are plentiful. A few years ago, Russian state TV showed a plump President Dmitry Medvedev chugging down caviar and joking with local fishermen. Japan found Medvedev’s visit—now patting his napkin to his pursed lips—“an unforgivable outrage.”

War! War! Two Russian fighter jets penetrate Japan airspace in 2011. Japan assembles its combat fighters. Russia calls Japan “radical”; Japan calls Russia “regrettable.” Everyone forgets that all this stuff is super yesterday.

“Vive la guerre!” they scream. But no one can hear them—Putin is skiing and Abe is drowning in century-and-a-half old wine. —DA

NEWS

02

YOUR FUTURE IN MEDIA

MAY 03 2013

MEDIA DIGEST

3

RELAXXX

by Ellora Vilkin & Doreen St. Félix Illustration by Stella Chung Hey, have things have been rough lately? Your hair keeps falling out in the shower, all you want to eat is bread, everyone’s out to get you, that kind of thing? You’re not alone: Li’l Rhody is the second most-stressed state in America, according to last week’s Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. Pollsters asked a random sample of 350,000 adults nationwide whether they’d felt stressed “yesterday,” and with 46.3 percent answering yes, Rhode Islanders came second only to West Virginians. (Kentucky, Utah, and Massachusetts round out the bottom five). While we agree that times are hard, we also think Gallup’s metric is kind of bullshit (maybe everyone was just having a bad week?). Below, we present a more inclusive stress barometer and some helpful ways to unwind.

THE GREAT RHODE ISLAND STRESS TEST 1. Stretch your hands out in front of you. Look at your fingernails. They are: a. Perfectly shaped! Got a mani at Metro Nails yesterday. b. A little jagged. You chew on them when traffic on Broadway is jammed. c. Bloody stumps. You finished the nails and have moved onto flesh.

2. A toddler walking a cute puppy stops near you in Prospect Terrace Park. You: a. Stoop to pet the dog, and smile at the toddler. b. Stoop to pet the bewildered toddler, and smile at the dog. c. Are sitting in your office reading the Indy and can’t, for the life of you, re-

member what a “park” is.

3. On the 34 to East Providence, the passenger next to you turns up the volume on his headphones. Your reaction is to: a. Bop softly, and consider that the Dixie Chicks are actually musically brilliant. b. Tap his shoulder, gesture at his personal music device, and mime at him to turn-it-down, buddy. c. Pull out his earbuds and rip them with your teeth.

4. You have an assignment due by noon and at 10 pm the night before, you’re staring at a blank page. You: a. Read over your school or work notes, sipping some tea while you outline. b. Read over your school or work notes, sipping some vodka while you outline. c. Throw your computer out of the window and explain to your superior that the “rear window ate [my] computer.”

5. You are taking a semi-serious stress test in your favorite weekly newspaper. You: a. Relax, laugh, and tell your friends to take it too.

RESULTS: Tally up your a, b, and c responses. If you have: more “b and/or c” responses, you’re probably stressed out. more “a” responses, you have beautiful nails.

We think everyone, in any state, could use a little relaxation—try these tips and chill out.

MAY 03 2013

FEATURES

04

IN THE

Art in the East Side Railroad Tunnel

by Emma Wohl Illustration by Michelle Lin “do you know why this closed in the first place?” someone asks me on a Friday night under a full moon at the entrance to the East Side Railroad Tunnel, next to Gano Street Park.

“Some RISD kids threw a party. The cops thought it was a satanic ritual, but it was just some college kids.” On May 1, 1993, a group of students gathered—maybe to celebrate the ancient Gaelic festival Beltain, maybe just to throw a rager—in the mile-long tunnel, which was still completely open to the outdoors. They beat drums and set fire to a car.

Police eventually broke up the gathering with tear gas. After the altercation, the city blocked off the entrance to the tunnel with a sheet of corrugated steel. Since then, someone has cut a narrow doorway out of the metal.

Almost twenty years later, on April 26, 2013, a collective calling itself “tunnel tribe” held another gathering called “art at east side,” the inaugural event of a series they plan to hold in and around the tunnel’s eastern entrance. Visitors crack jokes about pagan rituals. They beat drums and chant.

Candles float in brackish water; people grasp branches to support themselves as they wade through the partially flooded tunnel, balancing on the train tracks that haven’t operated in decades. A few hundred feet inside, the most intrepid among us find the skeleton of the burned car. It feels like a pilgrimage to a holy site.

The group that organized the event evidently agrees.

“There’s some sort of faith you have to have to walk into total darkness,” one of the organizers explains, “and that night, because there were so many of us, a lot of people felt like they weren’t scared and felt like they were ready to go in.”

But who are these organizers? you’re probably wondering.

The members of tunnel tribe are, so far, two Brown students who began to devise an exhibit in the tunnel as a project for a class, The Art of Curating, “but it kind of spiraled out from there” into the hoped-for series, designed to bring in a larger community, they said. That may seem like an overly ambitious goal, and they spout big names; the conceptual artist Pablo Helguera, founder of the “School of Panamerican Unrest,” a “traveling think-tank” and performance art exhibit, is cited as the chief inspiration for the exhibit. But they also recognize a more immediate inspiration in the tunnel’s acoustics and their “otherworldy effect”—“kind of like a chapel,” one organizer said. They know that people are quick to dismiss them upon learning they are students, but this project is primarily about celebrating the space.

05

METRO

They also wanted to avoid associations with those who trashed the tunnel ten years earlier. The tunnel, they believed, “was tainted by...a lot of destruction.” They wanted to subvert that, to turn it into “a place for gathering and creation.” The inaugural event was supposed to happen several weeks ago, but was delayed due to rain, pushing it closer to the twentyyear anniversary. the railroad tunnel, a source of fascination to those who live above it1, stretches a mile from Gano Street on the East Side to the other side of College Hill, near the intersection of Main Street and Thomas. It opened in 1908, bearing trains headed from Bristol to Fall River, MA. The dwindling use of freight trains in the 1950s contributed to its decline, and the last train passed through the tunnel in 1981, shortly after ownership transferred to the state.

Since then, graffiti artists have taken over, tagging the entryway and the nearby Seekonk River Bridge (commonly the “ghost bridge”) with elaborate designs. A zine called “UNDERNEATH PROVIDENCE Findings Thus Far” contains stories and images from the tunnel. One entry chronicles the writer’s first encounter with the area: “The ground under my feet cracked with broken glass, dried leaves and rusted spray cans. I was 16 and it was perfect.”

Many Providence residents remember when the tunnel was functional. One commenter remembers it from his time at Brown, from 1974-1978: “If you were in the library at the proper time, you could feel subterranean rumbling.” Even while the trains ran, teens would walk through on dares from friends. In the 1960s, “the whole area around the tunnel was a playground for us as kids,” another commenter remembers.

The city of Providence and Brown University discussed reopening the tunnel to a bus or tram as part of an East Side revitalization project in the early 2000s. But with the city’s budgetary prospects looking ever bleaker, the project has been discussed less and less. The western entrance to the tunnel is now blocked not only by a metal barrier but also by the parking lot of an apartment complex.

to allow passage. Floating in the water, amid other debris, are ten-year-old computers. The art on display includes one faint projector, powered by candlelight, far inside and up against the tunnel wall. At one point, a duo on bass drum and guitar starts to play outside, with no introduction. Most of the audience—mostly college kids, but including people in their late 20s at least—is facing the opposite direction, staring into a bonfire.

The members of tunnel tribe maintain their anonymity for several reasons. “There’s no ownership when it comes to a public site,” they explain. They are more like curators—they invited artists to make art in and around the tunnel, set up the space, and wrote the curatorial statement available on tunnel tribe’s wordpress. “We’re just facilitating a vision that we had,” they said.

But they’re not totally ready to give up the reigns yet— asked if they would rather be involved in curating future projects, they said, “We want people to feel like they can reach out to us, and since we’ve done something [in the tunnel], to work with them; we have that experience.” Then again, one organizer said, “I’d love to attend someone else’s event there.”

There’s a sense of ambivalence in wanting to curate a space and document what goes on while letting it grow organically, but there’s no doubt that this is a more democratic way of experiencing art than what you’d encounter in a conventional museum or gallery. Visitors are left to their own devices, to make more art or music or just to observe. There are no instructions.

It’s important to remember that these aren’t the first people to create art in this space, nor do they claim to be. A small shack sits close to the tunnel opening, built by other artists in January. A book by the dwelling’s entrance offers a message, a fitting epigraph to tunnel tribe’s event: “We give and take the places we visit.” The hope now is that others will do the same.

EMMA WOHL B’14 is sixteen and it was perfect.

1. The Independent, in fact, opened a story in 2008 with the lede, “Every few years, a

on the april night in 2013, the atmosphere is celebratory but calm. Early arrivals to the event are cautious, stumbling down into the ravine, where the tunnel begins, aided by flashlights or the moon. At the bottom they find a swamp, with sheets of metal, plastic, and wood laid across the muck

piece emerges in the Independent, BSR, or the Providence Journal with the message ‘Did you know there is a mile long, underground railway tunnel underneath College Hill?’”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

IMPULSE CONTROL

Can Brain Scans Predict Criminal Behavior?

by Megan Hauptman Illustration by Lizzie Davis

the first popular scientific explanations of criminal behavior were published by Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso in the late 19th century. He believed that criminality was biologically predetermined and established several metrics for identifying born criminals, none of which held up to rigorous investigation. Though Lombroso’s studies fell out of favor as their validity was questioned, the biological paradigm of criminology that he introduced remained popular.

Modern believers of Lombroso’s biological determinism have turned to neuroscience as a tool to explain and predict criminal behavior. Neuroscientific evidence has primarily been introduced in courts to link brain trauma to abnormal antisocial behavior, but a recent study claims that neuroscience could also be used to predict the likelihood of future criminal behavior. The study, released last month by the Mind Research Network in New Mexico, claims that low brain activity in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC), a part of the brain associated with impulse control and decision making, can predict recidivism in a statistically significant way. Neuroscience has increasingly been used in courtrooms to explain the cause of a crime already committed, looking backwards. The study done by the Mind Research Network could be potentially be applied to look forward, to make release decisions based on what someone’s brain might indicate about their future actions.

Using an fMRI scanner, researchers in New Mexico scanned the brains of 96 incarcerated men and recorded their brain activity while they performed an impulse control task.

The men who participated in the study were told to press a button as quickly as possible when they saw the letter X pop up on the screen, but not to press the button if they saw the letter K. X showed up on the screen 84 percent of the time, which predisposed people to hit the button and made it harder to suppress the impulse when K popped up. These tests were done five years ago, concurrently with questionnaires and activities designed to evaluate impulsivity.

In the past year, the research team has followed up with each man to see who has been rearrested and discovered that participants with low ACC activity were roughly twice as likely to be rearrested for a felony arrest within four years of their release as were participants with high ACC activity. In the study’s abstract, the authors write, “these results suggest a potential neurocognitive biomarker for persistent antisocial behavior.”

Kent Kiehl, lead author of the study, says that the study “predicts resistance to crime rather than persistence.” The results demonstrate not that low ACC activity caused recidivism; rather, high activity helped people avoid making decisions that might cause re-arrest. Kiehl and other researchers see this study primarily as helpful in developing ways to increase ACC activity, such as cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness meditation practice. The Mind Research Network is currently working on a series of studies that will test the effects of various practices designed to

MAY 03 2013

increase ACC activity. “Brain systems might have some flexibility, plasticity where we can effect change, ” Kiehl says.

“We want to leverage the science to develop some treatments that will actually work.”

Though Kiehl stresses the implications this study has for rehabilitative treatments, he also acknowledges the role that fMRI tests could serve in parole and court hearings. “Judges want to have the best information in front of them,” Kiehl says, and “they are very poor at judging what actually causes recidivism.” Pen and paper risk assessment tests are already widely used by parole boards to attempt to predict someone’s chance of re-offending, and they are generally inaccurate indicators. “The more closely we measured brain functioning with fMRI, the more predictive it was, much more than impulsivity questioning or psych testing,” Kiehl says. Courts and parole boards would potentially be able to use fMRI tests to get a more reliable indicator of someone’s risk of reoffending. “Science is really no different than any risk assessment,” Kiehl continues. “All risk assessments are trying to evaluate what’s happening in your brain.”

Though there has been a flurry of media interest in this recent study, a practical application of its findings is still far in the future. As well as working on studies that would measure the effectiveness of therapy or medication on increasing ACC activity, Kiehl and his partners are collecting and analyzing data for a very similar study, with a much larger data set.

Kiehl urges readers to remember that “we’re very cautious about [the study’s] potential use.” And the possibility of court-ordered brain scans raises a lot of murky legal questions.

Would brain scans constitute physical or testimonial evidence?

Physical evidence, also known as real evidence, such as a court-ordered removal of a piece of bullet shrapnel, can be collected without the defendant’s consent. Testimonial evidence is evidence given by witnesses or the defendant, and cannot be mandated by a judge. “Is brain activity testimonial evidence?” asks Kiehl, pointing out that the fifth amendment is designed to prevent self-incrimination. Brain scans that indicated that a defendant had low ACC activity might violate their right to avoid self-incrimination by contributing to a longer or more restrictive sentence. the questions raised by the predictive claims of this study extend beyond its potential use in sentencing or release decisions. This study demonstrates a strong correlation, perhaps even a causation, between poor impulse control and criminal behavior. The study claims that this poor impulse control can potentially be predicted by measuring brain activity. It assigns a lot of weight to biology, and very little to environmental or circumstantial factors. Kiehl and his team recorded a variety of information about each participant, including education level, extensive prior criminal record, histories of substance dependency, and other factors.

Substance addiction, in particular, has been identified as a high-risk factor for recidivism, but Kiehl says that even when subjects’ histories of substance abuse are accounted for, ACC activity was still a more reliable indicator of re-arrest.

But it seems difficult to really account for a wide range of environmental factors in a study focused on neuroscience.

While the circumstances that someone has waiting for them when they leave prison are difficult to quantify, a strong support system and a job have been shown to have an enormous impact on keeping ex-offenders from returning to prison. The reasons why many people recidivate aren’t a mystery. Plenty of research has shown that ex-felons leaving prison face a lack of job opportunities and restrictions on government services, such as welfare and low-income housing, that make supporting themselves and their families difficult.

This struggle often increases the probability that they might turn to illegal methods of procuring income. Insufficient funding for drug treatment programs both in and outside of prison makes it difficult for people to overcome addiction, which can also lead to continued criminal activity.

The brain is complex and shaped by one’s environment and experiences. Children who grow up in neighborhoods with high incidents of gun violence often experience post-traumatic stress disorder and have trouble focusing or completing tasks. People who have substance addictions experience brain transformations that make it difficult for them to regulate and control their impulses. A 2011 study from UC Berkley in 2011 indicated that substance addiction could potentially damage the ACC, making it more difficult for people with addiction problems to practice careful decision making. Historian Peter Becker, who studies the history of biological criminology, argues that “by simply reducing social and cultural factors to the environment of the brain, neurophysiological processes and neuroanatomical features can be singled out and linked to behavioral patterns without paying any more attention to the wider context.”

Science could be useful in developing more effective cognitive therapy techniques or in establishing the importance of treating addiction in prisons. But using neuroscience to explain and predict recidivism—without acknowledging all the other well-studied factors that make it difficult to stay out of prison—is incredibly misleading. Perhaps brain scans could help parole boards more accurately assess someone’s risk of re-offending, but to laud their diagnostic powers without acknowledging that two-thirds of all previously incarcerated individuals recidivate is disingenuous and dangerous.

MEGAN HAUPTMAN B’14.5 presses buttons.

SCIENCE

06

a russian henchman pins Lara Croft against the plyboard of a shantytown hut, pawing his hands down the curves of her breasts. The man murmurs something in Lara’s ear as his hand twitches over her hips, and Lara cringes. But before he moves any further, she knees him in the groin, bites off his ear, wrestles him to the floor and, eventually, shoots him between the eyes. Lara wails and chokes, staring at the gun in her hand. It has stopped raining in the base camp where she sits, and the blood on her body is rendered thickly.

This sequence—Lara’s first kill in her career—was the centerpiece of the newest Tomb Raider gameplay demo at its E3 2012 debut. That day, executive producer Ron Rosenberg explained in an interview with Kotaku that the new game was constructed as an “origin story,” a prequel to the Tomb Raider games released in the ’90s. The game, he explained, sought to “humanize” protagonist Lara Croft. Lara is “definitely the hero, but—you’re kind of like her helper… When you see her have to face these challenges, you start to root for her in a way you might not root for a male character,” Rosenberg said. “Towards the end, we really start to hit her, and to break her down… she’s taken hostage, she’s almost raped… She is literally turned into an animal.”

Rosenberg’s statement and the demo frustrated the hell out of me as a long-time player of the franchise, and unsurprisingly precipitated a furor among parts of the gaming community. How could a franchise so vested in its female protagonist stoop to sexual assault as a marketing ploy, a contingent of gamers wondered, and I agreed. But the question that the sexual assault poses isn’t a new one. Debates over the representation of Lara, her body, and her femininity papered gaming magazines as early as the franchise’s release in 1996. Lara was either too sexy to be a feminist icon, or too intellectual to be smutty—as if the two concepts are mutually exclusive. What the sexual assault in the new Tomb Raider recalls from previous debates—and what the rest of the game reiterates—is this: What is it that makes the Croftian hyperbody, “boundless, multiple, prosthetic” as Mary Flanagan defines it, so endlessly fascinating for gamers? tomb raider debuted in 1996 to immense critical and commercial success and, for one reason or another, tanked in 2003 with the release of its fifth game. Development and production were kicked around to a few different companies, and Tomb Raider games cropped up on the market erratically and to poor reception over the next seven years. In response to the franchise’s abysmal sales rates, the developers of Tomb Raider released a “reboot” of the franchise on March 5, 2013. The reason for the franchise’s sharp decline, publisher SquareEnix argued, was Lara’s “Teflon coating.” She was a tight-lipped, bigbreasted ex-aristocrat who took no shit: she was as stone cold dodging the leering limbs of mutant human experiments as she was when she read her dead father’s journals. She was eminently unrelatable. If the reboot “humanized” Lara with a kind of Bildungsroman, their logic went, then the market sales would follow.

It would be generous to say that the developers’ intent to “humanize” Lara’s body proved a red herring. By the logic of the game, “human” (read: relatable) bodies are traumatized bodies, bodies in pain. As I navigated Lara through a (paltry) 14 hours of gameplay, her body—the clean, polygonal surface of her toned thighs and trapezoidal breasts—was beaten and bludgeoned and burned.

The game opens with a pan shot of a shipwreck on an island in the Sea of Japan.

Lara, separated from her crew, is clocked over the head and kidnapped by an island-goer.

She wakes up swathed in a cocoon of fabric and strung up by her feet to the ceiling of a cave, presumably left for dead. She panics—Help! Help! I’ve got to get down! and I pick

07 FEATURES

up my controller. A torch is (serendipitously) scorching by her side, so I swing Lara into its flicker. This is going to hurt! she gasps as I swing her back and forth across the cave’s length, the cocoon hovering in a slow burn. The fabric snaps, and Lara hurtles down the length of the cave and pierces her stomach on a rusted nail. Her moans pitch into shrieks the longer I tap the triangle button to guide the extraction of the nail. She wrenches the nail from her abdomen, and the camera fizzles into a grayscale double-vision (to really hammer home her blood loss, I suppose) as she hobbles through the rest of the cave. For the next ten minutes of gameplay, Lara slips the hands of crazed indigenous men, detonates an old carton of gasoline, and dodges falling boulders as she snakes her way out of the crypt, whimpering the whole way through.

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with Lara’s reaction to her kidnapping.

I can guarantee that should I (by some awful and invidious strain of happenstance) find myself in the same situation, I would scream myself into a dark corner until exposure got the better of me. Lara is realistic in the sense that most people in her position would freak out like she does, but herein lies the problem. I cannot think of any of Lara’s male counterparts in other gaming franchises that narratively “require” an origin story, much less one that requires their relentless subjection to obscene amounts of bodily torture for the sake of relativizing their experience. The operative assumption for developers, then, is this: gamers cannot “identify” with, or otherwise assume the position of Lara Croft like they could Solid Snake or Max Payne, and so must instead be situated as Lara’s “protectors.” The assumption is shored up by another, which is that the gaming demographic consists almost exclusively (and developers cater to the interests) of men.

Frustrated that the game foists the mission to “protect” a woman who had, until this installment, never needed protecting and who, by virtue of the closed system of video game narratives, I knew was going to be subjected to a stupid amount of violence no matter how many henchmen or rabid wolves she shot, my enthusiasm waned. The image of the resilient Lara I had grown up with was ruined, and for what? The gratuitous affirmation of presumptive male gamers’ baser instincts. The “realism” of Lara’s pain, here, belies a much more disconcerting reality: that media producers writ large shill their product on the back of the derogated female body. i can imagine the retorts. “But, as a female gamer, don’t you identify with Lara’s struggle? Isn’t her pain somehow emblematic of the pain all women experience at some point or another?” To which I say definitely not because a) that’s a false consciousness and b) identification is not an identitarian process. By which I mean, playing a female protagonist as a female gamer does not eventuate some kind of voodoo moment in which I somehow understand Lara’s experience as an extension or iteration of my own. This isn’t to say, however, that I don’t “identify” with Lara the character, and that, in contradistinction to developers’ assumptions, other gamers don’t either. As a gamer, I am responsible for her every move on screen, and so Lara’s interests are necessarily aligned with—identified with—mine: if Lara dies, the game ends and I have to either restart at a checkpoint or go write my thesis. This dynamic has proven much more tendentious for male gamers, who are often vocal about resenting their “forced identification” with a female protagonist (i.e., “tomb raider sucks i hate to play a female char”).1 Male gamers are adamant about this point: they don’t play “as a woman” when they play Tomb Raider; they play as

1.

I’m not making this up. See Conan’s review of the game on his Clueless Gamer segment, or read virtually any review of the Tomb Raider franchise posted on gaming forums.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Lara and the Real Girl Crofting the Female Body

by Emma Janaskie Illustration by Diane Zhou

men controlling a woman. The distinction, for them, is important, and it’s telling that developers across the board (with good reason, to an extent) are open about assuming a largely male player-ship. The reboot of Tomb Raider in particular, I find, anticipated the male knee jerk reaction to this “forced identification.” Tomb Raider, until this installment, was famed for its sexualization of Lara (inviting the deluge of nude codes, Tomb Raider porn, the ads featuring Lara in a bikini advertising sports drinks), but clearly the tact of overtly sexualizing Lara had maxed out its market capital. The games stopped selling, and Lara’s objectification and sexualization became the problem for developers to solve, the mystery to unravel.

If you can’t fuck the woman who invites your desire, the logic of the Tomb Raider franchise goes, you might as well save her, and nothing antes up the paternalistic drive like watching her suffer. Throughout the game, Lara’s body is immersed in violence: she whimpers as she quietly swims through a river of blood, knocking aside errant limbs; she cries as she’s strung up (again!) by her feet next to 30-some naked, rotting corpses. The more I played through the game and the more I listened to Lara scream and whimper, the more I wanted to toss my controller on the couch and stop playing. It became clear to me that the impulses that developers mechanize in order to sell games—the impulses to both fuck and save Lara Croft—are twin responses to a female hyperbody, a body that, in its virtuality, is a fantastical body; the prime site of male gamers’ anxieties and misgivings about the female form.

If presumptive male gamers are reluctantly situated in some form of identification with Lara because the very mechanics of gaming demand such an identification, then those gamers must be afforded some form of control over this feminine hyperbody (that, or the game simply won’t sell.) The game proves that the formal and narrative devices affording gamers this control—“humanization,” which is really traumatization, and sexualization—are cleaved along the lines of sexual difference. They depend on the assumption of masculine gamer for their efficacy. I was done “protecting” Lara and I never

MAY 03 2013

wanted to bed her in the first place, so by hour 13, I found the game buckling under its clichés. That said, these narrative devices and their sexual determination don’t prescribe all male players’ experience of the game (or female players’ experience, for that matter).

There is room for alternative, non-narrative modes of game playing (no one says that you can’t ditch the idea of raiding tombs and spend hours shooting the crabs on the beach); but that’s beside the point. The point is that the game and the game’s narrative presumes a non-reflexive, masculine gamer. Until this presumption is both recognized and interrogated, debates about the representation of femininity are damned to dance around each other and across the mainstay of identification. in its alleged project to unravel the tightly woven fantasy of Lara Croft’s body, the rebooted Tomb Raider becomes the very send-up of its own methods. It tells us that there is, of course, nothing “real” behind that killer pixelled bod, that what motivates gamer interest in Lara are gamers’ own anxieties and projections triggered by half-baked narrative pot shots like sexual assault. Tomb Raider, then, sells gamers on reality by underhandedly doubling up on fantasy. After all, virtual reality is just that: virtual. Even the most graphically nuanced and realistic games never prescribe straight shots of realism for gamers—everything virtual is always chased with the ever-ready shot of phantasm.

In the case of the Tomb Raider franchise, male gamers can always return to Lara’s body, the theatre for their simultaneous paternalistic and carnivorous affirmation. But as a woman playing the game, I did not want to be reminded that this Lara was the inchoate incarnation of the Lara I grew up with, because to be inchoate, in this game, is to be victimized. Which means here: crudely feminized.

My frustration with the game, though, is an outlier on the operative bell curve.

Female bodies that don’t suggest their own destruction or penetration don’t sell. By so laxly deploying identification as the viniculum through which trauma is trafficked in as humanization, the developers of Tomb Raider have turned Lara’s body not into a site of a nascent, resilient femininity, but of garish violence. It is no secret that the video game industry has long capitalized on stereotypes about women and their bodies. But by cracking open Lara’s body in the name of revealing her emotional interior, the developers have only re-fetishized that body, snapping into clarity the trenchant impulses to police and fuck a heroine who, by some other set of rules, in another world, could have been unstoppable.

EMMA JANASKIE B’13 is a “woman.”

FEATURES

08

THE BIRDS Picturing Providence’s Peregrines

by Anna Rotman Illustration by Nina Ruelle there are myths about providence’s Superman Building in need of debunking. The first myth is that it served as the model for the Daily Planet building in the Superman comics.

The second is that it is lifeless, or, as Providence realtor Gerard H. McDonough told the Providence Journal, “a tombstone in the center of the city.” The building, 111 Westminster, closed its doors to human tenants earlier this month when Bank of America moved out. It was already mostly unoccupied: the bank had only been using a fifth of the 26-story edifice.

But one group of residents has survived the exodus, and is thriving.

Peregrine falcons are experiencing an unambiguous comeback. The birds of prey were strongly affected by the widespread use of the pesticide DDT in the 1950s and within a few decades had all but vanished from the eastern United States. With the enforcement of DDT bans and the intervention of wildlife services breeding programs, their population rebounded and, in 1999, they were taken off the US Endangered Species list.

The peregrine falcon is the ultimate predator: it can reach speeds above 200 mph and attack birds mid-air. Scattered at the feet of their nests are piles of discarded remains. Urban areas are ideal hunting grounds for these raptors, with the preponderance of pigeons and tall buildings. And they are not the only birds of prey stalking the city streets and skies.

Providence is home to hawks, owls, kestrels, and ospreys among others. the audubon society of rhode island and the US Fish & Wildlife Services installed a nest box on 111 Westminster in 1996. Their goal was to attract a family of falcons, as part of a concerted effort by the Fish & Wildlife Services to boost their population. There had not been a known successful nesting in Providence since 1951. The current box—designed for a RISD class project and made of donated rainforest wood—is shallow enough to mimic a ledge and has a gravel substrate. According to Jeffrey Hall, the Senior Director of Advancement at ASRI, the first peregrines hatched in the nest box in 2000. Since then, around 30 falcon chicks, or eyasses,

have hatched successfully. ASRI volunteers band the birds so that when spotted again, they can be identified: one of last year’s fledglings is now in Connecticut, and the nest’s resident male is from Boston.

The latest eyasses hatched last Friday. Falcon eggs are around the size of chicken eggs. The birds that hatch out of them are furry, wet, white, and helpless. ASRI, with the help of private and public donors, installed a camera onto the nest box and the live stream is available online (asri.org). For the most part, the video is so monotonous that you need to focus on the ant-sized cars sliding along in the background to make sure it hasn’t stalled. Because the eyasses only recently hatched, there is minimal action in the nest box: at most times of the day, one of the parents is sitting on the hatchlings. But if you catch the live stream at the right moment, the payoff can be big: one of the parents delivering food, or the male and the female handing off sitting duty and leaving the cuddled up hatchlings exposed for just a few minutes. The hatchlings will leave by the end of the month, Hall explains. But the next few weeks will be full of drama: “Once the birds get bigger, they’ll need food so the parents will be hunting all the time.”

told the Independent, and once you start, you’ll notice them everywhere. Almost every lunch hour, Green grabs his camera and takes a walk around Downtown. His photos (which he posts regularly on providenceraptors.com) are a testament to downtown’s unseen drama. The most surprising ones are those taken in busy places, like Kennedy Plaza, where a hawk is flying at eye-level, clutching a bloody pigeon carcass, without so much as a nod from a passerby.

Talking to Green, it is clear that what started as a curiosity has become a lifestyle. He had not considered himself a bird watcher before moving to Providence from New York City.

Now, he tracks the hatching schedule and nesting locations of owls, hawks, herons, and falcons. For Hall, the nest box is a success story: the Rhode Island peregrine population has been rising steadily and new nests have been springing up across the state without any human intervention. For Green and other fledgling wildlife admirers, it has changed the character of urban living. “I eventually want to live in a house, out of the city,” Green says. “But it’s hard to leave: people take entire vacations just to get a glimpse of a peregrine and I get to see them from my desk, looking out my window.”

peter green, a providence-based graphic designer, has seen the falcons up close. Every year, 21 days after the eggs hatch, ASRI volunteers climb to the roof of 111 Westminster and tag the newest members of the Providence peregrine family. This is the only day of the year that the falcons are disturbed. The group waits until the third week because by then the young birds’ feet are fully grown, which means that the bands won’t cause any harm. Although the banding itself only takes a few minutes, it is no easy task: falcons are protective and can cause serious damage with their talons. Green—who has joined the expedition for the past three years—became acquainted with the falcons like one would any neighbor: by spying on them with a telephoto lens from the roof of his apartment building.

Shortly after moving to Providence, Green started noticing birds of prey haunting the streets. One minute a red-tailed hawk would be tearing up a pigeon in Burnside Park, and the next, it would be gone. “You just have to look,” Green

Soar on, ANNA ROTMAN B’14.5, soar on.

Photos courtesy of Peter Green, copyright 2012.

09 METRO

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Peregrine Falcon Location: For a glimpse of the mighty peregrine falcons, walk from 111 Westminster St. towards Exchange St. Cross the street and, standing next to the Bank of RI building, crane your head. You should be able to make out the nest box towards the roof in one of the building’s creases.

ID: If you keep your eyes on 111 Westminster St. for long enough, you’re bound to see one come or go. With its long wingspan and short tail, it looks like a stealth bomber, which, rumor goes, is not a coincidence. It is similar in size to a crow, but much faster. Its head is dark and its belly is barred black and white.

Great Blue Heron Location: Anywhere along the river is good place to spot herons.

You’ll probably have the most luck, though, at India Point Park.

Herons can often be found standing motionless in shallow areas, patiently stalking their aquatic prey.

ID: The heron is the most elegant Providence bird. It has an S-shaped neck, long legs, and it flies with slow, heavy wingbeats.

As per its name, it has blue-gray coloring, with a black stripe over each eye. Its beak is wide and long and shares the dull yellow color of the bird’s legs, which, in flight, stick out like the inferior limbs that they are.

Cooper’s Hawk Location: As with the red-tailed Hawk, where there are cooper’s hawks, there should be cooper’s hawks. So follow the pigeons to get a chance at encountering these aggressive hunters. Unlike most other raptors, they kill their prey through repeated squeezing.

ID: The cooper’s hawk is smaller than the red-tailed hawk and overall a lot less red. It has a much longer tail as well, striped in black and brown. It can also be recognized by its flight pattern: an exceptionally agile aerial navigator, it can often be seen gliding leisurely.

Red-tailed Hawk Location: In the past, Kennedy Plaza and Burnside Park have been regular haunts for red-tailed hawks. When park-goers feed the pigeons, they are inadvertently luring them into a hawk’s ideal buffet.

ID: Untrained birdwatchers often confuse hawks for eagles. In almost every case, it’s not going to be an eagle. It’s a hawk. But that shouldn’t be a cause for disappointment. This hawk is still one of the largest birds in North America. It has a short, wide tail that looks like a cinnamon-colored fan. It has a distinct, shrill, raspy scream, reminiscent of a flying dinosaur.

MAY 03 2013

METRO

10

I’M HAVING A HARD TIME WITH THIS

This Shit is so Race-Baiting, but Why am I Laughing?

by Raillan Brooks Illustration by Lizzie Davis

Keisha: Oh my God Breadquanda gon die when she hear this...girl you would not I just heard what had just occurred I just got off the phone with Eshewandabufantanquibalefandellarequandralaquishabonishatishabufantrellaniquantrell, and she had say [sic] that she had seen Terrell fuckin’ some other lady.

Unnamed woman: Oh my god who the fuck is he fuckin’ now?

Keisha: Some bitch named Deltrese.

Unnamed Woman: Who? Keisha: Some bitch named Deltrese.

Unnamed Woman: Oh my God excuse you my name is Deltrese.

Who is Terrell? Why is he important to Keisha, or to Deltrese, or to Breadquanda? Why didn’t Deltrese know what Keisha was about to say if it was true? And Deltrese is obviously not Breadquanda. Why did Keisha walk into a stranger’s house and mistake her for her 200-pound best friend with Icee-blue hair?

The Keisha Fabo videos appeared on YouTube in the summer of 2011. The first of the videos is the most popular, though it’s hovered around 1.2 million views for about six months. Each one of the three videos follows four characters: the titular Keisha, her best friend Breadquanda, the new girl Bonshequidalafondria (sp), and their accidental enemy Deltrese—or Some Bitch Named Deltrese, as she’s credited, I’m not really sure since they’re used interchangeably. All the videos were made in a SIMS character generator, all landscapes are SIMS landscapes, and all the dialogue is vocoded.

By the third installment, the videos have become aware of themselves. A “previously on” montage establishes the conflict with Deltrese as an arc, and introduces new viewers to the vernacular of the characters. The viewer learns that autotune is constitutive of, not independent from, the dialogue, and Breadquanda’s encounters with various penises are elevated to a plot point (there is no fourth installment). The third video now has title cards—“Welcome to Keisha’s Valley”—and a sweeping landscape shot, when the other two did not.

All the women are single and live in Victorian mansions in a manicured suburb, which I’m guessing was meant to set off the ’90s hoodrat aesthetic of the characters (I think their outfits are facsimiles of something TLC wore in some music video, but I can’t remember).

Whatever there is to say about the Keisha Fabo videos, it’s obvious that they were constructed deliberately. They all follow a basic structure, always beginning with Keisha seeking out Breadquanda with some bit of gossip—the content of which is either the main conflict of the video or the action that starts it—and always ending with our protagonists dancing to actually existing four-on-the-floor hip hop tracks.

Deltrese serves nicely as a stable villain character.

The humor of Keisha Fabo is exclusively potty race humor, the sort of stuff in the Def Comedy Jam DVD my white friends and I passed around in high school, except more reckless and sort of nastier. The writer is clearly going for broke, betting on viewers’ already existing ideas about what Black (people) humor is supposed to be, all jive talk and Friday references. Race isn’t real in Keisha’s Valley. The writer bloated and contorted it beyond recognition. Viewers laugh either because no one like Keisha or her friends exists IRL, or they hope that they don’t. (I’m not writing here about the

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gender problem (the first thing you notice is that even though all the characters are women, they are all voiced by men. One man, in fact) It’s not that the issue is less important or interesting, or is subordinated in any way by the race question. It’s just that my blackness and my gayness make it hard for me not to see those things first, think about them first, and more responsibly. I’m sorry.)

Who is behind Keisha Fabo? In the two years since the Keisha Fabo videos hit the Web, their provenance is still a hot debate on those seedy message boards, the ones with Ad Tech showing Anime women speaking in Russian accents. Is the creator white? Black? All we know with reasonable certainty is that the creator is male and probably young, though how young we can’t really tell. That the creator is gay demands a little more extrapolation. The campiness of these and other videos on the same YouTube channel point in the same direction, as annoying as it is to admit (I and the denizens of the Net could be wrong about this, but I’ll explain later why in all likelihood the creator is a gay man).

For about a year, the most likely culprit was Miles Jai, a bona fide YouTube celebrity vlogger who colors his permed hair in the same panicky neons as the characters in the videos.

He is a loud, proud black gay man—that’s what most of his videos are about, or at least circle around—who, maybe intentionally, performs a character that could have been snatched straight out of a Keisha Fabo plot line. He’s also an accomplished, if technically amateur, voice artist. That his voice and the voices of Keisha, Breadquanda, and Deltrese were not precisely the same might just have been shtick, or digital effects, or both. A more satisfying explanation comes from the production of the videos themselves. In a number of his vlogs, he uses sound files from Keisha Fabo that seem uncorrupted.

Did he have the originals?

But on July 11, 2012, after receiving harrassing emails and YouTube comments, Jai tweeted:

My guess is that no one and everyone is behind Keisha Fabo. Viewers stumbled on yet another product of gay men’s appropriation and caricaturization of black femininity, a cultural mode prominent on YouTube for the obvious reason that YouTube enables and encourages performance (see: Chris Crocker, Jeffree Star, and Sharolaid, a white gay Florida man in drag as a white lady prank-calling local Taco Bells and Dairy Queens as a black lady. He went on hiatus in 2008, but I think he just reactivated his channel). People on Yahoo! Answers have a lot of theories about why gay men act like black women. Soulflower, an Answers user for over six years, says that “I think that some Gay White men have been associated with Black people because in the 1970s disco was played at Gay nightclubs. Many of the disco singers were Black women and other groups of people made the association,” which is hilarious. But you get the point. It’s the idea that gay men are constitutionally unable to resist extravagant femininity, and stereotypes of black women lend themselves neatly to their displays. (A competing argument is, so what? We have no way

of telling if all the minstrelry was intentional. Why not take it for what it is? I’m not all that interested in arguments that Keisha Fabo represents the first gasps of the digital age of exploitation art; there’s no hint of celebration for Black cultural formations, nor is there any indication any Black people whatsoever were involved in making this (by the way, this makes me think of the controversy surrounding Django Unchained, where Quentin Tarantino was never able to overcome his knowing whiteness in a substantive way. The one thing he was never able to convince us of was his innocence.))

Even underneath all that, there’s something about how the videos are viewed that makes it hard to ignore a pattern.

The Internet has in some ways become the waste heap for cultural production too un-PC or too shitty to appear on TV, in no small part due to anonymity and the impossibility of perfectly establishing provenance (old idea, but check out 4chan or the r/cringe subreddit if you don’t believe me). There’s also the diffusion of cultural labor we ought to talk about.

The Internet has become the stall door of a men’s bathroom toilet because we are allowed to consume it by ourselves. The back of a TV is always to a wall, but with a computer there is always a screen between you and the room. You can delight in secret. Did I delight in Keisha Fabo? At first, I have to say, yes: the jokes were boisterous and uncompromising, and it felt good that the humor was activating some of the codes and stereotypes only “I” am able to enjoy. But then they morphed into something else. I started showing them to my friends (full disclosure: aforementioned white high school friends posted it to my Facebook wall about a year ago), expecting them to have the same giddy appreciation of the videos as I did. As the looks of horror started to outnumber the smiles, it occurred to me that Keisha Fabo was not mine to enjoy. I wondered why I thought it was so funny. Mostly, I realized, because I didn’t have to let anyone see me smile, lest my body and its status be dragged into the conversation.

Thanks to Google’s new push to have users use their real names as handles, we now know that someone named “Kyle M” was behind the videos. If you look at the 12 non-Keisha Fabo videos he posted, it’s clear Kyle M is thinking about something. The rotating pentagrams adorned with photos of Lindsay Lohan at each corner set to atmospheric music, a review of a Charmin Ultra commercial, the fractals of gyrating disembodied heads of Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga laid over with chopped and screwed versions of their music. Kyle M is well-versed in the motifs and going concerns of Internet Art (the logics of late capitalism, the re-importance of the body, the cultures and commodifications of mass media). In most ways, Keisha Fabo stands out as the dumbest thing he’s made.

Yet we’re still no closer to putting a face to the videos than before. The face. That’s what matters, I guess—feeling like a racist when you laugh is a drag. When Breadquanda insists that she sucked a dick so hard that it popped clean off and revealed itself to be a dildo, viewers want to be a part of Keisha Breadquanda’s call-in-response of autotuned Oh mah gah’s, before heading to the club to “pop [their] pussies.” I think Kyle M wants that, too. His artisanal YouTube freakshow might be his way of gesturing towards a liberation, not just as a white gay man who needs to feel “free” to perform black femininity, but that our giggles ought to be directed at the way we consume mass media: without much mind to the bodies that are attached to it. I think that’s stupid, but hey, how else do you garner 1.2 million views?

RAILLAN BROOKS B‘13 is looking for some thug daddies to fux wit.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Music in Your Feet The Appalachian Mountain Dance

by Grier Stockman Illustration by Adriana Gallo

when the cattle are loaded up and the auctioneer retires, the livestock hall in Ripley, West Virginia takes on new life. In the summer gloaming, you can just make out the form of a pick-up truck as it rolls into the back lot. A door slams. Boots click. A roof note lingers as a fiddler plucks his string. Bodies disappear inside. What unfolds in the oxen pits and between the bleacher seats—loud and irreverent—is a three hundred year old tradition: clog dancing.

Born out of the folk dances brought to the Appalachian region from Scottish, Irish, English, and Dutch-German settlers in the early 1700s—and later influenced by Native Americans, African slaves, and Russian Gypsies—clog dancing, or “clogging,” is one of the oldest dance forms in the US. The clog itself looks more like a tap-shoe, with two “jingles”—flapping metal pieces—attached to the toe and heel. They create a percussive rhythm to a tune’s downbeat. I phoned up renowned instructor Jeff Driggs of West Virginia to get a better sense of the experience: “Once you get those on your feet you realize that you’re an instrument yourself and everything you do with you feet will make music…there’s almost a power to it. And you can go along with it, you can add to it, and you can change it. That’s the beauty of having that music in your feet.”

There’s nothing remotely connected about the way the upper and lower body move in clogging. Feet move intentionally, arms sway and pump loosely. When you take in the dancer’s entire figure, the overall effect of the movement is casual. But steps like “The Briar Patch” or “Steppin’ on a Snake” capture the urgency and precision of the clogger’s footwork. Clogging can be performed with shoes or without, “it doesn’t require costumes or a college education,” writer Angela Charlton explains. Its founders “danced to enjoy themselves, for a break from daily hardship…they weren’t concerned with standardized steps.” To the people of Appalachia, clogging still embodies the sound and movement of settlers’ newfound freedom upon immigrating to America. Clogging’s unique form reflects both their unique immigration story and deep ties to the American landscape.

Appalachia spans from northern Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to the Southern Tier of New York and is home to more than 23 million people. West Virginia is the only state to fall entirely within the region. The landscape of West Virginia is nearly impenetrable. The hills are tightly packed into a verdant wilderness, divided only by narrow river valleys—known locally as “hollers”—and a loose skein of mountain roads. The hills that aren’t sliced open and gutted for coal are so steep that, anthropologist Kathleen C.

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Stewart observes, “the sun shines down on them for only a few hours a day before passing over the next ridge.” The insides of mountains are still piled on the roadside—giant, smoking piles of black coal. Their oily discharge poses a constant threat to the surrounding creeks and waterbeds that vein across the backcountry. Trains run constantly; their metronomic whistle underlies the state’s slow and steady soundscape.

With its dense forests and bewildering mountain system, Appalachia’s foreboding landscape held off the westward expansion of British colonies for nearly a century. The few entry points into America’s interior, through the Hudson and Mohawk Valley (New York), and the Cumberland Water Gap (Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia) were well protected by powerful Iroquois, Creek, and Cherokee tribes. As a result, Appalachian frontiersmen of the early 18th century were fiercely independent, self-sufficient individuals. Far removed from civilization, the people of Appalachia developed their own way of life—one long-buffeted from change by the barrier of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

In West Virginia, the old adage goes, “you can take the man out of the mountains, but you can’t take the mountains out of the man.” With its powerful steps and free, interpretative form, clogging celebrates the history of its forbearers and the preservation of the mountain lifestyle. Smaller, more rural communities, which expert clogger Driggs claims “haven’t changed in a hundred years,” work hard to keep the tradition alive. As a child, Driggs remembers a community patriarch and famed mountain dancer, “D Ray,” picking up kids in the bed of his pick-up truck and taking them down to the local dance hall to teach them how to clog. “That’s just mountain culture,” Driggs explains.

Mass media has taken a toll on the freedom and individuality of clogging. Young cloggers have absorbed the structure and choreography of more popular dance, like hip-hop, into the old movements of the mountains. Now, young Appalachian women in sparkly t-shirs clog to Missy Elliot on Youtube. And while once practiced communally, clogging has found its way into the competitive dance world, dividing older and younger generations. The division isn’t necessarily lamentable, though. Grassroots clogging still has a place in Appalachia; you can hear it in the old dance halls of West Virginia on weekend nights. This new growth only continues a centuries-old pattern, in which the dance absorbs and blends the rhythms of diverse cultures to create something uniquely American.

GRIER STOCKMAN B’14 is a toe-tappin pistol packin’ hot mama.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

E-BURN DAVIS

An American Giant

Startup, Meet Nostalgia

by Tristan Rodman Illustration by Eli Pitegoff american giant began with an epiphany. “People are tired of products made far away from home—they are looking to be more connected to the things they use every day and the people who make them,” founder and CEO Bayard Wintrhop explained to Esquire at American Giant’s launch.

American Giant makes hoodies. Based in San Francisco, Winthrop and Phillipe Manoux­the—the company’s creative director and a former Apple industrial design employee— collaborated on every detail to get their hoodie just right. They source all their materials from the United States and conduct all manufacturing in Milbrae, just south of San Francisco. Winthrop speaks about the benefits of keeping the manufacturing chain local in terms reminiscent of the locavore food movement. He knows where his fabrics come from and feels more comfortable with the final product as a result. If the problem is that most textile goods are too cheap and disposable to begin with, American Giant seeks to correct this by manufacturing durability. With a factory only fifteen minutes from headquarters, a shipment of fabric that comes in incorrect or a batch of hoodies frays too easily can be sent back quickly and for a minimal cost.

If you think this is beginning to sound like your typical trendy “Made-inthe-USA” apparel company, you’re not wrong. The fashion industry often uses domestic manufacturing as either a cover-up for poor quality goods or a way to make the consumer feel ethical and empowered. Ralph Lauren came under fire for outsourcing the manufacturing of the US Olympic uniforms, and Union Made, another San Francisco-based clothing label, was exposed by Gawker for selling goods that weren’t, in fact, union-made. But American Giant strays from the traditional mold of the made-in-the-USA gimmick. Rather than base their business strategy on what they recognize to be outdated models of supply chain and manufacturing, American Giant uses tactics traditionally employed by Silicon Valley startups: direct-to-consumer distribution, building brand image and fan loyalty, and the generation of hype through online write-ups. Despite this, American Giant still harbors nostalgia for an old American way of doing business where things are done correctly, not easily, and the brand uses that nostalgia to create a strong mythos around their product.

The consequences of running a company that sells physical goods in the manner of a startup that sells immaterial goods (apps, etc.) became clear this past December. American Giant received a write-up in Slate from tech writer Farhad Manjoo, who championed the American Giant hoodie as “the greatest sweatshirt known to man,” praising its texture, its fit, and build quality. Instantly, the company was flooded with orders, a half a million in two days. Manjoo reflected in a later article, “One of the promises of hosting your business on the Internet is that, thanks to viral marketing, you can become an overnight hit. For lots of Internet companies there’s little downside to instant success. If you sell software, your app can go from 10 users to 10 million overnight and, as long as you manage your servers well, you’ll be OK…If you make stuff that can’t scale at the speed of the social Web, instant demand might be more of a curse than a blessing.” One outraged commenter on Manjoo’s initial piece exclaims, “This company may in fact make the world’s best hoodie (I’ll judge for myself if mine ever comes), but they obviously completely suck at scaling up to meet the demand created by this article.”

American Giant’s meteoric ascent highlights a broad-stroke shift in the dynamics of the American Dream. Many years of applying a strong work ethic has morphed into cashing in overnight on a genius idea. The promise has changed: through hard work over a very concentrated period of time, you will become immensely successful, briefly. Mobility is no longer possible via a steady, consistent climb by the many, but rather only through a meteoric ascent by a select few.

MAY 03 2013

Of course, the myth of the American Dream is just that. Today, the balance has shifted from the myth of work ethic to the myth of origin. This isn’t to say that origin myth is no longer important in America, but rather that the starting point is now more important than the climb. Apple started with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in a basement. Facebook started in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room. America has always steeped itself in origin mythology, from the founding fathers to Henry Ford. These myths are cemented and reified through circulation in popular culture. What’s new here may not be the myth, but its application to a new type of figure—not the self-made hard-worker who climbed from the bottom but the self-made hard-worker who sat around waiting for the next big idea. And it goes beyond just the tech industry: when Drake raps, “Started from the bottom now we here,” he glosses over the (negligible) work it took to ascend. The origin story begins to dwarf the myth of work ethic by focusing on the two endpoints rather than the journey between them.

The necessity for an origin myth to span that gap has grown so strong that it’s essential now to create your own. This is perhaps why Bayard Winthrop sought out tech writers (and Farhad Manjoo in particular) to write an article on his hoodie. And even before Manjoo’s piece caused the company to blow up, previous press coverage had come equally from fashion publications (who focused on the company’s dedication to detail) and technology publications (who focused on the company’s business strategy). The press coverage and the enormous buzz generated by Manjoo have grounded American Giant’s origin myth, both explaining and obscuring how the company traveled from small-scale hoodie manufacturer to makers of one of the most in-demand hoodies currently on the market.

Now that American Giant has become giant, there’s an interesting paradox: if their application of direct-to-consumer business models to material goods is successful, it means that they can scale, grow and create more manufacturing jobs domestically. In other words, by following the path of ascent from nothing to everything, from lower class to upper class, American Giant seeks to restore middle class accessibility. Bayard Winthrop buys into this wholesale: “This idea that technological innovation is liberating the best of American manufacturing is a fascinating business idea, and it’s one that has me really optimistic about the American manufacturing sector looking forward.” Rather than manufacturing jobs for computer science majors straight out of college, American Giant aims to create jobs for American manual laborers.

Even there, however, this desire is shrouded in nostalgia. American Giant’s “About Us” page reads like this: “From seed to sewn, what we make and sell is the product of an old American work ethic and a new American way of doing business. So you can not only be proud of what you wear but be surprised at how well it’s made, how well it fits and the quality of how it feels. We cut no corners.

We did this the hard way. We do things the right way.” At the core of American Giant’s philosophy is a tension between new American business strategies and old American work ethics. American Giant seeks to show that the two can successfully coexist.

But American Giant has yet to show that it can scale to meet its demand, and it’s still not clear that a $80 hoodie will ever be viable on a large scale. It’s also unclear how large American Giant’s operation can become, what types of laborers they will employ, or how much they can pay them. At the core of it all sits mythology: an initial boom that sustains a career of innovation. Even if American Giant fizzles, we know how it started.

TRISTAN RODMAN B’15 can make you a celebrity overnight.

FEATURES

14

BENSON TUCKER The chair is leaning on half of its legs, his feet kicked up on the table, and the dregs of a beer slosh in the bottom of a Budweiser can. “I don’t even drink Budweiser,” he thinks. He reaches for another. Fucking Gramsci, bro.

Most of the literature on Ben Tucker has been redacted over the years by one government agency or another, but we do know the skeleton of his biography. Grew up at sea, catching salmon by day and running a poker racket for the Brotherhood at night. Spent six years in a prison off the Moroccan coast, where he wrote and disseminated his manifesto, “Le Main de Saignement”; released after a second insurrection made him too much of a liability to the administration.

But he vowed to return. He changed his name, removed his tattoos, started a vegan diet. Salsa, mostly. He’s a meditative man, Spartan in manner. Most people say he’s waiting. Waiting for the right moment. I once overheard some girls in the AS220 bathroom: “But what’s he waiting for?!” Stuffed in that big brain—feet kicked up on the table, moving on to his third Budweiser—is the answer. The answer to all the questions.

ANA ALVAREZ ROBERT MERRITT The first night I met Rob he brought me to his dorm room under the pretense of “grabbing a jacket.” He offered me a Capri Sun and read poems off his Blackberry that he asked me to judge as either “good” or “bad.” Later, he told me about his time in Vietnam and suggested I read Eyeless in Gaza.

Once, Rob and I went to Newport. We walked along the mansions and there were three of us. Sometimes he pretended to be my boyfriend and sometimes he didn’t. Afterward, I bought him fish and chips. We may have seen Ruth Madoff having clam chowder, but the sighting remains unconfirmed.

Rob taught me how to mop, how to use a scanner, and how to make really good nachos. He also taught me how to drive at night and how to use scissors most effectively. Sometimes I call him a genius. Sometimes I just call him. He has a lot of movie projects and I’m trying really hard to star in one.

He offered me a role playing a character inspired by me in a neo-surrealist ghost movie, but I didn’t get the part. Instead we just made our scariest faces into the camera and he showed me some forks he’d hung from the ceiling.

He has a magazine called The Beam. I’m trying really hard to buy the name from him, but he’s a tough sell. He is loyal, like an old dog. We’ve talked about moving to Sweden together, and that sounds okay. We’ll live on a goat farm and marry each other’s cousins.

ERICA SCHWIEGERSHAUSEN Erica flosses. Ricky mixes two gin and tonics and convinces you to watch an episode of Carrie Diaries, STAT. She’s interested in dads; she’s great with moms. Erica has a signature soup. Ricky’s the most erotic ice skater you’d trust to edit your thesis. Throw the girl a legal pad, it’s the rebranding.

Over eggs she’s chatting about the ethics of representation, and, also, polar bears. How do they walk like that? She once had an intimate encounter at the Central Park Zoo. Nights you lie in bed together, silently texting. Someone says you two sigh in unison. Neither notice, but it feels right. Today, she announces, she’s really interested in writing about the everyday. Specifically, she wants to know why are you’re calling wedges platforms? Also, are there any pickles left? Point taken.

Erica never gets hung over, actually blushes, and you, you want to give her everything; stamps, chive dumplings, a rentcontrolled apartment in Brooklyn. She wants it in writing.

Joan Didion wrote her college recommendation. “Is that… a metaphor?” Erica asks with a certain disdain. Personally, she’s pledged allegiance to scare quotes. Born narcissist, babyfaced boy magnet, Ricky’s the girl of your dreams.

Write drunk, edit sober. You can’t remember if she said that or if you just glimpsed the epigraph of a password protected word document she uses to write down all her ideas. You’re feeling kind of guilty. She’s busy googling her name. Solipsism strikes again. Goodbye to all that, but only for now. See you in the Big City.

DAVID SCOFIELD “It’s just you and me, Old Buckshot,” the Indiana Rough Rider whispered to his horse. She whinnied. Back east they call him David Scofield. ‘Round these parts, they know better.

His shadow’s so long, it feels like night time when he rides into town. He’s got pistols—nice ones—in leather holsters he fastened himself. There’s an eagle feather in his neon orange Stetson. As he stood in front of the Last Chance Saloon, the townspeople drew their curtains. “BANG!” went the doors as he stepped inside. Snake Boots, our story’s villain, lay slumped over the counter. “There’s only room for one of us in this town,” he grumbled. “But I’m a lover, not a fighter,” the Rough Rider said, and opened a bag of cheese puffs. As he started to eat, the orange powder coated his fingers. “Let’s share. They don’t have these in the Ratty.”

15

JOSEPH BARRY ELKINTON This publication has misspelled Barry’s name many times; sometimes he’s Bari, sometimes Larry, sometimes Carrie. No, no, we’ve just called him Elkington now and then, but it’s an innocent mistake. Behind his back he’s known as the sleazy David Scofield. He’s quick-witted and silver-tongued, and his devil-may-care sense of direction is a guide to us all.

Barry is tired, and world-weary. In these pages, he has revealed his deepest and darkest childhood memories, and we thank him for that. If you comb his Week-in-Reviews, you’ll find answers to three out of five of his security questions, and you’ve got good odds at getting into his bank account. May his pheromones linger on our flesh for seasons to come. Here’s to you, Joseph Elkinton the Seventh.

This is an Emergency. Hanging on the wall is a white sheet, and you stand soldier-straight in front of it. Ana Cecilia Alvarez has floated to this room to take your picture, to take you and to make you Art, and your shoulders are shocked straight.

She wants to put glittery star stickers on your face.

“Relax, be you,” says Ana Cecilia, who doesn’t have a camera. But Ana Cecilia, Ana Cecilia Alvarez never needed one. She just looks at you and then—you two are in Mexico City, riding on rusted bikes and then Paris, pissed off, waiting for a streetlight to change and then Bilbao, switching accents to the way they talk here, and then always New York City, staring at a mosaic of two eyes pinned onto a subway hall, assembled from a collection tiles the color of the gilded eyes of Ana Cecilia.

You stare so long that you become a statue with stickers on it, but you expected that. And squinting her eyes and making a camera CLICK sound with her mouth, Ana Cecilia Alvarez takes your picture—she takes you.

TYLER BOURGOISE It’s 11PM on a Tuesday. The bar is dark and crowded. Tyler Bourgoise licks the salt off his palm, tilts back a shot of tequila. He swallows and bites a lime wedge. We’re drunk.

“That,” Tyler says, “was delicious.”

Tyler is Cowboy/Karamazov, and that makes for a complicated duality. For example: TCB plays squash but had a shaved head in high school; he loves Beethoven but has probably killed a dog before. And he has deep, green eyes but penciled a passage from the Inferno on his dorm room wall last year. Oops—those last two kind of fit together.

Once I ran into Tyler on the street when my grandmother was visiting. She said he was handsome afterwards. My grandma. I’m not saying Tyler’s a Fucking Loser, or a Creep, or anything like that. His gaze is just strong and also penetrating, and I think my grandma liked it. Keep that kind of thing up and he might just make it.

SCOUT WILLIS GREG SEWITZ I know only one weightlifting champion in Rhode Island who can fit into a Banana Republic men’s medium, and that’s Greg, a man of paradoxical depth. He moves nimbly but with incredible force, like some sort of Mesoamerican god with the eyes of a weasel, the wings of a condor, and the hiss of a serpent. One thing to remember: Greg knows all of the people you know. A few years ago, I invited him to my birthday party. I found him in the corner with a Sierra Nevada in one hand, his checkered sleeves rolled up. He greeted me jovially, feigning formality with a jocular handshake, but when I shouted “thanks for coming!” over the thumping music, he furrowed his brow in confusion. Later that night, a friend informed me that I had actually gone to Greg’s party, a soiree so desirable that I unknowingly skipped my own birthday party. Soon Greg will graduate, where he’ll cook crickets for a quick million and shake hands with all the people you wish you could shake hands with. But he won’t lose that boyish smile, or his knack for creating instant traditions. When he goes forth from our hill once and for all. the children will gather and sing: O! Sadness. O! Woe. In the sky of all things flies dear Greg, Weasel with the Biggest Wings

Like a septum piercing that only occasionally shows its studded prongs, Scout is tastefully spicy. Her name is short for an unprintable proverb my bachelor uncle told me once. She’s a succubus eating hot fries; she’s draped exclusively in silk— only raw on the weekends. Once I asked her for a cigarette.

She gave me one made entirely of candy and then asked me if I had a name. It was hard to remember it, in that moment, and as I choked on the first letter of a first name more country than my own she stopped me with an eyelash maneuver heretofore unknown to man. I was silenced. It was holy. She asked me to strip. I obeyed. Within four seconds she was slamming poetry about a sputtering boy named Clem and his exquisitely tiny—but...but...I’m a girl, I protested to myself. It didn’t matter anymore. I reached to touch her hair, but she swatted me away— at least buy me a drink! I take whiskey with SaintGermaine infused with an herb from the Idaho mountainside.

We were on a date and I was striking out. Lacking the necessary ingredients I improvised. And I’ll give you some pointers if you spot me some gas—When my moped ran out she dissolved into a puddle of silver goo. I think that’s her over there.

Kale, ginger, and beef jerky in a juicer make a moonshine to woo a fox-draped hound. Write a billet doux on a typewriter and slip it under her leather chaps. Brave the deserts and bring back a the skull of a canyon deermouse and place it on her pillow. Then we’ll talk.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

KATE VAN BROCKLIN

RAILLAN BROOKS When we first saw Raillan, he made us tremble. We didn’t know whether to kiss him on the mouth or run away. His eyes, his charisma, the fire within, his delicate calves—like an 18th century dancer. He is a man of paradox. The long and the short of it is, he has a little nip to him, but also a soft underbelly like the cats he watches on the Internet. He just does shit. He’ll spend days doing nothing, watching Fassbinder, and then just rips out the best piece of whatever that you’ve ever seen. Really, anything. Press TV and a shot for every lie.

His freckles are coming, he’s sun kissed like a lion cub with a serrated tongue. He can tear somebody a new asshole and then lick it.

Raillan is never trapped in the game—it’s a tidepool, he’s laughing from the shore.When Raillan sits down he faces the room; he faces it, it’s his. He throws murder mystery parties (character names and descriptions from a torrent) to show up as an aerobics instructor a league above your own. He’s a mentor, but no oligarchy here—the populace loves him. He understands power with and for; he understands the four types of power. New voicemail? It’s from Raillan. He hasn’t heard from you in awhile and is just checking in. Are you fucking someone? Raillan supports you. He’ll help you score.

He buys shots, for people. Those people are you. Here’s your iPad, Mister Brooks.

BELLE CUSHING It’s 3 am. Do you know where your kids are? They’re asleep, peacefully, sucking the thumbs on the hands of Anne Alexander Cushing. Belle, they coo. Yes, they’re 25. Belle has seduced both of your sons. Belle, they whisper. As if that’s my name, she smiles, but they don’t hear. The vaguest of wonders enters your mind—did you even hire a sitter? Be still, suspicion, you’re silenced by the kale stew vacuum-packed in your Sub-Zero fridge. What are the ingredients? Where are your diamonds? The light fixtures from the bathroom? Shh, a voice coos. Belle’s here.

It’s 6 am. She’s gone. Left you lonely with nothing but the detritus of gruyere. She’s on the lam and she doesn’t mind the pun. She’s one glob of hair gel away from an anarchist.

Your sons are crying. Your children are laughing. Belle has distinguished the two. She did your taxes on the side—you’re 50 grand richer now and so is she. With a click of glitter heels and a bespectacled wink she explains: no problem, no problem, it’s an old Yankee racket I learned from my grandfather, Anne Alexander I. We call it “Puritan on The Half-Shell.”

That sounds so... dirty, you gasp, fumbling for your rosary. But it’s too late. God won’t save you now. She’s signed off gchat—you’ve lost her. She’s nocturnal. She’s invisible.

MAY 03 2013

Look! there, draped in lightswoons—those teacup bones—the wheat-colored hair—a lush waft of pines—there’s Kate. From the Oregon firs she floated here, gathering gauzy light around her shoulders for warmth. You glimpse her wafting through campus in pastels and soft leather shoes, her flowerstem neck bent delicately under a tiny locket and a camera strap. Click!

Kate knows if your aura is Mayfair or Kelvin. She takes your photograph, drifts away. When you see her next, gathering petals from a cherry tree, she has made you something: a gel print of her dog in a handwoven seagrass frame. Later, you try to call and thank her, but forget she communes only by flickrmail, and then only in whispers. You check her photostream, see her looking up from the soft ivory folds of Snuggle Harbor, her nightly resting place. What does she dream of, you wonder? Freckled willows, coral reefs, the key to your heart! And there—a saucer of raspberries—three oak fruits— ether shadows—there is Kate, day-strolling and light-bathing, captioned “rosegold wandernoon.” She is everything, you think, everything that glimmers in sunlight and must, finally, slip softly away.

MIMI DWYER Everyone says the same thing: “She held me hostage once, but now I love her.” She finds frostbite endearing, even quaint. It must be the way she has of picking olives out of jars. At the summit, she’ll share cigarettes with sherpas before descending the mountain in a bound to burrow with hedgehogs in the grass. Sriracha is pouring out of her pores. The hot sauce gets deeper. The hedgehogs begin to drown, but she carries them to safety with her own bare hands. On the new moon, she invited me over. “Have you seen my room?” she asked, “the drapes are new.” She wades through the detritus—dead fireflies in styrofoam and pine cones and pages of the written word. “Oh this? It is the silhouette of your soul.” Later, she offered me coffee (bustelo) with milk and sugar (cubano). When I coughed a little, a light brown dripping from my mouth, she wiped my chin with her hand, stared into my eyes and whispered, “shut up, you fucking baby.” I nodded, she nodded, and I will never speak again.

OLIVIA JENE-FAGON Once I went to a pet store with Olivia. I kept picking out tiny gerbils. She pulled a bengal tiger up by the scruff of his neck, looked at me, and smiled. At this point the other animals weren’t stepping out of line: they saw the look that puny gerbil got. RO-DENT. Batting practice. Smooth ‘n cool. Under cover.

In sixth grade Olivia dropped out of private school for three days and the whole city dressed in plaid. They say the mayor got a memo. She didn’t have a phone yet so you threw yours away. The underage headliner at a belly-dance club, she literally got arrested and the cop wrote her name wrong: Ovivio. It topped the baby-name charts for the next four years. She was wearing tights for pants before you grew legs.

She dropped a barrette, you cast it in gold, laid it at her feet.

In 1998 she told you it was 2000—maybe the clocks were wrong? You ordered her a calendar: cats for our feline friend.

They weren’t A Thing yet... in America. You wonder if she used it.

One look and you’re done. She has you cowering in a corner or frozen to the floor, but you keep crawling back for more of her lithe hands gesturing gracefully through the air, until finally, she spirits you away on the sounds of Al Green.

The smoothest torture you ever did know.

EMMA JANASKIE “Well, that’s not really what I meant by mimetic hyperbody.”

She sighs softly, a duchess opening a bottle of champagne.

She tolerates us heathens, with our reductive interpretations of Irigaray, our skin blemishes. Finds us cute, even. Yet we cannot help but wonder: where does Emma (if that’s even her real name) go when she’s not undercover? She’s been spotted hunting waterfowl in Devonshire (never without Lady Danger on her lips), playing Russian roulette in Macau, nodding seriously over slow-drip with Johnny—Mr. Franzen to the rest of us. But we could have guessed all of that. Here’s what we wouldn’t have guessed: that her father proposed to her mother on a boat he had built by hand from the bark of a wayward willow; that in Morocco there is a color of paint named after her eyes. But then she plops down on the couch, pounds the last of her cheeseburger, and toggles away. Up, down, B, A, B, right joystick. The buttons respond obediently, and pixilated bad guys lay prostrate and bloodied on the floor of the warehouse. “That was total shit. Far too easy.” That sigh again.

Could she really—the thought creeps in—just be one of us? She smiles, all cinematic and knowing. Because we don’t really need the answer. This is more than enough.

ANNIE MACDONALD The bartender told me she had turned up two months ago.

Rumor had it she was already running optics for the two nastiest collectives in Periphery East. Tough fucking work.

Trash-Merms and Noise-Neos, both bad, and neither trust shit unless it dances their dance. The bartender heard she was from an ivy burb near New York, a place with a lot of trees.

She only said what she wanted to, though. Always had that backpack.

“So how’d you get the Merms?” I didn’t know if she was pissed or pleased I was talking to her. “I know you got pink hair, but I can’t imagine a true work up chick getting her feet wet in a crust-lagoon, even for optics business.”

“Do you have pot?” She smiled, I think.

“That’s old-time shit. You an old-time chick?”

“Don’t call me a chick.” This chick was beautiful. “But maybe I’m a romantic.”

We left late and walked through residentials. I just followed her, couldn’t tell if she minded. Near the harbor wall, a beat up black hover turned a corner. It slowed down.

She stopped, turned around, grabbed my hand. We ran.

Next thing I knew we were on the other side of the wall, lying on our backs in the hold of a busted container craft. It was a long time before I said anything.

“What the hell was that?” I could hear her breathing. I moved closer. This beautiful chick was sound asleep.

She opened her eyes around six, right before the first crafts started docking up. I’d lay there awake all night.

“Hey,” I said. “What happened last night?”

“I’m hungry.”

We said goodbye back in residentials. I tried to keep following her but she wouldn’t have it. As she walked away I could have sworn her hair turned from pink to grey.

Grey hair and a backpack. Grey hair and a fucking backpack.

16

E L G RE CO

by Edward Friedman Illustration by Lizzie Davis

She looked past her camera. What time’s your flight tomorrow? I asked. She looked at me, processed the question, made a disdainful face. Um, I don’t know, like 11:30? she responded. Oh, sorry, I said.

When the video came on she was wearing a black dress and standing looking down at me. She bent over whatever surface her computer was sitting on and put in her earbuds, smiling.

Do you like my dress? she asked. Then, before I could answer, she took out the earbuds and backed away from her computer, twirled, and I saw that the dress’s hem, falling midway down her thighs, had the same big and gentle scallop as the straps.

It was very beautiful. I nodded enthusiastically and gave a thumbs up, which was dorky and I regretted it, but I don’t think she noticed at all.

Will, handsome and English, left the bar with a high schooler in tiny, high shorts one night. The following morning he told us what happened: So we were on the beach, doing our thing, and then we heard police shouting at us, so we scrambled to cover up. When we turned around there were two homeless guys pointing and laughing.

She came back to the computer and pulled the dress over her head. She lifted the microphone on the white earbud cord to her face and said that her parents would be home soon and she didn’t want them to walk in on her Skyping with me in her underwear, so she had to go get dressed. She disappeared and I was left to look at the meeting of her walls with her ceiling, which was blue like a robin’s egg.

She didn’t reappear very quickly so I looked up from the little phone screen at the street and building across it. They were bathed in orange streetlight light. The street ended 80 feet away in a T-intersection with a much busier road. On our first night on the island I was a little drunk and was about to cross the busier road when a bouncer at the bar on the corner behind me called out, and I stopped and turned to look at him.

Three little cars zoomed past me from the right; they drive on the left side of the road here, and I hadn’t really seen them.

“Bro, I saved your life,” he said, heavy Caribbean accent.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said, smiling and kind of drunk.

“I think you should probably buy me a Heineken.”

I smiled and said (regretting it again), “Save me a couple more times and I will.”

Every time I saw him for the rest of that week, he shook his head and said, “I should have let you die.” +++ On the third day, Tariq told this story: last night I came into the room late, at like 3:00, and the bedside lamp was on, and Anthony was kneeling on the bed with his hands clasped and his weight thrown forward onto his elbows. And I thought, hmm, I’ve never known Anthony to pray before. This seems weird, to start praying now. But then I noticed that he was kneeling in a pool of vomit, and there were little red and pink flecks all over the rest of the bed.

Anthony was young on the team. He wore dreadlocks to just above his shoulders and had a slender, almost feminine or pubescent body. I remember, vaguely, the first time I saw him shirtless—long before this trip—thinking, wow that guy is cut. But now, seeing him shirtless on the beach or by the pool a lot, he was just scrawny in a fleshy way. His skin was fairly dry, and something bothered me about his big, dark nipples, plump and puckered at once. He tried hard but was not solid on the field. This bothered me too.

Tariq and I were walking on the beach on the third night.

The beach was across the busy road from our hotel, El Greco.

On the part of the beach running beside the sidewalk, little brightly colored shacks sold barbecue and fruity drinks in

17

LITERARY

He continued: but then I asked her if she wanted to go back to the hotel, and she did, so we walked up the beach and crossed the street. No one was back yet, so it was quiet and the woman at the desk winked at me. We got to the room, but right when we went in, she saw David’s bed. [David had been bleeding from his arms, knees, and shins after the game that day and, typically, had gotten into bed without washing.] It was covered in blood. She turns to me and was like “Ew eww! Will, what the fuck! I’m leaving,” The rest of the room was filthy too because of David. So I turned to let her out, but our door was broken again! We were trapped. And so we pounded on the door for like 15 minutes before someone came and let us out.

coconuts to tourists. In two places, maybe 80 yards apart, big concrete jetties protruded into the ocean. A string of white and red buoys, starting far away in either direction and bobbing happily beyond the jetties, marked the swimming area.

Along the shore toward downtown, cruise ships blinked and gleamed in their massive berths. They lit the façades around the marina, but we couldn’t see anything other than the ships from our beach, because there were buildings and a grove of palm trees in the way. Out on the jetty a very bright white floodlight from the street cast our shadows long down the concrete, seaward. Tariq looked toward the ships. Stars shined dimly around them. The dark blue-black water and sky met invisibly on the horizon. He didn’t say anything. Later he told me he had been thinking about his dog.

At night we would go to this bar where sunburned, flipflopped cruise passengers ate enchiladas beneath visors during the day. At night, high schoolers from Long Island and Manhattan came and drank margaritas and mojitos in tall and curvy plastic cups with straws. The boys wore button-down short-sleeve shirts that were mostly blue and white. The girls wore small dresses or lacey black tops and high-waisted, neon shorts that showed the bottoms of their butts. They would kiss their boys and sometimes look over at us, whispering excitedly.

The days passed in lazy swooping arcs of sun and wind. After breakfast I went back to bed. I was injured, so at practice I stood in the dusty grass and watched. Local youth ran around the dirt track circumscribing the field. They loped tirelessly, lanky and athletic. For lunch we ate fried chicken and conch, then returned to El Greco to nap again.

In town there was a big open building that housed a market where vendors sold traditional woven things, woodcarvings, and ugly t-shirts. One afternoon a big group of us went, and Tariq, Sam, and I meandered through the stalls below the vaulted metal ceiling. In a sour mood, exhausted from the heat, I complained about how shitty everything was and urged Tariq and Sam to leave with me. A stand of woodworks caught Sam’s eye, and I complained softly to Tariq while Sam bought a hefty wooden sword-machete for his girlfriend. +++ Over breakfast, two weeks later, I asked her if she wanted to talk about our plans for the summer. Looking sorry, she said that it wasn’t a good time. I kidded, scoffing, so you don’t want to break up with me right this second? She made the sympathetic-endearing face this time, and I filled with doom.

I cried at the train station but not really again afterwards. I would sit up remembering the languor of El Greco and hating her sweatshirt.

I didn’t tell her about the high schoolers there. I told her that I was having a good time, but the trip was getting so long.

She was at her parents’ house, because they were all leaving to go on vacation the next morning. She came back wearing a sweatshirt that I didn’t like; it was a nice speckled grey-blue, but written down the sleeves and on the back were words like “love”, “peace” and probably “music” in bold sans serif yellow.

I furrowed my brow and widened my eyes at the little camera above the screen, to seem sympathetic and endearing. It didn’t work.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FRIDAY MAY 3

WEDNESDAY MAY 8

risd take a break // risd auditorium, 17 canal st., providence Everyone seems really excited about Le1f. Open to RISD and Brown students; there will be a beer garden. $10. 7PM-12AM.

library pizza night // rockefeller library, brown university Pizza in the Rock. Free. 9PM.

third world first // room 001, salomon center for teaching, brown university A two-day conference focusing on Brazil’s growing literary and artistic landscape. 4PM Friday; 6PM Saturday.

SATURDAY MAY 4 bird walk // riverside park, 50 aleppo st., providence Spring birding in the city. Wear sturdy shoes for some off-path walking. Sponsored by the Audubon Society RI and the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council. Suggested donation $10.

10AM-12PM. your mom // providence public library, 150 empire st., providence Celebrate Mother’s Day a week early with an afternoon of stories about moms. PG-13. Proceeds go to the Rhode Island Family Literacy Initiative. $14. 2PM.

SUNDAY MAY 5 free taco bar // snookers pool lounge, 53 ashburton st., providence Cinco de Mayo bash. There will be free tacos, DJ Judah, a photo booth, a patio, and a chance to win a Corona mountain bike. 4-7PM. garden time // 166 waterman st., providence Hoeing and playing with chickens. Ice water provided. 10AM-1PM. Free brunch at 11AM.

MONDAY MAY 6 human-robot interaction symposium // 121 south main st., 11th floor, providence Fundamental questions about cognition and action in humans and robots. 11AM – 3PM. a lyric reading // brown university book store, 244 thayer st., providence Readings by Brown University Nonfiction Writing Program award winners, including two Indy senior editors. The seasonal ginger lemonade is finally back on the menu. 5:30PM.

TUESDAY MAY 7 romeo and juliet // pell chafee performance center, 87 empire st., providence The classic tale of forbidden passion in a world filled with violence and jealousy, performed by students in the Brown/Trinity Rep MFA Program.

General admission $12; students/seniors $6.

7:30PM.

self-obliteration // cable car cinema & café, 204 south main st., providence A screening exploring identity, erosion, and the spectacle of bodily breakdown. Featuring “Infinity Mirror Rooms” by Yayoi Kusama. $5. 9:30PM.

THURSDAY MAY 9 double take the suit // chace center galleries, risd museum, 224 benefit st., providence Jim Fortier of Marc Allen Clothiers and RISD Professor of Painting Dennis Congdon discuss late RISD Professor Richard Merkin, an inspiration for the current exhibition Artists/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion. Free with museum admission. 6:30PM. micro-memoir // providence anthenaeum, 251 benefit st., providence Write and read (out loud) short personal memoirs.

Bring your parents. 5-8PM. mellon mays senior research presentations // faculty club, brown university The Indy’s own Raillan Brooks talks about the sociality of information technologies and success rates of digital literacy instruction programs in Boston.

Plus, refreshments. 12-2PM.

IN THE KNOW? e.g. how to create an abundance mentality? email listtheindy@gmail.com @list_easy this w ee 2000: k in lister y Th geocac e sport of hing b egins.