The College Hill Independent Vol. 33 Issue 10

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY DEC 02 2016

33

10

THE

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 33 / NUMBER 10 DEC 02 2016

INDY COVER

Sawfish Kearney McDonnell

NEWS 02

Week in Review Zack Kligler, Dolma Ombadykow, Will Weatherly, Shane Potts, and Liz Cory

05

Viva Cuba Camila Ruiz Segovia and Sebastián Otero Oliveras

FROM THE EDITORS

03

Ending Solitary Confinement Gabe Zimmerman

07

Urban Removal Clare Boyle

Bruce Springsteen’s butt circa 1985— I don’t want to…be NORMATIVE about how or what a butt should be but…

It’s the last issue of Volume 33: so long, farewell, adieu…

And what a farewell! That butt, I mean. The show is finished, he waves, he turns, it’s the last thing you see. I hope this issue is of a similar quality, as end-notes go. I hope you think so.

METRO

ARTS

— SS

11

Boss Sauce Saanya Jain

13

blip bloop Tai Shaw

FEATURES 09

15

Josh Oppenheimer Elias Bresnick Eileen Smiles Noah Fields

Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs

METABOLICS 06

MANAGING EDITORS

Self-Destructive Toes Anna Hundert

LITERARY

NEWS

Camila Ruiz Segovia Shane Potts Liz Cory METRO

17

Triptych Brigitte Santana

EPHEMERA 12

ARTS

Gift Guide Patrick McMenamin

Will Tavlin Ryan Rosenberg Kelton Ellis FEATURES

Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick Dolma Ombadykow

X 18

Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Marianna McMurdock

Beanie Babes Nicole Cochary

METABOLICS

Sam Samore Isabelle Doyle SCIENCE

Fatima Husain TECH

Jonah Max OCCULT

Sophia Washburn

LITERARY

Stefania Gomez EPHEMERA

Patrick McMenamin Mark Benz

Maria Cano-Flavia Pia Mileaf-Patel Kela Johnson Julie Benbassat Dorothy Windham DESIGN & LAYOUT

X

Liby Hays Nicole Cochary

Celeste Matsui Meryl Charleston Andrew Linder Ruby Stenhouse

LIST

Malcolm Drenttel Alec Mapes-Frances

Charlie Windolf

COVER

BUSINESS MANAGER

Mark Benz

Dolma Ombadykow

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

SENIOR EDITOR

Gabriel Matesanz

Alec Mapes-Frances

STAFF WRITERS

MVP

Hannah Maier-Katkin Jack Brook Eve Zelickson Saanya Jain Anna Hundert Andrew Deck Signe Swanson Josh Kurtz Zack Kligler

The College Hill Independent — P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS

Frans van Hoek Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Ivan Rios-Fetchko

WEB MANAGER

Steve @ TCI Press <3

Letters to the editor are welcome. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

WEEK IN APOLOGIES Dolma Ombadykow, Will Weatherly, Zack Kligler, Liz Cory, and Shane Potts ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz BY

FIERY FAILURE

TOO LATE NOW Mitt Romney and Alexander Hamilton walk into a bar. They sit down and have a nice drink—a crisp cider, or maybe if it’s Mitt’s choice, an ice cold Keystone Light. When they ask to close out their tab, the barback passes them a crumpled manila envelope.

Inside: a few misplaced documents, including a bullet-pointed list of policy roll-outs and a blank check from the Trump Organization. Additionally, a piece of scrap paper with ripped edges and a belabored cursive outlining a request for an apology: Dear you two irrelevant/dead politicians, I demand an apology. Your actions made me, a cis white male about to assume the most powerful office in the world, feel small inside. While I fundamentally don’t understand guilt, I am sure that you feel guilty about this. While the city of New York is spending $1 million to protect me from any consequences of what I say and do, they are spending $0 on protecting my ego and fragile heart. I will require you to find the highest platform from which to shout, “Trump is really just a great guy!” Preferably your Twitter account.

It was clear from the letter that Trump had a special spot in his vengeful heart for Hamilton. Listen, I’ve always loved the theater, he wrote, and I have always stood behind the kind of conservative values promoted by productions like Jesus Christ Superstar and Annie, Get Your Gun, I assume. But I have never believed that yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater constitutes free speech, and that goes double for yelling that my vice-president-elect ‘believes homosexuality is a choice that can be freely discriminated against with the support of a higher power’ in a theater. Singing and dancing is alright with me in a pent-up way, but I won’t stand for such violations of expression!

In a section directly targeted toward Mitt, Trump writes in an attempted shorthand—Play your cards right and we could be half-smiling at a dimly lit table in my restaurant. That’s an honor, believe me, it’s harder to get a reservation there than a spot on my cabinet, there’s some very important people who would tell you that. And if you’re lucky, there might be a young garlic soup with thyme and sautéed frog legs in it for you.

Under a signature sized to compete with John Hancock, Trump ends with a postscript, because, after still complaining about the media’s campaign coverage three weeks out, postscripts have become his sort of thing. PS: you can be Secretary of State too, if we go Dutch.

—DO + WW

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

People of Sweden, we fucked up—again. We, your humble Gävle goat committee, have failed you. I, Eje Berglund, Gävle goat spokesperson, am eternally ashamed.

We had security guards, and they were bribed.

We had cameras, too—they were hacked. We also had fences—ok, admittedly we didn’t try that hard on this one. We opted for some rustic old Swedish fences, likewise terribly breachable and wonderfully pleasing to the eye. Why haven’t we made this damn goat fireproof, you ask? Well, we caved and tried that five years ago. The fireproof glaze turned our beloved yellow goat brown. This simply wasn’t passable—an insult to our Swedish aesthetic. A brown goat is basically the same thing as a burned goat.

This year’s beloved Gävle goat was tragically set aflame à la Molotov Cocktail last Sunday, less than 24 hours after its unveiling. It was the 35th to be destroyed in our tradition’s 50-year history. Sure, the creature is made entirely of straw, but that’s not an invitation to whip out your lighters. This gentle giant is built to celebrate the Advent, one of the most important holidays in this country’s history. It also cost us $250,000 to build, so, yeah...thanks a lot, jerks.

What is this fascination with fire, seriously? Every year, we build this majestic 42-foot-tall goat, only to have it desecrated and demolished by hooligans.

Worse, sometimes these vandals aren’t even Swedish. Anyone remember 2001, when that American guy burned our goat, and made no intention to flee?

Legend has it he just tossed on a pair of Raybans and oogled until the handcuffs snapped around his wrists.

We’re sick and tired of cleaning up giant piles of goat ashes, to be fucking frank. Why can’t you guys just leave the poor thing alone? Think of the kids. Do you have any idea what it’s like to watch the joy of your child suddenly crushed when they see the goat collapse into a pile of char? I take my children to this celebration every year; this year, my daughter didn’t even want to go. “It makes me too sad to watch the big goat eyeballs burn off the big goat head,” she told me. She’s nine.

My son hasn’t talked to me in a week. I’ve received several reports that he’s been skipping school.

His Google history over the past three days consists of every conceivable combination of the phrases “lots of fire,” “pyrokinesis,” and “ruining Swedish history for dummies.” Tonight, I found lighter fluid and a kitchen lighter in his backpack. You criminals, you have no sense of decency! You are ruining my family! Let the goat live!

PUN-DER ROAD Bruce’s steed had never failed him before. Springsteen trusted the motorcycle, built for him piece by piece by his friend Billy Joel, and each time he revved its engine he could hear Billy’s promise in its whir, feel his human touch in the bike’s vibrations. As the Boss set out from his Freehold, New Jersey home this Veterans Day, Billy’s horsepower gripped between his thighs, he expected a typical ride through Freehold’s backstreets. After a few short hours of racing in the streets, however, Billy’s beast broke down (he never did have the endurance) and Bruce found himself stranded, a wreck on the highway. The star found himself with no option but to take the long walk home into town, or simply to wait on the roadside rocky ground for a passing state trooper of highway patrolman. In his sad eyes, Bruce entertained a vision that old Billy would drive all night to take him into his gentle arms (those were lonely days after all).

Alas, luck struck for Springsteen not in the form of Joel’s pink Cadillac, but in the form of locals Dan Barkalow, Ryan Bailey, and Bob Grigs. The three motorcyclists, all veterans, also expected a casual tour of Freehold’s finer roadside gems as they mounted their bikes that day. To their surprise, one of those gems was that vision in leather, daddy in denim, steel-eyed stallion of sweet Jersey dad-dreams, the Boss himself. Barkalow admitted being a bit starstruck at the encounter, but after Springsteen hopped on the back of his bike (parting with Billy’s masterpiece, sweet sorrow) and bought the gang a round of drinks, the group said he was just a “down-to-earth guy” who had seen better days.

After a few weeks of dodging Bruce’s late-night calls and voicemails (“having restless nights, Billy, take me back in your arms”), Joel paused his set at Madison Square Garden on Monday to admit that he had built Springsteen’s bike at the bike shop he owns—the esteemed 20th Century Cycles in Oyster Bay, Long Island—and apologized to the artist with a cover of his song “Born To Run.” “No good deed goes unpunished,” said Joel, as his phone pulsated gently backstage with Bruce’s customized Rosalita ringtone.

Springsteen was spotted later sitting in a dark corner of a bar across the street. “I’m on fire, Billy,” he whispered. “Our glory days have yet to come.”

—ZK

—LC + SP

NEWS

02

BOXED IN

Ending solitary confinement in Rhode Island Gabe Zimmerman ILLUSTRATION BY Amy Hollshwandner BY

Content warning: mental illness and suicide “It’s like being buried alive,” stated an inmate incarcerated in a solitary unit at Rhode Island’s Adult Correctional Institution (ACI). The box, as those who have spent years in solitary often call it, is an eight- by ten-foot concrete room smaller than a parking space.

In Rhode Island, prisoners condemned to solitary confinement spend 23 hours a day in complete isolation, restricted from access to recreation (except for a lone hour in an outdoor cage), prison programming like GED courses, phone calls to loved ones, or physical human contact of any kind. A snapshot released by the RI Department of Corrections (DOC) in May showed that 6.4% of the state’s incarcerated population, or 196 people, are currently being held in administrative segregation or closed confinement—which, like the Bush-era euphemism, “enhanced interrogation,” is simply the indirect rhetoric that correction officials have used to dress up the facts of torture.

Many incarcerated people spend extended periods of time in conditions like this, often enduring years and even decades without interacting with other incarcerated people, non-incarcerated people, or the natural world. Anthony Graves, who was incarcerated in Texas and spent 18 years in solitary before being exonerated on all charges in 2010, described solitary in TIME Magazine as “a system that seems designed to break a man’s will to live.” +++ Through studying the use of solitary confinement in the United States over 200 interviews and psychiatric diagnoses, Harvard psychiatrist Stuart Grassian concluded that solitary has intensely negative effects on the mental health of the roughly 80,000 incarcerated Americans subjected to it daily. Incarcerated people who spend more than 15 days in isolation suffer deeper psychological trauma than those not in solitary, including irreversible psychological disorders like chronic depression, general paranoia, self-harm, and outbursts of violence. Furthermore, people in solitary developed behavioral disorders at higher rates than those in the general population (28% vs.

15%), according to the Clinic for Forensic Psychiatry.

Even though people in solitary make up 3–8% of the nation’s population of incarcerated people, they account for about half of all prison suicides. This statistic doesn’t take into consideration individuals like Kalief Browder, a New York City teenager incarcerated in solitary for two years without a trial for allegedly stealing a backpack, and who took his own life in June 2015 outside of prison. Venerable figures such as Nelson Mandela have called the crushing isolation and mental exhaustion of solitary “the most forbidding aspect of prison life.” UN Special Rapporteur (and former Argentinean political prisoner) Juan Mendez has led the charge for the practice to be banned internationally for over 15 days as a violation of the UN’s Convention against Torture.

The United States is alone among democratic nations in its extensive use of solitary confinement.

Solitary has historical roots in Quaker methods of imprisonment, exemplified by the opening of Philadelphia’s infamous all-solitary Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829. The practice, known as the ‘silent system,’ died out in favor of prison labor and was rarely used in the United States by the late 19th century. Surveying the use of solitary confinement in 1890, the United States Supreme Court found that “even after a short confinement, [inmates] became violently insane; others committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed.”

However, in conjunction with the rise of mass incarceration in the late 20th century, legal and popular opinion shifted away from regarding solitary confinement as a violation of the 8th amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. And many activists and scholars have pointed out that the increased use of solitary confinement has dovetailed

03

METRO

with the expansion of mass incarceration, and that the practice fulfills incarceration's systemic mission of racial oppression and control. “People of color are disproportionately placed in solitary confinement and segregation,” AJ Yolken, a member of the Providence chapter of the national prison abolition organization Black and Pink, told the Independent. While the federal government does not keep track of racial composition of inmates in solitary, a study by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found that incarcerated Black and Latinx individuals are 2.25 and 1.65 times more likely to be put into solitary than their white counterparts. They are also more likely to be diagnosed with mental illness in conjunction with solitary.

As in the system of mass incarceration writ large, the use of solitary confinement relies upon punishment doled out with little justification or accountability. In recent years, prison officials have been punishing incarcerated people with year-long stints in solitary; positive drug tests, disobeying orders, or even using profanity are arbitrarily assigned as reasons. In South Carolina, 16 incarcerated people were sentenced to a decade in solitary and more for giving family members login access to update their Facebook profiles. WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning was reportedly put into indefinite solitary confinement in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas for obtaining a Cosmopolitan magazine and possessing expired toothpaste. In response to a 2015 lawsuit by the ACLU, New York State has cut the role of non-serious and petty offenses from violations leading to confinement.

Rhode Island, however, has not followed suit.

Rhode Island’s penal code punishes incarcerated people with solitary confinement for actions like swearing, poor personal hygiene, or holding hands. People incarcerated in Cranston’s Adult Correctional Institute (ACI), Rhode Island’s only state prison located just 10 minutes from downtown Providence, confirm this trend. The state prison system “locks people in solitary for non-problematic reasons,” one currently incarcerated inmate wrote to the national anti-solitary advocacy project Solitary Watch, “like if you identify as LGBTQ, put in lawsuits, or express your political views…they tend to throw you in solitary for a long period of time.” Even a suicide attempt, considered a circumstance requiring personal and medical attention in almost any other circumstance, can and has led to additional time in solitary in the ACI. In 2015, there were over 4,347 infractions which resulted in some form of punishment—including solitary—at the ACI. More than half (2,303) of these infractions were a result of vaguely categorized “disobedience,” while only 18% of infractions were given out because of violence. More and more, solitary confinement is being used as a means to assert dominance over incarcerated people.

Measuring instances of inmate violence is often a false justification for further intervention and control.

As stated in a letter by a member of Black and Pink who is currently incarcerated in the ACI, correctional officers “are not trained to care for prisoners [with mental illness] and their response to abnormal behavior only exacerbates the situations that arise due to prisoner mental health disabilities. Thus, prisoners find themselves being punished due to their mental health issues and inability to cope with stress-filled, oppressive environments.” As it stood last year, 15-17% of the ACI’s population has a Serious Persistent Mental Illness (SPMI), including 10.8% of the population in solitary. The use of segregation and solitary confinement for inmates with SPMIs only exacerbates their conditions and exemplifies the frightening reality of a prison system which locks the

most vulnerable in our society into solitary. +++ In conjunction with Black and Pink and other community organizations, lawmakers led by State Representative Aaron Regunberg (D-Providence) and Senator Harold Metts (D-Providence) proposed legislation earlier this year that would limit solitary confinement at the ACI to 15 days. House bill H7481 would also ban the use of solitary on vulnerable populations, including pregnant women, juveniles, and people with mental illness. However, longtime state DOC director A.T. Wall and Rhode Island Brotherhood of Corrections Officers union (RIBCO) president Richard Ferruccio both vehemently opposed putting limits on solitary, and were successful in tabling Regunberg’s bill in the House for the 2016 legislative session with the support of House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello (D-Cranston). The ACI, where most of the RIBCO staff work and vote, is located within Speaker Mattiello’s district in Cranston; Ferruccio’s union was a large campaign contributor to Mattiello in his contested Statehouse race this cycle, which the Speaker won by 85 votes.

The main line of reasoning DOC and COU officials gave in opposition to the bill was that it would “take away their ability to keep the ACI safe.”

However, this claim is not supported by any evidence linking the practice of solitary confinement with a successful reduction of violence among incarcerated individuals. For example, because of recent reforms, Colorado’s prison system has fewer people in segregation than Rhode Island, despite an incarcerated population around seven times larger (19,619 vs.

3,125) than the Ocean State. As a result, not only did so-called ‘inmate-on-staff violence’ fall to its lowest level since 2006, but mental health among incarcerated people improved as they were taken out of an environment that exacerbated anxiety and depression. This pattern has been documented in other states across the country that have total autonomy concerning the rules and regulations on solitary in the state prison system. In Mississippi, the state reduced its entire solitary unit population from 1,000 to 150 prisoners, saving $8 million annually and reducing the level of prison violence by 70%.

Governor Gina Raimondo has the legal authority to effectively end solitary confinement in Rhode Island, as she could direct DOC Director Wall to ban the practice among juvenile and mentally disabled incarcerated people and limit it otherwise to a 15-day period. She could also direct the DOC to implement serious administrative reforms, including the introduction of a ‘step-down’ incentive program based on successful initiatives like Washington State’s Inten-

DECEMBER 02, 2016

sive Transition Program, which eases people incarcerated with chronic behavior problems out of solitary through a step by step curriculum which includes anger management and group prison programming. This has proven effective: since implemented, there has been a 50% drop in the number of people the state keeps in isolation.

If the governor fails to act in the best interests of incarcerated Rhode Islanders’ human rights, there are other ways forward. In lieu of substantive action from state government, a House Judiciary Commission was created to study this issue; the 19-member commission (which includes Wall, Regunberg, and Ferruccio) met for the first time on September 29, only 12 audience members were present. The Commission is scheduled to present its findings before the start of the legislative session in January 2017, till then it is important to work with local community organizations to continue to put external pressure on state lawmakers to take concrete action for the human rights of incarcerated Rhode Islanders.

In working towards an ultimate goal of prison abolition, putting an end to solitary confinement in Rhode Island deserves urgency and anger. The legal restriction of solitary confinement practices in Rhode Island and across the country would provide relief to incarcerated prisoners, boxed-in and in mental distress. As stated by State Senator (and prison deacon) Harold Metts, “We cannot in good conscience call our prison a ‘correctional’ institute when the system relies on a punishment that is essentially designed to cause mental breakdown.” Until addressed, the use of solitary in Rhode Island should continue to be considered a social failure on every level.

GABE ZIMMERMAN B’17 wants the state of Rhode Island to end solitary.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METRO

04

EL COMANDANTE HAS DIED BY

Camila Ruiz Segovia and Sebastián Otero Oliveras

Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution, died last Friday. His brother, Raúl Castro, currently the head of the Cuban government, announced the passing of the revolutionary in a brief message broadcasted on national television: “Beloved Cuban people, it is with great pain that I must share the news... that today, November 25, 2016, el Comandante en Jefe de la Revolución ha muerto.”

The death of Castro, one of the most controversial political figures of the twentieth century, has unsurprisingly spurred heated emotions around the globe. Whether it is recalcitrant hatred or devotional love, we all seem to have strong feelings for Castro. In Miami, Cuban-Americans, a diaspora that heavily opposes the regime, began celebrations on Calle Ocho as soon as the news was received.

For the Cuban community in Miami, Castro’s death represents the end of an era of political oppression, an opportunity for change in an oppressive economic system, and even the possibility of returning home. US media outlets describe the Castro legacy as one marked by political prisoners, the repression of press freedom, and the absence of democratic elections. Meanwhile, in various African and Latin American countries, where Castro is a symbol of Global South power and resistance to US imperialism, crowds gathered outside Cuban embassies in capital cities to pay their respects. Here, the media cite the achievements of the Revolution in terms of education, health, and reduction of crime. In the upcoming days the ashes of El Comandante will travel across the island, giving the people of Cuba an opportunity to say a last goodbye to the leader.

What will follow is a time for reflection, remembrance, and speculation of an uncertain future.

-CRS It was a little after midnight. I was at Corner’s café, one of the many bars that appeal to a specific sector of Cubans who can afford it. Los Boys, a local band, plays funk and rock covers. Another night in La Habana; one of the few I have left. My friend from Chicago, who was outside of the bar talking with a Cuban friend, signals for me to come outside.

He delivers the news: “Seba, Fidel Castro just died. I’m not lying. Raúl Castro just said so on TV.” It wasn’t a lie.

Outside of the bar, I saw some people on their phones, all of them talking about what had just happened. Inside, people are still listening to Los Boys. I don’t know what to feel. I don’t know what to say. I just observe. I leave Corner’s and head to

05

NEWS

my apartment, which is close by, to check what’s on TV. As soon as I turn it on, I hear Raúl Castro’s message again. Now I finally believe it. Fidel has died.

I return to Corner’s and I find the bar empty, the employees cleaning up. I ask one of them what happened with the show and he tells me, “We stopped it halfway through…I am not sure if you already know but el Comandante has died.” I leave with my friend and go to the house of the bassist from Los Boys, which is also close to the bar, because it’s his birthday. And at it is at this point that something I would have never expected to happen after such a historic event takes place.

Yes, the night that the leader of the Cuban Revolution passed away, we ate cake. It wasn’t planned, we already had everything set up. On the night that one of the most important men of the 20th century died, we celebrated the life of my friend, the bassist. Yes, the night that Cuba changed forever, no one in the house said anything and we took out our instruments and played music. Happiness reigned over any feeling of uncertainty and sadness. Or perhaps those feelings were so strong that they collectively agreed to not show them. Or perhaps they showed them through their laughter and musical improvisations. Or perhaps there was no sadness. The truth is I don’t know, I didn’t ask.

I don’t think I’ll ever know. But what I do know is that the night in La Habana was very far from what it was like in Miami.

Saturday morning arrives. I receive a text from one of my Cuban friends, a fellow student, inviting me to come by the University. Professors and students are leaving flowers on the staircase in front of the famous statue of Alma Mater that marks the entrance to the University of Havana. I walk to the University from my house. The street is relatively empty. There are only a few cars. You can feel the silence. To get to the staircase in the University I have to pass by Ignacio Agramonte plaza. One of the streets that surrounds the Plaza is full of messages for Fidel. Once at the University, the security guard asks me for my student ID. I’m shocked. No one’s ever asked me for it before. They never ask.

Many people are wearing black. At the law school there’s a short line to write notes to Fidel that will later be sent to Fidel’s family. The students are emotional. The air is heavy. Of course, I also write a note.

I arrive at the staircase. Emptier than I had hoped. The students walk slowly. The masterly voice of Mercedes Sosa signing La maza and Vengo a ofrecer mi corazón sounds over the loudspeakers.

Then another one of my friends, from Honduras, calls me to let me know that el Instituto Cubano de Investigación Cultural Juan Marinello (the Juan Marinello Cuban Institute of Cultural Investigation) is hosting an event to celebrate the legacy and life of Fidel that is being organized by el Colectivo Pangea (the Pangea Collective) and Proyecto Nuestra América (Project Our America), social organizations focused on political and social justice education.

At the event there are around 40 people, all of them young. They carry flowers in their hands, some banners, and a couple of Cuban flags. We go to the street. We arrive at calle 23 in the neighborhood of Vedado at the intersection with calle L, a very busy corner. Once there, we head down calle 23 until it meets the Malecón at the ocean, screaming slogans like “¡Fidel, Fidel! ¿Qué tiene Fidel, que los imperialistas no pueden con él?” (Fidel! Fidel!

What is it about Fidel that the imperialists can’t handle?) “¡Viva Fidel, ahora y siempre!” (Long live Fidel! Now and always!) “¡Compañero Fidel Castro, presente!” (Comrade Fidel Castro, present!).

People on the street take out their cellphones and start recording. Cubans with cellphones record everything. Almost no cars go by. An American couple stops me to ask what I think about what’s happening. More Cubans have gathered by now.

Now we’re at the Malecón. Some poems are read about and for Fidel. The group makes a circle and in the center a young boy holds a boat made of newspaper, onto which people leave flowers and say a word or more about what Fidel meant to them. The environment is a contrast with that of the University. Here, there’s a more lively tone, more energetic, more explicitly political. The event culminates by offering the newspaper boat to the sea like a symbol of a new beginning for the Cuban Revolution. By coincidence it was the morning of November 25 1956 that Fidel disembarked from Mexico to Cuba on el Granma, as one of the members at the gathering reminds us. On my way home along calle 23, I notice that the movie theaters are taking down signs for the films and other cultural activities scheduled for the coming days. Arriving home I see that the teatro Mella doesn’t have a single letter on its marquee. This week, the movie is in the streets.

[Originally published in Spanish in Diálogo.]

-SOO

DECEMBER 02, 2016

FEAR AND TREMBLING BY

Anna Hundert Kela Johnson

ILLUSTRATION BY

Content warning: sexual violence My fingernails grow about as fast as the continents drift. Sometimes I look down at the white slivers as they form, fight the urge to bite them, and think of how the Indo-Australian plate is forever crashing into the Eurasian plate, folding mountains toward the sky.

I imagine that an anxious god might nibble at the top of the mountains as they crinkle upward. But I don’t think about tectonic plates as much as I used to.

My nails litter the sidewalks of cities I’ve lived in, the gaps between seats on trains, the carpets of classrooms, the floors of coffee shops. Oh stop it, my mother says, swatting my hand away from my mouth, it’s bad manners, it’s unhygienic.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s anything left of me wedged between the creaky floorboards of a dark Tudor house on Woodbury Street, where the banging of radiators during that snowy Ohio winter always sounded like the footsteps of his parents coming home early.

Or perhaps pieces of me are still congregating with dust bunnies beneath the acolytes’ pew at St. Paul’s, or among the racks of red choir robes, or up in the bell tower where if you listened very carefully you could hear the vibrations of old Anglican hymns in the silent air that hangs between bells. I wonder if pieces of me are up there, still listening.

scents with me and sometimes other people’s clouds come close enough to mix with mine.

I used to imagine God like that: an immeasurable fluid, always touching every inch of me. Or sometimes I was a continental plate, trembling and drifting on top of a God-lithosphere whose currents were so ubiquitous that you couldn’t even always feel them.

But I don’t think about tectonic plates as much as I used to. My schooling is different these days, and I nibble on my pinky-nail as I read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. The so-called father of existentialism shows me a god shouting down to me from far, far away, telling me that I must sacrifice my child to him. What kind of a god would say such a thing. A god you could never touch, a god who would never crouch to wash your feet, would never let you draw nearer to press your fingers into his wounded hands and wounded side. Would never offer up his brown, broken skin and point to the places where the outside

+++ If most types of anxiety really do boil down to an anxiety about edges, then this boy would be an excellent case study, with his shaved hands and self-destructive toes, and, of course, his preoccupation with circumcision. He was a standup comic, and this preoccupation even made it into some of his bits.

For example: Abraham is chatting with God and you know, they’re getting along okay because he’s Abraham after all, and God says to Abraham, Can you do me a favor? and Abraham says, Sure God, anything, and then God says, I want you to cut your dick off.

Then he’d pause for laughter.

But it wasn’t just the standup routine. He was the kind of person who would crack jokes about an absent foreskin while a girl was on her knees in front of him. He did not believe in God, and probably still does not believe in God, but that’s hard to say. It’s hard to say ‘does.’ The linguistic problem is that the two of us cannot coexist here in the present tense, a place where we once allowed our scents to mix with each other, crumbling into each other like continental plates. But of course he left so much more inside of me than I left inside of him.

+++ Is this my body? I ask myself, flicking away a sliver of fingernail or staring down at rusty redness unfolding in the toilet. Is this my body? I rinse the tiny hairs out of the razor I’ve used to shave my legs. I balance a stray eyelash on my forefinger and try to think of a wish.

Sometimes I catch my mother looking at me and I wonder if she is wondering is this my body? Wasn’t that body once part of my body? And what was the moment when she became a body of her own?

And perhaps, looking at my body, she feels the violence of our separation all over again, when I broke away from the boundaries of her body, coming out of her the way you’re not supposed to, which is to say that I dipped my toes into the outside world first, just in case I changed my mind, just in case I decided that I didn’t want to have edges to myself after all. Sometimes it’s easier to dwell inside of someone else’s edges, never worrying about where you begin and end, where the outside world begins and ends. +++ Nail biting is a thoughtless habit, but chewing can be a lot like thinking. You do it over and over again without having anything to show for it, yet it can still be satisfying in a way that most things aren’t. After ruminating over nail biting on and off for a decade or so, I’ve come up with a theory that most types of anxiety boil down to an anxiety about edges: the edges of this room are too close to my own edges, my stomach folds over itself like so many dog-eared pages, that person’s edges are too close to mine, is he going to touch me, please don’t touch me, my edges are too far apart from each other, look at all this space I occupy within the edges of this rectangular mirror, look at how wide my thighs spread on the seat even when I press them tightly together, how could I have let him inside of my edges, how could I have refused, how could I have refused. +++ It’s nice to have complete control over your own edges, to prohibit them from involuntary change. But to know your own edges requires also knowing what is beyond them. The air floating nearest to my skin is warmed by its proximity to my blood. This is the space where the scent of me lives, a mingling of bodily molecules and hair products (for unruly curls) and lotion and deodorant and, sometimes, a perfume that supposedly smells like sheer love. I carry this cloud of

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

perfect excuse to touch him. I’d hold the lost eyelash lightly in front of his lips and say, make a wish.

His toenails always grew in wrong, and every few years he had to get minor surgery on them to keep them from slowly destroying his toes. It bothered him a lot that they didn’t look quite normal. But they were only different if you looked closely, if you were, for instance, crouching to kiss his feet in the tender moments after oral sex. He was the kind of person who would then offer you a mint, but would never insist. He was the kind of person who could bear to taste the residual semen that clung to his lover’s tongue and teeth. This is a kind of intimacy that I do not fully understand but I know that it must mean something, when your edges have been blurred so entirely, so utterly erased that such a taste does not repulse you.

We both liked the idea of the intimate digestion in my body: unnatural-yet-natural, me-yet-you.

+++ world had been allowed to enter: a nail here, a spear there.

These days, we know that we mustn’t touch each other’s open wounds. Tiny inhabitants dwell in our bodies that we could never have imagined, and our bodies’ edges are not what they seem. I always carry hand sanitizer with me.

I have read too much, trapped in Kierkegaard’s “double movement” of infinite resignation and infinite joy, and he tells me that I therefore must not, cannot speak. Men have so many ways to silence you.

Sometimes I find violent pink fingerprints on my skin, and the fingerprints say I have been here, and the I is not me. They are the place where my body ends and the outside world begins. Sometimes I can feel someone moving inside me long after he is gone, and then I feel that my edges are not entirely my own, and sometimes that is a good feeling and sometimes it is not. The fingerprints do not show the difference. +++ There was once a boy who didn’t ever bite his nails.

He cared a lot about the appearance of his hands and kept each nail perfectly trimmed. He couldn’t stand the coarse black hair that grew on the backs of his hands so he shaved them down to the wrist. His arm hair stopped right there in the way that a sleeve would. I liked watching him shave his face in the bathroom mirror, but he never shaved his hands in front of me.

His shiny black eyelashes were so thick that they would often float down to his cheeks, and it was the

And in the end, he asked me to sacrifice my only child and I said, I’ll have to think about it and that was not good enough. He was always kind. I wanted to tell him that Fear and Trembling is really just a long-winded justification for why Abraham didn’t tell Sarah about the impending sacrifice of Isaac. There it is: the birth of existentialism, all bogged down in explaining away a husband’s poor communication skills.

Sometimes it’s easier to think back to a moment of violence and chalk it up to poor communication.

Sometimes it’s easier to bite your nails than to control your body’s edges in more important ways. Sometimes it’s easier to part your legs than to part your lips to speak. I am still learning how to speak about such things. His hands were strange and beautiful, and it almost seems unjust to place them in my memory alongside other men’s hands—those that left violent pink fingerprints on my skin.

And can you imagine what Sarah would have said, what she could have said, if Abraham had told her before going out to the mountaintop that he would sacrifice her only child. How could she have refused.

ANNA HUNDERT B’18 encourages you to call the National Sexual Assault Hotline if you need help: 800-656-HOPE(4673) or visit RAINN’s online hotline at hotline.rainn.org.

METABOLICS

06

RENEWAL FOR WHOM? Considering historic preservation in Providence

BY

Clare Boyle Kela Johnson

ILLUSTRATION BY

In 2013, Providence deemed Benefit Street the city’s “mile of history.” The street, which sits one block east of Main Street on the east side of Providence, was originally developed “for the benefit of all.” Named as such in 1756, according to the City of Providence, the street provided an alternative entrance to the tracts of farmland that were originally allocated to some of the city’s early elite, including Olney, Angell, Wickenden, and Carpenter, whose names still live on in the city’s street signs. According to the Rhode Island Historical Society: “Once little more than a back lane through farmland, Benefit Street blossomed into the home of the Providence’s elite in the 18th century…[and now] boasts one of the most extensive collections of 18th and 19th century urban architecture in the country.”

The city now capitalizes on the historic street as one of its prime tourist destinations, but in the late 1950s it placed less value on Benefit Street’s historic structures. Brown University sought to expand its campus onto Benefit to accommodate a student population dramatically increased by returning GIs. In architectural plans, squat, cube-like buildings set back from the street were set to replace some of the 300 residences dating back to the city’s first settlement in 1636.

The University’s attempt to expand fit the national trend of urban renewal, a movement some preservationists have termed “urban removal” because of its emphasis on replacing rather than restoring old buildings. In Providence and elsewhere, historical preservation was born in opposition to urban renewal— seeking to restore, rather than destroy, the city’s dilapidated housing stock.

In response to Brown University’s plans, John Nicholas Brown, a descendant of Brown University’s benefactor, organized members of the East Side community into the Providence Preservation Society (PPS), which joined the City of Providence in conducting the “College Hill Study of Historic Area Renewal.” Released in 1959, the document elucidated the rich history of the neighborhood to discourage demolition and offered suggestions for how to repurpose its buildings. This study was ultimately the first survey of its kind to suggest that preservation could be a tool for—rather than an obstacle to—urban development, according to current PPS director Brent Runyon. Following the study, Mrs. Malcolm Chase (of Chase Bank family fame), who lived on the corner of Power and Thayer Streets, started a company which purchased 20 houses in the Benefit Street area at a cost of about $10,000 each, refurbished them, and eventually prepared them for resale.

Prior to this restoration, North Benefit Street was home to a range of cultural communities, including strong Irish, Black, and Sephardic Jewish populations. The “College Hill Study” estimates that in 1958, 2,000 of the area’s 13,000 residents were “non-white,” specifically mentioning the presence of 1,000 “Portuguese and Cape Verdeans” and approx-

07

METRO

imately 700 African-Americans. The Study noted prevalent “overcrowding and building deterioration” among North Benefit Street’s structures, 84% of which were occupied by tenants rather than owners. Each building was divided into up to half a dozen flats.

While the preservation movement succeeded in saving many historic buildings from the destruction of the urban renewal era, this work often benefited only a small part of the community. According to the City of Providence, the “area became one of the first urban renewal projects in the country to encompass rehabilitation as opposed to demolition.” The City of Providence website goes on to contend, “Unfortunately, some displacement of the local minority community did occur during the rejuvenation of these structures.” Mrs. Chase’s company’s beautification efforts converted these structures into one- and two-family homes that former residents could not afford, effectively displacing the area’s marginalized populations. Affluent citizens eager to safeguard College Hill’s aesthetic character staved off the wrecking ball but ended up pushing marginalized groups into further reaches of the city, burying the stories they had imprinted on the buildings under coats of shiny new paint. +++ 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the National Preservation Act. This act established the National Register of Historic Places and the list of National Landmarks, and stipulated that federal agencies review any construction project involving federal funds or federal lands to ensure that it does not erase important cultural or architectural heritage.

To mark the anniversary, PPS hosted a “Why Preserve?” symposium this November, exploring, Runyon said, how preservationists can “think about the whole community rather than just the buildings,” and “make neighborhoods better without displacement.”

For Providence preservationists, moving forward with inclusivity in mind means turning to examples like Michigan, where the Historic Preservation Network, with funding from the Michigan Department of Labor, coordinates the Vocational Education Program, which teaches workers how to rehabilitate historic properties. The program saves buildings, provides employment, and gives community members specific and profitable skills.

PPS is exploring bringing a similar program here, beginning with an assessment of similar organizations like Stop Wasting Abandoned Properties Inc, which converts blighted properties throughout Providence into affordable housing and offers workshops for tenants and low-income buyers.

PPS has also looked to arts and culture organizations as a potential way for “people to imprint themselves on a place,” says Runyon. “Art enlivens and interprets spaces.

Sculpture, music, and dance can communicate what a place means to people and bring others in.” This approach echoes a popular urban planning initiative called “creative

placemaking,” coined in a joint report by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), United States Conference of Mayors, and American Architectural Foundation in 2010.

In creative placemaking, “partners from public, private, non-profit, and community sectors strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, city, or region around arts and cultural activities.” Runyon says that preservationists are now embracing programs like this, which they have historically rejected in favor of "keeping things the way they are.”

PPS’s new move towards inclusive preservation draws on the work of forward-thinking 1960s preservationists, such as urban writer and activist Jane Jacobs. Jacobs fought the construction of highways through Greenwich Village, rallying supporters behind the argument that urban development should emphasize rather than destroy those aspects of a neighborhood which make it most unique. In her first famous article, a piece in Fortune Magazine entitled “Downtown is for the People,” Jacobs cautions against remaking the city “to fit an abstract concept of what, logically, it should be,” instead urging city officials and citizens alike to “consider what can inject the wonder, the cheerful hurly-burly that make people want to come into the city and linger there,” to look for a neighborhood’s strengths and “reinforce and exploit them.”

Through its annual “Most Endangered Properties List,” PPS raises awareness about and opens public dialogue on Providence’s most significant deteriorating buildings.

However, PPS often does not have the resources to practically intervene in city projects, which continue to prioritize economic growth over the inclusivity that PPS advocates for. Most of the city’s preservation plans have focused on downtown, largely overlooking Providence’s other neighborhoods. For example, the city’s preservation efforts for the Industrial Trust (or “Superman”) building in downtown Providence have included proposals for luxury housing, dorms, and banks, responding only to the needs of a small segment of the Providence community.

As the city invests in its downtown it has left other neighborhoods to plan and fund their own initiatives. Trinity Restoration Inc. began its preservation projects in 1988 with the goal to repurpose the Annex of Trinity Methodist Church in Trinity Square on Providence’s South Side. Richardson Ogidan remembers asking, “What will work in here that will make this building a great asset to the community? How do we turn this great asset back to the community?” In determining what to do with the Annex, Trinity Restoration Inc. sought a use that would both benefit the South Side while also reinforce its strengths—diversity chief among them.

Ogidan is now the executive director of the South Side Cultural Center of Rhode Island (SCCRI), which is the current manifestation of Trinity Restoration, and works to involve community groups and individuals in

DECEMBER 02, 2016

art-making.

Trinity Square sits between three major high schools and the two most trafficked bus stops in the state system. Ogidan estimates the surrounding neighborhoods to be 20% Caucasian, 20% Black, 40% Latinx, and 20% other people of color.

Accordingly, the SCCRI houses seven partner tenant organizations, such as Rhode Island Black Storytellers and Arte Latino of New England. In giving space to the community it serves, the SCCRI amplifies the voices of populations otherwise overlooked by the city.

To get on its feet, the SCCRI secured grants from the Rhode Island Foundation Expansion Acts Program and the Rhode Island Council of Humanities. Lack of city funding requires organizations like SCCRI to rely heavily on these philanthropic grants. The City of Providence currently uses tax stabilization to encourage commercial and industrial development. Tax stabilization can include freezing taxes on income producing properties, a stipulation that excludes organizations like SCCRI. In 2001, the Rhode Island General Assembly approved what PPS Board Member Lucie Searle characterized as “a very progressive state historic tax credit program,” but discontinued it at the start of the recession in 2008, “primarily because of

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

budgetary concerns.”

Ogidan and SCCRI’s other board members want to provide a place for the South Side’s youth to gather, increasing foot traffic through the area and bringing in a progression of other businesses over time. “To me [projects like SCCRI are] the start of neighborhood revitalization, which I understand [Mayor Elorza] is interested in doing. I don’t care how much Downtown glitters,” Ogidan said, noting that, unless more emphasis is placed on Providence’s other neighborhoods, “sooner or later the city will die.”

city, and state, to propose uses for the building.

An Armory Steering Committee, whose members include Mr. Runyon, city officials, and community advocates, will begin meeting in early 2017.

Commenting on the Armory, Mr. Sanderson said: “Eventually the structural systems will begin to fail. The state will not keep up with patching the holes in the roof, and the structural steel will begin to rust.”

CLARE BOYLE B’20 believes there is cheerful hurly-burly all over Providence.

+++ From the doorway of the SCCRI, one can see the towers of the Cranston Street Armory rising above the rows of houses that comprise the West End. Like the Superman building, the Armory stands empty. The city spends millions in annual maintenance for these empty structures, and both have logged multiple entries on the PPS’ “Endangered Property List.” The Armory has appeared on and off the List since 1996.

Last spring, Michael DiBiase, Director of the Rhode Island Department of Administration, called for “stakeholders” from the neighborhood,

METRO

08

WORKING THROUGH EMPATHY An interview with director Josh Oppenheimer

Elias Bresnick ILLUSTRATION BY Frans van Hoek BY

Josh Oppenheimer is an American documentary filmmaker best known for his films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. The Act of Killing won the European Film Award for Best Documentary in 2012, both films were separately nominated for Academy Awards, and in 2014, Oppenheimer received the coveted MacArthur “Genius Grant." Regarded by many as a masterpiece of the genre, The Act of Killing propelled Oppenheimer into the esteemed company of investigative filmmakers the likes of Werner Herzog and Errol Morris.

A highly inventive and idiosyncratic effort, the film takes for its subject the aging Anwar Congo, a former paramilitary leader involved in the massacre of 1,000,000 accused communists during the Indonesian genocide of 1965. The state-sponsored genocide has been largely erased in mainstream US history, despite the fact that it was largely a product of Cold War tensions between the US and Soviet Union. The genocide primarily targeted unionized Indonesian workers and ethnic Chinese residents, many of whom had no legitimate ties to communism. Rather than tracing the arc of the genocide itself, Oppenheimer focuses primarily on Congo himself. Congo, much enamored by classic Hollywood gangster films, agrees to allow Oppenheimer to shoot individual scenes of a hypothetical gangster movie based on him and other members of the paramilitary organization ‘Pancasila Youth.’ The resulting documentary is the combination of reenactments from the perpetrators and interviews with Congo and other killers. The film is surreal and unsettling in a variety of ways, perhaps none more profound than the way in which, as the movie progresses, the formerly unrepentant Congo begins to glimpse the full weight of the atrocity he and others participated in.

The Look of Silence, which Oppenheimer considers a sequel to the original, follows Adi Rukun as he confronts the men who brutally murdered his brother during the same period of genocide. The movies have had a huge impact within Indonesia, as the once taboo topic of the historical injustice has become the subject of a national dialogue. In November, Brown University’s Asian American Heritage series screened the two films and brought Oppenheimer from London for a series of talks and teach-ins. I had a chance to sit down with Oppenheimer to learn more about his films and the role he believes the camera can play in beginning to reckon with the past.

09

FEATURES

+++ The College Hill Independent: Anwar’s actions during wartime were harrowing and unconscionable…

Josh Oppenheimer: Not wartime, there was no war, that’s the first thing I interrupt you with. And it’s almost unique, to have that kind of genocide outside the context of a war. There was a war in Rwanda and there was a war in Germany, Bosnia, and Cambodia, so it’s interesting to note there was no war. It was a period of genocide.

The Indy: Right, that’s a useful clarification. So, during the genocide, Anwar’s actions were totally unconscionable and devoid of any kind of responsibility to morality. The sense we get watching the film is that this is a man without a conscience. One might argue that Anwar’s reaction to the camera, his awareness of an external gaze, is what ultimately allows him to develop a kind of consciousness and a sense of self.

I wonder what you see as the film’s role in constructing a kind of conscience in Anwar?

JO: I think that’s a good point. Many people do see a man with a conscience, struggling with that conscience very early in the film. But I accept your experience of the film as valid, and I think that you’re making an excellent point that this layer of self-consciousness which comes with being filmed can indeed activate a kind of moral awareness. And this is methodologically built into the filmmaking through the screenings, of course, where I’m screening back to him every scene we shoot, and he’s suddenly seeing himself on screen. Which as you know, and everyone knows—from looking at a picture or a video of yourself—is a very strange, almost uncanny experience.

You’re meeting yourself—the one person you never see—for the first time.

The Indy: I wonder how you negotiate the gap between what characters say and what they feel. Some of the most impactful moments in the film spring from your refusal to take Anwar at his word.

JO: Cinema is all about reading subtext. Cinema is a terrible medium for words. An interview, a shot of someone talking, becomes cinema the moment they don’t believe the words they’re saying, or there’s

something else behind the words, or the pauses between words are betraying something else. As a filmmaker, my entire job is to be sensitive to those cracks and gaps. My job from the very beginning, when someone takes me to a roof and starts boasting and dancing where they killed people, and I’m feeling disgusted, is to look at that and think, “do they really… how are they feeling when they dance on this roof? Is he happy, really? Or is something else happening?" And in Anwar’s case you can see right away that other things are happening. I then have to read and interpret and guess and propose that the next scene that we create together be something I think will elicit some insight into the tension that I saw on his face in the previous scene. So I’m constantly analyzing—and it’s not because of philosophy I read—it’s because of the empathic work that we have to do when we’re working with other human beings in film.

The Indy: It really strikes me, and I’ve talked to a lot of people who feel this way, that if you hadn’t directed this film, it easily could have wound up as a kind of forgettable PBS documentary or something. Werner Herzog made the observation while speaking about your movie that facts don’t necessarily constitute truth and that directors must understand this in order to make good documentary. I wonder about what your thoughts are on using directorial control versus allowing things to just happen.

JO: No one allows things to just happen! It’s just not how films are made. It’s how we’re told films are made so that we can forget about the making. Just like in fiction, we sit down to watch a fiction movie and we forget about the making to imagine we’re seeing something just happening. It’s suspension of disbelief. Good films are made when the filmmakers and the participants collaborate to create occasions that are designed to reveal previously invisible things relevant to the questions the filmmaker’s asking. If these things have been invisible hitherto, there’s a reason for it. Therefore, invariably we’re trying to create occasions where people are pushed beyond their comfort zone even in what appears to be a fly on the wall documentary. It’s always made that way. And it’s very important. Especially when I’m speaking to young filmmakers I stress this, because you cannot become a good filmmaker by trying to

DECEMBER 02, 2016

disappear into the wallpaper.

The Indy: At some points in the movie you come off as a kind of spy behind enemy lines. We hear these brutal and totally immoral statements coming from the perpetrators, and I imagine you standing there behind the camera, and what your reaction must have been at the time and having to keep that at bay in order to allow them to reveal themselves. I’m wondering how you deal with not taking a stand in the moment.

JO: Well, you’re aware of the consequences of taking a stand in the moment, which is that your crew will be arrested, you’re going to be arrested and deported, and there will be no more film. So it’s an easy calculation, especially when you have fear pushing you in one direction, you think to yourself, ‘I might just about get through this and be able to make an amazing film if I keep quiet here. Or, if I get really upset I might be arrested and my dear friends who are working with me possibly beaten up or worse,' and that fear will keep you quiet in that moment, because you know you’ll have your day, you know you’ll have your moment to reveal this to the world and to Indonesia.

The Indy: Were you at all afraid while making the film?

JO: I wasn’t afraid when I was hearing them describe horrible things, in a kind of physical sense. I was emotionally afraid as I found I was much too close, much too intimate with people who worked despairingly, knowing that they somehow can’t avoid acknowledging their own guilt, [who are] throwing themselves into the worst, the darkest possible image they might have of themselves. That gave me nightmares and insomnia.

There were a few moments in which I was physically afraid, when the characters would start questioning my position. There’s this very important scene where Adi Zulkadry says, ‘you know if we succeed in making this film, it will show that we’ve been lying. And everyone already suspects it but this will confirm it.’ And just before he launches into that speech I heard him through his radio microphone during a break in the filming telling the others, ‘don’t you think Joshua is a communist?’

Now in that kind of moment I’m afraid, and I go up to him and say let’s talk about it. And that’s a kind of confrontation that’s scary, but you have no choice. It’s scarier to stay quiet and let that brew around you, and so again it’s fear that drives you.

The Indy: To go back to this idea of the fear of being emotionally connected to characters who really have perpetrated unimaginable evils… I’m reminded of In Cold Blood and Truman Capote. Capote goes to write a piece on two death-row inmates and ends up becoming very close to a man who committed an unthinkable atrocity for no reason. Watching your movie, Anwar comes off at a lot of times as this very sympathetic character, crazily enough, and I can’t imagine what your

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

relationship with him was like.

JO: He is a sympathetic character. I guess the scary thing about Anwar is that there’s some threshold beyond which he’s no longer sympathetic. As deeply as I feel for him, and I actually believe he feels for me, I always was wondering what would it take for him to turn against me. And is it that he would never have killed someone he was close to, and would only have gone after his enemies and people he didn’t know? Or could he have easily turned against people he loved? I never really knew the answer. But I actually think he’s someone who would turn against people he loved no more easily than you or I would. It’s more that he easily dehumanizes people he doesn’t care for.

The Indy: Right, and one thing that your films comment on so powerfully is the influence of propaganda and its capacity to allow perpetrators to absolve themselves from guilt. The central source of anti-communist propaganda during the ’60s was, of course, the US media machine. So I wonder how accountable you feel the US is for exporting this propaganda that inspired mass-murder, and, to move to the contemporary, I wonder whether and where you think analogous models of propaganda are at work today.

JO: Yes and yes. I mean, we’re very responsible. This didn’t just happen in Indonesia, it happened again and again and was rationalized in the American media. In Guatemala, as part of US intervention there, 200,000 people were killed. That’s more than all the other Latin American dirty wars combined. There was the overthrow of Allende in Chile, the dirty wars in Argentina, the military junta in Brazil, the overthrow of Mossadegh and installation of the Shah dictatorship, which is what led to the Islamic government and theocracy in Iran.

Again and again and again all over the world, the US has rationalized this kind of mass violence, and celebrated it and justified it as necessary if not heroic. We have a president elect right now who’s talking about not only water-boarding’s not being so bad, but out-and-out torture being appropriate for anyone he decides is a terrorist. And this is our president elect! The United States has a whole Hollywood genre, the Western, dedicated to celebrating and mythologizing Native American genocide.

The Indy: I was also thinking about the movie within the context of the election. In both of your movies there are clear victims and clear villains, and the two groups understand very little of each other. And one of the miraculous things about The Act Of Killing is that it’s able to, in a sense, convert Anwar from the one camp to the other. Anwar ultimately begins to see his own actions as the children of these murdered accused communists might have seen them. And I can’t help but think of the dialectically opposed political camps in the US who see and understand increasingly little of each other,

and I wonder what you would say about the potential of artistic projects like yours is to bring about understanding, or empathy between the two.

JO: Well, I think certainly film works through empathy. I mean, it ought to work through empathy; of course there are well-crafted works that actually inspire hatred—whether it’s Birth of a Nation or the films of Leni Riefenstahl. But I think that one thing that The Act of Killing shows is that Anwar as a perpetrator has destroyed himself. And I think it’s worth asking to what extent, when we close our hearts to whole segments of the population around us and refuse to see their humanity—which maybe both sides of the American political divide actually do, but certainly the so-called alt-right does when they look at anyone across an ethnic or religious difference—we destroy ourselves. Because we hollow ourselves out. Our humanity rests in our ability to empathize with one another, to understand one another, to put ourselves in each other’s shoes. That basic sense of ‘I couldn’t hurt you, because how would it feel to be you being hurt, and how would I violate myself if I could do that’ is what keeps us—when we are peaceful with each other—peaceful with each other. And it’s what gives us our ability to live with all sorts of people and to care for one another, and to feel sickened when someone you don’t know is hurt in front of you. And when you have a political culture which is about vilifying and demonizing and making yourself feel strong by asserting your supremacy over others, you might feel strong, but you’ll only be a strong monster. You’ll only feel strong as a kind of hollow shell of what you could be. I think to look at the brokenness of the perpetrators and those who champion their legacy in America, just as I look at the brokenness of Anwar and the paramilitary protegées in Indonesia, would be a very important project.

When I showed The Act of Killing in Indonesia, the first screening was a secret screening before it was shown thousands of times around the country, at the National Human Rights Commission, and we invited all of the leading news editors in Indonesia. The editor of Tempora Magazine called me the next morning and said, ‘I saw your film yesterday. I’ve been censoring stories about the genocide for as long as I’ve been in this job. I’m not going to do it anymore because your film has taught me that I can no longer continue to be a perpetrator, I don’t want to grow old as a perpetrator.’ He identified with Anwar’s brokenness. And if you could make a film that would show the brokenness of someone like Donald Trump—because he’s broken, it must be unbearable to be him, no matter how much power and wealth he has—that would be a moral warning to anyone who would be otherwise moved by his message.

FEATURES

10

A SPRINGSTEEN FAN’S DAUGHTER ILLUSTRATION BY

BY Saanya Jain Gabriel Matesanz

When I was 14 years old, my father sat down on the piano bench with me and placed some sheet music on the stand. He couldn’t read it, but he had made sure his kids would be able to. As I began to test out the first chords of “Dancing in the Dark,” I didn’t know I was playing the music of one of the world’s best-selling artists of all time, an artist who had won 20 Grammy awards, two Golden Globes, an Academy Award, and would later be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

I didn’t know that his music would connect a father in the throes of a mid-life crisis and his teenage daughter. Looking in the mirror, he was searching for a spark and she wanted to change her clothes, her hair, her face. All of this, halfway across the world in North Africa, in an Indian family, 28 years after the song had been released, by way of airplanes, treasured cassettes and timeless notes. +++ Bruce Springsteen was once asked how he delivered such vein-bulging, heart-thumping, ground-shaking, hell-making live performances. He said that he knew his “voice was never going to win any prizes,” so he focused on his songwriting and, now legendary, live performances. I knew I had to go to the last stop of his “The River 2016 Tour” in Foxborough, MA—the closest he was going to get to Providence for some time.

When I arrived with a group of friends at Gillette Stadium, I was certain that we alone would decrease the average age of the audience by a few decades.

Though there was a sizeable population of fans sporting t-shirts they had bought at concerts before I was even born, there were people my age all around us, singing each song word for word.

Three of our fathers had introduced Springsteen’s music to us. It came as a surprise to me, since we all had a natural aversion to anything our parents thought was cool. “I hated him at first because my dad liked him,” was how my friend Sarah put it. The three of us came here as a kind of hereditary rite of passage, or a testament to our fathers, some here, some gone.

One friend’s parents had met at a Bruce Springsteen concert. Another’s father spent his last night in the US at a Springsteen concert before flying back to India.

My father had missed the opportunity to see the Boss on his New Delhi tour when he was in college, and I was there to see Springsteen in his stead.

To be clear: I am no Springsteen expert. There are people who own all 34 albums. There are people for whom Springsteen was the soundtrack to their lives. One person had a sign in the pit that read, “I’ve been to more concerts than years I’ve been alive.” For Springsteen fans, that kind of devotion is the norm, not the exception.

That night, Springsteen ignored Foxborough’s 11:30 curfew (which had already been extended from 11:15, just for him), costing the stadium a $22,000 fine. That night, he caused a traffic jam for two hours in the late hours of night in the suburbs of Massachusetts. That night was the second-longest concert he had ever played, at four hours and one minute. That night, at least three women completed a cycle begun by their fathers.

11

ARTS

+++ How do 120,000 Swedes in Gothenburg in 2016 or 70,000 Indians in New Delhi in 1988 sing their hearts out to Born to Run—a song with New Jersey-specific references to Highway 9 and the Palace, a demolished Asbury Park amusement hall? How do the mostly white collar fans of Springsteen’s blue collar world, who have never known “workin’ in the fields/ ‘til you get your back burned,” sing every word with conviction?

How does Springsteen’s appeal transcend generational and national boundaries, while being grounded in the minutiae of the American ’50s working class world?

The answers lie somewhere in his songs—in burned out Chevrolets and Kingstown bars—but also in his live performances. The setlists of his concerts are a work of art in themselves: loosely planned, so the night can take him where it may if he is inspired by the song requests on hand-written cardboard signs in the pit. His songs are interspersed with anecdotes almost sung, with their own rhythm, perhaps a song in the making. At Foxboro, he recounted: “I handed in my record to the record company, and they said…Well, they gave it back to me.”

stemmed from a lived experience, became a performed mythology that anyone can connect to. +++ When my friend Sarah was little, her father told her, “Bruce Springsteen changed my life.” He played Springsteen on every road trip, intertwining his own stories with the stories of the songs. He would tell them about devoted fans who got to meet Springsteen and about each person in the E Street Band.

He would describe the magical moment when tens of thousands of people would hold their breath as Springsteen played the opening notes in a concert. He would play “Thunder Road,” his favorite song, over and over again. When Sarah and her siblings were little, they found it annoying. She came around to the music later, and Springsteen concerts became her and her dad’s shared passion.

In fact, her first concert ever was a Springsteen concert. As her father sat on the grass across from the stage, a giant bucket of popcorn in his hand and his family by his side, he proclaimed “Everything is perfect right now.” Just then, her little brother began to look queasy. Her father dumped the popcorn out so that he could hold the bucket under his son as he vomited. It was still a pretty perfect night. +++

He strummed his guitar, the audience cheered, a kind of call and response.

“They said, ‘there are no hits on this!’ So I went home and got out my rhyming dictionary.”

And he jumped straight into “Blinded by the Light.”

And so went the night. He touched fleetingly on the “ugly” election season, on his first guitar, on his father, on playing for the the legendary producer John Hammond who let “two absolutely fucking nobodies” into his office.

Perhaps his appeal is that, in 50 short years, through “practice, practice, practice,” someone became the Bruce Springsteen. That from Asbury Park, NJ, the son of immigrants from Italy and Ireland, he made his life an example of the American dream. In Springsteen’s world, it is a dream anyone can aspire to.

Perhaps the tighter the focus of the lyrics—the Metuchen Ford plant assembly line in “Glory Days,” for example—the more universal the song. Maybe because the details become symbols that carry within them the American dream, which mean different things to those outside of the US, and those within the US but outside the white working class universe that Springsteen constructs. Even though he no longer belongs to that class, he retains his image as its spokesman. Conservatives and liberals hold up his songs as the embodiment of America. They meant different things to my teenage self and to my father, but in that very fact, they are a repudiation of the things that separate us.

I had never been to New Jersey, and I had only seen the likes of the car mechanics that Bruce Springsteen played in his music videos in Hollywood movies.

In that sense, Springsteen’s vision, even though it

In 1988, my father was in college in India, and Bruce Springsteen was the rage there. The song “Born in the USA” was the anthem of the many men who dreamed of living the American dream, little aware that the song was a critique of the Vietnam War and its aftermath on veterans (a mistake that Ronald Reagan was also guilty of, using the song for his reelection campaign). The songs were on cassettes, the kind that have black wire that you would occasionally have to re-form by wiggling a pen around. The New Jersey accent was hard to understand, so he and his friends sang the bits they knew.

When Springsteen came to New Delhi that year, his campus was full of young men who took overnight buses to his concert and back. My father was not one of them—rock n’ roll wasn’t the kind of folly for which you risked your education in his family. But he would hear them say, hum Boss ko milne jayenge: we’re going to meet the Boss. +++ At different stages of our father’s lives, in different countries, Sarah and I connected with our dads through Springsteen’s music. More than just an American Dream, or a white working class dream, it is a dream that people around the world can imagine participating in whenever his heart-thumping music comes on.

As we waited to head home, I turned to a friend and said: “I can’t wait to tell my kids that I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert.”

SAANYA JAIN B’19 also can’t wait to finish Springsteen’s five-hundred page autobiographical tome.

DECEMBER 02, 2016

HOLI DAYGI FT GUI DE Ae rt her e v ol ut i on,t he r ewi l l beda nc i ngi nt hes t r e e t s ,be a c he si ns t e a dof s i de wa l ks ,c ut i e ss t r ut t i n’ a r oundr i g hta ndl e .Ande v e r y onekno wswha tt o j udg eaMa r xi s t ‘ spur i t yb y.Fr om t het r e a dsc a ki ngt hehi l l s i de st ot het oe s s t i c ki ngoutt hee ndoft heg r ound,i t ’ st heboot sb ywhi c hone ’ sr e v ol ut i ona r y c on vi c t i onss t a ndorf a l l .

Copapa i roft he s eboot ss ol db yt heZa pa t i s t a s ,s t a mpe dwi t ht heEZLN l og oa ndr e a dyt owi t hs t a ndt hewe a ra ndt e a roft heda nc i ngt ha t ’ l l r e a l l y c ount .Ase a s ya si ti st oma kef unofl a z y,pr e t e nt i ousMa r xi s t s ,t he Za pa t i s t a sa r edoi ngr e a l ,wor l dc ha ng i ngwor ka ndde s e r v ey ours uppor t .

Sl i di ngs c a l eof$1 2 0t o$2 5 0wi t hpr oc e e dsg oi ngt oSc hool sf orChi a pa s .

Andf ort hedwe e bi e rc omr a de sa mong s tus :al e a t he rEZLN g l a s s e sc a s e , g ua r a nt e e dt ohol dupt hr oug hy ourwhol et he s i sofGr a ms c i a nr e a di ng soft he Wa c ho ws ki s i bl i ng s ’ fil ms .

Al i l poe mf ory ours we e t i e

“ Conc e r ne da boutt hee n vi r onme nt a l i mpa c tofme ns t r ua t i ng ?Thea v e r a g eAme r i c a n woma nt hr o wsa wa y2 5 03 00poundsofme ns t r ua l r e l a t e dwa s t ei nt he i rl i f e t i me .We l l , f r e tnomor e .The s er e us a bl e ,c omf y,s t yl i s hpe r i odpr oofunde r pa nt swi l l he l pdr a s t i c a l l y r e duc ebi oha z a r dwa s t e !

Al s os we e tde a l si fy oubuyi nbul ks os ha r ea ndg e tonef ora l l t hel o v e l yme ns t r ua t or si ny ourl i f e ! ” e s e ht t ps : / / www. s he t hi nx. c om/

Hopi na n yc a ry ouc a nfinda ndhe a doutt ot hec ount r y.The r e ’ ss ur pr i s i ng l yg oodde a l son l a ndoutt he r e ―t a kes omef r i e ndsa nds t a r tbui l di ngahous e .Se t t l ei nt oaqui e t e rl i f e .I n v e s t i nt heonl ys or tofv a l ueAme r i c as e e mst or e a l l yv a l ue .Got ot hel oc a l c ommuni t yme e t i ng s a nds t a r tt a l ki ngt ope opl e .Tr youtac ooporc ommune( l o v e l ybutme s s y<3e d. ) .

Pr i c e :~$5 6, 000f or45a c r e s ,e noug ht os t a r tal i f ewi t h.

UNCERTAINTY IN ARCHITECTURE

BY

Tai Shaw

Or, the blip

How do we work with uncertainty? Uncertainty suggests undesirable and uncontrollable outcomes. It also suggests opportunity. Deriving from my architectural thesis investigation about blips, uncertainty, and ambiguity, comes a house for two.

Here, a blip denotes an incidental moment of realization and decision. In a drawing, a blip indicates a moment of deviation or variation within a continuum. In a building, a blip exists in a threshold, a corner, a sudden opening.

This design, a house for two people with a shared practice, tests the instrumentality of the blip to project varied and ambiguous readings. The intent is to depict the complexity of union and individuality.

The joining of two volumes, diagrammed below, introduces variance, or blips, within the intersections, overlaps, and shifts of lines.

generative diagram set 1

generative diagram set 2

13

ARTS

DECEMBER 02, 2016

House for Two Where two territories intersect, The emptiness holds a table for two, sometimes a few.

The union of two is a conflict of sorts, every corner is a collision of lines.

The roofs, two hovering pieces overlap yet remain as individuals.

Together or apart?

The house begs to question.

house for two rendered with axonometric projection

floor plan of the house

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ARTS

14

WRITING NIGHTLIFE

How is a rave like a writing desk?

Noah Fields ILLUSTRATION BY Pia Mileaf-Patel BY

Suppose a writing desk walks into a gay club. Or perhaps the desk is the dance floor of the club. The books on my writing desk commingle, rub their limbs against each other. Loose sheets of poetry dance with queer theory until a zine cuts in. Colorful post-it notes flirt on the surfaces of open pages. James (Schuyler) tongues Samuel (Delaney), Leslie (Feinberg) looks on. We converse with one another on the side of the dance floor as if we were not removed by time and space.

My thought experiment reminds me of Anne Carson’s stated writing practice. In an interview, Carson talks about using three different desks at a time and the inevitable slippage that results: “I work at three different desks, with a different project open on each, let’s say, so one is academic, one writerly, and one art. I go at these erratically, sometimes to all three desks within an hour. They cross-pollinate one another.” A classics paper swerves and finds itself on the poetry desk; a short story accidentally lands on top of the academic pile. They say hello and suddenly the projects germinate in new, hybrid directions. Such is the joy of entropy: the fruitful commingling of theory, art, and life. The flow is dynamic and multidirectional. +++ It’s just after midnight, and we are outside the club. I don’t know about you, but I’m dressed to kill—a black mesh top, magenta lipstick, and a shedding black leather jacket to finish the look. Femme touches to fuck up my masculine presentation. The line’s a little long, winds around the block. But we’re patient—look at all the queer fabulousness around us. Fishnets, mascara, combat boots, tank tops. And besides, all the more time for us to talk, to let our excitement build.

To enter the club, first we’ll have to pass the bouncer. Perhaps the most intimidating bouncer in the world is Sven Marquardt, the renowned photographer who guards the doors of Berghain, an infamously hard-to-get-into techno club in Berlin. Every weekend, hundreds of wannabe-revelers get turned away after hours of waiting in line. The inscrutable door policy has inspired fervid internet speculation on how to get in.

The secret? In an interview with GQ, Marquart revealed how he curates the crowd: “It’s subjective…

You always want friction, though. That’s the theme in any good club.” Friction also interests me. The jarring juxtaposition of unlike things rubbing against each other. Perhaps this is why I am so jazzed about the queer poetics of nightlife, tasked with reconciling the seemingly mismatched worlds of poetry and the gay club. One appears reflective and pensive, the other disreputable for its hedonism and social transgression.

Is this an impossible dance, to make poetry and raving speak the same tongue? To make this dance work, the writer must perform a brave act of translation—in its Latin etymology, literally “to carry across.”

Through language, the writer must carry the body, hold the thought in suspension midair, glide across the floor of language with pleasure. Carpe noctem—to capture nightlife on the page. By translating, the writer of nightlife passes the “bouncer” of translation and enters a queer world. And so we arrive, animating the club anew: queer nightlife splayed on the desk. +++ What can the queer dance floor teach us about writing? In the recent essay “What Beyoncé Taught Me,” Zadie Smith offers some “dance lessons for writers” via a series of case studies of the world’s most famous dancers, including Fred Astaire, Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Beyoncé, for literary pointers in “position, attitude, rhythm and style.” Through these master

15

FEATURES

classes, Smith reverses the direction of the metaphor for dance as “poetry in motion” to set language in motion. What follows is a series of snapshots of some of my favorite queer poets of nightlife—Frank O’Hara, Eileen Myles, and Langston Hughes—to observe how the writer dances. +++ I am struck by a confession Eileen Myles proffers in her autobiographical novel Chelsea Girls over a drink in a gay bar: “I was writing these poems up in the air, really stupid ones all over those cocktail napkins they give you. God, they were awful. About vitamins and stuff. I was off cigarettes which always made me particularly insane…” Even as we sit at the bar, Myles can’t stop writing her poems. Myles improvises with writing “up in the air,” like a dancer. Her napkin poems are not intended to be permanently preserved and we readers will certainly never see them; instead, they are a means of improvised engagement with the stimulating surroundings of the club.

Myles invokes writing as a verb, not writing as a noun. Spontaneous and giving no fucks about how it will appear tomorrow morning. How fabulous and liberating! Just as nightlife is an ephemeral experience and its pleasures are retained only in the memory of the participants, Myles cruises with language and relishes in its temporary immediacy, even while acknowledging that the actual content might be “really stupid” and probably not worth preserving. Instead of showing us these supposedly “awful” poems, Myles preserves for us the pleasure of the process—the motion of the poetry-making, the hand dancing across napkins. Spare the hangover for another day. +++ Something about the writing changes. As queer writers from James Baldwin to the Pomo Afro Homos have demonstrated for decades, the process of writing nightlife is not merely imitative; the attempt to transcribe (translate?) queer nightlife demands new experiments on the page. We shift towards the ephemeral, embrace the immediacy of stimulation, polyrhythmic sensation. We think about space and intimacy. What bodies does this desk hold and how do they touch?

We move closer.

Take Frank O’Hara’s 1955 poem “At the Old Place,” for instance. At first, it seems like a descriptive poem about nightlife, narrated in the continuous present to place us there. But amidst describing his escapades in the Village, nightlife writes in O’Hara’s hand. An evening is improvised fresh on the page and O’Hara foregrounds the pleasures of nightlife’s language: Down the dark stairs drifts the steaming chacha-cha. Through the urine and smoke we charge to the floor. Wrapped in Ashes’ arms I glide.

(It’s heaven!) Button lindys with me. (It’s heaven!) Joe’s two-steps, too, are incredible, and then a fast rhumba with Alvin, like skipping on toothpicks.

O’Hara improvises with sound play, rhythm, repetition, alliteration, and line breaks to translate the transient joys of the gay club. Read on the page half a century later, the language still pulses with restless energy. +++ So many voices. Shouting over one another simultaneously, excited by the freeing possibilities of the

night. Langston Hughes lets us overhear some of this dizzying frenzy in his 1923 poem “The Cat and the Saxophone (2 A.M.)”: EVERYBODY Yes? WANTS MY BABY I’m your BUT MY BABY sweetie, aint I? DON'T WANT NOBODY Sure.

BUT Then let’s ME, do it!

SWEET ME. Charleston, mamma! !

The intense multi-line enjambment and varied capitalizations simulate overlapping voices in the crowd.

Hughes interpolates song lyrics from a popular ragtime song played by live musicians (reproduced in all caps) into bar chatter, interrupting what seems to be an ongoing conversation. Boy, it’s hard to hear you over the music! Instead of emphasizing narrative, Hughes highlights the stimulating atmosphere and the surplus of feeling it produces. Just as the characters in the poem’s narrative feel compelled to get up and dance the Charleston, Hughes’ language too wants to leap off the page and move. The poem does not reduce nightlife; instead, nightlife expands the poem. Hughes’ language pushes out of itself to carry music, bodies, and space, refusing the limits of the page. (That extra exclamation point!!)

Hughes’ sexual orientation is controversial in scholarly circles, though it’s widely suspected that he was gay, as Isaac Julien’s landmark film Looking for Langston portrays. In The Scene of Harlem Cabaret, Shane Vogel suggests that regardless of Hughes’ actual sexuality (which may, ultimately, be unknowable), his literary project was fundamentally queer insofar that it refuses foreclosed identification and questions “the constitution of the sexual subject in the first place.” By depicting scenes of illegal after-hours nightlife as a site of intimacy and pleasure, Hughes renounces regulation and embraces an alternative, queer life-world. +++ In Impossible Dance, an ethnography of social improvised dancing in New York’s LGBT clubs, Fiona Buckland reimagines the form of her theoretical approach to match her unique subject: “In a way, this project is a dance floor. People enter and, drawing on their experiences, memories, hopes, and desires, move across these pages in unique ways. Their moves interact with the moves of others. There are similarities and differences, juxtapositions, counterpoints, polyrhythms. There is self-fashioning, queer world-making.” Buckland’s metaphor reminds me that reading and writing are fundamentally physical encounters.

When I read literature on queer nightlife, my goal is not to analyze the works as passive objects but instead to improvise with them and highlight their breaks from normativity. We are not contemporaries, but somehow we find ourselves here on the same writing desk.

Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology puts the “orientation” back into “sexual orientation” to apply a critical optic to how bodies are spatially oriented. Rather than encountering the world through the “straight” framework heteronormativity encourages, the queer eye might look askew through a new angle. Likewise, I contend that queer nightlife re-orients our phenom-

DECEMBER 02, 2016

enological relationship to the activity of writing—disrupts, dizzies, seduces, intoxicates the poet’s thoughts and language. In short: the poetics of nightlife queers our perspective of the writing desk, invites us to come at it from another angle. +++ Yet another angle: I experiment with writing my own nightlife poems, riffing with the bodies on my desk.

Watching the others dance, I pick up some of their moves and see what feels good. I copy a punctuation mark, try to imitate a rhythm I hear, echo a mood or a sense of flow. I think about how my own experiences of gay clubs can shape my relationship with language.

Can I approximate the pleasure I’ve worn, the sense of total aliveness on the page? Dancing in the dark, I set language free. +++ Arrival The moment prior to the beginning Not a priori but apéritif Before fateful roads calcified breath beckoning sideways through window panes riding nebulas of yellow heat and purple laughter exiting private space and coming into the open carrying a nervous freight of expectations oh what a friday night might offer

Traipsing against one-way traffic we treat crumpled bedsheets like zebra crossings and laugh off a heckler and a furious moon or two on the holy path to pleasure delighting in fresh wonderment how deep is this shared liminal space The moment you slip into my skin And there was no more peeling Underneath or over +++ Dancing Feet 1

2

Can’t fuck with the DJ / palette of juicy / industrial beats and rich / textured jazz and vocal samples / she paints the room / with joy / !!

2 Wish she’d play something familiar. Something I recognized. Like Robyn. I’m in the corner / watching you kiss her / I’m right over here / why can’t you see me / I’m giving it my all / but I’m not the girl you’re taking home / ooooh / I keep dancing on my own.

3 Bounce / bounce / dive / TURN AROUND / vogue / shimmy / pose / Pose / POSE / and start again 4 I swear, man, it’s like I’m physically compelled to flail on the beats. I’m like totally in the zone. It’s like time disappeared and I can’t even discern the edges of the songs anymore!

5 The only person / I ever kissed / at a dance party / was also the only / person I ever / kissed.

6 when-we-go-home-we’ll-remember-the-intimacyof sharing-loud-music-with-a-room-full-of-strangersat-dawn-how-we-slipped-out-of-our-bodies-&-became-a-singular-waveband-we’ll-remember-sweatdrenched-floors-&-shirtless-collisions-&-drunkmake-out-sessions-&-flashing-strobe-lights-&-treating-laws-of-friction-as-fiction-&-also-the-intoxicating-force-of-darkness-blooming-riper-&-riper-evenas-the sun-slowly-rose 1

4 3

5 6

NOAH FIELDS B'17 is waiting for Robyn.

The moment I measure diligently This sweaty dance floor in square feet Exacting a linear understanding of joy lily foaming mouth expelling innocence in murky tides surrounded by chemicals and decibels and spools of potential yous waiting to be whisked to a quiet place eyes trembling and tumbling intrepidly in various combinations of treble and bass The moment we pour Out of the taxis of our bodies

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEATURES

16

THREE POEMS BY

Brigitte Santana Yuko Okabe

ILLUSTRATION BY

Baum Bicycle Bridge The descent down the Baum Bicycle Bridge is: boogie board with killer whales flipped shopping cart dried out nopal Gnats Get in Your Mouth Biking down the LA River Bike Path, gnats get in your mouth and eyes At the right time, the Arroyo Seco Bike Path can feel like outer space; but then, all my ideas of outer space are shaped by movies from the 80s The sky at dusk is tangerine You always wanted to bike to where it ends, under nothing, under an overpass It Was Always Mañana Those were the dark years, when we lived in the dungeon.

We were standing in Rite Aid and you said, “How can I help her?”

And I thought, “That’s not your job,” but I said, “You’re doing what you can.”

17

LITERARY

DECEMBER 02, 2016

INDY LIST 12/02 — 12/08

03 Becoming

03 Green Cross

02 Artists,

Real or Loved Off? @ Yellow Peril Gallery (69pm)

Rhode Island Open House @ 135 Gano St. (12-5pm)

Environmentalists, Activists: 10 Years of UPP Arts @ Providence City Hall (5-7pm)

Champagne brunch?

04 Holiday Card

POT is legal!

03 C R A P:

Party @ PrYSM (26pm)

An Exposition of Worthless Garbáge @ Brown Design Workshop (7:30-9pm)

Since 2007, Urban Pond Procession has organized Providence artists and communities around continuing and expanding stewardship of local natural resources, most notably Providence’s Mashapaug Pond. This exhibit celebrates their ongoing work. On view until Feb. 12.

Join Pink & Black for an afternoon of letter-writing & card-making for our queer and trans siblings locked up around the country.

Brown/RISD STEAM made stuff out of TRASH.

02 - 03

America’s Hardcore Fest 2016 @ Hardcore Stadium, Cambridge Researchers from Cornell University in Ithaca studied the emergent behavior of crowds at mosh pits by analyzing online videos, finding similarities with models of 2-D gases in equilibrium. Simulating the crowds with computer models, they found out that a simulation dominated by flocking parameters produced highly ordered behavior, forming vortexes like those seen in the videos.

BEWARE.

06 Meet & Greet:

Rhode Island Coalition for Reproductive Justice @ 26 Benevolent St. (5:307pm)

LIST encourages protesters to stop this alt-right attack on indie rock./// Twin Peaks is evil... their website is twinpeaksdudes.com/ The PERSONAL is POLITICAL, fight back

Events throughout the town all day including Tree Lighting and Fireworks @ 5pm &&&& I HEARD SANTA WILL B THERE <3xoxox

Nic Coolidge, of KNOX, performs a live hardware set of improvised modular techno. Free! THo when are we gonna be done w dudes who make electronic music using womyn names for their “projects”........ Comeonnnn BROO!

A five-year-old Indian boy gets lost on the streets of Calcutta, thousands of kilometers from home.

He survives many challenges before being adopted by a couple in Australia; 25 years later, he sets out to find his lost family. FReE ScCREENING. Tickets oNLINe.

Together Pangea, Golden Daze @ The Sinclair, Boston (8pm)

Lights @ 25 Ocean Rd, Narragansett (10am6pm)

Moon: JULIA @ 100 Dorrance St (6-10pm)

Lion @ 154 Angell St (6:30-10pm)

07 Twin Peaks w/

04 Festival of

05 Mondays On the

05 Ivy Film Festival:

04 Reading The

w RKO Army Shadowcast @ Aurora (7-10pm) To the fans, Rocky Horror is a repeated cycle of going home and coming back to see the film each weekend, making the practice a ritual of compulsive, re-affirmation of community that has been compared to a “religious event”. The audience call backs are similar to responses in church during a mass.

Black Queer Feminist Coloring Book Night @ Tufts LGBT Center (6:30-7:30pm) Afro-Futurist artist Makeda Lewis talks about her new coloring book. First 45 ppl get free copies. There will b coloring.

Holiday Sale! @ AS220 Labs (6-9pm) Ppl selling stuff! COol As220 ppl selling stuff! Like a flea market but better cuz its at night and you can get drunk?

08 Norah Jones Day

Breaks Tour @ The Vets (8-11pm) Omg omg omg omg omg.

Stop by the John Hay reading room with a book by an author of color, a non-male author, a queer / trans author, or an author who holds more than one of these identities. There will be music. Occupy the library!

04 Rocky Horror

06 Avie’s Dreams:

08 AS220 Annual

Margins @ 20 Prospect St (122pm)

05 Petition

Delivery: Reed and Whitehouse @ 1 Exchange Terrace (121pm) Join Resist Hate RI to deliver a fuck trump petition to Senator Reed and Senator Whitehouse. Let them know what you’ll do if white supremacy is further normalized…

08 Territorialize,

a solo show by Linda Ford @ 26 Benevolent St. (6-8pm) (transitive verb. ter·ri·to·ri·al·ized, ter·ri·to·ri·al·iz·ing, ter·ri·to·ri·al·iz·es. To make a territory of; organize as a territory. To extend by adding territory.)

Linda Ford is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores practices that excavate bodily knowledge by attending to somatic experience.