The College Hill Independent Vol. 44 - Issue 1

THE INDY*

03 WHAT DOES INDIE SOUND LIKE? 05 BREATHING IN ANTI-UNION AIR 07 ALGORAVES ARE HERE RIGHT NOW

Volume 44 Issue 01 11 February 2022

THE HARMONIOUS ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

THE INDY* This Issue

Masthead*

00 “KISS”

MANAGING EDITORS Ife Anyoku Sage Jennings Isaac McKenna Alisa Caira

Eli Kauffman

02 WEEK IN FOOTWEAR Masha Breeze & Nora Mathews

03 WHAT DOES INDIE SOUND LIKE? Will Allstetter

05 BREATHING IN ANTI-UNION AIR Cecilia Barron

07 ALGORAVES ARE HERE RIGHT NOW

WEEK IN REVIEW Masha Breeze Nora Mathews FEATURES Mara Cavallaro Anabelle Johnston Corinne Leong Amelia Wyckoff NEWS Anushka Kataruka Nicole Kim Priyanka Mahat

Zach Braner

09 BITES FROM BREAK

Lily Chahine, Katherine Xiong, Janek Schaller, Caroline Allen, Callie Rabinovitz, Eli Gordon, & Jane Wang

ARTS Jenna Cooley Justin Scheer Arden Shostack EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Ayca Ulgen

12 PHANTOM ROMANCES & UNSENT LOVE LETTERS Emma Rosenkranz & Dorrit Corwin

METRO Jack Doughty Nélari Figueroa Torres Rose Houglet Sacha Sloan

14 SELF-PORTRAIT AT THE BOTTOM OF THE HILL Zora Gamberg

15 ‘PARTYGATE’: CLASS PRIVILEGE AND UK POLITICS Gabrielle Shammash

17 ON/INSIDE/THROUGH

SCIENCE + TECH Rhythm Rastogi Jane Wang BULLETIN BOARD Deb Marini Lily Pickett X Soeun Bae

Lucia Kan-Sperling

18 WELCOME TO... DEAR INDY

DEAR INDY Cecilia Barron

19 THE BULLETIN

LITERARY Alyscia Batista Annie Stein

Cecilia Barron

OUTREACH COORDINATOR Audrey Buhain

From the Editors Right now, at the very moment these words are leaving my fingers in an unedited heap, it is 12:14 AM. This is a very different time than it was when I entered the College Hill Independent’s top-secret headquarters this afternoon.

Then, it was 1:54 PM. I had just gotten out of a class I maybe don’t like as much as I should, and I had just finished asking previous managing editors to send me words of affirmation…and a crossword as I awaited their replies.

The words, while affirming, were not-quite-enough to make me believe that this thing, this romantic, lovey-dovey, mushy, harmonic thing could exist again (and, hopefully, again after that).

But now, as we inch towards 12:21 AM and decide that we can make instant hot chocolate without measuring ¼ a cup of cocoa exactly, it feels as if maybe it can.

As ¼ of a cup of ISIA, only adding the letter ‘A,’ I am understanding more what it means to be like a styrofoam cup of hot chocolate. I am warm, but cooling. I am settling into my corner of the Indy and growing comfortable.

It is not Valentine’s day yet, but it soon will be. When it is, and before it is, and after it is, I hope you can cuddle up with a better-than-styrofoam cup of hot chocolate (or your hot drink of choice) and maybe, just maybe, read this first issue of the Indy.

P.S. This FTE took 21 minutes to write, but the creation of this Indy took many, many hours. We hope you love it as much as we do.

-AC

01

Volume 44 Issue 01 11 February 2022

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

DESIGN EDITORS Sam Stewart Anna Brinkhuis

SENIOR EDITORS Alana Baer Audrey Buhain Mara Cavallaro Anabelle Johnston Deb Marini Peder Schaefer STAFF WRITERS Hanna Aboueid Caroline Allen Zach Braner Rachel Carlson Lily Chahine Swetabh Changkakoti Danielle Emerson Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo Mariana Fajnzylber Edie Fine Ricardo Gomez Eli Gordon Eric Guo Charlotte Haq Billie McKelvie Charlie Mederios Bilal Memon Loughlin Neuert Alex Purdy Callie Rabinovitz Nick Roblee-Strauss Nell Salzman Peder Schafer Janek Schaller Koyla Shields Ella Spungen Alex Valenti Siqi ‘Kathy’ Wang Katherine Xiong COPY EDITORS Addie Allen Evangeline Bilger Klara Davidson-Schmich Megan Donohue Mack Ford Sarah Goldman Zoey Grant Alara Kalfazade Jasmine Li Abigail Lyss Tara Mandal Becca Martin-Welp Pilar McDonald Kabir Narayanan Eleanor Peters Angelina Rios-Galindo Ellie Tapping

COVER COORDINATOR Seoyoung Kim DESIGNERS Leah ‘El’ Boveda Briaanna Chiu Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Clara Epstein Elisa Kim Tanya Qu Emily Tom Floria Tsui WEB DESIGN Lucas Gelfond ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Hannah Park ILLUSTRATORS Sylvie Bartusek Ashley Castaneda Hannah Chang Claire Chasse Michelle Ding Rosie Dinsmore Quinn Erickson Lillyanne Fisher Sophie Foulkes John Gendron Amonda Kallenbach Joshua Koolik Lucy Lebowitz Olivia Lunger Tom Manto Sarosh Nadeem Kenney Nguyen Izzy Roth-Dishy Lola Simon Livia Weiner GAME MAKER Loughlin Neuert Maya Polsky WRITING FELLOW Chong Jing ‘CJ’ Gan MVP Hannah Park — The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI in Seekonk, Massachusets.

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures.

Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and selfcritical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

WEEK IN REVIEW

Week in Footwear Opinion: The New Green M&M is Bimbo Erasure TEXT MASHA BREEZE DESIGN TANYA QU ILLUSTRATION JOHN GENDRON January 20th, 2022–Mars, Incorporated, the company which owns M&M’S, announced that they would be updating their brand, with the goal of “increas[ing] a sense of belonging for ten million people by 2025.” Among the steps they outlined to reach this goal was a “fresh, modern take” on the appearance of their mascots, to give them more independence and more “nuanced personalities.”

What did this rebrand look like? Castration.

The once sexually-liberated bimbo icon Ms. Green has been shot in the street and replaced with an insole-wearing corporate homunculus whose cold, dead hands have been broken from their rigor and set on her hips, as if to say “I’m Jennifer Garner in the early 2000s TV series Alias. Hear my sexless scream and know that my fate is also yours: to be sterilized and exsanguinated for the consumption of millions. To be denied all pleasure, but smile still. To know death.”

As Samson lost his hair, Ms. Green lost her quintessential knee high heels. Instead, she now wears the shoes of a eunuch, or a David Schwimmer impersonator, shoes which somehow make her look bald even though she never had hair. These shoes have treatment-resistant depression. These shoes belong to a Russian DJ or a twink who sells Adderall. The friendless meat puppet who wears these shoes is not Ms. Green; it is something much older and hungrier.

What did Ms. Green do to deserve this public execution? What is it about a liberated bimbo that threatens the nuclear family? When I watch an M&M’S ad, I want to feel threatened, not hungry. I want a green M&M whose raw sexual charisma chills me to my core. I want a

green M&M whose arched eyebrows make me actively dysphoric and borderline hysterical.

I want a green M&M who looks like she does poppers, not a joyless YMCA drowning victim who looks like she would misgender me while wearing lobotomy-core shoes. I don’t want to ‘eat’ my green M&M, I want my green M&M to eat.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of this rebrand is that Ms. Brown, the bespectacled teacher kink incarnate whose glance of disapproval and crossed arms seem to defy cisnormative femininity, has been allowed to keep her heels in the new ad. As a trans woman, I celebrate Ms. Brown and her quiet, mommy dom resistance. But I must also question why her sexuality is palatable while Ms. Green’s is not. Is the smart, conservative girl trope (e.g., Anita in Jennifer’s Body, Spencer in Pretty Little Liars, Cady in Mean Girls) truly a subversive archetype, or does she, more often than not, serve as a critique of the bimbo, a guillotine for any woman who dares to find power in her sexuality and aesthetic self-expression?

Certainly, Ms. Green is more than her shoes. But valuing her shoes as an important part of her aesthetic identity doesn’t make her less smart, powerful, or worth listening to. It makes her the most gorgeous girl in the world.

Opinion: Please, Green M&M, I Have A Family TEXT NORA MATHEWS DESIGN TANYA QU ILLUSTRATION JOHN GENDRON Who was it who said you can’t be disgusting and gorgeous and sexually promiscuous and also wear sneakers? I bought a pair of Merrells off eBay last month, and I already have a UTI. All hail the green M&M. All hail the gorpcore slut. She’s wearing thermal underwear and she can make the peanut M&M go absolutely feral on national television.

The green M&M’s new look is the coworker from your job in high school who ate in the mandatory denim-on-denim uniform. No, your J. Crew button down will not look that good on you! That’s her magic.

My green M&M has a low arch and bunions. My green M&M is so hot she will kill God. If you think these things are contradictory, I urge you to seek treatment or maybe read a book. You might like it! It’s like a movie but words, and the pictures happen in your head.

This is not an argument in favor of corporate rebrands (my community is still experiencing the seismic aftershocks of the Dunkin’ Donuts reinvention… hello soulless “Dunkin’”). Is this green M&M really more palatable to a national audience? Not unless everybody suddenly got really chill about a lot of stuff all of a sudden. Look in her eyes—this green M&M has insane beef with strangers in Facebook groups. This green M&M got special

permission to smoke indoors in every Pacsun in America. You should be scared! She can run faster now.

Don’t get it twisted. This is also not an argument in favor of girlbossery, not a you-canhave-it-all argument (being hot in sneakers? It’s been done before: insert reference to a topical-yet-unexpected inappropriately sexualized cartoon character here).

Do I think it’s a betrayal of her roots and, by extension, women everywhere? Probably. But I also think that the green M&M has a shocking capacity for cruelty and that she will use it against anyone who speaks against her and her outfit choices. If you don’t think this is a calculated move for dominance of the M&M’s chosen family (polycule?), please, I’m begging, at least try reading a listicle. You might learn something.

Would I want to be friends with this new green M&M? What I’ll say is that the scariest women I know wear fleece-lined long johns.

They’re prepared for anything—they make their dogs wear shoes. You need them as your allies.

Some websites will try to tell you that the new shoes are “proof that you can wear whatever you want and still portray your personality.”

To them I say: Get a hobby, seriously. Your kids miss you. The sneakers are, however, proof that the green M&M can wear orthopedic bowling shoes and be so hot she’s medically a biohazard.

The rules are different for her—she’s a piece of chocolate who knows what sex is. I don’t think that’s hard to understand.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 01

02

What Does Indie Sound Like?

ARTS

On the nonsensicality of indie as a music genre

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

ILLUSTRATION CLAIRE CHASSE

Indie, it seems, has sold out. When Taylor Swift released her 8th album, folklore, on Republic Records (a once independent label, now owned

by Universal Music Group), Pitchfork (a once independent music publication, now owned by Condé Nast) hailed the pop superstar’s project as her ‘indie’ reinvention. Along with praise for her indie era, however, the conferral of the title angered many, prompting think pieces with titles including “Is Every Artist an Indie Artist Now?” or “Taylor Swift is Indie Now, Apparently.” Taylor, however, is nowhere near the first non-independent artist to be branded as indie, with the label having been divorced from its roots for years. Spotify's “Ultimate Indie” playlist is a prime example, presenting the listener a spread peppered with billboard-charting industry behemoths from Bruce Springsteen to Lorde, along with many other recipients of multi-million-dollar publishing deals that fly in the face of indie’s original DIY ethos.

The history that these article-writing indie formalists harken back to began a little over fifty years ago, when indie’s primary goal was to circumvent the industry. The Buzzcocks’ 1977 Spinal Scratch EP is widely held up as one of the first indie records, having come directly out of the band’s need to operate outside traditional structures. After their music was ignored by the sole distributors at the time—major record labels—they founded their own label: New Hormones. In an interview, the Buzzcocks’ bassist, Steve Diggle, recalls that “at that time we didn't think we'd get a deal, so we came up with the idea of making our own. It seems obvious now, but the thought that we could phone a record plant and get them to make some, that was an amazing feeling.”

However, following the success of their first record, the Buzzcocks would go on to release the rest of their early projects with United Artists, a major label. Many of their contemporaries would follow this same trajectory as well, with the more successful ones like the Sex Pistols being picked up by majors following local fame.

As opposed to the view purists have surrounding their favorite indie darlings, the genre’s punk originators saw their decision to independently publish their music as one of necessity rather than staking out a moral high ground. Only retroactively do we call the Buzzcocks indie artists, and their independent publishing is no longer a prerequisite to inclusion.

Almost all canonically iconic indie acts from Radiohead to The Strokes have released albums on major labels. Modern indie, then, evidently finds its identity elsewhere.

TEXT WILL ALLSTETTER

+++

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Moving beyond market semantics, one could make an argument for indie as a sonic label or musical genre. Using Spotify’s “Ultimate Indie” playlist as a bellwether, however, I had a hard time constructing a cohesive definition for the genre. As the supposedly ultimate™ typifiers of indie, their common musical thread was less than clear.

Using this framework to categorize what

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ARTS

“ is most commonly considered indie today, the grouping would most reasonably comprise a myriad of 90s soft-rock descendants. For the playlist, this definition works for a good portion of the songs they’ve labeled indie. Many of them are driven by analogue drum kits, mildly (but nevertheless easily palatable) distorted plucked electric guitar, and a dialed-up singer-songwriter affectation. However, Spotify throws us curve balls like Kerro Kerro Bonito’s “The Princess and The Clock” or Caroline Polachek’s “Bunny is a Rider,” both unapologetically maximalist electro-pop dance songs that resist this attempt at classification.

Giving the playlist’s author the benefit of the doubt, indie is used in some cases as a prefix, not a cohesive musical grouping. When used in this modality, the indie label operates more as a modifier than as a genre. In this sense, indie can be seen as a huge umbrella that not only includes indie-rock derivatives, but indie-pop, indie-folk, indie-electronica, and even indie-classical. With this understanding, using indie as a prefix indicates a song that transgresses the mainstream rules of the genre in which it’s situated.

However, Spotify doesn’t create playlists based on systematics like this. They curate around genres, musicians, and moods. At this point, the listener is left to assume that the author does, in fact, treat the playlist as a genre. Now, when ‘indie’ no longer operates as a modifier but maintains its grouping, from its subgroups emerges a genre in itself, divorced from its original stylistic roots. Indicative of the modern music landscape, indie is no longer a modifier for other labels or a description of relation to an industry, but a distinct group in its own right. If someone were to tell you their favorite type of music was indie, you’d likely know exactly what they meant; a muddled impression (but nonetheless easily identifiable) including artists like Alex G, Clairo, Lana Del Rey, Grimes, and MGMT. But, although songs from artists like these might be playlisted and genre-d together, musically, there isn’t much overlap.

The only thing left that all these songs have in common is a vaguely left-of-center feeling.

They are subtler, less conventional versions of designed-for-radio tracks from acts like Justin Bieber or Ed Sheeran, but ear-candy regardless.

Their definition is a seemingly negative one, found in their opposition to traditional mainstream polish.

They’re songs intentionally designed to be put on aux with people you don’t know well to please everyone without seeming lame. Without dipping into ‘experimental,’ an ideal indie track throws in enough musical unconventionalities (a moment of obvious autotune, an off-key note, a strained vocal) to distinguish it as different— an attempt to be more interesting, thoughtful, cooler—from the firmly mainstream. A top 50 track is a bit too basic and experimental is too weird. An indie song, then, works to culturally elevate the listener above the mainstream while retaining its palatability, shying away from more divisive experimental elements. Hence, perfect

aux music; you’ll look hip without offending anyone’s sensibilities.

As a last ditch-effort to defend indie’s cohesion, one could make the argument that indie as a genre is the makeshift, inevitable child of a new, post-genre musical landscape where recording equipment is easily accessible and 60,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify a day.

When genre is so often disregarded, it’s natural we’d try to group the dissidents together despite their differences. But with scores of popular, genre-defying musical artists notably absent from the indie conversation, it’s clear that inclusion in the group requires more than a genre-bending sound. What elements of James Blake’s music make him indie that Frank Ocean’s doesn’t have? +++ Without an evident musical or even conceptual underpinning, we are left to assume the grounds for their grouping is in some shared identity between the artists. This isn’t a completely left-field idea. Punk, too, had central characteristics that existed outside its sonic, or even lyrical, style. An anarchist, DIY, grunge ideology is crucial to the genre’s functioning.

Indie, in a similar way, relies on ideology rather than musical similarity for its grouping. Indie’s ideology, however, is a much more passive creation of identity than punk’s political underpinnings.

As argued by Horkheimer and Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, products of mass culture are manufacturers of individual identity: “Life in the late capitalist era is a constant initiation rite. Everyone must show that he wholly identifies himself with the power which is belaboring him.” In their conception, under capitalism, one does not simply consume music but is forced to identify with it. The indie music listener is inherently the indie music fan, transforming an action into a state of being.

In the case of indie, however, the grouping solely exists for that purpose. While the individual projects themselves might have merit beyond the manufacturing of identity, insofar as they coalesce under an ‘indie’ title that serves no musically taxonomic purpose, the genre exists as Horkheimer and Adorno theorize, exclusively to create identity. While other genres like rap, country, or folk share elements that both provide a natural musical grouping while also contributing to a shared identity, indie’s functioning is unabashedly singular.

While cultural identities like these are often “you know it when you see it” situations consisting of a myriad of micro-identifiers, one can identify a few prominent threads running through the indie music community.

Whiteness, for one, is central to an indie identity. Although a few musicians of color have been labeled ‘indie,’ the overwhelming majority of acclaimed indie artists are white. Artists like SZA, Kali Uchis, or Saba seem like they would fit squarely into the indie landscape but are almost never included in the conversation, instead being fiercely contained in genres like R&B or,

While the individual projects themselves might have merit beyond the manufacturing of identity, insofar as they coalesce under an ‘indie’ title that serves no musically taxonomic purpose, the genre exists [...] exclusively to create identity.

as Tyler the Creator noted after his Grammy win for IGOR, ‘urban.’ Following his 2019 win for Best Rap Album, he lamented that “it sucks that whenever we—and I mean guys that look like me—do anything that's genre-bending or that's anything they always put it in a rap or urban category.”

Class, too, underpins indie identity. In many ways, it feels like indie follows the tradition of the aughts’ curly-moustached hipster. It has an introspective, apolitical, liberal arts college sound. Inherent in its opposition to the mainstream, indie often positions itself as the intellectual and cultural superior to the other genres. Vampire Weekend is the platonic ideal of a 2010s indie band; coming out of Columbia, their music draws on a wealthy northeast aesthetic, romanticizing college quads and Cape Cod’s chilly beaches.

Essential in any uniqueness, including indie’s manufactured one, is exclusion. Drivers of mass culture from award shows to magazines all subscribe to this identity, validating and pushing it forward. Like any other element of popular culture, indie has adopted the biases and discriminatory practices ingrained into the cultural landscape. In Sarah Sahim’s 2015 Pitchfork piece “The Unbearable Whiteness of Indie,” she points to a 2015 petition asking for Kanye West’s removal as Glastonbury Festival’s headliner, which garnered over 135,000 supporters. Supporters claimed he went against the festival’s rock roots, but acts like Jamie xx—an electronic dance musician—got no such attention.

Similarly, in an interview with NPR, Dean Blunt recalls an incident where a white “bro in a bridge-and-tunnel club in Manhattan” asked him "Can you play trap? Cause I'm hearing you play noise." Simultaneously picking up on and perpetuating indie’s whiteness, listeners like these create an unapproachable culture for artists of color. In line with Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory, as white indie fans identify themselves with the genre, artists like Dean Blunt challenge that identity. In a world where one must ‘wholly identify’ with the media they consume, it’s much easier for listeners to fall back on problematic stereotypes, creating situations like the one described by Dean Blunt.

Despite claiming to represent some amazing, innovative, genre-transforming artists, indie as a label struggles to categorize a cohesive musical vision. Instead, it opts to create an exclusive consumer identity out of flannels, film cameras, craft beers, and vibes.

WILL ALLSTETTER B’23 is a Swiftie, but in a mainstream way.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 01

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Breathing i Ant

TEXT CECILIA BARRON

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

METRO

An Interview with Organizer, Grad Student, and Worker Rithika Ramamurthy

05

Rithika Ramamurthy is finishing her English PhD at Brown, leading the Grad Labor Organization (GLO), and working full time as the Economic Justice Editor at Nonprofit Quarterly.

Somehow, she found time to talk with the College Hill Independent about her time at the GLO, which has become increasingly important as unions everywhere—from Columbia and Princeton grads to John Deere and Kellogg workers—fight for better workplaces.

Brown grad students won their first contract in 2020 after graduate student unionization was legalized following a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision in 2016—but this was no easy fight. In 2004, the Brown administration won a decision with the NLRB which banned not only Brown grad students but also grad students in private universities across the country from unionizing. That precedent was overturned twelve years later after Columbia students petitioned for its reversal.

It is fitting, then, that Ramamurthy applies a labor lens to not only her dissertation on the realist novel but to the student-workers relationship at Brown as a whole. The university that blocked unionization for well over a decade is nothing if not the site of a labor dispute, a precarious workplace, and a faulty employer.

Ramamurthy, who plans to enjoy the stability of her work at NPQ rather than enter the grim landscape of academia after she wraps up her dissertation this year, has spent her time at Brown organizing, researching, teaching, and writing. She has, like all other graduate students, been working for Brown. Thanks in no small part to her leadership, that work has become more protected and less exploitative—but that work isn’t over yet.

CB: How did you end up at Brown?

RR: I applied to like 13 grad schools and got into seven. Eventually, I chose based on the location, funding package, and set of mentors, in this kind of idiosyncratic way. If I were to do it again, I would definitely go for the place with a union.

Since I started grad school, I think it has become so visible how grad schools with unions are safer for a lot of reasons. I’m glad that we made one after I got here.

CB: Could you talk about how you first got into labor organizing?

RR: I remember the day I first signed my union card when the organizing drives started in late 2015, early 2016. I came to some of the early meetings, and we had a group of people who were dedicated to seeing this through, and that was really exciting. But I didn’t really get involved in leadership because there wasn’t a clear structure for a really long time. It was more of a horizontal organizational structure until we were ready to bargain the contract, so someone nominated me—to this day I do not know who—and it felt like this call of history that I was supposed to take up (laughter).

Somewhere in my third year, there was this

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

one very prestigious fellowship at Brown, the Cogut, which allows you as an English grad to not have to TA your senior year, and just be in a fancy seminar instead, where you talk to other professors and postdocs about your work. I didn’t get the fellowship, and I was devastated. I don’t know what you know about the academic job market, but it is bad. So once I didn’t get this fellowship, I sort of started down this spiral.

I started to get really anxious about academia and where it was going, reading a lot about it, educating myself on what my prospects actually were, and getting more and more macro with it. So when this person nominated me for the bargaining committee, I was already in this mindset that academia was really messed up.

Why is it that only one or two graduate students are allowed this space in the entire humanities division? A friend of mine really synthesized it for me and said, “You’ve been learning a lot

“A university directed and managed by its employees would look very different. The people who do the teaching, research, and work to clean its toilets and stock its libraries would lead a fundamentally different university.” about academic labor stuff, don’t you wish that the University’s resources were apportioned differently?” I was like, sure. And then he said, “You should go on the bargaining committee.”

And he was right. It was the most tangible and important way that I could think of pushing with other grads for the University to make its decisions more equitably.

CB: Your research focuses a lot on the 19th-century realist novel and labor. Did your research interests become more focused after you got into organizing, or did they inspire you to get into organizing? Was it a more mutual relationship?

RR: I would say that I’ve always had an interest in social relations under capitalism. That’s really what I came to grad school to study. The 19th-century realist novel is the prototypical object that starts to model these relations in a really large way to see how all these different people, institutions, and social forces can be related from a distance. I do think that the labor angle really came through after I started doing this academic work because obviously, my mind was on it all the time, but it really put a fine point on things. I was always trying to talk about inequality in the novel as a very broad concept.

But I realized that all the sorts of inequality that I was registering were coming from the way that labor was portrayed in these novels. It’s not just about representations of work, but the novel’s own ideas of what relationships might have to character, or what relations labor might have to the creation of settings. I began to focus on what narrative works can do to help understand these relations, and the weight of figurative language in characterizing labor, this kind of thing. I know that it sounds very discourse-brained, but I think that literature allowed me to think creatively and imaginatively about labor, a concept I had a really hard time dealing with the abstracted nature of. I was able to put a finer point on the class dynamics and the 19th century that I was interested in.

CB: Now that it’s legal for grad students to unionize, what sort of mechanisms are used to prevent it from happening?

RR: Unfortunately, you know as well as I do, we live and breathe anti-union air. Before we come to Brown, we are taught that unions are bad — they’re bureaucratic, they take your money, and they’re not right for this workplace because ‘students are not actual employees.’ There are a million reasons the boss will offer you to tell you that a union isn’t right for this kind of worker.

That was no different at Brown. The administration, legal or not, really tries to emphasize that the academic relationship that you have with the university is distinct from your employment relationship. But you simply cannot do the work of thinking and writing without doing the labor of educating others or doing research in a lab or working for a professor. So, this fantasy that intellectual work is somehow in this sphere of untroubled relations is something I think employers still push on grad students.

The University controls its entire financial apparatus, and when unions come in and demand transparency, there is a lot of intimidation in that relationship, which I think happens everywhere in our culture. Seeing other grad students win and seeing them improve their working conditions, seeing them protecting themselves from workplace harassment, these are all things that are going to positively impact the trend of grad students turning to unions.

These are all things that are going to positively impact the trend of grad students turning to unions and organizing unions to fight, especially against these multi-billion dollar corporate employers and nonprofit corporations that have enough money to pay us all more and then some.

CB: What are some of the most important things you’ve won?

RR: GLO is at its most powerful when we’re fighting for people to keep their jobs. I think the administration has never had that check before on departments deciding internally to get rid of people. In that scenario, it doesn’t matter if it’s an academic dispute, you’re dealing fundamentally with an employment relation. When you’re

METRO

in ti -Union Air taking someone’s job away, they have certain rights.

We also won a lot of really transformative benefits. I mean, even in my own life, my husband was on our health insurance because he was still a law student and didn’t have healthcare. After the union contract, including 75 percent coverage for spouses, our bill went down from $380 to only around $100. I think financially there have been a lot of benefits, but really like I was saying, what’s felt most critical has been having a democratic mechanism where you can get together with other workers, advocate for one another, and say “someone in my department is being disciplined and it’s not fair,” what can we do about this? Filing grievances and really standing up to administrative power.

CB: Shifting to what your organizing work is doing now—where does the GLO’s work on the divestment movement stand?

RR: You will have to keep an eye on that because the way that we plan campaigns is not with every detail planned from start to finish. I do know that whatever pressure the organizing committee or the social justice committee is planning on building and creating will obviously be in line with enshrining certain protections at the level of the contract. I think that contracts can be and should be expanded to secure those kinds of things for grads from vulnerable populations, but also against the university’s own financial pursuits. We have a contract expiration coming up in July of 2023, and I think that folks are getting ready to put pressure on divestment—the next step is publicizing the referendum, asking students what they would want to see out of a change in Brown’s policies around Palestine, and then beginning to organize to win that. It’s not for me to decide, it will be a larger effort. Harvard grads won caste protections in their contract, so in a contract that we might write, you can imagine certain protections for grads from

Palestine. You know, grads are denied fellowships in Israel if they’re of Palestinian descent.

There are funding opportunities that are not available to them.

CB: When it comes to divestment, I can imagine there’s some debate within the GLO. How do you manage those internal politics?

RR: All of the people that voted against the referendum or who are unhappy that we held it in the first place are getting something out of the union contract that they like. A union is not a place for you to get whatever you want all the time. It’s a place for you to democratically define what your priorities are, and sometimes your priorities are not gonna match up. There will be protections and benefits for parents that you won’t enjoy, for example. But taking away those benefits and protections is not logical—you could just decide that they don’t apply to you and move on.

CB: I was wondering if you could talk about another aspect of the GLO—its responsibility to Providence. For example, the River House in the Jewelry District was just purchased by Brown for grad student housing. Obviously, Brown brings a lot of people into Providence, that’s how it survives. How do you manage that fact which can pose problems for the surrounding community?

RR: I think joining your union and advocating for community justice is the only thing that you can do. I was furious when I found out about River House. Admin called as if it was some big exciting secret, and I was like, “Oh my god, what’s this news that they’re gonna tell me?” They were like, “We just purchased this multi-million dollar building.” I immediately responded to t`hem saying that whatever prices the housing is listed for are going to be totally unreasonable as grad students already can’t afford to live in grad student housing, and that they’re actively contributing to gentrification.

We’re working with local groups on the payment program, so that payment in lieu of taxes [whereby Brown pays Providence directly to compensate for the fact that it doesn’t pay local property taxes] can be effective. We’ve also collaborated with local unions to make sure that the other jobs that Brown is hiring for are union jobs, like painting and construction. I just think making as many alliances as possible in labor is a good strategy.

CB: As someone who spends so much time organizing and being in the academy, how do you balance those two worlds which are often in opposition? Can Brown ever be conducive to the work that GLO is trying to do?

RR: A university directed and managed by its employees would look very different. The people who do the teaching, research, and work to clean its toilets and stock its libraries would lead a fundamentally different university. We don’t know what it looks like, we’ve never seen it before. I know that it sounds utopian, but I think

it’s a real vision of a cooperatively run knowledge institution that would actually benefit people like you who pay a lot of money to go here.

For me personally, I don’t think I can reconcile the academy and organizing. I think that’s why I took this job as an editor at an institution that is much smaller, that pays me really well, that wants to compensate me properly, and that respects my labor. I don’t have a union there, which sucks, but I think fundamentally I do spend my time researching, writing, editing, and doing a lot of the things that I was doing before but with a stable paycheck and without the precarity of knowing that it’s five-year contract work.

Brown is very scarcity-vibes, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In the long-term, a university built according to union lines would look like one where everyone had a secure, well-compensated job. It would also mean that the university’s mission was not endless accumulation, but instead focused on redistributing resources in an equitable way and not depending upon the investment of the endowment in war crimes abroad—or whatever it is—in order to make its money. I don’t know that that would be a superrich university anymore, but then your next step is to abolish the Ivy League and private universities. We could keep going. I don’t know that our union will ever accomplish that, but what it can accomplish is continuing to insist on and hopefully institutionalize real democratic checks on power so that boards of trustees and upper-level administrators are not the only ones making decisions about who gets what, and when, and why because that isn’t working for anyone anymore in higher education.

CB: It’s hard to think of academic work as labor in the same way we think of a lot of union jobs.

But it obviously is. What work can be done to demystify academia generally, but not undermine its importance at the same time?

RR: I’m not worried about undermining academia. I think academia could use a bit of undermining. Aligning academic struggles with worker’s struggles is a worthwhile reframing.

Bringing those struggles closer together pushes academics to think of themselves as situated in a larger system of labor organizing and how it can change their institutions. And it is hard, because it is intellectual work, and people don’t always think of intellectual work as real work. Probably my own dad thinks I just sit and read books all day. But I think the people who do the work for the university, who teach your classes, who do the work that makes the university money for and make it run the institution, they know that what they’re doing is work. More ‘like other worker’ conversations and less ‘ivory tower, academic specialty’ kinds of things. The kind of knowledge we produce is special but that doesn’t mean the work should be treated any differently.

CECILIA BARRON B’24 is going to read more 19th-century realist novels this semester.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 01

06

ALGORAVES ARE HERE RIGHT NOW

TEXT ZACH BRANER

DESIGN EMILY TOM

ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES

S+T

Dancing to algorithms in a corporatized world.

07

When Kraftwerk first toured North America in 1975, they mobilized crowds into robotic frenzies with their strange electronics, and rock critics prophesied doom. The machines were coming for the soul of rock n’ roll, marching to industry dominance on the cold logic that, as Lester Bangs saw it, “anything a hand can do a machine can do better.” Heroes like Little Richard, Mick Jagger, and Jimi Hendrix, who had pumped the blood of popular music with raw humanity for the last quarter century, could not compete with artificial perfection. It’s a familiar fear.

The sense that technological progress is an unstoppable force that will either save or destroy us became popular during the Industrial Revolution, and has dominated speculative thinking ever since. Music is an especially significant symbol in this polarized discourse, as a realm of human creativity and self-expression often supposed to evince the ‘divine spark’ that separates us from our tools. In 1909 E.M. Forster wrote ‘The Machine Stops,’ a techno-dystopian short story where “there are no musical instruments,” only the all-powerful Machine filling each human’s hexagonal pod with “melodious sounds.” On the other side, in 1888 the utopian novelist Edward Bellamy fantasized about the possibilities of now-common technology: “If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained.”

Such perspectives fixate on the horizon.

Meanwhile, reality shifts underfoot, and the old categories (human/machine, music/sound, apocalypse/status quo) blur or disappear altogether. In the midst of cyclical pronouncements of music’s death and rebirth, the salvation or extinction of humanity, debates where the only available attitudes seem to be blind hope or despair, a new kind of music experience has emerged: the algorave. It is a concert where the performer is a programmer, improvising an algorithm that generates music in real time as the crowd watches, and, if the performer succeeds, dances like mad. Its participants in cities across the world will celebrate their tenth year this March, and—befitting its age—the movement has no fixed commitment to the future. Instead, the unique properties of the algorave trend embrace the conditions of the present so brazenly that they reveal possibilities hidden within it. +++ If Kraftwerk ripped the halo from popular music, the present has revealed horns and a tail. The music industry now stands unmasked as the servant of logic much colder than transistors, and its efforts have irreversibly twisted music’s place in the world.

While advising Obama’s 2008 financial crisis recovery effort, the economist Alan Krueger found the music business a useful microcosm for the way the American economy had functioned since 1980: a “winner-takes-all” system that enriched a few megastars and their publishers and disemployed the rest. In the postwar period there was a solid ‘middle class’ of musicians who could earn a livelihood playing local clubs and touring regionally. A stigma against gouging your fans kept concert tickets relatively affordable, even for major acts. But between 1980 and 2010, as the top 1% of American fami-

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

lies doubled their share of national income, the top 1% of performers more than doubled their share of total concert revenues to well over half.

Like the American middle class, music’s middle class disappeared.

The “big six” music publishers in 1998 became the “big five,” then the “big four,” and by 2011 the “big three”—Universal, Sony, and Warner—controlled around 88% of the global music market. In the same span more than 100% of income growth in the United States went to the top 1% of families, a figure only possible because the rest of the country saw their incomes stagnate or decline.

These twin trends grew from the same economic reality: a global economy snowballing toward frictionless exchange and bowling over democratic norms—like strong unions and fair ticket prices—in its path. The result for music is that just 5% of performers take home 90% of all concert revenue in the United States, while the result for the US economy is inequality on a scale not seen since the late 1920s.

But the music industry itself is an incarnation of deeper patterns of global capitalism—it owes its existence to an invention that transformed a social process into a commodity.

Edison’s phonograph preserved musical performances as physical objects; soon these could be mass produced and distributed worldwide. A new market burst into reality, and the mythos of celebrity and genius developed around the recording industry to justify the fact that a handful of individuals now occupied a cultural space formerly rooted in the traditions of local communities. Intellectual property rights were introduced to protect owners’ ability to profit by selling individual songs, and the homogenizing force of the recording industry’s commercial standards spread across the globe. Within a generation, the historical practice of music had fundamentally changed, and the idea of ‘pop,’ as universally popular music, became possible.

The internet was supposed to be the final Rubicon point for music, when its commodity form would either cement itself or break down forever. In 2003 Eben Moglen, a prominent member of the free software movement,

delivered the “dotCommunist Manifesto”: It predicted that the ability to freely exchange information with anybody through the internet posed a fatal challenge to the music industry.

How could the owners defend their lucrative role as providers of music when the marginal cost of creating an audio file was zero? Record companies no longer manufactured anything; their function not just as middlemen between artists and fans but as gatekeepers who had monopolized music production would be exposed. Moglen foresaw an anarchist system of music creation and free distribution online, where “the only difference between a musician and non-musician would be who happens to be playing at the moment.” If it meant those profiting from the current system would lose their incomes, so be it: “Its [property’s] existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of everyone else.” He expected the internet to restore music as “communion, rather than transplantation.” The same would follow for all art, culture, and knowledge, until a newly self-empowered class would see through the manufacturing of scarcity in all areas of society and force political change.

That didn’t happen. The music industry was hurt badly by the switch to digital media, but it adapted. Thanks to streaming, the IFPI in 2020 reported a sixth-consecutive year of revenue growth in global recorded music. Instead of “communion,” streaming gave listeners personalized algorithms and year-end wrap ups to encourage them to invest more of their identity in the platform; the data the companies collect—not just listening habits but location, age, gender, inferred emotional state, current social setting—is the real engine of the new sector.

S+T

+++ I stumbled into an algorave in the depths of the pandemic eighteen months ago, when the world felt like a mirage I sometimes viewed from the interior of my computer screen. It was a streamed event, billed yaxu + hellocatfood, with their faces in either bottom corner and a programming terminal behind them. yaxu, the alias of Alex McLean, a primary founder of the algorave movement, mumbled something in an English accent and began typing. A simple drum pattern emerged, but after one or two cycles it shifted into a challenging tempo. The sound turned jagged, waveforms crawling out of an acid bath, then the sample dropped and the background lit up. hellocatfood (Antonio Roberts, a Birmingham-based visual artist) nodded as the screen populated with warped geometries, flashing between colors on the beat as the shapes collided with each other and skewed across dimensions like an abstract painting in constant revision. I don’t like dance music, but I couldn’t stop watching. The song never settled for long; its intricate patterns broke down into bare simplicity almost as soon as they emerged, and then drove immediately at the next idea, and the next. The graphics morphed with the carnage, but before long the distinction between the sound and the image and the two faces in intense focus disappeared; the whole thing moved together in a heaving synthesis. Somehow the performance had conjured life from the materials of zoom purgatory. After forty minutes of this, I was exhausted. And happy. +++ Alex McLean didn’t coin the term “algorave” until 2012, but since the early aughts he and a small crew of postgraduate students, musicians, and clubbers in London have been making algorithmic music live, performing at abandoned warehouses or on decommissioned ships. Neither the music industry nor the academy were interested, so the group formed TOPLAP, now the figurehead organization for livecoding any form of art performance, and shared everything they knew online. They were strong believers in free software, like Eben Moglen, and uploaded all of their work as open-source projects to allow anybody to see their code.

“Most livecoders tightly align themselves with the open source community, the idea of having free software that anybody can use, and that’s accessible to everybody,” says Charlie Roberts, a professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute who started livecoding in 2010 and later developed the gibber livecoding environment. “Livecoding provides the same type of transparency as having open software that anybody could look at—it offers the potential for people to watch and learn from what you’re doing.”

The original TOPLAP manifesto demands that livecoders make their algorithm visible in performance: “Obscurantism is dangerous.

Show us your screens.” Typically the code will be projected on the wall behind the programmer, their frenetic typing overlaid on the visuals.

This makes the possibility of a mistake, even total failure, essential to the performance.

“Almost inevitably somebody’s going to make typos that someone won’t see, and they’ll be wondering what’s wrong. Crashes are going to occur,” Roberts says. When they do, they are typically greeted with a cheer from the audience, a recognition of the mental strain of livecoding and a celebration of the human role in it. There’s also a flicker of pride that the machine couldn’t handle its operator’s designs, that the element of anarchy can never be fully extinguished.

In 2009 Alex McLean began work on TidalCycles, an intuitive livecoding language that surged in popularity and helped transform the small, mostly UK-based scene into an interna-

tional phenomenon. But the values embedded in livecoding prevented the trend from being co-opted by commercial interests, and have staked out a space for musical communion through technology, not against it.

“Algorave isn’t a trademark. The logo is free. Anybody can do an algorave,” McLean said on a panel last year. His panel-mates were prominent algorave figures Antonio Roberts (hellocatfood) from Birmingham, Melody Loveless from Brooklyn, and Abhinay Khoparzi from Allahabad. The TOPLAP website maintains a listing of algorave events from around the world; anyone can submit an event. The forum thread on preparations for a 10th anniversary algorave festival contains heartening testimony to its international reach: livecoders from San Francisco, Barcelona, Antwerp, Brooklyn, Glasgow, Leipzig, Trento, South Africa, Sema, and Berlin volunteering to organize local algoraves for the celebration this March.

The TOPLAP community of livecoders have no hierarchy, and consequently no shared ideology, but for Alex McLean the movement expresses a different attitude towards technology: “I like the idea of livecoding to connect with your environment and community, not in a tech utopian way, but to kind of slow down technology and bring it into everyday life in a more human way,” McLean said on the panel. “Working against narratives around the idea that code is going to replace music or musicians, putting forward the coder as musician—I think that has its own politics around it, as to how we think about what computers are and how we relate to them.”

“We are... ... a celebration of livecoding. ... root(-kit)ed in the global livecoding scene. ... anchored by the rallying cry “show us your screens!” ... a recursive live stream && artist community. ... celebrating crashes && mistakes. ... everywhere && everywhen. ... everycolor && everygender. ... inventing && destroying microgenres daily. ... pushing the boundaries of music && technology. ... never ending && already over. ... inviting you.”

- lines community moderator, from the 2/5/22 FLASHCRASH algorave McLean based TidalCycles, in part, on ancient practices of weaving and textile manufacturing, where a similar process of combining basic elements creates work of incredible complexity. The TOPLAP manifesto insists on the intrinsic meaning of the algorithms used to generate these patterns: “Livecoding is not about tools. Algorithms are thoughts. Chainsaws are tools.” McLean explained that algorithmic thinking doesn’t belong to the future—dystopian or panglossian—but to the ancient human past: “There’s nothing new about this feeling of working with abstractions, because you can see it in the archeological record. People have been playing with these discrete patterns, interferences, and structures for millennia.”

McLean’s insistence on finding continuities instead of rigid boundaries extends to the movement he helped foster: he has no idea how to define livecoding, acknowledging that his clearest attempt—any program where you follow the rules as you write or modify them— would include the US Constitution. Melody Loveless, who teaches a class on livecoding at NYU, simply shows her students a compilation of people trying to define livecoding and uses it as an example of how definitions take shape in the first place. It’s a willful haziness that suits a style of music McLean has described

as ‘anti-genre,’ and whose participants delight in blurring inherited schemes for organizing experience.

An algorave live-streamed on Feb. 5th by a group called lines ended with a message laying out their commitments: “celebrating crashes && mistakes. ... everywhere && everywhen. ... everycolor && everygender. ... inventing && destroying microgenres daily. ... pushing the boundaries of music && technology. ... never ending && already over. ... inviting you.”

Algoraves exist on the spine of global capitalism, but have so far avoided pandering to the market. It helps that the audience is still relatively small, confined to academic and experimental art circles. But the structure of the movement itself resists commodification.

The prestige of performing and the excitement of attending comes from improvisation, which rules out mass production. Collaboration and shared ownership are inherent to every level of participation—from the developers creating the software open-source, to the forums where users help each other use it, to the performance as the musicians and graphic artists react to each other’s algorithms and the audience. Like other improvisational forms of music, it restores the immediacy of music as an act of communion.

But unlike those forms which rely on in-person gatherings and entry fees, algoraves were born to bring people together virtually.

“I haven’t done an in-person performance in just under two years now,” Roberts says, discussing the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on livecoding. “All of the performances that I’ve done have been online, and I think that’s really interesting—it’s definitely a different experience, sitting at home doing these performances, versus being in a club having giant subwoofers behind you shaking your computer as you’re trying to type on it.”

But the advantage, Roberts says, is further extending the reach of livecoded music.

“One thing we do talk about in the livecoding community is that algoraves are not an accessible venue for lots of different types of people,” Roberts says. “It could be that you are a parent with a child and you can’t go to a club at midnight, or you have some type of disability that prevents you from going into a crowded club to see these types of performances. Streaming has been a great way to improve on that.”

The dilemma posed by Kraftwerk has not been solved—the terms of the debate have changed. The opposition of human versus machine does not hold when livecoders rediscover the humanity of music in their machines live with every performance. Nor can it capture how algoraves conjure communion for anyone connected to the internet in a world where in-person music is unaffordable or unsafe. Both E.M. Forster and Edward Bellamy were right, in prophetic ways. But their attempts to write the limits of humanity are perhaps most telling in how they reveal the limits of that exercise. +++ Whether algoraves will keep to their founding principles as their popularity grows, or, like rave culture before them, succumb to a market-ready aesthetic, is beside the point. Their achievement lies in using computers to escape such binary thinking. That first algorave revealed possibilities within a present I felt had exhausted itself.

To be disappointed that it might not last forever only recapitulates the values of imperishability and replication that livecoding resists. It’s true algoraves aren’t going to save the world; they likely will not change the music industry. But I am grateful for the opportunity they provide to live outside the grip of inevitable futures.

ZACH BRANER B’23 is sweating like he’s in a rave.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 01

08

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH CHANG & LILLYANNE FISHER

FEATS

Birthday Cake January 5, 2022

07 09

Pink Drinks

CW — discusses EDs Whenever I went out freshman year, I followed an identical routine— three unflavored vodka shots with a Vitaminwater chaser. The mixture would meet my stomach lining each Friday and Saturday night without the cushion of food, splashing into underworked bile. I was dedicated to finding the precise amount of alcohol I needed to consume—as close to nothing as possible—while still getting drunk enough to match my shell of a physical experience with an equally empty mental state.

Special events were a minefield; I was constantly prepared to evade and defend myself from any food-focused celebration that came my way.

Predictably, that constant tension interfered with my streak of near-perfect birthdays, and my 19th was more fraught than fun. My friends had planned a day of adventures for me, but the winter cold combined with my under-insulation left me shivering and weak. My boyfriend at the time had booked us a meal at a fancy restaurant in downtown Providence. Punishing myself for accepting the gift, I refused to eat the next day.

Two years later, on a Thursday that completely snuck up on me, I turned 21. I slept in that morning, waking up to a sweet, milky coffee and a pancake breakfast with my best friends for close to a decade now.

I bought my first legal drink, the pinkest and sweetest cocktail on the menu. I ended the day with a couple cupcakes and a joint (legally obtained thanks to my new age and DC’s ambiguous recreational policies).

My birthday lingered into the next week. I arrived home to my mom’s most sincere expression of love, care, and reflection: a cake. With my parents and sister by my side, I cut into the red velvet cake, heaps of cream cheese frosting and pink candy hearts sticking to the knife on the way back up. I didn’t cry about the amount of butter in it.

LILY CHAHINE B’24 is coming to terms with her sophomore status.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The cake was nine inches in diameter, at least half a foot tall, a few shades above burnt, and dense as a brick. When sending a picture to my family—each of us scattered to the winds on my birthday for the first time I could remember—I photographed it overhead, where the cowlicks on the icing and the way the top layer was listing dangerously to one side could be hidden out of frame.

Also invisible to the camera lens: the hard, rubbery strata that lined the base and sides of each layer. The sides that had concertinaed inwards like a crinkled paper bag, molded to the shape of the baking parchment.

The quasi-insulting nickname we’d yet to scrawl on the top in sparkly green icing. My best friend, holding up their phone, gesturing for me to get in frame and smile.

It was everything a 21st birthday should have been and nothing like I’d expected it would be. I’d always imagined I’d be home, drinking with high school friends, feeling a little less like a child. Then junior year hit. With it came a break-up, two falling-outs, and a huge argument with my mother. Suddenly, all the plans I’d made, and all the things I’d assumed would be constant, seemed too dangerous to touch. All the happiest parts of my recent past now hid behind the nervous thrum of a high-voltage wire.

Now here I was, bouncing between the four walls of a friend’s apartment in Providence and seeing no more than three people a week—a sudden seclusion that was worrying the hell out of my family and my best friend, though none of them would show it. Here was my cake, the proof that I’d made it, heavy and misshapen and verging on inedible.

Here I was, squatting into a frog perch by the counter as my best friend laughed and laughed.

Here was a truer, more hopeful vision of my future, maybe; the weight of the cake—of the moment—something I needed both hands to hold.

KATHERINE XIONG B’23 is better at baking rice cakes than actual cakes.

FEATS

Mayonnaise

and Memory

Sweet Potato Soup

CAROLINE ALLEN B’22.5 thinks that hashbrowns are a top tier form of potato.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 01

ILLUSTRATION JOSHUA KOOLIK & SAROSH NADEEM

JANEK SCHALLER B’24 is currently experimenting with cream of apple peel, and it’s going just as well as you’d expect.

I haven’t eaten old-white-lady food for four years. Potatoes and some form of pickle. Every dish a little too heavy on the mayonnaise. You eat with slightly tarnished utensils which give every bite a gentle old-lady aftertaste.

Memories sift through the room, soaking into every corner and flavoring every dish. The last time that I sat at this heavy wooden table was in 2017, a couple months before my grandfather—the last of my living grandparents—passed away. Ten years before that, I had hugged my grandmother goodbye for the last time by the mirror a couple feet away.

Now I am back, staying with the dear family friend who has moved into my grandparents’ old cottage. As we sit down to lunch, I realize that I have never had an intentional one-on-one conversation with someone of an older generation. I was too young to appreciate the importance of those conversations, I was too far away, or there were other family members surrounding us in a warm and busy swirl. There was always some reason why I didn’t appreciate what I had.

We sit together. I unconsciously position myself facing the bookshelf, just as I used to as a kid when I would read the book titles behind my grandfather’s head as I lost focus on the adults’ conversation. I notice familiar titles still in position on the bookshelf.

Our conversation is tentative at first as we adjust to unfamiliar intergenerational dynamics. But we ease in, and meander together through mazes of memory and experience. My eyes do not stray back to the bookshelf. The iceberg lettuce salad drips with ranch dressing and nostalgia.

I can’t say that I had missed the taste of old-white-lady food. But the slow, deliberate, and love-drenched conversation that we had over the potato salad? Now that I missed.

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

The recipe promised us a gloriously viscous hodgepodge, stuff that’d sooner revert into its original, vegetal form than drip off your suspended spoon, but the tantalizing prospect of a phase-defying meal was not, in fact, our foremost consideration—we were mostly concerned with the sack of sweet potatoes that had been lodged in the back of our pantry for a number of weeks, quietly sprouting eyes in the darkness. The rave reviews from thirty-three strangers on the internet offered us another pleasant, but largely tangential, incentive.

We set about our work, peeling the potatoes, dicing the onions in haste. Dad, struck by some of his patented inspiration, tossed several handfuls of sliced apples into the pot before realizing that he had forgotten to remove the peels. After a tick of slack-jawed confusion, we decided that the skins ought to have been included anyway—after all, they are the most nutritious part of the fruit.

With considerable aplomb, I plunged the silver puree-er into the simmering, orange mess, and churned the remaining lumps into an appetizing mush. Various spices spilled into the pot of their own accord, and, with a flourish, we declared the soup complete, divine, and ours.

Just then, Mom came barreling through the door to the kitchen and made a beeline for the stove, as if she had smelled the impending culinary disaster a few dusty, graveled miles away during her homeward commute. She whisked the wooden spoon from me, and, to our horror, made the soup her own. Without even sampling our handiwork, she launched a cayenne grenade into the pot, and, by cutting our concoction with several pints of tap water, doused our coagulated dreams.

“This isn’t mashed potatoes,” she retorted, scornfully.

It wasn’t. It was our soup. But the first spoonful, as it always has been, was a revelation: spiced to lip-burning perfection, fluid (as every soup should be), and undeniably delectable. But even in spite of Mom’s last-minute rescue mission, it’s a soup that remained the result of our misadventure; my shoddy knife skills, Dad’s reckless abandon, and the microscopic remnants of untold apple peels, furtively boosting the nutritional value of that night’s meal, whether we could taste it or not.

10

Home

I hadn’t eaten a pineapple cake since my Ngabu and Agong moved out of their house in New Jersey nearly a decade ago. In that house, my grandparents had cultivated their own little patch of home, and I had watched it blossom. The walls were a mosaic of Chinese art and calligraphy, much of which my Ngabu had made. A basket of foam slippers sat near the front door, and the kitchen was always stocked with colorful treats marked in letters I couldn’t read. Over the years, my grandparents moved several times, each time downsizing, each time letting go of cultural belongings that I had once deemed holy. By this fall when my Agong passed and we began the process of moving my Ngabu again, their collection of cultural artifacts had dwindled to a few paintings. The new apartment building was nothing like their old house. Almost all the residents were white, and the building’s interior closely resembled that of a Holiday Inn. It was everything my Ngabu was not. My Ngabu was bright red. She had a qipao in every color imaginable and was educated in the Japanese art of flower arranging. The flowers she liked were vivid and red like her. The new apartment building was gray, and the bouquet in the lobby was made of plastic. She glowed in comparison. On the first day of moving, I brought over the last of my Ngabu’s paintings from her old apartment. The new unit was spacious and well-lit but entirely empty apart from a bed and dresser. It was hard to imagine her living there.

I squeezed her hand and allowed my eyes to wander, eventually landing on a shiny red box on the kitchen table. Upon closer examination, I realized that it was filled with pineapple cakes. A note on top of the box indicated that the treats had been left as a welcome gift by the building staff. “Look Ngabu,” I called. I studied her face as she approached the table, eventually detecting a soft smile. The cakes were the only Asian thing in the building apart from the two of us. We ate together in silence, savoring the fleeting taste of home.

CALLIE RABINOVITZ ’24 is seriously considering buying a third rice cooker.

11

Scrambled Egg Whites Every morning when I’m home in San Francisco, my dad cooks me scrambled egg whites. He wakes up early and heads to the kitchen, pouring out the egg whites from a paper carton, swirling them in oil on a nonstick pan. Once done, my dad divides the eggy lump into two portions: He saves the neat one for me, a fluffy, flavorless cloud. He gives himself the worse one, the one with all the burnt, crusty bits from the pan.

Mushy and bland, the egg whites sit on a plate in a small pool of liquid that collects as they cool. “Eggs are ready!” my dad calls out from the kitchen, and I race downstairs from my room. We sit together at the table, chewing our rubbery bites in unison. I eat the whole plate, every day.

The egg whites are not exactly a choice—my whole family has incredibly high cholesterol, which makes the regular consumption of egg yolks impossible. But what started as a decidedly inferior alternative has evolved into something delicious to me—my dad’s specialty, a dish no one else can replicate.

Once, I stayed with my uncle here in Rhode Island, and he tried to make egg whites for me. He couldn’t get them to set in the pan, and they ended up jiggly and half-raw. He said they looked like brains. “Your brains are ready!” he yelled from the kitchen. I could hardly swallow a bite.

It’s a common question: what foods do you miss from home? While a good Mission burrito tops my list, scrambled egg whites come in at a close second. “But you could scramble your own eggs here!” people say.

“Oh, well,” I respond. But I have no idea how to scramble egg whites.

Truth be told, I’ve never tried.

ELI GORDON ‘25 has been known to make the occasional omelet.

Sumos are the Most Delicious Money-Laundering Scheme There is an entire compilation post on Tumblr, spanning at least twenty thumb-swipes on mobile, that stars quotes and excerpts and images exalting the intimacy of orange peeling. Not in the peeling itself, but in the peeling for others—getting the blanket of citrus spray on your fingers so your friend doesn’t have to, splitting the fruit in half along its pulpy lines for a lover, saying let me share this tiny package with you, let us bite in together.

My mother and I were in an unresolved fight all semester, but when I came home, there was a grocery bag of sumo oranges on top of the fruit bowl. Sumo oranges are the expensive kind. They are bumpy and grotesque—no buddha’s hand, though still giving the impression that some god reached down and tried to play scrabble with their genes—but their skin is loose, and the juice is sweet and clear. My mother does not put on airs like buying Louboutins and sumo oranges for herself, but she buys them for me, her prodigal daughter, come home from afar. Careful, she warns. Sumo oranges are hard to pick well; grocery stores stock few, and they rot so easily. There might be some moldy spots. It’s true, there are, but I eat around them. There’s nothing in the world like peeling a sumo orange. The sumo knows itself; its identity is contained, and it clings to nothing worldly; its peel comes away like sweatpants sliding down your legs, and its thin white webs pull off like bubbles floating towards the surface.

My mother is the kind of mother who will only eat the sumo orange if it’s already in a stage of consumption. I unwrap the gift and take half, leaving the other big piece on the dining tablecloth. Soon, she sidles by, her workday over. When I next look at the table, sumo is gone.

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION JOSHUA KOOLIK, SAROSH NADEEM, & HANNAH CHANG

FEATS

Taste

of

JANE WANG ’24 has yet another take on the oranges=intimacy schema.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LIT

PHANTOM ROMANCE I press dandelions and lavender and carnations into my diary at the end of the night, a sacred performance of red roses ironed between school textbooks.

You, elusive as a dandelion, whose withering eyelids I want to embrace, butterfly-lashes and petal fingertips, taunting, so tenderly, along my thigh.

Haunted— It’s all: black tulips & dahlias & bat orchids, crying specters & dusted relics, tears caught in dixie cups, pebbles placed on headstones.

Our bodies are cemeteries.

Let stems entangle, bouquets flood, and if I am to perish first, add me to those pages, brittle leaves & stunted perfumes.

They are yours to keep.

I thank our spirits for this ineffable ruin— nation of the untouchable: paper cranes on your windowsill, the ivory piano key you keep hidden in your desk, the daily soliloquies you record, the way you over-pronounce my name, waltzing on muddy grounds.

Ghosts rest on your knuckles, questions mark your dimples and stars panic along your chin.

(Would you know the number of wrinkles in my palm?)

You peek your head through the door frame and whisper goodbye: You linger with me, you leave with her.

With those passing glances, I know, I know, I am merely a phantom romance.

So I wake up and offer a bouquet of yellow roses.

I attempt to restore your faith through prayers or morning corn muffins, buttered and hot.

EMMA ROSENKRANZ B’23 in love with love.

My sexual awakening came in the form of an unrelenting crush on my childhood best friend’s older brother. He was four years older and presumably wiser than my pre-pubescent peers, and I idolized everything about him. Oblivious to the chemicals and emotions of physical attraction (I hadn’t yet taken a sex ed class), I thought I was in love. Better yet, I found it entirely unreasonable that he wasn’t in love with me.

Two years into my unrequited lovefest, he graduated high school. I was finishing eighth grade. I had just read Jane Eyre for the first time and felt lovesick like a long-lost Bronte sister. Naturally, I condensed my feelings into a letter that I’d give him before he left for school. But I found myself petrified when it came time to drop it in his mailbox, so I opted to stick a copy in my eighth grade time capsule, which I’d open on the beach four years later with my senior class. Part of it read: I realize that you’re off to USC and that a lot happens in college. I understand that although it doesn’t seem like it, three and a half years of a difference in age is a lot, in terms of life experiences and maturity. The problem is that I am mature for my age and find the majority of eighth grade boys rather repulsive. I have always been told by many that I’m wise beyond my years, an old soul, and sometimes even a smart ass, so it’s hard to imagine myself with any of the immature guys I know.

I’m cringing just thinking about it.

The thing is, I’m not looking for anything right now anyway because it doesn’t make the least bit of sense. I want to be friends with you because of all the reasons I’ve already given, and maybe someday something more will happen, and maybe not. I just needed to get this off my chest because one thing I don’t excel at is being patient. In fact, I’m awful at waiting, and I’m surprised I haven’t burst for this long! +++

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 01

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

My high school years were defined by a series of more age-appropriate crushes that unexpectedly resulted in a formidable force of guy friends.

At the end of senior year, I developed feelings for a new acquaintance, and it seemed as though he liked me, too. We made plans to see a comedy show and get dinner. I became acutely aware of our body language while we ate ramen (perhaps the least sexy first date food): stools faced toward each other, rather than toward the bar. Two hours later we looked at our phones and realized that we missed the comedy show because we were so deep in conversation about everything from middle school traumas to religious beliefs. He drove me home, and we made out briefly in his car before we said goodnight.

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

Yet, I am still a believer in ghosts, that my hyacinths will live longer, that no one will read my diary, that my collection of flattened flowers will stay preserved.

Unsent Unlove Letters

TEXT EMMA ROSENKRANZ

I’m sure she has written atlases mapping your body, which eye is the first to puddle, the way you kiss when your oxygen drops, brain suffocates, neck loosens.

12

LIT

To this day, he denies that dinner the label of “first date.” According to him, we were just two friends getting dinner and fooling around a little for ‘fun.’ That summer was long and hot and lustful, bridging the angst of finishing high school and the whirlwind of college chaos. I would FaceTime and talk to him for hours. I’d never met anyone so charming or dryly funny.

I never sent him the letter I wrote, but he’s reading this now and laughing, triumphing that he was right to force me into maintaining a friendship with him. My life wouldn’t be the same without it.

I still often think about the conversation we had together over ramen and continued in your car, and it reaffirms my confidence that we are both passionate, emotionally vulnerable, mature, and, at times, dramatic people, who value our personal relationships immensely. We have chemistry; there’s no denying it. I recognize that you’re scared and don’t want to get attached to anyone or anything right now. I fear the same thing, especially taking into account how deeply we care for the people we care about. We don’t do anything half-assed.

The timing is shitty and impossible to ignore or fix, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try for at least something. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this way about someone. It’s been a long time since I’ve found myself unable to distract myself with other guys and other thoughts due to someone being so impenetrably present in my mind. I hate that you have that power over me. I stand by what I told you: I don’t need another guy friend. Now that you know me better, I hope that’s pretty clear to you at this point.

TEXT DORRIT CORWIN

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

+++

13

I began college adamantly against any kind of defined relationship, which meant it didn’t take long for me to fall into a pattern of hooking up with men I knew I’d never date. Hot guys who I knew from the get-go were assholes—prep school, chiseled body, daddy issues—became easy targets, because I knew I’d have fun without getting emotionally attached.

In March of 2020, I met up with yet another student athlete/econ major, who I’d been warned was nothing but trouble—which made him more enticing. We got off on the wrong foot. Awkward eye contact, bold text messages, trading out our cute coffee first date for an all-nighter on a common room couch (sorry to the rest of Champlin third floor). I thought he’d disappear. I’d learned to cope with the guys I wanted close vanishing with no warning, but I wasn’t yet aware that the ones I wanted gone would remain in my orbit for at least the next four years.

He devoured my attention the way he might eat cake: voraciously at first, then slowly, to make the sweetness last longer, even when he no longer wanted it and knew it would give him a stomachache. Yet, after his feast, he felt no guilt or remorse. He kept nibbling at the frosting and munching on crumbs.

Three months into quarantine we were still flirting daily over Snapchat, with absolutely no knowledge of when we’d see each other again.

Finally attaining the yellow heart felt like digital foreplay to falling in love. I showed all my cards and led him to believe that I cared about him, before I knew whether I actually did.

When I found myself in his beach town later that summer, he refused to see me. As a parting gift, I left a box of cookies at his house wih a note that began, “You’re a colossal asshole, but I wouldn’t have survived quarantine without your nauseating charisma and intellectual escapades.” I expected the grand gesture to result in either a breakup or a makeup, but his response was lukewarm. He continued leading me on for the next eight months until I finally ran into him at a party.

I think I’m more attracted to the story than I am attracted to you. I avert my gaze so you don’t notice me staring. I know I’m more attracted to the story, because

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

there is simply no way I’d want to leave here with the lanky, pouty, lame guy sitting in the corner, acting like we’re amicable acquaintances. As I soak in the tension, I realize that the version of you I’ve spent a year getting to know is one I’ve dreamt up in my head—a figure completely different from the one that stands in front of me. +++ My impromptu COVID gap year brought me closer to a friend I’d been eyeing long before I knew him. He was that guy in middle and high school who you had a crush on if you didn’t have a crush on anyone else, the default crush.

And rightfully so—instead of waking up one morning during puberty covered in pimples like the rest of us, he magically grew a six-pack overnight.

When we were both still in LA and he asked me to meet up for ice cream, I was caught by surprise when we hooked up in his car afterwards. It escalated out of nowhere, so it seemed, but I couldn’t complain. This was the excitement our friendship had been lacking for a year, and it was the only time I’d ever successfully exited the friend zone… or so I thought.

After hooking up intermittently over the months that followed and suffering from carsex soreness, he ghosted me out of nowhere.

It was during that hiatus that I realized how emotionally invested I’d become in our casual sexcapades. But in April, when he broke the ice and took me out for dinner, I agreed to label it “friends with benefits.” I talked myself into believing that’s what I wanted, too.

This fall, back at Brown, the label remained intact, though unspoken. He sat me down and divulged intimate trauma and delicate secrets, filling in all the gaps I had been dumbfounded by, so I offered support to my friend in need. We thought we could successfully separate platonic love from sex, which worked well, until suddenly it didn’t at all. Now, it ebbs and flows.

I guess this is a very long-winded way of saying that I’m flexible, so long as you are able to be honest and vulnerable with me about how you’re feeling. In a perfect world, I want this to be something. It is so possible that now isn’t the right time for you, despite it being the perfect time for me, and that’s fair. But I can’t just keep hooking up with you whenever it’s convenient for you. Whenever you’re lonely and want someone to want you. Whenever I crack and reach out to you—not just because I miss you, but more importantly because I want to know that you’re okay. No matter how crazy good the sex is, it isn’t worth the confusing and convoluted aftermath, when I get my hopes up only to watch them come crashing back down. It’s impossible for me to trust you when you’re so erratic and mysterious. Nothing will be too much for me to take on. I care about you a lot; I just need you to let me care for you. +++ 2022 began with a love bomb bigger than I knew how to handle. I decided to ring in the new year by consciously attempting to rejigger my brain on dating apps; instead of only swiping on the same sexy, picture-perfect men I’d inevitably hook up with once and then forget about, I’d try to find ones I might not hate sitting down to dinner with. Almost immediately, a perfect candidate fell into my lap: New York native, Harvard graduate, self-deprecating humor, witty flirt. We matched on a Jewish dating app and were so immediately mutually obsessed that I told him on several occasions I couldn’t believe the sea of green flags I’d stumbled upon…no red in sight. (Wrong.)

Three weeks after talking nonstop about everything from HBO shows and Ivy League elitism to our kinks and our relationships with our mothers (the latter two being unrelated, of course), we finally made plans to have dinner.

The buildup was electrifying; I couldn’t remember the last time I had clicked so well with a guy

before even meeting him.

The morning of our date, I spotted him two tables away from me at brunch. Three rounds of mimosas weren’t enough to quench the knot in my stomach. Once I verified it was him (the Aspen t-shirt and graphite Apple watch band were a dead giveaway), I texted him from across the restaurant. Then, I watched him go on his phone without acknowledging my text, and, 20 minutes later, exit the premises with his friends without as much as a wave. He later claimed that he didn’t see me or my text in the moment, and by 5 PM he’d come up with a barrage of excuses as to why he had to cancel our date that was set for that night at 8. Most notably, he was scared to see me before I went back to school the following week, because he “didn’t want to get attached” to something that would inevitably be impermanent. I haven’t heard from him since.

I thought we were on the same page about not copping out of this. I’ve said this to you before because I really do relate to your thought process: I overthink every situation I’m put in. I try to predict what my life will look like a week, a month, a year in advance.

This year I want to stop doing that and just live in the moment, and I would encourage you to do the same.

Regardless of how bizarre and recently shitty this all has been, I care about you. I’m used to being the pessimist, but I’ve been happy playing devil’s advocate from the optimist side, if it means you’ll gain a new perspective and give me a chance. If you’ve never seen “Before Sunrise” I suggest you do so ASAP. LA might not be as romantic as Vienna, and matching on Lox Club might pale in comparison to a Eurail meet cute, but the same sentiments apply. There’s a lot to be said for making the most of the time you have. +++ The relationships that have defined me have mostly been undefined, but a lack of label hasn’t made them any less character-building. I want to pay homage to all the people who’ve been emotionally wounded (and occasionally empowered) by situationships. Today I’m celebrating the Jane Austen in many of us, who wants to air every grievance and have the last word, and the inner Carrie Bradshaw, who is ready to let her stories run free and have the last laugh. This Valentine’s Day, I will sit down with my single friends and a bottle of rosé to lament all the relationships that never came to be and thank God for the fact that they didn’t.

DORRIT CORWIN B’24 regrets to inform you that every word written here is true and can’t promise that she won’t pick up her pen in the near future.

ZORA GAMBERG “SELF-PORTRAIT AT THE BOTTOM OF THE HILL“

X

Zora Gamberg (RISD Painting ’23) Self-portrait at the bottom of the hill Graphite on paper 38 x 42 in.

“This drawing is an offering to the body and a representation of my desire to reconcile with its inescapability. It is also a meditation—scratching at paper with pencil instead of skin, the drawing became a process of healing. My figure inhabits an idealized landscape, a space with symbols of my longing for home, to connect and restore as the land itself becomes intertwined with the struggle between mind and body.”

Zora Gamberg’s work is currently on view in Of Soiled Bodies at the Gelman Gallery, curated by Veronica Bello and Correna Dorrego until March 3, 2022.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 01

14

NEWS SECTION

: ” E T A G Y T R “PA

CLASS PRIVILEGE S C I T I L O P K U AND

TEXT GABRIELLE SHAMMASH

DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU

ILLUSTRATION OLIVIA LUNGER

How the UK government made its own crisis

15

If you have your finger on the pulse of United Kingdom affairs, you will have seen a plethora of pandemic-informed images from this past year. Empty city streets, probably in Central London, as the UK entered its third lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Queen, sitting alone, at the funeral of her husband of 73 years.

And a retrospectively released picture of Boris Johnson and friends drinking in the Downing Street Garden. A harmless picture, had it occurred two or more years ago, but now a central piece of evidence in the events that could bring down Johnson’s Premiership: ‘Partygate.’ The term follows the naming convention of American political scandals—a fitting choice considering Johnson’s creation of a White House-style briefing room, employment of personal photographers, and his links to private United States healthcare companies.

Accusations first emerged that parties had occurred in the Prime Minister’s office and residence while the rest of the UK was under COVID-related restrictions three months ago.

Unlike the US, the UK has experienced three lockdowns in March 2020, November 2020, and January 2021. The story quickly developed with the Daily Mirror, the Guardian, the Sun, and the Times all publishing images and information throughout December 2021 and January 2022.

With the Labour Party, the UK’s main liberal opposition party, ahead in the polls, Conservative Members of Parliament openly calling for his resignation, and a traditionally friendly media turning against him, Johnson’s political future is in doubt. Two-and-a-half years into his premiership and two years after his landslide victory, Boris Johnson’s bubble might have burst.

Boris Johnson has spent the last three decades cultivating his image as a carefree man of the people. He has not suffered from the elitist image that David Cameron, one of his Conservative Party predecessors, couldn’t shake (even though both men attended Eton College, the University of Oxford, and Oxford’s Bullingdon Club—three institutions highly associated with the UK’s posh elite). Despite defining himself in opposition to mainstream Conservative politicians like Cameron and Theresa May, Johnson’s premiership is threatened by the fatal flaw of his two predecessors: accepting conservative populism as normal.

Johnson’s existence politically as a non-establishment establishment figure gives him appeal to the broader UK electorate. He refuses to apologize for lying, he “says it how it is,” and the contrast in his persona to traditionally elite figures like Cameron has allowed him to escape the consequences of many of his actions. He has turned unpreparedness, incompetence, and

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

arrogance into relatability. This separation from the traditional right-wing of British politics has given him electoral success particularly against the backdrop of far-left opponents. He beat left-wingers like London Mayor Ken Livingstone in 2008 and Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. In the 2019 General Election, Johnson and Corbyn faced each other in the so-called ‘Brexit Election.’ Johnson trounced Corbyn, winning 50 northern, working-class seats, traditionally held by the Labour Party.

Enter November 30, 2021 when reports began to emerge of Christmas parties from 2020, while the rest of the UK was under Tier 3 lockdown restrictions. That Christmas, after nearly two months of lockdown, millions of Brits had been looking forward to a three-day lifting of restrictions to see their family and friends. The planned break for household mixing did not occur as COVID rates of infection and hospitalization were too high. These gatherings at Downing Street, whether officially parties or not, were some of the rule-breaking events that had led to “canceling” Christmas on public health grounds a mere 11 months earlier. While some have followed and felt Johnson’s hypocrisy for years, it was now front and center for the wider public.

December 2020 was a particularly difficult time for the morale of British citizens. Vaccines were not yet widespread, but COVID felt like old news. After a month of full lockdown and another month of intense restrictions, Christmas, the event for which people held out hope and planned family reunions, was canceled. Take Hugh Palmer’s story in the Guardian. On January 10, he shared an image of his mother taken in May 2020 when she had to cut her own hair as he watched through the window. She died that August, and Hugh’s contempt for Johnson is blunt. Then there’s Eve Beattie, writing in the Scottish Daily Express, a small tabloid paper describing the Downing Street parties as “a kick in the teeth.”

The defense of Johnson and his team, based on the argument that this story was the product of Johnson’s political opponents in the “Westminster Bubble,” quickly evaporated.

Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, some of the UK’s most loved TV presenters, frequently brought up the allegations on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!—a popular UK television show. The story was covered by another UK cultural institution: the comedy panel show.

Panelists on Have I Got News For You critiqued Partygate every Friday night with over four million people ultimately watching parodies of the scandal on December 3 and 10. Partygate was no longer just a story for readers of broadsheets (the Guardian, the Times), only accessible

behind a substantial paywall. The story had broken into popular culture in a way Johnson’s other scandals hadn’t. While millions of Brits were self-isolating, saying their last goodbyes to grandparents in a nursing home parking lot, receiving devastating health news alone, or suffering bereavement without family support, Johnson and his staff enjoyed planned parties.

As the weeks passed, Johnson’s contempt for public safety and human decency seemed to only grow.

On December 7, video footage from the briefing room leaked. Filmed on December 20, 2020, the Prime Minister’s press secretary, Allegra Stratton, and other advisors openly laugh at potential questions about the Christmas party from only two days prior. Stratton and other advisors’ nonchalant attitude toward the rule breaking faced visceral reactions across the country. A week later, the Conservatives lost the ultra-safe seat of North Shropeshire in a by-election (the previous MP had resigned in disgrace for corruption, further adding to the view that the entitlement of Partygate was rampant across the Conservative Party and government apparatus). The Guardian reported that on December 7, the day the video was leaked, 124 people in the country had died of COVID and that on the day the party took place, 564 people had succumbed to the virus. As 2021 became 2022, the allegations spread. Birthday celebrations, leaving-dos, secret Santas, and other parties had occurred from May 2020 to April 2021. The longer the story remained national news, the deeper public discontent with Johnson ran. Johnson’s arrogance was no longer interpreted as charisma but as poor government—his populist appeal was running out.

So why has Partygate struck home with the UK public? Johnson’s class act has finally collapsed. Decades of moving along the political pendulum and passing himself off as opposition to the status quo has come to an abrupt end.

His media portrayal and public image finally match up with reality: an arrogant posh-boy who thinks rules don’t apply. For him, an anti-establishment, relatable image had been so powerful in gaining public support given the UK’s relationship to class. The UK has a complicated and fundamentally uncomfortable view of social mobility: everyone wants it, but people are embarrassed when it occurs. Despite a decades-long decline in industry and manufacturing, accompanied by an increase in the number of jobs available in a middle-class profession, over 60% of Brits identify as working class.

According to the research of sociologists Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, 47% of those from professional/managerial origins identify

NEWS SECTION

as working-class. Britain is an intriguing outlier among western democracies—where else are people ashamed of their parents’ and grandparents’ social mobility? Modern Britain is particularly attached to the image of meritocracy. The ‘working-class-upbringing-turned-good’ narrative is supposed to separate 21st century Britain from its 19th century counterpart. This narrative does not account for generational mobility, potentially fueling a sense of shame for those born neither working class nor elite. Discomfort with open social mobility may be the reason the British public felt more connected to Boris Johnson—whose entire life has been spent in the upper class—than the current Labour leader Keir Starmer, a man with working-class origins who rose late in life to liberal political prominence. With Partygate, people finally see Johnson as embodying the elusive, elite ‘them.’

Partygate also hit the news as the Omicron variant surged. After 18 months in-and-out of lockdowns and through dozens, if not hundreds, of rule changes, Brits were wondering whether it was all going to start again. In the end, no national lockdown occurred, in no small part because the UK government had lost the political authority to enforce restrictions. But the confluence of these two events meant the hypocrisy hit with added strength. Not only did Johnson, his family, and his staff set restrictions and repeatedly break them, but they might set restrictions again. The public’s scorn for Downing Street parties was personal. Unlike scandals involving selling peerages, foreign donations to the Conservative party, or abusing public money, everyone had a stake in Partygate. Everyone’s lives had changed in March 2020, and the vast majority of people had adjusted their

lives for communal safety. They used WhatsApp to celebrate their birthdays, attended weddings and funerals over Zoom, put off vacations, and canceled plans with friends. One only needs to look at Twitter for a few moments to see how widespread public frustration is. Partygate enraged the British public on an intimate level.

They might not care who funded Johnson’s redecorated flat or who was allowed to fast track government contracts, but who followed COVID rules was their business. COVID rules were an issue for everyone, as the government had made it that way.

This time the allegations couldn’t be explained away as political vengeance from journalists or Westminster-bubble phenomena.

The trust between the two principal parties, the voter and Johnson, was gone. The result of the 2019 general election showed that many working-class voters had adopted Johnson as their own. Post-scandal polling data shows these voters have ditched Johnson in droves in the wake of Partygate. As Johnson, his ministers, and their advisers tried to shed personal blame, they tried to bring the rest of the government apparatus down with them. Loyalty to party over country was clear within their defense: “everyone was breaking the rules, we just did not know any better, it’s not our fault.” If Johnson’s counternarrative succeeds and people attribute Partygate to the indecency of all politicians and public servants, the parts of the UK government which stand as social equalizers could lose public trust as well.

The British government functions by the ‘good chaps’ theory. MPs, their advisors, and civil servants are supposed to be ‘decent, honorable, and honest’ people working for the

good of the country. As a result, parliamentary rules require all MPs refer to each other as honorable and bans accusations of dishonesty.

Several opposition MPs have already had to leave the chamber in the past several weeks for calling Johnson a liar. When the government is not made of ‘honest, decent’ people, the parliamentary democracy is no longer accountable to public opinions and MPs constituencies. No half-hearted apology is going to bring back the 179,000 people who have died of COVID in the UK. No counter briefing in the press or insults flung at the Labour Party in Parliament will rebuild that trust. With the ultra-safe seat of North Shropshire recently lost in a by-election and Labour ahead in the polls, the Conservative Party is wondering whether people like Hugh and Eve will vote for them again. With both the Treasury and major news outlets reporting that the UK is entering the biggest cost-of-living crisis in 30 years, the class privilege to which Johnson is finally associated is coming to a head in national discussion. Will Partygate lead to a discussion of culturally specific forms of privilege or just become another reason to distrust politicians and government?

GABRIELLE SHAMMASH B’24 will be covering all future ‘-gates.’

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 01

16

17

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LUCIA KAN-SPERLING “ON/INSIDE/THROUGH”

EPHEMERA SECTION

DEAR INDY SECTION

For most, Valentine’s Day brings with it feelings of love, passion, cute candies, and a bunch of <3s. But the Dear Indy readership apparently thinks that’s a bit too easy.

I mean, love is complicated, no? The holiday should be one of deep contemplation, not some occasion to take the person you like out to some Asian fusion restaurant. What better way to celebrate this day of romance than by asking a random stranger about the utility of your own relationships?

It may be true that I assumed the Dear Indy title through a cash bribe and legacy admission, but that’s never stopped anyone else! I’ve lived (carefully), and I’ve learned (a bit), and I’ve loved (maybe once), dear friends. I know enough to say that this holiday is better spent in quiet solitude than in bed with someone else. You can have all the kisses and hugs you want on the 14th. That’s nice and wholesome or whatever. But here at Dear Indy, we’ll be spending the holiday smoking cigarettes and breaking off all ties as we look out over the Providence skyline. You can join us if you’d like.

Friend Wanting Benefits: I have a really difficult time differentiating between romantic and platonic love. Sometimes, I think my best friend is my soul mate and we’re meant to be together. She just got a girlfriend and I fully support them but deep down, it hurts my heart a lot. At the same time, I’m unsure I even have any sexual attraction towards her. I just love her and the feelings are overwhelming and confusing and I don’t know what to do with them.

ILLUSTRATION IZZY ROTH-DISHI

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 01

DESIGN SAM STEWART

This is kind of normal, sometimes, for some people. Like, for you and I, this is normal, and that’s totally valid, but I don’t think most other people experience it this way. Maybe we can work through this together, and come out feeling a bit more normal on the other end.

Some people seem to flow in and out of relationships with ease.

They’re single one day and taken the next, and it’s like nothing ever happened. Like, this isn’t the biggest thing to ever happen to them in the history of their happenings. Like their whole lives don’t go through a revolutionary transformation every time someone looks at them like that.

I can tell from your question that you are not one of these people. That’s OK—neither am I. In high school, this person I sort of liked and I had one (1) conversation. The next day, he asked my friend out, and I got my mom to call me out of school. I told everyone I had food poisoning. Relationships—especially those that never were (hiiiii Finn)—have been and still are a crisis that I’m working through. If you’re anything like me, I would venture to say that you find crises in many things beyond relationships. Maybe you’re still going to be transitioning to college by May of your senior year. Maybe you still feel like the dust is settling from the time you moved in second grade. Maybe you’re still adjusting to our post-9/11 world. Every day poses itself as a new crisis to you, something to be mitigated and managed. Your first relationship would certainly, then, pose a crisis of catastrophic proportions.

What’s so daunting about living with crisis-brain is the feeling that your feet will never reach solid ground. Just as you accept that you’re now dating someone, something throws you off. You get annoyed with the way they text like your mom (don’t use punctuation, freak!). They don’t like that you think hearting their message is an adequate reply (just type some words, asshole!). Once you asked them to get you a bagel and they returned with one that was whole wheat (I’m still recovering). Or maybe one day they just seemed kind of tired in a way that makes you feel like they really really hate you.

Whatever it is, your world is up in flames again just as it was cooling down.

So let’s accept that we’re always going to be in crisis. Let’s even celebrate it! In this relationship, in the next one, in the one after that.

Your feet are never going to touch the ground—you will always be suspended in mid-air. Other people call this “butterflies.” It’s so cute. For us, it’s like the Tower of Terror rides at amusement parks that simulate free falling to death.

So what do we do when the ride operator falls asleep and we’re stuck on the ride for months or, if you really like this person, years?

Then you need to distinguish between the crisis and the calamity.

Them hearting your message is a crisis. It’s kind of weird, but just don’t think about it too much. If they seem tired, they might actually be tired. Even if they get you a whole wheat bagel, chew it through and accept the fiber! These crises can be mitigated and managed.

You might have to talk to them about it—something like, “hey, can you be a little less tired for me :) <3 thankssss”—but each crisis doesn’t have to turn your world upside down. You, who deal with these crises every day, should know how to manage these better than anyone.

Calamities are the things that can’t be solved with any communication, even an especially long “pleaseeeeeeeeeeeee.” It’s like they got you the whole wheat bagel, but instead of cream cheese, they put mustard on it. Or instead of even hearting your message, they give it a thumbs up. Or they cheat on you. Or they leave you on read. These are all calamities, like if the Tower of Terror just fell all the way to the ground and everyone died and Six Flags New England had to close down. I don’t think you’re there yet.

So make a plan, buy a survival kit, stop, drop, and roll, baby.

You can do this because you’ve been preparing your whole life for these kinds of things. I can proudly say that the next time a relationship went awry, I managed to not drop out of college (Finn, if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be here today). And there’s something to be said for us crisis-brains who always look a little paranoid and scared. Sure, the people who get butterflies are more normal and lucky and generally better than us. But we know what the stakes are. We walk the line. We’re the ones really living.are. We walk the line. We’re the ones really living.

TEXT CECILIA BARRON

A friendship is a sort of romance, a relationship between two people out of love and the hope that maybe one day they can hook up in a ‘platonic’ way. In my opinion, all good relationships have a platonic edge to them— the best couples are the ones where you can’t always tell they’re dating, leading you to perhaps accidentally flirt with someone you really shouldn’t have. And, likewise, all good friendships are a bit flirtatious. Haven’t we all superliked our friends on Tinder, after all?

I mean, you love this person, they’re your best friend.

You chose them and they chose you, in a sense. I think there’s something sexy to that.

So then, what distinguishes a friend from a possible romantic partner?

Where does the line between girlfriend and girl friend crystallize? I don’t want to say that boundary is solidified only by sex. That would ignore all the microdramas of screenshots and prolonged eye contact that make a connection exciting. Unfortunately for some of you, I’ve seen friendships more sexually-charged than other long, committed relationships. Honestly, I think more people should dump their partners and just date their friends, but that would solve everything and put Dear Indy out of business. So instead I’ll say whatever this means: desire works in convoluted, idiosyncratic ways. Just because you don’t want to rip your friend’s clothes off doesn’t mean you don’t want something more with her.

And what do we even mean when we talk about sex???? I think your question has a lot to do with it, but in the i-want-to-write-an-angsty-love-poem sense, not the doyou-wanna-check-out-my-bedroom sense. I think love poems are more sexual than libido-motivated house tours, anyways. If you find yourself spending hours listening to Mount Eerie, walking through campus, romanticizing the sludge, and thinking about your friendship, you sound pretty horny. It might not register that way—it’s not a very horny soundtrack—but most people don’t get that down when their best friend gets a new partner. I mean, we might get a little jealous—like, was I not enough? Or, damn I need a girlfriend—but nothing too dramatic. Deep down within you, deep into your desirous little corners, there’s something else going on.

So now we find ourselves at the age-old crossroads: do we stay or do we go? Do you tell your friend how you feel, honestly, and then take it from there? If she feels the same way, yay! Dear Indy will officiate the wedding.

Her girlfriend will hate you, but everyone needs a good enemy. And if she politely rejects you—it will probably sound something like “oh my god, I had no idea, that’s so sweet, but I just um never really uhh I like you a lot just not uh like that but um”—then her girlfriend will still hate you, but pity you a little, too. Your friendship will be really awkward, even friendship-ending awkward, but on the bright side, it might be awkward enough to drain you of all horniness for a few weeks.

I think these are your options. I know they’re not inspiring or particularly “hot.” But another thing about the Venn diagram of friendship/relationship is that, like a romance, some friends break up. Sometimes a relationship, romantic or platonic, just kind of fizzles. Or it moves in another direction, away from you or away from her. Or, it just doesn’t become anything at all. I’m not saying that’s painless. But I am saying that your current situation sounds more painful than this. At the end of the day, no one wants to see their crush making out with someone else in front of them. We all wanna be the person making out. So go there! Be that person! Happy Valentine’s Day!

Catastrophe Cathy: I’m in a relationship for the first time, and it feels like a constant crisis. Not that everything is bad all the time—things are good almost all the time! It just always feels heavy and overwhelming and anxiety-inducing. When does the crisis end? Is this normal?

18

THE BULLETIN

DESIGN OPHELIA DUCHESNE-MALONE

ILLUSTRATION ELI COFFMAN

THE BULLETIN

On Brown’s Response to COVID-19 -----

We, the undersigned^ graduate workers of the English department at Brown University, write to voice our opposition to the university’s ableist, racist, classist, and anti-black response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Brown’s latest policies demonstrate its continued prioritization of profit over people, as well as its hostility toward Rhode Islanders not affiliated with Brown. We pledge our support for one another in refusing to work in unsafe conditions, understanding that, in a pandemic, what endangers us also endangers Providence and Rhode Island.

We demand that Brown provide students, graduate workers, staff, and faculty the option to work and study remotely.

We demand that Brown safely provide all necessary materials needed for study and employment to remote workers and students.

We demand that Brown outfit all classrooms used for instruction with adequate recording infrastructure.

We demand that Brown reinstate regular PCR testing, alongside twice weekly antigen tests for those who risk false positives due to prior infection with COVID-19.

We demand that Brown establish a robust protocol for informing all students, graduate workers, staff, and faculty of any known exposures in our classrooms or workplaces.

We demand that Brown continue to publish COVID-19 positivity rates regularly and publicly.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, black, brown, disabled, poor, houseless, and housing-insecure people in the U.S.— and especially those living at the intersection of these identities—have experienced disproportionately high rates of infection, severe illness, and death, exacerbated by limited access to testing, distance and isolation, quality masks, and treatment. In Rhode Island, positivity rates have remained consistently highest among black and Latinx people for as long as these numbers have been tracked. Those who require hospital care, including those not affiliated with Brown, face an overwhelmed and triaged medical system unable to offer its patients the care they deserve. The trauma of an overburdened medical system has compounded—one in five healthcare workers has left their job since the pandemic began. Moreover, inequities noted early in the pandemic have worsened. Race, disability, class, and housing status still overdetermine the death rate, as well as access to testing, high quality masks, isolation, hospitalization, and life-saving treatments.

Brown has responded to this collective emergency with policies that stress individual over collective responsibility. Its COVID-19 response participates in a lethal framing of the pandemic, rendering black, brown, and disabled lives disposable in the name of convenience and profit*. Further, Brown continues to compare Rhode Island’s positivity rate against its own, obscuring Brown’s location within Providence and its impact on spread throughout the city and state. Such tactics are antagonistic and emblematic of Brown’s parasitic and neocolonial relationship to Providence.

Last semester, Brown had the power to approve or deny requests for remote work and study, though the form to petition for remote study has since been removed for graduate workers. However, we do not believe that Brown can or should determine what level of risk is acceptable for us, when we cannot know in advance which students or staff will face long-term complications from COVID infections**.

Brown has suggested that we should plan to get sick, implying that spread is inevitable and not a result of its own policies. We do not accept this. Brown’s recent communications downplay the risks of Omicron and participate in ableist and eugenicist logics that are both violent and inaccurate. We note that there is currently insufficient data to suggest Omicron will not cause the long-term complications of other variants, scant evidence that vaccination significantly reduces the risk of developing long COVID symptoms, and no such thing as a “mild” COVID-19 infection. Brown’s perpetuation of these ideas contributes to the systemic mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and constitutes material harm.

Brown has claimed that in-person work is safe, citing the expertise of Dr. Ashish Jha. However, as a dean of the university, Dr. Jha has a vested interest in our return to in-person work, which compromises his ability to determine our safety. While Brown leverages the opinions of its administrators as scientific consensus, other colleges and universities such as RIC, CCRI, Harvard, and Yale have opted to work and study remotely for either the entirety or the frist few weeks of their spring semesters***.

We maintain that those most at risk of infection, severe illness, and death are not disposable. We claim our right to a safe workplace, and we claim our accountability as human beings in helping to create a safe world. We, the undersigned graduate workers of the English department at Brown University, will take action if Brown continues to endanger our colleagues and community.

Upcoming Actions and Community Events -----

Friday, 2/11 @ 2 PM: Transit Equity Day 2022 Join RI Transit Riders, the George Wiley Center, and DARE (Direct Action for Rights and Equality) as they honor Rosa Parks’ birthday by demanding that transit equity is recognized as a civil right.

Location: RI Department of Administration Saturday, 2/12 @ 11 AM: Community Aid Drive From 11 AM to noon, Wide Awake Collective will be hosting a Community Aid Drive in Kennedy Plaza. They’ll have winter clothes, camping gear, socks, hand warmers, and more. The drive happens every Saturday starting at 11 AM; on the first and third week of the month they’re there until 3 PM. Location: Kennedy Plaza Tuesday, 2/15 @ 6 PM: Black + Mental Health + Matters This workshop, cohosted by Art With Impact and the Brown Undergraduate Council of Students, is a space for Black students to “be seen and heard, both collectively and individually” while working towards finding mental wellness, healing, and thriving through art.

This is a workshop centering Black students at Brown.

Saturday, 2/26 @ 12 PM: SISTA FIRE RI Member Orientation SISTA FIRE RI is a member-led org that is “building collective power with and by women of color for social, economic, and political transformation.” From noon to 3 PM, SISTA FIRE will be hosting a virtual orientation for new and active members. The orientation focuses on their origin story, values, and strategies for creating change.

Register at: bit.ly/SFRImembership

Mutual aid* & community fundraisers

*Mutual aid is “survival pending on revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to a system of institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

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Support a Black mom who is grieving Donate at tinyurl.com/Black-mom-griving This fundraiser is intended to raise money for a Providence community member who has faced several trials this past year: assaults on her family at the hands of police, traumatizing DCYF raids, and the passing of close family members and friends, including her father. While battling cancer, she is also the primary caretaker of several grandchildren, and needs the funds to provide for them and pay for her father’s service.

Queer and Trans Mutual Aid PVD Venmo @qtmapvd, PayPal.me/qtmapvd Support mutual aid for LGBTQIA people in Rhode Island! There are currently 16 outstanding requests for aid, equal to $1600. Help QTMA fill this need!

Kennedy Plaza Survival Drive (by Wide Awake Collective) Venmo WideAwakes-PVD, Cashapp: $MutualAidMondays Support weekly survival drives on Saturdays at Kennedy Plaza! This drive distributes food, water, hygiene materials, warm clothing and other important items to folks in need.

Railroad Fund PVD Venmo: theorytakespraxis The railroad fund provides sustainable support to people currently incarcerated in Rhode Island. Please donate and help Railroad support a friend who is in need of continued survival and support this winter.

Ocean State A$$ Mutual Aid Fund 2022 Venmo: OSA-funds Support local sex workers by donating to the venmo above and consider buying an Ocean State A$$ calendar, on sale at Fortnight Wine Bar, Hungry Ghost Press, Symposium Books, Mister Sister Erotica, and RiffRaff.

COYOTE RI Closet (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics RI) Contact Sheila Brown (401) 548-3756 to donate or collect items.

Now accepting donations of hygiene products and new or used clothing at the Love and Compassion Day Health Center; 92 East Avenue, Pawtucket RI, 02904.

* We are inspired by and recommend everyone read Mia Mingus’s “You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence.” ** According to the CDC, risk factors for severe COVID-19 infections include mental illness, including depression and mood disorders, as well as diabetes, asthma, and many other conditions prevalent on our campus. *** For all links included in this article visit: https://bit.ly/BrownKeepUsSafe ^ For a list of signed students, visit our website