The College Hill Independent V.30 N.3

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT V 30 N 03 | FEB 13 2015 A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY

VOLUME 30 | ISSUE 3

news 02 Week in Review

dash elhauge, lisa borst & alex sammon

03 Harping About Lee dominique pariso

METRO 05 Spoke n’ Word emma phillips

07 No Bags Allowed erin west

ARTS 09 2D 4 Me

cheyenne morrin

FEATURES 11 e-mail us Maybe m&p

15 Jinn and Tonic yousef hilmy

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

science 12 Germ-free adolescents

fROM THE EDITOR S

camera ford

SPORTS 13 Flying Low miles taylor

EPHEMERA 14 DIY V-Day

casey friedman

There once was a man named jove Who was clothed in nothing but mauve He carried a snake And swam in a lake And then he was full of love.

LIT 17 Flow-ting

stefania gomez

–SB

X 18 Ear-otica

layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

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

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN CIVILIZATION

by Dash Elhauge, Lisa Borst & Alex Sammon illustration by Lee Bernstein

No Uglies On a warm autumn day in 1963, President John F. Kennedy sat calmly beside his wife, Jackie, in the back of a limousine.

Nellie Connally, the First Lady of Texas, turned back and smiled at John. “Mr. President,” she said. He leaned in to hear her. “You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.” He looked to the sky as if he had just spotted a constellation, just like in photographs. “No, you certainly can’t,” he said. Then, with an unnervingly quick pop, President John F. Kennedy was dead.

In the weeks that followed, the Warren Commission, formed

by Lynden Johnson to investigate Kennedy’s assassination, presented a theory that haunts the Secret Service and security officials to this day: the single-bullet theory. The idea that a single-bullet had managed to strike and wound Texas Governor John Connally and pass through the President’s throat.

But today, we live in a more dangerous world—weapons are discrete and more lethal than ever. All it could take to kill the president is one ugly.

At least that’s what the Romanian ambassador to France, Bogan Mazuru, seems to believe. In preparation for a reception with Romania’s President Klaus Iohannis at the Romanian Consulate, the embassy inadvertently attached a spreadsheet that described the physical appearance of each of the guests invited to the party, calling some “undesirable” and others “ghastly.”

But our friends at the Romanian consulate handled the matter diplomatically. Mazuru, when asked by Romanian TV station Digi 24 about the invitations, said the matter was “unfortunate.” Then, without being pushed for further explanation, he added, “I don’t consider myself guilty; I can be responsible though. Those are two different things. When something is happening in your courtyard, then you are responsible.”

So, what’s going on in the Romanian ambassador’s courtyard? What’s going on is the consulate managed to simultaneously fire an incompetent diplomat and make ugly people feel way too uncomfortable to come to the Presidential reception while still technically inviting them. The Romanian consulate, though seemingly making one of the biggest blunders of its career, has gotten everything it ever wanted.

My theory: this goes all the way to the top. The question is: is Mazuru the second shooter? –DE

FEBURARY 13 2015

Note to Self It’s Presidents’ Day Weekend. Maybe you’re taking the Peter Pan Bus down to New York to visit your cool friends at Cooper Union. Maybe you’ll arrive to a city covered in gray slush and cowish people, trudging and pushing around each other in Times Square. Maybe you’ll look hard at the miles of sad, self-absorbed faces, bundled in swaths of identical Canada Goose coats, and think to yourself, cities really are the loneliest places on the planet.

Look at all these lowly conformists, each of them lost in their own pitiful worlds. You know just where to go to feel better.

Ah, art museums: the most civilized places we’ve got. You gladly pay MoMA’s obscene admission fee—it’s for the love of culture, you tell yourself. Art makes you a better person. Art makes you enlightened. You stare in awe at Starry Night. Such mythos, such technical mastery!

Suddenly, your enlightenment is interrupted. An errant iPhone, set to front-facing camera mode and affixed to the end of an extension rod, whizzes through the air and hits you in the center of your slackly rapturous face.

Except now that won’t happen, because MoMA, along with the Hirshhorn Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Guggenheim, and others, has recently banned the use of selfie sticks (colloquially known as ‘rods of self-involvement’ and ‘narcissism wands’) on its premises. Perhaps the museums have failed to understand the importance the selfie has played throughout the history of art, from Van Gogh to Egon Schiele to Nam June Paik’s perpetually self-absorbed TV-Buddha. Nonetheless, they’ve cited safety concerns for museum-goers, as well as fears of priceless paintings being mauled by rogue selfie sticks, flailing at the hands of tourists who love art almost as much as they love themselves.

Eventually, you ride the bus back to Providence, where even the RISD Museum has instituted the ban. You stare at your reflection in the window, lost in your own pitiful world. –LB

Abundance in the Oven There exists—believe it or not—a book called the Guidebook for Civilized Tourism. Published by the Chinese national government (known for small-press mainstays such as How To Make Steel in Your Backyard), the GCT contains 64 highly diagnostic pages of “do-nots” for the Chinese traveler abroad, a list of faux pas that includes public nosepicking, overzealous slurping, and stealing life jackets from airplanes—you know, the classic misbehaviors that incur furtive eye-rolling from the locals.

Nowhere on this list is there a bullet point about limiting consumption. Life jacket replacement costs notwithstanding, the tourism industry loves Chinese tourists, and for good reason: while the average German visitor to the US spends $396 per stay, the average Chinese visitor spends a mind-blowing $2,039. The money is flowing to the trappings of discreet luxury—Hermes scarves and Chanel baubles—items that the Chinese government taxes at up to 60 percent (perhaps to fund their publishing arm(?)).

But the fun doesn’t stop there, because many of these tourists aren’t just coming to drop ungodly sums of cash— they’re also coming to drop shorties. Maternity wards weren’t just going to sit idly by and let luxury retailers have all the fun—can you blame them? Just checking the specs on the new Gucci Jackie Soft Crocodile Top Handle Bag, there’s no reason to believe a newborn wouldn’t fit snuggly inside. Can’t we all just get along?

All over the country, a cottage industry dedicated to “birth tourism” has sprouted. There are boutique delivery rooms, maternity hotels. And, like the aforementioned handbag, they aren’t cheap. Chico On The Childcare, Los Angeles’s most infamous of such locations, runs an average tab of $15,000, before medical costs.

And yet, this method is a veritable bargain compared to other methods of gaining citizenship. An EB-5 visa, which requires investment in an American company, can run up to a million dollars. Chico promised an American passport and proper paperwork for all babies born in its facility, as citizenship is granted to anyone born on American soil. Why past tense? Well, Chico, like so many birth tourism destinations, vacated seemingly overnight, according to a recent LA Times article. The practice remains in dubious legal standing in the states, but its popularity grows exponentially year over year.

The guidebook doesn’t get into the best decorum of childbirth, an omission which has yielded the inspiration for the Chinese press’s newest initiative—a chapbook of 2015’s most luxurious baby names. –AS

NEWS

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PRE-REFLECTIONS ON

GO SET A WATCHMAN

by Dominique Pariso illustration by Margaret Hu

Stop the presses. Rocking the literary world, Harper Lee, celebrated novelist of To Kill a Mockingbird announced on Tuesday, that she is, at long last, publishing a sequel.

The fiercely private and elusive author has hardly been heard from since performing the literary equivalent of a mic drop over fifty-five years ago. She published one masterpiece, won a Pulitzer, and walked away. Under the immense pressure of her first success, Lee suffered from decades-long writer’s block. Knowing her second novel would forever be compared to her first, she decided not to bother. She lived for a time in New York City. Eventually, though, she returned home to her small, Southern town of Monroeville, Alabama, the real-life inspiration behind her book.

To Kill a Mockingbird has since become a mainstay on middle school reading lists the world over, both resented and loved by generations of pre-teens. Go Set a Watchman is more its previous incarnation than it is sequel. Interestingly, although as yet unpublished, this second book was written first. It was written and submitted to a publisher who promptly rejected it.

In this manuscript, Scout’s all grown up—returning to Maycomb to visit her aging father during the upheaval of mid-1950s America. The original publisher who read the script for Go Set a Watchman back in the mid 1950s enjoyed the flashbacks of Scout as a young child so much that, in a moment of insight, he instructed Lee to go home and rewrite the manuscript, entirely from the perspective of Scout as a child; in this severe reframing, To Kill a Mockingbird was born. Lee’s lawyer, Tonja Carter, stumbled upon the original manuscript—which was assumed to be lost—when she was checking on the incredibly valuable original manuscript of To Kill A Mockingbird.

A quick search on Amazon reveals that Go Set a Watchman, still five months out from its July release, has already skyrocketed to the number one best seller in books. Amazon is billing it “as a magnificent novel in its own right.”

Harper Lee would surely be pleased to hear the praise that people are heaping upon this new release. Reclusive as ever, she spends her days in an assisted living facility in Monroeville—which brings us to the controversy surrounding this novel. Lee’s health is failing; she is nearly blind, profoundly deaf, and has suffered a string of strokes that have left her wheelchair-bound. With a string of characters, plotlines, and shifting motives, the conspiracies brewing around this latest publication are so complex that Harper Lee herself might have had trouble dreaming some of them up.

Much of this fierce debate centers on the extent to which Lee is able to express her interests in her present condition. The fears seem reasonable, considering that Lee had declared publicly for over half a century that she would never publish again. Further, her sister and lawyer, Alice Lee, who had long served as her defender and advocate in the face of the public, retired and then passed away in 2014. Since then, lawyer Tonja Carter has represented Lee. Under her counsel, Lee has authorized a surprising number of actions including granting permission for To Kill a Mockingbird to become an e-book, suing her literary agent to regain her copyright, suing the local museum in Monroeville for exploiting her trademark, and, now, publishing a sequel. Further, Harper, an imprint of the publishing house HarperCollins, has not actually spoken to Lee about the novel. All contact has been facilitated through her

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NEWS

lawyer, a disturbing trend that has merely fanned the fire. Much of the current speculation has circled around Carter, questioning to what extent she may be manipulating the aging Lee. Expressing her joy over the publication of her new novel in a statement, given to Tonja Carter, she wrote that she is “alive and kicking and happy as hell with the reactions to Watchman.”

What lies at the heart of this controversy, however, more than the intrigue and more than the conspiracy theories, is the desperation on the part of the readers. Many people want, so badly, for this book to be published that it doesn’t really matter how it gets to print so long as it does. Perhaps, on a primarily literary level, this speaks to the impulse that all readers, in some form or another, have. It’s the same impulse that has people lining up at the local Barnes and Noble for hours just to be the first to get their hands on a copy released at midnight. Not to mention that many read her first book when they were much younger, and few things a stronger hold on people than the books they read as children. But that is not all that is at stake here. The country is experiencing a tense moment in history on the side of race relations. People are looking for wisdom, or meaning, or something to help them puzzle through it. They figure Harper Lee did it once; perhaps she can do it again. Naïve? Possibly. But certainly not unreasonable.

This is just one of a string of controversies that has surrounded the reclusive author ever since the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird and her subsequent retreat from the public eye.

The novel has been banned on and off in various school districts throughout the years due to the difficult subjects of race and rape within. That, coupled with the consistent use of racial slurs in the book has caused schools throughout the country to debate whether or not they should assign the novel to students. +++ More than anything, this is what makes To Kill a Mockingbird so significant. Not the controversy, not the speculations, not the publicity, but the legacy it has left by being, for many, students’ first classroom exposure to issues of racism. To Kill a Mockingbird remains one of the few books that have managed to make the subject of America’s long history of racism more accessible to scores of readers. As a vehicle for generating discussions of race in the US, the novel is not perfect by any means. The reality is that Harper Lee is a white woman. The main criticism of the novel, heaped in amongst the acclaim, has always been that the novel features a white narrator and a white hero, and the story is told from the perspective of a white, economically comfortable Southern family.

Tom Robinson is often regulated to the side in the larger context of the novel. The very idea that a novel about race features very few diverse characters is, of course, problematic—as is the idea that Lee is regarded as a preeminent author about racism. Because, it is in fact racism she has only ever observed and never directly experienced. Further, there are countless novels just as brilliant written by non-white authors that will never garner this much publicity or praise in American history.

It is a situation that, in many ways, is still with us today.

While much of the media is saturated with the claim that we are living in a ‘post-racial America,’ the truth is that we have not come

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

nearly as far as this term suggests. After the Michael Brown shooting, the Pew poll found that of 1,507 polled, 48 percent felt that race was not a factor at all in the case. When broken down further to account for racial difference, it found that 60 percent of whites felt that way as well. Eighty-one percent of Blacks felt the opposite: that race was a factor in the case.

After the grand jury declined to indict Wilson, 64 percent of whites supported the decision, while 80 percent of AfricanAmericans felt that the wrong decision was made. Further, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights published data showing that racial minorities are far more likely than their white peers to be suspended from school, to be taught by less qualified teachers, and have less access to rigorous classes. In terms of economic status, AfricanAmerican children are three times as likely to live in poverty compared to white children. President Obama’s election may have boosted the myth of a ‘post-racial America,’ but it’s still just that: a myth.

And it is obvious that the current racial landscape of America is the site of bitter contestation. But the policies and norms that constitute modern-day racism are cloaked behind language less overt than that of Jim Crow segregation. There is a kind of perverse nostalgia for the moral clarity that was present in the America of the mid-20th century. Audiences want to read books like Go Set a Watchman because they depict a more overt racism that we are comfortable condemning. The more accepted use of aggressive racial slurs and the cruel practice of de jure segregation allow audiences to safely express outrage at obvious targets. +++ In Scout Finch’s town of Maycomb, Alabama, a Black man, Tom Robinson, is falsely accused of raping a white woman and is found guilty even after the lawyer Atticus Finch proves there is no way he could have done it.

The narrative is told from the perspective of Scout Finch, a young girl growing up in a small town in the Depressionera South. Her father, Atticus, is charged with defending an African-American man, Tom Robinson, who is falsely accused of raping a young, white girl. Robinson is, unsurprisingly given the rampant racism of the era, found guilty and thrown into jail. Later, while trying to escape from jail, is shot in the back by the officer on guard.

Tom Robinson is one fictional character, but he provides a name and a face for the scores of anonymous men who have also fallen prey to our current racist criminal justice system.

According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2009 non-Hispanic blacks accounted for nearly 40 percent of the total prison and jail population while only accounting for 13.2 percent of the overall American population. Continually, 90 percent of all prisoners convicted on drug charges in state prison are African-American or Latino. However, our world and Tom Robinson’s world are different. Institutionalized racism has changed its outward manifestations and ‘looks different’ than it once did.

At least in Robinson’s case one could argue that prison guards are allowed to shoot escapees. Today, we are facing an America where officers in uniform are killing Black men for even less of a ‘reason.’ The times may have changed, but this disregard for Black lives is still rampant. From Staten Island to Ferguson, it has finally being widely acknowledge by the media and white audiences that police brutality is an epidemic in America. Protests are taking place in cities and on campuses the country over. #BlackLivesMatter is frequently trending on Twitter, but one can’t help but wonder what has why something that should be obvious must be stated, screamed, fought for.

Harper Lee was born in 1926. To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960; the story takes place in the early 1930s. Go Set a Watchman was written in the 1950s. It takes place in the 1950s but is being published in 2015. Watchman was written in the 1950s and then stowed away; it has not seen the light of modern times. It is being published with no further editing, untouched from when Lee first set pen to paper. And here is where the significance of it being published now, this year, lies. What will we see of the America preserved within its pages, and will Harper Lee have anything new to add to the conversation in 2015? Racism today manifests itself differently than it once did. Gone are the days of de jure segregation, Jim Crow, and violent public lynchings. Instead we have police brutality, ‘wars’ on drugs and terror, and coded language that gives an appearance of respectability to racial arguments in the political sphere. This book may not be able to remain relevant enough to navigate the world its readers now face. At worst, it will stand as a mere relic of the past. At best, it will give readers a new insight into the present. At this point, perhaps it is only fair to wait and see.

What made To Kill a Mockingbird so remarkable was not only its ability to capture a society built upon traditions of racism, but to do so through the eyes of a young child. And many of us were young children ourselves the first time we read the novel, so were, arguably, able to relate to Scout’s perspective. It was the easy reader on racism.

The last time readers saw Scout she was a child learning this lesson for the first time. Watchman, on the other hand, promises a Scout that can perhaps see her past, her father, and her town with far more maturity than she ever could as a child.

After Tom Robinson’s conviction, Atticus tries to explain to Scout what has happened: “They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it—seems that only children weep.” Well, Scout’s not a child anymore. And neither are we. And, quite frankly, neither is America. The time for the country to have learned from its mistakes is long overdue. It’s time to grow up.

DOMINIQUE PARISO ’18 has never, ever, killed a mockingbird.

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FEBRUARY 13 2015

NEWS

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BROKEN SPOKE

by Emma Phillips illustration by Nikolas Bentel In the image of New York and Boston before it, Providence is designing a bike share. Providence’s bike share will be a public-private partnership. In 2010, Alta Planning + Design—the same company that controls New York’s Citi Bikes—completed a feasibility study to assess the possibility of implementing a bike share in Providence. This positioned the company as the obvious frontrunner when the City of Providence solicited bids from bike share implementation corporations in 2013. The City sought a company that could make the bike share revenue neutral, and Alta promised to do just that.

Bike shares are commonly implemented by municipalities and private corporations working in tandem. From the onset, the partnerships illuminate divergent allegiances, or allegiances that should be divergent. Alta is a for-profit company that seeks to make money off of its system. Meanwhile, the City is charged with establishing infrastructure that serves the people who live here. In the creation of the Providence Bike Share, the City of Providence seems to have forgetten this allegiance.

Crafting the new bike share, Providence envisions a “financially self-sustaining model.” Alta seeks to achieve this by soliciting sponsorships, and, in its feasibility study, offered the city two potential funding avenues. The first is public funding. Grants are available via the Federal Transit Authority, Federal Highway Administration, Center for Disease Control, and Department of Energy.

Public funding affords the City greater control of the bike share. The second is private funding. The New York City bike share is entirely privately funded. It has served as neither a public, nor an accessible form of transit. After the creation of an exclusive system completely backed by private investments, the City of New York attempted to retroactively change the homogeneity of bike sharers, locating stations within one block of every New York City Housing Authority Station, but these users only account for .004 percent of the New York City bike share annual members.

The City of Providence opted for private funding. They also recommended a service area to Alta that makes it rather clear what users they envision and are actively courting. They are not avoiding the nearly solely rich, white clientele of the New York City bike share, but are effectively replicating it. The design covers a clearly outlined 1.4-mile radius of Downtown, College Hill, Fox Point, and Federal Hill, announcing the City’s priorities in an overt geographical mapping. The lines of exclusion are defined by the locations of proposed bike share hubs. While the word ‘share’ may invite visions of equity and progress, those visions are false. This is not an effort to connect the furthest, neglected quadrants of the city to the well-serviced urban core. Ironically, Alta, whose vested interest is in profitability over accessibility, suggested that Providence establish, “a new non-profit organization to oversee the creation of a bike share system.” Perhaps the corporation decided they lacked the bureaucratic capacity to address equity. No non-profit was established.

Alta seeks to profit from this bike share. Their systems can expectedly be exclusive. They take three steps to ensure that. To join the bike share, a smart phone, credit card, and state-issued ID are mandatory, forging a targeted market. It is the fact that the City, a governing body charged with providing public services, is compounding this exclusivity with geographic bounds that is alarming. Without the enticement of generating any revenue from this venture, Providence theoretically has no loyalties to a specific clientele. Yet in providing mobility to the residents of the city that fit the image of the rebranded Creative Capital, Providence is seeking to create a bike share that generates marketable social capital. +++

According to the feasibility study, the pilot fleet of 200 bikes and 20 bike hubs will serve to “link Downtown to College Hill.” After initial plans to launch in fall of 2014, the date was pushed to spring 2015, as the City has had difficulty fulfilling its promises to assist Alta Bike to identify, “relationships with prospective institutional customers.” The delay indicates trouble acquiring financial support from the institutions that are geographically poised to benefit most from the design. “The Preliminary Station Plan recognizes areas of highest potential demand, which includes parts of Providence where ‘early adopters’ such as Brown and RISD students reside.” The bike share was mapped for these identified, ideal early adopters. It then enticed these institutions, inviting them as benefactors to support a service created in their image. Yet when the city opted for private rather than public funding, when they targeted specific institutions, they honed in on a clientele that is supersaturated with transit options. There already exists a strong link between Downtown and College Hill. It comes in the form of free RIPTA access, university-run shuttles, taxis, personal cars, zip cars, and frequently discounted ubers and lyfts.

As the proposal would have to compete with a smorgasbord of other transit options, there’s no guarantee the demographic for whom this bike share was created will use it. Historically, bicycles have served as an alternative to cars, an inclusive option for those without access to four wheels. In courting the privileged, the City is competing with established private mobility, forgoing connections in neighborhoods in need of superior transportation networks where they would not cater to a fickle, niche market, but rather entrench themselves in permanent transportation infrastructure.

The City declared, “The initial size of the network should, at minimum, include Downcity, Capital Center, Fox Point, the Hospital District, College Hill and Federal Hill.” All the neighborhoods selected for inclusion in the bike share have, at minimum, two things in common: they are predominantly white and the median income falls above the citywide average of $37,856. The residents of the neighborhoods excluded, namely those in the South and West Side, are predominantly people of color with incomes below the city average.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Demographics (% white residents/annual income) {Included neighborhoods//Downtown and the East Side} Federal Hill (55%/$43,328) Downtown (64%/$73,591) College Hill (75%/$76,448) Fox Point (86%/$83,733) {Some excluded neighborhoods//South + West Side} West End (14%, $23,346) Lower South Providence (19%/$23,654) Olneyville (27%/$30,188) Hartford (33%, $28,065) Elmwood (39%/$29,275) Silver Lake (42%, $27,981) Providence claims the bike share should create “good connections to nearby residential neighborhoods.” The vague rhetoric of connection quickly disintegrates next to the clarity of the superimposed dashed red lines that serve as explicit boundaries between bike share access and neighborhoods in South and West Providence. After glancing at the proposed map, Providence resident and RIPTA rider Brent Runyon, reacted, “I can’t imagine why it would cover half of Broadway and not the other half.” +++ The history of redlining makes it easy to imagine why the bike share will not cover West Broadway. Redlining began with the Housing Act of 1934, and was originally used to outline Black innercity areas where banks would not invest, making it difficult for those neighborhoods to attract families who could purchase their own homes. It has since evolved, broadly denoting discrimination and the denial of services to residents based on racially determined boundaries drawn by those in power.

The Providence bike share seems to be its eeriest modern evolution. The fact that policy fellows at the mayor’s office drew this recommended bike share service area in the classic dashed red lines of exclusion seems dangerously forgetful of very recent history. In creating the bike share as an explicitly targeted service, the familiar dashed red lines of segregation are painfully clear. +++ Based on the map the City outlined, Alta is concerned with the “topographical change between Downtown and College Hill.” To remedy this issue, they “may recommend to the City that additional signed bike routes be established to take advantage of access to the top of College Hill…from the south where grades are gentle.” If the City sought public funding, they might move beyond the peripheral participation of creating signage to address a topographical change, and have the leverage to incorporate the system as a pillar of infrastructure, establishing a bike share program that branches outside areas frequented by aspiring academics and coveted creators that the current bike share caters to.

The City can still reclaim its alleged allegiance to the public and serve as a pioneer in the American bike share sphere if they model the program after that in Avignon, France. A small city of 90,000, Avignon is measurably closer in size to Providence’s 177,994 residents than New York’s 8.4 million, and arguably serves as an example of the most effective link between the public and private of any bike share globally. The membership includes a bus pass, which allows users to mix modes of transport and creates a link between regions not covered by either bus routes or bike hubs.

The City’s difficulty in attaining private funding suggests it may be time to reflect on its nature as a public institution, and pursue public funding sources. Currently, Providence’s model for the bike share will charge an $80 annual fee, in addition to a $6 hourly rate. In publicly funded San Antonio’s model, unlimited hour-long rides are free.

Providence has an opportunity to extend the bounds of inclusion with a bike share designed with equality in mind, by capitalizing on their role as not only a governing agency, but also as representative of the public in this partnership. That public does not live in a 1.4 mile radius, and expanding the parameters of the bike share to include those historically excluded regions will serve to differentiate Providence from Boston and New York. The City must call for the elimination of Alta’s state-issued identification requirement for registration, a common tactic for excluding marginalized immigrant populations from accessing services. The City can transition from private to public funding to create a public good. Providence can capitalize on its small size, and realistically place bike hubs in every neighborhood. RIPTA can be included as a partner to create a comprehensive and interactive transit system. It should not be a radical idea to allow all residents of the same city the right to move freely through it.

EMMA PHILLIPS ’17 thinks Creative Capital is a shoddy alliteration.

FEBRUARY 13 2015

METRO

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DOWNTOWN: FEELS LIKE HOME?

by Erin West illustration by Caroline Brewer

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Late in January, on a day that hit zero degrees with wind chill, I stomped my feet to keep warm outside of the Bank of America on Westminster Street. I was about to go on what I can only describe as a “Tour of Homelessness” downtown.

Six other students and I had spent the week learning about homelessness in Rhode Island by visiting organizations engaged in homelessness advocacy. That afternoon, our guide, John Freitas, took us along the canal and through the backstreets of downtown Providence while pointing out spots in the city that are significant to folks currently facing homelessness. John himself experienced homelessness from 2006 to 2011. He is now housed and serves on the executive committee of the Rhode Island Homelessness Advocacy Project (RIHAP), an organization that runs nightly outreach to those staying out on the streets and also liaises between people experiencing homelessness and legislators or large organizations like Crossroads emergency housing. That day, although we all meant well, I felt I was essentially a “homelessness tourist,” as though people who are homeless were something to be put on display, looked at, catalogued, and then stepped away from.

Tours can only happen in public spaces, or in private spaces with explicit permission. All the spaces we entered were public, but many felt very private and we weren’t asking anyone for permission. In one spot, I noted a needle and bloody rag left behind from the night before. Just as these spaces skirted the line between public and private, we skirted the line between well-meaning idealistic college students and intruders. Although we were only hoping to learn more about homelessness, at points we were traipsing through someone’s bedroom or living room. The experience of homelessness, which already often lacks privacy, was again put out in the open and offered up for show.

Homelessness outreach initiatives constantly run into issues of privacy, physically and otherwise. It can be difficult to make out the line between being helpful and being probing. Don Boucher of Riverwood Mental Health Services takes issue with the VI-SPDAT, a questionnaire given to people experiencing homelessness that determines which services they are eligible for. He believes some of the questions are too personal. One asks about sexual history, another about having ever been abused. Megan Smith, who runs a mental health outreach program in Providence through ACCESS RI, says that she constantly struggles to interact with people living on the streets without violating their private space: “I know a couple who is sleeping in a generator grate. I always try to approach those places as I would a house, even to the point of knocking on something that I can knock on.”

While it’s unfortunate that I was exposed to the experience of homelessness in a way that may have conflicted with the privacy of some individuals, I’m not sure I would have been able to access those stories otherwise. I still believe this “tour” had a lot to offer. John says he’s thought about the tour set-up, but he’s just doing what he knows—sharing his experiences and perspectives. What John gave us that day was a glimpse into what Providence may look like to a marginalized and silenced population. With Providence downtown changing more rapidly by the day, and with Kennedy Plaza having just opened its doors on January 17, it’s high time we took a serious look into how Providence is serving or failing to serve its people.

doors announcing: “NO PUBLIC RESTROOMS AVAILABLE.” Just like that, in all caps. John says that simply finding a place to use the bathroom can be challenging at best and humiliating at worst. He tells me that those cute cafés we just passed would be nice enough to let me in for the restroom, but they wouldn’t have taken a second look at him when he was homeless. Inside the bus station, a bit of construction was being finished off in a corner. There was caution tape around the construction area but on the other end of the building, two meager benches built into the wall were also taped off. “Why do they have those roped off?” I ask John. He responds, “They don’t want folks sitting around in here.”

Just as we exit the station, a man in a worn-out pea coat holding a coffee cup approaches John. The lid of his cup is dirty with coffee that splashes every time his hand shakes from shivering. This man is homeless and must know John is connected to resources. They chat about where he can find a shelter to stay in that night. Right next to the bus terminal, a warm building with plenty of space, this man cannot go in for a break from the cold. He turns away from us and continues to walk the streets as he has probably been doing all day.

+++ Providence River We start off along Providence’s signature canal, where you can often find residents walking their dogs in the early morning or rushing downtown to work.

Along the canal is also where John has found the same man sleeping for at least two years. The man that stays there says he prefers the patch of grass and chainlink fence to the shelters, which, as John explains, can often be dirty, bug-infested, overcrowded, and witness to violence, sexual assault, and theft.

Shelters have become overwhelmed in the past few years due to a sharp increase in homelessness. From 2007 to 2012, Providence saw a nearly 25 percent increase in individuals seeking shelter. Maintaining decent conditions in shelters has been even more challenging this winter. Bill Stein from Harrington Hall shelter says that recently, they have resorted to cramming extra mattresses into every space possible.

Alleyway It’s getting chilly so John ducks off the main drag and into an enclosed alleyway I’d never noticed before. I note that it feels much warmer here. John says he brought us here on purpose. He knows this spot because it’s good for getting a break from the cold.

The alleyway is behind a restaurant. While we’re chatting there, the workers stare at us strangely from the kitchen windows. I can only imagine how much icier those looks would have been if I had not been a well-kempt, young, white female wearing Sorel boots. John tells us that once, when he and his partner Barbara were homeless, they had come by some extra money and decided to go for a sit-down meal in one of the restaurants downtown. They entered, sat down with some of their bags tucked beneath the table, and tried to get the attention of the waitress. Chatting in the back with the bartender, she completely ignored John and Barbara. When John or Barbara waved for her attention, she would look away. After 20 minutes of this insulting refusal of service, John and Barbara left.

Kennedy Plaza Bus Terminal The spiffy new Kennedy Plaza bus station just opened its doors on January 17, 2015. We go to take a look inside and are greeted by several signs taped to the

Providence Public Library Next to all these large companies and condos, Providence Public Library at least looks like a friendly face. As we walk by, John says people who are homeless are

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Kennedy Plaza The rest of the plaza is still under construction. John notes that many of the old public benches where he and others used to congregate to share information or just chat are missing. The new benches differ from the old ones in a significant way: they are segmented with armrests, making it impossible to lie down. In the descriptions of Kennedy Plaza’s revitalization, RIPTA mentions the need for a “safe space” and “safety concerns” seven times. This may explain another new feature of the Plaza: a set of several surveillance cameras operated by local police.

“Welcoming” is also listed as a goal on the website. When the construction is finished, the plaza will feature a new café with small tables. This space welcomes people who will buy an espresso and linger before heading to one of the nearby linen napkin restaurants. John, however, says Kennedy Plaza is, “indifferent to the people it serves and their needs.” He says he resents the planners of the Plaza because they didn’t consider how to serve the most vulnerable citizens.

Randall Rose, of the RIPTA Riders Alliance agrees that renovations were pushed by wealthy businesses in the area and were in part intended to “get the homeless people and low-income working people out of Kennedy Plaza.”

Smith says that since the new construction of Kennedy Plaza, she has heard many more accounts of people who are homeless or look homeless being asked to leave the area.

The Biltmore Walking away from the plaza now, we dodge men in dark green uniforms pushing brass luggage carts and sleek black cars pulling up to the Biltmore Hotel.

John stops to tell us a story. A few Januaries ago, while on nighttime outreach, a student found a woman with her baby walking around Kennedy Plaza. She asked the woman if she had somewhere warm to go and the woman responded that she had just gone into the lobby of the Biltmore to warm up, but the concierge had thrown her and her child out into the cold because they were not staying in the hotel.

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allowed in, but they can’t bring any bags with them. That’s a tricky feat when you can’t store things at shelters and have to carry all your possessions with you at all times.

The library officially has this bag policy for security reasons, and say that they apply it universally to all visitors. However, this policy’s implementation is typically left up to the discretion of the guard at the door. A security personnel at the library told me that bringing in suitcases or luggage bags would not be a problem, but that trash bags may not be allowed. When pressed for a reason, he said they weren’t sturdy and could possibly split and spill their contents in the library.

Libraries are maybe one of the greatest public service achievements. Open to anyone, they provide access to literature, the news, and internet, among other resources. When the homeless community is turned away from the library door, they are also shut out from all those services.

Gourmet Heaven Walking briskly past Regency Plaza (we’re all freezing by now—but no one is about to complain), I notice the Gourmet Heaven sitting at one end of the apartment complex. I immediately think of something a formerly homeless woman recently told me. One day, near Regency Plaza, two local university students approached her and offered her a sandwich. They wanted to ask her a few questions for an interview and suggested sitting on the steps outside Gourmet Heaven. She told them she was happy to answer questions, but that she couldn’t sit outside the store. They looked confused and said it would be perfectly fine, but she was adamant that she couldn’t sit there. The two kids didn’t get it.

She explained that the students would have been completely left alone, but if Gourmet Heaven had seen a homeless person sitting on their stoop, they would have come out immediately and told her to leave.

Bus Stops We end our trip back near Kennedy Plaza at the bus stops. “Alright,” John says, “you want to meet homeless people? Here we are.” This feels bizarre, we are approaching this exchange as if those who experience homeless aren’t just other residents, but another species entirely. I think John kind of wants to challenge us to feel uncomfortable.

John exchanges greetings with two men sitting at one of the stops. We all chat as a group for a bit. One man is young, early twenties. He was just released from jail a few days ago but without anywhere to go. He’s in a shelter now, he says he wants to look for work. He says he was “kind of ” given resources. The other man is staying at Crossroads Shelter, he says it’s full to the brim. Another man who was standing near us also joins in the conversation. John says he, too, is homeless.

John told me later that he tries not to make this tour, “like a trip to the zoo,” and one of the ways he does this is by actually interacting with folks. I saw that, but I still felt like an intruder at that bus stop.

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Buses are vital to the day-to-day necessities of people who experience homelessness. After getting booted out of the shelters early in the morning, it’s a bus to somewhere that will let you stay inside, then a bus to somewhere that serves free lunch, a bus to an appointment, and quickly one more bus back to the shelter to get in line and secure a bed for the night.

John says if you ride RIPTA often, you’ve already met the homeless community of Providence. +++ A few weeks ago, newly-elected Mayor Jorge Elorza cut the ribbon for the new Kennedy Plaza. The Providence Journal quoted him as saying, “There are so many improvements that have been made, and these improvements will not only serve the needs of our commuters but also create a community space that’s welcome to everyone.” I might once have applauded that statement with the rest of the crowd, but after spending the afternoon with John, I can’t swallow this line.

Providence is often lauded for the reconstruction of its downtown. Many would point to new business and attractive avenues as evidence of a job well done, but actually, I don’t think reconstruction has been done very well. The ‘revitalization’ of downtown Providence has bought into the all-too-common failure of urban redevelopment: prioritizing the interests of business owners and the wealthy while leaving behind and often purposefully excluding lower income community members. Kennedy Plaza and Providence downtown has recently made itself only more welcoming to an elite subset of Providence residents by creating a very un-welcoming environment for many others, especially those who experience homelessness.

Explaining how these development projects were carried out, Rose Randall said: “Media and politicians hyped this redevelopment as good for Providence.

People were deceived, they thought they were making their community better.”

Politicians, development agencies, and the general public are too often guilty of ignorance and neglect when it comes to the needs of marginalized populations.

I do not suggest every resident take a “tour” to become more conscious, but, as Providence continues to develop in the coming years, we need to have a much more critical eye when examining how our spaces are being transformed to fit or ignore the needs of certain segments of the population. (The I-195 redevelopment project should be watched closely).

My favorite place to view Providence is from the canal, leaning over the railing. On a sunny day, the clear water that now runs through what used to be a trench of weeds and tossed trash reflects a sparkling Providence Skyline. I have hope for where Providence is going in the future, but, if not watched carefully, the inclusive “One Providence” vision Elorza promoted will become like the reflections of buildings I see in the canal: a wobbly sham.

ERIN WEST B’18 is just starting to understand how Providence fails to serve its people.

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Pastel squares crumble beneath your feet. You poise your fingers, held equidistant from weapon schematics and a twitch key. Usually a reactive tap would save the hero from semi-deletion. But not on this yellowing cliff face. Not when 32 conspiring pixels form a gaping, toothed blackness; not when decadence creeps through his veins towards a final portal without respawn.

This is Hyper-Light Drifter. This scene from the 2D action roleplaying game brings the player into a techno-fantasy world where abyssal creatures are constructed from pixelated 8-bit schematics.

This homage to old-school games started as a modest $27,000 Kickstarter campaign in 2013. But after backers poured nearly $600,000 into this anachronistic concoction, its lead developer, Alex Preston, expanded its scope and accessibility, adding tendrils reaching as far as the PS4, Xbox One, and even the Wii U. This remarkable development feat—the brain-child and ode of one man—has Reddit, Kotaku, and Critical Gamer buzzing with feverish visions of stunning, minimalistic imagery and lush visual storytelling. Employing rigorous new media experimentation, this game, among other indie titles such as Transistor, The Witness, and Never Alone, are exercising the fat from the corpulent, multi-billion dollar game industry.

Since the neon arcades of the 1980s, video games have evolved into a voracious pasttime. According to Statista, in 2010, Americans spent an average of 22 hours a week playing video games and spent over $25 billion to gain access to Mario and Luigi, Marth and Master Chief, Booker and Titus. This remarkable expenditure has propagated a bevy of scholastic fields including game scholars, game narratologists, and new media theorists, all dedicated to unearthing the undeniable allure of video games. Cultural theorists such as Mary Flanagan and Jane McGonigal argue that video games represent a novel device for understanding human expression and artistic reception.

Another strain of contemporary game fanatics, critical game designers, argue that video games represent a novel art form. In 1923, cinema was praised by Ricciotto Canudo as the seventh classical art form, the evolutionary successor of its expressive ancestors. Critical designers see each of these mediums expressed in the eighth hybrid art form.

Sculpture and architecture carve the digital landscape. Music, poetry, and narrative sing out in rhythmic soundscapes of coin-grabbing and clip grinding; the fluidity of dance is expressed by the slippery “feel” of the game’s mechanics. Painting and cinema illuminate the realm of fantasy and create the compositional frames of cut scenes. But as a system operating upon a series of interactive loops that connect user input and in-game affect, video games inherently promise a novel artistic dynamic: a playful engagement between producer and consumer.

If video games signal the dawn of a new media space, a place where art responds to its audience and empowers its user consumer with agency, how did its industry become engorged with cookie-cutter characters, overindulged with stereotypes, and chronically addicted to unwholesome money-grabs?

The AAA game industry refers to the hundred-man development companies like EA Games and Ubisoft. In the 1990s, these companies promised their fans a fantastical Hollywood where one could pioneer the rules. They offered the tantalizing “choice” of designing an avatar with purple hair, or self-destructing with an incendiary grenade just to see their revamped flesh explode. It was this unique possibility-space, this medley of control, immersion, and addictive engagement that produced a faction of avid gamers demanding satisfaction. Typically, they deliver this premise through “87 bajillion guns” or sophisticated, individually rigged breasts.

The big dogs in the gaming world followed the recipe for a classic Hollywood cocktail: 1/2 flashy graphics and hyper-realistic characters, 1/4 addictive play, 1/4 content (story, visual and auditory style, etc.), and an indulgent rim of salty Skinner mechanisms used to automate the player’s mouth not only to salivate at the next bonus feature, but also to desire empty rewards like randomized loot. This operant conditioning has given producers the excuse to substitute mechanisms of addiction and spectacle for the artistic merit and introspective engagement

by Cheyenne Morrin illustration by Alex Kiesling

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the aesthetics and business of videogames

offered through innovative play. This corrosive market has even hindered the delivery of their own product; new games are often released incomplete or buggy. Their solution? An IV drip of continually released online patches and updates, purging the poisonous design from the system. Even Nintendo, long favored as the most genuine and independent AAA giant, has succumbed to servicing their signature brands and choking their fan base with rare “special edition” amiibos and consoles whose low stock is controlled by eBay scalpers. In short, if Mario 64 were released next week, his flying cap might not see game time until next year, and a month after fans would have to install a patch in order to fix broken collision detection. While this recent development shift might give the community more time to digest stale design choices during Alpha and Beta releases, those multi-million dollar budgets (often over 100 million) are squandered on ineffective preproduction.

And while consumers gorge themselves on these filler foods, there remain a select few— perhaps those designers who grew up in the Tron glory days, or those avant-garde creative types, or maybe even the developer of the bestselling Bioshock franchise—who remember the promise of immersive, fantastical realms and truly engaging play that was made by the burgeoning art form so many years ago. Ken Levine, the author of the half-a-billion dollar Bioshock series, gave up his prominent stake in the AAA industry, downsizing to “a smaller team with a flatter structure and a more direct relationship with gamers…which in many ways, will be a return to how we started: a small team making games for the core gaming audience.” Like many critical designers, Levine is cutting out the excess the industry affords and following the creative footprints of the indie development scene.

This recent development culture harkens to a time of streamlined design. No flashy graphics, no arbitrary loot, no distractions from the artful play video games can offer. Many indie game designers simply don’t have the budget or time to add unnecessary features. Often, they’re just gamers who want to contribute a new play experience, or coders who want to embed their custom game engine in pixel paint. Even indie hotshots such as Supergiant Games started as a group of passionate gamers who contributed their art, writing, and coding skills to craft remarkable feats of collaboration. Games like Hotline Miami, SuperMeat Boy, and Braid have reaped a myriad of fans and design awards because they’ve reframed the experience video games yield and have forcibly instated fresh design paradigms. These games are critically acclaimed for using a simple game mechanic as a lens for experiencing the entire game’s world: from the audio-visual landscapes to the political undertones embodied by characters like Red and Clementine, each moment of play drips with a richly unique tone. These budding developers have redirected their attention from graphical fidelity and open-world systems to limited worlds that use every aesthetic facet to hone in on holistically satisfying experiences.

On the other hand, if you compare Halo, Titanfall, and Call of Duty 4, you’ll find little variation in mechanics, narrative, or visual style; these first-person shooting games are frequently rehashed with a slightly different 30-something-white-skinned-brown-haired protagonist and a slightly different arsenal of guns. Compared to such AAA titles, the growing body of indie games is vastly varied. These succinct games showcase art styles ranging from SuperMeat Boy’s pixelated gore to Transistor’s hand-painted neon cyberpunk architecture; they showcase narratives ranging from the longer multiplayer adventures of Trine 2 to the 10 minute orientalist critiques of the PleasureDromes of Kubla Khan; most of all, they showcase player experiences that come in a different shade than multi-million dollar hyper-realistic open worlds. These passionate developers forfeit no aspect of meaningful play.

Instead, these games craft elegant experiential complements between different design fix-

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ings. BattleBlock Theatre employs snarky metanarrative to spice up the incessant deaths that accompany cooperative platforming games. Proteus draws the player into a peaceful exploration by pairing a soothing visual palette with delicate bells and chimes as the player navigates the world. This design paradigm starts upon the most fundamentally satisfying premises—player expectations, emotive arguments, novel mechanic ‘feels’—then crystallize them into symmetrical patterns of story, visuals, audio, and mechanics. Braid, initially developed by Jonathan Blow as a critique of recent game design trends, wraps every facet of experience around the concept of time. The unique time-sliding mechanic relates to its narrative structure, its characters, and its transient visual and auditory palette.

This approach to game design has reconceptualized play in such broad and meaningful strokes that Extra Credits—the YouTube channel game designers ingest like their daily multivitamin—has argued for a new way of categorizing games entirely. Rather than sorting games into first-person-shooter, puzzles, and platforms, they claim that games need to be evaluated upon the underlying emotive reasons that draw players to their space, or their aesthetics of play. And while AAA titles such as Portal, Bioshock, and Zelda have delivered uniquely satisfying aesthetics, the industry overall has become expressively paralyzed by their own standards of excess. Any push for novel aesthetics originates in the indie development scene.

Bastion brings the player into a lush, procedurally generated, floating world. To complement this abstract landscape, the designers employed a powerful narrator to punctuate and elaborate upon the player’s in-game actions; this porous relationship between the player’s narrative of play and the game’s internal narrative has conjured a new aesthetic of storytelling. Relatedly, Thomas Was Alone uses their omnipotent narrator to breathe life into the game’s faceless, geometric characters.

And for others indie developers, this storytelling platform has opened up novel ways to explore alternative, invisible, or prejudiced narratives. Dys4ia devised a variety of “clunky” game mechanics to viscerally impart the developer’s transgender experiences. Never Alone uses its game engine to simultaneously impede and empower the player’s agency in order to metaphorically express the ancient lore and native perspectives of the Iñupiaq people.

For years, the AAA industry has extruded and unfolded according to the player’s whims, without the threat of elegantly designed competitors. But the indie market is pushing for a more nourishing regimen of play, challenging gamers to engage more meaningfully, conceptually, and most of all, critically. Instead of the drive for graphical fidelity, subsurface scattering techniques, and the monumental vault over the uncanny valley, the gaming community demands more wholesome synesthetic elixirs of engagement, conceptual depth, and innovative design.

The venom drives your mission into the crumbling ruins. Your desire for a remedy is all that remains. If it weren’t for the crippling venom, you’d probably turn back. Back to your home, back to comfort, back to the world that buried itself in its own product.

Your antiquated energy blade pulses.

CHEYENNE MORRIN B’15 is thinking up the ninth art form.

CHEYENNE MORRIN B’15 has feverish images of stunning minimalistic imagery.

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ADVICE COLUMN My mom got a cat now that I'm at college. I don't want her to be lonely, but I can't help but feel replaced (plus, I'm so allergic!). I want to love this cat—it's so cute— but I'm jealous of it and it makes me sneeze. What do I do?

M: So on a Tuesday evening when you were living at home, who would you hang out with? Now who do you hang out with on weeknights? Not your mom anymore, right? Have you replaced her? The idea that you can replace someone presupposes that people are substitutable for each other—like negative one child plus one cat equals zero. But it equals two! Love isn’t zero-sum!

P: The Internet also tells us that if you draw a warm bath and enter it with said cat, you can acclimate your sinuses to its allergens, plus have a sweet hot tub time with a cute cat! No guarantees here, but maybe worth a shot. Alternately, try an over-the-counter allergy medication, like Zyrtec!

M: As Morrissey sang, all these years ago: “It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate.../it takes guts to be gentle and kind.”

P:

by M&P becomes self-defeating and exhausting. At a certain point, you have to let yourself act.

I have not talked to my sister outside of a familial context in four years. She's trying to reach out to me, and I think she's more mature, but I'm in a good place in my life and I don't know if I want to let her in.

Should I prioritize family over my own anxiety?

M: Very little worthwhile occurs without risk. That said, mental health is the most important thing, behind maybe breakfast, so keep it real with that, too. Sometimes it takes passing a boundary to see where it needs to be drawn?

P: I often only learn about modern slang from talking to my little brother. Tapping four fingers together twice means hashtag.

M: There are also lots of lower-stakes ways of communicating these days—e-mail, for example, or Facebook messages.

P: Or Twitter. On Twitter you can use hashtags. My little brother uses Snapchat a lot, but if you’re just getting things going again that could be weird.

Should I make art or money?

M: How much money? Make enough money to make art!

That said...I think with most big, abstract choices like this, life doesn’t present them as clearly as they might seem in your head. It’s not like there’s this big post-graduation fork in the road you have to traverse. You can work for a while to pay off your student loans, and then go back to school, or whatever. You can work 9-5 and sculpt in the evenings.

P: Agreed, someone still needs to write the great American investment-banking novel. Start living your life as if it were art, money is art.

Live and die art. Turn money into art and then sell out for bitcoin.

M: As Steven Patrick Morrissey (of The Smiths and Morrissey fame) sang, “England is mine,/ it owes me a living.//But ask me why, and I’ll die.”

I'm a vegan who wants to integrate leather into my fashion scheme. Any advice for how to reconcile my conflicting desires?

M: Buy used! No new cows need die for you to wear dead cow.

P: Or try artificial leather! Try such funsounding varieties such as Birko-Flor, Kydex, Naugahyde, Rexine, Vegetan, or Fabrikoid!

Most of these are weird plastic variants and be aware many aren’t biodegradable, so research wisely and/or pick clothing that will be hip forever. See example below.

Is all of my behavior one giant self defense mechanism?

P: I often feel this way. If all your behavior were really a self-defense mechanism—which maybe it is!—it would be hard to even see what in yourself you were looking to defend. But the problem becomes that there’s no easy way to dissociate what’s protected from the behavior protecting it. You are your behavior as much as you are anything hidden behind it.

M: It’s a lot like the end of Mulan.

P: Thinking only about what’s hidden behind your behavior, a secret self no one can see, quickly

Gimme a reason to get out of bed.

M: Feel you completely! You should get out of bed so that you can keep looking for a reason to get out of bed.

P: Listen to your favorite bands from when you were 16 until you feel you can move again.

Maybe also be glad you are no longer 16 (and if you are, there’s always The Smiths).

To ask the Indy for advice, submit questions at tinyurl.com/indyadvicecolumn.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BACTERIA[S] R US

by Camera Ford illustration by Brielle Curvey Last week, a new study delivered confirmation of something that many of us had suspected for decades: the New York City subways are teeming with bacteria, viruses, and the DNA of unidentifiable organisms. In other words, humans (and the occasional giant rat) are not the only living creatures on that jam-packed morning commute.

Typically when we hear the word “bacteria,” we run the other way. An abundance of anti-bacterial soaps, hand sanitizers and even facial cleansers have helped shape the public perception of bacteria as a symbol of dirt, filth, and disease. Companies spend millions of dollars marketing their cleansing, immunizing, and sterilizing products to anyone who dares depart the protective cocoon of their bedcovers each morning. We douse our skin sometimes multiple times a day in an assortment of chemical solutions, and less-than-daily showers become unthinkable lest we bring sickness into our lives. But in reality, the story is more complicated. +++ Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College spent the last 17 months swabbing assorted public surfaces for DNA in each of New York’s 466 subway stations as part of a project called PathoMap. The study, headed

by Dr. Christopher Mason and born from a curiosity about how bacteria might transfer between adults in close quarters, has resulted in one of the most extensive urban microbiology projects ever attempted. At final count, the team had found 15,152 distinct types of life in the city’s subterranean ecosystem. To put this in perspective, the carefullycontrolled sidewalks and lawns above are home to only 50 different tree species.

The collected samples combine to form a map of the city that you won’t find in a guidebook. Want to know where people have been eating kimchi or sauerkraut? At a surprising number of stations there are microscopic traces of the fermentation agent Leuconostoc citreum to show you the way. They are the vestiges, perhaps, of a hurried lunch break or a tourist’s wander-fueled hot dog craving. The infamous Escherichia coli, as well as pathogens tied to food poisoning, were found in almost every one of the surveyed stations. Even the city’s different ethnic enclaves are on bacterial display; DNA sequencing of the human cells left behind at the stations showed clusters of Chinese, Mexican, and even Finnish descendants centered around stations in specific neighborhoods.

Still, on average only 0.5 percent of the DNA that the team collected was human, while that of insects, rodents, plants, and fish represented up to 15 percent of the total. The biggest portion, though—about 48 percent—was the DNA of organisms that had never before been identified. The rest of the microbial haul indicated the presence of things that ranged from the ordinary—mozzarella cheese—to the alarming—anthrax and bubonic plague. Luckily, most of the samples were dead upon collection, and only 67 of the over 15,000 were tied to disease-causing organisms. +++ Some of the subway’s most commonly found bacteria included those linked to food poisoning, toxic chemical cleanup, and artisanal Italian cheeses. Bacteria are single-celled organisms and can withstand a dizzying range of temperatures and survive almost anywhere: soil, water, within our own bodies. For instance, Acinetobacter radioresistens can withstand high levels of radiation and has evolved the ability to acquire resistance to multiple potentially harmful substances. Some strains are even resistant to all commercially available antibiotics.

A bacteria species called Pseudomonas putida breaks down organic pollutants such as toluene and oil, making it useful for cleaning up oil spills. Some types can live on pure caffeine. Propionibacterium freudenreichii also break down substances: often found in milk, these bacteria are known to spoil dairy products but are also used in the cheese industry to create Swiss, Emmental, and Jarlsberg.

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The bacteria create CO2 bubbles that, when popped, leave the characteristic holes in the cheese.

The chickpea-shaped Micrococcus luteus thrives on the oxygen-rich environments of your mouth, throat mucus-membranes, and respiratory tract. Some strains absorb ultraviolet radiation and are a prime ingredient of sunscreen, while others can slow down the metabolism of a sick patient and make their recovery process more difficult. Cronobacter sakazakii, which thrive in environments ranging from wastewater to synthetic surfaces, are the main cause of meningitis and various bloodstream infections. They can also survive for up to two years in very dry places, which has led to harmful trace amounts being found in products like powdered baby formula, herbal teas and even tampons.

A lot of bacteria have frightening effects. But for all of the specimens whose effects make your skin crawl, there are just as many that are crucial to your survival. The overwhelming majority of bacteria are the good ones that digest our food and produce vitamins, or, outside of the body, make important antibiotics or turn milk into yogurt. Furthermore, most of our cells are not actually our own. We carry roughly 10 times as many bacterial cells in our bodies as human cells. 99.9 percent of the unique genes in our body are of bacterial origin. We are walking bacterial colonies.

The general public’s lack of knowledge about bacteria’s importance has led to a feverish need to purge all surfaces, clothes, and other everyday items of all traces of microbial activity.

This obsession with cleanliness has been partly responsible for an increasingly dangerous issue: antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. AMR, which is now a reality worldwide, has multiple sides.

On the one hand, many antibiotics and antiviral or antifungal treatments for common ailments like pneumonia and urinary tract infections have become markedly less effective. Overuse of these treatments in situations that don’t call for them, as well as patients’ tendency to stop taking their antibiotics as soon as they start feeling better and before the prescription is complete, have caused microbes to evolve. Unless new treatments are in development, many routine illnesses will be untreatable in the near future because consistent exposure to the substances meant to kill them has left the surviving microbes strong enough to resist the treatments altogether. A manifestation of this dilemma: 27 percent of the subway samples turned out to be from antibiotic-resistant bacteria like Acinetobacter baumannii.

This same process has created ‘superbacteria’ resistant to commonly-used household items, for instance, your hand sanitizer. But at the same time, the overuse of antibacterial household and personal care items has obliterated the good bacteria from your system as well. That leaves your immune system in a compromised position from which to deal with increased odds of infection.

Sadly, the desire to be sterile and free from infection has resulted in the possible eventual extinction of many of our medical advances. +++ Still, for better or for worse, at least one place has yet to give in to the hysteria around banishing bacteria and staying clean. The New York City subway stands as an unwitting beacon for the advantages—or at the very least, the relative harmlessness—of low-level microbial exposure. From sunscreen to staph infections, there were traces of just about everything wriggling around among the five and a half million people who travel through the cold, bacteria-ridden capsules each day. But before you decide to never again venture to New York, remember that your favorite coffee shop or neighborhood supermarket is probably just as much of a bacterial free-for-all—its members might just be a little different.

CAMERA FORD B’16 is a walking bacterial colony.

SCIENCE

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CLIPPED WINGS

by Miles Taylor illustration by Devyn Park

That means non-Blacks already support the Hawks and show up to games at a disproportionately high rate. But, as Levenson makes clear, it’s not about percentages—it’s about optics: “my further guess is that 40 pct still feels like 70 pct to some whites at our games,” and “southern whites simply were not comfortable being in an arena or at a bar where they were in the minority.” +++ In spite of these comments, fans, including those in the Black community, have continued to show up to the games. Part of this is attributable to the fact that people show up to sports events when the teams are doing well. But it also has something to do with how the Hawks’ owners are perceived in Atlanta. Rembert Browne, originally from Atlanta, insisted the scandal “isn’t about the Hawks,” it’s about Levenson being out of touch because he is a wealthy, old, white, male. Atlanta fans can support the Hawks in spite of their ownership because they are accustomed to doing so.

The controversy around the racially charged emails lowered the already low expectations for the Hawks this year. The owners scrambled to control the fallout from Levenson’s leaked emails.

The franchise did not sign the superstar that it desperately coveted.

Budenholzer, entering his second year as a head coach, assumed General Manager duties and suddenly became among the five most powerful coaches in the NBA. The Hawks seemed destined to remain a fringe playoff contender. The first few weeks of the season seemed to confirm these worries. Through Thanksgiving, the Hawks were a tepid 7-6. Mayor Kasim Reed demanded the team be sold by the end of the year. Then, unexpectedly, the Hawks won 14 of 16 Watching the Atlanta Hawks play is like watching chaos. On offense, games from November 26 to December 26. Despite a complete lack of no one stops moving. The court is a constant whirlwind of picks, organizational oversight, the Hawks went into 2015 on a roll. cuts, and passes. Center Al Horford moves up to set a pick for point This run continued into January, though there was now added guard Jeff Teague, rolls away a second too early, gets the pass, kicks motivation for their strong play: survival. Shortly after the new year to shooting guard Kyle Korver, who swings to forward Paul Millsap, began, the Hawks announced that the other two ownership groups who passes back to Teague, who shoots and scores. They jump from had agreed to sell, so the whole team was up for bids. Days later, writer moment to moment, from play to play, never stopping. On defense, Bill Simmons suggested that two prospective buyers planned to move they constantly switch match-ups, extend into passing lanes, and reach the Hawks to Seattle. If the Hawks and their attendance collapsed, the for steals. This is the style of play that the Washington Wizards faced on move could have become very real, very quickly. Though the current January 11 in Atlanta. It was too much for the Wizards on both sides of owner and the NBA have since made clear that any buyer would the court, and Atlanta collected its 8th straight victory, 120–89. have to keep the team in Atlanta, similar promises were made about But this chaos wasn’t confined to the court. The team had just the Seattle Supersonics before they moved to Oklahoma City. The been put up for sale following a scandal concerning an email sent by Supersonics and Atlanta Thrashers, two of the most recent professional owner Bruce Levenson to the business operations team, bemoaning sports franchises to relocate, were 20-62 and 34-36, respectively in their the predominantly Black home crowds. The Hawks had also just lost final seasons before moving. The stakes were clear: win and stay, or general manager Danny Ferry, who had been indefinitely suspended for lose and go. The Hawks responded, maintaining their play and going making racially insensitive comments about Sudan-born NBA-er Luol undefeated January as the rumors of relocation faded.

Deng during a conference call. Yet, The Hawks had the best record in the Eastern conference and were in the midst of a 19 game winning +++ streak—the longest of any NBA team this season.

Last April, when former Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling was I was at that Hawks–Wizards game with my sister in early January, caught on tape asking his girlfriend not to bring Black guests to his awed by 48 minutes of chaos that flummoxed the Wizards and led to an games, the NBA asked teams to self-report any potentially controversial easy Hawks victory. This on-the-court success has had an unintended statements before Commissioner Adam Silver’s lawyers found them. consequence: people have forgotten about the turmoil in the front The Hawks complied, and Silver faced his second race-centered office and the unconscionable emails that caused it. The ascendancy of controversy in the three months he had been in office. Danny Ferry, the Hawks’ unique and dizzying gameplay has become the dominant the Hawks’ General Manager, said that Luol Deng had “some African lens through which to view their season, erasing the memory of bigoted in him… he has a store out front that’s beautiful and great, but he may executives and the underlying problems that led them to believe that be selling some counterfeit stuff behind you.” Even more damaging was an arena ought to cater “to a 40 year old white guy.” On February 10, Hawk’s owner Levenson’s email, which blamed the stadium atmosphere, Grantland writer Charles C. Pierce, known for his blend of politics and including the prevalence of gospel and rap music in the half-time sports journalism, wrote about the Hawks. The words “email,” “owner,” performances, for the lack of white fans at games. His complaints were or “race” weren’t mentioned once in the fifteen hundred word article. horrifying, almost unbelievable: they ranged from complaints that “the Phrases like “unselfish” and “best story” have taken their place. He’s not kiss cam is too Black” to theories that “blacks dont [sic] seem to go as alone. Sports writers Zach Lowe, Robert Siegel, and countless others crazy cheering” to claims that “the black crowd scared away the whites.” have also written at length about the Hawks’ surprising dominance Levenson’s email not only shrouded racism in the business jargon without making mention of the team’s reprehensible front-office. of increasing a “season ticket base”; it also appeared to be factually When fans and writers pay attention to the on-court controlled chaos, wrong. Fifty-four percent of the city’s residents are African American.

Levenson and Ferry become footnotes, buried deeper and deeper in the Thirty-eight percent of Atlantans are non-Hispanic whites. On his blog fine print, creating a false façade that everything is fine. The turmoil FiveThirtyEight, Statistician Nate Silver estimated that 48 percent of and pain they caused may seem to have faded, but it’s still there, just Hawks fans are Black, and 40 percent are white, with Hispanics and below the surface, waiting for a few more shots to clank off the rim.

Asians making up the last 12 percent. Levenson’s own guess for the racial breakdown of Phillips Arena was that it was 40 percent Black.

MILES TAYLOR B'18 likes watching chaos.

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SPORTS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

R U ALONE ON V DAY? HERE IS A GOOD WAY 2 NOT FEEL ALONE CUT ME OUT AND PASTE ME TO THE BACK OF CHAIR! IT’S JUST LIKE BEING ON A DATE!

I’M ANDROGYNOUS SO I APPEAL TO ALL!

I WILL FULFILL YOU EMOTIONALLY AND PHYSICALLY!

100% RECYCLABLE

I LIKE THE SAME THINGS AS YOU!

I WON’T FLAKE OUT ON OUR DATE! BECAUSE I CAN’T! ACCESSORIZABLE!

FEBRUARY 13 2015

EPHEMERA

□ 14

EXCERPTS: NOTES FROM CAIRO

by Yousef Hilmy photographs by Yousef Hilmy

12/23 Still on the plane. I wonder how much of Egypt will simply (or not so simply, I suppose) be the void left after my grandmother’s death—will I miss her more acutely once I pass by her apartment, now empty? There’s so much about her that I feel I never got to learn. When I try to remember her, I can only think of the space in which I most often saw her: on her bed, halfheartedly watching a soap opera on TV. I think of her soft auburn hair and her saggy skin, of the touching way she told me, in Arabic, bitawhishni hata lama-inta hina (“I miss you even when you’re here”). Doleful words coming from a simple woman, the daughter of a mayor from Inshas, a small village in the Sharkiya Governorate, some 60 kilometers from Cairo.

12/24 First morning in Cairo. I slept well. Woke up at 5am and talked to Mama for a while; she’s nostalgic for the days of my childhood, when, she tells me, I didn’t have a sharp tongue, when I’d acquiesce to her constant orders. I recommended her Boyhood, which she says she’ll watch on the plane back, if it’s available. Outside it’s smoggy and noisy, just as I remember it. I can’t help but compare what I’m seeing now with memories I have of Cairo from the many times I’ve visited over the years. Little of the change is physical: the concrete apartment buildings, nondescript and built in an unpleasant seventies Soviet style, look the same; my grandfather’s apartment, in Heliopolis, from which I’m writing this now, has the same ugly green-and-yellow checkered sofa that he bought when we were living here in 2004 and 2005. Yet, in the past 50 years or so since it was built, this apartment has witnessed a lot: five presidents, countless terrorist attacks, successful and unsuccessful assassination attempts, the reopening of the Suez Canal, a revolution, snow. My grandpa, now a frail 82 year-old, has maintained his packrat tendencies and still keeps the same appliances from the 1960s and 70s.

A fly is perched on my Wrangler jeans. Shouts of bikya, bikya come from the peddler who roams the streets buying and selling used, sometimes broken, goods. A familiar cycle: there are always things to sell, to repurpose. Eleven years ago, as a nine-year-old American boy living in Cairo for the first time, I probably heard the same man shouting as I was getting ready for school. He doesn’t know it, but I’ve cursed him and his annoying shrill yell hundreds of times in what was then a very broken Arabic.

(The language is broken itself.)

Baba, Omar, and Sharif are coming tonight. Haven’t seen them since I left for Brown. +++

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I walk down three flights of stairs and into a street that, cluttered with cars and moving bodies and the harsh sound of bartering, seems to be bursting from its seams. The oil that is used to fry falafel at Gad is strewn with gnarled green flotsam, and I don’t think it has been changed since yesterday. There are only men in line. I pass a row of deteriorating mansions, some of which have been empty for twenty or thirty years. They occupy a great deal of valuable real estate in Heliopolis; some say jinn inhabit them. The one directly in front of me must be inhabited by some very aristocratic jinn, for its design— reinforced concrete or stone with neo-classical features, useless columns, gaudy cornices, a thousand arabesque details—is ostentatious in a way that is found only in developing countries that were once colonized. The filigree that marks its mildewing façade seems out of place, un-Egyptian. One of my uncles told me that the land on which it is built is worth one hundred million pounds. The owner, an Emirati businessman, bought it some twenty years ago and decided to leave it as it was. He has never lived there.

Dust is his only tenant.

The buildings are dead and the streets are dead and the small shrubs that jut in spurts in the cracks of the sidewalk are close to dead—and yet all around me there are currents, echoes that I notice only if I listen closely.

Egyptian with American eyes, Mama said.

12/27 Ate some leftover baklava from last night’s gathering.

12/30 Mama told me that she just wants to go back to the way it was. Egypt in my childhood was a heaven, she tells me. Something in the air is stale and grim—peoples’ spirits seem almost entirely deflated, save for a few I met who insist that this period of silence and stagnation is common to all revolutions, that it’s a transitional period, after which “true change” will start. I don’t know what to think about any of that. What happens to tradition? What persists despite political and economic transformations? Amo Hamada himself told me that Soor el Azbakeya— literally the fence of Azbakeya, one of the oldest book markets in the Arab world—is not what it once was. Perhaps that’s just typical generational thinking: that things will never be the same, that the new generation is distracted by new technology, etc. But there’s also a sense that traditional structures and institutions are losing their aura, their value, as the budding Egyptian youth continues to look forward and to dismiss its past as useless tradition.

This word “generation” seems too uniform, like a glassy surface. My cousin Chaimaa, a

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

filmmaker who’s producing a documentary on teenagers’ aspirations for the future, tells me that the Egyptians she interviewed could not envision a past free from corruption, felool, and fascism. She tells me that among the people she met there are many factions and schisms when it comes to political sentiment: a few think Morsi was unjustly ousted and that the military set him up; some think the revolution was never real to begin with (but those who protested in in Alexandria, Port Said, surely they were not instructed to do so?); others just want the same zeal to return to the Zamalek vs. al Ahly football rivalry; all agree that the mounting trash heaps scattered throughout the city have to go, have no place in the modern world. Still, more than anything, I espy a collective consciousness in the way Chaimaa talks about the narratives she’s tracked down; everyone emphasizes education’s intrinsic importance to the future. Amr, 13, whose brother was stabbed during the revolution and later died from an infection, wants to study medicine one day. Huda, 18, is attending Cairo University next year, where she intends to study humanities. She loves Abbas al-Akkad and Sonollah Ibrahim, and wants to write a book about the revolution one day, hopefully from a better Egypt.

They were all at Tahrir Square. Inside each one of them is a time-lapse: Tahrir busy, Tahrir bloody, Tahrir with graffiti, Tahrir as one Egyptian flag, Tahrir barricaded, Tahrir silenced, Tahrir spectral. +++ There could be trespass. A long day, a good day, but also an eye-opening one.

I went to Khan el Khalili today with the family and I saw some white people, who, in an annoyingly Orientalist way, called this part of Cairo “authentic” Egypt. Always timeless, their descriptions, always ahistorical and essentialized. I bought oudh (agarwood) perfume for Jackson and a pashmina scarf for Katie. I think they are good gifts that I would like to receive.

The streets were crowded on the way there, as they usually are. We stopped at Amr Ibn el ‘Aas mosque, the first one built in Egypt. Despite being continually expanded and repaired over the last thousand plus years (intermittent renovation to add more prayer space, a fire in 1169, an earthquake at the turn of the fourteenth century), it has retained a kind of majestic quality. The structure is gorgeous, with its rectangular architecture and wide prayer hall and golden slatted light that nestles around the open courtyard. I think mosques in Cairo are the only places of respite in what is otherwise a frenetic, sometimes nightmarishly crowded city. There was a special prayer afterward for a funeral. I saw a guy with a nose that looked like a popped balloon, similar to something I’d seen in a documentary about India’s ‘Untouchables.’ Sharif bothered me by being so brazen with his staring.

Mohamed, our driver for the few weeks we’re here, is driving. I listen while he talks with my Dad. We are a people that works only after being hit with a shoe, Mohamed says. We need a strong president, like Sisi, someone to force Egyptians to work, to have some kind of maslahah as to their duties. It’s all military, it’s all military, they gave a false choice, they stole the land, and the Ikhwan are worse than them, the problem is they said: us or the Ikhwan; you don’t know the Ikhwan? Okay we’ll show you the Ikhwan, and they showed us the Ikhwan, they ruined the country. Are you trying to tell me that it’s all a plot? No, it’s more complicated than that. So what you’re trying to tell me is that what’s coming is worse, that we have nothing to look forward to… +++

february 13 2015

Soft light seeps through the linen. We whisper and whisper into the eternal footman’s ear, and tell him to give us a few moments, let us be here. And the specter he sweeps the floor with his striated teeth, attempting to rid the room of the pestilence underneath. Inside or outside Heliopolis the smog persists, the sepia to us like the tone of our gaze. And the incomprehensible nothings of the beggar sitting outside the gates, with his ravine hands and bushy grey brow, on a rug we call vintage, his eyes watery and weak.

Gedo’s sister told me today of her dead brothers and sisters—all nine of them—and what she said sounded like a list of the sahabah (to friends, out there in the shade, don’t you run out of sympathy). I found some fragments jutting from the trash heaps and they turned out to be worth something after all, and what it’s worth for what it’s worth shall be kept a secret, hidden from your eyes. +++ We were walking, Baba, Mohamed, and I, to the copper section of the Khan el Khalili district, to see about some platter grill that keeps meat warm as you’re serving it. I don’t know, Mama wanted it. We came to a shop, but the grills they were selling were too expensive, even by American standards. So we left and walked a kilometer to get back to the car, where Mama, Omar and Sharif were resting. On the way back, Halawa motorcycles—rickety, coughing gas, driven by bearded men with crooked yellow teeth or scrawny teenagers smoking cigarettes—swerved in between us dangerously. The “shops” were cavernous spaces filled with rubble; the men inside them—some of whom were covered from head to toe in a kind of silvery layer—hard at work pounding, crafting, shaping, melting. At Mohamed’s request, I took plenty of pictures and even some videos. Later on, in the car, Baba described what he had just seen to Mama, and he could only do so by describing it as a “lack of order,” “chaos…without design.” I probably unconsciously registered the experience in the same way, but my critical lenses—the “problematizing” tool I acquired after I got to college— quickly rejected such notions as ethnocentric and Eurocentric. It’s entirely exploitative, I think, to feel shocked by the egregious disparity in quality of life; that is, to reduce it to a formula, and a cheap one at that, of affected empathy. There is real struggle over here.

Struggle that I’ll probably never know. What does it mean to represent that destitution, that state of living?

I must be wary of my eyes. My American eyes. Not in this house, not in these narrow streets, not from the top of Cairo tower, not from inside al-Zawyia al-Hamra, Zamalek, Heliopolis, Maadi, or Mohandessin, not from the vestibules of haunted, abandoned mansions, nor from the sleek green windows of contemporary condominiums, not in the smell of Shawerma wafting in the air, not in America, not in Sonollah Ibrahim, Taha Husayn, Ahdaf Soueif, Naguib Mahfouz or Gamal el-Ghitani will I find an authentic frame. The authentic frame does not exist. The truth is a trace.

YOUSEF HILMY B’16 is an aristocratic jinn.

features

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for Sally Ride

by Stefania Gomez illustration by Soyoon Kim

NASA engineers asked Ride, “Is 100 [tampons] the right number?” She would be in space for a week.

–American Prospect, June 19, 2014 [Playtex] triumphed over the more politically connected, engineering-driven Hamilton-Standard to win the Apollo lunar space-suit contract…by drawing on the craft-culture handiwork and expertise of seamstresses, rather than on the hard-line culture of engineering.

–Smithsonian Magazine, August 27th, 2012 Red planet spots hover up here like our space suits, soft as moon dust, twenty-one layered lunar landscapes: Playtex, seamstress, cotton soft as hands.

The moon has no assembly lines or gravity, fatigued bodies or ground control, only tides, gentle pull of maroon tissue.

Up here, everyone sloshing, rupturing in and out of Apollo, everyone swathed, soft, susceptible organs floating.

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literary

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

This Independen week in ts: Bridgew ater, MA’s Independe nt lists Dak a three yea r-old female ota, Amst its Shelter Pet of the W aff, as eek.

Friday, February 13

Thursday, February 19

Monday, Feb 23

Photocomfort

Opensignal

Star Chef Dinner Series: Robert Sisca

7PM // Fete, 103 Dike Street, Providence, RI // $10 Photocomfort, a new project from Justine Bowe, Will Radin, and Gabe Goodman will be making its live debut. The three are all descendents, in some form, from old Providence staple Magic Man.

Indigo Girls with Rhode Island Philharmonic

8PM // Providence Performing Arts Center, 220 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI // $45 Did you know the Indigo Girls are the only artist to have top 40 titles on the Billboard 200 in the ‘80s, ‘90s, ‘00s and ‘10s? I did not. I certainly did not. See them, live, with a big orchestra.

Newport Winter Festival

Ongoing through February 22 // Newport Country // some free, some not Newport is going all in for nine days in February.

There will be multiple performances by tribute bands, a lot of food to eat, and even a bridal show.

Saturday, February 14 Valentine’s Day Dinner

6PM and 9PM // Julians, 318 Broadway Street, Providence, Rhode Island, 02909 // $69 This is a good place to eat, and a good place to eat a lot, and a good place to eat maybe too much to even feel romantic. It’s $69 (ugh) and reservations can be made by calling 401-861-1770

Sunday, February 15 Tribute to A Love Supreme

8PM // Aurora Providence, 276 Westminster Street, Providence, RI 02903 // $5 Tenor saxophonist Leland Baker and his band pay tribute to the 50th anniversary of the Coltrane classic.

Monday, February 16 Beginner Swingdance Lessons

8PM to 11PM // Alumnae Hall, 194 Meeting Street, Providence, RI 02906 // Free The Charleston will be the focus of the 9PM session.

Maybe too late for Valentine’s Day, but it’s never bad to pick up some new moves for your rug-cutting arsenal.

Tuesday, February 17 The Time that Remains Screening

5:30 PM // Watson Institute Joukowski Forum, 111 Thayer Street, Providence, RI 02912 // Free Brown professor Ariella Azoulay curates the “1948 Once a Upon a Palestine” film series, and this installment features Elia Suleiman’s 2009 film The Time that Remains, a historical drama about the foundation of the Israeli state.

Wednesday, February 18 Swans

8PM // The Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway Street, Providence, RI 02909 // $25 in advance, $30 day-of The now-reunited Swans play the Columbus off the heels of last year’s To Be Kind, a noisy, ripping, and seriously acclaimed record. From 1982 through 2015, there’s a lot of material to review before attending.

6PM to 8PM, 9 PM to 12PM // Machines With Magnets, 400 Main Street, Pawtucket, RI 02860 // $8 Opensignal, a Providence-based artist collective concerned, in their words, “with the state of gender and race in experimental electronic-based sound and art practices,” kicks off their 2015 festival with a series of artist talks and performances from Donna Parker, Virusse, and Blevin Blectum. Talks from run from 6 to 8, & the show starts at 9.

7PM // Gracie’s, 194 Washington Street, Providence, RI 02903 // $$$ Chef Robert Sisca of Boston’s Bistro du Midi will be gracing Gracie’s with a menu full of classic French cuisine. Make a reservation by calling 401-272-7811.

Tuesday, Feb 24 I Love Lucy! Live On Stage

Friday, February 20

7PM // Providence Performing Arts Center, 220 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903 // $28 and up

Opening: RISD Faculty Biennial

I love Lucy.

Ongoing through March 22 // RISD Museum, 20 North Main Street, Providence, RI 02903 // $12 for adults, free for students, staff, and faculty of affiliate institutions RISD’s got a lot of hot profs. Their work will be on display for about a month at the RISD Museum, representing RISD’s departments in apparel, textiles, painting, printmaking, ceramics, glass, sculpture, illustration, photography, jewelry & metalsmithing, graphic design, industrial design, architecture, landscape architecture, interior architecture, film, animation, digital media, furniture, and probably more.

Rhode Island Philharmonic Open Rehearsal

5:30 PM // Veterans Memorial Auditorium, 1 Avenue of the Arts, Providence, RI 02903 // $15 Watch as the RI Phil practice pieces by Mozart, Sibelius, and Stravinsky. Seating is general admission, and Larry Rachleff will be conducting. The works may be in progress, but they’ll still probably sound perfect to our non-orchestra-member ears.

George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic 8PM // Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, 79 Washington Street, Providence, RI 02903 // $25 in advance, $30 day-of More living legends come to Providence. Funkadelic have played Lupo’s before, and they left the building with its roof intact. I’m not so sure they can make the same guarantee this time around.

Saturday, Feb 21 Shpongle

7PM Fete, 103 Dike Street, Providence, RI 02909 // $22 in advance, $25 day-of The first time I heard of Shpongle it was in the context of their catchphrase: “Prepare to be Shpongled.”

They’ll bring their stage show, Shpongletron 3.1, to Fete on the 21st. Prepare, I suppose, to be Shpongled.

Sunday, Feb 22 Closing: Circus

RISD Museum, 20 North Main Street, Providence, RI 02903 // $12 for adults, free for students, staff, and faculty of affiliate institutions The RISD Museum’s exhibit compiling visual artifacts from, and work inspired by, the circuses of America and Europe from 1850 to 1960 is coming to a close. See the works by Calder, Matisse, and Chagall before they perform their vanishing act.

Wednesday, Feb 25 Philip Glass: An Evening of Chamber Music 7:30 PM // Veterans Memorial Auditorium, 1 Avenue of the Arts, Providence, RI 02903 // $38 and up Philip Glass makes music based on repetition and variation. Musician Philip Glass repeats and varies musical themes. Philip Glass, a musician, varies and repeats in a musical way. Musically speaking, repetition and variation are the main materials used by Philip Glass, the musician. Based on repetition and variation, the music of Philip Glass is music based on repetition and variation.

Opening: Providence French Film Festival Ongoing through March 3 // Cable Car Cinema, 204 South Main Street, Providence, RI 02903 // $9 general admission, $7 for students

More on the particular screenings in Lists to come.

Passes for 4 screenings are available for $26 (general rate) and $20 (student rate). Purchase advance tickets at cablecarcinema.com

Birdlady, Dan Dodd, Pvramid, Cassie Ramone, Sean Kennedy 8PM // Aurora, 276 Westminster St, Providence // $510 sliding scale A musical wizard, a birdlady, some rock ‘n’ roll fairies, a Vivian Girl and a former Famous Winter gather for a special night of debachery. Come one come all.

Thursday, Feb 26 Opening Night: The Glass Menagerie

7:30 PM // Trinity Repertory Theater, 201 Washington Street, Providence, RI 02903 // $300 The classic Tennessee Williams play comes to the Trinity Rep. Annie Scurria plays Amanda in the production. The play, directed by Brian Mertes, will run through March 28.

Timber Timbre @ Columbus Theater

8PM // The Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway Street, Providence, RI 02909 // $13 in advance / $15 day-of If you’ve seen the video for “Hot Dreams,” you know the kind of dark stupor you’re in for. Their 2014 album of the same name was nominated for the Polaris Prize and is still creeping into my dreams.

the

Monster Jam

2PM // Dunkin Donuts Center, 1 La Salle Square, Providence, RI 02903 // $15 and up

e n d.