The College Hill Independent V.30 N.7

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT V 30 N 07 | APR 3 2015 A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY

VOLUME 30 | ISSUE 7

NEWS 02 Week in Review

dash elhauge, dominique pariso, elias bresnick, & kyle giddon

03 French Exit for the UK sebastian clark

METRO 07 Labor Notes peter makhlouf

11 Schoolhouse Rock erin west

ARTS 05 Googly Eyes

erin prinz-schwartz

SPORTS 09 Red, White & Blue Balls zeve sanderson

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 Jade Donaldson MVP Alexa Terfloth

SCIENCE 13 Tap That

camera ford

FEATURES 04 Sad Heads

patrick mcmenamin

15 Contact High matthew marsico

EPHEMERA 12 C is for... mark benz

LIT 17 Ignition Remix athena washburn

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FROM THE EDITOR S Nothing sadder than soggy pizza, our imperial grandmother insists while scooping the iodine from my speech-bubble intestines.

DR. SEUSS: Psilocybin is not for children DR. DRE: Dr. Phil is dead, Theo. Chill Out. ENNUI: Waaah! Waaah! My baguette—über soggy!

Mind upside down is wind, I screwed that up.

Headlines, headlines, head boards where the lice carve “Tom and Alice Liceberg 4EVER.” JOURNALISTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST: Dudes…

PARTY BUS: Not a single bathroom on this thing...

VIKING LANDLORDS: Wikipedia is the truth, man…

Mid 60s, cloudy, sunny sometimes. How was your spring break down?

DIPLO: This velvet void throbs with a violent undoing.

PLAY-DO: Gloop gloop glurbadee!

DO RE MI: Cue the horns. –GN

18 Clearly So Raw 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 FOOLS

by Dash Elhauge, Dominique Pariso, Elias Bresnick & Kyle Giddon illustration by Layla Ehsan & Pierie Korostoff

Abandon hope, all ye who read!

The scribes have played a ruse; These penmen hath concocted fibs Yet dare to call it news.

So in the triptych cast below Two artifacts doth lie; But if ye closely readest there One truth ye may espy.

O noble reader, canst thou tell The fiction from the rule?

Wilt thou unveil these vile myths Or stay an April Fool? –KG Busted In a 1997 episode of the quietly-eat-your-chicken-nuggets-and-avoidtalking-about-another-day-of-first-grade-with-your-mom television show Arthur, the strikingly well dressed talking rabbit Buster Baxter finds a cat jumping into his arms as he’s walking home with a cone of Rocky Trout ice cream. In the days that follow, Buster becomes a local hero. He’s followed by the press, asked for autographs, receives free gifts, and, according to the official Arthur Wiki, “even has an ice cream named after him!” The fame eventually goes to Buster’s head, but through a bizarre sting operation involving a robotic cat orchestrated by the Brain, Buster learns a valuable lesson about not being a huge dick to your friends. If only catboys were so easy.

That’s right, you heard me: catboys. The Boise Weekly reports that an eight-year-old dressed as a cat is stuck in a tree just outside Boise, Idaho. It was local wheat farmer Dan Senthfield who spotted the boy, while working in his field. “I just saw this kid out there, sitting really high up in the tree, and I thought ‘that can’t be safe.’ It wasn’t until I got closer I realized he was dressed as a cat.”

Though you don’t like to recall it, you have in all likelihood, been to a high school Halloween party, so the scene should be easy to picture: a dark spot on the nose, six lines representing whiskers, a headband with some protruding black fuzziness. If the kid was feeling really ambitious maybe a little black tail. Probably sitting on a branch, swinging his legs and licking his wrist.

Local emergency personnel arrived quickly to the scene. The parents of the boy refused to comment, but neighbors and schoolmates at the scene say the boy has been dressed as a cat for a number of weeks.

“I’m kinda glad he missed our playdate today,” said Jack Esfurth, local 4th grader.

Emergency personnel attempted to coax the boy down from the tree, but the boy responded only with cat noises. Boise Animal Control representative Randy Winston warned that in some cases the use of large machinery scares cats, causing them to jump.

What no one points out, neither in Boise nor in Arthur, is that we seem to be dealing with animal-human hybrids. This isn’t a cat; this is a catboy. No Rocky Trout ice cream required—offer that kid some moose tracks and he’ll climb right down.

Another problem solved, thanks to your friends at The College Hill Independent. You’re welcome, Boise. –DE

APRIL 3 2015

The Birds A story stranger than fiction, but true nonetheless. François Mensonge, a 73-year-old resident of the coastal French town Toulon, hadn’t made it out of the house for a while. Six years to be exact. Single and searching for fulfillment after retiring from his job in ’09, François—a self-described lover of animals—began steadily amassing a collection of pets as extensive as it was exotic.

Until recently, no one was entirely sure exactly which animals were under his charge, but neighbors report having heard everything from the cawings of cockatoos to the screeching of finches spilling out of his house and onto the lamppost-lit city streets. When asked in court last week why he chose to surround himself thus, he explained: “J’avais assez dit dans ma vie. Le silence des animaux était apaisante.” Or, “I had said enough in my life, the silence of animals soothed me.”

But what, you ask, was the story? The whole fiasco began when François called a local pest control service in order to help rid his home of an ever-worsening bug infestation. Following protocol, the unwitting employee sprayed the crevices of his home and left mouse traps for good measure. But François had not asked for mouse traps. To his horror, he awoke the next day to find his prized Andalusian door mouse squirming beneath the cold weight of an unremitting metal hinge, his left paw gruesomely mutilated. The mouse survived, but the incident left François wounded.

In a turn of events the pest control company—Sans Cafards— could only call unexpected, François is currently filing suit for malpractice and animal cruelty, to the tune of a cool €250,000. French lawmakers assert that the case has precedent, citing a recent decision sympathetic to the prosecution made in a trial concerning a mistakenly consumed pet lobster. You can’t make these things up.–EB

Sugar Fix Any teenager worth their salt had at least one solid sneak out plan in place in the event of an uncool parent emergency. Here was mine: I would carefully compose a pillow person in the exact dimensions of my sleeping form. I’d slip a note under said doppelganger telling my parents not to worry, I was not actually being kidnapped, sprinkling in lots of x’s and o’s so they wouldn’t be too mad. I’d sneak down the stairs in socked feet, carefully avoiding the squeaky fifth step. I’d go out the back door, tiptoe across the yard, hop in a friend’s car idling just down the street and be home free. Easy. Yes, I may have watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off one too many times. And no, I never actually had the gumption to put my plan into action.

But last Friday a brazen four-year-old girl in Philadelphia boarded a bus at 3am in search of a slushie. Bedtime be damned. When the call of a late night craving sounds, one must answer and answer with vigor.

Little Annabelle’s sneak out plan? She grabbed her purple raincoat and went out the back door. It seems that sometimes the least laid plans work the best. She then set off into that cold night full of all the fearlessness and pluck that only a tiny human with great thirst can posses.

Sadly, poor Annabelle never reached the spoils of her adventure.

After setting out on foot, she eventually hopped aboard a bus. A well-meaning bus driver, who was probably more impressed than he’d care to admit, immediately alerted the proper authorities and she was returned to her parents unscathed within the hour. Annabelle had spent the time becoming happily acquainted with her fellow bus riders, her legs swinging from her seat, a smile planted on her face. Her parents, for their part, seemed to have aged considerably in the same time span.

One could almost see the grey hair coming in. It should come as no surprise, then, that they are beefing up their household security before the hormones set in. –DP

NEWS

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EXIT RIGHT

by Sebastian Clark illustration by Alexa Terfloth

Soon to be unemployed students of Brown and RISD, you are not alone. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), as many as 73 million young people between the ages of 14 and 28 are actively looking for work worldwide. While your hopes might lie in the supposed resuscitation of the global economy, such an outlook is mistaken. The situation is only set to worsen with just 200 million jobs predicted to be created for 600 million people coming of age in the next decade.

This “ticking timebomb,” as the International Development Committee (IDC) called it in its latest report, is most hazardous in Europe and Africa, where it has become the key issue in almost all recent elections. The phenomenon of widespread youth underemployment has become a defining aspect of political life in many countries around the world. The role of youth in the rise of Syriza in Greece and now Podemos in Spain has been profound, irrevocably changing the political landscape in two countries with youth unemployment rates hovering around 50 percent. In a similar vein, Muhammadu Buhari defeated Goodluck Jonathan in the Nigerian election this week, running on an, albeit less radical, campaign of job creation and anti-corruption. These political parties have achieved much of their respective successes by challenging the rhetoric of a skills gap, declaring, that youth unemployment is a not the fault of the young people themselves but is instead because of an economy unable to employ them. Whether these parties will succeed in what amounts to restructuring the global labor market will be able to do so, however, is another matter.

Youth unemployment is an international affair that can only be tackled at the level of global governance and cooperation. This will be difficult if the aforementioned rhetoric theory of youth not being qualified to work is the basis of policy. When the United Nations met this week to discuss the issue, its Deputy Secretary-General, Jan Eliasson, set the agenda in his opening remarks: “the frustration is understandable and undermines belief in government and national institutions.

We must ensure…relevant education and training for employability.”

Given that almost half of unemployed youth in Europe are higher education graduates—a figure even higher in North Africa—it goes without saying that this approach is misplaced. We have reached an era in which youth unemployment must be seen as a direct result of policy and its negative connotations de-stigmatized. It is also time that the value of idleness—as a petri dish for creativity and its productivity in cultural terms—be acknowledged by government.

It is participation in this global endeavor for economic reform that the British people—taking inspiration from Greece and Nigeria—must demand of its next government in the May 7th election. The irony is that, like never before in its modern history, the UK is on the precipice

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of an exit from world affairs. Withdrawal from the European Union has never seemed so likely and is, indeed, the issue being discussed alongside unemployment. In spite of numerous reports finding otherwise, a myth persists that British jobs are being taken by foreigners flocking in from within the union, and that the country’s role in decision-making has been vastly diminished. Moreover, there is reason to believe that political forces have ensured the continued dissemination of such a myth of ‘job-stealing immigrants.’ This week, a cross-party group found that a comprehensive government investigation of the issue— which cleared the European Union of the charge of interference in UK domestic policy-making—was buried by Tory ministers for not aligning with the conservative party’s views.

The origins of the myth of a demographic and political ‘threat’ posed by the EU, however, lie with the UK Independence Party (UKIP). UKIP’s first election poster, unveiled Monday, claims that “IMMIGRATION IS THREE TIMES HIGHER THAN THE TORIES PROMISED,” plastered above three escalators rising up and over the White Cliffs of Dover. David Cameron, strong-armed into a sympathetic stance by the far-right contingent of the Tory party that is threatening to join UKIP, has also said that a referendum is required to avoid sleepwalking into “an accidental exit” from the EU. It is perhaps of no surprise that the Tory electoral campaign has failed to arouse any genuine excitement among voters when another of its election promises is to force unemployed young people to complete unpaid community service in order to receive public benefits. Alongside the unspecified £12 billion cuts to public spending that another Tory, or Tory-led coalition, government would bring, and in the absence of demand for employment, the government will now commit youth to bearing the brunt of deficit reduction efforts. The idea of making people work for benefits is supported by the world’s leading economists, from Joseph Stiglitz to Min Zhu, who are in agreement that the greatest restraints on global employment is insufficient aggregate demand.

What more conservative Tories are considering, and what UKIP is actually proposing—leaving the EU and withdrawing from international econonimc commitments—may only add to economic injustice against young people both abroad and in the UK. In contrast, Mary Creagh, the shadow secretary of state for international development, said: “A Labour government will reverse this government’s ideological funding cut to the [United Nations' International Labour Organization] to stamp out slavery in supply chains… and we will increase UK spending on health and education services in the poorest countries to create decent jobs.” Although Labour’s stance on austerity is muddled, Creagh’s statement would make sense in light of last fall’s Labour campaign against Scottish independence. During the campaign Gordon Brown declared in an Op-Ed in Mirror, “There is no place in the world where four nations share the same civil, political, social and economic rights—from the right to our NHS, to help when unemployed—as we Scots, English, Welsh and Northern Irish do.”

Only two and half years on from the London Olympics, with which came a spectacular renewal of British sense of self-worth on the global stage, there has been an equally spectacular reversal. The disappearance of British willingness to dabble in global affairs, many would argue, is a century overdue, but here there is a lurking danger.

Abandoning the world outside its borders won’t save the UK from its domestic unemployment woes. And the small island country certainly doesn’t match up to the scale of the problem of youth un- and underemployment.

SEBASTIAN CLARK B'16 is a petri dish for creativity.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

APRIL 3 2015

FEATURES

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COMIC RELIEF A conversation with Providence Comic Consortium’s Walker Mettling

by Erin Prinz-Schwartz illustration by Devyn Park Providence is a great city for certain things—coffee milk, noise music, gruesome bike vs. pothole accidents, and notably, indie comics and zines. This weekend, the Rhode Island Independent Publishing Expo (RIPE) took place at Providence Public Library on Washington Street.

Three sunny rooms were packed with comic artists selling books all Saturday and Sunday afternoon, punctuated by talks on everything from creativity to political art to the predictive abilities of scifi. Walking around the expo was exciting, albeit overwhelming: comic book covers were teeming with robo-rabbits, neon entrails, future city skylines, independent wolf-girls. Some were drawn with clean, minimal linework, some in dense, sketchy ink, purposefully messy scrawls; in watercolor, black pen; neon marker; photocopied, digitally painted. There were a lot of visitors browsing tables, and there were also a lot of exhibitors.

The comics scene in Providence is doing well.

Comic art in Providence has a surprising group of contributors—kids at community libraries. The Providence Comics Consortium (PCC) is a group that provides after-school programming to kids by teaching them how to produce their own comics. But it only takes a quick flip through one of PCC’s publications to understand that this is not an average library class. Almost nothing is off-limits, and it seems like the kids benefit from it. Their stories are usually hilarious, and occasionally, surprisingly moving and sad. It was represented by a table at the expo that featured a gumball machine full of surreal tchotchkes (like googly eyes on a razor blade, not for children under the age of 13).

I spoke to Walker Mettling, a co-founder of Providence Comics Consortium, next to a wall rack full of comics at Ada Books on the West Side. Mettling also organized a show of Comic Consortium work and other comic-related arts at 186 Carpenter in January that was loosely inspired by the 1980s Garbage Pail Kids trading cards and their spinoff cult film. Throughout the interview, Mettling kept running into the printing studio in the back to grab a book either relevant to a point he was making or written by an author he had just referenced. By the end of the interview, I had a tall, colorful stack of them on the arm of my chair.

The College Hill Independent: What is the Providence Comics Consortium? How was it started?

Walker Mettling: The Providence Comics Consortium started in October of 2010. It was initially the Providence Community Library, they tapped me and Andrew Esche… do you know about the break between the libraries in town? {I did: in 2009, the City of Providence ran out of funding for the Providence Public Libraries (PPL), in operation since 1871. All nine neighborhood branches were going to be closed before a group of volunteers created the nonprofit Providence Community Libraries (PCL) to maintain them. Today, the city-funded Providence Public Library manages the historic library downtown, where RIPE was held, and the Providence Community Library network runs the rest of the city’s branches. Roughly two-thirds of PCL’s budget comes from the city.} The Comics Consortium started right after the Providence Community Library sprouted up, and they wanted to do more programming with less money. They wanted to do a comics class, and the idea was to use it as a back door to literacy and to get kids interested in books. I think our interest was in comics being a print medium, and actually making books—that the kids would make books, and that the books would live in the libraries. And my long-term creative and curatorial practice has always been about putting different groups of people together, so giving adult cartoonists assignments to work with the kids

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has been part of it since the beginning.

The way artist Mickey Zacchilli describes the role of adults in the Comics Consortium is “adult working cartoonists doing fan-fiction of the characters that the kids invent.” I wasn’t sure about that at first, but I think I’m really into that as a description now.

So we started with community libraries, then branched out. We were at Foo Fest last year and ran an advice booth via pneumatic tube. I think we dispensed 250-something pieces of advice.

I almost asked for a piece of advice from the PCC at Foo Fest, but the line was too long. This was the setup: people at street level write questions on a sheet, then stick it up a pneumatic tube that rises three stories to the top floor of AS220. There, Comic Consortium child cartoonists quickly draw an answer to the question and shoot it back down, where it’s posted on a corkboard for everyone to see.

The Indy: What are some of the other projects you’ve done?

WM: A couple years ago, the DOT wanted us to do some books about seatbelt safety. I wasn’t sure, then I talked to the kids and they were like, “yeah!” So we did three little books, then a bigger anthology. A bunch of kids had written raps, and the library asked us to put them in the book, but we didn’t want there to be big text blocks. So we had dinosaurs rapping, and giant gorillas, rapping about “seatbelt, seatbelt, put it on.” There was actually a concert where they performed all their raps, and a lot of books got handed out.

Right now I’m at the Mount Pleasant Library, and we’re making life-size sculptures of heinous car accidents that will be in the library.

The plan at this point is to have motion sensors in them so that when patrons get up close, the sculptures scream out and talk about not wearing their seatbelt. We’re gonna have a car, then we’re gonna have this minotaur, with his guts trailing out, and the nerve holding onto his eye hanging out of his head. There’s weird stuff like that.

We were also in a Creative Time show, in a touring art show called Living as Form. We made a book for the show, The Math Warriors, about a math vigilante gang. We were between WikiLeaks and Ai Weiwei in that show, which was weird. And there was another group there that did stuff with kids about economic literacy. We actually stole the idea of the pneumatic tube at Foo Fest from them. Their setup was, you talk to a banker lady sitting at a desk, where you would ask for financial advice. Then she would shoot the questions through the wall, where there was a panel of kids who would answer financial questions and then shoot them back, and they would get posted.

The Indy: Can you talk a little about Collect ’Em All!, the Garbage Pail Kids exhibit at 186 Carpenter?

WM: The genesis of the carpenter show involved Jori Ketten [cofounder of 186 Carpenter] and a mutual friend of ours, Casey Coleman. Casey’s brother found a huge cache of Garbage Pail Kids trading cards in the trash in New Orleans. Casey used to live in town, and there was confusion about who he left the Garbage Pail Kids to when he left: me or Jori. From the beginning, she was like, “I want to do a show with all the Garbage Pail Kids in it.” And I don’t think I was the only one who was skeptical about that, but after a while, I said, “You haven’t

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

done a show yet with those Garbage Pail Kids that Casey left me.” And she said, “I’ll give you the doubles, but then you have to help with the show.”

The Indy: So the show was created to resolve this dispute, basically.

WM: Well, it was year ago that we had that conversation, and I said I couldn’t do the show until January. We decided to riff off of these trading cards and make some new cards, and we’d put up all the books that the Comics Consortium made. And other people just got involved through us mentioning it. Like Jacob Brendon, he used to run a junk store in Worcester. He made all the toys in the case.

At the Exhibit, you could buy a pack of trading cards that were created for the exhibit. (I got Living Baby Made of Cow Meat, Mateo the Great, and Taco Bear.) There were also Frankenstein-esque homemade toys, photo albums full of obscure trading cards, watercolor illustrations, a collection of masks of 1980s pop culture characters on the wall, sheets of uncut trading cards, and of course, the highly contested Garbage Pail Kids card collection.

The big book of trading cards and the MAD Magazine cards that were uncut on the wall, those were Josh Gravel. He runs the Arkham Film Society. They play weird old B movies, 16 millimeter, and horror.

He’s a big film collector, so in the middle of January he had a night where he put together a video. He always overdoes it a bit, it’s kind of like going to a noise show where there’s a little bit of endurance involved… he put together a 90 minute video answer to all the stuff we had up there.

In terms of doing the trading cards, adults and kids would submit linework, and I plopped those into a template for the black layer of cards and colored all of them as a sheet and did the color separations by hand. We had a party where we packed all the cards, and put the pieces of gum in. There was another crew making all the stuff for the gumball machine. There were a bunch of kids there on the night of the Josh Gravel program, but there were razor blades with googly eyes in the gumball machine. We were on the edge of our seat watching what the kids got, but they just got, like, slime with a plastic cat head in it or something.

The Indy: Yeah, I guess it’s good that no kids got razor blades.

WM: But there’s also a crazy paradigm shift that would produce. Like, “what?! You can put googly eyes on a razor blade and then put it in this machine?!” And I think that’s what a lot of this is trying to do, in a way.

Having just a miniscule amount of danger involved is really good.

The Indy: You realize that you can play with things you’re not supposed to play with.

WM: Right, and in terms of the Comic Consortium books… the book that’s been by far the most controversial is a collection of prose stories called The Baboon, the Banana Dog and Other Stories. But it was interesting, in terms of establishing the lines. Because when it’s a kid’s writing versus their art, where the prose is not filtered through their drawing… adults will project more stuff onto it.

The Indy: What was controversial about it?

WM: Well, there are a bunch of cool things that are controversial about it. I had one parent who was worried about her son talking about the stories we made up in class in public. There were zombie children, for example. There was also the baboon, and I think all of us need to have baboon nightmares at some point. Baboons are terrifying. But one of the stories is about the baboon being harried by airport security. He finds a dead body by the dumpsters, and he strips the corpse and puts on the corpse’s clothes, so that totally makes sense.

But there’s other stuff that didn’t come up. One of the stories is a list of all the rides at a crazy theme park, and one of the rides is for parents—you put your kids on the ride if you want to swap their genders.

A kid wrote this piece called “The One-Page Story of Jimmy-Rhonda,” and it’s about Jimmy-Rhonda’s life after going through this ride. And it’s like, “these are the facts about Jimmy-Rhonda…” it’s this weird, trippy gender-bendy story.

The story of Jimmy-Rhonda is very short. Reproduced from the book, here are the facts: “1) She liked the gremlins. 2) She had a hamster. 3) His name was DAME. 4) She had a potato tattoo. 5) She loves chicken.”

I told the mom of the kid who was uncomfortable that I totally understand having those feelings, and if you don’t think he’s ready, bring him back in a year. And she asked if we were going to continue with these types of themes. But the kids are driving it. I do have fixed boundaries, but it’s not like I’m going to censor them if they cross my lines—we’ll just have conversations about it. I think it’s important for them to cross lines and to have weird-ass conversations about it.

I just finished doing a class at a Montessori school, and doing classes in school is totally different. There’s a sheen across what they’ll even allow themselves to think when they’re at school. But when you’re a kid who’s just at the library, it’s kind of like summer camp. It’s not as sterile as being in school, where you have to be careful about what you’re thinking. And I think that’s the thing with the stories that the parents had trouble with. You can certainly write stories and give characters situations that force them to make bad decisions. And you can write characters who are just doing bad things.

So I wrote an introduction about that, and the kids wrote an introduction from their perspective. And Brian Evanson came to speak— he’s the head of Literary Arts at Brown, and he basically got kicked out of Utah for his first book. He got kicked out of the Latter-day Saints Church, and lost his job at Brigham Young. And we talked about that; images are crazy like that. You watch weird Italian zombie movies too young and you’re sleeping with the light on until you’re fifteen. And you can also write something, and you get run out of town. So Bryan Evanston wrote a foreword to that book, too.

ERIN PRINZ-SCHWARTZ B’15 wants the PCC to make life-sized sculptures of the heinous bike vs. pothole accidents that she’s gotten into.

APRIL 3 2015

ARTS

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LABORING FOR DEMOCRACY On the minimum wage in Rhode Island

by Peter Makhlouf illustration by Teri Minogue

Rhode Island has an NRA problem. And it has nothing to do with guns.

Last June, the Rhode Island legislature passed a short, one-sentence amendment to the state budget. It stated that no municipality in the state of Rhode Island could mandate a higher minimum wage than the state’s hourly rate. One of the biggest supporters for this amendment was the National Restaurant Association (NRA), who have been lobbying for pre-emptive measures such as these all over the country. They are just one part of Rhode Island’s Hospitality Association (RIHA), which is also composed of the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA). RIHA’s webpage proudly congratulates states across the country that have passed these pre-emptive measures—measures that RIHA has fought tirelessly to put in place. Both the AHLA and the NRA, often in tandem, have campaigned nationwide to put a halt to minimum wage increases through PACs and independently commissioned reports.

Typically conservative states such as Oklahoma and Kansas have passed these pre-emption laws, a move to be expected from right-leaning legislatures. The fact that Rhode Island’s overwhelmingly Democratic General Assembly spearheaded this amendment is puzzling— how could such a measure pass in The Ocean State?

To those unacquainted with Rhode Island politics, RI’s Democratic elected officials hold a peculiar position. Despite being in the heart of liberal bastion that is the Northeast, the Democrats in Rhode Island are pro-life, they get funding from the NRA—the other NRA— and they consistently advocate for and lie about tax cuts for Rhode Island’s wealthiest. Further, many commentators quickly pointed to the connections between supposedly liberal politicians serving in the state General Assembly and the constellation of lobbyists funding their campaigns: lobbyists such as RIHA. RIHA was quick to mobilize for this bill because of the hotels that it lobbies on behalf of. The bill was intended to thwart any possibility of Providence raising its minimum wage to 15 dollars an hour, a move driven by and for hotel workers at two specific hotels: the Providence Renaissance and the Providence Hilton. Both hotels are owned by the Procaccianti Group, a real estate and investment corporation worth several billion dollars, headquartered in Cranston. And without fail, the Procaccianti Group and all their relevant properties are members of the RIHA. In 2014, RIHA paid two lobbyists nearly $2,100 a month to fight against wage increases and for this statewide preemption. A review of the 2014 Rhode Island lobbying records by the Independent revealed that these lobbyists opposed bills ranging from an increase in the minimum wage (back when the battle was for nine dollars), to bettering workplace safety, to fining employers for tip/wage theft. Both of these lobbyists had connections to the Northern Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce (NRICC), an organization that boasts proudly of their opposition to minimum wage legislation on their website. The NRICC is part of a series of Chambers of Commerce that have worked tirelessly throughout the nation to stop any increase.

The Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce funded two different lobbyists to the tune of $75,000 each last year. Those two lobbyists donated to the campaign of Nick Mattiello, the Democratic Speaker of the House. Mattiello was the one who slipped the minimum wage amendment into the budget knowing that attempting to pass it as a bill would draw too much public attention and would require serious

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debate within the General Assembly. By the time the budget was up to vote, it was a massive document with six months of momentum behind it. Mattiello also received direct donations, aside from the lobbyists, from both the Chamber of Commerce and the RIHA Political Action Committee.

Mattiello’s quick thinking in the eleventh hour guaranteed the passage of the amendment without any opposition. But the initial bill and the push for this legislation in the first place came from another Democratic senator: Representative Raymond Gallison, who was appointed to chair the House Finance Committee by Mattiello. The bill was nearly identical to many others across the country who passed similar preemption laws. The legislation was modeled upon a framework provided by ALEC: the American Legislative Executive Council, a rightwing organization bringing together conservative politicians and private sector representatives. They have provided legislative frameworks such as these for a range of issues from illegal immigration to voter ID laws.

They have also been investigated in the past for suspicious lobbying activity. According to the National Employment Law Project, Democratic legislators in Rhode Island introduced three bills, all based off ALECaffiliated frameworks, all part of ALEC’s wage suppression agenda. And it does not stop there. Media has time and time again cited the opinion of the “Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity,” a free-market think tank that has commented on the dangers of a higher minimum wage. The Center for Media and Democracy has discovered several ties between the Center for Freedom and Prosperity and ALEC. On the same night that the state House of Representatives approved the budget with the crippling amendment, another vote was being held across town. The Providence City Council was deciding whether to approve a referendum on the November ballot for a 15 dollar per hour minimum wage at Providence hotels. The illusion presented, in media coverage of the referendum, was that the issue was more complex and divisive than it may appear. However, the reality was that Providence voters were overwhelmingly in support of the measure by a 3-1 margin. Sixty-six percent of voters said they would support a proposed increase for hotel workers, in a poll conducted shortly before the legislature’s preemption measure. Not only that, but when the City Council had held a public hearing on the matter, 22 community members spoke in support of a higher wage, while only five spoke against.

All five speaking against were hotel owners or industry lobbyists, all white men.

A few hours after the House passed the budget and thwarted any possible increase in Providence, the Providence City Council approved the referendum in a symbolic act. The choice of a referendum—as opposed to an ordinance—was itself also significant. The idea in part was to put the power in the hands of the voters. This was the slogan of the hotel minimum wage campaign from the outset: “let our neighbors vote to give us a raise.” The campaign was an exercise in democracy and solidarity and more than just economics. This approach was starkly different from Democratic Mayor Taveras’s who called for an “economic impact study” to decide the fate of hotel workers. At the same time, organizers were insistent that economics indeed were on the side of the workers, who could contribute those additional wages to local business.

Power had to come from local communities; Democratic support for workers was nowhere to be found. Not only that, but activists reported that the AFL-CIO and the Teachers’ Union—the two unions most closely aligned to the Democratic GA—had both expressed opposition to the fifteen dollar minimum wage, privileging political alliances

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

over worker solidarity. Time and time again, so far as the Democrats in power were concerned, workers would have to look elsewhere for support. House spokesman Larry Berman confirmed that the amendment was passed specifically to ensure that Providence could not raise hotel workers’ wages. Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza, a Democrat who promised to fight the state imposition during his campaign, has already been equivocal when asked if he would follow up on the promise.

When asked if he would seek to have the GA repeal the amendment he said, “I mean, we’ll see...we’ll have our priorities.”

With support from politicians absent, workers took matters into their own hands. On June 16, the day after the Senate passed the budget, three hotel workers along with a Central Falls city councilwoman all took part in a weeklong hunger strike demanding that then-Governor Lincoln Chafee veto the budget. All those taking part in the hunger strike were women, and all of them women of color. Overwhelmingly, this has been a campaign by working women for working women.

Santa Brito, one of the participants in the hunger strike, made a direct plea to Mayor Taveras at a rally in City Hall: “Please support the working women of Providence.” This again, was part of the democratic empowerment inherent to the campaign. Many women in Providence, forced into these low-paying jobs, are limited in their ability to partake in local politics, union organizing and policy discussions.

Despite their burdensome workloads several have remained steadfast in rallying for a better standard of living. Two in particular, Mary Kay Harris and Carmen Castillo, two middle-class women of color, recently joined the Providence City Council. Castillo is a hotel housekeeper, and was one of the stalwarts of the fifteen-dollar campaign. She, more than anyone, was keyed-in to the trappings of the Democratic illusion: “Every person has their principles,” she said, “but I think they get sacrificed in politics.” Castillo was working forty-hour weeks in the Westin hotel while campaigning for office and rallying for the minimum wage campaign; she continues (though the hotel has changed its name to Omni) to this day.

Housekeeping staff make up the majority of hotel workers, and nearly all of these staff members are women. The wage gap between men and women in Rhode Island is steep, especially for women of color. Women on average make 85 cents for every dollar their male counterparts make. Latina women are primarily the ones taking these hotel jobs and they make an astonishing 44 cents on the dollar compared to their white male counterparts. The call from organizers has been clear: support working women over big business. The National Association for Women in Rhode Island echoed this call during a recent open session in front of the House Labor Committee.

Where the fight for a higher minimum wage goes from here is yet to be seen. Governor Raimondo recently held a press conference urging that the legislature raise the rate to $10.10 an hour, but she was ambivalent as to whether it stops there. On the whole however, she has offered a glimpse of promise, declaring even back during her campaign that attempting to suppress minimum wages was part of the “cookie-cutter Republican economic theory that doesn’t work.”

The push for a municipal wage of fifteen dollars has been thwarted by the preemption measure and the only hope now is reform at the state level. The biggest campaign currently underway is about the subminimum wage of $2.89 guaranteed to tipped workers before gratuities are added. They are about seventy percent women and suffer from even lower, unsustainable wages. ROC United, a coalition of restaurant workers and customers among others made their presence known at Raimondo’s press conference. They made it clear that making ends meet is only one concern for workers making a subminimum wage. In an industry that is composed of 70 percent women, the need to work for tips has led to the highest rate of sexual harassment out of any industry. Also, tipped workers are highly susceptible to wage theft by their employers, a practice the state is lax in patrolling and that ROC United is quick to highlight. The theft is endemic, and with a

APRIL 3 2015

profound gap between sub- and standard minimum wages, some employees are left working for pennies compared to what they are owed.

There has been no change to the subminimum wage in over 20 years and some General Assembly members have introduced legislation in the hope of gradually increasing it to equal the minimum wage within the next few years. In any case, it is still a far off prospect. Wherever workers and organizers decide to take the fight from here, one thing is for certain: the Democratic legislature is not the place to turn.

PETER MAKHLOUF B’16 has nothing to do with guns.

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The court is its typical 94 feet long by 50 feet wide; the hoop stands ten feet tall; five from each team play at a time. Everything looks the same but the ball. Rather than eight leather panels of burnt orange, the basketball on the court tonight looks like Fourth of July paraphernalia—two panels of red, four of white, two of blue. When shot, the backspin blends the colors into an arcing blur of Americana.

On March 22, playing with the iconic multicolored ball of the American Basketball Association (ABA), the Providence Sky Chiefs beat the Baltimore Hawks in front of a mostly full crowd at Brown University’s Pizzitola Center. With the 107-100 overtime win, the Sky Chiefs claimed the Regional Championship, capping off a successful inaugural season.

Jamal Wilson, a 6’ 5” guard and former standout for the University of Rhode Island (URI), led the Sky Chiefs with 33 points. “It’s a great opportunity being on the team,” Wilson told the Independent before practice earlier that week. Although Wilson enjoyed his time playing professionally in four countries—Greece, Germany, Latvia, and China— he prefers to be back in the community in which he attended college. “There are a lot of familiar faces,” he said, smiling and looking up at the 6’10” center Jason Francis and 6’ 9” forward Orion Outerbridge, who stand on either side. Francis and Outerbridge, both teammates of Wilson’s at URI, echoed his enthusiasm about being able to play professionally in Providence. “I got hurt my junior year,” Francis said. “I needed to do physical therapy in the area. The Sky Chiefs are a great opportunity to continue my basketball career.”

This seems to be the word of choice for the Sky Chief ’s first ABA season—opportunity. For players looking to play professionally over the past couple of decades, there have been three options: the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Basketball Development League (NBDL), and basketball leagues in countries scattered around the world. Given that there are only 720 available spots on NBA and NBDL rosters, most are forced to look internationally. But the network of hundreds of franchises across dozens of countries makes the process of finding a team difficult. Even if players make a roster, many complain of trouble adjusting to new cultures, of short-term contracts that don’t offer much job security, and of little legal recourse if teams renege on promises. The ABA offers a compelling alternative. As the Sky Chief ’s General Manager Antonio Lopes explained to the Independent, the ABA allows players to stay close to family and friends while making money “doing what they love to do.”

Last summer, Giovanni Feroce—a former Rhode Island State Senator and ex-CEO of Alex and Ani—founded the Sky Chiefs. The announcement came shortly after the Providence Anchors, another local ABA franchise, folded without playing a single game; according to ABA CEO Ron Tilley, “[the team] didn’t get going because of its inability to follow the high level of standards I’ve set for the league.” Now the CEO of Benrus, a “lifestyle brand” headquartered in Fox Point, Feroce renamed the team after the company’s eponymous watch. In the October press conference announcing the start of the season, he held up the timepiece. “I’m going to be selling Sky Chief, Sky Chief, Sky Chief,” he said to the group of reporters gathered at the Benrus office, unclear whether he was referencing the watch, the basketball team, or both. A successful ABA franchise would not only offer

UP IN THE AIR

by Zeve Sanderson illustration by Pierie Korostoff & Nick Bentel Feroce potential revenue from ticket sales, merchandise, and broadcasting rights, but also 13 dribbling, shooting, and dunking advertisements in arenas across the country.

For the state, the team is peddling the usual buffet of promises that accompany the introduction of a sports franchise: civic pride, an influx of money, and job creation.

Then-mayor Angel Taveras said at the Sky Chief ’s October press conference, “We’re very excited for this opportunity. Not only is this good for the morale of our state, but it’ll also bring positive attention to our state. It will bring visitors to our state, and that’s something that we need.” Rhode Islanders have historically trekked north to Boston for professional basketball, but a successful run for the Sky Chiefs could keep their fandom and accompanying expenditures local. Feroce also has plans to bring ABA tournaments to Providence, which would hopefully fulfill Taveras’ prophecy of increased tourism, and is considering partially renovating the West Warwick Civic Center to use for practices and games.

“Giovanni is building a business, which will add jobs to the community,” Lopes said.

“Everything he does, he does big.”

It sounds great: an outlet for local talent to play professionally, national marketing for a Providence-based company, and the economic and social uplift of a successful sports team. But as the Sky Chiefs look to become an established franchise, their success may not depend on their on-court play, but rather on the dynamics of a league that has long been built on unfulfilled opportunity. +++ Founded in 1967, the ABA sought to disrupt the NBA’s basketball monopoly. Drawing inspiration from the American Football League, which successfully challenged the established National Football League, the ABA’s model was innovative. For owners, a franchise could be bought for a mere $5,000. For players nearing the end of their careers, it offered higher paying contracts than those of the NBA; for young players, it assured them playing time. But, most importantly, the ABA provided fans with a unique spectating experience.

It aimed to separate itself from the NBA with a faster style of play, the introduction of the three point line, the creation of the slam dunk competition well before the NBA’s own version, and, of course, the multicolored ball.

The narrator of the HBO Documentary “Longshots–The Life & Times of the American Basketball Association” described the league’s early years as “Glorified street ball.

The red, white, and blue ball was viewed as a joke. The three point shot was viewed as a gimmick.” With many basketball fans considering the renegade league as mere spectacle, the first seasons were met with tepid response. Photographs of games show more people at the scorer’s table and on the benches than in the stands. In his contract with the Memphis Pros, Johnny Newman received 5,000 tickets a game and complained of being unable to give them away.

The league, however, continued spending more money to lure players away from the NBA—like Julius Erving, Connie Hawkins, and George Gervin—and ABA teams began beating their more established brethren in exhibition games. They even persuaded the NBA’s four best referees to jump leagues by offering higher salaries and more benefits.

With talented rosters and flashy gameplay, the ABA started filling arenas. But the league’s real success came from its expansion into untapped markets. Franchises were founded in smaller cities like Salt Lake City and San Antonio and in cities south of Washington D.C., places in which the NBA had shown little interest.

Even with an enlarged fan base and a growing network of teams, though, ABA

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franchises remained unprofitable because of their inability to attract television networks and radio stations. “The ABA was…the invisible league. If you didn’t buy a ticket, chances are you didn’t see us play,” said one former player in the documentary. With increasing popularity but without financial stability, the ABA merged with the NBA in 1976.

Almost two decades later, in 1999, Dick Tinkham (one of the ABA’s founders in 1967) and Joe Newman (an advertising executive) re-founded the ABA, though without any formal relationship to its namesake organization. Central to the league’s rebirth has been its focus on a “fan-pleasing entertainment experience.” Like the introduction of the three point shot, the new league’s emphasis on gameplay has resulted in a number of new rules aimed at increasing scoring and showcasing star players. Under a rule ambiguously named “3-D,” if an offensive team loses possession before crossing half court, the defensive team gets one extra point for a made basket on its next possession. Another rule allows a player to remain in the game after his sixth foul, though each additional foul by that player gives the opposing team an extra free throw. The former encourages risky defense, which results in increased scoring; the latter prevents star players from fouling out.

Like the ABA of the 70s, this new iteration is attempting to carve out a niche in the basketball landscape by offering faster gameplay, by expanding into markets without NBA teams, and by offering talented players an opportunity to play professionally. Today, 76 teams are broken up into 11 geographic regions, but according to Jamal Wilson, there is little parity, with “only 25 competitive teams.” “The others are really just out there to play,” he said, recalling games that were played in front of near-empty gyms.

Lopes said this talent disparity is the result of unequal resources among ownership groups. “To avoid the lack of profitability of the ABA in the past,” the league’s website reads, “[Tinkham and Newman] decided to improve the business model by making it more affordable to own a team by reducing the operating costs, cost of travel and venues.” Many owners have treated their franchises as amateur side projects, refusing to invest in personnel, training, and facilities; others, like Feroce, have spent significant resources offering higher salaries, hiring professional coaching staffs, and constructing arenas. The outcome has been a number of games almost unwatchable in their one-sidedness. In December, the Sky Chiefs beat the San Diego Surf by 33 points. The Shreveport Mavericks, who have won 88 straight games and the last three ABA championships, had a stretch in which their average margin of victory was more than 50 points.

According to Lopes, “in order to enhance the brand, integrity, and loyalty of the league, there needs to be financially strong teams.” Although the league was founded on an affordable ownership model, Lopes said that the vetting process for potential owners should be more stringent, which would inevitably decrease the number of teams “to a more sustainable level.” With more financial resources, the remaining teams would be able to recruit more talented players. So the logic goes: better players mean higher quality basketball, which attracts more fans; more fans give organizations more money, and the cycle starts again.

But even if this causal sequence unfolds as planned, the league may be plagued by the same problem as its ancestor: invisibility. Most professional sports franchises rely on television contracts to turn a profit, and as Feroce made clear at the October press conference, “We’re here to make money, don’t ever get confused. This team, this product, the players, this is a livelihood for a lot of people. That’s ultimately what’s driving this.” But where will this money come from? The thirty NBA teams, for example, collectively earn nearly $2 billion a year from their local and national broadcasting deals. This year, ESPN3—the network’s online station—has streamed a few ABA games, although the Sky Chiefs games have yet to be aired. It’s unlikely that national networks would be interested in regularly broadcasting games from Shreveport and Providence, and even local television contracts may be difficult to acquire, as the schedule is already oversaturated with regional NBA and college basketball games.

Deb Weinreich, vice president of communications for the Sky Chiefs, told the Independent that attracting better players will be integral to the league’s success. “Our main goal is to fill the arena by putting the best product out on the floor,” she said. It makes sense.

The past ABA has provided a blueprint for how an upstart league can sell tickets: bring top players to regions without professional basketball teams. Currently, most ABA franchises— even ones with strong financial backers—can’t offer contracts competitive with established international leagues, and many players are forced to work in order to supplement their basketball income. The Sky Chiefs schedule their four or five weekly practices at night so that players can hold nine-to-five jobs. “Soon, we hope to be able to pay enough to allow our team to be full-time basketball players,” Weinreich said.

But this hope could prove to be a catch-22: in order to acquire the money to attract recognizable players, ABA teams will likely need television contracts; in order to appeal to a television audience, ABA teams need to field a roster of recognizable players. Without broadcasting deals, ABA franchises may have to acquire debt in order to offer competitive contracts. Or, as Lopes said, the ABA could increase the financial requirements for owners, reducing the size of the league while ensuring that teams have the resources necessary to put “the best product out on the floor.” But according to the ABA’s official site, a smaller league doesn’t seem to be in its future: “the ABA will continue to grow as it…grows its number of teams.” +++ “It was brought to my attention that the opportunity [to buy the team] was out there,” Feroce said in October. “I did some homework and realized if a first rate product was put together it could sit alongside our other two outstanding pro franchises, the PawSox and the P-Bruins.”

He’s right: both teams have built successful organizations relying heavily on local support, like ticket sales and sponsorships. But the for-us-by-us model might hinder the opportunities—for players who don’t make the NBA or NBDL to play professionally in the states, for Benrus to reach a national audience, for the city to meaningfully increase tourism—from being realized, for each likely requires the league to develop in the way Feroce and his staff envisions.

The Sky Chiefs’ organization has a clear sense of what a successful “product” looks like, and it’s strikingly similar to that of the original ABA: an independent professional league with fast gameplay, high quality players, a national market, and a profitable ownership model. With 76 teams and a league set on expansion, though, it’s unclear when or whether that vision will come to fruition.

Even if it doesn’t, the Sky Chiefs could become a staple for Providence basketball fans—judging by the full stands on March 22, it may already be one. This localism won’t attract college standouts, advertise Benrus’ watch to the masses, or bring fans flocking to Providence. But with professional and college sports making millions off of broadcasting rights, there’s a refreshing stasis in a basketball “product” that must be consumed in the arena itself.

Walking along Westminster on a sunny day last week, I heard the pa-pa-pa of a basketball against the pavement. A boy was across the street, skipping and dribbling. As he emerged from behind a car, the red, white, and blue ball became visible.

ZEVE SANDERSON B’15 is peddling the usual buffet of promises.

APRIL 3 2015

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SEPARATION

BY DESIGN

by Erin West This fall, the Providence Public School Department will open two new specialty high schools with the help of a $3 million grant from the New York-based Carnegie Corporation. The announcement about these two schools follows other recent openings of schools, such as the charter Mayoral Academies. The Carnegie-funded schools, which PPSD is temporarily naming the Opportunity by Design (OBD) schools, have again sparked a reoccurring debate on how Providence students can be most successful.

PPSD Superintendent Susan Lusi is a strong proponent of the OBD schools. In a recent op-ed in The Providence Journal, she wrote that she “looks forward to learning from their successes and sharing their stories as proof points of what is possible in urban education.” The OBD schools promise to incorporate creative teaching practices such as flexible schedules, out-of-the classroom learning, and an emphasis on using technology. Lusi believes in the potential of the OBD schools as places to experiment with learning. Ideally, some of their best practices will eventually be implemented throughout the public school system.

Carole Marshall, a Providence public school teacher for over 20 years, is more skeptical. She wrote in The Providence Journal this February, “Let’s not waste our time on something that’s a proven failure, the school-within-aschool model,” referring to the OBD programs. In order to use its resources more efficiently, PPSD is not creating new buildings for these schools, but is housing them within two already existing high schools: Hope and Mt. Pleasant.

Hope and Mt. Pleasant high schools both struggle with tight budgets, low attendance rates, and below average test scores. Starting this fall, their buildings will be home to Carnegie’s well-funded, creative learning programs. Stark contrasts between fully government-funded public schools and specialty schools that receive private funding, resources, and attention are common in urban districts, but the two types of schools are usually located on separate campuses. This fall, the disparity between resources and attention given to different programs will be a glaring daily reality for all students and faculty in the Hope and Mt. Pleasant buildings.

To put the Carnegie grant in perspective, Providence spends approximately $15,400 per high school student. The $3 million from Carnegie split between the two school’s enrollments over three years would even out to $2,500 extra per student (though the budget does not explicitly allocate the funding per student). This $19,000 total figure stands in contrast to the roughly $13,500 that was spent on each Hope student last year. In essence, with the OBD schools, the school district is choosing to invest more in a small, select group of students, while the majority of students are left on the outside of these special programs and with less resources.

This fall, the Carnegie money will enter a school with a constricting budget and a lack of infrastructure and technology. Sometimes it’s simple things for Gwendolyn Rogers, a current teacher at Hope, that affect her ability to innovate like the faculty of the OBD schools will be able to.

Rogers feels like teachers at Hope are strongly encouraged to be creative and incorporate technology into the classroom, but showing her students the thought-provoking video clips she found is challenging when most of her classrooms do not have projectors or Smart Boards. Besides Smart Boards, she says there are about two reliable copy machines for the over 75 faculty members, and not every classroom even has Wi-Fi. One anonymous Hope senior is unhappy about the Carnegie school and told the Independent, “[Hope] needs an upgrade, not another school going into it.” Instead of spending money on a new school entirely, she said she would rather see dollars going to fix the auditorium ceiling that's falling apart or to the backstage room that remains completely ruined from a fire that happened years ago.

When talking about resources allocated to Hope and Mt. Pleasant students and to OBD students, PPSD Communications Director Christina O’Reilly told the Independent, “There may be a perception of a greater

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difference than there actually is. There is no difference between an OBD student and a Hope student in terms of what kind of resources get put into them except what comes over and above with this grant.” After the next three years, O’Reilly says the spending should roughly even out between OBD and Hope students because “it is in nobody’s interest to funnel a lot of extra money into any one school.” Even after the grant runs out, however, the extra technology and improved infrastructure will certainly stick around for OBD students. “In the end, it doesn’t matter” a teacher at Hope anonymously told the Independent. “If people perceive disparity, the tension and resentment are real.”

It's the prospect of this stark separation and inequality that concerns Marshall, who was a Hope High School teacher when the third floor of the building was home to another school-within-a-school. From the late 80s to the early 2000s, the Essential School operated as a small, resource-rich program for high-achieving students. During her years at Hope, Marshall witnessed the Essential School’s detrimental effect on Hope students’ morale.

She says Hope students felt “envy and anger” every time they realized that they were treated differently from the students upstairs. Marshall says Hope kids began saying they attended the “Unessential School.” Eventually, in response to the conflict, Hope community members including Marshall phased out the Essential School.

Gwendolyn Rogers worries that next fall, Hope students will again feel disregarded. Rogers feels especially uncomfortable with recent conversations surrounding how Carnegie students might be differentiated from Hope kids. PPSD Communications Director Christina O’Reilly explained to the Independent that uniforms are not being considered but that badges or ID cards are possibilities for security purposes and to help administrators and faculty identify students. In whatever form it takes, Rogers told the Independent that “if you’re going to differentiate, you’re going to send implicit messages that different students get different resources and treatment.”

Despite all these concerns, inaugural principal of the OBD in Hope Kerry Tuttlebee believes the relationship between the two schools does not have to be contentious, but rather collaborative. She told the Independent that she sees a “two-way reciprocal relationship with other schools… [in which] they are learning from us and we are learning from them.” She noted that students will share spaces like the cafeteria, gymnasiums, and play on the same athletic teams. She said it is possible they could use some of the Carnegie money to improve these shared spaces, which would benefit both schools. Besides financial spillover, both Tuttlebee and O’Reilly stressed to the Independent that these schools are worth investing in because there will also be spillover of methods and teaching practices. They believe being able to build these schools from the ground up will allow for innovation that would not be possible within an existing school with a long history and tradition of practices. As a result of this freedom, O’Reilly says, “these ideas are going to be brought as broadly as possible across other schools.”

She believes most importantly that “it is not a situation of creating have and have-nots; it’s a situation of creating forerunners and immediate followers.”

But how exactly will the immediate followers feel? While the debate over what is best for students and how these new developments will impact their well-being rages on, what the actual students think may not be so clear. Rogers says she has tried to broach the topic of the OBD in her Hope classroom, but students often shrug their shoulders at it. They say the new school bothers them but they don’t see Carnegie as a dramatic change. The students at Hope see this shake-up coming, but for them, this is the norm.

Placing Carnegie in Hope next year is yet another link in the endless chain of experiments and adjustments that Providence students face. Rogers says it’s possible that “students could experience this and not realize it or be able to articulate it because it feels natural.”

ERIN WEST B'18 is not shrugging her shoulders.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

APRIL 3 2015

EPHEMERA

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THE THIRST AHEAD

by Camera Ford illustration by Casey Friedman

One day in late February, the taps that carry water to São Paolo’s 20 million residents suddenly went dry. The effects were not universal across the entire city; in the following days some areas saw sporadic hourly coverage while others had no running water for days in a row. Although the government tried to keep the public from panicking with promises of new reservoirs to be built, Brazil’s natural disaster monitoring service noted that the city’s main reservoir system could run dry by the end of the year. To most residents, the reality of their situation came as a total shock.

Home to 12 percent of the world’s freshwater supply, Brazil seemed an unlikely place for such a drastic crisis even though it has suffered from high temperatures and lower-than-usual rainfall over the last year. But as the world gears up for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janiero, residents of Brazil’s largest city are reckoning with an unprecedented, but perhaps not surprising, drought.

Large-scale deforestation since the 1980s has increased erosion and runoff and destroyed the wetland that typically stored rainwater for release into reservoirs.

These effects, combined with high temperatures, low rainfall, and mismanagement and overuse of available water sources, have led to the drought that stretches across central and southeast Brazil. Now, a month after the initial shock, scattered rainfall has provided São Paolo’s reservoirs with a small but much-needed boost. But the water levels still hover at 13 percent capacity—far too close to depletion to sustain a large population for long. Water coverage has resumed, although in most areas the water only comes on for a few hours a day or the available amount has been cut almost in half. The government’s poor handling of water resources leading up to and during the drought has convinced many residents to consider moving elsewhere in search of a more stable water supply.

As surreal as it has been for residents and concerned onlookers around the world, São Paolo’s predicament is a test run for how other cities and even nations might handle future water scarcity on a large scale. +++ Closer to home, California is confronting a growing water crisis of its own. In the last month or so, reports of overdrawn reservoirs and nearly empty riverbeds have exploded across state and national news outlets. A NASA satellite monitoring program set up in 2002 has observed a continuous decline in California’s water storage, and groundwater depletion has been happening steadily since the beginning of the 20th century. Now in its fourth year of drought, California has about three years of water left for immediate use if it conserves well. Californians use roughly 150 gallons of water per day, which is low for the United States but more than twice as much as the average for the rest of the world. While the drought is currently in a chronic state, it has been in the making for quite some time.

As with most drought situations, industrial and private use of water has stayed constant or increased while groundwater reservoirs are tapped for water that should be used decades in the future. Much of the increased demand is due to food production. The process of irrigation used in most agricultural operations is wasteful, with a little more than half of the water lost to leaky pipes and evaporation into the air before it actually reaches the crops. This, combined with the fact that about 80 percent of California’s water goes to agriculture, means that most of the water is being lost in ways that renders it impossible for re-use in our lifetimes.

It’s also important to note that even though drought is a problem that is affecting the entire region, low-income communities—which are often made up of immigrants and people of color—are still being hit the hardest. The lawns of sprawling estates in Beverly Hills are still green, but in many small, workingclass towns across California residents have been forced in recent months to rely on emergency bottled water handouts from local churches or come up with the thousands of dollars needed to have a deeper well drilled near their homes. +++ Only 2.5 percent all of earth’s water is freshwater (most of which is frozen into the polar ice caps or melting into the ocean), while about 97.5 percent is the saltwater that makes up the oceans and brackish water bodies like deltas. Rainfall is a key factor in maintaining these precious freshwater supplies, because in many places lower-than-normal rainfall means the area’s reservoir simply won’t have as much water for the months ahead. Over short periods of time rainfall irregulari-

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ties tend to even themselves out. However, it’s when longer-term changes occur that rain scarcity can become a problem.

Aquifers, the most common source of the water that humans use to supply our wells, exemplify the difficulties we face in an increasingly erratic weather and climate system. An aquifer is an underground layer of rock, gravel, sand, or silt that is permeable enough to allow water to pass through. Aquifers are typically supplied through rainwater or melted snow that trickles between the spaces in loose soil or sand at the surface, and down to the rock layers underneath. This water is called groundwater, and tends to fill the spaces between the rocks that make up the aquifer as well as the pores within each individual rock. You can think of an aquifer as a sponge. As it travels into the earth, the water is moved through the rocks because of gravity’s pull and the weight of the water above.

This constant motion results in surprisingly well-filtered water. But, because aquifers are often the result of thousands of years of water accumulation, natural replenishing processes cannot offset our fast-paced consumption in any meaningful way. Once it’s gone, it’s gone for a while.

+++ According to the UN World Water Development Report, over the next 20 years the average supply of water per person will drop by roughly 30 percent. The coming scarcity is due in large part to the combination of low or nonexistent rainfall, warming temperatures, and deforestation or agricultural expansion that further increases water use while decreasing the earth’s ability to replenish.

However, even with regions across the globe facing eventual water scarcity, there are places where peak water consumption—after which water use overtakes replenishment—has yet to happen. In many developing nations, there are areas with sizable water reserves waiting to be tapped because there is no infrastructure in place that can move the water to the people who need it. In Turkana County, a poor, arid region of Northern Kenya that suffers from frequent droughts, only 44 percent of people had access to safe water in 2012. Many were forced to rely on water from a local lake even though the high fluoride levels made it unhealthy for consumption. Then, in late 2012, an exploratory drilling expedition found two previously-unknown aquifers whose combined volume of 250 billion cubic meters could provide Kenya with enough water to last an estimated 70 years. +++ The potential for widespread water shortage or uncertainty might seem bleak, but there are ways to temper future crises and save what water we have left. Currently, the vast majority (on average, 70 percent) of water in agricultural areas like California and the rice-producing regions of China, Cambodia, and India goes to irrigation and livestock care. So, one of the clearest (though perhaps not simplest) ways to address local water resource allocation is to reduce the farming of waterintensive crops, especially in drought-prone regions. For example, it takes almost 5 gallons of water to produce one walnut and 3.3 for one tomato—these among a number of thirsty crops grown in California’s water-poor climate. The situation is similar in places like Rwanda, which produces a large amount of the world’s cocoa beans despite its dry climate. As part of efforts to address these issues, food scientists and biochemists are hard at work engineering ever-more drought-resistant, high-yield crops that can feed our cravings with fewer resources.

The single biggest impact, though, might be made by seriously reducing meat production and consumption. While the Western world is currently the largest market for meat, demand is constantly growing as burgeoning middle classes in developing nations consume more meat more often—often in parts of the world traditionally not used to heavy meat intake. Between the cow’s water needs and the water it takes to grow its feed, your bacon cheeseburger requires much more water than you probably realize: almost 1,500 gallons just for the meat. As of yet this suggestion has remained largely unpopular, especially in the meat-loving US of A. But there might come a day when McDonalds are forced to use veggie burgers or meat substitutes in the beloved quarter-pounder with cheese. Still, regardless of how such lifestyle changes are received by the public, one thing is clear: changes in our collective water supply are here to stay.

CAMERA FORD B’16 is holding out for a McFalafel.

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APRIL 3 2015

SCIENCE □ 14

IN WHICH CONTACT OCCURS

by Matthew Marsico illustration by Alexa Terfloth Samuel R. Delany’s 1975 science-fiction opus Dhalgren takes place in and on the outskirts of Bellona, a mysterious city in the American Midwest. The phones and televisions don’t work there, and the city is, somehow, permanently on fire. Before the book begins, in a sequence of events hinted at but left unexplained (as much in Dhalgren is), something catastrophic happened. The police force, the municipal government, and the majority of citizens have fled, leaving Bellona what some might call lawless.

But as a social entity, the city isn’t as cutthroat or terrifying as the idea of lawlessness might imply. While violence is not uncommon, modes of life forbidden or discouraged by the codes of other American cities flourish. To take one example: our main character, an amnesiac known only as The Kid (or “Kidd,” for a spell) establishes a romantic partnership with a woman named Lanya fairly early in the narrative. But around the book’s halfway point, the couple absorbs a young man named Teddy and becomes a remarkably successful ménage à trois. (There’s a lot of sex in the book, in terms of both amount and variety, which might explain in part why it sold over one million copies in the seventies.)

Questions of urban life and the nature of the city play a part in much of Delany’s most prominent work. (And there’s a lot of it—he wrote his first published novel when he was nineteen, and he wrote and published eight more in the next six years.) A lifelong New Yorker, it might be more accurate to say that Delany has been more specifically concerned with the ways cities can contain and support different kinds of people and modes of life. What would a truly democratic urban life look like? Delany’s writing has always had a political bent—himself black and gay, he wrote his first science-fiction novel when his then-wife, poet Marilyn Hacker, expressed her frustration at the genre’s dearth of compelling female leads. In an essay appended to his novel Trouble on Triton—written and published immediately following Dhalgren—he explains that science-fiction interests him because it expands the realm of what can be meaningfully said. He compares the genre to atonal music or abstract art: when you discard conventional rules, expressive and imaginative possibilities emerge.

Trouble on Triton’s subtitle is “An Ambiguous Heterotopia,” after a concept by French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault. As Foucault writes in his essay “On Other Places,” heterotopias are places, like boarding schools, psychiatric hospitals, and ships, where things which exist in “normal” culture are “simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” That is to say: as in Dhalgren’s Bellona, people and events and things from the world outside the “heterotopia” show up there, too. They just mean something different inside. Trouble on Triton’s largely romantic action is initiated when our main character, Bron, takes a new way home from work, cutting through a section of the city that the police have given up policing towards the end of broader municipal order. In the interest of the performance, they dose him with psychotropic drugs, and he falls in love with the lead actress.

In Triton, the lawless city is on the margins of the city proper;

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but Dhalgren’s Bellona is in the American Midwest, right in the heart of the country. Dhalgren is, in large part, an exploration of this inversion. The resulting urban landscape, while certainly not without its dangers, is less wild than it seems at first, both to readers and to the Kid; it leaves room for entirely different systems of value to emerge. In one memorable subplot, the Kid goes to work cleaning for the Richards, a delusional nuclear family living in an abandoned apartment complex; he quits when he realizes he doesn’t actually need the money they’re paying him, because there is nowhere in Bellona for him to spend it. (And when the Richards’ daughter pushes her brother down an elevator shaft— tellingly, perhaps the book’s single most shocking moment of violence.)

But for all the book’s experiments—and Dhalgren is as formally inventive and experimental as any of the big-name 20th-century postmodern novels—the thematic and narrative backbone of the story is a rather conventional one. In essence, it’s a kunstlerroman, or narrative of an artist’s development. The Kid learns in Bellona that he wants to be a poet; by the end of the book he has written, published, and grown dissatisfied with his first book of poems. The book contains a number of lengthy intellectual conversations with a broad cast of interesting characters, including astronauts, prostitutes, and book publishers; and the Kid changes and grows substantially from the novel’s beginning to its cyclical end. Which is to say that in—and from— the chaos of the city, he has received an education.

Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a 1999 collection and revision of two earlier essays, attempts to describe and explain the major redevelopment, begun in the late 90s, of a single block of New York City’s Times Square. The block (42nd Street, between 7th and 8th Avenue) was home to a wide variety of businesses and people—most significantly, at least for his first essay, a number of pornographic theaters, often screening heterosexual porn, which attracted men seeking gay sex. The book’s first essay is largely devoted to a memoiristic description of how those theaters operated, of the social worlds they constituted and contributed to. Its second was originally conceived as an academic lecture; it pans out from Times Square specifically to look at cities and urban development more broadly.

This second essay, called “…Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red,” can be read as an attempt to more or less systematically understand, towards the ultimate end of shaping policy in the future, what exactly will be lost when the “FortySecond Street Development Project” transforms the block into a space for high-rise office buildings (as it has now). “The primary thesis underlying my several arguments here,” he writes at the opening of the essay, “is that, given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.”

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Explicitly following Jane Jacobs’ study The Death and Life of American Cities Delany describes contact as a “fundamentally urban” kind of encounter: more or less random, between you and the people you happen to be sharing space with. Conversations and interactions between people in the supermarket or on the street, with neighbors or librarians—in an ideal urban setting, this kind of contact is broadly desirable and, more importantly for Delany’s thesis, occurs regularly across classes. (Class, too, he means more broadly than simple socioeconomic standing; an example of cross-class contact he gives later in the essay is an experienced writer meeting an up-and-coming one.) This is why the movie theaters were, if far from perfect or utopian, nevertheless spaces that fostered interclass contact.

He distinguishes contact as a mode of human interaction from networking, which occurs more intentionally and is based on preexisting, shared interests. The example he gives of a networking function is the writers’ workshop. While contact and networking aren’t fully separable, one important difference “is that, in networking situations, the fundamentally competitive relationship between the people gathered in the networking group is far higher than it is in the general population among which contact occurs.”

For example: when riding a public bus, the resource we are there for (space on the bus, in order to get somewhere we need to be) is—barring exceptional crowding—generally not sparse enough to put us into competition with one another. In a writing workshop, on the other hand, everyone is trying to get published. Because of this, he argues, interclass contact is where most useful interaction occurs.

The contemporary liberal-arts university gathers students together, pretty explicitly, in the interest of a kind of networking.

Whatever the resources are that its students are competing for (jobs? an A? …money?), they are generally represented to us as finite, zero-sum. Sometimes they are—A’s on certain kinds of grading curve are; certainly money is. But knowledge, as such, is far closer to the opposite: the more those around me know, the more I know, and vice versa. Because these different kinds of goals—the finite and, for all intents and purposes, the infinite— coexist under the same umbrella of “university education,” the network that is the university creates the illusion in its customers that we need to be competitive with each other. Which, sure, sometimes we do: but we don’t need people in class discussions contributing like class is something to be won. (This happened even in my public high school; the resource, I suppose, was college admission.)

In spite of what sometimes seems its best efforts, Brown University exists within a specific urban context, that of Providence. The university expends a great deal of energy attempting to prevent potentially unwanted contact between students and that context. In campus tours, for example, tour guides speak of the city (“the downtown”) as a resource to be used if desired, not as the situation in which anything that happens at school necessarily also happens. Many of the campus’s ostensibly public resources, like the libraries, require card-swipe access to enter after a certain hour.

And when protestors disrupted New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly’s invited lecture last year, a thread of conservative commentary on campus framed the issue as though unruly Providence citizens were undermining Brown’s ability to pursue free intellectual inquiry. (Many of those instrumental in leading the protest were members of Providence organizations committed to racial and economic justice, such as Direct Action for Rights and Equality. And many, of course, were students.) The understanding that Providence somehow failed Brown itself fails to take into account the fact that the policing and political strategies

APRIL 3 2015

required to preserve Brown’s elite status further undermine the physical and economic safety of many of the city’s already marginalized residents.

But Delany’s thesis goes deeper than this. In Dhalgren, as in Delany’s New York, interclass contact is not merely convenient or pleasant: it is the site of both opportunity and tremendous meaning. He gives a number of mundane, recognizable examples, like throwing out his broken vacuum cleaner only to meet someone in the post office ten minutes later selling his; on the other hand, he describes that he met and befriended his current long-term romantic partner, Dennis Rickett, when Rickett was homeless and selling books.

While, in a number of deeply important senses, the student body of Brown University spans classes, it also serves to create a class of its own, with its own goals and blind spots. And the idea that the university effects a retreat from society in order to pursue its goals is a myth, and a harmful one. Brown is no more separate from its local, national, and global context than other organizations and corporations are, from Planned Parenthood to Goldman Sachs.

So what would it mean to foster interclass contact in a Providence with Brown present? It seems to me it would require a radical revamping of what the university understands its own place in the city to be, and what it considers the aims of its instruction.

What if Brown classes could be taken affordably and for credit by everyone in Rhode Island? Or if university funds being funnelled into fancy dorms and dining halls went instead to open, community-led, Brown-affiliated programs and facilities? Could Brown University open itself up to becoming a site of genuine contact with those with whom we share our city? Whether possible or not, it seems to me necessary. Because why would we assume that only members of our class have something to teach us?

MATTHEW MARSICO B’15 writes book reviews and other things.

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AFTER DARK AT THE TEXACO

by Vhalla Otarod

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holes through rubber, everything sparking little flashes of wrong-color flame: broken-bottle green can see the dirty sidewalk through neon-scorched, cracking up and flaking

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literary

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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