The College Hill Independent V.30 N.8

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT V 30 N 08 | APR 10 2015 A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY

VOLUME 30 | ISSUE 8

NEWS 02 Week in Review

jamie packs & elias bresnick

03 Iran-na Talk About It peter mahklouf

METRO 04 Charter Schooled madeleine matsui

05 Chain Hang Low sarah weiss

ARTS 07 Hot in Here?

max genecov, joshua kurtz, eli pitegoff, erin prinz-schwartz, maya sorabjee

SPORTS 09 Outta tha Pawk tristan rodman

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 MVP Tristan Rodman

FEATURES 13 Ghosts in the Machine

FROM THE EDITOR S

eliza cohen

INTERVIEWS 11 Democracy When? sam samore

TECHNOLOGY 15 Server Farmer lisa borst

EPHEMERA

One May I spent three weeks sitting in an armchair in my family room. I looked through a wall of slide-open glass windows onto a backyard full of green. The grass was green and the oak trees were green and the sky was white-blue without clouds. The forsythia were yellow.

The immobilizer was gray. It wrapped twice around my chest (once under the shoulder, once over) and velcroed my right arm to my left hip. I un-velcroed this arm twice a day to unhinge my elbow, which was in danger of freezing in place. I sat in the armchair because I couldn’t lay down.

I looked out the window because I couldn’t focus on books or TV. I had three metal pins the size of chopsticks holding the bones of my right shoulder (bruise-blue and purple and black) in place. It was 68 degrees and sunny every day. –SW

12 Congratulations noah beckwith

LIT

17 Men, Two

dash elhauge

X

18 Bling Bling layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

Corrections: Last week’s Ephemera page was created by Noah Beckwith, not Mark Benz. And last week’s Literary piece, “After Dark at the Texaco,” was written by Vhalla Otarod, not Athena Washburn. The Indy regrets these errors.

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 SPONSORSHIP

by Jamie Packs & Elias Bresnick

APRIL 10 2015

Whopper of a Wedding

Edge of Yesterday’s Tomorrow

Wedding announcement photos are surely the pinnacle of elegance. Typically set in some idyllic pastoral scene, or perhaps against a timeless white background, the photos serve as a means to express a couples’ love to friends, family, exes. An Illinois couple, however, is changing things up with their recent decision to take their wedding announcement photo in front of America’s (almost) favorite fast food chain, Burger King.

And this decision is paying off big time.

Last week, Burger King announced their support of the wedding between Joel Berger and Ashley King, stating that they would pay for all wedding expenses and give gifts to the couple. Unsurprisingly, the decision has gone viral.

The romance between the pair goes way back. Berger and King, now 24 and 23 years old respectively, met in Kindergarten while growing up in New Berlin, Illinois. The connection between their names, however, wasn’t pointed out until a motivational speaker visited their school in the fifth grade and made a joke about it. Nonetheless, it seems to have stuck.

Hyphenated names may be in vogue these days, but Joel Berger and Ashley King are taking things to the next level.

Berger and King, however, are not outwardly making their decision based on any notion of gender equality, but rather as a means to express their strange devotion to the fast food chain. And Burger King could not be happier about the potential PR possibilities. After hearing about the coincidence, the company exuberantly tweeted, “Mr. Berger and Mrs. King? Is this real life? Please help us find this amazing couple. #BurgerKingWedding” Imagining the themed wedding between the couple is the stuff that wedding planners’ dreams are made of. The couple has already divulged their plan to give their guests koozies with a wedding photo on one side and the Burger King logo on the other, but the possibilities are truly endless: burger-shaped ice sculptures, paper crowns for all, fluorescent lighting, a wedding cake made from the supple buns of the Whopper.

I’m just hoping that the Hamburglar doesn’t make an unwanted appearance. –JP

Have you seen the new type of ad popping up everywhere on TV lately? I’m sure you have. Frenetic montages of humans absorbed in mesmerizing feats of skill and daring sweep across the screen; a motorcyclist flips three times in the air and lands leaf-light, his tires hitting the ground with moon-rover-like weightlessness; a snowboarder tears down a pristine white snow-face with the swaggering casualness of a shirtless springbreaker sauntering down the beach; the obligatory badass wing-suit guy hurtles through a gap the size of a prenatal infant. I won’t try to deny it: I love these advertisements.

When YouTube offers me the skip button five seconds in, I’ll sit and watch the rest before going on to view the original extreme sports montage video I’d clicked on. These ads, meant to instill the viewer with a sense of the epic, the sublime, are immensely entertaining in and of themselves. They’re beyond words. They need no words.

That’s why the prolixity of Adidas’ recent Take It campaign, featuring numerous professional athletes the likes of Gareth Bale and John Wall, was particularly heinous. The ad features quick moving sports scenes set to a mounting drum beat. A man narrates: “The last goal doesn’t matter. The last victory, already forgotten. Yesterday is gone. Lost in the record books, but today is up for grabs. Unpredictable. Unwritten.

Undecided. Now is ours. Do something and be remembered, or do nothing and be forgotten. No one owns today. Take it.” Aside from undoubtedly breaking some sort of record for the longest string of trite terse platitudes in a single sports ad, Adidas commits the cardinal sin of making absolutely no sense. Forget that the words are unimaginative and witless, they simply don’t add up. The ad sets itself up as a celebration of the present: “yesterday is gone…today is up for grabs,” fair enough. But when it goes on to provide the rationale for why athletes strives to win, the words run, “do something and be remembered. Do nothing and be forgotten.” Huh? I thought yesterday is gone. How can you be remembered if the previous day doesn’t exist? Do you see what I’m saying here? Adidas is dangling an ever-receding carrot in front of our leporine noses! It’s almost dystopic—scrapping and battling each day only to have the fruits of your labor forgotten by the time the sun rises. What I mean to say is, stop talking. Show me that dude in the wing suit traversing the infant sized hole again.

–EB

NEWS

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POWER PLAYERS Negotiating the Future of the Middle East

by Peter Makhlouf

Since the Iranian revolution, 1,672 Iranians have died in plane crashes. Iran has one of the most dismal aviation safety records in the world. While this is a particular case, it is emblematic of how crippled Iran’s economy has become through years of sanctions by the US and its allies. The lack of access to international trade has forced citizens throughout the country to jerry rig parts of planes, cars, and bridges among others.

Post-revolution, the cost of sanctions has been debilitating, and intentionally so, as a direct way of continuing the erosion of Iranian stability. All in all they have been fairly successful.

Of course, sanctions never affect the consequences they intend to. For years, Iranians have been denied access to crucial medical supplies and their banking assets have been frozen in international markets, thwarting any possibility of foreign transactions. The wealthy remain comfortable, and while basic grocery prices have skyrocketed due to inflation, luxury apartments are still being built into mountainsides.

Corporations are clever enough to bypass or innovatively work around sanctions. But the middle and lower classes in Iran have borne the brunt of the sanctions’ effects. The labor force in 2014 was 30-40 percent poorer than it was in 2012. Iran has been hanging on the edge of sustaining itself economically, but these past few years have threatened to upset that fragile balance. GDP has declined nearly two percent in recent years. To a large extent, the recent election of the more moderate President Rouhani was an expression of popular sentiment that sought an end to the crippling sanctions. Times had to change. +++ This past week, on the shores of picturesque Lake Geneva, the P5+1 came to an agreement with Iran, which agreed to a protraction of their nuclear program to be accompanied by strict oversight by independent inspectors. In exchange, the US and EU would stem their onslaught of nuclearrelated economic sanctions which has left Iran’s economy in shambles, especially in recent years. While President Obama declared it a “historic moment” in US foreign relations— which it undoubtedly was—he had to navigate a treacherous terrain of strategic interests, domestic politics, and foreign disapproval in the process.

While scrutinizing the realm of geopolitics is at times confusing and reductive, one cannot ignore the way in which each of the power players at the table, and even those who were not at the negotiations, attempted to strike a deal without upsetting the careful balance of regional dominance throughout the Middle East. None of these regional powers were as vocal as Israel was. Since these negotiations began eighteen months ago, analysis and commentary on the question of easing sanctions could not shake the spectre of Israeli interests that haunt the US. Culminating in Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, this period of talks has time and time again been filtered through an US-Israeli lens: what does Israel think and what is the US reply?

Israel’s criticism of these talks and the influence of the Israel lobby stood out so prominently that Obama invited veteran The New York Times Middle East correspondent— and fervent supporter of Israel—Thomas Friedman to the White House to set the record straight in a lengthy interview. Why the uproar from Tel Aviv in the first place?

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Israel under Netanyahu created a maximalist set of demands without which it would not approve of a settlement. Iran would have to recognize the state of Israel, cease any and all nuclear enrichment, and would have to submit to inspections “anytime, anywhere” from outside. The extent of Netanyahu’s open-mindedness was when he ventured to say that the other option if the talks did not satisfy him were “not necessarily” military action.

Beneath the rhetoric there are material realities that dictated much of the political confrontation. Israel’s actions, for over half a century now, have gone unpunished and unquestioned. Israeli aggression is subject neither to criticism from the West nor from the string of Western-backed clientkings reigning throughout the Middle East. The potential for Iran to become a regional power—economically and militarily—could reverse the equation. This is why a central tenet of the sanctions has been restricting Iran’s ability to purchase weapons.

Whereas Iranian political sentiment since the 1979 revolution has been vocally opposed to Western influence, Israel has been a crucial ideological analog to the US’s aggressive policy towards the Middle East. This special relationship between the US and Israel is why every president from the Cold War to the post-Cold War era has been silent despite full knowledge about Israel’s covert nuclear bomb programs. It was not until this February, in the midst of Iran talks, that the US released the information about Israel’s nuclear programs after a Freedom of Information lawsuit required them to do so. These programs are immense compared to the Iranian programs that the US has deployed sanctions against.

Israel insists that nuclear armament is a necessary response to the existential threat it faces from Iran, though that threat has been called into question when it was recently discovered that Prime Minister Netanyahu lied about the extent of Iran’s capabilities to the United Nations. Israel is certainly not alone in declaring Iran to be a threat, with much of the West declaring similar fears. Though the question still remains: what exactly is this threat? Iran’s military budget is quite small compared to regional counterparts, infinitesimal compared to the US which by conservative estimates has a military budget 130x the size of Iran’s. And though the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini has been maniacal in his antiWestern declarations, for the most part the people facing the largest threat from his state are the Iranian citizens themselves who are subject to many Islamist factions within the government. On the flip side, the claims of an existential threat made by Israel are actually far more applicable to Iran.

Israel, India, and Pakistan have all refused to sign the nuclear proliferation agreement—which Iran is a signatory of—and all three abstaining countries have threatened Tehran time and time again.

The peril Iran faces is not fanciful thinking. Several US Republicans expressed similar sentiments to freshman senator Tom Cotton, who posited that the alternative to negotiations

could be military engagement. Recall it was only five years ago that McCain joked on the campaign trail that the response to Iran was “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb…”

Rhetoric stemming from hawkish US politicians not only confirmed that if there was any threat, it would come from the US, but their statements closely mirrored arguments vocalized by Israel as well. No one was more outspoken with such language than Benjamin Netanyahu, who said that any option other than capitulation to Iran would be military engagement. Iranian politicians are not blind either. They are well aware of the US’s ability to carry out an invasion based upon a lie, as it did in 2003. They are also well aware of the role that Israel had, especially Benjamin Netanyahu, in urging on the US. Israel has stood in the way of nuclear disarmament time and time again, most recently in December 2012. A conference was planned in Helinski in the hope of creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. Iran unconditionally agreed to attend; Israel refused. The US collapsed the conference using Israel’s byline almost verbatim. The nearly inextricable tangle of US and Israeli interests has not been the only limiting factor when it comes to discussing the negotiations.

The extent of critical discourse in the US has been paltry at best; politicians, citizens and commentators alike seem to have forgotten or willfully repressed the horrors of the Gulf War. The entire reason for sanctions originally was a question of US strategic interests, where US strategic interests are defined as the United States maintaining its position as world superpower. When a popular revolt cast aside the tyrannical, US-backed dictator, the clamp came down hard on Iran. The US vigorously supported the reign of Saddam Hussein providing both military funding and access to chemical weapons throughout the Reagan administration.

Hussein’s belligerence against Iran left more than 100,000 Iranian civilians dead by the conclusion of the eight-year war.

But talking about the US support for Hussein’s war crimes back in the 1980s is off-limits as it opens up the aggressive maneuverings that the US and its allies have undertaken for years in order to secure regional supremacy.

That said, President Obama has decided to engage in a new policy of diplomatic détente over hostile stalemate in a few, select cases. It is the policy he has taken with Myanmar, Cuba, and Iran. But if there is one lesson he has learned, it is that undoing the legacies of this declining American empire does not come easy, and comes often, maybe even always, at the expense of a few friends.

PETER MAKHLOUF B’16 does not sanction sanctions.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

HOW TO SLICE AN APPLE

by Madeleine Matsui illustration by Layla Eshan

After a slew of new appointments to the Providence School Board (PSB) by newly elected Mayor Jorge Elorza, the expansion of charter schools in Rhode Island has proven to be as controversial here as anywhere else in the country. Despite a projected budget shortfall for the city, for the first time in five years the PSB is pressing the mayor’s office for an increase in the city’s contribution to the Providence Schools Department.

A large portion of the expected increase of $16.8 million in funding to the city’s total school budget of $363 million for the 2015-2016 fiscal year would go towards benefits and payments to charter schools. The Elorza administration has refused to comment on whether it will indeed increase funding for the Schools Department, although a spokesperson announced that the issue is among the mayor’s top priorities.

Since funding for schools is tied to student enrollment, and in light of strong interest in charter schools, it seems likely that Providence will be investing more resources in charter schools under Mayor Elorza.

With around 7,000 children enrolled in 25 (primarily urban) charter schools across the state, there has been increasing pressure from parents for charter schools to expand due to rising numbers of applications and the limited number of spaces currently available. Tallying the results from the recent lottery for the 2015 school year, the strong trend in increasing applications to the public charter school lottery has continued. Speaking with the Independent, Steve Nardelli, executive director of the Rhode Island League of Charter Schools, said: “The final figures haven’t been confirmed, but it looks like we had over 13,500 [charter public school lottery] applications for 1,740 openings across 25 schools.”

Despite swelling interest in public charter schools, a wide range of critics—including parents of public school students, school superintendents, and municipal leaders and politicians—have in recent years voiced their dissatisfaction with charter schools and urged reduced funding. They have charged charter schools with failing to provide the empirical evidence needed to justify their budget increases and have blamed charter schools for placing additional financial strain on an already over-burdened system at a time when funding to other public services is being cut and services consolidated. One of the primary concerns is that charter schools are drawing

from the central pool of already limited funding, specifically impacting traditional public schools’ finances. Responding to criticism from those who disagree with increasing charter school funding, Susan Lusi, PSD superintendent, urged members of the City Council Education Committee to move away from viewing charter schools as in opposition to public schools. Instead, she offered a vision of charter schools as an investment in the state’s future as a whole. She also endorsed a more proportional funding formula in terms of charters versus regular public schools, and in March announced an expected $4.4 million increase to a total of $19.5 million to support the city’s 4,200 charter school students.

In 2013, Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) released its second-ever national report on charter school performance, with encouraging outcomes for the Ocean State. The report found that Rhode Island “clearly led the pack in growth rates and impact on performance.” CREDO’s findings showed that in terms of reading, Rhode Island has “the strongest charter effect,” with 86 additional days of learning at a traditional public school necessary to match the results of the state’s charter schools; the Center reported similarly promising results in math, with a gap of 108 additional days of learning. With public school enrollment declining in most urban and suburban communities throughout Rhode Island, the report’s findings suggest charter schools in the state are producing measurable and substantial growth in student learning and will surely fuel interest in charter schools as an alternative for students and their families.

Funded with public dollars but afforded added flexibility in terms of personnel hiring, school structure, and budgetary management, charter schools have emerged as an alternative approach to the traditional public and private schools in the country. The “Charter Public School Act of Rhode Island” specifically encourages the development of schools that employ alternative learning methods to cater to the needs of public school students and offer them additional choices in terms of their education. Similarly, the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) states on its website that its vision for charter schools is to “provide school choices and opportunities for Rhode Island families – particularly those with pupils who are traditionally underserved.” “Back in the 90s, when charter school legislation was first passed,” Nardelli told the Independent, “a major focus of charter school legislation was and has always been at-risk students usually in the urban centers where there is poverty, and poverty equates with that risk.”

Meeting the needs of economically disadvantaged students remains a central issue for charter schools and a motivating factor in increasing funding. The RIDE report

calculated that in 2013, 67 percent of charter school students in Rhode Island were eligible for free or reduced lunch, compared to 47 percent of traditional high school students.

Reduced-price lunch recipients’ family incomes are at most 185 percent more than the federal poverty guideline and at most 130 percent more for free lunch recipients. Stark differences in student achievement are tied to economic differences that exacerbate gaps in learning. Across the state, a recent report released by Roger Williams University Latino Policy Institute found a 29-percentage point gap between low-income students and wealthier students in math.

The challenge for public charter schools in Rhode Island is to effectively serve a higher percentage of students eligible for free or reduced lunch as well as a higher percentage of English language learners (ELLs) compared to the state as a whole. According to statistics compiled by the RIDE in April 2014, 11 percent of public charter school students receive English language services, while the rest of the state’s traditional public schools had a 6 percent rate of ELLs. Compared to Rhode Island as a whole, public charter schools also serve a greater percentage of Black and Latino students, as well as fewer white students. As of October 2013, 52 percent of students were Latino, 16 percent were black, 26 percent were white, and 6 percent were another ethnicity or identified as multi-ethnic. The Latino Policy Institute report found that by 8th grade, Latino students score approximately 2 to 2.5 grade levels below white students nationally, with the Latino-white achievement gap in Rhode Island as one of the worst in the country.

Because of their flexibility in curricula, charter schools are better able than traditional public schools to tailor their programs to the needs of their students. Yet a whole host of interconnected issues stand in the way of student success, from neighborhoods with segregated housing policies to illprepared teachers to lack of adequate social services. Schools in general are also faced with annual fixed costs growing at a pace faster than access to new sources of funding, not to mention complicated issues such as how best to assess both teacher and student performance. Since educational outcomes are usually strong predictors of economic well being later in life, student achievement and equity certainly have major long-term consequences. For now, charter schools in the state remain an open question far from being resolved. As both a growing mainstay and relative newcomer to the educational landscape, much of charter schools’ future and ability to create lasting change hinges on the much-contested allocation of state and municipal funding. Evidence pointing towards charter schools as continuing their reputation as a quality public school choice option for Rhode Island’s most vulnerable populations suggests proposed increases in funding are justified. With steady interest from parents and students forming a strong foundation for future growth, Rhode Island charter schools have the potential to act as a vehicle for innovation and an instrument for broader educational reform.

Madeleine Matsui B’17 is learning.

April 10 2015

METRO

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THE UGLY ROCKING BIRD PENDANT

by Sarah Weiss

Seller, blackcatjewelz, shouts: BEAUTIFUL RARE ANTIQUE OSTBY BARTON 10K STERLING ETCHED WHITE TOPAZ RING SZ 7 on eBay, as if the Internet will be more enticed by the use of all caps. The stone is set into an intricate pattern of metal peaks and troths, BEAUTIFUL DETAIL, and the whole thing rests on a bed of blue velvet, which gives the white topaz an ultramarine tint in one picture. +++ Mr. Engelhart Cornelius Ostby was from Norway. His jewelry education and apprenticeship were in Oslo, where his large family also lived. In 1866, his brother and parents immigrated to America. He followed soon after, making his way from Oslo to New York City to Providence. For almost a decade he worked in the Providence jewelry industry as a designer and engraver until starting his own business with another jeweler named Nathan B. Barton. They would become the world’s biggest manufacturer of gold rings. After growing out of their initial building, the business moved to an old Ladd Watch Case Company space, on the corner of Richmond St. and Clifford St., and their operation doubled in size.

Having arrived in Providence just over a decade prior, Ostby fulfilled the American Dream. He had his own factory, his own livelihood, and his own family.

Ostby was a jewelry enthusiast, traveling often to Europe to shop overseas markets, and survey new craft-related inventions. He pursued all of it—machines, designs, and artists—something to bring back to his kingdom of rings. Every time he and his wife, Helene, visited Norway, Ostby brought back Norwegian Goats cheese: a tradition. He made his last trip in 1912, this time on vacation. Helene and he traveled across Southern Europe, stopping in Egypt, before getting wind of a boat named the Titanic that would be making a voyage back home, which Ostby promptly secured tickets for. He never made it back. Helene did. +++ Peter DiCristofaro, owner and director of the Providence Jewelry Museum (which currently displays a small selection of its collection in Cranston), is frustrated because “there is not one thing in The Jewelry District that says this great industry was there!” No walking trail, no commemorative stones, just a few green signs with arrows pointing pedestrians to where the area roughly sits. He collects all of it—machines, designs, and the relics left behind by artists—hoping to some day, soon, showcase in a larger space and with more items.

Locals and out-of-towners, alike, struggle to find The Jewelry District. Virginia jeweler, Hugo Kohl, once drove 9.5 hours to get to the city’s jewelry hub, only to find that there was little to nothing left of it. It is un-identifiable and understated, the leftover infrastructure of a lost industry. Instead of The Jewelry District, Hugo found Peter, whose preservation campaign he has been on board with ever since.

Google “providence jewelry district” today, and you will get a red polygon that hugs I-195 at its bottom, meets the river at its east and jogs along Ship and Friendship Streets to the north and west. To its south, beyond the highway, is Rhode Island Hospital. Zoom in and you will find restaurants with names like “Fatt Squirrel” and bars like “Mirabar,” a tattoo studio, a yoga studio, an animal hospital, a children’s museum, and a couple cafes. Walk the narrow streets and you’ll notice walls of brick buildings with impossible quantities of windows.

At the turn of the 20th century, the corner of Elm and Eddy was home to a jewelry shop with a vacant first floor. Blocks away, was another jeweler, situated on Chestnut and Point—its first floor leased to laundry and machine enterprises, surrounded by foundries and lumber mills, set into an enclave of American industry.

Two decades later, in 1920, the shop at Chestnut and Point, which hosted various jewelry manufacturers, was joined by two more jewelers on Richmond and Personage. A new jeweler opened on the corner of Point and Richmond.

Just before the construction of the I-195 highway in 1956, jewelers crowded the neighborhood’s slim streets. One was on Hospital, another four on Elm, three on Personage, two on Point, and two on South. There was another on Plain and yet another on South and a full-blown factory on Hospital that was built in 1955. One more sat at Point and Person-

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age. They were impossible to miss. +++ Jewelers lie somewhere in between sentimentalists and industrialists— wrapping gold around fingers and draping silver on necks. Rings denote marriage and brooches mark wealth, cold and hard. Metallic adornments make personal statements, resting on bodies as declarations of love, accomplishment, or memory.

But for many, jewelry-making was just a job. Peter reminds, “Here we are being all touchy feely in 2015 talking about the glory of the jewelry industry, but it was just a job. That’s why there’s no pictures. They would have laughed at you: photograph what? Nobody photographed their factory, it was just a place where people worked.” +++ To Peter, and jewelry makers at-large, a die is a stamp. By stamping a strip of metal, of any kind, jewelers are able to form complex, curvilinear, three-dimensional pieces. Each die is a metal block. To be utilized, it is fixed into the vice of a progressive stamping machine, a type of press designed to give jewelers enough leverage to easily shape strip metal.

By cranking the press, the jeweler forcefully lowers the die down onto the metal, imprinting the flat surface with peaks, troths and, dimension. There are hoards of dice in Peter’s warehouse. They lie in boxes, on shelves, in drawers, populating the collection space with possibility. “I’m just the bone collector; I’m just the archeologist,” he asserts.

In each die is the mark of a jeweler’s hand, each a signature of his or her artisanship. Different stamps match different rings, pressed into silver or plated gold. Once a die is designed and fixed into a press, the stamping process is completely mechanical.

4 Edwards St., Providence, Rhode Island is the collection warehouse for the Providence Jewelry Museum. Heavy, paint-chipped machines clutter the cavernous space. Some still have dice stuck in their vices—bloated with their last job before being put out of work. They are utilitarian antiques: still functional, tarnished with decades of inertia.

Metal finds its way into every corner of the space, which is a series of smaller and smaller rooms. Peter’s office is in the loft, towards the back.

He works among relics. +++ The Providence jewelry industry was comprised of a constellation of specialists—many hands touching the same tiny piece of metal before they were worn on necks, fingers and wrists. Manufacturers, who sold to brands like Tiffany, had outside vendors: polishers who shined, solderers who welded, engravers who made marks, linkers who made links, and enamellers who coated some of it in colorful, shiny enamel.

Providence was a network of production—each craftsman was within a couple blocks of the next, and jewelry was the city’s principal cultural capital. Other cities couldn’t compete; Providence’s jewelry industry was America’s jewelry industry.

Since the 1980s, things have changed, and the jewelry industry has been reduced to The Jewelry District, which isn’t much. Research conducted by ‘Historic New England’ suggests that, at its peak during the 1950s, the jewelry industry employed 16,000 workers. Since then, “We didn’t go out of business,” Peter pauses, “the business evaporated. We’re talking about 1,000 factories down to…150. Mass extermination. But it was their own damn fault. They didn’t embrace globalization.” Quickly, almost all jewelry production moved overseas, leaving Providence unable to compete with cheaper links, bezels, and bands manufactured for cents rather than dollars. Peter points to his wife for contrast: “My wife was commuting to Hong Kong. I said, ‘you see my wife? She goes over there every six weeks.’” His wife is a fashion designer specializing in denim. +++ A job in jewelry was often a first job for recently immigrated individuals who arrived in Providence. The process of learning how to handle metal was relatively quick, cheap, and un-fettered by a language barrier. Someone could show you how to make jewelry; they didn’t need to tell you.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

It was as if every nationality had its own corner of the manufacturing process. Peter tells it like this: the Italians did the grunt work— stamping, polishing, and sawing—manipulating metal. The Armenians were the enamellers, dressing monochromatic pieces in vibrant glossy color. The Jews were the merchants. They sold the product to retail companies. Everybody coexisted, stayed out of one another’s way; everybody kept up their corner of town.

Jewelry-making was accessible. Starting up took little support or outside investment. Peter cites famous designer, Steven Lagos, as an example: “[he] came here years ago and he said two weeks ago I was a short order cook, now I’m a jewelry designer. It’s got the lowest point of entry of anything on earth. Don’t get me wrong, he’s talented. But you can go to a catalogue, buy yourself a bench, buy yourself a torch, buy yourself a little file and you haven’t spent $500 and you’re doing it.” +++ Electroplated jewelry is the kind that rubs off on your skin. It’s the stuff that makes thumbs blue and necks grey. It’s cheap. Providence came to rise with an answer to this shortcoming. Seeing a desire for affordable jewelry with integrity, Providence jewelers invested in gold cladding, which encases a cheaper metal (like sterling silver or brass) within a solid gold shell. Unlike electroplated jewelry, it is impervious to sweat. +++ Peter hopes to one day reconstruct the landscape of the Providence Jewelry industry in a museum—space to be determined. His goal is to be able to fill rectangles on maps with what used to be inside them, to immerse the viewer in what each manufacturer used to look like. For instance, “So if we were to go to 86 Clifford St., this guy George Dover was in there. And not only was he an artist, he was a brilliant die maker.

The jewelry he made, they’re treasures. Just going through his catalogue and seeing the kind of metal that he did. It’s beyond understanding how they could all do that in those little shops. I love the fact that I know this guy, I know his name and address. And a portion of him…I can fill that building. And I have some of his machines, some of his books, some of his stuff. And I tell all of these jewelry antique people—I have his smells!

I can smell his smells.”

And then there’s Engelhart Cornelius Ostby of Ostby and Barton.

“Another big ring jewelry company. He put his daughter on a lifeboat and went down with the Titanic. He was over there buying. And this was the largest ring house. They made the Tiffany engagement ring in this place. Tiffany, years ago when I worked for them, they wanted to make their engagement ring again. The original dies were here in our Ostby and Barton. So I brought it back to Tiffany 116 years later. I brought them back the original models and patterns. But this guy went down in the Titanic.” +++ Peter pulls out a silver pendant. It’s shiny and delicate, swinging from its clasp. It’s so bright against his rough palms, even in the darkness of the warehouse. Within its miniature sterling cage there is a little blue bird, which makes a rattling sound when he picks it up. He takes out another box, this one with two metal blocks. Holding one in each hand, he examines them—one has a shape that juts out like a bump, laden with little grooves, and the other has a small depression, with its own convexities that correspond with the first block. He presses them together.

“I’ve had this set of die for thirty years and for thirty years I was saying, ‘someone invested money in this.’ Will I ever see the product? will I ever know what it does? So for thirty years I’ve been staring at this stuff,” Peter laments. “And six months ago, on eBay, I found what it was. And it’s got a bird rocking inside of it. A bird! Rocking. And someone says ‘oh that’s ugly.’ Well, no it’s not. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”

SARAH WEISS B’15 works among relics.

april 10 2015

metro

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CULTURE SHOCK a short timeline of controversial art

by Max Genecov, Joshua Kurtz, Eli Pitegoff, Erin Prinz-Schwartz, Maya Sorabjee illustration by Margaret Hu

To simply be offensive in one’s artistic practice is to engage in a hollow act of provocation. It is to be, for lack of a better term, uninteresting. To simply cause a stir will not suffice. Utilitarian ends alone, such as provoking important conversations about, let’s say, appropriation or aestheticization or systematic racism, do not simply redress the ethically fraught act of appropriation or aestheticization or racism that caused them. That would be too easy.

But on occasion the controversial piece succeeds, sometimes even by creating its own metric for success (see Black Square). We might go so far as to say that success for any piece of art depends on at least a minimal degree of controversy.

At this point it gets hard to generalize. The controversy provoked by a piece is always a matter intimately bound—to borrow Susan Sontag’s phrase—to the incommensurable task of interpretation. In the brief survey of controversial works that follows, a singular (and damning) interpretation of each respective work tends to dominate its reception. This is then followed by the artist’s conceptual defense of a crossed boundary, or at least an appeal to the plurality of the work’s significance. The conceptual tact and artistic cunning of each piece that follows remains open for debate.

Black Square Kazimir Malevich (1915) oil on canvas So the oft-quoted adage that floats around the Internet goes: art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. But sometimes, the controversy surrounding an artwork doesn’t stem from its vulgarity or shock value. Sometimes, art manages to inflict ire not because it is flagrant, but exactly the opposite—because it is opaque. Take the textbook example (quite literally—I first saw it in my high school Theory of Knowledge textbook), Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square.

The Russian painter first exhibited his iconic work at the “Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10” show in Petrograd in 1915. The piece—a pristine square of dense black paint on a white canvas— did what it said on the box, and Malevich had it installed in the corner of the gallery at a height in order to invoke the spirituality of his wickedly simple geometry. While receiving international acclaim for his abstract oeuvre and for spearheading the Suprematist movement, the artist faced increasing criticism at home. The Stalinist regime needed paintings of the Socialist Realism variety, ones that depicted the travails of the working class. They had no time for inaccessible black squares. Malevich was subsequently banned from creating abstract art, and died with the black square suspended above his deathbed and another one on his tombstone. Today, Black Square remains a source of controversy not because it defies the prevailing politics, but because of its epistemological cunning. It sits at the center of the unresolvable debate about what can even be considered art. Is it the minimal technical effort or the sophisticated thought process that defines the painting’s status as art? Some are mesmerized by the impenetrably dark void while others tear their hair out because of the same impenetrability. To this polarity, another rootless Internet proverb might suffice: “modern art = I could do that + yeah, but you didn’t.”–MS

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arts

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

There’s Something about Alba Eduardo Kac (2000) Rabbit, jellyfish (?)

The year is 2000, four years after the cloning of Dolly the Sheep, the year of gel pens and glittery Y2K keychains, and Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac presents his newest work, Alba: an albino rabbit with a tiny bit of jellyfish DNA that makes her glow green under specific lighting. Alba, also called the GFP (green fluorescent protein) Bunny, was born and bred at a genetics lab in France and meant to be moved to Kac’s loving homestead in Chicago after reaching adulthood. Kac describes Alba as “transgenic art,” a lovable alien designed to break down our speciesist inhibitions about biotechnology. The international science community, art critics, and animal rights activists describe Alba as unnecessary, unethical, dangerous, and ultimately, bad art. In response to the outcry, Alba was kept in the French facility where she was born, never to trade the white cube of the lab for the white cube of the gallery.

Or was she? A 2002 article in Wired magazine reports that Alba is dead at the age of four, according Louis-Marie Houdebine, the scientist who engineered her. It’s horrifying how the genetic tampering enacted by humans shortens the lifespan of—wait, what? According to Kac, the rabbit was born in 2000, making her two years old if she died in 2002. The discrepancies keep coming: Houdebine maintains that the facility had already spliced phosphorescent DNA into the genomes of not one, but four rabbits. In 2000, Kac had simply chosen the one he liked best, renamed it, and presented it as an art piece. On top of that, there is only one image in existence of glowing, green Alba, and Houdebine maintains that it is doctored—maybe entirely fabricated. Was Alba ever real? Was this just an act of posthuman parafiction? Is it plagiarism if you claim a French geneticist’s idea of combining bunny and jellyfish DNA as your own, then try to take one of his rabbits and put it in a gallery? Which is less ethical, bad art or bad science? We may not have answers in this millenium, but until then, shine a blacklight over the mischievous rabbits in your backyard: what you see might surprise you. –EPS

Immersion (Piss Christ) Andres Serrano (1987) Cibachrome Print “At the time I made Piss Christ, I wasn’t trying to get anything across,” Andres Serrano told The Guardian referring to his 1987 60x40 inch photographic print entitled Immersion (Piss Christ), depicting a small plastic and wooden crucifix, submerged in amber colored liquid—a jar of the artist’s own urine. If there is no iconoclast where there is no icon, then it’s hard to read the artist’s professed naiveté as anything less than pure affect, part and parcel of some conceptual appeal to shock and ambiguity. Had Serrano genuinely not been trying to get anything across, a cross was likely ill advised.

Few works have affected such an enduring onslaught of verbal and physical attacks as Piss Christ. Controversy was born on the US Senate floor in 1989 after conservative members of congress took notice of the piece and its partial funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Senator Jesse Helms attempted to use the incident—an apparent abuse of taxpayer dollars—as leverage for harsh reductionist policies aimed at both the NEA as well as the politician’s own emotional investment in Serrano’s practice. Standing at the center of the cocoon of friendship that is the Senate floor, Helms bravely proclaimed, “I do not know Mr. Andres Serrano, and I hope I never meet him. Because he is not an artist, he is a jerk.”

In recent years a steady stream of polemics against Piss Christ has transformed into an inquisition bent on destruction. The photograph’s appearance in the 1997 Serrano retrospective at the National gallery of Victoria in Melbourne attracted attempted vandalism in the form of two teenagers equipped with hammers. Thwarted, however, before hammer met the cross, the teens’ mission was completed over a decade later at an exhibition in a gallery in Avignon, France.

On Palm Sunday of 2011 a group of Christian Fundamentalists held the gallery’s security guards hostage just long enough to smash a plexiglass screen and slash the Piss Christ it protected.

Since the upsurge in violent attacks against the work, Serrano has elaborated on the conceptual fiber of his creation. He suggests that the photograph brings a crucifix that has been shamelessly coopted as commodity in a consumer capitalist society closer to its visceral origins; the crucified body inevitably soils the cross.

As inevitable though is the reality that post-modern sophistications amount to a feeble defense of controversial art in the court of public opinion. –EP

april 10 2015

“Four Scenes from a Harsh Life” Ron Athey (1994) Performance, eight actors Performance artist Ron Athey enacted his “Four Scenes from a Harsh Life,” the second painful element of his “Torture Trilogy,” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1994. It reinterpreted moments from his childhood in a household full of apocalyptic pentacostalism and mental illness by situating them in a theater of cruelty where actors would ritualistically mutilate their bodies onstage with knives and needles. During one segment, after aping Yves Klein’s “women paintings” that utilized anonymous women’s bodies as paintbrushes, Athey presented a “human printing press,” where he cut into fellow performer Divinity Fudge’s back along his cuneiform-like tattoos and soaked up the blood with paper towels. These paper towels were hung on clotheslines on the stage, threatening the proscenium. Though purposefully shocking in its own right, this moment in “Four Scenes” mutated in the American cultural landscape. Sensationalized news coverage and cultural fears around AIDS as a contagion misrepresented Fudge’s HIV negative blood soaking on paper towels as Athey’s HIV positive blood being thrown on the audience. (Athey is himself HIV positive, though he doesn’t know whether he gained it in the mid-80s from unprotected sex or from intravenous drug use.) This all boiled into a larger controversy when a National Endowment for the Arts grant related to the Walker Art Center, which was as equally removed from Athey as the false story was from the actual performance, became connected to the artist. It was worth $150 and bestowed upon the Center, which was then said to have accommodated Athey, who in actuality had never even applied for federal funding for his art. Athey’s work became a battleground for arguments over what art should be and whether contemporary, extreme forms have any validity. Irrational AIDS fears metastasized into a culture war about the purpose of extreme art in American society because of Athey’s blood and his sexuality as symbolic agents.

As the American gay community seemed headed toward an apocalypse via AIDS, Athey wanted to create rituals that would unsettle his audience and heal them at the same time. The fears around his work, especially early on in his career, almost become part of it, including the misunderstanding over the blood and the NEA conversation. Today, Athey still performs, though in smaller, more contained pieces. He cuts himself, gets pierced with arrows, and buries hooks in his face with messianic fervor, but now his audience seems to know what they’re getting into, in what Athey calls a “post-AIDS world” that takes those with AIDS as people managing an illness rather than walking, infected corpses. –MG

“The Body of Michael Brown” Kenneth Goldsmith (2015) Performance On March 13th, at a Brown University conference entitled “Interrupt 3: A Discussion Forum and Studio for New Forms of Language Art,” Kenneth Goldsmith, the poet laureate of the Museum of Modern Art, performed a new work entitled “The Body of Michael Brown.” The poet, whose practice dictates that a “writer need not write any new texts but rather reframe those that already exist in the world,” performed Michael Brown’s autopsy report to a group of predominantly white academics. The text was unedited (though rearranged). The audience’s applause was tepid at best, and the brief discussion that followed the reading was uncomfortable, yet subtly supportive. Almost immediately, the performance went viral on social media, and within a few days several news outlets such as the Huffington Post, The Guardian, and The New Republic picked up the story, though much of the dialogue surrounding the event has been limited to the very white academics who were in attendance.

Goldsmith has retweeted negative comments with #LovingTheHate but otherwise remained relatively silent on social media. He addressed the outrage days later on Facebook, where he wrote, “Perhaps people feel uncomfortable with my uncreative writing, but for me, this is the writing that is able to tell the truth in the strongest and clearest way possible. Ecce homo. Behold the man.” But to take a body—a politicized body—and perform its wounds is to claim ownership over it, to embody the very system that executed it in the first place. There is no doubt that there is a productive conversation to be had about appropriation and aestheticization in conceptual writing. However, the more urgent dialogue, that which Goldsmith has refused to address, must focus on the very systems that allowed this event to occur in the first place. Goldsmith has chosen to donate his speaking fee to Michael Brown’s family and has requested (or legally pressured) that the recording of his performance not be made public. –JK

arts

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now taking the field...

YOUR RHODE ISLAND

RED SOX

moving baseball to the capital city

by Tristan Rodman illustration by Natalie Kassirer & Nik Bentel The last professional baseball stadium in Providence was demolished in 1887.

The Messer Street Grounds, home to Providence’s Major League Baseball franchise, the Grays, took up two square blocks between Messer, Willow, Wood, and Ellery streets, between Federal Hill and Olneyville Square. The Grays left the MLB after the 1885 season, and soon thereafter the Grounds were sold, demolished, and broken into sub-plots. In 1926, the construction of Route 6 circumscribed the land the ballpark occupied. One hundred and twenty-eight years later, after the demolition of a highway and the parsing out of sub-plots, professional baseball seems posed to return to Providence.

On February 23, a nine-person ownership group headed by Providence attorney James Skeffington and Red Sox president Larry Lucchino announced their successful bid to purchase the Pawtucket Red Sox. The group, incorporated as PBC Associates, purchased the team for over $20 million from Madeline Mondor, the widow of late PawSox owner Ben Mondor, who passed away in 2010. Included in Skeffington and Lucchino’s announcement was a plan to move the Red Sox AAA franchise from Pawtucket and McCoy Stadium, where they’ve been since 1970, to a new ballpark to be constructed on the Jewelry District land freed up by the 2010 re-routing of I-195. The team, Skeffington hopes, will be called the Rhode Island Red Sox. From the February 23 announcement, the language surrounding the potential ballpark moved quickly. In a matter of days, plan to build a baseball stadium on the I-195 land shifted from “possible” to “likely” to “impending.” Staying in Pawtucket has never entered the discussion. Rico Vota, Communications & Constituent Services Offer in the Pawtucket Mayor’s office, told the Independent via email that the ownership’s legal counsel, Robert Goldberg, first contacted the Pawtucket municipal government on February 15. A meeting was set up for February 22, which the mayor anticipated as a simple introduction. Mayor Donald Grebien planned to present “a redevelopment concept for a ballpark district.” The mayor was informed at that meeting, on the eve of the ownership group’s announcement, that the ownership group did not have plans to keep the team in Pawtucket. The news, according to Vota, was “as much of a surprise as it was a disappointment.”

James Skeff-

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ington, almost always referred to as Jim, is a lifelong Rhode Islander with bushy eyebrows and native accent that renders the ‘r’ in “ballpark” unnecessary. He served as legal counsel for the Red Sox in their most recent land negotiation (the construction of a new spring training facility in Florida), and has been involved in almost every major land deal in recent Rhode Island development. A February 24 article by WPRI’s Ted Nesi highlights Skeffington’s main projects: Rhode Island Housing, the Rhode Island Convention Center, the Providence Place Mall, Garage C at T.F. Green, and the GTech building downtown. Almost all of those projects involved public money. If there’s anybody with the ability to brute-force a land development deal in Rhode Island, it’s Skeffington.

Skeffington has made it clear that without the riverfront stadium in place, he could move the team elsewhere. “My objective is to keep it in Rhode Island,” Skeffington told WPRI on his introductory press call. “But obviously all I can do is lay out a vision, lay out a plan with my colleagues—Larry, myself and our partners—and let the state decide whether this is something they treasure and are as excited about as we are.” In an interview with Tim White and Ted Nesi on Newsmakers three days later, Skeffington said that Governor Gina Raimondo joked to him that she “didn’t want to be the governor to lose the Pawtucket Red Sox to another state.”

Even with Skeffington’s significant influence, building a stadium on the opened-up I-195 land would require a coordination of assets and efforts that would all need to align simultaneously, and the alteration or re-interpretation of a number of laws and stipulations. Nearly every organization the Independent contacted—the I-195 Redevelopment District Commission, Brown University, the Narragansett Bay Commission, and the Office of the Rhode Island Speaker of the House—delayed further comment until they had received a formal proposal from Skeffington’s office. +++ When the $610 million I-195 reconstruction was completed in 2013, the freed up land was divided into parcels for sale and redevelopment. A number of laws and bylines dictate how, and for what use, the parcels may be sold and developed.

One of the stipulations for the land, according to Title 37 of RI state law, is that it must be sold at “fair market value.”

Skeffington’s preferred financing plan, outlined on Newsmakers, is to build the stadium with the ownership group’s money, lease the land back to the state, and then sublease the stadium to the team. Skeffington did not mention how, exactly, the ownership group would acquire the land from the state, but a February 23 article on WPRI.com states that the ownership group “would require the state to give them land at no cost.” Under such an agreement, the ownership would benefit from the added value—as landowners, they would be able to re-negotiate the lease terms periodically, increasing the rate based on higher land value. In an email correspondence with the Independent, Nesi wrote that under such an agreement, “the team would be receiving valuable land for free and then, presumably, receiving a payment from the state on top of that (in the form of lease payments), so there would be upside potential in both those parts of the deal.” But, as Nesi continues, “The new ownership group would argue the state benefits from the activity and prestige of the park, as well as the fact that the currently vacant land would be used.”

The ownership group also seeks a tax stabilization agreement, which would limit tax rates on the stadium land even as its value increases. Section 44-3-9 of Rhode Island State law, which stipulates how tax agreements may or may not be used to help facilitate businesses relocating to Rhode Island, however, prevents tax agreements between the State and “any manufacturing or commercial concern

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

relocating from one city or town within the state of Rhode Island to another.” A March 6 article on WPRI.com Rhode Island noted that GTech, in a deal negotiated by Skeffington, was able to move its corporate headquarters from West Greenwich to downtown Providence and still receive such an agreement. (GTech, at the time, was incorporated in Delaware). Skeffington is not seeking taxpayer bonds to fund the project, which means that public ownership of the stadium is far less likely than a land agreement between the City and the ownership group.

As Ted Nesi put it in an interview with the Independent last spring, “if some people are paying less than others, it means those guys who don’t have a deal are subsidizing the ones who do by paying a higher tax rate.”

Another stipulation for the I-195 land, far less clear in its specific implementation, is that the redeveloped land incorporate “open space.” Parcel 4, the proposed stadium site, is currently planned as a five-acre waterfront park feeding into a pedestrian bridge across the Providence River. A 2013 call for urban design and development proposals published by the I-195 Redevelopment District Commission states that “Interconnected Open Spaces, walk ways and other public amenities are both a part of the 195 lands, and a direct link to the initiatives underway by Neighborhood Associations and City and State planning efforts” and that “discussions and incorporation are expected to be part of the plan.” The same document calls the proposed park a “central feature” that will “activate, excite and help define the entire redevelopment effort.”

Currently, the requirement is set to be filled by the planned park on Parcel 4, but a February 26 article by Walt Buteau at WPRI suggests that “if the P-4 land is used for the stadium, open space would have to be created somewhere else in the district… unless the agreement is changed to allow less open space.”

Another possibility, Buteau writes, would be to put the park on a different parcel.

When the Indepdendent asked Dyana Koelsch, the spokesperson for the I-195 Commission, what the specifics of the open space requirement were, she called it an “unanswered question.” “There are some public space requirements in particular involved from the moving of the highway,” she said. “But beyond that […] it’s just premature.”

Maneuvering tax law, flexing an interpretation on “fair market value,” and shoehorning a baseball stadium into green space will require significant lobbying, and the ownership group has hired Robert Goldberg, a former State Senate minority leader, to lobby on their behalf. This above outline is one of many possibilities, and Skeffington said as much on Newsmakers. A formal land use proposal is currently expected by the State, the City, and the I-195 Commission, and City Council President Luis Aponte is currently appointing a working group to study what types of deals the city might be able to offer the team.

+++ Pawtucket, faced with losing a baseball team central to its culture and economy, plans to seek compensation from the State. “If the state legislature is going to incentivize the new owners to relocate the team from one urban distressed community to another,” Vota wrote to the Independent, “then they should provide that same level of financial commitment to Pawtucket to ensure that we are left whole.” Vota said that the Pawtucket Red Sox bring “hundreds of thousands” of people to the city each year. When I asked Nesi about such an agreement, he gave a response that should make Pawtucket representatives less-than-hopeful.

“The state isn’t rolling in cash,” wrote Nesi, “and depending on the size of the subsidy the Providence stadium is going to get, it seems unlikely lawmakers would be willing to double that amount and then hand half the cash to Pawtucket. It’s going to be up to the Pawtucket delegation and the mayor to keep the pressure on so that the city doesn’t come away from all this empty-handed.” The Pawtucket Red Sox have their home opener at McCoy Stadium on April 16.

TRISTAN RODMAN B’15.5 has been divided up for sale and re-development.

+++ For all the complications, hurdles, and pitfalls of moving the PawSox to the Providence waterfront, the move could be hugely beneficial to the city and the area surrounding the ballpark. A baseball stadium would provide active use of the space in Parcels 4 and 42, and create jobs in both its construction and operation. Skeffington has argued that a vibrant waterfront ballpark would also make the surrounding land more attractive to investors and developers and valuable to land owners and the State. In many ways, a Jewelry District ballpark would be the final piece in a vision of Providence that includes pedestrian paths, a bike-share system, and a streetcar.

The City announced last Friday that it is moving forward with plans to develop a streetcar connecting downtown Providence to the Jewelry District, postponing service to College Hill to Phase 1B of the project. The proposed streetcar will go straight from the Amtrak to Parcel 4. “We like that streetcar concept!”

Skeffington joked to WPRI. At a media tour of the site last Thursday, Skeffington announced the results of his ownership group’s surveying and research. In addition to Parcel 4, Skeffington said, the stadium would need to include Parcel 42 (previously marked for potential hotel development), and would require the demolition of Brown’s continuing education building at 200 Dyer street, which opened in 2012.

A proposal for a Starwood hotel property on Parcel 42 was rejected in August, per the Providence Journal. When asked for a statement, Mark Nickel, Brown’s public affairs coordinator, referred me back to Brown’s initial release on February 23: “We welcome the prospect of a multi-use athletic, cultural, and community facility, including the prospect of college athletics played in a new stadium, as a positive contributor to this environment, and believe it will complement our academic investments in the area.” The ballpark, as proposed at the media tour, would feature a grassy berm in left field, a park along the waterfront, and right-field bleacher so close to the waterfront that home runs would splash into the Providence River.

APRIL 10 2015

SPORTS

□ 10

VOICES ON THE GROUND

by Sam Samore illustration by Gene Creemers

A Conversation with Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is perhaps better at asking questions than anyone else in the media. Goodman is founder and primary host of Democracy Now!, an independent daily news hour broadcast on over 1,200 radio and television channels, as well as online. She once drove then-President Clinton to an angry outburst after a round of intense questioning during a call Clinton made to her show during the 2000 election; he was seeking to simply tell listeners to vote. She has received the Robert F. Kennedy Prize in International Reporting, the George Polk Award, The Islamic Community Award for Journalism, and the Right Livelihood Award, among others.

We talked over the phone; my questions centered on new media forms, but Goodman consistently brought up specific policy issues from a broad range of current and past events, occasionally leaving the original question topic behind. It was a telling indicator of her brand of journalism, which is focused on the content of what different voices, especially those ignored by the corporate media, have to say. Throughout our conversation it was to these voices that we inevitably returned.

The College Hill Independent: People have been talking about the ways in which social media sites, like Reddit or Twitter, have the potential to democratize news and the way information is produced and consumed by the public. What do you think about that idea?

Amy Goodman: I think it’s very important that we get news from many different sources. In the past there were the traditional gatekeepers, so we heard so often from a minority elite. Now, we can choose many more ways to get information, and judge for ourselves how reliable that information is. So many newspapers have closed, for example, and I don’t think it’s just because of the Internet. I think that for a long time they brought us just a very narrow selection of voices that were very much representing a corporate establishment, like in Washington.

The range between Democrats and Republicans is often very narrow. When it came to the war in Iraq in 2003, Democrats joined with Republicans in authorizing the war, and you had the newspapers largely coming out for war, when what we needed was to hear from people across the political spectrum, across the globe. When we wage war in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, what about hearing from people at the target end of our weapons? That’s who you hear from least. For example, when it comes to drone strikes now, the government will tell us this many 'militants' have died, or this many 'terrorists' have died. Well, how do we know who they are? Studies are coming out of New York University, of Stanford University, talking about how the vast majority of those killed are civilians. As the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone said, “If you’re going to remember two words, remember these: governments lie.”

The Indy: Immediately following the Boston bombing, there was a Reddit community who thought they had identified the culprit, but they were wrong. Do you think when the media is in the hands of the public that there is the potential, not for intentional lies, but for misinformation?

AG: Well, there always is. But that’s also true with the mainstream media, and that’s often been the case. Let’s look at the example of weapons of mass destruction. You had the media repeating the lies of the administration saying Iraq had weapons of mass destruction—it wasn’t true. If you look at how people felt at the time in the US, I would say about half the people were for going to war. The US would go to war about six weeks later, March 19, 2003, so this was a critical time when the public was evaluating what was true. That’s when the media has to bring out the greatest diversity of opinion. The group [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] did

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a study of the four major nightly newscasts at the time—that was NBC Nightly News, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and the PBS News Hour. There were 393 interviews done around the war—this was a time when half the population was for war, half against—393 interviews done around the war, and guess how many were done with peace leaders?

Three, three of almost 400. That’s no longer a mainstream media, that’s an extreme media beating the drums for war. I think the important thing is to broaden the discussion. But, as you point out, the Internet can be a global rumor mill.

It doesn’t mean you just believe anything that you read. We have to be extremely critical, but we also need a media that is separate from the government. We need a media that covers the movements that create static and make history, really bringing out the voices of people on the ground describing their own experiences. That’s also where the establishment media has failed us for so long—look at Ferguson, look at Occupy. We need to go beyond the establishment spokespeople, and there’s where I think a more decentralized media comes in. But you can’t accept anything at face value, and yes, there are going to be mistakes made.

The Indy: One thing I’ve heard discussed in regard to protest movements in Ferguson and New York is the way certain narratives or histories are simplified by activist movements, to create effective calls to action. What do you think about the relationship between the narratives that activist movements present, and more rigorous attention to detail, and whether those can be in harmony with each other?

AG: Well, I think it’s our job as journalists to go to where the silence is. So often protestors are expressing a reality on the ground, and that has been very important in pushing these stories forward. If people hadn’t protested—that is the only reason the justice department moved into Ferguson. In the case of Ferguson, the corporate media did come out, and they reported on the militarization of police. But they only came out because of the mass protest that was happening. This is a much bigger and very important story, the militarization of the police of the United States well beyond Ferguson. At Democracy Now! we have high school classes come all the time to watch the broadcast, and if it’s a class of African Americans, almost everyone raises their hands if you ask if they’ve been stopped by police. If you have a class of white high school students, rarely do they raise their hands. We live in different worlds, and we need a media that reflects those different worlds, and provides a platform for people to speak to each other. I see the media as a huge kitchen table that stretches across the globe, that we all sit around and debate and discuss the most important issues of the day—war and peace, life and death—and anything less than that is a disservice to a democratic society.

about the massive drought in California. Governor Brown is mandating a 25 percent decrease in use of water, although not touching the main corporate growers, the main users of water in California. It’s an extreme situation. The media has so far ignored or covered up this issue—it’s not even climate change, it's climate chaos. Climate change is the perfect story to illustrate how captured the media is by corporations and a government that is very much beholden to corporations and the fossil fuel industry. Increasingly people tune in to radio and television just to get the weather because it becomes increasingly extreme. And instead of just flashing those two words, “severe weather,” what about flashing climate change, climate chaos, global warming. These are meteorologists.

They should be telling us the connection between drought in California, the extreme cold in the north east, the forest fires of Colorado, as well as the floods. People aren’t stupid, but these are very disparate weather events—what connects them?

That’s what a responsible media would be talking about. The rest of the world has major debates around climate change.

Not ‘does it exist,’ but ‘what can we do about it?’ And in this country the networks are very much captured by the oil industry. When you look at the money that swamps politics, politicians aren’t going to raise a red flag around this.

The media covers the range of opinions between the Democrats and the Republicans, but the range of public opinion in this country goes far beyond that. I really don’t think that those who care about war and peace, those who care about climate change, about the growing disparity between rich and poor in this country are a fringe minority.

Not even a silent majority. But there is a silenced majority; they are silenced by the corporate media. We are now larger than most network news shows. Certainly than those on MSNBC or CNN. So I would say that you cannot describe the typical consumer of Democracy Now! I think that conservative and liberal lines are breaking down. The kind of log jam that you get in Washington, and that’s reflected on the networks, isn’t the way most people operate in the world. I think Democracy Now! has definitely broken the sound barrier and addressed issues that are not typically just one group of people’s concern or another's.

The Indy: As Democracy Now! grows and has more resources you are able to reach a broader audience. But I wonder if, with this growth, it’s becoming more difficult to stay independent.

AG: That is our mission, to be independent, to be a truly independent news cast, to interview people who are closest to the story. Once the range of options are presented, people can make up their own minds. We very much respect the consumers of news. The stakes are so high right now. Today on Democracy Now! our first segment after the headlines was

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A letter to the administration:

APRIL 10 2015

EPHEMERA

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THE HISTORY OF The Work and Life of Elizabeth Fulda

by Eliza Dexter Cohen The American Museum of Natural History keeps detailed records. The museum, founded in 1869, was an early pioneer in bureaucratic management, and their paper trail is extensive. The archived documents include pieces of scrap paper with meeting times, telegrams confirming mail deliveries, and birthday party invitations between curators. The museum took meticulous photographs both of finished displays and of the staff’s work process. Glossy prints capture scientists piecing together unmatched fossil bones in their studios and school children pressed against glass-walled taxidermy displays in the cavernous museum halls. On the back of many of these images is the same small note in faint pencil script: Photo taken by E. M. Fulda.

Elizabeth Fulda took photographs of curators at work, catalogued collections, and illustrated many of the scientists’ books. There is one small bronze statue still on display that is based off of her sketches. It is a figure of ancient camel species, collapsing into the dry sand in a desert draught. Their skeletons would then fossilize into these positions, and a few million years later, paleontologists would excavate their bones, and Fulda would reimagine the moments of their deaths in a small pencil drawing. Donna Haraway calls this Museum a sort of “Garden of Eden.” Grown-ups playing god. Among them, a young man named Theodore Roosevelt, who personally shot several of the specimens that still live in the exhibit cases.

This museum is full of ghosts.

I find her salary invoice from the summer of 1921. She sometimes has the middle initial “M” and sometimes “R.” I’m not sure why. Could she have gotten married? She doesn’t have an employment record among the personnel files.

I stand in the museum full of screaming children and tourists with wide lens cameras and it feels abandoned. Totally empty of the people who built these halls and worked in them at a time documented in black and white photographs and color illustrations. I can only see Fulda, through the blur of a long century, but she feels whole and warm against the hollow claps of flip-flops on polished marble floors.

I start watching for ghosts. I don’t really know what to look for.

In 1924, in the back corridors of the department of Mammology, Fulda photographs Paul Boltman preparing a mastodon specimen from India, but he does not look up. He watches his tool and the surface of bone, excavated from dusty fields. According to Boltman’s colleague, the mastodon specimens from that expedition to India helped to illuminate “hitherto obscure problems of identity, affinity, and taxonomy” of the mastodon evolutionary timeline. After the shutter falls does he look up at her? Does she smile? Fulda gave her camera access to the back rooms of the museum. Few people (and even fewer women) could walk into the curators’ workshops. A century later, I need university letterhead for my laminated researcher’s card to look at these boxes of letters.

Good machines become invisible. Good cameras do not leave streaks. Historians of Science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison believe “mechanical objectivity” emerged in the midnineteenth century. They argue that in this historical moment, scientists redefined the path to truth, and shifted objectivity from expertise to machines. Nineteenth century natural historians created composite illustrations of specimens, emphasizing their distinctive features by using brighter colors and magnifying proportions. Increasingly, scientists turned instead to photographs, which captured images of individual specimens with all of the idiosyncratic irregularities of a single bird alongside their confusing similarities to other species. This new development was distinct “in its methods (mechanical), its morals (restrained) and its metaphysics (individualized).”

Good ghosts have good stories. Good ghosts can tell ghost stories first hand.

After weeks of reading letters and invoices labeled by date, I find a manila folder with the residues of something that never happened. A series of hand-drawn sketches stacked in a folder entitled “The History of Life On Earth.” These too bear Fulda’s signature. In 1924, William Gregory and Charles Frick commissioned a vast mural with a budget of $50,000 (Fulda’s annual salary was a little over $2,000). They asked Fulda for a series of panels to climb along the walls of a grand staircase. Gregory categorized her audience as “intelligent people.” Each step would take them forward in the historical timeline of the earth. As far as I can tell, it was never made, and if it was it must have been destroyed at some point; I can’t find the staircase now. But it was planned, and Fulda made the initial sketches.

The first panel shows unnamed dinosaurs in a thunderstorm. In the second, skies still dark, two dinosaurs rip into the throat of a third. A bird watches. The viewer climbs. In the next set, the panels depict ocean corals; the violence subsides. Streaks indicate moving water. The viewer takes another step. A bird lands on a tree in the next panel. Below grazing animals watch slowly as the skies clear. The panel is still crowded with clouds, but now with a break of light. Herds of ancient camels walk toward the horizon. A mother nuzzles her young to keep moving. In the final panels, the dark clouds clear and the sky glows. A bird spreads its wings, about to take flight. The viewer climbs another stair and sees structures, people with drums. Spears. Something that looks like Stonehenge. We reach the Paleolithic era. A castle. One more step up to the third floor of the staircase. The last panel shows galaxy nebula. We catapult into the edge of space and time. We stand on the top landing.

work toed the line between the real and imagined. When she did substitute a camera to draw by hand, it wasn’t quite anachronistic, but almost. She used mounted skeletons to reproduce the animals in two dimensions, imagining the surrounding landscape. Imagining that staircase that never was, I fold the sketches, each feather-light, careful that my clumsy movement doesn’t send them flying to the carpet floor.

The museum archivists nod when I ask about Fulda, knowing my question before I ask.

They then shake their heads. I have made friends with historians by remembering together the unanswered question we have both asked in that same room. I know more about those historians, decades my senior and strangers again after a brief meeting, than I know about our mutual imaginary friend haunting the archive.

Despite the stories, ghost can be seen in broad daylight.

In the Progressive Era, the increasingly professionalized field of scientific illustration offered an avenue for women to become involved in institutional natural history. The Assistant Director of the Natural History Museum at the time, Wayne Faunce, said that one of Fulda’s “completed series of figures would be of greatest usefulness to scientists the world over.” Mostly, Fulda did what Historian of Science Ruth Cowan calls “invisible labor.” Cowan uses this construction to describe women’s work in twentieth century suburbia (think: washing machines, microwaves).

Instead of the split-level home and the sacred sanctum of the post-war family, Fulda worked in the hallways and stairwells of the grandest scientific cathedral of New York City. I find no evidence of whether she wrote letters in the evenings, if she had a family, or where she washed her laundry. Instead, the parts of her life visible to me now are those assembled from the few documents she shed as she worked; swept into the archives by custodians of history. She was, at moments, seen. She shone. In her days as museummaker, Fulda was an expert, handling fossils that visitors could never touch. Roy Andrews, a museum curator, wrote to the museum President to recommend Fulda to the task of making watercolor restorations of “Mongolian beasts” as a gift from the American Museum to the Chinese Government. He wrote of her “unusual training and aptitude.” Faunce boasted that “few people other than Mrs. Fulda can do this work at all.”

And yet, in this letter, Faunce was writing a request to the city to fund the rest of the work through Roosevelt’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA) intended to combat the unemployment epidemic. So the Museum, one of the most powerful institutions in New York City, honored her work and claimed its international significance, but needed Roosevelt’s help to fund the rest of her projects. In the Museum budget, she only half-existed. Rinsing negatives and folding manuscripts with love. I wonder if TERA agreed to the grant request.

Ghosts gaze. I stare back. I wonder if I am afraid.

Fulda worked with Charles Knight—a prominent muralist for the museum, trained first as a portrait painter for Manhattan elite. When the museum commissioned Knight to design a mural for the Dinosaur Hall in 1925, he insisted on using only his own assistants, refusing to work with Fulda. “I am sorry to say that this would be quite out of the question,” he said curtly in a letter to Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museum president. He wrote, “I don’t like to see this Museum employ such very mediocre talent… her drawings [are] ... wholly unscientific and without life… Mrs. Fulda’s qualifications for the work are nil and her personality is so distasteful to me that even though she were ever so capable (which she decisively is not) I still would refuse to consider her for a moment.” Knight added, “This criticism is, I assure you, purely impersonal.” The director George Sherwood replied to Knight, “I trust that during the happy hours of your summer vacation you will plan out the future and will think out the best method of securing cooperation. In the past every great artist has had cooperation…” Every time I see one of Sherwood’s letters, he seems to be protecting someone or assuring them of their worth to the museum.

Ghosts can be forgotten.

A woman on the radio reminded me of an adage I had heard a long time ago. We die two deaths: one when our body ceases to fulfill the minimal mechanical requirements for functioning, and the other when the last person to remember our story also dies, and our name falls from the lips of the living. How dimensional can I make this woman? Enough to postpone the second death?

In a 1958 article in the World Telegraph, Elizabeth Fulda poses for a portrait. I had thought she posed in front of a window but when I look back at the article I realize she is next to a landscape painting—presumably her own. “Artist, 80, Takes it Easy,” the headline reads. “There were 106 blue morning glories blooming outside a window behind her head, and a layout of woodcuts, tools and sketches beside her in the four-flight walkup studio,” the staff writer for the Telegraph describes her private home. She holds a brush and a palette, limp in her hand. She looks away from the canvas, toward me but looking a little past my left shoulder, off the frame of the camera.

ELIZA DEXTER COHEN B’15 listens to ghost stories.

Ghost stories are imagined, or real, or imagined real.

Fulda’s designs for the mural on the “History of Life on Earth” told a story of progress, of literal enlightenment, of increasingly complicated physical and social structures. But most of Fulda’s

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Photos and archival materials are reproduced courtesy of AMNH Special Collections

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EARTH LINKS Technology, Agriculture, and the Computational Metaphor

by Lisa Borst illustration by Devyn Park We conceive of the Internet mostly through metaphors. Early imaginings of a globally distributed network of information likened the nascent web’s structure to that of a branching tree, its archival function to human memory. In 1945 engineer Vannevar Bush, who served as director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Manhattan Project, wrote in The Atlantic about a hypothetical machine called the Memex—considered by many to be one of the first imagined incarnations of a computer—that could organize and archive information using “trails and paths,” as if information were a natural landscape to be groomed and tamed. Later imaginings of computers throughout the 1960s and 70s, focusing on their potential to store data and carry out repetitive tasks, rested on analogies of human brains and central nervous systems. The Providence- and New York-based artist Faith Holland focuses much of her work on the ways in which popular conceptions of the Internet visually and rhetorically recall the human vagina, reappropriating sci-fi imaginaries of the Internet as a series of endless tubes and tunnels that are ready to be entered and “penetrated.”

The Internet, often imagined as unanchored in real, physical space, becomes easier to talk about when we bend and stretch it into spatial analogies and metaphors, tethering it to more familiar reference points—the human body, the mind, and especially the earth. Indeed, the rhetoric of the current Internet—despite fantasies of the web as an aspatial site of futuristic progress—rests overwhelmingly on metaphors borrowed from botany, agriculture, and natural history: we discuss the Internet in terms of server farms and data mining, Explorers and Safaris, the rhizome and the cloud. Computers run and die and sleep; they have memory and energy. Digital product names consistently reflect artifacts and systems of the natural world, from the computer mouse to the Macbook Air. Walk through any university library or classroom or office and count the number of apples you see, all missing one bite rounded with digital precision, all emitting a soft electronic glow. Even the word “web” itself evokes a silky and arachnid structure, branching and converging at endless glimmering vertices.

The Electronic Frontier This sort of linguistic skeuomorphism (a term that refers to the use of real-life physical metaphors as a way to make the functions of digital technology more comprehensible—consider the clicking shutter sound of an iPhone’s camera, or the faux-soundboard aesthetic of a software like Garageband) is only one component linking the realms of computers and natural history. The relationship between the Internet and agriculture seeps past the rhetorical; historically, the two worlds have consistently collided and converged in material ways. In his 2006 book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, the media theorist Fred Turner discusses the ways in which many early Internet ideals and applications—so often considered the products of Cold War defense research and military-industrial efforts—in fact arose from the very same counterculture communities that, in the 1960s, were largely concerned with eco-friendliness, sustainable farming and “going off the grid.”

Turner traces the development of the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture magazine founded by writer and biologist Stewart Brand that focused on sustainable agriculture, DIY ecology, and building environmentally friendly intentional communities. The catalog, first published in 1968, was a seminal artifact for a generation of counterculturalists who ostensibly used ‘going off the grid’ as a means of protesting post-WWII consumer capitalism. However, Turner argues that, heralded in a large part by the Whole Earth Catalog, many of the communities that initially focused on building small sustenance farms, hippie communes, and other agrarian intentional communities in the 60s quickly found utility in the very same “cybernetic discourses and collaborative work styles”—meaning, namely, a nascent Internet—that had developed through Cold War research.

Turner traces the eventual development of the communities surrounding the Whole Earth Catalog into the early Internet community known as the Whole

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Earth ’Lectronic Link, or the WELL; several users involved in the WELL eventually went on to found the magazine Wired, today a hugely influential, mainstream tech publication.

Much of this shift—literally, “from counterculture to cyberculture”—is evident in the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog itself, which initially functioned as a kind of product review. In issues published in the late 1960s, theoretical texts on cybernetics began to appear within the magazine’s pages alongside reviews of farming tools and holistic medicines; Turner writes that Stewart Brand “published letters from high-technology researchers next to firsthand reports from rural hippies.” That these juxtapositions actually worked to unite the worlds of sustainable farming and early online community-building reflects the twin utopian ideals shared by those two disparate realms; it also indicates the remarkable importance of building shared rhetorics between worlds.

Throughout the book, Turner emphasizes the deliberate process of constructing a shared language to unite digital technologies with the sciences, the natural world, and 60s political concerns—a kind of Esperantic link between fields. Recalling Vannevar Bush’s imagining of the Memex proto-computer as a system of branching trails and paths, Turner writes that the prevailing model within the Cold War-era military-computer-industrial complex was a conception of institutions as living organisms—an ethos and a rhetoric that sat well among intentional communities seeking to integrate life and land, social practices and agricultural labor, into singular sustainable systems.

The rhizomatic and acentralized—but ultimately programmable—architecture of the Internet comfortably straddles this divide between organism and institution. Indeed, Turner cites Kevin Kelley, executive editor of Wired, as asserting that humans are coming to believe that “the universe is a computer.”

Continuing to quote Kelley, Turner writes that, in the 1990s, “Many had believed that ‘thinking is a type of computation, DNA is software, evolution is an algorithmic process.’ Soon enough, [Kelley] argued, human beings would begin to imagine all of biology as an instantiation of computer logic…. ‘We are compiling a vocabulary and syntax that is able to describe in a single language all kinds of phenomena that have escaped a common language until now. It is a new universal metaphor.’”

Data Farming The metaphor runs both ways. Tech lifts agrarian language from biology and natural history, just as biology and agriculture rely heavily on tech discourse; and beyond rhetoric, too, there is movement in either direction. Inversely to Turner’s model of circa-1960s movement from the farm to the web, there appears to be, now, a parallel motion in the opposite direction: the application of contemporary digital innovations toward creating more sustainable agriculture practices, the seeping east of Silicon Valley.

In the past few years numerous tech companies and startups have emerged with the goals of improving agricultural output, collecting data in order to create predictive models for use by farmers and growers. The startup FarmLogs, for example, was founded in 2012 and allows farmers to store their data in the cloud and optimize production by keeping precise track of scheduling, seeding and irrigation, and other logistical information; it’s now used by 20 percent of row crop farms in the US. In a blog post about FarmLogs published this February, Sam Altman, President of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, wrote that, “Technology is about doing more with less. This is important in a lot of areas, but few as important as natural resources.”

This focus on using technology to stretch the capacities of natural resources falls among the larger tech-industry trend toward “solutionism”—the reliance upon digital technologies to solve real-world problems evident in business models like Uber and Airbnb, which use smartphone apps to solve issues of transportation and housing (although notably only for those users who can afford to take part in the sharing economy). The solutionist attitude was reflected clearly

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in multinational agricultural giant Monsanto’s 2013 purchase of the Climate Corporation, a San Francisco-based tech company that uses aggregated weather data to create and sell predictive insurance policies based on highly precise variations in geography, season, and crop. The sale brought an unprecedented amount of media attention to the role that digital technologies can play in agriculture, demonstrating big agribusiness’ faith in big data.

However, the ideological overlaps between the agricultural world and Silicon Valley startup culture—even its subsets concerned directly with agricultural production—remain contested. A 2013 New Yorker article about the Climate Corporation takes place largely at the company’s San Francisco office, where writer Michael Specter observes a company-wide game of foosball and remarks upon the Climate Corporation’s characteristically ultramodern, glorified-recroom tech-campus aesthetic. “It is hard to say which scenario is less likely,” he writes: “that this place, with its brushed-concrete floors and its spare digital ethos, is the headquarters of what is essentially an agricultural insurance company, or that anyone who works here has anything in common with the people who farm the millions of acres that the Climate Corporation currently insures.”

It’s true that our collective imaginaries of the contemporary tech campus (which, in my mind, stands somewhere between the Facebook offices in The Social Network and the exaggeratedly futuristic campus setting in Dave Eggers’ 2013 utopian novel The Circle) little resemble the vast and dusty Midwestern landscapes we tend to associate with the modern agricultural industry. However, the tech campus, at least rhetorically, shares many of its ideals with a 60s-era intentional small-farming community—in particular, the imploding division between work space and leisure space exemplified by something like a companywide foosball tournament. The Whole Earth vision rested on a unification of labor and life, an attempt to dismantle the delineations between capital-driven “work” and free, pleasure-driven “play.” On a communal sustenance farm, you live where you work, work where you play, grow what you eat. Likewise, the Silicon Valley tech campus ideal promises a similar collapse of this division, with large-scale tech companies providing their employees with residential and transportation arrangements, meals and gyms and childcare, ping-pong tables and foosball tournaments.

Head in the Cloud This familiar tech campus vision—with its organic in-house cafés, its eco-friendly shuttle buses running from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, its Montessori education for employees’ children—stands as a salient and shiny example of the sort of vague, west-coast, NPR-leftism we tend to associate with the largely youth-driven culture of the contemporary tech industry. However, as many tech critics have argued, the actual business practices and political interests of the tech industry don’t always align with the ideals its office cultures ostensibly encapsulate (let’s not forget that controlling the Climate Corporation, invested in its foosball tables and trendy treadmill desks, is Monsanto—widely imagined as the contemporary face of corporate evil).

april 10 2015

Indeed, many of the ideals and politics that the tech industry uses to describe itself—especially those, such as egalitarianism and openness, sustainability and eco-friendliness, and non-commercial civic engagement, that begin to converge with the utopian idealism of the 60s communes discussed in From Counterculture to Cyberculture—start to deflate when one considers the material realities of the current technological landscape. As tech critic Tom Slee argued in a 2014 interview with the Independent, the architecture of the Internet itself has shifted tremendously since the heyday of the WELL, its political and social potential considerably shaken. Early Internet architecture of the sort championed

by Stewart Brand depended on a nonhierarchical and networked model, one that allowed many computers to communicate with each other with no singular central node. The early Internet was, by design, egalitarian; the appealing and broadly leftist promise was that anyone could take part. But now, Slee argues, “That architecture has changed. Now there is this hub and spoke thing, whether it’s Facebook or Wikipedia. You might try and picture it as a network of people, but it’s all peripheral computers talking to a central computer.”

The trouble, according to Slee, is that while these realities of Internet use and tech-industry logic have shifted enormously, the rhetorics of sustainability and egalitarianism have persisted across the industry—so that, for instance, when Indiana passed its Religious Freedom Restoration Act last month, effectively allowing state-sanctioned discrimination against LGBTQ individuals by private businesses, it felt only ‘natural’ for Apple CEO Tim Cook to publish an angry editorial in the Washington Post, arguing that, “Our message, to people around the country and around the world, is this: Apple is open. Open to everyone, regardless of where they come from, what they look like, how they worship or who they love.”

This kind of borderline-utopian rhetoric works neatly to describe a company (with roots in the LSD-fueled counterculture of Steve Jobs’ youth) whose product names, like so many other digital technologies, rest on the language of the natural world—from the earliest incarnations of the Macintosh to newer features like its Retina Display. But by linking itself rhetorically to ideals of nature and counterculture, the tech industry is largely failing to talk about itself with the sort of openness and transparency for which it so often advocates. At a time when the agriculture industry is increasingly influenced and mediated by Silicon Valley, to ground technology in agrarian language becomes a tautological exercise: at some point, technology can only talk directly about itself.

LISA BORST B’17 worked on a farm once, but she grew tomatoes there, not data.

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TWO MEN

by Dash Elhauge

Two men folded their bodies in the wind. One of the men panned his red chin over the landscape.

The flurries rose and the sun fell. At the edge of the white hills, where the snow sparkled, there was nothing.

One of the men turned and the other tilted his head. One of the men pivoted his buried heel and the other tucked his nose beneath his collar. One of the men put his hands in his pockets and the other pocketed his eyes deep in his skull. Their eyes ached as they traced the snow.

The men huddled and unzipped their jackets, pinching the lining of their pockets. They rubbed the smooth of their chins against each others' shoulders and clasped arms. They stared at each other lovingly, eyes wide.

One of the men ran his fingers through the other man’s hair. The other man pulled his hat down to his neck. The man did the same, and they were silhouettes of faces. Neither could see the other smile. And the other man fell back and the man caught him. The other man whispered as he fell but the man saw only mist. And the man squeezed the other’s hand and the other man watched as it broke and became only flesh.

The man lit a cigarette over the other and withdrew a book from his pack. The spine crinkled in the wind. He recited: A man leans over a bridge and sees his reflection. He asks, Why can’t I distinguish between my son’s eyes and my hand on his cheek? His reflection distorts in the wind, and he thinks this is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. He bends down to get a closer look and falls. He drowns.

The ashes of the man’s cigarette fell to the page. The other man saw the glow through the weave of his hat and felt lonely and the man whispered in his ear and he swallowed. The man pulled the other man’s hat off and the stray wool rained down and the other man raised his face to the dust and the man held the other man’s hand as the piling snow buried him and his eyelids creased and his thoughts traced a story he’d heard long ago, when he was very young.

And the other man’s eyes shut tight to keep out stinging flakes leaking through the bottom of his hat and the snow formed little hills on his eyelids. And the other man leaned down close and watched as the sun set on the dying man’s eyes.

And the man looked up and the stars collapsed into one another and he wept in fury. He pulled a wool blanket over the other man and rose, head blended with night, and turned to find the sparkles.

But the moon was swept in dark clouds and he could not see. In the distance, he heard the shifting of flurries that hang above the frozen blanket, which drift and sting at ankles. The man pulled off his hat, gathered his pack over his shoulders and pushed toward the sound.

And as the man walked he thought of a story he’d heard when he was very young, that he’d recite to himself under the sheets when darkness swelled in his room and the din of sparkly earrings and creased overcoats and hollow laughter strained his eyes in the darkness: There was a boy in a village. Every day the boy got water from the river for his ailing father. But one day the boy heard trickling before he reached the river. So the boy followed and followed the sound of the water, until he came upon a hunched man in a cotton blanket. And the man looked up and said he did not hear the water, but there was water where the sun met the ocean. So the boy walked on for many miles.

He saw nothing, but heard trickling, and walked on. It was raining. It rained for many years and the boy never returned home.

The man’s legs dragged against the snow, pulling against his creaking knees, and slowly, as he wrestled control of his breath, the man’s legs met, and he came to a stop. The man heard the shifting not in front of him but to the side. He blinked his hidden eyes. But when the man tilted his head the sound shifted. So the man tilted his head again, but again it shifted. And over and over the man spun his head and the sound shifted louder and louder and the man pulled some cloth out from his pack and shredded it and shoved pieces in his ears but they would not stay so the man reached into his mouth for spit but his mouth was dry and the pieces of cloth fell from the man’s ears and now the shifting was louder than ever and seemed to be coming from right beneath him so the man dug and dug and before long he realized he wasn’t digging to get out he was digging to find the other man. And he found him he found the other man but he was without a face and he parted the snow around his head and lay down with him and kissed him gently on the cheek but the man had no cheek. So he dug further but there was nothing but the man, so the man removed part of his own cheek and lay it on the other man, but when he bent down to try and kiss it there was nothing so he removed more of his cheek and again there was nothing. So the man removed his nose, too, and there was nothing and his eyes and there was nothing and his ears and bit by bit the man faded into the other and the wind swept and the flurries rose and the little bits of snow that never find a place to land shifted and landed firmly over the man and again, there was nothing.

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Would you rather be m y mom or my dad? L is tth e in d y @ g m a il .c o m

Friday, April 10 Political Concepts at Brown

9 AM to 7PM // Pembroke Hall 305, 172 Meeting St, Providence // Free Some real superstar profs throwing down here. MCM’s Phil Rosen, Joan Copjec, Bonnie Honig, and Lynne Joyrich all speak, as do comp lit’s Suzanne Stewart Steinberg and Adi Ophir from Middle Eastern Studies. Each block pairs two panelists with a moderator, focusing on keywords like “Region,” “Missing,” and “Reclamation.”

Nerf Wars

4 PM to 6PM // Teamworks, 732 Lees River Ave, Somerset, MA // $5 ***THIS IS A KIDS EVENT*** So just keep that in mind if you’re a twenty year-old planning on showing up and crushing the competition. That would be mean.

Saturday, April 11 11th Annual Breakfast & Raffle to Help Homeless Cats and Dogs 8:30 AM // Norwood Baptist Church, 48 Budlong Ave, Warwick // $10 (adults), $3 (children under 6)

Paid access to a full breakfast spread will benefit the Warwick Animal Shelter, a nonprofit who will use the proceeds to help their dogs and cats find homes, and to continue operating the shelter. Donations of dog and cat food are also accepted, but I don’t think they can be used as currency to purchase human food.

Political Concepts at Brown

9 AM to 7PM // Pembroke Hall 305, 172 Meeting Street, Providence // Free The party continues, including a special guest appearance from Jacques Ranciére.

RISD Student Art Sale

10 AM to 4 PM // Nickerson Green, between Waterman St and Angell St, Providence // Free

RISD students will be hocking their wares, rain or shine.

There’ll be food trucks and entertainment, and a lot of very very good student art.

Robot Block Party

12PM to 4PM // Pizzitola Sports Center, corner of Hope St and Bowen St, Providence // Free Part of National Robotics Week, this exhibition will feature demos and exhibits of robots of all types. Governor Gina Raimondo will preside as honorary chair. Rumor has it she has been searching the exhibitions for a successor.

IFF Presents: Dosa Hunt (followed by Q&A)

6:45 PM // Martinos Auditorium, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, 154 Angell St, Providence // Free Dosa Hunt’s title does not mislead. It’s short film featuring musicians—including Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij and Dapwell of Das Racist— trying to find the best dosas in their hometown. Q&A to follow with director Amrit Singh, producer Zoe Schack, and Dapwell himself.

Shores: Cody Fitzgerald’s Thesis Performance

8PM // Grant Recital Hall, 105 Benevolent St, Providence // Free Homerism alert: Cody is my roommate and I’m playing keyboards in this performance. But that’s how I know it will be cool!! I just got out of rehearsal with fourteen orchestral musicians crammed into Cody’s bedroom, which is a perfect description of the sound of Cody’s thesis recordings themselves. The pieces will be both performed and played as finished products.

IFF Party with DJ Dapwell

10PM - 1AM // AS220 Blackbox, 95 Empire St, Providence // Ticketing TBA After his Q&A, Dapwell will take the decks at the AS220 black box. He’s very good at what he does.

The w eek in Indep enIndy W dents eek in Raleig Durha holds m/Chapel H h/ th il theind e domain n l ame y.com AND T DON’T H They h EVEN USE I EY T!! ave it redire indyw ct t ee the m k.com, whe o ost re re cen post is “Happ t blog y East Week er e North nd Reading : Caroli n a’s P Are Sc rewed oor .”

Sunday, April 12 Family See + Sketch: Buckminster Fuller, Six Part Push Pull Tensegrity

2PM to 3PM // Farago Lobby, RISD Museum, 20 North Main St, Providence // Free Family drawing time. Ever tried to sketch a Bucky Fuller creation? It’ll probably make your brain hurt.

6th Annual Bowl-a-thon

3PM to 6PM // Town Hall Lanes, 1463 Atwood Ave, Johnston // $10 with fundraising goal of $50 A bowl-a-thon to benefit the Women’s Health and Education Fund, an allvolunteer organization assisting those who choose abortion or contraceptive care but cannot afford the cost. More info at www.bowlathon.nnaf.org/whef

IFF Presents: Trainwreck

4PM // Martinos Auditorium, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, 154 Angell St, Providence // Ticketing TBA Closing the Ivy Film Festival is a months-early screening of Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer’s feature-length comedy, Trainwreck. LeBron James is in it. For real.

Monday, April 13 The Humanities in Israel/Palestine: Reflections on the State of Knowledge 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM // Pembroke Hall 305, 172 Meeting Street, Providence // Free Guests from the Minerva Humanities Center in Tel Aviv will be in conversation with Brown University professors on the state of political discourse in Israeli universities.

Tuesday, April 14 Chess Club

Wednesday, April 15 RISD tool() Series: Place

6:30 PM // Bayard Ewing Building 106, 231 South Main St, Providence // Free The final tool() talk of the semester will feature Jer Thorp, Paula Gaetano-Adi Brian House, Daniel Peltz, and Lynette Widder on the possibilities and problems of using place as a tool in one’s artwork.

Thursday, April 16 Opening: The Subject 6PM to 9PM // Proxy, 270 Westminster St, Providence // Free The first line of the exhibition text for “The Subject,” which features work from Aaron Graham, Kyle Laidig, Luke Moore, and Kate Stevenson, quotes “We Found Love.” But it also continues by talking about “entanglement with/in capitalism.” Just so you know where you stand.

Jer Thorp Lecture

6:30 PM // Chace Center, RISD Museum, 20 North Main St, Providence // Free

Jer Thorp is a data-based artist and will be talking about his work—in his words, “a rambling selection of my software-based, data-focused artwork.”

Preview his work at blg.blprnt.com

Pawtucket Red Sox Opening Day 7PM // McCoy Stadium, 1 Columbus Ave, Pawtucket // $9 and up The PawSox begin their second-tolast season in Pawtucket (probably), against the Rochester Red Wings. The first 3,000 fans will receive a commemorative poster.

New Urban Arts 18th Annual Fundraiser

7PM // 186 Carpenter St, Providence // Free

7PM to 10 PM // New Urban Arts, 705 Westminster St, Providence // $20

Beginners are “welcome and encouraged” but the atmosphere is also described as “hyper-competitive.” Good luck.

Come celebrate the work of students and alumni while snacking during our annual event!

Emma SulkowiczIFF Presents: Trainwreck

4PM // Martinos Auditorium, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, 154 Angell St, Providence // Ticketing TBA Closing the Ivy Film Festival is a months-early screening of Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer’s feature-length comedy, Trainwreck. LeBron James is in it.