The College Hill Independent V.30 N.09

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT V 30 N 09 | APR 17 2015 A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY

VOLUME 30 | ISSUE 9

NEWS 02 Week in Review dash elhauge, maya sorabjee, malcolm drenttel & zeve sanderson

03 Keeping Up w/ History dominique pariso

METRO 05 Ponderous emma phillips

FEATURES 04 07 08 09

Stop. Watch

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 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 Spring Weekend

ARTS 11 Hoffin’ Paint jonah max

13 Visible Cities sarah cheung

SCIENCE 15 Deer in the Living Room

EPHEMERA

NRA Rating for HC: F NRA Rating for LC: F

12 Echo Chamber

Blind Leading the Blind

LIT

ppms

Wingardium Leviosa mika kligler, anne fosburg & sam samor

Vote by HC on No Child Left Behind: Yea Vote by LC on No Child Left Behind: Yea Vote by HC on Use of Military Force Against Iraq: Yea Vote by LC on Use of Military Force Against Iraq: Nay

mark benz

Miss Lonelyhearts

Year in which Hillary Clinton (HC) publicly supported a national recognition of same sex marriage: 2015 Year in which Lincoln Chafee (LC) publicly supported a national recognition of same sex marriage: 2004

jamie packs

rick salamé

yousef hilmy

FROM THE EDITOR S

Score from League of Conservation Voters for HC: 82% Score from League of Conservation Voters for LC: 78% Vote by HC on Secure Fence Act of 2006, which authorized fencing on US-Mexican border: Yea Vote by LC on Secure Fence Act of 2006: Nay –ZS

17 #twinning emma moore

X 18 Underwater Composition natan lawson

SPORTS 16 steroidzboiz stephanie hayes

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 PUNS

by Dash Elhauge, Malcolm Drenttel, Maya Sorabjee & Zeve Sanderson

Asset Management Fee Structure for Municipal Pensions “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Your hands can’t hit what your eyes can’t see,” Muhammad Ali rhymed in one of the most famous shit talks in sports history. Really, talk doesn’t get much shittier than that. It’s not just that Liston won’t win the bout, it’s that he can’t, cause he’s throwing blows eyes wide shut. Ali: Come at me, bro. Liston: Where you at?

Over the past decade, the Office of New York City’s Comptroller has been Liston to Wall Street’s Ali. The City relinquished control of their $160 billion pension fund to the trusty hands of finance’s elite, preparing to ride the industry’s coattails to populist prosperity. Divided between private asset classes (like hedge funds and real estate) and public assets (stocks and bonds) the firms boasted marvelous returns.

Finally, Wall Street helps Main Street, the masses cheered.

Retired po-po roll up and down Gotham’s avenues in Benzes, teachers bite into golden apples, sanitation workers...Oh shit!

Pulling the oldest trick in the capitalist book, financial firms buried management fees for investing the City’s funds deep in the fine print, which, obviously, nobody took the time to read. Last week, comptroller Scott Stringer announced that the City lost $2.5 billion after these hidden-in-plain-sight fees were accounted for. Public asset classes had outperformed their benchmarks (read: beat the market), but 95 percent of this value-added was eaten up by fees, leaving only $40 million for public retirees. The private asset classes had significantly underperformed, missing their benchmarks by an astonishing $2.6 billion once fees were deducted. According to The New York Times, “The problem stems from bad decisions and overlooked data. Relevant information about fees lay buried deep in footnotes of financial reports that no previous comptroller’s office had ever bothered to extract or publicize.”

I say we send Wall Street its own incomprehensible, impossibly long document. Data’ll teach ‘em. –ZS 99 Anti-red balloons There is something profoundly sad about the act of sending a message in a bottle—and often more so because of the sender than the contents of the receptacle itself. Even as children, we watched our helium balloons float away from our fingers into a neighboring universe of nonexistence with only fleeting sadness, even then conditioned to accept the next-to-nothing probability of ever seeing it again, or of it having a life beyond our own.

But South Korean activist Park Sang-hak has spent the first several months of 2015 performing this same desperate sendoff around one thousand times over. Park, the chairman of Fighters for a Free North Korea, a human rights organization, has been launching balloons into the nether for years, hoping that they will drift across the DMZ as airborne messages-in-bottles, and that their contents will eventually reach the hands of the isolated North Korean public. For years, it’s been millions of balloons containing transistor radios, flash drives and pamphlets, but lately, Park has been sending across DVDs of The Interview, the uncouth Franco-Rogen slapstick whose mediocrity only made headlines in December because

APRIL 17 2015

of its spawning of a tense political standoff between North Korea and the US. Despite police resistance and an assassination attempt, Park has continued his incessant ballooning much to the annoyance of both sides of the border. North Korea is enraged by Park’s determination to besmirch the name of their Supreme Leader, while local residents in his own nation don’t appreciate the unnecessary tension that this poetic stunt is causing at the DMZ. While the balloons are designed to release their contents by the time they drift above Pyongyang, critics are skeptical about the effectiveness of the campaign, arguing that most North Koreans do not own computers, and would not be able to watch the film even if they were to risk doing so.

The idea seems strange, but Park’s efforts are a clear reminder of all the things—such as bad filmmaking—that we tend to take for granted. If it is indeed, as Pyongyang has referred to it, a de facto “declaration of war,” it might be the most serene battle cry in history: hundreds of oblong piece of plastic, bobbing across space.

We can only hope that this won’t inflate North and South Korean tensions to the point of poetic aerial combat.

–MS Murky Waters The infinite has always perplexed man, and indeed, this week on the high seas the endless and the ceaseless have taken the form of uncontrollable vomit. The Infinity is a 965’ cruise ship currently sailing under the flag of Celebrity Cruises. Previously known for their novel “Pick your Perk” program, the Celebrity Cruises name took a beating this week following the release of reports that the Infinity had been overwhelmed by a norovirus outbreak.

On Monday, the ship’s 2,000 passengers were freed to roam the city of San Diego, but not before hundreds of vacations were ruined by vomiting, diarrhea, fevers, and body aches. Six members of the 964-person crew are also said to have caught the bug. The Infinity was home to similar outbreaks in 2006 as well as in 2013. Since the beginning of the year the CDC has reported five outbreaks of gastrointestinal viruses aboard cruise ships in American waters. No guilty party has been identified; the Infinity recently earned a perfect score on the CDC’s renowned 100-point Vessel Sanitation Program scoring metric. The norovirus may have managed to stow away in bad food, a sloppily washed towel, or any number of other virus-friendly nooks. On cruisecritic.com, a review of an Infinity cruise by user Photo_Traveler describes the staff’s attempts to prevent a norovirus outbreak in 2014: “When the code red activity started after leaving Mexican waters, the ship became squeaky clean. It’s almost clean enough for surgery in most areas of the ship.” Reports from those aboard for this most recent outbreak have yet to be posted to cruisecritic.com, cruisereviews.com, or any of the other major review services.

The good news is that none of the cases were really serious, and everyone made it out alive. Your friends at the Indy just hope that the crew of the Infinity won’t be too pooped to keep on cruising. –MD

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The Armenian Genocide 100 Years On

by Dominique Pariso Kim Kardashian’s Instagram has long been lauded as the master class in selfie taking. Scrolling through the feed, you see a montage of close-ups and wider shots: of the perfectly tousled hair and contoured cheekbones that we all desire, and of the aestheticized, perfect lives that have become the chief aspiration of contemporary life. And yet, each year, Kardashian takes the time to acknowledge the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide on her social media accounts.

The flow of images is interrupted, and we are reminded that the horror of the past still lingers in our perfect present.

This year is no different. Kardashian—herself a product of the Armenian diaspora—is attempting to illuminate the brutal massacre of over one million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, which utilized death marches, concentration camps, and mass burnings and drownings. +++ “Oh yeah they all went for it, Kim, Khloe, her husband… what’s his name, Cayenne…”

“Kanye, Mom.” “Oh right, Kanye…”

I was on the phone with my mom, who informed me that the Kardashians were even visiting Armenia this week to acknowledge the upcoming anniversary. As a public we may be complicit in trivializing these events. More people will tune in for the episode than actually know or care about what it is commemorating.

Indeed, there's a fine line between genuine compassion and Bono. And nobody wants to end up like Bono. It’s almost too easy to make jabs at Kardashian for her stance on this platform. #Armenia? Celebrities will always be scrutinized, especially when they’re championing a cause. Do they really care or are they merely doing it for publicity? Famous people be warned.

But there’s nothing funny about Kardashian choosing to use her position to raise awareness about this often ignored part of history. And she is not alone.

On Sunday, Pope Francis, in a commemorative mass at St. Peter’s Basilica called the period “genocide.” “In the past century, our human family has lived through three massive and unprecedented tragedies,” he said, calling the Armenian slaughter “the first genocide of the twentieth century.” Whoever would have thought that Kim K and the Cool Pope would make one heck of a tag team? But their combined efforts seem necessary, especially as the centenary of the genocide approaches later this week.

On April 24, 1915, over 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were rounded up by Ottoman authorities and arrested in Constantinople. This day marked the beginning of a brutal, eight-year campaign by the Ottoman government to purge ethnic Armenians from the country. An estimated 1 to 1.5 million people were

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killed. It was also the catalyst for the Armenian diaspora, which found many populations settling in parts of Europe and the United States. The Ottoman Empire, controlling the region that is now present-day Turkey, was aligned with Germany during World War I. Turkish military leaders feared that the Armenians would be eager to fight for the enemy if they believed that they could win their independence through an Allied victory. The Armenians organized volunteer battalions to aid the Russian army fight against the Turks. This, coupled with years of political unrest and violence between the Turks and the Armenians, led the government to take drastic measures to eradicate them from the country.

To this day, the Turkish government takes issue with the recognition of those years as genocide. While they have acknowledged to a certain extent the violence that was perpetuated against the Armenians, they believe that it is historically inaccurate to suggest that the murders where systematic and intentional. They further assert that there were far fewer causalities than the estimated 1.5 million.

Turkey considers the Turkish-Armenia conflict to be a civil war in which both sides suffered losses. An unconvincing argument to be sure, but it does point to the underlying resentment on the part of Turkey. Given Turkey’s continued political significance in the Middle East, only around 20 countries and the UN have formally challenged them on the matter.

But, the United States is not among them. Despite naming the atrocities for what they were during the 2008 election campaign, President Obama, upon entering office, has taken up a more coded language, referring to the period as an “atrocity” or a “dark period.”

Obama is well aware of the consequences. Last month, when a bipartisan resolution was introduced in Congress calling “for the United States government to do the moral thing and recognize these atrocities for what they are—genocide,” Turkey threw the equivalent of an international temper tantrum and immediately threatened repercussions against the US if the resolution were to pass.

And they make good on their threats. Two years ago, when France passed a law making it illegal to deny the Armenian genocide, Turkey cut all ties with the country. In Rome, mere hours after the mass, they removed their ambassador from the Vatican. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu tweeted that the Pope’s use of the word was “out of touch with historical facts” and “unacceptable.”

It is clear that Turkey seeks to maintain legitimacy through what Harvard professors Arthur and Joan Kleinman have called “official silence,” the technique by which “the totalitarian state rules by collective forgetting, by denying the collective experience of suffering.” Now there is a kind of secondary violence being exerted on the Armenian people in robbing them internationally of the word that captures a part of their history. It is hard to

remember that when large sums of money, diplomacy, and international relations are at stake.

And it is not just the use of this word, but the attempt to rewrite the history. It's far easier to tamper with the history textbooks than to face the past because it forces individuals to ask harder questions. And by editing the history books, we allow the collective memory to be altered. To face up to what has been done would require the shared traumatic experience of processing the truth.

Instead, the Turkish government expends vast amounts of energy making sure this truth stays buried. No monuments will be constructed, no books or films are allowed to be made, people are punished for publicly speaking about these events. For example, in 2005 Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk was brought up on criminal charges after issuing a statement referencing the killings. The charges were eventually dropped, but not before he was made the victim of a hate campaign and assassination threats. This sets a bad precedent for the country, and thus allows the repression and reconstruction of the memories of the Turkish people.

Turkey is responsible for the first genocide in a century of horrifying violence. This century ushered in a time of technological advances and military campaigning that allowed the killing of a vast quantity of people more efficiently than ever before. Many of us sat in high school history class staring mindlessly at posters that read platitudes like “Never Forget” or “Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.” And yet what we are asked to remember is a heavily edited anthology—Rwanda, Cambodia, Nazi Europe, but not Armenia.

The suppression of acknowledgement of the genocide in Turkey is insulting because they are alone in their complete refusal to take responsibility—especially when compared to other nations that have similar pasts. Under the 2005 Rwanda constitution, “revisionism, negationism, and trivialization of genocide” is illegal and treated as a criminal offense. Germany, for its part, paid reparations, and memorials have been erected on German soil. Not to suggest that this somehow makes even a small dent in the horror; however, this effort to take responsibility is, in some ways, the least they can do.

In 1939, Hitler himself said, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” I think that I speak on behalf of everyone when I say that we should not let Adolf freaking Hitler still be sort of right.

It's time for our world leaders to keep up with the Kardashians.

Dominique Pariso ’18 wants to call a spade a spade.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The Climate Itself I imagine that a lot of people think that, before hot air balloons and other forms of air travel, people made maps by walking around and jotting down what they saw. In reality surveyors used complex astronomical calculations to determine longitude and latitude well before anyone could actually experience bird’s eye view. Telescopes were trained on the moons of Jupiter, and observatories calculated star positions in predictive tables.

When did the moon appear to pass over that star? The time differential between observed and expected told you your location.

by Rick Salamé

For centuries clocks have been used to measure east-west distance. Twenty-four hours is the time it take for the earth to rotate 360 degrees. Four minutes is one degree of rotation, one 360th of the earth’s circumference. The east-west distance between Washington DC and Chicago is 42 minutes and 28 seconds.

In the eighteenth century we ditched the lunar calculations. Bring two clocks onboard your ship. Set one to the mean time of the port you left and set the other to noon overhead. The time differential tells you where you are.

I don’t know when we first realized that measuring distance in this way could be applied to the human scale. In 1916 Albert Einstein proved that simultaneity had no absolute determinability. “Every reference body (coordinate system) has its own particular time; unless we are told the reference body to which the statement of time refers, there is no meaning in a statement of the time of an event.” Since 1983 the official definition of the meter has been “the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.”

The world’s most accurate clock is in Colorado. It works by measuring the vibration of strontium atoms suspended in a field of lasers. It can keep time for five billion years without losing or gaining a second in error. It is so sensitive that it will show time dilation if moved a couple centimeters higher or lower, if the tiniest shift in the Earth’s crust occurs. Two of these clocks would never, ever be in agreement because even if they’re in the same room, they’re not at the same time. Researchers at the University of Colorado think the only hope for achieving a unified time scale for humans at this level of precision is by sending these clocks into space.

In 1840 “A Lady” published a poem in the English newspaper Caledonian Mercury. “Companion of my solitude / My Cheerful nevertiring clock;” she began her ode. A quaint artifact of a time before twentieth-century physics. Her eyes, in fact, registered the movement of the hands a fraction of a second after they had moved, thanks to the time it took light to travel to her eyes. Her brain registered the change a fraction of a second later. Look at the person sitting next to you: When did you first realize you were alone in time?

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A POND AND THE PEOPLE

by Emma Phillips illustration by Caroline Brewer

Mashapaug Pond, even as the largest freshwater pool in Providence, is easy to miss. It’s tucked behind the grey concrete facades and garish storefronts of Ocean State Job Lot—a strip mall that lies on the Providence-Cranston border. The built environment of highway onramps and overpasses has cropped up around the natural one, rendering it invisible and inaccessible.

The pond is nestled on land that formerly belonged to the Narragansett Indian Tribe, who have lived in the region for over 30,000 years.

As a source of both water and spirituality, the pond was a beacon of community gathering. Now, an easy lull of glassy quivers creates a feeling of peace, but one that only exists at surface level. The pond has long been, and still is, the center point of a cycle of environmental racism, oppression, and marginalization.

Located in what was formerly theWest Elmwood Neighborhood, Mashapaug is adjacent to an area that once housed 567 family homes, owned predominantly by people of color. Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that preceded it, mortgage discrimination explicitly dictated where racial minorities could purchase homes. In 1940s and ‘50s, West Elmwood was one of the few areas where loans were approved for people of color, as its proximity to the Huntington Expressway made it an undesirable neighborhood for those with other options.

In 1961, the 117-acre West Elmwood Neighborhood was destroyed to make space for the Huntington Expressway Industrial

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Park, an expansive lot that houses companies and warehouses. Today, many of the commercial buildings lie empty, long since abandoned by their tenants as Providence’s defining industrial era became assuredly post-industrial. The Providence Redevelopment Agency’s Mashapaug Pond Feasibility Plan cited high rates of crime, urban blight, and illicit activities as creating generally unhealthy living conditions to justify the destruction of the homes.

The Providence NAACP fought diligently against these accusations, generating a petition against claims they knew to be unfounded, which served as fabricated reasons for the agency to execute demolition framed as urban renewal. As former residents pursued relocation, the same rules of discrimination that excluded them from receiving loans to purchase homes in white neighborhoods also precluded them from renting there.

Former land and homeowners were stripped of the security and sovereignty land ownership afforded them. Keisha-Khan Perry, an Africana Studies professor who focuses on Black land loss, argues that land can be understood as a basic human right, and seizing Black land through the framework of urban renewal risks further solidifying a white settler mentality. After Roger Williams seized the land of the Narragansett people, The Providence Redevelopment Agency perpetuated this white settler mentality and facilitated displacement under the guise of urban development.

Now, Mashapaug pond and the area surrounding it are in actuality, hazardous. Not because of residents engaging in illicit activities, but

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

because of the toxic legacy of corporations that used Mashapaug Pond as a dispensary for industrial refuse. In 2012, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management declared the pond a Class 5 toxic water body, an accolade reserved for only the most polluted. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) deemed the water unsafe to drink, fish, or swim in. The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (RIDEM) echoed these sanctions, mandating no contact with the water and imploring pond visitors to wipe their feet thoroughly after leaving the area to avoid transmitting toxic contaminants to their homes.

This toxicity is largely due to continued non-point source pollution—that is, pollution from diffuse sources. It’s a common process in cities that results from constructing spaces with heavily-paved surfaces that are incapable of absorbing precipitation, as porous surfaces do in the natural water cycle. When storm water runoff pounds city ponds and rivers, it brings with it the trademark residues of the city: gasoline, synthetic fertilizers, and oil. During this process, it is impossible to isolate a specific culprit, and so the water quality of Mashapaug Pond is continually degraded. In a 2012 statewide water body impairment report, the EPA made claims about the probable sources filling the pond with contaminants. Pet waste and overflow from storm sewers could be blamed for fecal coliform.

High levels of phosphorous could be chalked up to wildlife defecation.

There is one toxic substance, though, about whose origin the EPA did not hypothesize. It’s Polychlorinated Biphenyl (PCB). “Source Unknown.”

Tissue samples of fish tested positive for the compound, which is illegal.

Congress banned PCB in 1979. The EPA found it to cause cancer, birth defects, and slowed neurological functioning. In a peer-reviewed study on the effects of PCB on rats, every single rat exposed to the substance developed cancer. PCBs can also attack the reproductive, endocrine, immune, and nervous systems.

In 1967, Textron, an electronics manufacturer, purchased the land around Mashapaug from the Gorham Silver Manufacturing Company.

One of largest silver manufacturers in the world during the peak of its operation, the corporation began polluting the pond in 1831, and didn’t stop until it closed over a century later in 1940. The precious metal empire transformed the pond into a cesspool, and Textron maintained it. PCB was present in chemical cocktails used to clean heavy machinery, but there is little clean about its filthy legacy of permeating groundwater stores.

Chemical refuse did not always surreptitiously slide into the pond either, but also sank there in the form of 55-gallon drums eventually discovered by emergency response divers during a skating accident rescue.

In 2006, Dr. Robert Vanderslice, the chief of Environmental Health Risk Assessment at the Rhode Island Department of Health, requested that an analysis of cancer rates be conducted in census tract 15, which contains Mashapaug Pond. The Center for Epidemiology at the Rhode Island Department of Health had difficulty claiming causality between environmental carcinogens and the region’s cancer rates due to its small population. 567 families in West Elmwood were displaced in 1961 with the construction of the Industrial Park, reducing the available sample size to those living in nearby neighborhoods. Today, only about 2,700 people live in census tract 15, 67 percent of whom are non-white. Perhaps because of the drastically reduced sample size, the elevated rates of liver cancer, lymphoma, and myeloma could not be proven to be associated with the pollution in the pond and surrounding areas. But common sense suggests these patterns are no matter of chance.

Since 1993, Textron Inc. has been charged with 29 EPA violations in 17 other states, but not in this case. Textron’s direct culpability is murky in an instance where deeds have changed hands, and stewardship of the land is not a necessary clause of ownership under the auspices of the law. Textron purchased the land in 1967, assuming both 37 acres and the ramifications of Gorham’s pollutants. In 1986 though, Textron sold the land, and the additional pollutants to augment Gorhams’ originals. The parcel then went through a series of quick real estate transactions, first to the Winoker Group, then on to the Adelaide Development Corp until the eventual owners, Seaman Equity Group, defaulted on their taxes in 1990, and the City of Providence gained possession. Yet when the city acquired the land, it became clear that their vision for repurposing and the standards for remediation to commercial and industrial standards that Textron agreed to in 1994 were incongruent.

Jorge Alvarez High School was built in 2007, the same year the report was released that found no statistically significant link between elevated levels of environmental carcinogens and elevated rates of cancer in the area. Constructed on the brownfield site formerly occupied by Gorham and Textron, it is positioned on polluted ground. It was also built in explicit violation of RIDEM standards. The remediation to commercial and

april 17 2015

industrial standards is insufficient for a school, which can legally only be built on land that has been reconstituted to meet residential standards. The City ignored this fact and pushed forward with construction, an act of conscious negligence. Amidst public outrage, RIDEM then sued the City of Providence.

The city department responsible for the toxic parcels may sound familiar. It’s the Providence Redevelopment Agency, the very agency that created the 1961 Mashapaug Redevelopment Plan.

Following the lawsuit, the city department did not remediate the toxic parcels of land surrounding the high school, but constructed fences and signage in the hope of deterring students from coming in direct contact. Instead of reaching residential standards, indoor air ventilation systems were installed to prevent students from inhaling volatile organic compounds in tainted groundwater stores directly beneath the foundation that had become gaseous. No ventilation system exists to filter the air students breathe once they leave the confines of the school. A fence and signage are insufficient barriers to separate teens from land known to contain PCB, a substance, that once airborne and inhaled, enters the bloodstream directly.

In those areas where the City, Textron, and the law are failing, art has begun to thrive. Urban Pond Procession Arts (UPP Arts) is fighting injustice—not with lawsuits, but instead with a crew of community members, puppets donated by Big Nazo, and the beats of the Extraordinary Rendition Band. Founder Holly Ewald, a local artist, was originally approached to create inclusive signage about the pond’s toxicity in English, Spanish, and Khmer.

“There’s such a complex and full story of the industrial history of the pond,” she said. She couldn’t let that story go untold. The organization formed in 2007 with the intent of holding an annual awareness-raising parade around the pond’s perimeter, but has since expanded to provide place-based environmental arts education in schools within the Reservoir Triangle area, targeting Alvarez High, Sophia Academy and Reservoir Elementary, and all the while accosting Textron for the grants to do it.

As their name suggests, the Environmental Justice League of Rhode Island (EJLRI), has also been instrumental in filling critical gaps that neither Textron nor the City have addressed.

After Alverez was constructed in 2007, there was a glaring lack in communication with parents and students about the toxicity of the surrounding area until the organization circulated a bilingual letter in 2012 to informing about the conditions to which they were, often unknowingly, being subjected.

The emergence of voluntary activists raising awareness about the pond’s charged history is promising, but the onus of remediation is not theirs. The EPA has unequivocal evidence that PCB still exists in Mashapaug Pond and surrounding groundwater sources.

The source is not unknown, and both Textron and the City must be held accountable. At minimum the compromised land that now houses a school must be reconstituted to suit residential standards. In the very construction of Alvarez, the City of Providence exempted itself from code compliance, shirking DEM mandates with haste. It might be about time to dredge the pond, and it sure is time to dredge the system.

Emma Phillips B’17 has been called pond scum.

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Taha Husayn Traces of a Visionary

by Yousef Hilmy

1. For some, to see means to know. Our eyes isolate, violate, pay no regard to the problem of hallucination and illusion.

Our eyes trick us into believing that the “real” is merely what we see on the surface, what we perceive immediately. Taha Husayn, the renowned Egyptian writer and intellectual, was not such a person. His life teaches us that the real is what we feel, that it is what we share, that to a boy who believed “the world ended to the right of him with the canal,” the real is what we can imagine and synthesize.

2. Taha Husayn was born, in 1889, in ‘Izbit el Kilo, a small village in Upper Egypt, near Maghagha. Called “The Dean of Arabic Literature,” he is most famous for his monumental autobiography, al-Ayyam (The Days), which was written in three volumes, between 1926 and 1967. In the autobiography, Husayn—who refers to himself as the “the lad” or “the boy”— traces his early childhood and education, up through his experiences as a student living in Cairo and France in the early 1900s.

3. Taha Husayn was blind. He had been so from the age of three, as a result of neglect. One day, ophthalmia attacked him, and he was not tended to for several days. It being ‘Izbit el Kilo, which was comprised mostly of fellaheen, there was no doctor or medical professional on site to attend to him.

The village barber was eventually called in to treat Husayn.

Unsurprisingly, he botched the operation, and from that point on Husayn was left without sight, as a person who, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges, “carries with him everywhere the portable jail cell of his blindness.”

4. But what does it mean to carry around with you this “portable jail cell?” At times, Husayn was inhibited by an acute fear of embarrassment. In “An Egyptian Childhood,” the first section of Al-Ayyam, Husayn recalls an incident that always reminded him of his immense differences from his siblings, connecting both the personal and social aspects of his blindness.

One evening, Husayn was eating supper with his father and his brothers, while his mother, as was the norm at the time, instructed her daughters and the house servant in bringing to the table the dishes required for the meal. Husayn tells us “he was eating just as the others were eating, when a strange thought occurred to him! What would happen if he took hold of a morsel of food with both hands instead of one as was customary?” When he did this, his brothers burst out laughing and his mother began to cry. His father, a stern but calm man, told him in a somber tone that this was not the way one did things, that this was not the way one ate food.

Husayn felt the weight of his family’s piercing eyes, without mediation or resistance, judging him for overstepping his bounds, not knowing his place.

From that time on, Husayn tells us, his movements were

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fettered with infinite caution, fear, and shyness. Writing and recalling this incident, Husayn isolates it as the central event that helped him to identify with Abu al-Alaa al-Maari, a blind skeptic Abbasid poet from the eleventh century. This identification proved to be integral to both Husayn’s personal and intellectual interests in his later years, reflecting itself in his scholarship and his fictional work.

Husayn relates one of the traditional stories about alMaari, one that was frequently narrated by Arab storytellers: “They say that one day he was eating treacle, some of which, unbeknownst to him, fell down the front of his garment.

When he went out therefore to lecture to his students, one of them said to him, ‘Sir, you have been eating treacle.’ Abu al-Alaa quickly put his hand on his chest and said ‘Yes! God save us from gluttony!’ Thereafter he gave up eating treacle for the rest of his life.”

The student’s casual observation, though surely benign in intention, asserts a marked distance between him and al-Maari—one of a kind of sovereign visuality, an awareness. In response to this story, Husayn tells us that until he was 25 years old, he gave up any kind of food that had to be eaten with a spoon, such as soup and rice, for fear of soiling his clothes and having his brothers laugh at him. He identified with al-Maari, who always ate alone, not even with his servant, who would eat in an underground tunnel, so that he could be left alone and eat as he liked. He understood these habits because he saw himself in them.

This displacement, in the blind individual, of mental and physical space is constantly negotiated and overcome. It can be argued that Husayn’s decision to eat alone sits at the nexus of agency and acceptance of his disabilities. And it is this same understanding, this ability to negotiate two different viewpoints, as it were, that would allow Husayn to mediate between traditions (East and West) and to contribute brilliantly to the zeitgeist of a nation grappling with the challenges of modernity and [post]colonialism.

5. Even if he was discouraged by the disgraces of blindness as a social category, however, Husayn did not let his condition impede him. He not only came to terms with his blindness; he excelled in spite of it.

He memorized the entire Qur’an by the age of nine, with help from a teacher at the local Qur’anic school. At the age of 12, in 1902, he left home to go to al-Azhar, the famous Islamic university in Cairo. For the blind boy, Cairo was unforgiving and unfamiliar, full of strange sounds and smells that intrigued and frightened him. Husayn writes that in this period he was “lost in bewilderment.” Although Husayn was living with his older brother, who was also a student at alAzhar, he had little to no help getting to and from school. His days were divided into three marked categories: confinement in his room, which was cramped and where he faced extreme bouts of solitude; the agitated journey back and forth from al-Azhar, which, needless to say, was overwhelming and stressful; and, finally, the courtyard of al-Azhar, which is described in halcyon terms: a place of “rest and security,” in which he felt the conviction of being in his own country, amongst his own people, and lost all sense of isolation, all sadness.

Thus al-Azhar, especially at this formative period of Husayn’s adolescence, is framed in his writings as a place of respite and belonging, but also of “dogmatic tradition” (restricted by the “shackles of taqlid,” in the words of the reformist Muhammad Abduh) that needed to be problematized and imagined out of.

Indeed, it was at al-Azhar where Husayn’s rigorous intellectual spirit was cultivated and shaped.

6. Husayn’s interest in less traditional sources or subjects, like literature, pushed him to enroll in the newly found Egyptian University, in 1908, where he wrote his dissertation on Abu al-Alaa al-Maari. It was also here that Husayn was exposed to “men who wore the fez,” that is, the Western-educated effendiyah class whose secular, humanist thought Husayn would go on to absorb, adapt, and negotiate in his broader literary project.

7. In France, Husayn found eyes. He was looking for someone to read to him. His French, which he had studied in Egypt, was still not perfect and, of course, he still needed someone to help him with reading from non-Braille books (in Cairo, he had a companion who read to him). Suzanne Bresseau, a Catholic Parisian war refugee, responded to an advertisement Husayn had placed in the local paper, became his reader and eventually took on the role of his personal secretary, helping him with scripts and assisting him with the research aspects of his thesis. Bresseau, referred alternately by Husayn as his “sweet voice” or “his eyes,” was integral to Husayn’s academic success in France. A learned woman herself (she was studying for a teaching certificate at the École Normale Supérieure, before a bombardment forced her and her family to leave Paris in 1914), she taught him ancient Greek and Latin, in addition to transcribing his entire doctoral dissertation, which was on the social thought of Ibn Khaldun. Husayn would later write that Bresseau, whom he married in 1917, lifted “the heavy curtain of blindness that from my boyhood had shut me off from the world.”

8. On their return to Egypt after the war, in 1919, the year of the Egyptian Revolution, Husayn was appointed for a professorship at Cairo University. In his more than 40-year professional career, Husayn held many other positions: founding rector at Alexandria University, Minister of Education under Abdel Nasser, and the editor of various periodicals, like al-Kawkab and al-Jarida magazine, among others. With the Comtean positivist thought he had learned and adapted in France, under notable intellectuals such as Emile Durkheim and Gustave Bloch, Husayn went on to write superb historical, philosophical and fictional work, which negotiated seemingly opposing traditions and argued for a grand synthesis in the form of secular nationalism. Many of the theories Husayn argues for in his texts are, it should be said, questionable and contentious, as is usually the case with any adoption of Western frameworks in the post-colonial era. Even critics of Husayn’s work, however, could not deny how innovative and provocative he was, how dazzling his work was in its wide array of sources. Indeed, in both Taha Husayn’s personal life and literary project we see the traces of a visionary, of someone who at once accepted and transcended his position, who, within and through his blindness, could see and imagine in a remarkable, even revolutionary way.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ADVICE

by PPMS

What do I do if I met some people over spring break who I am in love with and will probably never see again? Do I try to stay in touch, or simply the enjoy the ephemerality of our relationships?

P: This is tough. A lot of these kinds of relationships seem to me to be built on the basis of their limited timeline, that being what makes them feel sort of special. But I also don’t think that that means they have to end. I think you could reach out to these people and say something to the effect of wanting to keep up but not being quite sure how to. Try to remember that these are relationships built upon a certain suspension and go from there.

S: Writing letters is kind of like time traveling. I think you can stay in touch in a way that preserves the ephemerality of your relationships. It’s all about matching friendship-style to friendship-content. Don’t connect on linkedin. Exchange addresses, think of envelopes as archives.

Every time I have to say ‘no’ to someone, I end up feeling so rejected myself...and I think there’s something about the finality of a rejection that I just can’t make myself face. Help me figure out how to have the confidence and resilience to turn people down?

S: Try: ‘not really,’ ‘probably not,’ and ‘I’d prefer not to.’ Or try saying ‘No’ and then immediately do something validating that reminds you of your own self worth, like singing the Self Worth Song (lyrics: ‘I like myself, I’m worth a lot’ x2 with accompanying hand gestures).

P1: Is ‘me too’ helpful advice? Eventually you have to let some doors close, you can’t pursue every opportunity presented to you. No matter what, you end up saying ‘no’ by not doing some things, it’s then just sort of kinder and more helpful to let people know earlier in words.

P2: Rejecting someone means having faith that there will be other people, now or in the future, who you don’t reject (assuming you like having people in your life!). I think that’s the scariest part of saying no or saying goodbye—it’s hard to remember that you’ll continue to draw people in, and some of them will be people you do want to keep close.

There is a freshman in one of my sections who is tremendously over-eager. Her hand is in the air every moment the TA gives us the opportunity to speak, even though it was made explicit at the beginning of the semester that (a) no hand-raising necessary, and (b) attention should be paid to the proportion of contributions one makes to class discussion. I wouldn’t normally think twice about it, as I feel I can sympathize with her situation to a degree—being new, being nervous, being excited, etc. But as the semester has progressed I can now say that she has single-handedly ruined discussion section. All conversation must react to or notably ignore her digressions, untamed verbosity, and contrived attempts at sounding profound. The TA hasn’t done much to curb the pestilent enthusiasm. I’m reaching out to you, Indy Features Advice Column, to ask if you think there is something I can do to convey to the freshman a better section etiquette without coming off as entirely demeaning/offensive. I really like the class and want to engage in conversation about the material, so I’m coming to you in a last ditch effort to save a section gone awry.

S: Ignoring the number of deprecating comments about the Indy Features Advice Column in this submission (ahem “last ditch effort”), I think you should ask her for coffee. Usually when I’m not getting along with someone I don’t know in a group setting, it’s too easy for me to code that person as ‘the tremendously over-eager freshman who unnecessarily and compulsively raises her hand while ignoring the proportion of contribution she makes to the section.’ Find out what her coffee order is, what she eats for breakfast every morning, and what she thinks about when she is waiting in line for the doors to open at a concert. There are probably a million and a half reasons she talks so much during your section, including, but not limited to a debilitating fear of silence, a deep and unrequited love of the TA, or a desire to engage with the material that is so genuine that it’s impossible to find reprehensible.

APRIL 17 2015

Or maybe she knows how much it annoys you. You just can’t know until you ask!

P2: Please ask her how she does it and report back to me, I’m still terrified of speaking in class! Or maybe she and I could alternate days in each of our classes, for the perfect cumulative amount of participation? Let me know if she’s interested.

Thanks!

Sometimes being myself and living the life I live seems unbearable. But then I think about the problems I actually have and compare them to problems that other people have, and they seem unimportant. But then I feel guilty for feeling bad about the problems I have. Should I accept that the problems I have are real problems for me because of my situation and worry about them, or try to care less because they’re so trivial?

S: Perspective is the goal. Some problems are trivial and some problems are simultaneously trivial and significant because they become tied to things like sleeping or breathing or being able to remember where you put your keys this morning. I’m sorry that the life you are living seems sometimes unbearable.

I’m glad you realize that it is probably pretty privileged. The key is making sure the trivial problems do not become the significant problems. Perspective. Take a drawing lesson.

P1: Agreed, for me, the thing to watch for is how your own problems compromise the types of attentions and efforts you can bring out into the world to work with more meaningful problems. In this way, these are very much non-trivial problems. I also don’t think working on these things are mutually exclusive. I feel like I’m always working on two fronts: on things outside of myself and with my own shortcomings and internal problems, to make myself more attentive to things I haven’t even thought to think of yet. And neither exists independently, every internal breakthrough I’ve had comes from working on problems outside of myself.

P2: Often I think it’s that meta-emotion—feeling guilt or worry about other feelings—is the least productive and most harmful way to experience the world! Let yourself feel things, and try not to judge those emotions so much. You’re going to feel. You’re also more than your feelings. Can you repeat that to yourself a few times?

For me, the goal of life is to be happy. But what if that happiness comes at the expense of others, which it is almost certainly going to do in some way? Should I care? I only have one life, so should I just try to make myself as happy as possible, even if it might ruin the lives of others? Why do I have any obligation to help others instead of myself? Please answer without referencing some sort of religious or religiously derived code of morality.

S: The happier you make yourself, the more your happiness will trickle down to make other people happy.

P1: P2: I’m curious what kinds of things you wish to do will simultaneously make you very happy and ruin the lives of others. Are there other activities that could suffice?

I have a terrifying fear of having a question of mine answered in an Anonymous Advice Column. What should I do??

M: You could have given us your name.

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MAGIC, MAGYCK, magick “

“Bring a small, empty tin-can and a pencil to beat it with,” read the flyer. “It will make an ominous and interesting sound. During the demonstration we will attempt to raise (by Magyck) the Rampart Police Station several feet above the ground and hopefully cause it to disappear for two hours.” It’s March of 1970, in Los Angeles; the recent police killings of three queer people are fresh in the minds of Gay Liberation Front activists. “If the GLF is successful in this effort,” the flyer continues, “we will alleviate a major source of homosexual oppression for at least those two hours.”

Some witnesses claim the station rose six feet. When asked about the realness of it all in a Q&A at Brown last month, Reina Gossett, a trans rights activist and prison abolitionist, deferred to the existence of “multiple truths.” But it’s almost irrelevant, anyway; the GLF action was part of a legacy of occult insurrection. Just three years earlier, in ’67, anti-war protesters had negotiated permission from the US government to levitate the Pentagon a maximum of ten feet in the air (down from an original request of 300 feet). Several hundred people, led by Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman, gathered around the Pentagon, chanted ancient Aramaic exorcism rites, and attempted collective telekinesis.

These two instances of occult action are different—anti-war participants of the ’67 levitation are not necessarily comparable to GLF participants of the ’70 levitation as subjects of state violence. But both illuminate the ways in which magic has and can be used as a tool of protest for which the state has no viable response. Even if the levitations did not work in the literal sense, the action could act as a metaphor for the state’s disregard for the desires of its citizens. Either way, protesters are making a statement about the existence of an arena of agency—magic, desire, collective willpower—over which the state has no control. Gossett writes that the GLF action was “outside the normalized organizing tactics preferred by the Non-Profit Industrial Complex”; it was “filled with accountability to the living, dead and unknown forces that are all fully involved in our struggle for liberation.”

The state scrambles to respond to occult actions. When confronted with radical magic, the government can negotiate—in ’67, negotiation put them in the absurd position of issuing a permit for the levitation of the Pentagon. They can respond with violence—but Gossett argues that queer, criminalized people of color are always, constantly subject to state violence.

Or the state can fail to respond at all—which makes space for a collective action to occur outside the purview and sanctions of the police.

The state can, however, direct the way in which histories of occult insurrections are taught and told. Take the Haitian Revolution, a slave-led revolt that gave rise to the first-ever black republic. In her book The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below, Carolyn E. Fick writes, “Despite rigid prohibitions [by French colonists], voodoo was indeed one of the few areas of totally autonomous activity for the African slaves. As a religion and a vital spiritual force, it was a source of psychological liberation in that it enabled them to express and reaffirm that self-existence they objectively recognized through their own labor.”

Racist Western rhetoric around Haitian voodoo as barbaric or primitive, however, has denied Haitian revolutionaries their role in mainstream histories as radical visionaries; if the Haitian Revolution is talked about in American classrooms, it is not talked about as a politically modern movement akin to the roughly simultaneous French Revolution. If ritual magic allowed Haitian revolutionaries channels of action to which the state had no response, it has since served as a justification for their political and intellectual sequestration.

Occult actions continue, though, despite the stories told about them. Just this week in Madrid, a group called Hologramas por la Libertad projected a stream of hologrammatic protesters in front the Spanish parliament in response to and as a workaround of the passage of the Citizen Security Act, which criminalizes public protest. It might not constitute magic, but watching the streams of translucent protesters pass by in online footage of the action brings to mind the ghosts of those who have been disappeared, killed or erased by the state.

Gossett is hopeful about the presence of ghosts amid protest: “I wonder what a resurgence of actions connected & accountable to grief, the dead, the unborn, unknown and alive would do to our collective resiliency,” she writes. “I imagine a shift in connection and accountability would create more space in our movements to hold more people, more levity, more magic, less isolation and less shame.” –MK

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If you were following the independent documentary scene in 2004, you may have seen a film called What the Bleep Do We Know!? (stylized as What thē #$*! Do we (k)πow!? (remember: 2004)), a low-budget documentary which examines the relationship between quantum physics and consciousness. In particular, it’s interested in the possibility that we might be able to control reality with our minds, an idea the filmmakers and the physicists/philosophers they interview extrapolate from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and especially the notion in quantum physics of the “observer effect.” In other words, the movie uses quantum theories to explain what is essentially magic. The mysterious force of consciousness’s operation through quantum physics manifests in the film as an abundance of cheesy/trippy early-2000s digitally animated visuals, along with a narrative that runs alongside the interviews, depicting a wedding photographer whose life begins to exhibit signs of—well—magic. A pick-up basketball game turns into a lesson on alternate universes when a shot is simultaneously missed and scored; a visit to the movie theatre becomes an opportunity for the photographer to duplicate herself, unwilling to miss any opportunity.

Most theoretical physicists wrote off the film, and the theories it propagated, as “pseudoscience.” One philosopher of physics interviewed in the film, David Albert, criticized the filmmakers for selectively editing his interview, when in fact he is opposed the linking of quantum physics and consciousness. As it turns out, however, What the Bleep Do We Know!? does not stand alone in its combination of quantum mechanics and powers generally considered superhuman. In fact, “Quantum Mysticism” has a large enough body of work surrounding it to merit its own Wikipedia page, and the desire to connect consciousness to quantum mechanics has existed since the invention of the theories themselves. In an article written for The European Journal of Physics, historian Juan Miguel Marin outlines the conflict between Heisenberg and Schrodinger’s interest in mysticism and Einstein’s strict realism, a debate that seemingly disappeared following WWII. It reemerged, however, in Berkeley during the 1970’s, in the form of New Age philosophies. Fritjof Capra, an Austrian physicist studying at U.C. Berkeley at the time, became a member of the Fundamental Fysics Group, a collection of physicists interested in the connections between various forms of ‘Eastern mysticism’ and quantum mechanics. He published the best-selling book The Tao of Physics in 1975, amid a storm of criticism and praise. Many similar books followed; indeed, the directors of What the Bleep Do We Know!? are members of a New Age spiritual sect themselves: Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment.

A well-known joke about theoretical physicists goes like this: an experimental physicist shows a theoretical physicist the field-changing results of his latest experiment; the theoretical physicist responds, “That’s all fine in practice, but what about in theory?” The joke evidences a degree of similarity between mainstream theoretical physicists and their new-age counterparts: not only are they both the butt of jokes, but they also share a deep respect for the powers of the mind. There is disagreement, obviously, on what exact role it should play; whether the mind can directly affect physical reality, or whether its centrality is only in explaining physical reality. In any case, it seems to be a porous boundary. It’s telling that some of Einstein’s most important work takes the form of thought experiments: using one’s mind to manipulate reality in a productive way, and also that scientists like Einstein are held up on irrefutable pedestals, almost as if they were the center of a New Age spiritual sect.

I do not mean to suggest that the argument between quantum mechanics and quantum mysticism is meaningless, but rather that both sides might consider a broader definition of magic, as an umbrella term for the connections, causal or not, between what happens inside and outside the mind. At the opposite of end of physicists who dabble in mysticism lies certain practitioners of “Chaos Magick” who dabble in physics. Their philosophy is useful; in his article “Magick and Physics,” writer Dave Lee states, “As research progresses in this area, we shall see how well the model continues to fit. But…Chaos Magick has always had at its core a profound respect for technical excellence in sorcery, and a profound impatience with metaphysics…What matters is not how consistent the belief is with the rest of one’s beliefs, but whether one can believe it long enough to do the sorcery.” Lee exposes something juvenile in the insistence of both the New Age thinkers, and those who decry them, on arguing.

Can’t we all just focus on doing the sorcery? –SS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

by Mika Kligler, Samuel Samore & Anne Fosburg In Lancashire, England in 1612, nine women and two men accused of witchcraft were hanged. In the following 85 years in Salem, Massachusetts, 20 witches were executed. But public violence against witches didn’t end in the seventeenth century and in fact has faced resurgence in the past decade. Four hundred years after the Lancashire trials, two women—one in Colombia and one in Nepal—were set on fire after family members accused them of using witchcraft to make neighbors sick. A 2009 report by the UN Refugee Agency estimated that 200 witches were accused and/or tortured in a single Papua New Guinean province in 2007.

In the past decade, violence against witches has become endemic in many developing countries. Papua New Guinea’s Constitutional and Law Reform Commission estimates that there are approximately 150 witchcraft-related homicides annually, and hundreds more women are accused and tortured. The details of these murders are brutal. In February 2013, in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, Kepari Leniata was bound, doused in gasoline, and thrown on a pile of burning tires. As she burned alive spectators tossed more flaming rubber on top of her. She was 20 years old and the mother of two children.

Amnesty International notes that women are six times more likely to be accused of witchcraft than men. According to the UN Refugee Agency, approximately 90 percent of accused witches across history have been women, and as a result of either perceived or actual practice of magic, become the objects of ritualized violence. Modern witch-hunts occur far more often in developing countries where medical care is limited and education about the causes and treatments of illnesses is scarce. In Papua New Guinea the leading causes of death are malaria, tuberculosis, and pneumonia, all of which are preventable. When someone dies in small villages, it’s not uncommon for the funeral to double as the organization of a witch-hunt. Women accused of witchcraft may not in fact be practicing any kind of magic; they may be refusing to submit silently to gender-based subjugation, which is then conflated with witchcraft. So-called “glass men” are hired to identify the witch who caused the death in visions or dreams, and then the village rapidly turns against her. In a book entitled Imagining Evil, Gerrie ter Haar says “to be labelled a witch…is tantamount to being declared liable to be killed with impunity.”

Richard Eves, an anthropologist at the Australian National University says that in New Guinean culture, “there is a view that nobody dies a natural death unless it is old age.” From that perspective, there is a need to identify the cause of all of the “unnatural” deaths that occur, and that cause is often linked to sorcery. However, the gendered nature of accusations of witchcraft cannot be ignored. Jack Urame of the Melanesian Institute argues that “gender antagonism is embedded in the cultural, social, and ideological belief system and the abuse of power in Papua New Guinea.” Frequently the violence against witches is state-sanctioned.

From 1971 to 2013, the Sorcery Act in Papua New Guinea held black magic as an acceptable defense of murder, and the murderer could walk free.

Accusations of witchcraft tend to be indications that a woman is stepping outside of her socially mandated role. Whether or not she is actually engaging in practices of magic or spell-casting is irrelevant; she is perceived as possessing powers that make her dangerous or subversive. Urame claims that a “cultural assumption that women are dangerous to men influences male hostility towards women when dealing with sorcery and witchcraft issues.”

She is controlling what she has no right to control; meddling in what she ought not to (typically the health of members of her community). She begins to inhabit a space outside the well-established and traditional patriarchy. The practice of witchcraft becomes a channel of subversion for oppressed women, but paradoxically its visibility inevitably results in violence.

In places like Papua New Guinea the immediate response by men in power is to violently remove her from the system entirely. Kepari Leniata, and dozens of others across the globe go up in flames, sending a message that is impossible to misconstrue: to be a woman is to be subjugated, and any attempt to transcend the structure that subjugates her engenders violence. –AF

april 17 2015

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INFECTIOUS A Conversation with James Hoff

by Jonah Max

Over the past decade, the New York-based conceptual artist James Hoff has distributed his work as paintings, LPs, cufflinks, used hard drives, and ringtones; he’s inserted it into book covers and printed it onto slipmats.

The speed with which this work spreads across platforms and genres often means that it escapes easy definition or hasty categorization—exercises that Hoff himself frequently seems to be examining or complicating. Most recently, however, Hoff’s practice has been centered around the creative potential of computer viruses, releasing Blaster on PAN Records in 2014— an album of dancehall-style electronic drumbeats that have had their binary data altered by the eponymous Blaster worm, creating a record that hovers between glitch techno, EDM, and noise. But again, when discussing his work, classification always seems to fall short. Hoff has also brought his interest in viruses to the realm of abstract art with his Skywiper and Stuxnet series. In these series Hoff corrupts digital images of aluminum surfaces with the viruses and then, through a process called dye sublimation, registers those corrupted images upon the original surfaces themselves.

Apart from his studio practice, Hoff is the cofounder of the publishers Primary Information with curator Miriam Katzeff and No Input Books with artist Danny Snelson.

Brown hosted Hoff last month at Interrupt3—a three-day forum chiefly concerned with digitally mediated language art. Initially intending to give a more traditional artist’s talk, Hoff changed his mind and ended up performing his most recent virus sound work, “Operation Olympic Games,” commissioned by Deutschland Radio. He transformed the conference stage into a dance floor and used the overhead projection to stage a text-based performance by Danny Snelson.

The College Hill Independent: While you came to Interrupt3 to perform recent sound works as a musician, your artistic work encompasses a number of other media and practices—writing, artist books, visual art, performance, publishing. Maybe we could talk a little about how and perhaps why your work has expanded across all of these platforms?

James Hoff: It can be summed up with one word: impatience. I've always had a hard time sticking to script and working across platforms allows me to tackle the same idea from different angles; a sort-of chipping away through different media. Art, generally speaking, is open to this cross-pollination and unlike other disciplines, music or writing for example, it has been expanded enough to engulf a range of practices. My work is usually motivated by ideas rather than aesthetics (which are important to me but come later in the process) and so after an idea has been worked out I can begin plugging it into different modes to determine what will work best. In the last few years, I've been working with computer viruses as generative tools and that's allowed me work through the same concept in painting and sound simultaneously, which has been fun.

The Indy: Thinking about the virus pieces, it’s interesting to hear you say that your work is primarily motivated by ideas rather than aesthetics since there seems to be a great deal of attention paid to how those works are received and circulated as objects. For example, after you performed at Interrupt3, a fairly academic conference, I saw you perform a very similar work at a noise show in Boston, not to mention the fact that I’ve heard that it’s become popular with EDM and experimental music crowds. Your work’s ability to move across these disparate communities doesn’t seem accidental. Perhaps we could talk about interest in this sort of circulation and how you went about achieving it with Blaster and the more recent virus works.

JH: The virus work, in particular, gives me a lot of room for moving between genres. The ultimate aim for this work is to insert the computer virus into pre-existing genre forms or to introduce digital viruses to offline networks through identifiable cultural forms, such as dance music or abstract painting. Computer viruses are typically hiding in plain sight and are often disguised as recognizable media online so part of the challenge of this project was using the virus as a generative tool to create work that

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was fluent with offline media and predetermined musical types. I come out of a noise background and I wanted Blaster to speak to that but also to move beyond that community, into a beat-driven or dance frame. The virus is already linked to dance music so it was an easy starting point, but beyond that I've also created works that could be identified as new age music, musique concrète and modern classical. Music travels so well, even accidentally, so it's a great medium for viral works. While I have emphasized the virus as the starting point for the work, I'm happiest when people appreciate the music without knowing its conceptual DNA, when it's considered just another song to dance to, or make out to, or do the dishes to—whatever it is that people like to do while listening to music.

The Indy: It’s interesting to see the virus works travel as abstract paintings as well. As you said, music can circulate very effectively and in perhaps unexpected patterns, but paintings, on the other hand, particularly abstract paintings, seem to exist on what I imagine to be a very tired, predictable circuit—existing either in a rarefied art market of galleries, museums, and private collections or as the ubiquitous art of waiting rooms and lobbies. Are you interested in having the virus works ‘infect’ either of these worlds?

JH: Yeah it's sort of hard to accidentally see an abstract painting, though I agree, they are ubiquitous; sort of the elevator music of our times. However, in those spaces lies a great opportunity for producing interesting work for a captive audience. In this way, someone like Nicolas Slominsky has been an inspiration. When he wasn't busy creating the jingle or compiling popular musical invectives, he was forming the Boston Chamber Orchestra and conducting Varèse at Carnegie Hall. Experimental approaches and popular form (the so-called high and low cultures) need not be mutually exclusive in my opinion and quite often it is only the contextualizing cultural space that separates the two. My paintings are directly engaged with the gallery world, but I'd love it if my work found its way into waiting rooms and lobbies—or any non-space for that matter. I like the idea of waiting for the dentist next to a virus like Stuxnet or Skywiper. In many ways, it's an ideal space.

The Indy: And maybe it’s obvious but I think it might be worth mentioning that it feels like your use of mass cultural spaces like doctors' offices or dance halls is quite distinct from earlier, maybe more ‘traditional’ conceptual gestures—like the artist Joseph Kosuth buying ad space in The New York Times or Artforum—where, despite the piece’s democratic distribution, its real reception still takes place in an elite art world. With Blaster and the virus paintings, the works really seem to be received by and function in these diverse markets much like any other cultural object. So I’m sort of curious to hear if you feel at odds with these earlier conceptual practices.

JH: I don't feel at odds with them but more in dialogue. I think Dan Graham is a good example of someone who sought out public media space across a range of venues: from Harper’s Bazaar to neighborhood weeklies to pornographic magazines. This approach, which dovetails nicely with pioneering artists' books of that time, was influential for me when I began formulating ideas around my work and its movement through the world; through networks, etcetera. Mel Chin's project “In the Name of the Place” with Melrose Place, in which he placed contemporary and experimental artwork by his peers onto its sets, was also another revelation for me because of its 'hiding-in-plain-sight' approach. Graham’s work sought a pedestrian or public space but also drew attention to itself as art. Chin's work on the other hand sought a more congruous relationship to the media form and that media form's traditional audience. In this way it was far more subversive. The aim of my work follows this path into cultural non-sites, spaces in which media is already present but often overlooked.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

CONVERSATIONS WITH YOURSELF (or very, very Beethoven)

By Mark Benz

APRIL 17 2015

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

photographs by Sarah Cheung

april 17 2015

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STUFFED TO THE GILLS An Amateur Dissection of Taxidermy

by Jamie Packs illustration by Devyn Park

Prepare the form In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the protagonist pulls up to an empty motel and has an unsettling dinner with its owner—the infamous Norman Bates—in his neighboring mansion, the parlor of which is covered wall-to-wall with stuffed animals. The beady eyes of his extensive taxidermy collection stare at us through the screen, and we are supposed to shudder. Taxidermy has become a lazy trope, a kind of shorthand that urges us to suspect that something isn’t quite right, that maybe there's a psychopath in our midst.

Taxidermy has long occupied a rather grim space in our cultural imaginary. It's a practice reserved only for avid hunters or the mentally disturbed. Yet the true story is certainly more complicated, for taxidermy inhabits a compelling liminal space between science and art, disgust and intrigue, life and death. Perhaps there is something deeper under that layer of fur, feathers, and skin.

Remove the skin John Hancock (the English ornithologist, not the American founding father) is largely considered to be the father of modern taxidermy. While taxidermy was practiced in Europe before Hancock’s birth in 1808, its implementation was rather crude—animals were simply gutted and stuffed with cotton or straw, leaving their bodies to rot—and the practice existed largely outside of public view. While methods slowly improved over the years, it was Hancock who ushered in a veritable golden age of taxidermy, elevating the custom from a niche scientific interest into a bona fide art form.

As an ornithologist, Hancock was an avid collector (read: hunter) of birds, which he then preserved and modeled with a previously unparalleled sense of artistry. Although Hancock may have originally been drawn to birds as a result of his interest in the natural world, the artistic potential of the medium soon began to seep in and overtake his work. One of his most famous pieces, entitled “Struggle with the Quarry,” depicts a heron being viciously attacked by a falcon with its wings outstretched in elegant fury. This work, along with a number of other mounted bird tableaux, was exhibited at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. The Great Exhibition was intended to be a display of the scientific and artistic progress of the mid-19th century and thus provided critical exposure to Hancock’s grotesque practices, which hovered somewhere between art and science. The public was smitten with the work. A judge at the exhibition even remarked that Hancock’s series “will go far towards raising the art of taxidermy to a level with other arts, which have hitherto held higher pretensions.”

Hancock’s well-received avian creations were part of a larger cultural current in which taxidermy was slowly coming into vogue within the nineteenth century British mainstream.

It was common for middle-class Victorian homes to be ornamented with stuffed birds as a symbol of good taste. Even Queen Victoria herself was rumored to have accumulated quite an impressive collection.

Preserve the skin Nowadays, taxidermists are largely not considered to be artists, but sadists who derive perverse enjoyment from exploiting the death of innocent animals. This is why a contemporary audience would likely be shocked by the fact that the man who was once the chief taxidermist at the United States National Museum at the Smithsonian has also been called one of the fathers of the American conservation movement. William Temple Hornaday eschews the modern image of the taxidermist-as-sadist, and instead proposes an alternative history in which taxidermy is closely linked with deeply held views on environmental ethics and education.

Hornaday, who was born in 1854, lived to witness the almost complete effacement of the buffalo population in the American West. The buffalo’s previous status as pest waned to the point where individual buffalo deaths began to be

reported by national news sources. Perturbed by the sweeping demise of the species, Hornaday planned a trip to Montana with a plan to kill more than a dozen of them.

Hornaday’s logic may seem backward to those of us who grew up in a time when environmental responsibility is principally manifest in the act of recycling cardboard or turning off lights; however, the act of killing was, for Hornaday, deeply entwined with a conservational ethic. In a biography about Hornaday, Gregory Dehler wrote that he was both “one of the greatest American conservationists,” as well as someone who “probably killed more endangered animals worldwide than any other single person of his generation.” While these kinds of contradictions may make us uncomfortable, Hornaday was unwavering in his belief in the educational potential of taxidermy, consequently imbuing his creations with the conviction that they would be immortal, eternally proclaiming the glory of the American wilds. With the imminent extinction of the buffalo, Hornaday perhaps saw taxidermy as a way to proclaim that these animals were worth saving while also preserving them for future generations who may not have the chance to see the creature alive. In this sense, Hornaday perhaps believed that taxidermy could be a way to combat what psychologist Peter Kahn has called “environmental generational amnesia,” a phenomenon in which each generation becomes accustomed to their environment and thus forgets how much it has changed and (likely) degraded since the past. Hornaday’s taxidermy creations, however, wouldn’t let us forget.

Dress the form Today, taxidermy is no longer confined to the space of the Natural History Museum or the hunting lodge, but is beginning to seep slowly into urban spaces filled with hip 20 and 30-somethings. D.I.Y. taxidermy is practically replacing microbrewing and beekeeping as the newest hipster trend.

And one doesn’t have to look far to find a make-your-own taxidermy kit or classes aimed at teaching you how to, say, preserve that road kill you passed the other day. While there are a plethora of online forums and video tutorials, formal workshops are springing up in cities like London, Chicago, and New York. A workshop called “Fancy Chicken Taxidermy Class” at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn will cost you $400.

The reasons why young urbanites are drawn to taxidermy are many: some view it as an artistic practice, others as a kind of spiritual return to the environment, still others as a bold fashion statement. Nonetheless, many young D.I.Y. taxidermists are quick to point out the moral foundations of the seemingly taboo process. Firstly, the animals that are used by these practitioners are either found dead or have died of natural causes (there are a shocking number of small businesses centered on preserving dead pets). Making your own taxidermy, they insist, is the only way that one can assure the animals being used are sourced ethically. In an article for The New York Times entitled “A Kinder, Gentler Taxidermy,” Allis Markham, an assistant in the department of taxidermy

at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, frames this argument within the well-trodden discourse of factory food production: “Just like the meat I eat, the animals I use for my taxidermy can’t have been raised in an industrial way.” Later in the article, 23-year-old self-taught taxidermy instructor Mickey Alice Kapwis declares, “I have a lot of vegans in my classes.”

D.I.Y. taxidermy also fits within an ethic of avoiding waste. Kapwis explains how along with more traditional forms of taxidermy, organs can be preserved in jars, and bones can be used to make jewelry or otherwise ground up to be used as fertilizer. While clearly appealing for its shock value, this macabre hipster trend seems to have a solid moral backbone.

And it probably won’t be long until we see horn-rimmed glasses made out of, well, horns.

Sew it up In 2012, the Dutch artist Tinkebell created a work called “Cupcake—My Little Pony,” which consisted of a taxidermy horse wearing 3D-printed roller skates and cartoonish eyes pasted onto its face. The piece was exhibited at Art Rotterdam in the Netherlands during February of this year, and was met with much criticism.

The use of dead animals is nothing new in the art world.

Damien Hirst’s creations suspended in formaldehyde are but one (rather pricey) example of the growing genre. And like others who opt for this morbid medium, Tinkebell has received a great deal of criticism for her practice. When, in a previous project, she made a purse out of her own dead cat, the artist received so many hateful comments that she published them as a book entitled Dearest Tinkebell. The book contains such passages as “I HOPE YOU GET MADE INTO A PURSE GO TO HELL FREAK,” or the more eloquent “IF I KNEW WHERE YOU WERE I WOULD BURN YOU, LOCK YOU IN A CAVE, AND WATCH YOU SUFFER SO THAT YOU WOULD KNOW WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO GET YOUR SKIN RIPPED OF STRAIGHT FROM YOUR SKIN!!!!!!!”

But Tinkebell’s hate-inducing and arguably disturbing taxidermy creations are built around deeply-held ethical concerns. In an informal interview with Justus Bruns on YouTube, Tinkebell explains that “Cupcake—My Little Pony” is a part of a larger project in which she is making toys out of real animals as a means to shed light on the industry of creating perfect animals. The artist cites the act of breeding dogs and the creation of hypoallergenic cats as examples of the ways in which our society has adopted a factory model for creating what she calls “perfect pets.” Critics of the work, however, are clearly not considering these issues when they view her artwork. Interestingly, Tinkebell’s controversial methods resonate with a longer legacy of taxidermy as a mode to express concerns about the changing place of animals while simultaneously presenting them in an artistic manner. Yet the fact that these concerns are still being overlooked may come as no surprise. In the end, it might be hard to get over the fact that what you’re looking at is just a dead animal.

JAMIE PACKS B’17 is definitely not a psychopath.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE ARMS RACE

by Stephanie Hayes illustration by Casey Friedman

Bodybuilding and the Muscular Dead-End “This is unacceptable,” said Arnold Schwarzenegger, placing emphasis on all the wrong syllables. “We don’t want to see the biggest guy out there, we want to see the most beautiful man, the most athletic man out there on stage.”

At this year’s Arnold Classic—an annual ‘sporting’ festival that includes a bodybuilding portion—the competition’s namesake took to the stage to express his disgust at the immense physiques winning bodybuilding contests today.

The seven-time Mr. Olympia, action film star, and politician claimed that these bodies were so big, they were no longer beautiful, no longer something to aspire to. “Look at the old days when Steeve Reeves won,” he urged the audience.” When Steeve Reeves won and you saw him on the beach, you’d say to yourself: ‘I would love to have this guy’s body.’ But that’s not what you can say about the guys today who win those competitions.”

Schwarzenegger criticized the builders’ thick necks, their distended guts—a telltale sign of human growth hormone use—and their generally poor proportions. But most of all he criticized the judges. “Let’s say I’m a judge... the question [would be]: ‘whose body do I want to have?’” He continued: “We have to make sure that we’re rewarding the right guys.

Because if you reward the right guys, then everyone will start training to have a beautiful body again, rather than…” he paused and with a face of disgust added, “a power lifter’s body…” The audience erupted in applause and laughter.

This remarkable speech went thoroughly unremarked in the media—an unsurprising outcome given bodybuilding’s steady decline from public view since Ahnuld’s time, due to its failure to produce another figure of his stature. Yet, if we ignore the fact that it was Schwarzenegger and his peers who began this literal arms race in the first place, and his use of the word “athletic” to describe these bodies—what’s the athletic component of bodybuilding, exactly? The carefully choreographed posing? The preening? The fake-tanning?—he has a point. Bodybuilders often invoke the language of sculpture to describe their physiques, but the professionals today have bodies Michelangelo could only dream up on hard drugs, locked away for months with a vacuum pump and a few copies of Flex magazine. Since the introduction of steroids in the 70s, bodybuilding has become a battle for the biggest biceps, and it’s reached the point where the bodies hitting the stage are completely undesirable to the vast majority of people—and even, apparently, to Schwarzenegger. This is significant not just for the subculture and its ardent followers, but, I would argue, for regular men. Though extreme and disgusting to some, bodybuilders aren’t separate from regular men; they’re simply the extreme end of the same muscular spectrum, the eerie conclusion of the widespread push in recent decades towards an increasingly muscular body, a sign that perhaps this muscle madness has gone too far. +++ But first, let’s backtrack a little. If you’re unfamiliar with bodybuilding, this whole spiel probably seems ridiculous. I imagine you were tripped up by Schwarzenegger’s assertion that the physiques winning bodybuilding competitions were or could ever be aspirational or “beautiful.” If this is the case, I’d encourage you to Google Charles Atlas, who was dubbed “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man” by Physical Culture magazine in the 20s, and whose physique managed to sell thousands of copies of his mail-order fitness regime. In the 50s, there was Steve Reeves, the bodybuilder-turned-film

APRIL 17 2015

star who, at the peak of his career, was the highest paid actor in Europe.

Then along came deca and Dianabol—the most popular anabolic steroids of the 60s and 70s—and, with them, a bigger, buffer, and previously unfathomable physique. At his peak, Schwarzenegger had pecs roughly the size of his own head and a chest that appeared to have been inflated with a bike pump. He was so lean that his skin, thin as Bible paper, looked like it’d been shrink-wrapped to his frame. In 1977, Schwarzenegger admitted to anabolic steroid use, claiming that he only used the drugs for the 8–10 weeks before a competition. Schwarzenegger started the arms race, but it’s gone far further than he could ever have imagined. Thanks to a smorgasbord of more recent drugs (like insulin and human growth hormone), the so-called ‘mass monsters’ winning competitions today are so muscular and have such little body fat that they’re practically a different species. At 6’2” Schwarzenegger hit the stage weighing around 220 pounds, from 1970–1975. From 1999–2005, eight-time Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman had a listed height of 5’10” but often entered competitions weighing 295 pounds. Jay Cutler, Coleman’s successor, was equally massive; at only 5’7”, he consistently weighed upwards of 270 pounds. These numbers translate into very different physiques. As Schwarzenegger less-thanflatteringly put it: “It used to be that you used to have a V-shaped body, now, I dunno, it’s kind of like a bottle-shaped body, or something.” Former bodybuilder Sam Fussell put it more delicately, in an email to me: “Now, [the top bodybuilders] look like Humvees and Transformers. In my day, they looked like Ferraris and Lamborghinis. A question of taste.”

Taste is central here, as despite the existence of clear criteria (bodybuilders are awarded points for their symmetry, proportionality, and level of muscularity), the judging process is ultimately subjective. In Schwarzenegger’s day, judges consistently rewarded men with so-called Apollonian proportions—that is, neck, calves, and biceps of the same circumference, and a chest twice the size of one thigh. Today, they seem to reward pure size. Why they do this is unclear, but the result is that while the most muscular bodies of the 50s were also (to many) the most desirable bodies, the most muscular bodies today are completely undesirable to most people and, more importantly, unattainable without serious chemical assistance.

Yet—and here’s the catch—these bodies have an impact on the average guy’s understanding of muscularity. +++ “Not everyone wants to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but they don’t want to look 70 percent less muscular than Arnold Schwarzenegger,” said psychiatrist and body image researcher Roberto Olivardia, when I asked him whether or not bodybuilding had an impact on the rest of the world. “If the bar keeps raising in terms of how muscular somebody can get, it eventually starts to trickle down. It really does.”

By “it,” he means not just the desire for muscles, but steroid use. “Early on, anabolic steroids were confined to bodybuilding circles, then they started to trickle down to other sports, like baseball and football. Now, many athletes are doing it for performance enhancing purposes, but we also know that the main variable in anabolic steroid use is body image dissatisfaction.” (It’s been estimated that over one million Americans have used anabolic steroids for image

enhancing purposes.) “Fitness models, film stars...everyone’s taking them.”

Models, actors, and others simply take far fewer steroids than bodybuilders, and often different compounds (e.g. they might cycle testosterone, but not insulin or HGH). The result is a physique that is less extreme than a bodybuilder’s, but more appealing to the average guy. These men are what Olivardia calls “politely ‘roided”—that is “they’re taking enough steroids to lose fat and gain muscle but not enough to look like they’re taking them.” And this is precisely the problem.

For the economic benefit of supplement companies and fitness models, and for the social kudos afforded to buff film stars and regular guys, performance- or appearance-enhancing drugs are never even mentioned. Instead, steroid-fed fitness models smile for cameras, nursing tubs of creatine that were in no way responsible for their growth. Fitness magazines devote double-page spreads to the grueling workouts and draconian diets of actors in the lead-up to major roles, conveniently failing to mention the steroid cycles that were also a part of the preparation. Even more laughable is the coverage of the Mr. Olympia contest, in which inhumanly large men compete to be named the best bodybuilder in the world. Much is said about the competitors’ twice-daily training sessions, 7000-calorie diets, and posing routines; little mention is made of the truckloads of chemicals that make this amount of training and muscle-building possible. Men are led to believe that they’re a few kettlebell swings and skinless chicken breasts away from their ideal physique.

The question then follows: is Schwarzenegger right? If those on the extreme end of the muscular spectrum (bodybuilders) are undesirable, and if the bodies men are exposed to in magazines and films exceed natural limits, have we reached an aspirational dead-end? As it stands, many men are either striving for the impossible or attaining it with the help of chemicals. The meaning of muscles—as a symbol of hard work, discipline, a high pain threshold—has altered immensely. This leaves me wondering: what’s even the point anymore?

Bodybuilding once purported to offer the world the ideal version of man. Today bodybuilders offer a sort of hyperreality, existing at the extreme end of the spectrum. The gains in terms of muscularity and vascularity have been immense, but, I would argue, with more than a million American men diagnosed with muscle dysmorphia and many more with morphed perceptions of their own musculatiry, there have been some large losses.

STEPHANIE HAYES B’15 doesn’t even lift, bro.

SPORTS

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TRAVERSING MAGAZINE TEAR-OUTS

by Emma Moore illustration by Alyssa Bentorf

Archival Work Performed by: Emma Moore Location: the Picture Collection, RISD Fleet Library second floor, 4 November 2014.

The Subject Index binder at the RISD Picture Collection ranges from Abacus to Zoo. Each listed item has a corresponding folder. Each folder is filled with mostly-laminated magazine pages.

Items in each folder tangentially relate to the subject, and are chosen for the image, not the article.

Between A to Z some entries are: Animals, Architecture, Christmas, Flowers. Sub-categories that warrant individual files, in brief: Cats, Cows, Ocelot; Greek revival, Genoa (Italy), Prehistoric; Crèches, Wreaths, Trees; Delphinium, Gentian, Rhododendron.

Less salient categories: Africa with country delineation, Airplanes foreign and domestic by decade, District of Columbia– Washington (misc.), Fans, Housing–Subdivisions. (Likelihood that Fans are of the ceiling and tabletop variety yet mild hope for groupies.)

The Picture Collection is a Tumblr and Pinterest precursor, archiving decades of magazine images. A purely physical, encyclopedically-organized depository of image references (the reviewer notes a personal fetish for paper). The Collection is a packrat grandmother’s dream, piles of musty paper barely contained in straining manila folders. Modernity results in the slow process of laminating more recent newspaper and magazine pieces—protected and sturdy.

Request: A random sampling of files at the whim of a student archivist (Layla) who requires a release form including an ID number and a local address (though, a. how would a slip of paper be missed? and b. how would they find me?).

(Subsequent) Files Examined: Plastics, Twins (& triplets, quads, etc…)

File Enjoyed: Twins After Babies, Bakeries, Baldness; Doors (I, II), Drag Queens, Drapery (on figures); Kites, Kitsch, Knitting; exists Twins (& triplets, quads, etc…). It comes after Turkey I, II (See also: Costume-turkey) and before U.F.O.’s (See also: Science Fiction).

Fleeting Reaction(s): 1a. sufficient magazine instances of people in turkey costumes exist to constitute a unique file?, 1b. enough RISD students examine people in turkey costumes to deserve stated unique file, 2. note to remind archivist on grammatical nuances of apostrophes (‘s is possession, s is plural). 3. relevance of maintaining such an archive??

In the twin file, pages are extracted from: New York Magazine, Twins Magazine, Parents Magazine, Out Magazine, LIFE, TIME, The New York Times, Vogue. They are unlabeled, not contextualized.

Dated from the 1950s, 1980s, 2000s: advertisements, fashion shoots, and personality profiles—all show exacting symmetry.

Overall trend in glossy diversity is general obsession with doubles, multiples. Used for advertising, sexing up, rarity, and similarity, sometimes all at once. Quadruplets face the same way, with ponytails that fountain in coordinated angles, eyes that implore in unison. Children 0–8 are popular subjects, as are attractive young men—double trouble (is this attention bias?).

Bumper stickers stating, I <3 Quads and I <3 Triplets. Ciara times two, doubly attractive with the aid of photoshop.

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literary

Visuals: Two sharp flashes of red, legs cocked in sync, the only difference the hand that holds matching handbags. Through close examination the slightly higher shoulders of one, the heavier cheekbones of the other are noticed (gleefully). A double spread of a dull blue Chevy, grizzled truckers with beards disappearing underneath dashboard: black Ray-Bans® reflect the same scene.

Freckled faces, smudged T-shirts, skinny arms slung around identical necks: advance to the here and now, muscular and honed, one chose crew, one chose track. Occasionally conjoined—or unjoined. Always appearing uncomfortable, sparking feelings of circus freak voyeurism. An incongruous 80s advertisement for SharpTwinCam; camcorder second fiddle to two embracing girls subsumed by striped pajamas and riotous curls. Sickly-looking bald babies, too small—small enough to fit into one stomach— dressed up like play dolls. They come in all shapes and sizes.

Accompanying Text: Seeing Double. The Carlson Twins: Abercrombie’s Cover Boys.

“They keep their clothes in the same closet and wouldn’t think of buying a new pair of shoes – they like them best when they’re pink – or coat or dress or jacket if there were only one left in the shop.” Divided at Birth. “We live together now. If we left each other, we’d just go nuts. You don’t really need anybody else.”

Identical yet Individual. “I should have understood that Ravel’s music gives both sisters goose pimples.” Why do Identical Twins Differ? The Same DNA Could Reveal a Great Deal About Us. “Aren’t you a little old to be twins?’ a woman said as she passed them in the street a little while ago.” Nurture Individuality (a soap advertisement, questionable). Exclusive: Raising Septuplets!

Major Themes: Twins are fascinating to play find-the-difference with: which one is prettier, taller, smarter. Twin genes are complicating and solving the nature-nurture debate through separation or similarity. Twins are hard—yet curiously peculiarly interesting—to raise (especially in triplet, quadruplet, quintuplet iterations) according to mother profiles, accompanying photo-essay indicating the need for octopus arms. Twins are not perfectly symmetrical iterations: diet, illness, the unknown influence, identicals, fraternals masquerade as one embryo. Twins wearing expensive clothes is doubly compelling in advertisements. Twin-ness speaks to a deeply held secret desire for of a missing half, the doppelganger always dreamed about, the invisible friend.

Extrapolations: Defining this reviewer’s early childhood, the Olsen twins—Mary Kate and Ashley, also known as MK&A—came to prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s, first singular in Full House cuteness and later double in “Our Lips are Sealed” flirtation. Smart, sassy, attractive, their best friend was a reflection of themselves, always present and always on the same page. Each generation has a pair—the Grady twins, Lee and Lyn Wilde, the Jamison Twins, Susan Evers and Sharon McKendrick reincarnated as Annie James and Hallie Parker. When famous, their love, looks, and drama differences take on extra weight, questioning decisions of divergence and of unity. Viewing twins, making a sport of looking in your own mirror, looking at someone else’s real-life mirror.

An exhausting comparison, a tiring exercise: personal duality of bestowed identicality unfathomable.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Friday, April 17 Shen Yun 2

7:30 PM // Providence Performing Arts Center, 220 Weybosset St, Providence // $58-128 The billboards may be up all year long, but Shen Yun is only here on Friday and Saturday. Get your (expensive) tickets and find out what it actually is.

Saturday, April 18 All-Day Sacred Harp Singing

Neutral Milk Hotel

8PM // Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, 79 Washington St, Providence // $35 GA, $45 reserved The last time Neutral Milk Hotel came to Providence, Hurricane Nemo hit and threw everything out of whack. Catch Jeff Mangum & Co. this time around, hopefully with better weather.

Monday, April 20 the void.

10 AM - 3PM // Providence Friends Meeting House, 99 Morris Ave, Providence // Free

Tuesday, April 21

This is the twelfth annual all-day shape note sing, and all are welcome. There’ll be a potluck lunch as well. Their website is pretty specific about what kind of food to bring: “If you have been to all-day singings before you will have noticed that what gets eaten at singings is NOT the salads and raw vegetables, but CASSEROLES and other hi-carb things. You work up a big appetite singing, and by lunchtime people are ready for food that sticks to the ribs.”

7:30 PM // Machines With Magnets, 400 Main St, Pawtucket // Free

Sunday, April 19 Bizarre Bazaar

11 AM - 3PM // Nickerson Green, Prospect St between Angell and Waterman, Providence // Free to enter, but bring cash to purchase things RISD has a Facebook group called “Free and For Sale,” in which students offer items for free, or for sale. This event promises to bring the Facebook group to life. Expect to find clothes, furniture, artwork, and stuff that is also way less cool and useful.

Old Jews Telling Jokes

2PM // Trinity Repertory Theater, 201 Washington St, Providence // $44 and up Trinity Rep’s website features three production stills from Old Jews Telling Jokes, and in each one somebody has their arms up in anguish, wrists turned outwards, as if to say, “Oy! What coulda been!” The play runs through May 10.

OPENSIGNAL.v.2.3

Opensignal’s spring concert series continues with artist talks from Providence’s Laura Cetilia and Nicole Carroll and Argentina’s Cecilia Lopez at 7:30, followed by performances at 9.

Wednesday, April 22 The Moose Progress, Feng Shui Police, Sad Family, Anthony Mattera 9PM // AS220, 115 Empire St, Providence / $6 GA, free w/ Brown ID Two Indy-helmed bands on one bill. News editor Dash Elhauge helms Feng Shui Police, while Features pals Matt Marsico and Patrick McMenamin join forces with Metro’s Sophie Kasakove (and their friend Bailey) as Sad Family. They’ll be joined by The Moose Progress and Anthony Mattera for a raucous evening.

Thursday, April 23 Visiting Designer Lecture: Ben Rubin B’87

6:30 PM to 7:30 PM // RISD CIT 103, 169 Weybosset St, Providence // Free What do composer Steve Reich, architect Renzo Piano, musician Laurie Anderson, and statistician Mark Hansen have in common?

They’ve all worked with Ben Rubin, a New York-based media artist and Yale professor in graphic design.

Friday, April 24

Sunday, April 26

Critical Design/Critical Futures Symposium

Lady Bug Release

9:30 AM to 5:30 PM // RISD Chace Center, 20 North Main St, Providence // Free w/ required registration

11:30 AM to 1:00 PM // Roger Williams Park Botanical Center, 1000 Elmwood Ave, Providence // $3 (adults), $1 (children) LET THE LADYBUGS GO FREEEEEEEEEEEEEE

How do you design the future? I don’t know, I’m currently going into it unplanned. This might help.

Observations of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist

Monday, April 27 the second void.

Tuesday, April 28

6PM // Martinos Auditorium, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, 154 Angell St, Providence // Free

Sheila Heti

Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist is Coco Fusco B’82. She performs and writes on the politics gender, race, war, and identity. Her lecture will be both performance and reality, natch.

The Indy’s Drew Dickerson interviewed Heti last year about the practice of interviewing.

That kind of meta-level shit is all over Heti’s work, including her 2012 novel How Should

Saturday, April 25

2:30 PM to 3:30 PM // McCormack Family Theater, 70 Brown St, Providence // Free

a Person Be?

Wednesday, April 29

Strides in Solidarity 5k Walk & Run 11 AM // 1 Prospect St, Providence // $15 registration fee

Making Robots Behave

Registration fees go right to Partners in Health. The pace is up to you.

Essential for future survival.

Spring Arts Festival

Thursday, April 30

6PM to 9PM // Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, 154 Angell St, Providence // Free Receptions for student exhibits and music from Breast Milk, Akiko Hatakeyama, Arvid Tomayko, and BUMPR.

The Great International Spring Beer Festival

12 PM // Barus and Holley 190, corner of Hope St and George St, Providence // Free

The Internet’s 21st Birthday Bash

8PM to 1:30 AM // Aurora, 276 Westminster St, Providence // Free Am I really as old as the Internet? Am I the Internet!?

The Juan Maclean

7PM // Rhode Island Convention Center, One Sabin Street, Providence // $49

8PM // Fete, 103 Dike St, Providence // $12 (advance), $15 (day of)

$49 gets you unlimited access to over 250 beers. That’s either super economical or the worst way to get your money’s worth. Have fun and be safe.

John Maclean grew up in Providence. The Juan Maclean, his electronic project, came to life in New York, a contemporary and labelmate of LCD Soundsystem on DFA. The live band, which features ex-LCDer Nancy Whang, will make a stop at Fete after a week-long residency in Brooklyn. This will be very, very good.

When does boy oh boy turn into man oh man? Listtheindy@gmail.com

This week in Independents Ireland’s Independent just published a short recap of a study done at Trinity College, which found that grandparents who must take care of young children are at a higher risk for depression.