The College Hill Independent Vol. 32 Issue 2

the college hill independent Volume 32

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a Brown/RISD weekly

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Issue 02

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NEWS 02 Week in Divas Jane Argodale, Liz Cory, & Corey Hébert

Volume 32 No. 2

03 Égalité?

Piper French 06 Poisoned Politics Ryan Rosenberg METRO 09 Lead Lined Rick Salamé ARTS 11 Not Your Parents’ Star Wars Will Tavlin 15 Running Into Some Difficulties Liby Hays FEATURES 07 Stars and Scribes Gabrielle Hick OCCULT

From the editors: It rained the night before yesterday. There was a fuzzy caterpillar marooned in the middle of the sidewalk.

Did you know that they turn to goo inside their cocoons?

That before they can turn themselves into something else they must first be a third thing, or a non-thing really. Completely liquidized, suspended in a womb they built for themselves. And that if you condition a caterpillar with a Pavlovian response, the fear stays encoded in their cells, passed on to their next life.

Isn’t that fucking cool?

DP

05 Bernt Offering Lance Gloss TECH 14 Ex_Poetica Kamille Johnson LITERARY 17 Three Sonnets Marcus Mamourian EPHEMERA 13 An Emotional Taxonomy Jake Brodsky X 18 and I was like ZOOM! Jane Campbell Robertson

Managing Editors Camera Ford Alec Mapes-Frances Francis Torres News Jane Argodale Piper French Julia Tompkins Metro Sophie Kasakove Jamie Packs Shane Potts Arts Lisa Borst Jonah Max Eli Neuman-Hammond Features Gabrielle Hick Patrick McMenamin Dominique Pariso Science Fatima Husain Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa Tech Kamille Johnson

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.

Interviews Elias Bresnick

Metabolics Sam Samore

Staff Writers Ben Berke Liz Cory Kelton Ellis Liby Hays Corey Hebert Hannah Maier-Katkin Madeleine Matsui Kimberley Meilun Ryan Rosenberg

Ephemera Mark Benz Jake Brodsky India Ennenga

Staff Illustrators Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Ivan Rios-Fetchko

X Layla Ehsan Sara Khan Pierie Korostoff

Web Charlie Windolf

Occult Lance Gloss Literary Marcus Mamourian

List Polina Godz Rick Salamé

Senior Editors Sebastian Clark Rick Salamé Kim Sarnoff Maya Sorabjee

Cover Jade Donaldson

MVP Kamille Johnson

Design & Illustration Celeste Matsui Alexa Terfloth Zak Ziebell

theindy.org

@theindy_tweets

WEEK IN

by Jane Argodale, Liz Cory, & Corey Hébert illustration by Catherine Cawley SLAY While most people who watched the Super Bowl 50 halftime show were blown away by Beyoncé’s fierceness, dancing, and profound use of the word slay, some of us were also in awe of her aggressive and unapologetic Blackness. David A. Love of the Grio described the performance as something that will “influence [future] times for black people, but also echo the struggles and movements that are taking place at this moment in time.” Her new song, “Formation,” is not only catchy, it’s thoroughly Black. The song’s wildly popular video touched on police brutality, Hurricane Katrina, and her racial background, saying, My daddy Alabama, Momma Louisiana/You mix that Negro with that Creole make a Texas bama.

She kept the Blackness of her song in full view by choreographing a performance that honored the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Dressed in all black surrounded by Black dancers wearing black berets, black leather, and afros, it was hard to miss her statement. The political undercurrent of the performance was not accidental. Super Bowl 50 also happened to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party.

Not surprisingly, there has been controversy across the nation surrounding the song, but especially the halftime performance. Twitter has been on fire with outcries from all sides. While one tweeter said she was “offended! [Because] Beyoncé didn’t have any Caucasian Back up dancers! She’s Racist!” Another tweeter on

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the other side of the spectrum said he, “realized what in his life isn’t important (car, kids, food, etc) and can be sacrificed for Beyoncé tickets.” Media reactions ranged from calling a Beyoncé an advocate and an activist, to calling her a racist and saying she #ruinedthesuperbowl. One particularly angry—and random—pundit (and person in general) is former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, whose highly intelligent take included him saying he didn’t, “know what the heck it was.

A bunch of people like bouncing around and doing strange things.” In response to Giuliani’s rant, in which he also called for more wholesome halftime show entertainment, Jessica Williams of The Daily Show went on a rant of her own. She said she “didn’t realize that singing about race was equivalent to Janet Jackson getting her titty pulled out at the Super Bowl.”

Regardless of what side of the spectrum viewers are on, it is a fact that Beyoncé’s performance made a statement. She is obviously a Black Bill Gates in the making. Whether people love her or hate her is up to them. However, whoever is mad at Queen Bey is probably just a corny hater. Who knew that the Super Bowl halftime show could be anything other than accidental nudity or mind-numbing pop songs for white middle class families. It is clear Queen Bey, did not come to play with you hoes, she, came to slay, bitch. –CH

From Twitter to the Pictures Last October, Michigan resident Aziah Wells took the Internet by storm under her nom de guerre, Zola. On her Twitter account, Wells recounted a spur-of-themoment trip to Florida with a fellow stripper named Jess whom she had just met, and the chaos that ensued.

In the 150 tweets there are twists, betrayals, and a shooting—literally fulfilling Chekhov’s rule that when a gun is introduced in a story, it must eventually go off. Wells’ voice is also incredibly entertaining. At one point, when Jess and her boyfriend begin arguing after he finds out that she has been engaging in prostitution, Zola goes off to the pool because “I mean, i am in florida !” The riveting tale quickly went viral, and Wells has enjoyed the Internet fame worthy of someone who managed to accidentally tweet the perfect plot for a Hollywood thriller.

In fact, Hollywood may be where Wells’ story is headed. According to Deadline, as of last week James Franco is set to direct an adaptation based on the Rolling Stone article that investigated the series of tweets.

Wells seems excited, having tweeted the week before, “If I told y’all who I got a call from today you would never believe me.” Though James Franco is perhaps an odd choice of director, it still feels appropriate that the Zola story will make it to the silver screen. After all, Wells’ story promises a kind of equality in social media. With 150 tweets and no connections to the film industry, a young woman from Michigan will get to see herself portrayed on the big screen. Perhaps the movie could still end with her original last line: “If u stuck with that whole story you are hilarious lol.” –JA

Feb 12, 2016

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The Young and the Ratless Only the good rodents die young. Isn’t that what they say?

This week, Rose, the albino rat starring as “Toby,” the protagonist’s pet albino rat in the critically acclaimed Broadway show The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, met her untimely demise in a tragic accident at her Upper West Side apartment—four days after making her acting debut.

Rose was just eight months old. Her guardian, Curious Incident’s veteran animal trainer Lydia DesRoche, explained to the New York Times that Rose was playing on some shelves in another room when “a metal door on one of the shelves came off its hinges and landed on her.”

Rose’s was the classic Broadway story: fate hands a young, penniless, born-performer a ticket to the big time— only to rip it from her paws just as she begins to fully grasp it. This past July, Rose was rescued by DesRoche after being abandoned on a West Side Highway median strip along with, inexplicably, dozens of other albino rats. As Rose regained her health over the following months, DesRoche noticed an adventurous spirit surfacing in Rose and decided to take her to the stage on a whim. She was a natural. Rose stood atop Toby’s red cage bruxing her incisors and boggling her eyes “like a possessed vaudeville comic”—which the Times reports is, somehow, a sign of rat relaxation.

While one might chalk up Rose’s casting to her mentor’s intuition, the Curious Incident cast was facing stormy times when Rose entered the picture and they desperately needed to find a new It-Rat. The rat playing Toby, also named Toby, had suddenly fallen ill with tumors. Unable to perform, Toby was forced to pass the role to her understudy, Tulip. But, it seemed, Tulip choked under the spotlight.

Although she was performing eight shows a week, everyone knew the truth: Tulip wasn’t made for the job—not like Rose was. In the days leading up to her death, Rose was already mastering Toby’s kiss scene with his owner, Christopher.

When DesRoche heard the fall from across the apartment, she knew it immediately… something had gone terribly, terribly wrong. “[The rats are] always knocking things off the shelf—it’s like a game. But this sounded like the ceiling came down.” To her horror, DesRoche entered the room and saw *DUN DUN!* Rose’s delicate white body crushed beneath a pile of paper, file holders, and the metal door. Rose died of her injuries en route to the veterinarian.

Although the late actress’ death is being ruled a freak accident, there were no witnesses to her fall. With Tulip’s whereabouts at the time of the accident unaccounted for, this Broadway drama may be just beginning to unfold…

–LC

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Christiane Taubira and the Debate Over French National Identity Barring any unforeseen circumstances, individuals with dual citizenship who are convicted of terrorism in France will be soon stripped of their French nationality with the guilty verdict. Known as déchéance, or forfeiture, this law will likely be written into the constitution later in February and is a symbolic response to the latest round of terrorist attacks in Paris, which have left France under a state of emergency since November. It has garnered widespread popular support (a poll conducted by international news channel BFMTV found 94% in favor) and conservative acclaim (the far-right party Front National [FN] has supported such a measure for years) but split the liberal political establishment in half, pitting President François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls against many who believe the bill runs counter to French values. The fiercest opponent of all: French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, who resigned her position rather than be forced to defend the bill in Parliament. In an interview with Algerian Radio, Taubira denounced the bill as posing a “fundamental problem in terms of national rights by birthplace, to which I am firmly attached.” At a news conference, she told the press: “I am choosing to be faithful to myself, to my commitments, to my fights.” +++ It is only fitting that the catalyst for Taubira’s departure was a question of citizenship. Born in French Guiana, a former colonial territory that is currently one of France’s five overseas departments, Taubira has advocated for the rights of citizenship, as well as a more inclusive definition of French nationality, throughout her political career. Indeed, her resignation has put the spotlight on France’s complicated, often paradoxical relationship with its own sense of national identity—what it means to be French, and who is allowed to claim that title. It is a question that has plagued France since its inception as a republic based on Enlightenment values in 1792. The country has rewritten its nationality laws “more often and more significantly than any other democratic nation,” writes immigration historian Patrick Weil. During its long and shameful colonial period, France attempted to export a sense of shared culture and identity in order to make of its African, Asian, and Arab colonial subjects “typical French citizen(s)” who were “expected to be everything except in the color of his skin, a Frenchman,” according to historian Michael Lambert.

Though skin color didn’t entirely preclude access to this shared national identity, it was seen as an obstacle, a detractor that had to be counterbalanced. And though France’s colonized people were offered full French citizenship under the law, historian Julian Jackson writes in The Other Empire that an actual sense of belonging “was always receding…the colonial populations treated like subjects, not citizens.”

When it comes to immigrants in metropolitan France, many of whom arrived from France’s colonies, the country has always practiced a policy of assimilation rather than integration: newcomers are expected to adapt or conform completely to French norms and values. Former President Sarkozy, arguing in a 2011 speech that multiculturalism had failed, said: “If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you are not welcome in France.

We have been too concerned with the identity of the person who was arriving, and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him.” And yet France’s commitment to this notion of a single community is belied by the many social and political barriers that prevent newcomers to France from accessing such a community in the first place. Immigrants are often sequestered in HLMs (Habitation à Loyer Modéré), rent-controlled housing towers in banlieues on the outskirts of city centers, subject to exclusion and discrimi-

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by Piper French illustration by Celeste Matsui

nation in nearly every aspect of their lives. And though they are expected to erase visible traces of difference from their bodies—notably in France’s laws banning the display of “conspicuous” religious symbols—the large majority of immigrants to France cannot mask that ultimate mark of difference, the color of their skin.

In adherence to its conception of single community as national community, France does not account for racial difference on its census; as such, there is no way of knowing the exact demographics of the country. But though there may be no de jure segregation or distinction among races, national identity is wielded in subtler ways to reassert the otherness of people of color in France. A research team backed by the Open Society Institute concluded in 2011, “you can be of any descent, but if you are a French citizen you cannot be an Arab”—multifaceted identities are “ideologically impossible” in France. In an interview conducted with Al Jazeera as part of a larger meditation on France’s relationship to its Black citizens, Guadeloupean soccer star Liliane Thuram offered a personal anecdote of the ways that Frenchness is often seen as incompatible with dark skin.

“You leave the Caribbean, there’s no doubt in your mind that you’re French,” he said, “But when you arrive in Paris you’re not French anymore; you’re black.” +++ There has been ultra-nationalist political activity in France since the Dreyfus Affair, the late 19th century political scandal that split France in two and lead to the creation of the French far-right. Still, parties such as the Front National, whose members regularly engage in xenophobic and racist rhetoric that occasionally crosses the border into illegal hate speech, have seen a surge in popular support in the last decade. The FN, which was founded on a reactionary platform by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972, has always been attempted to further narrow the already slim parameters of French identity, wielding it in order to exclude nonwhite French citizens and withholding it from arriving immigrants altogether. It received almost no support for the first decade of existence, and was politically unpopular at the close of the 20th century during the creation of the European Union, a moment of increased unity across Europe.

However, the party has enjoyed a recent increase in favor due to a number of factors: recent backlash against the E.U. and the concept of multiculturalism itself, the threat of increased immigration from Syria and elsewhere, and the terrorist attacks that rocked France last January and November. France is currently under an indefinite state of emergency, and though déchéance is the type of law characteristically promulgated (and actually first conceived of ) by the FN, it was most recently proposed by the Socialist government in power.

PM Manuel Valls, echoing Sarkozy’s speech in 2011, defended the controversial bill by saying: “You are French because you adhere to a community.” Committing an act of terrorism, he reasoned, excludes you automatically from that community—as long as there is another community that can claim you. The déchéance law would only strip French citizenship from those French citizens who also hold a second nationality. Though this provision, a practical necessity, was ostensibly included in order to quell fears that anyone could be left stateless, it carries a more insidious message. The elimination of French identity and citizenship rights will only be a threat for those who hold some other claim to national identity as well— overwhelmingly, the very people who already find themselves on the margins of French society. For the three million dual nationals in France, most of whom have never and will never engage in terrorist activity, it is a reminder that their claim to their own national identity is more tenuous than ever.

The College Hill Independent

+++ Though President Hollande has been forced to the right on the issue of déchéance by fears of seeming too soft on security, many members of his party have spoken out against the déchéance bill and all that it represents. No critic was more strident than Christiane Taubira. The ex-Minister of Justice has spent her career fighting to make the legal definition of Frenchness more inclusive and encompassing, and she frames her resignation as just another step in that fight. She began her career organizing for Guianese liberation from France in her hometown of Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana. She ran briefly for president of France in 2002, exhorting the “need for government to address the concerns of people of color, women, and others who have been excluded from the mainstream political systems,” but only received 2.3 percent of the vote. Other notable accomplishments include the passage of a 2001 law denouncing slavery as a crime against humanity, which now bears her name.

Taubira’s attempts to expand the boundaries of Frenchness also extend beyond the bounds of race and nationality: In 2013, she introduced and backed the eventually successful law that legalized gay marriage, which she believed strengthened French society by “granting the simple recognition of full citizenship to homosexual couples.” Still, her political career is informed by a deeply personal struggle: In 2013 Taubira told the New York Times, echoing Liliane Thuram, that she “became black in Paris.”

And inevitably, Taubira has been hampered by the very problem that she has devoted her career to grappling with. The limits of her efforts to propagate an inclusive and diverse understanding of Frenchness are clearly visible in the nature of the criticism directed at her. She is targeted by politicians, civilians, and the media alike, and their criticism tends to be constructed along exclusionary lines, attacks on Taubira’s identity rather than her politics.

The irony here is clear. After all, Taubira is a skilled orator who often speaks extemporaneously and quotes French poets and scholars in her monologues. She is a stylish dresser, a mother of four who rides her bike to work. Her colleagues have lauded her for her elegance, charm, and grace. In theory, she embodies many classically “French” virtues. Still, she is denied Frenchness again and again. Often, the language used against her is coded—a subtle reminder of Taubira’s origins and race that reassert her otherness in French society. Her support of the bill that named slavery a crime against humanity lead to accusations of “playing identity politics.”

In response to her vocal support for the gay marriage bill in 2013, protestors switched their chant from “you are beat, families are in the street,” to “you are beat, the French are in the street,” a characterization that Taubira interpreted as “a message of exclusion.” She told the New York Times: “I don’t believe there have been other protests, or that it would be conceivable that a protest address another minister” with such a slogan.

Other times, criticism of Taubira has veered into openly racist territory. Most shockingly, a 2014 Charlie Hebdo cover depicted Taubira as a monkey—a misguided attempt at satirizing another newspaper, the rightist Minute, whose cover had contained two sophomoric banana and ape puns in reference to a photo of a grinning Taubira. (In an unconnected incident, this colonial-era racist trope was employed by a minor FN politician, who called Taubira a “savage” and said she would “prefer to see [Taubira] swinging in a tree than to see her in government.”)

Even the criticism of Taubira that isn’t explicitly racialized tends towards the vitriolic, far more so than that directed towards

Feb 12, 2016

her (now former) colleagues in the Socialist party. It’s unsurprising, if disheartening. Not only is Taubira politically and ideologically at total odds with those on the far right, she herself represents everything that the Front National and many others detest and fear about the supposed direction France is heading. The mixed, integrated multiculturalist society that the FN dreads is made manifest in the form of one fierce, diminutive Black woman who was born in a former French colony but fought her way to the heart of the political system in Paris.

But Taubira not only represents a vision of France that is frightening to many. In many ways, she is an embodiment of the paradoxical nature of French identity itself. Of the double violence of a nation that willfully colonized vast swathes of the world but refused to name and accept as their own the people caught up in the colonial system. Of a society that sees brotherhood as integral to its value system, but rejects its Black and brown brothers and sisters over and over again in favor of a theoretical idea of fraternité that doesn’t account for the realities of racial difference. Of a culture that claims to define membership by literary and cultural connaissance, but ultimately delineates belonging on the color of one’s skin rather than one’s ability to quote Proust at whim. Of a country founded on secularism that applies a law banning the display of obvious religious symbols to the bodies of women wearing veils but not men wearing yarmulkes, nor people with crosses around their necks. Of a national ideology centered on the idea of universal and inalienable human rights, which may soon begin to bypass this inalienability by disowning those convicted of certain crimes from the body politic, effectively eliminating their right to possess rights at all. +++ “Who gets to be French?” Karl E. Meyer asked in an eponymous 2012 New York Times article. This question is perhaps more easily answered negatively. In the eyes of many, Christiane Taubira does not, despite her values and many years of service to the French people. The subject of Meyer’s piece, perpetrator of the Toulouse killings Mohammed Merah, did not—he was denounced by the French Parliament in the wake of the attacks as having “nothing French about him but his identity papers.” Soon, others convicted of terrorism under France’s new laws will not even have those identity papers. Then again, they have never really gotten to be French in the first place.

PIPER FRENCH B’16.5 n’est pas Français.

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BERNIE SANDERS AND THE GLASS-PROOF ELEVATOR The non-issue of a candidate’s religion

If the 2016 presidential race has revealed anything about US politics, it has shown us how little remains off-limits. This, in the face of a history of strict presidential fitness: of the 43 derrieres to have occupied Washington’s top seat, all have belonged to men; all but one have belonged to Protestants; and all but one have been white. Of course, Barack Obama’s election in 2008 demonstrated that an African-American candidate can marshal an electoral majority, despite ongoing racial tensions throughout the country. Hillary Clinton’s overall lead in the Democratic polls may result in the first non-male presidency. With her recent narrow victory in the Iowa caucus, she became the first woman to win that contest; her potential to break this ceiling of male political power has rightly drawn a stream of attention since she declared her intent to run in 2008. Another matter, championed by conservative media, is that Ted Cruz’s triumph in Iowa makes him the first Latino candidate to win there. Furthermore, Bernie Sanders’ success in New Hampshire makes him the first socialist to make a serious bid for the presidency since Eugene V. Debs ran from inside a prison cell in 1920. Amidst the hubbub over these firsts, one ceiling stands out as absent from the discourse: that the socialist Senator Sanders is also Jewish.

Maybe the silence on Sanders’ Jewishness is a natural, admirable measure of inclusion in American politics. Maybe we now live in a country that has shed religion from the political sphere and lives up to Thomas Jefferson’s hallowed dictum, protected by the First Amendment: the separation of church and state. This is a nice idea, but many will find it hard to believe—particularly considering the ways in which religion has factored into the race so far. Most visibly, Muslim-bashing has proven in-bounds for Republican front-runners Trump, Cruz, and Rubio. In well-publicized statements, they conflate American Muslims—a population of 3.3 million—with the Islamic State (ISIS) and radical Islamic terrorism broadlydefined. Their discourse recalls the unfounded claims that Barack Obama is a Muslim—claims levelled as accusations during his candidacy, such that viewers of mainstream TV might have thought "Muslim" an expletive. Religious tolerance in the US still has profound limits. +++ As the typecast president—white, male, God-fearing—begins to split at the seams, it is worth looking at just which seams are splitting, and which aren’t. According to a Gallup poll from June 2015, 38% of Americans would not vote for a Muslim presidential candidate under any circumstances. But other groups have gained more acceptance: Sanders faces only 7% of the population who would not elect a Jew; Catholics Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio face such discrimination from only 6%. Clinton, a Methodist, is up against a slightly steeper 8% of Americans who would not vote a woman. But above all these, 40% of Americans say they will not vote for an atheist—apparently, none are running.

Pundits have proffered the idea that Bernie’s non-issue is simply symptomatic of internal politics among Democrats and will acquire full issue status should Sen. Sanders enter the broader, more religious field of the general election. Predictably, the average Republican voter is more likely to declare herself religious than the average Democrat, and, according to Pew, a full 70% of white evangelicals lean Republican. Yet, according to another 2015 Gallup poll, Republican voters are more likely than Democrats to vote for a Jewish candidate, and are more willing to elect a Jew than a Catholic. It does not seem that Republicans are postponing their attacks on Sanders until the moment is ripe—conservative candidates, particularly Mr. Trump, have not hesitated to play the 'socialist' or 'communist' card in reference to the Democratic field, and Sanders in particular. These critiques are not surprising, given that only 26% of Republicans would vote for a socialist candidate.

The non-issue of Sanders’ Jewishness sheds light on popular conceptions of who does, and who doesn’t, pass muster as an American. American-ness has never been reducible to citizenship, though citizenship is often a proxy over which differences in race, ethnicity, country of origin, religion, and values are played out. Among the many identities that make up the nation, Jews have been more deeply enfranchised than many other minority groups, especially over the last halfcentury. Jewish candidates do face prejudices that a Protestant

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does not: anti-Semitism is an enduring force in many communities, and theories about international Jewish conspiracy abound. But in terms of political precedence, they face fewer hurdles than many other minorities. Consider that two other Jewish candidates have sought the top job—Pennsylvania Gov. Milton Shapp, in 1976, and Joe Lieberman, in 2004.

Or, that L.C. Levin was the first Jew to reach the US Congress, back in 1845, and that two hundred have done so since.

The first Muslim to be elected to Congress was Keith Ellison.

That was in 2007.

Thanks to such precedents, Sanders has not had to break any ceilings just yet. He has been able to eschew conversations about his faith, preferring to focus on “the issues.”

When the matter comes up, it is rarely at Sanders’ behest. In those situations, Sanders has avoided scandal by forthrightness. Whereas Obama was forced onto the defensive by false allegations, Sanders has simply acknowledged being a Jew—he says he believes in God—and pointed back at Wall Street.

While on a talk show hosted by Diane Rehm last June, he was asked about false claims that he had dual citizenship with Israel. Sanders gave his piece: “I’m an American,” he said, “I don’t know where that question came from. I am an American citizen, and I have visited Israel on a couple of occasions. No, I’m an American citizen, period.” Sanders followed up this rhythmic assertion with another revealing tidbit: “You know, my dad came to this country from Poland at the age of 17 without a nickel in his pocket. He loved this country.” No Promised Land—just a fervent faith in the American Dream.

Declaring faith in the Dream is not a new move. Sanders’ reply recalls that of John F. Kennedy during his 1960 presidential campaign, as he spoke to claims that his loyalty to the Vatican might supersede his patriotic duty. “I am not the Catholic candidate for president,” declared Kennedy. “I am the Democratic candidate for president who happens also to be Catholic.” As non-Protestant candidates, both have made a pivot from religion to nation or party; for many voters, this pivot does the trick. But not all of them. For many, flagwaving cannot make up for skipping church, and candidates know this. Last week, Sen. Cruz declared, “I am a Christian first. I am an American second. I’m a conservative third. And I’m a Republican fourth. And I’ll tell ya, there are a lot of Americans who feel the same way.” In strongly evangelical Iowa and among conservatives generally, this position apparently served Cruz. To be a Christian first is an expression of American-ness in the eyes of some voters, and rather than being forced like Kennedy and Sanders to separate church and state, the Protestant candidate has the privilege of conflating the two.

by Lance Gloss illustration by Frans van Hoek

Sanders has drawn criticism for his silence on foreign policy, but his stance on Israel is telling. He endorses the “two-state solution,” but he does not support Israel wholesale: he was one of only 21 senators to abstain from the otherwise-unanimous Senate Resolution 498, sanctioning Israeli action in a missile exchange with Palestinian Gaza; he also boycotted public appearances by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Meanwhile, Rubio and Cruz have received high ratings from pro-Israel publications, largely for their militant support of the Jewish state in the Middle East.

So he is not the Zionist candidate for president, but he may still benefit from Zionism. One wonders about the effect of Jewish-affiliated campaign donations. Sanders himself makes a point of scrutinizing sources of campaign money, and recently critiqued Clinton for her acceptance of some $700,000 from Goldman Sachs, which he claims will bias Hillary in favor of financial powers. His own campaign is built on small donations of unconfirmed origin. But Clinton and much of the Republican field have accepted donations from Jewish interests—powerful incentives to avoid antiSemitism. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in the period from 1990-2006, Zionist interests alone (not to be confused with a far greater figure for all Jewish sources) contributed $56.8 million to federal campaigns and party groups. In the same period, the figure for all Muslim and Arab interests combined was only $800,000. This ratio goes a long way in explaining why some candidates comfortably bandy hate for Muslims, but are hesitant to alienate Jews. +++ Protected by precedence and interest, Bernie has managed to avoid the topic of God remarkably well. Instead, he has taken every opportunity—climate change, the financial crisis, profound income inequality—to wave the flags of science, pragmatism, facts. So, even if he is elected, Bernie Sanders might not be best-described as the first Jewish president. More so than the slightly-Christian Thomas Jefferson or the light-onreligion Barack Obama, a President Sanders might be a truly secular Commander in Chief. To illustrate: at a Baltimore mosque this January, Obama concluded a speech condemning anti-Muslim rhetoric as he usually does: “…and may God bless the United States of America.” Sanders, celebrating his near-win in Iowa, gave a different parting message: “…when our government—the government of our great country—belongs to all of us, and not just a handful of billionaires; when that happens, we will transform this country.” Applause, and the speakers cut to David Bowie. Not a trace of God in the whole speech. Is Sanders the Jewish candidate for president?

Or, is he the secular candidate for president, who happens also to be Jewish?

LANCE GLOSS B’16 is registered as an Independent.

The College Hill Independent

WE ARE NOT DISPOSABLE Accountability and Irreversibility in Flint, Michigan

In October of 2014, employees at the General Motors manufacturing facility based in Flint, Michigan began to worry. The employees at the engine plant, which uses an average of 75,000 gallons of water per day, believed that high chloride levels in the newly resourced water from the Flint River were corroding and rusting their heavy-duty auto parts.

Given that the corporation had the economic means to cease using the Flint River water, they created a plan to buy water from Lake Huron so that their machinery would not be in danger. It has taken many months for Flint residents, who rely on the same water that caused GM’s suspicions, to capture the attention of neglectful government officials and prove to them that their own living bodies are being destroyed by the poisonous water. +++ For almost fifty years Flint drew water from Detroit’s main water system. But in an effort to bolster Flint’s weakening economy, government officials proposed a plan to draw “free” water from the Flint River. By switching to the local water source in early 2014, Flint hoped to save $5 million over the course of two years. In a city where 40% of residents live in poverty, the mayor at the time, Dayne Walling, urged the community to “toast” the change with a sip of “regular, good, pure drinking” water.

An indisputable difference between the two sources of water: corrosion-control chemicals were present in the water supplied by the city of Detroit, and not in the Flint River’s water system. Once the water supply was switched, the Flint River water began seeping a mixture of poisonous metals—mostly lead—into the water supply. Within months, residents of Flint realized that something was terribly wrong.

They notified local government officials, protesting with jugs of discolored, foul-smelling water in their hands. In July, Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality urged Flint residents to not to panic about the strange state of the water: "Anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can relax. It does not look like there is any broad problem with the water supply freeing up lead as it goes to homes," said the organization’s lead spokesperson Brad Wurfel, who recently resigned. Their pangs of worry were continuously brushed over by ignorant officials. What ensued in the following months after resident’s initial complaints has finally been recognized for what it has always been: a federal emergency.

In a speech made on January 17th, civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson said that the city should be surrounded by tape, “because Flint is a crime scene.” The government’s initial refusal to own up to the neglectful behaviour that spurred the monstrosities of the Flint water crisis is disturbing. In an email dated September 25th 2015, Dennis Muchmore, Governor Rick Snyder’s chief of staff, writes to Gov. Snyder that two state health and environmental agencies “feel that some in Flint are taking the very sensitive issue of children’s exposure to lead and trying to turn it into a political football claiming the departments are underestimating the impacts on the populations and particularly trying to shift responsibility to the state.”

by Ryan Rosenberg illustration by Zak Ziebell

Muchmore then writes, referring to Andy Dillon, then the state treasurer, “I can’t figure out why the state is responsible except that Dillon did make the ultimate decision so we’re not able to avoid the subject.” State government officials expressed genuine disinterest in taking responsibility or offering immediate aid or inquiry into a crisis with longterm detrimental consequences, while instead maintaining a that’s-not-our-problem stance. The government’s efforts to conceal citizens' concerns, as evident in the over twohundred emails released by Governor Rick Snyder, show the intentionality of this ignorance. The emails have multiple consequences. Perhaps a lack of motivation to question such an ideal fiscal solution was at play. Or, perhaps the situation reflects the chilling prospects of officials deeming the predominantly Black population of Flint unworthy of quality essential resources by marking their voiced complaints as inadequate—bringing to light what civil rights activists deem “environmental racism.”

The stinging repercussions of the crisis on various Flint residents were illuminated in an article published in the Detroit Free Press. Two-year-old Sincere Smith broke out in itchy rashes on his arms, legs, face, and stomach after bathing in Flint water. The same water that rusted steel auto-parts was eroding Sincere’s skin. Sincere and his three siblings’ single mother, twenty-five-year-old Ariana Hawk, is pregnant and attends Mott Community College. "I can’t afford to go buy 20 gallons of water just to bathe him one time,” said Hawk, who has resorted to using wet wipes in order to wash her children. Soon after moving to Flint last fall, Kerry Wheeler’s boxer, Beast, refused to eat. He became lethargic, vomiting constantly. When Wheeler began giving Beast bottled water, “he perked right back up after a couple days.” Wheeler, Beast, and her eleven-year-old daughter are planning to escape Flint and move to Taylor, Michigan. Flint resident Catrina Tillman told the Detroit Free Press, “It’s kind of like you feel like you’re the black sheep in the family. In this case, you feel like you’re the black sheep in the country.”

The “black sheep in the country” metaphor resonates with the theory that environmental racism is what has driven government officials’ crude ignorance. The term environmental racism, first used in the 1980s, is defined by the New York Times as “the disproportionate exposure of blacks to polluted air, water and soil. It is considered the result of poverty and segregation that has relegated many blacks and other racial minorities to some of the most industrialized or dilapidated environments.” According to U.S. Census data, people of color represent 56% of the population living less than 1.8 miles from one of 413 commercial waste facilities in America. A prime example of environmental racism is Altgeld Gardens, a housing community that was built in 1945 for Black veterans returning to south Chicago from World War II. The complex is enveloped by 53 toxic facilities and 90% of Chicago’s landfills. A staggering number

of children born into Altgeld Gardens develop brain tumors.

To this day, residents have not been relocated. The population of Flint is predominately Black, which raises the obvious question of whether such harsh and irreversible indifference would have occurred if the city were mostly white. “Everyone has a story,” said Flint resident Melissa Mays to the Detroit Free Press. “These stories need to be heard. All this boiled down to, we were poisoned because the Emergency Manager took democracy away. We are not disposable people. The people who did this need to be held accountable.”

Amidst the messy tangle of who must be held accountable and the government’s complete failure to respond to urgent cries, what is most devastating about the situation in Flint is the irreversible repercussions of lead poisoning on children. According to a New York Times report, the effects of lead poisoning on growing brains include “lower intelligence, difficulty in paying attention and with fine motor skills, and lower academic achievement[.] Some studies have also linked lead exposure to violent behavior, and higher crime rates that can span at least two generations.” Though increased calcium, iron, and vitamin C intake and chelation therapy can help the body remove lead from the bloodstream, the effects of lead poisoning are proven to be more or less permanent.

The cruel irony of the Flint water crisis lies in the negligence shown by officials trying to save money by switching water sources, when ultimately the resources the state and the country will expend addressing the damage will far outstrip what may have been saved by switching the water supply in the first place. According to an article in The Guardian, state and federal agencies estimate that re-sourcing the water supply and providing water filters, water bottles, and behavioral health care for children who have been been exposed to the water will cost over $45 million. Moreover, certain things, like the impact on a child’s growing brain, are without price. Superintendent of the city school system, Bilal Tawwab, fears what the crisis will mean for schools in Flint.

“That’s the piece that keeps me up at night,” he told the Times.

“It costs almost double to educate a student with special needs.

And our wages, our salaries, are so low.”

For the children of Flint, the future is bleak. It’s impossible to decipher whether it was neglect or willful malice that signaled to officials that the people of Flint’s voices did not deserve to be heard. The result of their actions, or lack of action, is a public health crisis and environmental racism all the same. Clean water is a basic human right. Innocent beings were not simply denied of this essential resource, but also deliberately poisoned by it. The city can apologize, promise changes, and secure a different discourse for the future, but for some, what is done is done.

RYAN ROSENBERG B’17 drinks from the tap.

Feb 12, 2016

NEWS

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ALL THAT WE H

by Gabrielle Hick illustration by Alec Mapes-Frances

In one place, long ago, they called him Nabû. In their tongue his name was a god’s name, and he was scribe of all the universe: the shifting sand of the desert, the slant of sun on limestone lamassus—those creatures carved by man to guard the gates of palaces, dwellings raised up into the sky so that a king might imagine himself a god. But a king is not a god, for a king is only a man, and a man does not have the power to spin out the web of a life past the point of breakage, as Nabû could. For Nabû was the keeper of the Tablets of Destiny, upon which he inscribed the fates assigned to men who were not gods, men who built palaces that crumbled apart, back into sand; men who were swallowed by the desert they tried to tame, who lived and who died, and through all this, Nabû kept writing. The stylus in his hand was never still.

King Ashurbanipal was the last of the great kings of Assyria. He did not know this, that he would be the last king of an empire that ruled the Middle East for centuries. Nabû did, for he was the scribe of everything and everyone, and he recorded the fate of every child and every king. But Ashurbanipal did not, and so he built a library in his city of Nineveh with the belief that it would stand triumphant for years and years, and he filled the shelves with thousands and thousands of cuneiform tablets, so that the stories of his people and the histories of his conquests would be remembered, safe on clay tablets in the cool dark of the library. When Ashurbanipal, last of the great kings, crushed a revolution in Babylon, the conquered city was ordered to copy out the texts from their own collections, and from their libraries. Babylonian scholars worked in the gloomy quiet of a city defeated, and prisoners-of-war copied words out onto tablets, the task disquieted by the dull clinks of their chains. King Ashurbanipal, standing in his library, surrounded by all that he had ordered written down, all the written learning of his universe, exclaimed: “the god Nabû, scribe of all the universe, bestowed on me as a gift the knowledge of his wisdom.” This too was written down, by a nameless scribe who died long ago.

Nabû knew, as Ashurbanipal did not, that the library the King had built was to be destroyed, for so it was written on the Tablets of Destiny. After Ashurbanipal’s death, the Babylonians, remembering the chains and the styluses, allied with the Medes and ravaged the city of Nineveh. In the library the sound of tablets being broken apart ricocheted against the walls. Words, severed from their sentences, flew into the shadows of the rooms, because clay is breakable, and Ashurbanipal was only a king and not a god. For thousands of years the tablets of Ashurbanipal’s library slept in pieces on the floor, the words of the Assyrian people and of the empires they conquered destined to erode slowly into the fine dust of clay. +++ Some nights, in the cool and quiet, King Ashurbanipal would cast his eyes up, up into the far corners of the celestial firmament that reigned over everything, even over him, the last great king of Assyria. No matter the height of the temples he raised into the sky, King Ashurbanipal knew that he would never build ziggurats high enough for the gods to notice.

Looking at the sky and the stars and trying not to think of the distance between him and them, King Ashurbanipal, just a man, imagined himself sitting amidst the gods: Ashur, Ishtar, Nabû. He wanted to live forever, the way the gods lived, not condemned to walk for a finite period on the grass and the dirt and the sand but to live bright and terrible forever in the heavy night and in the pinprick of stars. King Ashurbanipal wanted this, all this, but he knew that one day he would die, as Nabû knew, because Nabû was a god who knew the fates of the entire universe and recorded those fates on the Tablets of Destiny.

King Ashurbanipal, knowing and wanting and always dying, day after day, ordered the cataloguing of every star in the night sky: every constellation, every individual bright point against a black swath, every planet, which his people called “wandering stars” because they, too, had been nomads once. They knew what it was like to drift. King Ashurbanipal could not be immortal so instead he decided to write down every distance in the night sky, the distance between stars, the distance between planets, so that he might tame them, tame the sky, and tame the gods. King Ashurbanipal was bound to the earth, and the distance between him and the gods and the sky was too great to ever conquer, even for a king. So he bound the stars to clay tablets, and in the short strokes of cuneiform he named them so they might be tamed. Holding his star catalogues in his hand, King Ashurbanipal stood in his library and imagined that the distance between the eternal realm of the gods and him was really not that far at all: the thickness of a tablet, the soft weight of a stylus pressed into wet clay. +++ Every night as the world slipped into the seventeenth century, the century when Galileo saw the moons of Jupiter and Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Johann Bayer went to bed unknowingly dreaming the same dreams as a king, the last great king of Assyria. Johann was a lawyer from Bavaria, and by day he looped the law over and around his fingers, twisting it into the shapes of whatever he needed right and wrong to be. In the nighttime, alone, Johann looked up at the sky and the smattering of stars that lingered outside the reach of his own realm. He thought about binding the stars to his own set of rules, twisting them to the credos of a celestial law. A law, when it is written down, tames something.

Johann sifted through Ptolemy’s star catalogues, but they were incomplete and uncertain, the latter a trait that Johann did not see within himself. He spent careful hours writing and writing, wrestling the constellations of the evening onto a page, committing them to the laws of his hand. He became a celestial cartographer, charting a pathway through nighttimes, navigating by the positions of stars and how they linked up to form shapes and figures and gods that humans had projected onto the sky for thousands of years. Here, Orion, with his sword in his hand. There, twelve more constellations that Ptolemy had

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AVE WRITTEN

never written down. To Ptolemy, those stars were strangers, solitary and random. But Johann recorded them in his Uranometria as constellations, so that they might be known, and named. He could look up at the sky and see them in the groupings he had written, the law of his hand drawing shapes against the night. Johann’s atlas was the first to cover the entire celestial sphere, because all before him, the Babylonian astronomers or Ptolemy or Tycho Brahe or Alessandro Piccolomini, all those who had sought to do the same kind of refining of a wild wild sky, they had never been able to wrestle with it all. But Johann mapped the world, and wrote it all down in his book with the careful handwriting of one who believes in the law of all realms. He was a scribe, biblical, powerful, and just. +++ Sima Tan was the Grand Astrologer to the imperial court of the Han dynasty, slave of the skies. He was ordered to begin a monumental historical summary of ancient China and the world, but he died before it was finished, his name half-remembered. His son Sima Qian rose up into the title bestowed on his father, and the new Grand Astrologer wrote late into the night, trying to write down all the dynastic histories of China so that the Emperor might have them at his fingertips. The book was called the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), and two thousand five hundred years of Chinese history filled its pages when it was finished, from the age of the legendary Yellow Emperor to the reign of the Emperor Wudi of Han, the current Emperor. In the Records, Sima Qian bent and broke history because he was the scribe and could do so. History was not written as linear, but fragmented into edible pieces, smaller units of time that spilled over into each other.

The manuscript was written on bamboo slips that were collected together into bundles, which often repeated what the other was trying to say. When the bundles were collected together, the entire history of China written by a father and son would have weighed as much as a woman, or a slight man. History is heavy. Much later, the work was copied out onto silk, and the Emperor could have rubbed his own name against his face.

Sima Qian knelt and placed one of the bamboo slips of the finished Records in the hands of the Emperor Wudi. The Emperor read his own name, recorded. This was a process of tripling, in which the object of the desire, the mode of desire, and the desire consumed each other. The Emperor was full, for he knew that he would last in the moment beyond this one. He would live forever in a bamboo slip, in the bend of his name along a fold.

In the Records there is a brief account of Sima Qian. Quietly, hungrily, he wrote his own name and his history, so that the scribe might be more than a scribe. This is possibly the world’s first autobiography, which is the process by which a scribe consumes himself.

After the Records: Sima Qian sided with a friend who had surrendered to the enemy, and for this the Emperor had him castrated. But in the great history of China that he had written, Sima Qian is whole. +++ On February 1, 1998, a space probe named Voyager 1 became the farthest thing existing in space that humans had ever created; its distance from Earth unparalleled. On August 25, 2012, Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause, the solar region around the Sun that consists of wind and magnetic fields. Voyager 1 did not slow down in its travels through the eleven billion miles of the heliopause, did not take a moment to do what the name of the region seems to suggest. By the time it crossed the heliopause, Voyager 1 had been travelling alone in space for thirty-five years. Voyager 2 was launched two weeks before its partner, but it travelled more slowly, flying by Uranus and Neptune in the late eighties, planets that its partner will never see, far away in the realm of interstellar space.

The two Voyagers are out there still, hurtling through the darkest and deepest parts of night along their separate and solitary trajectories. Some of the scientists who built the probes, who dreamed of robots who could go where man could not, are long dead, their dreams caked in the posthumous. But dead or alive, the scientists who built the Voyagers believed in the power of transcendence, that even beyond the grave, beyond our time, our voices might be heard by extraterrestrial beings. Each Voyager carries a goldplated copper phonograph record, the light of stars and suns and moons glinting off the golden rim. The scientists included a cartridge and a needle, and etched into the surface in careful writing instructions for how to play the message copied onto the record. The scientists who thought to speak across time were also scribes, recorders, and romantics.

On the record is a collection of images and sounds chosen to represent what Earth is like: the languages of ancient peoples and the languages we speak now; the anatomy of a body and the workings of a brain; an image of a breakfast, a caterpillar, a woman cooking dinner bent over the counter. When the record is played, maybe, one day, the strains of Bach and the still of Beethoven will be heard; the wails of a baby, born on Earth, years and years ago.

Maybe some day, eons from now, far beyond the heliopause, the Sun, and the atmosphere of our own earth, a golden disk a long way from home will be found, and something or someone or some being or some god will read the inscription on its surface, written by scientists who dreamed of being scribes and built robots who could see what we could not, and who we hurled into the sky with words we had once written down branded into its back: To the makers of music—all worlds, all times.

Maybe this message will reach the makers, and the gods will know all that we have written.

GABRIELLE HICK B’16 wishes she read cuneiform.

Feb 12, 2016

FEATURES

08

SOMETHING’S IN THE WATER On Lead Poisoning in Rhode Island

Several men huddled around a fire hydrant late on a recent winter night. They were workers with Providence Water, a state-regulated department of the City of Providence that provides the capital with its water supply. They were flushing the main, the large pipe that runs down the center of a street, by releasing a high velocity stream of water from the hydrant. Over time, minerals from the water build up on the walls of the pipe, tightening its aperture and reducing flow and water quality. According to the workers, these flushes have nothing to do with lead.1 Providence, the workers were quick to point out, has the second best water in the country.

The claim that Providence has the second best water in the country used to appear on the homepage of Providence Water’s website, until it was removed sometime between October 16 and December 16, 2014. This despite the fact that in 2012, 2013, and 2014 the water consumers got from the tap exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) lead action level, being the level of concern at which remedial measures are triggered under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Under the provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act, the utility was required to distribute brochures notifying customers of elevated lead levels in all three years.

The most recent legally required notification of high lead levels was issued May 28 of last year. 2015 water quality data has not yet been released, but a spokesperson for Providence Water, Dyana Koelsch, told the Independent that “the latest testing shows that we do meet current regulations.” It is important to note, however, that meeting current regulations does not mean that the lead levels are below the EPA’s level of concern. For example, an excessively high lead level coupled with an informational brochure is fully in compliance with federal regulations without indicating that water lead levels are safe. As of the time of writing, water quality data had yet to be released.

But the tests that produce such data may be intentionally misleading. UK newspaper the Guardian recently exposed several US health departments for giving at-home water-testers instructions that would lead to systematically underreporting the amount of lead in tap water.

The Rhode Island Department of Health allegedly instructed residents selected to participate in the testing to run their taps “until cold” before filling the sample bottles, a practice that reduces the amount of lead in the water and does not reflect the lead content of water that has been sitting in the pipes for several hours (like, for example, when you wake up in the morning).

Koelsch called the Guardian’s claim a “misunderstanding” and said that, while the utility would not go “tit-for-tat” with a newspaper, she conceded it would indirectly rebut the accusation by communicating “the truth.” Providence Water has not yet communicated a statement to the Independent, but has updated the section of their website dealing with lead at least three times between February 5 and 10. The old page, “Lead In Your Drinking Water,” has been replaced with “Reducing Lead Levels in Drinking Water,” and the link on the homepage now reads “Lead in Household Plumbing.” Providence Water has not placed dates on their statements. The most recent one (as of February 10) says, in part, “Our water meets or exceeds all Federal and State Safe Drinking Water Act Regulations.” +++ Despite lead being a highly regulated and tightly monitored neurotoxin, information about one’s personal risk from lead can be surprisingly difficult to get. Some Rhode Island buildings are certified as lead safe, but most aren’t. And some 80 percent of homes are thought to be older than 1978, the year lead paint was outlawed for home use, according to the Rhode Island Department of Health. Providence Water estimates that 20,000 homes in Providence

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are still serviced with lead pipes that run from the mainline in the center of the street to the sidewalk, where the homeowner’s piping begins. Federal law has required that Providence Water distribute brochures via mail informing residents of excessively high lead concentrations in the city overall, but doesn’t require that the utility distribute information detailing exactly where utility-owned lead service lines are used. Consequently, a system map is not available online.

Customers may call the Lead Service Hotline or the Water Quality Hotline and inquire about a specific address, but it’s easy to imagine that many Providence residents do not know that they should be doing this. And information about pipe material isn’t widespread even among utility employees. None of the maintenance employees from that night knew what metal the service lines off the main they were flushing consisted of.

And even if someone does know the material of the pipes, both in their service line and in their own plumbing, testing for lead in the water that comes out of the tap is done mostly by conscientious customers that are willing and able to pick up a lead testing kit and pay a $10 processing fee. Koelsch did say, however, “I’m sure if people can’t afford the $10 they’ll give [the test] to them.”

A recent report by the Environmental Justice League of Rhode Island shows that environmental toxins are predominantly concentrated in low-income and minority neighborhoods of Providence. This finding is supported by a 2010 study in the Maternal and Child Health Journal that demonstrates that lead poisoning is concentrated in Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Woonsocket, and in poorer and less white areas within each of those cities. In some suburban census blocks they found zero cases of lead poisoning between 1993 and 2005, compared to one urban census block where 48.6 percent of children were lead poisoned in that same time period.2 But local activists from organizations such as Childhood Lead Action Project and the Environmental Justice League of Rhode Island say the problem goes beyond the presence or absence of environmental health hazards in these neighborhoods. “We don’t live in a city and a state where everyone has the same power to act on the information that they may or may not have about lead hazards and other environmental hazards in their homes,” Laura Brion, Director of Community Organizing and Advocacy at the Childhood Lead Action Project, told the Independent. +++ Since federal and state legislation began targeting lead in the 1970s, the incidence of lead poisoning has steadily decreased in the United States, a fact that has lead some media outlets to call news coverage of the Flint, Michigan water crisis overdone. In the mid-1970s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that the average US child under the age of 5 had a blood lead level of 15 micrograms per deciliter. In context, the on-going crisis in Flint finds 4.9 percent of the city’s children with blood lead levels greater than or equal to 5 micrograms per deciliter, the amount of lead that the CDC defines as lead poisoning.

Rhode Island is one of the country’s worst states when it comes to lead poisoning. According to a 2010 study by Rebecca Renner published in Environmental Health Perspectives, the rate of children with elevated blood lead levels in Rhode Island is three times higher than the national average. Renner attributes this, among other things, to corrosive water that strips traces of metals from the pipes, to the fifth-oldest housing stock in the nation, and to the tens of thousands of Providence homes serviced with lead service lines.

“We also have issues, just like Flint, with lead pipes being used to bring our water to our homes,” Jesus Holguin, Youth Leadership Director at the Environmental Justice League of RI, told the Independent. “There are similarities between Providence and Flint when talking about our Industrial past and the way these industries have all closed down and moved away, leaving a legacy of pollution in our communities. The right to clean air, clean water, and safe places for kids to play is something that wealthy communities take for granted. Many low-income and minority communities don’t get parks, street lights, housing code enforcement, or safe drinking water.” Koelsch, for Providence Water’s part, says that the utility “take[s] concerns from all their customers seriously, no matter what neighborhood they live in.”

The College Hill Independent

by Rick Salamé illustration by Gabriel Matesanz

Renner believes that the Rhode Island Department of Health downplays the correlation between lead in drinking water and lead poisoning among children, arguing instead that other environmental sources of lead are the prime drivers of lead poisoning. “When we see elevated blood levels, the typical sources are either paint, dust, or soil,” Joseph Wendelken of the Rhode Island Department of Health told the Independent when asked about Renner’s position. (For the record, Laura Brion agrees that paint, dust, and soil are more often the culprits behind elevated blood levels, but worries that the current flawed testing protocol means that we don’t really know what the scope of the lead-in-water problem is.)

Despite this worry, Rhode Island is making progress in the fight against lead poisoning.

Data from the Department of Health show the prevalence of lead poisoning has decreased steadily from 34 percent of children in 2002 to 5 percent in 2014. “Rhode Island is still known, nationwide, as a lead poisoning hot spot,” says Brion. “We’re known as a lead poisoning hotspot that has done a lot to make the situation better, but we’re still not ahead of the pack.” The 2014 data indicate that about 1,000 children had elevated blood lead levels that year, according to calculations made by the Independent. And for advocates, that number is still too high.

Every case of lead poisoning is preventable. The sources of lead are well-known and the mechanisms by which it enters the blood stream are non-controversial, even if the relative proportions to be attributed to water versus soil, dust, and paint are debated. That’s a big reason why these 1,000 lead poisoned children in Rhode Island represent a scandalous failure to public health advocates despite the fact that the figure is an improvement on ten years ago. And it’s why the situation in Flint is such an outrage to so many. Part of what is missed by those who call media coverage of Flint overdone is the fact that ‘better’ simply isn’t good enough when it comes to lead.

Critics of lead abatement policies point out that the blood lead level considered to be poisoning has been lowered over time by the CDC—most recently in 2012 it was lowered from ten to five micrograms per deciliter. State Representative Joseph Trillo (R–Warwick), speaking in 2014 against a tax increase on home sales that would have provided $2.3 million for lead paint abatements said, the state’s improvement in the lead poisoning rate “wasn’t enough for the lead paint people. So what did they want to do? We had reduced it from thirteen thousand kids ten years prior down to twelve hundred. Now it was going down so low they said we have to lower the standard of the blood level. And they did that… we’re putting a tax on the property owners to put money towards a problem that’s been solved.”

But there is no known safe concentration of lead in the blood, and negative health effects have been found with as little as two micrograms per deciliter. The dangers of even low levels of lead are well established and include risk of a variety of neurological and other disorders.

Inadequate funding or political will behind lead paint abatement programs, home risk assessment programs, or upgrades to water systems, will continue to allow a certain amount of lead poisoning to happen. And since the victims are predominately poor and predominately Black and Latinx, a certain political tolerance for lead poisoning seems likely to persist despite the efforts of generally well-intentioned yet underfunded health departments like Rhode Island’s.

“Although Providence has made a lot of good progress around lead,” Holguin says, “we still see disparities in who’s affected in terms of race and income.”

“When I look at Flint I’m just heartbroken on so many levels because I just know how possible it was to stop the disaster from ever happening,” Brion told the Independent. “Every child that has been lead poisoned has experienced a violent attack on their brain. And I don’t think that’s a dramatic way of putting it. It deserves that attention, that horror, and that respect.

Our normal should be zero. Because it can be zero and because all children deserve that.”

RICK SALAMÉ B’16 found the Lead Service Hotline less than helpful.

— 1 Providence Water officials disagree, and tout the practice as part of their anti-lead efforts.

2 The paper does not make it clear whether that census block is in Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, Woonsocket, or Newport, which are statistically clustered together as the worst lead poisoning areas.

Feb 12, 2016

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by Will Tavlin illustration by Pierie Korostoff

The triumphant return to Star Wars, the opening crawl, like every preceding Star Wars film, plants us in the thick of space catastrophe. Against John Williams’ colossal orchestral opening, we are dropped into a galaxy far, far away—some three decades following the aftermath of Episode VI: Return of the Jedi: Luke Skywalker’s triumphant victory over the dark side, the tragic death of Darth Vader, and the collapse of the Empire. Curiously absent in the prologue is any mention of the film’s true protagonists, Rey (Daisy Ridley), a desert scavenger with a mysterious past, and Finn (Johnny Boyega), an ex-stormtrooper who’s desperate to escape his future in the First Order. Antagonist Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), the former student of Luke Skywalker who fell to the dark side, is also absent from the crawl. That the very first words of the film are “Luke Skywalker” summarizes what many critics have claimed is wrong with the film: that The Force Awakens remixes and regurgitates the original Star Wars trilogy.

Christopher Orr, writing for the Atlantic, calls the film “less sequel than remix [...] ensnared in its own nostalgia.” Andrew O’Hehir writes for Salon: “[Abrams and co.] barely even pretend to advance the story of the initial trilogy; they rewind it and repeat it, with [...] the same action set-pieces, narrative dilemmas and hidden connections.” The allusions to A New Hope, the original Star Wars film released in 1977, are heavy handed.

Structurally, you can replace Rey and Finn’s journey to deliver the map to Luke Skywalker to the Resistance, with Luke and Han Solo’s journey to deliver the Death Star plans to the Rebellion; Kylo Ren with Darth Vader; and the First Order with the Empire. The Force Awakens even recreates famous shots from A New Hope like the Empire’s starship flying over the camera (now a First Order starship), or chemical sunsets over Luke’s desert wasteland (now Rey’s desert wasteland). There’s a new Death Star too, called Starkiller Base.

And yet, Orr’s description of the film as “ensnared in its own nostalgia” doesn’t really begin to account for the degree to which the film is obsessed with the franchise’s past.

Neither does this ‘nostalgia’ explain exactly what Disney, the proud new owner of Star Wars, is working towards within the franchise’s longer-term goals. ‘Nostalgia’ implies a reference to a particular set of qualities relevant to A New Hope—or, more broadly, the original trilogy—or even more broadly, the experience of watching Star Wars in the late ‘70s. Implicit though is a sentimentality directed towards the past, whether that’s the far, far-away past of Darth Vader’s Empire, or the more literal past watching A New Hope as a kid for the first time in 1978.

But The Force Awakens produces moments that confuse exactly which ‘past’ it’s referring to and what even reproducing a franchise’s ‘past’ might look like. Take, for example, the way The Force Awakens plays with humor. In the opening scene of the film, Kylo Ren storms the desert planet Jakku in search of the map to Skywalker. Apprehending the beaten and bloody Resistance pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Kylo Ren begins his interrogation. “So who talks first? You talk first? I talk first?” Poe yammers in an inexplicably New York accent. “It’s just very hard to understand you with all the...” Poe gestures to Ren’s mask before he’s forcefully silenced. The audience guffaws. It’s a funny moment, but the humor is strikingly different from that utilized by George Lucas in the original trilogy.

There’s a moment, towards the end of A New Hope, when Luke and Han Solo dress up as Stormtroopers in order to infiltrate the Death Star and rescue Princess Leia. After

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shooting through a room of Stormtroopers, Han Solo radios to command center from the main computer to contain the situation: “What happened?” an Empire cronie responds.

“Had a slight weapons malfunction, but, uh, everything’s perfectly alright now,” Han Solo stammers. “How are you?”.

The cronie asks for his operating number. Han Solo shoots the computer.

The original trilogy exercises a form of humor that often looks like slapstick, but always plays with the qualities of the characters themselves. Han Solo is just as brash as a hero as he is a smuggler; he approaches every situation with the same charisma and underhanded charm, and it’s funny to see that played out in situations where we wouldn’t expect it. However, in The Force Awakens, we laugh at the Poe’s joke about Kylo Ren’s mask because of the thousands of images, parodies, and cultural quips that have been made about masks, Vader, and the fact that villains wear them. There isn’t even a specific directionality in this joke; The Force Awakens simply takes advantage of the viewer’s likely-to-be-held knowledge that a relationship between masks and villains merely exists.

Abrams plays this humor out again towards the end of the film: Han Solo and Finn make their covert mission to lower Starkiller Base’s shields. Finn, at this point, has lied about his schematic knowledge of the base in order to convince the Resistance to authorize the mission and thus execute his own: rescuing Rey. Han Solo, incredulous when he discovers this, slams Finn into a wall: “People are counting on us. The galaxy is counting on us,” Solo grits through his teeth.

Finn looks up, enlightened at his revelation: “We’ll use the force!”

“That’s not how the force works!”

Another big guffaw. Han Solo’s remark is funny because we know how the force works. It’s been drilled into our heads over the past thirty-eight years in films, TV, magazines, videogames, conversations—literally everywhere—and it definitely can’t bring down the shields of Starkiller Base. The Force Awakens is not just about referencing A New Hope, or even the original trilogy. It’s about exploiting the cultural appendages that have superseded the films themselves. +++ Alan Dean Foster’s 1978 Star Wars spin-off novel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, is considered by many to be the first piece of Star Wars content exterior to the original trilogy. Since then, external bodies of Star Wars content have emerged to form what is known today as the Star Wars Expanded Universe—commonly referred to as the ‘EU.’ Books, TV shows, comics, toys, history, analysis, any and all fictional content officially certified by Lucas Licensing (a Lucasfilm subsidiary responsible for licensing and merchandising), the Star Wars EU stretches from 36,000 years before Episode I: The Phantom Menace to 136 years after Episode VI: Return of the Jedi.

EU content is separated into canon and non-canon. Canon, according to Lucas Licensing editor Sue Rostoni, in a 2001 issue of Star Wars Gamer, “refers to an authoritative list of [content] that the Lucas Licensing editors consider an authentic part of the official Star Wars history.” Non-canon content, while still part of the EU, exists in a separate imagi-

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nary. The goal, as she notes, “is to present a continuous and unified history of the Star Wars galaxy, insofar as that history does not conflict with, or undermine the meaning of Mr. Lucas’s Star Wars saga of films and screenplays.”

The EU is incomprehensibly vast; and after nearly four decades of generating countless worlds, characters, and stories, it has found a flourishing space online. Look towards Reddit, a website that hosts specialized and community maintained forums called ‘subreddits,’ and find everything from /r/StarWarsSpeculation, for fan theories on upcoming books and films, to /r/YourStarWars, where users create new Star Wars characters and role play in the comment section. Qu1nlan is a mod of the /r/StarWars—a general Star Wars subreddit that with over four hundred thousand regular subscribers, makes it one of the largest on the web. He tells me in an email: “I grew up on Star Wars EU material far more than I grew up on the movies.” For fans like Qu1nlan, places like /r/StarWars provide the space for intimate engagement with EU material; debates about the Empire’s history, its politics, the ethics of Han Solo’s smuggling racket.

Beyond commercial gains, the great success of the EU is its fuzzy, intangible allure.

“It’s really the EU that makes the Star Wars universe what it is, if you ask me,” says Qu1nlan. “That’s where it gets the breadth, the depth, and the emotion that the movies were never quite able to tell in two hours.” More important than the toys, novels, TV shows, Lego sets, and video games, the most valuable piece of merchandise the Star Wars EU generates is affect.

That is, until Disney threw it all into the trash compactor.

On April 25 2014, two years after it was bought by Disney for just over $4 billion, Lucasfilm announced on its official website: “In order to give maximum creative freedom to the filmmakers and also preserve an element of surprise and discovery for the audience, Star Wars Episodes VII-IX will not tell the same story told in the post-Return of the Jedi Expanded Universe.” This announcement is known today as the canon wipe; a move orchestrated by Disney that divorces nearly all Expanded Universe content created until April 25 2014 from the official Star Wars canon. Like a Jedi mind trick, a thirty-year-old war chest of information was erased with the wave of a corporate hand.

Fury in the Star Wars community, as one can imagine, ensued.

“No matter which side you were/are on, this was a huge ordeal,” SimplTrixAndNonsense, another mod of /r/StarWars, tells me. “All hell broke loose,” adds Qu1nlan.

“People [...] were heartbroken over what in many people’s lives, including my own, was a lifetime of hard work and dedication that was just kind of thrown away by Disney disrespectfully.” The opinions among Star Wars fans were polarized—on one hand, fans like Qu1nlan felt betrayed by the franchise they loved. Conversely, new fans felt welcomed to a franchise they felt would be inaccessible otherwise. According to Qu1nlan, “It was kind of this big culture clash between the new people and the really old nerds, with the two sides fundamentally not understanding each other.”

From the perspective of The Force Awakens, it’s strange that a film so obsessed with its cultural appendages and the past that produced them would simultaneously betray it all. There’s merit to the idea that Disney executed the canon wipe because making a new film within the bounds of the EU would have been nearly impossible. “[It] would have likely have been a die-hards only set of films.” says Yunners, another mod of /r/StarWars.

“At least newcomers could enjoy the saga without needing to ask a torrent of questions.

Feb 12, 2016

‘Who was this Thrawn guy? Why is Luke married? Where did all these new Jedi come from?’” Starting with a clean slate unbeholden to the Lucasfilm’s framework makes Disney’s process of branding their mark on the franchise undoubtedly easier.

A clean slate is also important considering the general consensus felt towards the franchise after Lucas’s disastrous set of 1999-2005 prequels. It’s best not to think of The Force Awakens as a sequel, or even a reboot for that matter—but rather an act of reclamation. Reclaiming Star Wars, for Disney, relies on appealing not simply to the characters or plot structure of A New Hope, but to the larger set of affective experiences and memories felt by millions when they watched Luke Skywalker and his rag-tag group of friends stand up to the dark side—and win. Critics have agreed: “I was delighted to be once again transported to a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away—specifically, to May 25, 1977, when my 10-year-old self saw Star Wars on opening day and had my mind forever blown,” Christopher Orr writes in his Atlantic review.

It’s a kind of nostalgia that excludes the fans who poured their souls into the Extended Universe Disney wiped from existence. +++ A new extended universe is on the horizon; shortly after the canon wipe, Disney announced Star Wars Legends—the new moniker for the now Disney-approved expanded universe. Already, Disney has released several novels: Heir to the Empire, The Han Solo Adventures, and The Lando Calrissian Adventures. A new war chest of content is already on the way.

Opinions are shifting too. “It’s calmed down now,” Qu1nlan tells me about the current state of canon wipe fury. “There’s still hurt going around, but the new movie did assuage many concerns for some people.” Disney’s hope is that new bonds will form.

That new fans will feel towards Disney what the old guard feels towards the Expanded Universe: underneath the officially licensed books, DVDs, videogames, and comics, that warm fuzzy fondness of discovering and maintaining a galaxy far, far away from one’s own—of finding one’s own essential Star Wars-ness of Star Wars.

It’s another Jedi mind trick; and just like the Stormtroopers who, in A New Hope, watched Obi-Wan Kenobi wave his hands and send them away, we too fall hypnotized: This is not the Star Wars you’re looking for, Disney whispers.

It looks like it just might have worked.

WILL TAVLIN B’17 is a little short for a Stormtrooper.

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IS IT THE CANVAS OR THE PAINTER? Poetry’s Machine Age

by Kamille Johnson

This anatomy Of extraordinary names Where did it come from?

The poem is not what you think. This haiku was crafted by a computer algorithm, known as JanusNode, in 2001. The three-line poem implies the writer’s relationship to a body, one of complexities and nuances. As a reader, it’s easy to ascribe meaning to the philosophical question of the origins of a body. The power of this poem comes from its ability to pull the reader into a physical context, bringing human associations with it that are actually not founded in the text. For me, this opening poem raises a couple of questions: Is it possible to know when a poem is written by a computer instead of a human? Does it matter? The first question is technical, but the second is a question of value judgment, presenting its own complexities. +++ The literary elements of computer-generated poetry are twofold: the poem, and the code used to make the poem. Consider the poem as a piece: every time the algorithm is run, the output is a new piece. Each poetic algorithm is unique based on the programmer’s intent.

Given the right set of inputs, the computer can figure out how to put together a string of words to make them look like something we might call a poem. Sometimes these poems, like the one above, can be genuinely interesting. One algorithm might choose its words based on parts of speech while another might compose a poem by counting a word’s characters. No matter the approach, algorithms used to create poetry depend on their source texts. So what can we then make of their results? Can a collection of words arranged by a computer be defined as poetry?

Perhaps poetry’s inherently human connotations set a standard for the computer to either match or surpass. Computers are definitely better at doing other things. But are they imaginative and critical enough to imitate a human? In the case of computer-generated poetry, we can expand this initial question to ask, can computers be poetic? Let’s say the success of a computer-generated poem is its ability to convince us a computer didn’t create it. Lucky for us, there’s a barometer for this, known as the Turing Test. Alan Turing lives on today as the extraordinary mind who gave us the beginnings of computer science. The test he devised evaluates a computer’s ability to behave as a human. The question guiding it was similar to ours: “Can computers think?” To answer this, Turing came up with a game, in which a judge asks a hidden man and woman a series of questions based on normative gender identities, like “how long is your hair?” The woman’s role is to get the judge to think she’s the man. Since Turing, the test has boiled down to simply a judge and a computer, where the judge guesses if a human or the computer generated the answers to their questions. If the judge is less than 50 percent confident that a human generated the answers, the computer is considered to be successful in imitating a human. At botpoet.com, you can play the judge in the Turing Test and guess if the poet’s author is a bot or not. But even with the help of the Turing Test, we’re still left wondering if it’s enough to know that a poem-generating algorithm can trick us into finding humanity in a machine. We just have computers trying to fool us. Anyone who has ever seen The Matrix should start thinking about getting ready for the apocalypse. +++ Regardless of the output’s ability to deceive us of its origins, the computer is inherently limited to and dependent on human participation in order to function. Gnoetry, another poetic program, produces outputs that are based entirely on the source code the human decides to enter. The more source code, the more the poetry is dependent on the human’s decisions.

While Gnoetry uses various source texts and topics, Nick Montfort’s generator, Taroko Gorge, is constrained to one topic: the incredible canyon Taroko Gorge in Taiwan. A PhD candidate at MIT, J. Nathan Matias, introduced Shakespearean language to the Androidapp, Swiftkey, to generate sonnets. Other bots crowdsource material: Pentametron pulls sonnet lines from Twitter.

In 2010, Zackary Scholl’s computer-generated poem passed the Turing test. It was later published in the Archive, one of Duke University’s literary magazines. Here’s the poem:

poem. Before, when referring to the piece, to the end product, the individual poem was uniquely essential. Now, with Scholl, the end product is an experience that is rooted in Turing’s fascination with deception. In other words, the piece is a performance and the poem is a mark of that performance.

The computer remains a tool in the artist’s creative process and the poem is the interface through which the piece is made accessible to the audience. A piece begins and ends with the human poet: they write the code, choose a series of source texts, run the algorithm, and finally they choose which lines to keep. These are the elements the poetic programmers get to play with as they build their algorithms. Think of each algorithm as a combination of linguistic rules, all of them. We’re talking limitations or specifications about the length of word, the type of letters in each word, or even punctuation (where it can and can’t be used). Beyond language, the programmer might also consider the length of each line. In JanusNode’s haiku, the coder had to define how many syllables could be in each line such that the computer searched for a sequence of words that matched these criteria.

Maybe they even told the computer to make a string of words with exactly 17 syllables and then chopped them up into lines accordingly. It’s impossible to know without looking at the code, but these slight changes in programming are the human’s fingerprints on the piece.

Some people have even taken this view of code as poetry to an extreme. A publishing project, code {poems}, has created a space to publish poetry entirely written in code. In their words, “Code can speak literature, logic, maths. It contains different layers of abstraction and it links them to the physical world of processors and memory chips. All these resources can contribute in expanding the boundaries of contemporary poetry by using code as a new language.” There’s something very intriguing about this move to “code as a new language.”

When it comes to life, the work wobbles across the line between technology and poetry.

How, then, does the artistry manifest itself in various parts of the creative process? Does the language of the code allow us to enter a new realm of poetry?

Without getting into the chaos of cyberspace, there’s something interesting happening when a poem is crafted and curated entirely in the realm of machines. In some ways, what’s happening here is moving us back into the realm of the Language poets, but through the medium of the digital. In the 1970s, Language poetry emerged as a form of poetry that championed reader participation in finding meaning in the poem. These poets interrogated the limitations of language, seeking to neutralize the presence of a speaker.

One of the most beloved Language poets, Lyn Hejinian, discusses her relationship to language in the introduction to her 2001 collection of essays, Language of Inquiry. Hejinian recognizes that poetry “takes as its premise that language is a medium for experiencing experience.” What then becomes of this experience in the original text, in the form of code, is invisible to the reader?

This multi-layered nature of computer-generated poetry captures an interrogation of the computer itself. What’s at stake when we differentiate between the computer as the canvas or the painter? It might help to check out how other poets are actively integrating technology into their practice. Sophia Le Fraga, a Brooklyn-based artist and former poet-inresidence at Brown University’s Literary Arts department, often uses technology as a medium for her performances. In her piece Und3rground Lov3rs, Le Fraga brings to life a series of texts by two couples. The performance piece is a choreographed reading of the messages.

It’s all about the human interaction that happens through tech. However, this work offers a different approach to the poet’s relationship to technology.

Through her language, Le Fraga invites her audience to find meaning in the social drama at play. In some ways, Le Fraga is bringing us a new type of Language poetry as the reader is asked to pull meaning from shorthand lines. Between her use of language and incorporation of technology, Le Fraga might act as the bridge between old and new media. The mode of instant messaging allows the piece to exist both inside and outside of cyberspace. This use of technology puts Le Fraga, and similar poets, at odds with the poetic programmers. Computer-generated poems build an experience with technology where the role of the computer is often intentionally hidden. The human role remains as the author elects what pieces to show. Other poets, like Le Fraga, are playing with ways the success of their work depends on the explicit role of technology. In either context, the computer is a tool. Whether the author acknowledges technology’s role determines when the computer stops being the canvas and becomes the painter.

KAMILLE JOHNSON B’16.5 is not an algorithm.

A home transformed by the lightning the balanced alcoves smother this insatiable earth of a planet, Earth.

They attacked it with mechanical horns because they love you, love, in fire and wind.

You say, what is the time waiting for in its spring?

I tell you it is waiting for your branch that flows, because you are a sweet-smelling diamond architecture that does not know why it grows.

Scholl was sly about his process. He waited four years before writing a blog post on the poem’s origin.

Zoom out. Scholl made an algorithm, and the output was considered to be a worthwhile poem, but he took the credit. So who’s the poet?

Scholl brings us to the second literary element of computer-generated poetry: the piece is the code itself and the human is the sole creator of the work. This perspective keeps us a bit more honest about the limitations of computers as poets. Scholl moves the focus away from the poem that the computer generated and emphasizes the process of generating that

Feb 12, 2016

“Uz Pinigus,” by Anonymous, excerpt (http://www.sourcecodepoetry.com/)

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RISD Confidential On Foundations and Boundaries A mythic aura hangs about RISD Foundations year like a thin layer of spray fixative in an art student’s lungs. When we speak of Foundations, we speak of the erosion of boundaries: the border between yesterday and today, as two days are breached by a period of manic productivity, and then between man and machine, as the next morning one’s body becomes a glue-encrusted automaton, staggering all but brain-dead into studio under the weight of your geodoesic pizzaslice-printed monument to lost childhood. But beyond the mental and physical degradation, Foundations year has a beauty and worth all its own, and great merits absent from the standard liberal arts education. It is not necessarily that Foundations facilitates the creation of art—in fact, in such a climate of overwork and overstimulation, art (like sleep) is evasive in character.

It’s instead that Foundations year creates openings for dramatic irony, for beautiful lived-in paradox that almost always contradicts the “official” lesson at hand. Here are three examples of how our exhausted yet ego-inflated states, coupled with loose and unpredictable class structures and teachers’ cult-of-personality, made Foundations a breeding ground for postmodern absurdity. It is impossible to say where the projects and narratives begin or end. They are the instances in which the true logic of our work could peek out from under so many layers of contrivance.

The revealing was not through the art-object itself but through how it was created and received; the story surrounding it.

A Drawing Story This one could be straight out of a Borges short story: A brilliant and devoted international student set out to make a series about drawing itself for our Drawing final. He began by generating page after page of dense horror vacui compositions, emphasizing his artistic dynamism, his utter dominance over the entire piece of newsprint with bold, expressionistic sweeps of charcoal.

The next week the pieces became more figurative, though never illustrative, the gestural lines swarming in around figures drawing at their easels. The next week, at our teacher’s insistence, space became his main concern and the focus shifted to our desolate, empty studios themselves.

Bigger, bigger, she demanded every week. The drawings expanded until they encompassed the entire studio wall itself, with all the contents of the room recorded exactly to scale. In his rigorous enquiry into the essence of drawing itself he had somehow moved from abstraction to trompe l’oeil mural—the opposite vector of what we generally accept as art historical progression. But for all the rhetoric of drawing as a “window into deep space,” or an exercise in impassioned mark-making, in truth these drawings functioned as mere time cards. Our teacher wanted density as evidence of devotion, a palimpsest of false starts to testify to the many obsessive hours we’d committed to her homework. In the boy’s drawings the columns of the empty studio were emphasized by a series of vertical marks which I thought echoed tallies on a prison wall. The size of the drawing didn’t necessarily make it more accurate, only more encapsulating.

The drawing would have been impossible to execute in any other context, as it was inexorably tacked to its arena of production. So if the assignment had begun with drawing-as-self-expression (expressionism), it had ended with drawing-as-labor, the individual both literally and metaphorically obliterated and their labor-hours the only thing left hanging. (That being said, the boy loved to work and we loved his drawings. Perhaps my interpretation was just sour grapes, as the studio Stockholm syndrome had not rubbed off on me and my impoverished doodles.)

A Design Story In Design class we were asked to create performance pieces. A few people missed the point entirely and did musical performances or skits. (They were not heavily criticized for this, somehow.) Another group of people asked to perform in the afternoon. When we got back from lunch, we saw why—all three of them were using the trash we had generated during the day to some artistic end. The first performer took a symbolic route, sitting in a rocking chair and throwing the pieces of trash over her shoulder into a suspended baby swing, representing the longstanding environmental problems being passed from one generation to the next. We all agreed, her performance made us consider the magnitude of these issues, and emphasized

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the obscene amount of refuse a class of only 20 people had generated in such a short period of time. The next performer put the trash the first performer had thrown back into the trash bag and then proceeded to dump the trash onto the table, adding a placard, “Trash, [The artist’s name], 2016.” We all agreed, her performance made us consider the diffusion/dispersion of the category of art since Duchamp first hauled out Fountain in 19-fucking-whenever, and emphasized the obscene amount of refuse a class of only 20 people had generated in such a short period of time. The next performer put the trash the second performer had dumped onto the table back into the bag and lit a cigarette. We followed him outside as he emptied the bag onto the ground right next to the canal and then walked back inside. I didn’t follow him inside because I wanted to pick up the garbage before it blew into the river. We all agreed, his performance really brought to light the pervasiveness of the littering problem and emphasized the obscene amount of refuse a class of only 20 people… HEY! I screamed. I was literally screaming. HE DIDN’T TEACH US ANYTHING! WE ALL ALREADY KNEW THIS CRAP FROM ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND PBS SHOWS AND PUBLIC EDUCATION CAMPAIGNS AND IF YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU COULD HAVE LEARNED FROM THE OTHER TWO PERFORMANCES PRECEDING HIM WHERE WE ALL SAID WE LEARNED THAT VERY SAME THING WE RECYCLED THAT GARBAGE PERFORMATIVELY THREE TIMES BUT IT’S STILL GOING TO KILL AN ANIMAL BECAUSE NOT ONLY IS HE NOT HELPING HE LITERALLY MADE THE PROBLEM WORSE AND I HAD TO STAY OUTSIDE AND CLEAN UP AFTER HIM THAT ISN’T EVEN ACCELERATIONISM BECAUSE IT’S SO BORING AND ARTLESS AN ARTIST SHOULDN’T BE PART OF THE PROBLEM AND AND AND… For the rest of the critique, everyone agreed that my anger meant the piece had been maximally effective as a provocative political gesture.

Oh, and the cigarette? It had “determined the duration of the performance.”

A Spatial Dynamics Story In Spatial Dynamics our assignment was to use a live animal in our final. I was paired with my good friend, who is an awesome artist, designer and thinker, but my creative opposite in almost every way. We were supposed to base our world for these animals off of short stories we’d written. Mine was about RISD, written entirely in acronyms like Retina Is So Delicate; Reach Into Soundless Depths; Revolution, If So Desired; Rotting Is Slow Dreaming. His was about impatience. When we first started to discuss the project, we instead became interested in the logical problem that everything is different, but that everything has the same opposite, “nothing,”—that the opposite of “broccoli” can’t be “not-broccoli” because “not-broccoli” is an empty mold container for the idea of broccoli. From this point we became interested in the idea that dichotomies aren’t opposites but always a pair like form and content, a shell and its contents. A hermit crab seemed the perfect cheeky allusion to this line of ontological inquiry. I wanted to use photos or patterns that alluded to terrorism, to highlight the bioethical dilemma of animals as art objects (What’s next, people as art objects? Oh wait, Vanessa Beecroft...) This idea was quickly nixed and we got into a fight about my love of surface application (phototextures, stickers, buttons) versus my partner’s love of material properties (working with the natural grain of wood, for example,) which for me, felt like a very gendered debate. Our compromise was to make the piece about hermit crabs as nature’s consumerists, allowing them to choose between different 3-D printed shells shaped like the Platonic solids—Cube, Tetrahedron, Octahedron, etc. We brought the crabs back from Petco, swaddled in sweatshirts, and set to work on fabricating their food bowls—naturally, in the shape of 3-D letters spelling out “HIGH DEMAND.” But unfortunately, the shipment for the printing filament was delayed (demand but no supply!) and the night before crit we found ourselves sans tank decoration, with the crabs still cozy in their original flamingo-and-tulip painted shells. (We realized later that our new shells might have had their interior spirals going in the wrong direction). For a five week project, the tank was a travesty, and we launched into a last minute plot to bring forth the poetics of our own failure. We briefly considered being naked (without our “shells”) or even having sex in front of the class, for whatever shock value might distract from the tacky hermit crabs, but my partner was worried about shrinkage in the chilly, creature-packed studio.

We ended up decorating the tank with 3-D printing pen and tulip paintings, while I read a last-minute critical essay in a robot voice over generic reggae music. Our argument was that,

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by Liby Hays illustration by Allyson Church while the project looked rushed, it actually took millions of years for the hermit crabs to evolve, for the oil that makes up the printing plastic to be compressed. We argued that nature could achieve a balance between form and content that human art could emulate but never fully realize, hence the futility of our own efforts here. We claimed that capitalism imposed a fantastical element alienating form from content (commodity fetishism) that at-home 3-D printing might be able to combat, by rendering the production process visible, and the object banal. At the same time, the more could be done at home, the more we could retract permanently into our “shells.” (None of these points I would defend, then or now.) When we were done presenting the crickets from a neighboring project underscored the silence. The only feedback was that our essay had been too long, and that if we wanted to actually make a statement, the hermit crabs would have had to design the Rhino files and operate the 3-D printer themselves. +++ Though these stories are absurd, I don’t intend to undermine or make fun of RISD in any way. I still have much to learn from these strange episodes (among many others I have yet to document.) It’s to RISD’s credit that an art studio can operate on so many levels at once. My problem with college-level liberal arts or lecture-style classes is that there is no room for paradox to unfold. The curriculums are rigid and formulaic; while you can learn in the class, the class itself can’t come unhinged and operate as a larger metaphor. In art school, on the other hand, the boundaries of what is considered our work can be flexible enough that our projects may (intentionally, or unintentionally) function as a critique of our own conditions of labor. Based on an artist’s claims of meaning and our class’s and teacher’s judgments, what counts as our work can extend to include its process, its mode of display, its reception and/or its failure. There is little potential to produce such challenging meta-commentary in a traditional liberal arts class, no venue for public critique of the class structure itself. These environments are designed to be polite and safe, but there’s something to be said for the drama and unpredictability of art school. Foundations assignments often seemed akin to social experiments or even reality TV. The contrived but also deeply personal nature of the prompts produced self-consciousness but a modicum of self awareness. The push for individualistic expulsivity (projects exploring one’s past, one’s body) was tempered by widespread conformism and easy retreat into the crit hivemind, producing narrative outcomes that bewildered and amazed me. We faced the difficulty of finding own voices while navigating a labyrinth of contradictory creative dogmas, espoused by professors who were caught in mazes of their own. The concept of art was exploded and abstracted from every angle until it became nothing but particulates in the air. But my resounding conclusion is this: if our entire system of education and work is a series of nesting performances, we might as well make those performances big, bold, and memorable. For Foundations year doesn’t present meaning as something concrete, like its name might imply, but as something lively and amorphous— growing, shifting, hemorrhaging, regrouping, beaded with blood, sweat, and gouache.

LIBY HAYS B/RISD ’19 is starving.

Feb 12, 2016

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THREE SONNETS

by Marcus Mamourian illustration by Emily Small

Sonnet One, or Sonnet for Adhesives Wailing rust when shaving drywall, A veiled reticence and a bag of hash for a Superstitious coroner who, as a compatriot and proprietor, Overcharged at the auto body shop, Forgot her nitroglycerin, Velcro in the glove box, To parse a simple play Two parts, Faust performed in Texas Aberrant strife and refugee, shared A maimed handshake, and A Spanish botanist, curable but repulsive Onerous to augment, hot to the touch Hunting knife, kept under eye, over head And all the prize money I couldn’t accept Free to deliberate, but please donate.

Sonnet Two, or Sonnet for Industrial Resins An empty beaker of double-blind origin, An unaccompanied outlet, studded w/ gold beads, Vexed, a frantic affliction, I ordered Three bottles of formaldehyde, plastic wrap I tipped, cautiously, Into the florists to buy a rake Clawing with a delicate cadence All the while, my telephone went unanswered, Anyone was calling: Onto plush leather, w/ optimized lighting, Spilling formaldehyde into the last space Into lasting places, or simply, Unto play tasted, and retrieved an orange straw from The cabinet, eager but not overjoyed.

Sonnet Three, or Sonnet for Glossy Surfaces Initially, a homely conversation, Abridged on both sides, the riches wire He fosters a salute, to be conventional Proprietary, contesting rarities and undesirables Customer service, initialed “HR,” reaches For a strangling, reflecting hazard My brothers, by indexical strength, are many However one looks at it, still lacking is the triptych Hence the hazardous step, in the past I’ve avoided with Caution, incubated my own kin And forthcoming would be a stop At the Fraud Department, I was caught Peeling a misdemeanor, over the trashcan acid, Though since revoked from my record.

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Lo-fi, psychedelic, surfer, and indie jams galore. Some great local bands here!

2.17

From the facebook description: “Join us in our movement to end the inhumane practice of solitary confinement and segregation practices in the Rhode Island prison and detention centers!”

The potluck will be to introduce people to the campaign and to each other. Guests are requested to bring a food dish. Childcare and Spanish-language interpretation available.

Learn about the historical relationships between the Syrian Revolution and the Palestinian struggle and between the Assad regime and Israel. Learn about the experience of Palestinians in Syria during this period of civil war. Presentations and conversation with Dr. Yasser Munif, Joseph Daher, and Nidal Bitari.

Critique and Conversation RISD Museum // 6.30–8pm // free

The Syrian Revolution and Palestinian Liberation Alumnae Hall @ Brown University // 4pm // free

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“Local curators, artists, and art educators facilitate conversation centered upon works of art in the Museum’s collection followed by focused, critical dialogue about ideas relevant to contemporary creative practice.”

Part of a series on cinema and Black cultural politics. Kara Keeling, Associate Professor of Cinema Arts at University of Southern California, will be speaking about her work on the intersections of technology, (anti-)racism, and Black media practices. Keeling gives particular focus to how the lower capital requirements of digital media technologies are changing the relationship between technology and cultural conceptions of Blackness.

Indie folk show. One Indy editor called it “very sincere,” which means nothing since its coming from an Indy editor and we are incapable of judging sincerity by normal standards. It’s actually the source of our power. It’s why we’re cool.

Free screening of a documentary about hypermasculinity in America and the damage that our society’s narrow and constrictive definition of manhood does to boys and men, and girls and women. Followed by a discussion with mental health professionals from around the state.

Ice Floe 2: Loveflow <3 CR // 9pm–4am // free (I think)

Radical Love Finlandia, 116 Waterman St // 10.30pm // $3 (no one turned away for lack of money) Marie Davidson, Ran May, Ater Charta, Timeghost, Jokif Behr Aurora // 8pm // free

Get Brown’s student mariachi band to serenade your lover this valentine’s day. Or you can buy a serenade for yourself. Self-love is important and valid. It also encompasses more than mere masturbation. For instance, it can encompass serenading.

Hot Tramps, Adam Finchler, Yuna, Favourite AS220 // 9.30pm // $5

2.16

All-ages dance party featuring DJ sets from K-Poppers, Wacklikethat, DJ Gooby, DJ Godbody, and more.

Live performance by surprise band and “inflatables” provided by Phneuhaus. Visual art installations

by Khole Foods and Aliend0g.

There’s just a whole lot of things going on here. If you don’t know where <3 CR is, your best bet is to message one of the organizers of the Facebook event. Or ask a friend.

2.15 Digitopia: Black Futures and the Cinematic Granoff @ Brown University // 5.30 pm // free

Oh dear Indy reader, you surely remember last week’s notice about the Boston SciFi Film festival. The finale is here, a 24-hour film marathon. What a way to wrap up what has been an emotional week for all of us.

Four bands will play this show that also doubles as the opening reception for a photography and mixed media exhibit centering around themes of sexuality and self deprecation. Visual art works by Johnny Ray, Gyna Bootleg, and Joseph Mauro.

Sianna Plavin, Abi Reimold, & Lady Queen Paradise News Café, 43 Broad St, Pawtucket // 7pm // I think, free

2.14

Sugar Pie, Gyna Bootleg, Honda Civic, invisible Robot Hands opening reception for ‘It Stays with You’ Machines with Magnets, 400 Main St, Pawtucket // 9pm // $7

A friend who moved to New York and works in high-end left-y media invited me to this event.

I’m not gonna be in NYC this day, but if you are, the Indy figures you could do worse. It’s probably gonna be kind of expensive and maybe a little silly as a conceit, but the money does go to the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, which works to ensure all people have equal access to gender self-determination.

Rhode Island Fact of the Week: The Rhodian population of fallow deer was found to be genetically distinct in 2005.

The Mask You Live In (Screening) Metcalf Auditorium @ Brown University // 7pm // free

Neutrinos, Timecop Beach Party, Little Tomb, Food Court AS220 // 9pm // $5

41st Boston SciFi Film Marathon Somerville Theatre, Davis Square, Somerville, MA 12pm // $64.50

Verso Books’ 2nd Annual Red Party 20 Jay St, Brooklyn // 8.30pm // price unclear

2.13

¡Mariachi de Brown Serenades 2016!

Everywhere // 12pm // $20 at Brown’s campus, $40 off campus

An interactive art exhibition featuring finished and in-progress work by students at New Urban Arts. New Urban Arts is a community arts studio that pairs young people with adult artist mentors and gives young people an artistic outlet both after school and year-round. They do great work, and so do their students.

Go check it out.

End Solitary Confinement Coalition-Building Potluck PrYSM, 669 Elmwood Ave // 6pm // free

Mid-Year Making: an Exhibition of Student Works New Urban Arts, 705 Westminster St // 5–7pm // free

2.12

Brown’s Students Against the Prison Industrial Complex and Joshua Robinson are hosting a party to raise money to pay Robinson’s legal fees.

He’s going to be involved in a police brutality case this spring to seek justice for a brutal beating he received at the hands of the Providence police.

If you cannot attend the event but want to support, you can contact studentsagainstpic@gmail.com Please respect the space and the event.

Free show featuring techno and electronic music from Quebec supported by local acts Timeghost and Jokif Behr.

Self-proclaimed power trash punk band Hot Tramps will be playing with all these lovely openers. It should be noisy and straightforward and fun.