The College Hill Independent V.29 N.02

the college hill A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY SEPTEMBER 19, 2014 | V29 N2

independent

MANAGING EDITORS Alex Sammon, Lili Rosenkranz, Greg Nissan NEWS Sebastian Clark, Kyle Giddon, Elias Bresnick METRO Rick Salamé, Sophie Kasakove, Cherise Morris ARTS Lisa Borst, Eli Pitegoff, Erin Schwartz FEATURES Jackie Gu, Matt Marsico, Sara Winnick TECHNOLOGY Patrick McMenamin SPORTS Zeve Sanderson FOOD Sam Bresnick LITERARY Kim Sarnoff, Leah Steinberg EPHEMERA Mark Benz X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff LIST Polina Godz, Megan Hauptman DESIGN + ILLUSTRATION Casey Friedman, Ming Zhen COVER EDITOR Jade Donaldson SENIOR EDITOR Tristan Rodman STAFF WRITERS Mika Kligler, Will Fesperman, Stephanie Hayes, Jamie Packs, Pranay Bose, Dash Elhague STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Andres Chang, Amy Chen WEB Edward Friedman COPY Mary Frances Gallagher, Paige Morris BUSINESS Haley Adams COVER ART Jade Donaldson MVP Jade Donaldson (seeing double) ;)

VOLUME 29 | ISSUE 2

NEWS 2 Week in Review

lisa borst, sam bresnick, kyle giddon & tristan rodman

3 Last King of Scotland sebastian clark

METRO 5 Crass Ceiling sophie kasakove

7 Howdy Neighbor! cherise morris

ARTS 8 Gnarly Vidz eli pitegoff

LIT 17 Skins

kim sarnoff

INTERVIEWS

FEATURES 9 Beep Boop

stephanie hayes

TECHNOLOGY 14 Elevator Music

patrick mcmenamin

SCIENCE 15 Munch Munch connor mcguigan

EPHEMERA 13 Snuggle Party Lil’ Meatsmack

X 18 Scrappy Doo layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

FROM THE EDITOR S Last week, The Indy published “Closed Doors, Sealed Mouths,” a piece of investigative journalism exposing and examining the sex trafficking of Asian women in Providence. The editors of the Indy apologize for the impact of this article, caused by assumptions in the piece as well as our editorial oversight in not attaching a trigger warning. Although we cannot offer an exhaustive correction to open-ended issues, the editors would like to address and clarify a few of the assumptions and biases made in last week’s piece. “Closed Doors, Sealed Mouths” conflates sex work with sex trafficking, when the two, though not unrelated, are not synonymous; the piece one-sidedly advocates for criminalizing sex work, when the debate is more complicated and the current system is unequipped (and often unwilling) to address these issues in an ethical manner; the piece uncritically uses language and terminology that masks the humanity of those involved; it does not acknowledge the problematic reporting done in online forums; and it takes a monolithic racial analysis. We are grateful to those who have participated in discussion sparked by “Closed Doors, Sealed Mouths” and added further nuance, analysis, and contextualization of sex work, sex trafficking, criminalization, racial analysis, and the words we use to talk about them. All readers are invited to join the discussion by contacting indyfeatures@gmail.com or visiting us online at theindy.org. _____________________________________ Last week saw the publication of a piece accredited to Mark Benz under the title Chiseled. This piece is actually the work Untitled Wood Engraving by RISD-artist Oliver Dewey-Gartner.

11 Follow the Leader greg nissan

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

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN SONGBIRDS

by Lisa Borst, Sam Bresnick, Kyle Giddon & Tristan Rodman illustration by Casey Friedman

KILLING IN THE NAME OF

WORK HARD, PLAY HARD

To a culture accustomed to choosing its favorite restaurants by their Yelp reviews—crowd-sourced, grade-inflated, irredeemably unsophisticated and proletariat—the critical weight carried by France’s Michelin Guide might seem excessive. But a three-star Michelin rating can propel a chef to international notoriety and importance; a restaurant earning the Guide’s most prestigious rating is deemed, officially, as one with “an exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.” That may be the case, but this week, French authorities are trying to determine whether exceptional cuisine merits the temporary dismissal of a long-standing European Union directive.

A member of the bunting family, the ortolan is a fistsized songbird that has traditionally been served as a delicacy in gourmet French cuisine, even chosen as the last meal of late French President François Mitterrand. Because ortolans were considered a threatened species in France during the nineties, the hunting and sale of the bird, along with several other species of bunting and finch, were banned by the EU in 1999.

But the notoriously epicurean French government, perhaps fearing a gastronomic revolution, failed to properly enforce the ban until 2007—during which time an estimated 400,000 ortolans had been illegally killed, sold, and fed to wealthy Parisian foodies.

This week, however, a group of three-star-rated French chefs have requested permission to preserve a long-held culinary tradition by serving the bourgeois bunting on one weekend every year.

Especially popular in southwestern France, ortolans are traditionally held captive in a dark box and force-fed millet until fat, then drowned in Armagnac. (Incidentally, this is almost exactly how President Mitterrand died shortly after eating his last ortolan.) The ortolan is then roasted and eaten whole, usually by diners wearing napkins draped over their heads—the purpose of which, according to the daily newspaper Le Parisien, is to conceal either the embarrassing sight of spitting out bird bones from onlookers or the shame of chowing down on an endangered songbird under God. For years, this gourmet indulgence has been forced underground, where velvet smoking jackets and leather cuffs tend to get irreparably dirty and where ortolans can sell for up to €200 a pop. So at the very least, France’s three-star elite are asking nicely. –LB

Boredom has been threatening to ruin baseball for decades.

The nation’s attention span has never been shorter and its pastime never more painful to sit through. Baltimore Orioles first-baseman Chris Davis, confronted with the tedious task of playing baseball 162 times in 180 days, found a way to dial in. Last Friday, the MLB suspended the O’s slugger—nicknamed “Crush” by fans and teammates—for using Adderall without a therapeutic use exemption. But nobody said that performance-enhancing drugs can’t help out in a tough spot.

On Tuesday, four days into his suspension, Davis was driving along I-295 towards BWI airport when he witnessed a car wreck. Eyes darting across the road, he jumped into action. Quick and alert, he flagged down other motorists and organized the effort to free a citizen trapped underneath an overturned pickup truck.

Another amateur first responder, Mike Soukup, wrote in an email to an Orioles beat reporter that he was initially unsure his fellow do-gooder was Davis because he “had no Orioles gear on,” but recognized his black and orange shoes.

Soukup continued by encouraging the disgraced slugger. “I think they screwed you over bigtime,” he said to Davis at the scene of the accident, “and I support you 100 percent.”

“Thanks, it really means a lot,” Davis responded, maintaining consistent eye contact.

While the Orioles have clinched the American League East, Davis isn’t allowed to be with the team during his 25game suspension. Unable to crush baseballs, he is looking forward to writing term papers for college students. –SB & TR

SEPTEMBER 19 2014

OPENING YAK James L. “Jim” Dolan is president and CEO of Cablevision, a telecommunications empire that spans most of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. He also owns the New York Knicks, the New York Rangers, and “The World’s Most Famous Arena,” Madison Square Garden. Sources estimate his net worth at $1.5 billion.

One of Dolan’s favorite bands is The Eagles, which he booked to play at Madison Square Garden arena this past Saturday. For their opening act, Dolan chose a little-known blues group called J.D. & the Straight Shot, whose headlining initials stand for none other than—you guessed it—Jim Dolan.

A lifelong music lover, Dolan culled together the Straight Shot back in 2000 to provide him with some entertainment while he wasn’t busy running a massive entertainment consortium. No word as to whether the name was meant to serve as subtle encouragement for his sports teams.

“Since I first picked up a guitar at 16, I wanted to create something that touched people,” Dolan says. Apparently the touching feeling of disappointment brought about by Dolan’s Knicks wasn’t doing the trick.

Since then, J.D. & the Straight Shot have released six albums containing what their Facebook page calls “a fusion of down ‘n’ dirty blues with classic rock swagger.” If you’re lucky enough to listen to J.D. croon, be sure to pay attention to his lyrics. On “Governor’s Blues,” Dolan lobs insults at Chris Christie and Bill de Blasio and complains about New York City’s taxes. On “Under that Hood,” a twangy blues number, he sings of Trayvon Martin: “On a hot Florida night comes an ugly sound / Shots are fired, I’m gonna hold my ground.”

“I’m an artist, and an artist doesn’t worry about being politically correct,” Dolan recently told The New York Times.

Critics of J.D. & the Straight Shot, which is composed of veteran studio musicians and Dolan’s son, Aiden, have not been kind. The New York Post called Dolan “a singer with limited range, an awkward way with melodies, and a tenuous hold on key,” while the Times called his vocals “karaoke-grade.”

But the advantage of being a billionaire is that you don’t have to listen to your critics. Instead, you just take captive an arena full of unsuspecting people who paid $150 to see The Eagles and make them listen to you sing about how high your taxes are.

It is, after all, Dolan’s garden—we’re just sitting in it.

–KG

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PRE-REFLECTION ON THE SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE REFERENDUM

by Sebastian Clark illustration by Margaret Hu

I write this article on Tuesday, two days before 4.28 million Scottish people vote on whether they want their nation to be independent from the United Kingdom. My prediction: 79 percent Yes, with a 30 percent margin of error.

As you already know the result, however, I neither place much faith in my precise prediction, for it still lies in the balance, nor hedge my bets by discussing the two possible paths that lie ahead. I instead opt to write on the one concrete result of the independence referendum — a lot of unhappy Scots. Whatever the case, just shy of half a nation will belong to a state to which they have no allegiance. If not physically severed, the United Kingdom will at least be so emotionally.

Up until the latest stages of the debate, before which independence was unimaginable, the name ‘United Kingdom’ had transcended its literal meaning. In popular imagination, it described one country, not two. It carried its weight, conjuring the thought of bygone days of imperialism, industrialization, and innovation. But henceforth, with each utterance of the country’s name, a hollow echo will ring; a back-thought chuckle will be insuppressible as together, the English and Scots, in perhaps their last remaining moment of unity, note the irony. The British, whoever they may be, will be left in a situation in which the name of their country will mock the very foundations of its existence. The Union Jack too, proudly waved one hundred years ago today at the start of World War I, will have come apart at its seams. No longer will it be seen as a single, iconic representation, but as it was originally intended: a composite layering of the Scottish Saltire and St. George’s Cross. If the vote is No, the disjuncture between red and blue will be sharp.

If Yes, the flag will be physically dismantled and its millions of reproductions, scattered across the world by decades of colonialism and pop culture alike, will exist as dregs of an olden age, memento mori. The country which once touted itself as the world’s most ‘civilized’ will have descended into the ‘tribalism’ it once sought to erase from the world.

But let’s imagine I am writing the day after Thursday.

+++

+++ Yesterday morning, 4.28 million Scottish people woke up; went to work, to school, or maybe even to yoga. They sipped their Colombian-roast morning coffee, likely from Starbucks, contemplated their daily chores, and then they went to vote on independence.

Faced with two boxes, a Yes and a No, they drastically altered the course of British history with a pen, not a gun. Never has a movement for independence been so peaceable.

Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary who led the Irish Republicans in the violent War of Independence, must be turning in his grave. He would have been dumbfounded even further to know that the question “but what currency will we have?” could predicate a nation’s decision of whether it should be sovereign or not. It is not that the cultures, norms and beliefs of England and Scotland are so irreconcilable that they can longer share a state, as was deemed the case between the Catholic Republicans and Protestant Unionists in Ireland. It is that the referendum offers a divorce of convenience.

And, perhaps, an appropriate end to a marriage of convenience. Absent from the three-year long debate on independence has been a historical justification for why partition should occur. Scotland’s leading historian, Sir Tom Devine, is the only to have done so substantively. Recalling that it was only after the Scottish Kingdom funnelled 40 percent of its circulating money into the Darien Scheme, a failed colonization of Panama, did its insolvency make union a bright prospect. “It was pragmatic,” he argues.“From the 1750s down to the 1980s there was stability in the relationship. Now, all the primary foundations of that stability have gone or been massively diluted…Ironically, it is England, since the 1980s, which has embarked on a separate journey.”

Indeed, in the rhetoric of Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), we have seen little invocation of William Wallace, Robert Burns, or Scottish Enlightenment. This is not the typical depiction of the drive for independence; the Scots are not awakening from sleep to rediscover something deep-down, forgotten, but always known.

Present at times, though, has been a coded anti-English, anti-establishment, prejudice.

"Instead of believing the word of a Tory prime minister,” said Salmond, “the people of

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Scotland can get all the powers we need to build a better, fairer country by believing in ourselves and voting yes.”

A pre-vote YouGov poll found that 51 percent of No voters based their decision on their disapproval of parliament. Not unique to Scotland, this represents a binary political attitude that has come into play in recent years, manifesting itself similarly in the mutual distrust between Main Street and Wall Street in America. In Yorkshire, it is the North versus the South; in Wales, the rural town versus London; and, in Scotland, Holyrood versus Westminster. Prevailing opinion is that the current government is bent on formalized corruption, ruling on behalf of a transnational elite that, with a network of supranational political influence, are the political puppeteers of the UK. Anyone who has spent time in London over the last ten years can confirm this as at least partially true.

What is noticeable about these puppeteers is their absence. All that can be seen are their armored cars with tinted windows, parked outside their £25 million mansions, protected by their state-of-the-art CCTV. Together, they represent a Trojan Peacock, bringing its wealth to London, showing it for all the world to see, but insidiously occupying its politics. Never climbing down from its hatch, there’s no way to know who they are or whether they are even in the region.

As a Bloomberg report in April of this year found, 85 percent of houses now sold in Central London are bought as secondary homes, mostly for investment purposes. At One Hyde Park, for instance, where apartment prices range from £6 million to £100 million, there are only 19 permanent residents in a building with 83 units. The rest: 26 are occupied under three months a year, 23 are registered by companies, and 16 are recorded as empty, yet still, suspiciously, owned.

This comes at a time when there is a deficit of 160,000 homes in the country and those that cannot afford housing, predominantly families earning less than £50,000 ($84,000) a year, suffer under the plight of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s austerity measures, despite his Tory government only holding 1 out of 59 seats in Scotland.

With this, it can safely be said that neoliberalism is the target of the Scottish Yes vote. It has driven a wedge into the stress fractures of the shockingly resilient British class system, resulting in a gaping chasm between the internationally mobile elite and those left in the wake of deindustrialization. In his Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey noted that the “British case is particularly interesting.” “Margaret Thatcher,” he writes, “invoked nationalist sentiment in support of her neoliberal project, though it was the idea of England and St. George, rather than the United Kingdom, that animated her vision— which turned Scotland and Wales hostile.”

The beloved Scottish director Bill Forsyth captured contemporary sentiment in his 1983 cult film Local Hero. Taking inspiration from a Shetlands man who in 1981 sued Big Oil for dirtying the sand on his local beach, the film tracks the attempted takeover of a Scottish town by an eccentric oil mogul. From Houston, he sends over an American named MacIntyre, who he believes to be of Scottish heritage, but is in fact Hungarian.

MacIntyre, though wooed by the rural idyll, puts big money on the table and wills the villagers into self-destruction. The scheme is eventually foiled, but the most salient takeaway of the film’s conclusion is the simple line, “we’ll have nowhere to call home but we’ll all be stinking rich.” This represents the dubious (com)promise of the neoliberal approach. An approach sustained by the trusting belief that if there is more wealth, everyone will have more wealth. As more wealth has endlessly flown into London, but not up to Scotland, the truth has been exposed.

It is on this premise that the most reasoned support for the Yes vote has come, that nationalism—“the opposite of globalization”—can be an antidote to neoliberalism’s erosion of social solidarity. “Change in any direction, except further over the brink of market fundamentalism and planetary destruction” as George Monbiot demanded last week in the Guardian. “Yes to Scottish Independence — and to the End of British Neoliberalism,” proclaimed Natasha Lennard on Vice News.

But Scotland is perhaps caught in the snare of the neoliberal catch-22. Again returning to Harvey, “the neoliberal state needs a certain sort of nationalism to survive. Forced to operate as a competitive agent in the world market and seeking to establish the best possible business climate, it mobilizes nationalism in its effort to succeed.” Indeed, replete in the SNP’s white paper is “Deregulation … light-touch business policy … reduction in corporation tax below the UK rates.” Alex Salmond has not shied away from expressing

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

his admiration for Ireland’s stunningly flexible corporate tax rate of 12.5 percent, where corporations, most infamously Apple, can negotiate a rate as low as 2 percent. In a world where Barack Obama, supposedly one of the world’s most powerful men, is inept without global cooperation, the question stands: what can Scotland do alone to combat neoliberalism?

In what situation are people, regardless of nationality, better off divided than united?

Nationalism, which defines people by what they are not, only compounds the ruthless effects of neoliberalism. Its only future lies in a race to the bottom. +++ So, returning to the unhappy Scots just shy of a majority. How can we attempt to make them happy? Scottish-English inequality is a power dynamic institutionalized by the fact that Scotland has its own government, but England and Wales do not. Embedded in the political framework is the intimation that Scotland is not inherently part of the United Kingdom. Whilst it needs new rights and powers too, so does the rest of the United Kingdom, which is equally excluded by London’s willingness to sell itself. The introduction of federalism would facilitate flexible, multiple identities, where a Scot can consider themself a Highlander, Scottish and British, or, if they like, just Scottish.

SEBASTIAN CLARK ’16 is fuck Nate Silver, who knows who’ll win?

SEPTEMBER 19 2014

NEWS

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HOMEWARD BOUND

by Sophie Kasakove illustration by Andres Chang

Over the past three years, lifelong Providence resident Roline Burgison stood by and watched as her friends, family, and neighbors left the state. It’s not that these people wanted to go, Burgison is quick to explain, but that they had nowhere to stay. As housing costs and foreclosure rates skyrocketed in Providence in the wake of the 2008 recession, many residents left their home state in search of a more affordable life. “I told my kids to leave,” Burgison, who is an active member at Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), explains. “I said ‘you were born and raised here, but there’s nothing left for you here.’” After searching for two years, Burgison finally managed to find a one-bedroom apartment for herself in the Silver Lake neighborhood on the western edge of Providence.

“I found a place for now, but this is not where I want to stay,” Burgison says. “There’s no such thing in Rhode Island as affordable housing.”

The average Providence resident pays approximately 35 percent of their income towards rental housing, the highest rate of any city or town in Rhode Island. By definition, housing is considered “affordable” when it costs less than 30 percent of a family’s median income; any renter paying a higher percentage is considered cost-burdened, those paying over 50 percent of their median income towards housing are considered severely cost-burdened. In Providence, 55 percent of renters are cost-burdened, which is even higher than the troubling national rate of 51 percent. More strikingly, Providence has one of the highest percentages of severely costburdened renters in the country. Using a survey of 36 major U.S. cities, Housing Works RI, an organization advocating for affordable housing, showed that only four major cities rivaled Providence’s rate of severely cost-burdened renters. In a phone interview, Nicole Lagace, director of Housing Works RI, explained, “In Providence—excluding the East Side— the average two-bedroom monthly rent was $1081. The annual income needed to afford that was $43,244. If we’re looking at a median rental household income of $30,000 that’s a

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huge lag in the income needed to afford an apartment in Providence.” Raising the stakes of this issue is the fact that 66 percent of Providence residents rent their homes, nearly double the national average of 35 percent.

Rents haven’t always been so expensive in Providence.

Facing a staggering $110 million structural deficit following the 2008 recession, the Providence City Council began upping the tax rate ratio on rental properties in 2010 in order to cover the cost of, among other expenses, public education.

These taxes are imposed on the non-resident owners of rental properties, but in practice the owners rarely bear the burden: when taxes go up, landlords raise the rents to make up the difference. This means that Providence renters now have a 75 percent higher tax rate than homeowners. Since renters tend to be in lower socio-economic brackets, this means that taxes are falling very heavily on the poor; a recent study released by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found Rhode Island’s tax system to be among ten states with the highest taxes on the poor. According to the Institute, in 2012, the lowest 20 percent of income earners paid about 35 percent more than the top one percent in property taxes. The property taxes are further inflated to make up for the fact that tax-exempt universities and hospitals own 40 percent of the potentially taxable real estate value in Providence.

The 75 percent tax differential between renters and homeowners may sound familiar: the Providence Apartment Association has pasted the statistic on signs all over the city (excluding Blackstone, where most residents own their houses). The Assocation, headed by Keith Fernandes, began in 2010 when the initial tax levy was passed. Since then, the organization has been at the forefront of the movement against the tenant tax. In an interview, Fernandes explained that the city government has justified the high tax differential by arguing that the value of a multi-family house is less than the value of a single-family house. “There’s no way that the differential in values is 75 percent,” Fernandes says. “Why

should residents of two houses on the same block that look exactly the same be paying wildly different amounts in taxes?”

Fernandes answers his own question: the city, he suggests, doesn’t care about its renters as much as it does about homeowners because “renters don’t vote in Providence.” This statement is clearly an exaggeration, but there’s truth in it too: almost 65 percent of renters in Providence are non-white Hispanics and Hispanic voting participation nationally has hovered around only 45 percent in the past decade. Additionally, a large segment of the renting population in Providence is students, who are also less likely to vote in local and state elections.

The Providence Apartment Association’s campaign has had some measure of success. The organization worked with other groups to pass an ordinance that will reduce, starting next year, the real estate tax rate on non-owner-occupied residential buildings from 175% of the owner-occupied rate to 160% of the owner-occupied rate. Mayor Angel Taveras previously vetoed the ordinance in July, calling the bill “irresponsible and ill-conceived,” citing estimates that the ordinance could cost the city about $6.6 million in revenue next year, money which would most likely be compensated for by raising taxes on homeowners. Despite the Mayor’s forceful objection, the city council overrode Taveras’s veto by a supermajority with 10 votes out of a possible 15.

While Fernandes emphasizes property taxes as a key factor in determining rental costs, the advocates working on this issue instead see these taxes as just one piece of the puzzle.

Nicole Lagace, for example, suspects that many landlords wouldn’t decrease rents in the event of a property tax decrease, but would instead keep the extra revenue for themselves. In looking at other factors contributing to high rental costs, John Marcantonio, executive director of the Rhode Island Builder’s Association, believes that the most important factor in the high rental costs is the lack of affordable housing stock in Providence. Marcantonio explains that the housing stock in

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Rhode Island is made up of predominantly old, dilapidated, and inefficient buildings that require a lot of money to make livable, as well as a significant stock of foreclosed homes that have yet to be refurbished. According to Marcantonio, Rhode Island’s housing stock is the third oldest in the country.

A complex and inefficient system of permits and approvals hinders builders in Rhode Island from replacing this deteriorating housing stock and diminishes profitability.

Many towns impose zoning restrictions, code requirements and development conditions that curb the development of rental housing and sometimes prohibit lower-cost housing altogether. These “exclusionary zoning” restrictions include minimum lot-size requirements, floor area ratios, land useintensity ratios, and limits on units per acre. Navigating all of these restrictions can take months if not years. Jim Ryczek, executive director of the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless explains, “Cities and towns can either choose to be very helpful when housing projects come up for proposal or they can choose to be unhelpful, using the mechanisms of permits and zoning to halt progress.” The waiting time for building in Rhode Island shrinks already-lean profit margins as interest payments on the land purchase continue. High-end projects are the only ones that yield enough profit to compensate for the waiting time, which makes for very few affordable housing developments. Since the recession, no more than 600 units have been built in Rhode Island per year, as compared with approximately 2000 in the years before the recession.

Often, these restrictions result in shutting out low and moderate-income families, as well as post-college students from a Rhode Island’s communities. Marcantonio believes that some communities in the state intentionally use these restrictions to prevent families from settling down. “Many people in this state see children as a liability,” Marcantonio explains. “The cost to educate children is really high. People think that if they can prevent new housing from built, they can lower the amount they have to pay in taxes for educa-

SEPTEMBER 19 2014

tion.” This suggests that if the state government were able to minimize its dependence on property tax dollars to support public education, communities might be more inclined to allow families to move in. “We have to agree as a community that children, young families, and college students are an asset, and create a lower cost structure to support those populations,” says Marcantonio.

A third proposed solution comes in the form of reevaluating the states’ attitudes towards density. Local governments often resist building more housing units in an effort to minimize density. Outside of urban centers, these efforts seek to minimize sprawl and suburbanization. Lou Raymond, executive director of the South County Habitat for Humanity says that in South County, limited housing stock leads to inflated rental costs, making the area, which consists of towns like Kingston, Narragansett, Charlestown and others, unaffordable for most people in the working and lower class. “People have philosophies about how they want to protect areas and have open spaces,” says Raymond. “I think people need to re-look at how we use land and allow some things that we haven’t done in a while.”

Marcantonio likewise emphasizes that conservationist inclinations need to be put on hold in order to provide living space for people in need. “Density in its natural form means affordability,” Marcantonio says. “We could add a lot more people to our cities if we changed our density regulations.”

Raymond and Marcantonio feel strongly that increased density is the key to creating affordable housing stock in the state, but the concept is fuzzy. Does increased density mean building new affordable housing units on empty lots or in foreclosed properties that have been boarded up for years? Does it mean building additional floors and accessory units on already existing buildings? Or does it mean squeezing additional families into already packed affordable housing developments? In many cases, the question of density becomes a negotiation between quantity and quality of life.

A final consideration when looking at the affordability of rental properties in Providence is utility costs. The cities’ old housing stock is filled with non-insulated lead and pestinfested buildings that new renters are responsible for fixing.

Nicole Lagace insists that creating affordable housing could be as simple as “weatherizing buildings, replacing windows, and making utilities cheaper.” Lagace believes that it is the owners’ responsibility to fix these homes but that owners often don’t have the resources to do so. Organizations like the Rhode Island Alliance for Healthy Homes, a partnership of local agencies (including Green and Healthy Homes Initiative Rhode Island, Rhode Island Housing, Inc among others) is stepping in to make Rhode Island’s housing stock more energy-efficient and environmentally safe. This organization is also involved in refurbishing foreclosed homes into livable, affordable housing. However, limited funding means that the organization can’t serve everyone in need.

The problems facing Rhode Island are extreme but not unique: local governments have faced criticism for housing policy everywhere. Even in cities where governments have managed to provide large-scale public housing, countless challenges remain: violence and poor living conditions are a staple of many subsidized developments. Yet relying on the private sector to provide affordable housing presents its own problems: the ups and downs of the market and the whims of property owners are too unreliable to put a stable roof over everyone’s head.

SOPHIE KASAKOVE B’17 has mediocre weatherproofing.

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GAYBORS ON FIRE Queer sights, sounds, and spaces in the Creative Capital

by Cherise Morris illustration by Elizabeth Goodspeed On the morning of August 1, 2013, dozens of same-sex couples said “I do” across the state of Rhode Island. Since becoming the tenth state to legalize same-sex marriage, RI has been inducted into a cadre of progressive and “tolerant” states in a nation in which the fundamental right to openly love and be loved is still contested. In the past decade, Rhode Islanders have elected several openly gay politicians, including incumbent 1st District Representative and former Providence Mayor David Cicilline. Openly gay former Providence mayoral candidate Brett Smiley made headlines this summer after releasing a campaign advertisement that featured an adorable reenactment of his clever proposal to his husband via PowerPoint presentation. Despite being the last state in New England to repeal anti-sodomy laws in 1998, and the last state in New England to legalize same-sex marriage, Rhode Island has been portrayed as a symbol of acceptance in the past year.

According to Census Bureau data, the Ocean State had an overall Gay Index rating of 175 in 2000. The Gay Index is a metric that compares the proportion of self-reporting same-sex couples among the total number of households in a given metropolitan area to that of the US average. Despite the inherent problem of reducing identities to data, the Gay Index results support recent portrayals of Rhode Island; the number of respondents in Providence who reported being in a same-sex relationship was 75 percent higher than the national average. Separate indices for queer males and queer females were recorded at 190 and 159—90 percent and 59 percent higher than national averages, respectively. Today Rhode Island is home to the 14th most same-sex couples in the country: nine per 1,000 households. Providence itself has the highest LGBTQ concentration of any city in Rhode Island and one of the highest percentages of same-sex couples among comparably sized cities.

Amin Ghaziani, professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, examines the social history of gay enclaves in his new book, There Goes the Gayborhood? Ghaziani describes a gradual transformation occurring on multiple registers: as queer populations move out of historically gay areas in major American cities, heterosexual populations move into these neighborhoods. He attributes the LGBTQ community’s recent residential and commercial dispersion to be the result of this demographic change as gayness and gay culture have become more present in the mainstream.

Providence, despite its statistically significant gay population, lacks a cluster of streets or venues that formally signify the entrance into a designated safe and queer space. This exemplifies the so-called “post-gay” metropolitan trends of the past ten years. “Post-gayness,” a term coined by British author Paul Burston in 1994, refers to the dispersion of queer bodies and culture despite the continued cultural dominance of heterosexuality with respect to institutional recognition, popular culture, and prevailing societal norms and assumptions.

Walking through Providence, you won’t see pride flags plastered outside of all businesses on any one stretch of pavement or even a significant cadre of same-sex couples walking hand-in-hand down any one specific avenue. While some areas of the city are known for having a visible LGBTQ presence, like College Hill and Fox Point, there is no one specific gayborhood in Providence akin to that of San Francisco’s Castro or New York’s Greenwich Village.

Establishments and sub-communities in Providence—re-

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cently ranked 12th on The Advocate’s list of America’s gayest cities—that cater specifically to the interest of queer community building exist in dispersed networks that traverse residential boundaries from the East Side to Federal Hill. Many places throughout Providence continue to provide spaces where queer crowds congregate and cultivate community. The DownCity area has the heaviest concentration of LGTBQspecific venues, predominantly clubs, including popular spots like the 66-year-old MiraBar, EGO, Dark Lady, and its sister bar Alleycat—which this past April hosted a fundraiser for Brett Smiley. Lola’s Bar and Cantina, open for less than two years, has become a magnet for queer and lesbian locals. The cantina hosts a weekly queer womyn’s bash, or “kiki,” every Sunday, as well as several other parties, concerts, and even

the occasional fashion show. Sofrito Fridays at Lot 401 are monthly dance parties that welcome a predominantly gay Latino population as well as a sizeable segment of RI’s lesbian Latina community. QuEER Book CLuB meets on the third Sunday of every month at the quaint and independent bookstore Books on Square. The scattered placement of these spots suggests greater access to and visibility of queer communities and culture.

In recent years, however, several LGBTQ establishments have closed their doors. Well-known party production group and Providence’s longest running weekly lesbian night Girl Spot, which attracted a large queer Latina crowd, and one of the only exclusively women’s bars in town, Deville’s Cafe, have both closed in the past two years. Deville’s is reportedly relocating from its South Water Street property, though its next location is unknown. Luna’s Lady Night, a seasonal weekly concert series (with an occasional pre-show round of speed dating) that showcases queer female artists at the Roots Art and Cultural Center, is also currently on hiatus.

Contextualized in Ghaziani’s observations—old gayborhoods are decentralizing in large cities as new gayborhoods are cropping up across mid-sized cities—Providence is an anomaly with its dispersed network of LGBTQ spots, sights, and sounds. Peruse the Providence section of any gay city website or LGBTQ travel guide and many of the restaurants, arts and culture events, and nightlife suggestions are spaces that attract a mix of orientations, not only those targeting exclusively queer populations. Providence is decentralizing LGBTQ-friendly spaces like many larger cities.

These trends can be seen as urban manifestations of larger issues concerning the changing definitions of where mainstream culture and gay culture overlap. Residential inclusion and acceptance of queer communities and spaces is positive; but does forgetting the importance of constructed safe spaces and insular community building in favor of tolerance risk complacency and inattention in pressing gay rights issues? Are we at a crossroads in a journey towards a “post-gay” Providence?

A post-gay Providence, in the same vein as a post-racial or colorblind Providence, will likely never exist. Historically gay areas are as fluid and transmutable as other neighborhoods and the cities that encompass them. This fluidity of composition should not be taken as a signifier of a distant world where queerness—and by extension queer political struggles—will become indistinguishable because of prevailing “tolerance.” Hate crimes targeting queer people still occur throughout Providence (nine were reported last year); derogatory comments are still hurled from speeding car windows at queer couples late at night; dozens of LGBTQ youths find themselves homeless every day. As gayborhoods come, go, and change, the importance of exclusively queer neighborhoods in the preservation of queer histories, the development of queer identities and communities, and the present-day gay rights and marriage equality campaigns is undeniable and should not be forgotten in public memory. Queer social spheres in Providence, as diffuse as they are, have carved out spots to exist within and without spatial limitations, forming lasting identities and a strong sense of community.

CHERISE MORRIS B’16 wants to say “Hi gaybor!”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ROAD RASH IN VIVID COLOR Holding your skateboard by the truck, known colloquially as “the mall grab,” might seem inconsequential to the layman, but it can serve as a salient cue of inauthenticity to those in the know. The popular narrative surrounding the mall grab: people who carry their board by the trucks, instead of by the wood of the tail, shop at corporate mall-chain skate shops like Zumiez and Pac-Sun. It’s unclear why this way of holding a skateboard is associated with these retailers. Though perhaps arbitrary, “the mall grab [is] the ever-present distinguisher between most real skateboarders and fake skateboarders,” according to a 2009 article entitled “The Mall Grab” on (ironically enough) the official X Games website. How does such a seemingly small gesture indicate so much to skateboarders and so little to everyone else?

Though its status as a multibillion-dollar industry might suggest that skateboarding has “sold-out” since its fledgling days as a fringe culture from the 1970s through the 1990s, many skateboarders still feel that there is a core of their culture that refuses to be subsumed by corporate America.

Whether or not this is true is hard to say. What does it mean for skateboarding to be subsumed by corporate America?

Does a kickflip not remain a kickflip when flicked with a Nike SB rather than a Lakai high top, which would garner fewer glares at the skate spot?

Whatever the case, there is the widespread fear among skateboarders, as popular skateboard blog Jenkemmag puts it, that “corporations only value skate-companies and skateboarders in relation to how much capital they can generate for a group of shareholders, instead of valuing them as important parts of our culture.” From this fear grows a system of cultural cues—small details—that signify how aware one is of the way their consumer decisions affect skateboard culture.

As if it were the black sheep of King Midas’ family, wherever the corporate hand seems to touch the skateboard industry, the industry turns a sickly green hue. The lesson of the mall grab is that even arbitrary details in the practice and aesthetic of skateboarding become replete with significance and become indicative of a corporate or non-corporate stance.

+++ Much in the way that Bob Dylan’s electric conversion sparked vitriolic reaction among his fans, who lamented his loss of purity, so did the transition from the Sony VX1000 camera, recording skate videos in standard definition, to various high definition cameras, have a hugely polarizing effect on the skateboard community (though certainly not on such a national scale). The subtext of the debate resonates with the typical fringe-versus-corporate tension central to the “the mall grab” phenomenon and common to any subculture whose popularity and potential profitability have garnered the attention and funding of corporate sponsors. Standard definition—the dirty skate-rat David. High definition—the corpo fat-cat Goliath.

The SD vs HD debate came to the fore in 2009 when Nike SB came out with Debacle—the world’s first full-length HD skateboard film. That it was filmed with a high-definition camera was hugely significant; almost every full-length professional skateboard video for the fourteen years preceding Debacle was shot not only in standarddefinition, but with the same standard definition camera: the Sony VX1000, which came out in 1995. “The VX is just, like, made for skateboarding…” said Beagle— a well-respected videographer for Baker Skateboards—in a recent mini-documentary featured on the RIDE channel. Holding the one-of-a-kind green and yellow VX1000 that has become iconic in his lap, he continues: “The handle on top keeps it all steady. It’s got the best fisheye. I don’t really see any other cameras better than that.”

Beagle is famous for the low-budget, rough-aroundthe-edges skateboard culture he captures in his videos for Baker and its affiliated brands. He splices clips of casual drug deals, debauched party scenes, and sometimes his dog performing skateboard stunts in between shots of impressive skateboard maneuvers. In the seminal 2005 video “Baker 3,” he even films himself running a mile down the street as he’s chased by a man and two cars trying to steal his camera. What’s compelling is that it’s all real, candid, and often unabashedly illegal.

SEPTEMBER 19 2014

by Eli Pitegoff illustration by Eli Neuman-Hammond

The high-definition debate in skateboard culture

He offers the viewer a lens into skateboarding, but more than that, an honest view into the debauched and entertaining hijinks of skateboard’s sweat-stained elite. Woven into the debauched clips of Baker skate videos are the formal characteristics specific to the VX1000—formal characteristics that span the entire industry from 1995 to the present.

The uniformity of filming equipment employed in the production of skate videos since 1995 has rendered certain formal consistencies unique to the Sony VX1000’s footage an industry standard rather than a mere stylistic detail. Over the years, the camera’s grainy composition and golden/blue color distortions have become aesthetic features inextricably linked to the essence of the skateboard cultures these films portray.

Colin Read, the videographer of the skate video instant classic “Tengu: God of Mischief,” points out in a recent VICE interview that the VX1000 “came at a time when people were perfecting the art of skate videos. Because of that, it just has a history in skateboarding for people of my generation.”

It should come as no surprise then, that the hyper-crisp images and vivid coloring of Nike’s Debacle composed a particularly jarring aesthetic for the skate world. The 1080p resolution of the HD camera looked like the clean-shaven, straight-laced brother of the low-life VX1000’s 480p resolution. But beyond a violation of skate videos’ general propensity for grunge, Debacle made a mockery of the rougharound-the-edges conventions that filmmakers like Beagle have championed.

Debacle is a strikingly cinematic Skate Film. Even outside of the use of higher resolution cameras, it is a notable film for its self-reflexive commentary on the skate video genre.

The film introduces each skateboarder with a scene portraying a “debacle”. Professional skateboarder Daryl Angel’s part, for instance, begins with a man jumping in front of his board after he grinds a bench. Angel jumps off his board and gets into the supposed stranger’s face. The stranger yells things like “I told you to stop skating!” and “Get off my damn property!” until Angel throws his skateboard through the nearest window, shattering the glass before he runs away. At first, these spectacles seem to be in keeping with the skate video motifs that Baker skateboards mastered and so many others emulated—destruction and illicit debauchery. But upon further consideration, the sheer gall of these skaters being followed around by a posse of Nike’s cameramen breaking windows, wrecking cars, being generally short-fused and insufferable to the people around them begins to seem totally unlikely.

If it seems unthinkable that a major corporation would release footage of their sponsored athletes acting in flagrant violation of the law, it’s because it is. At the end of the 20-minute film, a disclaimer discretely flashes across the screen for three seconds, which reads: “No actual cars, glass, people, business owners, concrete benches, windows or bus shelters were hurt during the filming of Debacle. All the stunts were performed by professionals. Do not try this at home or any-

one else’s home. Nike SB wholeheartedly endorses skateboarding, but always skate within your abilities and with respect.”

The video’s artificial hijinks were received poorly, as one might expect. The Youtube comments near the release of the film spewed negativity, in true Youtube comment form, but the exact nature of the negativity is telling. User “Frenchieakafrenchie” echoed the criticism of a majority of the other commenters, in relatively inoffensive terms: “The skating's great, but the whole music and extra 'badass' scenes are literally what a fatcat nike exec who has never skated in his life probably thinks skaters are still like.” The video comes off as the cinematic adaptation of an authentic Baker 3 skate video (with really good stuntmen), grounded in the market research of an expensive consulting firm. If we are to take the Youtube comments as a general litmus of the film’s reception within the world of skateboard fandom, then it seems that HD’s grand introduction into the skate world is tethered to and thus tainted by an all-too transparent corporate attempt at authenticity. Not only did Nike’s HD inauguration change the formal aesthetic of the skate video, but it also offered up a hollowed-out semblance of the rich, if sometimes deplorable, skate culture captured through the lens of Beagle’s VX1000.

+++ With these debacles in mind, it’s no surprise why there would be resistance to the adoption of the HD aesthetic into skateboarding culture. But in 1995, there was no nostalgia attached to the Sony VX1000’s idiosyncrasies. It was the superior technology for skateboard filming in spite of its departures from exact visual representation—its warm blue and gold hues. The skate video’s fidelity to the standard definition aesthetic will forever demarcate an era of skateboarding.

Perhaps the incorporation of HD will one day come to receive the same sort of nostalgic attachment that the VX1000 did.

But the VX1000 will remain the visual attire of Beagle’s masterful sleaze. That HD videos strike a visual dissonance with the VX1000 is exactly why we can conceive of a coming shift in skateboarding culture; as is true with many new technologies, the acceptance of HD seems inevitable at this point. But it’s never easy saying goodbye.

ELI PITEGOFF B’15 is real, candid, and unabashedly illegal.

ARTS

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by Stephanie Hayes illustration by Casey Friedman “Imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine.

And when the entire world has adopted devices with sleek, silent touch interfaces, where will we turn for the sound of fingers striking QWERTY keypads?”

- Brendan Chilcutt, creator and curator of the Museum of Endangered Sounds In 2012, Brendan Chilcutt launched the Museum of Endangered Sounds, a virtual museum dedicated to preserving the bleeps and beeps of old technologies. The no-frills website currently houses 33 sounds, including the tick-tick-whir of an old rotary phone, the fuzzy sound of TV snow, and the desperate bleeps of a Tamagotchi. Scroll down and you’ll find a photo of Chilcutt, whose oversized glasses and eerily alert expression recall the subject of Chuck Close’s hyperrealistic portrait Mark, an iconic image of the nerd; it’s a visual hook into an aural universe.

“And tell me,” Chilcutt implores, in the website's lyrical blurb, “who will play my Gameboy when I’m gone?” +++ The museum’s geek mascot is just a front. The site was actually started by three friends— Marybeth Ledesma, Greg Elwood, and Phil Hadad—who met while studying at Virginia Commonwealth University. The aforementioned mug is actually that of Jeff McDonald, a creative technologist named in Forbes’ “2014 30 Under 30: Marketing and Advertising” list, who agreed to pose for the photo. “It’s more fitting if there’s a quirky curator behind the Museum,” Ledesma told The Indy, via email. “This geeky crusader taking on a completely impossible task and really dedicating himself to it. It's a fun story,” added Hadad.

The idea for the museum emerged during a car ride, the three friends all typing on their cell phones. The clacking keys of Ledesma’s Blackberry alerted the others to the silence of their own iPhone keypads. Later on, they test drove a car whose engine turned on silently, at the click of the button. Technology’s trademark sounds, they realized, were being traded in for silence. +++ It may have begun as a joke, but the site struck a serious chord with multiple generations, and the trio was inundated with suggestions of sounds to add to the site. Generation X’ers wrote in about including the soft crackle-pop of a stylus touching vinyl and the mechanical din of a dot matrix printer. Gen Y’ers offered recordings of a dial-up modem and of a Nintendo 64 cartridge being sucked into the womb of a console. Many accompanied their requests with stories, “explaining how the sound was present in their childhood, reminded them of a family member or time in their life, or was tied to a feeling of frustration or pleasure,” recounted Ledesma. Some even sent in their own recordings. The website received 4 million hits on a single day in April 2012, following some media coverage

by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and NPR, among others. Today, the page view tally stands at around 15 million.

Although Chilcutt’s passion for Pacman is fictional, the museum does tap into a societal issue that is current and very real: we’re progressing through technology faster than we can preserve the sounds of these devices. When it comes to the shrill cries of a 1994 Nokia or the monotone voice of a Furby, the loss of old audio might not seem so grave—some might even consider the silence of touchscreen tablets a welcome change after years of hammering away at laptop keys. Or perhaps the loss just hasn’t quite struck us, as the contrived nostalgia (read: “vintage” obsession) of companies like Urban Outfitters and Instagram ensures that antiquated technologies live on in a visual form. At Urban Outfitters alone, you can buy an iPhone case that looks like a cassette tape, a Nintendo Gameboy Tee, and a Fujifilm INSTAX Instant Smartphone Printer that gives digital photographs a Polaroid-esque glaze. Meanwhile, apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic offer a range of filters that mimic the faded look of Polaroid photographs or pictures from a Kodak Brownie. We’ve been quick to embrace the visual aesthetic of “vintage” technologies when offered in the form of new products, while letting the aural component of these devices slip away. It seems our society privileges convenience over nostalgia, and, since the clacking keys of a typewriter and the whirring of a Polaroid camera are related to their inefficiency as technologies, we’ve gladly replaced them with faster, less cumbersome, and quieter devices.

But technological sounds aren’t the only ones we’re losing. One-of-a-kind recordings of famous voices and early forays into musical recording are at an even greater risk of being lost forever. Due to a lack of funding for proper preservation facilities, these unique recordings are routinely left in humid and moist conditions that dramatically shorten their lifespans. And as the pace of technological progress amps ever upwards, as the machines needed to read old media move further and further into obsolescence, it becomes increasingly harder to save this audio, so closely tied to our cultural memory.

Recordings of now-lost languages are also threatened by this march ever onwards. By 2100, National Geographic estimates that over half of the 7000 languages currently spoken on earth—many of them still unrecorded—will have died out. The failure to preserve such sound means the death of not just nouns, verbs, adjectives, and a specific syntax, but of a store of knowledge about certain cultures, history, the environment, and the workings of the human brain. Admittedly, the loss of sound is abstract and hard to comprehend.

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While our society privileges the visual in snapshots and descriptions, sounds are dynamic and tough to pin down, always reliant on action. Yet, on a historical level, they add a crucial texture to their respective time periods. Imagine watching Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech without audio and trying to comprehend its full force. +++ “Hear my voice: Alexander Graham Bell.” In 2013, we heard Bell for the first time.

The recording is fuzzy and static-filled, but the words are spoken with clarity and pride. Recorded on wax-and-cardboard disc in 1885, the 10-second snippet is one of the earliest sound experiments in recorded history and the only known recording of the man who invented the very device that has enabled our disembodied voices to float across the world for centuries: the telephone.

Bell’s voice was resurrected by Image Reconstruct Erase Noise Etcetera—or, more affectionately, IRENE—a new scanning technology developed by physicist Carl Haber of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. By scanning the surface of 2D media and playing audio from the resulting image, IRENE reconstructs sound from media without making contact. This touch-free process means sound can be extracted from rare, old, or fragile records that would be morphed or even shattered by the touch of a stylus. IRENE has even been used to digitally reassemble audio contained within broken discs, such as an orchestral recording from the 1940s, which had shattered into six shellacked pieces. Since its completion in 2012, IRENE has saved numerous sounds, including the first known recording of the human voice (a Frenchman crooning “Au Clair de la Lune,” in 1860), an eerie recording of the earliest talking doll singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” and a 1912 recording of the last surviving member of the now gone Yahi tribe of Northern California, recounting the tale of “Wood Duck."

IRENE won Haber a MacArthur Fellowship and, according to The Boston Globe, was heralded as a “game-changer” by Tom Rieger of the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. But it isn’t enough. The technology cost around $200,000 to develop, and, as a result, is used selectively and sparingly. As Rieger told The Indy in an email, IRENE is a “last resort technology, available when nothing else can work and when the recording is considered important enough to justify the cost.” When asked what constitutes a valuable recording, Rieger explained that the Library of Congress “[does] not make the judgment call on what is important.” He added: “As far as who decides what is important, some things are obvious, other materials that get to go on IRENE are for their research potential in working with new formats. Often it is the case of who has funding available.”

While some groups fund the use of IRENE for personal or research purposes, funding for wider sound preservation projects is not forthcoming. A 2012 report by the Library of Congress, entitled “The National Preservation Plan,” explains that this is largely due to the legal barriers governing public access to recordings, which leave governments little incentive to invest in saving them. “Preserved sound can only benefit the public if it is made available for listening,” the paper acknowledges. Yet, “few historical recordings can be made available online legally because of idiosyncrasies in the US copyright law.”

Recordings produced before February 15, 1972, are not under Federal copyright protection and are instead subject to “a complex network of disparate state laws.” Identifying and locating the owner of such “orphan works,” the report explains, is often difficult. The plan proposes a few avenues for improving public access, but acknowledges that, “Some recommendations can be achieved in the near future. Long-term initiatives may take a generation.” +++ The Library of Congress’s Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation is the size of approximately 34 football fields and contains 120 linear miles of shelving—many of which are in need of ongoing preservation. Each year the library digitally preserves about 15,000 recordings and acquires between 50,000 and 100,000 more, Gene DeAnna of the LOC told NPR in May of 2014. Those untended records have an estimated 15 to 20 years before degradation or the challenges of acquiring the necessary equipment to read these devices make preservation too difficult or expensive, according to a bleak 2012 report by the LOC entitled “National Recording Preservation Plan.” As we continue to move through technological devices at ever-increasing speeds, the sound preservation pile will grow in turn. Sound preservation is a race against time, and we’re stuck on a backwards-moving treadmill.

The fragility of today’s data storing devices only adds to the struggle. Right now, we can copy a file with the click of a button and store entire libraries of music in a device the size of a thumbnail. The vast capacity of these devices and the ease of their use belie their weakness. In a 1996 essay entitled “Preservation in the Digital Age,” Paul Conway, the Head of the Preservation Department of the Yale University Library, shows that there is a direct relationship between the recency of a medium and its fragility. Papyrus fragments from 4500 years ago, although fragile, are still legible, he explains. Yet, versions of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, published in 1851, are now deteriorating and hard to read, thanks to the wood pulp and acidic compounds added to paper of the time to keep up with industry demand. Digital recordings fare far worse, as confirmed by a 2011 paper

by Barry Lunt entitled “How Long is Long-Term Data Storage?” Magnetic tape, as used in cassette VHS videocassettes, has a life expectancy of between 10 and 50 years, while recordable CDs and DVDs are expected to survive between one and 25 years. We can hold one terabyte of data in a USB drive (that’s 57,000 copies of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

to Heaven”), but its life expectancy is shorter than that of a $100 banknote.

This glaring oversight, while shocking, is not without a history. A New York Times article from 1990, entitled “Lost on Earth: Wealth of Data Found in Space,” details NASA’s failure to catalogue and preserve digital records of 30 years of space missions. According to the article, NASA’s system (or lack thereof ) was so poor that “extracting useful information [would] require years of ingenious detective work.” Many of their tapes were unlabeled, others were damaged by heat and water, and others still were in good condition but could only be read by machinery “so outdated that little of the necessary hardware remain[ed].” The article’s accompanying photograph showed a woman sitting beside shelf after shelf of steel-canistered computer tapes, holding a pencil and, presumably, cataloguing them one by one. NASA had managed to send astronauts safely to the moon and back, but had neglected to develop a viable system for preserving the records of what they found there. NASA’s linear narrative of progress—“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”—was threatened by their failure to document the past. +++ The default iPhone text tone, the melodious start-up of a Macbook, and the even, instructive voice of Siri—we can already predict the sounds that will be lost next. And if the struggles of NASA and the Library of Congress can teach us anything, it’s that we shouldn’t simply focus on preserving the past, but on preserving the present. The lightning pace of technological change means that today’s sounds are, essentially, already endangered. As technology cannibalistically devours itself with the release of each new device or model, we’re facing loss under the guise of progress.

This realization demands a selfish question: if the sounds of our society are stored in the least durable formats and the weakest media yet, what memory will be left of our generation? If history is to rhyme with itself, the iconic voices, languages, and technological noises of our time may only survive as graphics on trendy consumer items: a T-shirt featuring a screen-printed image of an SLR camera or a phone case made to resemble a “vintage” iPhone 5. Preserved in this form, sounds, objects, and voices of varying significance would come to assume equal value.

In the spirit of Chilcutt: imagine a world where iCloud and Spotify and Dropbox have been superseded and few records of our society survive. Which noises and memories will be preserved and which will be forgotten? Where will our grandchildren’s grandchildren go to gain a true sense of our time and the sounds that defined it? And where, I beg of you, will they go for a Barack Obama rendition of Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” pieced together from snippets of the President’s formal speeches?

STEPHANIE HAYES B’15 will be preserved.

SEPTEMBER 19 2014

FEATURES

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A CONVERSATION WITH WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

by Greg Nissan illustration by Caroline Brewer

Bill Deresiewicz can see your criticism from across the auditorium. What else would you expect from someone who leveled a pubic critique at some of America’s most lauded institutions in his New Republic essay, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League,” excerpted from Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. Deresiewicz gave a lecture at Brown this Monday, in which he spent most of the question-andanswer period listening to students defend their academic choices or offer blind agreements with his premise. The irony wasn’t lost on him; he frequently pointed out how many of these defenses proved exactly his point – that we’re led to sever ideas like “practical skills” from things like “understanding who you are” to the disservice of both. Deresiewicz also elaborated elements of his argument missing in his New Republic articled – his call for “100 Berkeleys,” or a resurgence in public universities, his disdain for online education, and his views on the literary canon. I spoke with Deresiewicz in the lobby of the Providence Biltmore this Tuesday before he returned to New York.

The College Hill Independent: I was really interested in the idea you started your talk with, the contrast between the metaphor of “finding yourself ” and “building yourself.”

Can you elaborate on your emphasis on the latter?

Bill Deresiewicz: Aside from the fact that I think “finding yourself ” has become this horrible cliché, I don’t think that the process involves this desperate search. I think the metaphor helps change the way you approach it. It’s not like you don’t have this preexisting self—you go into the woods and it pops up. Building yourself happens in the course of experience, in the course of taking classes, in the course of living. The truth is that in some ways the truth lies somewhere in between the two metaphors. You do discover within yourself capacities, interests, and desires you may not have known you had, but at the same time, they also develop, and they develop in relation to experience.

Building also helps get away from this idea that there’s this authentic self. I think the notion of authenticity is problematic. The “self-building” suggests that the self expands.

In the book I use the phrase from John Keats’s letters where he talks about the veil of soul-making: you’re making something. The veil of soul making is the world.

The Indy: How did your own experiences in college and as a teacher inform your perspective? I was interested in what you said about teachers engineering their own obsolescence.

Did you find that in your own education? And how do you try to instill that in your classroom?

BD: It’s a mysterious process. With teaching, you think, how do I awaken, how do I provoke. I don’t think the right way is to go about it directly. As a teacher, it’s not like I had “Ten Steps To Get To My Own Obsolescence.” We all have a variety of marvelous capacities within ourselves.

That comes with being human. It’s a matter of encouraging them to come out of hiding. Unfortunately, one of the main problems with teaching today is that it imagines the mind or the person in a very limited way. Teaching to the test presupposes a very crude understanding of what happens. Even the notion of intelligence; there’s an idea that’s becoming more popular in psychology, that intelligence is not a fixed thing. I’ve never been a systematic teacher in terms of having studied the question of education. In some half-conscious way of my own I emulated the teachers that were most valuable to me. You ask questions that you don’t know the answer to, that makes things difficult for

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students and they respond with those capacities that they didn’t know they had. It comes out. In the most obvious sense, if you were just teaching a skill, say guitar, it’d be very clear what that meant, engineering your own obsolescence, but in the broader sense it’s about learning to learn. Teachers can be useful for your entire life, maybe in different areas. I’m learning new things. Every time I read a writer who I admire, I’m probably learning from them, probably more consciously than unconsciously.

The Indy: I was also struck by your attempt to renegotiate the idea that there’s practical education and then the things you do to explore your own mind. A lot of the responses to your talk seemed to be personal defenses against or total affirmations of your ideas. They either began with, “Well, I study this, so how can you say…” or “I just wanted to say I totally agree with you.” In some ways the responses enacted your ideas about the way these students blindly follow their tenets of their education. In the general response you’ve gotten, in rference to practicality—what people determine to be practical skills—how many of the responses are simply defenses and how many engage with or pick apart your ideas?

BD: Well, look, obviously I’m biased. I do feel there’s an enormous amount of defensiveness and a depressing shortage of real engagement with what I’m saying. Nobody likes to be criticized, including me. I know this is a cliché, but it’s actually true. Intelligent criticism is useful. It hurts, and my first impulse is probably to reject and my second is to say, “Okay, maybe I can learn from that.” Good points that I couldn’t respond to are things I feel I need to think through. I’ve been saddened, both by public responses from students and adults. The two pieces that were published in the Brown Daily Herald today, they were particularly bad examples of a hostile response. I hear from a lot of people privately. They tend to be more positive, but also more thoughtful, including some of the critical ones.

The Indy: A lot of criticisms I’ve seen of my own generation is that we’re the most coddled, the most-praised from day one, which creates this praise-seek mechanism. You also said, “You should train for your career and not your first job.” Do you see a relationship between this praise-seeking and the logic of having to constantly go for that next “practical” step?

BD: I think there’s a lot of legitimate fear about the future.

Unfortunately, nobody says the obvious thing, which is that it really matters where you come from and where you went to college. There are two Americas in college, like there are anywhere else. That’s what kills me, especially at schools like Brown: you kind of already have it made. Another factor is, it’s a number of different things. The Pavlovian conditioning of needing the next pellet of food. You can think of it in two ways. I want to make a lot of money, so that’s what I’m going to do. Or, I don’t know what I’m going to do, so I’m just going to try and make a lot of money. Or, I’m interested in this, and I’m going to make it work somehow. As someone recently said, there’s a different between success and fulfillment.

The Indy: You make this appeal to the humanities, subverting the idea that this kind of knowledge isn’t practical. But there’s certainly a strain of humanities education that remains very goal-oriented: once you learn these specific techniques you can get to the level where you can understand what Keats, or whoever, is saying. As a scholar, even in humanities, have you seen this goal-oriented learning that doesn’t seem to advocate building yourself, rather falling in line with traditional forms of analysis?

BD: There’s a lot of bad humanities teachers and a lot of bad humanities teaching. It’s important to teach techniques of reading or methods of analysis, but also the notion that what’s valuable about artistic text is that they don’t have a solution in the way an equation does. Any work of art that’s worthwhile is worth coming back to. I can speak from personal experience, because the meaning changes when you come back to look at a play when you’re forty, and you find it’s a different play than when you were eighteen. The complexity of a real work of art creates that endless fecundity.

The Indy: Certain people have a more immediate propensity for the humanities than others. Are there any methods in your teaching for getting people who are not necessarily literary-minded to engage with literature?

BD: At Yale, there are no required courses. At Columbia I taught the great books course for two years. The second year, there were a lot of finicky students, some from the engineering department. I don’t think it’s useful to try and browbeat them. I think the best thing you can do is do your best to teach the work in a way that tries to undercut all that cultural capital, upper class crap, the mysterious decoding crap, and invite people to respond. Even if the responses are not smart at first, or resistant, there’s an enormous power in general in life in listening to people rather than lecturing them. One of the most valuable things in listening to people rather than lecturing them is when you listen to them, they start to hear themselves talk. Not to make them foolish, and it doesn’t always work. Some of those people ended up just as resistant, some of them had an inkling that they might want to explore further. They were freshmen, so they had a lot of time left.

The Indy: Are there any responses you’ve gotten, especially to your essay in The New Republic, that were really surprising, or things you actually hadn’t considered?

BD: I’ve gotten as many responses within a few weeks.

There’s been a much more diverse range. I think it provided some people who didn’t go to Ivy League schools with a certain amount of validation. There are certainly management people who don’t think much of Ivy League people because of the attitudes they bring and the difficulty they have working in a team or in a subordinate position. Parents are also looking for guidance and they’re looking for validation. I don’t think I’m going to take anyone from zero to 100, but maybe 45 to 55. I’m helping them get across the line. There are parents who’ve written to me for advice and I’m like, I don’t know you, I can’t give advice, but here are some general things. But now I’m getting parents who are coming to me with really specific problems asking for advice.

There was this grandpa from Texas and hew as very upset his granddaughter was going so far away to college, to Loyola of Chicago. I said, I think you’ve got to let her go explore but also she’s going to college 1,000 miles from home, that’s a really good problem to have. There are worse things. It actually helped, which surprised me. He wrote back and was appreciative. I thought he’d be very angry with me.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SEPTEMBER 19 2014

INTERVIEWS

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BY LIL' MEATSMACK

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EPHEMERA

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE

The sounds of the digital archive by Patrick McMenamin illustration by Ming Zhen How can a body connect with the Internet? Think of how each sense would conceive of the Internet. It’s harder than you would initially imagine. The Internet inevitably gets figured in terms of smoothness, integration, unfettered connectivity.

Think of graphic representations of floating green text webs or a boundlessly unmediated everything-store. Sense requires something to hold onto, a fault line in the systems of information. For the Internet, the only conceivable fault line lies precisely in its impenetrability, in the senselessness it engenders. So then, what would that senselessness sound like?

In his memoir A Year with Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno identifies the importance of error in a medium’s sensibility. He points to the fetishization of “CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of the 8-bit” to conclude that “whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.” For Eno—an integral figure in the majority of modern music’s technologically aided evolution—modern art is then “the sound of failure,” of “a medium pushing its limits and breaking apart.” Yet the Internet, in presenting the entire history of recorded sound atemporally and seamlessly, in what many have termed the “digital archive,” seems to present us with a medium whose chief characteristic is its unbreakability.

Can the Internet then have a legitimate claim to sound like everything?

The past few years of music to ride Internet hype waves would seem to indicate so. Looking back at the past decade, one can see the entirety of recorded music systematically re-appropriated—from the ‘60s garage rock and girl groups in hip early-2000s New York City bands to the commercial cheese of ‘90s R&B in contemporary electronic music—and rolled out anew. This phenomenon has widely been chalked up to the unmediated and limitless access the Internet provides to the digital archive. The novelist Jonathon Lethem, in his essay “The Ecstacy of Influence,” even goes so far as to say that the existence of such an archive creates a genreless present, where any form can be assumed or incorporated by artists. For him, the Internet facilitates a utopian historical project set out by the English metaphysical poet John Donne, that—through the freedom and formlessness of art—all mankind will become “one author, and [be] of one volume.” This intuitively makes sense: if all the artistic genres and forms are laid out before us atemporally, any may seem just as interesting as the next.

Yet, in looking at the succession of popular genres reappropriated by Internet-enabled young artists, the parade of nostalgia progresses in a startlingly historical manner. As the historical mining of the digital archive came closer and closer to the present era, a question began to emerge: has the digital archive closed the loop of artistic input? If so, the Internet’s claims to perfect seamlessness would seem justified and a utopian art achieved. But could we live with the silence? +++

SEPTEMBER 19 2014

By the end of the first millennial decade, the historical re-appropriation of sounds from the digital archive ran into the childhoods of those who grew up alongside the Internet’s popular adoption. The music that resulted—largely within the world of experimental electronic music—became especially self-conscious of the assumptions behind the appropriation of past sounds. This proved most true in vaporwave (sometimes also styled as “vapourwave”), a music genre named for a publicly announced future technology that a company never makes or even has any intention of making.

The term emerged in 2010 with Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1. Made by Daniel Lopatin—who also records under the name Oneohtrix Point Never—Chuck Person’s Eccojams inaugurated a style of music that sampled, looped, and mutated ‘80s and ‘90s pop R&B hooks, corporate Muzak, and lounge jazz to create slick pastiche-style pieces.

Vaporwave artists often worked anonymously, assuming a multitude of names to match their prodigious output.

Vektroid, for example, has released 40 albums since 2005, under such names as MACプラス, 情報デスクVIRTUAL, and New Dreams Ltd. The Photoshop art that adorns these albums replicates the aesthetic of Windows ’98 and stock photographs while song titles make liberal use of brand names and Japanese or Chinese characters. Despite its incredible aesthetic specificity, vaporwave ran its course in the space of about three years, demonstrating an arc of rapid codification and just as rapid abandonment.

As a relic of an Internet music culture that churns out microgenres, this is hardly surprising. Yet, as one of the first genres to interrogate nostalgia as both lived and virtually represented, vaporwave foregrounded the underlying assumptions behind an Internet culture geared toward historicist re-working. Most vaporwave artists ground their work theoretically in the Détournement of the Situationist International or Marxist accelerationism—the idea that exacerbating the hypocrisies of capitalism will bring about a crisis or revolution.

In re-contextualizing the forgotten, ambient, and excessive noises of techno-capitalism—the advertising jingles, forgotten pop hooks, the Muzak of commercial space—through pitch, tempo, and tone processing, vaporwave simultaneously satirizes the cheesy excess of the sounds and uses them as the basis for what often becomes moving and original music. These sounds, sourced from the dawn of consumer tech’s expansion onto the Internet, remind one of the very awkward process by which the digital archive began being built in the first place.

Vaporwave thus reminds us that the Internet does have its own sounds: the aural byproducts of techno-capitalism. For most of those growing up alongside the Internet’s commercialism—these artists included—the kitschy, surreal sounds of glittering synths in Windows commercials eventually became the means by which they accessed music in any sort of “digital archive.” Any sort of claim to accessing or re-appropriating everything that ever was must then take into account the now laughably futuristic sounds of techno-capitalism’s expansion online.

The tension vaporwave mines in both ironizing and celebrating the sounds of early techno-capitalism lets it both isolate the perceived excess of that capitalism and recognize its importance in opening up the ability to remix these sounds into art in its own right. At its best, as the artist INTERNET CLUB put it in response to the glut of theoretical thinkpieces, vaporwave is not just “Marxist plunderphonics,” but entertaining, captivating, and evocative, especially for listeners who similarly grew up alongside the digital archive’s construction.

The repetitive smoothness of the synth chimes, pitch-shifted popular vocals, and occasionally glitch-based rhythms collectively create an immersive soundscape. One begins to buy into the use of these sounds as advertising or background moods in the first place. They almost defy thought in the simplicity of their appeal, as if being stuck in an elevator for long enough, you suddenly and drowsily realize, you don’t really want to leave.

And maybe this gets toward what vaporwave as a genre offers: the chance to sincerely indulge in the pleasures offered by the conditioned stimuli buried in technologically mediated childhoods from within the protective cone of political irony. This approach validates the Internet music community’s default setting, exposing the techno-capitalist underbelly that enables the historicist aesthetics so popular today. Vaporwave adds the history behind claims to genrelessness, proving that the digital archive has not resulted in a genreless landscape but has the same historical contingencies as any other artistic movement.

The online hype cycle that fed—but also was in part the object of—vaporwave seemed to have proclaimed it dead last year with the release of Oneohtrix Point Never’s R Plus Seven.

On R Plus Seven, Lopatin added dense layers of droning grit from layered echoes of organs and vocal samples turned into rhythmic breath to the trademark cleanliness of vaporwave. R Plus Seven thus achieved an incredibly powerful and shifting sense of focus that more closely replicates living movement than the hypnotic loops of Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1.

Through the sounds of the Internet, that which lies dormant behind its choices—the human—has ruptured through and given us something to hold on to.

While it seems almost especially pointless to proclaim the death of a genre that built itself around sounds meant to be dead-on-impact, the popularity arc of vaporwave validates the very thing it demonstrated: that genres—and art forms in general—base themselves in history and thus must eventually die. The digital archive has not launched us into artistic utopia and closed the loop of human expression. And for this, for teaching us once again how to die, we must thank the most insignificant, a microgenre built on the forgotten.

PATRICK MCMENAMIN B’17 floats free and aimless, in waveless waters.

TECHNOLOGY

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A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

by Connor McGuigan illustration by Pierie Korostoff

The Australian shark cull and the plight of apex predators “As long as Homo sapiens has been sapient… alpha predators have kept us acutely aware of our membership within the natural world. They’ve done it by reminding us that to them we’re just another flavor of meat.”

David Quammen, “Monster of God” In Western Australia, along a stretch of coastline about the size of New England’s, seven people have died from unprovoked shark attacks since 2010. In the same four-year period there only five fatal attacks in the entire United States.

The deaths in Australia were eerily similar. Seven men— capable surfers, swimmers and divers—taken by great whites near other people in broad daylight. The Australian media was almost formulaic in its coverage of each attack. Appearing on national television every few months were photos of genial husbands, fathers and sons superimposed over razor teeth and leering black eyes. The message was clear: it could have been anyone. In a country plagued with a fear of sharks since its colonial era, the fish became a full-fledged national security threat.

The spike in attacks puzzled marine ecologists. Despite the animal’s notoriety, the great white shark’s behavior is something of an enigma to scientists. The covert predator’s population size and movements off the coast of Australia are still poorly understood. They do know, however, that the animal almost never deliberately seeks out humans as prey.

Western Australia policymakers, meanwhile, had to decide on a plan of action. The most contested strategy up for discussion was a program to systematically catch and kill large sharks near public beaches. As the attacks continued, the possibility of a cull came into the forefront of the statewide dialogue. Australia lauds itself for its environmental stewardship, so political leaders were at first hesitant to push for a plan that institutionalized the killing of endangered animals.

State premier Colin Barnett said in March of 2012, after the fifth fatal attack, that a cull was “not the answer.” Perhaps he was clinging to some hope that the catastrophe would just stop—that the poorly understood animals would get distracted by harbor seals and vacate his waters.

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SCIENCE

A year later, with two more deaths fresh in the public memory, Colin Barnett appeared on television to debut the state’s freshly minted shark killing arsenal. He held up to the camera a barbed hook large enough to eclipse his head. As part of a $20 million shark prevention program, 72 of these hooks were to be baited and suspended in “kill zones” one kilometer off the coast of popular beaches. Tiger, bull, and great white sharks larger than three meters would be “humanely destroyed”—or shot in the head. The war on sharks was underway. +++ “The loss of apex consumers is arguably humankind’s most pervasive influence on the natural world,” wrote ecologist James Estes in a 2011 Science review article. In the study he synthesized years of research and reached a stark conclusion: killing off top predators is one of the worst things that can be done to an ecosystem. Apex predators, which occupy at the top of the food web, exert control over the entire ecosystem by managing the numbers of their prey. If they go, populations of what was once their food explode and the ecosystem can radically change. This phenomenon is called a trophic cascade.

It turns out trophic cascades can have much wider ramifications than scientists originally believed. The decline of leopards and lions in Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, may have an impact on the rise of infectious disease in the region.

As predation declined with the drop in big cat numbers, the population of olive baboons in the region exploded. Baboons then began transmitting intestinal parasites to humans at an increased rate. What was at first lamented for ethical and aesthetic reasons became the cause of a major public health problem.

Scenarios like the baboon surfeit are unfortunately commonplace on a planet largely inhospitable for dominant predators not named Homo sapiens. The rise of human beings has incurred a massive toll on the world’s other apex predators. Scientific consensus considers the planet to be in in the midst of its sixth mass extinction, characterized by the loss of apex predators. And this time, instead of asteroid impacts or falling sea levels, humans are the sole source of death.

Bears, wolves, big cats, and sharks have been on endangered species lists since their invention. At this point, there’s a sense that low populations of big predators is a fact of life on earth.

In some ways, this is valid. Energy is lost with each step up a food web. An anteater does not acquire all of an ant’s energy, and the anteater’s predator does not acquire all of an anteater’s energy. It follows that there should then be fewer tigers than ants.

Large carnivores also exhibited relatively high extinction rates before humans began to proliferate. It’s not the fact that some large carnivore populations are sparse that alarms conservationists; it’s the rapid rate of extinction across many species, and our role in incurring it.

Big animals were far more abundant and diverse before humans began spreading through new habitats. Giant sloths the size of elephants and saber toothed cats once roamed the grasslands of South America. North America was home to its own species of lion and cheetah.

Paleontologists have noted that the extinction pattern of these animals and many other large predators matches up with the timing of our arrival in their habitats. As early humans spread through the planet 50,000 years ago, they became more adept hunters. The predators they encountered in new habitats suffered from the added competition for food.

They also hadn’t evolved alongside humans and likely were easily hunted.

This human-driven extinction scenario is just one theory that attempts to explain the sudden death of many large mammals 10,000 years ago. What isn’t subject to conjecture is our decimation of large carnivore populations in more recent times. Humans are horrible at cohabitating with other apex consumers. In fact, we’ve found it difficult to thoroughly develop any region without widespread slaughter of its natural predators.

Take the plight of the gray wolf in America. The spread of agriculture through the American West disrupted the habitat and prey base of our country’s iconic canines. Wolves subsequently developed a taste for a new type of prey that appeared in abundance: domestic livestock. The wolf in this period was a serious threat to the livelihood of settlers, and they developed a vitriolic fear of the animal. Teddy Roosevelt, an early champion of conservation, called the wolf a “beast

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

of waste and destruction.” For decades, the US Government supported the systematic extermination of the American wolf population until just a handful of packs remained in the lower 48 states. Conservation efforts came just in time to rescue the animal from the brink of extinction.

Often people are prone to pardon environmental atrocities of eras past. One may argue that the importance of conservation hadn’t been discovered, or that the animal posed a serious threat to the livelihood of many. But if we exonerate our ancestors we must first take lessons from their mistakes— which have failed to do. Once the wolf population rebounded, some groups claimed conservationists had reintroduced a threat to livestock and healthy elk populations. This is a view unsupported by data and shared by few scientists. Still, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho have again legalized wolf hunting.

The characterization of the wolf as a menace to humans has persisted in some parts of our country. +++ The trial shark cull in Western Australia ran from January to April this year. Of the 172 sharks hooked, 50 measured over 3 meters and were destroyed. 14 more died on the drum lines and 4 were shot because they were determined to be too weak to survive. All 50 large sharks were tiger sharks, which haven’t attacked humans in Western Australia in years. Not a single great white was caught.

The Western Australian government hoped to continue the cull each summer for three more years. Their plans were blocked last week by the state’s Environmental Protection Authority, which cited a “high degree of scientific uncertainty” regarding the cull’s impact on great white populations.

There still remains uncertainty as to why shark attacks spiked in the first place. The most popular theory among scientists seems to be that there are simply more people encroaching on their environment. Reflecting on population growth in Western Australia, shark specialist Rory McAuley said, “If you look at Perth from the water at night, when you can see the lights of the suburbs, you see that it now reaches over a huge stretch of coastline, further than you can see in the north and the south.”

SEPTEMBER 19 2014

Premier Barnett expressed to parliament that he was “disappointed” with the decision to end the cull. He said, with regards to future, “I think if you have, I’d use the term rogue shark…. I think we need to catch that shark and remove it.” The idea of a “rogue shark” that seeks out humans is an unsubstantiated idea popularized by Jaws. It’s a misrepresentation of the animal that perpetuates a common myth: that sharks are out to get us.

The end of institutionalized shark killing is a victory for both the ecosystem and the thousands of Western Australians who advocated for it. It’s also a triumph for the families of the seven recent victims, whose tragic losses were used to justify a fruitless slaughter.

Still, a deadly mentality remains. TV specials with titles like “Great White Serial Killer” and “Man vs. Fish” attract millions of viewers to Discovery Channel. We continue to reduce this complex animal to a man-eating caricature, just as some cling idea of the wolf as a pest.

Sharks aren’t stalking our shores for human meat, and wolves aren’t put on this earth to eat livestock. We are the ones annexing and altering our fellow predators’ habitats. The threat these animals pose is often our own reckless expansion coming back to bite us. After all, they have been around since long before Perth lit up at night.

CONNOR MCGUIGAN B’15 ...shark fin soup, on the other hand...

SCIENCE

□ 16

yesterday, in the arm of the river, my skin asked to leave me.

by Kim Sarnoff

(i) when I researched drowning, the book spoke of spades and party hats. ‘farm your celebration’ ‘don’t muckrake the water’ and hands marked, in a figure of the party, ‘stone sling’ and ‘one day, when your skin asks to leave you, stone’ (ii) yesterday, middle time, in the arm of the river, my magma sunk, I called from the stream – hung in the air and cleaved by the shore, lung for lung, I was diluted. slung in my skin, I lay towards the sea, she spoke with mind through the eastern current. skin said blood will tint the ocean blue, mind will sing in marine washes. I floated before my shadow unmoored – how ocean will lap me in the image of green!

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LITERARY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists, RISD Museum, 20 North Main // 2 pm // Free

The Low Anthem, Ravi Shavi & What Cheer? Brigade Providence Rink, 2 Kennedy Plaza // 6 pm // Free Free outdoor concert, t-3 days till the autumnal equinox.

Local bands, local beer (Trinity Brew House) and local ice cream (Tricycle).

Panic Cure: Poetry from Spain for the 21st Century McCormack Family Theater, 70 Brown St // 7 - 8 pm // Free Bilingual poetry reading by two contemporary poets as part of a weekend series of discussions and seminars on Spanish poetry and translation.

Movie screening.

“A lavishly illustrated romp” through Chicago’s 1960s Imagist art scene. Screened in conjunction with RISD Museum’s exhibit What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to present.

Pronk! Fundraiser, Aurora, 276 Westminster // 7 pm // $10 Get excited for Pronk! (radical marching band festival, coming October 13) by getting really sweaty at this dance party fundraiser, featuring What Cheer? Brigade, Extraordinary Rendition Band, Kickin’ Brass, TRUNK, and Project 401.

Guantánamo Teach In Faunce Underground, 75 Waterman St // 7-8:30 pm //Free John Porcellino, live and also in digital form Cable Car Cinema, 204 S Main St// 2 - 5 pm // $5 “Good time is practically guaranteed.” John Porcellino, the author of comic mini-series King Cat, is expected to discuss some comics, to watch a documentary about his life and work, to sign some books and “maybe even sell something”.

Your ticket includes a discount for John Porcellino’s book and unlimited access to snacks and refreshments.

FirstWorks Urban Carnevale Greater Kennedy Plaza // Free Celebrate FirstWorks 10th anniversary with aerialists spinning from skyscrapers, tape art, performances by international musicians, and a lot of food trucks.

Mount Eerie, Assembly of Light Choir Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway // 8 pm // $15 Mount Eerie sounds like the gentle throbbing in your ears when you’re floating in the ocean. With a local opener, Assembly of Light Choir, a secular choir of twenty women who perform experimental/ classical arrangements.

Should be strange and beautiful.

Did you know Guantánamo Bay has been under US territorial control since 1903? Or that the US held immigration detainees at GTMO long before 9-11? Learn more about the history of the US’s controversial military base in Cuba, and how it relates to contemporary debates about migration, law and human rights.

Yes/No/Goodbye Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway// 8 pm // $5 A night of film, live music, poetry and “ambient madness” to connect you with the “uncharted area of your brain.”

Scientifically suspect.

Roses, Ava Luna, Celestial Shore & Tapestries, AS220, 115 Empire St // 9 pm // $6 Bands range from romantic rockn-roll to no wave to kitchen-sink music. Perfect for a Wednesday date night.

Reading by Jesse Ball McCormack Family Theater, 70 Brown St// 2:30 – 3:30 pm // Free Author of The Curfew and Silence Once Begun will read from his work as part of the Writers on Writers series. Ball’s The Curfew is the best dystopian-fiction-as-puppet-show I’ve ever encountered.