The College Hill Independent V.28 N.03

MANAGING EDITORS Julieta Cárdenas, Simon Engler, Tristan Rodman NEWS Sebastian Clark, Alex Sammon, Emma Wohl METRO Megan Hauptman, Rick Salamé, Kat Thornton ARTS Greg Nissan, Maya Sorabjee FEATURES Kyle Giddon, Lili Rosenkranz, Josh Schenkkan TECHNOLOGY Houston Davidson SPORTS Zeve Sanderson INTERVIEWS Drew Dickerson FOOD John White LITERARY Eli Pitegoff EPHEMERA Molly Landis, Matthew Marsico OCCULT Addie Mitchell, Eli Petzold X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff LIST Claudia Norton, Diane Zhou DESIGN + ILLUSTRATION Mark Benz, Polina Godz, Casey Friedman, Kim Sarnoff ART DIRECTOR Aaron Harris COVER EDITOR Polina Godz SENIOR EDITORS David Adler, Grace Dunham,

VOLUME 28 // ISSUE 3

NEWS 2 Week in Review

david adler, kyle giddon & alex sammon

3 $ochi

sophie kasakove

7 Save the Date emma wohl

METRO 12 Perishibles, Please michelle zheng

6 Signing Off

megan hauptman

FEATURES 9 Speak Broken Open a. s. l.

ARTS 4 Columbus, Columbus lisa borst

EPHEMERA

Sam Rosen, Doreen St. Félix, Ellora Vilkin STAFF WRITERS Lisa Borst, Vera Carothers, Sophie Kasakove, Becca Millstein, Abigail Savitch-Lew, Carly West, Sara Winnick STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Andres Chang, Amy Chen, Jack Mernin WEB Edward Friedman, Patrick McMenamin COPY Mary Frances Gallagher, Paige Morris BUSINESS Haley Adams COVER ART Will Urmson MVP Emma Wohl

SCIENCE 5 Long Life Lobsters

FROM THE EDITOR S

connor mcguigan

TECHNOLOGY 13 Tom Slee

houston davidson

OCCULT 17 Decentered arthur schecter

FOOD 8 Eat Your Heart Out sara winnick

LIT 15 Good Times, Bad Times matthew marsico

X

Ask him not to smoke inside. He will not gripe. He will not stop. But since you don’t know what to say, bat away the smoke with your hand and tell him about a holiday party you attended where girls and boys danced on a forty-foot long banquet table. Barefoot, on tiptoes, they extended their arms upwards to light cigarettes with the flames of low-hanging chandeliers. Explain that the gesture was beautiful.

As you speak, he will fold the collar of his navy coat and play with a remote perched on the coffee table until the sounds of a radio station are released from the walls. “Just sounds like a lot of bad breath and cheap light fixtures to me.” His pinched lips will deflate you. All the air in your chest that you have saved up for laughter and sputtering stories with smiles will be trapped between your ribs. The only way you can dispel this nervousness is by crossing and uncrossing your ankles as you sit next to him on the couch with calculated care. Do so as he watches the ceiling fan decelerate.

Offer him a glass of water. As you walk to the kitchen, try to remember the title of the song he was so eager to share with you a few weeks ago. The one with the Andean pan pipes about children looking into the throats of cannons. Remember that he loved watching tormented towels turn in washing machines as a kid.

Return with the cup. When you are seated again, bury your fingers into your scalp and try to hide the middle part of your hairline. Say something about Laundromats or wars, anything to excavate a smile from his face.

Today, he, the one with the laughless eyes, will haunt you as you sit next to a different boy. - LR

18 Be My Vladentine layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

11 Something Fishy

matthew marsico & molly landis

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. The Independent receives support from Generation Progress/Center for American Progress. Generation Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at GenProgress.org.

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN PASSION

by David Adler, Kyle Giddon & Alex Sammon illustration by Lucrezia Sanes CYBERSEXY

PIZZA PIE, PLEASE BE MINE

BURROWING INTO MY HEART

Some grievances of digifuckers: laptop heat on bare stomach skin, distorted speaker vocals, implied volume constraints, and frozen pixels. Always frozen pixels.

Enter Mojowijo. The vibrating device, billed by its creators as “the world’s first motion-activated body massager,” tries to restore the intimacy of ordinary sex to long-distance relationships. In the Mojowijo model, each romantic partner is equipped with a silicone-coated vibrating toy, and each toy’s sensations are controlled by one’s long-distance partner, however many miles away.

Here’s how it works: each Mojowijo links up to the accessory port on a Nintendo Wii controller, which detects the various motions of the device, as in digital tennis or bowling.

The signal from one Mojowijo vibrator is then transmitted to the partner’s Mojowijo, which vibrates according to the speed of motion. Once couples have their devices, all they have to do is download Mojowijo’s software and dial into each other on Skype. With an active Internet connection and a gigabyte of RAM, pleasure is at one’s fingertips, or, rather, at someone else’s, who is holding a Nintendo controller.

For women, the Mojowijo toy resembles a standard vibrator. For men, it takes the form of a vibrating ring attached to the end of a baton. One is reminded of the grabber arms used to pick up objects from the kitchen floor, or in factories to assemble cars. But Mojowijo’s websites stresses that the ring, when placed around the phallus, feels “very similar to an expert tongue.”

All alone this Valentine’s Day? Fret not. Mojowijo isn’t just for existing couples. Users can meet, talk, and dial in to each other’s vibrators via Mojowijo’s in-house chatrooms. Finally: the time has come to fuck strangers halfway across the world with motion-controlled robots. The future is now. – KG

In the hustle of our daily lives—scraping snow from the windshield, avoiding public restrooms, making a wish with a wayward eyelash—it is easy to forget that we live in the land of pizza.

As far as insects go, fruit flies are pretty anodyne. They don’t bite, they don’t sting, they don’t even bother to land on you.

Given how irritating their relatives are, fruit flies make for a tolerable bunch.

So it seems kind of unbelievable that a fruit fly sighting in Whangerei, New Zealand, home to the country’s passionfruit export operation, shut down all activity early last week, bringing a 4 billion dollar industry to a standstill. Authorities are in the midst of an expansive search to determine whether this fly acted alone or as part of a larger, more nefarious fruit fly posse.

02

NEWS

A memory: In the early twentieth century, signs appeared in New York’s Little Italy offering pizza cavere, or “hot cakes” in the Neapolitan dialect. William Grimes, in his Appetite History, describes the local origins of our fair pizza: “Local laborers would drop in for a pie, or a portion thereof, but to the rest of New York the Neapolitan specialty remained a mystery.” Mysterious indeed: An 1880 article in the Washington Post described the dish as “a sort of cake beaten flat in a round form, and seasoned with curious condiments.” The curiosity, by World War II, had become a national phenomenon, with grated cheese sprinkled all across the land.

A return: This week, the USDA published a groundbreaking report on pizza progress.

Food Surveys Research Group Dietary Data Brief No. 11 February 2014.

In it, some staggering statistics. On consumption: more than 25 percent of males ages 6–19 consume pizza on any given day. On ethnic distribution: Adult whites are more likely to consume pizza on any given day than blacks or Hispanics; children, however, displayed no ethnic differences. On gender: Men eat more pizza than women, except in the crucial age range of 2–5 years old. Pizza knows neither gender nor ethnicity among the babies.

Perhaps the best statistic—represented by a pie chart— depicts the “percentage of pizza consumed by eating occasion.” Overall, the graph reports, almost 10 percent of pizza consumption is “at a snack occasion.” The report is unclear as to whether this includes Bagel Bites.

There are a number of conclusions we might draw from these data—about national health, about the state of the pizza economy. Yet as we weather the fury of the Valentine’s Day storm, curling up in our rooms to lament the lack of a significant other, remember that pizza will always be there, through thick and thin crusts. –DRA

Here’s what we know about the perpetrator: Name: Queensland Fruit Fly Sex: Male Height: 7 mm Dress: Nude The Queensland Fruit Fly is of paramount concern to New Zealand’s horticulture export not because of its size, but because of its reproductive habits. The flies burrow into the passionfruits to lay their eggs. The fruit provides a nurturing environment for growth. Needless to say, larva is not a popular flavor for the vast majority of passionfruit consumers.

An infestation would be disastrous for the country’s export economy.

In what can only be described as a physical rendition of Fruit Ninja, the Ministry of Primary Industry has commissioned a team of 120 expert slashers to slice up each and every fruit, searching for tiny fly eggs. So far, they have chopped up 60 kilograms of fruit, and there is no end in sight.

As it stands, the shell-shocked town of Whangerei remains on high alert, explicitly forbidden from eating, touching, and interacting with fruit until the threat has been fully documented.

If only New Zealand’s most desired singles weren’t so tough to find. –AS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FOOL'S GOLD corruption and human rights at Sochi

by Sophie Kasakove illustration by Andres Chang

Sochi is where Russians go in the winter to escape the winter.

The resort town, whose streets are lined with palm trees, hardly seems like an ideal location for the Winter Olympics.

As it turns out, that’s exactly why the Putin administration chose Sochi: it is the definition of an engineering challenge.

“This is Russia telling the world that they’re capable of pulling off a remarkable project, that Russia is a rich, successful, powerful country,” says Professor Peter Toumanoff, Director of Marquette University’s Center for Global and Economic Studies. “This is the Soviet Union in 1957 putting the first satellite in space.”

The $51 billion spent on the Sochi Olympics could have launched Sputnik 1 into space hundreds of times. The sixteenday event cost Russia almost five times the initially projected $12 billion and makes the Sochi Games the most expensive in history. The immense cost stems in part from the corrupt practices of the Putin administration and in part from the Russian government’s purposeful choice of a subtropical location for winter sports. The combination of these factors makes this year’s games more expensive than all previous Winter Olympics combined.

In a recent television interview, Russian President Vladimir Putin attributed this price inflation to “honest” mistakes in cost estimation. But according to a May report by Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, and fellow Putin-critic Leonid Martynyuk, $30 billion of the budget has gone missing in “kickbacks and embezzlement” to close associates of Putin.

“Almost everything that is related to the cost problems and abuses in preparation for the Olympic Games was carefully concealed and continues to be covered up by the authorities,” Nemtsov added on his blog. The current economic environment of Russia, Toumanoff argues, stems from the messy transition from a planned to free market economy following the demise of the Soviet Union.

Alexei Navalnay, a Russian political and financial activist, who himself was wrongfully accused of embezzlement by the Russian government in 2013, stands at the forefront of the current anti-corruption movement. Navalny claims that Russia spent twice as much as necessary to build at least 10 of the Olympic venues, including the Bolshoi Ice Palace, the Fisht Stadium for the opening and closing ceremonies, and the Adler speed-skating arena. The Russian public is not ignorant of the ongoing graft: in a recent survey conducted by the Levada center in 45 regions of Russia, 47 percent of respondents believed that the government had “squandered” funds in the construction of Olympic infrastructure.

03

NEWS

+++ One of the most blatant instances of government misconduct is the construction of the Adler-Krasnaya Polyana highway, which links the sports stadiums on the sea with the alpine resorts to the east. This highway is the most expensive piece of new Olympic infrastructure, with construction costs amounting to $8.7 billion—nearly the same as the total cost of the Vancouver Olympics. The project went 90% over budget.

Russian Railways, owned by Gennady Timchenko, constructed the highway. Timchenko, easily one of the richest men in Russia, is a long-time friend and hockey partner of Putin. They also belong to the same judo club and geographic society. With an estimated fortune of $14.1 billion, Timchenko has large holdings in a range of Russian companies spanning the industrial and energy sectors. One of his companies exports almost a third of Russia’s crude oil. When asked by Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung about a connection between his success and his relationship with Putin, Timchenko rejected the allegation as “nonsense.”

Timchenko shared the contract for the Adler-Krasnaya Polyana highway with Arkady Rotenberg—another judo partner of Putin—who has been involved in nearly every major Russian construction project of the last decade. Five of Rotenberg’s companies have been involved in construction at twenty different locations in Sochi, amounting to a total of $7.4 billion worth in contracts. “This is the way business is done in Russia,” says Professor Nina Tannenwald of the Watson Institute at Brown University. “It’s highly oligarchical with various sectors of the Russian economy being controlled by a very small number of people.”

This highway has significant costs beyond the $8.7 billion price tag: built right in the middle of Akhshtyr, the construction has become a significant burden to the residents of this small village. “When the construction began, we had hope, we believed that no one would suffer,” Akhshtyr resident Alexander Koropov told Human Rights Watch (HRW) in December 2013. “Everyone in the village has suffered.”

The trouble started in 2008, when Akhshtyr became the site of a dump for waste generated by tunnel construction. The construction also destroyed the village’s well—its only source of clean water. For the past several years, residents of Akhsthyr have depended on weekly government shipments for drinking water. Locals told HRW that the amount of water brought in is not nearly enough, and they are concerned that the government will cease shipments once the Olympics are over.

The citizens of Akhshtyr have also lost access to public transportation. Before the construction began, it took 25 minutes for residents to walk to the nearest bus station. Now, it takes two hours to circumvent the construction surrounding the station. The construction has also left cement dust all around Akhshtyr—on some days, it reaches five inches.

“My neighbor across the street grew a lot of peaches,” said Akhshtyr Resident Tatiana Velikaia. “This year, he couldn’t sell any peaches because there was a layer of cement dust on the peaches. Nobody bought them.”

In 2011, the residents of Akhshtyr staged a protest to demand compensation for their losses. Arms linked, the villagers stood for hours in the middle of the Adler-Krasnaya Polyana highway, blocking construction vehicles from passing.

Responding to the citizens’ demands, Sochi Mayor Anatoly Pkhomov promised to supply Akhshtyr with new water lines and a pedestrian bridge to link the village with public transportation. But with the Games well under way, these promises remain unfulfilled.

The environmental irresponsibility of the Putin administration can, like economic corruption, be seen as a vestige of the Soviet Era. “The Soviet union was very myopic when it came to the environment,” Toumanoff explains. “The idea was: get the job done, get the bonus, forget the consequences.

That’s an attitude that hasn’t disappeared.” +++ The International Olympic Committee (IOC), participating countries, and even corporate sponsors have turned a blind eye to the economic corruption, environmental damage, and human rights violations accompanying this year’s Games.

According to former Fulbright Senior Specialist in Russia, J. Gordon Hylton, this silence stems from a global acceptance of the flaws of the Olympic system, suggesting that there has always been an “aura of corruption” surrounding the Olympics. Silence on these issues serves the interests of everyone involved. “The IOC has an obligation to speak out, to protect the ‘dignity of human beings’ as outlined in the Olympic Charter,” Tannenwald told the Independent. “But what’s really in their interest is to keep quiet so they can accomplish their primary goal: to create an arena free of politics.”

Coca-Cola faced enormous international pressure to retract its sponsorship of the Sochi Games in light of the human rights violations in Sochi and Russia’s anti-LGBT law.

The company did neither and stands to gain immensely by keeping quiet and keeping their contracts. When the Putin administration began construction for the Games, it bet that the benefits of financial and environmental irresponsibility would outweigh the accompanying criticism. As over a million athletes, spectators, and politicians flocked to Sochi this week, it looks like it bet right.

SOPHIE KASAKOVE B'17 needs a judo partner.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

recovering Columbus Theater Before Misak Berberian bought the Columbus Theater in 1962, a previous owner, facing financial trouble, allegedly tried to set the building on fire to collect insurance. Made almost entirely out of concrete, the theater failed to ignite, but a burn still mars the mural above the main stage. The mark is visible from the theater’s gilded balcony and serves as a permanent reminder that the Columbus, while now a major player among Providence’s music venues, in many ways only barely transcends dilapidation.

Ben Knox Miller, guitarist and vocalist of Providencebased band The Low Anthem, told me the story behind the burned mural as we hurried around the theater on Thursday, February 6, in the hour before funk singer Charles Bradley took the stage. Miller and the rest of The Low Anthem were instrumental in the reopening of the Columbus, which, until November 2012, had sat dormant for several years in Providence’s Federal Hill. Since then, The Low Anthem and others have transformed the Columbus into a fully operational recording studio and venue, where the band is currently finishing its latest record and where artists including Chain & the Gang, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and Ed Askew have performed. A quick scroll through the Columbus’s website shows that its acts have become more recognizable since its first shows in 2012: Marissa Nadler is slated to perform there in March, as is Fred Armisen. As the revitalized theater gains prominence, it is attracting increasingly impressive names to a once-neglected part of Providence—a city that has recently undergone a creative renaissance of its own. +++ The Columbus’s marquee glows unsteady over Broadway, its lettering inconsistently illuminated. Built in 1926, the large, ornate theater originally featured silent films and vaudeville acts. It changed hands several times throughout its early years and struggled to stay in business—hence the rumored arson attempt—until Misak Berberian purchased it in the early 1960s. His son Jon, now in his eighties, soon took over the business and is the space’s current owner. Throughout the fifty years in which the Berberians have owned the theater, it has functioned as a music venue, a studio, a playhouse, and, for much of the late twentieth century, an adult movie theater.

Due to financial struggles and changing fire code regulations for theaters and music venues—which were tightened radically throughout Rhode Island following the 2003 fire at the Station Nightclub in Warwick—the Columbus closed on and off for several years. In 2009, the theater was finally forced to shut down, seemingly permanently. For two years, the Columbus sat empty as Federal Hill developed around it.

In 2011, The Low Anthem stumbled upon the space, largely by accident. “The only reason it came onto my radar,” remembered Jeff Prystowsky, The Low Anthem’s drummer, “was because we were coming off of a tour where in every town we played a venue like this. So when I went to get a slice of pizza at Gusto, across the street, I was looking at this place.

My mind was still in that tour mindset: arrive at a town, look

FEBRUARY 14 2014

by Lisa Borst illustration by Polina Godz

for the venue, look for the pizza shop. And it was our first day home, so I looked for the pizza shop, and I found it. And then it was like, where’s the venue? And I was like, there it is. And then I was thinking, wait a minute, that’s the place that’s been closed for years.”

The Low Anthem approached Berberian about renting one of the theater’s upstairs rooms to use as a recording space.

“He was just so excited that someone cared about the theater that he was glad to have us in it,” Miller said. “He let us record in here when there was nothing going on….We were just making music in the space and trying out different recording techniques, which is kind of an interest of our band.”

The Low Anthem’s discography reflects a concern with making music with nontraditional means. The band packaged their first record, released in 2007, using recycled cereal boxes they’d found dumpster diving. Their fourth record, 2011’s Smart Flesh, was recorded in an abandoned pasta sauce factory.

“The environment definitely has an effect on the music,” Prystowsky told me as we stood in the Columbus’s bright lobby. “You’re always making music in a space; you’re playing this thing in this room in this place. So if you have a room itself that is inspiring, then when you play—it’s inspiring to have music come out of you that you didn’t know you had in you.”

It’s not hard to see how the Columbus might be conducive to producing the sorts of cavernous, reverb-heavy sounds for which The Low Anthem is known. If you don’t look too closely, the theater is daunting. Its main stage is enormous; its red and gold coloring lends it an air of opulence. Stained glass and murals of classical gods and goddesses decorate the walls and ceiling. Every surface that could be carved has been carved; intricate acanthus designs adorn every wooden table and mirror and piece of molding. The theater does feels like some bizarre, excessive, vaudeville time warp. +++ If you spend enough time in the Columbus, though, its cracks become apparent. Chunks of carved molding have fallen away; splotches of paint discolor the ceiling. Panels are missing from the glass fixtures above the seating area. The red leather seats are in many places cracked, stained. “It’s grandiose, but it’s dingy,” Miller told me, as we watched Charles Bradley’s band sound check from the balcony. You can see the burned mural from there. “But I love the energy of this place.

It’s bizarre, it’s dilapidated.”

Miller recalled the band’s first few months as tenants at the theater. “When we moved in here it was like this bizarre, ghostly attic,” he said. “Stuff dating back many generations was just tucked in corners. It was really fun, that time right when we moved in. It was really spooky.”

Much of the clutter—from generations past and present—remains in the Columbus’s many hallways and back rooms. The main stage and seating area are tidy and well kept, but incongruous remnants of the theater’s many iterations can be found throughout the rest of the building. A statue of a saint prays alone on a back stairwell. Upstairs, leftover props from an old music video shoot, including an inflatable dino-

saur, lie around haphazardly. For a while on Thursday night, a huge red luminescent C—ostensibly a remnant from the logo on the marquee outside—was leaning against an upstairs wall, plugged in and lit up, until somebody complained that it smelled like something was burning. +++ After renting studio space from Berberian for several months in early 2012 and hearing him discuss his desire to reopen the Columbus as a venue, the members of The Low Anthem decided to help him bring the theatert up to code. They formed a group, the Columbus Cooperative, with several friends, including musicians, the manager of Providence band Brown Bird, and a bartender. “We all had a compatible set of skills,” Miller said. “And we all just like each other a lot.”

Staffing the theater on a volunteer basis, the co-op cleaned up the space and organized a benefit show in November 2012, billed as Revival! to kick off the Columbus’s renaissance period. The Low Anthem performed, along with Brown Bird and several other Providence acts. The event sold out.

The Columbus Cooperative continues to maintain the space and head the theater’s programming. As volunteers, the members of the co-op book bands, collect tickets, and sell drinks. In the year and a half since the theater reopened, they’ve been able to start hosting multiple shows a week.

However, large-scale shifts toward a more sustainable business model—perhaps one that includes a salaried staff and more consistent programming—are a distant goal. “Everyone in the co-op has their different things that they’re doing, so we’re taking baby steps,” Prystowsky said.

Despite the increasing prestige of the Columbus’ performances, it’s still clear in many ways that the venue is volunteer-run, that its resuscitation is still underway. In a space that was once exceptionally ornate but that is now being run by a small team of twenty- and thirty-somethings, there’s an implicit tension, an undercurrent of scrappiness amidst the building’s grandiosity. It’s in the CASH BAR sign, scrawled in Sharpie on construction paper and taped to an elaborately carved mirror; it’s in the pervasive smell of weed in a gilded backstage hallway built in 1926. It’s in the flickering marquee outside and the charred mural above the stage.

“The history of this building, dating back through the past fifty years, it’s been a history of caring about the building and working hard to keep it operational, but it hasn’t really been about appearances,” Miller told me. “Stuff has been done in a fairly cheap way just to make ends meet. Whether that’s meant showing porn or whatever, it’s always been about surviving. But also—there’s a certain magic. The owner just loves this place, and we feel the same way about it. We don’t need to dress it up, we don’t need to take the edges off. We love them. We love the fact that it’s all this guy’s work, for 50 years…it just gives it such character. You feel like people’s hands have been on it.”

LISA BORST B’17 plays music in pasta sauce factories.

ARTS

04

SIX FEET UNDERWATER how to live forever in three easy steps

by Connor McGuigan illustration by Layla Ehsan

16th Century explorer Juan Ponce de Leon searched for the Fountain of Youth in the place where, today, people go to die. Modern scientists are doing the same, but they’re steering clear of Florida.They're directing their attention to a small number of animals that seem to have age-reversing tactics coded into their DNA. Each of the following three animals has its own way of fighting senescence, a term that refers to the process behind aging and eventually death of “natural” causes. Some of them are even considered immortal.

IMMORTAL KARAOKE “My name is Scarlet Medusa, A teeny tiny jellyfish But I have a special secret that no others may possess I can — yes, I can! — rejuvenate”

THE DEATHLESS TENTACLED TUBE The name “Hydra” has prompted fear in both ancient Greeks and children born after 1985. The many-headed mythical reptile played a pivotal role in both the legend of Hercules and the Disney movie it inspired. About 300 years ago scientists discovered an animal that resembled Hydra and named it after the fictitious creature. It still stalks ponds and lakes today.

Like the beast of yore, it is said to be immortal. But don’t worry—unless you’re a water flea, you’ve got nothing to fear.

Hydra is a group of freshwater relatives of jellyfish. They resemble a tiny, simpler version of the anemone: a tube with a tentacle-bearing head at one end and a foot at the other. The tentacles give it resemblance to the mythical creature. Most Hydra are just a few millimeters long. You probably brushed into one last time you swam in a lake or a pond. They’re common creatures, but unless you’ve got a microscope, you’ve probably never laid eyes on one.

The first experimental data that seemed to prove Hydra are immortal was published in 1998 by Pomona College biologist Daniel Martinez. In his paper he wrote, “Hydra may potentially be immortal.” Not exactly boldly-worded, but it was the data that did the talking. Martinez observed Hydra for four years and showed that the creatures’ mortality rates did not increase as they aged.

The key to Hydra’s apparent agelessness has to do with how they reproduce. Put some Hydra under a microscope, and a few will appear to have tiny copies of themselves growing on their sides. What you’re seeing is Hydra’s primary mode of reproduction—an asexual process called budding.

It turns out you need a pretty special cellular setup to spit clones out of your sides for eternity. Hydra’s body column is essentially a compartment of stem cells, which, like an adult human’s stem cells, renew dead cells and damaged tissues.

Unlike ours, Hydra stem cells are constantly replacing tissue.

Whereas humans hold onto many of their cells from birth, the longest a non-stem cell stays in a Hydra body is 20 days. Hydra stem cells have an indefinite self-renewal capacity, meaning the Hydra will never run out of its supply. Holistic repair that never lets up—this seems to be the recipe for Hydra’s lack of senescence.

Theoretically, this system could allow an individual hydra to live indefinitely in the absence of external pressures like predation. Some believe Hydra hold the to increasing human longevity. We can’t even be completely confident Hydra don’t senesce until someone looks at their aging over a longer period than Dr. Martinez did. Until then, “may potentially be” is the best we’ve got.

05

SCIENCE

BOILING OUR ELDERS In his essay Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace questioned the practice of boiling lobsters alive by illustrating their capacity to feel pain. He didn’t consider that the lobsters on our plates often outdate the humans eating them.

Lobsters don’t just defy aging—they seem to reverse it.

Mammals like us stop growing once they hit adulthood. Lobsters seem to never to slow down. Their shell grows stronger every time they shed their old one. They seem to get more fertile with age. They still die in droves from predation and disease, but without these pressures their lifespan could be staggeringly long.

The secret to lobster longevity lies in its ability to thwart a problem inherent to cell division. Every time a cell divides, the copying mechanism always results in a loss of DNA at the end of the duplicated chromosome. Imagine a photocopy machine that reliably misses the last sentence of the page.

This would work fine if every page of your book ended with a sentence of gibberish. This is how animal DNA is set up; we have buffer zones at the ends of our chromosomes. The buffers in a normal human cell erode and halt cell division after about 50 rounds of duplication. Those in the lobsters cells never go away.

That’s because every organ in a lobster’s body is loaded with an enzyme called telomerase. Cells with high telomerase levels can duplicate endlessly. Cancer cells, for instance, are packed with telomerase. And scientists believe lobsters maintain their telomerase levels regardless of their age. If a 100-year old lobster loses a claw, it can grow it right back.

Telomerase isn’t enough to make lobsters truly biologically immortal, as they are sometimes referred to in the press.

Just really old. The biggest ones we’ve caught have all been gauged at over 100 years old. And there are probably older ones out there—the biggest, most fertile lobsters in the sea.

These words—in their untranslated form—are stored in the databases of karaoke machines throughout Japan. Those intent on warbling them after a few cups of sake only have to search “Mr. Immortal Jellyfish Man” and flip through a roster of songs. This particular number is titled “Scarlet Medusa Chorus.” Other options include “Life Forever,” “Die-Hard Medusa” and “Scarlet Medusa—An Eternal Witness”.

Mr. Immortal Jellyfish Man is a quasi-celebrity in Japan, where he often appears on national television equipped with jellyfish apparel and a karaoke mic. Behind the oversized burgundy shades is man with an earnest message. Marine biologist Shin Kubota has devoted much of his life to harvesting and studying the world’s only captive population of the jellyfish species Turritopsis dornhi. These Hydrozoans—the same class that Hydra belongs to—are able to rejuvenate themselves endlessly and are thus considered biologically immortal.

On the surface, T. dornhi appears to have a lifecycle relatively common to Hydrozoa. It contains two distinct phases: polyp and jellyfish. T. dornhi polyps hatch from fertilized eggs and develop into a stationary colony. A polyp colony looks like a cluster of Hydra gathered together on the ocean floor.

While Hydra polyps bud off new polyps, T. dornhi polyp colonies bud off jellyfish that will soon reach sexual maturity. It’s as if a caterpillar released butterflies into the air from its sides.

For most Hydrozoans, the medusa stage is the beginning of the end. Some species have only a few hours to feed and exchange sperm and egg before they die. At the most, they have a month or two. So how, you may ask, do these tiny jellies in Kubota’s lab stick around forever? If T. dornhii jellyfish are feeling the stress of adulthood, they simply transform into a kid again.

This species is the only known Hydrozoan that can transition from a medusa back to the polyp form. If it experiences physical damage or danger, the animal floats to the bottom of the sea from whence it came. There, it folds in on itself and starts to look more like a tiny puddle than a jellyfish. Slowly, a polyp stalk begins to emerge from the glop. Then another, and a few more after them. Eventually a brand new polyp colony emerges, which starts to spit out new jellyfish, which can eventually sink back to the ocean floor and… so it goes.

Kubota has exploited this process to keep colonies of genetically identical T. dornhii alive since he started studying the immortal jellyfish. He dons his entertainer cap (actual cap, looks like a jellyfish) because he wants to share with the world his amazement with these creatures. He also believes that the animal will “apply ultimate life to human beings.” Keep dreaming, Mr. Immortal Jellyfish Man. CONNOR MCGUIGAN B'15 has a special secret that no others may possess.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

A BEE IN MY BONNET Pastor Dan Ivins, “the sign guy” of First Baptist Church

The Indy: What do you see as the role of brevity and humor in religion and religious organizations?

When I walked into Pastor Dan Ivins’s office at the First Baptist Church, the first thing I noticed was the orange. Ivins, who is originally from Athens, still decorates his office in the color of the University of Tennessee’s sports teams—even after fifty years of preaching at churches all across America.

An orange football jersey hangs over the back of an armchair, emblazoned with the number 36. “That’s because I’m the Number 36 pastor of this church,” Ivins told me. “Roger Williams was Number One.” Ivins, who began working as pastor in Providence eight years ago, will soon retire and move back to Knoxville. He was packing up his office when I stopped by. “There’s two kinds of moving hell,” Ivins said as I came in. “Moving out hell, and moving in hell. And you always have to do both.”

On his desk sits a nameplate with REV IVINS spelled out in scrabble tiles. On the other side of the office, a large metal sign with chunky four-inch moveable letters reads “Earth without Art is ‘Eh’” Underneath, in smaller letters: “Worship 11AM.” This sign, which was about to be carted out of Ivins’s office and placed in the church sign holder on the corner of Waterman and Main Street, is Ivins’s pride and joy. He jovially refers to himself as “The Sign Guy;” he’s been crafting the church sign’s clever and sometimes confusingly cryptic aphorisms for the past four years. “And now that I’m resigning they want me to do it from Tennessee,” he laughed.

Ivins is an unconventional pastor for a historic old New England Church, and he knows it. He rides a motorcycle to work and claims Richard Pryor as his patron sinner. During our conversation, Ivins’s dog Lillybeth, a tiny white Maltese, ran frantically around the office. He speaks with a strong Southern accent and chuckled frequently as we talked about the iconic sign, his sources of inspiration, and some of his more controversial messages.

The College Hill Independent: What was the first sign you ever put up?

Dan Ivins: First sign? “We reserve the right to accept everybody.” And the first time I preached: “It’s not just a museum.” Because when I came in at first everybody said that this church is just a museum. I try to do three things with the sign that I try to do when I’m preaching too: I try to make people think, and I try to help them laugh, and then sometimes I make ‘em mad.

The Indy: How does Rhode Island compare to other places you’ve lived and worked?

DI: It’s funky, but I fit right in. A lot of people make fun of my accent and I give it right back to them. Like they think they don’t have accents. I put up a sign once that says “Who Cares?” but spelled cares Cay-uhs. That was our code word for a long time, me and the custodian. I’d come in in the morning and he’d say “Who cay-uhs?” and I’d say it back.

One time I got the choir to say it in together in unison and everybody was shocked. They were up on the balcony, and on cue I had the choir say “Whoooooo Cay-uhs?” Keep them on their toes.

But I’ve loved that sign. And it just started. I got an idea, what I call ‘a bee in my bonnet.’ So I got that bee and I put it on the signboard and leave it there for a few days until I get another bee. I’m driving our custodian nuts because he has to change it pretty often.

FEBRUARY 14 2014

DI: I use humor all the time. I think that when people laugh it disarms them. They aren’t as defensive, and if you can combine humor with truth you’ve got a double whammy. I like Yogi Berra. And a lot of these signs are Yogi-isms. I’ll say something that’s the opposite of something; like “The Best Man for the Job is a Woman.” Well, the feminists loved that one. Like Yogi: he’ll say, “If you come to the fork in the road, take it.” Stuff like that.

People think you’re going to say something they expect and then you switch it up. And I have a patron sinner. [chuckles] A lot of people have a patron saint, but Number 36, the sign guy, has a patron sinner. I love Richard Pryor, because he’s funny. He makes me laugh.

by Megan Hauptman illustration by Amy Chen

Church Seeks Members. Long Term Relationship Preferred.”

Well, some people thought it was racist. Everything’s racist now. That sign ended up on a list of 25 things that are common to Rhode Island.

The Indy: Have you ever had people in the church ask you take a sign down?

DI: I put up a sign when they were fighting over healthcare: “It’s going to get worse before it gets worse.” One of my more liberal congregants didn’t like it. He thought I was slamming Obama, but I don’t want to offend anybody.

Sometimes humor can be offensive. You’ve got to get people thinking. And for instance, my motto, that’s what I put up first: “We reserve the right to accept everybody.”

They’re not expecting me to say accept, they’re expecting reject, they think you’re being exclusionary, but I turn the tables on them. And our church adopted that motto immediately, and I think they’ll keep it after I leave.

The Indy: Do you think the humor of the sign brings people into the church who might not otherwise stop in?

The Indy: What will you miss about Providence?

DI: Oh yeah, almost weekly. Students who go walking by— RISD students, Brown students, come in and ask me what it means. This is an irreligious place too. I put up a sign for the atheists, who won’t come into the Church, but they’ll see that sign: “For those who don’t believe in God but miss him.” And people really came in for that one—what’s that mean? What’s that mean? And I don’t tell them. I just ask, “What do you think it means?” But it does create a lot of interest and I am amazed at that. Three lines. People stop at a red light and they read it and they call me.

DI: I used to live in the Avalon, near the Amtrak station. My wife is a concierge there, but I moved out of the Avalon three years ago. It just got too loud. I have to sleep on Saturday night, and Saturday night downtown is a rocking place.

With WaterFire and all the parades and races that they have.

Doggone foot races. You’re trying to have worship on Sunday morning and these people running up and down the streets.

Sometimes they have drums and bands—why do you have a band for a foot race? But it’s a lively town—it’s a big little city, or a little big city. We love the celebratory nature of the city.

They like to celebrate stuff.

The Indy: What were some signs you’ve gotten strong responses to?

DI: I try to talk about things that people are thinking about, like health care, taxes. This one [Ivins shows me a photograph of a sign that says “God doesn’t have favorites, but the sign guy does. Go Broncos!”] went viral—150,000 hits. Somebody put it on their Facebook. It was on TV in Denver, it was on TV in Seattle, it was on Meet the Press.

What they don’t know: it’s not dated. I did it for the San Diego game. But I left it up on the Monday after, and everybody thought I was doing it for the Patriots game. So everybody in Rhode Island got mad but everybody in Denver loved it. It created a national debate: Does God have faves?

And of course I said, no, but I do. Because I’m a Peyton Manning fan. In fact we have a Manning room here, and I started calling it the Peyton Manning room. The historians don’t appreciate it, but I’m just having fun. But see that sign was a mistake—it was meant for San Diego. But because it wasn’t dated, it went all over the place.

People were calling me and writing me to get permission to use the sign at the Super Bowl. And the tight end for Denver—Julius Thomas—he got it on his Twitter. And he wrote me and thanked me and said he got inspiration from this sign. So I had an investment in that game. He caught five passes against the Patriots!

Another time, I made one sign in response to this feature article in the ProJo about The Dating Game—the dating TV program or whatever. It’s a service that helps get single people together. And you’ll see: “Single White Female seeking something” so I put on the sign one day: “Single White

The First Baptist Church has a collection of Ivins’s signs from the past few years on their website: http://www. firstbaptistchurchinamerica.org

METRO

06

ALL IN A DAY

a partial collage of date-based protest

by Emma Wohl illustration by Tristan Rodman

Tuesday marked the one-year anniversary of the death of Aaron Swartz, the programmer and Internet activist whose crusade for “Guerilla Open Access” to information allegedly led him to bypass network security at MIT and download millions of articles from the academic database JSTOR. At the time of his death by suicide at age 26, Swartz was facing 35 years in prison for various illicit acts carried out in the name of “opposing the privatization of knowledge,” a call he made in a 2008 manifesto.

February 11, 2013, was also “The Day We Fight Back.”

We represents a “broad coalition of activist groups, companies, and online platforms,” according to a press release on the movement’s website, fighting back against NSA surveillance of private citizens, celebrating the defeat of the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) last January, and mourning the loss of a visionary. The protest was initiated by a coalition of organizations fighting for free speech, fair use, privacy, and transparency on the Internet, led by Demand Progress, an internet activist organization founded by Swartz and now led by Rhode Island’s former Democratic State Representative David Segal.

“The Day We Fight Back” compels Internet users, by clicking on banner ads, to call or email their Congressional representatives asking for stricter regulation of NSA surveillance. It enlisted over 6,000 websites to install graphics publicizing the movement. It provides Facebook profile and cover photos to help spread the word. It has, in other words, the basic scaffolding of an armchair Internet organizing movement—a far cry from the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto of Swartz, its would-be spiritual forebear.

Rooted in a few clicks per adherent, what can such a movement amount to? “The Day We Fight Back” is part of a long tradition. What, if anything, has changed?

MAY DAY The first of May, 1890, was not your average Labor Day picnic. (For one thing, it was not in September). But it was the first International Workers’ Day, which has in the years since become the day to honor the labor movement and mobilize around concerns plaguing workers of one country or internationally.

Perhaps the disastrous effects on the labor movement of the May 4, 1886 Haymarket Square demonstration in Chicago pointed to a need for better organization. The Haymarket rally was the continuation of a union strike for the eight-hour workday, which had begun on May 1 across the country. When an unidentified individual (presumed to be part of a group of anarchists) detonated a bomb during the rally, a riot broke out. Seven officers and at least four workers were killed. Fear of unions and Communism and an outpouring of community support for the police ensued.

Over the next four years, the international workers’ and Socialist organizations regrouped. The first Congress of the Second International in 1889 called for a May 1, 1890 general strike around the world—the first May Day celebrated as a holiday for the working classes, as well as a recognition of the Haymarket Square massacre. By the mid-20th century, it was an institution—International Workers’ Day is officially celebrated on May 1 in 80 countries.

MOUVEMENT DU 22 MARS The Mouvement du 22 Mars did not earn its date-based moniker until after the day in question—and that, in fact, may have been a gift.

On March 22, 1968, students at the University of Nanterre joined leftist militants, poets, and musicians to occupy university administrative buildings, calling for an end to class discrimination in the university system and student autonomy. By the end of the day, the police had surrounded the building and dispersed the students, who publicized their manifesto and called for a continued struggle. That led to ongoing clashes with police and university administrators, culminating in a series of nation-wide uprisings that May. Focusing on the work of a single day may be empowering, but the fanfare may be self-defeating if it becomes all about the spectacle and the gathering and turns into more of a party than a protest. By holding off the self-congratulating ’til the day’s work was done, the organizers circumvented that risk. The movement didn’t identify with the name until the May uprisings caught hold and felt the need for an origin story. That lag time did not halt the self-congratulating itself, however, as a movement of 150 students, a few workers and artists came to claim an entire day and the whole cause of university reform.

BUY NOTHING DAY Ted Dave first put up posters encouraging fellow citizens to reject the consumer impulse—by not shopping for 24 hours—in Vancouver in September 1992. Over subsequent years the event grew and was moved to coincide with the biggest consumer spectacle of the year—Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.

Since then, the movement has escalated. Adbusters now encourages such Black Friday activities as credit card cut-ups, zombie walks through malls, and ten-person phalanxes wielding empty shopping carts to wheel through stores, disrupting the (otherwise no doubt seamless) flow of consumptive traffic.

In 2014, Black Friday experienced its first shopping decline since 2009, the height of the economic recession. But don’t hail Ted Dave as a crusader finally finishing his war.

With more stores open on Thanksgiving proper than ever before, and Walmart beginning its Black Friday sales at 6 PM Thursday—not to mention the ever-popular Internet, with the extra incentive of Cyber Monday three days later—the consumer impulse hasn’t so much been defeated for a day as become too powerful to concentrate on its once-native turf.

As consumerism evolves, the corresponding protest has yet to show the same flexibility in countering it.

U.S. DAY OF RAGE #OCCUPYWALLSTREET SEPTEMBER 17TH. BRING TENT. The iconic “very sexy poster,” as The Nation called it, was unveiled in Adbusters in mid-July, setting a date for the mysteri-

ous occupation. As September 17, 2011 grew closer, it took as its title “U.S. Day of Rage,” inspired by a Twitter account of the same name. With such a title, the day invited speculation about crowds of 20,000 protestors, comparisons to the Arab Spring uprisings, and—at least from libertarian news site The Blaze—fear of an uprising that would attempt to dismantle the stock market.

Just as the hype did not start on September 17, the movement didn’t end there. There was hope for a long time after—and there are still people who believe in the possibility of reorienting political power to the people. There were even other individual days where the 99 percent was called upon to rise up, such as October 15, a “global day of action.” Yet after that first day, the logistics and divides and realities, the question of whom should be represented and how, all set in. +++ Part of what differentiates the movement around “The Day We Fight Back” from earlier attempts at “democratic” grassroots mobilization is the big-name support it has gained from major NGOs (Amnesty International, the ACLU, Greenpeace) and tech giants. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and AOL previously came together as Reform Government Surveillance, a coalition that lobbies the world’s governments to regulate against web surveillance.

Google blogged about Tuesday’s events, and the company offered up its web freedom-oriented campaign platform Take Action to publicize the day.

Two years ago, another daylong protest laid the groundwork for February 11’s activities: a combined information blackout and protest of SOPA and its partner, PIPA (the PROTECT IP Act, in fact a much longer and scarier acronym), with similar broad-based web support. Wikipedia went black for a day on January 18, 2012. Google posted banner ads. Commentators who favored stricter intellectual property legislation railed against the idea of bias in sites intended to provide objective responses to searches; participating sites and protestors responded that the legislation posed a threat to all Internet access platforms and users, regardless of ideology.

Since then, tech moguls’ potential as allies has been called into question. Many of the largest companies supporting “The Day We Fight Back” have come under fire in the last year for providing users’ information directly to PRISM, a NSA surveillance project founded in 2007. Since that project became public in June, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk have faced a rocky relationship with their users, who grew wary of giving out new information. It seems, with their recent outspoken views on web security, they grew tired of the negative press. For the organizers of “The Day We Fight Back,” the motive behind making the movement digital was to attract the “politically aware, slightly more technical community” of Silicon Valley—not exactly the hackers and anarchists who idealized Aaron Swartz.

So what makes a movement think itself capable of speaking for all? Swartz, in his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, felt that a small, elite cadre was hoarding a shared cultural heritage. For those who claim to be honoring him, it is the belief that the only way of stopping an omnipotent and omnipresent power is with cohesion—even if it means making a deal with certain members of that very same elite.

EMMA WOHL B’14 disrupts the flow.

07

NEWS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

D.I.Y. NECCO crafting with corn syrup

by Sara Winnick illustration by Pierie Korostoff

February 14 is the only day of the year well-suited for red construction paper, public displays of affection, temporary cupid tattoos, and pink-accented outfits. It is also a day for unparalleled consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, cornstarch, gelatin, modified food starch, artificial flavoring, Arabic gum, xanthan gum, and food dyes Red 3, Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, and Blue 1. Operating under the assumption that no one actually wants to eat prescriptive pastel corn-paste, below are five alternate uses for the St. Valentine’s favorite mass-produced candy.

NECCO Candy Hearts are now yours to wear, to gift, and to wallow over.

1.

BEJEWEL ME

2.

Materials: embroidery thread, large sewing needle, fixative, NECCO Candy Hearts a.

b.

For yourself. i. Select NECCO Candy Heart with desired message. Keep in mind that this is your own Valentine to you, and from you, to be displayed publically. Recommended: “Cute” “No Way” “Mine” ii. Use needle to poke one horizontal hole through the sides of selected NECCO Candy Heart. Make sure the hole runs parallel to message on front for optimal visibility. Go slowly—NECCOs, too, are prone to breaking. iii. Spray punctured heart with fixative or other synthetic preservative agent. Note: this is a precautionary measure (may or may not be an ingredient in NECCO Candy Hearts). iv. Allow time to dry before placing near breathing organs. v. Thread needle with embroidery thread. Recommended: black string and nauseating light green NECCO Candy Heart with red text, to ensure an ironic read. For the extra-crafty: flip heart over and write original message with black thin tipped permanent marker on blank side of the heart. Recommended: “My Mom Loves Me” “X” “Winona forever” vi. String thread through heart. vii. Tie. Should hang conspicuously at the center of your neck, a la tattoo choker necklaces, circa 1993. viii. Cut strings short. Take care to avoid hair or fingers, as you will be tying and cutting behind your own neck.

For your Valentine. i. Select NECCO Candy Heart with desired message for your Valentine. Keep in mind the inevitable cheesiness of the present regardless of content. Recommended: “You Rock” “Love You” “Be Mine” ii. Repeat steps ii and iii above. iii. Thread needle with embroidery thread. Recommended: light pink, purple or white embroidery thread with similarly rosy NECCO Candy Heart to ensure an endearing and fun-loving read of your crush’s new fashion statement. iv. String through candy heart. v. Cut strings long. vi. Hold behind your Valentine’s neck, kissing the neck or the necklace briefly before you tie the knot. Should hang delicately as a pendant above belly button, below chest.

REFRIDGERATOR POEMS 2.0 Materials: adhesive magnet sheets, hot glue, fixative, NECCO Candy Hearts a. b. c. d. e. f. g.

3.

Spray hearts with fixative.

Cut 25 small circles out of adhesive magnet sheets.

Peel away paper covering sticky side of magnet sheets and add small dollop of hot glue for extra adhesiveness.

Place hearts on top.

Moan.

Allow time for glue to dry before attaching to refrigerator.

Use to form poems (love is real / real love… my baby / my boo / sunshine / be mine?… write me / tweet me / love me…) while waiting for water to boil, popcorn to pop, “Drunk In Love” to come on in the next room at a party.

SAYING NICE THINGS IS HARD Materials: fixative, bowl, NECCO Candy Hearts a. b. c. d. e.

4.

Spray hearts with fixative.

Pour into bowl.

Place bowl near envelopes, stamps, thank-you cards, pen, paper, and desk.

Smirk.

Pluck hearts out for procrastination and/or empty inspiration.

HOLD YOUR HAIR BACK Materials: fixative, bobby pins, hot glue, NECCO Candy Hearts a. b. c. d.

5.

Spray hearts with fixative.

Attach to bobby pins with hot glue.

Allow time to dry.

Use to hold hair back while ________. Recommended: vomiting, bike riding, performing coitus.

HAPPY WAGON Materials: fixative, emotionally resonant vessel, NECCO Candy Hearts a. b. c. d. e.

Spray hearts with fixative.

Place 10 hearts inside the “happy wagon” and 10 outside.

Place in a visible location.

Upon looking, ask “Am I happy?” i. If yes, add one candy heart to the container. ii. If no, remove one candy heart from the container.

Self-reflect.

SARA WINNICK B’15 wants you to write her / tweet her / love her.

FEBRUARY 14 2014

FOOD

08

THE RIM OF

by A.S.L. Illustration by Sara Khan

Aunt Diane and I hunch in the hospital waiting room. She unpacks her purse and places a pillbox, a paintbrush, and a sock on her shaking knees. She packs and repacks, drops and picks up her things.

“Is the pill?” she asks. Each word trembles like a damaged wing. I put back the pillboxes and tell her she’s good until tomorrow.

The receptionists ask me if she’s seen a doctor. The visitors gawk as we hobble to the gift shop to buy a snack. I know they expect her to slide off her feet, her shuffle punctuated by a clatter of bones. We’re there waiting for the doctors to stitch my grandmother’s wound; she fell down the stairs at the Napa Bed and Breakfast after telling my aunt to watch her step. “The blind leading the blind,” Diane says when it’s clear I’ve lost our way in the maze of tiled hallway. I put my arm through her arm and feel her weight in my hands.

When I was a child, Diane would disappear for whole days behind the door of my grandparents’ den. They kept her frozenness from me. I’d watch my mother go into the den, the high back of the couch blocking my view, and wonder what paralysis looked like. At dinner she’d be back just the same, limber in dark green linen, and then would be gone again before I’d noticed, narrowing out like the shadow of a tree. My mother talked about mornings and evenings, counting hours awake and hours behind doors, looking for trends in the sickness.

During my preteen years, we’d visit Diane’s cottage on the Napa River. There was a garden of lemon trees and a dock disintegrating in the water. My uncle’s yeasts grew in jars along the cold glass windows, rosemary dangled from the ceiling, and for miles and miles on all sides spread the vineyards, the grape bushes with their branches fixed upward. My aunt and uncle, well known for their eloquence, had worked for Bluefield Wine giving company tours to visitors.

Seated on her slumping couch in the cottage, I’d try to focus on Diane talking about her days at Bluefield as her torso jerked, her arms rotated back and forth and her legs folded over her shoulders. Diane would joke about extreme yoga, freak shows and all the weight she was losing from constant movement. We tried not to stare at the bruises on her calves.

“Let me get you a taste,” she’d say, crossing the room toward a bottle of champagne. Between couch and table, her legs would buckle and she’d come crashing down, one hand grabbing the leg of a nearby chair, the other catching her weight. We’d rally around her, but she’d assure us she was fine. It was happening more often than she cared to express.

In her presence we’d talk about books or movies, or speak optimistically about the upcoming brain surgery. I learned to screen out the ecstatic movements crackling around the fringes of sight. My mother always cried during the car ride back. Diane had lost her job, her driver’s license, and her independence. She’s stuck out here, my mother would say as I stared into the vineyards, each row of bushes slapping onto the next like a collapsing row of cards.

Digressing your hands, craning your eyes for grappling a memory to stay the fall: you woke an insect in human skin.

What if, by accident crushed?

09

FEATURES

+++ The doctors stitch up my grandmother and the three of us return to the Napa Bed and Breakfast. It’s where we always stay when we visit my aunt. This time we’ve arranged for my aunt to share a room with me, thinking she’ll be better off sleeping with us while her husband is out of town. Diane can’t remember what day he’ll be back.

That night, I wake to the sound of heels thumping against the floor.

“Are you okay? Do you want me to turn on the light?” I ask.

At the sound of my voice, the movement stops and I see her hands grab a fistful of sheet. A moment’s silence, then the words come one by one, squeezed through her throat like stones.

“Not chilled,” she says. She stands stock still, one hand clenching the lifted sheet.

I turn on the bed lamp and our squinting eyes meet across the room. She has made a tornado of the hotel’s excessive layers of sheeting and on the bedspread is a yellow stain.

I sit up and notice her shorts are around her ankles, her thighs and pubic hair in full view.

“Do you want to use the bathroom?” I say, trying to disguise my surprise.

She follows my eyes toward the toilet. “Yes,” she chokes, beginning to shuffle toward it. “No.” Her ankles twitch, her knees catch in the pajamas, and she falls into the bed, face flat against the mattress.

I put my feet on the floor, but I too am choking with every movement, unsure of what she wants.

“I’m fine.” She picks herself up onto her elbows and stares back at me with a stiff expression. I try a smile, wondering if Diane is aware of how much she’s changed.

“I… was… was…” Her voice congeals. “Was looking for my clad.”

“Do you want a sweater? Should I turn on the heat?”

“Oh, the temperature is fine.” The words arrive so fluidly I wonder if she means it or is merely using the first phrase that popped into her mind. “Unless you feel careful without me.”

I consider possible ways to interpret this sentence.

Diane draws from a swirling pool of words, catches one, knows it’s not right, and fishes once again. The signified is cut loose from signifier. Yet certain phrases remain in her grasp; she can still quote whole verses of Shakespeare, Yeats or Ezra Pound. This type of language—language that rolls off the tongue, a flourishing, uncontrollable vine—has staying power in an altered mind.

Lying on her side across the mattress, she tries to disentangle the pajamas from her ankles, but instead pulls them further up her leg. The struggle continues for several minutes, and finally I can’t stand watching any longer.

“You’re so close,” I say, trying not to condescend. I approach her side and she relaxes her hands and lets me pull the wet bottoms off her feet. I bring her another pair of pants lying across the lounge chair and hold open the leg holes so she can stick in her feet.

She thanks me, scooting to the top of her bed. I return to my mattress and for a moment we are silent. I wonder whether I can go back to sleep or if I should continue to send my words to dance with hers on the rim of meaning.

Instead she still twirled: rattled and bony now laugh echoing back to nights she couldn’t conquer.

On leaves like tears: strewn shells of what she was— hush and still hear wings shiver.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

MEANING +++ In “Ethics of Linguistics,” Julia Kristeva tells linguists to expand their study of grammar to poetry. To her, developing a poetic linguistics is a political project, a rejection of structural hierarchies. It makes me think of the campaign to change the conversation around deafness; the problem is not deafness, some say, but the way we’ve constructed our infrastructure to be inaccessible for the deaf.

Sometimes I wish Diane could live in a world of her own grammar. I want us to have no shame in the contortions, the staggering, or the splitting of signified from signifiers. If it were only a question of my family and me overcoming our embarrassment for Diane’s dance in hospital waiting rooms, of us coming to accept her speech as a form of poetry, the problem would be easy. But I can’t poeticize away the disorder. My aunt is self-aware, even on the mornings when self wanes out of sight. She wakes every day to her metamorphosis and can’t forgive herself. Tired of dependence, wishing to be of use in someone’s life, she longs for her former self.

I may doubt her consciousness that night in the hotel room, but the following morning corrects me. We are in the hotel dining room, and I am standing at the buffet putting together breakfast for my grandmother and my aunt.

“Sit down. Let me help you,” my aunt calls to me from her chair.

“She’s getting your breakfast, Diane. Be patient,” my grandmother says.

I pretend not to hear this exchange as I scoop fruit onto their plates. I worry Diane would not be able to serve breakfast without shattering the dishware and I am too impatient to let her try.

“Are you sure you don’t want a muffin?” I ask my grandmother as I returned with her meal.

“I’m fine,” my grandmother says loudly, touching my hand as I pass. “What would we do without you?”

Diane stares at my grandmother, but the words don’t come fast enough. I bring Diane’s breakfast and then return to the buffet to serve myself. “I usually like to eat eggs in the morning because yogurt is too cold for my stomach,” I tell them. “But the fruit and yogurt look good. And I might have to try this granola.” Talking fluidly feels like showing off, but I do it anyway, feeling it’s my duty to keep things light.

Then Diane snaps. Anger fetches the right words like a hook. “Sit down. I’ll serve you,” she cries.

I leave the buffet and sit down. Diane is silent, staring at the tablecloth. It’s like her own anger has shocked her, or some new invisible struggle has sidetracked her. Then she begins to eat. My grandmother eats her yogurt. A minute later, when it’s clear I’ve been forgotten, I stand up to finish serving myself, distracting them with more insincere praise for the food.

I want to say to Diane: Just accept. What other option do you have?

Loss never in proper place we pack unpack your past inside out your purse unfolds a raison yearn a wrinkled youth.

FEBRUARY 14 2014

+++ I imagine her alone at sundown, sitting at the kitchen table, watching the dock sway in the river. The light dissolves into the mountains, drosophilia settling to suck on the fruit of the vineyards.

Diane is at work on her watercolor pad. Each painting is rendered in muted colors, and the smooth lines form vaguely familiar shapes. Some look like flowers or kelp; some like houses with eyes, or wheels rolling into the water. Last time I visited I told her which ones I liked and asked for the source of her inspiration.

“There’s no idea at first… I start with the brush… a line.”

Diane communicates in colors oozing across a page, in lyric verses and harmonic currents. These languages tap a deep nerve that the disease has not yet touched. When my mother plays her ukulele, Diane stands perfectly attentive, one hand cupped behind her ear, singing “If I Had a Hammer” with her eyes focused on my mother’s strumming hand. In such moments, she seems miraculously freed from her constraints. She’ll utter whole sentences or cross the room with only the slightest limp.

“The arts in general take you to a place within the here and now. And I think that’s one of the beauties for people who may be suffering. They don’t have to think of past or future.

They have to think about now and now only,” Rachel Balaban told me when I spoke to her about Diane. Balaban is regional coordinator of the Dance for Parkinson’s Disease program and directs the Artists and Scientists as Partners at Brown. Parkinson’s Disease leads many people to overcome their hesitation about the openness of art, she said.

“As you lose your abilities and have to redefine yourself as the way your aunt has and others do, I think you lose that fear because it gets you in touch with parts of yourself that are starving to be expressed.”

Of course, that impulse to express oneself can exist simultaneously with nostalgia for a former, privileged self, a self that could integrate successfully into human systems. But human systems aren’t always the best at retaining their members. I remember this whenever we say goodbye and we’re driving out of Napa, past the vineyards crisp with drought, the knotted branches, the striped trunks of the towering eucalyptus. Humans produce chemicals that eradicate vineyard pests while altering brain chemistries: insecticides that can trigger Parkinson’s Disease in a healthy 45-year-old woman.

It’s in spite of those systems that Diane paints and sings. Sometimes she bikes a tricycle while my mother and I run next to her on the road by the parched riverbank. The air smells of the cracked yellow earth, of sand in the rushes. On her bike she is steady, her wheels keeping time to an inner melody. She can pedal without falter all the way home.

What if we were born to break into renewal— roots uprooted, unraveling sound.

Your brush gushed streams as wind swelled knees.

You waked an insect and dreamed up wings.

FEATURES

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EPHEMERA

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FALLING THROUGH THE NET food insecurity in Rhode Island

by Michelle Zheng illustration by Casey Friedman Erin, a food safety manager at the Mathewson St. Church meal site, was homeless for two years in the ‘90s. She fell through the cracks of worker’s compensation and, while financially insecure, made use of public benefits to supplement her food budget. What was given wasn’t enough.

“I did have the food stamp card and was able to buy some fresh fruits and vegetables every once in a while,” she said. “It doesn’t last long. In maybe the first two weeks of the month, you have some fresh vegetables. But after that you have to rely on the stuff that you get from the food pantries. I ate a lot of peanut butter and tuna fish right out of the can.”

14.9 percent of Americans are food insecure, meaning that they struggle to put adequate, healthy food on the table on a regular basis. That’s more than 1 in 6 Americans.

Rhode Island is hit particularly hard. 15.5 percent of residents are food insecure, six percent considered severely so–– both figures well above the national average. In Rhode Island, food insecurity is tied to the state’s high unemployment rate, large population of refugees and immigrants (who are often economically marginalized), and the decline of its manufacturing industry, which has taken rungs of the socioeconomic ladder with it. +++ Food insecurity is defined by more than just hunger.

“Really, food insecurity is about not having access to sufficient quantities of safe, nutritious, culturally appropriate foods,” said Dave Rocheleau, head chef at Crossroads RI, the largest homelessness services center in Providence. Beyond the simple need for sustenance is the need for food to be relevant to individuals’ dietary and cultural needs.

Fresh produce is generally more expensive than canned and processed goods, and harder to get at pantries and meal sites, which tend to receive more nonperishable goods because of their low cost and ease of storage. “I see it in my donations all the time ––carbs, carbs, carbs. Three quarters of my population are diabetic, and that’s the number one thing that we have donated,” Rocheleau said. “The things that they really should have: Lean meats, fruit, vegetables are harder to come by.”

The origins of the problem lie in national policy, particularly in longstanding agricultural programs. The US Farm Bill is a group of programs that determine national spending on agricultural subsidies and on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program). The agricultural portions of the bill were originally released as the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. The Act aimed to support Depression-era farmers by subsidizing their income in the face of falling crop prices. But now, it does nearly the opposite, subsidizing growers of a select number of crops—many of whom are well-off—at the expense of lowincome individuals, who face cuts in SNAP benefits as a direct result of this allocation of funding within the bill.

The Farm Bill subsidizes mainly corn and feed production, while delegating little funding to fruit and vegetable farmers. If the proportions on our plates matched the proportions of these subsidies, we’d be looking at a plate of corn, soybeans, wheat, and hay, with a garnish of cotton. On top: a sprinkle of fruits, nuts, and vegetables.

Asking people to eat more fruits and vegetables amounts to asking them to buy more expensive food, and usually taking more time to prepare it as well. “Doritos are cheap because

FEBRUARY 14 2014

we subsidize them. Significantly,” says Kayla Ringelheim, Community Access Program Director at Farm Fresh Rhode Island. “And fruits and vegetables are not so cheap. That’s so invisible to most people that we just assume that’s the way it is when really, we’re doing this. This is an active thing that is happening.”

This comes at the cost of health. Refined grains, fats, and added sugars are more readily available and inexpensive because of the allocation of food subsidies. But they’re also lower in nutritional content and more calorically dense. We’ve heard it before: overconsumption of such foods is linked to conditions like obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.

Yet our government incentivizes their consumption on multiple levels. In Rhode Island, even fast food chains accept SNAP dollars. Not only is fast food cheap because of subsidized ingredients on the back end—it can also be purchased with consumer vouchers on the front end. There’s a double reduction in cost to the consumer, a double incentive to choose unhealthy foods. +++ Farm Fresh Rhode Island, a nonprofit that runs farmers markets across Rhode Island, is working to incentivize the purchase of healthier produce by food-insecure consumers statewide.

Bonus Bucks, an initiative run by Farm Fresh Rhode Island, offers two dollars of free fruits and vegetables for every five dollars spent with SNAP benefits at farmers markets.

Farm Fresh started Bonus Bucks in 2009, and saw a 706 percent increase in SNAP usage at its markets after just one year. Its continued success since then has been clear: $23,676 in benefits was spent in 2009, and $73,818 in 2012. The program is charitably funded and has been implemented in cities all over the country.

Nationally, SNAP is the most direct policy solution for food insecurity in place, giving low-income individuals monthly benefits to use for purchasing food. But as too many have experienced, these benefits are often limited—and they’re getting smaller. Last November, Congress cut SNAP benefits by five billion, leading to a five percent decrease on average in benefits. And the recently passed Farm Bill proposes eight billion dollars in cuts to the program over the next decade.

Local groups are addressing these policy issues within the state. The Rhode Island Food Policy Council, for example, has sought to increase collaboration between different sectors of the state food economy, including nonprofits and statelevel lawmakers, to improve access to local food systems.

But despite these successes of local initiatives, the origins of the problem exist on a larger scale than local solutions can address. Scaling down food insecurity in Rhode Island will require legislative action far beyond the state.

MICHELLE ZHENG B’16 is a local initiative.

METRO

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SHARING FOR MONEY an interview with technology writer Tom Slee

by Houston Davidson illustration by Julieta Cárdenas

Technology lingo rings hopeful. Recently, a Silicon Valley-endorsed candidate for national office promised to bring about “Government 2.0” and claimed to wear “tech groupie” as a badge of honor.” President Obama keeps encouraging Americans to learn to code. A perpetual heroic aura hovers over the latest tech “start-ups,” promising “disruptive” impact through visionary innovation. A Great Laptop Theory of History. Yet there seems to be a troubling inattention to how it really impacts our society with its political and economic arrangements. What will happen to the classic stuff of political conflict? Beyond the buzzwords and glamour, much writing on technology lacks good answers.

Tom Slee’s work concerns the ethical and political consequences of the way we think, talk, and engage with technology. His columns have appeared in The New Inquiry, Jacobin Magazine, and on his own blog, Whimsley. In his published work, he challenges the popular vision that technology provides access to a shiny utopia where politics and economics are solved. We talk here about the loudly esteemed “sharing economy” and political ideology of Silicon Valley.

The Indy: I’ve heard the common Silicon Valley political ideology, if it indeed exists, referred to as Cyberlibertarianism. What does this term mean to you?

TS: It’s the view that technologists should be able to do whatever they want to do without interference from the state, rooted in a techno-utopian belief that digital technologists can solve social problems through engineering. Many belief systems are more about the culture people live in than an explicit set of commitments though, and Cyberlibertarianism is no different: it’s linked to Silicon Valley in the 1990s and California rugged belief in the unfettered individual. It has a strong appeal to people who haven’t thought much about what it means to build a good society.

The College Hill Independent: You talk about the language of transparency, the language of non-commercial civic engagement, and the romantic language of rebellion all being used as an appealing façade by tech companies for an agenda that has nothing to do with these things.

Tom Slee: If you go back into the early days of the Internet there has been a tension between sharing stuff on the one hand and commercialism on the other.

There’s this idea he has that we can now collaborate in a non-commercial way because of the Internet, because the costs of finding other people and the costs of working together with other people are lowered by the network infrastructure.

This idea feeds into broadly leftist ideas of self-organization, anti-hierarchy, an almost localism as if they [Internet users] were in a community, but now that community is the whole world. Those are very appealing ideas for a lot of people, including myself I might say. The problem is that what’s happened is that the rhetoric has stayed there, but the bulk of the activity when people are talking about this is now hugely commercial activity. There’s a real clash there in my mind between the commercial side and these notions of openness and transparency. This has been going for ten years now but this contradiction seems to get stronger and stronger.

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TECHNOLOGY

The Indy: What do you make of the existence of an anti-government refrain in a lot of the tech sector’s cyberlibertarian intellectual circles? Tech companies partially colluded in state surveillance; Smartphone makers didn’t wake up one day totally surprised to find that they had somehow implanted tracking devices in millions of pockets.

TS: Good question. If you look back at the early days of the Internet and its technological architecture, the idea was that of a large number of independent computers communicating with each other, with no particular center. It had that topology of being very egalitarian. Anyone could join and register an IP address.

Now, that architecture has changed. Now there is this hub and spoke thing, whether it’s Facebook or Wikipedia. You might try and picture it as a network of people, but it’s all peripheral computers talking to a central computer. Who is that central body that is mediating everything? It becomes important.

It’s not surprising if those technology companies like to continue talking about this as if it’s a network of individuals. At the same time that everything goes through their network, the rhetoric stays at the level of the individual.

“We’re just about people talking together,” they might say. Yet all those communications are stored on the same set of servers. The surveillance stuff comes out quite naturally from this.

The Indy: Do you think within the next decade we will see something in politics that will mobilize a tech-sector vision (e.g. cyberlibertarianism) into a real-world political coalition?

TS: First, I’m in Canada and things here are a bit different. Some of that seems to be particular to the States. But we certainly see it within some arms of government and not all of those necessarily all on the right. The [US] State Department has a fair amount, as is the case with their former employee Jared Cohen who is now working with Google [as the Director of Google Ideas, Google’s “think/do tank”]. If people of that kind decide to go political, they have the money clout to do it. But in the end it has a natural hostility to politics. I think that will keep them from entering politics. Now if they do enter, I think they’ll do it on the right and be inherently “anti-government.” On the other hand, there’s a strand that says that Silicon Valley votes Democrat. Maybe the California ideology is a simplification of what’s going on in the technology world.

The Indy: How about San Francisco with its tech commuters? They’re being charged with spoiling the character of the city by driving up real estate prices.

Both the employees inside the Google Bus that ferries employees from San Francisco 40 miles south to Silicon Valley and the activists protesting the Google Bus are likely to vote democrat. This may change. With the former group now reportedly being protected by security guards aboard the bus, how could anybody deny that something political is afoot?

TS: It’s politics without the politics. The tech view might say “all that political stuff is old-fashioned, it’s a product of institutions and we don’t like institutions.”

There’s a certain naïveté about that that, if it enters the political world, will hit a brick wall fairly soon. That’s just my guess.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The Indy: That brings up a point about the way that a lot of tech people view the role of their skills. A notable amount of tech sector voices espouse the principle that if you bring in the youth with their Computer Science degrees, they will solve things. I’m thinking of Code for America, which sends in “developers, designers, and researchers” to help out cities and counties across the country. Do you think that represents an instance of this tendency?

The Indy: Much investment has gone to scaling up websites that were built and run by volunteers with non-commercial intentions. You have written that “Private capital damages [these] open commons through three mechanisms. It erodes the common, it alienates the community that tends the common, and distorts the essential nature of the common.” Is there a way in which these can be scaled without commercialization?

TS: I do. Municipalities are not simply problems to be solved. They’re complex, interdependent communities. There are political conflicts and all kinds of issues that get in the way of having “effective solutions.”

If you simply try and stick a technological fix, you don’t end up getting very far. There are some really difficult problems in this world, and there are lots of people who have been working on them for a long time.

A lot of new technologies come with standard examples of how they can be useful. The Code for America example is that people can report potholes on their smartphones and get them fixed.

There’s a road around the corner from me that’s had potholes for three years.

The problem is not that they don’t know where the potholes are. The problem is lacking the resources and priorities to fix it. Code for America would need to go through the same process of realizing that technology is going to play a subsidiary role in solving complex municipal problems.

TS: There are some models but it’s not one-size-fits-all. In the end, there is a possibility as long as there’s modesty on the behalf of a technology provider.

Ushahidi, a website that came out of Kenya, has tried to provide map resources during times of crisis. During the Haiti earthquake it got a lot of publicity because its maps were supposed to help aid work. There was a lot of talk at the time, not by Ushahidi but by others, that this was a new model of grassroots aid done through the Internet which could provide on-the-ground help, in contrast to these big and cumbersome NGOs. The same tech being “disruptive” story that we hear all over.

It didn’t change everything in terms of aid. However, over the last three years, they’ve matured as an organization. Now they work with those aid agencies.

The Indy: TIME Magazine lauded the “shared economy” as one of “ten ideas that will change the world”. Pulling back for a second, what exactly is the sharing economy?

TS: It’s easier to list the exemplars than define it: Airbnb in short-term vacations; Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar in taxi services; in Europe there are more long-distance ridesharing services like Blablacar; and then TaskRabbit in the area of errands.

It’s become a very loose term. It no longer has much to do with sharing.

I’d say it’s now become “internet platforms that host peer-to-peer contracts,” so Airbnb matches hosts and guests, the taxi companies match drivers and riders.

The Indy: How do you position services like TaskRabbit, and Mechanical Turk that allow people to essentially outsource chores or brunt work to real people online? Are these really part of the sharing economy?

TS: You have to stretch it pretty far to encompass Mechanical Turk but there is a link, in that both the companies focus on micro contracts between peers. TaskRabbit and even companies like Homejoy, which is for house cleaning, identify as part of the sharing economy.

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The Indy: Is Wikipedia also an exception?

TS: I think it is. It’s huge and has a lot of flaws, but Wikipedia is a hopeful thing.

In 2002 there was this event and it gets called “The Spanish Fork”. It was a discussion whose conclusion was to maintain Wikipedia would be non-commercial.

Wikipedia continues to be an interesting place and continues to be valuable.

Whereas if you take something similar that has gone a different path, like IMDB, which is now owned by Amazon, it’s now a channel for the film industry. It’s useful but fundamentally different.

The Indy: How might you describe the “scene” of techno-criticism, if one can be said to exist?

TS: I don’t think there’s one coherent “scene” because critics (on both sides) come from so many different points of view. There are a lot (on both sides) in the academic world—people like Sherry Turkle from MIT on the critical side, who has a long history of studying human-robot interactions, then there are journalistic writers, and increasingly there are voices of criticism from within the technology world itself—people like Bill Joy who invented the Java programming language.

As technology has expanded to encompass so many aspects of our lives it seems like there are an increasing number of people who are moving beyond a simple pro- or anti-technology position. And I’d say the technology debates seem to cut across political right and left both on the broadly anti and broadly pro-tech sides.

TECHNOLOGY

14

PRESENCE

by Matthew Marsico illustration by Casey Friedman

It felt like I was giving out. I was smoking again: first just a cigarette after dinner, then, one after lunch . . . and then both before and after breakfast, etc. In my experience, these sorts of things escalate quickly. I hadn’t done my laundry in two weeks, I’d been wearing the same pair of socks for three days. I’m sorry if this detail is a bit much for you, but it’s the truth.

Don’t get me wrong: I was not suicidal, or anything like that. I was still showering every day. I am just calling it “giving out” for the purposes of this story because it felt like it feels when you break or sprain some body part badly, and it doesn’t hurt badly immediately, but the feeling in your stomach or the fact that you felt something go “click” and now you can’t stand up straight tells you something you may not feel or understand completely immediately. But “completely immediately” is a bad phrase: what I mean is that you may not understand any of it immediately, and you will definitely not completely understand it immediately. What I am saying is that these things take time, sometimes.

Another reason I am using this metaphor is that I am a big believer in the body’s signals, even when I don’t fully know what’s going on with them.

But I don’t know, it’s hard to say. I had been living with my brother in Charlotte, North Carolina. I grew up in the southern part of the city, almost in South Carolina—the Taco Bell we used to go to was actually in South Carolina. This is boring, I’m sorry, but I am not 100% sure myself which details here are important, so I’ll try to move quickly, because I do think some of this is important.

I had gone to school out of state, but I moved back after I graduated, because I didn’t think I could really handle any place faster-paced. My family was getting older: my father had just turned fifty-six, and my sister had just turned thirteen—she was about to go to high school, and I remember what high school was like, and I’ve heard it’s even harder for young girl adults—young-adult girls?—for adolescent women. So it seemed like a nice idea to be near my family. I moved back with my parents and sister until I got a job as a long-term sub teaching US History to middle schoolers, at which point I moved in with my brother, who was studying architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

But then I quit my job, and it was right after I quit, or maybe before, that I felt like I was starting to give out. I was unhappy. I was thinking of moving back north, maybe Maine or something. I called my mother to tell her I had quit.

“Do you usually take Idlewild or Tom Short to get to Ben’s place?” she asked, by way of response. “Idlewild” and “Tom Short” are roads in east Charlotte, and Ben is the aforementioned brother, whose house I was living in. She showed up a couple of hours later with some groceries, mostly vegetables.

I was lying on my bed smoking a cigarette when she walked in. She didn’t comment on the cigarette, she just smiled to herself and started to clean up my room. I remember when I was a kid she used to sit next to me on the couch while the family was watching television and pick at all the little whiteheads and ingrown hairs on my arms, and she was doing this to take care of me or something. I knew it was coming from a good place, but at the same time it kind of hurt and felt like kind of a weird gesture, kind of too-close— and so maybe this detail is a bit much for you, too, but what I am trying to say is that her cleaning my room reminded me of when she used to do that. I was very embarrassed.

“Where is your guitar?” she asked, bending over to pick up a pair of dirty socks.

“In the closet,” I said, cringing. I hadn’t played in a while. I used to sing in the chorus in high school and everything—though I always had trouble with the harmonies.

She stepped over a bunch of stuff on the ground (my laptop, more clothes) and opened the closet. She pulled out my acoustic guitar and started to play it, which was hard to do because she was standing up and it didn’t have a strap.

“Since when do you play guitar?” I asked, surprised.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

“Hold on. I brought something over,” she said. She leaned the guitar really gently up against my desk and went into the kitchen. I put my cigarette out and hid the butt in the ashtray next to my bed and stood up, like I thought I could get a new shot at a first impression when she came back. She came back holding my old CD copy of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, usually referred to as Led Zeppelin IV, or sometimes just IV. “What’s the best song on this record?” she asked.

I hadn’t listened to Led Zeppelin in years, because my tastes had changed a lot, but for a while it had been my favorite album. “‘When the Levee Breaks’ is my favorite,” I said.

She looked around my room for a CD player. I told her I didn’t have one. I felt very young.

“Can we put it on on the Xbox in the living room?” she asked.

She didn’t know how to do it, so she handed me the disc and I turned on the TV and put it in, and I used the Xbox controller to skip to Track 8. We both sat down on the couch in front of the TV. It started playing, and she turned it up a bit with the TV remote.

“It’s the last song on the album,” she commented, looking at the liner notes.

“It’s a perfect closing track,” I said.

When it finished, she asked, “Why do you like that song?”

I was taken aback. “Why do I like it?”

She had turned her whole body to face mine. I noticed all of a sudden that my hair was very greasy.

“Yeah,” she said. “Does it have to do with the drums?”

I’d played drums since middle school. “Yeah,” I said, and then I started to tell the story about how the drum track on “When the Levee Breaks” was recorded. It’s one of the most famous drum tracks in history—it sounds amazing, the snare drum sound is really amazing, and it was recorded with only one microphone in a stairwell in a mansion. I couldn’t remember if the take they used for the album was the first take they recorded or not, but I thought it was.

I stood up from the couch to start the song over. “Can you hear how hard he’s hitting the drums?” I asked. “John Bonham used to buy the biggest sticks he could find— the guys in the band called them his ‘trees’—and then he’d turn them backwards and hit the drums with the butt-ends. Each snare-drum hit sounds like—sounds like . . .” I said, and then I started to sing along with the drum part. I rewound the track again to the beginning, the drum intro, and I started doing the whole air-drumming thing—this is sort of embarrassing to think about now, but it felt really natural then—and I closed my eyes and was sort of nodding my head from side-to-side, air-drumming, and when I opened my eyes my mother’s were closed, but not like she was relaxed—like she was holding them closed, actively closed, in concentration.

Later, when I was living in Sacramento, I was driving home from work one day and fiddling with the FM radio. Sometimes when the weather is right you can pick up a couple of great stations from Oakland. One of these stations was a classic rock station, and that evening it was coming through, kind of, and I suddenly realized that the song it was playing was “When the Levee Breaks.” I hadn’t heard it in a long time, and the sound was cutting in and out, but the static didn’t bother me, because I knew the song so well.

It reminded me of how at chorus concerts in high school—all the guys in tuxedos and the girls in their black dresses, arranged in rows on the risers, everyone nervous, sweating, all our friends in the audience—the chorus director, Mr. Anderson, would play the first chord on the piano so we could hear our notes, and then he’d get up to the podium to conduct, and he’d smile, and he’d whisper: get your note, get your note—because you have to have the note really solidly in your head before you can sing it—and then he’d raise his baton and whisper: one, two, three, four: and then we’d sing.

FEBRUARY 14 2014

LITERARY

16

THE NEXT FRAME

by Arthur Schecter illustration by Katherine Hsu The Italian renaissance got its name for a reason. Immense technological leaps and the consolidation of wealth and power resurrected archaic knowledge and vivified contemporary pursuits. It was a rebirth in the fundamental sense of the word. The study of what was once considered to be fate written in the firmament became an arena of speculation as to how we could ever be the center of our cosmos.

Spurred by recent advances in telescopy and developing empirical frameworks, thinkers like Copernicus and Galileo struggled to articulate the idea of a decentered cosmos. Their views clashed directly with the institutions that made their discoveries possible. The knowledge produced by churches and universities came to question the doctrines of divine logic and geocentrism that those institutions held most dear.

At the same time, the patronage of magnates such as Lorenzo di Medici encouraged the recovery and translation of ancient philosophy. What we understand today as “the occult” was made possible by Medici’s push to transcribe and preserve the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus, the apparent orginator of Hermetic philosophy, who preached unity, connectivity, and correspondence between the spheres of creation. The emphasis on the mind and the imagination, on the inner world of esoteric thought, offered new life to a cosmology which was quickly losing its bearings.

Giordano Bruno, the Renaissance polymath, viewed the findings of Galileo and contemporary philosophical speculation through a similarly mystical lens. His work treated fidelity to one’s self as requisite to the search for truth. He not only anticipated the consequences of heliocentrism for cosmology—daring to speculate that the Sun is one of many stars, each orbited by many worlds, some of them like ours— he also paid the price for speaking centuries out of turn.

Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition.

His work predicted many of the guiding assumptions of the sciences today.

Institutional thought has never accepted what its creations make possible, what its own progeny discover.

Institutes promoting inquiry and reason in the Renaissance clung, as they do today, to the last, best image of inquiry and reason. But whatever the orthodoxy has of value it owes to the last, best heretics moved by inspiration.

Under the shadow of the Inquisition, some scholars chose the luxuries of dogmatic and scholastic authority over the risk of life and limb. But those who sought the connectedness in things followed their pursuit to the end, regardless of the divisions thrust upon them. In a profound sense, every visionary thinker has always been a sort of mystic, struggling with the experience of what he or she knew to be real, emerging from a tradition that never had a name for it.

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OCCULT

+++ Rationality itself is only a partial view. But what do we do with the whole picture?

I’ve neglected to explore what might be missing. I’ve hoped to avoid everything from funny looks, to academic fatwas against irrational silliness, to the gleeful sadism of institutional psychiatry, which so delights in putting the world into neat boxes because you’re dilly-dallying in the packaging process.

The resources available to scholars today—in both institutional funding for research and in the digitization of the humanities and sciences—are approaching a critical point.

To look within, seeking honestly to dispel the illusion of separation and stasis, is to see a path, a part to play, already laid out. And the visionaries of the past risked far more than ridicule for a mere fraction of the knowledge now available. +++ We need to troubleshoot our dialogue with nature, not nature itself. The way in which we learn is the very image of the world we’re trying to discover: an evolving, organic, self-aware world of reciprocal connections, not a set, mechanical world of replaceable parts.

MIT’s Mat Tegmark is laying groundwork to interpret consciousness as a fifth state of matter. Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, or PEAR, has been refining decades of research unequivocally showing the effect of human intent on quantum noise-based random number generators.

Research today radically suggests that the mind is not in the head. Preliminary studies point favorably toward quantum information storage by microtubules in the brain, a theory laid out by Sir Roger Penrose in the ‘80s. This suggests that the holographic model of the universe, conceived around the same time, should be seriously reconsidered today. Holography is a kind of analog recording that allows a 2D plate to show a 3D image. Even shards of the plate will reproduce the whole image, but the larger the piece, the sharper the image produced by the laser shining through it.

Holographic cosmology and the holographic theory of the brain assume that everything that exists contains its own interior map of the universe. Larger, more complex objects (larger pieces of the holographic plate) have clearer maps, human brains being the absolute extreme of complexity, and therefore awareness. Brains are information processing organs, but the nature of the information itself remains largely mysterious.

The physical is no longer the center of our universe, simply one conduit for awareness. And we can’t entertain any other positions if we are to seriously pursue research into occult phenomena.

There are decades of documented accounts and rigorous study on the subjects. Over 20 Nobel laureates have

conducted paranormal research, and many other scientists are formally demanding a reopening of these fields, their readmission to academic dignity. Etzel Cardena of Lund University authored an injunction to this end less than one month ago. Nearly 100 physicists, neurologists, and psychologists signed.

Evolutionary biologist Rupert Sheldrake has produced a testable hypothesis of morphic resonance: that the origins of form lie not only in the specific proteins coded for by DNA, but in fields of information (fields that put form into matter) of a nonphysical nature. These waves propagate across time, as suggested by species of rats which learn to perform the same trick with increasing proficiency across generations, regardless of the specific population or physical proximity. The idea that organisms and even minerals share a collective memory outside of physical space-time can be tested, but remains unfunded. These frame-breaking notions vegetate in a climate of general suspicion. +++ Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for prophesying a cosmology identical to ours. He pursued a unified vision with every means at his disposal, regardless of the consequences.

What’s our excuse?

We can remain complacent and insist that theory is best left refined until it magically sprouts legs; we can ruminate confidently how this whole mind business is inside the skull, how it’s only a matter of time before science lays it all out and restores order; we can be a good wife, a good father, a company woman, or a bohemian.

But what if we dare to live the realization, that the world out there and the world inside us is the same process doing the same thing? What could happen if we tried to express the unity in this vision?

Don’t fear being lumped with the new agers, the totalitarians, the cultists, or the nihilists. Don’t fear the spotty bibliography and the marginal scholarship. Talking systematically at length about the occult is part of the pursuit of knowledge. Something can be “all in your head” or “work fine on paper” and still be of vital important to how we see the world.

Following intuition into structured inquiry––however unorthodox––will never fail to put you on the side of history.

Giordano Bruno speculated that ours was not the only world orbiting the only star, anticipating the full consequences of Copernicus and Galileo’s formulations by whole centuries. To take faithful risks is to usher in the next frame. To take faithful risks can break open the universe and reveal everything, wide open, orbiting around a coherent point within all of us.

ARTHUR SCHECTER B’16.5 was just listening to an interview with Genesis P. Orridge and Robert Anton Wilson, and pretty much approves of life in general.

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the list Friday, February 14 Self-Massage Workshop

3–4PM / / 95 Empire St., 3rd Floor Dance Studio // $5 Some one named Betsy Miller is going to lead a Self Care Workshop. Betsy wants you to Relax, Restore, Rejuvenate! With Betsy you can learn and practice simple self-massage, somatics, and visualization techniques to relieve tension, decrease stress, and feel awesome. All are welcome to learn from Betsy.

Saturday, February 15 Queer Salon

7PM // 186 Carpenter St., Providence It’s an interdisciplinary series exploring queer art and art by queers, featuring visual art, performance, poetry, prose, films, plays, essays and everything in between. There will be readings by Susan Jane Bigelow, Imogen Binnie, Elliot DeLine, Red Durkin, Tom Léger, and Riley MacLeod. Also, Topside Press will be there. Their mission is to publish authentic transgender narratives.

Wednesday, February 19 The Evolution and Transformation of Civil Wars Over the Past Two Centuries

5–6:30PM // Watson Institute, Joukowsky Forum, Brown University, 111 Thayer St., Providence Stathis N. Kalyvas will be speaking about the topic in the title of his talk. He is an Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science and director of the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at Yale University. http://events.brown.edu/even

TECHNE: A Creative and Educational Model Emphasizing Difference

8–10PM // Behind the Orwig Music Building on the corner of Hope St. and Young Orchard Ave., Providence

Show

TECHNE offers modular workshops that combine sound, technology and improvisation. Its workshops incorporate organic, analog and digital realms as tools for expression and provide opportunities for students to listen, dialog, share and vocalize.

An important aspect of TECHNE is addressing gender imbalance within electronic music fields by introducing young women to technology and alternative ideologies of music making.

Downtown Boys (release) , Shady Hawkins (welcome to Providence), Power Masters, The YaBeautifuls. Shey Rivera is hosting.

FORM A LOG / UNICORN HARD-ON / BROWN RECLUSE ALPHA / TITANS OF JAZZ

JENNIFER AVERY | (numb)Charlottes Afternoon Tea

“Electronic. Experimental. Mythical.” Can’t say no to that!

Ms. Avery will share readings from Lucy Clifford and her own writings, “Arch(i) texture” and “Penelope and Danathar,” while serving tea and small nibbles. RSVP today to this exciting event during the run of “(numb)Charlottes”! Creative attire encouraged!

Thursday, February 20

9PM // Spark City // $5

4–7PM // Yellow Peril Gallery, 60 Valley St. #5, Providence

Sunday, February 16 2014 Swim Championship Finals

1PM men, 5PM women // Katherine Moran Coleman Aquatics Center, 235 Hope St., Providence // $5 student, $8 general admission I don’t like competition but it’s really fun to watch people swim! You can even just watch the water around them—and usually people are doing the same stroke at the same time, which makes it even more fun to watch.

Be My Ally: The Upstander Play

7PM Fri., 3pm Sat. and Sun. // Media and Performing Arts Center, The Met School, 325 Public St., Providence // pay what you can Nine young playwrights, each in the fifth grade, have collaboratively written a fulllength play around the theme of acts of kindness, and turning bystanders into upstanders in bullying situations. This is a Manton Avenue Project Production.

Monday, February 17

8PM // MACHINES WITH MAGNETS, 400 Main St., Pawtucket // $8

Maribo: A solo show by Diane Zhou

7–9PM // Gallery 221, List Art Center, 64 College St., Providence The Independent’s own Diane Zhou will provide artwork and, I guess, cheese.

RISD Apparel Departmental Exhibition: Opening Reception 6–7:30PM // Woods-Gerry Gallery, 62 Prospect St., Providence There will most likely be free food. No free clothing.

Screening of Malcolm X

12:30–2PM // The Unity Center of Rhode Island College, 600 Mt. Pleasant Ave., Providence The movie chronicles the intellectual and spiritual enlightenment of the man born Malcolm Little—who became Malcolm X and died El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz—from his boyhood through his rise and fall in the Nation of Islam to his assassination on Feb. 21, 1969.

Show

9PM // Spark City // $5 Libyans + White Load + Funeral Cone

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom three one-hour episodes // online

I was researching psychiatric prescription drug use on the Internet yesterday and I found this documentary on freedom. It’s from the BBC and the thing about the BBC is that they treat their viewers as citizens, not so much as consumers. The description on the website says “This series… [explores] the concept and definition of freedom, specifically, ‘how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom.’” https://archive.org/details/AdamCurtis_TheTrap

Tuesday, February 18 50/50 : artist/context

10AM–5PM // Gelman Student Exhibitions Gallery Chace Center, 2nd floor, 20 North Main St., Providence This is a graphic design exhibition curated by by Chloe Lee MFA ‘14 in Graphic Design and Minkyoung Kim MFA ‘15 in Graphic Design.

Open Life Drawing

6–8:30PM // 150 Empire St., Providence // $6 I’ve put this in the list before but I also feel like it’s ok to do it again. This happens every Tuesday. Bring your drawing supplies. There will be a model.

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