the college hill A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY SEPTEMBER 26, 2014 | V29 N3
independent
MANAGING EDITORS Alex Sammon, Lili Rosenkranz, Greg Nissan NEWS Sebastian Clark, Kyle Giddon, Elias Bresnick METRO Rick Salamé, Sophie Kasakove, Cherise Morris ARTS Lisa Borst, Eli Pitegoff, Erin Schwartz FEATURES Jackie Gu, Matt Marsico, Sara Winnick TECHNOLOGY Patrick McMenamin SPORTS Zeve Sanderson FOOD Sam Bresnick LITERARY Kim Sarnoff, Leah Steinberg EPHEMERA Mark Benz X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff LIST Polina Godz, Megan Hauptman DESIGN + ILLUSTRATION Casey Friedman, Ming Zhen COVER EDITOR Jade Donaldson SENIOR EDITOR Tristan Rodman STAFF WRITERS Mika Kligler, Will Fesperman, Dash Elhauge, Stephanie Hayes, Jamie Packs, Pranay Bose STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Andres Chang, Amy Chen WEB Edward Friedman COPY Mary Frances Gallagher, Paige Morris BUSINESS Haley Adams COVER ART Jade Donaldson MVP Lisa Borst
VOLUME 29 | ISSUE 3
NEWS 2 Week in Review
eli pitegoff & zeve sanderson
METRO 3 Puff Puff Pass cherise morris
5 Where’d Everybody Go? sophie kasakove & rick salam
12 The Buddy System erin schwartz
ARTS 4 Different Andies dash elhauge
7 Tweedy Bird lisa borst
LIT 17 ?
ashlyn mooney
SPORTS 15 Cooking the Books
kyle giddon, tristan rodman, zeve sanderson, & will underwood
FEATURES 9 Come Together will fesperman
13 Tides of March
malcolm drenttel & lance gloss
FOOD 16 Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weeni sam bresnick
FROM THE EDITOR S We are having some printer problems. Whose printer? Why? What are we printing? Some words. We wrote some words here on our computers and we wanted to print them out. Could we read them if we didn’t print them out? Yeah, but it would be worse. What? It would just be less good. Hey everyone! Oh wait y’all are having printer problems? We are having some printer problems, yeah. Terribly sorry! It’s my printer. I am sorry about my printer, I don’t know if it’s going to print the words out. What’re the words y’all are trying to print out? Well, we wrote them. It’s not a big deal. We like them, but they don’t mean much. But it would be a lot worse for them to not be printed out. We mean, it would be better for them to be on paper. No, that makes sense to me, yeah. They’re not any more there on paper than they are on our computers, maybe. Are they? Maybe, but it’s nice to have them on stuff that’s not our own computers because then it’s like they’re something else. They’re from us but they’re not ours. Well, since my printer is broken, y’all could write them out by hand. Well, we don’t know if we want to do that. We are pretty out of handwriting shape. Our hands all hurt quite a bit. - MM
EPHEMERA 6 Ping!
ben ross
X 18 Rodney layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff
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.
In last week’s issue, the illustration for “Homeward Bound” was falsely attributed to Andres Chang. The illustration is in fact by Kristine Mar.
THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS
WEEK IN HUMANITY by Zeve Sanderson & Eli Pitegoff illustration by Ming Zhen
TITANS OF INDUSTRY
FACE BURGER
You know the image: Leonardo DiCaprio standing at the bow of the ill-fated Titanic, arms spread wide-open, yelling into the wind, “I’m the king of the world!” Last Saturday, the actor came one step closer to fulfilling his prophetic proclamation, as United Nations Ban Ki-moon appointed him an official UN Messenger of Peace (UN-MOP) with a special focus on climate change. The appointment came just in time for last Sunday’s massive environmental protests across the globe, strategically staged just days before the international UN Climate Summit hosted at its headquarters in New York. With 40,000 people marching in London, 30,000 in Melbourne, 25,000 in Paris, 15,000 in Berlin, and over 400,000 in New York City, protestors demanded that climate change no longer be viewed as a speculative issue of tenuous importance to the citizens of the world. Standing at the podium in front of hundreds of the world’s leaders at the Climate Summit, DiCaprio made certain things clear: “I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters, often solving fictitious problems.” The world leaders looked on with wonder. “I believe mankind has looked at climate in that same way, as if it were fiction,” he went on. Though his appointment is largely symbolic, Ban Ki-Moon’s idea is that DiCaprio’s Xfactor—the type of charm and good looks that earned him the 2006 runner-up spot for Time’s “Sexiest Man Alive” title— will raise awareness for one of the most pressing issues of our age. The fear is that perhaps one day Titanic will come to represent a twisted, Utopian vision of the past, in which the biggest threat associated with icebergs is their very existence. The hope is that icebergs remain the villain, and DiCaprio our catharsis-inducing love-boat. -EP
On September 21, FOX announced it had hired London Mess Chef James Thomlinson and food artist Miss Cakehead to make human-flavored burgers as a promotion for season five of Walking Dead. The culinary duo spent months scouring pages of testimonials from famous cannibals in search of a faux-meat recipe worthy of its real counterpart, finally deciding on patties of veal, pork, and bone marrow. While this food experiment was meant to be a one-time marketing ploy, we all know where this is headed: the online flier that accompanies the press release lauds human meat as the tastiest of all the animal kingdom, the creations are handed out at a one-day pop-up stand called Terminus Tavern in an East London location released via Twitter, crowds swarm the makeshift eatery, and the burgers are devoured within the hour. Reviews are spectacular. Dinner Party Daily raves, “It’s good enough to bring out the Hannibal Lecter in us all.” The Cannibal Independent, the second most distributed weekly in the cannibal community, echoes this praise: “It takes me back to the first time I ate man. Morning Star© has a new market.” An anonymous blogger, EatMeEatYou11, writes on a Reddit thread, “I can’t believe it’s not human.” Buzzfeed publishes “17 Reasons You Should Eat Your Neighbor.” It becomes the most shared list of 2014. What started as promotion transforms into gastronomy. Drawing inspiration from Mao Sugiyama, who prepared his own testicles for Tokyo diners in 2012, restaurants begin serving consensual cuts—meat farmed from people willing to give up their limbs to the highest bidder. A nutritional study finds that an all-human diet is beneficial to athletic performance, giving new meaning to the proverbial shit-talk “I’m going to eat you for breakfast.” The Catholic Church mandates that human meat replace communion wafers in order to shorten the leap of its churchgoers’ faith. To defend cannibalism against its moral opposition, the growing human-meat industry forges a PR campaign, re-branding their position pro-sapiens. “The human body contains enough protein to meet the daily nutritional requirements for 60 adults,” the pro-sapiens lobby’s website states, quoting the flier from FOX’s 2014 press release. A true utilitarian delicacy. The debate goes to Washington DC, where, during speeches about a bill making cannibalism illegal (it’s currently legal), Rand Paul proclaims to a ravenous Congress, “Let the market determine morality,” then takes a bite of a grilled forearm. Too late to turn back now. -ZS
SEPTEMBER 26 2014
NEWS
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DOPE BEATS Groovy advocacy and marijuana regulation at the cannabis caucus “Oh you mean the thing with the moon bounce?” said every friend I tried to convince to come with me to the “Cannabis Caucus,” presented by Regulate Rhode Island, a statewide coalition of organizations and Rhode Islanders working to legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana. The event was the first of its kind—one part networking event, one part political rally, one part local electronic music showcase. The mix of concert vibes and political content intrigued me. All my friends declined to join me there, but given my support for the cause and genuine interest in what this unconventional convention was all about, I decided to fly solo. Still relatively unsure of what the event would look like, I made my way downtown after finishing a joint. It was only appropriate, I figured. I listened to the eerie sounds of vintage Danny Brown trap music. Brown, a pioneering goon and well-known champion of cannabis, would surely get me into the right mindset. I would undoubtedly be all about that bass by the time I arrived. I mused on how much fun playing in a moon bounce would be in my foggy state of mind. Whew—Westminister was a long street, I thought to myself as I passed lot number 140, my legs weary. I was going to 276. I eventually walked past a screening of O Brother Where Art Thou in a lot, and, tempted as I was in my dreamy state, I didn’t stop. I had made it to 260, too close to veer off track. When I finally arrived at Aurora Art Space, the downtown venue that hosted the event, a small crowd was gathered outside, chatting, and smoking—only tobacco, of course. After realizing I left my wallet at home, I narrowly avoided the five dollar donation at the door and slipped in. Right on time for the first speaker. There was no moon bounce, which disappointed my fantasy to bop around weightless for a while, though its absence was not too surprising. About 20 people and I drifted into the spacious back room. The sparseness of the crowd made the room expand in my mind. Many others stayed in the front bar area. One of the event organizers, Jared Moffat of Regulate RI, gave a brief welcome, emphasizing the diversity of the coalition—a theme that would pervade the evening. Sam Bell, State Coordinator of the Rhode Island chapter of the Progressive Democrats of America, was the next to speak. Both he and the next speaker, Republican Providence mayoral candidate Dan Harrop—whom the liberal Bell introduced as “the next mayor of Providence”—started by articulating the human costs of the War on Drugs and the undeniable link between marijuana criminalization and rampant mass incarceration. Harrop went on to say legalization was one of the most important contemporary civil rights issues, referring to it as a “moral imperative.” Rhode Island was the 15th state to decriminalize small quantities of marijuana. The law, which passed in 2012 and went into effect in April 2013, makes possession of less than an ounce of weed a civil violation with a $150 fine. Three violations in 18 months, however, add up to a misdemeanor charge with larger fines of up to $500 and the possibility of a 30-day sentence at the RI Adult Correctional Institute. The Marijuana Regulation, Control and Taxation Act, if passed by the RI state legislature this session, would end marijuana prohibition for those of legal age (21 years old) and would regulate and tax marijuana similarly to alcohol. According to a survey conducted last year by Marijuana Policy Project, 52 percent of Rhode Islanders support legalizing and regulating weed. Another recurring theme in my conversations with several caucus attendees was legalization’s prospective job benefits and potentially positive effects on state revenue. Moffat returned to the stage to make an announcement about prepared letters in support of legalization that guests could sign and send to state legislators. If you didn’t know your representative’s name, event volunteers would find the name for you by looking up your address. There was also a photo booth. The first remarks were concise. Then the first musical act, Kazamier, began as time stalled. Lo-fi synth beats pulsed from the background, as most folks returned to the coldly lit bar area. The music was the perfect mood for my haze. The dance floor was largely unoccupied for most of the
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by Cherise Morris illustration by Brielle Curvey
night. Never more than ten people were scattered under the flickering lights, bobbing their heads, at any given time. Folks seemed more interested in networking than the music showcase. The music, which had already faded to an obnoxious murmur in the background, seemed even more unnecessary. I found myself chatting with Harrop later in the night. I asked about the striking cross-party coalitions around legalization movements in Rhode Island and across the nation. “It’s simply not a party issue at this time,” Harrop mused aloud. The crux of the cause, remarked Harrop, is the aversion to “getting involved in people’s lives.” Harrop, a psychiatrist, compared having a joint to drinking a beer. Percussion got heavier throughout the mix. And then the first set was over. Moffatt returned to the stage to introduce the next few speakers. Each two consecutive DJ sets were punctuated by brief political commentary for the rest of the evening. The night’s thematic pendulum, which swung between political commentary and synth vibrations, was difficult to navigate. A representative from Brown’s chapter of Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, reiterated in two or three sentences the implications of marijuana prohibition—namely extraneous incarceration—for young people, particularly young people of color. The crowd was steady at anywhere between 50 and 60 people all night—and surprisingly intergenerational. But immediately I noticed that the overwhelming majority of event attendees were white, consistent for the duration of the event. It was refreshing to hear so many people dissect the intersections of race, class, and the so-often skewed and racialized enforcement of marijuana laws. At an event that was branded as free and open to the broader Providence community, however, as one of the three people of color I encountered in my one and a half hours at the caucus, a more—let’s say—colorful constituency would have been nice to see. And while all the commentary around this aspect of the state regulation debate was consciously critical, many of the speakers’ advocating on behalf of populations absent from that particular room suggested a disconnect to me.
Write-in gubernatorial candidate Anna Armstrong entered the stage to chants of “beat Buddy Cianci!” Beyond briefly mentioning home grows—personal-use marijuana plants grown in the comfort of one’s own home—as a “crucial” aspect of her platform, Armstrong’s speech was one of the longest and most off-topic of the night. One avid Armstrong supporter kept yelling “AMEN” during her remarks. She spent several minutes talking about the larger function of the political system and how she could win the election as a write-in candidate with no campaign funding. She struck me as an odd choice to speak at the event until I later realized that Armstrong had given me one of her campaign stickers when I first entered Aurora. The sticker had a large tree on it beneath the words “Anna Armstrong for Governor,” so I figured she was down with the cause. I spent most of the night trying to chase down Moffat. “Five minutes,” he kept saying. But an hour went by. I wondered how the event had been conceptualized. I wanted to ask him how the organizers selected the musical acts. If they even had. And was there any connection at all between the music and the message? If there was, I missed it. Detached from the relevance of the commentary on the issue, the music made the whole night seem as disjointed as Armstrong’s speech. Was that the point? Aha. Taken metaphorically, the manic atmosphere of the event could have been some grand allegory for the state of the legalization debate in Rhode Island. Drawn to the cause for a multitude of reasons that are as disparate (yet valid) in origin as the average age of any two caucus attendees, the coalition members and legalization advocates and stakeholders are as scattered as the evening’s agenda. I never spoke to Moffat. And I left before I could see what was up with all the hype around this moon bounce cat, but after checking out his soundcloud page, he seemed OK— even if he isn’t an inflatable castle. CHERISE MORRIS B’16 thinks you should just say “now.”
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
A PART OF ME Pop-punk’s lo-fi resurgence Dylan Baldi shrugs and strums a couple quick chords on his Gibson. His mustache rolls back and forth over a smile as he mumbles. Between his entropic mane, thickly forested jowls, and horn-rimmed glasses, his fuzzed-out face gives no other hint of his expression beyond a floating smile. “I feel like a different person than when I wrote [our previous album]… I hope I’m getting better.” Baldi has just finished “I’m Not Part of Me,” the second song of his set for KEXP in Seattle. “There’s a way I was before,” it begins, “But I can’t recall how I was those days anymore.” +++ Cloud Nothings, Baldi’s band, is one of many in a resurgence of lo-fi pop-punk. Starting off as a disillusioned college student uploading Garageband recordings to MySpace, Baldi completely embraced the lo-fi aesthetic: record everything yourself, run your vocals through a shitty amplifier, don’t use fancy drum sets, and let bright fuzz reign, reign, reign through your mix. The past six years has seen the pages of Pitchfork light up with bands embracing the lo-fi aesthetic: Wavves, FIDLAR, Bleached, Girls, King Tuff, Best Coast, Harlem, The Orwells, Twin Peaks—all slicking back wayfarers, glugging cheep beer, and trying almost too hard to make it clear as day that they, like their progenitors, don’t give a fuck. This new wave of bands borrows endlessly from the attitude and sensibilities of early ‘90s pop-punk rock. When I saw The Orwells last year through the sprawling arms and projectile sweat of a mosh pit, the lead singer sprayed his water bottle at the crowd. 20 years prior Green Day was starting a mud fight with the audience at Woodstock ’94 so large they had to stop their set. Cloud Nothings croon, “My mind is always wasted listening to you;” Green Day sings, “As you sit around feeling sorry for yourself.” The same energetic kids are picking the same fights, singing the same bratty lyrics. But why? Why are we seeing these same attitudes sneak back 20 years later? Aren’t we, like Baldi says, different people than we were in the past? A first glance at music videos makes it seem as though we’re not. Blink-182’s video for “All the Small Things” features band member Tom DeLonge sitting on the toilet dressed in a borderline fluorescent white boy-band suit, a re-enactment of a Britney Spears video, and a naked Blink running away from the ocean, junk swaying in the beach air. The point being, Blink had no problem looking like a bunch of goofballs. Which isn’t to say that today’s reincarnation of pop-punk is
necessarily serious, but each act of humor is relentlessly clear about its own tongue-in-cheek-ness, to the point where the tongue is protruding several inches from the face. FIDLAR’s recent video for “No Waves” begins with a long ‘80s sitcom intro, à la Full House, that at a first glance might seem in league with the goofiness of Blink. But even this has the camcorder static inserted, a person who flips off the camera. Everything is overdone to the point where it tips the balance from camp to sarcasm. It’s still goofy, and it’s lovable in the same way that Blink’s videos are, but there’s a certain fear to it, as if the band is protecting itself from being called a sham, from someone claiming that they’re not serious enough, that there’s no real emotional depth to them. Green Day didn’t launch themselves into the stratosphere with the messy vocals and sharp distortion of Kerplunk. They did it two years later, with the creamy bass and bright overdubbed guitars of Dookie. “Welcome to Paradise” was re-recorded on Dookie and became a hit. Green Day’s success came with the abandonment of a lo-fi aesthetic. Those bright guitars and tightly compressed harmonies became the hallmark of the pop-punk sound. Slews of spiky haired blonde kids screaming how much they hate the popular kids ran with the same aesthetic: The Offspring, Sum 41, Yellowcard, Simple Plan. But that sound was just the concession that Green Day had made. Green Day came from the legendary Gilman DIY scene in Berkeley. They served as a release for the kids who sold burgers and mopped floors during the week, moshing in a small, dirty club with writing on the wall. They had nothing, and they were proud of it. Those kids didn’t want to see more than a couple amps and some young kids like them on stage. They didn’t want guitar tones drowned in expensive pedals. That was the scene Green Day loved; Operation Ivy and Rancid were the bands they idealized. But they became famous for the bright, thick sound they used in Dookie—the very compromise they had made to make their music more accessible. And the Gilman scene hated them for it. Years later, when Green Day returned to the Gilman after the release of Dookie, they found “Green Day sucks” written on the bathroom wall. In 2008, Green Day recorded an album under the name The Foxboro Hot Tubs, using nothing but an 8-track and a crunchy guitar tone reminiscent of the one used on Kerplunk. They picked Best Coast as an opening act on their last tour a couple years ago. Between the two aesthetic decisions, Green Day seem to be trying to reclaim whatever it is they lost 20 years ago, returning to their Gilman roots. They became one
by Dash Elhauge illustration by Brielle Curvey of the biggest bands in the world, a band that even middleschoolers were too cool to like. By the time they released American Idiot in 2004, Green Day had the booming drums and resounding guitar of arena rock. They were Grammy winners. The only way they could make a lo-fi album was to abandon their name entirely. In this way, the resurgence of lofi bands seems like an attempt to offer an alternative vision of what pop-punk could have been—perhaps even what Green Day had always intended. But all this seems ironic. Recording technology has only increased in fidelity over the past 20 years. Even home recording has reached a point where everything can be done with reasonably high quality. It seems bizarre that to make a recording sound more authentic we have to consciously and purposefully distort the sound. I asked The Orwells recently how they recorded Remember When during a Reddit AMA. For “Mallrats,” they said, they ran everything, including the vocals, through shitty amplifiers in order to bring out that lo-fi sound. Again, there seems to be a kind of fear, a desire to distort before anyone can claim that they’re trying to bring forth tremendous emotional depth. To try very hard to make it ostensibly clear that they’re not trying to create something that delights or moves the listener, even if that’s exactly what they’re trying to do. It’s kind of like not studying for your chemistry final and then drawing an elephant on the front of your blue book instead of taking the test. Do you want to be known as that kid who flunked the chem final, or that ballsy kid who drew a huge fucking elephant chowing down on some hydrogen atoms and walked away? The kid who leaves the exam and the bands in the poppunk resurgence have one thing in common: they’re absolutely terrified of failure. Today’s world doesn’t forget. Everything is recorded, everything is broadcast. You don’t get to make a shitty album and just do a better job next time. That shitty album is going to be immortalized on the Internet. Every time someone googles your band, that 2.0 album on Pitchfork is going to rise right to the top. We feel nostalgic for a time when you could fuck around and experiment, when everything traveled by word of mouth and people only ever heard about the albums they should be listening to, not the shitty ones. The lo-fi tones of the pop-punk resurgence seems to be nostalgic for this pre-Internet era, to display a desire to return to the “golden era” of the resurgence’s heroes—but only partly. +++ Baldi languidly strums his guitar and croons out the side of his mouth. TJ hunches over his bass and anchors the chaos of Baldi’s strumming. Jayson, wearing a wolf t-shirt, smashes the ride cymbal so fast his arms seem detached from his body. Together, Cloud Nothings buzz and cut through the air, bouncing against the walls of KEXP. Eyes closed, bellowing so hard he blows bits of his own beard apart, Baldi croons the chorus to “I’m Not Part of Me,” an almost simultaneous rejection and nod to the heroes of pop-punk past. “I’m not you,” he croons. “You’re a part of me.” DASH ELHAUGE ’17 cannot draw elephants.
SEPTEMBER 26 2014
ARTS
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LIKE A WHISPER
Rhode Island's quiet depopulation
by Sophie Kasakove and Rick Salamé
In late July I saw James Diossa, the 20-something mayor of Central Falls, shaking hands with supporters of state representative candidate Shelby Maldonado at her fundraiser. I was there as an intern for UNITE HERE, where Maldonado was also employed. Angel Taveras and Gina Raimondo made 30-second appearances, and Speaker of the House Mattiello held court over by the bar. I eventually walked over to the ever-smiling Diossa and asked him whether he remembered doing an interview back in May with someone named Sophie Kasakove from The College Hill Independent about depopulation in Rhode Island. He claimed to remember, and I asked how he felt about the way things were going in Central Falls. He quickly blurted out that there was no depopulation problem and stopped me before I could press him. Abruptly, he insisted he had to leave the fundraiser immediately, though half an hour later I spotted him near the buffet, grinning away. But the elephant in the room remains—Rhode Island’s population is indeed shrinking, you’ll just never hear it on the campaign trail. Everyone’s embarrassed. +++ A typical classroom at Warwick Veterans Public High School has between eight and nine students. This is not an indication of a progressive mission to reduce class sizes: the city of Warwick simply doesn’t have enough children to fill its schools. Over the past two decades, the city’s school population has been decreasing by one to two percent each year, dropping from 19,000 in the 1970s to 9,900 in 2013, according to Warwick parent David Testa. Estimates indicate that the city will lose another 1,000 students in the next 10 years. This dramatic drop in school population has led to the closure of several public schools in the city in the past decade, with more closings and consolidations in the works. Recently, the school board proposed transferring the population of Warwick Veterans High School to Pilgrim High School on the other side of town. The plan was met with so much resistance from Warwick Vets students, parents, and teachers that it was suspended, pending reevaluation by an outside consulting committee. Many Warwick families had deep ties to the school, with multiple generations having attended, according to the Providence Journal. Cities and towns all across Rhode Island have faced similar challenges resulting from depopulation in recent years. In the past three years alone Rhode Island’s population fell by nearly 3,000 people, making its growth rate the slowest in the country. Numerically speaking, this population decrease has two major causes: the decrease in birth rate and an increase in out-of-state migration. The slowing of birth rates is fairly consistent with regional trends, as census results show that New England is the least fertile region in the US. More concerning for state politicians and residents is the state’s net migration rate: for most of the last quarter-century, Rhode Island residents have been steadily moving to other states. In five separate years, the state lost 10,000 or more residents to other states, peaking at a loss of 12,566 in 2006, on the eve of the financial crisis. The loss in population is so severe that Rhode Island is likely to lose one of its two delegates to the US House of Representatives in the coming years. According to Rhode Island’s Principle Planner Amanda Martin, the recession, which “started early and lasted longer in Rhode Island than in other states,” has had a direct effect on the state’s population. High unemployment rates, poor housing stock, and few business opportunities have sent thousands to economically stable neighboring states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut, in many cases leaving behind those without the resources to do so. Today almost a third of the state’s population is classified as low-income.
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The largely invisible weight of this economic pull that Connecticut and Massachusetts exert on Rhode Islanders is felt most strongly when it comes to economic regulation. One of the most controversial items in the Rhode Island’s Fiscal Year 2015 budget was Article 11 Section 4, which prohibited municipalities from setting minimum wages higher than the state’s. Over the course of the floor debate, supporters of the preemption kept coming back to one simple point: Rhode Island is a small state and it has to remain economically competitive with its neighbors. High—or worse, diverse—minimum wages would send jobs across the border, they said. Rhode Island’s minimum wage is set to rise from eight dollars per hour to nine dollars per hour on January 1, a figure that is also being adopted by Connecticut and Massachusetts. Estimates made before the change in minimum pay showed that the state would not reach pre-recession levels of employment until between 2018 and 2020. New estimates are needed as a result of the changes in the region; whether they will be more or less positive for RI remains to be seen. +++ Rhode Island does, however, have a fairly robust culture of education. With a number of major universities across the state, there remains a steady stream of young people entering the state every year. Yet, a large number of students leave the state after graduating college, a source of major concern for state and local politicians. In an interview with the Independent, James Diossa said that it is crucial that the state make a concerted effort to rebrand itself as an attractive place for young entrepreneurs. Diossa says that Central Falls is working on a program from which graduates of Rhode Island College could receive free housing in Central Falls if they work as educators in the city’s public school system. The city is trying to establish itself as an alternative option for young business people and artists who want to live in a tight-knit community with easy access to Providence and Boston. Central Falls’ efforts are not directed at overall population growth: it is one of the few cities in Rhode Island that has seen significant growth in recent years, gaining 1,000 residents in the past decade. With an area of only 1.29 square miles, it is the smallest and most densely populated city in Rhode Island. The city’s growth efforts aim to reshape its demographics in order to create sustainable growth in the city. Only eight percent of the city’s population, overwhelmingly made up of recent Hispanic immigrants, has a bachelor’s degree or higher; nearly a quarter of the city’s residents live below the poverty line. In luring students to Central Falls with the promise of free housing, Diossa hopes to develop business growth in the beleaguered city. Cities like Warwick are also making a concerted effort to draw in new residents. For Warwick, these efforts are born of desperation: the city’s population has fallen by 3,000 in the past 10 years, now estimated at 82,672 people. If current trends continue, the city is expected to have a population of 74,701 people in 2040. When I asked Warwick’s mayor, Scott Avedisian, about the city’s drop in population, he blamed it on the TF Green Airport expansion, which he claims has forced about 1,000 residents to leave their homes over the past 10 years. But even if his statement is accurate, it doesn’t explain the projection of future population decline. “Our population, though it has declined, is relatively stable if you look at our percentages,” he said in response to a question about the economic and social impact of depopulation. “Over 90 percent of residents live in the same house for over a year.” When I
pressed him to elaborate on his answer, he got annoyed. “They don’t have homes,” he said, “their homes were taken. It’s not as if they’re making a conscious decision to move.” Warwick has rebranded the center of the city as “city-center Warwick” and is working on creating new housing stock to lure people back. Avedisian also says, like Diossa, that the city is making an effort to draw students to the city after graduating by building housing with “more amenities.” Projections show that the fight for young residents is a losing battle: by 2040, the share of Rhode Island’s population between the ages of 20 and 64, which now hovers around 65 percent of the population, is expected to drop to 54.2 percent, based on birth and death rates. Martin writes in her population projections that a shrinking share of population ages 20-64 may signal “increased strain on those younger people who are able to provide support to children and the elderly.” But the loss of youth is not universal within the state: nearly 20 percent of Providence’s population is in its 20s. Providence will ride the national wave of young Americans moving back into urban areas and out of the suburbs to which their parents’ generation fled in the 1970s and '80s. Providence alone is projected to account for 72 percent of statewide population growth from now to 2040. The city is getting larger both absolutely and relative to the state and, with its special appeal to economically desirable young people, it can expect to grow its political and economic clout vis-à-vis the state. Maybe that’s why Providence’s mayor Angel Taveras was almost uniquely willing to talk about population statistics when applying for federal funds for a new streetcar. His administration’s project summary for the streetcar advertises that it will “attract 1,500 new city residents.” Streetcar notwithstanding, most Rhode Island politicians from all parts of the state will continue avoiding direct confrontation with the issue—glancing at it sideways in the course of debates about job-creation, capital flight, airport expansions, and the annual "brain drain" created by local college graduates moving away. +++ Most of the chairs at Maldonado’s fundraiser were empty, though depopulation was not the culprit. But as I watched a couple of people picking at that over-stocked buffet in that oversized room, I couldn’t help but feel like the handful of politicians and staffers in the room were all eyeing each other—seeing who would be the first to leave. SOPHIE KASAKOVE B’17 & RICK SALAME B’16 are still here.
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
PNGPNGPNGPNGPNGPNGPNGPNGPNGPNGPNGPNG by Ben Ross
SEPTEMBER 26 2014
EPHEMERA
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SIDE WITH THE SEED A conversation with Spencer Tweedy by Lisa Borst illustration by Eli Neuman-Hammond
“Is this a strictly bandmate relationship, or do you ever have to say, ‘don’t make me pull this tour bus over?’” Stephen Colbert asks Jeff Tweedy in an interview with the Wilco frontman and his teenage son, Spencer, on Monday night’s Colbert Report. The father-and-son duo—recording, simply, under the name Tweedy—released their first album, Sukierae, this past Tuesday. Spencer, 18, plays drums, while the older Tweedy sings and takes charge of most other instruments. As Colbert suggests, the record is a family affair in both lineup and content: Wilco has long been held as a token “dad rock” band, and, while the classification feels like a cheap shot, many of Sukierae’s best songs—“Nobody Dies Anymore,” “Pigeons,” “I’ll Never Know”—allude to themes of parenthood, married life, the household routines of watching television and falling asleep. During the recording process, Jeff’s wife, Susan, was diagnosed and began treatment for cancer. Oblique references to that are present on Sukierae, too. On The Colbert Report, father and son sit close together and occasionally say almost the same thing at the same time. Spencer—quiet, lanky, wearing a denim shirt that almost matches Jeff’s—seems to defer slightly to his dad. The Tweedy live band plays “Low Key” on Monday night’s show, a song from the double album’s first disc. Like Wilco’s best records, Sukierae is effortlessly versatile in style, shifting fluidly between genres and moods. There are a number of catchy, breezy folk-pop tunes among the album’s 20 tracks, but there are also moments of pared-down balladry, crashing, electrified almost-punk, dark and reverb-heavy dream pop. Anchoring nearly every track, and often working its way to the forefront, is Spencer Tweedy’s tight, splashy drumming. +++ Tweedy’s children have often had peripheral roles in popular narratives about Wilco. Spencer and his younger brother appear at the edges of magazine profiles and interviews; in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, a documentary about the making of Wilco’s muchlauded 2001 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, there’s a scene in which Spencer Tweedy, preschool-aged, bangs out one of the record’s songs on his lap. (He’s been a percussionist for a long time.) Spencer isn’t the young boy on the washed-out cover of Sukierae—that’s Jeff Tweedy as a kid—but perhaps comparisons are meant to be drawn: between child and parent, present and history, a nascent musical trajectory and one that’s arguably at its peak. I spoke to Spencer this past Saturday, on the morning after the first show of Tweedy’s current tour. He answered my phone call from a music festival in Bristol, Tennessee. We spoke about making Sukierae, his experiences as a young musician, and growing up with a hugely successful indie-rock dad; he told me before we hung up that he’d been interested in speaking to the Indy because he’d almost applied to attend RISD next year, after Tweedy finishes their tour. The College Hill Independent: I know you’ve been in a band for a long time, beginning in elementary school. When you were playing with your old band, The Blisters, did you ever feel like you were tokenized as a “young” band? Is it different to be on tour with an older, more established act? Spencer Tweedy: Oh, yeah, it’s definitely different. The Blisters really only played shows for our friends, or the people we went to high school with, or people in the general Chicago music community, and, you know, that’s a rowdy teenage bunch. Whereas these shows are with more serious music fans, who like my dad enough, or like what we’re doing enough, to pay a decent amount of money to come see us. So, there’s definitely a difference, but I wouldn’t say that either is better or worse. I can’t speak highly enough of both bands. I’m really enjoying myself in this situation, where I get to play with my dad and we’re playing in really beautiful, historic venues to large audiences. That’s a really nice luxury. The Indy: I’ve seen on Twitter that you’re involved with—or at least a supporter of—allages music initiatives. Have you ever had any difficulties navigating or performing in musical spaces that are 21+? ST: I’ve definitely been jostled around a little bit by club owners or security people or whoever’s in charge of enforcing rules at bars and clubs where we play music. But the Chicago music community is really, really supportive, and there are a lot of venues there that are not only open to having all-ages shows, but welcome it, because there’s a strong community of teenagers and underage people who want to come see music. And they make money off of them. So, in Chicago, I’d say the situation is really, really good, if not ideal. It’s not too hard to book a show if you’re a kid band. There’s a range of options and they’re all really supportive. The Indy: How much of a solo record is Sukierae? It was born from the experience of your mom being sick, which must have been a shared experience in your household. I was wondering how much you collaborated creatively with your dad.
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ST: The majority of my contribution was just the drumming. I would say that for this project, I contributed very little other than that. My dad might say something other than that—maybe he would say that my brother and I helped him a lot more, in other ways, but I think the drumming was the main thing I gave to the project. I don’t know, occasionally my dad would ask me to provide input on a song, when it was in a little bit of an earlier stage, but for most of Sukierae, he presented the songs to me, and then I played drums on them. The Indy: There’s this trope of parent-child musical collaboration that I’ve seen with bands like Van Halen (in their reunion tour, Eddie Van Halen’s son replaced their longtime bassist), with the kid inheriting a spot in the band in the same way you might inherit your dad’s used car business or something. Can you position Tweedy within a larger lineage of family bands? ST: [Laughing] Well, I think it’s really sweet. I was actually in a record store in Athens, Georgia the other day, with the rest of the Tweedy live band, and everybody made fun of me because the one record I bought was Bill Monroe and James Monroe’s Father & Son. I was just interested in seeing how another group had a take on that—plus, Bill and James Monroe are awesome. But I don’t think too hard about our place on the continuum of music history. But I’m excited about what’s happening, and I like it, and I think it’s a cool thing. The Indy: How do you think Sukierae stacks up among Wilco’s discography? ST: I probably have a pretty biased opinion, but I think it stacks up incredibly well. I think Sukierae is an astonishing accomplishment on my dad’s part. The songwriting is great; the recording is great. I think it’s a really special record right off the bat, and I hope that people agree with that. It seems like, so far, people are seeming to agree, but there will inevitably be people who say that Jeff Tweedy hasn’t written a good song since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The Indy: What’s your favorite Wilco record? ST: I don’t have one; I’m not inclined to choose a favorite. But I will say that the ones that came out when I was a really little kid, so from 1995 to like, 2001, hold a special place in my heart because I listened to them every day as a really small child. And I think that whatever you consume as a really small kid is bound to touch you in a different way than stuff you listen to today. Those are really special for me. The Indy: Have you ever gone back and watched that documentary, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot? ST: I haven’t ever seen the whole thing. I’ve seen the scene where I play “Heavy Metal Drummer” on my lap a bunch of times, but I’ve never seen the whole thing. My family was just talking—well, my family minus my dad, so my mom and my brother and I—we were just talking about sitting down to watch it sometime soon, because it’d be fun to see. The Indy: At Brown especially, I’ve been really fascinated by the strange respect that’s often given to people with important or well-known parents or siblings or whatever. Was that a weird space to occupy growing up? Did you ever hang out with, like, Stephen Malkmus as a kid? ST: Yeah—my family has maintained a lot of normalcy throughout the years. I see it as, we’re a normal family, we don’t live ostentatiously, but we—my brother and I—we have had many opportunities afforded to us because of my dad’s career that have been really, really nice. And we’ve been able to live comfortably and have nice things because of the success of Wilco. But at the same time, we try to keep it pretty low-key. I wasn’t homeschooled or taken away from my friends; I felt very much a part of the city of Chicago. So I think for the most part it stayed pretty normal, but then once in a while there are the crazy, unique things that our family gets to do, like hang out with Stephen Malkmus. And those are pretty cool moments. The Indy: Did you ever feel any desire to rebel or whatever as a teenager? What do you even do when you have the quintessential cool dad? ST: Yeah, you know, that’s exactly the problem—I couldn’t rebel because there’s nothing to rebel against. My parents are 100 percent respectful and supportive of me and who I am. And I think it’s punk to get along with your fucking parents.
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WHEN PIGS FLY: THE UNLIKELY VICTORY OF SMITHFIELD WORKERS by Will Fesperman illustration by Ben Ross It took three campaigns and over 14 years for workers at the largest hog slaughterhouse in the world to form a union. The 2008 labor victory at the Smithfield Foods, Inc. plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina—a region where unions have long struggled—was perhaps the most improbable in recent US history. Now, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) local 1208 has its sights on a nearby chicken plant. To form a union, organizers—many of whom are workers at the Smithfield plant—are banking on the strategy that won six years ago. In the first two attempts at the Smithfield plant, management used illegal tactics to crush the hastily organized campaigns of out-of-town activists. But after a decade of failed initiatives, activists planted themselves within the rural community, determined to stay for the long haul. The organizers established a worker’s center and recruited locals to help lead the campaign. After a few years of putting down roots, the campaign blossomed onto the state and national levels. Civil rights leaders, clergy, and students set out to publicly shame Smithfield. Workers told their stories of mistreatment to audiences in New York, Boston, and Chicago. In 2008, a vote was held, and the union won. The Reverend Mac Legerton, executive director of the Center for Community Action, a social justice organization in Lumberton, NC, said the third campaign won because organizers built lasting relationships with the community. Tom Clarke, the lead UFCW organizer in that campaign, said that the long-term, community focus was “very different” from how the UFCW normally ran its campaigns. Clarke said those community-based tactics should be implemented in labor fights across the country, with Smithfield as a model. The victory was an anomaly in an anti-union region and era. North Carolina, like every other state south of Maryland and east of Texas, has a “right-to-work” law that removes the requirement that workers at unionized plants pay their union dues, undermining its very structure. In this anti-union culture, the Smithfield campaign was “one of the toughest…in modern US history,” said Keith Ludlum, president of the local 1208 in Tar Heel. But despite the campaign’s unexpected triumph, Clarke said, the Smithfield story remains “almost like a secret” in the labor movement—its lessons have yet to be learned. +++
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Ludlum calls the Smithfield plant “the boss-hog of all slaughterhouses,” and for good reason. The plant employs around 5,000 people to kill and package 34,000 pigs a day. The size of multiple Wal-Marts, the plant is active all but three and a half hours a day. From highway 87, you can’t see the lagoon of hog shit behind the plant, but you can smell it. When the wind blows, the stench travels a mile down the road and creeps through shut car windows. Slaughterhouse work is fast-paced and dangerous. Workers stand by conveyor belts and moving lines of hooked meat, performing the same action for hours at a time. To maximize profit, supervisors run the lines at high speeds. As the meat rushes past, workers must make incisive cuts with large knives. “Say you got 17 people on that line,” explained Leonard Walker, who has worked at the plant for 19 years, from the kill floor to the warehouse. “That line is supposed to run so that every third person [cuts] a piece of that meat. But when you got 17 pieces coming every 17 seconds…accidents do happen.” Legerton describes Smithfield’s business model as “low wages, high production, high risk of injury, and extreme temperatures.” Legerton compares the work to migrant farm labor. “In my wildest dreams I never imagined that we as a nation would take the model of migrant farm work and expand it from the farm to the factory,” he said. The horror stories are well-documented, and numerous—enough to fill a 21st-century re-write of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s harrowing 1906 account of the Chicago meatpacking industry. “I have been out there when people died and they kept on working,” Walker said. “The supervisors don’t want to stop the line.” Smithfield plants in other states were unionized, and the company respected existing union contracts when it purchased new plants. But “Smithfield built [the Tar Heel plant] from day one thinking they wouldn’t have a union,” said Eduardo Peña, an organizer on the third campaign. The company built the plant in a poor, rural area where high-paying jobs are hard to find. In the 1990s, the company achieved vertical integration in North Carolina—it owned the plant, the trucks, the feed, and the millions of pigs—and perhaps feared that a union would disrupt the smooth operation of that system, Peña speculated. UFCW organizers first tried to unionize the plant in 1994, and again in 1997, hoping to bargain for higher wages and safer working conditions. Both times, workers voted against joining the union. Legerton said the failure of the first two campaigns did not surprise him. “The organizers
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ran the campaign out of a motel, and had no major office or investment in the community,” he said. Poor organizing wasn’t the only obstacle in the way of a union victory. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that Smithfield used illegal tactics to intimidate workers at both elections in 2004. Smithfield fired workers who campaigned for the union, like Ludlum, the current president of the local 1208. And on the morning of the 1997 election, police in riot gear formed a “gauntlet,” standing on either side of the plant’s entry path, said Gene Bruskin, a UFCW organizer. “With all these white guys standing there ready to shoot [the workers], I wouldn’t call that a free vote,” Bruskin said. At the time, most of the plant’s workers were black. While the vote was being counted, police beat up an organizer, Bruskin said. Legerton said the failed campaigns—the second especially—were vulnerable to Smithfield’s anti-union tactics because the organizing was ineffective. “[The second campaign] was shorter and done with haste,” Legerton said. “And this led to a very violent attack on the organizers at the plant on the night of the vote.” Clarke agreed that the approach was flawed. “It was the normal way that unions operated,” he said. “You would bring in folks from around the country…None had any particular investment in the community.” That strategy doesn’t work in the rural south, Legerton said. For a rural, southern community to support an outside organization, they must feel assured of a long term commitment, he said. Instead, rural North Carolinians came to view the UFCW as “a fly-by-night organization that might bring in 100 people for an election, but then we’d be back to whatever cities we were from,” Clarke said. Legerton gave “constructive criticism” to UFCW organizers during the first two campaigns, he said. But it wasn’t until the third and final campaign that organizers took his suggestions to heart. +++ Clarke arrived in Tar Heel in October 2002, he said, determined to try a new strategy. He led a team of five or six UFCW organizers, including Peña, who initially felt that being assigned to the Smithfield plant was a punishment. “The stigma of the previous two campaigns was very strong in our organization,” Peña said. “People were like, ‘what did you do wrong?’” From the start, the organizers took a humbler tack and focused on slowly building connections within the community. “A large part was acknowledging that we’re not the mighty union coming in to provide salvation for these workers,” Peña said. “It has to come from the inside.” When the organizers arrived in Tar Heel, they worked out of a trailer within view of the plant. Smithfield had, by that time, established its own police force, and Clarke knew that workers wouldn’t feel safe coming to the trailer, he said. So the organizers quickly moved to a building in Red Springs, a town in neighboring Robeson County where many Latino workers lived, and established a worker’s center. To introduce themselves to the workers, the organizers knocked on doors in small towns and trailer parks, where the majority of plant workers lived. Some of those workers joined the organizing team, along with veteran North Carolina labor activists. Clarke said he was determined to include more locals on the team. “Within a few weeks…I got workers getting in the car with me and talking to their co-workers,” Peña said. “It was worker to worker.” At the workers’ center in Red Springs, organizers tried to show workers what a union could do for them. They brought in attorneys to help injured workers receive workers’ compensation. Five days a week, a “certified immigration specialist” from Texas counseled immigrant workers, Clarke said. By acting like a union, the organizers showed their commitment to the workers and took away some of the stigma surrounding unions.
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The organizers established a communication network inside the plant: at least one worker in each department kept their co-workers up to date on what the workers’ center was doing, Clarke said. The network grew to 300 people. Organizers also connected with community leaders like Father Carlos Arce, then the priest at San Andrés, a Catholic church in Red Springs. Arce had the trust of many Latino workers, and his support of the union would eventually prove vital. Legerton said he was “very pleased” that the organizers built a base of trust and support before trying to make big changes in the plant. “The community began to sense and understand that they were here to stay,” he said. +++ With the community groundwork in place, activists took the next step by organizing small actions within the plant. One was initiated by Ludlum, who was given his job back in 2004— after a 10-year exile—when the NLRB issued its injunction against Smithfield. Ludlum could have continued with his better-paying job, he said, but he chose to return to the plant and organize. Ludlum, who worked in the livestock division unloading and moving pigs, wrote “UNION TIME” on his hard-hat. Supervisors forbade him from doing so on the grounds of uniform violation, even though other workers often displayed non-political messages on their clothes and hats. But Ludlum resisted, management caved, and more people began writing pro-union messages on their coats and hats: “God Bless the Union,” Ludlum remembers one person writing. After this concession, the emboldened livestock workers demanded clean drinking water. At the time, their water coolers were prepared by livestock workers who brought in contamination from handling the pigs and their excrement. Ludlum refused to drink the contaminated water and often became light-headed from the hot, grueling labor when his bottled water ran out, he said. The workers won their clean water cooler, as well. As the small victories began to pile up, Ludlum sensed that more workers were adopting a “no fear philosophy.” Elsewhere in the plant, a group of Latino workers walked off the line in protest when the company took away their “second knife.” Workers were traditionally provided two knives—the second served as a replacement when the first became dull. The workers protested that taking away the extra knife took away the jobs of people who had to sharpen the plant’s knives, and increased the number of injuries, because more people were using dull knives. Peña helped the workers write a petition to bring back the second knife. “All of a sudden we have 150 signatures from one department” in one day, Peña said. “They got their knife back.” Ludlum said the small victories had enormous meaning for the workers. “People who always had their heads bent over” stood up for their rights for the first time, he said. “Those people will never be the same. From then on, they will always demand more.” Organizers also took on the company police force, which in their view existed only to intimidate workers. “This is a meatpacking plant, it’s not a nuclear plant, it’s not an arsenal,” Clarke said. “What could possibly be the reason for having a company police force? It was clearly to keep workers from exercising their rights.” The company police had all the powers given to local police—they carried guns and drove police cruisers, and they could follow workers off the plant property and detain them in a jail cell within the plant. The powers had been granted by a permit from the state of North Carolina. After constant pressure from the organizers, as well as from Human Rights Watch, Smithfield decided not to renew the permit in 2005. The police force was scaled back to an average security force, with limited powers of arrest and patrol. There was soon an unexpected sense of momentum, Peña said. “All of a sudden we started getting things done. It was a little bit of luck, and timing—planets aligning.” Suddenly, the
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national UFCW could not ignore what was going on in Tar Heel. +++ As the campaign gained steam, UFCW organizers saw an opportunity for expansion. Gene Bruskin took over for Clarke as lead organizer, just as the campaign began to open onto the state and national levels. “It was completely clear to me that it didn’t matter what the workers did [in the plant], that was not going to be enough,” Bruskin said. “Here they are, these people in one of the poorest counties in the country. No one, even in North Carolina, knows where Tar Heel is.” Organizers recruited a coalition of civil rights leaders, clergymen, local college students, and former workers to target Smithfield products by leafletting outside North Carolina Harris Teeter stores, a grocery chain. The coalition also targeted Smithfield’s publicity queen extraordinaire: celebrity chef Paula Deen. Deen was doing a promotional tour at the time and touting Smithfield products wherever she went. “Imagine you have a hundred people in line to get their books signed [by Deen],” Bruskin said. “And we’re up front in her face, and we unroll a scroll with a message from the workers. And she’d start screaming.” The actions were meant to force the national spotlight on Tar Heel and let Smithfield feel the heat. Bruskin called it an “unrelenting push.” When Deen appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007, the show would not permit her to say the word “Smithfield,” Ludlum said. Organizers also sent workers to major cities in the northeast and midwest to tell their stories of mistreatment to whoever would listen, including religious groups, immigrant rights organizations, and other meatpacking workers. In response, the city of Boston and the United Church of Christ released statements condemning Smithfield. At the same time, actions around the plant escalated. Thousands of immigrant workers—many, if not most, undocumented—organized a march on May Day in 2006. The workers marched through a historically black neighborhood in Lumberton, handing out fliers that had the face of Cesar Chavez alongside the face of Martin Luther King, Jr. +++ In the heat of the campaign, an unexpected immigration crackdown dramatically changed the racial demographics of the plant and stalled the movement. In November 2006, The News & Observer reported that Smithfield sent letters to 640 immigrant workers telling them their identity information did not match government records, and fired about 50 of them. Smithfield officials said they were complying with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Fed up, Latino workers staged a massive walkout in protest. About 1,500 workers walked off the lines, Bruskin said. Organizers, eager to resolve the crisis, met with the protesting workers and wrote up a list of demands. “Our role [as organizers] was really to support the workers, not to tell them what to do,” Bruskin said. The workers demanded that Smithfield give the fired workers’ jobs back, rescind the 640 letters, not punish the workers who walked out, and begin meeting with a worker representative to address issues within the plant. Smithfield refused to meet with either the workers or the union organizers. Father Carlos Arce, the priest at San Andrés, stepped in to negotiate. Organizers would not, perhaps, have had Arce’s help if they had not established strong connections early on with the Latino community of Red Springs. “It cannot be understated that the UFCW demonstrating an ongoing commitment to those workers set the stage for what happened later with the walkout,” Clarke said. Arce, who could not be reached for an interview, emerged from the meeting with Smithfield officials victorious. He got the company to agree to all of the workers’ demands—in writing. But months later, in January 2007, Smithfield allowed ICE officials full access to the plant. ICE took 21 workers off the line and arrested them. The following August, ICE arrested 28 workers in their homes in the middle of the night, using addresses provided by Smithfield. Walker remembers hearing from one of his friends who was arrested along with his wife. Authorities had separated the couple from their infant children. “He called me and said he was in Texas,” Walker said. “His kids were in Lumberton [North Carolina] in a mobile home.” “Angel,” an undocumented immigrant who works in the plant’s laundry room, said the
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crackdown made immigrant workers afraid to openly support the union. Angel, who asked that his named be changed for this article, walked in the May Day march “as an immigrant and a member of [Arce’s] church,” he said. But after the walkout, immigrant workers like Angel didn’t want to participate in marches or in-plant actions, he said. “A lot of the support disappeared.” Over the nine months between the walkout and the nighttime raid, around 1,100 Latino workers— about a fifth of the plant’s workforce—left the plant, The News & Observer reported. The workers went from being about two-thirds Latino to one-third, Bruskin said. Despite the losses, the demographic shift ended up helping the union’s cause, Clarke said. The majority of workers who remained didn’t have the fear of deportation hanging over them and were more able to take part in the campaign, he added. The national side of the movement persisted: activists continued the actions at grocery stores and Paula Deen events. Protesters flocked to the 2007 and 2008 shareholder meetings at Smithfield’s Virginia headquarters. Smithfield tried to stamp out the actions at grocery stores by filing a lawsuit against the UFCW in October 2007 under a federal racketeering law, claiming millions of dollars in damages from the union’s public campaign. But faced with increasing pressure, Smithfield dropped the lawsuit a year later. The UFCW reached a settlement with the company: the union would drop its public campaign if the workers would be allowed a fair union vote. Both sides made good on their promises. When the vote was held in December 2008, the union won. +++ As part of the settlement, union organizers were able to read internal Smithfield communications relating to the campaign, Peña said. It was a rare chance to see which of the union’s tactics had actually “freaked them out,” he added. The three things that unsettled company officials the most, Peña said, were the actions inside the plant, the demonstrations outside Harris Teeter stores, and the targeting of Paula Deen. But Legerton tells a slightly different story of the campaign. In his view, the in-plant actions and the public campaign—which he classified as issue-based and movement-based organizing, respectively—would never have been possible without the initial years of community-based organizing, in which activists built deep relationships with the people of Bladen and Robeson counties. “Any successful campaign to change anything in our democracy will have elements of all three [tactics],” said Legerton, who has spent decades organizing in rural North Carolina around issues including health care, poverty, and environmental justice. Issue-based organizing tackles specific issues, like getting clean drinking water for livestock workers, or, say, getting Brown University to divest from coal companies. Movement-based organizing creates a farflung base of support, beyond the community where the activism began, like when groups in Boston and New York showed their support for Smithfield workers. Legerton—who said he learned about effective social action working for the United Farm Workers of America in the 1970s—said the community-based piece is often lacking in US activism. “The power of the community-based approach is that people identify more with each other than they do with an issue,” Legerton said. “And that’s a hard lesson for most social justice practitioners to learn, including labor unions.” That lesson will be put to the test in the UFCW’s new campaign in Bladen county, where organizers will see if they can once again buck the anti-union current of the south. The local 1208 is trying to organize a Mountaire Farms chicken plant, where there are similar stories of abuse and unsafe working conditions. In March, the UFCW filed 22 complaints of unfair labor practices at the Mountaire plant with the NLRB. Ludlum said the union is taking a “worker to worker” approach for the Mountaire campaign, even more so than in the Smithfield fight. Ella Ellerbe, a Smithfield worker and a union representative, said the fact that the union is already established in the community is making the Mountaire campaign easier. “With Smithfield you got people from Washington, DC coming down, but with Mountaire it’s [from within] the community,” Ellerbe said. “If I knock on the door and you know me, isn’t that better than if it’s a stranger?” WILL FESPERMAN B’15 is a vegetarian.
SUBTWEET ME LIKE YOU USED TO, BUDDY A ranking of the buddy cianci twitters
by Erin Schwartz illustration by Alex Kiesling It’s been said that Twitter is the agora of the digital age. If that’s true, Providence mayoral candidate Buddy Cianci’s Twitter is an agora full of people dressed up as him making jokes about his marinara sauce. Twice-elected mayor, Cianci uncovered rivers and carried Providence out of economic ruin. He also ended both terms with felony convictions, the first time for assault and the second time for conspiracy to commit racketeering. Wings torn off and cast out of City Hall, Buddy did his time, then returned to Providence to host a radio talk show and donate $3 in four years from his nonprofit marinara startup. So when Providence’s favorite antihero announced his candidacy in the final hour, it called up a crop of pretenders to the throne of the Cianci social media empire. The Indy has launched into the fray to do a roundup of the relative realness of all our Buddies on Twitter. If you like white bread and pumpkin chaider, @CianciForMayor is for you. This is the official Cianci campaign account, linked from his website. It doesn’t have the same flair as some of its peers but there is still some choice weirdness to be found. Notable Tweet:
With 1,600 followers, @VincentCianci clocks in at the most popular account, beating out even the “real” Buddy’s six hundred. As art historians have debated whether to attribute the Dreyfus Madonna to a young Leonardo DaVinci, some argue that these seven tweets sent in 2009 might be Buddy’s first foray into Twitter. But the genius behind @VincentCianci plays with the line between satire and genuine baby-boomer net awkwardness too well to be sure. Who is Ron and why is he a “brullion,” a word that @VincentCianci appears to have made up? What is the symbolic function of addressing his tweets to Facebook? It’s not an enigma that can be solved in our lifetime, unless the Freemasons or a witch would like to weigh in. Notable tweet:
@TheFakeBuddy is the social climber of the group. His comments are completely off-brand and he blatantly fishes for retweets by mentioning the heavy hitters of PVD’s Twittersphere like the Phoenix’s Philip Eil and positivity bangle snake oil salesmen Alex and Ani. Buddy Cianci is no bottom feeder, and you should not stand on his lofty shoulders just to boost your lousy Klout Score. I will not equivocate, I will not excuse— @TheFakeBuddy is, like, so fake. Notable tweet:
@NotBuddyCianci keeps things a little too real with his moralizing, straightforward character attacks on Cianci and Democratic candidates Elorza and Solomon, and signature end-days hashtag #PVDBeware. This guy clearly sees a beast with seven heads winning the 2014 mayoral election. Coupled with his tendency to asterisk-censor “fucking,” @NotBuddyCianci has an air of total not-chillness about him. Geez, we get it, you think rampant political corruption is a big deal, but this was fun before. I suspect @NotBuddyCianci would be down to put on a hooded black robe and play a round of chess with you on a desolate Swedish beach. Notable Tweet:
up for his small follower base with the underappreciated genius of his tweets. Notable tweet:
Providence citizens: when you pick up your ballot on November 4, make sure you don’t just check the box for Buddy Cianci. Instead, use the write-in section and specify which Buddy you’d like to see in office. Our law-and-order pick is @ NotBuddyCianci, but if you prefer a more whimsical experience of state power, go for @VincentCianci. We’re in the Digital Age and this is America—electing a Twitter handle to the office of mayor is totally chill. ERIN SCHWARTZ B’15 will be casting her vote for @ TaylorSwiftLA.
Rumors swirl about the enigmatic figure behind Verified Buddy Cianci (@RealBuddyCianci). Sources say that he is a dues-paying Brown alum who retreated to a monastery in Brooklyn to hone his tweetcraft. His posts are scrawled on parchment and delivered by rabbits to scribes at a nearby ’Net Café. Either that, or he is a local teen. @VerifiedBuddy makes
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MARCH IN SEPTEMBER Considering New York’s record setting climate rally by Malcolm Drenttel and Lance Gloss illustration by Casey Friedman
By the light of dawn on Sunday, policemen could be seen erecting temporary fences along the streets of Manhattan. Visitors from across the US and the globe were already lining up along Central Park West, many of them for the first time. The People’s Climate March, to coincide with the 2014 UN Climate Summit, would soon be underway. In stark contrast to the marchers, many New Yorkers awoke unaware that their routine commute would be interrupted by the teeming mass of protesters, crowding the streets for the length of the three-mile route. Spectacle Nearly 400,000 marchers assembled for what is now being called the largest demonstration for climate change action in history. By the numbers, the turnout far surpassed last year’s Keystone XL pipeline protest in Washington DC, previously the largest with 40,000 participants. Sunday’s demonstrators ran the gamut of national and international cultural groups, a point which march organizers have emphasized. Unions marched in matching casual outfits. Children and elders moved interspersed with students and the middle-aged. Scantily clad men and women, some wearing nothing more than stickers, strolled casually among the throngs. Some came clothed in vegetables; others, in elaborate costumes, such as mermaids and lobsters (both of which were accompanied by signs bemoaning species endangerment). Dreadlocked Rastafarians rattled jars to vuvuzela melodies and brass band beats. In bursts, call and response chants infected crowds, the noise shifting and compounding, growing hoarse and dying out. Often the sight of observers on balconies high above would rouse the crowd into a momentary frenzy. Musicians and revolutionaries abounded. The scene was so musical and colorful it might have been mistaken for Mardi Gras— save for the absence of heavy drinking. The march was, in many ways, an emphatic rejection of the short-termist thought which defines the world’s politics, a rejection of business as usual. Free of any one keynote speech, the voice of the march was that of its participants, many of whom carried signs:
increases beyond this figure will lead to catastrophe. Fortunately, large-scale disappointment with government action has mobilized a second phase of climate action. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has become an outspoken advocate of climate action. “Our foot is stuck on the accelerator,” Ban said in 2009, “and we are heading towards an abyss.” Thankfully, he is not interested in a Thelmaand-Louise ending for the planet. To this end, he has demanded a faster pace in climate change legislation. In May of this year, top-level leaders met in Abu Dhabi, outside of the UNFCCC’s annual schedule, to outline a fast track to change. At this meeting, dubbed the Abu Dhabi Ascent, figureheads of politics and the global economy made bold proclamations of a new era in climate change policy. Step two of this new track comes this week in New York City, where heads of state, economic giants, major NGOs, and other members of society have assembled, again outside of the UNFCCC. No concrete legislation will come out of this week’s events. Rather, it has been billed as a sort of pep rally to build momentum for stage three, the 2015 conference of UNFCCC parties in Paris, from which the boldest legislation yet is anticipated.
“Consumerism is killing the environment” “Planet before Profit”
ISIS: another petro-dollar war
“Change the System, not the Climate”
Carbon cuts, not welfare cuts
Obama = (climate) Change
“More horses, fewer cars”
Veganism will save us
“Climate change is a healthcare crisis!” “Don’t Frack with U.S.!”
Sea change The People’s Climate March represents the popular share of the momentum needed for strong action in 2015. Marchers wanted to inform government and business clearly, and at times threateningly, that the public wants “climate justice… now!” It was with this in mind that organization efforts began soon after the summit was announced. Notably, the marching route, over which police and organizers have been wrangling for months, did not pass before the UN building. This symbolic gap in the proceedings was greeted with consternation by organizers and participants. Missing the epicenter of global politics was certainly a blow to momentum. However, the protesters did wind through Times Square, the crown jewel of capitalist culture. There, surprised tourists and New Yorkers ogled, ignored, and even joined in. Many signs seemed to decry American capitalism at its heart. Shouts and protest chants grew loudest in the canyon of bank skyscrapers and LED advertisement screens surrounding the Square.
Teach science: they’ll love the planet more
The signs demonstrated the variety of angles taken on climate change. The once isolated spheres of politics, education, energy, economics, and agriculture came together for the event. In the words of a participant from Virginia whom we interviewed, unlike Washington’s Keystone XL rally in 2013, this march “showed the real diversity of ideas” in the climate justice movement. Marchers also spoke of the emphasis on solutions. “There’s no limit to this life potential,” said one participant, “I’m 66 and look at me! I’m still glowing. In my lifetime, we’ve made solar panels. We’re getting off of oil!” Hopeful march sentiments abounded, but scientific data cast a different light. The world is heading toward a 2.5 percent increase in carbon dioxide emissions in 2014, with no sign of emission rates slowing any time soon. Additionally, the past few attempts at change within the UN framework have failed conspicuously. While the People’s Climate March was the largest popular demonstration of this kind to date, the climate justice movement knows it needs cooperation from major political bodies. The movement hopes to frame 2014 as the year when true institutional change begins. In context In 1992, the UN met at Rio de Janeiro to first discuss a global climate policy, leading to the non-binding United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and a number of other initiatives. Through the framework of the UNFCCC, nations have collaborated yearly to establish new binding agreements. Among these was the Kyoto Protocol, in which developed countries, the world’s largest polluters, committed to marginal restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. What momentum existed in 1997 came to an appalling slump five years ago at Copenhagen, where an extensive summit produced no binding results. Since then, the US has withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol. What’s more, none of the treaties so far have the potential to keep global temperatures from increasing 2°C above pre-industrial levels. The scientific community holds that
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A marching Vermonter stated that people want a “real change in the system,” not another small fix. Moving peacefully through Times Square—one of the world’s most magnificent monuments to consumerism and materialism—offered mixed emotions. The knowledge that, once the marchers had left, the SUVs and the consumers and the suit-and-ties would reappear, fueled a sense of powerlessness among some. However, the power of the march was felt in the complete shutdown of midtown Manhattan. On any other Sunday, the banks and shops and offices would have been teeming with the causes of climate change; on this day, the people had shut the system down, and had managed to do so both peacefully and with hope for a different future. A mixed bag As the race wound around the corner from Central Park South onto 6th Ave, one little girl struggled to keep up. “Let’s go on!” encouraged her father, “there’s a lot of hope here today.” While many could feel the positive energy of the event, the sentiment was not
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
universal. Many onlookers sneered or grew angry. “What does this even do?” questioned Jen, a middle-aged New Yorker who had been surprised by the march while out shopping with friends. “The smell of patchouli is just too much,” she pronounced, and walked west around the corner onto 56th. This cynicism is not altogether surprising, and was not unique to onlookers. Even among marchers, doubts spread as to whether the day’s action would produce tangible results beyond the mass of emissions and waste required in assembling 400,000 people. The two-day gap between the march and the Summit itself, along with the physical separation from the UN building, may be indicative of a disconnect between the climate action movement and the policy-makers. While some leaders, including Rhode Island Senator Whitehouse and climate-celebrity Al Gore, marched alongside the public, most of the 120 heads of state slated to attend at the Secretary-General’s invitation were still in their respective capitol buildings. Many protesters would have advocated for stronger action, even militant action, under the belief that government stasis in addressing climate change demands extralegal reactions by the people. Common were condemnations of the march’s relative tameness and assertions that those most affected by climate change deserve more impassioned and ferocious action. Such complaints echo Malcolm X’s description of the 1964 March on Washington as “an outing, a picnic.”
A message By Sunday evening, the deluge had subsided, leaving the city to digest the remnants of the grand traipse. Marchers, who hours ago had joined in a chorus of eco-political chants (“What do we want? Climate Justice! When do we want it? Now! If we don’t get it? Shut it down!”), leaned against deli walls. Lines protruded from bodegas; sweaty marchers emerged, sucking thirstily from plastic straws. On corners, trashcans overflowed with cardboard signs, bearing slogans about fracking, veganism, solidarity. As the hours passed, charter buses trickled out from New York City’s congested streets, picked up speed, and spread out across the Northeast. Shirts printed specially for the occasion were folded up and placed in closets to remain there. As the dust settled, protesters turned inward, asking the all-important question: What had been accomplished in those few overcast Manhattan hours? This was the recognition of an evolution. The environmental movement looks different today than it did when Edward Abbey wrote his radical environmental treatises. Green today is not the same as it was when Al Gore brought An Inconvenient Truth into the American living room. Marchers recognize climate change as the priority of our era, as the amalgamation and culmination of disparate movements across time and space. Solutions in all sectors, delivered by the old and young alike, are now being reconsidered as valid, necessary, and long overdue. This week, the UN will address these solutions by way of bold declarations, and what they call “action plans” and “deliverables,” with centralized financing and new plans for infrastructure. The globalization of technology and business may have its drawbacks, but in this time of crisis, worldwide instruments like the UN offer the potential for coordinated action. That said, Sunday’s effects are not limited to the global scale; in the words of Cameron Johnson, Brown student and Bus Coordinator for Rhode Island and Massachusetts, “the march’s momentum is not dissipating, it’s just coming back to a local scale.” The burden then does not fall only on the UN, but on every person who recognizes climate change as the fundamental issue of our time. The clock is ticking on climate change, and this Sunday, the ticking grew loud, amplified by hundreds of thousands of voices. MALCOLM DRENTTEL B’18 and LANCE GLOSS B’18 came clothed in vegetables.
Striking a balance Organizers and participants were faced with the same dilemma that has plagued revolutions and protests throughout history. “Picnics” are known to serve up good eats, and the deep-down fuzzy feelings many associate with hybrid car ownership and recycling, but they aren’t known to bring about ground-breaking international policy change. On the other hand, violent rioting is hardly constructive. Certainly, there is a middle ground between picnicking and throwing bricks. That very mixture of assertiveness and restraint produced instrumental results for labor, civil rights, and anti-war movements. Effective marches are an inconvenience and a spectacle, but do not deliver harm or harbor a bad reputation. In many respects, Sunday’s event toed the line. The People’s Climate March was not conceived to smash car windows, but to show what barriers have already been broken down.
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FEATURES
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MAJOR LEAGUE LITERATURE by Kyle Giddon, Tristan Rodman, Zeve Sanderson & Will Underwood
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (2011) Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding is about baseball in the way Good Will Hunting is about math: it’s more of a setting than a subject. Henry Skrimshander, the protagonist, is a shortstop on a small college baseball team. The narrative arc follows Henry’s athletic performance—a meteoric rise then a tragic fall. Countless pages are filled with descriptions of ground balls, batting practice, and early morning workouts. So yes, in these ways, baseball is inescapable throughout Harbach’s 528-page debut novel. But the power of The Art of Fielding is the implicit and sometimes explicit position of baseball as a stand-in for everything else. Harbach writes, “You loved [baseball] because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about the Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.” In the quote as in the book, baseball sets everything in motion but quickly fades away. After finishing the novel in a three-day binge, I passed it along to my mother. A sports book, she sneered, but I pleaded until she gave it a try. When she finished, I asked her what she thought. She paused and whispered, “As in baseball as in life,” and said nothing more about it. –ZS Honus and Me by Dan Gutman (1997) In the mind of a child collector, there are two tiers of baseball cards. The first and lesser group is comprised largely of the cards you can cajole your parents into buying for you in the checkout line at Academy. Made by companies like Topps and Upper Deck, these cards depict current players and are almost literally a dime a dozen. Similarly mundane are reprints of famous cards, which are sold in commemorative packs that feature canonized players from the sport’s history as they were printed during the players’ careers. In the second tier, there are Originals. Originals must be old, they must depict important players, and if both of these criteria are met the card is imbued with an aura comparable to that of saints’ knucklebones or the crown of thorns. You don’t buy Originals at sporting goods stores, and you certainly don’t buy Originals in packs. An Original is bought at a specialty comic store as an occasion, and as such holds a special place in the imagination of young baseball enthusiasts. Originals are what make children like me fanatical about collecting. It was against this background of baseball fetishism that I first read Dan Gutman’s Honus and Me, a book filled with a keen sense for the inarticulable magic of Originals. The book’s protagonist, baseball-obsessed Joe Stoshack, lacks any baseball ability, but frenziedly absorbs stats and collects cards until one day he acquires by chance a T-206 Honus Wagner card that when held allows Joe to travel to 1909 and play catch with Wagner. For a child so thoroughly taken with baseball cards, reading Honus and Me was like flipping through a daydream I entertained every day. Though perhaps not literally, Originals offered a means to sit (on my bunk bed) in the presence of the sport’s most towering figures, or even to play catch with them. –WU
SEPTEMBER 26 2014
King of the World by David Remnick (1998) You have seen a photograph of Sonny Liston even if you do not know his name. You have seen him splayed across the canvas of a boxing ring on May 25, 1965, with the heavyweight champion of the world, Muhammad Ali, standing above him. You have seen him, defeated, in dorm rooms, in bars, on magazine covers. Everywhere, his ignominy is called inspiration. This is because the subject of the photograph, everybody knows, is not Liston but is Ali, who at age twelve proclaimed himself the greatest boxer in the world and then spent the next ten years delivering on his word. Since then, there have been some two-dozen or more Ali biographies, ranging from merely celebratory to hagiological, and the media has added no shortage of mythmaking. That is to say the subject of Ali has been saturated for a long time. David Remnick seemed not to care. He arrived late to the Ali lit with King of the World in 1998, but he was the only biographer who had already won a Pulitzer Prize, and, well, it shows. Rather than spotlighting only Ali, Remnick is generous with details of the supporting cast—Floyd Patterson, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, the haunted Liston, and others—who turn the book into less of a biography than a social history. And while I picked up the book for Remnick’s story, I stayed for his prose—where else would a boxing coach be described as “a cross between the Emperor Hadrian and Jimmy Cagney”? Maybe just in The New Yorker. –KG
Shaq and the Beanstalk by Shaquille O’Neal (1999) A short précis on Shaq and the Beanstalk, in some senses, is unnecessary. On its cover, the children’s book suggests everything contained within. Shaquille O’Neal, the ex-NBA center with still-superior height and girth, stands amidst green vines. A chicken roosts on his shoulder. Down O’Neal’s jersey falls a subtitle: “and other very tall tales.” The 1999 release, published by Scholastic at the peak of Shaq’s reign over the Association, spans five chapters: “Little Red Riding Shaq,” “Shaq and the Three Bears,” “Shaq's New Clothes,” “Shaq and the Three Billy Goats Gruff,” and the titular “Shaq and the Beanstalk.” The Big Aristotle takes some liberties with his source material, blending all five tales into each other. Reviewing at the School Library Journal, Lauralyn Persson suggested that while the stories are “not especially distinctive from a literary point of view,” they are both “clever” and “fastpaced.” Despite the lukewarm critical reception, Shaq has thrived in the publishing world. Since his debut, O’Neal has authored or co-authored three other volumes. His 2002 autobiography, Shaq Talks Back, lists on its final page: “Also by Shaquille O’Neal: Shaq and the Beanstalk.” The book, now 15 years old, is both a relic and in abundance. On Amazon, new copies begin at $99.40 while used editions can easily be found for $.01. –TR
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MINIATURE FOOD BLOOM by Sam Bresnick illustration by Cecilia Berriz
The backlash has been brewing for years. Disappearing are the 16 oz. porterhouses bathed in gravy served with a mound of mashed potatoes. The massive portions packing thousands of calories that have laid waste to the waistlines of millions of Americans are finally giving way to smaller, healthier options. According to researchers at University of North Carolina Gillings School of Public Health, people are eating more often while consuming fewer calories. This reimagining of the American diet has traditionally been confined to the savory sector: sushi joints and tapas bars have been multiplying furiously due to the public’s infatuation with bite-sized morsels. The last 10 years, however, have seen the trend move into the sweets sector with the rise of the miniature dessert. +++ Crumbs Bake Shop opened on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 2003, just before the cupcake contagion began spreading through New York City. The company soon grew famous for its 4-inch, icing-encased behemoth and went public in 2011 before expanding to 79 stores by 2012. Each cupcake costs between $3.50 and $4.50, and flavors such as “Birthday Cake,” a vanilla buttercream-filled beast of a dessert, contains upwards of 600 calories. Yet, after reporting losses of over $28.5 million during 2012 and 2013, Crumbs was forced to file for bankruptcy, narrowly avoiding total collapse by selling its humbled remains to Lemonis Fischer, parent company of Dippin’ Dots, the a micro dessert in its own right. The intrigue here lies not in Crumbs renewed ability to sell cupcake deathstars but in the company’s startling demise. While Crumbs peddled the gargantuan, competitors Sprinkles and Magnolia shot to the other end of the spectrum, riding diminutive iterations of creamy excess to the top of the market. It seems even Crumbs saw the writing on the wall—but its “Tastes,” a line of little cupcakes, was too little, far too late to save the company. How could a chain that grew exponentially for over eight years collapse in just two? Is it possible that the cupcake Goliath was felled by a bunch of bite-size Davids? Though one can point to the cooling of the cupcake craze, the real answer lies in the bakery chain’s inability to shrink with the times. Crumbs’ demise coincided almost perfectly with the speedy rise of Baked By Melissa, another mini-chain that produces tiny cupcakes in twenty different flavors. Though the company started as a hole-in-the-wall in New York’s SOHO district, the last five years have seen Melissa open twelve locations. The website boasts that “Each of our Original Flavors have [sic] fewer than 50 calories!” and that 4-5 cupcakes are equivalent to a “normal” dessert serving. At $1 each, the cupcakes are also affordable. It is this glut of flavors and the ostensible healthiness of a single cupcake that have combined to catapult Baked By Melissa into the cupcake pantheon. Instead of buying a solitary, massive dessert from Crumbs, one can enjoy the Red Velvet, Chocolate Chip Pancake, Cinnamon Bun, and Tiramisu. What could possibly be better? The cultural fixation with tininess, along with skinniness, has helped foster the small foods revolution. By marketing itself as a purveyor of comparatively healthy, small snacks, Baked By Melissa has, intentionally or not, aligned itself with the idea that smaller is better. Even though one is likely to consume 4-5 cupcakes in a single sitting, thereby consuming a regular dessert’s worth of calories, the illusion of healthiness drives the appetite for tiny sweets. There are, however, many contradictions in the company’s marketing approach. Melissa’s biography sheds light on her pastry philosophy: “Drawing on inspiration from the care-free rock ‘n roll culture of the ’60s and ’70s and the idea that people should be able to taste more flavors without that post-dessert guilt trip, Melissa…opened the first Baked by Melissa Shop.” The use of the term “post-dessert guilt trip” connotes the terrible danger of over-indulgence, a statement
SEPTEMBER 26 2014
seemingly irreconcilable with the company’s attempt to itself as a proponent of “care free rock ‘n roll culture.” Meanwhile, a large proportion of its customers are careworn young people obsessed with staying slim. The stores’ sterile white cabinets and spotless glass display cases recall hospitals much more than mud-spattered Woodstock tents. The closest the company gets to invoking the ’60s and ’70s is its “Tie-Dye” cupcake. There is simply nothing rock n’ roll about Baked By Melissa; indeed, getting baked with Melissa seems to be no part of the plan. +++ According to Neil Irwin of The New York Times, trends tend to start at innovative restaurants in cultural capitals and then move outwards. “Over time, they become more and more mainstream, eventually finding their way to neighborhood bistros in the hinterlands and chain restaurants across the country,” Irwin writes. A classic example is fried calamari, a dish that was in vogue with the restaurant elite in the 1980s and has since made its way to Arby’s across America. Irwin goes on to argue that it has traditionally taken about 16 years for food trends to spread to the mainstream. But miniature foods have become a sensation far more quickly. In 2011, just four years after miniature foods started to rank in the top five food trends according to the National Restaurant Association, Starbucks introduced its line of “Petites,” a collection of eight desserts under 200 calories that each cost $1.50. Cake Pops, Whoopee Pies, and Lemon Squares are the flagship options. Annie Young-Scrivner, global chief marketing officer for Starbucks, notes that, “our research shows that customers are looking for that little something in the afternoon. They just want a couple of bites of something to complement their tea or espresso beverage.” Piggy-backing on the idea that consumers desperately desire more choices that masquerade as healthy, Starbucks is trying its hardest to offer good options to the calorie-conscious. It is necessary to point out, however, that calories are not the only evil lurking within sweets. The Starbucks Red Velvet Whoopie Pie contains 190 calories and 19 grams of sugar. It is generally thought that a grown adult consuming 2,000 calories a day should take in about 25 grams of sugar. This “petite” snack, as Starbucks likes to call it, leaves little room for other sugars and provides few nutrients. In an interview with Today. com, Kathy Hayden, an analyst for Mintel, a food trend research company, notes that miniature sweets “really fit well with the snacking phenomenon that has not by any means peaked.” Hayden points to the fallacy that miniature foods are contributing to making people healthier by replacing desserts. Ironically, they are being consumed as snacks, thereby adding to caloric intake. It is because they are small that mini-desserts are over-consumed. One is less likely to buy a massive cupcake with a 5 PM coffee than to scarf down a Starbucks Lemon Square. So, will smaller sweets lead to a thinner nation? “I don’t think anyone’s losing weight from them. I think that they’re a nice little extra,” said Hayden.
Yet, beneath the shiny gloss of marketing rhetoric dwells an even more insidious societal truth. For the first time in history, it is the poor who are overweight. The excess of cheap sugars and fats in the American diet has led to the explosion of obesity across the country. While high-calorie foods are inexpensive and plentiful, massive portions have become a signifier for obesity, a new signpost of class distinction. Baked By Melissa, by charging more for smaller helpings and claiming fewer calories, is keying on this insecurity. By selling 50-calorie quarter-sized pieces of cake dolloped with frosting, the company appeals to the rich who seek to eat healthy and are willing to pay for it. In a depressing twist, people are lining up in droves to pay more for less food, a tiny act of conspicuous consumption. It is a competition between bakeries of who can offer less bang for the buck, and the wealthy cannot seem to get enough of it, eager to distinguish themselves from the engorged masses. Psychologically, tiny desserts work to exploit the consumer desire to have the most possible choices. Miniature sweets, by dint of their size and variety, afford us the impression of opportunity, the illusion of variety, and the false impression of consumer agency. This illusion of satiety, after all, is what the miniature food trend offers; but it is nothing more than an artificial stopgap, as the consumer is never truly satisfied. SAM BRESNICK B’15 is still into supersizing.
+++
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THE WHAT
by Ashlyn Mooney
illustration by Soyoon Kim I know a boy and his pet rooster got traded on Craigslist for an armoire and a field outside of town. Anyway I know the story I know which corner of the floor I’ll stick my eyes in when and I heard the neighbors say we’re coming up a misty spring There’s a dog that bit me once I know, from a ridge of toothmarks on my ankle—same as Mom’s scars when Grandma locked her foot inside the anthill. My rabbit’s bones poked out the mud last rainfall until the dog mouthed them gone. Grandma’s hair got took off by the oven when she lit the gas I know to wind the clock and I saw the Peeping Tom watch three skinflicks last afternoon I know Kinnickinnick smokes well as tobacco and it’s easier to find around here. I know squirrels get burnt on the east electric fence I know because I smelled them I know the shit in the barn was human once and canine the next because the first time it was mine I know what thaws will rot or freeze depending on the June I took a picture of the bone the dog I know brought home and sent it to the cell phone of my friend the neighbors complain but only from nearby their shotgun cases It was me that drew mud pictures on the western window with my thumb I learnt the name of the Plumb Creek Monster but I’ll never tell for now. I know a black widow from a brown recluse and I’ll bite them back I know who got caught naked in the Cottonwood— I know whatever I ferret away will get rooted out strung up to the tip of a hound’s nose but I can dodge a greenstick whip smart. I know the shortcuts pattered by the dog feet and I’ve seen which way the moths take to the mountains: that way there. If my stomach’s full I will not speak I know I know The bones stay in the ground until the rain shoves in
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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT