The College Hill Independent V.29 N.6

the college hill A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY OCTOBER 24, 2014 | V29 N6

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 Matt Marsico, Sara Winnick TECHNOLOGY Patrick McMenamin SPORTS Zeve Sanderson FOOD Sam Bresnick LITERARY Kim Sarnoff, Leah Steinberg SCIENCE Connor Mcguigan EPHEMERA Mark Benz X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff LIST Polina Godz, Megan Hauptman DESIGN + ILLUSTRATION Casey Friedman, Ming Zhen COVER EDITOR Jade Donaldson SENIOR EDITOR Tristan Rodman STAFF WRITERS Mika Kligler, Will Fesperman, Stephanie Hayes, Jamie Packs, Dash Elhauge STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Andres Chang, Amy Chen WEB Edward Friedman COPY Mary Frances Gallagher BUSINESS Haley Adams COVER ART Ben Ross MVP Kim Sarnoff

VOLUME 29 | ISSUE 6

NEWS 2 Week in Review

elias bresnick, sebastian clark, & india ennenga

3 Your Taxes kyle giddon

METRO 6 Tumbletown lisa borst

15 Panel on Panels estelle berger

ARTS 9 West Side Story katherine long

FEATURES 5 Monkey See, Monkey Do will fesperman

SPORTS 7 Broken Record stephanie hayes

EPHEMERA 12 idk-Hole

chung bologna

X 18 Scoping layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

13 Mountain Man raphaela posner

LIT

11 17

Rothko & Friends kim sarnoff

FROM THE EDITOR S Some time ago, in my travels, I heard the story of a boy from Antioch who wished to live among mermaids. Long hours would he spend in the sea, floating among the perch and kingfishers, and falling to great depths in the hope that a sea-girl would invite him to the deep. In this activity he persevered for a number of years, but his repeated efforts yielded only frustrations, and as he approached manhood resigned himself to walk upon the land.

But the Fates would have it that he arrive at wealth and renown. He sought his calling as a dyer, first as an apprentice, but soon as his own master, as he learned to stain garments with the deep cerise of lion’s blood. None in all of Antioch could replicate his hues; he began to work the cloth of princes and was sent, for a time, to serve the caliph.

When he returned to Antioch he married the daughter of a nobleman and purchased a villa on the shores of Lake Amik.

Yet all his success, his family, and his house of servants only reminded him of the mermaids that eluded him. One morning, as he wandered along the bazaar by the River Orontes, he noticed a man giving a demonstration of a peculiar apparatus—an inverted metal cauldron that, when submerged directly in water, would contain the air beneath it. He knew at once that this would be the instrument of his success, and with trembling hands he made his purchase and endeavored to the sea. Once inside the diving cauldron, he submerged into the deep until the water turned to black.

Some time before dying, he was approached by a mermaid, who asked him, “Why, with all that you have, do you abandon your successes, to live as a brother to mermaids?”

“Because,” he is said to have answered, “The dyer’s hand does only change the hue of the cloth. The cloth’s old colors, just as all else in the world, are still etched upon the past, and that will never be lost.”

It was a very silly story. –KG

Hellebore lucia iglesias

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

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN IRRATIONALITY

by India Ennenga, Sebastian Clark, & Elias Bresnick

SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM

BUDDY ON THE BASEPATH

FUZZY PANDEMIC

It’s 3 AM, you’ve been up all night working, and you’re hovering somewhere between vindictive frustration and utter hopelessness. Your roommate has been chatting away mindlessly for what feels like hours now, periodically asking you if you’ll refill the water or maybe make a midnight snack. And you just can’t help it anymore, you know you’re on the verge of snapping and you figure you’ve got two options: you can calmly say goodnight, go to your room, and practice deep breathing exercises, or you can jab a needle full of potassium chloride into your roommate’s arm and do a victory dance as she slowly perishes.

Let’s not pretend we haven’t thought this way before.

Annoying people sometimes drive us to horrifying fantasies, a perfectly normal reaction. But carrying out those fantasies is far from ordinary. Unless, of course, you’re Daniela Poggiali, who seems to have made these murderous daydreams quotidian realities. The 42-year-old Italian nurse was arrested after one of her elderly patients, Rosa Calderoni, died under suspicious circumstances at Umberto I Hospital in Lugo. Police believe that Poggiali used potassium chloride to stop the patient’s heart, and they are investigating other strange deaths that happened on Poggiali’s watch. Poggiali’s coworkers have, it seems, been aware of her temper for some time now. They report that Poggiali would often sedate annoyingly talkative patients and occasionally give them unnecessary laxatives in a kind of strategic double-whammy maneuver that would both embarrass the patient and literally make the other nurses shovel shit.

Poggiali’s actions were prompted by spite, not some misguided attempt at alleviating suffering. The nurse apparently took selfies next to some of the corpses while giving a celebratory thumbs-up sign. These are the kind of images we associate with Abu Ghraib and torture facilities, not medical institutions. Similarly, we usually try to explain murder as an act of serious hatred or a manifestation of deep-seated pathology, not simply a response to irritating old people, especially when the murderer has voluntarily chosen to care for those old people.

Although the number of Poggiali’s victims is still unclear, in part due to the fact that potassium chloride is difficult to detect in the bloodstream, the Daily Caller quite ironically reported that the “unperturbed” nurse was suspected of killing “several” patients. “Several,” in this case, means 38. –IE

The only way I can think to describe Buddy Cianci is as a squirrel with a severe nut allergy. The sound of the crunch, the power of his jaw, is his fuel. As he cracks through the shell, satisfaction delivered, he is met with anaphylactic shock.

He has not rebuilt public trust by, unlike other miscreant politicians before him, aggrandizing the rehabilitative effects of incarceration—the supposed EpiPen of American society—but by declaring that he never lost it.

Showing no remorse, he maintains his innocence. When asked by a student at a Brown University talk whether he would change anything in his life, he replied, “the verdict,” referring to the 2002 judicial case in which he was found guilty of racketeering conspiracy. For Buddy, participating in the mayoral race is, at best, an un-kickable habit, and, at worst, a death-drive, inevitably going to end in a situation no better than that of the now infamous Squirrel of South Street substation.

The one difference this time, he says, are the data analytics that allow him to micro-target his voters. Meeting with Providence residents earlier in the year, Buddy mentioned that “we hired a company that breaks down voters and their behavior—you know, people who like baseball are more likely to vote for me, that kind of thing.” Maybe because baseball fans abide by “three strikes and you’re out” as a rule to life. Last week, he told The New York Times he “would win because of all the voters who remember him coming to their Little League games.” Whoever feels allegiance to Buddy on these terms should probably note that there was also likely a pedophile at that Little League game, too, just speaking statistically.

At a time when American politics are at a partisan standstill, his rise from the ashes reflects a compromise on the part of the people of Providence, a willingness to place faith in a black-box institution that “gets shit done,” regardless of the methods. Whether you consider Cianci’s results to constitute actual progress is another affair; all that matters here is the illusion that a megalomaniac’s charisma can conjure. –SC

It’s a fact as well borne out by Greek comedy as it is by South Park—the best way to beat your enemy is to make him look ridiculous. This could be why the company GIANTmicrobes has recently seen a huge spike in sales of its cuddly “Ebola-replica” stuffed animals. As the virulent disease rages across parts of West Africa, casting mayhem and anguish in its wake, children across America tonight lay down their heads atop a brown Ebola-like fuzz-ball that, by all reports, is really cute and comfortable.

GIANTmicrobes specializes in making microscopic diseases into plush dolls. By scaling up microbes to 1,000,000 times their original size, the company succeeds in making a product that, well, vaguely resembles a disease.

Their website claims the toys are for educational purposes. “I use Ebola to talk to my kids about current events,” chirps one beaming teacher. “I used the stomachache microbe to teach my daughter about why she got sick,” adds a pragmatic mother. Of course, we can’t question the scientific value of a fuzzy doll purporting to be a replica even while it sports two eyes, a face, and a welcoming smile, but there are some people who admit the purpose of the dolls might not just be didactic.

Wrote one Amazon reviewer: “I admit it is fun when I get to tell people that my infant is chewing on Ebola or that my toddler is carrying Ebola.” She continues, “So far we haven’t gone into what Ebola is, but that will come.”

Images flood my mind of a dystopian future: children trading in their Raggedy-Anne dolls and beanie-babies for replicas of meningitis and gonorrhea, the phrase “I have Trichomoniasis” becomes fodder for social cachet in Kindergartens everywhere, our children associating the words “cute” and “fun” with West Nile virus… The list is unending.

If you’re in the market for one of these Ebola toys, you should know the company has sold out its entire selection of Ebola merchandise for the time being due to popular demand. But don’t despair just yet: you can add Ebola to your wishlist for just $9.95. –EB

OCTOBER 24 2014

NEWS

□ 02

AN INTERIM REPORT

by Kyle Giddon

On June 28, 2014, I submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to four United States Cabinet agencies asking what they were reading. Specifically, I asked for copies of all invoices related to any newspaper or magazine subscriptions purchased by each agency’s Office of the Secretary during the past two years.

My purpose was threefold: first, to get a better sense of what popular media our government might use to inform policy; second, to gather some new evidence on the exact outlays of federal agencies; and, third, to make an aesthetic judgment. Is the graduated income tax sponsoring belles-lettres, at least?

My requests were sent to the Departments of Agriculture, Justice, the Treasury, and State, four agencies chosen for their dissimilarity in purpose. Each request was nearly identical; I only replaced “Office of the Secretary” with “Office of the Attorney General” in my letter to the Department of Justice. I also solicited a statutory public-interest waiver on the fees that are sometimes associated with FOIA requests: “Please waive any applicable fees. Release of the information is in the public interest because it will contribute significantly to public understanding of government operations and activities. This information is being requested in my capacity as a journalist for The College Hill Independent who is investigating the use of public funds for newspaper and magazine subscriptions, in order to understand how government officials use privately published media to inform policymaking and decisionmaking.”

They all bit on the delicately crafted legalese. (And in doing so, these esteemed agencies of the federal government of the United States implicitly acknowledged that The College Hill Independent reputably serves the public interest).

By law, all agencies are required to respond to FOIA requests within 20 business days, and the target final response is one month from the submission date.

But time tends to move on the agency’s speed, regardless of legal requirements: the large volume of requests creates a backlog for underfunded FOIA offices, whose staffers respond to requests when time becomes available. So despite the best-laid plans of the Freedom of Information Act, the results still depend on the gears of bureaucracy, and at each agency my request met a different fate.

Department of Justice The Department of Justice acknowledged receipt of my request in a July 9 email: “[A]s you are clearly seeking records maintained by the Justice Management Division (JMD), we have forwarded your request to JMD for processing and direct response to you.” On September 8, I received a phone call from a Department of Justice FOIA staffer (“No Caller ID”), who asked if I would find acceptable a spreadsheet of all newspaper subscriptions and their associated costs, rather than the invoices. This was unusual, because FOIA usually applies to already existing records and does not require agencies to ever create any records ex nihilo. Nonetheless, I agreed and have not heard from them since.

Author’s note: In the corresponding images, I have redacted my home address. No other changes have been made.

Department of Agriculture The Department of Agriculture acknowledged receipt of my request via email on July 29, 2014, some 31 days after submission. On September 10, I received a phone call from a “Senior FOIA Specialist” who told me my request was very “unusual” and that the needed records were probably scattered around. He asked if I would find it acceptable to modify my request to “[r]ecords reflecting the name and dollar amount spent on electronic and non-electronic subscriptions for Secretary [Tom] Vilsack from January 1, 2013 to September 10, 2014,” and I assented. On September 22, I received an email constituting “final response:” “Unfortunately, no records responsive to your request were located or identified.” Zilch!

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The Freedom of Information Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, on July 4, 1966, and governs the disclosure of documents controlled by the US federal government. All executive-branch government agencies are subject to query, with release exceptions granted to a number of different document types, including trade secrets, personnel files, records related to active law-enforcement or national defense, intra- or inter-agency memoranda, and geological information “concerning wells.”

Department of State I received a handwritten letter from the Department of State on July 14, acknowledging my FOIA submission and assigning me a “Case Control Number.” I have not heard from them since.

U.S. Department of Justice Office of Information Policy Suite 11050 1425 New York Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530-0001

Telephone: (202) 514-3642

July 9, 2014 Mr. Kyle Giddon 61 Flint Avenue Larchmont, NY 10538 kyle_giddon@brown.edu

Re:

FOIA-2014-03446 / SBT

Dear Mr. Giddon: This responds to your request made via the Office of Information Policy eFOIA Portal and received in this Office on June 28, 2014, in which you requested invoices, bills, lists of charges, or other financial account statements from the year 2014 related to all newspapers, magazines, and other publications, including online subscriptions, currently subscribed to by the Office of the Attorney General. This response is made on behalf of the Office of Information Policy.

Department thethe Treasury Please be advisedofthat Office of Information Policy of the United States Department

of Justice processes Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Privacy Act (PA) requests for here comes mothermaintained lode. Theby Department the Attorney TreasuryGeneral, emailed me records it And maintains as well the as records the Offices of the Deputy Attorney General, Associate Attorney Public Affairs, Legislative Affairs, and their final response on August 21, General, and it contained 22 pages of invoices.

Among Legal Policy adjudicates administrative of denials of FOIA/PA madeexpected to the and thousands of taxpayer dollarsappeals spent on subscriptions, thererequests were some the Department. This Office maintains the case files for the initial requests and administrative publications (The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The appeals it processes.

Washington Post) and some surprises (The New York Post, The Atlantic, The New

Republic, The Yes, the whenever you pay incomesystem tax, you Additionally, for New your Yorker.) information, Department has afederal decentralized forare making thatrequests Secretary thecomponent Treasury Jack Lew can read maintains Malcolm its Gladwell for free. processingsure FOIA andof each of the Department own records.

Accordingly, FOIA requesters need to direct their requests to the Department component(s) they believe have records pertaining to the subjects of their requests. In this instance, as you are clearly seeking records maintained by the Justice Management Division (JMD), we have forwarded your request to JMD for processing and direct response to you. Contact information for JMD may be found in the Department of Justice Freedom of Information Act Reference Guide.

Lastly, please be advised that because we have routed your request to JMD, your request to OIP will no longer be tracked in our system and your case number will be closed.

You will need to contact JMD to obtain information regarding the processing status of your request.

Initial Request Staff Office of Information Policy U.S. Department of Justice

OCTOBER 24 2014

NEWS

□ 04

THE CELLULOID CAGE Animal liberation at the movies illustration by Julie Kwon

by Will Fesperman

There’s a moment in 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes that made me shiver. A human repeats the famous line from the 1968 version, “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” But in 2011, the human is the oppressor, and our chimpanzee hero, Caesar, sounds his first articulate word: "NOOOOO!” in response. The cry is follwed by silence, the human shock as that NO shoots out of a B-movie blockbuster and laps up to every American doorstep and dinner table. This millennial ape is not a human in disguise. He speaks for hundreds of millions in labs, for billions in windowless farms.

So how did animal liberation sneak into cinema? In fact, there are lots of movies in which animals escape human-imposed captivity, and even a few films that critique speciesism (in a phrase, the system that confines and kills nonhuman animals). But Rise of the Planet of the Apes—a summer action flick re-make starring James Franco—outshines them all. Rise can be read as a watershed moment for animals in cinema. One more crack in the wall.

It began with Bambi (1942), the Walt Disney feature about a white-tailed deer whose mother is killed by “Man,” and it continues today with the liberated zoo animals of DreamWorks’ Madagascar franchise. Cinema is one of two major media in our culture that frequently tell stories of animals fleeing captivity and abuse. The other medium is children’s books. The fact that these stories even exist in our society—one that at every turn preaches human superiority and exploits animals—deserves close inspection.

One quickly realizes, surveying films with animal liberation plots, that most of these movies are animated and aimed at the five- to ten-year-old set. One also notes that these movies aren’t actually about animals. They’re about humans—how we talk, how we think, how we love, hate, rebel.

Here’s what happens to dangerous narratives: first, the rebellious animals become villains, and their liberation inflicts human tragedy. In Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), we see, early on, parakeets in cages and chickens battered and fried. Then the birds come in flocks to peck out children’s eyes. In 28 Days Later (2002), the escape of a few lab chimps heralds the death of humankind. And in Willard (1971), a boy is eaten alive by rodents after refusing to kill the rats in his house.

If animal control fails, we muzzle. We stuff stories of animal liberation into a trivial form, animated children’s movies: 101 Dalmatians (1961), Chicken Run (2000), Madagascar (2005), Free Birds (2013). Then we snip the teeth (and beaks, and tails): we tame animals’ lived oppression into an allegory for human experience. These movies teach children about human friendship, human forgiveness, human perseverance. Those Claymation chickens escaping a slaughterhouse in Chicken Run? A satire on old P.O.W. films, of course. We’re sent to war like sheep to slaughter. Critics say the caged parrot in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is a metaphor for women in the patriarchy. But what about the parrot? What if the parrot is a parrot?

Another tactic: root out all references to (or criticisms of ) actual systems of oppression. Thus the animals in the

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FEATURES

Madagascar grow nostalgic for the pampered lives they used to live in the zoo.

Even in this neutered and spayed form, animal liberation plots can unsettle. Disney earned rebuke from deer hunters in 1942, and to this day animal-eaters call planteaters “Bambi-lovers.” I’m surprised Rise, a film about animal testing, didn’t get some cheek from the biomedical industry, which in the movie suffers a few barbs (and is ultimately responsible for the end of human civilization).

But perhaps scientists know the end is near for research on apes in the US, home to most of the remaining captive chimpanzees in the world. Rise, unlike animal films before it, doesn’t shy away from those actual chimps in actual cages.

Rise exudes a confidence in its critique of labs and zoos, as if the filmmakers trusted the message would resonate with mainstream viewers. Apes have personalities and feel emotions like we do, a lab worker tells Will (James Franco). The lab worker has just euthanized 12 primates with a lethal injection, and can’t bear to kill one more. He hands the needle to Will, to all of us, and the film asks us in its somewhat clunky but sincere way, “Could you?

Could you?” And then the film delivers a classic critique of animal testing—that the results don’t transfer to humans.

In this case, a drug that makes chimpanzees smarter doesn’t cure Alzheimer’s in humans; it kills humans, and will ultimately kill most of the human race.

But the jabs at animal testing aren’t what make Rise a revolutionary film. It’s the treatment of its animal characters, who are animals, not stand-ins for humans. In the original 1968 Planet of the Apes, the ape characters stand fully upright, wear clothes, and even have human-like hairstyles. The ape costumes look comically fake, which heightens the sense that the film is a parable about humanity, not a story about human-animal relations. But in Rise, filmmakers created ape characters who were physically and psychologically much more ape-like. In an interview with Parade, the film’s visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri said their goal was a more realistic chimp. “What we really do is try to understand the difference in how humans make certain expressions and how apes make those expressions and try to find the blend between the two,” he said.

When have we ever seen a complex film character who is an animal and does not walk, talk, and think like a human? Granted, Caesar is a super-smart chimpanzee who eventually acquires human speech. But his ape subjectivity, expressed in his movements and his relations with other apes, never disappears. Long sequences of Rise depict communication between apes who haven’t taken the special drug, who are regular apes. They speak with species-specific body language and gestures. One orangutan who picked up sign language from the circus communicates to Caesar with rudimentary signs, and the film provides subtitles.

Unlike the apes in Planet, the apes in Rise are apes, not humans. Their experiences are not about racism, or the Vietnam War, or human genocide. Their experiences are their own, and Rise respects them as such.

Rise is also anti-speciesist in a less sexy, but more

important way; the producers chose to use computer animation rather than live apes. Using captive animals would have negated the film’s critique. The movie industry has a history you don’t want to hear, or maybe about which you don’t care, like the on-screen slaughter of pigs, turtles, monkeys, horses, and, in Apocalypse Now (1979), an ox. Even pioneering filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, in his 1925 film Strike, depicts a man’s cutting a cow’s throat as she writhes on the ground. Eisenstein uses her death as a metaphor. How clever.

Rise isn’t the first mainstream film with a liberationist agenda. In the two years leading up to the 1975 publication of Peter Singer’s classic animal rights text, Animal Liberation, two films rang the bell for nonhumans: Charlotte’s Web (1973) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Viewers rarely detect the radical blood that runs between them. Speciesist culture teaches us to understand pig slaughter in Charlotte’s Web as an allegory and to ignore Chainsaw’s anti-speciesist critique.

Charlotte’s Web faithfully reproduces E.B. White’s 1952 children’s book about a pig saved from the blade. The movie includes the book’s unsettling first line, “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” And Chainsaw reminds humans that we are animals, with animal skin and animal blood; that humans can only be “dehumanized” or treated “like animals” if we treat nonhuman animals “like animals,” i.e., with horrific cruelty. Characters die on meat hooks and human skin becomes clothing. In a 2010 interview with Bizarre, director Tobe Hooper said he became a vegetarian while making the film, adding, “the heart of the film was about meat.”

Subversive as these films are, they lack Rise’s political bite. Fern does not rescue Wilbur the pig from a factory farm. That said, Rise is not everything most animal liberationists (who often adhere to sociological or Marxist analyses of oppression familiar to Brown students) would hope for. There’s no intersectional critique of speciesism, racism, and sexism. I think one woman has a speaking role, and I don’t remember her name. And the apes ride horses in the final scene—can’t the horses be liberated, too?

You think I’m joking.

The shortcomings are to be expected. Americans are just now rubbing their eyes at the idea that animals ought not to be imprisoned and killed. We’re beginning with the easy species: the ones lucky enough to share at least 90 percent of the human genome, plus cute dolphins at SeaWorld. In the early 1960s, men wagged their fingers at Jane Goodall for calling chimpanzees “he” and “she,” because a beasty brute is an “it.” Fifty years later, in June 2013, the National Institutes of Health announced its plan to retire all but 50 of its chimpanzees from labs to sanctuaries. And yet, we continue to sweep away the annual crop: 10 billion animals for food, millions from the labs. There are two more Madagascar spin-offs in the works, but with Rise, imperfect as it is, mainstream cinema has registered the first tremors of change.

WILL FESPERMAN B'15 is directing his own Madagascar spinoff.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BLOG-ARITHMS

by Wiz Khalisa

Ideas for your next tongue-in-cheek, Providence-specific novelty tumblr account Aggregate, curate, copy and paste. It’s almost 2015 and modes of artistic production are changing and fluid, just like the landscape of Providence. You need to amp up your web presence, and the Creative Capital is ripe for affectionate, Photoshopped mocking. Maybe someday your single-use novelty blog will become viral and you’ll get a book deal with Urban Outfitters. Here are some ideas to get you started, examples included.

H.P.Lovecraft Monsters Terrorizing Providence Landmarks Named After H.P.Lovecraft

Is It Coffeemilk?

Images of coffee and milk that, while together, are nevertheless not coffeemilk.

Defaced Buddy Cianci Signs

What is Roger Williams Doing With His Hand?

Legend has it that the statue of Roger Williams in Prospect Park used to also include a Native American boy holding a bible. Now Roger just looks sort of uncomfortable. The domain name rogerwilliamsholdingthings.tumblr.com is open and just waiting to be snatched up and filled with less imperialistic gestures.

October 24 2014

METRO

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BETTER, FASTER, STRONGER Is there a limit to human performance?

by Stephanie Hayes

illustration by Lee Bernstein

On September 28, 2014, Kenya’s Dennis Kimetto became the first man to run a marathon in under two hours and three minutes, crossing the finish line of the Berlin Marathon with a time of two hours, two minutes, 57 seconds—26 seconds faster than the previous record. Emmanuel Matai, another Kenyan, came in second place, finishing in two hours, three minutes, and 13 seconds, also beating the old record.

They’re not alone. The athletes of this century are shaving off seconds and adding centimeters to records across a range of sports, outright shaming winners from decades past. To put the recent marathon in perspective: had Kimetto been running in the 1908 Olympic marathon, he would have won by almost an hour. Kimetto is convinced he can break the two-hour mark, as is Matai. But as record after record is broken—by, admittedly, smaller and smaller increments—a broader question emerges: is there a ceiling on human performance in sport? And, if so, when will we reach it? +++ In a 2014 TED Talk entitled “Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger?” David Epstein explores the intricacies behind the seeming march of progress in sporting performance. Examining a number of different sports, he shows how new technology, more advanced training techniques, new psychological approaches, and the careful pairing of bodies to particular sports account for much of the progress we’ve seen in recent decades.

Take Usain Bolt, widely considered the fastest man of all time. Bolt’s personal best time in the 100 meters, 9.58 seconds, far outshines that of American sprinter Jesse Owens, deemed the golden boy of the 1936 Olympics for his then world-record time of 10.3 seconds. Yet, had Jesse Owens raced in last year’s world championships, Epstein explains, he would have had 14 feet still to go when Usain Bolt finished.

But Epstein soon complicates this disparity. Owens was running on cinder, the soft ash from burnt wood; Bolt ran on rubberized tracks. Owens had to dig a hole in the cinder surface to mark his starting place; Bolt had blocks to propel him forward. Taking these factors into account, sports scientist Ross Tucker finds that Owens wouldn’t have been 14 feet behind Bolt, rather within a single stride. In fact, the vast majority of improvement between these two competitors can be accounted for by technology.

Similarly misleading record leaps occurred in 2008, when Speedo got a little too good at making swimsuits. For years, swimmers have taken steps to reduce the drag on their bodies in the water: shaving off body hair, wearing swimming caps. Changes in techniques and technology, including the birth of the tumble-turn and the introduction of pool-side gutters, resulted in bursts of record-breaking over the years. But Speedo’s full-body suits made of impermeable polyurethane raised the bar further. The sleek suits increased buoyancy, reduced drag, and lessened swimmer fatigue. They were so effective that, in individual Olympic events, only four world records remain from the pre-polyurethane era. Fans and swimmers across the world argued that the suit devalued the athleticism of the sport: squeezed into one of these (a process that took up to 30 minutes), less-than-lean bodies became as streamlined as those with six-pack abs. The suit was banned on January 1, 2010—but not before over 250 world records were broken by athletes wearing the suits. Shortly after, Speedo issued a press release, saying the suits had “cast a shadow over the sport.” Although FINA—French for the International Swimming Federation—didn’t nullify the records broken by swimmers wearing these suits, which were all marked with an asterisk, indicating they came with a catch.

Similarly, from the early ‘70s to the late ‘90s, the record for the longest distance cycled in one hour improved by almost five miles as bicycles became more aerodynamic.

Then, in 2000, the International Cycling Union decreed that anyone wanting to challenge this record had to do it with essentially the same equipment used by Eddy Merckx in 1972 when he set the record at 30 miles, 3,744 feet. “Where does the record stand today?” asks Epstein, “30 miles, 4,657 feet, a grand total of 883 feet farther than Eddy Merckx cycled more than four decades ago.” We’re fooling ourselves when we believe improvements are all natural.

The ever-widening pool of available competitors has been another major factor in the record-breaking we’ve witnessed in recent decades. The most obvious reason for this is that the world’s population is greater than ever, resulting in more competitors across the board. Take the New York City Marathon, for example, which has exploded in popularity in recent years. In 1970, the first ever NYC Marathon saw 127 competitors, of which only 55 crossed the finish line. In last year’s NYC Marathon, a record high 50,704 runners participated, with 50,304 finishing the race.

The recent search for the bodies best suited to each sport has seen a further influx of talent from developing countries that, until recently, didn’t have access to the training regiments and international competition opportunities available in the so-called developed world. Kenyan distance runners—or, more specifically, runners from Kenya’s Kalenjin tribe—are a prime example. Their long, lean bodies are optimal for endurance running, while Kenya offers the ideal training location, its high altitude allowing runners to improve the delivery of oxygen to their muscles. And they dominate the sport. Epstein puts their success in perspective: while 17 American men in history have run a marathon in under two hours and ten minutes, 32 Kalenjin men did this last October.

Viewed in this light, the record breaking we’ve witnessed in “pure sports” like swimming and track and field isn’t actually a sign of athletic progress; it’s the result of a wider selection pool and better gadgets. Certainly, even with more competitors and new technology, some records show no sign of budging. Mike Powell’s 8.95m long jump record has remain untouched since 1991. Michael Johnson’s 400m time of 43:49 seconds, set in 1996, remains the Olympic record almost two decades later. Although, in 2008 and again in 2009, Bolt broke Johnson’s 1996 record in the 200m, Johnson’s ability to hold both a 200m and 400m record for so long is a testament to his unique athleticism, as these two distances demand vastly different tactics, training, and physiques. These records support the findings of a 2010 study by French researcher Geoffrey Berthelot, which suggest that the height of record-breaking was hit in 1988 and athletic performance has plateaued since the start of the 1990s. Peak performance in 23 of 36 sports, he writes, has stagnated.

By 2027, he thinks there will be no breakable records left in “pure sports.”

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+++ Now that we’ve picked the best bodies, fine-tuned diet, nutrition, and training techniques, and developed new technologies (and subsequently banned some of them), is there much farther to go?

What’s certain is that the rate of improvement will continue to decrease across the pure sports like swimming and track and field, as the mere willingness to work harder is no longer enough. One exception, suggests sports researcher Giuseppe Lippi in a 2008 article, is endurance events. Unlike a sprinter’s performance, which relies mainly on fast-twitch muscles that cannot be easily enhanced through training, endurance athletes can substantially develop their slow-twitch muscles and aerobic activity through regular practice. That said, marathon times, for example, are tough to compare due to the wild variations in courses and conditions. The Berlin Marathon—the course on which the most recent record was set—is considered to be one of the more favorable courses for runners, with its flat profile, even surfaces, and generally mild autumnal weather.

After this, we might be forced to rely on total athletic outliers to stir up the competition, those individuals that seem born to play a particular sport. Take swimmer Michael Phelps, whose wingspan is three inches greater than his height, lung capacity is double that of the average man, and feet—at an immense size 14—are practically flippers. Or, picture Usain Bolt who, at 6 feet 5 inches, is a head taller than many of his competitor.

This means he takes only 41 strides to run 100 meters, rather than the 44 or 45 strides of his rivals. Bolt epitomizes the changing shape of world-class sprinters, who are becoming taller and leaner than their shorter, bulkier predecessors, explains Alan Nevill, a specialist in biostatistics at the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom. While shorter legs give runners an advantage at the start of the race, longer limbs are beneficial in the middle stages of the race when runners have reached their top speed and need to power to the finish. Scott Trappe, who heads the human performance lab at Indiana’s Ball State University, believes Bolt also possesses 25 times the amount of “superfast twitch muscle” of the average human.

Or, perhaps, we’ll revert to different timing systems. In the 1972 Olympics, swimming events were recorded to the thousandth of a second, rather than hundredth-ofthe-second system that was normally used and continues to be used today. That year, the final for the men’s individual medley was won by two thousandths of a second. Public outcry ensued and the universal timing system reverted to two decimal points. Should we encounter a record-breaking drought in the near future, the organizers and sponsors of sports may need to resort to similar timing measures to stimulate public interest in sport.

Whether a record broken by this miniscule amount is still meaningful is open to question. +++ If we watch sports to see records broken by better and better athletes, if we watch sports to celebrate the development of human athleticism, will improvements enabled by unnatural or artificial means hold any value?

The obvious answer is no, given the public outcry about the Speedo suits and widespread outrage following Lance Armstrong’s 2013 confession of performance-enhancing drug use. Even Flo-Jo’s frozen record from 1988—when she ran the 100 meters in 10.49 seconds, a time no woman has come within a seventh of a second since—remains a source of contention today, having occurred before the days of drug testing. Although performance-enhancing drugs and better swimsuits are both examples of technology improving performance, clear distinctions can and should be made between the two. While drugs have been used by some athletes in some sports on some occasions, technology has made a difference to athletes across all sports, from faster bikes to lighter shoes. While the former represents a moral transgression and an example of unfairness, the latter merely disrupts the historical continuity of sporting progress.

This raises questions as to where the boundary sits between acceptable and unacceptable technologies; between those that are considered positive advancements and those that are deemed disruptive or too good to be believed. As it stands, this line is blurred. While Speedo’s full-body swimsuits were swiftly outlawed, there’s been no question as to whether we should remove the gutters from the side of the pool or return to cinder running surfaces. While we’re certainly not about to go backwards, this demands the question: moving forwards, where will we draw the line between what is “natural” enough and what is artificially enhanced? +++ If and when the “pure sports” run out of breakable records, perhaps the focus of the Olympics will shift away from swimming and track and field, towards team sports or events requiring more subjective judging processes, like gymnastics and diving. Perhaps we’ll stop placing so much emphasis on records and comparing today’s athletes to those of the past. Whatever happens, the appeal of sport will surely live one. There’s something awe-inspiring about watching bodies so fine-tuned they’ve become instruments, completely under the athlete’s control; about seeing disciplined bodies pushed to their physical limits.

STEPHANIE HAYES B’15 has plateaud since the start of the 1990s.

october 24 2014

SPORTS

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MEDIATIONS ON FUSION

by Katherine Long illustration by Soyoon

"Music is like a drug; whoever acquires the habit can no longer devote himself to important activities. We must eliminate music because it means betraying our country and our youth. We must completely eliminate it."

—Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, July 1979, radio broadcast calling for a ban on all music in the new Islamic Republic of Iran Iranian musician and Brown University lecturer in music Mohsen Namjoo’s most recent concert—a thunderous day in May, in Grant Recital Hall—was a quiet but provocative affair. Nearly every seat was full. Concertgoers had traveled from as far away as Seattle to see Namjoo. The air was stuffy with anticipation.

Namjoo has recently risen to something close to fame on the world music circuit—widely attributed to his combination of blues guitar (think Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker) with traditional Iranian melodies and classical Persian poetry (think Sa’adi and Hafez). It seems nearly impossible for reverent critics to say his name without breathlessly uttering the word “fusion” in the same sentence.

Namjoo stepped onstage to polite applause and played a set with reciprocal politeness. He commented on the number of parking tickets he had received in the past six months living in Providence. And, without saying much more, he left.

The artist had printed his own concert programs, apparently from his office: sheets of printer paper, with column headings “Melody,” “Language,” “Style,” “Rhythm,” and, most intriguingly, “Other.” The songs were listed not by name, but by number. For every category, the songs were described as either “E,” for Eastern, “W,” for Western, or “E+W,” for, presumably, “fusion.” (Except for the “Other” category—only small stars, pertaining to four songs, never explained.)

Every member of the audience held the key, presumably, to the entire concert: that table listing every song’s eastern and western characteristics. Some of the categories were easy to suss out: “Language,” for example. Some were much more difficult. What distinguishes an Iranian rhythm from an American blues or Spanish flamenco rhythm? Certainly, the setar sounds different than the guitar—it lends a reedy, lugubrious tone to any song. But is that distinctly Iranian?

Musicians from plenty of other countries use a setar.

The theme of the concert was also ambiguous. Namjoo explained that he lifted the concert’s title —“When You Talk About Iranian Fusion, What Are You Talking About?” —from Raymond Carver’s brutal short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” In Carver’s story, two couples find that words are inadequate to express both the exquisite delight and deep pain, bordering on trauma, of being in love. But what he believes that story has to do with Iranian music remained unsaid. A similar sense of macabre romance, perhaps?

But Namjoo’s almost scientific dissection of his own music—plotted out in a chart for every concertgoer—and the fact that he plays with the line many draw between Eastern and Western influences, raises questions not only about his artistic process, but also about the nature of “fusion.” His generalization that “fusion” entails combining elements from different cultural traditions glances over the assumptions implicit in his East/West cultural dichotomy. In the context of an Orientalizing legacy, a tradition in which Western and Eastern culture are never considered equally legitimate—and guess which one is “less authentic”—what sort of compromises does that entail? And taking it for granted that all artists incorporate a variety of influences into their work, when does a piece of art become a work of “fusion”? +++ Namjoo has a halo of grey-brown hair, almost an afro, framing a long, sallow face. He’s around six feet tall and has an Adam’s apple big enough that you have

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to remind yourself not to look at it. Offstage, his movements are quick and nervous. He struggles obviously but good-heartedly with speaking English. When he smiles, he gets a bright, eager look in his eyes that makes it easy to forget he’s spent the past five years in self-imposed exile. In 2009, he was sentenced to prison for quoting the Quran in his song “Shams.” Namjoo, born in 1975, is a member of what Iranians refer to as the nasl-e sookhteh, the burnt generation.

Burnt by the Iran-Iraq War, burnt by the brutal excesses of the first 10 years of the Islamic Republic, burnt by dashed hopes for an Iranian resurgence and by an increasingly globalized world and, often, by exile. Since his arrival in the West in 2009, Namjoo has floated from city to city, giving concerts, making albums, nurturing his growing fan base in the world music crowd and the vast Iranian exile network. In 2012, Namjoo completed a musical residency at Stanford University; in 2014, he began lecturing at Brown University on Iranian music. Since he’s been in the US, his albums have started featuring noticeably more acoustic instrumentation and less synthetic post-production tech.

Over the past seven years, Namjoo’s style has become more experimental and playful. His first full-length album, Toranj, was released in Iran in 2007. It bears witness to the hotel lobby keyboard, distorted electric guitar, and booty bass—think “Careless Whisper,” Duran Duran, even the Western music that was played in Iran around the time of the Revolution in the the late 1970s and early ’80s, before Western music was banned. But Toranj also highlights the raw power of Namjoo’s wailing, ragged voice. He screams, he yips, he barks, he croons, he growls—all traditional Iranian technique, known as tahrir. His range is extraordinary. He is, truly, a master on the setar. Songs from his 2012 release, 13/8, a reference to notoriously complex Iranian time signatures, are pareddown, mostly Namjoo on setar, sometimes accompanied by snare and upright bass. But his voice leaps and pops and riffs, reminiscent of Ella, scatting over a barebones piano. “Sanema,” about a torturous love, is the most vocally playful.

Namjoo at times roars, at times burbles, at times doo-wops and at times sings in the operatic style of Iranian maqam performers.

Namjoo’s latest album, Trust the Tangerine Peel, incorporates influences from Nirvana and Led Zeppelin, as well as village music from Namjoo’s hometown, Torbat-e Jam, in southeastern Iran. “Golmammad,” for example, samples the melody of “Whole Lotta Love” on both electric guitar and keman. Namjoo is as pitch-perfect as a keening, moaning Robert Plant—only the lyrics, a folk song from Khorasan about a son who has been killed in battle, belie the song’s origins.

But the lyrics are slightly off. Namjoo substitutes the word “mother” for “soldier,” so instead of the traditional, “A hundred times I told you not to take up arms, Golmammad the soldier,” he sings, “A hundred times I told you not to take up arms, Golmammad’s mother.” The song is dedicated “To Our Mothers.” The music video features a mother and wife, or sister, keening beside an unmarked grave—all set to the raucous, hyper-sexualized theme of “Whole Lotta Love.” Namjoo suggests that the real victims of the burnt generation are not its young men, keyed up to a fever pitch, literally and spiritually martyred in the maelstrom of the 1980s, but the nameless, faceless women they leave behind, scarred and spiteful—and, Namjoo implies, vengeful.

Viewed in one light, Cold War-era Western imperialism could be seen as somewhat responsible for those women’s pain—the US equipped Saddam’s regime in the 1980s, even as he waged senseless preemptive war on Iran and gassed his own citizens. The killer instincts and advanced torture techniques of the Shah’s secret police force, SAVAK, were learned in American training camps. Middle Eastern pro-democracy movements, including one led by Iranian politician Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, were diverted by American and British intelligence agencies. Yet Namjoo, explaining his work in an interview with Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, says that as a young musician in the 1980s, and during his compulsory military service in the 1990s, he heard similarities in

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

subject matter and tone between Western rock, banned by the Islamic Republic, and the Iranian village music that was glorified by the same. He loved how blues musicians repeated the same five notes over and over – it reminded him of the traditional Iranian music, built of improvised meditations around 12 codified sets of notes or themes, called dastgahs.

Namjoo’s work, then, could be seen as the worst kind of “westoxification,” (in Persian, gharbzadegi, literally “being hit with the West”) an idea expounded in the 1970s by the first great demagogue of the Iranian Revolution, French-educated sociologist and Islamic scholar Dr. Ali Shariati. He described a cheapening of Islamic values resulting from an influx of Western consumerism. Shariati prescribed a “return” to a socially just, publicly ecstatic Islam, the Islam of the great Shi’ite martyrs Ali, and his sons Hasan and Husayn.

Westoxification, Shariati wrote, is a peculiar type of fusion, a fusion that results in a product less valid—less authentic—than the sum of its parts. There is a commercial aspect to Shariati’s discussion of European cultural imperialism, a process whereby the East is turned into an “empty, void consumer,” arriving at a nadir when it seeks to repackage and market itself to the West for profit. Maybe there is a commercial calculus in what Namjoo is doing. After all, one reason he chose to leave Iran, he told Neshat, is because “no one is really living off of making records in Iran.” None of his Iranian fans can buy his albums, because they’re not allowed to be sold in the country. Instead, his music is downloaded illegally and sold by street-corner bootleg artists; he complains to Neshat about the lack of respect for intellectual property rights in Iran. So maybe it’s not so much of a stretch to think that in order to turn a buck by selling records to a Western audience – the only audience buying – he’d have to give them something they recognize.

The idea that Eastern musicians are incentivized to re-package themselves for Western audiences is by no means new. It stems from the Orientalizing view that the West is able to master the East by quantifying it in familiar terms. The inverse of that imperial equation is that in order to be known in the West, the East must sell itself on the West’s terms. Perhaps the musical foil to Namjoo is the Swedish-Iranian musician Arash, from Los Angeles, who in 2005 did the unthinkable for an “ethnic” artist and broke into mainstream Western pop with his single, “Boro Boro,” a flashy, heavily-produced dancehall hit. The music video shows a Hollister-clad Arash, clubbing, dancing with scantily-clad women in front of the Hollywood sign, riding through Southern California in a red convertible; it glorifies conspicuous consumption using almost uniquely American tropes. Almost nothing about the song is distinctly Iranian except the language: Arash sings in Persian. This year, he collaborated with T-Pain on a single titled “Sex Love Rock n Roll.”

Arash’s cultural emptiness is partially what Shariati meant when he railed against miniskirts and praised the heroes of Karbala. And the tradition is still alive: The New York Times coined Namjoo’s most persistent moniker, “The Bob Dylan of Iran.” In the 21st century, the only recourse of America’s high-culture bastion in describing Namjoo’s music is by comparison with an American standard (albeit one who pilloried American Cold War ideals) Yet critics said the same thing about a genre of music now acknowledged to be one of the most progressive and significant of the past three decades: rap music. Sampling from a diversity of musical genres is one thing that defines rap as a genre. Golden-age artists including Eric B. & Rakim, KRS-One, and Public Enemy saturated their albums with samples from funk, get-down be-bop, and hard rock. Namjoo seems to be doing exactly the same thing. He grafts phrases and motifs from David Bowie and Eric Clapton straight into songs with centuries-old lyrics and melodies, ending up with a postmodern “Variation on a Theme from Zeppelin.” And it implies, too, that to him, the giants of Western rock and roll are no more sacred than Iranian village folk singers: Namjoo uses both of their work with equal impunity.

OCTOBER 24 2014

And to say Namjoo is just pandering to Western tastes may be missing the point entirely. University of Toronto ethnomusicologist Farzaneh Hemmasi notes a process whereby exilic Iranians in the US “took up…music and dance… as constitutive elements of their oppositional version of Iranian culture,”—oppositional because the Islamic Republic banned most forms of music and dance in 1981 and has only lifted some restrictions since. During Mohammad Khatami’s presidency, relatively lax enforcement and some policy changes in the Ministry of Islamic Guidance led to a small flourishing of Iranian rock bands.

But when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad assumed power, those rules were rolled back.

Women are not allowed to sing in public or make solo recordings; Western music is not allowed to be played; verses from the Quran are not allowed to be used in popular music.

Back in April, six Iranian 20-somethings were sentenced to prison (though ultimately released on bail) for recording a music video to Pharrell’s “Happy” and posting it on YouTube. While their charges were never made public, it can be assumed their crimes, in the eyes of the Islamic Republic, were multiple: listening to Western music, dancing to Western music, dancing provocatively, dancing, appearing on camera without hijab (women), appearing in front of men without hejab, spending time with unrelated members of the opposite sex, and using YouTube.

Within Iran and within the exile community, there exists a desire to challenge the cultural norms of the Islamic Republic. These Iranians were more flagrant and certainly less concerned for their personal safety than most citizens of the Islamic Republic dissatisfied with the policies of the Ministry for Islamic Guidance is known. But in the video, they just look, well, happy. Like they don’t give a damn that they know they’re going to prison, that this video is a blazing protest against the regime under which they live.

Namjoo’s music is protest music. It is provocative music. Provocative, because every time he imitates Kurt Cobain, every time he nods to Sonny and Cher’s “Bang Bang,” every time he emits a Plant-ian wail, he is casting the gauntlet down in front of the Islamic Republic, Ali Shariati, Ruhollah Khomeini. Namjoo’s prolific use of 1970s standards is a deliberate choice of weapon in his understated battle against an oppressive regime founded at least in part on a violent rejection of the West of the 1960s and ’70s. Namjoo takes a stand against the idea that he has been contaminated by the West, that his music is “toxic” to a nation’s morals.

But the way he “samples” those standards hints at a subtle rejection of Western—and specifically American—cultural hegemony. Namjoo’s use of “Bang Bang” at the end of “Golmammad” is reminiscent of RZA’s use of the same song throughout the soundtrack to Kill Bill. And his irreverence for things like copyright infringement and intellectual property proves that he doesn’t blindly worship at the altar of the Western musical canon—far from it. He takes what he needs from each tradition but is suckered in by the political baggage of neither. Namjoo, by employing what ethnomusicologists would call a “Southon-South transfer,” establishes his discursive space as drawing on, but distinctly apart from, either the East or the West.

This is his fusion. Not that he is able to engender a superficial reconciliation between East and West, not that he’s able to market the East in a way the West finds appealing, but that he is able to carve out a space both a part of and apart from either body of music.

None of which eases the appreciation of the gritty power of Namjoo’s music, which is why, I am sure, he kept the commentary at the concert to a bare minimum.

KATHERINE LONG ‘15.5 is the Bob Dylan of College Journalists.

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FORGERIES

by Kim Sarnoff illustration by Ming Zhen

Wheatfield with Cypresses, Van Gogh I was rolling, too, and God stopped in pieces.

Madonna, Munch he said, “I want a cream bath.”

The Actor, Picasso I touch my back to ensure I’m not real.

The Lovers, Magritte we ate off a crossbow wrapped in gingham.

Luncheon on the Grass, Manet you did not know what you were doing, either.

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literary

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BY CHUNG BOLOGNA TIGHTS

OCTOBER 24 2014

EPHEMERA

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WHAT THE MIND SCARES UP Fiction and reality in John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van

by Raphaela Posner

I am sitting in the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, MA, admiring the proscenium decorated with Grecian women made of sheet metal. John Darnielle, the driving creative force of the band The Mountain Goats, walks onstage, his brown corduroy jacket falling heavily over his black outfit. Formed in 1991, The Mountain Goats were originally known for homemade, lo-fi recordings. Now, they record with a full band in a studio, but still hold on to the relaxed and genuine style of their original releases. Unlike the last time I saw Darnielle perform, singing songs of the suburban gothic, he walks on stage armed with a book, no guitar in sight.

Darnielle reads from his novel, Wolf in White Van, which made the longlist for this year’s National Book Award nominees. The novel follows Sean Phillips, a game inventor who was heavily disfigured in a violent incident as a teenager. The cause of Sean’s disfigurement is not revealed until the end of the book, when it becomes clear that Sean is a ghostly shell of the man he could have been. Sean creates a game called “Trace Italian,” a role-playing contest set in an imaginary world, played by sending letters in the mail. The world of the “Trace Italian” is a place for Sean and his players to escape into, “some magic pathway back into childhood,” as Sean describes it. Wolf in White Van follows Sean as he attempts to balance between the fictionalized world of “Trace Italian” and the reality of his disfigurement.

Darnielle’s lyricism has long been ballyhooed for its ability to articulate the struggles of suburban life with irony and devotion. His presence on social media is entertaining and thoughtful, updating his fans on Twitter with morsels like “learning that Raffi live-tweets Canucks games is the greatest gift” and “spend enough time alone in a hotel room and learn just how perfectly some Wordsworth poems can be sung to bluegrass tunes.”

Darnielle has journeyed to Brookline to read from Wolf in White Van and speak with writer Tim Horvath, a short fiction writer and winner of the New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Fiction. Horvath likes to infuse his own realistic stories with imaginative potential, much like Darnielle himself. Once onstage, Darnielle jumps into reading a portion from Chapter 13 of Wolf in White Van: “‘Friends a long time,’ I said very carefully, very slowly, holding my spasming jaw as still as I could. I wanted to get the r in friend right, but I couldn’t, so I said fend. Who knows what long even came out like.”

In this scene, Sean is speaking to his father about his friend Kimmy, who has frequently visited him in the hospital immediately following his incident. Hearing this passage read aloud, the difficulty of Sean’s speech arrests in a way that doesn’t translate in mere text. As Darnielle reads, his theatricality shines through; his face contorts to mimic the movements Sean’s mouth makes. His voice is nasally, not annoyingly, but in a way that enters my hidden cochlear chambers so I can fully hear Darnielle read, “This is different from calling out into a cave or well; it’s a form of prayer.” +++ Darnielle’s novel ruminates on the line between fiction and reality, as well as the ways that humans construct our own ideas about what counts as “real.” While recovering in the hospital, Sean creates a fictional universe in his mind. Upon his return to the non-hospitalized world, he turns this imaginary place into a game, “Trace Italian,” named for the “star fort” Trace Italienne that first appeared in the 15th century as an architectural form that was thought to be less vulnerable to cannon fire. The star formation made it so that the fort had no blind spots and the lower, thicker walls absorbed the force of cannonballs.

The game is played through the mail; players must send four pre-addressed envelopes with their subscription. Sean advertises the “Trace Italian” in magazines, attracting players

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from around the world. Players must make their way to the sanctuary of the Trace Italian, located somewhere in Kansas. They send in their moves, and Sean sends them the information for that particular choice. Each letter from Sean ends with four choices for the player to make in their next act. The immersive game provides an expected escape for its players. Darnielle says that the Trace Italian of the novel is a way to “merge with the object of contemplation and not have to be yourself for awhile.” Some players find it hard to distinguish the world of the Trace from the real world, a trait that’s both beneficial and detrimental. But for many, the Trace is just a place to explore in parallel to the real world; much in the way we read fiction while moving through our daily lives.

Horvath asks Darnielle how Wolf in White Van was created, and Darnielle thanks him for carefully avoiding the term “creative process.” Darnielle explains that the book originally had many narrators, but eventually he realized that Sean’s voice rang truest to Darnielle’s intentions. Moving the microphone about constantly and sitting with his legs bent at an odd angle, Horvath seems scattered in contrast to Darnielle, whose voice doesn’t waver when answering questions. Horvath asks if Darnielle did a lot of research for Wolf in White Van. “I can do a great hospital scene without having to look much up,” Darnielle said. He was a nurse for a while, before music became his full-time gig. Horvath also spent time in psychiatric wards as a counselor, mainly working with children and adolescents.

Despite the appeal to metafiction of Trace Italian, some of Wolf in White Van is purely autobiographical. It is not just his experience in hospitals that he culls from his own life. The park north of Darnielle’s high school in central California, where he would hang out with friends, inspires the park in the novel, situated north of the high school where teenagers go to smoke cigarettes.

After Darnielle finishes speaking of the ways in which Wolf in White Van mirrors elements of his own life, the conversation continues. Horvath facilitates the discussion, which actually feels more like an interview than anything else. He makes connections between Darnielle’s work and that of Miranda July and Samuel Beckett, but he mainly prompts Darnielle with questions about his writing process and intentions for the novel.

One of the best questions Horvath asks concerns which passages were emotionally trying to write. When Darnielle speaks about a scene between Sean and his father, I can feel my stomach tie in the same knots it did when reading of his father’s disinviting him from his grandmother’s funeral. Darnielle says that he wants to make his readers cry, because he likes crying and feels it is a true expression of a piece’s impact on the audience. Darnielle’s ability to evoke unforced emotion, present in his music, still rings true in his prose. +++ Sean thinks in long, beautifully constructed sentences in the opening chapter of Wolf in White Van. He remembers his father carrying him up the stairs. Sean thinks, “It’s a cluster memory now: it consists of every time it happened and is recalled in a continuous loop.

He did it every day, for a long time, from my first day back until what seemed like a hundred years later, and after awhile, the scene blurred into innumerable interchangeable identical scenes layered one on top of the other like transparencies.” These long sentences make it possible to fully enter Sean’s mind and see the world through his eyes, a dive into stream of consciousness thinking. The style of writing allows the reader to relate to Sean, as the reader can immerse herself into his thought patterns.

This is also present in Darnielle’s music, where he explains the nuances of human

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

interactions. “The first time I made coffee for just myself I made too much of it/ But I drank it all just ‘cause you hate it when I let things go to waste/ And I wandered through the house like a little boy, lost at the mall/ And an astronaut could’ve seen the hunger in my eyes from space,” Darnielle sings in the song “Woke Up New” from 2006’s Get Lonely.

He utilizes longer phrases to invite the listener into the somber situation, as he does when speaking for Sean.

Darnielle weaves a second, imaginary world by creating a game within the book, itself, of course, fiction. The metafiction of the Trace Italian leads the reader to question the relationship we have to reality, as characters get lost in the new world. Are we escaping into the fictional world of literature just as the players explore the Trace? The blurring of the line between reality and fiction leads to a tragic accident involving a player of “Trace Italian.” The player’s family tries to sue Sean, and he defends the Trace in a pretrial hearing, bringing to the surface the question of whether or not the fictional world is beneficial to those who choose to temporarily lose themselves within it. In Wolf in White Van, Sean says, “It’s a little strange to me, to be defending something that was supposed to have been a place where people could feel safe and have fun, where nothing ever really happened except inside our heads.” Wolf in White Van questions the validity of escapism into a created world. On one hand, the Trace Italian has provided a new world for Sean when recovering from his injuries. On the other, it has torn apart the lives of some of its young players, leaving one of them without sensation in his hands due to hypothermia.

Darnielle’s novel is an internal mediation on the impact of fantasy. His ability to create new worlds is, again, present in his music. The Mountain Goats songs often are small worlds in themselves. In “This Year,” he sings, “I broke free on a Saturday morning/ I put the pedal to the floor/ Headed north on Mills Avenue/ And listened to the engine roar.

My broken house behind me and good things ahead/ A girl named Cathy wants a little of my time/ Six cylinders underneath the hood crashing and kicking/ Ahh, listen to the engine whine.” We see the Trace as a way for Sean to escape the hospitals, but also the Trace as a world that has actually swallowed one of its players whole. The line between fantasy and reality is blurred, as players forget which moves take place in the Trace and which take

OCTOBER 24 2014

place in real life. Are we responsible if the lines we created are blurred by someone else? +++ There’s this feeling I get before I talk to someone I admire. It’s like I’m seven years old and scared to jump off the diving board into the pool. It’s an experience that I know I would regret missing out on, but in the moment the possibility of embarrassment looks like the hard surface of the water. I have fictionalized Darnielle, and I forget that he exists in my world until I am standing in line, six feet away from the table where he sits, signing books with a sharpie. Through my speakers in my room he has invited me into other fictional worlds, ones where he seems to sit in the corner and nod knowingly about the small secrets his characters (and I) keep hidden between diaphragm and lungs. I hand my book to him and feel the pitch of my voice raise an octave, as I’m told it does when I speak with people I don’t know. “I saw you in Denver this summer and I’m a big fan,” I say. “Oh yeah, we played the Gothic, right?” he says, and I’m taken aback by how casually he speaks to me, smiling with his closely set eyes. There’s no intention of intimidation from his side of the signing table. To him, this is probably just another easy conversation with a fan while he transcribes my name from the sticky note on the cover page of Wolf in White Van. But the fictional Darnielle I created can no longer exist in the form that he did before I met the real version. I will go home and listen to The Mountain Goats and create a new Darnielle in my mind, one who is friendly and jokes about Aristotle, as I wonder if this version is closer to the real thing.

RAPHAELA POSNER B’18 wishes she could have brought a real mountain goat to Brookline.

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SET THE ROOF AFLAME Solar panels in historic Providence

by Estelle Berger illustration by Maya Sorabjee

The Providence Historic District Commission (PHDC) failed to show up to its own meeting. On October 14, Amy Greenwald and her husband Justin Boyan were notified that their special hearing before the Commission was canceled due to lack of quorum, and, to add what went unsaid, the Commission’s lack of foresight.

Greenwald, a computer science professor at Brown University, and her husband are embroiled in conflict with the historic preservationists of Providence as they attempt to install 21 photovoltaic solar panels on the roof of their family home in the College Hill Historic District. They first proposed their plan to the PHDC on September 22 at the Doorley Municipal Building on Westminster Street. But as preservationists of a different kind, their prerogative to protect the Earth’s ecosystem through solar energy was not welcomed by the Commission. Instead, the PHDC scheduled a special hearing. But without a quorum, the Commission will revisit Greenwald’s case at the regular meeting on October 27.

Ten Jenckes Street sits on an incline. The house is painted orange, the front door red.

The plaque that reads “Leonard Blodget House 1832” is drilled above a first-floor window. This is the oldest home to go before the Providence Historic District Commission to request approval for a solar array of this size. Greenwald’s array is an arrangement of 21 modules that will cover nearly the entire surface area of her roof. Each module is a grouping of photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight into electric current. According to Real Goods Solar (RGS), the energy company that plans to install their panels, Greenwald’s family can expect to generate enough electricity to power both their house and an electric car. Under a loan program established by the West Broadway Neighborhood Association (WBNA), Greenwald and Boyan would only pay $750 up front and are projected to save $35,000 over the next 25 years. By the second year, the system would pay for itself. Boyan explains that because their roof faces south, the system would “produce 95 percent of [their] family’s year-round power needs…completely pollution free.” Over the course of any given year, they will cumulatively operate almost entirely independent of the grid.

The Providence Historic District Commission remains resolute in their determination to prevent the installation. At the preliminary PHDC hearing on September 22, 10 Jenckes Street—case number 14.099—was fourth on the agenda. The Commission, led

by Michael Marino, sat at a U-shaped table in the first-floor conference room of the Municipal Building. With a bowtie and waxed mustache, Marino, partner at Plourde, Bogue, Moylan + Marino LLP, focused on maintaining the colonial, 19th century aesthetic of the properties on the docket.

As Greenwald and her husband waited to be called before the table, they listened to the other cases with half-open mouths. Obdurate and mournful, a commission member declared, “This is my last skylight!” after an artist applied for more windows above his studio space on Angell Street. To carve into an aging structure is painful to a committee of long-time Rhode Island residents. Providence’s historic neighborhoods are landscapes of a collective memory, and a Commission governed by nostalgia clamors to make the city remember. At this same meeting, an applicant requested permission to replace her original slate roof because of unmanageable weather damage. The Commission approved the case as submitted, but as a final word, a panelist added, “I’m sorry to lose that slate.”

Because Providence does not have official regulations surrounding solar installations, the PHDC has composed a tentative set of guidelines titled “Energy Efficiency and Other Sustainability Improvements.” Under the Passive Solar Energy Systems heading, the Commission states, “On historic buildings with any type of gable or hip roof form, solar panels are not permitted on the front or primary roof slope, but may be located …out of view from the street(s) adjacent to the building.” These rules have not yet been adopted.

Therefore, “sustainable improvements” are treated like a skylight or a chimney, or any other designated rooftop eyesore.

The language of this update is defensive. The Commission attests: “The concept of energy conservation is not new: in fact, historic buildings were often designed to respond to the local climate and maximize natural sources of heat, light, and ventilation.” This phrase seems to absolve the Commission of its responsibility to the environment rather than hold it to a higher standard of adaptation to renewable energy technology.

Because the south-slope of 10 Jenckes faces directly toward the street, the PHDC is steadfast in its adherence to the phrase in their “Standards and Guidelines” that states: “Original historic roof lines…should be retained.” The manual goes on to urge homeowners to “consider locating new rooftop elements so that they will be out of view from street level.” These guidelines are based upon precedents established by the National Park Service, but the Commission is free to amend their own manual through due process.

Boyan appreciates the PHDC’s intention to sustain the colonial architecture in his neighborhood, but “solar power is different. A historic home with solar panels communicates a strong intention” to maintain the environment beyond Providence, beyond Rhode Island.

Outside of the historic districts, Providence has taken steps to support solar energy.

This June, the State House and Senate passed the Renewable Energy Growth Program bill, which, according to Providence Business News, established “a 160-megawatt, five-

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year program to finance solar and other distributed generation projects.” This legislation not only benefits energy-conscious homeowners, but it also has the potential to add 250 green jobs to the Rhode Island market and bolster the average annual economic output by $30 million. Boyan commented that the PHDC “didn’t seem to care about the environmental benefits of [his] project,” and it seems as though they are disinterested in the larger financial implications as well.

After the PHDC meeting, Greenwald appeared before the Providence Planning and Architectural Review Committee (PAR) on October 1. Under the vaulted ceiling in The Old Brick Schoolhouse on Meeting Street, the room of architects, planners, and preservationists turned their attention to Jason Martin from the PHDC. This is a “huge issue that’s not going to get smaller,” he said. The room was rapt. Someone coughed. On the screen behind him appeared a single image of a historic home, and on its roof was a sleek, black grid of a dozen solar panels.

Still standing before the PAR, Martin asked, “Is it visible? Definitely. But is it noticeable?” Because Greenwald’s house is angled uphill, the top of the roof can be observed only from the sidewalk directly across the street. From below, above, and behind, the grid will be nearly invisible. Greenwald and Boyan have already received letters of support from their two adjoining neighbors and the College Hill Neighborhood Association as a whole. A committee member then asked the obvious question: “If we’re the two percent [of onlookers], who are we serving?” +++ Two days after the scheduled special hearing before the PHDC, Sam Zurier, Councilman for Ward 2 (which includes College Hill), proposed an amendment to the Code of Ordinances before the City Council. On October 7, he sent a letter to the PHDC that stated his condemnation of the Commission’s inability to find “a sound balancing of the interests of historic preservation with environmental concerns.” Because the Commission failed to create a set of standards, Zurier introduced legislation that would eliminate the Commission’s power over solar cases.

Section 404 of the 1994-2012 Providence Zoning Ordinance currently states, “An active or passive solar energy system…is permitted in all zones as an accessory structure.”

If Zurier’s ordinance is passed, the following phrase would be struck out in thick black ink: “In a historic district, solar energy systems and solar collectors shall require the approval of the historic district commission.” Unless the Commission creates a viable policy, the ordinance, upon passage, will be enacted on January 1, 2015.

Earlier in the month, Boyan released an e-mail update about the case and made a point to embolden his political ties. In preparation for the special hearing that was supposed to occur, Boyan invited Council Majority Leader and Chairman of the Committee on Ordinances, Seth Yurdin. Boyan describes him as “a strong friend of the environment, as well as us personally.” He also extended the invitation to “State Legislator and neighbor,” Representative Edith Ajello, and solar energy advocate Jerry Elmer from the Conservation Law Foundation who, according to Boyan, “has said he will try to attend the meeting and provide a short statement of support.” Even if Zurier’s motion proves to be purely threatening and Boyan’s connections insubstantial, the earnest pursuit to install solar panels on the roof of 10 Jenckes Street has become a citywide political initiative.

Providence is not alone in grappling with the clash between preservation and energy efficient technology. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory recently performed a study of cities that have effectively established rules regarding the implementation of solar energy. While each municipality stresses the importance of retaining the historic character of the building, places like Eureka, Arkansas and Boulder, Colorado emphasize that “one goal should not be achieved at the expense of the other.” The article underlines Greenwald’s most appealing argument, which is that “historic preservation and solar [power] work toward achieving a shared objective: resource conservation.”

In an effort to decrease dependence on underwater electric cables that run from Falmouth to Martha’s Vineyard, the historic island has expanded its solar program. Over the past 12 years, home and business owners have installed over 223 photovoltaic arrays, which are projected to produce 1.4 million kilowatt-hours in 2014. All together, these systems will power roughly 197 homes on the island. Here, the residents of Martha’s Vineyard recognized the sun as an available resource for becoming both self-sufficient and sustainable.

Similarly, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Matt Grocoff, a LEED Green Associate and sustainability advocate, was able to persuade his city’s historic commission that, like Greenwald, his restoration project extended beyond the scope of his property. Today, his 110-year-old Victorian home is America’s oldest and Michigan’s first net-zero energy building. With 36 solar panels on his roof, insulated walls and windows, geothermal heating and cooling, and efficient appliances, Grocoff and his family generate enough energy

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

to power their home, their car, and more for their city.

Prior to the special hearing, Greenwald and Boyan composed a Homeowners’ Statement that begins with the climate. “Our family is very worried about the consequences of global warming,” they write. And in an attempt to appeal to the preservationists in the room, they added, “The results [of climate change] would be catastrophic for our city, our state, and our natural heritage.” This is not just about Jenckes Street. The update to the PHDC guidelines opens with: “Historic preservation and environmental sustainability are equally important public policy goals in Providence.” Now, this is an opportunity for Providence to embody this ideal, and reconcile its grasp on the past and need to look forward.

As the case progresses and the PHDC fails to face the larger environmental issues at stake, the Commission is publicly blinding itself and upholding its obstructionist status.

On May 20, 1860, Henry David Thoreau wrote a letter to his friend, Harrison Blake, and asked, “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” But the Commission’s cosmetic anxieties and fear that the black panels will disturb passers-by and disrupt the historic character of the neighborhood undermine the city’s accountability. “The biggest contributor to global warming,” writes Greenwald and Boyan, “is burning fossil fuels for electricity.” And their proposed installation would remove their house from that cycle of destructive consumption.

The Commission members are lost in an image of 18th century Providence. Each historic house is an emblem of a time before global warming, before energy technology, before photovoltaic solar arrays. Now, with pressure from Greenwald, Boyan, and City Council, the PHDC must reimagine its identity as keeper of a self-same past. This is their call to reconcile the space where architectural and environmental conservation meet. Greenwald did not falter as she presented her case in front of the PAR on October 1. “We are all preservationists,” she said. Gesturing out the window to the cobbled street below, she added, “If we can’t preserve our environment, then we can’t preserve our neighborhood.”

ESTELLE BERGER B’16 is sorry to lose that slate.

OCTOBER 24 2014

METRO

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HELLEBORE LEAVES SOLARIUM

by Lucia Iglesias illustration by Margaret Hu

In Hellebore’s Solarium the leaves have begun to scab. They flake verdigris, all celadon and coppery. These exfoliations flurry round a marble caryatid, sheathing her nude limbs in scale. Quails burl the caryatid’s scooped shoulders and fringe her scapula in slatey plume.

Hellebore’s Solarium—asylum for the diluvian displaced.

A falcon abandons his snood of shadows in the latticework to skim through leaf guff, hunting for nest bittles and bobbits.

Each skyblack, the quails nude his nest of all its plunder and plume. Pouncey skievish things.

Hellebore’s velocipede flinches into the Solarium. The boneshaker bicycle’s skin is all silver leafed, hammered out of beachcombed dental crowns. Spokes glister like new-perked aglets.

Through the clerestory, moon sneers. A sickle moon sharp enough to draw blood. Its spired light scales the lattice, a skulking skiagrapher X-raying Hellebore’s Solarium. The willow’s splayed limb, now nude of leaves, quails in the moon glare.

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Hellebore leaves her velocipede spoke-shivering against the caryatid’s shins. The asylumatrix snaps her fingers and a covey of quail splinter from their nest to swath her in a quivering kimono. Plume-enrobed, Hellebore gusts to the oriel window— and is gorgonized. The vignette below leaves her lithiated, one girltall limb of stone.

The street’s smirking flotsam eddy around a lamppost. Fingers webbing and faces fleshing out in gills, they, the Leftovers, are making a home of the floodwaters. Hellebore’s Solarium is an abomination to these disciples of the deluge, if only because Hellebore is still ferrying parcels of glasshouse apricots down to them in pulley baskets on Sundays.

Newly hydrodynamic, he would eel uncatchable through the armed drifters who flensed him, if only they would clip his tether, if only they would let his legless body slither glistening into Diluvia’s swell. If only his heart would learn to knead water in place of misspent blood.

Hellebore fists through the crown glass. Autumn leaves spume out on the spangleshower. Moon frosts the mullion window lividbright. With a sickled shriek, the girl flounces out of her tower on a cloud plume of quail. Hellebore leaves her Solarium, her nest no more. She and her flock plummet towards Flood’s adopted brood, skyvengeance for a limb-stripped boy.

A someone has been lanterned and limbed. His streamlined torso shimmies suspended in the nimbus of gaslight. The pentagonal human form truncated to a vermiform cylinder. Limp bait dangling from a lantern pole.

Hellebore knows that pink belly. She has seen it pregnant with the first dewy apricots of Sunday. The fruit betrayed him.

Sundays he looked skyward instead of floodward. He fancied choice fruits over Leftovers. They called him Traitor.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

(The Twins: 5/21 to 6/20) You haven’t backed up your files in a while—bold move, Gemini! Don’t forget that Mercury’s still in retrograde for one more day...

(The Lion: 7/23 to 8/22) That first frost sure nipped your buds, Leo, but stay strong—newfound warmth can come in many forms. This is a good time to check back in with your extremities.

(The Scales: 9/23 to 10/22) You’ve been feeling vulnerable, Libra. It may be time to reconnect with your most vital self. Try relaxing in a warm bath of amniotic fluid.

(The Archer: 11/22 to 12/21) If your friend gets a tattoo gun, they may not charge you… but there could be other prices to pay.

(The Water Carrier: 1/20 to 2/18) It’s best to keep in mind that anything put in writing during Mercury’s Retrograde may need some serious edits. A kiss is not a contract, but it’s very nice. It’s very very nice.

(The Ram: 3/21 to 4/19) An intriguing stranger is about to enter your scene, Aries, but beware—this new flame may turn out to be a familiar mistake in a sexy ghost costume.

(The Fishes: 2/19 to 3/20) You’ve been getting and eating kippersnacks, and they taste so good. Sardines are the bad ones, you need to eat kippersnacks.

(The Bull: 4/20 to 5/20) Someone close to you is ailing right now, Taurus. Although their affliction may repulse you, it’s time to ditch your fears, put on your Nurse Doctor Shoes, and be their hero.

(The Crab: 6/21 to 7/22) An anxious nightmare may be leaving you sleepless, Moonchild—sweet dreams will return soon, but only after you make the decision that’s been plaguing you. We also recommend Nyquil taken with a warm glass of milk.

(The Virgin: 8/23 to 9/22) This halloween, you will have a chance to be someone you are not, or at least dress up like them. Make it count :*

(The Scorpion: 10/23 to 11/21) Your long lost twin is dressing up as Slutty You for Halloween. Plan accordingly.

(The Seagoat: 12/22 to 1/19) Seagoat, you often feel torn between elements.

Where do you belong, seagoat? A lush meadow, or the salty ocean? You might find your sea-tuation baaaaa-ffleling, but don’t be afraid to stray from the herd.

Low Columbus Theater, 270 Broadway // 9 pm // $17 Ambient indie rock at its best.

Zen Retreat for College Students Cambridge Zen Center // 9 am – 3:30 pm // $35 Biannual zen meditation retreat aimed at college students.

A few hours of sitting meditation in 30 minute segments with instruction, vegetarian lunch, outdoor walking, dharma talk.

Contact director@cambridgezen.com for information or to register.

Rocky Point opens to the public Warwick // 10 am – 4 pm // Free Former amusement park site, abandoned since 1996, opens its gates to the public for the first time as a state park. Music, food, expansive views of the ocean.

Steel Yard Iron Pour 27 Sims Avenue // 5 – 9 pm // $10 Annual outdoors halloween party featuring a sculptural iron pour.

Molten metal, ceramics sale, plus live music and performances.

Learn to Knit with Zoe Foreign Affair, 140 Brook St // 7 pm // $10-20 sliding scale It is getting cold outside. Homemade scarves and earbands are warm and good as presents. Bring yarn and needles.

Honoring our Journalists The Met, 1005 Main St Pawtucket // 4 – 8 pm // $10 Potluck to honor reporters and newsroom staff recently let go by the Providence Journal. Music by the Gnomes and Mark Cutler and the Men of Great Courage. Donations go to a fund for a new Vietnam Legacy Memorial.

Outsourcing, Privatization, and Subcontracting: Workers of Brown and Providence Speak Out List 120 // 6 pm // Free A teach-in hosted by the Brown Student Labor Alliance, Fuerza Laboral, AFSCME, and workers from Brown University’s libraries and Mailroom on how workers and allies at Brown and in Providence can fight back against outsourcing, privatization, and subcontracting.

Pecha Kucha Columbus Theater, 270 Broadway // 7:20 pm // free Show and tell for adults; bring your own 6 minute and 40 second slideshow presentation to share.

Downtown Farmer’s Market/Play in the Park Burnside Park, Kennedy Plaza // 3 – 6 pm // free Last weekend for the downtown farmer’s market.

Play outside!!

Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder An Evening of 16mm Projection Performance Black Box Theater @ AS220, 95 Empire St. // 8 – 9:30 pm // $5 Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder stage the scene of film as orphaned object through the temporal labor of moving image installation. If you’re still unsure what this means, consider attending.

Jack-o-Lantern Spectacular Roger Williams Park Zoo // 6 – 11 pm // $12 Annual event featuring thousands of carved and lit jack-o-lanterns.

2014 Theme: Jack-o-Lanterns from A-Z. “H is for Horoscope, J is for jungle, T is for famous thinkers, and so on.” Also promised: jack-olanterns carved like Princess Diana and Nelson Mandela.

Runs until November 2.