The College Hill Independent Vol. 33 Issue 6

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY OCT 28 2016

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A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 33 / NUMBER 06 OCT 28 2016

INDY COVER

Halloween Part 2: The Sequel Gabriel Matesanz

NEWS 02

Week in Review Sam Samore, Jack Brook, Emma Phillips, and Malcolm Drenttel

09

Sticking to the Union Lisa Borst and Will Tavlin FROM THE EDITORS

METRO 03

Cartoon Couture Andrew Deck and Will Weatherly

05

Gassy Colin Kent-Daggett

ARTS 07

4 Comics Matthew Kramer

08

Leggings on Leggings Signe Swanson

Dust off that Mia Wallace costume, get cozy in an oversized sweater, and watch the leaves change to colors that match the red brick façades lining your optimal cobbled path. It’s that spooky time of year.

Many modern pagans believe that at this time of year, our world is closest to the spirit world. You can hear it in the rattling of our radiators. Meanwhile some of us are still waiting for the heat to turn on. Close your eyes, and perhaps you’ll catch what the residents of that other world are trying to tell you.

Romanticizing autumn ignores the fact that much of autumn is marked by death. Chapped lips give way to cracks of cherry blood, an uncomfortable reminder of your cells’ belabored regeneration. Soon after Halloween ends, the fun-sized Milky Way bars begin to grey and gather dust on discount shelves.

But, the leaves will grow back.

Welcome to the Indy’s Halloween issue. Spook!

FEATURES 11

Corny Jokes Dominique Pariso and Dolma Ombadykow

13

Lambda Omega Lambda Vhalla Otarod

— JA & MM

MANAGING EDITORS

OCCULT 15

Hairy Trees Kathy Ng

SCIENCE 12

Grassy Raina Wellman

TECH

NEWS

Camila Ruiz Segovia Shane Potts Liz Cory METRO

Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Marianna McMurdock ARTS

17 Alec Mapes-Frances

Will Tavlin Ryan Rosenberg Kelton Ellis FEATURES

X 18

Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs

[we're going as the museum patron -ed] Liby Hays

Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick Dolma Ombadykow METABOLICS

Sam Samore Isabelle Doyle SCIENCE

Fatima Husain TECH

Jonah Max OCCULT

Sophia Washburn

LITERARY

Stefania Gomez

Maria Cano-Flavia My Tran Bryn Brunnstrom

EPHEMERA

Patrick McMenamin Mark Benz X

Liby Hays Nichole Cochary

DESIGN & LAYOUT

Celeste Matsui Meryl Charleston Andrew Linder Ruby Stenhouse WEB MANAGER

LIST

Charlie Windolf

Malcolm Drenttel Alec Mapes-Frances

BUSINESS MANAGER

Dolma Ombadykow

COVER

Gabriel Matesanz ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

Gabriel Matesanz STAFF WRITERS

Hannah Maier-Katkin Kim Meilun Jack Brook Eve Zelickson Saanya Jain Anna Hundert Andrew Deck Signe Swanson Josh Kurtz STAFF ILLUSTRATORS

Frans van Hoek Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Ivan Rios-Fetchko

SENIOR EDITOR

Alec Mapes-Frances MVP

Liz Cory The College Hill Independent — P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

WEEK IN ALT-RIGHT Sam Samore, Jack Brook, Emma Phillips, and Malcolm Drenttel ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz BY

@JESUS An effective way to schematize nascent changes in conservatism in the United States, namely what one might call the transition from a Christianity-based conservatism which emphasizes the importance of the Bible and the United States Constitution in living a moral life, to what has been christened the “AltRight”—which rallies instead around Pepe the Frog and the act of trolling—is the recent and shocking development in Google-powered info-metrics which shows, as the Daily Mirror reports, that users search the word “memes” more frequently than the word “Jesus”. Twitter user @Kuwaddo first noticed the change, which actually occurred in April, undiscovered until now. The meme-o-philia of the alt-right is a recent topic of much discussion, especially regarding the addition of Pepe the Frog to the Anti-Defamation League’s hate symbol database.

Examination of the data reveals further interesting results. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google searches of “Jesus” spike around the Christmas and Easter holidays, prominent events in the life of Jesus (his birth and death occurred, according to certain sources, during these months, respectively). It is even possible that “Jesus” will overtake “memes” in number of searches this coming Christmas, if only briefly. More curiously, the number of “memes” Google searches has sporadic bursts, most notably during June and July of 2014, when the number of “memes” searches increased by twenty points, only to fall back to its prior levels by August. What occurred during these two months to cause such an explosion in the number of “memes” searches—in some sense, a harrowing preview of the meme-ness of our times? What terrifying symbol of the chaotic-evil 4-chan racists emerged during that fateful summer? This intrepid reporter leaves it to other, intrepid-er reporters to unearth the answer.

- SS

HAIRDO-TERONOMY In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and Australia. So, too, did He create Ziggy Mosslmani, an Australian teenager.

And God said, “Let there be mullets,” and there were mullets. God saw that the mullet was good, and He separated the mullet from the lameness of other hairstyles. God called the mullet “hilarious” and the others He called “boring.” There was Ziggy, and there was his haircut—the mullet. And it was so.

And God said, “Let this mullet be so hideous that no other mullet shall surpass its terribleness.”

So God made the mullet flow long in the rear and in the front he shaved Ziggy’s hair off.

And God said, “Let him not give a shit.”

And God said, “Let the Ziggy and his mullet and his friends be gathered to one place, and let a photographer appear.” And it was so. God called the photographer to snap a photograph of the mullet and upload it to his social media account, where it would go viral.

Then God said, “Let the Internet teem with trolls. Let the mullet produce memes: LOL-bearing images and photoshopped quips.” God blessed the trolls and said “Be fruitful and increase in number and let the memes spread on the Internet.” And it was so.

Ziggy’s hair photoshopped as a skunk’s tail, Ziggy as a horse, his mullet the mane, and another applying the mathematical principles of the pythagorean theorem to the mullet. God saw that the memes were good—especially the one about the skunk. And He marveled at what He had wrought.

But Ziggy didn’t marvel. He filed a suit for defamation. He cried out that the internet and the media had forsaken him, that due to them was “a joke” and “a ridiculous person because he wears a ridiculous haircut.”

God was merciful and God was just, though he also had a sense of humor. He admonished Ziggy: “You shall make use of the fruit of my labor. Besides, I made you a teenager so you wouldn’t give a shit.”

Ziggy defied God. He filed suit this year. Yet the judge agreed with Her Creator. She said the mullet memes were clever—in particular the thing about the pythagorean theorem.

And so God breathed a sigh of relief and saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

- JB

MERCHANTS OF VENISON Grandpa Arby tells a story about his first solo hunt. A cold fall morning in the hills of Georgia, alone, crossbow in hand. He sat in his perch looking down on smokey woods. Crow calls fill the air, a final owl hoot resounds through the ash boughs. All of a sudden, there HE is. What a buck. 18 points of sinew and musk. The trophy every hunter spends their lifetime dreaming of, there, on his first hunt! Of course he missed. But that experience left him wanting just one thing: to kill lots of deer and give their meat to a midgrade fast-food chain for all Americans to savor.

The day has come. Arby’s has been called America’s juiciest meat shop. Now they’re rolling out a campaign featuring America’s favorite roadkill: venison, the people’s veal. But you deer-loving Rhode Islanders better hold your horses: the gamey grub will only be available in six states (Wisconsin, Tennessee, Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia), and unless you’re on a long road trip with a group of recently lapsed vegetarians, chances are you’re not passin’ through just for some subpar slop. Don’t blink or you’ll miss this chance to mix your two favorite American pastimes: fast food & deer. Rob Lynch, Arby’s Brand President & Chief Marketing Officer, says he is confident that “deer hunters are going to love this sandwich.” To the contrary, on social network behemoth Twitter, Matt Cartier (@NYSHOCKER) responded to the announcement by declaring “I think I’ll stick to harvesting and cooking my own venison!”

No word yet on whether the meat is local or human.

In the Indy’s honest opinion, the company’s new “It’s Meats Season” campaign is neither particularly witty nor compelling. But it’s certainly carnivorous.

- EP + MD

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

02

FAIR EXCHANGE IS NO THEFT RI defunds its only needle exchange BY

Andrew Deck and Will Weatherly Dorothy Windham

ILLUSTRATION BY

On October 2, a group of monsters, superheroes, and drag performers gathered at The Dark Lady, a gay bar on Snow Street. They huddled outside its front doors, smoking cigarettes and turning the sidewalk into a vision of Disneyworld in the hours after its performers’ shifts end. The performers were there to support a Cartoon Couture fundraiser hosted by AIDS Care Ocean State (ACOS), a Providence organization which provides outreach, prevention, and care services for people at risk of or affected by HIV/AIDS infection. The event catered to a powerful cross-section of audiences: it drew upon the city’s queer community as well as partygoing young people, whom ACOS identifies as likely to mobilize around the issue of HIV/AIDS. George Marley, ACOS’s development director, collected the cover charge at the door dressed as Harley Quinn.

Performers Onyx and Crystal Mess expressed doubt that the attendees were aware of what the event was for. Crystal Mess told the Independent that they had initially taken the job as just “another chance to perform.” The event, like the people at it, was putting on a costume, celebrating cartoons and queerness to gather under the rallying cry of supporting ACOS. That call for support became more urgent this past June, when the General Assembly failed to renew state funding for ACOS’s needle exchange program, ENCORE. ENCORE works to provide sterilized syringes and disposal of used ones for intravenous drug users through outreach teams in communities across the state. For several years, the supplies for these services had been funded by the state's community service grant program. Totaling $65,000, ACOS’s community service grant represented 60 percent of the organization’s state funding for the 2017 fiscal year, according to the Providence Journal. ACOS now faces the task of seeking other funding or drawing from resources allotted to its other services, including its outreach, education, and programming efforts.

Established in 1994, ENCORE has purported to be an integral force in the state’s drop in HIV/ AIDS transmission rates among intravenous drug users, from 17 percent in 1994 to 1 percent in 2015.

Given the necessity of ENCORE, the only program in RI of its kind, and its increasing relevance amidst the state’s rise in both opioid overdose and Hepatitis C (HCV) mortality rates, the General Assembly’s decision seems deeply misguided, if not harmful.

And for some members of the queer community represented at Cartoon Couture, the state’s lack of AIDS prevention as a funding priority echoed the start of the AIDS epidemic in the US during the 1980s, when a combination of policymakers’ apathy, queer marginalization, and lack of accessible care fatally intersected for 362,000 people in the span of fifteen years between 1981 and 1996. An attendee at the event dressed as Wonder Woman fumed that “to cut off requisite health care to a minority group that is already so marginalized is a slap in the face to the people [the state] claims to believe in and support...

03

METRO

People are saying it didn’t have anything to do with the gay community, it was just about cutting back.

Well, why cut back that?” +++ In the past year, the General Assembly’s community service grants have faced public scrutiny, restructuring, and a federal investigation. Last spring, the former Bristol Representative Raymond E Gallison Jr., Chairman of the House Financial Committee at the time, resigned after he was found to be on the payroll of an education nonprofit receiving a community service grant.

In effect, for 10 years, the nonprofit’s annual $70,000 grant was a part of Gallison’s salary. An FBI and state investigation were launched into the claim, alongside embezzling and solicitation charges.

Gallison’s affair affirmed criticisms that the Assembly’s allocation of grant money wasn’t transparent.

The criteria used in the grant selection process wasn’t publicly known, and in effect community service grants put several million dollars into the hands of the Speaker of the House and President of the Senate to dole out, often to build goodwill and bolster reelection bids. Last year, House Speaker Mattiello was heavily criticized for directing a $125,000 grant to sports, youth and community programs in Cranston, his home district. But it was only after “Gallison’s misdeeds that the Speaker and Senate President thought it was time to tighten up the community service grants program,” Larry Berman, communications director for the office of the Speaker, told the Independent in a phone interview. While the allocation process was changed slightly—in addition to the grants awarded by the Assembly, some of the money is now pooled and given out to state agencies to distribute—The House Speaker and the Senate President still decide (with input from their staff) who gets funded. The primary response was not a procedural overhaul, but a slashing of the grant program entirely.

The budget for grants was cut in half, from $11.6 million in the 2016 fiscal year to $5.1 million for this coming year. It was in this funding void that ACOS saw its anticipated financial resources disappear.

26 community service grants were awarded last June under the new budget. AIDS Care Ocean State was off the list, as were nearly one hundred other organizations accepted the previous year. Even after “tightening up” the program, the reasoning used to approve certain grants and deny others remains murky.

“If the service could be duplicated somewhere else or it wasn’t significant enough, we just deleted it,” House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello told the Providence Journal in June, soon after announcing the 2016 fiscal year grant recipients. That reasoning falls short in the case of ACOS. As the only needle exchange service in the state it stands distressingly alone in the statewide efforts to combat HCV and HIV transmission. Further, Rhode Island law actually mandates that the Department of Health maintains a needle exchange program.

When asked why ACOS didn’t make the cut, Berman attempted a “unique need” argument similar to Matti-

ello’s, before acknowledging that this didn't necessarily apply to ACOS. Instead, he reasserted that ACOS was just one of many organization facing funding cuts.

“They pretty much scrapped the entire community service grant program,” he said.

While it’s true that ACOS joins a large group of worthy community service organizations turned away at the door this year, the grant program wasn’t entirely scrapped. RI Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Meals on Wheels, and Rhode Island Legal Services, all received funding. Alongside these critical services organizations was John Hope Settlement House, who the House had planned to offer a $300,000 community service grant before the legislature’s audit of the organization this past June when the organization’s chairwoman was found to be an RI state representative—a near repeat of the Gallison scandal. If there are some standards to the ways organizations prove themselves to be worthy of community service grant funding, they seem broad enough to value a range of organizations, and even some that are questionably deserving.

ENCORE has proven itself to be a valuable service, especially for the intravenous drug users it serves.

ACOS's website reports that in 2015 alone, the program distributed 57,783 clean needles and collected 43,308 contaminated ones. The program also distributed 108 kits of NARCAN, a medication which counteracts the effects of an opioid overdose. 25 individuals were given NARCAN kits during an opiate overdose by the ENCORE outreach team, likely saving their lives. But while in the same fiscal year the General Assembly allocated $375,000 to WaterFire, it couldn’t find a justification for the $65,000 ENCORE needed for supplies like NARCAN. For AIDS Project RI, a Providence organization which provides HIV/AIDS testing and education, the needle exchange is an integral element of AIDS prevention in Rhode Island. Its executive director Stephen Hourahan stressed to the Indy the extent of ENCORE’s impact with the little money it needed for its success: “It’s very small dollars, $65,000, ultimately. To be that effective and to save that many lives is a huge impact.” +++ ACOS isn’t the only organization serving queer Rhode Islanders that saw a loss of funding this fiscal year.

Youth Pride RI, a queer youth advocacy and community group, saw its state funding of $50,000 entirely eliminated following the budget cut. Youth Pride is the only organization of its kind in the state, yet Speaker Mattiello justified the cuts to RIFuture because he felt “those services, needs, potentially are being serviced elsewhere,” including by “guidance counselors in the school[s].”

“I’m not really sure that’s the case,” Youth Pride RI Executive Director Christopher Lauth told the Independent. “The truth of the matter is that LGBTQ folks in our society have special needs... the mainstream kinds of services don’t support the needs of our folks and the people in our community… there’s a need for

OCTOBER 28, 2016

training and education that’s also ongoing. We know that for some of these specialists in their education program, there’s not enough that is covered for underserved and underrepresented communities.”

This was the state’s approach to ACOS as well. The General Assembly dissolved the support for ENCORE’s specialized purpose, while hoisting its responsibilities on a broader infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist for the communities it serves. For people like the Wonder Woman at Costume Couture, the erased needs are those of the LGBTQ community, as the needle exchange program has worked to prevent HIV/AIDS, a disease intractably connected with queer history. “It really wasn’t so long ago that the whole outbreak started, and I think [the movement] has come such a long way,” she said to the Independent.

But even this narrative reduces the nuance of what needs ENCORE seeks to address, and whose needs those are. Which is troubling, because despite Mattiello’s assumption that those needs are being met elsewhere, more populations are in need of clean needles with every passing year. “We often get grouped with LBGTQ organizations because we’ve always been serving that population,” said ACOS development director George Marley in an interview with the Indy. “But as technologies enhance and medications are more readily available, effective, and less expensive (theoretically), the population we serve takes on a new look.”

That “look” for ENCORE is not necessarily characterized by queerness, but rather populations who can’t afford clean needles for intravenous drug use. In Rhode Island, this financial insecurity increasingly puts individuals at risk of HCV more than HIV, a detail that the typical AIDS-focused queer narrative might ignore. With an estimated 4-7 percent of Rhode Islanders infected with HCV, the disease surpassed the number of people infected with HIV/AIDS, at around 1 percent of Rhode Islanders infected. Its resulting mortality rates have multiplied fourfold over the past decade, with 102 HCV-related deaths in 2014. Though HCV can be transmitted sexually, it doesn’t carry as close of an association with queer sexual practices; the RIDOH report identifies ENCORE as a priority for prevention, but it doesn’t single out “men who have sex with men” as a population experiencing higher risk.

What it identifies instead is alarming: the extent to which the spread of HCV dovetails with Rhode Island’s opioid epidemic. “[RIDOH] researchers laid two maps side by side: one, the location of the diagnosis of hepatitis, the other, the location of the state’s opioid overdose deaths,” reported RIPR. They found that the maps nearly “perfectly overlap,” and that HCV infection is “highest in areas with the highest rates of opioid overdose deaths.”

The populations suffering at the confluence of these two crises are varied; public health officials and HCV activists identified women and people of color as particularly at-risk. “When you’re talking about the situation with our needle exchange program,” Hourahan explained, “you’re talking about IV drug users who are most likely not gay and not queer, so I think that there’s a question [about

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

whether] there’s a perception of others that are impacted.”

The absence of this perception emphasizes the importance of considering the needle exchange as not only a fight against HIV/AIDS. If it was, ACOS’s fight would seem to be more finished than it is; both Thomas Bertrand, the chief of RIDOH’s Center for HIV, Hepatitis, STDs and TB, and Amy Nunn, Director at the Rhode Island Public Health Institute, credited ACOS for nearly eradicating HIV/AIDS transmission via intravenous drug use. And considering the growth of HCV infections, the financial vulnerability of the populations it touches, and its pernicious spread through increasing opioid use in Rhode Island, these factors only serve to emphasize the needle exchange’s continuing necessity.

Placing ACOS’s work in a continuity with the mainstream narrative of the AIDS epidemic of the 80s partially reduces the nuance of current epidemics in Rhode Island.

Part of the project of emphasizing the value of programs fighting these diseases to supporters is to emphasize them in all their complex, modern urgency, honoring the needs of the populations affected in ways the General Assembly failed to do. Ironically, many of the people doing this are queer people like those at Costume Couture; they may be drawn to their passion about AIDS through its queer legacy, but they’re also the ones who organizers rely upon most frequently for support in developing movements. Hourahan reported that, for AIDS Project RI, “our most vocal people and most people associated with the AIDS organizations around the country are mostly queer, and therefore there’s a clear connection between those two.” This was the strength of Costume Couture’s overt queerness: people like Onyx and Crystal Mess, who assembled their fellow performers after

a single call. The costumes that night might have disguised the grim realities of increased infection and opioid overdoses beyond the Dark Lady, but they also brought and showed queer support, a demonstration of loyalty to a cause that has grown far beyond them.

Even so, Yolandi Fizzure, a drag performer and Cartoon Couture’s organizer, expressed hope that these efforts wouldn’t always fall on queer shoulders, or be seen as only queer issues. “For the gay community, its charity event after charity event,” they sighed, watching people trickle into their event. “There’s a lot of problems that are affecting our community… we should get, y’know, some straight people in, and some of their straight money,” they joked, and laughed through a Maleficent face mask.

ANDREW DECK B’17 and WILL WEATHERLY B’19 want RI’s straight money to return to ENCORE.

METRO

04

ASTHMA AND EYESORES Wind, gas, and environmental racism in Rhode Island

BY Colin

Kent-Daggett Maria Cano-Flavia

ILLUSTRATION BY

“I’m a big proponent of wind and offshore wind, but the short-term solution to bring down energy costs for businesses and families is natural gas,” Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo told Providence radio station 630 WPRO in August of 2015. Raimondo was referring to multiple Rhode Island-based projects that lie at the center of debates about America’s energy future: the nation’s first offshore wind farm, near Block Island, and proposed natural gas infrastructure in Fields Point and Burrville.

The natural gas facilities have emerged in the context of dialogues surrounding crumbling infrastructure in America. Aging roads, rail lines, and dams have been critical points in this year’s election, and the urgent need for new infrastructure is one of few issues agreed upon by Trump, Clinton, and Sanders. Energy infrastructure—including power plants, substations, and pipelines—is no exception. Old oil- and coal-fired power plants are reaching retirement age, meaning that about 30% of New England’s generating capacity could be gone by 2020, according to ISO New England, the region’s non-profit Regional Transmission Organization. The decline of this energy infrastructure, some of which is more than 40 years old, threatens to raise electricity prices for RI citizens.

The Fields Point liquid natural gas (LNG) facility proposed by utilities provider National Grid is pending approval by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to begin construction in March 2017. The company would add a liquefaction facility to an existing LNG storage site, allowing National Grid to liquefy natural gas from the nearby Algonquin pipeline, which stretches from Boston to New Jersey. The gas itself comes from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, across Appalachia, the Midwest, and Canada. While National Grid also requires permits from the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council and the Department of Environmental Management (DEM), FERC approval is the most important piece to the facility’s construction. Cristina Cabrera, the Executive Director of the Environmental Justice League of Rhode Island (EJLRI), told the Independent that FERC approves 98% of proposals that it sees, making the permitting process hard to stop.

Since 2000, LNG facilities have multiplied across the US to fill the gap left by aging power plants and capitalize on expanding domestic natural gas production. Data from ISO NE and the US Energy Information Administration indicate that natural gas now supplies 33% of America’s electricity nationwide, 44% in New England, and 95% within Rhode Island—the leading figure on each scale. The predominance of natural gas is a recent phenomenon. It provided only 15% of New England’s electric production in 2000, but by 2024, ISO NE estimates that natural gas will provide 49% of the region’s electricity in contrast to just 6% from oil and coal. Proponents of natural gas cite coal’s near-double rate of CO2 emission as justification for the growth of domestic natural gas production and processing facilities like the one proposed in Fields Point. +++

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METRO

For the Washington Park and South Providence communities that continually bear the burden of emissions and toxins from industry at Fields Point, the new LNG facility represents more than just a piece of the broader infrastructure puzzle. While natural gas may burn cleaner than coal, Fields Point doesn’t have a retiring coal-fired power plant. This means that the new LNG facility would only increase total emissions in the region.

Cabrera also cited the possible explosion of the LNG facility as the biggest danger facing the area.

Given the array of toxic chemicals used in Fields Point, the proximity of the state’s primary hospital, and the lack of hurricane protection at the Port, Cabrera described the construction of the LNG facility as “like putting a match next to dynamite.”

Less-visible, long-term consequences of industry are already present in the communities surrounding Fields Point. Effects include higher rates of asthma due to diesel emissions and particulate matter and illnesses from exposure to toxins in the air and water. The EJLRI found that Providence neighborhoods near the Port already suffer from the highest childhood asthma rates in the entire state.

Sheila Calderon, a Washington Park resident, said at a demonstration at the facility in July that her multiple sclerosis was caused by a lifelong proximity to industrial pollutants. “I don’t know if I got sick from breathing toxic fumes or living and working on contaminated land," she wondered.

Nationwide, the neighborhoods that suffer from industrial pollution and the subsequent negative health outcomes are disproportionately low-income communities of color. A 2003 paper in the journal Social Science and Medicine found that in many urban areas, Black and low-income children were 15-20% more likely to have asthma, due in large part to environmental factors. In Massachusetts, “low income communities received 23.7 percent of all carcinogens; 30.8 percent of all organochlorines; 27.8 percent of all persistent bioaccumulative toxins; and 45.8 percent of all reproductive toxins,” even though “they represent just 10.2 percent of all towns,” according to a 2005 report by Northeastern University’s Philanthropy and Environmental Justice Research Project. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that the one-mile radius surrounding the proposed LNG facility is comprised of 75% non-white households, 56% low-income households, 17% non-English-speaking households, and 31% of residents have less than high school education. All 11 of the EPA’s toxic polluters in the City of Providence lie within the same one-mile radius of the LNG terminal.

The specific location of National Grid’s LNG terminal will likely compound the potentially disastrous health impacts on the community. The soil contains volatile organic compounds, asbestos, lead, arsenic, and a host of other toxic substances due to the operations of the Providence Gas Company in the early 20th century, according to EcoRI News. Though the site was partially remediated in 1994, these toxins remain in the dirt that is being dug up by National Grid. Construction is set to begin as planned despite approval of a Public Involvement Plan by the DEM that should require community input before construction. For residents of Washington Park and South Providence, National Grid’s LNG facility is hardly the ‘short-

term’ solution described by Raimondo. Rather, it is just the newest facility that will outsource the consequences of industry to their communities.

These community concerns have largely fallen on deaf ears, partly due to jurisdiction—the LNG facility is a federal project and three presidentially-appointed FERC commissioners in Washington, DC provide ultimate approval. Despite Mayor Jorge Elorza’s writing to FERC to express his disapproval, public opposition by several State Representatives, and a Providence City Council Resolution in March calling for a comprehensive environmental review and a community involvement plan for the project, FERC is not required to take such input into account. National Grid has not been committed to the public engagement process either. Sherrie Anne Andre, a founder of the FANG (Fighting Against Natural Gas) Collective, told EcoRI that the company distributed English-only leaflets to the predominately Spanish- and Khmer-speaking community with unclear dates about their opportunities for input.

The City of Providence also bears some responsibility for the lack of public input, most recently due to a cancelled public hearing on the LNG facility. The City’s Ordinance Committee planned to hear testimony from citizens on September 12, but the meeting was cancelled with no explanation just 30 minutes prior and has not been rescheduled. Overall, Cabrera says that there have been effectively no opportunities for the community to even learn about the project, let alone to have their concerns heard. The disregard for community input in the development process is yet another way poor neighborhoods of color are exploited for the sake of ‘progress’ as defined by energy companies. +++

Free of emissions, posing no danger to groundwater, and several miles from the shore of any marginalized community, offshore wind farms remedy the worst problems of natural gas. The nation’s first such wind farm lies off the coast of Block Island, presenting a possible alternative to a future of fossil fuels. According to the New York Times, Rhode Island was able to “seize the lead in this nascent industry” from larger neighboring states whose projects suffered from homeowner complaints and a lack of political support. New England is a logical place for the development of offshore wind infrastructure, as the region “has dense cities with strong electrical demand, high power prices… and some of the world’s stiffest ocean breezes off the coast,” according to the Times. Despite this natural fit, the Block Island wind farm and its developer, Deepwater Wind, faced public opposition that is remarkably superfluous compared to the Fields Point LNG project.

The wind farm will not subject residents of Block Island—which is home to a 95% white population, a median home value of almost $1 million, and a notable lack of industry—to the same health risks as the LNG facility. Opposition to the project has instead centered around the obstruction of ocean views. Rosemarie Ives, whose family owns a cottage on the island, told the Washington Post that her family “certainly [doesn’t] appreciate

OCTOBER 28, 2016

will continue to produce less than a tenth of New England’s electricity through 2024, mainly due to few large-scale developments. Natural gas prices are also lower than the cost of offshore wind energy. According to the Washington Post, the wind farm’s electricity will cost its consumers about double the amount paid by the average American.

While natural gas rates are lower on paper, costs externalized to the community through health care bills and lower quality of life must be taken into account.

Asthma medication, trips to the emergency room, and continuing care for chronic illnesses are costs of fossil fuels that aren’t reflected in the 12.3 cents per kilowatt hour paid by the average American. Additionally, prices for wind energy are expected to fall sharply as technology expands around the country and new projects develop in New Jersey, Maine, Oregon, Virginia, and Massachusetts. With continued commitment from communities as well as local, state, and federal governments, offshore wind may provide a sustainable answer to New England’s energy woes. +++

the turbines ruining the view [her] family has had for nearly 100 years.” Sourcing Rhode Island’s electricity from projects like the Block Island wind farm means less industry harming communities in Providence.

But clearly these projects will meet resistance. For residents and vacationers on Block Island who have not had industry historically forced into their communities, this advancement towards a healthier and more equitable future becomes an inconvenience and an eyesore.

Ultimately, opposition to the Block Island wind farm was unsuccessful and the turbines will soon be operational. A similar story has unfolded recently in Burrillville, RI, where the 96% white city of 15,000 has struggled to impede a proposed natural-gas-fired power plant. While low-income communities of color clearly bear the greater burden of these projects, the inability of some wealthy white areas to resist development highlights the powerful interests vested in new energy infrastructure.

As important and commendable as the Deepwater Wind project is, offshore wind is far from replacing fossil fuels in New England’s energy mix.

Block Island’s five turbines are projected to generate 30 megawatts (MW) of electricity for about 17,000 homes, in comparison to the Manchester Street gasfired power plant in Providence which generates 450 MW for approximately 112,000 homes. Overall, ISO NE predicts that non-hydropower renewable sources

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In the context of aging infrastructure and global climate change, Governor Raimondo’s distinction between short-term and long-term solutions becomes more complicated. While Raimondo’s professed pragmatism supports a harmful and discriminatory status quo, present material needs do exist within New England’s energy grid that offshore wind energy will not scale in time to solve. At the same time, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into liquid natural gas infrastructure sets a precedent for decades to come—New England’s oldest coal-fired power plants are just reaching retirement after more than 40 years of operation. Ultimately, Raimondo’s view that a $180 million investment in liquid natural gas constitutes a "short-term solution" ignores the lasting and unequally experienced consequences of an unsustainable energy infrastructure.

These diverse considerations underscore why opportunities for community input, which have been sorely inadequate in the Fields Point LNG process, are so vital. Activism against the LNG facility is “about proposing what a different political and economic structure could look like,” Julian Rodriguez-Drix, a Washington Park resident and a board member of EJLRI, told the Indy. Without an opportunity for citizens, politicians, and industry representatives alike to discuss their concerns, little progress can be made towards a structure in which endangering low-income communities of color is no longer any kind of solution.

COLIN KENT-DAGGETT B’19 asks you to support the Environmental Justice League’s campaign against LNG at http://ejlri.org/donate-now/

METRO

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FOUR COMICS BY

Matthew Kramer

VULGAR IN VOGUE A look at taste’s effect on fashion

BY

Signe Swanson Julie Benbassat

ILLUSTRATION BY

On October 13, curator Judith Clark and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips debuted their joint exhibit The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined at London’s Barbican Gallery, which prides itself on an ability to “push the boundaries of all major art forms,” according to its website. The exhibition explores the complexities of the term “vulgarity” through displaying works of fashion that had been previously delegitimized by the art world for their so-called tastelessness.

This exclusion is deeply embedded in the curatorial practices of fine-art museums. In the 19th century, Sir Henry Cole and William Morriss, art directors at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, considered the display of modern fashion vulgar for its ‘femininity.’ Morriss did not value his era’s women’s wear, considering it too “bundled up with millinery… upholstered like armchairs.” This historical exclusion of contemporary fashion from the space of the museum continues to this day. It wasn’t until World War II that elite fine-art museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Victoria & Albert Museum created costume and textile departments, whose exhibitions remained limited to the display of historical apparel.

In the 1950s, as major museums saw more women, such as Madelaine Ginsburg and Natalie Rothstien of the Victoria & Albert, gaining curatorial positions, museums slowly became more inclusive of modern fashion. Fashion: An Anthology, a 1971 exhibit at the aforementioned museum marked a major turning point in the departure from the framework of costume, instead focusing on that year’s haute couture styles. It wasn’t until 1983 that the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized its first show around a living designer, Yves Saint Laurent. They justified featuring YSL’s designs on the basis that the brand had “significantly impacted the culture of Western fashion for 25 years.” The institute’s departure from dead styles to living ones was groundbreaking.

Nonetheless, the Met still primarily displays fashion with an emphasis on history, not art. To this day the Met offers only two year-round fashion-related tours: one relating costume history to the museum’s collections of armor, textiles, and paintings, the other similarly exploring antiquated dress.

YSL’s show faced criticism from the Met’s own curators for its implicit commerciality. What dissonance, after all: YSL’s designs being window-shopped on 5th Avenue while also being gawked at in a building of knight-suits and busts of Roman emperors. When the Costume Institute’s current curator, Mark Bolton, assumed his position in 2002, he discovered the department’s lingering, unspoken policy against featuring living designers.

In spite of this, Bolton plans to exhibit works by a living designer for the second time ever at the Met: Rei Kawakubo of Commes Des Garçons (CDG) this coming May. Kawakubo is no stranger to the fashion-art dichotomy; in fact, this dichotomy has shaped her career. Since its conception in 1981, CDG’s runway styles have evolved from more traditional, dress-shaped dresses to ‘dresses,’ loosely put. Her spring 2016 collection features one with a supersized black raven-colored pompom in the center, a rich blue loofah-esque material tufting outward from the pompom core. Kawakubo’s designs vary; she produces more artistic runway pieces as well as clothing more widely available for purchase. One can buy her shoes at Nordstrom, for example. CDG’s collaboration with Converse yielded both low-tops and high-tops with little red hundred-dollar anthropomorphic hearts on them.

The Met’s exhibit, however, will not be featuring anything CDG has sold at Nordstrom, focusing exclusively on Kawakubo’s runway styles. In the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

exhibit’s press release, curators emphasize that “Kawakubo’s work challenges conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and, ultimately, fashionability.” By excluding her more conventional designs from the exhibit, the Met upholds its long-standing bias against granting typical clothing the title of ‘art.’ In the same press release, the Met states that they will “explore [her] work, that often looks like sculpture.” The Met’s curatorial decisions rely on the assumption that museum-worthy fashion is the opposite of commercial.

Backlash to the YSL exhibit from the museum’s own staff, as well as the conditions meriting Kawakubo’s inclusion in the Met, highight the museum’s challenges of reconciling cultural relevance with artistry. Curation treats the museum as a status symbol in which art is judged in terms of its ability to trascend the ordinary. +++ By curating an exhibit around objects that were historically discredited by the museum, Clark and Phillips seek to deconstruct vulgarity, to expose the elitist futility of taste. They have named and categorized 20 different facets of vulgarity, each corresponding with a room in the exhibit. One room showcases that which is “too-common,” exploring the medium of denim. Another exposes the “too-popular,” including Andy Warhol’s Souper Dress and Moschino’s candy-wrapper evening gowns.

The “Ruling In and Ruling Out” room consists of etiquette guides spanning from the 16th century into the modern day. The conclusion of this juxtaposition of so many vulgar things against so many other vulgar things is clear: the word “vulgar” doesn’t mean much other than as a signifier of delegitimization.

Outside of the Barbican exhibit, the project of reclaiming the ‘vulgar’ has also been taken up by contemporary artists, who have worked to expose the meanings that modern apparel can communicate in the space of the museum. Last year, New York’s New Museum featured Cheryl Donegan’s Scenes and

Commercials, a reflection on the intersections between consumerism, middle-brow culture, and fashion.

In one room of the exhibit, Kiss My Irish Ass played, a video of the artist painting shamrocks with her Irish ass. In another stood a makeshift boutique of clothing the artist had purchased on eBay, as well as leggings, jackets, and coats, all with photos of other leggings, jackets, and coats printed on them. In her recent project, 70 Cotton Smocks, artist Marit Ilison uses cotton smocks ranging in color from white to dark purple to recall “laboratories, medical institutions and haute couture ateliers.” Unlike Kawakubo, both of these artists use apparel solely as a conduit for a wider set of artistic practices; Donegan and Ilison do not sell their work to the public. Their pieces of apparel are situated in an “art” context rather than a “fashion” one, even as they seek to interrogate the dimensions of vulgarity that inform that divide.

While Phillips’ and Clark’s use of gallery space for an exhibit on vulgar fashion reclaims clothing’s position as an art form, The Vulgar also follows many of the conventions of other fashion exhibits. Like the vast majority of fashion exhibits in major museums, it primarily explores history, aiming to celebrate clothing that has been considered unfashionable through the ages. One section, for example, explores the harsh portrayal of Puritan dress in Flemish painting, noting the extreme denial of color and decoration.

These paintings, once considered vulgar, no longer seem out of place in a museum.

Deploying the categorization of ‘vulgar,’ even when the word itself is not used, constructs strict, subjective borders around what is and is not art.

By blurring these borders, Barbican’s exhibition demonstrates how rigidly they continue to be held elsewhere. In an interview with the Guardian, Phillips addresses the dogmatic application of taste, calling it “a militant and aggressive narrowing of the mind, when it says, ‘I know what I like—and don’t like— and you’ve got to agree with me.”

SIGNE SWANSON ’19 thinks it’s okay to disagree.

ARTS

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CA N ' T SE RV Harvard University Dining Services on strike BY

Lisa Borst and Will Tavlin Gabriel Matesanz

ILLUSTRATION BY

On Saturday, October 22, a middle-aged man stood in the rain on the corner of John F. Kennedy Street and Memorial Drive, wearing a Harvard University Dining Services baseball cap. Under a poncho, he held a sign: “Harvard should treat their employees with the same courtesy and respect we have for the students in our dining halls.” Peter, who wished not to give his last name, has worked for Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) for 21 years. Alongside nearly 750 other coworkers, he was approaching his third week of being on strike against the University, advocating for higher wages and affordable healthcare.

Around him, thousands of students and alumni— from Harvard as well as from other elite universities around the world—milled around the banks of the Charles River, which divides Cambridge, MA from Boston. This past Saturday was day one of the Head of the Charles Regatta, an annual two-day rowing event that attracts tens of thousands of visitors. As crew teams rowed past, onlookers purchased concessions from luxury companies and startups—lobster rolls, vitamin-enriched water. A Brooks Brothers tent hawked plaid umbrellas for $80.

Peter was soaked. He told the Independent that, because he hadn’t been working during the strike, he was two months behind on his mortgage. His mother had taken money from the bank account she had set up to pay for her funeral to help him make his payments. No one—not the union, nor Harvard students, nor the administration—had expected the strike to go on for as long as it did.

This Wednesday, negotiators from Harvard and HUDS—represented by the Boston branch (Local 26) of international labor union UNITE HERE— reached an agreement, ending the unprecedented strike. Harvard’s dining workers had only gone on strike once before: for about four hours, in the summer of 1983. Harvard is, as it was then, the wealthiest university in the world. As many workers and media outlets have pointed out, the $35,000/year salary demanded by HUDS workers represents one-one millionth of the school’s $35 billion endowment. This dissonance—alongside Harvard’s status as symbolic of elite universities more generally—is part of why the strike has received the attention it has: in the past three weeks, the strike has been covered by several national news outlets, and was endorsed by a broad swath of organizations and public figures, including the Boston Globe, Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Cambridge and Boston City Councils, and Ben Stiller.

With the strike now over, the question remains: why was the world’s wealthiest university so reluctant to cede to its service workers’ demands? On Saturday, Peter said that, despite the financial impacts he’s felt, “it seems like [the administration’s] battle with us is not really over money. It’s over trying to tell us that they’re the ones who run Harvard, not us. It’s like a power move.” +++ HUDS employees’ contract with Harvard University officially expired on September 17 after four months of failed negotiations. UNITE HERE Local 26 has steadfastly demanded two points since negotiations began last June: a guaranteed annual minimum wage of $35,000 and maintaining their existing affordable health care benefits. Until now, HUDS workers earned an average of $21.89 per hour—a number the university has repeatedly cited as one of the highest among cafeteria workers and service workers in Boston. But HUDS workers don’t work during Harvard’s summer and winter breaks, which combine to nearly 3.5 months of de facto unemployment; spread out over the course of a full year, their annual wage was

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NEWS

estimated by the union as just over $30,000.

Medical benefits remained the sticking point amidst negotiations. Harvard initially offered the union several plans which wouldn’t go into effect until 2018, and which would significantly increase both copays and monthly premiums. The Harvard Medical School’s class of 2019 estimated the plans’ annual costs for a family of three at around $3,000, which, including additional emergency care, could total up to 16% of a HUDS worker’s annual income. “I’m a type 1 diabetic who has to take insulin to survive,” said Annabel A. Pappas, who has worked at Harvard for 35 years, at a rally. “Harvard University wants to decide if I live or die.” After months of Harvard refusing to budge, and after working without a contract for more than a week, the workers voted 591–18 to authorize a strike in mid-September.

The strike, from its beginning, put a great deal of financial pressure on HUDS workers. Local 26 set up a strike assistance fund, but was only able to pay workers on the picket line $40 a day. “I’m not sure how much longer we can take it, but we have to,” Peter told the Indy, 17 days into the strike. “We just can’t give in at this point.”

On October 14, nine female HUDS employees and two members of UNITE HERE, including Local 26 President Brian Lang, were arrested after shutting down traffic in Harvard Square in protest of the strike. One of the women who was arrested was Rosa Ines Rivera, a charismatic mother of two who has worked for HUDS for 17 years. Rivera told the Indy that the arrests were planned ahead: “We just wanted to make a statement, we wanted to try to get the attention of the administrators,” she said on Monday.

“It seems like they’re pretty slow at drawing their attention to our cause.”

The arrests galvanized the attention of the public. Last Saturday, just blocks from the Head of the Charles Regatta, Local 26 held a rally featuring the nine women who’d been arrested. Nearly 1,000 supporters arrived at Cambridge Commons to demonstrate their support for the strike. Mounted on the back of an 18-wheeler flatbed truck, members of Local 26 and Teamsters Local 25 pumped up the crowd. “If we don’t get it?” Local 26 president Brian Lang asked the crowd. “Shut it down!” supporters responded. Dozens of unions poured out from New Haven, Philadelphia, and Atlantic City in solidarity.

Rhode Island Jobs with Justice bussed several dozen supporters from downtown Providence. Speakers repeatedly questioned the administration’s moral standing. “They are acting like a white-collar crime syndicate,” said Sean O’Brien, President of Teamsters Local 25. “They are not rewarding the people who are responsible for the next generation of world leaders. You serve them day in and day out with the utmost respect, but more importantly, with pride in your job.”

Rivera, a mother of two, told the Indy that the work she puts into her job and the recognition Harvard gives to its workers don’t balance out. “These kids that come to the school are like our kids. We don’t turn our backs on them. We’re here when there’s a storm, we spend the night to make sure they eat,” said Rivera. “We’re here for the students, but we have a family to take care of. We cannot give 100% to the students if our families are not 100%.”

organized around dining halls: each of the university’s “houses”—dormitories where nearly all students live for the entirety of their time as undergraduates— contains its own dining hall, with a dedicated regular staff of HUDS workers. “We all as students feel like we’re a community,” said Gabe Hodgkin, a junior and a member of the Harvard Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM), an undergraduate student group dedicated to organizing around labor movements.

“Dining hall workers were some of the first people on campus to know our names. They check in with us every day, they show up everyday to work with us.”

When the strike began, several dining halls immediately shut down, meaning that many students had to eat at different houses’ dining halls—which were, predictably, overcrowded and understaffed.

Harvard contracted temporary workers to staff the remaining dining halls, but the food they served was critiqued by students as unhealthy, and it lacked ingredient listings for students with food allergies.

“They brought in frozen food, and it’s quite bad,” said Henry Gomory, a member of SLAM. Last Friday, as the strike was still ongoing, Gomory showed the Indy graphics he’d been making and circulating on SLAM’s social media; in one image, an ambiguous dessert is crowned with a chunk of undercooked meat. The caption reads: “Meat in the banana pudding? #BringbackHUDS!” Gomory, a senior, said that although his priorities laid with achieving justice for HUDS workers, the university’s response to the strike had had negative consequences even for students who didn’t support the strike. “Harvard is not providing the food that they promised you, and you’re paying for it. It feels like a breach of contract,” he said.

Throughout the strike and in the months leading up to it, SLAM worked alongside HUDS employees and organizers from UNITE HERE Local 26 to drum up support among students. This past Monday, SLAM organized a student walkout, the second in two weeks. At 2pm on the strike’s 20th day, as tour groups weaved their way across Harvard’s iconic Yard, around 500 students streamed out of class and gathered around a statue of founder John Harvard. SLAM member Jonathan Roberts addressed the crowd with a megaphone. “We’re tired, as students,” he said to the crowd. “But this fight is really not about us. This fight is about over 700 workers coming together and arguing and fighting for their rights, for 20 days without pay… It’s about creating a sense of solidarity with every member of the Harvard community.”

Across Harvard Square, in an administrative building at 124 Mt. Auburn Street, representatives from Unite Here Local 26, including Brian Lang, had already been in negotiations for several hours with Harvard administrators. Together, students and workers marched to Mt. Auburn Street, chanting. At the administrative building, students staged a sit-in in the lobby as workers picketed outside. Indoors, as hundreds of bodies assembled, SLAM member Noah Wagner told the Indy that the sit-in was an attempt to pressure the university by disrupting academic life. “Things in the classroom could not continue with business as usual if the lives and livelihoods of our dining hall workers were being disrupted, being disregarded,” they said.

+++ Rivera’s sentiments speak to why the strike received so much support from Harvard’s student body, including endorsements from Harvard’s Undergraduate Council and the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson. At Harvard, undergraduate communities are

OCTOBER 28, 2016

E P REST I GE Pressure was building on the university from beyond the classroom as well: that morning, the New York Times had published an op-ed by Rosa Rivera, the HUDS worker who’d been arrested earlier in the month. In it, Rivera describes falling behind on her rent this past August, and having to move into public housing with her children—one of whom was recently told she might need surgery. “I know that health care costs are going up everywhere, and I don’t have all the answers,” wrote Rivera. “But there must be some way not to shift costs onto Harvard’s poorest workers.” In the Times, Rivera invoked the inscription carved onto a wall of the School of Public Health, where she works: The highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being.

Outside the sit-in on Monday, Rivera told the Indy, “I just found it really ironic that something like that could be on a building at the same university we’re striking against for affordable healthcare.” +++ This month’s HUDS strike invokes a noteworthy history of labor organizing among its workers, and an equally visible history of anti-unionization sentiments on the part of its administration. In the 1970s and ’80s, clerical and technical workers at Harvard popularized the phrase “we can’t eat prestige” to protest the idea that elite universities could pay their employees minimally because of the name-brand work experience they provided. The protests resulted in recognition of unionized labor by the university after several decades of resistance.

Then as now, the administration’s actions raised the question: why would Harvard—which the Atlantic described in an article about the strike published on Wednesday as “the richest school in the country and the birthplace of some of the nation’s most progressive policies”—so adamantly refuse to meet the demands of its service workers?

At Saturday’s rally, Brian Lang addressed the supporters. “In 18 days, this strike has spun more than the battle over these modest demands,” he bellowed.

“It has turned into a battle for the soul of Harvard University as an institution…Today we have a Harvard that operates more like a corporation that does a little bit of education on the side—rather than a beacon of higher education that uses the wealth it attracts to combat income inequality, race inequal ity, and gender inequality.”

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Harvard’s months-long reluctance to cede to its service workers' demands points to a fundamental inconsistency between its actions and the intellectual and social ideals it claims to uphold: an inconsistency rooted in the administration’s attempt to control the limits of Harvard’s community. +++ Around 1:30am on Tuesday, after most students had left the sit-in, Lang walked out of the administrative building where he’d been negotiating all day. A video posted on SLAM’s Facebook page shows Lang addressing the small crowd of workers and students remaining outside, who are already tentatively chanting. “Victory. Everything,” he declares, and the crowd erupts in cheers.

On Wednesday, the details of the approved negotiations were released. Harvard agreed to an annual minimum wage of $35,000, yearly 2.5% wage increases, and full coverage of medical related copayments through 2021. These agreements meet every point the union had demanded.

But unionized workforces at other universities face similar obstacles to those at Harvard, often without the visibility accorded by such a uniquely prestigious institution. Karen McAninch is a business agent for United Service and Allied Workers of Rhode Island (USAW), which represents multiple groups of service workers at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, including the Brown Dining Service workers (BDS) and heads the union’s bargaining team. She says that BDS workers’ hourly wages will be a major bargaining point in the next round of negotiations, set for 2018. As employees of a non-profit educational institution, BDS workers, like HUDS, can’t collect unemployment from the federal government during breaks in the academic year. “It creates an inequity for this particular group of people because they’re paid hourly,” McAninch explained. Other positions at universities usually have annual salaries, which account for the summer gap. “But folks who work in cafeterias don’t make as much money and they generally don’t get enough to cover themselves for 12 months a year when they’re only working nine,” said McAninch.

McAninch is hopeful that the success of the strike at Harvard will help in negotiations with Brown and elsewhere. As the world’s wealthiest and the most

visible university, Harvard’s treatment of its workers reflects on the ability of higher education institutions to uphold managerially the standards that they hold themselves to intellectually.

Outside of 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Rivera told the Indy that the HUDS strike means as much to Harvard as it does to service workers everywhere. “We are trying to push Harvard to make decisions in the future that make more sense to its employees,” said Rivera.

“We’re hoping that Harvard can make an example for other universities, other food service workers, just the working class, period.”

LISA BORST and WILL TAVLIN B’17.5 believe in the right to the highest attainable standard of health.

NEWS

10

HORRORSCOPES BY

Dominique Pariso and Dolma Ombadykow

Scorpio October 23 - November 21 The Moon is communing with Venus on the astral plane. You will receive a vision of your great (great) grandmother who will tell you to watch out! The signal drops.

You call Verizon for tech support and you’re stuck on a hold line for 37 hours: B-rate classical music pings in your ear, the slightly off-tune cello reminds you of your bat mitzvah, when your younger cousin stole all the attention to show off their second chair status. Soon, you are ascending. The stars do not dictate what you do.

Look at you, a whole universe inside and outside. Sleep well.

Sagittarius November 22 - December 21 You are a person of action, Sagittarius.

Here are some ideas to get you started: Start a for-profit. Build a tiny house. No, smaller. Do a somersault. Kill your shadow. Laugh heartily into the void. Film a natural makeup tutorial. Drink somebody under the table. Brew a potion and guess what it does. Schedule a time to cry.

You’ll need: a ball jar, the hair of three guinea pigs, a found toenail (clipped), a turtle neck, fourteen ounces of urine, a vial of tears gathered at the last showing of the Notebook.

Capricorn December 22 - January 19 Okay, listen up, my sweet little sea-goat! I had a fever dream last night: I was dehydrated, coming heavily down three stairs of a rusted out silver trailer in the middle of the desert. A group of beings—my feathered friends, familiar but alien—had their feet in a kiddie pool, asses in lawn chairs, sharing popsicles from a cooler. There was a radio with a long, bent antennae picking up signals to a pirate radio station broadcasting from a city underwater. I couldn’t catch a reflection of myself but I felt light.

I looked up and saw a shooting star. So yeah, I think your month is gonna be kinda like that. Weird.

Aquarius January 20 - February 18 Take a cue from famousbirthdays.com’s third most-famous Aquarius star, 13-yearold YouTube sensation and cover song crooner Johnny Orlando. Grab your nearest grey zip-up hoodie, find the poorest lighting you can muster, sit on your knees in front of a dirty mirror, and lip sync with a vengeance. This month is all about role-playing. Indulge. Go fully into this new version of yourself, and make sure to take it seriously. If you laugh just once,

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your eyes will lock contact with themselves through the thumb-smudged mirror, obfuscated but still visible. In the haze, you watch yourself turn into the prepubescent, gel-slicked blonde, you catch the Ontarian cadence of your new, actualized being.

See, now you’re trapped.

Pisces February 19 - March 20 You are a maker of things, a lover of beauty, an art hoe. But if you feel a lag in your creative energies this month, don’t despair. On the 14th, go to Swan Point, turn your dinner plate eyes towards the sky, howl at the heavy hung Beaver moon, danse Macabre. The bones of your beloved manifest the dust left to settle in the void as you depart. You’ll feel better in no time, just what the doula ordered.

Aries March 21 - April 19 The stars have aligned to tell us you’re going to be so hungover on November 1st.

bloodstained hand.

Cancer June 21 - July 22 This month, the chance is yours for Change. Flora is the new fauna. Midnight is the new midday. Shrimp cocktail is the new krill. Witch is the new bitch. Cat is the new dog. Sofa is the new settee.

Tombs are the new wombs. Paisley is the new plaid. Savers is the new Salvation Army. Tax breaks are the new taxes.

Purgatory is the new Providence Place.

Ghoul is the new ghost. Clinton is the new Clinton.

Leo July 23 - August 22 You’ll catch the Halloween fever a week late: on November 3rd, pull out your Ouija board, conjure up a seance, and vlog your way into a brand-spanking-new conspiracy theory.

Virgo Taurus April 20 - May 20 Steal your downstairs neighbor’s candy (it’s in the pillowcase, tied shut with a knot, stowed atop the refrigerator next to the kitchen window the parents always forget to close). Buy some Pepto Bismol for your inevitable stomachache (hint, it also works on blackheads in a pinch). Enjoy.

Weeks later, the dentist you’ve avoided seeing for three years will tell you that your front tooth will fall out in the undetermined but near-distant future. You are surrounded by the floor-to-ceiling wall decal of a palm-treed beach scene to remind you exactly where you are not. The root of the tooth is remarkably four millimeters shorter than its pair, which seems like little but is in fact a lot! The dentist asks if you’ve been punched in the face recently, or ever. You recall your upbringing by pacifier-holding, pacifist parents first and then immediately remember noticing the bruise that grew on your upper lip when you woke up face down, head on the outer lip of the bathtub rim, near-comatose at twelve noon with a seventy-five percent empty pillowcase of candy corn, which tastes like shit anyway.

Gemini May 21 - June 20 Well, we could tell you what to do this month, dear ones. But we both know you two don’t give a fuck. Keep doing you.

Both of you. Tie a ribbon in your hair, straighten your dress, and walk off hand in

August 23 - September 22 You’re so insightful, you might as well get that third eye tattooed between your brows. The world is your oyster, or mussel, or clam. Go with your gut, it’s probably right. Honestly, we’re just so proud of you and can’t wait to see how far you go. You’re the person at the party that everyone’s drawn to, you are pure light.

Indeed, your body becomes something of a duality, taking on the characteristic of wave and of particle. As you weave around and move through space and time in a vibration that simply never stops, you realize you are trapped in what is, in fact, an eternal darkness that is situated within you and around you and alongside you and is central to your being but is also completely and wholly its own. You’re running out of breath now, but you can’t stop.

Libra September 23 - October 22 Infidelity is the name of the game this month, Libra. Set up your Tinder dates weeks in advance and make sure to leave the 24th, 25th and 26th open for business. No need to show up to your family’s Thanksgiving feast this year—a dinner date at the Cheesecake Factory will do just fine. Skip the cranberry sauce and turkey sandwiches and swap in leftover Bang Bang Chicken and Shrimp. Order your 32-month-anniversary Reese’s-peanut-butter-key-lime-pie-bananatruffle-red-velvet-chocolate-tuxedo-cheese-cake cheesecake to go, pull out your thick, woolen holiday sweater and just go wild: it’s cuffing season.

OCTOBER 28, 2016

THE GRASS ISN’T GREENER Raina Wellman ILLUSTRATION BY Juan Tang Hon BY

Fertilized, chemically manipulated, frequently mowed, regularly watered and generally adored, the lawn and its upkeep are sites and sources of both American identity and great ecological burden.

The modern, archetypical American lawn first originated outside the castles of European nobility in the 17th century and spread into the United States, perhaps beginning in 1803 when a lawn was installed at Thomas Jefferson’s estate, Monticello. Years later, pesticides, weed-free grass seeds, advanced fertilizer, and easy application methods made the installation of an immaculate lawn attainable across the United States. And while the suburban American dream landscape is now very easy to achieve, it is at the cost of biodiversity and the health of local environments.

Cristina Milesi, the scientific director of the Institute of Public Health and Environment in Palo Alto, has been using satellite imagery to track the growth of the American lawn since 2003. Her research led her to find that American lawns occupy around 128,000 square kilometers, around three times as many acres as irrigated corn. In an interview with the College Hill Independent, Milesi urged lawn owners to take notice: “we have to accommodate more and more people without having more water, which means there needs to be different aesthetics for modern landscapes.”

William Levitt, the face of the real estate company Levitt & Sons, helped to develop suburban housing in the 20th century and effectively establish the lawn as a standard of homeownership in the United States.“No single feature of a suburban residential community contributes as much to the charm and beauty of the individual home and the locality as well-kept lawns,” he wrote. In the suburban yards of returning soldiers during the fifties, rules and regulations concerning grass color, water usage, and lawn ornaments emerged, comprising just a portion of homeowner associations’ efforts to preserve a particular image of the American lawn. In Washington DC, regulations prohibit lawn owners from allowing grass and weeds to grow more than 10 inches in height. Additionally, lawns with grass or weeds that are dead and diseased are subject to fines.

This past April, in Sugar Creek, Missouri, a family was given four days to tear out a vegetable garden that broke a newly implemented city ordinance requiring traditional landscaping. In the past few years, similar cases have occurred in Florida, Oklahoma and Michigan.

In part because of regulatory efforts, the green lawn has become a real threat to the intricate ecologies of our landscapes. Swaths of land consisting of diverse and delicate ecosystems are now subsumed under brilliantly green grass. In drought-ridden New Mexico, where I’m from, the prevalence of the banal green lawn provides an eerie contrast to the desert landscape. Yearly, New Mexico gets between 8­-21 inches of precipitation. This makes the required 1-1.5 inches of water required each week for lawn upkeep, a task that essentially must be done entirely by hose or sprinkler, using up valuable resources.

When communities remove native grasses and wildflowers to install sod, they demonstrate disregard

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

towards the beauty that local landscapes provide, but there’s an even greater range of negative impacts.

As Mark Hostetler, a professor of the Department of Wildlife Ecology & Conservation at University of Florida, explained in an interview with the Indy, “the lawn is an exotic monoculture inhospitable to most wildlife.” Monocultures, the agricultural practice of growing only a single variety of crop, generate a wide range of problems including vulnerability to environmental changes and pests. Indigenous species do not forage in or use lawn surface as a nesting habitat, so immediately following the installation of a lawn there is a loss of plant and animal diversity. On a subterranean level, lawn chemicals impact the soil, creating nutrient waste, leaching into the groundwater and reducing the activity of beneficial organisms within the dirt. Moreover, when communities remove native grasses and wildflowers to install sod, they demonstrate disregard towards the beauty that local landscapes provide. +++ In order to combat environmental distress due to drought, lack of ecological diversity, and poisonous pesticide use, scientists, landscapers, and architects are looking to reinvigorate the American lawnscape.

Xeriscaping, which was originally defined by Xeriscape Colorado in 1981 and is growing in popularity, is one of the most promising landscape redesign options. Xeriscaping is a practice of landscaping that uses drought tolerant plants with the intention of conserving water and establishing waste efficiency.

Companies offering xeriscaping are available across the United States to landscapers who have the initiative to change norms in order to promote sustainability. In particularly dry areas throughout the Southwest, rock gardens with areas that support the diverse, water efficient local plant communities are a practically maintenance-free possibility.

Still, Hostetler believes that there is no easy solution to lawn culture. “It’s more of a mindset. The important thing is to switch your mindset. It is possible to have aesthetically pleasing landscapes that have a reduced footprint,” she says. As a tradition and a norm, the lawn can be difficult to buck against, but as Hostetler expressed, “we need that one person to make a step within the community.” However, we need to look beyond personal judgment and expectation and address the many sustainably adverse city and county ordinances and homeowner association rules that arrest or fine people for installing gardens or letting their grass get crisp, brown or overgrown.

Unfortunately, the act of rethinking lawn maintenance practices rarely occurs except in circumstances of severe drought. In California, the drought generated higher water prices and pushed people to rethink the way that they landscape. In another case, homeowners in Los Angeles were offered up to $3.75 a square foot for scrapping their lawns. Californians were also encouraged to install artificial turf, receiving tax rebates for installing synthetic grass. Similar alternatives must be considered even when the crisis is less immediate.

+++ Though water use is currently high and strictly monitored in California, golf courses require large expanses of grass and upkeep as well as huge, rarely regulated quantities of water. The golf course’s required water intake can be more than 325,851 gallons per year according to the United States Golf Association. Golf courses are installed in environments all over the world, including places that don’t naturally foster the green grass prevalent in Britain and now the United States. In Maricopa County, Arizona, where rainfall is inconsistent and meager, there are more than 220 golf courses.

Yet some landscape designers have realized golf courses need to be made up of landscapes that incorporate and foster the ecosystem of the surrounding environment. One example is Peter Dye, a world-renowned golf course designer who created the Kiawah Island Golf Resort in South Carolina, which is classified as an Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary.

Within the course, Dye utilized native grasses, created over 22 acres of freshwater wetlands, and restored about 80 acres of saltwater marshlands. Dye is not alone more than 2,100 golf courses in 24 countries participate in the standardized certification process created by the Audubon Society. This standardized sustainability certification process proves that there are ways to develop outdoor spaces for human use that incorporate wilderness communities, but it does not wholly address the larger problem at hand. In order to negate the many problems that lawns pose, action must be taken by individuals and small communities, not just designer golf courses. +++ It’s time to stop extravagantly using our resources.

On the East Coast, Rhode Island included, creating a sustainable landscape also means focusing on drought-tolerant plants and soil with special mulches and compost. In a November article for the Ecological Landscapes Alliance, a Northeast landscaper named Benjamin Crouch advocated for local grasses and plants like white sedum, toadflax, beardtongue, and coneflower.

If communities are going to continue growing personal plots of grass, Milesi notes that they need “to do research on the type of lawn they are planning to install and look beyond aesthetics for deeper root systems, which require considerably less water.” In her interview, Milesi recommended that lawn owners consider reducing lawn surface area, installing drought resistant species, and letting the grass grow its hair out a bit. Communities need to look at the lawn as more than just an aesthetic issue. Nonetheless, most people continue picnicking, barbequing, and doing somersaults while failing to consider the many underlying problems created by these verdant landscapes.

RAINA WELLMAN R’19 is nervously pulling out strands of grass.

SCIENCE

12

ON FRATERNITY BY

Vhalla Otarod Teri Minogue

ILLUSTRATION BY

His sophomore fall we dropped my brother off at the frat house, car full of his boxes and sound equipment for his band. The frat house was a peeling two-story Victorian with Greek letters over the doors and an aged-looking balcony.

My brother’s big came loping out to our car in a polo and khakis. He grabbed my brother’s hand through the open passenger door and pulled him out of the car and into a hug.

New members of a fraternity are assigned “bigs,” big brothers, from the older classes. A big serves as your mentor within the frat. My brother had once told me that his big was a fucking psychopath. He said it in a way that meant it was a good thing, that he liked his big despite his psychopathy—or perhaps because of it.

My mother and I stepped out of the car too. I ascertained from the first handshake that, yes, my brother’s big was a fucking psychopath.

He had a facile smile, a casual gait without slouch, and the demeanor of a talented actor playing the role of “likable guy.” I saw right away that my mom loved him—he had started telling her how he’d sanded down the floors

so they would be splinter-free for the new brothers. For my part, I couldn’t help but be charmed when he insisted on helping me unload the car.

The first thing you see when you stand in front of the frat house is a big glossy boat attached to the trailer hitch of a pickup. It’s right in the middle of the lawn and at least three hours from the nearest marina.

My brother smiled when he saw it. He nudged his big and said, “She’s back, huh?”

Laden with boxes, the boys had to go around the boat’s starboard side to get to the front door. My brother kicked the gleaming stern as if in greeting, and then they disappeared into the lettered maw of the house.

Mom and I kept our distance, milling about in front of the pickup truck.

My mother said, “Doesn’t he seem wonderful? I feel much better now.”

We watched them make several trips between the house and the curb before my brother’s big waved us in for a tour.

My brother led me upstairs to show me his room. Greek letters painted on the back wall, nearly his height.

As we stepped into the hallway, a creature interrupted our path. It took a few blinks for me to identify the sinewy electric-green body winding through the sawdust. Yes, that is an iguana, my brother shrugged. I later learned that his big also kept a pitbull and a chinchilla in the house.

After the tour, we said our goodbyes to my brother and his big brother.

As my mother and I returned to the car, I saw some other guys on the roof, just throwing shit off it. Televisions and glass jars and mini-fridges. They screamed whenever something hit the ground and exploded. My mom followed my eyes and said, “Would you look at those kids.” Her smile hadn’t faded. I wanted to cry then, but I knew it was ridiculous so I laughed.

We clambered into the car and shut the doors.

“How about some girl time?” she said, and we drove away. +++ The 2016 film Goat follows a fraternity pledge as he undergoes a week of non-stop hazing in order to become a brother of the fictional Phi Sigma Mu. The film is an adaptation of a memoir by the same name. Some of the film’s events allegedly occurred in a fraternity at Clemson University.

Goat breaks from the boys-will-be-boys mold of movies like Animal House and Neighbors.

It depicts hazing as physical and psychological torture. The film’s midpoint finds one pledge locked in a dog kennel as the Phi Sigma Mu brothers kick him, urinate on him, pour beer over his head, and turn the cage on its side. Our hero and the other pledges watch. They remain silent and lined up against the basement wall as ordered.

As we watched this scene, my friend said, with gratitude, “We will never know what it’s like to be men.” I thought about her reaction as the credits rolled.

I felt no relief in the knowledge that as a woman, I would never experience fraternity

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FEATURES

OCTOBER 28, 2016

hazing. I revisited Goat many times after that first viewing, maybe in the hopes of understanding how I should feel at the end. I never do.

In one of my favorite scenes, the protagonist, his biological brother, and a Phi Sigma Mu brother abscond to the frat house lounge to smoke Cuban cigars. They wear a drunken uniform: navy sportcoat, rumpled oxford, half-undone ties. They’re sweating liquor into the upholstery. Between moments of comatose head lolling, the Phi Sigma Mu brother confesses to the other two that his father hates him.

He tells the brothers how much he loves them, how happy he is that they’re there. Then he puts an arm around the protagonist and manages a giddy “Phi Sig, motherfucker.” It’s not meant to be a sweet moment, ending on that ominous note. But I find it tender and sad in a way that has little to do with the characters’ situation. That scene floods me with a nauseous emotion that smacks of disappointment or maybe envy.

I keep thinking: I will never know what it’s like to be a man. +++ Fraternities represent a system of male social dominance that hinges on fictive kinship. Imposed fraternal bonds allow for and are even forged in abnormally aggressive behavior. These bonds are sustained by loyalty: not reporting your pledge master even if he abuses you.

As Goat illustrates, this structure can create an injurious environment that seems inescapable for pledges. One character insists, “If you quit, what else is there?” A laughable fix, perhaps, to those of us who have managed life unaffiliated, but this imperative is bigger than any one fraternity. According to a study by the U.S. Department of Education, over half of all college students in the nation are involved in hazing rituals.

The idea of fictive kinship as vital to survival and success is not unique to the modern United States. Some Vikings, for instance, swore blood oaths and declared “blood brotherhood” with allies in battle. The early Celts often fostered their sons to be raised by wealthy and powerful men in the hopes of establishing bonds that would protect the boy as he trained to become a warrior. Men in these societies relied on fictive kinsmen for support in political disputes, personal quarrels, and blood feud.

In Goat’s prologue, the protagonist suffers a violent carjacking. Injured and stranded in the woods, he survives because nearby homesteaders find him collapsed on their property. As the story of his trauma circulates, the brothers of Phi Sigma Mu assure him that once he pledges their fraternity, he will never again find himself so shamefully defenseless.

“You know why?” asks a fraternity alumnus.

“This is Phi Sigma Mu. Okay? We’re gentlemen. We don’t like to fight, but if we gotta fight, then we all fight.” +++ Growing up, I lamented my lack of an older brother. I imagined that older brothers were invaluable to a young girl’s education. Or at least some of my friends’ older brothers seemed so, the ones who taught their sisters to climb trees and watch football.

The sisters of older brothers all seemed smarter and stronger than I was. Emotionally tougher. Even as a child, I think I realized that having an older brother with older friends would have acclimated me to a sort of male space I now find threatening.

My younger brother and I were never close as teenagers. We didn’t go to movies or eat lunch together, we barely saw each other at home. We made

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

no effort to understand each other’s lives. Once he found me crying in my bedroom after a school dance and asked why I’d put on so many tons of makeup just to ruin it. He never expressed any emotion except cool irritation, and I felt silly in comparison. I felt like such a girl. +++ Fraternities dominate the social scene at my brother’s college. To remain independent is to isolate oneself from campus life. My brother held an ambivalent attitude toward fraternities during orientation, telling my parents he likely wouldn’t bother with rush. He changed his mind halfway through the first week of school.

It was a pragmatic decision for him. Ideally, my brother would find in his fraternity a network of mentors, or at least ritual words of brotherhood to guide him: the Greek name of his fraternity, their generations-old oath of loyalty, even the crude nicknames bestowed upon him and his fellow pledges. He would belong to a clan that protected and promoted its own. He would become easy in the presence of wealthy men, privileged men, the kind of men who are statistically likely to run the country after graduation.

During recruitment, my brother grew more excited about the prospect of pledging. He was not worried about hazing, though he knew it occurred.

He had found a tribe, and it didn’t matter if he disliked certain individuals within it. All that mattered was that he liked them as a group. They seemed to him smart, well dressed, and fun, which meant that he would also seem this way when he became a brother.

I was happy for him and envious of him. I had misunderstood my childhood longing for male mentorship and protection as the desire for an older brother. Now I knew, I had wanted all along what my brother had now—fraternity. +++ The first time my brother called me in a non-emergency situation came a week after his formal induction.

I picked up the phone and demanded to know what was wrong.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just wanted to see how you were doing.”

He told me about the pledge ceremony, about his big and his new brothers. He disclosed almost nothing about the events of his initiation—only snippets that I knew represented a sanitized summary.

The phone call couldn’t have lasted more than a minute.

After my brother settled into the frat house, his big helped him build a bedframe for his mattress.

It was sturdy and splinter-free. Together they also repainted the walls, carefully outlining the Greek letters. My brother would pay for supplies but never labor. His big seemed happy—even enthusiastic— to spend long hours improving my brother’s living space.

In fact, he seemed keen to be of use whenever possible. My brother once asked his big for help in a physics class he had taken the year before, and his big would have given it, if not for the fact that he had eaten his graded final exam on a whim. Chewed it up and swallowed it. Shame, too, because he had gotten a perfect score.

I was privy to such anecdotes now. As the year passed, I received more frequent phone calls from my brother. The first time he said, “I love you,” I stood dumbfounded many seconds after he’d hung up, phone pressed to my ear.

+++ In one the most intense hazing episodes in Goat, the older brothers lock the pledges in a shed with a keg and a goat. The pledges must finish the keg or, threatens one of the brothers, “I can 100 percent promise you, you are gonna have to fuck this goat.” Despite frequent vomiting and general misery, the pledges tap the keg.

Having drunk the last drops, our protagonist rings a bell that will alert the brothers outside to the task’s completion.

“I don’t get it,” said my friend. The concept of hazing baffled her, and more so, the fact that willing pledges allowed it to exist.

I did kind of get it.

The scene continues like this: For a moment after our hero rings the bell, the pledges stand in silence, unsure whether anyone is still out there. For a moment, they are abandoned. Then comes the banging on the door and walls and the whooping all around. The door bursts open, and the older brothers pour in like a horde of riotous spirits. Except now, they’ve been appeased.

They are benevolent. Hugs all around. A giant bonfire awaits the pledges outside.

I felt acutely the satisfaction of this moment and others in the film when praise and approval punctuate abuse. The pats on the arm, the well dones. I was scared of what it would say about me as a woman to admit this, but part of me understood the need to hear, you did good, kid—and understood the need to hear it from someone who had locked you in a cage and urinated on you.

I know a guy who pledged a notorious frat in the South. He once told me that the humiliations and physical torments depicted in Goat were not uncommon during his frat’s initiation. His fraternity upheld a tradition of assigning, as a pledge’s big, the brother who had hazed him with the greatest zeal during initiation.

He said that a pledge could expect sexual humiliation, sensory deprivation, and beatings from the man who would then serve as his mentor.

Four years later, he and his big are best friends. +++ My brother suggests that I stop watching Goat.

Whenever I call him now, I ask him about hazing.

He tells me about his fraternity’s goals for rush this fall.

Indulgent, like he’s answering a child’s questions about politics. When I prod him on the initiation planned for pledges, he says, “I can’t say, but if we don’t make it kind of hard, there’s no point.” I jump on that, tell him he’s quoting a character from Goat and, how weird is that? You just said the same exact thing and didn’t even realize it!

Don’t you have schoolwork to do? he asks.

I show my housemate a picture of my brother. In it, he and I are standing side by side. He’s wearing an oxford and khakis and showing just enough teeth. We don’t really look alike.

My housemate glances at the picture.

“I thought you had a younger brother,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. “That’s him.”

“Oh. He looks older there.”

VHALLA OTAROD '17 studies warrior cultures.

FEATURES

14

SPIRIT RESONANCE

BY

Kathy Ng

There was once a cook who was much revered for his mastery with knives. Charged to cut up an ox, the cook set to work as if the knife was an extension of his own body. Every twist of his waist, bend of an

graphed dance akin to an act of creation. As if he was performing a choreographed dance. Slices of meat fell How marvelous.

What skill! An admiring patron exclaimed. Not skill the cook replied I’m not interested in skill anymore. What I care about is the Way. The blade has no thickness. If I slide it through the spaces between the joints, guide it through the paths of least Leave it to the Chinese to write poetic parables about butchery.

I grew up hearing ghost stories about the house I lived in. For some reason my mom was always the only one present to witness the actual paranormal occurrences. Pieces of her jewelry would suddenly go missing and reappear in the same spot where bedroom would keep sticking out its disk slot without any visible prompting. One morning, she burst out of the bathroom in the middle of a shower, hair dripping my dad and I got there the prints were gone. As my mom crawled around clawing without success for any trace of evidence, I asked her to stop, please stop. My mom thinks I don’t believe her, but I never said that.

I simply supposed that demon hands, like all living things, are susceptible to the science of evaporation and an incoming rush of dry air. +++ The mountains of ancient China must have been casting spells on the rich and robed scholars from that time long lost to the misty charms of journey, driven by a mad mission to achieve the impossible, to capture what they could not see. The mountains must have been beautiful in a way that eyes of today are not equipped to recognize, but surely even in the fog of foregone and forgotten centuries, they could not have looked like that.

The reservoir near my home is lined with hairy trees. Crinkly sort of trees, weak in the way that they loom, slumping over like old women with swinging breasts. The hair, black and stringy and entangled with rare shimmers of dying bronze, tumble over

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OCCULT

tug! A private game I played as a quiet but destructive child, the kind who never got caught stealing people’s erasers and licking them under tables. So it was shocking, truly, when one day my mom caught arm with jolting aggression, and slapped the backs of both my hands. Ghosts live inside those vines. Do not stir them. They will follow you home and strangle you in your sleep.

Parenting indeed is an awe-inspiring power, made the picture of a dead person in the eye; why, on the rare occasion when it has been necessary, I whisper fervent apologies to any bush I pee on in case I’d just inadvertently urinated on a sleeping spirit; why, even now, whenever I pass by those hairy trees along the reservoir, I don't walk, I run.

In the sixth century, a man by the name of Xie He recorded six laws by which Chinese paintings ant two.

Law 1: Spirit Resonance An old poem once claimed a painter would become the bamboo that he would paint. Cryptic nonsense?

Perhaps. Perhaps it is silly to imagine how brittle bones can possibly hollow themselves to become

delusion of magic? What is bone method? Perhaps

tion, the resonating echo of a bygone spirit who bore the weight of mountains from its earthly body until its eventual collapse.

The Chinese calendar is lunisolar, which I understand to mean as having something do with year according to some irregular astrological pattern.

That’s about all I know. It just never felt worth it to try and comprehend a version of time that seemed so disarmingly unstable. According to that calendar, the Hungry Ghost Festival is an annual festival that takes place on the 15th night of the seventh month. On this day, the right stars align, and the realms of the dead an eerily haunting sort of osmosis, and ghosts are once again allowed to roam the earth, perhaps to pay some old friends some unwanted visits. Growing up with the Greco-Roman calendar, I never knew the exact date of the festival, but there were always plenty of other markers to remind me of the day’s forthcoming. The wet summer air dries up for autumn, stores start putting up signs for back-to-school

sale, and my mom won’t stop talking about it. It’s her favorite holiday.

When I was about 15 she decided to celebrate by buying us tickets to a special Ghostnight screening of the horror movie Insidious. She heard about the event on a radio show that specializes in ghost stories that she listens to everyday. I hate horror movies. So I’ve never understood, or perhaps I’m afraid to hypothesize, why my mom thought that Insidious would be ters are just supposed to trust mothers like that.

I cried my way through the movie as my mom smiled encouragingly and urged me to keep my eyes open. On the way home that night, walking along streets brimming alive with the possibility of ghosts, my mom sneaked up behind me and whispered who’s there? I screamed and slapped her right across the face. +++ You can hardly see the man in the scroll. The sixth patriarch carrying a pole, painted in an ink so pale it would seem that the artist did not want his work to survive the test of time. The painted man appears to be a shadow of a shadow, evaporating in a watery dream, as if existing on a tenuous bridge between existing and disappearing. This is an ancient thing called apparition painting, a style that emerged during the Southern Song period. It was called apparition ists of the time were possessed with a curious impulse a twice removed penumbra of the actual man. Ghost.

Strangely however, the features of his face would always be accented with jet black ink. The eyes, especially the eyes, would be shards of obsidian, lightning sparkling with the electricity of the very present. It receding into clouds of old mist, but some are moving forward with the speed of light, unweaving itself from the decaying silk to look you squarely in the eyes.

My mom begins each day with the same morning ritual. Holding our dog like a baby, she bows the Goddess of Mercy, and thanks her for our dog’s tiny vial of water that she places in front of a baseball card-like image of the goddess and gives her a fresh tangerine that will proceed to rot over the next couple days, untouched.

I have very distinct memories of twirling her crystal

OCTOBER 28, 2016

time growing up, the youngest of eight in a desperately poor household, she spent a lot of time playing alone, drawing on bathroom walls and burning candles in tin boxes. One time she got her hands on a Ouija board and tried to talk to ghosts. Because I was so lonely, she said.

Nothing came of the game, but later that night, as she was sleeping, she was suddenly jolted awake by a gust of freezing air and the sensation of an acute pressure on her neck. A pair of invisible hands, with the strength of death, was choking her. What did you do? I asked.

My mom would smile as she remembered that right into the face of the devil, she cried for Christ to help her Jesus saved me, my mom told me, and that is why you should never play with ghosts. I’d nod with my whole heart as I placed my baby hand over her cross, I’m glad you’ll always have this to protect you.

My mom doesn’t believe in god anymore. I don’t know where her cross went. Now she wears a jade mon-

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

cording to some monk that she regularly consults with, she is apparently quite the ghost magnet. The thick red string around her neck gives her hives and rashes.

I would tell her that that is obviously a bad omen, and worse, but I know she won’t believe me.

It will probably take me more than three thousand years to get through an ancient Chinese scroll. The time it has taken to inch its way towards my eyes, I want to dedicate the same amount to time travel back in a snail pace sort of tick-tock in hopes my patience would unlock some sort of cosmic vision, allowing ancient washes of ink to once again breathe the life of the hands that painted them, to sweep me away with the force of a waterfall cascading from a swirly heaven.

Ludicrous daydreams, I know, but at least these are spirits that do not belong in the realm of my nightmares.

The clock will slow, each second will expand into its own ocean, and at long last, at the end of this timeworn

understand that these scrolls, bursting forth with the how deep you can fall is completely up to you. When was, where were such places? How did they ever exist.

Perhaps landscapes to satisfy a wanderlust not for the physical but for the imagination are not from this world at all. What is spirit resonance?

Perhaps it is a journey. If so, then what is breath but an invitation, the privilege to share the air with those that have gone before us, a gentle whisper in the ear that there is nothing to fear. Simply ask the question, where are the mountain ghosts?

KATHY NG B’17

OCCULT

16

SIMPLE PROPERTIES BY

A favorite bookstore has been marked “Permanently closed.” The taco place on the corner has a new photo. The geo-locational marker for the liquor store appears on the wrong side of the street.

An exceptional Indian restaurant has suddenly acquired a low rating. Places are posted, updated, revised, shared, rated, reviewed, moved, bookmarked, deleted.

Increasingly, today’s urban and suburban environments are experienced through layers of algorithmic and crowd-sourced textualization, mediated by the tastemaking software installed on our networked devices. Integrated mapping and review platforms—Yelp, Google Maps, TripAdvisor, Apple Maps, Foursquare, and so on—contain data sets called “places” or “locations,” collections of entries and tags sourced from user input (via reviews, ratings, and wiki-style fields for entering business hours, menus, etc.), organized through machine-assisted processes of agglomeration and curation (sorting into lists, categories, suggestions), and attached to pairs of coordinates.

I want to find some coffee in a neighborhood I’m unfamiliar with: the search results will appear on an interactive map; they will have been annotated

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TECH

with various data and descriptors, which will expand if I am looking for more details. I am trying to make a decision. What will be offered on the menu? What kind of space am I about to enter?

How busy will it be? What is its ambiance like?

How much will it cost me? How quickly can I get in and out? The platform is supposed to help me answer these questions in advance—preempting a “bad decision.”

Google has helpfully provided some of the more popular places stored on its Maps platform with what it calls “snapshots” or “editorial summaries,” compiled by writers presumably employed or contracted by the tech company itself.

Made up of one or two tight phrases, the blurbs are typeset in italics just below the full name of a given business or landmark, and attributed only to “Google.” Their purpose is to provide glosses of the associated place data. There is no evident rule for the assignment of such summaries other than a loosely-defined “popularity”—either a place will be graced with a summary from Google, or it will not.

Living in New York this summer, and using Google Maps frequently, I began developing a

Alec Mapes-Frances

poem from these “editorial summaries.” “SIMPLE PROPERTIES,” excerpted below, is the result. Although most of the text comes from summaries of locations in the New York City area, part of what I am suggesting is that, like a chain restaurant or big box store, Google’s poetics point toward a new ubiquity, with no clear regional or territorial specificity. Cutting phrases and tags from their assigned places, I wanted to perform, diagram, and open up the monolithic language of an emerging International Style, a gentrifying jargon that compresses urban topologies into smooth, seamless, and “quirky” spaces of consumption.

This has less to do with a portrait of a place or set of places than with the notion of “any-space-whatever,” the empty collection of “genre features,” “basic settings,” and “relaxed surroundings” that compose the fabric of the generic, antiseptic, overdeveloped city.

ALEC MAPES-FRANCES B’17 gets lost when his phone dies.

OCTOBER 28, 2016

List.

29 - 30

40th Boston Book Fair @ Hynes Convention Center (all day) Old English boc “book, writing, written document,” traditionally from Proto-Germanic *bokiz “beech” (source also of German Buch “book” Buche “beech;”), the notion being of beechwood tablets on which runes were inscribed, but it may be from the tree itself (people still carve initials in them). The Old English word originally meant any written document. Prizes to whoever finds the loveliest rune-inscribed beechwood tablet @ ye olde boc faire.

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Building a Vocal Community With Ysaye M. Barnwell @ Southside Cultural Center, Providence (10am - 4pm) Best known for her work with Sweet Honey in the Rock, Dr. Barnwell will host this workshop on the development of resistance, unity, and peace through the Black vocal tradition.

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Mayor Jorge Elorza’s Halloween Monster Mash @ Providence City Hall (5:30 - 7:30)

28 - 29

Sea Scare @ Mystica Aquarium (6 - 9) Finding Dory meets Carpenter’s Halloween.

Ellen Degeneres plays Michael Myers in a tour-de-force performance. Diane Keaton stumbles as Laurie.

Our beloved leader, his beneficence Jorge Elorza, is throwing down big time! Expect all the things you’ve come to expect: a costume contest, candy, a heavy police presence.

If you get the chance, be sure to inquire as to when he’s going to prioritize passing the CSA.

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Sasha Grey at DusK 2 Dawn (1am - 7am) Some know her as a former member of the industrial band aTelecine, some as the greatest *adult film* actress of all time. She’s hosting the ridiculously overpriced grand opening of Providence’s newest after-hours club: Dusk 2 Dawn. Don’t miss this chance to catch a glimpse of greatness.

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NoLNGinPVD Community Meeting @ Renaissance Church, Providence (3 - 5pm) National Grid wants to build a dangerous Liquefied Natural Gas facility in South Providence. The Southside has seen enough environmental racism (see page 5). This organizing meeting is for all those interested in community-based resistance.

($25, scholarships available)

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Narragansett Bay Symphony Season Opener! @ McVinney Auditorium (3 - 4:30pm)

Nosferatu with Live Score @ Brattle Theatre, Cambridge (7 - 9pm)

Spooktacular ‘16 @ Analog Underground (11am - 5pm)

Celebrate with Working Families Party @ Ladder 133 (5:30 - 7:30pm)

Best band ever Slint’s 1991 album Spiderland featured a song titled “Nosferatu Man,” whose lyrics make references to macabre and gothic horror. Slint will not be performing.

Your favorite indie record shop throws a wild party complete with all-day DJs and hella discounts. Be sure to go b4 Amazon catches wind of it.

Great party hosts a great party. Food & drink provided?! Radical politics!? Don’t miss this fun chance to meet WFP candidates from across the state.

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After Orlando PVD @ 154 Angell St, Providence (8 - 9:30pm)

The Diorama Dilemma: Is There a Future for Anthropology in Museums @ 75 Waterman St, Providence (5:30 - 7pm)

Race & Voting Rights in Rhode Island: Slavery to Black Power @ The Kings Cathedral, Providence (6:30 - 8:30)

Talk by Michelle Grabner @ 64 College St, Providence (5 - 7pm)

Donna Haraway on Gorillas in the museum: “I want to show the reader how the experience of the diorama grew from the safari in specific times and places, how the camera and the gun together are the conduits for the spiritual commerce of man and nature, how biography is woven into and from a social and political tissue.” In a similar vein, Chip Cowell will look at Native American dioramas.

A talk by Dr. Kerri Greenidge of UMass Boston on the history of race and voting in America to be followed by a panel discussion by local experts on the ongoing issues for black voters in Rhode Island.

Some have said that symphonies—along with Bach, Berlioz, and (whoever the heck is) Mussorgsky—are dead. But they also say punk is dead… Rock on Mussorgsky!

This staged-reading of new plays from noted international playwrights in response the shooting at Pulse Nightclub is being held in concert with over 50 readings around the country. Donations accepted for Youth Pride RI.

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Timothy Cardinal Dolan: Jewish-Catholic Dialogue at 2,000 Years @ Providence College (7 - 10pm) Sounds like some NWO shit. Someone ask him about the illuminati? how *the Church* perpetuates heteropatriarchy? Syria??? Ooo, ask Timmy if he hangs out with lepers and sex-workers, ;)...

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Grabner makes delicate, texturally-focused paper works, and was one of the curators of the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Ken Johnson sucks!