The College Hill Independent Vol. 33 Issue 7

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COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY NOV 04 2016

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A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 33 / NUMBER 07 NOV 04 2016

INDY COVER

Google Mirth Nicole Cochary

NEWS 02

Week in Review Eve Zelickson, Jack Brook, and Hannah Maier-Katkin

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Defenders, Offenders Shane Potts and Camila Ruiz Segovia

METRO 04

Wire Tap That Jane Argodale and Marianna McMurdock

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Separate But Not Equal Kelton Ellis

ARTS 08

e-fux Alec Mapes-Frances

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Abode In Design Dolma Ombadykow, Malcolm Drenttel, Jonah Max, and Ryan Rosenberg

FROM THE EDITORS We’ve been going on lots of dates. Drive-in movie theaters, ice cream joints, makeout point, C-SPAN, that sort of thing. Staring into our partner’s eyes, surreptitiously touching palms, and d’oh! We do it again—we bring up the one thing we shouldn’t have: the presidential election.

As we suck mutually on a single strand of spaghetti, one of us mentions how liberal democracy works in theory but once you get to the nitty gritty of quasioligarchical two-party systems— We fight. We break up. We make up. We make out. We lie across a big brass bed and look into each other’s eyes, lovingly whispering that representational victories mean nothing in the face of an expanding net of systemic violences.

I’m sorry. I know you were in the mood there for a second.

— WT + PM

FEATURES 07

Story of a New Name Teddy Davey MANAGING EDITORS

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Foreign Correspondence Lance Gloss

METABOLICS 13

Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs NEWS

Political Posture Sam Samore

Camila Ruiz Segovia Shane Potts Liz Cory METRO

TECH 15

Virtual Cheese Charlie Windolf

LITERARY 17

Kill Your Grapes Javier Sandoval

EPHEMERA 14

Party Favors Patrick McMenamin and Mark Benz

Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Marianna McMurdock ARTS

Will Tavlin Ryan Rosenberg Kelton Ellis FEATURES

Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick Dolma Ombadykow METABOLICS

Sam Samore Isabelle Doyle SCIENCE

Fatima Husain

X 18

TECH

I made this; do you want it?

Alice Hamblett

Jonah Max OCCULT

Sophia Washburn

EPHEMERA

My Tran Bryn Brunnstrom Julie Benbassat Dorothy Windham

Patrick McMenamin Mark Benz

DESIGN & LAYOUT

LITERARY

Stefania Gomez

X

Liby Hays Nichole Cochary

Celeste Matsui Meryl Charleston Andrew Linder Ruby Stenhouse

LIST

WEB MANAGER

Malcolm Drenttel Alec Mapes-Frances

Charlie Windolf BUSINESS MANAGER

COVER

Dolma Ombadykow

Gabriel Matesanz SENIOR EDITOR 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

Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Ivan Rios-Fetchko Maria Cano-Flavia

Alec Mapes-Frances MVP

Charlie Windolf 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 ELECTION PREP Hannah Maier-Katkin, Jack Brook, & Eve Zelickson ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz BY

TINY DANCER, TINY HANDS This past June, writer Dave Eggers recognized the sweet pitter-patter opening of Elton John’s classic “Tiny Dancer”—playing to a crowd of Trump supporters at a rally, who probably just wanted to hear their favorite Ted Nugent rippers anyway. Afterward, Eggers told The Guardian how absurd it was that Trump has made it common practice to use artists’ music without their permission. Eggers (of McSweeney’s fame) decided it was an opportune time for the “resurrection of the political protest song.” He reached out to all his musical friends—Aimee Mann, Andrew St. James, and Death Cab for Cutie among them— and enlisted them in a 30-day project called 30 Days, 30 Songs that would release one song each day until the election. The catch: he would only recruit musicians who agreed to make music that supported “a Trump-free America.”

Eggers told Vogue that the songs might, upon first listen, “sound benign to Trump supporters, but if you listen closely, they’d all be puncturing that inflated horror of an ego he has.”

You don’t have to listen too closely to clipping.’s “Fat Fingers,” released on day 25 of the project, to hear the perforation of Donald’s psyche: “First off fuck your tricks and the clique you claim / How an uncredentialed rapist even get in the game / Can’t relate to shit cause his life been too kushy / And keep grabbing vaginas cause won’t no one give him pussy.”

To top it off, the lyric video backdrop is footage from the destruction of Donald Trump’s Hollywood Star. So subtle, so savage.

“We are all suffering from collective post-traumatic stress from this election…but right now, while we while we’re cowering in a corner and sweating profusely… these songs can give you some succor and a moment of calm. Some of the songs you can even dance to,” Eggers told Vogue.

If you’re looking to boogie in the polling booth this Tuesday, or put together a pithy little pre-game playlist, the Indy recommends checking out Bhi Bhiman’s “With Love from Russia,” Franz Ferdinand’s “Demagogue,” and El Vy’s “Are These My Jets.”

We do, however, regret the exclusion of Elton John’s classic croonings from the project.

-EZ

CUPPA JOE We need a leader who understands the People. A leader who can shake up Washington, a maverick who WILL bring change. It is our civic duty to vote, and so we as Americans have to make the right choice. I’m not talking about a cretin in a pantsuit, or a snivelous orange blob that spews racist obscenities.

No, I’m looking for someone better—a transcendent individual, the kind we’ll one day be able to put on our currency or carve into Mount Rushmore. If you’re wondering where on Earth you could find such a person, I say look no further than the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park. There you will encounter Joe Exotic, a man who sleeps with tigers, carries a pistol on a holster slung around his waist, rocks a dyed blonde mullet, and wears buckskin pants.

For over a year, Joe Exotic has been launching a grassroots campaign through a series of Youtube videos, laying out his plan to take over Washington and return the power to the People: “First thing is, I’m not cutting my hair, I’m not changing the way I dress—I refuse to wear a suit.”

Along with increased protections for the owners of exotic pets his campaign offers a promise to resurrect the voice of the middle class citizen through his slogan, “It’s About Everyone.” He also offers a chance to revolutionize the whole goddamn system. “Ever created the real change?” he asks on his website, JoeExotic2016.com.

“The dude has cancer,” says an official Joe Exotic media spokesperson. “But he’s still planning on going to Congress and shit. He wants to do what he can for these people, for real.”

But Joe Exotic is not perfect. It’s true that the Humane Society has characterized his zoo as “a ticking time bomb” (“If somebody thinks they’re going to walk in here and take my animals away, it’s going to be a small Waco,” Joe retorted), he has been ordered to pay the Big Cat Rescue sanctuary one million dollars for stealing their logo, and yes, he also once threw “Tiger King” condoms into a crowd of grandmothers and small children at a zoo show.

Yet supporters of Joe Exotic continue to rave about him on the comments section of his website, and it’s hard not to get swept along in the excitement.

Kaycee from Fuquay Varina gushes: “Joe will really be able to change America for the better!”

Carla from Millbury writes: “He means business; He is one great honest person!!!!”

Joe from Findlay adds: “I guess I could say you sir are one lucky motherfucker, cause your [sic] still here speaking out against Washington, the Politicians and others. I’m surprised someone hasn’t tried assassinating you. However, I do expect them to.”

Lisa from Kansas, perhaps the most pragmatic of the bunch, offers her thoughts: “What I’d like to see is Joe run in 2020 so he can have 4 years to prepare and be taken seriously. I think if he were to hold a 4 year fundraising campaign he could be one of the front runners in 2020. Otherwise, I feel like this short campaign for 2016 will be a wasted vote for many.”

To this claim, Joe responds: “Don’t count me out just yet. There is not one Candidate right now looking out for you as an American Citizen except me.”

-JB

DUMB-SHINE STATE If there is anything we’ve learned to expect from a presidential election year, it is that Florida will inevitably find a way to fuck everything up. Fourth in population size, but first in dysfunction, America’s dingleberry has a coveted 29 electoral votes to give away through the course of its perpetually fraught election processes.

In the 2012 election, an estimated 201,000 Florida voters did not cast their ballots because they were discouraged by long lines; this problem was most pertinent in parts of central Florida with large Latinx communities. Florida also requires voters to possess a state-issued ID to be eligible to vote—a provision that many have likened to a modern poll tax. In previous elections, absentee voter ballots whose signatures did not match those on their driver’s licenses were completely disregarded. This October, Florida offered a solution as half-hearted as someone whose heart has been bitten in half by a alligator: a federal district judge ordered election officials to contact absentee voters whose signatures on their mail did not match the signature on their driver’s licenses and to let them know they would be discarded. Read: absentee ballots can still be thrown away, but the supervisor of elections doesn’t have the authority to ghost you. It’s far from consent, but maybe there’s a little solace in at least knowing when you’re being screwed over.

Florida was the last state to be called in the 2012 election. In some counties, ballots had to be recounted in the days following the election. However, unlike the notorious 2000 election, in which hanging chads and Florida’s general bungling of the voting process determined the fate of the nation, President Obama didn’t need Florida to secure the nomination. For once we could watch the embarrassment unfold with nothing more than aggravated amusement.

This year, our tackiest state once again has the potential to determine the outcome of the presidential election. When this paper went to print on Wednesday night, FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast showed Trump leading Clinton by about one point. Trump needs Florida to have a chance at victory. While polls are not necessarily predictive of the final outcome, Trump could win the election with the help of the state famous for stories about residents chasing gators and biting off each other’s faces. In an election year where the prospects seem demoralizing across the board, it seems that the only solution may be to travel back in time to the beginning of the 19th century to stop the US from taking Florida from the Spanish.

Or better yet, stop Columbus from stumbling into the Americas in the first place.

-HMK

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

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PROTECTORS, PROTESTORS, AND PRIVILEGE On law enforcement disparities between Standing Rock and Oregon Shane Potts and Camila Ruiz Segovia ILLUSTRATION BY Kela Johnson BY

On October 27, the arrival of military tanks abruptly interrupted the prayers of water protectors at the Sacred Stone Camp in the Standing Rock Reservation. In an unprecedented escalation of violence, law enforcement officials from North Dakota, armed with batons and dressed in riot gear, raided the area.

“Militarized law enforcements agencies moved in on water protectors with tanks,” said Dave Archambault II, the Chairman of the Sioux Tribe in a press release. “[W]e continue to pray for peace.”

For months now, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has peacefully resisted the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), an oil pipeline stretching 1,100 miles from North Dakota to Illinois, that would compromise water access for this indigenous community of about 8,200. Originally, Dakota Access had planned to build the pipeline just outside the city of Bismarck. But residents of the state’s capital, 94% of whom identified as white according to the 2010 US Census, feared that the project would expose them to poisonous water. Soon DAPL was rerouted to go through Standing Rock, the home of a community of Native Americans​​.

With the relocation of the pipeline, the burden of compromised access to living resources was placed on indigenous people.

Responding to this injustice, members of the Sioux Tribe peacefully rose to defend their rights to drinking water. Their resistance efforts drew the attention of journalists, activists, celebrities, and thousands of sympathizers across the country and world. Numerous indigenous groups from around the world flew to the reservation to join the movement.

“We all face threats to our lands and waters from extractive industries and other exploitive practices,” said Jennifer Weston, a member of the Sioux Tribe, in an interview with the C ​ o​llege Hill Independen​t published last month​. But what had been a site of community and prayer turned into a place of fear and tension last week. The colorful flags that delineate the camping area suddenly came into high relief with the black military gear of law enforcement agents.

“T​here were police walking around everywhere with assault rifles,” said Tara Houska, a member of the NGO Honor the Earth. In an interview with Amy Goodm​an from ​Democracy Now! Houska, who was present during the confrontations, said she saw police arresting dozens of people. Allegedly, some officers smiled and laughed while conducting the arrests. “[It] was a ​shameful moment for this country,” Houska expressed. A video of the ​confrontation filmed by U ​ nicorn Riot shows policemen deploying tear gas, pepper spray, and smoke grenades at unarmed, peaceful protesters. Attempting to dismantle the blockade put up by water protectors leading up to the camp, police dragged women by the hair, shot rubber bullets, and arrested at least 142 people. A no-fly zone was also established in the area.

And while law enforcement agents advanced using considerate amounts of violence, water protectors remained non-violent.

“To protect the water, we must remain peaceful and prayerful,” said​Dave Archambault II in a message published through the Sioux Tribe’s Facebook page. “​We must not resort to the corruption and violence our people have endured.” Even now, after the recent incident of police repression, the water protectors have maintained their commitment to peaceful disobedience. On October 30, in response to the police attacks, the Sacred Stone Camp called for an international vigil for Standing Rock. “Let’s create a global container around our brothers and

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NEWS

sisters on the ground so that they may heal from the very traumatic experiences that they suffered,” said Lyla June, a community organizer and Native American woman, in a video promoting the event on Facebook. “Let us also pray for our brothers and sisters in uniform... because they are of our human family as well.” +++ On the very same day that North Dakota enforcement agents repressed indigenous people in Standing Rock, a group of white protesters were pardoned in Oregon for taking over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon earlier this year. I​ n January, 27 armed protesters took over the Refuge, a sacred land belonging to the Burns Paiute tribe.​“The protesters are a little vague about [what] they plan to do here now​that they control these buildings,” Martin Kaste of N ​ PR says. “They say they just plan to stay put and, as they put it, ‘unwind’ the federal government’s ownership of this wildlife refuge.” For 41 days the militia occupied the sanctuary, until the final arrest was made on February 11, 2016. Seven protesters were put on trial in the Oregon standoff case, including leaders Ammon and Ryan Bundy, but were found not guilty of conspiracy to impede federal employees from discharging their duties. ​ The occupation was, in part, motivated by the 2015 resentencing of Dwight and Steven Hammond—two white ranch workers from Oregon—for arson of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). ​ “When the Hammonds were originally sentenced [in 2012],” The District Attorney’s Office of Oregon put forth in a press release, “they argued that the five-year mandatory minimum terms were unconstitutional and the trial court agreed and imposed sentences well below what the law required based on the jury’s verdicts.”

In Oregon also, indigenous abuse unfolded.

As the militia seized the Malheur refuge, the Burns Paiute tribe watched in horror as the Bundys sacrilegiously dismantled the tribe’s​l​and. The ancient artifacts at the site were held and moved. In an arrogant display of violence, the Bundys bulldozed a sacred burial ground, protected by the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979. The Bundys wanted the land to be given to ranchers. But the Burns Paiute asserted that they had roamed the land far before ranchers and farmers settled upon it.

“Before white settlers arrived in the mid-1800s,” The Oregonian illuminates, “the Paiutes occupied territory throughout the northern Great Basin and into the Columbia Plateau and the central Oregon Cascades.

Their land included the existing wildlife refuge, all surrounding ranches and every acre of federal land in Harney county.” In 1868, the tribe signed a treaty with the federal government that requires the American government to protect the Natives’ safety.

The acquittal, though celebrated by Bundy and his supporters, raises pressing concerns about land ownership, recognition,​​racial bias and unfair treatment under the law. The verdict of Oregon protesters, on the same day of the mass arrest of water protectors in Standing Rock highlights the privileges that the white ranchers and farmers possess. Despite possessing firearms and carrying out a barbaric land seizure, the Oregon defendants were released of charges. Meanwhile, in the Sacred Stone Camp, 142 unarmed protesters were arrested. It is clear that engagement in legal, peaceful civil disobedience does not exempt protestors of color from facing repres-

sion. Meanwhile, white protestors can carry their guns without fearing legal consequences.

Bundy and his supporters, mostly white ranchers, present less of a threat to the government than the water protectors at Standing Rock. Their seizure of the Oregon land presents no real, crucial hazard to American proceedings because land in Oregon is not pertinent to current domestic or foreign goals.

The land is​​federally designated to the Paiute peoples, and the refusal of the government to seriously intervene in the land seizure, or provide adequate retribution reflects the systematic neglect of Native Americans in this country. Though Obama halted the construction of a portion of the Dakota Access project, executive action to end the pipeline is unlikely, as these type of projects are seen as a crucial part of the national energy policy. “Homeland Security classifies pipelines as critical infrastructure,” Aaron Bady writes for the L ​ A Times, “potentially making it possible to prosecute the protesters as terrorists.”​​Notably​, t​ he land at Standing Rock was put under federal protection in the Fort Laramie treaties of 1851 and 1868. In violently arresting Natives, the authorities​​disobey the treaties that they themselves historically agreed to. +++ Who has a claim to land in the United States? For centuries now, white populations have​​displaced indigenous people without facing severe repercussions.

This country was​​founded on the forceful dispossession of​​indigenous people of their lands. What we see today at Standing Rock and Oregon is the perpetuation of a disastrous legacy of land discrimination and racially biased law enforcement. The mass arrest of indigenous protesters and the acquittal of Oregonian land defenders are painful reminders of persisting inequalities. That these​​two events could have happened on the very same day, however, stresses the pressing need for change.

While the verdict for Oregon has been decided, the future of the water protectors in North Dakota is still at stake. On October 31, in an uncommon demonstration of solidarity, 1.4 million of Facebook users ‘checked-in’ at Standing Rock. The action was aimed at confusing the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, who allegedly was using Facebook to track protesters. While the Department denied the accusation, the event demonstrated the wide support for the movement. The eyes of the world are on Standing Rock. And the struggle continues: “I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t being taught to stand up for human rights,” said Mekasi Horinek, a Native American activist at the Sacred Stone Camp in an interview with the N ​ ew York Times a day after the confrontations​. In their efforts to halt the construction of​​the Dakota Access Pipeline, water protectors are fighting to rewrite​a​ history of indigenous oppression. As ​Dave Archambault II stresses, “​[T]his is about our dignity as human beings.”

SHANE POTTS B’17 & CAMILA RUIZ SEGOVIA B’18 encourage you to visit standingrock.org and make a donation. Supplies, cash, or donations can also be sent to: S ​ acred Stone Camp P.O. Box 1011, Fort Yates, ND 58538

NOVEMBER 04, 2016

AN ABBREVIATED TIMELINE OF VOTING IN RHODE ISLAND

all photos taken from the public domain

BY

Jane Argodale and Marianna McMurdock

After a year that’s felt a little like an episode of Survivor, featuring older contestants and more liberal use of spray tanning, Rhode Islanders prepare for the polls. On this fall’s ballot, two three-way-races are underway for seats in the RI State House: one for Providence’s district 5 seat in the State House of Representatives and another challenging Nicholas Mattiello (D)’s incumbency as Speaker of the House. On the national ballot, Hillary Clinton is expected to win this reliably blue state, but even the possibility of a xenophobic reality television star winning any states at all is alarming. As we approach what may be one of the most nerve-wracking election days in recent memory, these decisive (and sometimes scandalous) moments in Rhode Island electoral politics in the last century showcase the power of the electorate and their elected, in all their mistrusting glory. +++ The 1841 Dorr Rebellion­(pictured top right)—­headed by working-class men, disenfranchised by property requirements—was the first in a series of shifts away from a parliamentary-modeled legislature in Rhode Island. Though the rebellion failed in its ultimate goal to craft a new state constitution, the presidential election the following year drew 4,000 additional voters to the polls than in the previous election. Their efforts had introduced the voice of the disenfranchised to the state legislature and spurred an on-going conversation about including more citizens into the electorate.

Rhode Island Democrats rang in 1935 with a political coup that ended decades of Republican dominance. At the beginning of the new legislative session on New Year’s Day in 1935, Governor Theodore Francis Green staged what would later be named the “bloodless revolution”: he refused to seat Republicans who had won highly contested elections in 1934. Pictured above and to the right, a rather poised Green is pictured during his time as a U.S. senator at middle left with fellow Rhode Island State Senator J. Howard McGrath at middle right, and President Harry Truman on the far right.

Green demanded a recount of the 1934 votes, which resulted in a win for Democrats. With a majority in the State House, the new government immediately passed a series of reforms that created a cabinet-style government with a small number of departments to replace numerous government agencies. In the same move, the new legislature unseated the Republican-majority Supreme Court. Though Republicans would briefly regain their majority later in the decade, this seizure of the state government—in line with the majority of state voters—ushered in an era of Democratic control of state politics and a cabinet system of government that remains in Rhode Island to this day.

+++ In 1938, Republican William Henry Vanderbilt III (pictured above) was elected Governor of Rhode Island (with the Democratic majority in the State House remaining), joining a legacy of wealthy heirs assuming political office.

Like many such scions, Vanderbilt was in over his head, and lost his chance at reelection after a wire-tapping plot against the mayor of Pawtucket went public. While this effort to investigate allegations of corruption and voter fraud was technically legal, the foiled plot became a scandal and led to the downfall of Vanderbilt’s political career. His rival J. Howard McGrath, then the Democratic Federal District Attorney, seized upon the revelation to accuse Vanderbilt in an article of using “terroristic systems employed in totalitarian countries.” Voters sided with McGrath, and Vanderbilt lost all chance of reelection.

In recent decades, a rallying cry arose against a new form of institutionalized corruption: general assembly members were simultaneously, unabashedly serving as executive

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

board members for pseudo-public authorities like the Narragansett Bay Commission (NBC).

As executive of the NBC, for example, Vincent Mesolella ran one of the largest infrastructure projects in RI—the Combined Sewer Overflow, a three mile subterraneous pipeline—without much oversight at all. As he was at the time deputy house whip, he oversaw legislation and implementation of the project. Luckily in this case, SaveTheBay’s support of the project was able to mitigate some of the potential consequences of such a one-man operation. But the era of dual-allegiances made citizens skeptical of the ethics of RI politics—one case being three-term governor Edward DePrite’s conviction for bribery, extortion, and racketeering in the late 1990s.

In 1992, Sheldon Whitehouse started the fight for what would eventually become a constitutional amendment to create a great separation of powers within RI. The state’s original constitution gave the state legislature basic autonomy over most sectors, making RI a hotbed for corruption. In the decades before the amendment passed, the RI legislature increasingly exercised power over the state’s regulatory agencies, mainly by appointing the boards or commissions of each agency. In 2004, with over 75% of voters in favor, the amendment passed, working towards broader democracy at the state level after two centuries of questionable loyalties.

+++ Home to all of these moments in Rhode Island’s history, the current State House, completed in 1904, boasts the fourth-largest self-supporting marble dome in the world.

Pictured below, the neoclassical mammoth is home to the executive and legislative branches of Rhode Island’s government. Residents of Providence’s House District 5 have a choice between three candidates to select who will write the state’s laws under the dome this year. Incumbent candidate John DeSimone lost in the Democratic primary race to Providence public school teacher Marcia Ranglin-Vassell, and is now running as a write-in candidate against Ranglin-Vassell and Republican Roland Lavallee. Another three-way race is taking place in House District 15, between incumbent Speaker of the House Nicolas Mattiello, Republican Steve Frias, and Independent Patrick Vallier.

The strong challenges to incumbents, along with the possibility of unseating the Speaker of the House, mark this tide in Rhode Island politics as rather uncertain.

These races—and the bloodless revolutions, wire-tappings, and corruption that preceded them—make up a story of election drama and spectacle whose next chapter will be played out next Tuesday.

METRO

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SMALL STATE, BY

Kelton Ellis Dorothy Windham

ILLUSTRATION BY

Historical events and legislative records might suggest that Rhode Island’s schools should have been equal and diverse a long time ago. Rhode Island’s General Assembly formally outlawed school segregation in 1866 after nearly a decade of advocacy by George Downing and the state’s other Black leaders—an early shift compared to the rest of the country, but not surprising in a state with a relatively progressive political tradition. The Supreme Court likewise banned legally segregated public schools in the entire nation with 1954’s landmark Brown v.

Board of Education decision. Yet nearly 60 years after that case, school segregation remains an intractable problem for America’s—and Rhode Island’s—communities of color due to a dangerous mix of social and legal forces.

School districts are typically organized by neighborhoods that are already racially and economically isolated; widespread housing discrimination still means that low-income families and families of color have decreased access to certain neighborhoods and, therefore, to better schools. When these families came to urban centers throughout the 20th century, white flight from the cities condensed wealth in the suburbs and left cities with less of the property tax revenues that fund education. Though segregation is popularly associated with the South’s Jim Crow laws, Rhode Island underwent its own white flight from Providence to surrounding suburbs in the ’70s and ’80s: the city was 90% white in 1970, and is now about 49% white, while the entire state has retained a white majority of 81%.

Increasing residential segregation, then, increased school segregation due to neighborhood-based zoning. None of this was helped by a Reagan- and Bush-era wave of legal challenges to integration efforts like busing, which had been successful in cities like Charlotte, NC. Conservative judges across the country began to consider forced integration a waste of time, believing that the progress made toward integration could happen on its own without court oversight. Demographic data shows increasing integration and achievement for students of color up until the ’80s, then a gradual drop continuing up to the present day.

People of color will soon be the majority in public schools. But national school segregation is worse than it has been at any point in the past four decades, according to a 2009 paper by UCLA professor Gary Orfield. White children represent slightly more than half of all public schoolers, yet the average white student still sits in classes that are more than three-fourths white. Conversely, about 40% of

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METRO

Black and Latinx students go to a school that’s considered ‘extremely segregated,’ where over 90% of the students belong to these demographics. The average Black or Latinx child also attends schools with almost twice the poverty as the average white student. Due to the property tax funding model, a school’s resources tend to reflect those of its student body and surrounding neighborhoods. Schools that are poorer, which are invariably attended by mostly students of color, suffer from lower achievement due to this disparity. +++ The Providence Journal reported a year ago that Rhode Island has some of the country’s worst school segregation, ranking sixth-highest in the US for segregation of its Hispanic students (a term that some researchers use in place of identifiers like “Latinx,” since a crucial dimension of school segregation in America is the language barrier for some students who speak Spanish at home). Although the state is only 12% Latinx, the last census indicated that 63.6% of Providence’s public school students identify as such. This gives the state’s capital its own distinction as the ninth most segregated school system in the US for Latinx children. Black students, who represent about 8% of RI public school students, comprise half the amount of students in Rhode Island, which means that they statistically appear to be less segregated. Nonetheless, the educational disparities that apply to Latinx children in the state are largely applicable to Black children too, as data from the advocacy organization RI Kids Count demonstrates.

A study from scholars at diversitydata.org reports that the average Latinx student in Rhode Island goes to a school where 45.6% of their classmates will also be Latinx, while white students will have a Latinx peer only 8.3% of the time. A quarter of Latinx students in RI attend school where almost every student is a person of color. These numbers aren’t only troubling for the racial segregation they indicate. Students of color are far more likely to experience challenges that compound race and income disparities, leaving them doubly isolated.

According to the same study, the average Latinx student in Providence additionally attends a school in which three out of four students are considered low-income, based on free and reduced-price lunch eligibility.

+++ As the numbers tell it, schools in Rhode Island are isolating low-income people of color while simultaneously placing better-off white students elsewhere.

Disparities in achievement correlate almost exactly with a Rhode Island school’s ethnic demographics.

The Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) collects performance data for the state’s schools based on standardized tests and graduation rates. A cursory scan of these school report cards, combined with racial and economic demographics, reveals that the schools that are considered ‘high-achieving’ in Rhode Island are much whiter and wealthier. “Enrollment in Rhode Island public schools generally reflects the demographics and housing patterns of Rhode Island communities and neighborhoods,” said Elliot Krieger, spokesman for RIDE, told the Indy over email. Though some diverse schools like Providence’s own Classical High are ‘high-achieving,’ most of the schools that receive that descriptor are in towns like Portsmouth and Narragansett, which are well over 90% white. Such

NOVEMBER 04, 2016

BIG GAPS Segregation in Rhode Island's public schools abject segregation, along with the rankings that effectively show that whiter schools serve their students better, broadcasts the damaging message that only some students deserve the best that the state has to offer. This does little to encourage teachers, administrators, and students in the most vulnerable schools, where low expectations from all parties can make rectifying the problem even more difficult, as Orfield relayed to the ProJo last year.

Students of color who live in segregated districts are much less likely to graduate from high school; they are more often reading and doing math below expectations for their grade level; and they tend to live in poorer neighborhoods that offer less access to enriching opportunities like AP courses that prepare students for college. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has found data that supports these concerns. 76% of white students graduate from Rhode Island high schools, compared to 52% of Latinx students and 59% of Black students. White students in Rhode Island have more than twice the opportunities to take ‘gifted and talented’ classes compared to students of color, and more than three times the access

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

to AP math courses. What’s more, Superintendent Christopher Maher of Providence Public Schools told ProJo last year that “one out of four [of the students in his district] is an English language learner,” or ELL, from predominantly immigrant families. When English is the primary language of instruction, lack of fluency—and lack of ELL resources on the part of schools—can further threaten a student’s chances of academic success. +++ Schools that are separate and unequal inflict enormous harm on low-income communities of color. Some damage is obvious because it’s quantifiable, while some of it is mental damage that’s invisible. I should know. I grew up in it.

My hometown of Macon in Bibb County, Georgia is intensely segregated. Though two-thirds of the city is Black and about one-third is white, but you wouldn’t know it based on public high school enrollments. Five of the district’s seven high schools are over 85% Black. Four of these, including Central where I went, are more than 90% Black, which qualifies them as ‘extremely segregated’ by education researchers.

Each of these schools is over 85% low-income as well.

Howard High School, in Macon’s whiter, wealthier north, boasts higher achievement than other high schools along all metrics, and gets applauded for it as if it happened solely by merit. The rest of the city’s white residents have mostly opted to send their kids to almost all-white private schools, further sapping the Bibb County schools of resources (though their founders would deny this, several of Macon’s private schools were established in the years immediately before and after integration orders were enforced, which is no accident of history).

Educational success in Macon has become so linked to whiteness and wealth that my father briefly floated the idea of sending my younger siblings to faraway Howard or to a distant private school to escape the abysmal prospects that the school district offers poor Black students. I was fortunate enough to be in a magnet program at my school that was more diverse and benefitted from better human resources. But that didn’t insulate me completely from the rest of Central’s students, a population that now includes my younger siblings. Though some teachers worked hard and cared deeply, half of the students in my year didn’t graduate.

Black students in Bibb County schools are assumed to be lazy, their families structurally deficient, sometimes by Black people with positions of power themselves. What doesn’t get blamed so much is Macon’s overwhelming complacency with this arrangement.

They forget, for instance, that in 1970 the governor of Georgia openly advised Macon’s white citizens to defy school integration orders, and that they have been quietly following his advice for well over four decades. +++ The story is identical in too many places, including the Ocean State. Rhode Island, like the rest of the US, is undergoing a demographic shift that will soon create a student population made mostly of people of color. The state will run into problems unless it works mightily to combat inequities in education. Continued segregation in Rhode Island would create a cycle much like other areas with large and concentrated proportions of low-income Black and Latinx students: these students have smaller chances of achieving social mobility through educational attainment, as they become less likely to get the college degrees that enable a higher standard of living. Their children then inherit similar situations. Moreover, education is a formative influence in a person’s life; when white students and students of color alike are educated without peers of different backgrounds, a society that looks like it’s diversifying is really just stratifying.

Proposed policy solutions abound, most of which currently revolve around increased school choice.

Krieger, the spokesman for RIDE, told me that “Education Commissioner Wagner has advocated for more options for families, including the opportunity to enroll children in schools outside of their neighborhoods, enrollment in career-technical schools and programs, PrepareRI dual enrollment, the Advanced Coursework Network, as well as increased opportunities for enrollment in charter public schools.” Mayoral academies, Rhode Island’s unique charter school system, show both promising achievement and serve a diverse student body; Blackstone Valley Prep’s website touts its commitment to both academic excellence and “intentional diversity.” Most of the policies advocated by the Commissioner to combat segregation, however, rely on the faulty premise that kids merely need to escape segregated schools. And some research by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project suggests that school choice can make segregation worse. Policymakers must answer the question: what can the state do to help those left behind while only a few get better opportunities? Part of the fix must be robust measures to counteract the residential segregation that enables its own replication in the state’s classrooms. And though integration should be a priority, so should the highest resource allocation for schools that likely won’t be integrated anytime soon.

KELTON ELLIS B’18 wants schools to make good on Brown v. Board.

METRO

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UNNAMED

An outline of an essay I will not write Teddy Davey ILLUSTRATION BY Teri Minogue BY

Content warning: family abuse, dysphoria, slurs, references to sexual violence I. I had a father once. His hands had a condition where they grew an inch every time I spoke. When I was a bulb, he could fit me in his fist. When I broke out of the ground, he could pinch me between fingers. His hugs wound twice around my body, constricting me, and I wondered if this was what a sports bra felt like. When he braided my hair (he never taught me to braid it myself), he pulled too much, like he didn’t know the strength of his own arms. a. I cut it all off. He said he didn’t like it, so I kept it close to my skull for a few more years, in case his hands got strong enough to unwind the hair from my scalp.

II. I cannot remember when my own hands started to grow, but I am sure it was winter, because the woman budding inside me froze and fell off my sternum, my stem.

New words reached up my throat, and again I could not speak for myself: “tomboy,” “queer,” “dyke.” Let us name it to prove we know what we are talking about: a. Imagine my hands, twice the size of my feet, pointing to parts of my body and dissecting them, digging in to find the soil underneath. On my breast, I search for flower petals, but there is only an uncharted map of skin. Between my legs, I find pollen, and I name it Stamen. I am older now, I have breasts now, I have petals, I only name the Stamen. The Pistil names me and I find myself in a white-walled room, filling out charts. Name: Teddy—no, Margaret. Gender: clumps of breath, earth, and leaf—for these purposes, let us call me female.

III. I call myself female and ask them to swallow the question mark in my belly. My father does not know of this clinic. My mother would cry. I tell them I am unemployed, a student, and they click their pens, bite their lips. Sexual history? Why does it matter, I ask, I am not getting an IUD for fear of someone else’s seed, but my own. When a womb denies itself, the hollowed eggshell swells in a desperation to choke the host, scrape out space for someone new to name it. I do not want to be someone else’s home. I am already my father’s house, my mother’s doorstep, the bed of many men who thought they could fit me in their fists. a. They lay me down, say it will hurt. Three women in white robes, one holding my hand.

I tell them I am used to pain. They nod, they understand: “Women are used to pain.” No, I say, it is something else. Do not call me one of you unless I ask first—did I ask first? b. It is searing. My life does not flash before my eyes, but I can feel death in my ovaries and black bile in my breasts. Will I become a boy when I sterilize the girl? My life does not flash before my eyes, but I see her life rewrite itself. That daughter, that child who will never exist, because my name is not Mother nor Father. c. Father forgive me: I was raised Catholic. It cannot be an abortion if she never existed, if there was no fertilization, if it is only my body’s monthly resurrection that will rust away. No need for a eulogy.

i. But it does feel like a burial when they use

metal to pry open my insides and put

something alien there. They tell me it is the

shape of a T, and I imagine the cross, a

prayer reaching up my legs. d. When I leave, I am shaking. Something orange falls out of my mouth, out of me and onto the snow. I want to devour it, bring it back to my body, baptize my rebirth in vomit. And yet I speak, say to my sister, “Let’s get out of here. You drive.” e. And then we are at her house, and then I am on the toilet, and then my womanhood falls out of me. I still have eyes, and I see the tablespoons of blood in that toilet, and I think I must be dying. But I do not die.

i. (We do not die; we suffer and cry, and we

wipe our own tears, for fear that someone

else’s hands will only get stuck in our eyes.)

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IV. The story is not over until someone is devoured. When my mother was pregnant, she opened her tongue and spat me out, orange. When I was her daughter, it was only because I had yet to look in the mirror and wipe my face of her stain. a. I am no longer a girl, if I ever was. I met men who only knew how to love with large hands, and when they caressed my face, I could kiss their palms, but they never let me speak. It is those hands, the hands of men who wanted to make a woman out of me, that stuck fingers down my throat and choked her.

i. (I think of my father’s palms, my mother’s

face covered by her palms—no, his palms.)

V. I did not realize what it meant to be grafted until it happened to me. My stem wilted without a flower to weigh it down, so I sewed my body to a trunk, and I grew in ways that felt both fully myself and fully other. I called myself “boy,” “faggot,” “genderqueer,” “mentally ill (or maybe insane),” “survivor,” and none of these were true, and all of them were true. At least I could speak them for myself now, try them on, wear them inside out. To be called Woman from birth is to be told you must bloom when you do not know yet how to speak. But in unnaming myself, I became the ugly, the bizarre, the unspeakable, and I began to search for a new kind of beauty in my mother’s mirror.

VI. This is not the end of the story. There has been no devouring; I am not my mother’s cutting board. If I have lived less time than her, at least I have lived at all. I had a father once, but I never had a mother. The woman in my house was already a ghost, and she preferred her flowers freshly cut, so she could watch them die on her perfectly white windowsill. So we fought each other in this way: she called me a weed, and I survived to spite her. If I am my mother’s daughter, it is only in shame. It is only in my inability to ground power in womanhood. Just as a girl died to grow my leaves, my mother ripped roots to keep herself intact. She was once green, but that was long before me.

By me, she remembered she once had flesh and eyes, blue eyes, and she hated me for it, and I hated her for it, too.

And she remembered her own spite in me, and I spited her to survive.

(We are all flowers. Sometimes, I wonder why we are ripped from the earth, colorful and crying for some priestly eye to confirm us women. Are we not as beautiful left alive?)

VIII. My mother loves me, she says this like a slap. “I love you,” and I say, “I love you,” when what I mean is, “I am too afraid to tell you the truth.” a.“The Truth”: If I love her, it means I cannot leave her, that there is some hope in saving her.

When I was smaller, I imagined my father dying, my mother and I surviving together. My hair grows out again, and she braids it. We start making pottery, dirt on hands, and we mess up more than we don’t. When a pot goes wrong, you water it down and start again. We remold ourselves. I imagine her tucking me into bed, singing like she used to. But my memories of her are still always silent. b. I learned that to survive was to draw words from nothing. When she kissed me goodnight, it was usually something else, “I am in pain.” It was, “Do not save me, do not save yourself. Lie here on the road to Damascus and die with me.”

If she withered, I do not know. I left before I could see the sun beat her down anymore. c. There are words in the silence. There are seeds underground, waiting for rain, waiting for spit, waiting for flame. Sometimes, waiting to decompose.

IX. This is what I have found for myself: it is possible to love, maybe love again. Slowly, without naming it, I open my large hands and try to smell the pollen there. Someone reaches out and licks my palm, offers me water, washes the chlorophyll from my neck. I am dripping in spring, I am smelling the dew between my legs in a way that used to scare me. There are hands everywhere, asking, asking quietly, “Can I touch you. Can I love you. Can I hold you, just hold you.”

X. The sunset today is orange. I do not have to stare at the sun to feel the color bathing me again, so I sit with my back to it; I can see enough on my own. My hands are shrinking now, enough to hold a pen, enough to hold a hand. My hands are the hands of my father, hairy and scarred. My mother, silent and furious. They are my lover’s, my friends’, my sister’s, my daughter’s. I am learning to sew, to sew my tongue shut again, learning to let flowers bloom out of my throat. It is only an outline.

The story does not end until someone is devoured, but if I devour myself, digest the orange and turn myself more me, perhaps there will be an ending. Just as there is an ending to my skin, an ending to the cross in my belly, an ending to the growth of my hair.

I. I was a daughter once. Now, I speak for myself when I say I am nothing in need of a name, and I swallow.

TEDDY DAVEY B’19 is a plant who only eats plants.

VII. My mother loves her daughter, but she is yet to know what it means to love me. Her hands are transparent, and I wish they were more than that. I wish she weren’t so easy to blow over, to shred in a simple rain, to waste on cicadas.

She is nourishment, and they feed, and my father lets them feed. She hurts, but she hurts in silence, and my father pulls her closer to him. A blade of grass newly cut secretes stench to warn other blades, a silent scream. My mother does not even do this. a. Had she done it, I would have smelled my father’s cologne before I found myself drowning in pesticides. Before I found myself incapable of becoming a man, incapable of flowering into woman.

NOVEMBER 04, 2016

INTERNATIONAL ART SPAM Specimen: The Artist’s Museum begins with the impulse to collect and connect, bringing together large-scale installations, photography, film, and videos that employ artworks from the past as material in the present, animating existing artworks, images, and histories to reveal unexpected relationships and affinities.

—Press release for The Artist’s Museum, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, October 31, 2016 (via e-flux) In 2012, the New York-based online magazine Triple Canopy published a piece regarding a kind of art writing that has increasingly come to dominate the global scene. They named it “International Art English.”

Written by Alix Rule (a doctoral student in sociology at Columbia) and David Levine (an artist based in New York and Berlin), the project attempted to define the contours and history of the “language through which contemporary art is created, promoted, sold, and understood,” a language which “has everything to do with English,” but is “emphatically not English.”

International Art English (IAE), Rule and Levine argued, is a form of “global” English used primarily in press releases for art events, and in critical art writing more generally. It’s a bona-fide language, they claimed, and not just a professional or niche jargon; Rule and Levine hoped to prove this “scientifically.”

The piece attracted a number of responses in the years following its publication—many of them very critical—and its success as a provocation was largely due to its shortcomings, its unevenness and overly tongue-in-cheek approach. “Some will read our argument as an overelaborate joke,” Rule and Levine admit. “But there’s nothing funny about this language to its users. And the scale of its use testifies to the stakes involved.” The stakes, ostensibly, have to do with IAE’s being an image of power, the very language of Empire, a beguiling rhetoric that incites everyone to play its game. Like many critics before them, Rule and Levine basically suggest that art-speak equals elitism, and that anyone who calls themselves progressive would do better to avoid its opaque, circle-jerk language altogether. “International Art English” managed to stir up a conversation that far surpassed the limited and poorly articulated terms of the original article: a much-needed conversation about the politics of writing about art in the early part of the 21st century.

The comedy of “International Art English” stems mostly from its posture as a research project in linguistics. Sampling from e-flux, a curated listserv that circulates art-related press releases and announcements daily, Rule and Levine used a simple quantitative methodology to elucidate the lexical and syntactical characteristics of IAE. They compared word frequency in the e-flux corpus (from its inception in 1999 to 2012) with word frequency in what’s known as the British National Corpus (BNC), a database, maintained by Oxford University Press, that contains around 100 million words intended to represent general, late-20th century English usage. Statistical deviations were isolated using a metric of “words per million.” (For example, a search for the word “reality” yields 313.7 words per million in the e-flux archive, but only 64.1 words per million in the BNC). e-flux is statistically significant for the regularity and size of its output—around four or five mailings per day—but the list promotes only non-profits, and is aimed at a much more intellectual and experimental sector of the art world than its commercial counterparts (Artforum, Contemporary Art Daily or Blouin Artinfo). Rule and Levine weren’t clear on why they thought e-flux was representative of the larger art world and its linguistic trends, but, in any case, this seemed to be their wager.

Rule and Levine showed that IAE, statistically, relies on buzzwords ripped from English translations of French and German academic theory: terms like ‘aporia, radically, space, proposition, biopolitical, tension, transversal, autonomy,’ ‘dialectics, production, negation, and totality,’ not to mention prefixes and suffixes such as ‘para-, proto-, post-, and hyper-; -ion, -ity, -ality, and -ization.’ They traced the present ubiquity of this terminology to the influential art journal October, founded in 1976 and still active today. Led by academics like Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin H. D.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BY

Alec Mapes-Frances

Buchloh, October helped to popularize trends that were emerging in Europe in the late ’60s and early ’70s, introducing American art writers to new developments in deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism. Levine, in a panel discussion held at Triple Canopy’s Brooklyn space in 2013, suggested that the new theoretical trends were eagerly received at the time by the English-speaking art world, which throughout the 50s and 60s had been dominated by turgidity of a different kind: the masculinist rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism, which in writing made overblown claims about “death,” “transcendence,” and the “spiritual.”

The point here is that the story of IAE is primarily a story of translation and transcultural development within English. As Rule and Levine write, the most quintessential IAE is a mutant: not “Standard English,” but a language developed through variations and displacements in non-Anglo contexts. There is French IAE (Rule and Levine’s case of “French interns imitating American interns imitating American academics imitating French academics”), there is Scandinavian IAE, and—though this goes relatively uncommented upon in Rule and Levine’s analysis— there is non-European IAE: Chinese IAE, Korean IAE, and IAE from the global South. Rather than writing in local languages and translating to Standard English, galleries based in Taiwan, Mumbai, and Brazil all appear to write in IAE. This is the colonizing force of English at work. Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović’s description of the state of things in 1992—“An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist”—is no less true today.

But there is more at stake than a straightforward tension between homogenizing English center and a non-English periphery. While the periphery is coerced—by global capital—into speaking the major form of English, it also deviates from it at the same time, letting new material multiply and spiral out into the major form. It is this deviation from standard English in IAE that concerns Rule and Levine, betraying their conceptual over-investment in something like ‘correct’ or ‘untarnished English.’ On the one hand, Rule and Levine admit that writing in IAE seems to be some kind of imperative wrought by global capital; on the other hand, they mock and admonish IAE’s writers—most of whom, by Rule and Levine’s own logic, work for non-profit institutions—for buying in at all.

In her response to the Triple Canopy project, artist Hito Steyerl unfavorably compares Rule and Levine’s position to the nativism of a “Standard English Defense League,” which would aim to protect the integrity of the major language against minor uses by immigrants and insurgencies. Rule and Levine don’t give a consistent, normative account of what art writing should be—they certainly don’t advocate “Standard English”—but their argumentation leaves the tired prescriptions of high school English teachers uncontested: English writing should be economical, sparing, clear, plain, uncontaminated by too many decadent, foreign elements. +++ Rule and Levine are not wrong to associate IAE with power and the global 1%. No doubt, IAE often marks the spread of “neo-feudal, ultraconservative, and authoritarian contemporary art rackets,” as Steyerl writes. But the association is only hastily articulated in “International Art English.” Critic Mostafa Heddaya, for one, has a much stronger account of what might be the complicity of IAE; his piece for Hyperallergic, “When Artspeak Masks Oppression,” convincingly reads certain deployments of IAE as propaganda for

American projects recently undertaken in the Gulf region, of which NYU and the Guggenheim Foundation’s developments in Abu Dhabi are the most visible examples. At the Guggenheim, the United Arab Emirates’ history of human rights abuses was sublimated into benign, IAE-endorsed “self-criticism”: as Guggenheim Abu Dhabi curator Reem Fadda put it to an American audience, what Guggenheim valued was art about “looking and introspecting and commenting and criticizing,” “asking ourselves” about “ethical positionality.” This sort of neutering language does nothing other than serve multinational oligarchs who want to appear “concerned” and “vaguely subversive” in their aesthetic choices, all while collaborating with American cultural institutions to exploit migrant labor.

But there is nothing novel here, as long as IAE is understood simply to be Orwellian doublespeak. If it were only a matter of identifying European academic theory’s filtration into the global art world as a mystifying, ideological obscurantism, the concept of International Art English would have no purchase.

It is IAE’s gaps and imperfections—its failure to encompass the real affects, materials, and processes of art today, in short, its failure to convince—that makes it useful as a concept. Perhaps Rule and Levine were onto something when they chose press releases, the spam of the art world, as their initial object. Is there not, as Steyerl suggests, another radical potential to this spam? What would an articulation of IAE around the concept of spam, and its weird contortions of the digital, open up? Is it possible that IAE hasn’t gone far enough towards abstraction and deterritorialization?

International Art English in a minor register— an insurgent IAE—would record, rather than elide, imperial expropriation, further layering on mutations and degradations. More than a language of clarity and neutrality, maybe art needs a ‘degenerate’ language, a delirious, spammy language, one that goes beyond vacuous rehearsals of well-known French and German critical theory to actually modify them, to produce a more exciting kind of imperfect or poor writing.

If there is, as Rule, Levine, Steyerl, Heddaya, and Mladen Stilinović all agree, no way to opt out of English (and its European ‘critique’), there is still the possibility of making English resonate differently, with the voices of the marginalized and excluded. Rather than essentializing and disavowing theory-heavy IAE as an elite form of socioeconomic distinction, maybe we might encourage a more inventive, excessive use, spearheaded by the unschooled, by those without ‘expertise’ or ‘qualifications.’

ALEC MAPES-FRANCES B’17 regrets the exclusion of a number of excellent voices in the IAE debate.

Find them here: Mariam Ghani, “The Islands of Evasion: Notes on International Art English” https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/the-islands-of-evasion-noteson-international-art-english Alexander Provan, “Chronicle of a Traveling Theory” https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/ chronicle-of-a-traveling-theory Martha Rosler, “English and All That” http://www.e-flux.com/journal/45/60103/english-and-all-that/

ARTS

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HOUSE WORKS Exploring the limits of the home MALL-HOUSE In 2003, artist and RISD graduate Michael Townsend devised a plan to create a luxury apartment in a 750-square-foot space in the parking garage of the Providence Place Mall. The seemingly benign, Mixed-Up Files-esque project spawned after he heard a radio ad featuring someone musing about how great it would be if we could live inside the mall.

Townsend undertook the project, along with seven of his friends, partly in protest to the mall’s construction in the late ’90s and partly, according to his blog, “out of a compassion to understand the mall more and life as a shopper.” Constructed over the course of a couple of years, the mall-house was eventually adorned with sofas, a cabinet for china, and a Sony PlayStation. A Salon article, which chronicled the artists’ habits while dwelling in the structure, noted that they accessed the space by shimmying through a two-foot-wide tunnel, which one artist involved described as an “opaque gray oatmeal mixed with the contents of a lint trap.” The project, which in itself represents an idealization of displacement, is further problematized by the rhetoric used by the artists in which they employ a self-congratulatory tone for having endured imperfect conditions. It’s worth noting that Townsend’s blog which documented the mall endeavor was titled “Trummerkind,” translating to “children of the ruins” in German — a gross sensationalization of the self-inflicted project.

The space where the apartment was assembled was originally used as a storage space for Providence Place, and all the materials used to decorate the apartment were purchased from the mall. There’s the sense that Townsend desired to be surveilled or found out by mall employees based on the way he regularly drew attention to the project by documenting it on a blog, uploading images of the apartment and scanning pages of his sketchbooks. But malls are never great at perceiving nuanced habits or feeling the footsteps of each individual that comes into contact with their carpeted bowels. Perhaps this explains why it took four years for the project to be exposed. Eventually, the blog became so popular that it neared the top of Google searches related to Providence Place, potentially leading to Townsend’s discovery by a security guard in October of 2007, whom he greeted by yelling “Surprise!” and pleading no contest. In the months that followed, Townsend was charged with criminal trespassing, sentenced to six months probation, and was banned from ever entering the mall again.

Yet, the shock value in the structure’s existence obscures the privilege inherent to the project, which ultimately promoted an aestheticization of temporary shelters. Townsend and his buddies would only stay in the structure, which he refuses to call an “art piece,” but instead “a home,” for a week or so at a time, and then retreat to their actual homes, equipped with working toilets, electricity, and heating. Posing questions about the how artists survived the project, like how they managed to sleep in the parking lot when it was cold, for example, gives them an unnecessary platform to ostentatiously talk about the self-inflicted hardships, thereby elevating them to heroic mascots and further aestheticizing displacement.

According to the Salon article, “They made a bed of cardboard and insulation tiles where they spent cold nights. They washed up — it was dusty — in mall bathrooms.” They also disguised themselves in mall-shopping outfits and carried Nordstorm shopping bags, aesthetic gestures foreign to their own, as the article emphasizes that Townsend is exceptionally low-maintenance, someone “who will happily wear the same pair of sneakers until they’re held together with tape.” The artist’s skewed project straddles critiquing the tackiness of the mall and its shoppers, while simultaneously supporting standards of fine living and romanticizing displacement. “Life

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from within the mall was committed to the pursuit of normalcy,” Townsend wrote of the project, identifying a sentimentalized struggle to achieve a base-level of comfort. Salon’s mythologizing rhetoric in describing a project that aestheticizes homelessness is dually disturbed by the claim that the artists never intended “to make a spectacle of themselves.”

—RR THE HOME BECOMES A HOUSE This past spring, the exterior of a two-story home in Detroit was stripped away by American artist Ryan Mendoza and shipped off to Europe. In the aftermath, the interior was left exposed on the residential block where the structure had stood for generations.

The house, which was foreclosed on in 2012, once stood as the multigenerational home of the Thomas family. Vincent Thomas, the 53-year-old African American man who grew up in the house with his seven siblings and was its final owner, describes the home longingly in a documentary about the project as “a place where fun happened.”

The home’s foundation and its principle supports remained standing near the Eight Mile and Livernois neighborhood of Detroit. The Thomas family home was one of the nearly 60,000 then set for foreclosure in a city that has recently fallen trend to a series of artists and photographers who have profited off the reduction of the city to an image of “an abandoned and gutted home,” according to the Guardian.

After his intervention, Mendoza shipped the home’s shell to the Netherlands in parts, re-suturing the building in an empty, cement expanse opposite the main structure of the Art Rotterdam. After the end of the museum’s three-day Fair to Discover Young Art, the building was relocated once more to its final, permanent display at the Verbeke Foundation in Antwerp, Belgium this April.

In an interview with Berlin Art Link, Mendoza explained his decision to paint the house’s exterior stark white as an attempt to reify its status as an “art object” and “protect the house from the voyeuristic nature of people.” His goal to ‘protect’ literally whitewashes the building, recasting the structure and doubly displacing the family that previously called it home.

Mendoza, who has lived in Europe since the nineties, explained to Detroit Free Press that in the early stages of the project, he “wasn’t even looking for something in Detroit. [He] just wanted to bring America back to [him].” When a friend recommended the city as a place to acquire cheap structures, Mendoza was struck by this particular building, as it reminded him of his childhood home in Pennsylvania.

Inside his re-fabrication of the structure’s façade in Europe, Mendoza projects video footage of his mother, former Miss Pennsylvania, against the inside of the back exterior wall.

In Mendoza’s reconfiguration, it seems, the art object worth ‘protecting’ is the memory of his childhood. To this end, the use of the Detroit home serves Mendoza’s free-market attitude toward cultural consumption. His abstraction and aestheticization of American poverty, it seems, is simple fodder to solicit morbid curiosity from the viewer.

The house has been laid to rest in the gardens of Antwerp’s Verbeke Foundation as a part of its permanent collection. The home has been bolted shut, hermetically sealed, and exported as cultural artifact, taking “a life-size slice of Detroit’s blight back to Europe for display,” as Colleen Kowalewski writes in the Detroit Metro Times.

In a documentary his wife filmed of the installation process, Mendoza explains, unblinkingly and with baited breath: “If you think superficially, then this is exploitation. If you think in a deeper way, then this is connection.”

CASTING CASTING A A SHADOW SHADOW Rachel Whiteread makes casts of spaces. Under chairs, in closets. Entire rooms, homes. While casts are traditionally used in the reproduction of sculptures, Whiteread inverts the relation, turning negative space into productive space. Her 1994 sculpture House was a concrete cast of the interior of a Victorian terraced house in East London. 193 Grove Road was a building slated for demolition, in a neighborhood slated for redevelopment. For 11 weeks the structure—which had offered shelter to human-animals for over a hundred years—was reimagined as a concrete block. Where it stood there is now a quiet little park, ever-so-Britishly named Wennington Green.

The result of the casting process is that all those elements of the building’s shape which intrude on the interior, often not originally visible from the exterior, are reproduced surprisingly as exaggerated indentations. This is most visible in the window panes; which seem removed from the house without their muntin bars. Lacking the house’s spatial logic of walls and windows as containers, the windows appear to bulge.

They seem to resist their own weightiness, suggesting the light, almost immaterial, push of air against these very same surfaces. In an interview with Lynn Barber, Whiteread mentions “happy places, I suppose, where you went and dreamt. Places of reverie. And where you’d mutilate your dolls, cut their hair and everything.”

Perhaps Rosalind Krauss had these scenes of mutilation and isolation in mind when she declared that Whiteread’s work “is continually moving through a funerary terrain, a necropolis of abandoned mattresses, mortuary slabs, hospital accoutrements (basins, hot-water bottles), condemned houses.” House offered a brief pause in the wave of progress, bearing witness to a fleeting moment in the development of Homo Urbanus. Concrete, invented by the Romans, evokes the material conditions for both city-building and war-making. Grove Road was where the first V-1 Flying Bomb fell on London in 1944. In only two months, this early cruise missile managed to destroy nearly as many English buildings as were erased by The Blitz, explosively erasing flesh and bone as only an afterthought to the much more demanding concrete. Nearly 60 years later, the neighborhood, still recovering from wartime destruction, was slated by city planners for the redevelopment of concrete-free, green-spaces like Wennington Green. 193 Grove Road was occupied until just before the first concrete was poured for House. The evicted resident, Sidney Gale, could only express shock and disgust toward the project, demanding “How can they get grants for arts projects when we can’t get grants for homes?

I could have bought a new home for my family with this money.” In this retelling, House is less a sculpture of a home than an occupation of space in remembrance of the tragic history of urban violence.

Perhaps it is no surprise that Whiteread would go on to design a similar Holocaust memorial for city of Vienna.

“The Public,” nonetheless, attempt-

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Ryan Rosenberg, Dolma Ombadykow, Malcolm Drentell, and Jonah Max ILLUSTRATION BY

ed to prevent the destruction of this ode to destruction.

3,300 signatures were gathered for a petition. While these could be the signatures of House’s truest supporters, it is equally possible, and important to the story, that they could be the voices of gentrifiers who saw the possibility for real estate speculation in the neighborhood’s prominent sculpture (and its sculptress’ close ties with blue chip galleries and global art domination).

These voices went unheard, however, and the thin structure of House was demolished within two hours on January 11, 1994. Nothing remains, save a line of maple saplings and two concrete benches.

—MD HOLE IN THE WALL Between 1974 and ’75 in a condemned townhouse in Paris’s 4th Arrondissement, a circular cut was made through the kitchen’s linoleum-tiled floor. A second cut was made through the kitchen’s wall, and a third, final cut ran through the building’s brick exterior itself.

Standing in the gutted kitchen, one could peer into the living room and the hallway of the floor below, as well as onto the street. Viewed from the street, the building’s façade looked as though it had been bored by some fantastical cylinder. These building cuts, titled Conical Intersect and coordinated by the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (with the aid of assistants and half a dozen freelance construction workers), were one expression of a practice Matta-Clark and others would call anarchitecture—“an ongoing process,” according to

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

his notes, of “making space without building it.”

While “making” and “building” often operate as synonyms, the distinction Matta-Clark was signaling becomes visible when one considers the different sorts of labor and, in turn, compensation implicit in a term like homemaking as opposed to homebuilding. That is, Matta-Clark’s architectural interventions, his anarchitecture, sought to make visible precisely the spaces which capitalism had tucked away—the feminized, valueless, and hidden zones that appear to buttress our economy rather than participate within it.

By operating within these neglected spaces, well outside the walls of any art institution or overt capitalizing force, Matta-Clark believed that his work might evade the sort of fetishism the art economy had long bestowed on its objects. Of course, this was not the case.

One can now trace the rubble, for instance, excavated from Matta-Clark’s sites as it makes its way into gallery spaces and museum halls, assuming astronomical value. A 40-square-inch cut-out Matta-Clark had made of a dilapidated floor, titled Bronx Floors, recently sold at Christie’s for a quarter-million dollars. The paper ephemera (sketches, blueprints, proposals) that his work left behind have similarly garnered exorbitant price tags—a simple drawing of a tree from 1971 fetched almost $10,000 at auction.

This unfortunate irony that the art designed to evade commodification ultimately becomes the most

Maria Cano-Flavia

fetishized and highly valued is not unique to MattaClark; Lucy Lippard, in her work Six Years, finds that this trend in many way characterizes nearly all conceptual art experiments in the ’60s and ’70s. And yet, with Matta-Clark it reaches something of a perverse climax.

Over the past five years, Frieze and other art fairs have rebuilt FOOD, a project Matta-Clark designed to feed the homeless and hungry on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, at their various venues in Europe and America—now they serve organic carrots to the upper crust of the art economy.

—JM

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A QUESTION OF COMPATIBIL Islamophobia in Europe's gay capital Lance Gloss ILLUSTRATION BY Celeste Matsui BY

People from 180 countries are long-term residents in Amsterdam. By this measure, it is the most international municipality on Earth, and also one of the most visited. It is known as a haven of liberalism and tolerance: a place where atheists and medieval seditionists, pot-smokers and transgender people come to be themselves. But this identity has not prevented Amsterdam, or the rest of the Netherlands, from growing tense in the face of the refugee crisis. Of late, the country has become a major site of rising rightwing, anti-immigration opinion among white Europeans. In Amsterdam, xenophobia is aimed heavily at Moroccan-Dutch citizens and increasingly toward Syrian refugees. Furthermore, this ‘Gay Capital’ has been central to the mobilization of LGBTQ rights as a justification for Islamophobia.

“We have been too tolerant of the intolerant” is a go-to platitude for Geert Wilders when he speaks about Moroccan-Dutch people. Wilders is an anchor of the Netherland’s anti-Islamic camp, as leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), which began as his oneman party in 2005 and is now the third-largest party in Parliament. The PVV motioned for a total ban on immigration from Muslim countries in 2007—eight years before Donald Trump proposed this in the United States. In an op-ed in the daily Algemeen Dagblad, entitled “Muslims, Free Yourselves and Leave Islam,” Wilders outlined his reasoning. “The more Islamic apostates there are,” he wrote, “the less misogyny, the less hatred of gays, the less anti-Semitism, the less oppression, the less terror and violence, and the more freedom there will be.” In Wilders’ view, LGBTQ rights and Islam are “incompatible.” His program for the 2017 election includes the banning of the Quran.

In a country where the vast majority of people of color have roots in primarily countries with sizeable Muslim populations—especially Turkey, Morocco, Suriname, and Indonesia—the implications of such a proposal are nothing short of disastrous.

In attaching his political racism to the popular discourse of Dutch progressivism, Wilders has been able to make allies across the Dutch political spectrum, while distancing the PVV from other anti-queer, anti-immigrant parties in Europe, like France’s National Front (FN) and Austria’s Freedom Party.

Many LGTBQ groups have lambasted the PVV’s appropriation of their cause. COC Nederland—one of the oldest LGBTQ organizations in the world—has called his statements “an attack on the values of our country.” Yet, the PVV’s predicted share of the 2017 vote has only grown, and their views have gained increasing influence with the second-largest party, the Labour Party.

These days, Dutch news is saturated with statements from LGBTQ people—particularly white gay men—claiming that they feel less welcome than in the past. Like a “stranger on my own doorstep,” explains Piet, a gay resident of Nieuw West, to the Independent.

The popular gay.blog.nl reports “widespread fear after wave of reports of gay couples who were bullied” in the Amsterdam’s Nieuw West neighborhood. The Indy spoke to one gay couple, who had moved out of Amsterdam to a small town on the Belgian border.

“We couldn’t really be ourselves there anymore,” says Marijn. “Not like it was, because new people [nieuwe mensen] look at you funny.” “New people” is one of many proxy terms for allochthoon—a term introduced in the 1972 census for anyone who is not ethnic-Dutch.

In everyday speech and in political discourse, allochthoon is used to describe almost exclusively people of color—particularly people with Muslim backgrounds, who make up nearly a quarter of the population in Amsterdam and neighboring Rotterdam.

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+++ The Dutch national image is anchored in what some sociologists have termed “post-progressivism.” One white Amsterdam resident, Willem, encapsulated this ethos to the Indy in a typical fashion: “Oh, we don’t really have discrimination here. We did that already.”

This so-called post-progressivism relies on a national narrative of tolerance, rooted in centuries of coexistence by Dutch Protestants and Catholics.

Following WWII, the Netherlands transitioned from the most church-going nation in Europe to the least, and became a mecca of tolerance for non-conformists—provos, feminists, squatters, and the marginalized LGBTQ community. The Dutch government embraced a secular, pro-gay rights stance, precipitating the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2001—a global first. Amsterdam has largely retained this image. Iamsterdam, a dominant tourism enterprise, proclaims on its website that “80% of American homosexuals who visit Europe call in on Amsterdam.”

They may visit the pink granite triangles of the Homomonument, party on Pink Saturday, or float down the canals at the Pride Parade.

In a country that prides itself on protecting LGBTQ people, the rising number of hate crimes against queer people in Amsterdam has been a source of great concern. This rise in hate crimes has caused the government to do more research into the populations that they think may be responsible. A highly publicized statistic from the last government report on Dutch Gender and LGBT-Equality states that “four times as many students of Turkish (45.9%) and Moroccan (34.5%) origin have a negative attitude to homosexuality” when compared to ethnic-Dutch students (8.7%). Another report by this Ministry notes that Muslim youth are overrepresented among those convicted of violence against gays in Amsterdam, having been identified in two-thirds of violent cases.

Many point in reply to biases held by Dutch police. A recent expose by anthropologist Paul Mutsaers found that discrimination was evident in police conduct and police training academies; at local stations, officers “hang newspaper reports on the bulletin board on which heads of Islam and migrants are negatively circled.” Artists and activists recently called for inquiries into “structural racism and the discrimination by the Hague police” after police used violence against a group of Moroccan-Dutch men accused of petty crimes in 2015.

Discrimination against allochthonen extends far beyond the police. The median income for allochthoon households today is more than 25% lower than that of white households, according to a GINI Project report. Allochthoon students have lower marks, more violent classroom environments, and higher dropout rates than white students. Of students with Moroccan descent, more than half will be strapped with a criminal record by age 24. Many will live in what the government terms “super-diverse” neighborhoods targeted for redevelopment, in which social housing is replaced by high-rent and owner-occupied flats.

In the last decade, structural oppression has been compounded by a surge of Islamophobia. This wave can be traced back through two high profile deaths. The first, in 2002, was the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, a gay, conservative politician who called Islam a “backward culture.” This was followed in 2004 by the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose works included a short documentary about the abuse of women in Islam entitled Submission (2002), and 06/05 (2004), a film about the killing of Fortuyn.

He was shot and stabbed by Mohammed Bouyeri,

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a Moroccan-Dutch man. Following the attack, mosques were vandalized; Molotov cocktails were thrown at mosques, a church, and schools, with few convictions.

In the midst of such divisiveness, others are working to bridge the gaps between more conservative Islamic values and mainstream Dutch secularism.

This is particularly true for the growing proportion of Muslims and former Muslims in Amsterdam’s LGBTQ community. To assist Muslim youths struggling with their sexual identities, organizations like Safe Harbor have been inundated with participants and volunteers. In a lauded gesture, a “Moroccan boat” joined the Gay Pride Parade for the first time this year.

Furthermore, as Salim, a gay Muslim Amsterdammer, pointed out in an interview with Humanity in Action, “Every religion says you can’t be gay. It’s not just Muslims.” His point is crucial—for most of its history, even Amsterdam did not tolerate non-normative sexualities on religious grounds. Homosexuality is outlawed in the Bible, and as a Christian nation, the Netherlands had a national identity constructed around these moral codes. Furthermore, as former Indy editor Raillan Brooks records in the Village Voice, European powers are largely responsible for the criminalization of homosexuality in the Middle East and North Africa. Brooks notes, “the Ottoman Empire… decriminalized gay sex in 1858, nearly 150 years before the U.S. As imperial European powers metastasized across the region in the nineteenth century, they spread laws that recriminalized homosexuality.” Thus, the popular conflation of the West with ‘tolerance’ and Islam with ‘intolerance’ is historically off-base. +++ In the last few years, the Syrian refugee crisis has raised the stakes even higher on an already contentious conversation. The Netherlands has welcomed relatively few refugees from the conflict in Syria.

According to The Guardian’s January 2016 estimate, only 47,500 refugees reside in the country. There are 266 asylum applications in the country per 100,000 citizens—almost exactly the EU average. This rate is far lower in many other European states, such as France (114) and the UK (60), where anti-immigrant sentiment has flourished. Meanwhile Lebanon hosts over one million asylum-seekers and Jordan hosts almost 1.5 million; both countries are less than half as populous as the Netherlands.

Many Islamophobic politicians have capitalized on the fear of an influx of refugees. Reported incidents of violence against LGBTQ people in refugee camps have further bolstered their rhetoric around Islam’s inherent intolerance. According to COC Nederland, there were at least 21 cases of anti-gay violence at refugee centers in Europe in six months from October 2015. Among them was Omar Abdelghani, who told the Indy he feared “being tortured, imprisoned, even raped” for his sexuality in his home country—incidences of which have spiked since the war broke out in 2011, according to VICE. Some of the refugees he encountered at the center outside Amsterdam, says Omar, were “the same people I ran away from.” He received serious threats and was pushed around.

COC Nederland is lobbying for the creation of a LGBTQ-only refugee center in the Netherlands, like one created in Berlin earlier this year. They emphasize that their primary goal is education rather than separation, and that Dutch values about LGBTQ

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rights can be lived out by all. While maintaining that Wilders’ xenophobia is toxic, they concede that “in emergency situations, there needs to be a facility for people being bullied, threatened,” according to COC spokesperson Philip Tijsma. +++ As the refugee crisis continues, Wilders’ line has become increasingly appealing to an international audience. Some of Europe’s far-right parties are changing their tune to harmonize with Wilders’.

Marine Le Pen, President of France’s conservative National Front, has recently switched to the support of same-sex marriage equality, after decades of opposition to LGBTQ rights. She now polls a significantly larger share of Paris’ gay vote (26%) than its straight vote (16%).

Recent events in the United States have created a similar opportunity for the US Republican party to follow Wilders’ line. In June of this year, a gunman committed to ISIS killed 49 and injured 53 others at a gay nightclub in Orlando, FL. Trump took the opportunity to affirm his suspect commitments to LGBTQ Americans, and to suggest that Islam is a threat to their welfare. Wilders himself spoke at this year’s Republican National Convention in support of Donald Trump’s Islamophobic political program weeks after the shooting, condemning Western leaders who “allowed millions of Muslim immigrants to come from Islamic countries to our free Western societies.” US Republican leader Newt Gingrich chimed in that week, proclaiming that “if our enemies had their way, gays, lesbians and transgender citizens would be put to death as they are today in the Islamic State and Iran.”

On Monday, Oct. 31, Geert Wilders came to court under charges of inciting hatred toward Muslims. That is, he was supposed to come to court. He didn’t show. Instead, he made a morning tweet: “NL has huge problem with Moroccans. To be silent about it is cowardly. 43% of Dutch want fewer Moroccans.

No verdict will change that.” And, in a recent poll— conducted by the PVV—43% of people did indeed hold this opinion. 55% opposed his trial. Wilders says he is defending his right to free speech by refusing trial for voicing his opinions. He has called it a “political trial,” aimed at unseating him, and it may well be.

Others who sing the same tune—for example, Hans Spekman of the Labor Party, who proclaimed, “We must humiliate Moroccans”—are not being brought to court.

The fallout for his non-appearance is not yet clear, but it would be a mistake to assume that, were he to be indicted, the sentiments that the PVV has stoked would disappear. It is as unlikely that Islam will disappear from Europe as it is that European states will institute Sharia law, as the far-right has loudly claimed. The first step is to unseat the image of Islam as a monolith, in collision with an equally monolithic set of Western values. We should instead center human rights on culture and identity. In an era of globalization and flux in which encounters across social distance are increasingly common, developing means to reconcile, rather than reify, differences is of the utmost importance.

LANCE GLOSS B’18 sits below sea level.

FEATURES

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BODY POLITICS ILLUSTRATION BY

BY Sam Samore Gabriel Matesanz

Content warning: racism, transphobia, rape, Donald Trump In an election in which bodies play such a significant role, their degradation and instrumentalization and celebration and carceration and transition and movement and death and life, it seemed prudent, at this final hour, this witching hour, to take a closer look at the particular body which seems to haunt us.

In order to cut him down to size, so to speak.

This is Donald Trump’s face. Alt-right Twitter trolls, the sort who spam famous or semi-famous Twitter users of various oppressed identities—especially Black, trans, undocumented, and Jewish—with violent bigotry in an attempt to force them off of the platform, have been known to keep Twitter’s default egg Avi in order to stay anonymous, be bodiless. Lately, however, they often use images of Trump’s face. It is Trump’s very body that enables their bodilessness.

You almost get the feeling that if they arrive to the polls on election day, as Trump has asked them to do, in order to intimidate and frighten, that they will wear Trump masks. Does it mark a significant change in the machinations of white supremacy? That the identifying image has changed from a pure blank slate—the egg before the chicken—to a sort of ideal man? Or at least a humanoid character?

This is Donald Trump’s head, where he wears his “make America great again” hat. On a recent plane ride, I sat next to a man wearing one of these hats. I got the feeling that everyone around him shrunk away, scooted in their seats in order to be a little farther away, and he almost seemed sheepish…I could have been projecting.

This is Donald Trump’s hair. There is something about Donald Trump’s appeal in his ridiculous or unconventional or larger-than-life appearance. No one else in the world has hair like Donald Trump. It is so strange, so meme-able. The right and left alike love to make memes of Trump…this perhaps explains the feeling of intimacy.

This is Donald Trump’s chest. For a tall man such as Trump, this part of the body can be especially intimidating. Trump is rallying his supporters to show up at polling locations to intimidate voters, in particular Black and Latinx voters.

Especially if they are tall men, these supporters may puff their chests to intimidate others. To increase their animalic intimidation, some Trump supporters have even been recorded bringing dogs to early voting sites.

Donald Trump frequently makes this shape with his hands when he’s making a point, and sort of thrusts it forward repeatedly. In scuba-diving, this is called a “demand-response” signal—it asks if another diver is okay, and the signaled diver must respond.

If the signaled diver is indeed okay, they are to respond with the same signal. But the way Donald Trump uses this symbol, it more seems to say “YOU ARE NOT OKAY! YOU ARE NOT OKAY! YOU ARE NOT OKAY!” to everyone, really.

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These are Donald Trump’s hands, which, like his penis, are of some size, say, x. In response to Trump’s comments in which he bragged about committing sexual assault, the author Jessica Bennett, performer Amanda Duarte, and the artist Stella Marrs collaborated on a t-shirt which reads “Pussy Grabs Back,” along with a picture of an angry cat. It’s reminiscent of the 2007 film Teeth, where protagonist Dawn O’Keefe uses the teeth in her vagina to bite off the penises of her would-be rapists.

One can imagine the cat clawing Trump’s hands—clawing them until they bleed :)

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LITTLE LOST ROBOT BY

Charlie Windolf Andres Chang

ILLUSTRATION BY

The mood was subdued at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s 1984 annual gathering. By that year, the field had expected to produce some kind of robo-utopia, but it had pretty much failed to deliver, and prospects were bleak.

Attendees, among them the late computer scientist Marvin Minsky, coined the term “AI Winter” to describe the frosty responses they were receiving on grant proposals. For the next few decades, winter was there to stay. +++ 30 years earlier, back in 1956, Minsky spent a summer at Dartmouth attending the conference that created the field of AI. At the time, Minsky was working on a machine called SNARC, short for Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator. SNARC was a hodgepodge of vacuum tubes, motors, and spare parts, including an old autopilot from a B-24 bomber.

But the machine’s disarray was, to some extent, by design: it was built to simulate the mess of biological brains.

SNARC was built around Hebb’s rule, a thenrecent idea about biological learning conceived by the psychologist Donald Hebb. Hebb was studying the basic problem of classical conditioning: how do brains associate experiences with rewards? When adults learn to like coffee, what does that mean for their brains?

In Hebb’s time, scientists knew a good bit about neurons. It was clear that they were wired together into a communicating network: neurons received electrical messages from other neurons on little tendrils called dendrites. If they received strong enough impulses, they would fire, sending the message along their axon to other neurons’ dendrites. Then if those neurons were receiving enough on their dendrites, they would fire as well, and so on.

Some parts of this network are fixed, encoded in the genome, like the neurons that keep us breathing. But Hebb realized that in order for the brain to learn, something inside it had to be changing, and he conjectured that it was the connections between neurons. Hebb thought: what if when neurons fire, they strengthen the dendrites that had just received messages? If that were true, then individual neurons might be able to ‘learn’ which of their upstream neighbors are more and less related. In the coffee example, this might mean that a ‘reward’ neuron learns that the ‘coffee-taste’ neuron is associated with the ‘caffeine-rush’ neuron, turning coffee into a pleasurable thing in its own right.

That rule seems way too simple to account for something as complicated as learning. To some extent, it is too simple: modern neuroscience knows that Hebbian learning is only a part of how neurons self-organize. But, it was enough for SNARC to work.

A ‘neuron’ from SNARC Minsky described SNARC in a profile published in the New Yorker in 1981. He built 40 ‘neurons,’ each from “six vacuum tubes and a motor.” He wired them together with “synapses that would determine when the neurons fired,” so that the whole network could function as a connected brain. The whole thing took up most of a room.

To test out his machine, Minsky imagined that

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it was simulating the brain of a rat running through a maze. Well, a really dumb rat: 40 neurons is nothing compared to the 18 million you’d find in your average rodent. He placed the virtual rat inside a virtual maze, and tried to get it to learn its way to a piece of virtual cheese.

To do that, he gave SNARC three ‘eye’ neurons.

These would tell it what choices were available at a given time: the ‘left’ eye neuron would fire if it could go left, the ‘forward’ eye neuron would fire if it could go forward, and the ‘right’ if it could go right. SNARC also had three ‘decision’ neurons: when these fired, the rat would move in the directions they represented. The rest of the neurons were connected randomly between the perception and decision neurons.

To train the virtual rat, Minsky set it loose in the maze. At first, it would run around randomly. But whenever it made a choice that brought it closer to the cheese, Minsky had wired the brain to self-adjust according to Hebb’s rule, reinforcing the pathways that helped it make that good decision. If the rat had just gone forwards, then the forward neuron would strengthen its connections to the neurons that had just told it to fire, and those neurons would do the same with the ones that had just told them to fire, and so on.

Imagine this rat running through a simple maze, where the food is straight ahead. All it has to do is always go forwards. Whenever it happens to go forwards, the neural pathways that made that choice are reinforced, until they dominate all other paths. Eventually, the network would learn to ignore the ‘left’ and ‘right’ perception neurons completely.

Minsky realized that in order for the rat to find its way through more complicated mazes, it would need some form of memory. So, he found a nice trick: he wired the output from the brain’s decision neurons as inputs to the network’s next step, which let it peek at its previous decision when trying to make a new one.

But having only decision neurons in the loop didn’t help much: it just meant the brain knew its immediate past. If our brains were wired like that, we might only remember the last word we said. So Minsky added another loop, using internal neurons instead of decision neurons, since while the decision neurons had to spit out decisions, the internal neurons could hold whatever information they liked.

Minsky wasn’t sure how the rat would use this second loop. He figured it might become a sort of ‘short term memory’ loop, where information about the rat’s progress through the maze might live. But he could never be quite sure what was in this loop just from looking at it, in the same way that neuroscientists can’t tell what you’re thinking about just by looking at an MRI. Still, with this second loop, SNARC was able to learn much more complicated mazes, although it was never perfect. +++ SNARC wasn’t very well received at Dartmouth that summer. Non-neural computers had been solving mazes for a few years by then, so building whole fake brains seemed uncalled for. They were easy to solve on normal computers; one strategy was to try all of the possible paths and see which one worked. Or, if the maze was too big for that, try the ones that move you toward the goal first, in the hopes that the solution is one of those and you’ll find it faster.

These kinds of strategies, where decisions are made by searching through all the possible choices, were a big topic that summer. Another attendee, Arthur Samuel, presented a search-based checkers program that he had written on an IBM mainframe, which was so well received that IBM’s stock jumped 15 points overnight. To pick moves, his checkers program would try all of the possibilities for one side, and then try all of the opponent’s possible responses, and all of the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

responses to those, simulating a few back and forths and choosing the best outcome. Checkers wasn’t too hard for search-based AIs, but it seemed totally out of reach for analog brains like SNARC: how would one even begin to teach those 40 neurons a game like checkers?

The big hit that summer was a program called Logic Theorist, an attempt to build a program that would simulate the way mathematicians work. Logic Theorist received mathematical axioms as input, and would search through the branching tree of possible deductions to prove theorems. It worked surprisingly well: when given the axioms from Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, a 20th-century text that constructed a new foundation for mathematics, Logic Theorist proceeded to prove the first 38 theorems in the book. Famously, Logic Theorist’s proof of the fact that two of the angles in an isosceles triangle are equal was shorter and more easily understood than Russell and Whitehead’s.

The surprising success of neat symbolic reasoning programs overshadowed Minsky’s messy approach for the next couple of decades. AI organized around the idea that intelligence could be written down in symbols, that there were rules you could write down that would solve every problem. But by the ’80s, nobody had come up with the rules for some really simple problems.

One was reading handwritten text: there’s just no way to write down the rules for all the possible ways the number one can look. Different people write it different ways: it might be slanted, it might have the little serif at the top, or a base, who knows.

The problem was worse in fields like machine translation: how can you write down rules to convert English to Russian? A lot of funding was poured into this question during the Cold War, but results were often strange. In one notorious example, a machine tried to translate the idiom “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” into Russian, but produced something like “The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten” instead.

Machines struggled with idioms and other phrases requiring the kind of common knowledge that people take for granted. Gigantic efforts were made to compile databases of common knowledge for machines, but it became clear pretty soon that there was just too much.

By the mid-’80s, this sort of trouble had frozen most government funding channels, bringing on the winter. +++ While progress in AI slowed, lots of other things happened. One was the internet: by the late ’90s, there were huge repositories of data out there. Images, text, all kinds of stuff. AI researchers found all this data really useful. They no longer had to come up with hard rules for translating between languages, but could instead look for statistical regularities in human-translated sources like movie subtitles and UN session transcripts.

These models had to be ‘trained,’ like SNARC, and their translations were only as good as the data they were trained on.

Another development was in gaming. The market for realistic first-person shooter games produced these bizarre, powerful consoles with their own specialized processors called Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).

GPUs were built to do stuff that video games needed done: move a million triangles by one inch, or draw a million dust particles to the screen all at once.

It took until the early aughts for people to realize it, but GPUs were good for things other than gaming.

They were built to carry out lots of math operations simultaneously, which physicists and chemists found useful for simulations involving lots of particles. One of the first AI researchers to realize this was the computer vision scientist Yann LeCun. LeCun was studying the human visual system when he realized that it could be simulated easily on a GPU.

The visual system has these layers of neurons: the first is something like the sensor in a digital camera, with neurons activated by light coming in. They send this raw information to the next layer, which picks out edges. The next layer might pick out shapes, and the next might start to build objects, and so on. LeCun realized that each layer could be thought of as a bunch of neurons doing similar mathematical operations, so he used a GPU to implement it. What he produced was one of the first ‘deep’ neural networks: instead of having one group of neurons like SNARC did, LeCun’s networks had layers upon layers of neurons, which passed on more and more abstract representations of images to the next. LeCun was one of the first researchers to make deep neural nets that could recognize handwriting with near-human accuracy.

Networks like the ones LeCun developed are running all over the place: social networks use them for face recognition (tag your friends!), or to figure out the contents of images to suggest tags. They’re how Snapchat finds your face so it can put dog ears on your head, and they also see the road for self-driving cars. There are other deep nets out there too: ones with short-term memory structures, like the loops in SNARC, have proven to work well with time-based data, like speech and language. Networks like these let Siri hear its users’ commands. A couple of months ago, Google Translate started using these nets for all of their translations. Deep neural nets haven’t even been out there for a decade yet, but AI is already more optimistic than ever.

But it’s a strange optimism. In terms of number of neurons, these nets look something like fruit fly brains, which have about a quarter of a million neurons and ten billion synapses. And as you might expect, these fruit fly brains aren’t so good at navigating human society.

Take for example the net that Google used to suggest tags in Google Photos. Last year, Brooklyn programmer Jacky Alcine noticed that it was tagging photos of a Black friend of his as a gorilla. On Twitter, he wrote, “Google Photos, y’all fucked up. My friend's not a gorilla. What kind of sample image data you collected that would result in this, son?” Alcine went on to point out that these networks can only predict from what they’ve seen, and that Google had clearly put too many white people in the network’s training data.

Microsoft’s chatterbot Tay, trained to mimic the language of a 19-year-old American girl, was another disaster. Soon after it went live on Twitter this March, a group of trolls realized that it was still learning how to speak. They immediately began feeding it a ton of garbage, and soon enough Tay was tweeting racist and sexist language to anyone who would listen. Microsoft took the bot offline quickly, but accidentally put it back online a few days later, at which point it tweeted, “kush! [I'm smoking kush infront the police]” and asked followers if they would “puff puff pass?” Tay has been offline ever since.

Even as AI is solving bigger problems than it could before, it’s also become a bigger problem itself. With the old rule-based AI from before the winter, at least we knew what was going on inside the machine. Now, we train our computers instead of programming them, and they make about as much sense to us as our own brains do. Which is, well, not very much.

CHARLIE WINDOLF B’17 is not getting into a car driven by a fruit fly any time soon.

TECH

16

HAVE YOU KEPT YOUR BLOOD Javier Sandoval ILLUSTRATION BY My Tran BY

[...]

Have you kept your blood warm?

Or did you leave it at table, grasping through the oak door after me? Did Winter’s gasp pass your face and ghost into our living place, hushing the candle on the table beside your cup, shuddering the glow from our after-meal rushing the warmth out, flushing it over our welcome mat sleek with Winter’s ice, over leaves poking to spike my skin, over elm roots hoping to jab with elbows while their hands hide inside the pockets of the ground?

Did Winter spy our setting stomp our comfort lick the grail cold?

If my finger rimmed it would it echo or choke with frost?

Or did Winter chill your wine killing your grapes, slurp your good spilling our fate, burp our secret lost in gust and smoke?

You wrote me a book of faith and oath: to keep safe behind the oak, and warm beside your fireplace, but you left the door open and Winter crept inside and sighed, gusts of snow white swirling, blowing in.

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LITERARY

NOVEMBER 04, 2016

List 4-5

the sheep. His best known album— The Queen is Meat—went platinum with the platinum extracted from MORISSEY’s own mines. Really though he’s a tool so go to Tommy’s Place instead^^^^^^

Too many good acts for us to pull selections out. Can’t stand the image (or sound (I guess)) of Wolf Eyes feeling left out... :( All sorts of noisesy and soundsy and fuzzy commingling for a night of delights and disgusts. Actually a really gross lineup. Should be called Filth Fest.

Artist Talk: Finding Metacom @ 64 College St (5-6pm) Duane Slick and Martin Smick talk about a recent collaborative exhibition which focuses on King Philip’s War Club as context for exploring the lingering presence of Metacom (King Philip’s Wampanoag name). A taste of the local colonial context for what continues at Standing Rock.

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Hassle Fest 8 @ Brighton Music Hall, Boston (Lots of times)

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NOVEMBER 4 — NOVEMBER 10

Bending Genre: Writers in Conversation @ Providence Public Library (2-4pm)

Brazil’s Political Future: What’s Next? @ 111 Thayer St, Providence (7-9pm) Jean Wyllys is an Afro-Brazilian, openly gay Federal Congressman from Rio de Janeiro, representing the Party of Socialism and Freedom. After a turbulent year of Olympic decadence and the impeachment/coup of Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff this is a great opportunity to hear a voice from the trenches.

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AMERICA RUNS ON DUNKIN. FIRST 2000 FANS IN ATTENDANCE RECEIVE A FREE DUNKIN’ DONUTS MUG! BRUINS RULE.

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MT Anderson, Mary Cappello, Dawn Paul meet and converse writerly things. “Image of a girl holding a blaster to a twin’s temple. “Remember, Direct Action Training - #NoDAPL @ State of the Party @ MFA, Boston (all bi***. You can’t spell ‘danger’ without FANG Collective (6-8:30pm) night bb) DNA.” Blam. ” =FEED FANG is offering this training to preBoston’s Museum of Fine Art opens pare people to take direct actions in ALL NIGHT for another fun-azz party. solidarity with the front line resistance Like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Yu-Gi-Oh! Regional Qualifier @ Omni to the Dakota Access Pipeline. LesBasil E. Frankweiler + more DJs. Chris- Providence (10am-10pm) sons will include the roles needed to tian Marclay’s 24-hour video The Clock carry out an action, how to do jail supwill be on view so you can see all those Twelve hours of curse casting blood port, the history of nonviolent direct late-night scenes that no one was ever boiling monster mayhem. Highlight action and much more. supposed to see... sure to be the Dragon Duel, scheduled to begin at 1:00, entry to which is free and limited to Duelists born in 2004 or later. Little 12yo dragons! Too cute.

Torrey Pines by Clyde Petersen @ AS220 Southern New England Livestock Con(9pm-12am) ference @ Bristol County Agricultural High School, Dighton MA (8am-4pm) A stop-motion animated queer punk Staged Reading: The Invasion of Vox coming-of-age tale, taking place in Has the drought depleted your crop Populi @ The Wilbury Theatre Group (8Southern California in the early 1990’s production? You want to start raising 9pm) featuring a live-score. cattle? Finna start using holistic pasture practices? You’re eyeing that the The future looks bleak, full of Bad Rapmeat wholesaling profit margins? You pers & Evil Promoters. Only Vox Populi want to raise sweet little piggies and can save us....

Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberacome to love them like your own chiltion @ 95 Cushing Street (5:30-7pm) dren(maybe more)only to slaughter & butcher their bodies? Me too XD Gary Y. Okihiro presents an intellectuJohn Bohannon & Wes Tirey and Westeral history of ethnic studies and Third year @ 186 Carpenter (7:45-10pm) World studies and shows where they converged and departed by identifying Providence Bruins Mug Night @ Dunkin Drone is hilarious. some of their core ideas, concepts, Donut Center (7:05-10pm) methods, and theories.

eeli @ Tommy’s Place (9pm-ish)

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Providence’s newest cutie takes the stage for a night that sounds like Lisboa, smells like dive bar, tastes like honey-crusted crickets, feels like wobbledywobbldywob MORRISSEY DANCE NIGHT VOL. IV : UNLOVABLE PLEASURES @ Dusk (10pm2am) Morrissey endorsed Hillary Morrissey did 9/11 Morrissey poisoned Dolly

Just a normal day. Keep moving.

Nothing to see here.

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