The College Hill Independent V.27 N.7

managing editors David Adler, Doreen St. Félix, Ellora Vilkin news Simon Engler, Joe de Jonge, Emma Wohl metro Megan Hauptman, Rick Salamé, Kat Thornton arts Becca Millstein, Grier Stockman, John White features Lili Rosenkranz, Josh Schenkkan science Golnoosh Mahdavi, Jehane Samaha SPORTS Tristan Rodman interviews Drew Dickerson literary Edward Friedman EPHEMERA Molly Landis, Ka-

THE indy volume 27 #7

tia Zorich OCCULT Julieta Cárdenas X Lizzie Davis list Claudia Norton, Diane Zhou design + illustration Mark Benz, Casey Friedman, Kim Sarnoff Cover Editor Robert Sandler Senior editors Grace Dunham, Alex Ronan, Sam Rosen, Robert Sandler Staff Writer Alex Sammon STAFF ILLUSTRATORs Andres Chang, Aaron Harris web Houston Davidson COPY Mary Frances Gallagher, Paige Morris Cover Art Robert Sandler MvP Simon Engler P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 & theindy@gmail.com & @theindy_tweets & theindy.org Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Generation Progress/Center for American Progress. Generation Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at GenProgress.org.

news fROM THE EDITORS When a couple people came running out, we stopped mid-chant. The two were clearly agitated— wide-mouthed words accompanied by sharp, decisive gestures. But I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I dropped my half of the banner and moved closer. Were the protesters inside getting escorted out? Arrested?

The lecture has been cancelled.

People shouted, repeated the sentence. I tried to shout but had already shouted too much. No one else left the building for a while. We picked back up the chant, though, louder than before, and when everyone else left the building we all shouted together. Some people joined the chant, and some people shouted another form of assent. Some people shouted mouth-to-ear about what had happened inside so that people who’d been outside could know. Some people shouted that they had come to hear Ray Kelly speak, not us.

I’ve heard people say that they’re embarrassed now to be a Brown student. I’ve never been more proud. The voices of those oppressed by the longterm, structural racism that Ray Kelly and his policies perpetuate won out. That’s bigger than anything else I’ve ever been a part of. And I’m not alone. The protests have catapulted the protesters’ arguments into the public eye far more than would have happened otherwise, and discussion on all sides of the many issues at hand have been explicated more fully and audibly than any question and answer segment would have allowed.

As we shout, we must also listen. Let’s continue to be heard. –JW

2 Week in Review houston davidson, drew dickerson & emma wohl

3 Solidarity all of us

5 NSA joe de jonge, alex sammon & meghan sullivan

METRO 12 Psychics

ARTS 8 In Atlantic City erin schwartz

9 Reflektor tristan rodman

SCIENCE 15 Play eliza cohen

LITERARY 17 Thumbsucker

sam lin sommer

charlotte seaberry

FEATURES

X

6 GNPs sophia seawell

18 Postcede joanna zhang

13 White Boy Rap sam rosen

INTERVIEWS 7 Miranda July drew dickerson

e p h e m e r a : 11 molly landis & katia zorich

week in fantasy

by Houston Davidson, Drew Dickerson & Emma Wohl Illustration by Casey Friedman If you think you’re dreaming this, you can wake up now. And there’s no need to go back to sleep—because this week, we’re exploring issues from real life. Here’s the week in fantasy.

PLAYING SOLDIERS

PIGSKIN PILEUP

ICE, or the Israel Challenge Experience, is an adult military fantasy camp run by former Israeli Defense Forces soldiers at an undisclosed location on the Israeli coast. For $3,650, you can fire real guns, like a real IDF soldier, for 7 days straight.

During the typical day—17 hours long, by ICE’s reckoning—you will practice shooting, learn how to construct a roadblock, conduct vehicle inspections, sniff out bombs, save hostages, and defend yourself using Israeli Krav Maga combat techniques.

Of course, after a hard day of anti-terror assault training, ICE acknowledges that you’ll want more than plain chow and a stiff bunk. ICE promises “modern on-site lodging and delicious food.” Kosher, Glatt Mehadrin, and Vegetarian.

Lest the comfort undermine the authenticity of your experience, ICE wants you to know that their night challenges will “give you the thrill of the action, as close to the real thing as you can get. This is no childs game.” Even though it’s camp.

Finally, ICE knows your friends might doubt your ability to perform “Mossad-Type Operations” like “stealing classified documents,” “planting listening devices”, all while “evading enemy capture”. Fear not, ICE has a videographer at all times to capture the “right out of a Hollywood movie” thrill of the tactical missions. “There is nothing more fun than viewing yourself in the action on your own TV.”

A Raleigh, North Carolina fantasy football team manager (if you’re going to craft a fantasy world, might as well give yourself a position of power) just raised the stakes of the game, dragging his neighborhood into a sordid hostage-taking plot.

Since the first league, the GOPPPL (Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League), was formed, American Fantasy Football, wherein general managers draft players from the real NFL roster, has grown exponentially— now ESPN, Yahoo, and the NFL itself provide statistics and platforms to participate while following the football season, currently in its 9th week. With such major actors at play, it’s easy to lose sight of the personal stories and passions that drive the game.

Case in point: Joe and Bob* live next door to each other in Raleigh, NC. Where they are in a fantasy football league together. A recent Craigslist ad suggests that Joe’s team, now just past the midpoint of the season, is not doing very well—a team consisting of ”a bunch of waiver wire garbage (i.e., new running back for the winless Bucs), one half of a running back by committee (i.e., Fred “Fucking” Jackson), and a wide receiver who’s one sniff of glue away from being suspended for the year (i.e., Josh “I Wish They Would Legalize Pot In Ohio” Gordon).” It is as of yet unclear how Joe managed to select such a lineup.

The ad weaves a backstory of friendly cooperation gone wrong. Before a recent trip to IKEA, Joe asked if Bob needed anything. Bob asked for some nice picture ledges, and Joe happily obliged, before realizing that he and his neighbor are now, in the world of fantasy football, bitter enemies—their teams are facing off this week, and he is distinctly at a disadvantage. Not only is Joe’s team just terrible; Bob’s appears to be quite good.

So our hapless hero took to Craigslist to post an ad for the ledges. After chronicling the specifics of the fate that brought such a measure about, he wrote, [W]hat does this have to do with picture ledges from IKEA? Well, I decided to hold them ransom from my neighbor unless he agrees to bench Lynch and Moreno and replace them with Darren McFadden and Bryce Brown. If he doesn’t fulfill my request, I will sell the stupid-ass picture ledges to someone else in the Raleigh-Durham area.

Now, it seems, Bob has three options: 1) Acquiesce to his neighbor’s demands and drink the bitter draught among some nice picture ledges; 2) Pay the ransom ($19.98, double the original price) and gleefully trounce his rival; or 3) Give up on home decor. There’s no space for that in wartime.

This quiet neighborhood has become a battlefield.

-EW

+++ Chicago is deep in the Negev Desert. Chicago is an enigmatically-titled “Arab village” mock-up that has prepared generations of Israeli soldiers—the real thing, not fantasy role-players—for a number of the country’s banner operations.

Photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin recently spoke with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about their work in the fantasy village. “Everything that happened, happened here first, in rehearsal: the invasion of Beirut, the first and second intifadas, the Gaza withdrawal, the battle of Fallujah,” Broomberg and Chanarin said. “A sense of fantasy inevitably slips in...the fantasy of the soldiers who built it.” +++ On its FAQ page, ICE responds to campers curious as to whether they “will get to actually patrol in enemy territory”: “You can leave the truly dangerous stuff up to the Israeli Army, they know what to do. You will be training to do what they do, simulating combat and tactical experiences.”

Should Chicago suffer a dip in action, the simulators of the simulators will fix that right up. –HD

NovemBER 01 2013

SHITTY PHOTOS OF DEAD DOGS Under no other circumstances would we gladly scan over low-resolution photographs of what would look to be the corpse of a warm-blooded, four-legged animal. But this is the chupacabra, that selfsame goat sucker of Puerto Rican lore. The apocryphal beast arises here and there from time to time, in one or another seedy corner of the internet—semiartful photoshops, shaky handheld footage of a quick-moving animal, pixelated stills of sunbaked road-kill. Just around the corner from Halloween, the town of Picayune, Mississippi has had a chupacabra sighting.

“If a zombie had a dog, it would look like that.”

So says Jennifer Whitfield, the Picayune resident who captured the creature on tape. She and her son filmed the alleged beast as it fed near her home. We see a gray, tuft-haired canine at the edge of the woods, chewing on something before running back off into the trees. It is certainly wretched. Of all God’s creations, this seems one of those forgotten. Not to dispute Ms. Whitfield on a semantic-analogical point, but the Picayune Chupacabra looks more like if—by some gypsy’s curse—a wolf were made to live the rest of its life as a wet cough. The Picayune Chupacabra looks like Balto as he begs for death.

“If you were forced to build a rough model of your childhood pet using only coat-hanger wire and the meat from a stadium turkey leg, it would look like that,” I say aloud to myself.

The good people of the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks are, however, less than willing to play suppose alongside the rest of Picayune’s residents. They’ll have none of the chupacabra, thank you. More likely, they say, it is a coyote with a case of mange. Sgt. David Burnette: “It’s probably sick, weak, and not able to hunt on its own, so it’s going to the nearest food source it can find.” A quick realitycheck and all our fun is immediately wiped out from under its own legs. By a cruel joke of both nature and myth, a cryptic creature demystified becomes an unpretentious animal with what looks to be a very painful skin condition.

And therein lies the formal problem and constant frustration of the cryptid more generally (cryptid being the object of cryptozoology, the study of creatures whose existence is not scientifically recognized). The second one sees a headline about the discovery of a real, wild Bigfoot is the second before the second one learns the truth of the horrifying hoax—examine any closer and you’ll find a gorilla costume stuffed with dead possum and slaughterhouse leftovers. Your sonar image of the Loch Ness Monster is in fact an algae bloom. Your jackalope is a clumsy taxidermy. Your chupacabra is a shitty photo of a dead dog. - DD

*Names have been changed. It is not, in fact, clear Joe is a man, since the post is entirely in first person, but for the sake of clarity, here we go.

news █ 02

We stand in solidarity with student movements at Brown University and across the world.

We condemn intolerance, inaction, and injustice.

We will assert our power and we will make our change.

student

power

STILL SPYING

by Joe de Jonge, Alex Sammon & Meghan Sullivan Illustration by Julieta Cárdenas

edward snowden is a relatively free man. Four months into his year-long Russian asylum, he has managed to fly under the global media radar. That is until a photo of him—or his doppelganger—grocery shopping surfaced on October 7. Three days later, his father Lon Snowden flew to Moscow to see his son. The relationship between these two events is unclear and likely irrelevant, but let’s not forget, these are spies.

A condition of Snowden’s asylum is that he stop publishing classified documents. Yet revelations of US espionage net continue. On October 17, days after Lon left Moscow, The New York Times published excerpts from the first interview with Edward Snowden since he was granted asylum. The reportedly “wide-ranging interview” took place “over several days” while Lon was in town.

There are two interrelated points here. One, Snowden asserted that neither the Russians nor the Chinese accessed his trove. And two, after passing the files to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong, he no longer has copies of the files. So, the Russians did not access the files because he did not bring them to Russia. It is a different story with the Chinese, as there is no doubt he had the files in Hong Kong.

Still, Snowden told the Times, “There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents.” Snowden claims that his previous work, including targeting (read hacking) the Chinese and teaching a course on Chinese cyber-counterintelligence, allowed him to evade his Chinese spy counterparts.

Snowden’s claims are believable, or at least plausible. But, again, we are talking about spies. Snowden’s assertions in this interview are undeniably thought out and motivated by his uncertain political position.

As foreign heads of state express their outrage over the United States tapping their phones, we have to question the performance. Didn’t they know, or at least assume, something like this was going on? Weren’t they sharing data all along?

And as Glenn Greenwald moves on to his new venture, shouldn’t we question his assertion that the best is yet to come? The news cycle is quick: Is he afraid his 15 minutes are up? Did you know his name a year ago?

Will you know it in a year?

LEAKING ON OUR ALLIES, AGAIN an iphone note is a private thing. It’s a to-do list, a diary entry, a description of your last one-night stand. And when it comes from a politician, it can even contain confidential state information. It’s no wonder, then, that the US spying on our allies has pissed people off. German Chancellor Angela Merkel confronted President Obama in a phone call on October 23 over indications that the National Security Agency has monitored the German Chancellor’s mobile phone. “We need trust,” Merkel said in a press conference on October 24, “Spying among friends is never acceptable.”

This revelation is only the latest in a stream of reports revealing the extent of American eavesdropping. On October 21, French newspaper Le Monde reported that the NSA tapped French phone conversations—70.3 million between December 10, 2012 and January 8, 2013.

French President Francois Hollande had similar comments for Obama, saying that such actions infringe on the freedoms of the French people and are unacceptable between friends. And on October 28, the Spanish government summoned the US ambassador to discuss allegations that the NSA harvested data on nearly 60 million Spanish phone calls between December and January.

Our close allies, Germany and France in particular, are stewing in outrage and prioritizing efforts to improve data protection while the United States scrambles to control the damage. The President reportedly assured Merkel that the US government currently is not, and will not in the future, tap the Chancellor’s phone. But Obama notably refused to comment on the NSA’s past relationship with Merkel’s cell. Facing demands for explanations of their alleged activity, the NSA commented that the American government “gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.” Indeed, a former US ambassador to NATO stated that each government attempts to collect intelligence to the best of its ability.

It is worth noting that our allies co-operate extensively with United States on intelligence gathering. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the Director of the NSA, told the House Select Intelligence Committee on October 29 that the data behind the recent outrage was collected in conjunction without NATO allies. “This is not information we collected on European citizens,” Alexander said. “It represents information that we and our NATO allies have collected in defense of our countries and in support of military operations.”

Nonetheless, American disregard for foreign laws threatens US relations with allies across the pond. France and Germany have indicated that trust may be rebuilt. Obama is trying to rebuild bridges. He’s reportedly been considering an outright ban on spying on allied heads of state, and some have reported that a more informal version of this ban has already been put in place. Still, political theater has consequences, and our allies will likely be less willing to share confidential information with US intelligence agencies in the future.

Greenwald’s World everyone knows who edward snowden is. The man who engraved him into popular consciousness, however, has been far more anonymous, hidden in the umbrage of his own careerdefining story.

That is, until recently. This week, Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first reported the Snowden leaks, has put himself in the headlines with news that he will be leaving the Guardian to establish a startup news venture. Mobility within journalism is nothing new—Greenwald himself was working for Salon.com barely a year ago—but this move has piqued public interest far more than his prior relocation. Looking to capitalize on his recent success, Greenwald has

05█ NEWS

joined forces with Snowden collaborators Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill to form a “momentous new media outlet with major financial backing,” as he told BuzzFeed last week.

The new outlet, temporarily titled NewCo (Greenwald is emphatic that this name will be revisited and revised), is to be entirely online, though content will be behind a paywall.

Greenwald’s manifesto paints the venture as a sort of investigative journalist’s utopia—investigative journalists will be staffed at all levels of management, production, and hiring—allowing immunity from “the pressures coming down on journalists at major reporting posts.” A press release emphasizes that “all proceeds from the site will be reinvested in journalism,” curtailing any potential for profiteering. The group aspires to report exclusively on issues of civic engagement, without any threat of censorship or external influence.

The major financial backing comes courtesy of Pierre Omidyar, a billionaire investor and the creator of eBay. Omidyar claims to feel similarly “passionate about civic engagement,” and shares Greenwald’s dream of establishing a new brand of unabated muckrakers. A native of Hawaii, Omidyar has already taken steps to help realize this new journalism. In 2010, he created the Honolulu Civil Beat, a highly regarded local publication that is founded upon “ferocious, investigative journalism.”

After extensive phone conversations—Greenwald lives in Brazil; the two have never actually met—Omidyar struck a deal to bankroll the endeavor to the tune of $250 million.

This move is not an unprecedented one for Omidyar, either. That figure is the same amount Jeff Bezos (billionaire founder of Amazon) spent to acquire The Washington Post a few months back. The paper actually reached out to Omidyar even before contacting its eventual purchaser, in order to gauge his potential interest in acquisition.

And yet, something about this setup feels like kissing your sister. This most recent transaction continues a trend of tech billionaires dipping their toes into journalistic waters and being exalted for it.

Termed “the billionaire savior phase” of new journalism by the Columbia Journalism Review, the implications of tech giants gobbling up reporting outlets should not be downplayed. These colossal Internet companies, eBay included, are the same ones harvesting data, monitoring online activity, and sending or selling it to the National Security Agency. Omidyar and Bezos alike have enormous vested political and economic interests in this system. Certainly Omidyar wouldn’t take too kindly to an expository piece about eBay’s user tracking provisions, even if it resembles “ferocious investigative journalism.”

There are other objections to be raised as well. NewCo’s payment structure allows it to function as a quasi-non profit, immune to almost all taxation but able to sell advertising space indiscriminately. This setup seems to be rolling out the red carpet for the same coercive, external forces NewCo has tasked itself with combating.

As fallout from the Snowden leaks continues, this serves as an important if unpleasant reminder there is always money to be made when it comes to information. Greenwald was effectively able to parlay the illicit surveillance of millions into a dream job—his own news outlet.

While his stated intention was to battle back the invasive practices of the NSA, his affiliation with Big Tech gives reason to worry that the industry facilitating this spying in the first place marches onward.

On October 30, Greenwald announced the hiring of Liliana Segura and Dan Froomkin, two highly respected investigative journalists, both of whom have launched nonprofit justice-driven outlets in the past. Their tweets seem cautiously optimistic about the potential of NewCo. Maybe we should feel that way as well.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BEYOND HE SAID, SHE SAID a history of personal pronouns

by Sophia Seawell

for over a year now, Danii Carrasco B’17 has identified as genderqueer, nonbinary and sometimes trans-masculine. “In the simplest terms it means that I’m neither male nor female,” Carrasco said. “I’m read as female, but I would prefer to present more masculinely or more androgynously. I haven’t had the opportunity to do so.” What Carrasco can do—and has done—is ask their English-speaking friends to refer to them by “they/them/theirs.”

Carrasco attended an all-girls high school in New York before coming to Brown. “I’m used to hearing ‘she,’ ‘hey girl,’ and things like that,” Carrasco said, ‘so I’m used to keeping quiet even though it bothers me. It’s hard to remind myself I should speak up.” Despite being socialized with feminine pronouns, Carrasco describes the experience of being incorrectly gendered as “dysphoria inducing.”

It’s not uncommon to hear students at liberal arts universities jokingly remark that “gender is a spectrum, not a binary.” But as Carrasco’s experience shows, the majority of society still does conceptualize gender as an either/or question, casually linked to similarly binary anatomy. The perpetual creation and enforcement of this binary is a function of cissexism, the structures of power and knowledge that affirm and privilege cisgender people (those who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth) while erasing or invalidating the identities and experiences of trans and non-binary people. Cissexism in the US is manifested in almost countless places (sexual education classes, hospitals, public restrooms) and language is one of them.

“Pronouns are an extension of my identity,” Carrasco said. At home with their family in New York, they mostly speak Spanish, “which, as you may know, is a highly gendered language,” Carrasco said. “There’s no way to use gender-neutral pronouns.” But for Carrasco, English is rife with opportunities. “People learn new words every day. Nobody has a problem with iPhones or Skype but for some reason people have a problem learning pronouns.” +++ unlike 145 other languages, English does not have a grammatically correct way to refer to people or their possessions without invoking gender. English pronouns are the only gendered survivors of Old English, when all parts of speech were heavily inflected. Some linguists hypothesize that these endings fell out of use around the 11th century when Vikings invaded England and sought to homogenize their already-similar languages.

English grammars in the 1500s marked the beginning of standardizing modern English, a process that continued through to the early 18th century. Tools for mastering the language were geared towards preparing the sons of wealthy families to study Latin, and so the masculine pronoun, reflecting both the authors and the audience, became the default.

Generic use of “he” was repeatedly promoted over the centuries, but perhaps due to the “first wave” of feminism, linguists continued to search for a more inclusive alternative. Otto Jespersen noted in his 1894 book Progress in Language: With Special Reference to English, that a sentence like “It would be interesting if each of the leading poets would tell us what he considers his best work,” contained “the disparaging implication that the leading poets were all men.”

Another singular construction, “they/their,” had made its way into English through the Danish spoken by Scandinavian invaders in northern England in the early 11th century. It was commonly used by the late 1300s. But grammarians in the 16th century decided to follow Latin rules, which dictated that a singular “they” was grammatically incorrect. Although this opportunity to standardize “they” as an epicene—meaning having one form to refer to both genders—pronoun was lost, authors like Jane Austen, Goggrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll and George Orwell would later continue to employ it in their writing.

Other attempts to avoid binary pronouns, dating back to around the 1850s, are numerous: eer, hie, ha, hesh, thir, se, heesh, hse, kin, ve, ta, tey, fmshem, se, j/e, jee, ey, ho, po, ae, et, heshe, hann, herm, ala, de, ghach, han, he, mef, ws, and ze. Fittingly, linguist Dennis Baron describes the gender-neutral pronoun as “the one most often advocated and attempted, and the one that has most often failed.” +++ there is, supposedly, a linguistic reason for the historical failure of gender-neutral pronouns: Like prepositions and conjunctions, pronouns belong to a closed class of parts of speech, a group of words that are functional or grammatical in nature. As the name suggests, new items are rarely added to this group. Open classes like nouns and verbs are generally more related to the content of a sentence and therefore are open to additions. Given that we’re constantly

NovemBER 01 2013

inventing new things that need names, it follows that creating new nouns is relatively easy and speedy process. From there, add “to” (e.g. to Google, to Skype) and ta-da: new verb.

However, linguists are having difficulty making clear-cut distinctions between the classes.

What may be more important, Baron notes, is less that “pronoun systems are slow to change,” but that the process of change comes from the bottom up. “When change comes, it is typically natural rather than engineered,” he says. For example, “to Google” became a verb because people were using Google more than they were using Yahoo or other search engines—not because Google made it into Merriam-Webster first. Rather than being told to start using a word, we found a word to describe what we were already doing. +++ reacting to sweden’s recent adoption of “hen” as a gender neutral pronoun, Jan Guillou, one of Sweden’s most famous authors, blamed “feminist activists who want to destroy our language.” But linking gender-neutral pronouns to feminism ignores the way in which the language of some feminist discourses—for example, referring to abortion as a “women’s issue”—often excludes trans, genderqueer and non-binary people in order to create a (cissexist) solidarity. “In many feminist spaces when people are talking about body image, reproductive rights, that kind of thing, the language is so gendered,” Carrasco said. “It can be very uncomfortable for trans people. Like me, being assigned female at birth, these issues affect me and are important to me but constantly hearing them gendered is a reminder that I’m the other.”

In response to the exclusion of gendered language, a variety of individuals and communities have developed alternative gender-neutral pronouns. In the 1980s the “Spivak system”—e/eim/eir—was developed by mathematician Michael Spivak and popularized

by LambdaMOO, a text-based virtual reality that reached its peak in the mid-1990s with about 10,000 members. Although Baron has since seen frequent use of Spivak pronouns in transgender forums online, ze/hir/hirs appears to be the most popular gender-neutral pronouns, at least in the online genderqueer community. The first recorded usage of “hir” was on Usenet in 1981, and in 1992 Baron found that it was regularly used on the electronic newsgroup alt. sex.bondage.

Authors of the past decade like Leslie Feinberg and Kate Bornstein brought the concept of preferred gender pronouns into public consciousness, but they are still far from mainstream.

“No one asks you your pronouns in any space other than queer—and usually not even in most queer—designated spaces,” said Bennett Knox B’15, who identifies as genderqueer. “I feel like the impetus is on me to say ‘can we also say our pronouns?’ because it’s just generally assumed.

Most people are going to use the pronouns that they feel like they should use for someone based on how they read them.” +++ normalizing the question of gender pronouns, rather than only asking in certain contexts or singling out individuals, would be a key step for the safety and inclusion of trans and nonbinary people. For example, asking a binary-identified trans person their preferred pronouns, particularly in a public space, may “make them question: am I passing? Do they realize that I’m trans? Am I safe here?” Carassco said. “Because it’s not a commonly asked question.”

Philanthropist and politician Napoleon Bonapart Brown, writing in The Atlantic in 1878, said “the need of a personal pronoun of the singular number and common gender is so desperate, urgent, imperative that . . . it should long since have grown on our speech.” Given the failed results over a century to do so, it seems unlikely that a gender-neutral pronoun, if introduced and accepted, would be commonly used or last. Awareness of the multiplicity of identities and respect for them, on the other hand, is doable: “in terms of what people can do just in daily life to make a trans person more comfortable,” Carrasco said, “pronouns really go a long way. I know that when I’m hearing ‘she’ all day and then one of my friends who knows that I’m genderqueer and knows my pronouns says ‘they,’ it’s a relief! It’s like ‘Oh, they remembered!’ It feels nice.”

Sami Overby B’17, who identifies as male-of-center and genderqueer, said that using correct gender pronouns is “the most basic, and the most common, and the most everyday thing that needs to happen. I think that being able to see trans people verbally, to have that visibility for who they are will begin to change the way that people think about trans people.”

SOPHIA SEAWELL B’14’s preferred gender pronouns are she/her/hers.

FEATURES █ 06

I NEED TO WORRY LESS ABOUT YOU

by Drew Dickerson Illustration by Diane Zhou

an interview with Miranda July

miranda july is a multi-disciplinarian working as director, actress, visual and performing artist, and writer. She has a digital art piece currently in progress, “We Think Alone,” commissioned by Swedish museum Magasin 3. “We Think Alone” features ten subjects—among them authors Sheila Heti and Etgar Keret, fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy, and actress Kirsten Dunst—responding to topics given by July. Each subject selects an email from his or her sent folder appropriate to the topic provided. Each Monday morning since July 1st, these themed emails have been collected and sent out to everyone on the “We Think Alone” mailing list. The piece runs until November 11th and signing up is a quick matter of giving and verifying one’s email. If you’ve ever wondered what Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s electronic correspondence looks like, this is your chance (though most of his letters look to be done through a press agent). Some messages are to intimate friends, others to strangers. Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin this week apologizes for missing someone’s phone call. Which is to say that responses range from immense to comparatively little voyeuristic interest. I called July promptly at 3:15 PM Los Angeles time. We talk here about her previous work, her current work, touch briefly on a past therapy session, and end on collections.

The College Hill Independent: Your book It Chooses You is a collection of interviews. I was curious in starting off this conversation whether or not that project changed your idea of what the interview as a form is and similarly what it means to be an interviewed subject.

Miranda July: I knew I wasn’t that good an interviewer before I did that. And it only confirmed my respect for the people who interview me and make it look so easy. It’s actually not. I felt like my questions were so simple. I always felt so clumsy. Which is partly why there’s a lot of explaining afterwards about what I was noticing, because I couldn’t always draw that out in the moment of conversation.

The Indy: I know as well that the process of writing that book was influential in the making of your feature-length film, The Future. As you work across disciplines, do you feel at all like you’re exercising the same skill or a similar set of skills between mediums?

MJ: In the largest sense, it’s all the same. It’s the creative process of being loose enough to have ideas but disciplined enough to have a practice—that’s the same in all of them. But some of them are very social. And that’s always the hardest for me, whether interviewing the people or being a director on set. And then a lot of what I do is so solitary. Most of the projects involve being alone and writing at some point. I like that. That difference feels necessary to me in a way, that I’m not always sitting alone and that I’m not always dreading the challenge of interaction. I dread it and it also charges me up.

The Indy: That you mention being alone and the difference between social and solitary ways of art-making is interesting. Would you describe your current e-mail piece, “We Think Alone,” as a social or solitary work? It seems to synthesize both elements.

MJ: Yeah. For me, it’s social in the fun, removed way that email allows. In that it’s like I’m throwing a party but I don’t actually have to be at the party with all the people. I just invite them and kind of introduce them to other people, sort of like a host. What I love about it is that you really see the people thinking alone. You don’t really see the relationships, you just see the moment where they’re grappling with their side of it. It was a nice respite from my novel, which I’ve been working on the last couple of years. Ultimately, that’s more of a lonely project.

The Indy: Most of the press for “We Think Alone” has focused on the formal conditions of emailing. But in your own statement, I thought that the most immediately compelling phrase was “art of privacy.” How do you mean that?

MJ: I think about Lena Dunham, who is beating everyone to the punch in terms of exposing herself. She’s of course not exposing everything. She’s doing it in a specific and very powerful way. But that’s in such contrast to a more classical actress—like Kirsten Dunst, who we don’t really know anything about. Usually that’s more how it is. These actresses are supposed to be blank slates and that’s how you make a career, by other people writing for you. And then, of course, we’re all deciding how much to put up on Facebook and how much to tweet. Has something really happened if it wasn’t Instagrammed? Whether or not you’re being surveilled or feel like you’re being spied upon, you’re actually negotiating that everyday anyways. You’re making choices about that. So it seemed like a poignant time to point at the simple ways people are sharing themselves, but in a way different from all of the exposure that we’re used to seeing.

MJ: I think in the simplest sense, titles are these signs that invite people in. Ideally your sign would be just a mirror, so that people would be like “Well, I’m interested in that, in myself.

That must be the book or movie for me.” And “You” is the word that does that. Not totally consciously, but it always seems like a good title when it has that word in it. “Oh, well that has a certain ping to it.” Now, of course, I try not to do that. And also—I remember there was a therapy session where my therapist said something about focusing so much on what the other person is feeling and not on what I’m feeling, focusing on you rather than me. I thought, “Ah, I have all those titles...” Maybe I need to worry less about you.

The Indy: How important do you think it is that this piece was commissioned by the museum Magasin 3? This work seems to be entirely without place, which is true of digital art generally.

There are venues and archives like Rhizome.org, but location and occasion are often lost or obscured in such pieces.

MJ: Magasin 3 is involved in the sense that the people in charge of mailing out the emails are in Stockholm. I email them every week, triple-checking, working with a woman in Stockholm who works with the museum. I guess I like the fact that, yeah sure, most people won’t even notice that it was a piece that was part of a show—but because that show’s specific mission was to not revolve around the gallery, but to be more ephemeral, I thought it was smart curating.

Yes, this is part of the show, but this part of the show is in people’s inboxes. I guess I personally like that. I like that way of thinking about art and art-spaces. It seems that, increasingly, you can have the experience of a museum and not live near a museum. A lot of people don’t live near the interesting places where they want to go, and they don’t need to necessarily. I like that about it.

The Indy: It seems to eliminate certain social aspects of the museum. The floating context is more akin to something like a book. The experience of it is immediately subjective.

MJ: I love going to a museum more than anything. I guess I love the idea of museums sending things out in the world. It is like a book, except that it goes right to you.

The Indy: On books—I know you collect errata, book corrections.

MJ: It’s a very passive collection, because I just have to come upon them. Now and then I do, and it’s always really exciting. I’ll yelp and go put it in my folder that I’ve had for 25 years but still only have 12 or 15 in there. I’ve found some nice ones and see no reason to stop it. It’s not going to overrun my house.

The Indy: The title “We Think Alone” seems to suggest the question of whether or not you see yourself, in this, as trying to approach something like thought.

The Indy: I’ve only ever found one myself, in a textbook. It seems like you have to have a book with a direct, practical purpose. It makes no sense to correct a piece of fiction.

MJ: I guess I was thinking mostly about how email is not a simultaneous conversation. I think I Wikipedia-ed “email” the way you do when you’re trying to look at all angles of something.

Like—“What is email?”—you know? It emphasized that lack of simultaneity. That struck me about it.

MJ: I did…Do you know a subscription-based art project called The Thing? All these artists make objects and they produce the objects. You can subscribe and receive the objects. They’re doing a book, and so I had to figure out what my contribution to this book would be. And I made an errata for it. But a correction suggests that something is a typo, then provides a correction.

The Indy: In your work there seems to be a definite ethic of one’s self in relation to others. I notice you use second person and first person plural often in your titles—It Chooses You, No One Belongs Here More Than You, as well as Me, You, and Everyone We Know.

The Indy: It’s recursive, in that case.

07 █ interviews

MJ: Yeah. It’s actually wrong. It creates a mistake instead of fixing one.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ARTLANTIC Public art meets public space in Atlantic City

by Erin Schwartz Illustration by Andres Chang it’s the summer of 2013, and I’m watching an ad for Jersey Shore tourism in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. That fall, I had seen photos of the devastated beaches an hour away from my hometown—Long Beach Island, Seaside Heights, Manasquan—but most memorable were the pictures of the storm clouds passing over Atlantic City’s high-rise casinos.

Now, in the commercial, Springsteen guitar plays while sunkissed children trace “#strongerthanthestorm” on the beach with sandy fingers. Governor Chris Christie declares, “The Jersey Shore: open for business.” This is three years after the Atlantic City episode of Jersey Shore airs, in which Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino and Snooki get into a fight over a comment about Snooki’s weight. They scream, battle lines are drawn, but the drama blows over and the cast still enjoys a night out at AC’s hip nightclubs, drinking bottles of vodka with blurred-out labels. Atlantic City’s reputation has been tied to this glitzy casino culture since the late 1970s. But the more recent devastation of Hurricane Sandy created a different narrative—the casino industry is failing, the city’s infrastructure is damaged, and Atlantic City needs to find a new act.

Atlantic City hopes to revamp its image through the efforts of curator Lance Fung and his Artlantic project.

Commissioned by the Atlantic City Alliance, a private group funded by state casino tax revenues, Fung’s Artlantic is a series of public art installations specifically designed for the area’s cultural and ecological context. The first exhibits were installed just before Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, and the last are slated to open in 2016. These installations are meant to counteract the negative images of Atlantic City, both an overthe-top, cultureless casino city and as a shore town facing economic trouble in the storm’s aftermath. +++ the artlantic project has two sites so far— Étude Atlantis, an installation on the boardwalk by John Roloff, and a green space titled Wonder which features landscape design by Diana Balmori and incorporates works by Kiki Smith, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, and Robert Barry. Roloff’s Étude Atlantis is a long stage, sloped slightly inward and bordered by slanted trees. Inspired by the search for Atlantis, the space is a largescale optical illusion; the back wall and floor are painted with angular monochrome spirals that congregate on a mirrored “cistern” at its center. The piece functions as an interactive mural and performance space for dancers and musicians.

The second installation, Wonder, is both public art and green space. Tucked away behind a row of buildings, the landscape designed by Balmori involves two circular mounds that form a figure eight, wildflowers planted in the center, and a tall screen of local beach grasses. Near one mound is a low garden of bright-red plants and sculpture of a woman holding the prone body of a doe, both by Kiki Smith. A wooden pirate ship half-sunken in the sand by Ilya and

NOVEMBER 01 2013

Emilia Kabakov occupies the park’s other end. Weaving between the two are conceptual artist Robert Barry’s textbased pieces. These giant colored letters spell out aspirational words—“BECOMING,” “DESIRE,” “GLORIOUS,” “PERSONAL”—that illuminate at night and are a clever riff off of the kitschy casino signage nearby. Also part of the Wonder installation are “thrown ropes,” three snaking patterns of boulders, perennial evergreens, and annual flowers by Peter Hutchinson, as well as interactive birds’ nests built by Robert Lach and Victorian furniture with hurricane water-level marks

by New Jersey artist Jediah Morfit.

Curator Lance Fung is excited to speak about Wonder, because to him, its dual function as public art and public space represents a significant curatorial challenge. In an interview with the Independent, Fung said “[The Atlantic City Alliance] found out about me through the grapevine and approached me. They had no clue… if this should be a biennial or art fair, or an exhibition indoors… The ACA was set up to help promote Atlantic City and to show a different side of the city other than what you see in the headlines.”

Given significant creative latitude by the ACA, Fung took into account the city’s resources and needs. He noticed that AC had many empty lots, “but in meetings with local people, I heard again and again, ‘we need a safe, clean, and green space.’” Instead of creating a straightforward art exhibit, Fung decided to use Artlantic as a platform to build the green space that the city lacked, creating a public art-park with the ACA’s funding that located high-art pieces in an outdoor space more accessible than a gallery. Fung said, “With all this money for an art show… I can create something that may be more necessary or useful—public space.” +++ the wonder installation, fung’s park of public art, is not located on the main tourist thoroughfares. Fung hopes that its main users will be Atlantic City residents, not the visitors who come for the casinos and clubbing. He often mentions inclusiveness as a goal for Artlantic, contrasting Wonder with the central boardwalk that links casinos and tchotchke shops.

“There are public spaces where people are not welcome… [like] The Boardwalk, which I saw as a pedestrian freeway.

Poor residents are not welcome on the boardwalk, they are told ‘don’t come in unless you’re going to buy.’” The park is meant to provide a counterpoint—to show a side of AC not so saturated with the hyperconsumerism of the gambling industry. He is trying to build a space figuratively miles away from the gaudy Boardwalk casinos.

However, it is unclear how the park will become an inclusive or well-used public space beyond the fact that Wonder is free to enter. Fung often draws a distinction between inclusive and exclusive spaces to explain his project, but also separates “art people” and “not art people.” He says, “I was working in a void… [due to] no local support from creative people” and expresses that “making art for tourists is

watering down any intellectual merit.” Yes, art designed for tourists is often bad art; down the boardwalk from Roloff’s op-art mural is another interactive art piece, a life-sized Monopoly board with three-foot-tall green house pieces and oversized dice. It is designed for the photo op, and Fung may be right in assuming that visitors to AC are as attracted to its kitsch as they are to the artistic merits of Wonder and Étude Atlantis. But there is a tension between the mission of creating a welcoming public space and the hierarchy of good or bad aesthetics that is inherent to the project of curating.

Fung hopes his project includes the city’s residents and excludes the glitz and kitsch that have made AC infamous.

In fact, Wonder’s landscape was designed to block off the Boardwalk; Fung remembers asking himself, “How high can we make the mound so that they can’t see the casino or the strip club across the street?” But the distinction between desirable and undesirable aesthetics goes beyond aversion to tourism or over-the-top nightclubs—it conflicts with the public nature of the space Fung wants to create. If AC’s yearround residents think Wonder is ugly and do not use the park, in the view that divides “art people” and “not art people”, the park has not failed as a public space. Instead, the residents simply have bad taste and do not understand it.

Speaking to this concern, Fung says, “people need to give the general population a bit more credit for appreciating art, and we also need to educate general public as to what it is.” Although he does trust that AC’s residents will enjoy the installations, underneath is still the idea that liking Artlantic is a sign of good taste, and that not everyone has good taste.

Creating public space is crucial, and so is giving public artists the latitude to make good art that the public might hate. Fung is working to reconcile these two forms of public aesthetics, but there is a conflict of interest—though not an insurmountable one—between building democratic public space and the curator’s belief that the art is good, whether the public appreciates it or not.

This is also what makes the project so exciting. Fung says that “a true success is in giving the project enough time to blossom,” and he is right—public space is judged on how well it ages and how well it is used, and hopefully the residents of Atlantic City will find in Wonder the well-designed green space they did not have before. On a larger scale, “Artlantis” was commissioned to save the Atlantic City tourist industry from itself. But anyone from the Garden State can tell that an attempt to remake AC will not stick unless it incorporates a certain amount of trashy Jersey joie de vivre. It will require a willingness to trim down the beach grass, reveal that there are casinos, strip clubs, and a giant Monopoly board nearby, and allow Artlantic to be part of Atlantic City.

ERIN SCHWARTZ B’15 would totally go clubbing with the cast of Jersey Shore.

ARTS █ 08

SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE

Arcade Fire and The Virtual Window

by Tristan Rodman Illustration by Aaron Harris

“Trapped in a prison / In a prism of light” – Reflektor, “Reflektor” “The window opens onto a three-dimensional world beyond: it is a membrane where surface meets depth, where transparency meets its barriers.”

– The Virtual Window I grew up in a house with large panes of glass for walls. The living room, always illuminated by sunlight, faced south looking over Los Angeles. The distinction between window and wall was never one I had reason or resource to make; the house brought with it a certain mode of viewing.

I had dreams where the translucent boundaries disappeared; I could reach out and touch the city.

My childhood was spent waiting for my parents to emerge from their offices in the basement, where the light could not bend. I would press my ear to the carpeted floor and strain to hear the muffled sounds of typing below. My father shuffled between screenplay projects and participation in “The WELL,” an early online community. My mother was hard at work on her second book, The Virtual Window. As I tried to listen through the floor, breaching the opaque material, my parents sat in front of windows, entering and researching the virtual.

Upstairs, the expansive glass panes brought the outside in, at once displaying a panoramic cityscape and highlighting its distance. In reality, the buildings were impossible to reach. The computer screens we hid behind displaced and augmented the windows, offering an illusion of immersive space, a glance at something on the other side.

Arcade Fire’s fourth album, Reflektor, released this past Tuesday, inhabits these liminal spaces—between inside and outside, illuminated and obscured, life and afterlife. It is split across two discs. Reflektor moves through death and dying, the powers and failings of art, and the refractions created when trying to access the inaccessible. Speaking on her childhood, singer and multi-instrumentalist Régine Chassange told Rolling Stone, “I listened to my neighbor’s music, the sounds coming through the walls.” Sound can pierce the opaque in ways that light cannot.

Reflektor reveals the inevitable mutations in light and sound as they cross media—walls, windows, screens. Like my dreams of touching the city, Reflektor and The Virtual Window begin with glass and attempt to move through it. The virtual, in definition “almost or nearly as described, but not completely,” shows the loss inherent in a transfer between and through formats.

On the title track, husband and wife Win Butler and Régine Chassange sing in alternation, “I thought I found a way to enter / It’s just a reflektor.” Chassange’s voice echoes back, warbled and refracted. She sings through a prism.

On Sunday mornings, my parents always came upstairs. A certain set of records accompanied those mornings: Patti Smith’s Easter, Love’s Forever Changes, The Velvet Underground & Nico. I introduced Arcade Fire into the Sunday morning rotation. Light and sound filled the house, if only for a few hours, before work began again.

“Sometimes it moves so fast / If you stop to ask / It’s already passed” – Reflektor, “You Already Know” “[The window] opens, it closes; it separate the spaces of here and there, inside and outside, in front of and behind.”

– The Virtual Window

Milk to create The Wilderness Downtown, an interactive music video that stages “We Used to Wait” on the streets surrounding the viewer’s childhood home.

They made a short film with Spike Jonze, Scenes from the Suburbs, turning America’s anonymous subdivisions into expansive landscapes.

Arcade Fire do not simply make records, they build entire worlds. Music becomes the primary access point for something much larger.

Reflektor continues to push the boundaries of what an album is and can be. Where does the frame hang around a record? All of Arcade Fire’s performances around Reflektor, from a secret show in Montreal to an NPR session at Capitol Records, have been done under a full-band pseudonym: The Reflektors. By changing the band name, Arcade Fire reframe themselves, granting critical distance to the work and opening up play within it. At a small show in a Bushwick warehouse on October 18th, formal attire or costume was mandatory. Arcade Fire were performing as another band, so their audience listened under other identities. James Murphy, the record’s producer and fellow leftfield pop culture icon, introduced three people in large papier mâché heads as “Arcade Fire.” The band bumbled through their opening chords. Moments later, a curtain dropped on the other side of the venue to reveal The Reflektors, charging into “Reflektor.” “Sorry we played a trick on you,” Butler giggled. They played the same trick a few days later on The Colbert Report, and again Tuesday night on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

The first glimpses of the album were revealed through paintings on the sides of buildings, chalk drawings, graffiti, and silver stickers all over the world—from Madrid to Montreal.

Photos of the insignia, the letters R/E/F/L/E/K/T/O/R placed in a diamond formation inside of a circle, were documented by an Instagram account of the same name. The photos started popping up in early August, though the band did not acknowledge any connection for three and a half weeks. The experience of Reflektor unfolded before us, always mediated, always watched. The panoptic question flipped: who is watching whom?

“Shot by a security camera / You can’t watch your own image” – Neon Bible, “Black Mirror” “The mirror casts mon reflet partout (my reflection everywhere)” – Neon Bible, “Black Mirror” My parents and I went to see Arcade Fire at the Hollywood Bowl in 2007. On stage, they were accompanied by a series of small circular screens, onto which film clips and feeds of the performance were projected. They opened with “Black Mirror,” the entire Bowl draped in black and white shadow. As they transitioned into “Keep the Car Running,” both stage and screen burst into color. We were seated far back into the crowd, distanced enough that it was easier to watch the band play on the large screens floating above the audience. At times, the cameras would eclipse each other, capturing both the band on stage and the projection of the band playing.

Arcade Fire were in many places at once.

In her book, my mother describes the visual phenomenon of mise en abyme—the multiplicity and recursion created by standing in between two mirrors. Windows within windows, doors within doors, screens within screens, all ad infinitum. Literally translated as “placed into abyss,” the term attempts to describe a phenomenon that exists primarily in image, not in words. Such is the experience of Reflektor, a record that draws its borders loosely, framed with its edges intentionally blurred.

Nearly a decade since their first record, Funeral, Arcade Fire find themselves in an uncomfortable position: they are North America’s premier rock band. Their last record, 2010’s The Suburbs, won the Grammy for Album of the Year. They worked with Google and director Chris

09 █ ARTS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NO UOY EES EDIS REHTO EHT wodniW lautriV ehT dna eriF edacrA

namdoR natsirT yb sirraH noraA yb noitartsullI

“What if the camera / Really do / Take your soul? / Oh no!”

– Reflektor, “Flashbulb Eyes” “The virtual is a substitute… an immaterial proxy for the material” – The Virtual Window The first music from Reflektor came via a “virtual projection.” The word “virtual” is often thought of in conjunction with cyberspace—an imagined elsewhere.

Yet, as my mother would insist, it is more than that; it refers to the experience of a transfer between formats.

Metaphor is virtual, rendering images into words. Photography is virtual, rendering three dimensional spaces into two dimensional prints. Memory itself is virtual—the transformation of an event into an image in the brain.

Virtuality is an attempt to capture the otherwise inaccessible.

Arcade Fire’s collaboration with interactive filmmaker Vincent Morriset plays with the ideas and definitions of virtuality.

At justareflektor.com, you synchronize your phone and computer screens. The site prompts you to hold the phone screen up to the computer’s webcam. By changing the position of the phone, you can shift the focus and framing of the video on the screen, or direct light onto the faces of the actors. Sonic elements come out of the phone’s speakers, blending with the larger soundscape. For the first half of the video, the webcam feed only tracks the phone’s movement. Halfway through, the feed is suddenly displayed back at you, inverted and projected onto a broken mirror. You see your face, broken and refracted, holding up one screen to another. The reflection multiplies—mise en abyme. This moment haunts, both for its inversion of technology and its reflection of person onto his/herself. You can’t access yourself in the virtual; the image is broken, face sandwiched between screens. “Like the window,” my mother writes, “the screen is at once a surface and a frame—a reflective plane onto which an image is cast and a frame that limits its view.”

“Afterlife,” the album’s second single, first appeared in a lyric video with the track’s words laid over Marcel Camus’ 1959 film Black Orpheus. The track struggles with what happens after death—both of person and of love. Win and Regine ask together, “When love is gone / Where does it go?” The problem is that of a system that doesn’t necessarily close; something is always lost into the ether. The track takes melancholy tone and morphs it into physical action. Using a deeply locked groove and vocal chants, the locus of the chorus (“Can we just work it out? / Scream and shout ‘till we work it?”) is the dancefloor. Catharsis seems possible here in a reverse rendering—if we’ve lost so much transferring physical to virtual, there’s hope in mapping the virtual back onto the physical. On The Colbert Report, interviewing as a member of The Reflektors, Win Butler stated that their ideal is to have you “shaking that ass with a tear in the eye.”

“Took a drive into the sprawl / To find the house where we used to stay” – The Suburbs, “Sprawl I (Flatland)” “We can know the past only in terms of how it has been constructed for us…mediated through the lenses of the present.”

– The Virtual Window It was in our glass house that my mother passed away. In her final weeks, she phased in and out of the present. I spoke to her in a bedroom in Los Angeles in 2009 and she replied from a trip to Paris in 1995. Time slipped and morphed, its horizontality folding into a vertical stack.

The Suburbs came out nearly a year later. I drove around the hills of Los Angeles with the stereo loud, plumbing the emptiness. I wished for the streets to rearrange like the town in “Suburban War.” I sped down the 101 late at night, waiting to feel.

My mother described the flatness of Champaign, IL, the suburb in which she grew up, as “almost twodimensional.” I entered her street into The Wilderness Downtown and watched the flatness expand on the screen in front of me. It was a collapsing of perspective and visual planes, each visual element its own moving window. Windows slipped and morphed, layered in a vertical stack. In The Virtual Window, she asserts, “Perspective may have met its end on the computer desktop.”

– The Virtual Window “We watched the end of a century / Compressed on a tiny screen” – The Suburbs, “Deep Blue” The key to Reflektor may be in its retelling of Greek mythology. “Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)” and “It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus)” play with the myth of Orpheus, who attempts to bring his wife Eurydice back from the dead with music. Of course, he can’t. Win and Régine map the characters onto themselves, singing at each other across an impermeable divide. The two tracks are inverses, mirrors, windows into each other. “Awful Sound” ends, “We know there’s a price to pay / For love in the reflective age / I met you up upon a stage / Our love in a reflective age.” Myth updated, the track ends with the recognition of impossibility: “Oh no, now you’re gone.” The finality of death hits as the song swoops up into a vacuum, sound shutting off entirely as if collapsed into a black hole.

Yet, as the next track pines, “It’s Never Over.” Régine sings as Eurydice: “Hey, Orpheus! / I’m behind you / Don’t turn around / I can find you.” Of course, she can’t. In the second verse, she switches to French, calling out, “De l’autre côté de l’eau / Comme un echo,” which translates to “On the other side of the water / Like an echo.” Win sings back, “Hey Eurydice / Can you see me?” The two worlds come into dialogue, yet never break through to each other. At the close of “It’s Never Over,” Win and Regine sing together, split in stereo. Male voice on the left, female voice on the right, the song ends with them far apart, trying to breach the span through the listener’s ears. Unable to reach the other side, they lament: “It’s over too soon.” If The Suburbs is a mid-century American novel, Reflektor is a Greek tragedy.

“After life / I think I saw what happens next / It was just a glimpse of you, like looking through a window / Or a shallow sea / Could you see me?”

– Reflektor, “Afterlife” “I know you’re living in my mind / It’s not the same as being alive” – Reflektor, “Supersymmetry” I took my dad to see Arcade Fire in 2010 at the Shrine Auditorium. The back of Win Butler’s piano had been replaced by a screen, showing video of roads, clouds, and houses in uniform rows. A large LED billboard hung over the stage. They opened with “Ready to Start,” and Butler bellowed, “I would rather be alone / Than pretend I feel alright.” We exchanged few words that night.

My mother concluded The Virtual Window with a note on the suicide of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who threw himself out of his apartment window in 1995. She explains, “for Deleuze, there is always a beyond, outside this frame, an ‘out-of-field,’ a more ‘radical elsewhere.’” Through death, “Deleuze found this elsewhere.”

Death itself is virtual, an attempt to transfer into something uncapturable. Yet there is always something lost in this transfer, inaccessibly on the other side. Separated by the window, staring at a screen, reflected on the other side of the water, the memory of my mother recedes, mise en abyme.

TRISTAN RODMAN B’15 thought he found the connector.

NOVEMBER 01 2013

ARTS █ 10

THE MINDREADERS Providence from the mind’s eye

by Sam Lin Sommer | Illustration by Lucrezia Sanes MOTHER MYSTIC’S APOTHECARY SHOP somewhere, nestled among pubs and pizzerias, the wise Susan Asselin was waiting for me. I had scheduled a Tarot reading, but I couldn’t find any occult images or neon lights.

Her shop, with a gray exterior and wide storefront windows, was fairly unassuming. Only an ornately decorated sign reading “Mother Mystic’s Apothecary Shop” distinguished it from the rest of Federal Hill.

I didn’t know at the time that Tarot cards—playing cards with symbolic images ranging from a tower struck by lightning to a fool carrying a bagpipe—have a far broader cultural background than the occult. Originally used for recreational card playing in 15th-century Italy, the cards attained mystical significance in the 18th century, when French scholar Antoine Court de Gebelin linked them to the religion of Ancient Egypt. Since then, the mysterious symbols have been linked to traditions as diverse as the Hebrew Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, and Jungian psychoanalysis.

It wasn’t until the 1960s, amidst great spiritual upheaval, that Tarot became popular in the United States.

The front room of a Tarot reading shop could have been anything from a mini-museum of Egyptian artifacts to a sanctuary of water fountains and incense This room was neither. On one shelf lay a collection of herbs used for healing and for creating love, among other things. On another, penisshaped candles lay side-by-side with blended glass candles.

An entire wall was dedicated to books on the occult, some brand-new and some covered in dust. They covered subjects from handy spells to the lives of great psychics to the histories of magical traditions in the West. I turned around and saw the woman I had come for sitting behind the front counter: Susan Breton Asselin, known to her faithfuls as “Reverend Mother Susan Asselin.” Wearing a beaded necklace and a long dress, she was drinking tea out of a plastic mug. “Hey, Susan. Do you still have time for a tarot reading?” I asked.

She looked up, revealing a face drained of emotion—or maybe spiritual energy. But her blue eyes shone beneath her fatigue, even as she responded with a flat “yup.”

A door with a sign that read “Be respectful—psychic reading in progress” opened into a large, dimly-lit room with a square table. She grabbed a deck of ornately decorated cards and handed them to me. “Here—shuffle the cards and think about what questions you are trying to answer.”

I had come in to be taken on a spiritual journey; I didn’t have any questions prepared. But like anyone else, I suppose I had been mulling over a lot of questions recently. If Susan could offer me quick answers, why not ask? I thought hard as I shuffled and handed her back the deck.

Without hesitating, she flipped over a series of cards and stared at them intently, trying to figure out what the metaphysical world was telling her. Still staring down at the cards, she asked me what my questions were.

I told her that I wanted to find a sense of inner happiness. To this she nodded and answered unwaveringly, “Yes. It seems like you’ve already found it, though. But you ignore it, again and again. Why do you keep ignoring it?”

For a second I was speechless. I squinted at her questioningly as an idea took shape in the back of my mind.

I had been toying with an interest in poetry for the last few years. When I asked Susan about “inner happiness,” I had wondered whether, maybe even hoped that, she would tell me that poetry was worth my time.

I responded: “Poetry. It’s just so risky...I guess I’ve always known that it’s something special to me. But I’m afraid of it.”

She nodded again. I had to follow my heart, she explained, in order to find success. Our session continued this way for a while, with her drawing insecurities out of me as she gave me more and more soul-freeing advice. “Follow your gut,” “Don’t be held down by definitions,” and “Be your own boss” were the common threads. She even had some predictions about my future career: as a poet, I would be the “bridge between two worlds,” and my art would be the center of various streams of income.

NovemBER 01 2013

Several times, it crossed my mind that her predictions might be one-size-fits-all responses for anyone coming to a psychic for guidance. After all, anyone coming to a reader for guidance is ready to take a leap of faith. All the reader needs to do is say “jump.” I knew this, but I didn’t care; her suggestions were exactly what I needed to hear. +++ susan has drawn customers from all religious persuasions: “I have Muslims, I have Christians, I have Hindus, I have atheists, I have agnostics. When your life gets stressful, and you’re looking for answers, this is a place where you will generally come if you can’t find answers in traditional beliefs.

Paganism doesn’t require that you believe in anything.” This made sense coming from a woman who grew up steeped in “magical Catholicism,” a religion that involves performing witchcraft to communicate with saints. The saints to her were not higher beings residing in heaven, but rather “archetypes with energy behind them.” She spent her childhood playing with Ouija boards and swinging divining pendulums to communicate with the spiritual world.

It seems that while Susan didn’t believe in organized religion, she did believe in her intuition. When I asked her how she approaches Tarot reading, she told me, “I use Tarot cards to spark my intuition.” Then she corrected herself: “To spark my psychic ability.” When she reads Tarot, she told me, “Suddenly I’ll ‘know’ things. Sometimes I’ll just hear words.

Other times I’ll see pictures.” When she stared meditatively at those cards, images and words were popping into her mind. Whether they were simply more intense versions of the average person’s eureka moment, or distinguishably otherworldly experiences, I don’t know.

No matter how much we deliberate, or how much we search the ancient texts of our religions, there comes a point at which a problem seems unsolveable. It is from this place that people decide to turn to readers like Susan—because they need to be told to follow their hearts. Whether Susan offers psychic abilities or simply “intuition,” and whether her guidance is personalized or one-size-fits-all, this is her simple message.

PSYCHIC FAIR on my way out of Susan’s reading room, I walked through a kitchen where a woman carrying a child sat talking with a man in a hoodie. At first glance, I mistook them for a family hanging out after a psychic reading. But, I remembered Susan had told me earlier that she was holding a “psychic fair” where three local psychics congregated and gave “mini-readings.”

The man and woman were both psychics.

“Susan’s one of the best,” the man in the hoodie told me. His name was Jonathan. The esteem with which he held her was rare in the psychic world. It’s tough to find common ground where space is staked out for Catholics, Cabalists, and Romany. I was lucky to have stumbled upon this gathering of three readers.

Susan recommended that I speak to the man in the hoodie, whose name was Jonathan. A young, glib, selfproclaimed “bibliophile,” he was a skeptic, even towards himself. “I don’t care if you call it psychosis or psychic,” he said, “because my ability has allowed me to help people.” He went on to cite the services he has done for the community: solving crimes, identifying illness, and emotionally healing the victims of assault and rape. He is trained in mediation to handle clients who need to settle complex conflicts before they can be spiritually healed. But in cases, like those of assault and rape when, as a psychic, he “can’t ethically take responsibility,” he has “a list of numbers to call.” His duty to others, not his assuredness in his powers, grounds him.

Minus his psychic ability, Jonathan is a therapist. But that’s a big minus. A conventional therapist provides clients with clinically-approved solutions to their problems. Some people simply don’t benefit from conventional therapy, and others have problems so complex that formal logic simply

can’t tease out a solution. Still others may have no faith in Western logic. These are the people who all must find faith in something else: the irrational, the mystical, the occult.

KAREN BENTLEY, WAYLAND SQUARE to skeptics, it may be a bit easier to believe in a reader who doesn’t even call herself a psychic—or believe in the metaphysical at all. That may be the appeal of Karen Bentley, a Tarot reader who practices in an office in Wayland Square, Providence. When I looked up the stairs of her office complex next to L’Artisan Café, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would her place of work be a dark, incense-filled den covered in mystical artwork and shriveled heads? Or would this non-psychic reader live at the cutting-edge of Tarot in a bleached white and stainless steel station lined with flat-screen monitors?

A tall, young black woman stood confidently in the doorway. Her clothing was casual: She wore jeans and a blue sweater. She extended her hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Karen.”

With white walls and just enough room for a desk, two chairs, some shelves and small chest it could be described as economical. On the walls hung not incense-burning candles and or drawings of pentacles, but instead several certificates in Tarot reading and conflict mediation, along with a Bachelor’s of Science in Legal Studies from Roger Williams University.

As soon as we sat down, she perked up and began chatting excitedly. “I don’t give predictory readings. I view Tarot as a creative aid,” she said clearly and quickly (she has taken acting classes to refine her speaking skills). Unlike most psychic readers, she does not believe that Tarot has any fortune-telling powers. “I don’t like the word ‘psychic.’

I try to distance myself from that movement,” she told me.

Her ideas are closer to those of Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. Jung conceived of the Tarot as the ancient equivalent of today’s Rorschach test, bringing out archetypes contained in a person’s collective unconscious.

These archetypes represented universal parts of the human experience hidden in the subconscious mind. The closest Jung got to the metaphysical was his belief in “synchronicity,” the idea that meaningful coincidence, along with the conventional relationship between cause and effect, drives the interactions in the universe.

According to Karen, the images in Tarot cards have such a universal significance that they bring out deeply nested feelings from other peoples’ minds and her own as a reading occurs. “Whoever invented it, invented it as a psychological game,” she told me. Her Tarot readings are driven not by her predictions, but by the clients’ thoughts and questions. “I try my hardest not to ask questions. If I wait long enough, usually the client will. I have to stop myself from projecting onto the client.” +++ the friendly congregation of readers I stumbled upon in Mother Mystic’s was a rare occurence. There isn’t much cooperation in the psychic world. Susan said, “It’s not a community. it’s dog-eat-dog. Every person’s watching out for his or herself.”

Many readers hold their profession to a moral standard.

But at the same time, some, Jonathan told me, are “nefarious assholes. They’ll tell you, ‘oh, you’re cursed. Here, buy a $200 candle.”

Readers do perform a special service to the community.

In few other environments do people leave behind all formal schools of logical and religious thought in preparation for a leap of faith. Readers, whether guided by psychic power or synchronicity, are masters of instinct, and they impart every bit of intuition that they can to their soul-searching clients.

I asked Susan what she thought the purpose of the modern-day reader is. She told me, “Most of my clients come to me because they want to redirect their lives.” Then, with conviction, “I can see it on their faces.”

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NOTHING WAS THE SA E W

On Drake and the white boy imaginary in the summer of 2003 I was unanimously considered the best rapper at Camp Walt Whitman in Piermont, New Hampshire. Looking back, I may have been even better than I gave myself credit for. I had a sophisticated sense of timing and was dexterous with internal rhyme schemes. Sam Rosen/Flow’s chosen/To make folks frozen, like naked hobos in Hoboken. Rap was part of my identity there. I gave album suggestions, settled arguments, and in my most important contribution, organized the camp’s first-ever rap battle. It happened late one night, after dozens of hopefuls had scribbled in their notebooks and rhymed in the shower for weeks. We tried our best to recreate the dark, musty setting of 8 Mile—there were forty of us and we packed in close, left only one light on in the center of the cabin, and used an extra shower head as a microphone. Everyone had given himself a moniker. Jesse Goldberg was “Dr. Dreidel,” and I coined myself “20 Shekel,” evoking the bravado and ruthlessness of 50 Cent, whose Get Rich or Die Trying was the anthem of our summer spent canoeing and playing whiffle ball. +++ Last year, I saw exactly who I would have become had I never retired 20 Shekel and just went on rapping. His name is Lil Dicky—a white, upper-middle class Jewish rapper from the suburbs of Philadelphia. Richmond University, class of 2010. When his first music video went up on YouTube, it got one million views in 48 hours.

I will argue that no white rapper in the entire world is as consumed by his whiteness as Lil Dicky. Most white rappers have one mediocre catharsis track where they exhume their anxieties about doing Black music; Lil Dicky is trying to build a career out of this tension, and so far he’s pulling it off. What makes Dicky so fascinating, though, is how directly he seems to embody the bizarre logic of conscious appropriation: he is constantly lamenting the fact that he is not Black while simultaneously celebrating the spoils of white privilege.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the video for a song called “White Dude.”

The video shows Lil Dicky gleefully celebrating all the spoils of white privilege. He smokes weed in broad daylight in front of a police car, drives a BMW into the driveway of a gorgeous suburban home, and eats nutritious food while his Black friend opts for a cheaper, less healthy option. Where I eat at when I’m high is where they eat at to survive— food chains! At one point, Lil Dicky simply extends his bare arm to compare skin color with a Black man. As the camera pans up, our protagonist is grinning while his friend looks blank and defeated. Dicky is pretty happy to be a man, too— he’s happy not to have to “cake on my makeup,” “eat dick, and he doesn’t have to “speak to his mother to still love her.” When his girlfriend presents him with a positive pregnancy test, he simply waves his hand and leaves the room. “If I impregnate I can pack a bag and be on my way, but good luck, girl!” It’s amazing, really, the way the song so explicitly outlines the realities of white supremacy and patriarchy, and then tells us that has nothing to do with Black people.

But Lil Dicky also sees his whiteness as the greatest tragedy of his career. This pain is everywhere, but he has an entire song dedicated to it, called “How Can I Become a Bawlaa?” The song is basically a list of all the rap tropes he doesn’t have access to do because he’s white. “I just wish I could say Black things,” he laments.

Lil Dicky is grounding his entire narrative in the tension we were navigating at summer camp— the cover of his mixtape is a panned-out shot of him standing in the middle of a gigantic, on-fire star of David— and he’s off to a nice start. That his videos can garner millions of views in a few days is a testament to how many white rap fans relate to his position, the same one I struggled with as a 13-year-old. In a recent appearance on AXS TV, Dicky’s interviewer, a fellow white guy, said this: “That’s what I love about your music, man. You paint the perfect picture of what it’s like to struggle as a white, heterosexual, middle-class male. And hip hop needs that.” The audience chuckles awkwardly, but Lil Dicky remains serious. “Yeah,” he says, “there’s a big voice out there that’s not represented in hip hop.” +++ if lil dicky had launched his career when I was at summer camp, he would have been everyone’s second-favorite rapper, but our favorite—by a mile—would have been Drake.

Drake’s second full-length album Take Care won this year’s Grammy for best rap album and the reception to his recently-released Nothing Was the Same cements him, if Take Care hadn’t already, as one of the very biggest stars in music. He’s handsome and charismatic and talented. But there’s something else going on that has put Drake on top of the world’s

05 █ ARTS

by Sam Rosen Illustration by Casey Friedman most popular kind of music, and it has so much to do with the kind of tension that Lil Dicky is navigating.

Drake is, according to lildicky.com, LD’s favorite rapper, something that is both interesting and incredibly obvious. Drake is Dicky’s favorite, and would have been 20 Shekel’s favorite, and maybe is my favorite today, because he is the only person that stands at the absolute center of race and identity in hip hop.

The details of Drake’s life combine to form a racial identity that far more complex than Drake simply being thought of as a Black man. This is true partially because Drake has a Black father and a white mother, but that’s not the only reason. J. Cole, for instance, also has a Black father and a white mother, and he would never receive a critique like the one rapper Kool A.D. (of Das Racist) leveled at Drake, tweeting: “i like the new Drake album but 1. he didn’t start from the bottom 2. he says nigger a few too many times 3. he seems to hate poor people. [sic]” Here lies the complexity: Drake is Jewish, an identity that today in America is deeply coded as white. Yet Drake is also universally recognized as Black, because if you have a Black parent in America then you’re Black. Drake is not the only Black Jew in this country, but he is coded as both in a way that would seem impossible if we couldn’t watch him pull it off.

Drake is Black and white and hood and suburbs and introspective and aggressive and delicate and hyper-masculine. He was formerly a child actor on the teen drama Degrassi, but his mentor is Lil Wayne. His video for the recent single “Started from the Bottom” shows Drake working a boring job at a convenience store and living in his mother’s house— his idea of the bottom, as Kool A.D. notes, is decidedly middle class.

The richest example of Drake’s embodiment of this paradox is the video for Take Care’s “HYRF (Hell Yeah Fuckin’ Right).” The song features Drake at the peak of his powers. He raps the middle of his verse in a single, spellbinding breath. He is powering through his words, but enunciates everything perfectly as he recounts a failed relationship—in mere seconds we learn where she went to school, who’s paying her tuition, where they ate on their first date, how long they waited to have sex, and the details of their last awkward texting session.

But you could watch the video on mute and still glean its importance—the song itself is completely tangential to the brilliance of the video. The first frame is actual footage of a young Aubrey at his bar mitzvah. A white relative bends down to ask him if he has anything to say to the camera. “Mazel tov!” he beams, adorably. “On October 24th 2011 Aubrey “Drake” Graham chose to get re-bar mitzvah’d as a re-commitment to the Jewish religion,” the screen reads as little Aubrey dances awkwardly at his actual party.

“The following is a clip displaying the events that took place…” And then there he is, all grown up, standing outside an enormous Miami synagogue with his entourage, reading carefully from the Torah as the rabbi assists him. He kisses the ends of his talis, his prayer shawl, and touches it gently to the scroll, just like I did in 2003. It’s a sold-out show—the pews are packed with white family members and Black rap celebrities. Brian “Birdman” Williams, CEO of Drake’s Cash Money Records, is sitting between DJ Kahled and an old white lady. Everyone wears the same proud smile. The candle-lighting ceremony—all of the shout-outs that a Jew ever gets to make, crammed into fifteen minutes—features R&B star Trey Songz and more tequila than cake, and segues into a cultural dance orgy.

White uncles make out with Black supermodels; Drake’s cousins chug Maneschevitz and break furniture with Lil Wayne.

Drake is the hip hop Rorschach test. Do you see a Black guy acting a little “too white,” or the opposite, like Kool A.D. does? You can hate Drake or love Drake for basically the same reasons. Drake would have meant everything to us at summer camp if he had been around when we were that age, because he would have been “Black enough” for us to accept him as an authentic rapper, yet “white enough” for us to feel like we could claim and celebrate him without being ashamed. Drake would have given us a deeper level of closeness with the Black music we were dying to feel and understand. I still experience that impulse, but now I better understand how wary I should be of embracing it. +++ for people worried about the appropriation of Black music, Drake poses an interesting dilemma. You can’t call his music appropriation, because he’s obviously Black, but the reception of his music has the potential to feel an awful lot like appropriation if you choose, reasonably, to look at Drake as a Jewish guy who makes great rap music. Luckily for the concerned, Drake’s music provides plenty of fodder for leveling a veiled critique of the very complicated racial politics he represents. Drake talks about love and intimacy

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

in a way that is more interesting and layered than almost any of his peers. Most rappers love songs are about women; Drake’s are about how men feel about women. Drake is not a feminist—far from it—but his perspective is unique for a genre whose mainstream rarely leaves the strip club unless it’s going straight to the parking lot to get a blowjob in the Maybach. “I’ve had sex four times this week—I’ll explain,” he coos shamefully on “Marvin’s Room.” “[I’m] having a hard time adjusting to fame.”

If you want to critique Drake these days, this is where you hit him. You frame him as soft, weak, overly sensitive, possibly homosexual. There is a Twitter account, @DrakeTheType, with almost half a million followers whose soul purpose is to churn out these kind of jokes. All the tweets start the same way, “Drake the type of nigga…”: “…to make a photo collage for his homeboy’s birthday.” “…to put a condom on to kiss a girl.” “…that won’t use hand sanitizer because he feels guilty about killing germs.” “…to try and pay for a grape he ate the grocery store.” “…that would get nudes from a girl then photoshop clothes back on her body….” “…who wears a robe and fuzzy slippers in the morning.”

These jokes are not relegated solely to the world of Internet shenanigans. Kendrick Lamar, the newest insurgent rap king, recently boasted in a verse at the BET Awards that he “tucked a sensitive rapper back in his pajama clothes,” and in the morning the music media was abuzz about how Kendrick dissed Drake without even mentioning him by name.

The point of these jokes is to weaken Drake by framing him as rap’s most prominent poser, and more specifically as something less than a real Black man. Dissing Drake is great self-promotion for Kendrick Lamar—whose good kid, m.a.a.d city, is adored by serious fans (and features a lovely verse from Drake) but whose commercial success so far comes nowhere near that of the “sensitive rapper”—because it both boosts his credibility with purists and increases his profile with mainstream fans. White fans do this too—con-

NOVEMBER 01 2013

demning Drake is one of the quickest ways to show that you’re a fan of “real” hip hop. I used to do this—my favorite way was to call him by this first name, Aubrey.

But this critique of Drake is so transparent. Instead of critiquing Drake for being white, we critique him for being soft. Instead of explicitly saying that Drake’s success feels a little like the most complex form of appropriation of Black music, because it brings fans like me a little closer to ownership of the music than maybe we should be, everyone just calls him a pussy. Drake is not a “real” rapper, so if Drake makes you feel a special connection with hip hop then you’re just fooling yourself. Problem solved.

Ironically, this critique calls on the classic, pernicious tropes of Black masculinity that rappers like Kendrick Lamar are so heavily praised for dismantling. Casting Drake to the periphery of hip hop culture—when he’s very obviously at its core—requires championing the same ideas that many are, rightly, so worried will spread through misguided appropriation of Black music: that Black men are violent thugs, that Black women are hoes not worthy of true personhood.

Drake often boasts that he plans to a very important rapper for a long time. I happen to think he’s right, but probably not in the same way he does. In 2013, as this country incessantly asks whether we are finally “post-race” in a way that proves that we obviously aren’t, Drake is the rare public figure whom we’ve been able to deem both white and Black, and really mean it, without having our brains explode. We don’t often get figures like Drake in American culture, someone who simultaneously makes us think so much about race without letting us barricade ourselves behind tropes and stereotypes. So Drake will continue to be incredibly meaningful as a measurement of racial ideology in America because how we think of him will say so much about where we are. It doesn’t matter if he wins 15 Grammys or his career fizzles out—either outcome would be a powerful referendum on our collective racial consciousness. His career has absolute value meaning. When your success is just as meaningful as your failure, you have power that not even Drake himself has likely ever dreamed of.

ARTS █ 06

STEVEN, LEON, AND YOU Playwright’s Note: If we are angry at science for its crimes, we must interrogate the dimensions of science’s fallacy.

If we are awed by science for its process, we must interrogate the dimensions of science’s fallacy.

One danger of science claiming too much authority is that it will have too much credibility.

The bigger danger in science claiming too much authority is that science could lose its credibility.

All of the dialogue attributed to real people is directly quoted. The ghost, of course, is me.

[Inside the Senate House in Cambridge, England, May 1959. Early evening.

CHARLES PERCY SNOW, chemist, stands before colleagues.]

CP SNOW. A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold–it was also negative.

Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of ‘Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?’

[GHOST OF CP SNOW, dressed identically to CP SNOW, enters, jogging slightly and out of breath. His shoes are untied. He trips slightly. He stands, stops and looks up, slightly surprised to see so many people.]

GHOST. I ask you, audience, to consider this moment in time. I ask you to consider your moment in time. Welcome to this intellectual dinner party. Here’s some sherry. Keep your wits about you as you watch the fight. You may end up in the melee. Dim the lights, note the exits, and light your hair on fire.

[Blackout.in] [The New Republic, online, Summer 2013. Scene is set in the same dinner party in Cambridge, a bar with oak chairs and gleaming taps. PINKER enters, a distinguished linguist and evolutionary psychologist from Harvard. PINKER wears a black suit, his curly hair mimicking Noam Chomsky’s or Albert Einstein’s.]

feel prickly and self-pitying about the humanistic insistence that there is more to the world than science can disclose…. Kant’s significant contributions to our understanding of mind and morality were plainly philosophical, and philosophy is not, and was certainly not for Kant, a science.

[PINKER takes out a notebook, furiously writing. WIESELTIER coughs slightly.

They both start to speak for a moment and then freeze in a tableau.]

[THE GHOST OF CP SNOW, who has been sitting in a chair on stage, stands and paces for a few moments. He returns to the table and climbs onto the back of the chair, perching slightly awkwardly.]

GHOST. [Addressing the audience] Pinker and Wieseltier are speaking in dichotomous language about those two cultures that Snow identified 50 years ago. Their public performance in an intellectual magazine reinforces categories of “science versus humanities,” actively deepening that divide. And, you! Where are you in that divide? You are deeply implicated! You may not even see this because it’s so close to your nose! But look up. The sun is far away and was in a different place earlier in the day. Doesn’t it seem like a more obvious guess to say that the sun probably revolves around the earth? And yet, it doesn’t. Schooling is an elaborate apparatus that functions to transmit a worldview from one generation to the next. How do you know the earth revolves around the sun? Or that the earth is round? When you hear a politician speak, do you expect to hear an argument based on statistics? When you find out somebody is a scientist, do you tend to have more respect for them? You are living in a time shaped by a particular scientific worldview.

[Murmuring grows in the audience. GHOST stands up, trips for a second time now.

GHOST quickly ties shoes and gulps down a glass of water.]

GHOST. Shh! Listen! Science is on trial! This trial is using two very rigid categories as reference. Wieseltier says science is a criminal. Pinker says that science can lead us into a new era of understanding. When Wieseltier demands that science stay out of “nonscientific questions,” what does that mean? How narrow do we allow this category to get?

[Audience murmurs loudly. JOSIANE-HOUDICOURT BARNES, a bilingual science teacher from a Massachusetts public school, stands up and waits for a moment until the talk dies down.]

STEVEN PINKER. [Leans tensely against the bar, eyes wild. He is speaking loudly.] Science Is Not Your Enemy. . . . The great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were scientists. Scientific carpetbaggers are regularly accused of determinism, reductionism, essentialism, positivism, and worst of all, something called “scientism.”…Scientism, in [a] good sense, is not the belief that members of the occupational guild called “science” are particularly wise or noble. On the contrary, the defining practices of science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are explicitly designed to circumvent the errors and sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable.

JOSIANE-HOUDICOURT BARNES. The lack of minority participation in science is a concern in many circles. . . . Blacks and Hispanics each constitute about two percent of the scientific workforce, [and] schooling rests at the heart of the issue. [In a] University of Miami study analysis of data from interviews with Haitian students, research [findings] associated the poor quality of the children’s responses to features of Haitian culture . . . I give examples of teachers who used discourse practices common in Haiti to leverage scientific argumentation in their classrooms. . . . These [practices] need not be seen as a detriment to learning but as a resource on which teachers can rely to open up views of scientific meaning and discourse.

[PINKER stands in the bar, a little drunk, and waits.]

[GHOST nods.]

[Time passes. We can hear the soft sound of pages turning in the back of the bar. The New Republic, online, Autumn 2013. The jazz is soft in the background and a few graduate students have gathered to watch the scene. LEON WIESELTIER finishes a cup of raspberry tea. He stands up from his table in the back of the room. Wieseltier is the current literary editor of the New Republic and an author of many books on Jewish identity in the modern world. He puts his glasses on and winds up a practiced Yeshiva-boy’s punch.]

GHOST. By having an artificially rigid frame of what types of discourses are “scientific,” we exclude those students from succeeding academically and filter them out of future labs—labs which end up needing those skills after all. By reinforcing the dichotomy between science and non-science, science research itself is hurt by limiting the voices at the table.

LEON WIESELTIER. Science confers no special authority, it confers no authority at all, for the attempt to answer a nonscientific question. It is not for science to say whether science belongs in morality and politics and art…. Some scientists and some scientizers

15 █ SCIENCE

[ANNE FAUSTO-STERLING, a biologist and feminist theorist, stands up and clears her throat authoritatively.]

ANNE FAUSTO-STERLING. Gonads, hormones, and chromosomes [do] not automatically determine a child’s gender role. . . . These scientists studied hermaphrodites.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

science on trial: a one-act play

by Eliza Cohen Illustration by Casey Friedman

. . but never questioned the fundamental assumption that there were only two sexes.

Intersexuality. . . in [their] view resulted from fundamentally abnormal processes. . . .

Gender systems change. As they transform, they produce different accounts of nature.

GHOST. Science is shaped by the gestalt of the time. This is a familiar and high stakes message. However, in his piece, Pinker is unwilling to back down out of the claim that rigorous methodologies can “circumvent errors” made by those inevitably flawed scientists. His insistence dooms science to lose in a public trial of its legitimacy. Scholars of the past decades have produced detailed examinations of the social structures that have built the scientific institutions. Pinker is defending science against attacks that he says come from humanities scholars and the religious community. Science is on trial. But the discoveries of science don’t suddenly crumble if we discuss their socially constructed production systems.

[BRUNO LATOUR, philosopher and sociologist of science, stands. He looks around the room. He smiles and puts his hands in his pocket.]

BRUNO LATOUR. They’re sitting around a table, some 15 French industrialists responsible for sustainable development in various companies, facing a professor of climatology, a researcher from the Collège de France. One of the industrialists asks the professor a question I find a little cavalier: “But why should we believe you, any more than the others?” I’m astonished. . . . to my great surprise, he responds, after a long, drawn-out sigh: “If people don’t trust the institution of science, we’re in serious trouble.” . . . I belong to a field, science studies, which has been working hard to give a positive meaning to the term “scientific institution.” Now, in its early days, in the 1980s, this field was perceived by many scientists as a critique of scientific Certainty—which it was—but also of reliable knowledge—which it most certainly was not. . . . we have only been trying to prepare scientists for a finally realistic defense of the objectivity to which we are just as attached as they are—but in a different way.

GHOST. And yet! There is a way to interrogate our institutions of knowledge without being destructive to their credibility. In fact, it will be a necessary step in preserving the institution’s credibility. The first steps often look like accusations because the more one looks at an institution, the more one sees what was previously invisible.

Wieseltier’s article is a clear accusation. The article is entitled “Crimes Against Humanities,” and I understand his strong choice of words. From Social Darwinism, to narrow descriptions of human gender and sexuality, to the idealistic monoculture cropping of the green revolution, the institutions of science certainly have a lot to answer for. The vested authority given to things labeled as scientific progress gives those projects more license to commit crimes against humanity. But this is not just a plea for bench scientists to realize the social implications of their work. It’s about what counts as knowledge in our society. Pinker, Wieseltier, and another small handful of public figures are naming the terms of a high stakes debate.

Instead of splitting up which questions and thinkers are scientific or not scientific, like a couple in divorce court, we must realize the depth to which the scientific worldview shapes how we see. By picking a fight with the entity of Science, Wieseltier allows science to remain a monolithic power. This type of language perpetuates a debate that is resting on outdated terms. The dichotomy reinforced by this public dialogue obscures the real depth of this worldview and prevents us from developing an accurate trust in the institutions of knowledge that we rely upon. That is partly why Pinker and Wieseltier shouldn’t be in bar fights at their age. But you can be.

[Fade to black. Curtain.]

ELIZA COHEN B’15 will give you four nickles for a pair of dimes.

[Background noise grows as more and more people start murmuring. A few people gather their coats and walk out the door.]

NOVEMBER 01 2013

SCIENCE █ 16

THUMBSUCKERS

by Charlotte Seaberry

The Mormons had overrun our neighborhood. We noticed it on Thursday. Michael was working at his dad’s gas station. He puts gas in the cars. I was sitting on the curb, watching him work and talking to him. Sometimes when he was feeling silly, he would stop mid-sentence and pull out one of the nozzles and splash gasoline on my shoes and then pull out his lighter and pretend to set me on fire. The Mormon boy was riding by on his bike.

“Hey, there’s that Mormon boy riding his bike,” I said.

He was working, too. But he knocks on doors and hands out pamphlets and waits to be asked inside the house. We see him everyday and he always wears the same white button-down with black slacks and his hair slicked down. We see him everyday, but I pointed it out on Thursday. Michael waved his arms at the boy. The boy looked over and then rode his bike through the gas station and stopped by us.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

“Are you a Mormon?” I asked.

“Yes,” the boy said.

Michael opened his mouth to say something, but a car pulled up and honked at him to fill the tank. He walked over to it. I tapped the Mormon boy’s front bicycle wheel.

“I’m Dylan,” I told him.

He nodded at me like he heard me, but he was watching Michael. Michael walked back over to us with the gas nozzle. He shook some drops of gasoline onto my hand.

“That’s too much,” I told Michael.

“I don’t give a shit,” he said.

“This is Michael,” I told the Mormon.

“Okay,” he said.

The Mormon looked back and forth between us and started to get back onto his bike. Michael grabbed the handlebars and leaned down so he could put his face right into the Mormon’s.

“Where are you going, Mormon?” Michael said.

“I have to pass out pamphlets,” he said.

The Mormon lifted up one of his shoulders. There was a satchel on it, filled with little booklets. Michael shook his gas nozzle over them. But when he pulled out his lighter, the Mormon slapped it out of his hand. It landed on the ground. I put my fingers into my mouth. Michael dragged the Mormon off the bike and onto the ground.

“We don’t need anymore Mormons,” he told the Mormon, his face in his, “We don’t need you trying to spread your crazy gospel shit. Our neighborhood is fucking overrun by you weirdoes and your 20 wives and your cats.”

“I don’t have a cat,” the Mormon said, but then his mouth got smashed in by Michael’s fist.

I bit at my thumb and kept my eyes half-closed. The Mormon jumped up from the ground and swung his arm at Michael.

He punched Michael in the head. I stood up and moved over to the little patch of grass and kept eating my fingers. Michael wrapped his arm around the Mormon’s neck and started choking him. Michael’s muscles were moving. I got a hard-on. I became unsure. The Mormon squirmed out of the hold and started throwing his fists at Michael over and over, hitting him everywhere and making him kind of bleed. I stuck my hand down the front of my pants and started rubbing myself.

Michael was one of the best fighters in our neighborhood, I think. He used to tell me about all the kids he beat up at the high school. He never told me about a time that he lost. So I think he was one of the best fighters because that’s what would make him a good fighter.

The Mormon was sitting on Michael’s stomach and punching him in the face a lot. He was getting red on his shirt and his hair was messy. He was saying things too, but I couldn’t hear because my hand was moving faster. It looked like Michael was trying to wiggle out from under the Mormon. He threw a punch, but it was sloppy. He just flung his hand out. It was angled all wrong. The Mormon grabbed the hand and held it. The light hit it very nicely and it made Michael’s skin look very tan. I kept eating at my hands and mouth. My hard-on was hurting for it. The Mormon’s whole arm came rearing back. I thought about warning Michael, but I didn’t. The fist hit him in the face and his neck snapped to the left. He let out a noise in between a scream and a moan and I let out the same. I wiped my hand on my pants.

The Mormon stood up and picked up his bike from the ground. He spat on Michael. Michael was lying on the ground, crumpled up and small.

“Goodbye,” I said to the Mormon.

He nodded at me, but didn’t say anything. Then he got on his bike and pulled away from the gas station and left. Probably to keep delivering pamphlets. I squatted down on the ground, pulling up blades of grass between my fingers and eating them. I looked over at Michael. I thought about Michael. I thought about putting my fingers in his wet mouth. I thought about holding his tongue with my fingers and with my tongue. I thought about masturbating onto his bloody face. I thought about his asshole and fucking it. I thought about fucking him so hard that I could climb inside him and live in his intestines and tell him when to shit. I thought about being his shit and his cock. I thought about his cock and holding it and pressing my cock against his. I thought about playing in his mouth.

I walked over to Michael’s body and picked it up and he wrapped his arms around my neck. He tried to say something in my ear, but just spat blood on the side of my face. It ran down my neck. I started walking towards his house and dragging him along. The sun was starting to set and I pointed that out to him. He kind of laughed and choked on blood and I looked at his teeth and they were red. His house is very far from the gas station. I walked him there.

A week passed to the next Thursday and I hadn’t seen Michael since the Thursday before. I waited at the gas station for him, but the man working there said he hadn’t shown up for a week. I heard someone say my name. The Mormon boy pulled up on his bike and waved at me.

“Do Mormons really like cats that much?” I asked him.

WWHe blinked and shrugged one shoulder.

“I’m Benjamin,” he told me.

“Okay,” I said and took one of his pamphlets.

17 █ LITerary

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

So fresh!

So cool !

Friday, November 1

Monday, November 4 Wednesday,November 6 How To Have a Difficult Conversation

Screening of Left on Pearl

12PM-1PM // RISD Museum Contemporary Art Gallery, 224 Benefit Street, Providence // Free with museum admission ($12/adult, $5/student)

12PM-1PM // Sheridan Center for Teaching & Learning, 96 Waterman Street, Brown University, Providence

6:30PM-8:30PM // 106 Smith-Buonanno, Brown University, Providence

Assembly: Reserve with Casey Llewellyn

Casey will explore (as always) the relationship of “you” to “I” and the scraping of the self against the outside. -Casey Llewellyn

It’s ok to be upset. I don’t think we should be afraid of ‘negative feelings’ (because they’re very helpful) but also I think it’s best to minimize unnecessary hurts. So mayLoving Kindness in the Face of Adversi- be we should all go to this event. Examples of events that might prompt you to go to this ty with Sharon Salzberg event are if you someone in your life doesn’t 5:30PM-6:30PM // 106 Smith-Buonanno, Brown take your feedback well (maybe it’s them, University, Providence maybe it’s you, maybe both), or if you have to If you’re going to go to a talk about meditalk to a loved one about Ray Kelly and they tation go to this one. Salzberg co-founded don’t realize that Brown shouldn’t endorse Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, institutionalized racism. Led by University Ma which is basically like the best one we Ombudsperson Ruth Rosenberg, this workshop have in America. Her latest book, co-authored will introduce effective strategies for havwith Robert Thurman, is entitled “Love Your ing a “difficult conversation” and provide an Enemies: How to Break the Anger Habit & Be a opportunity for you to practice. BYO lunch and Whole Lot Happier.” I’m pretty sure this is RSVP to sheridan.brown.edu. the real shit.

Saturday, November 2 Tuesday, November 5 Lovingkindness Workshop with Sharon Salzberg

Interracial Dating Forum

7PM-8:30PM // 001 Salomon Center, Brown University, Providence

11AM // First floor, Alumni Hall, Brown UniA student panel discussing their experiencversity, Providence // $20/student, $30/facules with interracial dating and interracial ty, $60/GA. Buy online. relationships. This event is sponsored by the OK, so she’s also doing a day-long workshop on Third World Center (TWC). lovingkindness. If you really want the good stuff you should go to this. FYI: LovingkThomas Bell & Christina Deroos: The indness is a meditation that cultivates our Highs and Lows of Technology in Perfornatural capacity for an open and loving heart. mance Art It is traditionally offered with meditations 7:30-8:30PM // AS220 Industries, Lucie Way, that enrich compassion, and joy in the hapProvidence piness of others. It can also deepen your sense of peace. Salzberg will teach you how to This is an installment of the AS220 Media Arts cultivate the above qualities and will answer Lecture Series. Contemporary media artists all your questions. (In case it wasn’t clear, Thomas Bell and Christina deRoos will discuss lovingkindness is like a drug but made by your their approach to creating interactive multimind). media performance work that incorporates an array of technology, often repurposed to serve creative ends. Thomas and Christina will share Auction Central perspectives from their independent work and 8AM // Central Congregational Church, 296 Antheir collaboration as Remote Control Tomato, gell St., Providence a performance initiative of Spread Art. An auction of antiques and collectibles is open to dealers and the public Open Sewing Circle Doors open at 8 am. The “Buy It Now” shop 9PM-11:55PM // AS220, 115 Empire St., Proviopens at 8AM. The live auction begins at 10 dence am. Cash-and-Carry. Handicapped Accessible.

Cash, Credit Cards, Checks Accepted This event has laid back vibes. It’s a making-night that welcomes anyone who wants to make something with their hands while in the company of others. All types of art and craft welcome! Bring your sewing, knitting, weaving, drawing, watercoloring, block-printing, jewelry-making, coloring book, wittling, gluesCareer Lab Walk-in Hours ticks, whatever.

3PM-5PM // Career Lab, 167 Angell Street.,

Sunday, November 3 Providence

Undergraduates are welcome to come in and ask questions about résumés or cover letters. I think they want you to make it quick. This is staffed by ‘peer advisors.’

Circuit Des Yeux / Belarisk / Jason Lescalleet / Mark Cetilia

The makers of this documentary about the March 6, 1971 takeover of a Harvard University building at the end of the International Woman’s Day march will be at the screening and will be available for discussion thereafter.

The press statement says that the film tells the story of one of the few takeovers by women for women. I wonder what that means. Also, apparently this action proved transformative for the participants, led directly to the establishment of the longest continuously operating community Women’s Center in the U.S., and sparked the development of many other feminist and community organizations. Let’s check it out! (Also, maybe we could ask them for tips to take over something ourselves?)

Screening of Snakes on a Plane 7:30PM-10PM // 108 Rhode Island Hall, Brown University, Providence The film will be screened then people will have a discussion and determine if snakes are friends or foes.

Thursday, November 7 Screen Time Academic Workshop

12PM-1PM // 310 J Walter Wilson, Brown University, Providence Take control of your life. Learn how make intentional decisions about your screen time.

Jacqueline Twitchell of Psychological Services can help you if you are easily distracted by irrelevant apps, texts, websites, or video games, and find it extremely hard to turn them off even when you know you need to. It’s all about strategies.

Can Participatory Maps Save the World?

Maps Before and After the Smartphone: A Global History, 1968-2013 5:30PM-7PM // Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller Library, Brown University, Providence Assistant Professor of History Jo Guldi audit the experience of appropriate technology and map-making in particular back as far as 1968, when maps were first trumpeted as a way to overturn lines of class and culture, and up to 2013, when lightweight Indian startups promise to deliver infrastructure for cities like Bangalore and Kibera that lack the centralized bureaucracy to manage water and sanitation in traditional ways.

The House I Live In: Film Screening and Interactive Image Theater 7PM-9PM // 101 Salomon Center, Brown University, Providence

9PM // 400 Main Street, Pawtucket // $7

After listening to one clip each: Circuit Des Yeux: would best if you were on Klonopin. It’s like that kind of music.

The Coincidental Hour 8PM-9:30PM // Empire Black Box, 95 Empire St., Belarisk: is super weird and will make you feel special feelings and like you were just Providence // None listed born into a new world.

Hosted by Ric Royer, The Coincidental Hour is Jason Lescalleet: feels like when you’ve done every show wrapped in one. It’s a children’s a lot of Adderall and you feel hollow, but in show game show variety show talk show late a good way. night cabaret. In every episode the audience Mark Cetilia: seems like he is a close personhas a chance to win cash or material prizal friend of Sharon Salzberg. es, and sometimes even lose something. Every episode is full of these songs, and special guests and frightening audience challenges.

And sometimes there is balloons! And other times food!

Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live in will be screened and then audience members are invited to join interactive, improvisational brainstorming sessions led by Bryonn Bain, Lani Guinier, Tim Mitchell, Gerald Torres, and Tricia Rose.

Exotic Pro vidence of the W eek:

Provide n Lancaste ce Twp, r County , PA 70% o

f resi the same dents lived in house fiv e years ago.