The College Hill Independent V.28 N.06

VOLUME 28 // ISSUE 6

news 2 Week in Unrest

sebastian clark, carly west & emma wohl

METRO 17 Metro TOC katherine solá

ARTS 10 Chin Up

sarah cheung

11 The End, Alone patrick mcmenamin

TECHNOLOGY 5 Start Here

tristan rodman

LIT 9 Deus Ex Machina maru pabón

managing editors Julieta Cárdenas, Simon Engler, Tristan Rodman news Sebastian Clark, Alex Sammon, Emma Wohl metro Megan Hauptman, Rick Salamé, Kat Thornton arts Greg Nissan, Maya Sorabjee features Kyle Giddon, Lili Rosenkranz, Josh Schenkkan TECHNOLOGY Houston Davidson SPORTS Zeve Sanderson interviews Drew Dickerson FOOD John White literary Eli Pitegoff EPHEMERA Molly Landis, Matthew Marsico OCCULT Addie Mitchell, Eli Petzold X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff list Claudia Norton, Diane Zhou design + illustration Mark Benz, Polina Godz, Casey Friedman, Kim Sarnoff Cover Editor Polina Godz Senior editors David Adler, Grace Dunham, Sam Rosen, Doreen St. Félix, Ellora Vilkin Staff WriterS Lisa Borst, Vera Carothers, Sophie Kasakove, Becca Millstein, Abigail Savitch-Lew, Carly West, Sara Winnick STAFF ILLUSTRATORs Andres Chang, Amy Chen, Aaron Harris, Jack Mernin web Edward Friedman, Patrick McMenamin COPY Mary Frances Gallagher, Paige Morris BUSINESS Haley Adams Cover Art Polina Godz MvP Casey Friedman

SPORTS 7 Hot Doggin’

nicholas catoni, kyle giddon, lili rosenkranz & zeve sanderson

15 March Madness

¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿?????????

FOOD 14 Pile Up lisa borst

OCCULT 13 Hard Boiled

fROM THE EDITOR S Maybe ten years ago, I had surgery to remove a large fragment of tooth from the roof of my mouth. The doctors alleged I opened my eyes right before they made the first incision. “If we had given you that much anaesthetic,” the surgeon told my mother, “you would’ve been on a breathing tube.” The surgery went fine. This story feels, in memory, like a punch-line without a setup: it’s stupid, and it makes no sense.

Fast-forward ten years. I’m taller, and I weigh more.

(I weigh twice as much as some of my friends.) My inner world feels sort of like this massive, impossible-to-describe thing, this paleolithic clusterfuck, all these big dinosaurs eating each other and it’s raining a lot, and there’s this comet coming, maybe? I’ll be standing around at a party and I’ll think about all the space I’m displacing; I remember that, at one point, I required surgery to have a “large fragment of tooth” removed from the roof of my mouth. How did it get there? Well, it must’ve grown, which is no small comfort. I give a friend a hug. –MM

jennifer avery

EPHEMERA 8 Reminds Me Of Dad

matthew marsico & molly landis

X 18 Birds with Friends layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

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

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

VENEZUELA: revolution from above

by Emma Wohl On March 6, the anniversary of Hugo Chávez’s death, a few hundred of the former Venezuelan president’s most loyal followers flocked to his marble tomb at an old military barracks in a slum above Caracas. Afterwards, state officials and military personnel—joined by the presidents of Bolivia and Nicaragua—marched through the streets in Chávez’s honor.

The ceremony also marked a full month since the beginning of the demonstrations against Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro. The wave of protests began February 4 with student demonstrations against the police’s failure to investigate a sexual assault case on their university campus in the Andean city of San Cristóbal. When the police suppressed the protestors—spraying tear gas into the crowd—without responding to the institutional failure they targeted, the protests multiplied and spread to other cities.

Protestors are angry about police suppression, and also with Venezuela’s soaring inflation rate; in January, the annual rate was calculated at 56 percent. At the same time, Venezuelans struggle with shortages of basics such as oil, toilet paper, and cornmeal. The supply of the bolivar, Venezuela’s currency, expanded 70 percent in 2013. Critics say Maduro’s government has been spending exorbitantly on social programs only for the purpose of garnering votes.

The president and his supporters counter with accusations of a conspiracy against the government concocted by right-wing politicians and business interests, backed by the United States. They also point to the expansion of social services, which last year impressed even some of the president’s critics. Venezuela’s central bank issued a statement in January, underscoring its concern for citizens’ welfare: "It is important to emphasize that the population continues to receive, with equal or greater intensity, the benefits that the state provides through state-run commerce that offers food at accessible prices.” +++ According to Francisco Toro, an anti-Chavista political journalist and opinions columnist at the New York Times, the student demonstrations inspired a nation-wide wave of demonstration “in defense of the very right to protest.”

But this interpretation of the protest wave is by no means the consensus. According to a number of left-wing observers, the demonstrations are not spontaneous outbursts of popular power. Instead, they are an attempt by right-wing politicians to consolidate opposition against the Chavista president Maduro, supported by university students—in Venezuela, a much more conservative bunch than in most of its neighbors, “These protests have far more to do with returning economic and political elites to power than with their downfall,” George Ciccariello-Maher, a historian and the author of We Created Chávez, a “people’s history of Venezuela,” wrote in The Nation.

Nine months ago authors of similar leftist stripes applauded what, superficially, seemed like an equivalent display of national participation in Brazil. So is the condemnation of protests in Venezuela a hypocritical response by those who want to preserve Chávez’s—and, by extension, Maduro’s—legacy and believe in the socialist Bolivarian Republic? It’s likely.

But these writers also highlight nuances particular to these protests that have largely been overlooked in international coverage. Many of the burning tires and violent confrontations occurred in middle class areas; the student protests happened at private or state universities which have increas-

MARCH 14 2014

ingly excluded poorer students; and the new low-cost public bus system, the more broadly accessible Bolivarian University, and the Cuban medical personnel who run the Barrio Adentro welfare program have all been targets of protestors’ violence.

Meanwhile, in the poorer areas of the country and its cities, people have largely kept to themselves. The response of the majority of ordinary Venezuelans has been to rally behind Maduro, Mike Gonzales wrote for Jacobin, joining in the president’s “call for ‘peace.’” The repression of the protests has served to detract media attention from their goal, which is far from clear. According to Gonzalez, the orchestrators of the protests want to mobilize large numbers of people in order to destabilize the current regime and bring to power the same people who ran the country in the mid-1990s, before Chávez came to power. In order to gain assistance from the International Monetary Fund, the neoliberal regime of Carlos Andrés Pérez slashed social spending and commodity subsidies, the effects of which were felt almost entirely by the working class.

The protests’ leader also helps to demonstrate their upper-class nature. Leopoldo López, who has positioned himself as the country’s opposition leader, is the Harvard-educated son of an oil executive; he currently sits in prison for “inciting violence” after encouraging protests and speaking at a rally in February. He served as mayor of one of Caracas’ eastern districts before being barred from running for public office for allegedly accepting bribes and misusing public funds. Lopez, 42, also has shiny hair, fair skin, and a pearly-white smile— characteristics that many analysts point to in explaining his popularity among the student movement and to distinguish him from the dark-skinned Chávez, who was long considered too indigenous for the elite to fully endorse. The party through which Lopez rose to politics, Primero Justicia (Justice First), received financial support from USAID—the international development agency with roots in the US government’s Cold War-era Good Neighbor Policy—throughout Chávez’ time in office. Meanwhile, among those still hoping to overthrow Maduro through electoral politics, Lopez’ charisma and maverick persona carry the threat of a new demagogue’s rise to power—or at least the outward appearance of one, enough of a threat for Maduro’s government to act to crush all his enemies. Lopez “is giving the government the perfect excuse to accuse the opposition of destabilising the country," Carlos Romero, an opposition-leaning political scientist at the Central University of Venezuela, told the BBC. +++ It is wise to pause here and remember that a large spontaneous uprising, whether directed by an entrenched elite or an angry populace, is highly unlikely to be completely uniform.

Certainly not all those who are taking to the streets oppose the government’s socialist ideology, worry about its economic future, or hope for greater freedom and accountability. It’s likely that many protestors are bringing their own personal issues to the forum, intending to give voice to a generalized discontent rather than topple the government. In the slums of San Cristóbal, lower-class citizens who may not have originally sympathized with the student protests have risen up against the militarized crack-down and siege-like conditions throughout the city. At the same time, not all who blame Venezuela’s abysmal economic situation on its current government applaud the protestors. For the government, journalist Rafael Osío Cabrices wrote in a Times op-ed, they may be “a welcome deflection of public attention from a faltering

economy and rising crime. They may even invigorate this flaccid dictatorship.”

International observers can be forgiven for not having a clear picture of the events on the ground, and not only because of their complexity. Venezuela’s government acted quickly to censor sources giving voice to the protests. On February 20, President Maduro told CNN’s team that they would have to leave Venezuela, after about a week of threats to expel them if they did not “rectify” their reporting of the protests. In a press conference, the president accused United States-based media of “calling for civil war.” A day later, after CNN published a lengthy story about its pending expulsion, he reversed the decision and allowed the news team to stay in the country. Still, the threat lingers in journalists’ minds. In part—at least according to some protestors—the lack of coverage is a national problem as well and is the fault of Venezuela’s national media; “Damn the media that turn their backs on the people,” read a sign at one protest in Caracas. Shortly after the protests began in February, the government ordered outlets to limit any discussion of violence that could "foment anxiety." The next day, only five out of 38 radio stations monitored by the Press and Society Institute carried any news of a demonstration where two protestors and one government supporter died.

When reports of supposed events on the ground do get out, they can be more illustrative of observers’ prejudices than of what is truly happening in Venezuela. On Twitter, a number of images have circulated along with messages favorable to the protests; the images themselves, however, come from older protests in Chile, Spain, Brazil, Bulgaria, and Spain—serving to further the confusion about the true nature of the protests.

Meanwhile, in trying to paint the protestors as the vanguard of a new coup, the government has fallen into the same practice. On March 1, Vice President Diosdado Cabello revealed a photograph on national television that showed a wall of assault rifles, claiming they belonged to a retired general who clashed with police over his vocal opposition to Maduro. In reality, the photo came from the site of a gun rental shop in Wisconsin. +++ But violence is also real. On Monday, March 10, 23-year-old student Daniel Tinoco was shot late at night by a group of gunmen. He was a student and at the center of the protests in San Cristóbal. Protestors claim the shooters were governmentbacked paramilitaries; Maduro argues that this and more of the 20 deaths of individuals on both sides of the protests are part of a growing coup d’etat. Before his death, Tinoco was in charge of defending a camp, used by protestors, that held gas bombs, stones, and other makeshift weapons—to protect themselves from police, they claimed.

Powerful members of the opposition disturb the governmental machine, which sputters into action and strikes wildly in response. People whose lives are disrupted by police interference become disillusioned; the Right harnesses that disillusionment in fueling further attempts to undermine the Leftist regime. The game seems endless; if anyone wins, it will only be at a cost too high to fully fathom yet.

Emma Wohl B’14 might be a hypocrite.

NEWS

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UKRAINE: war misunderstood

by Carly West

The Cold War was arguably born in Crimea, at the Yalta conference, where in 1945 Franklin D. Roosevelt conceded to the Soviet Union’s assertion of dominance in Eastern Europe.

Seventy years later and twenty years since the fall of the Soviet Union tensions have erupted in this Ukrainian peninsula, pinning Russians forces against Ukrainians and by extension, the US and its NATO allies. This geopolitcal coincidence has spurred an outpouring of alarmist Western media threatening the imminence of a Second Cold War. There are certainly grounds for comparison. It’s a story we’ve heard time and again: Russian troops invade a satellite state. An autocratic Russian leader blames the United States and unspecified “radicals and nationalists” for meddling. A puppet leader pledges loyalty to Moscow. And yet, perpetuation of Cold War rhetoric overlooks critical economic and political shifts since the Cold War. Antigovernment protests erupted in the Ukraine late last year, after President Viktor Yanukovych turned down an offer of increased economic cooperation with the European Union, opting instead to take a $15 billion loan from Russia.

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets. As days turned to weeks, the grievances developed into a broader outcry against police brutality and state corruption. Fearing the ire of the demonstrations, Yanukovych fled to Russia.

Ukraine’s parliament voted to formally remove him from office, named Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk Interim Prime Minister, and called for new elections on May 25, 2014.

Under humanitarian pretenses, Moscow slandered protesters as dangerous extremists and ordered military occupation of the Crimea. Russia has mobilized planes, boats, and helicopters, flooding the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea with 16,000 troops, and surrounding 10 Ukrainian military bases.

No shots have been fired, but Russian loyalists and Russian troops are primed for action.

The situation has sent shockwaves through Europe, which has huge economic interests at stake in the region’s stability, largely due to dependence on Russian oil supplies.

U.S. and European government officials threaten economic sanctions should the Russian incursions intensify. The tone of these threats has been highly diplomatic, referencing international law and norms of conduct. Despite this cautious tone, the E.U. and the U.S. have committed to providing financial support to the Ukrainian government and to enact-

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ing punitive measures if the crisis escalates. In a recent press conference, President Obama stated, “We are examining a whole series of steps—economic, diplomatic—that will isolate Russia and will have a negative impact on Russia’s economy and its status in the world.” +++ Putin’s involvement has been received differently by divergent factions within the Ukraine; in western provinces, most people speak Ukrainian, and call for deeper economic and political ties with Europe; in Eastern provinces like Crimea, there are more Russian speakers, some with Kremlin loyalties, some staunchly opposed to Russian encroachment. Since the Russian invasion, there has been widespread speculation about increasing Russian control of the region. Tens of thousands of people in Ukraine have held rival pro-unity and pro-Russian rallies. After scheduling a referendum in mid-March, which Western nations stated they would not recognize as legitimate, Crimea’s regional legislature adopted a ‘declaration of independence of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea’. In other words, many Crimeans have voiced their support for independence from Kiev and closer ties with Russia.

The U.S. media has overwhelmingly framed this crisis in Cold-War terms: a battle between liberal Western democracy and traditional Soviet ambitions. In recent weeks, CNN offered us “5 lessons for a new Cold War,” while the BBC proclaimed, “Ukraine: ‘Clash of Cold War rivalries.’” Recent media coverage from both conservatives and liberals has largely consisted of vilifying Putin and criticizing the Obama administration’s failure to display American military might.

Obama’s preference for diplomacy over decisive action has set off a wave of criticism from conservative pundits and politicians alike. At stake in the current crisis, according to many critics on the right, is not only Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, but also Washington’s credibility as a global superpower and the post-Cold War international order. Marco Rubio published a listicle in Politico Magazine entitled “8 Steps Obama Must Take to Punish Russia,” which forewarns of a “a dark and dangerous era in world affairs” should Obama not proactively “deal with tyrants like Vladimir Putin.” Senator John McCain blamed Obama’s alleged timidity—particularly referencing the White House’s decision

to not take military action against Syria last September. “This is the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy in which nobody believes in America’s strength anymore,” McCain said, speaking before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Obama’s “weakness” and “appeasement” in dealing with adversaries has become a steady mantra for many conservatives, who demand the projection of American strength in order to set a precedent in negotiations with adversaries, including Beijing and Tehran.

Liberal and progressive voices are also quick to use polarizing Cold-War rhetoric. In a recent speech, Hillary Clinton compared Russia’s seizure of Crimea with Hitler’s annexation of Sudetenland in 1938, implicitly evoking the perils of an appeasement strategy. The New Republic admitted that Mitt Romney was right in predicting that Russia remains “our number one geopolitical foe.” A New York Times Article entitled “How It All Began: A Cold War Battle Heats Up,” which describes a monolithic Ukraine that wants political and economic ties to the EU. +++ This is not the second Cold War, and the U.S. media is remiss to treat it as such. According to Strobe Talbott, an expert on the history of the Cold War, there is “no real ideological component to the conflict [in Ukraine] except that Putin has become the personification of rejecting the West as a model.”

Russia has completely shifted from state socialism to (crony) capitalism and is fully entwined with the global economy.

While the Soviet Union was impervious to foreign economic pressure—largely due to its ideological commitment to selfsufficiency—Russia’s entwinement in the global economy makes further aggressive militancy an unpleasant and unlikely option.

The scope of potential US action is also limited. The United States cannot afford to hastily sever ties, as it need Russia’s support—or at least its acquiescence—in its efforts to block Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and end Syria’s civil war. For a judicious approach to the crisis in Ukraine, these limitations—and the complexities of the region—will demand careful consideration.

CARLY WEST B’16 said it first.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria: a new direction

by Sebastian Clark Utopian ideals demanding an overhaul of society are more ably articulated than realistic calls for reform. If the large-scale protests that brought down the Berlin Wall sought democracy, civic freedom, and human rights, the most recent wave to rock the Balkan nations has been less idealistic than it has pragmatic. Like Occupy, and most contemporary protests, they have been negative in nature—against the status quo, rather than in pursuit of a new one.

Protests in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria—ongoing since January 2013—express continued discontent with the nepotism and corruption that plague their public sectors, ripple effects of both states’ failed transition from communism to capitalism. The breadth of the protestor’s attacks on social immobility, governmental unaccountability, and habitual corruption has made it easy for government to cast demonstrations as undirected anger on the part of urban hooligans. It is true that the majority of the protestors are young urbanites, but their anger only seems unintelligible because there is no adequate political process through which it can be expressed.

The majority come from a highly-educated middle class that know well enough that their only option is to take to the public square. +++ The shortcomings of the Bosnian government ultimately lie in the splitting of administrative powers between the BosniakCroat Federation and the Republic of Srpska. This power share—codified in the US supported 1995 Dayton Accords— has generated a political stalemate on sustained ethno-political lines. Indeed, it is these very divisions that have allowed politicians to perpetuate a culture of governmental inertia in which systemic corruption can thrive. By centering political debate around pre-existing and apparently irremediable ethnic conflict, many authorities have been able to divert attention away from widespread bribery. The most notable and recently acknowledged example is the €600 million EU development loans, of which, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development data suggests, only 55 percent reached the citizens they were supposed to benefit.

Although Bosnian protests in 2013 initially addressed small-scale issues, like the handling of identity cards and the rights of veterans, this year they eventually erupted into violence in the northeastern city of Tuzla. When workers were laid off—adding to the unemployment rate of 40 percent— because of the questionable privatization of a public manufactur, riots broke out on February 4. These were fuelled by rumors of bribery and cash-siphoning on the part of the new owners.

Word travelled to the cities of Mostar, Sarajevo and Banja Luka, where disaffected college graduates took up the workers’ cause under the broader category of government corruption.

MARCH 14 2014

The situation came to a head when government institutions and historical archives were invaded and set alight in Sarajevo on February 7th. The monetary and cultural cost was extensive: there was €25.5 million of damage and 60 percent of the material within the Archives of Bosnia and Herzegovina was lost.

The Serbian publication Balkanist referred to the events as a “collective nervous breakdown.” To a certain extent, the protests relieved the ethno-political complex through a type of cultural shock therapy. As hundreds more began to mobilize, both in the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Republic of Srpska, it became clear that civil cohesion could be found across ethnic divisions. Unity was found in opposition: Bosnians created anti-government slogans, raising the cry that “you are all disgusting, no matter what ethnicity you belong to.” While refuting political tactics to divide citizens and proclaiming unity, the slogan does nothing to dismantle racist rhetoric. This hints at a difficult path ahead. +++ Bulgaria is the only Eastern European country to have never re-elected an incumbent government. In this perpetual state of political instability, the Bulgarian private sector has managed to remain consistent in its inconsistency. Oligarchs, through an institutionalized network of corruption, have controlled the country since the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc. With an endless change of figure-heads, a continual promise of a better future has not materialized into real reform.

In February 2013, a rapid rise in electricity and water bills, stemming from government-granted monopolies, produced civil demonstrations in the city of Blagoevrad. As in Bosnia, these escalated into a greater venting of the public’s anger as mass non-partisan movements protested government ineptitude in over 30 other cities. After seven self-immolations in Presidency Square, at the heart of the capital Sofia, the center-right ruling party of Prime Minister Bojko Borisov resigned.

The formation of a new government by a coalition of socialists, extreme nationalists, and ethnic minority parties did little to quell the protests. Once again, under the guise of political progress, the oligarchs took hold. Anti-EU media mogul Delyan Peevski was appointed head of the National State Security Agency, which led to yet another wave of protests and his eventual resignation in June 2013.

Parliament has been besieged twice—once in July of 2013, and again in November of the same year—to little affect. Peevski was reinstated as a Member of Parliament in October 2013, which lead to a violent confrontation between police and students. As the ceaseless conflict wore on, creative, non-violent attempts at expression and satire found a place in the shifting movement. In December of 2013, a

group of prominent Bulgarian actors and media personalities performed a mock funeral commemorating the death of parliament. The tumultuous political atmosphere has persisted into 2014. In February, students outside the President’s Offices threw around computer mice to protest the government’s reluctance to implement electronic voting—an act as much performance art as organized demonstration. +++ Civic protest in Bosnia and Bulgaria has responded to the absence of effective democracy. While the 1989 protests brought formal democracy, it has been superficial; government disorder and unaccountability has continually stifled success in both the public and private sectors. This has been the rallying point for unification. Whether the protestors can break free of negative refutation, however, remains largely to be seen.

There have been a few promising signs. Local plenums have developed in both Bosnia and Bulgaria, representing the emergence of grassroots democracy. Realizing the demonstrations were unsustainable, each day for the last couple of months, citizens have gathered in such forums dotted throughout their countries to voice their anger. This represents a deeper, more positive form of protestation. Whereas demonstrations occurred for lack of a political process through which discontent could not reach government, plenums create their own processes. This is citizenships’ attempt to recreate democratic institutions on its own terms.

Many Western commentators have drawn comparisons to Occupy. Indeed, the discourse seems similar. Reuters quoted a former solider, Drenko Koristovic: “There is a drastic difference between the small circle of people that has robbed this country of its assets—and we know who they are—and 90 percent of people who have nothing to eat.” What is different though—and this is said wary of the optimism that undermines civic action—is that Occupy sought not to create its own sphere, but defined itself in relation only to what it was against. The issue with occupation is that the protest boxes itself in; it cannot advance outside of the space it has occupied, its functioning is limited to the symbolic level. To say that the discourse in Zuccotti Park added to American democracy would be a gross exaggeration.

But that should not be taken to mean that the plenum model will succeed. GK Chesterton wrote that “merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

The plenum may enlighten and deepen civil society, but it eventually needs to lead to an effective change to the parliamentary system.

SEBASTIAN CLARK B’16 is a creative attempt at satire.

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HOW NEW BECAME technology and origin myth

by Tristan Rodman illustration by Layla Ehsan At the beginning of the world, Camel did not want to work. Every time Horse or Dog or Ox would ask for help, Camel would moan, “Humph.” The djinn of the desert warned Camel: “I shouldn’t say that again if I were you.” But Camel humphed again. And so the genie puffed Camel’s back into a hump, letting him survive without eating for three days in order to catch up on the work he refused. That is “How the Camel Got His Hump,” explained in Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 collection of Just So Stories. In each pourquoi story, Kipling tells why something is and how it came to be: “How the Alphabet was Made,” “How the Leopard Got His Spots,” “The Beginning of the Armadilloes.”

Kipling passes down tales in which the mythological explains the everyday. Through repetition, pourquoi stories turn from speculative fiction to accepted fact. The answers provided by folklore supersede all others. The myth, once inscribed, cannot be forgotten or altered. The stories claim that the world could once support magic but can no longer. Leopard never again will change his spots—he is “quite contented” with the way things are.

By providing a mythical origin, pourqoui stories provide no origin at all. They preclude other answers. The stories are good enough. They pacify curiosity—things are just so. +++ In Imaginary Futures, historian Richard Barbrook argues that old technological projections of the future structure the way we view the technological present. Each prophecy suggests its completion. “The present is understood as the future in embryo,” Barbrook writes, “and the future illuminates the potential of the present.”

The future promised, promises, continues to promise. It sells itself ad nauseam: artificial intelligence, the information society, techno-utopia. We still envision the flying car as it whizzes the Jetson family through space. Barbrook offers an aphorism: “the future is what it used to be.” +++ In Silicon Valley, origin mythology precedes everything. Stories cement themselves: Apple started with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak tinkering in a garage; Mark Zuckerberg coded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room. We know them from magazine covers, television news reports, and the feature films that recite their stories.

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TECHNOLOGY

Jobs, a 2013 biopic, opens in an Cupertino auditorium. Steve Jobs (played by an age-enhanced Ashton Kutcher) walks into the hall as strings lift. The audience stands in ovation. “I’m about to show you something that’s amazing,” says Jobs as the room quiets down. “Something that no one else in the world has seen yet.” He places his hands together, then separates them outwards in gesticulation. He makes a joke, then pauses for the laugh. “The device I’m about to introduce to you is gonna revolutionize an entire industry. It’s a music playing device,” he continues. His audience gasps in disbelief, and he reassures them. As he speaks, he places his index finger and thumb together, shaking his arm at the elbow on every word. “It’s a thousand songs, in your pocket.” Jobs pulls an iPod out of his light-blue Levis. Without time to digest or process, the audience leaps to their feet. The gap between introduction and ecstasy shrinks to zero. Mythology propels itself from such reiteration; in retelling, fiction and reality lose their borders.

Origin mythology promises a glimpse at the imaginary future, a peek into the world in which a given new thing will exist. “The importance of a new technology lies not in what it can do in the here and now,” writes Barbrook, “but in what more advanced models might be able to do one day.” It matters not whether the product is hardware, software, or vaporware—a new thing that doesn’t exist right now and might not ever.

On stage, a story spins about why this new thing is new, why it is necessary, why it is radically different from all before it. Oftentimes, only press members, prophets of origin myth, are in the room. Only through the press does origin reach the populace. The thing appears, as if from thin air, to satisfy a need created minutes earlier. Through the origin myth, the new thing tells us that it fills a void we never knew we had. It arrives already essential. You never asked why the leopard got its spots. The answer precedes the question: it is just so. +++ On the eve of Cyber Monday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sat with Charlie Rose for an interview and product demonstration on 60 Minutes. “There has never been a company quite like Amazon,” Rose begins. “Amazon has reinvented itself time and again, changing the way the world shops, reads, and computes.” In the interview, Bezos speaks with eyes wide, pausing before each clause to make sure he imbues it with the necessary enthusiasm. “When I was delivering the packages myself,” Bezos laughs, “one of my visualizations of success is that we might one day be big enough to afford a forklift.” He staggers forward in his chair. You are now in on the joke.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEW AGAIN

Bezos lets Rose and the 60 Minutes crew into the company’s headquarters in Seattle to unveil a new production. Before the reveal, Bezos and Rose talk about Amazon’s holy grail for the consumer: same-day delivery. Bezos then introduces Amazon Prime Air, drones that deliver products weighing less than five pounds within the half hour. In under a minute, Amazon has created and fulfilled a consumer desire. “I know this looks like science fiction,” says Bezos, “It’s not.”

Amazon’s webpage for the project promises, “One day, Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today.” For now, Prime Air is vaporware, and even Bezos admits it’s “still years away.” But by showing off Prime Air years before its commercial viability, Amazon has cemented its relevance far into the imagined future. Bezos guarantees: “It will work, and it will happen, and it’s going to be a lot of fun.” If Prime Air ever becomes a reality, we will know the moment in which it began.

Mythology obscures motivation. In the 60 Minutes segment, Amazon Vice President Dave Clark projects, “Anything you want on earth, you’re gonna get it from us.” Following the shots of Amazon warehouses sorting packages with jawdropping efficiency and the intro narrative presenting Amazon as revolution, monopoly seems like a natural end. “If you can do this with all these products,” Rose explodes, “you guys are going to organize the world!”

Even the CIA stores its data in Amazon’s cloud. +++ Origin mythology redirects attention from corporate interests to consumer benefits. In Dave Eggers’ recent novel The Circle, the titular company uses its mythology to indoctrinate. In the not-quite-real Bay Area satellite of San Vincenzo, Mae Holland joins the Circle—a tech company that has overgrown all other tech companies—with wide eyes and unending enthusiasm.

Even as the company descends into the obviously sinister, Mae takes up each new thing and its corresponding origin myth with ease. Of course, everything at the Circle is just so.

In the opening pages, Mae tours the Circle’s campus while her friend Annie launches into origin mythology for the Circle’s executives and products. “I know this,” Mae protests, the Circle’s stories woven deep in her cultural fabric. “Don't stop me now,” Annie continues, “I’m giving you the same spiel I have to give to heads of state.”

The Circle, legend has it, crushed competition by condensing all personal information on the web into one place. Its main feature is TruYou—“One button for the rest of your life online”—a profile that unifies everything: passwords, payments, identity. By tying all purchases to people’s real names, crime and fraud precipitously drop: “TruYou changed the internet, in toto, within a year.” In its myth, TruYou sounds revolutionary.

As the novel progresses, the Circle expands its panoptic extremes. Everybody can be seen and monitored by SeeChange cameras; each child can be geo-located by ChildTrack sensors embedded in the skin; politicians elect to “go transparent,” wearing broadcast cameras around their necks 24/7. The message and its accompanying imagery are not subtle. (At one point, a translucent shark devours other sea creatures in a controlled captivity tank.)

One night, a SeeChange camera catches Mae stealing a kayak and paddling through the San Francisco bay. Called into CEO Eamon Bailey’s office to discuss the transgression, she finds herself at the center of the Circle’s unfolding mythology. If she knew people were watching, Mae admits, she would’ve acted differently. A few days later, Bailey brings Mae on stage in front of the entire Circle for a demonstration.

In their public conversation, peppered with witty banter and obvious calls-to-joke, Bailey and Mae reveal new mantras for Circle. “SECRETS ARE LIES” flashes on screen as Mae explains that, when uninformed, we invent dreadful explanations for ourselves. “SHARING IS CARING” pops up as Mae explains how shameful and selfish she was for not sharing her kayak trip with others. “PRIVACY IS THEFT,” the heftiest phrase of all, emerges as Bailey explains, “It’s the natural state of information to be free.” At the end of the conversation, Bailey announces that Mae will be going transparent, streaming all of her future experiences to the Circle.

Transparent Mae becomes a walking product demonstration for the company. She broadcasts every hour of her day, touring viewers through the sparkling campus. Mae never questions herself or the environment surrounding her, and to the reader this uncritical acceptance comes off as oblivious, frustrating, even unbelievable. The novel’s opening line—“My god, Mae thought. It’s heaven.”—suggests its end. Mae doesn’t transform. She buys in. +++ As origin mythology passes down and through product demonstrations in Bay Area convention centers, it continues to naturalize. The type of on-stage speech delivered by CEOs like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos becomes its own oral tradition. Repackaged and resold, origin mythology turns the new anew. If you want to sell a product or an idea, amass an audience and begin to weave. Beginnings always obscure their ends; mythologies always occlude their motivations.

New things are never just so.

TRISTAN RODMAN B’15 claws at the fabric.

MARCH 14 2014

TECHNOLOGY

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BUY ME SOME PEANUTS the new frontier of cracker jacks

by Nicholas Catoni, Kyle Giddon, Lili Rosenkranz & Zeve Sanderson illustration by Pierie Korostoff Sitting and cheering for three hours is hard work. But stadium food isn’t just about sustenance—it’s about the identity of the organization and the culture of the region. Gastronomy can be just as much of the fan experience as the game itself. A few snapshots from around the globe:

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A TABLE FOR TWO, PLEASE Everything is local, but nothing is cheap. Barclay’s Center, in Brooklyn, advertises “unique menu items” and “specialties from artisans and entrepreneurs.” Fatty ’Cue, the well-known Williamsburg restaurant, serves Southeast Asian style mac ’n’ cheese and sandwiches. Fresco by Scotto’s offers Italian dishes similar to those in its Midtown restaurant. Brooklyn Bangers and Dogs grills up classic America fare from Saul Bolton, the Michelin-starred chef. But the options are pricey even for arena standards. A full meal at any of the 55 neighborhood vendors runs at least $15, and that’s not including a $10 domestic beer. Cultural authenticity isn’t cheap. And if you want to a sit-down dining experience before sitting down in your seat, the arena has its own 40/40 Club, presented by American Express (whatever that means). Be sure to make a reservation, though. A minimum week in advance is recommended. –ZS

MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB At halftime, I watched as some twenty-thousand Scots flowed into the bowels of Easter Road Stadium, the home of Hibernian Football Club, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Most tottered toward the urinals, seeking relief; some, however, made directly for the food vendors in order to purchase Scotch pies—double-crusted meat dishes filled with minced lamb. These meaty treats, about fifteen centimeters (six inches, you Yank) in diameter, have become so popular in Scottish football stadiums that they are often referred to as “football pies.”

While I didn’t purchase any that day, I ended up having some anyway: when the visiting team took a late lead, a fan in the row behind me began to shout obscenities at the referees, and I suddenly felt something warm traveling down the back of my neck. Baah, indeed. –KG

THE DUNE SALOON For the fifth consecutive year, the West Michigan Whitecaps—the Class A affiliate of the Detroit Tigers—asked fans to vote on an innovative food item. The winner, chosen from dishes designed by Whitecaps supporters and local vendors, will be added to the menu for the upcoming season. Warning: the ballot ignites lust in the gustatory system.

Some highlights from the ten nominees include the Pop Tart BLT (a self-explanatory culinary feat), the Augger Dogger (a hot dog surrounded by fried potato chips on a stick), the Poor Richard (a beef dog topped with mashed potatoes and gravy), and the mammoth Sleeping Bear Dunes Sundae (sea salt caramel ice cream with teddy graham topping overflowing out of a regulation-size batting helmet). There are no losers in this contest, especially if you’re a visitor of the ballpark. (Actually, maybe there are. But who worries about something as piddling as a diet during a ball game?

You should always be preparing for hibernation in the Mitten anyways.)

And it’s low-level baseball; something’s gotta help pass the time, and it might as well be a downright dirty dish. This year’s first-place platter will replace last year’s champ, the Baco, which is exactly what it sounds like: a bacon-shelled taco. It will also join the ranks of the waiver-requiring, ghost pepper-laden “Squealin’ Pig,” toted as the spiciest sandwich in baseball. Someone, somewhere, is keeping a list, with a cold glass of milk nearby. With a salacious menu, America’s pastime, and Michigan’s beautiful Sleeping Bear Dunes a few hours away, I know where I’ll be headed this summer. –NC

WE WANT TACOS In Los Angeles, the Staples Center has filled its concrete corridors with concessions. In the concourse, fans swarm taverns and stands, carrying pitchers of beer and hot dogs wrapped in soft pretzel dough with wide arms. Droves of men scale stadium stairs, peddling cones of caramel corn and cotton candy. But, above all, Laker fanatics want tacos, and you can hear them chanting their collective plea during the final seconds of the fourth quarter.

If the Lakers win at home and hold their opponents to under 100 points, each fan in attendance receives a coupon for two free tacos from their local Jack in the Box, worth a retail value of 99 cents. The free taco phenomenon has persisted since the 2005– 2006 season. After halftime, announcer Lawrence Tanter begins to entice the crowd with the promotion. Statics fade away as Jack in the Box's logo (a cartoon snow-man head with a gold pointed hat) flashes across all screens. The fans unite and erupt, urging players by shouting, “We want tacos!”—a phrase that has replaced other expressions of encouragement like “Defense” or “Let’s go Lakers.”

The taco has become a metric of success (sports reporters have called blowouts “taco nights”) and an incentive to keep spectators in their seats. Opponents, aware of the stakes, will even try to squelch the home team fervor, by trying to score taco-spoiling three pointers in the last moments of a game.

Recently, the Lakers' losing streak has led to a taco shortage.

Watching the clock run down with their team lagging behind, fans know that they will walk away hungry, with jack shit. –LR

SPORTS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

MARCH 14 2014

EPHEMERA

â–Ą 08

1. Cartoon heart raking leaves / Cow head (upside down) / Shark from Jaws / Sculpture on a beach / Happy crab / Plant coming out of the ground 2. A mustachioed man / Hockey player with a mustache / Mustached man with a long face / Mustached monster / Face / Face w/ mustache 3. An alien holding a machine gun in each hand/ Fighting ravens / Seagulls staring into each other’s eyes while pooping / Grove in autumn / Lemurs chillin 4. Woman with moth in her mouth (Silence of the Lambs) / Mustached man / Skeletal vagina / Biker dude 5. Lungs of a smoker / Vultures / Dragons / I stepped in a puddle!

6. Star Wars ships / Cow alien / Birds-eye view of a volcano / Bug frozen in amber from the dinosaur age 7. Two wasps holding hands (or a pelvis) / Two dogs fighting over a Dorito / High-fiving crawfish / Crown of a witch king 8. Pulmonary embolisms / Volcano / Vagina / Jellyfish 9. Fancy angel wings / Cave painting of raging bull / Snail carrying another snail / Scary! Really scary porcupine

9 8

7 5

6 4 1

3 2

DIORAMA

by Maru Pabón

Emilio (or James or Tony) sits on the copper sand staring wistfully (or longingly) out across the sea (and/or ocean.) He exists solely to make a point, and at the end of this passage he will die. I warn that re-reading will serve only as an overdose of nostalgia for this fictitious, evidently lonely and freckled young man. The point of him is the beach he sits on. The beach is a lot of little sands and water, or the edge of a culture in some more profound respect. The swishing curls of sea foam would look friendlier in the company of a pretty boy dressed in white, so for the benefit of this episode, an animal of just that description is placed upon a high dune, maybe 20 feet from where the water chases up the sand. Maybe 30.

My name is Want. That’s German (or maybe English) for everything the boy is thinking, feeling, and hoping in this particular moment. Some decadent gathering of his contemporaries is happening in a grand beach house perhaps 400 feet behind him. Inside, young adults dance on floors sticky with melted pill capsules, saliva (and/or silly string and sweat.) Some bodies chase vodka with fistfuls of shiny things, others unravel their skins as the tempo increases.

The creature, after sampling half-chewed contempt and unrequited lust from a platter of human emotions, has fled to the beach hoping that someone notices his loneliness and comes to console him. Or better yet, the object of his desire could arrive to have sex with him, and their little world would pulse and change colors for anything up to forty perfect seconds.

Want is invisible, sharp, and bites into bounds. First, I will sever a knot that makes him rational, and perhaps tie the threads loosely to my own deep-set, aesthetic needs. That done, I find the boy sitting up, carving the impression of his legs upon the sand, tracing tiny hearts (or stick figures) with the idle tips of his toes. Painfully straight, his hands rest upon his thighs, but ever so occasionally they slide down past his knees like tanned tectonic plates of flesh and like some fantastic wooden doll he changes form and his head sinks to his lap and his blonde (or brown) hair brushes across his forehead, and sat thus, he weeps. A pathetic, prophetic sort of weeping.

O, how he wants to drip red onto emotional blankness.

O, how his mouth tastes like watercolor disappointment.

The beach house has antique windows. By has, I mean it was built with them. The boy has limbs, but his limbs aren’t him. The beach house as a whole is the beach house, the windows are a bit of beach house.

The boy, and the sand, and the perfectly pleasant house, all align themselves carefully to construct the most beautiful picture of life in this century. The most happily contrived thing I have ever dreamt of, the boy and his p(r)etty thoughts, drifting amidst the pastel haze of an anonymous seaside town. I can make him anything, and I choose to make him unfulfilled and shallow and fleeting. The perfect world in the higher planes of my dreams revolves inconsistently, and each day it sneezes more loudly. The colors dribble, the sands blow up and away and out of view. The boy can be made to stand on the edge of panic, walk out of the frame of my imagination. I can make him swallow more pills and choke on chunks of sand, and perhaps I just did.

If he is foaming at the mouth, then the soles of his feet have burst open. If the handle of vodka has shattered, find him sinking fast and struggling against the current. Meanwhile, I can bring down the beach house, brick by window by brick, and I just did, consider them all overdosed and broken, dead and buried. The house made splinters, fire dancing with more passion than human muscles ever could. Consider the whole happy picture black and solemn, blank and undesigned. Consider the real world for a second, and then the happy planes of the imagination. The only place I cannot be is within the worlds I create, sifting through sands and skins and layers. Struggling with the real, too, it seems I'll sit exactly between life and dreamt up beaches. Staring out the window of a 100th floor glass suite, the sky and the Earth blue and green and glowing below, and faded and unfocused in my peripheral vision, in the foreground, a kind of painted diorama, of the pretty boy and the pretty house and the beach and my mind.

Now don't finish this, please, I pray of you, I’ll—

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literary

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

TO STRAND photographs by Sarah Cheung

MARCH 14 2014

arts

□ 11

YOU SWAN, GO ON Sun Kil Moon and the artist as death-prophet

Bob Dylan’s “Highlands” plays over the stereo. About ten minutes into the song, I become distracted and check my computer quickly. When I refocus on the music, I’ve lost Dylan. Over the steady pulse of an organ, Dylan explores the tensions of his past with his present existence, but I’m no longer there. He has gone ahead without me. I start to consider my personal distance from Bob Dylan and wonder how he feels at this present moment: How he feels about me, in this room, right now, or even how he feels, post-dinner, sitting in his own living room. I realize I don’t even know where Bob Dylan lives or why I feel that’s important for me to recall. +++ More so than any other figure, the folk artist plays up to the world’s conception of the artist as a prophet, amplifying and foretelling future anxieties for the rest of us. I use folk here loosely, to mean any songwriter who—often with mythical undercurrents—seems to understand and then to lead the feelings and perceptions of people, both in the collective and individual senses. There exists a classic lineage of these artists, those who have taken on entire social movements or the scope of individual lives in their art. This lineage contains the canonical names all folk songwriting must contend with: Presley, Dylan, Cohen, Waits, Lennon, Springsteen, Cash. These artists cultivate a unique connection to the (usually) American people and their everyday tragedies, elevated for their ability to elucidate the fears, anxieties, and sadnesses of farmers, young people, sailors, factory workers, bankers, and political figures.

What’s most remarkable about these artists is their ability to connect at such a personal level while maintaining the level of universalism that lets them be prophets for a wider audience. We feel the best songs, very deeply and unshakably, not as an audience but as individual listeners. This fact lends itself to the faith we have in these artists, why we let them have such sway over the way we come to see the world.

The modern inheritors of this songwriting lineage have stretched this power in a multitude of directions, including a subversion of the basic tenets of the folk hero’s relationship to his or her audience. The generation of more personally oriented and confessional songwriters that emerged during the 1990s, Mark Kozelek of Sun Kil Moon exemplary among them, has brought us, as music listeners, uncomfortably close to what the elevation of the artist as a prophet means for our own sense of self.

Kozelek established himself as a member of this lineage during the 1990s as the chief creative force behind the Red House Painters, writing glacially shifting slow songs about melancholy and nostalgia. Following the Painters’ dissolution, he continued to record under his own name and as Sun Kil Moon, mining more and more personal territory. Kozelek’s most recent album as Sun Kil Moon, Benji, released in February, continues this progression. The songs play as the live narration of Kozelek’s thoughts. This songwriting style brings us more closely into contact with the idea that the artist thinks as we do, stripping away the mythic element of the folk hero.

Kozelek’s last album as Sun Kil Moon, 2012’s Among the Leaves, reveled in the listener’s desire for knowledge of the artist’s life, detailing his affairs, jealousies, and complaints about his fans—“guys in tennis shoes”—as he toured the world. Benji applies the same hyper-confessional approach to Kozelek’s meditations on death through his family, friends, and experience of national tragedies. Where many found Among the Leaves unrelatable and overwrought for its heightened honesty, Benji has been met with nearly universal critical praise. This dissonance points to the existence of accepted forms of openness, where an artist’s attempts to identify with his or her audience are only recognized as valuable within certain subject matters. As listeners, we want to preserve the idea of the artist as having something greater to say than we might, as coming down to our level only for special occasions.

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arts

by Patrick McMenamin illustration by Daniel Dittrich The critically lauded form of honesty Kozelek plumbs on Benji corresponds with the latecareer, death-fearing albums of the folk songwriting lineage. This trope, established in the 1990s

by Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, Tom Waits’s Bone Machine, and Johnny Cash’s American Recordings, invokes the image of the wise elder settling down and looking back as a way to provide guidance for the future. These albums become a way for the artist to use their established careers to pull their lyrical concerns—and their listeners—forward. We hold on to the familiar cadence of a Dylan song as we rely on him to bring us to some understanding of our futures, of our death. +++ “Well, my heart's in the highlands at the break of day / Over the hills and far away / There's a way to get there and I'll figure it out somehow” –Bob Dylan, “Highlands” There seems to be something about death that demands simplicity. We spend practically our whole lives reckoning with what death means to us, but when we think of death itself, it is just that—a simple, cold end. Death feels elemental and true in way that even birth doesn’t, paradoxically because it confronts us as a prospect of simplicity rather than as an assured reality.

A simple test: when was the last time you thought of your birth?

At the same time, though, thinking of death as simple involves an active ignorance of its implications, of thinking of the millions of echoes it holds within our lives. We recognize this complexity but seek not to pursue it, favoring a simple understanding of death that may reference complexity but doesn’t engage with it. Death becomes separate from its personally felt pain and consequences, an abstraction we can thus ignore on a day-to-day basis.

Death-obsessed albums evoke the desired simplicity of death in their musical style, often singled out as a “return to form” for the artist. The foregrounding of blues-rock menace on Waits’s Bone Machine, a return to stripped-down production and covers for Cash’s American Recordings, and echoes of surreal balladry in “Highlands” not only recall the artists’ earlier work, but also solidify their careers in a narrative arc. For this generation of singer-songwriters, the death-oriented album became a way to unify and define their personal “sound” as they carried their lyrical concerns forward.

This kind of narrative arc offers a kind of closure and understanding through active engagement with the artist’s back catalogue. The familiarity this arc engenders composes the simplicity the audience desires when dealing with death. Lyrically, then, the audience gives the artist a lot of leeway to explore the consequences and complexity of death. Unwilling to handle the complexity of our own ends, we look to the artist to spell it out for us.

Throughout “Highlands,” the pulsing bedrock of organs and tumbling blues guitars drive Dylan’s reflective observations. Dylan has long used this churning musical momentum to bolster the coherence his abstract lyrics occasionally move away from. “Highlands,” however, seems grounded in a narrative: Dylan disappoints a waitress with his drawings and relevance to the modern world. The slow churn of the music comprises the “return” for Dylan, a way to recall the abstraction of his older material. His conversation with the waitress details a disconnect, where Dylan’s drawings and answers don’t correspond to the waitress’s life or “at least that’s what I think I hear her say.” “My heart’s in the highlands / I can’t see any other way to go,” Dylan confesses. His abstraction becomes a way to cope with the world around him as it changes and indicates that he will be left behind. He still needs lived experience, a connection to the younger world around him to become meaningful. Dylan thus continues to stretch his lyrical concerns toward a vague “highlands” while identifying where he has come from (and must return to).

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

While Dylan, Waits, and Cash all continued to make music after these albums, at this point in their careers, they conceived of their careers’ end in terms that referenced their entire lives’ work. Here perhaps lies the answer to why these albums feel especially prophetic. They do what we can’t: lay out the appropriate complicated terms for their end and continue beyond them. +++ “Carissa was 35 / You don't just raise two kids, and take out your trash and die” –Sun Kil Moon, “Carissa” What reading death-obsessed art as the elevation of artist-as-prophet ignores is that these artists really might just be bone-chillingly afraid of dying. Mark Kozelek foregrounds this fear on Benji, becoming extremely relatable in his failure to comprehend death as such a simple process.

Listening to the record, I’d occasionally cringe at just how awkward Kozelek sounds singing lines such as “So when Christmas comes and you're out running around / Take a moment to pause and think of the kids who died in Newtown.”

On Benji, Kozelek documents the specifics of his personal experience of death as a way of accessing death in the shared sense. He juxtaposes the tragedy of his personal experience with more universally felt experiences, such as the Newtown shootings or fear of serial killers. The specificity of his honest lyrical approach amplifies the tragedy of his personal experience, but comes off as forced when applied to less personal subjects. In so doing, Benji encourages us to consider the personal implications of distant deaths. Even this feels incomplete and presumptuous, though, as if there is still no level where he has the right to sing about these so personally.

The specificity of detail—all of it filtered through Kozelek’s own life—adds to this feeling of discomfort across Benji. Even in the autobiographical songs, about his cousin “Carissa” or his neighbor “Micheline,” it seems gaudy or inappropriate to lay these people’s lives so bare.

Kozelek recognizes this, as on “Carissa,” where he sings “I didn’t know her well at all / But it don’t mean that I wasn’t / Meant to find some poetry to make some sense of this, to find a deeper meaning / In this senseless tragedy.” Kozelek’s lyrical style just happens to be so bare and factual that we don’t see this poetry except implicitly, understanding that he finds poetic significance in the events and thus finds them worthy of presentation. This lyrical technique forces us to confront the meaning and complicated truth of these events—of death—alongside Kozelek. We lose the artist as our guide. Kozelek’s honesty makes us uncomfortable because it refutes the idea of an artist-prophet, making him just as fallible and generalizing as the rest of us and leaving us to confront death independently. +++ “But there’s one thing you can’t lose / And it’s that feel” –Tom Waits, “That Feel” I’m haunted by the idea that there is something to lose. That some day, Waits, Dylan, or Kozelek could wake up and no longer believe in what they do. That I could go on believing in the power of it while they don’t. They must know more than I do.

Death-oriented art plays off of this tension, promising the power of a career spanning arc while also revealing the artist’s own confusion. We look to such art to guide our perceptions of death, a search it satisfies while telling us it too is unsure. No bridge is crossed; we don’t give ourselves the conviction to pursue these matters, and we don’t think of the artist as quite like us.

Instead, these albums remind us of these tensions, which sometimes feel like as much as we can handle.

I turn the stereo off, pour myself another cup of tea and turn on my computer. My headphones feel comfortable around my ears. I think about Mark Kozelek, sitting in his studio, absently plucking his guitar and reflecting on how he ended up here. He recognizes me on the other side. He has already hit record.

PATRICK MCMENAMIN B’17 seeks death-prophet, any kind.

march 14 2014

arts

□ 12

WE WERE SO GRAND IN THE FISH GUT VERSAILLES

by Jennifer Avery What is it like to live inside an egg?

First there are the countless problems of the brittle porcelain calcium floor, ceilings walls all molding into one foolish dome. This could however be an egg of Faberge; wrought in fiddled, labored lines and the grand form of a tinker, polishing emeralds from rocks and wrapping them with window frames. But not everything lovely is gilded. This is decay, or decomposition in the vibrancy and hue of flea puce is flea in English, it is a lite mauve/brown color that was all the rage in pre revolution France. (Puce as it was in Versailles, the grey pink brown violet taffeta that all the sliding towers topped in ostrich ribbon coveted to the misfortune of sixteen. Like tiny bloody stains on bed sheets that even Borax cannot remove.) Close, ladies with big hair walked down a hallway, Louis XVI hated the color puce and also got his head chopped off.. I am sorry if this is spoiling things for you.

A cavity of the Mongers’ arch procures a stench not even circulating gills alleviate. Our sweet egg, forgotten after a pastel Easter celebration, is threading stink under the floorboard. First a charcoal dark—no, no I bet they see red domes with ivy membranes letting in lights—and it falls sacked by cocardes bearing a purple and green disease. There must, of course, be blood before a denaturing of protein. The changed mortar—elastic, thick and floating down halls of mirrors and doors with handles so large only powdered wig valets can touch them; always with a crack crack crack on the metal mixing bowl.

Viscerals, eggs, Versailles were delicate sulfur faint places. Sprites of the staircase tumbling velvet, melting on gold; in tandem with pearls of ants marching in a death sea anemic bowel. Buttermilk soldiers spawn up river for ovum. They hunt for the warm and dense at the center. This is a chateau, no a cathedral. No mistress or monarch will wander down Eph Hall, the loveliest loftiest tunnel suspended with mirrors, ants, wigs and velvet guts. The abbess in her anchorage, no, no, the favorite of the court repeats a dressing cycle in her own room. More fabric, another garment, inches of powder until she is too cumbersome, too heavy in jewels, too much hair, too many hands from ladies maids and princesses of the blood. She over ripens and threads stink. She stays there, under doors in that tiny space given to open and fade to theatrical bronze statues. (Of course, of the picturesque, but—this is a process and it hurts.)

When gutting a fish always steer clear of the and second floor. It is haunted. When drawing Versailles do not forget to arch your back.

When smashing eggs wear lace gloves and bricks.

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OCCULT

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WE ARE WHAT WE WASTE legislating food disposal in Rhode Island

by Lisa Borst illustration by Amy Chen

Rhode Island’s only landfill is located at the end of a rural road in Johnston, which, when I visited in early March, was lined with some truly filthy snow. The grounds of the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (RIRRC) are enormous and industrial. The landfill itself is surrounded by a tall barbed-wire fence, and its periphery is, in the winter, a mess of melting snow and corrugated steel and indefinitely parked trucks. Beyond the fence, there are mountains. They dwarf the fluorescent-vested laborers and the dump trucks winding their way around them. I had envisioned volcanoes of trash, with treasures—vintage furniture? potential found art?—poking through miles of rotting food and broken glass. In actuality, the trash mountains are covered daily with layers of material—usually gravel and something called Posi-Shell (“a sprayapplied coating similar to stucco,” according to the RIRRC’s website)—to reduce odors and to separate the trash from the surrounding environment. The mountains formed don’t really look like trash at all, but like vast, ancient outcrops of bedrock.

Rhode Island is the only state with just one sanitary landfill for all of its residents. (There’s a second, smaller landfill in Tiverton, but only Tiverton residents are allowed to use it.)

As the single destination for all of the garbage generated by RI’s 12 colleges, 19 hospitals, eight prisons, and 1.05 million individuals, the landfill is filling up.

The RIRRC wants us to remember that it is a finite space. Even 230 acres of landfill can only hold so much trash, its website reminds us; in fact, the RIRRC expects to cease landfill operations in 20 to 25 years. “When the landfill closes there are three alternatives,” says the website. “1. Find another city/town to build a landfill (no city/town is jumping at this!); 2. Ship it out of state (three times as expensive!); and 3. Incinerate (currently prohibited by RI law).” Despite a rhetoric dominated by cheerful exclamation points, the moral of the story is a familiar one: our landfill is going to overflow.

We need to create less trash. +++ According to a 2011 EPA study, food waste constitutes 14 percent of landfill space in the US. The same study shows that food waste accounts for only 1.6 percent of recovered materials—meaning that food waste is, quantifiably, the least recycled kind of garbage. Another recent study, conducted by the National Resources Defense Council, concluded that Americans throw away 40 percent of the food supply, and an astonishing 52 percent of all fruits and vegetables go to waste.

In the US, the average person throws out 1400 kilocalories of food every day—enough to feed a sedentary eight-yearold—and, in total, $165 billion in food winds up in landfills annually.

A new RI bill proposes a solution to the issue of largescale food waste. Bill 7033, which was introduced in late January by the House Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, seeks to establish a “safe and environmentally sound food residuals recycling initiative” in the state.

If passed, the bill would mandate that businesses and organizations that generate a set amount of trash divert, compost, or otherwise reduce the amount of food waste they contribute to the landfill. The bill emphasizes the need to reduce food consumption and waste at its source, but also places importance on diverting food waste for agricultural use and using organic matter for compost and anaerobic digestion. Beginning in January 2015, the legislation would apply to organizations that generate more than 52 tons of food waste annually. That amount would be gradually reduced every two years, so that by 2021, the law would apply to any “person whose acts or processes produce any amount of food residuals.”

MARCH 14 2014

At a House Committee on Environment and Natural Resources hearing on March 6, State Representative Donna Walsh, one of the bill’s sponsors, said that this sort of legislation is not new to New England. “Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont have all passed similar legislation,” Walsh said.

Walsh emphasized the importance of extending the lifespan of RI’s only landfill. “It is estimated that 25 to 30 percent of what goes to the landfill is food waste,” she said, citing a percentage significantly higher than the national average, “second only to paper and packaging. If we maintain the status quo, the landfill will close by 2038. But if we can divert a significant amount of food waste…we could extend its life to 2045.”

At the hearing, though, no one addressed the obvious: what will happen to our trash after 2045? +++ The RIRRC advertises itself from the highway with signs, and you can call to schedule a tour. The effect is clear: the RIRRC is aiming for a certain degree of transparency; they’re proud to show you what they do with your trash.

But when I showed up on a Saturday morning, no one seemed to want to talk about the issue of food waste, let alone the landfill’s unavoidable closure. Multiple men in fluorescent vests tried to direct me toward something called the Eco Depot, and I was asked three or four times whether I was trying to dispose of hazardous waste or electronics. Finally, one laborer told me that many workers at the RIRRC never really interact with food waste at all. The landfill has a composting facility onsite, but it is not licensed to compost food scraps, just leaf and yard debris. It seems that, in a facility that also processes an entire state’s hazardous materials and e-waste, food scraps are not the landfill’s most visible concern.

Donna Walsh believes that Bill 7033 would spur the creation of new food waste management businesses statewide.

The bill only applies to businesses or organizations located within 20 miles of “organics recycling facilities,” meaning both large-scale composting facilities or anaerobic digesters— systems in which microorganisms, in the absence of oxygen, break down organic matter and turn it into useable methane.

Since there is currently only one composting facility in RI, Walsh said that the bill would ensure the creation of several new facilities in order to meet demand for food waste disposal for businesses throughout the state. “Such a prohibition would create pressure throughout the food chain to reduce waste; we would be forced to seek out and develop environmentally friendly ways to process food waste,” she said at the hearing last Thursday.

+++ The proposed legislation has proved controversial among organizations that produce waste on a large scale. “I’m not sure [the Committee on Environment and Natural Resources] fully understands the scope of what they’re asking for yet,” Brian Pacheco, General Manager of Providence’s Eastside Marketplace, told me. “We do a lot of stuff on our own that’s not mandated by law, but I don’t know if they’ve taken into account the cost that a bill like this will have on small businesses.”

At last Thursday’s hearing at the State House, Pacheco’s concerns were echoed by Kristin Gennuso, who owns the restaurant Chez Pascal on Hope Street. Gennuso said she fears that the legislation won’t provide transportation opportunities for businesses seeking to dispose of large quantities of waste.

“It’s going to put the burden on small businesses—and in this state, we already have a lot of burdens,” she said.

I asked Walsh whether the proposed legislation would provide any infrastructure—a waste collection system, for example—for businesses with Pacheco and Gennuso’s concerns. “There will be no infrastructure provided to businesses,” Walsh responded in an email, “but they have the option of doing their own on-site composting, as is being done at Johnson and Wales at their Harborside campus, or they can have waste taken to an anaerobic digester.” Walsh was referring to Johnson and Wales’ on-campus food digesters, which divert approximately 85% of the school’s food waste—or 200 tons a year—into compost. At $75,000 apiece, however, such food digesters may not be a feasible option for small businesses, pointing again to the importance of generating new businesses that specialize in food waste disposal throughout the state. +++ Given the recent adoption of similar legislation in neighboring New England states, as well as RI’s history of progressive waste management laws—in 1986, it became the first state to pass mandatory recycling legislation—the eventual passage of Bill 7033 seems likely. And as Kristin Gennuso reminded the House Committee on Environment and Natural Resources last week, food residuals are a commodity, if an overlooked one: food scraps, if composted, can very easily be used to grow more food. In a state in which one in six individuals face food insecurity, reducing the amount of food we throw away— often perfectly good, useable food, the 2011 NRDC study emphasizes, with significant nutritional value—that we throw away could be an important step toward cultivating more sustainable food systems statewide. The fact remains: even if RI can divert a significant amount of its food waste, the lifespan of its only landfill will still only increase by about seven years.

After that, the future of our trash remains unknown.

LISA BORST B’17 dumpster dives.

FOOD

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MARCH dick pics

Doritos emojis

therapy mutual orgasm

corporate synergy public radio

abstinence breast milk

Amazon Prime Birthright

The Second Amendment handjob

dial-up Rumspringa

margaritas

15

SPORTS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

MADNESS sexting in public

The Old Testament Crossfit

septum piercings Odwalla

Odd Future naked sleep

a juicy peach service learning

BDSM “leaning in”

mosh pits Percocet

vodka-soaked tampon tl/dr

DDR (vs. FDR)

MARCH 14 2014

SPORTS

16

MAKING CONTACT Providence Dojo, American Dream

by Katherine Solá illustration by Matthew Menzies The United Martial Arts Academy on Branch Avenue is decorated with Muhammad Ali posters. Signs proclaim that “a black belt is a white belt who never gave up.” Sensei Tom Evans begins the kids’ class with a series of bows, warm ups, and stretches. The class comprises about fifteen kids, half of whom trail in late dragging sports bags almost as big as they are. They wear the traditional karate uniform—a gi—and belts, though many don t-shirts.

Evans leads the kids through kicking drills, sparring practice, and forms, continually asking questions as the kids chorus back with learned responses.

“When do we give up?” “NEVER!” “If it hurts, that means what?” “IT’S WORKING!” “Who’s the best?” “I AM!” Evans has one pair of girls shout “I CAN DO IT!” and to my surprise, they cut through their initial confusion and pull off a perfect combination. +++ After the kids’ class ends, on a Tuesday evening in early February, Evans leans his 6’1” lanky frame back in his office chair as he tells me how he became the proprietor of a martial arts school at the age of 26. Evans began training at the age of four with Hanshi Larry Sullivan, who developed Sullivan’s USA Karate, a New England martial arts franchise and karate style. Evans opened his first martial arts school at 21, but says he had a “tough start” financially. He reopened on Branch Avenue two years ago.

Evans is a professional Mixed Martial Arts fighter (his ring name is “Captain America”) and an MMA referee and judge. He also works as an Academic Advisor with the College Crusade of Rhode Island, a nonprofit that encourages Rhode Island highschoolers to attend college, and with his own non-profit Regional Fight Sports, which awards scholarships to high school fighters. His work reflects the ethos of selfimprovement, confidence, and success common to American Karate culture.

“I work with kids,” Evans says frankly. He holds a degree in Human Development and Family Studies from URI, a course of study described by the website as “how we develop from birth through old age with a particular emphasis on how family and community settings improve quality of life throughout the lifespan.” The program trains graduates to work in fields like childhood development, family therapy and senior living.

“Martial arts is a privilege,” explains Evans as describes the benefits of karate training. He says about 20 of his students have learning disabilities, and he uses his knowledge and experience of childhood development to adapt the curriculum for each one. He describes bullying as the “number one problem in our society,” and aims to teach his students how to walk away from confrontations with confidence. Evans reads all his students grades and claims a “100% success rate” in helping his students improve their academic performance and self-esteem. +++ One boy catches my eye as he leaps loosely around the room in practice, limbs windmilling as he collapses onto his bag.

I notice that he is not wearing a belt. Evans is eager to tell me about Dylan, who is 10, has ADHD, and was recently diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Evans claims that he tailors his approach accordingly, devising his own system of

17

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METRO

incentives and penalties for Dylan’s benefit. One reward is practicing a scripted self-defense performance in preparation for the tournament.

Evans paces towards Dylan and shoves him with both hands. “So you wanna join my school, you little punk?” he barks. They break into a choreographed fight. Dylan throws Evans to the floor and rolls around on top of him as Evans shrieks and moans in mock agony. The skit ends when Dylan seizes a club from Evans and pretends to hit him with it, eliciting an agonized groan. Dylan smiles broadly at the end of the routine.

After class, Evans shepherds Dylan’s mother into his office to talk to me. She blinks frequently as she talks about how Dylan’s three years of karate have changed him. Karate has helped with his socialization, she says. Before karate “he wouldn’t do anything in front of anybody.” Dylan thrives within the highly structured and controlled environment of a martial arts school. +++ The day of the tournament dawns bright and freezing as competitors roll in from across New England. I meet Hanshi Larry Sullivan, owner of Sullivan’s USA Karate. He is a trim man with well-kept white facial hair and clear blue eyes. In an incongruous nasal drawl he explains what makes his karate particularly American: “Me.” Sullivan explains that Sullivan’s Karate is above all a “customer-based service,” tailored to a particular market depending on people's preferences. He says he named the school USA Karate because consumers think “it says USA karate so it must be good.” He explains that he has fired instructors who do not understand “they’re there to give a service.” Most students do not come to USA Karate looking for an "authentic" Japanese experience, so the schools do not use Japanese words beyond the instructors’ titles—like sensei, hanshi or uke. Breathing exercises to manage the flow of chi become “working your insides.” A strong work ethic and good grades replace the search for enlightenment. For parents, it’s easier to have this message delivered by a fierce-looking fighter in a cool uniform.

Poses with a historic Japanese root change as they are assimilated into American popular culture. Take the crane pose, Sullivan says. The classic pose is well known from the Karate

Kid: the fighter stands on one leg with the other cocked up in front and the hands far above the head in a predatory crouch, poised for a jumping front kick to the face. Successful execution requires focus, balance and coordination. Hanshi Larry explains that Americans tend to be less flexible, so for a 6’6” man the pose becomes a “wrecking crane,”—the crane from which a wrecking ball swings. +++ As I walk around the tournament hall after Dylan’s performance, I ask a girl why her gi has a camouflage pattern. She responds: “Because Amuricah!”

This Martial Americana is apparent all over the room, echoing Sullivan’s explanation of “Me.” Teenager Amelia Spalter says the ethos of her dojo is “vote and join the military,” and explains that “it’s not at all about body, mind, spirituality, or anything.” Tim Burnell fights with Team Liberty from Littleton, NH and explains the name in terms of “the personal liberty of martial arts.” I spot eagles and American flags on most uniforms. Gleaming green and gold trophies are awarded for first, second, third and fourth places, despite the fact that several divisions comprise fewer than four competitors.

Martial arts purists despise this kind of Americanization, and dream of learning authentic techniques from grizzled monks in a Japanese temple. They lament that the old senseis are rolling in their graves at the bastardizing of their old traditions. These critics think karate is pure technique, and the benefits of karate are to be found in exactly replicating ancient practice, to attain the ancient wisdom of energy flows and enlightenment. But in talking about their teaching, both Evans and Sullivan describe martial arts as a force for community good, rather than a series of kicks and punches. “I don’t wanna use the word fail,” says Evans Sr., Tom’s father. Many kids leave the tournament with huge smiles, holding two or three trophies taller than they are.

KATHERINE SOLÁ B’14 fights on.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Friday March 14

Feminist/Women’s Media Festival

Fri-Sun // Cable Car Cinema, 204 South Main St., Providence // FREE Friday’s theme is Industry and some nice selections for Friday include Friday’s Web series shorts at 12PM and Mommy is Coming, Cheryl Dunye’s queer sex comedy starring Papi Coxxx at 10PM. Annie Sprinkle (The most incredible woman and pornstar of the past, present, and future) dared Cheryl Dunye to bring adult movies back into theaters, and this is what came out. Checkout http://feministwomensmediafestival.tumblr.com for the long schedule of free films!

Hydrogen Jukebox

7:30-9:30PM // Alumnae Hall Auditorium, Brown University, 194 Meeting St., Providence Hydrogen Jukebox is a really special opera with poems from Allen Ginsberg set to music by Philip Glass to paint a picture of post-WWII America.

It’s just the best thing and we’re so lucky that it’s being put on in Providence! This also continues on the 15th and 16th.

Music Show

9PM-1AM // AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence // $7 Morris and the East Coast, The Really Heavy, Meadows Brothers, and Max Garcia Conover. It’s like Blues but from Boston.

Saturday March 15

Feminist/Women’s Media Festival

Fri-Sun // Cable Car Cinema, 204 South Main St., Providence // FREE Saturday’s theme is Archives. There will be a Silent Film Program on Comedy and Caricature at 12:15PM and a panel discussion on archives and race at 4:30PM in Granoff’s Martinos Auditorium that’s moderated by Karen Baxter and includes panelists Rhea Combs, Cauleen Smith, and Portia Cobb.

Sunday March 16

Feminist/Women’s Media Festival

Fri-Sun // Cable Car Cinema, 204 South Main St., Providence // FREE Sunday’s theme is Borders. At 2PM it’s Amber Hawk Swanson’s The “Feminism?” Project which “brilliantly ironizes the disjuncture between the typification of femininity in mass culture and its more illusory lived experience to imply that such irony might have something to tell us about the ‘open question’ of contemporary feminism.” And at 8PM there will be a screening of Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years, which was is a documentary released for the 20th anniversary of her death and chronicles “Lorde’s contribution to the Afro-German women’s movement and her engagement with racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, classism, and homophobia in Berlin before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.” At one point I caught myself feeling as if some ‘little angels’ organized this film festival, but then I remembered that it was actually not ‘little angels’, but some real adult people named Beth Capper, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Rijuta Mehta, Brandy Monk-Payton, and Maggie Hennefeld.

Starla and Sons: Long-Form Improv Auditions

Sunday 6-8PM // Friedman Auditorium, Metcalf Research Building, 190 Thayer St., Providence Auditions continue on Monday from 5:30-7PM at List Art Building 120.

Invest in your future.

Double Take: Valentine Typewriter

2-2:44PM // RISD Museum of Art, 224 Benefit St., Providence In anticipation of the exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production, Eric Anderson, assistant professor in RISD’s History of Art + Visual Culture department, talks with Kate Schapira, poet and lecturer in Brown University’s English department, about this bright red portable typewriter.

MonDAY March 17 Toyin Odutola Lecture

6-8PM // 424 College Building, RISD, 2 College St., Providence Toyin Odutola is a fine artist who is popular right now. People like her “mesmerizing portraits rendered in the humble media of paper and ball point pen.”

TuesDAY March 18 Masculinity Series: Beyond Traditional Masculine and Feminine Expressions of Grief 12-1:30PM // 403 J. Walter Wilson, Brown University, 69 Brown St., Providence

Deanna Upchurch and Mark O’Neil are grief counselors from Home and Hospice Care of Rhode Island and they will run a seminar exploring the different ways people might grieve outside of traditional gender stereotypes and how to cope when friends and family have very different grieving styles.

2-for Tuesdays

All Day // Geoff’s, 163 Benefit St., Providence Did you know you can get 2 sandwiches for the price of 1 at Geoff’s Sandwich Shop? You probably did know that, and you’re welcome for the reminder. It’s such a good deal.

WedNESDAY March 19 Screening of Jaffa

5PM // Joukowsky Forum, Brown University, 111 Thayer St., Providence Screening of Eyal Sivan’s documentary Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork. The movie “narrates the visual history of the famous citrus fruit originated from Palestine and known worldwide for centuries as ‘Jaffa oranges.’”

After the movie there will be a conversation with the director.

Thursday March 20 Music Show

9PM, 8PM doors // The Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, Providence // $10 advance, $12 day of show Lady Lamb The Beekeeper (Brooklyn, NY), White Hinterland (MA), Dr. Jones and the Shiners (PVD). All Ages, 21+ with ID to drink

RISD Painting Senior Exhibition: opening reception 6-7:30 PM // Woods-Gerry Gallery 62 Prospect St., Providence

Food and paintings! Paintings and food!

In the know? e-mail listtheindy@gmail.com.

This Week in Listery- March 15, 1985

The first Internet domain name, symbolics.com, is registered. Now it’s just an advertising wasteland.

Bummer! Bow wow wow